by Peter Clines
She was about ten yards from the gate when one of the guards noticed her. He was a tall man dressed in military camos. She didn’t recognize him. He saw her cap and gave her an approving nod. “Don’t get too close,” he called down to her. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of teeth.
“How close is too close?” she called back. She tried to sound a little flirty. Guys let you get away with a lot more when they thought you were flirting.
She saw his chest move with a chuckle she couldn’t hear. He pointed with his free hand. “See the line?”
Madelyn looked at the bright line painted in front of the gate. “Yep.”
“Stay a yard back from the line and you’ll be fine. They won’t be able to touch you.”
He was reassuring her, she realized. A lot of people probably came to the gates, looking for familiar faces. A lot of those After Death folks. She gave him a nod and he turned his attention back to the creatures on the other side of the Wall.
There were two guards in the shack, but they were eating lunch. One looked at her, and his eyes lingered long enough to worry her. Then he went back to his sandwich.
It was just her and the exes. There were dead men, women, and children. Young and old. Black, white, Latino, Asian. The ex-virus didn’t discriminate.
Except for me, thought Madelyn. It doesn’t want me for some reason.
On the plus side, the exes were falling apart and she wasn’t. They were missing fingers and hair and skin. Some of them had dark sockets where there should’ve been eyes or noses or ears.
Most of the ones at the gate were watching the guards on top of the Big Wall. Their attention kept shifting to the nearest target as the men and women walked back and forth. It made them sway.
A dozen or so at the far end of the gate stretched their hands at the shack. The windows were large enough for them to see the two men inside. Their crooked fingers clawed at the air, trying to pull the structure closer.
She moved a little closer to the shack. The exes there had their eyes at ground level, but she didn’t want to get near enough for the guards to get a good look at her. She took a few steps forward and stood a foot back from the painted line.
None of them looked at her.
She took a breath and held it for a minute. “Hi, there,” she said. Her words were washed away under the torrent of clicking ivory. She tried again and it came out louder than she’d intended. One of the guards walking above her, a rail-thin woman, glanced down for a moment before continuing south along the Wall.
The exes didn’t react to the sound at all. Their heads never moved in her direction. Their grasping hands didn’t reach for her.
A%Oss dead man with sun-bleached hair stood right in front of her. It wore a tuxedo jacket over jeans and a brown T-shirt, and it took her a moment to realize the brown was all stains. It stretched its arms toward the guard shack. Two of its fingernails were missing on one hand.
Madelyn took another step and set her toes on the line. She pulled her hand from her pocket and moved it back and forth in front of the dead man’s face. The ex’s eyes stayed focused on the shack a few yards away. “Can you hear me?”
She glanced around. The guards were ignoring her for the moment, wrapped up in their breaks or their duties. She reached across the line and tapped the ex on the back of its grasping hand.
It paused for a moment, then went back to reaching for the guard shack. Both her feet were past the line. They could grab her. There were three of them who could reach her without even trying. But they didn’t try.
Madelyn slid forward, lined up between the bars, and punched the ex in the shoulder. The tuxedo corpse rocked on its feet, but its focus never shifted. All the exes around it ignored her, too.
“Hey,” yelled someone up on the Wall. “Get back behind the line!”
Madelyn looked up and saw the guard in the camos staring at her. His face was trying to decide if it was angry or scared. Two other guards were turning to see what he was yelling about.
Then everything happened at once.
An ex a few feet away, two down from the one she’d punched, shifted on its feet. It was a thin man in a long coat. It wore a helmet wrapped in digital-camo cloth. The ex looked around and she realized it was reacting. It was doing something different. Like the ones had the other day when she was out with Freedom.
It had a pistol. It slid the weapon out from under its coat and brought it up. The barrel pointed between the bars at the gatehouse. The dead man’s face pulled into a grin.
Something landed behind her. The camo guard had leaped twenty feet through the air to land on the pavement. The name on his coat said JEFFERSON. His hand reached for her shoulder. He was looking at her, not at the exes. Not at the ex with the gun.
