Ex-Purgatory: A Novel

by Peter Clines

  “Watch your mouth,” said St. George.

  “Make me,” snapped Christian. “I’m sorry you don’t want to be reminded that she finally ran out on all of us, but—”

  “More likely,” said Stealth, “I would guess he is hoping to make you restrain yourself before I come up with a more direct way of silencing you.”

  Christian gave the unmasked woman a nasty look, took in a breath to respond, and then she recognized the voice. Her face softened and she shrank back.

  “What happened here?” demanded Stealth. “Was it Legion? Did Agent Smith cause this somehow?”

  Christian’s eyebrows went up at Smith’s name. Then her usual surliness surged over her brief surprise. She settled back in a corner of the room and glared at the heroes. St. George wasn’t sure if it was mild shock or plain old stubbornness.

  Stealth took a step toward the former councilwoman, but he held her back.

  “You should get some sleep,” said Barry. “You look fried.”

  “It’s been a rough two days,” St. George said. “I think I am kind of fried.”

  “Both of you sleep,” said Freedom. He nodded to St. George and Stealth. “You need it more than any of us. We can do shifts until we all get caught up.”

  “We’ll … we should …” St. George tried to come up with a protest, but part of him realized in the few moments of downtime his brain had started shutting down all on its own.

  “I’ll wake you up in four hours,” said the captain.

  Stealth took St. George by the arm and guided him back to her quarters. The small cot still had a sheet on it. It looked glorious.

  He pulled the shirt off over his head and popped two buttons off in the process. It smelled like death. There were dark stains and splatters all over it, but not enough to hide the fact it had been white once. A few stitches had split on one shoulder. He let it drop on the floor. He didn’t look forward to putting it on again when he woke up.

  Stealth peeled off the ragged fleece jacket. There were two or three dark patches on the arms that had dried into little spikes. Blood and gore had soaked through the fleece to make a few spots on her bra. She placed her baton and the pistol she’d taken from Billie’s body and placed them on top of the jacket.

  They stretched out on her thin mattress. There was no blanket or pillows, but it felt luxurious to not be standing. She pulled his arm around her shoulders and pressed herself against him. Her skin was warm. She was always warm.

  He kissed her forehead, and he was pretty sure she kissed him back, but he was already asleep.

  It’s the early days of the outbreak. I don’t even know it’s an outbreak yet. In four days, I will meet the woman who will change my life forever. She will tell me the monsters are the result of an infection. A year and a half from now, we will learn where the infection came from. Two days after that she will tell me her name.

  There are almost a dozen monsters—exes—in the parking lot with us. They are hunting homeless people. They won’t be exes for another two weeks, when the President refers to them as ex-humans for the first time in a televised statement. The name will stick.

  A dead thing grabs my cape and tugs me off balance. I spin around and hit it in the head with a backhand. Its skull cracks under my knuckles.

  With me is Gorgon. His vampiric gaze is useless against the monsters—the exes—but earlier we stopped a minor gang skirmish, and for another hour or so he is superhuman. He grabs an ex by the wrists and swings, throwing it across the pavement. His leather duster whirls open as he does. I know he looks much cooler than I do, but I am still proud of my red and green costume.

  I’m aware this is a dream. Far more aware than I’ve been in a long time. This is the past replayed as present.

  I slam my hand out and an ex flies across the parking lot to slam into a brick wall head-first. It slumps to the ground. Gorgon—his name is Nikolai, but I don’t know that yet—punches the last one in the jaw. Its head spins from the blow, and he grabs it and twists even more. Its neck breaks with a sound like driftwood and it drops.

  A year and a half from now Gorgon’s body will be twisted by a giant monster—a bastard of the ex-virus and a failed super-soldier project—and his own spine will break in four places. His death will be quick. My friends and I will tell ourselves it was instantaneous.

