St. George stalked along the fence line. A halo of dark smoke surrounded his head as he clenched his fists. “I should’ve let you beat it out of him,” he said. “If we knew where they were holding Barry, we could just break in there and set him free. The three of us could level this place. How could I be so damned stupid?”
Stealth walked alongside him. She’d said nothing since they left the conference room.
“You were right,” he said to her. “We shouldn’t’ve trusted them. Hell, Barry was right. The military always turns evil during a zombie apocalypse.”
“They are not evil,” she announced. “They are doing what they believe is right, in a way consistent with the training and orders they have received. I once held many of the same views myself. Over the past two years you have convinced me otherwise.”
“They’ve got Barry locked up somewhere and you don’t think that’s evil?”
“Is it so different from what we do? At the Mount he is often trapped in the electric chair for eighteen hours at a time.”
St. George shook his head. “He volunteers for that.”
“He volunteers because we have placed him in a position of unavoidable responsibility. By eating an apple and staying in the chair he can provide power to over twenty thousand citizens of Los Angeles for lights, security, cooking, entertainment, and more. If he leaves the chair, they will have none of these things.”
“It’s not the same.”
“It is, George,” she said. “It is why I had the chair built. Once it existed, I knew he would not fail us.”
“But that’s different. We’re on the fringes. We’re just trying to survive. This isn’t what it was supposed to be like. I thought...” He sighed and let another mouthful of smoke out into the air.
“What?”
He kicked at a rock and it skittered through the chainlink to hit an ex-soldier’s boot. “I guess I was like Danielle,” St. George said. “I always figured someday everything would go back to normal. Someone would drive up outside the gates and tell us everything was okay, we could all go home. I could go back to being a maintenance guy who got Thai food from the place on the corner and dressed up in a costume to fight muggers. You could go back to... whatever it was you did for a living.”
“I was a retired fashion model with multiple athletic championships and doctoral degrees,” said Stealth. “By most standards I was independently wealthy.”
“Wow,” he said after a moment. “You really are Batman, aren’t you?”
“You are avoiding the subject, George. What do we do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“We must free Zzzap and also ensure Danielle and the Cerberus suit return with us to Los Angeles. How will we do this?”
He stopped walking and looked at her. “We can’t,” he sighed. “I don’t like it either, but like you said, they’re not evil. They’re the good guys.”
“They seek to undo much of our work at the Mount and to bring a sizeable part of our population under their direct control.”
St. George glanced around. They were a few dozen yards from the closest guard tower. There was one soldier in it, half-watching them.
“It would appear we are between shifts,” she said. “There are minimal human guards on patrol to hear our discussion, and I have guided us away from the perimeter cameras and microphones.”
“Look,” he said in a lower tone of voice, “this isn’t some movie supervillain or something. It’s the United States Army, acting under orders of the President. It’s like Smith said, we’d be committing treason.”
“Would we? We cannot be traitors to a non-existent country. Are we still living within the United States?”
“Of course we are.”
“Geographically, perhaps, but a nation is defined by more than mere borders.” She turned to the fence and looked out at the dirt and scrub of the proving ground. Three exes were stumbling toward them out of the desert. “All of this land was once Native American territory, correct?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
“Suppose an individual came to you claiming to be the representative of that territory. If they demanded you follow their laws and obey their commands, would you?”
“Are we on a reservation or something?”
“No.”
“Then I’d probably be as polite as possible but keep following the current laws as best I could.”
She nodded. “Just as you have at the Mount.”
They looked out at the sand for a few minutes. A trio of exes pawed at the outer fence. One was a topless woman with clotted filth in her hair. Another, an elderly man with one arm, had a pair of spectacles hanging around his neck by a chain.
“I feel sick.”