St. George nodded. “Let’s get word to him then.”
“It is unlikely Legion will make another attempt tonight,” said Stealth. She holstered her weapons and focused on the crowd of exes below. “His demonstrated impatience and the mix of headgear imply this was the majority of his scavenged armor, possibly all of it.”
St. George raised a skeptical brow. “Are you sure?”
“He has never returned in less than five hours once he has been driven back. It is more likely he may strike at another part of the Wall, but I would say the odds are against that as well.”
“So, is this what things are going to be like now?” asked the thin woman. “Because this sucked.”
Stealth’s expression was hidden beneath the blank fabric of her mask. Her body language was another story. St. George had known her long enough to see the subtle signs.
“Okay,” he said, “if you’ve got this in hand, Captain, we’ll leave you guys to it and get back to our patrol.”
Freedom gave them a quick salute. St. George held out his hand and Stealth grabbed his wrist without a word. He focused on a spot between his shoulder blades and rose into the air. He lifted the woman and they shot into the sky, her cloak billowing behind them.
St. George sailed up to the top of the half-finished building at this corner of the Big Wall. If the world hadn’t ended it would’ve been an office building or apartments by now. Instead, it was a framework of rusted girders and sheetrock. It gave them a good view of the north and west sides of the Wall.
Stealth lowered herself onto one of the beams. She held onto his hand even though her balance was perfect. She had a firm grip. St. George hung in the air near her, his fingers threaded between hers. “You’ve been expecting something like this, haven’t you?”
“I have,” she said. “It was only a matter of time before Legion realized he could use the resources of the city to outfit the exes. This will complicate matters for a time. Our ammunition stores are strained as it is.”
“But you’ve already planned for it?”
“I have.”
“So what’s bothering you?”
“Before the assault, Captain Freedom detained three teenagers attempting to steal a car.”
“So?”
“Petty crime has risen almost ten percent in the past few months since the Big Wall was completed. It is a distraction we do not need now that Legion has discovered these new assets.”
“Yeah, but it’s a good sign, in a way,” said St. George. “If we’re getting big enough to start having a crime problem, it means we’ve got a pretty sizable population. Things are getting better overall.”
All around the Big Wall, and as far as they could see, figures shuffled and stumbled in the streets. The sound of their teeth popped and cracked in the night like a hundred distant bonfires. Even at night, St. George could see thousands of them, and he knew there were thousands more out there in the darkness. Stealth said there were just over five million exes in Los Angeles. In three years he hadn’t seen anything to make him think otherwise.
At the best, every one of them was a mindless machine with no purpose past killing and feeding. A pack of ten could strip a person to bones in less than half an hour. At the worst, the undead were harboring Legion.
Stealth shook her head inside her hood. “As always,” she said, “you are an optimist.”
“Well, what is it they say?” St. George shrugged. “ ‘Better the devil you know …’ ”
THE ARROW ON my GPS was starting to turn, but the road looked like it was turning with it. We’d been driving for about an hour at that point. Neither of us said much. We didn’t speak the same language, so it wasn’t that surprising.
My driver, Nikita (named after Khrushchev, his manager had told me), was an inch taller than me, maybe twice as wide, and with a permanent scowl cutting across his stubble. Picture every stereotypical Russian you’ve ever seen. The reason it’s the stereotype is because so many of them look like that. Nikita’s one of them. The scent of cloves hung on him like cologne, but he had the good manners not to light one up while we were in the car together.
To be honest, we tried to talk a couple times. I think that’s just human nature. We’ve got another person next to us, so we feel obligated to say something. Every now and then I’d ask about our progress or part of the landscape or offer to show him the GPS so he could get his bearings. Once I tried asking about the weather. “It’s a lot warmer than I expected,” I said. “Is it always this warm here in the summer or is this a global warming thing?”
Half the time he’d ignore me. The other half he’d turn and reply with a few sentences. Or maybe one sentence with some really long words. I can’t even speak a few words of Russian on my own, so it was hard to tell. Once, he delivered a long, impassioned speech about … something. Maybe a tree we passed that he grew up with or something. I have no idea.
It wouldn’t’ve taken much to speak Russian, granted. There’s a tattoo on my Adam’s apple for just that sort of thing, and one behind each earlobe. But a lot of the stuff we were carrying was very sensitive and I couldn’t risk it getting tainted by other energies.
So, anyway, when I’d tried to hire a guide, I hadn’t thought to ask for someone who spoke English. It’d been hard enough explaining the location I wanted to the guy at the agency.
“Here,” I told him, pointing at the map. “That’s where I want to go.”
The tour guide manager was a skinny man who reeked of cigarettes. His fingers were yellow. I got the sense they’d been a regular part of his diet for years. He looked
