No Hero (17 page)

“The gun!” he shouts. “Give me the gun!”

“But it’s—”

“Give it to me!” He looks mad with panic. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I press the gun into a hand taped close to his side.

One of the beasts punches through what’s left of the door. The next one just punches a path through the wall.

Gripping the gun awkwardly Clyde fires a shot down the length of his pants. He’s aiming at nothing. Just the wall. An electrical plate shatters.

An electrical plate.

One of the beasts lifts a paw and prepares to decapitate Ilsa.

Clyde grunts and rolls forward. He grabs a wire that spills out of the shattered plate on the wall.

“Kton achton mal racthon al mannon...”

The scrap-metal tiger with its claw raised freezes. Its limbs grind and scream.

“...feton mal rannon tel shathal ac rannon...”

The beast comes apart. Its paw shudders as if struck, and then quite simply, quite gently each constituent part separates itself from all the others, and in a slow-motion explosion, shrapnel drifting lazily through the air, it collapses to the floor.

From the center of the mess, a tabby cat scampers away.

The second beast backs away, mewling, something like shock on its face.

Ilsa turns to stare at us.

Clyde mutters another word. The duct tape around his arms and legs burns away, disintegrates into ash in a moment. Clyde tosses me the gun. “Your turn,” he says.

Wait. What? My what?

I look at the gun in my hands.

Ilsa is screaming. She is bending down. Grabbing something. A knife. A jagged shard of metal. Some part of the dead tiger. Some weapon. She’s snatching, and screaming, and she’s going to—

My first shot punches Ilsa back a step. I didn’t even know I’d fired. The gun goes off again. My hands jump. Ilsa reels into the doorway. Two bright roses of blood bloom on her chest. She stumbles over scrap metal, wavers, clutches at the frame. Not dead. She’s still holding the metal. Still... I have to shoot her again. Oh shit. Oh fuck. I have to...

I close my eyes. I fire. Open my eyes.

The bullet takes the top of Ilsa’s head off, opens her like a can. Blood sprays straight up, like a fountain.

“No!” A scream. A sound dragged out of a man. I look up and see—beyond the corpse, beyond the mewling scrap-metal tiger, in the doorway to the grimoire room—Olsted, bruised and bloody and horror-struck as he watches his daughter die.

In the wound in Ilsa’s head I can see the Progeny thrashing. Tendrils whip the air, sprouting from around the beak-like mouth. A white, segmented body. A maggot’s body with a thousand short legs spasming in the air.

I wait for the eggs. The white spray of alien young. I wait for confirmation that the thing is dead. I wait to see if Clyde and I are out of range.

But it doesn’t come.

The Progeny kicks free of Ilsa’s body, kicks free of the corpse. It is moving. Still whole. My shot didn’t have the angle of Kayla’s sword blade. It didn’t hit hindbrain, where the thing nests, squirms, and roots. It didn’t get it when it was corporeal, when it was nesting. I killed the host but not the Progeny. I set it free.

I open fire again but my bullets fly through the Progeny’s transparent body. It’s like shooting at air.

Olsted howls again. His eyes scan the devastation of his home. He looks at me, at the gun I hold. There’s murder there. Of course there’s murder there. He just witnessed murder. I just murdered his daughter. Oh shit. I just murdered... Oh shit.

Before Olsted can react, before he can spit me on some pole of magical spite, the Progeny moves. It lances through the air toward the old man. The speed is incongruous from its fat body. The tendrils spear forward. It heads straight for Olsted’s skull.

The old man flings up an arm and there is a crack like a lightning strike. Every hair on my body stands on end. I can feel warm air blowing over me, as if an oven door has been opened.

The Progeny stops. It hangs in midair, mouth tendrils and tail thrashing. Olsted stands, his hand outstretched, as if holding it in place.

No, that’s wrong. Actually holding it in place.

Beside me, the remaining beast snarls. It turns. It leers at the small white creature. It flexes scissor-blade claws. Then it moves.

The Progeny does too. Suddenly jagging left. The beast and Progeny careen toward each other.

“No!” Clyde screams, but I can’t see what he’s frightened of. All our enemies are fighting each other.

And then the Progeny glides through the outstretched claw of the beast and slams straight into its chest.

