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

a bulletproof vest under her shirt, and a set of pins and tags identifying her as ten-year veteran Officer Altman. Her left arm had been bitten several times. Two fingers were missing from that hand, along with part of a third, and she had made a rough bandage from a bandanna. Her right ankle was soaked with blood. Her left cheek hung open. She was crying. She was still alive.

“How long since you were bitten?”

She jumped and tried to raise her gun before she saw me. “Oh, thank God,” she said.

“How long? If it has been less than two hours there is a slim chance you can be saved.” Even as I said this, though, I took note of the paleness of her skin by the wounds. She was sweating and her eyes were having trouble focusing.

Altman shook her head. “They overwhelmed us. We tried the Taser, warning shots. They just kept coming.”

“You have been told not to waste time with such measures,” I said. “The only way to stop them is to kill them.”

Her eyes hardened for a moment and she glared at me. “They’re still people.”

“They are not. That is why your partner is dead and you have a day at best. Have you radioed for assistance?”

She shook her head. “One of them bit through my microphone cord. I can’t reach the car radio.”

I walked around the car and closed doors until I reached her partner. He twitched twice and I put a round through the base of his neck. Altman cried out at the sound. At this range, the vertebrae exploded. The twitches stopped.

“The car is still secure. I can leave you here until help arrives, or you can attempt to drive.”

“You’re not staying?”

“No.” I lifted her to her feet.

“Fuck you.”

“There are too many exes at large. The next twenty-four hours will decide if Los Angeles can be contained or if it will be lost. That outweighs the needs of one police officer who ignored the order to make kill shots.”

Altman settled into the driver’s seat and dragged her legs into the car. I pulled her partner’s sidearm, his spare ammunition, and retrieved the Mossberg. “It may be several hours before help can reach you,” I told her. “You will need to defend yourself until then. Do you have food and water?”

She snorted back a laugh. “What, like a box of donuts?”

“A first-aid kit?”

She nodded.

“Use whatever antibiotic agents you have in it. It may give you extra time.”

“You really think I’ve got a chance?”

“It is difficult to say. There have been some cases of recovery, if the victim receives immediate medical care.”

“How soon is immediate?”

I paused. “The attacks happened in a hospital.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I ordered her to lock the doors and left her. If she did die, she would be trapped in the vehicle. As I walked back to the motorcycle I shot two women, each wearing a House of Blues staff shirt. The bike roared back to life and I resumed my path across Sunset.

In one of the earlier Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet a Sir) made an observation on logical deduction. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

There is, however, a specific flaw in that maxim. It assumes people can recognize the difference between what is impossible and what they believe is impossible.

The ex-humans have been appearing for twelve weeks now. Three months since the first known sighting. They have been captured, studied, and killed. There are warning posters, public service announcements, and news reports. Yet people still cling to the impossibility of the living dead even as it looms over them, attacks their homes, and devours their neighbors. Soldiers, police, and private citizens force themselves to believe the exes are just infected with some curable disease, despite all the evidence, and will not take the necessary steps. They will not accept the truth. They will not act on it.

The outbreak will not be contained. It is too late.

The world as we know it is over.

THE THIRD-FLOOR conference room in Zukor hadn’t been touched when the building was refitted as a hospital. The table was a glossy black slab surrounded by overpriced, high-backed chairs. Stealth sat at the head of the table with a casually dressed St. George to her right, Gorgon to her left in his usual body armor and duster. A handful of civilians filled the other seats, residential leaders from across the Mount and their staffs. At the far end, Doctor Connolly stood by a large flatscreen TV, tapping her laptop while comparing last-minute notes with Josh.

Stealth leaned closer to St. George. “Who did you send out?”

“Luke with three mechanics, plus twelve guards,” he said. “Cerberus is backing them up.”

“They left at sunrise,” added Gorgon. “The gate’s staying in constant contact. They reached Big Red twenty minutes ago. No sign of the SS, no other traps. They’d just gotten the first tire done when I walked in.”

Connolly nodded to Stealth and the room grew quiet. “I know you’ve gotten regular updates,” she said, “so some of this may seem like old news to you. I just want to go over everything, because we need to change a lot of preconceived notions we’ve had until now.

“We know it’s viral. A virus that mimics leukocytes—white blood cells—in appearance, so a visual check of the blood will miss it most of the time. We know it’s highly infectious. It’s not airborne, only passed by contact with bodily fluids, but it can survive a very long time outside a host while still in an active state. So a dead ex, stained clothes, even a dried blood smear on the wall—all of them can transmit the virus.”

Gorgon leaned back. “That would imply almost everyone’s been exposed to the virus at one time or another.”

“Precisely,” said Connolly with a nod. “This was the big discovery that made us look at everything again. The ex-virus is more aggressive and replicates faster than anything on