Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent

by Adair, Bobby

  Of course, I missed. My aim really was getting worse. I fired four more times before a round caught her just above her left eye. She did a grotesque pirouette as blood, brain and bone exploded out the back of her skull.

  To my right, Murphy was firing again, but stopped by the time I looked over.

  “Damn, there must have been a bunch of them on your side.” He grinned at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get them all?”

  “Yeah.”

  We held our positions for a few more minutes.

  Murphy called into the cavernous store. “Hey, Whitey, it’s dinner time. Come and get it.”

  No more of the infected came out.

  Turning to Murphy, I said, “What I’m thinking is, we grab some coolers, some sleeping bags, winter coats, boots, Coleman stove, tents…”

  “Yeah, yeah. I gotcha. Some of everything they’ve got here.”

  “Let’s stick together while we’re shopping.”

  “Yep. You push the basket. I’ll ride shotgun since I can hit what I shoot at.” Murphy couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Yeah, yeah, funny man.”

  Chapter 36

  Having loaded the Humvee with nearly as much as we could stuff into it—the damn things just weren’t as roomy as they looked like from the outside—Murphy and I were in one of the aisles in the camping section. I found myself eyeballing a machete display.

  “I think you miss your machete, Zed.”

  “I do.” I picked up a particularly wicked-looking machete with a black plastic handle and black powder-coated blade. On the side of the blade was painted a white skull over the name “Zombie Killer.” Pointless curves and cutouts adorned the blade’s back edge. It was a frightening tool.

  I tore off the plastic and cardboard wrapping and hefted it while I admired its inherent evil.

  Murphy laughed. “Man, don’t get that piece of crap.”

  Embarrassed, I asked, “Why?”

  “Look at it. It looks like a movie prop.”

  “So? It’s sharp.” I pointed it at him. “It’s got a pointy tip.”

  “You’re not going to be sword fighting. I mean, get it if you want. I’m betting it’s a piece of shit.” Murphy grabbed a Zombie Killer off of the display rack, tore off the packaging and wrapped his fingers around the handle a couple of times until he had a good grip. He stepped over to the end of the aisle, gave me a smile and started hacking at the metal shelving.

  I jumped back as pieces of merchandise flew. All along its forty feet, the shelf rattled with each impact.

  On the third hack, the blade got stuck and Murphy had to wrestle it back out again. Breathing heavily from the exertion, he held the Zombie Killer out so I could see the blade.

  “Holy crap.” The blade had big gouges where it had hit the shelf. One gouge looked like the blade had been bitten away by a sizable lizard. I looked down at my blade and back at Murphy’s. Was the Zombie Killer really that shoddy? Or was Murphy just that strong? “Let me try.”

  I hauled back and swung the machete at the same shelf. Mine got stuck on the first swing. I wrenched it out and hacked twice more. When I was done, I held up my Zombie Killer and compared it to Murphy’s. It looked just as bad. Even the plastic handle was cracked. I couldn’t believe it. It had looked so damn lethal. “What a piece of crap.”

  “Uh-huh.” Murphy tossed his Zombie Killer on the floor.

  Looking at the price, I said, “I can’t believe this thing cost sixty bucks.” I dropped it.

  Murphy pointed to the most utilitarian of the machetes on the display. It had a plain wooden handle and was wider at the end of the blade than near the handle. It looked quite a bit like my first machete. Its blade didn’t glisten and it didn’t have a name. It was just a machete. It cost seventeen dollars. I picked it up to see how it felt in my hand.

  Murphy nodded at the shelf. “Try it.”

  “Okay.” I went after the shelving unit just as before. The blade had more weight than the Zombie Killer and it hit the thin metal shelf and bit in deeply. I yanked it out and hacked twice more. When I was done, I held the blade up for inspection. It was nicked, but there was no significant damage.

  “I know which one I’d buy, if I was a machete man.” Murphy nodded at the blade in my hand, just in case I needed a hint.

  “I agree. And I’ll save forty-three dollars.”

  “Plus tax.” Murphy turned and headed over to look at other bladed tools on the aisle.

  I left the nicked machete on the shelf, put four more into our shopping basket and took the last for myself. While Murphy selected some hatchets, several axes, a few dozen knives and propane lanterns, I worked on fitting my machete sheath across my back so I could pull it out over my shoulder without cutting my ear off.

  I practiced the movement several times and pumped myself up with badass confidence. I’d wielded my last machete through some pretty horrific business. Having one in my hand felt good.

  We loaded the last of the gear into the Humvee’s back seats. Murphy put himself in the driver’s seat while I got in on the passenger side and we drove out into the rain.

  Chapter 37

  “What time is it?”

  Murphy looked at his big gold watch. “Twenty after four.” He turned onto an exit ramp for Highway 183 and drove the Humvee north in the southbound lanes.

  “The rain is letting up.” I looked through the windows to see behind us. The sky was black to the south and east.

  Murphy took a long look at the clouds. “Looks like the worst of it is past.”

  Every detention pond I could see was brimming. Every low spot in the road was a pond. Water flowed down every slope. “I think we’ve got plenty of time to make it back before dark.”