She acted without thinking. It was like soccer. The ball came at you and you leaped to block it. You didn’t think. She knew the ex was going to shoot the guards in the shack, so she just acted.
She twisted away from Jefferson and pushed down on the gun just as the ex squeezed the trigger. The pistol jerked under her hand, and the blast sparked against the pavement in front of the shack. The arm fought back and she struggled to keep the weapon pointed at the ground. The barrel was hot now.
“Gun!” bellowed Jefferson. He leaped back and swung his rifle around. At the same time he grabbed Madelyn by the arm with his free hand and yanked her away from the gate. He was strong. Really strong. It crossed her mind he was one of her dad’s super-soldiers just as her feet left the ground and she sailed through the air. If Jefferson hadn’t held on she would’ve tumbled across the road. As it was her hat went flying and her hair spun in every direction. The landing shook her and knocked her sunglasses to the ground.
The guards up above looked confused. Some of them shot down into the exes outside the Big Wall. Jefferson fired through the gate. The ex with the pistol slumped with a hole in its head.
A dozen sleepwalking remember falling asleepgirl people exes woke up. Their posture shifted, their eyes became alert beneath their helmets. Pistols and rifles appeared from under shirts and coats. Some of them aimed at the guard shack. A few leaned back to aim at the guards on top of the Wall. At least three aimed at Jefferson, enough to make him hesitate for a moment. Shots echoed across the street and one of the guards howled and grabbed at his arm.
None of the exes aimed at Madelyn. None of them even looked at her.
She lunged past Jefferson again and grabbed a pistol from the dead man holding it. The gun flew over her shoulder and she reached through the gate to yank a rifle away from the next ex.
The exes looked confused. “WHAT THE HELL?” they all roared at once.
The rifle was heavier than Madelyn thought it would be, so she let it clatter on the pavement halfway through the bars. She took two quick steps and grabbed a pistol with each hand. She tried to think of it like a game. The weapon-grabbing game. One of the handguns went off as she grabbed it, and another shot thundered near her head. She cringed away but didn’t feel any pain.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?” The exes looked past her at Jefferson. Then up in the air and all around them. Their heads moved in sync, like dancers or those Olympic swimmers. They were so confused they’d only fired a dozen shots so far.
ST. GEORGE STOOD in the air and examined the symbol burned into the pavement outside the West Gate. Even with a dozen exes meandering over it, he could see it was different from the one up on Bronson Avenue. That one had been an hourglass, but this looked more like a pair of overlapping triangles. He tried to read some of the words scribbled out along the lines, but the walking dead made it hard to see anything more than a few syllables here and there. It wasn’t English, and it didn’t look like any of the Spanish words he knew. If he had to guess, he’d say it was Latin.
The edge of the circle was twenty feet out from the Big Wall, past the crosswalk and across from a dust-covered bus stop. For a moment he thought about flying up and looking at it from above. Then h
e remembered the dead woman twisting and exploding at the North Gate. There were two stains on the far edge of the circle where the same thing had happened here. He decided he could see it well enough from where he was.
He looked at the swarm below him and picked an ex at random. It was an emaciated woman with blond hair and clothes that had been stylish before the end of the world. She’d probably been pretty when she was alive. Now the skin was stripped from its chin and half its neck. Its bottom lip was gone and the teeth were yellow and cracked.
He wondered if the wound was how the woman had died. Maybe an ex had torn off part of her face with its teeth, letting her get away only to die and rise. Or maybe it was something someone had done trying to put the dead woman down, a blow to the skull that had missed.
St. George swooped down and lifted the dead thing by the back of the neck. It twisted in his grip as the ground fell away beneath its feet. A few nearby exes made awkward grabs at him as he rose back into the air with his catch. He drifted across the Wall and settled down in the open space inside the gate.
