Hero Rising

by Shane Hegarty

  The car passed them in a spray of dust.

  “Great,” said Emmie with full sarcasm.

  There was the sound of brakes and of the car reversing. It reappeared, slowing to a halt beside them. Inside was a woman looking unsure of whether she should pick them up. Finn didn’t give her any choice, just opened the passenger door and hopped in.

  “Oh …” said the woman. “I …”

  Emmie climbed into the seat behind them.

  The woman started up the car again. “Where are you going?”

  “Slotterton,” said Finn, hopeful. “Any chance you’re going in that general direction?”

  The driver appeared cautious, unsure. “Actually, that’s exactly where I’m going,” she said after a moment.

  They passed the train station. The blue of rotating police-car lights was dancing on its walls. The train was still there, passengers on the platform, driver and inspector explaining all to the police officers. Finn and Emmie sank in their seats as they passed, hands covering their faces, suddenly aware they had no idea where they were.

  Their destination set, Finn glanced behind at the train station, wanting to feel relief as he lost sight of it. But he couldn’t. Even on this long stretch of empty country road, he felt like the walls were closing in.

  Finn and Emmie sat in the car, silent for the most part. Finn was in the front, Emmie in the back. Even after several kilometres, the driver still seemed unsure whether she should have picked them up.

  “So, where are you two from then?” she asked with forced jolliness.

  “Nowhere,” said Finn.

  “Darkmouth,” said Emmie at exactly the same time.

  The driver looked at Emmie through the rear-view mirror. “Oh,” she said. “Darkmouth. That’s supposed to be a nice little place?” It was very much a question, a hint that she had heard Darkmouth wasn’t that nice a place at all.

  Neither of her hitch-hikers said anything.

  “My name’s Anne, by the way,” she said. “And you are …?”

  “Emmie,” said Finn. “I mean, I’m not Emmie. She is. I’m Finn.” He felt like he was giving away far too much information already.

  “And what has you two out on that road at this time of day?”

  “We got lost,” said Finn.

  At the same time as Emmie said, “The train broke down.”

  “The train broke down and when we came out of the station we went the wrong way,” Finn said, knowing how contrived it all sounded. This time he caught Emmie’s eye in the rear-view mirror. She looked away.

  “So why are you going to Slotterton?”

  “Just a day out,” he said. Emmie didn’t contradict him. “We thought we’d go to see the sights.”

  They passed a factory belching smoke from a tall chimney.

  The woman seemed to be appraising them, although she had probably made up her mind at this stage, no doubt deciding that there was more to all of this than met the eye.

  “It’s fifty miles from Darkmouth to Slotterton,” she said quizzically. “That’s a long way just to see the sights.”

  They didn’t answer that, just sank a little lower in their seats.

  “Smoofyland is in Slotterton,” pressed Anne. “Are you going there?”

  “No,” said Finn, definite.

  “It has the sparkliest rollercoaster in the world.”

  “Yeah, I heard that,” said Finn.

  “So what happened with the train back there?” Anne asked.

  “Nothing,” said Finn, defensive. He could sense Emmie’s apprehension behind him. “Why do you think anything happened on the train? Nothing happened.”

  “I just noticed the police car,” she said. “That’s all. You said the train broke down. I was wondering if something had happened to cause it.”

  Finn didn’t answer and the silence in the car lasted several kilometres more. To distract himself from how uncomfortable this all was, Finn concentrated on the swinging fluffy dice hanging from the mirror, quietly berated himself for showing less calm than he should have.

  The driver eventually put the radio on to fill the silence. At first, she found only static, the words of a presenter lost beneath hiss and squall. She pressed the button to scan for a station.

  Finn could almost feel the heat of Emmie’s growing annoyance behind him.

  The radio crackled.

  “… extensive damage to the train …”

  Anne turned up the volume.

  “… wild animal …”

  Finn talked over the presenter. “It’s lovely around here,” he said, as they drove by an abandoned building, its walls covered in graffiti. “Were you out shopping?” Any question would do.

  “Shopping?” asked Anne.

  “Yeah, shopping,” Finn pressed, looking for a topic, any topic, to distract her.

  “Yeah,” Anne replied. “I was shopping.” It was almost like she’d just remembered this herself.

  After a while, Finn noticed they were entering the edge of a town. The fields were giving way to houses, lining the road on either side, and people on footpaths were heading one way or the other, walking their dogs.

  A sign read:

  It did not mention anything about monsters, or the town’s population, or its bloody decline. Yet Finn knew a couple of truths about the place. Its original name was Slaughtertown and many centuries ago it had been a Blighted Village of such renown that whenever it was mentioned to Legend Hunters in other Blighted Villages, they would suck air through their teeth and screw up their jaw in the internationally recognised expression meaning, “Whoah, that place is a mess.”

  Not any more. It had become dormant. No Legends had bothered it in a very long time. Slotterton had become dormant so long ago that even its Legend Hunter family had gradually vanished.

  That was not the only thing that was different from Darkmouth. Something seemed not quite right about this place. Something was off with the people he saw going about their business. Finn couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  “I just need to grab petrol,” Anne said, indicating to turn off into a garage, “and then I’ll drop you wherever you need to go. You OK to wait here?”

