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

The scratching of Madelyn’s pen stopped. “Okay,” she said, “now I need some light.”

St. George rooted around in the emergency kit and came up with the flashlight. “I thought you didn’t want to remember the day?” he said with a yawn.

She smiled. “It’d be nice, but it’s always better to remember something than nothing.”

“Maybe,” said Barry. “There’s a bunch of stuff I’d like to forget. The Phantom Menace. The last two seasons of Heroes. Spider-Man trading his life with Mary Jane to Mephisto to bring Aunt May back. Pretty much all of—”

“You wouldn’t,” she said. Her smile faded. “It sucks.”

“Sorry,” Barry said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

She switched on the flashlight and balanced it on her shoulder so it lit up the journal. Her face vanished in the shadows. St. George tried to get a sense of her expression behind the light. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a little bright, that’s all.” The pen went up and tapped her temple, then went back to the page. “Eyes are always dilated now, remember?”

“I meant you. Are you okay?”

She kept writing. Then she shrugged. “I worry I’m going to forget something important,” she said. She kept scribbling. “That I don’t have enough…y’know, enough memory space in my brain.”

“That’s why you write everything down, right?”

“Yeah, but I mean…past that. I’ve got the facts, but sometimes I lose the actual memories.”

Barry pushed himself up against the raft’s wall. “What do you mean?”

Madelyn finished another line in the journal and ended it with an emphatic jab of the pen. “I had this friend in high school, Janice. She had a pair of retro rocker jeans she wore that had about two dozen rips and tears in them. Showed a ton of skin.”

St. George had a sip of water. “And…?”

“And that’s it,” said Madelyn. “That’s all I know about her. It’s the only thing in my journals. I don’t know if she was just a friend or my best friend or maybe ‘friend’ is code for frenemy or my secret lesbian girlfriend or…or what. I don’t know if we had classes together or went to the same school or even what she looked like.”

She bent her head back to the journal. The pen scratched at the pages again.

“It might not mean anything,” said Barry. “I don’t remember half the people I went to high school with. Heck, I couldn’t tell you the names of half the people I used to work wi—”

“I can’t remember my mom.”

The ocean lapped against the sides of the raft. It was a gentle drumbeat. The sound made the thick tubes tremble.

“Not at all?” asked St. George.

She set the pen down on the journal. It rolled into the groove between the pages. “I mean, I know she existed. I know she and I were heading to meet my dad at Krypton when I was killed. But past that…”

The three of them listened to the ocean for another minute.

“When Smith did his thing,” said Madelyn, “when he…she…put us in the dream, I think it erased a lot of stuff in my head to make room for all the fake memories. I remember my dad in the dream better than I remember him in real life.” She picked the pen back up and tapped it on the page again. “And then I realized one day my mom hadn’t been in the dream. The idea of her was there, I’d talk about her, but I never actually saw her or heard her. And I hadn’t noticed because I couldn’t remember her in real life, either.”

“I’m so sorry,” Barry murmured.

She shook her head. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I mean, it’s not okay, but it’s not like it makes me upset or anything. I mean, it does kind of abstractly, like the way you get upset about people dying in stupid wars and stuff, but I can’t get upset about it because, well, I don’t remember her.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, now I just worry I’m going to…”

St. George looked at her. “Going to what?”

She stared at the journal for a moment. Then the flashlight tilted and she slumped back against the wall of the tent. It gave under her weight, tilting her enough that she slid down to the floor.

“Maddy?” He picked up the flashlight and spun it around.

The Corpse Girl’s eyes were half-open. She looked relaxed. He lifted her hand and it was limp.

“Whoa,” said Barry. “Is that how she falls asleep?”

“Yeah. Haven’t seen it happen in a while. I forgot how sudden it is.”

“No irony there.”

St. George snorted.

“Jesus, that’s awful. About her mom.”

“Yeah. Just in case we all needed another reason to be pissed at Smith.”

“Either of them,” Barry said.

IT CROSSED DANIELLE’S mind that Lester Briggs could’ve been a very successful criminal before the Zombocalypse. No one would be able to describe him. He’d raised “average” to an art form.

Lester stood just under six feet tall. His brown hair needed a cut, but wasn’t long enough to be shaggy. Nor was it thick. His eyes were brown, too, his skin tanned but not dark, his nose large but not to the point it drew the eye. There was muscle in his arms and chest, but not enough to make anything fit him tightly. Even his facial hair rode the fine line between stubble and a full beard.

What he lacked in appearance, he made up for in enthusiasm. He insisted on giving them a tour of Eden the morning after they arrived. Danielle hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the main building—the architectural love child resulting from a three-way between a community center, a freeway rest stop, and a storage shed—but Gibbs had pointed out she needed to know the garden’s layout on the off chance anything happened.

The lieutenant had bowed out of the tour himself, though, claiming his mechanical foot wasn’t good on uneven ground for long walks. Danielle thought it was more that he