Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I really need to get this sword out.

  I stand, leaning my body out through the empty frame of the windshield, pitching my body until it meets the angle my head tells me is right. I twist my hand just so. Not too far clockwise or anticlockwise. I pull with fast, firm efficiency, watching the pitch of my shoulder, my elbow. The sword comes out in a quick, clean stroke.

  And, actually, this could have been worth the migraine.

  Punin is tearing at the roof, punching holes. His fist comes down, almost sits in Aiko’s lap.

  I twist round in my seat, facing backwards, body still through the windshield, propped up by the wind. I can see Punin towering above me. He twists, sees me. He raises his fist. I swing the sword.

  A sword lances through the air in front of me. Not mine. No flames. No flash. Just sheer and deadly. It slams through Punin’s fist. He screams as he is pinned to the car.

  I’m already swinging. A great cleaving swipe, aimed at his midriff. Flame spits and crackles as my sword connects with his side, continues on, embeds in spinal tissue.

  Punin doesn’t even scream. Just spills himself out onto the road in a silent, bloody gush.

  I stare across the road. Kayla is looking at me, leaning out of a car window, her hand still extended from the throw that speared his hand.

  On the car hood—a bloody stain. No Russian. Malcolm is smiling triumphantly.

  I stare at Punin’s corpse, still flapping against the car window, pinned by Kayla’s sword.

  I tug my sword free, then Kayla’s. Punin’s body tumbles to the road, and rolls away. I discover I know the angle to toss the sword back to Kayla. She catches it. For a moment she might even look impressed. She nods at me, and ducks back into her car.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Three Russians down. Four to go. Four spark-haloed silhouettes racing through the night. Still on course.

  And then just two sparks.

  Which means…

  Suddenly, sitting in Clyde’s lap. Between Aiko and Felicity. Ekaterina Kropkin. Terminator eyes red with rage. She smashes an elbow into Felicity’s face. Felicity’s nose becomes a red smear. I yell, drive the sword at her, slicing into—

  —nothing. A flash of light. The Russian woman gone. The flaming sword tip is an inch from Felicity’s blood-soaked hands as they clutch her face. She bellows in pain.

  “No,” Clyde says clear as an alarm cloak. “No.”

  To my right another flash of light. I spin, expect to see Kropkin lunging at me, but there’s proto-Lenin, Urve Potia, on the hood of Tabitha’s car. Electricity lances through the windshield. Glass scatters.

  “No!” I bellow, an angry echo to Clyde. These bastards just upped the personal ante.

  I’m not really thinking as I pitch across the car, seize the steering wheel. Devon screams. I ignore her. I slam the car right, barreling us into Tabitha’s car.

  Hands loose on the wheel, too busy ducking, Tabitha loses control. Her car veers right, slams up onto a kerb, grates along building facades. Potia is thrown wildly up. He crashes into concrete, rolls along, his body folding at unnatural angles. He lands, becomes a speed bump for Tabitha. Becomes a mess of blood and bone.

  Four down, you fuckers.

  A lightning burst, right in front of my eyes, blinding me. I reel back into the chair, retinas burning. I just make out the figure in front of me, her hand going back.

  Felicity is still yelling, still bleeding.

  Clyde says “No” again. The same voice. Definite. Soulless.

  Kropkin’s hand plunges towards my throat.

  And stops.

  “No,” says Clyde.

  Her hand goes up. She clutches her head.

  “No,” says Clyde.

  I blink, trying to clear my vision. Trying to understand. Kropkin pulls away from me, pushes herself backwards, across the hood of the car.

  “Wait…” I say, not understanding, feeling that something is askew, that we have somehow deviated from life’s script.

  Ekaterina Kropkin calmly pushes herself off the hood of the car and under our tires.

  The car thuds over her, bounces, suspension shrieking. The back wheels hit and the car flips up. We land, crash down. Bewildered. Dazed.

  “What?” I ask the world. “Why did she…? Did she…?”

  Words emerge from Felicity’s bellowing. “You irresponsible, amoral shit!” A hand leaps out, strikes the side of Clyde’s mask. His head snaps away, a bloody handprint on the otherwise blank wood.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. But I think I do. But I don’t want to.

