Ex-Purgatory, Peter Clines [top ten books of all time .txt] 📗

the folds in his shirt stood out. They scraped on his arm and he had to make an effort not to scratch and draw more attention to them. The itch moved up to his bicep and he raked his fingers across it.

The bouncer shook his head and smirked. George scratched at the itch again and the man’s smirk broke into a wide smile. He had bad teeth. One of his incisors was missing.

The bar could hold a hundred people, but it was almost empty. Two men sat in the booth farthest from the door, and a man and two women sat in the one closest. A woman in a dark T-shirt cleared a table that looked like it had held a fair-sized party in the recent past. A half-dozen young student types—film students, said something in George’s university-experienced mind—chattered away at the other end of the bar. George heard enough names and terms to grasp they were having a serious talk about comedy. One of them started reciting lines about Winchesters and pints with a bad British accent.

A thick-built man with thinning hair was wiping down the bar as they walked in. He glanced over his shoulder at the clock as they reached him. “Only got time for one,” he said. “What can I get you?”

George pointed at one of the taps. Karen examined the row of bottles behind the bar and ordered a vodka martini. A few moments later the bartender presented their drinks and vanished to get final orders from the film types.

Karen held the stem of her glass and lifted it to her lips. The liquid shifted, touched her tongue, and she set the glass down on the bar napkin. The base of the martini glass was centered on the square of paper. “And now?” she asked him.

George sipped his beer. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

They sat in silence for a moment. Neither of them touched their drinks.

“I got shot a few hours ago,” he said.

She waited for him to continue.

“I was shot, and the day before that I was snatched by the feds and my apartment was trashed. And I think I met—”

A spike of pain shoved into the back of his skull. The room spun for a moment. He winced. The tip of his nose felt wet.

“I think I met the President and the First Lady.”

She let the martini brush against her tongue again. “Why do you think you met the President?”

“Because I remember it.”

“No,” said Karen. “Why did the incident occur?”

“They thought I might be—” The spikes pushed at his eyes again. He ignored them and forced his memories forward. “He wanted to know if I knew him.”

“The President?”

“Yeah,” said George. “Madelyn said—” The spikes shot forward another quarter inch. They grew thorns. He could picture them making deep dimples across the back of his eyeball. “Madelyn said he can make people believe things. He’s from somewhere else, like us.”

She slid the bar napkin out from under her drink and held it out to him. “Your nose is bleeding again.”

“I know,” he said. “I think … I think it bleeds when I get too close to the truth. And the truth is, a crazy girl told me I had superpowers, and then she shot me a dozen times in the chest and it didn’t do anything.” He tugged at the shirt and looked down past his chin. “I think the bruise is already fading.”

She reached across the bar and pulled two more napkins from a small tray. The bartender glanced over and saw George with the wad of red paper. “You okay, buddy?” he called over.

“Fine,” said George. He wrapped his fingers around the napkin to hide most of the blood. “Don’t worry about it.”

“For the sake of argument,” said Karen, “let us assume everything Madelyn has told you is true. We are superheroes trapped in some alternate universe or time stream.”

“It sounds a lot more believable when you say it,” George said.

“If this is all true,” she continued, “why would we go back? This world offers us everything we would have tried to achieve. It is free of the dead creatures which overwhelmed that reality.”

“But it’s not where we’re supposed to be,” he said. “If she’s right, it means there’s another world out there that was depending on us. A world we’ve abandoned, even if we didn’t know we were doing it.” He dabbed at his nose again with a fresh napkin.

Karen stared at him for a moment. “The perfect prison,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Prisons are built around certain inherent ideas, chief among them being the prisoners do not wish to be there and the threat of death or injury overrides the desire to escape. For people such as you and I, that threat is greatly reduced, if not nullified. So how does someone imprison us?”

George folded the napkin in half.

“They create a prison we have no reason or desire to escape from.”

At the end of the bar the students had shifted topics. Two of them were acting out a scene from something. It took George a moment to recognize the skit.

She followed his gaze. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. It’s just … This may sound stupid, but I’ve been hearing a lot of Monty Python lately.”

Karen looked at him for a moment. “This is important how?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just kind of weird. All these years on campus, I must’ve heard people doing Monty Python skits a few thousand times. But I can’t remember anyone ever doing Steven Wright, Seinfeld, Eddie Izzard … anyone else. It’s always old Python stuff.”

“I am not familiar with their individual skits,” she admitted.

A slim man with glasses raised his voice to a near-manic tone. “It’s a stiff!” he shrieked. “Bereft of life. It rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!”

George waved down the bartender. “Sorry,” he told the beefy man. He nodded at the group at the far end of the bar. “Are they in here