Ex-Isle

by Peter Clines

  The exes shambled closer. The click-click-click of their teeth broke the air into small, jagged bits. At the front of the horde was a gray-skinned girl with long pigtails and a gore-stained dress. The dead girl’s left arm ended just past the shoulder in a dried, messy stump. The ex’s remaining hand reached for him.

  He let the rifle drop and pushed at the walkway with his hands and feet. It moved him back, but not enough. As slow as they were, the exes moved faster. The dead girl crouched, her gnashing teeth dipped toward his leg, and—

  Warm fingers brushed his neck. His collar and shirt yanked up, and he was dragged away from the undead. His steel foot carved a furrow across the lawn. His savior huffed and grunted and hauled him five-ten-fifteen feet away from the horde before letting go of his collar. Gibbs scrambled to his feet and turned to give a quick thanks to—

  Smith panted and glowered at him. She stepped past him, put both hands on the haft of the shovel she’d been carrying in her claw-hand, and smashed it across the dead girl’s jaw. The ex spun in a full circle and dropped to the ground. The dead man behind it, a workman or groundskeeper in simple clothes, tripped and fell forward onto the path. She brought the shovel down on the dead man’s head.

  Smith turned back to Gibbs. Anger and regret and disgust fought for dominance on the woman’s face. She jerked her thumb once at the main building and then took off. She didn’t look to see if he followed.

  The dead girl clawed at the dirt path and pushed itself up on its one good arm. It flopped over twice before it managed to push itself to its feet. Its head sat crooked on its neck, but not enough to put it down.

  Gibbs followed after Smith. His metal toes dug at the lawn but didn’t slow him down. He threw his legs forward and caught up with the Asian woman halfway down the path.

  The exes followed.

  The sound of gunfire by the fence dropped. “I’m out,” shouted Taylor. He let his rifle drop and pulled the homemade brass knuckles from his pockets.

  Kennedy did a quick head count and came up with about seventy exes left in the parking area. Sixty-nine as Wilson dropped another one. Hancock’s rifle bucked against his shoulder, and he lowered it with a scowl when none of the zombies fell. “Same!” he yelled.

  Between Wilson and herself, they had maybe a dozen rounds left between them. Even if every one dropped an ex, it left them on the wrong side of an eleven-to-one fight. Tight odds even if they were all still in peak condition.

  Across the parking lot, a baker’s dozen of zombies pawed and grabbed at the exoskeleton. Its movements weren’t as fluid as usual, as if it had been damaged. Or wounded, with Cesar running it. The battlesuit grabbed them one by one with its free hand and flung them away. The other hand stayed clamped to the fence pole with the links threaded between its fingers.

  “Cesar,” she yelled. “Support!”

  “I can’t leave the fence,” he called back. “I’m holding it up.”

  Kennedy lined up on a bald ex with what looked like a saw blade stuck in its head. “Figure something out.”

  “I need some rope or chain or something.”

  “Figure it out!” She squeezed the trigger, and the round pinged off the goddamned saw blade. A second round punched into the dead man’s forehead and it collapsed.

  Her rifle was empty. She swung it around to use like a club. “Falling back, heading east,” she told the squad. “We’ll try to lure them away from the main building.”

  The closest ex was four yards from them. Its jaw snapped shut with a clack, and Wilson blew its teeth out through the back of its skull. It tipped back into the horde behind it.

  “Who’s going to lure them the fuck away from us?” growled Taylor.

  The Unbreakables dropped back a few feet and shuffled to the left. The zombies shifted and staggered after them.

  “We get them heading that way,” said Kennedy, “swing around the back fence and double-time it back to the main building. We reload and regroup there.”

  They each took a few steps and leaped. Their muscles were still strong enough to carry them a few yards—enough to make the exes pivot and stumble. Some of the exes fell. A few others tripped over the fallen.

