Yesterday's Hero (32 page)

“Oh sh—” Aiko’s expletive is cut off by the floor.

I struggle onto my back. Try to look at what’s handing us our arses today.

I wish I hadn’t.

It’s like a clipping error in a video game. Three frogs, stacked imprecisely on top of each other, each one seated within the one below. Four legs are planted squarely on the ground, eight wave ungainly in the air. One squat face stares at me. Two more sprout painfully above and behind it, mouths twisted, features distorted.

It’s roughly the size of an ottoman. Either the footstool or one of the Turkish sultans if he was bent down. Doesn’t matter. Too bloody big for a frog if you ask me.

“Alright you—” I start, clambering to my feet.

A tongue whips out of the face staring at me. It’s about the breadth of my arm and the length of my nightmares. I take it full in the face. It feels like being bitch-slapped with a brick wrapped in snot.

My feet bid farewell to the ground. I arc like an acrobat. I land like a sack of shit.

I take a break from the fight to stare dazedly at the ceiling waiting for the pain to subside to the point where I can breathe again. As fun as that is, though, there is absolutely no way I am letting something as revolting as a mutant frog eat me. Some sort of killer wolf with fangs and a tail of fire: maybe. But I so do not want to be the guy remembered for getting noshed on by a giant amphibian.

I roll towards it, which, while it minimizes the threat posed by the tongue, turns out to be a mistake with a flaming sword. Instead of coming up with a swing and a battle cry, it’s more of a hop and a yelp.

Froggy slams me in the gut with another tongue-slap.

“Are you—?” I hear Aiko ask over the rush of the breath leaving my lungs. But I have had it with being embarrassed by this thing.

I lunge breathlessly at the creature, sword stretched out wildly in front of me. It’s not a move of great elegance or finesse, but I’m making up for that by being too close to bloody miss.

Except I do.

My sword hits empty air. There’s no frog there. The stairwell is empty.

I hear something land behind me. I almost have time to turn before—

Thwack. Something slimy collides with the side of my head. I collide with the wall. I stare groggily at the frog.

“It teleports?” I ask the world at large. “It bloody teleports?”

I go at it then, a mad dervish. I heft the sword above my head, whirl it in huge circles. Flame crackles like an angry halo.

I hit space. Space again. Empty space. Each time I close, the frog moves. Its tongue slaps me, knocks me this way and that. I am drenched in frog spittle. I yell, let my rage out at it. My frustration. If I could just chop off the end of its tongue. So I could jam it up its irritating, teleporting arse.

The tongue catches me under my chin, a perfect oral haymaker that lifts me off my feet and plants me against one wall.

The frog and I regard each other from across the stairwell. I swear the bastard thing is smiling.

“You know what,” I say, “as cool as this sword is—”

I lever myself half off the ground.

Its tongue sits me right back down.

“Screw it.” I just yank out my gun and shoot the bloody thing.

Three short thunderclaps. Holes appear in the frog. Blood sprays, decorates the wall. The frog dances and rolls. Then lies dead and still.

Slowly, painfully, I get up off the floor. Aiko, who seems to have escaped the whole incident remarkably slime free, looks at me apologetically. “I was totally with you on the sword thing,” she says. “Would have been awesome. But, well…” She shrugs. “Maybe the fanny pack is more your speed after all?”

She’s making light, but her hands are shaking. And I should take the joke in the spirit it was intended, but all my battered pride will allow me to say is, “Oh shut up,” as I start to hobble up the stairs.

“A
giant teleporting frog?” I am not sure if Devon is more disdainful of the quality of monster I am fighting, or my inability to do so proficiently.

I look at her sourly. I swear I can hear Jasmine snickering in the background.

“Oh, Arthur, I’m sorry.” Devon seizes me in a bear-crusher of a hug. Considering the residual frog spit covering me, it’s pretty decent of her.

“No, I’m sorry,” I say, once I can get air back in my lungs. “Just… being beaten up wasn’t the most fun.”

I’d been so excited about the sword too. I was looking forward to my Errol Flynn moment. Swinging on a chandelier and diving over a grand staircase.

That said, considering how this stuff normally goes, I’d be lucky to get a bare bulb and a stripper pole most days.