The beast stops moving. Shudders.

The cat. The cat is still in there. In the heart of it. The cat has a brain. Has a hindbrain. Has a place for the Progeny to nest.

“Run!” screams Clyde.

Which seems like such a remarkably good idea, I’m already doing it.

The massive metallic cat hurls itself at Olsted as I hurl myself at the door. The grimoire is lying on the floor, discarded in the chaos. I reach down, grab it, as the infected beast slams into some invisible wall between it and Olsted. Its claws scrape down the air as if against a chalkboard. Olsted flings out another hand. Something explodes. The beast wheels away, claws dicing the air.

I’m down, running crouched over. Like a roadie at a rock concert. The grimoire is clutched to my chest. A steel foot mashes down on the floor beside me. I fling myself back. I spin. I run.

I am upside down, or sideways, or falling. Coffee tables are exploding into splinters. Somehow I’m in the kitchen now, behind a counter, now a line of cabinets. There is a snarling gnashing from the middle of the room. I pop up, fire randomly, hit nothing. I see Clyde running for the doorway. I run after him.

Out in the hallway. Look left. Look right. A sound like a train disaster behind us. Left. Right. The elevators. We run. Feet pounding over the carpet.

And the elevator doors are opening as Clyde and I sprint toward them. They slide apart. The doorman is standing there. Concerned. Confusion on his face. He sees us. Reaches for a gun.

My fist flies out before his catches the handle. Adrenaline has taken over. I’m holding the pistol. Cold-cock him right on the side of the head. My hand sings with pain. He staggers back, into a wall. I grab him by the collar. Knee to groin. Hurl his doubled-up body out into the hallway. The elevator doors slide shut.

My breath comes in ragged bursts. Clyde is on his knees whimpering.

Kurt Russell is a terrible, terrible role model.

The sounds of chaos fade above us.

Going down.

“A complete and utter shambles.”

It’s not depressing to hear the words because we failed but because we failed again.

“A disaster.”

Shaw is shaking her head. Tabitha, Clyde, and I are lined up in front of her. Another bollocking. Only Kayla is missing this time. Can’t blame her.

“Now,” Shaw paces back and forth, “the idea was that, by taking Kayla off the team you three would learn to work better together, correct?”

The silence is long and awkward. Finally we all seem to realize she actually wants an answer.

“Yes,” Clyde mumbles. Tabitha and I mm-hm our responses.

“How would you say that went?”

She’s not as pissed as I expected, just tired-looking. Disappointed.

“Not as well as hoped,” I finally say into the gaping silence.

Shaw nods solemnly. “Yes,” she says. “Punching Clyde in the face was probably a good sign you’d derailed.”

Part of me wants to argue about how unfair that is. Part of me wants to say that the plan had already gone awry at that point. That no, it wasn’t probably the best decision, but I was dealing with an evolving situation. Except, I was meant to be in charge. I’m where the buck stops.

“We got the book,” I say. It sounded like a repudiation in my head, it sounded like a whine out in the wild.

“Yes.” Shaw nods. “The minimum bar for success, but you did do that.” Again she sounds tired. She shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know.” She looks up at us. Smiles. Grimaces. Shakes her head. “Just find out what it tells us,” she says. “Make this worthwhile.”

Tabitha and Clyde scurry away, Clyde snatching the grimoire off the table. Shaw and I are alone in the room. She looks at her watch.

“Not as well as hoped?” She shakes her head again. She looks at her watch. “We’ll talk about this later,” she says. “I have to be somewhere.” And then she leaves and I’m alone.

I stand for thirty more seconds, stare into space, then find a chair and sag. Head to table. This again. Here again. Messing everything up again. Wasn’t I a competent policeman a few days ago? Wasn’t I good at my job?

Yes. Yes I was. That perks me up a bit. I was good at something once.

I am not good at this. This is stumbling from disaster to disaster. And I know the life of a little girl is on the line, I know that. But I think the really responsible thing to do is to put those lives in the hands of someone who can actually do something to save them.

I don’t need to wait to have a talk with Shaw. I need to just quit.

There’s something liberating in the thought. Which in turn makes me feel guilty. But knowing someone else will be dealing with this makes me happy. Some competent military intelligence ninja bastard, to quote Swann. It’ll be nice to go back to working with her.

