An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  The titan shrugged and its shoulders scraped on the chain-link fence. “I was going to once we were all alone, see, but Stealth kept hanging around with Dr. Morris and then she shut the suit off and it made me, like, sedated, y’know?”

  “Where the fuck are the Gatekeepers?” bellowed one of the soldiers. He looked at Barracks Eight a hundred yards away. “It’s been over ten minutes since the perimeter alarms went off.”

  One man with sergeant’s stripes and the name STEWART separated himself from the others. “Yates, Benton,” he snapped, “go find out what the hell is taking them so long. The rest of you, take up positions. You know the drill—single shot, pick your targets, now move.” He glared at St. George and whispered something into his radio.

  “Hey,” said the battlesuit. There was a squawk from the speakers and Cesar’s next words were a metallic whisper. The armored skull nodded at the sergeant. “I can hear that guy talking in my head. They’re coming for us, man. We gotta split.”

  Freedom and his squad burst from the old reactor complex and double-timed it across the base. Their pace would’ve made Olympic sprinters jealous. It didn’t feel fast enough.

  “Unbreakable Twenty-two,” he snapped into his radio. “This is Unbreakable Six.”

  “Unbreakable Six, this is Twenty-two,” came the reply.

  “Twenty-two, this is Six,” said Freedom. “Main gate, double-time. Hostiles inside and out.”

  “Six, this is Twenty-two. Understood. ETA five minutes.”

  It was going to take him six minutes to get all the way back across the base. Smith had suggested checking on Zzzap, and sure enough the electrical man was out. Sorensen was missing, too. He was supposed to be helping the base medics take care of Shelly. According to the soldiers on guard duty at the old reactor, the doctor had sided with the heroes. He’d led St. George there and helped free the prisoner.

  Freedom tried to think of himself as a rational man. It was one of his strengths as an officer. He knew hate was an irrational emotion. Nevertheless, there were things he hated. Cowardice was one. Betrayal was another. And he couldn’t think of a worse form of betrayal than treason.

  It was one of the few things he had in common with Smith.

  The agent had delivered the bad news. Shelly was not doing well. The colonel was hanging on, but his injuries were too great. “He may end up comatose,” Smith had said. “Can you believe that?”

  Freedom’s grip tightened on his Bravo, and he felt the comfortable weight of Lady Liberty on his hip. The super-beings from Los Angeles—he couldn’t call them heroes anymore—were going to pay for what they’d done here.

  St. George leaped thirty feet and landed next to a sign warning all visitors to declare weapons and electronics. He ripped the metal signpost out of the ground. His fingers crumbled the concrete mass at the end like a lump of dried mud. “Cesar, listen to me,” he said, soaring back to the fence. “You want to be part of the team, right?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “Here’s what I need you to do.” He bent the post into a large U shape. The sign got in the way, so he broke the rivets and tore it off the post. “I need you to find Danielle,” he said. “Dr. Morris. Head back to the workshop. If you find her, your job is to keep her safe. Got it?”

  “Got it? What about everyone else?”

  He pushed the U through one side of the gate. “If you find soldiers in trouble, help them out. If you find exes, just kill them.”

  The titan’s head tilted. “Kill ’em. All on my own?”

  St. George looked up at the armored skull as he worked the signpost around and out the other side of the gate. “While you’re in that suit you’ve got as much armor as a tank and you can rip a Hummer apart with your bare hands. You can handle exes with no problem.”

  “Right,” said the titan. “Okay. Still gettin’ used to this. What if I see Zzzap or Stealth?”

  “Tell Zzzap to make sure your batteries are good. If he asks, tell him …” He tried to think of a good code phrase while he twisted the signpost like an oversized garbage tie. The posts of the gate squealed and bent in until they touched. “Tell him I said you’re five by five.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s from one of his favorite shows. He made me watch four seasons’ worth of it. He’ll know what it means.”

  “Okay. And Stealth?”

