Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (2 page)

Belching and feeling somewhat uncomfortable from all the food stuffed into my belly, I cleaned up the kitchen in the last of the evening light as Murphy pulled all the curtains closed on the back of the house. When everything was clean except for a pile of raw catfish filets laying on a plate beside the stove, I shook my head as I revived our earlier conversation. “It’s a shame all this catfish will go bad.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed as he came back into the kitchen. “Nothing we can do with it, though.”

“If the house had solar power, we could probably run the fridge and keep it cold, or freeze it.”

Murphy shrugged. “I think staking your survival plans to solar panels is not a bad idea, but it’s irrelevant. We don’t have any panels. And we don’t know jack shit about running a refrigerator on solar.”

“Yeah. I guess.” I picked up a piece of fish, looked at it, then dropped it onto the pile with a wet slap. “I’ll bet… I’ll bet we could dry this fish in the barbecue grill. It’s got a propane tank on it.”

“Fish jerky?” Murphy grimaced.

I laughed. “We’ve had plenty of days when a piece of fish jerky would have been a dream. I think if you coat it with enough salt and pepper or whatever seasoning we’ve got in the cupboard, it won’t matter anyway. It could be raccoon meat and we wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Ugh,” Murphy replied, then changed the subject. “You getting restless?”

“Why?” I turned and shot an irritated look at Murphy. “What do you mean?”

“I see you out there every day looking at those helicopters.”

“And?”

Murphy laughed. “Sometimes you act like you’re the only smart person in the world. You watch the helicopters come and go, and every day I can tell you’re getting more and more curious. I know you’re going to tell me one day you want to head south and see where they’re going, or head north and see where they’re coming from. I know you.”

I wanted to deny it, but Murphy was right. I knew in my heart I should probably get as far away from the helicopters as I possibly could, but still, some little part of me wanted to believe they represented a return to normalcy—hot food every day, Starbucks, bottled beer, hot showers, civilization. I hesitated to answer. “I am curious about the helicopters.”

Murphy leaned on a counter. “Stop playing with that fish. Wash your hands and let’s talk about this.”

I held up my hands and looked at them. Okay, I shouldn’t have touched the raw fish. Still, clean hands were another one of those luxuries left behind. I wiped them on my pants. “Good enough, mom?”

Murphy glanced into a kettle we kept beside the sink. We shared the chore of filling it from the lake, but didn’t boil it so it wasn’t for drinking. It was for pouring over dirty hands or dirty dishes, and unfortunately, I’d used the last of it cleaning up the dinner dishes. Murphy said, “If you get sick, don’t blame me.”

I looked at my hands. “I’m conditioning my weak immune system for a dirty world.”

“Whatever.”

I smiled. “So what did you want to say about the helicopters?”

“Civilization is out there somewhere,” Murphy pointed toward the lake, “wherever those helicopters are taking off from and landing.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Every day I see those,” he said, “I wonder about Rachel.”

“Do you worry whether she and the others made it out to Balmorhea?” I asked.

“I don’t know that answer,” Murphy frowned. “I can only guess, and guesses aren’t worth shit.”

“Yup.” I took a moment before I asked. “Do you think that by finding the folks with the helicopters you can get in touch with Rachel and Dalhover somehow?”

“Yes,” Murphy answered. “I gotta believe these guys with the helicopters are setting up some kind of communication network at least. Maybe they’re trying to reestablish order. If that’s the case, at some point, they’ll come into contact with Rachel and the others.”

“Murphy, you’re being unemotional about Rachel and kind of ignoring the underlying question.”

“Which is?” he asked.

“Whether you made a mistake in staying here with me. Whether I made a mistake in choosing to remain.”

Murphy shook his head in instant response. “Rachel’s tough. She’s smart. She doesn’t need me to protect her. Sure, I would have liked to stay with her but—” Murphy cut off his words for no apparent reason.

“But what?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

He frowned again. “What you said that night on the pontoon boat.”

