An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  “I thought it was clever and subtle.”

  “It was not.”

  “Cute and endearing?”

  “On a childish level, perhaps.”

  Someone knocked on the door, tapping out a rapid drum solo. St. George smiled at her. “Last chance to vanish into a shadow.”

  “Do you wish to answer the door or shall I?”

  He wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “I’ll get it. Don’t want to freak everyone out right off the bat.”

  She dipped her head and set the glasses on the table.

  Danielle and Barry waited in the hall. His wheelchair was aimed at the door, ready to enter. She stood behind him, one of her hands clutching the chair’s handle.

  “Hey,” said St. George. “Thanks for coming over.”

  “Free food, good friends, a night away from the chair,” Barry said. He tipped his bald head back and smiled. “You know I’m all over that.”

  Stealth was right. Barry looked calm. His thin frame was relaxed, free of the odd jerks and tics the energy form had developed over the past few months. He looked … normal.

  Danielle snorted. Her strawberry-blond hair was tied back in a messy ponytail, away from her freckled face. He could see a collar of black spandex under her shirt, the Cerberus contact suit. It served as her security blanket outside the armor.

  Her knuckles were white on the wheelchair’s handles. She lifted her free hand to reveal a bottle. “I brought presents.”

  It took him a minute to register what she was holding. “You actually have wine? Real wine?”

  “I’ve been saving it,” she said with a shrug. It was a tight, contained movement. “You said tonight was something special, so …” She shrugged again.

  Barry looked between them. “Special? What have you two been keeping from me?”

  “Beats me.” She pushed the wheelchair into the apartment and her shoulders relaxed by a few degrees once they were inside. “Is it just us?”

  “Not exactly,” said St. George.

  “Please tell me it’s not Freedom,” said Barry. “I’m sorry, but that guy can be so upti— … oh.”

  Stealth stood by the table. Her arms hung straight at her sides.

  St. George stepped forward and took her hand. Her fingers wrapped around his. “Guys—Barry, Danielle—this is Karen.”

  Danielle’s eyes went wide. Her shoulders tensed back up. Barry gaped.

  Stealth shifted under their gazes. “Good evening,” she said. A moment passed and her free hand went up to sweep a strand of ebony hair away from her face. As she lowered it, she paused to tug at the collar of her blouse.

  The silence stretched out for another few seconds before Danielle cleared her throat. “Hello,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting … we … We didn’t know George was … seeing anyone.”

  “You,” said Barry, “are very pretty.”

  Stealth’s lips twitched and she dipped her head to him. “Thank you.”

  Danielle set the wine down on the table. Then she picked it back up. “George, do you have a corkscrew?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  The redhead nodded, glanced at the other woman again, and vanished across the room. St. George separated his fingers from Stealth’s and followed Danielle into the kitchen.

  She turned on him as soon as he stepped through the doorway. “It’s her, isn’t it?” whispered Danielle. It wasn’t a question.

  “What?”

  “Don’t play stupid, George.”

  “I’m not playing.”

  She glanced back at the living room with wide eyes. They could hear Barry filling the air with small talk. He was quizzing the dark-haired woman on her favorite movies.

  Danielle looked at St. George. “Want to know something? Women size each other up all the time. We’re way more competitive than men. That’s why no one ever knows who I am out of the armor.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I know those hips and that rack, I just never see them without black spandex and leather straps stretched across them. And besides, I screened her when we moved into the Mount, remember? I didn’t see her face, but I know she’s black.”

  A wisp of smoke sighed out between his lips. “Don’t say anything, okay?”

  “Don’t say anything?!” Danielle swung the bottle back at the doorway. “What the hell is going on?”

  “She’s trying to socialize, okay? She hasn’t dealt with anyone without her mask on in three years.”

  “And you know what that says to me? She’s going to kill us all because we’ve seen her face.”

  “Please,” he said. “Just be cool about this. For me. She needs it.”

  She glared at him for a moment, then thrust her hand out. “Corkscrew.”

  He pulled open a drawer, fumbled through the collection of kitchen tools, and held up a corkscrew. “Thank you,” he said.

  She pulled it from his fingers. “Don’t thank me yet.” She took a deep breath and headed back into the living room. She ran into Stealth in the doorway. They stood eye to eye for a moment.

  “Have you started the pasta?” Stealth asked.

  Danielle swallowed. St. George shook his head. “No, I was just about to.”

  “I will take care of it,” she said. She stepped to the oven. Danielle vanished back to the living room.

  Barry gave a couple frantic waves when St. George returned, and the hero crouched by the wheelchair. “Where?” demanded Barry. “Where in God’s name did you find a woman like that?”

  “What?”

  “Her. Karen. Where’d she come from?”

  He blinked and exchanged a glance with Danielle. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You … you probably just never noticed her before.”

  “It’s the Mount,” hissed Barry. “You can’t hide someone who looks like that. Was she from Yuma?”

  St. George shook his head. “No, she’s been with us all along.”

  “Liar. I know her from somewhere, though.”

  “Maybe right here?”

  “Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work on me. I’ll figure this out.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair.

