Ex-Heroes, Peter Clines [reading like a writer txt] 📗

Of course, it only took a few moments for all this to go through my mind, but it distracted me. Long enough that the man tried to grab my arm and sink his teeth into my biceps. Or what passed as a biceps.

A lot of my friends are physicists, which is how I got a handle on the Zzzap thing when it happened to me. When I’m in the energy state I have no physical form. I’m just a big ball of raging electromagnetic energy given shape and motion by my force of will and consciousness. In simpler terms, although it’s not as accurate, I’m a very tiny G-class star that can think. Jerry thinks if it was possible for me to fall asleep in this state, I’d just lose cohesion and explode like a bomb.

End result, as I mentioned, I am dangerous to touch.

His hand charred to the bone in less than a second. There was a horrible crack as his teeth overheated, boiled inside, and shattered. A whole mouthful of teeth bursting apart at once—there’s a sound you don’t forget too soon. I leaped away from him, sent out a 911 signal, and tried to survey the damage.

The old man was burned. His mouth was ruined, just a burned-bacon hole in his face filled with bone shards and dark blood. And he didn’t seem to notice. What was left of his jaw was still moving up and down. He and the woman had their arms up, reaching for me, as if neither of them had just seen the damage touching me could do.

What the fuck had Stealth pulled me into?

At the end of the alley a young guy in black yanked his Goth girlfriend in from the sidewalk and up against the wall. She swore at him and wrapped her legs over his hips. They didn’t even notice me. Or the two infected people. Nothing like a quick dry hump between clubs.

The old woman was facing them. She lowered her arms away from me and started stumbling in their direction. As she passed the old man, he turned and shuffled after her. They were slow, great-grandmother slow, but I was between them and the couple in the blink of an eye.

I let the light and heat flare up around me, and heard the two kids gasp. The homeless people kept shuffling forward. The woman’s teeth chattered like she was freezing to death.

Stay back, I said. Medical help is on the way.

Behind me I heard the Goth couple scamper away.

They kept lumbering toward me. I flew up and behind them. They followed, twisting their heads and arms so far they almost fell over. I’d seen this behavior before. Creature Double Feature out of Boston. Late-night movies on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Okay, enough’s enough, I shouted. I want you both down on the ground now! I raised my hand and let the energy build. Sparks shot off my fingertips, and I knew looking at my palm was like looking at the sun. The shadows in the alley vanished. They didn’t blink. I don’t think I’d seen them blink yet.

Get down! This is your last warning.

The man banged his ruined teeth together with a noise like crunching glass.

In front of my hand the air superheated and did a trick everyone else on Earth needs a supercollider and a magnetic bottle to pull off. An arc of raw plasma scorched its way through the alley, a millimeter wide but igniting everything within four or five times that range. It could burn through concrete like the proverbial hot knife through butter, so searing the old man’s thigh to the bone was no challenge at all. I lost it, and if this had been a normal man, I would’ve killed him, or crippled him for life at best.

As it was, he didn’t notice. His stagger swung a little to the left, but he kept moving toward me. I don’t know why I thought a leg burn would slow him down when having his teeth and tongue burnt out of his mouth hadn’t.

They still hadn’t blinked. Their eyes were dull and gray. I think they might’ve been blind. I still don’t know to this day.

But right then, I knew what they were. I’d said it to Stealth as a joke, but here they were right in front of me. No joke, no gag, no doubt what these people had turned into. I didn’t know how, but it was useless to deny it.

My fingers flexed again. The air boiled, night turned to day, and the man’s head vanished in a cloud of fine ash. It was so fast his body stood there for a moment with nothing above the shoulders but a cauterized stump. And then it collapsed with steam drifting from the neck and leg.

The woman opened her jaws wide and brought her teeth together with a solid clack.

I heard the repeating bang, saw the heat spike, traced both bullets as they streaked down the alley and smashed their way into the old woman’s head. Her face collapsed in on itself like a balloon. She dropped like a sack.

Stealth swung herself off her motorcycle and holstered the pistol. “Are these the only ones you have seen?”

What the hell is this?

She ignored me and checked both bodies. “We do not have time to waste. Are these the only ones you have seen?”

They were zombies! I shouted. Real live zombies!

“By definition,” she said, “they are not alive.”

But where did they—

“Are there any more?!”

I took a mental breath and tried to calm down. I don’t know.

“You were looking, correct?”

I was looking for sick people, I snapped back. I don’t see things the way you do. To my eyes, they don’t look alive, they look like furniture. So, yeah, there’s a good chance I overlooked them if they weren’t moving or making noise like these were.

She mulled on this for a moment. “Can you identify them now?”

It’s going to be a lot harder. It’ll take