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

barely slowed him down. He punched one hard enough to crush his rib cage. Threw four of them almost half a mile out to sea, one after another. The others surrendered, but we sent them away anyway. We’d never be able to trust them.

We learned our lesson the hard way. The world was different. The rules were different. Don’t believe what anyone says. Trusting gets people killed. You can’t build real security on trust and beliefs. You build it on what you know.

“None of them have weapons,” I tell him. “No other signs of life from their ship, but we won’t know for sure until we search it.”

“When do you want to go?”

“As soon as possible,” I say. I step under the gazebo into the shade and lean up against one of the posts. “Their boat has solar cells.”

His brows go up. “Are you sure?”

“It’s only half a mile out. They’re pretty clear.” I know how he’ll react to the next words. “Lots of people saw them. Not sure how many realized what they are.”

He raises a hand to rub the bridge of his nose. “Damn.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

He finally turns to look at me. “Did they say anything about them?”

“The solar cells?”

“The new arrivals. Did they mention having power to anyone?”

“Yeah. Sounds like they were just using it for their galley. Refrigeration and distilling water.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s all they said.”

“But they must have a radio.”

I shrug.

He shifts in the chair and rubs his nose again. He sighs. “People will want to sweep every channel and set up shifts to monitor it,” he says. “We all know it’s pointless, but they’ll do it anyway. Human nature.”

“Probably, yeah.”

Now he drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. It’s an old routine. He goes through it every time. He worries that he’ll seem heartless, so he has planned responses he falls back on, even when it’s just the two of us.

He stops drumming, takes in a breath, and holds it. For a moment I think he’s going to change. Then he lets the breath out between his teeth. “We’re getting close to harvest time with the potatoes, aren’t we? I’m not sure we can afford to have people distracted right now.” He stares at me, waiting for me to say it. He never likes to be the one to suggest things.

I know what happens when people aren’t paying attention. When they aren’t doing their job. That’s how John died. He was bitten because somebody slacked off in those early days of helicopter drops. Someone didn’t do their job.

And then I—

I made it safe for everyone. That’s what I do now. That’s my job.

“The sun’s already on the way down,” I say. “We’ll tell everyone we’re searching the boat first thing in the morning. Tonight you can slip over there, do a quick search, and disable the radio somehow.”

He thinks about it and nods. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he says. “Maybe it will already be broken.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“I know how troubling it is to do this again,” he says. “How wrong it feels. But I believe you’re right. It’s what we need to do.”

John knew what needed to be done. He died saving me. He died so I could live. So I could make sure everyone lives.

So I could make sure he stayed dead.

Maleko and I talk for a few more minutes. The usual stuff. He congratulates me on being so brave, like he always does. I tell him I’m not brave, like I always do. He gives me one of his tight smiles. I wonder if he had braces when he was little.

I head back down to the Pacific Eagle. People will be staring out at the new ship, wondering if it’s got some magic button on it that we can push and it’ll fix the world. They don’t want to admit the world’s broken forever and they just need to deal with it.

I wasn’t lying to Maleko. I’m not brave. I’m just not scared.

John and I saw this Affleck movie once, Devil-man or something like that. One of the superhero movies he always wanted to watch. He liked it, but he said lots of people online liked to shout about how awful it was. It wasn’t a horrible movie, but I don’t remember much about it. A blind superhero just didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

One of the things I do remember was a bit with a priest. Devil-man was in the confessional—not in costume, just as Affleck—and he tells the priest he’s not afraid of dying. And the priest tells him that a man without fear is a man without hope.

It’s a catchy line. And it’s true. I’m not brave. I just haven’t been scared since I gave up hoping things would get better.

HIS OWN COUGHING woke him up. There was saltwater in his mouth, scratching at his tongue. He spit it out, coughed up more, and spit that out, too.

St. George opened his eyes enough to wonder where he was. Somewhere dark. His clothes were damp, and the cold reached through his wet suit. He blinked a few times, salt stung his eyes, and he blinked a few more. He reached up to rub them, and something tugged at his wrists.

“Owwww,” said Barry from behind him. “Watch it. You almost dislocated both my arms.”

“You’re okay?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. They squeezed a lot of water out of you, and you’ve been out cold since then.”

“How long?”

“About twelve hours, I think. I nodded off for a while, and you were still out when I woke up. The sun went down about an hour, hour and a half ago.”

St. George looked around and tried to blink more water from his vision. He thought they were under the wooden gazebo in the cruise ship’s courtyard. His eyes cleared a little more and he saw the slats were much closer. And made of metal.

The cage had been bolted together out