Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

I shrugged.

  “Vinegar.” He sniffed the air. “And gunpowder.”

  I didn’t have room for any thoughts about that. The door, like the one on the gatehouse, had been blown off its hinges. I charged into the dim light inside, hoping a wayward White would be there, setting an ambush.

  No such luck. Only shadows and a musty stink, rusting prison bars, and cells for criminals. Inside the cages, corpses lounged on cots, slumped against walls, or lay in heaps on the floor where they’d died—lucky bastards. Each had been mummified by years of heat and dry air.

  At the far end of the first floor, with Murphy trailing silently behind me, I climbed the stairs and stomped down the length of the second tier, not caring about all the noise I was making. The desiccated dead weren’t going to wake. Apparently, no lingering Whites were going to crawl out of their spider holes to try and feed on me, either.

  I wished they would. Try, that is.

  At the far end of the second floor, the one nearest the gatehouse, the cells had been cleared out. They looked lived in. Based on the number of recently used beds, my guess was six people had resided there. A pair of the cells had been modified into a bunker. Gunports cut through the concrete, up and down the wall that looked down on the gatehouse. They were the ones with the weird scorch patterns on the wall outside. Shell casings lay scattered across the floor. Blood stained the concrete and pooled in places, some still sticky. No bodies, though. No guns on the floor. No ammunition, no knives, food, or even water. Someone dumped a bookshelf and left the books scattered all over.

  “Why take the bodies?” asked Murphy.

  I didn’t have an answer. At least I was curious about it—it was a distraction from my turbulent emotions and my hunger to brutalize something.

  Cancer seemed like such a cheat after all of our losses and tears, our times apart, and the happiness we worked so hard to build in Balmorhea. We’d grown into two halves of a whole, Steph and me. Something I never believed would happen, or could happen, back before the virus started its rampage across Austin, back when I was circling the drain of a loathsome existence.

  With Murphy close behind, I worked my way through another cell block of mummies and bunkers, only half paying attention. Maybe not even that much. More looking for prey than clues, hoping to happen upon it, and lost in a helpless rage. Following my feet, not seeing any bodies, weapons, nor anything of value in a post-collapse world.

  Standing in the shade next to the building we just searched, drinking, and deciding which building to search next, Murphy said, “You gonna be okay?”

  “No. Probably not ever again.”

  “I know it doesn’t do any good for me to say this right now, but one day, you’ll be able to hear it.”

  I knew what he was going to say, but words of hope wouldn’t even form into complete thoughts in my head. I was lost without Steph, and I hadn’t even lost her yet.

  “One day,” said Murphy, “the hurt goes away. You get better. You smile again. You laugh.”

  I squatted and leaned against the wall. In my head, I knew Murphy was right, but in my heart, I knew I was fucked.

  “We’ve been through it before, you and me. That’s just the way this world is now.”

  I nodded.

  “Man,” Murphy stepped out from the wall and spun in a slow circle, “I don’t know what happened here—not exactly—and I don’t think we’re gonna figure it out. I don’t know what went down at Lyle’s place, but it probably looks just like this. Raided. All beat to hell. More dead shit in a dying world.” Murphy took a long pause. “Zed, I gotta tell you, I’ve been hurtin’, too. You know I love Steph. You two are family to me, all I got left in this world. Fuck this fucked-up place. Let’s go home. No more scouting, no more hunting, no more crazy shit for a while. Let’s just stay in Bal. You two get whatever happiness you can get before things get bad. You hear what I’m saying?”

  I felt like I should cry. It seemed like the thing that normal people might do in the face of the constant barrage of hurt we suffered and witnessed. I didn’t, though. I felt a numbness coming on, a defense mechanism from a long time ago, the armor that got me through so many difficult years. “You’re right. We won’t find anything at Lyle’s place that we won’t find here. No point going there. We’ll finish here, though. I mean, we’re already here. Let’s see what we see, and then we’ll go.”

