Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  Bill came back to the table and seated himself as he picked up his silverware. “How many chances should one give, do you think? Three? One? Five?”

  “Forgiveness is situational.”

  “Is that what you want from me, now? Forgiveness?”

  I was still holding my greasy fork, knowing I couldn’t tell Bill what I truly wanted. “I acted inappropriately. I ask your forgiveness.”

  Bill nodded, and that was that. “We interview everyone we bring in, whether normal, infected, or in-between, like you and I. We know a great deal about Balmorhea, about you, Murphy, Steph. Anyone of significance.”

  Trying not to be combative, I asked, “How do you interview a White?”

  “I can see by the look on your face, you’re confused. Perhaps ‘evaluate’ would be a better word where the infected are concerned. Those with the mental capacity, we put into our army and train them to fit. As for the normals, as I told you, critical mass is everything when trying to rebuild society. That is what we are doing here in New Tejas, rebuilding, as I assure you, countless other groups are attempting across the globe.”

  “There was a guy in our barracks,” I told him. “he said people have to stay for a year, and then they get to choose. Now he’s gone. Is he free, or is he dead?”

  “As hopeless as your long-term situation was in Balmorhea, you people had a good life. Thanks in large part to you, which is why you and I are having this conversation. Most communities we assimilate—”

  “Assimilate?” I accused. “That sounds like a euphemism for conquer and kill.”

  “Anyone who can be conquered will be. That is a simple truth of the way the world is now. No, that’s not true—that’s the way the world has always been. Always. You’re educated. You know your history. Think on it in those terms and you’ll see I’m right. You may have been able to pretend it wasn’t true in Balmorhea because a wide desert insulated you from the changing world, but now you know better, don’t you?”

  “Murphy told me you killed twenty-eight of us. Is that true? Only twenty-eight?”

  Bill nodded as he chewed. “Proportionally, that’s significantly more than our average, but Balmorhea was a special case, wasn’t it? The largest single community we’ve assimilated so far. Cohesive. Well-armed. Prepared defenses. It was expensive for us. We lost over fourteen hundred trained infected.”

  “My God, how do you sleep at night?”

  “I’ll not compare headcounts and clear consciences with you while you pretend to be blameless. How many did you murder just a few nights ago, and for what? Revenge over a girl who reminded you of Steph?”

  All I saw was red then, as I calculated whether I could kill Bill before his bodyguards zapped my brain into a puddle of fried goo.

  “As you simmer in anger over that girl Pluta and his savages brutalized, ask yourself, how many normal people did you kill on that mission to the munitions factory? Yet nobody raided your barracks in the middle of the night and burned you alive. Did they?”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. Not once, when I was burning and killing.

  Bill turned to one of his bodyguards. “Bring another beer for our friend. He is going to need one.” Looking back at me, he said, “Hypocrisy hurts when it shows up in your mirror.”

  89

  Bill left me with my thoughts as I finished my barbecue and ate my mock banana pudding. As I calmed, I took several gulps of beer, and I sat back in my chair.

  “It’s sometimes easy to see the world in blacks and whites, heroes and villains,” Bill told me. “I get the impression that is the world you wish you lived in, as a way to hide from the pragmatism and ruthlessness you apply to the real world when you’re outside Balmorhea’s walls.”

  My reflexive response was to disagree, and then argue, but I was still reeling from Bill’s body blow over my hypocrisy. Unfortunately, he was right about that, and I’d not even seen it. Emotions had clouded my ability to think clearly. Maybe they had for a long time.

  “Zed—may I call you Zed?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t want us to be enemies. I have a strong suspicion that you’re intelligent enough to truly understand what we’re building here. I also believe you have the fortitude to help us in reaching our goals.”

  “I—” I didn’t want to fall into another cesspool of my own hypocrisy. “Forgive me for saying this, but life here is cheap. I don’t know that I could ever—” I didn’t even know what followed any ‘ever’ I could imagine.

  “Human life, that of the normals, is infinitely precious to me. I traded over fourteen hundred trained infected to bring five hundred normals here. Because here, I believe they’re safe. As for the infected we lost, they represent a loss of resources, yes, but lives? No. Mindless monsters turned to a purpose, that’s all they were. If you honestly believed they were more than that, this world would have killed you many years ago.”

  “If the normals are precious and the infected are worthless,” I asked, “then where do you and I fit in? Why do all this? I mean, you get an entourage and you can tell people what to do, but that’s an overrated benefit if there ever was one. Wealth isn’t really a thing anymore. Is this all about getting an extra serving at dinner and getting out of doing your share of work in the fields?”

  “Whoever builds the world that grows out of the current chaos,” Bill told me, “is going to make the rules. Not just for today and tomorrow, but for the next thousand years.”

  “A Thousand-Year Reich,” I scoffed. “I didn’t figure you for the Führer type.”

  “Hitler killed himself in a bunker in 1945. I’ll still be here in a thousand years, reaping what I sow.”

  I laughed out loud. I hadn’t pegged Bill for a crazy, but all of us intelligent infected had a few loose screws.

