Ex-Patriots (6 page)

At the far end of the bridge they could see a
matching roadblock and an olive-drab truck. Lady Bee stood on
Road Warrior
’s rooftop deck with her binoculars out. “I
count maybe thirty exes,” she said. “They’ve noticed us but the
barricade’s giving them troub—ah, two just fell over it. Nine,
maybe ten bodies on this side. Looks like two or three of them are
moving, but it might be heat ripples off the pavement. They look
like military.” She lowered the glasses and looked at St. George
standing in the air over her. “Military could mean weapons and
supplies.”

He nodded. “Let me go check it out.”

The hero shot through the air and landed on
the far side of the freeway next to the truck. A few yards away the
pair of exes that had fallen over the roadblock staggered to their
feet. There were ten Guardsmen around the truck. Seven of them were
still dead.

Both legs on one of the exes had been
shredded below the knees, maybe by a grenade. The dead thing
crawled clumsily on its elbows and reached for St. George’s boot.
He kicked it in the bridge of the nose and the skull came away from
the neck. It sailed out over the freeway as the body slumped to the
ground. He heard it clang on the hood of some far-distant car.

The other two had been a man and a woman.
Their legs and arms had been eaten down to the bone before they’d
come back. The woman’s cheeks and lips were gone, too. Everything
not covered by body armor. The dead things twitched and thrashed
and stared at him with chalky eyes. He reached down, twisted each
of their heads around, and they stopped moving.

All the bodies had been stripped clean of
weapons and ammunition. Even the exes. Four of the bodies were
missing their boots and socks. St. George took a moment to check a
few supply crates and the back of the truck, but they were empty,
too. He rapped a knuckle on the vehicle’s gas tanks and a hollow
sound echoed back.

There was a scuffling noise behind him. The
pair of fallen exes had reached him, plus a third had slumped over
the barricade and creeped headfirst toward the ground. He grabbed
the one in the stained security outfit as it leaned into him and
hurled the dead thing out over the freeway. It sailed through the
air for a few hundred feet, bounced on the top of a minivan, off
the side of a white truck, and vanished between two compacts.

The other ex wrapped its arms around him and
sank its teeth into his bare shoulder. Incisors, canines, and
molars crumbled away against his skin, but it kept gnawing with the
jagged stumps. He reached up, pushed his thumb into its mouth, and
pressed up against its palate. The bone creaked but held long
enough for him to swing the dead thing up and over his shoulder. He
brought the ex down onto the pavement hard enough to pulverize its
bones. It collapsed into mush.

He focused and whisked himself back through
the air. Lady Bee scanned back and forth on Cahuenga with her
binoculars. Ilya and a broad-shouldered woman, Keri, stood by while
Paul went through the back of the wrecked pickup. A trio of
scavengers at each end of
Road Warrior
kept an eye on the
street and the exes that drifted along it.

“Nothing,” St. George told them. “Anything
here?”

“Looks like this guy was doing our work for
us, boss,” said Ilya. Paul handed a sack of canned goods down to
Keri. She ferried them to Lee standing on the liftgate of their
truck. “Five bags of non-perishables, three more that look like
they came from a CVS. No weapons, but there was a box of nine
millimeter in the glove compartment with thirty rounds left in
it.”

“Any sign of the driver?”

“Some blood on the seat and the steering
wheel,” said Paul.

Ilya pointed at the spider-webbed windshield.
“Bullet hole,” he said. “I bet they got shot running the roadblock,
crashed, and then...”

“Then walked away from it, one way or the
other,” the hero finished.

“The other,” said Lady Bee from the top of
the cab. “If they were alive, they wouldn’t’ve left everything
behind.”

Paul handed down a final bag and hopped out
of the truck.

“Moving on, then,” said St. George. A few
yards down the road he could see another, larger gas station with a
shot-out sign. He could remember driving past it a few times back
in the before days, back when he was just a college maintenance guy
moonlighting as a superhero in a thriving Los Angeles, but he
couldn’t remember if it had been an Arco or a Mobil or what.

