Slow Burn Box Set: The Complete Post Apocalyptic Series (Books 1-9)

by Bobby Adair

  I nodded, not caring that Murphy’s summation of my plan made it sound every bit as stupid as it was. “I need to kill him. I don’t know that I can find him. But I need to kill him." I pointed to the crest of a hill against the star-sprinkled sky. "The naked horde is over there somewhere. At least some of them are. If they're there, Mark won’t be too far. They all stick together.”

  "No, they don't," Murphy argued. “Up at the lake we saw parts of the horde. Not the whole thing.”

  “Maybe we only saw parts of the horde,” I told him. "With all the hills and trees up in that area the whole horde could have been within a mile of us, and we wouldn't have known."

  “What?” Murphy’s face showed how little he thought of my counterpoint. “Am I supposed to accept that? Is that your whole argument?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not making a logical argument. I’m just telling you what I need to do. I need to find Mark and I need to kill him. He’s a roadblock for me in my drive toward happy Murphy-ville. It’s that simple. It’s revenge. It’s justice. It’s catharsis. It’s whatever I want to call it. I only know I have to do it. I can’t move forward until I do.”

  Chapter 6

  At the end of it, Murphy understood. At least, he said he did. Grace made a perfunctory effort to dissuade me, but in the end, she just shook her head and frowned, disappointment at a stupid choice. It was a combination of gestures I’d seen from people my whole life. Jazz told me I was crazy and made the biggest effort to change my mind. Gabe watched some of it, but mostly stayed close to Fritz.

  After they all loaded up, they wouldn’t drive away. Maybe they didn’t want to feel the guilt of abandoning me. Maybe they were playing a mind game, allowing me to face the reality of my choice in hopes that I’d change my mind. Or maybe they thought I was being a junior high kid, acting out for attention.

  What do I know? I’m not a shrink.

  I waved at them and walked naked into the darkness.

  Well, naked except for the boots. I kept those, along with Mr. Mays’ knife, tucked inside above my ankle. And, of course, I carried my machete.

  I wrestled quite a bit with the choice of whether to wear the boots. They could mark me as different when I went among the naked Whites in the horde. But I didn’t have four months’ worth of calluses built up on shoeless feet, as I was sure the naked Whites all did. I didn’t know how many miles of thorns and rocks and broken glass were waiting out there to mangle my soles with cuts and sores. They would surely turn infected from running through all the pissy mud and shit they left along their way.

  I wondered how many Whites simply died of infection that festered in untended wounds. As many or more had to be succumbing to exposure on the nights when the air turned frigid. How many would make it through the winter? Jeff Aubrey’s apparently incorrect equations only took into account death by fratricide and starvation. What of the magnified lethality from sleeping naked outdoors, eating raw flesh, and drinking unclean water?

  And the thought came to me, as it often did: what if Mark was already dead?

  I stopped walking and looked back in the direction of the cars. I didn’t see anything. The black of the earth behind me was only distinguishable by the stars in the sky beyond.

  I missed my night vision goggles, I think, as much as I’d have missed my machete, had I chosen to go empty-handed. As awkward as the bulky goggles felt when strapped over my head, I’d become accustomed to seeing through the blackness of the nighttime world.

  I was alone with the weight of my choice.

  No turning back.

  Well, I guess I could have turned back to the original plan and started the long hike toward College Station. I could have ransacked some farmhouses along the way, and maybe even scavenged a running vehicle. If I put my mind to it and caught a little luck, I might even have made it there by dinnertime.

  That thought comforted me.

  It assured me I wasn’t trapped by the consequences of one bad choice. I was choosing to proceed based on my logical line of irrational thought.

  Or it proved I was an idiot.

  Chapter 7

  Roads seem so much longer when walking than driving. It’s a truth that’s obvious to the point of triviality, until you park your car and walk back the way you just drove, feeling the passing of slow miles in your feet and knees.

