Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (17 page)

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Wiping
putrescent spittle off my ear for the last time, I glanced at my cooperative female and then over at her annoying counterpart. We stood on the deck inside the boathouse with nothing but water between us and the open exterior door. I was empty-handed except for my knife. But on the way out of the video room, I took a chance and waded through Specialist Harris’ remains, then put the MOLLE vest into the girl’s hands and the M16 in the guy’s. They were both outwardly agitated once the rifle was in play, but they complied anyway and subsequently followed me into the elevator and then down to the dock.

Getting the items back was a different story. When I reached out to take the MOLLE vest, the girl wouldn’t let go. I whispered to her in her peculiar vernacular, “The Joel ass head.” She spent a moment having what passed for a thought in her brain and concluded that I needed to have the vest.

Trying the same lie to circumvent the male’s reluctance to let me have the M16 proved fruitless. There was only one quick way to resolve the issue. I put a hand on the rifle’s handle, right beside his, held tight, and fell backwards, letting gravity carry me into the water. Unfortunately for the guy, he didn’t quite figure out that he was at risk of getting wet until it was too late to recover.

We splashed in together.

The girl shrieked. The male howled and panicked, but he let go of the rifle. I pushed myself away from his flailing arms and legs and ignored them. They’d just become a non-factor as I waded into deepening water.

Paying a heavy toll in stubbed toes and bruised shins, I moved quickly out of the boathouse and through the water toward my canoe, dunking myself a few times along the way to wash off as much of the gasoline on my skin as I could. I’d probably burned off five minutes since setting the light timer in the video room. Only fifteen minutes remained until detonation.

As expected—or maybe hoped—the canoe was where I left it, and with each step closer, the water got shallower and I moved faster. Once there, I dropped my knife, new rifle, and vest on top of the clothes that I’d left in the bottom of the canoe and quickly pushed it out into the water. A few hard paddle strokes put me out into the current, and I chose to go down rather than upriver. My destination was upriver—the direction that Murphy, Steph, and the others had gone—but I needed to maximize the distance between me and my bomb. Paddling downriver with the current would give me more distance than paddling against it.

When I floated past the boathouse entrance, the female saw me and renewed her shrieking. To my surprise, the male was out of the water and pushing his dripping self up off of the deck.

Well, how about that?

I wondered how that experience would affect his fear of the water, but at about that same time, I realized that it didn’t matter. In fifteen minutes, he’d be dead.

It was time to paddle like my life depended on it, because it did. It took just a few minutes to get my heart rate up to a pounding, rapid rhythm. I gasped for breath as I neared my physical limit, slicing the canoe through the water at a good pace.

Mr. Mays
’ house passed on the far bank, and it occurred to me that my gasoline vapor bomb could be a danger to both him and Nico. Fortunately or not, I had the detached presence of mind to know that those dice were already rolling. If they both were in the house and away from the windows when the bomb exploded, they were far enough away that they might be okay. My pulling the boat up to the bank and running up to the house with a warning on my lips wasn’t likely to change the outcome for them. By the time I got up there and explained the situation completely enough that they’d be willing to do something about it, the bomb would have detonated. So I pressed on down the river.

L
abored distance grew between my canoe and Sarah Mansfield’s mountaintop compound. Questions nagged my idle mind as I paddled. Would the bomb detonate at all? Had I screwed something up? I reviewed all of the steps I’d taken, all of the things I’d checked along the way. It had to work. How big would the explosion be? Was I far enough away? Did I have any hope of getting far enough away? Should I stop and watch the fire rip the sky and blow the top of Mt. Bonnell into the river?

Paddle on and let those questions answer themselves, dumbass!

There was only one variable left in the equation that I had any control over, and that was the distance that I’d be from my bomb when it exploded. No matter what else happened, the likelihood of my being alive afterwards was dependent on how far downriver I was when the bomb went off.

Paddle!

