Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (3 page)

“What kind of distraction?” Dalhover asked.

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I answered. “Let’s assume for the moment that I can.”

“That mitigates the risk,” Dalhover agreed.

“Not to Zed!” Steph’s voice jumped up an octave.

Neither Dalhover nor I responded.

Steph shook her head and pointed at the monitor. “I’m not sending Zed over the wall into that unless there’s no other choice.”

Dalhover s
moked the last of his cigarette, stubbed it out on the bottom of his boot, and threw the butt in a trashcan. “By the time there’s no other choice, it’ll be too late. By the time you know that you should’ve killed the Smart One on the rock, it’ll be because there are more Smart Ones out there or because there are too many of them, or because they’ve already figured out a way to attack us. If we’re going to do it, then it’s got to be preemptive. If we move the Humvees to block the gate, then sending Zane over the wall is a necessary step.”

“You’re downright loquacious when the spirit moves you, Dalhover.” I slapped him on the shoulder.

Dalhover looked at me in way that said “Don’t touch me again.” It didn’t look like we were ever going to be best buddies.

“And how will you get over the wall and back in again?” Steph asked.

“We can figure it out,” I responded. “I think the primary question to answer is whether we should do something, not whether we can. We can figure out the how-to later. But you’re the boss. What do you want to do?”

Steph propped up a hard
façade in front of emotions that were starting to frazzle. “Is that what you want to do, Zed? How many times can you roll the dice and win?” Steph took a long breath to collect her thoughts, looked up at me, and spoke. “Let me ask you, if we take the risk…no. Zed, if
you
take the risk, what do we gain?”

I didn’t need time to think about it. I’d already assessed the situation. I knew the answer.
“Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.”

“
So you understand where I’m going with this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Best case
, I go over the wall, kill the Smart One, distract the mob and they move on. We stay here and live happily ever after. Worst case: I get killed. That’s the worst case for me, anyway. But somewhere in the middle, there’s the most likely case.”

“Which is?” Dalhover asked.

I answered, “We get rid of this group, and eventually a larger group shows up, with too many Whites or too many Smart Ones to get rid of. So we bail out and head upriver. The thing is, I don’t doubt that will happen. I just don’t know when. It could be later on today, or next week, or next month.”

“Sounds right,” Dalhover agreed.

“And if more show up this afternoon?” Steph asked. “Is risking your life worth a few more hours of luxury?”

“It’s not about that,” I argued.

“What, then?” she asked.

“Murphy.”

“Murphy?”

Serious and calm, I answered, “Like you said, we don’t know how bad Mu
rphy’s injury really is. If jostling him around on a boat for a couple of hours could put him at more risk, then going over the wall is worth it to me. It’s that simple.”

Steph couldn’t find a good response
, so she remained silent.

“Why?” Dalhover asked unexpectedly.

“Why?” I shot back at Dalhover, more harshly than I wanted to.

Not affected by my emotions, he repeated, “Why?”

“I need to.”

“Why?”

I looked around the room, maybe looking for an escape from the suddenly, uncomfortable question. But the need for secrecy with my motives was a childish remnant of junior high social dramas. I answered, “I would do anything for Murphy.”

“You’d even risk your life?”

I nodded.

“
You’d die for him?”

I thought about it for a second, or pretended to. I knew the answer as soon as it was asked. “Yes.”

Dalhover didn’t take his eyes off of me, but took his time pulling out another cigarette and lighting it. “Why?”

I was getting a little irritated and snapped, “Because Murphy and I would both be dead if it weren’t for each other. He saved my life, more than once. He…” I wanted to say he cared about me. I wanted to say he loved me like a brother
, but those words just couldn’t come out of my mouth.

Dalhover stared at me.

I looked over at Steph. She watched, but was unable or unwilling to intercede.

It took me a minute
for me to put some thoughts together. “Murphy and I work well together. We…care for each other. Murphy will do anything for me. I’ll do anything for him.”

Dalhover nodded, “And what about the rest of us?”

“What are you asking me?”

“How do you feel about the rest of us?”

I spent a few moments looking at Dalhover and thinking about what he and I had been through. “I’ll be straight with you, Dalhover. I don’t like you very much. I know you don’t like me. But I respect you and I don’t think you’d let me down. I don’t think you’d fuck me over. We’ve fought together. I don’t know what makes that mean something, but I know that it makes me think I can trust you.”

Dalhover continued to appraise me as he sucked on his cigarette. “Yeah,
you’re right that I don’t like you, Zane. I think you listen to your balls more than your brains. You make bad choices, but for the right reasons. Somehow it works out for you. You’re lucky, loyal, and brave. Or stupid. I’m not sure which.”

I was taken aback by that mix of compliments and insults
, but I bit back a big “Fuck you.”

