Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (6 page)

We were out in the center of the river and starting to float downstream when Murphy lowered his rifle, glanced at me, then looked up at the far end of the dam. “We’re doing this the wrong way.”

I looked up at the tall hill on the other side of the river and saw houses built among the trees. I looked at the dam for a clue as to what Murphy was talking about and then I looked around the boat. “What?”

He said, “We need to start working the night shift.”

“Murphy, have you been smoking some weed I don’t know about? You’re not making any sense.”

“Hey man, I’m having an inspiration.” Murphy shot me a fake frown. “I’m trying to make a major improvement in our lives.”

“Uh, oh.” I cranked the starter on the engine.

“Don’t start the boat,” Murphy said as he came up to sit in the seat opposite me. “Hear me out on this one. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hiking around and riding boats up and down the river.”

I scanned the banks as we sat in the boat, starting to drift. “Assholes in the helicopter aside, it’s safe for us to travel this way… mostly. On the river, the Whites don’t mess with us. Even when we’re walking, they mostly don’t mess with us unless we start talking or shooting.”

Murphy replied, “What I’m saying is, we’ve got night vision goggles.”

“And?” There had to be more to Murphy’s epiphany than that.

Murphy scooted around in his seat and leaned forward, ready to sell. “What if we had a silent car to go along with our night vision goggles? Then we could go anywhere.”

“Okay, Batman, I give up,” I said as I looked downriver. “Are you saying we should maybe go back to Sarah Mansfield’s house and get her Tesla? I doubt it still has a charge on the batteries, but it’s electric. It’ll be silent.”

“No.” Murphy grinned and pointed out past the other end of the dam. “I was watching this video online a month or so before the outbreak. There’s this dude, Mitch something-or-other, who’s got a shop right up on 620 just past the dam.”

“And?” I asked.

“His thing was converting old muscle cars to electric.”

“Battery-powered muscle cars?” I wasn’t buying it.

“I swear man, it’s true,” said Murphy. “His first car was this old sixty-something Mustang he called the Zombie 222.”

“Okay, now I know you’re fuckin’ with me.” I cranked the boat engine and it started up.

“I’m serious.”

“Uh, huh.” I put the boat in gear to engage the prop.

“No, I really am,” he said. “It’s a real thing. He makes these cars and they’re fast as shit. They generate like eighteen hundred horsepower. No lie. And they’re quiet.”

“The reason I
know
you’re fuckin’ with me is that nobody, and I mean
nobody
, would ever put an electric motor in a muscle car. That’s pretty much a religious debate in itself.”

Murphy paused to think. “No, he retired from high-tech or something and it was his pet project. He said he could get more torque out of an electric motor, and he set a speed record. I’m not shitting you.”

Murphy did seem serious. I dropped my hands from the wheel and rested them in my lap. “So you’re thinking we get us an electric car and drive it around Austin at night when nobody can see us or hear us.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy, slapping a palm on his head. “We’ve got the advantage of the night vision goggles. I don’t know why we haven’t been doing this all along.”

“Me neither,” I sarcastically agreed. “Charging could be a problem. Half the time the roads are full of crap. An electric car doesn’t offer us any protection.” I rubbed my chin. “Anything else I’m forgetting?”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “You forgot to apologize for being a dick just because this isn’t your idea.”

I rolled my eyes and started to say something but realized he was probably right. I sighed and forced an apology. I turned off the boat engine.

Murphy laughed and slapped me on the back, hard enough that I nearly bumped my head on the windshield. “It’s just how you are, man. Don’t you think I know that by now?”

I rolled my eyes again. “Do you remember that map we made when we were at Sarah Mansfield’s house? Do you still have it?”

Murphy shook his head. “Long gone, dude. Too much wear and tear. Know what I mean? Too much shit goin’ on.”

I nodded. “If only we could have laminated it.”

“Why?” he asked.

“A satellite map would show us where all the houses in Austin with solar panels are.”

“Yeah.” Murphy grinned. “All of our gas stations.”

I started to accept the idea. “We could get a network of places around town where we could get a charge if we needed it. I went with a buddy once to look at a Nissan Leaf. They told him he needed to spend like fifteen hundred bucks to install a charging station in his garage, but if he was out somewhere away from home he could just plug the car into a regular outlet for thirty minutes or so and get a half charge or seventy-five percent or something like that.”

