by Peter Clines
“So you have been bitten,” said Alice.
Barry pushed himself over and back up into a sitting position. He tensed his abs to hold himself in place and dragged the robe over himself. “Everybody convinced I don’t have the mark of the beast or anything like that?” he asked, bracing his arms on the floor. “Or do I need to flop around like a fish for another ten minutes?”
“We have to be sure,” said Steve. There were two other men with shotguns. They’d relaxed a bit when it became clear Barry couldn’t walk, but they hadn’t lowered their weapons. “I needed to make sure you weren’t faking.”
“Faking what?”
“This.” He waved his hand at Barry sprawled on the floor. “It might be a trick.”
Barry glared up at Steve. The other man looked six feet over him from his current position. “Yeah, I’m tricking you into putting me in a very vulnerable position. Damn, I’m clever.” He shook his head. “What’s next? You want to drown me in the pool and make sure I’m not a witch? Or just see if I weigh as much as a duck?”
Steve let the barrel of his own shotgun drift down to the floor. “When was the last time you had contact with the ex?”
“What ex?”
“The dead girl you brought with you.”
“It’s Corpse Girl,” said Barry. “Like Steamboy, but with more death. I think she copyrighted it, so be careful about using it too much.”
“Answer the question.”
“What are you asking? ‘Contact’ is pretty vague. Are we talking about the Sagan book or the movie with Jodie Foster or First Contact when the Borg travel—”
Steve tapped his boot against Barry’s foot. A little harder than a tap, but not a kick. “When was the last time you touched it?”
Barry raised an eyebrow and looked from his foot up to Steve’s face. “We have to work on your people skills.”
“Answer the question.”
He sighed. “I think we might’ve brushed feet while we were sleeping last night, but it’s hard for me to be sure.” He waved at his legs.
“You slept with it?” spat one of the guards. He had the dark, flaking skin of someone who lived in an ongoing cycle of sunburns and peeling.
Barry twisted around to look at the man. “First off,” he said, “she’s a she, not an it. And yes, all of us slept together in the same life raft.”
“I’d never close my eyes around one of those things,” muttered the other guard. There was a thin gap between each of his teeth, as if they’d been spaced out.
“So, hey,” said Barry, “fascinating as all this narrow-mindedness is to listen to, how about we shake things up with a little quid pro quo, Clarice?”
Steve looked down at him. “What?”
“While we were walking up here, you were talking about the bombs going off. When did that happen?”
The tall man’s jaw tensed up.
“Hey,” said Barry, “I’m flopping on the floor. You can at least answer one or two easy questions, right?”
Steve’s fingers flexed on his shotgun and Barry tensed. He found the switch in the back of his mind, the one that turned him back into Zzzap, and put a little bit of mental pressure against it. The change took less than a second, but it didn’t hurt to be ready.
Then the tall man’s grip shifted. “About four and a half years ago,” he said. “Right after things got bad.”
“What day?”
“We don’t know for sure. We were all out here, at sea. One day the Internet crapped out, and then all the broadcasting stopped. And then…” He tapped his fingers on the shotgun. “We think they dropped the bombs in July or August.”
“August of…2009?” asked Barry.
Steve’s jaw shifted again and he nodded.
“Typical government morons,” said the gap-toothed guard. “Too late to do any good.”
Barry nodded without hearing the man. “So,” he said, “you saw the flash or what?”
Steve shook his head. “Not from out here. We got it all from witnesses. Los Angeles was just a crater. Most of the West Coast was gone. Most of Honolulu, too. The whole island of Oahu.”
“Yeah,” said Barry, “I’ve seen Honolulu, too.”
The sunburned guard looked down his peeling nose at Barry. “How d’you know about Honolulu but not know about everything else? Where’ve you been all this time?”
“I have been,” said Barry, “in Japan.”
The men paused and looked at each other. “Japan’s still there?” Steve asked. “I heard Tokyo got hit, too.”
