Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent

by Adair, Bobby

  I realized that as much as I wanted to go downriver and find Steph and the others, the person who was most likely to benefit from any help I could give was Murphy. And though I didn’t explicitly do anything to help, Murphy needed time to recover—he loved Mandi. I kept an eye out for him while he stared despondently at nothing and tried to find an open road to pass through his grief.

  On the second day, I awoke on the couch in the living room. When I sat up, I saw Murphy standing at the rail on the deck with a box of dry cereal in his hand. I watched for a moment and saw him eat a handful and the concern I’d had the previous day started to fade.

  I went outside and took up a position by the rail a few feet to his right. I glanced down at the cereal. He scooped a handful for himself and handed the box to me. It was a little stale after a month in the pantry, but it was better than no breakfast.

  Far below us, the water level had dropped, but the current in the river was still running fast. All of the hills had been saturated in the storm and the runoff was filling the creeks, which flowed down to the Colorado River. All up and down the valley, wide swaths of debris, uprooted trees, and demolished houses littered the banks.

  “Why don’t we ever see any normal people?” Murphy asked, eyes wandering over the flood destruction below.

  For a few long minutes, I thought about that. Or I thought about what I should say about what had happened two days before. “Are you all right?”

  Murphy nodded, turned to me and put on his familiar smile, but his smile was alone on his face. His eyes were sad and angry.

  In the absence of an answer, I leaned on the rail and looked at the wall of trees growing just outside the backyard fence. Nothing was moving but branches swaying in the wind. We had no infected company that could be seen. “You know, Murphy. I admire you in a lot of ways.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re Murphy.”

  No response.

  “Do you remember that day when we went to your mom’s house?”

  “Have you ever tried to cheer somebody up before, Zed? ‘Cause you’re not very good at it.”

  “I’m not trying to cheer you up, Murphy.”

  “My mistake.”

  “I know it’s hard, what happened the other day.”

  “Yep.” Sitting on the rail on the other side of Murphy was a coffee cup. Murphy picked it up and took a sip.

  “I can’t imagine how hard it is for you to smile when you do, when the world just wants to be a big fucked up mess.”

  Murphy didn’t say anything about that. Something down in the river seemed to have grabbed his attention and wouldn’t let go.

  “What I’m saying is, I’m with you, no matter what you need to do. You want to stay here and stare at the walls, I’m here with you. You want to go downriver, I’m there with you. If you need to cry about it, I won’t shame you for it.”

  “Big boys don’t cry.”

  “Everybody who’s still alive cries. It might be the only thing that keeps us human.”

  Murphy nodded and watched as a couple of mockingbirds swooped into the backyard, aerobatically chasing a grasshopper.

  I figured I’d try humor. “You know, I already went online and ordered my What Would Murphy Do bracelet.” I smiled. “Don’t let me down, man.”

  Murphy chose to answer. “You know what Murphy would do?”

  “No.”

  “Murphy would kill some Whites. Murphy needs to kill some fucking Whites.”

  We said nothing for a long time.

  To have Murphy wholly invested in my plan to slaughter Smart Ones was one of my goals. But the cost he paid, we paid, for that was too high. Hell, we didn’t yet know the full cost. Steph, Dalhover, Amy and Megan had all gone down the flooding river with the current. Who knew if they’d found a safe place or drowned?

  Could it be they all died?

  The thought sent a grievously sharp pang through my heart.

  Thinking about all of that while the sun slowly rose in the late morning sky, I asked about something that had been bothering me. “Is this all my fault?”

  Murphy shook his head and looked disappointed. “Self-pity?”

  “No.” I looked up at him. “If we’d been there with them instead of going off and chasing across town, would it have turned out differently? Could we have saved them?” It wasn’t self-pity. I really wondered. I needed to know if I was making bad choices that were hurting people.

  “As much as I’d like to blame you for dragging me off, Zed, as much as I’d love to punch you in the head until I felt better, I know I might as well go out there and punch a tree trunk. What happened wasn’t anybody’s fault. Nobody knew God was gonna drop a Noah flood on us. Nobody knew the anchor line was gonna break. After that happened, nobody could have done anything. Maybe if we’d been there, the outcome would have been different. Maybe we’d both be dead now. Maybe all of us would be.”

  Did that make me feel better, blaming it all on random circumstance?

  “We need to go downriver and see if we can find the others,” Murphy said.

  I nodded and looked downriver. “Thanks. I need to know if they made it.”

  Murphy looked at me. He knew I was mostly talking about Steph. “Seems the only way we’re gonna know for sure is to hike down there and find something that’ll still float. That’s the only way to get downriver that makes sense. Do you remember which boat they took?”

  The picture of Dalhover and Steph firing from the bow of that boat was etched into my memory but the painful memory that followed. “Yep. It was the Malibu with the black hull.”

  Changing the subject, Murphy pointed down to where the riverboat had run aground. “It’s gone.”

  I looked down the length of river visible from our perch. Just to keep the conversation going, I said, “Do you think it sank, or washed down?”

