Halfheroes

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  From behind, Abos heard the woman's voice directing the security guards. "She's in Eden Wing."

  Abos opened the first door she came to and stepped inside. It was a dark locker room with one window, big enough to get through but set high up in one corner.

  The running footsteps stopped outside the door, and the handle turned.

  Two men entered, flicking on the lights. They scanned the room, one of them staying in the doorway while the other quickly checked any open lockers. Satisfied, they withdrew and ran to the next room.

  Abos watched them go, her back flat on the ceiling five feet above their heads. She floated across to the window, pulled it open and dropped down to the carpark.

  Five minutes later, she was back at the river - the area where she'd landed was near a no-go zone in a rough neighbourhood, which was a perfect place to take off unobserved. Wary of running into the dealers or the pimps, she took a different route back, approaching the bridge from the north along a path covered in litter.

  With perfect timing, a BMW cruised to a stop parallel to the riverside path.

  The men inside wound down the darkened windows and shouted something incomprehensible. Abos didn't need to understand the slang they used to know the kind of thing they were saying. The tone was universal. She sighed and turned to face them.

  Doors clicked open. Three men walked towards her. The fourth remained in the car, the engine still idling.

  Abos let them approach. It was possible they wanted to help her, fearing she lost. It was possible. Just not likely.

  They split up as they got closer, the biggest—a gold tooth flashing in the starlight—grinning and murmuring constantly. Whatever he was saying caused the other two men, now closing off her other possible escape routes, to snigger. When they were within a few feet of her, they stopped. She had one on each side, and Big Boy directly in front of her.

  Hooking his thumbs into his belt, Big Boy stopped smiling. He nodded at his friends. They came at her quickly, one aiming to restrain her while the other produced a knife.

  Abos took a step forward as the first man reached for her. He stumbled as his hands found air where she had just been standing. Before the second man had time to react, Abos turned, grabbed them by their jacket collars and brought their heads together. Not hard enough to cause any permanent damage, but hard enough to hurt.

  The man with the knife dropped face first onto the path. The other joined him, clutching at his head and moaning.

  Big Boy went with his first instinct, which was to reach around to the small of his back and grasp his handgun.

  By the time he’d raised the weapon, the woman had gone. The dumbstruck expression on his face was only there for as long as it took him to realise she was behind him. Abos made her location clearer by reaching into his trousers, taking hold of his underwear, and pulling upwards until the waistband reached his shoulder blades. He squealed and dropped the gun.

  Abos hoisted him over her head, took a glance downriver, then threw the man over half a mile back towards the London Eye.

  As she turned, she heard a distant splash.

  The BMW's driver had his earbuds in. He sang along, missing the sight of the woman with the helmet sprinting fifty yards before soaring upwards and out of sight.

  The Shard swayed, like a ship at anchor. Daniel wondered if a fall from this height would kill him. He was pretty sure it would. That night in Birmingham had been painful enough, and they'd only fallen about twenty storeys before landing in water. A car might break his fall, he supposed, the metal crumpling as it slowed his progress. If that happened, he might snap some bones, but he fancied he'd survive. It would bloody hurt, though.

  He was so lost in speculation, that when Abos spoke quietly into his ear twelve-and-a-half minutes after leaving, he yelped in surprise.

  "Can you carry this?"

  Abos was holding out three gel bags full of purple-red blood. Daniel tucked them into one of the bike's panniers.

  "Any problems?" he said.

  "Not really."

  Daniel sat on the bike and waited. Thirty seconds later, a businessman stumbling back to his hotel after a wallet-draining evening in Soho stood in front of a poster featuring the unlikely automotive flying star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The poster exhorted families to come and see the impossible become real. The man, remembering how much he loved the film as a child, tried to make a drunken note in his phone to take his family as, three hundred metres above him, a woman flew south, accompanied by a halfhero on a motorcycle.

  Daniel's phone rang. He pressed a button on the bike's handlebars.

