by Peter Clines
The last half mile to the freeway was the worst, even when the curving road widened out to three, then four lanes. They’d been this way on scavenging runs before, but Road Warrior was a little wider and a little longer than their other trucks so the going was slow. They worked their way up past the big Methodist church at Franklin and a few scavengers bowed their heads or crossed themselves.
The big truck rolled past the parking lots for the Hollywood Bowl and the long-dead marquees for the amphitheater. On the center island stood a concrete memorial to the Bowl, surrounded by long, brown grass. The electronic screens in it were smashed to bits. Lady Bee’s gaze drifted over to the large marquee on her left. There were two half-eaten bodies at the base of it, gray and shriveled from the sun. Dueling vandals had rearranged the letters and numbers into Bible passages or obscenities. “Why are people always so determined to arrange numbers into six-six-six?” she asked aloud.
“Because if this is hell,” Lee said, “it means things can’t get any worse.”
A handful of exes staggered between the mess of cars in the lot and stumbled towards the sounds of life. “Hey,” said Jarvis. “One of them’s in a tux.” He slipped his rifle off his shoulder and into his hand.
Paul looked where the bearded man pointed. “Yeah, so?”
“Might be someone famous.”
“Or it might be some poor bastard who bit it on his wedding day,” said Ilya.
Jarvis pulled a small pair of binoculars from his bag. “Can’t tell who it is,” he muttered. He held them out to Ilya. “Check it out for me.”
“No.”
“If it’s someone famous I need the points, man.”
Ilya smirked. “If you can’t tell they’re either not famous or you’re out of luck.”
“Bastard.”
“It’s nobody famous,” said Paul. He was looking through a small telescope. “No one I recognize, anyway.”
“Damn it,” said Jarvis. “Haven’t seen a good celebrity in over a month.” He gestured at an alabaster statue looming over a stagnant fountain. “Is the statue supposed to be someone famous? Would that count?”
“It’s just a piece of rock,” said Lady Bee. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not just a piece of rock. Same guy who made the Academy Award made it.”
They all looked at Hector. Ilya and Paul both raised their eyebrows.
“What? I got ink so I can’t read a book?” The tattooed man shook his head. “Fuck all you guys.”
The truck rolled to a stop. The road split ahead of them. The right two lanes ran beneath an overpass and up onto the freeway. The left two lanes were Cahuenga Boulevard. Two roads into the Valley. The scavengers moved forward to look at the mass of concrete.
“Sailors beware,” said Lynne. “Here be dragons.”
St. George gave a black sports car a firm shove, knocking it into the overgrown plants on the side of the road. “Just like we planned,” he called to Luke. The hero pointed up the left lanes to the Cahuenga Pass. “When I scoped it out earlier, the southbound side seemed to be clogged the least. I’ll clear a path through the cars. Stay about ten yards behind me.” He looked at the scavengers on the roof of the cab. “Bee, Ilya, Lee, keep me covered, but hold off shooting unless you’re sure I need the help. Everyone else watch our back, make sure we don’t get blocked—”
“Watch it!” shouted Hector.
They all saw the blur coming out of the sky at St. George before he did. Rifles snapped up. He spun and raised his fists just as the ex crashed into the ground. The hero leaped into the air and gore splattered across the pavement.
“Fell off the freeway,” said Hector. He pointed up at the overpass.
“You okay, boss?” called Ilya.
St. George settled back onto the pavement. “Been worse,” he said. He shook a few wet clumps of meat and hair off his boots.
“You need a moment?” asked Bee with a smile.
“I’ll survive,” he said. “Everyone ready?”
They nodded and saluted as he turned back to the road. Luke revved the engine again. St. George took a few strides forward, wrapped his arms across the hood of a green Hyundai, and swung the car off to the side.
They headed up Cahuenga, over the hills, and into the San Fernando Valley.
