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

It took a moment to sink in. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jarvis shook his head. “They’re suspending you while they ‘investigate.’ ”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Yeah, but you can’t prove it,” his boss said. “Did the feds give you a letter or a number to call or anything?”

“Well … no.”

Jarvis threw up his hands. “They’re paranoid, George. You and I both know there’s a few thousand parents who’ll be calling in if they find out there’s a suspected terrorist working here.”

“I’m not a—” George bit his lip. He clenched his fists. “This is bullshit.”

“I know, buddy. I know. But my hands are tied.” He paused. “I need your ID. And your keys, including the keycards.”

George stood in front of the desk for a few more moments. Jarvis studied something on his computer screen. Then he grabbed a pen and tapped it on the desk. It click-click-clicked for almost thirty seconds before the fight went out of George and he pulled the lanyard off his neck.

“You’re still going to get paid,” said Jarvis. “Won’t be any overtime or anything, but it’s something.”

“Thanks.”

It was clear there had been people in George’s apartment while he was at work. Books were shifted on the shelves. Some of his DVDs were out and opened. Half his clothes were on the floor and the closet door—

What did he keep hidden in the closet?

—the closet door was wide open. The cabinets were ajar and a few drawers left open an inch or two. He wondered if the government hired two types of agents—the ones you sent in when you didn’t want any sign they’d been there, and the ones you sent in when you wanted someone to know they’d been there. Maybe they were trained for both options.

He tossed his phone and wallet on the kitchen table, kicked off his shoes, and started to clean up. He did easy stuff first. Pushed in drawers. Shuffled books and DVDs back into place.

He shoved all the clothes in the hamper. They looked okay, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing clothes a lot of other people had been handling. Plus he’d seen enough CSI shows to know they could have been sprayed with different chemicals to show blood or gunpowder or chemical residue. Lots of stuff he could’ve told them they wouldn’t find.

His laptop was open and on. The password probably hadn’t slowed them at all. For that matter, he realized, what about all his other online passwords? Bank of America? His e-mail? Facebook? Amazon? He’d need to reset them all.

Although, would it make a difference? The President had seemed straightforward, but George still didn’t feel like trusting the blonde who’d snatched him off the street. He was probably being monitored somehow. Despite what he’d told Jarvis, it was a good bet his name was already on tons of Homeland Security lists. There might be cameras or microphones in his apartment, too.

He was annoyed to find the browser history had been wiped clean on his computer. Half his bookmarks, too. It wasn’t a real surprise, it just felt kind of petty for them to erase stuff like that. Even if he had no plans to look up any of those sites again.

After two hours George decided his apartment wasn’t any messier than it had been when he went to work. His stomach grumbled. There wasn’t much in the way of food in his apartment, but he knew he couldn’t blame that on the CIA or the Secret Service or whomever the blonde had worked for. He ate out once a week, just at the Mexican place up the street or the Thai restaurant a block over, but after missing a day and a half of work he wasn’t sure he should be spending any money he didn’t need to.

There was a knock at the door.

He felt more cautious than usual and checked through the peephole. He didn’t see anyone for a moment, then saw the little girl’s head in the bottom of the fish-eye view. He unlocked the door and swung it open.

Not a little girl. A girl in a chair.

“What are you doing here?” George asked.

“Looking for you.” Madelyn rolled the wheelchair forward a few inches, but he didn’t open the door any wider or step out of the way.

“How’d you find out where I live?”

“You pointed the building out to me once,” she said. “While we were out scavenging.”

“No more games,” he said. “I’m done. How did you get my address?”

She sighed. “I had wild wheelchair sex with a guy in the university’s payroll department. Is that what you want to hear? Let me in.”

He shook his head. “You need to go home. Or back to the dorms. Just go away.”

“I’m trying,” she said. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t our life. We’re supposed to be somewhere else.”

Her words made his head ache again. “Please,” he said, “just stop.”

“You’re super-strong, George,” she insisted. “You’re invulnerable. You can breathe fire. You …” She took a breath and stared him in the eyes. “You can fly.”

He closed his eyes and counted to five. The pounding in his head faded. When he opened his eyes again, she was still staring at him.

“You need to go,” he said again.

She sighed. “Okay, then.”

He waited for her to turn and head back down the hall.

She didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we need to get past this, and I can’t think of a better way to convince you once and for all.”

Madelyn pulled something out from between her hip and the arm of the wheelchair. It seemed to swell in her hand as George realized what it was. She pointed it at him.

“Whoa!” he said. He put his hands up. “Hang on. You don’t want to—”

The gunshot rattled the window at the end of the narrow hallway.

AMID ALL THE jostling and the shock, it crossed George’s mind he’d never been in an ambulance before.

The oxygen mask and the gurney straps limited