An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  He was much more awake, just like that. “Who is this?”

  “I believe we have a mutual friend. I am with George Bailey.”

  He chuckled. “George Bailey, the loveable martyr of Bedford Falls? The guy who runs the Building and Lo—wait! George?” He sat up in bed. “You’re with George?”

  “I am.”

  “Hey,” called another voice beyond the phone. Barry remembered it from a few days ago, and from countless nights. He’d been kicking himself for not getting the other man’s number before they lost their connection.

  “You have been having dreams of another life,” said the woman.

  “Yes,” said Barry.

  “A life where the world is overrun with animated corpses and you possess some form of superhuman abilities or powers.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes I have. Are you one of the final five Cylons, too?”

  “I believe the answer to that would be yes.”

  “Wow.” Barry shifted himself back so he could lean against the bed’s headboard. “Okay, question for you. Do you know who George Romero is?”

  “Our mutual friend has already shared this question with me. I also do not know the proper name of Romero’s creations.”

  “Damn it.”

  “A few moments ago you made a popular culture reference to the television series Battlestar Galactica, correct?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You sound very pretty, so please don’t tell me you’re one of those freaks who think the original series was better.”

  “You are a follower of such genre material.”

  “A follower?” he echoed with a chuckle. “Yeah, I am. Do you know me?”

  “Please name another science-fiction series which is currently being aired.”

  “What?”

  “Battlestar Galactica aired almost five years ago. Can you name a network series since then? One on the air or even one which was canceled?”

  Barry racked his brain. He’d been watching reruns of the second season of Chuck with a bit of Deep Space Nine, the later stuff where the Dominion War really took off. He tried to think of anything new that stood out. He’d been meaning to check out the new season of Doctor Who, but realized he wasn’t sure which season that was. Had the BBC taken another weird on-again, off-again hiatus, like they did with Tennant’s last year in the lead role? For that matter, what season was Chuck in? And how had LOST ended? He was pretty sure it wasn’t on the air anymore, but couldn’t remember a final episode.

  “Mr. Burke?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  He couldn’t even think of any new cartoons. Every morning with breakfast he’d been watching an episode of Battle of the Planets. He knew it was soft-core by some standards, but he’d grown up on this version before he’d ever heard of the original Gatchaman. And off that thought another memory shoved its way forward.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re the ninja.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “In my dreams,” said Barry. “I recognize your voice. You’re the ninja. You’ve got guns. And a cape.”

  There was a pause. “Shall I take this to mean you cannot name a current television show?”

  “I just told you you’re a ninja with guns and you still want to talk about television?”

  “It is more important,” said the woman on the phone. “Have any elements of your dreams appeared in the real world?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Have you seen any elements from your dreams while you were awake?”

  “Like a guy in a red and green sweater with a glove made of knife blades?”

  “The walking dead.”

  “Ahhh. No, not that I can …”

  There’d been a staff meeting a few days ago, right after George’s call, when his coworkers had gotten quiet and looked very pale under the office lights. They’d all stared at him without blinking for a moment, then the meeting continued as if nothing had happened. And there was a smell in his office he couldn’t track down, a sort of under-scent of mildew and rot. It clung to everything. Sometimes he even brought it home with him.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think maybe I have, yeah.”

  There was a pause on the other end. Then the woman spoke again. “I believe it is in our best interests to be together,” she told him. “Can you travel to Los Angeles?”

  A handful of thoughts flashed through Barry’s head. The casual meeting he was supposed to have with Mike from maintenance about the smell. Jerry and Vanessa talking about component testing schedules. Keith asking for reports. His weekly Warhammer game with the guys down at the store.

  He thought about his dreams and how right they felt. Not just in a geek-fulfillment sense. In a simple, basic sense. Speaking to the woman on the phone, speaking to George, he knew his dreams were true.

  “Yes,” said Barry. “Yes I can. I can be on the first flight out of the Sunport and be in LA before ten o’clock.”

  “I will arrange for a car to pick you up at LAX.”

  “Cool,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

  She hung up and he set the phone down. He thought about what he’d just agreed to, and was pretty sure it was going to mean the end of his career at Sandia. They were always on a tight budget, and he wasn’t high enough up the chain to have any sort of protection. He was throwing it all away over a dream.

  A dream where he could fly.

  Barry reached up and grabbed the handle over his bed. Most folks called it a trapeze, but he always felt if you were going to tell people you had a trapeze over your bed it needed to live up to certain expectations. He pulled up on the handle and swung his body across the bed and out over his wheelchair. His legs dragged behind him.

  It was a little after two in the morning. He could be packed and ready to go by three-thirty and at the airport by five. Then he just needed an accommodating flight.

  “He will be here in the morning,” Karen told George. “I will have my father pick him up at the airport.”

  He glanced at her from the driver’s seat. “Is that wise?”

  “How so?”

