Peter Clines - Ex-Heroes

“You smell horrible.”

Stealth stood in the shadow of the open door behind him. As always, she wore her full uniform, even the mask. Her face was a tight, black surface of vague features, hidden even further by the shapeless charcoal hood shrouding her head. As far as St. George knew, no one had ever seen her face.

“You told Gorgon you wanted to see me first thing,” he said. “So I’m here wearing four or five liquefied exes.”

“You could have showered.”

“That’s not how they heard it.”

She stood an inch or two shorter than him, but her cloak and hood made it hard to be sure how much. They wrapped her like a flimsy toga, barely disguising her figure. Her charcoal and gray uniform could’ve been body paint. “Would you prefer to clean up and speak later?”

“Are you actually offering me a choice?”

She stared at him for a long moment. “No,” she said, “but I know you like to feel you have one.”

He smirked. “What happened with the Seventeens?”

“You first, please. Mark Larsen. How was he attacked?”

“Just bad luck. An ex stuck in a shower. They didn’t see it or hear it until it was on top of a rookie.”

“Lynne Vines?”

“Yeah. Mark tried to pull it off her. It broke its own neck to bite him.”

“Nothing they could have done differently?”

“Not as I understand it.”

“Is he going to live?”

St. George looked at his boots. “I wouldn’t put money on it, but anything’s possible.”

She nodded. “Now, the trap.”

“Not much to tell. They knew we’d be heading back that way. They dropped a jammer and a spiked chain across the road.” He described every detail he could remember about the road, the time, even the chain itself. She prodded him now and then. He talked about waiting for the ride and killing the exes.

“So you were protecting yourselves for twenty-five minutes and then your team fired several bursts on full auto to save you.”

“I didn’t need saving.”

“They thought you did and acted accordingly, that is what matters. How much ammunition?”

“All together?” He ran some numbers through his head. “Three-fifty, maybe four hundred rounds.”

“The truck?”

“It’s a landmark right now. Needs all new tires, possibly new wheels. If we can get a crew there in the morning before the Seventeens strip it, it should be salvageable.”

Beneath the mask her face shifted. She pushed back the hood a few inches and pressed slim fingers against her temples, turning her eyes up to the ceiling and pushing her chest out ever so slightly. After a year and a half, St. George could talk to her without his eyes straying when she struck a pose. When they strayed now, it was a deliberate choice.

“Tell me it was worth it.”

He leaned against the table. “We got around four hundred pounds of food. A third of that’s a big bin of wheat flour. Some basic medicine and first aid stuff. Lee and Andy found a shotgun with about thirty shells and a bunch of 30.08.” His fingers did a quick drum roll on the table. “We only had two-thirds of our usual time.”

“I understand.”

“So what happened here?”

“They attempted to rush the gate. I counted twenty-three of them.”

“Gorgon said fifty.”

“Gorgon enjoys a degree of exaggeration where his own exploits are concerned.”

St. George almost made the laugh sound like a cough. “What gave it away? That we were a decoy?”

“Your situation made no tactical sense,” she said. She tapped her maps, running a finger down the same stretch of Vermont he’d been on earlier. “If they knew what was or was not in your truck, they either would have attacked when you were further away from the Mount or not at all. If they did not know, it was foolish to set a trap at all since they know you go out with almost every mission, often with another hero. Since theft was not the motive, the next would have been just what they accomplished—-leaving you, Cerberus, and Zzzap stranded.”

“Getting us out of the way for an attack,” he mused. “You are amazing, my dear Holmes.”

Stealth pointed to a section of the map south of Century City, making a slow circle with her finger where she had marked several streets and blocks with green ink. “They are becoming more aggressive and frequent in their attacks. We may need to take offensive measures.”

“You mean, go after them?”

“I mean locating and eliminating them.”

He furrowed his brow. “In what sense?”

“In the sense of eliminating them.”

“We’re not killers,” he said. “We sure as hell can’t be saving mankind if we go out and murder a couple hundred of them.”

“By my estimates the Seventeens have grown well into the thousands,” she said. “And unlike our group, they are mostly fighters.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It will.”

He slammed his hand down on the map and felt the table crack. “We aren’t going to stoop to that,” he said. “We’re the good guys. The idea is to save everyone, not just the people we like.”

There was a flurry of movement on one of the monitors. Van Ness Gate. A small ex, a boy, had squeezed through the barricade of trucks, and was staggering toward the gate guards. They tripped it with a pole and pinned it down with their rifle stocks. A woman ran into frame with a sledge and crushed the little skull.

St. George and Stealth watched in silence as they wrapped the small figure in plastic and started hosing down the pavement.

“If that is your feeling on the matter,” she said, “we can proceed in that direction for now. You know I value your opinions.”

The hero let out a breath and twin trails of smoke curled up from his nose. “A year and a half ago I was doing maintenance at UCLA,” he said. He stared at the map, at the dozens of green crosses and lines south of Wilshire. “You see movies where society collapses this quick and you just laugh it off. You figure there’s the police, the military, the feds …I mean, they couldn’t all lose it at once, right?”

Stealth looked at him. Even through the mask, he could feel her skeptical stare. “They did.”

“But not everyone loses it at the same moment,” he insisted. “You’d think people would’ve helped each other, tried to hold on to things.”

“Do you remember Katrina?”

He tossed the name back and forth. “Which one? We’ve lost two or three, I think.”

“Hurricane Katrina,” said Stealth, “which decimated New Orleans in 2005. The levees collapsed, brought the floods, and what happened? No one came to help and the city fell into chaos in mere days. Looting. Gangs. Militias. There were hundreds of thousands of citizens who had spent years believing their government did not care about them and were now seeing the proof of it. Then the same government that left them to drown for a week came in, imposed martial law, and ordered them all into what were essentially concentration camps without food or water.”

He shook his head. “Yeah but that was—”

“And now the dead are walking,” she said. “Exes, zombies, ghouls—whatever you wish to call them. There were epidemic warnings and hazmat teams everywhere, dead people getting up to attack their friends. The police could not stop them. The military could not stop them. We could not stop them.” She ran a finger across the zip codes of Los Angeles. “If people in one city reacted as they did to rising water, is it a surprise things collapsed during a worldwide crisis like this?”

He took a slow breath and set his jaw.

She turned back to the monitors. “Is there anything else to report?”

“No.”

“Go take a shower.”

He glanced across the room at the low-profile door. Her head tilted beneath her hood.