Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (10 page)

Sunlight filtering down through the green water dimmed in the turbidity left after the struggle of the panicked Whites in the mud of the river bottom. But the murky water slowly moved downriver with the current. Relatively clear water flowed in to replace it. Nico and I, weighed down by our backpacks, sat on the bottom in a small clearing in a duckweed forest. Around us grew an inexplicable garden of the tiniest white flowers. I used hand gestures to keep Nico motionless and calm. The situation needed to stabilize before we moved to the next step.

Our only two enemies were panic and a lack of air, and we had plenty of air. The octopus on each tank, of course, had a combination pressure and depth gauge.
The tank we were both breathing on stood at 2600 psi, nearly full. The other had 1000.

When the crawdads, frightened into their holes by the struggle, started to come back out again to investigate, I figured that we had been sitting still long enough. With some difficulty, I helped Nico to shed his heavy backpack full of jewelry, and then after ensuring that he wouldn’t let go of it, I mounted the tank with the most air on his back and clipped the buoyancy control vest across his chest. The backpack went back on, only backwards so the bag was on his chest. He needed weight to stay under. Similarly, I put the other rig on my back and rearranged my jewelry weight. We were both breathing our own air at that point and we were nearly ready to go.

I spent a good while disentangling the four drowned Whites and getting their backpacks off so that they’d be easier to move underwater. That only left me with 500 psi in my tank and that concerned me. I checked Nico’s tank pressure. He’d burned off nearly as much air just by watching me work, probably from anxiety. Understandable. I indicated to Nico to keep an eye on his tank’s pressure gauge and managed to get him to mimic me as I handled the chains of my dangling Whites. Together, we started a slow trudge across the soft river bottom.

We weren’t too far into the colder, deeper water when my air tank ran dry. Having practiced that drill in my certification classes, coupled with the close eye I kept on the gauge, I didn’t panic. I already had the extra regulator from Nico’s tank in my hand when it happened. I just held my breath for a second and switched regulators. The tank I left on. I was coupled with the buoyancy control device and it would make for a good floatation device, should it become necessary for Nico and I to surface and drift downriver for a bit.

We were down to a depth of thirty feet and I was purposefully veering left as we mushed through the muck to compensate for the current that was pushing us to our right.

In a nice surprise that couldn’t have come too soon, the river bottom suddenly sloped up rather steeply in front of us. We were headed up toward the far bank and the going got clumsy and slow over the big slippery rocks. Dragging the marginally buoyant bodies behind added to the difficulty. I checked Nico’s pressure gauge. It wasn’t dangerously low but we were using air very fast. I was thinking hard about inflating the buoyancy control devices and going to the surface when I stepped up onto a big rock and my head broke the surface.

Thank God!

The hardest part, I hoped, was behind us. I reached down for Nico’s hand and helped him up onto the rock beside me.

With the water just under his chin, Nico spit out his regulator, put a hand on my shoulder to steady himself on the algae-slick rock, and said, “You’ve got some big balls.”

“Um, thanks.” I turned to look across the river. Nancy and Bubbles were standing at the end of the dock, looking down into the water where we’d all gone in. That was more persistence than I’d expected. Off to our right about thirty yards was the dock with the canoe tied to it. Quietly, I said to Nico, “Let’s try to make it over to the dock underwater so that they don’t see us.”

He gave me a nod and we put our regulators back in and slipped beneath the surface. Once underwater, I checked our air pressure. Just a hair under a six hundred psi. We’d make it.

I
t was slow going, but we weren’t in a hurry by then.

When w
e came to the surface beside the dock with the canoe shielding us from the other side of the river, neither wrinkly Nancy nor ebullient Bubbles saw us.

“What next?” Nico asked, after spitting his regulator out again.

“You’re not going to like this next part.”

“How’s that?”

I looked at the bodies of one of the attached Whites who had just floated to the surface a few feet away. “You know as well as I do that we need to get rid of these guys.”

