Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (16 page)

“Damn,” Murphy muttered.

The entryway was set on a dais four steps above the biggest living room I’d ever seen. It was a vast expanse of light-colored wood floors, modern furniture, stark white walls, and widely dispersed abstract art. The most stunning feature was the two-story wall of windows stretching around the convex curve on the back of the house.

Through the windows,
the sky glowed a faint purple along the horizon. The black hills across the river were dotted with the tiny stars of solar-powered landscape lights and occasional fully lit houses. The wide Colorado River shimmered far below in the moonlight and stretched out around a bend heading west and south.

“Wow,” Mandi
said.

To our
left, a dining room held a very long table that looked to have been sliced vertically from a three-hundred-year-old tree and spanned enough length to seat twenty. To our right, a wide staircase of the same light-colored wood flooring as the rest of the house rose and sank at intricate and unexpected angles like something designed by M. C. Escher.

Somewhere up those stairs, footsteps echoed.

We all shared a look. The house was not empty.

I nodded to Murphy, still with Steph in his arms. He backed into a corner to the left of the door. Mandi did the same. Thankfully, Russell stuck with her. Perhaps he’d tired of my abandoning him.

Dalhover tracked the barrel of his rifle back and forth across all the spaces, keeping an eye out for movement. That left the stairs for me, so I positioned myself at the foot of the stairs and waited.

The clomping footsteps above were awkward, careless, and urgent. It had to be a White, alerted to our presence by the sound of the opening and closing of the door. I reached again for a pistol that wasn’t there, and thought of taking back the one I’d given Steph. She was in no shape to use it.

Too late.

Through the gaps between the steps I saw jeans, a turquoise t-shirt, and white skin. The White was on the stairs. In no time, it tromped down
, the made its way around the last sharp corner, and howled.

She was a short, stout, Hispanic woman, with her black and gray hair pulled back in a bun. She had blood smeared through the wrinkles on her face and down the front of her tent-like t-shirt. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t trip, stumbling and running as she was. Looking past my alabaster skin, she focused on Dalhover and rushed toward him, which made my task easy.

I stepped to the side and as she passed, swinging my machete around and catching her across the back of the neck. My machete, wedged between the bones of her neck, was yanked out of my hand when she dropped. I reluctantly let it go, raised my M-4, and pointed it up the stairs.

The paralyzed woman struggled to breathe as she bled out at my feet. I listened for more noises in the house, but couldn’t make anything out with the woman’s mouth making dying noises below me.

Suddenly, it stopped.

I glanced down to see Dalhover’s knife sticking out of the side of her head. He was standing back up and raising his weapon. Problem solved.

The relative silence revealed a noise somewhere down the stairs. Dalhover heard it, too. It was a muffled, thumping sound. We listened for a few moments longer. The sound wasn’t getting closer. It definitely wasn’t getting farther away. Someone was trapped somewhere below.

“Hey,” I called into the house, hoping to draw any more infected to us.

Still, the muffled thumping from below.

“Hey!” We waited.

I gave it a few more minutes and shouted again, “Hey!”

Nothing but the thumping.

Dalhover quietly told me, “We need to clear the house.”

I nodded my agreement, then looked back at Murphy. “You got this?”

“Yeah.” He laid Steph on the floor and brought his weapon up. Mandi kneeled down beside Steph to keep the pressure on her wound. Russell kneeled beside her. Steph seemed stable, not calm, but not hyperventilating anymore.

I looked at Dalhover with raised eyebrows.
Which way first?

Dalhover tilted his head to his left and moved into the dining room. I followed. It was clearly empty, but there was a doorway at the far end, on the right.

Dalhover hurried down one side of the long table. I went down the other. Glancing to my left through the windows, I saw the gauntlet and the curved terraces. The bodies of the two security guards, the naked woman, and the boy lay down there. But the only movement came from the lawnmowers.

Dalhover stopped against the wall beside the doorway into the kitchen. From across the dining room, I walked forward
slowly, scanning across the kitchen in an arc. It was empty. I nodded the all-clear to Dalhover and he jumped through the doorway and down five steps to the kitchen’s tile floor.

I hurried across and joined him.

The under-cabinet lighting gleamed off of the stainless steel counter tops and smooth black lacquer cabinets. Dalhover was moving left around the central island and opened a door to a pantry. A light came on automatically as the door swung. From where I stood it appeared to be large, but sparsely stocked.

Dalhover grunted something unintelligible and closed the door. He hurried over to the two refrigerators built side by side into the cabinetry. He opened one, then the other, bathing himself in the gl
ow of the refrigerator lamp. Upon closing the second, he looked at me and his sad eyes turned angry. “Goddamned vegetarians.”

The far wall of the kitchen was just an extension of the floor-to-ceiling windows we’d seen from across the living room, but only half the height. There was apparently a room above the kitchen.

A long, stainless steel bar separated the kitchen from the living room and was lined with a row of barstools. I followed Dalhover around it and into the living room. On the other side of the glass ran a balcony the length of the house. Nothing out there but patio furniture.

The living room had plenty of fur
niture, but was devoid of anything alive. On the back wall of the living room, there were several doors and the entrance to a hall. Above those room, the doors on the upstairs rooms, swung out to an open hallway that ran the length of the house.

The first door off of the living room
led into an empty bathroom. The next, a library with a desk and more couches. Down at the end of the living room, a short hall opened up to a washroom on the right, a maid’s quarters on the left, and a downstairs guest room.