His boots tapped the pavement but he kept his arm up. The dead woman saw Cerberus, Jefferson, and another guard named Derek standing in a loose semicircle. The ex stretched out its arms and made awkward grabs at them. It swung back and forth in St. George’s grip. remember falling asleep-f since st
Madelyn shifted behind Cerberus. She’d been skittish around the guards since Freedom left. St. George shook his head and gestured for her to come out in the open. “You’re safe here,” he told her. “No matter what happens, you’ll be safe.”
Jefferson stepped forward, his rifle braced in one arm. He batted away the grasping fingers, and gave the ex a quick pat-down with his free hand. “Clear,” he said.
“Can’t believe we need to start watching them for weapons,” said Derek. “I mean … a zombie with a gun? It sounds like a joke.”
“Not anymore,” Cerberus said. She pointed at a pair of exes in camoflaged helmets. “Legion got to the armory out in Van Nuys. Weapons, ammunition, helmets, body armor.” Her head shook back and forth. “For all we know he’s got a dozen exes out there watching the walls through telescopic sights.”
Derek grimaced at the thought. So did a few guards on the Wall within earshot. The casualness faded from their movements.
St. George gave the ex a shake and raised his voice. “Rodney,” he shouted. “Time to have a talk.”
His voice echoed out across the street for a moment and then the dead woman stopped thrashing. The clicking teeth stopped and its face shifted from a blank mask to a surly grimace. It reached back to swat the hero with one hand. “Told you plenty of times, dragon man,” the ex said, “it’s Legion now.” Without a bottom lip, its voice was a drunken rasp, like the words were being dragged into the air across sandpaper.
Cerberus leaned forward with a hiss of servos and scraping armor.
St. George set the dead thing down. It shrugged a few times and turned to glare up at him. The ex had been a tiny woman, a good six inches shorter than the hero. “Got a question for you,” he said. As an afterthought he added, “Legion.”
The dead woman snorted. “The answer is fuck you.”
“All that time you were hiding out at Krypton, while Dr. Sorensen was covering for you, were you ever going to keep your side of the deal you made?”
Madelyn stiffened at the mention of her father. Her face got hard and she took a bold step away from Cerberus. Her sneakers slapped hard on the pavement, almost a stomp.
The ex didn’t even glance at her. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” it said to St. George.
“The one where you told him you’d find his family for him.”
The dead woman sneered as best it could. “What’s it to you?”
“Think of it as your big chance to prove you’re better than I think you are,” said the hero.
Madelyn took another few steps forward. The only person closer to the dead woman now was St. George. Madelyn stood up straight in front of the ex.
Legion tried to spit at St. George, but without a lower lip it just leaked thick oil over its chin. “Yeah, my word matters,” it growled. “I looked for them, just like I said. Didn’t make any difference. His old lady’s dead and walking. Never found the girl’s body. Figured it was easier to let the old guy think I was still looking.”
Trader Joe’serre together“And it gave you a place to hide,” said Cerberus.
The ex turned to the armored titan. Its gaze passed right through Madelyn. She even stepped to the side to stay in front of the dead woman’s face. “Fuck you, puta,” Legion spat at Cerberus. “I don’t hide from nothing.”
“Except me,” she said. The titan held out one massive gauntlet at head height and squeezed it into a fist. The ex gave her the finger.
St. George nodded. “So you looked for his daughter and never found her?”
Legion returned the nod while Madelyn waved both hands in front of the ex’s face. “Yeah. Never saw any sign of her. What’s it to you, esse?”
St. George smiled. “Okay,” he said, “I think that answers that.”
“Answers what?” growled the ex.
“It makes sense in a way,” said Cerberus. “I remember the military tried using dead bodies as bait for a while, but the exes only react to living people.”
“Yeah, I remember something about that,” said St. George. “The bait thing.”
“Bait?” echoed Legion. “What the fuck you people talking about?”
“Doc Sorensen ran some tests out at Krypton, sir,” offered Jefferson with a polite nod to Madelyn. “He said it’s some kind of perception thing, like how the T. Rex in Jurassic Park can’t see you if you don’t move.”
