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

arms. He tried to wake her up, pressed his fingers against her throat, and listened to her breathing. I was maybe five feet behind him when he glanced back. “Did you know about this?”

I nodded and smiled. “Do you want to lie down next to her?”

He set her back down on the blanket, placed a fold of it under her head, and returned my nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’d like that.”

His brow wrinkled, and I saw a spark of fear deep in his eye. He recognized what was happening. What he was doing. It’s always more fun when people realize what’s going on.

“Just stretch out and relax,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be a good way to spend the afternoon?”

St. George looked down at one of the open blankets, flipped the edge over to double it up, and sat down on it.

It’s a little risky, doing this. Getting them alone one by one and then dropping them. One quick response, one of them puts it together before I can speak, and this fun little experiment is over.

But it’s still better than the alternative. I’d heard stories about what happened to me out at Project Krypton. Well, to other-me, I guess. I pushed for details where I could, eavesdropped when I couldn’t. I heard about other-me getting dragged out from behind the curtain. Colonel Shelly dying. Professor Sorensen dying. Stealth planting a knife in other-me’s throat before I could escape to Groom Lake.

I couldn’t risk that happening here. First rule of building your new empire—get rid of the people who brought down your last one. The people who know how to beat you.

I’m still amazed I got Stealth. Granted, I took her out first so she wouldn’t have a chance of being suspicious. Well, any more suspicious. She’s so damned fast. But she never saw it coming and four minutes after walking into the stage to check out “safety concerns” she was unconscious on the floor.

Danielle was next. And Freedom’s still the same clueless idiot, deferring to anyone he considers above him. God bless the military mind-set.

St. George stretched out on his blanket and shifted a few times to get comfortable. He glanced over at Stealth, then up at me. “You’re right,” he said. “This is kind of nice.”

I plastered a smile on my face. “Why don’t you take a nap?” I suggested. “A good long one.”

He yawned and blinked twice.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to dream about a world where there aren’t any zombies?” I asked him. “No exes, no ex-virus, nothing ever happened. You could forget all of it. Just the plain old world where you’re a normal guy, doing whatever the hell you did before you became a superhero. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“God, yes,” he said, and yawned again.

One great thing about this new, overpowered skill set is the dreams. The old me, the other-me who’s out at Groom Lake or somewhere, could force someone to sleep, but eventually they’d wake up. I couldn’t control their subconscious. But with Christian’s powers in the mix, I can make people combine their dreams and build on each other’s memories. Two or three people together can make a great, rich world, each of them filling in the gaps for the others. A world they never need to wake up from.

St. George managed to turn his head toward Stealth before his eyelids got too heavy. Then he just rolled back to center. His breathing leveled out.

I whispered a few more suggestions. I wanted them out of the way, lost in the dreamworld. But any good jailer knows you want a wall around the prison, too, just in case people get out of their cells. Just in case they start to wake up. Nothing too elaborate, just a believable tweak on reality, enough to keep them busy for a few—

“What are you doing?”

I turned around and saw Sorensen’s brat halfway between me and the door. The Corpse Girl, she likes to call herself. I should’ve guessed she’d be here. She follows St. George around like a dog. I wonder if he’s doing her. Necrophilia’s really not my thing, but I can see the appeal of a body that’s almost-eighteen forever.

She marched across the room. In the dim light, her skin looked pure white. Even walking, she had a stillness to her that had taken me days to pin down. Sometimes she stops breathing. It’s one of those subtle things, a person’s chest moving up and down. You don’t realize you register it until you meet someone who doesn’t do it. She doesn’t blink sometimes, either. It’s kind of eerie, and I say this as someone who’s been mentally cloned into another body.

I’ve got to admit, it creeped me out when I became conscious enough to realize who the Corpse Girl was. Little Madelyn, the daughter Sorensen would not shut up about, even after I’d arranged to have her killed in front of him. It was like some bad horror movie. The dead come back to life, you turn around, and there’s the girl you killed in act two, back for zombie revenge.

Of course, she had no idea who I was. Then or now.

Granted, I didn’t know enough about her, either. She’s dead, but she’s not your standard ex-human. Twice I’ve given her simple commands, as a test. They last about a day with her and then she just seems to shrug them off. I’ve heard she’s got some sort of memory problem, which makes sense in a way.

It meant I was going to have to be harsh with her.

She was twenty feet closer when she saw the heroes stretched out on the floor. Her sneakers chuffed on the concrete floor as she stopped. There was just enough contrast to her iris that I could see her eyes flitting back and forth over all the figures. Mostly St. George, of course.

I gestured with my hand. “Could you come here?”

The Corpse Girl started moving again. She took a few more steps, then stopped again. She