Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire

by Adair, Bobby

  As the water’s surface turned golden under a sun that was nearing the horizon, my canoe floated in front of Sarah Mansfield’s open boathouse. Seven or eight naked Whites were inside howling and slavering at the sight of me—I guess the canoe made me look like a normal human, a tasty morsel—but not daring to enter the water and come for a bite.

  Paddling the boat right up to the dock was probably a bad idea.

  Instead, I scooted up the river for bit and paddled the boat over toward the shore, where I let the current carry me back down in the direction of the boathouse. Due to the overall secure design of the Mansfield estate, the boathouse had no windows. All of the walls were solid. So by coming at the boathouse from the side, the infected inside couldn’t see me.

  They were quieting down when I pushed the boat up onto the bank just a dozen feet upriver from the boathouse. I didn’t tie it off. It seemed to be planted firmly enough on the bank that it wouldn’t float away by itself.

  In a move I probably should have skipped, I looked down at myself as I pulled my T-shirt off and threw it into the canoe. My God, I was thin. My stomach muscles had definition that I hadn’t seen since high school, but my ribs were just as prominently displayed. When was the last time I’d eaten? I couldn’t answer that. I was loosing track of the days. All I really knew about that was that it had been long enough that I no longer felt hunger. What I did feel was an oppressive fatigue that made even the effort of paddling the canoe across the river difficult.

  I needed to get some food, but first things first.

  I took off my boots and socks and left them in the bottom of the canoe. My pants fell down around my feet on the bank and then followed. I hesitated at the skivvies; all of those puritanical prohibitions against being naked in public kept the elastic drooped on the jutting bones of my pelvis; that, and the fear that starvation might have shrunken my manhood along with the rest of me. But all of the infected in Sarah Mansfield’s house were naked. The only way to fit in would be for me to be naked as well. With the slightest of efforts, I tugged down and my underwear dropped to my feet.

  Nice surprise!

  If anything, the lost weight made my favorite parts look larger by comparison.

  Only a kitchen knife—a parting gift from Mr. Mays—separated me from the savages at that point. I was ready to fit in. The only tricky part would be swimming up to the dock and climbing up out of the water. What would the Whites in the boathouse think of that?

  Into the cold water I went, wading through patches of sticky muck and over slippery stones. Sharp rocks seemed to animate themselves in their efforts to poke my bare feet. When the water was waist deep, the duckweed became a nuisance, dragging prickles and slime over my skin and finding its way into crevices where such things should never go.

  Once I was within a few feet of the boathouse, I reached out a hand to the wall and slipped off of a wide, flat rock into water that was up to my neck. But as I went down, I got a grip on one of the metal bars beneath the boathouse. Underwater, it was constructed as a cage to let water flow through and to keep people like me out. On the top edge of the cage walls, just above the water’s surface, the solid walls were built.

  With nowhere to put the knife, and wanting to keep my hands free, I put the blade between my teeth cowboy-movie-star-style and pulled myself along the wall of the boathouse. Hand over hand on the underwater bars I went, until I came to the wide boat door on the front.

  The deck inside was constructed in a U-shape along the back and side walls of the structure. The boat door, though, was offset from the center of the building so that one side of the doorway ended right at the edge of the interior decking. The other side—the side where I was—couldn’t be reached from the deck.

  Ducking my head beneath the water, I confirmed that the bars of the underwater cage stopped at two or three feet beneath the surface where the boat door opened. That made perfect sense, of course. The boat and jet skis needed room for their draft.

  Moment of truth.

  I moved over in front of the open boat door. The infected inside immediately saw me and started to howl.

  Twelve feet of water separated me from the nearest of them. Any one of them could easily have jumped in and waded across, but I was betting that they, like all the others so far, were hydrophobic.

  That proved to be a good guess. Not one dipped so much as a toe in the water.

  Using the boathouse wall for balance, I climbed up onto the top edge of the underwater cage and stood up straight in the open door. With the water up to the middle of my thighs, I wanted the Whites on the decks to see that the bobbing head they first spotted in the water wasn’t food at all, but a naked White, just like them. More importantly, a naked White with a knife. I don’t know if they understood what the knife was, or whether it implied a degree of status among them. But I hoped that guess would prove correct, as well.

  As I stood there, waiting patiently, the infected in the boathouse came to realize that I wasn’t food after all, and one by one stopped making a fuss.

  So far, so good.

  The next part would be tricky. I needed to get over to the deck without them forgetting what I was. For all I knew, they had the memory span of goldfish and would start thinking I was food again three seconds after I was back down in the water.

  Or was that three-second thing just another spurious urban myth of which I needed to disabuse myself? How many outright falsehoods had the protective umbrella of civilization allowed me the luxury of believing through the years? Without a single question, in most cases!

  With no mortal consequences waiting in the wings, there were few limits on the indulgence of personal ignorance.

  Mistakes are paid for with blood.

  A first corollary had to be “Don’t take it on faith.” Or, “If you it learned from watching TV, don’t bet your life on it.”

