Peter Clines: Ex-Communication

“But you’ve already planned for it?”

“I have.”

“So what’s bothering you?”

“Before the assault, Captain Freedom detained three teenagers attempting to steal a car.”

“So?”

“Petty crime has risen almost ten percent in the past few months since the Big Wall was completed. It is a distraction we do not need now that Legion has discovered these new assets.”

“Yeah, but it’s a good sign, in a way,” said St. George. “If we’re getting big enough to start having a crime problem, it means we’ve got a pretty sizable population. Things are getting better overall.”

All around the Big Wall, and as far as they could see, figures shuffled and stumbled in the streets. The sound of their teeth popped and cracked in the night like a hundred distant bonfires. Even at night, St. George could see thousands of them, and he knew there were thousands more out there in the darkness. Stealth said there were just over five million exes in Los Angeles. In three years he hadn’t seen anything to make him think otherwise.

At the best, every one of them was a mindless machine with no purpose past killing and feeding. A pack of ten could strip a person to bones in less than half an hour. At the worst, the undead were harboring Legion.

Stealth shook her head inside her hood. “As always,” she said, “you are an optimist.”

“Well, what is it they say?” St. George shrugged. “ ‘Better the devil you know …’ ”

THE ARROW ONmy GPS was starting to turn, but the road looked like it was turning with it. We’d been driving for about an hour at that point. Neither of us said much. We didn’t speak the same language, so it wasn’t that surprising.

My driver, Nikita (named after Khrushchev, his manager had told me), was an inch taller than me, maybe twice as wide, and with a permanent scowl cutting across his stubble. Picture every stereotypical Russian you’ve ever seen. The reason it’s the stereotype is because so many of them look like that. Nikita’s one of them. The scent of cloves hung on him like cologne, but he had the good manners not to light one up while we were in the car together.

To be honest, we tried to talk a couple times. I think that’s just human nature. We’ve got another person next to us, so we feel obligated to say something. Every now and then I’d ask about our progress or part of the landscape or offer to show him the GPS so he could get his bearings. Once I tried asking about the weather. “It’s a lot warmer than I expected,” I said. “Is it always this warm here in the summer or is this a global warming thing?”

Half the time he’d ignore me. The other half he’d turn and reply with a few sentences. Or maybe one sentence with some really long words. I can’t even speak a few words of Russian on my own, so it was hard to tell. Once, he delivered a long, impassioned speech about … something. Maybe a tree we passed that he grew up with or something. I have no idea.

It wouldn’t’ve taken much to speak Russian, granted. There’s a tattoo on my Adam’s apple for just that sort of thing, and one behind each earlobe. But a lot of the stuff we were carrying was very sensitive and I couldn’t risk it getting tainted by other energies.

So, anyway, when I’d tried to hire a guide, I hadn’t thought to ask for someone who spoke English. It’d been hard enough explaining the location I wanted to the guy at the agency.

“Here,” I told him, pointing at the map. “That’s where I want to go.”

The tour guide manager was a skinny man who reeked of cigarettes. His fingers were yellow. I got the sense they’d been a regular part of his diet for years. He looked at the map spread across the counter. “Cherepanovo?”

I shook my head and tapped the map again.

“Iskitim?” He shook his head. “Bad place for tourists.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head again. I double-checked my notes—as if I didn’t have the exact location memorized—grabbed a pencil, and made a small X on the map. “There,” I told him. “I want to go right there.”

He frowned at the mark on his map, then peered at it. “Sixty kilometers away,” he said. “Nothing out there but a few poselok —little villages.”

“I just need to be there in two and a half hours,” I told him. “Me and my equipment.” I gestured at the bags and pulled a few bills from my wallet. This trip was costing me three months’ pay, but if I pulled this off, it’d be worth it.

Granted, if I messed it up, there was a solid chance I was going to be very dead. Along with everyone in a forty-mile radius or so. Give or take a mile.

He shrugged, took the money, and picked up the phone. After a quick conversation in Russian he told me my driver would be here in twenty minutes. He explained Nikita’s name as we killed time.

I expected to get two or three people and a truck. Instead I got Nikita. The man was an ox. He threw one bag onto his back and picked up one under each arm. He and the manager tossed a few quick words back and forth and then he marched over to a battered BMW sedan. He fit all three bags in the big trunk—you can’t help but think of the Russian Mafia when you see a trunk that big—and waved me to the passenger side of the car.

For almost an hour now we’d been driving along a paved road that could’ve been in Kansas or Oklahoma or some flyover, grain-belt state. You hear Siberia and you picture some nightmare arctic wasteland, but it’s kind of beautiful. If you’re into that sort of thing.

The arrow on the GPS began to swing again, but this time the road didn’t swing with it. I looked ahead but didn’t see any turnoffs. Nikita drove along at a steady fifty miles an hour or so. The arrow was pointing at the steering wheel, then him, and then it was aimed at the backseat.

“Stop,” I told him. “We missed it.”

He grunted, shook his head, and gestured at the road ahead of us.

“No,” I said, shaking my own head. “Back there.” I held up the GPS.

Nikita slowed the car to look at the little digital arrow, then glanced back over his shoulder. He sighed and turned the car around in a wide three-point turn.

We backtracked three-quarters of a mile until the arrow was perpendicular to the road. He watched it with me and brought the car to a smooth stop. I hopped out.

It looked like we were on the edge of someone’s field, one that’d grown wild for a season or two. Just flat land for miles, broken by a couple small clumps of trees. For some reason I’d imagined this spot would be in some remote forest or something. Maybe a mountain plateau.

We were still half a mile away. I looked back at Nikita. He’d opened his door and looked over the car at me. “Come on,” I told him. I pointed at the trunk. “Bring the bags.”

He threw his hands up and looked around with a bewildered expression. He threw a few words at me and gestured at the road again.

I pointed out at the field with the GPS and tapped my watch. “The bags,” I said again.

He sighed, slammed his door shut, and stomped over to the trunk.

I stumbled out into the field. The grass was just high and thick enough that I couldn’t see the ground, so it was awkward. I made myself go slow. It would suck to get this close, after all this time, and break my ankle a few hundred yards from the site.

Nikita cleared his throat behind me. “We drive out here to see field?”

I stopped and looked back at him. “You can speak English?”

He snorted. “Of course I speak English. You think this is United States where people speak only one language? Russians much smarter.”