An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  Of course, the one we couldn’t ignore was the kid with the green bandanna stabbing me in the gut. I know now he was a Seventeen. Then I just knew he was the punk who made Meredith scream by trying to kill me.

  We’d just seen Eddie Izzard at the Wiltern and were walking to where we parked, a few blocks up Oxford. She never liked parking in structures and called it a scam. The kid grabbed her arm, shouted for my wallet, and then he twisted her arm and she screamed. I lunged and pounded him until he was unconscious, and that’s when we realized he’d stabbed me six times during our fight. Six bloody holes in my shirt, but not a mark on me.

  When we saw the news reports about the Mighty Dragon, Blockbuster, Zzzap, and the rest, we both knew what I had to do. Meredith bought a full-body motorcycle suit and stitched on a logo, and for months I was the Immortal, the man who couldn’t be killed. I was hit by cars and shotgun blasts. Threw myself off buildings. One night after a gang shoot-out I got home and pulled twenty-three bullets out of myself.

  And then we made another discovery.

  Mere cut herself with a kitchen knife while chopping broccoli. Nothing deadly, maybe a stitch or two. We laughed—it was bound to happen someday, she was so clumsy. And I held her finger and felt a tingle, a flow of my power, and she gasped as it closed up. The skin sealed together without so much as a pucker.

  A medical resident who could heal with a touch. My success rate at the hospital went up. My popularity with my fellow heroes and police did, too. It took another month for my codename to change to Regenerator.

  I teamed up with most of the heroes at one point or another. Midknight. The Mighty Dragon. Cairax. Even the police during a few standoffs. I was the ultimate support guy. With me backing you up, nobody could fail. Heck, with me there everyone was an immortal.

  And then, with all this going on, then she died.

  It was stupid. A stupid way to die. She’d been safe. So safe. It wasn’t fair. That’s what’s important to remember. It wasn’t fair for her to get taken away from me like that. That’s what they’ll need to understand. What happened wasn’t right, so I didn’t do anything wrong.

  A broken finger. She died because of a broken finger. Mashed in a car door, broke the skin, heavy bleeding. If I hadn’t been out playing hero I could’ve fixed it in ten seconds. Instead the neighbors called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital.

  And once she got there, the emergency room staff screwed up a test and gave her the wrong type of blood. She was Anegative and some idiot nurse misread a chart and gave her Rh positive blood. Blood that should’ve been screened out of their blood banks to start with, because it was tainted with hep-B. The mixed symptoms confused them and they spent hours pumping her full of poisons to deal with misdiagnoses, and filling her with more of the wrong blood. The odds of it happening are a million to one. I know this. Two horrible, freak mistakes that both fell on one person. As someone in the medical profession, I know this and I understand why they could’ve been so baffled. Hell, anyone who watches House knows why they were baffled.

  It still wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

  Meredith died in agony just as I got home and the neighbors were telling me she’d gone to the hospital for something minor. And so I did what anyone else would. What anybody with my abilities would’ve done.

  It didn’t take long to claim her body. The hospital staff knew how bad they’d screwed up and were willing to agree to anything. I talked about religious beliefs and they let me walk out the door with her body. I kept my hands on her the whole time, willing life into her nerves, every fiber, each individual cell.

  My power let me see what had gone wrong. Let me reach in to fix her. But there was so much that needed to happen. Even more than I could do. I had to rebuild her, redesign her, so she could fix herself. Twist and tweak her blood cells to let them restore her nervous system and replenish her and fight the problem. Make them multiply faster. Make them stronger. Tougher. More aggressive.

  Like a virus.

  Sixteen hours after I got her home her eyes fluttered. An hour later her right hand twitched. I collapsed from sheer exhaustion after forty-two hours of forcing every bit of my energy into her, but not before I saw her lips move and heard her body shift.

  I slept for thirty hours.

