Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  I hollered, “That’s what she said.”

  Bill’s poker face pinched up in an angry twist. He raised his hand and pressed a finger into his empty palm, kind of like Spiderman. My remaining hostages spasmed and dropped to the floor, jerking and kicking. That was my cue. I laid down on the floor and waited.

  Lying near the back wall, staying still to sell the ruse, I held my hook just above the clicker-zapper that I’d placed on the floor in exactly that spot. My good hand held the flamethrower, with my fingers on the trigger, the pilot jet burning blue.

  Still wearing my gas mask, hence, able to keep my eyes open, yet hidden, I watched two of Bill’s linebacker bodyguards stalk into the room, giving it a good look around. When Bill followed, he surveyed the damage we’d done and walked over to me as a few more of his militiamen entered.

  He nudged me with his boot. “What a shame.”

  With the smallest of movements, I depressed the button on the clicker-zapper.

  Bill’s toughs stumbled. The shock kicked in and they went stiff and collapsed. That’s about how long it took Bill’s ultra-smart brain to process that something was seriously amiss, and he took a quick step for the door.

  Unfortunately for him, I hooked his ankle.

  Down he went.

  I rolled over, bringing my flamethrower to bear, holding the blue pilot jet just inches above his crotch, the nozzle pointed up at his face. I said, “Yes, Bill, what a shame.”

  109

  Bill’s cellular network brought an ease to the negotiation and fulfillment process that made me envy pre-collapse criminals who’d gotten themselves stuck in hostage situations. Bill telephoned his number two and provided a list of our demands, a schedule, and the specifics of the horrors that would befall Bill in the event of noncompliance—basically, Bill would start losing pieces of himself.

  To me, the deal seemed like a no-brainer. What I asked for, New Tejas didn’t need and wouldn’t miss. What I offered in exchange was priceless and irreplaceable—Wild Bill, their god, alive and relatively unharmed.

  Our supplies arrived in less than two hours on a flatbed trailer behind a pickup—food, water, diesel, ammunition, guns, full tanks for the flamethrowers, various medications, and warm clothing. Not being the trusting type, I utilized our abundant supply of Bill’s thugs and put Murphy and Jazz to work forcing the thugs to taste test every container of food provided. One of the diesel cans was dumped and then refilled from another so that each could be checked individually for explosives or even tracking devices. In that way, we worked our way through the supplies, loading them into Bill’s personal pearly-white SUV and one belonging to the bodyguards who followed him everywhere.

  While that was going on, Grace and I kept Bill inside the bunker, out of sight and under threat.

  Steph arrived as dawn was breaking across the sky. Her accompanying doctor pushed her wheelchair up to the blasted front door.

  “You can’t take her in this condition,” he told me when I peeked out.

  “Lay down and put your hands behind your back,” I told him. “Don’t move until I come back for you.”

  Steph stood and walked inside on wobbly legs. Of course, we hugged. She cried, but I was too amped out of my gourd on danger and adrenaline to let any of those kinds of emotions bubble up to distract me.

  “I’ve got Bill,” Grace told me, as she nodded toward one of the overturned chairs in the room.

  “If you care for her,” the doctor outside called, “you’ll let me take her back to the hospital.”

  “You will not say another word unless I ask you a question,” I called back. I grabbed a chair and righted it for Steph to sit on. “Are you alright?”

  “Zed, I’m dying.”

  Something about that sounded terribly certain and final, so much so, that I didn’t know what to say. In fact, I found myself unable to speak as I stared at her. I couldn’t move. I don’t even know if I breathed. It felt like I’d hit a wall in time, one that dunked me in morphine and left me disconnected from the world.

  Steph reached up and touched my cheek, as tears crept down her own. “Talk to me. Tell me you’re alright.”

  I nodded. Still unable to get a word through my constricted throat.

  She stood and took me in her arms, whispering her love into my ear and apologizing for her condition.

  All I could do was shake my head, until I finally said, “It’s not your fault. I was never your fault. I—” I wanted to tell her what Salgado had told me, that Bill’s staff of Mengeles were experimenting on her, stealing what little time she had left, but I couldn’t bring myself to crush what little hope she might have left, no matter that it was built on a foundation of lies.

  She pulled back, kissed me, looked around at the destruction, and forced a smile. “You’ve been busy.”

  I smiled, too, and sucked in my blubbery tears. “Some people won’t listen to reason.”

  She pulled me tight again. “Zed, you’ll be alright. Okay? You will. Promise me you will.”

  “I can’t. I don’t think I’ll ever breathe again.”

  “You have to.” She glanced over at Grace. “They depend on you. You know that, don’t you? We all depend on you.”

  I shook my head, because I couldn’t believe it. And didn’t care. Not in any way that made any sense at the moment.

  “Murphy, Grace, and Jazz, they’re your family,” she told me. “You have to take care of each other.”

  “I can get you out of here. We can all go right now.” I steeled my nerves to ask the hardest question I ever had to speak. “Do you want to escape, or go back to the hospital?”

  “I’d rather have a day with you than a lifetime alone.”

  It was my turn to wrap her in my arms and sob.

