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

He drifted down and south. A huge black scar marked three and a half blocks beyond the Wall. Two gutted houses had collapsed in on themselves. Two others still stood with charred walls and hollow windows. One had burned to the ground and left a brick chimney standing in the ashes, flanked by a few blackened boards.

In one sense, they’d been lucky. Dozens of overgrown lawns and under-watered hedges had survived the flames. If there’d been any wind last night, half the city could’ve gone up.

In another sense, the fire had really screwed them.

A little lower and he could see Billie Carter waiting for him on the Big Wall. She stood between the South Gate and the southwest tower, right in front of the burned area. Her head tilted up from her binoculars as he descended. “I’m double-checking just to be sure,” she told him, “but it looks like we lost the whole grove and another twenty-three trees past that.”

“Dammit,” muttered St. George.

“Sorry.”

“Are they definitely dead? Not just…I don’t know, scorched or something?”

She nodded. “All burned black and dead.” She held out the binoculars. “Want to see? Half the grove is just ash.”

He shook his head and pressed his lips into a flat line. The Larchmont area south of the Big Wall had been lots of high-end, suburban homes before the Zombocalypse. More than a few of them had fruit trees, either out front or hidden in their back lawns. Apples, grapefruits, lemons, even a set of twin fig trees. One spacious backyard had turned into a small grove of fourteen orange trees gathered around a koi pond. With the year-round growing season in Los Angeles, it had been one of the Mount’s few dependable sources of food.

Had been now being the key phrase.

“Dammit,” St. George said again. “This does not help things.”

Billie’s stomach grumbled. “No kidding.”

He managed a brief smile. “We’ve got to get Eden going now. Right now.”

“It’s not ready,” said Billie. “I was talking with Al the other day. They’ve got the fences extended, but that’s it.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve been up there moving a couple dozen cars around for them. But we don’t have a choice.”

“Yeah, everyone’s still whining about only getting two meals a day.”

“Still better than no meals a day,” said St. George, “and that’s where we’ll be in a month or two if Eden isn’t up and running.”

“Speaking of which…”

“Yeah?”

“I think there need to be more scavengers up at Eden.”

“So you’ve said a couple times now.”

“They’ve got twelve, but think how many more houses they could be going through if we sent up a full team of twenty. Or both teams. They could be pulling in three or four times more supplies than we’ve been getting here in Hollywood. And we need that after this.” She gestured out at the blackened buildings.

“I know,” he said, “but Eden’s only got space and resources for so many people. More scavengers mean less people actually working up there.”

Billie’s jaw shifted back and forth as she ground her teeth. “They’d be working.”

“You know what I mean. Right now the priority has to be getting Eden up and running. It’s a continuous source of food.”

“Or,” she said, “we could finally hit downtown.”

They both looked to the east. The distant buildings gleamed in the sunlight. Canyons of steel and concrete choked with dead vehicles and undead people.

The scavengers had made one attempt to conquer downtown, almost four years ago. It ended in near-disaster as almost a thousand exes had surrounded and immobilized their truck. St. George had been forced to airlift the scavengers away one by one—a brutally long process in the days before he’d mastered flight. Billie had been the second-to-last person out. The truck was still down there, another dead thing on 3rd Street.

“I know the idea of working a garden doesn’t thrill you,” he said, shaking his head, “but we both know it’s a better option than downtown.”

Billie gave him a tight grin. Her jaw worked back and forth again. St. George wondered how busy she kept the last two dentists in Los Angeles. He’d never met either of them himself. Not professionally, anyway. His nigh-invulnerability extended to his teeth.

“I’d still like to give it a try someday,” she said.

He bit back a grin of his own. Only a Marine would be excited about leading a mission into hell. “If we don’t all starve in the next few months,” he said, “we’ll talk about it.”

Billie perked up. “I’ll hold you to that,” she said.

“I’ve got to go check in with Danielle and then Freedom.” He waved his hand at the blackened streets. “If you spot anything positive out there, let me know.”

“I’m positive I saw a couple crispy exes staggering around.”

St. George gave her a loose salute and pushed himself back up into the air. He spun twice, got his bearings, and let his flight become a slow arc to the north. His gaze drifted west as he did. The air quality in LA was really amazing these days. No haze, no smog. He could see for miles.

Zzzap had been gone for two days now. For the past few months they’d been trying to reestablish contact with the rest of the world. Before civilization had taken its last wheezing step and collapsed, there’d been stories about other safe zones. Pockets of survivors were scattered throughout Europe and Africa, one or two in South America, and a large group in Japan. That’s where he was now.

Zzzap could make it around the world in twelve hours. Less if he went suborbital. And in his energy form he could see almost all types of electrical activity, provided it wasn’t shielded somehow. It made him the perfect person to search for other groups and serve as an impromptu ambassador.

It was strange not having him around, though. Even expanded out to fill a square mile, the Mount was still a small place. Over the past few years, St. George had grown used to seeing people every