Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer
Read Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer Online
Authors: Bobby Adair
Text copyright © 2013, Bobby L. Adair
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design and Layout
Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz
Editing & Proofreading
Cathy Moeschet
Lindsay Heuertz
George Mathew
Robyn Roopchan
eBook and Print Formatting
Kat Kramer
Political Satire
Zombie Fiction
Well, here we are again, back for Book 3 in the series. Thanks to all of you millions of readers who have enjoyed the first two books. Well, not millions at this moment, but perhaps at some point in the wildest dreams of my future. I hope Book 3 continues to make the story more exciting and engaging.
It occurs to me, having sent the book o
ff for the final round of proofreads, that I forgot to run a count on the number of naughty words, something I usually do prior to editing. (I then replace at least some of them) In case you haven’t noticed yet, I have an irreverent attitude toward rules of unacceptable synonyms; those rules that society uses to tell us which words we can use in polite company and which we cannot. The bottom line is, I just don’t care.
I think that words are tools that groups of people use to repress other groups. Throughout history, people
’s manner of speech (not just language) and word choice has identified them as part of a particular socio-economic class or ethnicity and as a result has subjected them to prejudice and oppression. I don’t want to be a part of any social system engaged in that kind of bullshit. So, I mount my personal protest by allowing my characters to express themselves just like regular folks.
And while we’re on the word thing, I came across the word Quixotry while reading an article on the word game Scrabble. Apparently Quixotry was played for 365 points in the highest scoring scrabble game ever. Holy crap! I immediately thought, I’ve got to use that in one of my books. Well, I wrote it in, then out,
then in, then back out again. In the end, I didn’t use it. It seemed too pretentious for the moment in the story where I’d added it. So, it’s out. But stay on your toes; I may use it in a later book. Actually, given Zed’s penchant for seemingly foolish quests, it might have been a good name for the series.
Now on to more traditional Foreword material.
Thank you Captain John Cummings for all the technical advice on military gear and weaponry. Apparently there’s more to real life than what one can see on YouTube. Oh, and to think that I had the trapezius and deltoids mixed up my whole life. It’s interesting and sometimes humbling to learn the truth about something you thought you
knew
.
Thank you Jeff Anonymous for some interesting discussions we had on the long-term consequences of seemingly insignificant plot choices early on in the story. That led so some substantial shifts in the storyline.
Thank you to my editors and proofreaders. The more the spirit moves me as I’m writing, the worse my grammar gets. You guys/girls have corrected a ridiculous number of mistakes.
Oh, I guess this is where I make promises about the
next book in the series. March – April 2014 would be nice. That’s my goal anyway. Please don’t string me up if I don’t get there. But rest assured, that I’ll try, and of course, I’ll put the screws to very understanding editors/proofreaders to try to make a March deadline.
The rest of the series will probably run for three more books though I suppose I might wrap up the story in two. We’ll see. There are some ideas for the characters that I wanted to explore but I don’t see being able to get there with the direction that the story is moving
in now. And I don’t want to write a series that rambles around for ten or twelve books before we finally get some resolution. So, those other ideas might sit on the back burner for a year or two while I figure out what to do with them.
Oh, and as you flip the pages, you’ll see that I added a recap
(thanks Cathy) of the first two books for those you who have a life outside of memorizing every page that I write. : )
As many of you have found, I have a Facebook page,
www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor
, where I try to keep everyone updated on the status of upcoming books, and generally post anything interesting as I think it relates to the genre
—right now there’s a very cool thing going on with pictures of old abandoned “post-apocalyptic” buildings that started with a random trip to the Texas panhandle ghost town of Perico, for a photo “safari.”
My website,
www.BobbyAdair.com
, is
currently floundering in my procrastination. There’s really nothing there. The thing is, I write software at my day job and when I get home from a long day in the cube, the last thing I want to do is pop open my laptop and write some more code. So, as the joke goes…good thing I didn’t become a gynecologist.
I hope you enjoy the book.
Bobby
Book 1 – Zero Day
Zed Zane wakes up hung over one Sunday morning and begins to fortify himself with vodka before going to his mother’s house for lunch
—and to beg for rent. There, he finds his mother and a neighbor dead, and his stepfather in full-throttle, crazed cannibal mode. Zed, fighting for his life, kills his stepfather in a scuffle, during which he sustains a nasty bite wound.
He tries calling 911, but the line is perpetually busy. That’s strange, but no stranger than the way that Zed is beginning to feel. He spends the next two days unconscious with a raging fever, and awakens as what soon becomes known as a “slow burn,” a carrier of a virus that destroys higher brain function and turns people into vicious, flesh-eating monsters.
Together with Murphy, a fellow slow burn who escapes with Zed in the aftermath of a prison riot following his erroneous arrest for the murder of his parents and their neighbor, we follow Zed on his quest for shelter, resources, and a plan for living in the strange new world in which he finds himself.
