Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Page 12

  He spotted us. Or that’s to say, he spotted Murphy in his dirty military garb with rifle in hand. He screamed, raising the alarm. More Whites—all naked—got their feet beneath them. I couldn’t figure how any of the Whites in the group chasing us had gotten so far down the creek without us seeing them flank us.

  I shouted, “Stop!”

  Murphy turned around and paused, anxious anger on his face. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Can you shoot one of those cows from here?”

  “No.” Murphy didn’t even glance at the cows. “They’re too far.”

  "Goddammit, Murphy. I am fucking serious. Can you shoot one from here?"

  Murphy looked at the cows that with our growing urgency seemed to be getting smaller and farther away. “No.”

  Several of the Whites had knives. Were they all smart or just good imitators? That mattered less than the fact that they were starting to run toward us.

  “If we can get close enough to shoot some cows,” I told him in rapid-fire speech, “the Whites will forget about us and go after them.”

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Murphy turned his back to the creek and started to run for the cows. “This better goddamn work.”

  I lit out after him. “When you get close enough to take a shot, stop and do it." I looked back at the Whites who'd come up out of the creek bed. By running perpendicular to the flow of the creek, we’d pretty much negated the advantage they had over us when they were unseen down in the gulley. "Just make sure you do it before we get close enough to spook them.”

  "This gun is made for killing people. You know that, right?"

  “Yeah.” It’s hard to put all the disdainful inflections you need to communicate into one syllable when you’re running for your life and gulping every precious breath.

  "It's not made for killing two-thousand-pound cows."

  I wanted to smack myself in the head. All those times when I’d filled my magazines with those surprisingly small bullets. I knew that. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, hoping I sounded confident.

  Murphy laughed as he panted and ran. “You’re so full of shit.”

  Whites were now running from the creek from where Murphy and I had climbed out. Those were definitely the ones who’d been chasing us already. All my hopes of them running up and down in the brushy, sunken banks along the creek disappeared when the white bastard with the kitchen knife had screamed the alarm.

  “Shoot one broadside,” I hollered at Murphy. It was a guess. Hell, I wasn’t a hunter, but I’d watched them on TV. “If you get three or four rounds into its lungs, you won’t kill it right away. But…” I had to take several breaths. All the running was taking a toll. I couldn’t keep it up for many more miles.

  “The cow won’t be able to run away,” Murphy finished.

  “It’ll bleed like crazy,” I said. “That’ll slow it down.”

  “I’ll get a couple of them, if I can.”

  First one, then several of the cows looked at us. Or they saw the seventy or eighty Whites spread out behind us.

  When Murphy and I were less than a hundred yards away, the first cow bolted. He’d apparently been conditioned by the new behavior of humans. Made sense. Most of the cattle that weren’t now afraid of humans were probably already dead.

  Murphy dropped to a knee, raised his weapon, and took a second to steady his hand. I spun around to watch for oncoming Whites. We had time, but not much. The rifle popped off three fast rounds.

  A cow mooed loudly.

  Sounded like a hit to me.

  All of the cows mooed sounds that grew to panicked, higher pitches.

  Murphy fired again.

  In all the sound coming from the cows, in all the screaming coming from the Whites, in the vibrations in the ground from now running hooves, I couldn’t tell if Murphy’s bullets hit a target for sure.

  Whites were closing fast. I raised my machete and got ready to swing. “Murphy?”

  He fired several more bursts and then shouted, “C’mon, man.” He jumped to his feet and ran.

  I followed as fast as my feet would carry me.

  Ahead, four-dozen cattle were pushing their bodies close together as they stampeded away. Their direction shifted first to our left, then to our right. With me and Murphy so close and the Whites spread out in such a wide area behind us, the cattle were confused.

  “Well?” I panted.

  "Got three," Murphy told me in clipped words between breaths. "One, with only a couple of bullets."

  “How many in the others?”

