Slow Burn (Book 4): Dead Fire (20 page)
The sun was getting close to the horizon and I was drifting down the river again. At one point when I was standing on the deck, watching the shore slide by, I caught a whiff of a familiar smell. But it was a smell I hadn’t sniffed in so long, I found myself walking around the deck, trying for a better whiff.
It was near the stern, out in the sun that I breathed in a full dose and sighed.
Rain!
Somewhere, over the hills and out above the blazingly hot dirt and dead grasses, a thunderstorm was pouring rain down on a land whose need was beyond desperate. The smell of the ozone from the lightning, and the water evaporating off of the hot ground and streets had a distinctive scent that floated on the wind, down between the hills, over the river, and to me.
It smelled like hope.
Energized by the possibility of rain, I used the time on my hands to clean out the cooler and salvage twenty-two bottles of beer and thirty-four cans of soda. Thankfully, none of them were diet drinks. Diet food and drinks were made obsolete the moment that dining in America changed from recreation back to a matter of survival. The sodas and beers got packed into the pillowcases, tied off, and lowered into the cold river, hanging by a rope off of the deck railing. It was the only refrigeration I had.
As I neared my destination, I sat down on the flat deck at the bow of the pontoon boat, dangling my feet in the water, and using a paddle to nudge the boat in the direction I hoped to go. I use the word ‘hope’ because I’m not sure if my paddling had any significant effect on the direction of the boat. Eventually, I spied the boathouse, emerging out of the darkness on the peninsula, where I remembered it to be.
So it was back to sweating and struggling with the paddle to urge
the pontoon boat to a place in the current where I had a chance of catching one of the posts in the boathouse with the rescue hook when I floated by. As I reached that point, I jumped up to the starboard railing, took the long hook out and braced myself against falling into the river.
It all went in slow motion at first, and I was thinking it would be too easy. But everything seemed to accelerate as the dock drew closer. I hooked the end of the rescue pole around a thick wooden pier and gripped it tight as the starboard railing pulled back against my torso, anchoring the boat at a spot in the water and creating a pivot point around which it slowly spun. The ski boat had a slow-motion collision with the stern of the pontoon boat, then slid out and around in a wide arc.
As soon as the bulk of both boats w
as out into the river and roughly perpendicular to the shoreline, I hauled in hard on the rescue hook to bring the bow of the pontoon boat closer to the dock. A rope was lying at my feet, attached to my boat and just waiting to be looped around a cleat or piling.
Maybe a minute or two after catching the pole, I found myself attaching that line. It had all come off just as planned. Both boats straightened out into the flow of the current. I gave a thought to bringing them both into the boathouse to secure them more thoroughly, but decided against it. It would be better to do that after I checked the house for whoever might be inside. My arrival at the house was predicated on the truth of Freitag’s story. A hurried exit could still be in the cards, and I didn’t want to lose my boats if that became necessary.
Without hesitation, I jumped onto the wooden dock, naked except for my shorts, with my knife in one hand and my pistol in the other. The house ahead was dark. It looked abandoned. But then, that was the smart way to make it look from the outside. No attention was good attention these days.
At the end of the dock, I stepped up onto the grassy lawn and walked under the deep shadows of the live oaks.
The stone patio that surrounded the pool was up the slope fifty or sixty feet ahead. The kitchen door was my target. I’d go there and knock. If my friends were inside, they’d see me through the glass. From there, the story in my head jumped unrealistically to happily ever after. It was the kind of thought that could only be entertained on a full stomach and a slight alcohol buzz.
The ground sloped up a little more steeply as I got near the pool, and I froze because I spotted something moving in the shadows on the other side: an alabaster Aphrodite with blazing red hair. Or Steph.
She moved gracefully along the far side of the pool, but didn’t give any indication that she saw me. I wanted to call to her, but there was a chance that the redhead wasn’t Steph at all, but just an infected monster, morphed by my imagination into Steph. There was a chance that other Whites were lurking in the shadows around me, ready to pounce if I risked a single syllable. With that thought, I looked into the shadows to my right to see if anything was over there among the thick oaken trunks.
