Ex-Communication

Twenty-Six Now

MADELYN’S BICYCLE SKIDDED to a stop and she double-checked the address. Hector had run a piece of duct tape down the arm of her jacket and written out the street number with a fat Sharpie marker. “Don’t want you getting halfway there and forgettin’ where you’re going,” he’d said. He’d also given her a few map pages from something called a Thomas Guide that lined up to show her the route out of Hollywood and into the Valley.

It hadn’t been hard to convince him to help her. Despite her mom’s constant warnings, Madelyn was pretty sure not everyone in Los Angeles with a tattoo would slit your throat if you asked a question or flashed your headlights to remind them theirs were off. Hector de la Vega was gruff, and he stared at her boobs just a little too long for her liking, but he got the urgency of the mission a little more than St. George did. Hector had a cross on each arm, and the numbers of a Bible verse on his collarbone. She wondered if he was religious and had a better idea of what the demon represented.

By the same token, she was also pretty sure Hector wouldn’t be too broken up if she never came back. She’d seen the big man recoil when his fingers brushed the back of her hand. Nobody liked the feel of dead flesh, and he’d been one of the ones giving her looks at the big meeting.

Getting out of the Mount hadn’t been half as hard as she thought it’d be. It reminded her of a line from an old Houdini movie her mom loved—had loved. Nobody made safes to keep people from breaking out of them. She’d scaled the Wall while the guards were facing the other way and slipped down into the crowd of exes below. It’d been creepy as hell, being surrounded by them, but it wasn’t any worse than a school hallway between classes. Hundreds of people around you but not one of them seeing you while they moved. They jostled her, but none of them reacted to her.

Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the invisible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel like to catch fire and explode.

It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.

“I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”

She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.

Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.

She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.

Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.

Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.

Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.

An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.

It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.

The dead thing had the same jaw and cheekbones as Hector. She decided right then to say she hadn’t seen any sign of the old man. She wouldn’t want to know her family was still walking around.

She left the ex standing in the driveway and walked through the gate. There was a flowerbed that had grown out into the small yard. A few cobblestones in the grass led up to the big wooden door. It swung open when she pushed on it.

She was looking for a wooden box three feet long and eight or nine inches square. It was padlocked shut. Hector thought it might have a little plaque on the lid, but he couldn’t remember for sure.

The cottage was small, and there weren’t too many places to hide something that size. Madelyn looked in both closets, under the bed, then went through each drawer of the dresser. She checked under the couch and behind the washer and dryer.

There was a loft above the washer, but it was just filled with dusty paperbacks. Hector’s grandfather had loved science fiction. She wondered how he’d felt when the dead started to walk.

The fridge was disgusting. The kitchen cabinets were jammed full of pots and pans of every size and a huge selection of dishes. She even looked in the dishwasher. Someone had run it before the end of the world. The glasses and silverware were still sparkling clean.

The cottage didn’t have a basement, which seemed weird to her. Growing up on the East Coast, almost everybody had a cellar. It just felt like the old man’s home was missing something important.

There wasn’t a real attic, either. She found a small hatch in the ceiling of the bedroom and got up into it with a footstool from the kitchen. Twenty minutes convinced her there was nothing but old clothes and Christmas decorations up there.

Madelyn checked her watches. She’d spent an hour biking into the Valley, and another hour searching the house so far. According to watch number two, sundown was in ninety-three minutes. And Max’s deadline was in four hours.

There was a small shed in the backyard, one of the ones that looked like a big Tupperware container, but it was nothing but garden tools and a lawn mower. She even tipped over a few bags of potting soil and fertilizer to make sure the box wasn’t hidden behind them. Nothing in the tight gap between the shed and the backyard fence, either.

Even though the garage was connected to the cottage, it didn’t have a connecting door. She tugged on the big door but it was locked. Or maybe the motor was holding it shut. She walked around the garage and found a side door opposite the cottage. It was also locked.

A quick trip back inside let her find the basket by the door. It had a very overdue parking ticket, some loose change, two key rings, and a small remote with a single button on it. Madelyn squeezed the remote a few times before she remembered the power had been off for a few years at this point.

Back outside she started testing the key ring against the door. Hector’s grandfather had shuffled down the driveway and found a friend. A tall ex with a plaid shirt and a limp. They’d bumped shoulders and were turning together in a creepy slow dance. They didn’t notice her or the sound of jingling keys.

And how is that, she wondered. There was a certain logic to them filtering her out, but shouldn’t they see and hear other things she had contact with? Were the exes seeing an empty suit of clothes walking around, or a set of keys floating in the air, or did the filter have range?

The first key she tried on the second ring fit the door. She glanced at her watches again. Fifteen minutes trying to get into the garage. If she didn’t find the box soon, it’d be dark by the time she got back to the Mount. She pushed the door open.

