No Hero (34 page)

“There!” Tabitha points to the vast bulk of the power station’s main body. “Lose them in there.”

Boom. Shaw blows another lock away. My foot hits the door. Kicking it in.

The door doesn’t move. I bellow. My foot throbs with pain. I see the hinges. The door doesn’t open the way I’m trying to kick it.

Then the door blows outward, torn from those offending hinges. Something massive and shadowy advances out into the night. Something that’s been waiting for us and for this moment.

It’s Tabitha who kills it. Her pistol barks and a bullet catches it in the eye. A chunk of its skull ricochets off the doorframe. Then we’re over the tumbling corpse and looking onto a staircase leading down. Colossal machinery pulses to our right. We hug the wall to the left. Roars bounce up. Strange echoes that make it impossible to place things.

“Electricity,” I pant. “Clyde will be where there’s electricity.”

“In a bloody power station,” Tabitha points out.

“The generator.” Shaw nods. “We need a map of this maze.”

Down we go.

And then stop.

Because the monsters are coming up. We all open fire. A cacophony of gunshots and howls. Glimpses of beaks, and teeth, and claws. We back up the stairs. Until Tabitha screams.

It’s a sound that sluices through my head despite all the other noise. Shaw and I both spin. We see the hand on her shoulder. The hand as thick as her waist. Massive, craggy nails, biting into Tabitha’s flesh. Blood welling up. Her face twisted and horrified. Tattoos fading against her abruptly pale skin.

And then she’s not there. She’s just a scream fading into the distance. The creature just flings her away. Like a rag doll.

It’s huge. Fucking gargantuan. Its head is the same size as my chest. Its chest is as big as my car.

“Oh crap.” You would think I’d have come up with some better last words by now.

The creature pulls back its fist.

Shaw’s arm is abruptly about my waist, and for a moment I think how odd a moment this is to hug me, and I think that there are worse ways to go, and then she pulls me over the edge of the stairs and I’m falling again, and I think that maybe there aren’t worse ways after all.

The fall doesn’t knock me unconscious, but I wish it did. We sit there groaning as seconds and chances tick by us. I make it to my feet first. Help Shaw to hers. I can’t see Tabitha.

There’s another door. I try the handle. It opens. We’ve lost Shaw’s shotgun in the fall. Supporting each other, like contestants in the world’s most horrific three-legged race, we stumble back out into a space we don’t want to be in. We stumble back out into the open.

“Balls,” I try to say, but mostly just spray blood from my busted lips.

Beside me, Shaw nods.

The space before us is oddly open and quiet. Cooling towers to the left of us. Buildings stretch away in front and to the right. Behind us I can hear monsters roaring at each other. The call and response of bellow and bark.

“Tabitha,” I manage to say.

“Clyde,” Shaw’s voice is a whisper. “Focus on Clyde. He’s the priority.”

And it’s a cold truth, but I don’t think Shaw shies from those. There’s something admirable in the focus. We’re here to get this thing done.

Suddenly the night air shudders. The ground shudders. The whole of reality pulses. Shaw and I pause in our shuffling run. Everything is still. Not a sound behind or before us. And it’s almost as if we imagined everything. As if it was all a dream. As if we are Dreamers, waking up from long somnambulism.

Then part of the power station explodes.

Concrete and bricks rain down from the building before us. They spatter down on the gravel. Too far away to hit us. Close enough for us to simply stand and stare as lightning arcs its way in reverse up into the heavens.

Bright and white and unfading. First one bolt then another joins it, twisting around the first. Then a third strand. Then a fourth. They dance around each other, out through a hole punched in the roof of the power station. More strands of lightning lance upwards. The illuminated clouds twist around them—a distant whirlwind. The strands of lightning are knotting together, forming one massive beam that sputters and crackles. The air smells of ozone. All the hairs on my body stand on end.

“Found him,” I say.

Then, from deep inside the heart of the power station, whatever is left of Clyde brings a Feeder through.

It comes. Down out of the sky it comes. And then it
is
the sky. It is everything. Horizon to horizon is eclipsed, the night sky obliterated by its presence, by the simple weight of its shadow.

“Oh,” I start, but I never make it to the expletive. The sound drags out of me, a long hollow thing. “Ohhhhhh...”

