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

by Bobby Adair

  Chapter 7

  The Humvee skidded on the gravelly concrete behind the Walmart, just by the loading dock.

  “Go!” Murphy shouted from above, standing up through the hole in the Humvee’s roof, both hands on the machine gun.

  Jazz's door opened in concert with mine, and we both hopped out.

  Grace had the Humvee moving as we swung our doors closed behind us. She gunned the engine, and the heavy beast plodded away, with Murphy looking back to watch us.

  Whites were howling all across Fort Stockton. It sounded like thousands, and they knew what the sound of that Humvee meant.

  Grace turned the corner at the far end of the Walmart without slowing down. Jazz and I listened as the sound of the rattling diesel started to fade.

  I was naked again, in the winter’s chill with nothing but a worn pair of boots, my dinged-up machete, a hand-sized flashlight, and a raggedy little backpack.

  Wearing only a pair of boots, Jazz had a pack of her own on her back with a pistol and several magazines inside, along with a flare gun and three rounds for it. She carried a big camp knife in one hand and a small flashlight in the other.

  My adrenaline was spiking in a familiar way I’d almost forgotten.

  Jazz turned to me, the cool façade she liked to wear showing its cracks.

  “Just us,” I whispered as I headed for the loading dock.

  Jazz followed.

  As if to cement the reality of our choice, a handful of screaming Whites came running through the dark holes on the loading dock where the metal doors used to be. Giving Jazz and me barely a glance, they hopped off the concrete dock and tore-ass around the corner of the building, chasing the sound of the departing Humvee.

  The sound of more echoed out of the darkness inside.

  Chapter 8

  Coming to a stop against the wall, just before going inside, I looked over at Jazz, the unspoken question plain on my face—go in, or run away?

  She was conflicted.

  Dirty handprints smeared the walls around the loading dock. The concrete dock under our feet was worse. Filthy trails blossomed out from the hole in the wall, spreading across the driveway and leading around the corners of the building. Single-serving piles of shit lay intact or smashed into stains. The smell of urine and feces flowed from within.

  Jazz had made the same obvious deduction as me. Whether or not most of them were home, Whites lived in the Walmart.

  Her mouth was sealed in a razor slit across her face. Her eyes were hard, desperately trying to hide her apprehension.

  Going inside might get us killed.

  I leaned in close, putting my lips to her ear. "I have to go in. You understand that, right?"

  She nodded.

  “You can wait out here.” I looked around. “Maybe—” The sound of slapping feet froze my words in my throat. I turned, machete ready for business.

  Three more Whites came running out of the darkness. Two passed right by, one gave us a long stare, but the howling of the others drew him forward.

  I pointed at a motel across the street, sitting alone on the face of the flat desert, surrounded by dirty scrub, cracking asphalt, and the carcasses of cars. “Hide there. If I’m not out in fifteen, don’t wait. Go to rendezvous one. I’ll meet you there or at one of the other two.”

  Jazz shook her head. She cut her eyes inside. She had made her decision.

  I raised my eyebrows, looking for confirmation.

  She stepped away from the wall and headed for the loading dock.

  I followed.

  The reek engulfed us in the rear stockroom. Pallets, shredded boxes, crashed shopping carts, a forklift, metal shelving, mounds of clothing, plastic bottles, broken glass, and packaging of every variety lay mounded against the walls, leaving goat paths open for our passage.

  The stench of death mixed with sewer reek.

  I spotted bones in the gloom, broken in pieces, the marrow sucked out.

  The voices of Whites echoed through the vast building. I had no way to guess how many. Dozens maybe. Twice that.

  We pushed on. We needed to get out of the stockroom and onto the main floor. The pharmacy would be in one of the corners, probably near the front. At least that's the way it seemed to me from what I could remember of the way Walmarts were laid out.

  The doors leading from the stockroom onto the sales floor were—of course—gone. As we passed through, we found ourselves in a maze of the Walmart's inedible inventory and shelving, shoved into stinking piles that towered over us. Paths led into the disorder in three directions. Two of those paths branched into more. Rows and rows of tinted skylights illuminated the interior in a twilight gray speared with shafts of brilliant sunlight where the Plexiglas on some had been shattered. Everything smelled of mildew and unwashed armpits.

  The sound that stopped us there in the entrance, though, was one neither of us expected to hear, certainly not one we'd heard in more than three years—it was a baby crying.

  Chapter 9

  ‘What the fuck?’ mouthed Jazz.

  A live baby didn’t make any sense, unless there were normal humans somewhere inside, in some kind of impenetrable fortress. Was that what kept Whites lingering in the building? Humans? And how had a band of humans not just survived, but managed to thrive holed up in a Walmart?

  If the Fort Stockton survivors had seized the Walmart early enough into the collapse, they could have taken control of years worth of food stocks, medicines, and nearly everything anyone might need for long-term survival. But what about water? Did they have collectors and cisterns to capture the meager rainwater that fell out here? Had they drilled a well through the floor? My mind spun through a thousand logistical and tactical questions. Only one thing was sure—if survivors were holed up inside, then no matter what everything else in the Walmart looked like, they had to have the cream of the crop, supply-wise, already stashed in their fortress. If medical supplies were here, they’d have them.

