Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin

by Adair, Bobby

  I tapped the keypad with my finger as I nudged Murphy to look. I smiled.

  He shrugged and turned his attention to covering my back while I strayed off mission.

  I keyed in my number, the door lock clicked, and with my machete raised I swung it open. “Holy crap.”

  Murphy spun around and pointed the barrel of his rifle over my shoulder and into the garage.

  “Dammit, Zed,” Murphy huffed. “Don’t startle me like that.”

  “You’re quick when you’re startled.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Look.” I pointed into the well-lit garage as I stepped across its pristine floor. “C’mon.” I waved Murphy to follow. “This place is clean. They never got in here.”

  Murphy stepped inside, letting the door swing closed to a click of the lock. He started a search of the garage, looking for any Whites that might be inside. I stopped gawking at the well-lit orderliness and realized I should be doing the same.

  Murphy passed by the rear of Sarah Mansfield’s Tesla sitting exactly where it was the last time I saw it. I hurried down to the front of the car, near the wall of closed garage doors, and started my walk, paralleling Murphy’s path—looking down the row of cars, looking between, looking inside, and looking beneath. We passed the old Corvette. We checked the Mercedes.

  Once we’d looked over the Humvee, with doors still hanging open and old dried blood on the seats—some of it Steph’s—Murphy shook his head and broke his silence. “I can’t believe this is all still here.”

  Still staring at the crust of blood on the seat, I thought about the night we’d arrived at Sarah’s house. I absently said, “I guess that means the solar cells didn’t get too damaged by my fire.”

  “Or at least all of them didn’t.”

  I turned away from the blood and closed the door. I looked back up to the other end of the five-car garage. I pointed at the Tesla. “We could pull the Mustang in and charge it there.”

  “I guess,” Murphy agreed.

  “We should at least bring it in and top off the charge.” I needed to get my mind off Steph. How do you move on without the guilt of trying to forget? How do you forget the painful parts without attaching the brief bits of happiness? I said, “This is exactly what we were hoping to find around Austin, right? Houses with solar power where we could recharge the Mustang.”

  Murphy looked down at me with a cautious question on his face.

  “What?”

  He shook his head and glanced at the garage side door we’d come through.

  “What?”

  He sighed. “You’re thinking about moving back in, aren’t you?”

  “No.” That was the truth. He’d guessed wrong at the meaning of the distance in my voice, the suddenness of my apparent absence. After all of Murphy’s prodding to get me moving out of my wallowing self-pity over Steph, I felt like I was letting him down by letting myself get lost in my thoughts about her. I chose a lie and ran with it. “Maybe. This was a pretty sweet place when we were staying here.”

  “You’ve been back inside after that naked bunch of shit monkeys fucked it all up.” Murphy lowered his weapon and thumbed in the direction of the lawn. “Not to mention the corpse farm. Why would you even think about staying here? The place is too fucked up.”

  “It’s like those ranchers out in the country,” I said, “the ones that hang the coyote carcasses on their fences to keep the other coyotes away. All of the dead Whites outside will keep the live Whites away.”

  “Bullshit,” said Murphy. “I don’t want to hear it, man. Let’s just get the Mustang in here and get it charged.”

  Chapter 22

  It only took a few minutes to get the cars jockeyed around in the garage so that our Mustang was backed into the Tesla’s spot. In the Mustang’s trunk, besides a layer of electronic-looking stuff with hundreds of blue glowing LEDs—the battery system for the car, I guess—were adapters for the car’s plug and a long length of thick cord. It looked like we could plug it into just about anything, including the Tesla’s power station. Thank Mitch for spending the extra time and work on that choice. We decided that when we left the next day, we’d move the Tesla back to its spot in the garage so we could leave it plugged in. You never know when a fully charged car is going to come in handy. We found a spot outside to stash a garage door opener, just in case, and proceeded warily into the house.

