by Bobby Adair
Murphy said, “Familiar, in a way.”
“We’ve never been here.” Well, not so close. The Lynaugh clan didn’t like Balmorhea colonists because we harbored people like me and Murphy—Slow Burns. So, we didn’t trade with them. They didn’t bring their sick to our hospital. We kept our distance. With some fifty miles of desert between us, that last part tended to be easy.
Murphy still had his binoculars up. “What I’m saying is, the place looks like everything looked right after the collapse—freshly fucked up.”
“You see anybody moving down there?”
“I see fires.”
“The fence on this side looks intact, but on the north side, it looks like maybe it’s down. Hard to tell from this angle.”
“On the far side,” said Murphy, “at the vehicle entrance, those gates look like they’ve been broken through.”
The double set of gates on the far side were mostly hidden from view by one of the prison buildings situated directly between us and them. “I can see the top part of the gates, but I can’t tell.”
“See how those top bars aren’t straight across,” instructed Murphy. “Something’s not right. If you take that Lyle dude at his word, and the same bunch hit Lynaugh in the same way as his place, then they probably smashed a big truck through.”
“What do you think of Lyle’s story?”
“Man, you talked to him. What do you think?”
“He seemed credible.”
“His buddy, Alonso, told the same story. That girl with the stripper name, ah—”
“Cinnamon,” I filled in.
“Yeah. She said pretty much the same. For as much as she was able, being half out of it.”
“You think that Carlsbad bunch did this?”
Murphy shrugged. “From what Bonny said, that makes as little sense as a phantom horde marauding their way across the state.”
I sighed. Murphy and I were in the same place with all of it. Too many unanswered questions. That’s why we were out there watching the Lynaugh Unit burn. We needed to find what clues we could and piece together some dependable truth. With events over the past few days being what they were, and with the stakes, as usual, being the lives of my friends and, frankly, everybody I knew, guesses taken from miles away weren’t going to be good enough.
“I hear that bald noggin’ of yours rattling.” Murphy laughed as his humor. “You thinking we should go down there?”
“I am. We need to be careful. If anyone’s alive, they’ll likely shoot at us.”
“I’ll bet you a cold biscuit they’re all dead.”
19
Way back in the mid-nineties, The Texas Department of Criminal Justice built the James Lynaugh Unit to house 1,400 male prisoners. In the desert south of Fort Stockton, surrounded by marginally arable desert and a few squat hills, the terrain offered no constraints to the prison’s layout. So, the state-contracted designers applied a bureaucratic measure of creativity and constructed the prison in the shape of a big square, a quarter mile long on each side. A wide road, laid out in a square, marked the outermost boundary of the detention facility. Twenty yards inside that asphalt perimeter, a tall fence prevented reluctant residents from dashing off into the desert. If the chain-link palisade and miles of desert weren’t enough to discourage escapes, guard towers at opposite corners of the fenced square commanded kill zones down all four sides.
One of those towers loomed at the corner ahead of us, apparently empty. Manning the .50, Murphy stood through the Humvee’s roof hatch, watching for threats from the tower and the other prison buildings. I stopped the vehicle just outside the north fence, about halfway between the corners. With nothing but cropped creosote bushes and stunted yuccas spread across the desert behind us and zero cover around us, I figured anybody looking already knew we were there. I swung my door open and told Murphy, “Cover me.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”
I hurried over to where the perimeter fence gaped open, took a last look for hostile movement, and examined the cleanly severed wires. I was no forensic expert, but it looked to me like someone had used bolt cutters to split the fence from the ground up to six feet. They’d sheared it across the bottom edge and peeled the corners back to create a hole plenty large enough for an adult-sized anybody to run right through.
Your basic dimwit White couldn’t have cut that fence, not with tools, not in straight lines. If Lyle had been telling the whole truth about what he’d witnessed, and Whites had attacked Lynaugh, Smart Ones had to have been leading them. Still, that didn’t explain the trucks that smashed their gate. Smart Ones didn’t drive. They weren’t that smart.
I turned my attention to the sandy ground, looking for more clues.
“You lose your car keys?” asked Murphy. “Or your virginity?” he laughed.
“Why is that even funny?”
“I don’t make the rules of comedy, I just channel the muse.”
“Does your muse look like Ronald McDonald?”
“More like a monkey on roller skates.”
“Good god, Murphy. Are you keeping an eye on those buildings?”
“I’m multitasking.”
“Fine, yuk it up if you want, but if I get shot, Steph’s going to have your ass.”
Murphy didn’t say anything about that. Usually, he’d smartass something up out of nothing just to get the last word. I glanced up to make sure he wasn’t choking to death on a snot gob.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s it? No more funny remarks?”
Murphy concentrated on the buildings across the wide, dusty yard. “I just figured, you know, with Steph and all.”
“Whatever.” As in, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“What are you looking for?”
“Jimmy Hoffa.”
“So, you can be funny, but I can’t?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Maybe I will let somebody shoot your ass.”
I pointed at the sand. “Footprints.”
