Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I go at it then, a mad dervish. I heft the sword above my head, whirl it in huge circles. Flame crackles like an angry halo.

  I hit space. Space again. Empty space. Each time I close, the frog moves. Its tongue slaps me, knocks me this way and that. I am drenched in frog spittle. I yell, let my rage out at it. My frustration. If I could just chop off the end of its tongue. So I could jam it up its irritating, teleporting arse.

  The tongue catches me under my chin, a perfect oral haymaker that lifts me off my feet and plants me against one wall.

  The frog and I regard each other from across the stairwell. I swear the bastard thing is smiling.

  “You know what,” I say, “as cool as this sword is—”

  I lever myself half off the ground.

  Its tongue sits me right back down.

  “Screw it.” I just yank out my gun and shoot the bloody thing.

  Three short thunderclaps. Holes appear in the frog. Blood sprays, decorates the wall. The frog dances and rolls. Then lies dead and still.

  Slowly, painfully, I get up off the floor. Aiko, who seems to have escaped the whole incident remarkably slime free, looks at me apologetically. “I was totally with you on the sword thing,” she says. “Would have been awesome. But, well…” She shrugs. “Maybe the fanny pack is more your speed after all?”

  She’s making light, but her hands are shaking. And I should take the joke in the spirit it was intended, but all my battered pride will allow me to say is, “Oh shut up,” as I start to hobble up the stairs.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  “A giant teleporting frog?” I am not sure if Devon is more disdainful of the quality of monster I am fighting, or my inability to do so proficiently.

  I look at her sourly. I swear I can hear Jasmine snickering in the background.

  “Oh, Arthur, I’m sorry.” Devon seizes me in a bear-crusher of a hug. Considering the residual frog spit covering me, it’s pretty decent of her.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say, once I can get air back in my lungs. “Just… being beaten up wasn’t the most fun.”

  I’d been so excited about the sword too. I was looking forward to my Errol Flynn moment. Swinging on a chandelier and diving over a grand staircase.

  That said, considering how this stuff normally goes, I’d be lucky to get a bare bulb and a stripper pole most days.

  “Would it cheer you up if I told you I thought I could blow up disrupted space-time particles?”

  I weigh this information. “How big of an explosion do they make?”

  “Very small individually. But if you get a big pocket it could make quite the boom.”

  “Let’s find a really big pocket.”

  “Att-a-boy.”

  α-1

  We’re in the room where Nikolai died. Devon pauses at the small cross we made for him, mutters something under her breath. She’s holding a tangle of wires and circuitry attached to a naked speaker.

  Aiko, Malcolm, and Jasmine have come along for the show too. Jasmine is headphone-less. She regards Devon’s messy little machine with something like hatred.

  “The headphones were a worthy sacrifice,” I tell her.”

  “You, like, totally realize that frog was karma, right?” she asks me.

  Devon looks at her sympathetically. “Would you like to blow something up too?”

  Jasmine grimaces, then shrugs, defeated. “Sure.”

  Devon holds out the wires to Jasmine. She takes it, then examines the messy thing, turning it over several times. Finally she looks up. “Like, how does it work?”

  “Well,” Devon says, “you point the speaker at the disturbance.” Jasmine sorts the apparatus out from the tangle, and grips it delicately in one hand. “Then you take those buttons in the other.” Jasmine organizes an accretion of circuitry into her left hand. The wires connecting the two parts make it look something like an electronic nunchuck. “And you press play.”

  Jasmine looks at her. “That’s it?”

  “Wait,” says Aiko.

  Jasmine huffs angrily.

  Aiko won’t be distracted. “So if this works,” she says, “then it’s going to cause the disturbed space-time particles to detonate?”

  I nod, keen to get to the exploding part. “Thereby posing less of a threat to the Chronometer and random bystanders.”

  “Blowing shit up poses less of a threat?”

  Aiko’s quizzical expression gives me pause for thought.

