Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire Read online

  Freitag slumped as she sat and draped her bloody hands across her knees, staring absently at the amputee. Strands of her black hair had come out from under her cap and were tipped with straw thin scabs of blood where they’d dragged across the bleeder’s wounds. Her light brown Hispanic skin was smudged with red where her dainty hands had wiped at her sweat. Her smooth, doll-like face was failing completely at masking the hate.

  “So we’re just going to let him die?” Steph stood up and looked each of us in the eye before settling on Dalhover. “Top?”

  “Captain,” Dalhover answered. “Unless God himself comes down here and miracles him all better, he’ll die. If he makes it through the night, he’ll be dead in a week. The longer he lives, the more pain he’ll suffer. Letting him die now is the humane thing to do.”

  Steph spun around to look at me with fire in her eyes. In her head, she knew that letting the man die was the only thing that made sense, but her nurse’s heart couldn’t accept it, and for that, her eyes showed me her blame.

  Silence hung in the air, as heavy and slow as impending death.

  I finally broke it. “I’ll get the bandages, if that’s what you want me to do.”

  Steph didn’t answer.

  Freitag reached over and put a hand on the dying man’s cheek. In an icy voice, she said, “He was a painter.”

  Everybody seemed stuck between breaths at that.

  Freitag continued, “His paintings were beautiful. He was really good. He was living his life’s dream when all this shit happened.”

  Softly, Steph asked, “What was his name?”

  Freitag ignored the question and continued to stare at the bleeding man. “He was my aunt’s boyfriend. He was good to her.”

  Silence lingered, broken only by the rapid breaths of the man on the floor.

  Steph finally admitted, “I can’t save him.”

  “I don’t think he’d want to live without hands,” Freitag’s voice was harsh. “How can a painter paint without his hands?”

  Steph looked down at her hands. They were covered in cold, wet blood that had climbed its way up to her elbows. To herself, she said, “I need to wash.” She headed for the restroom.

  That was that.

  I looked back down at the handless painter, whose blood wasn’t delivering enough oxygen to his brain, which in turn told his body to breathe faster. I stepped over the bloody amoeba on the floor and went to squat by Mandi and Murphy. I asked, “How is he?”

  Mandi started to say something, but burst into tears.

  Chapter 3

  When I woke after a short, fitful sleep on a recliner in the theater, I got up and looked around in the darkness. Murphy lay just as he had when I’d gone to sleep. Mandi slept on a recliner pulled up beside his with an arm stretched over to him. Russell slept in a near-sitting position on his recliner. Specialist Harris hung off the edges of a recliner too small for his large frame. Quite the opposite, Freitag was as engulfed by her recliner as she was by her billowy fatigues.

  Walking out into the dim glow of the lobby, I saw that the frail-boned bleeder had died in the night. His body was wrapped in blankets and lying next to the elevator. The crawling red floor amoeba and all of the bloody smears had been cleaned off of the white marble floor while I slept. There were no scattered bandages or red footprints. It was as clean as the day we arrived in Sarah Mansfield’s house.

  A glow shone through the open door of the video room. A desk chair creaked. Plastic wheels rolled across a few inches of floor. Hushed conversation followed.

  I looked back down at the bird man’s body and my gaze lingered across the contours of his head and his bony shoulders. His arms were crossed over his chest like a mummy. A couple of hours of sleep had done nothing but enhance my emotional separation from the corpse. He may as well have been a piece of abstract furniture or a long-dead museum exhibit. I felt nothing. No pain. No anger. No empathy and certainly no sorrow. It was just another corpse. Tidier than most, but just as dead.

  “He died about an hour after you went to bed.” It was Steph’s voice behind me, informative in tone and frayed from fatigue.

  I searched for words that would be right for the moment, but I couldn’t find them. So I just stared at the bird man.

  “We have coffee.” Steph offered.

  I turned. She leaned against the doorjamb with a cup in her hand. “We found it in the groceries you brought back.”

