Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Page 6

  I could make all of this work.

  Chapter 12

  The nearest source of diesel was likely to be the truck parked near the combine. Unfortunately, the two Whites were still entwined across the seat, so I wouldn’t be able to get inside without causing a stir. The windows on that truck weren’t tinted either, so any glow from dashboard lights would be easily visible from the outside. If I could even get the bent-hinged door closed. That meant I needed an alternative method to check for diesel, which, on the truck, wasn’t at all hard to figure out.

  The ground was littered with brown corn stalks, some with leaves, many without, some short, some long. I merely had to pull one out from under an irritated White, strip off a few leaves, and voila, I had a three-foot-long diesel depth-measuring device.

  Yeah, I’m cool enough to name my tools.

  The diesel on the semi-tractor was stored in a drum-shaped tank, attached horizontally beneath and behind the driver’s side door. It had a big metal cap, covering a hole that left me way more room than I needed to shove the stalk of corn inside to check the depth. That seemed like an easy task until the stalk I was shoving inside hit what I guessed was a device to prevent siphoning the gasoline out.

  Argh!

  I stood back and stared at the tank for a moment, trying to imagine another method by which I could measure the depth of the fuel, until it occurred to me it was a pointless endeavor. Even if the tank were full, I couldn’t siphon it with the siphon protector inside. Could I remove that? Sure, but could I wrestle it out of there with a crowbar and hammer without making enough noise to wake a few hundred sleeping Whites? Nope.

  I scratched the truck off my list of possible diesel sources.

  My next move was to evaluate the status of the fuel in the combine.

  After walking around the Big Green Bug twice, looking for a gas cap, I climbed up on top. It had to be on top. That was the only part I hadn’t examined on my meticulous walks around the beast. Unless it was there in plain sight, just not visible in the dark.

  Once on top, I had to take care to avoid falling into what appeared to be a bin for storing grain before offloading, because down at the bottom of the bin was a nasty-looking augur for pushing grain up through the offloading pipe. It wasn’t spinning but still looked frightening.

  At the back of the combine, I found what I was looking for: a big gas cap. I unscrewed it, taking the requisite care to do so silently, lest I echo a few pings of metal through what I expected to be a big, hollow tank beneath.

  Once it was off, I slipped my corn stalk down inside. Thankfully, no siphon protector guarded the hole.

  My cornstalk worked, as imagined, and returned an unhappy result. The tank was nearly empty, but not completely so.

  I decided that was good.

  That meant the tank hadn’t been run dry by a combine left idling in the field. That meant the lines were still full of fuel. That meant the battery probably still held a strong enough charge to crank the starter. A potential list of problems had collapsed to just one. All I needed was more fuel.

  I stood up and looked around, hoping I’d see something close by.

  Nothing.

  I guess I'd hoped that I'd see a fuel tender that I’d missed in the darkness. I mean, how much diesel did the Big Green Bug need to harvest a whole field? Surely, the farmer didn’t drive it down to the gas station when it needed a fill-up.

  In the end, speculating on the topic didn’t matter. If I wanted to use my Big Green Bug to harvest the naked horde, I needed to bring some diesel to it. I recalled the shapes of roofs I’d seen when I’d been on top of the combine earlier, and I looked for them again. And there they were, maybe five miles distant.

  I looked up at the sky and wondered how much night I had left. Could I find a way to get over to that town, acquire some fuel, figure out a way to transport it, and then get it all the way back here and into the combine, while my crop of ripe Whites still lay in the field?

  Sure. Why not?

  What the fuck else was I going to do with my time?

  Chapter 13

  Tiptoeing through the sleeping Whites, or at least treading carefully, I worked my way in the direction of the town I’d spotted. When I reached the edge of the sleeping horde, I was surprised it wasn’t as clearly defined as it was when I first came upon them. Small bands and cliques were nestled in sleep together, but separate from the main horde. Some lay just a few paces nearby. Other groups lay a few hundred yards away. Some were only made up of a few dozen Whites. Some were comprised of many more.