The garage was a lot like hers back home, an example of controlled chaos. A huge Lincoln filled most of the space. There was a trio of bikes parked—stacked, really—against the back wall. Metal shelves held some canned food, jars of nails and screws, a plastic toolbox, and a few more paperback books. It looked like Piers Anthony and Alan Dean Foster had been banished from the loft. An upright piano stood under a drop cloth and some empty flowerpots. An old painting—a guy with a mustache and a sash—hung on one wall next to a pair of rakes and a folding ladder.

Madelyn pulled everything off the piano and opened the lid. She pressed her hands against the Lincoln’s windows and looked in the backseat. She got down on all fours and looked under the car. It wasn’t until she climbed back to her feet that she bothered to look up.

Just like her own mom and dad, Hector’s grandfather had saved space by putting stuff up in the garage’s rafters. He’d even wrestled a sheet of plywood up there to use as a huge shelf. She could see suitcases, old boxes, and what looked like a big stuffed bear.

Stretched between two of the beams, right over the big door, was something wrapped in a black trash bag. It was about three feet long.

It took her a minute to get the ladder off the wall, and another two to get it in front of the Lincoln. As she was trying to set it down, one of the legs swung up and broke the Lincoln’s tail light. Nobody would ever know, but she still felt bad. She kicked out the ladder’s legs and climbed up to the top. It wobbled a little, but she’d never been scared of heights.

A few tugs and the plastic bag came loose. The box was dark wood, just like Hector had said, with narrow iron hinges. It looked old. She slid one side free and let the whole thing settle into her arms. It took a moment to get her balance and then she worked her way back down the ladder without using her hands.

The box reminded her of a coffin, even though she’d only been to one funeral in her whole life. There was a crest engraved in the lid with a few words in Spanish—she’d studied French in school. There was a latch made from the same black iron as the hinges. The padlock on the latch, however, was steel and new.

Madelyn looked around the garage for a minute and found the plastic toolbox. There was a flathead screwdriver right on the top tray and a hammer underneath that. She pushed the screwdriver through the padlock’s hasp and whacked it with the hammer. The screwdriver slipped loose and spun across the garage. She chased after it, repositioned, and pounded a few more times. The padlock didn’t budge, but the latch tore free from the wood. It made her pause for a moment, then she beat on the screwdriver a few more times until the box cracked and the latch ripped away.

She heard a thump behind her and spun around. Grandfather de la Vega and the other ex were pressed against the garage door, their heads framed in the large windows. Well, the top of grandfather’s head. The wood muffled their clicking jaws. Another ex, a skinny woman in a dress, stumbled up the driveway behind them.

Less than an hour until sundown. She needed to get moving. She threw open the box and tossed aside an old black sheet that had been folded over the contents. And there was the sword.

After seeing the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie she’d convinced her parents to let her take fencing lessons. It’d been a huge letdown. Junior-level fencing wasn’t as action-packed as the movies made it out to be, and competition-legal foils just didn’t measure up to the gorgeous sword Orlando Bloom had made for Commodore Norrington or the one Inigo Montoya’s father had made for the six-fingered man.

This sword did, though. She didn’t know anything about weapons but she could tell this was a piece of art. There weren’t any fancy jewels or gold or anything, but it was still beautiful. The blade was thin and covered with hundreds of curls and scrolls that reminded her of her dad’s paisley ties. Above the handle—the hilt, she remembered—was a circle of metal, curved down to guard the hand. It was cut and engraved to look like an elaborate flower. A thick rod of metal stretched side to side beneath the circle, and a matching one curved down to make the knuckle guard.

She wrapped her fingers around the hilt and lifted it out of the box. It was a little heavier than she’d expected, but it balanced in her hand really well. There were a few faint nicks on the blade, but they’d been ground down and polished out. The sword had been used a lot, but somebody had taken care of it. The edge was still sharp.

“Corpse Girl for the win,” she said with a smile.

Another thump convinced her to get moving. There wasn’t any scabbard or anything in the box, so she hiked up her coat and slid the sword through her belt. It was a little awkward, but she was pretty sure she’d be able to ride a bike with it.

Grandpa and his tall friend ignored her and kept trying to walk through the garage door. The female ex stood in the middle of the driveway as if lost in thought. There was a stringy piece of something caught in her teeth and it flapped up and down as her jaw moved.

Madelyn swung her leg over the bike and edged the kickstand up with her foot. As an afterthought, she reached out and tugged the gate closed. The exes twitched when the latch connected, but none of them made a move toward her. She guided the bike past the dead woman and back down to the street.

She peeled the tape off her sleeve and took another look at the Thomas Guide pages. Just over three hours until Max’s deadline. A lot of the trip into the Valley had been uphill. Hopefully the way back would be faster.