Ex-Communication

Thirty-Four Now

CAPTAIN FREEDOM STRUGGLED to his feet. He remembered riding in the back of a cargo truck in Afghanistan where the crates slid and shifted under his feet. Standing in the crater was like that, except the crates kept reaching up to drag him back down.

He was in a lot of pain. If his ribs hadn’t been broken before, they were now. He’d heard people say pain felt like needles or blades, but anyone who’d felt real pain knew it was a screw. It kept twisting deeper every time you thought it was done. His side was filled with white-hot screws.

Where the tail had skewered him, he felt his pulse and wetness on the inside of his jacket. Half of his torso had a faint chill that reached into his arm and was working its way up his neck. Even with his basic first-aid training he knew it wasn’t a good combination of feelings.

The floor of the crater shifted again. A dead hand reached up to grab at his knee. He bit his lip, drove his heel down, and heard bones crunch beneath him. He kicked at a few exes grabbing at his legs. A dead woman with a patch of bare skull tried to gnaw on his boot and knocked out its own rotted teeth. A mangled, genderless thing caught its fingers in Lady Liberty’s empty holster and made Freedom stumble for a moment.

Half the exes in the crater had made it to their feet. He slammed his fist into one, then brought his arm around to batter away another. It flew back, taking two other exes down with it, and Freedom felt the burning screws in his ribs sink a little deeper. He gritted his teeth.

The pause gave a dead woman with matted hair the chance to grab his arm. He could feel the teeth through his combat uniform, but the material held. A quick shake knocked the ex off. A pair of arms wrapped around his leg, and he let his fist swing down like a hammer.

Even as that ex dropped, another one grabbed him by the waist. Its withered arms squeezed tight enough to set off the fire in his ribs. He turned to shake it off and the screws tightened down even more. The dead man made a wet noise as it slipped away and white spots danced in the captain’s eyes.

The wet noise hadn’t come from the ex. The side of his uniform was soaked in blood from his armpit to mid-thigh. The wetness hadn’t gone away. He’d just gone numb. Shock. He was going into shock.

He battered away another dead man and struggled through the growing crowd of exes. He just needed to finish the mission. He had to get to the demon.

Then he could rest.

Madelyn ran to her high point. The sword bounced and swung on her hip. An ex stumbled into her path and she elbowed it out of the way. She was supposed to climb the remains of the street sweeper. She needed to be high up and close enough so she couldn’t be blocked when she saw Stealth’s signal.

She pulled herself up into the cab and swung her legs around onto the hood. A quick twist and she crawled over the windshield onto the roof. It wobbled under her weight.

There were exes everywhere, more than she’d ever seen before. A thousand of them, at least. The sounds of the fight were drawing them in from all over the city. The clicking teeth and the rumbling clouds drowned out almost everything.

St. George dragged the monster up into the sky where Zzzap waited. Stealth was on the roof of an SUV, right where she said she’d be, with the big shotgun-pistol Captain Freedom called Lady Liberty. And Freedom was …

Then she saw him, covered in blood and vanishing beneath the swarm of exes in the crater.

There was a sound like a falling redwood as Cairax hit the pavement. She glanced at the fight and back to the huge captain who’d been friends with her dad.

Madelyn leaped off the street sweeper and ran to the crater, shoving exes as she went. Throwing herself into the pit was just like stage diving, at least from what she’d seen on TV and in movies. She dragged herself though the crowd, pushing and shoving and kicking at the exes. It was a struggle. They all wanted to get to Freedom as much as she did, maybe more.

She jumped into the air and kicked off a dead man’s hip. It got her close enough to grab Freedom around the neck. She threw her legs around his waist and pulled herself tight against him.

He winced and his eyes went wide. “What are you—”

“Trust me,” she told him. She pressed her body against his and squeezed with her legs. She could hear his heart thumping through his body armor. He was cold. She could feel his blood seeping through her jeans and into her coat and tried not to think about it.

The exes slowed their frantic pawing. Their grips loosened and their dead gazes drifted away. The chattering teeth moved away from Freedom. The ones on the edges of the mob wandered off. The closest ones bumped against him a few times before stumbling away.

Madelyn smiled. “Welcome to my world,” she said.

“Finish the mission,” he told her.

“We’re going to. Come on.” She loosened her grip on him and shifted her weight so she could slide over his shoulder. He put up a hand to help her. A moment later she was riding piggyback on his broad back.

He wheezed, but didn’t cry out. “Where to?”

“Get me to the far side of the street,” she said. She shook her hips and the sword swayed on her belt. “I need to be able to hand this thing off to Stealth.”

Cairax Murrain rolled its shoulder and broke St. George’s half nelson. The hero fell away and a shrug from the demon knocked him back. Cairax turned on him with a growl.

St. George went to throw a punch and an ex snagged his arm. The zombie bit down on his wrist and its teeth crumbled against his skin. He shook it off in an instant, brought his fist around, and Cairax’s tail wrapped around his throat.

The thick rope of muscle heaved him into the air. It wasn’t strong enough to choke him, but he couldn’t get enough leverage to pull it loose. He focused on his shoulders and tried to haul Cairax back into the air, but the tail shook him hard and dragged him back down.

Cairax pulled him close. The demon’s teeth whisked against each other as it spoke. Its breath smelled like rotted milk. “If dear Maxwell dies,” Cairax said, “it may save your soul, but your heart shall still be my feast.”

“I hope you choke on it,” he gasped over the tail.

Gunfire echoed behind the demon and it turned with a growl. As the horn-covered head turned, St. George saw rounds spark off the jutting points and one of the wider tusks. It sounded like someone with a machine gun.

Stealth stood on the roof of the SUV, her Glocks firing in each hand. They ran dry and she let the magazines tumble into the crowd of exes below. The guns spun in her hands, her fingers danced between grip and belt, and she was firing again. Bullets sprayed across the demon’s face like heavy rain.

