Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (18 page)

I
woke on a pallet of flat seat cushions next to the tool chest that Murphy had left on the pontoon boat a week or more before. It was late on a brilliantly sunny morning and my head was throbbing. My joints were stiff and my stomach was rumbling. When I sat up, I had to throw out a hand to steady myself on one of the benches that ran down the length of both the port and starboard sides of the boat.

I was sorely missing regularly scheduled meals. At least the warm morning air felt good against my skin.

Looking downriver, I saw that one of the girls was fishing near the bow of their big boat and I wondered how boring their daily routine must be, cooped up all day on that boat. Oh well, not my problem at the moment.

I checked both shores for anything that could be a danger and, seeing nothing, went to the stern and jumped into the river to clean myself up. The water was cold, of course. It was always cold, no matter what time of year. The water in the river flowed out of the bottom of the big dam upstream, so it came off of the bottom of the lake, where all the coldest water settled. After a few minutes, my skin got used to it, and I lay back, floating on the surface, truly relaxing for the first time in a week.

It felt good. And goodness had become such a rare commodity.

As I lay there, gently bobbing on the few waves and watching the puffy, white summer clouds, I noticed smoke. Raising my head and starting to tread water, I spun in the direction of the smoke. The fires on Mt. Bonnell that I’d started the night before with my fizzled bomb had grown. Hopefully some of the naked infected were still there, screaming and burning as their skin crisped black and flaked off.

It was a dirty, murderous thought, but the imagining of it didn’t feel bad.

I climbed back aboard my pontoon boat, sat my naked body out of sight of the young girls on the riverboat and thought about the day ahead. Food, clothes, weapons, friends. And fucking Freitag.

Food needed to come first. I was going to fall into uselessness if I didn’t get a lot more calories in me pretty soon. Clothes were a nice luxury. If I was going to be in a house collecting food, there’d surely be a closet with something to wear.

Some kind of weapon would be a necessity. Again, if I was in a house, a kitchen knife was kind of the least I’d expect to find there. And being in Texas, the sky was the limit in terms of potential firearm availability.

Then it came down to Freitag versus friends. If I knew where my friends were, I could get past my desire to get some vengeance on her. Really, all I wanted was to reunite with my friends and know that they were all okay. Everything else on my list was just a necessary step in the direction of seeing Murphy, Steph, and Mandi, distasteful Dalhover and simple Russell.

Freitag knew what had happened to them. That meant that the most expeditious path to my friends was through her because wherever she was—and I hoped she was still on the river—the ski boat would show me exactly where she’d gone ashore. I was betting that she’d be close by.

The river between the dams couldn’t be more than fifteen miles long, and I was somewhere near the midpoint of that stretch. So seven miles of river going upstream was what I had to check for the ski boat. Depending on how much of the morning I burned off finding food and weapons, I could find Freitag, and with any luck, my friends, before sundown.

I got up off the deck and checked my boat’s fuel gauge. There was about three quarters of a tank. That seemed like a lot, though I had no idea how much fuel the tank held or how far the pontoon boat could go on three quarters of a tank. It had to be enough to scoot up and down my fifteen-mile section of the river many times, at least.

As I stood there by the boat’s wheel, I noticed four, no, five bloated bodies drifting down river toward me. One wore a brilliantly colored turquoise skirt that spread out around her body in an enormous flowery semi-circle with graying white stamens. Two were children, and their skin wasn’t infected white. They were Hispanic and they floated face down in the water, with black halos of hair spread around them.

Another woman, a big girl, was of no consequence to me because I noticed at that moment that one of the flotilla was man with a broad, hairy back, and he was wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts, which, if I cinched up the belt, would fit me well enough.

Thinking back to my fight with the alpha in the boathouse who’d made the bad choice of victoriously dangling his manhood where I could grab it, a pair of risk-free shorts suddenly moved to the top of the necessity list.

A quick glance around the pontoon boat’s deck was enough to inventory my resources. The big red toolbox, of course, and several dozen seat cushions that I’m sure doubled as floatation devices. Two life preservers and a rescue hook, the kind found by nearly every swimming pool in the country. It was a twelve-foot-long aluminum tube with a rounded, body-sized hook at the end, perfect for fishing infected corpses out of the river. But what really caught my eye were a couple of things I hadn’t noticed and hadn’t thought to look for previously. Just below the cushions on several of the bench seats were latches, giving away the presence of storage bins beneath. At least one of those storage bins had to be a cooler. And a cooler might contain something edible, or at least a warm drinkable.

