Big Damn Hero

17

“Toby,” Mal said softly. “Toby Finn.”

Toby, his one-time Amigo, his another-time brother-in-arms. The man he would have gladly given his life for both before and during the war.

Now, here he was, up on the platform, and from what Mal could make out of his appearance, Toby was much changed. He was thin, positively emaciated, and was stooped over like a crookbacked octogenarian. His face was gaunt, and the mop of unruly ginger ringlets that Mal remembered was now a wispy cap, the few strands remaining atop his head coarse and kinked like copper wire. Toby used to catch holy hell in Independent bootcamp over those carroty curls of his. The other recruits called him Rusty and Little Orange. Seemed the postwar years, as for so many others, Mal himself included, had not been kind to Toby.

But he was alive, and here, and Mal was overjoyed. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Tobias! Tobias Finn! Toby!”

His voice ricocheted off the surround of rock walls and ceiling. From the cavern floor, heads twisted in his direction. On the dais, Toby Finn stared up, his expression blank, unreadable. Mal was taken aback. Did Toby not recognize him?

“Toby, it’s me,” he called. “Mal. You remember me, right?”

His words were met with boos and hisses. Shocked, as though the catcalling had a physical force, Mal took a step backwards. Someone, a hatchet-faced woman with a lazy eye, grabbed his arm and held him still. The chorus of ill will rose in volume, buffeting him like body blows.

This is insane, Mal thought. It’s like I’m public enemy number one. What in tarnation is going on?

Then Toby raised his hands for silence. Gradually the din died down.

“Ladies, gentlemen, comrades one and all,” he said to the crowd, “it’s been a long time coming, but I have done what you asked and what I promised.” He thrust out his arm, pointing at Mal. “I have brought to face justice the man who conspired with the Alliance and stole victory from our grasp. I have brought you the traitor Malcolm Reynolds.”

At the word traitor, which rolled off Toby’s tongue with great emphasis, a fresh barrage of boos and shouted curses flew in Mal’s direction.

“String him up!” someone yelled over the din. “String him up!”

It quickly became a new chant, not “Trai-tor! Trai-tor!” now but “String him up! String him up! String him up!”

Mal’s brain strove to process this turn of events. On either side of him, his captors grinned and nodded to each other, as if seeing him humiliated was a rare and memorable treat.

This can’t be right, he thought. It ain’t right. I must be asleep on the floor of my shuttle, still dopey from that gas Covington spritzed me with.

But he wasn’t. And now that his eyes had completely adjusted to the dim and shifting light, he picked out a couple of other faces below that he recognized. Other Browncoats whom he had fought alongside in Serenity Valley. Sonya Zuburi, her raven hair prematurely streaked with white, looked like she wanted to take a bite out of him. Her husband David had his hand wrapped firmly around her arm and was holding her back. Mal had saved both of their lives at the risk of his own, advancing into the teeth of an enemy barrage, laying down covering fire so they could retreat from a burning barn. The expressions on their faces said his selfless act was long forgotten and had been replaced by something other than eternal gratitude.

Sonya raised her fist and shook it at him as she chanted along with the others.

David must have loosened his grip on her, because she suddenly broke free, pushing away, shouldering between two burly men, one of whom stood aside to let her pass. As Sonya rushed towards the foot of the wall below the ledge, she bent down and picked up something from the floor. In the process, she sideswiped a fellow veteran, knocking him onto his back in the dirt.

Her face contorted with rage, Sonya flung the rock at Mal. The men flanking him dodged the projectile, but Mal stood his ground, and he felt the breeze as it zinged past his left ear, missing him by millimeters.

“Enough of that,” Toby Finn shouted at the backs of the crowd. “Stand down, Sonya. We aren’t a gorramn rabble. We’re soldiers! We will be disciplined about this.”

Mal turned to the man standing beside him and said, “What is it that you think I’ve done?”

A blank stare was his only response, as if Mal had spoken in a foreign language. For one weird second he wondered if the man was a robot with a malfunctioning neural cortex. The sense that this couldn’t actually be happening, that this was all some feverish dream, welled up inside him again; yet he couldn’t deny the reality of his predicament. Not ten minutes ago, his biggest problem was a full bladder. Death by lynch mob was looming larger as a source of concern.

A peal of hurrahs rose up as a bald man scrambled up the front of Toby’s platform with a coil of rope. He stopped near the top and held out his arm, dangling a hangman’s noose from his fist. To roars of approval, he tied the end of the rope to the handrail and let the noose drop free.

The crowd’s frenzy bubbled up, soon on the verge of boiling over. And when it did, Mal was pretty sure they were going find the courage to stretch his neck.

