An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  She signaled her acknowledgment and his eyes fell on the line. He prodded it with his boot, then crouched to look at it. His brow furrowed.

  The rope was a crude whip. The long strands weren’t leather, just sinew and tendons that had been dried and braided together. There were white barbs along the length of it, gathered in tight quartets. They gave the weapon a strong resemblance to a length of barbed wire. It took a moment for Freedom to realize he was looking at close to a dozen teeth woven into the whip’s lash with their roots pointing out.

  He heard a noise and looked up to see Stealth. Her cloak streamed behind her. “Where is the prisoner?”

  Freedom nodded at the railing. “He’s dead, ma’am. He threw himself off the Wall. The exes tore him ap—”

  Stealth took three quick strides to the railing. Her hands flicked and her pistols were out. Freedom saw a quick ripple of movement within her hood as she scanned the street at the base of the Big Wall.

  Then she fired both weapons, aiming at something across the street. Freedom unholstered Lady Liberty and joined Stealth at the railing just as her pistols ran dry. It took him a second to realize what she was shooting at.

  The prisoner stood there, arms spread wide. His clothes had been shredded by the exes, and his skin was smeared with gore, but he was smiling. A dead woman latched onto his forearm and tore a mouthful of flesh away. Another one gnawed on his calf. The white-haired man didn’t seem to notice.

  Stealth’s fingers shifted and empty magazines dropped from each pistol to rattle on the platform. She reloaded in seconds and was firing again. Freedom raised his own weapon and Lady Liberty thundered. The trigger-happy guard joined them, but Freedom could tell the man was just spraying bullets.

  The prisoner flailed under the assault. His skin ruptured and blood sprayed across the lawn behind him. He staggered back and dropped on the grass. The exes chewing on him were torn apart by stray rounds from Lady Liberty’s bursts. Their remains fell on either side of the man.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am,” said Freedom, “what the hell was that all about?”

  The cloaked woman ignored him. She reloaded again.

  The prisoner rolled over and scampered across the lawn on all fours.

  Stealth tracked him and led her shots like a decorated marksman. Freedom saw her score half a dozen hits before the prisoner got back to his feet. The white-haired man sprinted to the end of the block before glancing back, and Stealth rewarded him with three rounds in the face. His forehead burst apart and he slumped against an SUV, but he was moving again before he hit the ground. He shook off the impact, rolled under the vehicle, and vanished.

  A shadow passed over them. St. George hung in the air. “Go,” she shouted at him. “That way!”

  The hero shot across the road after the escaped prisoner. He got to the SUV and shook his head. He raised his hands to his mouth and called out a name twice.

  Freedom waited for the cloaked woman to turn to him, but she stared out after the prisoner. He took the moment to shove his earbud back in. The panicking man still monopolized the airwaves.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said the voice on the radio. “The Thing got out. It got out of the Cellar.”

  LEGION FOUND HIMSELF in a dead man, wandering in the middle of a tree-lined residential street. Small houses and one or two apartment buildings. He glanced around and looked through the eyes of a dead woman at the end of the block. The street sign said Stetson, like the hat.

  He expanded his view, spreading out across another dozen or so exes until he saw a few more nearby street names. Walnut. Harkness. Colorado. He saw big buildings framing a campus and the sign for Pasadena City College. He was about twenty-five miles away from the Big Wall, way out past Glendale.

  His attention focused him into a new body, a heavyset Samoan stumbling through a store parking lot off Colorado. The dead man was intact except for a few scrapes and cuts. And one dead eye. He reached up to check the socket and realized it was made of glass. It’d be fine for now.

  Legion looked around the parking lot. The store had faded pink awnings with a “99” logo on them. There were a dozen dusty cars parked at different angles. One of them was T-boned into another, totaling both. A driver’s side door hung open, and he saw old blood splattered on the passenger seat. A primer-colored muscle car sat halfway through the store’s big window next to the double doors. Purple shopping carts were scattered everywhere. Some had drifted with random winds, others were tipped on their sides like dead animals.

