by Bobby Adair
Steph was getting to her feet with her rifle up. She let go with automatic fire in front of us, clearing a path to get us another dozen feet closer to the boat. I ran into the gap, swinging my machete with all the frail might I could muster.
Her pistol fired at the Whites around us as she came behind. When my foot splashed into ankle deep water, I thought we’d made it. The naked horde was afraid of water. With every step now we’d get closer to safety. I turned as I emptied the last of the bullets from my pistol, but Steph got tackled again. Without the slightest thought of anything but killing the beast on her, I stepped away from the water, hacking and screaming.
Another white jumped on Steph, and then another. I cut at them. I roared. I cut at the ones close by as she struggled to get up. I beat at whites with the butt of my pistol and I hacked, but there were so many. There were so, so many. They were all over Steph by then. She was struggling and screaming, screaming not from anger, but pain. They were ripping at her. I reached in for her hand and tried to pull her toward the water as I chopped at the monsters on her.
Just get to the water.
Just get to the water.
But all I saw were grasping Whites and blood. I pulled, and she held my hand, knowing instinctually it was mine, knowing—
Her hand went slack.
And in that one heartbeat, as I hoped for her to re-grip my hand, I knew she was dead.
I swung my machete and let rage run away with me. I was feet from the water, a dozen feet from the safety of the boat, but I didn’t know anymore in which direction it lay, and I didn’t care. I was surrounded by Whites who couldn’t get through the mass of their brothers to reach Steph’s warm body, and they focused on me, wounded, bleeding, and marked for death by my choice to shoot my gun.
But I didn’t care. I just wanted to spend the last of my living moments mauling them with my blade and watching their faces turn to fear as their blood spewed from their wounds.
A grenade exploded nearby, followed by a wave of White howls. A second later, another grenade exploded, knocking me and all the Whites down around me. When I looked up, a little dazed, I saw Murphy. He ran at me through the smoke, grabbed me by my backpack, and without slowing, pulled me into the water, splashing through to the pontoon boat.
At the boat, he turned and fired at the Whites brave enough to wade in after us. “Get in the goddamned boat,” he yelled.
Unable to think for myself, I did as I was told and crawled in, rolling onto the deck and gasping for air from the effort.
Murphy’s gun continued to fire, then his feet were pounding across the deck, and the boat’s engine was revving loudly. More firing. The boat lurched off the lakebed, and we were afloat, moving away from shore. I was still lying on the deck trying to breathe, wishing I had the energy to roll off the flat deck and wade back to shore.
Chapter 53
We’d been drifting out in the lake well offshore from Pace Bend Park for several hours. The motor was off, and the pontoon boat bobbed on the waves while Murphy stood at the helm, night vision goggles on, watching.
Not a word was said between us.
I sat on the flat deck, holding onto a canopy support post, dangling my feet in the water, listening to the slosh of waves, and staring into the darkness. My gunshot wound had ripped open in the fight. It bled and didn’t seem to have any interest in slowing down.
I didn’t care. I felt the blood soak into my pants. I felt it trickle down over my knee and down my shin to mix with the cold lake water.
My life was never meant to have a happy ending, of that I was certain. Looking back, it was a surprise to me that the bits of happiness that tumbled serendipitously down even managed to stick to me long enough to ever make me smile. And though the intellectual parts of my brain told me that I should remember Steph’s smile, the smell of her hair, and the angelic way she looked wearing Sarah Mansfield’s jeans and t-shirt that day in her living room when she was caring for me after another losing round with a White, I couldn’t. I was drowning in numbness, and when I came up for air, all I felt was hurt.
Murphy said, “I see ‘em.”
I looked up into the darkness. In the night, I could barely make out the squat, white cliffs standing over the lake’s edge.
“One, two, three,” Murphy counted. “The truck and the trailer. They all made it.”
I didn’t care.
He said, “I don’t see any Whites anywhere.” He started the engine and headed the boat across the lines of waves, splashing me each time our starboard pontoon hit a crest. “You’ll be fine,” he told me. “We’ll all get to Balmorhea, and we’ll all be fine.”
Weakly, I said, “I’m not going.”
“What?”
Louder, I said, “I’m not going.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
We splashed through the short waves for another ten minutes or so, then Murphy cut the engine and we drifted up to the tip of the long peninsula on which Pace Bend Park lay. As we got close, I saw Dalhover, Rachel, Gretchen, and a few others coming down a wooden stairway built on the side of the cliff.
Murphy came up to the front of the boat. The port side pontoon bounced against a wooden swim platform at the bottom of the stairs. He jumped out and tied us off on the railing.
Feet were clomping down the stairs. Murphy came back onto the boat to help me up.
I said, “I was born to live in a world of Whites. I just never knew it.”
“You’re low on blood. You’re talking gibberish.”
I knew I wasn’t. Murphy didn’t want to hear what I was saying. “I’m staying here, Murphy.”
“You’ll die if you don’t get help. We need to go.”
“Help?” I asked. “Help from who? Steph is dead. Nobody has any medical training.”
Murphy looked up at the stairs and back down at me.
