Peter Clines: Ex-Heroes

Katie had been on the walls of the Mount for two hours, leaning against the Earth, when St. George dropped out of the sky wearing a leather flight jacket.

She held out a fist without looking up and he rapped his knuckles against hers. They didn’t speak for six minutes, and she used the time to finish cleaning her rifle. Half the reason she volunteered for the walls was so she didn’t have to talk to people, and he knew it. She finished with the weapon, reloaded it, and adjusted her sunglasses. The rifle settled against her shoulder as she finally looked up at him.

St. George was in his midthirties, a solid six feet tall with pale eyes behind tinted lenses. Like a lot of people in the Mount, he was lean, with a body more used to surviving than being well fed. Unlike most people, he had thick brown hair that stretched down past his shoulders. It took way too much effort to cut it, she knew, and it wasn’t like it put him at extra risk.

“You’re early,” she said at last. He shrugged. “Slow day. I’m doing the rounds in reverse.”

“She won’t like that. That’s the kind of thing’s going to get you in trouble.”

“Maybe.” She tossed a pebble over the edge and tried to pick out the rap it made on the pavement from the chattering below. “You still going out tomorrow?”

A single nod from him. “We’re going to head north again. Try hitting some of the apartments and smaller shops toward Los Feliz.” He looked down at the exes milling on the streets and sidewalk below. “Nice crowd today.”

“You should’ve been at the Van Ness gate yesterday. Almost twice as many.”

“Any problems?”

She shook her head. “Stealth authorized ten rounds. Only one miss.”

“One’s enough to piss her off.”

“Yes it was.” Katie glanced at the moving figures on the street. She counted two dozen exes below on Gower. Nine male, fifteen female. Just the other night she’d gotten in a heated, after-sex discussion with Derek about whether exes even had genders.

“They don’t mate,” Derek had said. “They don’t use the parts for anything, so calling them male or female is pointless. They’re all just ‘its’.”

“So if you don’t have sex, you’re an it?”

“Well, not if you’re choosing not to have sex, no. But rocks don’t fuck. Neither do chairs or blankets or exes. So they’re its.”

Katie wondered if St. George was fucking anyone, or chose not to. Or if he was an it. The heroes still tended to keep to themselves, even the friendly ones. Still, she was guessing he’d be pretty awesome.

“Anything else?”

She handed her binoculars to him. “Look up at the sign.” She pointed up Gower to the hills, where the most famous real estate sign in the world still stood.

He took a long look. Near the ‘H’ was a small oval of darkness, maybe six feet across and ten high. It was like a dead spot on the lens, and it made the white, weather-beaten letter look more like a backwards four.

“Midknight?” Katie asked.

“Yeah,” said the hero. He sighed and smoke curled from his nostrils. “That’s him all right.”

“What d’you want to do?”

He handed her the binoculars. “Track him. He’s not dangerous up there in the hills, but if he gets down into the city he could play hell with our night defenses.”

“Why don’t you just go take care of him now?”

“Hardly worth the effort, don’t you think?”

It was her turn to shrug. “A dead ex is one less ex.”

St. George took a long, slow breath. “Like I said, he’s no danger to us up there. If he gets into the city, we’ll get rid of him. It’s a waste of time and ammo to do anything else.”

“Sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”

The air hissed out of his nose as more smoke. “Only met him two or three times. But he was a decent guy.”

“Don’t get soft. Stealth’ll have your head.”

His lips twisted into a wry grin. “She’s tried.”

Katie snorted and looked back down to the street. Right below her one of the male exes, a guy in a gore-covered casual suit, was banging its face against the wall of the Mount, trying to walk through the concrete. “You heading over to Melrose next?”

“Yeah,” said the hero. “Message for Derek?”

“Just tell him he’s an idiot and he’s still wrong.”

“I was going to tell him that anyway, but sure.”

She gave him a weak salute. St. George took a few running steps along the rubbery tar paper and hurled himself back into the air. He sailed away along the wall, heading for the gate a few blocks east.

Katie settled back against the oversized globe and watched the stumblers below. The trendy ex had managed to turn. Its shoulder dragged against the wall, and every other step sent its face swinging at the concrete again as it clicked and clacked down the sidewalk.

“Living the Hollywood dream,” she sighed, and shouldered her weapon again.

They say you never forget your first time. It’d been about three months since the Incident at the lab.

“Incident” was how they kept referring to it in the news and in the therapy sessions, and the word had been beaten into my head by constant use.

There’d been a lot of publicity around me at first as the sole survivor of the explosion, but the news quickly shifted to focus on the twelve people who had died and the scandal of poor chemical storage. Of course, who could blame the University for not designing their building to resist a meteor strike? Of the twelve victims, seven took a few hours to die. One took a whole day. There was a lot in the papers regarding the wave of chemicals we’d been exposed to. Things that could poison you, twist your body chemistry, or taint your blood. Even corrupt your DNA, according to some people. I also read lots of articles about that meteorite and the odd wavelengths of electromagnetic energy it threw off. Lots of stuff on Wired news about it for a few weeks. I think NASA ended up with it, farmed a ton of work out to MIT, and then it just sort of dropped off the radar. I was in quarantine for a month. Three more weeks passed and I faded back into obscurity, too. Well, George Bailey did, anyway. Yes, George Bailey. My name’s been my curse my entire life. To this day I’ve got no idea why my parents were so cruel. And, yes, I own the deluxe DVD edition and I prefer to watch it in the original black and white. Anyway, it’d been three months when I noticed the strength.

That was first. Physical therapy after the explosion had felt kind of easy and weights seemed a little lighter at the gym, but nothing amazing. One day I was running to beat the street-sweepers (if you live in the Koreatown area like me, street-sweeping rules your life) and somehow managed a fumbledrop-kick that left my keys under the car. I was stretching for them when my shoulder pushed against the frame and shoved my Hyundai a foot up onto the sidewalk. Odd, yes, but it’s amazing what you can justify when parking enforcement is closing in on you. It wasn’t until a few days later, back at work, that something happened I couldn’t ignore. I got pissed, lost my temper at a dumpster with a stuck lid, and kicked it through the side of the applied physics building. By the time a crowd gathered and security showed up, people already assumed some drunk had slammed it with his car. Even that I probably could’ve rationalized somehow, but a week later I was taking a shower and had a rasp in my throat. One of those little tickles that’re a bit too coarse, like you’d hiccupped a bit of stomach acid but it didn’t quite make it to your mouth. I hacked to shake it loose and belched a cloud of fire a little bigger than a basketball. It melted part of the shower curtain. I was smart enough to start testing my limits out of sight. People tend to be surprised how much empty space there is in Los Angeles. You can wander some parts of Griffith Park and you’d never guess you’re still in one of the biggest cities in the country. So getting away to practice lifting boulders or breathing fire isn’t impossible, but it still has some risks—especially when you’re training yourself to vomit on command.