  The path on this side was a dirt service road between two small boulders. A good chokepoint. They jogged a few yards down the road, and Wilson turned with his rifle. “I’ve got about five or six rounds left, First Sergeant,” he said. “I can slow ’em down a bit.”

  “Stay together.”

  “Noise’ll keep ’em coming this way, too,” he pointed out. “We don’t want to lose ’em in the dark.”

  “He’s right,” said Hancock. “We need to keep their attention.”

  Kennedy nodded. “Don’t be brave,” she told Wilson. “They get close, you catch up to us.”

  “No worries there, top.”

  The Unbreakables ran deeper into the garden. Wilson looked at the approaching zombie horde and raised his rifle to look down the sights. Right in front was the dead teenage girl he and Franklin had tossed over the fence the other day. Its left shoulder and arm hung low, even while the hand at the end twitched. Part of the dead girl’s cheek had been torn loose against the pavement when it’d hit the road, and it hung in a loose flap against its face.

  “It’s always the cute ones,” he muttered, and squeezed the trigger.

  Cesar watched the soldiers vanish between the two boulders. He heard a shot, then another one. Most of the exes stumbled down the tree-shaded path after the Unbreakables. A few stragglers lurched off into the garden plots, more or less in the direction Gibbs had run with the garden people. A couple zombies in the far back of the horde shifted around and wandered back toward him.

  He swung his stiff arm and slammed it into two exes, catching each of them in the skull. The dead people collapsed. He grabbed a one-armed woman with a skinless face and flung the zombie over the fence.

  Another gunshot from the path.

  He could do this. He could deal with all of them. He just needed to figure out how to get away from the fence.

  There was a stubby chain on one of the dumpsters, something to lock it shut, but it was barely long enough to go around the post, and he didn’t have a way to fasten it. There were a few lengths of old twine and thin rope inside the big bin, things that had been cleared out of garden plots, but he could tell they were all too brittle and rotted to be any good. If he had both hands free, he was strong enough to tear the dumpster apart and make strips of metal…but he didn’t have both hands free.

  Another gunshot echoed to the battlesuit’s microphones. A moment later, over the clicking of hundreds of teeth, he picked out the hard clack of a gun locking open. Whoever was shooting had just run out of ammunition.

  He looked around for a trash can or a garden stake or a signpost. Something he could use to tie the fence in place. Something metal and solid.

  And then he had an idea. It wasn’t a great idea, or a safe one, but he knew it would work. And he didn’t have anything else.

  He shifted his bulk around and traded hands so the stiff arm was holding the chain-link. He squeezed it a little tighter, pulling the fence right up to the steel post. A few more exes tried to gnaw on him, and he backhanded them away. The blow knocked the head off a dead man and sent it spinning into a garden plot. The plot with the white-and-orange birdhouse. He’d have to remember it and make sure everyone was careful there until they found it.

  He looked at the battlesuit’s left arm and wondered if he was going to have some more killer scars or something a lot worse.

  Cesar’s steel fingers reached into the superstructure of the crippled arm and tore out one of the support struts. He screamed, and the suit’s speakers turned it into a roar. His vision fogged with white and gray static. His legs trembled. He focused on his hand, on keeping the fence tight and near the post.

  The camera view cleared. A few lines of text across his vision warned him of possible structural damage. Oh, Jesus, his arm was on fire.

  A bun
ch of the exes had turned back. Looked like his screams sounded better than gunshots. Good thing.

  Then he reached over and ripped another strut loose. Another scream echoed off the trees and houses. He felt his knees shift. The battlesuit staggered, and he caught himself before it tipped over. He willed the static out of his vision.

  The left arm wobbled. Two of five supports gone. The wrist felt weird, like it was sitting wrong. But the hand was still holding the fence up.

  His free hand bent one of the supports against the post. Then he looped it around the steel pole and threaded it through the chain-link. He squeezed the ends together and bent them over each other twice like a giant twist tie.

  He smacked a few more exes away and bent the other support. This one went under the hand holding the fence. It took a little longer to get this one around the post and through the fence, but then he knotted it in place.

