Ex-Patriots (42 page)

They grabbed St. George at his wrists and
tried to pin his arms. Some wrapped themselves around his legs.
None of them wasted time trying to bite. Five bodies had hold of
him. By the time he’d crushed three skulls there were ten. He threw
off four with a shrug of his shoulders and there were fifteen. They
piled on, using sheer numbers to hold him down.

“Gotcha this time, Dragon,” whispered one of
them.

“Gotcha good,” said another.

St. George snorted. “You think you can hold
me?”

A musty arm wrapped across his throat. A hand
slapped over his eyes. Fingers grabbed at his hair and ears and
clothes.

“There’s a concrete truck just a little ways
from here,” said one of the exes. “What if we dumped the whole
thing on us? Bury you under all these corpses. What do you
think?”

“I think you’re still an idiot,” said St.
George.

He focused between his shoulder blades and
shot fifty feet into the air. Over two dozen exes came with him,
clutching his body too tight for their own good. Legion had enough
time to grunt with surprise and St. George dove back down, flying
head-first for the tarmac. At the last second he shifted direction
and hurled himself back into the sky.

The exes rushed past him in a flurry of limbs
and bodies. They smashed into the helipad. Some plowed through
other undead that hadn’t been carried into the air. Skulls
shattered, bones snapped, and gore splattered across the blacktop.
Close to thirty exes ceased to exist.

St. George hung in the air for a moment over
the pile of corpses. A few of them still writhed in the heap. He
landed and wrenched their necks the way a regular man would open a
twist-off bottle. The last one glowered at him and was taking in a
breath to speak when he broke the top of its spine into three
pieces.

Monroe and Truman snapped off bursts at the
last few exes. “Sir,” shouted Monroe. He pointed down the road
where another mob staggered toward them.

“Get your man back to the main gate,” said
St. George. “We don’t need to stay here any longer.”

“What about Smith? He’s still got your
partner, right?”

He looked up. The Black Hawk was already a
quarter mile away and six or seven hundred feet up, climbing fast
even as it tilted away to the north. A body flew out of the side
and plunged toward the ground.

* * *

“Wait a minute,” shouted Smith. He’d swung
himself into one of the chairs and started to struggle with the
harness until something caught his attention. He looked across at
Stealth. “I thought you handcuffed her arms in front of her.”

Hayes was still leaning over her, adjusting a
last strap. He glanced down at his captive and her empty lap.

“We are now on the helicopter,” Stealth said
in a loud, clear voice.

Her hands slashed through the air, the left
arm still trailing both handcuffs. The open palms slammed against
his ears and the super-soldier felt a wave of pain and dizziness as
his eardrums ruptured. Her legs whipped up and back as she drove
her heels into his kneecaps. As he staggered back she grabbed his
jacket and pulled herself up to crack her head into the bridge of
his nose. The floor tilted and Hayes was pitched out the Black
Hawk’s open door.

Polk tried to shrug off his harness and stand
up. She slammed both heels into his chest. Before he recovered she
spun on her hands and circled his head with her feet. The chain of
her shackles pulled tight on his throat. She jackknifed her body up
and drove four punches into his forehead one after the other. He
tried to block them but she was too fast and her calves were in the
way. By the fourth one Polk was hanging loose in the harness. She
swung back down, untwisted the shackle chain, and flipped back to
her feet.

She turned to Smith. The combat knife she’d
grabbed from Polk’s belt spun in her hand.

Smith yelled something at her. With the
engines roaring and the wind coming in through the cabin doors, she
couldn’t hear what it was.

He realized she couldn’t hear him and his
eyes went wide.

She saw the pilot glance back at her. He
reached for his sidearm.

She threw the knife. It sank into Smith’s
throat just below his Adam’s apple. The blade missed his carotid
artery.

It severed one of his vocal cords.

Smith grabbed at his throat and glared at
her. She saw blood bubbling on his lips as he tried to shout
commands to the pilot. The deck of the chopper tilted again.

