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

that had dried into little spikes. Blood and gore had soaked through the fleece to make a few spots on her bra. She placed her baton and the pistol she’d taken from Billie’s body and placed them on top of the jacket.

They stretched out on her thin mattress. There was no blanket or pillows, but it felt luxurious to not be standing. She pulled his arm around her shoulders and pressed herself against him. Her skin was warm. She was always warm.

He kissed her forehead, and he was pretty sure she kissed him back, but he was already asleep.

It’s the early days of the outbreak. I don’t even know it’s an outbreak yet. In four days, I will meet the woman who will change my life forever. She will tell me the monsters are the result of an infection. A year and a half from now, we will learn where the infection came from. Two days after that she will tell me her name.

There are almost a dozen monsters—exes—in the parking lot with us. They are hunting homeless people. They won’t be exes for another two weeks, when the President refers to them as ex-humans for the first time in a televised statement. The name will stick.

A dead thing grabs my cape and tugs me off balance. I spin around and hit it in the head with a backhand. Its skull cracks under my knuckles.

With me is Gorgon. His vampiric gaze is useless against the monsters—the exes—but earlier we stopped a minor gang skirmish, and for another hour or so he is superhuman. He grabs an ex by the wrists and swings, throwing it across the pavement. His leather duster whirls open as he does. I know he looks much cooler than I do, but I am still proud of my red and green costume.

I’m aware this is a dream. Far more aware than I’ve been in a long time. This is the past replayed as present.

I slam my hand out and an ex flies across the parking lot to slam into a brick wall head-first. It slumps to the ground. Gorgon—his name is Nikolai, but I don’t know that yet—punches the last one in the jaw. Its head spins from the blow, and he grabs it and twists even more. Its neck breaks with a sound like driftwood and it drops.

A year and a half from now Gorgon’s body will be twisted by a giant monster—a bastard of the ex-virus and a failed super-soldier project—and his own spine will break in four places. His death will be quick. My friends and I will tell ourselves it was instantaneous.

He turns and looks at me. The dark irises of his goggles gleam in the streetlights. He shrugs and settles the long jacket around his body. The jacket looks wrong without the silver sheriff’s star on it, but that is still almost nine months away, and I realize I’m looking at him through my eyes, the eyes that have seen all this before.

This is the point where most dreams collapse. The point where you become too conscious of the dream and start thinking about it rather than experiencing it.

“Okay,” says Gorgon, “you’re clear this is all in your head, right?”

I stare at him. This is not how the past went. I’m not sure what to say.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, George,” the other man growls. “It’s a dream. Just a bunch of stuff you dredged up from your memories to help you figure stuff out. You’ve beat him on this level before, when you saved Karen out at Project Krypton.”

Gorgon was dead months before I traveled to Krypton. He never learned Karen’s name. No one else did, not until the night—

“It’s not me, you idiot,” he snarls. “This is all just you. All of it. Smith made you provide all the details, made you build your own prison, but you stuck me in here to help you remember the truth. You’re just talking to yourself.”

“Like Fight Club?”

“Yes, just like Fight Club, except I’m way better looking than Brad Pitt.”

I snort back a laugh and realize I’m not wearing my mask. My old costume, the Mighty Dragon, is gone. I’m back in my leather flight jacket, the one that was charred to bits fighting the demon, Cairax Murrain. I’ve got a pair of goggles of my own, but they’re pushed up on my forehead, holding my hair in place. “You were just a clue,” I say. “Because I knew you weren’t supposed to be here.”

He nods back and looks down. His body is twisted under the coat. His clothes are wrapped tight around his waist. His toes point behind him. One of his knees bends at a strange angle. “Looks like everyone dredged up some dead people to gnaw at them. Plus you had that stupid parrot sketch and all the clicking sounds. Little things your subconscious was trying to get your attention with so you’d know none of this was real.”

The parking lot has vanished into a dark gray blur. The dream is starting to fade away. Or maybe I just can’t focus on it because I don’t need it anymore. Even as I think this, another ex lumbers out of the darkness behind Gorgon. It’s a man in a suit. It has a very colorful tie. Even in death, its smile is broad and insincere.

I step forward to knock it away, but Gorgon stops me. He glares at me through his goggles. “Don’t you get it?”

I look back at him, then at the ex. It’s only a few feet from us. “Get what?”

“Jesus, you’re dense sometimes.” He turns and points at the ex. It has a United States flag pin on its collar, and also a small pin showing a bear. The seal of California. “How often do you have to have something set out right in front of you?”

“What are you talking about?”

Gorgon turns and the ex grabs his shoulder. It bites into his bicep, but the leather