Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent Read online

  Nico was at the far end of the kitchen by then with Mr. Mays’ rifle resting awkwardly in his arms, dry blood crusted on his shirt and pants.

  Murphy came in behind me. “Man, it stinks in here.” He spotted Nico at the far end of the kitchen. “No offense, man.”

  “Murphy, close the door.” I looked at Nico. He looked to have eaten, but was otherwise unsettled. “Nico, what’s wrong, man? Where’s Mr. Mays?”

  Nico looked away without answering.

  I stepped closer. “Nico?” He was different, skittish, odd. “Dude, what’s wrong?”

  Nico shook his head. “They uh…they g…got in.”

  Murphy asked, “The Whites?”

  “Yeah,” Nico looked through a doorway into the living room. “They got in. They k…killed Mr. Mays.”

  “What?” I’d heard what Nico said, I just wasn’t willing to accept it. “What happened?”

  Nico looked at the floor, at the cabinets, at the sink and then back into the living room. “There wasn’t anything I could do. I tried. I t…tried to stop them.”

  I tensed. “They’re gone, right?”

  Nico nodded.

  I stepped closer to Nico’s end of the kitchen.

  “You shouldn’t come in,” he said, looking out the kitchen window. “It’s bad. It’s…” He looked back into the living room. “He’s in th…there.”

  I tried to soothe him using slow, calm words. “It’s cool, dude. We’ve all seen it. You know what I mean.”

  Nico turned almost manic for no apparent reason. “T…take me with you, Z…Zed. Don’t leave me here. P…please, take me to your friends.”

  “Um.”

  “Please. Please.” Nico had tears in his eyes. Outside of anger, after I implied he’d molested his daughter a few days earlier, it was the first significant emotion he’d expressed. “I can’t do this alone. I just can’t. I n…need to be around p…people. I’m l…losing it in here.”

  “It’s cool, Nico.” I had serious doubts about Nico’s mental state, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I glanced back at Murphy and then, out of pity, made a choice for the group. “You can come along, but you have to calm down. All right? Be cool. Okay?”

  Nico nodded, unable to speak, his emotions were bubbling over.

  “Are there any Whites still around?”

  Nico didn’t say anything.

  “Nico, any Whites still around?”

  “No, I ch…chased them off.”

  With disbelief heavy in his voice, Murphy said, “You chased them off?”

  “I… I swung the rifle like a c…club and chased them b…back out the door.”

  “How many were there?” Murphy asked.

  “Two. Three. It…It all happened so fast. I was angry. I didn’t know what I was d…doing. I was so m…mad. I was trying to save him. I really was. I thought I was s…saving him.”

  “It’s okay, Nico. Just be cool, okay?” I said.

  Nico leaned on the counter and looked down at the floor.

  I looked back at Murphy again.

  He was worried about everything here and made sure I read it clearly on his face.

  I shrugged as if to say, “It’s a done deal. Let’s make the best of it.”

  “Nico, right?” Murphy said.

  Nico nodded.

  “I’m Murphy. You got any food in the house?”

  Nico shook his head. “Nothing. We haven’t caught any f…fish at all. Nothing.”

  “Anything else?” Murphy asked. “Canned food?”

  Nico shook his head.

  Something was really wrong, but I wasn’t putting the pieces together. I told myself it had to be Nico’s fragile emotional state. “Is there anything in the house we need to take with us?” I asked. “Ammunition? Tools? Weapons? Anything worthwhile?”

  “We should just go.” Nico was deflating into sadness.

  “No. We need to check the house first.”

  “W…why do you need to ch…check the house?” Nico switched to defensiveness, but it was weak.

  “We have to see if anything is here that we need.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Murphy’s voiced boomed out. “Zed, let’s get outta here, man. Nico, it was good to meet ya.” Murphy looked at me and motioned to the door. “C’mon.”

