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

be part of a jawbone. The servos strained against it, and it limited his range of movement. He thought about folding the exoskeleton’s arm up and trying to crush it, but worried he’d blow out the motors altogether and leave himself with a crippled arm.

He could still swing it like a club for now.

The power levels worried him more than the arm. The fighting and his stunt with the dumpster had burned off a chunk of the batteries’ charge. He was down to seventeen percent—maybe twenty-five or thirty minutes under great conditions.

And these really weren’t great conditions.

There were still more exes in front of him than the battlesuit’s targeting systems could handle. Sixteen of them were on a direct path between him and the fence’s closest point. Another forty-two between him and the farthest point of collapse.

The exoskeleton pivoted at the waist so Cesar could look over his shoulder at the soldiers behind him. He’d lost Gibbs somewhere. The lieutenant had vanished, along with the gardeners who’d been working in one of the nearby plots.

“I’m gonna try to pull the fence up,” he called back. “Can you hold ’em for a few minutes?”

“Make it fast,” Kennedy yelled over the sound of teeth and bullets. Her head settled back to her rifle sights and she fired again. One of Cesar’s sixteen exes twitched and sprayed black blood out of the back of its skull. It collapsed.

Cesar stomped forward and brought his fists down to crush two skulls. He scooped up another ex, a woman with white-blond hair and jogging clothes, and hurled it out past the fence. The hand came back down as a fist and shattered a dead man’s neck and shoulders. The battlesuit’s other arm, the stiff one, hurled a zombie away, but it got more height than distance. It dropped hard out on the street and splattered across the pavement. The fist came down like a hammer even as the other hand grabbed an ex by the arm and flung it away.

The system cleaned a path to the fence, even if all the movement attracted more exes. Better him than the soldiers, though. Even as he thought it, a dead man with dark hair and a withered blade of a nose tried to grab the exoskeleton’s arm. The zombie cracked teeth on one of the pistons before Cesar swatted it away.

The fence sagged for about forty feet before righting itself at a distant post. At least a dozen exes stood on the fallen section as they staggered into the garden. He shoved an ex away and crouched to grab the end closest to him. The battlesuit’s steel fingers slid through the chain-link.

Just like Danielle had said, a stiff cable threaded through the top of the chain-link. The frayed end had a sharp loop in it, like it had been curved so long or so tight the curve had just become part of the cable. Just inside the curve hung three little things like padlocks held together with hex nuts. The little locks hung loose, but the cable was crimped on the side of the loop across from them where they’d bound the wire rope tight against itself.

He tugged on the fence, and a double handful of zombies wobbled as it shifted beneath their feet. Another pull gave him a sense of the weight and made a dead woman topple over. He straightened the battlesuit’s legs and hauled the fence back up into position. Exes tumbled on both sides. One bent over backward, and its spine made a sound like a branch breaking. He stepped back, pulled the chain-link back to the post, and it stretched tight and solid.

The barrier was back up.

“Okay,” he called back to the soldiers. “I got it!”

As soon as he spoke, he realized he was trapped.

The moment he let go of the chain-link, the fence would drop again. He could see at least twice as many exes in the street outside, with more shambling closer. There was no way the suit’s oversized fingers could work the hex nuts on the little clips, and he wasn’t sure how they went on, anyway. There wasn’t enough of the cable to tie it around the post.

There were still more exes inside the fence line than the targeters could count. Maybe eighty or ninety. Some of them were still trying to gnaw on the exoskeleton, but most of them were closing in on the small group of soldiers. Rifles were dropping them, but not fast enough.

And they were running out of ammo.

Javi stumbled through the dark garden. He’d headed for the main building and figured he could lock himself in the pantry or the bathroom or the toolshed or something. Somewhere safe.

He hadn’t expected the cable to slip so fast.

When he’d seen Cerberus and the soldiers and the robo-foot guy all arguing, Javi knew what way things were going. He saw the writing on the wall and knew it was time to add a few tags of his own. He’d already snuck a wrench out to the fence once or twice over the past few days and just given the connectors a little quarter-turn. Enough so he could loosen them fast when he needed to. It was supposed to be a fail-safe protection thing. A weapon of last resort. When the guards all made their move, tried to kill all the Seventeens, he’d be able to take them all with him. Or die knowing they were going to get theirs as soon as the cable went.

But then he got down to the parking lot and there were so many damned exes there. Hundreds of them, all pressing up against the fence and banging their teeth. He couldn’t even get near the nuts he’d been loosening, not without putting his hand right in some zombie’s mouth.

Made sense. All the new people in Eden had attracted the exes. That’s what happened—they saw people and tried to eat them. Probably what all the soldiers and guards had planned all