by Peter Clines
Danielle lifted her head. She shoved her hands down and grabbed her pant legs to help hide the tremors in her arms. Even through four layers of clothes, people would be able to see it.
Another breath.
Up ahead was a clean spot. No leaves or dirt on the narrow strip of pavement. The pile of bodies had been here, the one Les…Lester had shown off the other day. The exes that had been killed by the Gardener. Cesar had mentioned something about all the bodies being moved. Part of the general cleanup of the garden. Lester had most of the people harvesting all the existing food, but some just weeded and cleaned out all the crap.
She shuffled past the clean spot. Up ahead stood an old storage shack. Past that, an open space, a wide spot in the utility road that marked the corner of the garden. She’d covered one short side of the garden. Maybe a sixth of the distance in just ten minutes.
The click-click-click of teeth bounced off the wooden fence and the edge of the shack. Once Danielle passed the small structure, she’d see the northern fence. The one with the ditch full of exes that had paralyzed her during Lester’s tour.
But they’ll be farther away, she told herself. Much farther, and I know they’re there. No one’s springing them on me.
Another minute of hesitant steps got her to the shack. Then she moved her foot forward, shifted her weight, and an ex came into view, pressed up against the fence. The dead woman wore some kind of police uniform, but it was tan instead of dark blue. The light uniform contrasted the huge spill of dried, black blood that covered the ex’s shoulder and spilled onto its chest.
Her next step revealed a dead man and something so withered Danielle wasn’t sure what it had been when it was alive. The chattering grew in the air around her. A dead woman with a shredded shirt pawed at the chain-link fence. So did a tall man with dark skin. A small ex sprawled against the fence, pushed flat by the bodies behind it.
Every inch of movement showed her more of the dead. She could see ten, then twenty, then at least thirty. Each step was smaller than the last, but there were so many against the fence, all tumbled down from the freeway and attracted to the sounds of living people. A tall cluster of cactus, just a dozen feet ahead, and a thick patch of cornstalks were the only things blocking her view, and once she went past them she’d see all of the exes. The whole north side of the garden.
Danielle’s shirt tightened on her. Her shirt, her bra, her hoodie…all so tight she could barely breathe. The ACU jacket was a weight on her chest, straining her lungs and her heart and crushing her arm and—Christ, she thought, I’m having a heart attack.
No. No, I’m not. It’s just another damned panic attack. That’s all. There’s nothing wrong.
She forced her eyes open and her arms away from her body. Air flooded into her lungs. Sweat coated her body and soaked her clothes.
Her eyes went to the fence line. The solid fence line. Even more 55-gallon drums had been added along the length, and a few planks of wood. It wasn’t much, but it was still better than just the chain-link.
I should’ve been helping with this, she thought. I’m a goddamned engineer and I’m sitting inside while they’ve been trying to build a better barricade.
And the shack was behind her.
None of the zombies noticed her. Their chalk eyes aimed past the cactus and corn at something she couldn’t see. They bit at the air and strained against the fence.
The panic creeped back up her body. It crawled over her stomach and across her back and set prickly fingers on her chest and shoulders. The sweat made her clothes clingy and tight.
An image slid through her brain. Some of the Unbreakables—maybe Taylor and Hancock, of course it would be them—finding her curled up on the utility road. Shaking in a little fetal ball. No one would be able to depend on her again after that. No way they’d let her near the battlesuit.
She had to go back to the main building. But if she went back, she’d never get past this. But if she went any closer to the exes, she’d break down and never get in the suit again. But if she…
“No,” she said. She clenched her jaw. For a moment, her anger contributed to the panic loop. Then it punched through. Danielle took eight strong steps, right up alongside the cactus, before her breath caught again.
So many exes. A hundred along the back fence, easy. Maybe two. Past the chain-link was nothing but dull skin and pale eyes and so many teeth, shaking the air with the ongoing barrage of clicking.
Somebody else watched the exes, too. A tanned, bald man with work gloves and no shirt. He stood a few feet from one of the fence poles, between two of the big barrels. The dead tried to push fingers and lips and teeth through to reach him. One tall woman with no scalp had an arm over the fence and across the barbed wire. The dead thing swung its hand back and forth, grasping for the man even as it ripped its own limb apart on the steel barbs.
The chain-link swelled and squeaked. For every one of the zombies that managed to push hard, another stumbled and dropped back down into the ditch between the fence and the freeway. A constant cycle of exes, never getting enough traction to actually knock the fence down.
The man reached out and rocked one of the barrels just as she registered the tattoos across his arms and shoulders. He tugged on the drum, and it tipped up into his hands before he let it drop.
“Hey!”
Her shout echoed across the garden. The man spun around and took a few steps away, a movement too smooth to be the first time he’d done it. Almost a dozen undead skulls swung in her direction, but her anger and amazement at the man—at Javi—let her ignore them.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled at him. She took a few more adrenaline fueled steps before the exes began to shut her down. They were so close. Some of them turned their focus on her.
Javi’s brows narrowed. “What’s it to you?”
“Are you messing with the fence?”
“No.”
“What the hell were you doing?”
“Nothin’,” he snapped back. “I was just checking it out.”
