Ex-Patriots (5 page)

The last half mile to the freeway was the
worst, even when the curving road widened out to three, then four
lanes. They’d been this way on scavenging runs before, but
Road
Warrior
was a little wider and a little longer than their other
trucks so the going was slow. They worked their way up past the big
Methodist church at Franklin and a few scavengers bowed their heads
or crossed themselves.

The big truck rolled past the parking lots
for the Hollywood Bowl and the long-dead marquees for the
amphitheater. On the center island stood a concrete memorial to the
Bowl, surrounded by long, brown grass. The electronic screens in it
were smashed to bits. Lady Bee’s gaze drifted over to the large
marquee on her left. There were two half-eaten bodies at the base
of it, gray and shriveled from the sun. Dueling vandals had
rearranged the letters and numbers into Bible passages or
obscenities. “Why are people always so determined to arrange
numbers into six-six-six?” she asked aloud.

“Because if this is hell,” Lee said, “it
means things can’t get any worse.”

A handful of exes staggered between the mess
of cars in the lot and stumbled towards the sounds of life. “Hey,”
said Jarvis. “One of them’s in a tux.” He slipped his rifle off his
shoulder and into his hand.

Paul looked where the bearded man pointed.
“Yeah, so?”

“Might be someone famous.”

“Or it might be some poor bastard who bit it
on his wedding day,” said Ilya.

Jarvis pulled a small pair of binoculars from
his bag. “Can’t tell who it is,” he muttered. He held them out to
Ilya. “Check it out for me.”

“No.”

“If it’s someone famous I need the points,
man.”

Ilya smirked. “If you can’t tell they’re
either not famous or you’re out of luck.”

“Bastard.”

“It’s nobody famous,” said Paul. He was
looking through a small telescope. “No one I recognize,
anyway.”

“Damn it,” said Jarvis. “Haven’t seen a good
celebrity in over a month.” He gestured at an alabaster statue
looming over a stagnant fountain. “Is the statue supposed to be
someone famous? Would that count?”

“It’s just a piece of rock,” said Lady Bee.
“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not just a piece of rock. Same guy who
made the Academy Award made it.”

They all looked at Hector. Ilya and Paul both
raised their eyebrows.

“What? I got ink so I can’t read a book?” The
tattooed man shook his head. “Fuck all you guys.”

The truck rolled to a stop. The road split
ahead of them. The right two lanes ran beneath an overpass and up
onto the freeway. The left two lanes were Cahuenga Boulevard. Two
roads into the Valley. The scavengers moved forward to look at the
mass of concrete.

“Sailors beware,” said Lynne. “Here be
dragons.”

St. George gave a black sports car a firm
shove, knocking it into the overgrown plants on the side of the
road. “Just like we planned,” he called to Luke. The hero pointed
up the left lanes to the Cahuenga Pass. “When I scoped it out
earlier, the southbound side seemed to be clogged the least. I’ll
clear a path through the cars. Stay about ten yards behind me.” He
looked at the scavengers on the roof of the cab. “Bee, Ilya, Lee,
keep me covered, but hold off shooting unless you’re sure I need
the help. Everyone else watch our back, make sure we don’t get
blocked—”

“Watch it!” shouted Hector.

They all saw the blur coming out of the sky
at St. George before he did. Rifles snapped up. He spun and raised
his fists just as the ex crashed into the ground. The hero leaped
into the air and gore splattered across the pavement.

“Fell off the freeway,” said Hector. He
pointed up at the overpass.

“You okay, boss?” called Ilya.

St. George settled back onto the pavement.
“Been worse,” he said. He shook a few wet clumps of meat and hair
off his boots.

“You need a moment?” asked Bee with a
smile.

“I’ll survive,” he said. “Everyone
ready?”

They nodded and saluted as he turned back to
the road. Luke revved the engine again. St. George took a few
strides forward, wrapped his arms across the hood of a green
Hyundai, and swung the car off to the side.

They headed up Cahuenga, over the hills, and
into the San Fernando Valley.

