Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  Our truck passed through Balmorhea’s south gate. Inside the walls, bag heads were everywhere, hauling bodies, putting out fires, carrying loot, corralling prisoners and herding them toward the front gate. All wore roughly similar uniforms, just as we’d seen the night before. Inside the wall, though, nearly all kept their gas masks on, as the air was thick with smoke from the burning houses and lingering tear gas.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d have bet the days of massive infected hordes were behind us. But then, this bunch with the gas masks wasn’t just another horde of feral Whites. “There are thousands of them.”

  “I never miss the latest news when you’re around.”

  “Sometimes it’s okay to be serious about things.”

  “Most of the time it’s not.”

  I didn’t bother to glare at Murphy. There was too much to see outside. “A lot of our friends died last night.”

  “Like every other night since the virus first showed up on TV.”

  “You’re surly.”

  “My bad. I was still going for funny.”

  “We’ve had a pretty good run here.” I was trying to come up with a silver lining. “You have to admit that.”

  “I do. But here we are again. In the shit, surrounded by assholes and bodies.”

  “Maybe you need to stop acting like a—”

  “A Zed?”

  I spun on Murphy, ready to snap, but stopped when I saw him trying to mask his anguish with a grin. So, I apologized instead.

  “Ain’t nuthin’, man. We all had a long night.”

  I turned back to scowl through the holes in the wall, projecting my hate on my conquerors. “They’re not a mob. They’re an army. Organized. Uniformed. Disciplined.”

  “I don’t know about disciplined,” argued Murphy.

  “They’re not running around crazy like most Whites, killing every normal in sight.”

  “You got me there, Tonto.”

  “You still trying to be funny?”

  “Trying.” It sounded more like he was trying not to cry.

  44

  I tried counting corpses, but it was hard to spot the dead residents of Balmorhea among so many bodies. I made a go of counting live bag heads but gave up on that endeavor as well. They were such a busy bunch, hurrying this way and that, following one another, a yellow-headed alpha in the lead, all looking pretty much the same. So damn many of them.

  And so many questions came to mind.

  One nagged at me more than others—most others How was it that the bag heads and Preacher Dick’s zealot brigade descended on Balmorhea at the same time? Coincidence didn’t seem sufficient to explain such a confluence of destruction. And the fact was, we were responsible for tempting Preacher Dick’s bunch down from Carlsbad, at least we believed we were. I couldn’t begin to shake my own guilt in this clusterfuck either, because for nearly a year, I’d been discounting the rumors of a White horde storming out of the east. The clues had all been there. I just didn’t want to believe it. Should I have taken a scout party a hundred or two hundred miles east to search out the truth? Should I have checked Abilene or Kerrville, even Austin or San Antonio? Probably.

  So much danger lay on such a long trip, though. Van Horn, Pecos, Fort Stockton and Marfa marked the rough borders of the desert we typically ranged through. We ventured outside that area from time to time, but it was always a risk, and, like our recent venture to Carlsbad, too often lethal. Still, because my mental wiring had been laid wrong by nature or nurture, I couldn’t help but blame myself. I hadn’t done the right things. Hadn’t acted urgently enough. Hadn’t known for sure what was coming until it was too late.

  I cursed myself for the hundredth time that morning, and then I thought about Steph. Staring at the endless scatter of bodies, I feared the worst. It made my heart feel like a lump of oxidized lead, slowly leeching poison into my veins. It made the world feel like a black hole, sucking me down into nothingness.

  “You’re doing that thing again,” Murphy told me.

  “What?”

  “You know. Getting mad about all this isn’t going to help.”

  “We don’t even know what all this is.”

  “I know we’re gonna need your hairless melon percolating on all amps if we’re going to unfuck it. Your little mental tantrums never do anything except spin you up into doing something Stupid—That’s stupid with a capital S.”

  What was I even supposed to say to that? I turned to stare outside again.

