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

the faint rumble of more cars. The bars were closing down and people were either heading home or out to after-parties. Most of them were heading east or south toward the freeways.

“Your hands are clean.”

He looked down. The smears of blood and dark tissue across his knuckles had vanished. The stains on the fleece jacket were gone, too. He looked over his shoulder at the bar. “Okay,” he said, “as far as everyone in there knows, did we just run out without paying for our drinks?”

“Focus, George,” she said.

“We don’t want them calling the cops on us.”

“There are no police to call. This is all just an illusion.”

“Right.” He looked west. “How long do you think it’ll take us to reach Westwood on foot?”

Stealth flexed her fingers. “It depends on what we find on the way.”

FREEDOM RAN PAST the packs of homeless people gathered around a few grates. People assumed Los Angeles was always sunny and wonderful, but the past few years had taught him otherwise. There wasn’t any snow, but it got cold enough at night to endanger anyone’s health. Even now, half an hour before sunrise, he caught wisps of his breath.

His morning run was almost done. It was a winding route from his Hancock Park apartment, through Beverly Hills, and then down to the recruiting office. He’d measured it out to an even eight miles. He ran it every day, rain or shine, in under forty-five minutes, depending on traffic lights. At the end of the day he ran it home.

The Army may have been done with him, but he was determined to stay worthy of his uniform.

There were more street people all along his route. They held out desperate hands as he strode past them. There seemed to be hundreds of them these days. He knew the economic crash had left many people in a bad place, but it seemed like the number of homeless had doubled or tripled in the past few months. A few of them tried to follow him every morning and night. They’d stagger toward him with their hands out, mouthing silent pleas. At his pace, they fell behind before most of them even reacted to his passing. He tried not to think about them while he ran.

Sometimes, though, in the deserted city of predawn, there was something unnerving about them. In the shadows their poses and sluggish movements struck him as aggressive, even a bit dangerous. He wasn’t sure why. Their hands seemed less pleading and more … hungry.

There was one stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that cut through the Los Angeles Country Club, right between Beverly Hills and Westwood. Tall hedges bordered the road on either side. If he encountered other pedestrians or bicyclists here, it meant stepping off the curb and running in the road. There was nowhere else to go for two-thirds of a mile. On those dark mornings, when the homeless were gathered there, he often thought of it as Donner Pass. He wasn’t sure what made him pull that particular name from history. The street wasn’t high in the mountains or buried in snow. Which left one option. The hungry option.

At West Point he’d had a recurring dream after writing a paper on the Donner Party and how their situation could’ve been resolved aside from resorting to cannibalism. The dream had come back, as of late, and he’d had it two or three times in the past month. Maybe more.

In his dream, however, eating other men hadn’t been a last resort. The settlers had changed into soldiers under his command. He was a captain again, in charge of leading them to safety, but he kept getting conflicting orders from the President for them to stay put. Then the whole group, dozens of men and women with skin gray from frostbite, came at him like some ancient horde. Their teeth snapped at his fingers, their hungry hands grabbed at his arms and neck.

Wilshire sloped down a steep incline toward the Federal Building and 405 (he still hadn’t picked up the Californian habit of addressing all freeways as “the”). Freedom pumped his arms and thrust his legs at the ground. Banks, stores, and apartment buildings flew past him. There was no traffic on the road to judge his speed by, but he was sure he was breaking the posted speed limit.

He cut down Manning Avenue and slowed to a walk when he hit Lindbrook, still three blocks from the office. There was something on the sidewalk up ahead. For a moment he thought a car might’ve gone up over the curb. Whatever it was had more than enough mass.

Then the shapes firmed up in the morning haze. A dozen crates and shipping containers, the super-sturdy ones edged with steel, sat in front of the recruiting office. They reminded him of the cases he’d seen at traveling USO shows, the ones designed to hold equipment.

A woman half leaned in the door frame behind one of the larger cases. Her head was turned away from Freedom, and her red hair was twisted into a messy braid. She wore jeans, but her top was an Army Combat Uniform jacket with fuzzy patches instead of insignia. Her arms were crossed in a way that seemed more defensive than casual.

He let his boots hit the ground a little harder as he covered the last few yards between them. The slap echoed along the sidewalk and she turned. Her face was dotted with freckles. Just enough to keep her looking young, although the scowl lines around her mouth helped cancel it out. “Good morning, ma’am,” he called out to her.

“Morning,” she said. “You Freedom?”

He held out his hand across the crate. “Lieutenant Freedom. What can I do for you?”

She pried one of her arms away from her chest, took his hand, and shook it once. “Dr. Danielle Morris,” she said. “I’m supposed to do a recruitment demonstration for your office?”

“I wasn’t expecting you so early.”

He released her hand and the arm folded back to