  110

  Three weeks later, Steph died in Oklahoma, in the flat grasslands out in the panhandle where you can stand in the dirt and see all the way to forever.

  One morning before the wind kicked up, I pulled the hood off of a Dodge pickup, laid her body down on it, and cremated her in the parking lot of a highway gas station. Afterward, I took great care in sweeping her ashes into an empty paint can that had to serve as her urn.

  We lost an SUV and half our supplies in an ambush just east of Pueblo. We proceeded with the one SUV and the supplies we had left.

  It was early summer by the time we finally found ourselves on the winding dirt road up to Pike’s Peak. Despite the season, a cold wind blew through a bright, blue sky and the temperature fell to near freezing as we climbed.

  Grace was driving and Murphy was in the front with her. Jazz and I were in the back. I was staring at a pair of lakes far below when Grace pumped the brakes and Murphy said, “What’s this?”

  In seconds, we were all out of the vehicle, weapons at the ready. It wasn’t an ambush. There wasn’t any cover from which to mount one. Scattered around the parking area at the peak of the mountain, some group of twisted zealots had planted scores of upside-down crosses. Hammered onto the heavy timbers, in various states of decay, hung crucified bodies.

  “We can go back down.” Grace was spooked. “Find another mountain.”

  Feeling somewhat fearless with my flamethrower on my back, I marched forward. Murphy followed. And then so did Jazz and Grace. I stopped in front of the first crucified body, stripped bare and desiccated. It looked like a mummy with no wrappings. It had been a woman, with skin as infected and white as my own.

  Out in the desert, I’d seen what sun and wind could do to a body if the scavengers didn’t get to it. “She’s been here for years.”

  Shaking his head at the atrocity, Murphy walked over and touched the woman’s leathery old skin. “These have all been up here a long time.”

  “They’re Whites,” realized Grace.

  For no one, or everyone, Jazz’s voice cracked when she asked, “Why does everybody hate us so much?”

  We searched the barren landscape and found nothing. A few vehicles rested on flat, brittle tires
—those that weren’t burnt down to their shells—looking like they hadn’t moved in ten years. The expansive Summit Complex that housed the souvenir shop, restaurant, and convenience store didn’t hide any living creatures of any sort. And then we relaxed. At least as much as we ever did when we’re out in the world.

  I fetched my paint can containing Steph’s ashes and climbed up to the roof deck where tourists used to stand to take photos of the countless green and gray mountains to the west, or the boundless tan plains stretching off to Kansas to the east. Far below, Interstate 25 wound north and south through a gridwork of broken streets and colored rectangles that used to be Colorado Springs.

  Standing several paces behind me, Murphy said, “Probably should stay up here tonight. Don’t want to get caught on those roads down there in the dark.”

  I nodded as I stared at the sky starting to change hue far in the east.

  “It’s gonna get cold as your mamma’s tits up here,” he added. “We can hole up in the visitor’s center. Still plenty of stuff in there we can burn to stay warm.”

  Without looking back, I said, “You’re a good friend, Murphy.”

  “I know.”

  “And Grace and Jazz, too.”

  “They know.”

  I shed my flamethrower rig, laying it carefully on the deck, and placed Steph’s urn on the rickety rail.

  “Don’t lean on that,” Murphy warned,

  Though I could see Colorado Springs eight-thousand feet down, the rocky ground just below me was only a fifteen-foot fall away. Plenty far to break an ankle or fracture a skull. I took care to keep my weight on my feet.

  As I stared across the infinite, empty sky, spread over a vast, dying world. I imagined myself as a bird, soaring over everything, without a single complicated care to drag me into the pain of human existence. I swayed with the wind. Felt its cold bite. Wishing its currents would carry me so far away I’d never have to look back.

  But that was never going to happen.

  The world was just one small, rocky sphere that I was going to be stuck on forever. Forever, if Bill and Preacher Dick were right.

  For how many lives would immortality last? And who would really want it, when the pains of one single life were so hard to bear.

  I popped the lid off of Steph’s paint can and poured her ashes over the rail. The wind gusted, swirling them away like they were flying, never touching the ground, dispersing into nothing, becoming part of the Colorado sky.

  I heaved the paint can down the slope. It bounced on the rocks until it came to a clanking stop.

  My strength broke and my knees buckled. I fell to the ground wanting to wail, but I’d been all cried out for weeks. Still, standing back up and taking my first steps in a life without Steph seemed too difficult to contemplate. So, I sat there.

  The sun slowly sank behind me.

  The wind died and the evening’s deep cold set in.

  Thoughts and memories paraded through my head.

  “You’re not alone,” Murphy told me.

  “What?”

  “You mumbled something about being alone.”

  He was probably right. My thoughts too often turned into words when I wasn’t paying attention. “You’re a better friend than I ever deserved. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Mostly you just tell me how you’re right all the time.”

  “Well, you’re a better…”

  “Stop. I got it. Do you need a hug?”

  “I just needed to get that out of my system.”

  “At the risk of being a downer here, some of that shit never gets out of your system. You carry it forever.”

  “Mandi?” I asked. “Rachel? Your mom?”

