No Hero (19 page)

Then silence. A gentle creaking. The car rocks back and forth on its roof. I am dangling upside down, my seatbelt doing a decent job of crushing the life from me.

After a minute I manage to get the shaking in my arm to calm down enough so that I can unbuckle myself. I drop awkwardly, smack painfully into the crumpled fabric of the roof. The car window is smashed and I crawl out onto the rough asphalt. Pebbles push into my skin. I can smell my own sweat. It’s in my eyes, thickening my eyebrows. My breathing is ragged.

I use the car to pull myself up. I’m looking at the construction site. I know this place. I’ve been here. I’ve been stabbed here.

I know where Alison is.

The sirens grow closer as I start to run.

They’re waiting for me on the top floor. The police tape blocking off the stairway has been ripped in two. I look for blood on the steps and there is none. Doesn’t calm me down. I’m about two heartbeats away from cardiac meltdown.

I’m expecting just the two of them. The runner and Swann. Looks like I hit the jackpot, though.

The runner is there. A tall man, slender to the point of starvation, his whole body strangely elongated, almost stretched. Piano-player’s fingers, hangdog eyes perched either side of a roman nose. His blond hair stretches to his shoulder blades. Long bangs sweep over porcelain-pale skin. Bastard hasn’t even broken a sweat.

Beside him, another man stands, holding Alison’s unconscious body—

“Olsted,” I say.

“Not exactly.” He smiles back. He is not like he was last night, when I was in the apartment with him. He stands taller, more confident. He’s not tired. He smiles a lot more.

Progeny. When Alison said they found a lot of scrap metal in the apartment the night before I assumed Olsted had won. But the Progeny didn’t need that body to win. It won Olsted’s body.

The two Progeny aren’t alone. Around them—I count quickly—five, six, seven creatures that were once human. Now they’re something like the student we fought. Twisted by magic into something vast and monstrous— faces pulsing with overgrown veins leer out from between colossal shoulders; arms as thick as tree trunks; fists big enough to make my balls retract into my body.

One has devolved further than the others. His eyes are insectile, fractured. One arm dissolves at the elbow into tentacle-like reams of flesh. His legs end in elephantine paws, feet fully gone. He leers at me, a lolling tongue six feet long or more spilling from a mouth like a gash in his skin.

“You really are a lifesaver,” says Olsted, the thing that was once Olsted. “I mean, I should have realized myself that capping the little girl was the best way to crack the old man’s nut—” he taps his own head “—but there you were to point the way.” He shakes his head. “I was just about ready to give up the ghost and just infect your friend, but it’s not like we don’t already have eyes in MI37.”

He’s not looking at me as he says the last. Drops it in like bait and just lets me react. And I have no idea if he’s lying or not, but it’s way too far off-topic for me to care right now.

“Give me Alison,” I say

The Olsted-thing looks to the runner, who shrugs mutely.

“You’re not even a little bit curious?” he says. “Is it the lovely goth girl just dying to sink her claws into young Clyde? Is it Shaw? The ice queen? Is that why she’s such a fucking horrible leader? Is it Kayla? Ah, Kayla. Not quite human is she? What she does? And how does she do that? How does my friend here run the way he does? Something else at the wheel, perhaps. Someone not concerned with the limits of your pathetic species’ bodies?”

“Give me Alison!” I scream. Every nerve in me is scraped raw. I cannot have this friendly fireside chat. I do not care about the end of the world. Just the end of my world. The end of my friend. Everyone in MI37 could be Progeny for all I care right now.

Olsted sighs. “All business, is it? Well, I must disabuse you of a misunderstanding.” He stops there, seems to lose interest, looks over at the runner and rolls his eyes.

“I’ll kill you,” I say. Quietly. Because I mean it. I actually mean it. In cold blood. Whenever. Wherever. “If you don’t give her to me, I’ll kill you.” No matter what is between us. No matter how many monsters.

“There you go again,” says Olsted. “I mean, what on Earth makes you think I’m going to give her back?”

“What,” I hiss through teeth clenched so tight I can hear them grating in the gums, “do you want?”

“Ah!” Olsted claps his hands. “We reach the very nubbin of the misunderstanding, the very beating heart of it.” He smiles broadly, no humor in it, just a baring of teeth.

