Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire Read online

  I stepped out of the woods and meandered toward her, feigning attention on the mob.

  She looked at me, but I didn’t look back. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her facial expression change. I froze, but after a few moments, she looked back at the wall.

  I pretended to keep my attention on the mob as I slowly sidled to my left.

  She looked at me again, but this time, didn’t look away.

  I focused on the Whites in front of me.

  Still, she stared.

  And stared.

  Three or four minutes passed until I couldn’t take the staring anymore. I looked back at her. Her concentration was gone, replaced by blank curiosity, but those eyes, deep brown and indecipherable, were almost human. How much was going on inside that diseased brain?

  I tried my best to mirror her blank expression to no effect. Still, she stared.

  I looked back toward the mob, hoping she might do the same. After a minute, she did. She looked at the mob, the gate, the wall. Whether it was my imagination or not, her expression didn’t go back to the concentrated look she had before. Only curiosity was left.

  She was about four feet to my left, just beyond arm’s reach. With my machete, I knew I could spin and bring the blade around with enough force to cleave a mortal wound in her small body. She wouldn’t have a chance. By the time she realized what was happening, her flesh would be tearing open. The thought of it gave me pause, but she had to die. If she didn’t, Steph, Murphy, Mandi,—all of us—were at risk.

  Pirate assassin.

  Arrgh!

  Like a striking cobra—at least in my mind—I made my move. The blade came up and out. My arm pulled it down over my head as I stepped and spun with all the fury and speed that virus-infected muscles could deliver. But in those microseconds it took for my blade to reach the diminutive woman, she not only saw me move, but reacted fast enough to jump to her left in a blink. My blade hit rock, ringing loudly and throwing sparks.

  Surprised by her speed and my failure, I found my eyes glued in disbelief to the sight of the blade’s edge grating against stone, not buried in flesh.

  But the mob, at least those in the back, were moving, turning their attention to me. Things were going to get very interesting very fast. I looked down the length of my blade and followed it up toward the gymnast. Her momentum was still carrying her to her left and she was trying to catch her balance, in a weird bit of awkwardness that seemed out of place for her apparent athleticism. Then I spotted it.

  Blood.

  She teetered two steps further from me, then another.

  The blood was on her arm, halfway between the shoulder and elbow. Lots of blood. And her shirt was cut across the ribs. There was blood there too.

  When she came to a stop ten feet away she stared at me with a look of horror that told me she understood, with every bit of imagination and intellectual abstraction, exactly what was coming next in all of its gory, painful, finality.

  A White from the mob on my right screamed and started to move. Another scream of jubilation followed and was joined by more.

  For an impossibly long time, the gymnast eyed me, accusing, hating. Then she ran. Eight or nine Whites with blood in their eyes chased her into the dark cedars—hounds on the hunt.

  Full of ambivalence and remorse, I ran after.

  Finish what you start!

  She has to die!

  Right?

  On the heels of the other White chimps on the hunt, we screamed with one voice. We were a pack.

  Branches snapped. Grunts. Breathing. Underbrush mashed underfoot.

  The girl stayed in the trees and veered to her right, away from the road. She was prey. All she thought was escape, survive.

  Something in the sound changed up ahead.

  Struggle in the trees.

  That was quick!

  The girl was caught.

  Screaming! Not the pursuing Whites, but the girl.

  The hair on my neck stood. My blood flowed ice cold. It sounded like murder. The wolves had caught Little Red Riding Hood and were eating her alive.

  I stopped and watched the last Whites ahead of me disappear into the darkness.

  The girl’s voice didn’t sound like that of an animal. It sounded human. She sounded human.

  “No!” A voice ripped through the black forest in a bloody gurgle, then squelched down to nothing.

  Only the sounds of the beasts remained, triumphal, snarling at one another, staking their claim at the kill.

  “No!”

  Is that what I heard?