  The next building seemed to have been used as an educational facility—classrooms, desks, chalkboards, and the like. Didn’t look like anybody had set foot inside in a decade. Another building was a factory, and that’s where things got a little weird. The factory, back in the day, it seemed, had produced brooms, mops, scrub brushes, and other janitorial implements. The tracks through the dust on the floor made it clear the long-ignored building had been searched, recently. Every machine, the work benches, the conveyors, and even the storage racks were labeled with large, colored tags. The machines were all tagged red. The conveyors, yellow, and some specialty items were orange. Shelving was blue. No dust on the tags, no fading. Mint condition.

  “What’s up with that?” asked Murphy.

  I didn’t have a guess.

  A support building housing the prison laundry and cafeteria contained similarly tagged pieces of equipment. Of note, while not being a huge surprise, not a scrap of food was left, though it was clear the erstwhile prison residents had been using the cafeteria facility as a dining hall.

  In a separate facility, a small-scale cannery, the machinery was also tagged.

  Murphy and I finally entered a dorm that didn’t smell of old death. It appeared to be the one where most of the residents lived. By counting beds and rooms, I put the total count of Lynaugh residents at sixty or seventy, at least twice the population I’d guessed. Again, we saw plenty of spent brass and blood smears, but not a single corpse.

  We found a trio of petroleum storage tanks that looked large enough to hold thousands of gallons. It suggested the Lynaugh residents had also been trading grain and livestock for oil products from the small clans that maintained the pumpjacks around Midland and Odessa. I opened a spigot on a tank and a thin stream of diesel trickled onto the ground.

  “The bastards stole the diesel,” guessed Murphy. “Do you think they brought a tanker truck with them?”

  I didn’t want to say for sure, but that seemed to be the case. “Just how prepared were these raiders?”

  Similarly, two small grain silos that looked to have been disassembled from nearby farms, moved inside the prison fence, and reconstructed, were empty. The rolls of hay inside a pole barn were each tagged.

  It was when we entered a vehicle storage and maintenance facility that the tag system started to make sense. Inside, nearly thirty trucks and tractors were parked in neat rows. Each was labeled with a tag, half colored bright green—the first of those we’d seen. The others were marked in red and yellow, with only a few blacks. Doing a little research while Murphy looked on patiently, I discovered that the bright green tags were affixed to vehicles that seemed to run well. Red tags were attached to vehicles and tractors that ran rough. Black-tagged vehicles were under repair or were borderline junk.

  “It’s a prioritization system,” I told Murphy.

  He shrugged it off. “They were always a weird, standoffish bunch here.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “You always say that when you feel like being contrary.”

  “I don’t think these tags were being used by the people who lived here. I think—”

  “Based on a half-assed guess.”

  “No,” I argued. “Maybe if it was just the vehicles that were tagged, that might make some sort of sense. I think the raiders tagged this stuff.”

  “And this is important to me, why?”

  “They wouldn’t go to the trouble to prioritize the leftovers if they didn’t mean to come back later to collect them. It means the guys who raided this prison are coming back.”

  “Or they couldn’t take
it all with them because they got bigger game in their sights.”

  I looked silently at Murphy, too numb to voice the guess he was getting at.

  “Like Balmorhea, dumbass.”

  22

  Reassessing my risk matrix—so many years after the fall, the stink of corporate blabber-speak still found its way into my thoughts—I pushed the armored Humvee to give me all the speed it could muster, near fifty miles an hour. I-10’s desolate stretches passed under the hum of our off-road tires. Overhead, legions of fat, gray clouds paraded south. A nasty cold front was blowing down out of Canada, blasting sheets of sand across the road in front of us. It was going to be a cold night. Maybe wet. Maybe snowy.

  Futzing with the radio, Murphy said, “I still can’t raise Bal.”

  In response, I glanced at the sky. Tumultuous weather tended to play havoc with our signals.

  He looked up and scanned for dangers. “How far?”

  “Another fifteen minutes to the exit.”

  Murphy turned his attention back to the radio. Balmorhea needed to know what we knew. What we suspected. ‘Feared’ was probably a better word. Either way, they needed to know it sooner than later.

