Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

brushed some more glass off his clothes as he walked back to the car. There were some fragments of windshield in the back of his jeans, but a few hops sent them tumbling down the inside of his pant leg.

“We appear to be uninjured for the most part,” said Stealth. She stretched past Danielle and folded down the driver’s seat. Danielle pushed the door open and the two of them slid out of the car. Freedom’s door opened with a squeal of forced metal. The huge officer climbed out. He kept Madelyn cradled in one arm.

There were a few other abandoned cars on the road. One was nothing but a blackened frame. Two of the others had bodies in them. In one of the cars, the body behind the steering wheel pawed at the windshield. The sound of teeth echoed in the air all around them.

St. George tapped the hood of the Taurus. “Cesar,” he said. “You okay?”

The car was silent.

He walked around and leaned in the door. “Cesar?”

The radio was long gone. A rectangular hole gaped in the middle of the dashboard.

“He is not here,” said Stealth.

“How can you be sure?”

“Cesar’s abilities allow him to possess mechanical devices with a certain amount of functioning electronic circuitry. Based on the dust layer and the degree of fading in the various materials, I would estimate this vehicle has not functioned in at least four years.”

St. George looked at the car. “What’s that mean?”

“Is he dead?” asked Madelyn. “If he switched over into a car that didn’t work, would that … I mean, could it kill him?”

“I do not know,” said Stealth.

“But it’s the car he said he was in,” said Danielle. “The red Taurus.”

A few yards behind the car, a crowd of undead staggered out into the street. One of them fell off the curb and hit the pavement face-first. The others wobbled but kept their balance.

“We can’t stay here,” said Freedom. “We’ve got to get moving again.”

“Are we just going to leave him here?” said Danielle. She stood with her arms wrapped tight around herself and watched the mob of exes. There were at least fifty of them now, and more in the distance. The closest were a dozen yards away.

“There is no evidence he is here,” said Stealth. She glared at the car as if it offended her. “If we are shifting between realities, perhaps he has been left behind in the other one.”

“Except he could see this one,” said Madelyn. “He saw the car and the dead people.”

“There is too much conflicting data to make a solid hypothesis.”

There were scrape marks around the trunk lock, and a dent that could’ve been from a crowbar. St. George yanked and it swung open with a squeak. “Damn it,” he muttered.

Danielle looked at him. “What?”

“Maddy’s wheelchair is gone,” he said.

Maddy tried to sit up in Freedom’s arms. “What?”

St. George looked down at the empty trunk. It had been stripped down to the frame. “Gone,” he said.

An ex fell on him from behind and bit his shoulder. Its teeth sank into the fleece and grated on his skin. St. George shrugged the dead man off, grabbed it by the shoulders, and shoved it back at the approaching crowd. It knocked a few of them down. A few more stumbled over the fallen ones.

“We should be on our way,” said Stealth.

“I agree,” said Freedom. “We might move quicker without the wheelchair.”

“Yeah,” said Madelyn. “Piggyback?” The huge officer lifted her up and she swung around to hang on his broad shoulders.

Freedom settled Madelyn on his back. “We’ll need to cut back and forth through side streets,” he said. “We need to start throwing them off our trail before their numbers get any larger.”

St. George took a last look at the car. He wondered if Cesar was somewhere else right now, wondering how everyone had vanished out of the car. Or maybe he was in some limbo, not even aware he’d ceased to exist.

Stealth started walking. They all fell in behind her.

They headed up Santa Monica Boulevard. Exes trailed behind them. St. George and Stealth beat aside the undead and crushed skulls. Freedom grabbed one that got too close and hurled it back across the wide road. After half a mile Stealth guided them onto a road heading east. Half a mile and seven more dead exes after that, St. George saw the hotel stretching up above the skyline.

“It’s getting into the afternoon,” he said.

“I am aware. From the shadows, I would put the time at twelve-thirty.”

He glanced at the shadows. “Is this going to be a long stop?”

“I hope not.”

The air rippled and the white noise of chattering teeth vanished. Stealth stepped back and pushed Danielle out of the way as an SUV roared by at twice the posted speed limit. It missed George by inches.

“Jerk,” shouted Madelyn.

“Not much of a choice, is it?” said Danielle. “We stay on the sidewalks, we get attacked by random exes. Walk in the streets and we get hit by cars.”

“They seem to be happening faster,” said Freedom. “The shifts. It feels like we can’t go more than an hour without one happening.”

“They are,” said St. George.

When they were across the street from the hotel, Stealth stopped. “St. George and I shall go on from here,” she said. “The rest of you should remain at this location and attempt to locate Barry.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Danielle’s brows made twin arches over her eyes.

“Which part of my statement was unclear? Depending on traffic and his possible experiences during the shifts, he may have been here for as much as ninety minutes.”

“Are you actually saying we should split up?” asked Madelyn. “Have you ever seen a horror movie?”

Stealth’s nostrils flared. “On an average day the hotel has over nine hundred occupants. The hallways are less than six feet wide, leaving us very little maneuvering room. If we experience another shift and even half of those individuals were revealed as exes, there is no way a group of this size would