Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected (11 page)

Murphy clomped up after. Mandi’s tiny feet came up last.

I swung the bedroom door open and stepped in. Murphy took a position in the doorway with his M-4 pointed at the guy’s back. Mandi peeked around Murphy.

I shuffled around the bed in the narrow gap between the mattress and the wall. The guy hadn’t moved a bit since my first visit. He just stared at the pile of charred bodies spread across his neighbors’ back yards. I wondered if his friends, wife, or child might be among the dead. I wondered whether the mental stress was too much for his brain to handle, or whether in despair, he had just given up, just shut down.

“Hey,” I said as I stood just beyond arm’s reach.

Of course, no response.

Nothing ever just fucking works out by itself anymore.

I looked over at Murphy to ensure myself that his gun was pointed in the right place.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I pulled my pistol down to my hip but kept it pointed at the man, gunslinger style. I knew my aim would be terrible shooting from the hip, but at a distance of a few feet, I doubted I could miss.

I stepped closer and reached out with my other hand and touched the man on the shoulder. “Hey.”

He very deliberately turned his middle-aged face toward me, but the eyes that blinked at his tears were those of a child.

“Man, are you okay?” I asked.

He blinked twice more, but said nothing.

“Do you understand me?”

The man’s facial expression changed slowly. He was confused, but after a moment, he nodded.

I glanced over at Murphy. He shook his head and shrugged. Mandi looked anxious, but clearly happy that we weren’t shooting.

Yet.

“Can you speak?”

The guy just looked at me.

“Is this your house?”

Another blank stare.

“Are you able to move? Can you stand?”

The guy furrowed his brow in concentration. He nodded.

Frustrating!

“Will you stand?”

Slowly, the man stood up beside the bed and faced me.

“Can you walk?”

Another nod.

“Why don’t you follow me into the kitchen?”

I backpedaled in the narrow space between the bed and the wall until I was out of the room, keeping my eye on the guy and keeping my pistol pointed at him.

“Murphy, once he sees Mandi, be ready.”

Mandi asked, “Why?”

I answered, “Because you’re not infected.”

“Oh.”

Once we got downstairs to the living room, I asked, “Mandi, would you check around and see if you can find a thermometer, please?”

I brought the guy into the kitchen and asked him to sit down, which he did. He was certainly compliant.

“What do you think, Murphy?”

“I don’t know man. I think his brain is fried or he’s gone off the deep end. I’m surprised he’s not dead already. Man, what do you think?”

I answered, “I don’t know what to think. I’m wondering about something Jerome told me.”

“Jerome the Liar?”

“Yeah, Jerome the Liar.” I let my tone tell Murphy that that little conversational dance was starting to get irritating. “He said that not all of us slow burns end up at the same temperature and that the higher your temperature, the lower your brain functions. Maybe this guy is high enough to be like this, but not quite high enough to be a monster.”

Murphy reiterated his point. “Based on what Jerome said, right?”

“Look Murphy, I don’t know if everything that Jerome said was bullshit or not.”

Murphy shook his head and stepped back a bit, “But you do know that everything he knew about the disease, he learned on the internet.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue.”

“When you have a liar tell you something he learned on the world’s biggest repository of lies, I don’t know how probability works, but I think whatever probabilistic equation explains that situation will tell you that he was probably full of shit.”

“What?”

“You know,
x
plus
y
times
q
squared equals turd. Heh, heh, heh.”

Mandi came into the kitchen. “I found this thermometer in the medicine cabinet. It’s one of those ones that you just shine in your ear and it reads out the temperature digitally.”

I said, “Perfect.”

Mandi raised her hand. There was something dangling from it. “I also found this.”

Murphy asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s his badge,” Mandi told him. “He worked at the highway department. His name is Russell Coronado.”

“Russell Coronado. Hmm.”

Mandi handed me the thermometer and I holstered my pistol. Russell was seeming less and less like a danger, but I didn’t know what to think of him. “Russell, I’m going to check your temperature. Is that okay?”

Russell just looked at me.

Whatever.

I put the thermometer to his ear and clicked the trigger. Russell didn’t react.

I read the thermometer’s display out loud. “One-oh-two point three.”

“That’s high,” said Mandi.

“For a normal person,” I said. “Here, Murphy. Check Mandi.”

Mandi came in at 98.6, exactly normal. My temperature was 99.4 and Murphy was 99.9.

For Mandi’s benefit, I said, “This guy Jerome told us…”

Murphy interrupted, “Jerome the Liar.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jerome the Liar…”

Mandi asked, “Who’s Jerome, again?”

“Jerome got Karma-lized,” Murphy busted out laughing.

Mandi got cross and asked, “Caramelized? What?”

I didn’t know whether to smile, get angry at Murphy, or get angry at Jerome for all he’d done. I said, “It’s a pun, I think.”

Murphy said, “I’m not trying to be mean. Jerome got killed, but it’s like he was trying to deserve it.”

I nodded.

Mandi asked, “Why do you call him Jerome the Liar?”

I said, “Tell you what, let’s see if there’s any food or water first. Jerome is a long story. We can talk about it after we find something to eat.” I crossed the kitchen and opened a door that looked like it could be the pantry.

Murphy checked the kitchen sink for water pressure.

“I’ll check the fridge,” Mandi offered.

“No water,” Murphy said, playing with the knobs.

“There’s plenty of stuff in here,” I said.

