Ex-Heroes e-1

by Peter Clines

  “We’re moving in less than five,” said St. George. “Let’s not start wasting ammo yet.”

  Big Red ’s engine rumbled.

  Cerberus shoved a blue Prius up onto the curb and kicked the last motorcycle away with a spray of sparks. A few blinks inside her helmet switched on the armor’s night vision scopes, and she examined the shadowy underside of the freeway overpass. Some jagged, green graffiti spelled out PEASY RULES. Nothing else.

  Her footsteps echoed on the concrete pillars. Another set of blinks brought up the long-range lenses. She studied Melrose as far as she could see for signs of life or ex-life.

  Nothing.

  She plodded back under the bridge and into the sunlight again. “Clock’s ticking,” shouted St. George from the truck. “Everything okay?”

  She gave him a heavy nod. “How’s that look?” she bellowed back with a wave at the overpass.

  Luke gave her a thumbs-up from the cab and Big Red rolled forward. St. George walked alongside until they reached the overpass. Cerberus was still gazing down Melrose. He rapped her on the arm. “Something wrong?”

  Her head shook. “I don’t know. Something feels wrong.”

  “How so?”

  The suit swept its gaze back and forth across the overpass. “Not sure,” she said. She shrugged her massive shoulders.

  “Mount up for now. We’ll figure it out.” He hopped past her as she rode the lift gate back up. “You okay for power?”

  “I’ve got another ninety-one minutes at peak, three hours of idling.” She dipped her head at Barry, a fetal ball in the blankets. “Let him sleep. It’s not like he gets to that often.”

  The lift gate locked into position and St. George leapt to the roof of the cab. Lady Bee gave him a wink and settled back on her pillow.

  There was a gas station at Vermont, drained dry three months back by an earlier expedition. They were turning onto Vermont when Lynne, the teenager, stumbled to the front of the swaying truck. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You guys are the only heroes left, right? I mean, you and the ones back at the Mount.”

  “As far as we know, yeah,” said St. George. “We know some are dead and a few are exes.”

  “Were there any supervillains? You know, like in the movies?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “So who stacked up the cars like that?”

  “We think it was the SS. The South Seventeens. They were one of the gangs from the Koreatown area, like the XV3s. There are other survivors in LA, but they’re not all quite as civic-minded as us.”

  “No,” she said shaking her head. “I mean how’d they do it? How’d they cram them all under the bridge?”

  Seeing the Big Picture

  THEN

  The third punk met my eyes and froze in midswing. I held his gaze, drained him until he dropped the baseball bat, then let my goggles snap shut. The little fuck fell over, twitched once, and whined like a hurt dog.

  When my eyes first started to change, a few days after I got the blood transfusion from that creepy old woman in Greece, I thought it was kind of useless as superpowers went. Then I realized people couldn’t fight me without looking at me. And that changed my view on things.

  After stumbling into this night job about seven months ago, I had a solid routine down. Work at the agency by day. Grab dinner or hit the gym to work out, socialize a bit, and convince everyone I have a life outside of work. Leave early because I say I’m working on a script, like half the people in town. Home to sleep until eleven. Patrol as Gorgon for four or five hours. Two hour nap, and then back to work. Catch up on any lost sleep over the weekend, and be seen enough to keep people from wondering why Nikolai started wearing dark glasses for his sensitive eyes around the same time an optic-themed superhero appeared.

  Of course, half a dozen comic-book types have appeared all across the country these past few months, even some in Europe, and they’re all a lot more interesting than me. Somebody flipped a switch and wham superpowers are showing up everywhere. The Mighty Dragon was the first, but I think the morning after my first night out the big story was a man made of electricity in Boston. The Awesome Ape is in Chicago. Here in LA, in addition to the Dragon, there’s some kind of monster terrorizing drug dealers in Venice Beach, and a dominatrix-ninja type cleaning up the Rampart district. Over in Beverly Hills there’s an immortal guy who heals instantly from everything. Just the other night I heard about some kid down in Koreatown who’s wearing a rainbow-striped karate uniform and bouncing around like a superball.