Although Zed himself has not “turned” completely, as have most of the other infected, the ambiguous, not-immune-but-not-dangerous category in which he finds himself will from this point forward direct his every thought and step if he is to survive.
Book 2 – Infected
Book 2 – Infected
finds Zed, Murphy, and their traveling companion, Jerome on the move again following what proves to be a brief respite in a university dormitory, in the company of some extremely, albeit justifiably, paranoid ROTC students and three coeds, one of whom befriends Zed. In the process of stealing a Humvee, Jerome is shot by soldiers and Zed and Murphy head on alone to find Murphy’s family.
With Murphy’s mother dead and his sister missing, their next stop is a house rumored to feature an underground survivalist bunker, where another surprise awaits.
With Amber’s legacy, a flash drive in my pocket, I walked.
Russell followed.
What else was he going to do?
Through the university’s campus and into a neighborhood of old wooden houses, I walked past cars, corpses, and clothes. The dead left their remains where they gasped their last breaths and all the tidiness of the world flitted away in the breeze.
I had no destination. I had no goal. Dark thoughts of revenge and the stupidity of it followed me like the half dozen infected who each fell in line behind Russell, keeping step as we walked. Was social conformity so hardwired into the human brain that even the fever rot couldn’t burn it out?
Shadows shortened.
Summer heat shriveled hope as it boiled toward midday.
I wanted to douse myself in the kind of cheap tequila that starts punishing you the moment it passes your lips and mosh through my hate with some raging, slamming, metal music. Oblivion and numbness, so familiar, beckoned me. I wanted to forget everything.
Every single fucking thing.
I came to a stop. My entourage did the same. I stared at the sun and tried to sear the image of Amber’s bruised face out of my brain. But it wouldn’t go. Spots in my vision were all I earned for my trouble.
I wanted to squeeze Mark’s throat and see his eyes bulge, see his face twist, and hear the pinched sounds from his throat as he tried to gasp for breath. I wanted to revel in the ever-weakening pounding of his fists on my face, like a metronome winding down while his brain died from oxygen deprivation.
But he was more likely dead than alive, a probability that increased with each passing minute. He might be a slow burn or a raving cannibal, one of a million white faces, none of which I’d ever recognize again. Unless fortune one day smiled on me, I’d never find him. Revenge would only ever be a little nugget of unrequited, unfulfilled hate, weighing on my soul.
I needed to let it go, but I knew I never would.
Ahead of me, a medicine capsule of a car seemed suddenly to be in the middle of the road, offensively bland, obnoxiously shiny. It angered me beyond reason and my machete wanted sorely to punish it. So with black fire in my eyes, I attacked, hacked at a fender, and rent ugly scars in the soft metal.
Supportive even in violence, Russell was immediately beside me, beating on the hood with his baseball bat. And what the fuck was I going to do with him? Did I really need a Siamese twin?
My infected hangers-on assailed the car with their fists and smashed their skulls against the windows until the glass spider-webbed and caved in.
I jumped up on the hood and went after the roof with my blade.
The Whites tore at the car’s leather seats. Russell screamed. I roared. The infected joined. We were the destroyers, and our victim’s pieces fell to the asphalt.
Sweating and breathing heavily, I pointed my machete to the sky and screamed at God.
White clouds morphed into other white clouds and slowly slid across the blue and gray. Such was his answer.
I jumped down to the street and fell back on the hot asphalt—my dirty, matted hair my only pillow. The odor of unwashed sweat lingered over me. My knees and elbows were soiled and scraped. My arm, bandaged and scabbing still oozed pus from its own little infections. And the blood of the dead, of those Whites victimized by my bullets or my blade covered my clothes and skin in crusty, reddish-brown badges of every shape.
Tired, thirsty, hungry, spent, I stared into the mottled blue.
I was lost.
My childhood came to mind, and for the millionth futile time I tried to forget it all. But the Ogre and the Harpy had so branded the stench of their wicked ineptitude on my soul that I would forever carry those scars, cursed to hear the Harpy’s hiss, even when I breathed my last breath.
Forgetting is a skill learned by the lucky. I’d tried and tried, but always failed. In my failure, I’d watch over and over Jerome’s death while I hid behind a wall, I’d see Earl’s head explode in front of me as I ran across the street, I’d forever see Amber’s bloody, inanimate face.
Nothing in life is worth remembering. The past is something to escape from, nothing more.
On my feet again, I wandered through parts of Austin I’d never seen before. But no matter the street names, no matter the style of houses behind the curb, they were all the same
—
empty and lifeless, the realm of the infected.
But
I
was infected.
Was this realm now
mine? King Zed and his dumb, white lackeys, destroyers of cars and screamers at the skies.
That was worth a laugh, but a laugh was a million miles from my heart. I was wallowing in self-pity over a girl I barely knew, and there was no rational explanation for it. I needed a way to get past it. I
was
rational enough to know that.