“Good work Ke-mo sah-bee. Aren’t they, like, all over the place?”
“Yes.”
“Is that supposed to be a revelation?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let me see if I can catch up. Ummm, from all this riveting evidence, I deduce a whole bunch of chicken brains charged through that hole you so astutely observed from way the hell back on the hill.”
I sighed. Murphy could be exasperating.
“Don’t do me like that with the silent sarcasm. You’re not in junior high anymore and I’m not your mom. Why don’t you just tell me what you think you’re looking at?”
“Not what I’m looking at, what I’m looking for.”
“And that is?”
“Bare feet. Footprints of bare feet, that is.”
The lightbulb plinked on in Murphy’s head. “Wait—what?”
“Everybody who came through here was wearing shoes. By the look of the pattern, I’d say boots.”
That shut Murphy up. He knew as well as anybody who had spent any amount of time outside Balmorhea’s sturdy walls that feral Whites tended to go barefoot. Most didn’t even have the sense to wear enough clothes to keep their dangly parts warm in the winter.
“Smart Ones.” It was the only thing that made sense with the puzzle of clues I had so far.
“That would be a lot of Smart Ones not to have a bunch of dumb ones in tow.”
“Look at these,” I pointed to three clear rows of tracks in the dirt. “They were out here in three ranks. They stayed in line and took turns running through the hole.”
“A hole that’s only big enough to fit one person at a time.”
“Wearing shoes. Well-organized.” I didn’t like where these bits of data were leading.
“You’re not thinking Whites, are you? You’re thinking normals?”
I shrugged. “The shoe patterns are the same.”
Murphy followed that clue to the same place I did, and he had as much
trouble believing it. “Military?”
As much as it didn’t make sense, I didn’t see any other possibility. Or, it made sense, a very scary sort of sense. “Somebody’s running around the desert with a regiment of militiamen and they’ve got the infrastructure to equip them with matching boots.”
After another minute of thought, Murphy disagreed with me. “Maybe they stumbled into a big stock in one of those discount warehouses or something.”
“Or something?” I asked.
“Yeah, or something.”
“Whatever. I think it’s clear they killed everyone inside.”
“Slow down, Sherlock. I already told you I think they’re all dead inside. What are those tracks telling you so you can pretend this is all your idea now?”
“These tracks are all headed inside,” I told him. “None are coming back out, and I don’t see their bodies spread out everywhere.”
Murphy agreed. “Don’t see any bodies.”
20
After circling the prison twice on the perimeter road and seeing no sign of life, I inched the Humvee through the smashed gates and stopped on an expansive parking pad just inside. Clearly, it was the area where deliveries and prisoners came and went. Which meant the area had to be well covered by guards with guns. I looked for sight lines to the perimeter guard towers—I couldn’t see either of them. That left only the thick-walled gatehouse, which looked like it had been built to withstand a Marine assault. In fact, with its front door blown off and scorch patterns above the narrow windows, it looked like the Marines had already been there.
Following my gaze, Murphy swung the .50 around to point at the stout building.
I hopped out of the Humvee, machete and shotgun in hand, and headed for the open door. “I’ll do a quick check inside to see what I see.”
“Anybody in there?” Murphy called. “You listen here! Behave or I’m gonna light you up.”
Peeking inside the dark door, I first noticed the stench: petroleum, ash, burnt plastic, and over-cooked meat. Familiar. Too familiar. Heinously so, because that was the kind of fucked-up world I lived in. Brass shell casings littered the floor. They looked freshly spent, shiny, like they’d been in a box somewhere since the collapse, waiting to get fired at somebody someday, just because. The shiny ones lay in clumpy patterns, here and there among hundreds of others, all discolored by intense heat. The walls were stained black by fire. The remains of some furniture lay in black crisps. The weirdest things were the outlines on the floor, crime scene corpse outlines with the bodies missing.
I’d seen death come in a hundred different ways a thousand different times, and those were lowball estimates. Fire, though, gave me the heebie jeebies ever since I torched those naked Whites at Sarah Mansfield’s house up on Mt. Bonnell and then saw the horror of my work. However I died, whenever that day came, I hoped it wouldn’t be in a fire.
Crossing to the stairs to check the second floor, glass crunched under each of my steps, and I stopped. I knelt. Broken glass blackened by soot lay everywhere. I picked up a piece in the shape of a bottle bottom and rubbed a clean spot with my finger. Translucent brown. Following a hunch, I kicked through the ash and debris until I came across a hunk of scorched leather wrapped tightly around a piece of glass with a few bits of wire running through. All roughly the size of a wine bottle cork. “Motherfucker.”
“You say something?” Murphy called from outside. “You alright?”
“I’m cool.” I wasn’t.
