Yesterday's Hero (44 page)

But… but… Felicity. Oh God, she’s dead.

And, God, this can’t be happening again. Someone I… God, did I love her? I think I loved her. And she’s dead.

And Clyde. I can’t even… What did I even feel for him? I’m still caught in the muddle of who he was and who he is, who he was becoming.

Was. Jesus.

I can’t deal with the past tense. I can’t…

“Big Ben.” Aiko’s face is aghast, she’s staring at the bodies, but she’s talking about Malkin, about what’s left to be done. “He’s in Big Ben.”

And I try to care, try to give a shit about the end of the world.

She’s just lying there. She doesn’t even look like herself. Blackened, bloody. A rictus of pain. She died in pain. Leo Malkin killed her. He fucking roasted her.

The red is starting to fill my vision.

“It’s over,” someone says. And I know they’re right. It’s too late. I will never get to revenge this. I will never get to make this right. The world is going to end to the soundtrack of Tabitha’s screams.

“It’s motherfeckin’ not.”

Kayla’s arm is about my waist. I’m off my feet. I’m twenty feet from where I stood. The distance is increasing. There’s the confused, terrified-looking policeman between us and Big Ben. He holds up an open palm.

Kayla’s backhand breaks the sound barrier. He flies from our path, another useless rag doll.

Felicity’s dead.

Malkin killed her.

Two other policemen are between Kayla and Big Ben. They heave out pistols. In this post 9/11 world, London PD takes its monuments’ safety seriously. She leaps, plants a foot in one man’s throat. She launches off him as he drops gurgling. Her other foot swings, connects beneath the other copper’s chin. He flies away, dismissed.

And I’m still in her spare hand. Still bundled up like so much luggage.

We’re fighting. We’re fighting for what’s right.

She crashes through a door I couldn’t make out in the dark. We’re in a tiny black space. A yell from someone. The crunch of flesh against flesh. Something, someone, falling past me.

I don’t know how Kayla’s doing what she’s doing. The physics of it defy me. I am lost in her violent ballet. A mere accessory of her ferocity. But I don’t care. Because she’s getting me closer to Malkin. Closer to his death.

And I know revenge won’t bring her back—

God I can’t…

She’s dead…

I can’t breathe.

I need to focus on the red. I need to cling to my rage. I need to make that fucker pay. Pay, and pay, and pay.

Pounding feet. More shouts. Kayla leaps, gazelle-like. Her feet fly out. Bodies spin away. Light reflects from the blade of her sword. Flat steel twangs against skulls. Bodies fall. Gunshots boom, but they never sound near, always seem to be retreating, even as their echoes rattle in my ears.

We go faster. Faster. It’s hard to breathe, as if my head is jammed out the car window again. Kayla’s arm makes the garotting seatbelt seem like a loving embrace. Screams. Shouts. More people now. The whirl of
glimpsed violence is thicker about me.

Felicity is dead. Clyde is dead.

And I can’t think about it. All I can think is that Leo Malkin must pay.

And then a sudden screeching halt. My neck cracks as the g-forces reverse. My vision blurs. I can hear Kayla panting hard, her breath short and ragged. I can hear shouts and yells, pounding feet echoing up behind us. I hear something else. A mechanical noise, repeated and repeated. The same action happening over and over all at the same time.

My vision clears.

Oh shit and balls.

Machine guns. Men and women ratcheting the action on their machine guns. Hundreds of them. That was what that noise was.

We’re in the doorway of a room perhaps thirty yards wide, and twenty yards deep, and it is full. Literally full. Metal concert mosh pit full. Soldiers pack the place. Row upon row of them. An ugly crush of people. The place is hot with the sweat of them all. They wear black sweaters, and black bullet proof vests, and black night vision goggles, each head marked by two bright green LEDs.

And every last one of them has a very large black machine gun. And every last one of them is pointing that very large black machine gun at Kayla and me.

My brain tries to dissociate, to enter denial. It wonders how the night vision goggles survived. I find myself thinking that they probably weren’t needed until Coleman set off the EMP. They probably weren’t on at the time.

