An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  “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 it. 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 toward 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 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, and 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 nonperishables, 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.

  Hector stepped up onto Road Warrior’s liftgate and paused. He looked back and forth up the street. “What is that? Is that … flies?”

  Lynne cocked her head to the side. “It’s not flies. Bees, maybe, or hornets?”

  “It’s not insects,” said St. George with a shake of his head. “Too steady. It almost sounds like …”

  He rocketed thirty feet into the air. “Grab the flare gun!” he shouted down at them. “Red flare, fast!”

  Jarvis fumbled in his pack. “What the hell is it?”

  “No way,” said Lady Bee. Her eyes were wide and she smiled as the droning sound grew louder. “No way!”

  “It’s a plane!” shouted St. George, going higher into the sky.

  IF YOUR PARENTS gave you a name
like Augustus Phillip Hancock, you’d’ve joined the Army, too. Trust me. When I turned eighteen, I wanted to be anywhere but Little Rock, so when Eddie said he was going to sign up I did, too.

  Now, I ain’t supposed to tell anyone about this. When I got pulled into Project Krypton last year, still a fuzzy right out of boot camp, they had us sign a bunch of waivers and security paperwork. Nobody with wives or kids. Nobody who was an only child. Then they shipped us off to Yuma, which I can say is dead center in the middle of nowhere. A woman from Broadsword Company said she’d heard the whole project used to be based at Natick, like you’d expect, but it’d gotten so big they had to set up a whole sub-base out at Yuma for it. One of the fellas said the little base should be called Kandor, and two or three fellas thought that was really funny, but I didn’t get the joke.

  One of the fellas in Broadsword also said all the paperwork we’d filled out was the same stuff they use for suicide missions, but I think that’s bullshit. Although, looking back at it, maybe it ain’t.

  I was one of the lucky ones. Turns out my company, Greyhound, was the control group. We were eating sugar pills and getting shots of saline water. Apparently they can just stick that in you and it doesn’t do much of anything.

  So, yeah, Greyhound was lucky. Angel and Devil Companies, too. Well, kind of. They’re all getting dialysis or something for a few weeks. They weren’t getting sugar pills and saline.

  Broadsword are the fellas that got screwed. Their company had the biggest concentration of the stuff the old doc was giving us. It didn’t go over well. I’ve heard them talking about all the stuff Angel and Devil are getting, plus marrow transplants and hormone therapy and stuff. None of them are complaining though. We all know what happened to Lucas and Jacobs, and ain’t nobody wants to go through that.

  Well, none of us know officially. But we were all there for the start of it, and Eddie works in the medical wing. He saw how they ended up. So we all know.

  At first it seemed great. All of Broadsword Company was bulking up, getting stronger, just like the old doc wanted. Then they all started getting cramps. And they were … swelling. You know those fellas who get crazy ripped? The ones who hit the gym every day and do contests and stuff? It was like that. Their arms and legs were getting bigger, and stretching their skin so it was creepy tight and their veins stood out. And they weren’t even working out much.

  It hit Jacobs first. He just got itchy. He tried to be a good soldier, suck it up and not let it get to him, but it kept getting worse. After two days his eyes were watering. Not crying, just watering bad.

  Third day we told him he had to go see the doc. He was pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those Southern weirdos who say beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the first sergeant. Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it was pulled so tight.

  We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas came along, too, ’cause he’d started to feel itchy, and now he was worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was still there. We heard it all from him later.

  Apparently the old doc’s serum didn’t work like he hoped. Remember how I talked about the crazy ripped fellas? You ever see them when they’re so big they can’t put their arms down? I think that’s what they mean by muscle-bound. Well, that’s what was happening to Lucas and Jacobs. Their muscles were growing out of control. Four days after we took them down there, Eddie told us they couldn’t even move anymore. Their arms and legs were just big sausages of muscle. They looked fat because their abs were getting so big, and they couldn’t lie flat because their glutes and shoulders were twisting their backs up. And their skin was still splitting. It couldn’t grow as fast as the muscles were, so they were getting some kind of sharkskin grafts or something.

  On the fifth day they started screaming. We heard it all over the base. Turns out their bones were growing, too, but they weren’t growing fast enough, either. They kept getting crushed between muscles or stretched apart as the muscles kept getting bigger and thicker. “It’s like their bodies’ve turned into torture racks,” Eddie said one night when he got back to the barracks. “They’re being pulled apart by their own muscles.”

