Ex-Communication

Prologue Now

“THIS IS THE northwest corner,” shouted a man on the radio. A gunshot blasted over the open channel. “Twenty … something. We’re under attack! Two maybe three hundred of them. We need help!” The call was punctuated by another shot.

Captain John Carter Freedom of the 456th Unbreakables, considered temporarily on leave from his post at Project Krypton, was only a few blocks from the northwest corner of the Big Wall. He heard two more sharp pops echo between the buildings. Rifles, but unfamiliar to his ears. Civilian weapons. That lined up with the voice’s confusion at radio protocol. Freedom was pretty sure it had been the wall guard who went by the name Makana.

He looked down at the kids in front of him. Two boys and a girl, barely into their teens. All three of them sat on the curb with their hands zip-tied together behind their backs. They’d been trying to steal a car for a quick joyride when he found them. They’d been cowed by his appearance and surrendered without a fuss.

Most people were cowed by Freedom’s appearance. He was a bald giant of a man, almost seven feet tall and over three hundred pounds of solid muscle. A leather duster hung open across his broad chest, and a silver sheriff’s star sat on one lapel. Underneath the duster he wore a tan T-shirt and pants checkered with digital camouflage. Strapped to his thigh was a holster the size of a loaf of bread. He rarely had to draw the pistol it held.

A third and fourth shot rang in the air. The kids’ heads swiveled back and forth from Freedom’s face to the direction of the sound. One of the boys had gone wide-eyed with terror. They knew what the shots meant. They were aware of how vulnerable they were, tied up on the ground.

“You’ll be fine,” Freedom told them. “There’s a deputy on the way to take charge of you.”

Three more gunshots. And between the rounds he could hear a growing noise. The click-click-click that made life near the Big Wall so rough for some. The sound of teeth.

The girl opened her mouth to say something, but it vanished under the snap of his leather duster as he spun and bolted for the northeast corner. The captain had been quick for his size before joining the Army’s super-soldier project. Now he could run a three-minute mile without breaking a sweat, do five of them before he even started to feel winded.

The gunfire was near constant by the time he reached the northeast corner. It made Los Angeles sound like Iraq. He could see the half-dozen guards on top of the wall. Four of them were shooting down into the area beyond the barrier. The other two were pushing back the figures climbing onto the upper deck.

Freedom never broke stride. His legs flexed and hurled him twenty feet into the air. His duster flapped around him, and he steeled himself for combat.

The top of the Big Wall was a continuous platform made from old pallets and plywood. A double line of rope served as a railing. It was a temporary fix until a more permanent bastion could be built. Freedom hit the wood surface just south of the large square that was the northwest corner and took in the situation as he straightened up.

This corner of the Big Wall sat at the intersection of Sunset and Vine in downtown Hollywood, right at the center of the road. A Borders bookstore and a vandalized Chase bank stood just outside the barrier.

Almost a thousand exes stood outside the wall, too. Thirty months since the world ended and people still called them exes rather than zombies. “Ex-humans” was just easier to deal with somehow. Even the military had used the term.

Back when there had been a functioning military, the captain reminded himself.

The former citizens of Los Angeles crowded the intersection beyond the wall, filling the air with the endless sound of chattering teeth. Even when there was nothing in their mouths, their jaws gnashed open and closed like machines. Some of those mouths were lined with gray teeth. Others held a mess of jagged stumps that splintered even more as they banged together. Most of them were coated with blood and gore. Their flesh was the color of old chalk, spotted with dark bruises where blood had pooled inside the skin. Most of their eyes were dusty and dull, but more than a few had empty sockets gaping in their faces. Many of the exes had deep cuts or punctures that would never heal but also didn’t stop them. Some were missing fingers, hands, or whole limbs.

Something was different about the horde, though, and Freedom couldn’t put his finger on what.

The wall guards fired into the crowd with their motley collection of weapons. Rifles scavenged from personal collections or motion-picture armories. A dreadlocked man he recognized as Makana was trying to keep them organized, but there was an air of desperation around the guards. One of them swung his rifle like a baseball bat and clubbed a thin figure off the platform. The guard turned and swung again. The blow was wild, but it caught his next target in the side of the head and tipped it back off the wall.

