by Peter Clines
Freedom started running. He was three blocks from the Mount. The long, north–south blocks of Hollywood. “Twenty-Four, this is Six,” he said. “Coming to you.”
“This is Danny—uhhhh, Twenty-One—on the Wall. It just went over the Wall right by the Melrose Gate.”
Too much chatter and not enough information. He still didn’t know who or what they were fighting. It didn’t sound like exes. It sounded fast.
As Freedom passed an intersection he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A figure dashed across the road parallel to him, two blocks over and heading south. He saw the pale skin and thought an ex was inside the walls, but no ex moved that fast, even the ones Legion controlled. The captain turned his head and got a quick glimpse of the figure—a blood-splattered old man wearing khakis and a white T-shirt.
Freedom made a snap call. He pivoted and went after the man. “Six to Seven,” he called out. “Target engaged.”
Whoever he was chasing was fast, even barefoot. Not as fast as Freedom or the other super-soldiers, but enough that for a moment he worried he was chasing one of his own. He closed the gap. The old man was a few yards ahead. And he was running out of road. Beverly was just a block ahead.
A new voice cut over the chatter. “Freedom, this is Stealth,” she said. “St. George is moving to join you. Stop the prisoner at all costs. Use lethal force, nothing less.”
The word prisoner stood out. So did lethal force. And so did the tone in Stealth’s voice. He’d never heard it in all the months he’d known the woman, but it almost sounded like she was worried. Maybe even scared.
Freedom had enough sense to know anything that scared Stealth was something he shouldn’t be second-guessing.
He stopped in a shooting stance, pulled out Lady Liberty, and fired off three quick bursts with the massive handgun.
A handful of red carnations blossomed across the old man’s back and thighs. One grew out of his shoulder. He stumbled and flew through the air, carried by his own momentum and the impact of several twelve-gauge slugs at short range. His body crashed onto the pavement, rolled a few yards, and came to rest. It twitched twice.
Freedom walked over to the crumpled figure. The man wasn’t as old as he’d thought. The hair was deceiving, and it was shockingly white against all the blood soaking the man’s clothes. His gray eyes stared up at the sky. One of his hands looked withered and bony, like a corpse. His shoulder was a tangle of red sinews.
He took a slow breath and tapped his earbud. “Seven, this is Six,” he said. “Be advised, target has been neutrali—”
The man rolled to his feet.
He locked eyes with Freedom and hurled something at the huge captain. It struck him in the shoulder, just past his body armor. It cut fabric and broke the skin, but even at the joints Freedom’s muscle was too dense for it to penetrate far. He brushed it away and it clattered on the ground with a sound like wood.
The chalk-haired man was on the move and half a block away, sprinting like he’d caught his second wind. Freedom raised his pistol and fired again. The prisoner staggered but kept moving.
He raced out onto Beverly, headed straight for the Big Wall. The guards had heard Lady Liberty and were waiting for him. None of them were Freedom’s soldiers. All five of them opened fire. Many of the shots sparked on the pavement—the guards weren’t used to a fast target—but a good number hit. Freedom saw the man’s limbs jerk and tremble, but he never broke stride.
Something uncoiled from the prisoner’s shoulder like a snake and he swung his arm up at the guards along the top of the Wall. A long cord lashed out and wrapped around the neck of one of the guards. The man let out a wet cough. His companions stopped firing and leaped to help him, grabbing at the line.
The prisoner jumped. He went hand over hand up the thick cord to the top of the Wall. A dozen feet in seconds. The guards didn’t even realize they were helping by pulling on the line until the white-haired man was on the platform with them.
Freedom was a dozen yards from the Wall. He flexed his legs and hurled himself into the air. The guards were too close to the prisoner for him to use Lady Liberty again.
The prisoner lashed out and a guard staggered. Another one opened fire. The white-haired man and a guard stumbled back, but only the guard dropped.
