by Peter Clines
A few more threads of energy crackled off his arms and legs to snap against the copper rings.
I’m sorry , said Zzzap. I wanted to help him, and I thought he’d be able to help us. And I didn’t think you guys would’ve believed me until I could prove it. Especially you .
“In that, you are correct,” she said.
Another few megawatts arced from his body to the electric chair.
So , said Zzzap, what do I call you now?
She looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Are you Stealth while you’re wearing the mask and Karen when it’s off? Y’know like Batman and Bruce Wayne? Or can we call you Karen when it’s just us?
She glared at him.
The gleaming wraith put his hands up. I just want you to feel comfortable .
“Then you will continue to address me as you always have.”
He nodded slowly. Stealth it is, then .
Zzzap hung in the electric chair and she stared past him to the door. After a few wordless seconds she turned and walked away. Unlike the walk she had done for Todd, her boots were silent now.
So you actually know how he’s doing in school? he called after her. That’s not creepy at all .
She stopped and looked back at him. Her face shifted beneath the mask. “Before society collapsed, several studies showed boys between the ages of nine and twelve scored an average of fourteen percent lower than girls in English and reading classes,” she told him. “Double that percentage claimed English as their most difficult class. With a mathematically viable population of children, I saw no reason to assume those numbers had changed.”
And the bit about taking his sister’s doll?
Stealth held his gaze for another moment, then turned and walked back into the shadows.
Seventeen
Now
CERBERUS PATROLLED THE Corner on a regular basis. The guards liked seeing her. The rowdier folks were kept in line by the sight of the armored titan. It was a small enough area that she didn’t burn through too much battery life patrolling it. And it was far enough away from everything else that Danielle didn’t have to listen to people nagging at her about how much time she spent in the battlesuit.
The northeast corner had been a trouble spot when the survivors of Los Angeles started building the Big Wall. The Hollywood Freeway, often just called the 101, cut right across that part of the city. It was a paved canyon filled with dead cars that never moved and dead bodies that moved too much. There’d been some debate about whether the Big Wall should just avoid it. Some people had pushed for a zigzag path through residential streets. Others suggested running the Wall along Santa Monica Boulevard instead of Sunset, cutting the area inside by a third.
Stealth had brought the discussion to an end. She insisted on running the Big Wall along the exact lines they’d planned. “We shall not reclaim the city by avoiding challenges,” she’d said, “only by meeting them.”
She’d been right, of course. Making the Corner safe had brought together hundreds of workers. It was where the assorted peoples of the Mount, the South Seventeens, and Project Krypton had started to bond as a community.
The freeway ramps had been blocked by concrete traffic barriers set up years ago by the National Guard. The survivors added sections of chain-link fence that extended out along the sloping ground on either side of the ramps and also the overpasses that stretched above the freeway. Cars stacked two and three high pinned the chain-link in place. It wasn’t as solid as the Big Wall, but at the time it had been assumed the uneven ground would add to the barrier. The mindless exes didn’t deal well with hills, and more than a few of them tipped over before they reached the top of the ramps.
That was before the people of Los Angeles knew about Legion. In the months since, barbed wire had been strung along the top of the chain-link. Guard platforms were built at each ramp. Extra cars had been stacked to limit the possible ways through. Cerberus had stacked most of them herself.
It all left a small area of four blocks isolated on the other side of the man-made canyon. Not surprisingly, “the Corner” was where the rougher individuals among the survivors had ended up. A lot of the loners and former gangers lived there, and some of the soldiers, too. There were rumors of a black market, although what anyone could have a black market with nobody seemed sure. The one thing everyone knew was that the Corner was the one place inside the Big Wall where it was impossible to block out the sound of teeth.
Cerberus had seen the almost-pixie woman a few times before. Her dark hair wasn’t quite short enough to be a pixie cut, but Danielle didn’t know what else to call it. She was in her late thirties. Maybe younger—people had aged a lot over the past three years. She was skinny by build, not just in the way most people were skinny these days, and her clothes fit well enough to show off her figure, even with the stylish overcoat she was wearing.