  “I don’t want to spend the night out here.”

  “With the rain past us, the Whites are going to start coming out again. It might be slow going.”

  Murphy shrugged. “I’ll run ‘em down.”

  The rain was falling lightly and we had good visibility. We made quick time running north on the highway. As we drove, I kept an eye out for the SUV we’d towed back onto the road. I wondered if they made it out of town.

  Some of the infected were coming out of their hiding places in the stalled cars on the northbound lanes. A few were venturing out of businesses lining the access roads. None gave chase, however. Most seemed too distracted, frazzled by their experience in the storm. That was good to know. Thunderstorms were advantageous times for us.

  We got off of 183 at Anderson Mill Road and Murphy deftly wove the Humvee through a jam of cars at the intersection. He manhandled it through a ditch with several feet of flowing water to get around a long row of parked cars with broken windows. Some of those held corpses.

  After a few miles, the road was lined on both sides with six-foot stonewalls built to keep the noise of the traffic out of the neighborhoods. They also served to keep the infected residents corralled inside. At least, those not bright enough to find their way out along the roads that cut through the walls. As with every other street in the city, sometimes a few cars and sometimes many were in the road, on the shoulders and on the sidewalks. Some were wrecked, but many simply empty, with doors swung open.

  At the intersection of Anderson Mill Road and FM 620, cars were crowded at every angle. To get through, Murphy used the Humvee’s bumper to push a minivan into a ditch. That opened a way across somebody’s lawn and a path into a shopping center parking lot. Of course, the section of the parking lot in front of the big grocery store which anchored one end of the shopping center was a maze of abandoned vehicles and shopping carts.

  Some of the infected came out of their rain shelters as we navigated the parking lot. We were moving slowly enough that it was easy for a couple of them to jump onto the Humvee. But their presence didn’t bother either of us. Perhaps we were becoming used to the Whites.

  “I’ll shake ‘em off when we get out on 620.”

  I pointed to a r
estaurant in the strip center. “I used to go there for tacos.”

  “Torchy’s?”

  “They make some damn good tacos.”

  “Never been.”

  “That’s too bad. All mankind ever built or ever did, every war, every pyramid, every medical discovery were just sign posts on the way to the pinnacle of mankind’s greatest success, the Torchy’s taco.”

  “I miss hamburgers.”

  “You’re a burger man?”

  “Not just any burger. There’s a place called Hopdoddy down on South Congress. Man, what I wouldn’t do for a big burger and a cold beer.”

  “I hear ya.”

  Murphy bounced the Humvee through deep running water in another ditch. Both of our infected riders lost their grip and fell off. That put us westbound on FM 620, finally heading toward the Colorado River and home.

  We passed a dealership that specialized in exotic and restored cars. “I used to drive by that place all the time and drool.”

  Nice old automobiles were still parked in the lot in front of the building. Murphy looked over. “You used to live around here?”

  I pointed north. “My mom lived a couple miles that way.”

  “So this is where you grew up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is memory lane for you, then.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “No. Maybe. I hate this place.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  “I know. Just keep driving.”

  He did.

  I looked around at the trees growing thicker along the roadsides as the number of businesses thinned out. Most of the property along FM 620—on the northern edge of Austin—hadn’t yet been developed. Now it never would be.

  The sky was still matted in a thick layer of clouds, but the rain only sprinkled lightly down. We passed fewer and fewer abandoned cars the further we drove. Even the Whites were absent, another inexplicable black hole. I wondered about that until I slipped off into an old fantasy, imagining myself as the last living man on Earth, a fantasy not so far from my new truth. I thought about all of the things from the world I lost that I loved or hated. And oddly, in all of that, the loss that seemed most significant at that moment was Torchy’s Tacos.

  Of course, that conclusion made me feel like a total shit.

  Chapter 38

  The thing people never think about when they speed up and down the streets and highways is how the road undulates up and down with the terrain. If the road doesn’t slope up and down too steeply, all roads seem flat. Car engines do all the work of climbing low hills at seventy miles an hour, and drivers seldom notice the change in effort. But when those once-a-decade floods come, the low spots make themselves visible by filling or running with water.

  Our Humvee crested one of those undulations in the terrain along a road I’d always thought of as flat. But it wasn’t. Murphy brought the Humvee to a fast stop.

  A river flowed a quarter mile wide across the road in front of us.

  Without a word, Murphy got out of the Humvee, leaving the door open while he walked out in front. He stood and stared at the water.

  I followed.

  “You got another way down to the river, professor?”

  I looked at a wall of cedars that paralleled the road. To the left, another forest of cedars and oaks bordered the thoroughfare. Water flowed out of the forest on one side and into the forest on the other. In between was no evidence any road lay underneath.

  Shaking my head, I said, “There’s no river here to flood. There’s not even a creek bed that I remember.”

  Murphy looked around. “What are we gonna do?”

  I shrugged. “It’ll be like this all over town.”

  “We made it here just fine.”

  “We came this way on purpose, Murphy. All this water is flowing toward the river. We never would have made it across town. We’d have had to cross rivers like this everywhere there was a creek. You saw Waller Creek. All that rain water has to go somewhere.”