  It was clear Murphy thought the virus or emotional weakness had broken Nico and he wasn’t worth trying to salvage. I was moments from following Murphy out the door.

  “Please don’t.” Nico was coming towards us with one open, pleading hand. The other hand still held Mr. Mays’ rifle. “Please don’t leave me.”

  My head was telling me to ditch Nico and go. My heart was hurting for Nico’s pain and lobbying hard to keep my word and let him come with us. Such is the stuff of which mistakes are made. “Nico, it’s okay. Just let us check the house, okay? Is that rifle loaded?”

  “L…loaded?”

  “Does it have bullets in it?”

  “I d…don’t know.”

  Murphy scoffed. “Man, you don’t know?”

  Nico shook his head. “I don’t know anything about g…guns.”

  Murphy shook his head and snorted. “How could anybody not know that?”

  “Nico, give me the rifle,” I said. “I’ll have Murphy check it out while I check the house, okay? Afterward, we’ll all get on the boat and head upriver.”

  Nico nodded. But it took several long, reluctant moments before he handed the weapon over to Murphy. In a desperate tone, he asked, “You’re n…not going to t…take it and leave me here, are y…you?”

  “Man, I’m not taking your gun,” Murphy said.

  “Okay, Nico, you stay here with Murphy. I’m going to see if I can find any ammunition, okay?”

  Nico nodded more times than necessary as his eyes found their way down to look at the floor.

  Trying to think of a way to get out of my promise to bring him along, I walked past Nico and went into the living room.

  A shapeless red stain covered most of the rug under Mr. Mays’s body. He had bruises and gashes on bloody hands. His skull was smashed. His shirt was torn at the buttons. Underneath, his saggy skin was ripped to expose a thoracic cavity, empty except for the gore left when his organs had been eaten.

  I looked away from the body and tried to repress the memories of a crotchety old man who’d done me a kindness and given me a small meal, probably the last of his food. “Fucking Whites.”

  A lamp in the living room was on the floor. A recliner was lying on its back. Some of the pictures on the wall were no longer hanging straight. One, an old black and white photograph, colorized by hand with paint a half-century past, showed a strong young man in a military uniform, arm in arm with a blonde beauty in a wedding dress. That was Mr. Mays with his bride, probably when he was my age.

  The young man’s smile radiated through the years. Eight decades had not been unkind to that face, but death had masked it in ghastly anguish. He didn’t deserve to go like that.

  Nobody did.

  From the living room, the hallway looked like a retreat. I moved my feet quickly in that direction.

  It turned out to be no kind of retreat at all. It was covered with picture upon picture upon picture, documenting the life of Mr. Mays, his beautiful bride, their children, their grandchildren and more. It was a humble museum to happy, anonymous lives that ended and were now remembered by no one. The fragile mementos were destined to crumble under the moldy rot of time as if they never existed.

  No wonder Nico had gone half-crazy in this house. Every picture was a poignant reminder of the virus’s toll.

  The first bedroom I came to was a guestroom, or so I guessed. It held nothing worth my time. I took the pillowcases off of the bed—you could never have too many of those—and stuffed them into my pockets.

  The master bedroom, not really different from the other bedrooms in a house so old, had a gun rack on the wall above the dresser. It cradled a lever-action rif
le that looked like it belonged in an old cowboy movie. That prize made my depressing trip through the Mays Museum worth it.

  No, not worth it, not at all.

  The weight of so much death was becoming hard to bear.

  More searching turned up a nice-sized hunting knife with a sturdy blade, surprisingly sharp. Mr. Mays knew how to take care of his things. The knife was nestled in a sheath of leather undoubtedly older than me, probably older than my mother. That found its way onto my belt. It was no machete, but it was so much better than a kitchen knife stuck in a pocket.

  Chapter 11

  Back on the pontoon boat with the extra rifle, some ammunition, a couple of fishing poles, and a fishing tackle box full of all kinds of stuff that had no meaning to me, the boat putted slowly upstream. It was a quiet speed, a fuel conserving speed. But it was a speed that would leave us a couple of hours of travel time to the riverboat.