  It wasn’t her. I could see that as soon as I woke up. It was just a thing, still strapped to the gurney. The eyes were wrong. Flat. Meredith was gone. Dead. I’d just brought back her body, like some superpowered life-support machine, its jaws snapping at me. I should’ve destroyed it, but I couldn’t.

  It had her face.

  So I kept hoping one morning her eyes would be normal again, that her skin would be warm. And she never was.

  I had a funeral with an empty coffin. I went to work. I went out on patrol. I went to counseling. People everywhere told me how sorry they were for my loss and assured me things would get better if I just gave it time. That’s all I needed was time. And then I’d go home and feed the thing that had been my wife.

  One day, after six weeks of this, I came home and it was gone. Mrs. Halifax, our neighbor from two doors down, was dead on the dining room floor. She had a key, in case we needed her to feed the cats. There was a casserole dish near her right hand. Her right hand was six feet from her body, along with the rest of that arm where it had been gnawed through. She’d been gutted and eaten, by the look of her.

  I called the police. I think that was when the denial kicked in. I’d been at work the whole time and dozens of people could vouch for me. There was no evidence, so I couldn’t’ve done anything. Nothing but an empty stretcher in the living room, which a grieving doctor could explain with no problem.

  I did nothing wrong. The police agreed I’d done nothing wrong.

  That Saturday I heard about the woman attacking some Seventeens outside a movie theater. The woman who clawed and bit and ate an ear. The Channel 7 reporter said they put over twenty rounds into the woman before she stopped.

  They brought the body to our morgue. The face was gone. Most of the left hand had been shot off. But it still had Meredith’s hair, and the little scar under her right breast.

  I made sure she stayed a Jane Doe.

  Two weeks later I heard about another attack. Nine days after that the Mighty Dragon told me Stealth had called in Zzzap to help search the city for “some kind of infection.” By month’s end we had an uprising. The month after that it was a war.

  Then the war was over. And Meredith was still gone. And my powers were all but gone. And most of the world was gone.

  They’re going to find out. I try to slow down the tests, contaminate the samples, corrupt the data where I can. But there’s only so much I can do.

  Julie Connolly is a smart woman. Very smart. If the world hadn’t fallen apart she’d be a top doctor by now, I have no doubt. I think she suspects. She doesn’t know why I’m dragging my feet, can’t believe I’d be messing with results. But it’s nagging in the back of her mind. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me.

  They’re going to find out.

  And when they do, they’ll kill me.

  GORGON DROVE HIS FIST into Josh’s stomach again.

  The doctor slammed into the wall and his handcuffs chimed as he sank down to the lobby floor. “You have to understand,” he coughed. “I wasn’t … I just wasn’t thinking right. Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved?”

  “Yes,” growled Gorgon.

  They stood in the Roddenberry lobby, the closest Cerberus could get to Stealth’s office. As it was, the battlesuit rested on one knee, its head scraping the ceiling. Zzzap hovered nearby, lighting the entire lobby even as he charred the ceiling panels.

  Josh coughed again. “And what would you do, Nick?” he said. “If you could bring Kathy back right now, if you had that power, wouldn’t you use it? Wouldn’t you try to do it?”

  The goggles lowered to the floor.

  “I did what any of you would’ve done,” he told them. “George, w
ouldn’t you try to save someone if you had the power? I tried to save the woman I love and I … I made a mistake. That’s all. Just a mistake.”

  “You killed the world,” said Stealth. “Billions of people are dead because of what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  St. George was standing off to the side, still bare-chested, kneading his scalp with both hands. “So now what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He threw a glance at Josh. “What do we do with him? This is … Jesus, this is huge. This is war crimes huge.”

  “He makes Hitler look like a fucking saint,” muttered Gorgon.

  “Do we tell everyone? Do we lock him up forever? Do we …” St. George’s voice drifted off.

  “I think we’re missing the big issue here.” They all looked at Cerberus. “You started this. Can you stop it?”

  Josh turned to her. “What?”

