Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Page 5

  I’d made it a few hundred yards when I came to a clear spot and stopped, panting heavily. I turned to get an idea of the state of things behind me. My plan was working.

  Oh yeah, bitch, that’s right. The genius is back in the game.

  A wedge-shaped swath of pandemonium grew out along my path and pointed right at me. It was a sign that even the stupidest of Whites coming after me would be able to figure out. Too bad for them that they were caught up in the crowd of grouchy Whites waking from their sleep and bouncing to their feet.

  Whites were sitting up in all directions or climbing to their hands and knees. Awakened by the sounds, many were already on their feet.

  Things were about to get dicey, and if enough pissed-off Whites decided I was the entrée, things would zip right past dicey and on to straight-up fucked again.

  It was time for a new tactic.

  Time to put that ever-useful machete back to work. I spun in a quick circle and whacked or lacerated the skull of every White within reach. It’s surprising how quickly some of those damn things wake. They don’t waste any time groaning about needing a coffee. They bounce right up, ready to rumble.

  I pushed between a pair of them and took off at a jog, zigzagging back and forth, kicking and slashing, running in circles. I was trying to raise as big a mob of them as I could in the twenty or thirty seconds of safety I figured I had before the first of the sentries reached that clear spot I’d just left.

  I was putting the smell of blood in the air, wounding a bunch of Whites, some—enough—to make them vulnerable to their hungry comrades, and I was inciting a riot, or whatever passed for a riot among the naked Whites. I was betting that if I got enough of them up, the odds of the sentries finding me would sink to zero.

  Whites started to howl as the smell of blood worked its way into their nostrils and reminded their empty stomachs that a meal would come in awful handy.

  Screaming started as some saw the machete cuts as an invitation to partake of their comrade’s flesh. The noise woke more, and the undefined perimeter of my mob spread.

  Before I knew it, thousands were up all around, and none seemed particularly interested in me.

  I couldn’t have hoped for better.

  It was time to go.

  I hurried through the mob, keeping a wary eye out for any Smart One with a knife or any stupid one looking to make a bad decision. Bad, as defined by my possession of a machete I’d use without hesitation or guilt.

  Soon enough, I found myself among Whites, of whom only about half were on their feet, the other half either still sleeping or lying down and looking around. I wasn’t irritating them with my kicks and slashes by then, just being careful as I passed, so as not to disturb any more.

  I kept on in that fashion while I continually glanced back to make sure that no Whites were following along my path.

  When I got to the crest of the hill from which I’d originally spotted the house that contained the Smart Ones, I figured I was home free. The valley floor was in a state of pandemonium, and still, no Whites appeared to be moving in my direction.

  None was paying me any attention.

  Off to my left, along the crest and a good distance away, that combine and its accompanying tractor trailer still stood, inviting me to go over and make myself comfortable sleeping on a padded seat. To do that would probably have been a mistake, as I figured that the sentries might look there for me if they suspected I was intelligent.

  Instead, I dropped to the ground in a gap between two females, laid my machete in the dirt and lay down on top of it. I then spooned my way in close to one of the females and pretended at being as sleepy-still as I could manage, while I kept my eyes open and listened.

  Well aware of the trouble that always seemed to come when I dared such thoughts, I congratulated myself for my quick wits and clever plan. I’d escaped my pursuers and slipped away from another brush with death’s dirty maw.

  I wanted to laugh.

  Of course, I didn’t. I snuggled with my new girlfriend, thankful the night was chilly enough to keep my little friend at bay, and I watched.

  Chapter 11

  For all the adrenaline pumping through my veins, stoked by the memory of my victory—escape—as I replayed the event in my mind over and over again, I didn’t sleep. What I wanted more than anything was for Murphy to have witnessed it or lived through it with me, so we could grin and laugh and retell the story to one another.

  As it was, all I had to distract me from my story were naughty thoughts, as the female White in front of me kept pushing back, sandwiching me tight with the naked woman in back who’d embraced me and pressed her chest against me. When I wasn’t looking around, I laid my head on my bent arm, which put my face in the dirty mop of blonde hair on the head of the girl in front of me. Though I’d expected it to stink with all manner of rot, it didn’t smell bad. Or maybe I was just so used to the stench of my own unwashed odors that the woman’s smell didn’t bother me.

  And then the smell of the blonde’s dirty hair would remind me of all the times I’d wished I’d run my hand through Steph’s hair and smelled it over my face as I held her tight, and that only served to bring my rage to a boil.

  It took a few hours, I guess, but the mob I’d aroused down in the valley finally found their way clear to lying back down, and a kind of peace settled over the sleeping horde again. No Whites ever wandered up from the valley to the hill crest on which I lay. I did prop myself up on my elbow with some frequency to look around at the valley behind. There was always that possibility the White sentries had seen through my plan and had snuck up behind me. But they didn’t. It all worked out just as I’d hoped.

  As the night wore on, I found myself looking again and again at that combine, thinking what I could do with that hulking beast of a machine. I started to think that if I could make my way over to it—and I surely could—I might be able to get it started up. And I bet myself I could get all that spinning harvesting machinery running at full tilt and just plow it over that farmhouse on the other side of the valley.

