Slow Burn Box Set: The Complete Post Apocalyptic Series (Books 1-9)
Page 71
The ground sloped up a little more steeply as I got near the pool, and I froze because I spotted something moving in the shadows on the other side: an alabaster Aphrodite with blazing red hair. Or Steph.
She moved gracefully along the far side of the pool, but didn’t give any indication that she saw me. I wanted to call to her, but there was a chance that the redhead wasn’t Steph at all, but just an infected monster, morphed by my imagination into Steph. There was a chance that other Whites were lurking in the shadows around me, ready to pounce if I risked a single syllable. With that thought, I looked into the shadows to my right to see if anything was over there among the thick oaken trunks.
Nothing moved.
I glanced to my left.
Oh, shit!
It all happened too fast. Something was moving at me with a well-timed attacked from my left side, taking advantage of the fact that I was transfixed by the pale, red-haired goddess across the pool.
It was a trap, and I’d foolishly stepped into it.
I spun hard to my left as I bent low, trying my best to roll through the knees of my attacker before his hands and teeth could clamp onto my flesh.
My attacker, not expecting my evasiveness, stumbled into me, but instead of going over my bent back and giving me a chance to sprint off to an escape, he came down on top of me, smothering me with his weight. My knife jammed into the dirt as I collapsed into the grass. I struggled, squirmed, and tried to push the heavy monster off.
My only luck was that he was still trying to recover from the fall, so he didn’t have his massive hands on me. But once that happened, I was dead.
I kicked and pushed and punched and wrestled and grunted and beat the beast with the butt of my gun. If I was going to live through the next seconds, I came to the realization that I was going to have to shoot it and pray to God that his White companions wouldn’t get to me before I got out from under him.
I felt a blow to the side of my head and saw stars. Too late!
Still I struggled and tried to raise my pistol to fire, but my wrist got pinned roughly to the ground just as the big man on top of me figured everything out enough to sit himself on my chest and raise an axe to cleave my skull.
Recognition!
“Murphy! Stop!”
Everything froze.
It was fucking Murphy on top of me!
It was Dalhover pinning my pistol hand to the ground and pointing a rifle barrel at my head!
“It’s me, Zed!”
Without pause, Murphy grinned wider than I’d ever seen. “Zed? Damn, you look like shit.”
Dalhover rasped. “I’ll be God damned.”
Footsteps came running across the grass and I suddenly saw Steph, leaning over Murphy’s shoulder, looking down at me, her face draped in her red hair. Through tears that were just starting to flow she said, “Wow! You’re still alive.”
As I bore the weight of my struggles, and thought every day about the moment when I’d finally find my friends again, it never occurred to me to see the situation through their eyes. They, very reasonably, assumed I was dead. Each of them in their own ways had been grieving, crying, perhaps missing me, and doing what they could to move past it, filing the memory of my face away in the mental scrapbook of all the dead they’d known or seen.
But suddenly, there I was. Alive.
Murphy jumped off my chest and in standing up himself, yanked me up to my feet and engulfed me in a smothering hug. “God damn, motherfucker, I thought you were dead.”
I tried to croak the same back to him, but the lump in my throat was too big to allow for speech.
When Murphy eventually let go, Steph draped her arms around my neck and buried a river of happy tears in my shoulder. I put my arms around her, squeezed back, and did my best to keep my own tears sealed up tight.
Dalhover laid an arm on my shoulder and joined the embrace as much as he could ever be expected to. “Good to have you back.”
I thought maybe his voice cracked just a little bit.
I was home.
When I went into the house through the familiar kitchen door, Mandi shrieked and smiled as she jumped into my arms. Russell, glued to Mandi’s side by then, seemed ready to explode with emotions that couldn’t be contained or expressed.
Having used the pillowcases to bring my food and reasonably cold beers and sodas into the house with us, we gathered around the dinning room table and for the moment, chose to let our guard down. The peninsula where the house had been built was remote and secure because of it. No one stood watch.
A celebration of my rebirth was called for and we all wanted to share in the joy of being together again.
We ate cookies, drank beer, and shared stories.
We drank to Freitag’s solitude upriver and laughed at Murphy’s impression of her scrambling across the lawn to get her rifle while fearing that the Whites would return and have her for lunch. Of course, I don’t know if it was funnier watching his impression, or watching his attempts to re-stick the bandage that kept coming loose from the side of his head as he goofed.
The frequency of good moments was trending positive. It was easy to be happy in the moment. Only thoughts of tomorrow darkened my moments between laughs.
Slow Burn Book 5, ‘Torrent’
Chapter 1
In the pontoon boat, Murphy and I had been drifting with the slow current of the river for a few hours. We passed a row of mansions built onto a manmade peninsula just upriver from Sarah Mansfield’s mountaintop compound. That’s when we spotted our first Whites, glimmering in a sheen from a light rain in the morning’s gray light. At least forty of them squatted in a tight huddle in the short brown grass under the backyard oaks of one of the estates. Silent.
