Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Page 8

  Again, my horribly wonderful death beast didn’t so much as hiccup as it digested that first brave White.

  The tenor of the motor changed as chunks of bone and wet muscle flowed up the flume and was sprayed into the storage bin in the back. I flipped a switch and turned on the motor that drove the auger that shunted grain into the boom for offloading grain.

  I figured if I offloaded the dead Whites as they came on board, I’d scatter behind me warm, bite-sized morsels of their tastiness for any infected who might be coming up behind me. Surely, from their perspective, those bits would have to be a more appealing meal than whatever might be hiding inside the giant, noisy monster rolling away.

  I tried a turn and was surprised by the tight arc of the Big Green Bug’s turning radius, and I found the machine aimed back along the meandering path I’d just driven. Illuminated in my acre-lights—yeah, my new name for them—a good part of my posse was on their hands and knees in the shredded debris of other Whites. Others ran around in aimless loops, apparently overwhelmed with mental inputs and unable to come to a decision on what to do next. Some ran at the combine’s noise, lights, and cutting blades. Some watched, maybe too terrorized to move as the Big Green Sunrise God ate their friends.

  I pointed my invincible White harvester at the densest bunch of kneeling Whites and accelerated. With twelve tons of momentum rolling forward, I spotted Touchy-Feely girl in my path, staring. She was one of the frozen, not reacting.

  She didn’t run away, neither did she charge. She made no motion with her hands to wave me away, as an unexpected thought occurred to me. Maybe she wasn’t a brutal monster. Maybe she was a slow one like Russell, or maybe one even a little smarter than that.

  Was it possible?

  After all this time, could any tag-alongs still be alive in a horde of monsters?

  The blades cut into her ankles. Her face contorted agonizingly for the briefest of seconds before she was eaten by the harvester in a spray of blood and white skin.

  I leaned over and puked on the floor.

  Chapter 20

  The combine scooted along at a pretty decent clip. I couldn’t find a speedometer on any of the display screens, so my speed was a guess. Maybe it was a number not important to the harvest. I had information on all kinds of other things: yield, grain to chaff ratio, moisture, and a whole list of things I didn’t understand or give a shit about. A harvest of actual crops was likely never to be in my future. I only had to worry about Whites and how best to adjust the various parts of the Big Green Bug to keep it from clogging when I finally found my crop of Whites.

  Unfortunately, the naked horde didn’t stick to the roads while traveling. I kept finding myself rolling across fields, only to be deterred by fences—or the remnants of fences. I didn’t dare run those over. The last thing I wanted was for my cutting blades to be tangled with barbed wire. I continually had to backtrack to find a gate wide enough to get my monster through. Each time I had to find my way back to the horde’s path, which was never hard to spot.

  If a mile-wide glacier had been dragged across the landscape, it might not have looked much worse. Trees were still standing but the lower branches were mostly broken away. Nearly all other vegetation was stomped flat. The dirt itself was damp with human waste spread and tilled by countless running feet. Houses looked like they’d been through a tornado, all glass broken, doors gone. Vehicles didn't usually fare better though my Green Bug had gone ignored when the horde had settled in around it for a night.

  So in spite of keeping a decent speed, I felt like I was making slow progress.

  At least I was getting practice on running the Big Green Bug over Whites, of which there were plenty, all naked, some lone stragglers, some in groups. Altogether, I may have run down hundreds or I may have killed thousands. Nevertheless, I was getting frustrated.

  My fuel was down to about a third full. My head tortured me with irritating pains. My joints throbbed. I was tired to the point of dozing behind the combine’s controls. And with every mile I rolled, I had less nighttime left. At dawn, the naked horde would move again. If I didn’t catch them before they mobilized, I feared I might never.

  I turned off the paved road I was following and rode up a dirt road incline, bouncing the big machine over uneven railroad tracks that paralleled the street. Rolling down on the other side, I drove into a field of dried maize about four feet tall. The combine cut the plants on the sides of the road and ran them through the Green Bug’s metallic guts. I kept an eye out ahead for a swath where the maize was stomped down. That would mark the path the horde had taken through the field.

  Heads started popping up above the crops on both sides of the road. Stragglers. Or so I figured. I’d been running them down all night.

  Then I heard something over the sound of the big engine and spinning machinery.

  More Whites came to attention, head and shoulders above the maize.

  The sound became a scream, a thousand screams piled on top of each other, a hundred thousand wails.

  Maybe a frightening million, with a howl that made me shudder at the inadequacy of my Green Bug.

  The great swath of flat crops I’d been searching for confused me when I saw it, because it undulated with what I thought for a second were waves on a wide river, but materialized into white heads, screaming mouths, and clenching grasps, all converging on me.

  I’d found the naked horde, and they had found me.

  The fastest of the Whites fighting to be the first to get their teeth into the owner of acre-lights and rumbling diesel disintegrated in a spray of blood and severed limbs. A red haze fogged the air and tainted it with the stench of ripped intestines and torn stomachs.

  The combine lurched.

