by Peter Clines
“Dammit,” muttered St. George.
“Sorry.”
“Are they definitely dead? Not just…I don’t know, scorched or something?”
She nodded. “All burned black and dead.” She held out the binoculars. “Want to see? Half the grove is just ash.”
He shook his head and pressed his lips into a flat line. The Larchmont area south of the Big Wall had been lots of high-end, suburban homes before the Zombocalypse. More than a few of them had fruit trees, either out front or hidden in their back lawns. Apples, grapefruits, lemons, even a set of twin fig trees. One spacious backyard had turned into a small grove of fourteen orange trees gathered around a koi pond. With the year-round growing season in Los Angeles, it had been one of the Mount’s few dependable sources of food.
Had been now being the key phrase.
“Dammit,” St. George said again. “This does not help things.”
Billie’s stomach grumbled. “No kidding.”
He managed a brief smile. “We’ve got to get Eden going now. Right now.”
“It’s not ready,” said Billie. “I was talking with Al the other day. They’ve got the fences extended, but that’s it.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been up there moving a couple dozen cars around for them. But we don’t have a choice.”
“Yeah, everyone’s still whining about only getting two meals a day.”
“Still better than no meals a day,” said St. George, “and that’s where we’ll be in a month or two if Eden isn’t up and running.”
“Speaking of which…”
“Yeah?”
“I think there need to be more scavengers up at Eden.”
“So you’ve said a couple times now.”
“They’ve got twelve, but think how many more houses they could be going through if we sent up a full team of twenty. Or both teams. They could be pulling in three or four times more supplies than we’ve been getting here in Hollywood. And we need that after this.” She gestured out at the blackened buildings.
“I know,” he said, “but Eden’s only got space and resources for so many people. More scavengers mean less people actually working up there.”
Billie’s jaw shifted back and forth as she ground her teeth. “They’d be working.”
“You know what I mean. Right now the priority has to be getting Eden up and running. It’s a continuous source of food.”
“Or,” she said, “we could finally hit downtown.”
They both looked to the east. The distant buildings gleamed in the sunlight. Canyons of steel and concrete choked with dead vehicles and undead people.
The scavengers had made one attempt to conquer downtown, almost four years ago. It ended in near-disaster as almost a thousand exes had surrounded and immobilized their truck. St. George had been forced to airlift the scavengers away one by one—a brutally long process in the days before he’d mastered flight. Billie had been the second-to-last person out. The truck was still down there, another dead thing on 3rd Street.
“I know the idea of working a garden doesn’t thrill you,” he said, shaking his head, “but we both know it’s a better option than downtown.”
Billie gave him a tight grin. Her jaw worked back and forth again. St. George wondered how busy she kept the last two dentists in Los Angeles. He’d never met either of them himself. Not professionally, anyway. His nigh-invulnerability extended to his teeth.
“I’d still like to give it a try someday,” she said.
He bit back a grin of his own. Only a Marine would be excited about leading a mission into hell. “If we don’t all starve in the next few months,” he said, “we’ll talk about it.”
Billie perked up. “I’ll hold you to that,” she said.
“I’ve got to go check in with Danielle and then Freedom.” He waved his hand at the blackened streets. “If you spot anything positive out there, let me know.”
“I’m positive I saw a couple crispy exes staggering around.”
St. George gave her a loose salute and pushed himself back up into the air. He spun twice, got his bearings, and let his flight become a slow arc to the north. His gaze drifted west as he did. The air quality in LA was really amazing these days. No haze, no smog. He could see for miles.
Zzzap had been gone for two days now. For the past few months they’d been trying to reestablish contact with the rest of the world. Before civilization had taken its last wheezing step and collapsed, there’d been stories about other safe zones. Pockets of survivors were scattered throughout Europe and Africa, one or two in South America, and a large group in Japan. That’s where he was now.
Zzzap could make it around the world in twelve hours. Less if he went suborbital. And in his energy form he could see almost all types of electrical activity, provided it wasn’t shielded somehow. It made him the perfect person to search for other groups and serve as an impromptu ambassador.
It was strange not having him around, though. Even expanded out to fill a square mile, the Mount was still a small place. Over the past few years, St. George had grown used to seeing people every day.
He turned his head and mind back to his destination. He shot higher into the air, looped around in a wide arc, and plummeted back toward the ground. The wind dragged his hair back and his collar snapped like a whip.
A year earlier, a mind-controlling villain had trapped St. George and the other heroes in a sort of group hallucination—a waking nightmare where most of their powers were gone and the Mount had fallen. He hadn’t been able to breathe fire. Or fly.
The not-flying had bothered him the most. To the best of his knowledge, only five or six superheroes in the world had ever been able to fly. Really fly, not just jump or glide.
Somehow, he’d almost been taking it for granted.
In the months since escaping the dream world, St. George found himself enjoying flights much more. Taking joy in the fact he could soar through the air on nothing more than willpower. He did loops and barrel rolls and once or twice used the excuse of maneuvering exercises to pretend he was dodging missiles and streams of bullets.
