An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  Barry stared back at her. “You’re the redhead,” he said. He blinked twice and smiled. “Danielle. The Gundam pilot.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” she said, “but it’s good to see you.”

  “You, too.” He looked up at Freedom. “The door’s jammed. D’you think you can give it a pull from your side?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “And you do realize there’s a zombie teenager on your back, right?”

  “It’s come up,” said Freedom. He glanced over his shoulder. “You have a good grip?”

  Madelyn nodded. “Yep.”

  Freedom grabbed the latch and pulled. It snapped off, but it jerked the door open enough for him to get his fingers around the edge. He braced his feet, heaved, and tore the door out of the frame. “Do you need a hand, sir?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” Barry said. He leaned forward and Freedom scooped him up like a child. “Oh, and can any of you explain what the frak just happened to the whole city!”

  “Is this your first shift, Mr. Burke?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, so I’m guessing yes.”

  “It’s good to see you,” said Madelyn.

  “I know you, too,” Barry said after a moment. “You’re the dead girl in my dreams.”

  “The Corpse Girl,” she said.

  “Yeah!” He looked up at the huge officer, then at his uniform. “At least someone had the decency to wear nametags during the trippy amnesia fest.”

  “Just for you, sir.” Freedom looked around. The noise of ripping off the door combined with Barry’s shouts had attracted some exes. There were five or six in the immediate area closing on them. Maybe another dozen farther out. They had two minutes, tops, before they needed to start moving.

  Barry shook his head. “Captain Freedom,” he said. “Man, I hate cheap knockoff names. Can’t the government put any thought into this stuff?”

  Madelyn bit back a laugh.

  “My wheelchair’s in the trunk. You guys are with George and Karen Quilt, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Danielle. “They’re back at the hotel.”

  Freedom walked around to the back of the cab. “How’d you end up here, sir?”

  “I was taking a cab to the hotel,” Barry said, “like she told me. And then a few minutes ago everything just … changed.”

  “The shift,” said Madelyn.

  Freedom hooked the fingers of his free hand under the lip of the cab’s trunk and pulled. It wasn’t locked, but the hinges were rusted. They squealed as he pried the lid up, and then Barry swore.

  “No wheelchair,” said Maddy. “Déjà vu.”

  “Long gone, if it was ever there,” said Danielle.

  “Not a problem for now,” said Freedom.

  “My bag’s gone, too,” said Barry. “My Weyland-Yutani shirt was in there, damn it.”

  “We should head back,” said Freedom. “This area’s getting hot, and it’ll be harder to fight while holding both of you.”

  Barry looked up at Madelyn. “Wait, you can’t walk either?”

  She shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

  “Fantastic,” he said with a grin. He looked over at Danielle. “Three more people in wheelchairs and we’ve got a basketball team.”

  Stealth watched Quilt pack the weapons into a duffel bag he’d set on the couch. His movements were quick and precise. It was an admirable efficiency of motion.

  And it was wrong. She knew that. Terribly wrong.

  He used the last pieces of a shredded towel to separate the weapons so the bag would make no noise. He checked the chamber on the last of the Glocks and held it out to her without looking. It was done automatically, the way other fathers would hand over keys or credit cards.

  She took the Glock. It felt good in her hand. Not perfect, but good.

  He set a clip-on holster on the arm of the couch and followed it with a collapsible baton. The holstered pistol went on her right hip. She slid the baton into her side pocket.

  “I have packed the spare magazines,” he told her, “and enough ammunition for three reloads on each.”

  She looked at him. “What have you kept for yourself?”

  He zipped the bag shut. “I have the G36 and one of the Mark 23s.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  The edges of his mouth twitched, the barest hint of a smile. She remembered seeing it twice as a child. “Have you ever known it not to be enough?”

  It was an echo of what she had told St. George the night before.

  Too much of an echo.

  He held the bag out and waited for her to take it. She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at him. He stared back.

  “You are not my father.”

  The words hung in the air for a moment. He blinked once. “And what makes you say that, child?”

  “Because my father swore to kill me if I could not stop him,” she said. “It is the kind of man he was. No one can change that much. If you were my father, even a version of him … one of us would not be alive right now.”

  He set the bag down and blinked again. His fingers flexed once, like ten scorpion tails coiling and uncoiling. Then he reached up with his left hand and made a minute adjustment to his spectacles. “Perhaps I took pity on you.”

  “I often wished he had. But that was not his way. You are a vestigial childhood dream dredged up by Smith’s manipulations. A desire buried deep in my subconscious. I wanted you to be real so …”

  He waited for her. After a few moments, he raised one brow. “So …?”

  “So I could introduce George to my family.”

  “I see,” said Quilt. “And why would that matter?”

  “Because I think, in his own way, my father would have approved of such an honorable man, despite their many differences.”

  “I think he would have.”

  Stealth set her hand on the pistol.

  Quilt nodded. His mouth opened, as if to say something else, and then snapped shut. It opened and shut again. And again. The sound of clicking teeth filled the suite.

