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

She looked at Cesar. He shrugged. Kennedy stared back at the artichokes.

Lester slipped past them and waved for them to follow. They retreated a few paces and turned down a different path through the garden. He glanced back and kept waving, an overeager tour guide.

“This place should’ve been dust years ago,” he explained. “That was our first big surprise—how much of the garden had lasted. This side of the hills, all of the valley, it’s a desert. The only reason it was ever green was because of us. With no people, you’d expect everything up here to dry out in a few months, tops.”

“Automatic sprinklers?” asked Kennedy.

Lester shook his head. “No. Even if they were, they would’ve stopped when the utilities shut down. Now we’ve got the well Zzzap drilled for us, but before that he was doing it all with solar stills and irrigation.”

“He?” asked Danielle.

“We don’t know his name,” said Lester. “We’ve just been calling him the Gardener.”

“The Gardener,” echoed Kennedy.

Cesar gave Danielle a gentle elbow. “And you said the Driver was a dumb name?”

“It is a dumb name.”

“As near as we can tell,” Lester said, guiding them into a cross-aisle, “when the exes first started showing up and everyone made a run for it, this guy came here. And he just…took care of the place. Watering, weeding, keeping the fences up, and cleaning it out. That’s why it’s all in such great shape.”

They stepped out of the aisle onto a strip of sun-faded pavement. The far side of it was a chain-link fence. Behind that was a tall wooden one, a classic American picket fence, right down to the white paint and beveled tops. Someone’s backyard butted up against the community garden.

Next to the fence was a pile of eight or nine bodies. They were dried out and shriveled, almost skeletons. In several places the skin had crumbled to show pale bone. None of them moved.

Danielle sucked in a sharp breath.

“There’s three more piles like this one around the garden,” said Lester. “Check this out.” He reached out and pushed at the closest body with his boot, tilting the head. The neck creaked as it twisted.

A razor-straight gash ran right above the dead man’s brow. It stretched across the entire forehead, almost temple to temple. The papery skin around the wound trembled, as if there was nothing underneath to support it.

“What is that?” asked Kennedy. She stepped past Danielle to examine the bodies. “An axe wound?”

“That’s what we thought at first, too,” said Lester, “but then a few weeks ago we found the Gardener while we were sweeping for exes.”

The answer leaped to Danielle’s tongue. “It’s a hoe.”

Cesar looked at her. “What?”

“A garden hoe,” said Danielle. The mechanics of it unfolded in her mind. “I mean it’s an axe with the blade mounted crosswise instead of in line with the haft. It’d lose a bit of force, but with a long handle giving you leverage it could still do some serious damage.”

Lester smiled and nodded. “Yeah, the Gardener figured that out, too. Like I said, about forty bodies around the perimeter, and we’ve found a few places where it looks like he dumped them over the fence while he could.”

“So where is the great Gardener?” asked Kennedy.

Lester walked back toward the aisles and pointed. “About three rows over. We walked real close to him when we first came down that way.”

“He’s dead?” Cesar asked.

Lester nodded. “Looks like he sat down in a nice chair, finished off a bottle of scotch, and put a bullet in his head. Right through the roof of the mouth. No chance of coming back. He had the hoe with him.”

Kennedy gave a slow nod of approval.

Danielle felt the sweat running again, but forced her hands to stay at her sides. “Any idea why?”

“We’ll never know,” Lester said. “Not for sure. My guess though…” He held up his hands and hooked the fingers into claws. “My mother had rheumatoid arthritis. His hands are twisted up the same way, especially the left one. It might just be a rigor mortis thing, but he was pretty old from the look of his hair. I think he realized he was running out of time, might’ve been in a lot of pain, and just…”

“Bang, thud,” said Cesar.

“Yeah. He’s still in his chair. Been there for about two years, I’d guess. He’s covered in bean plants. They just climbed all over him.”

“And you left him there?” asked Kennedy.

Lester shrugged his not-that-muscular shoulders. “He loved this place. He’s not coming back. It just felt right to leave him in his spot, like a memorial. You want to see him?”

“No thanks,” said Danielle.

Cesar looked at his boss. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get this finished up, bro. We need to go get Cerberus put together.”

“Right, of course,” Lester said. “Sorry. Let’s swing back this way, and that’ll bring us around to the main building.”

He led them deeper into the garden. They walked past a trio of people harvesting green squashes and one person digging a trench. The narrow path led them between a plot filled with cornstalks and another that looked like grapevines.

Danielle registered the chattering just as they stepped out of the tall corn.

Another section of faded pavement stretched in front of them, part of the same service road circling the garden. A chain-link fence stood on the far side of the pavement. It was four feet tall and lined with 55-gallon drums. A single strand of barbed wire twisted along the top.

Past it was a wall of exes. At least a hundred of them stretched along the length of the fence. Dead men and women, young and old, some covered with gore and some with just a single obvious wound. Many of them had dried out after years of exposure, but a few still had curves. The lasting effects of a very healthy life or a surgically-enhanced one.

The four humans stepped into the open, and the undead turned chalky eyes on them. The dead pushed at the