  "Hi, Saffi," he said. "You realise you're the only person who ever calls?"

  Her voice was husky, with an accent Daniel had never placed. Saffi sounded amused.

  "I hear there are apps for this kind of thing, no? You can find yourself a nice girlfriend. Anyway, you lie. I know Sara calls you sometimes."

  "She's my half-sister. I only have eyes for you, Saff. You know that."

  She laughed dutifully. It was a sexy laugh. As he had never seen her, Daniel imagined Saffi to be tall, brown-eyed, and drop-dead gorgeous. Nothing else could match that voice. UN protocols and a secret iron-clad international agreement between the countries funding Saffi's activities meant the two of them were unlikely to meet. Daniel had just enough nerve to flirt under those circumstances.

  "Perhaps you can buy me dinner one day. In the meantime, could IGLU borrow you this weekend?"

  "What do you have in mind, Saff?"

  "I'm afraid it's one of yours again."

  Another halfhero gone bad.

  "Oh. Shit. At least tell me it's somewhere warm this time. Exotic. Five-star hotels?"

  "Newcastle."

  "Oh. Glamorous, Saffi. Cheers."

  "My pleasure, Daniel. It's your turf. I'll send you the details. Gabe and Sara will be there tomorrow."

  Daniel estimated it would take him at least three-and-a-half hours to get to Newcastle, even with light traffic and the bike's speed. He could get some sleep till lunchtime, read through the briefing, and be prepared by the time the others arrived.

  "I hope you're serious about that dinner." He knew Saffi was smiling on the other end of the line.

  "Completely."

  "I'd be upset if you were just pulling my chain."

  "Oh. Is this some sort of sexual reference, Daniel?"

  He felt himself reddening and started babbling.

  "No - no! It's a, you know, an expression, it's like, are you stringing me along, are you pulling my—no, that's worse. It's just a turn of phrase, you see, it doesn't mean...hang on."

  Saffi was giggling.

  "You bloody wind-up merchant."

  "I've sent the link. Shall we debrief afterwards?" She delivered the line without a hint of flirtatiousness but left a long pause.

  Now it was Daniel's turn to laugh. "You're outrageous."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  She rang off before he could respond. Daniel turned to Abos, grinning.

  "Change of plan. Can you drop me near a motorway?" Then, quickly, remembering the way Abos struggled with colloquialisms, "But don't, you know, literally drop me. Just set me down, Gently. Please."

  9

  Abos reached Cornwall before dawn, taking the blood samples and going straight to the lab. She flicked a switch by the door and the two long fluorescent tubes fizzed into life. The lab didn't live up to its name. There were no gleaming aluminium surfaces, no rows of test tubes, no bands of computer monitors. Nothing beeped. Originally an animal feed store, the smell of straw and grain still rose from the rough stone floor. The walls were unpainted. Low wooden beams studded with iron nails crossed the space, a radio dangling from one of them.

  Two gleaming bathtubs and two very large tables dominated the centre of the lab. Abos opened the door of the large fridge in the corner, placing the blood packs inside. From the other shelves, she removed handfuls of fresh fruit and vegetables, taking them over
to the nearest bath and, after putting the plug in place, dropped the food inside. After a few trips back and forth, the tub was half-full. She eased the tied plastic sheeting from her back and poured in its contents before fetching a pack of blood from the fridge.

  Abos poured the blood on top of the slime and food, then reached behind her and turned on the radio. It was tuned to the BBC World Service. Abos had learned the English language in Station's laboratory while growing her first human body. She must have achieved it by being aware of the surrounding conversations. Her future brother, or sister would have the radio on twenty-four hours a day.

  Abos didn't sleep. She spread out her pages of research and fired up Daniel's laptop, bringing up tabs full of websites she had been studying for months. Twice, she checked on the bath in the lab.

  Early afternoon, her phone rang.

  "Hello Daniel."

