Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

to the Four Seasons. The burned hulk of a limousine sat in the driveway. It stretched back far enough to block one lane of traffic. Two dead things shuffled around it.

Karen looked in his eyes. The muscles of her neck tensed. He clenched his fists and felt strong.

And then the world flickered. The streets cleaned out and the wrecks vanished or were made whole again. The restored limo lurched into motion and pulled into the hotel. A man standing near it snapped a few quick pictures with a small camera.

“It appears to be over,” Karen said.

George glanced behind them. The bodies were gone. The weeds had vanished. “Yeah, I think so.”

The man with the camera stared down the street at the two of them. Karen flipped her hood up and turned her back to the man. “I have been recognized,” she said. “Give me your phone.”

“What?”

The man took a few steps toward them, gaining speed with each step. His camera rose. “We will have to continue our discussion later,” she said. “I will give you my personal number. Call later this evening. We shall make plans to meet tomorrow.”

The idea that a supermodel was forcing her phone number on him crossed George’s mind. He bit back a chuckle as he pulled out his phone. She took it and her fingers danced over the keypad. She went to hand it back to him and paused.

“Your phone is a Katana LX, manufactured by Sanyo.”

“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to get a new one, but I’m kind of stuck in my contract and—”

“It is five and a half years old,” she said. “This model should no longer be supported.”

“It is, though.”

She handed him his phone and pulled her own from the sweatshirt pocket. It spun in her hands to reveal a sunken keyboard. “The T-Mobile G1,” she said, “with the new Android operating system. It was given to me as part of a promotional deal for a series of print advertisements.”

“You’re right,” he said. “That blows my phone away.”

Karen shook her head. “It does not. This phone was an early release in autumn of 2008. It is also five years old.” She looked at him. “Why would I still own a first-generation phone which is half a decade old?”

The photographer snapped off half a dozen pictures of them examining the phones. In a wide shot, it might’ve looked like they were holding hands. George imagined pictures of him and Karen Quilt with provocative captions showing up in magazines between shots of pop stars and hot actors.

Then he realized he couldn’t picture a single actor or actress who was considered the new big thing. He couldn’t name a new song or the person who sang it.

There was a plague. It broke out in the spring of 2009 and wiped out most of the world.

“What’s the last new song you heard?”

The phone spun and collapsed in her hand like a quick-draw artist with a pistol. “I thought I had made it clear I follow very few popular—”

“Anything,” he interrupted. “Anything at all. Can you name one song that’s come out in the past couple of years?”

She shook her head.

“Movies? Books?”

Her head moved side to side again. “I cannot.”

“No new phones,” he said. “No music, no books. Do you see any new cars?”

Karen scanned the street. “All the models I can identify are 2009 or earlier. With the economic downturn, this is not an impossible occurrence.”

“In this part of town? At this hotel?”

The photographer was close, barely fifteen feet away. Another one ran down the street to join him, and a third not far behind. “We shall talk later,” she said.

She turned and spun the sweatshirt off her shoulders and into her arm with the practiced grace of a runway model. The cameras focused on her as she strode away from George and back to the hotel. George was pretty sure the first guy had already taken at least a dozen photos of them together, but he still used the chance to slip back around the corner and head for his car.

His 2002 Hyundai. Over ten years old.

I’M FALLING THROUGH the air.

There are over a hundred people marching in the street below. Their boots kick up dust on the dirt road. They’re all wearing military uniforms, but they don’t move like the military. They’re wobbly and erratic, only loosely in sync. It’s as if the whole crowd is drunk. The crackling popping sound of teeth echoes up to me.

I realize I’m not falling toward the crowd, but toward a building on the side of the street. And I’m not falling alone. The man in the tinfoil suit, the brilliant man, is falling alongside me. The gleaming suit buzzes as we fall, and the buzzing makes words. If you don’t mind this part of the base being annihilated in the process, sure.

I’m not sure what the bright man is talking about. The dream has dumped me in the middle of a conversation. I can’t remember how it started, so I’m not sure how to respond.

The flat roof rushes up at us and only slows just before my boots hit. They never touch, or if they do it’s so gentle I can’t feel it. My arms shift and a third person enters the dream. I’m carrying an older man, with messy hair and an overgrown beard. He doesn’t seem to weigh anything. He looks like a professor who hasn’t slept in days. He’s familiar, both to dream me and to real me, watching the dream from some other vantage point.

I set the man down on the roof and a voice speaks. My voice. It takes me a moment to recognize it, and by the time I do the few words have passed and been lost. The old professor looks at me and nods. “I understand. I’ll be fine.”

And then I’m falling again. Some of the parrots—the monsters—see me coming and raise their arms. Up close I can see their uniforms are incomplete. Some have digital-patterned jackets,