  For a moment he considered telling Cesar to stay at the gate, but he knew the kid would be more useful searching the base. “Stealth can take care of herself,” he said. “Don’t worry about her. Find Danielle, find Zzzap, keep as many people safe as you can.”

  The gate was holding for now. Hopefully they wouldn’t need to open it soon. Close to a hundred exes lined the inner fence, with more pouring through the open outer gates. The soldiers had fallen into a good rhythm and bodies were piling up almost as fast as they trickled in.

  Almost as fast.

  He banged the titan on the shoulder. “Get going.”

  The battlesuit gave him a thumbs-up and charged away. St. George spotted Stewart. “Sergeant,” he yelled, “shouldn’t you have reinforcements by now?”

  The man gave him an angry glance and continued to direct the soldiers thinning out the dead.

  “Hey!” St. George took a small leap and sailed down to the ground in front of the sergeant. “I know I’m not high on the chain of command, but you’ve got a serious problem here.”

  “Sir,” Stewart barked, “we have things under control. Please step back.” He had two inches on the hero and he knew how to use it.

  St. George took a breath, counted to five, and let it slip out of his nostrils as smoke. “Have you ever seen exes talk before, sergeant?”

  It shook the sergeant for a moment, but he recovered. He didn’t answer.

  “I have, and nothing good came of it. We lost a lot of people. Friends.” He glanced over his shoulder at the base. “I don’t want the same thing to happen here.”

  The sergeant looked at the soldiers. “There should be a hundred men here,” he said. He pointed at Barracks Eight. “They’re the first responders for a perimeter alarm.”

  “And they’re not responding,” nodded St. George. “How long has it been since you sent those guys to investigate? About five minutes?”

  “Almost, but we haven’t heard anything.”

  “If they didn’t radio you, what would you have heard over all this?” The hero gestured at the soldiers picking targets through the fence. “I’m going to go check it out. Can you spare a radio?”

  Stewart opened his mouth, then paused. “I’m supposed to keep you under observation, sir,” he said.

  St. George gave another nod. “Feel free to observe me heading over to that barracks, then. When Captain Freedom gets here make sure he knows where I am, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He shot into the air and covered the hundred yards in seconds. Barracks Eight was silent. St. George was pretty sure someone was supposed to be standing guard duty, too. Billie Carter had called it the anti-fuckery patrol. The barracks across the street also didn’t have anyone standing guard.

  He stepped inside.

  The lobby was covered in blood. There were three dead bodies, two men and a woman. Their throats had been ripped open to kill them fast and quiet. He could see bloody handprints on the woman’s uniform where her arms had been held, and a smear across her face where they’d covered her mouth. One man’s jaw had been pried open until it snapped.

  There was a shuffling noise down the hall. Two ex-soldiers shambled toward him. Each one had a useless Nest device. Their teeth clacked together like a rock drummer banging his sticks before a song.

  “Anyone here?” he shouted. “Anyone? Help’s here.”

  Behind the exes the first-floor rooms were all open. He saw blood pooling in some of the doorways. A limp hand stretched out from one room.

  He counted to ten and heard nothing b
ut the click-click-click of teeth echoing through the building. Then a noise came from behind him.

  Freedom and a handful of super-soldiers stood in the main entrance. “Sergeant Pierce,” said the huge officer, “take your squad and return to the main gate. Provide tactical support and hold position there.”

  “Sir,” said the sergeant with a quick salute. A handful of men vanished back outside.

  Freedom took another step forward and raised his Bravo. “St. George, get down on your knees and place your hands on your head.”

  “Are you serious?” The hero shook his head. He heard the awkward footsteps of the exes in the hall behind him. “All this going on and you want to fight with me?”

  A Bravo roared and the zombie behind St. George was headless. Sergeant Kennedy stepped around the hero and twisted the skull of the other one. Two of the other super-soldiers, Franklin and Monroe, moved up on either side to cover her.

  And also, St. George noticed, to surround him.

  “There’s enough to deal with in our current crisis without having rogue elements on the base,” said Freedom. “Your partner is in custody. You will surrender now. Sir.”

