Ex-Purgatory

by Peter Clines

  St. George looked up and down the street. “They’re probably just out of sight,” he said. “Calm down, we’ll find them.”

  “I am always calm.”

  “Is that why you jumped out the window?”

  “When the shift happened, the hotel suite was filled with ex-humans. The balcony was the most efficient and safest way of exiting the building.”

  He looked at her. “What shift?”

  She glanced at him. “You did not experience a shift two minutes ago?”

  St. George shook his head. “It’s been pretty calm down here. No problems at all.”

  Her face didn’t change, but he recognized the annoyance. “You are certain?”

  “Yeah, of course I am. Do you think the world shifted over to post-apocalypse mode and I didn’t notice?”

  She glared at him, but he recognized the uncertainty in it.

  Movement on the sidewalk caught his eye. Freedom and Danielle, a block north. The huge officer still had Madelyn on his back, and now someone cradled in his right arm as well. “There they are,” he said. He squinted at the figure Freedom was carrying. “And they’ve got Barry.”

  Stealth opened her mouth, then pressed her lips shut again.

  They met up on the sidewalk. Barry smiled. “George, I presume.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “You, too.” He looked over at Stealth. “Both of you.”

  “Did you just jump out the window?” asked Madelyn. “Was that you?”

  “It was.”

  “That was so cool!”

  “Are you well?” Stealth asked Barry.

  “A little humiliated that I’m being carried around like a kitten, but fine other than that.” He glanced at Danielle. “Just being around most of you is unlocking a lot of stuff in my head.”

  “Can you change?” asked St. George. “Having Zzzap with us would be a huge advantage right now.”

  Barry’s face dropped. “No,” he said. “I can’t find the switch. I’ve been looking for it for a couple of minutes now.”

  “Crap.”

  Barry looked at George, then up at Freedom and Madelyn. “It’s not just me?” he asked. “None of you have your powers?”

  “Nothing past the basics,” Freedom said.

  “Only those which function on an unconscious level,” corrected Stealth. “Neither you nor St. George needs to consciously use your enhanced strength or endurance. St. George does not need to will himself to be invulnerable. Only those abilities which require conscious activation have been repressed. Barry’s transformation into Zzzap. St. George’s flight and fire breath.”

  “Makes sense, kind of,” said Danielle.

  St. George cleared his throat. “I think we can still make it to the Mount before dark if we don’t get slowed down.”

  “You mean, if the world doesn’t go all kablooey on us again?” Barry said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I still think we should just hop on a bus,” said Danielle. “Having Cesar drive us cut an hour off our walking time.”

  “And got me thrown through a windshield,” said St. George. “What if it’d been you?”

  Stealth turned and headed back up the street.

  “Great,” muttered Danielle.

  THE STREETLIGHT CHANGED, the walk signal appeared, and they crossed Fairfax. A half-dozen other people shared the crosswalk with them. A few of them glanced at the giant Army officer carrying two people, one of them a pale-skinned girl, but he didn’t hold their attention for long.

  “This is just weird,” said Barry. He looked up at a sign for CBS studios. “I mean, walking around LA with people everywhere.”

  “You’re not doing the walking,” said Danielle.

  “Don’t nitpick,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I do.” The light changed and traffic surged into life around them. “You think Cesar’s back?”

  “Maybe,” said St. George. He looked at the cars. “Don’t know how he’ll find us if he is.”

  “We’re heading for the Mount,” said Madelyn. “He’s smart. He’ll find us.”

  St. George glanced at Barry cradled in Freedom’s arm, then up at the officer. “Want me to carry him for a while?”

  “Hey,” said Barry. “Him is right here in front of you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’ve got skinny arms. It’d be uncomfortable as hell.”

  Madelyn and Danielle both chuckled.

  Freedom shook his head. “It’s better to just have one of us dealing with the wounded, sir.”

  “We’re not wounded,” said Madelyn.

  The huge officer glanced up at her. “The principle’s the same,” he said. “Wounding one man takes out two, because someone else has to help the wounded man. If we’re each helping one of you, we’re both hampered as fighters.” He looked at St. George. “It’s better for me to help both and leave you free to fight if we need to.”

  “Okay.”

  “Besides, you’re looking pretty beat, sir.”

  “I’ve been up for about thirty hours,” said St. George. “I’m not even sure when I ate last.”

  Danielle glanced at a bagel shop and Subway sitting next to each other across the street. “We could grab some food. Eat on the go.”

  “There is still a chance this is the real world which we are viewing through altered perceptions,” said Stealth. She didn’t look back when she spoke.

  “So?”

  “There is no way to know what we might be eating.”

  Madelyn’s face wrinkled up. “Oh, gross.”

  “There is also the chance we will be eating nothing at all. In which case we would gain no benefit from stopping.”

  “Okay, I get it,” said Danielle. She shoved her hands in her pockets. “No food.”

  “Please explain again how you found Barry.”

  The redhead looked up from the sidewalk. “Sorry, what?”

  Stealth turned around, but continued to walk backward in firm, even strides. It struck St. George that she somehow made walking backward in an oversized fleece jacket look very no-nonsense. “Explain again how you found him. In detail.”

