Ex-Communication: A Novel (24 page)

Tori turned to look at the ex. Her eyes went wide just as it sank its teeth into the base of her neck. She shrieked. Blood gushed out across her shoulder and soaked her overcoat. The dead man clawed at her chest with its fingers and she twisted away. Ex-Rich staggered back with a mouthful of flesh between its chomping teeth.

Danielle blinked and the lenses zoomed in. Tori was bleeding a lot, but it wasn’t pulsing. The ex had missed any major arteries. If she got back to the fence there was still a chance. A good chance.

But the almost-pixie woman was in shock. Once she was free of her dead friend she stood there for a moment. Her hand went up to touch her neck and came back soaked in red. She looked over her shoulder at the ex who had been her friend.

“Get back here,” yelled Cerberus. “Come on!” She tried stepping up onto the trunk of a car. It squealed and crumpled under her armored foot. She looked at the fence and tried to figure out if there was a way to open it that could be repaired quickly. The only way through was to shred it.

Another shot echoed across the freeway and an ex jerked but didn’t fall. It had been a dark-haired man in an L.A. Kings jersey. It took another few steps and a second round put it down.

Now Tori was hysterical. She turned to run and slammed right into a car. She sprawled on the hood and left a splash of blood on the silver paint. She pushed herself up and made it a few yards back up the ramp before she stumbled. She tried to twist herself back up and grabbed at her ruined shoulder. It threw her balance and she tumbled to the ground.

Ex-Rich fell on her, pinning her face down against the pavement. She twisted around onto her side and tried to push him away, and his teeth closed on her fingers. Its jaws opened again and her hand slipped in to the next knuckle. She howled.

The broken-jawed ex flapped its mouth at her and tried to chew her arm through the heavy sleeve of her overcoat. She thrashed her legs, but her almost-boyfriend slipped between them. Her other arm was pinned under her, and Cerberus could see it grasping at the air.

The guards took out two more exes heading for the woman, but a third slipped past them, and a fourth. Tori’s screams were already growing weaker when the two new exes fell on her. Her cries gurgled as if she had a mouthful of water and one of the exes stumbled back with pink meat between its teeth.

The steel fingers wrapped around the chain-link, and Danielle hollered at the exes as they ripped the woman apart. Then she stood up straight and bit back her tears. There was no way to wipe her eyes while she was in the suit, and she’d be useless if she couldn’t see or run the optical mouse.

Not that she’d been very useful to Tori as it was.

THE COUPLE ON
the other side of the street glanced at Madelyn. She tried to walk casually and watched them without turning her head. When their gaze didn’t leave her, she gave them a nod, a tight smile, and a little wave. The woman returned the wave and whispered something to the man, but they stopped looking at her and kept walking.

It was the third time this morning her disguise had worked, and she was feeling pretty good about it. The collar of her jacket was turned up and Captain Freedom’s cap sat low against her latest pair of sunglasses. She was lucky the hospital had a small stockpile of them. With her hands in her pockets, she was pretty sure she’d pass as a living person if nobody got too close.

She walked down El Centro, a residential street running parallel to Vine. At each intersection she could see the Big Wall a block to the east. If her notes were right, she was two blocks away from the gate she’d walked past with Freedom.

They were going to be annoyed with her for sneaking out of the hospital. The guards on her floor had been pretty lazy because they all thought her memory issues meant she was stupid. She’d heard them talk about how she’d probably forget the way out of the building or how to open doors. Adults were always underestimating her. It pissed her off sometimes.

And she’d been a lot better about writing in her diary since
arriving at the Mount. She had a lot more downtime, after all. Dr. Connolly even found two more notebooks for her. It meant she was clearer than she’d felt in ages.

Which was why Madelyn decided she needed to run some tests. Her dad had been very big on teaching her to use rational thought and the scientific method in all things. Schoolwork, cooking, sports, even dating.

In the months she’d spent—
years
, she corrected herself—wandering the Southwest, she’d come to suspect the exes didn’t react to her the same way they did to living people. It’d never occurred to her they couldn’t actually see or hear her. Even if it had, who’d want to test that theory out in the middle of nowhere?

Madelyn turned down a side street and the sound of clicking teeth grew louder. She stepped out onto Vine. The West Gate and its guard shack sat just a little bit to the south at the next big intersection.

She stayed on the sidewalk and slowed down a bit. There were more people along the street here and she didn’t want to scare anyone. Or get shot. A few of the guards on the Wall were dressed in uniforms, but all of them were carrying big military rifles.

She turned away from the Wall and fished her eyedrops out of her pocket. A quick glance confirmed there was nobody within a block of her, and none of them were paying attention to her. Her head tilted back and she pushed her glasses onto her forehead. The soothing drops washed across her eyes and the sunglasses slid back into place.

Through the gate she could see the exes. Dozens of them. Hundreds, she realized, as she got closer. A lot of them were looking up at the people on top of the Big Wall. Some of them stretched arms through the bars to flail at passing people who were far out of their reach.

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 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 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.

She smacked a pistol out of withered fingers and brought both palms down on a soldiery-looking rifle with a curved
clip. The dead man holding it fought back and snarled at the weapon. Her fist flew through the bars to punch the ex in the nose and she twisted the rifle away. She threw a clumsy kick and another pistol spun into the air.