Ex-Patriots by Peter Clines Read Free Book Online Page A

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