  “I helped,” Clyde says, calm and savage all at once in the backseat.

  “You made her?” I ask him. “You went into her head, and you made her do that?”

  “The grossest of violations!” Felicity sounds as if she has a cold. I am torn between comforting her and… and… Clyde… Clyde… I feel sick. That’s… And, Jesus, I know we are killing people here. I know we are fighting for our existence, for everybody’s continued existence. But that’s a sort of cold-blooded I can’t even begin to imagine. To just reach into someone’s head, to tell them to kill themselves. To know they’ll do it.

  “Good riddance, I say,” says Devon. Who is apparently a lot more bloodthirsty than her floral patterns would lead you to believe.

  “What would Tabitha say?” I ask him. “What would she think of this?”

  I look over at her car. Would it be different if she were here? Would he refrain from exercising the more alien of his powers? I fear he wouldn’t.

  “We cannot always accommodate others,” Clyde replies, quite calmly, and he turns his head quite slowly from Felicity to Aiko.

  And no. No, don’t make this about me. This is about more than just losing a friend. Losing friends. This is about what’s right and wrong. About good guys and bad guys. About being one and not the other.

  And maybe it’s not just what’s worth fighting for, but how you fight.

  I close my eyes. “She kissed me,” I say.

  Felicity snaps her head around. She looks at me. “What?”

  “She kissed me. I let her kiss me. I thought it was over. You and me. I thought we were done. And I let her kiss me.”

  “How the fuck is that relevant?”

  She’s angry. She has a right to be angry.

  “It’s not,” I say. “I think that’s the point I’m trying to make.” I’m not sure. But I have four friends in this car, and I think I can feel three of them slipping away. But maybe this is my chance to grab onto at least one of them. “You once said I was a decent man. And I did an indecent thing. I’m trying to make it right in a decent way.”

  Felicity stares at me, and I can’t read her face.

  “I don’t suppose,” Devon says from the driver’s seat. “That there’s a chance we could save the melodrama until later and sort of focus on stopping those two bastards in front of us? I mean, I realize that I’m just some psychopath’s ex-girlfriend at this point, but considering how completely my life has been crapped in over the past two weeks, I would really appreciate a little effort in making the sacrifice worthwhile.”

  She flings the car sideways. We spin around a car, sitting abandoned in the center of the street.

  There are people on the streets now. Some cheer as we scream past them. Probably think we’re street racers taking advantage. Some are busy smashing windows in stores. Grabbing and running. No alarms sound. The lights have gone down and the night people have come out. People willing to be faceless masses, to welcome the darkness. Chaos is slowly breaking loose in London.

  Jesus. Coleman EMP’d the capital. All of it. He shut everything down. For nothing. For a false belief.

  God I hope we get these guys just so I get to see the look on his bloody face.

  “Five down,” I say. But I can no longer smile as we hurtle towards the two remaining sparks of light.

  EIGHTY

  “Big Ben’s getting close.” Felicity, bloodstained and angry, is s
taring past me at the road.

  The Russians tear towards a T-junction and we shriek after them.

  “Left or right?” Devon is white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

  Clyde sits stonily in the backseat, saying nothing.

  The Russians are sixty yards ahead of us, Tabitha ten yards behind. Detonating disturbed space-time leads the way, and the blast of Malcolm’s pistol chases us. And the yards of stone frontage approach us at an alarming pace.

  “Toss up,” I tell Devon.

  “I’ve never made a handbrake turn,” Devon informs us.

  “Watch which way they go,” I say.

  “Any other patently obvious advice?” Devon snaps.

  I bite back an equally catty response. One of us losing the battle with our nerves seems like enough.

  A blink of light. Our tires eat asphalt. Another flare. We’re running out of road.

  Two flashes. One left, one right.

  “They’ve split up!” Aiko and I—apparently the official peanut gallery—say it in unison.

  “Oh shit on it.” Devon hauls on the steering wheel. The brakes squeal. The tires squeal. Even I squeal a little bit.