My stomach concurred with a growl.

First things first. I grabbed the aluminum hook pole and went to the port side of the boat and waited for the corpse with the shorts to float near enough by. I didn’t have to wait more than a minute.

I reached out into the river with the hook and looped it around the big man’s torso on the first try. When I tugged it to bring him closer, the hook compressed his bloated gut and his head—face down in the river—bobbed up on an eruption of bubbles, stinking gases of rotting flesh that floated my way on the wind and nearly made me vomit.

The shorts were risk-free, but there was still a price to be paid.

Hand over hand, I pulled the body toward the boat until I had it pressed up against the hull. In a quick move, I unhooked the man and dropped my pole to the deck as I got down to my knees and grasped, with no small measure of disgust, one of his ankles. I didn’t need my prize drifting off.

A slippery film covered the man’s skin, and if not for the thick hair on his leg, I might have lost my grip on his ankle.

I pulled his foot up onto the flat deck of the boat as I reached for his other. I didn’t have any desire to have the spewing end of the man in my boat. Pulling and tugging, I had to get the legs up onto the deck if I was going to have any hope of reaching the shorts. As I was working, the man’s belly pressed against the hull and several more puffs of gaseous rot belched out.

Remaining naked was starting to have some real appeal.

But I was close.

One more tug put the man’s thighs flat on the deck the belt within reach. In a most unflattering way, I straddled the man’s thighs—feeling the slime from his skin on my legs—to hold him down. I bent forward to reach down around his belly so that I could loosen the belt, then unbutton and unzip the shorts. I thought I heard giggles across the water, but I ignored them.

More gas seeped out of the man’s mouth and nose and bubbled up past his ears, giving me a full dose of the stink.

The shorts came loose and I pulled them off
hurriedly, somehow getting the underwear as well. For some reason, that really grossed me out. I jumped up off of the man, and as he slid back into the water, his dirty underwear fell out of the shorts and onto my feet.

I yelped and shook my foot to get them off as I hopped around the deck in utter disgust, making a complete fool of myself.

When they finally flew free and landed in the water just past the edge of the deck, I again had attention for something besides the violation I felt at having the wet underwear plastered to my skin. That’s when I heard the laughter of the three girls coming from the other boat.

The white skin on my face flushed red, but I held my hard-won shorts over my head in triumph.

I spent a good while back in the river after that, scrubbing my skin and the shorts, and wishing for soap. A little bleach would have been desirable as well.

Finally, the shorts were hanging over a rail to dry in the morning sunshine, and I was drying in the sun as well when I recalled the storage bins underneath the boat’s seats.

Cooler time!

Sliding a wide bench cushion over, I flipped a latch and opened the storage bin hidden underneath. Fins, snorkels, masks, inflatable water toys, ski ropes—nothing of immediate interest to me. I stepped across the width of the deck, pushed the cushions out of the way on another bench, flipped the latch, and lifted the lid.

“Oh, my God!” It smelled so bad that I fell back on the deck trying to get away from it. It was just as bad as the smell that belched out of the hairy man’s mouth. That was the cooler. It had been packed with meats, cheeses, ice, and other perishable items in apparent preparation for an afternoon picnic on the water that never happened. Now, the cooler was a sealed container in which all of those items had been rotting in the heat.

Standing up and leaning over the rail, I spit into the water to get the remnants of the spoiled taste out of my mouth. As I was doing that, it occurred to me that in that cooler, in the putrid, warm liquid, there had to be bottles of beer or soda. What kind of picnic could it have been without those? And where else would such items go but inside the cooler? That, of course, led to the next question. What about the dry goods, napkins, paper plates, cups, and chips? Those things wouldn’t be in the cooler. I looked around at the seats and sure enough, there were two more storage bins. It turned out that one of those contained some tools, more rope, and an extra anchor. The second, however, held just what I was looking for: a dull paring knife, three big bags of chips, unopened jars of pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup, and cookies—manna from Heaven, if there ever was such a thing.

Resisting the urge to tear into the packages like an animal, I started with a bag of corn chips, and with deliberate slowness, sat in the sun on one of the cushioned benches and ate them, one by one. I had no desire to barf everything back up after rushing too quickly to shove it all down my throat.

