Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Read online

  And there, I’d find fucking Mark.

  The cattle and the Whites had been moving from right to left across the road when I’d observed them from the Mustang. Looking across a field of flattened crops to the left of the road, I spotted stragglers moving off in that direction and Whites on the ground, filling their bellies on scraps of carcasses.

  Null Spot, the stealthy Indian tracker, immediately realized the naked horde had a long tail and left a wide path.

  The reality of seeing Mark bleed suddenly seemed within reach. On quick, excited steps, I scrambled down the steep incline of a roadside ditch and climbed the other side. I stomped my way through a trampled hedgerow of thorny bushes and twisted barbed wire, all the while patting myself on the back for my genius decision to keep the boots on my feet.

  I took off across a field carpeted in the husks of the crops that had dried out in the autumn weather before they were run flat by the passing horde.

  My breath flowed out in clouds of condensation. The night was turning a cold edge on all of us Whites running through it with naked skin. I knew I would have been feeling the cold were it not for the numbness the virus left with me. And I was well aware that pain is a biological feedback mechanism that tells a living thing to stop doing whatever it’s doing, lest it be injured or die.

  Without sensations of pain, I needed to pay close attention to my body, or I'd risk hypothermia.

  That thought gave me pause to look for the bodies of Whites in the field who might have died of exposure. Surely, some of them had succumbed to the elements. They couldn’t go all winter without clothing and not experience a pretty hefty casualty rate.

  I saw none.

  Then something else occurred to me. If any Whites fell, they’d likely be consumed by their hungry brothers and sisters, leaving nothing but scattered bones. That was the sum of life and death among every band of Whites. Run and kill until you die. Then feed your comrades with your dead flesh.

  I jogged for a bit to get my blood flowing and to warm my body up. I walked and then jogged again, proceeding alternately as I focused on avoiding the divots in the dirt left by panicked hooves. To step in one of those at the wrong angle might result in a sprained ankle—a deadly injury with so many straggling Whites around. I guess those that followed the horde specialized in cleaning up the fallen, whether they were still alive or not.

  I crested a few hills, seemingly getting farther and farther from civilization as I went. I saw shadowy copses where the terrain was too uneven to plow. Ponds with mirrored black surfaces sparkled starlight back at the sky. I realized I hadn’t seen a fence in a good while. Roads, rotting mobile homes, and barns seemed to have been stolen from the countryside.

  All around me were only endless, cultivated fields, slowly turning fallow.

  As I came to a walk at the end of one of my jogs, I realized I was getting thirsty. Necessarily, though, my water bottles were keeping company with a few days’ worth of food in my Hello Kitty bag in the backseat of the electric Mustang. The Mustang was probably fifty miles east by now.

  Looking around for a water source, I spotted a stock pond, but didn’t want to chance a drink from one of those. Every kind of bacteria that lived in cow pies would be in that water and would probably leave me with a case of diarrhea, or worse.

  I needed to find a creek. Flowing water had to be better for me than stagnant water.

  On the question of food? Eh. I’d gone hungry before. And thanks to my time convalescing by the lake with Murphy, I had a store of fat to burn off. If I lost twenty or thirty pounds again, I could afford it.

  I didn't think I'd be out that long, though.

  I’d just started my quest and already I was tracking the naked horde. Once I found them, I’d find Mark, and I’d give him a few good whacks with my machete.

  Problem solved. Walk off.

  The Whites wouldn’t likely fuck with me, not while I looked like them, not while I carried my bloody machete.

  Did I say how simple all of my schemes sounded as they rolled down the roller coaster of their momentum, turning surprisingly fast into adrenaline-laced screaming shit?

  Yeah, I know I did.

  Still, what else was I going to do? Sit in an abandoned Walmart somewhere and eat stale rice cakes until I died of old age, remembering all the people I used to know, ruminating over all the goddamned stupid things I’d done?

  Fuck that.