  Totally serious, Bill asked, “You don’t believe?”

  I held up my hook. “I sure hope it regenerates, but immortality? I want to believe, I just don’t.”

  “The truth is right in front of you, Zed. It’s been there all along, getting more stark with each passing year. All of us who had their genome altered by the virus and survived, we don’t age. We regress to our optimal maturity. Tell me Zed, how old do I look?”

  He looked twenty-something. All of us Slow Burns in Balmorhea did. I decided not to guess.

  “I’ll be sixty-nine this year,” he told me. “I rarely get sick, and every wound heals. Tell me it’s different for you.”

  I couldn’t.

  “Our scars fade to nothing,” he went on. “We regenerate lost limbs. You’ll learn that over the coming months.” He raised a hand to his young face. “This is eternal youth. This is the face of immortality.”

  90

  Bill granted me a night in the hospital with Steph. I arrived late in the afternoon, and somehow, an hour evaporated into eternity as the tears fell, and we held each other like we could truly never let go. The staff brought her dinner on a tray and came back with an extra meal for me. Steph was horrified over the loss of my hand and enraged over the brutality of the people who owed their fealty to Bill. She decided that he was well worth her hate, and she wasn’t the type to hate easily.

  She was weak, gaunt, and tired like I’d never seen before. I asked about the cancer, but she deftly steered things back to what had happened to me. I rushed through a watered-down version of all that had occurred after Balmorhea, but she already knew more than I admitted, because Murphy had ratted me out over the worst stuff.

  She pushed for me to tell her about my lunch with Bill and explain the sudden shift in Zed policy. I refused, and raised my palms as if to reveal to her the presence of the hospital in which we sat. “We have to talk about this. I’m not saying another word about anything until we do.”

  She took my remaining hand and sandwiched it between hers. She looked away, gathered her courage, and then her damp eyes settled on mine. “You talked to Murphy about this?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Then you k
now.”

  “Can they do surgery and remove the tumors?”

  “Here, in this hospital they could.” Steph took a long pause. “The doctors didn’t agree. If I’d had surgery, it might have bought me—”

  “Might have?” I asked. “As in past tense?”

  “If I’d had the surgery when I first arrived,” she took a moment to find the right words, “it might have bought me another three or four months. Maybe another six if I were lucky.”

  I coughed to cover the sob that tried to climb out of my chest.

  “I know this hurts,” she told me.

  “Go on. Tell me.”

  “Surgery in these cases is always a gamble. It could just as easily have killed me.”

  “Wait.” I took a deep breath to try and keep my composure. “Murphy was really unclear about what they can do for you here. They can’t have chemo or radiation, can they?”

  Steph shook her head.

  I’d been through so much on such small odds so many times, I knew my intuition on such things was badly twisted. Still, I couldn’t help but say, “I don’t understand why you didn’t at least try the surgery.”

  “Opting out of the surgery seemed like my best chance to see you again.” She gulped on her words, and then tears rolled, one-by-one, down her cheeks. “I knew you’d find your way to me, because I know how damn persistent you can be.”

  I smiled and laughed through my own tears. “Persistent, that’s a good word for it.”

  “Zed, I needed you to hold me when I told you goodbye.”

  After that, we held one another in her hospital bed and cried ourselves out.

  At her urging, I walked down to the basement cafeteria and picked up a few slices of sweet potato pie—ack. Steph assured me I wouldn’t regret it. I brought them back to the room and we ate. I was pleasantly surprised. I told her, “Murphy said some things about, I don’t know, gene therapy or something. Are they treating you at all, or just giving you drugs to make you comfortable?”

  “You remember Preacher Dick, and that thing he did with the girl’s arm?”

  “As if I could forget.”

  She smiled and kicked me. “It’s a segue. Don’t be an ass all the time.”

  “I love a girl who can use the word segue in a sentence.”

  “You love a girl with a vagina,” she laughed.

  That wasn’t true. Sure, a natural set of complementary sex organs was a prerequisite, but I laughed anyway, because it was good seeing her smile.

  She said, “They did this orientation and evaluation thing with us when we arrived.”

  “Are we still segueing?”

  “Keep up, Zed. This is multifaceted.”

  “I remember when you used to be a nice person.”

  Steph rolled her eyes. “Bill, whom we never met, because none of us are special like you, has a theory about critical mass where you need—”

  “Bill told me himself.”

  “During lunch? The one you won’t tell me about?”

  “You’re the one who decided on the double segue, otherwise we might be done already.”

  She squeezed my sole hand. “It’s good to see you happy.”

  “I’m happy because I’m with you, right here, right now, and I’m 100% serious about that. Out there, rolling dirt clods around on Bill’s anthill, I’m the worst version of myself all day long.”

  “Sullen and angry?”

  “As ever.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “What can I say? You light up my life.”

  “If you start singing, I’m going to punch you in the nuts.”

  “You were saying?”

  “Medically, in this world, this hospital is pretty great. It outclasses what we had in Bal.”

