Halfheroes

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  "We could be anywhere in the world, like, but I'm guessing America."

  Neither Daniel nor Sara answered.

  "All right, I get it." It sounded more like all reet in TripleDee's Newcastle accent. "You don't trust me. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be here." Hee-ar. "But you are here, and so am I, and, probably, every other halfhero Gorman could find."

  Sara responded to that.

  "I agree. He said halfheroes were a threat in the first video. I guess he means all of us."

  "Sara? This guy just ambushed us, beat the crap out of us, sold us out to Gorman... he's the reason we're here. And what, we're going to forget all that? Talk to him like he's not a complete bastard?"

  "That's rich coming from you, pal." TripleDee's voice was mocking. "Just coming to see me for a cup of tea and a chat, were you? Not planning to throw me in prison and throw away the key, then?"

  Sara and Daniel were silent.

  "Not denying it, then? Yeah, right, so get the fuck off your high horse. We're here now, we want to get out. I'm a practical man. We need to work together."

  "In your dreams, mate. You're just a piece of shit drug dealer. You'd stab me in the back as soon as look at me."

  "Yeah, as it's you, maybe I would, but you'd do the same. And I'm a businessman, Harbin. Plain and simple."

  "Businessman? Selling crack to kids and pimping women?"

  "Shut up, you two. Daniel, TripleDee's right. We need to work together."

  "Thank you." TripleDee sounded smug.

  "TripleDee, Daniel's right. You are a lowlife piece of shit."

  Daniel laughed.

  "But that means nothing now. We all want out. Let's focus on that."

  Daniel and TripleDee both grunted their assent.

  "Start by answering a question. How did you know about us, back in Newcastle?"

  "Robertson. Gorman's man. I didn't know that at the time, mind. He showed us pictures, videos. He said the UN had secretly funded you three to clean up rogue halfheroes and lock them away."

  "The way you say it, you make it sound like a bad thing."

  "Who appointed you as judge and jury?"

  "Don't get sidetracked." Sara was focussed on the immediate problem. "Robertson, or rather, Gorman, knew about IGLU, knew about Daniel, me, and Gabe. We were told that information could never get out. And yet he found us. We have to assume he knows more than we think he can know. Our backgrounds. Our powers."

  "He knows enough to keep us half-starved." Daniel felt like the lack of food was affecting his ability to think. He wondered how Sara was staying sharp.

  "Right," she said, "practicalities. We're inside a mountain. The access comes from above, hence, the lift shaft we saw in the video."

  "So?" TripleDee sounded dismissive.

  "So this prison was tunnelled out. You'd need machinery and manpower for a project like this. If we're right about him trying to catch all the halfheroes, how many others are in here?"

  Daniel had seen the reports of how many halfheroes had died during the onset of puberty.

  "Not so many. I'd be surprised if there were fifty of us."

  "I'm guessing there are thirty-three cells," said Sara.

  "That's very precise for a guess."

  "On the video, there were twelve doors leading off the circular room."

  Trust Sara to have counted them.

  "The double door led to the lift. He checked two other doors but didn't explore. The likeliest reason for him dismissing them is because he saw corridors just like the one he had just escaped from, identical to ours. Three cells in every corridor. Eleven corridors. Thirty-three cells."

  "Smarty-pants."

  "You know it. Right. There's the three of us from IGLU. How many were with you in Newcastle, Trip?"

  "Trip?"

  "I can't keep saying TripleDee. It makes you sound like a busty eighties pornstar."

  "If it makes you happy, pet."

  "I think we're a fair distance from happy. How many?"

  "Eight. Nine including me."

  "That's twelve plus the four from Gravesend."

  "Gravesend?" said TripleDee. Sara ignored him.

  "I'm assuming they're here too. Sixteen of us that we know of."

  "Thirteen of which are criminals," said Daniel. "Let's hope that if there are any others, they're not scumbags too."

  "I'm just ganna pretend I didn't hear that, okay?"

