Ex-Purgatory: A Novel

by Peter Clines

  The top of the staircase gave him a clear view of the street and half the intersection. He panned his head back and forth across, watching each pedestrian and each car that drove by. Studying the drivers reminded him of the checkpoints in Iraq.

  He glanced back at Dr. Morris. “I could use your help,” he said. “I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Burke looks like.”

  Dr. Morris—Danielle—stood with her back to the door behind him. It seemed to calm her to be surrounded. She was still vague in his memory. He seemed to remember her being much larger and brasher. He guessed part of that had to be the Cerberus battlesuit. She hadn’t said much since George and Karen Quilt left.

  No, he corrected himself. St. George and Stealth. He knew those were the right names, but his mind kept defaulting to the other ones.

  “He’s bald and black,” said Madelyn.

  “You just described me.”

  “And he’s in a wheelchair.”

  “Probably not if he’s in a cab,” said Danielle. She leaned forward and looked either way down the street. “He’s got light brown eyes. He smiles a lot. He’s really thin because his power …” She closed her eyes and brought up her fingers, but the memories came before she snapped. “His power eats him up.”

  The description brought an image to Freedom’s mind, but it was still too vague.

  Madelyn still hung on Freedom’s neck. He barely noticed her weight. Every now and then she’d shift her hips against his back. It disturbed him at first, and then he realized she was trying to make her legs work.

  Her skin was cold. He could feel it on his neck, even through her sleeves. She gave off no warmth at all. He’d felt bodies like that before. Another reminder of Iraq and Afghanistan.

  He remembered the name Stealth had used. The Corpse Girl. He still wasn’t sure what it meant. He just knew seeing Madelyn had filled him with a great sense of relief.

  A man walked by pushing a three-wheeled baby stroller. He chattered away on his phone and gave only a glance to the people up on the steps. A few more strides carried him past a decorative planter and out of sight. His voice continued for a few moments and then it faded, too.

  “This sucks,” said Madelyn.

  He turned his head enough to see her in the corner of his eye. Her skin looked pale in the bright sunlight. “How so?”

  “I figured once we all got back together everything would start making sense again. That everything would be fine.”

  “Fine how?”

  “Just, you know … fine. Back to the way things are supposed to be. We’d all get together and something would pop and we’d all be good again.”

  “In my experience,” said Freedom, “most problems aren’t solved that easily.”

  Danielle snorted.

  The world rippled around them. One moment the hotel was tall and pristine. The next, the bottom half was wrapped in overgrown ivy. Two balconies near the top were marked with black halos of soot.

  A car in the middle of the street came to an abrupt halt and gained three years’ worth of dust. Two of the figures across the street vanished, and the other two went from walking to staggering. The planter in front of them exploded with wild growth.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” muttered Danielle.

  “Whoa,” said Madelyn.

  “You saw it this time?” asked Freedom.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m still seeing it. Home again, home again, like Mom used to say.”

  “Should we stay here?” asked Danielle.

  “We should be good,” said Freedom. “The plants hide us a bit more now, and the stairs still give us restricted access.”

  “Also means we’ll have a harder time spotting Barry,” she said.

  Madelyn looked at the hotel. “You think they’re okay inside?”

  “They’re fine,” said Freedom. “The exes can’t hurt St. George.”

  “Stealth’s just human, though, right?”

  Danielle snorted again. “She’s not ‘just’ anything. If I had to bet, I’d say she has better odds of coming out of there than Geor—shit!”

  Freedom turned in time to see Danielle slam herself back against the door. Her breath was fast and her arms pulled in tight against her ribs. Her eyes were locked up above Freedom’s shoulder, on Madelyn.

  He turned his head and a dead girl looked back at him from a few inches away. Her skin was white, even more so against her dark hair, and her eyes looked like dusty chalk. He could see the retinas, but there was no color or shine to them.

  The Corpse Girl blinked twice. “What?” She looked at Freedom, then Danielle, and back. Her hand came up and patted at her head. “Is there a bug in my hair?”