  Our truck inched its way past the obliterated front gate, and all the metal junk hurriedly welded there to close the gaps. Now, it was all pushed into the ditches outside the wall, garbage again. In the open desert beyond, rows of large military tents had been erected and more were going up. Farther out on the plain, parked row upon row, were our vehicles. Not just our unused bug-out trucks and buses, but our farm pickups and tractors too, lined up like they were being arranged for an insurance auction. Only they weren’t our only vehicles. Black military trucks and some armored personnel carriers sat among them. What remained of Preacher Dick’s mechanized force. Strangest of all, though, were the normals in khaki uniforms, wearing red baseball caps and red neckerchiefs, out there around the vehicles, inspecting and arranging them.

  I spotted a pair of trucks with the faded emblems of the Lynaugh prison unit painted on the door. “Murphy, check this out. Definitive proof this is the same bunch that hit the prison.”

  “No, dude, you gotta see this.”

  I scampered over to Murphy’s side of the trailer as Grace sat up from her slumber.

  In a long line across the hay fields, I saw a row of tall travel buses, the kind with wide comfy seats, AC, tinted windows, undercarriage luggage compartments, and toilets. Normal, uninfected people milled around the buses, chatting and unloading their luggage, dressed just like normal regular people in normal regular clothes, nothing worn-out or holed, no backpacks, canteens, or guns. They looked like a coach tour, arriving at a golf resort for the night. No urgency. No particular interest in the thousands of dangerous white-skinned bag heads around, not a smidgen of interest in the bodies, burned-out vehicles, monsters, or pillars of smoke smudging the cold sky. Every one of them wore a blood-red neckerchief or winter scarf. Some even wore knit red gloves.

  “What the hell?” asked Murphy.

  Grace came over to gawk. “There’s got to be a couple hundred of them.”

  Farther up the road, the emptied buses stopped at the next group of normals. These stood in dozens of lines, the entire array surrounded by hundreds of Whites still wearing their gas masks and looking on menacingly—as though there were any other way to stare down prisoners while wearing a dirty yellow gas mask.

  “Those are our people,” realized Grace.

  “Excuse me?” Murphy pressed his face to the wall to look through the vent holes.

  I didn’t think it could be true. There were so many, but there they were, dressed like people typically dressed in Balmorhea, mixed in with scores of others clad in faded black fatigues. “You see anyone you recognize?”

  Stirred by our excitement, Jazz rose from her stinky straw nest to see what was going on.

  “That’s got to be most everybody,” guessed Grace. “Doesn’t seem possible.”

  A row of folding tables stood across one edge of the field, each with a pair of people wearing blood-red neckerchiefs, sitting behind. On each table sat a laptop computer, open, with screen glowing. As we watched, prisoners were called up from the head of each line to stand before the pair at the tables. They were made to strip bare, whereupon, each was weighed and given a cursory medical exam. One of the clerks at each table entered whatever data they were collecting into the laptop, including answers to questions I couldn’t make out, given the distance and all the other noise. Once the exam was complete, each prisoner was sent naked and shivering to a station where they were sized for a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, a gray shirt, gray jacket, a thick red stocking cap and a red neckerchie
f or scarf. Each was then handed a saggy canvas grocery bag and shepherded onto one of the buses that had just disgorged of the oddly normal tourists.

  “What do you think’s in the bag?” asked Murphy. “A sack lunch?”

  I laughed. “That’s the first question that comes to mind?”

  “Does it matter which question I ask first?”

  “It doesn’t,” answered Grace for him. Her stern glance at me silently said, “Grow up.”

  I didn’t think I’d done anything inappropriate.

  Our truck lurched to a stop. None of us said it out loud, but we expected to be offloaded and thrown in with the other Balmorhean prisoners. The trailer’s outer set of doors creaked open. Bag heads herded everyone off the lower level and guided them into the lines of the waiting.

  “There’s Josh.” Murphy nearly shouted it in his excitement. “And his crew.”

  “And Hannah,” added Grace. “Looks like her squad is with her.”

