An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  The watch is this big, gold thing. A retirement watch, I think. It’s like a bracelet on my wrist, even when I make it small. It looks expensive.

  February still doesn’t make any sense. Dad said the desert was freezing in the winter. It’s cold, but I don’t think I could’ve been walking around half-naked and with no food for three days. Although it doesn’t feel really cold now. Maybe the date on the watch isn’t right? Do digital watches go fast when they start to run out of power? That doesn’t make sense. Things go slower, right?

  My feet hurt and they look bruised. I think I’ve been walking a lot. For a long time. But they’re not cold. Shouldn’t they be cold if it’s really February?

  I just had an awful thought. What if it really has been seven months somehow? I was looking back through my diary and the last entry said I was going to keep heading north. But what if I found something and started heading south again? Or east or west? If I didn’t write it down I’d just wake up and head north again. I could’ve been walking back and forth for seven months now!!!

  Mom and Dad might think I’m dead!! They don’t know I’m wandering around out here with a head trauma or something!

  I’m on top of a Ford Explorer tonight. It’s all locked up tight and there’s a body behind the wheel and another one in the backseat. The one in the backseat is twitching but it can’t smell me, so it isn’t really reacting.

  I think there’s a city a couple miles north of here. There’s a big sign another two miles down the road from here. I can’t make out a lot of details. Far away things look hazy, like there’s thin clouds in the air or something. Or maybe it’s me. My eyes hurt like I’ve got a couple cat hairs stuck under my eyelids or something. I tried rubbing them all morning and it didn’t help. The old guy with the glasses and the watch had a little bottle of eyedrops. They helped a lot, but the far stuff is still hazy.

  Can a head injury make you nearsighted?

  February 23rd, 2010

  Dear Diary,

  This is messed up.

  I woke up and found a big gold watch on my arm. It said it was February 23rd, which I knew was wrong because yesterday was August 3rd. But then I sat down tonight to write in here and the last entry was dated the 15th. And I read it and I remembered the truck and finding the watch and that was yesterday. I’m sure it was yesterday and I’m only remembering days wrong.

  I think this watch might be broken. I read the last entry, but I just can’t believe five days slipped by without me knowing about it. I need another watch. That way I can tell if this one is right or not. A control watch, that’s what Dad would say.

  It’d be easy to find a watch in a city, but there’s no sign of that city I mentioned in the last entry. I climbed up on the roof of this big-rig to look for it. I’m back in the middle of the desert again. No sign of any big population centers. No road signs.

  I wonder if I should start making a list of cars and trucks. Or just their license plates. I could use them as landmarks so I can tell if I’m doubling back over somewhere I’ve been before.

  I wonder if I got into the city, wherever it was, and didn’t have time to write anything. They’re all probably overrun with exes at this point. I might have just been dodging undead the whole time.

  I wonder if I should try to find a gun. Maybe a shotgun or something, or some pistols so I can go all Milla Jovovich on any undead I find. I’ve never fired a gun before. I mean, I’ve played GTA and some Call of Duty, but I don’t think that counts.

  I wonder where Mom and Dad are. I wonder if they’re looking for me. I hope they’re okay and not too worried.

  February May 21st ???? 23rd WHO CARES?!?

  Oh God!!! Oh God this can’t be right!! I can’t be one of them. They don’t have minds! They can’t think or feel or anything. That’s what Dad told me. He said they were just corpses. Just corpses walking around because of a virus.

  There was a gas station and I thought I could spend the night because there’s no exes here except. There’s a big mirror by the register so you can see people behind you.

  I can see the mirror. I’m looking at myself in the mirror right now. I can see my skin and my eyes. I look like them.

  I want Mom and Dad! They’ll still love me. Dad can fix this. He’s one of the smartest people in the world. That’s why they hired him. He can fix it!

  I CAN’T BE DEAD!!!!!!!!!!

  “BOSS,” ILYA SHOUTED over the gunfire, “it’s worse!”