“Jurassic Park?” echoed Cerberus.
Legion’s eyes flitted between them. “What the fuck you people talking about?”
Jefferson glanced at the talking ex, then back to the heroes. “I remember it because the T. Rex scared the piss out of me as a kid. Pardon me, ma’am,” he added to Madelyn. “He said it was something to do with the reptilian brain. They see everything, they just process it different than we do. Living things get priority over dead things, moving things get priority over still things, things they see get priority over things they hear, like that. He said that’s why they run into walls and stuff.”
“They don’t need it, so they don’t register seeing it,” said Cerberus. She looked at the dead woman. “And he’s in the exes, so maybe he’s stuck using their senses. Or not using them, I guess.”
“And she’s dead,” said St. George with a glance at Madelyn, “so she’s not a priority.”
Legion looked down at the body he was wearing. One of the hands flexed open and closed. The ex’s brow furrowed in confusion. “She who?”
“We know he can see nonliving things,” said Cerberus. “Maybe it’s a focus issue?”
Madelyn took her cap off and waved it in the air in front of the dead woman. “So, you’re saying I’m not invisible, I’ve got a perception filter? Like on Doctor Who?”
St. George, Cerberus, and the guards all looked at her.
“Doctor Who,” she repeated. “It’s this sci-fi show from England.” Trader Joe’serre together
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” said St. George.
“Heard of what?” said Legion.
“Okay,” Madelyn said, “well, there’s this thing they use on it called a perception filter. It’s like a force field that makes things inside it less interesting so you can’t focus on them. So you’re sort of invisible but not really. You’re just … very forgettable.”
She waved the cap in front of the ex again for emphasis.
“Well, there’s one way to be sure.” St. George took a few steps back and looked at Madelyn. “Go ahead and hit him.”
“Her?” asked Madelyn, nodding at the ex.
“This some game, pendejo?” asked the dead woman. “Who you people keep talking to?”
“Yep,” said S
t. George. “Go for it.”
Legion looked up at St. George. “What?”
Madelyn let the cap drop from her hand. It hit the ground and Legion’s head shifted to glare at it. The dead eyes went wide for a moment. “The fuck?” he said.
“See?” said Cerberus. “He saw that.”
“That’s the big guy’s hat,” said the dead woman. “Where’d that come fr—”
Madelyn slammed her fist into the ex’s shoulder. It wasn’t a great punch, but Legion staggered back a step and spun around. “What the FUCK!” he shouted. The ex reached up to probe its shoulder with its fingers. It glared at the heroes.
“He can feel getting hit,” Madelyn said, “I just don’t think he knows I’m doing it.”
“Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know what to look for,” mused Cerberus. “He can’t prioritize you because he doesn’t know you’re there. It doesn’t even seem like he hears you.”
Madelyn leaned into the ex’s ear. “Hey!” she shouted. “I’m right here!”
“Hear who?” said Legion. The dead woman looked up at Cerberus, then past Madelyn to the roof of a nearby building. “Stealth up there somewhere? This her idea?”
“Hit him in the face,” said Cerberus. “For science.”
Madelyn grimaced, but threw another punch. It caught the dead woman on her bare jaw. Legion stumbled and spun around, clawed hands missing Madelyn by a good three or four feet. The ex spat out a mouthful of Spanish swears and curses that made St. George’s mouth twist into a smile. She poked the dead woman a few times from different directions, making it twist around, then placed her hands on its back and shoved it toward the gate. The dead thing stumbled and tried to get its balance back.
“Oh my God,” said the armored titan. “Once again, science makes the world a better place.”
Jefferson snorted out a laugh.
“This feels kind of mean,” Madelyn said. “I mean, I know he’s the bad guy, but he can’t fight back or anything.”
“You’re not doing anything he doesn remember falling asleep George people’t deserve a hundred times over,” said Cerberus.
