by Bobby Adair
Being so close to the hanging wall, it was easy to tell that most of the unlucky hangers had been up there for more than just days. They were well-picked over by the scavengers. As for the three fresh bodies, the blood on the wall beneath them was still wet. Two were missing body parts. They’d bled out.
With no caution for keeping it quiet, I slammed the ladder against the wall next to the only person who looked like she could still be salvageable—a girl, twenty, maybe twenty-five. Pretty? Maybe. All I could tell for sure was she’d been beat to Hell.
“What if they’re on the roof?” Murphy asked loud enough for Dalhover and I to hear.
“Shit.” Dalhover took up a position beside the Humvee, using it for cover as he aimed his M16 at the top edge of the Walmart’s roof.
Murphy kept scanning the parking lot, the highway, and the gas station out by the road. Danger could come from anywhere.
I scrambled up the ladder, pulling off a glove as I reached the woman. I put two fingers to her throat to check for a pulse just as I heard her ragged breath. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered.
“She’s alive.” I climbed higher and maneuvered her body over my shoulder to take her weight. Luckily, she wasn’t heavy. She didn’t resist. The ladder creaked under our combined weight.
Dalhover called, “You got it, Zane?”
The ladder’s feet slipped in the sand on the sidewalk, caught in a crack and stopped. Adrenaline zapped my heart. “A little help?” I asked.
Dalhover bounced across the sidewalk with surprising speed for a man his age. He braced the ladder, and I took another step up, taking the woman’s full weight again, reaching up to cut the thin rope on her ankles. Free from the rope, her legs swung out from the wall, throwing me off balance and nearly tumbling me off the ladder.
“Be careful, goddammit.”
I sarcastically thanked Dalhover for the belated advice as I stabilized the woman on my shoulder and steadied myself.
“Do you hear that?” asked Murphy.
Besides Murphy’s alarm, all I heard was my own panting and the ladder creaking as I rushed down the last few rungs. Dalhover helped take our damsel’s weight as soon as we were in his reach. That’s when I heard Grace blaring her truck’s horn from the other side of the highway.
“We got company,” shouted Murphy.
3
The woman I’d hauled down from the Walmart torture wall was in no shape to endure further rough treatment, but I had to get her into the back of our Humvee before the situation escalated into whatever was about to come next.
Just up the highway, in front of the Chili’s and behind a cluster of cars that had been rusting on the road since the collapse, sat two black vehicles, idling, waiting. By my guess, one was a Bearcat, one of those armored police vehicles SWAT teams and riot police had used extensively during the initial phase of the virus violence. The other vehicle was a Humvee with an MK 19 grenade launcher mounted on the roof. I had no doubts about that one. We had several in Balmorhea, though we were sorely short of ammunition.
As if to prove me right, the Humvee shot three rapid rounds in our direction. One hit a knee-high sand dune, exploding a dust cloud into the air. The other two detonated on the asphalt just short of us, showering our Humvee in rocks.
Dalhover already had the Humvee moving by the time I slammed the front passenger door shut. Through the dissipating dust, we lumbered toward a little strip center at the far corner of the parking lot.
Murphy called down from above, “Were those warning shots, or are they trying to kill us?”
Coughing through the dirt and dust, Dalhover shouted, “Open up with that .50.”
Murphy’s machine gun thundered.
Dalhover maneuvered around an overturned tractor-trailer, putting it between us and our assailants for a moment.
I laid my shotgun on the floor and took up an M16, hanging the barrel out the passenger side window. After all our years in the desert, I still wasn’t any good with a rifle, but in a moving vehicle bouncing across a rough parking lot, it wouldn’t have mattered if I were.
As we neared the strip mall Dalhover had been hoping to use as cover, a grenade round blasted a sandwich shop sign, battering the Humvee with shards of plastic and twisted sheet metal. A piece tore into my shoulder. I cursed.
“You okay?” asked Dalhover, as he bounced the Humvee over a curb. “Can you shoot?”
