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

by Bobby Adair

  Just inside the mouth of the horseshoe, hidden from the road, sat two Humvees with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on top. Behind each gun, the figure of a person stood, training the weapons on us.

  “Stop the truck!” Murphy told Grace. “Stop!” He jumped out while the truck was still rolling, letting the door swing open behind him.

  Seeing Murphy go, I followed quickly.

  Murphy ran ahead and slowed to a walk, as I came up beside him. We were still twenty or thirty yards from the Humvees and several people were moving around behind them, armed, not ready to show themselves. I couldn’t tell if they were our friends or some bunch of hostile assholes with the same idea I’d had.

  Come to Balmorhea. Be safe.

  Three figures walked out from between the two Humvees—a tall, older woman, an athletic black woman, and an unimpressive older man with bad posture.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. It was Gretchen, Dalhover, and Rachel.

  They’d made it. They were fucking alive and they’d made it all the way across Texas.

  Rachel shrieked and the tears flowed as she ran to Murphy, who grabbed her in his arms, hugged her, and cried as well.

  “Figured you were dead,” Dalhover rasped as he drew close, his hand extended to shake mine. Gretchen trailed behind, a smile on her face as well. Others stepped out from behind their cover.

  “It’s—” My voice cracked as I grasped Dalhover’s hand.

  In a very unlikely move, he reached an arm around my back to give me a hug. “Never thought I’d say I was glad to see you, but I am.”

  We separated. I wiped some creeping moisture out of my eyes and was immediately engulfed in a big hug from Gretchen.

  “Didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” said Dalhover shaking his head and looking back toward the Humvees. “Guess you don’t know.”

  Gretchen let me go, grasped my shoulders and held me still to look me up and down. "I'm not sure if you look better or worse but it's good to see you, really good."

  "It's good to see you guys too,” I told them. It was better than good. It was fantastic. It was the refutation of all my irrational dread. It was a genuine reason to be happy. Wait. I looked at Dalhover, guessing immediately some of them hadn't made it. Some of them were dead. "What don't I know?"

  Dalhover looked toward the Humvees again, drawing my eyes in that direction. Walking toward us, with pale skin, green eyes, flaming red hair blowing in the breeze, looking bewildered, was Steph.

  I think my heart stopped beating for a second, maybe a minute. The world stood still around me. Everything went silent. I thought I might explode from a mix of confused feelings.

  Reaching her arms around me to pull me tightly to her, close enough for me to feel her breath blow across my ear, she said, "Wow, you're still alive.” She started to cry.

  A rush of confusion slapped me in the face. A mountain of guilt poured over me. I’d abandoned her on the shore all those months ago. I thought she was dead. I fucked up. I so fucked up.

  “Wow,” my mouth said, running on autopilot, as my arms tried to remember how to hold a woman like I never wanted to let her go again. “You’re still alive.”

  Chapter 59

  Murphy was so goddamned happy, his happiness seemed to wash over everyone in range of his big voice. People were smiling all around us, introducing themselves, asking questions and trading answers.

  Not Steph and I. It was like they were all outside a bubble, the center of which stood me with her, separate from them. Looking at her face, seeing a ragged scar on her forehead running up into her hair, another on her cheek below her left eye, I felt a stab of pain at what she’d gone through. But the scars didn’t make her ugly. They made her real. They made her on the outside what she was on the inside—tough and beautiful.

  The wind blew her hair across her face and when she brushed it away, I saw the marks where teeth had torn at her forearm, and across the top of her hand. They’d healed, too. I recalled all the cuts, the bites, the bullet hole, the bruises, and the scrapes that left marks all over me I’d carry until the day I died. In that way, she and I were a match, damaged survivors, still standing when so many others had fallen.

  Steph started to shake her head as she looked at me, as if to answer an unasked question, she said, “It was my fault. It was my choice.”

  I choked on my words but I managed to say, “I thought you were dead.”

  “I let go of your hand.” She reached up and traced her fingers over a scar on my face. It was new since she’d last seen me. I didn’t remember how I’d gotten it. “It was a bad situation. I didn’t want you to die with me. I knew you wouldn’t leave.”

  “I wouldn’t have.” I took her hand in mine and I squeezed. How could I have let it go that day on the beach? “I didn’t. After you died—I thought you died—I don’t know what happened. I probably would have stood there in a stupor until they killed me. Murphy hauled me to the boat. He saved me.”

  “He saved us both.”

  “I don’t understand.” The memory of that day on the shore surrounded by a mob of Whites was so deeply etched into my mind I didn’t see how I could have missed a thing so important. Steph had been tackled by Whites. I was low on blood, barely strong enough to walk, and was trying to fight them off, trying to drag her into the lake. The naked ones were afraid of water, mostly, and I knew if I could get her to the water I could save her. But there were so goddamned many of them. And then her hand went limp.

  "It was the hand grenades,” said Steph, "I think. I heard the first ones. I felt the last ones. I think one of them must have detonated right next to the Whites who were on top of me. It killed them, maybe wounded them. I'm not sure. The concussion knocked me unconscious."

  Was that possible? It had to be. It just fucking had to be. Steph was right here in front of me. She was alive.