Freedom landed on the Big Wall. He heard two-by-fours crack under his heels, the wooden platform trembled, and the stack of cars groaned beneath them. For a brief moment the whole structure tilted.
“On your knees,” he bellowed. “Get on your knees with your hands on your head.” Even as the words left his lips, he remembered Stealth’s insistence on lethal force and realized nothing had stopped the man yet.
The prisoner glanced at the captain, then at the crowd of exes gathered below.
Freedom lunged forward.
The white-haired man threw himself over the railing and plunged into the horde outside the Big Wall.
Freedom looked over the edge. The prisoner had vanished beneath at least twenty undead. They swarmed over him and the sound of clicking teeth seemed to grow louder.
He turned to the men on the Wall. The two who were still on their feet, the shooter and a cornrowed woman, just stood there. Freedom knew the look. They were up and locked. The shooter kept glancing between the railing and the man he’d shot. The woman was frozen with her mouth half open.
“You,” he snapped at the shooter. He pointed at one of the bodies. “Check him. Now.”
The man blinked awake and ran to the fallen guard. The woman was still frozen. Freedom ignored her.
The man who’d been shot coughed and spat up some blood. Freedom could see the dark stain spreading across his chest. Bleeding but not spurting in pulses and not whistling. Serious, but probably not fatal if he got care soon enough.
The other man had a blade buried in his chest. It looked like it had been carved from pale wood—more of a stake than a blade. He was still breathing, but it was erratic. The shooter was gripping his hand and speaking to him, urging him not to quit.
The last guard, the one who’d been throttled by the prisoner’s line, unwrapped the last coil of it and tossed it aside. He was covered in blood. His hands were soaked with it, but there wasn’t enough to be arterial bleeding. The rope had just slashed through the skin of his neck.
“Seven,” Freedom said, “this is Six.”
“Six, this is Seven,” she replied.
“Seven, this is Six. Emergency medical to Big Wall south at Windsor. We have three wounded. One serious, one critical.”
She signaled her acknowledgment and his eyes fell on the line. He prodded it with his boot, then crouched to look at it. His brow furrowed.
The rope was a crude whip. The long strands weren’t leather, just sinew and tendons that had been dried and braided together. There were white barbs along the length of it, gathered in tight quartets. They gave the weapon a strong resemblance to a length of barbed wire. It took a moment for Freedom to realize he was looking at close to a dozen teeth woven into the whip’s lash with their roots pointing out.
He heard a noise and looked up to see Stealth. Her cloak streamed behind her. “Where is the prisoner?”
Freedom nodded at the railing. “He’s dead, ma’am. He threw himself off the Wall. The exes tore him ap—”
Stealth took three quick strides to the railing. Her hands flicked and her pistols were out. Freedom saw a quick ripple of movement within her hood as she scanned the street at the base of the Big Wall.
Then she fired both weapons, aiming at something across the street. Freedom unholstered Lady Liberty and joined Stealth at the railing just as her pistols ran dry. It took him a second to realize what she was shooting at.
The prisoner stood there, arms spread wide. His clothes had been shredded by the exes, and his skin was smeared with gore, but he was smiling. A dead woman latched onto his forearm and tore a mouthful of flesh away. Another one gnawed on his calf. The white-haired man didn’t seem to notice.
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br /> Stealth’s fingers shifted and empty magazines dropped from each pistol to rattle on the platform. She reloaded in seconds and was firing again. Freedom raised his own weapon and Lady Liberty thundered. The trigger-happy guard joined them, but Freedom could tell the man was just spraying bullets.
The prisoner flailed under the assault. His skin ruptured and blood sprayed across the lawn behind him. He staggered back and dropped on the grass. The exes chewing on him were torn apart by stray rounds from Lady Liberty’s bursts. Their remains fell on either side of the man.
“If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am,” said Freedom, “what the hell was that all about?”
The cloaked woman ignored him. She reloaded again.
The prisoner rolled over and scampered across the lawn on all fours.
