Ex-Heroes (19 page)

He scowled back at me. “Yeah,” he barked. “What’s that tell you?” His rifle banged and a dead Mexican man flew back, arms flailing.

“We’ve got radio,” shouted Wallen. “Survivors are in the main building.” He pointed across the tarmac, and a distant figure on a rooftop hopped and waved its arms.

As I turned my head, the targeting software haloed several dozen exes between the runway and the building. “Watch your step,” I bellowed over the speaker. “Let me take point.” I pushed past them and grabbed the closest dead thing, crushing its skull in my fist. Not efficient, but it was the kind of morale boost they needed.

I marched forward with the Marines flanking me. It took a month of fighting before officers realized the standard fire team didn’t serve much use against the exes. There were no grenade launchers or M240’s here. Just your basic M-16 for everyone, bayonets mounted, all set on single shot—-no bursts allowed.

The walking dead continued to flail at us as we marched across the airfield. A quarter-mile to the south the armor magnified the remains of a chain link fence. It had been bent and twisted and pressed flat to the ground for a length of twenty yards, and dozens of exes were staggering through the opening every moment. No additional barriers or watchtowers. The people hiding here had trusted a chain link fence with some barbed wire to protect them from hundreds, maybe thousands of massed undead.

“The perimeter’s compromised,” I told Wallen.

He gave a sharp nod. “We can’t stay here.”

My cannons lined up and fired a few dozen rounds at the distant fence. I watched a line of headless exes drop. The next wave tripped over their bodies, and so did the next. It wasn’t much, but it was a space. “Suggestions?”

“The main resistance is in Hollywood,” he said as we continued toward the terminal. “It’s eleven miles east-south-east of here. We hole up with these folks for a minute, get some transport together, and then get moving.”

Wallen’s Marines cleared a path for us. By the time we’d reached the building they’d put down almost a hundred exes. We made it into the private terminal and I swore inside the armor. Not one defensive structure set up. These people hadn’t prepared for anything. I wondered how long they’d been here, or planned to be here? Once that fence went down they were exposed and defenseless.

We could hear screams up ahead. And under the screams, hundreds of teeth clicking.

There were over thirty bodies in the hall. Only a handful had been exes. A few dead things were gnawing on limbs and clawing their way into torsos. The Marines made short work of them. One of the younger ones, Mao, threw up.

We passed a handful of offices before we entered the main section of the terminal. It was like the lobby of an office building. Maybe fifty people were scattered across the room as they tried to hold off twice as many exes. They were fighting with fire axes, shovels, and two by fours. Barely any firepower among them.

One fat idiot had a shotgun and kept blasting exes in the stomach. He didn’t seem to notice when he took down one of his own people with his wild aim. “Fucking hell,” he hollered, “the goddamned Army finally showed up!” He grinned, threw a loose salute at the Marines, and a teenage girl with a bloody, ragged torso wrapped her arms around him and took a chunk out of his neck. The fat man turned to throw her off and an old Chinese ex grabbed his arm and sank its teeth into his bicep. His shotgun went off one last time and he went down screaming.

Another dozen people had died just since we walked into the room. I stomped forward and began crushing skulls. Wallen was right behind me, driving his bayonet through eye sockets. The Marines were damned good. In five minutes every ex in the room was dead. Seven civilians had died, and one more Marine.

“Who’s in charge here?” shouted Wallen.

A bulky man with a hunting rifle stepped forward. “That’d be me. Mark Larsen.”

“How many people do you have here, Mr. Larsen?”

He looked at the bodies. “I think we’re down to about thirty of us down here. I’ve got fourteen families upstairs.”

“Any transport?”

“A couple trucks, including a diesel fueler. We’ve been waiting for someone to tell us where to go.”

“Good man,” said Wallen, clenching his fist. “Have someone get them warmed up and get your people. We’re moving out as soon as possible.” He looked at the crowd of Marines. “Alpha team, you’re with the trucks. Beta, keep the families safe.”

“Wall,” shouted someone. “Another wave of exes coming from the south. Lots of them.”

“How many is lots?” he shouted back.