Cairax took a few steps toward her, and her guns hit empty again. Its hooves thudded against the pavement and trampled a dead woman beneath them. It brushed a trio of exes out of the way with a sweep of its arm.

Then it glanced down.

The three exes had wrapped their arms tight around its long forearm. Each one held on without biting, or even gnashing their teeth at the air. They glared up at the demon.

“You ready for round two, pinche pendejo ?” they asked in unison.

Cairax had time to snarl before the exes pounced on it. The tide of the undead shifted as all the exes in the area charged the demon. A dozen grabbed its other arm. A platoon’s worth of them tackled its legs while a score more threw themselves on the tail. They swarmed over the demon like ants on a lion.

Three dead people sank their fingers into the coil holding St. George and yanked at it. They loosened it enough for him to get his hands in. He pried the tail open and dropped away. St. George took in a deep breath.

An ex loomed over him. It had been a heavyset man with a goatee, dressed in a filthy tee and wool cap. “Your lucky day, dragon man,” growled the corpse, “ ’cause I actually hate this fucking thing more’n I hate you.”

St. George nodded. “We need to hold it,” he said. “Stealth needs a clear shot at its chest.”

The ex nodded and hurled itself onto the demon’s back. Over a hundred dead people clung to the monster, burying it beneath their bodies. They shifted to expose its bony chest.

St. George leaped into the air, soared over the demon, and landed next to Stealth. “I think Rodney just gave us our edge.”

“Agreed.”

“Ready to tell me the big secret plan?”

“Symbolism,” she said. “We have the sword and an archangel.”

“What?”

“A creature of radiance and will, shaped in God’s image.”

The phrasing stuck in George’s head for a moment. Then Cairax Murrain lashed out with both arms and dozens of exes went flying. The barbed tail skewered three and shook them off. It reached up and seized the dead woman who’d wrapped herself across its eyes.

“Stealth!” someone shouted.

The cloaked woman turned. So did Cairax Murrain. Captain Freedom slumped on a car near Madelyn. She was on the roof, holding the sword over her head.

The demon’s saucer eyes squinted as if it was trying to focus on something. Then it snarled.

It could see her.

“Hold the demon!” snapped Stealth.

St. George hurled himself through the air. His boot slammed into Cairax’s face, knocking the demon’s head back into a small tree. The monster tried to bite down on his leg but only tore the heel off his boot. Cairax swung one arm at him and glared at the hero.

The Corpse Girl tried to remember everything she’d seen in pirate movies about throwing swords. None of it seemed instructional. In the end she just swung her arm back and hurled the weapon in Stealth’s direction.

As the hilt left her hand Cairax’s eyes got even wider. It hissed through its forest of tusks and lunged forward. Another dozen exes stumbled forward and threw themselves at its hooves. They grabbed at its calves and thighs.

St. George grabbed the demon’s arm and twisted it back. The odd proportions made it hard to use leverage, but he got the claw up behind the spike-covered back again. The spidery hand flexed in front of his face and the movie Aliens flashed through his mind.

All at once George knew why “in God’s image” sounded familiar. It was a phrase from the Bible. It was what people always said about humanity.

The blade spun through the air like a propeller. Stealth took three steps, reached up, and snatched the whirling saber out of the air halfway between Madelyn and the demon. Her fingers shifted on the grip and she pulled it back over her shoulder. For a moment she was a statue. Then she hurled the sword at Cairax Murrain like a javelin.

Light flashed between them. A sonic boom cracked the air. Zzzap placed himself between Stealth and the demon.

A creature composed of radiance and will, shaped in God’s image.

A man made of light and thought.

Zzzap reached out an arm so his palm was blistering the creature’s hide and hoped he wasn’t about to die.

The sword melted the second it touched the gleaming wraith’s shoulder. The blade dissolved into a stream of steel and silver. The intricate engraving blurred together and was gone. The leather grip incinerated, a small cloud of ash that vanished in a swirl of superheated air. Almost a third of the sword boiled away to vapor and broke apart in the furnace that was his body, reduced to mere atoms.

For Zzzap it was every type of discomfort his mind could pull up as an analogy. Having something physical inside him, even just for a tenth of a second, was past nauseating—it was agony. It was food poisoning and charley horses and getting kicked in the nuts and broken bones and smoke inhalation all at once. He sensed the sword’s path, right where Stealth said it would be going, and forced his arm to stay up with his fingers spread.

The stream of molten metal shot from his palm. Free of his internal fires, it shed heat into the air around the demon. Inertia shaped it into a gleaming icicle of steel as it crossed the open space.

The sword in Zzzap’s hand punched through the demon’s skin and slid between two ribs. Smoke poured from the wound as it pierced Cairax Murrain’s heart. The blade slid even farther, and used the last of its momentum to bury itself in the bone plates of the monster’s back.

Cairax Murrain roared. It was a howl of pain and anger and frustration and fear that shattered glass and made eardrums bleed. The demon threw off the exes holding its arms and lashed out at Zzzap. The talons tore through the wraith with a sizzle and a loud crack. It thrashed and howled and hurled St. George across the wide street.

Zzzap stood there with his arm extended as the sword boiled away around his palm. The jagged piece of steel never moved. It was solid in the air between Zzzap and Cairax Murrain. White flames shot from the demon’s mouth. The wound sparked and flared and caught fire. The blaze started to build and swell around the demon.

St. George saw Stealth dive behind a truck. Madelyn tugged Captain Freedom down behind a car. The exes were still throwing themselves at the demon. They were laughing even as the flames charred them down to the bone.

St. George closed his eyes and crossed his arms over his face.

Everything went white. There was a sound he felt more than heard. And then nothing.