  He pointed behind them, to the north side of the street. More exes were stumbling out of a nearby storefront that might have been a Blockbuster at one point and a pizza place on the south corner. Exes wearing helmets. Some of them even had tactical vests and other scraps of body armor.

  There were another hundred of them, at least. Maybe even two hundred. With the ones already swarming around Big Blue, that meant close to a thousand. The sound of clicking teeth almost drowned out the truck’s engine.

  The scavengers had driven into the valley through the Cahuenga Pass and followed the road all the way into Sherman Oaks. St. George and Cerberus were along as escorts. There hadn’t been any problems until they passed the pair of gas stations flanking Van Nuys Boulevard. There was a minor pileup of four or five cars down the road at the next intersection—nothing compared to some of the trainwrecks across Los Angeles—and the armored titan had gone ahead to deal with it.

  Cerberus had tossed two of the cars against the side of the road and the noise had attracted a handful of exes. Two of them staggered over from a street-side patio and another pair stumbled out from behind an oversized pickup truck. She batted one of them away with the BMW she was holding and dropped the car on another. A quick kick from the battlesuit sent a motorcycle skidding and sparking across the pavement to knock down the others.

  Then more had staggered out of the Second Spin store to the south, and some pushed out of the comic shop to the north. A lot more than should’ve been in such places. They piled out of the novelty gift shop with the tattered banner and the Panda Express and the Sprint store. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Far too many with military helmets protecting their skulls.

  Most of the scavengers were in the back of their truck. Billie, Jarvis, and a former Project Krypton soldier named Taylor stood around the half-lowered tailgate. Taylor was swearing between every shot. They’d started calling out targets as they fired, but the calls came slow as people took more time to line up. More than a few were called out twice as bullets flicked off the exes’ headgear or lost too much force to penetrate.

  Cerberus had tried to use the stunners built into her gauntlets but with the slow gunfire from the scavengers the dead overwhelmed her faster than she could put them down. St. George leaped over Big Blue to land near the titan and the two of them battered the exes back. They’d held back the tide as best they could.

  And then Ilya had seen all the other exes pouring into the road behind them.

  No question about it, St. George thought. Legion had figured out how to set a half-decent trap. He wasn’t supervising it, but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t difficult to predict what would happen when a bunch of exes surrounded a dozen or so humans.

  The hero soared back over the truck and landed a few yards behind it. A bullet smacked into his shoulder and he glanced back. “Sorry, sir,” shouted Taylor. “You got in my shot.”

  “Striped suit,” shouted Ilya from the truck, lining up on his target.

  “Teenybopper,” called out someone else.

  “Red shirt,” Lady Bee yelled from her perch on top of the truck’s cab.

  “Press pass.”

  “Parking enforcement,” called Jarvis with a bit of glee.

  St. George brought the edge of his hand around like an ax and chopped through an ex’s neck. Its head wobbled in the air and dropped to the pavement. He whipped around just as a teenage boy in a camo-wrapped helmet grabbed his other hand and started to gnaw on it. The dead thing’s teeth broke against his skin and clicked against the pavem
ent. He grabbed it by the shoulder and hurled it at the crowds spilling out of the Blockbuster.

  A trio of exes stumbled toward him, their jaws snapping open and closed. A pair of gunshots rang out and thudded off the Kevlar helmets. The dead men stumbled for a moment from the impact, then lurched forward again. The hero heard Taylor swearing behind him.

  He drove his knuckles through the closest one’s face and it dropped off his fist. One of the stumblers, a dead woman, grabbed at his arm. Two of its teeth—implants, probably—were still whole and brilliant white among the cracked gray stumps. He slammed his hand against the ex’s chest and sent it flying back. The body knocked down three or four others before it hit the ground. He slammed his hands together and crushed the skull of the last one, helmet and all.

  There were too many of them. He’d put down two dozen, the scavengers had dropped another forty at least, and they hadn’t made a dent in the horde. The body armor was making them harder to kill. Just hard enough. He didn’t think it was going any better at the front of the truck.