“That we’ll always be different?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “If we hadn’t showed up that night and saved Rachel and her hillbilly friends, I think they would have made it out of that cove. Hell, I’m sure Rachel and Freitag would have made it out anyway. Everything that happened after, happened because you and me are Whites. Regular people are afraid of us.” Murphy jumped up and sat on the counter.

“You think what happened was our fault?”

“Yeah.” He nodded again. “Some of it, all of it, I don’t know. Maybe eventually, Jay and his crazy brother would have backstabbed everyone anyway.”

“Those guys were nuts.” That was a fact. They didn’t behave rationally. Something inexplicable was wrong with them. Their behavior was too far outside the norm. How they’d been so crazy and not been locked up somewhere was an unanswered question that bothered me a lot.

Murphy nodded an acknowledgment. “You and me coming into the situation, we were like a powder keg. No, we were the sparks in a powder keg. We blew it all up. We didn’t mean to, you were just Null Spotting around and… I have to thank you for that. I would never have known my sister was alive if you hadn’t dragged me down to help those people stranded in the cove. I’m glad it happened. I just wish it didn’t go as far as it went. I wish all those people wouldn’t have died.”

“Do you think that was our fault, then?” I asked.

Murphy shook his head. “It was all Jay and his crazy brother. Without them, maybe we’d all be living happily ever after on Monk’s Island. Or maybe we’d have moved in and some of the other dipshits would have knifed us in our sleep. Jay was crazy, but plenty of those others hated us. A lot more of them—most of them—were afraid of us. That’s why most of them didn’t go out to Balmorhea, but instead back to Monk’s Island.”

Nodding, I replied, “I think you’re right.”

“Yup,” Murphy grinned. “So we’re cool. I didn’t think you were thinking straight that night they all left you and me here alone, but I think it was the right move. I’m a danger to Rachel just by being around her. She’s better off out there with Dalhover and the others.”

“Okay.” It felt good to have that behind us. I’d been afraid that Murphy was staying with me through resentful loyalty only. “What about the helicopters, then?”

“I told you what I think about ‘em,” said Murphy. “You tell me what
you’re
thinking.”

“I think they represent… ” I wasn’t sure exactly. “A threat. Possibly. They could represent something good, but it’s most likely a threat.”

“Why do you want to go see, then?” Murphy asked.

“We need to know,” I said. “It’s that simple. We just have to understand what all the threats are out there. Every time we go forward without all the information, we get in trouble. I don’t know if that’s something that can be fixed, but I know I’m going to mitigate that as much as possible.”

“Really?” Murphy laughed.

Clearly, he didn’t believe me. I huffed. “
You
tell
me
what you think my reasons are.”

“Oh, I’m not saying those aren’t valid reasons,” said Murphy. “You like to overthink things, and you especially like to hide from your motivations. It’s because you hate yourself most of the time.”

“Okay, Sigmund Freud.” I rolled my eyes dramatically. “Why don’t you tell me what I want out of the chasing-down-the-helicopter question?”

“In a way,” said Murphy, “you’re like a cat sitting out on that deck every day, watching a mouse crawl back and forth across the floor. Not knowing where the helicopters are coming from or where they’re going is driving you crazy. You can’t help yourself. Now that the thought is in your mind, you don’t have the impulse control to put it back out again. It’s going to nag at you until you do something about it no matter how dangerous it might be.”

“Wow.” I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or not. “You think my motivations are that simple? Really?”

“Nobody is as complicated as they think they are.” Murphy shrugged. “For the most part, we’re all just a bunch of Whites with a thin layer of rationalizations and morality keeping us civilized. Mostly, we just want to eat, fuck, and play.”

I laughed. “Sometimes, Murphy.”

“Sometimes?”

I said, “You’re a lot smarter than you think you are.”

“You’re not gonna say that when I tell you the
other
reason we need to chase those helicopters.”

Cautiously, I asked, “Okay what is my other reason?”