  Surprised, and relieved, I blabbered the obvious, “They made it.”

  Looking through the vent holes by then, Jazz said, “I see Ortega.”

  “Anybody see Top?” asked Murphy.

  I didn’t ask if anyone saw Steph. It seemed too selfish, but she was the only person I was scanning the rows for.

  “Javendra,” added Grace. “Down at the end of the sixth row.”

  If Javendra was there…then maybe. I looked.

  “Zed,” said Jazz, “I see Steph.”

  My voice cracked. “Where?”

  “Third from the end. Seventh row.”

  And there she was, flaming red hair blowing in the cold wind, dazed, but alive.

  45

  The metal gate at the end of the top level clanged open. A man wearing the now-familiar pseudo-military garb, with a dirty yellow neckerchief and a yellow gas mask sticking out of a bag hanging from his shoulder, stood there, white-skinned and hairless, with a permanent scowl on his face.

  “You four, get down here.”

  Of course, my innate need to rebel toggled on and I stayed put. Jazz looked to me and followed my lead. Grace gave me a slight shake of her head but stuck with us. Murphy was always willing to go along with anything that involved defiance.

  “Looky here, you hairless fucknuggets, you can come on down here like I told you, or I can send some of my taints up there to bruise you back to your senses.”

  Grace shot me another disappointed look and made her way toward the end of the trailer.

  “Sorry.” Jazz followed her down.

  Murphy glanced at me and shrugged. My sit-down protest in the back of the cattle trailer lost its potency. I followed him down the ramp and out the back, glaring at our fucknugget jailer the whole time.

  Once outside, under bag head guard, they led us very distinctly not off the side of the road where all of Balmorhea’s normal survivors stood lined up. Fucknugget led us beneath one of the recently erected tents, stood us in a line, and ordered us to stay put.

  While our guards eyed us, more yellows came and went. One set up a sturdy little footstool. A pair hauled in some weighty boxes of equipment. Another took a seat at a folding table, opened a laptop, and started pecking away. Two men strolled in—one, a tall white-skin wearing a weathered battle coat with markings down the arms. He looked down on everyone, and not just because he was tall. He looked like he thought he was a royal heir, prissy and cruel, inspecting the peasants. The other was an uninfected normal wearing a scarlet sports coat, looking like a Realtor at a Sunday open house, or some soft and creepy uncle nobody wanted to leave their kids with. By the deferential reaction of the others under the tent, I guessed the pair were the big swinging dicks in their circus.

  The Realtor pointed at us and asked the prissy soldier, “Senior Man Pluta, are these are all the taints we captured? The count seems low for a colony of this size, doesn’t it?”

  “Statistically speaking,” Pluta answered, “you’re right.” He pointed vaguely toward town. “The jib crew marked five dead taints and a handful of maybes.”

  “Maybes?” asked the Realtor.

  “Fired too crispy to know for sure.”

  I estimated the distance to Senior Man Pluta and figured I could have my hands around his throat before any of the yellows could stop me. Unfortunately, I also knew I wouldn’t have enough time to choke him out before they pulled me off and beat me senseless.

  Casting a casual finger in the direction of the field where the normal prisoners were being processed, Pluta told the Realtor, “In an unusual coincidence, when we deployed for our assault, we found the town had already been surrounded by a militant cult from Albuquerque.

  “Food grab?” asked the Realtor. “Were they hijacking fuel? I’m told we captured twenty-two military vehicles on the perimeter. Is that right?”

  “Military gear and SWAT equipment,” Pluta confirmed. “Most of the cult captives are tight-lipped about their intentions. They make up nearly a quarter of all prisoners. It seems what they wanted most of all were the taints. Specifically, the intelligent ones. They were full of the usual devil spawn talk. That was the core ideology that held them together. Needless to say, they didn’t have any taints mixed in.”

  “They had a leader, then?” asked the Realtor.

