Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (3 page)

I glanced back up to the oncoming mob, emptied my magazine to clear the closest of them and jumped off the concrete corner support. Two seconds later, I had the top edge of the banner in my grasp with my boots slipping off of the wall’s gritty edge.

The Ogre and the Harpy. The Ogre and the Harpy.

Going off the side of the building was a terrible, shitty, awful choice, with an infinitesimally small chance of being alive at the bottom. But no matter how fast my brain spun, there was no other way. Once those clutching white fingers caught my clothes, my chances of continuing life would hit absolute zero.

Infinitesimally small looked good.

I squeezed my hands and tried to bunch the taut nylon into something easier to hang on
to as my legs flailed out over the drop. Before I had time to hope for the best, gravity seized me and pulled me madly toward the sidewalk far below.

I held on
to the banner as tightly as I could, but the nylon slipped rapidly through my grasp, friction heating and tearing my skin. To put a damper on my acceleration, I pulled my feet in to squeeze the mesh between the rubber soles of my boots.

I started to slow. I had half a thought that I might live.

My boots hit something solid and kicked my feet out to the sides. Before I could shit my pants at that surprise, my hands caught onto a round metal rod sewn into the bottom edge of the banner, and I came to a joint-rending halt, hanging twenty feet above the ground.

“Holy shit!”

I was alive?

Frustrated shrieks cascaded down.

I looked up. “Oh no!”

One was climbing over the wall.

Like a fish on a line, I wriggled my body to swing the banner and out it went. Then back. Not far enough.

A White fell past me, grabbing at my boots, screaming not out of fear, but out of frustration for my being beyond her grasp. She hit the sidewalk in a sickening combination of thump and splat. The banner swung out further, then back.

Trying to time the rhythm of my bodily gyrations to the slow rhythm of the banner’s swing, I went way out over the sidewalk just as another infected woman came sliding down the center of the sloping banner. Her weight helped push it back toward the garage. She missed me by five feet when she slipped past with just enough of an arc to drop her past the sidewalk and into the grass with a sound of breaking bones wrapped in tearing flesh.

On the backswing, I flew into the gap be
tween the second and third floors. Suddenly, with concrete just four or five feet below me, I let go. I landed roughly, bruising knees and scraping elbows. My weapons clattered on the floor as I rolled but my sling didn’t slip off. My Glock stayed in its holder. Only my machete slipped away.

The few infected running through the second level looked at me but didn’t slow. The party was upstairs. Any White with ears could hear that.

With bloody, jittery hands, I gathered my machete and crawled to a shaded corner where my breath wheezed out in a nervous rattle. The coolness of the concrete offered what comfort it could while I assimilated the fact that due to little more than luck, I’d just lived through that ordeal. My heart started to slow and my nerves began the long process of winding back down.

I ventured a look down at my torn, blistered hands and thanked the virus that most sensations of pain were in my past. The hands were still functional, but they’d need attention, and soon. Such was the latest price I paid for my life.

Camouflaged in gleaming white skin, crusty bloodstains, and body odor, in that moment I exhibited none of the noisy behaviors of the tasty immune. The infected continuing through the second floor ignored me. I leaned my head against the wall, and for a moment, closed my eyes. Exhaustion was knocking at the door.

I was emotionally drained, empty, as
lost as I’d felt before I tried to fill the hole in my heart with the murder of Mark’s proxies. After so many years of being the dog that Dan kicked, couldn’t violence cure my rage, salve my sadness just once?

Residual adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands were unsteady. I needed time to regroup. I breathed in hot, smoky air. I smelled blood and cordite.

The angry yowls of the infected mixed with the shrieks of the dying.

I tried to clear my mind and disappear, even for just a second, but images of dead faces haunted me: Jerome, Wilkins, Earl, the Ogre, the Harpy, Felicity, Marcy, and a thousand white faces that used to be human. No,
were
human. Just unfortunate, diseased humans.

Amber was in that procession. Steph’s dead face would join soon. The virus was very effectively killing off every person
to which I had even the tiniest connection.

