Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  “If you were a rocket scientist,” Salgado answered flatly, “you wouldn’t have been captured by a gang of taints so dumb they have a hard time learning dog tricks. Get over yourself, and this will be a lot easier for both of us. I see from your paperwork you go by the name, Zed. Is that correct?”

  “It’s what people call me.”

  “If people called you Dog Squat, would you want me to put that on your paperwork?”

  “It’s not my paperwork. I don’t care what you put on it.”

  “Did you not understand the part about making this easier on both of us? I can say it again. Slower if it’ll help.”

  “Look, I’m going through your little monkey routine because Bill asked me to. I don’t have to like it.”

  “Is that what your life has been since the collapse? All things you like? Nothing unpleasant?” Salgado flipped the sheets on his clipboard, scanning what was written there. “How did you like it when the taints overran your trailer trash oasis and took all your stuff? You’re from that bunch, aren’t you? How’d you like sitting in that jail cell for weeks thinking we were going to starve you to death? Your life must be all peaches ‘n cream. Oh, and looky here.” Salgado tapped the paper on his clipboard. “It says, before the collapse, you were a barista. Pouring coffee for caffeine-addicted assholes? Did you like that, too? What, were you, still in high school then? Were you livin’ the dream, jerking off in the shower and playing video games all night while your parents watched Seinfeld reruns in the living room?”

  He was closer to the truth than he knew. It was disconcerting and certainly depressing. “How do you know that stuff?”

  “Look around, numbskull. This isn’t your Mad Max desert fantasy anymore. We’re rebuilding here. We’re systematized. We’re thorough. We interview everyone we bring in.” That’s when Salgado’s enthusiasm for his dressing me down faded, and he slipped into what sounded like a rote recitation. “Bill wants to know what everyone’s talents, aptitudes, and skills are. Everybody has a place, and a potential.” He looked at me again and he seemed to be asking sincerely. “That’s what we’re going to spend these several days figuring out. I’m asking you nicely, can you please not act like an ass every time I ask you a question?”

  93

  Salgado led me along a wide walkway down the center of the show barn. To our left, inside a chain-link cage large enough to park a few school buses within, wild Whites, naked and foul, squatted, stood, or stared at the sunlight coming through the skylights, or fought with one another over scraps of meat in the dirt.

  “We have a system.” Salgado pointed at the Whites in the first cage. “The worst of them go in Partition One. These are just animals in here. Worse than dumb animals acting on instinct, though. But you know that. Everybody knows that. They’re still smart enough to be dangerous. Incorrigible and useless. Most of the taints out in the world are like these.” He glanced over at me.

  At the next cage, the Whites inside looked pretty much the same as those in the first cage.

  “Partition Two, not as violent, but just as cognitively debilitated as Partition One. They tend to be followers out in the wild. Never the alphas. We haven’t found a use for this type that doesn’t take more effort than they’re worth.”

  I thought about Russell all those years ago, unable to speak. Dumb as a brick. At least it always seemed that way, but there at the end, when the people he loved were in danger on that listing riverboat, he’d tried to protect them, in his way. He’d died doing it. The memory felt like an icepick to the heart, but the pain passed, repressed into numbness almost as soon as it rose. It was old. One more wound that would never heal.

  Partition Three contained vicious Whites again. At least to my eye.

  “These,” Salgado told me, “can be trained, though none of these in here have started the process. They’ve gone through their evaluation, and they’re awaiting pickup by the corps training group. These make up the muscle of our armed forces. No doubt you saw them in action out in Hillbillyville.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I asked you to be courteous. I need to be, as well. I shouldn’t have disparaged your settlement.”

  We crossed a wide, yellow line in the dirt on the floor. A matching line had been painted up the walls and across the ceiling, separating the vast show barn into two sections. At the next partition, Salgado pointed. “Low yellows. These all go to the corps. These can understand basic English, a limited vocabulary. They are capable of acting as alphas for squads of the trained taints you saw in the last cage. If this were a traditional army, you might call these corporals. Potentially. Each of these will eventually act as an alpha for a handful of the stupid ones.”