“I’m warning you, you bastard.”

“Of what exactly?” Olsted spreads his hands. “How do you think you can harm me? What weapon do you have? What forces to support you?”

“I’ll think of something.”

Behind him the once-men shift their weight, alien muscles bulging in exaggerated poses. Reality punches in at the edges of my fear, my fury. What can I really expect to achieve?

“What,” I say again, “do you want?”

“Ah yes.” Olsted claps once more. “The misunderstanding. You seem to believe Alison here is a bargaining chip. That she has value. She is not. She does not. She is a demonstration.”

Something is off here. Even through the adrenaline-fueled hatred I can feel it. Something greasy in my stomach. Something slipping away from me.

“A demonstration of what?” I ask.

And just like that he snaps her neck.

It is like falling through ice into a river. A moment of blinding, almost unbelievable pain—something systemic, a pain that seems intense enough to cause pain itself. And then numb. Nothing. Sensation robbed from me. Yet inside me, some buried pressure building, the need for air, for what has been taken, slowly increasing until it occupies all space.

Olsted drops Alison’s broken body. It falls heavily to earth. All its grace is gone. Just meat and bones smacking onto concrete.

“A demonstration—” Olsted is speaking and his words come to me from a great distance filtering through my numbed neurons “—of how little we are scared of you, of how futile your achievements are. We are not afraid of you, Agent Wallace. We are not afraid of MI37. But you, all of you, should be very afraid of us.

“We walk among you, Agent Wallace,” Olsted says, “very close, very quiet, and you never know when you’re going to piss us off.”

“You won’t walk so feckin’ far without your feckin’ legs.”

I didn’t hear Kayla come up the stairs behind me. I can’t think where she has come from. I don’t truly care. It just means that this is her problem now. The violence is all her problem. I can just stare at Swann’s fallen, broken body, at the terrible awkward angle of her neck, and just collapse in on myself, on what I have lost.

I have lost a friend. I have lost the chance to ever tell her the truth of things.

Kayla moves like liquid fire. She burns across the distance between me and the Progeny. Her blade is out, is up. But the monstrous things are moving in, closing the distance, slow and clumsy as they are compared to Kayla, but massive and close. They form a wall of flesh around Olsted sealing him off.

She is dwarfed before them, waist-height on some. She does not pause, does not hesitate. The pattern of her limbs goes on. She dances up one’s outstretched fist, the blade trailing behind her, scoring a spitting wound of pus and blood as the skin and muscle peel from the bone. She jumps sideways, using the sword to lever off another, plunging it in and out of his chest as her feet beat a path across its abdomen, its pectorals. Then she is up and on its shoulder as it falls forward, and she balls up, rolls down its toppling corpse, blade out to one side, churning through the flesh of yet another creature, and she has breached their defense and stands before Olsted.

Except Olsted is gone. The runner has him, cradled as a babe in those thin arms, and together they are hurtling down some pylon wire, a tightrope act in fast forward. And then, one of the four remaining creatures plunges a fist the size of a TV at Kayla and she has to pirouette sideways to avoid the blow, then brings her blade crashing down, smashing through sinew and bone to sever the fist so it rolls away like some incongruous boulder invading this construction yard.

The monster geysers blood, dropping to its knees, howling. Kayla turns back to the wire. Olsted and the runner are on the ground now, a hundred yards or more away. The remaining three monsters smash at Kayla. She dances up their swinging limbs, stands astride the swaying head of one, almost casually reaches out and slits the throats of the other two, then brings the sword down, point first. The skull shatters. The sword sinks to its hilt. The thing falls to its knees. As it does Kayla pulls out the sword, wipes the blade clean on the taut purple skin of the creature’s skull. Two quick swipes and then she steps free as it finally crashes to earth.

She looks to the pylon wire, to the earth beyond. There is no sign of Olsted, of the runner. They are gone. We are alone.

I have made it to Alison’s body. Crawled on my hands and knees. I have her head in my lap. I am a mess of snot and tears. I can never tell her now. Never tell her anything. All the things to come that I’ll never tell her about.

I think Kayla is going to say something. She works her jaw, her tongue coming out, licking her lips once, twice. She looks away from me.

