by Peter Clines
“Next question,” said St. George. “Have many of the Seventeens changed? Are most of them exes?”
“I dropped over a dozen of them when they attacked the other night. They’re still alive. The majority of them, at least. And all five prisoners were alive when they were brought in.”
“Are you sure your power doesn’t work on the...” St. George shrugged. “On the smart ones? Maybe they’re different somehow.”
“I tried Eduardo in the cell. No effect. He’s dead.”
“About that,” asked Barry, “did all the prisoners change?”
Stealth set her fist on the table and rested on her knuckles. “The two who committed suicide both became exes. So far only Eduardo has shown signs of intelligence.”
“And we’re sure he’s intelligent? Not just spitting out words like a parrot or something?”
“As of yesterday he has taken part in three conversations. He is making definite, deliberate responses.”
“Just playing devil’s advocate,” said Barry, “but we’re usually fighting with the Seventeens over food and resources. From what I’ve heard so far, it sounds like these smart ones don’t go chasing after people. I mean, none of them actually need to eat to survive, right?”
Josh nodded. “Eating seems to slow down decomposition somehow, on a minimal level, but it doesn’t sustain them. We think it’s just some sort of basic, primal urge from the reptilian part of the brain, one of the only things that still works.”
“Good thing that’s the only primal urge they act on,” murmured Barry. It got a few chuckles.
“So this could be a good thing,” tossed out St. George. “A new breed of exes that don’t need to kill people.”
“They might still do it for fun,” said Gorgon.
“Of course, if they do decide to go after people, we’re their main resource,” said Danielle. “The Mount’s just become a big grocery store.”
“Open twenty-four hours,” said Barry. “Thank you for shopping,”
“So what is causing it?” Stealth glanced at Josh. “Some mutation in the virus?”
He shook his head. “The ex-virus doesn’t mutate. We’ve grown thousands of cultures. No variation at all. If I had to guess, I’d say these smart exes have some quirk in their own cells that’s making the virus react differently to them.”
“So this is something new.”
“You know what I’m wondering?” said Barry. “Why are the only ones we’ve seen Seventeens?”
St. George shrugged. “If you woke up as a smart ex, would you come running up to the Melrose Gate? There may be hundreds of them who are hiding from us.”
“Doubtful,” said Josh. “If it’s a cellular mutation in the victim it has to be extremely rare. Last numbers I heard said there were over three hundred million exes in North America alone and there’s never been a report of anything like this before.”
“Out of three hundred million,” argued Gorgon, “a few hundred is still pretty rare.”
“Maybe the people are all just starting to mutate now,” said Barry. “It could be some sort of evolutionary response to the virus, a survival of the fittest thing.”
Stealth shook her head.
“Maybe the virus just started to mutate now,” added Gorgon. “There could be some new influence we don’t know about.”
Josh glared at him. “The virus doesn’t mutate!”
“How can you be so sure?”
“How? Have you forgotten who I am?” He pulled his withered hand out from his pocket and thrust it at the goggled man. The parchment fingers trembled in the air. “I’ve been living with this damned thing hanging over my head for two years now. It doesn’t change or I’d know!”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Gorgon. “I forgot, you’re the fucking expert when it comes to dealing with the ex-virus.”
“Shut the hell up.”
“That’s how Kathy died, wasn’t it? Because of your expertise?”
“Yeah, you know what?” Josh straightened up and reminded them all how big he was. “Your teenage girlfriend’s dead.”
“Fuck you!”
“She died and I couldn’t save her. She’s dead, so’s Meredith, so are millions of other people. Millions! You don’t have any sort of special pass on grief so just deal with it.”
Danielle didn’t lift her eyes from the map. “Like you have?”
He stabbed a finger at her. “You’re the last one to be pointing out damaged people.”
“Quiet!”
Stealth turned her head to each of them. “The next person who interrupts,” she said, “I will break their right ring finger. Is that clear?”
They looked at her with raised eyebrows and slack jaws. Then, one by one, they shifted their gazes to St. George.
The Mighty Dragon shook his head and crossed his arms.
“Whipped,” murmured Gorgon.
Josh and Danielle bit back their laughs. Barry tried and failed.
Stealth and St. George glared at him.
“May we continue?”
They nodded.
“We are all making wild guesses and assumptions. Without information there is nothing else we can do.” She gestured at the map. “Therefore, we need to go make an assessment. The Seventeen’s exact location, numbers, resources. If we can, determine how many of them have become exes. We know most of their activity has been centered here in Beverly Hills, between La Cienega and Century City. The last time Zzzap made a pass, three months ago, this seemed to be their base of operations.”
Barry nodded. “They’ve used cars and a lot of the old National Guard barricades to block off roads and make walls. Gregory, Maple, Pico, Century Park East. They’re all just one massive pile-up, three cars high at places. Decent amount of barbed wire and stakes, too. Pretty much impassable by anything that can’t think and climb.” His finger made a set of slashes across the map.
Gorgon shook his head. “That’s a hell of a lot of space. How many people are we talking about?”
