Yesterday's Hero (2 page)

“Friend of mine,” Tabitha adds. “Owed me.”

Clyde gives one of his profoundly expressive shrugs that seems to sum up the whole story of how the hoody was acquired. And Clyde may now be a digital copy of the deceased man I called a friend trapped in an ancient Peruvian mask, and he may not look like my friend, he may not even sound exactly like him, but Clyde is somehow undeniably himself. It’s good to see him. I smile.

“I’d be lost without her.” Clyde turns his head and the mask stares blankly down at Tabitha. I imagine it’s meant to be a tender gaze.

Tabitha rolls her eyes.

But, yes, I was not the only one to celebrate saving the world last night.

“Excellent,” Shaw says in a slightly perfunctory way. “Good thinking.” She clears her throat. “Any actual insight on the situation?” She looks from Clyde to Tabitha.

Tabitha whips her laptop from a shoulder bag with the speed of a wild west gunslinger. “Not much,” she says. “Extra-reality animating force. Most likely. Summoned. Invested into T-Rex skeleton.”

“Wait,” I say, because I need time with these things. “An animating force. From another reality?” Tabitha nods to let me
know I’m keeping up. She looks bored.

“An animating force,” I repeat, “from another reality. And jammed into a T-Rex skeleton.”

“Invested into it, actually.” Clyde corrects my nomenclature.

I mask my inner bewilderment with balderdash. “So not really a zombie T-Rex then,” I say. “Just a skeleton.”

“Disappointed?” Tabitha asks.

And I have to concede it isn’t quite as cool as I’d hoped, but that’s not an entirely professional thing to admit. So instead I go with, “Do we have any idea who did the whole summoning and investing bit yet?”

“Quintessential bad guy,” Clyde says. “Nefarious plans and all. Ready to be thwarted.”

“Well.” Shaw claps her hands. “No time like the present.”

I look around at the gray day, the dripping bushes, the gaggle of angry tourists. “Anybody know Kayla’s status?” I ask. Because if your team does include a supersoldier, it does seem to make sense to have her around. There’s nothing like a superhuman swordswoman to make the animated T-Rex skeleton blues go away, I find.

“Oh,” says Shaw with a shake of the head and another pat on the arm, “she probably jogged here already. Takes her half the time the trains do.”

“Probably taken care of everything already,” Clyde says. “Knowing her.”

Two minutes ago

I would be the first to admit that Kayla and I have not always seen eye to eye. Take the time she stabbed me in the lung, for example. That said, I am more than willing to be the bigger man, to move past our differences, and face evil side by side.

Or, to put it another way—where the hell is she, and why the hell is my bacon not being saved?

Instead of waiting for an answer, I start running.

I’m not sure it’s exactly what Kurt Russell would do, but sometimes self-preservation has to win over your traditional eighties action movie muse.

Behind me the T-Rex’s jaws slam shut. A triceratops skeleton that formerly resembled excellent cover starts to look more like matchsticks. Stringy flaps of moldering T-Rex skin quiver at the impact of the monstrous jaws.

Shaw comes up from behind a bench, firing. Chips of bone and rotten flesh spatter away from the T-Rex’s chest. It doesn’t even turn to face her.

I definitely thought we were going to make it further than ten feet into the museum.

Clyde stands in front of Tabitha, arms out, protective. She seems oblivious, tapping madly away on her laptop. I’d love to take the time to appreciate the sweetness of the moment, but I’m too busy crab-crawling backwards over the ruins of an information booth and trying to keep the T-Rex from bisecting me. I take a few potshots at the zombie’s eyes. The T-Rex seems to have maxed out on fury, so they don’t even serve to piss it off any more.

Clyde grabs a battery from his pocket. With elegant, piano-player fingers he slips it up under the surface of the mask, into his mouth. He bows his head. The T-Rex advances. I hit the back wall. Shaw reloads desperately.

Tabitha says something inaudible to Clyde. His arms explode outward, violently flinging fistfuls of nothing at the ragged dinosaur skeleton.

It squeals, staggers sideways, trips over itself. Its head smacks against a mezzanine walkway with a spattering of plaster.

Behind Clyde, Tabitha fist pumps.

I’m back on my feet. The T-Rex struggles to gain its own. Head down, I scramble towards Shaw.

