by Bobby Adair
“I can’t p…paddle f…from up here,” he said.
“Then jump out and swim.”
Nico grumbled and whined, but leaned over the bow and started the awkward process.
After four or five minutes of effort without much in the way of results, Nico sat up, breathing heavily from the exertion and laid the paddle across his knees. “Th…this is impossible. I c…can’t d…do this alone. Why d….don’t you st...start the engine again and j…just p…pull up to the shore?”
Steph took a step toward him. “You can get out, then.”
I put a restraining hand in front of Steph and stood up. “I’ve got this.”
Steph moved back and cleared the way for me. “The sound of the engine will bring in any Whites in the trees. Is that what you want?”
It was only three steps to the front of the boat and I took just one. My pistol was in my hand and I was well within range if Nico should he decide to swing the paddle at me.
I looked at the darkness on the shore.
Nico interpreted that along with the drawn pistol as a threat. “Are you g…going to sh…shoot me, Zed? Really?”
On that long, simmering boat ride upriver, the sins of The Harpy, Dan, Nico and the world conflated in the self-pity stretched on a pedophilic coward’s face. My rage flashed white-hot, blowing away any rational sense of restraint.
In a smooth, natural motion, I raised my pistol, pointed it the center of that face and pulled the trigger.
For that tiniest bit of a microsecond, as that sad face ruptured, I was defined. I knew what I was. I was vengeance.
Nico’s head snapped back and parts of his skull splashed across the water. Slowly, so slowly, his body leaned backwards and fell overboard.
Steph gasped.
I leapt up onto the bow and fired two more vindictive rounds into Nico’s chest.
Fright silenced the frogs and crickets as the night seemed to solidify into a tiny eternity. In the absence of guilt and second-guessing, emotion was satisfied. The scales were balanced. Purpose was fulfilled.
Nico’s body started to sink; black water gurgling red through the bullet holes in his lungs.
But purpose contorted into old, familiar emptiness. Emotionless, I was just a thing with a lethal weapon, trying to remember what I’d been before my bullet had so rudely shattered Nico’s skull.
The body descended further and was gone.
Only cold, dark water and the curious, hungry howls of distant Whites remained to lament Nico’s passing.
“Zed?” Steph said.
Feeling like a soulless White monster, I came back to the moment. I stepped down from the bow and slumped onto the padded seat, my pistol hanging limply in my hand.
“Zed, are you okay?”
I looked up. Steph was worried.
I nodded but tears in my eyes exposed the truth of it.
In small, slow steps, Steph came over and sat on the cushion with me. She put her arms around me and pulled me to her. Somewhere in there, with my face buried in her thick red hair, the rage of a thousand repressed pains found a path to flow free.
Chapter 21
The boat drifted with the current. Steph’s arms held me tight and secure. The cries of the infected faded into the distance behind us as the night sounds of the river took over. Black-windowed houses and cluttered docks drifted past. Silent trees ignored us and dark gray clouds continued to flow across the sky.
I finally found my voice. “I’m sorry.”
Steph put a hand under my chin and pulled my face up to look at hers. “Don’t be.”
Wanting to stay there, feeling her heartbeat through our bodies pressed so close together, sharing the same breaths, wondering what it might be like to have Steph’s embrace always there for me, I still pulled away. Too many other thoughts were bothering me.
“What’s my temperature?” I asked.
Not quite letting go, Steph said, “You said I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Please.”
Steph’s arm dropped off of my shoulder. She sat back on her cushion and took my hand in hers, concentrating on it as if the answer to my question was there. “Why is that important now?”
I looked out at the dark shore, futilely searching for accurate words to describe the complexity of my emotions and thoughts. “I feel like a monster. I need to know if I’m turning into one.”
Steph didn’t have a response for that.
I asked, “Is that what’s happening to me? Am I turning into one of them?”