  Carefully, I slipped back down into the water, taking the knife out from between my teeth and gripping it in a much more utilitarian fashion. A couple of the Whites became immediately agitated. I worked my way along the length of the underwater fence toward the deck. All eyes were on me. Of the two agitated Whites, one ran over to take up an intercepting position on the deck. The other followed, but kept a little distance.

  Damn.

  But that didn’t concern me as much as another White I spotted glaring at me from the far deck by the back door, simmering, but calm. That one looked like trouble.

  When I got near the deck, one of the two agitated Whites started grabbing at me.

  Well, that just wasn’t acceptable.

  The water was up to the middle of my chest, leaving me the freedom to move my arms and torso. The bottom was mucky, but not so slippery that footing was difficult.

  Another swipe of the White’s paw nearly touched my nose.

  I leaned forward, just enough to tempt the White to try again. He did. I slashed back with my eight-inch blade and sliced a long gash on his forearm. The wound didn’t seem to bother him so much as pique his curiosity, as he lifted his arm to his face to watch the blood flow. But that didn’t hold his attention long. He was hungry and he thought I was food.

  I turned the knife around in my hand so that instead of slashing, I’d be stabbing when the next swipe came. And came it did, just as I tightened my grip on the handle.

  The hand came at my face, throwing an arc of blood through the air as it swung. Leaning into my stabbing motion, I put all of my weight into jamming the knife straight through the White’s forearm.

  The blade hit skin and went right through muscle and tendon, nicking bone and lodging between the ulna and radius. The White immediately tried to jerk his arm back, but only succeeded in losing his balance and falling into the water. I pulled the knife free as he fell.

  He howled. He splashed. He was frantic.

  That was my chance.

  With all attention on the White flailing in the water, I scrambled up the slippery, algae-covered underwater fence, using the garage doo
r rails as handholds. Just as I got my left foot onto the wooden deck, I noticed the glaring White who had been by the door poised just a few feet away, ready to pounce.

  Shit! How did he get over here so quick?

  Challenging him, I held his eye and very deliberately moved to get my feet below me on the deck, keeping my knife ready to jam into his skull at the first chance. But he was smarter than I gave him credit for. Just as I was planting my second foot, the White charged. I wasn’t in a good position to stab him, though I tried anyway. He deftly took advantage of my imbalance, swatted at my arm, and somehow punched me in the head as I fell.

  Without knowing how I got there, I found myself empty handed and laying on my back on the deck, with the alpha White’s foot triumphantly pushing down on my chest.

  I didn’t know what he planned to do next, but I guessed that his rot-brained plans weren’t likely to turn out in my favor. And that’s all the thinking I needed to do, because with his leg propped up on my chest, trying to smash me like a bug, his genitalia were terribly exposed above me and within easy reach.

  You’re not gonna like this next part, bitch!

  I grabbed two tight handfuls around the base of his penis and testicles and put everything I had into trying to rip them all the way off.

  Of course nothing detached, but God, I know it hurt when his balls squeezed through the vice of my grip because he howled with an expression of pain the likes of which I’d never heard before or since. I rolled toward the water and my chest pressed up on the foot that was planted there. So focused was the alpha White on the pain in his nuts that he lost his balance. Of that, I took immediate advantage and pushed harder. He fell into the water, splashing and howling, just like his comrade.

  Ha!

  I jumped to my feet and grabbed the first solid something I could get my hands on, a wooden boat paddle, and brought the blade down edgewise on the alpha’s skull. It was a glancing blow, but it was enough. He was dazed and lost his footing on the river bottom. Using the paddle again, I pressed it into his chest to hold him underwater. He should easily have been able to push it away and regain his feet, but he was past panic, with a severely debilitated brain. He drowned.

  When it was done, the boathouse was silent. Two white bodies were floating in the water. Five Whites were gawking at me in some sort of reverence. And I had learned that going pantless held disadvantages too significant to ignore.

  Looking around for my knife, I realized that it was gone. It was probably in the mud on the river bottom.

  The five Whites were all inching closer to me, but keeping their eyes averted like beaten dogs. I weighed the possibility of crunching their skulls with the boat paddle, but thought better of it. Better to know their full intentions before I went up the elevator where there had to be many more. If things went badly with five, I knew I could get away. With the water just to my left, escape was as easy as falling in. On the other hand, if things went badly up in the compound, surrounded presumably by hundreds… Well, that wouldn’t end well.

  So I walked confidently down the deck toward the back door of the boathouse. The first White I came to bowed her head and scooted out of my way. Creepily, just as I passed, I felt her hand on my back. Not aggressively, though. It was more of a caress.

  I kept moving.

  Another White passed and another pair of hands was on my skin, then in my hair. A pair of Whites in front of me were less inclined to move, and were downright stubborn when I tried to bull my way through. The fifth White joined and then ten hands were on my body, up on my shoulders and throat, then suddenly in my face and on my head. Their sweaty, rank skin pressed on mine.

  The first handful of hair they ripped out pissed me right the fuck off. There was no pain, of course. My reaction was all violation and surprise. I pushed at the hands and tried to get away. More of my hair was pulled away, and suddenly the hands were on my head, yanking at whatever they could grasp.

