Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent Read online

  Guessing the rain would kill my words before they drifted too far across the water, I softly asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Even in a world of bloody horrors, one could never be fully prepared for what might lie around the next corner. Murphy’s was transfixed on the burned Whites. Absently, he answered. “This is fucked up, man.”

  The boat’s port side bounced against a rubber bumper attached along the edge of the dock and started to drift back out into the water.

  I jumped across the gap with the rope in hand. Kneeling down on the dock near where a cleat was bolted, I looped the rope and pulled it taut. I glanced at the huddle of burned Whites to ensure they were still disinterested. Another glance up the length of the dock showed me it was empty. Using the rope, I then pulled the boat in close and wrapped the rope around and across the cleat several times. It would hold.

  Stepping back onto the boat, I took up a position beside Murphy. I peeled off the T-shirt I’d gotten from one of the kids’ rooms and laid it on the bench seat. Looking down, I saw my toes hanging off the ends of my canvas tennis shoes—cut away so they’d fit my feet. I figured I could get away with wearing them among the infected. They looked enough like dirty bare feet at a glance. I intended to keep my shorts on as well. My pistol and one extra magazine were hidden in the big pockets. In two other pockets, I’d rolled up a couple of the kids’ school backpacks. We’d need those if our trip to scavenge some ammunition was to be successful.

  Murphy shook his recently shaved head in disgust and looked down at me. He was more than willing to come along, but he thought my method of disguise was pointless. Without a word, he laid his rifle on the seat cushions and went to work removing his MOLLE vest. Once that was off, his shirt followed. He looked down at his pants and boots and shook his head again. He picked up his rifle to make it clear it was staying in his hands. “That’s all I’m taking off.”

  “Okay.” I kept my voice as neutral as I could. The rifle was a bad idea.

  He removed several magazines from his MOLLE vest and stuffed them into his pockets, then stowed the vest under the seat. He stood with his rifle in one hand and his hatchet in the other. “I know we talked about it, but I can’t leave my rifle. I’m not going out there without it.”

  “The only way we’re going to fit in perfectly is to go naked. Knives are cool, but nothing else is,” I said.

  “What are you saying, man?”

  “I’m not going naked either. I’m not going to tell you to leave the rifle, though I think you should. We just need to be discreet.”

  “Discreet.” Murphy grinned. “You crack me up, man.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He nodded. “It’s not like we were gonna walk down the middle of the street looking for attention.”

  “Yeah.” I looked down at my shorts and gave some serious thought to removing them and going out with just my knife. But what would I do with the school backpacks rolled up in the pockets?

  “Don’t be a worry wart, Zed. You’re my lucky charm. Everything’ll be cool.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Your lucky charm?”

  “Bad shit never happens when we stick together.”

  Murphy’s ability to see sunshine through the thickest clouds almost made me laugh. “You did get shot in the head when we were together.”

  “Ain’t nothin’. I’m fine now.”

  “And I got blown up in that bunker.”

  “You’re my lucky charm, not your own.” Murphy’s big grin brightened the boat. “Besides, you didn’t get blown up. You’re just a drama queen that got knocked down, is all.”

  I shook my head. “Whatever.”

  Together we exited the boat and walked quietly down the dock. The burned infected continued to ignore us.

  At the end of the dock, we crossed over a paved boat ramp and a parking lot. Near the back of the country club’s main building and out of earshot of any infected, I said, “We should check this place out to see if there’s a kitchen. If we could score some food in bulk, that would help out the supply situation.”

  “Right now?”

  “No, let’s stick with the plan today.”

  “I’d be cool to come back. Tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got no plans.”

  We skirted the building, crossed some wet grass, and came to a sloped driveway with a few inches of flowing rainwater. In front of us was a bend in Mt. Bonnell Road at the base of the mountain. A month before, that road would have been funneling the last of the morning commuters to their soul-deadening cubicles in the city. Besides Murphy and me, the only thing on the road that morning were some naked Whites, near and far, busy in their day of scavenging for something, a dog, a cat, an armadillo, anything, to eat.

  I looked around, paying extra attention to the thicket of cedars across the street. Nothing was moving anywhere within a hundred yards. “If we cross the street and get into the trees, we can still follow the road, and with any luck, we’ll avoid attention,” I whispered, pointing to my right. “When we cross, I’ll keep an eye on the ones down there. You watch the ones up that way.”

  Murphy gave me a nod and let me lead.

  Doing my part to watch the Whites down the road to our right, I hurried across with Murphy at my side. It was clear that we caught the attention of several. They weren’t shy about staring. But they made no sounds of alarm and made no move to come after us. Perhaps Murphy and I had enough bare white skin on display to assure them we were as infected as them.

  But something wasn’t right.

  Murphy and I had been through enough together that I was tuned in to any tension in his body language, his breathing, even the sound of his steps. And that’s how I knew.

  I shushed him with a hand gesture and crept back out to the edge of the covering trees to peek up the street. Kneeling to keep myself hidden behind some scrubby bushes, I peeked out at the Whites who’d watched us cross from up the road toward Mt. Bonnell. They were motionless, except their poses had changed from when I first saw them. They were all looking in our direction, save one who was leaning in close to a female, cupping his hands over her ear. He was whispering.

