Ex-Patriots (35 page)

Especially when I made him forget.

I never got noticed, though. The middle child
who didn’t need much attention. The quiet kid in class who wasn’t
so quiet the teachers worried about him. Just the average guy with
the average name, sitting there in plain sight.

I still don’t know if this was something I
was born with or something that was done to me. I remember the
first time I did it, though. Well, it might not have been the
actual first time, but it was when I knew for a fact I’d made
someone do something they didn’t want to do. Sophomore year of high
school. I spent a week working up my nerve to ask Phoebe Bradshaw
out on a date and she shot me down in front of her friends before I
even got it all out. I tried to save face while they were all
giggling and asked if I could get a blowjob instead. I’d heard the
line in a movie and it seemed appropriate.

Three minutes later we were in an empty
classroom and Phoebe was unzipping my jeans.

It has something to do with questions. It
took a while, and I got slapped and punched more than a few times
because of it, but I figured that out. The way your brain receives
and processes a question is different from how it hears statements
or instructions or music or whatever. I can’t order people to do
things, but I can ask them and they give me the answer I want. And
they believe that answer.

The rest of high school went very well for
me. I got excellent grades, great recommendations from every
teacher, and slept with every cheerleader from every sports team.
When I started applying to colleges, I got a full scholarship offer
from anywhere that would give me an interview. College was a lot
like high school, in pretty much every respect.

It was also where I learned I could push
people too far. Or for too long. I mean, I’d figured out the
nosebleeds, but college was the Christy incident. She was a
minister’s daughter who said her prayers each night and was saving
herself for marriage. Until she met me, anyway. After a month or so
of using her every way I could think of, I decided to have a
threesome with her and her roommate. The sex was great, but the
next morning Christy was dead and her brains were leaking out on
her roommate’s pillow. Turns out five weeks of making her mind do a
complete moral one-eighty had all piled up, triple-sinful sex was
the breaking point, and she had five or six aneurisms all at once.
On the plus side, I guess, she never felt any pain.

It is true, by the way. Some schools give
students straight A’s if their roommate dies. And if I’d known what
an animal her roommate would be during grief sex, Christy would’ve
died a few weeks sooner.

Anyway, it was after the Christy incident
that I started thinking a lot more about what I did and what I
could do with it besides getting good grades and porn star-level
sex every weekend. College wasn’t going to last forever, after all.
I needed a post-graduation plan. Something more than the grad
school and grades of my choice.
Summa cum laude
would
attract too much attention, but a solid
cum laude
would make
my resume believable without being noteworthy, wherever I ended
up.

It’s amazing how many people in the world
make a living by backstabbing or blackmailing or screwing their way
into a position of almost-power, and it’s amazing how many people
let them. All those clingers and hangers-on who get maximum
benefits for minimum effort. The trick is just to find the most
powerful people you can and latch on. In that sense, I wasn’t doing
anything any different than thousands of other people.

And the thing is, most people are
easy-to-manipulate idiots anyway. They
want
someone to tell
them what to do, no matter how much they say otherwise. Just pay
attention to any election and see how often morons get convinced to
vote against their own best interests. Heck, they’ll cheer and sing
as they screw themselves over and make someone else rich and
powerful.

The White House was the obvious first choice.
Too high-profile, though. Plus, at best you’ve got eight years
before someone new comes in and cleans house. These days most
politicians are way too partisan to hang onto someone from the last
administration’s staff, even if they’re doing a good job. I could
make them keep me, sure, but then I’d stick out like a sore thumb.
And the goal, as Monty Python says, is not to be seen.

Then there was a month checking out Fortune
500 businesses. It’d be easy to have some CEO hire me on as a
personal consultant or something. Thing is, most of those guys are
rich, but their power’s limited to one little sphere of influence.
Think about it. How many high-end movie studio executives can you
name? None, right? They step outside of Hollywood and they’re just
another schmuck in a town car.

So what did that leave me?

I was getting a guy to write a biochem paper
for me senior year when I had my epiphany. I was wasting my time
trying to find someone with all the right qualifications. I didn’t
need to find powerful people.

I needed to
make
powerful people.

One college job fair later I was recruited
for the Department of Homeland Security, complete with a generous
signing bonus. DHS was pretty much custom made for me. What better
place for an influential guy than a whole government agency created
to lean over everyone’s shoulders?

I got assigned a nice office and spent six
months trying to find what I wanted. The Cerberus Battle Armor
System seemed like the best place to start. I could get the project
greenlit, into production, and then have a whole platoon of armored
bodyguards throwing themselves in front of the guy I was already
standing behind.

Plus, to be honest, I hadn’t nailed a redhead
in a while. Doctor Danielle Morris was rude and talked to me like I
was an idiot. Her whole superior attitude made it even more fun
later when she was on all fours in bed.

Of course, three months after I got myself
assigned to the Cerberus project the superheroes showed up.
Honest-to-God superheroes flying around, fighting crime, shooting
ray beams, and all that stuff.

I admit, there was a week or two when the
thought of a costume ran through my mind. I pictured myself
squaring off against the Mighty Dragon or the Awesome Ape and
getting them under my control. Blockbuster and Cairax both seemed
pretty powerful, too. It’d be like collecting action figures or
something.

Then I came to my senses. No masks. No capes.
Nothing that involved revealing myself. Everybody goes after the
guy they see. Nobody goes after the man behind the throne.

Maybe a month later I heard rumors about some
Reagan-era program, Project Krypton. It was like the Star Wars
defense system—no one expected it to work. It was just something
else the Soviets would need to match our research on and drive
themselves deeper into bankruptcy doing it. Except Project Krypton
worked. They got some serious results before the project was
mothballed at the end of the Cold War.

