Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (12 page)

We parked a quarter of a mile from Russell's old house, among a collection of burned out cars that would serve to hide the Humvees from a casual observer. With the pile of charred bodies located on the opposite side of the block of unburned houses, we had a good chance of remaining hidden from the infected feasting there.

Russell and I headed out on foot toward his old house. I didn’t see a single infected moving about as we approached. That made me nervous. I was getting conditioned to expect one to jump at me every time I blinked my eyes.

As we stepped up onto the curb and started across Russell's dead lawn, the front door opened and Mandi peeked out. She cast a nervous glance both left and right, but her smile glowed as bright as the sun.

I hurried the last few steps up onto the porch and through the door as Mandi swung it wide for both Russell and me. Without a word, she closed and locked the door behind us.

Murphy, who had been keeping lookout through the window on the back door, turned and grinned widely when he saw us inside.

Mandi threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly. She did the same with Russell and got pretty much the same response. Nothing. Though I, at least, did smile.

"Let's get upstairs," Murphy said, leading the way to the office.

Once we were all upstairs, Murphy pointed out the back window and said softly, "There's got to be at least a thousand of them out there now. They've been coming in groups all day. They wander in from the east, mostly. When they get close, I think they smell the dead and find their way here.”

Through the back window, I saw that the pile of corpses had been dragged all over the blackened grass. The burned yards were covered with infected, surrounding and mutilating each corpse as they fed. Bodies had been dragged right up to Russell's back fence, and fifty or sixty Whites fed on them, not thirty feet from where Murphy and I stood at the window.

Murphy nodded his head toward the infected out back, "They make me nervous, being that close."

"Yeah," I agreed.

"I'm so glad you made it back," Mandi’s voice burbled with excitement.

Murphy took that as a cue and slapped my back. "God damn, I am too, man! I figured you were gonna get killed running off in the middle of the night like that."

I shrugged.

"What's the story with Amber?" Murphy was suddenly very serious.

I shook my head and tried to say that she was dead, but the words got caught in my throat.

Crap! Why did that happen?

Mandi hugged me again. "She's in a better place."

I nodded at the cliché and drew a deep breath as I pulled away. "Mark killed her. I think he's a slow burn."

"If he's a slow burn, why'd he kill her?” Murphy nodded his head toward the infected behind the house. “Maybe he was just like them."

"Nothing fed on her," I said, trying to push an image of Amber's bruised face out my mind. "She was beaten to death."

"That doesn't make any sense. Are you sure it was Mark?" Murphy asked.

I nodded. "Everybody else was dead. The building was still closed up.”

"All of them?" Murphy was surprised.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "All of them were infected except for Amber."

"Getting kicked out of there was probably the best thing for us," Murphy said.

I didn’t want to agree, but we were alive. That was better than the alternative.

Mandi asked, "Could Mark be immune, do you think?"

"No," I answered. "Amber was pretty sure he got infected."

"Man, that just doesn't make any sense.” Murphy was shaking his head and starting to pace around the room. Amber’s death was at least frustrating for him, maybe more. “I don't understand why he'd kill her if he was a slow burn. I don't understand why he didn't feed on her if he was infected."

"Dalhover has a theory that some of the slow burns aren't like us. More like the criminally insane. I’ve seen it myself. I think he’s right."

Mandi asked, "Who's Dalhover?"

It took nearly a half hour to bring Murphy and Mandi up to speed on what had happened. It took a little longer to discuss joining up with the hospital survivors. In the end, we decided to join up and head for the Evans’ family farm.

Ash and black turned to tan grass and rolling hills as we drove out into the country. Wind-tortured trees, like hedges, grew along the fence lines. Houses, trailers, sun-bleached barns, and rotted sheds dotted the hill crests or rested in valleys.

Cattle grazed in
parched fields or huddled like Whites where the trees provided shade. Fields of dry corn stalks and cotton waited for harvests that would never come. We saw not one living human as we navigated the narrow county roads and farm-to-market roads.

E
scape to the country was starting to seem like a really good idea.

Following Dalhover,
Steph, and the soldier in the lead vehicle, Murphy drove our Humvee in uncharacteristic silence. He and Mandi kept sharing furtive glances and worried smiles; I guessed that their relationship had changed, perhaps significantly, in my absence.

