Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 Read online

  When he was walking around to the other side of the boat, I heard the sound of boat motors. “Hurry, dude. I think I hear something.”

  Murphy looked up at me with a question on his face.

  “Boats,” I told him in a harsh whisper.

  He ran around to the other side of the houseboat. I climbed down the stairs, crossed the deck, and hopped over to the dock. When I went around to the boat’s port side, I saw Murphy’s legs sticking out of a window as he tried to crawl his way in.

  Figuring he had that problem solved, I ran down the dock until Rachel and I made contact. I pointed toward the lake as I ran.

  She understood immediately and jumped down from the bow to gather up the others.

  The sound of high-revving boat motors grew more distinct. I looked toward the end of the cove and wondered how much time we had before Jay’s boats arrived.

  Feet hit the wooden dock behind me. Fully expecting those feet to be one of the cabin cruiser’s occupants, I glanced over my shoulder. It wasn’t one of my new friends. “Damn.”

  Just a dozen feet behind me, a strong-looking young man with short hair and white skin was looking at me, trying to figure out if I was food or friend.

  “Hey, dude,” I said.

  That was enough. He rushed at me and reached for my throat. I ducked under his arms and sliced his abdomen open as he ran by. He fell to the deck, writhing, feebly wheezing his pain with what little breath he could muster. I stepped over and hacked at the back of his neck, bringing his misery and noisy death to an end.

  When I looked up, the rest of the boat’s passengers were running up the dock. I waved them forward and ran to the houseboat, jumping over to the houseboat’s deck as Murphy swung the back door open. A moment later, Freitag rushed past, followed by Rachel. Gretchen and Paul, older and slower, came next. Dalhover, self-appointed rearguard, was last. Murphy closed the door behind us.

  Once inside, Dalhover found a window through which to peek and see up the cove. Murphy found a spot at another window.

  “How did they get here so fast?” Gretchen softly asked anyone who would listen.

  “Jay is crazy,” Freitag said, as if that was sufficient to answer the question. She started peeking through curtains.

  Rachel said, “My bet is that when Jerry didn’t come back when Jay expected, he sent a boat out to see what happened.”

  “And they came across Gerald and Melissa paddling back in that kayak.” Paul cast a worried look toward the windows. The sound of the motorboat engines was audible through the houseboat’s thin walls. “It was the right thing to do, but we spent too much time finding a boat for those two. We probably should have left them on the shore somewhere.”

  “You survive. You help your loved ones. Fuck everybody else.” Even as I said it I knew I was being a hypocrite. I’d broken those rules and suffered the consequences too many times. “That’s just the way it is now.”

  Paul looked at me and his mouth twisted as though he was chewing on a bitter grapefruit rind.

  He seemed like a nice man, so I kept my “fuck you” to myself. He’d spent the whole epidemic on the island, trying to build an idealistic, mutually beneficial, post-apocalyptic utopia. The problem with any utopia is that it discounts the vile ability of humans to turn it into the same ugly world they create in every utopia. Jay and Jerry had just given Paul his first lesson in that course of study, and Paul hadn’t understood any of it yet.

  “Jay is a hothead,” Gretchen said. “He will race his boats all the way to the next dam. That’s the way he thinks.”

  “So we’re safe, then?” Paul asked.

  The engines of the boats were louder inside than our voices, but they revved just as high. Murphy, Frietag, and Dalhover all crouched.

  Dalhover, in a hushed voice said, “They’re at the end of the cove.”

  Everyone froze.

  “They aren’t slowing,” Murphy said.

  More than one breath of relief escaped into the air.

  The sound of the motors whined lower.

  Dalhover changed his angle on the window. “They’re going by.”

  I looked at Gretchen and said, “You were right.”

  “Some people are easy to predict,” she said.

  “But you didn’t predict that he’d mount a coup and try to kill us,” I said, some anger coming out in my tone. I was immediately ashamed for having said it. “That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

  Gretchen looked away.