When all those superheroes started showing
up, though, it got people thinking. Especially me. They reactivated
the program. I got transferred to it.

I mean, the battlesuit is a great idea, but
it’s a
thing
. Things can break down. They can run out of
bullets or batteries. And your power runs out with them. But if the
power’s something inherent, something the soldier
is
, not
something they’re wearing, then it can’t go away.

Besides, the military was a great place for
me. After knowing a few over-eager ROTC students in college, I
almost didn’t need any power to manipulate them. Say
terrorism
and
patriotism
in the right order and half
the soldiers I met would shoot their own mother without asking why.
The other half... well, they’d do it if I asked them.

Granted, when the exes showed it up it was a
big wrench in my plans. Now nobody else could wash out of the
program. I was still weeding through candidates, figuring which
ones were easiest to influence without risking their brains
bursting. Too many people die of multiple aneurisms and it starts
to look suspicious. It starts to draw attention.

So I had to put a bit more thought into
getting rid of the troublesome super-soldiers. The ones whose
morals or sense of duty were too strong. But it wasn’t that hard.
After all, they’ll do or believe anything I tell them. I can make
them think their vehicle’s going to run out of gas. Or they should
run full-speed into a mob of exes when the smart thing to do is to
sit tight. Or that they should put a gun in their mouth.

Now, though, it looks like I might get the
best of both worlds. The heroes are alive out in Los Angeles, and
they’ve got a pile of civilians with them. Hell, the Cerberus suit
might even still be out there somewhere. At first Shelly was all
for letting them stay self-governed and alone, but a quick Q and A
changed his mind for him. So now a team’s heading out to welcome
them back to the United States of America. I’ll ask if I can tag
along, too. In an advisory position, of course.

After all, what do you get when you’re the
ultimate power behind the throne?

You get ultimate power.

NOW

There were, by Specialist MacLeod’s guesstimate,
about a thousand exes around the Krypton fence. He was good at
guesstimates. Not even three years ago he’d worked the produce
department at the Albertsons on West 24th where he’d amazed
coworkers with the ability to put a number to avocados on an endcap
or jalapenos in a bin. Since he’d signed up, he was still amazing
people, but now it was spent brass on the firing range or zombies
at the fence.

A thousand was more than usual, but not by a
huge amount. A lot of them seemed to be stumbling across the desert
these past few days and joining the mobs at the chainlink. The open
space muffled their chattering teeth, but not by much.

Still, it was quieter up in a watchtower than
down on the ground. Morning run around the perimeter always creeped
him out. A lot of the dead things at the fence were wearing the
same uniform he was, and he didn’t like to see it up close. Heck,
the ex-soldiers walking the perimeter were bad enough.

His watch ended at fourteen-hundred. Fifteen
more minutes and he was off duty. Pulling a shift alone sucked and
he couldn’t wait until it was over.

He looked along the north side of the fence
and gave a wave to D.B. over at the next tower. He was stuck with a
solitary shift, too. The soldier waved back and MacLeod wandered
across his tower’s small deck to look down at the gates. Three
layers of steel pipe and chainlink between him and the dead.

Movement made him glance back into the base.
A figure was wobbling across the open space between the gate and
the helipad. At first MacLeod thought the back and forth gait might
mean it was First Sergeant Kennedy, but just as quick he realized
it was more of a stagger than a pleasant sway. He lifted his
binoculars and confirmed one of the ex-soldiers was heading for the
gate.

He picked up the tower’s handset and punched
in the extension for the zombie handlers. “Short Bus, this is Tower
two,” he said, “I think one of your kids is skipping class. You
know anything about it?”

“Negative, Tower. Do we have a dead
Nest?”

“Don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be feral, just
wandering.”

“Copy. Someone probably gave it a vague order
and now it’s trying to walk to Washington or something. I’ll send
somebody out to retrieve it.”

“Copy that, Short Bus.”

Below him the ex had smacked into the inside
fence and was still trying to walk through it. The zombie tilted
and slid along the chainlink. It swayed as its head and shoulders
slapped the fence again and again.

MacLeod sighed and wished he had a cigarette.
He looked west and saw more figures dotting the horizon. Damn,
there were a lot of exes today. He wondered what made them all
wander in the same direction.

Over the chatter of teeth he heard a faint
beep. Then two more. Then a fourth and fifth. He looked back down
to the gate.

The lone ex was at the keypad for the gate
controls. One finger from each hand stuck out. It stabbed at the
keys with quick, precise movements.

It took MacLeod a few seconds to register
what he was seeing. By then the red lights had started to flash. He
saw movement between the fences as soldiers ran to safety. The exes
outside the fence lumbered toward the gate with far too much
purpose. Their teeth had stopped chattering. After two years of
listening to the click-click-click of enamel he thought nothing
could be more unnerving. A hiss filed the air, a sucking noise, and
he realized they were breathing. A thousand exes were pulling air
into their shriveled lungs.

When they spoke, it was in one voice.

“CALL ME LEGION,” roared the exes, “FOR I AM
MANY.”

Their leathery voices echoed across the
desert plains and between the buildings of Krypton and broke down
into a dry laughter.

* * *

“It’s a nine-foot-tall, red-white-and-blue
robot built like a linebacker,” growled St. George. “Where the hell
did it go?”

After watching a dozen or so soldiers file
out after the battlesuit, Sorensen had asked to be left at the
workshop. He seemed fine with being left behind, and said he’d try
to contact Freedom or Smith through normal channels. St. George and
Zzzap had returned to the skies to hunt down whoever was wearing
the Cerberus battle armor.

Invisibility field?
said Zzzap.

“I think if Danielle could turn invisible,
she would’ve mentioned it before now.”

Yeah, but that isn’t Danielle.

Legion’s roar echoed up from the base below
them. The two heroes looked at each other.