Yesterday's Hero (43 page)

Staggering, barely able to see, I push out of the window. I’m on my back, head arched back. I can see Spilenski upside down. His form seems to ripple and bend.

Because I am seeing it through a bubble of distorted time. Because I am about to be hit.

I struggle against my own confusion, my own limbs. I demand my body gets its shit together. I half roll, half drag myself to the side.

The enormous gelatinous thing wobbles past me.

The police car disintegrates. Rust eats it. Parts fold up on themselves, compressing into impossibly small pieces of metal. Other bits unbuckle, spit out their rivets, collapse into shining unpainted sheets of metal as the clock turns back. A few chunks of rocky ore spatter the road.

Bwoom.

Spilenski fires at us again. I scramble up, still on all fours. An empty street in London. Lined with lawyers and dentists, real estate agents and upscale cosmetic salons. Not the sort to litter the street with convenient bits of rubble or colossal concrete barriers.

Bwoom.

I reach for my sword. My hand closes over empty air.

My sword. Still in the wreck of Devon’s car. Spilenski’s ball of messed up time rolling towards it.

God my priorities are messed up.

Bwoom.

I break into a run, lungs battered and screaming at me, demanding I stop this madness. My legs add to the chorus. Two yards between me and the blade. Four between me and the ball. One yard to the sword. Three to the ball. I scrabble at the sword’s hilt. Two yards. One. I dive away.

Bwoom.

Some part of my brain knows how to roll without setting fire to my pants. Still, I’m thinking Clyde might have overwritten some important self-preservation urges.

I come up, lit sword in my hands.

Bwoom.

My weapon recovered, but I’m still too far from Spilenski. The closer I get, the harder his giant balls of fuck-you-up are going to be to dodge. Going up close and personal would be suicide.

Bwoom.

“Shoot the fucker!” someone yells. Either Aiko or Felicity. At least, I really hope it’s not Devon.

Bwoom.

I have my pistol, but a bullet is only going to be turned into so much molten yesterday by the temporal distortion.

Bwoom.

Temporal distortion.

Devon’s tangle of wires around my left hand. I seize them, take aim. Each second I spend sighting the speaker on him feels like a grain of sand slipping through my fingers. I can feel Leo Malkin edging closer and closer to Big Ben.

Bwoom.

I aim the speaker. I press play.

Bwoom.

Barely audible syllables from the tiny speaker. A tinny voice.

Bwoom.

The explosion lifts me off the floor.

I
have heard that falling into water from a sufficient height is like falling onto concrete. I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I’ve had the good fortune of never being hurled from a sufficient height into water.

Falling onto concrete, however, from any height really, sucks balls.

The detonation throws me like a rag doll. I come down hard on my left side, arms splaying out. I roll, like a bowling ball waiting to hit the pins. My sword’s gone. My chin grinds over and over. My skin tries to dissociate itself from a fool like me, to stay behind scraped over the asphalt.

I come up bleeding, bloody, raw. I’ve replaced my palms with lacerations, my sense of hearing with a high-pitched whining sound. Blood keeps getting in one of my eyes.

And I’m smiling, because I’m still doing way better than Ivan Spilenski.

That said, so is pretty much anybody who’s not smeared over the base of a crater like strawberry jam.

I see my sword embedded in the roof of a classic red telephone booth. Apparently that’s as close as this Arthur is going to get to a sword in the stone. I hobble over to it. Wrench it free.

Felicity, Devon, and Clyde all slowly pick themselves up. Their clothes are ragged, their skin blackened by ash, crisscrossed by cuts. Clyde is double-checking the straps of his mask. I hobble towards them.

“You OK?”

“Yes,” Clyde says. “I am. This body is taking a beating though.”

This body.
Not his body. Not him. That wipes the grin off my face.

Felicity is checking her watch. “Big Ben,” she says. “We have to be there. Now.”

And she’s right. This is hardly the time to rest on our laurels. It’s just that resting on anything would be really nice right now.

Devon bends down, scoops something up from the street. Her mess of wires. Blasted out of my hand but still intact. She tosses it to me. “You’ll need this.”

