Ex-Communication

Twenty-One Now

LEGION FOUND HIMSELF in a dead man, wandering in the middle of a tree-lined residential street. Small houses and one or two apartment buildings. He glanced around and looked through the eyes of a dead woman at the end of the block. The street sign said Stetson, like the hat.

He expanded his view, spreading out across another dozen or so exes until he saw a few more nearby street names. Walnut. Harkness. Colorado. He saw big buildings framing a campus and the sign for Pasadena City College. He was about twenty-five miles away from the Big Wall, way out past Glendale.

His attention focused him into a new body, a heavyset Samoan stumbling through a store parking lot off Colorado. The dead man was intact except for a few scrapes and cuts. And one dead eye. He reached up to check the socket and realized it was made of glass. It’d be fine for now.

Legion looked around the parking lot. The store had faded pink awnings with a “99” logo on them. There were a dozen dusty cars parked at different angles. One of them was T-boned into another, totaling both. A driver’s side door hung open, and he saw old blood splattered on the passenger seat. A primer-colored muscle car sat halfway through the store’s big window next to the double doors. Purple shopping carts were scattered everywhere. Some had drifted with random winds, others were tipped on their sides like dead animals.

He glared at another ex in the parking lot. It was an older woman with a wrinkled face and a pair of bullet holes in her chest. “What the fuck,” he asked her, “happened back there?”

The dead woman stared at him for a moment, then staggered into the side of a pickup truck.

For a moment he considered looking back at the Mount. There were almost ten thousand exes within a block of the Big Wall. He could sense them in a basic way, like someone knowing they were wearing shorts or going commando without checking. He just knew where they were, all through the city. It wouldn’t take much effort to reach over and see through their eyes.

Whatever attacked him had taken his exes away, though. One moment they’d been there, the next minute a bunch of them were gone. He could still see them, but it was like part of him had gone numb, like a cripple looking at legs that weren’t part of him anymore. They’d become something else.

And “something else” had kicked the shit out of him.

When the first one jumped on him he thought it was the Dragon’s new trick. Somebody with telepathic-ness or whatever you called moving stuff with your mind. But none of the Dragon’s people were that savage. Even when Stealth fought, she was intense, but never sadistic.

It was fast and brutal and ruthless, like wrestling with a hungry pit bull. A smart, hungry pit bull crossed with a piranha. He’d thrown more exes at it and it had fought back with more of its own.

Legion didn’t have a real body anymore. He hadn’t had one for a year and a half now. It had freaked him out at first. He even came close to crying once. Real men still cried now and then. Not often, but it happened.

But then he realized he’d become something bigger than just Rodney Cesares or Peasy. He’d become untouchable. Yeah, he didn’t have a body anymore. He had millions of bodies, every one of them tireless and numb to pain.

Numb until today, anyway. Whatever was using the other exes had hurt him. A lot. He’d felt every body get slashed and torn apart. And for a few moments it had held him there, like holding a geek’s forehead and watching them swing useless punches. He hadn’t been able to shift away.

He hadn’t been able to do anything.

Legion kicked one of the purple shopping carts and it rolled a few feet across the parking lot. He stalked over, slammed his foot into it again, and watched it bang into the side of a Lexus. Another kick raised a few wisps of dust and chipped some paint off the car.

He was pretty sure the thing at the Mount would’ve killed him. He didn’t know how, but he felt it in his gut. If he’d stayed there it would’ve torn him apart. Somehow.

The thing that’d saved him in the end was the other exes were changing too fast. They didn’t have time to do much damage. They got tall and sprouted fangs and claws, like werewolves or something—enough to fuck up a regular person, easy. And then they’d pop open like hot dogs in a microwave and fall apart. There’d been a break and he’d thrown himself away, like diving off a bridge. He didn’t care where he ended up, as long as he wasn’t there.

It was kind of familiar, what the other exes had been turning into, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe something from back during his months in the Army when they were pumping him and a bunch of other grunts full of drugs to make them bigger and stronger. There’d been a bunch of weird stuff going on then.

