Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Page 2

  It was all a futile effort on the Whites’ part. They weren’t fast enough to catch it from behind. They didn’t get out in front of it in sufficient numbers to do anything but die as Murphy ran them down. The ones that did get on top didn’t stay, as Murphy bounced them off by running over curbs or whatever lumps he might find in the road.

  With the bridge behind us, the Mustang glided silently through the ashen remnants of neighborhoods. The fire that burned most of East Austin back in August had left little intact. The pattern of the streets was deducible only from the ragged lines of rusty orange and brown car skeletons, each having had all non-metal components long since blazed away.

  Blackened brick chimneys stood as grave markers for each house that had smoldered to cinder around it. Trunks of trees still stood, some holding the thickest of their limbs to the sky. All of the storm drains along the curbs had clogged with ash and fire debris when the storms came. What was left when the rain clouds blew away and the flood waters receded was an even blanket of blackened gray over everything not tall enough to reach above it.

  That was what the Mustang rolled through, six-inches deep. I ran over brittle bone, which I’d come to know from the peculiar feel of the crunch it made under our wheels. Of the other metallic remnants of the East Austin disaster, I only hoped none hiding in the ash on the road in front of me were sharp enough to puncture my tires.

  Behind the Mustang, a cloud of fine ash thrown up by the tires hid the Humvee from sight. I knew that made it hard for Murphy to see, but it made it impossible for him to lose me. What's more, with East Austin burned nearly flat, any White who happened to be wandering through wouldn't be able to see the Humvee. They'd hear the noisy diesel, but they'd only see the big, gray cloud, instead of a rolling vehicle.

  Eventually, the ashen desolation turned to rolling hills, blanketed by farms. The fields were separated by barbed wire fences, draped in bramble and sprouting wind-tormented trees trying to birth hedgerows. Interspersed with the fields were homestead parcels, boasting anything from a decaying trailer to a plantation-style mansion. As often as not, something, or a whole host of somethings—old cars, obsolete farm equipment, and kitchen appliances—stood in tall weeds, rusting their way into the black clay.

  Within ten or twenty miles of Austin’s outskirts, oddly shaped plots of land that used to be farms had long since been sold to developers with a penchant for laying out little subdivisions with names like Green Hills, Vista Norte, or Sunny Shitboxes, probably on a landfill mound, all built from low-grade yellow pine and the cheapest Chinese siding the builder could import and staple together. Over the sub-standard constructs, built outside the city limits and beyond the reach of restrictive building codes, the builders slapped on one of six colors of fresh paint, all inspired by some shade of dried curb mud and cockroach turds.

  The newer of the subdivisions looked squeaky-plain and tidy, with their ten-foot, two-leaf twigs of trees staked into the center of the cut-sod front lawns. None of the siding on those houses had yet warped. None of the paint had oxidized and washed away. Few of the shingles were yet blown off in the Texas wind.

  The older subdivisions, those built a decade or more in the past, looked like slums more than suburbs. Hard-working, middle-class folk who couldn’t afford the obscene real estate prices closer to town bought those houses on adjustable rate mortgages, thinking they could afford growing future payments, because they’d long ago been infected by the blinding disease of optimism that convinced them that despite the evidence of all their dismal yesterdays, their tomorrows would be dipped in gold.

  Fucked by the fine print, they were.

  The promo periods on their mortgages came to an end. Monthly installments bounced happily higher—for the banks—at pretty much the same time that gasoline prices rocketed to a new record. Suddenly that twenty-mile commute into Austin, manageable a year before, ballooned into unaffordability along with their house payments. They missed a payment on a credit card and general default rules kicked in, doubling the interest rate and monthly payments on all of their revolving debt.

  Stagnating wages couldn’t cover the difference. House repairs were skipped. Watering the lawn, a luxury in drought-parched Texas in those days, ceased. The twiggy trees died. The new sod turned to dirt. The house foundations, sitting on that porous, parched clay, shifted and cracked. Quarter-inch cracks zig-zagged down brick walls. Roofs opened at the seams.