I answered by firing at a second pair of black vehicles I’d spotted a quarter mile south. “We have two more over here.”
Dalhover cursed.
Murphy continued firing short bursts at the Humvee with the grenade launcher.
Our radio squawked to life with Grace’s anxious voice. “Headed east on Center Av—” static hid a few words, “—hostiles.”
“Center Avenue,” I told Dalhover. “That’s where we left Grace and Jazz.”
“Hold on tight,” Dalhover hollered.
I braced myself on the dashboard.
Our front wheels hit the slope of a railroad embankment. I bounced up, hitting my head on the roof, and the woman behind me flew forward and nailed the back of my seat. We hit the actual tracks and I lost all sense of up and down for a moment as loose equipment rattled inside the Humvee.
In an eye blink we were across. Dalhover was, shockingly, still in control.
Two more grenades exploded in the dirt far behind us.
Muzzles flashed from the vehicles south of us. I answered by expending a full magazine in their direction.
Dalhover plowed over a sagging chainlink fence. The Humvee stabilized on a layer of hardpan and Murphy ripped a long burst downrange. He let up when the Humvee passed between a rusting shipping container and a two-story metal building.
For half a second, it felt like we could let our guard down.
“Watch those flanks,” ordered Dalhover.
I pointed my rifle at the upcoming building corner on my right. We zipped past. Nothing lay hidden back there but scrubby desert weeds and rusting pickups.
Dalhover swerved past a pair of rotting dump trucks and then cut a hard right to run down another section of chainlink fence. That put us in a junkyard lined with rows of rusting cars stacked two and three high. We didn’t have any room to maneuver, but neither could our pursuers shoot at us.
I took a fast peek through the gaps between the hulks. “I think we’re running parallel to Center Avenue.”
“I know,” Dalhover groused. “I need to find a way through all this shit.”
I glanced back to check on our guest. She didn’t look much worse than when I pulled her off the Walmart. “You alright up there, Murphy?”
He had his gun trained on our six, ready to hammer any pursuers. “All cool up here, man.”
Dalhover cut another hard turn. We smashed through a rickety little fence and sped into a large square plot of undeveloped desert surrounded by rows of ugly pink houses and mobile homes.
“There,” I pointed at a dirt road on the far side. “I’ll bet that cuts over to Center.”
Slogging through the loose sand, Dalhover told me, “See if you can raise Grace on the radio.”
“We lost ‘em,” Murphy was shouting about the guys who’d been shooting at us. “We need to get the hell out of this shitty little town, ‘cause that’s not gonna last.”
“Thank you, Einstein.” I dug around the mess in the Humvee, looking for our Carlsbad map.
4
After tearing ass across the scrubby plains and fallow fields south of Carlsbad, it seemed like we’d lost the butt scratchers in the black vehicles—for real. Along the way, we also lost radio contact with Grace and Jazz. I felt okay about that, knowing the range on our equipment wasn’t great. I figured they’d already forded the Pecos by then and were racing through the oil patch east of town. If I was correct, they had no visible pursuit, so they’d make for rendezvous Elmer. “Elmer” was our codename for the predesignated rendezvous point east of whi
chever town we happened to be in. That was part of our planning process. Before we pushed into a city of any size, we set our rally areas at the four points of the compass using the code words “Norbert,” “Sluggo,” “Elmer,” and “Wendell.” Why the code words? We typically communicated using encrypted signals on old military radios—Dalhover had his habits and he imposed them on the rest of us. Anyway, it made life interesting, as if we needed any more drama.
Following a dirt road into a gulley, Dalhover drove the Humvee onto a low-water crossing running ankle-deep with the Pecos River’s greenish water. He stopped halfway across and flung his door open. “See what you can do for the girl.” He climbed onto the roof with a pair of binoculars in hand.
We were still dangerously close to Carlsbad, but I didn’t object. I hopped out and opened the woman’s door. Her bloodshot eyes rolled in my direction as I told her, “I’m here to help you.”