  "Seventeen halfheroes we didn't even know about. Picked up before us. Gorman has been planning this for a long time. We watched Howell walk through a wide corridor on the video. To build this place, they must have bored a tunnel leading down into the mountain."

  "And put some nice machine guns in there," said TripleDee. "Or did you forget what happened to Howell's Tee-shirt? Get past the guns and there's probably a private army waiting for us."

  "Maybe," said Sara, "but I don't think so. Hard to hide an army. Titus Gorman is a computer genius. Look at this place - it's almost completely automated. How many guards does he need? I've seen two guys deliver the food, that's all. I don't think there's an army. If we trigger the alarms, I'll bet the place is rigged to cave in, bury us here forever."

  "Well, thanks for your fucking cheery analysis."

  "My pleasure. No point wasting time on things we can do nothing about."

  "Sara?" Daniel tried not to sound as dejected as he felt. "What is there that we can do something about?"

  "I'm working on that, Daniel. So far, nothing."

  TripleDee pulled his face away from the door.

  "Brilliant. I'll just bang me head against the wall in here, then, shall I?"

  "Sara?"

  She looked at Daniel.

  "Nothing? Really?"

  "Nothing. You'll be the first to know when that changes There has to be a way."

  Daniel wasn't sure she was right. He distracted himself by worrying about Abos. Without him around, she would be even more isolated - and if she'd brought back another of her kind from her Egypt trip, there would be three of them to take care of. What chance did she have of finding him? How could she leave the others?

  Ten nights later, when Daniel woke from dreaming someone else's dream, he had no idea that an escape method had just been revealed to him.

  23

  Midnight is an arbitrary moment chosen to symbolise the end of one day and the beginning of another. It arrives at different times as the Earth continues its elliptical orbit of Sol, in the outer arm of the Milky Way.

  Samoa and Kiribati are the first to let off fireworks every January first, followed by New Zealand and Australia. The celebrations continue through parts of Russia, Japan, and Korea, then Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, into Europe via the Mediterranean islands, before crossing the Atlantic to Brazil, South America, North America, Alaska, and Canada.

  The Utopia Algorithm began its work at midnight on the twenty-first of May. When banking groups and other financial institutions began reporting problems, it started in Australasia. Other countries, on high alert after Titus Gorman's announcement, reassured the powerful that every precaution had been taken, security was their top priority, everyone's money was safe. Financial cyber-security was a billion-dollar industry, and the foremost suppliers of on and offline systems made reassuring noises to their high-end clients. International finance was an edifice constructed over centuries, a multi-faceted organism where each part relied on another; every bond, share, mutual fund, loan, mortgage, deposit, bill, currency exchange and financial instrument winding inextricably around the next, insinuating electronic tentacles into the market's every available orifice.

  The fear was undoubtedly there from the very first second after midnight, but it was concealed by blinkers so old, so established, and so firmly affixed to the financial system, that everyone feeling the bile rise in their throats swallowed it down and shook their heads in denial. The tsunami approached, and they kept raising their gaze to look over it at the sky beyond, pretending it wasn't there. Even as the sky d
isappeared behind an unstoppable torrent destroying everything in its path, even as they saw the flailing bodies of those who had issued statements encouraging calm, they said, "It's not happening. It can't be happening." Then they, too, were carried away by the giant wave.

  Croydon, UK

  Donald K Sturgeon was a man for whom book-keeping was almost as satisfying as his collection of nineteen-fifties West Coast jazz. Since retiring from his managerial position in Croydon Post Office a decade earlier, he had devoted nearly as much time to learning online personal finance software as he had to cataloguing his vinyl.

  Eschewing the more conventional alphabetical method, Donald filed his albums chronologically. Not only did he find it more aesthetically pleasing, it gave him the opportunity to travel in time. He could walk around the purpose-built shelves, feeling the years passing again and again.

  He lived alone, had done for seven years, since the day he had come back early from golf to find Martha in the study with his brother, Frank. The two of them were pushed up against the nineteen-fifty-four shelves, Frank's rough hands on her buttocks. Her eyes had been closed. Donald had avoided the mid-fifties section since then.