The children of the Mount loved it.
He looped around the studio water tower, back past the Roddenberry Building, and then dropped to the ground in front of a large building with a hangar-sized door.
For the past few years Danielle Morris had lived and worked here, in what had once been an old scene shop, back when the Mount was in the business of sitcoms and Star Trek shows. She’d blocked off a small section with curtains where she kept what amounted to a sparse studio apartment. The rest of the warehouse-sized space was her workshop, an area devoted to the care and maintenance of her greatest creation, the Cerberus Battle Armor System.
In the months since St. George had been forced to destroy the battlesuit, the workshop had been all about building a new one. Danielle had salvaged motors, wiring, subprocessors, and other components from the original Cerberus battlesuit. What she couldn’t salvage, she’d earmarked for raw materials. She worked all the time and rarely left the workshop. In fact, St. George couldn’t remember seeing her outside since then.
Several tables in the big space had been pushed together. Various parts sat in a rough outline matching the battlesuit. On reflection, he thought it looked like an autopsy in progress.
Danielle hid behind a welding mask and heavy gloves. Sparks cracked and leaped around her hands while she worked on the battlesuit’s torso. The welding torch moved to a new spot, and the sparks began again.
Two tables over, Thomas Gibbs worked on a laptop plugged into one of the huge mechanical hands. His hair had grown out into a mess of brown curls. Gibbs was an Air Force lieutenant who’d trained to pilot the Cerberus armor back when he was at Project Krypton. He’d been helping Danielle with the Mark II suit. His head came up and gave St. George a nod, but their eyes never met. The lieutenant’s knuckles rapped hard on the table three times.
Danielle looked up from her welding, then saw St. Ge
orge framed in the door. She pushed her mask up and revealed her freckled cheeks and wisps of red hair. “What’s up?”
“Just checking in.”
She gestured at the framework in front of her with a gloved hand. “You want a progress report?”
“No,” he said. “I meant in the sense of just saying hi.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the steel ribs and back up at St. George. Then she reached back and twisted the knobs on the welding tanks. “Hi.”
“Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days.”
She shrugged. “You’ve been busy up at Eden pushing cars around.”
“Yeah, sorry. You doing okay?”
Danielle pulled the welding mask off, and a messy ponytail fell behind her shoulders. “I’ll feel better once it’s together.” She tried to pull her arms across her chest and fumbled with the bulky mask. She shifted it in her hands, then set it down on top of the torso.
They looked at each other.
“So,” said St. George, “what’ve you been up to?”
She waved a hand at the skeletal battlesuit again. “Work.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not really.”
“Seen any movies?”
She shook her head. “No. Barry’s been gone all the time, flying around the world.”
“Ahhhh.” A moment passed between them, and he nodded at the metal ribs. “So, when do you think you’re going to have it up and running?”
Danielle’s shoulders relaxed a bit. “All the core elements are functioning now,” she said, her voice a little bolder. “We assembled the frame and did a test last week. I just walked around the shop. The balance isn’t quite right because there’s nothing on it, but it worked. I’m hoping to have the outer shell and the armor plating done in the next six weeks or so.”
“Sooner the better,” said St. George. “We’re going to have to get Eden up and running a lot sooner than we thought. We’ll need you.”
She frowned. “How much sooner?”
“Two or three days. Friday at the latest.”
Gibbs snorted but still didn’t look up.
Danielle stared at him. Her shoulders hunched back up. “Two or three days? I thought I had another two months.”
“The fire wiped out pretty much all the trees in Larchmont,” he said. “We’ve gone from being really tight on food to officially not having enough food. We need to have people in Eden now.”
She looked at the torso. “Well,” she said, “it all depends on Barry.”
St. George glanced up at the banks of lights, then down at some of the cables stretched across the floor. “You don’t have enough power?”
“Not enough heat. He’s a walking forge when he’s Zzzap. Well, a floating one.”
“Score another point for superpowers,” said St. George. He looked around the workshop. “Speaking of which, where’s Cesar?”
Danielle shrugged. “He’s out at the scavenger warehouse getting us some supplies.”
“And lunch,” said Gibbs without looking up from his computer. “Assuming there’s still food.”
“You might want to savor it when he gets back,” said St. George, “just in case.”
Cesar Mendoza had been a member of the South Seventeens gang who’d taken refuge in the Mount years ago with his family. At the time he’d been a scrawny young man barely out of his teens and always wearing a pair of driving gloves. He’d held off revealing his superhuman abilities for almost a year after joining the Mount. Being able to merge with vehicles and control them had seemed like an all-but-worthless ability in post-apocalypse Los Angeles. Then Cesar realized he could possess the Cerberus armor and use it better than any pilot. Danielle had grudgingly accepted him onto her team.
Lieutenant Gibbs walked over with his laptop. A low whisssk, like a steel brush on oily stone, whispered up from the floor with every other step. “Still can’t keep power steady to the left hand,” he said to Danielle.
“A short?”
“Maybe.” He rattled off a bunch of technical terms St. George didn’t understand. Danielle pointed at the screen and fired back with a few terms of her own. The air between them became a swarm of electronic- and engineering-speak.
