Ex-Isle, Peter Clines [ebook smartphone .TXT] 📗
- Author: Peter Clines
Book online «Ex-Isle, Peter Clines [ebook smartphone .TXT] 📗». Author Peter Clines
ALSO BY PETER CLINES
Ex-Heroes
Ex-Patriots
Ex-Communication
Ex-Purgatory
The Fold
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Peter Clines
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Broadway Books and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clines, Peter, 1969-
Ex-isle / by Peter Clines. — First edition.
pages ; cm. — (Ex-Heroes ; book 5)
ISBN 978-0-553-41831-6 (softcover) — ISBN 978-0-553-41832-3 (ebook)
1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Superheroes—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L563E95 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015033148
ISBN 9780553418316
eBook ISBN 9780553418323
Title page illustration by STILLFX/Shutterstock.com
Cover illustration by Jonathan Bartlett
Series design by Christopher Brand
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Peter Clines
Title Page
Copyright
A Quick Note About Time
Prologue: Now
Survivor’s Guilt: Then
Chapter Two: Now
Chapter Three: Now
Chapter Four: Now
Chapter Five: Now
Chapter Six: Now
Chapter Seven: Now
Chapter Eight: Now
Chapter Nine: Now
Chapter Ten: Now
Chapter Eleven: Now
Point of View: Then
Chapter Thirteen: Now
Chapter Fourteen: Now
Chapter Fifteen: Now
The Honeymoon Is Over: Then
Chapter Seventeen: Now
Chapter Eighteen: Now
Chapter Nineteen: Now
Chapter Twenty: Now
Opportunity Rocks: Then
Chapter Twenty-two: Now
Chapter Twenty-three: Now
Chapter Twenty-four: Now
Chapter Twenty-five: Now
Chapter Twenty-six: Now
Chapter Twenty-seven: Now
Chapter Twenty-eight: Now
Chapter Twenty-nine: Now
Chapter Thirty: Now
Making the Tough Call: Then
Epilogue: Now
Acknowledgments
THE WORLD ENDED during the summer of 2009.
Sorry you had to find out like this.
When Ex-Heroes was first published many years ago, I included enough details to make it pretty clear the story was set in what was then our present.
But, as you may have noticed, the zombie apocalypse didn’t actually happen that summer. Which means that in more than a few ways, the characters of Ex-Heroes are trapped in the past. Things have progressed for us. For the people of the Mount, though…it all came to a halt that summer.
After all these books, the effects of my earlier decision have started to make themselves known in small ways. Barry often laments never knowing how Lost ended, but we all know because it ended in May of 2010. The survivors can see a Borders Books just outside the Big Wall at Hollywood and Vine, even though that Borders was shuttered (with so many others) back in April of 2011. There’s a Walgreens there if you look today. In the world of Ex-Heroes, the United States never got out of Iraq, Scotland never held a vote for independence, and there were no Hobbit movies.
So when these oddities show up, please remember that their world hasn’t moved forward, even if ours has.
PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING St. George could see was on fire at this point, including most of the zombies.
The fire had started a block south of the Big Wall about four hours earlier, just before sundown. Nobody knew how. The flames had crawled north across a dozen overgrown lawns that hadn’t been watered in five years or rained on in five months. Then they’d climbed a few trees, and a light wind had pushed embers into the houses.
Now three city blocks of inferno lit up the night. The blaze reached for the Big Wall as it looked for more to consume, and the people of the Mount fought back as best they could. Half of them ferried buckets of water out to the flames or beat down the lawns with damp blankets. The other half—and St. George—pulled guard duty, keeping the firefighters safe from the exes.
The zombies—the ex-humans—had first appeared years ago. The undead had overrun cities, then countries, then whole continents. In the space of a year, the population of Earth dropped by more than ninety percent.
The living population, anyway.
Now millions of exes walked the streets of Los Angeles, and hundreds of them stumbled through the flames around the Mount. The click-click-click of their teeth meshed with the pop and crackle of burning wood. Sound and movement attracted them. Sound and movement and food.
The one St. George held by the throat pawed at him and clicked its teeth. It flailed at his face and scraped against the black leather of his biker jacket. The dead thing had a better chance of getting through the leather than through St. George’s stone-like skin. Two of the ex’s gaunt fingers hooked in his long hair but slid free as fast as they’d gotten tangled.
Yellow-orange flames raced across its body, burning away clothes and hair. It could’ve been a woman once, or a slim man with long hair. Too much of its body had burned for him to be sure. Ex-flesh didn’t catch fire easily, dried out from years in the sun, but their hair and clothes could burn. Sometimes, when it did, what little fat they had left became fuel, just like a candle.
St. George flicked his wrist and the ex sailed across the street, its spine wrapping around a parking sign’s squared-off steel pole.
Off to his left, two teams of people slapped at the fire with quilted blankets. Others kept the fabric soaked with water from buckets. They smothered the flames a few inches at a time. It was a slow, steady process, perfected after four or five similar fires over the years.
Two more exes lurched toward one of the firefighting teams, and a figure loomed out of the smoke to meet them. Captain John Carter Freedom, leader of the 456th Unbreakables super-soldier platoon, stood just shy of seven feet tall and almost half that wide. The flickering firelight gleamed across his dark scalp. He reached out and grabbed one of them with a gloved hand that covered the zombie’s shoulder. A flex of his tree-trunk arm sent the dead woman sprawling. His massive fist came around and shattered the other ex’s skull.
St. George grabbed a zombie and flung it back the way it had come. He tossed another one after it. The second one ended up draped
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