  Like a jackboot kicking me in the head, a pariah of a thought hit my brain. What if she wasn’t a Smart One? What if she was a Slow Burn, just like me? What if she had simply been wondering how she could get inside and join us?

  What if?

  What if?

  She screamed just a like a normal human.

  What if?

  No!

  Fuck!

  Chapter 6

  In the blackest of moods, I marched down the center of the street, the tip of my blade still red with the gymnast’s blood. A long helix of Whites was rounding a corner far ahead. But my thoughts were elsewhere.

  Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second-guessing.

  “No!” That’s what she screamed, but it couldn’t have been.

  I simply had to remember it differently.

  Repression is your friend.

  I had black holes aplenty in my heart for tossing in such memories. I just needed to keep shoving until this fucking memory let go and fell.

  I angled toward a pair of Whites squatting beside a bed full of dead brown flowers beneath three enormous oaks in the front yard of an oversized, overpriced house, with ridiculously oversized white columns holding up a stupid little roof over a just-pissed-me-off-for-being-there front porch. When I stepped off of the asphalt and into the grass, I had their complete attention. They were both disheveled, with blood on their shirts and smears on their faces, indisputable evidence of what they were; mindless, murderous, monsters. Their death would cleanse the guilt I felt over the gymnast.

  But she had to be a monster, too. She had to be.

  I raised my machete to do the bloody work that was only necessary to rip the memory of that gymnast’s screams from my mind and push the whole episode into a forgettable black Hell. But the pair wasn’t mindless enough. I don’t know what they saw or what they deduced, but just before I got within machete range, they both jumped to their feet, ran across the yard, and around the corner, casting furtive glances behind.

  I didn’t chase.

  Fuck.

  I squatted down beside the bed of dead flowers and stared at the grass.

  Did she really scream “No”?

  Should I have maybe made a sign with my hands? I didn’t know sign language. A thumbs up? An okay sign? How do you communicate without talking?

  Repression skills, don’t fail me now.

  I looked around. The next house over had an SUV sitting in the driveway. My plan was to blow it up. Well, not that one in particular, just the first one I came to. And that one was first. I’d need to break into the house and get a towel or a pillowcase or something to stuff into the gas tank. I could light it and run off. The explosion would draw the mob away from our gate. Hopefully.

  It was a simple plan.

  But as I sat there looking at the SUV, I started to ask myself some questions. Does it really work when you blow up a car like that? In all honesty, I didn’t know. It always worked in the movies. But in the movies, machine guns never ran out of bullets when a thousand monsters where running at you on the top of a parking garage. I realized that I seriously needed to disabuse myself of any truisms that I’d learned from my favorite action heroes.

  I didn’t have any experience with blowing up cars. It made no sense to bet my life on getting
it right on the first try.

  What else, then?

  Could I puncture that tank and then torch the leaking gasoline? Sure, but then there was the noise of puncturing the tank, noise that would be loudest when I was lying on my back halfway under a car, a very vulnerable position when making appetizing sounds among the ravenous predators.

  No, that was a bad idea. Kick it to the curb.

  What else?

  I could start the engine, put the car in gear, and let it roll out into the street. There was little doubt that would attract the attention of every White in sight. But would it make enough of a commotion that the mob would be drawn away from the gate? I looked up the street and tried to gauge the distance to the gate hidden among the cedars. It was at least a hundred yards, maybe a couple of hundred.

  The risk-to-reward ratio on that plan was too high.

  What about the horn?

  Hmm.

  Noisy? Yes.

  Easy getaway? Yes.

  Well, probably.

  But could I wedge something in the horn button to make it sound? I thought about the way that car horns were constructed. Sure, in an older car where there was a horn button of some sort, that idea might work, but how many modern cars had the horn button embedded with the airbag beneath the vinyl in the center of the steering wheel? Damn near all of them. So, wedging something in the horn was a crap plan.

  I looked down the street. The helix of Whites had filled the road. If they kept coming, they’d soon join those at the gates.