  Seemingly broken by the weight of events, Nico fell asleep on one of the benches near the stern.

  Murphy was standing beside me as I piloted. “That dude ain’t right,” he said.

  I cast a glance back at the sleeping Nico. “He’s not cut out for this, is all. He’ll be okay.”

  Murphy shook his head.

  “I know he seems like he’s losing it, but he’s been through some shit.”

  “We’ve all been through some shit, Zed.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not all I was going to say about it. He had to watch his kids get killed in his front yard. He’d been on Nancy’s chain gang for a week when they captured me. He held it together all through that. And if you think driving that Humvee into the river was bad, our escape from Nancy was on a whole different level of crazy shit.”

  “So you said.”

  “You know, he can’t swim either. Oh, and what the heck is up with people who can’t swim?”

  Murphy ignored my pointless question. “I still think he’s going crazy, man.”

  “He just needs a couple of days of safety to get back to normal. Whatever’s normal for him, anyway.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I mean he talks even more than you.”

  “Yeah, whatever. We don’t even know if Amy is going to let us stay on that riverboat yet. What are you gonna do when Amy and Steph meet his whack job ass and decide he’s too crazy to come onboard?”

  “They’ll let him stay.”

  “Suddenly you’re the optimistic one.” Murphy belted out a big laugh. “Optimistic Zed. I don’t know how to deal with it, man.” Murphy pretended to have trouble with his balance and dropped into a seat.

  I rolled my eyes. “Can we talk about Mark for a minute?”

  “I told you that dude you saw wasn’t Mark. It was just some baldheaded dumbass too stupid to run away from the Humvee.”

  I shook my head. “You can think whatever you want to think. I know what I saw. And even if I am wrong about it being Mark, I know he was a Smart One. You saw for yourself what the Smart Ones can do. You know they’re a danger to all of us.”

  Murphy nodded noncommittally.

  “They are organizing. They’re communicating. We’re at war, Murphy. We’re fighting to the death, and if we don’t go on the offensive and go start killing those bastards, they’re going to kill us.”

  Murphy’s smile left his face. Only the serious, older Murphy remained. As much as he didn’t want to see it, he believed it. At least I think he believed it.

  “We have to do something about them, Murphy.”

  “What can we do?”

  I looked back at the pile of weapons stacked all over the pontoon boat’s deck.

  Murphy grinned and pointed at Nico. “He’s our secret weapon.”

  I shook my head. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “What about the weapons, then?” Murphy waved a hand at the crates. “Are we gonna shoot all of ‘em? Everybody who thought that’d work is dead. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you have. It ain’t enough. You see that, right? Tell me you see that, Zed. ‘Cause you know the people who used to have all these weapons are dead now, right? You see that, right?”

  As much as I wanted to argue, I couldn’t deny that truth.

  Murphy pushed his point. “Your little nuclear bomb idea didn’t work.”

  “It was a gasoline vapor bomb.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work. And do you know why?”

  “Probably the humidity was too high. Maybe the wind mucked up the concentration of gasoline in the air. The ratio was wrong. Maybe if I’d detonated sooner—”

  “No, Zed.” Murphy jumped to his feet and moved around to plant himself in front of me. “You don’t see what the problem is, but I do.”

  In spite of the interruption, I was ready to hear the answer. Murphy served in the Army. Maybe he knew what to fix to make it all work next time.

  “It’s because you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

  That wasn’t the answer I was looking for, and in fact, it pissed me right off. I huffed and looked around Murphy to see out over the bow. “Just because my bomb didn’t work on the first try doesn’t mean I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

  “You don’t get it, Zed.”

  “What don’t I get?”

  “You think just because you know a bunch of random ass little shit that everything you try is going to work out like it did in some book you read or some movie you saw. The real world doesn’t work like that.”