More gasoline trivia bubbled to the surface of my brain. There was a conversion factor I’d heard once. No, I think I read it. I couldn’t recall the source, but the conversion was for TNT to gasoline in terms of explosive power. The ratio was ten to one. One ounce of gasoline held something like ten times more explosive power than TNT. Yes, that was it.
Was it true?

How much gasoline had I used? Um, twenty gallons or so…

Keep up the paddling pace.

I didn’t know what a gallon of gasoline weighed, but I did know that water weighed something like eight pounds per gallon and that gasoline was lighter. So, maybe six pounds per gallon. Twenty gallons, then, would weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds—it sure felt like it when I was hauling it up to the top of the pergola—and that implied the equivalent of an explosion with the power of twelve hundred pounds of TNT.

But that’s half a kiloton!

I just made a half-kiloton bomb?

There’s no fuckin’ way!

They measure nuclear devices in kilotons.

I could barely breathe in enough air to sustain my effort after that. I picked up my pace, going as hard as I possibly could, rerunning the calculations in my head. Surely that answer couldn’t be right. Could it?

Paddle
, dumbass, paddle!

I remembered hearing once that a gasoline vapor bomb was the most powerful non-nuclear device in the military arsenal. Confirmation? Under the strain of trying to pull in enough air to support my effort, I couldn’t come up with where I’d heard all of that crap. Was it TV, hence bullshit, or was it books? Oh, where was the internet when you needed it?

Ptht!

It was the sound of somebody punching a giant marshmallow that announced the detonation.

I snapped my head around to see.  The glow from an enormous disembodied flame burned in the sky above the peak of Mt. Bonnell. More sound. More flame. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, the fire spread and nearly died, then spread again with a hundred marshmallow punches as it crossed the mountain and spread down toward the river, an Aurora Borealis dying as it sank to the earth, torching a few trees as it settled over a mile-span along the north bank, then down onto the river. Flames danced across the water toward me.

I smelled gasoline in the air.

Fuck!

I pushed all my weight to the right and the canoe capsized with me as I fell into the water. Immersed in inky, cold blackness, the water around me lit up as though the sun had just gone supernova in the sky. As that light faded, I watched my purloined M16 sink into the darkness below. The blade of my knife twinkled as it sank, ten feet below, followed by my boots. Even my clothes drifted out of their place in the bottom of the canoe, semi-clad ghosts, searching in greenish water for souls to torment.

When it was done, my night vision was shot and I was out of breath, but I was still alive.

Alive and disappointed.

Coming up underneath the canoe, I took a few deep breaths, pushed myself under and scissor-kicked hard back up to right the canoe, which readily turned over. Hanging on the edge, I looked in. Nothing but water was inside, and too much of it.

Looking up at Mt. Bonnell, I saw the crenelated rows of houses along the crest, their geometrically precise silhouettes intact. They hadn’t exploded. Nothing had blown up but air and gasoline, too far above the ground and too dissipated to damage any property or kill any of the naked infected. The only result was some small, spotty fires in the trees.

It was all a spectacular fizzle. King Monkey Fucker Joel and Mark were probably sitting in Sarah Mansfield’s house, not even aware that I’d just tried to kill them and succeeded only in nearly barbecuing myself.

“Shit!”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

It was late. The fireworks show was over. A few small fires glowed dimly up on the mountain.

I’d pushed the canoe in near the shore where I could
stand, empty the water, and get back in. Except for the paddle, everything I had was lost in the dark river. The only reason I had the paddle was that it was in my hand when I capsized the canoe. Had I waited another four or five seconds before capsizing the canoe, it would have been burned when the gasoline vapor flashed. Maybe that had happened to many of the naked horde up on the mountain. It was something to hope for as the disappointment over my failure weighed heavily on me.

I’d been paddling back upriver for over an hour when
I pulled the paddle out of the water and drifted, feeling in my muscles the toll I was paying for so many days without food and with little good sleep. Sure, I’d drunk at least a quart of cola from the soda fountain on the roof, but those calories were gone, burned off on exertion and fear.

