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

across the parking lot. By then dozens of collisions had bled away its speed and power. It came to rest a few yards from the big compost pile.

The move had taken out almost fifty exes. Some were down for good. Others tried to crawl on broken limbs. A few flopped on the pavement and snapped their teeth at the air.

Cesar looked out at the street, and the battlesuit’s targeting system overloaded in less than a second. Dead men and women staggered toward the fallen fence, drawn by the noises of fighting and gunfire and the overlapping click-click-click of hundreds and hundreds of teeth. He’d punched a good-sized hole in the horde, but it was filling up again fast.

He had to get the fence up.

Gibbs aimed down the sights, and the rifle kicked against his shoulder. An ex sprayed its brains behind it and toppled over. He re-aimed, fired, and the dead woman stumbled at the last instant. His round tore a wide strip of the ex’s scalp away and knocked its head to the side, but it kept plodding forward.

A shriek echoed behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. Had the exes already gotten past them? Christ, had the fence failed somewhere else? If there were two breaches in the line, they were all pretty much dead.

He saw wide eyes through the leaves in a nearby garden plot.

His rifle was halfway around when he recognized Desi. And then he saw an older tattooed man he’d seen a few times before. And two others he sort of recognized. It was a full work crew.

And Smith. Behind them all was Smith. Of course.

“If you’re not fighting,” he told them, “you need to clear out. Get back to the main building.”

The click-click-click of teeth filled the air. The dead woman had staggered forward another two yards. Black fluid oozed from the scalp wound.

At this range, Gibbs barely had to aim. Less than fifteen feet. His first round took a baseball-sized chunk of bone and hair out of the side of the woman’s head. The next round caved in the cheek and eye socket of a near-mummified thing in a sky-blue T-shirt shambling behind the dead woman. A third round punched right between the eyes of a teenaged boy coated from nose to crotch with dried blood.

All three exes folded to the pavement.

The three best shots of his life, thought Gibbs. They gave him some breathing room. He glanced back at the people in the garden. “Go,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

“They’re on the path,” said Desi. “We’d need to go almost all the way to the back fence to get around them.”

“Then do it,” Gibbs snapped. He looked back the way he’d come and saw clumsy forms moving between him and the distant main building. They were headed for other guards and other gardeners, the ones up by the Hot Zone.

Hell, everywhere was the Hot Zone now.

Gibbs turned back and realized the soldiers had moved on without him. A good twenty feet separated him from the other soldiers, and that space was already filling with exes. The undead didn’t slow down at all. Some of the exes staggered right for him, lurching forward on stiff legs.

At the front of the pack towered a huge, top-heavy ex with shaggy hair and filthy overalls. It was slick with the fluids of decay. A chain dragged from its right hand, and Gibbs realized there was a steel animal trap clamped on the dead man’s wrist. There was some gore on the trap, but not enough to be a fatal wound.

His mind spun, trying to figure out how a redneck-looking zombie had gotten its hand stuck in an animal trap and then ended up in the middle of a higher-end Los Angeles neighborhood. Some exes had wandered a lot in the years since the dead first rose, but it still seemed odd.

The dead man took a few lumbering steps forward on tree-trunk legs, and Gibbs dismissed the thoughts. The redneck zombie was twenty feet away from him. He put his rifle to his shoulder and lined up the sights on the big ex’s broad forehead. It lurched to the side as he squeezed the trigger. The shot tore off the redneck’s ear and some hair. The dead man didn’t notice. Didn’t even break stride. Fifteen feet and closing.

He fired again. The big ex’s chalky eye vanished. Another damned lucky shot. He was using them all up today.

The zombie twisted around as it fell, and the animal trap clanged against the pavement.

Gibbs lined up again and blew the head off a gray-skinned woman whose body had withered down to skin and bones. Another shot put down an older man with a black tie and a crooked pair of glasses. He lined up on a little Asian girl with gory lips and a bloodstained school outfit and watched the dead thing’s face vanish in a burst of dark colors.

An ex tripped over the redneck’s body, kicking the animal trap as it stumbled. It hit the ground a few feet from Gibbs, but its outstretched arms and wrists took a lot of the impact. It crawled forward on broken bones, its jaw gnashing up and down on jagged teeth.

Too close. They were too damned close.

Another barrage of gunfire came from the Unbreakables. A quick glimpse showed they were dealing with fifty or sixty of their own problems. The battlesuit stood in a small horde of exes closer to the fallen fence. It smashed at them with its arms, but the pose of the head told Gibbs that Cesar was listening to something.

He was on his own.

Metal scraped on pavement. The animal trap shifted and slid on the ground. The big ex pushed itself up onto its hands and knees. Its stringy hair hung over its face like the ghost girl from that Japanese movie about the well. The dead man crawled forward and staggered back up onto its tree-trunk legs.

Gibbs had heard of things like