Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (18 page)

Several days passed, and life in Sarah Mansfield’s compound was a surreal concoction of normalcy, opulence, and the separate reality of the world beyond the walls. We were showered, fed, and comfortable. We had soft beds, clean sheets, and not a single White to chase us around. But the sounds of gunshots from the city
increased in frequency and drew closer each day. Whether through overwrought fears or accurate observation, it seemed the carnage was coming our way.

The memories of our experiences, all the dying, all the dead, and all the infected haunted our quiet times. We talked a lot about anything or nothing, whatever it took to keep us from staring at the walls and sinking into our thoughts. We’d all been through so much. We needed time to heal.

We distracted ourselves with the seemingly endless library of movies in the basement theater. We drank wine in the evenings and watched the panoramic sunsets over the hills across the river. All the ash and smoke in the air made for brilliant reds, purples, and oranges. The death of our world painted in spectacular beauty on the sky.

We took turns maintaining our vigil in the guardroom, watching the walls, watching for the threats that were sure to come.

I thought often about the naked horde that overran Dr. Evans’ farm. Would all the Whites eventually shed their clothes in their primal regression and band together into unstoppable, hungry armies? Would they scour the land and devour every last person before finally consuming themselves, as Jeff Aubrey’s calculations had predicted?

Were we going extinct, or did we have hope?

Perhaps hope. Murphy’s big smile was back. Mandi was still sweet. Those two had moved into an upstairs room together. The rest of us, not wanting to be alone at night, shared Sarah Mansfield’s very large former bedroom.

We had all the electricity we needed. Pretty much. The battery banks in the garage would store a few days’ worth if we kept the temperature in the house at seventy-eight degrees. Most of the lights were LEDs and used barely any electricity. Nevertheless, we removed any light bulbs that left us visible at night
from across the river.

W
e were hidden in plain sight, with a strong motivation to stay that way.

Sarah Mansfield, movie star, activist, environmentalist, vegetarian, and paparazzi paranoiac, left us
a house absent of firearms, meat, or animal products of any kind—generally a little short on edibles—but otherwise it couldn’t have been more perfect. In the long term, the terraces would be good for farming. The walls provided protection. An elevator down to a surprisingly secure boathouse gave us access to the river. And a primo surveillance system ensured that no infected hand would ever touch our walls without our knowing ahead of time.

It was mid-afternoon and I had the watch. Murphy sat in one of the high-backed leather office chairs, as did I. He was busy on the computer, but keeping me company. Russell squatted by the wall behind us. The wall in front of us was covered with color video monitors, all mounted at angles to give the person sitting at the center of the monitoring desk a good view of each; one monitor for each camera. Each had a bright red LED that would light up when the motion detector attached to the camera activated.

Two forty-two-inch screens were centered on the wall directly in front of the chairs. The video feed from the small monitors would scroll across the big ones at regular intervals. Below the big screens at the center of the desk was a map of the compound that showed each camera location. The ones displaying on the large monitors would light in green. With the press of a button, any monitor could be called up to the big screens. Audio from that camera could be piped in. It was an impressive system.

On one of the big screens I was watching
, two infected were a good way down the street, squatting beside a brick mailbox under the deep shade of an oak.

Murphy, with a copy of Amber’s flash drive and a laptop from the kid’s room, was busy stitching together Google satellite map images to get a full map of Austin. “Don’t let this go to your head, Zed, but it was a good idea to download all this stuff to the flash drive.”

“The maps were Amber’s idea. I didn’t think to ask for that.” I’d have preferred not to have Amber’s name mentioned. Her swollen, bloody face still haunted my thoughts and those thoughts always turned into rekindled hatred for Mark, and in the darkness of that mood, I’d entertain fantasies of how I’d slowly dismember him and listen to his high-pitched girlie screams as I sliced off his genitals one small piece at a time. I thought of stapling his lips back against his face and breaking his teeth, but leaving the painful stumps in his mouth. I wanted to flay his skin, smash his fingers with a hammer, and gouge out his eyes with a grapefruit spoon. It was a dark, twisted place of glorified revenge and torturous pain that bordered on evil. It was not a healthy place for my thoughts to wander.

“Well, we owe her. When I’m done putting this together, this map will come in real handy. Hell, it might be the only one in existence. That makes it valuable as hell.”

And because my dark mood made me feel contrary, I said, “But there’s got to be gas station maps everywhere.”