Mob mentality. It could turn so quick. During the war, Mal had heard tales about noncombatant folks weeping at the sight of the Browncoats arriving in their town to help them, then dry those tears when it came clear that as hard as the Independents fought, the town was going to fall to the Alliance. Heard that they blamed the men and women who had taken up arms to keep them free and turned on the exhausted soldiers, offering them to the Alliance commanders, even begging for them to be killed, as tears streamed down Browncoats’ war-worn faces. Sometimes folks went crazy with despair and did the killing themselves.

They blamed us because they believed in us and we failed, Mal thought. Is that why I’m here?

“String him up! String him up!” the crowd continued, surging to the foot of the wall.

Tightly spaced gunshots rang out, sharp and deafening in the enclosed space. Armed men stepped forward, moving in front of the dais, their weapons shouldered and aimed at the spectators.

“We will have order!” Toby bellowed at them. “We will follow the rule of law. The accused will get a fair trial and be judged by his peers. I know you’re eager to see justice done, but we are not thugs. Malcolm Reynolds will get his day in court.”

“And then we’ll string him up!” shouted someone in the crowd.

“Due process,” Toby Finn reminded them sternly. He gestured to Mal. “We are not criminals. We are not like him. A traitor is the worst kind of bad man there is. No allegiance to flag or brigade, no allegiance except to save his own stinking skin. Lock up the prisoner. Guard him well. We don’t want nobody taking it on themselves to do anything unlawful. Do you all hear me?”

“Toby, just listen to me for one moment,” Mal said. “Please.”

Toby could scarcely hear him over the tumult. He beckoned for silence. “Fella wants to say something. You’ve got a moment, Mal. Speak.”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Toby,” Mal said, “but I’m minded to think it’s something we can work out. Let’s sit down together over a drink, you and me, just like we used to at the Silver Stirrup back in the day, and talk it over. We were friends. Still are, to the best of my knowledge. I realize things on Shadow didn’t end as we’d have liked, ’specially where Jinny Adare’s concerned. That… That is one of the real tragedies of my life. But I always thought we’d put it behind us. Leastways that’s how you always acted during the war. What’s changed since?”

“What has changed, Mal?” came the reply. “Why, only everything. I’m not the naïve kid you used to know. I’m older, wiser. I’ve learned things.”

Mal sensed he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Toby, not in the time available, so he addressed himself to the crowd in general.

“I don’t understand what’s happening. We’re all Browncoats here, am I right? We all fought in the war, fought the Alliance. I’m one of you. You must appreciate that. I’ve never done anything could warrant such treatment. Whatever crime you think it is I committed— and I would surely love to someone to tell me — I am innocent.”

“Fine words,” Toby said, “from a lying tā mā de hún dàn.” He jabbed a finger in Mal’s direction. “You know what you did. And all this time you’ve gotten away with it, until now. Now, at last, your sins are catching up with you. How’s it feel? Maybe it feels like all along you’ve known this day was coming, and now that it’s arrived you’re glad, almost relieved. Your life of skulking around, of passing for honorable, is at an end. You can finally face up to who you really are.”

Baying cries rose up as Mal shouted, “That’s bullcrap, Toby. If anyone’s guilty of being dishonorable, it’s you with this here three-ring circus of yours. You’ve got this bunch of morons all whipped up into a lather with your pandering and your speechifying, but you’re the one who’s lying, and they’re gonna realize it sooner or later, and then where will you be? Huh?”

He realized he wasn’t helping his case any, insulting Toby and the other Browncoat veterans, but he was darned if he was going to let them make him their patsy or scapegoat or whatever it was they wanted him to be. He wasn’t going down without a fight, and for the time being at least, his best and only weapons were words.

Sure enough, the crowd went berserk, stomping and hollering. They were out for blood — his blood — and Toby didn’t hesitate to egg them on.

“Listen to him,” he said. “That’s how little he thinks of you. That’s the attitude of a man who’d sell out his brothers and sisters. Get him out of here! I want him out of my sight.”

A barrage of hate crashed down on Mal as the guards formed a huddle around him and herded him back down the tunnel, led by the hatchet-faced woman with the lazy eye. His legs were wobbly. His wrists chafed in their bonds. Everything that didn’t throb ached and everything that didn’t ache throbbed. He felt about a hundred years old.

This time when they reached the fork in the tunnel, they took the other branch, away from the shouting and the fury. Away from Toby Finn, one of his best friends growing up on Shadow, who, by some inexplicable twist of fate, planned to be his executioner.