  “No women here?”

  “They have their own evaluation facility. Mixing genders increases aggression in the males. Removing the females makes the males easier to control.”

  We passed the mid yellows, fewer still. They could speak and understand. They were what I used to call Smart Ones. They all looked half-crazy and ready to tear my head off. All were smart enough to be useful, stupid enough to be fearless, and vicious enough to be extremely dangerous. They were the strength that pounded the hammer of Bill’s army.

  We stopped at a near-empty cage.

  “These,” said Salgado, “are the high yellows. You’ll be in this group. Most taints in here have some cognitive limitations or a kinetic handicap. They could function in the old society like normal people and nobody would ever notice if it weren’t for the white skin.” Salgado flipped through the pages on his clipboard, searching until he found something. “It says in here that you have trouble shooting guns.”

  I felt terribly self-conscious about that. “I do fine with a shotgun. And a machine gun.”

  “With tracers?” he guessed.

  I nodded my admission.

  “Because you can follow the line of lights onto your target. Don’t worry, everybody infected with the disease suffers some type of debilitation. Everybody. With some, like you, it’s obvious. With others, it’s subtle, maybe something that doesn’t show up in this world we now live in. Some have lost the ability to read. Others can no longer add numbers in their head. This virus manifests like a stroke in most brains, killing small parts here and there. You should feel lucky you only lost the ability to aim a gun. Some early ones lost control of a leg or hand. Some went blind. Very few with any degree of physical handicap survived. Easy targets, if you know what I mean.”

  I did, and then a question occurred to me. “What’s Bill’s handicap?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You mean you’re not allowed to tell me?”

  He shook his head. “I mean, I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew.”

  94

  They ran me through the infantile shape-matching test and then proceeded on to letter and number matching, as though they’d cleaned out a preschool of all the learning toys and were intent on getting some use out of them. For breaks from the boredom of that, Salgado started the physical evaluation. I had to climb a rope, cross monkey bars, and swim laps in a pool. That was all before lunch.

  After a meal of coarse bread and a vegetable stew with stringy meat, I worked my way through the elementary school level tests—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, nouns, verbs, sentence structure, and basic reading comprehension. That was followed by a lengthy endurance test in the afternoon. Or more clearly, a series of them that culminated in a five-mile run.

  On the second day, I started with an IQ test, and was then sent out on an obstacle course. After lunch, I took another lengthy test that felt a lot like an SAT. After that, I drove a car on a closed course, rode a bike, rappelled, pitched a tent, and built a fire. After dinner, they ran me through a battery of tests that I guessed had been designed by pscyhologists in the pre-collapse era to ascertain emotional stability, personality characteristics, and probably overall integrity—however that could be measured by some numerical value.

  The thir
d day was filled with strength and agility tests, mixed with increasingly difficult and subject-specific, college-level exams. By the time they let me go back to my bunk in the cage, I was so tired I went to sleep as the sun was setting.

  I woke early the next morning to a quiet, dawning world. While I was taking my morning piss in the trough at the rear of the cage, I heard the Whites on the far end fighting over something. They always woke surly and hungry and didn’t settle down until after their morning feeding. A few of them were particularly interested in Salgado, who was also up early and walking down the central corridor with one of the guards. They weren’t in any hurry, as they seemed to be preoccupied with a menial task.

  I stretched to get the kinks out of my abused muscles and groaned for no reason other than I wanted to. It didn’t help anything. I didn’t have an audience to dramatize in front of, but it felt good. For mental reasons, I decided. I put on my boots, figuring I might as well be ready for the next day’s simulated tribulations. As I was crossing the cage to intercept Salgado as he neared, the lights inside the vast show barn plinked off. The electronic locks on the White pens clicked loudly and popped open. A surprised silence followed, broken when the guard with Salgado muttered, “Shit.”

