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

the merman whispered. Dark blood was trickling from his nostrils, and veins bulged across his chest and face. “What they’ve always given you. Admiration…respect…Why did you have to take it all away?”

St. George took a few breaths. “You held them prisoner and demanded it from them. You forced it out of them. I didn’t take it,” he said. “You never really had it.”

Nautilus sighed and sagged in the hero’s grip. St. George hung in the air. The ships were tiny models far below, the little Matchbox boats he’d had as a kid.

Then the merman twisted around and slammed a punch into the hero’s side. It was hard and sudden enough to break St. George’s concentration. They dropped a few feet before he focused again.

Nautilus threw his arm up, slid free of the half-nelson, and kept dropping.

St. George lunged after him.

The merman fell like a skydiver, angling his body into the wind. He picked up speed, dropping as fast as St. George could fly after him. His clothes rippled and snapped in the wind as he cut through the sky, passed over mist-shrouded Lemuria, and rocketed toward the ocean.

St. George willed himself faster. They were halfway down. He shrank the distance between them to twenty-five feet. Twenty. Fifteen.

They hit the fogbank and the horizon vanished. Clouds and water filled his view in every direction. He could see individual waves.

His fingers brushed webbed toes. He put on a last burst of speed and grabbed at the foot. Nautilus kicked him away. St. George reached and grabbed again. The ankle was small enough that he could get his fingers around it.

The merman spun and lashed out and howled. His gnashing teeth were small and square. White showed around desperate, dark eyes.

St. George tried to slow them down, tried to bleed off a little bit of their momentum. Nautilus slammed his other heel down on the hero’s hand. He kicked again and again, but there was only normal human strength in the tanned leg, and St. George’s fingers were like stone.

St. George pushed back against gravity. Inertia tried to tear the other man from his grip, and he fought that, too, grabbing hold of the ankle with both hands. The downward plunge became a slant. And then an arc.

They swung across the ocean. Nautilus stretched down, and his fingers brushed the surface of the water. Then St. George lifted them up into the air and brought them around in a wide circle. The ships of Lemuria were dark shapes in the mist, but they were enough for him to get his bearings.

Nautilus—Maleko—stopped fighting and let himself hang from the hero’s grip. His oversized clothes sagged on his small body. Frustration squeezed his eyes shut.

“Sorry,” said St. George. “You don’t get to take the easy way out.” He paused as they flew through the air. “I don’t know what went wrong, why you did all this, but it’s over. You’re going to explain yourself, and then you’re probably going to have to answer to all these people.”

A light cut through the fog and stopped in the air in front of them. Holy frak, said Zzzap, that was amazing. Like, Reign of Fire archangel amazing.

“Is everything good back there?”

The glowing wraith looked over his shoulder. Yeah, all under control. Maddy’s keeping the last few exes down, and some of Eliza’s people are dealing with them. Zzzap looked down at Maleko. What about him?

“He’s done,” said St. George. “They know the truth now.”

CESAR LOOKED UP at the battlesuit. The big, empty lenses looked down at him. It didn’t look too angry he’d messed it up.

Metal edges curled up out of the forearm. One of them looked like the jagged edge of a steak knife. From this angle, outside of the exoskeleton, he could see how one of the remaining supports had been torqued out of line. He’d been lucky the whole hand hadn’t snapped off while he fought the horde.

At least it could be rebuilt.

Wilson had died buying time for his squad. The exes had spread wider than expected and he’d been cut off. Going off the bodies, he’d put down half a dozen using his rifle like a club, then four more with his bare hands when they were too tight around him to swing the weapon. There wasn’t enough left of him to reanimate.

One of the scavengers, Paul, had died that morning while they cleaned the last of the exes out of Eden. No one was sure how. One minute he’d been searching the garden plots with two other sweepers, the next minute they found a dead ballerina gnawing on him, its frilly dress soaked in blood. Kennedy put it down with a quick knife to the base of the skull.

Lester lost three gardeners. One of them wasn’t dead yet. Javi’s temperature hovered around 101, and he’d been throwing up a lot. They’d tied him to a tree in case he died and reanimated when no one was looking. The plan was to take him back to the Mount and see if Doc Connolly could do anything for him.

Lester himself was still a wreck, although now it was shame rather than panic. It had taken him half an hour to stop crying. He barely remembered Danielle saving him.

In the big scheme of things, Cesar knew he’d got off easy.

He walked into the big room. It was still a mess of tools and components that needed to be repacked. He tapped his fingers on the Longshot. “So,” he said, “are we calling this done now?”

Danielle looked up from the worktable and shook her head. Her ponytail slid back and forth across her shoulders. “Hardly.”

“Gibbs says you fought off an ex with it. Saved Lester.”

She snorted. “I shot an ex at point-blank range. Doesn’t mean it works.” She waved a hand at the dark stain on the carpet.

He smirked. “You just don’t want to give me any guns.”

She rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the motherboard