Hector stepped up onto
Road Warrior’s
lift gate and paused. He looked back and forth up the street. “What
is that? Is that... flies?”

Lynne cocked her head to the side. “It’s not
flies. Bees, maybe, or hornets?”

“It’s not insects,” said St. George with a
shake of his head. “Too steady. It almost sounds like...”

He rocketed thirty feet into the air. “Grab
the flare gun!” he shouted down at them. “Red flare, fast!”

Jarvis fumbled in his pack. “What the hell is
it?”

“No way,” said Lady Bee. Her eyes were wide
and she smiled as the droning sound grew louder. “No way!”

“It’s a plane!” shouted St. George, going
higher into the sky.

THEN

If your parents gave you a name like Augustus Phillip
Hancock, you’d’ve joined the Army, too. Trust me. When I turned
eighteen, I wanted to be anywhere but Little Rock, so when Eddie
said he was going to sign up I did, too.

Now, I ain’t supposed to tell anyone about
this. When I got pulled into Project Krypton last year, still a
fuzzy right out of boot camp, they had us sign a bunch of waivers
and security paperwork. Nobody with wives or kids. Nobody who was
an only child. Then they shipped us off to Yuma, which I can say is
dead center in the middle of nowhere. A woman from Broadsword
company said she’d heard the whole project used to be based at
Natick, like you’d expect, but it’d gotten so big they had to set
up a whole sub-base out at Yuma for it. One of the fellas said the
little base should be called Kandor, and two or three fellas
thought that was really funny, but I didn’t get the joke.

One of the fellas in Broadsword also said all
the paperwork we’d filled out was the same stuff they use for
suicide missions, but I think that’s bullshit. Although, looking
back at it, maybe it ain’t.

I was one of the lucky ones. Turns out my
company, Greyhound, was the control group. We were eating sugar
pills and getting shots of saline water. Apparently they can just
stick that in you and it doesn’t do much of anything.

So, yeah, Greyhound was lucky. Angel and
Devil companies, too. Well, kind of. They’re all getting dialysis
or something for a few weeks. They weren’t getting sugar pills and
saline.

Broadsword are the fellas that got screwed.
Their company had the biggest concentration of the stuff the old
doc was giving us. It didn’t go over well. I’ve heard them talking
about all the stuff Angel and Devil are getting, plus marrow
transplants and hormone therapy and stuff. None of them are
complaining though. We all know what happened to Lucas and Jacobs,
and ain’t nobody wants to go through that.

Well, none of us know officially. But we were
all there for the start of it and Eddie works in the medical wing.
He saw how they ended up. So we all know.

At first it seemed great. All of Broadsword
company was bulking up, getting stronger, just like the old doc
wanted. Then they all started getting cramps. And they were...
swelling. You know those fellas who get crazy ripped? The ones who
hit the gym every day and do contests and stuff? It was like that.
Their arms and legs were getting bigger and stretching their skin
so it was creepy tight and their veins stood out. And they weren’t
even working out much.

It hit Jacobs first. He just got itchy. He
tried to be a good soldier, suck it up and not let it get to him,
but it kept getting worse. After two days his eyes were watering.
Not crying, just watering bad.

Third day we told him he had to go see the
doc. He was pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own
beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those southern weirdoes who says
beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting
any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the First Sergeant.
Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and
when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin
broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too
much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it
was pulled so tight.

We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas
came along, too, ‘cause he’d started to feel itchy and now he was
worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were
cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had
split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for
the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was
still there. We heard it all from him later.

Apparently the old doc’s serum didn’t work
like he hoped. Remember how I talked about the crazy ripped fellas?
You ever see them when they’re so big they can’t put their arms
down? I think that’s what they mean by muscle-bound. Well, that’s
what was happening to Lucas and Jacobs. Their muscles were growing
out of control. Four days after we took them down there, Eddie told
us they couldn’t even move anymore. Their arms and legs were just
big sausages of muscle. They looked fat because their abs were
getting so big, and they couldn’t lay flat because their glutes and
shoulders were twisting their backs up. And their skin was still
splitting. It couldn’t grow as fast as the muscles were, so they
were getting some kind of sharkskin grafts or something.