A narrow stairway in the washroom led us upstairs, where it came out beside a linen closet. From there we walked into the master bedroom, which took up one whole end of the house. It, of course, had the requisite floor-to-ceiling windows, along with a bathroom that might better be labeled a spa. It was larger than my apartment and decorated in dichroic glass tiles and translucent glass bricks. Off of that were two closets, each larger than my living room.

“Jesus,” I muttered to Dalhover.

“Yeah,” Dalhover answered
. It was good to be rich.

We came out of the master bedroom onto the upstairs walkway, and I glanced dow
n into the living room. Nothing moved down there, but the muffled thumping from somewhere downstairs could still be heard.

The first door led to a
gym. No infected there. Another bathroom was empty. Next, a guest room with its own bathroom proved empty.

We crossed a catwalk near the stairs, and Murphy, Mandi, and Russell silently watched us pass.

The room at the other end of the catwalk had to be a kid’s room, probably the one we’d killed on the lawn. It looked like a cross between the master suite and a teenager’s room. Great views, enormous bathroom, cavernous closet. Our shock over the opulence was starting to wear off, and the stark reality of life’s unfairness was sinking in.

Satisfied that the second floor was clear, I followed Dalhover back to the stairs. Above us, the stairs climbed up to a landing with a glass door that opened to the outside.

“Up or down?” I whispered.

Dalhover shrugged, “The noisy one downstairs isn’t going anywhere. It’s the quiet ones that worry me right now.”

I whispered down to Murphy from the catwalk, “We’re going up. Are you cool?”

“I got it, man.” Murphy refocused his attention down the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed at the stairs.

Dalhover and I climbed.

Once at the top, looking through the glass door, I said, “I’ll go out first. You stay inside. I wanna be sure the door doesn’t lock us out.”

“Yeah,” was Dalhover’s reply.

I went outside and let the door close behind me. It closed with a click. I retried it and it opened.

Finally, a normal door!

Dalhover came outside with me.

On the roof, a large swimming pool was surrounded by pergolas, from which hung rows of hoses designed to spray a cooling mist over the tanning chairs.

I walked around the counters of an outdoor kitchen and looked over the rail at the edge. Dalhover’s Humvee sat undisturbed in the courtyard, just as we’d left it. The garage’s roof was a solid mass of solar panels. “I wonder if that provides enough electricity to power the whole house.”

“I hope so,” Dalhover answered.

After walking the roof’s perimeter and satisfying ourselves with the view of the property from the top, we let ourselves back inside and headed downstairs. We passed Murphy on the main floor with a nod and proceeded down.

At the bottom, the stairs flared wide into an expansive room set up like a theater lobby. Above a curtained entrance to what could only be a home theater, a marquee surrounded in little golden bulbs advertised some movie I’d never heard of. A snack bar complete with soda machine, popcorn machine, and candy counter stood off to the side. A pair of restrooms marked ladies and gents opened out of one wall.

One wall of glass panels separated the brightly lit faux lobby from the dim light of a wine cellar. An arched doorway of old-looking wood opened to a tasting area that was flanked by a dozen dark wooden shelves, full of bottles. The cellar was bigger than most of the liquor stores I’d been in, and I’d been in a lot. There was no one inside.

Dalhover and I shared a look. I was trying to do the math in my head. How much more money than me did the owner of this house have? I guessed something similar was going through his mind.

I looked around again. The sound that had been thumping from down there had stopped. But there was a White around somewhere.

The two restrooms had open entrances with angled halls inside, just like you might find in a theater. The entrance to the theater itself was draped with a heavy curtain. If we were going to get surprised by a White rushing out, it would be from either the restrooms or the theater. The doors, we’d hear opening.

I nodded to the theater and Dalhover gave
me a minimal expression of affirmation. He stepped over to the side of the entrance, and put a hand on the curtain. I understood his intent and centered myself in front of the curtain, rifle at the ready.

He slowly drew the curtain back.

Beyond, I saw several rows of plush recliners facing a movie screen at least a dozen feet wide. Just as in the rest of the house, night-lights held the room in a dim glow. Nothing moved, so I proceeded cautiously in, looking left and right in rapid succession as I passed the curtain. No White was waiting there to ambush me. The walls, I noticed, were decorated with an assortment of movie posters, all featuring the actress Sarah Mansfield.

Oh
, shit!

I connected the face of the naked woman on the lawn
to the smiling face on the posters. This was her house. I’d killed Sarah Mansfield, hacked her to death with a machete.

…
And watched her infected son drown in his own blood.

Of course
, I didn’t know Sarah Mansfield, but her death felt personal. I’d seen so many of her movies—even finding some private satisfaction while I re-watched a particularly racy movie of hers when I was alone in my room—that I felt like I knew her.

I felt bad. The sadness was coming to crush me. Was it Sarah’s death, or was her death just a release valve for all the bottled up shit from the past few weeks?

My eyes welled up.

No!

No time for that now.

Stuff it down.

Put it somewhere dark.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Breathe.

Move the feet. Focus.

A quick circuit through the fat leather chairs proved the theater empty, and I exited. The restrooms were next, and I followed Dalhover into the ladies’ and then the men’s. Both were free of infected.

Back in the lobby again, I whispered, “This is Sarah Mansfield’s house.”

“
The
Sarah Mansfield?”

Before I could answer, a metal door to our left thumped with the sound of a fist pounding it from the other side. Well, that answered that question, and the next question. That was the source of the sound, and whoever was making it did know we were there.