  "Hi Abos. Great all-day breakfasts here. I've had three plates of egg, bacon, and potatoes. Tell me you've eaten."

  "Not yet. I may have some cereal."

  "It's just not fair," said Daniel. "I mean, not only are you stronger than me, but you can fly and move stuff around with your mind, like Yoda on steroids. And you do all that on two pieces of toast and a glass of orange juice? How is that right? If I don't shove food down my face every few hours, I pass out."

  The fact that Abos could not explain her abilities, was frustrating, but not surprising. Daniel had a liver that carried out over five hundred roles within his body, but he could no more have explained how it did it than he could have recited all of Hamlet.

  Abos put the phone on speaker and washed up the dishes from a takeaway two nights earlier. She enjoyed doing domestic tasks. The setup in the farmhouse with Daniel had soon begun to feel normal. After the first few weeks, they'd stopped treating each other like mysterious, exotic creatures and had relaxed. As the months had gone by, the initial strangeness had worn off, replaced by undramatic happiness, which seeped into their consciousness unnoticed.

  "There's an update from Palindrome," said Daniel from the phone on the windowsill.

  Palindrome was one of George's contacts, a hacker who treasured his or her anonymity. Anna, or Ada. Otto, perhaps. Daniel had an email address and a phone number for Palindrome which always went straight to voicemail. The voicemail message was female, so they both referred to her as a woman.

  "She says there's only one loose end from Hopkins and Station, but it's—in her words—a doozy."

  "Doozy?"

  "Something big. She's traced financial transactions from the turn of the century amounting to a few million pounds. But it's all hidden behind shell companies and red herrings."

  Abos frowned, not sure she understood the expression. Daniel, as if he could see her, explained more straightforwardly. "Hopkins, or Station, was paying someone a lot of money in nineteen-ninety-nine and two-thousand, but he did everything he could to make sure no one knew who, or why."

  "So you cannot find out what he was doing?"

  "Palindrome thinks she can. But this was back before the internet had its fingers in everything. She says many of the records are on paper, and it will involve old-fashioned legwork. It'll take time and money. She wants a hundred thousand for the job. I think we should go ahead. It's Hopkins' last surprise. We're done with him forever once we find out what he was spending money on. It was a long time ago, it's very unlikely it can affect us now. But I want to be sure. Agreed?"

  "Yes, Daniel. Let's be sure."

  "Okay. Good. What's your plan for the next few weeks?"

  "I have two strong leads to pursue. One in Russia, the other in Egypt."

  "What about Boudicca? She still a candidate?"

  "Yes. There are enough independent descriptions of her physical prowess, including one where a large tree uprooted itself and fell on her enemies. I have a historian in Cambridge working on it for me. It's proven difficult to find evidence of her burial place, but she's narrowed it down to three likely sites."

  "And how's our guest? Everything go okay?"

  Abos looked out towards the outbuilding where another member of her species—the only other member, as far as she knew—was undergoing the changes necessary to become a living, breathing person.

  "Yes. The process is underway."

  "Great. I should be back on Monday. I'll call if that changes. See you soon."

  Since Abos had stepped out of that bath in the cottage in her new body, she and Daniel had spent many hours discussing who, and what, she was. An alien? A man-made experimental being? Even a spontaneous evolutionary leap by some subterranean species? Nothing seemed to fit, but Abos was clear on one point: it was unlikely she was unique. Surely somewhere out there, there were others like her. But where was the evidence? Where were the historical documents describing beings with superhuman power?

  For a while, Abos had concluded that she was exploring a dead end. It had been a casual remark from Daniel that had changed everything.

  "What about Goliath?" Daniel had said one night, over a year ago.

  "Old Testament, King David's Goliath?" Abos had taught at a primary school and her knowledge of human history was better than Daniel's, which he couldn't help but find somewhat galling. Her ability to retain learned knowledge from her previous existences gave her an unfair advantage. She would have been great in a pub quiz.