Barry shook his head. “Nope. Must’ve been a translation problem. They’re fine.”
The man’s eyes opened a little wider. “Really?”
Barry nodded. “All the experience they had dealing with giant monsters, you think they couldn’t deal with a zombie uprising?”
Peel frowned. “Giant monsters aren’t real.”
“A couple of years ago we would’ve said zombies aren’t real,” said Barry. “Let’s not say anything that’ll make us all look stupid later, right?”
Peel nodded awkwardly.
“Remember the super-samurai? Most of them survived and they’ve got a safe zone set up, and, hey, speaking of which, are we pretty much done here? I’d love to get back with my friends.”
“In a couple of minutes,” said Steve. “What about your buddy? Why’s he keep saying he’s the Mighty Dragon?”
“Why do you keep saying he’s not the Mighty Dragon?”
“Because the Dragon died in LA,” said Peel.
“How do you know that? You don’t even know when the bombs went off, but you know he was there?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not questioning me about not being there.”
“You’re not saying you’re the Mighty Dragon.”
“Okay, yeah, but…” Barry stopped, shifted his weight onto one hand, and rubbed his temple. “Hey, is there any chance you’ve got a wheelchair stashed here somewhere? Or just a chair-chair? It’s kind of a pain to keep holding myself up like this.”
“In a minute,” said Steve. “We’ll get you back to your friends, you can all rest for the night, and tomorrow morning we’ll all talk with the boss.”
“Why not tonight?”
“Quarantine,” the tall man said. “Just want to make sure you’re all clean before we let you out and about.”
“Isn’t that what this whole strip search was about?”
“Just a follow-up thing. You can get infected other ways, too.”
Barry looked at him. “It’s Madelyn, isn’t it? You’re just waiting to see if she attacks somebody or something.”
Steve shrugged. “You brought an ex on board. We’ve got to keep everyone safe.”
“She’s not an ex. She’s just a teenage girl. Sort of.”
“She’s dead, right?”
“Well, yeah. But not that way.”
“If she’s dead,” said Steve, “she’s an ex.”
Barry leaned forward and crossed his arms. “I’ve got to be honest,” he said, “I’m sensing some serious trust issues from you guys.”
THE SUN CAME up over the freeway and flooded the armor’s optic systems. Cesar shook his head until the whited-out view readjusted. Color flowed back into the world, and he saw the garden, the fences, and the exes out on the street.
“You okay?” asked Gibbs. The hisses and whirrs of his foot blended in with the sounds of the titan as they walked the fence. It was only Cesar’s second time out in the battlesuit, and they were still checking a few things.
“Sunlight made the lenses flare up,” Cesar said. “Just took a minute to adjust.”
Gibbs frowned. “That shouldn’t be happening.”
“Might just be me, y’know. I get all the input direct.”
Gibbs pulled his clipboard out from under his arm and made a note as they walked.
The community garden had been two big areas on opposite sides of a residential street, each one surrounded by a low chain
-link fence. Those fences had been connected and reinforced with vehicles, like the Mount. Granted, Eden’s wall contained a much higher class of car, overall. And a lot fewer of them.
It was still a bit of a work in progress. Lots of vehicles could be found in the suburban residential area—mostly SUVs and sports cars—but they hadn’t had as much time to gather them and get them into place. Unlike the Mount, the cars weren’t stacked, and in most places it was just a single car parked against the fence. There were still long stretches with nothing but chain-link, posts, and some plywood to block the view.
One such place was the Hot Zone, the twenty-foot-wide walkway between the two gardens. When the people of the Mount first started working on Eden, they’d extended the fence across the road. St. George had found extra material around some nearby houses and driven new posts into the pavement. It was where they’d set up their gates for the trucks, and where the vehicles were parked.
The gates and necessary open space also made it the least reinforced part of the fence line.