“You still got them wires?” Kayla sets me down, brings me back to reality. This is not the end of our journey. This will not stop us. We are MI37. We will not allow it. We cannot.

I glance down at my left hand. Devon’s tangle of wires. Still wrapped around my fingers. Something to blow up the space-time distortion. Something to save the Chronometer. Something to blow the living crap out of Malkin with.

“Got it.”

“Through there.” Kayla nods at a door beyond the soldiers. Dark blue. Copper hinges. Something intricate carved into the whorls of wood. I can’t make it out in the half-light.

I stare at the soldiers. Clyde’s military ninjas. They stare implacably back.

Clyde’s dead.

Felicity’s dead.

“Let’s do this.”

I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die. There is no way I can fight these soldiers and live. But that doesn’t matter. I have to fight them. I have to try to get to him.

And then something happens and I only piece it together as I’m sailing through the air. The sensation of a hand on my collar. Of a great force heaving me. Of my feet leaving the ground. As Kayla throws me bodily over the heads of the soldiers, kicking and flailing, head first towards the dark blue door and the end of all things.

A
drenaline is an odd chemical. When it floods the system in great quantities your perception of time skews strangely. Every detail is crisp and clear, absorbed and processed. It’s like being Neo in
The Matrix
. Time slows. You observe.

If only I got Neo’s reaction times too.

Instead I watch in excruciating detail as the door flies towards my head.

My mind knows how to pull the sword, how to aim it, how to best angle it to break down the door. But the knowledge is useless.

A hundred machine guns track my path. I rotate as I fly, watch them rotate with me. I spin from headfirst to feetfirst. I see Kayla raise her sword. I can even make out her movements for once. I watch fascinated as she slices through the first of the gun barrels.

Then my feet strike the door. And time catches up with me. A compressed blur of movement and pain rushing past me, over me, trampling me.

My ankles feel broken. My head rings. The floor is cold and hard. I’m bleeding onto it.

I’m through a doorway. In the dark. Muzzle flares cast a thunderous strobe light. I wait to die, perforated by sixty rounds a minute. But the guns aren’t firing at me. The guns don’t seem to care.

Kayla dances on the shoulders of the soldiers. Her sword is a

line of liquid fire. Shards of metal spiral through the air as she hacks away with a sushi chef’s precision and efficiency.

And the soldiers fire and fire and fire, and fill the whole world with flying lead. And they cannot hit her.

But I am not here to gawp. I am not here to stare. I have to get up. I tell my arms and legs. I have to get up. Now. I have to turn around.

Knees trembling, I make it to my feet. The room I’m in is dark, cool, and larger than I expected. Probably most of the width of the tower. It’s a mess of machinery. Great hulks of painted steel lying dead and cold. Cables and cords thick on the ground. Pipes snake to the ceiling in ropy pillars. There are great panels of dials and meters, unreadable despite the reflected light of Kayla’s firefight.

The lower edge of Big Ben’s clock face breaches the upper half of the opposite wall. A white crescent of filtered moonlight.

I take steps in, try to see past the metal hulks to the Chronometer. Try to make out Leo Malkin in the mess. Surely if you decide to enshrine the device that controls all of time, you actually, well, give it some sort of shrine. It seems implicit in the action.

I go deeper in. Where is he? Where is the bastard? Where is my piece of his goddamn hide?

The noise of the firefight outside seems to drop away too quickly. I glance over my shoulder. The doorway seems small now.

A noise to my left seizes my attention, gives it a good shake. I stoop low, peer around the corner of another metal hulk. Its surface is cold against my hand, gently dotted with condensation.

There, rising out of a tangle of metal cords is something like a plinth. An industrial interpretation of an ornamental table. Hard steel edges, decorative rivets.

Sitting on it, reflecting the filtered moonlight that slants in through the clock face—a large bell jar. And inside that…

The Chronometer.

It looks like nothing else but a large golden clock, baroque in detail, its inner workings clearly displayed from its case-less back. Tiny cogs whir. Counterweights shift. Around it, pudgy little angels stroke harps.

For one of the most powerful supernatural artifacts in the world, it looks terribly like something my
gran
would have owned.

