Ex-Isle

by Peter Clines

  “It’s like a bounce house in here,” she called out to them.

  St. George unslung the red gym bag and let it hang from his hand. “Incoming,” he said, and swung it into the raft.

  “Got it!”

  He turned to Zzzap. “You ready?”

  The brilliant wraith nodded. He lowered himself to a foot above the surface, and the water began to steam below him. First time for everything, he said.

  He pulled his arms and legs in close to his body, and his light dimmed. The air around him settled and then made a quick, dry woofing sound as it was shoved out of the way.

  Barry cannonballed into the ocean. He came up a moment later, shook the water from his eyes, and looked up. “Oh, it’s great,” he said. “You should try this. It feels like the warm spot in a pool, but in a good way.”

  “I’ll pass, but thanks.”

  Barry stretched up a thin hand, and St. George grabbed it. He dragged his friend through the water to the raft. Madelyn was waiting for them. “Robe or sweatpants?” she asked.

  “Sweats,” said Barry.

  She pulled a roll of black fabric from the gym bag and placed it near the entrance. Then she crawled to the far side of the tent and faced the wall. “Okay,” she called out, “my innocent eyes are averted.”

  St. George heaved Barry’s naked form out of the water and into the raft. “It’s for your own safety,” said Barry. “Seeing me naked could ruin you for all other men.”

  “Too late,” she sang at the orange wall.

  Barry rocked back and forth on the floor and wrestled himself into the sweatpants. “All clear,” he said. “Thanks for the moment of almost-privacy.”

  St. George leaned in through the entrance. “No problem,” he said. “Hang on for a second.”

  He put his hands against one of the inflatable supports and pressed. The raft turned in the water as he drifted in the air. He rotated it a third of the way around, then stepped inside.

  “What was that about?” asked Madelyn.

  He waved his hand out the entrance. “Sunset view.”

  She crawled over on her knees, and Barry shifted himself over on his hands. “Nice,” he said. He reached into the gym bag and dragged out a thick cranberry robe. He wrapped it around himself and tugged at the lapels. “It’s very Hef, don’t you think?”

  “Did Hef end up in a lot of lifeboats?”

  “No idea.” Barry reached into the bag again and pulled out a Ziploc full of jerky.

  “Dibs,” said Madelyn.

  “Actually,” said Barry, tossing the dried meat to the Corpse Girl, “did anyone ever check out the Playboy Mansion? It’s in LA, right?”

  “Yeah,” said St. George. “But I don’t know where. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been there, though.”

  “It’s got the big pool. The Grotto. And a lot of zombie Playmates. You’d know.”

  “Y’know what,” said Madelyn, tearing off a chunk of jerky, “you two guys just go right along talking about the Playboy Mansion in front of the teenage girl. There’s nothing skeevy about it at all.”

  Barry laughed, and St. George blushed a little.

  “Why’d you drop into the water?” she asked Barry. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous for you with, y’know, your legs?”

  “Well, if I tried to drop into the raft I’d either burn a hole through the roof or bounce off.”

  She smirked. “I mean, why not change in the water?”

  He shook his head. “Not a good idea. Water and the energy form don’t mix.”

  “Electricity and water?”

  “More like the emergency cooling system in a reactor,” he said. “They’d douse the core with water if it was overheating. Same thing with the energy form. If I’m in the water, I’ll just bleed energy like mad. And the energy is me, soooo…” He shrugged.

  “Gotcha.”

  They ate a dinner of jerky and soybeans, sipping water while they watched the sun vanish over the horizon. Madelyn chewed on one last piece of dried meat while she unzipped her backpack and pulled out the bag with her journals and pens. “Okay,” she said, pushing her goggles up onto her forehead, “time to write down the day.”

  The biggest downside to Madelyn’s condition was her near-inability to form memories past the moment of her death. Every time she fell asleep, her brain reset itself and she forgot the previous day. The only way she’d found to learn new things was to keep a detailed journal and reread it each morning. It could take her four or five days of repetition before a name would stick with her, even longer for other facts.