It’s like a landscape. It’s like another world hanging above my head. And that would be easier, if that was just it, if the Feeder were just some chunk of rock, no matter how alien, if it were dead and dry. Even if it was coming down, coming to crush us all—I think that would be better.

But it’s alive. It’s a thing. A he, she, or it. It has eyes. It has a million bloody eyes. I can see them rolling in sockets the size of lakes, of shopping malls. Yellow irises, purple irises, orange, and gold. Pupils like black holes. I can see scales, and crags, and cliffs of skin. I can see veins like rivers. I can see organs the size of cathedrals pulsing beneath translucent pieces of exoskeleton, or chitin, or some other alien shit. It’s got bloody tentacles. It goes on forever. And it doesn’t end.

The air around me ripples, shifts. The smell of ozone is stronger now. It’s a sour taste at the back of my throat. Every hair on my head is standing up straight. Every hair on Shaw’s head next to me. It should be comical. This should be a great laugh, a real knee-slapper.

And something in me wants to laugh. Wants to laugh and not stop. And weep, and scream, and dance, and dance, and dance, and sing songs of praise. Part of me wants to strip naked and rejoice. Part of me wants to dig, to dig and never stop, to bury myself in the earth’s core. Part of me wants to start scratching the flesh from my bones, to get the gaze of it out of me. Part of me wants to claw out my eyes. Part of me wants to claw out Shaw’s, to take them for myself. Part of me... Part of me... Part of me...

I can feel madness hammering in the door, begging to be let in. Madness can take the pain away, the abomination of the thing away, it can take away the impossibility made possible. If I’m crazy I don’t have to be here anymore. Leave an answering machine on for reality. I’ll get back to you when I can...

My throat is completely dry, my attempt to swallow just a dry clicking sound. It all seems so futile now. So bloody pointless. Everything we’ve done so small and stupid.

Tendrils descend, like those from a Progeny’s mouth, but so... so... so much more, so much bigger. Jesus. They’re, just, just...

And still I can feel my mind slipping, like a car missing the gears, an ugly crunching sound. And perhaps madness has made it in after all, has said “screw it” to the door, loaded up Shaw’s shotgun and come on in, all guns blazing.

But madness doesn’t come. It remains a dream, wishful thinking. Because it’s not me losing a grip on reality, it’s reality itself losing grip. The world is changing right in front of me, permitting this monstrosity, this untruth.

Beside me, Shaw puts what I cannot into words.

“Oh fuck,” she says.

We start running. There’s nowhere to run. The Feeder is everything. It is the sky, and the sky is falling. But we run, because that’s all that evolution has left us with. This is our option.

We run. Run toward the beam of lightning, toward Clyde; run toward the hope that we can undo this, toward the impossibility that it is not too late. And above our heads is proof of the impossible—surely it’s time we had a little for ourselves. Surely. If there’s a God...

And there’s a God all right. It’s just he’s floating above my head munching on parts of Essex.

There’s an incredible pressure from above as we stagger forward. As if the atmosphere itself has grown denser, the air we’re pushing through a greater barrier. Gravity seems weaker. My feet scrape over the ground, barely making enough contact to propel me forward. Smaller chunks of rubble are rising into the air. Tiny electric shocks race up my legs each time my feet make contact with the ground.

There is a sound like an earthquake. Part of one cooling tower suddenly rips free, hurtles skywards, disintegrating as it goes, vanishing behind a cloud to immolate itself against the vast mass of the Feeder. I manage to stop myself from tracking the rubble all the way up. I’m whispering a new mantra to myself: don’t look up, don’t look up.

I can see a car in the sky. I pray it’s not the one with Ephie in it. I pray Kayla is still earthbound. In the distance trees are uprooting themselves.

As Shaw and I approach a door, the wood is torn free of its hinges and races upwards. Shaw and I are holding hands. I’m not sure when it happened. As if we are both victims of the mad belief that this way we’re heavier, that this way we can survive.

And the insanity clamoring at the back of my head is using that belief as a crowbar, trying to force itself in. Give up Shaw, it’s telling me. Give up Kayla. Sacrifice. Feed it. Feed it her. Feed him. Feed it anything. Just not me. Just not me.