I looked for another bottle cork mechanism of leather and glass. I found the remains of a few. Earlier that year, in the spring, well before the heat set in, a drifter came through Balmorhea, carrying with him—along with his other survival stuff—three Molotov cocktails. Only they weren’t standard Molotovs. The ones he possessed, he explained, were corked with a mechanism that could be activated by yanking a dangling wire. Once armed, any impact would detonate a charge that would ignite the fuel mixture inside. No need to light them first. He said he picked them up at a swap in Brenham, back the summer before. He called them “pocket napes,” short for pocket napalm. Seeing the value of such weapons, we traded a hundred rounds of ammunition, four pounds of beef jerky and a quart of cooking fat, plus all he could eat during his three-day stay. For that we received one pocket nape, which we reverse engineered and started to manufacture for ourselves. We carried ten in the Humvee when we went out on patrol. They were in there with Murphy at that moment. Pocket napes, I deduced, had been used to torch the guardhouse.
But Brenham, if it truly was near the source of the impact Molotovs, was five hundred miles east of Balmorhea. That raised more questions than it answered.
I headed up the stairs to the second floor. It was much the same as the first—torched. No bodies. No blackened weapons. Nothing salvageable. I exited the guardhouse and took a pause beside the Humvee as silent images of flaming horror occupied my thoughts.
“What’s the word?” asked Murphy. “You okay?”
“Right as rain.”
“We live in a desert, dumbass.”
“It rains here, too.”
“Fire get to you?”
I shrugged.
“You look like you just realized your dick fell off. Was it bad?”
Scanning the buildings out in front of me, searching for the danger of movement, I gave Murphy the quick, no-frills version.
“No bodies?” he asked.
“Not a one.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Not for Whites. Not for normals.” Murphy didn’t like being there any more than I did. And I hated it. “You know how many people they had here?”
With no contact between us and the Lynaugh group, I only had rumors to go on. “Twenty, forty, something in that range.”
“Mostly dudes, is what I heard.” Murphy took a look around. “Some were inmates back before the collapse.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I’m just sayin’.”
“You think maybe they were a tough bunch because of the prisoners?”
“No,” he told me, “that’s just what I heard, that’s all. Damn, man. I know crispy critters give you the willies and all, but you need to lighten up and focus on the to-do list, bro.”
I sighed. “Sorry.”
“Man, let’s finish what we came here for and get the hell out.”
Murphy was right. We needed to get busy. We had a whole creepy ghost prison to search, and we still needed to drive over to Lyle’s place and figure out what happened there. But something was bothering me. “What did you mean, back there when we were outside the fence?”
Murphy shook his head and looked at me liked I’d just changed colors. “What are you talking about?”
“About Steph. You acted like you knew something about her that you expected me to know, too.”
Murphy took a long, hard look at one of the detention buildings before pointing the .50 at it. “You see that?”
“There’s nothing over there. You’re hiding something.”
“Man, I don’t—” Instead of finishing, Murphy rubbed his big hands over his face.
“What’s up with Steph? You know I’m not going to let it go.”
“This ain’t the time and this sure ain’t the place. This is a talk you need to have with her, when you can—” Murphy ran out of words again.
“Look, dude.” Anger edged its way into my voice. “What are you not telling me?”
“Trust me on this, Zed? Please? You don’t want to hear this from me.”
My imagination spun up a score of possibilities. Bad, all of them. Of course, because that’s just how my mind worked most of the time, as happy as I was with Steph. I even tolerated the desert, because it was the best place to keep her safe. But I was too conditioned by life’s twisted sense of humor to believe that happily-ever-after could last more than a minute.
“You’re snorting like a little bull,” said Murphy. “You know, like you do when you’re so mad you’re about to explode.”
> “I’m not mad, Murphy. Not at you.”
“Don’t be mad at Steph, either. In fact, don’t be mad at anybody. It just is what it is, man. You know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t. Because you won’t tell me.” I glared over the unexplored prison buildings. Unanswered questions were turning into rage for no reason other than dusty old habit—habits I hadn’t indulged in so many years. Failing at finding a way to calm myself, I looked up at Murphy and pled more than asked. “Tell me.”
Murphy and I had been friends, close friends, for way too many years, for him not to see or to feel my desperation. Yet he couldn’t look at me when he finally spoke. “Steph has cancer.”
My whole world shrank down to an irrational dot of white-hot fuck, and all I could manage to say was, “What kind?”
“Does it goddamn matter?”
No. It didn’t. Balmorhea didn’t have the medical experts, the drugs, nor the advanced equipment that would allow us to evaluate and treat a cancer patient. A cancer diagnosis in Balmorhea, just like a cancer diagnosis anywhere in the post-collapse world, was a death sentence.
21
Without another word between us, Murphy killed the engine and climbed out of the Humvee. I was already marching toward the nearest building that wasn’t still burning, kicking through the dried corn kernels and hard brown wheat berries on the parking pad like they needed punishing. I noticed the blood stains, but I wasn’t in any state of mind to search an abandoned prison and reason my way through the clues to discover the nature of the danger marauding through the desert. Nor could I stand still. I ached for the catharsis of violence.
The wall of the building was scorched with burns splashed around a pair of second floor windows. The glass on the ground at the base of the wall made the source of the burns obvious. Murphy said, “Pocket napes. But do you smell that?”