O’Neill leaned in from the hall. “Maybe four digits, sir. We’ve got ten minutes, tops.”

“I’m going out,” I said. “I can get in deep and hold them off.” He nodded and I followed O’Neill back up the hall.

The Marines were smart and well-trained. They hadn’t wasted time with a solid barricade, just knocked over a ton of stuff for exes to trip and fumble with. They’d settled back and were letting off controlled, aimed shots, like a shooting range.

There were just too many, though. The Marines were making a dent, but they weren’t slowing the tide.

I marched toward the shambling crowd, cannons blazing. At this range, a round from the M-2’s could go through four or five skulls before slowing down. I thundered through a hundred rounds in a few bursts and dropped twice as many exes. Then they were around me and I fired up the stunners.

Exes don’t have any sense of pain, but they still have nervous systems, and those systems are still linked to their muscles. Which means a 200,000 volt blast will still drop one. The key thing to remember is it won’t stop them. The second the juice is off, they’re good to go again.

One pass of my hands and a dozen exes collapsed. I brought my arms back and watched ten more drop. Rounds splattered off the concrete as O’Neill, Laigaie, and Mao kept them down.

All around me. Ten, twenty, thirty of them. I swung my arms, swept a group of them together with a crunch of bones. They were hanging on my arms, on my legs, clutching at my waist. The sound of chattering teeth filled the battlesuit. I thrashed. I pounded. Warning lights flashed to remind me of the unexpected extra weight on each limb. I kept my eyes shut and crushed anything I got my hands on. My arms swung and I felt bodies slam against them.

I normally don’t suffer from claustrophobia. Even when I first started wearing and testing the armor there weren’t any panic attacks or nervous moments. It wasn’t until the first time I waded into a horde of exes that I started feeling trapped in the suit.

Someone shouted my name. It came again and I opened my eyes. Dozens of corpses surrounded me. The Marines had fallen back another thirty or forty feet. And a fresh wave of ex-humans was closing on me.

Ma Deuce and her twin sister had a shouting match that left fifty or sixty exes sprayed across the tarmac. The armor thudded back while O’Neill and Mao dropped a few dead things. We moved out around the terminal toward a row of hangars. The lenses switched and I saw the row of families running alongside them.

Wallen turned to check our flank and a tall ex fell on him. It was like the cheap-shot scare in a movie. A brunette woman, so close he didn’t have a chance. The walking corpse snapped its jaw and bit off most of his right cheek. The flesh peeled away and his nose stretched up with it for a moment.

He yelled out and froze. Just for a second. Long enough for the ex to get a second mouthful. There was a crack as his nose broke and was pulled off his face.

The Marines brought their guns up to shoot, but Wallen was flailing. A second ex latched onto his torso and sank its jaws in just above his collar. Dry fingers pulled at his arms, teeth pulled at his fatigues, and he fell back into the growing crowd of the dead. He never made another sound.

“Go!” shouted O’Neill. “We need to get to the trucks now!”

The M-2s turned the hangar wall behind us into confetti and I smashed through whatever was left. The Cessna inside got thrown out of the way as I cut through the next wall and into the hangar past that. The Marines flowed through the bottleneck. The exes bunched up.

Five minutes and another couple dozen dead exes later, we were at the trucks. Families were packed in the back and into the cabs. A third of the rifle platoon was missing. Netzley kept trying her radio with no response.

“Move out,” I shouted. “I’ve got point, everyone falls in behind me. Anything gets within ten feet of the trucks you put it down. Clear?”

There was a shout from the Marines, my optics flared to white, and I heard a dozen screams. The computer struggled to compensate and the airport reappeared on the screens. The light was all wrong. Everything was bright and washed-out. The civilians were looking up, their mouths open in awe, and two old Latino women were crossing themselves again and again.

Hanging above us was the shape of a man. It sizzled in the air, like high-tension lines on a damp morning. The white outline gave a friendly salute to Carter and tipped its head at me.

Howdy.
The voice buzzed like someone talking with a kazoo, except you could understand him.
I heard you were coming. Would’ve been here sooner but a lot of people thought you were still landing at Burbank.

