Broken Hero (13 page)

“Well,” Friedrich continues, unaware of the team’s internal debate. “If you would try to deny me, then I can but only try to deny you.”

He’s a bit long-winded when it comes to his threats, is old Friedrich.

“Is the chance of your liver getting toasty higher or lower than the chance of that Uhrwerkmänn doing to us what he did to your car?” asks Hannah.

Clyde pauses, swallows. “Fair point,” he says. “Any chance anyone could help me get a hold of two car batteries?”

“Bloody mental,” Hannah mutters again.

I point to the nearest truck. “Hannah and I are on that one. Kayla,” I point to the next nearest, “that’s yours.” I look to Clyde. “Just try to buy us time.”

“Can do.” And Clyde starts to mutter as the rest of us start to run. He flings out an arm toward Friedrich. I recognize the cadence of the nonsense. The spell Clyde calls Elkman’s Push. The one he used to damage the Uhrwerkmänner inside and knock down the walls so we could make our escape.

Friedrich doesn’t even flinch. Clyde skids backwards, sneakers squeaking over the surface of the road, arms pinwheeling, trying to keep his balance. Friedrich’s laugh is deep and hollow, booming out of his chest.

Shit and balls.

Hannah and I reach the first truck. She tries to get purchase on the lid, but it won’t even raise an inch or two.

“Get in the cab,” she yells, “unlock this!”

She’s got the who’s-in-command order mixed up again, but it’s probably not time to push the issue.

Kayla’s over at the other truck, slicing through steel with her sword, flinging the hood away. The whole supernatural strength thing does seem like it would be terribly helpful.

Clyde is still recovering. The recoil of his failed spell has shoved him close to the three Uhrwerkmänner pushing their way out of the building. All of them are still on fire. One whips a blazing arm in his direction. Clyde dodges forward but oil jets out of the Uhrwerkmänn’s injured limb in a flaming stream, spattering his tweed jacket. He howls, drops, and rolls. He comes back up smoking but no longer aflame.

Friedrich continues his advance.

The massive Uhrwerkmänn is in line with Kayla and her truck. She has her fists deep in the engine block, fishing with wires.

Friedrich brings his fist down, a blur of motion, and a crack of displaced air. Kayla glances up, flings herself backwards.

Friedrich’s fist buries itself in the engine block. There is a short sharp electrical crack and a momentary spurt of fire. Then his fist comes up. The engine is flatter than Clyde’s car. Kayla stands a foot away from the crater he’s made, empty-handed. And that’s one battery we’re not getting.

I’m up at the driver’s door, flinging it open, diving into the footwell, grabbing desperately for any handle that seems like it will pop open the hood. It’s only going to take Friedrich two more footsteps before he’s in line with our truck.

I grab something, yank, hear Hannah shout. She sounds at least vaguely positive. I beat my retreat.

Clyde is still caught between the flaming Uhrwerkmänn and Friedrich. He looks as if he’s going to make a dash between Friedrich’s legs, then thinks better of it. He glances back at the robots behind him. Thinks better of that. Instead he goes sideways, but that only takes him to the façade of the facing house. For a moment I fear he’s going to head into it. This is not a problem we want to bring to someone else’s doorstep. It’s bad enough we’ve destroyed Lang’s house without us causing the destruction of one whose owners are still actually alive. That is not at all our mandate.

Fortunately Clyde seems to remember that. Unfortunately that doesn’t give him many places to go.

“Got it!” Hannah yells, hauling the car battery aloft.

Friedrich advances on Clyde, ignoring us. We actually have a straight shot to Hannah’s Renault now. The three of us. Only Clyde is trapped.

I glance back at Kayla. She has recovered quickly, is at the third truck, eviscerating its internal mechanics.

Clyde is trapped. So we all are. I wrench the car battery out of Hannah’s hands. She yells but I ignore her. I pitch the car battery up through the air, wrenching my already screaming shoulder. It lands with a heavy thud at Clyde’s feet, barely bounces.

“Kayla!” I yell.

And then a second car battery whistles up through the air like a mortar. It comes down hard, slamming into Friedrich’s shoulder and ricocheting off without him even adjusting his stride. It lands on its end, next to the battery I threw.

“He has the batteries!” I yell to Tabitha.

Friedrich stands before Clyde. The three other Uhrwerkmänner complete a flaming crescent around him.