  None seemed to be injured. None was visibly lagging. I was worried that my hastily conceived plan was a failure. I looked far across the flat field at shapes faded gray in the distance. Could I outrun the Whites all the way there? If I did, then what?

  “Just run,” Murphy commanded. “Run.”

  I looked over my shoulder. The two closest Whites both held knives. We had maybe a fifty-yard lead on them.

  I started looking around for a Plan B, or C, or Q, or R. I didn’t know what letter I was up to by then. It’d been a busy day of failures.

  A thunder of shouts rolled through the white mass behind us and I found some extra speed in my feet.

  “You sure,” I breathed, “got some?”

  “Just run,” Murphy told me. He looked back at the chasing Whites, then up at the cows in front.

  Three cows separated from the herd.

  I felt a tinge of hope.

  One of the cows stumbled as it swung its head and veered. A bloody mist plumed from its snout. A long, baritone squeal followed. Something in me wanted to hurt at the sight of the poor, dumb animal struggling. Something in me wanted to celebrate. Most of me wanted badly not to be a poor, dumb Zed, getting eaten by the Whites on our tail.

  Another cow slipped back from the group.

  “Damn.” Murphy’s impatience was as strong as mine. We needed something to happen. “Fall, cow!”

  The cow’s run turned to a trot and over the space of a few steps it slowed to a walk. It made a pitiful sound as a living version of every herbivore’s nightmare unfolded before it. The herd ran ahead while the slavering predators snapped their jaws and charged up from behind.

  The cow wailed.

  Murphy and I were close enough that the bullets’ holes stood out red with blood flowing down the cow’s hide.

  The cow breathing out the red mist stumbled to its front knees, raised its head and mooed loudly.

  “We’re gonna make it!” I shouted to Murphy, still hoping the Whites would choose fresh cow lying on the ground to skinny people running away. They had to. Basic White nature demanded it.

  The uninjured cattle ahead of us were extending their lead.

  The Whites behind were getting closer and it was my fault. Murphy ran slower to stay with me.

  “Do you want me to shoot it again?” Murphy panted. “When we pass?”

  “No,” I told him. “Not necessary.” If the Whites weren’t going to go after a wounded animal that could no longer run, a few more bullet holes wouldn’t make a difference.

  The downed cow barely raised its head to look at us as we ran by. A dozen paces ahead, the other cow, still on its feet, wailed loudly as we ran past. I sprinted as hard as I was able. Distance was my friend.

  Murphy matched my speed with seemingly no added effort. I focused on keeping my feet under me.

  He looked back again and grinned through his words. “They’re stopping.”

  I looked. The two Whites with knives were stabbing and cutting the downed cow. It bellowed sadly each time a blade sank into its flesh. Other Whites were falling on it and tearing futilely at its thick hide with their fingers and dull teeth. Not one was still running after us.

  Chapter 31

  We ran another mile or two before coming to a place where the fields gave way to a thick forest of pine, pecan, and oak. Having not seen a naked White since we left that group by the cows, we ran into the trees, and when we could see nothi
ng around us but tree trunks and undergrowth, we slowed to a walk.

  Murphy stopped, leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “We can’t keep getting lucky forever.”

  “You been holding that in all morning?” I asked.

  “It needed to be said.” He stood up and fished a bottle of water out of his bag. He drank half of it down and offered the rest to me.

  I guzzled it and looked around, listening closely as I did.

  Murphy grinned and put the empty bottle back in his bag. “That was some intense shit.”

  I nodded with a chuckle.

  Murphy looked around and started through the trees again. “You can only flip a coin so many times before it comes up tails. We can’t keep pushing our luck.”

  Following along, I said, “I don’t agree.”

  Murphy laughed loudly enough that animals hiding in the brown leaves skittered away. “Of course, you don’t agree. Okay, Professor, why don’t you explain to me why we haven’t been pushing our luck? I just can’t wait to hear this one.”

