Peter Clines - Ex-Heroes

Twin ammo belts swung back to the file cabinet–sized hopper mounted on the armor’s back. They could fire nonstop for three and a half minutes, with an effective range just shy of two miles. I stomped down to solid ground flanked on either side by half a dozen Marines. Gunfire echoed across the landing strip and another ten exes fell. They were young and nervous, but they knew how to kill. I heard two screams as the dead fell on them. Having a three-hundred ton aircraft hit the ground a few feet away hadn’t stunned any of them. They were right on top of us. I moved out from under the plane’s tail. The suit identified dozens of targets. The cannons roared again and another handful of exes vanished in dark red clouds. Another scream came from behind us and I switched views inside the helmet. There were two or three exes crawling on the ground. The engines drowned out their chattering teeth. Their legs and spines had been crushed when the Hercules rolled over them during its landing, but that didn’t stop exes. One of them had Tran by the leg, gnawing through his camos and drawing blood. He beat its head in with his rifle stock and then fell over, clutching his calf and screaming. Netzley and Sibal stalked the other crawlers, and their skulls shattered with loud, harsh claps of gunfire. “Dose him,” shouted Wallen with a gesture at the wounded Marine. Carter ran forward and stabbed hypos into Tran one after another.

There was a common rumor massive doses of antibiotics could save you from the ex-virus. It wasn’t true. Officials have tried to stomp it out to conserve supplies. The ramp hissed closed and I targeted another four exes. Their heads popped into red mist. O’Neill was next to me, and the empty brass smacked against his shoulder and scorched his uniform. I glared down at Wallen. “This was the better landing zone?” He scowled back at me. “Yeah,” he barked. “What’s that tell you?” His rifle banged and a dead Mexican man flew back, arms flailing. “We’ve got radio,” shouted Wallen. “Survivors are in the main building.” He pointed across the tarmac, and a distant figure on a rooftop hopped and waved its arms. As I turned my head, the targeting software haloed several dozen exes between the runway and the building. “Watch your step,” I bellowed over the speaker. “Let me take point.” I pushed past them and grabbed the closest dead thing, crushing its skull in my fist. Not efficient, but it was the kind of morale boost they needed. I marched forward with the Marines flanking me. It took a month of fighting before officers realized the standard fire team didn’t serve much use against the exes. There were no grenade launchers or M240s here.

Just your basic M-16 for everyone, bayonets mounted, all set on single shot—-no bursts allowed. The walking dead continued to flail at us as we marched across the airfield. A quarter-mile to the south the armor magnified the remains of a chain link fence. It had been bent and twisted and pressed flat to the ground for a length of twenty yards, and dozens of exes were staggering through the opening every moment. No additional barriers or watchtowers.

The people hiding here had trusted a chain link fence with some barbed wire to protect them from hundreds, maybe thousands of massed undead. “The perimeter’s compromised,” I told Wallen. He gave a sharp nod. “We can’t stay here.” My cannons lined up and fired a few dozen rounds at the distant fence. I watched a line of headless exes drop. The next wave tripped over their bodies, and so did the next. It wasn’t much, but it was a space.

“Suggestions?”

“The main resistance is in Hollywood,” he said as we continued toward the terminal. “It’s eleven miles east-south-east of here. We hole up with these folks for a minute, get some transport together, and then get moving.” Wallen’s Marines cleared a path for us. By the time we’d reached the building they’d put down almost a hundred exes. We made it into the private terminal and I swore inside the armor. Not one defensive structure set up. These people hadn’t prepared for anything. I wondered how long they’d been here, or planned to be here? Once that fence went down they were exposed and defenseless. We could hear screams up ahead. And under the screams, hundreds of teeth clicking. There were over thirty bodies in the hall. Only a handful had been exes. A few dead things were gnawing on limbs and clawing their way into torsos. The Marines made short work of them. One of the younger ones, Mao, threw up. We passed a handful of offices before we entered the main section of the terminal. It was like the lobby of an office building. Maybe fifty people were scattered across the room as they tried to hold off twice as many exes. They were fighting with fire axes, shovels, and two-by-fours.

