Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a manhole in the middle of the alley, twenty feet from the back wall. If you can get the soldiers dealt with, that’s your easiest exit. Good luck.”

  Then she was gone.

  I stepped out of the Humvee just as a truck pulled into the alleyway, blocking that exit. It rumbled to a stop and I heard shouts as men cleared out from the back.

  Ducking behind my Hummer in a crouch, I heard them hustling forward. Taking a peek, I saw what they were doing.

  Forming a firing line. Pointed at me.

  Yay.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Dave Kory

  “Focus up, everybody!” Dave clapped his hands once, trying to get everyone on point. “I’ve got exciting news.” He could practically feel the glow of the information coming out of his body, and it was almost like it was lighting up the Brooklyn night. “I’ve got a couple sources on deep background saying that the Gondry administration is not going to sit back and let Sienna Nealon get away. They’re going in after her.”

  A round of cheers and applause greeted his announcement. He didn’t need to work very hard to take the temperature of this room regarding Sienna Nealon. She’d damned near killed a hundred reporters in the Eden Prairie incident. Everyone in this room knew, or was a degree or two removed from, someone who’d been there. Nealon was never going to win a popularity contest in any press bullpen in the US.

  “Are you serious?” Mike Darnell asked. His brow was furrowed, making him look his age.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dave said, smile not fading a bit. “They’ve already sent in one team—”

  “I heard,” Mike said. “How’d that turn out?”

  Now Dave had to work to keep the smile on, looking at one of the TV screens that encircled the bullpen. It was tuned to a cable news network and—hey, there was Bilson, doing another TV hit. “Not well. It seems like Nealon has the full backing of the Revelen government.”

  “Then if we’re going in after her,” Mike said, “won’t that mean war?”

  “It’s looking that way,” Dave said coolly. “But come on—things like this are why we pay more than anyone else in the world, by far, to have a top-notch military. So we can exert influence in the moments when it really counts.”

  A couple people clapped. Dave smiled; he wasn’t usually a fan of military intervention, but dammit, this was a perfect pairing if ever he’d seen one. Dangerous criminal in a far-off place? A likely threat to the US in the future? She was like another Osama Bin Laden, given all that she’d done.

  “What do we do, Dave?” Steve Fills asked. He had a little hum in his voice, excitement bleeding through.

  “This is going to be pure dynamite, we’re talking lit as—well, you know,” Dave said, grinning. “Everything I’ve heard suggests the Gondry administration is going in hard and fast, trying to wrap this up quick. But they need to make sure they’ve got public support, and that they deliver on this unspoken promise and finish the war swiftly. That’s the marching orders on their end. Now for us—this is nothing but opportunity. People are naturally curious and questioning in time of war. They’re going to be looking for explainers, so I need someone to put together a brief history of the conflict, really playing up the elements of discord.”

  “You want us to do a research piece on Revelen?” Holly Weber asked.

  “Yes,” Dave snapped his finger and Holly started typing furiously into her laptop, taking notes. “But don’t just go up the middle with it. You need an angle.” He smiled. “Look to their history. Find the skeletons in the closet, and bring ’em out for everyone to see. There’s gotta be some dark stuff in there. Let’s shine some sunlight on it.”

  “Can I write a counterpoint?” Mike asked, hand partially raised.

  Dave frowned. “To what? The Revelen history piece?”

  Mike’s look was deepest concentration. “To all of it. To any pieces you’re going to run on the war, on Revelen … I’ll finish my research, and I’ll have something ready to go in two hours. I’ve got some sources in the State Department that have given me some stuff, along with Department of Justice … it’ll be a nice counterpoint to what you’re talking about here.”