The T-Rex bellows again. Clyde balls his fists, pulls them into his chest, preparing the next blast. I imagine I can hear him muttering magical gibberish underneath his mask.

The T-Rex arcs round. Its tail blurs, traceable only through the wake of destruction. A vase becomes so much powder. A brontosaurus femur becomes a complicated jigsaw puzzle.

Tabitha and Clyde become rag dolls.

The tail connects, lifts them both into the air, slaps them carelessly away. Clyde barrels over Tabitha in midair. He hits double doors. They swing wide. Both figures tumble through. Dismissed.

The T-Rex peers at where I’m hunkered beside Shaw. I aim at its nostrils and attempt to widen the holes. The T-Rex screams, its undead breath wafting over us, filling my nose with the scent of decay. It is definitely more of a zombie T-Rex and less of a skeleton T-Rex.

I am less enthusiastic about this fact than I was a few minutes ago.

Shaw fires. The bullet ricochets off the T-Rex’s ribs with a whine, buries itself in a wall somewhere.

The T-Rex paws the ground with a massive foot.

I pop my pistol’s magazine, slam a fresh one home. I turn to Shaw. “I don’t suppose there’s chance,” I say, “that we get the day off on the grounds of, you know, the whole saving the world yesterday?”

Now

T
he T-Rex is gone from the main hall. Priceless artifacts crashing to the ground mark its progress a few halls distant.

Tabitha and Clyde stagger through the door on the hall’s opposite side, arms around each other more for support than to display affection.

“Well,” Shaw says. “That wasn’t exactly according to plan.”

Maybe we should claim the plan was for us to have our arses handed to us. Still, a new one wouldn’t go amiss. Step one: dealing with information gaps.

“Didn’t we agree it was going to be a skeleton?” I say. “It’s… fleshier than I expected.”

“Show off bad guy,” Tabitha says, without even opening her laptop. “Glamour.”

I love the way this job just keeps finding new concepts to totally mess with my head. “English version?” I request.

“Illusion magic,” Shaw supplies.

“OK,” I say, processing that. “Obviously the kicking-everyone’s-ass plan has issues. Probably time for a more nuanced approach.” I try to think at the same rate my heart is beating. “While the T-Rex is the only thing trying to nibble our legs off, it’s a secondary problem.” I nod to myself, and hope the others come with me on that one. “Whoever created it is our primary target. We take him down, the T-Rex falls too.”

“Agreed.” Shaw nods. Which is nice.

Tabitha rolls her eyes. Which is not.

“Excellent,” Clyde says. “Totally agree. Except… well, not really an objection, just a question. Seeking clarity on just one issue. Probably just being dense. But this chap we’re trying to find. Or chap-ess. Villainy is gender neutral, I’m sure. But anyway I was really just wondering, how do we find him? Or her?”

I open my mouth. Close it again. I look to Shaw to see if she wants to leap into the leadership breach, but she doesn’t seem to have anything to add.

I’d rather come up with a better plan than following the T-Rex. The further we can keep from that bastard the better. I scan the hallway in search of inspiration. It looks like a bomb went off. Rubble is strewn everywhere—chips of marble, porcelain, bone, and pottery. I see the remnants of the information booth that I stumbled through—the tattered entrails of a computer, discarded ballpoint pens, a crushed security camera…

Security cameras…

“Security cameras!” I say.

Everyone looks at me. There’s a familiar moment of panic that I should have gotten over by now. “The T-Rex can’t have destroyed all the security cameras in the museum yet,” I say.

“Good thinking.” Shaw nods tightly. I get a moment of warm fuzzies. “Tabitha,” Shaw turns to our researcher, “a floor plan.”

A few moments and violated firewalls later, Tabitha says, “Basement.”

We move in a tight diamond. Shaw takes point, Clyde tails behind. I can hear the coppertop clacking against his teeth beneath the mask. I walk next to Tabitha, the shaved side of her head. She catches me looking.

“Nice haircut,” I say. I try to breathe enthusiasm into the compliment. I am not so good at that.

Tabitha gives me the finger. It’s rather sweet for her.

She guides us to a locked door marked “Staff only” and Shaw produces a rather complicated-looking key which opens it without protest.

“That legal?” Tabitha asks.

Shaw ignores her. Which pretty much confirms that Shaw is apparently the type to carry around rings full of illegal skeleton keys.