In the light of the torches, the hatchet-faced woman stopped. She turned towards the wall on the right, yanking open a rusted, wire-mesh door. The hinges squealed. Hatchet Face gestured impatiently at the opening. Mal’s escorts bunched in tight around him like they expected him to make a run for it. Like they hoped he would, so they could beat him down. His lizard brain told him to do just that. Make your gorramn play. See what it gets you. He knew if he walked through that opening, he was never going to come out again. Might as well make a stand here and now, even if it only hastened the inevitable.

As the guards shuffled Mal forward, time seemed to slow. Details of his surroundings became magnified, larger than life. Water trickled down one of the tunnel walls, drop by drop, disappearing into a dark puddle of muck. A moth circled a burning torch, flirting with fiery death. Something made a little screechy noise farther down the tunnel in the darkness. A bat, maybe. Hanging upside down, trying to fall back to sleep.

Mal’s heart pounded to a funereal cadence, the kind where widows in black veils walk lead-footed behind the caisson, the dead soldier’s boots dangling backwards from the stirrups of his horse. Damn, he was in such strange ungodly trouble.

As they reached the doorway in the wall, he slid his glance into the dim hole where they planned to plant him. It must have been a storeroom of some kind. Nothing on the floor, no straw for a bed, nor a blanket to cover himself. Just dirt. And rock. Behind him he could sense the mass of the guards, blocking his way out. Once more his very soul protested, screaming at him to save himself. To do something.

No. It would make more sense to be compliant. Do what they wanted him to. Bide his time. That would give him the leisure to think of a way out of this situation.

So a calmer portion of his mind advocated.

But then adrenaline took over, a surge of fight-or-flight, an impulse whose dictates were impossible to refuse. There was no decision to act. It just happened, of its own accord, like water flowing downhill. Mal spun on his heel, bent low and charged the nearest guard, shoulder-striking the man mid-chest and knocking him off-balance and backward. As hands reached for Mal, he used the space he’d created, lashing out with his right boot. Contact, as he kicked the man between the legs. Without his arms free to counterbalance him, the kick was a little off-center, a little too far back to cause maximum pain, but it was still enough to elicit a squeal and a gasp. Mal spun again, one complete turn, building momentum. The man was on his knees, mouth gaping, so Mal didn’t have to kick high to hit him in the jaw. He felt the impact all the way to his hip joint. It felt good.

Someone in front of him grabbed his shoulders and Mal lunged forward, using his head as a battering ram, driving the crown of it into the other’s midriff. The hands released him. Mal whirled around, then charged the person blocking the doorway, Hatchet Face herself. Before he could reach her, fists from all sides, all angles, rained down on him, slamming into his solar plexus, connecting with his jaw, his kidneys. Mal staggered forward under the onslaught, fell to his knees in the dirt, then toppled forward.

A crushing weight came down on his back, grinding his face deeper into the soft dirt. He couldn’t breathe. He grunted. It was the only noise he could make as the fist-pounding continued. Black washes of pain filled his mouth as the weight suddenly came off and he was dragged backwards by his legs into the storeroom, which was clearly going to serve as a holding cell. Angry shouts played counterpoint to the toecaps battering his sides. Then hoarse laughter as the door clanged shut with the sudden force of a coffin lid. A bolt clanked as it was shot home.

Oh, God, that was dumb, Mal chastised himself. Why’d I go and do that?

The man he had so soundly dropkicked pressed his bruised mouth to the rusted mesh of the metal door. “You’re gonna die,” he said to Mal, his voice dripping with relish just as his split lips dripped with blood. “And it’s gonna be slow. Reeeal slow.”

“And don’t get to thinkin’ anyone’s coming to rescue you, neither,” Hatchet Face crowed. “Apparently you captain a Firefly these days and have a crew. Well, we took you in your own shuttle from Guilder’s and made it look as though you were piloting it, and the reason for that is nobody’ll suspect otherwise, not even your people. They’ll just assume, being the yellow-belly turncoat you are, you lit out on ’em, and they won’t be bothered none to go after you.”

“If you believe that,” Mal said, “then you have sorely underestimated my crew. They ain’t easily fooled. They’re coming for me. I know it in my bones. And woe betide you when they get here, darling, because they’ll be pissed and they will seriously mess up your day.”

“Sure, sure,” said Hatchet Face. “Even if that’s the case, they’re bound to be too late. How long do you think you’ve got? We’re just waiting on a couple more folks to show. Soon as they arrive — and it’ll be any moment now — the trial will begin. And rest assured, it won’t be a long trial. Your life can be measured in hours, Reynolds. Savor what time you have left, because it ain’t much at all.”