Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (19 page)

With each step down, the sound of rapid breathing from below became more distinct. My muscles were tense and my palms were sweating. It could be a White’s breathing that I heard, or it could be a fear-filled Freitag.

What came into view was the back of a petite dark-haired woman in camouflaged fatigues, holding an assault rifle in her hands, pointing it at the back of the house. It
was
Freitag!

Step lightly. Stay quiet.

The Whites were not in the house. If they were, she wouldn’t be standing out in the open at the bottom of the stairs.

Just four steps to go, nearly in arm’s reach, and Freitag was getting nervous. She hurried a glance at the kitchen off to her right.

Maybe it’s a sixth sense that people feel when someone is watching them that gives their spines the tingles. Maybe in Freitag’s case, it was just nervousness about the infected outside, coupled with an ominous sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. Either way, when I took another silent step down, her senses triggered and she looked back up over her shoulder like she expected something to be there. What she saw was a gaunt, bald creeper. She screamed as she tried to bring her rifle around to shoot me.

I pounced, blocked the rifle barrel toward the wall, and landed on her as she crumbled under my meager weight.

The gun went off, destroying the silence inside the house. We hit the floor with me on top, and I quickly wrestled myself into a position where I had her arms pinned under my legs with one hand pressing down on her forehead to hold her head against the floor. I pressed the warm metal of my dull blade against her throat.

Her eyes were wide with terror, but not recognition.

In a harsh whisper, I asked, “Are you alone?”

That did it.

She recognized my voice and her mouth fell open in a sad, silent wail. Tears flowed. The price for her sins had come due, and her murderer was sitting on her chest, or so she feared. It was a thought worth indulging, but I had more important problems to resolve than bleeding her stupid ass out all over that nice wooden floor.

“Do not scream,” I hissed. “Are there any others in the house?”

She was going catatonic, apparently focused entirely on her impending death.

“I’m not going to kill you. You deserve it, but I’m not going to. Where are my friends?”

Her continued silence made me realize that there weren’t others in the house. If assistance was available, she would have screamed for it already. She was alone. I pressed the point of the knife into her throat until it broke the skin. She needed some pain to bring her back into the moment. “If you don’t start fucking telling me where my friends are, I’m going to ram this knife through your throat and leave you for the infected to eat alive. Do you fucking hear me?”

“Don’t,” she pleaded.

“Talk!”

“I…”

“You’d better come up with a lot more than one fuckin’ syllable at a time.” I sat up and took my palm off of her forehead and let off a little of the pressure of the blade on her throat. “You’re a worthless bitch, but I’m not a murderer. At least I don’t plan to be. I just want to know where my friends are and what the fuck you did to them.”

“I didn’t…”

“I will kill you if I think you’re lying to me.”

Freitag looked to her right out across the floor and through the windows. Whites were on the back lawn and she could see them as well as I.

“They’ll be in here soon enough, and they’re not going to be coming after me when they come in. I’m tired of asking. Talk!”

Freitag looked back up at me and then looked away, “I didn’t leave you on purpose. I was in danger. I…”

“Don’t.” I pressed the knife against her throat again. “I don’t give a shit what you say about anything except my questions. Do you understand that? Your bullshit tears don’t mean anything to me. You are going to tell me what happened to my friends and then I’m going to leave, and if you’re lucky, I’ll leave you a gun to protect yourself with. Then I never want to see you again. There’s a whole big fuckin’ world out there. I live on this river now. Go be somewhere else. You got it?”

We went upstairs where eyes peeping in windows wouldn’t be able to see us and whose owners, with any luck, might eventually wander off. Once we got to the master bedroom, she pointed at the pillow-laden bed and asked, “Are you going to rape me?”

I just shook my head and instructed her to sit on the edge of the bed.

The room was large, like all the room in all the mansions, on all the million dollar lots on the river. I took up a position beside a dresser, well away from her, but where I could keep an eye on her and see the dock out across the back lawn. Unfortunately, the canoe, holed by one of Freitag’s misplaced shots, had sunk. I had her pistol sitting on the dresser along with an extra magazine. Two full magazines for the M16 lay beside those. The rifle, I kept pointed at Freitag. “Here’s the way this is going to work. You’ll tell me everything I need to know. If I’m satisfied that your story isn’t completely bullshit, I’ll leave you a weapon. The more cooperative you are and the more truthful I think you are, the more bullets I’ll leave you. As for the boats, I’m taking the ski boat and the pontoon boat I came in. You can have the canoe.”