And then Shaw half pulls, half shoves me through the maw of the doorway and into the darkness of a corridor and abruptly there is a ceiling over my head. No more sky No more Feeder. No more vacuum. No more madness.

We stand gasping in our pitiable shelter. I can hear the walls creaking, can see cracks appearing.

“What do we...? What do we...?” I can’t make it to the end of the sentence. Part of my brain is still trying to process what it saw, yammering at the overload, flooding the rest of my processing abilities with the horror of it all.

“Clyde,” Shaw says, and the word is almost foreign. “Come on. Clyde. Down.”

It gets easier the longer we’re under cover. We stay away from rooms with windows. We stay in stairwells, in dark places. It’s easier to enter denial that way

It’s not too hard to find our way now. We don’t need a map. We just follow the electric charge in the air. We go through rooms full of blown monitors, our feet crunching on the glass. We pass dozens of small fires casting flickering shadows around the remains of shattered strip lighting. Shaw uses a flashlight. I could use mine, but I’m still holding my pistol in my free hand so I’d have to let go of her to use it, and neither of us seems willing to give up the human contact just yet. We’re grounded by our palms— some circuit of flesh to counterbalance the circuits of wire that hiss and spit in the walls around us.

We hit the bottom floor of the place and the spaces start opening up. Shaw’s flashlight doesn’t penetrate the shadows too well anymore. But then we don’t need the flashlight. The hulking pieces of machinery, the gangplanks and walkways, the bundles of wire— everything illuminated in a pale white light that grows stronger and stronger as we walk on.

“Almost there,” Shaw says. And she makes it sound almost hopeful, as if there can still be hope. I’m not sure I believe that, but I cling to her words like a drowning man.

“I should reload,” I say.

“Good idea.”

We stand there, awkwardly facing each other as I fumble the mostly spent magazine out of the gun.

“What do you think happened to Tabitha?” I try to make the question light. I don’t try hard enough.

“Nothing good.” Shaw doesn’t either. She swallows several times.

“I’m scared,” I say. Because it’s absurd to deny it any longer.

“Me too,” she says.

“I don’t feel like someone who can fix this problem,” I say.

“Neither do I.”

We stand there. The fresh magazine is still not fully loaded. I stare at it.

“Bet no one else does right now, either,” I say.

“Probably not.”

I push the magazine home.

“Bollocks to it,” I say.

“Bollocks to it,” she says.

And then she kisses me.

It’s nothing really passionate. Nothing to write home about. Neither of us is swept off our feet. She just leans in, and pecks me quick and hard on the lips.

I stare at her.

“What?” she asks. “I’m relatively sure we’re about to die.”

I lick my lips. I can faintly taste strawberry Chap Stick. “I don’t mean to complain,” I say, “but you should probably work a little bit on your pep talks.”

I have to shield my eyes as we go through the doorway. The lightning is a scorching white stripe, like part of the screen of reality has burned out.

And there, at the heart of the madness, is Clyde.

What’s left of Clyde.

No. That’s wrong. It’s not what’s left of Clyde. It’s what Clyde has become. If it was what was left of Clyde, there would be less of him. Instead there is so much more.

His head is there, his torso. His eyes are wide open and bright white. His mouth is open and full of light too. Like the electricity is in him. Like he’s brimming over with the stuff. He’s pouring it into that beam of lightning, but I don’t think he can get it all out in time. It’s going elsewhere. Going deeper into him.

Clyde is growing. His arms and legs have become liquid, flesh flowing over the bundles of wires that lead to his twitching form. He lies in a spreading pool of himself, something half human, half generator. A pseudopod of pink, doughy flesh rises up and wraps around a pipe, squeezing tight, bending the thing. It climbs like a creeper, wrapping up and around, anchoring Clyde to the place. And that’s not all of it, of him. A lapping wave of skin grasps at rivets in the floor, clamping down on them so that they poke whitely through the stretched tissue; his arm is bifurcating over and over, splitting into thick tendrils that wrap around every available piece of machinery; even his hair betrays him, becoming roots that push into cracks in the concrete floor.

He already covers an area as large as my living room and he’s growing.

“Oh no,” I say. “Oh Clyde.” Because how can we fix this? How can we make this right? He’s not even human anymore. And if we can’t even fix Clyde...