Cesar and Gibbs walked past one of the Hot Zone’s simple guard stations. The blueprints showed a squat tower, but for now it was two folding chairs on a stack of wooden pallets, just high enough to see over the car that reinforced that length of fence. A man and woman sat and watched the exes thump against the vehicle. They each gave the armor a nod. “Good to have you out here, Cerberus,” said the man.
Cesar raised an arm and gave them a confident salute. They both smiled before turning back to the undead.
The exoskeleton and the lieutenant walked out of the Hot Zone and continued along the fence line. Cesar looked at some of the exes straining against the fence. There hadn’t been many when they’d arrived a few days earlier, but all the activity in the garden had attracted them. He winked, or thought of winking, and the armor’s targeting system came up with sixty-three targets. One shy of hitting its max. Dozens and dozens of red crosshairs filled his view. He swept them away with another thought.
Instead, he looked at the faces. St. George did that. He tried to remember these were people once, not just teeth-clacking zombies. So Cesar wanted to do the same.
There was a dead woman in a floppy straw hat that was close to falling off its head. A gaunt man in a black suit and tie had withered away to skin and bones. A kid about Cesar’s age was missing its entire right arm at the shoulder. A couple of zombie kids got jostled at hip-height, their faces pressed into the fence. One little boy gnashed his teeth on the chain-link.
One—it might’ve been a flat-chested woman or a slim man—had a chunk missing from its head, including one eye. Cesar could actually see inside its skull. However much of an ex’s brain needed to be destroyed to drop it, this one was just a few points above that.
The blood on all of them was thick and dry, like layers of old paint.
“Huh,” said Gibbs.
“What?”
“They’re following you.” He gestured at the exes as their skulls turned after the battlesuit. “They’re watching you.”
“Yeah, man,” said Cesar. “That’s what they do. You new here?”
The lieutenant snorted. “You’re in the suit. Why are they still going after you?”
“ ’Cause it’s what they do. That’s why Danielle’s so…” He dropped the volume of the speakers. “That’s why she wants to get back in here, bro. So she’ll feel safe when they go after her.”
“Right,” said Gibbs. “Except she’ll be in the armor. Wearing it. Meat in a can.”
“Bro…”
He shrugged it off. “It makes sense they’d go after her. Why are they going after you?”
“What do you mean?”
Gibbs reached up between the struts and put his hand inside the skeletal titan, right where the pilot’s stomach would be. “There’s nothing in the suit right now,” he said.
The battlesuit took a step back. “That’s weird, bro. Don’t reach inside without asking or saying something first.”
“My point is, you don’t have a body like this. There’s no meat for them to go after. So why are they following you? What do they see?”
“I dunno. I thought about it for a while, the first couple times I saw it. I think it’s ’cause the suit’s me when I’m in it.”
“What?”
The battlesuit held out a hand and flexed the fingers. “This is me right now. So they see the suit as alive cause it’s me. It’s, like, living metal or something.”
Gibbs scowled up at the exoskeleton. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It kinda makes sense,” said Cesar. The steel hand flipped over, and one finger bent down to tap the palm. “Y’know, that’s how my hands got all cut up. Was in a car, the wheels got shredded on a spike strip, and then my hands and feet were all shredded when I got out.”
“You’ve got scars on your feet, too?”
“Yup.”
“Still doesn’t make any sense. Exes don’t see any more than we do. They don’t see ‘life.’ ”
“Just the way it is, bro.”
The lieutenant shook his head. They walked across a small lawn spread between the main building and the fence. The toes on Gibbs’s mechanical foot sank into the grass, and his limp grew. Cesar slowed down a bit for him.
The battlesuit registered movement on top of the building. It was one of the Unbreakables in the little watchtower-slash-sniper nest they’d built up there between the solar panels. Cesar zoomed in, and the figure leaped from thirty feet away to five. Sergeant Johnson could see almost two-thirds of the fence line from there. His elbow brushed the basketball-sized warning bell they’d hung up there as his binoculars scanned back and forth. The big lenses held on the exoskeleton for a moment, then continued on to check the people working in the gardens.