* * *
The northbound side of the road was two solid lanes packed with cars, and the south side was only marginally better. St. George shoved trucks and cars out of the way and tossed motorcycles up into the bushes and trees on the south side of the pavement. It would take him a moment to get a good grip, but he could lift the smaller cars and stack them on top of the bigger ones. Sometimes, if he had a clear shot, he stacked them on top of exes.
To their right, between the automobiles that packed the northbound side, the scavengers could look down onto all ten lanes of Highway 101. Thousands of vehicles clogged the Hollywood Freeway in both directions. Some had ended their existence in crashes. Others had been gridlocked and abandoned. They were faded and grainy, painted with over two years of dust.
Thousands of exes stumbled between the cars. Their skins were withered from months and months in the sun. In at least a quarter of the vehicles, dead things pawed at windshields or clawed the air from open doors. They’d been left prisoners of seat belts and child locks. The endless sound of teeth echoed up from the freeway.
The scavengers went forward yard by yard. The sun was high overhead when they reached the top of the pass and the road started to slope down again. Just past the crest, the burned-out remains of a garage stood behind a fire-blackened fence. The cinderblock walls had cracked from the heat. A charred corpse lay near the gate, dressed in the remains of a mechanic’s coverall. St. George hopped the fence, tapped the corpse with his boot, and walked through the ruins.
Next door to the garage was a small fire station, the near side seared and blackened. The rolling door had been torn off the runners and the fire engine was gone. While St. George checked the garage, Jarvis, Paul, and Lee searched the building. It had been cleaned out by either civil servants or looters. Paul found an ex in the back and took its head off with a wide swipe of his machete.
A little farther down the road a mom-and-pop style gas station was crammed into a tiny strip mall. There were eight cars in a line, a pathetic attempt to barricade the plaza’s miniscule parking lot. Both of the pumps had been vandalized. Lady Bee pointed to the three numbers on the price signs and winked at Lee. There was a restaurant and what looked like a psychic’s shop. All the windows had been used for target practice until they collapsed under their own weight. The red tile roof was shot up, too.
Road Warrior pulled up alongside the line of cars and half a dozen scavengers leaped out, their armor jingling. Billie, Ilya, and a baby-faced man named Danny moved around to check the back of the building. Jarvis, Paul, and Lady Bee headed for the mini-mart behind the gas pumps. Through the broken window they could see something tall swaying back and forth in the shadows.
St. George landed on the rooftop deck of the big truck and waited. Under his watchful eye, a scruffy guy slipped from the cab and moved to the loading ports for the station’s underground tanks. He pried the metal covers off and fed a weighted line into the opening.
Lee and an older guy named Al slid out on the opposite side and took Hector with them. They watched up and down Cahuenga for movement. Hector started to line up on an ex down the road, but Lee put his hand out and guided the rifle’s barrel down. “Hold off shooting outside until you have to,” he said. “Noise attracts them.”
“I know that,” grumbled the tattooed man.
“How long since you’ve been out?” asked Al. He had leathery skin, dark eyes, and a few streaks of steel in his iron hair.
“Out?”
“Out of the Mount. Out from behind the walls.”
“Nine months,” said Hector. “Not since the war.”
“You go out a lot before that?”
“On and off. When I had to.”
“It’ll come back to you,” said Al. “Just don’t get anyone killed before then.”
A muffled gunshot came from the mini-mart. St. George looked over and Jarvis leaned out to give him an all clear. Billie’s team returned from around the back of the building. “Two exes,” she said.
“No problems?” asked the hero.
Ilya shook his head.
“There’s some apartments further back there,” Billie said. “How much do you want to search?”
“Let’s stay on Cahuenga,” he said. “We’ll have time to spread out later.”
They nodded and headed for the restaurant. From the battered signage, St. George guessed it was an Italian place.
“Sweet,” whistled the scruffy man. He’d moved to the second fuel tank. “There’s about a foot down there. Could be as much as sixty, maybe seventy gallons.” He grinned up at St. George through nicotine teeth.
