Ex-Purgatory: A Novel

by Peter Clines

  “How so?”

  “How d’you think? These days what’s everyone think when the government comes looking for your neighbor? Nobody’s getting the Nobel Peace Prize, that’s for sure. Half the people who talked to me yesterday thought you’d been arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo or something. If they see you …”

  “What are you getting at, Jarvis?”

  The supervisor scratched his salt-and-pepper beard. “Look,” he said, “just keep a low profile for a while, okay? Try not to … I don’t know, draw attention to yourself. Don’t do anything weird. Maybe this’ll cool down in a couple of days.”

  George’s phone buzzed. It was a text message from Karen Q. He deleted it without looking. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  “I’m doing you a favor,” said Jarvis, “ ’cause you’ve been here forever and you’re a great worker. Please don’t light yourself on fire or anything.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Another text came through. He deleted it.

  His first job was changing a flickering bulb in one of the lecture halls. Not a big deal, but it needed the big fifteen-foot A-frame ladder. When that was done, Jarvis sent him to deal with a backed-up toilet in one of the dorms, and then he emptied trash in some of the other science buildings. It was more mindless work. The most challenging part was mopping up after one trash can that had received a mostly full cup of coffee.

  George dumped the last bin in the dumpster. Loose papers, Doritos bags, and paper cups rained down onto the other trash. There were old clothes in the dumpster, plus a few swollen bags and some parts that looked like they might’ve been the guts of a television, or maybe an old computer monitor.

  He let the bin drop and rested his hand on the edge of the dumpster. He closed his eyes, rolled his neck, and pushed down. There was a knot in his shoulder he wanted to pop. He turned a bit more and levered his shoulder against the dumpster.

  When he opened his eyes, Karen Quilt was staring at him.

  She was dressed in black slacks and a blazer. She wore a tie but no shirt, and held the jacket more or less shut with one hand. The poster was less than ten feet away. Someone had put it up between his trips to the dumpster. He didn’t recognize the name along the bottom, and wasn’t sure if it was a brand or a store. Maybe both.

  She looked disappointed in him.

  This girl, Madelyn, she keeps telling me I’m supposed to be a superhero.

  He looked away from the poster and his eyes fell on the dumpster. It was almost full of trash. Most of it was paper, but the whole thing probably weighed close to three or four tons. His hand tightened on the edge and he gave it a shake.

  The steel container trembled.

  According to her we all have superpowers. That’s how we fight the monsters.

  He stepped to the side. It had the same sleeves as the one he’d lifted—that he imagined lifting—the other day, but they were lower on this model. It’d be even easier to put a hand on it and get the other one underneath. And this one was far behind the building. No one would see him.

  I’m supposed to be super-strong.

  He set one hand on the sleeve and his head flared. His fingers leaped back to his temple and felt the vein pulsing there. His nose started to run, and when he wiped it with the back of his glove it left a red streak.

  Another one. He couldn’t believe he’d had a nosebleed while talking to the President. Six-year-olds get random nosebleeds. It was tough to think of something more embarrassing, short of wetting his pants. At least the President and the First Lady had been gracious about it. Christian had given him some of the tissues one of her assistants carried for her, and even offered to have their medic look at him.

  George shook off his glove, tilted his head back, and pinched his nose. He walked away from the dumpster, dragging the plastic trash bin behind him. He passed the poster of Karen Quilt without looking at it.

  According to the menu, the cafeteria was serving chicken parmesan. George was pretty sure it was just a fried chicken patty with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, but he also wasn’t sure what actual chicken parmesan was supposed to be. With the spaghetti, a pair of rolls, and a trip to the salad bar it made for a solid lunch.

  He found a table with an abandoned newspaper and paged through the news. More on the President’s visit to Los Angeles. A sidebar about the First Lady talking to police and schoolchildren. As he finished his chicken patty, he found a short article in the entertainment section. Karen Quilt had been spotted with a mystery man outside her hotel. It was two paragraphs long, one of which was her bio. There weren’t any pictures. George wondered if the President had suppressed them somehow.

  Either the lettuce or tomatoes had gone bad. He wasn’t sure which. He pushed the salad to one side and split a roll with his fingers.

  Someone cleared their throat. He looked up and saw a young woman sitting across from him. Her dark hair was braided into a tight ponytail.

  She wasn’t sitting at the table. She was in a wheelchair. It was the crazy girl.

  “Hey,” Madelyn said. “I didn’t hear from you yesterday.”

  He ignored her and let his eyes drift back to the newspaper.

  She peered at it upside down. Her finger darted out to tap the Karen Quilt article. “I saw that online,” she said. “Was that you? Did you go talk to her?”

  Her hand was pale under the cafeteria’s harsh fluorescent light. He could see dark veins under the flesh and faint bruises under her fingernails. Part of him tried to insist a living girl’s hand couldn’t look like that.

  “Please leave me alone,” said George.

  Her eyes went wide. “What?”

  “Go away.”

