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.
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!”