An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  “If this is another level of the illusion,” said St. George, tapping on the table, “how do we get out of it?”

  “Can we get out of it?” asked Danielle. “When he plants these ideas, they’re pretty hard to shake.”

  “But not impossible,” Stealth said. “Several people have been able to create pathways around the blocks Smith creates.”

  “Like out at Krypton,” said St. George, “when I rescued you from the helicopter even though Smith told me I couldn’t beat him.”

  “Correct,” she said. “You were able to rationalize a situation which allowed you to act without violating the conditions he had imposed upon you.”

  “We were never able to do that before, though,” said Freedom. “He had most of us believing his lies for two years.”

  “Until we arrived at Project Krypton,” said Stealth, “none of you had reason to doubt the beliefs he created. Once we did, most of the Unbreakables resisted his imposed perceptions within a few days. The same may be happening here. Our minds are working around the imposed images and attempting to show us the real world.”

  “So, wait,” said Barry. “If we’ve already shaken off most of his voodoo, does that mean we’ve only been under for a few days?”

  “There is no way to be sure,” Stealth said.

  “So how do we get out of this?” asked Madelyn.

  “I’m still not entirely clear how we got out of the last one,” said Freedom. “Do we just have to … not believe in the world?”

  “How do you do that, though?” muttered Danielle. “It’s like the old ‘don’t think about pink elephants’ thing.”

  “I believe I have a possible solution,” said Stealth. She walked over to Freedom and gestured him down to her level. She cupped her hand by his ear and whispered for a few moments.

  Freedom glanced at her, stared across the room, and then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What?” said Danielle. “Are you going to share with all of us?”

  “Smith’s suggestions work in a manner similar to dream states,” said Stealth. “A simple idea is planted in either the conscious or subconscious, and the brain reworks memories to accommodate this idea.”

  “Okay,” said Barry. “That kind of makes sense.”

  “I believe there is a simple solution,” Stealth said. “There is a common sleep disorder known as a hypnagogic jerk. It is an involuntary muscle twitch. Some biologists believe it may be a holdover from our primate ancestors, similar to the Moro reflex in infants.” She looked at St. George. “I suggested it to you yesterday.”

  “You did?”

  She took a quick step back. St. George heard someone move behind him. He turned and Freedom slammed a football-sized fist into his head.

  It didn’t hurt, but he wasn’t ready for it and the force of the blow sent him reeling for a moment. Before he could shake his head clear Freedom had spun him around, grabbed his belt and one shoulder, and was forcing him across the room. The larger man took one step past St. George and lifted him up, the perfect position to—

  He flailed, tried to stop himself, but it was too late.

  Freedom hurled him at the window. St. George crashed through the blinds and felt part of the aluminum frame snap under his shoulder. All he could hear was the chime of broken glass and the rustle of the blinds tangled around him and the rush of wind in his ears.

  Four stories gave him just enough time to turn and see the pavement rush at him like a speeding truck. He clenched his shoulders, his back, everything he could think of. Something would make him fly, but he couldn’t think of it in the second before he—

  —woke up.

  St. George opened his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He stared up at the distant ceiling. He could see exposed beams and catwalks, all painted black, and a few different lighting fixtures. Most of them were banks of fluorescent tubes, but some big china-hat lights hung up there, too.

  His neck flared as he tried to sit up. There was a blanket between him and the concrete floor, but nothing else. His butt and elbows ached. His back and legs were sore.

  A spot on his back tingled, right between his shoulder blades. He focused on it and fanned the tingle like a weak flame. It grew across his body and out, pushing down on the floor. On the world.

  He rose into the air.

  He relaxed his concentration and his boots tapped the concrete. He looked down at himself. Boots, jeans, and a black motorcycle jacket to replace the one Cairax destroyed. He felt his head and found a thick mass of hair that needed a shower and was a month past needing a cut.

  His stomach grumbled. He was hungry. He rolled his abs and his stomach growled again. Hungry, but not starved. Maybe a little over a day without food? Two days, tops. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, touched it to his lips, and guessed the same without water.

  He looked behind him and forgot food.

  Stealth, Barry, and the others were all unconscious. Each of them was sprawled on a blanket. Freedom stretched off the ends of his.

  St. George ran to Stealth. She was in full uniform, with her hood pushed back off her head. He grabbed her shoulders and she leaped off the floor into his arms. He was strong again. Very strong. He took a breath, remembered how to treat the fragile world, and lowered Stealth down to the blanket.

  She had a pulse, and he could feel her breath through her mask, but she wouldn’t wake up. He tapped her cheek, kissed her forehead and lips, and tugged at her mask. He knew from experience that unbuttoning his shirt in the same room could wake her up. Pulling at her mask should’ve provoked a much more extreme response. Most people would lose teeth.

  “Hey,” he said. His voice echoed in the empty space. He raised it to a shout. “Stealth! Karen! Wake up!”

  Nothing.

  He looked at the others. None of them stirred, either. Barry was wearing sweats, the kind of thing he wore just before or after a shift in the electric chair. Danielle was in street clothes, but he could see the collar of her Cerberus contact suit under her shirt. Freedom had his leather duster on over his Army uniform. Cesar and Madelyn were both in regular clothes. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. It looked like they were dusty. St. George put two fingers on her pale neck and confirmed she didn’t have a pulse. She also wasn’t breathing.