The virus was binging on humanity, one overflowing spoonful after another, and with each death, human civilization ticked inexorably toward its end. And what the virus didn’t destroy, the natural entropy of the universe would. Long held at bay by human arrogance, it would soon crumble the fragile foundations of the world. Fires burned in east Austin. Blazing refineries in Houston disgorged untold tons of toxicity. The reactors would eventually melt down, and our failing dams would wash the reactors’ Chernobyl waste into the oceans
, killing everything in the marine world as well.

Empty skyscrapers would be tombstones to our dead cities. Satellites would fall from the sky. When the blood of our dead was washed away by time, the rusting carcasses of a billion cars would again stain the earth red.

How much of that would I live to see? Did I want to see any of it?

Did I want to face a future alone among the mindless monsters?

Alone!

Lost in the blackness of my mood, my scavenged cell phone buzzed in my pocket, teasing me with evidence of another life that would soon come to a violent end.

I wanted to cry, but the Ogre and the Harpy had beaten so, so many tears out of me, and nothing seemed to anger them more than a little boy’s tears.

I felt like I was twelve years old again, alone and imprisoned in a
heartless world with countless days of pain in my past and endless days of fear in my future.

And I knelt at Amber’s body while Russell’s wails vocalized my pain.

The cell phone buzzed again.

And Jerome
—cowardly, lying, useless Jerome—killed for no reason at all. What the fuck was that?

Was there a path forward, a road out of the darkness? Could I once again find in myself the strength that stood me before the Ogre’s wrath so many years ago, or would life’s cruelty finally prevail?

As I searched my heart for that answer, the cell phone vibrated for half a second, then cut short.

Whether the battery in the phone, the life at the other end, or the hope of the caller
—something else had just died.

I thought about a buddy of mine from seventh grade, Benny Clark. We met after school one afternoon to settle with our fists some little something so trivial that memory misplaced it almost immediately once it was over.

We fought that afternoon, or more accurately, we boxed. But I didn't try
; not really. Benny was a smaller kid than me, and that made a real difference at that age. And though we were fighting, he was my friend, and I had no desire to hurt him. He wasn't big enough to pack a punch that could hurt me. So, the fight was destined to go unresolved.

But assistant principal McQuig, being much more observant than I’d have given him credit for, caught us both and hauled us to his office. He laid a choice on the table: we could take the paddle, or he would call our parents to explain the suspension.

Well, that was a no-brainer for both Benny and me. He opted for the combo pac
k—
the call and a suspension. I asked to the point of begging for the paddle.

Paddling was punishment with an end. I'd bend over the desk and McQuig would haul back for a baseball-style swing and lay into my ass with all his gray-haired might. There was no defined number of swats for fighting, nor for any offense. Punishment ended when McQuig's temper settled, or his back and shoulders grew tired. This usually happened between three and five swats.

It was a difficult dynamic to predict. In the mornings, McQuig was full of energy and ready for five; not so much in the afternoon. But in the afternoons, his temper was short from a long day of dealing with the likes of me, so he was more inclined to shoot for five.

I took five that day. Perhaps my frequent flyer status was built into the equation somehow.
 

In spite of paying the price, however, I was too naïve at that age to understand how things really worked in the world. At the time, Dan was an assistant principal at another school in the district. I guess it only made sense that he knew McQuig.

Perhaps McQuig called to tell Dan of the favor he'd done him by tanning my hide. All I knew for a fact was that when Dan got home from work that day, he felt compelled to bellow at me for what seemed to me to be a thousand times, "You wanna fight? You wanna be a boxer? Is this what you wanna do? You wanna embarrass me?"

Of course the
 questions were all rhetorical. They were not to be answered with my words, nor Dan's.

The answers were in Dan's knuckles.

He beat me all the way through my fear and my pain, leaving only a crusty residue of anger and hate that I carried to school the next day, where a hundred snickering laughers pointed at my bruised face. Humiliation is such a powerful motivator in seventh grade.

So on the fourth day, when Benny returned to school, I found him in the hall. He smiled at me the way he always smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile back. Instead, I beat him down. With each pound of my fist, Dan's anger rolled through me and down to Benny. And when I was done, Benny looked like me, with fresh blood running from his mouth and nose. He had hollow, helpless eyes that understood something new about cruelty in the world.