To me. She throws them to me. And for a moment everyone looks to me. All of us moving together. All of us fighting for the right thing, the right way: together.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s finish this.”

I
f there’s a tomorrow, I’m really going to regret this.

In fact, it is my body’s opinion that no tomorrows might be a wonderful thing. It screams at me to give up. There’s still time, it tells me, to get some good lying down and not hurting so much done. Some time for the good stuff.

It’s a good argument, truth be told.

But it’s not what Kurt Russell would do. Somehow that mad thought won’t leave me. It’s a spur stuck in my brain driving me on. So I put my head down, pump my legs. I suck in lungfuls of air, try to find a little more willpower, just to push a little closer to whatever the finale is going to be.

There is still a chance I have make-up sex to live for.

One more stride. One more. One more. The stitch builds in my side. One more.

We round the corner. Big Ben stands before us, vast and shadowy. The clock face is lost in the EMP-enforced gloom. There are a few uniformed policemen standing near the base of the clock tower. A group of tourists chat in German. One of them clutches an old SLR camera to his eye. Something with a strip film and cogs and gears. Old-school tech that survived the blast. He takes photographs of the city in darkness. Each time the flash goes off, I almost shoot him.

“Where are they?” Felicity peers into the dark.

“Well, I think the Russian must be in there already.” Devon looks at Big Ben. “Didn’t seem the sort of chap to hang around and have a good old-fashioned natter about the best way to pluck a turkey.” I turn to stare at her. “Or anything else that may catch his fancy,” she says, a little defensively.

“No.” I shake my head. Look for straws to grasp. It can’t be. “Where’s Tabitha? Malcolm? Kayla?” I stare around looking for an abandoned police car, for any sign of them.

“We have to get in there!” Aiko jams a finger at Big Ben. “The others could be roadkill by now!”

Not exactly sugar-coating it for me. But still, I can’t think that way. If Malkin’s already in there we’ve already lost.

“Clyde,” I say. “What about Sinsdale? That took out one of them on the way here. Can you… I don’t know, booby-trap this place. Prime it with a Sinsdale spell to chop the bastard in two.”

Clyde looks around. “Too many tourists,” he says simply.

“Would anyone really miss Germans?” Devon asks.

Another flash from their camera. I’m tempted to side with Devon. I turn to stare at them, annoyed.

Except they’re nowhere near where the flash came from.

Another flash. Larger. Closer.

“Oh shit!” I pull my sword. Flames flicker forth. “Incoming!”

There’s a yell from one of the policemen at the base of the tower. Another from the Germans. Their camera clicks compete with Leo Malkin’s portable battery.

Tabitha’s car slews round a corner and into sight. At least two of the tires are blown. Bare rims throw up a wake of glittering sparks. A figure sprawls on the roof, clinging on. Kayla, her sword clenched between her teeth. Malcolm leans from the window. His shots are still a steady metronome beat.

Closer. Closer.

I toss my gun to Aiko. “Get ready.”

“Will be,” she says, steadying her aim.

My adrenaline is pushing my heartbeat up into my throat. And what would Kurt Russell do? He’d kick this guy’s ass.

Flash. Flash. Leo Malkin draws closer, outpacing Tabitha’s car, pulling away, pulling closer to us. Flash. Flash.

I ready the sword. Hold it high. A powerful position, my mind tells me. One of dominance. Bring the
sword
down, let gravity help power the swing. The flames are warm against the October damp. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck.

Closer. Closer.

I see him as he emerges from a flare of light. Yellow hair wild. Clothes torn. Bleeding from a long gash in his arm. His face: a mask of determination, rage… fear.

God, I almost feel sorry for him then, in that brief instant of connection. Out of time, out of friends, armed with only one desperate plan to try and make it all right. In some ways he’s not so different from me.

Except that, well… I’ve never tried to screw over all of space and time just to get what I want.

And then the moment passes. He closes his eyes, mouths a few empty syllables, jumps, and—

Nothing. He lands, almost trips on the ground. He stares, bewildered. He jumps again, an almost idiotic motion. Like a child pretending he can fly. I half expect him to flap his arms.

He stares around desperately.

“He’s out of power,” I say it as I realize it. “His battery, it’s dead.”

