Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected (6 page)

Murphy stopped the car in front of a dilapidated two-story house with a chain-link fence falling down around it.

I looked back in the direction of the fire. Knowing what to listen for, I heard the distant roar but I saw no evidence of the glow. We had time
—not a lot, but some.

Murphy grabbed his rifle and jumped out of the car.

I hurried behind. "Are you sure this is the place?"

"Yep."

The front door of the house was hanging on a single hinge. We ran inside.

The house had been vandalized to the point of worthlessness. Every window was shattered. The carpet was ripped from the slab. There were holes in the walls and holes in the ceiling large enough for someone to fall through. There were dirty, worn cushions on the floor, and graffiti on the walls.

There was trash. There were clothes and there were bones. It stank like an overflowing port-a-potty.

We passed through the kitchen
, which had been destroyed by vandals and copper tubing thieves.

Murphy flung open a door that led into the garage.

Infected!

“Shit!” I stumbled over my feet trying to back away.

Murphy, still full of pent up rage, wasn’t fazed. He barreled forward and popped off three rounds before swinging the butt of his gun around and to work on the skull of one who was close enough to catch his fury.

I regained my footing and fired six shots at movement in the darkness.

Then it was still. My eyes adjusted and
I saw eleven dead infected among the junk. That didn’t make sense. Some of them must already have been there. I also saw something very unusual. In the floor, there was a heavy, misshapen steel door. The rusty lock and handle had the look of having been pried open.

Murphy, pointed to my rifle, and pointed at the door in the floor.

I stood back and aimed my M-4 at the door.

With one hand on his weapon, Murphy bent over, grabbed the door, and pulled.

It clinked on something, but it didn't open.

Murphy pulled on it again. It rattled in its frame.

It was jammed or locked.

Damn
it!

How much time could we have?

He kicked it hard, and yelled, "If anyone's down there, get back! I'm blowing the door and then I'm coming in."

Murphy pulled a hand grenade from his MOLLE vest and placed it with both hands near the door's locking mechanism.

He looked up at me.

I needed no instructions. I ran back into the house and headed for the furthest end from the garage.

Murphy's heavy breathing behind me told me that I understood what was going to happen next.

We got to the end of a hall
, and before I could get into the bedroom, the grenade's blast rocked the house.

I stopped and turned.

Murphy was already running back toward the garage.

As we passed the open front door on our way back, I saw the orange glow of the fire above the roofs of the houses across the street. All of our chips were on this one bet.

Time for delays and caution were gone.

If the grenade had failed to do its work, we were dead.

The garage was full of floating filth and rearranged junk.

I coughed, inhaling more dusty crud.

It was hard to see. We made our way toward the center, where we knew the door lay on the floor. It was swung open by the force of the blast, more bent than before.

Murphy looked at me for confirmation.

I nodded. What other choice did I have?

The first step creaked under his weight.

No surprise
; it was dark.

I’d expected a doomsday bunker that would generate its own electricity. It either wasn’t doing that, the light bulbs were shattered by the grenade’s concussion, or an ambush awaited us below.

The darkness implied only negative outcomes, hence my lack of surprise.

Murphy flicked on the flashlight mounted on the barrel of his M-4, pointed the weapon into the gloom, and hustled down the stairs.

I let my M-4 dangle from its harness, drew my Glock, shined my light over his shoulder, and followed.

The room was maybe a dozen feet wide and twenty or thirty feet long. It had a concrete floor and shelves with dusty boxes and unidentifiable equipment stacked within. At the far end of the room on the left wall, another door was shut. The mechanism
was torn up. Someone had gone through that door as well.

And there were bodies. Some were clearly infected. Of others, I couldn’t be sure.

Murphy looked back at me. “If we can, we need to close that outer door. The fire will be here soon.”

“Yup.” I bounded back up the stairs, positioned myself on one end of the door, and lifted. Good God, it was heavy.

Murphy came up to help.

The hinges had been bent by the explosion, making it very difficult to swing the warped door up off of the garage floor.

As we got it back over the hole, in a position where gravity would close it once again, Murphy and I hurried down the stairs, chased by the roar of the approaching fire.

We ran to the far end of the bunker.

The second door hung slightly open, a fact I hadn’t noticed moments before in our hurry to check the room and reclose the outer door. We were carelessly racing into uncertainty, betting our lives on a guess that the bunker was safe.

We had no choice. The alternative was immolation.

Murphy took up a ready position outside the door. I put a hand on the handle. He nodded twice and on the third nod, I swung it open.

I jumped back and looked for movement in the blackness. I listened for sounds.

Nothing.

No, wait…I heard something.

I cast a fearful glance at Murphy. He looked back the way we’d come. The fire had to be on the house. Its roar filled the room.

Necessity drove us down the stairs.

