by Peter Clines
She glared down at him and the ex fell as his round burst its head.
* * * *
In the back of the truck, Lynne groaned and pushed herself up onto her elbows. “What the fuck?” She touched her nose and the fingers came back spotted red. She flinched as another volley of rounds went off. “What’s going on?”
“We didn’t have time to argue,” said Lee. “Still don’t. Grab your rifle and get up here.” He pulled the empty mag from his own weapon and slapped in a fresh one.
She wiped blood from her nose and grabbed the gleaming M-1 lying next to her. She checked the magazine and looked out at the dozens of exes stumbling toward Big Red . “I’m going to kick that jackass in the nuts when we get home.”
“He offered to let you, if it makes you feel better. Black coveralls.”
“Wifebeater,” called Billie.
Something flared like the dawn far down Melrose Avenue. “I think I see Zzzap,” said Bee. “He’s on his way back.”
The light pulsed twice and flared again. And then, echoing down the empty road, they heard reports over the endless clicking of teeth.
“Shit,” said Jarvis. “Is that gunfire?”
“That’s a lot of gunfire,” corrected Ilya.
“Exes?”
Billie shook her head. “That’s not just us. Somebody’s shooting back.”
St. George came bounding over the truck. He tapped the bead on his headset. “Melrose gate, you there?”
The radio hissed. “Melrose gate, this is the Dragon at Big Red , do you copy?” More static.
Cerberus glanced at him as she lifted an ex by the neck. “Another jammer?”
“It’d make sense.” He kicked an ex away and Jarvis put a round through its skull.
There was another surge of light and radios around the truck squawked. “ Big Red this is Melrose,” a voice buzzed over the walkies. “You guys still out there?”
Cerberus hurled her ex through the windshield of a car as St. George keyed his mic. “Here. That you, Derek?”
“They’re coming to you. ETA twelve minutes.”
“Copy that,” St. George said. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Lady Bee give a thumbs-up. “What’s all the noise?”
“Seventeens. Got a little ahead of themselves. If the gate had been open all the way they’d’ve had us.”
“Everything okay?”
There was a crackle of static. “Gorgon was waiting for them.”
“Right at the gate?”
“Yep. He’s feeling pretty amped right now.”
“How?”
“Stealth told us it was a diversion, you getting stuck out there. We caught a half dozen. The others are on the run. Zzzap’s keeping after them. How are you holding up?”
St. George planted his foot against another ex and sent it flying. He looked back at the truck again and the scavengers gave a variety of signals. He added up fists and fingers. “A third of our ammo’s gone. Immediate threat of two hundred exes. We’ve still got one man down and he …”
He glanced up at Mark’s slumped form and Lady Bee shook her head.
“He’s not doing any better,” finished the hero, “let’s say that.”
“Copy,” said Derek’s voice. “You should see their headlights soon.”
St. George took a breath and leaped back over the truck, coming down on top of an old Asian woman in a flowered blouse. He grabbed her by the hair and tossed her down the street into a chalk-skinned security guard.
The exes were a crowd now. A swarm of dozens on each side, all shuffling toward the crippled truck. The night echoed with countless clicking teeth and dragging limbs.
“Concert tee-shirt,” called Ilya.
“Hippie-girl,” said Lee.
“Doctor,” shouted Lynne. She had to reload and yelped when the M1’s breech snapped on her thumb.
Cerberus grabbed two exes and smashed their skulls together. She let the headless corpses drop and brought her fist down like a sledgehammer on a man in a tattered business suit. She kicked the bodies away and they tripped another handful of exes as they spun across the pavement. Lady Bee and Jarvis made sure none of the fallen got back up.
“Boss!” shouted Luke. “A little help.”
St. George stepped to the passenger side and a trio of exes fell on him. A teenage girl in a Jack In The Box uniform threw her arms on the hero and tried to sink her teeth into his neck. Another wrapped its arms around his shoulders as he twisted, tried to bite his scalp, and ended up gnawing a mouthful of hair it couldn’t tear loose. The last one, a child, clung to his leg like a leech and chewed at the back of his knee.
