Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (12 page)

Bodies, reeking and rotting, were still on the floor on level two. At least what was left of them. The floors were cluttered. I guessed the second level wasn’t being used by anyone. We found an unlocked door, walked right through the outer meeting room and commandeered the inner office.

Using a flashlight pointed at the ceiling for illumination, I looked at our prisoner. With all of the network cable Murphy and I could pull from the computers around the office, we had him wrapped tightly in a rolling office chair. He’d come awake as we were tying him up, and he wasn’t happy.

“What’s the deal here?” I asked him.

The guy spit some blood onto the floor and sniffled up some of what had been draining from his nose. He didn’t answer my question. Instead he asked me, in jumbled speech that was hard to follow, “Why you don’t tell me who you are and what the hell you’re up to?”

Murphy moved to punch him in the face but stopped before doing it.

The guy flinched and turned his head.

Murphy chuckled. “You macho boys crack me up.”

“Fuck you,” said the guy.

Murphy punched him in the face.

The guy’s head snapped back and more blood flowed.

I glared at Murphy.

The guy laughed. “The thing I wondered ‘bout you White Skins is…” the guy seemed stuck on finding the next word. “…Do you know? Stupid you are?”

I wanted to hit the guy myself, but I wasn’t sure if he even understood what he was trying to say.

He forced another laugh. “You… must be Einsteins of the White Skin world. You got guns and… shit. You still talk but you have to miss those… days when… you had a whole brain.” He spit some blood at the floor but mostly at me. “C’mon man. I smarter a lot than you. Let… me go. Leave. I forget it too.”

Murphy leaned and half whispered in my ear, “This dude’s an idiot.”

“You know that not hurts, right?” The guy looked at me. “I’m Survivor. Black eyes. No pain.” He grinned through bloody teeth.”

I took the flashlight and shined it into the guy’s eyes. I pulled it away and shined it in again before aiming it away. “Shit, Murphy. Look at this.”

Murphy leaned in close.

I said, “His eyes don’t dilate.” I repeated the experiment.

The guy said, “Survivor. Black eyes. No pain.”

“You had the virus?” I asked.

“Fuck you, dumbass,” he answered.

Murphy balled a fist.

“No pain,” the guy grinned again.

Murphy shrugged and said, “Unless you want me to knock out all of your teeth you’ll quit being an asshole and tell us what we want to know. It might not hurt, but you’ll sure miss the teeth when they’re gone, I guarantee you that much.”

“Not telling,” said the guy.

“Jeez,” I laughed. “You act like you’ve never seen a movie in your life.” I stood up and started to pace. “That’s the way this shit works. We tie you up. You protest. We beat you. You get all macho. We beat you some more. In the end, you tell us what we want to know. That’s just the way it is.” I sat back down in front of him. “It’s not like you’re hiding any government secrets or anything.”

I stared at him for a moment longer and said, “We don’t want to beat you, man. I’m Zed. This is Murphy. You got a name?”

The guy glared at me.

“Dude,” I said, “being an asshole doesn’t get us anywhere. Just tell me your name or I’ll make one up for you.”

He glared some more.

I huffed. “Fine. You’re Marvin. Cool?”

“Marvin?” He got a sour look on his face. “Call Don.”

Murphy asked, “Who’s Don?”

“I Don,” the guy told him.

“Don,” I said. “Look, here’s the deal. It’s not like we’re Russian spies or anything. Some bunch of dipshits in a helicopter shot up our boat. We followed the helicopters down here, and low and behold, we find you. A Slow Burn, I guess.” I pointed at Don. “We’re just trying to find out what’s going on.”

“Slow Burn?” Don asked. “Survivor. I Survivor.”

“Whatever,” I shrugged. “Is that what you call yourself, a Survivor?”

“I am,” he said. “We all Survivors.”

“Cool,” I said. “Why aren’t you white like us?” I asked.

Don looked me up and down, “You a White Skin.”

I laughed.

Murphy grabbed his crotch and said, “I’ve got your White Skin.”

Still laughing, I looked over at Murphy. “I thought it was a mocha frost tea bag.”

Murphy found that pretty funny.

I turned back to Don. We needed to get serious again. I said, “You got the virus. That’s why you have the dilated eyes and you don’t feel much pain. But it didn’t affect your pigment.”

Don shook his head.

“So you’re saying any Survivors that lose their pigment are White Skins?” I asked. “Even if they’re still just as smart as you? You know, just so I understand.”

Shaking his head and letting his anger show, Don said, “All White Skins is stupid. Cannibals. White Skins is White Skins.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s the difference between you and me besides skin color. We both survived.”