As we neared, I saw many had oozing burns flaking with blackened skin. Some had faces scorched so badly that all human features were gone. Skeletons wrapped in immolated flesh, by some vicious miracle, not yet dead.
It was difficult not to see them as the people they used to be. In that moment, it was harder still. Without the howling or attacking, chasing and killing, they were docile. Suffering with the most human misery on their faces. Tragic eyes pleading for mercy. And, in a curse perhaps worse than any other, the virus left them with the capacity to know their wretchedness and wallow in their tears. Naked on the bank, they looked like refugees waiting for the mercy of sepsis. It was growing in the pus under their scabs, soon to assist death in finishing its work and ending their torment.
No doubt they were burned as a result of my work. But in my imagination—as that gasoline vapor bomb came together—I thought only of them blowing up, disintegrating in a supersonic rush of hot gases. Even afterward, when it was clear the blast had been a dud, I hoped the resultant blaze would burn them, make them suffer. Just as they were, on the edge of the river. But while wishing the horror of fire-seared flesh on another living creature was relatively easy in the abstract, the reality felt as though something from the blackest depths of my hate had come to swallow what was left of my soul.
I turned away from the dying Whites and sat down on one of the pontoon boat’s long, padded benches. The motor wasn’t running—we were conserving fuel on our downstream journey—but Murphy was at the helm, alert. I looked ahead into the distance for a while, trying to let the gentle splashes of raindrops on the river bring me comfort. But before long, I found myself sitting up straight, watching my hands as they rested on my thighs, willing my fidgety fingers to remain still. I was thinking of my conversation with Steph earlier that morning.
***
A couple of dead grandparents, the former owners of the house to which we escaped, had built a deck at the highest point of their roof, maybe fifty feet up from the sunburned lawns. Accessible by a staircase that ran up through the center of the house, it was a square, fifteen feet on each side, beneath a roof built to protect from the sun rather than the rain. The old couple had probably taken their grandkids up there in the late afternoons to share smiles and watch
the sun cast its red glow over water skiers trying to get in their last runs before dark.
But Grandma and Grandpa had turned white with the virus and slaughtered their grandkids in the living room two floors below. Murphy and I put them both down a few weeks before when we’d discovered the mansion and decided to make it a safe house for our band of survivors.
Unable to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I’d wandered around through the dark house and eventually found my way up to the deck. Steph was up there alone, taking her turn watching for ghostly Whites that might be creeping toward us across the peninsula.
“You’re up early.”
“Yeah,” I said as I climbed the last of the creaky cedar steps to join her.
Without looking at me she said, “You were supposed to get a full night’s sleep. That’s why you weren’t given a watch assignment tonight.”
Was she scolding me? “I think I passed out for a nap on the boat this afternoon. It threw me off my sleep rhythm.”
“It’s still two hours before sunup.”
“And?”
“And maybe you should go down and try to get some sleep.”
“I’m tired of trying. You’re being motherly about this.” I smiled to let her know that I wasn’t completely serious.
Steph glared at me before turning back to look across the stretch of dried-out lawn between the river and the back of the house. “I’m responsible for keeping all of us alive. And that requires discipline, Zed.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I sat on one of the empty chairs and took in the view. The black river snaked off to the west. The sky flashed dimly with far away lightning, but only scattered clouds rimmed in silver moonlight hung in the sky above.
Steph changed her position to look up the road that led to the bridge at the end of the peninsula.
The smell of rain blown in on the breeze earlier that day was gone. The dry taste of dust and lingering smoke was back. To make conversation with a seemingly impervious Steph, I asked anyway, “Did it ever rain?”
Steph shook her head and gently snorted as if to say, “Of course not.”
“Do you mind if I sit up here with you?”
“It seems like you’ve already decided. Is everyone else still asleep?”
“Yep.”
Steph strode over to the railing that gave her the best view of the front of the house, and then without a word, walked over to me and laid her hand across my forehead.
“What?” I reached up to push her hand away, but her stern expression told me I’d better let her go about her business.
She pulled her hand back. “Last night, when I hugged you, I thought you felt hot.”
“I get that a lot.” I pasted on a grin.
“I’m serious.”
I put a hand to my face, then to my forehead. “What? I feel fine.”
“You have a fever, Zed.”
“I know.” We both knew the virus left me with a permanently elevated temperature.
“Have you had a chance to check your temperature since—?”
“Since?”
“When was the last time you checked it?”
“I’m fine.”
She was in Captain Leonard mode by then. “The last time I saw your temperature was after you got injured at Sarah Mansfield’s house. I’m guessing you haven’t touched a thermometer since?”
I shook my head.
“Do you think you should have?”
I shrugged, getting a little miffed. Sure, she was a nurse by training, but her tone didn’t sit well with me.
“I think you’re hotter than you were.”
“Maybe it’s just that you’re used to the cool air out here tonight.”
“Cool? It’s got to be at least eighty-five.”
“That’s cooler than a hundred.”
“Nobody thinks eighty-five is cool, Zed.”
I shrugged and tried to look for anything interesting out in the darkness to divert her attention.