  In her peripheral vision, the room fell apart. Wallpaper sagged and darkened. The couches were reduced to shreds of fabric and broken wood. The curtains vanished and let in the harsh sunlight.

  The duffel bag vanished as well. The weight on her hips changed as the pistol vanished beneath her hand and the baton dissolved into the air. Even the holster was gone.

  The dead thing was not her father. Its shoulders were too wide. The hair was too thin, even taking age into account. It was, by her estimate, an inch and a half too tall. The jawline was wrong.

  It reached for her and she batted its hands out and away. A strike to either side of its neck cracked two vertebrae. Her heel lashed out and shattered one of its knees. It hit the floor and a second kick cracked the side of its skull.

  There was a sound from behind her. Another ex-human stumbled in from the hall, drawn in by the sound. The door had been kicked open at some point, four years ago judging from the shade of the exposed wood, and splinters of the frame were strewn in the entryway.

  The ex had been a woman, and was still dressed in the dark uniform coat of the hotel. Two more followed in behind her, then a third and fourth. The third was wearing a staff polo shirt splattered with dried blood. The fourth had been a boy of eleven at most. It was dressed in red swim trunks with dragons on them. Another child tottered in behind them. This one was naked, but mangled enough she could not be certain of its gender.

  The sound of teeth grew louder and Stealth turned again. Another pair of exes had wandered out from the master bedroom. She guessed they’d been the original occupants of the suite. The dead woman wore a wedding band and engagement ring. The dead man did not.

  Eight exes, six of them in the narrow entryway.

  She leaped over the remains of the couch toward the bedroom door. The heel of her palm slammed into the dead man’s nose. The ex’s face flattened out with a crack as the bon
es were driven back into its skull. The dead thing staggered back and tipped over. She spun and struck the other ex just below the neck, crushing its throat back to the spine. Her follow-through shattered its jaw. She dropped, spun, and swept its legs out from under it.

  Another ex staggered from the suite’s office. A high kick snapped its neck. It wobbled and then fell over. Its jaws still snapped open and shut.

  Something moved behind her. The ex in the uniform coat had crossed the room and was a few feet away. The others were a yard behind it, still working their way around the couch. Three more had entered the room, and she could hear more in the hallway.

  Nine exes between her and the exit. At least six more in the hallway, judging from the echo of teeth and footsteps. Uneven floor. No weapons. While the exes took another step forward, she ran through five different methods of taking on multiple undead opponents. She considered a dozen possible scenarios and outcomes.

  Then she did the most logical thing to guarantee her safety.

  Stealth drove a kick into the uniformed ex’s chest, knocking it back into one behind it, and turned away. On her first step, she reached up and crossed her arms in front of her face. On the second, she grabbed the collar of her shirt behind her head. On the third step, now a full run, she kicked off and dove through the glass doors of the balcony.

  St. George stood at the corner of the hedge that separated the hotel grounds from the public sidewalk. He had a clear view of the main entrance to the hotel, the doorman, and the valet. A Middle Eastern–looking man, his wife, and three small children waited for their car. Two of the children were twins. A few paparazzi stood nearby, but none of them seemed to recognize him as the mystery man seen with Karen Quilt.

  It all looked real. He tried to spot an inconsistency in the way people moved or the smells of flowers and fountain water that hung in the air. He studied the front of the hotel for a break in the architectural details. Anything that would hint it was just a hallucination.

  A bee wove back and forth along the hedge and then launched itself toward the hotel flowerbeds. One of the paparazzi scratched the side of his mouth. The twins traded colorful cards back and forth between their hands.

  Then he heard a crash from above him. The thin sound of breaking glass. His head whipped up. So did everyone else’s. He saw the shards sparkling in the sun, the body in the air, and then—

  By the time he realized what he was seeing, she was already on the ground.

  Stealth ripped her shirt over her head and lashed out with it as she began to plunge. The sleeve wrapped around a balcony railing two floors below hers. It slipped loose of the rail just as quickly, but it was enough to shift her angle of descent, pulling her back toward the building.

  She let go of the shirt and slammed into the railing of the third balcony down. She held on for an instant, then dropped to the next one. Then the one below that, and the one below that. Her fingertips grabbed at the balconies like a mountain climber and the holds bled off her momentum. She dropped from railing to edge to railing, and less than ten seconds after going through the penthouse window she was standing on the ground.

  People rushed forward. Some of them looked shocked. A few of them had phones out to record the incident. The paparazzi were snapping photos of the scuffed-up supermodel walking around outside in her skimpy bra. She pushed past all of them and marched up to St. George.

  “Give me your jacket,” she said.

  He was still in awe. Still processing what he’d just seen.

  “What?”

  “I will attract too much attention like this.”

  “You just jumped out of a sixteen-story window, of course you’re attracting attention.” He pulled the fleece off and held it out. She tugged it over her head and sank her arms into the sleeves. It was big on her.

  They headed out onto the street and down the block. The photographers followed at a semi-respectable distance. “The others are gone,” she said.

  St. George looked up and down the street. “They’re probably just out of sight,” he said. “Calm down, we’ll find them.”

  “I am always calm.”

  “Is that why you jumped out the window?”