“Jackpot!” Mandi said, pulling a bottled soda out of the fridge. “It’s cold.”

“I told you the electricity was still on,” said Murphy.

I accepted a cold soda from Mandi and gulped a third of it down. “I’m curious about the electricity thing. Keep an eye on Russell.”

I headed for the back door. Russell got up and followed.

Oh, well.

Mandi pulled a single-serving frozen dinner out of the freezer. “I’m having lasagna. What do you guys want?”

Murphy was watching Russell follow me and asked, “What’s up with that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Mandi, cook me anything. Throw something in for Russell, too.”

Back outside on the porch, the site of the burned bodies piled along the fence line made me cringe. Russell stopped beside me and stared.

There were men, women, and children. Blackened hands reached out in permanent desperation. Faces were petrified in agony. They lay every which way imaginable, many trampled under the feet of the others, many clawing their way away from the terrible flames, all frozen in their dying pose, with clothes and hair burned away, skin blackened or gone, exposed red flesh rotting in the heat.

The macabre corpses grasped my attention and refused to let go. I wondered about the people in that pile, who they were, what they did for a living. I wondered how many used to be pretty girls, which ones were doctors or teachers. I wondered how many children in that pile would never grow up, how many of those kids’ last days and last hours were spent running and screaming in terror, chased by rabid white monsters.

I wanted to look away but was transfixed. I didn’t even blink. The image slowly cooked itself into my memory. It was the kind of vision that hardens your heart or shatters your soul.

“Don’t stare at it, man,” Murphy said.

“You snuck up on me, Murphy,” I said.

“You were in a daze. Your sesame chicken is done. You want to eat out here?”

“No fuckin’ way,” I answered. “Uhm, it’ll be safer in the house. I just came out to see what the deal was with the electric lines.”

I walked out into the yard. Russell followed. Indeed, there was a pole at the corner of the yard. A line ran each toward our house and the house next door. Three broken, blackened cables hung off the other side of the pole. I pointed, “What the hell?”

Murphy asked, “So where’s the electricity coming from?”

I followed the lines back to the house with my eyes as I walked farther out into the yard. Russell stayed with me.

“Looks like you’ve got a new best friend, Zed.”

“Whatever.”

The line connected to the house just under the eaves at the back corner. Looking up onto the back roof, I saw rows of shiny, dark gray glass. “Look, Murphy. Solar panels. All across the roof.”

Murphy walked away from the porch so that he could see onto the roof as well. “I’ll be damned. They really do work.”

Like a puppy, Russell stayed on my heels and followed me back into the house. I went into the kitchen, where Mandi had set the table for four, with a microwaved dinner and a cold bottle of soda at each place setting.

I plugged my phone in and left it on the kitchen counter to charge while I sat down at the table. Russell took a seat beside me.

“I think he likes you,” Mandi joked.

I rolled my eyes. “We should have picked a different house.”

Murphy and Mandi sat down with us and I started to eat. I felt a measure of relief when Russell picked up his fork and started on his meal. If he hadn’t been capable of feeding himself, I didn’t know what we’d have done with him. Civilization had regressed past the luxury of providing care for invalids.

Also to my relief, Russell showed no undue interest in Mandi. Whatever cannibalistic tendencies lived in the squirming little brains of the other infected, Russell didn’t seem to have those.

As we ate, I told Mandi the story of Jerome, which, of course, led to the stories about our escapes from the gym and the jail. Mandi told us a little about herself. She worked part-time at a daycare for special needs children and went to school at the community college. She’d lived her whole life in Austin
, in a house that was now ash, in a neighborhood that was gone.

After we finished eating and sat around the table, enjoying a moment of anachronistic normalcy, Mandi asked, “Can I say something?”

“You’re too polite,” Murphy observed.

I nodded. “I agree with Murphy
, but go ahead.”

“I just want to say that I’m sorry.”

“Say what?”

I asked, “What are you sorry for?”

Mandi answered, “I’m sorry for crying on the back porch when we got here.”

I said, “Don’t worry about it.”

She nodded and said nothing for few moments while she collected her thoughts. “All those people burned to death back there…Do you think they were…do you think they were infected?”

“I’m sure they were,” I lied. In truth, I had no way of knowing.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “They were infected who got caught by the fire. The infected aren’t that bright.”

Mandi argued, “Smart people get caught in fires, too.”

“Mandi, it doesn’t matter, not one single bit,” I said. “Not to sound cruel, but they’re dead. We can’t do anything about it.” My voice rose, perhaps more as a way to hide from my own weakness than to scold Mandi for hers. “If we’d been here when it happened, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. We’re all alive in a world that isn’t like the one we grew up in. We need to figure out how to deal with it. If not, we’ll die.”

“Dude,” admonished Murphy.

Mandi looked down at her plastic tray and fidgeted with a noodle for a moment. When she looked up, her eyes held restrained tears. “You don’t have to be harsh, Zed.”

I took a moment to think about what I wanted to say before I continued. “Mandi, I don’t mean to be an insensitive prick, but our new reality is harsh and violent. We all know it. We’ve all dealt with it firsthand, or we wouldn’t be here.

“Mandi, like I said before, I know you can be tough. And I do appreciate that you’re such a sweet girl that you feel like you have to ask for permission to ask a question. That kind of overly polite bullshit behavior probably served you well before, but it’ll just get you killed. Now, you need to be that tough girl that survived all those days in that bunker.”

Mandi, with an edge in her voice asked, “Why can’t I be both?”