  He turns and looks at me. The dark irises of his goggles gleam in the streetlights. He shrugs and settles the long jacket around his body. The jacket looks wrong without the silver sheriff’s star on it, but that is still almost nine months away, and I realize I’m looking at him through my eyes, the eyes that have seen all this before.

  This is the point where most dreams collapse. The point where you become too conscious of the dream and start thinking about it rather than experiencing it.

  “Okay,” says Gorgon, “you’re clear this is all in your head, right?”

  I stare at him. This is not how the past went. I’m not sure what to say.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, George,” the other man growls. “It’s a dream. Just a bunch of stuff you dredged up from your memories to help you figure stuff out. You’ve beat him on this level before, when you saved Karen out at Project Krypton.”

  Gorgon was dead months before I traveled to Krypton. He never learned Karen’s name. No one else did, not until the night—

  “It’s not me, you idiot,” he snarls. “This is all just you. All of it. Smith made you provide all the details, made you build your own prison, but you stuck me in here to help you remember the truth. You’re just talking to yourself.”

  “Like Fight Club?”

  “Yes, just like Fight Club, except I’m way better looking than Brad Pitt.”

  I snort back a laugh and realize I’m not wearing my mask. My old costume, the Mighty Dragon, is gone. I’m back in my leather flight jacket, the one that was charred to bits fighting the demon, Cairax Murrain. I’ve got a pair of goggles of my own, but they’re pushed up on my forehead, holding my hair in place. “You were just a clue,” I say. “Because I knew you weren’t supposed to be here.”

  He nods back and looks down. His body is twisted under the coat. His clothes are wrapped tight around his waist. His toes point behind him. One of his knees bends at a strange angle. “Looks like everyone dredged up some dead people to gnaw at them. Plus you had that stupid parrot sketch and all the clicking sounds. Little things your subconscious was trying to get your attention with so you’d know none of this was real.”

  The parking lot has vanished into a dark gray blur. The dream is starting to fade away. Or maybe I just can’t focus on it because I don’t need it anymore. Even as I think this, another ex lumbers out of the darkness behind Gorgon. It’s a man in a suit. It has a very colorful tie. Even in death, its smile is broad and insincere.

  I step forward to knock it away, but Gorgon stops me. He glares at me through his goggles. “Don’t you get it?”

  I look back at him, then at the ex. It’s only a few feet from us. “Get what?”

  “Jesus, you’re dense sometimes.” He turns and points at the ex. It has a United States flag pin on its collar, and also a small pin showing a bear. The seal of California. “How often do you have to have something set out right in front of you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Gorgon turns and the ex grabs his shoulder. It bites into his bicep, but the leather duster protects him. It gnaws away at the material. He shakes it loose and drives the heel of his palm into its forehead. It stumbles back and tips over. It makes no attempt to slow its fall and its skull hits the ground with a crack. The noise is loud enough that I realize—on that higher dream-level—that it’s going to wake me up. The last shreds of memory fall away, but Gorgon says one last thing before they do.

  “Why are you still dreaming about me, George?”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “AS OF RIGHT now, our first priority is to check for survivors,” said St. George. “I’m guessing that’s going to come dow
n to me. I’ll start as soon as the sun’s up. I can try to grab some more clothes for everyone and maybe find a wheelchair for Barry.”

  “I need my wheels, man,” said Barry with a nod.

  St. George had shaken out his shirt and knocked some of the dried matter off, but it still smelled like death. Stealth, on the other hand, had found a tight black turtleneck that looked like a cross between spandex and body armor. She looked a lot more comfortable in it.

  They stood around the far end of the conference table. Madelyn was still sleeping, but there was enough space for all of them to gather around the rough sketch of the Mount Danielle had made.

  St. George glanced at Christian. She hovered on the edge of the little group. She still hadn’t said much, but she’d been fine with eating their food. “Christian?” he asked. “Any information you’ve got would be great.”