The hero nodded. “We’ll wait until everyone’s done and then I’ll make some space for Luke to pull in. Don’t want to draw attention too soon.”
Jarvis, Paul, and Lady Bee came back from the store shaking their heads. “Cleaned out,” said Bee. “It’s a mess, but there’s nothing useful.”
St. George sighed. “Well, we all knew there was a good chance of that. It’s a main drag.” He tipped his head to the next storefront. “You guys want to take the psychic?”
Lady Bee gave a too-sharp salute and clicked her heels together with a smirk.
* * *
An ex stumbled across the road to them. It had been an older man with a wiry frame and a thin mustache. It reached out and Lee pushed it away with the tip of his rifle. “Hey, check it out.”
Al and Hector glanced over at him. “What?”
“It’s Vincent Price.” Lee shoved it back again. “That’s gotta be worth major points.”
“Vincent Price is dead,” said Al.
“Well, yeah. They’re all dead.”
“He was dead before this, fuckwit,” said Hector. “Like, twenty years ago.”
The other man scowled. “Are you sure? This sure looks like him.”
“Sure,” nodded the tattooed man. “He’s dead.”
“Maybe he came back anyway.”
Al shot him a look. “How the hell would he come back anyway?”
Lee shrugged. “It’s Vincent Price. If anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be him.”
“No,” said Al, “if anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be Bela Lugosi. But he won’t, because he’s dead, too.” He slid a machete from the scabbard at his side and chopped through the ex’s neck.
* * *
“Well, that’s something y’all don’t see every day,” said Jarvis.
At the center of the psychic’s shop stood a round table decorated with colored scarves and cloths. Half a dozen stubby candles had been knocked over. A crystal ball had fallen from the tabletop and its dusty shards lay near one of the legs. Tarot cards were scattered and turned at all angles.
An ex sat behind the table, clacking its teeth at them. It had been a woman once, Asian by the look of her. It was in a wheelchair. With the brakes locked, it was wedged between the seat and the table. Rings shivered on its bony fingers as it reached mindlessly back and forth with its hands. Every third or fourth pass it would snag a tarot card and slide it a few inches on the tabletop.
“Either y’all want to guess how long it’s been sitting there like that?”
“At least two years, looking at the dust,” said Bee. “Maybe more. She could’ve died right at the start of the outbreak.”
“Looks like she tried to give herself one last reading,” said Paul. “Guess she believed this stuff.” He prodded open a small fridge with his foot and recoiled from the smell he set loose.
“People believe a lot of crap when things get bad,” said Jarvis. He reached out and pulled one card from the table. The ex clawed at the metal rings of his sleeve with feeble fingers. He held up the image of the black knight with a skull face. “Death,” he said with a smirk. “Guess she was right on that.”
“The death card doesn’t mean death,” said Bee. “It means a transition. A change.”
Jarvis slid a bowie knife from his belt and stepped behind the ex. “Well, so she was still right,” he said. He grabbed its hair, pulled its head back, and sawed through the neck. When he was done he tossed the skull in the corner. “Let’s see if there’s anything good in the back room.”
* * *
As St. George predicted, the rest of the small plaza was picked clean. The big score was the fifty-odd gallons of gasoline. It took half an hour to pull it all up using a small hand pump. The scavengers killed another eight exes while they waited.
Two hours later they knew the next three buildings had been stripped clean of useful materials, too. Another sixteen exes dead, five of them with their necks snapped by the hero’s bare hands. The scavengers grumbled. Things had been getting tight in Hollywood proper, but it’d been a while since a mission was this unsuccessful.
At Barham Boulevard they found the remains of a National Guard roadblock. Concrete dividers were flanked with bright yellow barrels. The water that once weighted them down was long gone. The dividers blocked half the bridge that crossed over the Hollywood Freeway towards Universal City. At some point a jacked-up pickup had tried to crash through the barrier. It had wrecked a section of the roadblock but ripped up its suspension and a tire in the process. It sat a few yards onto the bridge. The paint had faded in the sun and a fine coat of dust had settled across it. Broken concrete and crumpled yellow plastic trailed behind it.