Tabitha starts intoning random syllables for Clyde to repeat.

Clyde kneels, seizes hold of both batteries. His arms shake violently, his head bucks back and forth, but I can see his lips move. “
Meshtar mal folthar cal ulthar met yunedar—
”

Friedrich raises a fist.

Clyde’s legs start to spasm.

Friedrich’s fist comes down.

Clyde’s lips are still moving.

And then they’re not.

Friedrich’s fists are a blur. There is the meaty crunch of impact. I close my eyes.

“Holy crap.” Hannah’s voice, her cockney accent very pronounced for a moment.

I open my eyes.

Clyde is still sitting on the street, still spasming and twitching. Smoke is wafting up from his palms.

Friedrich’s fists are a foot above his head. They are still balled. The Uhrwerkmänn is leaning forward, putting all his weight into them. I can hear the metal groaning. But they stay a foot above Clyde’s head, not moving, frozen in midair.

And then Clyde’s lips start to move again. Metal creaks. Friedrich’s titanic shoulders start to shake, picking up the spastic shivering of Clyde’s body. And then slowly, inevitably, his hands are pushed back.

Gears start to grind. With a bellow Friedrich eases up on the pressure of his blow. His arms fly back. Beneath Clyde, the ground is starting to deform. Weeds pushing up through the asphalt are pressed flat, leaves are crushed, oozing fluid. Cracks start to run through the pavement. The wall of the house behind him creaks. A windowsill cracks, is crushed down to splinters. An invisible ball of force expands around Clyde.

Friedrich is forced back a step, slams into a flaming Uhrwerkmänn, stumbles, steps on another, crushing it.

“Back up!” I yell, though I’m yelling at myself as much as Hannah and Kayla. There is something transfixing about watching the cracks in the pavement racing toward me.

I back-pedal, my eyes still on Clyde. The truck we just looted groans as the ball of force hits it, starts shoving it down the road after us. I start back-pedalling faster.

Friedrich is pressed up against Joseph Lang’s house. The Uhrwerkmänn he trampled is now half flattened beneath the weight of Clyde’s spell. I watch as its legs are crushed, then its torso. Friedrich is pushed back another step. Lang’s house crumbles around him. Bricks tumble about his legs, beams raining down over his massive shoulders. The start of a landslide.

Clyde’s feet are kicking so hard they’re starting to blur. His torso thrashes back and forth between the batteries. Somehow he’s still holding on to the contacts, but I don’t know how.

“Oh crap.” The expletive slips from between my lips. Clyde
has
to hang on. Inter-reality friction. If his spell is no longer powered by electricity then—and I don’t pretend to understand exactly how—the two realities, ours and the one he’s reaching into to craft this spell, will rub together, and the end result will be Clyde going boom in a fairly substantial way.

I slam my finger against my earpiece. “He has to end it,” I tell Tabitha. “Tell him to end it, before he shakes himself loose of the batteries.”

She understands immediately. “Shut it down! Shut it down, now!” There is uncharacteristic concern in her voice.

Next to me, the front of the truck gives way. I feel something invisible slam into me, send me reeling back. Hannah has turned and is just straight up, running away.

“End it!” I yell at Clyde, though I can’t imagine a way he can hear me. “End the spell now!”

The ball of force buffets me again, harder, bowls me over. Friedrich is buried deep in the façade of Lang’s house, now concave. Clyde’s spell is the only thing still holding it up. And the spell keeps on, continues to expand. I feel a crushing pressure start to roll over my toes, my feet. Bone grinds against bone. I moan.

“Shut it down, you plonker!” Tabitha snaps.

And then it’s gone. Everything gone. There is a second of perfect stillness. And then the air rushes back, a thunderclap of sound, dragging down the front of Lang’s house, flipping over the truck beside me in a great angry scream of flying metal. Hurling me onto my feet, sending me several running steps back toward Clyde. Friedrich slumps, staggers. Dust is a whirlwind before me.

The truck slams, upside down, onto the street. The quake of the impact tears through my gut. Hannah slams into a tree by the side of the road, peels herself off it, staggers on toward her car. Kayla is already there.

I try to pick myself up, get my bearings. I glance back at Hannah. And has she kept her cool? If she panics and takes the car, we’re all doomed. Still, Kayla’s with her. Kayla will help keep her sane.

