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

by Bobby Adair

  Careful to step over the sleeping Whites, I made my way back to the side of the combine and climbed up the steps to the cab’s door. It wasn’t locked. With a care to be quiet that had become a natural way of interacting with the world, I ever-so-gently handled the door mechanism and let myself into the large, roomy cab. I pulled the door shut behind me and latched it closed. The Whites sleeping nearby paid me no mind. They might as well have been disinterested nudists on a camping trip.

  The cab was clean, but smelled of old rot. The seat had no blood on it. I saw no signs of struggle. Even the keys remained. I spotted a personal-sized cooler on the floor in the corner of the cab, with the lid ajar. I guessed that was a lunch, abandoned months ago when the operator of the combine had hurried off to… well, he probably hurried off home. That was my guess. I was full of guesses. It was the Sherlock Holmes game I played in my mind when I wasn’t busy killing or running. In a world full of clues and murders, guessing the details of what had happened was becoming a morbid fascination.

  Looking at the combine and its accompanying truck, I guessed the operators hadn’t been attacked. Their equipment had been left in too orderly a state for that. It was as if they’d been harvesting and offloading grain when they were suddenly called away, likely picked up by another vehicle. The combine and truck had been sitting here since, waiting for me to show up with my murderous imagination.

  With the toe of my boot, I flipped the lid of the lunch cooler up and leaned over to look inside. Something wrapped in a sandwich bag had turned into a blob of mold and goo, long since dried out. I guessed that sandwich had been loaded with meat, cheese, mayo, probably some lettuce, and big, wet tomatoes. Moldy goo needs moisture to grow. Thankfully, a big bag of chips in its silvery, straight-from-the-store bag had been stuffed into the cooler next to the sandwich, thankfully not in a re-sealable—translate to: now tastes like mold—sandwich bag. Also in the cooler were a couple of Dr. Peppers.

  I’ve never been a fan of Dr. Pepper, but, hey, I did mention that pickiness over food choices was a luxury I could no longer afford.

  I sat myself in the cushy pilot seat with the chips in one hand and a soda in the other. The smell of the old sandwich in the cockpit didn’t bother me much. I’m sad to say, it’s a smell one gets used to. Having spent the last four months in a city with hundreds of thousands of decaying corpses, and more dying every day, the smell was commonplace. The thing I’d come to notice were those times when the breeze blew across my face, bearing nothing but the scent of the cedars and autumn weeds, absent the smell of death.

  I gulped down a good portion of the Dr. Pepper and belched loudly. I stifled a laugh at myself as I looked out through the tinted glass to see whether my rudeness had garnered attention from outside. Nope.

  The chips were stale, but again, freshness was a luxury afforded to residents of a world that no longer existed. To me, the bag contained calories and salt, both of which I needed, always needed.

  With my bony ass on a cushy, clean seat, with delicious calories and caffeine molecules tickling my neurons, a shiny little bulb of inspiration plinked on brightly in my imagination. My big, green bug needed a name: Godzilla.

  No. I liked Big Green Bug better.

  I looked over the control console on my right.

  A few yellow toggle switches stood out at the front of the panel, just below an LCD screen. It didn’t take much of an imagination to figure that’s where info on the status of the vehicle was going to be displayed.

  Most of the panel below the switches was covered in buttons—at least thirty of them—in groups of different colors, some green, some orange, and some gray. Thankfully, most had graphics on their faces. Of the row of three orange buttons, one pictured a turtle, one a rabbit. I had to assume those buttons controlled how fast the combine would do something, maybe spin the blades out front.

  Nothing here I can’t figure out.

  Yeah, because nobody ever lets his arrogant assumptions get him into trouble.

  I monkeyed with the buttons, dials, and switches, and I was quickly rewarded with an assumption-confirming illumination of the LCD screen that fried a rectangular blur of light onto my retina. I turned the LCD off and blinked away my temporary blindness, hoping no White outside had noticed the light inside the cab.