  I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing Mark’s bulging eyes as I choked him to death, but there was always that remote chance that I might see his lopped-off head fly over the cab, eyes still blinking, when the farmhouse and its occupants disintegrated under the harvester’s violent might.

  I almost giggled wickedly at that, but did my best to make it sound like a cough that twitched through my body and prompted the girls to snuggle closer.

  It was time to go.

  I extricated myself from the embrace of my girls and took another good look around. Nobody on his or her feet was nearby. I headed through the sleeping Whites.

  I arrived at the side of the truck first and figured I’d check it out before moving on to the combine. Besides, I saw in a movie once where one of these big rigs had been driven through a house or something. I wasn’t married to the idea of the harvester. I just wanted to kill Mark and his smart, infected buddies. The first thing I noticed was that the truck had sunk into the dirt up to its axles. A result of the torrential rains back in September, I guessed. All that water had turned the field into a soupy mix of mud and chaff. I saw that the driver’s side door was swung open and pushed all the way forward on bent hinges. Likely caught in a howling wind in that same storm.

  I didn’t have high hopes for the tractor trailer.

  Inside the truck’s cab, a couple of Whites lay entangled across the seat, looking the part of two lovers, worn out after wrestling for hours to bring one another to pleasure. Pressed together as they were I couldn’t tell if they were male and female or two of a kind? Were they lovers or simply two beasts sharing the comfort of a padded, narrow bed, and the warmth of one another’s bodies, while the cold air bit at their skin?

  Of course, the pair made me think of missed opportunities. Anger followed, and I hefted my machete, feeling ghoulish for wanting to hack and slash at two people, entwined and looking as human as any that lived before the
virus came.

  Why couldn’t the certainty of my hatred for these things stand a little more firmly?

  I asked myself whether the pair had feelings for each other. Was it possible? Did any of these Whites still have clear thoughts about anything? Did they feel sorrow for those they killed to fill their bellies? Did they cry in the dark for the children they’d lost?

  Or the ones they murdered?

  I blinked away emotions that threatened to swell, as the shameful side of everything I’d seen and done found room to run in my thoughts.

  I turned away from the two lovers and gritted my teeth, doing my best to embrace the hate I felt for all in the naked horde. I brought to mind memories of the friends I’d seen die, and that was all I needed.

  Rage.

  I turned away from the truck’s cab and nearly stepped on a gaunt-faced White, lying on his side, with a grimace on his sleeping face. I told myself it was meanness and rammed the pointy end of my machete down through his temple.

  He jerked and choked and then a slow exhalation of his last breath leaked out of his throat.

  He didn’t move after that, though a few of the Whites lying by him stirred.

  I’d taken my first step toward being the nightmare beast I’d been imagining all evening. It wasn’t as satisfying as I’d imagined. It felt more like stomping on a rat and hearing it squeak as it died.

  I wrenched the machete out of the dead White’s skull and made my way past the other sleepers until I was next to the combine.

  It was a big green monster, shaped roughly like an enormous refrigerator pushed over on its side, with huge wheels on the back and large, triangular shaped tracks on the front. The tracks hadn’t sunk into the mud. That was good. On the front of the harvester, a glass cab bigger than the kitchen in my apartment was tinted in black and looked like a dark-colored head on a giant green bug. The yellow stripes painted down the sides were worn and scraped from years of hard work. Out of a big storage bin on the back, a boom swung, with its tip angled down toward the following truck’s trailer.

  I made my way past the prone bodies to examine the wide, orange-colored corn harvesting device mounted on the front of the giant green bug. Wide enough to cut twenty or thirty rows of corn simultaneously, it looked to have been born from torture and crafted for violence.

  Just above ground level, dozens of long, metal, arrow-shaped pieces served as guides to route everything back to the mechanical nightmare of big-toothed saw wheels, thrashing strips of metal, gears, and conveyors. Still across those wheels were stuck stalks of dry corn plants that had been too jammed in the machinery to blow away in the hurricane wind. All that sharp, spinning steel guided the corn toward the mechanical bug’s throat, a pipe that sucked all the mangled corn from the shredders into the beast’s belly. Whatever lay in there was designed to separate chaff from cob, and cob from kernel. What it would do to flesh and bone sent a shudder down my spine. I involuntarily stepped back.

  My weathered green bug was violence on an industrial scale.

  Lovely and wicked, it embodied my every sadistic dream.

  Dim-witted, murderous Whites were going to spill torrents of red blood before my savage metal pet. And I was going to see Mark’s screaming fear as the spinning steel blades dismembered his body and juggled the warm, drippy pieces through the machinery.

  No matter what ambivalence I felt over the gaunt White I’d just killed, I’d feel only satisfaction when Mark’s life leaked out of his veins.

  Careful to step over the sleeping Whites, I made my way back to the side of the combine and climbed up the steps to the cab’s door. It wasn’t locked. With a care to be quiet that had become a natural way of interacting with the world, I ever-so-gently handled the door mechanism and let myself into the large, roomy cab. I pulled the door shut behind me and latched it closed. The Whites sleeping nearby paid me no mind. They might as well have been disinterested nudists on a camping trip.