This is the point where I should be charmed to find out something new and previously hidden about my new girlfriend. Being intimidated… well, I’ll pretend that’s close enough.

Stairs lead down. I go to take a step, but Clyde catches my elbow. I stand aside, but suspect chivalry probably isn’t his motivator for letting Shaw and Tabitha go first.

Clyde shuffles his feet and doesn’t say anything. It’s a maneuver his new body doesn’t seem designed for. A movement from his old self.

“So,” I say, taking a stab at the most obvious topic, “you and Tabitha.”

“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t sound as enthusiastic as I’d imagine he would given the length of time he let the crush fester.

But I suspect I know the fly in the ointment. Devon. The girl, not the shire. Because, I’ve no idea how Clyde feels about the south-west of England, but Devon-the-girl is Clyde’s ex of about ten hours. I also suspect she’s the main reason Clyde didn’t go back to his flat and try to find more suitable attire no matter what he says to the contrary.

“Well, I’m sure...” I start. “I mean I assume Shaw’s going to declare you dead. Which obviously—”

“Oh,” Clyde says. The sort of “oh” that means that something unpleasant is going to happen to my assumptions again.

“What?” I say.

“I may have phoned her.”

That one actually rocks me back on my feet. I have to take a step back.

“You did what? You’re in a new body. You’ve left her for another woman. Why did you...?” I can’t finish. I can’t comprehend the logic. Why would you do that to a nice girl like Devon?

“Well,” he twists his long elegant hands, “I didn’t sort of in any way take into account the declaration of death thing. And, anyway, the really important news, I thought, and maybe my judgment was clouded at the time by the, erm, well, I don’t want to go into details. But Tabby was involved at the time, and if we could leave it at that...”

God, please let us leave it at that. And this is hardly the most appropriate time for this conversation. Except Clyde is our big gun, the only one who the T-Rex even seemed to notice. And, more importantly, he’s a friend. Plus, for a man without a face, Clyde looks remarkably shame-faced.

“You see,” he twists his long elegant hands, “the thing is, well… I was thinking… Usually a mistake, I realize. But Devon wasn’t aware of the entire situation vis-à-vis my sudden reduction in corporeality. And I thought, well, Tabitha suggested, helpfully I think, though maybe in retrospect I should have reconsidered, but… Well I didn’t want to have to muddy the waters while clarifying the whole relationship point by having to clarify the whole being-a-wooden-mask point, so I sort of, maybe, perhaps, and, like I say, hindsight, twenty-twenty, all that stuff, but I sort of broke up with her over the phone.”

Wow.

Such… Devon… Just a nice girl. And why would you…

Except, maybe he wasn’t wrong. At least if he didn’t realize we were going to declare him dead. In that situation, how can you both show up on someone’s doorstep as a mask, and dump them in the same conversation? But holy hell.

“How long were you guys dating?” I say, which is not an entirely politic question.

“Twelve years,” Clyde says with remarkable succinctness.

“Jesus.”

I can picture Devon—an impregnable fortress of happiness in sudden and abrupt defeat. I feel bad for her. She deserved better. But I don’t know exactly what better would be in this situation.

I start down the stairs. “Assuming we make it out of this place in the usual number of pieces,” I say to Clyde, “you want to grab a pint later?”

“That does sound like a rather good plan.”

So that’ll make at least one today if the security camera thing doesn’t work out.

Above our heads, the T-Rex roars. A rattle like gunfire replies. I remember Inspector Chevy talking about civilian militia. And where are they in all this? Who are they? Remembering the way Shaw’s bullets ricocheted off the T-Rex’s bones, I rather doubt I’ll get to meet any of them.

The security room is a poorly lit, low-ceilinged room with far too many TVs coating one wall. Three are blank. Others show the rooms above us, some still whole, some less so. But no T-Rex. No villainous spell-caster.

I rather expected an array of colored buttons and glowing panels worthy of James Tiberius Kirk and boldly
going where no man had gone before, but instead there is just one desultory-looking computer the same shade of brown as the seventies.

“Tabitha,” Shaw says, and nods at it.

And should that be my line? Not that I should begrudge my boss taking charge. And I don’t really know why I should object to someone taking the pressure off me. Give me more time to concentrate on not being eaten. Except… Does she not trust me? Is she just being protective of me, now that we’re an item? Is she thinking of taking me out of the field?

Am I just over-thinking things?