  St. George pointed at a bundle on one of the tent’s supports. “I think there’s a flashlight in the emergency kit.”

  “Don’t need it, but thanks.” Madelyn thumbed through the journal, her chalk-white eyes darting back and forth across different pages. She flipped a few more over and began scribbling.

  St. George settled against one of the thick inflated tubes. The raft didn’t rock on the waves, but every now and then a little tremor shook the outer walls. “So, did they see you when you went back to the island?”

  “The Others?” Barry shrugged. He pulled a third oatmeal bar from the bag. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “The Others?”

  “He’s talking about Lost again,” said Madelyn without looking up from her journal.

  Barry tapped his nose and smiled at her. “I don’t think I got any closer than a mile,” he told St. George, “and I was there for ten or fifteen seconds both times. But the sun was on the other side, and this last time it was pretty dark behind me. If they happened to be looking that way, I would’ve been tough to miss.” He bit off a mouthful of oats and fruit. “You really worried about the element of surprise?”

  This time St. George shrugged. “It’s always tough to tell how people are going to react, y’know?”

  “I’m surprised Stealth hasn’t written up some first-contact rules for us.”

  “She tried, way back when, but even she admitted there were too many variables.”

  Barry smiled. “So how are we playing it tomorrow? Riding on your rep?”

  “Maybe. Winging it, I guess.”

  “The usual, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  The sunset faded, and the inside of the tent went from dim to dark. The raft thrummed like a drum as waves tapped it.

  The scratching of Madelyn’s pen stopped. “Okay,” she said, “now I need some light.”

  St. George rooted around in the emergency kit and came up with the flashlight. “I thought you didn’t want to remember the day?” he said with a yawn.

  She smiled. “It’d be nice, but it’s always better to remember something than nothing.”

  “Maybe,” said Barry. “There’s a bunch of stuff I’d like to forget. The Phantom Menace. The last two seasons of Heroes. Spider-Man trading his life with Mary Jane to Mephisto to bring Aunt May back. Pretty much all of—”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said. Her smile faded. “It sucks.”

  “Sorry,” Barry said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  She switched on the flashlight and balanced it on her shoulder so it lit up the journal. Her face vanished in the shadows. St. George tried to get a sense of her expression behind the light. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a little bright, that’s all.” The pen went up and tapped her temple, then went back to the page. “Eyes are always dilated now, remember?”

  “I meant you. Are you okay?”

  She kept writing. Then she shrugged. “I worry I’m going to forget something important,” she said. She kept scribbling. “That I don’t have enough…y’know, enough memory space in my brain.”

  “That’s why you write everything down, right?”

  “Yeah, but I mean…past that. I’ve got the facts, but sometimes I lose the actual memories.”

  Barry pushed himself up against the raft’s wall. “What do you mean?”

  Madelyn finished another line in the jou
rnal and ended it with an emphatic jab of the pen. “I had this friend in high school, Janice. She had a pair of retro rocker jeans she wore that had about two dozen rips and tears in them. Showed a ton of skin.”

  St. George had a sip of water. “And…?”

  “And that’s it,” said Madelyn. “That’s all I know about her. It’s the only thing in my journals. I don’t know if she was just a friend or my best friend or maybe ‘friend’ is code for frenemy or my secret lesbian girlfriend or…or what. I don’t know if we had classes together or went to the same school or even what she looked like.”

  She bent her head back to the journal. The pen scratched at the pages again.

  “It might not mean anything,” said Barry. “I don’t remember half the people I went to high school with. Heck, I couldn’t tell you the names of half the people I used to work wi—”

  “I can’t remember my mom.”

  The ocean lapped against the sides of the raft. It was a gentle drumbeat. The sound made the thick tubes tremble.

  “Not at all?” asked St. George.

