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

ex-human to the next. It wasn’t unusual behavior, but she felt an awkward requirement to carry the conversation a little further. “Are you looking for someone?”

“A friend of mine. Richard. Rich.”

The armored skull dipped once. “Ahhh,” she said. “Friend or boyfriend?”

“Just a friend,” said Tori. Her lips curled again, but the smile faded from her eyes. “Almost-boyfriend, I guess, but the moment never happened, y’know?”

“Yes.”

“We got close a couple times,” said the almost-pixie woman. “Really close that last Christmas Eve after we’d had a few drinks at a party. I stopped us before it went too far. Kind of wish I hadn’t.” She perked up and pointed down at the freeway. “There he is.”

“Which one?”

“Okay, see the woman at the bottom of the ramp? The one in the green tee with the missing arm?”

The armor swapped lenses and zoomed in on the crowd of exes. Danielle found the dead woman with a tangle of brown hair and the green tee. Her right arm looked like it had been twisted off at the elbow. “Yeah.”

“Go past her to the left. There’s a tall guy in a striped coat and a wild tie.”

The man in the pinstriped coat was on the shorter side, but so was Tori. He’d been good-looking in an average sort of way. One of his ears was missing, and Danielle could see bloodstains on his shirt when his lurching gait swung the coat open. His tie was a garish floral print. “That’s quite a combination.”

“He had to wear a tie to work, y’know, before everything, so making them clash was his little act of rebellion.”

“Ahhh.”

“Rich’s boss was a real bitch. When the outbreaks were happening, most places were closing down or letting people work from home. She insisted they all had to go into the office or they’d get fired.” Tori pointed at one of the taller buildings over on Sunset. “They got trapped in there. Three dozen people. I talked to him on the phone for a couple of days. They were living off the vending machines and stuff in the break rooms. The National Guard found them and gave them some food. They said they’d be back with a truck so they could get everyone out.”

“They never came back?”

Tori shook her head. “I don’t think so. After a week he called me to say they were going to try making a break for it. He figured if he could make it down to the freeway he could go along on top of cars and avoid the zombies.”

It wasn’t the dumbest survival plan Cerberus had ever heard. It wasn’t the brightest, either. She didn’t say anything. She’d long since grown used to people needing to unload on someone. And a lot of people found it easier to spill their guts to a giant robot than to a person they had to look in the eyes.

“Anyway, he told me to stay put and he’d get to me. So I stayed put. And I never heard from him again.”

The battlesuit shifted, and its toes scraped on the pavement. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said the almost-pixie woman. She took a long, slow breath. “It was a long time ago.”

Down on the street, the ex in the pinstriped coat had caught itself on the side mirror of a car. The dead man kept turning in small circles and bumping into the side of the car or other exes. After a few revolutions its coat slipped free and it staggered on. It headed in the general direction of the overpass they were on. Tori straightened up.

“After the Big Wall was done I kept coming out here to look for him. I even got an apartment over there.” She waved her arm across the freeway at the Corner, but her attention drifted back down to her dead friend. “About five weeks ago I found him down there on the freeway. He’s been staying put, just like he told me to.”

“He’s still pretty clean,” said the armored titan, unsure what else to say. “That must make him a little easier to … to see like this.”

“He hates being messy,” Tori said. “He’s one of those people who’re always washing their hands and brushing themselves off. He’s almost OCD about it.”

The tenses hinted the conversation was going off into a direction Cerberus didn’t want to be involved in. She’d had a version of it with someone every other week for the past four or five months since the A.D. movement had gained momentum. “If you’re okay, then,” said the battlesuit, “I’m going to move on.”

“Oh, sure,” said Tori. “I’m great now that Rich is here. Thanks for talking.”

Cerberus nodded, feeling like she’d dodged a bullet. She didn’t have anything against the almost-pixie woman’s religion—any religion—but she found dogma boring as all hell. Most people wouldn’t want to sit through one of her discussions about exoskeletal motion-reactive processors, either, but she didn’t feel the need to force the subject on anybody except Gibbs and Cesar.

Tori reached out an arm to wave to her former-almost-boyfriend as the titan thudded past. Cerberus looked up ahead and saw the two guards at the Sunset on-ramp wave to her. She was trying to remember their names when she heard the noise.

It was the hollow sound of bending metal. Part of her recognized it as someone moving on a car roof. Then she heard the rustling, saw a glimpse of movement through her rearview camera, and the two guards stood up and raised their voices. The battlesuit spun around just as the click of leather on pavement reached her.

Tori’s blanket hung across the chain-link fence. It covered and flattened the barbed wire. The fence still trembled from her vault over it.

The almost-pixie woman walked down the ramp, into the late-day shadows and toward the exes. Her hair was fluffed up from the jump. She was half turned away from Cerberus, but the battlesuit’s lenses could still see the happy smile on her face.

“Tori,” yelled the titan, “get back here now!”

She turned around and shook