And Clyde. Where the hell is Clyde? He was in the middle of that thing. And from the looks of the swirling maelstrom of dust and destruction filling the street, a lightly flambéd liver may be the least of his worries.

Plus, he has the only object we managed to recover from the house, even if it was just a desk ornament. This fight will not have been worth surviving if we arrive back at MI37 empty-handed.

I need to go back in to the chaos. I need to get him out.

And I can’t.

I stand there, and my legs just won’t move. I try to get them to go but they simply refuse. Sweat coats my face. I’m breathing hard. And I need to go in there. I need to get Clyde. I focus on that, but other images keep flickering through my head. Bronze fists descending, buildings collapsing, Felicity standing before a house alone, her telling me she wants me to move in with her. All of my pains seem suddenly so much worse, seem to weigh so much heavier. I cannot move for the weight of them. They hold me to the spot. I gasp for air.

I have to go—

I have to—

Behind me, Kayla is slamming her hand down on the horn of the car. “We have to feckin’ go!”

I try to answer. I can’t get the air.

He’s in there. He’s fucking dead. If I go in, I’ll be… I’ll… I’ll…

Then, from the swirling cloud that fills the street, an eddy becomes a shadow, becomes a hunched over figure, becomes Clyde, hacking and coughing, stumbling forward.

His hands are red, blistered, every hair on his head is on end, and his eyebrows are smoking slightly, but he is alive. He is Clyde, and he is still standing.

He paws dirt from his eyes, stares around wildly, sees me.

“We can go now, right?” There’s a slightly hysterical edge to his voice.

Something crashes behind him, invisible in the swirling chaos. Clyde jerks, flinging his head around to look over his shoulder. He starts to run.

My limbs come loose. I run too. Pell-mell, like the proverbial bat straight out from Satan’s dusty arsehole. I fight to keep in control, to not just run over Clyde. Instead I grab his shoulder, pull him with me.

Hannah’s car starts moving. And we are not there. She is leaving without us. She is abandoning us to our deaths. She is—

She is turning the car around. A swift three-point turn, and Kayla flings doors open. I throw Clyde across the seats, dive on top of him. Hannah applies her foot to the accelerator, and we take off, leaving only dust and disaster in our wake.

One of the advantages of dating Felicity is that she allows me to apply the ice packs before we do the debrief. Also, Clyde needs to be taken for an MRI scan to make sure he’s not char-broiled his intestines. Meanwhile, Tabitha is sent on a begrudging sandwich run, and I take painkillers, and walk myself through a self-assessment for concussion. Basically, if you can read it, you don’t have one.

Kayla spends most of the time telling me not to be “such a big feckin’ nancy”. I prefer that to the time she spends staring at her phone saying terrifying things like, “No, he’s too pretty,” and “Aye, that’s a bum, that is.”

Clyde returns around the same time Tabitha brings the sandwiches back, with a foul-smelling cream all over his hands and a surprisingly chipper attitude.

Hannah sits quietly, applying ice and bandages in equal measure. Having consumed her sandwich, she pulls herself out of her chair and stumbles stiffly off in the direction of the office kitchen. She comes back with a cup of something brown. She takes a sip then spits out a long stream of fluid into one of the trashcans. “Jesus,” she says, disgust painted clear upon her face, “what the bloody hell is that?”

Clyde and I exchange a glance.

“Coffee,” I venture.

She shakes her head. “That is not pissing coffee. That’s pissing piss that is.”

I’m not sure why—maybe it’s just the residual adrenaline in my system, or perhaps my desperate desire to forget my moment of total paralysis—but I take mild offense to this. The MI37 coffee is indeed shitty. It does indeed taste a little like cat urine. But it is our coffee. It is the coffee of brotherhood. Clyde and I have saved the world drinking that coffee.

“I think Tabitha tested it once,” Clyde says, “and actually compared to most coffees you’ll find that the urine content is actually quite low.”

Hannah looks at him like he just dealt her sanity a blow it didn’t need to take. “Most coffees?” she says.

“Look,” I say, “I’ll admit it’s not the finest brew, but…”

“It is awful,” Clyde agrees. “Which is what makes the urine thing so surprising I think.”

That is not the point I am trying to make.

“Is this how you fight off the monsters then?” Hannah asks. “Just throw a mug of this stuff at them and see them bugger off to the mothership.”