Ex-Patriots (25 page)

Unless I’m displacing the air by some
other means.
He held up the gleaming arm again and wiggled the
fingers.
Inside the visible area of the energy form is a little
over nine hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. I keep all that energy
contained, but air still comes near me, gets heated, and pushes
away. That’s where the sonic booms come from. I’m not solid, but
the atmosphere acts as if I am.

The doctor stroked his beard. “Assuming I
believe you, Mister Burke, what are you getting at with all
this?”

What I’m getting at, Emil—Can I call you
Emil? What I’m getting at is that to a being of pure energy, a big
pane of clear glass is the same thing as an open door.

The shadows vanished as Zzzap flitted through
the observation window.

Sorensen and Smith stumbled back. The
soldiers drew sidearms. Zzzap raised his hand and the temperature
shot up by twenty degrees.
Don’t do anything dumb
, he said
to them.
You can’t hurt me and I don’t want to hurt you.

Sorensen pulled off his glasses and stared at
the wraith with wide eyes. “You could’ve done that at any
time.”

Yup.

“Then why spend so much time talking?”

Because I wanted to hear what you had to say
about all this. And I hate to be the one to break it to you,
doctor, but your own personal Elvis has left the building, if you
get my drift. Now if you’ll all excuse me, I think my friends are
somewhere nearby and they need to hear that you people are a bunch
of nutjobs.

He shot toward the door and there was a
deafening crack. Zzzap flailed in the air, then rushed the door
again. There was a second report, and the wraith was hurled away a
second time. His outline blurred for a moment, then pulled back to
a crisp silhouette.

The doctor polished his glasses on his shirt
sleeve and balanced them back on his nose. “I’m sure you’re
familiar with the concept of a Faraday cage, Mister Burke,” he
said. “They were very popular with scientists and espionage
agencies because they block out all outside signals and
interference. One as well-built as the one around this chamber can
block any type of electromagnetic signal. Cell phones, television,
radio waves— it can keep all of it out.”

The rumpled old man smiled at the gleaming
wraith.

“Which also means it can keep anything
in.”

Smith cleared his throat. “I know you don’t
want to hurt anyone,” he said. “But I’d guess just hanging out in
an enclosed space like this with you isn’t... well, it’s probably
not healthy for any of us mere mortals in the long term.” He nodded
at the soldiers. “Definitely not for these two who are going to be
here monitoring you. Maybe you should go back into the core?”

Sorensen was still smiling. Zzzap glared at
him. He didn’t have eyes, but they all sensed the glare. He drifted
towards the window.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said
Smith, “I just lost a bet with Colonel Shelly. I was sure you’d get
out.”

Yeah, thanks. That makes it all much
better.

THEN

I didn’t even want to be in the Army. I wanted to be
in a jazz band. Get out of college, make a little money giving kids
horn lessons, and spend my nights playing trumpet somewhere down in
the Gaslamp district as Harry Harrison and the Starlighters or
something like that. That was my real dream.

Yeah, I know. There was a writer named Harry
Harrison, too. Only about ten thousand people have told me that,
thank you.

Then the White House had to start this stupid
war in the Middle East while I was in high school and it looked
like I might get drafted. People were talking about the draft, can
you believe it? That was what I heard all through college. There
hadn’t been a draft in forty years, and the last time was for a
stupid, pointless war, too. If the Repugs stayed in power after the
election, everyone on campus knew they’d keep the war going.

Dad sat me down. He’d done a stint in the
Navy right out of high school and he explained why. If there’s a
draft, they decide where you go. If you enlist on your own, you get
a lot more say in where you go. He spent Vietnam on board the
Will Rogers
, slept in a warm bunk almost every night, and
never got shot at once.

So I went to the recruiting office just
before I graduated college and the Army officer told me there was
an Army band. They’d actually pay me to play trumpet for four
years. I signed up and told Dad it was one of the best decisions
I’d ever made.