  Finn agreed. Emmie didn’t answer, appearing to have taken a vow of silence in protest against this entire escapade.

  “I’ll take you the rest of the way,” Anne said as she stepped out. “I won’t be a moment.”

  Finn observed Slotterton and its people through his window. There were wide attractive streets, with busy shops painted brightly. Flowers hung from baskets, sprouted from window boxes. The people going about their day were enjoying the afternoon sunshine, the warmth.

  He had an uneasy feeling about it all, as if it wasn’t real. That everyone he could see was pretending. He shuffled in his seat, unable to shake a queasiness about this place.

  “Something is not normal here,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” said Emmie, sunk in her thoughts. “Why did we stop anyway?”

  “For petrol,” said Finn.

  “Then why hasn’t she bothered getting any?”

  Finn looked out and saw Anne just inside the door of the garage’s shop, on the phone. She seemed agitated, glancing over at them repeatedly.

  “We have to go,” said Finn immediately, almost out of the car before he had said it, awkwardly pulling his bag behind him.

  Anne’s back was turned as she kept talking on the phone.

  Emmie was flustered as she stepped out after him. “Why the rush?” she asked.

  Finn jogged away from the car, out of the garage, Emmie following, only looking back very quickly to see Anne realise they were no longer there. She left the shop, scratching her head, looking around.

  “She said she’d been shopping,” Finn said. “Did you see any shopping bags in her car?”

  A horrible realisation dawned on Finn as he sat on a doorstep at the edge of the town square, watching the residents of Slotterton greet each other with friendly waves, st
op to chat on the street while their kids ran freely about the town square.

  None of this seemed real to Finn. Or the way it should be. He’d spent his life in Darkmouth, where everyone had their heads down. Where invasion and destruction and rain were always just around the corner.

  “Everyone seems, I don’t know, so …” Finn couldn’t even find the words to describe it. He had his hood up, jacket pulled tight over it. Hiding from anyone looking for him. Hiding the lies he was keeping from Emmie. Hiding the Gatemaker he’d been given on the Infested Side and which might now be of no use given he was all this way away.

  “Normal,” Emmie said, finding the word for him. “This is how normal people live, Finn. This is how I used to live before I came to Darkmouth.” She was still very sore about how everything was turning out, and how her phone was now fertilising a field many miles away.

  “These people just have no idea, though,” Finn continued, watching the shoppers, strollers, talkers, cyclists, skipping kids. All of them moved like they had nothing to weigh them down. He’d never seen the like of it. “They have no idea of what could burst into their world at any moment. They’ve no idea what’s been going on in Darkmouth, of what we’ve done to save them all, over and over and over.”

  “Thankfully they’ve no idea you released a Legend on a train either,” Emmie reminded him.

  “That wasn’t on purpose,” he protested.

  “I’m not really sure that matters.”

  Two men pushed prams past them. The men were in bright T-shirts, wearing sunglasses. It was like they were on holiday. Finn could hardly cope with this levity. He felt claustrophobic, trapped among such general happiness.

  “Why did you steal the Legend in the first place, though?” Emmie asked. “You must have known it wasn’t Broonie. We’ve seen him desiccated. He doesn’t look like that – he looks more like an angry cabbage or something.”

  “I had it in my hand when the alarm went off. I just ran. I didn’t have time to think.”

  “Is that really all it was?” she asked him, and he wondered if he could crawl any further into his hoodie, to disappear for ever.

  It was time for a distraction. “Come on,” Finn said. “We’ll be seen if we stay much longer here.”

  He stood up and walked to a shaded corner of the street, a table under a café awning. Taking a seat, he removed the computer from his bag and opened it. Emmie sat with him, her weariness beginning to drag significantly on her every gesture.

  “If there is something else going on, you have to tell me,” she said to him, as he pressed close to the screen while it blinked into life. “We’re in this together.”

  “The assistants make notes of everything,” Finn said. “They don’t put their shoes on without writing down what foot they started with. They’ll have everything on here. Every experiment. Every failure. Every problem. I’m sure of it.”

  “Lucien has been trying to persuade me you’re acting very strangely,” said Emmie.

  A waitress put menus in front of them, went off to clean up another table.

  “Now we’re in an old Blighted Village, after a Griffin fight, trying to stop gateway experiments because you stole lots of stuff from them, all while you’re holding back something,” Emmie continued. “You’re not exactly doing anything to prove Lucien wrong.”

  “It’ll all be here,” he said, this time doing his best to ignore the emotional pull of the family picture on the screen and pressing a key to clear it and get to business. “The gateways. The experiments. The cave. The cage.” He scratched his chin. “All this messing around causes problems. I’m going to find the proof. This is how we tell the world. I’m getting Darkmouth back.”

  ENTER PASSWORD came up on the screen.

  He typed in the old one his family used.

  BUBBLES.

  It didn’t work.

  “What password do you think Lucien would use?” he asked.

  Emmie looked incredulous. “Do you know how desperate you sound, Finn?”