  “Well,” Devon intercedes, the proud parent defending her child, “it’s a question of degrees. An explosion, in general terms, is not a wonderful, happy, shiny thing. Not the sort of thing one puts in a box, wraps in paper, and gives to a child, for example. Well, excepting certain children in the class of Mrs. Bradmoor around twenty-three years ago. Maybe Kenneth McWhirter, for example. For him and his derisive comments about a girl’s enthusiasm for chocolate custard, an exception could be made. But, yes, as I was saying, in general terms, that’s a no-no. But here we’re dealing with a more specific case, sort of a sliding scale from, say, nothing going wrong at all, to explosions, all the way to ungluing parts of people in time and space. And also, while I don’t want to be seen as the squeaky wheel demanding some oil, maybe we could all consider that I just retroengineered this from what was, quite frankly, some shitty math, written in a language that I don’t actually speak, so maybe a little slack is in order.”

  We all contemplate that for a moment. “All right then.” Aiko nods. “Let’s blow some shit up.”

  Jasmine crosses the room until she’s about five paces from the water. “Is this good?” she asks.

  Devon nods.

  Jasmine presses the button.

  The thin sheet of plastic over the speaker ripples. At first I don’t hear anything, but then there’s a sound like muttering, like a record played backwards. It’s an ugly sound, tinny and raw. Jasmine makes a face.

  “Is this—” she starts.

  A ball of fire fills the air above the pool of water from which the catfish emerged. There’s a percussive clap that rocks Jasmine back on her feet and ruffles my hair. Steaming drops of water spray about the room.

  “Yeah!” Jasmine whoops.

  But the fire hasn’t finished. A flickering flame lingers in the air, racing up the height of the little waterfall. It spits and sparkles, fiery strands of light spinning away and fizzling out.

  “Oh shit,” Devon says.

  We all turn to her.

  “Why—” I start, and then the next explosion knocks me off my feet.

  Water sprays across the room. I see something unfolding out of the water, massive and on fire. A shapeless blob of scales that expands and expands out before collapsing into nothing. Then suddenly bursts into existence again, still wreathed in fire. And it’s gone before it hits the wall.

  Trails of fire are racing up and down through the hole the waterfall fell through.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Devon is cursing as she picks herself up.

  “What’s happening?” Malcolm is not in the most amused mood.

  “It’s propagating.” Devon is already moving towards the doors, the stairs up. “The particles of disturbed space-time are too densely packed. It’s like we’ve lit a match in a gunpowder factory.”

  “And we didn’t think of this before we tried out the device?” Aiko is frozen by her outrage.

  Devon is framed in the doorway. “They’re undetectable particles.” Devon is talking with her hands, and her hands are saying “Panic!”

  “You know,” she adds, “you really should be running away right now.”

  Another boom emphasizes the point. The floor shakes. We run.

  We hit the stairs. More blasts, both above and below. The floor shakes. I rattle between wall and banister. The rusted thing creaks ominously. I think of teleporting frogs and find my balance.

  We hit the first floor just as part of the ceiling gives way. The world becomes a stinking, rasping cloud trying to erase my lungs. I cough and spit. The
sound of collapsing concrete races after me. I lose sight of Aiko in the swirling clouds. I call out and hear nothing.

  Another explosion. More felt than heard. I pick up the pace. A wall looms out of nowhere. I crash into it, spin away, smash through a doorway. The room is clear but blank. Dead end. I back up. A blast spits fire at me, knocks me flying. I land on the floor. It’s not soft.

  Another doorway ahead of me. A chance for an exit. I pump my legs, push my body towards it. Another explosion. The wall around the door quakes, ripples like water.

  The door comes down, heavy concrete lintel smashing inches in front of my feet. I skid to a stop, graze my nose on rubble.

  There’s more smoke than dust now.

  Another explosion. Another.

  And what a stupid bloody way to die after all this.

  I spin around, try to retrace my steps. A window. I just need a window. Anything.

  Another explosion. Another. Another.

  I’m choking, coughing, blundering. I’m down on my hands and knees.