“Zed, there isn’t any good answer, you know that, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
Steph took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. “Don’t you see? If I tell you your temperature has been going up, then you’ll believe you are a monster and shooting Nico is proof. If I tell you your temperature has stabilized, because of the way you are you’ll decide you’re more of a monster, because you won’t have the virus to blame.”
I didn’t know what to say about that, not at first. “I think I’d rather know. I don’t want to put my head in the sand anymore.”
Steph tried to change the subject, or at least divert it a bit. “Nico deserved what he got.”
“Tell me, Steph, please.”
“I’m throwing away the thermometer when we get back to the boat.”
“And?”
Steph shook her head, dropped my hand and crossed her arms.
“I need to know.”
She surrendered. “Your temperature has been stable since we started checking every day. Mostly. Maybe it’s gone up a little, but it’s hard to tell whether those are just normal fluctuations or not.”
I leaned over, put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. I realized she was right. I did feel like more of a monster. I was a civilized, thinking man. Yet I’d let my temper run away with me and I’d chosen to kill Nico. I chose to murder him. Deserving or not, he paid for a lot of sins with his blood.
“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.
Steph put an arm back over my shoulders and pulled me close.
The excuses I was telling myself seemed important enough to share. “Steph, I can’t tell you I know that he molested his own daughter, but I think he did.”
“It’s not important, Zed.”
“It is to me. I guess I suspected it all along. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
“People like that don’t change. You know that, right?”
“No. Yes. I think I read that somewhere once. Something having to do with recidivism rates among pedophiles or something.”
“None of it matters. I don’t fault you for what you did. Maybe in a way, I wish I had the courage to do it myself.”
“I’m not sure ‘courageous’ is the right word to describe what I did.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone calls it. It doesn’t matter why you think you did it. Nico earned what he got. Besides that, nothing else means anything. None of this changes anything about what I think of you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re a good man.”
“A good man?” My laugh was mocking.
“You’re a good man, Zed. Learn to take a compliment.”
I sat up and leaned my head over on Steph’s shoulder.
The emptiness started to fade and it felt good to be in her arms doing little more than watching the stars between the clouds.
Chapter 22
The next morning, the rain was coming down heavier than I’d seen in a long time. It pummeled the pontoon boat’s canvas roof and added enough noise to make conversation difficult. That didn’t matter much, as the first few miles of our journey had passed in silence. Murphy spent a good deal of time in the stern looking back upriver. I think the more attached he got to Mandi, the more he hated to leave.
Amy, usually good for a conversation, seemed infatuated with her new M-16 and was keeping pretty much to herself.
Dalhover, who was driving the boat, surprised me when he look
ed over at me and opened the conversation. “What I don’t get is why Captain Leonard let you and Murphy go. I didn’t think it was decided.”
I shrugged. I was doing that a lot. It seemed to be such a handy gesture. “Don’t know. She woke me this morning and told me if I still wanted to go, I had her blessing.”
“You didn’t talk about it last night when you two went out to ditch Nico?”
“Not about this.”
Dalhover looked over to Amy. “Did you talk to her?”
Amy looked at me then back at Dalhover. “We talked for a long time.”
“When?” Dalhover asked.
“After Zed and she got back from taking care of Nico. Neither of us went to bed.”
“And that’s when you decided that going for the suppressors was a good idea?”
Amy got a bit defensive. “You don’t agree?”
“Didn’t say that.” Dalhover took his time digging a cigarette out of his pocket. He put it in his mouth and after a half-dozen attempts to get his lighter to flame, held it up to the end of the cigarette, which proved to be too damp to light. “Dammit.” He tossed the cigarette into the river.
“Those will kill you.” I grinned.
Dalhover shot me a dismissive look.
Amy asked, “So, you do agree that we should do this?”
“It’s Murphy and Zed that are going, if I understood correctly,” Dalhover said.
Amy huffed. “I meant ‘we’ as a group.”