“Man, those are fine for driving, but a satellite map is a whole different deal. You see where the
Walmarts are, and the food. You can see where the houses are, where the trees are for cover.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I know.”

Murphy grinned. “So you were just being a dick, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Now that you’ve got that out of your system for a few minutes, I’ve been thinking.”

“About?”

“I think we need to put together a plan to defend this place.”

“I think we don’t,” I answered.

“You’re not done being a dick yet?” Murphy asked.

“
No, that’s not it. I think we let the walls keep out the infected and let the house do the rest. I don’t think we do anything.”

Murphy shook his head emphatically, “Man,
that’s the pussy approach, Zed. This is a sweet place. We need to hold on to it.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Just then, Steph came in through the open door, that like most of the interior doors, we’d propped open. “What are you guys doing?”

I nodded toward the monitors, “Watching some Whites down the street.”

Steph’s casual demeanor was obliterated by an involuntary tensing. Her eyes turned worried, then fearful, then she tried to mask it, all in the gap of a second or two.

“It’s just a couple
, and they aren’t doing anything right now,” I told her. “They rambled up the street a little while ago, looking for food, I guess. Now they’re resting in the shade.”

Steph relaxed
and walked over to stand between the chairs.

Murphy reached up with one of his long arms and pointed them out on the monitor. “They’re way down the street. See ‘em there, just by that mailbox
?”

“Yes
,” Steph nodded. “I see.”

“They don’t look like a threat,” Murphy reassured.

Neither Steph nor I responded to that. For my part, I just didn’t agree. They were all threats, either active or waiting to materialize. I looked up at Steph. “I thought you were watching a movie with Mandi.”

She
turned to sit on the desk in front of us. “Too sappy. I got bored.”

Murphy asked, “Is Mandi still in there?”

“She recommended it. She said it was one of her favorite movies,” Steph answered.

“She digs the chick flicks,” Murphy allowed.

We looked at each other silently for a moment then Steph stood and said, “Well, hey, I didn’t mean to interrupt you guys…”

“No, no,” I said, hurriedly, “we were just talking about defending this place. Stuff like that. Stay if you want.”

“I shouldn’t feel this way, but this place seems pretty well-defended already,” Steph said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” I agreed.

“But what do we do when they come?” Murphy asked, “Because you know they’re gonna come. It’s just a matter of time.”

“We don’t know that for sure.” Steph’s wan smile appeared. She was trying to convince
herself as much as Murphy. “This place is hard to find. You can’t see it from the road unless you hike through the trees. The only way to find it is by accident.”

“Unless you’re across the river,” Murphy disagreed, “Then you just have to look up. From over there, this place probably looks like…like...”

“Like Olympus,” I concluded for him.

“Yeah,” he agreed
. “Like Olympus.”

“But the infected aren’t smart enough to see us from across the river, figure out how to get over here, and then find us, too.” Steph argued, “They don’t have that much mental capacity.”

Murphy shook his head emphatically. “Not according to Sergeant Dalhover. From what he says about the Smart Ones, those guys could figure it out. What we need to do is mount four or five fifty caliber machine guns on the roof. Then if those fuckers come for us, we just shred ‘em when they try to come over the wall.”

A gruff, flat voice said, “That’s a bad idea.”

We all looked at the door. Leaning on the doorjamb was Dalhover, his face stretched down into his comfortable frown. But with all of our eyes on him, he didn’t feel the need to elaborate.

“Hey, Top,” Murphy asked after a few moments of waiting. “Why are the fifties a bad idea?”

“Those walls aren’t made for defense. They’re made for privacy. Sarah Mansfield wasn’t interested in keeping an army of infected out when she built this place. She was interested in keeping the paparazzi from taking pictures of her tits.” Dalhover stopped talking and looked at as if that were sufficient information.

It wasn’t.

I didn’t agree with Murphy, but I didn’t know what Dalhover was getting at, so I asked, “What do you mean, exactly?”

“Those are cinder block walls. Fifty caliber bullets will go right through them,” Dalhover told me.

I didn’t see a downside to that, assuming the infected were on the other side of the wall.

Dalhover went on, “A swarm of those infected will show up. Everybody will run up to the roof, all panicked and such. With no experience behind one of those guns, shooting fifty caliber bullets at the infected coming over the walls, what you’re going to shred won’t be the infected, it’ll be the trees and the walls. Then the infected will waltz right in through the gaps.”

Murphy said, “Doesn’t matter. Every window and door in this place has those steel doors that roll down to close ‘em up. The infected can’t get through those.”

