Slow Burn (Book 9): Sanctum

by Bobby Adair

  I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to stare at the darkness, distraction-free, but I answered anyway. “First day in Austin, near as I can tell.”

  “If the world wasn’t so screwed up, you’d be something of a celebrity.”

  But here I was talking, responding to this stupid talk of celebrity for doing nothing at all. “Maybe on Facebook, but who gives a shit, right?”

  Martin scooted around to arrange himself in a more comfortable position. “How’d you come to get it?”

  “Missionaries from my parents’ church brought the virus to Austin from Africa near as I can guess. Parents caught it. I got it from them.”

  “So you were ground zero in Texas,” said Martin. “You must have been through a lot.”

  I looked down at Martin, trying to gauge him. Things about him hadn’t added up to trust yet. Far from it. Still, I was having a hard time hating him. “We’ve all been through a lot, but you look like you’ve done all right for yourself.”

  Martin looked down at his big belly. “They take care of me because I’m a pilot.

  He wasn’t grossly obese, just surprisingly so. Nobody was fat anymore. He looked like somebody’s grandpa—round belly, a bald head two sizes too big, white beard hiding a stubby neck.

  “You’re pretty old to be a pilot.”

  “I told you, I’m retired. I lived here in Killeen.”

  I focused my attention back out the window. How long had Murphy been gone? Where was he?

  “When things got really bad,” said Martin, “they set up a refugee center here at Fort Hood. That’s how I came to be on the base.”

  “And the Survivor Army?” I asked. “How’d you come to work for them?”

  “It’s not as clear-cut as you seem to think.”

  I looked at the darkness, missing my night vision goggles.

  “When the refugee center collapsed, I found a place to hide.” Marty nodded in the direction of the hangars. “That’s when I found the storage room that Murphy is going to check out. I stayed there for awhile, maybe a month.”

  “And the virus?” I asked. “Your skin is white like mine.”

  “While I was hiding out in the storeroom I contracted it.”

  “And you recovered.”

  Martin raised his bound wrists to display his white hands. “So it seems.”

  “And you were alone? No wife? No kids?”

  “Never had any kids. The wife couldn’t.” Martin’s face looked a little sad. “Breast cancer got her seven years ago.”

  “So you hid by yourself?” It was an accusation, and I let my tone tell the meaning clearly.

  “When the infected overran Fort Hood the first time, things were chaotic. Everybody was trying to get away to save themselves. Nobody had time to organize. You don’t know what it was like.”

  I did know how it was like but I said nothing more about it. I started to feel like I was a bit of an ass. What if this chubby old man was telling the truth?

  “Eventually, the Survivor Army showed up,” said Martin. “They caught me when I was out scrounging food. They probably would have killed me, you know, just like you and Murphy were going to, but I told them I could fly the Black Hawks.”

  “And it worked,” I accused again, “so you tried it on us.”

  “Yes,” Martin admitted, “it did work. But I really can fly them. That’s what the Survivor Army had me doing.” Martin thumped his belly with his bound wrists. “That’s why they took care of me. Not too many people left who can fly a Black Hawk.”

  “How often did you fly?” I figured I’d let Martin elaborate and then look for holes in his story. Nobody lies as well as they think they can.

  “Every day.”

  “To Austin? San Marcos?”

  Martin nodded. “All over the place.”

  “So you know a lot about how things are out there.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I mean you flew to all the Survivor Army bases and stuff, right?”

  Martin shook his head. “There’s just the one base, here.”

  “What about Austin?”

  “We were trying to set up in Austin,” said Martin, “down at the Capitol mostly. The judge wanted to be the governor. I never understood how he figured he wanted that or what good it would do him. Didn’t matter though. It didn’t work out.”

  “Why?” I knew why. At least, I knew Murphy and me had a big part in why it didn’t work out.

  “Things seemed fine at first,” said Martin. “We chased a bunch of people off the Capitol grounds.” Martin shook his head and his lips curled down as though he had something bitter on his tongue. “A lot of what the judge had these idiots do was just wrong. Those people at the Capitol were like me mostly—infected, got better. White skin. But lots were different.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Martin looked me up and down. “They had white skin like you and your buddy, like me, like I said. But lots of them weren’t right in the head. Not very bright. Not stupid and mean like these Survivor Army boys, just really stupid. Least it seemed that way when we finally went down there and did what we did. Most of them just stood there like they didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, having already heard the story from Grace. I figured I’d catch Martin in a lie.

  “The judge had me do some recon flights early on. I saw them farming on the Capitol grounds. They built a wall around the place. Looked to me like they were set up pretty good. You know, rebuilding. I figured we were checking them out to make sure they weren’t hostile before we contacted them to start trading with them or whatever. But the judge, he isn’t like that. He already had his plans for them. He gave a big speech to everybody one day, like these people at the Capitol were stealing our birthright or some such shit. Got the idiots all riled up.”

  “The idiots?” I asked for clarification.”

  “The Survivor Army guys,” said Martin as though there was no doubt about who he meant. “Mostly idiots. The virus left their brains half-rotten. Long story short, we went down to Austin and slaughtered them folks at the Capitol.”