I got eight swats from McQuig that day. Perhaps a new record. I got suspended, and Dan beat me daily until I went back. But what the fuck; he probably would have beaten me anyway.

What I should have learned about catharsis that day was the lesson that eluded me every time I ever I let my anger run free. Catharsis is a bullshit concept.

Benny had been my best friend for years before that fight. After I beat him in the hall, he never spoke to me again. All that catharsis did for me was cost me a little piece of my humanity.

Slaughtering Whites for what Mark did to Amber was like that. When the rage flowed and the Whites died, it felt like something, something with a frightening name. But after, I felt like a death camp Nazi who’d finally looked into one too many pairs of sunken eyes.

And now I sat in a humid charnel house of my own making, having tried to assuage a vindictive rage with the murder of the wrong people. Mark had to die for the world to ever be right again. In my mind, it was a necessary step. But I knew that was also an indulgence of the darkness, a choice to forever cultivate a hate. It was a backward path. And to chase Mark down that path, the easy path, was to shower myself in the blood of the Whites until my luck ran out and I was as dead as the pile infected at my feet. And would Mark be in that pile? Not likely.

But what real choice did I have?
To move forward instead? To what?

I’d only ever been an isolated spectator to an endless parade of tragedies. Being alone in the dark was all I knew. All my life I’d collect acquaintances and discard them before they became real friends, before they became too much of an emotional risk. And as much as I had needed to find Amber, as much as I needed now
to know what had happened to Steph, in my choices, I’d scraped off Murphy, Mandi, and Russell and isolated myself again. The cycle of my habit was at work under the guise of rational choice.

So what was forward for me?

That hard path was to pick up the fragile pieces of a nascent chance at life, a life that I’d very handily scattered across a dying city. That path seemed so difficult and so urgent, but the hard part, if I was still alive at the end of the day, was to chance a real relationship with another person, with other people.

And I know I didn’t think it through at the time that I let Russell latch on to me, but maybe that was Russell’s value. Non-judgmental, silent, and simple, Russell wholly accepted and needed me. He took those intangible but important parts of a relationship and put them on the table while asking for nothing in return. Was it possible that in helping Russell to stay alive he would unwittingly help me to take the baby steps of learning how to fit into normal society, or at least whatever might be left of society when this was all over?

Were the first few steps of the hard path forward to ironically be illuminated for me by Russell?

Perhaps.

So with Russell’s help, I chose to move forward, and all those parts that I was good at planning for came together in a snap. I was ready to go, alert and back in the present. My eyes were open and I was aware of my surroundings.

Three infected lurked near a support column at the top of a ramp, fixated on me, puffing up their courage. Their faces were gaunt, their hands very busy at invisible nothings that needed desperate attention. Their eyes were alert and shifting from focus to focus, but always finding their way back to me.

They looked hungry, but were unaware of the feast that awaited them for free, if they’d only follow the parking garage’s ramps up another three floors. Maybe they were just lazy. Maybe they thought I looked like I was dying, infected like them, but an easy meal.

I laid my machete across my thighs, its grip slippery in my bleeding palm. I decided that I wasn’t going to slaughter the three skinny Whites, and neither was I going to be eaten by them. But their hunger was going to make them do something stupid, very soon.

A step on the path forward was control and I was going to take it by bringing the situation to a head. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the concrete wall. I calmed my breathing.

It was time.

The infected couldn’t resist the temptation that my closed eyes presented. Just a moment after closing them, I heard the sound of a half-dozen feet running across the concrete floor.

And by choosing the path forward, my old mantra was outmoded, but still effective.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I drew a sharp breath, opened my eyes, and jumped to my feet just as the three stepped within machete range. Their eyes widened as they each struggled to halt their momentum. Even their malfunctioning brains were able to register surprise.

My machete swung up as I straightened and slashed deeply across the belly of the leftmost of the trio. Pushing my blade’s momentum in the same swing, I ripped it through the jaw of the one in the middle. Both went down and the third jumped back.

The first infected hit the floor immediately, unconscious and rapidly bleeding to death. The one with the jaw injury was flailing, half silly from the blow to his head, splattering blood in every direction.

I roared and charged at the last one still on her feet. She turned and ran.

Victory!