Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Read online

  I held a clear plastic package up for my mesmerized Whites to see. I ripped it open, pulled out a brown piece of meat and stuffed it into my mouth. It only took a few seconds before the smarter ones in my group grabbed packages of their own and had them open.

  As the feast began, I took a handful of beef jerky packages, extra-hot, and shouldered my way past my Whites to get away from the smell. I found myself a wooden bench beside a detached garage and sat down to eat my breakfast as the morning sun rose over the horizon.

  When I’d left my combine the night before, I’d done so with the urgent need to get my diesel and get back to it. My crop of sleeping Whites was in the field and ready for harvest. Now the sun was up, I guessed that the horde was on the move to find its own breakfast.

  I was going to have to follow their path with my combine and hope to catch them asleep, so I could start my harvest tonight. I was in for another long day and another long night, but the result would be worth it. I’d lose a few nights of beauty sleep. That wasn’t going to hurt my non-existent chances of getting laid and Mark would be dead. A worthy trade.

  Chapter 16

  I lost control of my little mob of fifty or so when we passed a park with a pond on the way to Walmart. They peeled off from the line one at a time at first, but before I could accept what was happening and pretend like I was leading them, they all ran toward the water. So I followed them down to the pond’s edge and reluctantly drank.

  Even after months of drinking some of the vilest water, the thought of putting the green pond water into my mouth turned my stomach. More than my thirst, I thought of all the bacteria swimming in the green soup, eager to get into my gut and give me the shits. Thankfully, my system was developing immunity to the most common malicious microbes in the water. My bouts of diarrhea were coming less and less frequently as the months passed.

  It was mid-morning by the time we stepped into the Walmart parking lot, which was a mess of abandoned vehicles. Some were jammed together in collisions. Others were abandoned where they’d been parked between the painted lines. I suspected the ones with broken windows marked the places where people had died inside.

  And that was the thing with the state of the world: everything hadn't gone to shit at the same time, though now, it looked like it had. The virus had taken weeks, maybe months, to reach all the nooks and crannies where people lived on the face of an earth apathetic to their plight. But the last major event that humans experienced in their messy little spots on the map occurred when the number of infected in the vicinity grew too large for them to handle. And they acted mostly the same way everyone else acted. Some holed up and boarded the windows. Some ran to the big box store to stock up one last time. Others piled into the lines of cars jammed on the roads out of town, hoping to find a safe place that didn’t exist.

  They all died in the act, leaving every locale in a morbidly similar state of chaos.

  Inside, the Walmart was messier than the parking lot. A riot of looting and fighting had exploded up and down the aisles. The floors were covered in all manner of merchandise, the remnants of the dead, and the piles and piles and piles of feces left behind by the ones who’d done the killing and the eating.

  As foul smelling as it was, at least it didn’t stink as bad as Moe’s trailer.

  The grocery section of the store had been cleaned out. The canned foods were all gone, not even dented stragglers in the trash on the floor. Given that Whites can’t make sense of cans, that meant that people had time to prepare for what was coming their way. Or, I suppose, some people in the area had lived through the initial mayhem and had scavenged the goods at a later date.

  My hope, as I led my band of Whites through the mess, losing many to shiny distractions along the way, was that the things I was shopping for never made it to the top of priority lists as end-of-the-world shoppers filled their carts.

  The automotive section, being stuffed in the back corner of the three-acre sales floor, didn’t appear to have gotten much foot traffic when the end finally came. Plenty of packaged tools and car doodads hung on their display stands or sat on their shelves. Sturdy racks of car batteries and tall stacks of tires went untouched. That struck me as odd until I realized I was thinking in terms of old luxuries. People only had time or room or energy for the things they needed for survival right now, or maybe tomorrow or next week. Nobody was stocking up on auto accessories they’d need in the years ahead when such things were sure to be scarce.

  As shortsighted as that behavior was, I’d been doing much the same. Sure, I aspired to accumulate a stockpile of goods in a safe place to see me and mine through whatever was to come. In practice, I owned only things that I absolutely needed, and then only enough of those that would fit in my bag and not slow me down when it came time to run. And at the moment, I didn’t even have that. All I had were my boots—as yet unnoticed by my little band of white killers—my knife, my machete, and my unprotected pecker.

  It was going to be nice to get pants on again when I finished my mission to kill Mark and as many of his murderous minions as I could.

  I stopped walking. The White behind me bumped into me. A few more Whites bumped into him as the line came to a stop. Apparently Walmart was full of too many colorful distractions for them to give me their full attention.

  I, of course, had to grab a five-gallon gas can off the shelf. That’s the foundational element of monkey-see-monkey-do. The White behind me in line copied and selected a gas can from the full shelf. The next White in line did the same.

  Things got a little more time consuming after that. I had to make several trips through the Walmart to round up my mob and get them each loaded with a couple of empty red jugs. Several of us even carried green garden hoses coiled over our shoulders.

  When I had them organized enough to stay on my heels, I led them back outside and to the filling station at the edge of the Walmart parking lot. It was the obvious first place to try. I didn't figure it had any fuel, but it was only a few hundred yards away, so why not?