He glanced up at Luke. “Watch the lift gate for me.”
“Got it.”
He waded a few yards away from the truck, dragging the exes with him. He worked his hands between himself and the teenager as she gnashed at his throat, felt a tooth drop from her mouth, felt her withered breasts under his palms, and shoved. She flew back and vanished into the night. Between gunshots he heard something in the distance hit the ground and crack.
His fingers closed on the child’s neck. Two yanks shook the thing off his leg, and he held it at arm’s length to look at it for a moment. It was caked in blood and gore. He hurled it at a shuffling dead man and watched them both fly back into a tree just off the road. They twitched for a moment, trying to move with shattered spines.
Another ex lumbered toward him, a heavy bald man with a dark goatee. There were two bullet holes in his shirt. St. George tried to step forward and the ex swallowing his hair tugged him off balance.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He whipped his neck forward and felt his hair slide free to slap against his back.
The goateed ex raised its arms, clacked its teeth together twice, and its left eye vanished in a spray of black blood. It dropped to the ground.
“Thanks,” St. George shouted.
“No worries,” yelled Billie from the truck. “Priest.”
St. George drove his hand into the hair-eater’s throat and felt the bones shatter. He held the dead thing by its limp neck and swung it, knocking down two more exes. A backhand throw landed it on top of the wiggling pile under the tree.
“Headlights,” bellowed Cerberus. She pointed at the faint glow past the overpass.
“About fucking time,” growled Ty, lining up a shot. “Militarywannabe.”
“Everyone get ready to move,” said St. George as he walked back to Big Red . “All your gear, all the supplies we found, anything that rides in the truck. We leave nothing. Not a piece of rope, not a band-aid, nothing.”
The rescue truck was Big Blue , a cobbled-together twin of their own vehicle. It surged up over the hill, engine growling, and crushed the exes beneath its tires. The men in its bed added their weapons to the hail of gunfire knocking down exes.
“Marines,” howled Ilya, “we are leaving!”
Big Blue squealed to a halt a few yards away. “Somebody call for a lift?” shouted the driver. Johnny K leaned out the window and grinned at them. “Load up.”
Luke bounded over the cab, sliding down next to Jarvis. “Gate to gate,” he yelled. “We’ve got wounded and supplies. There’s too many exes to walk it.”
Johnny K nodded and threw his vehicle back into gear. Big Blue swung into position near St. George and the hero lowered both lift gates to create a walkway between the truck beds. The scavengers dragged bags and crates across. Lady Bee and Ty carried Mark.
Luke slid into Big Red ’s cab through the window and started handing things out. Fire extinguishers. First aid. Ammo boxes. Flares. Jarvis and Lee ferried them to the other truck. Luke crawled out, clutching a police radio to his chest. “We’re clear,” he shouted to the armored titan.
Cerberus crushed a skull in her palm and nodded. She batted a few away and pushed through the swarm. They clawed at the armor and chipped their teeth on the metal plates. She trudged forward, dragging them with her as they filled her screens.
“Drop the gate,” shou
ted St. George. He batted exes away, clearing a path for the battlesuit. Jarvis, Lee, and Lynne fired into the crowd while the others stabbed down with their pikes.
Cerberus swung her arms, shaking off the undead, and the pikes knocked them away. St. George peeled them from her, hurling them into the swarm. Bodies vanished beneath the shambling horde.
She stomped onto the metal lift gate and Luke flipped the switch, raising her up with a whine of hydraulics. “Hop on,” he yelled to St. George.
The hero cracked an ex across the jaw and shook his head. “I’ll slow the lift. Get her on board.”
“Damn it, boss—”
“Give me a pike!”
Someone tossed the flagpole down to him and he swung it like a bat, cracking half a dozen exes in the skull. He pulled back and swung again, knocking down another handful before the shaft cracked. He rammed the broken pike through an ex’s skull and kicked the corpse away.