  The undergrowth thinned out. The trees stood taller overhead. They were spaced widely enough that I was able to catch up a few steps to walk beside Murphy.

  “You’ve got goosebumps all over you,” he said with a glance. “You feel cold?”

  I looked at my arms. Indeed, they were covered with goosebumps, under a sheen of sweat that was evaporating away. "I don't feel chilly.”

  Murphy blew out a big puff of condensation. “It’s getting colder. We need to find you something to wear.”

  Still looking at my arms, I nodded and wondered again how the growing cold would affect the naked horde. "We're bound to find a house or something. I'll find some clothes and get dressed until I to go back out hunting for Mark again."

  “And pushing your luck,” said Murphy.

  “You know everything you’re calling luck isn’t luck, right?”

  Murphy didn’t look at me when he replied. “Every time we make it through some sticky-ass situation, it seems like luck to me. Like it was pretty damn lucky those cows were there just when we needed them, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Murphy laughed some more. “I think the virus in your brain is turning you into a golf ball head who hasn’t figured out he stopped being smart about four months ago.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed, “and I don’t disagree that we’ve gotten lucky plenty of times, but I’ll tell you what I think happened this morning. We got unlucky a lot more than we got lucky.”

  “And here we are, unlucky enough to still be alive.”

  I ignored the comment and said, “When we left the barn this morning there weren’t any Whites around, at least none close enough to bother us. We got unlucky when those Whites from inside the house spotted you in your GI Joe outfit and came after us.”

  “I’m not going naked,” said Murphy. “I don’t care what you think you’re doing with all of your naked, undercover bullshit." Murphy looked around for Whites. Habit dictated it.

  “I’ll do what I need to do to kill, Mark." I looked around, as well. It was like yawning at that point. When one person looked around, everybody else did too. You just never knew when some white fuckers were trying to sneak up on you for a meal.

  “So because we had some bad luck when those Whites from the house spotted us,” Murphy said, “that’s your argument for why we don’t always have good luck?”

  “Not completely,” I told him. “But when they came after us, we didn’t get away from them by luck. We used our brains to figure it out.”

  “And my marksmanship,” said Murphy.

  I waved a hand at my naked white skin. “And my ability to fit in and hobble the ones I could. None of that was luck. We were smart about using what advantages we had to get away.”

  “But we didn’t get away,” Murphy argued. “Because they started screaming and alerted all those other golf ball heads to chase us. Bad luck or good luck?”

  “More bad luck,” I said. “And what did we do? We got into the trees and would have gotten away from those guys, too, if not for that other mob that was out searching for us. And at each turn of bad luck, we didn't depend on good luck to get away. We evaluated the situation for what it was, and we used our brains and brawn to take what was there and turn it to our advantage. The fact that none of the things we tried this morning worked out proves that it wasn’t luck that saved us. We only needed to stay ahead of the Whites long enough for one of our plans to work out. One eventually did: the cows.”

  “And if the cows weren’t there?” Murphy asked. “If we didn’t have the good luck of the cows being there, then what?”

  “Something else.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  We came out of the trees and into another field, not large compared to the one we’d spent a good part of the day running through, maybe the size of a football field. One side was bordered, of course, by the forest, and two other sides by a dirt path and a narrow asphalt road. Across the field from us stood a collection of houses; several dozen spread over ten or twenty acres. Standing a hundred feet tall above the village were five Siamese twins—concrete grain silos connected across their tops by a rusty, metal-framed catwalk and some weird-shaped roofs that didn’t make any sense to me.

  Murphy stared at the silos, fascinated by something up there.

  I was already past my interest in the aging grain silos and studied the field as we shuffled between the short, green plants—plants that hadn't been trampled by white feet and hadn't been grazed to nubs by herds of passing cattle and feral pigs.

  I stopped walking. “Murphy.”

  He kept going. “What?”

