by Bobby Adair
Dammit. I’m not going to drown in twenty inches of water.
Rolling over onto my belly, I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. The rough asphalt tore at my knees and palms, but the friction brought me to a stop. I breathed deeply and looked up.
The Humvee was back in ankle-deep water again and Murphy was hanging out the door, looking back. It was clear from the look on his face he was only seconds from abandoning the Humvee and coming after me.
I gave him a wave to let him know I was all right and his grin stretched wide.
The worst was behind us.
Chapter 40
At the corner of Ranch Road 2222 and Ranch Road 620, the largest intersection for miles in any direction, we had to navigate through the usual maze of abandoned cars. The infected from nearby apartment complexes and shopping centers found their way back outside. After days of being cooped up, staying out of the rain with nothing but the grumbling in their stomachs to keep them occupied, they were ravenous. And, if I dare say, more than a little rude about it.
We picked up four of them by the time we were moving southeast on 2222. One was on the roof, one on the hood, and two were hanging onto the passenger side.
Murphy said, “There’s a big hill up here in a couple of miles.”
“Don’t sweat it. We’re not going down that hill. About a mile ahead, there’s a light. Turn right.”
“How well do you know that road? Do you think we’ll get stuck in some more flood water?”
“The roads we’ll be taking run along the crests of the hills. You know, so the houses on both sides will have those million-dollar views. I’m pretty sure we’ll be good.”
“Did you used to date a girl in this neighborhood, too?”
“Nope. I had a stoner friend who lived out here.”
Murphy started to run through his maneuvers to shake off the four infected clinging to the Humvee.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said. “With the rain stopping and the Whites starting to come out, we’ll probably pick up some more going through these neighborhoods.”
“Yeah.” Murphy steadied the Humvee in the center of the road.
“We can try and lose them all once we get closer to where we’re going.”
“How close can we get to the river?”
“If we do get through on these roads, there’s a street called Far View. It runs along the crest of a big hill on this side of the river. When you’re driving on that road you can see between the houses. The river is down below.”
“How close do you think that is to the riverboat?”
“I think we’ll be able to see the riverboat from there.” I pointed at the intersection coming up in front of us. “This is the place. Turn right here.”
The intersection was blocked with too many stalled vehicles, so we had to turn around and go back a half-block. A few quick turns later, we were on River Place Boulevard, heading directly toward the Colorado River again.
Murphy gestured toward the backseat. “We got a lot of stuff here. What are you thinking we should do with it? How do we get it to the boat if we’re up on a hill?”
“I think we find a safe place to park, hike down to the river, find a boat of some kind to get home and come back here in a couple of days when things have settled a bit. Heck, maybe we can even drive the Humvee right down to the river once all the roads dry out. I know there are houses close to the river. I just don’t know how to get to them.”
“The infected will be out.”
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”
With more than one wrong turn on winding roads—most of my memories of the neighborhood were made when I had at least a few extra chemicals in my blood—we found our way to a narrow, little no-name ribbon of pavement that looked like somebody’s driveway. It cut between Narrow Ridge Drive and Glenlake Drive. After that, Far View Drive was the first right. By then, we’d driven too fast over too many speed bumps and our friends without pigment had lost their grip and fallen off.
Scanning across the road and looking into the yards on both sides of the street, I said, “I don’t see any infected around right now. What do you say we pull over and jump out while we can?”
“How close are we?”
“I won’t know until we get a clear view of the river.”
Murphy turned the Humvee into the first driveway on the left and followed a long, steep curve down to a courtyard big enough to turn around in. In front of us was a four-car garage. The house on our right had so much glass on the front and back, I could see right through to the low-hanging clouds above the hills on the other side of the river.
Murphy cut the engine and we both took a good look around before getting out.
Coming together at the front of the car, we continued to keep an eye on the dying landscaping while we situated our weapons. I adjusted my sling so my rifle was hanging down my back. In my left hand, I held my pistol, in my right, my new machete. I was ready. “You want to go around back? I’m betting the deck has a view of the whole river.”
“Let’s go straight through.”
I shrugged. Murphy led the way.
At the front door, he knocked with the handle of the hatchet.
We waited.
Knocking was a pretty effective way to bring infected residents out into view. But none obliged us by coming to the front door.
Murphy knocked again. It was a big house, after all.
We waited.
Nobody came.
“One more time?” I asked.
Murphy knocked, waited a few moments and tried the doorknob. It turned and clicked. The front door swung open on silent, well-lubricated hinges. In we went.
The air inside was hot and stale, but didn’t reek of rot. Everything appeared to be in order. Not even the usual clutter of life collected on the counters and tables of most peoples’ houses was anywhere to be seen.
Must be nice to have a maid.
“Hey,” Murphy called up into the towering space above us in the foyer.
I could see all of the main living room, much of the kitchen and down a hall to our left. Above us, a loft opened up to more space on the second floor. “I don’t think anybody was here when the virus hit.”