  On the occasions when it did rain, water leaked in. Mold followed, because even in the fucking Texas heat, the thick humidity makes sure that things never completely dry out. Because the insurance companies stopped covering mold damage a decade before, the houses turned unlivable and worthless.

  For the hard working folk who hadn’t figured it out by then, they learned how ‘fucked’ was spelled, what it tasted like, what it smelled like. They knew it with all the intimacy of a herpes-infected lover. They loaded their shit into U-Haul vans, dropped their house keys into brown envelopes, and jingle-mailed their dreams away to the mortgage companies.

  A cancer of bleak despair wormed its way across the face of America in those years, creating open sores of pre-apocalyptic rot for the virus to settle in.

  Now it was hard to tell which houses had been abandoned for years and which held the recently deceased.

  The farther we drove from Austin, the more my mood turned to shit, the more the whole shitty world looked like something tormented by a biblical plague and forgotten by God. And the more I felt like I was running away, though the promise of fledgling hope lived in College Station, our destination a hundred miles to the east.

  Chapter 2

  Fritz studied the map that was unfolded across his lap, running up the door panel and overhanging the console. Yeah, with the passing of the smartphone into history's long list of lost technological marvels, paper maps were back in fashion. Using a tiny flashlight, one of those with a single LED, designed for hanging on key chains he said, “Turn left up at this next corner.”

  “I think that sign back there said 1704.” I looked at the trees lining the road and craned my neck as though that would help me see around the corner we’d just passed.

  “That’s the one,” confirmed Fritz.

  “You guys mapped this out on your way here?” I asked as I drove the car through another turn.

  “Yeah.” Fritz dragged his finger through the spot of light left on the paper by his tiny LED. “It took us four tries to find open roads all the way to Austin.”

  “The roads are that bad out here?” I asked.

  “Some of them are,” said Fritz. “In some places the bridges are blocked. I guess the farmers figured if they barricaded the bridges, they’d protect themselves.”

  I made no attempt to hide the bitterness in my laugh. “Most of these bridges run over dry creeks.”

  “They were worried about people driving into their area, however they defined it, and bringing the infection with them,” said Fritz. “They didn’t think about all the infected coming on foot.”

  “It’s hard to think of everything,” I allowed. I’d been through plenty of mistakes where the thing or things I’d missed nearly cost me my life. That led directly to thoughts of all the lives my mistakes did cost. That, of course, led directly to thoughts of Steph and even Amber.

  Painful, festering shit.

  We passed a cluster of a dozen houses centered on an antique shop and a convenience store with signs out front advertising shelled pecans and gooey nut-filled candies. I asked, “What’s the story with all the little towns out this way? Are they road-blocked?”

  “Nope. Not all of them.” Fritz didn't look up from his map. "We'll have to go through Lexington. It's not that big, but we saw a bunch of the infected when we passed through on the way here. That could be trouble. In Dime Box, the locals tried to block the road but did a pretty bad job. Getting through was easier than it looked like it would be. Caldwell might be a problem.”

  I nodded knowingly. Caldwell was one of
the largest of the small towns between Austin and College Station. Bigger town, more infected. Simple logic.

  With apologies hiding in the tone of his voice, Fritz said, “We couldn’t find a way without going through at least some towns. We tried.”

  We crested a rolling hill that had a view of the paved road running over the terrain and across a bridge over a creek at the bottom. Past the creek, the road climbed back up to the crest of the next hill. Just ahead, a herd of cattle charged across, stampeding through the shrubs, weeds, and fencing.

  Without even thinking that I was wearing night vision goggles, I asked, “You seeing this?”

  Fritz looked up, raising his pistol as he tried to make out shapes in the darkness ahead.

  The light coming off the thin sliver of moon was okay, but not great.

  I pointed as I took my foot off the accelerator. “Way up there. The cows.”

  “I see something moving across the road,” said Fritz. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “It’s like a thousand cows on a stampede or something.”