  Paul looked like he wanted to slap me. Had he been a younger man, he might have.

  Freitag said, “You’ll get used to him. He’s an ass.”

  Well, fuck her. I gave her the meanest look I could put on my face. “Or you can ditch me somewhere for the Whites to eat while I’m doing you a favor.”

  “Kiddies.” Murphy’s sounded like a dad threatening to stop the car and spank the children in the back seat.

  “I knew Jay and Jerry were—” Gretchen took a moment to look for the right word. “Unusual.”

  Rachel laughed nervously as she looked at one of the windows. “They’re more than unusual.”

  “Nobody could have guessed they would plot to kill us,” said Paul.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about that. I’m just angry because he kidnapped the girls. I know this kind of stuff is hard to see coming.” Involuntarily, I looked at Freitag, but turned away before she saw it. For the moment, we were on the same side, even—or so she said. But I feared she might be as crazy as Jay and Jerry, and any insult might tip the scales of her stability in the wrong direction. That made me nervous.

  “They’re gone,” Dalhover announced.

  Everyone relaxed.

  Turning back to the room, Dalhover said, “They’ll be back. They’re hauling ass up the lake trying to catch us before we get wherever they think we’re going, but they’ll be careful on the way back and search for us. They’ll come into this cove, and they might find the boat.”

  After a short pause, he added,“They’ll have more guns than we’ve got.”

  “Do we hide here?” Gretchen asked, “Or do we go onto shore and try to find a place?”

  I looked down at the bloody machete, still in my hand. “There are Whites around. Plenty, I’d guess. If they see us making for a house, we might be double screwed. They’ll trap us inside, and if there are enough of them around when Jay’s men find the cabin cruiser, the Whites might give away our hiding place. I can’t imagine that will turn out any way but badly.”

  “He’s right,” Dalhover told everyone.

  “He likes being right,” Freitag sniped.

  I ignored her.

  “What are our choices then?” Paul asked. “Do we stay here and hope they don’t find us when they come back? Is that our only choice?”

  I looked around at the room. Each of them was looking for better answers from the others. But none of us had a better idea.

  Crap.

  Hiding in the houseboat didn’t seem like a good idea. I turned to Murphy. “Do you know how to hot-wire a car?”

  Grinning, he asked, “Why does everybody always ask the black dude that question?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, looking over at a shrugging Dalhover. “Here’s what I think. We see if we can find the keys to one of these boats and get out of this marina while Jay and his nutjobs are chasing their tails up at the other end of the lake.”

  “Yes.” Paul was nodding enthusiastically. “We’ve got a window of time in which to get away. We can head back down the lake while they are going up. They’ll never know. Then when they get here on the way back and find the cabin cruiser, they’ll think we’re around here. We’ll have lost them.”

  Yeah. Isn’t that what I said?

  Chapter 19

  The sound of boat engines faded to nothing.

  Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen stayed on the houseboat. Dalhover and Freitag went to work together to search the boats in the marina to see if they could get one started. Murphy and I h
eaded up the dock toward the marina office. The hope was that we’d find the keys for the boats there.

  Murphy hefted his insufficient little hammer. “I’ll feel better once I get a rifle back in my hands.”

  “Soon enough.” I hoped. I looked around for signs of Whites.

  We were crossing a long walkway that led from the boat slips to the shore.

  Rubbing his hand over his head as he looked around, Murphy sighed and said, “I’m having second thoughts about going to hunt Smart Ones.”

  I stopped and looked at Murphy, shaking my head. “What the fuck, dude? I thought we agreed on what we need to do after we get through all this bullshit with Jay.”

  “C’mon.” Murphy pushed me forward. “We got work to do.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause we need a boat.”

  “You know what I’m asking.” I was mad.

  “You said so yourself, didn’t you? What Would Murphy Do?”

  “I thought Murphy would kill some motherfucking Whites,” I said. “Last I heard, that’s what Murphy would do.”