“Would it cheer you up if I told you I thought I could blow up disrupted space-time particles?”

I weigh this information. “How big of an explosion do they make?”

“Very small individually. But if you get a big pocket it could make quite the boom.”

“Let’s find a
really
big pocket.”

“Att-a-boy.”

α-1

We’re in the room where Nikolai died. Devon pauses at the small cross we made for him, mutters something under her breath. She’s holding a tangle of wires and circuitry attached to a naked speaker.

Aiko, Malcolm, and Jasmine have come along for the show too. Jasmine is headphone-less. She regards Devon’s messy little machine with something like hatred.

“The headphones were a worthy sacrifice,” I tell her.”

“You, like, totally realize that frog was karma, right?” she asks me.

Devon looks at her sympathetically. “Would you like to blow something up too?”

Jasmine grimaces, then shrugs, defeated. “Sure.”

Devon holds out the wires to Jasmine. She takes it, then examines the messy thing, turning it over several times. Finally she looks up. “Like, how does it work?”

“Well,” Devon says, “you point the speaker at the disturbance.” Jasmine sorts the apparatus out from the tangle, and grips it delicately in one hand. “Then you take those buttons in the other.” Jasmine organizes an accretion of circuitry into her left hand. The wires connecting the two parts make it look something like an electronic nunchuck. “And you press play.”

Jasmine looks at her. “That’s it?”

“Wait,” says Aiko.

Jasmine huffs angrily.

Aiko won’t be distracted. “So if this works,” she says, “then it’s going to cause the disturbed space-time particles to detonate?”

I nod, keen to get to the exploding part. “Thereby posing less of a threat to the Chronometer and random bystanders.”

“Blowing shit up poses
less
of a threat?”

Aiko’s quizzical expression gives me pause for thought.

“Well,” Devon intercedes, the proud parent defending her child, “it’s a question of degrees. An explosion, in general terms, is not a wonderful, happy, shiny thing. Not the sort of thing one
puts in a box, wraps in paper, and
gives to a child, for example. Well, excepting certain children in the class of
Mrs. Bradmoor around twenty-three years ago. Maybe Kenneth McWhirter, for example. For him and his derisive comments about a girl’s enthusiasm for chocolate custard, an exception could be made. But, yes, as I was saying, in general terms, that’s a no-no. But here we’re dealing with a more specific case, sort of a sliding scale from, say, nothing going wrong at all, to explosions, all the way to ungluing parts of people in time and space. And also, while I don’t want to be seen as the squeaky wheel demanding some oil, maybe we could all consider that I just retroengineered this from what was, quite frankly, some shitty math, written in a language that I don’t actually speak, so maybe a little slack is in order.”

We all contemplate that for a moment. “All right then.” Aiko nods. “Let’s blow some shit up.”

Jasmine crosses the room until she’s about five paces from the water. “Is this good?” she asks.

Devon nods.

Jasmine presses the button.

The thin sheet of plastic over the speaker ripples. At first I don’t hear anything, but then there’s a sound like muttering, like a record played backwards. It’s an ugly sound, tinny and raw. Jasmine makes a face.

“Is this—” she starts.

A ball of fire fills the air above the pool of water from which the catfish emerged. There’s a percussive clap that rocks Jasmine back on her feet and ruffles my hair. Steaming drops of water spray about the room.

“Yeah!” Jasmine whoops.

But the fire hasn’t finished. A flickering flame lingers in the air, racing up the height of the little waterfall. It spits and sparkles, fiery strands of light spinning away and fizzling out.

“Oh shit,” Devon says.

We all turn to her.

“Why—” I start, and then the next explosion knocks me off my feet.

Water sprays across the room. I see something unfolding out of the water, massive and on fire. A shapeless blob of scales that expands and expands out before collapsing into nothing. Then suddenly bursts into existence again, still wreathed in fire. And it’s gone before it hits the wall.

Trails of fire are racing up and down through the hole the waterfall fell through.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Devon is cursing as she picks herself up.

“What’s happening?” Malcolm is not in the most amused mood.

“It’s propagating.” Devon is already moving towards the doors, the stairs up. “The particles of disturbed space-time are too densely packed. It’s like we’ve lit a match in a gunpowder factory.”

