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

Peel looked up. “What?”

“This isn’t what I ordered. I told her to write it down.”

St. George smirked. The little girl giggled. Even Peel’s lips curled up a bit.

“The service here has really gone downhill.”

The guard pulled a canteen off his shoulder and twisted the strap around a crossbar so it hung inside the cage.

“How are we supposed to eat?” asked St. George. He shook one wrist and jingled the cuff binding his arm to Barry’s.

“Sorry, man,” said the sunburned man. He didn’t meet St. George’s eyes. “It sucks, but I’ve got my orders.”

St. George sighed. “We’ll figure something out.”

The guard walked a few yards away and sat down on a hatch with his back to them.

After a few tries they figured out how to take turns lifting the bowls, twisting their arms and leaning to the side. Barry slurped his bowl empty on his third turn. St. George sipped his. Little Devon pulled down the canteen and passed it back and forth with the girl. After his third sip, he grudgingly held it out for Barry, tilting it so the chained man could swallow a few mouthfuls.

“Thanks,” said Barry.

Little Devon glowered at him.

“How you doing?” asked St. George.

“Locked in a cage,” Barry said. “You?”

“Kind of the same. I meant calorie-wise. Are you doing okay?” He twisted around toward his friend.

Barry shrugged. “Been worse. Could be better.”

St. George set his bowl on the floor and slid it behind him, toward his friend. “Here. You can have the rest. I’m not hungry.”

“Why? Was yours worse than mine?”

“Once we get out of here, I can’t have you weak. You need it.”

The sun crept higher and forced the shadows back into hiding. A few more people appeared, most of them wearing broad hats and carrying farm tools. They stared at the prisoners in the cage until one of the guards—cowboy Mitchel with one l—yelled at them to get to work. Some of them crouched and worked the soil with their hands. Others pushed at the sides of the raised beds with their tools. A few had watering cans they moved back and forth between the plants while they snuck looks at the superheroes.

“Hey,” said St. George.

Peel looked over.

“Can I ask you a question?”

The sunburned guard glanced at Mitchel farther down the deck. “I’m just supposed to feed you and get the bowls back when you’re done.”

“So they said you couldn’t talk to us?”

“What’s your question?”

St. George tried to nod his head toward the farmers. “Devon told us you got seeds from the cruise ship. Where’d you get all the farm stuff?”

“Huh?”

“Pitchforks. Hoes. Rakes. That’s not stuff you find on a boat.”

The corners of Peel’s mouth twitched again. “Depends on the ship.” He tapped a foot on the deck, then chucked his chin at the stack of containers. “The Pacific Eagle had over eight hundred shipping containers on her when it joined us. Tons and tons of made-in-China crap.”

“Sounds like a lucky break for you,” said Barry.

The sunburned man shrugged. “Eighty percent of it was useless shit. Electronics, car parts, toys, games. Stuff like that.”

“At least all the kids had a couple good Christmases,” said St. George.

Peel smiled. A real smile. “My kid got fifteen Transformers that first year.”

“That was a good year for Transformers,” agreed Barry. “They did some really sweet G1 rereleases.”

The guard frowned.

“Never mind,” sighed Barry.

“Past that, we got a bunch of clothes. Some extra cookware. And a bunch of gardening tools.”

St. George nodded. “Lucky.”

“Yeah.”

“No offense,” said Barry, “but, uh, why aren’t you wearing any of the clothes?”

“We are,” said Peel. He tugged at his shirt. “Almost six hundred people, almost five years. Clothes don’t last forever. We’ve gone through all five containers worth, plus everything we could find here on the Queen.”

Little Devon took the girl’s empty bowl, stacked it in his own, and held them out between the cage bars for the guard. The boy leaned in, grabbed the two bowls by Barry, and pushed those out, too. “I’ll leave you the canteen,” the guard said. “It’s gonna get pretty hot out here around noon.”

St. George wiggled one of his fingers to point up at the cage’s top. “Can you talk to someone about throwing a blanket or a sheet over this?”

Peel’s mouth twisted into another sad smile. “Don’t think they’ll go for giving you privacy.”

“Not privacy,” said St. George, “just some shade for the kids so they’re not out in the sun all day.”

The guard looked over at the girl and Little Devon, and his face shifted.

“If it helps, you can even put it all on that side so I don’t get any shade. That’ll score you points, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It will. Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

The sunburned guard stood up with the bowls and swung his tray under one arm. He looked at the two prisoners. “Are you really him? The Mighty Dragon?”

St. George nodded. “I am.”

“He is,” agreed Barry.

The guard glanced over at Mitchel again, then crouched back down. “How’d you survive the bomb? Where were you?”

“There was no bomb,” said St. George.

“So what destroyed LA then?”

“Nothing. Los Angeles is there, in one piece. It’s got a ton of exes, but there’s over twenty thousand survivors, too.”

“Twenty thousand,” echoed Peel. He whistled.

“Ryan,” yelled Mitchel. “Give ’em their food and then leave ’em the fuck alone!”

“I’m getting the bowls,” the peeling guard—Ryan—shouted over his shoulder.

“How long’s it take you to pick up a fucking bowl? Get out of there.” The cowboy marched across the deck and used his shotgun to wave sunburned Ryan away from the cage.

The guard gave St. George a thoughtful look, then walked away.

Barry twisted his head around. “You know what?”

“What?” St. George stretched his fingers again, brushing them against the handcuff chains.

“I think this is the longest I’ve been human in about four years.”

Little Devon’s eyes got wide.

“What?”

Barry shrugged, and the chain hopped away from St. George’s fingertips. “Well, I mean, I’m in the electric chair so much of the time, doing the power thing. I’m out for eight