by Peter Clines
Hell, everywhere was the Hot Zone now.
Gibbs turned back and realized the soldiers had moved on without him. A good twenty feet separated him from the other soldiers, and that space was already filling with exes. The undead didn’t slow down at all. Some of the exes staggered right for him, lurching forward on stiff legs.
At the front of the pack towered a huge, top-heavy ex with shaggy hair and filthy overalls. It was slick with the fluids of decay. A chain dragged from its right hand, and Gibbs realized there was a steel animal trap clamped on the dead man’s wrist. There was some gore on the trap, but not enough to be a fatal wound.
His mind spun, trying to figure out how a redneck-looking zombie had gotten its hand stuck in an animal trap and then ended up in the middle of a higher-end Los Angeles neighborhood. Some exes had wandered a lot in the years since the dead first rose, but it still seemed odd.
The dead man took a few lumbering steps forward on tree-trunk legs, and Gibbs dismissed the thoughts. The redneck zombie was twenty feet away from him. He put his rifle to his shoulder and lined up the sights on the big ex’s broad forehead. It lurched to the side as he squeezed the trigger. The shot tore off the redneck’s ear and some hair. The dead man didn’t notice. Didn’t even break stride. Fifteen feet and closing.
He fired again. The big ex’s chalky eye vanished. Another damned lucky shot. He was using them all up today.
The zombie twisted around as it fell, and the animal trap clanged against the pavement.
Gibbs lined up again and blew the head off a gray-skinned woman whose body had withered down to skin and bones. Another shot put down an older man with a black tie and a crooked pair of glasses. He lined up on a little Asian girl with gory lips and a bloodstained school outfit and watched the dead thing’s face vanish in a burst of dark colors.
An ex tripped over the redneck’s body, kicking the animal trap as it stumbled. It hit the ground a few feet from Gibbs, but its outstretched arms and wrists took a lot of the impact. It crawled forward on broken bones, its jaw gnashing up and down on jagged teeth.
Too close. They were too damned close.
Another barrage of gunfire came from the Unbreakables. A quick glimpse showed they were dealing with fifty or sixty of their own problems. The battlesuit stood in a small horde of exes closer to the fallen fence. It smashed at them with its arms, but the pose of the head told Gibbs that Cesar was listening to something.
He was on his own.
Metal scraped on pavement. The animal trap shifted and slid on the ground. The big ex pushed itself up onto its hands and knees. Its stringy hair hung over its face like the ghost girl from that Japanese movie about the well. The dead man crawled forward and staggered back up onto its tree-trunk legs.
Gibbs had heard of things like this. Exes that took head shots and didn’t go down. Just like how some people survived a bullet going into their brain, every now and then an ex did, too.
On his own with a handful of civilians and an unkillable redneck zombie.
He stepped back past the greens. “We have to go,” he told them.
Desi took a step back, her eyes flitting from the rifle Gibbs held to the exes. “Go where?”
“That way,” he said, pointing back. “Away from them.”
The click-click-click of teeth was even closer. They could all feel the sound in the air. It drowned out the gunfire from the Unbreakables.
Gibbs herded them back. They moved with him. “We need to move now. We need distance.”
The older man with the tattoos looked all around. “But we—”
“Now. Run.”
Two of them took off with no further prodding. Desi, Smith, and the tattooed man stood there with him. Gibbs looked over his shoulder. The exes were stumbling a bit on the softer ground of the garden plot, but not much. Their grasping hands were just a few yards away now.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, grabbed Desi with one arm and the older man with the other. “Come on,” he said. He dragged them through the plot. It took a second for them to stop resisting and march with him. They went across the path on the other side, and into the next plot.
The older man looked back. “What if we run into more of them?”
“We won’t,” said Gibbs. “The fence only broke there. They’ll all be coming from that direction.” The lieutenant glanced back at the exes, and then at the clawing footprints his mechanical toes left in the soil. They dragged in the dirt like a rake. He tried to lift his foot higher.
They ran.
Danielle paced back and forth, trying to control her breathing. She shot quick glances out the window toward the fence. Just over the tops of the pea trellises and sunflowers and corn, she could see the battlesuit. Its arms went up and back down. Gunshots echoed from the parking lot, punctuated now and then by louder ones from above.
Lester slumped in the corner, his arms wrapped around himself. He muttered quietly while his eyes went back and forth between the two doors and the window. Danielle had seen people react this way before.
Jesus, she thought, is this what I look like to everyone?
She tried to blot out the distant sound of teeth and her own breathing and the cold sweat running down her front and back. She needed to calm down before the tension made her freak out. If they were all going to get through this, they needed her to be…
Tension.
She pictured the fence lines in her mind, the ones Lester had shown off that first day. The ones she’d seen in her pathetic attempts to walk around the garden. None of the fences had a solid top rail. The chain-link just hung off a long, heavy tension cable, clamped in place by a trio of wire rope clips.
They were all idiots.
Her included.
She turned away from the window and pushed down the waves of nausea running up and down her body. A quartet of walkie-talkies sat in a charging station on the table. She snatched one up, flicked it on, and spun the dial. “Cesar?”