  He backhanded another ex away. “Cerberus,” he shouted. “Get back on board.”

  From this angle, St. George could only see the titan’s blue and platinum skull and its broad shoulders over the truck. A little over a foot of bulky, armored spine was visible on its back. Cerberus grabbed an ex in either hand, slammed them together, then looked back at St. George. “There’s too many up front,” she bellowed.

  Billie hopped up onto the tailgate and stomped twice. “Turn us around, Luke,” she shouted.

  “Fucking comic-book guy,” growled Taylor. He put a round in an overweight ex in a Superman T-shirt and cracked its helmet. The zombie fell over backward.

  The truck’s engine revved and it lurched forward. An ex that had made it past Cerberus, a bulky man with blood-splattered eyeglasses under its helmet, dropped under the bumper and the large tires crushed its legs and one arm. Taylor and Jarvis took a few steps, keeping close to the tailgate while they called out more targets.

  St. George grabbed a dead man by the neck and waist, lifted the ex up, and marched forward with it like a battering ram. Other exes tried to reach past the body and became a tangle of grasping arms and snapping jaws. He heaved and sent a score of them sprawling back. Their bodies tripped another dozen heading for the truck.

  A quartet of the undead wrapped their arms around St. George in a group hug. The hero shrugged them off and hammered his fists down hard on their helmets. The impact cracked helmets and crushed three of their skulls. The fourth, a girl in a soccer uniform, he batted away. She plowed into another ex and they both tumbled back into a third.

  Big Blue was halfway through a three-point turn. Taylor had leaped up onto the tailgate. Jarvis was still walking alongside it. The truck surged back again and knocked down another ex with the edge of the tailgate.

  The air tingled and St. George heard the crackle of electricity over the chatter of teeth. Cerberus was firing up her stunners again. Arcs twisted around the titan’s gauntlets and exes dropped at her touch.

  An ex reached for St. George. He grabbed the claw-like hand and swung the dead thing into the air, bringing it around like a club. He swung it once to the left and once back to the right, knocking down a dozen zombies as he did. The ex broke apart on his third swing, its cartilage crumbling like old jerky.

  He spread his arms wide and marched away from the truck. He caught three exes against himself. The one by his face was a Latina with chalky eyes and no helmet. The dead woman tried to bite his face and its teeth scraped off his nose. St. George snapped his head forward to crack its skull.

  The ex slumped against him and was pinned there when he walked it back into another one. He was pushing six exes at two steps, ten of them at four, and by the time he shrugged them off almost twenty exes were knocked to the ground.

  They were already closing back in around him. He leaped into the air and they reached after him with withered fingers. He pushed himself through the air, back to the truck, and a half-dozen exes tipped over as they tried to twist and follow him. A tall one latched onto his boot and he dragged it a few yards before it dropped away.

  “Son of a bitch!” shouted Jarvis. There was a sharp edge to his voice. The older man kicked his leg and swung his rifle down to shoot something on the ground. At point-blank range, its helmet did nothing against a rifle round. St. George got a quick look at the twisted thing before its head exploded. It was the ex Big Blue had run over, still wearing the red-flecked glasses. It had used its one good arm to crawl under the swerving truck to where Jarvis stood.

  The salt-and-pepper man swore again. A wet stain blossomed on his left calf, just above his boot. He stumbled and grabbed the edge of the lift gate as the truck shifted gears again.

  He’d been bitten. Bad, from the look of it.

  “Get him in the truck,” shouted St. George. “Now!” He flew down, grabbed another ex that had gotten close to Jarvis, and hurled it away.

  Taylor had been part of the same super-soldier program that had given Captain Freedom his enhanced physique. He wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as Freedom, but he was still three or four times stronger than most of the people in Los Angeles. He grabbed Jarvis by the collar, heaved, and set him down in the back of the truck. Bee leaped down from the top of the cab and pulled a first-aid kit from her shoulder bag.