In a shallow valley,
the road bisected a grove of tall pecan trees that mercifully shaded us for a half-mile. At the end of the grove, we came upon a small collection of buildings at a T-intersection. A town name was painted on a green highway sign in reflective white, but I didn’t bother to read it. It was one of those towns so small that its name was only ever mentioned by people giving directions that included the phrase “down yonder.”

A
closed store with a sagging wooden sign weathered away on one corner. A bar was boarded up with sheets of gray plywood, delaminating with age. The five or six houses were in such a state of disrepair that the owners had to have died or stopped caring years before I was born.

Brown stains, clothing remnants, and a few bones littered the crushed caliche parking lot in front of the bar. At the edge of the road, coyotes fought over the remains of a small, child-sized body.

Mandi turned away from the sight outside her window and looked at Russell and me in the back seat. In a tone that made it clear that she was convincing herself, she said, “It’s better out here, I think.”

“Yeah,” I grunted, leaning my head on the glass, staring emptily out of the window. My ability to pay attention was starting to fade. My butt was in a cushioned seat. Cool air blew over my skin. Fatigue, held at bay all day by a river of adrenaline, was coming to collect its due.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Mandi went on. Her sweet voice bounced along like a squeaky kid’s wagon on the sidewalk.

She said some more things, but my fatigue
made her words seem like sing-song noise, not worth comprehending. My attention drifted. My eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep. I needed the sleep. But sleeping led to dreaming; running and chasing and killing and dying and murder and blood and screaming and screaming and screaming
…

And those kids.

Those pitiful fucking kids.

I shot up straight in my seat. I had a crick in my neck and drool on my cheek. I was disoriented.

The Humvee was idling but not moving. Russell sat beside me and stared straight ahead. Through the windshield I saw the other Humvee sitting on the road. Then a longhorn trotted between the two vehicles.

“What the…?” I wondered if I was still asleep.

Another of the big cattle followed the first.

Murphy laughed, “Man, you know you’re in Texas when you see a stampede.”

Mandi giggled, “There’s only like ten cows. That’s hardly a stampede. And they’re not in a hurry.”

To our left, one of the big longhorns jumped over a barbed wire fence and walked out into a crop of dying sorghum. The rust-colored bull sniffed at the plants but didn’t seem interested in eating.

Murphy pointed down at a farm in the dip between the rolling hills. “Look, down there beside that barn.”

Mandi looked. “What?”

“That’s a Humvee. I’ll bet that’s the farm.”

Dalhover jumped out of his Humvee and trotted back toward us, giving the longhorns a wide berth.

Murphy lowered his window so that Dalhover could speak to him. “After these damn longhorns get out of the road ahead of us, we’ll get moving again.” Dalhover pointed to the farm down the slope. “That’s the place, over there.”

“Gotcha, Top,” Murphy answered.

Without another word, Dalhover hurried back to his vehicle.

To no one in particular, Mandi said, “I hope they have running water. I really need a shower.”

“I’ll say,” Murphy laughed.

“Don’t be a pig!” Mandi retorted, punching Murphy in the arm.

Something had definitely happened between them.

Outside, the longhorns had lost all sense of urgency. No one in the Humvee seemed to care. With our goal in sight, and no two-legged monsters in pursuit, our sense of urgency was gone as well. My head lolled over against the glass and I closed my eyes again.

Rest.

“I like it here,” Mandi said. “If there’s not enough room for everyone in the house, I’ll bet there are empty farmhouses nearby that we could move into.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

“What kind of crops can you grow here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Murphy answered. “Whatever we need, probably.”

“We even have cows. I like steak. Do longhorns taste like regular cows?” Mandi asked.

Murphy chuckled. “They don’t have as much fat, I think.”

“Look,” Mandi said excitedly. “There’s someone on the porch. They’re waving at us.”

More things were said, but I was starting to fade back to dreamland, or maybe dream hell and sleep land. But there was a change in Mandi’s tone of voice. “Why are all the longhorns looking in that direction?”

I opened my eyes and sat up. Not alarmed, but alert.

The longhorns outside had all come to a stop and were looking back toward the farmhouse to our east.
Two weeks before, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But running for your life at every turn changes a person. I put a hand on my rifle and looked around for the danger.

Murphy had
tensed as well. He sat up straight in his seat, but said nothing.

“What is
it?” Mandi asked, seeing the change in Murphy and looking back at me.

“Don’t know,” Murphy answered.

