Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire Read online

  Steph couldn’t find a good response, so she remained silent.

  “Why?” Dalhover asked unexpectedly.

  “Why?” I shot back at Dalhover, more harshly than I wanted to.

  Not affected by my emotions, he repeated, “Why?”

  “I need to.”

  “Why?”

  I looked around the room, maybe looking for an escape from the suddenly, uncomfortable question. But the need for secrecy with my motives was a childish remnant of junior high social dramas. I answered, “I would do anything for Murphy.”

  “You’d even risk your life?”

  I nodded.

  “You’d die for him?”

  I thought about it for a second, or pretended to. I knew the answer as soon as it was asked. “Yes.”

  Dalhover didn’t take his eyes off of me, but took his time pulling out another cigarette and lighting it. “Why?”

  I was getting a little irritated and snapped, “Because Murphy and I would both be dead if it weren’t for each other. He saved my life, more than once. He…” I wanted to say he cared about me. I wanted to say he loved me like a brother, but those words just couldn’t come out of my mouth.

  Dalhover stared at me.

  I looked over at Steph. She watched, but was unable or unwilling to intercede.

  It took me a minute for me to put some thoughts together. “Murphy and I work well together. We…care for each other. Murphy will do anything for me. I’ll do anything for him.”

  Dalhover nodded, “And what about the rest of us?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  “How do you feel about the rest of us?”

  I spent a few moments looking at Dalhover and thinking about what he and I had been through. “I’ll be straight with you, Dalhover. I don’t like you very much. I know you don’t like me. But I respect you and I don’t think you’d let me down. I don’t think you’d fuck me over. We’ve fought together. I don’t know what makes that mean something, but I know that it makes me think I can trust you.”

  Dalhover continued to appraise me as he sucked on his cigarette. “Yeah, you’re right that I don’t like you, Zane. I think you listen to your balls more than your brains. You make bad choices, but for the right reasons. Somehow it works out for you. You’re lucky, loyal, and brave. Or stupid. I’m not sure which.”

  I was taken aback by that mix of compliments and insults, but I bit back a big “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll tell you what, though,” Dalhover continued, “I’ll stand by your side in a fight. You can take that to the bank. You can trust me. I guaran-God-damn-tee it.”

  “Does that mean we’re going steady?” I asked with an empty smile.

  Dalhover gave me that stare of his that made it clear that my smart aleck remark wasn’t worth a response. But he did say, “You can call me Top if you want.”

  I nodded, “Top.”

  “What about me?” Steph asked, effectively masking any extra meaning that I might have read in her face.

  With a little of the emptiness gone from my smile, I answered, “We haven’t been through enough shit together yet.”

  Steph spun her chair back toward the monitors. “You’re such a fifteen-year-old.”

  Chapter 4

  The deck lounger made of heavy ipe wood seemed to have too many sharp corners, but at nearly eight feet long and with widely spaced slats that had supported its now-absent cushion, it would serve its new purpose—that of a ladder—quite well. Dalhover and Specialist Harris carried the lounger down from the pool deck and across Sarah’s back yard toward a part of the wall far from the front gate. They huffed and sweated under their burden—more so Dalhover than burly Harris—but refused my help. My duties in the remaining wee morning hours were yet to come.

  As they wrestled the lounger down one of the tiers, I took a moment to double check my kit. My machete, a pistol, and a rifle, of course. Extra ammo, water, and a few snacks, just in case. A lighter and a knife.

  “How long have you been here, First Sergeant?” Specialist Harris asked.

  “A week, I s’pose,” Dalhover answered.

  “Were you guys over at camp Mabry?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No need to call me sir,” I told him. “I’m not in the military. I’m just some dude.”

  “Habit,” Specialist Harris responded. “We were at Mabry from the beginning. At least my unit was.”

  “You didn’t get deployed?” Dalhover asked.

  “No, First Sergeant.”