  She set the pen down on the journal. It rolled into the groove between the pages. “I mean, I know she existed. I know she and I were heading to meet my dad at Krypton when I was killed. But past that…”

  The three of them listened to the ocean for another minute.

  “When Smith did his thing,” said Madelyn, “when he…she…put us in the dream, I think it erased a lot of stuff in my head to make room for all the fake memories. I remember my dad in the dream better than I remember him in real life.” She picked the pen back up and tapped it on the page again. “And then I realized one day my mom hadn’t been in the dream. The idea of her was there, I’d talk about her, but I never actually saw her or heard her. And I hadn’t noticed because I couldn’t remember her in real life, either.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Barry murmured.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I mean, it’s not okay, but it’s not like it makes me upset or anything. I mean, it does kind of abstractly, like the way you get upset about people dying in stupid wars and stuff, but I can’t get upset about it because, well, I don’t remember her.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, now I just worry I’m going to…”

  St. George looked at her. “Going to what?”

  She stared at the journal for a moment. Then the flashlight tilted and she slumped back against the wall of the tent. It gave under her weight, tilting her enough that she slid down to the floor.

  “Maddy?” He picked up the flashlight and spun it around.

  The Corpse Girl’s eyes were half-open. She looked relaxed. He lifted her hand and it was limp.

  “Whoa,” said Barry. “Is that how she falls asleep?”

  “Yeah. Haven’t seen it happen in a while. I forgot how sudden it is.”

  “No irony there.”

  St. George snorted.

  “Jesus, that’s awful. About her mom.”

  “Yeah. Just in case we all needed another reason to be pissed at Smith.”

  “Either of them,” Barry said.

  IT CROSSED DANIELLE’S mind that Lester Briggs could’ve been a very successful criminal before the Zombocalypse. No one would be able to describe him. He’d raised “average” to an art form.

  Lester stood just under six feet tall. His brown hair needed a cut, but wasn’t long enough to be shaggy. Nor was it thick. His eyes were brown, too, his skin tanned but not dark, his nose large but not to the point it drew the eye. There was muscle in his arms and chest, but not enough to make anything fit him tightly. Even his facial hair rode the fine line between stubble and a full beard.

  What he lacked in appearance, he made up for in enthusiasm. He insisted on giving them a tour of Eden the morning after they arrived. Danielle hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the main building—the architectural love child resulting from a three-way between a community center, a freeway rest stop, and a storage shed—but Gibbs had pointed out she needed to know the garden’s layout on the off chance anything happened.

  The lieutenant had bowed out of the tour himself, though, claiming his mechanical foot wasn’t good on uneven ground for long walks. Danielle thought it was more that he didn’t want to waste time with Lester’s overexcited spiel about the garden. She glanced back at Gibbs and the building as the overly average man led her and Cesar away. First Sergeant Kennedy joined them as they headed down the first of the long, narrow aisles.

  Eden had been a large community garden at one point, one of over fifty scattered across Los Angeles. There’d been individual plots filled by individual tastes. Now, though, it was wall-to-wall plants. More than a few sprawled into the aisles. Some of them were almost six or seven feet tall, and the group walked past a monstrous clump of cacti that stood well over ten. As the four of them made their way down the overgrown path, Danielle caught glimpses of an old lawn chair, some sun-weathered tools, and what looked like a birdbath half hidden in the weeds and vines.

  Danielle’s shoulders relaxed a bit inside her ACU jacket, and she wasn’t sure why. She was outside, and she’d never been much of a nature person even before her phobias had kicked into high gear. They’d been walking for almost two minutes when she realized the thick plant life muffled the click-click-click of distant teeth.