  “This all stems from your powers. Can you undo what you did?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, of course not. I can’t un-heal someone. Don’t you think I would’ve done that years ago if I could?”

  This isn’t healing, though, said Zzzap. This is … this is just unnatural.

  “Unnatural,” smirked the doctor. “You’re a walking fusion reactor. George is bulletproof. Nick’s a fucking vampire, for Christ’s sake. And you’re saying I did something unnatural?”

  Gorgon was still looking at the floor. “Is it tied to you?”

  “What?”

  “You created all these things with your power. Even if you can’t stop them, are they still linked to you somehow?”

  Josh shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “There is a simple way to find out,” said Stealth.

  It was a scene from a Western. She pulled the Glock so fast, like a quick-draw artist, that there was no time to stop her. Josh’s forehead burst before most of them even realized she had the pistol out. St. George was just starting to lift his arm when the doctor’s eyes rolled back in his skull. Josh tipped over backward, hitting the wall just under the splatter. Blood poured out of his mouth and the ruined mass of his nose.

  “What the HELL!?!” shouted St. George over the echo of the third gunshot.

  Stealth looked at him as she holstered the pistol, and her voice almost sounded confused. “It seemed like the simplest solution to all our problems.”

  “You know, every time I start to think there’s really something human under that mask, you go off and—”

  Josh lunged up and took in a deep, rattling breath.

  Oh, Jesus, said Zzzap. Stealth had her pistol back out.

  Josh’s eyes trembled and swung back down. The irises shrank, focusing on Stealth. The bloody hole swelled, filled in, and sealed itself shut. His nose wove itself whole again. The doctor staggered back to his feet, his hand shaking as he felt the back of his head.

  Cerberus made a noise inside her armor that came out as a hiss of static.

  There was a coarse, scraping noise as the back of his skull knitted together and his nose pulled itself tight. He spat out a mouthful of blood and a tooth he’d already regrown. “Oh, come on,” he wheezed. “All I’ve been through and you think a few bullets are going to put me down? Don’t you think I tried that?”

  St. George glared at him. “You said your powers were gone.”

  “I can’t heal anyone else,” said the doctor. “Can barely even heal me. But it keeps me alive. Trust me, I’ve been trying for over a year. I’m here whether I like it or not.” He leered at them with mad eyes.

  “We’ll decide what to do with him later, then,” said Stealth. “Gorgon.”

  The goggles whisked open and his gaze pinned the doctor. Josh didn’t try to look away. He sank to the floor as Gorgon dragged out his life. The doctor began to twitch on the carpet.

  “That’s enough,” said St. George.

  Josh spasmed for a few more moments before the lenses snapped shut. Gorgon drove his boot into the fallen man’s head. “Just to be sure,” he told them.

  St. George shot him an angry look before turning to Stealth. “So what do we have?”

  She threw a blueprint of the Mount on the lobby floor and crouched next to it. “The walls are still secure, the fences are all reinforced, so the most likely attack points will be the Melrose gate, Bronson, and North Gower.”

  “What about Van Ness or Marathon?”

  “Too far east and north for a major assault,” she said. “We can leave regular guard units there. If the Seventeens have done any reconnaissance of their own they will know Marathon is sealed.”

  “So’s Bronson.”

  “Sealed to regular exes. If they are being guided by Casares we must assume they will be smarter and more resourceful. It is the next-closest gate after Melrose, the fence is low, and it is a very tempting target.”

  “I’d still like to see extra people at Van Ness,” said Gorgon.

  “You doubt my strategy?”

  “I doubt Rodney’s going to approach it as strategically as you are. He’s kind of an idiot when you get down to it.”

  “I was taking his lack of formal training into account.”

  Cerberus pointed a thick metal digit north of the studio. “Are we worried about Hollywood Forever?”

  Inside the hood, Stealth’s head shook. “The sheer height of the walls still protects us there. Regular numbers along that wall.”

