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

been a trick of the dim light from the moon. Or maybe some aspect of the possession wearing off.

Stealth shook her head. “We do not know the upper limit of his healing ability. He may, in fact, be dead. It is also possible he will be fine by morning.”

“Wow,” said Madelyn. “Is that … that’s good, right?”

Stealth’s boot lashed out and caught the skull right at the base. It snapped off the spine and spun twice on the ground, away from the pile of bones. Her foot whipped forward again and sent the skull sailing down past the intersection of La Brea and 3rd. It hit the pavement with a loud crack almost twenty yards away, right at the entrance to a furniture store parking lot, and skittered south even farther. It settled in the gutter in front of a ransacked yogurt shop.

“Just to be safe,” she told Madelyn.

I WAS DOWN in Venice. I don’t go there often. I’m not a big swimmer, and I’ve never surfed once. As the Mighty Dragon … well, there’s a lot of wind coming off the ocean. Even with the cape-wings, I can’t really glide down there, so my mobility gets cut down. It all just becomes exaggerated hops. And it makes me feel kind of silly. Yeah, I’m hopping fifty or sixty feet at a time, but it just seems undignified for a superhero to be bouncing around.

But there’d been some weird stories coming out of Venice over the past month. People said a monster was stalking the boardwalk. I’d seen a news report saying it was a giant purple dinosaur (and, wow, did Fox make a lot of lame jokes about that). A few homeless folks who’d seen it said it was one of the aliens from the Sigourney Weaver movies.

I knew of four heroes who’d taken up in L.A. There was me. There was the guy with the headgear, Gorgon. There was Midknight. And there was the ninja-Batgirl woman. I’d caught her watching me one night while I dealt with some muggers, but she was gone by the time I finished with them.

I generally worked around my home. Hollywood, Los Feliz, a bit of Koreatown. Midknight was out in the Valley, Burbank usually. Gorgon was over on the west side, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. The ninja-woman stayed around downtown and the Rampart district, but sometimes I’d hear stories of her in other parts of the city.

No one covered the beaches. So after the fourth or fifth report of the monster, I decided to check it out. I drove over, parked in a corner of that big lot right at the end of Venice Boulevard, the one before the beach, and changed into my costume in the backseat. I figured enough surfers probably changed in and out of wetsuits there that I wouldn’t draw too much attention, even at night in December.

It’s kind of silly, I know, but it surprised me when I learned the Venice Boardwalk was made of concrete. It’s just a big sidewalk. You hear “boardwalk” and you just think … well, wood. I thought the whole thing would look like the Santa Monica Pier.

Anyway, I was coasting around in the sky as best I could and came in for a landing on one of those tall apartment buildings right on the waterfront. A few homeless people saw me and pointed. I’d been doing this for almost six months now. People tended to recognize the costume by this point. One guy with a shaggy beard saluted.

Then I heard the wail. Somebody in a lot of pain. They yelled again and I saw a few of the people on the boardwalk scatter.

A few steps launched me through the air and north along the beach. The wind knocked me around. I went maybe twenty or thirty yards and managed to land on a shop without slipping off and crashing.

The cries were clearer now, but as I tried to pinpoint them they shifted. New voices started yelling. And they were scared. I was hearing screams, not yells.

I got a better sense of where it was coming from, about two blocks away down the boardwalk, and just as I did three teenagers came running out of an alley. Three boys. They were gang age, but weren’t wearing any colors. What they were wearing looked a little too high-end for gangs, too. All just a little too shiny and new. I wasn’t an expert on footwear, but I was pretty sure those weren’t Payless sneakers.

Whoever they were, they were terrified.

I stepped off the rooftop to soar down to street level.

The last kid was maybe a yard out of the alley when something reached out after him. At first I thought it was a spear or a board. Something long and thin that somebody’d thrown after them. Then the end split open and wrapped around the kid’s head like something out of a horror movie. The arm yanked him back into the alley.

I was halfway to the ground. I shifted my cape and glided toward the alley. The other two kids ran below me. One of them gave me a glance, but they never looked back. The closest one smelled like piss.

I ran over to the alley. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the gloom and see what the arm was attached to. I was right. It was something out of a horror movie.

On a guess it was maybe nine or ten feet tall, but it was tough to be sure because it was hunched over. It was more or less human-shaped, but the proportions were off. It was too tall and thin, like a person who’d been stretched out on a rack and stayed that way. It made every step and swing of its arms seem unnatural. It had a tail that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a scorpion.

Its head looked like a fish. One of those deep-sea fish with the huge eyes and teeth so long it