Ex-Purgatory

by Peter Clines

  “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 often?”

  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 th
umb and forefinger. The dead man’s jaws kept snapping at him even as its arms and legs sagged. He hurled the body back into the crowd and knocked down two of the others.

  Not as strong as he should be, he noticed. That throw should’ve taken out the whole crowd. He wondered if it was some sort of residual block in his mind.

  Behind him, Stealth brought her boot down on the crawling ex. It slammed face-first into the floor and left a dark stain on the carpet. A second kick to the back of the head made the dead man slump. A puddle of dark liquid spread out from under its head.

  St. George grabbed another ex and twisted its head around. A third one, the blond man, latched onto his arm and bit down on his elbow. The ex’s teeth left a sticky circle on his sleeve and then splintered apart. He brushed the teeth fragments out of the fleece and then drove his fist through the blond man’s face.

  The front of the zombie’s head collapsed beneath his punch and his knuckles broke out the back. For a moment the dead man’s skull hung on his wrist like an oversized bracelet, the limp body dangling beneath it. St. George shook his arm until the rest of the head cracked apart and the corpse fell free. It hit the ground with a thump. He kicked it away and it crashed into the booth where the two exes struggled with the table.

  Another step and he grabbed two more exes, a dead man in a suit and a slim woman with bristle-short hair. Their teeth beat out a constant click-click-click. He swung them and their skulls cracked together like billiard balls. Another swing and both of them slumped to the floor.

  The last of the film types stumbled toward him and he grabbed its outstretched hands. A twist of his wrist spun the dead woman around and dislocated one of its arms. He put his hand on its back and pushed. The ex flew across the bar and crashed over a table.

  Something slammed into his back. The oversized doorman. Its jaws swung open, and St. George realized it was missing most of its teeth. A collection of splinters stuck up from its lower gums. Shards of bone and enamel were white against its dark tongue.

  It bit down hard on his shoulder and what was left of its teeth turned to dust. He reached up, put his hand on its forehead, and shoved it away. The needles left in its jaw tore furrows in his shirt as it staggered back. Its gnashing jaws made a sound St. George could only describe as pulpy.

  He took a step after the dead man and brought his hand around. The edge of his palm tore through soft flesh and brittle bones. The zombie’s head rolled to one side even as the momentum of the blow carried it to the other. It spun off the ex’s shoulders and fell to the floor. The body crashed on top of it a moment later.

  St. George flicked some of the gore off his fingers. He turned and Stealth looked at him. A trio of exes slumped on the floor at her feet. “Most impressive,” she said. “You seem confident in your abilities.”

  He looked at the bodies scattered around the bar. “To be honest, I’m just acting on instinct,” he said. “There’s still a lot of stuff going on in my head.”

  “I understand. I am having similar issues trying to distinguish my own history from this alternate one.” She dropped to her knee and drove a punch into the back of an ex’s neck as it tried to rise. There was a loud pop and it collapsed.

  He glanced at the door, and then up. “Do you think these shifts affect all of us at the same time?”

  “I do not have enough data to predict such a thing.” She walked over and took his hand. Her fingers felt good threaded between his. “You are worried about Barry?”

  St. George nodded. “It would suck to be him if he was in midair on a plane and shifted back to our world.”

  Her eyebrow twitched. “If such a thing happened, his own abilities would most likely activate on instinct to save his life.”

  “We don’t know that, though,” said St. George. “I’m still feeling kind of weak, and most of my other powers haven’t kicked in.” To emphasize the point, he glanced down at his feet. He tried to make them rise, but they stayed on the floor of the bar. There was a trick to getting off the ground, but he couldn’t remember it. He flexed his toes, tried to imagine rockets thrusting out of his feet, pictured huge wings lifting him into the air.

  He stayed on the ground.

  “From what I understand,” said Stealth, “you have not needed your abilities past strength and invulnerability. I am sure I could throw you from the top of any structure of significant height and your ability to fly would reassert itself.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I love you, too.”

  “I am still unsure what has caused this—”

  “Smith,” said St. George. “He’s back.”

  Her mouth snapped shut. “Are you certain?”

  “Who’s the President right now?”

  Her lips pressed even tighter together. She remembered Agent Smith, formerly of the Department of Homeland Security.