Legion picked up the shopping cart. The dead Samoan had slablike muscles that still had plenty of strength in them. He got the cart over his head, roared, and slammed it down on the windshield of the Lexus. The glass spiderwebbed from side to side. He picked the cart back up and slammed it down again. The windshield collapsed in across the dashboard and driver’s seat. He tried to drag it out, but one of the wheels had hooked on the steering wheel.

He growled and drove his fist through the driver’s-side window. Then he brought both fists down on the roof and dented it in. He kicked the door and slammed punches into the hood and yanked at the cart until he’d deformed the steering wheel and knocked the last few bits of glass from the windshield frame.

Truth be told, he was bored as shit most of the time. Even with the extra effort it took, big projects like looting the National Guard armory or gathering up all the armor and guns and ammo in the city didn’t take long when you had a hundred thousand bodies doing it. At least once a week he fucked up a car, just for the hell of it. Sometimes a house or an apartment building. He’d trashed half the food court over in the Glendale Galleria during one angry weekend.

After a couple of minutes of violence he calmed down and looked at the car. He’d messed it up pretty good. The roof was beat down, and the hood was pretty messed up. He’d smashed all the windows, one of the headlights, and most of the instruments on the dashboard.

The Samoan’s hands were ruined, too. The fingers were broken and the flesh had ripped away from the knuckles. The foot he’d kicked the door with was pretty messed up. He focused on a skeletal little girl across the parking lot and shifted into her. He watched the Samoan stagger on its bad foot for a few steps before it fell over. The dead thing flailed on the pavement for a minute or so before it rolled over and crawled off.

Legion let his view flow out again for a moment, drifting through the Samoan’s head for a few seconds, and then focused himself inside an older man in the middle of Colorado Boulevard. It was a big guy with a beard and loose skin. Legion liked being big. It reminded everyone he was strong.

Little soul .

He spun around and staggered. He’d picked an old guy with a bad knee. Maybe a whole bad leg, and being dead hadn’t helped it any. He forced the body up straight.

Nobody behind him. He thought he’d heard a voice, a buzz in the air like glow-boy from the Mount. He had a lot on his mind, though. He’d already written off what had happened earlier and was ready to start planning his next assault.

How interesting you are, little soul .

This time Legion reached out to look through a dozen sets of eyes. He saw himself in the old man, and a heavyset woman with a missing hand, and a teenage boy, and a slim woman whose face and hair had been burned off at some point.

There was no one around who wasn’t him. He stayed in all the bodies and marched across the street. He looked in cars and behind bus stops and in the small patio of a Starbucks.

He wasn’t sure if he’d heard the voice or just imagined it. It sounded damned close, though. And warm. Not warm in a good way, but warm like sick with the shakes.

Little Rodney Cesares. Son of Juan and Gabrielle. Once so great in body, now a living soul with no flesh around it. How fascinating .

“Okay,” called Legion. He found two exes up on the roof of a thrift store and one trapped on a balcony with a high railing. He looked down on the street through their eyes. “That you, Zap-man? Where you at, hijo de puta ?”

Nothing. He couldn’t see anyone anywhere. He reached out and guided a few more exes down to the intersection. Thirty different views, but nothing.

“You think you can hide from me?” The dead took in a breath and shouted in the street, “I’M LEGION! I’M EVERYWHERE!”

The words echoed on the street for a moment. Then silence settled down across the street and coated everything. The air grew still.

Do you take the name of Legion in vain, little soul?

He poured himself back into the old man with the bad knee and grinned. “I am Legion, bitch,” he growled at the air. “I’m death incarnate. I’m the guy who killed the world.”

He had the unmistakable sense of someone standing right behind him. Behind all of him. Every ex within his reach felt a warm prickling on their backs and shoulders, a faint pull on the eyes. All his bodies looked around and saw nothing, but the feeling remained.

You insult the great name of my sibling with your ignorance and arrogance. Perhaps a lesson in humility is in order. If nothing else, it should relieve my boredom while I await my new vessel .

Legion rolled his fingers up into tight fists. All of the walking dead within three blocks copied him, guided by his anger. “Oh, yeah?” he spat. “Fucking coward. Come out here and give it your best shot.”

And a few moments later, every ex in Los Angeles County screamed at once.