Peter Clines - Ex-Communication

St. George dragged Cairax into the sky. The demon’s long limbs flailed at the air for a moment and then it laughed. The sound almost made St. George lose his concentration, and they dipped for a moment.

Cairax reached up and clawed at the hero’s chest. The talons gouged his flesh and set his nerves on fire. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the wetness spreading across his body. He went another thirty feet into the air, spun the demon around, and hurled the creature at the ground. Cairax plummeted down and the pavement cracked under the impact.

Zzzap flew up to hover by his friend. He nodded at the slashes on St. George’s chest. You okay?

“I’ll live,” he said. “How about you? You look a little pale.”

That thing can take some serious punishment. I’ve burned up half my reserves .

“Are you going to be okay?”

I’ll be fine, but I don’t think I can do anything else big if we’re going to pull this off .

“Pull what off?”

Just get him pinned. This is going to be so awesome if he doesn’t kill us all. Whoops .

Zzzap pointed his hands down and blasted Cairax Murrain as it leaped up at them. The demon pushed through the blast, like a shark forcing its way through a wave, but the heroes had flown higher into the sky. Its claws swiped at the air below them and it plummeted back to the ground.

The demon landed hard, crushing a trio of exes beneath its hooves. It roared up at the two heroes, crouched to leap again, and white fire exploded in its eyes. Cairax howled and stumbled back.

Stealth braced her leg and fired Lady Liberty again. The pistol was huge in her hands, a cut-down combat shotgun with nowhere to hold on. She had one hand on the grip and the other in front of the drum magazine to steady it. The trigger stayed down and Lady Liberty bellowed her magazine at the demon. The shells burst into white flame against the dark flesh of Cairax’s face and chest, like flares in the darkness. The demon threw his claws up and staggered back.

St. George dropped out of the sky and drove his heels into Cairax’s skull. He wrapped one arm around the thick neck and hooked the other under the beast’s shoulder. He couldn’t reach far enough for a half nelson, but he grabbed one of the demon’s long spines and held tight.

The huge pistol ran dry and Stealth let it drop. She spun to her left and held out her hand. Her fingers went wide to catch their target and signaled to Madelyn to—

Madelyn was nowhere to be seen.

CAPTAIN FREEDOM STRUGGLEDto his feet. He remembered riding in the back of a cargo truck in Afghanistan where the crates slid and shifted under his feet. Standing in the crater was like that, except the crates kept reaching up to drag him back down.

He was in a lot of pain. If his ribs hadn’t been broken before, they were now. He’d heard people say pain felt like needles or blades, but anyone who’d felt real pain knew it was a screw. It kept twisting deeper every time you thought it was done. His side was filled with white-hot screws.

Where the tail had skewered him, he felt his pulse and wetness on the inside of his jacket. Half of his torso had a faint chill that reached into his arm and was working its way up his neck. Even with his basic first-aid training he knew it wasn’t a good combination of feelings.

The floor of the crater shifted again. A dead hand reached up to grab at his knee. He bit his lip, drove his heel down, and heard bones crunch beneath him. He kicked at a few exes grabbing at his legs. A dead woman with a patch of bare skull tried to gnaw on his boot and knocked out its own rotted teeth. A mangled, genderless thing caught its fingers in Lady Liberty’s empty holster and made Freedom stumble for a moment.

Half the exes in the crater had made it to their feet. He slammed his fist into one, then brought his arm around to batter away another. It flew back, taking two other exes down with it, and Freedom felt the burning screws in his ribs sink a little deeper. He gritted his teeth.

The pause gave a dead woman with matted hair the chance to grab his arm. He could feel the teeth through his combat uniform, but the material held. A quick shake knocked the ex off. A pair of arms wrapped around his leg, and he let his fist swing down like a hammer.

Even as that ex dropped, another one grabbed him by the waist. Its withered arms squeezed tight enough to set off the fire in his ribs. He turned to shake it off and the screws tightened down even more. The dead man made a wet noise as it slipped away and white spots danced in the captain’s eyes.

The wet noise hadn’t come from the ex. The side of his uniform was soaked in blood from his armpit to mid-thigh. The wetness hadn’t gone away. He’d just gone numb. Shock. He was going into shock.

He battered away another dead man and struggled through the growing crowd of exes. He just needed to finish the mission. He had to get to the demon.

Then he could rest.

Madelyn ran to her high point. The sword bounced and swung on her hip. An ex stumbled into her path and she elbowed it out of the way. She was supposed to climb the remains of the street sweeper. She needed to be high up and close enough so she couldn’t be blocked when she saw Stealth’s signal.

She pulled herself up into the cab and swung her legs around onto the hood. A quick twist and she crawled over the windshield onto the roof. It wobbled under her weight.

There were exes everywhere, more than she’d ever seen before. A thousand of them, at least. The sounds of the fight were drawing them in from all over the city. The clicking teeth and the rumbling clouds drowned out almost everything.

St. George dragged the monster up into the sky where Zzzap waited. Stealth was on the roof of an SUV, right where she said she’d be, with the big shotgun-pistol Captain Freedom called Lady Liberty. And Freedom was …

Then she saw him, covered in blood and vanishing beneath the swarm of exes in the crater.

There was a sound like a falling redwood as Cairax hit the pavement. She glanced at the fight and back to the huge captain who’d been friends with her dad.

Madelyn leaped off the street sweeper and ran to the crater, shoving exes as she went. Throwing herself into the pit was just like stage diving, at least from what she’d seen on TV and in movies. She dragged herself though the crowd, pushing and shoving and kicking at the exes. It was a struggle. They all wanted to get to Freedom as much as she did, maybe more.

She jumped into the air and kicked off a dead man’s hip. It got her close enough to grab Freedom around the neck. She threw her legs around his waist and pulled herself tight against him.

He winced and his eyes went wide. “What are you—”

“Trust me,” she told him. She pressed her body against his and squeezed with her legs. She could hear his heart thumping through his body armor. He was cold. She could feel his blood seeping through her jeans and into her coat and tried not to think about it.

The exes slowed their frantic pawing. Their grips loosened and their dead gazes drifted away. The chattering teeth moved away from Freedom. The ones on the edges of the mob wandered off. The closest ones bumped against him a few times before stumbling away.

Madelyn smiled. “Welcome to my world,” she said.

“Finish the mission,” he told her.

“We’re going to. Come on.” She loosened her grip on him and shifted her weight so she could slide over his shoulder. He put up a hand to help her. A moment later she was riding piggyback on his broad back.

He wheezed, but didn’t cry out. “Where to?”