  “I mean … well …” He tried to think of a polite way to phrase his worry and gave up. “Is it safe for your dad to go to an airport?”

  Her eyebrow went up.

  “Isn’t he kind of … wanted?”

  The corners of her mouth trembled again. The almost-smile. “My father long ago perfected the art of hiding in plain sight. If he does not want to be noticed, he will not be. How else could he be staying in a hotel surrounded by paparazzi?”

  George decided to call the matter closed. “Okay, then,” he said.

  They were still on surface streets. Somewhere deep in Santa Monica. He didn’t know exactly where, but according to the street numbers he’d hit the beach in another dozen blocks if he kept heading down the road they were on. After that …

  “Let’s stop and get a beer,” he said.

  Her eyebrow went back up.

  “We’re driving around with no plan and the car’s got a quarter tank of gas. Let’s stop and make some kind of plan.”

  She glanced at her phone. “Last call will be in the next fifteen minutes at most establishments.”

  They passed two clubs before settling on a bar. George parked across the street, went to shut off the engine, and realized he still didn’t have a key. The engine revved. It sounded like a grumble.

  “We’ll be right back,” he said to the dashboard. “Half an hour at the most.”

  The car revved again and then turned itself off.

  “You are talking to your car,” said Karen.

  “I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “but the car’s talking back.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but decided against it.

  They walked across the wide road. An oversized man sat on a tall chair near the bar’s door. A tall table with a desk light and a beach umbrella created a small check-in station. The doorman looked up from his book when he saw t
hem approaching and straightened up. George went to reach for his wallet and realized it was back at his apartment, but the man waved them through with a broad smile at Karen. He took a quick step to make it clear they were together. It felt awkward, and under the stark lights the folds in his shirt stood out. They scraped on his arm and he had to make an effort not to scratch and draw more attention to them. The itch moved up to his bicep and he raked his fingers across it.

  The bouncer shook his head and smirked. George scratched at the itch again and the man’s smirk broke into a wide smile. He had bad teeth. One of his incisors was missing.

  The bar could hold a hundred people, but it was almost empty. Two men sat in the booth farthest from the door, and a man and two women sat in the one closest. A woman in a dark T-shirt cleared a table that looked like it had held a fair-sized party in the recent past. A half-dozen young student types—film students, said something in George’s university-experienced mind—chattered away at the other end of the bar. George heard enough names and terms to grasp they were having a serious talk about comedy. One of them started reciting lines about Winchesters and pints with a bad British accent.

  A thick-built man with thinning hair was wiping down the bar as they walked in. He glanced over his shoulder at the clock as they reached him. “Only got time for one,” he said. “What can I get you?”

  George pointed at one of the taps. Karen examined the row of bottles behind the bar and ordered a vodka martini. A few moments later the bartender presented their drinks and vanished to get final orders from the film types.

  Karen held the stem of her glass and lifted it to her lips. The liquid shifted, touched her tongue, and she set the glass down on the bar napkin. The base of the martini glass was centered on the square of paper. “And now?” she asked him.

  George sipped his beer. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

  They sat in silence for a moment. Neither of them touched their drinks.

  “I got shot a few hours ago,” he said.

  She waited for him to continue.

  “I was shot, and the day before that I was snatched by the feds and my apartment was trashed. And I think I met—”

  A spike of pain shoved into the back of his skull. The room spun for a moment. He winced. The tip of his nose felt wet.

  “I think I met the President and the First Lady.”

  She let the martini brush against her tongue again. “Why do you think you met the President?”

  “Because I remember it.”

  “No,” said Karen. “Why did the incident occur?”

  “They thought I might be—” The spikes pushed at his eyes again. He ignored them and forced his memories forward. “He wanted to know if I knew him.”

  “The President?”

  “Yeah,” said George. “Madelyn said—” The spikes shot forward another quarter inch. They grew thorns. He could picture them making deep dimples across the back of his eyeball. “Madelyn said he can make people believe things. He’s from somewhere else, like us.”

  She slid the bar napkin out from under her drink and held it out to him. “Your nose is bleeding again.”

  “I know,” he said. “I think … I think it bleeds when I get too close to the truth. And the truth is, a crazy girl told me I had superpowers, and then she shot me a dozen times in the chest and it didn’t do anything.” He tugged at the shirt and looked down past his chin. “I think the bruise is already fading.”

  She reached across the bar and pulled two more napkins from a small tray. The bartender glanced over and saw George with the wad of red paper. “You okay, buddy?” he called over.

  “Fine,” said George. He wrapped his fingers around the napkin to hide most of the blood. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “For the sake of argument,” said Karen, “let us assume everything Madelyn has told you is true. We are superheroes trapped in some alternate universe or time stream.”

  “It sounds a lot more believable when you say it,” George said.

  “If this is all true,” she continued, “why would we go back? This world offers us everything we would have tried to achieve. It is free of the dead creatures which overwhelmed that reality.”

