Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 Page 5

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I think there will be little room in the days ahead for geological work. We’ll all be farmers, or hunters, or soldiers, I guess.”

  “Or doctors,” Steph added. “And nurses.”

  “Just the essentials,” I agreed. “Getting back to the beginning, so you guys were camping on the island and when people started showing up after the virus hit, they voted you in charge?”

  Gretchen shrugged, “It just kind of happened. The first arrivals just deferred to me on decisions.”

  Paul chuckled, “She’s a take-charge type.”

  I looked at Steph, “Sounds like somebody I know.”

  Steph punched me in the arm.

  “Hey, that’s a compliment,” I protested.

  “Eventually, we voted,” said Gretchen. “It seemed like the smart thing to do, having somebody in charge. And I won.”

  “By a landslide.” Paul smiled at Gretchen.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  With a formal nod, Gretchen said, “Thank you. I owe it all to the little people.”

  We all laughed.

  I asked, “So people just kind of trickled in as things got bad in town?”

  Becoming more serious, Gretchen said, “Yes. We got six that first night after the riot at the jail downtown.”

  I was thinking about my escape from that riot with Murphy when I noticed Paul looked down at his feet and shaking his head. I asked, “What happened?”

  Gretchen had a little difficulty with it. “There were six of them, a family with four children. The oldest of the kids was fifteen, the youngest was eight.” Gretchen seemed to run out of words at that point.

  I looked over at Steph. She was looking at Gretchen. I guessed she hadn’t heard the story yet.

  Gretchen took a big gulp of air as though that might make the story more palatable. “It was the fifteen-year-old that turned first. It happened late that night.” Steph pointed at the silhouette of the old chapel at the top of the hill. “We were all sleeping in the church then. I was keeping guard. The family was exhausted. It seemed like the right thing to do to let them rest. I was outside, keeping an eye out for danger. Paul was inside.”

  Another long pause. It was Gretchen’s and Paul’s first one-on-one experience with the infected, and it had scarred them more deeply than subsequent experiences.

  Paul stuck his arm out. He had a nasty, bite-shaped scar. “The fifteen-year-old attacked me.”

  Steph took hold of Paul’s arm and examined the nearly healed wound. “You’re lucky.”

  “That I wasn’t infected?” Paul nodded. “Yes. I guess I’m immune.”

  I looked at Gretchen. “And you think you’re immune, too.”

  She nodded. “I have to be, or I’d have caught it by now.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Paul had to kill the boy to save his own life,” she said.

  “The parents got angry,” Gretchen said. “They didn’t behave rationally.”

  “I guess that’s to be expected,” I said. “That early on in the infection, I mean.”

  Gretchen looked at Paul. “The father had a gun, and he threatened Paul with it. Even though his son was there, with pale skin and blood all over his face from biting Paul. His father—”

  “—Jim,” said Paul. “His name was Jim.”

  “I’d forgotten.” Gretchen admitted. “Jim was livid. He couldn’t accept that his son had turned. Even though he was frightened enough about everything going on to bring his family out to the island, he couldn’t accept the reality.” Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe none of us could, at first.” She pulled her hands together in front of her mouth, almost as though she were going to pray, as she thought about what to say next. “I thought Jim was going to shoot Paul. But I had a gun, too. We always have one when we’re out camping—not that we ever needed it before—but just in case, you know.”

  Steph and I both nodded. Of course.

  “I think that’s the only reason Jim didn’t shoot Paul.” Gretchen pointed to another old structure up on the hill. “Jim took his wife and kids and went to the old stable and told us to leave him and his family alone.”

  “Yelled at us to leave them alone,” Paul said.

  Gretchen nodded emphatically at that. “He was so angry with us.” Then she shook her head. “He made his wife hold their gun and picked up his son and carried the body with them to the stable. I begged them not to go.”

  “Why?” I asked. “It sounds like the best thing, given what happened.”

  Shaking his head, Paul said, “The other kids were infected.”

  “Oh, no,” Steph said.

  Gretchen said, “One of them appeared to be feverish. The other was lethargic. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. Jim was crazy over the death of his son by then. He was talking about revenge, and calling the police, and what not. He thought we just wanted to kill his kids.” Gretchen stopped talking after that.

  After a few moments, I ventured a guess. “And they turned. They turned that night?”

  Gretchen nodded. “Paul and I didn’t sleep after that. It was nearly sunup when we heard the ruckus from the stable. There was crying and screaming. There were gunshots.”

  “What happened?” Steph asked.

  “The children killed the mother. The father shot the children. I think he was feverish by then. He shot himself.”

  In a lost voice, Steph said, “Oh, my God.”

  Shaking his head, Paul said, “Probably not an uncommon story.”

  We all agreed.

  “We burned the bodies.” Gretchen said, after we’d had a moment to assimilate the story’s conclusion. She looked at Paul, and it was pretty clear that the two were close. “We both thought Paul was going to turn. He made me keep the gun after that. But I didn’t want to be here, not in this world, without him. We don’t have any kids. We never wanted any. We don’t have any family that we’re close to. We only have each other.”