  Their bodies were slick and oily with weeks of unwashed sweat. Soft breasts, oh such a desirable thing in a previous life, pressed me in a cage of poking elbows and bruising knees. Every breath I drew was full of their exhalations of maggot rot and spit. Their nails bit my skin and their soft vocalizations were perversely orgasmic.

  It wasn’t until all of the hair on my head was gone and blood was running off my scalp in rivulets and drips that the five let up. Hands rubbed over my head and palms dragged down my body from shoulder to buttocks before they separated.

  I was a red and white monster, striped in my own blood.

  The five went docile again and gave me some space. I rubbed blood out of my right eye and looked at the Whites harshly. I rubbed a hand over my hairless scalp and it came back solid red. I checked the whole of my head. There were no major wounds, just patches where the hair took some skin when it was ripped away.

  I gave another thought to picking up the oar and bashing bloody the skulls of each of the Whites, but came to the realization that they’d actually done me a favor. Whatever kind of perverse acceptance ritual that was, I now looked like them, perfectly camouflaged to fit in, hairless and ghastly.

  Fuck it.

  Forward!

  When I turned the knob on the back of the boathouse door, the five were wide-eyed with amazement. Apparently the problem of the doorknob had been beyond their abilities to solve. When I went through, though, they crowded in behind me and played follow the leader with me all the way to the elevator, where two more Whites were apparently stranded, staring at the silvery door.

  I pressed the button next to the elevator door and it immediately slid open, empty.

  Sweet.

  All seven Whites shoved into the elevator with me.

  Not so sweet.

  Pushed against the back wall, it was difficult squeezing through the crush of bodies to push the button to get upstairs. Unfortunately, one of the Whites just wouldn’t fit, and the door wouldn’t close because he was in the way.

  That was frustrating, but as I was coming to realize, nothing was going to go as smoothly as I wanted ever again.

  Shoving and pushing came next, as I worked my way back out of the elevator. Of course, they all followed as soon as they realized what was happening. Once back out in the hall, I looked over the four females and three males—at least one of them needed to go—picking out the smallest of the men, an old guy with spindly arms and bad posture—the weakest one.

  Without warning, I punched him hard in the face. Before he even knew what was happening, I punched him a second time. When I tried to knee him in the gut, he was staggering away and I missed. Two of the Whites closest to me, though, had already joined in and were slapping and pummeling as the old guy retreated.

  He started to run. Blood was in his mouth and fear was in his eyes.

  Several of my Whites went after him, but let up after a dozen steps, looking back to see that I wasn’t pursuing. They stopped and made monkey howls at the running man.

  The guy got to the boathouse door far at the end of the corridor, put his back to it and looked at us with terror in his eyes. Whites weren’t bright—with notable exceptions—but they understood enough about social order and death to know when to run.

  The elevator door had automatically closed while I was thinning my herd, so I pressed the button to open it back up. It was still empty and I stepped inside. This time, my entourage fit, the door closed, and we were lifted up toward Sarah Mansfield’s compound.

  Chapter 21

  The elevator came to a stop at the rooftop pool deck and the door opened up to the remains of a burnt orange and blood red sunset out across the western hills. The pool deck was in disarray; some of the loungers had been pushed over, cushions from others were strewn about. Over in the far corner, I spotted bloody remains. The Whites had fed there. But on whom did they feed?

  That question would need an answer.

  It took some shoving to get my Whites going through the door. As soon as we started to move, the two that had been s
tuck staring at the elevator downstairs ran immediately to the edge of the pool and knelt down to drink. The others had had plenty of water where they had stranded themselves.

  Following the two to the edge of the pool, I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off of the blood and bones in the corner. I needed to go examine them and see if could figure out if those were remains of my friends. But dammit, I didn’t want to. I’d come into the house looking for proof that my friends had escaped, that they were alive. I wasn’t ready to deal with the opposite case.

  Spinning up reasons in my mind to hold my position, I wondered how many days it had been since I’d last eaten. I wondered when I’d last gotten a full night’s sleep. I wondered what day it was. Had a record breaking hot and dry August been replaced on the calendar by an equally brutal September? Would the heat ever abate?

  The sky overhead darkened as the last glimmer of sun sank below the horizon. Lights inside the pool winked on, casting a turquoise light over all of us naked Whites on the roof.

  The lights!

  The electricity still worked!

  I turned and looked at the door that led into the house. The glass panel was broken out, but the hall inside glowed with nightlights. The house was not a total loss. That was good. But even better, I recalled something that I’d spotted on my first night up on the roof with Dalhover.

  Paralyzing procrastination disappeared as I turned and stepped toward the outdoor kitchen. There was one White in the kitchen area, squatting on the floor by the grill, playing with his fingers on his knees. Annoyingly, three of my entourage followed me into the area and seemed to be doing their best to stay between me and whatever I wanted to get to.

  A stainless steel cabinet built on top of the counter just to the side of the empty refrigerator opened right up on smooth hinges. After all, why lock it? The purpose of the stainless steel cabinet was not theft protection, but weather protection. Inside, a six-head soda fountain gleamed, ready to meet my needs with Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, root beer, and tea. I pushed a finger against a lever beneath a soda head. It clicked, and out poured a stream of cold, brown soda.