  “We’re lucky,” Lester said, half turning to them as he walked down the path. “So many things were already thriving when we got here. A lot has died off, and some things have gone wild, but there’s still plenty of variety up here for us to get started with.” He pointed at a plot filled with sprawling vines as they walked along. “That’s all one squash plant. There’s four or five more of them in this row. They’re monsters. They grow like mad, and each one’ll put out a couple dozen squash each season. We should have about a hundred pounds worth ready to send back to the Mount by the end of the week. There’s a few hundred soybean plants the next row over. They reseeded themselves and just took over four or five plots.”

  “Oh, yay,” sighed Cesar. “More soybeans.”

  Danielle reached out to smack him in the back of the head. Force of habit. But a flicker of movement caught her eye. Something gray two aisles over, hidden by a cluster of tall sunflowers.

  The chatter of teeth seemed closer. Her sides tensed as her arms pulled in. She staggered to a halt.

  Kennedy almost bumped into her. The first sergeant set a hand on Danielle’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she said. “Not any room to pass.”

  The gray thing was gone. The sound of teeth was a faint echo. Two people in bright colors walked down another aisle, carrying garden tools and talking.

  “Yeah, sorry,” said Danielle. She crossed her arms and grabbed her elbows. Her back was sweating. A cold sweat. She could feel it beading up.

  A few quick steps and she caught up with the two men.

  Lester hadn’t even noticed she’d fallen behind. He pointed at green beans and peas to be harvested, turned a corner, and pointed out more changes they were going to make. “Garlic’s like a weed up here,” he told them. “There’s some of it growing in pretty much every plot.”

  “Too bad there wasn’t a vampire apocalypse,” said Cesar.

  Lester grinned. “While you’re here,” he said to Danielle, “there’s a couple of rototillers I’d love to have you take a look at. It’d speed things up a lot if we could get them running again.”

  Most of the plants were low to the ground. The overgrowth wrapped around fence posts and grew between slats and chicken wire. It was like wading through a wide, waist-deep pool of leaves and twisting vines and stems. A shredded shade umbrella hung like a tattered flag. Danielle took a deep breath. Her fingers bit into her arms.

  Kennedy pointed at a thick patch of sprawling plants, one of the tallest things in the row. Their leaves looked like swollen ferns, and spiky purple flowers topped tall stalks. “What are those?”

  “Artichokes,” said Lester with a smile.

  “Really?”

  He
nodded. “The big flowers? That’s what happens to the part you eat if it isn’t harvested. Watch out for that,” he called to Cesar. “It’s a snare trap.”

  The young man leaned away from the curved branch. “A what?”

  “Believe it or not, we’ve got a rabbit problem,” Lester explained. He waved at the surrounding greenery. “Five years alone in here with all this let their population boom. There’s a couple hundred, at least. They were everywhere when we first showed up. There’s some cats and a fair amount of rats, too, but the rabbits are out of control. We’ve got snares set all through the garden.”

  Kennedy’s mouth twitched. “A few people told me they had stew up here,” she said. “I thought they were joking.”

  “It’s delicious,” said Lester. “And we’ve got sweet potatoes, carrots, lots of spices. I think it’s going to be a big draw to get people up here to work.”

  “You’re killing bunny rabbits?” asked Cesar.

  Lester looked at him and blinked twice. “Well, yes,” said the average man. “They’re a danger to the crops and a good source of meat, so it’s a win-win.”

  “That’s messed up, bro. You know how much my niece would love to see a bunny?”

  “Bunny rabbits?” echoed Kennedy.

  Cesar shrugged.

  “Believe me,” Lester said, “there’s no danger of us getting them all.”

  Behind them, something rustled. Unsteady movement in one of the plots. Danielle turned, looked past Kennedy, and saw leaves moving. The teeth were near, the clicking was so close, and she was in the open.

  Kennedy saw her staring and glanced back. “Something wrong?”

  Danielle blinked. Two drops of cold sweat ran down her back. Another one ran between her breasts down to her stomach. “Are we…” She took another breath and turned around, forcing her hands down. “Are you sure it’s safe to be out like this?”

  It was Lester’s turn to blink. “Pretty sure, yes.”