“I have a thermometer in my bag downstairs. After my shift, we’re checking you.” Steph looked back across the grass toward the mountain and examined the near-vertical face of the white limestone cliff.
How would anybody be able to see the infected climbing down the jagged, pale-colored rock? “We need some night vision goggles.”
“You can change the subject if you want, but I’m still taking your temperature when we get back downstairs.”
“What’s the point?”
“We need to know.”
“Why do we need to know? We can’t do anything about it, can we?”
“That’s not the point, Zed.”
“Of course it is. If the virus is progressing, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to dread the morning I wake up half brain-dead. I’d rather… I’d rather just stick my head in the sand.”
Steph turned away from the cliff and came over. She looked down at me. Her stern face had softened and, for the moment, she stopped being my boss and was just green-eyed Steph, a girl with guarded emotions and a big heart.
“Please?” I said. “I don’t want to know.”
Steph reached out and laid her hand back on my cheek. Just as I started to think it was something more than another temperature check, she slipped it up to my forehead. “Zed, please understand. I have to do it for the safety—”
“Uh-huh.” I huffed as I pulled back. Her hand fell off of my face. “For the safety of the others.” I jumped up and stomped over to the railing, anger boiling. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I white-knuckled the railing and stared at the cold black water, wishing things were different.
Steph’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. “Please, Zed. Don’t be like that. You know how much we all care about you. Please don’t be an ass.”
I motioned my head out towards the darkness. “I…” The words got caught in my throat. I didn’t want to be out there on my own again. I’d gone through too much finding my way back last time.
Steph’s other hand found a place on my other shoulder. “Please, Zed. Please, look at me.” She turned me around. “You have to know this isn’t going to be like it was back at the dorms. You know that, right? Nobody here would ever do anything to hurt you. Or… or to push you out.”
I nodded. I knew she was right, but it felt like it was going to happen anyway.
“Let me take your temperature. Please, let me protect our friends. I know you’re not a danger to any of us right now. But I have to do more than just hope it stays that way.” She paused. “How about if I check it and I don’t tell you if it’s gone up?”
Her hands were on my face by then, and though the moment was full of emotion, there was no romance in it. I was dealing with a fear that haunted me every time I glanced at my stark white skin. Perhaps she was, as well. And as much as I feared turning into one of them, I couldn’t help but sympathize with Steph’s fear—that I’d wake up one morning as a mindless monster and she’d have to put a bullet through my heart.
Without indulging any thoughts about the awkwardness of it, I pulled her into a hug and whispered, “Okay. But I don’t want to know. I never want to know.”
After that, our silence had no room for words. I pulled away from Steph and put myself back in my chair to watch the black river’s lazy current in the reflection of the moonlight.
Cicadas pulsed their rhythm and nocturnal frogs chirped.
I thought only of my burning desire to move, to do anything kinetic. With motion—paddling, running, shooting, even toting heavy bags of costume jewelry—came a solace in which the strain of effort consumed my attention and washed away all of the blackness. To move was to live. To live… Well, living was better than not. Being a brain-dead flesh eater was some kind of hell in between.
Anything but that.
I’m not sure how long I sat there absorbed in my fears, but it startled me when Steph interrupted with a question. “Are you okay?”
I nodded out of habit. I wasn’t.
“What are you doi
ng?”
I gave her a look that silently asked for an explanation. “Thinking.”
She looked down at my hands, which were resting on my thighs. “I mean… What are you doing?”
I followed her gaze and watched my thumbs tap out a sequence across each of my fingertips before repeating the sequence again, and again.
Fuck.
I clenched my fists tightly.
I hadn’t realized I was doing it. “Just fidgeting. I’ve always been fidgety.”
Fidgety, just like so many of those fucking white monsters.
A tear ran down her cheek.
Neither of us believed the lie.
Chapter 2
In a steady rain, the gray sameness of the morning made time flow as lethargically as the river’s current. Only the passing of trees, houses and hills gave us any sense we were moving forward with the day. Eventually we came to a wide inlet on the port side of the boat. It was something of a harbor for the marina that was to be where we left the safety of the river. The marina was part of a smallish country club at the foot of Mt. Bonnell, right where Mt. Bonnell Road cut hard east and changed names before it led past Camp Mabry on the way into central Austin.
From the country club, Camp Mabry’s munitions bunkers were only a few miles. Those bunkers were our destination.
Murphy and I paddled the boat toward the inlet, making as little noise as possible. It was no small effort to get the boat out of the current and into the mouth of the harbor. At that point, it became much easier to guide the boat, though no less difficult to move it.
Looking around for potential dangers, I saw a group of the infected huddled together against the rain in a grassy picnic area beside the docks. Just like the group I’d seen earlier, they all had burns, mostly bad, some horrendous. Not a one made any effort to look at our boat. They stared at nothing. In their rotted brains, they all knew the last days of their lives would be consumed by a single macabre task—awaiting death.
A pier that stuck prominently out into the marina was our target. Once close enough for our momentum to finish the job, I climbed up off my side of the boat and dropped my paddle on the deck. Murphy did the same.