In the beams of our lights, the room appeared to be a match for the one we’d just left, ten feet deeper in the earth, and set at a perpendicular angle.

No movement. That was good.

Murphy stopped at the bottom of the stairs and kept his rifle pointed down the length of the room.

I pulled the door shut behind us.

“Don’t worry about that,” Murphy said.

“No, we need to seal it if we can.”

“The fire?”

“I don’t know if it’ll suck all the oxygen out when it passes over, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“Do what you need to do.”

The door appeared to have a good rubber seal
, but the door handle was missing and the metal around the hole was bent. That left a large gap for air to escape.

I shined my light on a nearby shelf and grabbed a handful of a rotten sleeping bag material and stuffed it into the hole. A fortuitously handy cinder block served to keep the door closed. “That’ll have to do.”

With the door sealed, the fire’s roar diminished significantly. I heard disturbingly familiar noises from the far end of the room.

Suddenly frightened and angry for having missed the infected in the darkness, I shined my light down the length of the room.

The room had rows of bunks along one wall, what appeared to be a kitchen area at the end, and the remains of some living room furniture in the middle. I counted three bodies but I saw no movement.

Where were they?

I scanned the room again, ready to shoot anything that wasn’t Murphy, but my light revealed nothing in the dark corners that it reached. No movement at all.

Still, I heard the sounds of the infected.

“There.” Murphy shined his light on the far end of the room, near the left corner. “Another door.”

“How big is this fucking place?” I asked, out of frustration.

But with the fire roaring overhead and our situation stable for the moment, I should have been relieved, at least.

The door jiggled in its frame and the animal sounds of the infected behind grew louder.

They knew we were there.

I laid my flashlight on a shelf and pointed it down the length of the room. I ran a reassuring hand across the full clips stored in my vest. I holstered my Glock and in a smooth, comfortable motion, I raised my M-4 to a firing position.

I told Murphy, “We can’t beat that fire outside, but I’ll bet my ass that we can kill every brain-fried infected that funnels out of that door.”

“Make your shots count.”

“Murphy, at this range, I can hit anything.”

The Ogre and the Harpy.

We stood in our ready poses for at least five minutes while the door rattled, the infected moaned, and the roar of the fire crescendoed above.

As time passed, I grew impatient. “I wish they’d just open the fuckin’ door and come out.”

Relaxing his stance, Murphy looked at me and in a hushed tone said, "I wonder if they're locked in."

I shrugged noncommittally.

Murphy said, "I'll bet those are folks from the neighborhood that hid down here when everything started. I’ll bet they bolted the door shut, not knowing that some of them were infected already, and now they’re all too stupid to figure out how to open it."

I said, “If I say I agree with your deduction, don’t call me your dear Watson.”

“Who’s Watson?”

“Murphy, there are some cultural gaps in your education that we need to discuss some time.”

“I take it Watson’s not a rapper.”

“Whatever.”

Murphy said, "That must have been a nightmare when it all went down."

"Yeah. The next time I start complaining, remind me about this and about how good I have it.”

“I will.”

“I know. So, what are our options, do you think?"

"We could stand here and wait for Whitey to come out. That might take a few minutes or it might take a few days. They might never come out."

I asked, "Any other ideas?"

"Just bad ones."

I asked, “Like?”

“We could try the grenade thing again, but if the shrapnel didn’t kill us, we'd get knocked senseless by the blast. Then, if we regained our senses in time, we might get to die while the infected down there eat us alive.”

I agreed
, “Yeah, I’m not a fan of that one. I’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah?”

“We could block the door.”

"Not
we,
" Murphy corrected.

"Murphy, this isn't a good time for you to get lazy."

"Not lazy, Zed. Smart. One of us can pile enough of this junk between the wall and the door to keep it jammed shut. The other one needs to keep a rifle trained on that door in case the infected figure out how to get it open. Having us both standing around with boxes of crap in our hands when a hundred infected come pouring…well, that won’t have a happy ending."

"Not for us, I guess." I said.

"Nope, not for us, heh, heh, heh," Murphy agreed.

The door was blocked.

I was exhausted.

Murphy and I made ourselves comfortable at the opposite end of level two, at the foot of the stairs that led up to the first level. The infected finally calmed down, and not much noise came from beyond the door. After what sounded like the collapse of the house above us a few hours before, all the noise of the fire had gone as well.

I left my flashlight turned on and sitting on a shelf to provide some light in the gloomy space.
At least it provided enough light so that I could see whether the bag of chips I pulled of my bag were potato or corn.

“What do you got there?” Murphy asked.

I looked back in my bag. “Mostly chips, soda, and some donuts for breakfast.”

“Man, all I have are cupcakes, Peanut M&M’s, and three Dr. Peppers.”

“I’ve got like six bags of chips. I’ll trade some for M&M’s.”