  Dalhover and Specialist Harris wrestled the chair down another tier.

  “And the rest of your unit?” Dalhover asked, unnecessarily.

  “I’m the only one left.”

  “In that firefight we’ve been hearing since yesterday?” Of course the implied question, too uncomfortable to ask on its own, was how the rest of them died.

  “No, sir,” Specialist Harris answered. “They all got infected before that.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Apparently the virus got just about everybody. I’m guessing that since you didn’t turn, you’re immune.”

  Specialist Harris turned his melon-sized head and looked at me, but didn’t respond beyond that. I thought he was trying to intimidate me—maybe out of habit—with an ominous silence he’d practiced in the mirror to compliment his thick arms.

  “How did the firefight start?” Dalhover asked.

  “That’s hard to say, First Sergeant.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There was shooting from the first night. A little at first. We weren’t under orders to shoot. That’s not what we do. You know? Shooting civilians.” Harris came to a stop on the grass and drilled us both with his flat brown eyes, maybe looking for any sign of judgment from us. There wasn’t any. Dalhover and I held our silence and looked up at him.

  “It’s hard to say what happened. Officers were getting the virus. Guys were getting the virus and falling out. For a week or so, it seemed like we had a new CO every couple of hours.”

  Dalhover nodded, knowingly. Perhaps it wasn’t unlike his experience at the hospital.

  Harris stroked his fingers across a thick black stubble of beard. “Somewhere in the first few days, more guys just took it upon themselves to preemptively shoot the infected. There were orders or rumors of orders to shoot, but nobody seemed to know for sure. We were designated as a rally point for the refugees and survivors. The survivors. Can you believe it? Man, we were only a couple of days in when word came down. I guess that’s when I knew things were bad. By that time, half my unit had the virus. Most of the rest went in the next couple of days.”

  I asked, “Did a lot of civilians come in?”

  Harris nodded, “Yes, sir. At first, yes. It slowed to a trickle by the end of the first week and then nobody.”

  “How many of you were there?” Dalhover asked.

  “Hard to say, Top. The number was always changing. We had partial units coming in and single guys, guys from units that got wiped out. We had civilians coming, and people kept getting infected. There was a time there when we were in control of a couple of buildings and the infected were outside trying to get in, coming at us at all hours of the night and day. I remember it feeling like a siege. There were maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us at that point. I thought it stabilized there. At least, it seemed like it did for a while.”

  Dalhover sat down on the lounger, removed his crumpled cigarette package from his pocket, looked into it through the hole in the top of the pack, and made a sadder face than usual. He took one of the last few out and lit it.

  “We were making runs to the ammo bunkers a couple of days ago…”

  Dalhover interrupted. “The ammo bunkers. There are two there, right? How full are they?”

  “Mostly,” Harris confirmed. “They’re secure and mostly full.”

  Dalhover nodded. The gears in his head were turning.

  “Our CO pieced together a unit from six of us and sent us out
in two armored Humvees to ferry as much of the ammo and weapons back to our two buildings as we could. We were on a run when we saw them.”

  “Them?” I asked. “Naked and bald? A whole shitload of ‘em?”

  Specialist Harris crinkled his brow and nodded. “How did you know?”

  “A guess.” I looked over at Dalhover. “The ones we saw out by Dr. Evans’ farm, you think?”

  “They are the only naked ones we’ve seen,” Dalhover answered.

  I recalled that Mandi said that she’d seen one out at Dr. Evans’ farm with a knife. I asked Harris, “Did you see any of them with weapons?”

  “Some.” Specialist Harris nodded as his eyes fell to the ground.

  “What kind of weapons?” Dalhover asked.

  “Knives. Things they could use for clubs.”

  Looking for more information, Dalhover continued, “How many had weapons, do you think?”

  “Not many,” Specialist Harris answered. “Maybe ten or twenty.”

  I added, “I’m guessing there were thousands of them.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Specialist Harris.

