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

something for you,” he said. “If I’d known, I would’ve gotten them sooner.”

“Gotten what?”

He unzipped his brown leather flight jacket and pulled out a manila envelope. It bulged a bit in the middle. He held it out, and Madelyn leaned forward to take it.

The envelope was filled with photographs. Thirty or forty of them in different sizes. She pulled a few out and angled them to catch the moonlight. The top one in her hand showed a dark-haired, brown-skinned woman in her thirties sitting at a desk in front of a laptop.

“Who’s this?” Madelyn shuffled the picture to the back. The next one was the same woman smiling, caught in the moment just after a laugh. The photo after that showed a man with a beard and glasses holding a baby in his arms.

Then there were two ten-year-old girls doing homework together at the table. One of them had dark hair and eyes like the woman in the other photos. The other girl was blond, with a ponytail that ran out of frame.

“Is that me?” Madelyn held the picture up to the light. “Is that me when I was alive?”

“Captain Freedom told me that your father kept lots of pictures of you in his office out at Project Krypton,” said St. George. “I think I got all of them. There’s a bunch of you, your dad, a couple with friends. A lot with your mom.”

“My mom?” She flipped through the next few photos and found herself back at the front of her small handful. The woman at the desk. The woman smiling.

“There’s a couple of the two of you together, too. And some of the whole family.”

Madelyn slid the pictures back into the envelope and stood up. Then she threw herself off the water tower and wrapped her arms around St. George’s neck. He grabbed her by the waist and floated back to the top of the tower. “Easy.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.” She pulled back and smiled at him. A tear slid away from her chalk eyes.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

She stood there, smiling, and then glanced up at the cloaked woman. “I should go and let you two talk or…whatever.”

“Be careful on the way down,” he said. “No more sudden jumps.”

“Sorry.” She swung her legs onto the ladder. “Thank you.”

He smiled at her and nodded.

Madelyn vanished down the ladder. The sound of her boots on the rungs faded to distant vibrations. Then those were gone, too.

“You have a new coat,” Stealth said.

“Yeah.” He tugged at the lapels of the flight jacket and smelled saltwater. “A goodwill exchange with Eliza, the woman who’s running Lemuria now. She’s about my size, and we each liked the other’s coat better.”

“Are you confident they have Nautilus confined?”

“I don’t think he wants to escape,” said St. George. “Having everything collapse on him all at once like that, having the truth all come out, I think it kind of broke him. Last I saw him, he was just sitting in the Queen’s brig in his human form. Wouldn’t even look at me. Eliza’s got him on suicide watch.”

St. George stared across Los Angeles toward the Pacific.

“You are worried about them?”

“Not them,” he said. “Well, a little bit them, but I think they’ll be okay once they’re all ferried back to here or San Diego and better fed.”

Stealth dipped her chin. “The submarine?”

“Yeah.” He let his boots settle on the top of the tower near her. The breeze wrapped him in her cloak. “Nautilus had nuclear missiles. He just stumbled across a sub, and he had the power to wipe us out, just like that. If he’d fired them when he found it, we never even would’ve known what hit us.”

“And you worry someone else may do the same.”

He nodded. “There’s a ton of this stuff lying around out there. We’ve been worrying about rifles and helmets, and for all we know there’s a survivalist militia out in Colorado with a dozen Minuteman missiles or something.”

“Doubtful,” said Stealth. “Most Minuteman silos are located in either Montana, North Dakota, or Wyoming.”

“The point is, we’ve been thinking the exes are our big problem, and there’s tons of big problems out there. All the old ones, just waiting for someone to find them. Or, hell, just waiting for a natural disaster. What if an earthquake hits a missile silo? Or a tornado hits some CDC laboratory?”

“The world has never been a safe place,” she said. “The ex-virus did not make it more so.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s just…scary. Just a reminder how fast we could still lose everything.”

She took his hand. “Then we shall make sure we do not,” she told him.

“You sound pretty confident.”

“Of course. I have the Mighty Dragon on my side.”

He chuckled. “Thanks.”

“That was a good thing, what you did for Madelyn.”

“I should’ve done it ages ago. I knew she had memory problems. I knew the pictures were out there. I just didn’t think how much better it would make things for her.” He looked down at the Mount. “I was thinking, while I flew home, I should do this for all the Krypton soldiers. I could fly back, fill two or three duffel bags with personal belongings they left behind. Photos. Clothes. Books. Whatever they want me to grab.”

She wrapped her arms around him and lowered her head to his shoulder.

“Really, we should do it for anyone we can. How many people would love to get an old wedding album or a yearbook, or just some photos off their wall? Something to remember the past.”

“It would be a large undertaking.”

“It’d be worth it, though.” The breeze filled her cloak out, then pulled it tight on them again. Beneath it, he wrapped his arms around her waist.

“You are a good man, George.”

“I’m trying.”

Well, I’m never doing a book like this again.

Allow me to explain.

Last year I finished up a book called The Fold that a lot of you have read and enjoyed. As I mentioned