  Leading my band across the parking lot proved much easier than leading them through Walmart. They’d seen abandoned cars and the remains of bodies everywhere they’d been. Those things were not novel sights, not even for their simple goldfish memories.

  Once at the gas station, I knelt down beside one of three steel plates that I knew contained the pipes the delivery trucks used to fill the underground storage tanks. I dragged the plate away and was apathetically pleased to see my imitators remove the plates from the other two holes. Inside, a pair of four-inch pipes looked at me. One was labeled Diesel. Sherlock Zed deduced that the fuel I wanted was down there. Of course.

  I flipped a latch, opened the fuel pipe and leaned over to peer inside.

  Motherfucker.

  I’d hoped, unrealistically, to look down at a pool of diesel fuel. All I saw was a dark hole and a hint of the diesel’s reflective surface about twenty feet below.

  To my right, relatively smart Whites were removing the caps on the other pipes.

  Bored members of my group started to look around. Some started to wander. I sighed. Keeping them together was a chore.

  I took the garden hose off my shoulder, cut off the brass fittings, and unwound it as I ran the length down into the tank. I hoped that I’d hit resistance when the end of the hose reached the bottom. I further hoped I’d hear a splash as the end dipped into the trove of diesel in the ground beneath my feet.

  Neither thing happened.

  I simply kept pushing the hose until I had only three or four feet left to shove. I sucked on the end of the hose, hoping to pull the diesel up so I could siphon it into my gas can. I’d never siphoned anything from one container to the next without the use of a pump. I knew how simple it all looked on TV. That should have been a red flag of stupidity for me before I even tried. As it turned out, I gave up when I became too nauseous to continue. Petroleum fumes and human lungs are not a good mix.

  It probably goes without saying that I m
anaged to get not one drop of diesel fuel into my can.

  I rounded up my gang of empty gas can helpers and led them back to the park with the pond. There, I spent a good part of the afternoon lying on a concrete picnic table under a pavilion, waiting for my head to clear and my stomach to settle.

  Chapter 17

  As I lay and as my Whites wandered around the pond, chasing the ducks and trying to catch the big catfish that came near the surface, I started to think my situation through. That is, of course, after I considered giving up on my stupid combine plan altogether.

  And it was stupid. I had to admit that. The problem I had with my inner voice advising me was that it always sounded like The Harpy telling me I was a loser and a quitter.

  A quitter?

  Fuck her and the asshole she married.

  So giving up on even the most stupid of plans was a choice I was hardwired to reject. And that was how that thought process found its end whenever it came up.

  That left me running thought experiments on how those apparently ingenious farmers were able to get those giant-ass combines up next to the gas pumps to fill them. That led me down the path of thinking how much time they wasted driving those monsters back and forth from field to gas station. I was feeling like a superior prick about what a waste of time that was, until I realized I was looking at the problem in completely the wrong way.

  I sprang into a sitting position. “Duh!”

  A dozen white heads snapped around, eyes glued on me.

  Shit.

  Deflect.

  I turned and looked at an infected woman who was lollygagging near an iron garbage can holder behind me. I held the pose and hoped the other Whites’ attention would pass over me and land on her. I listened for the sound of footsteps coming through the dead, brown grass. As I listened, I couldn’t help but notice what a pretty girl the infected woman had been at one time. Impure thoughts came to mind. I shuddered and turned back to look at the Whites whose attention I’d attracted with my utterance. Thankfully, they’d all gone back to whatever they’d been doing before I spoke.

  I chastised myself silently for the mistake.

  Getting back to what I was thinking about, I realized the farmers probably had to have some petroleum storage tanks on their property for fueling tractors and such.

  I got off the table and stretched. My posse of Whites was rested and watered, and I had a new idea. I simply had to stop by any farms I saw on the way back to where I'd left the combine parked in the field, and I was bound to find a fuel storage tank.

  Problem solved.

  The surprise in all that? It worked.

  At the second farm I checked, I found a storage tank enclosed within a tin-sided barn. It was built on top of a framework of metal legs, so siphoning was no issue. Gravity did the work.

  The little trick I played on my posse for the trip back to the combine with the full cans of diesel had me smiling through a good part of the afternoon. I left my can empty, leaving the hard work to the Whites.

  After filling the combine’s tank. I had seven cans left over, some five-gallon sized, and several smaller. I attached those to the side of the combine using some rope I found in the cab.

  It was time to get into some trouble.

  Chapter 18

  The afternoon was drifting into early evening, and I climbed onto the top of the cab of the combine, my watchtower position from before. I was irritated, but not surprised, that three of my Whites climbed with me, including the shapely female I'd noticed when I was back at the park in town.

  The cab’s roof was plenty big for one person to stand on. With four it wasn’t crowded, but I didn’t appreciate the closeness of my Whites. All I’ll say about that is the absence of toothpaste and toothbrushes, coupled with a diet of carrion and whatnot, didn’t have a positive effect on oral hygiene. Okay, I’ll say two more things: bathroom habits and showers. Two underappreciated benefits of modern civilization.