  Tentatively, Steph asked, “If he turned, you were going to shoot him?”

  Gretchen nodded.

  “And then yourself?” Steph asked.

  “Yes.” Gretchen took Paul’s hand in hers. “We didn’t make any attempt after that to keep me from getting infected. I decided that if Paul was going to die, and I was going to die, then I was damn sure going to be affectionate with the love of my life.” Gretchen leaned over and kissed Paul on the lips.

  Steph smiled, but I could see restrained tears.

  “Neither of us turned.” Gretchen smiled. “We both got lucky with immunity.”

  “That’s amazing luck.”

  “Better than winning the lottery.” Gretchen said. “After that, we instituted the quarantine system for those coming on the island.”

  “And that worked?” I asked.

  “There were some difficult moments. But people were more understanding about it than you’d think. Everybody knew it was for the safety of all.”

  “Wow.” I shook my head. “Reasonable people.”

  Gretchen laughed at that. “I wouldn’t go that far. But about the quarantine, they were reasonable enough.”

  “Reasonable enough,” Paul agreed.

  “Have you had any infected on the island since that first family?” I asked.

  “Not a one.” Paul answered. “But we were plenty worried before the flood.”

  I asked, “Because of the lake levels? Did it get that low?”

  “Yes.” Paul nodded emphatically. He pointed at a spit of land pointing down from the north shore. “This island and that peninsula are actually part of the same ridge. It dips down beneath the water out there but not by much. Before the flood came and refilled the lake, anybody could have waded across and never gotten more than chest deep.”

  I looked in the direction of the peninsula. The islanders were surviving by little more than luck. Perhaps that was the story for everyone.

  Gretchen said, “Because of that, we try
to keep hidden out here. We don’t build cooking fires outside. We don’t walk around outside during the day, at least not where someone onshore can see us.”

  “Sounds smart.”

  “We got lucky with some of our choices,” said Paul. “They were the right ones and they worked out well. On the other hand, we don’t know what we’ll do about food in the long run. We can only scavenge along the shore for so long.”

  Gretchen ignored Paul’s change in the subject and pointed at Steph, “And we got lucky with who came to the island. We didn’t have anybody with any medical knowledge. But now we have Steph and Amy, two nurses. I don’t know all of what we need to survive in the long term, but I have to think that having someone to treat the injured and sick could make all the difference.”

  “I’m just a nurse,” said Steph.

  “You’re more than that,” said Paul. “You’re hope.”

  I liked Steph a lot, but I wasn’t sure I’d go that far.

  Paul went on. “We used to take for granted that if we got sick, we could just go to a doctor, get a pill, and get better. It wasn’t always like that for people. It wasn’t that long ago that influenza was a deadly disease. People got sick and died all the time. Minor injuries could lead to infection and death. We never had to think about those things because we had modern medicine. With the world like it is now, all of those seemingly minor medical problems become major again.”

  “I hadn’t thought that much about it,” I said.

  “I don’t know why,” said Paul, “but the subject came up a lot when we islanders talked around the campfire at night. It worried everyone. You see, people today—ahem, yesterday—were all specialists. We did jobs and had skills that made us successful in the world we’d built. I studied rocks.” Paul laughed. “Not much need for that now. People were financial analysts, computer programmers, insurance adjusters, all totally useless now. But doctors and nurses, those are professional skills that humans took thousands of years to develop, and that we can’t afford to lose. They represent one of the major progressive steps away from barbarity and into civilization.”

  Chapter 10

  Knowing that we had the whole next day to talk, Paul and Gretchen went downstairs to claim a bedroom. That left just Steph and me on the sun deck. The boat was silent, and I assumed by then that everyone else was asleep.

  I was sitting at the end of a vinyl covered couch, and Steph was sitting on a twin of my couch, but set perpendicular to mine, leaving us close enough together that our knees were nearly touching. She asked, “Was Murphy serious about what he said?”

  I raised my eyebrows to ask for clarification.

  “About going out to kill Smart Ones? Is that what you plan to do?”

  A path that had previously seemed so clear suddenly needed stuttered rationalizations. “We’re not safe. We have to. You saw what they did to…to Mandi, to Russell.”

  Steph leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. “Zed, I hate them too. I really do. We all do. But there’s nothing you can do about it. Chasing revenge around Austin until you get killed isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

  “It’s not revenge.”

  “How could it be anything else?” Steph wasn’t going to let me by without expressing her disagreement.

  “It isn’t revenge.”

  “Then what is it? Are you the Valiant Null Spot? Are you going to save the world?”

  I put a hand on Steph’s. I put them both there and stared at the white fiberglass deck. I looked at the patterns of black grippy tape and looked for a good way to figure out what I was really feeling, the reason I really wanted to kill the Smart Ones, if not to indulge a desire for revenge. Finally, I said, “I’ll admit, it doesn’t make any sense. When I take a clinical step back and examine it, it does seem pointless.”

  Steph laid her other hand on the pile of hands on my knee. “Then why do it?”