“And we didn’t think of this before we tried out the device?” Aiko is frozen by her outrage.

Devon is framed in the doorway. “They’re undetectable particles.” Devon is talking with her hands, and her hands are saying “Panic!”

“You know,” she adds, “you really should be running away right now.”

Another boom emphasizes the point. The floor shakes. We run.

We hit the stairs. More blasts, both above and below. The floor shakes. I rattle between wall and banister. The rusted thing creaks ominously. I think of teleporting frogs and find my balance.

We hit the first floor just as part of the ceiling gives way. The world becomes a stinking, rasping cloud trying to erase my lungs. I cough and spit. The sound of collapsing concrete races after me. I lose sight of Aiko in the swirling clouds. I call out and hear nothing.

Another explosion. More felt than heard. I pick up the pace. A wall looms out of nowhere. I crash into it, spin away, smash through a doorway. The room is clear but blank. Dead end. I back up. A blast spits fire at me, knocks me flying. I land on the floor. It’s not soft.

Another doorway ahead of me. A chance for an exit. I pump my legs, push my body towards it. Another explosion. The wall around the door quakes, ripples like water.

The door comes down, heavy concrete lintel smashing inches in front of my feet. I skid to a stop, graze my nose on rubble.

There’s more smoke than dust now.

Another explosion. Another.

And what a stupid bloody way to die after all this.

I spin around, try to retrace my steps. A window. I just need a window. Anything.

Another explosion. Another. Another.

I’m choking, coughing, blundering. I’m down on my hands and knees.

Something massive and gibbering scrambles out of smoke towards me. Some horror of fur and flesh, its form liquid and malleable. It’s past me before I can even figure out what it used to be.

Another explosion. Another. And then one more. It must be in the room next to me. As it lifts me off my feet, I think about that. Try to locate its point of origin. As I sail through the air I realize I was next to a door, and wonder if the thing was ripped off its hinges, if it’s going to hit me before I’m mashed against a wall. With adrenaline going, you really can think about a lot of things. About Felicity. About Aiko.

Glass shatters around me. I try and work out where it came from.

And then falling. And then the ground. Wet, and muddy, and not at all how I expected it. And then the smoke is pouring away from me. Pouring up into the sky.

The sky.

I can see the sky.

I am lying on my back, outside, staring at a window I just smashed through, staring at a Russian government facility, on fire and collapsing. And above it: the sky.

Strong hands grab me under my shoulders. I let them pull me away, let my head loll, my thoughts slowly arrange themselves back into something like cohesion.

“Thanks, Malcolm,” I manage to say as my feet bump over the twisted asphalt.

“Not quite a compliment,” Aiko replies.

I twist in her hands, almost forcing her to drop me. And it is her there. “You’re strong for your size,” I manage.

“Still not sure if that’s a compliment.”

I think I might have a slight concussion, but I start to laugh. Aiko laughs too. It lets a little of the terror wash out.

She drags me to where the others stand. We make a small tight knot, looking back at damage we’ve caused. The building comes down piece by piece, collapsing in upon itself, choking the endless basement levels.

Slowly, carefully, Jasmine hands Devon back the little knot of wires and circuit boards.

“Well,” Devon says, “on the plus side, we know it works.”

A road, several hours later

I
t is not a comfortable or easy walk through the shattered city of Pripyat. It is not fun slogging down the roads that come afterward. Jasmine and Devon complain more than me. Malcolm less.

When we hit the first village, Malcolm assures us he will get us a ride. I half expect him to tell us that he knows a guy who knows a guy, but it turns out that he has a fanny pack on that’s full of hundred dollar bills. Then he removes half of its contents. Apparently that’s our much touted exit strategy. And apparently Antonina, a savvy-looking local woman, knows a good deal when it walks into her grocery store.

One extortion later and she leads us to a truck that looks like it comes from the same trash pile as all of Nikolai’s vehicles, and tells us the ride to Kiev—home of the nearest international airport—will take a while. Then she sits up front in the cab, her eight-year-old daughter beside her, and I sit in the truck bed and see if my bruised bones can be physically shaken from my body.