  He glared at another ex in the parking lot. It was an older woman with a wrinkled face and a pair of bullet holes in her chest. “What the fuck,” he asked her, “happened back there?”

  The dead woman stared at him for a moment, then staggered into the side of a pickup truck.

  For a moment he considered looking back at the Mount. There were almost ten thousand exes within a block of the Big Wall. He could sense them in a basic way, like someone knowing they were wearing shorts or going commando without checking. He just knew where they were, all through the city. It wouldn’t take much effort to reach over and see through their eyes.

  Whatever attacked him had taken his exes away, though. One moment they’d been there, the next minute a bunch of them were gone. He could still see them, but it was like part of him had gone numb, like a cripple looking at legs that weren’t part of him anymore. They’d become something else.

  And “something else” had kicked the shit out of him.

  When the first one jumped on him he thought it was the Dragon’s new trick. Somebody with telepathic-ness or whatever you called moving stuff with your mind. But none of the Dragon’s people were that savage. Even when Stealth fought, she was intense, but never sadistic.

  It was fast and brutal and ruthless, like wrestling with a hungry pit bull. A smart, hungry pit bull crossed with a piranha. He’d thrown more exes at it and it had fought back with more of its own.

  Legion didn’t have a real body anymore. He hadn’t had one for a year and a half now. It had freaked him out at first. He even came close to crying once. Real men still cried now and then. Not often, but it happened.

  But then he realized he’d become something bigger than just Rodney Cesares or Peasy. He’d become untouchable. Yeah, he didn’t have a body anymore. He had millions of bodies, every one of them tireless and numb to pain.

  Numb until today, anyway. Whatever was using the other exes had hurt him. A lot. He’d felt every body get slashed and torn apart. And for a few moments it had held him there, like holding a geek’s forehead and watching them swing useless punches. He hadn’t been able to shift away.

  He hadn’t been able to do anything.

  Legion kicked one of the purple shopping carts and it rolled a few feet across the parking lot. He stalked over, slammed his foot into it again, and watched it bang into the side of a Lexus. Another kick raised a few wisps of dust and chipped some paint off the car.

  He was pretty sure the thing at the Mount would’ve killed him. He didn’t know how, but he felt it in his gut. If he’d stayed there it would’ve torn him apart. Somehow.

  The thing that’d saved him in the end was the other exes were changing too fast. They didn’t have time to do much damage. They got tall and sprouted fangs and claws, like werewolves or something—enough to fuck up a regular person, easy. And then they’d pop open like hot dogs in a microwave and fall apart. There’d been a break and he’d thrown himself away, like diving off a bridge. He didn’t care where he ended up, as long as he wasn’t there.

  It was kind of familiar, what the other exes had been turning into, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe something from back during his months in the Army when they were pumping him and a bunch of other grunts full of drugs to make them bigger and stronger. There’d been a bunch of weird stuff going on then.

  Legion picked up the shopping cart. The dead Samoan had slablike muscles that still had plenty of strength in them. He got the cart over his he
ad, roared, and slammed it down on the windshield of the Lexus. The glass spiderwebbed from side to side. He picked the cart back up and slammed it down again. The windshield collapsed in across the dashboard and driver’s seat. He tried to drag it out, but one of the wheels had hooked on the steering wheel.

  He growled and drove his fist through the driver’s-side window. Then he brought both fists down on the roof and dented it in. He kicked the door and slammed punches into the hood and yanked at the cart until he’d deformed the steering wheel and knocked the last few bits of glass from the windshield frame.

  Truth be told, he was bored as shit most of the time. Even with the extra effort it took, big projects like looting the National Guard armory or gathering up all the armor and guns and ammo in the city didn’t take long when you had a hundred thousand bodies doing it. At least once a week he fucked up a car, just for the hell of it. Sometimes a house or an apartment building. He’d trashed half the food court over in the Glendale Galleria during one angry weekend.