She looked at the 55-gallon drum. As far as she could tell from fifteen feet away, he hadn’t moved it. It had dropped right back down in the same position.
Don’t look at the exes, she told herself as the swinging hand brushed through the top of her field of vision. Just don’t look at them. Stay angry at him.
“This is the only thing keeping us alive,” she said. “If they get through, pretty much everyone in here is going to die.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And we both know who will and who won’t, right?”
Her anger tripped over its own feet. “What?”
Javi kicked the barrel. The echo rattled inside of it and blended into the chatter of teeth. “This is all fucking crap,” he said. “Empty barrels. Old wood. Tryin’ to dress it up and make it look like you people give a flying fuck about any of us. This goes down, you’ll be safe inside and all of us will be out workin’ massa’s fields.”
“What are you…? Are you still thinking that? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Nothin’s wrong,” he said. “I’m just not as dumb as all the rest of these sheeple. I know where things stand.”
“I’m not sure you know where you’re standing now,” snapped Danielle. She needed her anger back. Needed it strong. Her right knee trembled inside her pant leg.
Where were the patrols? Supposedly guards and super-soldiers did regular laps around the garden. Why was she dealing with this idiot?
“You’re supposed to be some awesome robot-mechanic,” he said. “Funny they don’t got you helping to make the fence safer. Funny you aren’t askin’ to do it.”
Her anger stumbled again. The tremor had reached her hips. “I wanted to,” she said. She pressed her hands against her sides and set her jaw. “I’ve just been busy with Cerberus.”
Javi shook his head and dismissed her with a wave. He turned and headed back toward the garden plots. “When it all comes down,” he said over his shoulde
r, “I’m gonna fight. Don’t think I won’t.”
Danielle waited until there was almost thirty feet between them. Then she spun and lurched back up the utility road. She couldn’t run, but her frantic steps carried her away from the exes, past the cactus, past the shed. The sound of teeth faded to its usual dull clatter. Her breath whooped in and out. The sweat stained through her hoodie and made her ACU jacket damp.
She wanted to scream.
“GAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH…”
Madelyn wasn’t sure why she was screaming. She didn’t remember having a bad dream. She hadn’t had a bad dream in years.
She hadn’t had any dreams in years.
At least it hadn’t been a loud scream. Just one of the muffled ones, where you stop yourself as soon as it starts. Not quite as embarrassing.
The room was dark and big. Pitch dark if she couldn’t see anything. Echoes and acoustics told her the size. A gymnasium, maybe?
Where was she?
She’d woken up in her room yesterday…no. Wait. Yesterday she was on a boat? An inner tube? An orange inner tube?
A raft.
She’d been on a life raft with Mom and they were going to see Dad. No, dammit. St. George. She’d been with St. George and…and…and…St. George and Barry! Zzzap!
She needed her journals. Where were they?
Where was she?
Madelyn sat up. Well, tried to. Her head and shoulders went up about three inches and then flopped back down. The move made her dizzy. Her arms felt funny, like they were sitting on her shoulders the wrong way.
She reached up to touch her forehead and poked herself in the cheek. Her arms weren’t where they were supposed to be. Or her head wasn’t.
She took a breath to calm herself and realized she couldn’t breathe. Not that she needed the air, it was just a habit she still had. But she couldn’t get her lungs to fill up.
She tried to take another calming breath, then mocked herself for being stupid. The mocking was good. She could still embarrass herself out of panicking.
Her hands came up again. Her neck was sore. She found two weird lumps on the side of her throat. The word vertebrae floated up from the random stew of memory fragments at the bottom of her consciousness.
Okay. Her neck was broken. That was new. She hadn’t broken a bone since coming back from the dead. Not that she could remember, anyway.
But her body always repaired itself. Cuts, burns, even her hair grew back. The main doctor at the Mount, Connolly, said it wasn’t “healing,” but she never wanted to explain the difference. Madelyn wondered if the woman had explained it a dozen times and just gotten frustrated.
If her body was repairing itself now, it would probably go faster with all the parts in the right place.
It took her a few minutes to get her hands in position. One on her jaw, one on the back of her head. She decided to count to five. Then she changed her mind and decided to count to three. And then, before she could lose her nerve, she just twisted her skull hard to the right.
There were two loud pops and a sharp pain—sharper than she’d felt in ages. Her spine thumped together, and her head slipped down an inch or so. Enough to make her vision shift. Another random memory. Someone lifting a stack of red poker chips an inch or so off the table and dropping them one after another. Click-click-click-click. Her head and neck did that.
Madelyn flexed her head left and right. No soreness. No stiffness. She could still move her fingers and arms. Couldn’t feel her toes, though.
The click-click-click of poker chips was still echoing in her mind. And just as she realized it wasn’t in her mind, she registered the sounds that had let her judge the size of the room. She mentally kicked herself over the rookie mistake. What kind of superhero woke up surrounded by exes—even in a dark room—and didn’t notice?
She tried to sit up again and flopped back down. Her core muscles were weak. Probably why she was having trouble getting air in her lungs, too. She wiggled her elbows around and levered herself up onto her arms.