  The hero’s face hardened. “You’ve got Stealth? Where?”

  “Last chance to surrender, sir.” He held the Bravo out at arm’s length.

  “You know that can’t hurt me, right?”

  “I do, sir,” said Freedom. “We’re going to do this one the old-fashioned way.”

  Kennedy slammed the steel stock of her rifle between the hero’s shoulder blades. The shock staggered St. George more than anything. He turned and she cracked him across the jaw with the weapon. His head snapped around and Franklin’s fist smacked into his face.

  The super-soldiers closed in on the hero.

  ZZZAP HAD CIRCLED the base three times. Exes were stumbling out of the hills and traipsing across miles of sand. The wide-open space made their numbers look like a lot less, but he knew he was seeing hundreds and hundreds of them. In another hour or two, at a guess, there’d be over five thousand of them surrounding the base.

  There were tons of them inside, too. He’d incinerated a dozen exes (and the corner of a building) with one blast and swung down to fly straight through a group of about twenty by the base’s post exchange. Most of them were left with cauterized stumps on top of their shoulders. The skull of one exploded like a grenade when he hit its cochlear implant. He shook for a minute afterward.

  He also couldn’t spot Danielle or Stealth anywhere. Stealth didn’t surprise him, but not being able to find Danielle was bothersome. It was so rare to see her out of the armor, especially when he was Zzzap, he wasn’t sure he even knew what she looked like.

  And he was starving. He almost never got hunger pangs in the energy form. It didn’t bode well for when he became solid again.

  Yeah, I know, he said to no one in particular. The wraith stopped in midair and glared off to the east. Look, why don’t you do something useful and figure out where Danielle is?

  After a moment he let out a buzzing sigh and continued along the fence line. He rounded the northeast corner of the base and saw the Cerberus armor. It was stomping down a back alley between one of the lab buildings and the hospital. Going off its body language, the titan looked lost and annoyed.

  It wasn’t Danielle inside, that was for sure. The suit might look the same in visible light, but Zzzap saw a handful of things that were wrong. The heat signature was different, the reactive sensors were shimmering in an odd way, and there was a strange electromagnetic haze around every system.

  He flitted down just as the battlesuit stepped out into the street that ran alongside the eastern fence. Hey, he said, did you ask anyone before you took that out of your mom’s closet?

  The helmet tilted up to look at him. “Bro,” it cheered. “Man, am I glad to see you.”

  I’m sure the feeling would be mutual if I had any idea who you are. So who are you? You’re not Army or they wouldn’t’ve been chasing you.

  “It’s me, Cesar. From the Mount.”

  Who?

  “Cesar Mendoza. I work on the trucks. I used to be one of the Seventeens.”

  The wraith flew back a few feet and raised his palm. Not a great character reference to pull out.

  “It’s okay, bro. Same team. St. George, he vouches for me.”

  Got anything to back that up with?

  The titan nodded its huge skull. “Yep. He said I was … damn, something from a television show.” It reached up a hubcap-sized hand and scratched its head. “He said you guys watched a bunch of seasons together. That’s how you’d know I was okay.”

  What show was it?

  “Oh, come on, man. I don’t even think he told me the name.” The battlesuit snapped its fingers, a noise like a hammer hitting an anvil. “I’m five. He said to tell you I’m five. That sound right?”

  It sets the stage for some IQ jokes, but that’s about it.

  “About time you stopped, you bastard.”

  Danielle half jogged out of the alley to the west. She gave the Cerberus armor a glare and looked like she might take a swing at Zzzap. “I’ve been chasing you for fifteen minutes now.”

  Hey, he said. I’ve been looking for you, too.

  “So have I,” chimed the battlesuit.

  “Here’s a tip,” she panted at the gleaming wraith. “If you want someone to reach you, try moving at less than three hundred miles an hour.”

  Ahhh. Didn’t think of that. Sorry.

  She rested her hands on her knees. “I think I’m going to puke.” She glanced up at the titan. “What the hell are you doing in my armor? Are you Army?”