Stealth tracked him and led her shots like a decorated marksman. Freedom saw her score half a dozen hits before the prisoner got back to his feet. The white-haired man sprinted to the end of the block before glancing back, and Stealth rewarded him with three rounds in the face. His forehead burst apart and he slumped against an SUV, but he was moving again before he hit the ground. He shook off the impact, rolled under the vehicle, and vanished.
A shadow passed over them. St. George hung in the air. “Go,” she shouted at him. “That way!”
The hero shot across the road after the escaped prisoner. He got to the SUV and shook his head. He raised his hands to his mouth and called out a name twice.
Freedom waited for the cloaked woman to turn to him, but she stared out after the prisoner. He took the moment to shove his earbud back in. The panicking man still monopolized the airwaves.
“Oh, Jesus,” said the voice on the radio. “The Thing got out. It got out of the Cellar.”
LEGION FOUND HIMSELF in a dead man, wandering in the middle of a tree-lined residential street. Small houses and one or two apartment buildings. He glanced around and looked through the eyes of a dead woman at the end of the block. The street sign said Stetson, like the hat.
He expanded his view, spreading out across another dozen or so exes until he saw a few more nearby street names. Walnut. Harkness. Colorado. He saw big buildings framing a campus and the sign for Pasadena City College. He was about twenty-five miles away from the Big Wall, way out past Glendale.
His attention focused him into a new body, a heavyset Samoan stumbling through a store parking lot off Colorado. The dead man was intact except for a few scrapes and cuts. And one dead eye. He reached up to check the socket and realized it was made of glass. It’d be fine for now.
Legion looked around the parking lot. The store had faded pink awnings with a “99” logo on them. There were a dozen dusty cars parked at different angles. One of them was T-boned into another, totaling both. A driver’s side door hung open, and he saw old blood splattered on the passenger seat. A primer-colored muscle car sat halfway through the store’s big window next to the double doors. Purple shopping carts were scattered everywhere. Some had drifted with random winds, others were tipped on their sides like dead animals.
He glared at another ex in the parking lot. It was an older woman with a wrinkled face and a pair of bullet holes in her chest. “What the fuck,” he asked her, “happened back there?”
The dead woman stared at him for a moment, then staggered into the side of a pickup truck.
For a moment he considered looking back at the Mount. There were almost ten thousand exes within a block of the Big Wall. He could sense them in a basic way, like someone knowing they were wearing shorts or going commando without checking. He just knew where they were, all through the city. It wouldn’t take much effort to reach over and see through their eyes.
Whatever attacked him had taken his exes away, though. One moment they’d been there, the next minute a bunch of them were gone. He could still see them, but it was like part of him had gone numb, like a cripple looking at legs that weren’t part of him anymore. They’d become something else.
And “something else” had kicked the shit out of him.
When the first one jumped on him he thought it was the Dragon’s new trick. Somebody with telepathic-ness or whatever you called moving stuff with your mind. But none of the Dragon’s people were that savage. Even when Stealth fought, she was intense, but never sadistic.
It was fast and brutal and ruthless, like wrestling with a hungry pit bull. A smart, hungry pit bull crossed with a piranha. He’d thrown more exes at it and it had fought back with more of its own.
Legion didn’t have a real body anymore. He hadn’t had one for a year and a half now. It had freaked him out at first. He even came close to crying once. Real men still cried now and then. Not often, but it happened.
But then he realized he’d become something bigger than just Rodney Cesares or Peasy. He’d become untouchable. Yeah, he didn’t have a body anymore. He had millions of bodies, every one of them tireless and numb to pain.
Numb until today, anyway. Whatever was using the other exes had hurt him. A lot. He’d felt every body get slashed and torn apart. And for a few moments it had held him there, like holding a geek’s forehead and watching them swing useless punches. He hadn’t been able to shift away.
He hadn’t been able to do anything.