  “It was at the time.”

  I stopped again and planted my feet on the dock. This needed to be resolved. “What about Mandi?”

  Murphy stopped and turned on me. For a second, he was an angry beast. I flinched. But Murphy’s temper flare passed as quickly as it came. He slowly shook his head. “If you want to chase off after the Smart Ones after we get the girls, I’ll go with you. I think it’s a stupid idea, but I’ll babysit you so you won’t get yourself killed while you’re being angry and stupid.”

  “What changed?”

  “Nothing changed.”

  “A few days ago, you wanted to kill them as badly as I did.”

  “I still do,” said Murphy.

  “Then what the fuck, dude?”

  Murphy’s face turned sad and he looked at the water, his thoughts getting lost in the lake’s cold depths. Then he looked across to the shore as though he’d just remembered that he needed to look out for Whites. “Is this the best time to talk about this?”

  “Just tell me what changed, and we’ll go.”

  “I can’t go back there,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “You remember how I told you I was, back after I killed those three…kids behind the 7-Eleven?”

  “Kids?”

  Shaking his head, Murphy said, “They were just teenagers.”

  “Murphy, don’t make them more vulnerable in your memory than they really were. You know what they did to Keisha. You know as well as I do that if they did that to her and laughed about it, who knows what they did to other people? They were vicious monsters long before the virus ever showed up. They deserved what they got.”

  Murphy nodded.

  We started walking toward the marina office again.

  Murphy said, “It took me a long time to get right after I killed those boys.”

  “Guilt?” I asked.

  “No,” Murphy was having a hard time with it. “I was in a dark place. It’s like I didn’t have a soul anymore.”

  I knew that feeling.

  “You joke about my philosophy,” he said. “I know you think it’s some kind of simple bullshit to make myself smile.”

  I stopped then. “No. Honestly, Murphy, I don’t. Yeah, it seems too simple to be real, but it works for you. You’re happy. Do you know how many people in this world are happy, or were happy before all this shit went down?”

  Murphy shrugged, and we started walking again.

  “Pretty much none of them.”

  “I feel like going to kill the Smart Ones, no matter how bad I want to—” He struggled for a moment and changed course. “I’ve got so much hate in my heart right now, Zed—” Murphy drew a long slow breath. “I don’t know if I can be both.”

  “Both?”

  “Me, the person I am now, the person I’ve been since I got right with all that shit about killing those three punks. Or that other guy, the angry one that needed his revenge. I can’t be both.”

  Chapter 20

  The marina office was a square little building a short way up hill from the edge of the water. It had grids of windows stretching across three sides, leaving the marina and the entire cove visible from the counter inside. When we got there, the door was open. The doorjamb was broken and the strike plate was on the floor among splinters from the wood that had held it in place. Someone had already forced his or her way in. The office stank.

  That gave Murphy and me pause as we stepped across the threshold. Papers were scattered on the counter and the floor. A desk behind the counter was in disarray. Murphy leaned over the counter and shook his head. “Dead guy.”

  I leaned over to look. A body with a big chunk of skull shattered open lay rotting on the floor. I said, “Somebody ransacked this place.”

  Murphy pointed to a tall, flat metal cabinet on the back wall. The sheet metal around the lock had been pried apart, leaving a wide rent.

  I turned to look out through the windows. “I’ll keep an eye out for them. You check for the keys.”

  “Probably right inside that cabinet.” Murphy shuffled through some office supplies scattered on the floor and stepped around the counter.

  “Two of those Whites we chased off the dock are out there, watching us.”

  “How close?” Murphy asked.

  “A ways.” I scanned across the marina. “I don’t think they want anything to do with us, but they sure seem interested.”

  The metal cabinet door swung open on creaky hinges. Murphy said, “Jackpot.”