  We’re up on two wheels as we make the left. I can see the kerb approaching. If we hit it, we’re going over.

  The car trembles. I can hear the free wheels spinning madly, whining through the air.

  The car comes down. Four wheels touch down. We slam up onto the sidewalk. Smash through a plastic box of newspapers. They flutter through where our windshield should be. I scrape a bogus story about solar flares off my face.

  I glance back. The rear lights of Tabitha’s car retreat from us. She’s chasing the other Russian. Malcolm and his deadly aim go with her. Kayla too.

  I need to concentrate. To focus. On the bastard in front of us. Which one is it? Ivan Spilenski, who almost killed me at the British Museum, or Leo Malkin, who almost killed me outside Trafalgar Square? The time distorter or the teleporter?

  A soft “bwoom.” A movie special effect of slowed time. As all around me, everything seems to accelerate.

  I try to bring the tangle of wires still clutched in my hand to bear. Try to target the ball of space.

  Devon slams on the brakes. Felicity flies forwards. My seatbelt snaps tight as a garotting wire. Aiko shouts. The car shrieks. Devon seizes at the handbrake. I try to wrench my head around. But I know what’s coming.

  Ivan Spilenski, you are so going down.

  Unless you turn me into a baby first, of course.

  The back wheels go, screeching round. We barrel down the street sideways. Devon’s precious tangle of wires flies out of my hand, somehow lands in the back seat. It snakes toward Aiko, picking up speed, heading toward the open window. The car pitches. We sail up onto two wheels again. The car teeters. The wires take off, lift up into the air. I snap out my hand, lunge against the tangential forces. I miss. The wires sail by.

  A trailing wire catches around my finger. I grip tight. It slips. I grab again, catch a finger hold, squeeze. I hold tight.

  The car goes over. Up onto its side. Down the street, sideways. The frame buckles. Blacktop grinds closer, closer, through my open window. Then—with a crash, with a shaking of the world—over again, onto the roof, which crumples down, shrieking, screaming, the ripped metal howling at the injustice. Gravity pulls at me, but apparently it pissed off my seatbelt at some point and that thing’s not letting go without a fight.

  “Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh no. Oh crap.” A stream of profanity flows out of Devon. I fear we may have broken her.

  Something slams into the exposed underbelly of the car. Slams through it.

  It’s a slow implacable grinding. Spilenski’s ball of distorted time eating out the exhaust, the suspension, the steering. Rust rains on us. Clyde kicks his legs out of its path, towards the crumpled car roof now below him.

  If we’d been upright… If we’d been facing head-on… It would have torn us apart. Not that Spilenski will be hanging around now, scratching his head.

  “Out of the car!” I yell. “Now!”

  And this is the point where the captain ensures all the crew are safely out before he takes care of himself, except I’m going to do that after I get the hell out of this death trap.

  I wrestle with the locking mechanism.

  Bwoom. Spilenski rolls out a ball of distorted space-time with my name all over it.

  And was it Satan his-bloody-self who designed this damn belt?

  Felicity slams down onto the roof behind me. She sees me wrestling. She slams her fist at the belt mechanism.

  The effect is something similar to what I imagine James Bond experiences when he activates his ejector seat. Except his car is never stuck upside down when he does it.

  Staggering, barely able to see, I push out of the window. I’m on my back, head arched back. I can see Spilenski upside down. His form seems to ripple and bend.

  Because I am seeing it through a bubble of distorted time. Because I am about to be hit.

  I struggle against my own confusion, my own limbs. I demand my body gets its shit together. I half roll, half drag myself to the side.

  The enormous gelatinous thing wobbles past me.

  The police car disintegrates. Rust eats it. Parts fold up on themselves, compressing into impossibly small pieces of metal. Other bits unbuckle, spit out their rivets, collapse into shining unpainted sheets of metal as the clock turns back. A few chunks of rocky ore spatter the road.

  Bwoom.

  Spilenski fires at us again. I scramble up, still on all fours. An empty street in London. Lined with lawyers and dentists, real estate agents and upscale cosmetic salons. Not the sort to litter the street with convenient bits of rubble or colossal concrete barriers.