Cerberus stepped up onto the bed of Big Blue and the lift gate gasped with relief. Luke toggled the switch and the metal plate swung up to block them in. “All aboard,” he hollered.
Johnny K gunned his engine and brought the truck around, crushing exes as it made a wide turn.
Dozens of hands pawed at St. George, grabbed his clothes, his hair, his limbs. He lashed out, felt them fall even as new hands reached for him. They pinned him with sheer numbers and he felt a swarm of teeth across his body.
This would be a good end, he thought. Overwhelmed saving my team. A good way to be remembered.
There was a roar of automatic fire and skulls exploded around him. Bullets slapped his head and shoulders like hailstones. His sunglasses shattered and his headset twisted into plastic scrap. The weapons barked again and exes sprayed blood and meat over him as they slumped and fell.
In the back of Big Blue , Lady Bee stood with Jarvis, Luke, and Ilya. Their weapons coughed up smoke. Jarvis dropped his empty magazine and reloaded.
St. George wiped gore from his face. The rounds had cleared a wide arc round him. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
“You’re bulletproof,” shouted Bee with a grin. “Stop whining and get in the truck.”
He landed next to the stripe-haired woman. “You just wasted a ton of ammo.”
“Maybe we just wanted an excuse to shoot you,” said Ilya with a smile.
“Thanks.”
“No worries, boss.”
Nine
NOW
The pipe clanged down across the gate, and the dead resumed their eternal grasping though the bars. The clatter of their teeth trembled in the air.
St. George stood and watched them. Big Blue was getting unloaded behind him. Lynne had just punched Jarvis hard in the back of the head. Mark was already halfway to the hospital.
“She wants to see you,” said Gorgon. “First thing.”
“I’m covered in shit,” the other hero said without looking away. “Infected blood. Rotted meat. I think some actual shit.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
St. George studied one ex, a rough-bearded man caked with as much dirt as blood. It had a gold tooth that flashed every time its jaw snapped shut. “What happened with the Seventeens?”
Gorgon shrugged. “About fifty. I just got up on the wall and dropped half of those imbeciles.”
“So you’re feeling pretty good.”
“Better than I have in ages.” He cracked his knuckles. “Tier five, easy. Want to go a few rounds?”
“I want to burn these clothes. And then get in the shower until sometime tomorrow.”
“She said first thing,” echoed Derek from the guard shack. He sighed and spat a stream of fire at the ground.
* * * *
It was a five minute walk to “city hall.” He could’ve made it in one good leap from Melrose, but he wasn’t in the mood to rush. Instead he shrugged out of his jacket and tried to wipe some of the gore from it.
The building was named Roddenberry, after the man who created Star Trek . Like most of the newer structures in the Mount, it had been built without any consideration for what was around it. The lines and windows belonged on a college campus, not wedged between warehouselike workshops and the old water tower.
The elevators worked, but the stairs took more time and he could tell himself he was going easy on Barry. His boots echoed in the empty stairwell.
Stealth had claimed the entire executive fourth floor as her own. Most people in the Mount thought it was a status thing. St. George knew it was because it was central, had the best sight lines, and was already wired for mass communication. She wasn’t the type who cared about status.
He rapped on a polished door and walked in. There was a large table people once sat at and discussed syndicated television shows and DVD box sets. Now all the chairs were gone and it was covered with maps and reports from across the lot. She’d moved over two dozen screens into the room, showing every street and every entrance into the Mount. She kept the curtains pulled, and the lights were dim if they were ever on.
Somewhere up here, past the low-profile door at the far end of the room, was a small suite where she lived. Or at least, where she slept, ate, and showered. The office of some high-end producer who just wanted his own full, private bathroom and a place to take a nap. St. George had never seen it, and only knew it was there because she’d let it slip once seven months ago. He knew it pissed her off to think she’d admitted to any sort of need or weakness.
