An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  He focused between his shoulders and the Valley rushed below them like a speeding river. Jarvis tensed in his arms, and the older man’s white-streaked beard flattened against his face. His skin looked pale, but St. George wasn’t sure if it was from the flight or the wound.

  He raced past the NBC Universal building, over the Bowl to Hollywood and Highland, and then dove toward the Wall. He caught a quick glimpse of the sentries and then he sank through the air to the Hollywood Community Hospital.

  Churches and apartments weren’t the only thing the people of the Mount had gained when the Big Wall went up. They had a real hospital now, a six-story white building with full facilities and offices. It was another symbolic structure, even if it was undersupplied and understaffed.

  The guards looked up when they heard his jacket rustle above them and focused on Jarvis in his arms. After the outer walls, the hospital was the most guarded place in the Mount. Armed men and women stood ready for when a patient died. It was their job to put a bullet between the eyes of each dead body before the ex-virus reanimated it.

  “Wounded man,” called St. George. “Make a path.” His boots touched the pavement and the guards stepped aside, pulling the doors open as they did. He marched past them.

  The lobby was dominated by the large warning sign they’d brought from the old Zukor building, listing potential symptoms of infection. Another symbol. St. George shouted for a doctor while he headed for the emergency rooms.

  Jarvis looked up at him. “Boss,” he said, “you got to promise me one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know what.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about it. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I don’t come back. Don’t let it happen.”

  “Nobody comes back. You know that.”

  “I don’t want my body stumbling around drunk, embarrassing me. Hurting anyone. Y’all make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “It won’t happen if you don’t get drunk next weekend.”

  “I ain’t joking.”

  “Neither am I,” said St. George. “Nobody comes back.”

  SERGEANT EDDIE FRANKLIN, sometimes called Doc Ed despite all his protests, took in the ragged jeans with a glance and peeled the gauze pads away from Jarvis’s leg. The skin around the bite was pale and clammy. “How long ago?”

  “Maybe ten minutes,” said St. George.

  “Did he hook onto you, sir,” the doctor asked Jarvis, “or’d you get him off quick?” Like most of the former soldiers, Franklin was still formally polite with most people. He’d been a combat medic with the 456th Unbreakables, which made him close enough to a doctor for most people at the Mount.

  “Not even two seconds,” said St. George. “He kicked it right off.”

  “And then shot it,” added Jarvis.

  Franklin had two fingers against the salt-and-pepper man’s throat and a palm on his forehead. “You’re cold.”

  “I was just a thousand feet up in the air doing a hundred miles an hour. Damn right I’m cold.”

  Franklin nodded and pushed the gurney down the hallway to a room. St. George followed for a moment, but knew he’d only be in the way. He found Jarvis’s eyes. The older man gave him a smile and a thumbs-up. Then the doors closed and he vanished.

  One of the guards outside tapped his headset. “East Gate’s calling for you, boss.”

  The hero bit back a sigh and nodded. He dug his earpiece out of his pocket and looped it over his ear. “Go for St. George.”

  “Hey, boss,” said a voice. It took him a moment to recognize Elena, one of the regular wall guards. “Heard chatter you were back. Got a minute?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “What do you need?”

  There was a brief pause. “I think it might be better if you came out here to see. East Gate.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in five.” He pulled the earpiece off. For a moment he thought about crushing it. Then he thought about setting fire to every ex outside the Big Wall. And then he thought about just finding Stealth and curling up in bed for a day or two.

  Someone cleared their throat. “Jarvis going to be okay?” asked one of the men in front of the hospital.

  St. George met his gaze. “I don’t know. Maybe. He was bitten.”

  The guards sighed and shook their heads. “Damn,” said the man. “That sucks. I really liked Jarvis.”

  “Everyone likes Jarvis,” said St. George. He thought about crushing the earpiece again. Instead he focused and soared up above the buildings.

  The East Gate was a misleading name. It was still just a solid line of stacked cars running north to south through the center of Melrose and Western. Where the gate would someday be was marked with a few bright lines of yellow spray paint. Since the scavengers had done most of their work on the east half of the city already, the East Gate was the last side of the Big Wall scheduled to get a working entrance.

  Elena, Derek, and a bald man St. George didn’t recognize waited on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs. They had an oversized umbrella and a few big chairs from the nearby furniture store set up there. All three of them looked out at the intersection of Melrose and Western. A few hundred exes staggered in the street between a bank and a storage center. Building the Big Wall had used up so many cars the roads around the barricade were wide, empty spaces.

  His feet thumped on the platform and they turned. “Hey, boss,” said Derek.

  “What’s up?”

  “Something kinda weird,” said Elena. Her finger stretched out and pointed down Melrose. “See the white building a block down on the right, just after the red one?”

  St. George nodded. From his angle, the building looked like a large house or maybe a small apartment building. Curved bars that looked more decorative than functional stretched over the windows.

  “Okay. Keep an eye on it.” Elena took in a deep breath and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey!” she shouted. “You still there?”

