St. George looked around and spotted a trio of exes closing in on a pair of firefighters as they fell back toward the Big Wall. He grabbed the headless body at his feet, pulled back, and hurled it at the three dead people. It spun twice in the air and knocked them to the ground. One fell headfirst into a patch of fire, and the stench of burning hair washed across the street before being overwhelmed by the smoke.
He marched over to the fallen trio and twisted their skulls around until their necks snapped. The teeth kept clicking, but the bodies went limp. He wiped his hands on his jeans, heard a scream, and moved toward it.
Before St. George got there another figure leaped forward. Specialist Kurt Taylor, one of Freedom’s men. The one with the shaved head and the mouth. He was another super-soldier from Project Krypton, but an earlier version, not even half as powerful as the captain.
A retreating firefighter had tripped over his equipment, and his two companions tried to untangle him before a pair of exes closed in on them. Taylor shoved both of the exes hard, and as he did something across the back of his hands gleamed in the flickering orange light. A vicious roundhouse punch exploded one zombie’s skull. Taylor’s other arm swung around, spraying teeth and bone from the other ex across the road.
He glanced back at St. George and grinned. Like most things Taylor did, it didn’t seem very nice. He held up his hand and revealed the thick bands of metal across his fingers. “Fucking awesome or what?” he said. “Grade-A zombie dusters, that’s what these are.”
St. George bit back a frown at the man’s glee. “Can’t you hit them hard enough already?”
Taylor’s face shifted, flitting between three or four emotions before St. George could identify them and then settling back into a sneer. “You can never hit those fuckers too hard.”
To emphasize the point, he turned, batted aside the grasping hands of a dead Latina, and drove a punch into its exposed shoulder. The bones sagged and the arm flopped to its side. He crippled the other arm and threw an uppercut that sent a swarm of teeth into the air. His last punch slammed into the ex’s forehead and caved in the skull.
Taylor lifted his brass-knuckled fists to the sky and howled. St. George sighed and watched the firefighters stumble away. “Make sure everyone’s falling back,” he told Taylor, then pushed himself back into the air.
He spotted a small pack of exes shambling toward a last group of firefighters and landed in front of them. He spread his arms wide and walked. A teenaged girl with a trio of arrows in her torso bumped into his shoulder, snapped her teeth at his face, and then staggered back as he kept walking forward. A man in a scorched Yummy Donuts uniform was next, then a brown and black figure that had been burned beyond any kind of identification. St. George kept walking and gathered an elderly woman with an empty eye socket, a half-charred little boy in a baseball shirt, and another blackened corpse. They all stumbled and tripped as he pushed them back, then collapsed in a heap on top of each other. He bent down and twisted their skulls around one by one, listening to the click of teeth and the crack of spinal bones.
Another call for a drop. He flew back to the Big Wall and grabbed a tall blue recycling bin swollen with over fifty gallons of water. He caught a glimpse of Madelyn switching her hose to a new barrel before he soared back into the smoke.
He remembered Sally T’s instructions and poured his water over a burning grapefruit tree away from the burning homes. The branches spat and hissed and sputtered, but the flames vanished. So did some on the ground around the tree.
His next drop went onto the roof of one of the salvageable houses, and the third went down its chimney to soak the first floor. The next barrel traced a thick line across the fire’s west flank and knocked down two exes, extinguishing one of them. He carried each of the last two barrels back over to the south side of the fire, soaking trees and rooftops and lawns.
A yell echoed behind him, the all-clear. Everyone was back inside the Wall with what sounded like zero casualties. St. George landed and stamped out a few small embers before they could grow on a dry patch of grass. He backhanded an ex as it reached for him. Its jaw crumbled against his knuckles, the skull collapsed, and the dead thing crumbled to the ground.
The flames didn’t light up as much of the night as they had half an hour ago. The air didn’t smell quite as smoky. He didn’t know much about fighting fires, but it seemed like they might have this one under control. “Contained”—that’s how Sally T would put it.
He hoped contained was going to be enough, but he was pretty sure it was too late.
St. George launched himself back into the air.
“IT WAS A disaster,” George told me. “A complete disaster.”
The fourth-floor room we stood in had once been an executive boardroom. I planned to use it as a base of operations. It was centrally located within the film studio, had an existing fiber-optic net within the walls, and had access to several of the physical resources I would need.
Ambient light from outside lit the room, although at seventeen minutes before sundown this created several shadows as well. A map of the film studio and a larger one of the surrounding area were spread out across the boardroom’s oversized table, an ostentatious slab of marble. I also had blueprints and
