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

yesterday…no. Yesterday she was on a small boat? An orange inner tube? A life raft. She’d been on a life raft with Mom and they were going to…no, dammit. She’d been with St. George and…and…and Barry! St. George and Zzzap.

Where were her journals?

Madelyn tried to sit up, got her head a few inches off the ground, and dropped right back down. Her abdominal muscles felt super-weak. She shifted from side to side and walked herself up onto her elbows.

She was on top of a pile of bodies. Almost on top. It looked like she’d landed hard and slid off to the side. A few streaks and stains decorated the nearby wall all the way up to where a few bright shafts of sunlight shone through cracks.

Many of the corpses were withered skeletons. A few still had meat on them. One or two moved their jaws back and forth. They didn’t even have enough strength to click their teeth together. A lot of them seemed to be wearing black coveralls, or maybe they were dark blue. A few of them had name tags and patches, but the light wasn’t good enough to read them, even for her. A few yards away, a little lower down the pile from her, she saw a pair of legs. A long coil of intestines spooled out of the legs and twisted back and forth across the pile. It was the bottom half of a small person, still pretty fresh. Whoever it was couldn’t’ve been much bigger than her. In fact, they’d been wearing boots and cargo shorts like hers, and the black tights might be part of a wet suit, but it was hard to tell from way over…

Madelyn screamed, but there wasn’t any air in her lungs, so it just ended up being a wide mouth and some frantic arm movements. She looked down at her body. Someone had ripped her wet suit, and one stretched-out, frayed flap had curled up and blocked her view of her legs. She shifted her weight onto one arm, then reached out to push the flap down. It didn’t hit her stomach.

She looked over at the legs, at least ten feet away. Her eyes traced the line of intestines, but the tangle confused her. She tried to take a breath to calm herself and wondered if her lungs were still inside her ribs. Were they somewhere else in the pile?

What the hell had happened to her?

Going off the stains on the wall, it looked like someone had tossed her—or parts of her—down onto the pile. It looked like a lot of bodies got tossed down here. If they didn’t break anything in the fall, some of them got back up. She was lucky she hadn’t broken her neck. Or her skull.

She looked over at the legs again.

Her body always repaired itself. Burns. Cuts. Even her hair grew back. Doctor Connolly at the Mount said it wasn’t “healing,” but never wanted to explain the difference. Madelyn wondered if the woman had already explained it to her a dozen times and finally just gotten frustrated.

Whatever drug or treatment or miracle cure her dad had given her, it let her fix her injuries. Repair every injury she could remember getting, and probably a bunch she couldn’t remember. And it made sense things would repair faster if they were all in the same place.

She lowered one elbow, then twisted her other shoulder hard enough to lift herself a little bit and get her hand down. Her arm straightened out, her body tipped up, teetered, and then flopped over on the pile. She slid a few feet and almost tipped again, but she grabbed a handful of Hawaiian shirt on one body and stopped herself.

A sensation twitched in the back of her brain and carried down to her tongue. She was hungry. Starving.

Could you be hungry without a stomach? Or intestines? A Dad question. He knew all those answers.

She shook it off, pushed herself up onto her hands, and started to crawl toward the legs. There was just enough torso below her ribs to drag across the pile and make her into a rough tripod. She was pretty sure the scratch-thump-scratch-thump as she moved was the broken end of her spine bumping against things. It was good she didn’t feel a lot of pain.

Her slide had taken her a little farther from the legs, so her crawl was uphill and across uneven ground. Twice the pile shifted beneath her hands and sent her sprawling. She stopped herself from tumbling and hand-walked across the rest of the bodies.

Madelyn slipped one last time and flopped down with her head on her own thigh. Weird on so many levels. She grabbed her legs and threw one arm over her lap. Her fingers tugged at the buttons on the cargo shorts. She wasn’t used to undoing them from this angle. A memory floated up from the soup at the bottom of her mind. Out in the desert, going through the pockets of dried-out bodies in a car. Buttons had slowed things down then, too. Velcro would’ve been much smarter. Mental note for her next mission.

She was on a mission. A mission with St. George and Zzzap. That’s where she was. A mission and something had gone wrong. If she’d been on a life raft yesterday, she probably wasn’t at the Mount. Maybe a boat? The hold of a big ship?

“Crap,” she muttered. The word didn’t make any sound, but she heard her dry lips brush against each other, and it was better than nothing. She’d been digging at the wrong pocket. Again, not used to it from this angle. Her hands made their way over to the other thigh pocket, the one pretty much in her armpit. She pushed her fingers into the pocket and found the folded-up plastic bag she’d put there when she was in the life raft. Four good-sized pieces of chicken jerky. Her mouth couldn’t get wet, but her tongue twitched again. She