* * *

The northbound side of the road was two solid
lanes packed with cars, and the south side was only marginally
better. St. George shoved trucks and cars out of the way and tossed
motorcycles up into the bushes and trees on the south side of the
pavement. It would take him a moment to get a good grip, but he
could lift the smaller cars and stack them on top of the bigger
ones. Sometimes, if he had a clear shot, he stacked them on top of
exes.

To their right, between the automobiles that
packed the northbound side, the scavengers could look down onto all
ten lanes of Highway 101. Thousands of vehicles clogged the
Hollywood Freeway in both directions. Some had ended their
existence in crashes. Others had been gridlocked and abandoned.
They were faded and grainy, painted with over two years of
dust.

Thousands of exes stumbled between the cars.
Their skins were withered from months and months in the sun. In at
least a quarter of the vehicles, dead things pawed at windshields
or clawed the air from open doors. They’d been left prisoners of
seat belts and child locks. The endless sound of teeth echoed up
from the freeway.

The scavengers went forward yard by yard. The
sun was high overhead when they reached the top of the pass and the
road started to slope down again. Just past the crest, the
burned-out remains of a garage stood behind a fire-blackened fence.
The cinderblock walls had cracked from the heat. A charred corpse
lay near the gate, dressed in the remains of a mechanic’s coverall.
St. George hopped the fence, tapped the corpse with his boot, and
walked through the ruins.

Next door to the garage was a small fire
station, the near side seared and blackened. The rolling door had
been torn off the runners and the fire engine was gone. While St.
George checked the garage, Jarvis, Paul, and Lee searched the
building. It had been cleaned out by either civil servants or
looters. Paul found an ex in the back and took its head off with a
wide swipe of his machete.

A little farther down the road a mom-and-pop
style gas station was crammed into a tiny strip mall. There were
eight cars in a line, a pathetic attempt to barricade the plaza’s
miniscule parking lot. Both of the pumps had been vandalized. Lady
Bee pointed to the three numbers on the price signs and winked at
Lee. There was a restaurant and what looked like a psychic’s shop.
All the windows had been used for target practice until they
collapsed under their own weight. The red tile roof was shot up,
too.

Road Warrior
pulled up alongside the
line of cars and half a dozen scavengers leaped out, their armor
jingling. Billie, Ilya, and a baby-faced man named Danny moved
around to check the back of the building. Jarvis, Paul, and Lady
Bee headed for the mini-mart behind the gas pumps. Through the
broken window they could see something tall swaying back and forth
in the shadows.

St. George landed on the rooftop deck of the
big truck and waited. Under his watchful eye, a scruffy guy slipped
from the cab and moved to the loading ports for the station’s
underground tanks. He pried the metal covers off and fed a weighted
line into the opening.

Lee and an older guy named Al slid out on the
opposite side and took Hector with them. They watched up and down
Cahuenga for movement. Hector started to line up on an ex down the
road, but Lee put his hand out and guided the rifle’s barrel down.
“Hold off shooting outside until you have to,” he said. “Noise
attracts them.”

“I know that,” grumbled the tattooed man.

“How long since you’ve been out?” asked Al.
He had leathery skin, dark eyes, and a few streaks of steel in his
iron hair.

“Out?”

“Out of the Mount. Out from behind the
walls.”

“Nine months,” said Hector. “Not since the
war.”

“You go out a lot before that?”

“On and off. When I had to.”

“It’ll come back to you,” said Al. “Just
don’t get anyone killed before then.”

A muffled gunshot came from the mini-mart.
St. George looked over and Jarvis leaned out to give him an all
clear. Billie’s team returned from around the back of the building.
“Two exes,” she said.

“No problems?” asked the hero.

Ilya shook his head.

“There’s some apartments further back there,”
Billie said. “How much do you want to search?”

“Let’s stay on Cahuenga,” he said. “We’ll
have time to spread out later.”

They nodded and headed for the restaurant.
From the battered signage, St. George guessed it was an Italian
place.

“Sweet,” whistled the scruffy man. He’d moved
to the second fuel tank. “There’s about a foot down there. Could be
as much as sixty, maybe seventy gallons.” He grinned up at St.
George through nicotine teeth.

The hero nodded. “We’ll wait until everyone’s
done and then I’ll make some space for Luke to pull in. Don’t want
to draw attention too soon.”