  “No,” Dave said, frown deepening. “Look, Mike … this is the narrative, okay? Sienna Nealon is a bad, bad, person.” He paused for applause, because the whole damned bullpen except for Mike clapped for that. “Going to war to stop her, to bring her back to custody, is an unvarnished good.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Mike said. “The data I’m getting is starting to suggest she might not even be guilty of the things we think she is. There’s a video floating around of the Eden Prairie thing—”

  “I don’t care,” Dave said, waving a hand furiously in front of his face as if he could banish Mike the hell out of here with a flick of his wrist. “We all know what happened there, okay? She tried to kill honest reporters doing their jobs. Just like in LA, when she nuked that Latino neighborhood—”

  “It was one Mexican restaurant,” Mike said, “and the government never even formally accused her of it, mainly because as far as we know, she has no power to create a nuclear event.”

  “Everybody knows Sienna Nealon explodes,” Constance Shriver said, her small face pinched. She stared at Mike as though he were an idiot.

  “There’s a difference between an explosion and a nuclear explosion,” Mike said. “LA was a nuclear event, it set off radiological sensors across the Western US. Sienna Nealon definitely had explosive powers, but not nuclear ones. LA was something different; my sources suggest it may have been an assassination attempt against her, not anything she directly caused.”

  “Bullshit,” Caden Chambers said.

  Mike gave him a glance. “I’m starting to think the people in this room might be a little too emotionally involved in this story to cover it dispassionately.”

  “Good,” Dave said. “They’re people. They have a perspective on things. That lets them write about it in an interesting way, with passion.”

  Mike just stared back for a moment. “It’s not … strictly speaking … good when your objectivity is blown all to hell.”

  “Objectivity is a myth and a stupid one,” Dave said, pacing a little, taking in the Brooklyn skyline, and Manhattan beyond. “The only people who don’t have a point of view on something are dead. How can you not have watched what Sienna Nealon has done over the last two years and—I mean, anyone with a pulse can see she’s a threat to human life.” He spun on Mike. “I mean, seriously … what you’re talking about … it’s like going back to the 1930s and doing a soft-focus puff piece on Hitler.”

  “That’s an extreme analogy, and an overused one at that,” Mike said. “I don’t think she’s doing any ethnic cleansing, or even endorsing it.”

  “It’s just an example,” Dave said. “But it holds. You don’t make apologies for terrible people. You don’t film them in soft focus. You show the world. Boldly. You take a stand, you don’t write a puff piece about how—I don’t know—something went wrong in their past that made them broken like they are—”

  “A human interest angle?” Mike asked. “Like her mother locking her in a metal coffin every time she misbehaved as a child?”

  “See, that’s sugarcoating it,” Dave said, pointing at him. “You want to make her look sympathetic?”

  “You want to completely dehumanize her?” Mike tossed back, still calm as anything. His lack of emotion was damned unnerving.

  “Oh, I’ve doubted her basic lack of humanity forever,” Dave said. “That’s long decided. Now I’m starting to question yours.”

  That sent one of Mike’s eyebrows up. “You’re questioning whether I’m human?”

  “Look at you, man,” Dave said, taking a step closer to him. The crowd was quiet save for an occasional, “Mmhmm.” “You’re sitting here arguing for Sienna Nealon. Mass murderer. About to start a war—”

  “I don’t think she possesses the capability to start a war all
on her own.”

  “—and you’re like a Hitler apologist over here.” Dave could feel the rage rising. “You can just sit there and think about the shit she’s done, vaporizing that neighborhood—man, people lived there. Had their homes there—”

  “No one died,” Mike said. “It was one restaurant.”

  “That’s callous as hell,” Dave said. “That was their lives. And you don’t give a shit.”

  “Well, I care more about human life than stuff, yeah,” Mike said. “And I’m trying to see to the truth of the matter, because it seems to me that few people are right now. I hear a lot of rage about her, about the things she’s done, but I don’t hear a lot of cold, hard facts. Looking over the Eden Prairie casualty reports, I don’t see a single reporter among the dead. Just the so-called protestors—”

  “They were activists protesting that she’d taken away their freedom,” Caden said, rising to his feet, face purple with outrage. “Without trial. Without evidence.”

