Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (8 page)

Bluto stepped back from the
open doorway and Nancy pointed one of her long crab-leg fingers into the house. Without hesitation, the free Whites ran inside and the sounds of rummaging and breaking echoed out. We pack mules stood in the shade and waited. None in the train seemed the least bit curious about what was going on in the house, or even curious about anything going on anywhere around them. They all stood and stared, awaiting instructions with empty eyes and closed mouths. Mimicking them, I tried to appear just as mentally passive and disinterested.

The first
of the free Whites to come back out of the house was the one that I’d seen Nancy beating the night before for bringing back handfuls of silverware. He dropped to his knees in front of her, and unfortunately for him, raised two more handfuls of silverware. Oops.

Bubbles giggled
like a warbling turkey.

Nancy’s furious bony hands slapped at the silverware and sent it clinking across the patio before going to work at slapping the White in the face five or six times. Once her anger was
vented, she leaned over, spent a good while whispering through cupped hands into White’s ear before pointing back into the house. He hurried inside. For a moment of personal entertainment, I speculated about what he might come back with next.

While the Whites rummaged for no reason that I could see,
Bubbles started to prance around the patio floor on her toes. Unfazed by the dancing, Nancy glared through the back door and into the dimness inside. Bluto watched Bubbles.

As discreetly as I could, I looked over the scattered flatware: f
orks, spoons, butter knives, standard dinner sets, nothing that would serve as a practical weapon. Still, anything was better than nothing, or so I told myself, not considering what consequences might attach themselves to a weapon found on my person. The nearest butter knife was eight or nine feet away. I’d likely not get a chance to sneak it into my bag, but patience could work in my favor.

Another White came out of the house. This one had handfuls of blue glass beads, the kind that might be at the bottom of
clear glass vase with fake flowers. Nancy recognized the shiny beads for what they were and was none too shy to express her displeasure in the usual way.

After his beating, the White hurried back into the house.

The third White came out with the good stuff. Nancy made a frighteningly joyous shriek. Bubbles giggled her way over and the two of them squatted on the patio with animated fingers. The White dropped the booty at their feet and Nancy pulled his head close to her mouth and whispered into his ear. He hustled back inside.

Nancy and Bubbles
set themselves to work, sorting with meticulous attention through the necklaces, earrings, watches, and rings, tossing some aside, trying on others, but building a little pile of keepers between them.

After t
he free Whites had ransacked the house to Nancy’s satisfaction, they squatted near the back wall of the patio and squabbled over a box of baking powder, a half can of Crisco, and some saltines, all of which was disappearing bite by bite into their mouths.

When it was all done, Nancy took her time in distributing the pieces between the backpac
ks and shopping bags that we pack mules carried.

When it was all done, w
e moved to the next house down the street and repeated the process. And that was the whole of my existence for the coming days as my energy level drained away in the incessant heat and my body withered from lack of food. I struggled each day to carry my growing load. I daydreamed about a chance to eat. I glared hatred at Nancy and Bubbles when they weren’t looking. Once, as I was glaring, I got caught. My reward for that was few a bony-handed slaps from Nancy.

No matter what I observed
, no matter what I imagined, I couldn’t find a way to escape. The hopelessness of slavery started to leech away my resolve to be free.

It was late in the afternoon
on some day that I’d lost count of. The tuition that I was paying to learn about the infected had surpassed what I could afford. Having successfully dehumanized my captors in my mind, I was having a little trouble accepting that the brain-dead bunch of them still had me in their control. I was slipping into dark anger at myself, a state of mind that wouldn’t help me get free.

We were working
our way up a gently sloping street away from the river. Wrinkly Nancy was leading us across an intersection with a four-way stop when the sound of a nearby gunshot to our left locked all of us in our tracks and turned every head. All sounds were stifled in our throats. Ever-busy fingers froze in anticipation. All eyes were wide. All faces pointed in one direction.

These
infected knew exactly what food sounded like.

A second
gunshot sent two of the free Whites running up the street and started a third’s feet to shuffling like a toddler’s pee pee dance. Only Bluto and the stupid one with the silverware fixation stayed put, eyes on Nancy and Bubbles, waiting for instructions.

Bubbles pranced up
to Nancy and leaned her ear close to Nancy’s mouth. Nancy cupped her hands and whispered. Bubbles whispered back. Nancy told her one more thing and then threw a bony finger into the direction from which the gunshots had echoed. Bluto, the dumb one, and the pee pee dancer bolted up the street. Big, round Bubbles bounded in deer leaps after them.

Nancy yanked our chain and
we followed at a fast walk.