  She shook her head, then looked at the map. “There were two families over on Stage 29,” she said. “The Dvorskis and the Randolphs. We all talked with walkies for a while, but the batteries ran out. I haven’t heard from them in a month, I think. Someone said Father Andy took people into his church when the walls fell, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  “I’ll check them all out.”

  Her lip twisted into a sneer. “Some of the scavengers struck out on their own about a month ago. No idea what happened to them.”

  St. George thought of Billie Carter in the truck with the pistol in her lap. “Second goal is setting up a safe zone,” he said, pushing the image from his mind.

  Stealth tapped the different gates into the studio on the map. “The Mount is still defendable for the same reasons it was originally chosen. St. George can check the gates with relative safety. Once the perimeter is secure, we can terminate all exes within the studio grounds and better assess our resources.”

  St. George looked at Barry. “This would be a lot easier if you could power up.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Barry shook his head. “I’ve got nothing. I’m pretty sure the switch is still there in my head somewhere, but it’s like I’m feeling around in the dark and can’t find it.”

  “I know what you mean.” St. George looked at the map and tapped Danielle’s workshop. “Third goal. Cerberus.”

  Danielle set her jaw.

  “If we get everything cleaned out, how long do you think it’ll take to get up and running again?”

  She tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “Hard to say. From what I saw, I know I’ll have to rebuild the lenses and screens from scratch, most of the inter-component connections, too.” She glanced at Barry. “Assuming we can get power back up, that’s a solid three weeks of work right there.”

  He coughed into his hand. “A real three weeks,” he said, “or are you trying to sound like a miracle worker?”

  Danielle snorted, but her lips almost twitched into a smile. “It’s a month of work,” she said. “If I get really lucky with a couple of things and there’s some decent replacement parts kicking around, maybe three weeks. It’ll all depend on what I find when I do a full diagnostic. As long as most of the computer systems are still intact and I can find all the missing components, I should be able to get the rest of it running again. Eventually.”

  “That brings us back to the big, overall question,” said St. George. “What happened here?”

  They all glanced at Christian, but she stared past them and out the dark window.

  St. George took in a breath to speak, but she cut him off.

  “You’re all so full of shit.”

  Stealth raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

  “All this acting so concerned,” said Christian. “Acting innocent. It won’t work. Are you trying to get me to buy into it so I’ll be on your side? Everyone knows what you did.” She stared back out the window. “Everyone who’s left, anyway.”

  “I know you’re not our biggest fan,” St. George began with a sigh. Then something in her tone, her inflection, gnawed at him. “Wait, are you saying,” he started again. “Do you actually think we had something to do with this? With whatever attacked the Mount?”

  “There wasn’t any attack,” she spat at him. “It was just you.”

  Freedom stood up straight and looked at St. George. So did Barry and Danielle.

  St. George blinked twice. “What?”

  She pointed an accusing finger at him. The nail was chipped. “You were out with the scavengers a few months ago. They said you just abandoned them and walked away, talking about dumpsters or something. No one knew what to do, so they just let you go.”

  He exchanged a glance with Stealth and shifted on his feet.

  She glared at him. “A week later you came back and started pounding on the Big Wall. Just punching the cars. You stopped before it fell over, and then wandered off again. A few days later you came back and knocked a hole in the West Wall. We had guards there for three days straight while we tried to figure out how to make it safe.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “There’s no way I would’ve done that. I was—”

  “Then you did it again,” she yelled. “Just lording it over us that they couldn’t hurt you. Showing off that you were safe.”

  “Where was I during all of this?” asked Stealth.

  “I don’t know,” snapped Christian. “Hiding somewhere, as always.”

  “And Danielle?” She nodded at the redhead. “Barry? The gate guards would not have let an unarmed woman and a man in a wheelchair out into the city.”

  “I don’t know all the details,” Christian said. “I just know you all left us high and dry, like I always said you would.” She pounded her chest. “I stayed. People can depend on me when things get tough. That’s why I—”

  “Enough,” said Stealth. “Be silent.”