  “I think there was some evidence, but I’m not unsympathetic to the ‘no trial’ part of it,” Mike said. “That was wrong. And it was a story worthy of being covered, as a human rights abuse—”

  “She’s a sick murderer,” Constance said. “A serial killer who’s killed more people than anyone since Hitler. Which is why we call her Hitler.”

  “I don’t think that’s factually accurate,” Mike said calmly.

  “Screw you, man,” Dave said, and shit, he was over this whole discussion. “She’s serious. You want to write a fact-check piece on something we already know? Let me help you with a fundamental truth: Sienna Nealon is a heinous, murderous person. Boom. Fact-check?” He turned to Caden, the resident fact-checker.

  “I rate it as ‘Absolutely True,’” Caden said.

  “Without doubt,” Constance said. She was standing now, too, as one did in these situations. Others were coming to their feet, the anger in the room almost palpable.

  Mike took a slow look around, arms folded in front of him. “Remember what I said before about lacking the objectivity to cover the subject in question? I want you all to think real hard about how you feel at the moment. And what you’d do if evidence suddenly came out that Sienna did not do the things you think she did.”

  “Man, to hell with you,” Caden said. “And to hell with her, too.” That spurred a round of applause. “She’s guilty as shit.”

  “What if she wasn’t?” Mike asked, still irritatingly calm. “What if you all had decided she was guilty, though, and weren’t even open to discussion about it?”

  “Because she’s guilty and we’re not stupid,” Constance said, and everybody broke into applause again.

  Dave was just smiling. Somebody threw something, a balled-up piece of paper, and it bounced off Mike’s back.

  “But what if she wasn’t?” Mike asked, damn him, again. “And what if you’ve been wrong all this time?”

  That produced a moment of silence. “Then she’s still a heinous person and deserves everything she gets,” Constance finally said, and boy did that get a chorus of agreement.

  “Hm,” Mike said. God, he was like a stone. “Have you ever heard of ‘Two Minutes of Hate’?”

  “Sounds like what your mother gives you every night,” someone shouted from the back. That was good for a long laugh.

  Mike just smiled tightly. “It’s a concept from Orwell. 1984. The idea being that you direct your anger toward a target that’s considered acceptable. Someone like Sienna Nealon. And you just … hate her, yell at her, scream at her, freak out in her general direction. It gives you catharsis for the things that maybe have gone wrong in your life. Keeps you from thinking about your problems in terms of what you could do to solve them and instead lets you transfer that anger to someone else.”

  “That’s beautiful, man,” Dave said. Yeah, he was over this shit, and over Mike in general. “Have I told you lately that—”

  “DO NOT ADJUST YOUR TELEVISION SETS,” came a loud, mechanical voice from every TV in the place. Dave flinched, turning his head to look. It had cut him off just before he was going to say, “You’re fired,” to Mike. That would have been sweet, but it could wait a minute or two.

  The nearest TV had lost the live feed from the news network, and instead there was a strange pattern and static. The picture took a moment, then resolved into something—it was like security camera footage from high up on a wall, and there, standing in the middle of an alleyway—

  Was Sienna Nealon.

  “Whoa,” Caden said. “Weird. We were just talking about her, and here—”

  “Look,” Constance said. “Soldiers.”

  And there were, pouring out of an army truck, pointing guns at Nealon. The word LIVE was scrolling across the bottom of the screen in a very basic text pattern, definitely not the network feed.

  “It’s on every channel,” Caden said, flipping the remote of one of the TVs. “Even this one,” and he pointed at one in the far corner that Dave would have sworn was not on a minute ago.

  “DO NOT ADJUST YOUR TELEVISION SETS,” the voice said again, mechanical, like someone was using a scrambler. “What you are about to see is actually happening right now.”

  “This doesn’t look good for Nealon,” Dave said, peering at the screen. “Caden—start writing something up about this. Live updates, stream of consciousness. We need to be on this before anyone else is.”