“Cool.”

“I need to find a watch,” I said, through a mouthful of corn chips. “I don’t want to burn up the battery on my phone by checking the time, but I hate not knowing what time it is.”

“There’ll be plenty around,” Murphy responded. “The trick is getting one that doesn’t require a battery.”

“Yeah. How do you tell?”

“I don’t know. Find one that looks old, I guess. Speaking of which, how’s your battery holding up?”

“Less than half. I need to get a solar charger for it.”

“That’s pointless, Zed. I don’t know when the cellular network will fail, but I know it will. I doubt that there’s anybody interested in keeping that stuff running anymore. The electric grid will fail, too. You can charge your cell phone in a wall socket until then. Besides, when the electric grid fails, the cellular network will go at the same time. So a solar charger for your cell phone is pointless.”

“Yeah, but I still need a solar charger for a computer.”

“Assuming you can get that flash drive from Amber,” said Murphy.

“I need to text her.”

“You’re worried,” Murphy observed.

“Yeah, of course. She said Mark was going nuts.”

“He was already nuts.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“Does the Null Spot want to go back and save her?”

Fuck your Null Spot, Murphy.

I knew that if I ignored the Null Spot comments long enough, Murphy would give up on them. “I don’t know what we should do about her.”

“Or even if we have any responsibility to her, Zed. You need to remember, we took them in and helped them, and they kicked us out.”

“It wasn’t a unanimous decision.”

“What you don’t seem to be getting here, Zed, is that we’re different. You can think all of the ‘We Are The World’ thoughts you want, but we aren’t part of that club anymore.”

“Murphy, once things settle down…”

“No, Zed. Once people get a belief in their heads, it’s damn near impossible to change their minds. Once they decide that all of us infected are a danger, they’ll always believe that, no matter what. Fear makes it all worse. Fear cements belief into people’s heads better than anything else. Right now, people are scared, right? As they should be.”

“That’s cynical.”

“Heh, heh, heh. That’s what I like about you, Zed. You can call me cynical and not see the irony in it. Heh, heh, heh.”

It was time to change the subject. “Murphy, do you mind if I ask what happened at your mom’s house? Were they both there?”

Murphy’s facial expression instantly changed. The deep smile lines on his face morphed into a furrowed frown.

Murphy stared at a shadow on floor for a long time.

I said, “Murphy, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

It took a little time for Murphy to answer. “There were three infected in my mom’s room. My mom was dead. Zed, it was a hard thing to see.”

“Yeah, I’ve been there.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t true. “And your sister, was she in the house?”

Murphy shook his head and refocused on the shadows. “I don’t know if she’s alive or turned infected or what. I’ll probably never know.”

“What about your relatives’ houses?” I asked.

“Anybody I can think of probably got their houses burned down when the fire blew through.”

“Oh. What do you want to do, then?” I asked.

“Sit in this bunker tonight and get some sleep.”

“No, I mean, after that.”

“I know what you mean, Zed. I don’t know what to do after that. You got any ideas?”

“I don’t know, Murphy. Since this all started, I’ve been mostly just trying to stay alive for the next five minutes. I mean, I keep thinking that we need to plan. We need to think through these problems. But everything we plan for keeps falling to shit. We got a place set up in the dorm and got kicked out. We went to your mom’s house…I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought that up again. We stole a Humvee and some fuckers
re
-stole it. Jerome got shot for no good reason at all, except to teach us both a lesson that might keep us both alive for another day.”

Murphy cut in. “That’s what I’m saying. We need to expect that from the uninfected. Or at least be ready for it.”

I went on, “And now we’re in a bunker that we hoped might be a safe place for us to ride this whole thing out, and it’s a junked out shit hole full of the dead and infected.”

Murphy said, “It did save us from that fire.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’m just being a whiny ass.”

I took a long drink out of a bottle of soda. “Murphy, you know all that stuff I keep talking about
? We need it. We need to know what to do to survive. The only things you and I really know are the stupid things we’ve seen in movies.”

“Zed, I was in the Army.”

“Yeah man, you know I mean besides that.”

“Zed, you think too much. You’re still alive. That’s better than I can say for damn near everybody else. So, yeah, you are being a whiny ass. I’d say things have worked out pretty good for you so far.”

“I wouldn’t say pretty good.”

“Well, I sure as hell would, Zed. You could be a brain-fried cannibal
, but you’re not. Life is gonna be hard now. Get used to bad shit happening. If we want to make it, we need to suck it up and move on.”

“I didn’t realize that you were such an optimist.”

“I’m a pragmatist, man. I think I’ve got a reasonably safe place to sleep tonight. I know I’ve got a pretty good load of ammo, an M-4, and a Glock. I avoided getting barbecued. I’ve got a full belly and enough food and water to get me through breakfast. Hell, by today’s standards, I’m a rich man. If I had some fucked up hair, I’d be the new Donald Trump. Heh, heh, heh.”

