Ex-Purgatory: A Novel (13 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “Something like that.” Her eyes dropped to the Kleenex in his hand.

He looked down. The tissues were spotted with thick blobs of red.

GEORGE WIPED HIS
fingers under his nose. They came back streaked with blood. Across the room, Kathy’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, jeez,” he said. He grabbed a few more tissues from the box.

Madelyn leaned forward in her wheelchair. “I think your nose is bleeding because you’re fighting him,” she said. “John—Captain Freedom—said he does things like this to people.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“So he remembers, too?”

She made a point of not looking at George. “Well … he told me before all this changed. Back in our world.” She tapped the image of the President and the First Lady. “It’s what Smith does,” she said. “He makes people believe things. It’s how he killed my mom and me.”

“Your mom’s dead?” asked Kathy.

“She isn’t dead and neither are you,” George said. “I saw her on moving day.”

“We’re supposed to be,” said Madelyn, “in our world. But he sent us here somehow and he made you forget you have superpowers. He tried to make all of us forget.”

He dabbed fresh tissues against his nostrils. “I don’t have superpowers. I think I might have a brain tumor or something.”

“You’re just remembering. Don’t you get it, George?” She waved her hands up and down, taking in all of him. “You’re so much more than this. Everyone looks up to you. Everyone trusts you.”

“Because I’m a superhero,” he said. He looked over at the list on her wall. “Because I’m ‘The Mighty Dragon.’ ”

She shook her head. “Because you’re St. George.”

The name echoed in his ears. It was the name from his dreams. The name he’d never quite been able to remember.

“If you don’t believe me,” said Madelyn, “believe her.”

She clicked her mouse and another window rose up on her screen. A photo of the supermodel, Karen Quilt, in the black dress. It was the same article George had been looking at that morning. The one about her being in Los Angeles.

Morning seemed like a long time ago.

“After my dad,” said Madelyn, “she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She’ll know what’s going on. She’ll get it.”

George stared at the picture. The woman looked so damned familiar. More than that. She just looked … right. He looked at her and felt content.

Then the pain in his head faded away, and the contentment faded with it. He was just a guy trying to buy into some fantasy of a better life. More to the point, he was a guy ogling online supermodels in a teenage girl’s dorm room.

“Look,” said George, “I know you want to believe this stuff. I’d like to believe it, too. But there aren’t superheroes or supervillains. There aren’t monsters. And women like that,” he said, pointing at the computer screen, “do not end up with janitors. Things just don’t work like that in the real world.”

“I keep telling you,” Madelyn said, “this isn’t the real world. Not our world, anyway.”

He thought about saying something, but closed his mouth. He walked the few steps to the door and opened it. “I wish I could believe you,” he said. “I really do. But I need something more than just you saying it’s true.”

“Then, please,” said Madelyn, “go talk to her. She’s here in LA this week. Find her and talk to her.”

He took a last look at her. The screen reflected on her eyes and made them look white. She stared at him like a hopeful puppy.

“We’ll see,” he said.

Her face dropped. “When my dad says that, it means no,” she said.

George smiled. He stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Just before the door latched he heard Kathy call out, “It was nice meeting you.”

George walked across campus, sure he was dragging a balloon that marked him as an idiot. His sleepless nights were getting to him. Madelyn’s stories were getting to him. He’d put his job at risk going up to her room. He’d done it because of a phone call that was probably a practical joke, plus a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.

The girl was just plain nuts. She had to be. Superheroes. Epidemics. Monsters. Presidential conspiracies. Just thinking about it made his head spin like a drunken blitz.

And yet …

Underneath it all, what she was saying made sense. He’d just been talking with Nick about how he always felt like he’d forgotten something. About the dream-shaped holes in his memory.

But superheroes?

He shook his head as he marched over to staff parking. A man in a sweater vest fumbled with a briefcase next to a car. George pegged him as either an older grad student or a younger professor. It was just a sense that developed over time. The vest had a set of large diamond shapes on it, like oversized argyle socks.

George couldn’t see his car. He took a moment and tried to slow down his whirling thoughts. It wasn’t good to drive so worked up and distracted, anyways. A few deep breaths and he spotted his rear bumper poking out a dozen spaces over.

Two young brunettes were heading across the parking lot
toward him. They were dressed in loose, tie-dyed shirts and pants. More freshman freedom. A brawny, crew-cut guy in a football jersey was heading to intercept them.

As the distance shrunk between them, George realized the two women weren’t that young. Their thin frames had made them seem close to their teen years, but as they got closer he could see their angular faces. Then he noticed the irregular pattern to their tie-dye. It wasn’t bands or radiant patterns. It was splatters and sprays, all in browns or reds.

He took a breath. The guy in the jersey was headed his way, too. And there was a shuffling sound behind him. The guy in the sweater vest.

In the corner of his eye, off in the distance, he could see dozens of figures scattered across campus and down toward Westwood. They moved in slow motion. Each one tilted and staggered as it walked.

George stood still and tried to stay calm. The hallucination would vanish in a few moments, just like the others.

The women were close enough for him to see their wounds. The one with almost-black hair had a gash that opened its mouth back along its cheek, showing off all the teeth on one side. The other one, the one with golden-brown hair, wasn’t wearing much of a shirt. Rags of clothing hung from its neck and shoulders, and its torso was a shredded mess of gore and pale flesh. It had been hit by a shotgun blast. Maybe two or three. Or a grenade.

They were twenty feet away now.

Behind him, the scraping sound was very close. George wasn’t going to indulge the waking dream by looking, but he guessed the vest guy was ten feet away at the most.