The guard was scared. Now that Freedom was on top of the wall, he could see that all the guards were scared. He wasn’t sure what had them so spooked. He drew his massive sidearm, a modified AA-12 shotgun that had been cut down to a pistol for his huge hands. The armorer had nicknamed it Lady Liberty. His gaze went down to the horde again.

Some of the exes were moving quicker than the others. They ran at the Big Wall and lunged up. They grabbed handholds and kicked with their feet, pulling themselves up the barrier. A handful of exes had turned their attention to Freedom as he landed. Behind their dead eyes, Legion glared out at the giant officer.

Over the years, the people of Los Angeles had developed methods and procedures for dealing with the undead. The mindless exes were still a threat, but it was a contained threat. One they had lots of practice with.

Legion had changed everything. The exes were pawns for him to control. He could slip from zombie to zombie, using them as his puppets. They could be his eyes and ears. Or his hands and teeth. He made them smart. He made them unpredictable.

Freedom pulled back his boot and kicked a climbing ex just as its head rose above the top of the wall. The dead man flew back into the crowd. It took Freedom’s mind a moment to register what he’d just seen, and then he realized what had caused the panic.

Most of the exes storming the Big Wall were wearing helmets.

Several of them wore motorcycle helmets with Lexan visors. A few looked like SWAT or National Guard issue. Freedom saw a few football helmets and hard hats. Even a few gleaming bicycle helmets, useless as they were.

Killing exes had always been a numbers game. Legion had shifted the numbers more in his favor and shaken the guards in the process. Their practiced methods and procedures were crumbling. They were hesitating and second-guessing shots.

Freedom had to restore morale and get their fire focused before things fell apart. The Big Wall was on the edge of being overwhelmed. The attack was spread across a section almost forty feet long and, from the look of it, another twenty or thirty around the corner. Legion had at least four hundred exes under his control. Half a dozen civilians to defend seventy feet of ground against a few hundred opponents.

Not great odds.

A dead man wearing a red construction helmet climbed onto the platform. Its fingernails clawed at the wooden platform. Freedom stomped on one of the hands and took the ex’s head off with another kick.

Makana and another noticed him and he saw their shoulders relax. The sheriff’s star and his Army uniform still had that effect on people.

“Take your time,” ordered Freedom. His voice bellowed out of his barrel chest, louder than the sound of teeth and rifle reports. He stabbed a thick finger at the horde. “Make them count.” To accent his words, Lady Liberty roared and threw two more dead things back from the wall. At close range a twelve-gauge round packed enough raw force to shatter a Kevlar helmet and the skull inside it.

The panicked shooting slowed. A dead man with a biker helmet staggered back and fell. One in National Guard headgear stumbled from a shot, then threw itself back at the wall. A figure in a football helmet dropped with a bullet in its eye.

More of the exes fell, but more of them reached the wall. A dead woman made it to the platform, but a guard smashed her off with a baseball bat. Another withered hand slapped onto the platform. Captain Freedom grabbed it by the wrist and pushed it away. The ex, a dead man in an Oxford shirt, fell back into the horde and was crushed under dozens of feet. Freedom turned and cracked Lady Liberty’s muzzle across the jaw of a teenage boy with a batting helmet and a bloody Atari T-shirt. The dead thing staggered back from the blow and vanished over the edge.

Captain Freedom shouted a few quick orders and got the guards spaced out to cover more area. “All units,” he called over the radio, “this is Six. We have a major incursion at the northwest corner of the Big Wall. Request immediate assistance.”

At least two people replied, but their words were drowned out by another burst from Lady Liberty. One of the rounds shattered a bicycle helmet and pulped the skull beneath it. The ex dropped and vanished into the tide of dead things below. Two of the others he hit struggled back to their feet.

The guard closest to him, a rail-thin woman with gray-streaked hair, paused to reload her rifle. It was an old M1, and Freedom was impressed by how fast she loaded the magazine without pinching her thumb. She brought it back up just in time to shoot a chalk-skinned man in the face. The round took a chunk out of the Lexan visor of the ex’s helmet and knocked it back off the Big Wall.

A dead body threw itself up onto the platform a few feet away and struggled to its feet. Freedom took four quick steps and clotheslined it with a sweep of his massive arm. The ex pin-wheeled back off the wall.

