by Bobby Adair
It was Steph’s turn to sigh. She understood. She agreed, but she still didn’t like it.
“We’ll take it slow, one step at a time,” said Dalhover. “We’ll start with the injured girl.”
“I’ll get her over to the hospital.” Steph headed for the ladder and paused to look at me.
“I’ll gather a detail and put some security around the other two,” I said.
“And the woman?” asked Dalhover.
“I’ll ask for volunteers to come with us,” surrendered Steph.
“Don’t take them off the wall,” Dalhover instructed.
She headed down the ladder.
I asked Dalhover, “You staying out here, or do you want to talk to these guys when they come in?”
“Out here.” Dalhover scanned the night. He didn’t like anything about the situation. “You deal with those two. And Zane, be careful. I don’t want to have to dig a hole for you tomorrow.”
I laughed. “I’m unkillable.”
“Just like all the other dumbass corpses.”
16
Unless the girl was going to spontaneously combust, she wasn’t a danger to anyone. She’d been roughed up and stabbed. At least once. She could barely keep herself upright. In one of the electric golf carts we used for getting around, Steph rushed her to the hospital on the other side of town, literally eight blocks away. My layman’s prognosis for her was good—if she had a strong immune system. So far into the collapse, the rare antibiotics we scavenged were long-expired, putting any infected wound on the list of potential killers.
Neither of the men seemed to have a strong emotional attachment to the woman. That’s to say, neither bawled about not letting the woman leave their sight. Neither insisted on going with her to the hospital to hold her hand, or whatever. That struck me as odd and set my alarm bells ringing.
Since Ortega never climbed out of bed to join us, neither did any other member of the town council. I took charge of the situation with the two men. I sent one to a small conference room in the old city hall building to have one of our militia officers get his story. Set a few guards outside the door, just in case. The older guy, Lyle was his name—maybe fifty, give or take—sat across the table from me in the Balmorhea Café. The place had been a little café and beer garden before the collapse. We’d resurrected it to fill that same function. It was one of the luxuries our little community afforded itself.
It’s funny how good it can make you feel to go out for a burger and a beer after spending so many years struggling to stay alive in a world turned so unforgiving and brutal.
We worked hard in Balmorhea. All of us. Everybody had a job. Many were farmers or were involved in the production and preservation of our food supply. Some of us—me, the other Slow Burns, plus a handful of others—were full-time scouts and scavengers. We had that one plumber, a stack of electricians and mechanics, doctors and nurses, even a sheriff with a deputy. We had people in every role our community needed, though most didn’t have any pre-collapse experience in the jobs they did. The only way this worked was keeping everyone to their community service obligation, building and maintaining our fortifications, taking guard shifts on the wall and towers, hell, even collecting the garbage. Everybody had a role in the militia. That was mandatory. Sometimes we had to fight to protect the community’s survival—our survival.
People died. Sometimes during an attack by a wandering gang of Whites. Sometimes raiding bandits murdered them, or they were murdered for scavenging the wrong supplies. More frequently than anyone liked, residents died unexpectedly, for no reason we could figure until one of the doctors performed an autopsy and found a burst appendix, a festering infection, or cancer. We didn’t have the diagnostic tools to catch every illness, and we lacked the drugs to treat most ailments.
Hence, the Balmorhea Café, our oasis. Live music from time to time—though our local music talent wasn’t really much to speak of. We had a small theater that only played old movies, a gym, a growing library. We held dances, harvest festivals, and holiday parties. We had social clubs and competitions, most anything an old small town might have had back in the 1950s, before thousand-channel HD TVs and cellphones took over our lives.
I asked, “You want something to eat?” It was the middle of the night, maybe closer to four a.m., but Lyle looked haggard. “A drink?”
Lyle glanced over at Clive, the old guy who ran the café. Such was the cost of waking him to use his place—Clive eavesdropping and not being subtle about it.
The man asked, “What is this?”