“Murphy, I know you think I’m half stupid from loss of blood—”
Murphy looked down at my shirt and shorts, drenched with my blood. His face was solid with worry. He started to reach under me to pick me up. I pushed him away with more strength than I thought I still had.
“We’re never going to fit in with them,” I said, half pointing to the people on the stairs. “Never. Maybe you can make a go of it. I can’t. I’m staying here.”
Rachel was suddenly down in front of me, pleading with me to go, but I could only half pay attention. I needed most of my mental energy just to keep myself upright. Dalhover said something. Gretchen’s voice turned urgent.
I was staying. Austin, Texas was my home. It was the place where I was born. It was where I had struggled to live. I was going to die in Austin, not out in some bumfuck West Texas desert where I’d be hated by everyone lucky enough to have immunity in their blood and pigment in their skin.
Somewhere in a blur of voices, I leaned over against the support post. I could no longer keep myself upright without it. I gripped it with all my might. I wasn’t getting off the boat.
Chapter 54
Between the blood loss from the initial gunshot wound, along with all that bled away after reopening my wound while I was killing Whites after Steph died, I was too weak to be of much use for anything. Murphy carried me to a house near the shore. He poured too much good vodka on my wound and not enough into my mouth. He sewed me up as best he could and put me into a bed upstairs. I slept fitfully on and off for a few days. I guess it was a few days. It could have been a week. I remember it turning light, then dark again several times. Murphy fed me. He brought me water to drink. And neither of us spoke.
One morning arrived and I woke. Light came into the room at an angle and cast a yellow glow around the shadows. I sat up in bed. I felt a little dizzy, but I was lucid. To my right, Murphy was sitting in a cushy chair, his M4 across his lap. He looked tired, but he was awake. He looked at me with no trace of a smile. All he had were hard eyes and a clenched jaw.
I looked at him for a long time as I put the sequence of my memory’s events in o
rder. I said, “Thank you, Murphy.”
He nodded.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I am.”
I nodded. He looked fine, physically.
“You okay?” he asked me.
I rotated my left arm around my shoulder and felt it stretch at the stiff wound under my rib cage. I breathed deeply. “I’ll need a couple of days, I think. But I’m okay.”
“You hungry?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Can you walk?”
I nodded, though I had no idea.
“I can bring you something.”
I shook my head and threw my legs over the side of the bed. “I need to get up.” I slid my feet down to the floor, careful to keep my hands on the bed. The effort was significant, and I had to pause to catch my breath.
“It’s the blood loss,” said Murphy. “What little you have left isn’t enough to do much at all. Do you remember passing out in the boat?”
I nodded.
“You were probably pretty close to kickin’ it. You’re lucky I got you here and sewed you up.”
“Thanks.”
“It might take a couple of weeks before you can get back to anything like normal activity levels.”
“Normal?” I smiled.
“You know what I mean.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.
“You lost a lot of blood that first night. Steph told me most of it after she fixed you up.”
I felt a stab of something in my heart. It was sharp and jagged. It tore, but fell away to bleak gray. I didn’t want to think about Steph. Every memory of her was wrapped in a layer of bloody, brokenhearted death. I had to wash those memories in gray. I had to forget.
With one hand on the bed, keeping my balance, I stood. Or that’s to say, I tried to stand. When I toppled over, Murphy jumped up to catch me. What started out as an effort to move my feet, to get away from a pain in my heart, turned into the humility of hanging from Murphy’s arms.
“If you need to do this,” Murphy said, “I’ll help you.”
I nodded. “I need to.” Feeling vulnerable and completely indebted to Murphy for his help, for being a friend that would do anything for me, I felt tears in my eyes and sniffled them back. I took a step. Murphy carried my weight forward. I took another step.
It was a slow, tiring process, but we made it from the upstairs bedroom down to the kitchen. Murphy put me in a kitchen chair near windows that looked out over the lake. I leaned on the table and thought about what an effort it was just to stay upright.
“I was planning on oatmeal,” said Murphy. “They got some brown sugar and pecans. No butter though.”
I shrugged and stared out at the glistening water. Behind me, I heard the clicking of an igniter on the stove, and then the sound of a jet of flame. Water poured into a pot and Murphy scooped a few cups of rolled oats into the water. The pan clinked as Murphy sat it on the stove.
What?
I turned to look at Murphy standing in front of the stove. “There’s gas?”
Murphy nodded. “There’s one of those big propane tanks or whatever outside. I guess it ain’t empty.”
“A hot meal.” I laid my head on the table. It had been so long since I’d eaten anything hot. “A hot meal.”
“I know.” Murphy said it with a pinch of his old enthusiasm, and I smiled as I looked at the lake.
While Murphy was cooking, I asked, “The others?”
“It’s just us here.”
“They went to Balmorhea?” I asked.
Murphy nodded.
“Even Rachel?”
“She’s better off out there than here.”
“You cool with that?”
“She doesn’t need me to hold her hand.”
When the oatmeal was ready, Murphy brought me a bowl and I slowly ate. It was fantastic. Murphy ate his much more quickly than me, but courteously waited in silence while I finished.
“Do you want more?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Thanks. I’m full.”