Then the swarm scattered, Gibbs nodded, and he walked away with his whispery steps. St. George glanced down. He tried not to stare, but he felt a twinge whenever he saw the man’s foot.
The lieutenant had been the last person to wear the original Cerberus armor. His mind had been under someone else’s control and he’d attacked St. George, damaging a dozen buildings across the Mount in the process. And then Zzzap had blasted off one of the battlesuit’s feet and a good part of the calf. Gibbs’s own foot had been incinerated in the process, cauterized right through the ankle. Doc Connolly had to remove what was left and an inch of the leg itself to make a clean stump.
Gibbs had hobbled around the Mount with a crutch for three months and made a point of avoiding all the heroes. It took that long for Danielle to burn through most of her anger and resentment at the loss of the battlesuit.
She built him a new foot as a peace offering. It was purely mechanical, a steampunk thing made of steel and brass and a collection of gears Cesar had found for her. The joints worked off pressure and counterweight and movement. Gibbs could walk again with a faint limp, and they’d never spoken of his part in the armor’s destruction.
St. George looked away from the foot and found Danielle watching him. “It wasn’t your fault,” she told him.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, “but maybe someday you’ll listen to one of us.”
He coughed. “So, going good, overall?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “Yeah. The original Cerberus was a prototype suit. It was made for easy use and assembly in demonstrations, not so much active duty. There’s about a dozen things we would’ve done differently, and I’m trying to implement as many of them as possible.”
“Like?”
“The Mark Two’s going to be about fifteen percent stronger, if my numbers are right. Grip strength is up almost twenty.” She tapped the torso section in front of her. “I’ve increased the range of motion in the wrists, shoulders, and hips, too.”
St. George couldn’t see the changes, but he nodded. He saw a component he recognized, one of the rotating arm mounts she’d built out at Project Krypton, and pointed at it. “Still using those?”
Danielle’s mouth curled into a tight smile. “So,” she said, “problem. At this point, both of the armor’s M2s are ruined. We’ve got replacement barrels, but one of the guns would need its threads recut to get the barrel on, and the bolt group’s ruined on the other one. We’ve got one replacement, but they’ve got it mounted on the East Gate watchtower.”
“And there’s only six hundred rounds left for it anyway,” added Gibbs.
St. George remembered the days of cheering when they’d find a box of shotgun shells. “Isn’t that a lot?”
“For a pistol or a rifle it’s not bad,” Danielle said, “but for Ma Deuce it’s about a minute of firing time. Cerberus needs a new ranged weapon.”
“Okay.”
She waved him around to one of the worktables. One of the arms was there, held up in brackets. A few cables ran from the shoulder joint across the table. “Thing is, we’re not swimming in any type of ammunition. So I’ve tried to come up with something else. I played with a few railgun models for a while, but every shot would eat up at least sixteen percent of the armor’s battery life to get anything to an even halfway decent velocity.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said St. George.
Danielle shrugged off her flannel shirt to reveal the black spandex bodysuit studded with metal contacts. It had been years since St. George had seen her without it. It wouldn’t surprise him if she slept in it. He wasn’t sure if she had more than one or if she rinsed it every other night.
She settled in next to the table and slid her right arm into t
he framework. It blended in with the metal and wires. “Then it struck me I was going about this all wrong,” she said. “I kept trying to solve it in a high-tech way, and that means precision ammunition or lots of power. What if I did something low-tech instead?”
She nodded over at Gibbs, and he tapped a few keys on the laptop. Several elements in the framework arm lit up. Tiny sparks danced at all the contact points along the bodysuit’s sleeve.
The battlesuit arm lifted its forearm out of the brackets. Danielle looked lopsided with the one massive arm. She flexed the fingers a few times and relaxed. Without the insulation and armor muffling it, the hum of the joints seemed closer to a squeal.
She shot a grin at St. George, then nodded across the room. “See that sheet of plywood?”
At the far end of the workshop, about twenty yards away, the oversized panel was propped up with some of the wooden jacks that had once held scenery in place. SW PLAT 2 had been stenciled on it. At least a dozen ragged holes had been punched in the target, each one the size of a golf ball.
Danielle turned her attention back to the battlesuit’s dissected arm. Servos hissed as she wrapped the steel fingers into a ball. The fist pulled back to her shoulder, like the first step in a salute, and something clacked inside the arm. St. George ran his eyes across the different struts and cables, but couldn’t spot the source of the sound.
The arm straightened out with a clicking, ratcheting noise. The clicks became twangs and then pings as it slowed to a stop. The sounds of tension. Danielle adjusted the arm, aiming it at the plywood. “I think that’s good,” she said to Gibbs.
“Three,” he said, “two, one.” He tapped a button on the laptop, something clicked in the battlesuit’s arm, and St. George heard a quick noise like a guitar string being plucked and muffled.
Something smashed into SW PLAT 2 with the sound of metal on concrete. The target rocked on its stands and then came to rest. A fresh hole had appeared at shoulder height.