  He watched a couple across the street, stopping at a florist to lift a bunch of lilies. “Did they look over at us?”

  “You’re getting paranoid,” said Emmie, her tone caring rather than critical. “I know why you’re worried, and we are on the run obviously, but you’re seeing trouble everywhere and that’s not good for you.”

  “Of course I’m paranoid, Emmie. They shot at us. They’re after us. They want to stop us. They want to stop me.” He thumped his chest.

  The waitress was standing over them, notepad poised for an order but scrutinising Finn after his outburst.

  “Can we get two glasses of tap water, please?” Emmie asked her.

  The waitress rolled her eyes, shoved the notepad in her back pocket and went away, shaking her head.

  “There’s something else going on with you. Tell me now, Finn,” Emmie demanded. “Tell me exactly what you’re keeping from me.”

  Finn looked around, tugged at the strings of his jacket hood, sat forward so he didn’t have to shout. He was cornered, he knew that. Silence wasn’t an option any more.

  “They asked me to help them,” he said. “They told me I need to do it.”

  “Who told you?” asked Emmie.

  He had been told time and again that he had a destiny. Whatever that was, he couldn’t do it alone.

  So Finn told Emmie everything. It was the only thing he could do.

  It did not go well.

  By the time the waitress brought the glasses of water, a couple of straws and a loud tut for having to bother doing it at all, Finn was a decent way through telling Emmie about the kidnapping, the Cyclops that wasn’t a Cyclops, the mine in the middle of an ocean, Cornelius and Hiss.

  He went on to tell her about the destruction Gantrua had left behind on the Infested Side, the request to steal the desiccated remains of the ghastly Fomorian in order to get a charm from him and use it to save the Legends over there, the Gatemaker device for opening gateways.

  And for a good chunk of the story, he felt it was going quite well. Emmie did not speak. Not an interruption. Not a question. She hardly even blinked, so absorbed was she in what he realised was an incredible tale of adventure and survival, of near-death and rescue, of an impossible mission from an unlikely source.

  He finished his story and waited eagerly for her response.

  “What a load of rubbish!” Emmie said, standing up.

  “No, it’s all true,” Finn insisted. “It’s exactly how it happened.”

  “Oh, I believe all that all right,” she said, shoving the chair in so that it rattled the table, then walking away.

  He was forced to follow, almost falling over the café furniture as he tried to keep up.

  “So, what is it?” he asked, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”

  Emmie stopped in the middle of the pavement, forcing a couple of people to walk around them. TVs flickered in the window of an electronics shop.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Where do I start? You travelled to the Infested Side, for ages, met half the Legends there, got given a secret mission—”

  “OK, I should have told you earlier—”

  She refused to slow. “Or maybe what’s wrong is that you were handed a device they said would open gateways, but could be a bomb for all you know. Or maybe the problem is that you stole a Legend and now I know why. You wanted Gantrua.”

  “No, Emmie,” he stressed. “It wasn’t that way. Not really.”

  A shopper walked between Finn and Emmie, forcing them to step back. But Emmie wasn’t finished and quickly closed the gap, forcing Finn to retreat further into his hoodie. He could feel the heat of her annoyance.

  “That Legend you stole that ended up escaping on the train,” she said. “It could have killed people. And do you know what the worst thing is?” she asked. “That the Griffin is not even the worst thing. What really hurts me is that I defended you to Lucien. I didn’t let him get to me. I didn’t let him convince me that you could,
despite everything we’ve been through, actually be a traitor.”

  That word hit Finn as hard as any kick. He felt the wind knocked out of him just as strongly. The flicker of the TVs in the window needled him. The whole world felt painful.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “Then why are you acting like one? Everything you’re doing, everything you’ve just told me. How am I supposed to tell anyone that it’s all fine?” She stopped, took a breath, tried to steady herself. “How am I supposed to convince myself?”

  The world moved around them in this town where the people didn’t worry about Legends or gateways or rain that brought chaos and carnage. It was sunny and bright and probably quite a lovely day. It didn’t feel like that to Finn. Everything felt broken.

  “Emmie …” Finn started, then wasn’t entirely sure what to say next. A part of him was urging him to fight her, tell her how wrong she was. Another to apologise. In the end there was only really one thing he could say. “I just need you to help me. Please.”

  She shook her head, sad as much as dismissive, caught between emotions, trying to find a path through her confusion.

  “The Infested Side doesn’t matter,” Finn said. “It can wait. First we just have to expose Lucien’s conspiracy. We can still get Darkmouth back. That’s all that matters now. I know you will find it hard to trust me. I should have told you about everything that happened, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to get you in trouble. I didn’t want to drag you into it.”

  “You dragged me so far into it I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of this mess,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d say this, but I wish my dad was here.”

  “Steve would just hold us back. We need to move forward.”

  Emmie lit up with anger. “Don’t talk about my dad like that. He’s bailed Darkmouth out – no, you out – when it’s not even his Blighted Village. He got trapped between worlds, which was really horrible. But still everyone thinks it’s your dad who’s so heroic. So don’t you dare talk about him like that again.” She turned her face away from him, towards the shop window and winking TVs.