  “From over here, it sounded like you killed a lot of them,” I observed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you run out of ammunition or get overrun?”

  “We didn’t run out.” Specialist Harris shook his head. “There were too many of them. We were overwhelmed.”

  “How many do you think you killed?” Dalhover asked.

  “Top, I want to say thousands, but there were so many, it didn’t seem like we killed any. Sorry, that sounds like a contradiction.”

  “Not really,” I offered up the small comfort. “If it was that horde we saw out east of town, there were tens of thousands of them.”

  “More.” Dalhover leaned down to pick up the chair. Harris followed his lead and the two of them carried the deck lounger the remaining distance to the wall in silence. Once there, they laid the chair flat and then propped it on its end against the wall. I stepped up onto the makeshift ladder and climbed halfway up. It was solid enough and it was tall enough.

  Dalhover turned to Specialist Harris, “Go back into the house. On the first floor, not the basement, at the far end of the living room is a laundry room. There’s a linen closet there. Get four or five sheets and bring them back here.”

  “Yes, First Sergeant.” Harris turned and hurried back up to the house.

  “My rope?”

  Dalhover nodded.

  “That’s cool.” I continued my climb to the top of the ladder. “Throw it over when I get back, okay?”

  “Are those your balls talking?” Dalhover commented.

  “What?”

  “Stop thinking with your balls. Use your brains.”

  “What, you want me to wait for you guys to make a rope out of the sheets and then climb down that?”

  Dalhover, his face serious, nodded.

  “I made the jump when we broke in here.” I tried not to let my disdain show.

  “That’s a twelve foot drop. With the curved coppice, there’s nothing to grab onto to slow your fall. In the dark, you won’t be able to see what’s on the ground outside. You could drop over the wall and sprain your ankle on a stump, or worse. You’re not gonna bounce on your balls, that’s for sure. Use your head, Zane. Wait for the rope.”

  I hated being schooled, but Dalhover was right. To jump off of the wall again had all the hallmarks of a mistake in the making, a mistake I didn’t have the extra blood to pay for. I climbed down the chair-ladder and sat myself in the grass and waited for Specialist Harris to return. “What do you think of those two?”

  Dalhover chose that moment to go back on word rations and pointed his expressionless face at me instead.

  “This isn’t the Army anymore. You can talk to me about the other grunts, you know.”

  The same look from Dalhover.

  I waited, but after a moment it seemed pointless so I said, “I think Freitag hates me.”

  Dalhover looked up toward the house then back at me.

  “Every time she had the chance when they were taking care of bird man… I mean that guy I injured, she kept giving me hateful looks.”

  Dalhover looked down at his watch, then back up at the house.

  “Whatever.” I huffed, and ran my hands across my vest, belt, and pockets. Another check wouldn’t hurt.

  Mistakes are paid for with blood.

  After several long, silent minutes, Specialist Harris returned with the sheets. We worked together tying knots in the sheets every couple of feet and then attaching them end to end. When it was done, Dalhover looked at me and nodded. “Good?”

  I made a show of yanking on two of the tied sheets to test the strength and said, “Yep.”

  “We won’t stay out here to wait for you. I’ll be keeping an eye out for you on the monitors. We’ll come out and throw the sheets back over the wall when you’re getting close,” Dalhover told me.

  I nodded and said, “But I may be in a hurry, and…”

  Dalhover looked up at the wall. “You don’t worry about me. If I see you running, I’ll have those sheets over the wall when you get here.”

  “But…”

  Dalhover looked me hard in the eyes. “Don’t worry about that. You take care of what you need to take care of. You be careful. Don’t take more risks than you need to. Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t worry about the sheet. It’ll be there when you get to this end of the wall.”

  Okay. Dalhover had a way of erasing doubts with his certainty.

  “Now get up there, and use the sheets when you go down the other side. We’ll hold it here.”