  Gorgon tapped the blueprints. “If we break it down that way, we’ve got enough manpower for forty, maybe forty-five guards at each of these gates.”

  That’s it?

  He shrugged. “We don’t have an army. Fuck, we barely have a militia.”

  The battlesuit straightened up as best it could. “How many weapons do we have? We could ask for more volunteers.”

  “Maybe another hundred rifles in good condition,” said Gorgon. “If we can get people, we can use them.”

  I don’t think we need to worry about the exes that much, said Zzzap.

  They all looked at him. “Why not?”

  Well, everything we’ve seen this guy do is either individuals or groups that are all acting the same way, right?

  Stealth nodded.

  I’m betting he’s still got a human brain, said the wraith. Or a human mind, at least. I don’t think he can control lots of exes individually. It’s too much input and output for him to handle. Like playing an RTS video game. You can work with one unit, or you can click on a bunch and make them all do the same thing. But it’s impossible to manage more than two or three to do specific tasks.

  “Does he need to?” Gorgon shrugged. “They break open a gate and the exes are just going to do what he wants anyway.”

  Right, but I don’t think we need to worry about anything too elaborate. He’ll probably just move them to where they can do the most damage and that’ll be that.

  “A good possibility,” said Stealth. “This makes splitting our forces more advantageous. Casares will have to split his attention to deal with all of us.”

  St. George nodded. “Keep him off balance on multiple fronts and he won’t be able to focus.”

  “Correct. We know he has Cairax as an asset. The demon is still faster and stronger than humans, even as an ex, and also fireproof and bulletproof. Odds are he will focus some of his attention there.” She looked up at Gorgon. “His main focus seems to be capturing you, however. You and I will be at the Melrose gate. It will most likely be the primary point of their attack and where he will be.”

  Gorgon nodded. “I can play bait. Barry?”

  The burning silhouette turned to him.

  “Remind me to bounce something off you. I thought of it a while back. It just seemed a little weird to bring it up if we didn’t need to.”

  “St. George, you can monitor between Bronson and Van Ness,” continued Stealth. “It is a larger area but you are the most versatile of us. Stay on alert for Cairax as well. Cerberus and Zzzap, you will guard the North Gower
gate. If conditions permit, Zzzap can offer support to other crisis points. Cerberus?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think it’s time we re-armed you.”

  Inside the armor, Danielle smiled. “Finally.”

  The North Gower gate was set up in the same way as Melrose. A truck had been tipped against the sliding fence to block one side, and another backed up to hold it in place. The other half was left open in case they ever needed an exit.

  The walking dead filled the street as far as they could see in either direction. They packed every inch of the alley across Gower and the lower level of the parking structure. Dozens and dozens of exes stretched and clawed through the bars of the gate. Young and old, male and female, fresh and piecemeal. Where the truck blocked the entrance they flailed at the fiberglass walls with open palms. The sound was like an enormous drum.

  “That’s going to grate on the nerves,” said Cerberus. She shifted her stance and the armor reset dozens of targeting factors for her. After all this time, the M-2s felt heavy on her arms.

  Zzzap hovered over her, casting light over the gate and down Twelfth Street. Could be worse, he said. Can you imagine if they all moaned like in the movies?

  On top of the guard shack, Lady Bee shook her head. “You don’t know when to shut up, do you, hot stuff?”

  What? I’m just saying, as sieges go—

  “Stop talking,” said the battlesuit. “Just stop.”

  A line of twenty guards stood by the gate, rifles slung over their shoulders. As one they stepped forward and rammed their pikes and spears through the bars of the gate. The dead stiffened as their skulls cracked and their brains were shredded. Then the humans pulled their weapons free, stepped back, and lunged at the gate again even as more exes staggered forward.

  Lynne leaned against a lamppost, her dark hair fresh-shorn down to her scalp. She looked up at Zzzap. “Couldn’t you just go out and burn them all up by touching them or something?”