  At the crest of a hill, I spotted a geometric black silhouette across the valley, on the crest of the next long roll in the earth. The thing was, though, that I had no idea what the strange object was. I stopped and cocked my head like a dog, trying to figure it out.

  What the fuck is that thing?

  I hurried over furrows that ran across the slope, eager to explore the thing I was looking at. Maybe the eagerness grew out of the boredom of having spent what felt like hours crossing nothing but empty fields. In a way, I was hoping the thing I was seeing might be a house, and that I might find some food and water inside.

  I stopped.

  The ground on the hill across the shallow valley was odd. I stared at it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t as black as all the others I’d hiked up. Sure, some of them were covered in winter grasses that didn’t mind the chill in the nights. Others were little more than black dirt full of tan weeds and crops, tilled under by all the White feet that had passed this way ahead of me.

  But this field seemed to glow a dull white in the darkness.

  Chapter 8

  I ’d crossed most of the wide, flat valley floor and neared what looked like a stark border between the trampled black dirt and the white glow when I realized what I was seeing. Whites.

  They were lying in an endless blanket across the valley, spooning, cuddled, skin touching skin, keeping each other warm by crowding themselves together tightly as they slept. That answered a question about freezing to death. I wondered how warm they stayed, snuggled together like that, with only one side of their bodies exposed to the cold air. Was it enough?

  I looked north as I thought about Whites in the colder climates. What were they doing, with snows already having fallen in places and subzero temperatures coming? Surely, they’d have figured out already they needed to shelter indoors at night. And if not? Would they all freeze to death over the winter and leave the northern states open to normals? Would they migrate from north to south and back again with the seasons, and become a new-century version of America’s great buffalo herds?

  That was something to think about in the long term—the possibility of leaving Texas and heading north. Of course, the same cold that could kill Whites could also kill normals and Slow Burns, like me. My thoughts ran down a rat hole, quantifying how much wood to chop for the winter and storing provisions for the long months with snow piled outside the door. And what about the smoke from the chimney? That would certainly draw in any Whites who’d figured out how to survive in the snow.

  Thoughts for another day.

  Standing at the edge of a blanket of sleeping white bodies that stretched as far as I could see into the darkness, I had real business at hand, the kind that required every speck of my attention. I needed to decide what to do next.

  I raised my machete and looked up and down the battered edge of the blade. How many sleeping Whites could I kill with it?

  Did I want to follow the herd, blending in during the daylight hours, looking like them and acting like them, risking getting busted with my boots on? It would be easy to wait for them to cuddle up to sleep for the night and run among their prone bodies, slashing their throats. I could be the monster of their nightmares.

  Did I want that?

  Oh, hell yeah, I did.

  I looked across the acres and acres of them, knowing the horde had probably spread itself over the crest of the hill, down into the next valley, and who knew how far beyond that. Maybe for miles. How many throats could I slash in a single night? How many nights would it take to kill them all? Weeks? Months?
Years? Would I ever finish?

  I scanned across all those bodies, breathing in that slow rhythm of sleep, snoring, and mumbling through their dreams. I lost hope that I could kill enough of them with my machete to make a discernible difference in their numbers.

  Still, it was a hard fantasy to let go of. The idea of it tempted me into indulging more thought on how I could kill as many of those evil white monsters as possible. The problem with my whole plan, I decided, wasn’t the futility of it, it was the method. Running among the sleeping with a swinging machete was a bad idea. If I wanted to kill Whites in the mass numbers that my aspirations required, I needed a more industrial-scale solution.

  I sighed. The dirt and dark skies were not fertile ground for inspiration.

  Looking back at the unnatural shape at the crest of the hill, I wondered if the Smart Ones, who directed the horde, were holed up inside. More importantly, I wondered if Mark was with them, keeping himself warm and comfortable.

  That thought made me angry.

