Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (6 page)

It was a security nightmare.

I tried the knob on the back door but it was locked.

I crept down near the end of the house to a sliding glass door. It didn’t fit with the architectural style and had probably
been installed in later years. Good for me. I could break in through one of those with ease, something I’d learned as a kid when I’d broken into the house of a kid from school through just such a door to steal all of his Nintendo games.

It’s easy to guess how that turned out.

The sliding door was locked, so I jimmied my machete into a tiny gap near the door’s handle and jiggled as I wedged the blade through. It didn’t take much time and didn’t make much noise. The lock compliantly popped loose. Before sliding it open, I took a moment to look and listen.

Still and quiet, my new favorite state
of things.

I slowly
moved the door on its track, opening up the house and allowing stale, hot air, damp with the sticky smell of death, to flow over me. I felt my gorge rise.

The sliding door
had opened to a bedroom. A corpse lay rotting, tangled in blood stained sheets, horrid black bite wounds on its arms and neck. Maggots crawled through wounds and across the skin giving the impression of movement, a grotesque living being. My grip tightened on my pistol. At the foot of the bed lay another body with a good portion of its skull gone. A brownish splatter of drips and lumps decorated the far wall. It was easy to see what had happened, a couple, one infected, one not. The White attacked the one on the bed, who’d waited a few bites too long before using the gun on her lover.

I stepped around a blackish spot on the floor and tried not to taste the fetid air.
Leaning over the bed, I pried at the rigor mortis grip of the decaying fingers on the revolver. There was a disgusting sound as I yanked it free. I scooted away from the bed as quickly as three steps would take me. In a dresser, I found a flimsy shirt in the top drawer. I wrapped the shirt around the pistol before dropping it into my backpack. I had no desire to get that repulsive stink in my bag. I wiped my hands on another shirt and tossed it on the corpse.

Loo
king up from that task, it occurred to me that the bedroom door was open. And it occurred to me that I’d been in the house less than five minutes and I’d already fucked up. I should have cleared the house before I went to work scavenging the revolver. Once again, luck had carried me through a mistake. I went to the bedroom door and banged on the wall with the butt of my pistol and said, “Hey.”

I waited and listened
, but heard no other sounds from inside the house.

I repeated the exercise and waited.

No Whites came.

“Anyone in here? If there’s anyone in here, just say so, and I’ll leave. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to raid your pantry. That is
, unless you’re using it.” I felt stupid for saying all that. Was there a protocol for breaking into someone’s house if they were inside, hiding from people that looked just like me? I’d have to give that some thought.

After waiting for
what seemed like a long enough time, I went back to search through the bedroom with the two corpses. In spite of the time I spent killing brain cells and memories as I wasted away the last years of my youth, I did read a lot. I did listen. And I learned. The world was a fountain of trivia and one bit of trivia that found a home in my brain was that though the number of guns per capita in America was on a steady rise, the number of gun owners wasn’t. Simple math led to the conclusion: if the two corpses had one gun, they might very well have had another. And they’d likely have bullets stashed somewhere nearby.

I checked the nightstand—n
othing there but some lubricating gels and adult toys. I avoided touching any of that as I rummaged. I went back over to the dresser and went through it drawer by drawer. Again, nothing of real value to me, though I did nick a couple pairs of socks. I held up a lacy black thong to the light coming through the back door and imagined what they would look like wrapped tightly over Steph’s hips. But one glance at the body by my feet turned my stomach and reminded me that I didn’t have time to indulge those kinds of fantasies. In the guy’s underwear drawer, I paused. The size was right, but I felt really creeped out at the thought of wearing a dead man’s skivvies. I left them. A trip to Walmart was in my future.

The closet was next
, so I stepped over and slid the door to the side. The hanger rack was packed with clothes and the floor was covered with shoes, mostly women’s. The shelf above the hanger bar held a dozen boxes, and I started pulling those down one by one and checking the contents as quietly as I could; a box of photographs, keepsakes, more photos, ski goggles, gloves.

Bingo!

One of the boxes contained a cleaning kit and three smaller boxes of ammunition. I couldn’t imagine anything else of value that might be in the other boxes so I stashed the goodies in my bag, slipped the only clean pillowcase off of its pillow and headed for the hallway.

