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

of railings and a few long strips of steel. It sat a few yards from a two-high stack of storage containers. Half a dozen low bonfires lit up all of the metal deck he could see. In the flickering light he saw the outline of plants twenty or thirty feet away, and his nose caught the strong smell of…what had they called it? Night soil.

He moved his arms again. He and Barry were handcuffed back to back, wrist to wrist. Shackles connected his feet.

“Madelyn,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Barry. “Still dead.”

St. George closed his eyes and took a few slow breaths. He felt a faint tingle at the back of his throat. The faint ember of a fire, weak but growing.

“How’d they get you?”

Barry sighed. “The whole thing was a trap, George. All the little kids there at that gathering? Human shields.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I realized that a minute into beating the crap out of him.”

“If this is what happens when you beat the crap out of someone, I think you need to get some pointers from your girlfriend.”

“Not in the mood, Barry.”

“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I couldn’t fire any bursts without hurting a kid or blowing a hole straight through the ship. Then Nautilus came back with you half dead, put one of his funky Deep One hands over your nose and mouth, and said he’d smother you if I didn’t turn human. Soooo…yeah, not a lot of options.”

“Why haven’t you changed back to the energy form?”

“Ummmm…You might not have noticed but we’re all in kind of close proximity here.”

“Yeah?”

“George, when I change everything around me tends to get incinerated by the radiation surge. The air all around the energy form hits six hundred degrees before I get it under control. It only takes a second, but still…”

“So? You know it wouldn’t hurt me. Might’ve woken me up sooner.”

“No, you’re missing the…Can you look over your shoulder without giving me a concussion or something?”

St. George shuffled on his butt and twisted his head around.

A little girl with curly hair and hazel eyes stared back at him. In the dim light, her skin was a few shades darker than Barry’s. “H’lo,” she said.

The hero looked at her for a minute. His eyes flitted down, saw her ragged clothes and the shackle chaining her to his friend, then looked back to her face. “Hi,” he said.

“George,” said Barry, “this is Kaitlyn. She’s three and a half and she’s been hearing all about you while you were asleep.”

She nodded once and continued to stare at him.

There was another child, a little boy, shackled to the other leg. He was curled up alongside Barry’s calf with his eyes closed, his head just below the knee. The boy’s nostrils trembled as he slept.

“That’s Colin. He’s four and he’s never read a comic book in his life. I was getting him caught up on Batman until he passed out. It’s been a long day for them.”

The chains were maybe twelve inches long. Even if they hadn’t been in a cage, the kids couldn’t get far away from Barry. Not far enough to be safe.

“Okay,” St. George said. He stretched his legs, rolled his ankles, and then snapped the shackles with a quick flex of his hips. “Give me a minute and I’ll have us out of here.”

“Stop!”

“What?”

“You need to get caught up before you do anything, okay?”

“I think I’ve got the general idea.”

“No, believe me, you don’t. These people have gone full Murderworld on us, okay.” He said it in a calm, almost amused voice. St. George realized it was for Kaitlyn’s benefit.

He took a breath and felt the fire smolder a little more in his throat. “Okay,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Barry tipped his head toward one of the small bonfires. “If you look around,” he said, “you should be able to spot a couple guards watching us. I saw whatshername, Alice, out there for a while before it got dark, and then one of the guys who was there when I was getting my ‘inspected by’ seal of approval.”

St. George glimpsed some faces in the flickering light. “Yeah,” he said. “I see one of the guys from my inspection. And that guy with the big mustache who kept staring at Madelyn. Mitchell?”

“Mitchel Kirby with one l,” sighed Barry.

“What?”

“Better not to ask. He’s a talker. So, I can’t break out without giving Kaitlyn and Colin an extreme sunburn. If you break out, or they think you’re trying to break out, they start shouting an alarm.”

“And Nautilus comes back? I wasn’t ready for him, but I can—”

“No, George. The alarm goes off and three cages of kids get dumped in the ocean.”

“What?” St. George twisted his head around again. Kaitlyn blinked at him.

“Yeah, I know,” said Barry. “Serious Marina del Lex–level supervillain stuff. Three cages, four kids in each cage all around the island. I can’t catch any of them in the energy form, and…well, you’re not fast enough. Even if we knew right where they were, you might be able to get one of them. Not all three.”

“How do you know all this?”

“They explained it all to me,” Barry said. “Nautilus and his sidekick-girlfriend, Eliza. They took great pains to explain it all to me.”

St. George looked at the shackle cuffs on his ankles and the broken chain hanging down to the deck. “You believe them?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. They used the kids at the meeting as shields, yeah, but this hostages-in-cages thing is a whole new level of messed up. But while I was waiting for you to wake up I’ve been talking with Kaitlyn and Colin. And I think I’m a believer now.”

“H’lo,” she said again. This time she raised her hand and flapped her fingers. The boy wheezed once at the mention of his name, then slipped back to sleep.

“Hi,” said St. George again.

“Kaitlyn’s a little shy at first,” Barry said, “but once she gets to know you she tells lots of great stories. Right?”

The girl nodded, giggled, and then yawned.

“You want