Ex-Communication, Peter Clines [ebook reader online free txt] 📗

the hallway to a room. St. George followed for a moment, but knew he’d only be in the way. He found Jarvis’s eyes. The older man gave him a smile and a thumbs-up. Then the doors closed and he vanished.

One of the guards outside tapped his headset. “East Gate’s calling for you, boss.”

The hero bit back a sigh and nodded. He dug his earpiece out of his pocket and looped it over his ear. “Go for St. George.”

“Hey, boss,” said a voice. It took him a moment to recognize Elena, one of the regular wall guards. “Heard chatter you were back. Got a minute?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What do you need?”

There was a brief pause. “I think it might be better if you came out here to see. East Gate.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in five.” He pulled the earpiece off. For a moment he thought about crushing it. Then he thought about setting fire to every ex outside the Big Wall. And then he thought about just finding Stealth and curling up in bed for a day or two.

Someone cleared their throat. “Jarvis going to be okay?” asked one of the men in front of the hospital.

St. George met his gaze. “I don’t know. Maybe. He was bitten.”

The guards sighed and shook their heads. “Damn,” said the man. “That sucks. I really liked Jarvis.”

“Everyone likes Jarvis,” said St. George. He thought about crushing the earpiece again. Instead he focused and soared up above the buildings.

The East Gate was a misleading name. It was still just a solid line of stacked cars running north to south through the center of Melrose and Western. Where the gate would someday be was marked with a few bright lines of yellow spray paint. Since the scavengers had done most of their work on the east half of the city already, the East Gate was the last side of the Big Wall scheduled to get a working entrance.

Elena, Derek, and a bald man St. George didn’t recognize waited on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs. They had an oversized umbrella and a few big chairs from the nearby furniture store set up there. All three of them looked out at the intersection of Melrose and Western. A few hundred exes staggered in the street between a bank and a storage center. Building the Big Wall had used up so many cars the roads around the barricade were wide, empty spaces.

His feet thumped on the platform and they turned. “Hey, boss,” said Derek.

“What’s up?”

“Something kinda weird,” said Elena. Her finger stretched out and pointed down Melrose. “See the white building a block down on the right, just after the red one?”

St. George nodded. From his angle, the building looked like a large house or maybe a small apartment building. Curved bars that looked more decorative than functional stretched over the windows.

“Okay. Keep an eye on it.” Elena took in a deep breath and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey!” she shouted. “You still there?”

Her voice echoed down the street and the exes at the base of the Wall shifted their focus to her. Their heads leaned back and their hands stretched up toward her. Their snapping jaws got more frantic. Another two dozen or so moved toward the wall and joined the mob flailing for the humans on the platform.

A block away, an arm stretched out between the bars of one of the second-story windows. It waved up and down a few times. “I’m here,” a voice yelled back. It sounded female. “They’re still all around the door.”

“Hang on just a little longer!” Elena shouted back. “Someone’s coming soon.”

“Okay.”

St. George watched the arm slip back into the building. “Why didn’t you send a team out for her?”

“We almost did,” said the bald man. “Then Derek noticed the exes.”

The hero glanced down at the crowd of undead. “Are they doing something odd?”

“Not exactly,” Derek said. “They’re not doing anything.”

St. George looked out at the street for a moment and then his brow furrowed. His eyes went from the flailing exes below the platform to the ones down the street. There were at least a dozen of them in front of the white building, still milling around. “They aren’t, are they?”

“At first we thought it might be acoustics or something, the way her voice echoes between the buildings,” said Elena. “Maybe it was confusing them. But we’ve been talking to her for two hours now, and it’s been a good hour since we started watching the exes for reactions.”

Derek nodded. “Someone shouts at the top of their lungs, waves their arms around, and not one single zombie heads in her direction. Just seemed wrong.”

“Yeah,” said St. George. “Good call, not going to check it out.”

“You think it might be Legion setting up another trap?” asked Elena.

“Doesn’t sound like him,” said the bald man. “He always talks with an accent.”

“It better not be,” said the hero, “if he knows what’s good for him.” He took a few steps and launched himself into the air, sailing across the street. Some of the exes reached up and made feeble attempts to grab at him, even though he was well out of their reach.

He drifted over and above the storage building so he could come at the white building from the back. The curved bars were only on the street side of the building, and it took a moment to find a second-story window that had been smashed at some point in the past few years. He spun in the air and slid into the building feetfirst.

He was in a bedroom. A withered body stretched across the bed. It had been there for a long time, long enough St. George couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. He guessed the pistol and the dark stain on the far wall had been there just as long. Had they lost someone they couldn’t live without, the hero wondered, or just decided they didn’t