  Tonight, he was in nineteen-fifty-nine with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The street was dark outside. It was almost midnight. He had a bottle of beer on a coaster. He wasn't much of a drinker, but the sight of a brown bottle, ice cold, condensation trickling down its neck, was the perfect accompaniment to Blue Rondo A La Turk. The opening track of the album followed a metre unusual in jazz. Until you had listened to it as many times as Donald, it sounded odd. You couldn't dance to it. Martha had once said you couldn't do anything to music like that, let alone dance. Donald had smelled gin on her breath that night. She had sat on his lap, despite knowing that his spreadsheet of monthly expenditure and investment performance would take another thirty minutes to complete. He was so distracted by her actions, it took him over an hour to make the figures balance. He had slept in the spare room that night.

  Just like appreciating Brubeck, understanding personal finance software had been hard work at first, but, now that he had mastered it, he found it immensely satisfying. Predictable. Reliable.

  Take Five was just coming to an end. The one track on the album not written by Brubeck, it had been its only hit. Its popularity confirmed the superficiality of the track, in Donald's view. Paul Desmond, the saxophonist who wrote it, undoubtedly had an easy charm about his playing and was one of the few alto players with impeccable intonation. But Donald felt the lazy phrasing of Desmond's improvisation detracted from the precision of Brubeck's playing. Not that he would skip the track, of course. Every album must be listened to in its entirety.

  As he got up to flip to side two, a flicker on the screen caught his attention. He turned back to the computer. The total figure was orange, denoting a conflict between his spreadsheet and his bank account. Donald snorted. Suspecting a glitch in the software—which would mean a strongly-worded email to the developers in the morning—he clicked out of the program and logged into his bank direct. Personal—checking—current—balance—refresh.

  Donald didn't blink for eight long seconds. Then he hit refresh for a second time, rubbed his eyes and looked again. Finally, he walked into the hall, opened the address book at B, and called the automated banking line, entering his details as instructed. Five sub-menus and forty-seven bars of Vivaldi later, the computerised voice announced a number which tallied with the one on Donald's screen.

  Replacing the receiver in shock, he walked back into his study and paused, leaning heavily on nineteen-fifty-one while he regained his composure.

  For the first time ever, Donald's spreadsheet was at odds with the amount in his account.

  How could this be?

  With a shaking hand, Donald picked up the beer and drank deeply.

  His bank account was down. His calculations weren't wrong. They couldn't be. Which only left one possible conclusion.

  He'd been robbed.

  Robbed!

  Of seven pounds and fifteen pence.

  Detroit, USA

  Carl stood in front of the ATM, praying. Pappa had always said the worship of money was the root of all evil, but he'd died of a cancer better healthcare insurance would have detected long before he couldn't piss without crying. Since then, especially since he'd had a kid of his own, Carl had been a little more flexible in his attitude to money.

  "C'mon, Lord, you know I don't ask you for much. Shit, I don't ask you for nothing, mostly, am I right?"

  A more responsive deity might have pointed out that Carl had stopped speaking to Him, let alone asking Him for anything, at the age of eight when he didn't get a bike for Christmas.

  "But, listen, Jesus, I ain't asking for myself, you know that. I'm asking for Jessie. She's two years old. She's just a baby. Her legs ain't right. Now, I ain't blaming anyone, don't get me wrong. Pattie says it's a punishment, but I don't believe that. I don't believe in a god that would give a kid a bone problem cause their mom and pa don't go to church."

  Carl looked at the words on the screen again as the ATM spat the card back a second time.

  "Insufficient? Insufficient? How am I s'posed to turn that into sufficient, motherfucker? Tell me that, why don't you? Not you, Lord, I was talking to this cocksucker. This machine, I mean, sorry for my language. I get riled, is all. Riled. You know I work all the hours they'll give me. You know Pattie still tends bar when her mom can sit with Jessie. She's all we got, and if we don't get her fixed up, doctor says she'll limp for the rest of her life. If that first quack had set the bone right, we'd be fine, right, but he didn't, so here we are. The man's a fucking bum—excuse me—but you know he is. If Jessie had fallen off that swing in the morning, we'd have caught him hungover. He does his best work then, everyone knows that. But no, it was after school. He'd been hitting the hard stuff since lunch. Could've been worse. At least he put the cast on the broken leg."