  Landmarks, too, are different to the point of unrecognizability. They’re blurs of collage and detail that stand out by color and texture, as drivers race by at seventy miles per hour. At walking speed, the eye focuses on different things, and the mind imagines a distinct farmhouse in one place, for instance, to be another in a different field on a different stretch of road.

  At least, that’s what I was thinking about when I took a turn onto the road that I figured would lead me to the mob we’d seen chasing cattle across the road.

  I wasn’t sure.

  And that wasn’t taking into account the tizzy I was in when I’d sped away from the place earlier in the night.

  All I could do was hope my memory was solid as I took a chance and headed north. If I’d remembered incorrectly, I’d walk and walk some more. One thing I figured I could count on was that I’d find the path of the horde, at least. A few hundred thousand Whites pillaging their way across the countryside would leave plenty of evidence of their passing.

  I didn’t have to suffer my uncertainty long. I found the place in the road where we'd seen the Whites come through the bushes while chasing the cattle.

  Blood coagulated in sticky spots on the road and puddled deeply enough to be slippery in others. Thick bones and pieces of cowhide lay in shreds and blankets, red with blood and white with fat on one side, dirty white and brown on the other. Up the road and in the ditches, naked Whites smeared in blood still gnawed on bones and gobbled bits of meat missed by their faster, stronger comrades.

  I looked around at the trees growing up along the fence line. I looked at the bushes that were knocked down, and the fence pushed over by frantic cattle and thousands of chasing Whites.

  A sizable band of them had been through. What I didn’t know was whether this band of naked Whites was a peripheral bunch, scouts, laggards, a splinter group, or even copycats. I only hoped that in pursuing them, I’d find my way back to the main horde, and from there, to the Smart Ones at their core.

  And there, I’d find fucking Mark.

  The cattle and the Whites had been moving from right to left across the road when I’d observed them from the Mustang. Looking across a field of flattened crops to the left of the road, I spotted stragglers moving off in that direction and Whites on the ground, filling their bellies on scraps of carcasses.

  Null Spot, the stealthy Indian tracker, immediately realized the naked horde had a long tail and left a wide path.

  The reality of seeing Mark bleed suddenly seemed within reach. On quick, excited steps, I scrambled down the steep incline of a roadside ditch and climbed the other side. I stomped my way through a trampled hedgerow of thorny bushes and twisted barbed wire, all the while patting myself on the back for my genius decision to keep the boots on my feet.

  I took off across a field carpeted in the husks of the crops that had dried out in the autumn weather before they were run flat by the passing horde.

  My breath flowed out in clouds of condensation. The night was turning a cold edge on all of us Whites running through it with naked skin. I knew I would have been feeling the cold were it not for the numbness the virus left with me. And I was well aware that pain is a biological feedback mechanism that tells a living thing to stop doing whatever it’s doing, lest it be injured or die.

  Without sensations of pain, I needed to pay close attention to my body, or I'd risk hypothermia.

  That thought gave me pause to look for the bodies of Whites in the field who might have died of exposure. Surely, some of them had succumbed to the elements. They couldn’t go all winter without clothing and not experience a pretty hefty casualty rate.

  I saw
none.

  Then something else occurred to me. If any Whites fell, they’d likely be consumed by their hungry brothers and sisters, leaving nothing but scattered bones. That was the sum of life and death among every band of Whites. Run and kill until you die. Then feed your comrades with your dead flesh.

  I jogged for a bit to get my blood flowing and to warm my body up. I walked and then jogged again, proceeding alternately as I focused on avoiding the divots in the dirt left by panicked hooves. To step in one of those at the wrong angle might result in a sprained ankle—a deadly injury with so many straggling Whites around. I guess those that followed the horde specialized in cleaning up the fallen, whether they were still alive or not.