  Wearing spandex or bright colors wasn’t my thing, though. There’s so much more practical stuff you can get when the agency you work for represents celebrities. The body armor? It’s a gift for Colin—-he’s playing a SWAT cop and wants to get used to the weight. I know it’s bending the rules, thanks so much. Reinforced leather duster? Hey, you-know-who has a weird fetish, what can I say. Storage locker under an assumed name? Ms. Lohan has some things she’d like to keep out of sight, but doesn’t want to get rid of. Your discretion is appreciated, thanks. Custom motorcycle helmet? Military-style utility harness? Kevlar gauntlets? People hand you stuff so they can tell their friends someone famous touched it.

  It was the end of my Christmas bonus and the start of my night job.

  These three Seventeens were out for at least an hour. Stupid fucks, barely into high school and already throwing their lives away. I flipped them over and took their wallets. Then I dragged them to a sign post and ziptied them to it with their arms behind their backs. I took their driver’s licenses and their cash (crime fighting isn’t cheap).

  “See this?” I growled. I held up the IDs. “I know who you are now. I know your names. I know where you live. In an hour I’ll know your families, your dogs, your girlfriends. What I’ve done to you, I can do to all of them. And worse.” The licenses vanished into a pouch on my belt.

  Yeah, I stole the whole gag from Fight Club . Sue me. If I was that creative I really would be writing a script and I wouldn’t have to finance all this with drug money.

  The goggles were the hardest thing. I knew what I needed, but had no idea how to make them. Through a friend of a friend I found a retired prop-builder out in Van Nuys. Guy used to design and make stuff for all sorts of sci-fi films before everything went digital. I told him they were for a movie being shot somewhere in Hungary. He complained for half an hour about film jobs leaving Hollywood and then asked when I needed them by. He built the goggles from old camera irises and dark-mirrored sunglasses, and made three sets of them, so I’d have spares. I got the blueprints and design notes, too, in case they needed to do on-set repairs. On the movie.

  I walked back to my motorcycle and pulled a road flare from the saddlebags. It hit the ground a few feet from the punks, casting a flickering red light over everything. People ignore gunfights, screams, and drug deals, but for some reason everyone calls the cops if there’s a flare burning in the street.

  I gunned the engine, spun the bike around, and gave them one last flash, the goggles snapping open and shut just like a camera. Somebody told me the moment I make eye contact is a lot like getting hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat, just without the actual pain. Then comes the fear when you realize I’ve got you locked. When someone’s in my sight, they can’t blink or look away.

  “Get out. You don’t want me to catch you again.” And I roared off in what I hope was a terrifying display of ice-cold bad-assery. It’s worked so far. Half a year at the night job and I hear crime’s down six percent in my territory.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean a lot. There’s always two or three gangs fighting over this part of the city. Sometimes it’s just tagging. Sometimes it’s drive-bys. The City Council would brag in the papers that gangs and drug dealers and homeless people had been driven out of this neighborhood or that one. No one would ever discuss the fact they’d all just moved somewhere else.

  So my goal wasn’t to drive th
em out. It was to eliminate them. To make every current and potential member of the South Seventeens—a gang that proudly referred to themselves as “the SS”—run in terror at the sight of a green gang scarf or bandanna.

  The bike shot down the street, slipping through intersections and around corners. I tried to cover as much ground as possible each night. The trick was to be seen as many places as possible, but never be moving so fast people thought I wouldn’t stop for something. There’s a reason police cars seem to move at “hanging out” speed a lot.

  I’ve also learned moving targets are harder to hit. There’s a chip in my helmet where someone tried to blow my head off with a rifle. Knocked me off the bike, and that was when I learned my power can drain someone from a block and a half away.

  I was on Pico when the sedan pulled in behind me. I got a good look at it in the mirrors. An old Caddy with a lot of power, a lot of seating room, and one dumb fuck sitting in the passenger window with a shotgun.