“Doesn’t look that way.” Murphy was already moving across the living room toward a pair of French doors that led to an outdoor living space with a view to envy. I closed the front door behind us and followed. Sizing the place up for possible refuge as I went, I quickly came to the conclusion too much glass on the ground floor meant the house was vulnerable.
Murphy swung the back door open and hurried across a wide, stone-covered deck, coming to a stop at the railing a dozen steps ahead of me. He looked downriver, then upriver. He stiffened visibly with tension.
Knowing something was up when I hit the rail, I looked upriver and spotted the riverboat, maybe a mile distant. But that wasn’t all.
Chapter 41
The naked horde was streaming up the north bank of the river, thousands and thousands of them, congregating in a screaming mass of angry arms and grasping hands, a hundred feet from the riverboat anchored in the current.
Everything I saw down the steep mountainside was wrong. Black diesel smoke was pouring out of the riverboat’s exhaust pipes. Someone was hoping the combination of anchor and engines would keep the boat from being washed downriver. The engines were straining in the current. The rough water behind the boat’s propellers was frothy white. The deep-throated diesels rumbled through the shouts of the infected.
The boat drifted from side to side on its bow anchor. The river’s surface wasn’t smooth. It was flowing. It was rough—I’d never seen it that way—and it was wide. Way up over its banks.
The remains of a boathouse floated past the riverboat. Debris, two-by-fours, siding and half of a house’s roof were jostled through the current and down the river. A capsized ski boat and a dozen white-skinned bodies were in the water. On the banks, the river flowed white between trees and arou
nd houses built too close to the bank.
Murphy’s voice, empty and sounding like it was speaking a thought that sneaked out without any conscious choice, said, “Holy shit.”
“This part of the river never floods,” I muttered in a pointless defense of what I’d said much earlier. “It never floods.”
But the water was rising, even as we watched.
A house on the south bank, directly across the river from us, collapsed and came to pieces in the water running over its foundation.
The wind picked up in a blast that blew needle-like droplets of rain into my eyes. Looking up, I saw a mass of roiling black clouds above a wall of torrential gray rain stretched across the sky north of us and moving our way. Lightning illuminated the clouds from within, and thunder rumbled over us.
The storm wasn’t done yet.
Murphy was the first to react. “We need to get down there.” He looked for a way to get off of the deck and down to the steeply sloping yard ten feet below.
Without the slightest inkling of a plan, without any idea of whether we could help or whether those on the boat needed it, especially without any idea of whether we could even get there, I hollered, “Fuck it!” With one hand on the rail, I vaulted over the side, trying to control my fall.
I hit the wet grass squarely with both feet, but they slipped out from underneath me, sending me skidding and rolling down the length of the backyard, until I hit the thin metal bars of a fence fifty or sixty feet down the slope.
With a grunt, Murphy hit the fence beside me.
Catching my breath, I asked, “You all right?” While waiting for an answer, I checked that I could move my arms, legs, fingers and toes. Nothing seemed to be broken.
Up on his knees, holding himself steady on a fence post, Murphy said, “I’ll live.”
Realizing that I no longer had my machete, I looked for it in the grass.
God, it was stupid of me to jump with that in my hand.
Thankfully, rather than being stuck in me, it was stuck straight up in the dirt near where I’d first hit the turf. My pistol, which I’d stuck in my belt just a second before jumping, was in the grass halfway up the slope.
“We should have looked for a better way down,” Murphy grumbled.
He was right.
Going back up the slippery grass slope easily ate up any time I’d saved by following my impulse to get down the hill quickly. Nevertheless, we were soon over the fence and doing some combination of jogging, slipping and falling as we cut across the steep slope toward the river and toward the boat that, for the moment, was keeping our friends safe.
Chapter 42
We were maybe a third of the way down the mountain, out of breath, standing on a limestone outcrop, looking for a path that didn’t seem to get steeper or more rugged as it went. Directly below us was a hundred-foot drop straight down a jagged cliff face. The wind was howling out of the north by then, carrying on it the haunting wails of the infected at the river’s edge.
Murphy was pointing to a path that looked like a promising way down when the riverboat’s anchor line snapped with a crack that cut through the wind and the voices of the Whites.
Even as the thick rope recoiled into the air, the riverboat was already spinning sideways. The current relentlessly drove it to shore, on our side of the river, where the Whites were screaming their excitement at their shift in fortune.
“You still have grenades?” Murphy hollered as he started to run.
I had four or five in my bag. I jumped off the outcrop and ran through the gap in the cedars that just swallowed Murphy. He wasn’t running down the hill so much as across it. It took only a moment to figure out he was headed to the top of another cliff that might put us above the bulk of the horde on shore. Well, not really above, but close enough.
The riverboat’s path was erratic as it struggled against the current. Figures ran across the top deck. One stopped and pointed. The boat listed hard to starboard and the figures on the upper deck tumbled toward the side rail.
“Faster,” I shouted.