Another small bedroom proved empty, though I did take two pillowcases from the bed in there. Pillowcases
, it turned out, were awfully handy to have around.

The end of the hall opened up to a living room, stylishly done
, with black lacquer furniture over natural wood flooring. The front door was open, though. Splinters of wood from the mangled doorjamb lay on the floor. I was immediately back on alert and stared into the shadows, looking, listening.

It took several long moments of
waiting there at the end of the hall, convincing myself that I was alone in the house, before I crossed over the creaky floor. The kitchen had a window that opened to the front of the house and I leaned over the sink to get a good look out—no dangers, nothing of immediate interest. There was movement just down and across the street. Several Whites were at the side of the road, in the deep shadows under the oaks, squatting and tearing at something. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what.

I turned my attention to an open door
in the wall at the end of the cupboard and was dismayed. Spilling out of it and covering the floor were packages of cereal and crackers, torn open and empty, as though wild animals had been here already. That was the pantry.

Careful to push the crunchy wrappers out of the way rather than step on them with my boots, I moved
across the kitchen. It was messy. Every single box of any kind of food was ripped open. Every jar was broken. At least the canned goods were spared. That was something positive.

I started filling one of the pillowcases with cans and had it nearly half full when a loud rumble from outside startled me. I dropped the pillowcase
, jumped to my feet, and pulled my weapons out, ready for a fight. In the moment it took to do that, I realized that the rumble was the ski boat’s engine.

I raced through the house, across the living room, down the hall,
and over the corpse on the floor of the bedroom. I bounded out through the sliding glass door. The sound of the boat’s engine revved loudly.

“What the fuck?”

Freitag had the boat in the center of the river, throttled all the way forward as she circled, bouncing over waves, and making a noisy, tempting spectacle for every white within a mile.

Is
she trying to warn me?

I looked left. I looked right. There were no
Whites in the yard. None on the dock. I heard them, though. They were yelping. They were running. They were excited and they were coming, coming toward the sound of the boat in the river right in front of me.

I ran at a full sprint to
ward the dock and waved.

What had frightened her off?

My boots stomped noisily across the boards over the water and I stopped as I got to the edge, waving, and yelling “Hey! Hey!” She still had plenty of time to pick me up.

A
s I came to a stop, she looked at me, with an unreadable expression. She made one more full throttle circle, and as she straightened the boat out, extended her arm toward me, flipped a middle finger, and let it stand brazenly as she headed up the river.

Then it occurred to me
that she was calling the infected down to my location and she was abandoning me.

Fucking Dalhover was right!

I screamed across the water at the top of my lungs, “Vindictive cunt!”

And as the reverberation of my scream faded from my ears with the receding sound of the motor, the clomping of running feet on wooden planks told me that I’d just fucked up
in royal fashion. But that’s as far as that thought went, because a body slammed me from behind, knocking the wind out of me as I splashed into the cold green water with a hysterical, hairless monkey on my back.

Bodies pressed me down through the cold water and into the muddy bottom. Hands tore at my clothes and grasped for my throat. Panicked arms and legs flailed. There were more than two of us in the water. My face was being pressed into the mud. My feet were above me. I squirmed.

Air!

I needed air so desperately!

I spun,
wrestled, and lost my sense of which way was up. All reason was gone. Only mindless panic and my need for air were left. My feet hit something solid and I kicked out hard. My head broke the surface for half a second and I gasped as hands clawed at my face to drag me back down and lift themselves out.

I was back under.

Elbows, knees, fingers, and teeth. However many of us there were, we were all struggling at a primal level to use one another’s bodies to get our own heads above the water.

Escape or die!

I caught a second half-breath and then I was under again.

With some oxygen in my blood
, I was able to form a thought. I pulled a knee to my chest and kicked out hard against a body as hands held firmly to my ankle. Paddling mightily with my hands, I got my head above water for another breath. The hands on my ankle wouldn’t release, so I kicked, and kicked, and kicked with my free leg, hitting flesh and bone. Then I was away from the grasping hands.

Underwater, I swam
hard for a few strokes and got another face full of mud as my teeth ground against a stone buried in the muck. I pulled my feet under and pushed to shoot my head above water again, just barely. I sucked as much air as I could before the weight of my equipment dragged me back down.