We’d passed a d
ozen or so widely spaced houses, set back in the trees, when Nancy turned off of the asphalt and guided us toward a house where a dozen Whites were dragging their hands across the brick walls, pressing their faces to the windows, tripping over the shrubs, and stomping down the dead flowers.

Bluto and
the dumb White were standing near the curb, looking around at the other houses, but mostly following the movement of Whites around this particular house.

Nancy took only a moment to assess the situation. She led us across the yard
and found a suitable tree at a corner of the garage, looped the length of chain around it, and padlocked our tether in place.

I was stuck. Again.

If the Whites’ instincts were right, there were normal people inside with at least one gun, a gun they shouldn’t have fired. Outside, there were more than a dozen Whites, two of those were Smart Ones, and four could follow verbal commands.

While the feral Whites continued their futile activity around the house, Nancy gathered up her pets and took her time in getting in the ear of each
to provide instructions. She had formulated a plan of attack and she was capable of conveying that plan, or so it appeared.

That was
not good.

It was so not good.

I racked my brain for a way to warn the people inside the house. They were in more trouble than they knew. I couldn’t yell a warning; to do so would be certain death for me with no guarantee that those inside would hear it, let alone heed it.

Crap!

I shuffled my feet and urged my chain gang buddies around to the side of the house, out of sight of Nancy, Bubbles, and the other Whites who were starting to gather in a group near the front door. I looked for a window that I could tap on, but there was nothing. We were on the outer wall of the garage, but not far from a privacy fence made of vertical cedar boards, and not far from the gate in that fence.

With my free hand,
I gripped the chain and pulled hard, trying to take out all of the slack. The Whites connected to me didn’t protest. They let me have my way, apparently willing to accept anyone’s rule. But in the end, the three- and four-foot lengths of chain between each of us didn’t add up to enough chain for me to lay a hand on the latch that opened the gate into the backyard.

I deflated
, but immediately chastised myself. Could I just quit when normal people’s lives were at stake?

Giving them a
warning was something that couldn’t be done. Pushing the limit of my imagination in that moment produced only unworkable ideas.

I turned my
thoughts to escape. I put my bag down, knowing that Nancy would beat me if she saw that I had. But she was preoccupied. I put my effort back into tugging at the loop of chain around my neck and tried vainly to pull it up over my head. It was just too damned tight.

I knelt down and started rummaging through my shopping bag, looking for anything that might be used to pick the lock, not that I had a
ny experience with that. In fact, it was likely an endeavor borne from the desperation of having no other ideas.

A crash at the front of the house alerted me that Bluto had busted
open the front door.

The Whites howled.

Time was up.

Escape was still on the table
, but helping those folks in the house was not. That option had just expired.

There was
a muffled scream from inside.

Lots of noise.

More gunfire. One shot. Two shots. Three.

More yelling, words I couldn’t make out.

A sound from the back of the house caught my attention.

More gunfire from inside
.

W
ithout warning, the cedar gate swung open. A girl and boy, late teens or early twenties rushed out, eyes wide with the surprise of seeing my surprised white face right in front of them.

The
girl swerved to her right as she passed, keeping out of my arms’ reach. The guy, slow to react, lost his balance, teetered through a few running steps as he passed me, and tripped over his own feet, landing on his face. The girl was immediately bent over beside him, tugging his shirt to get him back to his feet. With the boy suddenly lying so close, the chain gang froze, as virus-slowed brains processed the good fortune that landed so very suddenly within reach. Before they could surge toward the boy, the girl’s eyes went wide with terror. Movement just past me inside the gate caught her attention.

I interpreted th
e fear as a warning and snapped my head around to look. A White with arms swimming in the air and mouth agape was running through.

Withou
t a thought, I stuck a foot in front of the crazed White. He tripped and tumbled into a disoriented pile. While he was trying to figure out which way was up, I charged toward him. Too bad for him, he looked up just in time to catch my boot, in a full kick, right under his jaw. Bone cracked, blood gushed, and the White’s face dropped to the dirt.

One of the Whites in the chain gang gasped loudly.

I realized as I watched blood flow from every orifice of the White’s head that it was one of the free Whites, one of Nancy’s pets.

Good. O
ne down.

I
cast a guilty look over my shoulder to be sure that neither Nancy nor Bubbles had witnessed my crime. They hadn’t. The girl who’d just gotten the boy to his feet, looked at me, confused and surprised. I gave her a nod, and she turned and ran into the trees between the houses with the boy right behind.

A moment later, anothe
r White ran out of the backyard, but totally missed the fact that the boy and girl had run off into the woods. The White instead ran to the corner of the garage and made a left turn into the front yard.

There was another gunshot from inside and some more noise
, and then the only sounds I heard were elated yowls. The Whites had won. They were starting their feast on the dead. At least none of us pack mules would be on the menu for dinner. I’d live through another night.

