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

The other man shot a quick glance at the film types. “We get a lot of those folks in here. There’s a couple of little production companies in the buildings across the street. They too loud?”

George shook his head. “No, I just … What’s that skit they’re acting out? It’s on the tip of my brain and I can’t think of it.”

The bartender smirked. “It’s Monty Python.”

“Yeah, but what’s the actual piece they’re doing?”

The beefy man shrugged and turned his head. “Hey, Shaun?”

The skinny man paused in his recitation and returned the gaze. He had blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“What’s that sketch you’re doing?”

“It’s classic Python,” said Shaun. “The parrot sketch.”

Parrots.

Shaun and his partner, a man with horn-rims and shockingly blond hair, picked up the sketch, turning themselves to face their new audience. Their voices rose to match, reaching a manic pitch in the reenactment.

“If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch,” repeated the thin man, getting back into the part, “he’d be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He’s off the twig! He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This,” Shaun declared emphatically, “is an ex—”

A railroad spike slammed into George’s skull. Just before the pain forced his eyes closed he saw Karen’s hands fly to her own head. He heard her shift in her chair, and a faint grunt of pain.

His skull cracked and let in a brilliant light. It was so bright closing his eyes did nothing. Covering them with his hands made no difference. No matter what he did, he could still see it.

He forced his eyes open against the searing pain and looked at Karen. She was already staring at him. Her eyes were wide. He slid his hand across the bar and she seized it with a grip like a vise. George felt blood run across his lips, enough that he heard it splash on the bar.

“Hey,” said the bartender, “you two okay?”

Memories poured into George’s head like molten steel, burning everything else away even as they cooled and hardened. He saw himself. He saw his world. He saw them.

The undead.

The zombies.

The ex-humans.

A ripple washed over him and made the hair on his arms stiffen. A smell that had lurked in the background rose to the fore. It was the twin scents of must and mildew, and the tangy odor of rot lurked behind them like an aftertaste. He looked at the small puddle of blood on the dusty bar. His beer bottle crumbled away into a few shards of broken glass. The napkin under it collapsed and left a square of fragments and dust.

In his peripheral vision, a handful of people in the bar vanished.

The rest of them died.

The dead ones turned to stare. Their eyes were balls of chalk. Their skin was brittle pages from old books.

Their jagged teeth tapped together. It was a sharp, hard noise. The sound of crackling glass and clicking pens and beads hitting the side of a fan again and again. The sound echoed in the bar.

He pushed himself off the bar stool.

And St. George, the Mighty Dragon, stood to face the exes.

THE PLACE HAD been well looted. The shelves behind the bar were empty, and had been for years if the dust meant anything. What couldn’t be carted away had been smashed. Broken glass was everywhere. The padded cushions of the booth had been torn out.

St. George counted fifteen exes in the bar. The dead couple in the closest booth were trapped by the table, unable to rise and not smart enough to move to the side. One of the exes from the far booth had already fallen onto the floor. It crawled across the bar toward them.

Most of the film types were still there. Shaun was a desiccated husk. Its glasses hung loose off one ear. The half dozen or so exes around it banged their teeth together and shuffled around to face the heroes. Their arms reached for them. The ex with the blond hair raised hands that had three fingers between them. It looked like they’d been torn off in the same incident that had claimed the dead man’s chin and nose.

“You see them,” asked Karen. It was a confirmation more than a question.

No, not Karen, he corrected himself.

She was Stealth.

“Yeah,” he said. He pointed around the room. “Two there, another four, I think seven over there. The doorman by the entrance. I don’t see the server anywhere.” He glanced over his shoulder. “And the bartender.”

The bartender snapped its jaws behind them. Its cheek hung open on a flap of pale flesh and showed off a row of yellowed teeth. One of them stood out, bright white against the others. St. George figured it was an implant. The dead man’s fingers reached across the bar and brushed St. George’s arm.

Stealth rolled her shoulders inside her trench coat. She’d loosened the belt to give herself a better range of motion, but he could see it still pulled in the shoulders. Her fingers flexed in the thin leather gloves and batted away the bartender’s grasping fingers.

“I’ll take care of the big group,” he said. “Can you get the others?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any weapons?”

Stealth raised an eyebrow at him. “George,” she said, “have you ever known me to need a weapon?”

She turned and snapped out a punch like a snake striking. It caught the dead bartender on the bridge of the nose. There was a sharp crack as the bone pushed back into the skull and its face flattened out. The ex collapsed behind the bar.

He smiled. “Good to have you back.”

“And you.”

St. George stepped forward and caught the dead thing that had been Shaun by the neck. He lifted the ex off its feet and snapped its neck with a quick shift of his thumb and forefinger. The dead man’s jaws kept snapping at him even as its arms and legs sagged. He hurled the body