Yesterday's Hero (29 page)

And then finally, slowly, shuddering, the plane rolls to a stop.

We lie there. Smoke and dust billow quietly around us. Someone is sobbing, and I’m trying to pry my fingers loose from the chair so I can see who it is, see if they’re hurt, but I can’t let go. I can’t. My breath is ragged, my heart a wild galloping beast.

Hold on. Hold on. I just need to hold on a little longer.

Of all the ways this job has almost killed me that was… well, the second worst. Probably.

Not that this is even a job any more. What is this? A calling? A hobby?

Jesus. This is what I’m choosing to do in my spare time.

“You…” Malcolm’s voice from the cockpit breaks the silence. “You OK? Everyone OK?” Even he sounds shaky.

Finally I let go of the seat. It takes a while to stand up though. My legs are trembling violently. Everything hurts. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think I’m OK.”

“I… I… I…” Jasmine doesn’t get any further than that.

“Just a moment. I just need… Just a moment.” Aiko isn’t faring any better than us.

It’s Devon who’s crying. I take a step towards her.

“We land!” Nikolai shouts with glee, seemingly oblivious to all. “Very nice.” He claps his hands. “You like very much.”

And I find that, despite the shakes, despite the last dregs of adrenaline rattling in my body, I still have the wherewithal to step up to the cockpit and lay him out with a single punch.

Pripyat, Ukraine. An hour later.

I
t’s probably not fair to say that everyone has calmed down, but we have at least achieved the status of rational human beings again. Devon has cried herself out. Malcolm has finished obsessively searching for every piece of lost luggage, no matter how damaged. Jasmine is starting to talk again. Aiko has finished barking orders at everyone. And Nikolai has stopped threatening to have the Russian mob rub out me, my family, and anyone I may have said hello to during my tenure on this planet. And I have recovered from totally losing my shit over no longer having a way to fly out of this hellhole and finally accepted Malcolm’s promises of “an exit strategy” without threatening to resort to violence.

It’s a desolate bloody place we’ve landed in. What’s left of the plane lies on an old road, a thoroughfare that is now more weeds than asphalt. Gray buildings, ragged and sharp-edged, stare blindly down at the ruins of their city. Every window in the place is shattered. The whole place looks shattered. Like whatever happened here took the city and broke its back. It is a city gutted, all its viscera on display.

Even mother nature has been halfhearted in her attempts to reclaim the place. The trees are straggly things, anemic arms reaching desperately for the heavens. The vines clamber halfway up the walls and then seem to lose their sense of urgency. Dead gray strips of leaves hang down like discarded thoughts.

Malcolm is going round handing out guns like penny candy. We lost Nikolai’s giant sack of weapons, but fortunately by that point, so much of its contents had spilled about the fuselage that we have enough guns lying around that no one goes empty-handed. I even get another shoulder-holster.

“Alright then!” Aiko claps her hands. “Let’s get going!” She’s talking too loudly, too brashly.

“It’s OK.” I reach out a hand to her. “We can take a moment.”

“No.” She shakes my hand off. Then she stops and looks at me. “Please,” she says, and her voice almost breaks, “can we get out of here?” She takes a breath, it sounds loose and too long. “Come on,” she says, the false brashness back in her voice. “Let’s get moving, people!”

So we pull together our remaining bags, dust off our wounds, and start walking.

Two miles deeper in

Finally I see it. I’d expected it earlier, and had almost lost my faith. Had almost started to believe this was all for nothing, that I’d been blown out of the air for nothing. But then: proof. This is the correct path. For all of its terrifying implications, we were undeniably right.

The deer paces slowly out into the road before us. It lowers its head, nibbles at a weed, then raises its head and looks at us. After a moment it moves slowly on.

Copy after copy of the deer drags after it as it moves. A concertina of flesh. It stops to eat again, and one by one the multiple hindquarters fold into the whole.

Wonder and horror in equal parts leave me speechless. There is something majestic about it. Something awful.

“Woah,” Nikolai says, summing up the moment as best he can. “That is some pretty fucked up shit.”

He takes a step towards the animal, and it lurches into movement, leaping up and away. It multiplies as it does so, copy after copy of its own body hesitating momentarily before leaping after the first. Like photographic stills laid over each other. It bounds away, trailing its elongating body, disappearing into a long abandoned office building.