I laughed along, and our laughter disturbed the infected in the lower level. They pushed on the door and it rattled. Too bad for them. It wasn’t going to open.

“Do you want first or second watch, Zed?”

“I’m still on an adrenaline rush. I don’t think I can sleep just yet. Besides, I want to check in with Amber and Steph if I can get a signal down here.”

“Fine. I’m dead tired. You take the first watch. Wake me when you get sleepy.”

“Will do.”

Murphy made himself comfortable on his pallet and closed his eyes. I checked my phone’s signal strength. One bar.

I texted Amber and hoped for the best.

Me:
Amber, it’s Zed. Are you there?

I waited for an answer for a bit and tried again.

Me:
Amber?

I wondered whether she was sleeping, and I worried about other possibilities. Thankfully, before I could spin up too many horrible scenarios in my imagination, the phone displayed a response.

Amber:
Hey.

Me:
Sorry if I woke you.

Amber:
I’m guessing there was a delay between your texts but they both arrived at the same time on my end.

Me:
Ah. I was getting worried.

Amber:
I would say not to, but I guess there’s cause.

Me:
Yeah.

Amber:
Did you get to Murphy’s mom’s house?

Me:
Yes.

Amber:
And?

Me:
The mom was dead.

Amber:
And his sister?

Me:
Don’t know.

Amber:
Are you guys staying there tonight?

Me:
That’s a long story but we’re holed up in some abandoned survivalist’s bunker.

Amber:
That sounds promising.

Me:
It’s not. It’s pretty much just a hole in the ground right now but at least we’re safe for the night.

Amber:
That’s something.

Me:
How are things on your end? Did you get a chance to download any of that stuff?

Amber:
Grim and yes.

Me:
What?

Amber:
I downloaded a ton of stuff today. I’ve stayed in my room, most of the day doing that. I’ve got it on my flash drive.

Me:
You said, grim.

Amber:
Felicity and Major Wilkins are down with the fever.

Me:
Shit.

Amber:
They’re in another room. The guys are guarding the door. There’s talk of shooting them now.

Me:
What ever happened with Darren?

Amber:
Nothing yet. The door is still locked shut. He stays quiet most of the time but gets loud and violent when he hears us in the hall. There’s no doubt he’s infected.

Me:
Do you have a gun?

Amber:
Yes. I’m in your old room by myself and I’m keeping the door locked. But Mark has the master key that he found in the office so he can lock or unlock any of the rooms.

Me:
Is that something to worry about?

Amber:
I don’t know. I only go out into the hall when I have to go to the bathroom and I bring the gun with me. Mostly I hear what’s going on with the others through the door.

Me:
What do you think is going to happen?

Amber:
It’s like Blanton all over again. I think a couple of the guys have sequestered themselves in another of the rooms like me. Marcy and Mark are parading around like the king and queen, but only one of the guys is out there for them to boss around. It’s surreal.

Me:
I’m sorry.

Amber:
When I got here this place seemed like a refuge. Now I don’t know what it is.

Me:
Do you want me come and get you out? I can’t come tonight, but I could try tomorrow.

Amber:
Not a good idea. Everybody thinks you guys are the cause of the infection in here. They think you’re carriers. If they see you, they’ll kill you.

Me:
What do you think?

Amber:
I don’t know. There’s speculation about it all over the internet.

Me:
If that’s true, then I’m truly sorry. I didn’t know. By getting you from the dorm, I may have condemned you.

Amber:
We were going to die there anyway. It was just a matter of time.

Me:
I’m sorry.

Amber:
Don’t be. Things are how they are now.

Me:
Don’t give up hope, Amber. We’ll work something out.

Amber:
Hope is irrelevant. The infection is spreading among us. It’s only a matter of time before all of us here get exposed, if we’re not already. The internet says that exposure is inevitable. The virus is too resilient, too contagious.

Me:
Still, you might be immune. You haven’t contracted the virus yet. If the others were exposed, then you were too. Or you might end up like Murphy and me.

Amber:
Those are very slim chances, Zed.

Me:
Not really. For as much as you’ve been around the virus, especially at Blanton, and you haven’t come down with any symptoms yet, I think there’s a good chance that you’re immune.

Amber:
Thanks for the sunshine doctor Zed.

Me:
I’m not a doctor but I’m in contact with some people over at the hospital and that’s what they think.

Amber:
What?

Me:
That the longer you go without catching the virus, the higher the chances are that it’s because you’re immune.

Amber:
Really? The doctors said that?

Me:
Yup.

Amber:
Okay. I’m going to keep the flash drive in my front pocket. That way, if I get infected and I turn and they shoot me, you can find it there.