  A Smart One.

  Damn.

  Chapter 3

  With hushed urgency, I whispered to Murphy, “Follow me. As quietly as you possibly can.” I turned and ran through the trees, not along the road, but deeper into the forest.

  Breathing heavily after ten minutes of dodging hanging branches, cacti, noisy shrubs and thorny vines, we came to a stop. All I heard was the heavy shush of rain falling through the cedars’ needles and the steady dripping of water onto the ground. The rain was killing our ability to hear anything at a distance. But that meant anyone following couldn’t hear us, either.

  Advantage us?

  Murphy wore a question on his face, but I held a finger to my lips. I put another to my ear to indicate he should listen. It was possible we had pursuers. He hefted his hatchet and slowly scanned for movement in the forest around us.

  After listening, looking and hearing nothing, we traded speed for stealth and proceeded deeper into the forest, me in the lead, Murphy behind.

  The roads in that part of Austin snake around the rugged terrain and along the crests of hills. Though our path took us away from the most direct route to Camp Mabry, we were bound to come across an alternative road soon enough. Once there, we’d need to be much more careful when crossing. We were showing enough naked white skin to camouflage our relative normalcy from most Whites, but something about us—our choice to wear pants or the rifle Murphy carried—had piqued the interest of a Smart One.

  When we came to a six-foot privacy fence, we followed it for the length of four or five houses. We stopped at an empty lot and saw a residential street on the other side.

  I whispered to Murphy, “If there aren’t any Whites in the street, we’ll head up the block in the front yards, staying close to the houses, so we have some cover.”

  “We
could stay in the woods.”

  I looked down at my legs and arms, which were scratched and bloody. “Let’s check the street and then decide. Cool?”

  Murphy glanced down at his arms, saw plenty of the same, and gave me a nod.

  We crossed the empty lot and skirted a house sided in white limestone with little dead shrubs, bouquets of twigs and brown leaves that looked to have been planted that spring. With no time to develop a root system before the automatic sprinkler systems ran dry, they never had a chance.

  Back down the road in the other direction, four Whites squatted on a porch, out of the rain. They were clothed—probably not a danger to us. Besides those four, the street was empty.

  Off I went. Murphy followed. We kept close to the walls of the first house we passed and paused in the narrow gap between that house and the next to look up and down the street and make sure all was still safe.

  We leapfrogged our way to the gap between the third and fourth house up the block and were looking back down the street behind us when Murphy thought he saw movement. Whatever it was disappeared so quickly, we couldn’t identify it. Unfortunately, I was growing confident with our stealth and discounted the apparition as a trick of the rain pouring out of a roof gutter. That was a mistake.

  When we got to West 35th Street, Camp Mabry lay just across sixty feet of bare right-of-way, gravelly shoulders and two lanes of wet asphalt. We were positioned among some bushes with a view up and down the street. Both near and far, Whites loitered, enough of them to make me uncomfortable about making another crossing.

  I gave Murphy a silent look of worry.

  He understood and cast a glance both up and down the street before sinking back into the bushes and pulling me down with him.

  “Damn those naked fuckers,” I whispered.

  Murphy scooped up a handful of blackish-colored mulch from around the base of the bushes and smeared some on his arm and them some on his pants. It wasn’t enough to color him black, just enough to make some dirty spots. He looked over himself before grinning and whispering, “If we smear some of this around on ourselves, the black spots is what they’ll see from up the street. They won’t even notice we’re wearing pants.”

  “It’s raining, Murphy.” My tone didn’t do much to mask my disdain for the idea. “It’ll wash off.”

  Without losing a bit of his smile, Murphy said, “Don’t be retarded. It’ll take an hour or two for the rain to wash all this off of your skin. And you’d need some Tide and a long wash cycle to get it out of your pants.”

  “Retarded?” I was a little offended.

  “Don’t turn into a bitch on me, man.”

  I rolled my eyes, scooped up a handful of the mulch and started making smears on myself.

  It took only a few moments to camouflage ourselves as two dirty cannibals. When we were ready, Murphy said, “When we head out, walk beside me real close. I’m going to hold the rifle straight up and down between us so they can’t see it from either direction.”

  “Good idea.”

  As a matter of course, I looked around behind us. Nothing was there. Nothing was on our flanks. The apparition from the rainwater hadn’t materialized. Only the Whites up and down the road were visible.

  We stepped out of the bushes together and started a comfortably paced, side-by-side walk across the street.

  Of course, our movement caught the attention of every White on the road. All froze and stared. Murphy and I continued walking, doing our best to look like we belonged, which in a way we did. We were just as infected as those watching us, just not as symptomatic.

  One by one, each of the Whites I saw turned away, busying themselves with staring at nothing and trying futilely to stay dry under the boughs of the oak trees.