  “A shift happened while you were in the hotel,” said Freedom. “We heard a yell, investigated, and found Mr. Burke in a cab with an ex.”

  “He didn’t yell,” smirked Danielle. “He screamed like a little girl.”

  “Hey,” snapped Madelyn.

  “No offense,” Danielle said.

  “You’re not that little,” said Freedom.

  Stealth raised a finger. “What condition was the cab in?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the huge officer.

  “Was it damaged in any way? Exterior or interior?”

  Freedom looked at Danielle. She shrugged. “It looked like it might’ve been sideswiped,” he said. “The driver’s side was pretty banged up. The tires were flat, but I think that was just from dry rot.”

  “Nothing else?”

  He shook his head.

  Stealth closed her eyes for a moment, as if she’d been struck with sudden pain. She looked at Barry. “Explain from your point of view,” she told him. “Use as much detail as you can.”

  He looked at St. George. The hero shrugged.

  “I got a cab from the airport, like you said,” Barry explained. “I asked the driver how far out of the way Universal Studios was. He said not far—which turned out to be a big lie—and I asked if we could drive past it. We came down the freeway and he was pointing all sorts of stuff out to me. Then he got off in Hollywood and we were going along the streets and all of a sudden there was this … I don’t know. It was like the world switched channels.”

  Stealth glanced at St. George. “For how long?”

  “Half an hour,” he said. “Maybe forty-five minutes. I wasn’t checking my watch for any of it.”

  “That’s not right,” said Freedom. “It was ten minutes at the most.”

  Barry shook his head
. “Half an hour at least.”

  “In high-stress situations, it’s not unusual for time to seem to slow down,” the captain explained. “It may have felt like half an hour, but—”

  “Half an hour at least,” repeated Barry. “I don’t know what you guys saw, but I know what I saw.”

  Stealth focused on St. George. “You still insist there was no shift at all?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Inside the hotel,” she said, “the shift was at least ninety seconds. I am not sure it continued after I left the room.”

  “After you dove out the window, you mean,” said St. George.

  “Yes.”

  “That was so cool,” Madelyn said.

  Stealth came to a stop as the light changed to red. A row of cars turned in and drove through the crosswalk behind her toward a towering parking structure. Madelyn looked back and forth from Stealth, still facing backward, and the stoplight. “How did you—”

  “On the opposite corner the crosswalk signal has a beeper for sightless pedestrians. The sound is distinct, even beneath the traffic noises.”

  “But you couldn’t know which way the light was changing off the sound.”

  “She can’t,” said St. George, “but she can see the flow of traffic on this—”

  The road flickered and the cars slammed to a halt as a wave of dust and decay washed across the street. Cars lost tires and windshields. Buildings lost windows and signs and one even lost a wall. Half the pedestrians vanished and the city went silent.

  St. George opened his mouth to yell and took two steps forward, but Stealth was already whirling. The ex behind her caught a strike in the throat and one in each knee. She ducked, grabbed its calves, and flipped the dead man over backward. It struck the pavement head-first and went still. She lashed up with the heel of her hand and caught the second ex under the jaw, spraying its teeth into the air. They clicked and pattered on the pavement while she drove three more hammer blows into the sides of the creature’s skull, each one cracking bone. The ex wobbled and then slumped to the ground.

  A dead woman with stringy hair grabbed Danielle by the arm. Its fingers had been worn down to bony tips. She shrieked and yanked her arm away, but its claws caught at her sleeve.

  Freedom shifted Barry in his arms and slammed his boot into the ex’s side. The kick crushed the dead woman’s pelvis and rib cage. It flew away from Danielle to crash against a rust-spotted truck. The ex slumped to the pavement and flailed, trying to move limbs that had nothing left to support them.

  St. George took two steps and shoved a muscle-bound ex in workout clothes. The dead man flew across six lanes of street and slammed through the side of a bus stop. It tried to get up, but its legs were hooked up and over the steel framework. Too much thought was needed for it to free itself.

  “Well,” said Barry, “that all looked pretty easy.”

  “We’ve had a lot of practice,” said St. George.

  “It was very cool,” said Madelyn. She smiled at him from Freedom’s shoulders.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh frak,” said Barry.

  St. George turned. Danielle shook as if she was cold. There was a gash in her sleeve. The bony fingers had torn through the camouflaged material as it was hurled away.

  “Oh no,” she muttered. She thrashed her way out of the coat. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

  “There’s no blood,” said St. George. “I don’t see any blood.”

  The Army jacket hit the ground and Danielle held her arm up. Her shirtsleeve was already rolled up, and they could all see the white scrape on her arm. There were a few small curls of loose skin around it. She poked at it and they all waited.

  The scrape turned pink. At a few places it was almost red. But it didn’t bleed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. Her eyes were wet. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Barry grabbed her hand. “You’re okay,” he said. “That’s all that matters. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” said Freedom. “I didn’t mean for it—”

  “This is getting ridiculous,” said Danielle. She squeezed Barry’s hand. “How are we supposed to do this? We’re not even halfway to the Mount.”