“I’m not sure if you’ve got a death wish or what, but it’s like you’ve got this dark-hearted picture of yourself that you feel like you need to nurture. Or torture. Maybe if I find you a teddy bear in one of these houses you can start hugging it at night and you’ll get better. I don’t know.”

“Fuck you about that teddy bear shit,” I told him, a little bit angry.

“The other reason is that you’re an adrenaline junkie,” he said. “I don’t know if you were before, but I know you are now. You get off on the crazy shit like nobody I ever saw.”

“And you don’t?” I accused.

Murphy shrugged and smiled guiltily. “I do. Hell, maybe that’s the main reason we’re both not dead. As hard as all this shit is to deal with, I mean, they’re people. We kill sick people to survive. It’s a rush when you’re in the shit and you’re fighting just to stay alive. There’s nothing like it.”

I nodded. I agreed with all of that.

“And this is cool and all, relaxing and eating and getting fat, but you’re going to get restless sitting around in quiet paradise. You need to go find some trouble.”

“You know as well as I do that nothing is static anymore,” I said. “We’ve been lucky for six weeks. Only a few Whites have come out here to fuck with us. Eventually, more will come than we can handle and we’ll have to go. I think we head out on our terms, not theirs.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “We need to prepare ourselves to go then.”

I nodded.

Murphy put his hand on his left side, just below the ribs, the place where I’d been shot on my side. He asked, “Does that cause you a problem when you swing your machete? Can you move around okay?”

Holding my shoulder again, I swung my arm around to confirm. “It feels a little tight, but I think I’m okay. How are we set for M4 ammunition?”

“I’ve got maybe three hundred rounds. You didn’t have any on you when I pulled your ass out of the shit. We’ve got your rifle but—”

“But?” I asked though I knew what was coming.

“But you can’t hit a goddamn thing with it. We need to ditch that rifle—I don’t know, leave it here or drop it off for those fucks on Monk’s Island, and get you something that fits with your abilities.”

“And that would be?”

Murphy grinned. “A shotgun, of course.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked. “It’ll be noisy as hell.”

“Damn. You’re right.” Murphy thought back to all of the hassles we went through to get the damned silencers. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. You keep your M4. Whether you have a shotgun or an M4, you can only hit things that are pretty close. With the M4, you shoot from the hip. Spray a half dozen rounds in the direction that your Whites are coming from, and you might hit them with one or two. But thirty divided by six is only five.”

“Say what?” Math.  Never my strong suit.

“The magazine holds thirty rounds. If you fire a couple of three-round bursts at every target, you’ll get five shots in before you have to reload. A pump-action twelve gauge might get you eight rounds.”

“But reloading that—don’t I have to feed those shells in one at a time? No magazine, right?”

“That’s right,” Murphy nodded emphatically. “You’re better off with the silenced M4. You’ll just need to carry lots of ammo.”

“Sounds like maybe we need to visit Camp Mabry again.”

“Ugh. I hate that place.”

We left the lake house mid-morning the next day and motored at a gasoline-efficient speed down the lake. With enough water and food in our bags to keep us fed and hydrated for a few days, the pontoon held plenty more water and food items hidden in storage compartments under the seats. We figured we could leave the boat anchored in a cove beyond the easy reach of any passing Whites. That would provide us two places—the boat and the lake house—that were safe and stocked, awaiting our return.

You never can be too safe.

At least that was a phrase I told myself as congratulations when I felt like I was doing something smart. The rest of the time—which seemed like
most
of the time—I ran on a full-tilt mix of testosterone and stupid and didn’t deserve any self-congratulating clichés.

A thin layer of high, gray clouds kept most of the morning’s sunshine off of us. A wind carried bow spray across the deck, putting an unpleasant edge on the chill.

Murphy piloted the boat between two rows of widely spaced white and faded orange channel buoys through the winding center of the lake. I sat on one of the bench seats, watching the green shoreline pass by, seeing the empty branches of trees that only weeks before were full of leaves. Houses occupied slices of lakefront property both large and small. All appeared to be deserted. Even the Whites were out of sight.

