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

No, she realized, even collapsed was too small a word. It had pretty much vanished. Almost forty feet of barrier was flat on the ground. This was pretty much the definition of catastrophic failure.

The exes were stumbling into Eden. Over two hundred of them, easy. The only saving grace right now was that they were too mindless to run. They staggered in with halting, uneven steps, propelled by lack of resistance more than any conscious motivation.

Kennedy dropped to one knee, swung her rifle up, and squeezed off a burst. The three rounds caught a dead man in the throat, jaw, and forehead. The ex’s head exploded and it crumpled to the ground. She thumbed the rifle’s selector and put a single shot through a zombie’s nose, then another one into a dead woman’s eye. Three exes down in less than a minute.

A wall of exes shambled toward them. The other Unbreakables opened fire around her. Some of the undead dropped. Others tripped over the fallen. But it was such a small fraction of the horde. Barely a tenth. They needed something big to shift the odds.

And then, right on cue, something big appeared.

The titan charged into the crowd of exes. An icon warned Cesar how much power the charge was burning up, but he swept it aside. He needed his mind and his vision clear.

The exoskeleton stomped forward and slammed one of its pile-driver arms into a withered dead man. The zombie exploded, spraying dried meat and bones across the pavement. Cesar punched another one, rocketing the ex’s shattered body back into the horde. He swung one of the battlesuit’s arms around and clotheslined two dead people at once. They dropped, and he stomped down on one, crushing its chest beneath steel toes.

He looked around, and the targeting system highlighted dozens of figures. There were exes everywhere. Some of them swarmed around him. Others headed after the soldiers.

The battlesuit’s microphones picked up the crack of bullets splitting the air, and one of the exes near him twitched and fell over. Another one spun and dropped. A third jerked its head to the side and stumbled forward, the right side of its head a mess of twisted tissue and clotted blood. A round pinged off one of the pistons in his arm and came close to crippling the exoskeleton. “Hey,” he shouted over his shoulder.

“Sorry,” yelled Hancock.

Cesar turned back to the fence and swept his arm around. Three exes were hurled back toward the street, one with a crushed skull. He swung his foot forward and shattered the knees of a dead housewife, dropping the dead woman to the pavement.

A dead man with a crooked hairpiece grabbed the battlesuit’s other arm. A gray-skinned woman with hollow cheeks wrapped withered arms around the exoskeleton’s waist. A gore-covered child tried to gnaw through the cables in the left calf. Another ex closed its bony fingers on a support strut.

Cesar thrashed at the undead and shifted his hips. Some fell away from the battlesuit. Others lost fingers and teeth as they clung to the titan. He brushed the last few away, then slammed his fists into some others closing in on him.

Something metal clanked under one of the suit’s toes. He glanced down and saw a crescent wrench on the pavement. It was clean and new, not rusted.

Another gunshot echoed through the suit’s external microphone systems. A pale-skinned man with bloody teeth and a gore-covered sweatshirt tumbled back as a black crater opened up above its right eye. The body was limp before it hit the pavement, and another ex stumbled over it and pitched forward.

In the suit’s rear camera he saw the Unbreakables form a line. Gibbs appeared on the path. His toes sparked on the concrete as he ran. He took a few steps toward the soldiers, then dropped and brought his own rifle up.

They didn’t have any cover. The parking lot was just a big open space. It didn’t even have the concrete bumpers in the spaces that exes could trip over. The kind of place he used to skid around and pull donuts in back when he was possessing sports cars.

What would St. George do?

No. What would the Driver do?

He’d get right in there and spin donuts through the crowd.

Cesar waded deeper into the horde. The current of exes drifted after him, and even flowed backward at a few points. Every few seconds one of them would twitch in time with a rifle shot and drop to the ground. Many of them stayed down, but some of them kept crawling after the exoskeleton. A few were spun around by the force of the shot and dragged themselves toward the soldiers.

He made his way over to the dumpsters reinforcing the big gate. Both of the bins were filled with assorted trash, scraps, and a few of the split-skull exes the old Gardener had left in piles around Eden. Cesar’s steel hands closed on the edge of a dumpster and tugged. It felt like about a ton, altogether, but he hadn’t been good at judging weights in the naked exoskeleton. He let the suit’s fingers slide down to the corner, then pulled hard.

The dumpster swung away from what was left of the fence. It whipped around, scraping on the pavement, and the metal bin rang with impacts as it battered exes in every direction. Cesar took a step, gave himself some room, and spun it in another wide circle. Bones cracked. The dumpster plowed over some of the zombies and crushed them beneath its squealing wheels, driven on by the battlesuit’s muscles.

Cesar spun again, aimed, and let go. Momentum carried the dumpster across the parking lot, along the fence line. It slammed through the wave of undead bodies and left a path of broken exes behind it. A few went flying, struck the ground, and then were crushed when the rolling dumpster caught up with them.

The green box traveled almost forty feet, two-thirds of the way