Mr. Mays
’ house was far back downriver behind me by the time I started drifting. I realized that I should have stopped on my second time past, knocked on the door, and asked for a safe spot to spend the night. Well, if they had a door to knock on.

The canoe
floated slowly into a spin, caught in the current flowing one way while the wind blew me in the other.

I supposed I could drift back down to Mr. Mays’ house and see if they’d let me in, but that bitter thought smacked of quitting. In the mood that was on me, one step onto that slippery slope would send me down a dark hole out of which I might not be able to climb back. To continue upriver was to endeavor toward the goal, to try and find my friends. Seeing Murphy get up off of that recliner and wobble his way down to the ski boat was troubling, but it did bring hope that I’d find them all alive. And that hope was something real.

But I was so tired. I was naked, crusted in dry blood and scabs. I was hungry, really hungry, and dehydrated again. Steph, Murphy, and the rest could be in any of a thousand places upriver and I had no idea where.

Or they could be dead.

Such a likely possibility now.

Zero. That was the depressing word emblazoned on the flag that had planted itself on the sad mound of my thoughts. I was back at zero again. No weapons. No food. No friends and no clothes.

Don’t lie down.

Don’t quit.

Paddle.

Just paddle.

So I paddled. Persistence for its own sake.

Upriver again. Slowly, against the current, but I was moving.

Houses along the shore passed by. I spotted a ski boat lifted on a hoist up out of the water, I guessed to protect the hull from the algae. I really wanted that boat. Motorized transportation was another of modern society’s underappreciated luxuries. Pulling my paddle across my lap, I gave the boat a long hard look and thought about what I could do to acquire it. I’d have to search the house for keys and then, assuming I lived through that, having only fingernails and fists to protect myself, I’d have to figure out how to manually lower the boat back into the water. The process of stealing the boat was that of unknown dangers and potentially unsolvable problems. The risk-to-reward ratio just wasn’t high enough.

Paddle on.

As housing development on the banks thinned, leaving mostly trees and few dark houses, the miles slowly dissolved behind me. It was all black water, bends in the wide river, and old trees. Frogs chirped like fat crickets in the wet shadows and the buzz of cicadas modulated in and out of obnoxiousness. Mosquitoes occasionally found me and had a meal on my bare skin before buzzing off to hide among the leaves on the banks.

Up ahead, I spied a familiar shape on the north bank, and my hopes sank a little. It was the pontoon boat that Murphy had almost acquired a week or so prior. It was tied next to the dock in front of the house that he and I had raided and prepped as a safe house. The ski boat, however, was nowhere to be seen.

The absence of the ski boat led to three possibilities: Freitag had killed them all and dumped the bodies in the river, they’d taken the food and moved on to someplace else because this house had become unsafe, or this house was unsafe again when they arrived. I went with the odds and decided that going into the house was a bad idea.

At least the pontoon boat was still there. That had been ready to go when Murphy and I had left it. I needed only to hop on, untie the ropes, start the engine, and head upriver with internal combustion assistance
—which is exactly what I did.

Ten minutes after seeing the pontoon boat come out of the darkness on the north bank, I was motoring up the river with the canoe on a rope skimming along in my wake and feeling ever-so slightly better about my situation.

The tourist boat with the three girls was my next stop. With any luck, they could give me some idea what had happened to my friends.

It didn’t take long for the riverboat to come into view anchored just where I’d last seen it.

Careful to keep a distance of thirty feet or so between our two hulls, I came up alongside, looking for the silhouette of a girl’s head or a hunting rifle sticking above the upper rail. Of course, I didn’t see one. It was such a minor thing, not seeing at least one of the girls immediately, but I was starting to shade toward pessimism on every uncertainty I stumbled on. I called across the water. “Hey.”

I waited.

“Hey, this is Zed.” They were a timid, cautious bunch. “Amy, Brittany…ah…Megan, are you there?”

There were still three ski boats tethered off the stern of the faux paddle wheeler. The girls had to be on the big boat.

“Hey.”

Nothing.

Along the top rail, I thought I saw the barrel of a rifle peek over. Three shadowy head silhouettes popped up as well.