  I gunned the throttle and pulled away. They picked up speed. Their car swerved a bit and I could hear them howling and laughing. Drunk or stoned to work up their courage.

  A little more speed from the bike. A lot more from the Caddy. They were gaining fast. My timing needed to be pretty good for my next trick to work, but they were so wired I didn’t think I needed to be perfect.

  I let my speed drop and swung the bike to the left, heading for an alley a bit up ahead. The sedan swerved to cut me off, gunning its engine again, and I clamped hard on the brakes. The bike shrieked to a halt and spun around.

  They oversteered and rushed past me. The guy in the window fired off a blast from the shotgun while one in the back seat shot a few rounds from a pistol. They were barely aiming and none of them came close.

  They slammed into the corner of the building, right where the alley began.

  Fifty mile an hour impact with no airbags.

  I pulled the bike up and let the goggles snap open. Didn’t want to drain too much—-all these idiots had hospital time ahead of them. Especially the shotgunner. He’d been thrown out and made a good-sized dent in a blue mailbox. I checked his pulse. His collarbone and left arm were shattered, but he was still alive, lucky fucker.

  The driver moaned as I dragged him out the window. The steering wheel had slammed him pretty hard, fractured some ribs, and his face was cut up a bit from pieces of windshield. He cried and cursed in Spanish until the third time his head hit the trunk of the car. “I don’t know nothing, bro,” he spit out. “Leave me alone.”

  “You don’t know nothing?” I repeated, denting the hood with his skull again. “You were looking for me, weren’t you?”

  “No, man, I swear.” He tried to spin and knock my hand away, but he’d already seen my eyes. He was as strong as a ten-year old and I had the energy of four people. I twisted him back and pressed his head against the trunk.

  “Any second now I’m gonna get bored hitting your face on this car and we’re gonna move to the sidewalk. You were looking for me?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, we were.”

  “Was it Rodney? He still too chickenshit to fight me again?”

  If my life as Gorgon was a comic book, Rodney Casares would be my archenemy. He would’ve been exposed to gamma rays, found an alien artifact, maybe teleported with a housefly or something. Then he’d get a costume, rob a few banks, try to take over the city once or twice. We’d fight a lot, he’d be foiled and get away at the last minute, all that nonsense.

  Instead, here in the real world, he was what you’d think of as the top enforcer of the SS. They had some stupid title for him, but I made a point of not using it. He’d been in court once on murder charges, four or five on assault and battery. He hated my guts for draining his little brother while the stupid kid was out trying to earn his way into the gang with some smalltime robbery and vandalism. Once his brother got out, the two of them came after me with a few other boys and I took out all of them. Rodney’s tough, but he can’t fight with his eyes shut. And there’s not much better insult in that community than making someone look weak in front of family and friends.

  The Seventeen’s face shifted at the name and he grinned. “You don’t know?”

  “What?”

  “Rodney’s fuckin’ out, bro. In the hospital. Probably dead already.”

  “Who was it?”

  The driver shook his head. “Weren’t no one, just some crazy bitch. Jumped on him outside the movies Friday night. She was all biting and shit. Ripped up his neck, chewed off one of his ears. Loco Tommy said she swallowed it.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “What you think happened, man?” A weak hand came up and wiped away the blood pooling in his eyes. “Shot the bitch fuckin’ stone cold. Word is she was so hopped up she took almost twenty rounds.”

  There’d been a piece on the news a few days ago of a woman with multiple gunshot wounds. Gang related. I never followed up on it until now.

  One of the Seventeens in the back of the car groaned and fumbled his door open. I kicked it shut, slamming his head on the frame. He slumped back in his seat. The idiot on the trunk tried to leap up again, and this time I let the goggles stay open.

  “So who sent you after me?”

  He whimpered and his wide-open eyes watered up. I let the lenses close and shook him.

  “Everyone,” he whined.

  “What?”

