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

Standing in front of the shop, shielded from the road by a stand of twisted oaks, I said, “It doesn’t look like all that much.”

“At a glance neither do you but nobody complains.” Murphy laughed.

I said, “You do.”

“Damn, I crack myself up.”

I turned away from him to scan the area for infected.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” he said.

“I wore the paisley ones just for you,” I teased.

Murphy looked around for movement, back to the serious business at hand. He said, “Those Whites that ambushed us weren’t naked.”

Nodding, I said, “I’m assuming your point is they weren’t part of the naked horde.”

“Yes, Professor.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

Murphy chuckled. “When I say that to you it doesn’t change anything, so let’s not pretend, okay?”

“Whatever.”

“You know what I’m sayin’ though, right?” Murphy asked.

“That it seems like we keep seeing more and more of them act a little bit smarter as things go along?”

“Yeah,” Murphy nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly what it’s starting to seem like.”

Shrugging to underscore my guess, I said, “Maybe the dumber ones are getting culled out of the population through a higher mortality rate making the ones that are left—the ones who are a little smarter—more visible to us.”

“Maybe they’re just learning.”

“Who’s to say?” I pointed at the door. “You ready?”

Murphy took one last glance around and stepped forward with his weapon up. “You open it. I’ll shoot anything that comes out.”

“If it’s not locked.” I stepped to the door and gave Murphy a look to let him know to get ready. I turned the handle. It wasn’t locked. That was a nice surprise. I swung the door open wide as I jumped to the side and raised my machete, ready to hack whatever came out.

Nothing did.

Murphy and I shared a glance as we waited.

I tapped my machete on the door jamb a few times.

No response.

I stepped to the doorway, leaned my head in and said, “Come and get it, dimwits!” I quickly leaned back out.

Murphy’s face turned into a silent question.

“What?” I asked.

“Are the cars in there?”

“Fuck, Murphy. I don’t know.”

“How could you not know? Cars are those big things with wheels and shit.”

“Dammit,” I huffed. “I saw some cars, but I was looking for Whites.”

“I know that.”

“Sometimes you can be so damn difficult.” I smacked the door jamb with the flat side of my machete again and leaned in. “Hey. Anybody in there?” Feeling a bit bolder, I didn’t jump back from the door. I continued to look inside. “Hey,” I yelled. Louder.

Nothing.

I waved Murphy to follow and I stepped into the shop. It was too dark to see well with the naked eye and it was too bright for night vision goggles. “A window or two wouldn’t hurt.” They wouldn’t have helped much either, with only diffused twilight sun coming in.

Murphy came up beside me, bumping me forward and pulling the door shut behind.

“Don’t close it,” I said. “The only light is coming from the open door.”

He reached over and flipped a switch beside the door and the rows of light fixtures on the ceiling splashed a bright light down upon us, down on the neatly arranged cabinets of tools, storage racks, and cars.

Murphy closed the door. “Hey, man. Anybody in here?”

Looking around for movement in the shop and not seeing any, I turned the deadbolt handle on the door, hearing the lock slide into place. “Just us now.”

With weapons up, we walked along the front wall, with the closed garage doors at our back, looking for anything that might be lurking. The shop wasn’t a large space, maybe big enough to fit a half dozen parked cars with plenty of room on each end for some machine shop tools, storage, and workbenches. The only space we couldn’t see into was what looked like an enclosed office area in one corner. The door into that space was open.

We checked between the cars. We checked beneath. We peered inside each and saw nothing alive.

We went into the office area, which turned out to be something else. It was more of a man cave with couches, beer signs, diamond-plate trim, a fridge—empty as it turns out—and cabinets. In the back, down a short hallway was a bathroom. I knocked on the bathroom door and got no response from inside. I swung that door open and jumped back in surprise as a white-skinned body fell out. Without thinking, I hacked it once across the chest.

“It’s dead,” said Murphy in a tone of voice that made me think he wasn’t entirely sure.

I waited for the body to move, to react. It didn’t. It just lay there.

“It smells pretty bad,” I said. “I wish I would have just left it in there.”

Murphy stepped up beside the body and studied the face for a moment.

“What?” I asked.

“Checking.”

“For?” I asked.

“I thought it might be Mitch,” he said.

“Who’s Mitch?”

“Dude who owns the place,” he said.

“You know him?”