  Her voice echoed down the street and the exes at the base of the Wall shifted their focus to her. Their heads leaned back and their hands stretched up toward her. Their snapping jaws got more frantic. Another two dozen or so moved toward the wall and joined the mob flailing for the humans on the platform.

  A block away, an arm stretched out between the bars of one of the second-story windows. It waved up and down a few times. “I’m here,” a voice yelled back. It sounded female. “They’re still all around the door.”

  “Hang on just a little longer!” Elena shouted back. “Someone’s coming soon.”

  “Okay.”

  St. George watched the arm slip back into the building. “Why didn’t you send a team out for her?”

  “We almost did,” said the bald man. “Then Derek noticed the exes.”

  The hero glanced down at the crowd of undead. “Are they doing something odd?”

  “Not exactly,” Derek said. “They’re not doing anything.”

  St. George looked out at the street for a moment and then his brow furrowed. His eyes went from the flailing exes below the platform to the ones down the street. There were at least a dozen of them in front of the white building, still milling around. “They aren’t, are they?”

  “At first we thought it might be acoustics or something, the way her voice echoes between the buildings,” said Elena. “Maybe it was confusing them. But we’ve been talking to her for two hours now, and it’s been a good hour since we started watching the exes for reactions.”

  Derek nodded. “Someone shouts at the top of their lungs, waves their arms around, and not one single zombie heads in her direction. Just seemed wrong.”

  “Yeah,” said St. George. “Good call, not going to check it out.”

  “You think it might be Legion setting up another trap?” asked Elena.

  “Doesn’t sound like him,” said the bald man. “He always talks with an accent.”

  “It better not be,” said the hero, “if he knows what’s good for hi
m.” He took a few steps and launched himself into the air, sailing across the street. Some of the exes reached up and made feeble attempts to grab at him, even though he was well out of their reach.

  He drifted over and above the storage building so he could come at the white building from the back. The curved bars were only on the street side of the building, and it took a moment to find a second-story window that had been smashed at some point in the past few years. He spun in the air and slid into the building feetfirst.

  He was in a bedroom. A withered body stretched across the bed. It had been there for a long time, long enough St. George couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. He guessed the pistol and the dark stain on the far wall had been there just as long. Had they lost someone they couldn’t live without, the hero wondered, or just decided they didn’t want to risk the exes getting them? How long were they living here after the dead rose?

  It crossed his mind that whoever it was could’ve been here even while the heroes were setting up the Mount. Someone just a hair too far away to hear the sounds of safety, or too scared to raise their voice and call for help. He wondered, not for the first time, how many other people he’d just missed saving during the outbreak.

  The bedroom door was open and he walked out into the hall. The carpet muffled his boots. It was a small apartment. Bigger than the one he’d had before the Zombocalypse, less than a mile from here, but not by a huge amount. The far end of the hall looked like a bathroom, across from him was a kitchen. At the front of the house was a living room, or maybe another bedroom.

  A stairwell down to a ground-floor door had been blocked with an upended table and a few chairs. They weren’t dusty. It was a recent barricade.

  He heard something move, and the shadows in the living room shifted. A few strides carried him down the hall. He peeked into the room, then took a single step in.

  Across the room from him, staring out the window, was a small woman. He guessed woman from her hips and general build. She had on two or three layers of ragged, mismatched clothes, and another layer that was pure dust and dirt. Some long locks of dark hair hung out from under a Red Sox cap she wore backward. A sequin-covered sneaker dangled from her waist and glittered in the afternoon light streaming in the window.

  Sitting near her on a coffee table was an overstuffed duffel bag. It had just as much dirt on it as she did. The shoulder strap had been padded with an old towel and wrapped in duct tape. She’d spread a sleeping bag across the couch.

  “Hey,” said St. George.

  The woman shrieked and spun around. A pair of oversized sunglasses hid her eyes, the square ones elderly people wore over their regular glasses. She’d tried to hide her size and age with the layers of clothes. St. George bet she was twenty, absolute tops. Probably not even out of high school. If high school was still in session anywhere.

  When she saw him standing there she fumbled at her belt and pulled out a revolver. It was huge in her hands. “Where did you come from?”

  He tipped his head back down the hall. “Through the bedroom window.”

  The girl took another deep breath and calmed herself. She leveled the pistol at his head. “We’re on the second floor,” she said. “I’ve been watching the street. Where did you come from?” Her lips curled down. “Have you been here all along? Were you watching me sleep?”

  “I’m telling you, I came in through the window,” he said again. “You called for help, so I flew over to check it out.”

  She took another deep breath. “I know how to use this,” she said, dipping her chin at the revolver. “It’s loaded and I’m a pretty good shot.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I used to be called the Mighty Dragon. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

  “Get over yourself,” she said. “You’re way too skinny to be the Dragon.”

  He smiled. “Afraid not.”

  She used both thumbs to pull the hammer back on the pistol. It made a loud clack in the room. “Last chance.”

  St. George took in a deep breath. He felt the tickle in the back of his throat, and let it sigh out. The flames trickled from his mouth and lapped up and around his head.

  Her brows went up above her dark glasses and her mouth fell open. Her grip slipped on the pistol and it shifted in her hands. The weight settled on her trigger finger. The hammer slammed down.