  “Madelyn knew,” St. George said. “She’s never even met him, but she knew all along. She tried to tell me, but the way he’d rewired my brain made me reject the idea. I told her she was crazy.”

  “It would seem you owe her an apology,” said Stealth.

  “Yeah. I’m guessing he found something out at Groom Lake that let him send us into another reality or something. Then he rewired our brains so we’d never know.”

  She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “This is not another reality, George.”

  “Sorry?”

  “This is our world. I suspected as much for some time, but knowing Smith is involved confirms it. He altered our perceptions so we did not see reality. This is why the exes were erased from our minds, so we would not realize what was around us.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

  She pointed past him to the decapitated ex on the floor. “Its teeth were broken.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “They were recently broken,” she said. “There was little discoloration on the inside edges and there were still shards in its mouth.”

  “Okay, and …?”

  She gave him the look that told him he’d missed something obvious. “There is only one thing in the bar it could’ve broken its teeth on, George.”

  It took him another moment. “Me?”

  “When we entered the bar you scratched your left arm. The arm closest to the doorman.”

  “The shirt’s kind of itchy. It’s still got those right-out-of-the-package folds that are pretty much starched into it.”

  “The doorman was an ex. It was biting you.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “It was.”

  St. George shook his head. “He sat on his stool the whole time. I would’ve noticed if he was chewing on me.”

  Her eyebrow went up again and she looked at her arm. “Much in the same way Captain Freedom thought he would have noticed if ninety-three percent of the people at Project Krypton had died?”

  When they’d first met the captain, his entire base had been under Smith’s influence. They believed they were a thriving military base with over fifteen hundred soldiers and support staff. Then the heroes had arrived and revealed that barely a hundred people were there.

  St. George shook his head. “This isn’t convincing us things are a bit better than we thought they were, though. This is him telling us things are completely different. It just seems way beyond what we saw him do before.” He tugged at the sleeve of his fleece. “And if we aren’t hopping between worlds, where did this come from? It’s not mine.”

  Stealth didn’t respond. She was studying her arms. She pushed the sleeve up on one and ran a finger across the skin.

  “Wait,” he said, “are you okay? Did you get bitten?”

  “I did not,” she told him. “I have no injuries at all.”

  He sighed in relief.

  “I am, however, also wondering where these clothes came from.”

  He looked at her outfit. “They’re not yours?”

  She shook her head. “I have only three civilian outfits at the Mount. All of them were chosen to be i
nconspicuous. Each of these items has been tailored to me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him.

  “So if we’re not jumping between worlds, where did you get a tailored outfit?”

  “I am not sure. It is possible Smith had them constructed to add to the illusion of another world.” She pushed the sleeve back down. “Our first priority is to locate the others. You know where Madelyn is?”

  “Yeah. And Freedom, Gorgon, and …”

  He stopped. He closed his eyes for a moment. He took a breath and opened them again.

  She was looking at him. Her eyes had the faint wrinkle at the corner that let him know she was concerned. “Gorgon?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I forgot. I forgot he was dead. I’ve been dreaming about a lot of dead people.”

  She reached out and squeezed his hand. “Madelyn and Freedom, then.”

  He nodded. “They’re over in Westwood, but they’re both alone. We get them, we figure out where the hell Barry and Danielle are, and then we get back to the Mount.”

  Her eyebrow twitched again and an expression that looked like confusion flitted across her face. Then she bowed her head. “I concur.”

  He walked to the door. It was a solid piece of wood at least an inch thick with no windows or peepholes. He rapped his knuckles against it four times and waited.

  The other side of the door was silent.

  They exchanged looks. He pushed the door open and slipped outside. Stealth was a beat behind him.

  The street was deserted. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. They moved past the sidewalk and into the street, keeping their backs to each other.

  “East is clear as far as I can see,” said St. George.

  “As is west.” She held up her hand when he went to speak again. She turned her head to the north, then to the south. “I hear nothing,” she said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “I hear nothing,” she repeated. “There is no sound of teeth.”

  St. George closed his eyes and listened. He turned and looked around. “What are the odds there isn’t a single ex within four or five blocks?”

  “Low,” said Stealth. “The street is clean. No leaves, no trash, no debris of any kind. However, all nine streetlights I can see from this position are unlit.”