Yeah, I joined Krypton right after I made
sergeant. What better way to stay off the front line than to
volunteer for a stateside experiment? And there was a decent chance
I’d end up in the control group, so I wouldn’t even have to deal
with side effects or anything, right?

Little did I know.

I made the cut. The surgery took. Three weeks
later I raised my horn to lips, took a firm grip, and dented the
outer cylinders. Gus and Wilson thought it was funny as hell.
Wilson dug up a bugle for me a few days later, left it on my
bunk.

Fucktards.

Of course, all this was all kind of moot.
Turns out no one’s just a musician when there’s a war going on.
First it was in the Middle East, but then it was everywhere. The
main instrument I had to play was my rifle, and since the exes
showed up I’d gotten very proficient with it. Solos, duets, I even
led a few six-piece numbers that got rave reviews under the name
Staff Sergeant Harry Harrison and the Unbreakable Twenty-ones.

When it all went really crazy, it had been
six weeks since our first attempt into Yuma. Four weeks since First
Sergeant Paine blew his own head off and most lines of
communication went dead. The last one said the feds had flown some
super-robot out to Los Angeles, and that made Captain Freedom
furious. He’d been arguing we should be on the front line all
along, and Project Krypton had just been lost in the chaos of the
Zombocalypse.

Yeah, Zombocalypse. Neat, huh? Gus told me
that one.

Thirteen days since the first of a small army
of exes staggered across a few miles of desert to pile against our
fence line and fill the air with the staccato chatter of enamel and
ivory.

Hard as it may be to believe, that wasn’t our
biggest problem at the time. It was part of the problem, yeah, but
the real issue was how we could work around it. The big problem was
Doc Sorensen. The doc was crazy worried about his family. Turns out
he had a wife and a teenage daughter back home. We caught him twice
trying to steal a Humvee so he could go get them. Freedom pointed
out to the old guy there was no way he’d make it over a thousand
miles and back, but the doc didn’t care. He argued they couldn’t
order a civilian around and threatened to quit the program.

That was when Smith stepped in. The
monkey-boy finally started carrying his own weight. God knows how,
but he’d pulled some strings and gotten Sorensen’s family on a
plane heading out here. Only problem was we didn’t have an airstrip
on the Krypton base. There are seven here at the proving ground,
including one nobody’s supposed to know about, and the closest
one’s about nineteen miles west and north of us.

Unlike Krypton, it wasn’t fenced off. There
were exes all over it. A lot of them were wearing tiger-stripe camo
and flight suits. I knew it was on a list of priority areas to
reclaim as soon as things stabilized. Thing is, we needed it
now.

The captain came up with a plan. A pretty
solid one. We were going to co-ordinate landing time with a mobile
unit. Unbreakable Twelve under Sergeant Washington was going to
drive a Guardian armored vehicle to the airstrip and hit the runway
at the same time as the plane. They collect the doc’s wife,
daughter, and the pilot as soon as they touch down, then bring them
back to Krypton safe and sound.

This was the other problem, because going
off-base meant we had to open all three gates. Twice. And we hadn’t
opened them since the wall of exes got here.

Most of us were on the gates. My section,
Twenty-two, and Thirty-two were inside the first ring of fences.
Captain Freedom had issued us all M16s on single-shot. They felt
like toys after carrying a Bravo for months. Too light and too
small. Their volume didn’t even go to eight, let alone eleven. All
we were going to do was walk back and forth, stick our rifles
through the fence, and pop exes as they headed for the gates. The
catch was we only had two magazines each. The quartermaster was
already rationing ammo, just to be safe. So one for the exit, one
for the return.

Sections Eleven and Thirty-three had the
second ring. When the gates opened they formed a single lane into
the base. They were in charge of any exes that slipped in there.
Sergeant Monroe, the new platoon sergeant, was with Eleven and
itching for a chance to take out some of the dead.

And above us all, in one of the watchtowers,
the captain was conducting the orchestra with a Mk 19 grenade
launcher. They’d stripped off the vehicle mount and he had three or
four cans of ammo with him. He could almost use the damned thing as
a pistol. He was going to make a lot of noise away from the base.
In theory, the exes would follow.

