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

still had a slim chance, provided they had any medicine left on the ships. Not a great chance, but it was better than none.

He’d put down at least thirty zombies. The people trapped on the tanker with him had put down another ten, maybe, before he got each of them to safety. Maybe a third of the undead on the tanker accounted for. Hussein’s teams had managed to take down two of the walkways connecting the tanker to the rest of Lemuria.

St. George thought there was a chance the exes had been contained.

A crack and a loud scrape echoed from behind him, and he turned in time to see the third gangplank slide fifteen feet down the hull of the cruise ship and hit the tanker’s deck. The cloth cover swept up like a parachute, then settled back down over the wreckage. He caught a glimpse of at least two dozen zombies.

And one dead girl.

He leaped across to the fallen gangplank and tore the loose canvas away.

Madelyn leaned on the railing. Exes crawled and twisted in the broken wreckage at her feet. Broken bones jutted out from gray limbs.

A few of the zombies turned their heads toward him and tapped cracked teeth together. Some flapped broken or dislocated jaws. They reached for him with snapped fingers and tried to drag themselves out of the press of bodies.

“What a bunch of jerks,” muttered the Corpse Girl. She limped over to St. George. He tore the other railing off, let it clatter on the deck, and lifted her out of the wreckage of the gangplank.

Her left leg twisted at the knee. Her foot pointed almost straight to the left. “You okay?”

“I don’t think anything’s broken,” she said. She looked up at the trio standing in the open doorway of the cruise ship. “No thanks to you!”

Alice stared down at them. She didn’t look upset.

St. George helped Madelyn over to a heavy pipe she could rest against. “Give me a minute, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He stepped back to the wreckage and knelt near the huddle of exes. They pawed at his arms, and their weak fingers grabbed at his sleeves. He reached out and twisted their necks one by one. Ten minutes later the teeth were still clicking, but the arms and legs were still.

He wiped his hands on the canvas cover and walked back to Madelyn. She tugged on the fingers of her left hand. Each one popped back into place. “Hey,” she said, shaking the hand loose, “can you stand on my foot?” She swung her hips and put the twisted leg in front of him.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He pressed his boot down on hers. “Good?”

“A little harder. Make sure you’ve got it pinned.”

“It’s pretty sol—”

The Corpse Girl wrenched her hips back, and the leg cracked three times. She yelped. St. George yanked his foot away and she stumbled. “Okay,” she said, “that tingled a little more than I thought it would.” She rubbed her stomach, then took a few cautious steps. “Don’t think I tore anything, though.”

A rumble and crash echoed across the water—the sound of a wave breaking on the shore. The crash faded into an ongoing hiss. Even some of the remaining exes turned, attracted to the sound.

A wall of gray clouds rolled across the ocean toward Lemuria.

By his seventh pass, Zzzap was almost three-quarters of a mile out. Two circles back he’d decided to focus on the eastern side of Lemuria, the side closest to the mainland. It made sense Nautilus would head in that direction.

He still hadn’t found the sub.

He shot higher into the air and tried to see something—anything—in the mess of signals and waves and patterns of the ocean. Some clue to where the sub might be or where it might’ve been. A trail of heat. A series of ripples that went against a current. Anything.

Back on the island he could see people running. And dying. Even from a few thousand feet away, they were bright yellow-and-orange outlines against the cool blue of the tanker’s deck. Electromagnetic auras crackled around them.

One of them gleamed like a star as it rushed across the ship. St. George in flight. The distant outline stopped, reversed, and lifted two of the glowing outlines up above the deck.

One of the orange outlines at the other end of the tanker flared and began to cool down. Its aura flickered and faded. The figure dropped, and a rippling wave passed over it. An ex, moving in to feed.

Back during the Zombocalypse, when the virus first swept across the planet, Zzzap had had a lot of trouble spotting the exes. They didn’t give off any heat, barely had an electromagnetic aura, and sometimes they wouldn’t bang their teeth together. He saw the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but they only registered in a small fraction of it.

It had taken him almost three months to figure out he needed to change how he looked for exes. He was used to looking for the pile of signals and wavelengths living things gave off. But exes weren’t explosions of heat and color. They were cold and dull. They blended in. He had to know to look for them, like trying to spot the Predator. They were the monster that was in plain sight until it moved, and even then they could be tough to pick out.

Son of a bitch. If he’d had a mouth in the energy form, he would’ve smiled. Or kicked himself if he’d been physical.

His gaze swung back to the ocean. He’d been searching all the currents and patterns for another boat, looking for one of them to stand out like a copper penny in a pile of silver dimes. He changed his focus.

He looked for the quarter in the pile of dimes.

A sub was going to be subtle. It’d be insulated to keep in heat so nobody froze. And it’d be shielded from radiation. No point having a nuclear sub loaded with missiles if the enemy could just find you with a Geiger counter. Plus