Hero: Le Maquisard [1/5]

Manufactured by Benway

He just made the bus from Lawton to Oklahoma City, only to find that he had an eight hour wait there for the next connection. He had sat in the library, reading newspapers and watching for MPs. He found no accounts of the action that he'd taken part in, only reports of press conferences and vague references to military operations in Ohio and Pennsylvania. He looked in an atlas and confirmed that Columbus was dead centre in Ohio and the logical place to start. He was sitting in a chair in the reading room trying to figure out what he was going to do when he got there when a passing security guard asked him to leave. He knew better than to protest.

The second bus had taken all night to reach St Louis, where there had been a one-hour layover. He checked his wallet and found that he had enough for breakfast at an all-night McDonalds. He bought a copy of the New York Times and found a paragraph about military anti-terrorist actions in Ohio below a paragraph on a bus plunge in India that had killed 83. There were no casualties mentioned for the battles on American soil. He tried to sleep, but the tiny, bright-eyed woman sitting next to him spent the entire night trying to convert him to something or other. It seemed that the answers to all the ills of mankind could be found in a brick-sized book by some writer named Rand. After she got off the bus in Indianapolis, he slept all the way into Columbus.

When he arrived, it was just past six and the sun was still high in the sky. He purchased three nutrition bars and found a library. The local papers had no coverage of the actions at all but, after the security guard had asked him to leave, he found a stack of a local free arts paper by the door. It had a 30 page article on the actions. The main area of operations had been in the vicinity of a city called Hamilton, 100 miles away in the direction of Cincinnati. The article crapped all over Media Command for clamping down on rumours, but gave few details of what the targets of the actions might have been. On the second reading, he made notes of the names of the people that the article had quoted. He went to a phone booth, and tried to locate the first name on the list. Directory Assistance gave him five numbers. He had 7 quarters. He tried again. Two more quarters disappeared and he now had 15 numbers. He asked a clerk in a 7-11 for a phone directory, but the man told him that the store was not a library and told him to buy something or get lost. He couldn't go back to the library until morning. He found a shelter, but when he went inside the smell drove him out almost at once. He stood on the opposite side of the road trying to muster up the courage to go back in until a cop came by and asked him to move on. He went to a park and sat on a bench and re-read the article for the third time. He found another name, and the name of the church where the man was a preacher. The name was familiar, and he set to backtracking his way to the bus station just as another cop was approaching.

He didn't find a church, but found instead a sign pointing to it on a lamp-post. When he reached it, it was dark and locked. He went through the gate and into the churchyard. It was dark and overgrown. There was a path down one side to a small house with a light on in an upstairs window. He knocked at the door. Lights blazed on, illuminating the yard and the front of the house.

"What do you want?" asked a terse voice from a security intercom. "There's nothing for you here. We have no money."

"I don't want money," he said. "I want to talk to you about the battle."

There was no response from the intercom.

"I was there," he said. "I saw it."

The lights cut out. From behind the door came the sounds of several bolts being undone. The inner door opened, revealing a tiny old man in a black turtleneck.

"You saw it?" said the old man.

"I saw it and I don't know what to do," he said, and started to weep.

The old man opened the wrought iron security gate and granted him sanctuary.

*****

The following week was one strange experience after the next. He told the whole story to the minister, then to a succession of visitors who were not named. Some looked like professors, others like military men, and one came in with a hard hat obviously straight off a construction site. He told it to them all. Some nodded, stonefaced, while others wept. A woman came and placed her hands on his face, then took them off and spat on him. He was blindfolded and taken to a hospital where he was tested in many large and complicated pieces of machinery. Not one of them gave him any indication of what it might all be about. He half expected the MPs to show up at any moment, to take him off to Leavenworth.

On the seventh day of his stay, a non-descript man came to meet him after breakfast. The man extended his hand hesitantly. He gave it a firm shake. There was a flash and a second man appeared, identical to the first. He didn't start, but his eyes did widen. The two identical men looked at each other.

"Want to stick around?" one said to the other.

"Naw," said the second one. "Don't think he's used to conversations in stereo. You don't drink that much, do you?"

"No," he said.

There was another flash and only one man remained.

"You're a mutant," he said.

"Yeah," said the man. "I was going to tell you my name was Paul Rogers, but there's no point now. Jamie Madrox."

"Marc Washington," he said.

Madrox took a sheaf of papers from a briefcase and made a show of rifling through them.

"You've been evaluated," said Madrox.

"Kinda had that feeling," he said.

"You're baseline human, and a deserter from the US Army," Madrox said. "They're looking for you, but they're not looking here. They've been searching in North Dakota and they've told your mom. She's pretty pissed off at you."

"I guess she would be," he said.

"You've totally screwed yourself over," said Madrox.

"Yes," he said.

"If you could turn the clock back, if we could you put back on the base a week ago the moment before you walked out, would you go?" said Madrox.

He opened his mouth, but found no words. He thought for a moment, then tried again.

"That depends," he said.

"On what?" said Madrox.

"On if you could put me back before I joined the army," he said.

"Welcome to the resistance," said Madrox, smiling.

*****

For the next two weeks, being in the resistance meant staying in a single room in a house in Chillicothe owned by an obsessively vegan Quaker couple who had more means of preparing tofu than he had imagined possible. Madrox had told him that they would need him to go public and he was willing to go along with that. Madrox also told him that he would have to wait until the journalists stopped kissing camo butt and decided to properly report the story. Madrox had also suggested that his tic might be gone by then.

"What tic?" he had asked.

"That one," Madrox had said, imitating something a street crazy might have done.