  They were the people we needed to talk to.

  The major chink in that plan, though, was that Jazz and I looked the part of the naked White, brain-fried and savage.

  However, half-rotten clothes lay within reach in every direction. All the ingredients for a successful meet-n-greet were on hand.

  I leaned in close, lips-to-lobe and whispered, “Survivors?”

  Jazz nodded.

  “We have to find them.”

  She agreed.

  Machete at the ready, I headed into the goat-path maze, following the sound of the crying baby. Jazz followed close behind. We were both running on max alert, ready to pounce on anything that moved. My breathing was coming in rapid pants and I was starting to sweat, despite the chilly temperatures.

  Jazz put a hand on my shoulder to get my attention.

  When I turned to look, she made a show of drawing a long, deep breath.

  I understood. I needed to calm down. It had been a long while since I'd run swinging-dick naked through enemy territory with nothing but my machete and a pair of boots. The habit of it, built-in from those long, horrific months after the collapse had worn thin in my years of comfort and relative safety out in Balmorhea. I'd lost my edge.

  A drew a few more breaths and focused on my heart rate.

  I used to be a stone-cold killer of Whites. I used to be Null Spot, the Destroyer. That's what kept me alive through all of that shit. That's what would keep me alive over the next ten minutes, two hours, or ten weeks. Whatever life looked like when I got back to Balmorhea with the Epipen, I needed to find a way to stay in practice for the kind of deadly work I was good at.

  I realized, my heart had stopped racing. My breath was flowing evenly and calmly. My hands had steadied out. I looked at Jazz and gave her a nod of thanks.

  We proceeded.

  Other sounds started to grow louder as we crossed the vast floor—the sounds of kids playing. Not many, but definitely kids. Young ones. Four, maybe five of them. Hell, maybe six, but definitely not a whole daycare's
worth. Whites were out there in the maze, too, making noises that didn't make any sense. They weren't words, nothing like it, but it wasn't that raging-mad howl Whites seemed to prefer when they were on the chase.

  The slap of bare feet jogging over linoleum grew from somewhere off to our left.

  I hurried toward a branch up ahead, determined to take the rightward path and avoid a confrontation.

  I didn’t make it.

  A pair of Whites, both males, came running around a curve on the path to the left. Both stopped and froze when they saw Jazz, and I poised there at the intersection of the three routes.

  I don't know if they noticed the boots or the backpacks we wore. I don't know if they recognized us as strangers. Given the broad spectrum of debilitative effects the virus had on the human mind, it was impossible to know. What I did know, though, was that their eyes settled on the machete in my hand. That, they understood. Which meant there had to be armed Smart Ones in Fort Stockton.

  In a flash of inspiration, I lowered my machete and raised my left hand, palm up, metallic orange flashlight looking shiny and tempting. I held it out in offering.

  Both Whites fixated on the strange bauble.

  I grunted softly and nodded my head toward the flashlight.

  The first one stepped timidly closer. The second followed, a little more boldly, trying his best to push past the other.

  Jazz shuffled behind me. She was nervous. She didn’t know what I had in mind.

  Once the Whites were within five or six feet, I flicked the flashlight on.

  The light startled them, and before their slow brains could think to come up with a response, I dropped the flashlight. It clinked on the floor but didn’t go out.

  The bold White dropped to his knees, trying to gather up the flashlight as the other stepped near and bent over for a closer look. That was his fatal mistake.

  I heaved my machete around, putting all my weight into a swing that cut right through the back of the timid White's neck. Its head fell away in a spray of blood as I pulled my machete back near my hip. The bold one looked up, his face covered in surprise, his eyes clouded with his buddy's blood. I drove the tip of my machete through his throat. He collapsed, grasping at the blade as I ground it into his spine, severing the connection from brain to body. He went limp and gurgled his way toward death.

  From behind me, Jazz muttered, “Shit.”

  Feeling the warmth of the splattered blood turning cold on my skin, I looked back at Jazz. “Shit?”

  “I—” She shuffled her feet away from the head oozing a puddle of red near her boots. “I didn’t expect that.”

  In truth, I didn't either, but self-preservation eclipsed every other thought, and I did what I did. Rationalizations followed as the blood ran across the floor. Would the Whites have passed us by on their way to whatever mischief was already on their minds? Were they the standard vicious ones, like most were, or were they the gentle Russell types like the ones we came across in Easy Town. Did I just murder two Whites who were still partially human?

  I filled in all the answers I needed to shore up my sanity, and once again, assure myself that I wasn't a murderer. I was Null Spot the Destroyer, and they were savages in need of the only thing that would cure them. I provided. They received. If anything, I gifted them a mercy. And that was all the rationalization I needed to cling to as the nebulous count of my victims ticked up by two notches.

  Jazz nudged me. “You okay?”

  The mouth of the guy on the ground was still gulping at the air, tongue smacking, popping each time the mouth opened. The eyes were blinking like it was trying to make sense of what was happening.