  I looked at the SUV for a moment longer, and then something obvious occurred to me.

  Duh!

  I looked around to see where the closest Whites were. There were many more around than I felt comfortable with, but the nearest was far enough away that my inspiration might bear riskless fruit. I pushed my pistol into its holster and put the machete into the scabbard I had rigged on my back. A hunk of limestone the size of a soccer ball, decorative, I guess, lay among the brown stalks in the flowerbed. I walked over and squatted down to it. Lift with your legs, the voice in my head told me. So I did, with a grunt. With another grunt, I pushed it up to rest on my shoulder, with both hands holding it steady.

  Here goes nothing!

  A few slow steps and then three quick ones toward the SUV gave me all the momentum I needed. With another grunt, I launched the stone toward the driver’s side window. The glass shattered, rocking the SUV back and forth. A siren under the hood bleated overbearingly. Without slowing, I ran past the SUV and around the corner of the garage to get myself out of sight. Best not to be associated with the noisy car. In the infected mind, noisy meant tasty. I had no plans to be tasted.

  Once past the house and out of sight behind a large shrub, I looked back. The Whites I could see were running toward the car. At least six, then nine, then a bunch. The car very cooperatively switched to a different, but just as obnoxious, noise.

  Ha, bitch!

  I skirted around the back of the house to put some distance between me and the car, then made my way through the cedars again until I came to another yard of mowed, dead, grass. My machete and pistol were back in my hands. They felt comfortable there, necessary extensions of the new me.

  The yard contained a big wooden play-scape and a big stone-covered patio with lots of outdoor furniture, but thankfully nothing that moved. I made my way out to the front yard, and as I rounded the house, the long helix of Whites that had been down at the end of the street were winding their way past, heading for the squawking SUV. There were at least twenty Whites already on the car, doing what they could to expose the tasty morsels that just had to be inside.

  I stepped up onto a big terracotta flowerpot to get a view up the street. A steady trickle of infected were coming out of the cedars up around where the gate to Sarah Mansfield’s compound stood. The plan appeared to be working. A short distance down the road, I spotted another car, much newer and much smaller. If my luck held, it also had an obnoxious alarm. And that was the updated plan—smash, wail, repeat. Work my way down the street.

  To my surprise, the plan worked without incident. I tripped the alarms on five cars, the furthest a mile down Mt. Bonnell Road and around a sharp bend. At that point, the street behind me was overrun with Whites, manic in their search for edible people in and around the bleating cars.

  It was time to head home.

  As promised, Dalhover and Specialist Harris were waiting for me when I arrived back at the wall. The knotted sheet-rope hung down from the top of the wall and I barely had to expend any effort as they dragged me up. The wide arc of the coppice worked in our favor for that.

  Leaving our makeshift ladder in place, we headed back inside.

  “I didn’t check the front gate,” I said. “Did it work?”

  Dalhover gave me a nod and the faintest of smiles. High praise from him.

  “Any trouble?” Specialist Harris asked.

  I shrugged. What was there to say about that?

  We climbed up a wall at the back of one of the tiers. I checked my watch then looked up at the sky. It was just starting to turn gray in the east.

  Finally, the end of a long, long, fucked up night.

  Chapter 7

  Sleep came easier and deeper than I ever would have guessed possible. I didn’t dream. I didn’t stir.

  When I woke again, laying flat in a recliner in the theater, the only sounds were those of Murphy’s deep breathing and Mandi’s light snoring. I checked my watch. It was after nine, and I was starved. Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleepers, I got up and exited the theater, visited the restroom to take care of necessary business, and threw some water on my face.

  In the mirror, I looked thinner and couldn’t help but run a hand over the hollows in my cheeks. My hair wasn’t to the unruly stage yet, though I’d need a haircut soon. Well, I’d want a haircut soon. Wants and needs were different now. At least living in the Mansfield mansion afforded me the luxury of washing my hair and shaving every day. Electricity and water made personal hygiene so easy.