  It took him a moment to wiggle his fingers free of the chain-link. The fence squealed a bit as exes piled against it, but it held. It’d hold for a little while, at least.

  Cesar stepped back. An ex grabbed his damaged arm, and he flung it away. One of the fingers trembled when he made a fist, and the wrist was tweaked. An ache throbbed deep inside it. But it worked.

  He swung the fist around, and an ex’s skull exploded on impact. He grabbed one in each hand and hurled them back over the fence. A dead woman tried to wrap its arms around his waist, and he crushed its shoulder and neck between his fingers.

  The throb in his arm faded a little.

  He set the battlesuit’s speakers to PA mode, max volume, and his power level tipped from thirteen percent to twelve. “Hey,” he shouted. He flung the dead woman away, swept his arms out, and smashed half a dozen exes to the ground. “Zombie folks! Get back over here. Got a little something special for you.”

  The horde turned and came to see what he had to offer.

  SLOW WASN’T IN Zzzap’s nature in the energy form. His speed tended to fall into either “ambling” or “supersonic” categories. There wasn’t much in between.

  But as he circled the island for the fourth time, he tried to move slowly and study everything below him.

  Truth was, he couldn’t see a damned thing. He didn’t use the visible spectrum, but it wouldn’t have helped him. A black submarine, underwater, at night, was going to be pretty much invisible to regular vision.

  In his eyes—well, if the energy form had actual eyes—the ocean was a riot of temperature swirls and electromagnetic currents. Every wave and ripple sent out dozens more across the wide spectrum he could see. Plus it reflected some of his own energy back at him. It was swirling paint and clouds in coffee and lines of force and a dozen other things all at once. He’d tried to explain to people that sometimes he was almost blinded by the sheer, overwhelming excess of it all.

  And that was all just on the top. If he looked beneath the surface of the water, it became layers and layers of patterns. So much movement and energy.

  Zzzap swung around for his fifth circuit, expanding his range a little wider. He was almost half a mile out from the island now. More area to cover, better chance he might miss something.

  He wondered if the sub might’ve already made it past him. If Nautilus was as fast and strong in the water as everyone said—and two fistfights with St. George seemed to back that up—maybe the sub was already a mile away. Or maybe it was still in his range and he’d skimmed right past it.

  He wondered if Nautilus would really launch nukes at Los Angeles. And how far he’d be from the island when he did it. And if he didn’t find it soon enough, what were the odds he could catch and disable an ICBM in midflight without setting it off? Or getting dumped in the ocean like Captain America?

  He couldn’t see the submarine anywhere.

  Madelyn grabbed the ex by its outstretched wrist and tugged it forward. The dead man didn’t resist, barely registered her touch. It leaned toward her, toppled, and dropped onto the pile.

  When the chain snapped, she’d realized the one thing she had to make a barrier out of was the exes themselves. She tripped, pulled, and shoved them together. Then the next wave tripped over the fallen ones, and then she yanked more dead people on top of that layer.

  The bodies were five deep, a wall across the walkway. Random arms reached out and grabbed at the air. Bodies shifted as they tried to get back to their feet. Their gnashing teeth got caught on each other’s clothes and hair.

  More of the undead hit the pile from behind. The whole thing shifted forward as the exes crawled over one another, but they were too slow and too mindless to untangle themselves. It’d take them at least twenty minutes to make it to the top of the ramp.

  “Score one for the Corpse Girl,” Madelyn said. And even as she said it she realized she had to make it to the next gangplank before the exes stumbled across it. Assuming they hadn’t already.

  A thump came from behind her and the walkway shuddered. An ex behind the pile tipped over and vanished. Madelyn turned around just as another impact shook the ramp.

  Two men stood at the head of the walkway, about fifteen feet away. And the over-tanned woman, Alice. They had big tools, and they were hammering and prying at the edge of the ramp. Trying to knock it loose, the Corpse Girl realized. If they’d already made it to this walkway, things were looking good for the cruise ship.