  “I think you might … you’re getting better,” Freedom said.

  “Yeah?” She shifted on his back and glanced over at Danielle. Then she noticed her own hand. “Oh, that’s right,” she said.

  A scream echoed down the street. It was far away, but it sounded like a man’s voice. A moment later it rang out again. It was words this time, but it was too distant to be understood.

  Freedom straightened up and felt Madelyn shift on his back. He listened to the echoes for a moment. It was coming from the north, he was almost certain.

  “Was that him?” asked Madelyn. “I’m not sure.”

  Danielle had her head cocked, listening, with her eyes closed. “I think it might’ve been,” she said.

  Freedom went down the stairs in long strides, taking two at a time. “Whoever it is,” he said, “they need some help.”

  The three of them headed north. A few exes spotted them and stumbled their way, but they were easy to outpace. Danielle stayed so close to Freedom she was almost pressed against him. They covered two long blocks.

  “Maybe we should yell for him,” said Madelyn. “We could try to triangulate or something.”

  “No,” said Freedom, shaking his head. “We don’t want to attract any more exes.”

  “Definitely not,” agreed Danielle.

  Another shout echoed across the street and she winced. This time Freedom pinpointed the source. A battered yellow cab sat in the southbound lane of Doheny alongside a dark and dusty sedan. A figure in the backseat of the cab slammed against the rear door again and again. The shape in the front moved much slower.

  They got closer and Freedom saw the cab had suffered some kind of collision. Most of the driver’s side was dented and caved in. The other side was blocked by the sedan. The cab’s tires were flat on the pavement and crumbling.

  In the backseat of the cab was a thin black man. He had bristle-short hair, as if he’d been shaved bald and let it grow back. His chin had a few days’ worth of stubble, too. The man saw them and waved. “Thank God,” he called out. “Get me out of here.” He’d rolled down the window, but it went only halfway. Probably to discourage dashers.

  Captain Freedom checked the other figure in the cab. The ex in the driver’s seat was trapped by its seat belt. It had turned halfway around to paw at the divider between it and the man in the backseat. He felt Madelyn raise herself on his back. “Zzzap,” she said.

  “Barry,” said Danielle. It was almost a sigh of relief. Her shoulders slumped and her hands unclenched.

  It was, Freedom realized, probably just what he had looked like when he’d seen Madelyn for the first time.

  Barry stared back at her. “You’re the redhead,” he said. He blinked twice and smiled. “Danielle. The Gundam pilot.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” she said, “but it’s good to see you.”

  “You, too.” He looked up at Freedom. “The door’s jammed. D’you think you can give it a pull from your side?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “And you do realize there’s a zombie teenager on your back, right?”

  “It’s come up,” said Freedom. He glanced over his shoulder. “You have a good grip?”

  Madelyn nodded. “Yep.”

  Freedom grabbed the latch and pulled. It snapped off,
but it jerked the door open enough for him to get his fingers around the edge. He braced his feet, heaved, and tore the door out of the frame. “Do you need a hand, sir?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” Barry said. He leaned forward and Freedom scooped him up like a child. “Oh, and can any of you explain what the frak just happened to the whole city!”

  “Is this your first shift, Mr. Burke?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, so I’m guessing yes.”

  “It’s good to see you,” said Madelyn.

  “I know you, too,” Barry said after a moment. “You’re the dead girl in my dreams.”

  “The Corpse Girl,” she said.

  “Yeah!” He looked up at the huge officer, then at his uniform. “At least someone had the decency to wear nametags during the trippy amnesia fest.”

  “Just for you, sir.” Freedom looked around. The noise of ripping off the door combined with Barry’s shouts had attracted some exes. There were five or six in the immediate area closing on them. Maybe another dozen farther out. They had two minutes, tops, before they needed to start moving.

  Barry shook his head. “Captain Freedom,” he said. “Man, I hate cheap knockoff names. Can’t the government put any thought into this stuff?”