“Amy? I’m Zed. I came by a week or so ago with a couple of other guys and left you some food and a gun.”

“Why do you look like that? Where are your clothes? What happened to you?”

“That’s a long story.”

The girls whispered amongst themselves for a minute.

“Trust me,” I called up. “It’s really me. How else would I know your names and my name if it wasn’t me.” It seemed like a silly argument, but it was the only one I could come up with.

“We thought you were dead.”

“Why?”

“A couple of days ago, a girl came by in what looked like your boat.”

“A girl? Was she alone?”

“I asked about the boat when she came by. I said it looked like your boat.”

“And?”

Amy’s tone turned to disgust and anger. “She said you raped her.”

“
What?
”

“Did you?”

“No!” Feeling like I needed to add more to my defense than just a denial, I said, “She’s a crazy bitch. She tried to kill me.” It occurred to me then that I should have said nothing else. The crazy-bitch addendum made me sound guilty even to me. I slumped down in my seat. “Did she say anything about my friends, about where they were, if they were okay?”

“No.”

Could she have really killed them all? Was she that wicked? Or had she abandoned them somewhere? “Did you think that was kind of weird? Her being all alone in my boat and not with Murphy or Russell or anybody?”

“Murphy, he was the one that tried to get on our boat the first night we met you?”

“Yeah.”

The girls conferred for a minute. “It did seem a little weird. We didn’t trust her, so we didn’t let her come aboard.”

“That was a good choice.” There was a silence that lasted a bit while I thought of what else I could ask. They weren’t trying to help at all with the conversation. “Are you girls keeping a watch all the time, even at night?”

Suddenly suspicious. “Why do you want to know?

“It’s just that it took a little while for you to figure out that I was out here.”

“We knew.”

“Fine. Can I ask a favor?”

In a tone that carried a harsh laugh, Amy said, “You can ask.”

“It’s really late. I’m really, really tired.” I pointed up the river. “Can I anchor my boat over there tonight and get some sleep?”

“As long as you don’t try to come on our boat.”

“Just, if you don’t mind. Kinda keep an eye on me. Maybe warn me if you see danger.”

“Like what?”

I looked around. “I don’t know. Any of the usual stuff, I guess.”

The girls huddled again. “You were nice to us before. You gave us food and a gun. Yes. We owe you a favor. We’ll keep on eye on you if want to sleep over there on your own boat.”

That was a relief anyway. “How are you guys set for food? Did that stuff we dropped off last? Are you out?”

One of the younger girls shouted, “We’re almost out. Do you have any to spare?”

I said, “I’ve been through some shit. I’m running on empty at the moment, but I’ll need to raid a pantry tomorrow, if I can do it without getting killed. I can probably drop some surplus off, if you like.”

“You don’t have to.” It was Amy speaking again.

“I know. Hey, can I give you some advice?”

“About what? You’re naked and you look pretty beat up
. I think we’re doing better than you are. Maybe we should give you some.” I could hear the smile in Amy’s voice on that one. She wasn’t being mean.

“I need to tell you a bit of a story first.”

Brittany asked, “Is it about why you’re naked?”

“Yeah, but it’s a long story.”

“We’ve got lots of time and no television to entertain us.”

I smiled. Maybe that was the worst aspect of the post-apocalyptic world for the modern human. No entertainment. How difficult would life get with no iPhone, no television, and no internet to fill in the boring parts? I told them about my experience at Sarah Mansfield’s house, taking extra time on the part about how quickly the naked horde had overrun what had seemed like pretty strong defenses. “I think you should take your ski boats and tie them up alongside, one midway on the starboard side and one midway on the port side. Leave one in the back, I guess.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know if those naked ones can get at you in the boat, but if they get some boats or start swimming at you from one bank or the other, if you have an escape boat hidden from their view, then you’ll have a better chance of getting away.”

“But they’re afraid of the water.”

“Don’t underestimate them if you see them on the shore looking at you,” I pleaded. “They are a very dangerous group.”