  Thinking of going up to the kitchen to get a cup, I looked at the stairs, suddenly daunted by the climb. Maybe a cup wasn’t worth it.

  As if reading my thoughts, Steph tilted her head into the video room and said, “I brought the coffee maker down here. Better to help us stay awake on the night shift.”

  “I could use a cup.” I walked toward her and she stepped out of the doorway as I neared. I asked, “Did you sleep?”

  She shook her head.

  Dalhover eyed me as I walked in, his eyes no more or less tired than they always looked.

  “Sergeant Dalhover and I took the night shift,” Steph said.

  “The whole night?” I asked unnecessarily.

  “That’s the plan,” Steph answered. “There’s creamer and sugar in the drawer to your left.”

  Without a word, Dalhover turned back to one of the large monitors. It showed a mob of Whites in the dark at the front gate, beating it with their palms and fists.

  “How many do you think are out there?” I asked Dalhover as I poured a hot cup.

  “Least a hundred. Some are starting to walk around the wall, looking for a way in.”

  “The ignorant fuckers should go away,” I said, frustration in my voice. “We’re not out there anymore. I mean, we haven’t made any noise in hours. Right?”

  “They’re beating on the gate. That’s the noise.” Steph reasoned. “They’re too stupid to know it’s not us. Their numbers have been growing all night.”

  Dalhover pointed to one of the Whites on the monitor. “That’s a Smart One.”

  I moved over for a closer look. “Which one?”

  “The one on the rock?” Steph asked, her surprise giving away a little of her disbelief. “She’s not doing anything.”

  “Yep,” Dalhover replied.

  “Yep?” Steph asked.

  Dalhover motioned across the mob with his finger. “Look at ‘em. They’re all beating on the door. But that one, she’s just sitting there on that rock, staring at the gate.”

  “Maybe she’s really stupid,” I hoped. “Maybe lazy. Maybe sick.”

  Dalhover shrugged.

  Steph asked, “You think she’s trying to figure the gate out, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.” Dalhover looked up at Steph to emphasize his point.

  The White sitting on the rock cocked her head to the side, changing her perspective. It reminded me of a dog. Four more infected walked out of the cedars and passed her by as they joined the mob.

  I blurted, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Steph was immediately tense.

  I pointed at an older man, one of the four that had just come out of the cedars. “I think I know that one.”

  “Know him?” Steph asked in disbelief.

  “I used to date a girl who lived down the road. I think that’s her dad.”

  Steph drew a deep breath to calm herself. “That’s how you knew about this place? You’d been up here before.”

  “Yeah.”

  Together, we watched, and conversation died away. We were hypnotized by the surging mob, as they pushed and beat on the gate, the manifestation of death, trying vainly to storm the castle. Vainly, for the moment.

  I broke the trance. “As much as I hate to say it, I think we’re coming to the end of our hiding phase here. It may be time to run soon. What are your thoughts, boss?”

  “Boss?” Steph looked at me with the smallest of fragile smiles.

  I shrugged.

  “If you’re not going to call me Steph, I think I’d prefer Captain.” It
wasn’t harsh; just a simple request between friends.

  “Jefe?” I asked, trying for levity. I was finding that humor was often the only way past all of the repressively painful bullshit of life as it was.

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” Steph said, sitting down in the empty rolling chair.

  “Then how did you know what I was saying?”

  “I think sometimes you think you’re still fifteen,” Steph said, looking intently at the large monitor in front of Dalhover. Her face still showed the fragile smile, though.

  “Agreed,” Dalhover rasped.

  Steph concluded, “It sounds too much like heifer. I’ll stick with boss if that’s what you want.”

  I laid a hand on Steph’s shoulder. “You’re the boss. What about you, Dalhover?”

  “You don’t want to call me anything but Dalhover or First Sergeant.” Dalhover’s tone gave no hint of allowing compromise.

  “Top?” I asked.

  Dalhover looked at me, and I understood that for some reason, that title was off limits to me.