After eating the equivalent of a few handfuls of the chips, I felt, for the moment, full, and I let myself bake for a while in the heat. And for the second time that morning, I let my thoughts of adversity slip away, and I felt good.

Deciding that a soda, a beer, or any liquid that that wasn’t river water would make a tasty second course, I walked over to the cooler that held the rotting meats, held my breath, and kicked it open with my foot. The lid leaned up against the side rail and I stepped toward the bow of the boat, upwind from the cooler. Jumping up on one of the benches across the deck, I was able to see down inside from a breathable distance. The cooler was a disgusting cauldron of rot, but in the liquid, among congealed blobs of gray disgustoid goo, floated dozens of canned sodas and bottled beers. Warm or not, one of those beers would taste so good. Holding my breath, I bounded across the deck, fished out a can and a few bottles and made my getaway.

Back near the bow, I leaned over edge of the boat once again and spent a good, long while washing the can, the bottles, and my hands until I could no longer smell the cooler’s stench on my skin. After that, I went back to my place in the sun and took my time drinking one of the beers and eating some cookies.

Calories in my blood unloaded in my brain and bounced around my synapses as the taste of alcohol brought with it the most vivid memories of my last normal night. My buddies and I were at a yuppie sports bar in the suburbs with dozens of enormous flat screen televisions and waitresses that wore tight blouses and skirts too short to take out in public. They always smiled sweetly with clean, white teeth though often their eyes were just as dead as the Whites I’d seen, betraying the lie of how they loathed serving the likes of me. Because one thing they knew, just as I did, was that I was no better than they were. I didn’t have a high-paying high tech job with a big future. We were all commuters, traveling, serially to the same unsatisfying future, the same dead end.

I was so hammered when I went home that night. I was so hammered after I drank that tequila the next morning and saw what the Ogre had done to the Harpy in the middle of their living room.

Oh, why weren’t those memories gone yet?

I tossed the beer bottle, still half full, into the river.

Wearing only my
warm, dry cargo shorts, I piloted the pontoon boat slowly up the center of the river, keeping a watchful eye on the banks and paying special attention to docks and boathouses. Occasional Whites were lurking in the shade to escape the midday heat, or were on their haunches on the banks, sipping from the river.

Much of the northern bank was undeveloped
, an unbroken forest of oaks and cedars. The southern bank had regularly spaced houses, mostly of the opulent variety, and they slowly passed, turning mundane in their ubiquity as the sun crested in the sky. When I finally spotted Sarah Mansfield’s familiar ski boat, it was docked in front of a Mediterranean villa-style house with stucco walls, a terracotta roof, and dying landscaping. Taking care to keep myself concealed between the pontoon boat’s bench seats, I motored on past without seeing a single living soul.

When I was a quarter of
a mile upriver, I killed the engine. Drifting back down and staying out of direct sight of the house would be safest. Unfortunately, guiding the clumsy pontoon boat with a single canoe paddle was a nearly futile endeavor for which I had no patience. When I came within thirty or forty yards of the dock, I dropped anchor and waited for it to catch on something as it dragged on the river bottom. The line straightened out, pulled taut, and the boat jerked to a stop, causing me to fall down as my momentum carried me forward on the suddenly motionless deck.

Secure enough for me.

I’d expected to have trouble pulling the anchor back up when I returned to the boat later on, but I’d deal with that problem when I got there. I patted my pocket to make sure the paring knife, my only weapon, was there. It was. Canoe time. Pulling the canoe’s bow line, I took the loop off of the cleat on the deck, tugged it up beside my pontoon boat, and very carefully put a foot in.

Well, carefully didn’t work out so well. With nothing to secure it to the boat, the canoe slipped away from the pontoon boat and my legs split wide apart as I lost my balance and fell into the river. The stupidity of it pissed me off, and I immediately feared losing the canoe. The canoe had real value in a world of hydrophobic cannibals.

When I got my head back above water and got my bearings, the canoe was skating across the water and getting caught in the current. I swam hard after it, figuring I could catch it in four or five strokes. I was wrong. It took closer to ten or twelve, and I was gasping for breath when I finally reached out of the water to grab it. My fingertips, instead of catching the edge of the canoe, barely caressed the top edge of the hull and slipped down the curved side, pushing it further away from me.

Crap!

When I did finally get a solid grip on the hull, before I could congratulate myself, the bow bonked into something solid. I looked up. It was the dock in front of the house. So much for a stealthy approach. If Freitag was in there, she knew I was out here.