  “You just attacked for no reason?” It came out like an accusation, though I tried hard not to make it sound that way. Some things are just too reprehensible to cover with a lie.

  “I’m not proud,” said Martin. “You don’t know how it is here. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Everybody has a choice.”

  Martin laughed darkly. “Look at you, young and strong. I’ll bet you can run pretty fast, too. But you’re arrogant like everybody your age.”

  I huffed and looked out the window. Fuck you.

  “Thing you don’t realize,” Martin continued, “one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll be an old man too. Your knees will go gimpy. You might be fat like me if things ever get back to normal. You won’t get around so good. Sure, I had a choice, I could have told those Survivor Army idiots I wasn’t going to fly, but they’d have put a gun in my hand and made me a soldier. First time I had to shoot it out with the infected I’d be dead. Hell, before all this happened I was lucky to be able to walk all the way ‘round the block with the dog. If I’d ever had to run for my life in all this mess I’d a got caught if I didn’t have a heart attack and die on the spot.”

  I took another look at old man Martin, tied up on the floor. That part was probably true. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything to save himself.

  “The only reason I’m alive now,” he went on answering the question I was getting ready to ask, “is because I was smart to find me a good place to hide and sneaky enough to stash away what I could so that I wouldn’t starve. Being old and slow you learn to survive with what you’ve still got.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “Still, you didn’t have to attack those people and slaughter them.”

  “You are an arrogant little bastard,” spat Martin. “You don’t hear anything I’m saying, do you? Just because I couldn’t resist outright d
oesn’t mean I didn’t resist.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “When we were attacking the Capitol, I made sure to keep my helicopter far enough away as to be out of range for any of the guys shooting out of it. I even kept the gunners at lousy angles so they couldn’t fire directly at the Capitol grounds. Hell, I’d do anything to keep the idiots in back from hitting anybody.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There was this one time,” said Martin, “I was on a ferry run—”

  “A ferry run?”

  “After we took the Capitol, we used to ferry men and supplies back and forth from here every day. The judge planned to make the Capitol his base, but he didn’t want to leave all of our equipment and ammo up here. So we moved it a little at a time.”

  I nodded an acknowledgment. I’d seen those helicopters going back and forth when Murphy and me were holed up in the lake house way up on Lake Travis. That was the whole reason we ran into those knuckleheads.

  “We were coming south one day, and we see this boat on the lake with a wake.” Martin looked at me for understanding. “A wake, you see. It wasn’t drifting, it was motoring down the lake.”

  That piqued my interest. “What kind of boat?”

  “It’s not important. A pontoon boat or something. Not that big.”

  I gave Martin my full attention. So far the situation sounded exactly like the one Murphy and me got caught up in. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I brought the helicopter down for a look-see. We always did that when we saw survivors. That’s how we recruited people. What we saw surprised everybody onboard. It wasn’t regular people who were driving the boat. It was the same kind of white-skinned infected we’d seen down at the Capitol. I knew right away they were normal just like me—I mean they had to be, they were driving the boat down the lake. They’d just docked and tied off.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “A couple of them, I think.” Martin straightened himself up. “What you’ve got to understand is, as soon as the boys in the back realized it was the White infecteds, they opened fire. As soon as I realized what was happening, I started jerking the helicopter around and complaining about turbulence from the water. I tried to keep them from hitting anything. I did that kind of stuff all the time. The idiots in the back never figured anything out. And I don’t think any idiot in my helicopter ever managed to shoot anybody.”

  “So you didn’t kill them?”

  Martin shrugged. “One of them jumped in the water. One of them ran into the trees. The guys in back all claimed they killed three or four, but I never saw any bodies. Hell, I never saw more than two down there. I figured they was lying.”

  I decided that no matter what else was true, Martin was probably a helicopter pilot. “That was me and Murphy on the boat that day.”

  “You’re lyin’.” Martin looked at me, trying to figure out what my new game was.

  “Not lying.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to add it, but I said, “I don’t know if I owe you a thanks or not but you did sink our boat.”

  “Plenty of boats on the lake for free. At least, I kept them boys in the back from shooting you. Like I said, I jerked the helicopter around a bit. It’s a wonder none of them fell out.”

  I looked out the window and scanned the dark ground for Murphy.

  “Do you see him coming back yet?” Martin asked.

  Nothing was moving out there. “You getting nervous?”

  Martin started to say something but coughed and cleared his throat. “You know there are a lot of reasons he might get delayed.”

  “Or killed?” I hefted my machete and looked down at Martin like a slab of butcher’s meat. Could I kill a fat old man? If Murphy turned up dead, I figured I could.

  Chapter 6

  When the sun started to show itself on the horizon the next morning with no Murphy, I found myself in a spot. Had Martin's compatriots ambushed and killed Murphy or had Murphy been killed by Whites? Was he injured? Was he somewhere on the base, waiting for me to find and help him?