A house on a bend in Matheson Ridge Road with a wide, lush lawn and an open front door offered itself up as a distraction. The green grass was a thick carpet under my feet but it blackened my mood to imagine what would become of it when the electric grid failed and the automatic sprinklers stopped giving it life.
Curiously, there were no signs of violence on the porch and the front door was undamaged, apparently just left open, forgotten in a rush.
A soft, air-conditioned breeze whispered over me as I walked through the doorway. Behind me, Russell and our friends followed. Looking back, I saw that their faces showed no appreciation of the wonderfully cold air. “Oh, Russell. You poor, oblivious man.”
As soon as his feet landed on the tile of the foyer, I slammed the door in the face of the infected behind, knocking the first one back into the others, who fell on the porch and the stairs.
The doorknob clicked and I turned the deadbolt.
A few seconds later, the infected were beating and pushing on the door. It wasn’t the frenzied behavior that I’d seen so many times already—it was different. It reminded me of Russell in those moments after I jumped into that attic and he stood on the bed, yelling, reaching, and frustrated.
“Fuck ‘em.”
Russell followed me into a large living room with a fireplace twelve feet wide, built of raw stone stacked all the way to the ceiling twenty feet over our heads. The room was filled with expensive leather furniture and inexplicably ornate doodads. It sported a glass wall on the back that gave us a view over a wide, wooded ravine, with glimpses of Austin’s downtown buildings in the distance.
We had walked much farther than I’d have guessed.
Though I wasn’t conscious of it, I had to be dehydrated, and my stomach, tired of futilely telling me how hungry I was, had given up. Russell, poker-faced, quiet, unshaven, stinking of sweat, needed water and food as much as I, though I doubted he’d do anything to resolve it if I didn’t put it in front of him.
But should I?
The empathy that had allowed Russell to attach himself to me the night before was under assault from the blackness of my mood. Did the world have room for Russell? Could I, should I be his keeper? Would it be kinder to cut him loose and let him die or let him chase me all over Austin until we both fell to the tearing hands of the hungry infected?
The kitchen, that’s where we needed to be
.
It was portioned from the living room by a giant marble-topped island surrounded by a dozen stools. The kitchen itself was as large as my apartment. Dual refrigerators built into a cabinet-covered wall proved to be
well-stocked. Whoever had left this house had left us with a bounty.
Bottled water was the first casualty of our refrigerator raid. I opened one and put it in Russell’s hand, then turned him around and put another seven or eight in his backpack. As Russell gulped his water, I opened another bottle and did the same. The cold water poured down my throat, bringing near orgasmic satisfaction. I was thirstier than I knew.
Dangerously so, perhaps. Staying alive with my virus-dulled senses was going to require a little more introspective attention.
With the water downed, Russell looked over my shoulder while I gathered up cold cuts, wheat bread, lettuce, and condiments. I dumped the sandwich fixings on the island and went to work stacking several thick sandwiches of expensive deli meats, aged cheeses, lettuce, and ripe tomatoes.
I parked Russell on a stool and jammed a sandwich into his hands. We ate.
I thought about Murphy and Mandi. Were they safe in Russell’s house, eating microwaved meals, sipping bottled water, and staying hidden from the infected massed around the charred dead behind the fence? How many hours had passed since Russell and I left? Could Murphy and Mandi be dead? Had it been long enough for that? Of course it had. I needed to get back to them, but I was drowning in emotions I didn’t understand and couldn’t process. I needed an outlet.
With a full stomach and the distraction of Russell’s noisy chewing fading into the background, I sat on my stool and looked across the glossy expanse of marble, out the windows, and down the long ravine. The twenty-eight floor UT Tower stood several miles distant.
Smoke hung like an ashy fog over the city and washed color and clarity from the world until it just faded into horizonless gray. High above, black billows of smoke from the Houston refinery fires rolled west. What was it, a week since Dan killed the Harpy and bit me in the kitchen
? And now the old world was casting about in messy throes of death.
Following the city’s skyline from the tower south, the basketball arena stood beside the highway like a giant snare drum. Just to the right of that lay the Brackenridge hospital complex. I strained my eyes to tease details out of the distance, but none would come.
Steph was in one of those buildings. Dead? Possibly. Probably.
I fished my phone out of my pocket. It was silent and held no unread messages.
I blinked as though tears were in my eyes, but I’d spent all of my tears over Amber’s body. There were no more left to fill the Harpy’s cup.
Wicked, destructive thoughts slowly coalesced in my mind. Trying to find Mark would be a waste of time at best
, so killing him wasn’t going to happen. Perhaps surrogates would feed the hunger for now. I needed to busy my hands in the bloody work of catharsis.
Steph, dead or alive, somewhere up in Brackenridge, was convenient enough to rationalize the violence that was brewing within me. Better to know for sure if she was dead than to ruminate over it later. At least that’s how the rationalization came together.
Null Spot—no, Null Spot
the Destroyer
—had
work to do.