  "That's the bloke, yeah," said Daniel. "He was a giant, right? He might have been one of your mob."

  A quick internet search had revealed that Goliath's height was put at somewhere between six foot nine inches and nine feet.

  "Even at six-nine, he was a big bastard. Everyone was smaller then, weren't they? He might be another Abos, Abos."

  A brief flurry of excitement had faded when Abos had reminded Daniel that Goliath's severed head had been presented to King Saul.

  "I don't know what would happen if my body was incomplete when I returned to my dormant state," she said. "It seems unlikely that, if enough of my corpse were missing, I'd be able to grow a new body. I don't know."

  "Kind of hard to test. Want me to fetch an axe?"

  "Joke?"

  "Joke."

  Deadpan humour was usually wasted on Abos. She had raised another problem with Goliath. "There's no mention of the head becoming slime, so either Goliath was human, or severing the head and removing the blood flow to the brain prevents my kind from returning to the dormant state."

  "Yeah, well, never mind," he said. "It was just a thought."

  Daniel had forgotten about it the next morning when he came downstairs to find Abos sitting at the computer, writing in a notepad. The table was full of scribbled pages, sorted into piles.

  "Have you been doing that all night?"

  "Yes."

  "What are you looking for?"

  "It was what you said about Goliath. It made me stop thinking about history, and start looking at stories, myths, and legends. If a being with unexplainable powers appeared now, it would be reported by social media in minutes. But go back a few generations, and you didn't even have cameras. More generations still, and the printed word was a novelty. Historians piece together a version of the truth from the stories they uncover. But the stories describing inexplicable supernatural events are labelled myths or folklore and are not included in the history books."

  "So some myths and legends might not be myths and legends at all? They're reports of other Aboses?" Daniel frowned. "If you're right, we're going to need a better name. Aboses is a bloody mouthful."

  Abos indicated the piles of notes.

  "Each of these describes a legend featuring a creature that was larger than average. I filtered likely candidates by focussing on those who with some kind of power. Strength, speed, flight, any mental manipulation of matter."

  "There's a name for that," said Daniel. "Telly Savalas or something."

  "Telekinesis. I have found candidates from the past few hundred years. I will start with them as the geographical locations are easier to pinpoint in m
ore recent accounts."

  "Great. How long before you find one?"

  "I don't know. A few weeks, I hope."

  That had been nearly thirteen months ago.

  Now, the research had paid off. There was another Abos beginning its transformation in a cheap bath in the shed outside.

  10

  Newcastle

  12:40 am

  Daniel raised the night-vision binoculars and swore. These were his least favourite jobs. The man the IGLU team had targeted was, on one level, just another petty criminal and drug dealer who was expanding his patch. The problem was, this dealer was a halfhero.

  "Half-twat," he muttered. Saffi had warned him it was 'one of yours,' but that didn't make it any less depressing. Every child of The Deterrent was a member of Daniel's extended family.

  "You're an embarrassment, bro."

  As there were so few halfheroes out there, Daniel took every bad apple personally. Since joining IGLU, he, Sara, and Gabe had broken up the criminal operations of four rogue halfheroes, alongside their regular missions. A new prison with enhanced security measures had been secretly built near Gravesend, holding those four halfheroes, and no one else. Two were British, one Spanish, the other American. All were multiple murderers. Daniel hoped the prison would welcome another inmate shortly.

  The man in question was drinking with some of his cronies. Dave Davie Davison—or TripleDee as he insisted on being called—was celebrating adding another housing estate to his portfolio of weed, crack and crystal meth clients. According to the online file, he'd achieved this by breaking the arms of every other dealer on the turf. When retribution arrived, Davison had put himself front and centre in the fire-fight. The bullets had bounced off him, and he'd only lost three members of his crew, which he'd considered an acceptable price to pay.

  Daniel tried to find some sympathy for his half-sibling. Davison had grown up in a rough area, with, according to the file, an alcoholic mother and—of course—an absent father.