Barely any firepower among them. One fat idiot had a shotgun and kept blasting exes in the stomach. He didn’t seem to notice when he took down one of his own people with his wild aim. “Fucking hell,” he hollered, “the goddamned Army finally showed up!” He grinned, threw a loose salute at the Marines, and a teenage girl with a bloody, ragged torso wrapped her arms around him and took a chunk out of his neck. The fat man turned to throw her off and an old Chinese ex grabbed his arm and sank its teeth into his biceps. His shotgun went off one last time and he went down screaming. Another dozen people had died just since we walked into the room. I stomped forward and began crushing skulls. Wallen was right behind me, driving his bayonet through eye sockets. The Marines were damned good. In five minutes every ex in the room was dead. Seven civilians had died, and one more Marine. “Who’s in charge here?” shouted Wallen. A bulky man with a hunting rifle stepped forward. “That’d be me. Mark Larsen.”

“How many people do you have here, Mr. Larsen?” He looked at the bodies. “I think we’re down to about thirty of us down here. I’ve got fourteen families upstairs.”

“Any transport?”

“A couple trucks, including a diesel fueler. We’ve been waiting for someone to tell us where to go.”

“Good man,” said Wallen, clenching his fist. “Have someone get them warmed up and get your people. We’re moving out as soon as possible.” He looked at the crowd of Marines. “Alpha team, you’re with the trucks. Beta, keep the families safe.”

“Wall,” shouted someone. “Another wave of exes coming from the south. Lots of them.”

“How many is lots?” he shouted back. O’Neill leaned in from the hall. “Maybe four digits, sir. We’ve got ten minutes, tops.”

“I’m going out,” I said. “I can get in deep and hold them off.”

He nodded and I followed O’Neill back up the hall. The Marines were smart and well trained. They hadn’t wasted time with a solid barricade, just knocked over a ton of stuff for exes to trip and fumble with. They’d settled back and were letting off controlled, aimed shots, like a shooting range. There were just too many, though. The Marines were making a dent, but they weren’t slowing the tide. I marched toward the shambling crowd, cannons blazing. At this range, a round from the M-2s could go through four or five skulls before slowing down. I thundered through a hundred rounds in a few bursts and dropped twice as many exes. Then they were around me and I fired up the stunners. Exes don’t have any sense of pain, but they still have nervous systems, and those systems are still linked to their muscles. Which means a 200,000 volt blast will still drop one. The key thing to remember is it won’t stop them. The second the juice is off, they’re good to go again. One pass of my hands and a dozen exes collapsed. I brought my arms back and watched ten more drop. Rounds splattered off the concrete as O’Neill, Laigaie, and Mao kept them down. All around me. Ten, twenty, thirty of them. I swung my arms, swept a group of them together with a crunch of bones. They were hanging on my arms, on my legs, clutching at my waist. The sound of chattering teeth filled the battlesuit. I thrashed. I pounded. Warning lights flashed to remind me of the unexpected extra weight on each limb. I kept my eyes shut and crushed anything I got my hands on. My arms swung and I felt bodies slam against them. I normally don’t suffer from claustrophobia. Even when I first started wearing and testing the armor there weren’t any panic attacks or nervous moments. It wasn’t until the first time I waded into a horde of exes that I started feeling trapped in the suit. Someone shouted my name. It came again and I opened my eyes. Dozens of corpses surrounded me. The Marines had fallen back another thirty or forty feet. And a fresh wave of ex-humans was closing on me. Ma Deuce and her twin sister had a shouting match that left fifty or sixty exes sprayed across the tarmac. The armor thudded back while O’Neill and Mao dropped a few dead things. We moved out around the terminal toward a row of hangars. The lenses switched and I saw the row of families running alongside them. Wallen turned to check our flank and a tall ex fell on him. It was like the cheap-shot scare in a movie. A brunette woman, so close he didn’t have a chance. The walking corpse snapped its jaw and bit off most of his right cheek. The flesh peeled away and his nose stretched up with it for a moment. He yelled out and froze. Just for a second. Long enough for the ex to get a second mouthful. There was a crack as his nose broke and was pulled off his face. The Marines brought their guns up to shoot, but Wallen was flailing. A second ex latched onto his torso and sank its jaws in just above his collar. Dry fingers pulled at his arms, teeth pulled at his fatigues, and he fell back into the growing crowd of the dead. He never made another sound. “Go!” shouted O’Neill. “We need to get to the trucks now!” The M-2s turned the hangar wall behind us into confetti and I smashed through whatever was left. The Cessna inside got thrown out of the way as I cut through the next wall and into the hangar past that. The Marines flowed through the bottleneck. The exes bunched up.