  “Stampeding?” he asked.

  The slower the car rolled, the more the beat of those hooves hitting the ground vibrated up through the tires. I laid a hand on the dashboard. “You can feel it.”

  Fritz put a palm on the dash and cocked his head. “I feel it. I hear ‘em, too.”

  Looking to my left, across fields stretched over hills that rolled all the way to the black horizon, I said, "I don't know if you can make them out, but there are thousands of them—and I do mean thousands—already out there." I was hoping Fritz could make out the black silhouettes of individuals, separated from the herd, standing out against the tan-colored field.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I looked back ahead at the cattle still crossing the road. “We can’t get through that.”

  Fritz shook his head to agree, then looked out through the Mustang’s rear window.

  I looked at the rearview mirror. Murphy was slowing the Humvee, matching my speed and maintaining the gap between us.

  “You wanna check the map?” I asked. “Or you wanna wing it?”

  I looked over my shoulder as I braked, preparing to turn around. That’s when something really important, something that I’d overlooked, became blazingly obvious.

  The trees and shrubs growing up the fence on the right side of the road were glowing red.

  The damned brake lights.

  Why didn’t I think to take out those fucking brake light bulbs?

  Maybe a better question was why it’d taken so long to notice. Was the virus cooking my brain into a new kind of dementia immune even to introspection? And what about Murphy? Why didn't he signal me about the brake lights much earlier? Or maybe he did, and I didn't notice.

  The sound of a bad tuba player reaching for octaves outside his range startled me. I jerked my head to my right. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of small and large branches snapped.

  Twigs, grass, and leaves exploded through the fence ahead of us from the right side of the road. A massive Hereford burst out of the flying debris, trailing strands of barbed wire and spewing a bloody froth. Other cattle broke through between the trees. Some got tangled in the barbed wire and wailed.

  Whites shrieked and poured through the holes in the fence, grasping at the big Hereford now in the center of the road.

  One of the Whites pounced at the beast and in the slow-motion, liquid time of surprise, the White flew through the air like a Neanderthal Superman with a knife in hand, trying to catch his prehistoric supper.

  As that image worked its way through my overindulgent imagination, I realized all of the Whites coming through the fence were naked and bald. Many of those closest to the cattle slashed and stabbed with kitchen knives, hunting knives, barbecue forks, and fireplace pokers.

  The gasping beasts blew a mist of red through moos that sounded more and more like cries.

  And my foot was still on the brakes slowing the car to a baby crawl, a speed that would tempt any predator.

  The red light still glowed on the trees.

  Whites stopped and looked away from their prey, surprised by the red glow. They apparently took just as long as I did to wrap their virus-addled brains around the same conclusion I was getting to: I was about five seconds from being totally fucked.

  Chapter 3

  I slammed the brake pedal down. The Mustang jerked and the tires chirped as they bounced and skidded. Just to make sure that I had the attention of every fucking White in the road.

  Not really. I was startled by the noise and primal violence on the road in front of me. Instinctively, my emotions were revving up to full-blown scared shitless.

  I wasn’t thinking.

  The car lurched to a stop. I pushed the shifter into reverse, and the white reverse lights on the rear of the car illuminated the trees and bushes in a much brighter hue.

  It was like I was trying to get every one of the white fuckers to notice me. The only stupid thing I didn’t do was lean on the horn.

  I mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and the car rocketed backward on the kind of instant acceleration that only electric motors with a flood of amps pouring through them can deliver.

  Still in liquid slow time, I realized that poor Fritz should have followed my seatbelt example—harness really—when he'd gotten in. Whereas I was buckled in tight, he was thrown against the dashboard, and his skull pounded a spider web of cracks across the glass, leaving a bloody smear.

  When I cut the wheels and slammed the brakes again, having warp-drive jumped across a few hundred yards, Fritz’s limp body rolled back into the passenger seat, and his weapon, keychain flashlight, and map tumbled to the floorboard. Blood poured a red river over his face from the wound on his forehead.