  Murphy shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “I don’t see any Whites down there anywhere.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid to come out.”

  “Should we test out these silencers to make sure they work like we hoped, before we put ourselves in a situation where we’re depending on them?”

  “Might want to. When we get down there, we could shoot some Whites from the boat and see what the others do.”

  “But they’ll be able to see us. It might be the visual cue of the gun will be enough to set them off. Hell, just them seeing us in the boat will be enough.”

  “What do you think, then?”

  Chapter 44

  Ten minutes later, Murphy and I were up by the road in the trees, looking for Whites. None were out.

  “How long do you want to wait?” Murphy asked.

  “I want to get this done and get down the river.”

  “Well, there aren’t any infected out.”

  “Okay.” I gave Murphy a nod that said, “Watch this,” and hollered out into the street. “Hey monsters. Time for second breakfast.”

  Heads immediately popped up out of bushes and from behind parked cars.

  Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at an infected man two houses down . The white was slowly standing up, looking back and forth, and searching for the source of the voice he’d just heard.

  The rifle cracked. Blood erupted from a wound and the infected man crumpled into the bush.

  I hissed. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “That was loud.”

  “That’s ‘cause we’re right here by it.” With the barrel of his rifle, Murphy gestured at a couple of Whites three houses down. “I don’t think those ones heard it, or they don’t know what the sound was.”

  Indeed, the pair of infected women was walking gingerly down a driveway, looking around. They knew something was up, but they definitely weren’t running toward the sound from Murphy’s rifle.

  With only one way to know for sure, I knelt, leveled my rifle at the nearest of the pair and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. Neither
of the infected women fell. Neither of them ran in our direction. Neither of them even looked at us.

  “You got blanks in that thing?” Murphy grinned. It was good to see a grin, but it still held an emptiness that would take a long time to fill.

  “I missed. It’s no secret you’re a better shot.”

  Murphy took the next shot and one of the infected women fell. The other jumped back, frozen in surprise.

  “Show off.” I fired another round and then another. “Damn.”

  None of the infected was coming at us. I counted seven on their feet up and down the street, suspicious, but with inadequate senses and insufficient brainpower to figure out what was going on. At least the silencers seemed to be working as hoped.

  Murphy said, “Give me your gun. There’s got to be something wrong with it, unless you’re the only person in the world who gets worse with practice.”

  Yeah, that had to be it. The rifle was faulty somehow. Maybe the sights were misaligned. I unclipped the rifle from my sling and we traded weapons. Murphy gave my rifle a quick inspection and raised it to his shoulder. With only a moment’s pause, he pulled the trigger. The rifle cracked. The second infected woman in the driveway fell.

  “What the hell?”

  Murphy shook his head as he lowered the weapon. “This rifle’s fine.”

  “Crap, I suck with guns.”

  “I’ll draw them closer in. Shoot at them when they’re near and see how that works for you. It just takes practice, is all.”

  I shook my head at my frustration. “I’ve been practicing a lot.”

  Murphy hollered, “Come and get it.”

  That got the attention of the remaining five, who all started heading toward us, looking back and forth to find the source of the voice.

  I pointed my rifle at a man who was jogging in the middle of the street and bearing down on us. At two houses distant, I fired. Miss.

  I fired again. Another miss.

  “Take a deep breath,” Murphy said.

  The guy was in front of the house next door. I fired and missed. He looked right at the spot in the trees where we were hiding and ran straight for us.

  At ten feet away, I fired again and hit him in the chest. At that point, the other Whites on the street, having seen the man run toward us with all of the certainty infected body language could convey, were also running at our position.

  Murphy and I went to work shooting them down. That’s to say, I squeezed off another six rounds at the sky, houses and shrubs, while Murphy killed the rest of them.

  Angry with myself, I asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

  “Not sure. I was kinda too busy to watch.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “For?”

  “For killing them. Because if we were going to depend on me to shoot them, we’d be getting eaten right now.”

  “Man, don’t get so down on yourself. We learned something pretty important.”

  Sarcastically, I said, “That the silencers work.”

  “More important.”

  “And that is?”

  “Zed, it’s like when you get mad, your brain stops working or something. Because this is exactly the kind of shit you’re good at figuring out. And then lecturing me on.”

  “Just tell me what you want to tell me.” I wasn’t in the mood for guessing.

  “When you missed that first dude, it was no big deal. He didn’t hear the sound of the gun, or he was too far away to figure out what the sound was. When he got close enough, though, he could tell. Did you see that just before you killed him? When you fired that last shot that missed, he made a beeline for us. He knew we were shooting.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly. Ah. The silencers are exactly what we hoped for, but when the infected are too close, the silencers aren’t silent enough.”

  I smiled. That was a great thing to learn. I frowned. “So by the time they’re close enough for me to hit them, they’re close enough to figure out that I’m shooting at them. Great.”

  Chapter 45

  We stashed the Humvee in the house’s garage, took on full loads of ammunition, about a half-dozen hand grenades each, and enough food to last several days. Then it was through the house, across the backyard and over the fence. With no wind and no rain, the jagged limestone slope down to the river was significantly less dangerous than it had been a few days before. Still, it took more than an hour for us to make our way to the water’s edge.