  When I felt I could see well enough again, I scanned the darkness around the combine. Nothing out there seemed to have done anything in response to the flash of light. The cab’s darkly tinted windows were probably a significant factor in that.

  I searched around the cab again and came up with a jacket, probably stored in the cab for those times when the weather turned cold or the driver got caught in the rain. I draped it over my head and over the LCD screen to limit the light that might escape. I brought the screen back to life.

  I’d thought that I might have some difficulty understanding all the info the screen might display, but it turned out the default view was nearly as easy to understand as an automobile dashboard. The most prominent aspect was a graphic of a gas pump and an indicator that showed the combine’s fuel tank was empty.

  Dilemma number one.

  If I wanted my Big Green Bug to help me in mowing down the Whites, I was going to have to feed him first.

  I wondered if the farmer who’d been running the combine had left the engine on when he took off or whether he’d just been low on diesel when everything went to shit.

  I sat back and thought on that one for a second, because it was an important question. If the vehicle had been left running, it would have used up all the fuel in the tank and the fuel lines before it stalled out. Then, with the key left in the on position, the battery's charge would have slowly trickled out over the passing months, leaving an insufficient charge to crank the starter.

  I looked down at the key and cursed myself for not having thought to remember what position it had been in before I started fiddling.

  But the LCD was on.

  Surely that meant something.

  I knew the battery might hold enough charge for that, and still not hold enough to crank what had to be a big starter on the massive engine.

  I leaned back in my seat, propped my feet up, and set about formulating my plan as sugary caffeine in my blood told me stories about my invincibility, and my intestines gurgled with all the carbonated water running through them.

  I could make all of this work.

  Chapter 12

  The nearest source of diesel was likely to be the truck parked near the combine. Unfortunately, the two Whites were still entwined across the seat, so I wouldn’t be able to get inside without causing a stir. The windows on that truck weren’t tinted either, so any glow from dashboard lights would be easily visible from the outside. If I could even get the bent-hinged door closed. That meant I needed an alternative method to check for diesel, which, on the truck, wasn’t at all hard to figure out.

  The ground was littered with brown corn stalks, some with leaves, many without, some short, some long. I merely had to pull one out from under an irritated White, strip off a few leaves, and voila, I had a three-foot-long diesel depth-measuring device.

  Yeah, I’m cool enough to name my tools.

  The diesel on the semi-tractor was stored in a drum-shaped tank, attached horizontally beneath and behind the driver’s side door. It had a big metal cap, covering a hole that left me way more room than I needed to shove the stalk of corn inside to check the depth. That seemed like an easy task until the stalk I was shoving inside hit what I guessed was a device to prevent siphoning the gasoline out.

  Argh!

  I stood back and stared at the tank for a moment, trying to imagine another method by which I could measure the depth of the fuel, until it occurred to me it was a pointless endeavor. Even if the tank were full, I couldn’t siphon it with the siphon protector inside. Could I remove that? Sure, but could I wrestle it out of there with a crowbar and hammer without making enough noise to wake a few hundred sleeping Whites? Nope.

&nbs
p; I scratched the truck off my list of possible diesel sources.

  My next move was to evaluate the status of the fuel in the combine.

  After walking around the Big Green Bug twice, looking for a gas cap, I climbed up on top. It had to be on top. That was the only part I hadn’t examined on my meticulous walks around the beast. Unless it was there in plain sight, just not visible in the dark.

  Once on top, I had to take care to avoid falling into what appeared to be a bin for storing grain before offloading, because down at the bottom of the bin was a nasty-looking augur for pushing grain up through the offloading pipe. It wasn’t spinning but still looked frightening.

  At the back of the combine, I found what I was looking for: a big gas cap. I unscrewed it, taking the requisite care to do so silently, lest I echo a few pings of metal through what I expected to be a big, hollow tank beneath.