Barry shifted on the table. The dark woman traced the outline he had described. “We are estimating about twenty-two thousand,” she said.
St. George’s palms hit the tabletop. “What!?”
“That was three months ago. A population of that size has had several births and deaths since then.”
“They’ve got twenty-two thousand people living there,” repeated Gorgon. “They’re doing better than us?”
“It’s like the Dark Ages,” Barry said. “They don’t have electricity past a few generators. Barely any working vehicles that I’ve seen. Most of their people are using torches and cooking over bonfires. Half their guards are armed with baseball bats and spears.”
“They have raw numbers,” said Stealth. “We have everything else.”
St. George cast his eyes between the woman and the dark-skinned man. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I decided it would be demoralizing to the populace of the Mount. The more people who knew, the better the chance it would slip out.”
Gorgon shook his head. “So this asswipe gang we’ve been telling everyone is no real threat is actually ruling their own kingdom with almost five times the manpower we’ve got?”
“Assuming they recruit children and the elderly into their ranks,” said Stealth, “yes, they are. I believe less than twenty percent of that number are actual members of the Seventeens. To continue the medieval analogy, the rest are living as serfs in exchange for protection.”
Josh pointed with his good hand. “Is that Roxbury Park?”
“It was,” said Stealth. “They are using it as their own farm now.”
He nodded and twisted his lip. “I proposed to Meredith there.”
Gorgon sighed. Barry looked up to examine a ceiling panel.
“Question,” said Danielle to fill the silence. “What about this Peasy, their big boss?” She looked at Gorgon. “He sounds like the likely candidate. You dealt with the Seventeens all the time. Who is he?”
>
The goggles swept back and forth over the map. “No idea. None of the guys I knew who were near the top before things fell apart. Might be a new player.”
“Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “There were a dozen or so men in their upper circle. The only ones with similar names were two Pedros and one idiot who called himself Painkiller, real name Fernando.”
Stealth tilted her head under the hood. “Painkiller?”
“He was a fucking idiot, trust me. Convinced he had some kind of superpower. Tried to fight me twice with his eyes closed, once while wearing a welding mask.”
Danielle tilted her head. “Did that work?”
“No.”
“Did he have any kind of power?”
“Besides a superhuman ability not to learn from his mistakes? No. Neither of the Pedros struck me as ruthless enough to run the gang, either. Good lieutenants, not real leaders.”
Stealth looked at the map. “Is there anyone in the next level who might fit?”
“The next level is a hundred guys. Probably twice that if they’ve gotten as big as you’re saying. Without a real description it could be anyone. Hell, Peasy could be someone who just moved in and took over.” He swiped at the map and knotted his fists once or twice.
“What?”
“It pisses me off,” he said. “I used to know the SS backwards and forwards. We’ve downgraded them as a problem for so long we don’t know a fucking thing about them anymore.”
“Thus, the recon,” said Stealth. “A small team. Two at most.”
“Just us?” asked Gorgon. “Or were you thinking of civilians?”
She shook her head. “After Zzzap, St. George and I are the fastest. We are also the best suited to operating without support.”
St. George raised an eyebrow. “How tough do you think this is going to be?”
Stealth ran her finger across the map. “Four and a half miles each way. Keeping a low profile, that is a full day of travel with no backup. With actual reconnaissance time, we will be gone for almost two days.”
Danielle tapped the map. “Why not just have Barry do another fly-over? Faster and easier.”
“Since he cannot hold anything,” said Stealth, “we cannot get images. Everything would come down to his memory, descriptive ability, and how long it would take to debrief him.”
“Plus I’m not exactly subtle,” he said with a wink. “Hard to do covert ops when you’re brighter than the sun.”
“We need to see what they are doing when they believe we are not observing, get a solid idea of their forces, and perhaps discover who this Peasy is.”
The pen Josh was twirling between his fingers clicked on the table. “Oh, hell.”
“What?”
“Not Peasy,” he said. He looked up at them. “Pee- Zee.”
Barry tilted his head. “What?”
“I was thinking about the virus and how it doesn’t mutate, and that got me thinking about the contagion and all the news announcements they kept making to keep people updated, and then it just hit me--”
“Pee-Zee,” repeated Stealth.
St. George glanced at their faces. “Am I the only slow one?”
“Patient zero,” said Josh.
THEN
It’s What’s Inside That Counts
Even with the shortage of pilots these days, we rated air travel. The rest of the team was in a passenger plane, sitting in real padded seats. I was on a bench, leaning against the interior wall of a C-130J Hercules, strapped into a five-point harness. Cerberus was broken down into over a dozen components and stored for transport. The crates were strapped to the sides of the plane, heavy Anvil cases mounted on solid wheels. With the way things were collapsing across the country, I wasn’t about to let it out of my sight.
The Cerberus Battle Armor system took five months to design and another four to build. At least six weeks of that was waiting for parts. Plenty of people had been working on exoskeletons before me. There was the Hardiman stuff the Navy tried in the sixties. Just before everything fell apart, Hugo Herr at MIT had one. UC Berkley had their Bleex rig and the Hulc. Sarcos Incorporated had a great one. And all I had to do was flash my DARPA card, say “National security,” and I got to look at the blueprints and software for all of them, whether they liked it or not.