Her eyes strained against the blackness, but there was nothing. Not even hints of movement. Just the echoing sound of teeth on teeth. There had to be at least a hundred of them, maybe more, but none were close enough to stand out from the echoes.
She reached down and felt something rubbery brush her fingertips. She traced the edge of it back and forth. Her wet suit had been ripped almost clean in half. The frayed edge had curled up and was showing off her abs to…well, anyone who could see in the dark. She shifted her weight onto one arm, then reached out to push the flap of wet suit down flat.
It didn’t hit her stomach. The flap went down lower and lower. It hit the lumpy surface she was laying on.
She felt around the ragged edge of rubbery material. Her fingers touched one of her floating ribs, then felt the loose flesh a few inches lower down. She curled her hand around under the arc of skin and found…nothing. Something dripped on the inside of her knuckle, and she realized her hand was inside her own rib cage. And there was nothing in there with it.
She wheezed out a silent cry. No wonder she was having trouble breathing.
“Okay,” she mouthed after she calmed down, “this is different.”
She racked her brain and tried to remember what had happened to her.
Back when she’d died, when the exes had killed her and her mom, they’d torn her apart. John—Captain Freedom—he’d tried to skirt around it, but one of the other Unbreakables had told her the whole story. She’d been in a dozen pieces, at least, and after the exes were done all those pieces hadn’t added up to one teenaged girl.
But she’d healed from it. Whatever treatment or chemical or miracle cure her dad had given her, it had been enough to put her back together. To let all those pieces grow back together.
All she needed to do was find the other pieces.
She swallowed and reached as far past her ribs as she could. There was no sign of her…of the rest of her. She stretched her fingertips and found scraps that were too dry or too soft, but nothing that was her. And she felt confident she’d know her own legs if she felt them.
Her head wobbled. She had a quick mental image of her spine coming apart and her head falling off, then recognized it as the usual twinge of dizziness before she fell asleep. Not surprising. She hadn’t had much food, and being torn in half probably burned up a lot of calo—
“Dammit!” she mouthed. She didn’t have her journals. She didn’t have anything to write with, or any time to write even if she did. She was going to have to go through all this again when she—
Madelyn woke up screaming. Or she would’ve if there’d been any air in her lungs. She wasn’t sure why she was screaming. She didn’t remember having a bad dream. It had been years since she’d had any dreams.
She blinked twice, an old habit from being alive, and looked around.
The only lights were high above. It looked like sunlight seeping in through cracks. More than enough for her to see by.
There were a lot of exes. At least fifty she could see from her low angle, but probably more. Most of them were just swaying back and forth—that weird lack of activity they fell into when they hadn’t seen anything move in a while. Maybe a third of them were staggering around. The chamber was big enough that the closest ones were a couple of yards away. The sound of teeth echoed off the metal walls.
Solid metal walls. Big sheets of metal. Definitely a chamber of some kind, not a room. She couldn’t remember seeing anything like that anywhere in the Mount.
Where the hell was she?
How had she ended up here? She’d woken up in her room yesterday…no. Yesterday she was on a small boat? An orange inner tube? A life raft. She’d been on a life raft with Mom and they were going to…no, dammit. She’d been with St. George and…and…and Barry! St. George and Zzzap.
Where were her journals?
Madelyn tried to sit up, got her head a few inches off the ground, and dropped right back down. Her abdominal muscles felt
super-weak. She shifted from side to side and walked herself up onto her elbows.
She was on top of a pile of bodies. Almost on top. It looked like she’d landed hard and slid off to the side. A few streaks and stains decorated the nearby wall all the way up to where a few bright shafts of sunlight shone through cracks.
Many of the corpses were withered skeletons. A few still had meat on them. One or two moved their jaws back and forth. They didn’t even have enough strength to click their teeth together. A lot of them seemed to be wearing black coveralls, or maybe they were dark blue. A few of them had name tags and patches, but the light wasn’t good enough to read them, even for her. A few yards away, a little lower down the pile from her, she saw a pair of legs. A long coil of intestines spooled out of the legs and twisted back and forth across the pile. It was the bottom half of a small person, still pretty fresh. Whoever it was couldn’t’ve been much bigger than her. In fact, they’d been wearing boots and cargo shorts like hers, and the black tights might be part of a wet suit, but it was hard to tell from way over…
Madelyn screamed, but there wasn’t any air in her lungs, so it just ended up being a wide mouth and some frantic arm movements. She looked down at her body. Someone had ripped her wet suit, and one stretched-out, frayed flap had curled up and blocked her view of her legs. She shifted her weight onto one arm, then reached out to push the flap down. It didn’t hit her stomach.
She looked over at the legs, at least ten feet away. Her eyes traced the line of intestines, but the tangle confused her. She tried to take a breath to calm herself and wondered if her lungs were still inside her ribs. Were they somewhere else in the pile?
What the hell had happened to her?
Going off the stains on the wall, it looked like someone had tossed her—or parts of her—down onto the pile. It looked like a lot of bodies got tossed down here. If they didn’t break anything in the fall, some of them got back up. She was lucky she hadn’t broken her neck. Or her skull.