  “Try again in a few,” I told him. He nodded, understanding my thoughts.

  Murphy looked left and then right. He checked his rifle without glancing down, and he scrutinized the road ahead. For whatever reason, a quirk of geology, wind patterns changing the soil composition, or subterranean moisture content levels, thorny huisache trees grew thick along the path of the highway for the next few miles, reducing how far I could see left and right. That section of I-10 always made me nervous.

  “Doesn’t make any sense,” mused Murphy.

  “Preacher Dick?” I asked. “The drone assholes? Lyle, and now Lynaugh?”

  “‘Zactly.”

  “The pieces don’t puzzle up into a cohesive picture.”

  “Isn’t that what I said?” Murphy tried the radio again. Nothing but static. “Lyle said they were Whites. Dude didn’t seem like he was lying. I mean, why lie about getting attacked by Whites? Unless, what if Lyle was in on it?”

  “You’re just pulling guesses straight out of your ass,” I told him.

  “What if Lyle saw an opportunity when these shitheads showed up outside his door.”

  “You think he stood by while they came in and killed his friends, and then decided to be their bitch? I don’t see it.”

  “What if the new shitheads didn’t kill all of Lyle’s people?” Murphy looked down the road behind us, and then checked our flanks again. “What if they were all taken prisoner?”

  “What for?”

  “Doesn’t matter. All those people from Lynaugh are gone. Not just the people who lived there, but whatever marauders got killed raiding the place. Who does that? Whack jobs like those butt humpers we ran into out in Carlsbad, that’s who. I bet they did it. Some kind of freaky religious thing.”

  “But Preacher Dick hates Whites, right? We know that. That’s the reason his people killed Bonny.”

  “The Walmart girl?”

  “Yeah,” I reminded him. “Seems to me, the Carlsbad people and the Lynaugh people would join forces and come after us, instead of fighting each other.”

  “I could see that.”

  “Except it doesn’t explain the Whites who overran Lyle’s place.”

  “Unless Lyle is lying,” Murphy crowed. “Right?”

  I shrugged. We weren’t doing anything but making jerkoff guesses we couldn’t prove one way or the other. Not while we were speeding down I-10, getting pelted by sand.

  Murphy tried the radio again and received no response. He pounded the dashboard. “You think something happened? You think that’s why they’re not answering?”

  We were maybe seven miles from our turnoff. “We’ll be there in—”

  Tracer fire speared out of the stunted trees beside the highway, tearing into our engine compartment. Steam erupted from beneath the hood. Bullets pinged the Humvee’s armor, and one of the front tires blew. The rim hit the asphalt, careening us onto the shoulder.

  I mashed the gas pedal to the floor as I struggled with the steering to keep us moving forward. Sprays of oil burst onto the windshield as our flat tire flew to pieces. The bare rim dug into the dirt, and the Humvee rolled onto its side, sliding into the ditch.

  23

  Steam poured out of the Humvee’s engine compartment. Cooling steel popped. Smoked roiled out through the open doors. I’d started that fire myself. I was shivering on a buzz of adrenaline overload—a natural result of being ambushed and crashing into the dirt—but I wasn’t so addled by intensity and surprise that I couldn’t think fast and clear.

  Panting from my hiding place in the thorny scrub, my body bruised and gashed, I peered into the haze of sand blowing across the desert. The distance faded to orange and gray uniformity so near I could barely see fifty feet. A heavy diesel engine rattled out there somewhere, drawing close as fat tires crunched over the aging asphalt. I focused on steadying my hands and slowing my breathing. If me and Murphy were going to survive what was coming, I couldn’t afford to be impaired by primal reflexes.

  The Molotovs inside the Humvee detonated from the heat. Fire and black smoke billowed up through the open doors.

  I checked my gear, a mantra, in its way, that helped find my calm whenever mayhem was in the offing. I gripped my machete, just to make sure it was still in its scabbard on my back. I checked my shotgun—a sawed-off, double-barrel antique I could reload in a heartbeat with eyes closed and fingers half-frozen. A knife, pistol, and backpack with my survival gear. Some pocket napes that survived the crash.