  Carl looked around the parking lot. It was empty other than some kids sitting on the hood of a car at the far end, drinking, then throwing empty bottles at the recycling point, most of them missing and shattering, accompanied by cheers. He knew they would rob him if they thought he had anything to take. But they knew he didn't. He had forty-six dollars in his checking account. Forty-six dollars. The doctor they had found said she would operate for three thousand dollars cash. That was cheap, she said. She might as well have said three hundred thousand dollars.

  "Bitch," muttered Carl. "Sorry, sorry."

  He was drunk for the first time in a year. A pint of cheap rum had chased down the beers he had bought in Lacey's. He'd just wanted to feel like a regular guy again. Someone who could go out sometimes, meet his buddies, have a few beers, talk about sport.

  "Shit, I'm sorry about the drink, okay, I'm sorry." Papa had put drink narrowly behind money in his list of sinful preoccupations.

  "Look, Jesus, here's the thing. I swear, no more drink, no more cussing, no more..." Carl searched his mind frantically for anything else that might be considered ungodly. There wasn't much. When he finally thought of something, he grasped it enthusiastically.

  "Okay, an' I swear I won't think about Denise that way again. Next time she bends over to pick something up, I'll turn away. I will, I'll do it, I promise in your name. Why that woman has to keep dropping things all the time beats me, anyhow."

  Carl kissed his ATM card, made the sign of the cross with it, said as much of the Lord's prayer as he could remember, then slid it back into the slot.

  "C'mon, Jesus, God, Mary, please. For Jessie. For my baby."

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was looking at a different figure.

  "Motherfucker."

  Remembering his promise to stop cursing, he slapped his forehead.

  "Shit! No, not shit, fuck, I mean, sorry, fuck it, sorry. I got this."

  He took a deep breath in and a deep breath out, looked at the screen again, then took out the maximum cash allowed: five hundred
dollars. He held the money for a moment and checked the screen again. The figure had changed to account for the five hundred he was now holding. It was still more money than he ever thought he'd have. He smiled so broadly he could taste his tears at the corners of his lips.

  "Now that's what I'm talking about. Thank you, Lord. And Amen."

  Washington DC, USA

  The table wasn't laid, and the room was dark. After opening the curtains herself, Cynthia checked the clock on the mantelpiece. Two minutes after seven. She sniffed. No coffee brewing.

  She walked through the dining room, straight across the marble-floored lobby and into the kitchen. A wave of the hand and the LEDs glowed into life, revealing a huge, gleaming room a boutique hotel would be proud of. Every work surface was clean, every prep area tidy. The saucepans, twenty-six of them, hung in size order from hooks along the far wall. The Italian coffee machine near the door—placed there on her instruction, so she could smell the freshly-brewed coffee when she came downstairs—was plugged in, but not switched on. She had paid a small fortune to have that particular machine shipped from Turin to Washington. Cynthia Ganfrey didn't believe in compromises when it came to coffee. She wasn't a big believer in compromises, full stop.

  She frowned. Her favourite brand of cup, which had just the right thickness of china, stood next to the machine. The beans were in the grinder.

  "Miriam?"

  Her voice bounced off the walls. Cynthia was struck with a sudden certainty: she was alone in the house. She didn't question her intuition, she knew she was correct. Cynthia was not a woman who believed in hunches; she was, rather, a woman who trusted conclusions made by instinct before her rational brain had caught up. Her business rivals, back in the days when she still had some, said she had killer instincts. Such comments were uncannily accurate, although none of her rivals knew it. Her first husband knew it, but wouldn't be telling anyone, as he was buried in the foundations of the building project he'd tried to cut her out of.

  She flicked the switch to warm up the coffee machine.