Another guard near the far end stopped to reload, but an ex crawled over the edge of the platform just as he pulled the magazine. He slammed the rifle stock into the zombie’s face, right below the brim of its yellow hard hat, then smashed it again when the dead woman grabbed at his knee. The ex trembled and fell limp across the plywood.

The guard with the baseball bat, a wiry man with Asian features, swung a line drive that knocked one of Legion’s puppets into the air. There was too much force behind the swing, though, and the man stumbled forward on the follow-through. His body bent over the ropes and the lines flexed. He dropped the bat, flailed for the lines, and added to his own momentum. An ex grabbed one of the waving hands and threw itself off the wall, dragging the man with it.

Freedom leaped to help the man, soaring two dozen feet along the top of the wall, but it was too late. The exes closest to the wall passed the guard back over their heads, carrying him away from safety. He had time to look back at his friends before the dead things dropped him on the ground and fell on him. Then he started screaming.

The captain clenched his jaw. He fired three bursts into the swarm of exes before his pistol ran dry. Half of the exes dropped and the guard stopped screaming. Freedom half hoped he’d put the man out of his misery.

He kicked away another ex, loaded a new drum onto Lady Liberty, and sized up the situation. The line was too thin. It was down to himself and five guards. It wasn’t even five minutes into the assault, but he knew which way it was going to go if something didn’t change.

Movement caught the corner of his eye as his pistol spat out three-round bursts at the undead. Back at his position another ex had made it onto the platform, a gaunt figure with a bare chest and a black SWAT helmet. It crawled across the platform and rolled over the far edge.

Legion was inside.

Freedom tensed for a moment as the dead thing crawled to its feet. One ex compromising the security of the Wall could mean the end of everything. But it was too far away for a kill shot from here, and he couldn’t risk leaving the Wall.

Then he realized what the ex had landed next to. Huge armored fingers wrapped around the zombie’s helmet and lifted it into the air. Legion batted at the steel digits and swore in Spanish. Its voice was a dry rasp that barely carried over the sounds of gunfire and teeth.

The blue and silver titan stood just shy of nine feet tall and six feet wide. Flags decorated its shoulders, and each of its metal arms ended in a three-fingered fist a little bigger than a football. The battlesuit swung an arm and hurled the undead creature back over the wall. It sailed through the air and hit the pavement outside.

“Situation?” barked Danielle Morris from inside the armor. She had the suit in public-address mode and her voice echoed across the corner.

Freedom fired three more bursts into the horde. The Cerberus Battlesuit wouldn’t’ve been his first choice for backup. It was powerful, but it no longer had ranged weapons. It was also too big and heavy for the platform on top of the Big Wall.

“You’re the second line,” he told her. “If anything gets past us, it’s yours.”

Legion took that moment to send another ex scampering over the wall. Cerberus took two steps, scooped up the dead teenager, and threw it over the barrier. “Got it,” she said.

The huge officer turned and found himself face-to-face with a dead woman in a football helmet. The ex lunged at him, but its gnashing jaws were blocked by the face mask. Freedom gut-punched the creature and it flew back down into the chattering horde. He moved along the wall back to his starting position, blasting exes wherever he could. They’d put down close to a hundred since he arrived on the scene, and the dead were still coming.

Two more guards, a man and a woman, ran along the Big Wall from the east. They added their fire and helped hold everything beyond the corner of the barrier. It meant somewhere else had thinner defenses now. Freedom hoped they’d hold.

He heard Cerberus move behind him, the muffled clomp of metal toes and the hiss of servos, and another ex came sailing back over the wall. He hadn’t even seen that one get past them. Not a good sign.

The thin woman with the gray streaks reloaded her M1 again. She shot him a nervous look he’d seen in other firefights. It was the last of her ammunition. He fired two bursts to cover her and Lady Liberty’s slide clanged empty again.

The guard heard it and looked up. As she did, an ex in a gold CHP helmet wrapped its pale fingers around her ankle and yanked. She screamed and slid toward the edge as the dead man pulled itself up onto the platform. She kicked it once in the head with her free leg. It snarled at her.