  Murphy was beside me then, nodding. “It gets easier. You remember the happy times. But the pain still comes back at odd times. It’s like somebody smashing you in the head with a hammer when you’re just gettin’ on with your day.” Murphy took a long, deep breath, like he was trying to keep his own tears from flowing. “But you know what? You know what that is?”

  I didn’t.

  “That’s proof,” he told me, “that the love was real. That it still is.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse about that.

  After giving me a moment to assimilate his wisdom, Murphy asked, “What’s next for two immortal dipshits like us, do you think?”

  “You mean, if we don’t freeze to death up here tonight or get eaten by a bear?”

  “Grace and Jazz are setting us up a spot in the souvenir shop. We’ll be fine.”

  I looked southeast. Down that way, across the grassy plains and deserts, lay Texas. Still. What was left of it. “I say, we go back to Billdo’s Buttfuck Heaven and burn it to the ground.”

  Murphy laughed. “Sometimes you get the stupidest, most self-destructive ideas, and somehow, the social filter in your brain doesn’t catch them before they spew out of your mouth. It’s like you’re training to win the gold medal for dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “Yeah? And what’s your plan, Grasshopper? Walk the earth and do good?”

  “Wow. Another medal. You’re a prodigy.”

  “You know I’m trying to grieve here, right?”

  “You’ve wallowed enough, dude. I know it hurts. It hurts me, too, but we gotta get used to that kinda shit. Unless we start following every dumbass idea you come up with, then we’re gonna be on this earth a long, long, time.”

  The End

  Final Words

  It’s a little bit odd writing a brief something at the end of a book, something from today’s perspective that will be linked to the book forever—or as long as forever might last in this fast-paced digital world.

  I remember back in Book 2 or Book 3, when I used to write this stuff into the preface, I joked a big thank-you to “all my millions of readers who’d made Slow Burn such a success.” At the time, I’d probably only sold a few thousand copies. The thought of selling millions was just a fantasy, and more a self-deprecating joke on myself than anything.

  Somewhere along the way, several years ago, my Slow Burn sales passed two million books and I stopped keeping track of that number. I was humbled by the success of the series—thanks to you, it was a dream come true.

  Now, five years after I released Sanctum, the 9th book in the Slow Burn series, I’ve released Firestorm, the 10th book, which you’ve just finished reading. Has it really been five years?

  For all of you who’ve kept track of me through the years on Facebook and through my email list, you know Book 10 has been an on-again, off-again promise, primarily because I didn’t want to muck up what I felt was a nicely complete story that ended with Book 9. The question of Book 10 was always the subject of any other book announcement…I’d announced a sci-fi book, and readers would say, “that’s nice, where’s Slow Burn 10?” It became the humorous subject of skeleton-waiting-on-a-park-bench memes, and good-natured ribbing on my page. I find it deeply satisfying that readers found such an attachment to the characters—characters that allowed me to channel my twisted sense of humor and observations of our world.

  I always attempt to create the best story of which I’m capable. I want every book I write to be better than the last. Now that Firestorm is done, I’m pleased. This year has been a challenge for all of us, and the story has given me an outlet, a way to escape.

  As to the question of whether I’ve succeeded in sending Zed and Murphy into a new direction where they may experience many new adventures, I think I have, and I hope I’ve succeeded in doing it such a way that doesn’t taint the 1-thru-9 saga.

  As always, I would love to hear your feedback on the story. The easiest way is to leave a star rating or even a brief review with the retailer from whom you purchased the book. It truly makes a huge difference for us indie authors when readers take the time to do so.

  Thank you for reading Firestorm. If you’re one of the many who finished Book 9 five years ago, thank you so very much for waiting so long for Book 10.
/>   Bobby

  Also by Bobby Adair

  Dusty’s Diary

  Fun and crass, Dusty’s Diary has become a fan favorite! Has some great advice about what to pack in your post-apocalyptic bunker (don’t forget the porn!). This series also has a fantastic audiobook on audible, narrated by the award-winning Ray Porter.

  Freedom’s Fire

  A sci-fi adventure, set in the near future. Plenty of signature Bobby Adair humor, with Dylan Kane and his trusty band of travelers on an interstellar road trip.

  The Last Survivors

  A collaborative series with fellow zombie author T.W. Piperbrook, this series has a little more of a Sci-Fi feel. It explores what happens 300 years in the future after the apocalypse, when man has rebuilt and gone back to an almost medieval society. Another book with a great audiobook companion, narrated by Sean Runnette.

  Ebola K

  A really great terrorism thriller with a bazillion reviews. It focuses on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the possibility of weaponized Ebola by terrorist organizations. Not the heart-pounding action of Slow Burn book but a little more in-depth and complex. This series follows an American college student teaching in Uganda as the country comes under attack from the deadly virus as he tries to make his way back to the States. The audiobook, available on audible.com, is narrated by Adam Verner

  It’s also historically accurate, so you’ll learn a little about the history of the disease as well…did you know that Ebola has been airborne in the US in the past? An interesting observation of how a pandemic can get out of hand quickly…sound familiar?