  Shit.

  I hoped he was okay. But I’m a pragmatic fucker when I start to get my head cleared out, even while the shit is flying. Whatever damage I’d done wasn’t going to get undone with hope and worry.

  The car spun as it came to a stop. I hadn’t managed to turn it all the way around, but I turned the wheels and got the Mustang straightened in the road before Murphy had reversed the Humvee more than a few more car lengths in the other direction.

  I looked out the Mustang’s back window and got a quick glimpse of cattle trying to escape the mauling, while hundreds of Whites chased my red brake lights.

  In front of me, Murphy maneuvered the Humvee into a lumbering Y-turn, spinning up gravel on the shoulder as he urged the heavy, armored vehicle to move.

  The Whites behind me closed the gap.

  I recalled how I’d been caught in that Humvee in front of the hospital back in August, with what seemed like a million infected screamers surrounding me. I’d lost control of my Humvee then. It was only through luck or answers to hasty prayers that I made it out.

  As Murphy's Humvee plodded, I imagined all the Whites I couldn't see, running toward us at full speed from out in the fields on the other side of the trees. If enough of them surrounded the Humvee, our little expedition to College Station would have an unpleasant end.

  “Fuck!” None of us is going to make it.

  At least that was my thought, because I was still stuck in flight mode. I needed to reset and take control. It was time to put some dents in my fine electric machine and waste some Whites.

  Reaching over and grabbing Fritz's collar to hold him steady, I put the Mustang back in reverse. Taking a half second to be careful, I accelerated the Mustang backward at the chasing Whites.

  Some of them stopped. Many of them slowed. The stupid, aggressive ones kept after me at full speed.

  And I knew—at least, I did all I could to convince myself—that no matter how many Whites got in front of the Mustang, I had enough power under my hood to burrow through. I only hoped the car would hold together when it came to that.

  The Mustang lurched with the shock of the first White I plowed over. He went under the car, as I guess his knees buckled with the impact of the
bumper. A second, third, and fourth went down.

  Whites were beside me by then. I mashed the brakes hard to stop.

  They grabbed at the car as I spun the wheels. The Mustang caught some traction, and the g-force pushed me into my seat. All the infected who’d managed to grab on either let go or lost their fingers as a gap instantly formed.

  Up ahead, Murphy had gotten the Humvee straightened out on the road and was rolling toward our escape when I drove up beside him. I goosed the Mustang and zipped out front. I needed to be in the lead again, not just because of the Mustang’s stealth, but because I needed to find a place to stop and look after Fritz, and I didn't want Murphy driving off into the countryside without noticing.

  We only needed to get away from the naked horde first.

  Chapter 4

  Drooling and mumbling, as if through a dream, Fritz blinked disorientation and blood out of his eyes as he tried to figure out what was happening.

  At least he wasn’t dead, though, with all the blood, I wasn't going to put a bet on his longevity.

  On the crest of the hill’s roll, with a view of a mile or more in all directions, I brought the Mustang to a stop. A stand of trees crowded the road on one side, growing through a fence and filling a ditch. A billboard with its paper ads peeling away in layers under the gaze of bulbless lamps stood on warped pine creosote poles. A quarter mile down the slope in front of us, two neglected houses reigned over one-acre homesteads, sharing an artificial pond in between.

  I studied those two houses through my night vision goggles, looking for Whites in the dim moonlight, expecting them to be there, just knowing that at any minute, those insufferable white monsters would come tumbling out the windows, running out from under the sagging roof of the squat barn, or pouring out from behind a row of round bales of hay.

  Nothing moved.

  My breathing slowed from adrenaline-driven, hyperventilated gasps to something in the vicinity of normal. I clicked the release on my harness, pulled it over my shoulders, swung the Mustang’s door open and got out in the middle of the road. Through habit more than thought, my machete found its way into my right hand, and the pistol filled my other. If any Whites were hiding close enough to come at me, they were going to die while their goldfish brains were still trying to formulate the complex emotion of surprise.