  “I…I…” It was hard to deal with the truth of it. “I have a rage. I have this big black hole that I feel like I need to fill. I hate the Whites. I hate the Smart Ones. As irrational as I know it is, I think if I kill enough of them, maybe I’ll fill the hole. Maybe I’ll feel better at the end.”

  “You won’t.” But she said it not as an insult but simply as a matter of fact, as though my assertion was so ridiculous on its face that it needed no thought. It was just wrong.

  I sat back in my seat and leaned my head back to look up at the stars. Timidly, I admitted, “I know.”

  “Then, why?”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Stay here with us. Don’t endanger yourself for nothing. Stay here with me.”

  With me?

  “I worry that I’m turning into a monster,” I said. “I worry that this need I have to kill isn’t pointless revenge. I worry that I want to do it because my brain is changing. I worry that I want to kill because I like it.”

  Steph sat up and pulled her hands to her own lap. She pulled her legs up onto the couch to sit Indian-style. “Is this about what happened with Nico?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think Nico was…He was just one in a long line. I’ve killed so many.”

  “But they were all infected. They were all dangerous.”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t think they were all dangerous.” I told her about the thin, bald kid in the Children’s Hospital, the one that looked at me and didn’t resist when I hacked him down with my machete. I wondered if he had been as innocuous as Russell. I told her about the girl who was sitting on the rock outside the front gate at Sarah Mansfield’s house. I’d heard her screams after the Whites chased her into the trees, and I knew she’d been a Slow Burn, just like me. I’d murdered her because I was too impatient, too stupidly certain about what I thought she was to figure out a way to discover the truth. “How many others have I murdered, Steph?”

  “You can’t think about it that way.”

  “And the worst part about it all,” I said, ignoring her comment, “is that sometimes the only time I feel better is when I’m killing more of them. How fucked up is that?”

  “Most of them, nearly all of them, are monsters, Zed. They’ll kill us if they have the chance. You have to remember that. You’re doing things that are hard because you want to keep the people that you love safe.”

  “Love?”

  “Okay, like. Whatever.”

  I looked across the bow of the boat and saw Monk’s Island, alone on the smooth black water. Softly, I said, “Love is fine. I’m tired of losing my friends. It hurts too much.”

  Steph rearranged herself in her seat, leaned forward, and put her hands back on my legs. “It does hurt. But we can’t give up. We still have to try to be human. If we can’t do that, what’s the point of it all?”

  “Exactly.” I shrugged. “What’s the point?”

  Steph stood up, leaned over me, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the lips. She sat back down, not taking her eyes off of mine. “Don’t go. Stay.”

  I’d both been wanting and dreading that first kiss for weeks, but the rush of feelings didn’t sit right with me. I deflected with humor. “Are you trying to manipulate me with your womanly wiles?”

  Steph smiled and a few tears rolled down her cheeks. Shaking her head, she said, “Yes. Maybe I am trying to manipulate you, but please, please tell me you know there’s more to it than that.”

  She was so beautiful in her severe, redheaded Steph sort of way. With that kiss she’d opened the door on the complex mess of emotions that had been troubling both of us. I said, “I think that kiss is the best thing that’s happened to me…fuck it. Let’s just say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Silent tears followed one another down Steph’s cheeks. “But?”

  “I have to be honest with you about something.”

  Steph shook her head and laughed through her tears. “You’re gay.”

  That was so unexpected, I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can be funny
.”

  “See, I told you.” She wiped her cheek with her sleeve.

  “No. I’m not gay.”

  “What then? Spit it out. I’m a big girl. Are you going to call HR and file a sexual harassment complaint?”

  I favored her with a smile, but we were both past the jokes. “When Murphy and I went to get the suppressors, we were on the hospital grounds for a little while.”

  “And?”

  There was no good way to say it. “Jeff Aubrey is still alive. Or he was, anyway.”

  Steph just looked at me for a long time after that.

  I waited patiently, silently.

  Finally, she asked, “Why didn’t you bring him back?”

  I shook my head. “I thought about it. I wanted to. Kind of.”

  “Kind of? So he wasn’t one of them, was he? If he was, you wouldn’t have had to think about it.”

  “No, I don’t know what he was.” It was my turn to lean forward and take Steph’s hands in mine. “He wasn’t like me and Murphy.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t right. He had a hard time with single syllables. I don’t think he understood what Murphy and I were saying most of the time.”

  Steph was crying again.

  “Steph, I don’t know if he was dangerous or not. He didn’t attack us, but Murphy and I are both Whites.”

  “Zed Zane, I hate this fucking world.”

  “I know.”

  Through her tears, Steph said, “It never stops hurting.”

  “I know.”

  Somewhere in the dark, we ran out of words and fell asleep on separate couches, with only our thoughts to hold us close.

  Chapter 11

  When I woke, my wrists were being bound behind my back. “Hey!”

  Steph was cursing and struggling.

  I rolled off of my couch and hit the deck while kicking out at a dozen legs that danced sideways to avoid my boots. Then they kicked back. A kick hit my thigh. Another hit me in the stomach and a third bruised my ribs before the bravest of my assailants dropped onto my chest and put a cold revolver barrel against my face. “Don’t move, you white piece of shit.”

  I stopped struggling.