At the far end of the bridge they could see a matching roadblock and an olive-drab truck. Lady Bee stood on Road Warrior’s rooftop deck with her binoculars out. “I count maybe thirty exes,” she said. “They’ve noticed us but the barricade’s giving them troub—ah, two just fell over it. Nine, maybe ten bodies on this side. Looks like two or three of them are moving, but it might be heat ripples off the pavement. They look like military.” She lowered the glasses and looked at St. George standing in the air over her. “Military could mean weapons and supplies.”
He nodded. “Let me go check it out.”
The hero shot through the air and landed on the far side of the freeway next to the truck. A few yards away the pair of exes that had fallen over the roadblock staggered to their feet. There were ten Guardsmen around the truck. Seven of them were still dead.
Both legs on one of the exes had been shredded below the knees, maybe by a grenade. The dead thing crawled clumsily on its elbows and reached for St. George’s boot. He kicked it in the bridge of the nose and the skull came away from the neck. It sailed out over the freeway as the body slumped to the ground. He heard it clang on the hood of some far-distant car.
The other two had been a man and a woman. Their legs and arms had been eaten down to the bone before they’d come back. The woman’s cheeks and lips were gone, too. Everything not covered by body armor. The dead things twitched and thrashed and stared at him with chalky eyes. He reached down, twisted each of their heads around, and they stopped moving.
All the bodies had been stripped clean of weapons and ammunition. Even the exes. Four of the bodies were missing their boots and socks. St. George took a moment to check a few supply crates and the back of the truck, but they were empty, too. He rapped a knuckle on the vehicle’s gas tanks and a hollow sound echoed back.
There was a scuffling noise behind him. The pair of fallen exes had reached him, plus a third had slumped over the barricade and creeped headfirst toward the ground. He grabbed the one in the stained security outfit as it leaned into him and hurled the dead thing out over the freeway. It sailed through the air for a few hundred feet, bounced on the top of a minivan, off the side of a white truck, and vanished between two compacts.
The other ex wrapped its arms around him and sank its teeth into his bare shoulder. Incisors, canines, and molars crumbled away against his skin, but
it kept gnawing with the jagged stumps. He reached up, pushed his thumb into its mouth, and pressed up against its palate. The bone creaked but held long enough for him to swing the dead thing up and over his shoulder. He brought the ex down onto the pavement hard enough to pulverize its bones. It collapsed into mush.
He focused and whisked himself back through the air. Lady Bee scanned back and forth on Cahuenga with her binoculars. Ilya and a broad-shouldered woman, Keri, stood by while Paul went through the back of the wrecked pickup. A trio of scavengers at each end of Road Warrior kept an eye on the street and the exes that drifted along it.
“Nothing,” St. George told them. “Anything here?”
“Looks like this guy was doing our work for us, boss,” said Ilya. Paul handed a sack of canned goods down to Keri. She ferried them to Lee standing on the liftgate of their truck. “Five bags of non-perishables, three more that look like they came from a CVS. No weapons, but there was a box of nine millimeter in the glove compartment with thirty rounds left in it.”
“Any sign of the driver?”
“Some blood on the seat and the steering wheel,” said Paul.
Ilya pointed at the spider-webbed windshield. “Bullet hole,” he said. “I bet they got shot running the roadblock, crashed, and then...”
“Then walked away from it, one way or the other,” the hero finished.
“The other,” said Lady Bee from the top of the cab. “If they were alive, they wouldn’t’ve left everything behind.”
Paul handed down a final bag and hopped out of the truck.
“Moving on, then,” said St. George. A few yards down the road he could see another, larger gas station with a shot-out sign. He could remember driving past it a few times back in the before days, back when he was just a college maintenance guy moonlighting as a superhero in a thriving Los Angeles, but he couldn’t remember if it had been an Arco or a Mobil or what.