Ex-Communication: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

almost a dozen feet thick. They’d built it by pushing cars together and stacking them one on top of another. It had been long, tedious work, with dozens of men and women holding off the exes while dozens more pushed vehicle after vehicle into line. Most of them had flat tires, and it was like forcing the cars through thick mud to move them. Even with help from the heroes, and then later from the super-soldiers of Project Krypton, it had taken just short of a year to build. When they’d finished, an industrious little boy had informed St. George the Big Wallhad exactly six thousand seven hundred and eighty-one cars in it. Stealth had told the boy he was off by two.
    There wasn’t anything near the wall the guards could use for shelter, though. It took only one rainy night in late February for them to realize that. The shack at the intersection of Melrose and Vine was for whoever was posted at the West Gate. There were still three more to build, one at each gate.
    St. George beamed at the structure as Jennifer climbed down her ladder. He glanced over his shoulder at the crowd. “Oh, come on.” He nodded at the shack. “You people know what this is? This is the first new building in Los Angeles in three years.”
    There was a quiet moment as they all stared at the little structure.
    Hiram Jarvis cleared his throat. The lanky man had a dark beard streaked with premature white and gray. “Thank God,” he said. “The housing market’s finally bounced back.”
    They all smiled. A chuckle danced through the crowd. “Time to invest,” called out Makana. The chuckles broke into applause. They all clapped this time. A few people hugged each other.
    It was good to see a crowd of people smiling, thought St. George. It didn’t happen often enough. He pounded his own hands together.
    The applause grew for a moment and then stumbled. A few people kept clapping, but the sound was off. St. George followed the dull thwack through the shifting crowd to the gate.
    The East Gate was two big arrays of vertical steel pipes just inches apart. It was strong enough to stop a speeding car. The goal was to eventually get both sides of it covered with chain-link fencing to keep the undead from reaching through. A double set of bars stretched across the panels to hold them in place, one at chest height and the other two feet off the ground.
    On the other side of the gate, a baker’s dozen of exes slapped their hands together. They all wore the same expression, wideeyes and a grin that was close to a sneer. As St. George got closer he could see the unhealing wounds marking all of the undead. One of the men was missing an eye. Another one slapped his hand against the ragged stump of his other wrist. There was a woman with gorgeous features who only had a few scrapes and bruises, and another who was little more than bones wrapped in papery skin. All of them had pale flesh and dull eyes. They kept clapping.
    “Things are lookin’ good in there,
esse
,” one of them said to St. George. It was the dead man with the missing hand. The ex beat the stump against its palm. “Lookin’ really good.”
    Twin trailers of smoke rose out of St. George’s nose. “You want something, Rodney?”
    The applause stopped. “I told you,” said the dead man before the other exes joined it in one voice, “DON’T CALL ME RODNEY. IT’S LEGION, DAMNIT!”
    “Whatever.”
    Half of the exes wandered away from the gate and milled about like the rest of the undead. Their jaws moved up and down, banging their teeth together. The ones left glared at St. George. The one-handed man tapped his knuckles against one of the pipes, and the other exes mirrored the gesture along the gate. “Someday soon, dragon man, I’m gonna get in there. You know it’s coming. You won’t be acting so smart then.”
    “Someday isn’t today,” said St. George. He spat out a burst of flame through the fence.
    The exes took a step back, then held their ground. It wasn’t enough fire