Slow Burn Box Set: The Complete Post Apocalyptic Series
Author: Bobby Adair
Date: 2019-07-20 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Fiction; Horror
Description: More than a million sold. Over 7,000 5-star reviews. Now in one special box set, including Null Spot, a brand new Slow Burn novella. It was one lucky mutation, lucky for the virus, that is. Unlucky for us. Of course, we weren't prepared for it. How does anyone prepare for a disease that can drive an entire species into extinction? By the time it was truly understood what was happening, the hospitals were overrun, the virus was in the air, in the neighbor's veins, and it was already too late. Except for those who would do anything to survive.
Publisher: Beezle Media, LLC

Slow Burn

This Special Edition Contains All Nine Books in the Slow Burn Series
and a Bonus Novella

ZERO DAY, Book 1

INFECTED, Book 2

DESTROYER, Book 3

DEAD FIRE, Book 4

TORRENT, Book 5

BLEED, Book 6

CITY OF STIN, Book 7

GRIND, Book 8

SANCTUM, Book 9

ALPHA, Bonus Novella

A series of novels
by
Bobby Adair

http://www.bobbyadair.com
http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor

Table of Contents

Book 1, Zero Day

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Book 2, Infected

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Book 3, Destroyer

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Book 4, Dead Fire

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Book 5, Torrent

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Book 6, Bleed

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Book 7, City of Stin

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Book 8, Grind

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Book 9, Sanctum

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

The End

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Slow Burn Book 1, ‘Zero Day’

Chapter 1

That day arrived like every other day in my life.

I came into it ill-informed and unprepared.

There had been exaggerated news reports over the past few weeks about the upcoming flu season’s annual pandemic. The whiners on the talking-head channels were making noise about racial cleansing that had spread out of Somalia and into Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Civil disorder had spread through China and the military was cracking down hard. Soldiers were marching. Tanks were rolling. Reporters were being arrested and internet communication had been disconnected, to whatever degree that can be done. Riots were tearing through Mediterranean cities and the Mideast had oscillated into a more violent phase of its perpetual cycle.

The world was falling apart in all the usual ways.

So I’d shrugged it off and spent my Saturday watching pre-season football with my buddies. I got a little too drunk, slept a little too late, and on that Sunday morning, my head hurt a little too much. It didn’t help that I was going to see my mom and Dan for a needling, nagging, degrading lunch that would end with my asking for a five-hundred dollar loan to cover rent, again, and I’d get another long speech about doing something with my life, showing a little enthusiasm, or developing some kind of work ethic.

How else could that morning have started, other than with a few shots from a now-empty tequila bottle on my kitchen counter?

And perhaps I should have not just noticed, but really paid attention to the weirdness in the streets on the drive over. But when one gets up in the morning and explicitly decides to paint oneself into oblivion behind a screen of booze, dark sunglasses, and heavy metal music, an unconcerned world just slides past, beyond an apathetic fog. Which is the whole point.

All of that worked just as planned until I walked into Mom’s house and slipped in some blood on the floor in the foyer. I was dumbstruck at the scene in the living room: some semi-mutilated guy, sitting deathly still in a chair by the fireplace, my mother, on the living room floor in a pool of blood, and Dan, on his knees with his back to me, hunched over her with busy elbows and noisy hands.

Time ticked languidly past. Unsavory images bombarded my optic nerve, only be to be rejected by my unreceptive brain.

Unencumbered by the state of horrified surprise that afflicted me, Dan stood up and looked at me with his thin gray comb-over dangling in front of his pale round face. His blood-smeared lips smacked and his crazy dark eyes fixated on me.

I yanked my phone from my pocket and threatened, “Dan, I’m going to call the police.” As if I wasn’t going to do that anyway.

He came at me, clearly not afraid of the police.

My feet somehow found traction on the slippery floor and I bounded into the kitchen. Dan gave chase with his big, blue-collar hands grasping at my shirttail.

With surprising speed, he caught me near the dishwasher. A big ape hand squeezed into my arm and spun me around. The other reached for my throat, with toothy jaws following close behind. I tried to protect myself by throwing up my left arm.

I reached over and pulled a large carving knife from the block on the counter, and I stabbed Dan, tentatively at first, but as his teeth tore my skin I stabbed again and again, with increasingly brutal enthusiasm.

When it was over, I sat on the floor with my back to a cabinet door in a large, copper-smelling puddle of Dan’s blood, with his sweaty body pinned across my legs.

He was dead.

I was fixated on the horrid bite wound on my left forearm. For a long time I watched, hypnotized, as the blood oozed and dripped.