  There was a thunderclap of noise in the small room and the bullet punched St. George in the shoulder. He yelped. The girl shrieked and jumped back against the window. The deformed round clattered on the floor.

  “Ohmigod!” she said. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He rubbed the top of his arm and patted the smoking hole in his jacket. “I’m fine. It just stings a little.”

  “Boss,” shouted a voice in his ear. “You okay? We heard gunfire.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Just a misunderstanding. Everyone’s fine.”

  “It’s really you,” she said. Her arm went down and the pistol slipped from her fingers. It thudded on the carpet. “You’re the Mighty Dragon.”

  “Told you.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. Her body slumped with relief. “Oh my God. I just … you don’t know what it’s like out there.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he said.

  “I’ve barely seen anyone in ages, and the people I did see kept trying to make moves on me. One guy stole some of my food and another one was this creeper who wanted me to do him and some people just shot at me and I …” She paused to breathe, dipped her head, and something like a smile crept onto her face. “I haven’t been able to trust anyone for a while now.”

  “You can trust us,” he said. “Inside the Wall’s clean and safe. We’ve got food, electricity, and …”

  Her glasses slipped down her nose when she lowered her head. She met his eyes and rushed to push the oversized lenses back up. “Please,” she said, “just let me ex—”

  St. George marched forward and snatched the glasses off her face, crushing them to splinters in his hand. She tried to turn her head and close her eyes, but he saw them again. There was no mistake. They were gray and chalky. The veins were dark against her pale irises.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said. She skittered back across the floor with one arm up, trying to hide her face. “Please! I’m not one of them.”

  St. George marched after her, grabbed the dead girl’s shoulder, and tossed her across the room. She hit the wall and fell onto the couch. “Rodney, I swear to God, after what you did—”

  “Please don’t!” she shrieked.

  “—the last thing you should be doing is wasting my time with another stupid …”

  He stopped.

  The girl was crying. A single tear made its way down her cheek. It left a path of clean, pale skin behind it. She was taking in raspy breaths as she cried, her chest moving up and down. Her cloudy eyes had gone wide with fear.

  “Please,” she said. “I’m not one of them. I swear. I swear I’m not.”

  St. George opened his hands wide and stepped back. “I … I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s okay. I thought … I thought you were somebody else.”

  She slid off the couch and skittered away from him. The trust had vanished from her face. Her eyes flitted to the pistol on the floor.

  “Who are you?”

  The dead girl lowered her arm a bit. “You’re not going to hurt me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. He raised his hands a little higher, spread his fingers a little wider. “I’m not going to hurt you. I promise.”

  A cloud of drywall dust drifted down from where she’d hit the wall. They both glanced at it. She set her jaw and glared at him.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “We’ve had trouble with … well, we’ve kind of got a low-level supervillain here in Los Angeles. He calls himself Legion but his real name’s Rodney.”

  She blinked. “And you thought I was him?”

  “He controls all the exes i
n the city,” explained St. George. “He can talk through them, see through their eyes, make them act just like a person. He’s tried to trick us before, so I thought you were him. Because you’re … you know.”

  “I’m not like them.”

  He nodded. “I can see that.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Okay, then. Do you want to come in? I think there are some people who’d like to meet you.”

  She stood up slowly. “How do I know I can trust them? Or you?”

  He gave her a smile. “I’m the Mighty Dragon, remember? One of the good guys.” He held out his hand. “Most people are calling me St. George these days.”

  She looked at the hand for a moment, then reached out and wrapped her cold fingers around his. “I’m Maddy,” she said. “Madelyn Sorensen.”

  “CAPTAIN?”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Captain Freedom. He’d been staring at the girl for two minutes. He turned to St. George. “It’s just … does it count as seeing a ghost if you never saw the real person?”

  Madelyn sat inside one of the hospital’s observation rooms. They’d cleaned everything out of the room except for a pair of chairs and a small table. Stealth had posted two guards inside the room and two more outside.

  Franklin and Dr. Connolly had wheeled in their own table to take samples and check a dozen or so different vital signs. The dead girl winced as another needle went into her arm, but she stayed in the chair. It wasn’t by choice. She’d agreed to let them strap her down until Stealth was convinced the girl wasn’t Legion.

  Madelyn had stripped down to a pair of threadbare jeans and an oversized T-shirt. The arm they were taking blood from had three wristwatches on it she refused to remove. A restraint ran between two of them.

  St. George and Freedom stood outside with Stealth, watching the tests. Freedom stood with his hands behind his back, at ease. It pulled his duster open across his broad chest. Stealth’s head moved inside her hood and her gaze settled on the huge soldier. “It is Madelyn Sorensen? There is no question in your mind?”

  Freedom nodded. “I’d bet my pension on it, ma’am,” he said. His mind flitted back three years, to the day he’d sent a team out to bring Dr. Emil Sorensen’s family to Project Krypton. It hadn’t ended well, for any of them. He still remembered the young girl being pulled across the sand, dodging the exes surrounding the base. He’d added her name—all their names—to the long list of people he’d failed to protect.