Nico looked up at the dock. “I don’t suppose you spotted a pair of bolt cutters over here when you formulated your plan.”

I shook my head. “I’ve only got one idea and it’s not a very good one for a couple of reasons.”

Nico asked, “And those are?”

“It’s a fucking disgusting solution. We push the bodies up on the dock then use the air tanks to smash their heads until they deform enough to slip through the chains around their necks.”

Nico’s face hinted at nausea and he looked at me as if begging for a different solution.

“I can’t think of any other way, Nico.”

Nico sucked a long breath between his teeth. “It can’t be any worse then most anything else I’ve seen lately.”

“I suppose not.”

“You said a couple of reasons,” Nico observed.

“Yeah, if Nancy and Bubbles are still over there, they’ll probably make a ruckus. If that happens, we won’t have long to get in the canoe and get out of here before more Whites show up and put us at risk.”

“Hold on. Hold on.” Nico raised his hands. “Nancy? Bubbles? Whites?”

“Oh. Slang, I guess. My buddy started calling the infected Whites and it sort of stuck with us.”

Nico nodded. “Nancy and Bubbles, your made-up names for the two infected women?”

“Yeah.”

“I get Bubbles. What’s with Nancy?”

“Just a name.”

“Your buddy…I guess since you’re alone, he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”
And what about Murphy?
The only way I was going to know was to take the next step in getting back to Sarah Mansfield’s house. “Let’s get this going.”

Nico and I got into position along the edge of the dock so that we could work together to push the bodies up onto the planks one at a time. After struggling for some time to get the first limp, slippery corpse out of the water, only to have it splash back in, Nico said, “I’ve got an idea.”

I listened, and a moment later, we shed our scuba equipment and climbed up onto the dock. Once we were standing on the boards, the risk of getting out of the water was clarified when Nancy and Bubbles recognized us. Hungry screaming followed.

“Do you want to pull or smash?” Nico asked me.

“Do you have a strong stomach?” I asked.

“I’ll pull.” With that, Nico pulled on the chain that led to the White linked between us. With some effort, he dragged the White up out of the water just far enough for his head to flop over onto the dock.

Then it was my turn. I closed the valve on my tank and removed the regulator. With on hand on the valve and the other on the bottom, I lifted the tank high into the air. From shoulder height, I smashed the twenty-five pound cylinder into the head of the dead White.

Bone cracked. Water spurted out of the mouth. The nose and ears spewed blood. But the skull didn’t collapse. I had to lift the tank and smash the skull against the dock two more times before Nico was able to slip the chain over what was left of the head. The corpse slipped into the river.

We wasted no time in giving number two the same treatment. Catching my breath while I waited for Nico to pull number three out of the water, I looked up at the nearest houses and saw nothing. But I did hear the excited wails of Whites. They weren’t far away.

Nico pulled number three up and placed the head in the blood spot on the dock. Bits of skull and brain lay all about our feet, but I couldn’t let that bother me, not at that moment. The whole experience was prime material for memory repression. I smashed down again. It took four blows with the cylinder to deform the skull to the point where Nico’s yanking on the chain freed the corpse.

But Whites were coming into the yard.

“That’s it,” I told Nico. “We need to go.”

“But…”

“Get in the canoe!”

The urgency in my voice was enough to put a fire under Nico. In a flash he was in the canoe and working his way down to the far end, almost losing his balance a few times. I laid the cylinder inside, pulled the loop of rope off of the cleat on the dock, and pushed us off just as the first Whites came running onto the pier.

“Would they have hurt us, do you think?” Nico asked, motioning toward the Whites we’d just evaded.

“With Nancy and Bubbles over there screaming like banshees, why not?” I pulled at the chain connected to the one White still in the water. “Look, dude, you’re gonna have to paddle. If I let go of the chain, I’ll get choked to death dragging this guy down the river.”

“Okay.”