  Booted feet hit the pavement, hurrying, but not running. Voices carried on the gritty wind, men shouting in that brusk way they do when they’re ginning up their courage.

  Rounds started to cook off in the fire.

  I jumped to my feet, crouching in the tarbushes, hurrying away from the flames, homing in on the rattle of the idling diesel.

  A shadowy man shouted commands.

  Thorns tore my skin.

  A dark silhouette grew out of the dirty orange haze, angular and brutal. It looked military, and it felt familiar, if only because it was black. It was a Stryker, a recycled Army APC from dirty, dead Carlsbad. Tortured Bonny hanging nude on the Walmart wall. Holding my hand while she wheezed, and me sitting there helpless and awkward, without any of the right words to comfort her pain. And then she died.

  I needed to kill some motherfuckers.

  Leaving my weapons holstered and my machete sheathed, I yanked the arming wires on my two pocket napalms and bolted through the desert scrub and blowing sand. With the fire roaring in the Humvee, and Preacher Dick’s militiamen focused forward, I reached a flanking position without being seen.

  From behind, the Stryker’s big engine seemed to idle louder than anywhere else. Plenty loud to hide the sound of my running feet. I spotted a guy standing out through the top hatch, hands on a big machine gun, looking the other way, ready to support his comrades out front. Likely, the guilty bastard who’d shredded my Humvee. I hurled a bottle at him, knowing it only had to land close. It hit him square between the shoulder blades and detonated, dousing him with a jellied petroleum mix that burst into flames an instant later. He screamed and dropped down through his open hatch.

  I jumped onto the back of the Stryker and climbed onto the roof, bounding up its length in a flash. The engine revved and the massive vehicle lurched forward just as I reached the flaming hatch. I heaved another pocket nape through, not caring what it hit inside, only that it detonated there.

  Rifle fire erupted around the Humvee—Murphy was going to work.

  Not wanting to risk a leap from the top of the rolling Stryker to the hard asphalt ten feet below, I scrambled down the side. Once on the ground, I sprinted toward the glow of the burning Humvee, estimating the geometry in my head as I went. I needed to keep the bulk of the wreck between me and where I knew Murphy was hiding
—at least where he’d been at the beginning of the ambush. If I was going to get shot, I didn’t want it to be my buddy’s bullet that hit me.

  Out of the orange haze, the flaming Humvee took shape. I spotted soldiers, two down, one crouching by the rear bumper, working his nerve up to try for a shot. He had tunnel vision for danger in front of him and didn’t hear me coming until I was close enough to blast him with my shotgun. From on the other side of the Humvee, three fast shots popped off, and then nothing moved except the sand in the air.

  Rounds still cooked off inside the Humvee. The Stryker rolled slowly off the road as something inside it exploded, followed by a firecracker string of bangs.

  “Zed,” called Murphy.

  Panting from my effort, I looked around for more bad guys. “I don’t know how many there are.”

  “I got three.”

  “I nailed one by the bumper.”

  “I thought that was a cannon I heard. I’m coming to you. Don’t shoot me.”

  Beneath the thick, black smoke rising into the sky, I put my back to the Humvee and scanned for enemies.

  Murphy ran up and took a position beside me, glancing back at the burning Stryker, which had rolled to a stop. “Anybody get out of that?”

  “If they didn’t, they’re dead now.”

  Murphy laughed. “We gotta check.” He dashed for the Stryker, angling to the side on our left.

  I raced to the other side, meeting him at the rear. The armored back door there was open, exposing an inferno inside. Down the road, two bodies lay on the asphalt, burning. No chance they were alive. We spent the next half-hour searching the area for survivors and came up empty. That left us standing beside the road as the wind grew colder and smoke blew south. Balmorhea lay nine, maybe ten miles away, if we followed the road. Perhaps as little as seven, cross-country. The choice didn’t merit even a single word of discussion. Trouble was on its way to Balmorhea, and we had to warn them. We checked the gear we each intended to carry, utility versus weight, and jogged into the desert.