  Walking hurriedly up the central concourse to get farther away from the feral Whites at the far end, Salgado withdrew his cellphone from his pocket and frantically dialed. The guard with him kept turning, stumbling over his feet, and rushing to catch up with Salgado as he made his case in rushed words for some action the two of them should be taking but weren’t.

  One of the gates slammed open down at the far end. That was followed by a sound I’d heard a million times since I’d witnessed infected Dan mutilating my mother’s corpse on the day my life switched gears from pre-collapse cush to post-apoc survival—the Whites were out. And they were coming.

  The guard with Salgado pointed his click-zapper at the mob while drawing a pistol, ready to defend himself with all means at his disposal.

  Salgado shouted at his unresponsive phone.

  The guard took half-steps back, deciding whether to bolt.

  I’d seen too many versions of the unfolding tragedy to think anything but the worse was coming. I shouted, “Run!”

  Salgado froze, looking at me, stuck between whatever choices seemed reasonable in his mind.

  I glanced around for armed enforcer types rushing into the show barn, but saw no one, so I flung my gate open and took a step out, but stopped. Indecision froze me, too. What if I were outside my cage when the enforcers did show up? They’d not know me from the crazed white skins scrambling out of open doors all up and down the concourse.

  The guard cursed again, clearly pressing the button on his clicker to no effect.

  I ran to Salgado, grabbing his arm, and yanking him out of his stupor. His clipboard fell. Papers went flying.

  The guard fired his pistol, popping through all the rounds in seconds, before turning to run as well. Unfortunately, he stumbled over his feet one last fatal time and tumbled into the dirt. Crazed Whites were on him before I could even shout a warning. He screamed in that terrifying, familiar way everyone screams when their flesh tears in the teeth of a wild animal.

  Pushing Salgado toward my cage, I realized I was making a mistake. Without the lock on the door, and with nothing I could think to use to wedge it closed, I could never hold it shut once the Whites spotted Salgado’s normal flesh cowering inside. But I was already out of choices on the matter. The Whites were coming on too fast. They’d already cut off our path to a door at the far end of the barn.

  “Where is the cavalry?” shouted Salgado, as he stopped, pointing his click-zapper and uselessly pressing the button.

  I pointed up the chain-link wall of my cage. “Climb. Climb like your life depends on it.”

  To his credit, he didn’t argue, but monkeyed up, heading for the top, knowing as well as I did, the chain-link top running across all the pens was no kind of escape from anything. It was only a delay. “Aren’t you coming?”

  No, I wasn’t. I ripped off my shirt to expose my bare, white skin. I turned toward the coming gang of Whites, flexed my wiry muscles and roared, challenging them, daring them to take another step.

  Those in front stumbled as they slowed, but those in back pushed through, and that was the whole of the effect I had on them.

  When the first of them was close enough, I tried to deck him with a punch to the throat, but he was already dodging away from me as though he’d never planned to get within arm’s reach anyway. That was the real effect of my challenge, the mob had split past me, none daring to come close enough for me to attack them. But they were hitting the fence, climbing after Salgado. And that was good enough for my purposes.

  I spun and reached for one who was already five feet up. I grabbed his ankles and tugged.

  Not expecting to have his feet pulled out from under him, the White’s grip above wasn’t ready to support his weight and he slipped down the fence, bending backwards as the rough galvanized wire shredded his face to blood and meat. I wasn’t done with the cruelty I had in store for him. I shoved his ankles up over my head as his torso slipped past, bending his back into a hairpin twist and feeling something snap inside. That’s when I let go.

  I jumped over his soon-to-be dead body and grabbed another White off the fence.

  An opportunistic White pounced on the first White I’d pulled down, tearing at its throat.

  I yanked another off the fence, stomped him across the neck, and kicked him in the face to add him to the breakfast menu.