Jersey guy lurched toward him. A dozen yards left between them, tops. The walking corpse didn’t have a crew cut. Its hair and scalp had been torn away from its skull. The ragged tufts of gristle and blood had dried into little points across the bone.

George closed his eyes. When he opened them, there would just be normal students around him. Maybe a faculty member behind him. Nothing else.

With his eyes closed, he was more aware of the smells of dust and mildew. They were so thick he could feel the scents in his nose. And the wafting odor of meat was getting stronger. Closer.

He could hear their teeth clicking together.
Click-clack-click-clack-click
. It was the sound of a speed typist with a wooden typewriter.

Something leathery wrapped around his wrist. A wave of nausea boiled up in his throat. His eyes flicked open.

The women were just a few feet away. Jersey guy was a yard behind them. Another dead man, this one in a long coat, stumbled out from behind a car on the far side of the lot. George looked over his shoulder and found himself face-to-face with the sweater-vest man. His skin was the color of cobwebs. One of his eyes was gone. The other looked like frozen milk.

His teeth snapped at George’s nose and missed by an inch.

George yanked his arm away from the grasping hand and stumbled back into the women’s embrace. They wrapped their arms around him from behind. Their hands pawed at his chest. One nibbled on his ear, then sank its teeth in and tried to rip the ear off. The other chewed on his shoulder. He could feel it gnawing through the fabric of his shirt.

The sweater-vest monster staggered forward with its arms wide. George brought up his foot and lashed out. His work boot slammed into the center diamond of the vest and the dead man flew back. It hit a car ten feet back, spun over the hood, and smashed into the windshield of the next car over with an explosion of glass and dust.

He turned and the two dead women spun with him like they weighed nothing. Something pitter-pattered on the ground. The dead woman chewing on his ear was losing her teeth.

Jersey guy loomed in front of him. George drove his fist into the dead man’s gut. The force of it folded the corpse over. It landed a few yards away in a heap that showed off its gory scalp, but its limbs had barely settled when it struggled back to its feet.

He reached across his chest and grabbed a handful of golden-brown hair. It was dry and brittle in his fingers. He yanked and
the dead woman flipped over his shoulder like a bag of leaves. The body hit the ground near jersey guy.

George took a deep breath. Acid burned in the back of his throat. He felt a deep need to throw up but bit it back and swallowed hard. He couldn’t risk being helpless while he got sick.

He rolled his shoulders and knocked the ear-biter away. The dark-haired monster staggered for a moment before it fell against a car and found its balance. Its jaws hinged up and down. The slash in its cheek flapped open and shut. The dead woman staggered forward and he threw a punch. The jaw crumbled like old plaster. The bottom half of its face sagged. Teeth scattered on the pavement.

It didn’t seem to notice. The left side of its face twitched as dead muscles tugged at the shards that had been its jawbone. The motion shook another tooth free from the ragged hole of its mouth.

George pulled his arm back and punched again. He didn’t hold back. The dead woman’s head shattered like a piñata. A double handful of wet tissue splattered across the hood of a parked car. The body tumbled to the pavement.

Jersey guy’s arms wrapped around George. They were thick and meaty, the arms of an athlete. Even in death, they were pretty strong.

George threw himself against the dead man. They hurled back, and jersey guy’s teeth scratched between George’s shoulder blades. He had a moment of intense déjà vu and realized he was living his dream—tumbling through the air and fighting monsters.

They crashed into something solid. An SUV. Jersey guy took most of the impact. George heard glass crackle and metal squeal. The arms holding him twitched and sagged.

He stepped away from the big truck and looked at the monster. The impact had caved in its rib cage. It slid down the side of the SUV and tried to raise its arms. Without anything to push off of, its shoulder blades flopped under the football jersey.

George reached down and grabbed it by the jaw and the back
of the skull. It tried to bite his fingers, but it didn’t seem to have any strength. Like a puppy trying to be savage, it couldn’t even break the skin.

He twisted the thing’s skull, just like assassins and other bad-asses did in the movies. There was a double-snap, like popping bubble wrap, and the body went limp. Its jaw kept gnawing at his fingers. He let go and the monster slumped next to the SUV.

He turned around. They’d staggered back much farther than he thought. His kick had propelled him and the monster over fifteen feet.

The corpse in the long coat had crossed the parking lot. It reached for him and he grabbed its wrists. He twisted around and sent it sailing into the trunk of a primer-colored muscle car. It hit the trunk skull-first and collapsed.

The dead woman with the golden-brown hair flailed on the pavement. On a guess, he’d broken its back when he flipped it over his shoulder. He reached down and twisted the woman’s head around. It felt right, somehow. Merciful. They were already dead, but this way they were more at rest. They weren’t walking.

George looked at the parking lot and the bodies and the dust-covered cars with smashed windows and the distant figures shambling across campus.

He waited for the hallucination to end.

His nose was bleeding again.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
George blinked and the world changed. The bodies vanished. The cars were clean and whole. The people in the distance picked up their pace and moved with smooth, even gaits.

He stood in the parking lot a few yards from his car. According to his phone, ten minutes had passed since he walked out of Madelyn’s dorm room, not the thirty-odd ones he remembered. There was no sign of the grad student with the argyle sweater vest.

There was blood on his knuckles. It was thick and grimy, more of a sludge than a liquid. His fingertips had oily grime on them. Residue from the dead woman’s crushed skull. It was under his nails. It smelled a bit like rust without the sharp tang.

He walked to the closest dorm and found a bathroom. There was no soap because it wasn’t intended to be public. He considered finding one of the supply closets and grabbing some soap and paper towels, but he didn’t want to wait to clean himself.