by Peter Clines
“This was a lot easier when I used to go out with you,” she said.
St. George glanced up at the armored head. “You never liked doing it.”
“Never said I did. I just said it used to be easier.” Cerberus shrugged her massive shoulders and looked away from the cross. “Let’s get it over with.”
A few of the guards pulled the additional support legs from the bars. Two others, Derek and Makana, flexed their hands inside heavy gloves and stood ready to grab the steel pipe that rested across the two halves of the gate. The exes reached for them, and each man batted dead fingers away.
St. George glanced back at Road Warrior. The truck’s engine idled and Luke flashed the headlights at him. The hero gave the driver a thumbs-up and shot into the air.
He sailed up and over the tall arch of the gateway. He kicked a few exes as he landed in the wide intersection and they pinwheeled away, knocking down others as they went. The hungry dead turned toward him and stumbled away from the gate.
St. George let them get close. They tried to drag him down and broke teeth on his stone-hard skin. He batted them away with a sweep of his arm and they flew back to crash through the horde. He threw punches and felt skulls shatter under his knuckles. He grabbed a body by the shoulder and swung it around, battering even more exes to the ground. His boots came down to smash their heads. Within two minutes of landing he’d cleared two dozen of them.
The gate squeaked open behind him, and he heard the deep thump of heavy footsteps. Cerberus strode out, her three-fingered hands letting off arcs of power. Exes couldn’t feel pain, but the nerves were still there. A 200,000-volt blast along those nerves would cripple their muscles long enough to drop them. The titan swept her hubcap-sized palms across the mob by the gate, and they dropped at her touch. They were struggling back to their feet when she marched over them and waved Road Warrior out behind her. The truck rolled forward and crushed exes beneath its thick dually tires. She gestured it past her and it rolled up to the intersection.
St. George leaped back over the truck, landing next to Cerberus. From the back, Jarvis tossed a long pike down to him. “Get going,” the hero said. “I’ll catch up.”
Road Warrior revved its engines and turned onto Melrose. Some of the scavengers saluted St. George and Cerberus as they pulled out, and a few waves came from the guards walking the walls.
Behind them, the hero grabbed the pike by one end and knocked down a wide swath of exes. The armored titan slammed out a punch that went through an ex’s head and caved in a skull behind it. They cleared a path back to the gate, where the guards fended off exes with more pikes.
An opening appeared and Cerberus strode through it. The gate clanged shut behind her, and Derek and Makana dropped the bar back into its brackets. St. George nodded to them through the bars, batting exes away as he did. “Everyone okay?”
“Piece of cake, boss,” said Derek.
“Cerberus?”
The titan turned and looked down at him. “Burned up about a fifth of my reserves with the stun fields, but no problems otherwise.” The armored skull shifted, and St. George knew she was looking at the cross again.
“Okay, then. See you all tonight. Watch for flares.”
A few more salutes were tossed his way and St. George flew up into the sky. The withered fingers of exes dropped away from him.
ST. GEORGE CAUGHT UP with Road Warrior three blocks away as they were crossing Vine. Work crews had stacked cars right down the center line of the street. The Big Wall, as people called it, was still a few months from being done, but here the cars were already three high. The rare times Danielle wasn’t in the Cerberus armor she worked with a few others to figure out how to build some kind of gate here at Melrose and Vine. For now it was a large opening two lanes across.
He soared above the big truck for a while, watching the road ahead for blockages or crowds of exes. The path was clear most of the way to Highland. They’d dragged most of the cars away to use in the Big Wall. A pair of zombies stumbled into the street at Ivar, and Road Warrior plowed over them. The hero flew a block ahead and landed at a gas station where the two big streets crossed.
Highland Avenue was one of the main thoroughfares of Hollywood. There’d been a lot of fighting here during the Zombocalypse as people trying to flee choked the street with cars. They’d been attacked either by exes or other panicked people trying to escape them. The people of the Mount had come out here more than a few times on scavenging runs. At different times he and Cerberus had pushed cars out of the way or even double-stacked them in places. The way was clear up Highland, but it was narrow. Very narrow in some places.
St. George waited for Road Warrior to catch up, and a minute later the big truck pulled up alongside him. Luke grinned at him from the cab. “Need a ride, sailor?”
“I was hoping you were heading my way,” said the hero. “See anything?”
The driver shook his head. “Nah, clean sailing. You taking point?”
He nodded and banged the truck’s hood. “How’s it holding up?”
“She’s a beast,” said Luke, “but she’s dependable. She’ll get us over the hill and back.” He shook his head. “You know, there was a point when I’d make this run once or twice a day without thinking about it.”
St. George smiled. “There was a time when all I worried about were muggers and car thieves.”
Luke grinned and gunned the engine. Road Warrior swung around the corner and headed north. “Donuts,” someone moaned as they passed a shop. “I still don’t know if it’s worth living in a world with no more donuts.” It got a few chuckles.
The drive up Highland was uneventful. St. George needed to push a few cars out of the way that had tumbled from where they’d been stacked, so he balled up his leather jacket and tossed it up to Lady Bee. A handful of exes stumbled up to the truck when it slowed down and the scavengers piked them through their skulls. They came across a Prius and two electric cars, and St. George marked their roofs with a large white X of spray paint he could see from the air. Gas was still a limited resource.
“This blows,” said Hector in the back of the truck. “We ever going to go over five miles an hour?”
Billie clenched her jaw and her right fist.
“It’s tricky going too fast in the city,” Jarvis said before she could respond. “A year or so back, there was a buncha troublemakers who left booby traps all over the place. Spike chains, deadfalls, stuff like that. Wouldn’t want to hit one of those at speed and get stuck out here, would we?”
He stared at Hector. The tattooed man stared back for a moment, then blinked. “Sound like a bunch of punks to me,” said Hector. The corners of his mouth curled up. “Was up to me, I would’ve smacked their asses down hard.” He drove his pike through the head of a gore-covered girl who was clawing at the side of the truck.
Another chuckle worked its way through the scavengers.
It took them an hour to get up past Hollywood and Highland. The famous intersection was a mess of broken glass, sun-faded billboards, and dead cars. Luke inched the big vehicle between the burned-out remains of a National Guard Humvee and a pileup involving half a dozen cars and trucks. A few yards past the intersection, St. George braced his back against an eighteen-wheeler cab on half-rotted tires. He pushed it out of the way inch by inch, his boots scraping on the pavement.
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 drift
ed 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,” said Lee, “it means things can’t get any worse.”
A handful of exes staggered between the mess of cars in the lot and stumbled toward 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 cinder-block 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 either by 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 minuscule 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’re some apartments farther 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,” said the tattooed man, nodding. “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.