Freedom took two steps and slammed his boot into the ex’s chin. The head whipped back and its neck snapped with a sharp crack. It tumbled off the platform and knocked another one off the wall on its way down.

The woman scampered back and grabbed her rifle. Freedom grabbed another drum from his belt. He had one more after this.

He turned his attention to the horde and something fluttered in the corner of his eye. His weapon came up. And then he realized they might have a chance.

A woman stood a yard to his left. She was dressed head to toe in skintight black, crisscrossed with charcoal straps and belts. Holsters rode low on her thighs, like the ones on a Special Forces soldier or an old-time gunslinger. A wide hood hid her face in shadows, and her cloak settled around her like a parachute.

“Took you long enough,” snarled Cerberus from somewhere behind him.

Stealth’s Glock 18C pistols were already out and firing. The rounds came so fast Freedom thought the weapons were on full automatic. Then he saw her aim twitch and realized she was firing single shots, each one finding a new target.

More than a dozen of Legion’s puppets dropped, their strings cut. Stealth took a step forward and her cloak swirled in the night breezes. The pistols never stopped. Every round found the open space in a helmet.

Within thirty seconds she’d dropped as many exes. Maybe more. She spun on her heel and kicked another as its head cleared the platform. The hard hat it wore cracked under her boot.

The pistols spun in her hands, came in close to her waist, and her fingers whirled. The Glocks came back up with fresh magazines and continued to fire. Freedom knew decorated marksmen and snipers who would’ve been in awe of the woman’s accuracy.

He fired off another burst from his own weapon and saw an ex in a military helmet drop, its face an unrecognizable mess. A zombie slipped over the wall closer to the corner and flew back out a moment later. A second form followed it. The ex hit the ground hard. The second figure hovered in the air on the far side of the intersection.

St. George, the hero once known as the Mighty Dragon, was a solid six feet tall, and the muscles of his wiry body were visible even under his stitch-covered jacket. His golden brown hair gleamed in the spotlights from the Big Wall. It brushed his shoulders and matched the leather of the jacket.

Freedom felt his own shoulders relax a bit.

St. George settled in the air above the crowd of exes. Even with a quick sweep across the horde, he could pick out unique features on each of them. They’d been people once, after all. Before they’d died.

A gore-faced girl with a bright green tank top and charred-black hands. A Hasidic man whose beard was caked with blood. A dark-skinned woman with a quartet of bloody bullet holes in her chest. A little boy missing his lower jaw. A knife-thin man in a leather trench coat. About half of them wore some kind of protective helmet. One large, bald ex glared at him through a hockey mask before it gave him the finger with both hands.

He took in a deep breath, felt the tickle of mixing chemicals in the back of his throat, and sent a wave of fire washing down over the swarm. It lit up the intersection with golden light. He swung his head and washed the flames across the back line of the horde.

Half of the exes stared at the flying hero even as their hair and clothes caught fire, their teeth still clicking away. The others, the ones wearing helmets and hard hats, flinched. They moved in perfect synchronization, all turning their heads away to the right as they raised their left arms to shield their faces. A handful of them glared up at him.

St. George drifted down into the crowd, grabbed a few exes by their necks, and hurled them back away from the wall. He moved through the horde like a man weeding a garden, plucking one dead plant after another. Over a dozen of them crashed against the buildings and pavement before all of them shifted their attention to him. The horde took in a rasping breath and spoke with one voice.

“Next time, pinche ,” they growled.

A shift rippled through the crowd of exes as Legion’s guidance vanished. Their expressions sagged and their teeth started clicking again. The ones closest to St. George stumbled toward him on unsteady legs.

He drifted into the air, away from the grasping hands, and back to the platform. A few more gunshots rang out, but he could see the horde was settling down. There were still a few dozen exes pawing at the wall, but without Legion controlling them it was a mindless action that would never get their feet off the ground. Climbing was too complicated for them.

“I think he’s gone,” St. George called out. Wisps of smoke drifted out of his mouth and nose, like an idling engine. His boots thudded against the platform across from Stealth. “Everyone okay here?”

Makana shook his head. “We lost Daniel.”

Another guard raised a trembling hand. There was blood on his fingers. “I … I think I got bit,” he said.