The water wasn’t more than four feet deep, so close to the shore, so I stood up slowly and was able to see a good part of the lawn and the roof of the house. I tied off the canoe and considered how to proceed. Why not just get out of the water, do my best not to look like a threat, and stroll up the house? I’d lost maybe ten pounds since Freitag last saw me. I was bald, scabby, and nearly naked. She probably wouldn’t recognize me. In front of the mirror in Sarah Mansfield’s bathroom,
I
barely recognized me.

I hauled myself out of the water and up onto the dock in front of the canoe. The ski boat was tied off on the opposite side of the dock, and I eyed it with a detective’s curiosity as I straightened up. No blood, nor any evidence of violence. That was good. Neither were there supplies of any sort. The keys were also gone. It was just an empty ski boat waiting on the lake for its owner to take it out for a sunny day on the water.

Satisfied that I’d learned all I could from the ski boat, I turned to head up the dock.

A rifle cracked and shattered the shoreline’s bucolic facade.

The canoe’s aluminum hull rang from the impact.

Before I even had time to think about it, I was doing some combination of jumping and falling back into the greenish water beside the dock.

I let my momentum carry me down to the bottom under less than three feet and struggled through the duckweed as I put some underwater distance between me and the dock.

It was so hard to remember to see myself through the lens of others’ prejudices. It didn’t matter whether Freitag did or did not recognize me. It didn’t matter that I was acting like a normal, unarmed person. I was White. And she hated anyone with the virus. In my anger over losing the canoe, I had overlooked that.

When I popped my head back out of the water nearly twenty feet from where I’d splashed into the river, I heard another gunshot and saw a burst of splinters on the surface of the dock. Two more gunshots followed in rapid succession. Freitag thought I was hiding in the water under the dock and was hoping to kill me with little more than luck.

Out of sight from the house, I let the current carry me down and I waded in chest-deep water toward the trees and undergrowth that bordered the property. In the frighteningly close distance, I heard the howls of the infected. They’d heard the shots too. They were coming.

Stupid Freitag.
Before the infected got their hungry hands on her, I needed to get to her and find out what she did with my friends.

I climbed up out of the water and took the paring knife with its meager four-inch blade out of my pocket and looked at it. As a weapon, it was better than nothing, but not by much. Dragging my thumb over the edge, I tried to gauge how sharp it was. Eh, sharp enough for a stabbing weapon, but I had doubts about what I could cut with it. Skin, maybe. Jeans? No way.

I was in the undergrowth about twenty feet from the shore when I saw the first of the infected run off of the street in front of the house and start searching the house’s walls for a way in. Choosing to wait and watch, to know what I was getting myself into instead of walking in stupidly—again—I spotted at least twenty of the infected. Half of those lollygagged around the yard, seemingly unable to figure out what to do next. Some of them looked around, searching for the tasty source of the sound they’d heard. A handful were working their way around the perimeter of the house, touching walls and pushing on windows. Whether Smart Ones, or just smart enough to know that houses sometimes contained food, those Whites were my biggest concern at the moment.

A heavily vined trellis was anchored at right angles around the front corner of what I guessed was the garage. The flat roof of the garage appeared to have some sort of patio on it. That looked to me like a way in.

As quietly as I could, I crept through the bushes, trying my best to avoid thorny vines and prickly pears. My appreciation for shoes was growing by leaps and bounds. When I came out of the trees, I caught the apathetic attention of several of the Whites on that side of the house, but they quickly deduced that I was one of them and left me alone.

I crossed the yard quickly, in case Freitag was stupid enough to take another shot at me with so many Whites so close. But no bullets came. I arrived at the trellis and examined the vines. There were no thorns. Good. The wood framework looked strong enough to support my weight. My biggest worry would be that of getting shot when I topped the wall and made for the doors that I presumed were on the other side of the patio. With any luck, Freitag was still looking for my floating body out of the back of the house.

Glancing left and then right, I figured I had enough space to get to the top of the trellis before I caught too much attention from the lackadaisical Whites on my side of the house. So I climbed. I was halfway up when I heard a noise below me.

Dammit!

An infected woman was doing her best to follow me. I moved up as quickly as I could. When I reached the top, I peeked over.