  The social structures of Whites were proving to be a mystery of immeasurable depth.

  That wasn’t what had my interest at the moment. Still riding a wave of confidence from my night’s little victories, I latched onto the first idea that sparked through the genius-engine wrapped within my bald skull.

  I was going to commandeer one of the smaller bands of Whites and put them to work at hauling the diesel I needed. Helping hands. Why not? I’d had Whites follow me before, imitating everything I did. The less intelligent mass of them had a strong propensity to imitate, and they liked to glue themselves to whomever they perceived as their leader. Hell, that was the basis for the command structure of the whole naked horde.

  I refrained from telling myself it would be too easy.

  The band I chose was one of the easternmost. They were separated from the next nearest bunch by more than a hundred feet. And there weren’t that many of them. Maybe forty or fifty.

  Could I control that many?

  Perhaps control wasn’t the right word. Well, definitely not. Could I influence that many?

  I was betting on it.

  They were sleeping in a roughly circular bunch. I took off at a jog around their perimeter, smacking the ones on the edge of the circle with the flat side of my machete as I went.

  They started to wake immediately. Which, of course, is exactly what I wanted.

  By the time I’d made one trip around the circumference of the circle, half those I’d smacked were already on their feet and watching me come around for another pass. I tightened my grip on the handle and prepared to lop off a head as I came within reach of the first one.

  You never know for sure what these fuckers are going to do.

  The first one glared at me but made no move to attack.

  I passed him by and cocked my head to urge him to follow.

  He took a few tentative steps to follow before he broke into a jog behind me to match my pace.

  I grinned.

  Was it really going to be this easy?

  Others fell into line as I made another trip around the circle. I kept smacking sleepers and laggards as I went. The Whites behind me started to reach down and slap their comrades as we passed, hurrying them to wake and join in.

  When maybe half the group was following, and most of the others were waking up, a big White with a knife and a wide, ugly face jumped to his feet at the center of the sleepers and stared at me.

  He was the alpha. This was his group. He knew I was stealing them, and he was pissed.

  I quickly switched my machete to my right hand so I could conceal it behind my body as I jogged. I no longer needed to slap sleepers, anyway. My followers were doing that for me.

  Knowing what was to come, I kept watch on the alpha at the edge of my peripheral vision, as I pretended to keep my attention focused in front. I wanted him to underestimate me. I wanted his wriggly, primitive brain to tell him that the skinny, white usurper with the odd, big clown feet was easy pickings.

  As expected, he raised his knife and sprinted at me. Unexpectedly, he was damn fast.

  I spun around, just a tad later than I should have. My machete caught him in the throat, but his momentum carried him forward, and we both fell as his body went into bloody spasms on top of me. The alpha’s twisting wrenched the machete out of my hand, and his warm blood gushed on my face and into my mouth.

  But that didn’t matter.

  The only
thing that did matter was that I get myself off the ground before the other Whites in the band decided we were both injured, hence weak, hence breakfast.

  They circled around me more quickly than if they’d been called to do so. It reminded me of kids forming a circle around two fighters on the school playground. Creepy. They shuffled on nervous feet. Their fingers fidgeted, and they looked down at us, trying in their squirmy, half-dead brains to figure out what to do next.

  As I got to my feet, one laid a tentative hand on my throat. Perhaps he thought all the blood on me was my own. I batted the arm away and smashed both my fists into his chest, knocking him onto his butt.

  I spun to see if any others were coming and instead saw a White reaching warily down for my machete as though it were a wriggling snake.

  I jumped over and shouldered her aside, stomping on the alpha’s head, and yanking the machete out of his throat. I raised the blade high and dared the Whites around me with my scowl. Males and females averted their eyes.

  I was the new boss.

  I hacked the old alpha once across the head and jogged another circle around his body.