I waved at Clive. He was behind the bar, busying himself with nothing. He was an older fellow, a little past sixty. Him and his wife—married after they met in Balmorhea—ran the café, since they were getting a little old to help in the fields. “Hey, Clive, would you bring us a couple of beers?”
That took Lyle by surprise. “You have beer?”
“It’s not very good,” I told him. “But the whiskey isn’t bad. We grow a ton of corn out here. We have plenty to experiment with. You want something to eat? We don’t have a lot of variety, but what we have is pretty good. Hell, you want a steak? Clive can grill you up a steak.”
Lyle shook his head, jaw slack, finding it hard to believe. “I heard tell ya’ll had a big herd of cattle over here.”
“Nearly three hundred head.” I felt pretty proud of that. Cattle were an enviable luxury in the post-collapse world. Though “luxury” might be misleading—those animals took a hell of a lot of work and resources.
“That’s too bad.”
It sounded like a threat, but I tried hard not to take it that way. “Why do you say that?”
“The reason we’re here.”
“Well, that saves me beating around the bush about it.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Beating around the bush?”
Clive sat the beers on the table.
Lyle picked up the bottle, surprised by the cold.
“We have refrigeration.” I pointed up at the lights overhead. “Electricity in every house. Solar power. We have backup generators, but we don’t use them that often.”
Lyle drank, and appreciation spread across his face. “We ain’t got no refrigeration back at the farm.”
“Where’s that?”
“This don’t have to be an interrogation,” Lyle retorted. “Or whatever it is we’re doing here.”
“It’s not an interrogation,” I told him, “we just need to be careful is all. I’m not trying to bribe the truth out of you. I’m just being nice, making conversation. You sure you don’t want something to eat?”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. And yeah, if you got a steak, I’d love one.”
“No potatoes, though. We can’t get the damn things to grow in the sandy dirt around here.”
Lyle laughed, a little sadly. “We had a farm the other side of Fort Stockton. Fifteen miles out of town. The farm was already there when we come across it right after things went belly up. Three irrigation circles. Coupla barns. Main house. A few others. Grew corn mostly, some squash, watermelon, beans. Some vegetables, enough for us, you know.”
“You been out there the whole time?” I asked.
“Took on some people as time went on. Lost some. Others left. Not everybody can take it out here. The desolation. The sun. Goddamned desert as far as you can see.” Lyle shook his head.
I nodded. I was one of those people and Steph had known it for years. Every now and then things would get rough, she’d bring it up. But we’d built a life in Balmorhea, not just for us, but for an entire community.
“No trees,” said Lyle. “No green grass. Just desert and mountains and heat. Me, I grew up in Odessa. This is home to me. After the world slid down the crapper, I never saw no reason to leave.”
“But here you are,” I said, “and in some trouble, too.”
“Yeah.” That bothered Lyle a lot. “Five, six years ago, had a young fellow with us, name o’ Marty. Broke his arm. We drove him ove
r here for your doctor to look at. He stayed on with you folks.”
“Marty Blankenship,” I said. “Yeah, I know him. And his girlfriend, Rebecca, right?”
“Yep. Decided they liked it here better than out there with us. Can’t say I blame ‘em. How are they doin’?”
Of course, first thing that came to mind was the baby.
Lyle caught it. “They all right?”
“Fine,” I told him. “Rebecca got pregnant again last year.”
“Again?” Lyle wanted to be happy about the news.
“Stillborn,” I told him. “Just like the first one.”
The news broke through Lyle’s armor. “Four pregnancies out at our place. Four little graves. Goddamned virus.”
“We’ve got nearly thirty kids here. All born since the collapse. That’s not to say we’ve got it figured out. We lost three or four just in the last few days.”
“After all this time. I still lay awake at night, wondering if we’re gonna survive this goddamned virus—if the world will ever be the same.”
“All we can do is keep trying,” I told myself, as much as I was telling him.
We toasted with a swig.
“What happened to Cinnamon? That’s the girl’s name, right?”
