Slow Burn: Zero Day, Book 1

by Bobby Adair

  The infected on the floor moaned and screamed their frustration at not being able to get their hands on us.

  We made it under the bleachers and were halfway to the entrance to the tunnel system when I heard the gym’s door give way.

  “We need to hurry.”

  Stepping clumsily over the shin-high cross braces we arrived at the entrance. Dozens of the infected entered the gym, and their howls echoed through the cavernous space.

  The girl saw where we were going and hesitated.

  With no time for convincing, I simply said, “C’mon,” and jumped feet-first into the tunnel. I landed hard, eight feet below on the concrete floor and rolled forward into the pipe-covered wall.

  I looked up. The girl was doing some combination of climbing and falling down the ladder.

  Once she hit bottom, I held up a hand to bring her to a stop and a finger to my lips to beg her silence. Dead, noiseless air was our only friend at that moment.

  If there were infected in the tunnel already, the shadows kept the secret of their presence.

  I pointed the pistol in front of me and waved for the girl to follow.

  Chapter 21

  The girl and I jogged quietly up the tunnel. I thought about the eventual failure of the electrical grid. How long would that take? The thought made me nervous. I had no flashlight and no matches. A failure at that moment would leave us in fatal darkness. I made a mental note of another assumption from the previous week’s life that I needed to discard, the dependability of electricity.

  On one evening in the near future, nighttime would slither up over the horizon, and the planet Earth would again know real darkness and the terrors that lurked there.

  We followed the same route that Murphy, Jerome, and I had followed the night before. The tunnel sat parallel to the road that ran between the dorm and the Chemistry building. It stretched the length of the campus from north to south.

  Thankfully, I saw no movement in the distance in front of us, but that might not be the case once the infected that chased us into the gym discovered our escape route and followed us into the tunnel. The noise they’d make would alert anything in the tunnel to our presence. With only a few magazines for the pistol, I knew I couldn’t defend us for long if any infected swarmed toward us.

  We needed an exit.

  I made a right turn into the tunnel that led under the dorm that held Murphy and Jerome safely on the fifth floor. “Fucker,” I muttered.

  The girl stopped, startled.

  I shook my head to indicate that my utterance held no meaning.

  “Almost there,” I whispered, pointing up the tunnel. “We’ll be safe when we get through that door at the end.” Of course, I didn’t mention that that was based only on the hope that the building wasn’t full of the infected.

  I jogged down the tunnel with the girl close behind.

  I had no faith that Jerome had come down and unlocked the door in the dormitory’s basement; so little, in fact, that I didn’t slow my pace as we came upon the alcove that kept the door to our dorm hidden from view. I focused instead on the doorway that led into the next building over.

  As I stepped in front of the shadowy alcove, I caught a blur of movement to my left. Before I could do little more than raise a protective arm, I was slammed hard against the other wall, with the weight of three struggling humans pushing me to the floor.

  They were infected.

  For the second time in less than a week, a human jaw full of dirty teeth ripped into my left forearm.

  I struggled to pull my pistol out. Just as I got my hand on the handle, the infected biter threw his head back, grimaced in disgust, and spat my blood from his mouth.

  He pushed forward with his arm to get off of me. The girl was a tastier focus for his hunger. The other two infected gathered their feet beneath themselves.

  As their weight came off, my pistol came free. I pressed it against the back of the head of the infected on top of me and pulled the trigger. His face exploded onto the concrete floor of the tunnel in front of him.

  The other two infected looked back, stunned for a moment by the explosive report of the pistol.

  I raised the pistol and shot one in the face. He fell across my legs as the other stepped back toward the girl. I shot him twice in the back. He fell but didn’t die.

  The girl backed away from the writhing monster.

  I squirmed out from underneath the bodies upon me, stood, and fired a fourth bullet. It found home in the skull of the squirming infected. He went limp.

  The girl’s eyes were wide with shock. I probably had the same look on my face. We stood there for a second with overloaded brains and ringing ears.

  A riot of screams echoed up the tunnel from whence we came.

  “Oh, my God,” the girl mumbled.

  We bolted at full speed toward the far end of the tunnel.

  Please, God, let the door be unlocked.

  A dozen seconds later, I was at the door with my hand on the knob. The life of the girl, and possibly my life, depended on whether it would turn.

  I torqued the knob.

  The locking mechanism inside clicked free.

  I yanked hard on the door and the girl and I stepped into a dark, quiet basement.

  I wasted no time in slamming the door shut, but there was no deadbolt, no latch. The only way to lock it was with a key. There was no key in sight.

  I scanned the dim room for something with which to secure the door.

  “Damn it!” I said. “We need to keep going. They’ll figure out soon enough that we’re in here. When they do, we won’t be able to keep that door shut.”

  The girl and I looked around. The basement was large, the size of a few classrooms. At its center stood an enormous heating and cooling unit. The walls were stacked with dusty junk and shelves. At the far corner, a staircase led down from a door at the top. The girl was already running toward it.