  Once it was off, I slipped my corn stalk down inside. Thankfully, no siphon protector guarded the hole.

  My cornstalk worked, as imagined, and returned an unhappy result. The tank was nearly empty, but not completely so.

  I decided that was good.

  That meant the tank hadn’t been run dry by a combine left idling in the field. That meant the lines were still full of fuel. That meant the battery probably still held a strong enough charge to crank the starter. A potential list of problems had collapsed to just one. All I needed was more fuel.

  I stood up and looked around, hoping I’d see something close by.

  Nothing.

  I guess I'd hoped that I'd see a fuel tender that I’d missed in the darkness. I mean, how much diesel did the Big Green Bug need to harvest a whole field? Surely, the farmer didn’t drive it down to the gas station when it needed a fill-up.

  In the end, speculating on the topic didn’t matter. If I wanted to use my Big Green Bug to harvest the naked horde, I needed to bring some diesel to it. I recalled the shapes of roofs I’d seen when I’d been on top of the combine earlier, and I looked for them again. And there they were, maybe five miles distant.

  I looked up at the sky and wondered how much night I had left. Could I find a way to get over to that town, acquire some fuel, figure out a way to transport it, and then get it all the way back here and into the combine, while my crop of ripe Whites still lay in the field?

  Sure. Why not?

  What the fuck else was I going to do with my time?

  Chapter 13

  Tiptoeing through the sleeping Whites, or at least treading carefully, I worked my way in the direction of the town I’d spotted. When I reached the edge of the sleeping horde, I was surprised it wasn’t as clearly defined as it was when I first came upon them. Small bands and cliques were nestled in sleep together, but separate from the main horde. Some lay just a few paces nearby. Other groups lay a few hundred yards away. Some were only made up of a few dozen Whites. Some were comprised of many more.

  The social structures of Whites were proving to be a mystery of immeasurable depth.

  That wasn’t what had my interest at the moment. Still riding a wave of confidence from my night’s little victories, I latched onto the first idea that sparked through the genius-engine wrapped within my bald skull.

  I was going to commandeer one of the smaller bands of Whites and put them to work at hauling the diesel I needed. Helping hands. Why not? I’d had Whites follow me before, imitating everything I did. The less intelligent mass of them had a strong propensity to imitate, and they liked to glue themselves to whomever they perceived as their leader. Hell, that was the basis for the command structure of the whole naked horde.

  I refrained from telling myself it would be too easy.

  The band I chose was one of the easternmost. They were separated from the next nearest bunch by more than a hundred feet. And there weren’t that many of them. Maybe forty or fifty.

  Could I control that many?

  Perhaps control wasn’t the right word. Well, definitely not. Could I influence that many?

  I was betting on it.

  They were sleeping in a roughly circular bunch. I took off at a jog around their perimeter, smacking the ones on the edge of the circle with the flat side of my machete as I went.

  They started to wake immediately. Which, of course, is exactly what I wanted.

  By the time I’d made one trip around the circumference of the circle, half those I’d smacked were already on their feet and watching me come around for another pass. I tightened my grip on the handle and prepared to lop off a head as I came within reach of the first one.

  You never know for sure what these fuckers are going to do.

  The first one glared at me but made no move to attack.

  I passed him by and cocked my head to urge him to follow.

  He took a few tentative steps to follow before he broke into a jog behind me to match my pace.

  I grinned.

  Was it really going to be this easy?

  Others fell into line as I made another trip around the circle. I kept smacking sleepers and laggards as I went. The Whites behind me started to reach down and slap their comrades as we passed, hurrying them to wake and join in.

  When maybe half the group was following, and most of the others were waking up, a big White with a knife and a wide, ugly face jumped to his feet at the center of the sleepers and stared at me.

  He was the alpha. This was his group. He knew I was stealing them, and he was pissed.