  I turned my attention to our surroundings, trying to put the atrocity out of my mind and listen for more Whites coming our way. “We need to move.”

  Chapter 10

  We came to the outer wall of the fortress in what used to be the girls’ clothing section. Where I'd been expecting to see cinderblocks and embrasures, iron bars and murder holes, and the bodies of Whites who'd made the mistake of coming too close, instead, I saw debris, piled to the ceiling. The sounds of toddlers seemed to be coming from the other side of the debris wall. To me, none of it made sense.

  Jazz pulled me close to whisper, “If this is the fortress, where the hell are all the Whites?”

  She was talking about the Whites that should have been laying siege and tearing through the barriers. I shrugged in answer. We had little choice but to keep searching. I pointed along the debris wall, thinking the apparent thought that there had to be a fortified entrance somewhere.

  Jazz tapped a finger on top of her wrist. Our time was growing short.

  I nodded in the direction we needed to go. Jazz silently agreed, and off we went. Careful. Apprehensive. Ready to bolt.

  Or kill.

  Chapter 11

  The entrance was only visible because of the trails stained on the floor by the coming and going of dirty feet. It wasn't a gate or a steel door, but a burrow through the base of the debris pile. The sound the children were making was definitely coming from the other side. The hushed tones of human voices were in there, too, though I couldn't make out a single word.

  Jazz shook her head at me as I stared down at the burrow entrance, deciding how to proceed.

  She took a glance around, saw that for the moment we were safe, and leaned in close for a nervous whisper. "I don't like any of this."

  “We can’t leave,” I whispered back.

  “We should, right now.”

  “It’s not that different from where Murphy and me found you and Grace.”

  “This is wrong.”

  She was one-hundred-percent right about that. But, I told myself we were both still running on pre-collapse intuition, and I made my decision—nothing else to discuss. I dropped to my knees to crawl through the tiny tunnel.

  “Don’t,” she hissed.

  “Have to.” I crawled inside.

  Knowing that splitting up was not in our best interest, Jazz accepted the folly or genius of my plan and dropped to her knees to follow.

  Inside, the tunnel reeked. The floor was sticky, and junk above and beside us stuck out with sharp edges to tear skin and leave infection.

  The tunnel was long enough for me to second guess my choice while being much too narrow for me to change my mind about it. Fortunately, it started to widen as we approached the end, and I couldn't help but think what a poor design choice that was. Better to narrow and lower it. Better to have potential entrants crawling in flat on their bellies to leave them at their most vulnerable when coming out the other side.

  With plenty of room, Jazz came up beside me, and seeing nobody in front of us as we reached the exit, I stuck my head out of the tunnel for a look around. The curved debris wall separated a considerable space from the rest of the Walmart.

  “Wha—?” Jazz gasped.

  Back along the exterior wall, near a collection of dirty bedroll nests and little hovels, seven or eight female Whites squatted or lay on the ground, nursing babies, and watching their toddlers play in the detritus of a bygone world.

  Whites. They were fucking Whites.

  One of the mothers spotted us, and mouthed what passed for a word of alarm. The other mothers were on their feet in an instant, gathering their children up and corralling them with the nursing mothers while they formed into a perimeter, five of them, glaring and growling, showing their teeth.

  Jazz punched me in the ribs, not at all gently. “We need to—”

  From somewhere outside, far, but close enough, Murphy’s heavy machine gun rattled off a burst and every White inside the Walmart howled.

  The White mothers charged at us.

  Chapter 12

  Scraping knees, shoulders, and elbows, we rushed through the tunnel, Jazz in front, me behind, glancing back into the darkness to see the White women coming for me, screaming their anger with a promise to kill us both. With no room to wield my machete in the tight space, I could do little excep
t crawl as fast as I could go.

  Just as I emerged into the relative light outside the debris-walled fortress, one of the women in the tunnel got close enough to grab my ankle.

  Jazz was already on her feet, knife raised, ready to take on any of the Whites coming through goat paths in every direction.

  I kicked. Fingernails dug into my skin. I jerked my leg, yet couldn’t shake the tight grip.

  I dropped my machete to use both hands to pull myself against the junk surrounding me.

  More hands grasped at my kicking foot.

  Jazz grabbed my arm and pulled.

  “The machete!” I told her, as I lay on the floor, tugging and kicking.

  Jazz immediately understood. She scooped up the machete, and half-crawled over me into the tunnel to get in range. Jabbing the blade at my assailants, she gashed my foot. I shouted, but the hands let go. In a rush and tumble, Jazz and I were suddenly out of the tunnel, trying to find our feet and arm ourselves with our meager weapons.

  Coming up one of the two goat paths we could see a gang of angry Whites, eyeing us for the intruders they seemed to know we were.

  Jazz was already running toward the clear path, and I took off at a sprint to keep up.

  I didn’t know where we were going, and she didn’t either, except that danger was closing.

  The Whites though, as dimwitted and as they were, as slow as they tended to think, didn’t waste too many thought cycles figuring out where we’d gone, and I heard them yelping and howling as they ran up the path after us.

  Jazz cut a hard left at an intersection. A dozen steps further, she took another turn, trying to get us lost in the maze.