  After a couple of minutes of violence he calmed down and looked at the car. He’d messed it up pretty good. The roof was beat down, and the hood was pretty messed up. He’d smashed all the windows, one of the headlights, and most of the instruments on the dashboard.

  The Samoan’s hands were ruined, too. The fingers were broken and the flesh had ripped away from the knuckles. The foot he’d kicked the door with was pretty messed up. He focused on a skeletal little girl across the parking lot and shifted into her. He watched the Samoan stagger on its bad foot for a few steps before it fell over. The dead thing flailed on the pavement for a minute or so before it rolled over and crawled off.

  Legion let his view flow out again for a moment, drifting through the Samoan’s head for a few seconds, and then focused himself inside an older man in the middle of Colorado Boulevard. It was a big guy with a beard and loose skin. Legion liked being big. It reminded everyone he was strong.

  Little soul.

  He spun around and staggered. He’d picked an old guy with a bad knee. Maybe a whole bad leg, and being dead hadn’t helped it any. He forced the body up straight.

  Nobody behind him. He thought he’d heard a voice, a buzz in the air like glow-boy from the Mount. He had a lot on his mind, though. He’d already written off what had happened earlier and was ready to start planning his next assault.

  How interesting you are, little soul.

  This time Legion reached out to look through a dozen sets of eyes. He saw himself in the old man, and a heavyset woman with a missing hand, and a teenage boy, and a slim woman whose face and hair had been burned off at some point.

  There was no one around who wasn’t him. He stayed in all the bodies and marched across the street. He looked in cars and behind bus stops and in the small patio of a Starbucks.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d heard the voice or just imagined it. It sounded damned close, though. And warm. Not warm in a good way, but warm like sick with the shakes.

  Little Rodney Cesares. Son of Juan and Gabrielle. Once so great in body, now a living soul with no flesh around it. How fascinating.

  “Okay,” called Legion. He found two exes up on the roof of a thrift store and one trapped on a balcony with a high railing. He looked down on the street through their eyes. “That you, Zap-man? Where you at, hijo de puta?”

  Nothing. He couldn’t see anyone anywhere. He reached out and guided a few more exes down to the intersection. Thirty different views, but nothing.

  “You think you can hide from me?” The dead took in a breath and shouted in the street, “I’M LEGION! I’M EVERYWHERE!”

  The words echoed on the street for a moment. Then silence settled down across the street and coated everything. The air grew still.

  Do you take the name of Legion in vain, little soul?

  He poured himself back into the old man with the bad knee and grinned. “I am Legion, bitch,” he growled at the air. “I’m death incarnate. I’m the guy who killed the world.”

  He had the unmistakable sense of someone standing right behind him. Behind all of him. Every ex within his reach felt a warm prickling on their backs and shoulders, a faint pull on the eyes. All his bodies looked around and saw nothing, but the feeling remained.

  You insult the great name of my sibling with your ignorance and arrogance. Perhaps a lesson in humility is in order. If nothing else, it should relieve my boredom while I await my new vessel.

  Legion rolled his fingers up into tight fists. All of the walking dead within three blocks copied him, guided by his anger. “Oh, yeah?” he spat. “Fucking coward. Come out here and give it your best shot.”

  And a few moments later, every ex in Los Angeles County screamed at once.

  “MA’AM,” SAID FREEDOM, “sir, with all due respect, this is your fault.”

  It made Stealth pause. St. George had said it was possible to catch her off guard, but this was the first time Freedom had ever seen it happen. He wondered how often anyone dared interrupt the woman.

  He was in Stealth’s meeting room with the other heroes. It was a rare thing for Freedom to be invited to these morning meetings. He understood they were informal, though, and the other heroes had known one another for years.

  The cloaked woman stood on the other side of the conference table and stared at him. He’d learned to sense her stares, even through the blank balaclava she always wore.

  St. George stood next to her, leaning against the edge of the table. He’d looked preoccupied for the whole meeting so far.

  Barry was in his wheelchair off to the side. He was also much more subdued than normal. If fact, Freedom was pretty sure the man hadn’t spoken yet.