  Madelyn looked down at the article again. “Didn’t she know you? She had to know you.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. Then he killed another few seconds by having a sip of milk. It was on the edge of spoiling, and the tang of it made his nose wrinkle. Something was wrong with one of the cafeteria coolers.

  “George,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I am not part of this,” he said. “Whatever fantasy world you’re making up, leave me out of it.”

  He might as well have slapped her. “What did you say?”

  He flipped the newspaper shut. It wasn’t as dramatic as slamming a book. “You,” he said, “are crazy. You need to talk to a therapist or a psychiatrist or someone. And I’d appreciate it if you would just leave me alone in the meantime.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing happened,” he said. “I’m just not going to play this game with you anymore.”

  “Game?”

  “All this superhero nonsense.”

  “You are a hero,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’m just a guy,” he said. “Just a regular guy trying to do his duty as a citizen of this great country.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Please,” he said, “just leave me alone.” He lowered his eyes to the newspaper and set his hands flat on the table. He could feel his veins pulsing in his temple. She was giving him a headache.

  He could see her in his peripheral vision. Her head was bowed, and he thought she might be trembling. He wasn’t sure what kind of outburst could result from that. He could guess a few possible ones.

  Instead, her pale hand reached out again. It came to rest on the front-page headline. The one about the President.

  “Did he talk to you?”

  He shoveled another mouthful of salad into his mouth. It tasted foul. The lettuce was slimy and the tomato was acidic. He forced himself to chew it.

  She tapped the picture of President Smith. “George, did he talk to you? Did he ask you anything? It’s important.”

  “George!” called someone else. Kathy, the crazy girl’s roommate. “Hey, how are you?”

  He pushed his fork through another lettuce leaf, but he couldn’t eat it. His stomach was churning after the last mouthful. On the
plus side, his nausea was overwhelming his headache.

  Kathy stopped a few feet from the table. “Are you guys fighting about something?”

  George shook his head.

  Madelyn ignored her. “Smith gets into your head,” she told George. “I told you, it’s what he does. If he talked to you, we’re back to square one here.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” said Kathy. “Sorry.” She gave a meek wave and walked away.

  Madelyn opened her mouth and the Nextel cut her off with a chirp. “George,” called Jarvis. He sounded tired.

  He wrested the phone off his belt without looking at Madelyn. “Yeah, boss.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  He shot a glance at her. “Lunch.”

  “Finish up and come on back to the office.”

  “Did you want me to deal with that broken mirror?”

  “I put Mark on it. Come back to the office.”

  George loaded his tray. He thought about taking the newspaper, too, but Madelyn still had her hand on it. He stood up. “You need to get some help,” he said.

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  He felt her eyes on him as he dropped off his tray and left. He tried not to think about her. His nausea was gone, but his head was pounding again.

  “I think I need to give you a couple of days off,” said Jarvis. “Just ’til this all calms down.”

  It was a kick in the gut, even though he’d felt it coming. “No,” he said. “Come on, Jarvis, you can’t.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “I did what you said,” George told him. He wondered if someone had seen him talking to Madelyn. “What happened?”

  “That bitch from HR came looking for you. The lawyers wrote up some sort of disclaimer for you to sign, something to show parents. I said you were over working in the chemistry labs and her head almost exploded.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Jarvis shook his head. “They’re suspending you while they ‘investigate.’ ”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Yeah, but you can’t prove it,” his boss said. “Did the feds give you a letter or a number to call or anything?”

  “Well … no.”

  Jarvis threw up his hands. “They’re paranoid, George. You and I both know there’s a few thousand parents who’ll be calling in if they find out there’s a suspected terrorist working here.”

  “I’m not a—” George bit his lip. He clenched his fists. “This is bullshit.”

  “I know, buddy. I know. But my hands are tied.” He paused. “I need your ID. And your keys, including the keycards.”

  George stood in front of the desk for a few more moments. Jarvis studied something on his computer screen. Then he grabbed a pen and tapped it on the desk. It click-click-clicked for almost thirty seconds before the fight went out of George and he pulled the lanyard off his neck.

  “You’re still going to get paid,” said Jarvis. “Won’t be any overtime or anything, but it’s something.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was clear there had been people in George’s apartment while he was at work. Books were shifted on the shelves. Some of his DVDs were out and opened. Half his clothes were on the floor and the closet door—

  What did he keep hidden in the closet?

  —the closet door was wide open. The cabinets were ajar and a few drawers left open an inch or two. He wondered if the government hired two types of agents—the ones you sent in when you didn’t want any sign they’d been there, and the ones you sent in when you wanted someone to know they’d been there. Maybe they were trained for both options.

  He tossed his phone and wallet on the kitchen table, kicked off his shoes, and started to clean up. He did easy stuff first. Pushed in drawers. Shuffled books and DVDs back into place.

