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

St. George managed a grim smile.

“Honestly,” said Barry, “if Madelyn hadn’t recognized him, I’m not sure I would’ve.”

The smile faded.

Barry moved his own head, careful not to shift the two children. “You okay?”

A thin wisp of smoke came out between St. George’s lips. “Madelyn.”

“Ahhhhh.” A few moments of silence passed between them. “Did you ever tell her?”

“About what?”

“Her condition. That she’s not a zombie, she’s an android made out of a big pile of nanites trying to copy a dead girl.”

St. George snorted and felt the chemical scratch in the back of his throat. “There was never a good time,” he said. “Half the Mount’s scared of her. Every day she’d wake up with her memories messed up. How do you add on to that with ‘by the way, you’re not even a real person, you’re just a robot’?”

“Hey,” Barry said, “machines need love, too.”

“D’you remember how many times Freedom had to tell her about her parents being dead? What was the final count? Four times? Five?”

“Something like that, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“I just…if I had to tell her she wasn’t even human anymore, I wanted it to be at a good point for her. When she’d have time to process it.”

“So to speak.”

“Yeah,” said St. George. “So to speak.”

“You do realize you’re still talking about ‘her’ parents, right? You know she’s still a person. In all the ways that matter.”

“Yeah. I wish a lot of other people had realized it.”

“Still, you should tell her soon. She’s going to figure it out sooner or later. Or figure out she’s a hell of a lot more than a random dead girl, at least.”

St. George tilted his head to his friend. “What do you mean, tell her soon?”

Barry turned his head, too, so they were eye to eye. “Oh, frak me,” he said. “I thought we were on the same page here, George.”

“What?”

Barry chuckled. “You’re such a lovable idiot sometimes. You never got around to reading Swamp Thing, did you?”

“What’s your point?”

“Think about it.”

“About what?”

“She’s already dead,” Barry said. “Remember? And even if she wasn’t, you can’t kill an android by tearing her in half.”

“OKAY,” SHOUTED AL. The brown-skinned scavenger banged on the side of Mean Green with his fist until they all stopped talking. The movement made his chain mail rattle. The other scavengers switched back to leathers in the cooler months, but Al wore the chain mail year-round. “We’re heading out. Everybody shut up and pay attention.”

“Sir yes sir,” shouted Taylor from the truck’s liftgate.

“Just told you to shut up, not shout,” Al said with a glare.

Taylor grinned and looked around at the other people in the Hot Zone. The scavengers weren’t smiling. Neither was Gus Hancock. The battlesuit didn’t even have a mouth, just speakers. Pierce just glared at him.

“Just trying to lighten the fucking mood,” Taylor muttered.

Everyone shifted their attention back to Al, and he tugged the brim of his hat down. He’d been one of the scavengers since the early days of the Mount, and Eden was his first command position. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was lean and well-muscled, the kind of build that came from a life of physical labor. Iron gray streaks ran through his black hair, and his eyes were dark circles on either side of his hawk nose.

“So we’re all on the same page,” he said, “we’re going to go fast out of the gate as soon as it’s wide enough. Cesar here cleans up any exes, makes sure the gates are closed, and then he joins us in the back.”

“Can’t you just keep up?” asked one of the scavengers, the big woman named Keri.

Cesar shook his head. “Running uses too much power. We’d get there and the suit’d stop dead.”

A couple people nodded their understanding.

“Anyway,” said Al with a glare at Keri, “Cesar gets in the back, we go slow for a few blocks, try to draw some of them away from the fence.”

He jerked his thumb at the dozens of exes pressed against the western wall of the Hot Zone. Their fingers stretched through the fence to grasp at the air. Some tore their lips on the chain-link. They stared at the crowd of scavengers with dead eyes. Their chattering teeth echoed in the air.

“We’re going to start about six blocks down and work our way back. We’ll go over the rules again there, and then you all split into your teams. Try to keep it as quiet as we can—let’s not attract a ton of exes. Everyone got it?”

The crowd gave off a collection of nods and murmured confirmations.

Danielle watched them from the gate at the north end of the Hot Zone. They’d set up the rectangular area to function as a four-way airlock. Gates on each end shut it off from the two sides of the garden. Then the gates on either side could open, depending on if a truck was heading back to the Mount or out to scavenge Encino for supplies.

Cold sweat burned her eyes, and she forced a hand up to wipe it away. Not even noon, the air already bordered on hot, and she had four layers of clothing wrapped around her. Almost all the clothes she had up at Eden. A few of the guards and scavengers had given her odd looks, but none of them had said anything.

With the width of the gate and the cars parked on the other side of the chain-link, the closest ex was almost fifteen feet away from her. It stood in the road that led back to the Mount. A dead man, short but with a lot of muscle that had withered away over the years. Dried clumps of gore decorated a tight beard, trimmed close to the jaw. Its clothes were casual, but blood spotted the T-shirt and jeans, and one of the blazer’s cuffs was torn and frayed. Something brown with age was smeared along the lapels,