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

this. Exes that took head shots and didn’t go down. Just like how some people survived a bullet going into their brain, every now and then an ex did, too.

On his own with a handful of civilians and an unkillable redneck zombie.

He stepped back past the greens. “We have to go,” he told them.

Desi took a step back, her eyes flitting from the rifle Gibbs held to the exes. “Go where?”

“That way,” he said, pointing back. “Away from them.”

The click-click-click of teeth was even closer. They could all feel the sound in the air. It drowned out the gunfire from the Unbreakables.

Gibbs herded them back. They moved with him. “We need to move now. We need distance.”

The older man with the tattoos looked all around. “But we—”

“Now. Run.”

Two of them took off with no further prodding. Desi, Smith, and the tattooed man stood there with him. Gibbs looked over his shoulder. The exes were stumbling a bit on the softer ground of the garden plot, but not much. Their grasping hands were just a few yards away now.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder, grabbed Desi with one arm and the older man with the other. “Come on,” he said. He dragged them through the plot. It took a second for them to stop resisting and march with him. They went across the path on the other side, and into the next plot.

The older man looked back. “What if we run into more of them?”

“We won’t,” said Gibbs. “The fence only broke there. They’ll all be coming from that direction.” The lieutenant glanced back at the exes, and then at the clawing footprints his mechanical toes left in the soil. They dragged in the dirt like a rake. He tried to lift his foot higher.

They ran.

Danielle paced back and forth, trying to control her breathing. She shot quick glances out the window toward the fence. Just over the tops of the pea trellises and sunflowers and corn, she could see the battlesuit. Its arms went up and back down. Gunshots echoed from the parking lot, punctuated now and then by louder ones from above.

Lester slumped in the corner, his arms wrapped around himself. He muttered quietly while his eyes went back and forth between the two doors and the window. Danielle had seen people react this way before.

Jesus, she thought, is this what I look like to everyone?

She tried to blot out the distant sound of teeth and her own breathing and the cold sweat running down her front and back. She needed to calm down before the tension made her freak out. If they were all going to get through this, they needed her to be…

Tension.

She pictured the fence lines in her mind, the ones Lester had shown off that first day. The ones she’d seen in her pathetic attempts to walk around the garden. None of the fences had a solid top rail. The chain-link just hung off a long, heavy tension cable, clamped in place by a trio of wire rope clips.

They were all idiots.

Her included.

She turned away from the window and pushed down the waves of nausea running up and down her body. A quartet of walkie-talkies sat in a charging station on the table. She snatched one up, flicked it on, and spun the dial. “Cesar?”

“What?” His voice echoed up out of the walkie. “Oh, hey. Cool.”

“I don’t think the fence is broken.”

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “I’m right next to it.”

“The fence went down,” she said, “but I don’t think it actually broke. I think the support cable slipped loose. All you need to do is pull it tight again.”

“Whoa, what? What do I need to do?”

“There’s supposed to be a thick wire rope, a big cable, across the top of the fence. Everything’s hanging off it.”

“Like curtains?” asked the walkie.

“Yeah,” she said, “like curtains. You need to find the end and pull it tight. It’ll make the fence come right back up.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but be careful. It’s going to weigh a lot and it’s going to have some exes standing on it. You’ve got to pull hard enough to raise the fence but not enough to snap the cable.”

“What happens if it snaps?”

Danielle closed her eyes and took a breath. The clicking of teeth seemed even louder. “If it breaks for real, the fence is ruined and I’m pretty sure we’ll all get eaten by exes.”

“Okay, then,” said Cesar. “Not breaking the cable.”

“Good idea.”

“You think it was Legion?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it looked solid when I saw it the other day. If it was rigged right, it shouldn’t have slipped.”

“I saw a wrench in the parking lot. You think maybe— Hang on a sec,” said Cesar. The exoskeleton swung its shoulders in the distance. “Sorry, had to sweep a bunch of ’em away, y’know. So you think maybe somebody did this?”

“We can worry about it later. First, get the fence back up.”

“Okay. I think I see the post where it came apart. Lemme try this.”

“Be careful. Not too hard.”

“Yeah, that’s not what you were saying—”

“Jesus, Cesar,” she said, “not right now.”

“Right, sorry. I’ll let you know when I got it.”

She set the walkie down and watched the titan crouch down. It vanished behind the rows of plants.

God, the clicking teeth were so loud. It almost sounded like they were in the…

Something shuffled near the side door. Lester shrieked. Panic struck Danielle in the chest and she turned.

It had been a man. A short man, dressed in the semicasual look that seemed so popular in Los Angeles. Jeans, T-shirt, dark blazer. A trim beard, spotted with filth, covered its jaw.

The zombie stumbled off the walkway and into the workshop. Its chalk eyes stared at her without blinking. Its teeth cracked together. One of the top front teeth was gone, and in its place was a steel implant post.

Cold fear spread out from her heart. It crawled down her legs and arms. It wrapped around her