  I glanced at Specialist Harris. He said, “We’ve got you.”

  I gave them a nod. That was enough. Time to get to work. Time to kill.

  Chapter 5

  With no pain and no noise, my feet gently touched the ground. I let go of the rope, and feeling the slack, Dalhover and Harris pulled it quickly back up over the wall. I was back in Indian Territory.

  Silent in the darkness, I looked around and listened. Just like at the front wall, the cedar forest was set back from the side wall by a fifteen-foot wide clear-cut buffer. The moonlight revealed no infected along its length. Out in the night, pops of gunfire mixed with sounds of coyotes, monkeys, and crows—the infected. White fists beating on our gate would draw all of those infected in if I didn’t solve that problem.

  Nervousness sweated my palms.

  Stop thinking! Start moving!

  I crossed the clear-cut band and stepped into the inky darkness among the cedars. My boots crunched too loudly across limestone gravel and I froze. Stealth was important, but the forest floor was mottled with shadows and pads of brown cedar needles that had accumulated in the low spots. Among the dark blotches, my feet needed to find those that were the rotting cedar needles. Those spots would be soft and silent.

  Slowly, I made my way through the trees, careful to avoid prickly pears and thorny vines, careful to keep close enough to the edge of the trees so that I could see the compound walls and maintain my bearings. Nervousness melted away as I sank into the task.

  Upon reaching the corner of the compound, I peered through the trees down to the front gate at the far end and made out the gray shapes of the raucous mob. The sound of their pounding fists and wails carried easily to me up the caliche road.

  I thought for a second about taking a direct approach down along the wall, but thought better of it. I didn’t want that Smart One on the rock to see me coming. But with at least a half dozen thorns of one type or another already sticking through my pants and irritating my skin, I decided that the stealthy approach through the woods was more trouble than it was worth. Instead of continuing through the woods, I followed the caliche road back out to the street and made a right onto the asphalt. That put me on a path parallel to the compound’s front wall. Once down the street, a short traipse through trees would bring me up behind the Smart One and the mob.


  Sticking close to the edge of the road, I moved. There were seven or eight Whites far down the street who caught my attention. Movement in the trees across the street gave away the presence of at least ten more. Up the street behind me, I spotted a group of three, very interested in something moving amongst the cedars.

  My machete found its way into my right hand and I cradled my pistol comfortably in my left. Quick, deliberate steps moved me toward my goal. The Whites gave me little more than a passing glance. As far as they could tell, I was one of them. But what they couldn’t know was that I was walking death, hidden in plain sight among them. That thought brought with it a feeling of power. Nervousness, fear, and that sense of power made for a heady mix of emotions, and I had to suppress a laugh.

  I was a wicked pirate assassin on my way to kill.

  Arrgh!

  My chosen spot in the cedars came up on the right. The sound of the infected beating on the gate and yelping made it clear that I was close enough. Off of the asphalt and into the trees I went, back to looking for dark spots on the ground between the trees and avoiding the prickly pears. Far off to my left, I heard the sound of at least a couple of Whites crashing through the trees as well, chasing the sound at the gate.

  The moonlight ahead of me grew brighter. The light tan color of the caliche road that ran along the outside of the wall became visible. The wall itself looked black and ominous. I spotted white arms, legs, and heads as I came to a stop at the edge trees.

  I was at the point where the road widened out to form the circular turning area in front of the gate. Not ten feet to my left, the Smart One still sat on her rectangular slab of limestone, scrutinizing. She was a small woman, just a hair over five feet tall, with the athletic look of an Olympic gymnast. She sat on the edge of the stone and dangled her feet, occasionally dragging her toes in the gravel. Her hands busied themselves in slow movements, fondling her fingers first on one hand and then the other, then starting over again. She was concentrating on the obstacle of the gate. Unlike the mob, she was silent.

  She was thinking.

  That was simply not acceptable. Death had arrived to reconcile that transgression.