She feebly nodded. Her skin was as pale as mine and every bit as dirty, but terribly bruised and scraped. Her feet were blackish purple. They looked like they belonged on a corpse. Every breath she exhaled sounded like it wanted to be a wail, only she was too weak.
I put my open canteen to her lips and she drank, spilling most of the water down her chest. She didn’t even have the energy to hold the canteen while I dug a sleeping bag out of the back to cover her with.
“My hands feel like they’re on fire,” she murmured. “My head...” she finished with a groan.
“It’s the blood, resettling in your system.” Total guess on my part. From our first aid pack, I opened up a small jar of THC-laced honey, homemade in Balmorhea. It wouldn’t do the pain relief trick like an old-school opiate, but it worked better than ten-years-expired ibuprofen. I scooped a spoonful of the bud honey into our guest’s mouth and left the spoon. “Suck on it. It’s disgusting, but it’ll help.”
She gagged, but kept the spoon in her mouth. I gave her a moment to catch her breath, then helped her with some more water. “What’s your name?”
“Bonny,” she whispered, and lay her head back.
From his position behind the roof-mounted machine gun, Murphy knelt and silently asked how Bonny was doing. Her eyes were closed then, so I shook my head. Her discolored feet worried the hell out of me.
“Top says get her stable. Make her comfortable. It’s going to be a long ride home.”
Bonny spasmed as a sharp pain cramped her spine.
I laid a hand on her crusty scalp, hoping I wasn’t causing her more pain with my attempt at comfort. Releasing her breath, she relaxed. I took another spoonful of the THC honey and scraped it beneath her teeth. I looked up at Murphy. “Tell Dalhover, the sooner we can get her to the hospital, the better off she’ll be. I don’t know what else I can do for her.”
“Top’s looking for dust plumes back the way we came. Doesn’t make sense we got away so easy.”
“Maybe they just wanted to chase us off,” I suggested. “Maybe they haven’t figured out how to refine their own diesel and they’re running too short to come after us.”
“Maybe if frogs had wings...” Murphy didn’t finish the wisecrack. “You got a couple minutes to see if she can tell you anything, then we’re back on the road.”
“I need to rearrange our gear so she can lay down.”
“Hurry it up. You know what a grumpy bitch Top turns into if you’re not ready to roll when he is.”
5
We’d been running through the maze of roads in the oil patch east of Carlsbad for over an hour and hadn’t seen anything anywhere that didn’t look like it hadn’t died or rusted out a long time ago. Dalhover kept the speed down to minimize the size of our dust wake. Murphy rode in the passenger side front seat.
Not that I could do anything, but I took the spot behind Dalhover where I could tend to Bonny. I had her stretched out on the wide console between the rear seats. It wasn’t a comfy place for anyone to lie, being bare metal, but I’d folded our sleeping bags to make a thin cushion under her. I rolled a blanket for a pillow. Still, every time one of the Humvee’s tires dropped into a pothole, the jolt ran right up through her bones. At least the THC had started to take effect. She was conscious but dreamy, death-gripping my hand like I was Jesus come to save her.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Are you in pain?”
She tried to smile, but it looked like a grimace. “Henry? Mikey?”
Her two friends, I guessed. I shook my head.
Tears pooled in her eyes and rolled down the side of her face.
She was in pain, the emotional kind, and I was the last person in the world who could provide competent comfort for that. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Bonny sobbed. She pulled my hand over her chest and wrapped her other bruised hand over it.
“She alright?” Dalhover rasped.
Murphy glanced back, concerned.
I didn’t have the answers they were looking for, except that I figured she was going to die. I shrugged.
Guessing at my thoughts, Murphy scolded me with his eyes before telling her, “We’re taking you to a hospital. Just hang on. You thirsty or anything? Zed, give her some water.”
I had a bottle at the ready. “We can trade places if you want.”
“No rifle for you, Zed,” griped Dalhover. “You couldn’t hit your dick with a hammer made of rubber pussy.”