Murphy and I were both running between scrubby cedars on a thirty-degree slope across rocky limestone so rugged that it promised to break ankles at any misstep. An impossibly loud scrape of metal hull on stone stopped us in our tracks.
We were out of time.
The current was pushing the riverboat across the rocky bottom close to shore. It listed further to starboard and the bow jammed between several large oaks just south of the horde’s main body.
Murphy already had a grenade in his hand and positioned himself at the edge of a thirty-foot drop. The nearest tree was far below. He heaved the grenade without a hope of reaching any White near the shore. It arced through open air.
As I awkwardly fished a grenade out of my Hello Kitty backpack, Murphy’s grenade flashed fire and exploded in the air just above the trees. A thunder crack of sound hit us a fraction of a second later and I understood Murphy’s purpose. Another of his grenades was already in the air.
I tossed a grenade, dropped to a knee and unscrewed my silencer as fast as I could. Once it was off, I started firing ineffectual, but noisy, rounds toward the mass of Whites below. Murphy and I were noisy bait, trying to draw the horde’s attention away from the riverboat.
But my rifle wasn’t the only one firing.
The riverboat erupted in gunfire as Whites climbed through broken oak branches and made their way onto the sloping decks.
Run. Go for the ski boat.
I aimed at Whites on the bow of the boat, but they were so far away. Round after noisy round blazed through the barrel of my rifle. Each seemed to evaporate in the air on the way to their distant targets.
More grenade explosions and then Murphy’s rifle came alive.
Far below us, tempted by our noise, hundreds of the horde were screaming up the cliff, making their way through the trees. But it wasn’t enough.
Down on the riverboat, three people were climbing to the roof of the pilothouse as a wave of Whites flowed onto the upper deck.
“Jump,” shouted Murphy.
It was Mandi and Brittany on the pilothouse, followed by slow Russell.
A ski boat with four occupants disconnected from the far side of the boat. It struggled in the current as it slipped fifty, then eighty yards downstream before it came around. Dalhover’s spidery figure stood in the bow with a rifle at his shoulder, spewing bullets at the Whites on the boat. Amy took up a position beside him and added her weapon to his fire.
Whites were on the ladder up to the pilothouse roof.
Russell stood at the back corner, pushing Brittany behind him as he screamed, face upturned to the clouds. Bravely, Mandi held her ground on the center of the roof and shattered each bald white head with bullets from her gun.
“Jump. Dammit, jump,” Murphy shouted.
It was thirty feet to the water from up on top, a scary height from which to jump into a violent current.
Please, jump.
I reloaded and emptied another magazine in the direction of the boat. The effort felt frustratingly futile. But I had to do something, and pulling the trigger on my weapon seemed the only thing I could do that had any hope of helping my friends.
Mandi stopped firing and fumbled with a magazine.
Dammit, she should have practiced that.
Dammit.
Fuck.
Whites were on the roof.
She got another magazine pushed into the receiver on her rifle and fired, but five or six Whites were on the roof by then. Jumping into the water was the only escape, but for some reason, she didn’t see that.
Whites fell in front of her as she pulled the trigger again and again, and again, backing up a step each time the fire shot out of the end of her gun.
Then she was empty and reaching for another magazine.
Murphy howled.
Mandi tried to reload but was instantly overwhelmed.
Horrified, I stopped firing.
Mandi kicked an
d punched and fought, but too many hands were clawing, too many jaws snapped.
More Whites flowed past the melee. Brittany hugged Russell from behind, burying her face in the small of his back, and then the Whites were on them, too.
For an impossibly long moment, Russell stood firm, as hands tore at his clothes and clawed at his skin, shielding little Brittany. But one grabbed her arm and pulled her away. It seemed the only thing I heard was Russell’s pained scream. The only thing I saw was bloody white skin.
Dalhover and Amy stopped firing and their boat started to drift down the river. The black clouds rolled over. The wall of rain hit us and hid the world from view. I could barely see a dozen feet in any direction. The wind threatened to blow us off the rock and lightning blazed all around.
With my voice cracking, I said, “We have to go, Murph.”
Chapter 43
I was torn between hunkering down in a safe place or rushing out into the storm—doubling down on futile action, which seemed to be the order of the day—in an effort to go all Null Spot and find Steph and the other survivors from the boat. But Steph was with Dalhover. Dalhover was as smart, resourceful and tough as he was abrasive. Hell, they were all smart, resourceful and tough. I couldn’t offer any help they would need. I chose instead to ride out the storm in the house with all the windows, the one on the ridge where we had parked our Humvee.
The storm blew itself out overnight and the sun rose to clear blue skies and blazing heat. The drought was broken. The heat wasn’t. Autumn should have been knocking on the door, but was tardy.
Murphy, who’d turned into a silent statue of himself, went out on the back deck early that morning and sat. He didn’t eat, though there was plenty of food in the house. He didn’t drink. Most noticeably, he didn’t speak. He stared at the sunrise. He watched the river below. He watched the sun go down later that day. He just sat in his chair and watched the colors of the world change.