  Something massive and gibbering scrambles out of smoke towards me. Some horror of fur and flesh, its form liquid and malleable. It’s past me before I can even figure out what it used to be.

  Another explosion. Another. And then one more. It must be in the room next to me. As it lifts me off my feet, I think about that. Try to locate its point of origin. As I sail through the air I realize I was next to a door, and wonder if the thing was ripped off its hinges, if it’s going to hit me before I’m mashed against a wall. With adrenaline going, you really can think about a lot of things. About Felicity. About Aiko.

  Glass shatters around me. I try and work out where it came from.

  And then falling. And then the ground. Wet, and muddy, and not at all how I expected it. And then the smoke is pouring away from me. Pouring up into the sky.

  The sky.

  I can see the sky.

  I am lying on my back, outside, staring at a window I just smashed through, staring at a Russian government facility, on fire and collapsing. And above it: the sky.

  Strong hands grab me under my shoulders. I let them pull me away, let my head loll, my thoughts slowly arrange themselves back into something like cohesion.

  “Thanks, Malcolm,” I manage to say as my feet bump over the twisted asphalt.

  “Not quite a compliment,” Aiko replies.

  I twist in her hands, almost forcing her to drop me. And it is her there. “You’re strong for your size,” I manage.

  “Still not sure if that’s a compliment.”

  I think I might have a slight concussion, but I start to laugh. Aiko laughs too. It lets a little of the terror wash out.

  She drags me to where the others stand. We make a small tight knot, looking back at damage we’ve caused. The building comes down piece by piece, collapsing in upon itself, choking the endless basement levels.

  Slowly, carefully, Jasmine hands Devon back the little knot of wires and circuit boards.

  “Well,” Devon says, “on the plus side, we know it works.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  A road, several hours later

  It is not a comfortable or easy walk through the shattered city of Pripyat. It is not fun slogging down the roads that come afterward. Jasmine and Devon complain more than me. Malcolm less.

  When we hit the first village, Malcolm assures us he will get us a ride. I half expect him to tell us that he knows a guy who knows a guy, but it turns out that he has a fanny pack on that’s full of hundred dollar bills. Then he removes half of its contents. Apparently that’s our much touted exit strategy. And apparently Antonina, a savvy-looking local woman, knows a good deal when it walks into her grocery store.

  One extortion later and she leads us to a truck that looks like it comes from the same trash pile as all of Nikolai’s vehicles, and tells us the ride to Kiev—home of the nearest international airport—will take a while. Then she sits up front in the cab, her eight-year-old daughter beside her, and I sit in the truck bed and see if my bruised bones can be physically shaken from my body.

  At least, I think, as a pothole in the road lifts me six inches out of my rough seat for approximately the nine billionth time, there is a plan.

  Kiev

  It’s almost three a.m. when we check into the hotel. I was expecting a student motel with fifteen to a room, but apparently Malcolm is picky about where he sleeps.

  “If I’m going to spend a third of my life doing it, I’m going to be comfortable,” he informed Antonina after rejecting her first five hotel choices. This apparently convinced her that she should have tried to get more money from us, and we have to walk the last fifteen blocks.

  The clerk, though, is a friendly fellow, more so than seems reasonable at such an hour; and being more bonesore and world-weary than I feel anyone should ever feel, I take advantage of this to pressure him into opening the bar for me. He pours me a double of some mystery whiskey and then, mercifully, leaves me alone.

  I sit in the half-light of a single lamp, and try to work out what’s eating at me. We’re not doing too badly, truth be told. Sure I’ve taken some knocks today, the worst of them possibly on my posterior, but we’ve still got two days before the deadline. We’re closer than we’ve ever been to ending this.

  Maybe I’m just tired.

  But then the real reason walks into the bar.

  “Mind if I join you?” Aiko doesn’t wait for me to reply. The desk clerk scurries over and she points to my glass, which may not be particularly wise, but a silent minute later she has her own. She takes a sip and sighs.

  “Quite the trip,” she says, nodding to herself. “Quite the trip.”