“You smell horrible.”
Stealth stood in the shadow of the open door behind him. As always, she wore her full uniform, even the mask. Her face was a tight, black surface of vague features, hidden even further by the shapeless charcoal hood shrouding her head. As far as St. George knew, no one had ever seen her face.
“You told Gorgon you wanted to see me first thing,” he said. “So I’m here wearing four or five liquefied exes.”
“You could have showered.”
“That’s not how they heard it.”
She stood an inch or two shorter than him, but her cloak and hood made it hard to be sure how much. They wrapped her like a flimsy toga, barely disguising her figure. Her charcoal and gray uniform could’ve been body paint. “Would you prefer to clean up and speak later?”
“Are you actually offering me a choice?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “No,” she said, “but I know you like to feel you have one.”
He smirked. “What happened with the Seventeens?”
“You first, please. Mark Larsen. How was he attacked?”
“Just bad luck. An ex stuck in a shower. They didn’t see it or hear it until it was on top of a rookie.”
“Lynne Vines?”
“Yeah. Mark tried to pull it off her. It broke its own neck to bite him.”
“Nothing they could have done differently?”
“Not as I understand it.”
“Is he going to live?”
St. George looked at his boots. “I wouldn’t put money on it, but anything’s possible.”
She nodded. “Now, the trap.”
“Not much to tell. They knew we’d be heading back that way. They dropped a jammer and a spiked chain across the road.” He described every detail he could remember about the road, the time, even the chain itself. She prodded him now and then. He talked about waiting for the ride and killing the exes.
“So you were protecting yourselves for twenty-five minutes and then your team fired several bursts on full auto to save you.”
“I didn’t need saving.”
“They thought you did and acted accordingly, that is what matters. How much ammunition?”
“All together?” He ran some numbers through his head. “Three-fifty, maybe four hundred rounds.”
“The truck?”
“It’s a landmark right now. Needs all new tires, possibly new wheels. If we can get a crew there in the morning before the Seventeens strip it, it should be salvageable.”
Beneath the mask her face shift
ed. She pushed back the hood a few inches and pressed slim fingers against her temples, turning her eyes up to the ceiling and pushing her chest out ever so slightly. After a year and a half, St. George could talk to her without his eyes straying when she struck a pose. When they strayed now, it was a deliberate choice.
“Tell me it was worth it.”
He leaned against the table. “We got around four hundred pounds of food. A third of that’s a big bin of wheat flour. Some basic medicine and first aid stuff. Lee and Andy found a shotgun with about thirty shells and a bunch of 30.08.” His fingers did a quick drum roll on the table. “We only had two-thirds of our usual time.”
“I understand.”
“So what happened here?”
“They attempted to rush the gate. I counted twenty-three of them.”
“Gorgon said fifty.”
“Gorgon enjoys a degree of exaggeration where his own exploits are concerned.”
St. George almost made the laugh sound like a cough. “What gave it away? That we were a decoy?”
“Your situation made no tactical sense,” she said. She tapped her maps, running a finger down the same stretch of Vermont he’d been on earlier. “If they knew what was or was not in your truck, they either would have attacked when you were further away from the Mount or not at all. If they did not know, it was foolish to set a trap at all since they know you go out with almost every mission, often with another hero. Since theft was not the motive, the next would have been just what they accomplished—-leaving you, Cerberus, and Zzzap stranded.”
“Getting us out of the way for an attack,” he mused. “You are amazing, my dear Holmes.”
Stealth pointed to a section of the map south of Century City, making a slow circle with her finger where she had marked several streets and blocks with green ink. “They are becoming more aggressive and frequent in their attacks. We may need to take offensive measures.”
“You mean, go after them?”
“I mean locating and eliminating them.”
He furrowed his brow. “In what sense?”
“In the sense of eliminating them.”
“We’re not killers,” he said. “We sure as hell can’t be saving mankind if we go out and murder a couple hundred of them.”