  “It’s okay,” she called up to them. She sucked in some air and raised her voice over the chattering teeth. “They’re down for a couple of minutes. You don’t need to rush.”

  One of the men glanced up at her, then hit the end of the gangplank again. The planks shifted, and the left side of the ramp sagged. The ropes tying the ramp to the cruise ship went tight. Madelyn stumbled against the guide rail. The pile of exes rocked to one side, and one of the precarious ones on the top, a dead man in a ragged wifebeater, flopped down near her feet.

  “Hey,” Madelyn called out, “wait a minute.” She put her foot on the dead man’s ribs and pushed it over onto its side. It flopped on top of two outstretched arms, each one from a different ex.

  A gunshot went off up on the Queen. A big one, like a shotgun. There was some shouting. The sound of clicking teeth suddenly had an echo.

  The people attacked the other side of the ramp. Crowbar and sledgehammer. The men grunted and hissed. The ramp shifted, dropped, bounced. Madelyn heard the creak of the ropes and felt the gangplank rock side to side.

  One of the men had a knife and was sawing at the rope closest to him. Alice lifted a bright red axe above her shoulder.

  “WAIT!” Madelyn took three long strides toward them. One of the men looked terrified. All he saw was an ex with its arms reaching for him.

  The fire axe slammed down through the ropes. The floor dropped away from Madelyn’s feet. The dolphin-covered ceiling came down, the walkway spun, the pile of exes dissolved into a swarm of bodies.

  They fell.

  St. George brought his fist around and hammered the side of an ex’s head. The skull and spine cracked, and the impact sent it sprawling into one of the supports for the catwalk. The steel rang with the impact, and the dead woman’s head became a shapeless blob. He reversed the swing and backhanded another ex in the face. Its nose, jaw, and right cheekbone collapsed. It stumbled back, fell over, and flailed until he reached down and twisted its head around.

  Two people had been killed on the tanker, plus the woman who’d been bitten but wasn’t dead yet. She still had a slim chance, provided they had any medicine left on the ships. Not a great chance, but it was better than none.

  He’d put down at least thirty zombies. The people trapped on the tanker with him had put down another ten, maybe, before he got each of them to safety. Maybe a third of the undead on the tanker accounted for. Hussein’s teams had managed to take down two of the walkways connecting the tanker to the rest of Lemuria.

  St. George thought there was a chance the exes had been contained.

  A crack and a loud scrape echoed from behind him,
and he turned in time to see the third gangplank slide fifteen feet down the hull of the cruise ship and hit the tanker’s deck. The cloth cover swept up like a parachute, then settled back down over the wreckage. He caught a glimpse of at least two dozen zombies.

  And one dead girl.

  He leaped across to the fallen gangplank and tore the loose canvas away.

  Madelyn leaned on the railing. Exes crawled and twisted in the broken wreckage at her feet. Broken bones jutted out from gray limbs.

  A few of the zombies turned their heads toward him and tapped cracked teeth together. Some flapped broken or dislocated jaws. They reached for him with snapped fingers and tried to drag themselves out of the press of bodies.

  “What a bunch of jerks,” muttered the Corpse Girl. She limped over to St. George. He tore the other railing off, let it clatter on the deck, and lifted her out of the wreckage of the gangplank.

  Her left leg twisted at the knee. Her foot pointed almost straight to the left. “You okay?”

  “I don’t think anything’s broken,” she said. She looked up at the trio standing in the open doorway of the cruise ship. “No thanks to you!”

  Alice stared down at them. She didn’t look upset.

  St. George helped Madelyn over to a heavy pipe she could rest against. “Give me a minute, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He stepped back to the wreckage and knelt near the huddle of exes. They pawed at his arms, and their weak fingers grabbed at his sleeves. He reached out and twisted their necks one by one. Ten minutes later the teeth were still clicking, but the arms and legs were still.