Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

ALSO BY PETER CLINES

Ex-Heroes

Ex-Patriots

Ex-Communication

Ex-Purgatory

The Fold

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Peter Clines

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Broadway Books and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clines, Peter, 1969-

Ex-isle / by Peter Clines. — First edition.

pages ; cm. — (Ex-Heroes ; book 5)

ISBN 978-0-553-41831-6 (softcover) — ISBN 978-0-553-41832-3 (ebook)

1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Superheroes—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3603.L563E95 2016

813'.6—dc23

2015033148

ISBN 9780553418316

eBook ISBN 9780553418323

Title page illustration by STILLFX/Shutterstock.com

Cover illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

Series design by Christopher Brand

v4.1

ep

Contents

Cover

Also by Peter Clines

Title Page

Copyright

A Quick Note About Time

Prologue: Now

Survivor’s Guilt: Then

Chapter Two: Now

Chapter Three: Now

Chapter Four: Now

Chapter Five: Now

Chapter Six: Now

Chapter Seven: Now

Chapter Eight: Now

Chapter Nine: Now

Chapter Ten: Now

Chapter Eleven: Now

Point of View: Then

Chapter Thirteen: Now

Chapter Fourteen: Now

Chapter Fifteen: Now

The Honeymoon Is Over: Then

Chapter Seventeen: Now

Chapter Eighteen: Now

Chapter Nineteen: Now

Chapter Twenty: Now

Opportunity Rocks: Then

Chapter Twenty-two: Now

Chapter Twenty-three: Now

Chapter Twenty-four: Now

Chapter Twenty-five: Now

Chapter Twenty-six: Now

Chapter Twenty-seven: Now

Chapter Twenty-eight: Now

Chapter Twenty-nine: Now

Chapter Thirty: Now

Making the Tough Call: Then

Epilogue: Now

Acknowledgments

THE WORLD ENDED during the summer of 2009.

Sorry you had to find out like this.

When Ex-Heroes was first published many years ago, I included enough details to make it pretty clear the story was set in what was then our present.

But, as you may have noticed, the zombie apocalypse didn’t actually happen that summer. Which means that in more than a few ways, the characters of Ex-Heroes are trapped in the past. Things have progressed for us. For the people of the Mount, though…it all came to a halt that summer.

After all these books, the effects of my earlier decision have started to make themselves known in small ways. Barry often laments never knowing how Lost ended, but we all know because it ended in May of 2010. The survivors can see a Borders Books just outside the Big Wall at Hollywood and Vine, even though that Borders was shuttered (with so many others) back in April of 2011. There’s a Walgreens there if you look today. In the world of Ex-Heroes, the United States never got out of Iraq, Scotland never held a vote for independence, and there were no Hobbit movies.

So when these oddities show up, please remember that their world hasn’t moved forward, even if ours has.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING St. George could see was on fire at this point, including most of the zombies.

The fire had started a block south of the Big Wall about four hours earlier, just before sundown. Nobody knew how. The flames had crawled north across a dozen overgrown lawns that hadn’t been watered in five years or rained on in five months. Then they’d climbed a few trees, and a light wind had pushed embers into the houses.

Now three city blocks of inferno lit up the night. The blaze reached for the Big Wall as it looked for more to consume, and the people of the Mount fought back as best they could. Half of them ferried buckets of water out to the flames or beat down the lawns with damp blankets. The other half—and St. George—pulled guard duty, keeping the firefighters safe from the exes.

The zombies—the ex-humans—had first appeared years ago. The undead had overrun cities, then countries, then whole continents. In the space of a year, the population of Earth dropped by more than ninety percent.

The living population, anyway.

Now millions of exes walked the streets of Los Angeles, and hundreds of them stumbled through the flames around the Mount. The click-click-click of their teeth meshed with the pop and crackle of burning wood. Sound and movement attracted them. Sound and movement and food.

The one St. George held by the throat pawed at him and clicked its teeth. It flailed at his face and scraped against the black leather of his biker jacket. The dead thing had a better chance of getting through the leather than through St. George’s stone-like skin. Two of the ex’s gaunt fingers hooked in his long hair but slid free as fast as they’d gotten tangled.

Yellow-orange flames raced across its body, burning away clothes and hair. It could’ve been a woman once, or a slim man with long hair. Too much of its body had burned for him to be sure. Ex-flesh didn’t catch fire easily, dried out from years in the sun, but their hair and clothes could burn. Sometimes, when it did, what little fat they had left became fuel, just like a candle.

St. George flicked his wrist and the ex sailed across the street, its spine wrapping around a parking sign’s squared-off steel pole.

Off to his left, two teams of people slapped at the fire with quilted blankets. Others kept the fabric soaked with water from buckets. They smothered the flames a few inches at a time. It was a slow, steady process, perfected after four or five similar fires over the years.

Two more exes lurched toward one of the firefighting teams, and a figure loomed out of the smoke to meet them. Captain John Carter Freedom, leader of the 456th Unbreakables super-soldier platoon, stood just shy of seven feet tall and almost half that wide. The flickering firelight gleamed across his dark scalp. He reached out and grabbed one of them with a gloved hand that covered the zombie’s shoulder. A flex of his tree-trunk arm sent the dead woman sprawling. His massive fist came around and shattered the other ex’s skull.

St. George grabbed a zombie and flung it back the way it had come. He tossed another one after it. The second one ended up draped