Beneath her featureless mask, Stealth closed
her eyes and leaped from the helicopter’s open cabin door. The roar
of its rotors faded as she dropped away and the Black Hawk
continued north.

She grabbed the edges of her cloak, letting
it billow out to catch the wind. She was too high up for it to save
her, she knew. Almost nine hundred feet. The cloak would slow her
descent, and while she would never reach terminal velocity she
would still reach a sufficient speed in the next few seconds for
the impact to kill her instantly.

Then a strong arm wrapped around her waist
and pulled her close. Her descent slowed and stopped, and she
wrapped her own arms around his neck.

“I’ve got you,” said St. George.

“There was never any doubt.”

NOW

“You are bleeding,” said Stealth.

“I’ll be fine,” said St. George. “I’ve had
much worse.”

They sank down through the air. St. George
could go faster on his own, but he was trying to make it a smooth
ride. They were heading back into a war, but for a minute or so
Stealth was pressed up against him. She was very warm, even in the
cool air of higher altitudes.

“How were you able to resist the suggestion
Smith gave to you?”

“I thought of
The Twilight Zone
,” he
told her.

“Again, I do not understand.”

“If you watch a lot of
Twilight Zone
s,
there’s a bunch of them that come down to misconceptions and
loopholes,” he explained. “People can’t do something because they
don’t understand what’s actually going on. I figured Smith’s powers
might work something like that.”

“You sought out a loophole in the suggestion
he gave you?”

St. George nodded his head. “At first I was
terrified, because I knew he was right. I couldn’t beat him. I was
sure of it. I knew if I tried anything a lot of people would get
killed and I still wouldn’t stop him.”

“Yet you resisted,” she said. “You tried to
stop him.”

“Nope. I told you, I knew I couldn’t stop
him. It’s like he hardwired it into my brain. I know it was some
kind of mind-control and I still can’t make myself believe I
could’ve stopped him.”

She hooked one of her legs around his. It
took some of the weight off his arm, although it was nothing to
him. It also pulled her even tighter against him. “Then how were
you able to fight back?”

“That soldier hit you with his rifle. The
second he did that, I realized I didn’t want to beat the bad guy. I
just wanted to save the girl.”

“You defeated Smith’s powers through a
semantic argument.”

“I don’t know. Did I?”

“So it would appear. It also appears you have
heroic fantasies where I am ‘the girl.’”

“Well...” He tried to figure out what the
right response was.

She looked up at him. “Do not worry, George,”
she said. “At the moment I find your heroic fantasies somewhat
endearing.”

“Ahhh,” he said. “Good.”

“I am sure Specialist Hayes appreciates them
as well.”

St. George glanced down at the soldier
hanging from his other hand. “Well,” said the hero, “he probably
will once he wakes up.”

* * *

So, how’d things go up there?

Stealth slipped free from St. George’s arm
and dropped the last dozen feet to the ground, her cloak billowing
around her. He kept his other arm up so Hayes didn’t crack his head
on the ground and two other soldiers grabbed the man. “Could’ve
gone better,” he said. “Smith got away. I’m sorry.”

“Not good,” Kennedy said. “If he reaches
another base he can start all over again.”

Freedom shook his head. “It’s not important
for now,” he said. “Smith’s a traitorous piece of crap, but right
now our mission’s to keep this base safe.”

Three lines of soldiers formed a rough
triangle. It reached almost a hundred feet on a side, with close to
two dozen men on each line in pairs and trios. Jefferson doled
ammunition out of a Humvee packed with crates and loose weapons.
For the moment, they’d pushed back the exes.

“
Where did you say he was
headed for?” St. George asked the huge officer. “A
lake?”

Freedom gave a single nod. “Groom Lake.”

Seriously?
Zzzap dropped closer to the
ground.
Groom Lake? He’s heading for
the
Groom
Lake?

“I am sure the actual base does not live up
to the popular urban legends,” said Stealth.

“Well,” said Freedom, “we can discuss that at
another time. For now, we need to figure out how to save
Krypton.”

The cloaked woman tilted her head. “The base
is lost,” she said. “The best course now is to prepare an
evacuation with as many supplies as possible.”

