Ex-Heroes (12 page)

In college I took several lovers, both male and female. It sprung from a desire for experimentation, although not in the way most college relationships are labeled. As I had suspected, sex turned out to be a fleeting diversion with no real rewards. Even more annoying, my skill as a partner was often judged on my appearance and not on any other abilities or aspects I brought to the arrangement. It was through these experiments I realized my beauty would always be my defining trait, no matter what a given situation required.

Over junior and senior year’s winter and summer breaks I was offered jobs modeling for Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. I took them all and appeared in eleven different catalogs and two in-store ad campaigns. The money paid for two years of masters studies where I wrote a groundbreaking thesis on DNA fragment tracking and identification. Despite complete faculty backing, no journal would publish a scientific paper written by a twenty-two year old underwear model. Twenty-two rejections. By sheer coincidence, that year I was also ranked number twenty-two on Maxim’s “Hot 100 List,” between Elisha Cuthbert and Cameron Diaz.

I have double doctorates in biochemistry and biology, with further studies in psychology, anthropology, and structural engineering. I wrote a book on memory structures and mnemonic devices explaining how anyone could improve their recall by at least threefold. It sold less than four thousand copies and now can only be found in remaindered bookstores with a “70% Off” sticker. By contrast, a paparazzi photo of me posing on a runway at Cannes was downloaded over twenty-three million times because my top slipped and there is a clear view of my left nipple.

I knew I had the physical prowess and skills to have a direct, positive effect on the city of Los Angeles. If people were only willing to see me as an object, however, then I would oblige and operate outside the judicial system as an unnamed thing.

My last civilian appearance was an episode of
Jeopardy
at the age of twenty-six. I won seven episodes in a row by runaways before I became bored and stopped trying. I was the longest-running female contestant the show had ever had. That money, $570,400, financed my uniform and equipment.

A quartet of exes stumbled into view on Las Palmas drawn out by the noise of gunfire. Three women and a man. They had fresh blood on their mouths. I gunned the bike’s engine, spun the rear around, and headed toward them. A fifth and sixth wandered out of the narrow space between buildings. I came to a halt a dozen yards from them. With both weapons firing, it took three seconds to eliminate all of them.

While I listened for signs of trouble, I reloaded. Both of my Glocks are the 18C military variant with the extended magazine, but it was not an evening to be caught low on ammunition. I carried four spare clips in my harness, plus the two in the pistols. There were an additional two hundred rounds in the cycle’s saddlebag. I had used a quarter of my ammunition in ninety minutes of patrolling.

Another ten minutes and twenty-three more kills brought me to La Cienega. A major intersection. A police car sat near the sidewalk, three of its four doors hanging open, the front crumpled against a Ford truck. Skid marks indicated the driver had hit the brakes, tried to swerve, and crashed.

There were fourteen bodies surrounding the vehicle. I could see one dead officer on the pavement by the driver’s side door. A Mossberg police shotgun lay a few feet from his left hand. The others had been exes. Besides the fatal head shots, they each had a collection of bullet wounds in their arms and chests. One had the curling wires of a TASER trailing from his stomach.

I heard a moan from the far side of the car.

The other officer, a woman, was bleeding. She had dark hair, the bulk of a bulletproof vest under her shirt, and a set of pins and tags identifying her as ten-year veteran Officer Altman. Her left arm had been bitten several times. Two fingers were missing from that hand, along with part of a third, and she had made a rough bandage from a bandanna. Her right ankle was soaked with blood. Her left cheek hung open. She was crying. She was still alive.

“How long since you were bitten?”

She jumped and tried to raise her gun before she saw me. “Oh, thank God,” she said.

“How long? If it has been less than two hours there is a slim chance you can be saved.” Even as I said this, though, I took note of the paleness of her skin by the wounds. She was sweating and her eyes were having trouble focusing.

Altman shook her head. “They overwhelmed us. We tried the TASER, warning shots. They just kept coming.”

“You have been told not to waste time with such measures,” I said. “The only way to stop them is to kill them.”