He took a long slow drink of beer, and then he stared at me as a sadness grew out of his eyes. He clearly blamed himself. “The infected.”
17
“Ambush?” I was thinking Lyle and the other two must have been caught scavenging in Fort Stockton. Out here in the desert, we didn’t get a lot of the infected these days, and certainly not any in good enough shape to mount an ambush.
“About ten o’clock. Full dark. A truck came barreling down the road.” Lyle snorted. “Didn’t make any sense. Still don’t.”
Lyle’s story piqued my interest and aroused my suspicion. “The infected using a truck? Are you sure it wasn’t bandits?”
“Wasn’t bandits. Not like any I ever seen. But It might have something to do with what I heard at the swap.”
I jumped right to the topic most bothering me at the moment. “Did you see any drones?”
“Like military stuff?”
“No,” I told him, “more like those little hobby jobs regular people could buy.”
“Don’t know nothin’ ‘bout any of that.”
“No unusual dots flying around in the distance?”
“Like I said, didn’t see no drones.”
“Sorry. We had something weird happen here yesterday.”
“You wanna hear about the swap?”
I nodded.
“About a month back, I was at the swap out by Ozona.”
That swap meet was too far for us, but I knew about it. “Lots a people go to that one?”
Lyle shrugged. “Used to be maybe forty, give or take. Last coupla times, maybe half that or so. But you never know. People come and go.”
I wanted to ask about the kind of items being traded, whether many of the people were desperate, or if they had many transients looking for handouts. A lot could be learned about the state of the region by knowing what went on at the swaps. I needed to know about the attack on Lyle’s farm first. “What’s the Ozona swap got to do with the car at your place last night?”
“That’s when I first heard tell of the trouble back East.”
“Infected trouble?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Nobody does.”
“You’re being cryptic.”
“Back around Junction, there was a whole string of farms and ranches along the Llano River. I couldn’t tell you how many—twenty or thirty homesteads, maybe more. Kinda like our place out by Fort Stockton. Survivors from San Antonio, mostly. Five here, ten there. Plenty of water, good land. Remote enough so they didn’t get much trouble from the infected comin’ west from the cities—not much, but not nothin’. The Llano River flows into the Colorado, which runs right through Austin. Infected scavenge their way up the valleys now and again. That’s what I heard. The point I’m getting at is this—a month or two back, everybody in that valley disappeared.”
“They went somewhere else?” I asked.
“Don’t know. I only heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy. You know how it is. I tried to track it down at the swap meet, but nobody who’d seen it with their own eyes was around. Like every tall tale, I heard five or six versions. Alien abductions, new utopia out by Houston, running water, cable TV, grocery stores.” Lyle laughed at that. I did, too.
“They just plain disappeared.” Lyle let that thought sit for a moment. “Some things were busted up, but not like you’d expect. Doors or gates broken, windows busted. Food stores raided. Livestock gone, natur’ly. No bodies.”
“You think the infected did it?” I asked.
“The world ain’t that complicated anymore. It’s always them, isn’t it? That’s why I’m confused about what happened to us.”
I silently waited for the story to come. Finally.
“Our ranch sits a half-mile off 2023, down a dirt road, nestled between two mesas. Flattop hills, really. You can walk right up ‘em. No cliffs, nothing like that. Thing is, we got an old gate with a cattle guard just off the road, and we keep a chain and a padlock on it. It’s not secure from much of anything, but it keeps drifters from coming down the driveway. Mostly. Halfway in, we got another gate, another cattle guard, and another chain and padlock. Thing is, you can see both these gates from our lookout deck up top on the roof of the main house. You can see for miles in every direction, except for what’s behind them hills. Pretty much like here, I suppose.
“Had a lot of wind last night. Kicked up so much dust you couldn’t see down the road. Couldn’t hardly make out our gate in what moonlight there was. Happens all the time out here. You know.” Lyle looked at me for a nod. I gave it to him.
