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

by Bobby Adair

  Steph laughed and let her binoculars hang from the strap around her neck. She reached out and took my hands. “You and Murphy are family. We’re all family down there. We’re what we have now. Each other. If you think your friends are good people, that’s good enough for us.”

  “You’ve talked about it already?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Not formally, but we all talk. Like you said on more than one conceited occasion, half those people down there—maybe all of them—owe you and Murphy their lives. You’re with us.”

  With us? Family?

  It had the too-good-to-be-true sound to it.

  “What? “Steph asked, suddenly hurt showing on her face. “You don’t seem—I don’t know—happy about that. Why?”

  “Always direct, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.” She was hard again, all business, her guard was up. She let go of my hands and put the binoculars back to her eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.” She gulped and asked, “Are you staying?”

  "I…” I wanted to say yes, of course. I was next to a gorgeous redhead who I'd told Murphy I loved. My only friends in the world were down there in those cabins. But I was still a White. And there were more than a dozen people down there who weren't. "When people get together, when there are a bunch of normals, I'm a White. Murphy's a White. Grace and Jazz are, too. It never works out."

  “What are you telling me?” Steph kept the binoculars to her eyes, but I saw a tear on her cheek, heard her sniffle.

  I reached up and pulled her binoculars down. She blinked and turned her face away as she started to cry in earnest. Never being one to figure out the best thing to do in these situations, I awkwardly reached my arms around her and pulled her to me and took a risk that didn’t seem as huge a deal as it would have been a year before. “I love you. I’ve thought about you every day since I left you on the beach.”

  Steph turned her wet face up to mine and kissed me, then pulled me into a tight, tight hug. “But?”

  “I want to stay but I’m afraid.”

  Chapter 62

  We were doing a shitty job keeping watch. Steph was more diligent than me, taking time every few minutes to scan the horizon, but mostly we held each other and kissed, not talking much, just taking the rare opportunity to feel the comfort of being in another’s arms.

  Finally, she pushed me away and told me to sit. She wiped her face and took another look across the horizon. She pointed to my binoculars and then pointed west. "Take those and scan the mountains over there. Then look at the mountains behind us."

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Tell me what you’re afraid of? Surely, it’s not the infected. I’ve seen what you do with them.”

  I chuckled and felt awful for it. Do all murderers do that? "I'm good at killing Whites."

  “Are you afraid I won’t love you back?”

  "It would be reassuring if you said it."

  “I love you.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. She was looking in the other direction through a pair of binoculars.

  “Don’t be a dumbass, Zed.”

  I laughed. “Now you sound like Murphy.”

  “Maybe he knows how to talk to you in a language you’ll understand,” she told me. “I’ve loved you a lot longer than you’ve loved me. I never said anything because I didn’t want to get hurt.”

  “I wasn’t exactly playing the field,” I said, as I scanned across the smooth brown ridges. “Did you think I was interested in other girls?”

  “I thought you were going to get yourself killed.”

  “Yeah. I suppose that’s a real risk these days.”

  Steph lowered her binoculars and turned to look at the mountains as well. “Anything that way?”

  “Nothing I can see.” I lowered my binoculars.

  “I think we have a chance here,” she said.

  “All of us?” I asked. “Or you and me?”

  “Both. And don’t give me that crap about thinking you’ll get rejected by the group.” She patted the pistol in the holster on her hip. “If anybody gives you any shit, I’ll shoot ‘em.”

  I laughed.

  "I'm serious.” She did smile, though.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine doesn’t sound definitive. What else are you afraid of?”

  That was a harder question to answer. I thought about it for a second before I said, “Fucked-up family. Fucked-up mother. I’ve never been good at managing my relationships. No positive role models. Know what I mean?”

  “That’s what on-the-job training is for,” said Steph. “I can cut you some slack. But you have to talk to me. You have to, or it won’t work. Can you do that?”

  What she was asking for was going to be a harder for me than she thought it would be, but I said, “Okay. I can do it.”

  “If you don’t,” she patted her pistol again, “I’ll shoot you, too.”

  I laughed. “So it is true love.”

  She wrapped me in another hug and kissed me. “We can make this work. You and me. All of us. We can live here for the rest of our lives if we want. We really can.”

  “I hate deserts.” I smiled to let her know it wasn’t a deal killer for me.

  She patted my flat belly. “Get used to eating real food again, and doing it every day. Get used to taking a bath, even if the water in that damn spring is cold as hell. Get used to feeling safe. Get used to being with me and this place won’t seem so bad.”

  “I think I could get used to it. I really do.”

  The End

  Slow Burn Novella, ‘Alpha’

  Chapter 1

  Three years, three months, and eleven days.

  That was the shelf life of my desert heaven in Balmorhea. I just didn’t know it that morning as the sun was peeking over the horizon in the east, while Murphy and me were bicycling down the centerline of Highway 17, coming out of the Davis Mountains toward Balmorhea State Park.

  Behind Murphy, the wheels on the cart attached to his bicycle squeaked under the weight of the three dead javelinas lying inside. “We gonna tell Dalhover we got these from the same herd?”