Her eyes hardened for a moment and she glared at me. “They’re still people.”

“They are not. That is why your partner is dead and you have a day at best. Have you radioed for assistance?”

She shook her head. “One of them bit through my microphone cord. I can’t reach the car radio.”

I walked around the car and closed doors until I reached her partner. He twitched twice and I put a round through the base of his neck. Altman cried out at the sound. At this range, the vertebrae exploded. The twitches stopped.

“The car is still secure. I can leave you here until help arrives, or you can attempt to drive.”

“You’re not staying?”

“No.” I lifted her to her feet.

“Fuck you.”

“There are too many exes at large. The next twenty-four hours will decide if Los Angeles can be contained or if it lost. That outweighs the needs of one police officer who ignored the order to make kill shots.”

Altman settled into the driver’s seat and dragged her legs into the car. I pulled her partner’s sidearm, his spare ammunition, and retrieved the Mossberg. “It may be several hours before help can reach you,” I told her. “You will need to defend yourself until then. Do you have food and water?”

She snorted back a laugh. “What, like a box of donuts?”

“A first aid kit?”

She nodded.

“Use whatever antibiotic agents you have in it. It may give you extra time.”

“You really think I’ve got a chance?”

“It is difficult to say. There have been some cases of recovery, if the victim receives immediate medical care.”

“How soon is immediate?”

I paused. “The attacks happened in a hospital.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I ordered her to lock the doors and left her. If she did die, she would be trapped in the vehicle. As I walked back to the motorcycle I shot two women, each wearing a House of Blues staff shirt. The bike roared back to life and I resumed my path across Sunset.

In one of the earlier Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet a Sir) made an observation on logical deduction. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

There is, however, a specific flaw in that maxim. It assumes people can recognize the difference between what is impossible and what they
believe
is impossible.

The ex-humans have been appearing for twelve weeks now. Three months since the first known sighting. They have been captured, studied, and killed. There are warning posters, public service announcements, and news reports. Yet people still cling to the impossibility of the living dead even as it looms over them, attacks their homes, and devours their neighbors. Soldiers, police, and private citizens force themselves to believe the exes are just infected with some curable disease, despite all the evidence, and will not take the necessary steps. They will not accept the truth. They will not act on it.

The outbreak will not be contained. It is too late.

The world as we know it is over.

The third floor conference room in Zukor hadn’t been touched when the building was refitted as a hospital. The table was a glossy black slab surrounded by overpriced, high-backed chairs. Stealth sat at the head of the table with a casually dressed St. George to her right, Gorgon to her left in his usual body armor and duster. A handful of civilians filled the other seats, residential leaders from across the Mount and their staffs. At the far end, Doctor Connolly stood by a large flatscreen TV, tapping her laptop while comparing last minute notes with Josh.

Stealth leaned closer to St. George. “Who did you send out?”

“Luke with three mechanics, plus twelve guards,” he said. “Cerberus is backing them up.”

“They left at sunrise,” added Gorgon. “The gate’s staying in constant contact. They reached
Big Red
twenty minutes ago. No sign of the SS, no other traps. They’d just gotten the first tire done when I walked in.”

Connolly nodded to Stealth and the room grew quiet. “I know you’ve gotten regular updates,” she said, “so some of this may seem like old news to you. I just want to go over everything, because we need to change a lot of preconceived notions we’ve had until now.

“We know it’s viral. A virus that mimics leukocytes-—white blood cells--in appearance, so a visual check of the blood will miss it most of the time. We know it’s highly infectious. It’s not airborne, only passed by contact with bodily fluids, but it can survive a very long time outside a host while still in an active state. So a dead ex, stained clothes, even a dried blood smear on the wall-—all of them can transmit the virus.”

Gorgon leaned back. “That would imply almost everyone’s been exposed to the virus at one time or another.”

“Precisely,” said Connolly with a nod. “This was the big discovery that made us look at everything again. The ex-virus is more aggressive and replicates faster than anything on record. We still haven’t even figured out how it can multiply and spread so quickly. It blows Marburg and Ebola out of the water, to the point it should be a complete failure as a disease.” She paused.