Don pulled a face and said, “You stupid. You cannibal. No White Skin smart.”

“What about us?” I asked.

That seemed to confuse Don. “You first White Skins I seen could talk. Some talk nonsense. Some we train. Like dogs. Not smart.”

I stepped back and paced around a bit.

Murphy sat on a desktop and looked at me. “I think he’s lying.”

“No lie,” said Don.

I looked at Murphy and said, “Yeah. I hate to agree with Don, but I don’t think he’s bright enough to lie.”

“Unless that’s the lie,” said Murphy, “the act that the virus made him stupid.” Murphy looked at the door and then looked back at me. “We should get out of here. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

I slowly shook my head. I needed to learn more about what was going on.
If
Don was telling the truth. Hell, Don
had
to be telling at least a partial truth. He was clearly a survivor of the virus, but in a form we’d never seen before. I asked, “Where did you live when the virus hit?”

Don pursed his lips, reluctant to answer.

“Do you think it matters?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, here’s what I think.”

Murphy started laughing again. “Oh no, it’s Professor Zed time.” He yawned and looked at Don. “You should have talked.”

“Whatever.” I shot Murphy a withering look. Back to Don, I said, “You guys had to have gotten all these helicopters from Fort Hood. You can pretend that’s a secret if you want. It doesn’t matter to me. My point was that in Austin, we haven’t seen any like you.” I put a finger on Don’s chest. “I’m wondering if in different parts of the state if… I don’t know…” I thought about it for a minute. “Why would people up where you’re from survive in a different way than we did down here?”

“I Survivor,” said Don. “You Meat.”

Further interrogation of Don turned out to be a waste of time. He didn’t tell us anything that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves by just sitting on a side street and watching the Capitol grounds. When my patience ran out, Murphy was kind enough to punch Don on the side of the head hard enough to knock him out again, sending him and the chair crashing to the floor.

We left him in the back office with the doors closed, lying on the floor still tied to the chair. I figured if he wound up stuck in there for a couple of days, eventually somebody walking in the hall might hear him holler. If not, well, I figured he would eventually work his way out of his binds.

At least that’s how I rationalized it. I didn’t want to think we’d left him to die of thirst while tied to a chair in a remote part of the Capitol.

Murphy said we should either kill Don or get off the Capitol grounds the way we came in. Any other plan, according to him, was stupid.

Nevertheless, Murphy reluctantly followed me down the hall on the second subterranean level, moving quietly toward the main building.

The clomping of boots coming down the stairs out of the Capitol alerted us to stop and squat in the deep shadows near the walls.

We waited and listened.

The boots came closer. They were on the level below us and had we looked over the balcony, we would have been able to watch them pass right below. That wasn’t necessary, as they were talking as they walked, making their position easy to track just by the sound.

“Justice Baird said six—bring six,” one guy told the other as they passed below.

“We never take them out at night,” said the other guy. “Did he say why?”

The first guy laughed bitterly. “You wanna ask Justice Baird why?”

“No,” the second guy muttered. “Where we supposed to take ‘em?”

The first guy said, “Out front. He wants ‘em to haul some of those deer blinds to the front wall so we can put more guns out there tonight.”

“They’re not that heavy,” said the second guy. “We could haul ‘em ourselves.”

“Why?” The first guy laughed. “We got White Skin labor. Why not use it?”

“They die when we work ‘em too hard,” said the second guy.

Laughing as they walked out of earshot, the first guy said, “We can get more.”

Murphy and I stayed put and silent while we waited for the two to pass through some doors down past the helicopter. Once they were inside, we hurried off.

At the end of the hall at the main stairway leading up into the Capitol building, we stopped.

“Which way, Batman?”

I huffed. “Stop calling me Batman.”

“You don’t like Null Spot.”

I pointed upstairs. “I think we should stay off the main floor.”

“Why are you so interested in scoping these dudes out?” Murphy asked. “Are we thinking about joining these yahoos? Because if that’s your plan, that’s one thing. If not, well you know what I think.”

I pointed back up the long hall we’d just come down. “You think those guys are talking about Slow Burns like Russell used to be?”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. Seems like they’re using them for slave labor. Why, were you thinking something else?”

I shook my head and started up the stairs, slowly and carefully.  

The Texas Capitol building looks quite a bit like the United States Capitol, except that it’s made of Sunset Red granite so it looks pink from the outside instead of white. The interior is laid out much like the U.S. Capitol with a high-domed rotunda at the center of two main wings: the Senate Chamber at the east end and House Chamber at the other.