“What?” His voice echoed up out of the walkie. “Oh, hey. Cool.”
“I don’t think the fence is broken.”
“Yeah, it is,” he said. “I’m right next to it.”
“The fence went down,” she said, “but I don’t think it actually broke. I think the support cable slipped loose. All you need to do is pull it tight again.”
“Whoa, what? What do I need to do?”
“There’s supposed to be a thick wire rope, a big cable, across the top of the fence. Everything’s hanging off it.”
“Like curtains?” asked the walkie.
“Yeah,” she said, “like curtains. You need to find the end and pull it tight. It’ll make the fence come right back up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but be careful. It’s going to weigh a lot and it’s going to have some exes standing on it. You’ve got to pull hard enough to raise the fence but not enough to snap the cable.”
“What happens if it snaps?”
Danielle closed her eyes and took a breath. The clicking of teeth seemed even louder. “If it breaks for real, the fence is ruined and I’m pretty sure we’ll all get eaten by exes.”
“Okay, then,” said Cesar. “Not breaking the cable.”
“Good idea.”
“You think it was Legion?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it looked solid when I saw it the other day. If it was rigged right, it shouldn’t have slipped.”
“I saw a wrench in the parking lot. You think maybe— Hang on a sec,” said Cesar. The exoskeleton swung its shoulders in the distance. “Sorry, had to sweep a bunch of ’em away, y’know. So you think maybe somebody did this?”
“We can worry about it later. First, get the fence back up.”
“Okay. I think I see the post where it came apart. Lemme try this.”
“Be careful. Not too hard.”
“Yeah, that’s not what you were saying—”
“Jesus, Cesar,” she said, “not right now.”
“Right, sorry. I’ll let you know when I got it.”
She set the walkie down and watched the titan crouch down. It vanished behind the rows of plants.
God, the clicking teeth were so loud. It almost sounded like they were in the…
Something shuffled near the side door. Lester shrieked. Panic struck Danielle in the chest and she turned.
It had been a man. A short man, dressed in the semicasual look that seemed so popular in Los Angeles. Jeans, T-shirt, dark blazer. A trim beard, spotted with filth, covered its jaw.
The zombie stumbled off the walkway and into the workshop. Its chalk eyes stared at her without blinking. Its teeth cracked together. One of the top front teeth was gone, and in its place was a steel implant post.
Cold fear spread out from her heart. It crawled down her legs and arms. It wrapped around her shoulders and throat and sent threads into her head.
The ex lurched toward her, and the click-click-click of its teeth filled the workshop.
THAT’S CRAZY TALK, said Zzzap.
“It makes sense,” said St. George, pushing himself off the yacht’s smashed deck and into the air. “If he takes a hundred people back to shore and they find LA’s been nuked, no one’s ever going to question him again.”
Yeah, but it’ll be freshly nuked, not five years nuked.
“Who’d be able to tell the difference?” St. George flew back to the cargo ship. The gleaming wraith followed. “To most people, ruined buildings and radiation means a bomb site. I don’t think there’ll be any elaborate tests to confirm when it happened.”
But there’ll be a blast. Light, heat, all sorts of stuff.
“If anyone even sees it, it’ll be a light on the horizon. You think after years of this he won’t be able to brush it off as a thunderstorm or something? Hell, half these people believe him now without any evidence.”
Besides, he can’t just launch the missiles. He’d need special keys and codes and a computer named Joshua and—
“He’s had years to figure this out,” said St. George. “Hell, for all we know he was on the crew.”
Madelyn waved to them from below. They dropped down to the deck. St. George explained what he’d seen below the ships to her and the Lemurians.
“You are sure?” asked Hussein. “It was not a trick of the light or a distortion in the water?”
St. George shook his head. “I was less than ten feet from it at one point,” he said. “I could see the rivets and the writing on the periscope-tower thing.”
Eliza shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s just nuts. Maleko might be…controlling, but he’s not…he’s not going to kill a couple thousand people just to back up his story. He’s not a maniac.”
Devon’s lips twisted. He set his son down and whispered some instructions. The boy took Lily by the hand, and they ran off into the night.
“What do you think he’s up to, then?” asked St. George. “He offers to take you all to see the nuclear wasteland that we know doesn’t exist, tells us how much he ‘didn’t want to have to do this,’ and then just before you go he decides to drag his secret submarine out and…what? Please, give me another way to look at this.”
Eliza bit her lip.
“I don’t know why he’s doing it,” St. George said. “Maybe he thinks he’s protecting you from something? Maybe…”
“Maybe he’s just nuts,” said Madelyn.
“Not helping.”
“Hey? Torn in half, remember?”
“That’s just because you’re an ex,” said Devon.
She glared at him. “No, I’m not.”
“I’d rather be wrong about it than sorry,” St. George told Eliza.
She shook her head one last time. “If there’s a sub,” she said, “shouldn’t there be a crew?”
“Perhaps they are on the sub?” Hussein offered.