Then you can add in all the optional extras. The Army’s Future Force Warrior system. Interceptor body armor. The latest TASER designs. Motion-sensor targeting programs. All this technology was just sitting around, waiting for one clever woman to put it all together.
Yes, I stole from the best.
New York’s been lost. No one wants to say it, but there it is. The entire city’s gone. Boston too. And Chicago. Washington DC’s hanging on by a thread, but I understand the president and his cabinet were evacuated to NORAD over a week ago. The west coast cities seem to have fared a little better, probably because they’ve got more sprawl and less concentration. One of the last decisions made by the DOD was to ship me and the suit out west. I was supposed to team up with some of the “superheroes” out there and be a visible symbol of government power, action, and safety in Los Angeles.
The rest of the Hercules was taken up by a platoon’s worth of Marines. I say “worth” because they were a patched-together group, a few surviving squads, individuals, and raw recruits out of basic that had been reorganized to make a functioning unit. I knew soldiers tended to be younger than most people thought, but seeing a bunch of kids all still in their teens drove it home. They were loud and boastful and bragging. And they were white-knuckle scared. Almost two thirds of the current enlisted U.S. military servicemen were dead. Half of them were still walking.
Our plane tilted and everyone shifted their feet. One of the flight crew spoke to the platoon sergeant for a few minutes, a tall, heavy-set man who spent the flight checking his troops. He nodded to the airman and walked back to me.
“Little course correction,” he said. His voice was loud and brash over the roar of the engines. He was ten years older than most of the men and women following him.
“Is there a problem?”
“No, ma’am, there’s been a development at Burbank. We’re diverting to Van Nuys.”
“That’s further into the Valley, isn’t it? We’re going deeper into held territory?”
“Technically, yes, but the airport is a safe zone. Approximately two hundred civilians and staff there.”
“How much longer?”
“Thirty minutes.” He held out his hand. “Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Wallen.”
I nodded at his nametag. “I know.”
“I’ve been meaning to compliment you on your outfit.”
I’d been issued a flak jacket with no tags and a helmet. I wore them over my street clothes. “Well, nothing says military consultant like the Red Sox and digital camos.”
“You a fan?”
“An ex boyfriend left it in my apartment. It’s got long sleeves and I don’t care what happens to it.”
“No love lost?”
“None.”
“When’d he dump you?”
“How do you know I didn’t dump him?”
The staff sergeant shook his head and sat down next to me. “Nobody dumps somebody back home. It’s always the other way around.”
I smiled. “Seven months ago.”
“That’s cool,” he nodded.
“Go for it, Wall!” A few yards back in the plane, one of the Marines sent a double thumbs up our way and the others hooted and cackled. It was the happiest, the most normal they’d looked for the whole flight.
Wallen stared him down, but it was a friendly stare. “Sorry about that.”
I shrugged it off. “They’re just blowing off steam.”
“So, you’re on the Cerberus team, huh?”
“You could say that, yeah.”
He nodded. “You been with them a long time?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m just wondering about this
guy,” he said with a shrug. “What do you know about him?”
“Who?”
He jerked his thumb over at the crates. “Danny Morris,” he said. “The guy in the suit.”
“I’m sorry...?”
“A bunch of the guys are just kind of wondering why a lab professor suddenly decides to be a government-sponsored superhero, y’know? Especially someone with no service history.”
I bit my tongue and nodded. “Makes sense.”
“So how much do you know about him?”
I toyed with a couple crude answers, but settled on “Quite a bit.”
“Like?”
“Genius IQ. Confident. The only person who completely understands how the suit works and can use it with any degree of competence.”
“Arrogant cocksucker, then? You can say it, I won’t tell.”
I smirked. “I think all of you need to keep in mind that suit can flip a HumVee with one hand.”
“For real?”
I nodded. “It threw a three-ton test weight fifty-five meters in one of the early trials, and we’ve made improvements since then.”
“Shit,” he grinned. “That’s bitchin’.”
“Yeah. Also, never say Danny.”
“No?”
“No. It’s always Danielle. Or Dr. Morris.”
“Danielle?” He struggled with it for a few seconds and then his eyes went wide. “Oh, shit. Sorry, ma’am. Dr. Morris. All of us just heard the name on the radio and--”
“Staff sergeant, sir!?” The airman was snapping his fingers again. Wallen gave me a quick glance and swayed across the deck. They talked for a moment and his shoulders sagged. He gave a sharp nod to the Marines as he made his way back to me. They weren’t buying it either.
“What’s going on?”
“Van Nuys has been compromised. One of their fences fell fifteen minutes ago. We’re landing in a hot zone.”
“Can’t we go back to Burbank?”
He shook his head and leaned closer. “Burbank’s gone. Completely overrun. Right now our best bet is to land at Van Nuys and come out fighting.”
“Aren’t there other airports in Long Beach and San Diego?”
“Way too far out of the way.”