  He deserved no comfort. He deserved to be shivering in the cold with ticks crawling on his skin, looking for hidden places to sink their mandibles and suck his tainted blood. He needed to be itchy from poison ivy exposure and scratching incessantly. He needed a cramping gut that forced him to squat every ten minutes for temporary relief from diarrhea. And he needed skin to be left raw from squatting so many times that it burned every time he relieved himself.

  But how much of that would he feel? He had a brain numbed to most pain by the virus. Just like me.

  With a tight grip on the handle of my machete, I reached down to my boot and took out my knife. I needed both handy as I waded into the blanket of sleeping Whites, carefully planting my feet in awkwardly spaced gaps, often squeezing my boot between bodies to find my footing.

  The going was slow. Some Whites stirred as I pushed and nudged. A few looked up at me before laying their heads back down to sleep. None made any move to threaten me.

  By the time I was halfway up the hill, I came to the realization that the big, black-silhouetted thing at the top wasn’t one thing at all, but two—a giant harvesting machine parked next to a semi-tractor trailer. I’m not a country boy, but I’m not completely ignorant either. So it was obvious to me the truck was there to run alongside the harvester for offloading whatever crop had been in the field.

  Disappointment slowed my progress once I figured out what the massive machines were. The Smart Ones leading the naked horde wouldn’t be sleeping inside.

  Of course, that didn’t mean the cab of one wouldn’t be a great place for me to bed down for the night. It would be better than the alternative—snuggling up with the Whites on the ground.

  Another thought occurred to me. I could use the harvester for a lookout tower. From up on top, I’d be able to see for miles in all directions. Perhaps I could spot the place where the Smart Ones were holed up.

  Chapter 9

  From the roof of the harvester, I searched. Out east, a series of black triangles and rectangles blocked the stars along the horizon. That had to be one of the countless tiny towns that dotted Texas’ farm country. Over the rolling undulations in the terrain in that direction, I saw only sleeping Whites, as though the crops that had grown in the fields had been replaced.

  So many.

  As I turned, looking for anything that might give me a bead on the Smart Ones, I uttered under my breath, “I’m your nightmare.”

  I loved that thought.

  It tantalized me with its power.

  It made me feel like an invincible Ninja, a black beast, a long-toothed devil with an appetite for white killers’ blood that I could pour into the void in my soul.

  I teased myself with vignettes of Whites waking in the morning and looking at the bloody, cold bodies lying around them. I decided that their wretched little brains had the capacity to fear what haunted their nights. I wanted them to know the price of their sins and to dread the moment when they’d wake with a machete through their throats, choking as they drowned in their blood.

  The memory of Steph’s dying hand wounded my heart again as I felt her lifeless fingers slip away from my grasp, and I hoped to God every White beneath my gaze would soon feel the heart-rending fear of the night monster that stalked them, reaping his revenge.

  I wanted them to walk through their days afraid to lie down to sleep. They needed to taste remorse. To suffer.

  Movement along a hill crest off to my left caught my attention. A discoloration on the down slope of the hill showed vaguely against the background of the Whites sleeping there.

  I stared into the dark, missing my night vision goggles again, trying to discern what I was seeing.

  A house?

  A farmhouse?

  Along the crest, something moved again, and I watched the pale silhouettes against the starred background. Three—thin, muscular, and naked—walking together.

  Sentries?

  I continued to watch. To the right of the house—it had to be a house—another three Whites cast silhouettes as they tiptoed through the sleepers along the crest.

  Yes. Definitely sentries, walking in wide circles around that farmhouse.

  Gotcha, motherfuckers.

  The Smart Ones leading the naked horde had to be in that house. Why else would sentries be walking a perimeter around it?

  My problem with Mark was going to find its solution before the night’s end. I wished I had some hand grenades. Then all of those smart white fuckers in the house would die. I entertained a fantasy of pounding a grenade into Mark’s mouth, breaking his teeth and watching the blood pour out, humiliating and hurting him before I pulled the pin.

  Pointless, but fun to think about.