  I gave one more glance to the door, hoping desperately to see a lock that I knew wouldn’t be there. Confirmation of the lock’s absence sent me running to the stairs.

  The girl reached the door at the top of the stairs before I made it to the first step. She grasped the handle with both hands and rattled it loudly in its frame. It was locked.

  “No!” she yelled.

  “Damn!” I looked around. A chance at living returned when I spotted an elevator door to my left. It had been hidden from our view by the heating unit in the center of the room. I ran over and pressed the button. It responded with a faithful amber light.

  I looked up at the girl with the last of my hopes on my face.

  She looked back, frozen with door handle in her hand, waiting for who knew what.

  I urged the elevator to hurry with my body language. The sound of the infected filled the hall outside the basement door through which we’d just come.

  Ding.

  The elevator was arriving.

  Relief.

  The girl bounded down the stairs as the door to the tunnel banged hard. The infected had arrived.

  The girl yelped something I didn’t catch.

  The light from the elevator seeped through the seam between the doors. It was one level up. I stepped around the heating unit to see the tunnel door. It was jiggling and coming a few inches open, before slamming shut again under the weight of the infected crowding the tunnel behind it.

  The doors of the elevator opened. The girl jumped in and pushed a button. I was immediately beside her. I pressed the button to close the doors just as the infected burst into the basement. Their frustrated screams echoed through the space as the doors pulled together.

  I inhaled a breath of relief, then raised my pistol and steeled myself for a danger I just knew would await me when the door opened again.

  The girl looked at my unsteady hand holding the raised pistol. She put her back to the wall of the elevator.

  The ogre and the harpy.

  The elevator dinged to announce its intention to stop on the
building’s ground floor. I looked down at the panel. The light for the top floor glowed.

  I drew a full clip from the pouch on my vest. I didn’t intend to die while fumbling for a cartridge full of bullets.

  I pointed the pistol at the seam between the elevator doors. “Push that close button as soon as the door opens. I won’t be able to keep the infected out for long.”

  “Okay.” Her voice cracked with fear, but she was steady enough.

  The elevator stopped. I drew a sharp breath and braced myself.

  The doors slid silently apart.

  The girl lunged for the button pressed it over and over.

  There were people in the hall—men dressed in khakis. They didn’t move. Their eyes showed their fright.

  They didn’t look infected.

  They held what looked like wooden training rifles by the barrels over their heads, ready to swing.

  Nobody moved. None of us knew what to do. We all had clearly expected something different when the doors opened.

  The elevator dinged again and the doors started to close.

  “Hey!” one of the guys said.

  I pulled the pistol back by my chest, stuffed the extra magazine into my pocket, then put my hand out to stop the elevator doors. “Hey,” I replied, flatly.

  “Hey,” another one said.

  “Say something else,” I commanded. “I need to know you’re not infected.”

  “We’re not infected,” the guy directly in front of me said. “You look like you are.”

  All the guys tensed. Their toy rifles inched menacingly higher.

  “Back off, fucktards! My gun is real.”

  “He’s fine,” the girl told them. “He saved me from…from them.”

  From the hall to the left of the elevator a hand reached around and grabbed my wrist.

  A big guy next to the talker lurched toward me, raising his wooden rifle to strike.

  I fired a deafening round into the wall beside the big guy. Everybody froze.

  “If you don’t get your hand off my wrist, I’m going to shoot your fucking arm off.”

  The hand released and disappeared around the corner.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked.

  The talker said, “You’re infected.”

  “I’m not,” I answered.

  “When were you bitten?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m immune.”

  “Nobody is immune,” the talker argued. “Your skin is pale. You’re bleeding from a bite. You’re just not done changing yet.”

  “There’s an epidemiologist from the CDC in the building next door. He can tell you whatever you need to know. But in the meantime, you need to believe that I’m immune because I have a gun to prove it.”

  “What does the gun prove?” the talker asked.

  “It proves I can shoot anybody else who lays a hand on me or tries to hit me with one of those dumbass toy rifles.”

  “So you’re the guy from the building next door who was out picking up the guns this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t the infected attack you?”

  I looked down at my bleeding arm. “I told you, I’m immune. They think I’m one of them, most of the time.”

  The girl chimed in, “Please, you guys. Can’t any of you see what’s going on outside? The infected are everywhere, killing everyone. Why are we at each other’s throats?”

  “We have to be sure,” the talker answered. “We have to keep the infected out of the building or we’re not going to get through this.”

  I said, “Well your basement is full of them. They chased us up the tunnel.”

  “The building is secure,” the talker said.

  “Thanks for forgetting the elevator,” I said.

  “That’s the only other way out of the basement.”

  I said, “If the building’s not secure, we’ll know soon enough. Listen, I don’t want to stand in this elevator all day. If you guys will back off, I’ll be happy to go and wait by a door until the infected calm down outside and I can leave.”

  The talker told his four companions to lower their wooden rifles. “My name is Mark. I’m second in command here.”

