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

up at the Queen’s logo. More than half of it has been scraped away. Some by time and the elements. Most of it by time and me. Back when I cared, I spent the better part of eight months chipping at it with knives and deck tools. I didn’t want a reminder looming over me.

It was supposed to be a three-week cruise with two stops in Mexico, but the Queen never actually docked in Mexico. Medical scares kept us out in the harbor. A week later they announced our return to California was going to be delayed. The crew smiled a lot and tried to act like it was no big deal.

Two days after that, the first infected people showed up. A couple who’d spent half the cruise in their stateroom. They’d told everyone it was the flu. It turned out their flu was the ex-virus people had been talking about. All the rumors we’d joked about with strangers over dinner were true. The ex-virus turned people into actual, walking-dead zombies.

The infected couple bit five people before security contained them all.

A couple days later there was a second outbreak. Eight people that time.

The crew stopped smiling. We still didn’t head for shore. At the start of the fifth week, a helicopter with the cruise line logo made the first supply drop. Four big pallets. The helicopter didn’t actually land, it just lowered them with a winch one by one. Mostly food, but there were some medical supplies in there, too. It reminded me of news footage of third world countries getting relief supplies after a natural disaster.

Two weeks after that was the next outbreak. Twenty-two dead. The captain said we had to dump the bodies overboard. There was no room left in the ship’s morgue. I remember a lot of people being shocked at the idea of dumping bodies, and exchanging a look with John that said we were both surprised a cruise ship had a morgue.

The day after the bodies went into the ocean, a bunch of people banded together and took three of the lifeboats. The next day four more were gone. By the end of the week all of them had vanished.

I think it was early July when we got the last drop. A Navy helicopter this time. Only three pallets, but we were feeding a lot less people at that point.

Has it only been three years? It feels like twice that. Sometimes I can barely remember my life before this.

I stop looking at what’s left of the Queen’s logo. Maleko is going to want to hear about this new ship. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.

I walk up the gangplank, feel it tremble with each step. A crowd of people mill about the top, aboard the Queen, and they draw back a bit when they see me coming toward them. They’re all nervous around me. Many of them are openly scared.

They should be scared. They know I make the tough calls. I do the things that need to be done to keep Lemuria safe.

“New arrivals,” I bark at them. “Watch yourselves.”

They flinch and nod.

It’s exhausting. They just don’t get it. If there was another way that would keep us safe, I’d do it. I don’t like having to be like this.

Sometimes, though, they disgust me. So many of them won’t do anything to protect themselves. They aren’t willing to take action. They think it’s somebody else’s problem. A few of them have even suggested it’s not a problem at all. That in “the big picture” we’re pretty safe and should stop assuming the worst is going to happen.

The worst isn’t going to happen. The worst already happened. My job now is making sure the next worst thing doesn’t happen, whatever it might be.

I walk through the ship. Up stairs. Down halls. Over the past three-plus years, I’ve come to know the Queen better than the old two-bedroom John and I shared just off Fremont Street.

I push open the doors and walk out into the courtyard. I remember being here by the pool as a passenger. Sitting by the pool in the shade and ordering big rum drinks we really couldn’t afford but it was our honeymoon. The deck chairs and umbrellas are gone now, of course, scavenged for firewood and fabric.

Maleko sits in his chair under the gazebo. A bar stood under it once, where they made those big rum drinks, but that got smashed too. I recognize his pose, the casual way he looks off to the side. Walking up here has been a waste of my time. I could’ve been helping to process the new arrivals or their ship.

But he’s the boss. With him, we have order and security. That matters more than any inconvenience I have to deal with.

He looks human right now. He knows I prefer talking to him this way. He’s a good-looking man, if you don’t think about the monster under his skin. Merman. Atlantean. Were-shark. Landshark. A lot of names people used when they thought he couldn’t hear them.

Then everyone learned that Nautilus could hear everything.

“Eliza,” he says.

“Maleko.”

“Any trouble?”

He still doesn’t look at me. I’ve never asked what he did before this, when he wasn’t being a superhero. It feels like he spent a lot of time reading life-coach books about “how to be executive” and that sort of thing.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I say. “Most of them are a little stunned. They’re headed to their exams now.”

“No signs of infection?”

“Nothing obvious.”

“No resistance?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

He nods once. “Do you think they are who they say they are?”

Two and a half years ago, a group of pirates attacked us. They had a drifting yacht and they called out to us about starving families and sick children. The guns came out when they docked. They killed six people before we fought back. Three more before Nautilus showed up and they tried to shoot him, too. He’s just flesh and bone, but it’s really dense flesh. The bullets