  Danielle sat next to the wheelchair. He’d come to learn what a rare thing it was for her not to be wearing the Cerberus armor if she had a choice. Even now, with Lieutenant Gibbs and the boy, Cesar, able to operate the battlesuit, it was still her wearing it more than half the time. He’d known a few tank officers who were the same way—not comfortable unless they were surrounded by steel.

  The arrangement of the room also didn’t slip by the captain. He’d been on this side of similar tables three times before. Two of them were for official inquiries into the deaths of soldiers under his command. The other was when he was brought into Project Krypton and had the full scale of the project revealed to him.

  He still wasn’t sure which type this meeting was. All four of the heroes looked uncomfortable. It could be going either way.

  “Please,” said Stealth. Her voice was ice. “Continue.”

  “I’ve been here for eight months now, ma’am, and this is the first I’ve ever heard of a high-security prisoner in the Mount. One being held a hundred yards from my own quarters.”

  “Are you claiming you have never heard of the Cellar?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it, ma’am,” he said. “Everyone in the city has. And everyone has a different idea what it is. I’ve been told it’s a quarantine area, storage for ex-humans, and where we keep monsters.” He gestured at St. George. “One very excited little boy told me it’s where you hide the magic lantern that gives you your powers, and you have to go down there to recharge.”

  Barry looked up at his friend. “You’ve had a magic lantern all this time and you didn’t tell me?”

  St. George smirked. So did Danielle. It didn’t break the mood, but it cracked it enough for everyone to breathe.

  Freedom plowed ahead. “Who is the prisoner? Why did you have him locked up? And where did he get all these primitive weapons from? Is it some … ritualistic thing?”

  “Man, that’d be nice,” Barry said. “So much simpler.”

  “Speaking of ritual,” said Danielle, “wasn’t Max supposed to be here for all of this?”

  Without turning Stealth pointed over her shoulder at one of the numerous video screens in the room. The high angle showed Max in another meeting room somewhere. He was scratching notes and symbols on a huge whiteboard. His brow furrowed at the board as he wen
t back and erased a pair of lines. “He has been notified twice,” said Stealth. “It was a courtesy. We do not require his presence.”

  “Still working on his demon-banishment thing?” asked Barry.

  “So he claims. Legion’s scream seems to have worried him.” Stealth tossed something onto the marble tabletop. It made a hollow sound as it bounced over to Freedom. “This is the weapon the prisoner attacked you with?”

  He picked it up. “It looks like it, ma’am. I couldn’t be certain. I only saw it for a moment.”

  It was a thick piece of pale hardwood. It had been scraped down to something that was almost a blade. He recognized the scratches down the length from crude weapons in Iraq. Someone had dragged the spike across rough stone or concrete to shape it.

  Then he registered the thick knob under the handle.

  “This is a bone,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said St. George.

  “Someone slipped your prisoner a leg of lamb when you weren’t looking?”

  “It is a human tibia,” said Stealth. “To be precise, it is the prisoner’s left tibia.”

  Barry tipped his head back and rubbed his temples.

  Freedom set the bone down. “I’m pretty sure the prisoner had both of his legs.”

  St. George nodded. “Yeah, he did.”

  Freedom frowned and nodded at the table. “And the whip?” It had been coiled and stuffed into a large evidence bag. He wondered how Stealth had actual evidence bags when his people were using Ziplocs.

  “Identifying exact muscle tissues is more difficult without certain tests,” she said. “However, judging from the density and length of the sinews, I feel confident saying it is comprised of nine sartorius muscles. There are also eleven molars worked into the braid, to increase either traction or damage. Possibly both.”

  Danielle shuddered and looked away from the table.

  Freedom pondered this for a moment. “So there are multiple victims,” he said. “He killed other people before he got out and we missed it somehow.”

  St. George shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’re all his. The prisoner’s.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop for a moment. “Looking at these and some of the evidence we found in the Cellar, we’re pretty sure he was tearing out his own bones and muscles to make weapons and tools.”