by Peter Clines
Stealth’s cloak wrapped around her like a shroud. Parts of it had burned. He could see glimpses of dark skin where her bodysuit had been torn or charred away.
He set his fingers against her wrist to check for a pulse. She grabbed his arm and pulled herself up, the knife in her other hand aimed at his own throat. The blade scraped off his Adam’s apple before she stopped herself.
She took a few ragged breaths. A third of her mask was gone. He could see her cheekbone and the smooth line of her jaw and the edge of her lips at the corner of her mouth. “You survived,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We did.”
She wrapped her arms around him and allowed him to lift her up. She settled on her feet and took a few cautious steps. “I appear to be uninjured.”
“Good.”
Madelyn waved them over to Freedom. The huge officer lay on the far side of the street, sheltered by the car the dead girl had dragged him behind. His hand wrapped over the bloody wound in his side. His breathing was ragged.
St. George looked around. “Try to find Barry,” he told Madelyn.
She nodded and darted away. Stealth followed her.
He crouched and set a hand on Freedom’s forehead. It was burning hot. His eyes blinked open and he looked at the hero. “I take it we won, sir.”
“Seems like it,” said St. George. “You look like crap, Captain.”
“I think the demon’s tail might’ve been poisonous. And I’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Can you walk?”
“No idea.”
St. George helped the big man to his feet. He swayed for a moment, then fell against a car. “I think I’ll wait here, sir,” he coughed.
“Zzzap’s alive,” Madelyn called from a few yards away. “And he’s … uhhh, naked.”
“That’s normal,” said St. George. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked Freedom.
“I’ve had worse.”
St. George glanced around for something to cover his friend as he made his way across the rubble. He didn’t have much left in the way of clothes himself. Pretty much everything that could burn near the demon had burned.
A few yards from Barry was the center of the spiderweb. Dozens of long bones lay there in a heap. A distorted skeleton, like the remains of a dinosaur. Scraps of charred flesh hung on the long bones. A long shard of gleaming metal stood between two ribs. It was the only thing not covered in dust.
Stealth tapped the horned skull with her boot and it fell free of the pile. It looked swollen and round. The sockets were too large. The jaw bristled with teeth like daggers. The spine dragged after it, bound together with threads of gristle.
Barry sprawled on the pavement. His dark skin was covered with ash. St. George remembered the ghastly look from 9/11 footage. The hand that had held the sword was still spread wide open, as if it had cramped that way.
Madelyn’s fingers danced down her shirt and she shrugged out of her flannel. Her bra and her skin were the same shade of white. She draped it across Barry’s lap. The other man’s eyes fluttered as she did.
Barry looked up at them. “You guys are still alive?”
“Yeah,” said St. George. He kneeled. “Barely.”
“Am I still alive?”
“I hope so. We don’t need any more ghosts.”
Barry nodded. “Cairax?”
St. George tilted his head back toward Stealth. “You got him.”
“Wow.” He started to relax, then his eyes snapped open. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Crap, crap, crap.”
“What’s wrong?” Madelyn asked.
“Are you okay?” St. George tried to check his friend’s body and wondered what he wasn’t seeing.
Barry’s eyes were wide with terror. “I can’t feel my legs. I think … I think I’m paralyzed.”
St. George looked at his friend for a moment, then burst out laughing. Madelyn giggled. Barry kept the act up for another few seconds before a grin broke out across his face.
“Well, damn,” Barry said after a minute of laughter. “I always wanted to do that.”
“Do what?”
He smiled at them. “I think we just saved the world.”
St. George stood up to join Stealth and saw the exes.
At least three hundred of them stood halfway down the street, near the crater. They stretched across La Brea Avenue, blocking it, at least four or five rows deep. Their arms were crossed. Their jaws didn’t move. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a similar line behind them, and one in either direction on 3rd Street.
They were surrounded.
“I have no ammunition,” said Stealth. “I assume the captain is incapacitated. Is Zzzap well enough to fight?”
“Maybe,” said St. George. He did a double take and stared at her face. The hole in her mask had vanished.
“Focus, George,” she said.
“How did you—”
“I carry a spare mask in my belt.” She tipped her head to the line ahead of them. “Be ready.”
One of the exes marched forward. It had been a tall, lean black man once. Two fingers were missing off its left hand. A gaping hole in its side was clogged with ropy lengths of meat that had probably been intestines before they were hit with a shotgun blast. It had both eyes, and St. George could see Legion’s expressions behind its face.
The ex stopped ten feet away from them, just past where the spray of ash and dust ended. St. George rolled his fingers into fists. He felt Stealth tense next to him.
“Could kill all of you fuckers right now,” said the dead man. The fingers of its mangled hand curled into a fist, then went loose again. Its jaw shifted side to side.
The heroes didn’t move.
The ex shook its head. “You got an hour.”
St. George waited a few moments. He let a few curls of smoke twist out of his nose. “Meaning what?”
“Got an hour to get back behind your Wall,” Legion said. “Nothing’ll bite until then. After that, you’re on your own.”
“Just like that?” said St. George. “After all this time, you’ve got us down and beat and you’re just walking away?”
