Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (11 page)

The night vision goggles gave me an advantage when jogging through the dark streets. I saw most of the Whites up ahead long before I was close enough for them to hear or see me. Nearly all of them were easy to avoid. Some forced me to take a detour. That being said, they might have left me alone, but that was always a gamble. You never knew which anachronistic behavior of someone acting normal would set the Whites off. Running car engines, talking, and shooting guns were the top three that nearly every White recognized as a sign of edible normals. Toting a gun, using a flashlight, or wearing clothes too clean and tidy seemed to be a trigger for a few.

Other Whites, as I’d seen too many times, were something akin to bullies. With their gangs of toadies, they might attack anything—person, animal, or another White—as long as the numbers were in their favor. With me alone, and exhibiting classic prey behavior of running in the dark, I was advertising myself as being in a vulnerable position. I could only hope that any problems that arose could be solved with bluster and blade.

At the northwestern corner of the Capitol grounds, I slowed and stopped behind a burned out car. Across the street, near the corner of the junk-puzzle rampart, partially concealed by low mounds of corpses, I spied Murphy. He was squatting, keeping himself concealed, signaling for me to come.

Straight down the street I saw past the intersection at the southwest corner of the Capitol campus. Whites were in the road on the far side of the Governor’s Mansion from the Capitol grounds. Some were loitering. Some were running toward the fire, which by then had engulfed the old white plantation house. Hundreds of them were howling. More were silent.

Infected voices were crying out from other directions. The Whites were aroused by the noise. The city was coming alive.

I found it interesting that the Whites down there hadn’t ventured onto the streets adjacent to the wall around the Capitol grounds. Did they understand that to be a killing zone? Were they all capable of learning?

Matters of concern.

I scanned down the length of the wall, letting my gaze linger on the deer stands where shortly before guards had watched. All the deer stands nearby were empty. To me, that seemed exactly the kind of move a shorthanded military commander would make when he believed he had an advantage in intelligence over his enemy. He’d sacrificed strength at the perimeter positions where no threats existed in order to fortify himself where the danger did exist—the growing horde of Whites around the Governor’s Mansion.

By virtue of them still being alive, the men inside must have understood the absolute necessity of preventing a breach in the walls. A breach would lead unavoidably to them being overrun and killed.

That being said, I also knew that any commander smart enough to still be alive would be smart enough to always watch his flanks. So though he’d moved his strength to the southwest corner of the Capitol complex, he most certainly had eyes watching the other walls.

I sprinted across the street and slid to a stop next to Murphy. I whispered, “We in?”

He nodded and noiselessly pulled back a flap of tin, creating a gap in the wall wide enough for me to slip through.

I was more than pleased to emerge on the other side of the wall into a hedge of ragged bushes, with a car on one side and a dumpster a little ways to the left, both components of the wall. Murphy squeezed in beside me and slowly let the tin flap spring back into place.

I sneaked forward to get a glimpse down the length of the inside of the wall. Whereas it had a smooth front, necessary to prevent the infected from climbing it, the back was a hodge-podge of all the things of various sizes that had been used to construct it.

I looked carefully at the dark windows of the Capitol building. I saw nothing there. But that didn’t mean there was no one inside looking back.

Murphy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed along a row of trees headed toward the buried annex behind the Capitol.

I nodded and whispered, “Ready to run?”

“Dude,” Murphy grabbed my shoulder as I started to stand and pulled me back down, “put your gun in your hands so you’re carrying it like a guard. Jump up real quick like, and we’ll walk together along the wall, back that way.”

“Ah,” I smiled. “In case somebody inside sees us. In the dark, they’ll think we’re a couple of them.”

“Ready, genius?” Murphy asked.

We got to our feet and walked, making a show of looking at the wall, pointing, and pausing.

“What do you see down there?” Murphy asked, nodding his head back toward the southwest corner of the grounds.

Looking back as we walked, I said, “I see at least a dozen dudes with guns, but with the trees and stuff in the way, I can’t tell for sure.”

“Look again.” Murphy nodded more emphatically.

I looked back and shrugged. “Dudes with guns? What do you see?”