The thin woman eyed the man and raised her rifle a few inches. “You think?”

“It was all so fast,” he said, his eyes locked on the rifle’s muzzle. “I mighta just cut myself on something. That’s probably all it is.”

“Get over to the hospital,” said St. George. “Get checked out. Cerberus, can you go with him?”

The battlesuit tipped its head and focused on the man. He walked down a wooden staircase and headed down the street. Cerberus followed a few steps behind him.

“Thanks for the assist, boss,” Makana said to St. George, and then added a nod to Freedom that made his dreadlocks swing. “Bosses. Didn’t think he’d have so many bodies ready to move that fast.”

Captain Freedom gazed down at the exes. “Helmets,” he said. “This is new.”

Stealth looked at the guards, then turned her head to Freedom. “How much ammunition was expended in this assault?”

“Most of it,” said Makana. He glanced at the other guards. They added shrugs and nods. “I’ve only got one mag left after this.”

“I’m almost out,” said the thin woman.

“I think I’ve got a couple rounds,” said another man, “and two clips after that.”

Twin streamers of smoke curled up and out of St. George’s nostrils. “I guess we got here just in time. Let’s get a resupply,” he said, “and some relief guards. Captain, can you stay with them until everything gets here?”

“Of course, sir,” said the giant officer.

“And somebody find out if Daniel has … had a family.”

“I think he had a boyfriend,” said Makana.

St. George nodded. “Let’s get word to him then.”

“It is unlikely Legion will make another attempt tonight,” said Stealth. She holstered her weapons and focused on the crowd of exes below. “His demonstrated impatience and the mix of headgear imply this was the majority of his scavenged armor, possibly all of it.”

St. George raised a skeptical brow. “Are you sure?”

“He has never returned in less than five hours once he has been driven back. It is more likely he may strike at another part of the Wall, but I would say the odds are against that as well.”

“So, is this what things are going to be like now?” asked the thin woman. “Because this sucked.”

Stealth’s expression was hidden beneath the blank fabric of her mask. Her body language was another story. St. George had known her long enough to see the subtle signs.

“Okay,” he said, “if you’ve got this in hand, Captain, we’ll leave you guys to it and get back to our patrol.”

Freedom gave them a quick salute. St. George held out his hand and Stealth grabbed his wrist without a word. He focused on a spot between his shoulder blades and rose into the air. He lifted the woman and they shot into the sky, her cloak billowing behind them.

St. George sailed up to the top of the half-finished building at this corner of the Big Wall. If the world hadn’t ended it would’ve been an office building or apartments by now. Instead, it was a framework of rusted girders and sheetrock. It gave them a good view of the north and west sides of the Wall.

Stealth lowered herself onto one of the beams. She held onto his hand even though her balance was perfect. She had a firm grip. St. George hung in the air near her, his fingers threaded between hers. “You’ve been expecting something like this, haven’t you?”

“I have,” she said. “It was only a matter of time before Legion realized he could use the resources of the city to outfit the exes. This will complicate matters for a time. Our ammunition stores are strained as it is.”

“But you’ve already planned for it?”

“I have.”

“So what’s bothering you?”

“Before the assault, Captain Freedom detained three teenagers attempting to steal a car.”

“So?”

“Petty crime has risen almost ten percent in the past few months since the Big Wall was completed. It is a distraction we do not need now that Legion has discovered these new assets.”

“Yeah, but it’s a good sign, in a way,” said St. George. “If we’re getting big enough to start having a crime problem, it means we’ve got a pretty sizable population. Things are getting better overall.”

All around the Big Wall, and as far as they could see, figures shuffled and stumbled in the streets. The sound of their teeth popped and cracked in the night like a hundred distant bonfires. Even at night, St. George could see thousands of them, and he knew there were thousands more out there in the darkness. Stealth said there were just over five million exes in Los Angeles. In three years he hadn’t seen anything to make him think otherwise.

At the best, every one of them was a mindless machine with no purpose past killing and feeding. A pack of ten could strip a person to bones in less than half an hour. At the worst, the undead were harboring Legion.

Stealth shook her head inside her hood. “As always,” she said, “you are an optimist.”

“Well, what is it they say?” St. George shrugged. “ ‘Better the devil you know …’ ”