Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

The young woman let out a brief shriek, as if she hadn’t decided if the attack upset her or just surprised her. Her phone clattered to the ground. She slapped at the hands, swore, and tried to get a better look at the man. Her expression was a mixture of annoyance and curiosity. The pale man smacked his lips together. It made a wet popping sound with a hard tap beneath it, as if he was snapping his teeth down on her hair.

“Hey,” called George. He broke into a run for the last few yards. “Let her go.”

The man showed no sign of hearing George or of letting go of the woman. He pawed her some more and bent his head to the soft curve where her neck ran into her shoulder. She smacked him with her purse and her face tightened. The man was a stranger. She was getting attacked in broad daylight. He leaned on her even more, pushing her toward the ground.

George grabbed the pale man by the shoulders. The suit jacket was damp. The man was soft, with no muscle tone at all. George twisted and yanked him off the woman.

It was one of those perfect moments of balance and strength, the ones martial artists train for. The man was thrown through the air and crashed onto the trunk of an old sedan, raising a cloud of dust. George wasn’t sure if it came from the car or the man.

“Fucking creeper,” snapped the young woman.

George took a step to place himself between her and the man. “You okay?”

She tugged at her shirt. “Yeah,” she said. She took a step, scooped up her phone, and scowled. “You’re paying for this, asshole,” she barked at the man, holding up the cracked screen.

The creeper waved his legs until he slid off the car’s trunk. He ended up on his feet more from gravity and inertia than effort. He turned to George and the woman and smacked his lips together again.

The man was more of an oversized teen. His eyes were dusty gray, like old Plexiglas that had been scratched a thousand times. George wondered if he might be an albino, but didn’t think the eyes were right for that, either. One side of the man’s nose was a ragged flap, as if something had gone in his nostril and ripped out the side. His skin wasn’t just pale, it was corpse white.

The creeper took a shaky step forward and his mouth opened and closed. There was something mindless about the movement, like a fish. George heard the man’s teeth clicking against each other, as if they were chattering in the hot sun. It was a familiar sound, but he wasn’t sure from where.

“Do you know karate or something?” asked the woman.

“No,” said George. “I was just lucky.”

“Well, feel free to kick his ass.”

“Maybe you should call the police.”

“Hello.” She glared at him. “He broke my phone.”

The pale man’s arms came back up and he took two more steps. “Okay, you need to back off,” George told him. “Just stop now before this gets any worse.”

The man took another step and seemed to stumble. George reached out to catch him. The man bent down and bit George’s arm.

“Oh, shit!” yelled the girl.

George shook his arm and slapped at the creeper’s head. The man’s teeth were caught in his sleeve, but he got it free. He took a few steps away from the man. The woman took a few steps back, too. She glanced at the arm. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. He didn’t even break the skin.”

“Lucky. You’d probably need half a dozen shots.”

The creeper straightened up as if he wore a backpack full of weights. His head shifted side to side. His teeth gnashed together four times. One of them cracked and a gleaming piece of enamel spun to the ground.

George lunged forward, put his hands on the man’s shoulders, and shoved. The pale man staggered back, hit the back bumper of the car, and tipped over backward. His skull bounced off the trunk with a loud clang, and his body flopped on the pavement between the sedan and a red minivan.

“Shit,” said the woman. “I think you killed him with your karate.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“He’s not moving.”

The body on the ground moved. It groaned once. It rolled over. The oversized teen blinked twice, then twice again. “Whoooooo,” he said. He burped and the smell of cheap beer wafted across George. “You have an awesome rack,” the teen said to the side of the car.

“Asshole,” said the woman. “You broke my phone.”

George stared at the teen. Down between the cars, out of the direct sun, his skin didn’t seem so pale, and his eyes were a faint blue, not the dull gray they’d looked like in the light. The side of his nose was covered with Magic Marker, and there were half-removed traces of it across his face. His hair had the stylishly rumpled look of someone who spent a lot of time making it look like they spent no time on their hair.

The creeper gave a drunken cackle. He rolled onto all fours and scampered between the cars. Once he was clear he staggered back to his feet and lurched away toward the crowds of students and parents.

“Asshole,” she yelled after him.

“Do you want to call security?” asked George. “I saw it all.”

The woman didn’t even look at him. “Do you know who he is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s not going to help, is it? Goddammit,” she muttered, cradling the cracked phone, “I had plans for tonight.”

George opened his mouth to say something else but she was already walking past him to her car. He looked after the creeper and caught a glimpse of the man stumbling through the crowd. He thought about calling security, but the girl was right. “Drunken frat boy” wasn’t much of a description.

Plus, George admitted, he wasn’t sure what the young man had looked like. He’d been