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

“Not a problem for now,” said Freedom.

“My bag’s gone, too,” said Barry. “My Weyland-Yutani shirt was in there, damn it.”

“We should head back,” said Freedom. “This area’s getting hot, and it’ll be harder to fight while holding both of you.”

Barry looked up at Madelyn. “Wait, you can’t walk either?”

She shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

“Fantastic,” he said with a grin. He looked over at Danielle. “Three more people in wheelchairs and we’ve got a basketball team.”

Stealth watched Quilt pack the weapons into a duffel bag he’d set on the couch. His movements were quick and precise. It was an admirable efficiency of motion.

And it was wrong. She knew that. Terribly wrong.

He used the last pieces of a shredded towel to separate the weapons so the bag would make no noise. He checked the chamber on the last of the Glocks and held it out to her without looking. It was done automatically, the way other fathers would hand over keys or credit cards.

She took the Glock. It felt good in her hand. Not perfect, but good.

He set a clip-on holster on the arm of the couch and followed it with a collapsible baton. The holstered pistol went on her right hip. She slid the baton into her side pocket.

“I have packed the spare magazines,” he told her, “and enough ammunition for three reloads on each.”

She looked at him. “What have you kept for yourself?”

He zipped the bag shut. “I have the G36 and one of the Mark 23s.”

“Will that be enough?”

The edges of his mouth twitched, the barest hint of a smile. She remembered seeing it twice as a child. “Have you ever known it not to be enough?”

It was an echo of what she had told St. George the night before.

Too much of an echo.

He held the bag out and waited for her to take it. She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at him. He stared back.

“You are not my father.”

The words hung in the air for a moment. He blinked once. “And what makes you say that, child?”

“Because my father swore to kill me if I could not stop him,” she said. “It is the kind of man he was. No one can change that much. If you were my father, even a version of him … one of us would not be alive right now.”

He set the bag down and blinked again. His fingers flexed once, like ten scorpion tails coiling and uncoiling. Then he reached up with his left hand and made a minute adjustment to his spectacles. “Perhaps I took pity on you.”

“I often wished he had. But that was not his way. You are a vestigial childhood dream dredged up by Smith’s manipulations. A desire buried deep in my subconscious. I wanted you to be real so …”

He waited for her. After a few moments, he raised one brow. “So …?”

“So I could introduce George to my family.”

“I see,” said Quilt. “And why would that matter?”

“Because I think, in his own way, my father would have approved of such an honorable man, despite their many differences.”

“I think he would have.”

Stealth set her hand on the pistol.

Quilt nodded. His mouth opened, as if to say something else, and then snapped shut. It opened and shut again. And again. The sound of clicking teeth filled the suite.

In her peripheral vision, the room fell apart. Wallpaper sagged and darkened. The couches were reduced to shreds of fabric and broken wood. The curtains vanished and let in the harsh sunlight.

The duffel bag vanished as well. The weight on her hips changed as the pistol vanished beneath her hand and the baton dissolved into the air. Even the holster was gone.

The dead thing was not her father. Its shoulders were too wide. The hair was too thin, even taking age into account. It was, by her estimate, an inch and a half too tall. The jawline was wrong.

It reached for her and she batted its hands out and away. A strike to either side of its neck cracked two vertebrae. Her heel lashed out and shattered one of its knees. It hit the floor and a second kick cracked the side of its skull.

There was a sound from behind her. Another ex-human stumbled in from the hall, drawn in by the sound. The door had been kicked open at some point, four years ago judging from the shade of the exposed wood, and splinters of the frame were strewn in the entryway.

The ex had been a woman, and was still dressed in the dark uniform coat of the hotel. Two more followed in behind her, then a third and fourth. The third was wearing a staff polo shirt splattered with dried blood. The fourth had been a boy of eleven at most. It was dressed in red swim trunks with dragons on them. Another child tottered in behind them. This one was naked, but mangled enough she could not be certain of its gender.

The sound of teeth grew louder and Stealth turned again. Another pair of exes had wandered out from the master bedroom. She guessed they’d been the original occupants of the suite. The dead woman wore a wedding band and engagement ring. The dead man did not.

Eight exes, six of them in the narrow entryway.

She leaped over the remains of the couch toward the bedroom door. The heel of her palm slammed into the dead man’s nose. The ex’s face flattened out with a crack as the bones were driven back into its skull. The dead thing staggered back and tipped over. She spun and struck the other ex just below the neck, crushing its throat back to the spine. Her follow-through shattered its jaw. She dropped, spun, and swept its legs out from under it.

Another ex staggered from the suite’s office. A high kick snapped its neck. It wobbled and then fell over. Its jaws still snapped open and shut.

Something moved behind her. The ex in the uniform coat had crossed the