One of the civilians, a bitchy former LA city councilwoman named Christian Nguyen, clicked her fingernails on the table. The chattering sound made several people flinch. “Except...?”

“Except it isn’t lethal,” said Josh without looking up.

Beneath her mask, Stealth’s expression shifted. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not lethal,” repeated Connolly. “We’ve run hundreds of tests, infected our lab rats as fast as we can breed them. The ex-virus is not a fatal contagion.”

A frumpy man with a gray beard, Richard-something, coughed. “I think there’s about five million ex-people outside who’d disagree with you,” he said, looking proud of himself.

The doctor nodded. “That’s what’s why it’s taken so long to isolate this. During the outbreaks, everyone was operating under the misconception the virus was lethal
and
somehow reanimated people. But it isn’t. It’s two separate things.”

“Wait,” said Gorgon. “How isn’t it fatal? Everyone who gets bitten dies within two or three days.”

“Yes they do,” she nodded. “Here’s where it gets interesting. You’ve all heard of the Komodo dragon, yes?”

Most of the heads in the room nodded.

“Okay, for years people thought Komodos were poisonous because their bite was so lethal. Turns out their saliva is like the agar in a Petri dish. It’s a perfect growth medium, so it’s just brimming with every bacteria and virus present in the tropics. They bite you, break the skin, and all that stuff gets shot straight into your bloodstream. Suddenly your body’s dealing with thirty or forty major infections at once.”

Stealth steepled her fingers. “And this is what exes do?”

Connolly nodded. “When a person dies, lividity sets in, and all the fluids in their body start heading down. Since they’re still standing, exes have a lot of material build up in their jaws and cheeks. The brain gets heavy blood flow, so anything in the bloodstream ends up there. The salivary glands, sinuses, and tear ducts drain out, so anything in the lymph system is there, too. Plus you’ve got all the necrotic bacteria that manifest in a dead body. And, of course the ex-virus itself. And then the ex bites you, and dumps all of that into your bloodstream.”

“But people are dying so fast,” said Christian. She spoke with the tone of a person determined to trip someone up. Her dislike of all superhumans was no secret.

“How is it possible one person could have that many diseases in them?”

“One person, no. But this is a cumulative effect. A bites B. Between blood loss, the shock of the bite, and whatever germs or viruses A just pumped in, B weakens and dies. Now B becomes an ex and bites C, but C gets both A’s and B’s diseases. When C becomes an ex, the next victim gets A, B, and C’s infections. It’s like a reverse-pyramid scheme, where every iteration gets everything the previous ones had.”

Stealth gave a faint nod. “Which is why the outbreak spread faster as it grew.”

“Right. After five or six generations of exes they each had dozens, maybe even hundreds of diseases in them. Think of Los Angeles two years ago. Imagine how many different bacteria and viruses there were in that ninety or so square mile area. The common cold. Chicken pox. Measles. Mumps. A couple strains of influenza. A few dozen different STDs. Even some folks with typhoid, Lyme disease, or malaria. You couldn’t come up with a disease that wasn’t represented in L.A. somewhere. Two months in getting bitten by an ex was like getting injected with the CDC’s wish list. Once you add an immunodeficiency disease like HIV into that mix, well...” She shrugged.

Richard-something and one of the women murmured. Gorgon swore out loud.

“If everyone in the Mount submitted to blood tests,” Connolly continued, “we’d find out the majority of us are infected with the ex-virus. It just doesn’t do anything until you die.”

Stealth tapped her fingers together. “So the early cases of people being cured?”

The doctor shook her head. “They were cured or stabilized as far as whatever other diseases they’d contracted from their bites, but... no. If and when they did die, I’d guess they still became exes. There’s no way to be sure until a bunch of people die under conventional circumstances. Our preliminary tests seem to confirm it, though.” She took a moment, weighing a thought in her mind. “I need to say... this is the final nail as far any hopes for a cure go.”