She seems barely human to me there. Gore splattered across her face, soaking her sleeves to the elbows, staining her jeans. There is a piece of shattered bone sticking from one shoe. I wonder if perhaps she will kill me too, if perhaps she cannot stop herself.

“Feck,” she says, and then she jumps from the side of the building, and only Alison and I remain.

Shaw finds us before the police do. They are milling around the crashed car and the construction site. Uniformed officers are phoning up construction companies worried about entering partially-constructed buildings. They are an ocean of buzzing activity, of static and nonsense, of insignificance.

Up here, on my island, I cling to Alison.

“It’s OK, Arthur,” Shaw’s voice comes from behind me, from the stairs, “you can let her go now.”

But I can’t.

There are footsteps. She comes closer. “Kayla told me where to find you.”

“Kayla.” I echo her. It is the first word I have said since Alison... since she...

“She told me what happened.”

“Why?” I say.

Shaw pauses. “Wallace...” Again she pauses. “Arthur, let Sergeant Swann—”

“Why didn’t she save Alison?” The question comes to me and suddenly seems all-consuming. It seems necessary, as if perhaps in the answer there is meaning to this, as if the signal amongst all this noise lies hidden within Kayla’s motives. “Why did she come too late?” I shake my head trying to clear it, but the words won’t stop now, they have control because I have none. “She must have known we were here. She found us here. She knew. But she came too late. She chose to come too late.”

“She was following you,” Shaw says. “I asked her to. After what happened with Olsted I wanted eyes on you, to ensure your safety. I wanted—”

“She followed me. She knew where I was.” I am chasing logic. I am in a maze of meaning, circling round and round, trying to find a center that can hold. “She came too late.”

“You were doing ninety down Cowley,” Shaw says. “Even Kayla has her limits.”

“She came too late!” I bellow the words, rip them from my lungs. “She knew. She didn’t save Alison. She chose.” I shake my head.

“She’s not human.” I say it. Try out the feel of it. “She’s not human,” I say it again, grimmer, with more satisfaction, because, yes, that I can hold onto. “Olsted told me,” I say, “eyes on us. Spies walk among us. She’s not human. She’s with them. One of them. She chose to let Alison die. She chose. She knew. She did.”

“Agent Wallace!” Shaw’s voice is a whip crack. “Put Sergeant Swann down now!”

I stand. I let Alison’s head drop. It cracks down on the floor, and with that sound another little piece of me is chipped away. “You’re protecting her,” I say. “You always protect her.” I advance on Shaw. My fists are balled tight. My knuckles are in my palms. “You’re with her. You’re with them. You’re one of them. You. You’re... You...”

I can’t get the words to work anymore. There is a lump in my throat hard as an iron bar. I cannot swallow. I clack and spit as grief and fury mingle, choked back, ready to burst. And behind the tears there is murder in my eyes. Fury I cannot chase down. I don’t want to chase down. An alien anger possessing me: that this fucking woman came into my fucking life, started tearing it fucking down, and she is with them, the Progeny she took Alison, she took, took...

I am going to fucking take the life from her.

I take a step toward her.

“Agent Wallace!”

I pull back my fist.

Her hand lashes out faster than I can track. There is a deep, hollow feeling in my neck. Everything blurs and slips sideways. Everything is dark before I even hit the ground.

I’m starting to get the feeling there may be more to this place than just my subconscious fantasies.

Same alley.

Same dead sky.

Same woman dressed in white.

Why do I keep coming back here? What has this got to do with anything?

I stand up. The beautiful woman puts her finger to her lips—a mime’s exaggerated mummery. But I don’t have the patience for this. I can feel the throb of reality at the back of my head. The dull ache of loss.

“Yes,” I say, waving my hand at her. “Hush. I know.”

A look of outrage crosses the woman’s face, spoiling her prettiness. She looks mean and petty. She suddenly looks mundane, like everyone else. And part of me is glad of that, and part of me is sad, but I can’t decide which is the larger part.

She leans in, urgent now, beckoning me closer with one finger. “She is not what you think she is,” she says. Then again, “She is not what you think she is.”

“Who?” I scream it at her. Because I am tired. Because this doesn’t help me. Because I’m at a loss and I have lost. Too much today. Too much. “Just tell me a goddamn name,” I ask. I beg. “Tell me!”