  Madelyn bit back a laugh.

  “My wheelchair’s in the trunk. You guys are with George and Karen Quilt, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Danielle. “They’re back at the hotel.”

  Freedom walked around to the back of the cab. “How’d you end up here, sir?”

  “I was taking a cab to the hotel,” Barry said, “like she told me. And then a few minutes ago everything just … changed.”

  “The shift,” said Madelyn.

  Freedom hooked the fingers of his free hand under the lip of the cab’s trunk and pulled. It wasn’t locked, but the hinges were rusted. They squealed as he pried the lid up, and then Barry swore.

  “No wheelchair,” said Maddy. “Déjà vu.”

  “Long gone, if it was ever there,” said Danielle.

  “Not a problem for now,” said Freedom.

  “My bag’s gone, too,” said Barry. “My Weyland-Yutani shirt was in there, damn it.”

  “We should head back,” said Freedom. “This area’s getting hot, and it’ll be harder to fight while holding both of you.”

  Barry looked up at Madelyn. “Wait, you can’t walk either?”

  She shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

  “Fantastic,” he said with a grin. He looked over at Danielle. “Three more people in wheelchairs and we’ve got a basketball team.”

  Stealth watched Quilt pack the weapons into a duffel bag he’d set on the couch. His movements were quick and precise. It was an admirable efficiency of motion.

  And it was wrong. She knew that. Terribly wrong.

  He used the last pieces of a shredded towel to separate the weapons so the bag would make no noise. He checked the chamber on the last of the Glocks and held it out to her without looking. It was done automatically, the way other fathers would hand over keys or credit cards.

  She took the Glock. It felt good in her hand. Not perfect, but good.

  He set a clip-on holster on the arm of the couch and followed it with a collapsible baton. The holstered pistol went on her right hip. She slid the baton into her side pocket.

  “I have packed the spare magazines,” he told her, “and enough ammunition for three reloads on each.”

  She looked at him. “What have you kept for yourself?”

  He zipped the bag shut. “I have the G36 and one of the Mark 23s.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  The edges of his mouth twitched, the barest hint of a smile. She remembered seeing it twice as a child. “Have you ever known it not to be enough?”

  It was an echo of what she had told St. George the night before.

  Too much of an echo.

  He held the bag out and waited for her to take it. She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at him. He stared back.

  “You are not my father.”

  The words hung in the air for a moment. He blinked once. “And what makes you say that, child?”

  “Because my father swore to kill me if I could not stop him,” she said. “It is the kind of man he was. No one can change that much. If you were my father, even a version of him … one of us would not be alive right now.”

  He set the bag down and blinked again. His fingers flexed once, like ten scorpion tails coiling and uncoiling. Then he reached up with his left hand and made a minute adjustment to his spectacles. “Perhaps I took pity on you.”

  “I often wished he had. But that was not his way. You are a vestigial childhood dream dredged up by Smith’s manipulations. A desire buried deep in my subconscious. I wanted you to be real so …”

  He waited for her. After a few moments, he raised one brow. “So …?”

  “So I could introduce George to my family.”

  “I see,” said Quilt. “And why would that matter?”

  “Because I think, in his own way, my father would have approved of such an honorable man, despite their many differences.”

  “I think he would have.”

  Stealth set her hand on the pistol.

  Quilt nodded. His mouth opened, as if to say something else, and then snapped shut. It opened and shut again. And again. The sound of clicking teeth filled the suite.

  In her peripheral vision, the room fell apart. Wallpaper sagged and darkened. The couches were reduced to shreds of fabric and broken wood. The curtains vanished and let in the harsh sunlight.

  The duffel bag vanished as well. The weight on her hips changed as the pistol vanished beneath her hand and the baton dissolved into the air. Even the holster was gone.

  The dead thing was not her father. Its shoulders were too wide. The hair was too thin, even taking age into account. It was, by her estimate, an inch and a half too tall. The jawline was wrong.