“No,” said the ex. “You’re walking away. I’m lettin’ you.”
“I do not believe you,” said Stealth.
“The fuck do I care if you believe me or not?”
St. George looked the dead man in the eye. “Why?”
Legion waved the mangled hand at the web of ash. “I ain’t stupid. El demonio here was gonna trash my city. You helped stop it. Gets you a pass. One time only.”
St. George and Legion stared at each other for a moment, and then the hero nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, fuck you, too,” said the ex. “Last thing I want is to owe you anything.”
“One hour, then,” said St. George.
Legion grunted at the hero and glanced at Stealth.
She crossed her arms. “This changes nothing.”
“Damn straight.”
“You are a murderer.”
“Take a look in the mirror, puta,” the ex snorted. “We’re all killers. I just killed people you liked more, that’s all.”
The dead man turned and walked away from them.
“And what happens next time we’re outside?” called St. George. “We’ll just go back to trying to wipe each other out?”
Legion looked back. “Guess you’ll find out,” he said. “You got an hour.”
The dead man’s face went slack and it stumbled on its next step. But its jaws didn’t move. The lines began to break up and the silent exes staggered off in different directions.
St. George looked at Stealth. She stared after the dead man. “Now what?”
“Captain Freedom requires medical attention,” she said. “Zzzap, Corpse Girl, and I will make our own way back to the Big Wall. If Legion keeps his word, we should have no problem reaching the South Gate within an hour.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“We shall f
ind a secure location and await your return. For now, you should get the captain to the hospital.”
“Yeah,” said St. George, nodding. “He was looking pretty … damn it.”
He hurled himself into the air and headed back to the Trader Joe’s.
The puddle of blood around Max wasn’t as wide as St. George expected, but he was still pretty sure the sorcerer was dead. The man’s skin was as white as Madelyn’s, and his chest was soaked in red where the bullets had punched into him. He didn’t move at all as St. George landed on the rooftop.
Then he shook and coughed up a spray of red. His eyes fluttered and he looked up at St. George. “Ahhh,” he croaked. “So … you won.”
“Yeah.”
“Congrat …” He coughed again and flecks of blood came out of the holes in his chest.
“Save it,” St. George said. “I’m going to get you to the hospital.”
Max’s head trembled side to side. He raised his hand an inch and tried to wave the hero back. “No,” he wheezed. “Done this enough times now.”
“You have another cheat lined up?”
Another minimal shake of the head. “I’m done. Glad … glad you killed him.”
“Is this your deathbed conversion?”
The sorcerer managed a weak smile. “Was on your side all along.”
St. George shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t buy it.”
“Why’d I … Why’d I tell you how to kill him, then?”
He looked at the dying sorcerer.
“Every word I said … almost every thought I had …” Max paused to suck in some air and the chest wounds wheezed. It was a wet sound. “… had to convince one of the nine lords of the Abyss I was on his side.”
“I wish I could believe you,” he said.
“That’s … that’s the trouble with the real world, George.” He took another wheezing breath. His last one. “Good and evil are never … that black …”
Max let the air out of his lungs. St. George waited a moment, making sure the man was gone. He left the body on the rooftop.
Madelyn reached down and tapped the gold band on the skeletal finger. It swung back and forth. She shivered. “Do you think he’s really dead?”
Stealth looked at the skeleton. “Cairax Murrain or Regenerator?”
The dead girl rubbed her arms. “I don’t know. Either of them?”
“I believe the demon has been killed or banished.”
“And the … the other guy?”
The bones of the arms and legs looked shorter. The teeth in the skull were still long, but not the tusks they’d been just a few minutes earlier. The horns were little more than lumps across the frontal and parietal bones. It might’ve been a trick of the dim light from the moon. Or maybe some aspect of the possession wearing off.
Stealth shook her head. “We do not know the upper limit of his healing ability. He may, in fact, be dead. It is also possible he will be fine by morning.”
“Wow,” said Madelyn. “Is that … that’s good, right?”
Stealth’s boot lashed out and caught the skull right at the base. It snapped off the spine and spun twice on the ground, away from the pile of bones. Her foot whipped forward again and sent the skull sailing down past the intersection of La Brea and 3rd. It hit the pavement with a loud crack almost twenty yards away, right at the entrance to a furniture store parking lot, and skittered south even farther. It settled in the gutter in front of a ransacked yogurt shop.
“Just to be safe,” she told Madelyn.
I WAS DOWN in Venice. I don’t go there often. I’m not a big swimmer, and I’ve never surfed once. As the Mighty Dragon … well, there’s a lot of wind coming off the ocean. Even with the cape-wings, I can’t really glide down there, so my mobility gets cut down. It all just becomes exaggerated hops. And it makes me feel kind of silly. Yeah, I’m hopping fifty or sixty feet at a time, but it just seems undignified for a superhero to be bouncing around.
But there’d been some weird stories coming out of Venice over the past month. People said a monster was stalking the boardwalk. I’d seen a news report saying it was a giant purple dinosaur (and, wow, did Fox make a lot of lame jokes about that). A few homeless folks who’d seen it said it was one of the aliens from the Sigourney Weaver movies.
