Bystander 27

  PRAISE FOR BYSTANDER 27

  “Hoskin’s pessimistic narrative voice [is] bleakly transfixing, and his quickly paced plot will keep readers guessing until the very last page.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Irreverent, gritty, and poignant when it needs to be, Bystander 27 is a bloody blaze of a read that peels back the familiar trappings of a super-hero tale to explore loss, revenge, and the power imbalance when cape-wearing gods walk the Earth astride us mere mortals.”

  Pierce Brown, author of Red Rising:

  “Rik Hoskin’s Bystander 27 is a novel equal parts mystery and action that will appeal to fans of comic books and graphic novels.”

  Brandon Sanderson, author of Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive

  “An epic and furious adventure!”

  Alan Philipson, contributing author of the Deathlands series

  “Bystander 27 is a twisty page-turner that freaked me out and kept me guessing. Rik Hoskin, you are SuperScribe! Bring on the sequel!”

  Nancy Holder, New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Saga

  “Wow! What a ride! Twisty, sneaky awesome book of superheroness with a dash of humor, mystery and thriller and completely different than anything you’ve ever read. Fun stuff! For comic book fans, for Marvel fans, for Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog fans.”

  Patricia Briggs #1 New York Times author of the Mercy Thompson novels

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  No shoes, no shirt, no cape

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2020

  Copyright © Rik Hoskin 2020

  Cover by Kieryn Tyler

  Set in Meridien

  All rights reserved. Rik Hoskin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 859 2

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 860 8

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  PART 1 Construction Lines

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  PART 2 Breakdown

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART 3 Framed

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  PART 4 Rub Out

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  PART 5 Vanishing Point

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART 1

  Construction Lines

  1

  Everything changed when Hayes’ wife died. He was waiting for her on the corner of Sixth and West 24th Street, close to Madison Square Park, and she was late. That was Melanie all over, late could have been her maiden name and marriage hadn’t changed her one iota.

  There was the other late, too, the one that had been good news for her and for Hayes and the reason they were meeting here today.

  “Quo,” she had said one night over dinner, “I’m late.”

  Hayes had looked up from the pasta he was working around the plate with his fork, a frown materializing on his forehead. “Late for–?”

  “Late,” Melanie had replied. “Late-late.”

  He looked at her, trying to make sense of the words she was saying, as her brown eyes the color of Turkish coffee looked hopefully into his. She looked beautiful then, more beautiful even than the day they had got married, eight weeks after he had got his discharge from the service. “You mean… we’re going to be… a mommy?” he said, knowing the words were jumbled and wrong, knowing she would laugh.

  Except Melanie didn’t laugh, she smiled. She smiled a smile that engraved itself on his heart in that moment, and he realized that they were both going to be parents. “Yes, Quo,” she said, nodding. “Isn’t it… perfect?”

  “It is,” Hayes had replied, and he had reached across the table for her hand, leaned forward and kissed her. She had tasted of pre-packed pasta and sauce from a jar, and of their future.

  That had been seven months ago, and now Melanie was in her third trimester, her belly distinctly ballooning, and they were meeting with her gynie in a clinic off Sixth Avenue to make sure everything was going okay. And she was late.

  Melanie Hayes, nee Monroe, had graduated in social sciences from Columbia and had gone into advertising. Hayes had met her in her final year at an employers’ fair, he there to represent the US Navy, she dressed for a party along with a gaggle of her friends, none of whom had any intention of signing up. But they had got talking somehow, an attraction flitting between them like a spark trying to catch fire, and when her friends sauntered off to check out the jobs in fashion and media and computers – shooting Warrant Officer Jon Hayes those judgmental looks that students have for “warmongers” as they went – Melanie had stayed.

  “Do you swim?” she had asked, running a hand self-consciously through her long, dark hair.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hayes had replied with the unambiguous abruptness of the Navy.

  “I mean, privately,” Melanie said. “You know – for fun.”

  Hayes had smiled, thinking of how he and his school friends used to sneak into McGinty’s pool not so very long ago. “Yeah, whenever I can.”

  “My parents have a pool,” Melanie said. “I mean, we do. I live with them.” She had cursed then, a rising blush turning her pale cheeks pink.

  “Where is that?” Hayes had asked.

  “Jersey,” Melanie replied, pulling a face that made Hayes laugh.

  They had spoken more, exchanged numbers, and when he was on leave, they had met up and found that they enjoyed more than just swimming together.

  Now, Jon Hayes was thirty-two and Melanie was twenty-nine, and they were about to have their first child. And Melanie was late.

  Hayes checked his wristwatch. 11.07. They had arranged to meet here at 11, so that they could walk together to the clinic for the 11.15 appointment, and not have to rush.