  To my immense surprise, nothing inside the house was burned. Definitely a good/bad sort of thing. Good in that there was hope the house could be salvaged. Bad in that all of the Smart Ones who were leading the naked horde had escaped the wrath of my fizzled gasoline vapor bomb.

  The house stank of old urine, feces, rotting bodies, and mold.

  My mind started clicking through renovation plans. I knew the house had been built with concrete walls—still visible—and concrete floors. I figured all we’d need to do was throw all the reeking furniture over the balcony and rip up the ruined wood flooring. From there, we could make the place more than livable. It still had running water, electricity, air conditioning, and heating.

  It looked like much of the surveillance equipment survived the fire, and in a fortuitous turn that I still couldn’t believe, the vast wine cellar in the basement had never been fouled by the Whites who took over the house. The doors remained closed. And although the glass wall was smeared with all manner of human filth, inside the room was perfect—the right temperature, the right humidity, the right level of light, and no smell. None at all.

  Whatever kind of system Sarah Mansfield had installed to maintain the atmosphere in the wine cellar was surpassing its design specifications in getting its job done.

  That made it all the more attractive to slip a bottle of some nice red wine I’d never heard of into my bag. I assumed it was obscure to me because its price kept it off my radar when I was at the liquor store. That and it wasn’t sold in a box.

  By the time we made it up to the roof, ground zero of my gasoline vapor bomb, we found evidence of the blast. Actually, we found almost nothing up there. It apparently had all been blasted off to kingdom come. That was proof that something big and violent had happened.

  The charred concrete skeleton of the outdoor kitchen still stood. The metal columns that had supported the pergola stood straight, supporting nothing. All of the lounge chairs, tables, umbrellas, the potted plants, and more to the point, the bodies of any Whites who’d been on the roof at the time of the explosion were gone. The pool, however, remained perfectly intact, and whatever automated system had been installed to keep the water skimmed and filtered was doing a job just as spectacular as the climate control system in the wine cellar. It was perfectly aqua blue and as clear as Caribbean surf.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Murphy when he saw the pool.

  “Me too,” I agreed.

  Chapter 23

  The next morning, after a night spent at a comfortable seventy-two degrees on an uncomfortable—yet safe—concrete garage floor, Murphy and I were back on Sarah Mansfield’s roof. We were splitting a can of SPAM and each of us had a can of fruit. Peaches for me, fruit cocktail for Murphy.

  “We need to find some sleeping bags or something,” said Murphy as he rubbed at a kink in his neck.

  I nodded. It was too bad the Whites who’d taken over the house had fouled every piece of anything that might be used for a pillow, mattress, or blanket. “You know, we should check the elevator today and see if it still works.”

  “The mad bomber evaluating his effectiveness,” Murphy laughed.

  I ignored the wisecrack. “I’m just saying, we’ll have some time to kill today. I mean, if we’re sticking with the plan to drive after dark.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “It worked great on the drive down here. I don’t see any reason to start being more stupid now.”

  “More stupid?” I asked, knowing exactly what Murphy was talking about. Damn near everything we’d done so far was arguably a stupid idea. However, we were both alive
. I kept my favorite argument on that topic to myself: Most people weren’t alive.

  “I’m gonna jump in the pool and wash myself and my clothes,” Murphy said as he stepped up to the edge.

  Surprised into silence, I only had time to watch as he plunged in.

  After a big splash, he stood up on the pool’s bottom and shouted, “Damn, that’s cold!”

  I craned my neck to see over the edge of the roof. Any loud sound might draw the attention of Whites you didn’t know were listening. I turned to Murphy. “I thought you didn’t swim.”

  “It’s only five feet deep.” Murphy splashed me. “You could probably use a dunk, too.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll keep watch. Besides, I just had a swim in the lake, with all my clothes on, if you’ll remember correctly.”

  “Didn’t your mom ever tell you that you should bathe every day?” Murphy grinned.

  I ignored him and walked over to lean on a wall from which I had a good view of the city.