  “The man calls himself Bishop Richard,” answered Pluta. “No last name.”

  “We captured him, too?”

  “Injured in a vehicle accident trying to escape. Mangled both legs, but he’ll survive. Asked God for a miracle when we took him, then he pissed himself.”

  “Has he been tagged for special treatment?” asked the Realtor.

  “Tagged and in the medical van. Gagged and under guard.”

  The Realtor pointed at us. “What about these, then? How tainted are they? What I mean to say is, are they verbal?”

  “Intel we’ve gathered indicates the dead taints and these four were part of Balmorhea’s military such as it was. At the beginning of our operation, six Humvees sallied from the south gate. A recon mission, diversionary attack, who knows? These taints were part of that group. They can drive, fire weapons, probably make independent decisions in a military situation. No doubt, they can talk.”

  “Sounds promising.” The Realtor walked over and inspected us, pausing and poking me in the chest. “Tell me, taint, can you use your words?”

  Because I just can’t help it sometimes, I spat, “Do the words ‘go fuck yourself’ count?”

  Pluta and the Realtor laughed. As the Realtor stepped back to stand by Pluta, he said, “I’d like to see the rest of the onboarding process.”

  “We typically take the alpha first. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier with the rest of them for onboarding, but by dropping the alpha down a peg, he loses respect. In the long run, the others are more malleable.”

  The Realtor showed his appreciation with a hearty nod. “You really have this down to a science, don’t you?”

  “Just following the protocols, sir.”

  “Have you gathered enough intel to determine which one the alpha is?”

  Fucknugget pointed me out. “They defer to this mouthy one right here.”

  The Realtor glanced at Murphy. “Not that big buck?”

  “Nope,” answered Fucknugget. “This is your boy. I’m sure of it.” He leaned close. “You’re gonna love this next part, taint.”

  Bag heads grabbed me from behind before I realized they were there, two on my arms, and then two on my legs. With no leverage, and with strong hands on my ankles and wrists, I couldn’t break free, no matter how hard I struggled. I didn’t cry out, though. Whatever they were up to, I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

  They hauled me over to the worn footstool and roughly shoved me to the ground in front of it. Well, not quite far enough in front. My face hit the block with a thunk that bloodied my nose and sent stars spinning through my vision. Before I could curse, a pair of strong hands turned my head to the side and pinned it down.

  “This,” a
nnounced Fucknugget, “is a buzz bolt. All ya’ll gonna get one. For you stupid ones who don’t know no better, think of it like a shock collar. We use it to train ya. Do this. Don’t do that. Shit here. Don’t shit there. Ya’ll done had dogs before. You know how it works. All four ya’ll gonna know who’s in charge. We gonna buzz all the stubborn right outta your heads.”

  Something cold and hard slapped down on the side of my head, just above and behind my left ear. I struggled, but the hands on my head pushed down so hard I thought my skull might crack. A drill whined to life, drawing so close I could hear nothing else, until the first screw burrowed into my bone. Then I screamed.

  46

  I came to, laying in the dirt beneath the tent. Jazz was screaming over the whine of the drill. Pluta was gesturing and explaining something for the Realtor. Murphy lay unconscious near me. Grace lay sobbing softly with a hand exploring the black puck bolted to her skull.

  With my hands and feet free, I decided it was high time I did some killing. I pushed myself up and jumped to my feet, intent on rushing Pluta and the Realtor. As I tried to lunge, I lost my balance and fell on top of Murphy. Fucknugget laughed, and so did most of the yellows around.

  “Get ‘em all up,” yelled Fucknugget.

  Hands took my arms and pulled me up to my feet. I swayed, barely able to keep my balance.

  They dragged Grace up beside me as one of them took to slapping Murphy across the face until he found consciousness again. Jazz, having just passed out from the buzz bolt install, puked when they helped her to stand.

  The Realtor walked over for a closer look. With Jazz, he dragged two fingers through the blood trickling down her neck. “How long before the bleeding stops?”