Once under, I
danced my feet around to find the bottom as I sank. It took several long seconds of sinking. The water was way too deep to stand. I didn’t know where the shore was. I needed to get several long breaths or I was going to drown. In desperation, I shed my rifle, my pistol, and my machete and pushed off of the bottom again to get my head above water.

With most of the weight off, I was able to get a good breath
, but my vest, still full of magazines, dragged me back under.

It was harder to get rid of. I bounced off the bottom again, breathed
, and saw that I was twenty feet off the end of the pier and drifting slowly downstream. A dozen Whites were on the shore, focused on me and following me down.

Dragged under again by the weight of my vest,
I struggled to peel it away. I pushed to the surface for another breath. It took longer to get up through the column of water above me. The river was getting deeper. If I didn’t shed the vest on this breath, I might not get another chance. Back underwater, I tore at the vest with frantic hands until finally, it fell away. I kicked and struggled back up again until my head broke the surface. Just barely able to keep my face out of the water, I gulped precious air. The boots felt like weights on my feet. I caught a deep breath and floated for a moment on my belly as I ran my hands over my body, looking for anything I could shed. My belt and holster went next. All I had left were a t-shirt, pants, and boots. I’d have to suffer with the boots. Laced half way up to my knees, there’d be no way to shed those and not drown in the attempt. But with all the other weight off, I was able to swim.

A
good fifty feet away from the last White still struggling—barely—in the water off of the end of the dock, I treaded water and floated with the current. Those on the shore still followed. A scream from the other shore caught my attention, and I saw that I had at least a dozen fans over there, as well.

“Shit.”

Getting out of the river would prove difficult. Sure, I was just as much of a White as all those on shore, but they couldn’t see enough of me to know that. All they did know was that I sounded like food when I went into the river. Most of those on shore didn’t see that part, though. Most of them knew only that the other infected were very interested in having me for a meal, and that was a good enough recommendation for them.

Spinning myself in a slow circle
as I treaded water and drifted with the current, I looked for boathouses or docks with boats attached. Unfortunately, every dock in sight was empty. It occurred to me then that Freitag was a lot sneakier than I’d given her credit for. She wasn’t being picky about finding the most peaceful place to lay Harvey Marin to rest, she was looking for the most promising place to lay
me
to rest. She’d been looking for the most Whites—all those shadows I thought I’d seen moving under the trees on the banks—and the absence of nearby boats that I might escape with.

Bitch!

I continued kicking my legs to keep my head out of the water.

Was Freitag punishing me for
what I did to Harvey, or was it that she just hated Whites? But the question of whether her motive was hate or revenge was moot at the moment. All of that would come later. At the moment, it promised to be another long night.

At least
I was well rested.

I needed to fin
d a way to elude my pursuers and round up a boat to take me back up the river. Before the sun set again, I’d give Freitag a harsh lesson in what hate and revenge looked like all wrapped up in the black heart of somebody who knew more about rage and hate than she ever would.

T
he water didn’t seem cold anymore.

An expanse of smooth
, grass-covered acres flowed down from a plantation-style house on the south bank to the edge of the water. An eight-foot black metal fence bordered the estate and presented an opportunity for me to get my feet back on dry land without having to fight off a bunch of hungry brutes while I did so. Dog paddling silently in the direction of the empty dock, I’d soon be fading back into the anonymity of my Whiteness while I sought out a boat.

When I got within a dozen feet
of the dock, my feet got tangled in the ubiquitous duck grass growing up from the shallow parts of the river bottom. It wrapped around my feet like grasping hands, forcing me to yank, tear, and struggle to get within reach of a ladder attached to the dock. But once one hand grasped solidly onto a rung, I relaxed, floated, and breathed.

The hardest part was done.

Twenty or thirty infected were at the fence a few hundred feet up the bank, straining to push their arms and legs through the narrow gaps between the metal bars. But their heads and shoulders just wouldn’t follow. In their frustration, they hollered, yelped, and growled.

I crawled up the ladder and stood on the dock’s wide boards
, letting the river water drain out of my clothes. Across the wide lawn, in the bushes, and under the trees, I didn’t see anything moving except for swaying branches. The place looked safe, for the moment at least. No safety could be counted on to last for long.

