An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean …” The doctor took a breath. “Okay, I’m just guessing here because this is all way, way out of my league, and at this point I haven’t slept in two days.” She looked at Stealth. “You super-genius types can do what you want with this. Maybe you’ll come up with another way to interpret all the data.”

  She took another slow breath and collected her thoughts.

  “I think Emil Sorensen invented something amazing,” Connolly said. “He figured out how to biochemically engineer the dream nanite sci-fi writers have been talking about since the seventies. Almost a self-guided, synthetic stem cell, if you will. And, for some reason, he used them on his daughter. Maybe she had some injury or a disease or something. I don’t know her history well enough to guess what happened. But they ended up in her body, and they started multiplying and fixing things. Maddy got older, became athletic, and they supported and enhanced her whole system. If anything went wrong—muscle tears, injuries, whatever—the nanites would zoom in, multiply, and replace it until her own systems could catch up.”

  “And then she died,” said St. George.

  The doctor nodded. “And then she died. And they tried to fix it.”

  They looked at the spiderweb on the screen.

  “From what you and the captain have told me,” continued Connolly, “she was probably mangled, missing a lot of tissue mass. So the nanites did what they’re supposed to do. They replaced the damaged and missing sections. And they kept replicating and replacing until they made her whole again. But the body was decaying, maybe getting eaten by scavengers. It was an uphill battle, and by the time it was done … there wasn’t much left of the actual body.

  “Plus they weren’t designed to do the job they were trying to do. Not something on this scale, anyway. So there were gaps. They built memories that were hardwired instead of flexible. They replicated a cardiopulmonary system, but it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t need to.

  “This is also why she sleeps. After watching them for a while, I can see a regular pattern where the nanites expend all their electrochemical energy and then become dormant until a sufficient gradient rebuilds. As they start to shut down she gets tired, and then when they start back up they reset themselves.”

  “And she forgets the previous day,” said Stealth.

  St. George thought of the smiling girl he’d left a few hours ago. The Corpse Girl. “So you’re saying Madelyn’s … what?”

  “Maddy Sorensen isn’t real,” said the doctor. “She doesn’t have any life signs because she’s a … a robot. An android. She’s a pile of nanites working together to duplicate the individual parts of a teenage girl on the cellular level, and they don’t realize there’s no actual girl left. They rebuilt a working model of a corpse.”

  The spiderwebs drifted across the screen.

  “Does she know?” asked St. George. “Did she see any of this?”

  “No,” said Connolly. “I was working alone on this all day yesterday and she was out earlier with you, right?”

  St. George nodded.

  “That’s why I figured now was the best time to talk to you about this.”

  “Does she pose a threat?” asked Stealth.

  Connolly blinked. “How do you mean?”

  “Is she a threat to the population of Los Angeles?”

  The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think she has any evil programming or something, if that’s what you mean. For all intents and purposes, she’s still just a teenage girl. No stronger or faster. It seems like she’s got more endurance and her pain response is a lot lower than it should be, but I think that’s a function of her … well, not being alive.”

  The cloaked woman turned her head to the image on the screen. “Could her nanites be dangerous to other individuals here in Los Angeles?”

  The doctor shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She reached out and tapped the screen. “I’ve only scratched these things, granted, but it seems like they’re Madelyn-specific, designed to her DNA, and they won’t last long outside on their own.” Connolly shrugged. “Like I said, this is a little over a day’s work. There’s still so much about these things I don’t understand. I could keep a research team busy for their whole careers.”

  “So,” said St. George, “now what do we do?”

  Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “What do you mean?”

  “Do we tell her?” he said. “Do we tell her what she is? Or what she isn’t, I guess.”

  “In a few hours,” said the cloaked woman, “her knowing these facts may be irrelevant.”

  “She still deserves to know,” said St. George.

  “That does not mean she would be better off knowing,” Stealth responded. “It is more likely such knowledge would cause her considerable mental and emotional stress.”

  Connolly nodded. “When I was an intern I saw people get close to complete breakdowns over all sorts of things. Tumors. Paternity tests. STDs. This is going to be just as life-changing for her as any of those. Heck, just the philosophical angle could keep you—”

  “This isn’t philosophical,” St. George said, “it’s a person. We can’t just—”

  “Either way,” snapped Stealth, “this is a matter best discussed tomorrow.”

  St. George took a breath, then let it drift out between his teeth. “You’re right,” he said. He glanced at Connolly. “Where is she now? Is she in her room?”

  Connolly’s brow wrinkled. “No, of course not.”

  “Of course not?” echoed Stealth.