  “The Colorado River.”

  “Eventually.”

  “How long do you think it’ll keep flowing like this?”

  How the hell would I know that? “A couple of hours. A couple of days.”

  Murphy looked at the sky to the north. “What are the chances we’ll get more rain, do you think?”

  “A hundred percent.”

  “I mean, really.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll rain more. But holy crap, how much longer could it possibly rain like it did this morning and this afternoon?”

  “You live in this part of town.” Murphy pointed at the new river flowing over the road. “Does this usually flood?”

  “Never.”

  “And you’d know, right? You drive this way, right?”

  I pointed down the road. “Mansfield Dam is four or five miles that way. This is the way to Lake Travis. I’ve gone this way a thousand times.”

  Murphy put his hands on his hips and stared at the water for a while. He turned and looked back up the road. He and I were still the only living things we’d seen since turning on to 620.

  While Murphy was coming to a decision about how to proceed, I took the time to take a hard look at the woods on both sides of the road. Nothing was there, nothing with a heartbeat anyway. I took a seat up on the hood of the Humvee and watched the water flow by. I wondered whether it would eventually finish draining off of the land to our north and allow us to pass.

  Murphy walked around, silent, looking at the water, looking back up the road. We were stuck and he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, his face was showing more and more worry with each passing minute.

  Finally, when he was standing beside the Humvee and looking at the water, I asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “With all of this water flowing into the Colorado River, what are the chances it’ll flood below the dam?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Murphy.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I love her, Zed.”

  “Say what?”

  “Don’t be a dick. I just told you that I love Mandi.”

  I wasn’t sure how that fit into the context. “I’m happy for you guys.”

  “I’m not used to worrying like this.”

  “I hear ya.”

  Murphy looked back up the road, perhaps trying to think of another way to get back to the riverboat.

  “You’re thinking they might get in trouble if the river floods?”

  Murphy nodded. He was deeply concerned.

  “I’ll tell you what. You know as well as I do, every time it floods, you see on the news how some dumbass tries to drive their car across a low water crossing and ends up drowning when the car gets washed down the creek. Right?”

  “That’s what worries me, man. I’m thinking about doing the stupid thing and just driving across.”

  “You’re that worried?”

  Murphy gave me a nod.

  “Listen. You get in the Humvee. I’m going to walk out there, you know, see how deep it is. See how strong the current is flowing.”

  Murphy shook his head. “You can’t do that.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Worst case, I get washed across the road and into the trees. If I’m in the trees, I can hold onto something until the current abates.”

  “That’s dangerous.”

  “But if you’re really concerned about Mandi…” I looked back at the wide new river. “I can handle myself in that. I’ll take the chance. Who knows, it might be safe enough to drive across. That’s what we need to find out, right?”

  “Thanks, man. Wait, I’ve got a better idea.”

  Chapter 39

  One end of the rope was tied to the Humvee’s grill guard. One end was tied around my waist, with maybe fifty feet in between. I waded out into the water and Murphy drove behind, keeping the rope stretched loosely between us.

  At a hundred feet across the new river, the water was stil
l only half way up my calves. The current was noticeable, but not strong. I wasn’t in danger of losing my footing, though the current did tend to trip me up when my feet crossed.

  To my surprise, the water at the halfway point was only just over my knees. I was having a little trouble keeping my feet under me by then, but the heavy Humvee seemed to be doing okay. I stopped, turned to Murphy, and raised my palms to the sky. “What you think?”

  Murphy swung his door open and stuck his head out. “I’ll chance it if you will.”

  “You always say I take too many chances.”

  “We’ve come this far. Let’s do it.”

  I pushed on through the water and hoped. But the thing Murphy and I hadn’t really thought about in our brief conversation was he was nearly fifty feet behind me and in slightly shallower water. That became clear when I heard the Humvee’s engine rev. I turned at the sound, just in time to see the armored vehicle slip to the left as the current got underneath and pushed it across the road.

  It was touch and go. It would slip. It would stop. I was frozen in my footsteps, wondering what I should do. Murphy quickly passed the point of wondering what he should do and chose to rev the engine higher. The Humvee accelerated toward me.

  With no desire to be run down, I took off at a clumsy run through the knee-deep water, angling to my left to get out of the Humvee’s way, working with little effect at the knotted rope around my waist as I sloshed.

  I made it out of the Humvee’s path for the moment, with full faith Murphy wouldn’t run me over. But I also knew he didn’t have full control over the Humvee’s direction. He was accelerating to get through the deepest part of the water—maybe a good idea, maybe not—but that choice was dangerous to me. Hell, even if he did avoid getting me stuck under his tires, at some point those tires would gain full traction on the asphalt. Being tethered to the vehicle might not turn out well for me.

  With a sigh of relief, I got the knot untied and dropped the rope.

  The Humvee was passing me by then, about twenty feet to my right, and splashing up a heavy wave that hit me and knocked me off of my feet. Weighed down with my equipment, I sank in the shallow water and the current started dragging me across the asphalt. I tried to sit up. I caught a breath, but the current pushed me back over.