“No helicopters.”

I stopped and turned to stare for a second. Damn. “Maybe they’re on the lawn on the
other
side.”

Murphy shrugged and moved on. “Maybe they aren’t here.” He went on to mutter, “Maybe we should get the fuck out of here the way we came in.”

“We’re here now.”

“You know what else?” Murphy asked.

Sarcastically, I said, “I love guessing but why don’t you just tell me.”

“No bodies.”

That put a stop to my sarcasm. I snapped my head around as I scanned the grounds. Murphy was right. No bodies. No bones. None of the usual detritus left when the dead had been scavenged for all that was edible. I said, “I guess they cleaned the place up when they moved in.”

From where we were, off to the west side of the Capitol building, we headed across the grass toward the rear. We passed through a cluster of brass sculptures—children frolicking on the grass. It made me wonder how long it would be before that scene became a reality again. Past the sculptures, we rounded a tall hedge and came to the edge of the spacious plaza that covered the underground office complex.

There, between two long rows of skylights, were parked two helicopters.

Murphy nudged me roughly with his elbow, and all but pushed me in a new direction as he quickened his steps.

I was already hurrying as I turned my head to see the danger.

We came to a stop behind a small square building built to house the elevators that Capitol employees rode up from down below.

“What?” I asked as I noticed chips out of the concrete wall. Bullets had hit it. Brownish stains not completely washed away by all the rains told me that some of those bullets had found their mark.

Nodding back in the direction we’d been going, as he looked at the darkness on the backside of the Capitol, Murphy said, “Three guys are over there smoking.”

“Fuck,” I chastised myself. I hadn’t seen them.

He peeked around the corner of the building and pointed. “Right there, you can barely see them past the row of skylights. By that stairwell.”

He leaned back and I took a quick look around the corner. Sure enough, there they were, glowing green in the night vision goggles with bright points of starlight shining from their lit cigarettes. “Got ‘em. What are you thinking?”

Murphy walked to the other side of the little elevator building and looked in the other direction. “I think if those guys are together, it’s because they’re bored of standing around by themselves and looking at the back of the wall.”

Seeing where Murphy was going with that line of thought, I said, “You think something’s not guarded right now.”

Murphy nodded.

We walked side by side across a long, wide piece of empty plaza to a small elevator building that mirrored the one we’d just been hiding behind. The whole plaza was built that way, one half a mirror image of the other.

I glanced back at the smokers more than once. I saw them looking at us in longer and longer glances, but after each glance, they apparently satisfied whatever curiosity or suspicion they had about us and they went back to their conversation and cigarettes. From a distance in the dark, Murphy and I did look like them.

We made a left turn at the elevator building and walked together toward another small house-like structure, the entrance to one of the stairways that led down into the office warrens. It stood on the opposite side of the plaza from where the three guards were killing time. Like its counterpart where the three men loitered, this one was set back into a square concrete alcove, presumably to protect those coming and going, at least momentarily, from any rain that might be falling, with space to open and close umbrellas.

With no more than idle curiosity from the guards, we arrived at the alcove. Hidden from view from nearly every direction, I tried the solid metal door to the stairs while Murphy kept lookout behind us.

Locked.

Damn.

I tried the door again, jiggling it quietly.

Damn.

“Locked?” Murphy asked.

I sighed.

“Try it again,” he said.

Shaking my head, I said, “Why?” I jiggled it again anyway.

“What’s the plan now?” he asked as he peeked out around the wall.

“I—”

The door clicked inside and swung open.

I tripped over my feet while stepping out of the way, and caught myself on the door frame halfway to hitting the ground.

Looking down at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, a guy in a half-assed military uniform stared.

Pointing, and angrily waggling his finger, the guy in the doorway said, “You dumbasses. Go back to the front wall.” Then his face changed. He knew I didn’t look right, but for some reason he wasn’t making the logical leap to what the color of my skin implied about me. Maybe it was the moonlight that threw him off.

I tried to get my feet beneath me while not knowing what to say back to him.

“Move dumbasses,” he ordered, waggling his finger again. He looked away from me and eyed Murphy as the expression on his face changed. Something was clicking in his brain.