  The river was flowing fast and it was still at least a foot higher than normal. But up in the branches of the trees – the ones that made it through the flood with roots still in the ground – were clumps of grass, gobs of mud and parts of houses. Up the slope of the bank were broken boats, coolers, boards, furniture, housewares, pretty much everything you could imagine, much of it shattered into puzzle pieces of the whole, covered in a film or a thick layer of mud. And in all of that were the bodies, naked, white and bloated with gasses of decay. The heat was accelerating the growth of putrefying bacteria and everything stank of death.

  For the first mile of our trek along the river, we saw several ski boats, some intact, most not. But none close enough to the water so we could guess at how to get them afloat. We did come across a Sea-Doo that looked plenty big to hold us both. We sweated and shoved it across fifty feet of rough ground to get it in the water, only to find it wouldn’t start.

  Along the way, we didn’t see a single living White. We saw plenty more bodies with bellies distending in the heat, on the shore with arms or legs bobbing in the edge of the water. Some were half-buried in drifts of wooden debris. More than a few were lodged in tree branches over our heads.

  Eventually, we found a plastic yellow kayak thing along with a canoe paddle and a fence board. We pushed it out into the river and used it to float with the current. But even that held a significant disadvantage. The current carried us too quickly to adequately survey the destruction on both sides of the river.

  Struggling to slow the kayak with his paddle, Murphy said, “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Yeah. That and I feel vulnerable in this thing.”

  “Like it’s going to tip over any minute?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “It’s not even a real kayak. It’s like some kind of Fisher Price kiddy kayak or something.”

  “How about if we just float with the current and whenever we see a boat that looks seaworthy, we’ll stop and see if we can start the engine?”

  “What if the water got into the engines? Do you think they’ll start?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know much of anything about marine engines, but in principle, they’re just like car engines. Air and gas go in one end, exhaust comes out the other. Water can get in just as easily, I guess. If it does, the engine probably won’t start.”

  “Makes sense.”

  We pulled our paddles out of the water and watched the shoreline.

  Murphy said, “If we don’t find a boat, you know we can’t paddle back up river with the current this strong.”

  “We’ll have to hike it, then.”

  Changing the subject, Murphy said, “I’m seeing lots of dead Whites.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder how many of them got killed in the flood.”

  “Hundreds, at least. It seems like everywhere I look, there’s a body,” I said.

  “Not to be a pessimist, but we need to prepare ourselves for what we might find downriver.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Steph and them got away in that ski boat, but the way the river was flooding, you know there’s a pretty good chance they sank, right?”

  I nodded. “I know that. I think I more than know that. I expect that. I’m just hoping for something else.”

  “You don’t seem all broken up about it.”

  “Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. I’m just trying to think, What Would Murphy Do?”

  “Zed, I’m just trying to get through the day, here. I know you like
to poke fun at me about trying to smile and move on. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m having a hard time. It’s like everything is weighing me down. I think if I just move my feet I can get back to a good place.”

  “Murphy, that’s what I’m doing, too.” I looked at him. “Honestly. I just need to find out if the others made it. I need to help them out if they need the help. Heck, maybe they’re all sitting on a deck on the back of somebody’s house down here waiting for us. I want to give them their silencers. That’s their chance to survive. And we’ve already paid too high of a price for those silencers not to have them put to use.”

  Murphy pointed at a ski boat on the bank. I looked over and shook my head. It wasn’t the one we were looking for.

  Continuing with my thoughts, I said, “I want to go and kill Smart Ones. I don’t know how many I need to kill. I don’t even know if it makes any sense to do it or not anymore. I don’t know if it ever did. I don’t know if it wasn’t all just a rationalization to take some vengeance out on Mark’s stupid white ass. I really only know I feel the need to kill them the same way I feel a need to eat and breathe. It’s a necessity to me. I can’t explain it better than that. I keep seeing what those Smart Ones are doing. It’s like they’re fucking up the whole Goddamned world and I want to punish them for it.”

  Nodding, Murphy said, “Punishing them would feel good.”

  I nodded also. “Maybe when enough of them are dead, I’ll get in a Humvee and drive to Balmorhea and sit out there for a few years trying to forget about all of this shit. Maybe I’ll try to figure out if Steph and I can be happy together without all of this bullshit. Maybe I’ll figure out if we’re something more than convenient people to hold onto when the grief gets too heavy to bear. Hell, I want to just wake up in the morning and not have to worry about seeing any dead people, without mourning whoever got killed yesterday or worrying about who’s going to die tomorrow.”

  I half-expected a smartass remark from Murphy after going off on my long rant. But I guess even he was past that. And that was sad enough to hurt.

  We rounded the bend in the river at City Park and floated past a long row of concrete foundations for McMansions that once stood next to the water. Now those houses were just broken pieces piled into a single mound of debris twenty feet tall among the thick trunks of several dozen cypress trees.