Big Red was parked next to the guard shack. It was a twenty-four foot truck that had been used for hauling set dressing back when the Mount was in the movie business. The new residents had cannibalized and customized it for scavenging runs. They’d chopped off most of the box and built a new frame for it, making it into a gigantic pick-up. It had a backup gas tank, a winch, and a cow catcher that had served as a battering ram once or twice. The double-cab sat four, another six rode in the bed, and a steel grill let two more ride on top of the cab. A petite woman with yellow and black stripes in her short hair was already there, seated on an old couch cushion. Lady Bee had an M-16 slung over her shoulder and a tactical holster strapped to one thigh. Someone once told St. George she’d been a movie costumer in the old days. She blew him a kiss as he walked past the truck.
Luke Reid was at the wheel, as always. He was a blond, broad-shouldered Teamster who used to drive trucks for a living before everything went south. St. George saw Jarvis in Big Red’s back, along with Ty O’Neill, Billie Carter, Ilya, and a few others he sort of recognized. They all gave him salutes and determined nods. Barry was already asleep in the giant truck bed, stretched out on a thick pile of furniture blankets with his wheelchair strapped to the wall next to him.
St. George walked up to the Melrose Gate and stopped a few feet away from the dozens of grasping hands reaching and clawing between the bars. The exes had the gate mobbed, as they always did. It was the only place they could still see into the Mount, see all the succulent, tasty people standing inside.
Although, no one was sure if exes could see anymore.
Almost no one used the word zombie. They’d been “exes” since the first presidential press conference. It made them easier to accept, somehow. The ex-living. Ex-people. Most of them still looked human. Usually the uninjured ones and the newer ones that hadn’t fed.
The former citizens of Los Angeles reached for St. George with discolored, rotting fingers. He could hear their joints pop as they moved. Dozens of jaws hinged open and closed, clicking their dark teeth together.
A curly-haired blonde whose mouth was caked with gore. A bald man with a gashed scalp and one ear. On opposite ends of the gate were a man and a woman in running clothes. By the left hinge, next to the female runner, was one with a face scoured down to the bare bone. A teenaged boy with a Transformers shirt and a clotted stump where his left hand should’ve been. A grandmotherly woman in a business suit stiff with blood. A black man near the break in the gate who stood still and stared back at St. George with blank eyes.
Their skin was anywhere from sidewalk gray to white, sometimes colored with dark purple bruises. Their eyes were all dull and faded, like cloudy glass. Many of them were just worn out. Flesh dry and cracking from months in the sun. Covered with injuries that would never heal but could never kill them.
St. George didn’t recognize any of them. That always made it easier.
A huge blue and platinum statue thudded over to stand next to him. His head didn’t even reach the stars and stripes stenciled across its armored biceps. The titan’s androgynous lines made it hard to think of as anything but an 'it', even knowing there was a woman inside. She looked down at the hero with bright lenses the size of tennis balls. “You know I hate doing this, right?”
He nodded. “You’ve mentioned it.”
Cerberus turned her gaze to the crowd of exes. “Just so you remember on the day I finally snap. Where’s Barry?”
“Asleep in the truck. You charged up?”
The armored figure gave a clumsy dip of her head. The Cerberus Battle Armor System wasn’t built for subtlety. Of course, she hadn’t built it with subtlety in mind. Even without the M-2’s mounted on her arms, Cerberus could take on almost anything left in the world. St. George had seen the nine-foot battlesuit rip a vault door off its hinges, lift a cement truck, and wade through a swarm of exes without scuffing the paint.
The guards had already unlocked the gate’s four reinforcing legs, and Derek and Carl stood waiting on either end of the long pipe resting across the Melrose Gate.
“Everyone ready?” shouted St. George. “Gate? Luke? Guards?”
They all nodded.
He leaped into the air and soared over the archway. As he sank back to street level outside the gate, his foot lashed out and an ex flew back. He grabbed two more by their necks and hurled them across the six-lane street.
The exes sensed life and the mob closed on him. Hands grabbed at him. Bony arms wrapped around his neck. A faceless thing that may have been a woman once bit down on his arm and lost two teeth.
St. George seized a wrist, swung the dead thing in a wide circle, and knocked down half a dozen more before launching it into the air. It clanged into the stoplight over the intersection. He slammed his palm into a breastbone and the ex flew back through some bushes into a wall. Another tried to grab his calf as it crawled to its feet and his boot broke its spine just above the shoulder blades.
“Still creeps me out, watching that,” said Derek.
Carl stared out at the battle. “Seeing them pile on him?”
“Seeing them not do anything to him.”
“Open it up,” barked the battlesuit. Cerberus clenched her three-fingered hands into fists as big as footballs.