  Feeling rested, but a touch groggy, I was wondering what troubles the new day would bring when I came out of the restroom and walked up to the theater-style snack bar, behind which Sergeant Dalhover had positioned himself with one foot propped up on a shelf, savoring a cigarette. He was watching across the foyer where Freitag was having a tense but hushed conversation with Steph. Steph was inside the video room. Freitag was in the doorway.

  I leaned on the snack bar counter and gave Dalhover a nod. I asked, “Any update on Murphy?”

  Dalhover shook his head. “Is he still unconscious?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dalhover shook his head again. “It would be better if he was awake.”

  Of course! I nodded. “What does Steph think?”

  “She says we won’t know until he wakes up.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s only been, what, nine or ten hours? That’s not abnormal, right?”

  Dalhover’s eyebrows knit. “More like twenty-four, Rip Van Winkle.”

  “What?”

  Dalhover tapped a finger on the face of my watch. “P.m., not a.m.”

  I looked at him like he’d lost his senses.

  “You slept all day.”

  “Wow.” I rubbed my hands over my face and shook my head. I looked back at Dalhover, still not sure whether to believe him.

  “Go up top and look outside. It’s dark again.”

  “I guess I must have needed the sleep.”

  Dalhover nodded and reached under the counter. He pulled out a box of chocolate candies from inside the glass display case and laid them in front of me. “You should eat something.”

  Chocolate candies for breakfast late in the evening. Hmm.

  Dalhover read the look on my face and said, “Specialist Harris is in the kitchen making dinner for everyone. He says he was trained as a chef.”

  “I think I’ll wait for that, then.”

  “He just went upstairs. We were waiting for you an
d Mandi to get up before we ate dinner, but we’re all hungry. Nevertheless, it’ll probably be a bit before it’s done. Eat the candy.”

  He was right. “Could you give me a Coke, too?”

  Dalhover scooped up a cup full of ice and drew me a soda out of the fountain while I opened up the box of chocolate covered nuts. Over my shoulder, Freitag was getting animated with her irritation, and I turned to look, a little curious about what kind of bug she had up her ass. I was starting to think she probably had a whole crop of cultivated ass-bugs.

  I thanked Dalhover for the snack and then he fell silent, watching the exchange between Freitag and Steph. I took my hors d’oeuvres, crossed the foyer, and planted myself on the floor with my back against the glass wall of the wine cellar.

  Using one of Sarah Mansfield’s expensive, organically grown, hand-picked-by-a-happy-farmer-on-a-sustainable-farm Egyptian cotton towels, I started to clean the crud off of my machete blade. After that, I planned to spend some time cleaning up everything in my kit, at least until dinner was ready. I thought about asking Dalhover to give me some training on how to care for my rifle and my pistol.

  But as I sat there wiping and re-wiping the nicked blade, I couldn’t help but see that bird man’s body was still lying next to the wall across the foyer, and in spite of the sugar and caffeine working their way into my bloodstream, that dragged my mood down.

  Becoming transfixed on the amorphous, blanketed lump, I slowly wiped back and forth on the blade that had killed the man inside. I tried hard to put the memory of that clusterfuck out of my mind. I tried to think of something good to replace it with. My success at getting the Whites away from the gates the night before felt good to think about for nearly a whole second. But that led, of course, to memories of the no-screaming gymnast who’d paid for our safety with her life.

  Why were those memories even back?

  Repress!

  Repress!

  I gave nothingness a shot. The oblivious serenity of an empty mind, that’s what I longed for. How good would it be to shed all of my messy memories and live for a day in Russell’s blank mind?

  A gray void swallowed my thoughts, and for a little while, all that existed in my world was the zen of a clean blade. There was no dead bird man. There were no harsh, hushed arguments across the room. There were no cannibals with virus-laden brains.