Devon frowned. “Would it still be running after all these years?”
Nuclear subs can run for decades if they’re maintained, said Zzzap, but the crew would still need food and air. I don’t think their filters would last that long.
“They could be dead,” said Hussein. “It is possible Nautilus merely found the vessel somewhere and stowed it beneath the island.”
“Ummmm…” said Madelyn, “what do people on submarines wear?”
They looked at her. “What?” asked St. George.
Is this a riddle? I’m not good with riddles.
“Do they wear a sort of blue jumpsuit thing?” She waved her hands up and down her body. “Y’know, kind of like a janitor?”
“Yeah,” said Devon. A few of them looked at him and he shrugged. “I had a cousin who was in the Navy.”
“There’s a bunch of exes dressed like that down in the place they dumped me,” Madelyn said. She pointed across the cruise ship toward the tanker. “Maybe thirty or forty of them.”
Devon tapped the side of his chest and let his fingers bounce on either side of his neck. “Did they have names here? And badges here?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I saw names on some of them, but a lot of the uniforms were torn up and bloody. Lots of gore around the mouths, you know? There could’ve been stuff there. I was more interested in getting out.”
Eliza’s face was grim.
St. George saw the expression grow. “What’s wrong?”
“When we first started the island,” she said, “we were cleaning out the ships, getting all the exes away from everyone. I thought…”
“What?”
“I thought the Hole was filling up kind of fast. Maleko told me not to worry about it. I was just stressed and counting wrong.”
“What’s the Hole?” asked St. George.
“If someone had the virus, if they turned, they went into the forward tank. The Hole. It was empty and made for a good holding pen.”
“Been there,” said Madelyn, flexing her arm. “Broke out of that.”
“So,” said St. George, “I’m guessing you thought the Hole was filling up fast right around the time Nautilus showed up with a bunch of new shotguns and pistols for you to defend yourselves with.”
The Lemurians glanced at each other. “It was maybe a month after we’d cleaned out the big ships,” said Devon. “We just figured they came from one of them.”
Seriously?
“Well they had to come from somewhere,” he said. “Why would we think they came from a submarine hidden under the—”
A scream echoed down from the cruise ship.
You hear that?
St. George and Eliza nodded.
Zzzap launched himself up into the air, looked around, and dropped back down to the small group. There are exes on the tanker. At least sixty or seventy right now, but it looks like a lot more of them are coming up from belowdecks.
Hussein muttered something angry in Arabic. “Someone’s opened the Hole,” he said.
Devon looked across the deck. “Jesus,” he said. He took off after his son without another word.
St. George looked up at Zzzap. “Do you think you can find the sub and stop it?”
The wraith shrugged. It’s going to be Predator-level invisible at night and in the ocean, even to me. And that’s not considering how deep it is.
“You’ve got to find it. We don’t know how far he’s going to go before he launches one of the missiles. Madelyn and I will help contain the exes here.”
Mekka-lekka-hi, said Zzzap. The wish is granted. He shot up into the sky.
St. George turned to Eliza. “Do your guards have any experience with exes?”
“We…” She looked over at the cruise ship and the tanker beyond it. “Not enough. None of us have dealt with large numbers of them since before we formed Lemuria.”
“Get your people off the tanker, if you can. Tell them to keep the exes off the walkways. Better yet, cut the walkways loose and let them drop.”
“We can’t do that. We don’t have a way to replace them.”
“You don’t have
a way to replace the people, either, do you?”
Eliza bit her lip again.
“Right. We’ll try to keep the exes contained to the tanker and rescue anyone still there.” He looked at Madelyn and held out his hand. “You and me, then.”
“Sweet.” She reached out, grabbed his wrist, and his fingers closed around hers.
St. George launched himself into the air and dragged the Corpse Girl along with him. He swung around to the cruise ship and flew over its tall hull. Another shriek rang up to them, then a gunshot, and then more screams.
Then the sound of teeth.
Once they passed the Queen’s smokestacks he could see at least a dozen exes. They’d already made their way up the long gangplanks and onto the cruise ship, lured by the sights and sounds of prey. Three of them were crouched and using their jaws to tear mouthfuls of flesh out of a figure. The light was bad, but St. George was pretty sure he glimpsed dreadlocks when one of the exes rocked to the side.
More exes spread out across the tanker’s low deck. Some of them staggered through the gardens. Others headed for the lower ends of the walkways.
A few figures moved faster, but they were almost all heading in the wrong direction. Some ran toward the front of the tanker. One had a shotgun, but a few of them tried to fight the exes with garden tools. Several of them screamed.
“I’ll save the people down there,” said St. George. “Can you hold that first gangplank on your own? The one closest to the hatch they’re coming out of?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You sure?”
She smiled up at him. “Dead certain.”
“Please stop that.”
“Never!”
St. George swung his arm, loosened his grip, and Madelyn dropped to the upper deck of the cruise ship near one of the stairwells. She put her hands on the railings and slid down the first flight of stairs. A few running steps put her at the next landing and she leaped down that flight, guiding herself along the rails.