  Jackpot? That was Mandi’s word. She used it all the time. I thought it best not to mention Murphy’s use of it. Off to my left, a tall White came out from behind some kind of building that probably contained a repair shop. He was looking at something out on the docks. No good was going to come of that. “Murphy, hurry it up.”

  “Man, I don’t know which keys are for which boat.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder. Rows of keys hung on hooks beneath three digit numbers. “I’ll bet those are the slip numbers.”

  “Like that does me any good, professor.”

  The staring White had two other companions, and one of them was looking back in the direction from whence they came. My guess was that more were on the way. At least they were all of the clothed variety.

  “Just grab four or five, and let’s go. There are some Whites out there getting really interested.”

  Keys jingled.

  “Interested in us?” Murphy asked.

  I watched another couple of Whites come out from beside the building. All of them were staring at the docks. I looked over at the docks, but couldn’t see what they were seeing but it didn’t take a genius to know it was one of our people who had their interest.

  Murphy shuffled back through the papers.

  The Whites took off at a sprint for the dock, and several more that I hadn’t seen followed them out from behind the building.

  “Shit.” I ran out through the door.

  The Whites were fast and were going to reach the long wooden walkway that stretched out to the boat slips before me. Halfway down the slope, Murphy ran past me with his hammer swinging in his fist. I tried to keep up.

  Seven Whites were stretched out in a widely spaced line, clomping on the deck when Murphy reached the boards just behind the last of them. I was still a good ten paces behind Murphy. I bounded onto the dock as Murphy reached the first of the running Whites. He swung his hammer at the side of the man’s head, knocking him off balance. As Murphy passed the reeling White, he pushed it into the water.

  The White was flailing at the water and starting to howl when I passed him.

  Murphy caught up with another White and shouldered her hard from behind, bouncing her face on the dock as she rolled off the left side and into the water. Two down, five to go.

  I made up a few steps of the distance between me and Murphy.

  A loud banging of wood on wood rang across the
water from the right. That had to be the sound that had gotten their attention.

  The first of the infected in our line made the right turn off the walkway and onto the main dock, followed closely by the second.

  Murphy closed in on a pair of Whites running side by side.

  A third made the turn.

  I shouted, “Hey, motherfucker!”

  The two Whites in front of Murphy turned as they tried to stop. Murphy barreled into both of them. One fell off the dock. The other hit the dock, banging his head, losing his senses.

  The other three Whites that had already made the turn to run up between the boat slips were too focused on the noise they’d heard ahead of them.

  Murphy ran on past the White he’d just knocked down, and I swung my machete to slice at his head as I passed. The blow caught him under the jaw, and while it probably wasn’t lethal at the moment, it would be. Whether I’d hacked all the way through the jaw or not, it was broken. The White would bleed out from the wound or starve to death in a month or two. Either way, it was out of the day’s fight.

  Murphy rounded the turn onto the wide dock between the boat slips. A few seconds later, I did too.

  Far down on the right, the houseboat that kept Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen hidden floated as innocuous and boring as every other boat in the marina. The tall, infected man leading all of us along passed the houseboat without showing an iota of interest.

  The loud bang pounded from somewhere far down toward the end of the dock. It had to be Dalhover or Freitag.

  Murphy caught up with an infected woman and pounded her in the back of the head as he passed. She tumbled. I clipped the back of her skull with my machete as I went by. She wasn’t likely to get up and join her two compatriots either.

  The tall one cut hard to his left and jumped off the dock, over a gunwale, and landed on the deck of a blue-hulled cabin cruiser.

  The infected woman following came to a stop on the dock at the stern of the cabin cruiser. She looked down at the water between the dock and the boat’s hull, fear on her face. From inside the cabin cruiser, fists pounded on wood.

  The woman, too fixated on the terrifying water, looked up at the sound of Murphy’s running footsteps just a moment too late. He body slammed her full-on, and she flew off the dock, bounced against the walkway between the cabin cruiser and the sailboat in the slip next door, and sank into the green water. She didn’t resurface.