  A couple of female Whites dropped to their knees and buried their teeth in the alpha’s warm flesh.

  I smacked each with the flat side of my machete to scold them for following their desires instead of my lead. One sulked away. One stood up, stopped me by getting right in my way, and spit a gob of dripping red flesh into her hand, extending it to me as a gift.

  All the Whites stopped. Most watched me and the piece of spit-covered flesh. Others dropped to feed on their old leader. Several of the males grew agitated, and their eyes lingered on mine in longer and longer increments. They were measuring me and building up their courage.

  Sherlock Zed came to the unpleasant conclusion that he needed to partake of the old leader’s flesh to seal the deal on the transfer of power.

  If you go, go all the way.

  I hollered a monkey scream, and as everyone flinched away, I hacked down on the old leader's forearm, severing it completely. I scooped it up, opened my mouth wide, baring my teeth, and mashed it against my mouth as I closed it.

  I wanted them to think I ate some of the other guy's flesh, but I had no desire to actually do so.

  With blood over half my face and dripping from my chin I threw the forearm down and hollered again.

  None of the males looked me in the eye.

  Done.

  I gave them all time to feed, and when they seemed to have enough in their bellies, I led them away. My band of Whites jogged behind as I followed a senseless, winding path across the field, heading east toward the small town.

  Chapter 14

  Despite my few successful intuitive leaps with respect to White behavior, some of their actions make no sense to me at all. After getting my Whites accustomed to following me, I figured I’d give up the serpentine running and make better time by proceeding along a straight path. It didn’t work. Stragglers fell off the back. Others started to wander after anything along the path that caught their interest. I figured that running along the serpentine path was just mentally taxing enough to keep the whole of their simple minds focused.

  It was no surprise that my attempt to rest them with brief walks was also a failure.

  So it was that we ran along a meandering back and forth path to cover the five-mile distance needed to put ourselves onto the potholed asphalt road into town.

  The sky was turning brighter in the east as we entered the town. That angered me, but there was nothing to be done about it. I’d gotten my Whites to town as quickly as I could. I still had to find some diesel, find a way to transport it, and get it back to the combine. I only hoped the naked horde hadn’t gone too far away by the time I got the combine running to chase them.

  After a long night of running, I figured my Whites needed water and something more to eat. I wasn’t attached to them. I was being pragmatic. If they got too hungry or thirsty, they might follow their instincts rather than me.

  I looked from side to side at the houses, hoping to see something that looked like it might be a source of food. What I noticed, though, were crosses, all made from white PVC pipe, each roughly three feet tall, planted in the front yards of the houses along the road.

  Doors were similarly marked with painted crosses, some neat, some sloppy. Bible verses were written on the sidewalks, on the curbs, and walls, mostly deliver-me-from-evil type stuff.

  Every house we passed was open, with broken windows and doors swinging on hinges. Yards were littered with furnishings, books, torn food packages, and even some empty cans. Amidst the decaying litter lay the shreds of clothing, broken bones, and shattered skulls, some with dry remnants of brownish flesh, others bleaching to white.

  It didn’t appear the crosses and verses had protected any of the residents of the houses we passed. Maybe God went bowling and forgot about the people in this town. Oh wait, he’d forgotten about everybody on the whole damn planet.

  I looked nervously at the sky, concerned that my blasphemous thoughts might earn me some punishment.

  When I reached the town’s main street, I turned left between rows of rundown buildings, many built back in the days when the farmers still rode horses into town and dreamed of the day they might ride the train into a big city like Austin or San Antonio. Some of those buildings looked like they’d been abandoned for nearly as long, or maybe just since the Walmart opened on the edge of town a few decades prior. I guessed there probably had to be one—every small town in Texas has a Walmart. In some of the old buildings, real estate agencies, nail salons, and antique dealers plied their trades behind big plate glass windows that were older than the business owners. Most of that glass was broken when we passed through.