Sometimes, a half-bottle of breakfast tequila just isn’t enough to deal with the day’s reality.

I dropped the knife and proceeded to roll the flabby corpse onto the tile.

I walked through the mess in the kitchen and found my cell phone on the floor in the foyer. Thankfully, it hadn’t broken in the scuffle. I dialed 911.

Busy.

Shit.

I tried again.

Busy.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I walked out the front door and onto the wide porch. The upper middle-class cracker neighborhood ignored me, focused instead on its own pockets of human chaos. Four houses down, across the street, some sort of scuffle had spilled out of the front door and people were struggling on the lawn. A car raced up the street at a very unsafe speed. Some residents loitered aimlessly.

911 again. Still busy.

What the hell?

I went back into the house, closing and locking the front door behind me. Things weren’t making sense.

Back in the living room, I looked down at my mother’s torn body and shook my head. It was surreal.

Perhaps some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried. As for me, I’d emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess.

I thought about an inheritance and an end to my financial troubles. I thought about the infection from Dan’s stale breath and yellow teeth beginning to fester under my skin. I thought about the eventual scar and the great bar room story it would make. Pain today, pussy tomorrow. Half a smile bent my lips.

The guy in the chair was in bad shape. Not living, of course, but in bad shape even for a corpse. His right arm was missing whole bite-sized chunks of flesh, human bite-sized chunks. His head was beaten beyond recognition. On the floor beside the chair lay a bloody fireplace poker, quite likely the weapon that had given his skull its new shape.

I felt sick to my stomach and an uncharacteristic chill.

Looking down at the wound on my arm I noticed that coagulation hadn’t yet begun to staunch the flow of blood. I needed to do something about that.

I dialed 911 again. Nothing.

Crap.

I went to Mom and Dan’s bedroom and into the master bath.

Opening the medicine cabinet, I found an off-brand bottle of antibacterial liquid.

My head started to pound. The morning’s tequila had outlived its usefulness.

Looking around for something with which to scrub, I found myself staring at the toothbrush holder. Mom and Dan weren’t going to need those anymore. I lay my forearm over the sink, poured the antibacterial into the gaping tears, and clenched my teeth.

Holy crap, it hurt.

Next, I went after the wound with a toothbrush.

More pain.

More antibacterial.

Rinse. Soap. Scrub. Pain, pain, pain.

Rinse. Antibacterial.

Clench the teeth.

Don’t scream like a pussy.

Antibacterial.

Breathe.

My head was about to explode.

Letting my wound air-dry, I found a bottle of aspirin, threw four into my mouth and slurped some water from the sink to wash them down. I found a tube of antibacterial cream and squirted it liberally into the wounds as blood slowly mixed with it, trying to wash it back out. A box of Band-Aids would have to fulfill the next requirement, as no gauze or tape was in the cabinet.

A chill. A fever was coming. Not good.

I used half the box of Band-Aids to pull the edges of my torn skin together. Blood oozed through. I found what appeared to be a clean washrag under the sink and used an Ace bandage to wrap it over my forearm.

I stood up straight to leave the bathroom and dizziness hit me so hard that I lost my balance and fell against the wall.

Christ.

Blood loss. It had to be the blood loss.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and tried 911 again. Still busy.

Suspecting then that the phone had been damaged in the scuffle with Dan, I made my way to the landline phone that sat on the nightstand by the bed.

I picked it up and dialed 911. Busy.

Dammit.

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

The dizziness returned and I fell into a sitting position on the bed.

The television’s remote control beckoned me from the nightstand. I grabbed it, leaned back on the headboard, and turned the television on. A few minutes of satisfying my addiction to mindless blabber would pass the time while I waited for the phones to free up. The news was on.

Eh.

Changing the channel suddenly seemed like an onerous chore, so I dropped the remote and let the TV’s colorful opiate wash over me.

A worried newscaster was talking over a video of some shopping center in France. He described the scene as a riot, but the video showed something much more violent.

People were running and screaming. Police were trying to restore order, but intermingled in the crowd were what appeared to be normal people, dressed in their Sunday afternoon casual clothes, going completely nuts.

“What the hell?”

The pounding in my head worsened. The chills carried with them a case of shivers. A high-grade fever was on the way. The four aspirin were proving insufficient. I reached for the telephone again to call 911, felt the room suddenly spin, and saw the hideous design on the carpet race up to smash me in the face.

Chapter 2

I woke up disoriented. My head throbbed. My throat was so dry I couldn’t swallow. My swollen arm hurt like hell. Numbness tingled my left hand.

Cheap motel carpet scum clung to my skin as I peeled my face away from the rug. I got up on my hands and knees. Standing and walking was out of the question, so I crawled to the bathroom sink where I pulled myself up.