Captain Freedom pulled himself up to his full
height. He loomed a good foot over Stealth. Kennedy stood next to
him, her arms crossed. “As I told St. George, we are not going to
abandon the base,” he said. “Even if we wanted to, for a facility
this size it’s a process of days, not hours. There’s too many
people for an orderly evacuation in so short a time. It’d cost us
too many lives.”

“I doubt that.” Stealth turned her head to
the lines of soldiers. “You claim to have a full brigade here, yet
every squad I have seen is four or five soldiers at best.”

“Teams are four or five soldiers,” said
Kennedy. “Squads are eight to ten. If you don’t understand the
organizational structure it can—”

“I am aware of military command structure,”
said Stealth, “which is how I know your numbers are incorrect.” She
looked at the soldiers defending the gate. “Every squad here is
undermanned. So are both platoons of super soldiers.”

Freedom shook his head. “You’re mistaken,
ma’am.”

“Counting yourself, captain, I have seen
fifteen soldiers on this base wearing the super forces patch. Shall
I name them for you?”

“You haven’t seen everyone.”

“I believe I have.”

There was a burst of gunfire from the fence.
A few exes had tried to force their way around the capsized
flatbed. They were gunned down.

I kept asking where everyone was,
said
Zzzap,
and you kept saying they were just out of sight.

Before Freedom could respond, Cerberus came
around the side of a building. It moved with a quick, long stride,
and Danielle rode piggyback on its shoulders, her arms around the
metal skull. The battlesuit moved past the soldiers and up to St.
George.

“Told you I’d keep her safe,” said the titan.
It set Danielle down on he ground. “You can count on me, man.”

“There’s a good sized mob of exes about two
or three minutes behind us,” she said. “Legion seems to be focused
on them. They’re coming after me.”

“Lucky you,” muttered Kennedy.

“Stow that, First Sergeant.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Man, am I glad to see you,” the battlesuit
said to Zzzap. “The armor’s at, like, eighteen percent power. I’m
starving in here, bro.”

Yeah, join the club.

“Danielle,” said St. George. “You guys were
at the north-west corner. How many people did you have with
you?”

“Counting the guys in the towers?”

“Include everyone you can,” said Stealth.

Danielle skimmed through her memories. “Nine,
I think.”

The battlesuit nodded. “Nine. Seven on the
ground, one in each tower.”

“There’s always three soldiers in every
tower,” Freedom said.

St. George looked at the towers flanking the
gate. “There’s only one up there,” he said, “and nobody in that
one.”

“Specialist MacLeod came down to help secure
the gate,” said Kennedy. She pointed to the soldier. “That’s why
it’s unmanned.”

“If one guy left, shouldn’t there still be
two people manning it?”

Kennedy looked back at the tower. “He must’ve
been on solitary shift. Sometimes, the way rosters line up, someone
gets stuck pulling duty alone.”

“Sounds like none of your rosters are lining
up, then,” Danielle said. She pointed down the fence line at other
towers. “One. One. One.”

“Smith has been biding his time here,” said
Stealth. “I would surmise since the outbreak occurred, his priority
has been his own survival and little else. The easiest way for him
to maintain control was to let you believe you were performing your
expected duties, within the scope which served his purposes.”

“Then why recruit people?” asked Kennedy with
a gesture. “If you’re right, if we were all just drones running the
base, why rescue all these people and bring in a bunch of extra
mouths to feed? Why put a few hundred civilians through basic?
Why...”

Her hand drifted down. They all looked at the
small squads fighting to defend the gate. Kennedy and Freedom
looked over at the empty barracks.

“Oh, God,” said Freedom.

Colonel Shelly told me you guys had enough
supplies for years,
said Zzzap.

“I would surmise,” said Stealth, “there were
far less recruits and refugees than you remember. It is likely no
one was rescued from Yuma. Smith merely convinced you of such to
make you more docile.” She turned her head to look out over
Krypton. “I would not be surprised to discover there are fewer than
a hundred soldiers and support staff on this base.”