  I was looking to the north, seeing trampled dirt, stomped grasses, piles and smears of human shit, and stragglers, some by themselves and some in groups. It was pretty clear in which direction the horde had gone.

  I felt hands on my shoulders, rubbing their way down my back. Then they were on my butt. Instinctively, I spun around and pushed. It was the shapely girl from the park. She stumbled back and bumped a White who should have been paying attention. He got knocked off balance and fell over the side.

  It wasn’t an exceedingly long way to the ground from up on top of the combine, maybe twelve or fifteen feet, definitely a survivable height. But the White wasn’t ready for the fall, and when he tumbled, he ended up landing on his head. His body crumpled over on top of him.

  That got the attention of some of my posse, who’d been loitering around the combine after we filled it up with diesel.

  The fallen guy didn’t move.

  It didn’t matter whether he was dead. It was pretty clear to me from the way the others were closing in on him that he was going to be dinner.

  The shapely girl reached a greedy hand for my genitals. I swatted her away, scowled, and grunted. She stepped back, and I thought about giving her a shove over the edge, but that suddenly seemed cruel, at least for her.

  Hell, we were practically in a relationship.

  But she was a beast; a hungry monster in a hot-chick wrapper with poor oral hygiene and a body stink that guaranteed any inappropriate temptation wouldn’t get far.

  Still, she had been beautiful, once.

  I climbed down from the combine while my posse started feeding on their dead brother. I walked twenty or thirty paces out front and gave the cab a long look. All the glass was tinted to near black. I couldn’t see inside, which meant the Whites couldn’t either, so I’d be safe during the day. At night, it might be a different story, with the LCD screen lighting the cab from the inside. There were plenty of flood lights mounted for illuminating crops to be harvested. Maybe with those blinding the Whites at night, they might not notice the glass-enclosed cab. When they attacked the Big Green Bug—and they surely would—maybe they’d focus their efforts on the metal parts they could easily reach.

  That was a shallow hope. I knew they’d eventually come after the glass. I just hoped as my green death machine chewed through the horde I could find Mark and shred him before I had to abandon my plan and run for my life.

  Chapter 19

  Sleep. That’s what I was thinking of when I got myself back into the cab and seated in its comfortable seat. I’d skipped one night already. Could I pull a second? The alternative was to sleep in the cab and let the naked horde get a full day farther ahead of me. Would I run out of fuel before catching up? If that happened, would I then burn another day on refueling, only to find myself two days behind?

  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

  Sleep was a luxury I’d have to forgo. I needed to suck it up through another long night and try to catch the white fuckers sleeping in a field again. If I could, I might run down thousands before they realized I was something besides a nightmare. And I might catch Mark in whatever comfy, warm place he had lain for the night.

  I guzzled the Dr. Pepper that I'd left in the cab, and as the caffeine and sugar did their magic, I said, “Fuck it.”

  I clicked on the glow plugs, and a buzz somewhere back in the engine compartment caught the attention of every White in my posse.

  They stared at the Big Green Bug but made no move to attack.

  Good for me.

  When the glow plug indicator light told me the engine was ready, I cranked the starter, and the diesel fired right up. A nice surprise in what was turning into a string of victories.

  The Whites around the machine attacked. Ineffectively, but still, they were a worry.

  I needed to get the combine moving. Whether I got any of the spinning machinery working on the harvesting head was a secondary concern. Even with relatively slow movement came a degree of safety. Whites could only chase so far.

  Or maybe they could. Who car
es? I was already committed.

  I flipped something—not sure what—and rows of lights illuminated an acre in daylight. Out in the field, Whites blinked, shaded their eyes, and looked away.

  The combine started to roll forward.

  “Ha, ha, motherfuckers!”

  Without trying, I ran over my first White, apparently one too stupid to run away from the coming sunrise of the Big Green Bug. I didn’t even feel the body hit the harvesting head.

  Dull thumps announced the arrival of Whites jumping on the harvester from the sides. That was expected and was a problem I could do only one thing about. Move and harvest.

  I played with controls both on the console and the joystick. The combine had four subsystems all driven by its powerful diesel: the drive system that kept my Green Bug rolling, the corn cutters on the harvesting head which I was trying to get spinning, the thresher that moved the harvested corn from the cutting head and separated the grain from the chaff, and the offloading system which transferred grain out of the bin through the huge pipe on top and into a following truck. It seemed straightforward enough—grain went into the bin on the back of the harvester, and the chaff flew out the back of the combine. All controlled from the comfy seat in the Green Bug’s cab.

  Did I say it didn’t seem that complicated? If I did, I was lying.

  Nevertheless, the harvesting blades spun into action.

  Let the mayhem begin.

  I accelerated.

  Damn!

  The combine lumbered along a lot faster than expected.

  As I quickly learned, though, I didn’t need to chase Whites. Those out front were drawn to the noise and lights. They attacked.

  The first attacker from the front leaped at my combine death machine. I don't know what his goal was, but from where I sat, it looked like he was trying to dive into the spinning saw blades. He disintegrated in a puff of red haze and flying bits of gore that both fascinated and horrified me.