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

shoulders and throat and sent threads into her head.

The ex lurched toward her, and the click-click-click of its teeth filled the workshop.

THAT’S CRAZY TALK, said Zzzap.

“It makes sense,” said St. George, pushing himself off the yacht’s smashed deck and into the air. “If he takes a hundred people back to shore and they find LA’s been nuked, no one’s ever going to question him again.”

Yeah, but it’ll be freshly nuked, not five years nuked.

“Who’d be able to tell the difference?” St. George flew back to the cargo ship. The gleaming wraith followed. “To most people, ruined buildings and radiation means a bomb site. I don’t think there’ll be any elaborate tests to confirm when it happened.”

But there’ll be a blast. Light, heat, all sorts of stuff.

“If anyone even sees it, it’ll be a light on the horizon. You think after years of this he won’t be able to brush it off as a thunderstorm or something? Hell, half these people believe him now without any evidence.”

Besides, he can’t just launch the missiles. He’d need special keys and codes and a computer named Joshua and—

“He’s had years to figure this out,” said St. George. “Hell, for all we know he was on the crew.”

Madelyn waved to them from below. They dropped down to the deck. St. George explained what he’d seen below the ships to her and the Lemurians.

“You are sure?” asked Hussein. “It was not a trick of the light or a distortion in the water?”

St. George shook his head. “I was less than ten feet from it at one point,” he said. “I could see the rivets and the writing on the periscope-tower thing.”

Eliza shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s just nuts. Maleko might be…controlling, but he’s not…he’s not going to kill a couple thousand people just to back up his story. He’s not a maniac.”

Devon’s lips twisted. He set his son down and whispered some instructions. The boy took Lily by the hand, and they ran off into the night.

“What do you think he’s up to, then?” asked St. George. “He offers to take you all to see the nuclear wasteland that we know doesn’t exist, tells us how much he ‘didn’t want to have to do this,’ and then just before you go he decides to drag his secret submarine out and…what? Please, give me another way to look at this.”

Eliza bit her lip.

“I don’t know why he’s doing it,” St. George said. “Maybe he thinks he’s protecting you from something? Maybe…”

“Maybe he’s just nuts,” said Madelyn.

“Not helping.”

“Hey? Torn in half, remember?”

“That’s just because you’re an ex,” said Devon.

She glared at him. “No, I’m not.”

“I’d rather be wrong about it than sorry,” St. George told Eliza.

She shook her head one last time. “If there’s a sub,” she said, “shouldn’t there be a crew?”

“Perhaps they are on the sub?” Hussein offered.

Devon frowned. “Would it still be running after all these years?”

Nuclear subs can run for decades if they’re maintained, said Zzzap, but the crew would still need food and air. I don’t think their filters would last that long.

“They could be dead,” said Hussein. “It is possible Nautilus merely found the vessel somewhere and stowed it beneath the island.”

“Ummmm…” said Madelyn, “what do people on submarines wear?”

They looked at her. “What?” asked St. George.

Is this a riddle? I’m not good with riddles.

“Do they wear a sort of blue jumpsuit thing?” She waved her hands up and down her body. “Y’know, kind of like a janitor?”

“Yeah,” said Devon. A few of them looked at him and he shrugged. “I had a cousin who was in the Navy.”

“There’s a bunch of exes dressed like that down in the place they dumped me,” Madelyn said. She pointed across the cruise ship toward the tanker. “Maybe thirty or forty of them.”

Devon tapped the side of his chest and let his fingers bounce on either side of his neck. “Did they have names here? And badges here?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I saw names on some of them, but a lot of the uniforms were torn up and bloody. Lots of gore around the mouths, you know? There could’ve been stuff there. I was more interested in getting out.”

Eliza’s face was grim.

St. George saw the expression grow. “What’s wrong?”

“When we first started the island,” she said, “we were cleaning out the ships, getting all the exes away from everyone. I thought…”

“What?”

“I thought the Hole was filling up kind of fast. Maleko told me not to worry about it. I was just stressed and counting wrong.”

“What’s the Hole?” asked St. George.

“If someone had the virus, if they turned, they went into the forward tank. The Hole. It was empty and made for a good holding pen.”

“Been there,” said Madelyn, flexing her arm. “Broke out of that.”

“So,” said St. George, “I’m guessing you thought the Hole was filling up fast right around the time Nautilus showed up with a bunch of new shotguns and pistols for you to defend yourselves with.”

The Lemurians glanced at each other. “It was maybe a month after we’d cleaned out the big ships,” said Devon. “We just figured they came from one of them.”

Seriously?

“Well they had to come from somewhere,” he said. “Why would we think they came from a submarine hidden under the—”

A scream echoed down from the cruise ship.

You hear that?

St. George and Eliza nodded.

Zzzap launched himself up into the air, looked around, and dropped back down to the small group. There are exes on the tanker. At least sixty or seventy right now, but it looks like a lot more of them are coming up from belowdecks.

Hussein muttered something angry in Arabic. “Someone’s opened the Hole,” he said.

Devon looked across the deck. “Jesus,” he said. He took off after his son without another word.

St. George looked up at Zzzap. “Do you think you can find the sub and stop it?”

The wraith shrugged. It’s going to be Predator-level invisible at night and in the ocean, even to me. And that’s not considering