Having accomplished that, I bent over at the waist and lay flat on the blue swirl faux marble counter top. I turned on the faucet. Beautiful, cool water flowed into my cupped hands and I sucked in what seemed like a gallon before I slipped back down to the floor.

Morning light spread shadows across the bathroom and onto the far wall above the garden tub. For a while, I watched a square of sunlight slowly inch down the wall as the sun went about its normal rounds.

As my dizziness waned, I pulled myself up to the sink again and gulped more water. My throat felt as if it had been sanded raw then left in the unforgiving sun to dry.

I dropped to the floor again and closed my eyes for a moment that lasted long enough for the sun’s rays to slide its square of light onto the floor.

When I opened my eyes again, my thoughts had cleared somewhat and I was able to hold a thought about something other than how completely shitty I felt. I pulled myself up to stand on wobbly legs.

To my surprise, I remained upright.

I drank again from the bathroom sink and looked down at the crusty brown washrag and bandage on my left forearm. I flexed my hand a few times. The damage wasn’t enough to hinder movement, but infection was sure to set in if I didn’t get to a doctor and get some antibiotics.

That’s when it occurred to me that it was late morning. The sunlight spilling in through the east-facing window made that clear. I realized that I had slept through the entire night on the carpet in the bedroom. I recalled the scene in the living room—Mom, Dan, and the guy with the smashed skull. I needed to call the police about that. They’d be none too thrilled with the elapsed time between the deaths and the phone call to summon them.

I thought back to Sunday’s breakfast tequila, and wondered how drunk I was when I’d gotten to Mom and Dan’s place. I wondered whether I’d been so drunk that I blacked out and delivered them some karma in a state of repressed psycho-rage.

Crap. I shook my head.

Maybe it was all just a nightmare.

Using the dresser, then the walls, then the doorjambs for support, I slowly made my way into the hall and out to the living room.

A pungent stench did its best to seep in through my pores as I forced my reluctant feet forward. The closer I got, the surer I was that my nightmare was real.

Step. Step. Step.

Christ.

A swarm of industriously prolific flies had come into the house through the open back door. They buzzed over the feast of Mom’s stinky remains while a generation of young maggots vacationed on the corpse of the guy in the chair.

Dan’s punctured body would be in the kitchen where I’d left it. I didn’t need a confirmation venture in there.

I needed to call the police, and in spite of the gore on the floor and the stench in the air, I needed to get something to eat.

I weighed the two priorities and the fear of the police’s authority sent me back into the master bedroom to the phone.

My cell phone lay on the floor near where I’d gone comatose the night before.

The landline on the nightstand, being so much closer to my hand, was my first choice. I lifted it to my ear.

Dial tone.

That was good.

I dialed 911.

Busy.

“Damn it.” I slammed it down. “What the hell is going on?”

I sat down on the bed and dropped my head into my hands.

Well, no cops for the moment.

Food, then.

I managed my way back up the hall, passed the living room, and stopped at the entryway to the kitchen. The buzz of flies echoed off the tile and hard surfaces. A congealed puddle of Dan’s blood covered half the floor and spread all the way under the fridge.

I was stuck. To get to the fridge, I’d have to wade through the nastiness of Dan’s spilled fluids.

“Jesus, it just keeps getting worse.”

Tracking Dan’s sticky blood all over the house didn’t sit well with me, so I found the cabinet with the kitchen towels, grabbed a stack, and laid them out in front of me like stepping stones in the blood.

What seemed like a good plan prior to the first step, turned to shit when a towel slipped in the slime. My feet went out from under me and I fell. My head hit the tile and exploded in a flash of pain and bright lights. I sent a string of curse words echoing through the house.

As disgusting as it was, I lay on the floor for several long minutes while the pain, in what seemed like every part of me, took its time to dissipate.

At least nothing seemed to be broken. Feeling the disgusting brownish red goo all over my back, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and slowly stood.

Bracing myself on the counters, I got to the fridge and pulled it open. For the second time in as many days, God’s good fortune shone on me. An unopened thirty-two ounce sports drink sat on the shelf.

I reached in, wrestled with the cap for a moment, put it up to my mouth, and poured it into my throat until I had to stop and breathe.

Setting the bottle down on the island in the middle of the kitchen, I looked at the smooth granite inviting my hands to linger on its cold surface. I leaned over, pressed my face on the stone, and reveled in the coolness.

As the minutes passed, the sugar from the sports drink seeped into my bloodstream and the glucose hit me like a rush of cocaine. The contrast from bad to good was so drastic it brought tears to my eyes.