Freitag barely nodded. She hadn’t seen yet that she’d sunk the canoe with her bad shooting.

I raised the rifle with one hand and pointed to the pistol with the other. “Which one?”

“I can have either one?”

“Makes no difference to me.”

“I’ll take the M16.”

“Fine.” I removed the magazine from the M16, tucked the pistol into my belt, picked up one of the M16’s magazines and started removing the bullets, lining them up neatly on the edge of the dresser. “Speak.”

“Do you want to know what happened at Sarah Mansfield’s house?”

“No. Scratch that. First tell me about Murphy.”

Freitag shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

“How is he?”

“Steph said he was going to be okay.”

“And how was he when you ditched him?”

“I didn’t ditch him.”

“How is he?”

“He was a little out of it. But he was walking and talking. I think he’ll be fine.”

I tossed Freitag a bullet. “I watched the archived video at the house. I saw what happened when you guys got overrun. So just tell me what happened after you left together in the ski boat.”

“Everybody was hating on me.”

I huffed to show my impatience.

Freitag glared at me. “I know you think I’m some kind of evil bitch, but it’s not like that. You need to understand why I had to do it.”

I rolled my eyes.

“They all blamed me for what happened to you.”

Duh!

“They didn’t say much about it. Mostly they just gave me dirty looks when they thought I wasn’t looking. Sergeant Dalhover, though, he gave me dirty looks all the time. He frightened me.”

I repressed a smile about that.

“Once we were all in the boat and Murphy realized that you weren’t with us… Well, he got very angry. I thought he was going to hurt me. Steph and Mandi calmed him down and made him sit in the back with Russell. The way he looked at me after that, I think he was going to do something.”

I tossed her another bullet and started emptying another magazine. So far, the bullshit sounded true enough.

“See, I didn’t have a choice.”

“Back to the facts, please.”

Freitag looked down at her feet. “Murphy told us about a safe house and that we should go there or something.”

I asked, “The one that he and I had been to before?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“And that’s where you went?”

Freitag nodded.

“Describe it to me.”

Freitag did and went into enough detail that she removed any doubts I had about her having been there. I tossed her several bullets.

Her eyes filled with fake tears again and her sad mouth said, “When everybody was inside, I was supposed to go out to the boat and bring the supplies inside. Steph had laid the boat keys on a counter in the kitchen and I took them when no one was looking.”

I shook my head.

Defiant, Freitag hissed, “You said you wanted to know.”

“Go on.”

“Once I was back on the boat, I…don’t you understand? I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t stay with them. They all hated me.”

“Go on.”

“I just started up the boat and left.”

“They didn’t try to stop you?”

“I don’t think they knew I was gone until it was too late. I didn’t see them come out of the house.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “And you didn’t run the boat around in circles for ten minutes to draw in every White in the neighborhood?”

Freitag looked at her feet.

“Well?”

“I didn’t do that.”

“You did it to me.”

Still looking at her feet, Freitag started to say something, but didn’t. She started to cry again. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t believe that. If anything, she was sorry that nobody believed her bullshit. She was sorry that she got caught. She wasn’t sorry she ditched me and called in the infected to kill me. “Did you circle the boat and draw in the infected when you ditched my friends?”

She shook her head.

I didn’t know whether to believe that or not. The only way I was going to know would be to head back down the river to the safe house and see for myself. At least I knew where to look. I hoped. How deep could Freitag’s vindictiveness run? I brushed the rest of the free bullets onto the floor. One magazine was still full, and I left it on the dresser as I headed for the door with both weapons.

“You said you’d leave the rifle!”

I stopped and turned. “I will. You have the bullets. I’m leaving your M16 on the grass in the backyard.”

“You asshole! You promised.” She jumped to her feet.

I gave her the coldest look I could pull together, and with the pistol I gestured for her to sit back down. “Here’s how that’s going to work. I’m going to leave this rifle out there in the grass. I’m going to get in the ski boat and get the pontoon boat and then use one to tow the other down the river. When I’m heading back down, I’ll get the attention of all of your friends outside and get them to follow me along on the bank. Once you see them go, run out and grab your M16. It won’t be far.”

“But what if some are still out there?”

“Be careful.”

“I hate you.”

“That’s nice. Listen, when you put the magazine in your rifle and you get back inside, be really careful about choosing to shoot it. Gunshots are like dinner bells to them. Oh, and don’t be such a duplicitous cunt if you find some other group of survivors. We were trying to help you guys when you came to our compound. We were ready to take you in. The whole deal with Harvey and Murphy was fucked up, but like Dalhover said, shit happens. So grow the fuck up.” I turned and headed out the door.