  I crested a few hills, seemingly getting farther and farther from civilization as I went. I saw shadowy copses where the terrain was too uneven to plow. Ponds with mirrored black surfaces sparkled starlight back at the sky. I realized I hadn’t seen a fence in a good while. Roads, rotting mobile homes, and barns seemed to have been stolen from the countryside.

  All around me were only endless, cultivated fields, slowly turning fallow.

  As I came to a walk at the end of one of my jogs, I realized I was getting thirsty. Necessarily, though, my water bottles were keeping company with a few days’ worth of food in my Hello Kitty bag in the backseat of the electric Mustang. The Mustang was probably fifty miles east by now.

  Looking around for a water source, I spotted a stock pond, but didn’t want to chance a drink from one of those. Every kind of bacteria that lived in cow pies would be in that water and would probably leave me with a case of diarrhea, or worse.

  I needed to find a creek. Flowing water had to be better for me than stagnant water.

  On the question of food? Eh. I’d gone hungry before. And thanks to my time convalescing by the lake with Murphy, I had a store of fat to burn off. If I lost twenty or thirty pounds again, I could afford it.

  I didn't think I'd be out that long, though.

  I’d just started my quest and already I was tracking the naked horde. Once I found them, I’d find Mark, and I’d give him a few good whacks with my machete.

  Problem solved. Walk off.

  The Whites wouldn’t likely fuck with me, not while I looked like them, not while I carried my bloody machete.

  Did I say how simple all of my schemes sounded as they rolled down the roller coaster of their momentum, turning surprisingly fast into adrenaline-laced screaming shit?

  Yeah, I know I did.

  Still, what else was I going to do? Sit in an abandoned Walmart somewhere and eat stale rice cakes until I died of old age, remembering all the people I used to know, ruminating over all the goddamned stupid things I’d done?

  Fuck that.

  At the crest of a hill, I spotted a geometric black silhouette across the valley, on the crest of the next long roll in the earth. The thing was, though, that I had no idea what the strange object was. I stopped and cocked my head like a dog, trying to figure it out.

  What the fuck is that thing?

  I hurried over furrows that ran across the slope, eager to explore the thing I was looking at. Maybe the eagerness grew out of the boredom of having spent what felt like hours crossing nothing but empty fields. In a way, I was hoping the thing I was seeing might be a house, and that I might find some food and water inside.

  I stopped.

  The ground on the hill across the shallow valley was odd. I stared at it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t as black as all the others I’d hiked up. Sure, some of them were covered in winter grasses that didn’t mind the chill in the nights. Others were little more than black dirt full of tan weeds and crops, tilled under by all the White feet that had passed this way ahead of me.

  But this field seemed to glow a dull white in the darkness.

  Chapter 8

  I ’d crossed most of the wide, flat valley floor and neared what looked like a stark border between the trampled black dirt and the white glow when I realized what I was seeing. Whites.

  They were lying in an endless blanket across the valley, spooning, cuddled, skin touching skin, keeping each other warm by crowding themselves together tightly as they slept. That answered a question about freezing to death. I wondered how warm they stayed, snuggled together like that, with only one side of their bodies exposed to the cold air. Was it enough?

  I looked north as I thought about Whites in the colder climates. What were they doing, with snows already having fallen in places and subzero temperatures coming? Surely, they’d have figured out already they needed to shelter indoors at night. And if not? Would they all freeze to death over the winter and leave the northern states open to normals? Would they migrate from north to south and back again with the seasons, and become a new-century version of America’s great buffalo herds?

  That was something to think about in the long term—the possibility of leaving Texas and heading north. Of course, the same cold that could kill Whites could also kill normals and Slow Burns, like me. My thoughts ran down a rat hole, quantifying how much wood to chop for the winter and storing provisions for the long months with snow piled outside the door. And what about the smoke from the chimney? That would certainly draw in any Whites who’d figured out how to survive in the snow.

  Thoughts for another day.

  Standing at the edge of a blanket of sleeping white bodies that stretched as far as I could see into the darkness, I had real business at hand, the kind that required every speck of my attention. I needed to decide what to do next.