Murphy and I had just reached the landing on the Capitol’s ground floor when some of the tall wood and glass doors at the front of the building swung noisily open on heavy bronze hinges. I rounded a turn and bounded silently up the next flight of stairs with Murphy on my heels. The sound of voices on the second floor prompted me to continue running past that level and up to the third floor.

Hearing nothing but voices echoing up from the floor of the rotunda, we stepped into the third-floor hallway leading down the length of that wing to the House Gallery. We tucked ourselves into an alcove in front of a large door and stopped to catch our breath.

Murphy leaned close to me and whispered, “I hope you have a plan to get us out of here.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I told him, feeling certain the place had insufficient security to keep us in. I pointed at a bullet-riddled door across the hall and motioned Murphy to follow.

After stepping lightly across the wide hall, I grabbed the door and swung slowly, hoping the old, ornate hinges wouldn’t creak and echo through the hall and up to the rotunda dome, then back down to the people who’d entered through the front door. Those people were down there arguing about something, but an out-of-place squeak of tarnished metal might interrupt them.

Thankfully, the hinges were well-lubricated, and we entered quietly, pulling the door closed behind us.

The office was huge with old windows that stood from waist height up eight feet tall. The square wooden desk in the middle of the office was of similar proportions and probably of a similar age. Its expansive top, large enough to park a small car, was clear except for smears of dried blood. The rest of the office was a shambles of shell casings, brownish-red stains, torn clothes, and bones. The clothes and bones were proof that the normal people who’d made their stand here had lost. At least that’s the way it looked to me. I supposed that some could have lived, abandoning their dead to scavengers who came later.

Evidence of death was everywhere, in everything. Worth notice were the places I came across where it wasn’t apparent that someone had died there.

Murphy walked over to one of the tall windows and peeked out into the fire glow between the blinds. “Hey,” he whispered, impatiently waving me to come over.

I crossed over a pile of books that had fallen out of the shelves on the wall, taking up a place beside Murphy to look out the window. The Governor’s Mansion was in full blaze and the flames were spreading to the old oaks on the property. The streets on the far side were filled with the infected, thousands and thousands of them. They were surging up side streets and pulling back. They looked like they were trying to get up their nerve to rush the walls.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “It’s like they’re afraid of this place.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I wonder what the trick is? You think it’s just conditioning, like training a dog?”

“Man, I don’t know.” He looked back at the door and looked around the room. “I don’t get a good feeling about this place. I think these dudes are whacked, and I think they’re stupid.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Look out the window, man.” Murphy pulled the blinds apart. “It’s only a matter of time before all those Whites figure out they can tear down that wall. We got through, and it wasn’t that hard.”

I nodded.

“Hell,” Murphy said. “If the naked horde comes back this way, these guys are fucked. They’ll never get those helicopters out before they get overrun.” Murphy shook his head and rubbed his face. “It’s like they’re all kinda psycho-stupid or something. Who the hell sets up a fortress in the middle of Austin?” He gestured at the noisy mob out in the streets. “In the middle of all that?”

He had a point. I said, “It doesn’t make any sense.” I looked out the window at the mass of Whites glowing red in the flames on the other side of the wall. Plenty of soldiers were out there. Well, not plenty. Relative to the number of Whites on the other side of the wall, the number of soldiers was laughable.

I said, “Those guards in the hall didn’t sound as stupid as Don.”

“Maybe they’re immune,” said Murphy. “Maybe they didn’t get the virus like Don did.”

Maybe. Don did say there were Survivors though. I took the implication to mean they’d all caught and then survived the virus. “Maybe this Baird guy we heard those guards mention wants to be the next governor of Texas or something. Maybe he’s trying to reestablish the government in Austin by taking over the Capitol.”

“News flash, Johnny Genius,” said Murphy. “There’s no more Texas. Just people like us.” He pointed at the soldiers out on the lawn, in their deer blinds, standing by their Humvees, or watching the wall. “I guess people like these fucktards. A few normal people who are being smart and hiding out.” He looked back at the horde in the street. “And them. Lots of them.”

As much as I agreed with pretty much everything he said, some small part of me wanted to believe that the government was coming back, that order was returning. I shook my head and stepped away from the window.

“What?” Murphy asked.

“Nothing,” I said absently. Did I really want to go back to my previous life anyway?

No.

This life sucked most of the time but so did the old one, just in different ways.

I went back over to the window and looked out. Could these yahoos really be the start of the effort to rebuild? “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s going to go bad eventually and all these knuckleheads are going to wind up dead.” I slapped Murphy on the back. “You were right. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”