Colonel Shelly wasn’t too keen on any of
this, but he and Smith had a talk and monkey-boy convinced him
taking care of Sorensen was in all our best interests. Maybe there
was still final testing to be done and if the doc left we were all
going to explode or something. Smith talked with the soldiers from
Twelve for half an hour, too, impressing the importance of this on
them, asking them again and again if they were sure they were up
for it, if they knew how to handle different things that might
happen. I think in the end they were ready to smack him.

Actually, I know they were ready to smack
him. Britney told me so when we met up for a good luck fuck in the
armory before she left. Yeah, it’s frowned on, but believe me, once
you’ve had superhuman sex or enhanced sex or whatever you want to
call it... well, we weren’t going to give it up until they ordered
us to. Besides, at the time I was pretty sure First Sergeant
Kennedy didn’t know. She was serious about her new rank, and I’m
sure she would’ve had us both over the coals. I found out a little
later that she did know, and it was an awful way to find out.

Squad Twelve left with no problem. It all
went smooth and by the numbers. Captain Freedom dropped a cluster
of grenades about a hundred yards from the fence and half the exes
wandered off to see what was making all the noise. They were
halfway there and he dropped another cluster to keep their
attention.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t
he just use the grenades on the exes. I asked that, too, when we
were going over the plan. Kennedy smacked me upside the head and
reminded me the dead things were already dead (her exact words).
The blast might mangle them, might even destroy one if it got
caught just right, but odds are it’d just be wasting grenades. A
mashed-up, slashed-up torso will kill a person pretty quick, but
all it does is slow down exes.

In five minutes our teams in the outer ring
had picked off about two hundred exes that wouldn’t leave the
fence. The posts on the gates got pulled and Twelve got escorted
out. They had one of the base’s five Guardians and Adams was behind
the wheel. He floored it and kicked up a fan of dirt and dust as
they shot across the desert. In theory they’d reach the airstrip in
about thirty minutes, just as the plane was touching down.

Two hours passed. A long intermission.

We still had radio contact, and Kennedy made
sure we got the updates she thought we needed. The plane had been
twenty minutes late. Enough time for the armored vehicle at the
airstrip to attract a lot of undead attention. It took a lot of
close-quarters fire to get Mrs. Sorensen and not-yet-legal Sorensen
into the Guardian. Sergeant Grant didn’t make it. Neither did the
pilot. Another Twelve had been bitten hard and was bleeding, but we
didn’t know who. But they had the package and they were heading
home.

Sorensen was about halfway between the gates
and the helipad. I could see him through the fences. His hair was
pretty thin on the top and I remember wondering if he had any
sunscreen on. When Kennedy told him the news he applauded.

About fifteen minutes later we saw the cloud
of dust where the Guardian was coming across the desert to us.
Everyone took their places. Squads Twenty-one, Twenty-two, and
Thirty-two loaded fresh mags in our rifles. The two inside gates
opened.

In the past two hours, most of the exes had
wandered back to the fence. They were pretty determined to get in,
what with all these tasty soldiers standing right on the other
side. Freedom sent another volley of grenades out across the
desert, about ninety degrees off from where the Guardian was coming
in. A bunch of the exes at the back of the crowd turned and
staggered towards the noise. Not as many as last time, but still a
good chunk of them. He sent his second cluster and it attracted a
few more.

Then the Guardian stopped. It was still a
good two hundred yards from the outside gate. We heard the engine
cough and give up under the clicking teeth. It was against
protocol, but I switched over to the command channel.

“It’s got a fifty gallon tank,” snapped
Kennedy’s voice. “How the hell are you out of gas?”

“Seven, this is Twelve. I don’t know,” said
Britney. Sergeant Washington. I remember that, too. Forcing some
distance between us right at that moment. Her voice was stressed.
“We’re bone dry. The tank must have taken a hit or something.”

“A hit from what?” I looked up at Kennedy,
standing near Freedom on the tower. I could almost see her grinding
her teeth.