“I’ll tell you what
, though,” Dalhover continued, “I’ll stand by your side in a fight. You can take that to the bank. You can trust me. I guaran-God-damn-tee it.”

“Does that mean we’re going steady?” I asked with an empty smile.

Dalhover gave me that stare of his that made it clear that my smart aleck remark wasn’t worth a response. But he did say, “You can call me Top if you want.”

I nodded, “Top.”

“What about me?” Steph asked, effectively masking any extra meaning that I might have read in her face.

With a little of the emptiness gone from my smile, I answered,
“We haven’t been through enough shit together yet.”

Steph spun her chair back toward the monitors
. “You’re such a fifteen-year-old.”

The deck lounger made of heavy ipe wood seemed to have too many sharp corners, but at nearly eight feet long and with widely spaced slats that had supported its now-absent cushion, it would serve its new purpose—that of a ladder—quite well. Dalhover and Specialist Harris carried the lounger down from the pool deck and across Sarah’s back yard toward a part of the wall far from the front gate. They huffed and sweated under their burden—more so Dalhover than burly Harris—but refused my help. My duties in the remaining wee morning hours were yet to come.

As they wrestled the lounger down one of the tiers, I took a moment to double check my kit. My machete, a pistol, and a rifle, of course. Extra ammo, water, and
a few snacks, just in case. A lighter and a knife.

“How long have you been here,
First Sergeant?” Specialist Harris asked.

“A week
, I s’pose,” Dalhover answered.

“Were you guys over at camp Mabry?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“
No need to call me sir,” I told him. “I’m not in the military. I’m just some dude.”

“Habit,” Specialist Harris responded. “We were
at Mabry from the beginning. At least my unit was.”

“You didn’t get deployed?” Dalhover asked.

“No, First Sergeant.”

Dalhover and Specialist Harris wrestled the chair down another tier.

“And the rest of your unit?” Dalhover asked, unnecessarily.

“I’m the only one left.”

“In that firefight we’ve been hearing since yesterday?” Of course the implied question, too uncomfortable to ask on its own, was how the rest of them died.

“No, sir,” Specialist Harris answered. “They all got infected before that.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Apparently the virus got just about everybody. I’m guessing that since you didn’t turn, you’re immune.”

Specialist Harris
turned his melon-sized head and looked at me, but didn’t respond beyond that. I thought he was trying to intimidate me—maybe out of habit—with an ominous silence he’d practiced in the mirror to compliment his thick arms.

“How did the firefight start?” Dalhover asked.

“That’s hard to say, First Sergeant.”

“How’s that?”

“There was shooting from the first night. A little at first. We weren’t under orders to shoot. That’s not what we do. You know? Shooting civilians.” Harris came to a stop on the grass and drilled us both with his flat brown eyes, maybe looking for any sign of judgment from us. There wasn’t any. Dalhover and I held our silence and looked up at him.

“It’s hard to say what happened. Officers were getting the virus
. Guys were getting the virus and falling out. For a week or so, it seemed like we had a new CO every couple of hours.”

Dalhover nodded, knowingly. Perhaps it wasn’t unlike his experience at the hospital.

Harris stroked his fingers across a thick black stubble of beard. “Somewhere in the first few days, more guys just took it upon themselves to preemptively shoot the infected. There were orders or rumors of orders to shoot, but nobody seemed to know for sure. We were designated as a rally point for the refugees and survivors. The survivors. Can you believe it? Man, we were only a couple of days in when word came down. I guess that’s when I knew things were bad. By that time, half my unit had the virus. Most of the rest went in the next couple of days.”

I asked, “Did a lot of civilians come in?”

Harris nodded, “Yes, sir. At first, yes. It slowed to a trickle by the end of the first week and then nobody.”

“How many of you were there?” Dalhover asked.

“Hard to say, Top. The number was always changing. We had partial units coming in and single guys, guys from units that got wiped out. We had civilians coming, and people kept getting infected. There was a time there when we were in control of a couple of buildings and the infected were outside trying to get in, coming at us at all hours of the night and day. I remember it feeling like a siege. There were maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us at that point. I thought it stabilized there. At least, it seemed like it did for a while.”

Dalhover sat down on the lounger, removed his crumpled cigarette
package from his pocket, looked into it through the hole in the top of the pack, and made a sadder face than usual. He took one of the last few out and lit it.

“We were making runs to the ammo bunkers a couple of days ago…”

Dalhover interrupted. “The ammo bunkers. There are two there, right? How full are they?”

“Mostly,” Harris confirmed. “They’re secure and mostly full.”

Dalhover nodded. The gears in his head were turning.

“Our CO pieced together a unit from six of us and sent us out in two armored Humvees to ferry as much of the ammo
and weapons back to our two buildings as we could. We were on a run when we saw them.”