  The answers to those questions would go a long way to determining what I did with Martin. And as much as I wanted to blame him, to murder him to assuage my festering worry, my rational side told me over and over again that Martin might not be guilty. The practical side told me not to take the chance. The most likely reason Murphy wasn't back was that Martin had lied, and his buddies were out in the hall waiting to ambush me when I left to find Murphy.

  Nodding at the conversation in my head, as I stared across one hundred yards of dead grass and damaged vehicles between our building and the nearest hangar, I put together a plan. I spun around and opened the drawers on the nearest desk.

  “What are you doing?” Martin asked, worry in his tired voice. Like me, he hadn’t slept a wink.

  The top drawer held nothing of interest. The drawers down the side held papers and office supplies but none of what I was looking for.

  “Would you answer me, please?” Martin’s voice was tinged with desperation. He knew the worry I was facing. He knew my suspicions. He was able to make deductions. “Did you see your buddy out there?”

  “Murphy,” I spat. “His name is Murphy. I’m Zed.” I marched across the floor and pushed the blade of my machete against Martin’s throat. “Just so you know, if I find out you’ve lied about anything, if you’ve gotten Murphy killed, I’m going to gut you. I’m going to make you suffer before you die.

  Martin slowly shook his head as his mouth opened and closed on words that wouldn’t form.

  I spun around and searched another desk, finding in the second drawer exactly what I was looking for, a roll of packing tape. Going back to Martin, I knelt down beside him and put my machete on the floor.

  Martin immediately struggled to push me away and get his feet beneath him. I elbowed him hard across his temple, and Martin's eyes rolled back in his head. With him dazed, I pushed him on his belly and put a knee between his shoulder blades. I took my roll of tape and sealed a strip over his mouth before unwinding the roll and wrapping it around his head several times.

  Martin had come back to his senses by the time I finished, and was turning his head to try and see me.

  I was feeling like an asshole because I’d let my concern over Murphy turn into anger, which turned into an elbow in Martin’s head when I could have just pushed him over and sat on him. I got off his back and told him, “Sit up.”

  Martin struggled to get back into a sitting position.

  I picked up my machete and leaned in close. "I've got some things to do. While I'm doing them, you're going to sit here, still and quiet. If I hear one sound out of you, I'll assume you're a liar, and we're not on the same side. You know what happens then, right?"

  Martin’s eyes were on my machete as he nodded.

  "Good.” I crossed the room to an interior wall. A neighboring office had to be on the other side. I ran my fingers across the texture and paint and rapped gently on it with my knuckles. Just as I suspected, sheetrock, not cinderblock.

  I put myself in position in front of the wall with one hand on my machete's handle and the other on the dull side of the blade near the tip and started to dig, pushing and wiggling the tip of the blade back and forth. I was going to get through the wall, I had no doubt about that. I didn't mind getting through slowly because my most important need at the moment was to do it quietly.

  Still, it went quickly. Sheetrock simply isn't that durable. In a few minutes, I'd made a hole large enough to allow me to squeeze between the two-by-fours. Unfortunately, the room I found myself in was not large, the door leading to the hallway had no window, and it opened into the hall at a place in the wall that had to be less than five feet from the door to the office where Martin sat imprisoned.

  I guessed that the ambushers waiting for me had to be farther down the hall. If I was going to get behind them, I needed to go through a few more walls, but that would put me farther and farther from Martin.

  I stuck my head
back into Martin’s office and made sure he saw me watching him before I pulled back through. I went to work on the far wall with my machete.

  Chapter 7

  After cutting through sheetrock to get into the fourth office since leaving Martin, I figured I'd gone far enough. The flaw in my plan that hadn't occurred to me until I was standing behind that office's door was that if I were an ambusher waiting for someone to come out of a door down the hall, I wouldn't be standing in the hall, I'd be partially concealed in a doorway for cover, which meant I should have run into one or two of them when I came through the wall.

  That got me worried. Would I have to work my way all the way down to the other end of the building? And if I did, why wouldn't the knucklehead taking cover in the office doorway not just shoot me when I started to break through the wall?

  Then again, the guys I was dealing with were Survivor Army types, not bright. Maybe they were all outside, lined up across the hall. Hell, maybe they’d all grown bored while waiting for their ambush to develop and they’d fallen asleep.

  Or the most likely scenario? It was all in my mind. I was getting worked up because I was stuck babysitting Martin when I should have been out killing White shitheads and searching for Murphy.

  I crossed the office to the door. I quietly turned the knob and shoved the door open just enough to get a peek into the hall.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Sure, there were papers on the floor, a few rolling chairs, some shattered computers, and the remnants of a desk, but nothing that looked out of the ordinary considering the end of the world and all.

  I was disappointed and a little bit angry. The absence of ambushers meant my guess was wrong. Or at least, it was wrong for the moment. I was still stuck with not knowing whether Martin was a good guy or a bad guy. I wasn't any closer to knowing Murphy's fate. I'd wasted too much time digging through flimsy walls while Murphy was still out there, perhaps waiting for me to come to his aid.

  Dammit.

  I pushed the door open, wanting to slam it against the outside wall to vent some frustration, but the damper attached at the top edge slowed the door and left it hanging open and creeping back to closed.