  “Yes,” I say, fully aware of how monosyllabic I am. This sort of thing seems to reduce me to caveman levels of verbalism.

  “So,” Aiko looks up at me from her glass. She’s changed into a pair of dark green cargo shorts and a loose white T-shirt proclaiming “I shot Kennedy.” It hangs off one shoulder. She has very smooth skin. “Why did you come to the Ukraine, Agent Arthur?” Aiko asks. “Business or pleasure?”

  Oh Lordy.

  It is, in the end, a question about the future. A question that extends beyond the Russian’s deadline, about life after the seventeenth. Assuming there is life beyond then. And I have been sticking resolutely to the short term.

  But here Aiko is, and she’s asking me where I stand. When the chips have all fallen where they may, am I with MI37 or the Weekenders? With Felicity or her?

  I look up at Aiko. She is a pretty woman. A clever woman. A good woman. A good human being. She makes me laugh. I admire her.

  But…

  Jesus.

  It’s all true of Felicity too. Except, that makes them sound the same. And they are so not the same. There is something so very fundamentally different about them both.

  And I know, I can be certain that I belonged with Felicity. I felt that, albeit fleetingly. She was the person I wanted. But now? Who am I now? Who is she now? And does that even matter? Because, surely regardless of whether the world survives, I don’t think our relationship will.

  So surely there’s no real question here.

  Except… Jesus, why can nothing ever seem sure?

  I begin to realize it’s been quite a long time since Aiko asked her question.

  “Maybe,” she takes a substantial swig from her whiskey, “I should put it another way.”

  I remain resolutely noncommittal.

  “I like you, Arthur,” she says. “I think we both know that. We both do now.” Another gulp of whiskey. “And I think we both know that your girlfriend doesn’t like you any more. So,” she finishes the whiskey, “the only thing I don’t know now is whether you like me.”

  Oh crap. And it’s all so simple when she lays it out like that. All so easy. Logical. Except logic doesn’t seems to apply to my life any more. Maybe it never has when it comes to the heart. And now I have to figure out how to explain that, when I can barely explain it to myself.
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br />   “Aiko—” I start.

  She closes her eyes, shakes her head. And even the tone of my voice is enough.

  “There is one other way I can put this,” she says. She stands. I think she’s going to leave. And part of me feels like an ass for having pushed away such an obvious opportunity, and part of me is so relieved I have to suppress the accompanying sigh.

  And then she leans in and she kisses me.

  Her lips touch mine. Soft as a breath. My mouth opens slightly, as much shock as… well, at least half shock. She slips my bottom lip between her two. My breath is caught. What if I am caught…?

  Caught by who?

  And then she pulls away. My breath so short it’s an actual little person.

  “I—” I start.

  “Think about it,” she says. “But, speaking selfishly, it’d be nice if you made your mind up soon.”

  She gives me a smile, a beautiful smile, then turns and leaves. I stay sitting, staring at the empty whiskey glass, at the smudge her lips made on the glass.

  And if I made the right decision or the wrong one, I honestly don’t know.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Thirty-five thousand feet above the North Seaand descending. October 16th.

  “So,” Devon leans across the aisle of the 757 and gives me a conspiratorial wink, “I am assuming you have a terribly cunning plan for when we land about how to find these dastardly Russians.”

  Terribly cunning might be overexaggerating the extent of my planning. The ratio between terrible and cunning has been somewhat negatively affected by the fact that I’ve spent a large portion failing to not think about either Felicity or Aiko. The latter of those women has spent the whole flight sitting directly in front of me, not turning around once. She has pulled her hair into two small pigtails. I have studied them to the point where I could now pretty much write an algorithm for their movement in response to turbulence. On other subjects I am less edified.

  “We need access to the full KGB files on our Russians,” I whisper, looking up and down the aisle for any stewards who seem overly interested in our conversation. There are, unsurprisingly, none. “We have their names, some associates. But we need things like aliases. Or known contacts. Or safe houses. More about them, about how they operate in London.”