As the sun sank behind the trees and the light started to fade, I wondered how many people had died in the house. Neither Nancy nor Bubbles had come out to check on us. I guessed that they were still gorging themselves on uninfected flesh or had passed out with bloated bellies into tryptophan-induced comas for the night.

Maybe Nancy and Bubbles were dead. Perhaps they’d been shot in their greedy rush to feed. But that was just wishful thinking. Well, sort of. If Nancy never came out of the house with the keys, I’d die of thirst chained to a tree.

Wrinkly Nancy certainly would have been smart enough to let the other Whites go in first and catch the bullets. As much as it pained me to think of them that way, Nancy and Bubbles were Smart Ones. They not only knew how to survive, but they were smart enough to organize other Whites to do their irrational bidding, and to domesticate draft animals, namely me. They were far from stupid.

The free White that I’d kicked in the face never moved again. He breathed for a long time through bubbly red snot and cracked teeth but eventually that petered out to lifelessness. Unfortunately for the Whites on the chain, I was the only one able to reach the downed man, which meant that none of them could get their teeth into his cooling flesh. That pissed them off for a long time, their agitation expressed in the bloody sores on their necks from the chain that yanked each of them back whenever they lunged for a bite. But all of that had come to a stop as they eventually accepted that it was going to be another long, hungry night under a buzzing blanket of feasting mosquitoes and crawling fire ants.

Through our boredom and hunger, the chain gang had slowly shifted into a semi-circle of prisoners, squatting in the sandy dirt off of the corner of the garage. The one chained closest to the front of our line, closest to the tree, now the skinniest of us, had passed out and was lying with his head on the tree roots. Whether he was asleep or something worse, I couldn’t tell. I just knew that my fate, if I didn’t find a way to free myself soon, was down the road that he was near the end of.

I thought about the people who had been inside the house. I wondered whether they’d still be alive if Nancy, Bubbles, and Bluto hadn’t been drawn in by the sound of their gunshots. The Whites who were already at the house when we arrived seemed perplexed. Walls, windows, and doors, taken for granted by normal people, were hard problems to solve for the infected mind. But for the Smart Ones, they were easy—too easy.

I crossed and uncrossed my legs while I looked up at the sky and watched it slowly grow dark. Little pin pricks of yellow and white sparkle grew out of the deepening blue. Several solar powered landscape accent lights flicked on around the dead garden. Something bigger than your average bug scratched my knee. I brushed it away without looking.

Thinking back to Jeff Aubrey’s calculations, the thought of just staying alive for twelve months hadn’t seemed like that difficult of a thing. I mean, it both did and it didn’t. But I thought at the time, what a hopeful thing his idea was, that just hiding out from a bunch of stupid cannibals would be enough to save at least some of humanity. It would save enough of us to start again.

There was a future out there for mankind that I wanted to hope would be better than our past. But the Smart Ones, they were changing those equations. The very real possibility existed that they might eventually root out all of the normal people left. If that happened, mankind would go extinct when the last of the Whites died of stupidity.

Again, something touched my knee and I swatted it away, irritated that some bug, fat on the carcasses of the dead, had the audacity to interrupt my thoughts.

Were those thoughts an indication that I was falling into one of my black moods, or was it a logical conclusion, inevitable, given the evidence? I thought it all through a few more times, and the more I thought, the clearer it became that the infected were a big problem, but the Smart Ones were
the
problem.

Stupid Whites could be avoided. Smart Whites though, might kill us all.

Again, the scratching on my knee. I looked down, expecting to see a fat tree roach or one of those creepy-ass fuzzy tarantulas on my knee. Instead, I saw a twig, and at the other end of the twig was a human hand. The infected man two mules up in the chain gang was poking me.

What the fuck, dude
?!
I glared at him but of course, said nothing.

The White looked down at the dirt.

I leaned my head back on my shoulders and looked back up in the sky.

Scratching on my knee again.

I jerked my head up and gave the White with the stick my meanest leave-me-the-fuck-alone look. He looked down at the dirt in front of him.

Irritating fucker!

I huffed to emphasize my anger and to discourage him from bothering me again. Instead of scratching me again with his twig, though, he tapped the twig on the ground in front of him.

I turned my body so that my knee would be out of his reach, looked out across the wide lawn and empty street, and tried to think of a way to get myself out of my predicament. But scratching on my arm flared my anger and I jerked around, ready to fight.

The guy with the twig very slowly, very deliberately, averted his eyes. Somewhere between my angry thoughts of pummeling him with my fists, it occurred to me to follow his gaze down.

Holy shit!

There in the dirt at the end of his twig was written the word
Hello
.