I saw patio furniture, big potted plants, and a gas grill. On the wall of the house, there were two sets of French doors and a couple of large windows. There were no blinds or curtains on the windows, and I was able to see into the room beyond. Not a single thing moved. Assuming that Freitag was still alone, there was no way she could cover all sides of the house on her own.

With a few quick heaves, I threw my legs up over the edge of the wall and got my feet planted before looking back down. The woman on the trellis was just a few feet below and another White was half way up.

Ugh.

Grizzly duty was up next. I glanced back toward the house to make sure that I wouldn’t be surprised from behind. I waited for the infected woman to arrive.

As soon as her head popped up over the wall, I jammed the paring knife into and out of her eye in one rapid motion. She stiffened, and at the same time seemed to open both of her hands to lunge at me. But her balance was gone and she was falling. Whether it was the knife thrust or the fall that killed her didn’t matter to me. It didn’t even matter whether she was dead. She hit the ground and didn’t move. That was all I really cared about.

To my right, the other White climber gave her a look and seemed stuck in a moment of indecision over whether to go back down and feed, or to keep climbing for the real prize: tasty, uninfected flesh.

He chose wrong.

When his head came up over the edge of the wall, I stabbed the blade hard into his temple, a move that was a mistake. As the White lost his grip and started to fall, my paring knife wedged in his skull, and I was barely able to keep hold of it as he fell. But I did. The infected man hit the ground near the woman’s expanding pool of blood. That problem was solved.

Infected were running toward the two downed Whites by that time, and I faded back toward the French doors to let them all forget about me while they dined. I bounded lightly across the patio and came to a stop with one hand on a doorknob, peeking into the windows. Still only furniture and fixtures in the room. Nothing moved. I turned the knob.

Locked!

Damn.

Well, no big deal. I hurried over and checked the other doors. Locked as well.

To break the glass would be a mistake. The sound would alert Freitag. I couldn’t have that.

Checking further, both windows were locked as well.

Hmm.

Quietly making my way over to the edge of the patio that overlooked the front of the garage, I stealthily peeked around the corner of the wall and quickly pulled my head back. No infected eyes on the front lawn spotted me, but neither did I see anything that looked like an alternative way to get into the house.

Across the patio again, I peeked around the back wall on the side of the house that faced the river and saw something that might work. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was my best chance of getting into the house quietly.

A sloped roof extended out from the back side of the house and the eaves overhead provided a path to a smaller patio further down on the back of the house.

As I jumped up onto the wall, my thoughts went, of course, to a hundred movies I’d seen in which the hero was running across a tile roof, only to have the tiles slip loose before sending him on a perilous skid to the edge of the roof.

Perhaps the guys who built this house had seen the same movies, learned a lesson, and had done a good job gluing these down.

I tested the stability of the first roof tile as I very, very slowly put my weight on it.

It held.

Away I went, slowly, so slowly, taking great care to check my footing with each forward step.

Before I knew it, I’d uneventfully arrived at the other patio. I hopped down to the concrete floor and made no sound at all beyond that of my bare feet slapping the cement.

A quick, deep breath and a quick look around were all I afforded myself before I checked the glass French door. It was open. I smiled.

I found myself in what appeared to be the master bedroom. It was decorated in a rustic Mediterranean style to match the house’s exterior. Lightly closing the glass door behind me, I listened, but heard nothing of importance. The infected weren’t inside the house. They didn’t know how to mask their victorious feelings with silence.

On the
dark wooden floor, bare feet were a stealthy advantage, and I crossed the room noiselessly. The bedroom door opened with the slightest of creaks and I looked out into a hallway that opened at the end to the large sitting room I’d seen from the patio. In the house’s silence, every buffet of the wind against the windows, every yowl of a White outside was magnified. My heartbeat pounded its drum and my breathing shouted in my ears.

Trusting in the solidity of the floor, I stepped out into the hall. No boards sounded a complaint under my weight. Still, I stepped slowly, letting the weight of each of my steps come down gently on the bare wood. Off to my right, a wrought iron rail looked over a curving stairway that led down to the first floor. I suspected that the shots had been fired from downstairs, but I checked another upstairs bedroom and a couple of bathrooms to see if anyone was on the upper floor before I proceeded down.

The bottom of the stairs was hidden from view as I started around the curve at the top, so I stayed close to the wall, knife at the ready for Freitag, or anyone she might be with, or any infected. I expected Whites to be noisy, but assumptions kept getting me in trouble.