  Standing at the street corner, his back to a wall, away from the sidewalk traffic, Hayes withdrew the phone from his pocket and checked its suddenly illuminated screen. There were no messages. He could phone her, but he knew Melanie, knew it would not make her any faster.

  Hayes had served in the Navy for eleven years before his honorable discharge. He had done two tours of Afghanistan and had chased all over
South America in the name of Uncle Sam. The Navy had made sure he was always on time, and it was a habit that his civilian life was never going to break. Civilian life was paced differently, but he would always be that guy who turned up ten minutes early, shoes shined and pants pressed. He prided himself on it.

  Melanie still approached life the way she had at uni, sleeping in at the weekends while Hayes was jogging the streets or on the treadmill in winter, arriving for the movie after the trailers had finished, catching the train as its doors played their closing serenade of beeps. In anyone else it would have driven Hayes mad, but Melanie was Melanie and he loved her for it.

  He was still looking at his phone, its screen going dark, when he heard the explosion. He turned, along with everyone else on the block, and tried to locate the source of the noise.

  For a moment there was nothing. And then, between towering skyscrapers two blocks away, a distant figure cut through the sky trailed by a familiar streak of light.

  Excitement and fear ran through the crowd as they recognized the flying figure. Dressed in white with gold accents at the cuffs and matching boots, the flying man was Captain Light, hero and savior, protector of planet Earth. For a moment, Captain Light seemed to just hover in the air, forty stories above the street, while the trail of light he had left in his wake dissipated, stars fluttering away like smoke.

  The crowd was jazzed.

  “It’s Captain Light!”

  “I love him so much!”

  “Go! Go!”

  People adored Captain Light. Everyone knew his story. He had begun life as an ordinary scientist whose experiments with an energy reactor had ended in the freak accident that had granted him fantastic powers. Now he could utilize the properties of the spectrum in ingenious ways.

  Captain Light hovered above the street for a few seconds, watching something that was hidden from Hayes’ view by a skyscraper to the left. A news copter came lurching inelegantly into view in the distance, eating up the space to capture footage of the scene that would already be playing out live on rolling news channels.

  Captain Light watched the unseen something for a moment. Then, with a spectrum trail of brilliance, the hero dipped down in a graceful arc like an Olympic high diver, trailed as ever by that brilliant streak of luminous propulsion. An instant later, he had disappeared behind the towering structure to the right, accompanied by the distant, muffled whoosh of displaced air.

  “What do you think it is?” a woman in the crowd asked. She wore a headscarf and shades, like a fifties’ movie star.

  “Whatever it is,” a heavyset, dark-skinned man with streaks of gray at his temples replied, “I hope Captain Light kicks its butt.”

  Hayes hoped so too. He had seen things overseas he wanted to forget, extremism fueled into hatred that had taken on a bloody and brutal physicality. But heroes like Captain Light dealt with something entirely different. They dealt with threats from the cosmos, or from other dimensions, or the kind of batty craziness that demented geniuses dreamed up in their lairs – which is to say they dealt with the kind of deranged bastards who had lairs to begin with.

  Hayes had seen one of them before, a hero called the Hunter who worked under the cover of night and used a specially-adapted crossbow to topple his enemies. Hayes had been picking up drive-thru at the time, and as he pulled away, the Hunter had landed on the roof of his car with a sound like clashing cymbals, before leaping away into the night after his prey. Hayes hadn’t even seen who the Hunter was chasing, it had been so quick.

  Another time, he had emerged from the subway to find the office block he was supposed to visit had been totaled a quarter hour earlier by Doctor Decay. The building and its occupants had been reduced to dust that caught in the wind. People were coughing and choking on that dust, people’s lives reduced to so much sand.

  Hayes was a spectator now, watching the brilliant trail that Captain Light left in his wake, trying to figure where he was headed, when something else came around the edge of the far skyscraper. It was big and dark and moving, like an oil slick on the sky. The crowd watched as that dark cloud condensed into a figure, dressed in black with a dark green cloak swirling like mist around her supple form – the Jade Shade.

  The news copter swayed overhead, lining up its shot as Captain Light reappeared from behind the far skyscraper, fists forward, speed up, powering towards the Jade Shade like a missile. From his mouth he emitted a beam of brilliance, gold but tinged with all the colors of the spectrum – his so-called spectral scream. From this far away, the scream was barely audible, its sound like the buzz of a fluorescent light bulb. Jade Shade seemed to shudder in the air as the scream burst struck her, and her demonic cloak lost integrity for an instant, its edges fraying outwards in wispy, powdery trails.

  And that’s when Hayes saw Melanie turn the corner. She was scared, head partway turned back to watch the incredible scene above her. She was just one member of a crowd of terrified civilians running for their lives from the battle playing out overhead. Seven months pregnant, she ran with all the grace of a water balloon, or like one of those stupid dachshund dogs whose legs are so short all they can do is waddle.