Murphy laughed at him. “You okay, Top? Dementia making your mouth say funny shit again?”
“I need a shooter up here to watch our flank,” Dalhover explained. “One who can hit what he aims at.” He slowed the Humvee to run through a dry creek bed.
Murphy scanned the horizon to our right. Nothing lurked out there but desiccated mesquite, yucca, and sandy dirt.
A silence settled over us as chalk-dust miles ground past. Even Bonny’s whimpers dissipated to nothing, leaving her to stare at the sky through the window. She didn’t let go of my hand, though. When she did speak, I had to ask her to repeat what she’d said.
She coughed, barely able to muster the breath for it. “I thought I was going to live forever.”
Live forever? I checked her forehead for a fever. Like everything in the Humvee, it felt gritty and hot. “You’re not going to die.” I couldn’t think of a better lie to comfort her delirium. “What happened back there?”
It took a handful of long moments before Bonny could process her memories into an answer that she babbled into an inaudible whisper.
I leaned in closer. “I’m sorry. I can barely hear you.”
“We happened on the message. We found the radio.” She meant the message we’d painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart. She was talking about the radio we’d stashed there. The two made up the gangway to Balmorhea’s informal immigration network, our preliminary vetting.
“We followed the instructions,” she said, growing sadder with each word. “We called for three days before we got an answer.”
Three days. I didn’t know what to say about that, either. We had someone back in Balmorhea assigned to monitor the shortwave channels 24/7. But sometimes signals were weak on the sending units—batteries ran low when too many clouds hid the sun, maybe too much dust coated the solar panel. Sometimes rats chewed through the wires or fire ants crapped out the connectors. Hell, even conditions in the atmosphere could hinder shortwave signal range or bounce them into an atmospheric layer that echoed them off to some other part of the world. “We came as quickly as we could.”
“Quicker would have been better,” she told me. “Richard found us first.”
“Who’s Richard?”
“Preacher Dick.” She tried to laugh. And failed. “Where…are you from?”
“Balmorhea.”
She looked at me blankly, like she didn’t understand what I’d said.
“A little nowhere town down in Texas. A hundred miles south.”
“Where they have the spring?”
“We have a colony there. Who’s this R
ichard guy?”
“Out of the ABQ.”
“What’s the ABQ?”
“Albuquerque.” Her eyes roamed past something only she could see—she’d lost hold of her lucidity again. Shortly after, she passed out.
Habit forced me to look outside, to the front, left, right, as I wondered about Albuquerque. The metro population had to be on par with Austin. Before, anyway. How could any normals survive in the remains of a city that size? Assuming Preacher Dick was a normal.
Bonny startled me by dragging a weak finger down the skin of my forearm. “You’re like me.”
“We’re both Slow Burns.”
She looked puzzled. She’d never heard our type called “Slow Burns” before. “They hate us.” She gasped and her voice grew weaker. “Go somewhere far away. If you stay here, they’ll kill you.”
6
Twenty miles east of Carlsbad, an hour before sundown, we spotted Jazz standing atop the pale green Suburban parked on a bump of a hill that marked rally point Elmer. Having reestablished radio contact twenty minutes before, we knew they’d made it. Jazz was up there with her binoculars, watching our distant dust plume materialize into a Humvee.
As Dalhover brought us to a stop, Grace walked up, nodding west towards Carlsbad. “What the hell was that back there?”
Dalhover flung his door open, hurrying for the sparse shrubs to relieve himself. “Talk to Zane.”
Already out of the Humvee myself, I reached to the sky to stretch and ease the kinks in my back. Jarring, cross-country treks had a way of wearing you down, even though you were mostly just sitting there.
Grace leaned in through my door to see what shape the girl was in. “She doesn’t look good at all.”
“She died a few miles back.” Saying it made me feel empty, because I didn’t feel any sadness for her. I didn’t even know if she had family—people. Hadn’t thought to ask, because sometimes the social graces just never come to mind like they should, even when maybe they’re the simplest, best thing to do.