  “Nope,” said the suit. “I’m the Driver. Maybe St. George told you about me?”

  He said he’s from the Mount.

  “The Mount? How’d he get here?”

  “Well, y’see, I switched into the helicopter while we were loading the suit up yesterday morning. Then I managed to—”

  He’s been babbling a lot. The wraith tilted his head at the armor then back to Danielle. You want him out?

  “Hey, whoa,” said the titan. The metal fingers came up, spread wide. “Same team, bro. Same team!”

  “I wouldn’t complain about it,” she said. “Then we need to figure out how to get me in—”

  “Guys, seriously,” said the titan, “you don’t want to do anything rash, because—”

  Check this out, said Zzzap. He pushed his palm forward. There was a crackle of static, a flash of light, and Cesar flew out of the back of the suit. He hit the wall of the lab building and collapsed to the dirt. Cerberus froze up like a statue.

  “Whoa!” shouted Danielle. “How the hell did you do that?”

  Something I’d been playing with. Opposite charges attract, like charges repel. So all I needed to do was match his frequency and—

  “No, I mean how did you throw him out of the suit?”

  Oh, said Zzzap. I thought we were on the same page. He wasn’t wearing the suit, he was in it, like a virus or static buildup or something.

  She looked at the groggy youth. “So you’ve been inside the suit all this time?” Her brow furrowed. “You were in the suit while I was wearing it?”

  “Look,” said Cesar, “this is a little weird for all of us, yeah, but—”

  “On your knees,” bellowed the armored titan. It stomped into an offensive posture and raised its fists. Arcs of electricity raced across its knuckles as the stunners fired up. “On your knees now and put your hands behind your heads!”

  “Yeah, tried to tell you,” Cesar muttered from the ground. “There’s another guy in there.”

  They’d halted the dead at the front gate. And no one else had died. That was the best Sergeant Stewart could say.

  Once St. George tied the gate shut with the signpost, they’d been able to get the exes under control. Ammunition was too low to get the upper hand, though. All the soldiers could do was break even, dropping the exes at about the same rate they were r
eaching the fence line.

  Plus the gate was coming apart. Little by little. Under Legion’s command, the exes threw their massed weight right at the gap of St. George’s knot and the simple gate hinges were squeaking again and again. Once he even caught a few of the dead men and women clawing at one of the lower hinges. They were trying to pry apart the riveted metal.

  When they noticed him staring, they’d all winked at him and leered.

  Then Staff Sergeant Pierce had shown up with a squad of the Unbreakables to take control, and Stewart breathed a faint sigh of relief. If nothing else, the twin mantles of leadership and responsibility were lessened a bit.

  The suppressive fire halted while the super-soldiers reinforced the gate with the sandbags from the machine-gun pits. They tossed the fifty-pound bags the way regular men would throw a beer to one another, even Pierce with his forearm in a splint. The bags piled up against the gate and held it steady. Withered arms clawed at them.

  Then the gunfire began again and Pierce’s men added their own weapons to the noise. The Bravos cut exes apart with short, vicious bursts. Bodies were falling faster than they were arriving.

  Stewart heard the roar of an engine behind him, and his confidence swelled again. The truck from the armory was here with fresh ammunition. In just a few minutes things were going to be under control.

  It wasn’t a truck. Not even a jeep. It was one of the Guardians from the motor pool, building up speed fast. One soldier was lugging a case of ammo and was sucked under the vehicle’s wheels in a windmill of surprised, broken limbs.

  The armored car roared past Stewart, aimed straight at St. George’s knot. He caught a quick glimpse of the driver. It was a grinning soldier with pale skin and a green box on the side of its head.

  In the lobby of Barracks Eight, Truman, Franklin, and Monroe took turns pounding on St. George with their rifle stocks. They started on his back, and when he tried to get away Jefferson grabbed his leg and flipped him over. The metal stocks were nicked and dented where they’d hit his bones. He rolled to the side to dodge one of Truman’s blows. The rifle cracked the tile floor and the concrete beneath it.