“Them?” I asked. “Naked and bald?
A whole shitload of ‘em?”

Specialist Harris crinkled his brow and nodded. “How did you know?”

“A guess.” I looked over at Dalhover. “The ones we saw out by Dr. Evans’ farm, you think?”

“They are the only naked ones we’ve seen,” Dalhover answered.

I recalled that Mandi said that she’d seen one out at Dr. Evans’ farm with a knife. I asked Harris, “Did you see any of them with weapons?”

“Some.” Specialist Harris nodded as his eyes fell to the ground.

“What kind of weapons?” Dalhover asked.

“Knives. Things they could use for clubs.”

Looking for more information, Dalhover continued, “How many had weapons, do you think?”

“Not many,” Specialist Harris answered. “Maybe ten or twenty.”

I added, “I’m guessing there were thousands of them.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Specialist Harris.

“From over here, it sounded like you killed a lot of them,” I observed.

“Yes, sir
.”

“Did you run out of ammunition or get overrun?”

“We didn’t run out.” Specialist Harris shook his head. “There were too many of them. We were overwhelmed.”

“How many do you think you killed?” Dalhover asked.

“Top, I want to say thousands, but there were so many, it didn’t seem like we killed any. Sorry, that sounds like a contradiction.”

“Not really,” I offered up the small comfort. “If it was that
horde we saw out east of town, there were tens of thousands of them.”

“More
.” Dalhover leaned down to pick up the chair. Harris followed his lead and the two of them carried the deck lounger the remaining distance to the wall in silence. Once there, they laid the chair flat and then propped it on its end against the wall. I stepped up onto the makeshift ladder and climbed halfway up. It was solid enough and it was tall enough.

Dalhover turned to Specialist Harris, “Go back into the house. On
the first floor, not the basement, at the far end of the living room is a laundry room. There’s a linen closet there. Get four or five sheets and bring them back here.”

“Yes, First Sergeant.” Harris turned and hurried back up
to the house.

“My rope?”

Dalhover nodded.

“That’s cool.” I continued my climb to the top of the ladder. “Thro
w it over when I get back, okay?”

“
Are those your balls talking?” Dalhover commented.

“What?”

“Stop thinking with your balls. Use your brains.”

“What, you want me to wait for you guys to make a rope out of the sheets and then climb down that?”

Dalhover, his face serious, nodded.

“I made the jump when we broke in here.” I tried not to let my disdain show.

“That’s a twelve foot drop. With the curved coppice, there’s nothing to grab onto to slow your fall. In the dark, you won’t be able to see what’s on the ground outside. You could drop over the wall and sprain your ankle on a stump, or worse. You’re not gonna bounce on your balls, that’s for sure. Use your head, Zane. Wait for the rope.”

I hated being schooled, but Dalhover was right. To jump off of the wall again had all the hallmarks of a mistake in the making, a mistake I
didn’t have the extra blood to pay for. I climbed down the chair-ladder and sat myself in the grass and waited for Specialist Harris to return. “What do you think of those two?”

Dalhover chose that moment to go back on word rations and pointed his expressionless face at me instead.

“This isn’t the Army anymore. You can talk to me about the other grunts, you know.”

The same look from Dalhover.

I waited, but after a moment it seemed pointless so I said, “I think Freitag hates me.”

Dalhover looked up toward the house then back at me.

“Every time she had the chance when they were taking care of bird man… I mean that guy I injured, she kept giving me hateful looks.”

Dalhover looked down at his watch
, then back up at the house.

“Whatever
.” I huffed, and ran my hands across my vest, belt, and pockets. Another check wouldn’t hurt.

Mistakes are paid for with blood.

After several long, silent minutes, Specialist Harris returned with the sheets. We worked together tying knots in the sheets every couple of feet and then attaching them end to end. When it was done, Dalhover looked at me and nodded. “Good?”

I made a show of
yanking on two of the tied sheets to test the strength and said, “Yep.”

“We won’t stay out here to wait for you. I’ll be keeping an eye out for you on the monitors. We’ll come out and throw the sheets
back over the wall when you’re getting close,” Dalhover told me.

I nodded and said, “But I may be in a hurry
, and…”

Dalhover looked up at the wall
. “You don’t worry about me. If I see you running, I’ll have those sheets over the wall when you get here.”

“But…”

Dalhover looked me hard in the eyes. “Don’t worry about that. You take care of what you need to take care of. You be careful. Don’t take more risks than you need to. Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t worry about the sheet. It’ll be there when you get to this end of the wall.”

Okay.
Dalhover had a way of erasing doubts with his certainty.

“Now get up there, and use the sheets when you go down the other side. We’ll hold it here
.”

I glanced at Specialist Harris. He said,
“We’ve got you.”

I gave them a nod. That was enough. Time to get to work. Time to kill.