Dalhover argued, “You’ve got a lot of confidence in this house’s defenses
—defenses that you didn’t design or build. You don’t know where the weaknesses are. You only see the strengths. But the Smart Ones, they’ll find the weaknesses. They did at the hospital. They’ll do that here.”

“I don’t think they’re that smart,” Murphy said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I countered.

“Why?” Murphy asked, his tone telling me that he thought I was just being a contrary dick again.

“Once we get a thousand or two thousand of them out there, they’ll creep around and dig their little fingers into every little nook and crevice.” I looked at each of them. “They’ll test every door, every window. They’ll climb up on the garage roof if they can. They’ll try to get across the roof of the bridge from the garage. Most will fall off. Some might make it. Who knows? Think of it like a hacker trying to get into a computer. They set up a program that tries a million passwords and keeps on trying until one works. The Whites are like that. Whether they’re smart or not. With enough of them out there, trying and trying to get at us in here, one of them will eventually find a way. When one does, the rest will follow.”

“Yep,” Dalhover agreed.

“So what are you saying, then?” Murphy asked. “Do we just abandon the place the first time a White gets curious about the wall?”

Dalhover looked at Murphy without changing his expression in the slightest, but without giving him a response.

“Man.” Murphy was exasperated. “Top, I’m not being disrespectful. I like it here. I like sleeping in a clean bed. I like sitting in a recliner and watching movies. I like taking showers and having clean clothes. I don’t want to leave. I honestly don’t know what you expect us to do when the Whites show up.”

Dalhover thought about that for a minute. His face somehow found a way to grow even sadder, and in his gruff voice, he said, “All I know is that what we did at the hospital didn’t work, and in the end, everybody died except us two. Once we fired the first shot, all of our choices disappeared. We were just reacting and retreating. And dying.”

Steph looked down at the floor. Thinking through the problem, perhaps, or thinking about too many painful memories.

After several long moments of depressing silence, I said, “Hide and run.”

“Running and hiding is how we got here,” Murphy scoffed.

“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “I mean it as a tactic.”

“Oh, no.” Murphy dramatically lolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. “I’ve heard that tone before. You guys will want to get comfortable for the lecture.”

Ignoring Murphy’s taunting hadn’t yet produced any results, but in the absence of any other plan, I went with it again. “Those guys that killed Jerome: Murphy, do you remember what we talked about afterwards?”

Murphy wrinkled his brow. “We talked about a lot of stuff. I think that’s when we decided to go steady, heh, heh, heh.”

I pushed on. “I mean, about why those guys that killed Jerome were still alive. They’d killed a couple of hundred infected and they were still alive, trying to kill more.”

“Because they had silencers, man.”

“Right,” I agreed, “but the silencers and the way they used them to snipe the infected
—it was a new tactic, an effective tactic, to fight a new enemy, with new strengths and new weaknesses.”

“Fine, Null Spot, I’ll play along,” Murphy said. “So when you say ‘hide and run’, you don’t mean, ‘run and hide.’”

“No, I don’t. That’s just a cliché. What I mean by hide and run is that instead of fighting them head-on or just shooting them, what we do instead is hide. That’s what those snipers did, they stayed hidden, for the most part, and without giving away their hiding places, they were able to kill the infected. And the other thing we do is run away, retreat. We need to make sure that we always have a path of retreat that’ll take us to our next hiding spot. According to the math done by Jeff, every day we stay hidden, there’ll be fewer of them out there, because they’ll have to eat each other if they can’t eat us. In a year or so, there won’t be that many left. At least, there won’t be any mega-hordes like that one that overran the Evans farm.”

“We have an escape route,” Dalhover rasped. “Down the elevator and through the tunnel to the boathouse. We’ll all fit in the ski boat.”

“Zed’s right,” Steph said, with the kind of authority in her voice that people listen to naturally. So naturally, all of us looked at Steph. “We’ll fight when we have to. We’ll kill them when we have to. But we need to be prepared to run, always. That’s how we’ll survive.”

“When do we run?” Murphy asked, not quite sold on the plan.

“I’ll decide,” Steph told us, as though it were the most natural of choices.

Say what?

Murphy looked at me, as surprised as I was.

“She’s the only officer here,” Dalhover told us.

Say what again?

“Wait,” I started, but was momentarily at a loss for words.

Everybody was looking at me, waiting.

I pointed at Steph, “You’re an officer?”

“I was a captain.”

“Was a captain?” I asked.

“I’m a civilian now.”