  “We’ve got to,” he said. “They’re all counting on us back there.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The armor’s back there,” said St. George. “The Cerberus suit’s waiting for you.”

  She bit her lip. Then she swiped the jacket off the ground and fought her way back into it.

  Behind them, Stealth spun on her heel and snapped an ex’s neck with a high kick. “Let us be on our way, then,” she said.

  Danielle muttered something under her breath and started walking. St. George fell in next to her. Freedom helped Madelyn adjust herself on his back, switched Barry to his other arm, and brought up the rear.

  The heroes walked for another hour and put down twenty-three exes. They’d passed Highland and were heading into a more residential area when the world glitched, giving them a quick glimpse of a bustling Los Angeles at rush hour. Then it reverted back to the devastated city they knew. Two-thirds of the cars on the road vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. The rest became wrecks with cracked windows and flat tires. The one closest to them, a BMW, had a dead woman with tangled brown hair in the passenger seat. The ex pawed at the glass between them. It was wearing a faded yellow sundress that had popped too many buttons. Bright red sunglasses were perched above the ex’s forehead.

  Danielle stared at the creature. “This is going to sound weird,” she said, “but I think I remember her.”

  The zombie smacked its head against the side window. Danielle hopped back and her arms pulled in close. She forced them back out.

  Madelyn pulled herself a little higher on Freedom’s back. “Was she a friend of yours?”

  Danielle shook her head. “I mean, I remember this ex. Trapped in the car with the sundress. She’s wearing combat boots too, right?”

  St. George stepped up and peered through the window. “Yeah.”

  “It was a run, a month or two before we met you guys,” she said to Freedom. “It might’ve been one of the times we were gathering cars for the Big Wall. I remember a couple of the scavengers making guesses about the sundress and boots combo. Ilya, Al, maybe … Billy? Did we have a Billy? I can kind of picture someone with short blond hair …”

  “Billie Carter,” said Freedom. “Not a he, she.”

  “Ahhh.”

  Stealth looked up at the sky. “We are within half a mile of the Mount and we have seventy-five minutes of daylight left.” She gestured them down the road.

  “Doesn’t sound bad,” said Barry. “I mean, as long as we don’t think about the few thousand exes outside the Big Wall any given day.”

  Danielle’s back went stiff so fast she staggered. She shot an angry look at Barry.

  “Sorry,” he said, “just thought I’d voice it because I haven’t heard anyone else bring it up.”

  Stealth lashed out with her foot and sent an ex staggering back. It was a dead man with silver hair in a deep red UMass sweatshirt. As it wobbled, she stepped forward, brought her palm up, and caught it under its jaw. The dead man’s head tilted back and it tipped over. The back of its skull hit the curb with the sound of an egg cracking.

  She glanced back at them. “We shall get as close as possible and signal the Wall guards. There are several apartment buildings and other structures near that corner of the Big Wall. We shall take shelter there until a vehicle can be sent out to retrieve us.”

  “That still doesn’t really answer the question about the thousands of exes,” Danielle said.

  “An actual question was not asked,” said Stealth.

  They walked on for a few more feet. “Okay, fine,” Danielle said. “How are we going to deal with all the exes outside the Wall? They’ll tear us apart before we can get into a building.”

  An ex stumbled ou
t from between two cars and reached for her. St. George lunged forward, grabbed it by the neck, and heaved it up and over his head. The dead thing sailed through the air and crashed down on the street behind them, a few feet from the BMW imprisoning the sundress ex.

  “Please note,” said Stealth, “the ex went after you, Danielle.”

  “Yeah,” she snapped, “I noticed.” She clenched her fists again and again.

  “It went after you,” Stealth said, “even though Barry and Captain Freedom were closer targets.”

  Their eyes all drifted between Freedom, Barry in his arms, Danielle, and the gap between the two cars where the ex had been lurking. They looked back at the broken ex in the street. They looked at each other again.

  And then they all looked up at Madelyn, still hanging on the huge officer’s shoulders.

  “The ex in the car also did not react to Freedom when he moved past it. It remained focused on Danielle and St. George. The sensory filter that renders Madelyn near invisible to ex-humans has been active for some time now, most likely since her true appearance began to register in our conscious minds again.”

  “Yay, me,” said the Corpse Girl, smiling.

  Stealth turned and continued east. “Her abilities extend to those she has contact with, and it would seem Barry’s proximity keeps him included as well. If she can include Danielle as well, that makes the four of you free to reach a safe position near the Wall while St. George and I hold off the exes.”

  “And if her powers can’t cover us all?”

  “Then you will have to move quickly.”

  Danielle sighed and muttered something. Stealth ignored it.

  Another two intersections went by. They passed Las Palmas. A handful of exes came after them. Stealth broke several necks. Freedom backhanded one through a wooden fence with his free hand. St. George threw a few of the zombies at the trios and quartets following behind them. They sprawled in the street and cut down on pursuers. He knew it wouldn’t be good to have a few dozen exes stumbling up behind them when they reached the dense numbers around the Big Wall.

  Freedom paused for a moment. “Pardon me, sir,” he said to Barry. He shifted the smaller man into his other hand. “I just need to shake that arm out for a bit.”