  “But it’s not where we’re supposed to be,” he said. “If she’s right, it means there’s another world out there that was depending on us. A world we’ve abandoned, even if we didn’t know we were doing it.” He dabbed at his nose again with a fresh napkin.

  Karen stared at him for a moment. “The perfect prison,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Prisons are built around certain inherent ideas, chief among them being the prisoners do not wish to be there and the threat of death or injury overrides the desire to escape. For people such as you and I, that threat is greatly reduced, if not nullified. So how does someone imprison us?”

  George folded the napkin in half.

  “They create a prison we have no reason or desire to escape from.”

  At the end of the bar the students had shifted topics. Two of them were acting out a scene from something. It took George a moment to recognize the skit.

  She followed his gaze. “Is there a problem?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. It’s just … This may sound stupid, but I’ve been hearing a lot of Monty Python lately.”

  Karen looked at him for a moment. “This is important how?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just kind of weird. All these years on campus, I must’ve heard people doing Monty Python skits a few thousand times. But I can’t remember anyone ever doing Steven Wright, Seinfeld, Eddie Izzard … anyone else. It’s always old Python stuff.”

  “I am not familiar with their individual skits,” she admitted.

  A slim man with glasses raised his voice to a near-manic tone. “It’s a stiff!” he shrieked. “Bereft of life. It rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!”

  George waved down the bartender. “Sorry,” he told the beefy man. He nodded at the group at the far end of the bar. “Are they in here often?”

  The other man shot a quick glance at the film types. “We get a lot of those folks in here. There’s a couple of little production companies in the buildings across the street. They too loud?”

  George shook his head. “No, I just … What’s that skit they’re acting out? It’s on the tip of my brain and I can’t think of it.”

  The bartender smirked. “It’s Monty Python.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the actual piece they’re doing?”

  The beefy man shrugged and turned his head. “Hey, Shaun?”

  The skinny man paused in his recitation and returned the gaze. He had blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

  “What’s that sketch you’re doing?”

  “It’s classic Python,” said Shaun. “The parrot sketch.”

  Parrots.

  Shaun and his partner, a man with horn-rims and shockingly blond hair, picked up the sketch, turning themselves to face their new audience. Their voices rose to match, reaching a manic pitch in the reenactment.

  “If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch,” repeated the thin man, getting back into the part, “he’d be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He’s off the twig! He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This,” Shaun declared emphatically, “is an ex—”

  A railroad spike slammed into George’s skull. Just before the pain forced his eyes closed he saw Karen’s hands fly to her own head. He heard her shift in her chair, and a faint grunt of pain.

  His skull cracked and let in a brilliant light. It was so bright closing his eyes did nothing. Covering them with his hands made no difference. No matter what he did, he could still see it.

  He forced his eyes open against the searing pain and looked at Karen. She was already staring at him. Her eyes were wide. He slid his hand across the
bar and she seized it with a grip like a vise. George felt blood run across his lips, enough that he heard it splash on the bar.

  “Hey,” said the bartender, “you two okay?”

  Memories poured into George’s head like molten steel, burning everything else away even as they cooled and hardened. He saw himself. He saw his world. He saw them.

  The undead.

  The zombies.

  The ex-humans.

  A ripple washed over him and made the hair on his arms stiffen. A smell that had lurked in the background rose to the fore. It was the twin scents of must and mildew, and the tangy odor of rot lurked behind them like an aftertaste. He looked at the small puddle of blood on the dusty bar. His beer bottle crumbled away into a few shards of broken glass. The napkin under it collapsed and left a square of fragments and dust.

  In his peripheral vision, a handful of people in the bar vanished.

  The rest of them died.

  The dead ones turned to stare. Their eyes were balls of chalk. Their skin was brittle pages from old books.

  Their jagged teeth tapped together. It was a sharp, hard noise. The sound of crackling glass and clicking pens and beads hitting the side of a fan again and again. The sound echoed in the bar.

  He pushed himself off the bar stool.

  And St. George, the Mighty Dragon, stood to face the exes.

  THE PLACE HAD been well looted. The shelves behind the bar were empty, and had been for years if the dust meant anything. What couldn’t be carted away had been smashed. Broken glass was everywhere. The padded cushions of the booth had been torn out.

  St. George counted fifteen exes in the bar. The dead couple in the closest booth were trapped by the table, unable to rise and not smart enough to move to the side. One of the exes from the far booth had already fallen onto the floor. It crawled across the bar toward them.

  Most of the film types were still there. Shaun was a desiccated husk. Its glasses hung loose off one ear. The half dozen or so exes around it banged their teeth together and shuffled around to face the heroes. Their arms reached for them. The ex with the blond hair raised hands that had three fingers between them. It looked like they’d been torn off in the same incident that had claimed the dead man’s chin and nose.