Shaking his head slowly, Murphy said, “I told you I saw a video on the Internet.”

I rolled my eyes as I turned to leave the man cave area. I walked out into the shop with Murphy behind me. Several shiny cars sat on the floor, some with engines clearly missing, a few others seemingly in working order.

Murphy pointed at a late 60s shiny black Mustang with two bright green racing stripes. “That’s the car, the one I told you about.”

“No shit? That’s nice.”

Besides a thin layer of dust, the Mustang looked to have been parked in the garage overnight, left ready for a quick spin down to the local burger joint the next day. The only thing unusual was a thick cord running out of the back of the car, connected where the gas cap used to be.

“You think it’s charged?” I asked, pointing at the cord.

Murphy shrugged, walked over, ran a hand down the crease on top of the driver’s side fender and opened the door. “Keys are in it.”

That piqued my interest.

Murphy reached into the car and scooted the driver’s seat all the way back, then folded himself inside. He grinned at me as I leaned in through the open passenger door window. He said, “It fits me perfect.”

“Not to burst your bubble, racy car boy, but if we take off in this thing it’ll be better if I’m driving.”

Murphy’s grin slipped away as his eyes caressed the black and chrome dashboard. “Because you can’t shoot for shit.”

I shrugged. “Yep.”

“Man, you’re taking all the fun out of this apocalypse thing.”

“I know.” I walked around to the driver’s side as Murphy struggled to get himself out. I sat down inside, adjusted the seat, closed the door and set my mirrors. With two hands on the wheel, I surveyed the dashboard, “It’s pretty much just like a regular car.”

Murphy took off his backpack and laid it in the back, then put himself into the passenger seat. He pointed the muzzle of his M4 out the window to shoot left-handed.

“Can you hit anything like that?” I asked.

“If I say no, can I drive?”

“You can drive if you want me on the trigger,” I said, getting comfortable behind the wheel surprisingly fast. “I could get used to this.”

Murphy frowned. “That’s what I thought.”

I reached over and slapped Murphy on the shoulder. “Don’t be jealous, man. I’m just the driver. It’s still your car since it was your idea to come here and steal it.”

“Inherit it, you mean.” Murphy ran a hand across the dashboard. “I like this. Does the AC work?”

I turned a knob on the instrument panel and a fan somewhere down inside the engine compartment blew air through the vents—air that quickly turned cold.

Leaning up to let the air blow across his face, Murphy said, “What more could a man ask for.”

I tried the heat. It worked better than in a normal car. It heated up in seconds without the engine running. I guess that concept of waiting for your idling engine to warm up the car is obsolete with an electric car.

Pointing at the gauges, I said, “Looks like it’ll tell me how much of a charge I have left. That’ll be good to know. Full right now.”

“Sweet.”

“I know.” I glanced up even though I could see nothing but the car’s headliner. “The solar panels on the roof of the building have kept it ready for us.”

“Does it tell you how many miles it’ll go?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t see anything like that.” Reading across the instruments, I said, “It’s pretty simple. Speed. Voltage. And estimated time left on the battery.”

“The video I saw on the Internet said this thing will do over 170.”

I laughed and had to take care to quiet myself quickly. “There’s no need for us to ever go that fast. So, we won’t.”

Bracing himself in his seat, Murphy said, “But don’t you just want to see what it feels like?”

“You mean right before we run into a road jammed with abandoned cars?” I asked. “Or right before we hit some shit in the road that blows a tire and we lose control and roll the car like thirty-seven times? I don’t think so.”

Murphy sighed. “You sound like my mom.”

“We just need to be able to drive faster than the Whites can run,” I told him. “That’s it. Besides, going slow reduces our wind resistance and will extend our range. That’ll probably be the most important thing to us, going the maximum number of miles on a charge.”

“Shut up, Professor,” Murphy told me. “Let’s see if this thing will move.”

“Okay, get out and unplug the car.”

Murphy made his way to the back of the car, removed the plug, then got back in.

Seeing that I had a good ten feet between the front bumper and the garage door, I put the car in gear, or whatever passes for that in an electric car since they’ve got no transmission. At least I assumed this one was like a Tesla in that respect. In theory, it had a simple electric motor with an axle running through it. To go faster, you just increased the voltage. Easy-peasy, in theory.