“He’s dead.” Aiko lines up the shot.

“No!” I hold up a hand.

The policeman is still yelling at us, but seems to have decided to come no closer. He grabs his radio ineffectually. It’s as dead as every other electronic device that was on during the blast. No back up for him.

The Germans are still snapping away.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Aiko doesn’t put the gun away. “He killed Jasmine.”

“We are
not
an execution squad,” Felicity insists.

And she’s right. We need to do this the right way.

We move in on him, slowly draw the circle tight. Behind him, Tabitha’s car grinds to a halt. She and Malcolm step out fast, guns drawn, also aiming at the frozen Russian. Kayla leaps down from the roof.

“I could stop him,” Clyde says quietly. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything ever again.”

“No!” Tabitha shrieks. I swear she almost brings the gun to bear on him. And did she see what happened to Kropkin? Does she suspect?

And where did my friend go? When was he replaced by the man, this thing, happily offering to overwrite a man’s brain to kill him?

“He moves, he feckin’ breathes a word, and I’ve got him.” Kayla holds her sword in both hands. The encyclopedia in my head recognizes the posture. It’s not one I would call defensive.

Felicity holds up her hand. “We are taking him in.”

Malcolm cocks his pistol. “I don’t remember agreeing to take orders from you.”

Felicity snaps her gaze to him. It’s the eye equivalent of Kayla’s sword pose. “If you shoot an unarmed man, I
will
arrest you.”

“He killed Jasmine,” Aiko says again.

“And he will pay for his crimes.” Felicity switches her gaze to Aiko. Aiko’s eyes slip to my face. Felicity’s eyes flick towards me and back.

And, suddenly, just like Leo Malkin, I know exactly what I want to fight for.

“We don’t kill him,” I say, shaking my head at Aiko. “We’re not like him. We’re the good guys.” I put my sword back in its sheath.

A thin smile is on Felicity’s face.

We draw in tighter on Leo Malkin. He has his hands up. He has that desperate caged look. But there’s nowhere for him to go.

It’s over.

“I say he’s too feckin’ dangerous to let live,” says Kayla. “I say we feckin’ end him.”

“To be fair,” Devon points out, “you say that about a lot of people.”

“Boy bands are a blight on the face of feckin’ humanity and they feckin’ deserve it.” I glance to see if she’s joking. Apparently she’s not.

But I’m not the only one who glances.

And, apparently, that moment of distraction was exactly what Leo Malkin was waiting for.

A
syllable. Another. A bright spark.

I spin, grab for the sword. A line of white fire briefly attaches Leo Malkin to Clyde’s face. To his mask. A moment of connection. And then gone.

Clyde slumps. My sword is out of its sheath. Kayla is moving. I swear I even see the muzzle flares as the guns discharge. But the world has lost its soundtrack, has gone silent as the grave.

A line of lightning. From Malkin to Felicity.

Felicity.

My Felicity.

Lightning. Bright and urgent and overwhelming. And then gone. Gone as Kayla’s sword descends, as the bullets fly. Gone as utterly as Leo Malkin.

Clyde falls to the ground.

Felicity falls to the ground.

Tabitha screams.

The smell of charred meat fills my nose.

Leo Malkin is not there.

I stare. And I stare. As Tabitha howls at the world.

Because… because… but there was no power.

Except the power in Clyde’s mask. The one power source that we brought to him. The one power source keeping Clyde alive.

Clyde lies on the ground.
Felicity lies on the ground.

Tabitha screams.

The smell of charred meat fills my nose.

Power—stolen from Clyde. Power—electricity, lightning, that burned through the air, that lit the world, that was buried in Felicity. My Felicity. Burned into her. Scorched and blackened. And then, its last remnants, fulfilling Leo Malkin’s last wish, propelling him up, up, up. Into Big Ben.

And he’s gone. And Clyde’s gone. And Felicity… Oh God. Oh no.

He lies on the ground.

She lies on the ground.

Tabitha screams.

The smell of charred meat fills my nose.

They’re dead.

“N
o,” I say. “No. Please no.” And… no… I just… I try to process it. I try to understand. It’s too big, too much.

She’s dead.

Clyde’s dead.