Legion kicked one of the purple shopping carts and it rolled a few feet across the parking lot. He stalked over, slammed his foot into it again, and watched it bang into the side of a Lexus. Another kick raised a few wisps of dust and chipped some paint off the car.
He was pretty sure the thing at the Mount would’ve killed him. He didn’t know how, but he felt it in his gut. If he’d stayed there it would’ve torn him apart. Somehow.
The thing that’d saved him in the end was the other exes were changing too fast. They didn’t have time to do much damage. They got tall and sprouted fangs and claws, like werewolves or something—enough to fuck up a regular person, easy. And then they’d pop open like hot dogs in a microwave and fall apart. There’d been a break and he’d thrown himself away, like diving off a bridge. He didn’t care where he ended up, as long as he wasn’t there.
It was kind of familiar, what the other exes had been turning into, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe something from back during his months in the Army when they were pumping him and a bunch of other grunts full of drugs to make them bigger and stronger. There’d been a bunch of weird stuff going on then.
Legion picked up the shopping cart. The dead Samoan had slablike muscles that still had plenty of strength in them. He got the cart over his head, roared, and slammed it down on the windshield of the Lexus. The glass spiderwebbed from side to side. He picked the cart back up and slammed it down again. The windshield collapsed in across the dashboard and driver’s seat. He tried to drag it out, but one of the wheels had hooked on the steering wheel.
He growled and drove his fist through the driver’s-side window. Then he brought both fists down on the roof and dented it in. He kicked the door and slammed punches into the hood and yanked at the cart until he’d deformed the steering wheel and knocked the last few bits of glass from the windshield frame.
Truth be told, he was bored as shit most of the time. Even with the extra effort it took, big projects like looting the National Guard armory or gathering up all the armor and guns and ammo in the city didn’t take long when you had a hundred thousand bodies doing it. At least once a week he fucked up a car, just for the hell of it. Sometimes a house or an apartment building. He’d trashed half the food court over in the Glendale Galleria during one angry weekend.
After a couple of minutes of violence he calmed down and looked at the car. He’d messed it up pretty good. The roof was beat down, and the hood was pretty messed up. He’d smashed all the windows, one of the headlights, and most of the instruments on the dashboard.
The Samoan’s hands were ruined, too. The fingers were broken and the flesh had ripped away from the knuckles. The foot he’d kicked the door with was pretty messed up. He focused on a skeletal
little girl across the parking lot and shifted into her. He watched the Samoan stagger on its bad foot for a few steps before it fell over. The dead thing flailed on the pavement for a minute or so before it rolled over and crawled off.
Legion let his view flow out again for a moment, drifting through the Samoan’s head for a few seconds, and then focused himself inside an older man in the middle of Colorado Boulevard. It was a big guy with a beard and loose skin. Legion liked being big. It reminded everyone he was strong.
Little soul.
He spun around and staggered. He’d picked an old guy with a bad knee. Maybe a whole bad leg, and being dead hadn’t helped it any. He forced the body up straight.
Nobody behind him. He thought he’d heard a voice, a buzz in the air like glow-boy from the Mount. He had a lot on his mind, though. He’d already written off what had happened earlier and was ready to start planning his next assault.
How interesting you are, little soul.
This time Legion reached out to look through a dozen sets of eyes. He saw himself in the old man, and a heavyset woman with a missing hand, and a teenage boy, and a slim woman whose face and hair had been burned off at some point.
There was no one around who wasn’t him. He stayed in all the bodies and marched across the street. He looked in cars and behind bus stops and in the small patio of a Starbucks.
He wasn’t sure if he’d heard the voice or just imagined it. It sounded damned close, though. And warm. Not warm in a good way, but warm like sick with the shakes.
Little Rodney Cesares. Son of Juan and Gabrielle. Once so great in body, now a living soul with no flesh around it. How fascinating.
“Okay,” called Legion. He found two exes up on the roof of a thrift store and one trapped on a balcony with a high railing. He looked down on the street through their eyes. “That you, Zap-man? Where you at, hijo de puta?”