“Don’t mind him,” I said to Amy.
“Do you agree?” Amy asked Dalhover.
“I said as much when we talked the other night.” Dalhover didn’t look at her. “I need a damn dry cigarette.”
Murphy, who’d walked up near the rest of us by the helm, reached up and wrapped his hands around one of the overhead supports to balance himself. “What’s up?”
Dalhover said, “It’s a stupid idea to do it today.”
“Waller Creek empties into Town Lake about four miles south of the university.” I spoke insultingly slowly. I didn’t like the implication I was acting stupid. “If Murphy and I hike up the creek bed, we can get to the university and back in three or four hours and nobody will ever see us.”
Amy said, “I think Sergeant Dalhover is right. With all the rain these last few days, the creeks might flood.”
“We always get flooding after a drought,” Dalhover said.
“That’s not true.” I didn’t know if it was true or not. I never really paid any attention to the weather back when I could sit in an air-conditioned apartment and drink myself into oblivion.
“How long have you lived in Austin?” Dalhover asked.
“All my life,” I said.
“Then you should know what a flash flood is. Don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“They’re always worse after the droughts.”
The boat bounced over some turbulent water and I gripped a rail to steady myself. “I don’t think that’s true.”
Almost to himself, Dalhover said, “I’ve lived in this part of Texas my whole life, which has been a lot longer than yours, Zane. We’re coming off the worst drought I’ve ever seen. Mark my words, it’s going to flood. Stay out of the creek beds unless you want to drown.”
“Yes, Dad.”
After that, we didn’t talk much for a while until Murphy said, “So what I wanna know is, what happened with the whack job?”
“You mean Nico?” Amy asked.
“You know another one?”
“Zed and Steph exiled him last night.”
Murphy busted out laughing. “Exiled? What the hell does that mean?” He looked over at me. “Oh no. I’ve seen that constipated face before, Zed. What happened? Nobody said anything about anything this morning and everybody was acting weird.”
Amy looked up at Murphy. “Steph said Nico’s temperature was up. He started acting crazy.”
“You mean crazier?” Murphy grinned. “What’d he do?”
Amy looked down at the deck. “He tried to…have his way with Megan.”
That surprised Murphy. “No shit. Man, I’d ‘a shot his ass.”
Amy glanced at me.
Murphy saw it and said, “Oh shit.” He looked at me. “That’s what you did. That explains the constipated face.”
I looked away. “I shot him.”
“Man, don’t beat yourself up about it. I didn’t say nuthin’ when we picked him up, but I don’t think it was Whites that broke into that house and killed your buddy, Mr. Mays. I think maybe Nico’s brain started to cook a little too hot and he got hungry.”
Chapter 23
We passed Sarah Mansfield’s boathouse, Mr. Mays’ house, with his remains still in it, the dock where Nico and I made our escape from Nancy’s chain gang and the country club with the Humvee still sitting in the water at the end of the boat ramp. We collected a solid-looking, aluminum-hulled canoe along the way.
Eventually we came within view of the old, gray concrete of Tom Miller Dam. It wasn’t a big dam, at least not compared to the three-hundred-foot-tall Mansfield Dam that divided this section of the river from Lake Travis some fifteen or twenty miles upriver.
Ahead of us on the left was a restaurant called The Hula Hut, with a wide wooden pier for a dining room. Having sat at a table on that pier, sipping a beer and waiting on my food many times with a summer breeze blowing across, I’d stared at the peculiarly constructed dam. Built into the near side was a small hydroelectric power plant. On the far end, a spillway effectively limited the level of the river. At most times, water didn’t flow over the spillway. Instead, the river’s flow ran through the hydroelectric turbines.
Through the center section of the dam were nine more spillways, taller than the main spillway, each topped with an enormous floodgate. If those gates were opened, the level of the river behind the dam would drop ten feet. I’d never seen them open. I’d also never seen the water running over them. But the water was roaring over them that morning.