The suit’s sensors were still going wild. “What about the other team? Did the other plane make it?”

The burning wraith seemed to slump a bit.
They didn’t. I’m sorry.

O’Neill fired at a distant ex and looked back up. “You’re Zzzap, right?”

Here to guide you to relative safety.
The figure nodded at me again.
Doctor Danielle Morris, I presume?

“No,” said Carter before I could speak. “That’s Cerberus.”

It was eleven when they left. St. George sailed through the air, watching the streets below for any movement past the slow drift of exes. A few caught glimpses of him and tilted their heads to follow his path. One fell over backwards.

He couldn’t glide as well as he normally did. The backpack was filled with water bottles and a small first-aid kit. It was slim and light, but it sat wrong. His balance was off and he just couldn’t find the sweet spot on the air currents.

On the rooftops below, Stealth flitted like a shadow. She darted between pools of darkness and leaped from building to building. When they got to an intersection she would throw herself out into space, grab his outstretched hands like a trapeze artist, and flip herself across four lanes of open road. Her cloak never made a sound as it billowed in the air.

The two heroes cut across the Wilshire Country Club, the upper-class neighborhoods of Highland, and the wide swath of LaBrea. Stealth killed eleven exes in that first hour, their necks snapped with blinding kicks. St. George just twisted their heads around.

They paused to rest on the roof of a deserted diner. “You doing okay?”

“I am fine. We do not need to stop.”

“You look like you’re slowing down.”

The cloaked woman shook her head. “I am fine.”

“Drink some water.”

She held the bottle and paused. He felt her eyes on him.

“What?”

“Turn around, please.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

She gave a slight tip of her head. “I do not want you to see me drink.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You’ve known me for over two years, I’m probably the closest thing you have to a friend, and you’re worried I might see your mouth?”

“Please, St. George. Turn around.”

He sighed, shook his head, and went to look over the edge of the roof. There were over two hundred exes scattered over the broad intersection. Every few yards on the sidewalk a squat wooden stump reached up between iron grates. A few of them were wide remains of huge palms, but most were as thick as his arm.

There was a deliberate crunch of gravel. She handed him the backpack. “Thank you.”

“I know you’re not scarred or disfigured or something, so why are you so obsessed with hiding?”

“How can you know I am not scarred?”

He smirked. “There are dozens of horribly injured people at the Mount. Half your face would have to be missing to be worse off than them, and I can see enough to know it’s all still there.”

“It could be a small scar. Perhaps I am vain.”

He nodded. “That would fit with the rest of the outfit, but I still don’t buy it.”

“You are still making suppositions. You have no evidence.”

“Two questions, then. When’s the last time someone called you by your real name?”

“I will not answer questions regarding my true identity.”

“Didn’t ask one. I just asked how long it’s been since someone called you by your real name.”

She tilted her head.

“I know ‘Stealth’ wasn’t your choice for a name. Wasn’t it someone in the LA Weekly or one of those that came up with it? You didn’t use any code name or secret identity or anything. So Stealth isn’t a name you picked. When was the last time someone used the name you were born with?”

Even in the dim light beneath the hood, he could see her expression shift under the mask. “Twenty-eight months ago.”

St. George blinked. “You know just like that?”

She gave a single, sharp nod.

“Okay then, question two. When was the last time someone saw you without the mask?”

“Someone who knew me?”

“Anyone. When was the last time anyone saw you without the mask?”

“Thirteen months. When we were getting settled in the Mount, I spent an evening walking the streets in civilian clothes to judge the mood of the population. October 31st, 2009.”

“Halloween? The last time you didn’t wear a mask was Halloween?”

“The irony is not lost on me. However, it struck me amidst the many costumes one unfamiliar adult would be less likely to stand out.”

“So the costume says you have no problem with people looking at you. Staying masked and never having a name means you’re bothered by who you were and you’re trying to hide it. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you were objectified a lot.”

She bowed her head. “Your deductive powers have grown considerably since we first met.”

“It’s all been your fine instruction, Mr. Holmes,” he said toasting her with a plastic bottle. He took another sip and pointed at one of the nearby remains of a tree. “D’you notice the stumps?”