  "When I came to,” she said, "it was over. Most of the horde that attacked us was gone. Maybe they followed the Humvees when they drove away. I don't know."

  “Only the cannibals stayed,” I said. “There are some in the horde who prefer to hang back and eat dead Whites.”

  “When I crawled out from under the bodies on me,” she said, “there might have been a few dozen on the beach, feeding. I was so covered in blood I don’t think they understood what I was.”

  “You just walked away?” It was an incredible story.

  She shook her head. “I was hurt pretty bad. I crawled to the water and swam out to the boathouse we’d been staying in. I found a boat and took it back to Monk’s Island.”

  "You were at Monk's Island?” She'd been so close, the whole time, maybe an hour away. "Murphy and me stayed in a house on the shore way up the lake until I got better. If it wasn't for Murphy,” I shook my head to finish the sentence as I remembered how I felt at the time. Had I died, it wouldn't have mattered to me. "He nursed me back to health.” But she was only an hour away. Damn. "How long were you on Monk's Island."

  "Three weeks.” Steph looked down as though she was guilty. "I didn't search for you in Austin. I guessed that you made your way out here with everyone else.” Tears started to flow down her cheeks again. "After I got settled enough, I found a Jeep, stocked it with supplies, found a rifle and a sidearm, and headed west. It took me about a week to get all the way here. I took the long way, I guess. I avoided anything that looked like trouble.” She smiled weakly through her tears. "When I got here and they told me the shape you were in the last time they saw you, I figured you must have died."

  Steph’s tears were flowing in earnest. Mine were, too.

  “That’s why I didn’t come back to find you,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”

  "Don't,” I told her. "You don't have anything to feel guilty about. You couldn't have known.” All of my guilt was threatening to smother me, though. "You didn't do a single thing wrong. Not one. You tried to save my life. That's it.” I blinked through my tears to focus on her face. "If anybody's guilty, it's me. Will
you forgive me for leaving you?"

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, half laughing through her tears. “Will you forgive me?”

  In what might have been my smoothest move ever with a girl, I answered her with a kiss.

  Chapter 60

  It was weird—exceptionally so—sitting down at a picnic table, one of three, lined up on the grass under the trees between the lodge and one of the canals, which seemed much more like a mountain creek with cold, clear water burbling by. We were having a celebration feast. The Balmorhea group had been smoking a javelina—a crazy-ass-mean wild pig with big tusks—since the night before. With plenty of mesquite around and plenty of javelinas, smoked wild pork was a dietary staple. We new arrivals provided canned corn and rice from our trip to the warehouse grocery in San Angelo, as well as a variety of canned sodas and beer for everyone to choose. For dessert, we had peanut M&M's, of which somebody had loaded thirty pounds into one of the pickups.

  Everybody was happy. Murphy was back to his usual self now that he’d reunited with his sister. And that made me happy. For all that I’d dragged him through, I was afraid I’d ruined him.

  When darkness fell, we moved the party inside, though all through the feast and then afterwards, at least two people stood watch on a tower they'd constructed at the center of the courtyard. It provided a view of the barren plain in all directions. The watch was always up there, never any exceptions. Everyone took a shift. Safe time in Balmorhea hadn’t made my friends complacent.

  All eleven who’d gotten into one of the Humvees or the pickup that night on the shore of Lake Travis made it out to Balmorhea. The trip hadn’t been easy. They’d had some hiccups along the way, but nothing that stopped them. What was better, not one of them had been killed since arriving. Now with the addition of my new companions, we were eighteen strong.

  Lonely little Balmorhea, so far from everything, had indeed been a good destination.

  When the first group arrived in Balmorhea, there'd been fifty or so Whites in town or nearby. Dalhover organized a hunt and the eleven efficiently exterminated them all. Over the following few months, they'd gone to work setting up their new home in the cabins out at the remote state park. In town, they collected and burned all the bodies, so as not to draw in scavengers of the two-legged and four-legged varieties. They systematically searched every house and business for all food, drugs, and weapons they could find. They stored some at the ranger's residence on the state park property. They stored the overflow in the high school.

  And what might be the best part, they’d contacted a group of survivors in Saragosa, a tiny agricultural community a few miles north of Highway 10, not ten minutes away by car. The survivors—seven of them—were mostly from the area. They were farmers or ranchers before the virus came and killed damn near everybody. That group of survivors was willing to give all the guidance our group needed for farming the local fields once spring came.

  Chapter 61

  After spending my first night in Balmorhea with Steph, we got up before the sunrise and hiked out from the lodge heading southwest. We crossed the canals and walked along a flat path for half a mile before we started up a winding path on the side of a tall hill. The sky turned from black to a light, pre-dawn gray as we neared the top and I saw the desert plain stretch north and east. To the west, mountains ten or twelve miles away blocked my view in that direction.

  The peak we were hiking to was the top of a bald hill three hundred feet up from the flat ground below. It was the first small peak in a ridge of mountains in the Davis range that grew taller and spread wider to the south and west. It was where the day-watch guards came, a pair every day. The group of eleven kept four people on watch full-time through all the daylight hours, two on the hill, two on the watchtower in the courtyard, and then two more on the tower at night. It was a big investment in man-hours, but security couldn’t be compromised. All of us were alive because we’d learned that lesson the hard way and had been lucky enough to live. Nobody wanted to pay that tuition again.