  I shrugged. “The reservoir herd is getting too big. If we don’t thin it out some more, they’ll forage every ounce of food in that area and move on.”

  “Are you practicing what you’re going to tell Dalhover?”

  I scanned the scrubby desert from left to right and took a glance behind us—just in case. “It’s the smart thing to do.”

  Murphy grinned. “That’s not an answer.”

  “Nobody’s hunted the reservoir herd since those two new litters took to the hoof. Dalhover doesn’t have an accurate count.”

  “Killin’ three adults,” argued Murphy. “The rest might run off anyway.”

  “Dalhover says they’re too territorial to run off.”

  “I think they stay for the scraps we dump out there for ‘em.”

  “I’m sure it helps.”

  I stood on the pedals to push the bicycle up a rise in the road. Murphy did the same, pulling the load of javelinas with a little more effort. When we crested the hill, the ground flattened out and we were able to see the state park complex several miles ahead.

  As had become the norm, nothing seemed awry. No alarm sounded. No gunshots cracked. No sound carried over the flat desert ground except the wind, droning bugs, and the distant yap of coyotes. Still, I carefully scanned, looking for movement, scrutinizing the faraway hills for evidence of any out-of-place lump or a dust plume that most certainly didn’t belong.

  “See anything?” asked Murphy.

  I shook my head.

  “Me neither.” He paused in one of those ways that tells you something else is coming. “I think it’s time.”

  I looked over at him. The subject had come up over dinner last night before we’d headed out on our hunting trip. “Seems like that’s all anyone talks about anymore.”

  “Like I said, it’s time.”

  “Is Jazz with you on this?” />
  “Why’s it gotta be like that?” asked Murphy.

  “You’re practically married.”

  Murphy huffed.

  “I’m just asking.”

  We rode in silence for a bit before Murphy said, “Yeah. We’re agreed.”

  “That’s a majority, then.”

  “We got food enough for two years stored up,” argued Murphy. “There’s no shortage of antelope and these mean-ass pigs. We wouldn’t have no trouble feeding another fifty or even a hundred.”

  “If they pulled their weight.”

  “Anybody who won’t pull their weight is already dead,” said Murphy. “That’s the way the world is now.”

  I laughed, because the logic was flawed. “Based on everything we can see from Balmorhea.” I laughed a little more. “None of us has talked to an outsider in more than two years.”

  “Those farmers from Saragosa—”

  “Who were all killed by that horde that came through last spring. They don’t count anyway. Saragosa is only ten miles away.” That simmered up an old pot of anger that refused to be gotten over. But then again, there were lots of those pots on my stove. “They should have moved in here with us. With our combined firepower, they wouldn’t have been killed and we wouldn’t have lost two of ours.”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

  “Say it again, then, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There are only sixteen of us now,” continued Murphy. “That’s not enough of us to survive. Not in the long run.”

  “And bringing more people in—strangers—will make that all better?”

  Murphy didn’t have a response.

  “Dude, you know how normal folks treat people like us.”

  Murphy pedaled on for a while before he said, “The world’s different now. It’s gotta be.”

  Chapter 2

  A half-mile out, we rode past the defensive ditch we’d started building the previous winter. Fifteen feet deep, twenty wide, with scraps of barbed wire scavenged from area ranches coiled in the bottom. The dry moat was supposed to be the colony’s first line of defense. None of us believed the ditch would stop a hungry white, and especially not any sizable horde of them. Its purpose was to slow down and disperse an attack.

  The way Dalhover explained it was if a White horde attacked, they wouldn’t be able to hit our compound’s chain-link fence en masse. They’d get stuck navigating the ditch. They’d climb out in ones and twos, giving us plenty of opportunity to shoot them in the open ground between the moat and the fence. Maybe most importantly, it would buy us time to decide whether to make our stand at the final ring of fortifications built around the horseshoe-shaped lodge, or to load up in our vehicles and flee.

  Unfortunately, the ditch proved a project too large for a single winter. The backhoe we used for the digging drank through the supplies of diesel and broke down once every few days. Scavenging barbed wire from the nearby ranches proved just as time- and resource-hungry. As a result, very little of the ditch had been completed.

  Murphy, clearly thinking about the ditch as we passed, said, “We could finish the moat if we had more people.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We keep four people on watch all day long, and two all night.”

  “And?”

  “That’s nearly half our manpower.” Murphy slowed and let his gaze wander over the compound. “That’s not sustainable with what we’ve got.”

  “I won’t argue—”

  Something caught Murphy’s attention. “What the—”

  I followed his eyes to see Jazz standing outside the gate, waving.

  “Hurry,” she hollered.

  Taking a quick glance to our rear for threats, I pushed my bicycle hard, yet not so hard as to leave Murphy behind with our load of javelinas.

  “Come quick,” Jazz yelled again, “It’s Steph.”

  Chapter 3

  When I entered our room, Steph was lying on the bed, unconscious and wheezing. I rushed over to her, on the edge of panic.

  Javendra—the veterinary grad student who’d specialized in farm animal diseases at Texas A&M—jumped to his feet and shook his head as he made way for me.