  Christian took in a breath to shout and Stealth’s hand slid down to the baton tucked through her belt. The former councilwoman turned and stalked out of the room. Her swears echoed back to them.

  “Should someone go after her?” asked Freedom.

  “She will be safe as long as she remains on this floor,” said Stealth. “We have more important matters to discuss.”

  St. George looked at his knuckles. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I just can’t.”

  Barry shrugged. “If Smith could make us all think the world was normal again, why couldn’t he make you smash through the Big Wall and think you’re … I don’t know, in the shower or something?”

  St. George shook his head.

  “I also do not believe you caused this damage,” Stealth said.

  “Thanks.”

  “At the moment, I cannot believe any element from her version of events.”

  Danielle frowned. “Why not?”

  Madelyn yawned at the end of the table. She sat up, blinked her chalk eyes, and took a quick look around the room. “Still just us, huh?”

  Freedom shook his head. “Christian Nguyen’s survived,” he said, “and possibly some others.”

  “But everyone else is dead?”

  Freedom and St. George exchanged awkward glances. The giant officer took in a breath to speak, but Stealth interrupted him. “You remember where you are?” she asked Madelyn.

  The Corpse Girl studied the room. “It’s your office at the Mount, right?”

  Stealth’s eyebrow went up. Her jaw shifted as she studied the girl.

  Madelyn looked around again. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Stealth after a moment, “it is.”

  “And,” said Danielle, “you were about to tell us all why Christian’s a liar.”

  “Perhaps not a liar,” Stealth said, her gaze swinging away from Madelyn, “but her version of events clashes with many observations I have made over the past forty-eight hours and additional facts I have culled from your own individual accounts.”

  St. George set his hands on the table. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Perhaps.” Stealth crossed her arms. “Christi
an claims St. George has been present here at the Mount and is responsible for much of the damage to the Big Wall. This would be consistent with the patterns of damage the Wall has suffered. The overall evidence I have seen here confirms that at least four months have passed. During this time, all of us were most likely wandering Los Angeles in a trance or fugue state.

  “The most straightforward possibility,” continued Stealth, “is that Smith has affected our perceptions. This is within the scope of his powers as we have experienced them.”

  “Okay,” said Barry. “Got it. Smith’s playing mind games.”

  “Which means he’s here in Los Angeles,” Danielle said. “He needs to talk to someone to control them.”

  “That makes sense,” St. George said, “but how could he have made it into Los Angeles, into the Mount, without any of us knowing?”

  “Maybe we did know,” said Freedom. “It’s possible he just forced us to forget.”

  Madelyn snorted and flexed her arms over her head.

  “However,” said Stealth as if they hadn’t spoken, “there is the matter of our clothes.”

  “What?” Madelyn looked at herself. So did Freedom.

  “Most of our clothes show little sign of wear. The stains are recent, from the past forty-eight hours, and many have not had time to dry. The damage is fresh and still shows clean edges which have not frayed.”

  “What’s your point?” asked Freedom.

  “Where did they come from?” responded Danielle. “If we’ve been walking around hypnotized for the past four months, where’ve we been getting clean clothes?”

  “Not just clothing,” said Stealth. She gestured at St. George. “Your hair smells of shampoo, as does Madelyn’s. My hands smell of skin cream. Captain Freedom has freshly cut fingernails. Barry’s clothes contain hints of the antiseptic spray used by cleaning crews between domestic flights.”

  Madelyn pulled a lock of hair under her nose and sniffed.

  “But I thought we decided this is all an illusion,” said Barry. “I wasn’t on a plane.”

  “You could not have been,” agreed Stealth. “Yet these scents cling to all of us. We also have this.” She pulled three small cubes of glass from her pocket and they bounced on the table. “These are from the windshield St. George went through when the Driver stopped moving. They were trapped in his fleece coat. If this was all an illusion, where did that momentum come from?”