  Big Blue lurched back and Cerberus stepped up onto the lift gate. The truck’s suspension sagged and squealed. “Go,” shouted Ilya, banging on the back of the cab.

  St. George hurled back a last few exes as the truck surged forward. He grabbed one ex by the throat, a dark-skinned woman with a gash in her cheek. The corpse smirked at him.

  “Still feel smart, dragon man?”

  It let out a coarse chuckle. The hero brought his fist around and shattered the dead woman’s jaw. The laugh echoed from a dozen exes around him. He lashed out and destroyed four more. Legion laughed at him the whole time.

  Big Blue was a block away and picking up speed. St. George flew after the truck and landed in the bed next to Cerberus. “How bad is it?”

  “Just a scratch,” Jarvis said through clenched teeth.

  “It’s bad,” said Bee. “Think it might’ve hit a vein.” She was crouched next to Jarvis. Hector de la Vega was across from her. He’d slashed open the bloody jeans to expose the bite and held the leg up in the air.

  The ex hadn’t taken any meat, but it had sunk its teeth in deep. Bee washed the wound clean with a bottle of water and half the liquid ran down to stain Jarvis’s crotch. For a moment the ragged bite pattern was visible on his calf and some of the loose flesh flopped back and forth like a dying fish. Then more blood streamed out and splashed onto the wooden planks that made up the back of the truck. She pulled a second bottle from her pack, hydrogen peroxide, and the wound sizzled. Jarvis hissed and twisted his face.

  Bee tore his jeans open more, felt her way up his leg, and pushed her fingers into his inner thigh. The salt-and-pepper man grunted and set his jaw. “Sorry,” she said. “Got to slow the blood flow.”

  “Cheer up,” said Hector. “Least they’re not cutting limbs off anymore.”

  “Yeah,” said Bee. “Now first aid just means I grope you for the ride home.”

  Jarvis forced a grim smile. “It too late to request the amputation?”

  “Watch it,” she shot back. She slapped a wad of gauze over the bite with her free hand and pressed down hard. The gauze turned red under her fingers.

  The truck rolled past a grocery-store parking lot. A few exes between the dusty cars turned their heads to follow the vehicle. They took staggering steps to chase it but it had already driven on before they covered a few feet.

  St. George’s eyes went from the older man’s grimace to the puddle of blood. Drops rained into it. It was the size of a dinner platter and still growing.

  Cerberus loomed over the operation like a statue, held steady in the swaying truck by her gyros. “It’s going to take us at least
an hour to get back,” she told St. George.

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to have to fly him.”

  “I know.” He set a hand on Lady Bee’s shoulder. “Tie it off,” he said.

  She nodded and let go of the gauze. In a moment she’d pulled a rubber tube from her kit and wrapped it around the wounded man’s thigh. She pulled it tight and knotted it. The bloody gauze sloughed off and splatted into the puddle.

  St. George bent down and gathered the wounded man into his arms like a child. Bee pressed two fresh pads against the bite and wrapped them with a bandage. It took a little longer for them to turn red. They all knew that could be good or bad.

  “Jesus, this is embarrassing,” said Jarvis. He sounded drunk.

  “Could be worse,” said St. George. “You ever ride a motorcycle?”

  “Not since I was a dumb kid.”

  “Just keep your eyes closed. It’s going to be cold up there but it’ll only take us a few minutes. We’ll be moving fast, so the wind’ll be the worst part.” He glanced up at Cerberus and back to the scavengers. “You guys going to be okay?”

  “We’ll be fine,” said Ilya.

  St. George shot up into the sky. He carried Jarvis up above the buildings, until they were higher than the hills and could see Hollywood proper on the other side. He took a moment to orient himself off the larger landmarks, found the Cinerama Dome, and followed the street another block to the corner of the Big Wall.

  The same corner he’d beat Legion back from a few nights earlier.

  “Damn,” said Jarvis. He shivered in the chill air. “Forgot to tell you I’m scared of heights.”

  “Yeah,” said St. George, “you should’ve brought that up. Hang on.”