  We whiled away the morning doing not much of anything—talking about trivial nothings, pointing at places in the distance where we had a favorite restaurant or bar. We talked about old girlfriends, avoiding mention of Mandi and Steph. We speculated about what the world might look like five or ten years down the road.

  We mostly ignored the carpet of bones and charred, rotting bodies spread across every visible open space below us. We watched the river flow by and listened to the birds in the trees. It was almost peaceful.

  When the helicopters came—two of them, flying from north to south as was their habit—the sound grew up out of the silence. At that point, we stopped talking and simply watched. They flew over Austin’s skyline, but before reaching the tallest buildings, they both descended and circled in the area just south of the university.

  I pointed. “It looks like they’re going to land on the Capitol grounds.”

  Shaking his head, Murphy said, “I doubt it. They’re probably just shooting at some more Whites like us.”

  “No,” I said. “Look.”

  The helicopters sank lower and lower.

  “See that pointy tip just behind that big blocky building. That’s the Capitol. I think they’re landing.” Sometimes stating your point twice helps it sink in.

  Both helicopters disappeared.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Murphy. “That can’t be safe down there. Whites are all over the place.”

  “Unless the naked horde cleaned them out when they rolled through town.”

  “No way,” Murphy disagreed. “There are too many people in Austin to think those naked fucktards killed and ate all of ‘em.”

  “According to Jeff Aubrey’s calculations,” I said, “something exactly like that was supposed to happen. How long has it been now?”

  Murphy shrugged. “It’s what, late November? Early December maybe.”

  “Everything started in August. Three solid months. A lot of them could be dead.”

  “Yet we still see them everywhere, right?” Murphy asked.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but nothing like the massive hordes of them we were seeing. Not only that, but back in the beginning, they were like under every mattress, behind every door.”

  “Whatever,” said Murphy. “You’re thinking about it all wrong. Just because we’ve been holed up in that house up by the lake for awhile with no Whites around most of the time, you think they all wandered off. We only left that place two days ago and how many Whites have we seen?”

  “Lots,” I said. “But—”

  “No buts,” said Murphy. “We saw them at the house where we got shot at. We saw them at Camp Mabry—”

  “We always see them at Camp Mabry,” I argued.

  “That’s right. And there they were, just like always.”

  “No,” I argued. “Not just like always. Usually, there are like a million of them there. This time it was a few dozen hiding in those empty bunkers.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” Murphy huffed. “All I’m saying is that we keep seeing them. They’re out there—a lot of them. As soon as you get to thinking that maybe we’ve turned some kind of corner and there aren’t that many, then you’re going to do something stupid and try to get us killed again. That’s all I’m saying. So, don’t think that stupid shit.”

  “I can think whatever I want,” I told him, feeling a tad petulant.

  “Then keep that stupid shit to yourself, because I don’t want to get munched by a pack of hungry Whites, okay?”

  “Damn,” I forced a smile. “Somebody misses Starbucks.”

  Chapter 24

  Being close to Thanksgiving, the sun set earlier in the day. Murphy and I rearranged the cars just as we’d discussed, buttoned up the garage, and rolled down Mt. Bonnell Road with a full charge on the Mustang’s battery and a full charge on our night vision goggles. Unfortunately, we had less ammunition than we would have liked and few hand grenades.

  Nothing is ever perfect.

  We had a half moon and not many clouds. Through the night vision goggles the world looked bright and alive. Coyotes were prowling. Owls swooped silently down from the trees to skewer their talons through inattentive rats. Whites who happened to be looking at the road stopped what they were doing to piece together in their virus-diminished brains what the shiny black shadow was floating quietly past. Only a few made any effort to get close to the road for a better look, let alone a futile chase.

  We passed Camp Mabry. It was on our way out. We went over the highway—Loop 1—on the bridge, thankfully still clear. That led us through a maze of residential blocks cut through by Shoal Creek.

  “You know where you’re going?” Murphy asked.

