Ex-Communication: A Novel by Peter Clines Page A

frantic. Another two dozen or so moved toward the wall and joined the mob flailing for the humans on the platform.
    A block away, an arm stretched out between the bars of one of the second-story windows. It waved up and down a few times. “I’m here,” a voice yelled back. It sounded female. “They’re still all around the door.”
    “Hang on just a little longer!” Elena shouted back. “Someone’s coming soon.”
    “Okay.”
    St. George watched the arm slip back into the building. “Why didn’t you send a team out for her?”
    “We almost did,” said the bald man. “Then Derek noticed the exes.”
    The hero glanced down at the crowd of undead. “Are they doing something odd?”
    “Not exactly,” Derek said. “They’re not doing anything.”
    St. George looked out at the street for a moment and then his brow furrowed. His eyes went from the flailing exes below the platform to the ones down the street. There were at least a dozen of them in front of the white building, still milling around. “They aren’t, are they?”
    “At first we thought it might be acoustics or something, the way her voice echoes between the buildings,” said Elena. “Maybe it was confusing them. But we’ve been talking to her for two hours now, and it’s been a good hour since we started watching the exes for reactions.”
    Derek nodded. “Someone shouts at the top of their lungs, waves their arms around, and not one single zombie heads in her direction. Just seemed wrong.”
    “Yeah,” said St. George. “Good call, not going to check it out.”
    “You think it might be Legion setting up another trap?” asked Elena.
    “Doesn’t sound like him,” said the bald man. “He always talks with an accent.”
    “It better not be,” said the hero, “if he knows what’s good for him.” He took a few steps and launched himself into the air, sailing across the street. Some of the exes reached up and made feeble attempts to grab at him, even though he was well out of their reach.
    He drifted over and above the storage building so he could come at the white building from the back. The curved bars were only on the street side of the building, and it took a momentto find a second-story window that had been smashed at some point in the past few years. He spun in the air and slid into the building feetfirst.
    He was in a bedroom. A withered body stretched across the bed. It had been there for a long time, long enough St. George couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. He guessed the pistol and the dark stain on the far wall had been there just as long. Had they lost someone they couldn’t live without, the hero wondered, or just decided they didn’t want to risk the exes getting them? How long were they living here after the dead rose?
    It crossed his mind that whoever it was could’ve been here even while the heroes were setting up the Mount. Someone just a hair too far away to hear the sounds of safety, or too scared to raise their voice and call for help. He wondered, not for the first time, how many other people he’d just missed saving during the outbreak.
    The bedroom door was open and he walked out into the hall. The carpet muffled his boots. It was a small apartment. Bigger than the one he’d had before the Zombocalypse, less than a mile from here, but not by a huge amount. The far end of the hall looked like a bathroom, across from him was a kitchen. At the front of the house was a living room, or maybe another bedroom.
    A stairwell down to a ground-floor door had been blocked with an upended table and a few chairs. They weren’t dusty. It was a recent barricade.
    He heard something move, and the shadows in the living room shifted. A few strides carried him down the hall. He peeked into the room, then took a single step in.
    Across the room from him, staring out the window, was a small woman. He guessed woman from her hips and general build. She had on two or three layers of ragged, mismatched clothes, and