The house sat on the inside bank of a bend in the river, a spectacular piece of property with a beautiful view
, but a view of water, trees, and a mountain, few houses, and no boat docks, aside from the one I stood on.

What to do?
Go through the house and possibly confront ravenously hungry Whites trapped inside, and me with no weapon in hand with which to dispose of them? But there’d most certainly be something I could use for a weapon inside.

No. Best to avoid
the infected altogether.

I’d need to find a gate and go out to the street and work my way down,
find that boat and get my ass back upriver to Sarah Mansfield’s house. Suspicious when Freitag returned without me, Dalhover would still be awake and probably in the video room. He’d see me out on the river and open the door for me to come in through the boathouse.

That was the solution that would most expeditiously put me back within the safety of Miss Mansfield’s walls. No need to go all Rambo on any Whites in the house only to find a butter knife as a weapon. No, I’d pushed my luck too far already.
I needed to get home.

My anger about what Freitag did
to me had boiled down to a simmer by then. I didn’t plan to kill her, not anymore. I would evict her and her buddy, Harris, though, and fuck ‘em both anyway.

T
he Whites who were still trying to figure out how to squeeze themselves through the fence howled louder when I started out across the lawn toward the far side of the house. They’d forget me soon enough.

I didn’t pass to
o close to the house when I came around the corner. No need to let myself get ambushed by anything that might be lurking there. Luckily, there was nothing, only a gate near where the fence abutted the side of the house. A tug on a pull-down latch was enough to free me back out into the world.

White, silent, and anonymous.

But weaponless too.

I looked back at the big house.

No! Just get a boat. Go home. No need to be macho about it.

The house’s front yard
was as large as the back and was bordered with stands of wild oaks, cedar, and thorny vines. Going through the woods to get to the neighbor’s house would prove noisy, messy, and slow. It would be better to walk out to the end of the property and follow the street down to the next house on the street.

So I walked over an expanse of grass.

The sound of the river frogs faded as I got further and further from the water, leaving the cicadas, crickets, and grackles to mask most other sounds. Distant gunshots and the simian vocalizations of the infected found their way through the nighttime cacophony. There were plenty nearby. The topography on this shore of the river was more conducive to development. Pricey houses were built on expensive lots amongst the trees for miles in every direction. Lots of houses meant lots of people. Lots of people meant lots of infected.

At the edge of the
crumbly asphalt, I looked up the street. It roughly followed the curve of the river that flowed past on the opposite side of the estate-sized lots. Just a short distance down the street, I saw mailboxes in the darkness, most on the far side of the street but at least two on the river side of the road. I walked toward them.

The first house I passe
d on the far side of the street looked to have been ransacked. The front door was open. Various items normally found inside the house littered the front porch and yard. There were empty food packages, couch cushions, and a couple of chairs from a dining room set. Slowing my gait, I looked over the mess. It wasn’t right. At least, it wasn’t right for a mess left by normal human scavengers.

The food packaging shouldn’t have been torn op
en and scattered. Not to say that all people are naturally tidy—they aren’t—but with the danger presented by all the lingering infected, sitting outside on the front lawn of any house was a fatally bad idea for any hungry looter.

The alternative explanation made frightening sense. The infected had figured out how to raid pantries.
That jibed well with what I’d seen in the house where I’d left Harvey. The infected had found and were eating up our food supply! That dramatically changed the situation for the survivors. Simply hiding and running was not a sustainable strategy by itself. We’d need to get very busy hoarding every container of preserved food we could find.

With extra urgency, I hustled
down the street toward the first mailbox and driveway on the river side of the street. Once there, I jogged down and around the house, across a large stone pool deck, and then over the grass. As I arrived at the boathouse, my heart sank. It was empty. I couldn’t see a dock at the next house over because of the river’s curve, but the dock attached to the boathouse allowed for me to walk out over the river and get a better look.

Thank God!

Two houses down, I spotted a ski boat tied to a neighbor’s dock.

It took a few minutes to jog back across the property and get back onto the street. Without slowing
, I turned left and started around the curve, looking for the mailbox that would mark the driveway to the property I sought.

T
he sound of Whites close by gave me pause. I slowed to a walk to hide the sound of my footfalls. I slowed my breathing to make it easier to hear what was going on around me.

The road revealed itself by degrees as I made my way around the curve
.

I stopped.

What the fuck is that?