  I revved the diesel higher, slowed my forward speed, and put more power to the harvesting head with all of its spinning blades and thrashing steel.

  The sound of bowling balls being dumped down a water slide startled me as vibrations rattled my Big Green Bug. It had to be bony chunks of Whites and skulls going through the auger that moved corn into the bin on the back.

  Blood and flesh flew in all directions as the Green Bug chewed through the horde.

  Whites were trying to climb the sides of my green monster, pounding their fists and beating their skulls. They wanted inside, bad. Everything was slick with blood, and the Whites slipped off. I felt them—barely—get caught in the tracks and go under the wheels.

  Racket from the back of the combine grew to a dismaying combination of clangs and groans. The engine strained under the load.

  Could these fuckers kill my Green Bug?

  Did I underestimate them again?

  Flirting with panic, I fidgeted with my array of controls.

  Necessary! What was necessary?

  I slowed some more.

  Speed was unimportant to me as long as I didn’t stop.

  The only other thing I needed was to keep my cutting blades and thrashers spinning.

  Clear the head.

  Use your brain.

  Calm.

  The Green Bug was still inching forward. Whites were still dying.

  As brilliant as the combine’s designers were, the thing just hadn’t been engineered to harvest a field full of skinny Whites. It was trying to thresh grain out of the bony, bloody flesh coming through the system and to offload the goodies out the back.

  I needed to divert the massive engine’s power away from those subsystems, but I was moving too fast over the controls to truly understand them.

  Some things I could power directly. That was clear. Others seemed only to be controlled through setting power ratios for maximizing crop yields.

  Dammit!

  If I couldn’t turn off the thresher and off-loader, I needed to find the hundred-percent chaff setting. Yeah. That’s what I needed. Where the hell was that?

  The whole combine started to shake. A circumstance that wasn’t conceivable until I rolled into the maw of my white nemesis.

  I maxed
the engine output and thought to look out the window, realizing I’d been completely absorbed in the machine’s controls, trying desperately to make all of those scary mechanical sounds go away.

  Whites were fucking everywhere.

  And what wasn’t a White trying to kill me was a part of a White that seconds before had been shredded by the spinning blades on the harvesting head.

  The shuddering in the Green Bug intensified, with all the engine power trying to grind its way through so much bone.

  It swayed and the attachments to the cutting head flexed.

  Fuck!

  How do I turn off the goddamn conveyor dragging the bodies into the thresher?

  Oil burned somewhere and mixed in with the smell of shit and blood.

  I toggled a switch. I flipped a button.

  Behave, you damn Green Bug!

  But they still died in numbers I saw, but couldn’t dare estimate.

  Whites on the sides of the Green Bug had climbed on top of the cab. They went up on some instinct, thinking they'd find the driver of my great beast up there. None had yet figured out the secret of the dark tinted glass.

  I guess.

  What the fuck did I know?

  A great groan preceded a screech of metal and something big banged deafeningly in my machine. The whole thing jerked hard to the left. If it wasn’t for the harvesting head sticking out so far on both sides, I think it would have turned over.

  Big chunks of metal rang as they banged around in the Green Bug behind me. Vibrations rattled through everything. An anvil-shattering smash of steel on steel sent another jolt through the combine. Relative silence. Only the sound of the engine rumbled behind me as it revved higher.

  Something in the threshing system had blown apart and whatever drive system connected it to the engine was no more. That was my guess.

  The harvesting blades spun blindingly fast.

  Amazed that the suffering machine hadn’t exploded in the violence behind me, I backed off on the engine power as I tried to save the Big Green Bug’s life.

  For a moment, I was in control and grinding forward through bone and flesh.

  A line of trees materialized through the haze of red.

  The edge of the field.

  I turned in as slow of an arc as I dared. I couldn’t surrender my momentum. I couldn’t get bogged down.

  The smell of burning oil was getting stronger. A new worry.

  Still, my cutting heads shredded, and Whites seemed more than willing to attack my monster from the wrong end.

  I finished my turn and was heading across the field again.

  Whites beat on my Green Bug with their puny fists and only succeeded in making a futile din.

  My panic evaporated in a swell of confidence. I smiled wickedly at myself and shouted insults through the glass at all the stupid Whites who were dying under my creative cruelty.

  I was Null Spot the Destroyer once again. Bringer of death. Reaper of white-ass zombie motherfuckers.

  How many Whites was I killing? I tried to do a quick count of the number of Whites who could stand shoulder to shoulder in front of my murder-beast. I tried to guess how long it took to engulf a row before my blades tore into the next.

  How many per minute?

  How many minutes had I been shredding?

  I knew I’d killed at least a thousand.

  Ten thousand?

  Twenty?

  Oh, fuckin’ A, yes!

  Now, where the fuck were Mark and his smart buddies?

  An explosion jerked my combine and bounced me in my seat.

  I looked at the wall of steel behind me as though it might reveal something.

  Still, my beast rolled forward.

  I discounted the noise as a fluke.

  Two more pops shook the beast, and my screen flashed through a series of alerts. An alarm sounded inside the cab.

  Uh, oh.