  “Shit!” Hayes hissed, and he began to push his way through the crowd towards Melanie.

  She was a block away, running scared. But she saw Hayes, raised her hand to wave, shouting something that was lost to a loud howl that suddenly ripped through the air. Hayes recognized that sound. It was the sound a helicopter engine made when it was in distress, a descending whine like a moping dog. Back in Afghanistan, Hayes had seen a friendly chopper get hit by an anti-aircraft missile, and it had made just that same moping dog whine before striking the ground in a fireball. Eight people had died.

  What happened next, happened fast. People were panicking, running in all directions, scattering for cover. Melanie was caught up in a crowd, some of whom ran straight into traffic. Car horns blared, a truck’s air brakes hissed loud as it fishtailed across the street.

  Then the news copter appeared from behind a building. Its angle was all wrong, nose pointed almost directly towards the ground, but still fifty stories up. The chopper was surrounded by tendrils of Jade Shade’s black mist.

  Captain Light’s indignant holler carried a whole block as he launched himself at Jade Shade, but his spectral scream dissipated as she threw up a shield of black mist that seemed to knock him from the sky.

  Then, suddenly, the chopper began picking up speed as it was tossed straight towards Captain Light like a spear. He was knocked from the air as it struck him, and went hurtling away like a rag doll as the chopper continued its deadly descent.

  “Run!” Hayes screamed, seeing the helicopter arrow down towards the crowds ahead of him. He was running towards the impact trajectory, towards Melanie. It was automatic for him. SEALs run towards danger, never away.

  Melanie was still running when the chopper hit the street. Its starboard ski cut through her chest and abdomen in a sudden, gruesome explosion of blood and flesh and bone, before flattening a yellow cab like it was made of tapioca. The impact was so hard that it shook the street for a block in all directions. Hayes felt it, his legs still pumping, hours on the treadmill and pounding the streets around their house ultimately giving him no more time to reach her than if he had been standing still. Screaming came from everywhere at once, a chorus of shock rising to illustrate the scene.

  Above, Captain Light and Jade Shade were exchanging blows, light against dark. One side of an office block shattered into glass shards as the villainess went caroming into it, but Light was at the scene in an instant, propping up the roof while the floor was swiftly evacuated. The Shade dove for the hero, bringing the full fury of her tesseract cloak to bear. Captain Light stood staunchly in place, holding the ceiling aloft as the Shade’s demons screeched all around him, batting their pliable bodies uselessly against his chest and legs as they tried to unbalance him.

  “Not today, Shade,” Captain Light stated through gritted teeth. “Not even
on your best day.”

  Ninety seconds later and it was all over. The Jade Shade was taken into custody, unconscious and with her supernatural cape removed and placed in a specially-designed crate.

  The crowd cheered Captain Light, some freckled kid running over to ask for his autograph. There was a thirty-foot-wide crater on Sixth Avenue containing the flattened remains of a news helicopter that looked as though it had tried to merge with a taxi cab.

  Hayes stood beside the crater and looked into its crumpled residue, a spider’s web of cracks across the blacktop all around it. Emergency vehicles were on the scene, sirens wailing, and New York cops were hastily ushering everyone back behind the temporary barricades they had erected. Hayes found himself pushed back with the crowds, ushered behind those barricades with their candy cane stripes of red and white, as though someone was trying to prettify the scene of the deaths.

  Just then, Hayes’ phone burbled, trembling against his pants’ pocket. Without thinking, he removed it from his pocket and looked at the illuminated screen. It was 11.15. Melanie’s appointment.

  2

  Ginnie. That’s what they were going to call her. Virginia. Virginia Hayes. But they had already shortened it to Ginnie by month five, when Melanie had felt the first kick.

  Now Ginnie was dead before even being born, a thing that never was and never would be. A person, snuffed out before they had had a chance at life.

  And Melanie…

  Hayes waited outside the crematorium, shoulders back, chest out, in a suit with pants pressed and shoes shined the way he had been taught. He watched the middle distance, eyes unfocused, as a short line of cars arrived in the balmy air of early summer, heat that left Hayes cold. He had felt real heat in Afghanistan, and whatever they called summer in New York seemed chill by comparison, especially today.

  Melanie’s parents, Jack and Jodie, the ones with the pool, arrived and said things he did not hear. So did Hayes’ supervisor from work, a ruddy-faced man called Jeff who was in his fifties with a hairstyle from the seventies. Hayes was thinking about the people he had lost in Afghanistan, the funeral services he had attended for colleagues, for brothers as they called them. And how with Melanie it was different. It was heartless, turned into ceremony by the very fact that it was not a ceremony. With the Navy it had been ordered, which made it somehow what the person had wanted and what everyone needed. Here it was sending a coffin to be burned.