  “Everyone’s gunnin’ to score on you.” He managed a weak smile. “You’re the guy who shamed Rodney. Take you out, that makes someone new top dog now that he’s gone.”

  I flipped him over and pulled his wallet. We went thorough the spiel, I pocketed his license and the cash, and then knocked him out against the trunk. Ten minutes later him and his two buddies were zip-tied together in a ring, arms to feet. I fastened the shotgunner’s unbroken arm to the mailbox and threw down a flare.

  In the sudden burst of light, I saw something across the street. A woman up on the roof. Watching me.

  My first thought was club girls. The hot, borderline-slutty ones who make a career out of being the girl everyone wants to dance with, buy drinks for, and take home—-or at least out to your car. Some of them used to paint themselves with latex rather than wearing clothes.

  The woman on the roof, her outfit was that tight and showed off that much. And she had a lot to show off. I say this as someone who deals with some of the hottest women on Earth every week as part of my day job. Black straps and belts crisscrossed her body, accenting her curves, a lot like the utility harness I wore. But mine was store-bought and I don’t think there was a quarter-inch of material in hers that didn’t need to be there. Pushed back over her shoulders was a dusty, Middle Eastern–looking cloak with a wide, layered cowl. The black and gray stripes were urban camouflage.

  The dominatrix-ninja.

  One of the Seventeens moaned and I glanced away, just for a second. She was gone when I looked back.

  I was tier three or so, enough that a two-story jump was just possible with a little effort. I took a running start, hit the center line of the street, and leaped.

  I landed on the bleached tar paper of the roof. The goggles were open, draining anyone who caught sight of me, but there was no one. I looked behind some air vents and an access door. She’d vanished like some little ninja-stealth adept.

  No big deal. All of the hero types must have been hearing about each other. I knew I was curious about the monster in Venice. The dominatrix had probably come down to this part of town looking for me. Maybe hoping she could be a sidekick or something.

  My coat flapped in the wind as I dropped back down to street level. No time to play cat and mouse with another hero. If the fucking kid was right and there was a power vacuum in the SS, this part of LA was going to be hell on earth by the end of the week.

  Five

  NOW

  Los Feliz was northeast of Hollywood proper. With the trees, brick shops, and the two-screen movie marquee, it wasn’t hard to pre
tend this section of the city was part of a small town somewhere.

  Big Red trundled to a stop under the trees. The scavengers hopped off the truck and spread out to a practiced perimeter. The lift gate hissed down and Cerberus lumbered off onto the pavement. Lady Bee slid off the cab, landing with a “clack” of hard soles. She opened the jockey box under the truck and pulled out a bundle of canvas grocery bags.

  “Everyone listening?” asked St. George. He nodded at Lynne. “Okay, for those who haven’t done this often, and the rest of you who’ve heard them thirty or forty times—-here are the rules. Groups of three. We check in every half hour. No one goes off alone. No one does anything alone, no matter what. You see something, you tell the rest of the group. You want to go look at something, go with the rest of your group. You need to piss, I hope you like company.”

  Jarvis squeezed off a round and dropped the overweight ex wandering out of the alley by the bookstore. The pallid woman fell face-first onto the sidewalk. They heard her nose snap on the pavement.

  “And as Jarvis just pointed out,” St. George added with a glare, “don’t shoot unless you have to. The noise attracts them.” The salt-and-pepper man winced and lowered his rifle. “If you hear a shot, or shots, don’t panic. Don’t run. That just gets people hurt. One of the easiest tricks to surviving out here is to walk. Use your brains, use your walkies, find out what’s going on first. Don’t run unless you know you need to run.”

  He looked at them until they all nodded their understanding. “Okay, then. Ty, David, Billie, check those apartments up there. Mark, Bee, you take Lynne and search all the ones on this side. Andy, Jarvis, Lee, you’ve got ground-level shops. Luke and Ilya stay with the truck. I’m going to mind this intersection here. Cerberus, that intersection up there is yours. Questions?”

  “What about Barry?”

  “Barry sleeps unless we need him.”