  At one end of the main street, an overpass grew like a small hill for traffic to pass unobstructed over the railroad lines beneath. I led my posse in that direction and climbed the steep bump of a bridge. Once at the top, I surveyed the town for a source of fuel. In the distance, I spotted a giant box of a building that, in the pale, early morning light—I couldn’t identify for certain—but I guessed was a Walmart. It was likely to have one of the elements in my fuel transportation solution.

  On the other side of the bridge, it was hard not to notice how the character of the small town changed from a quaint, dying town, to something akin to a slum. The houses were smaller. Peeling paint was decades too old to protect the wood underneath, and some houses sagged or leaned, leaving me to wonder why they hadn’t already fallen down. The PVC crosses were present, as were the verses painted on walls and porches. One thing I could say for the town was that in the end, they’d united in their belief that God would step in and miracle away the zombie scourge.

  I spotted a pickup and trailer parked beside one of the hovels. The house, like all others I’d seen in town, had been ransacked. The Whites had certainly done their business here. However, the trailer and truck looked untouched.

  On the front and sides of the trailer, brightly painted advertisements showed pictures of Moe’s Smoked Jerky—Beef, Deer, Turkey, Chicken.

  Chicken Jerky?

  Odd, but I’d have eaten Rat Jerky if that’s all Moe had stocked in his trailer.

  I led my band down the gravel driveway, past the pickup truck and around to the backside of the trailer where I stopped and grinned. A pair of double doors on the backside were closed and padlocked. I thanked God for the Whites’ inability to read. Otherwise, the trailer would have been broken open months ago.

  I looked around on the ground and quickly spotted a line of rocks on the border of a flowerbed. Each rock was about twice the size of a softball and suited my purpose nicely. I picked one up, and the act was imitated by at least a dozen of my fifty-ish followers. I pounded the rock against the lock, and the others started to pound the trailer in a thunderous ruckus, not understanding it was the lock and not the trailer I was after.

  No surprise.

  On the fourth bash of stone on metal,
the lock broke. I dropped my rock and heard other rocks thump into the dirt. My Whites were an impressionable lot. A few seconds later, I had the lock off, and I swung the door open to get a face full of wet, rotted flesh, slowly baking into a new kind of jerky inside the trailer.

  Chapter 15

  I didn’t know if it was Moe on the floor, but I decided that it had to be. The caricature of Moe painted on the side of the trailer led me to believe that he’d been a hefty fellow, which matched the body on the trailer’s floor. Putting on my Sherlock hat, it seemed to me that his relatives had locked him in the trailer early on in the outbreak. They’d had no desire to kill him, and judging by the cross in the yard and verses on the wall, had hoped to pray out a solution to the Moe problem. From the state of the town, it looked like everything had gone to shit quickly enough that the Moe problem was left to solve itself.

  Given that everything went down in August, and the trailer was black except where painted with the jerky graphics, I guessed Moe had died of heat stroke. Inside, the doors were covered with red streaks, and the plywood panels were cracked. Moe had put in a good effort to get out. Obviously, he failed.

  All of the Whites packed around me were looking at Moe. A few were licking their lips as they gave a thought to whether damp, smelly, Moe Jerky was worth feeding on.

  Understanding the details of Moe’s demise was not the reason I opened the trailer. With a roll-down cover above a counter on one side, it was clear to me the trailer had been set up to sell Moe’s jerky. And that implied that Moe’s stock might be stored inside, which it was. Boxes and boxes were piled against one wall and bungeed in place. Mostly that worked, but it looked like Moe had made a mess of those when he was trying to get out of his trailer.

  I yanked one of the boxes off the top of a tumbled pile and tore it open as the Whites watched me. The box was full of Moe-stink but inside were packages of Moe’s jerky, wrapped in plastic and labeled with the critter that had donated its flesh to the cause, along with a description of the seasonings that flavored its meat. I only hoped the seasonings were strong enough to overpower the stench of baked Moe.