Murphy smiled weakly. “You’re gonna be okay.”
“Thanks for taking care of me.”
“It’s nice outside this morning. Do you want to go out on the porch for a while?”
I looked up at the distance from the table to the back door, then from the door to the nearest deck chairs outside. I wanted more than anything to be out there feeling the warmth of the sun on my face. But I smiled and sniffled as another tear filled my eye. I shook my head. There was no way I could make it all the way out there, not even with Murphy’s help.
Murphy smiled. He stood up and said, “Put your arm over my shoulder. C’mon.” He lifted me in his arms. “Good thing there’s plenty of food here. We need to fatten you up before you blow away.”
Murphy carried me outside and put me in a chair, the one in the sun that I was hoping to get placed in. But I wasn’t going to ask. It was hard enough being carried around like a child, without making special requests.
“You good?” he asked.
I leaned my head on the chair’s back and let the sun shine on my face. “Yeah.”
Murphy took a chair on the other side of a small table. “You want any water or anything?”
I shook my head. “I just want to sit here.”
Some mockingbirds were making a racket in a tree nearby. Wind blew the branches, and the oak leaves, brittle but still green, sounded like Styrofoam packing peanuts rattling in a shipping box. But it was a familiar sound, a comforting sound. It was the sound of Texas in the autumn.
Somewhere out there in the world, a sound was different though—faint, guttural, thumping.
The sound grew.
I sat up straight and looked out over the lake. Murphy was already sitting up, looking.
“I hear it too,” he said.
We continued to scan the sky. As the sound grew louder in the distance we both knew what it was. It was distinct.
Murphy pointed far to the southeast.
I looked.
“That’s a Black Hawk helicopter,” he said.
“Army?” I asked.
Murphy nodded and sat back to watch it cross the sky in the far distance. No other helicopters joined it.
After a while, Murphy asked, “What do you think it means?”
I looked at the dark-colored dot making its noisy passage in the crisp blue sky and thought about it. Eventually, I laid my arm on the end table and pushed it up beside Murphy’s. He looked down at my arm. I said, “You’re white. I’m white. We’ll always be white. Whatever that helicopter means, it doesn’t mean shit to people like us.”
Slow Burn Book 7, ‘City of Stin’
Chapter 1
As I slowly recovered from my gunshot wound in the cabin on the south shore of Lake Travis, I spent long afternoons on the back deck staring at gray November clouds and watching the wind whip up whitecaps across the lake. I frequently sat in the drizzling rain until my joints were chilled to the point of aching, and my face turned so numb my lips wouldn’t form words when I spoke.
While I did my sitting and staring, Murphy mostly left me alone. Maybe he figured if I wallowed enough I’d eventually tire of feeling isolated and pitiful. I told and retold myself that everybody on the planet who was still breathing was doing the same thing under the burdensome grief of those they’d lost.
The thought I got good at avoiding was that the survivors who didn’t want to join the dead were dragging themselves up out of their grief and doing their best with what life had left them. The soon-to-be-dead were a lot more like me. Wallowing. Waiting.
For the most part, the Whites didn’t bother us. We were way out west of Austin on a peninsula sticking out into the lake. Around us were dense cedar trees hiding houses on neighboring properties. Most of the homes had been abandoned, or the owners had turned into Whites much earlier in the pandemic. They’d either been killed or had moved on.
At night, we sometimes heard them h
unting out on the other side of the lake. They’d scream and make a racket, running in groups of a few dozen or a few hundred through the woods. During the day, we’d watch a helicopter or two—sometimes three—flying from north to south in the morning, and sometimes, early afternoon. They often flew back before sunset. Murphy and I became convinced the helicopters must have originated up north—we both guessed Fort Hood in Killeen—maybe an hour north of us by car back when a car could still be driven at seventy miles per hour on the highway. Now those same roads were ribbons of asphalt sprinkled with abandoned hulks, scattered with bones, and stained with blood.
“Hey, man.”
I turned to look at the door, a question on my face.
Murphy motioned toward the kitchen. “I cooked up that big-ass catfish I caught. Fried him up in a cornmeal batter like my mom used to make.”
I nodded and got out of my sulking chair.
Murphy closed the door and went back inside.
I reached my left arm up over my shoulder and leaned to my right. As the scars from my bullet wound stretched, the sensation of pain was barely there—because it had healed completely, or whether the virus had numbed that part of my sensation away, I didn’t know. I headed into the house. It smelled of home cooking. It smelled normal.
What is normal?
It’s the simple things you never guess you’re going to miss until they sneak back into your life, bringing with them a jumble of nostalgic feelings with the fucked-up parts of the memories scraped off.
On the kitchen table sat a big, picture-perfect platter of cornbread-coated catfish filets and a bowl of misshapen hushpuppies. Murphy placed a bowl of steaming pinto beans on the kitchen table and pulled a chair out to seat himself.
I grabbed a chair and took a seat as well, popping a warm hushpuppy into my mouth. “It’s going to suck when we run out of propane.”
Murphy shook his head, betraying a moment of frustration before he smiled. “That White I killed a couple weeks back—”
