Peter Clines - Ex-Communication

Can a head injury make you nearsighted?

Dear Diary,

This is messed up.

I woke up and found a big gold watch on my arm. It said it was February 23rd, which I knew was wrong because yesterday was August 3rd. But then I sat down tonight to write in here and the last entry was dated the 15th. And I read it and I remembered the truck and finding the watch and that was yesterday. I’m sure it was yesterday and I’m only remembering days wrong.

I think this watch might be broken. I read the last entry, but I just can’t believe five days slipped by without me knowing about it. I need another watch. That way I can tell if this one is right or not. A control watch, that’s what Dad would say.

It’d be easy to find a watch in a city, but there’s no sign of that city I mentioned in the last entry. I climbed up on the roof of this big-rig to look for it. I’m back in the middle of the desert again. No sign of any big population centers. No road signs.

I wonder if I should start making a list of cars and trucks. Or just their license plates. I could use them as landmarks so I can tell if I’m doubling back over somewhere I’ve been before.

I wonder if I got into the city, wherever it was, and didn’t have time to write anything. They’re all probably overrun with exes at this point. I might have just been dodging undead the whole time.

I wonder if I should try to find a gun. Maybe a shotgun or something, or some pistols so I can go all Milla Jovovich on any undead I find. I’ve never fired a gun before. I mean, I’ve played GTA and some Call of Duty, but I don’t think that counts.

I wonder where Mom and Dad are. I wonder if they’re looking for me. I hope they’re okay and not too worried.

Oh God!!! Oh God this can’t be right!! I can’t be one of them. They don’t have minds! They can’t think or feel or anything. That’s what Dad told me. He said they were just corpses. Just corpses walking around because of a virus.

There was a gas station and I thought I could spend the night because there’s no exes here except. There’s a big mirror by the register so you can see people behind you.

I can see the mirror. I’m looking at myself in the mirror right now. I can see my skin and my eyes. I look like them.

I want Mom and Dad! They’ll still love me. Dad can fix this. He’s one of the smartest people in the world. That’s why they hired him. He can fix it!

I CAN’T BE DEAD!!!!!!!!!!

“ BOSS,” ILYA SHOUTEDover the gunfire, “it’s worse!”

He pointed behind them, to the north side of the street. More exes were stumbling out of a nearby storefront that might have been a Blockbuster at one point and a pizza place on the south corner. Exes wearing helmets. Some of them even had tactical vests and other scraps of body armor.

There were another hundred of them, at least. Maybe even two hundred. With the ones already swarming around Big Blue , that meant close to a thousand. The sound of clicking teeth almost drowned out the truck’s engine.

The scavengers had driven into the valley through the Cahuenga Pass and followed the road all the way into Sherman Oaks. St. George and Cerberus were along as escorts. There hadn’t been any problems until they passed the pair of gas stations flanking Van Nuys Boulevard. There was a minor pileup of four or five cars down the road at the next intersection—nothing compared to some of the trainwrecks across Los Angeles—and the armored titan had gone ahead to deal with it.

Cerberus had tossed two of the cars against the side of the road and the noise had attracted a handful of exes. Two of them staggered over from a street-side patio and another pair stumbled out from behind an oversized pickup truck. She batted one of them away with the BMW she was holding and dropped the car on another. A quick kick from the battlesuit sent a motorcycle skidding and sparking across the pavement to knock down the others.

Then more had staggered out of the Second Spin store to the south, and some pushed out of the comic shop to the north. A lot more than should’ve been in such places. They piled out of the novelty gift shop with the tattered banner and the Panda Express and the Sprint store. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Far too many with military helmets protecting their skulls.

Most of the scavengers were in the back of their truck. Billie, Jarvis, and a former Project Krypton soldier named Taylor stood around the half-lowered tailgate. Taylor was swearing between every shot. They’d started calling out targets as they fired, but the calls came slow as people took more time to line up. More than a few were called out twice as bullets flicked off the exes’ headgear or lost too much force to penetrate.

Cerberus had tried to use the stunners built into her gauntlets but with the slow gunfire from the scavengers the dead overwhelmed her faster than she could put them down. St. George leaped over Big Blue to land near the titan and the two of them battered the exes back. They’d held back the tide as best they could.

And then Ilya had seen all the other exes pouring into the road behind them.

No question about it, St. George thought. Legion had figured out how to set a half-decent trap. He wasn’t supervising it, but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t difficult to predict what would happen when a bunch of exes surrounded a dozen or so humans.

The hero soared back over the truck and landed a few yards behind it. A bullet smacked into his shoulder and he glanced back. “Sorry, sir,” shouted Taylor. “You got in my shot.”

“Striped suit,” shouted Ilya from the truck, lining up on his target.

“Teenybopper,” called out someone else.

“Red shirt,” Lady Bee yelled from her perch on top of the truck’s cab.

“Press pass.”

“Parking enforcement,” called Jarvis with a bit of glee.

St. George brought the edge of his hand around like an ax and chopped through an ex’s neck. Its head wobbled in the air and dropped to the pavement. He whipped around just as a teenage boy in a camo-wrapped helmet grabbed his other hand and started to gnaw on it. The dead thing’s teeth broke against his skin and clicked against the pavement. He grabbed it by the shoulder and hurled it at the crowds spilling out of the Blockbuster.

A trio of exes stumbled toward him, their jaws snapping open and closed. A pair of gunshots rang out and thudded off the Kevlar helmets. The dead men stumbled for a moment from the impact, then lurched forward again. The hero heard Taylor swearing behind him.

He drove his knuckles through the closest one’s face and it dropped off his fist. One of the stumblers, a dead woman, grabbed at his arm. Two of its teeth—implants, probably—were still whole and brilliant white among the cracked gray stumps. He slammed his hand against the ex’s chest and sent it flying back. The body knocked down three or four others before it hit the ground. He slammed his hands together and crushed the skull of the last one, helmet and all.

There were too many of them. He’d put down two dozen, the scavengers had dropped another forty at least, and they hadn’t made a dent in the horde. The body armor was making them harder to kill. Just hard enough. He didn’t think it was going any better at the front of the truck.

He backhanded another ex away. “Cerberus,” he shouted. “Get back on board.”

From this angle, St. George could only see the titan’s blue and platinum skull and its broad shoulders over the truck. A little over a foot of bulky, armored spine was visible on its back. Cerberus grabbed an ex in either hand, slammed them together, then looked back at St. George. “There’s too many up front,” she bellowed.