  “Whatever.” I looked back to Steph. “Back on topic, Boss?”

  Dalhover withdrew a nearly empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket and put one in his mouth.

  “In here?” I asked, a little offended.

  “Secondhand smoke isn’t going to be what kills you, Zane,” Dalhover told me.

  Steph came to his defense. “He can’t very well go outside and smoke.”

  Of course he could. He’d be safe on the roof. Nevertheless, I dropped it.

  The White on the rock cocked her head in the other direction.

  Steph asked, “Sergeant, will that gate hold?”

  Dalhover gave that some thought as he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke back out. “Hard to say.”

  “Your best guess?” Steph asked.

  “I think it’ll take a whole lot more of ‘em before they have any hope. Even then, the gate might not break. It might bend. If that happens, we won’t be able to open it.”

  I said, “We need to start keeping a count of how deep the crowd is that’s pushing on the gate.”

  Steph and Dalhover both turned with the same blank “What the fuck are you talking about?” stare. It didn’t bother me. I’d seen the expression too many times in my life to be bothered by it.

  “Let’s say the gate does break down,” I lectured. “If we know how many people deep the crowd is at that moment, then we learn something very important.”

  “That is?” Dalhover asked in his flat tone.

  “The interior gate is on the right hand side of that driveway. The width of the driveway between the walls limits how deep they can stack up in front of it,” I explained. “For instance, if they have to be thirty deep to exert enough force to break the outside gate, the driveway between the walls may be too narrow for thirty people deep. If that’s the case, then they won’t be able to break the second gate and we’ll be safe.”

  Steph was nodding when I finished. “That makes sense. Sergeant?”

  “Makes sense,” Dalhover agreed. “I’ll set up a log and instruct the watch to track the mob depth every fifteen minutes.”

  “I think you earned a Pop Tart, Zed.” Steph gave me a real smile.

  I smiled back.

  “Dammit,” Dalhover groused, and reached down to open a drawer of a file cabinet. From within, he pulled out a foil-packaged pair and handed them to me.

  I accepted. “Thank you, hoarders. I love these things.”

  Dalhover turned back to the monitors.

  “I think we stay for now,” Steph announced. “When they breach the first gate, we’ll reconsider. Besides coffee and the other goodies, how did your trip upriver turn out?”

  I briefly gave her and Dalhover the important points.

  “Any trouble with infected at the house?”

  I hesitated, then shrugged.

  Steph knit her brows and asked, “They were in the house?”

  “Some,” I answered.

  “How many?”

  “Some.”

  “Were you in any danger?”

  My hesitation gave me away.

  “Zed,” Steph was a little more angry than the conversation warranted. “You can’t keep taking unnecessary risks. You’re going to get killed.”

  “I’m fine,” I added a lie. “I know what I can get away with.”

  Steph huffed and turned her attention back to the monitors.

  I asked, “Do we know anything for sure about Murphy yet? Is he going to be all right?”

  Steph shrugged. “The bullet didn’t penetrate the skull, but it did hit bone when it grazed his head.”

  “And?”

  “And we’ll see.”

  “We’ll see?” I shot back at her. “What does that mean? He’s unconscious, right? He hasn’t been awake since it happened. Is he in a coma?”

  “Zed, don’t be melodramatic,” Steph kindly scolded. “I cleaned the wound and put an antibiotic on before I bandaged it. It stopped bleeding. He’s probably got a concussion. Whether there’s more damage, swelling of the brain or something else, I won’t know until he wakes up.”

  “Worst case?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t do any good to talk about the worst case, Zed.” Almost pleading, Steph continued, “Don’t we all have enough…sorrow already?”

  “Sorry. I’m just worried.”

  Steph reached over, put her hand on my arm, and said, “Let me do the worrying, okay? I’ll do everything I can for him, but it’s out of our hands for the moment. Either he’ll be okay or he won’t. Without hospital facilities and a neurosurgeon, there’s nothing more we can know, nothing more we can do.”