I said, “No habla de Spanish.”

“What?” The guy looked at me again, with his lip cocked up in an Elvis sneer, and he shook his head. “You stupid?”

With his attention focused on stupid me, the guy didn’t see Murphy swing his fist. The punch threw his head back as he crumbled and rolled backwards down the stairs.

I rushed inside, hurrying down the stairs after the tumbling asshole. As the guy hit the first landing, I pounced on top of him, pressing my hand against his mouth and putting my knee over his throat.

The door above clicked shut, and Murphy hustled down the stairs, stopping beside me.

“Nice punch,” I said, looking up. “He’s out.”

Interrogation seemed like the best option. Why not? We had the guy. We couldn’t leave him in the stairwell. We wanted answers, and he surely knew more about what was going on at the Capitol than we did.

With little effort, Murphy lifted the guy and threw him over his shoulder.

From a tour I’d taken a few years back I knew the annex was full of offices, conference rooms, hearing rooms, and plenty of open spaces where the light flowed in from the skylights above to make the subterranean space more palatable. I’m thinking now that a Capitol tour for a twenty-something guy sounds like a pretty suck way to spend a Saturday. But hey, it was free. Me and my buddies had been drinking since before noon. Damn near anything is entertaining when you’re hammered especially when every ornament and every architectural feature looks like a phallus. Swear to God.

Taking advantage of the perspective, we even took turns posing for photos by a particular design on the terrazzo floor that looked like a giant pink penis. That was funny as hell until a security guard came to investigate.

There. That’s my excuse for voluntarily killing a Saturday in a government building.

Thankfully, I hadn’t been so wasted that I forgot the whole day. Well, parts later that evening never resurfaced in my memory. That’s why I never figured out which one of my buddies barfed on my couch.

As it was, I had a pretty good understanding of the Capitol Annex layout.

I led the way downstairs. Shoes, eyeglasses, and the remnants of cell phones lay scattered on the stairs along with random crap out of a girl’s purse or some guy’s briefcase. It was clear to me the Whites had caught and killed people in the stairwell. The bodies were gone but the evidence remained.

Three stories underground, I opened the stairwell door into darkness. The feeble moonlight coming in through the skylights over the hallway didn’t provide sufficient light. Only the night vision goggles allowed me to see anything clearly.

“Anything out there?” Murphy whispered as he bumped into me from behind.

“Not sure,” I said, scanning the darkness a couple hundred yards to my left where the long wide underground hall terminated at the foot of the Capitol building. To my right, an equal distance away at the bottom of the round atrium, three floors below ground level, sat one of the helicopters. All around on the lowest floor, in the hall and under the balconies, were stacked boxes that had a familiar look. 

“You need to see this,” I said, glancing back at Murphy.

He leaned around the edge of the open door. “Anybody down there?”

Nodding, I said, “I don’t see any movement, but there’s a light way down there past all the boxes.”

Murphy peeked and then stepped back inside the stairwell, hefting the unconscious dude to keep him from slipping off his shoulder. “How’d they get the helicopter down there?”

I stepped into the stairwell with Murphy, letting the door close quietly behind me. “The only way they could do it is if some pilot with big balls flew down through the circular atrium. Seems kind of crazy but I guess it’s secure.”

“What were those boxes?”

“I think ammo and weapons,” I said. “Those looked like boxes we saw at Camp Mabry in the bunkers. I think they’re using this floor for an ammo dump.”

Murphy pushed the door open and leaned out far enough to get a good look. He came back into the stairwell. “Why store all that ammo here? Why are they setting up house at the Capitol?”

I shrugged. “Why did a bunch of assholes in a helicopter shoot at us and sink our boat? Why did they build a stupid fort around the Capitol building? Fuck, Murphy, I don’t know?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” Murphy pursed his lips and asked, “What’s the plan then? You want me to haul this dumbass back upstairs and ditch him?”

I took a moment to think about it. “Let’s go up a floor. With the helicopter and the ammunition down there, guys are bound to be down here sooner or later. The second floor seems to me like the best place to grab some state senator’s office and have a talk with this guy when he comes around.”