  I had a pretty clear idea of the destination. I was certain the helicopters had landed down near the Capitol building. Get there, and all I’d have to do was look around for a few minutes and there they’d be, surrounded by a bunch of assholes with guns. I wasn’t sure what would come after that, but if the opportunity arose to punch one of them in the face—well, I wouldn’t complain about that. Anyway, that was pretty much my plan. I pointed out over the hood. “That way.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Murphy heaved an exaggerated sigh.

  “I’m just working my way through this neighborhood, looking for open streets.”

  Murphy nodded and started looking down the side streets.

  “I need to make a left if I can,” I said. “The last four streets we’ve passed were blocked.”

  “You’re still thinking the Capitol building?” asked Murphy.

  “Yup.”

  We took our left turn, found a north-south road and made our way down to 15th Street. That wide thoroughfare had remained surprisingly clear, at least up to the point where it clogged with abandoned cars and military vehicles near Brackenridge Hospital. Driving on the clear road so close to our destination left me wary, however. It ran right past the northern edge of the Capitol campus, which is why I made a right turn three blocks before I reached the corner of the Capitol property.

  “Hey?” Murphy said, pointing down 15th Street as we turned off. “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Don’t want to get shot at again in case those assholes are over there on the Capitol grounds.” I looked admiringly at the interior of the Mustang. “We just got this shiny new car.” I smiled. “I don’t want it to get messed up.”

  Murphy laughed.

  When we reached 12th Street I spotted a parking garage, zipped silently in through the entrance, and parked the car on a nearly deserted second floor. I pointed east. “The Capitol is about four blocks that way.” I pointed south. “You know what’s down there?”

  “Is this a trick question?” Murphy asked.

  I shook my head. “About four blocks that way.”

  Murphy turned his palms up. “Should I?”

  “The Travis County Jail.”

  Murphy laughed. “Where it all started. For us anyway.”

  I looked south and recalled the jail
, the riot, and our escape. “That was some fucked up shit.”

  “It’s all been some fucked up shit.” Murphy smiled again and got out of the car.

  I got out, jingling the keys in my hand. “Leave ‘em or take ‘em?”

  Murphy patted his jeans pocket where he had the extra key stashed. “We’ve had too much shit stolen already. We take the keys. If some other fucker runs through and needs to steal a ride, he better hope there are more cars upstairs ‘cause he’s not taking ours.”

  We headed out.

  Chapter 25

  We walked up a hill that ran east along 12th Street, staying in the darkest shadows behind cars and other debris left scattered on the roads by the storms and the post-virus chaos. When the hill crested two blocks west of the Capitol grounds, we saw that we’d come to the right place.

  The Texas State Capitol complex covered a square in the center of Austin four city blocks long on each side. The Capitol building sat in the middle of what were mostly enormous old oak trees shading acres of green grass so thick and soft that it made visitors want to throw off their shoes to feel it between their toes.

  The grass on the northern side of the Capitol grounds had been dug up years earlier to bury a massive state office complex connected into the historic Capitol building through what was its basement. They layered the whole thing in a couple acres of concrete except for one giant, perfectly round hole a hundred or more feet across and three stories deep. The round wall inside the hole was flanked by granite pillars, balconies, and tall windows through which sunlight poured to irritate the bureaucrats in their warrens.

  Surrounding the whole complex on the inside edge of the sidewalk had been a decorative iron fence that stood about three feet tall with rows of little gold star spikes along the top edge. All of that iron was now gone or more accurately, relocated.

  Right on the curb, some bunch of somebodies had constructed a rampart at least fifteen feet tall that incorporated cars, pieces of cars, semi-trailers, metal doors, sheets of galvanized tin, and pretty much any piece of metal that could be scavenged from nearby. Whoever built it had welded all the pieces together to form a fairly smooth wall that ran perfectly parallel to the street. That black iron fence that used to keep tourists off the grass now topped the rampart.