  They screamed for three days straight. Eddie told me over chow they’d gotten so big it took huge doses of painkillers just to make them stop screaming. The whole thing was freaking him out. He’d snuck his phone in and showed me a picture of this swollen red thing that looked like a fat grub. He said it was Jacobs, and that his skull’d been pushed off his neck by all the muscles, but he was still alive ’cause it hadn’t actually broken his spinal cord yet. “If they can fix him,” Eddie said, “he’s still gonna be a cripple for the rest of his life.”

  On day nine they stopped screaming. All at once. On day ten we were told Jacobs and Lucas had died in the line of duty. They’d be given full honors. And the old doc was gone. Eddie said he’d heard Colonel Shelly and the higher brass were furious, and the doc had pretty much fled from the base.

  Anyway, we all figured that was it for Project Krypton. Three-fourths of us out of commission one way or the other. One company left. We got three days to wonder about it and then we met the new doc at a big briefing. There was this young fella with him in a dark suit, Smith from Homeland, and he smiled a lot and gave this little speech and introduced us all to Dr. Sorensen.

  The new doc’s the flipside of the old doc. The old doc was actually a young fella, not much older than any of us. He was some hotshot scientist, and kind of an asshole, to be honest. The new doc’s an older fella who feels like he should be a cool uncle or something. He’s got a big gray beard and glasses and he talks like a teacher.

  They were redoing Krypton from the ground up. Nothing was going to be the same but the name. It was going to be a whole new process. That made a lot of people rumble. But Sorensen stopped that real quick before the first sergeant could bark at us.

  “These are not going to be experiments,” he told us. “I will not be putting any of you brave men and women at risk. These are all established procedures, using tested drugs and chemicals. With some of you the treatments will take and with some they will not. But there will be no risk of … of what happened before I got here.”

  Then the first sergeant got up. He told us we’d done our duty and everyone here had carried out the requirements we’d signed up for. Even though they were keeping the number, as far as the Army was concerned this was going to be something new and the 456th was being disbanded. If we wanted out, we’d be debriefed and reassigned. We had until tomorrow morning to decide. He dismissed us.

  The young fella, Smith, started working the crowd. He was shaking hands, asking questions, kissing asses. He shook mine and asked if I was going to stick around and I told him, yeah, I probably was. I said probably but I think even then I knew I was going to be part of Project Krypton for the long haul. It just felt like I belonged there.

  I moved to the front of the room and realized a few fellas from Greyhound were behind me. I think we’d all been ready to get a new assignment. Yuma was boring as hell, and we’d all joined up to go overseas and kick some al-Qaeda ass. If Smith hadn’t said anything, I think we all would’ve walked out of the room and started packing. Now it was almost a pride thing to finish what we started.

  Colonel Shelly was having a talk up front with the new doc. If it was anyone else, I’d say an argument, but I knew the colonel didn’t do arguments. Or excuses.

  First Sergeant Paine was there. He locked eyes with me and I knew enough to stop where I was and stand at atten
tion. I heard the fellas lock up behind me, too. A couple fellas call him First Sergeant Bring-the-Paine, but not if he’s anywhere nearby. So we stood there for a few minutes while they talked and didn’t do anything except listen.

  “You can’t just throw him out,” the new doc was saying. “He was in the Broadsword trials for four months.”

  “And now he’s out of them, doctor,” Colonel Shelly said, “just like everyone else.”

  “It’s not that simple. The drugs and artificial hormones that idiot was filling them with are all through his system. They’re stored up in his fat cells waiting for him to have a flashback.”

  “You said he was clean. You also said if they never had any reaction during the testing, odds are they never would.”

  “In theory yes, but there’re always going to be residual traces in his kidneys, his skin, his fat cells. His tests said he was clean, but like anyone with a history of drug use, weight loss could cause a flashback and then it’s all back in his system again.”

  “Well, hypothetically, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sorensen. “I’m still not sure what caused the reaction in Jacobs and Lucas. There’re a dozen possible triggers. Stress. Adrenaline. A disease that strains his system. Potentially, any of it could cause spurts of muscle and bone growth.”

  “And what are the odds?”

  “It could happen, isn’t that enough?”

  “Could it?” said Colonel Shelly. “Could it really?”

  “The chances are slim I admit, but—”

  “Slim is fine by me. He’s insubordinate, he struck an officer, and he’s out. He can go home and the LAPD can deal with him. If he has a reaction, it’ll kill him and then no one has to deal with him.” The colonel turned and walked away.

  The new doc shook his head and followed him. “I still think it’s a mistake,” he said as he walked away.

  “Specialist,” First Sergeant Paine said. He was giving me that look. “What’s your purpose here?”