Cesar and Gibbs headed for a concrete path that cut through the lawn and down through more garden plots. It led to the parking lot, and on the far side of the parking lot was the service road that looped around the northern fence, the one along the freeway. And that would bring them back to the Hot Zone.
Cesar sighed. It came out as a buzz of radio static. The lieutenant glanced at him. “Something wrong?”
“Bro,” said the titan, “this whole patrol thing is boring as hell.”
“Welcome to the military,” Gibbs said.
“I’m not in the military, man. I’m a superhero.”
Gibbs snorted.
Something moved in one of the garden plots, and the suit systems highlighted it. Cesar used the digital zoom again. It was a woman with a good butt and nice hips, working alone in one of the plots, crouched over to pull weeds. She looked a bit older, but still in good shape. He’d been feeling kind of sophisticated lately, checking out some of the older ladies in their thirties and forties, and congratulated himself on being so mature just as the figure shifted and he saw the claw-hand and realized he was checking out Christian Smith. He shuddered, and the battlesuit reacted with a tremble that made some of the servos whine.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gibbs.
“Umm, nothing.” He unzoomed his view. The armor took a few more steps.
“Jesus, kid,” said the lieutenant, limping alongside him. “You don’t even have a face right now and you’d suck at poker.”
“Hey, you know what,” Cesar said. “I think I’m good now. You want to head back to the workshop and I’ll see you once morning patrol’s done?”
Gibbs shook his head. “I was going to walk with you at least to the other side of the parking lot.” He paused in his step to lift the mechanical foot. “I need all the exercise I can get. This thing lets me walk, but I can’t run anymore since I lost…”
His voice trailed off as his eyes found Smith. His free hand squeezed into a fist. Then he let it go and flexed his fingers.
Cesar looked down at him. “You cool, man?”
“Yeah.” The lieutenant stepped forward. “Yeah, I’m fine.” His metal toes came down on the concrete path with the sound of a steel rak
e.
Smith leaped up and slashed the air with something. She held the small shovel like a knife in her good hand. She glared at Gibbs, then up at the battlesuit.
A purple-red bruise covered one side of her face. Cesar had seen bruises like that on his aunt growing up. When he’d joined the Seventeens, he’d seen them on one or two girls who hung out with some of the wilder, more violent gangbangers. He’d stood up to one of the guys about it once. And gotten smacked down.
That was back before he was a superhero, though.
He took a step toward Smith. The battlesuit’s broad toes sank into the dark soil. Gibbs muttered something about cleaning.
The Asian woman took a step back. She glanced to either side, checking for paths away from the titan. A collection of syllables formed and died on her lips.
Cesar cleared his throat, and a raspy squawk came out of the speakers. Smith flinched back. “Are you okay, ma’am?” the battlesuit asked. “Or sir?”
Smith looked up at Cesar and rattled off another string of silent words.
“Ummmmm…I didn’t catch any of that. Maybe yes or no?”
The Asian woman scowled, shook her head, and gave him the finger with her mangled hand.
“Do you want to tell me who hit you?”
She turned back to her weeding. Her shoulders went up as she took in a breath. Then the trowel went back into the ground and she tried to work out all the roots of a weed the size of a small bush.
“I want to help,” said Cesar. “People shouldn’t be beating you up.”
“Just let it go,” murmured Gibbs.
The exoskeleton turned, and the lenses focused on him.
The lieutenant shrugged. “She doesn’t want to make a thing out of it. And it’s not like she doesn’t deserve it.”
“Hey,” said Cesar, “nobody deserves to get beat like that.”
Gibbs smirked. “Weren’t you in a gang? Did you just hug people back then?” He walked away, his metal toes rasping on the concrete.
Smith looked over her shoulder at the lieutenant for a minute. Her eyes slid down to look at the steampunk foot as he walked past. Her shoulders slumped.