  “I know.” It was a weak protest.

  “No, you don’t know. You say you know because you know that’s what a smart person should say, but you don’t know. You just think you know. And what you don’t know is when you’re running around, using up all of your luck, trying shit that shouldn’t ever have any chance of working, you’re wearing yourself out.”

  I didn’t understand. “Wearing myself out? What?”

  Murphy grinned. “You’re using up the luck so when I need it there won’t be any left for me.”

  “So it’s all about you?”

  Murphy grinned again. “Looks like that stick is back in your ass.”

  I rolled my eyes again. “I thought we were having a serious conversation.”

  We motored along a while longer. Whites were on the banks, peeking through the trees, or running along trying to keep up. At least their numbers were thinning.

  “Murphy, you know I believe we’ve got to do something about the Smart Ones.”

  “I know you believe that.”

  “And you believe it, too.”

  “Yeah, but believing something needs to be done isn’t the same as believing something can be done.”

  “You don’t think we can kill all of the Smart Ones?”

  “I won’t even talk about what a stupid hope that is.” Murphy shook his head. “Even if we could, we don’t even know which ones are which until it’s too late.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. “That’s not an unsolvable problem. I don’t really think we’ll ever kill all of the Smart Ones, but we need to kill enough of them so we have a chance to be safe, so we’ll have a chance to survive.”

  “So give me the bottom line here, Zed.” Murphy’s voice held a touch of anger. “You want to go off on some kind of zombie hunt? Is that it? And you want me to come along?”

  I shrugged and nodded. That wasn’t how I’d summarize it, but that was exactly what I wanted.

  “And just leave everybody on the boat, so when the shit goes down, we won’t be there.”

  “When the shit goes down?”

  “Don’t put on your dunce hat now and pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know sooner or later, riverboat or no riverboat, those fuckers are going to find a way to get to us. And when that happens, where do you wanna be? Off chasing some baldheaded motherfucker through the woods or back with your friends, helping them get to safety?”

  Murphy made a good argument with a depressing conclusion. But it was exactly the same
conclusion that drove my desire to hunt down the Smart Ones. “That’s why we need to do it.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we. If I go out there to kill the Smart Ones on my own, I know I’ll end up dead. If you come along, then we’ve got a chance.”

  Murphy turned to watch the water flow past the bow.

  “We have to, Murphy. You said as much yourself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They’ll eventually figure out how to get to us on the boat. They tore up Dr. Evans’ farm like it was nothing. They got into Sarah Mansfield’s house in less than twenty minutes. They’ll figure out how to kill every one of us, no matter where we hide. Our only choice is to kill the Smart Ones first.”

  “But you’re forgetting one thing, aren’t you?” Murphy turned to look back at me.

  He wasn’t being argumentative. He was making a point. And being unable to immediately guess what it was frustrated me. “What am I forgetting?”

  “You might be wrong about the Smart Ones. Remember, at first you thought it was… What’d you call it? Emergent behavior? What if the Smart Ones aren’t running the show? What if it’s all just that collective intelligence thing? You know, a bunch of twenty point IQs adding up to genius level when they work together. What if that’s what it is? Then you’ll never kill enough of them.”

  I shook my head even as I worked out my counterargument. “I think it’s some kind of hybrid of emergent behavior and the Smart Ones kind of guiding it. C’mon, you saw that for yourself, right? On that trail in the woods, one guy was clearly in charge. He was receiving and sending communications. All of those Whites on the trail were following him.”

  “It did look that way. But it always looks that way. It always looks like one of them is in the lead, but it doesn’t seem to matter which one, does it?”

  “I don’t know if that’s true. But I’m positive that is one of the things the Smart Ones take advantage of. They’ve figured out this follow-the-leader shit works. They do it spontaneously. The Smart Ones have figured out they can position themselves to be the leaders in that game, and when they do, they multiply their strength. It’s not just them going out and attacking regular folks, like us...”