  Without incident, we made it across the street and angled our path toward a large section of chain-link fence pushed over flat, just as the wall in front of Sarah Mansfield’s house had been. We stepped carefully through the tangled mess of barbed wire that once topped the fence. We crossed a narrow band of brown grass and made it into the cedar forest on the undeveloped land inside the southern border of the base.

  Together, we squatted between some trees. I looked up and down the road we’d just crossed.

  “That went better than expected,” I said, just as I noticed Murphy wasn’t looking at the street we’d crossed. He was focused back down the side street we’d just snuck up. “What?”

  “I think I saw something down there again.”

  Through the rain, I didn’t see anything that aroused my suspicion. “We should get moving.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Yeah.” I looked around. I was familiar enough with the road from all of the times I’d driven it on the way up to Mt. Bonnell to see my old girlfriend, Jackie. I was confident where we were. And my confidence in my ability to move unmolested among the Whites continued to grow.

  “I wish we could have looked at those satellite maps that we put together back at Sarah Mansfield’s house,” Murphy said.

  “Me, too. We’ll get to some place with solar power again. Based on that map that Dalhover drew of the base, if we cut straight north through these woods for a mile or so, we’ll come out pretty close to the ammo bunkers.”

  “Yeah, but he said the last time he was on the base was twenty years ago.”

  “Dude, they’re not going to move the ammo bunkers. You were right there when he told us Harris told him they left the bunker doors open after their last ammo run. They’re still there.” I took a glance at the thick woods behind us. “What’s up with you all of a sudden?”

  Rainwater running down Murphy’s face gave it a peculiar animation that underscored his unease. “I feel like we’re being watched. I think we’re being followed.”

  Of course, that flew in the face of the confidence I’d been cultivating. I looked back down the street we’d come up. “You think what you saw was something other than water running off the roof.”

  Murphy nodded.

  I was pretty sure Murphy was overreacting. “What are you thinking?”

  Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  I huffed and looked around again. “Fine. We can go back to the boat today and try another time.”

  Murphy looked down at me the way he’d look at a petulant nephew, but didn’t say anything for a long time. “No. We’ve come this far. Let’s get this done. We’re light on weapons and low on ammo. We need this stuff.”

  “Are you sure?” I tried my best to get back to my neutral tone. I knew I was prone to unrealistic certainty when it came to pursuing my mistakes, and I knew that certainty carried with it a viral charisma that bulled its way over others’ doubts. I wanted to move ahead, but I was trying to apply a two-heads-are-better-than-one solution to the question at hand. “Everything we do out here is risky shit. If you’re not comfortable with moving forward, then let’s get back to the boat.”

  “Any ideas how we’re going to get the stuff out of here yet?”

  I patted the rolled up backpacks stuffed into my pockets. “Besides these?”

  “We can’t get much in those.”

  I grinned. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Murphy stretched a smile over his concerns. “Just my kind of plan.”

  “We may be able to get some ammunition and, with any luck, some grenades in the backpacks. But a lot of Whites are around and that Smart One we saw a little bit ago is a worry. We can’t be loading up and just walking out of here with armfuls of rifles.”

  Murphy nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Let’s go check things out then. We’ll get what we can, and then get out of here. This’ll have to be just a mostly recon mission. Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  I stood up and backed deeper into the forest.

  I was in the lead again as we worked our way through the trees. I realized then something had changed in the social dynamic between u
s. Somehow, I’d been promoted from rifle toting novice to squad leader. I still couldn’t shoot worth a shit but Murphy could, and that gave me comfort. Besides, if the situation got desperate enough that shooting became necessary, the Whites would be so close and numerous, I wouldn’t have any trouble putting my bullets into them.

  Before long, we came to a curving trail through the woods and stopped. Looking up and down, I whispered, “What do you think?”

  “Jogging path?”

  That made sense. “You wanna take it?”

  “It looks clear.” Murphy was still worried.

  “It’ll be faster.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  I surveyed the trail again. The ground was all mud, cedar roots, and outcrops of limestone. Even without the rain falling, it would be near impossible to tell if anyone had recently passed.

  “What do you think, Tonto?” Murphy asked.

  “Tonto?”

  “You’re looking at that trail like you’re some kind of Indian tracker.”

  Ignoring the comment, I pointed to the left. “There’s a north-south road over that way.” I pointed right. “This is mostly woods over here. I think if we go that way, it might lead us up to the part of the base near where the ammo bunkers are.”

  “Might?”

  I shrugged. It was hard to tell where we were.

  Murphy nodded in the direction of the path away from the road.

  “Works for me.” I stepped out of the trees and started moving at a pace that I could quietly maintain.

  After a short distance, we rounded a sharp bend to the left. The underbrush bordering the trail grew thick and the overhanging oak branches darkened it in dusky shadows. Murphy reached up from behind and tapped my shoulder. When I looked back, he made an urgent gesture toward the bushes among the tree trunks beside the trail.

  It was time to scoot.

  Chapter 4

  Murphy hurried into the woods to our left, and I followed until we were well away from the trail. He squatted among some thick bushes and looked at the trail, pulling a finger to his lips to indicate quiet.