Jarvis, Paul, and Lady Bee came back from the
store shaking their heads. “Cleaned out,” said Bee. “It’s a mess,
but there’s nothing useful.”

St. George sighed. “Well, we all knew there
was a good chance of that. It’s a main drag.” He tipped his head to
the next storefront. “You guys want to take the psychic?”

Lady Bee gave a too-sharp salute and clicked
her heels together with a smirk.

* * *

An ex stumbled across the road to them. It
had been an older man with a wiry frame and a thin mustache. It
reached out and Lee pushed it away with the tip of his rifle. “Hey,
check it out.”

Al and Hector glanced over at him.
“What?”

“It’s Vincent Price.” Lee shoved it back
again. “That’s gotta be worth major points.”

“Vincent Price is dead,” said Al.

“Well, yeah. They’re all dead.”

“He was dead before this, fuckwit,” said
Hector. “Like, twenty years ago.”

The other man scowled. “Are you sure? This
sure looks like him.”

“Sure,” nodded the tattooed man. “He’s
dead.”

“Maybe he came back anyway.”

Al shot him a look. “How the hell would he
come back anyway?”

Lee shrugged. “It’s Vincent Price. If anyone
was going to come back as a zombie it’d be him.”

“No,” said Al, “if anyone was going to come
back as a zombie it’d be Bela Lugosi. But he won’t, because he’s
dead, too.” He slid a machete from the scabbard at his side and
chopped through the ex’s neck.

* * *

“Well, that’s something y’all don’t see every
day,” said Jarvis.

At the center of the psychic’s shop stood a
round table decorated with colored scarves and cloths. Half a dozen
stubby candles had been knocked over. A crystal ball had fallen
from the tabletop and its dusty shards lay near one of the legs.
Tarot cards were scattered and turned at all angles.

An ex sat behind the table, clacking its
teeth at them. It had been a woman once, Asian by the look of her.
It was in a wheelchair. With the brakes locked, it was wedged
between the seat and the table. Rings shivered on its bony fingers
as it reached mindlessly back and forth with its hands. Every third
or fourth pass it would snag a tarot card and slide it a few inches
on the tabletop.

“Either y’all want to guess how long it’s
been sitting there like that?”

“At least two years, looking at the dust,”
said Bee. “Maybe more. She could’ve died right at the start of the
outbreak.”

“Looks like she tried to give herself one
last reading,” said Paul. “Guess she believed this stuff.” He
prodded open a small fridge with his foot and recoiled from the
smell he set loose.

“People believe a lot of crap when things get
bad,” said Jarvis. He reached out and pulled one card from the
table. The ex clawed at the metal rings of his sleeve with feeble
fingers. He held up the image of the black knight with a skull
face. “Death,” he said with a smirk. “Guess she was right on
that.”

“The death card doesn’t mean death,” said
Bee. “It means a transition. A change.”

Jarvis slid a bowie knife from his belt and
stepped behind the ex. “Well, so she was still right,” he said. He
grabbed its hair, pulled its head back, and sawed through the neck.
When he was done he tossed the skull in the corner. “Let’s see if
there’s anything good in the back room.”

* * *

As St. George predicted, the rest of the
small plaza was picked clean. The big score was the fifty-odd
gallons of gasoline. It took half an hour to pull it all up using a
small hand pump. The scavengers killed another eight exes while
they waited.

Two hours later they knew the next three
buildings had been stripped clean of useful materials, too. Another
sixteen exes dead, five of them with their necks snapped by the
hero’s bare hands. The scavengers grumbled. Things had been getting
tight in Hollywood proper, but it’d been a while since a mission
was this unsuccessful.

At Barham Boulevard they found the remains of
a National Guard roadblock. Concrete dividers were flanked with
bright yellow barrels. The water that once weighted them down was
long gone. The dividers blocked half the bridge that crossed over
the Hollywood Freeway towards Universal City. At some point a
jacked-up pickup had tried to crash through the barrier. It had
wrecked a section of the roadblock but ripped up its suspension and
a tire in the process. It sat a few yards onto the bridge. The
paint had faded in the sun and a fine coat of dust had settled
across it. Broken concrete and crumpled yellow plastic trailed
behind it.