  “She’s breathing and she’s stable,” explained Dalhover, as I sat on the bed beside Steph and put a hand to her face.

  “Snakebite?” guessed Murphy, glancing at Javendra, Grace, and Jazz, all doing their best to conceal the worry on their faces.

  Steph’s shallow breaths seemed to be so tenuous it sent my fears spinning to the dark places where all my pent-up rage lived, where the irrational side of me shook constantly at the bars of his cage, wanting to come out and rule my actions.

  I lay a hand on Steph’s forehead. Her skin was blotched with hives. Her lips were hued in a dangerous blue. “She’s not getting enough air.”

  “Anaphylactic shock,” said Javendra.

  “An allergic reaction?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” confirmed Dalhover.

  I searched my memory for things that Steph was allergic to and came up with only one—scorpions. “Don’t we have an Epipen in the medical supplies?” It came out as an accusation.

  Grace, always the mature one, didn’t bite. “If we did, we’d have used it already.”

  “And it would be expired,” added Jazz. “My aunt used to keep those things around. They only last something like 18 months.”

  “So everything we have,” countered Grace, “is expired, or getting close.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Javendra. “I read a paper once about the long-term stability of drugs. Many were found to be able to deliver a therapeutic dose even four years after the expiration date. Unfortunately, heat can be a problem, but most would have been kept indoors, at least.”

  I cursed silently. How could we have forgotten to stock an Epipen? “Claritin? Benadryl?”

  “Not while she’s unconscious,” answered Javendra, our default doctor in Balmorhea. “She’d choke.”

  I focused back down at Steph. My mind was spinning and I was starting to feel panic. She looked every bit like she might stop breathing at any moment. “Do we need to give her a tracheotomy? She’s not breathing.”

  Dalhover stepped over and put a calming hand on my shoulder. “She is breathing.”

  “Her lips,” I told him. “She’s not getting enough air.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for her right now that won’t make things worse,” said Dalhover. “Not with what we have.”

  That wasn’t an answer I could accept, and the first thing that came to mind was a half-assed drugstore in a tiny podunk town thirty-five miles south of us, up in the mountains. I turned to Murphy. “When we were in Fort Davis last fall. Wasn’t there a pharmacy? Do you remember?”

  “Grace and I checked that place out,” said Jazz. She’d been on the excursion with Murphy and me. “When you and Murphy were searching through that little gas station down the street, we took all they had—”

  “—which wasn’t much,” added Grace. “No Epipens.”

  “Fort Stockton.” That was my next guess. It was the biggest town in a hundred miles with a pre-fall population over 8,000. Big enough to have its own McDonald’s. Damn well big enough to have a pharmacy or two. “It’s like fifty miles. A straight shot down I-10. I can take the Humvee. Be there and back in two hours.”

  “A couple thousand Whites live there,” Dalhover reminded me. “The aggressive kind. That’s the reason we don’t go there. You know that, Zed.”

  Dalhover was right. Several times we’d tried a quick scavenging run into Fort Stockton over the past few years, only to make a hasty exit when the population of local Whites grew too numerous and dangerous to make the risk of staying worth it.

  “With all those Whites,” I reasoned, as I turned to Murphy. “If we thought it was too risky to go, then I guarantee nobody else has. We’ve got to give it a shot.” I was on my feet, my resolve set. I knew what I was doing.

  Murphy did, too.
“I’m with you, man.”

  “You don’t need to go there,” said Javendra, nodding over at Steph. “She just needs time. It’ll pass.”

  I drilled him with a hard stare, certain he was blowing useless comforts up my ass. “You don’t know that.”

  Grace stepped forward, maybe sensing that all the shit bubbling over in my heart for Steph’s condition might explode in Javendra’s face. “Look at me,” she said. “It’ll pass. It did last time.”

  Those words hit me like a brick. I didn’t know whether to be mad or surprised. “Last time? There was a last time? And nobody told me?” Through their silence, I stormed out of the room. “I’m going to Fort Stockton.”

  Murphy was right behind me.

  Chapter 4

  I headed for the nearest Humvee with a .50 cal mounted on the roof. I told Murphy, “Check the fuel.”

  “You got it, bro.”

  Jazz, hurrying to keep up with us told no one in particular, “What we need is a doctor. If we explored getting more—”

  “Not now.” Murphy glared at her. He could tell Jazz was wanting to open up the discussion about bringing more people in.

  “Without modern medication,” said Grace, coming along as well, “we might as well get a shaman as a doctor.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” argued Jazz.

  “A shaman would know how to use local plants…”

  Ignoring the pointless discussion, I climbed into the back seat of the Humvee, with Dalhover coming to a stop outside. He pointed. “There’s a full belt on the .50.”

  I was already standing between the back seats, up through the hole in the roof, behind the gun, and peeking into the ammo can. It was full.

  “You can take that one,” said Dalhover, “if you’re going through with this. You can’t take the rest.”

  I lowered myself through the roof. “I understand.” I reached for one of the full ammo cans stored in the rear to pass it to Dalhover.

  “Fuel’s full,” Murphy said.