“That’s it,” Aiko says. “That’s what you saw at Trafalgar Square, right?”

“Yes.” I nod. “Yes that’s it.”

“Residual temporal-spatial disturbance.” She smiles and holds up a palm. It’s a confused moment before I high-five her. “Proof, Arthur. Not belief. Just there. Just happened.”

I smile.

“So.” Jasmine looks worried. “It just, like, wandered into a pocket of space-time crazy and that totally happened to it?”

“Pretty much.” I nod.

“So,” Jasmine persists, “we could totally walk into one and become, like, creepy monster us, right?”

“It’s on the continuum of possibilities,” Devon responds.

“So, you, like, totally have a way to spot those right? Because I am really so not about ungluing myself in space and time.”

“Erm.” Devon turns to me.

“Erm,” I say.

“Totally reassured, guys. Totally.”

Another mile

“There.” Devon points. “That building there.”

Things have been getting decidedly weirder the closer we get to the Chernobyl power station. The fountain that flowed backwards was desperately strange to look at. And there was the massive flock of birds caught in an infinite spiraling loop above a high-rise of cheap housing. The crumpled bag of crisps caught quivering in mid-air spitting out potatoes that melted to seeds on the ground. We’ve taken wide berths around these phenomena. So far everyone appears to be attached to the same space-time continuum they arrived in.

The same can’t be said for our surroundings. As we’ve moved towards the edge of Pripyat, closer to Chernobyl and the epicenter of the explosion, the levels of dilapidation have been increasing. The buildings are coming more and more to resemble giant piles of rubble.

But the building Devon is pointing at is remarkably whole.

“Reinforced structure.” Malcolm nods.

“Which means?” Aiko looks perplexed.

“Government building,” Devon and Malcolm say in unison.

Aiko and I get to the conclusion of that thought at the same time, but she’s the one who gives eloquent utterance to it.

“Pay dirt.”

T
he building reeks of mold and wet cement. The walls are covered in graffiti—skulls, roses, jagged Cyrillic letters, and amorphous blobs in drab shades of red and green and brown. None of the bright Day-Glo colors that London’s disenfranchised use to tag its public spaces and vehicles. But apparently we’re not the first people to make it this deep.

Whatever branch of the soviet government occupied the building, they left in a hurry. There are rusted filing cabinets wrapped in thick mutant strains of ivy—all stalk and no leaf. Smashed computer monitors litter the floor. Bookshelves spill their former occupants, providing rotten shelter for rodents. The place is a monument to abandoned bureaucracy.

Winston would fit in here. He’d hate it, but he’d fit in.

I wonder if I’ll ever see Winston again.

It’s funny how it leaks in. The realization of what I’ve done. Of what I’ve left behind. Who.

I wonder what they’re doing back in London. If they’ve worked out how to get closer to the heart of this. I wonder if I’m on a wild goose chase.

But the temporal effects are here. So the truth is here. It has to be here.

We go deeper still. Malcolm leads. Nikolai trails at the back. His exuberance is significantly dampened.

“This is not being so awesome now.” He tries to reason with us.

“It’s where we need to be,” I tell him curtly. Now I don’t need to rely on him for transport I find I don’t nod and smile so much.

We come to a stairwell. Tiles are peeling off the walls, collecting in small shattered piles at the corners of the landings.

“We split up?” I ask.

“Have you never even seen a horror movie?” Aiko looks at me like I’m insane.

And the truth is I’ve seen many, but I’ve never met anyone else who seemed to think they provided legitimate strategic advice. In fact, if I’m applying Hollywood logic, the best bet is running away very fast. The serial killer traps you on the roof. The giant monster lurks in the basement.

Maybe there is something to that logic after all.

“Down,” I say, letting randomness supersede Hollywood’s life lessons.

So down we go, to a landing with a great white stencil that reads α-1. A door leads onto the basement floor. The stairs carry on, descending into darkness. The sound of dripping water is louder down here.

“Sweep this floor?” Jasmine looks to Malcolm for confirmation. He seems to be fulfilling a role that lies somewhere between surrogate parent and drill sergeant.

“Sweep the floor,” I confirm as Malcolm nods.