He hadn't noticed the tic. He never saw it in the mirror. The Quakers commented on his nocturnal screaming, which they claimed to have heard. He had dreams that he didn't recall, and he certainly hadn't woken up screaming. The only thing that irritated him was that when he woke up, he would see Fred or the Chinese girl or the Anatomy Lesson standing by the door, looking at him. They never said anything, they simply looked very, very sad.

One weekend, the Quakers had said that they needed a proper night's sleep and so they were going to their cabin. He was not invited along. They suggested that he stay in as he had for all of the last two weeks, but they left their spare car and some cash should there be some sort of emergency. As they left, they said that his tic was getting better.

He spent the morning in the house, looking out the window at the car, holding the keys in his hand. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to do the stupid thing that he'd been wanting to do since the night he arrived in Chillicothe. He drove over the hills to Hamilton and found a military surplus store. He bought a pair of combat boots, a pair of binoculars and a set of camo fatigues identical to the ones that he'd left behind in Oklahoma. He went to the library, where he was stonily informed that the map room was closed. Since it was noon, he drove into Dayton and found the library there. It was a self-service kind of place, and he managed to find the topo maps that he needed and was able to xerox them before a guard came and asked him to leave. He knew that the wisest thing to do would have been to drive straight back to Chillicothe, but he knew that no-one would know he was gone for another two days. Besides, there was a full moon.

He didn't drive to the farm. It was clear from the map that there were better approaches than a frontal one, especially as it was likely to still be under occupation. The presence of a military checkpoint at a crossroads in the distance confirmed that, but he turned off a quarter mile before it and headed up into the hills. The road became narrower and narrower as he drove on, until it came to an end in front of a small wooden house with dark windows. He looked at his map. The road was supposed to continue on up the hill, but clearly did not. He decided that either the map was wrong, or he had turned into a driveway instead of into the road that he had been looking for. There was no car or any other kind of vehicle in sight. He opened the car door slightly and listened for a solid five minutes. No dog. He looked up the hillside behind the house. From the top, there would be a view of the fire zone. He put on his new fatigues and began hiking up into the forest.

It was dark when he reached the top, but that had been part of the plan. He crept the last half-mile on his stomach through the trees, stopping every so often to listen for patrols. He heard nothing, and eventually came to the crest of the ridge that he'd been seeking. It took him a while to set the optics on the binoculars in the dark but, once he did, he had a view of the fire zone. It didn't look anything like what it once had. There were light towers illuminating a set of white domes and there were tiny white figures running in between them. One dome was where the house had been, another was where the barn had been. Some sort of giant tarpaulin was stretched over the hillside where the underground complex had been. He looked at the yard in front of the house and saw the flagpole but with no flag on it. There was a truck parked at the place where they'd shown him the dead girl under the ground sheet, and a rectangular pit where he'd seen the prisoner in the black suit get shot. He watched the tiny figures running back and forth, and managed to pick out the observation posts along the perimeter. He marked them as best he could on his copy of the topo map. He watched for almost four hours, then crawled back to his car. When he reached it, he was bone tired. He thought about driving back and decided to sleep in the car until morning rather than risk the roads at night.

*****

He awoke at 6, cold and hungry. The house was as dark and dead as it had been the previous afternoon. Even so, he had the feeling again, the one that he had just before he'd almost been killed by the charred mutant. There was no gun in the car. He'd sworn that he'd never use one again. He cursed himself for that, and wished that he'd his M-16. He checked out the interior of the car, but neither Fred nor any of the dead girls were sitting in there with him. He scanned the yard, looking for what else it might be. On his second pass, he caught sight of a figure standing by the house. It looked wrong, somehow, something about the shape of the head that he couldn't see clearly. He picked up the binoculars as carefully as he could, then trained them on the spot. He saw a crimson flash disappearing into the brush in front of the house. He thought of the dead girl in the house in her crimson uniform. He started to sweat. He could leave, drive away and perhaps leave all of the dead behind. Instead, he got out of the car. It was close enough that someone from the fire zone could have fled here. They might be children, like the ones that he'd killed. Alive, but maybe starving. He had to be sure.

It took a long time to reach the front of the house. He was shaking when he found the open front door. He looked out across the yard and into the bush from the top of the front steps, but saw no-one. He entered a simple living room with a TV and a sofa set in it. There were heavy metal and motorbike posters on the walls. There were open boxes of cereal on the floor.

"Hello?" he called out.

There was no response. This was hardly surprising. When the thing had touched Fred, the only sound was 250 pounds of Fred liquefying and splashing onto the floor. He looked back over his shoulder and saw nothing in the bush. He went through a door past a staircase and into a kitchen. There were more open boxes there and a huge number of empty pop bottles. He touched the mouth of one. The pop was still there, wet and sticky. There was a small bathroom off the kitchen, empty. He looked up the staircase. It was dark, and furniture had been piled in the landing at the top. He recalled the barricade at the house and the dead man behind it.

"I'm lost," he said. "I'm looking for the way to Hamilton."

He knew that the sensible thing to do was to run. Instead, he mounted the stairs, one by one. There was no feeling, nothing making him want to run. There was only one door accessible among the dressers and bedframes that were piled so haphazardly there. He knocked, then opened the door.

It was a white room, or very close to one. The brown and orange and green furniture in the landing had once been in it, but all that remained in it was a mattress. The walls were beige, and the carpet had been white once. The mattress was covered in an unruly ball of greyish-white sheets. Underneath them, there was what might have been a human form, curled into a fetal ball.

"Hello?" he said.

The human-shaped lump remained inert. A lock of blonde hair was visible among the sheets. There was also a bloodstain on one of them. His stomach sank. He reached out and lifted the sheet to reveal the sleeping face of the whitest woman he'd ever seen. He put on his safest smile and was about to say something when her eyes flew open and everything went black.

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