  I quickly switched my machete to my right hand so I could conceal it behind my body as I jogged. I no longer needed to slap sleepers, anyway. My followers were doing that for me.

  Knowing what was to come, I kept watch on the alpha at the edge of my peripheral vision, as I pretended to keep my attention focused in front. I wanted him to underestimate me. I wanted his wriggly, primitive brain to tell him that the skinny, white usurper with the odd, big clown feet was easy pickings.

  As expected, he raised his knife and sprinted at me. Unexpectedly, he was damn fast.

  I spun around, just a tad later than I should have. My machete caught him in the throat, but his momentum carried him forward, and we both fell as his body went into bloody spasms on top of me. The alpha’s twisting wrenched the machete out of my hand, and his warm blood gushed on my face and into my mouth.

  But that didn’t matter.

  The only thing that did matter was that I get myself off the ground before the other Whites in the band decided we were both injured, hence weak, hence breakfast.

  They circled around me more quickly than if they’d been called to do so. It reminded me of kids forming a circle around two fighters on the school playground. Creepy. They shuffled on nervous feet. Their fingers fidgeted, and they looked down at us, trying in their squirmy, half-dead brains to figure out what to do next.

  As I got to my feet, one laid a tentative hand on my throat. Perhaps he thought all the blood on me was my own. I batted the arm away and smashed both my fists into his chest, knocking him onto his butt.

  I spun to see if any others were coming and instead saw a White reaching warily down for my machete as though it were a wriggling snake.

  I jumped over and shouldered her aside, stomping on the alpha’s head, and yanking the machete out of his throat. I raised the blade high and dared the Whites around me with my scowl. Males and females averted their eyes.

  I was the new boss.

  I hacked the old alpha once across the head and jogged another circle around his body.

  A couple of female Whites dropped to their knees and buried their teeth in the alpha’s warm flesh.

  I smacked each with the flat side of my machete to scold them for following their desires instead of my lead. One sulked away. One stood up, stopped me by getting right in my way, and spit a gob of dripping red flesh into her hand, extending it to me as a gift.

  All the Whites stopped. Most watched me and the piece of spit-covered flesh. Others dropped to feed on their old leader. Several of the males grew agitated, and their eye
s lingered on mine in longer and longer increments. They were measuring me and building up their courage.

  Sherlock Zed came to the unpleasant conclusion that he needed to partake of the old leader’s flesh to seal the deal on the transfer of power.

  If you go, go all the way.

  I hollered a monkey scream, and as everyone flinched away, I hacked down on the old leader's forearm, severing it completely. I scooped it up, opened my mouth wide, baring my teeth, and mashed it against my mouth as I closed it.

  I wanted them to think I ate some of the other guy's flesh, but I had no desire to actually do so.

  With blood over half my face and dripping from my chin I threw the forearm down and hollered again.

  None of the males looked me in the eye.

  Done.

  I gave them all time to feed, and when they seemed to have enough in their bellies, I led them away. My band of Whites jogged behind as I followed a senseless, winding path across the field, heading east toward the small town.

  Chapter 14

  Despite my few successful intuitive leaps with respect to White behavior, some of their actions make no sense to me at all. After getting my Whites accustomed to following me, I figured I’d give up the serpentine running and make better time by proceeding along a straight path. It didn’t work. Stragglers fell off the back. Others started to wander after anything along the path that caught their interest. I figured that running along the serpentine path was just mentally taxing enough to keep the whole of their simple minds focused.

  It was no surprise that my attempt to rest them with brief walks was also a failure.

  So it was that we ran along a meandering back and forth path to cover the five-mile distance needed to put ourselves onto the potholed asphalt road into town.

  The sky was turning brighter in the east as we entered the town. That angered me, but there was nothing to be done about it. I’d gotten my Whites to town as quickly as I could. I still had to find some diesel, find a way to transport it, and get it back to the combine. I only hoped the naked horde hadn’t gone too far away by the time I got the combine running to chase them.