It’s dark. Medieval dungeon dark. In a few places the ceiling has given way and light filters in. But all it reveals are more filing cabinets, more derelict computers, more rotting books. The place is a maze of little rooms with no clear purpose. One resembles a surgical theater. One looks more like a dentist’s.

“Where do we start?” Devon has managed to tear open one filing cabinet drawer. It’s stuffed with papers written in an illegible hand. She leafs through them. “There’s so much.”

I check my watch. The little box showing the date says the 13th. Four days counting today. Except we’ll need one to get back to England. Three. Well, three assuming Malcolm’s exit strategy doesn’t involve hiking the whole way, or wrestling down our own wild horses to ride back to civilization.

“We just start,” I say. “We have to. Pick a point and begin there.”

“Just at random?” Devon looks dubious.

I shrug. “I don’t see anywhere obvious to start.”

“You all so crazy.” Nikolai has found a lump of rebar from somewhere and is holding it defensively, like a club.

“Devon and Malcolm start going through files.” The plan forms in my mind while I speak it. “Aiko, Jasmine, Nikolai, and I will sweep the rest of the floor. Make sure there’s nothing weird here.

“Nothing?” Aiko looks dubious.

“Nothing weird
and
dangerous,” I modify.

Malcolm is nodding along.

“Once it’s clean we go down. Rinse and repeat. Once down is clear we go up.”

Three days. Three long laborious days. But no one questions me. I clap my hands. Back the way I did when I gave my team a pep talk back at the Oxford Police Station. “Come on people, let’s get to work.”

With darkness falling

We settle in for the night in a room nestled in α-1. It’s large, high-ceilinged. Rusty hulks of degraded electronics outline broad corridors. It reminds me of some post-apocalyptic NASA control room. The floor slopes down to a waterline—a nearby stream was redirected at some point and now flows through the building. It tumbles through the ceiling in a small waterfall. We can hear the sounds of it gurgling down into the deeper basement levels a few rooms away.

Malcolm made a campfire of sorts. There’s enough food in our remaining luggage to pull together a rudimentary meal.

Devon is perusing a foot-high stack of folders we lugged up from the next floor down, β-2. “A little light reading,” she called it. “Time flies when your nose is pressed hard into some profoundly trippy Russian magico-scientific texts.”

Nikolai is still nursing his piece of rebar. “You people all so crazy. Reading files. Talking time travel. What make you…” He looks to the dimness of the ceiling searching for the right English phrase. “…so sick in head?”

Aiko laughs. I join in.

Devon looks up from her folders. “Ex-boyfriend,” she tells Nikolai. Then she looks at the rest of us. “I dare any of you to come up with a worse reason than that.”

“I here because of you,” Nikolai counters.

Devon contemplates that. “OK,” she nods. “You win.”

Aiko, who’s been trying to make a bed out of clothing from the suitcases, finally lies back and says, “I think the government term for it was a low-level zombie event.”

I lift my eyebrows. Zombies have never come up before. She’s not looking at us, toying with her hair. “I was temping at a place. Apparently one guy had recently lost his wife. Tried to summon her ghost, or soul, or something. He had her corpse in his office closet. It was really fucked up. I don’t know what he was doing exactly. But it didn’t go right. I was in the office supplies closet. About the only person who didn’t lose their soul. It’s pretty hard to fend off zombies with office supplies.” She draws a breath that isn’t quite steady.

Jasmine shifts over closer to her, holds her hand.

Personally I am being colored impressed. Binder clips versus a hunger for human gray matter. Not exactly what I’d call fair.

“And they didn’t recruit you to MI37 after that?” I say.

Aiko shrugs. “The conspiracy theory thing. People judge.”

I shake my head. Despite everything, I still have a lot of love and respect for Felicity Shaw, but that was a very, very bad call.

Jasmine looks over at Malcolm. “Can I tell…?”

“No.” Malcolm shakes his head violently. He reaches into an inside pocket and pulls out a small brown vial of pills. He thumbs off the lid.

“I saw something I wasn’t meant to see,” Jasmine says cryptically. “I’d met Malcolm at AA.” My eyebrows give another bounce. Not even old enough to legally drink and she’s already a recovering alcoholic?