Peter Clines - Ex-Patriots

A muffled gunshot came from the mini-mart. St. George looked over and Jarvis leaned out to give him an all clear. Billie’s team returned from around the back of the building. “Two exes,” she said.

“No problems?” asked the hero.

Ilya shook his head.

“There’s some apartments further back there,” Billie said. “How much do you want to search?”

“Let’s stay on Cahuenga,” he said. “We’ll have time to spread out later.”

They nodded and headed for the restaurant. From the battered signage, St. George guessed it was an Italian place.

“Sweet,” whistled the scruffy man. He’d moved to the second fuel tank. “There’s about a foot down there. Could be as much as sixty, maybe seventy gallons.” He grinned up at St. George through nicotine teeth.

The hero nodded. “We’ll wait until everyone’s done and then I’ll make some space for Luke to pull in. Don’t want to draw attention too soon.”

Jarvis, Paul, and Lady Bee came back from the store shaking their heads. “Cleaned out,” said Bee. “It’s a mess, but there’s nothing useful.”

St. George sighed. “Well, we all knew there was a good chance of that. It’s a main drag.” He tipped his head to the next storefront. “You guys want to take the psychic?”

Lady Bee gave a too-sharp salute and clicked her heels together with a smirk.

* * *

An ex stumbled across the road to them. It had been an older man with a wiry frame and a thin mustache. It reached out and Lee pushed it away with the tip of his rifle. “Hey, check it out.”

Al and Hector glanced over at him. “What?”

“It’s Vincent Price.” Lee shoved it back again. “That’s gotta be worth major points.”

“Vincent Price is dead,” said Al.

“Well, yeah. They’re all dead.”

“He was dead before this, fuckwit,” said Hector. “Like, twenty years ago.”

The other man scowled. “Are you sure? This sure looks like him.”

“Sure,” nodded the tattooed man. “He’s dead.”

“Maybe he came back anyway.”

Al shot him a look. “How the hell would he come back anyway?”

Lee shrugged. “It’s Vincent Price. If anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be him.”

“No,” said Al, “if anyone was going to come back as a zombie it’d be Bela Lugosi. But he won’t, because he’s dead, too.” He slid a machete from the scabbard at his side and chopped through the ex’s neck.

* * *

“Well, that’s something y’all don’t see every day,” said Jarvis.

At the center of the psychic’s shop stood a round table decorated with colored scarves and cloths. Half a dozen stubby candles had been knocked over. A crystal ball had fallen from the tabletop and its dusty shards lay near one of the legs. Tarot cards were scattered and turned at all angles.

An ex sat behind the table, clacking its teeth at them. It had been a woman once, Asian by the look of her. It was in a wheelchair. With the brakes locked, it was wedged between the seat and the table. Rings shivered on its bony fingers as it reached mindlessly back and forth with its hands. Every third or fourth pass it would snag a tarot card and slide it a few inches on the tabletop.

“Either y’all want to guess how long it’s been sitting there like that?”

“At least two years, looking at the dust,” said Bee. “Maybe more. She could’ve died right at the start of the outbreak.”

“Looks like she tried to give herself one last reading,” said Paul. “Guess she believed this stuff.” He prodded open a small fridge with his foot and recoiled from the smell he set loose.

“People believe a lot of crap when things get bad,” said Jarvis. He reached out and pulled one card from the table. The ex clawed at the metal rings of his sleeve with feeble fingers. He held up the image of the black knight with a skull face. “Death,” he said with a smirk. “Guess she was right on that.”

“The death card doesn’t mean death,” said Bee. “It means a transition. A change.”

Jarvis slid a bowie knife from his belt and stepped behind the ex. “Well, so she was still right,” he said. He grabbed its hair, pulled its head back, and sawed through the neck. When he was done he tossed the skull in the corner. “Let’s see if there’s anything good in the back room.”

* * *

As St. George predicted, the rest of the small plaza was picked clean. The big score was the fifty-odd gallons of gasoline. It took half an hour to pull it all up using a small hand pump. The scavengers killed another eight exes while they waited.

Two hours later they knew the next three buildings had been stripped clean of useful materials, too. Another sixteen exes dead, five of them with their necks snapped by the hero’s bare hands. The scavengers grumbled. Things had been getting tight in Hollywood proper, but it’d been a while since a mission was this unsuccessful.

At Barham Boulevard they found the remains of a National Guard roadblock. Concrete dividers were flanked with bright yellow barrels. The water that once weighted them down was long gone. The dividers blocked half the bridge that crossed over the Hollywood Freeway towards Universal City. At some point a jacked-up pickup had tried to crash through the barrier. It had wrecked a section of the roadblock but ripped up its suspension and a tire in the process. It sat a few yards onto the bridge. The paint had faded in the sun and a fine coat of dust had settled across it. Broken concrete and crumpled yellow plastic trailed behind it.

At the far end of the bridge they could see a matching roadblock and an olive-drab truck. Lady Bee stood on Road Warrior ’s rooftop deck with her binoculars out. “I count maybe thirty exes,” she said. “They’ve noticed us but the barricade’s giving them troub—ah, two just fell over it. Nine, maybe ten bodies on this side. Looks like two or three of them are moving, but it might be heat ripples off the pavement. They look like military.” She lowered the glasses and looked at St. George standing in the air over her. “Military could mean weapons and supplies.”

He nodded. “Let me go check it out.”

The hero shot through the air and landed on the far side of the freeway next to the truck. A few yards away the pair of exes that had fallen over the roadblock staggered to their feet. There were ten Guardsmen around the truck. Seven of them were still dead.

Both legs on one of the exes had been shredded below the knees, maybe by a grenade. The dead thing crawled clumsily on its elbows and reached for St. George’s boot. He kicked it in the bridge of the nose and the skull came away from the neck. It sailed out over the freeway as the body slumped to the ground. He heard it clang on the hood of some far-distant car.

The other two had been a man and a woman. Their legs and arms had been eaten down to the bone before they’d come back. The woman’s cheeks and lips were gone, too. Everything not covered by body armor. The dead things twitched and thrashed and stared at him with chalky eyes. He reached down, twisted each of their heads around, and they stopped moving.

All the bodies had been stripped clean of weapons and ammunition. Even the exes. Four of the bodies were missing their boots and socks. St. George took a moment to check a few supply crates and the back of the truck, but they were empty, too. He rapped a knuckle on the vehicle’s gas tanks and a hollow sound echoed back.

There was a scuffling noise behind him. The pair of fallen exes had reached him, plus a third had slumped over the barricade and creeped headfirst toward the ground. He grabbed the one in the stained security outfit as it leaned into him and hurled the dead thing out over the freeway. It sailed through the air for a few hundred feet, bounced on the top of a minivan, off the side of a white truck, and vanished between two compacts.