She stood up, following and rattling on about something I didn’t care to hear.

I hollered back up to her. “I’m not listening to you. Don’t follow me. If I don’t see you standing in the window up here when I go across the backyard, I’m not leaving the gun on the lawn. Got it? And I’m taking a couple of the pillowcases full of food that I saw in the kitchen. I scavenged that, and you stole it. Oh, and you shot a hole in your new canoe, so fuck you.”

It is always a surprise to me when everything goes as planned.

So when I left the M16 in the yard, picked up the ski boat, tied it to the stern of the pontoon boat, and still managed to get the anchor free, all without getting shot at again by Freitag, I was surprised. And since she didn’t take any more shots at me, I fulfilled my promise to her and pulled the pontoon boat close to shore to get the attention of the infected around the house.

The Whites weren’t as cooperative as I’d hoped they would be, so I took a few shots with the pistol. After all, why not kill a few if I was going to use some bullets? It turns out that shooting moving targets from a distance with a pistol is a whole lot harder than it looks on TV.

What a fuckin’ surprise.

I didn’t hit any of them, but I did get their attention, after which they were more than happy to tromp through the woods on the bank and keep pace with me as I slowly motored down river. After half a mile, I pulled the pontoon boat away from the shore and watched them fade into the distance behind. Apropos to the situation, I gave them the finger for my own amusement.

Looking south and east, I saw billows of heavy, gray smoke several miles distant. It had to be coming from the Mt. Bonnell area. Those fires of my making had grown. More of Austin, perhaps the rest of it, was going to burn. That saddened me a little, but I rationalized away the guilt with an argument of inevitability. All of Texas was a dry tinderbox awaiting a spark. I hoped that a good number of the naked horde was roasting in the conflagration beneath that smoke. If that was the case, then the bomb hadn’t been a total waste.

My stomach rumbled
, letting me know that the cookies and beer from earlier were digested and it was ready for a refill. Oh, and I had two pillowcases full of other items. My personal stash of food had, for the moment, grown into a big enough hoard to keep me fed for two or three weeks.

It was time to kill the pontoon boat’s engine and drift. I was anxious to get back to my friends, to see Murphy’s grin and Steph’s smile. Even seeing Russell, Dalhover, and Mandi would do me good. But I knew where they were. At least I hoped that my confidence in my ability to tell the difference between Freitag’s lies and half-truths wasn’t misplaced. But the last thing I wanted to do was motor up to the dock in front of the safe house in broad daylight and alert every White on that side of the river to my presence. It would be better to arrive after dark and to drift silently in, as Murphy and I had done in returning to Sarah Mansfield’s house after that first trip out.

Given all of that, there was no point in running the engine to get down the river. If I drifted, I would likely arrive at the safe house after dark, and in the process, I’d conserve the fuel in the boat’s tanks. Conservation of our limited resources was something that all of us would need to start giving serious thought to, or we’d waste our way right back into the Stone Age and bemoan our stupidity when we arrived.

Flipping open one of the dry food storage bins, I carefully dumped the contents of one of the pillowcases in and took an eyeball inventory of the items as they fell. When a blue rectangular can with a big graphic of greasy pink meat fell past, I perked up. Spam! The lowliest of meats suddenly seemed to me to be the most delectable of entrees. It was high in fat and high in salt, two things my body sorely needed. A can of green beans was going to be my side dish, and along with those, another bottle beer would go quite nicely.

Both the Spam and green bean cans were designed to require no can opener, and I popped them open along with my beer open and sat in the shade on a cushioned bench with a plastic fork in my hand and a faint, but satisfied smile on my face. Things were looking up.

There’s something about sitting on a gently rocking boat in cold water on a hot summer day that is supremely relaxing. Birds were in the trees on the banks, some singing, some squawking. Sure, there were occasional gunshots, usually far in the distance, but I was learning to tune those out the same way I used to tune out traffic noise from the highway that ran right past my apartment.

I slowly filled my stomach and savored each salty bite as it went down. Even the beer was kind enough not to bring any unwanted memories with its flavor.

Eventually my lazy thoughts turned to more serious matters, and the problem of the Smart Ones, King Joel, and Mark. Murder Plan A, my bomb, had failed. I’d had such high hopes for that. Ratios of gasoline vapor to oxygen, barometric pressure, wind speed, and even humidity had likely played into the poor result. Perhaps on another day with even slightly different conditions, it might have worked exactly as planned and rid west Austin of its infestation of human roaches.