I said to Sergeant Dalhover, “We shouldn’t get too close to the dam. It looks like the current gets pretty strong.”
Sergeant Dalhover nodded.
I pointed to a building on the southern bank where Bee Creek added its flow to the river. “It would be nice to be closer, but why don’t you drop us off over there?”
Is that close enough?” Amy asked. “You’ll have to carry the canoe for, like, a mile to get below the dam.”
I smiled. “I’ll make Murphy carry it. He’s a big dude.”
“Hey, man,” Murphy said.
“It won’t be more than a half-mile.”
Dalhover took a long, hard look at the building and the thick trees growing down to the edge of the bank. “Don’t see any of ‘em over there.”
Murphy looked intently at that part of the shore. “Looks clear to me, man. Let’s hit it.”
Dalhover caught my attention. “Listen, Zane.”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful going through the trees.”
“I know,” I said.
“You guys will be carrying the canoe. You’ll be vulnerable. Don’t rush. Take your time. Be careful.”
“Yep.”
“A low bridge is a couple of hundred yards downstream from the dam. With the river as high as it is, the water may be running over. If not, it’ll probably still be too high to go under.”
That made sense. I gave him a nod.
“Stay in the trees until you get past the bridge and the rapids, then put your canoe in.”
The water on both sides of the dam was normally smooth, with only a gentle current that could be felt, but seldom seen. But the water wasn’t usually flowing over the dam, either. “Okay.”
“Don’t rush to get back tonight if it’s not safe. Take your time.”
It was all good advice. “We’ll be careful.”
Murphy slapped me on the back. “I wish.”
I shot him a hard look. “We’ll be careful. As careful as we can be.
”
Chapter 24
After stumbling through the fast-moving water between the pontoon boat and the shore, Murphy and I were soaked. We trudged up the steep bank, wrestling the canoe through tree branches along the way. Reaching level ground, we stopped for a breather.
Looking into the damp shade beneath the oaks and between the cedars, I whispered, “We can’t keep going this way. One of us needs to have a gun in hand.”
Murphy gave me a nod. “I can carry the canoe. You be the guard.”
Despite my earlier joke, I didn’t like that idea at all. “I’ll carry it.”
Murphy actually laughed out loud at that. “Whatever, man. You’re like an albino Somali. I’m surprised you can pick yourself up sometimes.”
“At least you think you’re funny.” I was mildly offended.
“Look man, put your end down. You know I can carry it easier than you.”
I huffed and looked at my wiry arms. I was stronger than I looked. I was sure of that.
“Don’t worry, dude. Steph likes your He-Man muscles.”
I stepped out from under the canoe and let it fall.
Murphy lost his balance for a moment, but to his credit, caught the weight before the canoe hit the ground. He took a moment arranging it at an angle on his back and shoulders, with the stern down low behind him and the bow up in the air in front. He gripped the gunwales with his hands, keeping it stable and making it look like the easiest thing in the world. He gave me a stern look. “Even you know that was stupid.”
He was right. If the canoe had banged on the ground, it could have brought unwanted attention. That was the only dumbass moment I could afford for the day. Actually, it was more than I could afford. I’d put us both in danger with a petulant choice.
I arranged my rifle into a comfortable shooting position before I turned to Murphy and said, “Sorry.”
He smiled, making it look less awkward to be carrying the canoe alone than with my help. “No sweat.”
And off we went, with little more than a destination and a skeleton of a plan.
Moving at a pretty good pace, we came out of the trees and onto a curved asphalt road that emptied into a small parking lot in front the windowless, two-story utility company building. Not a single infected person was anywhere to be seen. I waved Murphy to follow and we hurried across the empty parking lot. At the opposite end, a row of steel power line towers cut across the landscape. Below, all of the cedar trees had been cut to nubs, leaving only the prickly pear cacti and some hardy weeds growing up through the rough limestone.