  I raised my machete and looked up and down the battered edge of the blade. How many sleeping Whites could I kill with it?

  Did I want to follow the herd, blending in during the daylight hours, looking like them and acting like them, risking getting busted with my boots on? It would be easy to wait for them to cuddle up to sleep for the night and run among their prone bodies, slashing their throats. I could be the monster of their nightmares.

  Did I want that?

  Oh, hell yeah, I did.

  I looked across the acres and acres of them, knowing the horde had probably spread itself over the crest of the hill, down into the next valley, and who knew how far beyond that. Maybe for miles. How many throats could I slash in a single night? How many nights would it take to kill them all? Weeks? Months? Years? Would I ever finish?

  I scanned across all those bodies, breathing in that slow rhythm of sleep, snoring, and mumbling through their dreams. I lost hope that I could kill enough of them with my machete to make a discernible difference in their numbers.

  Still, it was a hard fantasy to let go of. The idea of it tempted me into indulging more thought on how I could kill as many of those evil white monsters as possible. The problem with my whole plan, I decided, wasn’t the futility of it, it was the method. Running among the sleeping with a swinging machete was a bad idea. If I wanted to kill Whites in the mass numbers that my aspirations required, I needed a more industrial-scale solution.

  I sighed. The dirt and dark skies were not fertile ground for inspiration.

  Looking back at the unnatural shape at the crest of the hill, I wondered if the Smart Ones, who directed the horde, were holed up inside. More importantly, I wondered if Mark was with them, keeping himself warm and comfortable.

  That thought made me angry.

  He deserved no comfort. He deserved to be shivering in the cold with ticks crawling on his skin, looking for hidden places to sink their mandibles and suck his tainted blood. He needed to be itchy from poison ivy exposure and scratching incessantly. He needed a cramping gut that forced him to squat every ten minutes for temporary relief from diarrhea. And he needed skin to be left raw from squatting so many times that it burned every time he relieved himself.

  But how much of that would he feel? He had a brain numbed to most pain by the virus. Just like me.

  With a tight grip on the handle of my machete, I reached down to my boot and took out my knife. I needed both handy as I waded int
o the blanket of sleeping Whites, carefully planting my feet in awkwardly spaced gaps, often squeezing my boot between bodies to find my footing.

  The going was slow. Some Whites stirred as I pushed and nudged. A few looked up at me before laying their heads back down to sleep. None made any move to threaten me.

  By the time I was halfway up the hill, I came to the realization that the big, black-silhouetted thing at the top wasn’t one thing at all, but two—a giant harvesting machine parked next to a semi-tractor trailer. I’m not a country boy, but I’m not completely ignorant either. So it was obvious to me the truck was there to run alongside the harvester for offloading whatever crop had been in the field.

  Disappointment slowed my progress once I figured out what the massive machines were. The Smart Ones leading the naked horde wouldn’t be sleeping inside.

  Of course, that didn’t mean the cab of one wouldn’t be a great place for me to bed down for the night. It would be better than the alternative—snuggling up with the Whites on the ground.

  Another thought occurred to me. I could use the harvester for a lookout tower. From up on top, I’d be able to see for miles in all directions. Perhaps I could spot the place where the Smart Ones were holed up.

  Chapter 9

  From the roof of the harvester, I searched. Out east, a series of black triangles and rectangles blocked the stars along the horizon. That had to be one of the countless tiny towns that dotted Texas’ farm country. Over the rolling undulations in the terrain in that direction, I saw only sleeping Whites, as though the crops that had grown in the fields had been replaced.

  So many.

  As I turned, looking for anything that might give me a bead on the Smart Ones, I uttered under my breath, “I’m your nightmare.”

  I loved that thought.

  It tantalized me with its power.

  It made me feel like an invincible Ninja, a black beast, a long-toothed devil with an appetite for white killers’ blood that I could pour into the void in my soul.