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

was smiling. A dead woman latched onto his forearm and tore a mouthful of flesh away. Another one gnawed on his calf. The white-haired man didn’t seem to notice.

Stealth’s fingers shifted and empty magazines dropped from each pistol to rattle on the platform. She reloaded in seconds and was firing again. Freedom raised his own weapon and Lady Liberty thundered. The trigger-happy guard joined them, but Freedom could tell the man was just spraying bullets.

The prisoner flailed under the assault. His skin ruptured and blood sprayed across the lawn behind him. He staggered back and dropped on the grass. The exes chewing on him were torn apart by stray rounds from Lady Liberty’s bursts. Their remains fell on either side of the man.

“If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am,” said Freedom, “what the hell was that all about?”

The cloaked woman ignored him. She reloaded again.

The prisoner rolled over and scampered across the lawn on all fours.

Stealth tracked him and led her shots like a decorated marksman. Freedom saw her score half a dozen hits before the prisoner got back to his feet. The white-haired man sprinted to the end of the block before glancing back, and Stealth rewarded him with three rounds in the face. His forehead burst apart and he slumped against an SUV, but he was moving again before he hit the ground. He shook off the impact, rolled under the vehicle, and vanished.

A shadow passed over them. St. George hung in the air. “Go,” she shouted at him. “That way!”

The hero shot across the road after the escaped prisoner. He got to the SUV and shook his head. He raised his hands to his mouth and called out a name twice.

Freedom waited for the cloaked woman to turn to him, but she stared out after the prisoner. He took the moment to shove his earbud back in. The panicking man still monopolized the airwaves.

“Oh, Jesus,” said the voice on the radio. “The Thing got out. It got out of the Cellar.”

LEGION FOUND HIMSELF in a dead man, wandering in the middle of a tree-lined residential street. Small houses and one or two apartment buildings. He glanced around and looked through the eyes of a dead woman at the end of the block. The street sign said Stetson, like the hat.

He expanded his view, spreading out across another dozen or so exes until he saw a few more nearby street names. Walnut. Harkness. Colorado. He saw big buildings framing a campus and the sign for Pasadena City College. He was about twenty-five miles away from the Big Wall, way out past Glendale.

His attention focused him into a new body, a heavyset Samoan stumbling through a store parking lot off Colorado. The dead man was intact except for a few scrapes and cuts. And one dead eye. He reached up to check the socket and realized it was made of glass. It’d be fine for now.

Legion looked around the parking lot. The store had faded pink awnings with a “99” logo on them. There were a dozen dusty cars parked at different angles. One of them was T-boned into another, totaling both. A driver’s side door hung open, and he saw old blood splattered on the passenger seat. A primer-colored muscle car sat halfway through the store’s big window next to the double doors. Purple shopping carts were scattered everywhere. Some had drifted with random winds, others were tipped on their sides like dead animals.

He glared at another ex in the parking lot. It was an older woman with a wrinkled face and a pair of bullet holes in her chest. “What the fuck,” he asked her, “happened back there?”

The dead woman stared at him for a moment, then staggered into the side of a pickup truck.

For a moment he considered looking back at the Mount. There were almost ten thousand exes within a block of the Big Wall. He could sense them in a basic way, like someone knowing they were wearing shorts or going commando without checking. He just knew where they were, all through the city. It wouldn’t take much effort to reach over and see through their eyes.

Whatever attacked him had taken his exes away, though. One moment they’d been there, the next minute a bunch of them were gone. He could still see them, but it was like part of him had gone numb, like a cripple looking at legs that weren’t part of him anymore. They’d become something else.

And “something else” had kicked the shit out of him.

When the first one jumped on him he thought it was the Dragon’s new trick. Somebody with telepathic-ness or whatever you called moving stuff with your mind. But none of the Dragon’s people were that savage. Even when Stealth fought, she was intense, but never sadistic.

It was fast and brutal and ruthless, like wrestling with a hungry pit bull. A smart, hungry pit bull crossed with a piranha. He’d thrown more exes at it and it had fought back with more of its own.

Legion didn’t have a real body anymore. He hadn’t had one for a year and a half now. It had freaked him out at first. He even came close to crying once. Real men still cried now and then. Not often, but it happened.

But then he realized he’d become something bigger than just Rodney Cesares or Peasy. He’d become untouchable. Yeah, he didn’t have a body anymore. He had millions of bodies, every one of them tireless and numb to pain.

Numb until today, anyway. Whatever was using the other exes had hurt him. A lot. He’d felt every body get slashed and torn apart. And for a few moments it had held him there, like holding a geek’s forehead and watching them swing useless punches. He hadn’t been able to shift away.

He hadn’t been able to do anything.

Legion kicked one of the purple shopping carts and it rolled a few feet across the parking lot. He stalked over, slammed