  95

  Having climbed to the top of the fence, I positioned myself to kick another White in the face as he reached the top. That bought me and Salgado some time. Four bleeding Whites were on the ground. The others were focused on their warm meat. For the moment. With over a hundred running through the dirt along the concourse, I knew the few bodies wouldn’t keep the Whites busy for long. I knew, too, that I’d never hold them off, if enough of them decided to scale the fence at the same time, looking to get their teeth in Salgado.

  I glanced at the ends of the big show barn, instantly spotting the doors. Neither had yet opened, no help poured through. When I turned to seek alternatives, Salgado was yelling at his unresponsive phone again. He was a hardheaded man, but he wasn’t going to live long if I didn’t find us a way out. That’s when I noticed the skylights. Of course, I knew they were there. But at the peak, where the roof stood nearly thirty feet up from the ground, making them inaccessible. Following the roof’s slope down to the outer edge, which stood only fifteen feet tall, I spotted skylights I could reach from the top of the cage. Each was spider-webbed with cracks from decades of punishment by the hot Texas sun. I shouted, “C’mon!” I was already running over the chain-link roof of my pen. “C’mon, dammit!”

  He loped across the wire mesh as quickly as he could.

  Reaching the skylight, I punched. Even through my virus-dulled nerves, it hurt too much to punch a second time. Especially for no effect. I went after it with my hook, punching and screaming, because my stump wasn’t fully healed. Finally, the thin Plexiglas shattered, and a large chunk broke away, giving me room to pound the upper layer.

  “They’re coming,” pleaded Salgado.

  I didn’t look. It didn’t matter. Either we’d get through, or we wouldn’t. If the Whites caught us, nothing I could do would save Salgado. In trying, I’d only get myself killed, too. I’d have to abandon him.

  “Hurry,” he whined.

  The top layer of Plexiglas shattered.

  “Go!” I dropped to my hands and knees so Salgado could use my back to step up. He understood immediately and jumped, climbing through above me.

  At the front edge of the pens, several Whites were climbing onto the top.

  I leapt up through the hole. Salgado grabbed my belt and pulled, half dragging me onto the roof, as sharp edges of Plexiglas cut my chest and stomach. I came to rest on my back, panting, “Damn.”


  We weren’t out of danger, yet.

  Salgado scanned the vast roof for our next escape.

  Leaking blood out of several deep wounds, I rolled up to my hands and knees. I was going to need stitches if I lived that long.

  “There.” Salgado pointed. At a corner near the front of the building, a ladder stood up from the edge.

  “No. This way.” I sprinted across the roof, my feet banging like thunder over the sheet metal. We reached the edge in seconds, and two or three minutes faster than we could have crossed the roof to get to the ladder. From there, I didn’t ask or suggest. “Roll when you hit.” I jumped, hit the ground hard and rolled as my knees stung from the impact.

  Salgado, doing it the slow way, and maybe the smart way, was busy climbing over the roof’s edge, swinging his feet down closer to the ground.

  “Hurry,” I urged. “If they see you, we’re lost anyway.”

  He dropped in a clumsy heap.

  I rushed over, thinking he’d injured himself.

  Catching his breath, he said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  I dragged him to his feet. “Can you run?” I was already moving, pulling him along.

  His feet caught up with events and carried his weight, but he was moving slowly, pointing out across the field toward the obstacle course in the distance.

  “They’ll see us when they get onto the roof if we head that way.” I hoped they wouldn’t come rushing out through the door at the far end of the building we were racing toward. But that’s the way risk worked. You placed your bets and you rolled the dice. The rest was beyond your control.

  96

  From inside a small, flat-roofed barn, a hundred yards behind the show barn, we watched as squads of yellows mustered outside the show barn. They’d soon storm in.

  Salgado dropped into the old straw on the floor and slumped against the wall. “I hate this more every day.”