  We were maybe halfway across the width of the field. “Murphy, stop for a second.”

  He looked around at the tree line and the houses and turned to face me nervously. We were exposed in the open, and he wanted to make sure I understood that.

  I pointed at the ground. “These plants. They’re small.”

  “Duh. It’s almost winter.”

  “No.” I shook my finger at the green sprouts. “This looks like a vegetable garden. These were all planted recently, like in the last month or so.”

  Murphy’s rifle flew to his shoulder in an instant. He scanned back and forth across the houses in front of us.

  Chapter 32

  We walked slowly forward, the barrel of Murphy’s rifle pausing on anything that moved—leaves floating down from an autumn tree, a sheet flapping on a clothesline, a window screen slapping when the wind gusted.

  In a cautious voice, he said, “This place already gives me the creeps.”

  I looked for more signs someone might be nearby. I saw no footprints, not even in the tilled furrows beneath our feet. I realized those would have been washed out in the heavy rain, but the plants were here, and no weeds were among them. They'd been tended.

  I looked hard at the windows of each house, the broken ones and the closed ones. I saw nothing but faded curtains and shadows.

  We stopped when we reached a clapboard back wall of an old house with peeling paint. Even from outside, it smelled faintly of mildew and rancid bacon fat.

  Murphy peeked through a curtained window, held his head up for a moment and put his back to the wall.

  I raised my eyebrows in a silent question.

  Murphy shook his head. He’d seen no one inside.

  I pointed to the smallish porch under an awning on the back of the house to let Murphy know what I intended. I took off, skipped the porch steps, and bounded up to put my back to a wall beside a windowed back door. I looked in, but saw only a kitchen. Dirty dishes filled the sink. The cupboard doors hung open on their hinges. Nothing moved.

  Murphy had followed me over and took up a spot by the wall next to the porch. With urgency on his face, he pointed at something over my shoulder.

  I crouched and spun, ready to hack. Nothing.

  I looked at him and mouthed a silent “What?”

  He waggled his fin
ger at the wall again.

  Frustrated, I looked back at the wall and this time whispered, “What?”

  Murphy pointed again. “The thermometer.”

  I huffed and looked at a big round thermometer with a dial on its face.

  “Thirty-nine, man. We need to get you in some clothes.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  I turned back to the door and tried the knob. It turned on gravelly innards that clicked satisfactorily, quietly. I tugged the door open. One of the hinges squeaked. Not loud. Just irritating. I stepped through.

  Murphy reached from his spot on the ground and took hold of the door. He shook his head, pointed at me, patted his rifle, and patted his chest.

  I shook my head and raised my machete as I stepped onto the worn, green linoleum inside. Boards creaked. Another step and I was fully inside, out of the wind. The sound of rustling tree branches and shrubs—loud background noise a moment before—became dull outside noises.

  Something thumped on wood inside the house. I jumped in fright, but nothing moved that I could see.

  Another thump.

  And while I stared at the part of the house’s interior I could see, it pounded again.

  It sounded like a baseball bat beating a wall. It reminded me of the sound of that monstrous White’s fist on the door in the basement that first night when we broke into Sarah Mansfield’s mansion. That thought slapped me with a repressed fear and a feeling of terrible inadequacy. That monster of a man would have killed me if Sergeant Dalhover hadn’t had the composure to put some bullets into him.

  Bam.

  I figured a White must be trapped somewhere in the house.

  I leaned out of the door and waved Murphy inside.

  A moment later, we were both standing in the narrow space between the messy counters in the kitchen, with a view through a doorway into the dining room. I wanted to see around the corner into the living room but all I saw were piles of folded clothes stacked high on the dining room table.

  Bam.

  I turned to Murphy and whispered. “What do you make of that noise?”

  “White.”

  What else?

  He tried to push past me to take the lead. I blocked him and all but bounded into the dining room, raising my machete as I did, ready to hack down whatever might attack me.