There were some unexplained switches, buttons, and a dial on the console behind the shifter, and on the shifter itself the letters usually there to indicate D for drive, P for park, R for reverse, instead spelled out “O SHIT.”

Murphy and I looked at that. Neither of us had any guesses. Oh, well.

I tentatively pressed the accelerator and the car rolled forward on a carpet of utterly silent magic.

Murphy laughed out loud.

“Dude,” I scolded, pointing at the insulated garage door. “If any Whites are out there they’ll hear you.”

Murphy shrugged. “Fuck ‘em. This thing is as quiet as a ghost. I love it. If we take this thing out after dark and use our night vision goggles, the Whites will never even know we were there. This is the ticket, man. No more scrounging around for Humvees with no keys that shitheads steal from you the first time you look the other way.”

With two stolen already, I couldn’t help but laugh at that. I jingled the keys dangling from the ignition switch, which on this Mustang was a two-position on/off switch. “We’ll need to check around the shop and see if we can find another set so we both have one.” I turned the key to the off position, then got out of the car. Murphy did the same.

Examining the vulnerable windows on the Mustang and looking at the sleek lines of sheet metal on the hood and front fenders, I said, “You know, just in case, we should weld some kind of metal cattle guard across the grill.”

“A brush guard?” Murphy laughed. “You mean a zombie guard.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I walked toward some long metal tubes and pieces of angle iron by the far wall. “Maybe we should also attach some strips over the windshield to keep bodies from going through. You know, in case we have to run them down while we’re going pretty fast. And on the side windows too so they can’t get in.”

“Man,” said Murphy, shaking his head. “You make it sound like welding some extra metal on is as easy as gluing a model airplane together.”

I looked at him with raised eyebrows. “It’s not?”

He shook his head.

I spotted some kind of big blue welding machine by the stacks of metal. “Really? I mean I’ve seen ‘em do it on TV. You just hook up the electric parts and stick the metal together. Sparks fly. It fuses. Right?”

“Seriously?”

Yes, I was serious. “It looks easy on TV. Didn’t you ever watch that Gas Monkey Garage show? Those guys made some really cool shit.”

“Sometimes you can be such a dumbass.” Murphy shook his head. “Nothing’s as easy at it looks on TV. Tell me you know at least that much.”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “If you don’t think we should, then we won’t.”

“Don’t put on that whiny bitch face,” said Murphy.

Ignoring his comment, I said, “That welder runs off electricity, doesn’t it? We’ve got solar panels on the roof to generate power. Maybe they’re enough?”

Murphy walked over to the welding rig and looked it over. “That’s the beauty of this thing. This welder is a combo—it is a generator
and
welder and looks like it has a plasma cutter. Anyway, if you decide you want to use it and don’t manage to electrocute yourself—and I’ll be honest, I think there’s a pretty good chance you just might—then I think you’ll fuck the paint all up on this beautiful black car and you’ll get some pieces of metal stuck all over it and it’ll look like total shit and—”

Interrupting, I said, “Aesthetics aren’t my top priority.”

Murphy shook his head and said, “And the first time you hit something, your shitty little porous, brittle welds will break because getting it right is a lot harder than it looks. Your arc could be too long or too short, the current could be too high, you could go too fast or use the wrong filler. That’s why people go to school to learn how to do this stuff. That’s all I’m saying. But you just go right ahead if that’s what you want to do. You want to weld that metal over there to this metal over here.” Murphy rapped on the Mustang’s hood a few times. “You don’t even know if it’s the same kind of metal.”

“The same kind?” I asked.

“Do you know if Mitch what’s-his-name stuck an aluminum hood on this thing so it would go faster?”

I shook my head.

“Or if that tubing is aluminum?”

I shook my head again as I turned away from the extruded tubes. “Fine. You made your point. Let’s find some keys and see what else we can scrounge up here.”

Murphy struck a pose and put on a face of mock surprise. “Oh… my… God.”

“Don’t be a dick,” I smiled. “That’s
my
job.”

“I was just gonna say you’ve hit a milestone in your maturation process.” Murphy grinned.

“I said you don’t have to be a dick.” I turned my back to Murphy and started rummaging through some drawers of neatly stored tools.

“You listened to somebody,” Murphy went on, comically dramatic. “You learned something in a fashion other than the hard way. I think I need to call a newspaper. I can see the headlines already.”

“Nobody reads newspapers anymore.”