  I gave Steph a weak smile and a nod.

  Dalhover changed the subject and said, “About the gates.”

  “Yes, Sergeant?” Steph asked.

  “It’s a risk but we could drive one or both of those Humvees down there and park them up against the outside gate. They weigh three tons each. The infected won’t be able to move ‘em.”

  “You wanna bet?” I thought about my Humvee back at the hospital, caught in the tide of screaming Whites. “Enough of them can.”

  Dalhover continued, “Six tons of steel behind those gates might make the difference.”

  “And the risk?” Steph asked.

  “They’ll hear the diesel engines, even with all that banging they’re doing,” Dalhover answered.

  Steph said, “They already think something is behind that gate. I don’t think the sound of the engines will make them any more or less determined.”

  “It’ll make a difference with the Smart One on the rock,” Dalhover countered.

  Steph thought about that for a second. “What do you think, Zed?”

  “I could go over the wall and kill that infected girl on the rock,” I said with a callousness that surprised even me.

  “The Smart One?” Dalhover asked, not bothered one iota by the girl or my indifference about killing her.

  “With her gone,” I said, “I could hike down the hill a bit, create a distraction, and draw the mob away.”

  “What kind of distraction?” Dalhover asked.

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I answered. “Let’s assume for the moment that I can.”

  “That mitigates the risk,” Dalhover agreed.

  “Not to Zed!” Steph’s voice jumped up an octave.

  Neither Dalhover nor I responded.

  Steph shook her head and pointed at the monitor. “I’m not sending Zed over the wall into that unless there’s no other choice.”

  Dalhover smoked the last of his cigarette, stubbed it out on the bottom of his boot, and threw the butt in a trashcan. “By the time there’s no other choice, it’ll be too late. By the time you know that you should’ve killed the Smart One on the rock, it’ll be because there are more Smart Ones out there or because there are too many of them, or because they’ve already figured out a way to attack us. If we’re going to do it
, then it’s got to be preemptive. If we move the Humvees to block the gate, then sending Zane over the wall is a necessary step.”

  “You’re downright loquacious when the spirit moves you, Dalhover.” I slapped him on the shoulder.

  Dalhover looked at me in way that said “Don’t touch me again.” It didn’t look like we were ever going to be best buddies.

  “And how will you get over the wall and back in again?” Steph asked.

  “We can figure it out,” I responded. “I think the primary question to answer is whether we should do something, not whether we can. We can figure out the how-to later. But you’re the boss. What do you want to do?”

  Steph propped up a hard façade in front of emotions that were starting to frazzle. “Is that what you want to do, Zed? How many times can you roll the dice and win?” Steph took a long breath to collect her thoughts, looked up at me, and spoke. “Let me ask you, if we take the risk…no. Zed, if you take the risk, what do we gain?”

  I didn’t need time to think about it. I’d already assessed the situation. I knew the answer. “Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.”

  “So you understand where I’m going with this?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Best case, I go over the wall, kill the Smart One, distract the mob and they move on. We stay here and live happily ever after. Worst case: I get killed. That’s the worst case for me, anyway. But somewhere in the middle, there’s the most likely case.”

  “Which is?” Dalhover asked.

  I answered, “We get rid of this group, and eventually a larger group shows up, with too many Whites or too many Smart Ones to get rid of. So we bail out and head upriver. The thing is, I don’t doubt that will happen. I just don’t know when. It could be later on today, or next week, or next month.”

  “Sounds right,” Dalhover agreed.

  “And if more show up this afternoon?” Steph asked. “Is risking your life worth a few more hours of luxury?”

  “It’s not about that,” I argued.

  “What, then?” she asked.

  “Murphy.”

  “Murphy?”

  Serious and calm, I answered, “Like you said, we don’t know how bad Murphy’s injury really is. If jostling him around on a boat for a couple of hours could put him at more risk, then going over the wall is worth it to me. It’s that simple.”