  We reached the top of the hill as the sun was just peaking over the horizon and the landscape was turning from black shadow to gray and tan. Steph pointed north and east. Catching her breath, she said, "You can see twenty miles from here."

  Pointing south and then west toward the mountains, she said, "We can see the mountains, obviously, but we can't see what's on the other side. We can't see all the canyons and draws. If Whites come from that direction, we might not have much time to react.” She pointed west. "The nearest town with more than a couple thousand residents in that direction is El Paso, two hundred miles away. All desert.” She turned south and we both looked at the mountains cast in stark shadows by the rising sun. "Presidio is a hundred miles that way with maybe four or five thousand residents before the virus. Past that is the Rio Grande."

  “We’re remote,” I agreed.

  I followed her over to an old pickup with a camper shell that had been driven up the dirt road to the top of the hill and left there. She opened the camper door and folded down the tailgate, setting her backpack on the gate once it was open.

  I took mine off with some reluctance. It wasn’t heavy. I was used to the weight of it on my back so much that I felt naked without it. In fact, I felt a little less secure when it wasn’t on me. Taking it off meant I’d have to waste extra seconds in putting it back on when it came time to run.

  Steph reached in, pulled out a folding lawn chair, and handed it to me before taking one out for herself. She next handed me a flimsy cardboard box nearly four feet long. It contained a telescope. She pointed to a spot a dozen yards away just where the peak of the hill started to drop away on the slope. “Set it up over there.” She reached into the pickup and grabbed a pair of mismatched cases for binoculars.

  I walked over to the spot she directed me to, saying, “You’ve got everything up here.” It was a nothing comment but it was a compliment too.

  “If you see something far away,” said Steph, as she walked over beside me, “even with the binoculars, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s an antelope or a White. With the telescope, we can see all twenty miles toward the horizon and make out everything.”

  “Everything?” I asked.

  "Cars coming up the highway,” she unfolded her chair and set it up, "Whites, cattle, and javelinas like the one Sergeant Dalhover shot. I think that's what he does when he's on watch. He looks for herds of javelinas so when he goes out to hunt, he knows where to find them."

  “Not a bad idea.” I unfolded my chair and faced it toward the rising sun. Neither of us sat down. “How does he do…with the javelinas?”

  Steph worked on setting up the telescope’s tripod. “We get fresh meat at most meals. You’d be surprised how much game is out here.”

  I looked across the landscape. “I would.”

  She laughed. “All of us were.” She pointed at the rows of trees in groves north of us along the highway. “You were right about those.”

  “The pecan trees?” I asked.

  “Do you remember?” she asked, as she mounted the telescope on the tripod.

  “You need help with that?”

  She smiled at me and for a moment, the scars were invisible. “Best time to ask.” She clicked something in place and pulled her hands away. “Done.” She seated herself in her chair and I sat down in the other chair beside her.

  “We were on the river,” said Steph, “in that riverboat thing when you told us about this place. Fresh water. Pecan trees. Antelope. You said it was remote and safe.”

  I smiled as I recalled that night, trying not to linger too long on the faces of those who’d died. “And ugly.”

  “Yes.” Steph drew a deep breath. “But pretty in its way. And fresh air. It’s everything you promised.” She pointed down at the state park cabins where everyone else was either sleeping late or getting up to do whatever they did out here with their days. “All those people down there would probably be dead if you hadn’t told us
to come here.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. I had mixed feelings of guilt over all those who’d died along the way, all those I’d had a part in killing, and for what, to save a couple dozen?

  “You’re beating yourself up again,” said Steph as she turned to face me.

  I shook my head. “Probably the same shit everybody goes through when they finally get a minute to stop running and shooting and scavenging for their next meal—they stop, take a deep breath, and reflect.”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Steph. She opened up her binocular case and took them out. “Get yours out, too. We need to see if anything snuck up on us during the night.”

  “Does that happen?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question, but it came out anyway.

  “Sometimes cars on the highway. Sometimes bands of Whites. Never those hordes like we saw in Austin. I think the biggest bunch was maybe thirty or so—weak, nearly dead from thirst and starvation.”

  “What about the cars?” I asked. “Survivors?”

  “I suppose.” She traced her finger along the path of the highway across the desert. “East to west. Sometimes west to east. People looking for something.”

  “Do they stop?”

  “Some stop in Balmorhea. They scrounge for fuel or food like everybody everywhere, I guess. But nobody comes down to the state park. A lot of them see the pecan trees by the highway and get out to search for what they can find. We don’t bother them. Best not to, I think.”

  “Not looking for any more people?” I asked.

  “Playing it safe.” Steph looked at me. “Another lesson. Maybe we learned it together. Maybe we learned it from you and Murphy. It’s hard to trust people these days. Right now, we’re being cautious, taking care of our own.”

  “What does that mean for us?” I asked. “Me, Murphy, Grace, Fritz, and the others?”