  “Second in command?”

  “We’re ROTC.”

  “Oh.”

  Mark said, “Maybe we can help each other out.”

  “Now you want to friends?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you come see our CO, and we’ll talk about it?”

  I was apprehensive. Moments before, they were raring to bash my head in with their wooden guns.

  Mark said, “You two can come out of the elevator. We won’t hurt you. The building is safe.”

  I looked at the girl. She seemed willing. I lowered the gun, but didn’t put it away. We stepped out of the elevator, but being surrounded by uniformed men—who just moments before were hostile—made me very nervous.

  Mark looked at the big guy beside him. “Tom, would you secure the elevator?”

  Tom stepped into the elevator.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “Us five and our CO. I’ll take you to meet him.”

  Chapter 22

  The CO was a retired military man with thinning hair, an expanding waistline, puffy cheeks, and a permanent scowl. We met him in a large storage room on the second floor that had long windows overlooking the plaza and the gym.

  Mark saluted the CO when we came into the room. The CO returned his salute. Mark said, “Major Wilkins, these two entered the building through the utility tunnels and came up through the elevator.”

  Wilkins asked, “Is the elevator secure now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The major turned his attention to me, “And you are?”

  “Zed Zane,” I didn’t extend my hand to shake since I still held the pistol.

  The major looked to the girl.

  “Felicity Bingham. I have friends in a dorm and…and we need help.”

  Felicity was on the emotional edge. I expected her to burst into tears at any moment, but gave her kudos for keeping it together during our escape.

  “We’ll get to that,” Wilkins said. He turned to me. “I saw what you did for Felicity out there, Mr. Zane. That was brave.”

  Not comfortable taking the compliment, I shrugged.

  Wilkins said, “You can holster your weapon. You’re safe in here.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks for letting us in, I guess, but I think I’ll just hold it for now.”

  “Why?” Wilkins asked, pointedly.

  I gestured to the windows. “You’ve seen the infected. There are a lot of them.”

  “They’re not in here.” Wilkins countered.

  “Not yet,” I argued.

  “You’re in no danger here,” Wilkins said.

  “Your guys nearly attacked me coming out of the elevator.”

  “When was the last time you looked in a mirror? You look like one of the infected.”

  I looked down at myself. My skin had grown paler since I last checked. My arm was bleeding from another bite wound. I had blood and brain splattered on my shirt from when I shot the infected guy in the tunnel.

  I looked back at Wilkins and shrugged. “I clean up nicely, though.”

  Wilkins ignored that. “Let’s get right to it then, are you infected?”

  Yes, was the visible truth of it, but I had no desire to back away from my more complex version of the truth. “I’m immune.”

  “Immune?” Wilkins said it slowly as though he’d just busted me stealing cookies from the jar on the counter.

  “Immune,” I confirmed.

  “When did you get bit?”

  “About ten minutes ago in the tunnel.”

  “The utility tunnel?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wilkins looked hard at my forearm. “What about the other bite?”

  “On Sunday.”

  “This past Sunday?”

  “Yep.”

&n
bsp; “You were bitten four days ago?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m assuming you’re not naturally an albino.”

  “Where are you going with this, Wilkins? You can see I’m not albino. I have color in my skin, just not the normal amount. You can see I have a normal hair color.”

  “But you got infected and you turned this way.”

  “What do you mean, turned?”

  “Turned into one of them.” Wilkins said.

  “I think I’m still me.”

  “You don’t seem crazed like the other infected,” Wilkins conceded.

  “I told you I’m immune.”

  “Maybe you just haven’t finished turning yet. There doesn’t seem to be any standard time for the infection to take over.”

  “Look, there’s a guy from the CDC who’s holed up with me in the building next door. He says I won’t turn. He says I’m a slow burn.”

  “A slow burn? What’s that?”

  “Something about body temperature or something. Look, I’m fine.” I looked down at my ashen skin. “I’m just a little different now.”

  “And the other infected, they won’t bother you.”

  “I went over this with Mark.”

  Wilkins stared me down.

  I held up my arm. “They don’t like my flavor but they’re not very bright. They make mistakes.”

  “So that’s why you were able to go out and strip the guns off of those dead soldiers?”

  “Hey, that wasn’t you guys who shot at me last night, was it?” Anger rose in my voice.

  Wilkins shook his head and patted his sidearm. “This is the only firearm we have. I’m not going to waste my ammo on a scavenger.”

  “Yeah, well fuck you too. You can call me a scavenger or whatever, but you see what it’s like out there. We needed guns and I risked my life to get them.”

  “I thought the infected didn’t like your flavor.”

  “Wilkins, if you’ve been looking out the window, then you see what happens every time I go out there. I damn near get killed.”

  Wilkins paused before altering course, “How many guns did you pick up altogether?”

  “I’m not sure.” I wasn’t ready to give that information away.

  Wilkins pushed on, “How many of you are over there?”

  “What are you getting at?”