  Stealth stepped back into the main room. “Dinner should be ready in fifteen minutes,” she said. “The wine should have just enough time to breathe.”

  “It was only a step above Two Buck Chuck before the end of the world,” said Danielle. Her lips twitched into a smile. “I’m not sure if breathing’s going to help it any.”

  “Still,” said Barry, “it’ll be better than that fruit cider–stuff they’re brewing down in Larchmont.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of that, too,” said St. George. He tipped his chin at Danielle. “Did you finish gathering up all those helmets?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. I went out with Cesar riding shotgun and got maybe two-thirds of them. We might’ve missed a couple.” She sank the corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle. “Something kind of strange I meant to tell you. There’s a lot of military helmets out there.”

  “There were several units of Marines and National Guard in Los Angeles before the fall,” said Stealth.

  Danielle nodded. “I’d expect some, yeah, with all the stuff Legion scavenged. The percentage just seems kind of high. I mean, didn’t we gather up a lot of that stuff when we were setting up the Mount?”

  “Has anyone else thought that we need a new name?” asked Barry. He’d already started in on the first loaf of bread. “I mean, this is the Mount here, yeah, but are we going to call everything inside the Big Wall ‘The Mount’ or what?”

  “That would be up to the civilian government,” said Stealth, “would it not?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “sorry. Shouldn’t bore you with shop talk.”

  The cork popped on the wine. Salad was tossed. Pasta was drained. Danielle sat down across from Barry. St. George and Stealth flanked them. They passed the salad and the bread. St. George poured the
wine.

  They paused with their glasses in the air. He realized they were looking at him. “Toast from the host,” said Barry.

  “Yeah,” Danielle said. “This may be the last bottle of real wine in the world. Let’s do it justice.”

  “There are nineteen pre-outbreak bottles in the Mount,” said Stealth. “Several families hold on to them for special occasions.” St. George gave her a look and her shoulders slumped. She gave a forced, awkward shrug. “Or so I have heard.”

  St. George raised his glass. “I guess … to bringing the world back to life.”

  “In the good way,” smiled Barry.

  “In the good way,” agreed St. George.

  Their glasses chimed together over the bread basket. Stealth put her lips on the rim, but barely let a drop touch her tongue.

  Barry began to load up his plate. Danielle, seated across from the dark-haired woman, had another sip of wine and seemed to relax. Stealth tore off a small piece of bread, then set it down on her plate. She pushed at some of the pasta with her fork, impaled it on the tines, and then pushed it back off onto the plate. She reached for her wineglass.

  Danielle watched her fidget. “Is everything okay?”

  Stealth straightened up with the wineglass. “I usually eat alone,” she said. “I feel somewhat self-conscious.”

  Barry shoved another wad of tomato-soaked bread into his mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said around the food. “Everyone’s watching my horrible table manners. Especially now that I’ve drawn attention to them.”

  Stealth’s lips twitched into something close to a nervous smile and she stuck her fork back into the pasta. She guided the bite around the plate.

  Danielle ate some pasta and swallowed some more wine. “So,” she said, “how long have you two been … together?”

  St. George and Stealth exchanged a glance. “I never really thought about it,” he said. “It just sort of happened over time, y’know?”

  “So … weeks? Months?” The redhead set her wine down and picked up a piece of bread. “How long have you been keeping this little secret from us?”

  “It wasn’t really a secret,” said St. George. “It just wasn’t something that comes up in casual conversation.”

  “It does for most people,” said Danielle.

  “The first time we slept together was five weeks after the convoy returned from Yuma,” said Stealth. “Is that what you wished to know?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Wait a minute.” Barry banged his palm on the arm of his wheelchair and turned to Stealth. “I know who you are.”

  She tensed in her chair.

  “You were on Jeopardy!,” he said. “About a year before the exes appeared. You were champion for, like, a week and a half, weren’t you?”

  “Six days.”

  “And you won almost half a million dollars. You beat the highest-earning day ever and then you beat your own score three days later. It was amazing. People were talking about it for months. They all had you pegged as the next Larissa Kelly or Ken Jennings. You played two games where the other players didn’t even get to buzz in. You just swept both boards.”

  Stealth gave a hesitant nod, then swept back the lock of black hair that fell across her face. “There was only one game where no other player buzzed in, but there were two games where no other player scored.”

  “Amazing,” said Barry. “What’d you do with the money? Take a trip or invest it or what?”

  “I invested some,” she said. “I spent the rest on clothing and equipment.”

  “Ahhh,” he said. “You’re a sports nut.”

  “Something along those lines, yes.”

  They all glanced at St. George. He made a point of shoving a piece of bread into his mouth.

  They made small talk through dinner, and St. George surprised them all with some peanut butter cookies from the bakery. For a few hours, they were just friends having dinner together. When he saw them to the door, Barry bumped knuckles and Danielle gave him a hug. “Thank you,” she said. She even tried to hug Stealth, but then both of them thought better of it.

  St. George closed the door and turned to the dark-haired woman. “Well,” he said, “that didn’t go too bad.”