I laid my arm on the rail, hanging it out over the water. I wondered if I’d still had all the sensation in my skin if I’d need to put on a heavy coat. I wondered what exactly it was about cold sensation on skin that made a person need to dress more warmly. I wondered how the Whites would react to the cold spells to come. Would they seek shelter as I guessed they were doing now? Or would they run around chasing each other half-naked through the cold until their teeth chattered enough to push them back indoors to huddle their stinking bodies out of the wind?

I noticed Murphy was steering pretty close to one of the lines of buoys.

“You dozing off back there?” I asked. “I can drive if you need me to.”

“I’m thinking about that shotgun thing again.”

I said, “I thought that was settled.”

Murphy took a magazine out of his vest and tossed it over to me. I reached out, fumbled the catch, and it clattered on the deck. He shouted, “Don’t let it—”

I jumped to my knees and trapped the magazine as it slipped near the edge of the deck. I caught it and held it up with a grin full of false confidence.

“You need to get active again,” he said. “Lazy time has made you clumsy.”

I pretended to check that the magazine was full as I ignored Murphy’s remark. I was getting a little clumsy, but it wasn’t because I’d been lazy. I suspected it was the virus affecting my motor skills. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“It’s for your rifle,” said Murphy.

“You want me to shoot?” I shook my head, giving Murphy an obvious hint on what I thought the answer to that question should be. “We’ve only got three hundred rounds, right?”

“We need to give you some practice shooting from the hip and see how that works out.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“If it costs two or three magazines to find out, that’s cheap compared to what it’ll cost us later if you can’t hit anything.”

I nodded. He was right.

Murphy pointed at a buoy bobbing on the waves coming up on our starboard bow. “I’ll pass by about ten feet out.” Murphy throttled down. “Three-round bursts. We’ll see how you do. Then we’ll see how far we can get from the buoys and still have a hope of hitting one.”

I wanted to think I couldn’t miss the buoy. It was basically a white plastic tube—probably filled with foam—standing four feet out of the waves, maybe ten inches in diameter. This particular one had a faded orange diamond shape with a speed limit in the center. It wasn’t as big as a man, but it presented a target the size of a kid on profile.

I positioned myself on the starboard bow of the boat just past where the side rail ended. I leveled my weapon and squeezed off three rounds.

The water splashed way out in the distance.

Keeping my curses to myself, I fired again.

More splashes.

Again.

With nine rounds spent, all sinking to Lake Travis’ rocky bottom, I looked at Murphy and faked a smile. “I think I missed.”

“He nodded.”

Still, I hoped. “Maybe I got a few rounds in but… you know.”

Murphy raised his own weapon, took quick aim and fired one shot.

The buoy slammed backwards onto the surface of the lake, leaving only a small drifting cloud of white plastic dust to mark the space it had been standing in a second before.

“Dammit,” I muttered as I watched the buoy pop back vertical and wobble to and fro before it settled into its previous position. Once it settled into a rhythm on the waves, I fired another nine rounds. Nothing hit.

Murphy sped the boat toward the next buoy. “I’ll get closer to this next one.”

“Closer?” I asked.

Murphy shrugged. “We gotta know.”

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I wanted to shout out in frustration, but I
knew
what was wrong. The virus was debilitating my coordination and I just didn’t want to accept it. I could only hope it would stop before I was an invalid or a brain-fried White.

The next buoy came up again on my side of the boat. We slowed. I fired three rounds. “Dammit.” They all missed. How could I miss from so close? I fired again. The plastic popped loudly and the buoy fell back into the water. When it popped back up, it splashed me. I fired another burst and then another. A few hits, mostly misses. I clenched my jaw and glared at the buoy. The boat wasn’t moving by then except for being pushed slowly by the wind.

I swung my rifle down in its sling and pulled my machete out, swinging it in an arc at the top of the buoy. The brittle orange-decaled plastic cracked and the machete jammed in the foam. I yanked hard, letting my temper do the thinking. The boat drifted. I lost my balance and fell in.