  In her case, he took it as a good sign.

  They’d been set out in a wide circle, feet pointing outward, their heads toward the center. The placement seemed too deliberate to be an accident. There wasn’t anything connecting them, but all of their heads were within twenty or thirty inches of each other.

  Not our heads, St. George realized. Our brains. He’s got our minds close together.

  He looked around. He was pretty sure he was in one of the old studio stages on the Mount. They’d all been converted into living space when the Mount had first been set up, but most of them had been abandoned since the Big Wall went up and people had better housing options. They’d been stripped down and left empty shells, with most of the lumber going to the Big Wall.

  Empty shells no one ever went to.

  He gave his friends a last look and then lumbered to the door. His limbs were stiff. He forced his legs to take longer steps, made his arms swing higher.

  He pushed on the door. It was stuck. He hit the bar again, hard, and dented it. He heard something scrape, a bang, and a jingle of metal. The door swung open.

  The sunlight was blinding. He saw a few stick figures heading toward him, and a few blinks put blurry flesh on them. They stopped a few yards away.

  “Sir,” said one of them. It was a woman’s voice. “What were you doing in there?”

  One last blink turned the blur into First Sergeant Kennedy. One of Freedom’s soldiers from Project Krypton. She was still wearing her uniform, but she’d rolled the sleeves up in tight, military fashion. Makana stood next to her. Alive. A few steps behind them were some other guards St. George recognized.

  He looked over his shoulder. A huge, blue 32
was painted on the wall behind him. At his feet were a few broken links of chain and a twisted padlock. “What day is it?” he asked.

  Makana raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “What day? How long have we been gone?”

  “We?” asked Kennedy. “Is the captain with you?”

  “We thought you were all off on a mission,” said Makana. “Have you just been sitting in there all this time?”

  “How long?” snapped St. George.

  Makana and Kennedy glanced at each other. “Maybe two days, sir,” the sergeant said. “You all left night before last.”

  “You said you didn’t want to influence the election,” said Makana. “So you all went out on some scouting mission for a couple days, to check up on Legion or something.”

  “What election?”

  “The election for mayor,” Kennedy told him. After watching St. George’s expression, she added, “It was yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” St. George shook his head. Dates and times were a jumble. He tried to put everything in order, to make sense of it, and had a sudden understanding of what life had to be like for Madelyn on a regular basis. He took a deep breath while his memories sorted themselves out. “Who said we went away?”

  Kennedy and Makana glanced at each other. “Well … you did,” said the dreadlocked man.

  “When? How?”

  Kennedy nodded in agreement. “You held a big meeting at the Melrose gate with four or five hundred of us. The captain, you, Stealth, Dr. Morris. You all said you were going to step away for three or four days.”

  St. George looked at Kennedy. “When did he get here?”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “Agent Smith,” he said. “John Smith. When did he get here?”

  The first sergeant’s brow furrowed. “Agent Smith?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sir, we haven’t seen him since we left Project Krypton,” she said. “Last reports had him heading for Groom Lake.”

  St. George stared at her. “He’s not here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re sure he’s not here?”

  Kennedy’s brows knotted for a minute, and then she scowled. She knew what he had done to her soldiers. And how he’d done it. “To the best of my knowledge,” she said, “Agent Smith has not been seen anywhere here at the Mount, sir.”

  He looked at her for a moment, and then at Makana. “Okay,” he said. “Wait here.”

  He staggered back into the stage. His legs were warming up, and his blood was flowing. He looked at the ring of his friends and made a decision.

  He gathered Stealth in his arms, cradled her head, and looked up. The ceiling was about forty feet up. He glanced at her masked face, back up at one of the high girders, and threw her into the air.

  Her cloak whipped around her as she soared upward. She rolled once, twice, and reached the top of her climb. Her knuckles rapped on one of the china-hat lights.

  Then she plunged back down.

  He flew up and caught her in midair. Her cape had wrapped around her like a shroud. She was limp in his arms. He put his ear close to her mouth and felt the same slow breaths.

  “Damn it.”

  He landed near the others and set her back down on her blanket.

  “Boss?”

  St. George looked over his shoulder. Makana had followed him in. The dreadlocked man gazed at the heroes sprawled on the floor of the huge space.

  “Are they all …?”

  St. George shook his head. “They’re alive,” he said. “I just can’t wake them up.”

  Makana looked at him, then at the empty blanket he’d been on. “How’d you wake up?”

  “Stealth had Freedom throw me out a fourth-floor window.”

  “What?”

  “Not important. I think Smith knew she’d be the hardest to keep under his control. She probably got a double dose or whatever it is he does.”

  The dreadlocked man looked at the others. “So you can’t wake ’em up?”

  “I don’t know.” St. George shifted, kneeled, and patted Madelyn’s cheeks. Up close he could see her eyes were dry. He shook her shoulders and poked her in the side.

  “Pinch her earlobes,” said Makana. “I heard once that’s a good way to wake people up.”