Most days the woman stood on the overpasses and stared down at the exes staggering between the dusty cars and trucks. Every now and then she’d be muttering a prayer or talking to herself. It wasn’t unusual to see. At a distance, the undead were a good device for soul-searching.
This evening, though, the woman was on top of one of the stacked cars a half block or so from one of the guard platforms. It was a minivan with a broad roof, and she was cross-legged on the luggage rack, a heavy blanket under her. She looked down through the coils of barbed wire at the exes on the weed-covered slope. Her expression was peaceful.
She glanced up at the approaching battlesuit and smiled. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they flitted to the stars and stripes on the armor’s shoulders. “Hello,” she said. “Am I supposed to salute or something? I’ve never been sure.”
“Just hello’s fine,” said Cerberus.
“Is it okay for me to be up here?” There was an odd pitch to her voice. It was somewhere between a high-pitched squeak and the creak you might hear in an older person’s voice. A cute voice that had been shattered by lots of screaming. “Am I in the way or anything?”
“Not at all.”
“I’m Tori.”
“Cerberus.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said with a faint smile. Her eyes drifted back down to the undead on the freeway.
Cerberus watched Tori’s eyes flit from one ex-human to the next. It wasn’t unusual behavior, but she felt an awkward requirement to carry the conversation a little further. “Are you looking for someone?”
“A friend of mine. Richard. Rich.”
The armored skull dipped once. “Ahhh,” she said. “Friend or boyfriend?”
“Just a friend,” said Tori. Her lips curled again, but the smile faded from her eyes. “Almost-boyfriend, I guess, but the moment never happened, y’know?”
“Yes.”
“We got close a couple times,” said the almost-pixie woman. “Really close that last Christmas Eve after we’d had a few drinks at a party. I stopped us before it went too far. Kind of wish I hadn’t.” She perked up and pointed down at the freeway. “There he is.”
“Which one?”
“Okay, see the woman at the bottom of the ramp? The one in the green tee with the missing arm?”
The armor swapped lenses and zoomed in on the crowd of exes. Danielle found the dead woman with a tangle of brown hair and the green tee. Her right arm looked like it had been twisted off at the elbow. “Yeah.”
“Go past her to the left. There’s a tall guy in a striped coat and a wild tie.”
The man in the pinstriped coat was on the shorter side, but so was Tori. He’d been good-looking in an average sort of way. One of his ears was missing, and Danielle could see bloodstains on his shirt when his lurching gait swung the coat open. His tie was a garish floral print. “That’s quite a combination.”
“He had to wear a tie to work, y’know, before everything, so making them clash was his little act of rebellion.”
“Ahhh.”
“Rich’s boss was a real bitch. When the outbreaks were
happening, most places were closing down or letting people work from home. She insisted they all had to go into the office or they’d get fired.” Tori pointed at one of the taller buildings over on Sunset. “They got trapped in there. Three dozen people. I talked to him on the phone for a couple of days. They were living off the vending machines and stuff in the break rooms. The National Guard found them and gave them some food. They said they’d be back with a truck so they could get everyone out.”
“They never came back?”
Tori shook her head. “I don’t think so. After a week he called me to say they were going to try making a break for it. He figured if he could make it down to the freeway he could go along on top of cars and avoid the zombies.”
It wasn’t the dumbest survival plan Cerberus had ever heard. It wasn’t the brightest, either. She didn’t say anything. She’d long since grown used to people needing to unload on someone. And a lot of people found it easier to spill their guts to a giant robot than to a person they had to look in the eyes.
“Anyway, he told me to stay put and he’d get to me. So I stayed put. And I never heard from him again.”
The battlesuit shifted, and its toes scraped on the pavement. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said the almost-pixie woman. She took a long, slow breath. “It was a long time ago.”
