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

She glared at him.

The gleaming wraith put his hands up. I just want you to feel comfortable.

“Then you will continue to address me as you always have.”

He nodded slowly. Stealth it is, then.

Zzzap hung in the electric chair and she stared past him to the door. After a few wordless seconds she turned and walked away. Unlike the walk she had done for Todd, her boots were silent now.

So you actually know how he’s doing in school? he called after her. That’s not creepy at all.

She stopped and looked back at him. Her face shifted beneath the mask. “Before society collapsed, several studies showed boys between the ages of nine and twelve scored an average of fourteen percent lower than girls in English and reading classes,” she told him. “Double that percentage claimed English as their most difficult class. With a mathematically viable population of children, I saw no reason to assume those numbers had changed.”

And the bit about taking his sister’s doll?

Stealth held his gaze for another moment, then turned and walked back into the shadows.

CERBERUS PATROLLED THE Corner on a regular basis. The guards liked seeing her. The rowdier folks were kept in line by the sight of the armored titan. It was a small enough area that she didn’t burn through too much battery life patrolling it. And it was far enough away from everything else that Danielle didn’t have to listen to people nagging at her about how much time she spent in the battlesuit.

The northeast corner had been a trouble spot when the survivors of Los Angeles started building the Big Wall. The Hollywood Freeway, often just called the 101, cut right across that part of the city. It was a paved canyon filled with dead cars that never moved and dead bodies that moved too much. There’d been some debate about whether the Big Wall should just avoid it. Some people had pushed for a zigzag path through residential streets. Others suggested running the Wall along Santa Monica Boulevard instead of Sunset, cutting the area inside by a third.

Stealth had brought the discussion to an end. She insisted on running the Big Wall along the exact lines they’d planned. “We shall not reclaim the city by avoiding challenges,” she’d said, “only by meeting them.”

She’d been right, of course. Making the Corner safe had brought together hundreds of workers. It was where the assorted peoples of the Mount, the South Seventeens, and Project Krypton had started to bond as a community.

The freeway ramps had been blocked by concrete traffic barriers set up years ago by the National Guard. The survivors added sections of chain-link fence that extended out along the sloping ground on either side of the ramps and also the overpasses that stretched above the freeway. Cars stacked two and three high pinned the chain-link in place. It wasn’t as solid as the Big Wall, but at the time it had been assumed the uneven ground would add to the barrier. The mindless exes didn’t deal well with hills, and more than a few of them tipped over before they reached the top of the ramps.

That was before the people of Los Angeles knew about Legion. In the months since, barbed wire had been strung along the top of the chain-link. Guard platforms were built at each ramp. Extra cars had been stacked to limit the possible ways through. Cerberus had stacked most of them herself.

It all left a small area of four blocks isolated on the other side of the man-made canyon. Not surprisingly, “the Corner” was where the rougher individuals among the survivors had ended up. A lot of the loners and former gangers lived there, and some of the soldiers, too. There were rumors of a black market, although what anyone could have a black market with nobody seemed sure. The one thing everyone knew was that the Corner was the one place inside the Big Wall where it was impossible to block out the sound of teeth.

Cerberus had seen the almost-pixie woman a few times before. Her dark hair wasn’t quite short enough to be a pixie cut, but Danielle didn’t know what else to call it. She was in her late thirties. Maybe younger—people had aged a lot over the past three years. She was skinny by build, not just in the way most people were skinny these days, and her clothes fit well enough to show off her figure, even with the stylish overcoat she was wearing.

Most days the woman stood on the overpasses and stared down at the exes staggering between the dusty cars and trucks. Every now and then she’d be muttering a prayer or talking to herself. It wasn’t unusual to see. At a distance, the undead were a good device for soul-searching.

This evening, though, the woman was on top of one of the stacked cars a half block or so from one of the guard platforms. It was a minivan with a broad roof, and she was cross-legged on the luggage rack, a heavy blanket under her. She looked down through the coils of barbed wire at the exes on the weed-covered slope. Her expression was peaceful.

She glanced up at the approaching battlesuit and smiled. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they flitted to the stars and stripes on the armor’s shoulders. “Hello,” she said. “Am I supposed to salute or something? I’ve never been sure.”

“Just hello’s fine,” said Cerberus.

“Is it okay for me to be up here?” There was an odd pitch to her voice. It was somewhere between a high-pitched squeak and the creak you might hear in an older person’s voice. A cute voice that had been shattered by lots of screaming. “Am I in the way or anything?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m Tori.”

“Cerberus.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a faint smile. Her eyes drifted back down to the undead on the freeway.

Cerberus watched Tori’s eyes flit from one