  “When the shift happened, the hotel suite was filled with ex-humans. The balcony was the most efficient and safest way of exiting the building.”

  He looked at her. “What shift?”

  She glanced at him. “You did not experience a shift two minutes ago?”

  St. George shook his head. “It’s been pretty calm down here. No problems at all.”

  Her face didn’t change, but he recognized the annoyance. “You are certain?”

  “Yeah, of course I am. Do you think the world shifted over to post-apocalypse mode and I didn’t notice?”

  She glared at him, but he recognized the uncertainty in it.

  Movement on the sidewalk caught his eye. Freedom and Danielle, a block north. The huge officer still had Madelyn on his back, and now someone cradled in his right arm as well. “There they are,” he said. He squinted at the figure Freedom was carrying. “And they’ve got Barry.”

  Stealth opened her mouth, then pressed her lips shut again.

  They met up on the sidewalk. Barry smiled. “George, I presume.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “You, too.” He looked over at Stealth. “Both of you.”

  “Did you just jump out the window?” asked Madelyn. “Was that you?”

  “It was.”

  “That was so cool!”

  “Are you well?” Stealth asked Barry.

  “A little humiliated that I’m being carried around like a kitten, but fine other than that.” He glanced at Danielle. “Just being around most of you is unlocking a lot of stuff in my head.”

  “Can you change?” asked St. George. “Having Zzzap with us would be a huge advantage right now.”

  Barry’s face dropped. “No,” he said. “I can’t find the switch. I’ve been looking for it for a couple of minutes now.”

  “Crap.”

  Barry looked at George, then up at Freedom and Madelyn. “It’s not just me?” he asked. “None of you have your powers?”

  “Nothing past the basics,” Freedom said.

  “Only those which function on an unconscious level,” corrected Stealth. “Neither you nor St. George needs to consciously use your enhanced strength or endurance. St. George does not need to will himself to be invulnerable. Only those abilities which require conscious activation have been repressed. Barry’s transformation into Zzzap. St. George’s flight and fire breath.”

  “Makes sense, kind of,” said Danielle.

  St. George cleared his throat. “I think we can still make it to the Mount before dark if we don’t get slowed down.”

  “You mean, if the world doesn’t go all kablooey on us again?” Barry said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I still think we should just hop on a bus,” said Danielle. “Having Cesar drive us cut an hour off our walking time.”

  “And got me thrown through a windshield,” said St. George. “What if it’d been you?”

  Stealth turned and headed back up the street.

  “Great,” muttered Danielle.

  THE STREETLIGHT CHANGED, the walk signal appeared, and they crossed Fairfax. A half-dozen other people shared the crosswalk with them. A few of them glanced at the giant Army officer carrying two people, one of them a pale-skinned girl, but he didn’t hold their attention for long.

  “This is just weird,” said Barry. He looked up at a sign for CBS studios. “I mean, walking around LA with people everywhere.”

  “You’re not doing the walking,” said Danielle.

  “Don’t nitpick,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I do.” The light changed and traffic surged into life around them. “You think Cesar’s back?”

  “Maybe,” said St. George. He looked at the cars. “Don’t know how he’ll find us if he is.”

&
nbsp; “We’re heading for the Mount,” said Madelyn. “He’s smart. He’ll find us.”

  St. George glanced at Barry cradled in Freedom’s arm, then up at the officer. “Want me to carry him for a while?”

  “Hey,” said Barry. “Him is right here in front of you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’ve got skinny arms. It’d be uncomfortable as hell.”

  Madelyn and Danielle both chuckled.

  Freedom shook his head. “It’s better to just have one of us dealing with the wounded, sir.”

  “We’re not wounded,” said Madelyn.

  The huge officer glanced up at her. “The principle’s the same,” he said. “Wounding one man takes out two, because someone else has to help the wounded man. If we’re each helping one of you, we’re both hampered as fighters.” He looked at St. George. “It’s better for me to help both and leave you free to fight if we need to.”

  “Okay.”

  “Besides, you’re looking pretty beat, sir.”

  “I’ve been up for about thirty hours,” said St. George. “I’m not even sure when I ate last.”

  Danielle glanced at a bagel shop and Subway sitting next to each other across the street. “We could grab some food. Eat on the go.”

  “There is still a chance this is the real world which we are viewing through altered perceptions,” said Stealth. She didn’t look back when she spoke.

  “So?”

  “There is no way to know what we might be eating.”

  Madelyn’s face wrinkled up. “Oh, gross.”

  “There is also the chance we will be eating nothing at all. In which case we would gain no benefit from stopping.”

  “Okay, I get it,” said Danielle. She shoved her hands in her pockets. “No food.”

  “Please explain again how you found Barry.”

  The redhead looked up from the sidewalk. “Sorry, what?”

  Stealth turned around, but continued to walk backward in firm, even strides. It struck St. George that she somehow made walking backward in an oversized fleece jacket look very no-nonsense. “Explain again how you found him. In detail.”

  “A shift happened while you were in the hotel,” said Freedom. “We heard a yell, investigated, and found Mr. Burke in a cab with an ex.”