Down on the street, the ex in the pinstriped coat had caught itself on the side mirror of a car. The dead man kept turning in small circles and bumping into the side of the car or other exes. After a few revolutions its coat slipped free and it staggered on. It headed in the general direction of the overpass they were on. Tori straightened up.
“After the Big Wall was done I kept coming out here to look for him. I even got an apartment over there.” She waved her arm across the freeway at the Corner, but her attention drifted back down to her dead friend. “About five weeks ago I found him down there on the freeway. He’s been staying put, just like he told me to.”
“He’s still pretty clean,” said the armored titan, unsure what else to say. “That must make him a little easier to … to see like this.”
“He hates being messy,” Tori said. “He’s one of those people who’re always washing their hands and brushing themselves off. He’s almost OCD about it.”
The tenses hinted the conversation was going off into a direction Cerberus didn’t want to be involved in. She’d had a version of it with someone every other week for the past four or five months since the A.D. movement had gained momentum. “If you’re okay, then,” said the battlesuit, “I’m going to move on.”
“Oh, sure,” said Tori. “I’m great now that Rich is here. Thanks for talking.”
Cerberus nodded, feeling like she’d dodged a bullet. She didn’t have anything against the almost-pixie woman’s religion—any religion—but she found dogma boring as all hell. Most people wouldn’t want to sit through one of her discussions about exoskeletal motion-reactive processors, either, but she didn’t feel the need to force the subject on anybody except Gibbs and Cesar.
Tori reached out an arm to wave to her former-almost-boyfriend as the titan thudded past. Cerberus looked up ahead and saw the two guards at the Sunset on-ramp wave to her. She was trying to remember their names when she heard the noise.
It was the hollow sound of bending metal. Part of her recognized it as someone moving on a car roof. Then she heard the rustling, saw a glimpse of movement through her rearview camera, and the two guards stood up and raised their voices. The battlesuit spun around just as the click of leather on pavement reached her.
Tori’s blanket hung across the chain-link fence. It covered and flattened the barbed wire. The fence still trembled from her vault over it.
The almost-pixie woman walked down the ramp, into the late-day shadows and toward the exes. Her hair was fluffed up from the jump. She was half turned away from Cerberus, but the battlesuit’s lenses could still see the happy smile on her face.
“Tori,” yelled the titan, “get back here now!”
She turned around and shook her head. “Don’t worry,” she called back. “He recognizes me. It’ll be fine.”
Dead Rich swung its head around to look at Tori. Its teeth banged together as it staggered toward her. The one-armed dead woman moved in her direction, too. So did an ex with a broken lower jaw, one with fingers worn down to bone claws, and a half-dozen others.
Cerberus took a few huge steps back to the minivan the woman had sat on. The battlesuit was too heavy to climb onto the car, and the chain-link would never support the armor’s weight. She didn’t have her ranged weapons because ammunition was so scarce for them. There wasn’t any way for Cerberus to get to the other woman except for tearing open a hole in the barrier. Danielle clenched her fists in frustration. “Tori,” she shouted again.
The almost-pixie woman ignored her. She was halfway down the ramp, seventeen and a half feet from the one-armed ex, according to the armor’s targeting software. The dead woman raised its stump and its one good arm.
A shot rang out and the ex’s head cricked hard to the side before it collapsed. The guards on the platform were lining up shots with their rifles. Tori looked up at them and screamed as another ex shambled toward her.
Cerberus patched herself through to their radios. “Keep her covered,” she ordered. “I’m going to try to get down there.”
“Make it quick, ma’am,” said one of the guards. “There’s at least a dozen more on the move, heading her way.” He was one of the unenhanced soldiers from Krypton. His name flitted across her mind for a moment and she pushed it away.
Tori broke into a run, heading down the ramp. One of the guards pegged the claw-fingered ex and the woman screamed again. Cerberus thought the woman had gone hysterical and was just running to get away from the gunfire.