  The cab was clean, but smelled of old rot. The seat had no blood on it. I saw no signs of struggle. Even the keys remained. I spotted a personal-sized cooler on the floor in the corner of the cab, with the lid ajar. I guessed that was a lunch, abandoned months ago when the operator of the combine had hurried off to… well, he probably hurried off home. That was my guess. I was full of guesses. It was the Sherlock Holmes game I played in my mind when I wasn’t busy killing or running. In a world full of clues and murders, guessing the details of what had happened was becoming a morbid fascination.

  Looking at the combine and its accompanying truck, I guessed the operators hadn’t been attacked. Their equipment had been left in too orderly a state for that. It was as if they’d been harvesting and offloading grain when they were suddenly called away, likely picked up by another vehicle. The combine and truck had been sitting here since, waiting for me to show up with my murderous imagination.

  With the toe of my boot, I flipped the lid of the lunch cooler up and leaned over to look inside. Something wrapped in a sandwich bag had turned into a blob of mold and goo, long since dried out. I guessed that sandwich had been loaded with meat, cheese, mayo, probably some lettuce, and big, wet tomatoes. Moldy goo needs moisture to grow. Thankfully, a big bag of chips in its silvery, straight-from-the-store bag had been stuffed into the cooler next to the sandwich, thankfully not in a re-sealable—translate to: now tastes like mold—sandwich bag. Also in the cooler were a couple of Dr. Peppers.

  I’ve never been a fan of Dr. Pepper, but, hey, I did mention that pickiness over food choices was a luxury I could no longer afford.

  I sat myself in the cushy pilot seat with the chips in one hand and a soda in the other. The smell of the old sandwich in the cockpit didn’t bother me much. I’m sad to say, it’s a smell one gets used to. Having spent the last four months in a city with hundreds of thousands of decaying corpses, and more dying every day, the smell was commonplace. The thing I’d come to notice were those times when the breeze blew across my face, bearing nothing but the scent of the cedars and autumn weeds, absent the smell of death.

  I gulped down a good portion of the Dr. Pepper and belched loudly. I stifled a laugh at myself as I looked out through the tinted glass to see whether my rudeness had garnered attention from outside. Nope.

  The chips were stale, but again, freshness was a luxury afforded to residents of a world that no longer existed. To me, the bag contained calories and salt, both of which I needed, always needed.

  With my bony ass on a cushy, clean seat, with delicious calories and caffeine molecules tickling my neurons, a shiny little bulb of inspiration plinked on brightly in my imagination. My big, green bug needed a name: Godzilla.

  No. I liked Big Green Bug better.

  I looked over the control console on my right.

  A few yellow toggle switches stood out at the front of the panel, just below an LCD screen. It didn’t take much of an imagination to figure that’s where info on the status of the vehicle was going to be displayed.

  Most of the panel below the switches was covered in buttons—at least thirty of them—in groups of different colors, some green, some orange, and some gray. Thankfully, most had graphics on their faces. Of the row of three orange buttons, one pictured a turtle, one a rabbit. I had to assume those buttons controlled how fast the combine would do something, maybe spin the blades out front.

  Nothing here I can’t figure out.

  Yeah, because nobody ever lets his arrogant assumptions get him into trouble.

  I monkeyed with the buttons, dials, and switches, and I was quickly rewarded with an assumption-confirming illumination of the LCD screen that fried a rectangular blur of light onto my retina. I turned the LCD off and blinked away my temporary blindness, hoping no White outside had noticed the light inside the cab.

  When I felt I could see well enough again, I scanned the darkness around the combine. Nothing out there seemed to have done anything in response to the flash of light. The cab’s darkly tinted windows were probably a significant fact
or in that.

  I searched around the cab again and came up with a jacket, probably stored in the cab for those times when the weather turned cold or the driver got caught in the rain. I draped it over my head and over the LCD screen to limit the light that might escape. I brought the screen back to life.

  I’d thought that I might have some difficulty understanding all the info the screen might display, but it turned out the default view was nearly as easy to understand as an automobile dashboard. The most prominent aspect was a graphic of a gas pump and an indicator that showed the combine’s fuel tank was empty.

  Dilemma number one.

  If I wanted my Big Green Bug to help me in mowing down the Whites, I was going to have to feed him first.

  I wondered if the farmer who’d been running the combine had left the engine on when he took off or whether he’d just been low on diesel when everything went to shit.

  I sat back and thought on that one for a second, because it was an important question. If the vehicle had been left running, it would have used up all the fuel in the tank and the fuel lines before it stalled out. Then, with the key left in the on position, the battery's charge would have slowly trickled out over the passing months, leaving an insufficient charge to crank the starter.

  I looked down at the key and cursed myself for not having thought to remember what position it had been in before I started fiddling.

  But the LCD was on.

  Surely that meant something.

  I knew the battery might hold enough charge for that, and still not hold enough to crank what had to be a big starter on the massive engine.

  I leaned back in my seat, propped my feet up, and set about formulating my plan as sugary caffeine in my blood told me stories about my invincibility, and my intestines gurgled with all the carbonated water running through them.