  He shoved all the clothes in the hamper. They looked okay, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing clothes a lot of other people had been handling. Plus he’d seen enough CSI shows to know they could have been sprayed with different chemicals to show blood or gunpowder or chemical residue. Lots of stuff he could’ve told them they wouldn’t find.

  His laptop was open and on. The password probably hadn’t slowed them at all. For that matter, he realized, what about all his other online passwords? Bank of America? His e-mail? Facebook? Amazon? He’d need to reset them all.

  Although, would it make a difference? The President had seemed straightforward, but George still didn’t feel like trusting the blonde who’d snatched him off the street. He was probably being monitored somehow. Despite what he’d told Jarvis, it was a good bet his name was already on tons of Homeland Security lists. There might be cameras or microphones in his apartment, too.

  He was annoyed to find the browser history had been wiped clean on his computer. Half his bookmarks, too. It wasn’t a real surprise, it just felt kind of petty for them to erase stuff like that. Even if he had no plans to look up any of those sites again.

  After two hours George decided his apartment wasn’t any messier than it had been when he went to work. His stomach grumbled. There wasn’t much in the way of food in his apartment, but he knew he couldn’t blame that on the CIA or the Secret Service or whomever the blonde had worked for. He ate out once a week, just at the Mexican place up the street or the Thai restaurant a block over, but after missing a day and a half of work he wasn’t sure he should be spending any money he didn’t need to.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He felt more cautious than usual and checked through the peephole. He didn’t see anyone for a moment, then saw the little girl’s head in the bottom of the fish-eye view. He unlocked the door and swung it open.

  Not a little girl. A girl in a chair.

  “What are you doing here?” George asked.

  “Looking for you.” Madelyn rolled the wheelchair forward a few inches, but he didn’t open the door any wider or step out of the way.

  “How’d you find out where I live?”

  “You pointed the building out to me once,” she said. “While we were out scavenging.”

  “No more games,” he said. “I’m done. How did you get my address?”

  She sighed. “I had wild wheelchair sex with a guy in the university’s payroll department. Is that what you want to hear? Let me in.”

  He shook his head. “You need to go home. Or back to the dorms. Just go away.”

  “I’m trying,” she said. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t our life. We’re supposed to be somewhere else.”

  Her words made his head ache again. “Please,” he said, “just stop.”

  “You’re super-strong, George,” she insisted. “You’re invulnerable. You can breathe fire. You …” She took a breath and stared him in the eyes. “You can fly.”

  He closed his eyes and counted to five. The pounding in his head faded. When he opened his eyes again, she was still staring at him.

  “You need to go,” he said again.

  She sighed. “Okay, then.”

  He waited for her to turn and head back down the hall.

  She didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we need to get past this, and I can’t think of a better way to convince you once and for all.”

  Madelyn pulled something out from between her hip and the arm of the wheelchair. It seemed to swell in her hand as George realized what it was. She pointed it at him.

  “Whoa!” he said. He put his hands up. “Hang on. You don’t want to—”

  The gunshot rattled the window at the end of the narrow hallway.

  TWENTY-ONE

  AMID ALL THE jostling and the shock, it crossed George’s mind he’d never been in an ambulance before.

  The oxygen mask and the gurney straps limited his movement, so he couldn’t get a good look at his chest. The woman with him—he wasn’t sure if she was a paramedic or an EMT or something else—kept asking him questi
ons. His name. What year it was. Who was President. He was pretty sure they were supposed to distract him.

  The woman had strapped an oxygen mask over his face and stabbed at his arm with three different needles. She cut open his shirt and probed at his chest with her fingers. She pushed a wad of gauze against him and held it with one hand. The driver said something and she turned her head to talk over the sirens.

  She looked worried.

  He’d been shot. Madelyn had shot him at point-blank range. He’d seen enough cop shows to know what that meant. He was maybe an hour from death, crippled if he was lucky. He tried to wiggle his toes, and it felt like they moved, but he couldn’t see them. He knew amputees felt phantom pain and itches in limbs they hadn’t had for years.

  He also remembered reading somewhere people never felt extreme pain. The human body had some kind of built-in system for deadening nerves. People never felt the full pain of broken bones or other severe injuries.

  George felt a dull throb in his chest. Nothing else. Combined with the woman’s worried expression, it had him on the edge of panic. He tried to talk but she pressed the oxygen mask against his face.

  They pulled the gurney out of the ambulance and rolled him down a hallway. There were white panels and fluorescent tubes, just like the endless ones he changed at work. A new woman and two men leaned over him. He glimpsed a police uniform on one.

  The gurney slipped through another door and came to rest inside a circle of curtains. The police officer had vanished. The new woman moved her hands around his chest. She was younger with dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. She pushed and prodded and asked if he could feel any pain. Then she vanished, too.

  Had they given up on him? There was a word for it, when they stopped wasting resources on hopeless cases. His heartbeat felt strong. He wasn’t having any trouble breathing. He couldn’t feel anything in his chest. Even the dull ache had passed. He guessed it was all the shots they’d given him in the ambulance, even though his mind still felt very clear.