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

his foot into it again, and watched it bang into the side of a Lexus. Another kick raised a few wisps of dust and chipped some paint off the car.

He was pretty sure the thing at the Mount would’ve killed him. He didn’t know how, but he felt it in his gut. If he’d stayed there it would’ve torn him apart. Somehow.

The thing that’d saved him in the end was the other exes were changing too fast. They didn’t have time to do much damage. They got tall and sprouted fangs and claws, like werewolves or something—enough to fuck up a regular person, easy. And then they’d pop open like hot dogs in a microwave and fall apart. There’d been a break and he’d thrown himself away, like diving off a bridge. He didn’t care where he ended up, as long as he wasn’t there.

It was kind of familiar, what the other exes had been turning into, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe something from back during his months in the Army when they were pumping him and a bunch of other grunts full of drugs to make them bigger and stronger. There’d been a bunch of weird stuff going on then.

Legion picked up the shopping cart. The dead Samoan had slablike muscles that still had plenty of strength in them. He got the cart over his head, roared, and slammed it down on the windshield of the Lexus. The glass spiderwebbed from side to side. He picked the cart back up and slammed it down again. The windshield collapsed in across the dashboard and driver’s seat. He tried to drag it out, but one of the wheels had hooked on the steering wheel.

He growled and drove his fist through the driver’s-side window. Then he brought both fists down on the roof and dented it in. He kicked the door and slammed punches into the hood and yanked at the cart until he’d deformed the steering wheel and knocked the last few bits of glass from the windshield frame.

Truth be told, he was bored as shit most of the time. Even with the extra effort it took, big projects like looting the National Guard armory or gathering up all the armor and guns and ammo in the city didn’t take long when you had a hundred thousand bodies doing it. At least once a week he fucked up a car, just for the hell of it. Sometimes a house or an apartment building. He’d trashed half the food court over in the Glendale Galleria during one angry weekend.

After a couple of minutes of violence he calmed down and looked at the car. He’d messed it up pretty good. The roof was beat down, and the hood was pretty messed up. He’d smashed all the windows, one of the headlights, and most of the instruments on the dashboard.

The Samoan’s hands were ruined, too. The fingers were broken and the flesh had ripped away from the knuckles. The foot he’d kicked the door with was pretty messed up. He focused on a skeletal little girl across the parking lot and shifted into her. He watched the Samoan stagger on its bad foot for a few steps before it fell over. The dead thing flailed on the pavement for a minute or so before it rolled over and crawled off.

Legion let his view flow out again for a moment, drifting through the Samoan’s head for a few seconds, and then focused himself inside an older man in the middle of Colorado Boulevard. It was a big guy with a beard and loose skin. Legion liked being big. It reminded everyone he was strong.

Little soul.

He spun around and staggered. He’d picked an old guy with a bad knee. Maybe a whole bad leg, and being dead hadn’t helped it any. He forced the body up straight.

Nobody behind him. He thought he’d heard a voice, a buzz in the air like glow-boy from the Mount. He had a lot on his mind, though. He’d already written off what had happened earlier and was ready to start planning his next assault.

How interesting you are, little soul.

This time Legion reached out to look through a dozen sets of eyes. He saw himself in the old man, and a heavyset woman with a missing hand, and a teenage boy, and a slim woman whose face and hair had been burned off at some point.

There was no one around who wasn’t him. He stayed in all the bodies and marched across the street. He looked in cars and behind bus stops and in the small patio of a Starbucks.

He wasn’t sure if he’d heard the voice or just imagined it. It sounded damned close, though. And warm. Not warm in a good way, but warm like sick with the shakes.

Little Rodney Cesares. Son of Juan and Gabrielle. Once so great in body, now a living soul with no flesh around it. How fascinating.

“Okay,” called Legion. He found two exes up on the roof of a thrift store and one trapped on a balcony with a high railing. He looked down on the street through their eyes. “That you, Zap-man? Where you at, hijo de puta?”

Nothing. He couldn’t see anyone anywhere. He reached out and guided a few more exes down to the intersection. Thirty different views, but nothing.

“You think you can hide from me?” The dead took in a breath and shouted in the street, “I’M LEGION! I’M EVERYWHERE!”

The words echoed on the street for a moment. Then silence settled down across the street and coated everything. The air grew still.

Do you take the name of Legion in vain, little soul?

He poured himself back into the old man with the bad knee and grinned. “I am Legion, bitch,” he growled at the air. “I’m death incarnate. I’m the guy who killed the world.”

He had the unmistakable sense of someone standing right behind him. Behind all of him. Every ex within his reach felt a warm prickling