  The doctor looked at St. George. “I thought you had her doing something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s why I decided to talk to you—I knew she’d be gone. She came in about two hours ago and said you’d given her a mission.”

  MADELYN’S BICYCLE SKIDDED to a stop and she double-checked the address. Hector had run a piece of duct tape down the arm of her jacket and written out the street number with a fat Sharpie marker. “Don’t want you getting halfway there and forgettin’ where you’re going,” he’d said. He’d also given her a few map pages from something called a Thomas Guide that lined up to show her the route out of Hollywood and into the Valley.

  It hadn’t been hard to convince him to help her. Despite her mom’s constant warnings, Madelyn was pretty sure not everyone in Los Angeles with a tattoo would slit your throat if you asked a question or flashed your headlights to remind them theirs were off. Hector de la Vega was gruff, and he stared at her boobs just a little too long for her liking, but he got the urgency of the mission a little more than St. George did. Hector had a cross on each arm, and the numbers of a Bible verse on his collarbone. She wondered if he was religious and had a better idea of what the demon represented.

  By the same token, she was also pretty sure Hector wouldn’t be too broken up if she never came back. She’d seen the big man recoil when his fingers brushed the back of her hand. Nobody liked the feel of dead flesh, and he’d been one of the ones giving her looks at the big meeting.

  Getting out of the Mount hadn’t been half as hard as she thought it’d be. It reminded her of a line from an old Houdini movie her mom loved—had loved. Nobody made safes to keep people from breaking out of them. She’d scaled the Wall while the guards were facing the other way and slipped down into the crowd of exes below. It’d been creepy as hell, being surrounded by them, but it wasn’t any worse than a school hallway between classes. Hundreds of people around you but not one of them seeing you while they moved. They jostled her, but none of them reacted to her.

  Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the invisible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel like to catch fire and explode.


  It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.

  “I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”

  She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.

  Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.

  She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.

  Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.

  Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.

  Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.

  An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.

  It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.

  The dead thing had the same jaw and cheekbones as Hector. She decided right then to say she hadn’t seen any sign of the old man. She wouldn’t want to know her family was still walking around.

  She left the ex standing in the driveway and walked through the gate. There was a flowerbed that had grown out into the small yard. A few cobblestones in the grass led up to the big wooden door. It swung open when she pushed on it.

  She was looking for a wooden box three feet long and eight or nine inches square. It was padlocked shut. Hector thought it might have a little plaque on the lid, but he couldn’t remember for sure.

  The cottage was small, and there weren’t too many places to hide something that size. Madelyn looked in both closets, under the bed, then went through each drawer of the dresser. She checked under the couch and behind the washer and dryer.

  There was a loft above the washer, but it was just filled with dusty paperbacks. Hector’s grandfather had loved science fiction. She wondered how he’d felt when the dead started to walk.

  The fridge was disgusting. The kitchen cabinets were jammed full of pots and pans of every size and a huge selection of dishes. She even looked in the dishwasher. Someone had run it before the end of the world. The glasses and silverware were still sparkling clean.

  The cottage didn’t have a basement, which seemed weird to her. Growing up on the East Coast, almost everybody had a cellar. It just felt like the old man’s home was missing something important.

  There wasn’t a real attic, either. She found a small hatch in the ceiling of the bedroom and got up into it with a footstool from the kitchen. Twenty minutes convinced her there was nothing but old clothes and Christmas decorations up there.

  Madelyn checked her watches. She’d spent an hour biking into the Valley, and another hour searching the house so far. According to watch number two, sundown was in ninety-three minutes. And Max’s deadline was in four hours.

  There was a small shed in the backyard, one of the ones that looked like a big Tupperware container, but it was nothing but garden tools and a lawn mower. She even tipped over a few bags of potting soil and fertilizer to make sure the box wasn’t hidden behind them. Nothing in the tight gap between the shed and the backyard fence, either.

  Even though the garage was connected to the cottage, it didn’t have a connecting door. She tugged on the big door but it was locked. Or maybe the motor was holding it shut. She walked around the garage and found a side door opposite the cottage. It was also locked.

  A quick trip back inside let her find the basket by the door. It had a very overdue parking ticket, some loose change, two key rings, and a small remote with a single button on it. Madelyn squeezed the remote a few times before she remembered the power had been off for a few years at this point.

  Back outside she started testing the key ring against the door. Hector’s grandfather had shuffled down the driveway and found a friend. A tall ex with a plaid shirt and a limp. They’d bumped shoulders and were turning together in a creepy slow dance. They didn’t notice her or the sound of jingling keys.