However, while it doesn’t appeal to my aesthetic senses in the slightest, apparently Leo Malkin has a mad-on for it.

He stands with his back to me, arms raised, a massive industrial-sized wrench poised above his head.

He brings it down. A great sweeping, powerful arc. And I stare. Too late. Too late by mere seconds.

The wrench bounces off the bell jar with a dull bonk. Malkin grunts with effort. Apparently the Chronometer is protected by more than just an electric anti-magic field.

But there are spider-line cracks in the glass. This is not some impenetrable barrier. Given time, Malkin will get through.

Funny—in the house of time itself, it’s the one thing Malkin doesn’t have.

Behind Malkin hovers something like a heat haze. It’s a barely perceptible shimmer. I’d probably have never noticed it if it wasn’t turning pipes into a fine rust-colored powder.

It’s spreading, rolling gently towards Malkin. He’s got about two minutes before it sets his personal clock back. And I’m guessing that then there’ll be about one more minute before it eats through the glass and sets to work erasing all of reality.

I look down at my left hand. The wires are knotted around my fingers. And I don’t need minutes to spray him across the room.

I point them at him.

“Hey!” I yell. There is a smile stretched across my skull. I’m going to enjoy this. I’m actually going to enjoy the death of another human being. Something is broken in me, and I don’t care. And I want him to know. I want him to know he is reaping what he’s sowing.

Malkin turns round, stares at me. His eyes go wide. And he knows.

“Enjoy hell, you motherfu—”

A flash of light.

Oh crap. Why did I have to open my big mouth?

M
y finger has to travel an inch. Leo Malkin has to travel thirty yards.

He still beats me.

The wrench buries itself in my gut, lifts me off the floor, sends me flying backwards, crashing, splayed painfully over machinery.

No. I have to… I can’t let it go down like this.

He comes at me again, in a flash of light. I roll, not knowing where he’s going to manifest, not knowing if he’s going to reappear with his foot stuck through my gut.

It turns out it’s behind me, and I am not rolling half as fast as I need too.

My upper right arm takes the blow. I feel the crack of the bone. The pain is like a lance from elbow to skull. Like someone lit a fire in my marrow. I howl.

Through tears, I see Malkin raise the wrench again.

Another shout from the doorway. Shots. Leo Malkin blinks out of existence. The air above my head shrieks as the bullets whip by.

I stagger up, clutching at my arm. It hangs useless next to me. I cannot believe this hurts so much.

Malkin better not believe that’s enough to take me down. This is a Python-esque flesh wound. I’ll bite his bloody legs off if I have to.

That said I’m totally going to use my flaming sword before we get to that point. I grab the hilt—

Something barrels into me from behind. Something angry, and large, and shouting in Russian.

I land on my bad arm. The world goes red with pain. I roll, senseless.

More shots.

I’m still going to kill you, you bastard.

I pick my head up. I can see the Chronometer, a silhouette between me and Big Ben’s clock face. Beyond that: a flash of light. Malkin. He looks around.

I raise my left hand. It’s shaking.

I can’t get my right up to press the button.

I fucking refuse to be defeated by my own limbs.

Malkin crouches low, scans the room, searching for me.

I bring my left hand to my mouth, grip the small, almost vestigial play button between my teeth. I twist my hand, straining against the tension in the wires, point the speaker.

Malkin moves a step left. Scans. Freezes. He’s looking right at me.

I bite down on the play button. Silence. I wait a heartbeat. Another. And then the speaker crackles to life. Words emerge.

Malkin stands.

The explosion hurls him backwards.

M
y sight of Malkin is occluded by roiling flames. Then, through the haze: the white glass of Big Ben’s face breaks. A national monument scarred. Malkin flies out into space. He flails, searching for power. Searching for a way to teleport back.

Nothing here for you, Leo. Ta-ta. Nice knowing you.

I shudder a sigh. I won. I saved the world.

I saved the world.

Shouts from the soldiers, yells, footsteps approaching. And then:

A spark of light. A thin trailing streak of electricity.

Oh no. No, no, no.

A soldier throws up his hands, clutches his night vision goggles. The two bright green LEDs have gone out.