The failure was demoralizing, but it couldn’t be the end of my efforts.

The thunder of an oncoming brainstorm started me thinking.

The snipers with the silencers, the ones that had killed Jerome, had done well for themselves. The number of infected bodies in that intersection was impressive. Surely those guys were all dead now, and their weapons were lying by their corpses, or lying where they left them after getting infected and wandering off, but still, they’d done well while they lasted.

I wasn’t much of a marksman, but I’ll bet Murphy was, and I had no doubt Dalhover could shoot. But bringing Dalhover out on hunting trips among the infected was too dangerous for him. As for Murphy and I, with a little care and a little planning, we could blend in and out of the infected population without any of the Smart Ones ever noticing. Heck, we could follow the naked horde like the Indians used to follow the buffalo herds on the Great Plains and hunt the Smart Ones into extinction.

That brought up the next question: how to identify the Smart Ones. Could we identify them based solely on their behavior? Possibly. And if we made a mistake and killed a dumb one, well, no big loss. They all needed to die eventually. I wondered if night vision goggles or an infrared riflescope would be helpful in sorting out which of the Whites down range was burning cooler than the others. The cooler ones would be the smarter ones. But was the equipment sensitive enough to allow us to tell the difference of a couple of degrees? Probably not. That would leave us with behavior-based identification.

I wondered if Murphy would go along. It would be great, so much safer, to have him as a partner in the venture, but I would go it alone if I had to. I understood the danger posed by my list of targets. I was convinced that it was a matter of life or death for anyone with a normal capacity for thought.

When my pontoon boat drifted around a bend and the faux riverboat came into view, it surprised me. I’d been so lost in my thoughts and plans that I’d lost track of time. Hours had passed, and it was late in the day. I wondered if I’d dozed off without realizing it. Well, no harm done. At the moment, I felt better than I had in many days, and I was on my way home, so to speak.

As I drifted closer to the river boat, I waved and smiled. The girls recognized me and waved back. Good. We needed to talk.

I started the engine on the pontoon boat and made a large U-turn so that the ski boat would be behind the pontoon boat in the current as I navigated up to within ten feet of the tourist boat.

“Hey,” I called over, “I need to anchor here for a bit so that we can talk. Is that cool?”

By this time, all three girls were up on the top deck, curiously watching. It was Amy who answered, “Yes. What happened to your canoe?”

“I traded it in.”

“That looks like your old ski boat.”

“It is.”

“Should I ask about the girl who took it?” Amy’s smile disappeared.

I shrugged. “She’s fine. I mean, she’s got a rifle. She’s got food. She’s in a nice house. And she’s probably got a few extra bruises, but I didn’t shoot her or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s what I’m asking. What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, there’s a long, long story, but at the end, I’m gonna ask you if four of our people can stay here with you guys.”

The younger girls were excited over that. Amy wasn’t. “I think maybe you guys have too much drama for us. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I think we’re past the drama part. Have you got some time to talk?”

Amy looked around in a gesture that seemed to ask if I was kidding about that. So I dropped anchor and secured my boat.

I told the three girls about our group, about our attempt to take in Freitag and the others. I told them about my experience with Mark at the dorm and with the Smart Ones at the hospital. I told them about Nancy and Bubbles and King Monkey Fucker, and I told them that I planned to go out and kill the Smart Ones because that plan, of all the ones I’d schemed since the virus took down civilization, was the most necessary for giving us normal people a chance at rebuilding our old lives. That last part sounded just as corny when I told her.

In the end, she seemed ready to agree. “I’ll be straight up with you, Zed. I get the impression that you’re a good guy, but it seems like you’re a trouble magnet.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“If you want to bring your friends down here, we’ll meet them. I’m not going to make any promises, but we’ll meet them. You just have to be sure that they know before you bring them that we might choose not to let them come aboard.”

“Of course, I understand. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach. I’ll tell you what, though, if it helps with your choice, Murphy and I can keep you guys stocked up with food and other supplies between our hunting trips. It’s safer for us to go ashore than it is for you.”

Amy laughed out loud, “Based on what you’ve told me, I’m not sure about that.”

I laughed too. It was hard to argue, but I did say, “When he and I work together, we’re safe. And you know that even if it’s dangerous for us, it’s a lot more dangerous for you. You know that’s true, right?”

In the end, we agreed that I’d bring everyone by the next day and we’d go from there.