With waning dizziness, I straightened up. I gulped down more of the sports drink and gingerly walked out of the kitchen.

I stopped for a brief pause in front of a large mirror in the foyer.

“Jeez.” I looked like crap, covered with blood, hair awry, an enormous makeshift bandage on my arm, and my skin so pale that I wondered how much blood I’d lost.

I went into the laundry room, stripped off my clothes, and threw them along with my gory tennis shoes into the washer. Naked, and still covered in the most disgusting goo, I walked to the guest bath and got into the shower to scrub myself clean and peel the crusty bandage off of my arm under the warm water.

After the shower, I sat naked on the bed and finished the sports drink as the sound of the washing machine in the next room vibrated. The wound on my arm oozed pus and blood. I’d need to rewrap it with whatever first aid supplies were left.

I picked up the remote and turned on the television. My thumb went on autopilot surf mode as I thought about what to do. The police, the hospital, or both?

News flickered to life on the screen.

Click. News.

Click. News.

Click. Still nothing but news.

“News sucks.”

I settled for one of the national cable news channels and turned up the volume.

The story was the same as Sunday, more rioting in France, but Germany, Italy, and England were added to the list. A panel of experts, or rather, speculators, argued about a virulent flu of some sort. International travel had been suspended by most countries. Airline stocks were tanking and the rest of the market was following their prices south. Video footage showed overwhelmed hospitals and bodies lying in the streets. An announcement from the White House was expected in a few hours.

The washer buzzed, so I went into the laundry room, put my things into the dryer, and started it up.

Back in the guest room, I turned down the volume on the television and tried 911 again.

This time, it rang.

Chapter 3

Meeting a naked psycho-creep in a house full of dead people was sure to leave a negative impression on the soon-to-be arriving police, so I retrieved my damp clothes from the dryer and dressed.

Suddenly worried about disturbing the crime scene, I chose to sit in a tiny clean spot in the wide foyer, taking care to keep my hands in my lap.

It wasn’t long before the doorbell chimed twice, followed by a series of rapid beats on the door.

“It’s the police. Open up,” a voice commanded from outside.

“All right. Just a sec.” I stood as quickly as I could, considering my blood loss.

Again, pounding on the door. “It’s the police. Open up.”

“All right,” I croaked, then muttered, “impatient bastards.”

More beating on the door. “Sir, you need to open up.”

I pulled the door open a dozen inches.

Two policemen fixed me in the predatory stare of their big, black, bug-eyed glasses before glancing down to the blood-covered white marble floor. One officer’s hand landed on the butt of his gun. The second officer grasped the handle of his weapon.

Very loudly, one of them commanded me to step slowly back from the door.

The other officer ordered me to show my hands.

“What?” was all I got out before the cop closest to me rushed forward, shouldered the door, and knocked me onto my back.

Before I could react, a cop was on me. My arm was wrenched around behind my me and I was leveraged onto my belly. A heavy knee landed on my neck, smashing my face into the floor. A handcuff caught one wrist. My other wrist was yanked back and cuffed to the first.

It all happened faster than I could come up with a snarky comment. “Hey. Hey. I’m the one who called you.”

They pretended like I hadn’t spoken.

“Don’t move.” one of the officers commanded, as he took his weight off of me.

I found myself staring at his shiny black shoe, situated just inches from my face.

Footsteps sounded as the other officer went further into the house.

“Oh, my God.” There was revulsion in the other officer’s voice.

“What?” the cop standing over me asked.

Nothing for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” said the second officer again.

“What?” the first officer demanded. Then, to me he barked, “Don’t move.”

I watched his feet step back slowly toward the living room. “Everything all right, Bill?”

Nothing.

“Bill?”

Just footsteps, shuffling backward.

Then Bill’s voice again, deflated this time. “Oh, my God.”

The second officer’s voice came next. “That’s sick.”

Then the footsteps got louder again.

The first officer’s voice yelled, “No.”

“You sick pig.” the second guy yelled, as I saw his shiny black shoe coming at my face.

Chapter 4

My right eye was swollen into a bluish lump. My lips were chapped. My throat was dry. My formerly clean shirt had a fresh coat of dried blood, some of it mine, all down the front. I was handcuffed to a metal table in a police interrogation room, alone and staring at the camera in the upper corner.

With no windows and no clocks, I didn’t know what time it was. I only knew I’d been in there for many, many long hours.

While I waited for my unscrupulous interrogator to return, I amused myself by tapping out a rhythm on the table, and alternately extending a middle finger from each hand at the camera above.