I knew of four heroes who’d taken up in L.A. There was me. There was the guy with the headgear, Gorgon. There was Midknight. And there was the ninja-Batgirl woman. I’d caught her watching me one night while I dealt with some muggers, but she was gone by the time I finished with them.
I generally worked around my home. Hollywood, Los Feliz, a bit of Koreatown. Midknight was out in the Valley, Burbank usually. Gorgon was over on the west side, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. The ninja-woman stayed around downtown and the Rampart district, but sometimes I’d hear stories of her in other parts of the city.
No one covered the beaches. So after the fourth or fifth report of the monster, I decided to check it out. I drove over, parked in a corner of that big lot right at the end of Venice Boulevard, the one before the beach, and changed into my costume in the backseat. I figured enough surfers probably changed in and out of wetsuits there that I wouldn’t draw too much attention, even at night in December.
It’s kind of silly, I know, but it surprised me when I learned the Venice Boardwalk was made of concrete. It’s just a big sidewalk. You hear “boardwalk” and you just think … well, wood. I thought the whole thing would look like the Santa Monica Pier.
Anyway, I was coasting around in the sky as best I could and came in for a landing on one of those tall apartment buildings right on the waterfront. A few homeless people saw me and pointed. I’d been doing this for almost six months now. People tended to recognize the costume by this point. One guy with a shaggy beard saluted.
Then I heard the wail. Somebody in a lot of pain. They yelled again and I saw a few of the people on the boardwalk scatter.
A few steps launched me through the air and north along the beach. The wind knocked me around. I went maybe twenty or thirty yards and managed to land on a shop without slipping off and crashing.
The cries were clearer now, but as I tried to pinpoint them they shifted. New voices started yelling. And they were scared. I was hearing screams, not yells.
I got a better sense of where it was coming from, about two blocks away down the boardwalk, and just as I did three teenagers came running out of an alley. Three boys. They were gang age, but weren’t wearing any colors. What they were wearing looked a little too high-end for gangs, too. All just a little too shiny and new. I wasn’t an expert on footwear, but I was pretty sure those weren’t Payless sneakers.
Whoever they were, they were terrified.
I stepped off the rooftop to soar down to street level.
The last kid was maybe a yard out of the alley when something reached out after him. At first I thought it was a spear or a board. Something long and thin that somebody’d thrown after them. Then the end split open and wrapped around the kid’s head like something out of a horror movie. The arm yanked him back into the alley.
I was halfway to the ground. I shifted my cape and glided toward the alley. The other two kids ran below me. One of them gave me a glance, but they never looked back. The closest one smelled like piss.
I ran over to the alley. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the gloom and see what the arm was attached to. I was right. It was something out of a horror movie.
On a guess it was maybe nine or ten feet tall, but it was tough to be sure because it was hunched over. It was more or less human-shaped, but the proportions were off. It was too tall and thin, like a person who’d been stretched out on a rack and stayed that way. It made every step and swing of its arms seem unnatural. It had a tail that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a scorpion.
Its head looked like a fish. One of those deep-sea fish with the huge eyes and teeth so long it could barely close its mouth. Half a dozen stubby horns circled its scalp like a
weird crown or something.
It had the third kid by the ankles, hanging him upside down so the boy’s eyes and its were level. Its tongue was out, this long thing like a snake. It was poking the kid on the nose. The kid was bawling, almost drowning in his own snot. There was a glossy stain on his jeans and it was creeping into his shirt as it followed gravity.
“Hey,” I shouted. “Put him down, whatever you are.”
I felt stupid as soon as I said it. Monsters don’t generally understand English. It was going to take a bite out of the kid if I didn’t hurry up.
But it didn’t. It turned to look at me. Its eyes shifted and it bared even more teeth.
And then it spoke.
“Well, well, well,” it said. It had a deep, cultured voice. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was that old British actor, Lee something, who’d been in Lord of the Rings and Man with the Golden Gun. “The Mighty Dragon,” it continued, “what a wonderful surprise this is. Please believe me when I say I am a great admirer of yours.”
It flipped the kid in its hand—a huge, long-fingered hand, like its arms ended in spiders—and set him down on his feet. He ran as soon as his shoes were on the ground. I let him race past me to get clear.
The monster took a step toward me. I noticed it was wearing a silver necklace, some pendant or something, the size of a halfdollar. Its claw-tipped fingers wiggled with excitement. “I must say, what an exquisite cologne you have on,” it said. “What is that scent?”
I took a step back. Then another one, out of the alley. “I don’t know what you’re—”
It followed me out onto the boardwalk. It wafted the air around its face and took in a deep breath through slitted nostrils. “Ahhh, of course,” it rumbled, “now I recognize it.” Its back curled and it leaned its head down toward mine. The pendant swung back and forth on its neck. Its mouth split in a toothy grin. “Fear.”
I was a little freaked. It’s one thing to be fighting street gangs and pitching in on Amber alerts. It’s another when some CGI nightmare slithers out from between a few garage-stalls.