That pumped up Murphy’s confidence in the idea. “So we could charge it up anywhere if we had to.”

I shrugged. “Lots of houses in Austin have solar panels.”

“I think we need to go car shopping.”

“And this electric Mustang is a real thing?” I asked, still a little skeptical. In truth, any electric car would do. Plenty of them were around Austin. The old Mustang, though, appealed to me in a sexy, impractical way that made no good sense. But it felt good to think about it. And that good feeling was something I’d been missing for a while.

Murphy picked up a paddle and leaned over the side of the boat, ready to dig into the water to get us to the bank across the river. “Google it if you don’t believe me.”

An hour later, with our boat tied to a tree overhanging the other side of the river, Murphy and I were standing at the peak of a cone-shaped hill looking up and down the length of 620. We were a little less than a mile from the dam but could easily see the road from our vantage. Plenty of cars littered 620’s lanes but it was passable. Trash and other things that had once been loaded in cars or hastily packed in suitcases lay on the road, in the trees, or washed into piles in the ditches. The remains of bodies—sometimes whole, most often not—lay all over the place with broken bones, clothes, and clumps of hair. More frequently, dark brownish stains on the bleached asphalt marked the spots where people had been slaughtered and devoured.

“Look,” said Murphy, pointing down 620 away from the dam. “Down just past those coyotes in the road. See on the left, maybe a quarter mile? That tan metal building back in the trees there?”

“Sure.” A dozen metal buildings were back in the trees along the road. The sun-faded color of any of them could be described as tan. But whatever.

“That one, there, with all the solar panels on the roof,” said Murphy.

“You’re thinking because he makes electric muscle cars, he’s got solar panels too?” I asked, guessing at the same time that it made sense.

“Sure, why not? Solar panels are cheap compared to what his cars cost.”

“How much?” I asked.

“I don’t know. A hundred to a hundred fifty grand, maybe?”

“Seriously?”

Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. A Tesla is around ninety, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” I stared blankly down the road, still not convinced we were doing anything but wasting our time. Murphy had already sold himself on the idea of the car, though. “Fuck it. Let’s go steal a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar car if it’s there.”

Despite the obvious advantage of being able to read signs posted in front of the businesses along the way, we decided to stay off the main road—too much visibility being out in the middle of five paved lanes with so much of the day’s light still left in the sky. From the top of the hill we’d spied an indirect path down a few trails, along several short stretches of dirt road, and up a paved street that would lead us to the shop where Murphy guessed the electric Mustang waited. It didn’t look like much of a trek, maybe a half mile, maybe a little more.

I followed Murphy down a zigzagging trail off the peak of the hill. We came out onto a dusty stretch of bumpy road between thick cedar forests on both sides. We passed around a long, slow bend to the point where all we were able to see besides the dimming sky above was the dirt road curving away into the trees in front and back.

Murphy came to a sudden stop, snapping his M4 up to a firing position and glancing quickly back at me before looking forward again. He scanned back and forth across all the trees.

I gripped my machete and raised the blade as I stepped up beside him and stopped.

Without the crunch of our boots on the gravelly road to mask the subtleties of the sounds around us, I heard something out in the trees to our left. I hoped it was a noisy armadillo but knew it was Whites.

I looked around for movement in the trees far ahead. For some reason, Murphy suspected something in front of us. I had to believe he was right. I peered into the dark shadows in the trees behind and beside us. Nothing. I glanced at Murphy. He nodded forward. He whispered, “They’re going to ambush us.”

“How do you know that?”

His eyes passed over my machete as he glanced at my shotgun. “You may need to use that.”

“Should we go back?” I asked.

“I think they’re ahead of us
and
behind us,” he said just as a hail of jagged chunks of white limestone—roughly the size of baseballs—arced in our direction from the trees on both sides of the road. The stones weren’t aimed well enough to hit either of us except by luck. Plenty were coming, though.

“I guess they’ve run out of regular people to eat,” I said, keeping my calm despite the hail of stones, “and now they’ve banded together to hunt the weak.”

“Yeah Professor, whatever,” Murphy said, with urgency in his voice. He nodded in the direction we’d come from. “My guess is they’ll be weakest that way. I’ll lead. You keep an eye on our rear.”

One of the rocks hit me in the shoulder, missing my skull by inches. “Motherfucker.”

