“And he can’t be killed,” added St. George.
“Yes. Which limits our options. Cerberus has locked him in a cell for now. I believe she wants to starve him.”
He lifted his chin. “We shouldn’t do that.”
“I agree.”
“Thank you.”
“There are larger issues to consider,” said the hooded woman. “The Seventeens are broken. We are now the only significant force left in Los Angeles.”
“How many people are still back at their little kingdom?”
“Almost nineteen thousand. Now with minimal protection and resources.”
“No way we can fit them all in the Mount.”
“None at all.”
The tallest buildings in the city were already glowing. St. George looked at the distant cluster of Century City and imagined the work crews he’d seen. “Zzzap and Cerberus could head down there,” he said. “Give them power for a while, and she’s a definite morale boost. We could get by with the generators and solar cells.”
“An adequate temporary solution. We will need a long-term one, however.”
He smiled. “If you’re saying that, it means you already have one.”
“Gower Street Studios is six blocks north of us. Ren-Mar is four blocks to the west. They are substantially smaller, but it would be possible to adapt the stages there into housing much as we did here. We could do the same with Raleigh Studios.”
“You always said Raleigh was too hard to defend. And it’s still not enough room.”
“It is a start.”
He looked at the roads outside the Mount’s walls. “You know,” he said, “we could do what they did. Use cars to block off streets. We could expand our perimeter, get all four stages inside one wall. One safe zone. It’d take some work, but we could do Sunset to Beverly, Vine to Western.”
“That would be almost a square mile. Difficult to patrol.”
“Not with another nineteen thousand people.”
“It would take close to a year.”
“Probably.”
Stealth looked out over the lot. “Do you think the general populace would be willing to begin such a project?”
“To have some hope,” he said. “A real purpose? Yeah, I think they’d all be up for that. I think they’d do almost anything so they can think the future’s going to be better.”
To the west, the night was concentrating its darkness for one last hurrah. In the east, the black had faded to dark blue and now light blue. Across the Mount a few birds chirped and sang.
“Will it be?”
“What?”
“I am not an optimist by nature, George. Will the future be better?”
He looked down at their home. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? We can sit in here and worry about what might happen or we can go out and do what we can to make a difference.” He shrugged. “We’re superheroes. We’ll make it better. That’s what we do.”
She followed his gaze and nodded. “Karen.”
“Sorry?”
The cloaked woman continued to look across the Mount as the shadows faded away. “My name is Karen.”
St. George started to open his mouth and thought better. He gave her a nod as the sun broke over the distant mountains.
“All right, then,” he said, stepping into the air. “We’ve got work to do.”
Acknowledgments
It still amazes me that a few random conversations could somehow combine with a handful of superheroes I made up in grade school to create a novel in just a few months. Let alone a novel someone else would want to read. Of course, it could not have happened so fast without some help from a few people. With that in mind, allow me to give some very heartfelt thanks …
To Ilya, who figured out how to defend a movie studio from the undead and gave me more information on how to do it than I could ever use in one book.
To Doug, who loaned me his own childhood creation, the Awesome Ape.
To the owners, staff, and players of a small world known as M’Dhoria. You wouldn’t be reading this if that world still existed, so I tried to make it live a little here.
To Jen, Larry, Gillian, and Marcus, who read early drafts of this novel, offered some thoughts, and convinced me I wasn’t entirely wasting my time. Double that thanks for David, who deserves to be paid far more than the few drinks I get to buy him when we’re in the same city.
To my mom, Sally, who read countless pages of bad sci-fi, fantasy, and Star Wars fanfic (long before such a term existed) and yet still always gave me the encouragement to keep at it. Even when it horrified her on many levels.
And finally to Colleen, the wonderful love of my life, who is always there to be a sounding board, a critic, a line editor, or to deliver either reassurances or a swift kick (depending on what the given day calls for). —P.C. Los Angeles, January 16, 2009
About the Author
Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and started writing science fiction and fantasy stories at the age of eight with his first “epic novel,” Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth . He made his first writing sale at age seventeen to a local newspaper and in the years since then he’s ghostwritten two books, published a handful of short stories, and the first screenplay he wrote got him an open door to pitch story ideas at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager . After working in the film and television industry for almost fifteen years, he wrote countless articles and reviews for Creative Screenwriting Magazine and its free CS Weekly online newsletter, where he interviewed dozens of Hollywood’s biggest screenwriters and upcoming stars. He currently lives and writes somewhere in Los Angeles.