The longhorns suddenly bolted. Given their thousand-pound weight, their quickness was surprising. The impact of their hooves hitting the ground vibrated up through the Humvee’s tires. They each hopped the fence to our left and plowed through the sorghum, sending clouds of pollen up in their wake.

The people on the porch had stopped waving and were looking around. Whatever had spooked the longhorns ha
d piqued their attention too.

I listened
, but over the sound of the Humvee’s engine and the longhorn’s hoof beats, I couldn’t make out anything.

“I
nfected!” Mandi pointed, urgency and fear tweaking her voice. Perhaps a mile away, on the other side of the valley, a double helix of stark white infected were cresting the hill.

With the house between the people on the porch
and the infected coming over the hill, they had no way of seeing them.

“Are they naked?” Mandi asked, her voice no less urgent.

Ahead of us, Dalhover jumped out of the Humvee and aimed his rifle into the distance and fired. He had no hope of hitting anything at that range, but I assumed the sound was meant as a warning.

The people on the porch froze for a second, and Dalhover fired again.

“Get inside,” Mandi pleaded.

“They will,” Murphy comforted her, putting a hand on her thigh.

As if waiting on permission from Murphy, the people on the porch hurried into the house and closed the door. Several more helices of jogging infected crested the hill to the east.

Dalhover shot the rifle in the air three times in rapid succession and looked down at the house.

“They should be safe now that they’re inside,” Murphy said. “They just need to be quiet.”

More infected came. Then more. And more. It looked like God had dumped a city-sized bucket of Whites on the other side of the hill, and they were splashing over and pouring into the valley.

With my voice stressed to the point of betraying my fear for those below, I shouted, “They need to get out of there!” I swung my door open and pulled my weapon up to my shoulder as I ran around to the other side of the vehicle. Russell was on my heels.

Dalhover shot me a worried look. The far hill was solid with running Whites. They didn’t shout. They didn’t howl—they didn’t see the people in the house yet—but the sound of tens of thousands of running feet and heavy breathing rolled across the valley like a swarm of ghostly locusts.

Where the hell did they all come from?

“Good God!” Dalhover shouted, in a rare display of emotion.

I fired my rifle indiscriminately at the horde.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, naked and hairless (and what the fuck was up with that anyway?) were distracted by the crack of my gun and altered their direction to run at us. The rest washed over the house.

From below, gunfire popped. Glass broke. A great howl gathered the strength of every rabid voice in the valley and blew the hush all to hell.

The Ogre and the Fucking Harpy.

It took all my willpower not to run, but I found the courage to stand and reload.

A grenade explosion disturbed the mass of bodies on the porch, but its sound was lost in the tsunami of screams; the bloody void left in its passing was quickly filled with struggling white bodies.

Still the infected flooded over the hill.
How many could there be?

Dr. Evans and a woman
crawled out of a second floor window and onto the roof above the porch. Another woman clawed her way out as Dr. Evans climbed the rough brick chimney to get to the top of the house. The infected were out the window now. They caught the third woman. She was shrieking. That’s to say that her mouth was open wide, her face stretched in fear. But the sound was lost.

My finger hovered over the trigger.

Dr. Evans and the first woman made it to the roof, but there were a dozen infected on the porch roof, running about, searching. More climbed out through the window.

Dalhover aimed at the house and fired, but the million-legged anemone absorbed the bullets with no effect. Nevertheless, I followed his example with thirty more futile bullets.

A White started the climb up the side of the chimney. When his head peeked over the edge of the roof, it exploded in a spray of brilliant red over white skin. He fell and bounced off the roof below where his body was swallowed by the mass.

More infected followed.

However many bullets Evans had in his pistol, it wasn’t enough.

Dalhover hung his head, and like a warped, wooden man, walked back to the front seat of the Humvee. The infected were starting to run up the long slope toward us. It was time to go.

My danger-driven talent for fast thinking kicked in and I ran up to Dalhover’s side of the Humvee, yelling at him through the window, “Follow us!”

“What?”
He looked back at me with a stolid face and eyes that had seen too much pain. He didn’t nod or shake his head.

“Follow us!” I pointed at our Humvee.

I ran back to my Humvee and jumped in behind Murphy. “We’re taking the lead!”

Without a word, Murphy gunned the engine, ran through
a ditch to get around Dalhover, and pushed the lumbering Humvee to speed away from the farm.