Then Tori got to the bottom of the ramp. She threw herself between the rifles and her dead friend. The woman spread her arms wide and looked up at them. “Don’t hurt him!”
The guards looked over at Cerberus. So did Tori. Danielle glared at the screens inside her helmet and slammed her steel fist down on the hood of the minivan. “Get out of the way,” she bellowed in full public-address mode. Her words echoed down into the concrete canyon.
Ex-Rich wrapped one arm around Tori’s waist from behind. The other one hooked over her shoulder and grabbed her left boob. Her face lit up for a second with a look of vindication and relief. Maybe even a bit of naughty excitement.
Tori turned to look at the ex. Her eyes went wide just as it sank its teeth into the base of her neck. She shrieked. Blood gushed out across her shoulder and soaked her overcoat. The dead man clawed at her chest with its fingers and she twisted away. Ex-Rich staggered back with a mouthful of flesh between its chomping teeth.
Danielle blinked and the lenses zoomed in. Tori was bleeding a lot, but it wasn’t pulsing. The ex had missed any major arteries. If she got back to the fence there was still a chance. A good chance.
But the almost-pixie woman was in shock. Once she was free of her dead friend she stood there for a moment. Her hand went up to touch her neck and came back soaked in red. She looked over her shoulder at the ex who had been her friend.
“Get back here,” yelled Cerberus. “Come on!” She tried stepping up onto the trunk of a car. It squealed and crumpled under her armored foot. She looked at the fence and tried to figure out if there was a way to open it that could be repaired quickly. The only way through was to shred it.
Another shot echoed across the freeway and an ex jerked but didn’t fall. It had been a dark-haired man in an L.A. Kings jersey. It took another few steps and a second round put it down.
Now Tori was hysterical. She turned to run and slammed right into a car. She sprawled on the hood and left a splash of blood on the silver paint. She pushed herself up and made it a few yards back up the ramp before she stumbled. She tried to twist herself back up and grabbed at her ruined shoulder. It threw her balance and she tumbled to the ground.
Ex-Rich fell on her, pinning her face down against the pavement. She twisted around onto her side and tried to push him away, and his teeth closed on her fingers. Its jaws opened again and her hand slipped in to the next knuckle. She howled.
The broken-jawed ex flapped its mouth at her and tried to chew her arm through the heavy sleeve of her overcoat. She thrashed her legs, but her almost-boyfriend slipped between them. Her other arm was pinned under her, and Cerberus could see it grasping at the air.
The guards took out two more exes heading for the woman, but a third slipped past them, and a fourth. Tori’s screams were already growing weaker when the two new exes fell on her. Her cries gurgled as if she had a mouthful of water and one of the exes stumbled back with pink meat between its teeth.
The steel fingers wrapped around the chain-link, and Danielle hollered at the exes as they ripped the woman apart. Then she stood up straight and bit back her tears. There was no way to wipe her eyes while she was in the suit, and she’d be useless if she couldn’t see or run the optical mouse.
Not that she’d been very useful to Tori as it was.
Eighteen
Now
THE COUPLE ON the other side of the street glanced at Madelyn. She tried to walk casually and watched them without turning her head. When their gaze didn’t leave her, she gave them a nod, a tight smile, and a little wave. The woman returned the wave and whispered something to the man, but they stopped looking at her and kept walking.
It was the third time this morning her disguise had worked, and she was feeling pretty good about it. The collar of her jacket was turned up and Captain Freedom’s cap sat low against her latest pair of sunglasses. She was lucky the hospital had a small stockpile of them. With her hands in her pockets, she was pretty sure she’d pass as a living person if nobody got too close.
She walked down El Centro, a residential street running parallel to Vine. At each intersection she could see the Big Wall a block to the east. If her notes were right, she was two blocks away from the gate she’d walked past with Freedom.