  I looked out across the sea of Whites dripping in the blood of their brothers.

  The beast’s smooth roll forward turned into a series of jerks.

  Not good.

  So not good.

  Null Spot started to think he might be in trouble.

  Chapter 21

  Black smoke mixed with the blood mist in the air.

  Burned petroleum stink flowed into the cab.

  My eyes started to burn.

  The combine jerked forward in rolling stutter steps that were getting slower and more feeble.

  However it had happened, my lovely green slaughter beast was on fire.

  It was dying.

  I glanced down at a terribly insufficient red fire extinguisher mounted to a part of the window frame in the corner of the cab. Would that keep me safe when the flames boiled into the cab?

  Recalling all those burned Whites I’d seen on the shore of Lake Austin in the days after my gasoline vapor bomb fiasco, I knew one thing more certainly than any other. I wasn’t going to stay inside and find out.

  Whites pounded on the sloping glass of my cab, I guess having given up on every other way to get inside the beast.

  One was hanging off the edge of the roof and banging his head against the glass. At first it was ineffectual, as his feet were dangling. He had no leverage. Then his toes caught hold, and he put some force into his head butt. He knocked himself silly, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

  I wanted to laugh, but a hairline crack reflected a purple light that had just started to glow out of the eastern sky.

  I reached down for my machete.

  Fighting my way out was a plan of the stupidest proportions. I had not even the wispiest hope of killing all those crazed Whites.

  Brains over brawn, Null Spot.

  Don’t be a dumbass.

  Once the glass shattered, I needed to find a way to blend myself into the mob before their half-pint brains linked me with the combine monster. That was my chance. Because once they connected me with the Green Bug, I was dead.

  It wasn’t a plan, but at least it was a goal.

  I looked through the tinted glass into the face of a White who’d just started beating his head against it. I knew—hoped—he couldn't see me through the dark tint. Nevertheless, he was the first one I was going to kill. He was the focus of my blame. And just fuck it. Why not blame him?

  He leaned his head back and swung it forward. A gout of blood, brain, and bone erupted off the top of his skull. The White fell.

  “Damn!”

  How the hell could a White hit the glass hard enough to rupture his skull?

  The glass cracked in other places.

  Two more Whites fell inexplicably away.

  Whatever they were doing out there wasn’t working for them, but it was creating an opportunity for me. If I could swing the door open… just maybe.

  Three Whites were pushing in on the glass door on the left side of the cab. But the door was designed to swing out. With them out there, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get it open and get out fast enough.

  One of them fell miraculously away. A second jerked and lost his balance. I turned the handle on the door and threw my shoulder into it smashing into the third. He tumbled into the mob.

  I stepped onto the platform just outside the door.

  Outside the cab, the screaming of a hundred thousand Whites was overwhelming.

  Blood was everywhere.

  The mix of smells was overpowering.

  Whites on the ground below me roared. Connection made. I’d emerged from the machine. That meant I and the machine were one. More importantly, it meant I was food.

  Shit.

  I scrambled to climb to the roof of the cab. Hands grabbed at my ankles.

  Three small explosions shook the Green Bug.

  Big orange flames billowed through thick clouds of black smoke over the grain bin on the back. Heat singed my eyebrows.

  The Whites on the roof of the cab froze, wide-eyed, mesmerized by the flames.

  None noticed me climbing to join them.

&
nbsp; My first instinct was to shove each of them off, but I realized instantly what a bad idea that was. They were my camouflage.

  The Whites from the mob below, the ones who had seen me come out of the cab, were clawing their way up behind, not having lost focus on their meal.

  Then the weirdest thing happened. The two closest to the top of the cab sprouted bloody wounds and fell away.

  Holy shit!

  Somebody was shooting.

  I looked around, seeing flames and black of night in one direction, graying light in the other, and a mass of Whites under my acre-lights’ illumination out front.

  Way out across the road that bordered the field, from a silhouetted black structure, fire sparkled out in three rapid pinpricks. More Whites fell from the side of the cab.

  Somebody was shooting the Whites around me.

  Why?

  Didn't matter to me. I needed to get off the combine before I was engulfed in its flames.

  Only one way to do it quickly.

  With the Whites on the unstable roof still hypnotized by the flames and trying to keep their balance, I spread my arms wide to engulf those nearest and I rushed forward. One fell into another and feet shuffled for balance, but still, I pushed, and off we all went, falling in a mass of elbows and knees, a rain of bodies pouring onto the Whites wailing on the other side of the combine.

  Chapter 22

  One of the few benefits of a virus-infected brain is the attenuation of pain. Sure, I still felt stuff, but lots of things that should have hurt didn’t. Falling off the combine into a scrum of Whites knocked the wind out of me, but thank God, didn’t break anything. It all hurt, but only a bit. I can’t say how the White felt who’d been unlucky enough to catch my machete blade in his shoulder as I came down on top of him.

  I jumped to my feet. I felt a little dazed but had no time to clear my head before making my getaway. I was in a pile of confusion and broken bones that might soon turn ugly. I wrenched my blade out of the White and started to move.