  St. George tried it. Nothing. He picked her up in his arms. “Stand back,” he said. “I’m going to try this again.”

  Madelyn’s body tumbled toward the ceiling. Her arms swayed and her back arched. She reached her high point, her head tipped back, and she started to plummet back toward the stage floor.

  Then she blinked twice and screamed.

  St. George leaped into the air and caught her ten feet above the floor. She grabbed at him like a drowning person, pulling herself tight against him. “What the hell?!” she shrieked.

  Kennedy ran in with her pistol drawn.

  “It’s okay,” St. George said. “I’ve got you.”

  Madelyn blinked again. “Where am I? What’s going on?”

  “I needed to wake you up,” St. George said, “and nothing else was working. So I tried the same thing Stealth did.” He settled on the ground and let her down.

  She shook her head and looked at Kennedy and Makana.

  He gave her a tight smile. “Wakey-wakey, Corpse Girl,” he said.

  “Jerk.” She stuck her tongue out at him and stretched. Then she looked down at her legs and grinned. “Oh, thank God,” said Madelyn. “I can walk again.”

  Kennedy crossed to Freedom and checked his pulse. “Is he drugged?” she asked St. George.

  He shook his head. “It’s Smith. He messed with all of our minds. They’re in some kind of trance. A dream.” He looked at Madelyn. “Do you remember any of it?”

  “Most of it, I think.” Her chalk eyes turned up to the ceiling. “Where are we?”

  “The Mount.”

  She blinked and glanced over her shoulder. “Really?”

  “You just said you remembered most of it.”

  “Most of the dream,” she said. Her lips twisted as she looked around the stage. “I can’t remember the last time I was awake.”

  St. George took a few steps toward the door. “Try to wake up everyone else,” he said. “Use bright light or buckets of water or something. Try to get them oriented when they wake up.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Kennedy.

  “To find Agent Smith.”

  “But we don’t know where he is,” said Madelyn.

  “He’ll be where he always is,” said St. George. “Behind the scenes. I’m going to go talk to the mayor.”

  St. George stepped out of Stage 32 and hurled himself up into the air. His shoulders buzzed with the sensation of flight. He shot up above the buildings, into the sky, and hovered there for a moment.

  The Mount was stretched out below him. Straight ahead was the water tower, off to his left were the facades of New York Street. Los Angeles spread out past the studio walls on all sides. He could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of people—living people—walking in the streets and between buildings. Off in the distance he could see the Big Wall, with dozens of tiny guards walking along the top.

  And past that were the exes. Close to the Big Wall they swarmed like ants. They were pinpricks from here, just big enough that he could see them lurch and stagger.

  He soared down and swooped over the garden. A few people looked up. Some of them waved. He swung around and landed outside the Roddenberry Building.

  Like a lot of the buildings at the Mount, Roddenberry was named after a famous filmmaker. They’d all thought of it as the town hall for years, even when it was nothing but Stealth’s offices and a few conference rooms that got used once a month or so. Now it really was the town hall. Almost half the offices were being used. The mayor was on the fourth floor. He remembered Stealth had agreed it was a good symbolic move to put the mayor’s office where hers had been, to make it clear to everyone the heroes were turning the governing of Los Angeles back over
to the people.

  St George marched through the lobby, past the half-dozen or so folks there. Once he reached the stairwell his feet left the ground and he flew up the stairs. His body jackknifed at each landing like a high-diver.

  The door on the fourth-floor landing was open.

  It was very bright. Stealth had always kept it dark, with plenty of shadows. Now light streamed in through the windows. There was a desk just by the stairs and elevators. A young man sat at the desk and looked up as St. George’s feet touched the carpeted floor. Behind him, two large potted plants flanked the doors into the big conference room. They looked plastic. The inner office doors were open, too.

  “Oh,” said the man. “You. Do you have an appointment?”

  They stared at each other for a moment. Then the man’s face cracked and he chuckled. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist. We don’t even have a schedule set up yet. There’s no appointments.”

  “Oh.”

  “Would you like some water or anything?” He pointed at the large bubbler across the reception area. “It’s cold.”

  St. George almost said no, but then realized how dry his mouth was. He filled a plastic cup and drained it. It made him feel a bit sharper and more awake. His stomach grumbled again as the water hit.

  “The mayor thought you might be stopping by once you and the other heroes got back,” said the young man. He waved his hand over his shoulder. “Go on in,” he said.

  St. George set the cup down and walked past him.

  The blinds were up, and Stealth’s old office was flooded with sunlight. All the screens were gone. She’d taken them with her when she moved to … wherever her base was now. It struck him that he didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure if it was because his memory was still spotty or she just hadn’t told him.

  The big marble conference table had been moved down to the other end of the room and turned. It was a massive desk now, covered with inboxes, a phone, two computer screens, and a small collection of photos. It all still looked very arranged. There hadn’t been time for any of it to settle and find its natural place yet.

  There were three big chairs in front of the desk, and one huge one behind it where the mayor was sitting. With its high back, St. George thought it looked a lot like a throne. He was pretty sure it was a deliberate choice.