It takes me a while to get to Shaw’s office because, I realize only after embarking on my journey to it, I don’t actually know where it is. Yet another indication that quitting is the right idea. And I open doors onto a lot of empty and dusty rooms, and even find out where the library is, before I finally find a door labeled “Section Director.”

It’s open slightly, and I hear voices, but I’m so excited by the idea of getting out of here that I don’t want to delay. Anyway, resigning shouldn’t take long, and the quicker the better. Then, my palm about an inch from the wood, I hear my name.

“—really even need this Wallace guy? The local police force is screaming that someone in the government stole their man without even asking.”

It is not Shaw’s voice. It is a whiny, nasal voice. Too close to nails scratching a chalkboard to be comfortable to listen to.

“Is this a joke, Robert?” The tiredness in Shaw’s voice has been ratcheted up a notch even from the conference room.

“No, it’s not a joke, Felicity,” says the whiner, Robert. “You know full well your department is out of favor. The government has ambitious plans and it is looking to cut. And after the stunt on Cowley Road you are looking like a good place to find a little spare change. So, is Wallace necessary?” “There are creatures, Robert—” Shaw sounds like she’s burning through her last gallon of gas “—looking to destroy the entirety of creation. To stop this, I have three agents I can send out into the field. Two are glorified researchers, a chemist from Cambridge with a surprising aptitude for thaumaturgy and a serious case of nerves.” I don’t feel good matching Clyde to that description but it seems to fit. “The other is just as smart but more eloquent with her middle finger than with anything else.” Tabitha. “And the third, while she fell into our hands with superhuman abilities, has several serious psychoses you tell me I can’t afford to have treated.” Kayla’s easy to spot. But this diatribe doesn’t make me feel good about what I’m going to hear about myself. “And now, I finally manage to get half a grip on someone who actually seems competent, someone who knows how to run an investigation, someone who may be able to save the life of a girl who you know has saved many lives herself, someone who I can actually trust to herd the cats I have running around out there, someone who was quick-witted enough to actually get a new grimoire into the agency out from under the nose of an actual Progeny, and you want to take him off my hands? So I repeat, are you having a joke at my expense, Robert?”

I just stand there. Because... No, I still need a minute.

I did good? After all that...

Holy shit. I did good. I got the grimoire. When Shaw’s telling it, I’m the hero of the piece.

And maybe I owe Kurt Russell an apology

My hand still hangs in front of the door. In the office, silence hangs.

Then, Robert’s nasal whine cuts through whatever moment it is we’re having.

“So, if Wallace is in, who can we cut?”

Shaw sighs deep and loud and long. I slowly back away from the door.

I sit in an empty conference room and try and work out what I’m doing. My watch says ten in the a.m. Clyde and Tabitha are researching ancient tomes, and I don’t know what I can do to help. Shaw is... I don’t know what Shaw is doing.

I need to get my head straight. I’m either in this game or I’m not. And it sounds like... God, it sounds like I’m in. No easy way out. No making this someone else’s problem. No working with Swann. I’ve got a little girl to save.

And if I’m going to save her, I really need to be in this game. I need to know what I’m doing. I need to understand this world I’m in. I need to stop just reacting. I need to commit. Learn this world. Learn its minutia.

Except it’s a whole new world to learn. Where do you learn about a new world?

Basics. I need to start with the basics. I need to start with the girl I’m meant to save.

The saltwater smell of their pool hits me as soon as I step off the elevator. In the glare of the pool lights, the shadows of cephalopods play on the room’s ceiling.

“Hello, Detective Wallace,” calls a voice.

“Agent Wallace,” corrects the other. The acoustics of the room make the words bounce hollowly around.

“I know.” There is laughter and splashing.

“Hello, girls.” I kneel by the edge of the pool. They swim over. Quick efficient strokes. Beaming faces surface.

“Hello,” says one, Ephie maybe. “Agent Wallace,” she adds. Both girls dissolve into giggles, submerging beneath a web of wriggling tentacles. Still not used to that.

They surface with little gasps of breath. “To what do we owe the pleasure?” asks the one who may be Ophelia. She performs a small, aquatic curtsey.