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

or nine hours at the most, and I usually spend that asleep.”

“Is it everything you remember?”

“Being human? Not really, no.”

“You’re not human?” asked Little Devon.

Barry smiled. “No, I’m human. I can change, though. Kind of like Nautilus does.”

“You turn into fire.” This from the little girl. St. George realized he still didn’t know her name.

“Yeah, sort of,” said Barry.

Little Devon looked at him. “Does it hurt?”

“A little bit. The change stings for a second or two. But once it happens…it’s great.”

A guard walked up. The Asian man with the tattoos. He looked to the kids and fired off a few quick syllables. Little Devon answered back in the same language.

The guard set his shotgun down away from the cage and pulled some folded blue fabric out from under his arm. He shook it out, and St. George realized it was a tablecloth. The guard flicked it across the cage, like he was making a bed, and shade fell across Barry and the kids.

“Thank you,” said St. George.

Little Devon said something else. The guard glanced at St. George and grunted. He picked up his shotgun and walked away.

“Dude,” Barry smiled at the boy, “what was all that?”

“What?”

“What were you speaking?”

“Oh,” said Little Devon, “it’s Chinese. A bunch of people are from Chinese boats, so a lot of us learned it.”

St. George turned his head. “You can speak Chinese? That’s amazing.”

Little Devon blushed under his red cap. “A lot of people can. I’m not very good.”

St. George leaned back and lowered his voice. “Have you noticed their guns?”

Barry nodded. “All the shotguns? Yeah.”

“Not just shotguns. I’m no expert, but I think they’re all the same model. I think all the people with pistols have the same make and holster, too.”

“So, about twenty, twenty-five matching weapons. Sounds like an armory to me.”

“Me, too.”

“Or maybe your basic starship replicator unit.”

“I’m going to stick with armory for now,” said St. George. He drummed his fingers on the deck. “Thing is, I didn’t think cruise ships were allowed to have armories. Nothing bigger than a basic weapons locker.”

“They’re not?”

“I don’t think so. I seem to remember reading it somewhere before, back when all the Somali pirate stuff was happening.”

“Huh,” said Barry. “Could be from this ship or the tanker.”

“Why so many, then? These ships are big, but I’m pretty sure they have small crews for their size. Just off what we’ve seen, that’s more guns than crew members.”

“Maybe there aren’t that many. Maybe they’re just passing them off to each other so we always see people with big guns.”

“Maybe,” St. George said. “I don’t think so, though. There were a lot when we first landed, and at that whole trial-meeting get-together.”

“Yeah, good point.”

“I’m hungry,” said the girl.

“Me, too, kiddo,” Barry said. He turned his head back toward St. George. “What about one of those bigger yachts? Not too hard to believe some billionaire’d load up their boat with an arsenal to prepare for the end of the world.”

“Yeah, for all the good it did,” said St. George. “Still seems like too many of the same thing, though. Would someone like that have an arsenal or a collection?”

“Hmmmmm. I’d go for the collection, personally. But maybe that’s just me.”

St. George turned to look out at the sea. The sunlight pinged and sparked off the slow waves. “Do you think there’ve been any other ships here? Like, ships they looted or got people off of, but then they got rid of the ship?”

“I don’t know.” Barry looked at the kids. “Did you guys ever hear about anything like that? Did a boat ever just stop by for a while and not stay?”

The girl shrugged twice. Little Devon shook his head. “Everyone stays.”

Barry straightened up a bit. “Hey, what about…No, forget it.”

“What?”

“I was going to say what if it was smugglers. Gunrunners, whatever you’d call ’em. Maybe somebody on one of the ships had a side business. But shotguns seem kind of low-end for that.”

“Yeah. You’d expect M-16s or AK-47s or something like that.”

“Exactly. Oh, frak me.”

“What?”

“Do you think there are zombie Somali pirates out there somewhere? That would be so awesome.”

Little Devon’s real name was Ash, which Barry found very entertaining but wouldn’t say why. The little girl was Lily. Ash remembered living on land and having a dog. Lily had been born on the ships.

Leather-skinned Alice brought lunch. It was more stew, chunkier this time. She replaced the canteen, ignored their questions while they ate, and walked away with the empty bowls.

The gardeners continued to stare as they worked the huge beds. Their expressions ranged from fear to anger. An older man with a broad face gazed at St. George with disgust. Two or three of them looked hopeful.

St. George studied them back. Some of them picked beans or peas. Others just seemed to be maintaining the beds themselves, pushing and adjusting the wobbly plastic liner that held the soil in place. He wondered what it had been intended for before necessity took over.

A new figure came around the corner of one of the distant containers and walked toward them along the raised garden beds. It was the Middle Eastern man St. George had seen a few times before. Mitchel moved to intercept him. They talked, and their voices went up as they talked some more. The tall man stepped past Mitchel, and the guard yelled after him, “Nobody’s supposed to talk to them.”

“I will talk to them, and I will do it without you hanging over my shoulder.”

“You’re not allowed.”

“On whose orders?” asked the Middle Eastern man without looking back. His words were tight and precise, the dialect of English as a second language

Mitchel took a few quick steps to keep up. “You know whose.”

“You heard this directly from Nautilus?”

“From Eliza.”

He stopped short, and Mitchel almost ran into him. “Eliza is a mate, just like me,” said the Middle Eastern man. “My orders carry as much weight as hers.”

The mustached man snorted. “You wish.”

“Are you challenging my authority? Do you want me to bring