Nico paddled the boat out into the middle of the river, giving us fifty or sixty yards of open water to either bank. The farther we got downriver from Nancy, Bubbles, and the Whites at the dock where we’d stolen the canoe—stolen, such an outmoded concept—the easier I breathed. Knowing it wouldn’t last, knowing that I’d have to be back on my toes sooner than I wanted, I savored the momentary illusion of safety.

Of course, I was still chained to
Nico by a neck collar, and behind me I dragged a white corpse that bobbed just below the surface. Such was my definition of safety and comfort. Oh, how my standards had changed.

As the canoe rounded a bend in the river and all of our interested parties went out of sight behind the trees overhanging the
river’s banks, Nico asked, “Zed is your name? Did I get that right?”

Looking at the banks and waiting for danger to materialize there, I softly replied, “Yeah, Zed. Zed Zane. And you’re Nico, right?”

“Right. Nico Wright. How’d you know my last name?”

“Say what?”

“Wright.”

“Are you fuckin’ with me, Nico?”

Nico smiled and shook his head. “My last name is Wright. You know, like Orville and Wilbur. With a W.”

“No shit.”

“None,” Nico confirmed.

“Ezekiel Zane is my full name.”

“No wonder you go by Zed.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised that scuba tank thing worked, Zed.”

“Me, too,” I admitted.

“What?”

I thought about ignoring Nico’s implicit argument completely, but in the end I chose to say, “I’m not going to claim expertise on anything here, but one of the things I’ve learned since the virus hit and the infected took over is that taking the initiative and taking a chance goes a long way toward keeping your ass alive.”

Nico paddled a few more strokes and looked back at me. “You know, I’ve never scuba dived before.”

I shrugged. “But you know enough about how scuba diving works that when I stuck the regulator in your mouth, you knew to breath, right?”

“Yeah,” Nico answered tentatively.

“That’s all I was depending on you to know.”

“And if I didn’t?”

“If you didn’t,” I paused, deciding how honest to be. “If you didn’t, then there’d be two bodies floating behind me now instead of one.”

Nico huffed and shifted around to look back out over the bow of the canoe, “Is that how it is, then?”

“Nico, grow up. Let’s be honest here. You’re an American. You’ve probably had a TV in your home your whole life. On TV you’ve probably seen about a million guys stick a regulator in their mouth and breath under water. If you were so oblivious to the reality around you that you didn’t know that basic fact, then you’d probably have been dead a long time before we met. But you did know, Nico. The odds were way, way in favor of your knowing. I knew enough about scuba diving to do the rest.”

“That’s pretty callous,” Nico responded.

I shrugged. “That’s just life, Nico. You know that as well as me. Look, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but here’s the deal. I don’t wanna die. That doesn’t mean that I’m gonna put your life at unnecessary risk to save mine, but risk is part of life now. That’s just the way it is. If we’d stayed on that chain gang, we were both going to die—first you, then me. If not tomorrow, then the next day. Tell me you know what I’m talking about here, Nico.”

Nico nodded and paddled a bit more. “Yeah, I’m just being grouchy. I knew where things were going. I guess I wasn’t ready to take the chance. I can’t even swim, Zed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I answered. “I know this isn’t going to sound true, but I thought about all of this stuff before I herded everybody off the end of the dock. For it to work, you didn’t have to know anything about scuba gear, and swimming was irrelevant. The only thing you and I needed to do was hold our breath and avoid getting tangled with the drowning Whites long enough to get the regulators in our mouths. That’s it.
I put us in that situation, a situation where we had the only advantages that people like us are ever going to have over the infected. Those advantages are intellect and knowledge. I had the knowledge of how to keep us alive underwater. The equipment to do it was available. You had the intellectual ability to control your panic and trust me after I put you fifteen feet underwater. You held onto my belt, as instructed, you waited patiently, even though the animal part of your brain was telling you to panic and try to get your head above water, and because you were able to make the intellectual deduction that holding onto my belt was your best chance to breathe air again, we both lived.”