  I agreed. Of course.

  She told me, “They only have enough medical critical mass to research one thing.”

  “Immortality?” I guessed.

  “Specifically, the way the virus alters human DNA.”

  “They can do that kind of science here in Podunk, post-apoc, Taylor Town, Texas?”

  “CRISPR editing isn’t as difficult as the layperson might think.”

  “I don’t understand how all this means anything for our immediate cancer problem.”

  “Zed, what they’re working on isn’t a Band-Aid or a maintenance drug. If Preacher Dick was right, if your buddy Bill and the doctors here are right, they’re working on the fix to everything. All illness. All cancers. Limb regeneration, even—”

  “Immortality?” It still seemed too fantastical for me to buy.

  “Perhaps just a reversal of senescence at the cellular level.”

  “Which means?”

  “The fountain of youth? Cell death and organ failure might still lead to death at a natural age. The doctors here don’t know one way or the other. I’m not sold on immortality, either.”

  91

  Daring to ask the question, I put it on the table. “Are you telling me there’s hope?”

  “Not without a miraculous piece of luck. For a decade, they’ve been working on a method to deliver the virus’s benefits to the host without the negative side effects.”

  “Like losing your mind or dying? Those side effects?”

  “Those are the ones,” Steph confirmed. “They’ve made incremental progress.”

  “Why are you here, then? What good is this hospital?”

  “They’ve been giving me phase I and phase II drugs that—”

  “Wait. What? They’re using you for a Guinea pig?”

  “It’s not like that, Zed. In this world, nobody has the ability to fully test anything. At least here I have a chance.”

  I nodded as my emotional circuit breakers did their usual thing, kicking me into numbness.

  Steph wiped a few tears off her face. “Now, I’ve told you everything. You tell me about this Bill lunch. What does he want from you?”

  I ran through the bulk of it and then told her, “He wants to run me through a battery of cognitive and physical tests so he can measure my potential, or something like that.”

  “That’s it?” Steph didn’t believe me.

  “For Bill, Taylor Town is just a seed. He wants it to grow, and the more it grows, the more bureaucrats he’s going to need. He didn’t come right out and say it, except for the creepy thing old guys do where they say, ‘You remind me of me when I was young.’ Total bullshit. The way he tells it, he and I never were—and never will be—anything alike.”

  “The more he wants it to grow?” asked Steph, laughing at Bill. “Does he want to be the King of Texas?”

  “Bill believes in this immortality business. He thinks that gives him enough time to conquer the whole world.”

  “That’s crazy.” Steph laughed a little nervously. “Did he actually say that?”

  “Not in so many words, but he thinks Slow Burns, those rare few of us who aren’t cognitively impaired, will rule everything. He thinks it’s inevitable.”

  “Because you’ll live forever. Jesus.”

  “Yeah, double jumpin’ Jesus.”

  “Did he sound crazy when you were talking to him?” asked Steph.

  “He sounded just as sane as you and me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I squeezed Steph’s hand. “What are we going to do?”

  “No,” Steph told me. “I know how you are. You’re not wired for middle management in King Bill’s Crazy Circus. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to keep Bill happy, so his doctors will do their best to cure you.”

  92

  The place looked like it had been a county fair show barn before the collapse. Bill’s people called it an evaluation center. Two of them walked through the front door and shoved me down onto a long wooden bench, one of ten sitting on a dirt-floor reception area.

  Seven others, all white-skinned infectees like me, already waited there. Two were restless, disgruntled, shackled by wris
ts and ankles and chained to the bench. A few waited listlessly, one staring at nothing, another being quietly interviewed by a man carrying a clipboard and pen.

  Before the thugs abandoned me, a normal, a mousy man named Salgado, arrived to take up a spot on the dirt floor in front of me. Decidedly beyond my reach. “You can speak?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  Exasperated, he turned to one of my thugs. “He can speak?”

  The thug nodded. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the habit of being a dick for no reason at all.

  Salgado turned back to me, eyes almost pleading. “Believe me when I tell you this. It’ll go easier for you here if you cooperate. If you can speak, then talk to me. Otherwise.” He glanced down at the end of the bench where a ragged woman struggled futilely against her chains.

  “I can talk,” I told him.

  “You’re cognitively capable?” he asked me.

  I held out my hand to underscore the obvious color of my skin. “My only handicap.”

  He glanced back at my thugs. “Has he exhibited any violent tendencies?”

  “Not today.” It was the first word I’d heard either of them utter. “It has a rebellious nature.”

  Salgado showed me the clicker he carried with him. “You understand what this is, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You understand what I’ll do if you fail to follow directions or if you turn violent?”

  “I’m a frequent flyer.”

  Salgado stared down at me as though he were reading my genetics through my skin. Coming to his conclusion, he told the thugs he had me under control. They turned and headed for the door. “You’re here at the evaluation center because you have a degree of mental capacity. I’ll be your personal examiner for the next several days because word came down from Bill that you’re to receive special attention. Do you understand?”

  “This isn’t rocket science.”