  “Danielle knew immediately.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  July 28th, 2009

  Dear Diary,

  My eyes opened when I heard the gunshot and the bullet hit the ground six inches in front of me. The sand poofed up and everything, just like on TV.

  I know that sounds kind of staged, but it was really just like that. Eyes open, poof. I almost peed my pants. I’ve never been shot at before. It’s scary as hell.

  Dad warned us stuff like this might happen. Some people weren’t doing well with the zombies. That’s one of the reasons calling them exes stuck. It was a psychology thing. He told me the term for it, but I don’t remember.

  Anyway, he said some people just went crazy. They were shooting at anyone they thought was a zombie or who they thought might be infected with the ex-virus that made them into zombies. Other people were shooting at people to get whatever food and stuff they had, or because they thought they were coming to take their stuff. And some people were just shooting at anything that moved. It was all pretty stupid. It was like everyone’s IQ dropped forty points just because they were scared.

  Writing it out makes it sound like I was all uber-cool and everything, like it was just a game or something. Bullets whizzing around me and I sat there thinking about psychology and stuff. The truth is, a second bullet made my hair move and I just ran. I rolled over two or three times and crawled on my hands and knees until I got to my feet and then I ran as hard as I could. Being on the track team finally paid off.

  I think I realized then that I only had one shoe on, but all I could really think about was running away from the gunshots.

  I ran maybe a hundred yards and saw an zombie ex-person.

  Dad says it’s better to call them ex-people, no matter what. They aren’t zombies, he says, because zombies are made-up sci-fi things and exes are real.

  I’m doing it again. I’m writing stuff like I was really cool and calm but I was screaming and running around. It’s been four hours now and I think I’m hidden pretty good. I know I should try to be more organized.

  Okay, so I was running away from the gunshots and I ran into an ex-person. It was a girl about my age, but she had blond hair. She was walking away from me, so I don’t think she saw me. Well, I know she didn’t see me, because I skittered away and hid behind some bushes and rocks and stuff and she didn’t follow me.

  I hid there for maybe a minute and then I heard something and realized there was another zom ex-person coming from the other direction and this one was looking right at me. So I got up and ran again. It was like that for two or three hours at least. I’d run and stop and there’d be another ex, so I’d run again. I’m lucky I’m in good shape. If I hadn’t been a runner already I would’ve gotten tired and they would’ve gotten me. There were so many of them.

  I think I’ve found a safe place for now. After running around for a while I found some tall rocks. There were one or two exes around them, but none up on them. I don’t think exes are good climbers. I ran between two of them and got up here. I looked around and found a nice little space between some boulders. It’s like a little canyon with one entrance. I can put my back to the wall and watch the opening. I think I could shimmy up to the top if I needed to get out, too.

  I’m not sure where the place I woke up is from here. I was just running around dodging zombies for so long and I didn’t keep track of directions. It could be right by this rock or miles away. I ran a half-marathon right after New Year’s and I think I ran at least that much getting away from all the exes.

  I got up on top of the rocks and looked in all directions, but I don’t see any lights. I don’t see any lights anywhere except the stars and the moon.

  I don’t know how I ended up here.
I mean, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere here. I remember I was in the car with Mom—we were going to meet up with Dad somewhere safe—and then I woke up and someone was shooting at me. I don’t remember falling asleep, or even being sleepy.

  My clothes are shredded!!! Really totaled. Janine has those retro rocker jeans she wears sometimes with like two dozen rips and tears in them, but they still cover more than my pants do right now. The seat of my jeans is gone and my ass is hanging out. No wonder I’m cold. I wish I’d listened to Mom and not worn a thong.

  My shirt and coat aren’t much better. One of my sneakers is gone and the one that’s left is all sticky with something black. My bra is more or less in one piece, so my tits aren’t on display. Not much, anyway.

  The coat has big pockets. The left one is torn open. It had some lip gloss, my house keys, and my phone. They’re gone. The other one had my diary and two pens. I’ve still got those, obviously.

  It’s like someone let a bunch of dogs play with my clothes while I was out cold and then dressed me back up in them. I’m wearing rags. And I’ve got sand in a bunch of itchy places from rolling around on the ground but I really don’t want to take my clothes off so I can shake them out, even though there’s nobody around.

  OMG Todd in sixth-period English would jizz himself if he saw me like this!!!

  God, I actually wish that little creeper was here. Or anyone. I’d rather have someone staring at my tits and ass than just being out here alone.

  I’ve got no idea where Mom is. We were supposed to be together, that’s all I can remember. Dad wanted us safe and together.

  I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where they are. I don’t have any food or water. I barely have clothes.

  I need to figure out what I’m going to do next.

  July 28th, 2009

  Dear Diary,

  There’s enough light from the moon to write this, so I’ll try to get it all in order.

  I woke up and I didn’t know where I was.

  I was between some big rocks out in the middle of nowhere. All my clothes are ripped up so much I’m almost naked. One of my shoes is gone.

  I don’t know how I ended up here. I remember I was in the car with Mom—we were supposed to be joining Dad somewhere safe—and then I woke up tucked in between these rocks. I don’t even remember falling asleep.