  And how is that, she wondered. There was a certain logic to them filtering her out, but shouldn’t they see and hear other things she had contact with? Were the exes seeing an empty suit of clothes walking around, or a set of keys floating in the air, or did the filter have range?

  The first key she tried on the second ring fit the door. She glanced at her watches again. Fifteen minutes trying to get into the garage. If she didn’t find the box soon, it’d be dark by the time she got back to the Mount. She pushed the door open.

  The garage was a lot like hers back home, an example of controlled chaos. A huge Lincoln filled most of the space. There was a trio of bikes parked—stacked, really—against the back wall. Metal shelves held some canned food, jars of nails and screws, a plastic toolbox, and a few more paperback books. It looked like Piers Anthony and Alan Dean Foster had been banished from the loft. An upright piano stood under a drop cloth and some empty flowerpots. An old painting—a guy with a mustache and a sash—hung on one wall next to a pair of rakes and a folding ladder.

  Madelyn pulled everything off the piano and opened the lid. She pressed her hands against the Lincoln’s windows and looked in the backseat. She got down on all fours and looked under the car. It wasn’t until she climbed back to her feet that she bothered to look up.

  Just like her own mom and dad, Hector’s grandfather had saved space by putting stuff up in the garage’s rafters. He’d even wrestled a sheet of plywood up there to use as a huge shelf. She could see suitcases, old boxes, and what looked like a big stuffed bear.

  Stretched between two of the beams, right over the big door, was something wrapped in a black trash bag. It was about three feet long.

  It took her a minute to get the ladder off the wall, and another two to get it in front of the Lincoln. As she was trying to set it down, one of the legs swung up and broke the Lincoln’s tail light. Nobody would ever know, but she still felt bad. She kicked out the ladder’s legs and climbed up to the top. It wobbled a little, but she’d never been scared of heights.

  A few tugs and the plastic bag came loose. The box was dark wood, just like Hector had said, with narrow iron hinges. It looked old. She slid one side free and let the whole thing settle into her arms. It took a moment to get her balance and then she worked her way back down the ladder without using her hands.

  The box reminded her of a coffin, even though she’d only been to one funeral in her whole life. There was a crest engraved in the lid with a few words in Spanish—she’d studied French in school. There was a latch made from the same black iron as the hinges. The padlock on the latch, however, was steel and new.

  Madelyn looked around the garage for a minute and found the plastic toolbox. There was a flathead screwdriver right on the top tray and a hammer underneath that. She pushed the screwdriver through the padlock’s hasp and whacked it with the hammer. The screwdriver slipped loose and spun across the garage. She chased after it, repo
sitioned, and pounded a few more times. The padlock didn’t budge, but the latch tore free from the wood. It made her pause for a moment, then she beat on the screwdriver a few more times until the box cracked and the latch ripped away.

  She heard a thump behind her and spun around. Grandfather de la Vega and the other ex were pressed against the garage door, their heads framed in the large windows. Well, the top of grandfather’s head. The wood muffled their clicking jaws. Another ex, a skinny woman in a dress, stumbled up the driveway behind them.

  Less than an hour until sundown. She needed to get moving. She threw open the box and tossed aside an old black sheet that had been folded over the contents. And there was the sword.

  After seeing the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie she’d convinced her parents to let her take fencing lessons. It’d been a huge letdown. Junior-level fencing wasn’t as action-packed as the movies made it out to be, and competition-legal foils just didn’t measure up to the gorgeous sword Orlando Bloom had made for Commodore Norrington or the one Inigo Montoya’s father had made for the six-fingered man.

  This sword did, though. She didn’t know anything about weapons but she could tell this was a piece of art. There weren’t any fancy jewels or gold or anything, but it was still beautiful. The blade was thin and covered with hundreds of curls and scrolls that reminded her of her dad’s paisley ties. Above the handle—the hilt, she remembered—was a circle of metal, curved down to guard the hand. It was cut and engraved to look like an elaborate flower. A thick rod of metal stretched side to side beneath the circle, and a matching one curved down to make the knuckle guard.

  She wrapped her fingers around the hilt and lifted it out of the box. It was a little heavier than she’d expected, but it balanced in her hand really well. There were a few faint nicks on the blade, but they’d been ground down and polished out. The sword had been used a lot, but somebody had taken care of it. The edge was still sharp.

  “Corpse Girl for the win,” she said with a smile.

  Another thump convinced her to get moving. There wasn’t any scabbard or anything in the box, so she hiked up her coat and slid the sword through her belt. It was a little awkward, but she was pretty sure she’d be able to ride a bike with it.