“Problem is,” he continued, “somebody’d cut through the chains on both gates and rolled down our dirt road so quiet we didn’t hear ‘em. Me, Cinnamon, and Alonso was up on the lookout deck. It was Alonso’s watch. Cinnamon followed him up there ‘cause…I guess she wants something to happen there. I headed upstairs because I was bored with sittin’ by the fire talkin’ about all we ain’t got no more. Been doin’ too much of that lately.
“Anyways, I was just sittin’ down to make myself comfortable, when a pair of headlights flashes out east of us. It takes a second for me to understand what’s happening, because it didn’t make sense. The truck these headlights were mounted on was already most of the way down our driveway and racing right at our main gate. Didn’t even have time to raise my rifle before it crashed right through.
“That was the signal, I guess, ‘cause they screamed like they just busted out of Hell. Nearly pissed myself, ain’t ashamed to say it. The infected. A thousand of ‘em, maybe more. Came running through the broken gate like they’d been hiding just outside our fence all night. We never knew they was there. More climbed the fence. Alonso opened up with his M16, full auto. I was shootin’, too, but I could barely see for all the tear gas in the air.”
“Tear gas? Are you sure?”
Lyle shrugged. “Something was burning my eyes like a mother. I was coughing so much, I don’t know if I hit anything. Cinnamon near fell down the ladder to warn everyone inside the house, you know, in case they didn’t already hear us shooting.
“You’re sure they were Whites? Pale skin, no hair?” The coordinated attack and the gear didn’t make sense for the infected.
Lyle looked me up and down. “Skin just as white as yours. Gas masks, so I can’t say about the hair. Happened so fast, though, with the gas in the air, infected all over the place, trying to get their hands on you. We barely got out, the three of us. Tore out across the desert in that truck. Nothing we could do for everyone else there. Too damn many of ‘em. Like the collapse all over again.” Lyle took a few moments after that, as the memories slowly turned to guilt in his mind. “Cinnamon got cut up. She was bleedin’ all over the pickup by the time we realized how re
ally bad it was. We didn’t have anything to patch her up with.”
I didn’t say anything because I would have sounded like a judgmental prick. Every vehicle in Balmorhea was stocked with bug-out bags and provisions. Regularly checked and refreshed. It was a holdover policy from our experiences at the beginning. All of us had been forced to flee more than once back then. Danger never called ahead to let you know it was on its way.
“We cut across the desert,” said Lyle, “I figured the Lynaugh Unit was my best bet. You know, old prison, secure as hell.”
I didn’t say that the prison fences, walls, and bars hadn’t done the original residents any good. “They wouldn’t let you in?” I asked.
“Everything happening out at the ranch was tenfold worse at the prison.”
“They hit both places at once? Same uniforms? Coordinated? All infected?”
“I seen what I seen. I’m just tellin’ you what it was.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean anything by it; I’m surprised is all. Were the people at the Lynaugh Unit able to fend off the attack?”
“Couldn’t tell, us being so far away. Parked on a rise, lights off. The shooting over at Lynaugh petered out after twenty or thirty minutes. Them infected kept whoopin’ and hollerin’. I’d say they busted that prison open as easy as they overran my farm. Don’t know if anybody made it out. I didn’t see any headlights makin’ a run for it. If I was a bettin’ man, I put money on them all bein’ dead.”
18
We knew generally where we were going, and specifically because it was marked on the map. But we didn’t need the map. The column of smoke drifting into the early morning sky marked our destination.
Murphy parked the Humvee on a flattop hill a mile west of the prison. We were out there alone, nothing around but desert and scraggly mesquites as tall as me. They were plenty big to keep us hidden from anybody looking in our direction and dense enough to conceal any number of the infected. Murphy killed the engine and we climbed onto the roof for a look around. Using my binoculars, I saw the fields north of the facility were under cultivation. I scanned up and down the prison’s fences, checked out the grounds, and looked over the buildings.
