Ex-Purgatory: A Novel by Clines Peter

Author:Clines, Peter [Clines, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780804136624
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-14T08:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

THE PLACE HAD been well looted. The shelves behind the bar were empty, and had been for years if the dust meant anything. What couldn’t be carted away had been smashed. Broken glass was everywhere. The padded cushions of the booth had been torn out.

St. George counted fifteen exes in the bar. The dead couple in the closest booth were trapped by the table, unable to rise and not smart enough to move to the side. One of the exes from the far booth had already fallen onto the floor. It crawled across the bar toward them.

Most of the film types were still there. Shaun was a desiccated husk. Its glasses hung loose off one ear. The half dozen or so exes around it banged their teeth together and shuffled around to face the heroes. Their arms reached for them. The ex with the blond hair raised hands that had three fingers between them. It looked like they’d been torn off in the same incident that had claimed the dead man’s chin and nose.

“You see them,” asked Karen. It was a confirmation more than a question.

No, not Karen, he corrected himself.

She was Stealth.

“Yeah,” he said. He pointed around the room. “Two there, another four, I think seven over there. The doorman by the entrance. I don’t see the server anywhere.” He glanced over his shoulder. “And the bartender.”

The bartender snapped its jaws behind them. Its cheek hung open on a flap of pale flesh and showed off a row of yellowed teeth. One of them stood out, bright white against the others. St. George figured it was an implant. The dead man’s fingers reached across the bar and brushed St. George’s arm.

Stealth rolled her shoulders inside her trench coat. She’d loosened the belt to give herself a better range of motion, but he could see it still pulled in the shoulders. Her fingers flexed in the thin leather gloves and batted away the bartender’s grasping fingers.

“I’ll take care of the big group,” he said. “Can you get the others?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any weapons?”

Stealth raised an eyebrow at him. “George,” she said, “have you ever known me to need a weapon?”

She turned and snapped out a punch like a snake striking. It caught the dead bartender on the bridge of the nose. There was a sharp crack as the bone pushed back into the skull and its face flattened out. The ex collapsed behind the bar.

He smiled. “Good to have you back.”

“And you.”

St. George stepped forward and caught the dead thing that had been Shaun by the neck. He lifted the ex off its feet and snapped its neck with a quick shift of his thumb and forefinger. The dead man’s jaws kept snapping at him even as its arms and legs sagged. He hurled the body back into the crowd and knocked down two of the others.

Not as strong as he should be, he noticed. That throw should’ve taken out the whole crowd. He wondered if it was some sort of residual block in his mind.

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