  It reached for her and she batted its hands out and away. A strike to either side of its neck cracked two vertebrae. Her heel lashed out and shattered one of its knees. It hit the floor and a second kick cracked the side of its skull.

  There was a sound from behind her. Another ex-human stumbled in from the hall, drawn in by the sound. The door had been kicked open at some point, four years ago judging from the shade of the exposed wood, and splinters of the frame were strewn in the entryway.

  The ex had been a woman, and was still dressed in the dark uniform coat of the hotel. Two more followed in behind her, then a third and fourth. The third was wearing a staff polo shirt splattered with dried blood. The fourth had been a boy of eleven at most. It was dressed in red swim trunks with dragons on them. Another child tottered in behind them. This one was naked, but mangled enough she could not be certain of its gender.

  The sound of teeth grew louder and Stealth turned again. Another pair of exes had wandered out from the master bedroom. She guessed they’d been the original occupants of the suite. The dead woman wore a wedding band and engagement ring. The dead man did not.

  Eight exes, six of them in the narrow entryway.

  She leaped over the remains of the couch toward the bedroom door. The heel of her palm slammed into the dead man’s nose. The ex’s face flattened out with a crack as the bones were driven back into its skull. The dead thing staggered back and tipped over. She spun and struck the other ex just below the neck, crushing its throat back to the spine. Her follow-through shattered its jaw. She dropped, spun, and swept its legs out from under it.

  Another ex staggered from the suite’s office. A high kick snapped its neck. It wobbled and then fell over. Its jaws still snapped open and shut.

  Something moved behind her. The ex in the uniform coat had crossed the room and was a few feet away. The others were a yard behind it, still working their way around the couch. Three more had entered the room, and she could hear more in the hallway.

  Nine exes between her and th
e exit. At least six more in the hallway, judging from the echo of teeth and footsteps. Uneven floor. No weapons. While the exes took another step forward, she ran through five different methods of taking on multiple undead opponents. She considered a dozen possible scenarios and outcomes.

  Then she did the most logical thing to guarantee her safety.

  Stealth drove a kick into the uniformed ex’s chest, knocking it back into one behind it, and turned away. On her first step, she reached up and crossed her arms in front of her face. On the second, she grabbed the collar of her shirt behind her head. On the third step, now a full run, she kicked off and dove through the glass doors of the balcony.

  St. George stood at the corner of the hedge that separated the hotel grounds from the public sidewalk. He had a clear view of the main entrance to the hotel, the doorman, and the valet. A Middle Eastern–looking man, his wife, and three small children waited for their car. Two of the children were twins. A few paparazzi stood nearby, but none of them seemed to recognize him as the mystery man seen with Karen Quilt.

  It all looked real. He tried to spot an inconsistency in the way people moved or the smells of flowers and fountain water that hung in the air. He studied the front of the hotel for a break in the architectural details. Anything that would hint it was just a hallucination.

  A bee wove back and forth along the hedge and then launched itself toward the hotel flowerbeds. One of the paparazzi scratched the side of his mouth. The twins traded colorful cards back and forth between their hands.

  Then he heard a crash from above him. The thin sound of breaking glass. His head whipped up. So did everyone else’s. He saw the shards sparkling in the sun, the body in the air, and then—

  By the time he realized what he was seeing, she was already on the ground.

  Stealth ripped her shirt over her head and lashed out with it as she began to plunge. The sleeve wrapped around a balcony railing two floors below hers. It slipped loose of the rail just as quickly, but it was enough to shift her angle of descent, pulling her back toward the building.

  She let go of the shirt and slammed into the railing of the third balcony down. She held on for an instant, then dropped to the next one. Then the one below that, and the one below that. Her fingertips grabbed at the balconies like a mountain climber and the holds bled off her momentum. She dropped from railing to edge to railing, and less than ten seconds after going through the penthouse window she was standing on the ground.