On the fifth day they started screaming. We
heard it all over the base. Turns out their bones were growing,
too, but they weren’t growing fast enough, either. They kept
getting crushed between muscles or stretched apart as the muscles
kept getting bigger and thicker. “It’s like their bodies’ve turned
into torture racks,” Eddie said one night when he got back to the
barracks. “They’re being pulled apart by their own muscles.”

They screamed for three days straight. Eddie
told me over chow they’d gotten so big it took huge doses of
painkillers just to make them stop screaming. The whole thing was
freaking him out. He’d snuck his phone in and showed me a picture
of this swollen red thing that looked like a fat grub. He said it
was Jacobs, and that his skull’d been pushed off his neck by all
the muscles, but he was still alive cause it hadn’t actually broken
his spinal cord yet. “If they can fix him,” Eddie said, “he’s still
gonna be a cripple for the rest of his life.”

On day nine they stopped screaming. All at
once. On day ten we were told Jacobs and Lucas had died in the line
of duty. They’d be given full honors. And the old doc was gone.
Eddie said he’d heard Colonel Shelly and the higher brass were
furious, and the doc had pretty much fled from the base.

Anyway, we all figured that was it for
Project Krypton. Three-fourths of us out of commission one way or
the other. One company left. We got three days to wonder about it
and then we met the new doc at a big briefing. There was this young
fella with him in a dark suit, Smith from Homeland, and he smiled a
lot and gave this little speech and introduced us all to Doctor
Sorensen.

The new doc’s the flipside of the old doc.
The old doc was actually a young fella, not much older than any of
us. He was some hot-shot scientist, and kind of an asshole, to be
honest. The new doc’s an older fella who feels like he should be a
cool uncle or something. He’s got a big gray beard and glasses and
he talks like a teacher.

They were redoing Krypton from the ground up.
Nothing was going to be the same but the name. It was going to be a
whole new process. That made a lot of people rumble. But Sorensen
stopped that real quick before Colonel Shelly could bark at us.

“These are not going to be experiments,” he
told us. “I will not be putting any of you brave men and women at
risk. These are all established procedures, using tested drugs and
chemicals. With some of you the treatments will take and with some
they will not. But there will be no risk of... of what happened
before I got here.”

Then the First Sergeant got up. He told us
we’d done our duty and everyone here had carried out the
requirements we’d signed up for. Even though they were keeping the
number, as far as the Army was concerned this was going to be
something new and the 456th was being disbanded. If we wanted out,
we’d be debriefed and reassigned. We had until tomorrow morning to
decide. He dismissed us.

The young fella, Smith, started working the
crowd. He was shaking hands, asking questions, kissing asses. He
shook mine and asked if I was going to stick around and I told him,
yeah, I probably was. I said probably but I think even then I knew
I was going to be part of Project Krypton for the long haul. It
just felt like I belonged there.

I moved to the front of the room and realized
a few fellas from Greyhound were behind me. I think we’d all been
ready to get a new assignment. Yuma was boring as hell, and we’d
all joined up to go overseas and kick some Al-Qaeda ass. If Smith
hadn’t said anything, I think we all would’ve walked out of the
room and started packing. Now it was almost a pride thing to finish
what we started.

Colonel Shelly was having a talk up front
with the new doc. If it was anyone else, I’d say an argument, but I
knew the colonel didn’t do arguments. Or excuses.

First Sergeant Paine was there. He locked
eyes with me and I knew enough to stop where I was and stand at
attention. I heard the fellas lock up behind me, too. A couple
people call him First Sergeant Bring-the-Paine, but not if he’s
anywhere nearby. So we stood there for a few minutes while they
talked and didn’t do anything except listen.