  Bwoom.

  I reach for my sword. My hand closes over empty air.

  My sword. Still in the wreck of Devon’s car. Spilenski’s ball of messed up time rolling towards it.

  God my priorities are messed up.

  Bwoom.

  I break into a run, lungs battered and screaming at me, demanding I stop this madness. My legs add to the chorus. Two yards between me and the blade. Four between me and the ball. One yard to the sword. Three to the ball. I scrabble at the sword’s hilt. Two yards. One. I dive away.

  Bwoom.

  Some part of my brain knows how to roll without setting fire to my pants. Still, I’m thinking Clyde might have overwritten some important self-preservation urges.

  I come up, lit sword in my hands.

  Bwoom.

  My weapon recovered, but I’m still too far from Spilenski. The closer I get, the harder his giant balls of fuck-you-up are going to be to dodge. Going up close and personal would be suicide.

  Bwoom.

  “Shoot the fucker!” someone yells. Either Aiko or Felicity. At least, I really hope it’s not Devon.

  Bwoom.

  I have my pistol, but a bullet is only going to be turned into so much molten yesterday by the temporal distortion.

  Bwoom.

  Temporal distortion.

  Devon’s tangle of wires around my left hand. I seize them, take aim. Each second I spend sighting the speaker on him feels like a grain of sand slipping through my fingers. I can feel Leo Malkin edging closer and closer to Big Ben.

  Bwoom.

  I aim the speaker. I press play.

  Bwoom.

  Barely audible syllables from the tiny speaker. A tinny voice.

  Bwoom.

  The explosion lifts me off the floor.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  I have heard that falling into water from a sufficient height is like falling onto concrete. I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I’ve had the good fortune of never being hurled from a sufficient height into water.

  Falling onto concrete, however, from any height really, sucks balls.

  The detonation throws me like a rag doll. I come down hard on my left side, arms splaying out. I roll, like a bowling ball waiting to hit the pins. My s
word’s gone. My chin grinds over and over. My skin tries to dissociate itself from a fool like me, to stay behind scraped over the asphalt.

  I come up bleeding, bloody, raw. I’ve replaced my palms with lacerations, my sense of hearing with a high-pitched whining sound. Blood keeps getting in one of my eyes.

  And I’m smiling, because I’m still doing way better than Ivan Spilenski.

  That said, so is pretty much anybody who’s not smeared over the base of a crater like strawberry jam.

  I see my sword embedded in the roof of a classic red telephone booth. Apparently that’s as close as this Arthur is going to get to a sword in the stone. I hobble over to it. Wrench it free.

  Felicity, Devon, and Clyde all slowly pick themselves up. Their clothes are ragged, their skin blackened by ash, crisscrossed by cuts. Clyde is double-checking the straps of his mask. I hobble towards them.

  “You OK?”

  “Yes,” Clyde says. “I am. This body is taking a beating though.”

  This body. Not his body. Not him. That wipes the grin off my face.

  Felicity is checking her watch. “Big Ben,” she says. “We have to be there. Now.”

  And she’s right. This is hardly the time to rest on our laurels. It’s just that resting on anything would be really nice right now.

  Devon bends down, scoops something up from the street. Her mess of wires. Blasted out of my hand but still intact. She tosses it to me. “You’ll need this.”

  To me. She throws them to me. And for a moment everyone looks to me. All of us moving together. All of us fighting for the right thing, the right way: together.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s finish this.”

  EIGHTY-TWO

  If there’s a tomorrow, I’m really going to regret this.

  In fact, it is my body’s opinion that no tomorrows might be a wonderful thing. It screams at me to give up. There’s still time, it tells me, to get some good lying down and not hurting so much done. Some time for the good stuff.

  It’s a good argument, truth be told.

  But it’s not what Kurt Russell would do. Somehow that mad thought won’t leave me. It’s a spur stuck in my brain driving me on. So I put my head down, pump my legs. I suck in lungfuls of air, try to find a little more willpower, just to push a little closer to whatever the finale is going to be.