  “But we don’t know anything,” Caden said.

  “We know Sienna Nealon is on every screen in the office,” Dave said, “including the one that wasn’t even turned on a minute ago,” and he waved at the screen in the far corner of the bullpen. “Start with that. If this is happening everywhere—and I bet it is, at least in New York—people are going to be wondering what’s going on. Let’s get those clicks.”

  He didn’t wait for Caden to answer. He heard the tapping of keys seconds later anyway.

  No, Dave settled in to watch with the rest, as the live feed showed the soldiers edging ever closer to Nealon, who stooped behind the Humvee, and he watched with his breath just slightly held.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Sienna

  “Sienna Nealon, in the name of the general, you will surrender to us!” The lead guy was shouting in English, voice echoing down the alleyway. His point was obvious and made still plainer by the military rifles he and his teammates had pointing at me, too.

  The summer heat of the evening sent a cool trickle of sweat down the small of my back, rolling beneath my new blouse, which was, tragically, already a victim of being a piece of Sienna Nealon’s wardrobe. Long tears in the fabric from the fall had left my arms exposed, the sleeves shredded, and a little section of my midriff showing.

  “What if I don’t want to surrender?” I shouted back. “What if I just want to huddle here behind my fancy Humvee and stroke the hood lovingly until I fall asleep?”

  That prompted silence as the man in charge tried to figure what the hell he could say to that. “You will surrender now, and come with us. Or else.”

  “Oh, I don’t like that ‘or else,’” I said. I had the seeds of a plan, but it was not one I particularly liked. “It makes me feel unsafe.”

  “It … is not our job to make you feel safe,” the head guy said a moment later, like he was spluttering to come up with a response. Couldn’t tell if he realized I was just dicking around with him to buy time. It didn’t seem like he did.

  I took a long, deep breath, then another, sliding my hands under the front of the Hummer. The undercarriage was warm, but fortunately, I wasn’t grabbing it directly under the engine, which I was sure would be hot enough to burn me. “Hey, man, you’re talking to the crown princess of Revelen here. If it’s not your job to make me feel safe, whose is it? What’s your name, soldier?”

  “I—what?” he asked. Confusion was definitely setting in. Time to act.

  “I asked your name,” I said, taking up some of the Hummer’s weight, a little at a time. There was no easy way to do
what I was about to do, but I wanted to keep my foes off balance until things busted loose, so … I continued to bullshit as I prepared to lift the damned Humvee. “You know, so I can report it to my great-grandfather, who runs this country.”

  “What is she talking about?” one of the other soldiers asked—in English, conveniently. A muttered reply in their own tongue illuminated nothing for me.

  The lead guy brushed him off in their language, and I could mentally hear, in his tone, his closure of the conversational portion of our confrontation. “You will obey my commands and come out from behind the car with your hands raised or—”

  “You want the Hummer back, right?” I asked. “Whole? In one piece?”

  “That … was not our orders,” the lead soldier said, once again dazzled by my bullshit and taking his eye off the ball briefly. “We are to bring you in, immediately, and—”

  “Well, you can have the Humvee back anyway,” I said and heaved, lifting that sucker high. It strained some of the muscles in my back, but only because I was practicing improper lift posture. I had to; it was a damned SUV, it extended at least fifteen feet past my grip on it. I levered it upright, then deadlifted with my legs, pushing it into the air from my waist on up.

  This was the tricky part. Gasps came from the soldiers, and I had only a second to act before they started shooting, I estimated. So I got the balance as right as I could given the time I had—

  And I walked the Humvee toward them.

  “What are you doing?” Shouts and gasps of surprise greeted my gambit. They were all gathered around the army truck, which was taking up most of the mouth of the alley, a tight fit between the two brick buildings that surrounded us on either side. I just walked it forward, bumper about knee high, the tail of the Hummer extending way above my head, the engine shielding me from fire. And a couple of them did fire, which was not smart. A couple just stood there, gawking, which was arguably even less smart.