Murphy looked up at the other rocks still coming. “We need to go.” Scanning from side to side with his rifle, he hurried but didn’t run.

I followed, trying to use his massive size as a rock shield while I kept looking behind and to the sides.

The Whites way behind us—in the direction we’d originally been going—yelped and growled. They seemed frustrated that their plan wasn’t working out. The tree limbs around us rattled with the sound of bodies brushing past. Thankfully, the foliage was thick enough to keep them from simply running through and engulfing us. The Whites were smart enough to set the trap but not quite bright enough to figure out how to react once Murphy and I took some active steps to avoid being ensnared.

Murphy’s rifle popped off several suppressed rounds.

I looked forward in time to see two Whites dropping rocks as they fell.

“Faster,” he said as he picked up the pace.

Behind us, where my view of the road was cut off by the arc of the trees lining it, I saw several dozen infected gathering their courage to run after us.

A particularly brave White jumped out of the dense foliage to my right. He planted his feet in a defiant pose and snarled at me for all of two seconds before my machete cut a gash across his throat. He fell, probably wondering what had gone wrong with his simple-minded little plan to menace us into running back toward the others in the main group.

As I watched the bleeding White crumble, I hurried after Murphy, bumping into him from behind when he abruptly stopped. At least a dozen Whites were emerging from the trees ahead of us.

“I’ll take these,” I said, stepping around Murphy as I quickly slipped my machete into its scabbard and raised my shotgun. “They’re close enough for me to hit ‘em or they will be in a sec’.” Nodding my head to our rear I said, “You’ve got a bigger problem back up the road.”

Murphy spun and started firing immediately in a quick rhythm of well-placed shots.

I leveled the barrel of my shotgun and let my attackers get a few steps closer and a lot more tightly packed as they came out of the trees and onto the road. I pointed at legs and knees, not looking for kills as much as twofers, hoping to put a few on the ground with each shot, knowing I only had six before I’d have to choose between reloading and going to work with my machete.

Not worrying about what was behind me, I focused and fired. Murphy would handle his end or he wouldn’t. Either way, it was out of my hands.

By my third shot, three of the Whites coming at me were down and a few others were hobbled. The Whites surged faster and I fired the last three shots in a quick flurry. A couple of Whites stopped, still smart enough to understand the carnage among them. The remaining, those still brave enough or dumb enough to rush, found out just how quickly I could switch from empty gun to swinging machete. I killed two almost immediately.

It’s like the machete was a complete surprise to them. Maybe their brains think slower with the virus, I don’t know. But it’s like they kind of understood what the shotgun was doing to them and when they saw me drop it, they figured they were safe to bull rush me.

I ran a few steps forward to get past the two I’d just hacked. To my surprise, one of them wasn’t dead, which I realized about a half-second too late. As I was hacking a running White across the thigh, the dying woman already on the ground grabbed at my leg. I tried to dodge her grip, but I slipped on loose gravel and tumbled, rolling over sharp rocks on the ground, doing my best to spring back to my feet. I earned a few bruises and cuts for the effort.

The few Whites who were able retreated back into the trees. The dead, dying, and wounded cluttered the road. For a moment, we were clear.

I looked back at Murphy just as he was jamming a fresh magazine into his M4. The road back in his direction was littered down its length with bloodied Whites.

“We gotta go,” I hollered as I pointed up the corridor I’d just cleared.

Murphy glanced back, his face fierce. He looked forward. “To hell with these guys.” Keeping his weapon at his shoulder and firing, he started moving.

Out in the distance, I heard howls that were repeated across the hills we couldn’t see. That was the bill for use of the shotgun coming due.

I hurried after Murphy and nudged him from behind. “They’re coming.”

I raised my machete to take on any Whites that might still be alive enough to grab at our legs as we rushed by.

Back in the direction I’d cleared with my shotgun, some Whites were coming out of the trees again looking at me and Murphy. They were confused. Their weak quarry had turned out to be something brutal and deadly. At least that’s what I wanted to think. Maybe they were just eyeing their dead buddies bleeding out—fresh meat for free.

“Keep it going,” I said. “They’re starting to regroup.”

Murphy’s rate of fire dwindled as we moved.

We were getting out of the thick of it.

I hacked at a grasping hand and a White howled for losing it.

“Okay,” Murphy said. “You ready to haul some ass?”

“I’ve
been
ready.”

“Follow me.” He took off at a full-speed run.