Nothing moved.
I glanced to my left.
Oh, shit!
It all happened too fast. Something was moving at me with a well-timed attacked from my left side, taking advantage of the fact that I was transfixed by the pale, red-haired goddess across the pool.
It was a trap, and I’d foolishly stepped into it.
I spun hard to my left as I bent low, trying my best to roll through the knees of my attacker before his hands and teeth could clamp onto my flesh.
My attacker, not expecting my evasiveness, stumbled into me, but instead of going over my bent back and giving me a chance to sprint off to an escape, he came down on top of me, smothering me with his weight. My knife jammed into the dirt as I collapsed into the grass. I struggled, squirmed, and tried to push the heavy monster off.
My only luck was that he was still trying to recover from the fall, so he didn’t have his massive hands on me. But once that happened, I was dead.
I kicked and pushed and punched and wrestled and grunted and beat the beast with the butt of my gun. If I was going to live through the next seconds, I came to the realization that I was going to have to shoot it and pray to God that his White companions wouldn’t get to me before I got out from under him.
I felt a blow to the side of my head and saw stars.
Too late!
Still I struggled and tried to raise my pistol to fire, but my wrist got pinned roughly to the ground just as the big man on top of me figured everything out enough to sit himself on my chest and raise an axe to cleave my skull.
Recognition!
“Murphy! Stop!”
Everything froze.
It was
fucking Murphy on top of me!
It was Dalhover pinning my pistol hand to the ground and pointing a rifle barrel at my head!
“It’s me, Zed!”
Without pause, Murphy grinned wider than I’d ever seen. “Zed? Damn, you look like shit.”
Dalhover rasped. “I’ll be God damned.”
Footsteps came running across the grass and I suddenly saw Steph, leaning over Murphy’s shoulder, looking down at me, her face draped in her red hair. Through tears that were just starting to flow she said, “Wow! You’re still alive.”
As I bore the weight of my struggles, and thought every day about the moment when I’d finally find my friends again, it never occurred to me to see the situation through their eyes. They, very reasonably, assumed I was dead. Each of them in their own ways had been grieving, crying, perhaps missing me, and doing what they could to move past it, filing the memory of my face away in the mental scrapbook of all the dead they’d known or seen.
But suddenly, there I was. Alive.
Murphy jumped off my chest and in standing up himself, yanked me up to my feet and engulfed me in a smothering hug. “God damn, motherfucker, I thought you were dead.”
I tried to croak the same back to him, but the lump in my throat was too big to allow for speech.
When Murphy eventually let go, Steph draped her arms around my neck and buried a river of happy tears in my shoulder. I put my arms around her, squeezed back, and did my best to keep my own tears sealed up tight.
Dalhover laid an arm on my shoulder and joined the embrace as much as he could ever be expected to. “Good to have you back.”
I thought maybe his voice cracked just a little bit.
I was home.
When I went into the house through the familiar kitchen door, Mandi shrieked and smiled as she jumped into my arms. Russell, glued to Mandi’s side by then, seemed ready to explode with emotions that couldn’t be contained or expressed.
Having used the pillowcases to bring my food and reasonably cold beers and sodas into the house with us, we gathered around the dinning room table and for the moment, chose to let our guard down. The peninsula where the house had been built was remote and secure because of it. No one stood watch.
A celebration of my rebirth was called for and we all wanted to share in the joy of being together again.
We ate cookies, drank beer, and shared stories.
We drank to Freitag’s solitude upriver and laughed at Murphy’s impression of her scrambling across the lawn to get her rifle while fearing that the Whites would return and have her for lunch. Of course, I don’t know if it was funnier watching his impression, or watching his attempts to re-stick the bandage that kept coming loose from the side of his head as he goofed.
The frequency of good moments was trending positive. It was easy to be happy in the moment. Only thoughts of tomorrow darkened my moments between laughs.
Well, it’s not quite the end. Book 5 in the series will be out in early summer of 2014. If you’d like to join the email list or any of your favorite social media sites to keep tabs on the progress or get alerted when the release date nears, click one below.
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Text copyright © 2014
, Bobby L. Adair
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