  Still, I had my nicked-up machete. It had served me well in killing. It would do for turning Mark into a carcass.

  I climbed quietly down from the harvester and made my way through the sleeping Whites.

  As I drew closer to the house, the Whites seemed to get more aggressive. No longer did they docilely ignore my nudging and pushing as I stepped over them. Missteps earned me grunts and angry growls. More than once, I bumped a White too hard and the reaction knocked me off my feet. Of course, I landed on other sleeping Whites who woke, none too pleased.

  Each time it happened, I brandished my machete and faced aggressive Whites with a silent promise to swing my blade. Their goldfish brains understood the threat because they’d seen blades kill. None pushed me past the threat to slice their throats. Not that I minded killing any of them. My concern lay in making enough of a commotion that I’d chance waking the Smart Ones in the farmhouse.

  I was maybe a hundred yards from the house when I caught the attention of one of the trios of sentries. They were a good distance to my left, standing still and apparently staring at me.

  I raised my machete and shook it at them, hoping to ward them off.

  They were unfazed and continued staring.

  I pressed on toward the house, keeping an eye alternately on it and on the three Whites, who were keeping an eye on me. It was only through the luck of hearing an animal scampering on the metal roof of a shed near the farmhouse that I looked to my right and realized I’d fucked up.

  Chapter 10

  Six or seven Whites had fanned out to my right, the closest standing only a few dozen paces away as I tiptoed between sleeping bodies on the ground. A few sentries were coming directly at me. Others weren’t. The lizard core of my brain recognized the trap immediately and shouted inside my head, “Run, motherfucker!”

  I ignored it as irrationality trying to raise a panic and I looked at the house where I suspected—knew—the Smart Ones were sleeping. I estimated the distance to the Whites closing in on my right. I looked at the three who’d been standing to my left, but were now hurrying past their sleeping brothers and sisters. There had to be Smart Ones, or semi-Smart Ones among them because their actions were too deliberate for stupid white monsters.

  They were clearly coming at me, or at least
encircling me.

  But they weren’t running. Why?

  Maybe they couldn’t because of all the sleepers littering the ground who might wake and make a mess of everything. Maybe the sentries weren’t sure what I was. Maybe they were afraid of me and my machete. Maybe they wanted to capture rather than kill me.

  That last one was a frightening thought, because it implied a lot about the command and control abilities of my adversaries in the house.

  The panic I’d felt a moment before was the correct response. It wasn’t irrationality.

  It was time to move my feet.

  Glancing back and forth for the safest vector, I spun around and took quick steps over the sleeping Whites.

  No surprise, the pursuing sentries quickened their pace. And if anything, they were moving faster than I was.

  Running wasn’t a solution I thought would work. That was only a path to twisted ankles and falling into a tumble of Whites, from which I suspected I’d never get up again.

  Instead, I put my own virus-tainted brain to work and dredged out an inspiration. I usually have no trouble coming up with an idea on the fly, though I try not to evaluate the quality of those ideas too closely.

  I smacked a sleeping White across the head with the flat of my blade and leapt across a few sleepers, not aiming my foot at a shadowy spot of ground between two prone Whites, but at the nearest, flattest spot I saw on a white body.

  As my foot landed, driving the wind out of an unsuspecting dreamer, the guy I’d smacked with my machete was already winding up an irate bellow.

  And before the sleeper was awake enough to catch his breath, I’d leapt to my next victim, taking care to swing my machete across as many Whites as I could reach, hoping to hit them hard enough to wake them.

  Leap number two worked as hoped. I was off again.

  The trick, it turned out, was to get off fast. To linger too long on a single step was to risk all kinds of bad outcomes. As that thought came to me, I figured the faster I ran, the better my chances, as long as I didn’t misplace a foot. So I bet my sense of balance and what I hoped was a traction advantage with the soles of my boots against my pursuers. I sprinted, leaving a wake of commotion I hoped would slow them down.