I leaned over and lay my face flat on the table, drawing minor comfort from the temperature of the steel. I closed my eyes, knowing that as soon as I dozed off, my interrogator would return to deprive me of sleep.

I heard the door open, but didn’t respond.

A phonebook slammed down on the table next to my head. I was too exhausted to react.

I heard a voice tell someone else, “This one’s still out. I don’t know what sent all the crackheads on a killing spree this week, but we’ve got to get that shit off the street.”

“Yeah,” another voice agreed. “I’ve got mine next door. Let me know if you come up with anything.”

A moment later, the chair across the table from me scooted out and a heavy man sat down.

He followed with a few exaggerated sighs. He loudly sipped from his coffee. He clinked the hard paper cup on the table next to my head.

Silence passed as he decided what to do next. A sharp exhalation and a hard slap on the back of my head announced his decision.

“Hey crackhead. Wake up.”

I didn’t react to the slap. Pain was becoming surprisingly easy to ignore.

I lolled my head in another direction and opened my eyes to look at my angry tormentor.

“What were you on?”

“What?” I feigned ignorance. I guess I was too hardheaded to cooperate.

He slapped me again.

“I thought police didn’t do this sort of thing anymore,” I said.

That earned me another slap.

The detective leaned back in his chair, drew a deep breath, and stared at me.

“Look, Ezekiel…Ezekiel, that’s your name, right?”

I picked my head up off the table. I straightened up in the chair, out of arm’s reach for the moment. “Yeah, but my friends call me Zed. Zed Zane.”

“Look, Zed, maybe you got started off on the wrong foot here.”

I looked down at the worn phone book on the desk and gave voice to my frustrations. “What? Is it your turn now to beat me with a phone book? Do you guys work in shifts or what? What time is it? Why can’t I get a lawyer? Why do you guys keep telling me the camera doesn’t work? Don’t you have one of those, ah…those, ah…who are those guys they have on TV? Oh, yeah, detectives. Why don’t you get one of them to look at the crime scene and confirm what I’ve been telling you all night? It has been all night hasn’t it?”

The detective ignored my outburst for several long breaths. “Are you done?”

In response, I chose a conversational technique that hadn’t failed me since junior high: I ignored him.

The big man leaned his furry forearms on the table. “You gotta understand, Zed. You come in here in wet clothes that you just washed all the evidence out of. You assault the arresting officers.” He shook his head.

“Bullshit.” I’d heard that accusation a thousand times at that point.

“You talk about killing your stepdad…You did kill him right? I mean you admitted that much, right? It’s right here in the file.”

Not any less irritated, I said, “I told you, it was self-defense. He was attacking me.” I drew a deep breath. “And where the hell do people even get phone books anymore?”

The officer crossed his big fuzzy arms and said nothing for a moment.

I did the same.

“Are you through?”

“Through with what?” I asked

“Acting like an ass?” he said.

“What? Are you kidding me? Really? I go to my mom’s house yesterday morning. I find my stepdad going all cannibal on her in the living room. He attacks me and I stab him with a knife to defend myself. I call the cops and then Dudley Do-Right and his partner show up, don’t even ask me a question, and decide instead to beat the shit out of me and drop me here. Does that about sum it up?”

No response.

I went on. “Now after who knows how long I’ve been in here, with you guys taking turns yelling at me, calling me a liar, oh, and beating me in the head with the phone book, you wanna say I’m acting like an ass? Well forgive me for being so goddamned rude.”

“Hi, I’m Zed Zane. I’m so pleased to meet you. Would you like a cup of tea?”

He didn’t react. He just stared at me.

So, we played the staring game for a good five minutes before I won and he asked, “Are you through now?”

“Whatever,” I responded.

“Let’s start again. I’m Detective Tom Wolsely.” He extended a hand across the table to shake mine.

I looked at his hand but made no move to respond. Of course, I did have two hands cuffed to the table.

“Don’t be an ass, Zed. It’s polite to shake a hand when it’s offered.”

“Maybe you guys should have thought about that whenever the hell it was that you locked me in here. How long have I been in here, anyway?”

The hand still hung over the table, just inches above the metal loop that constrained mine. “Zed?”

“Oh, good God.” I angled a wrist up and opened my palm.

He jiggled my hand roughly in the cuffs.

“Thank you, Zed.”

I let go and let my hand drop to the stainless steel.

“You have to understand, Zed, this story about your stepdad turning into a cannibal…what did you really think we’d think, Zed? It all sounds a little far-fetched, don’t you think? He was a deacon in the church. A member of the school board. A retired principal. Are we really supposed to believe he got all hopped up on crack and killed your mother and the neighbor?”

I nodded. “Of course I do. I thought the whole thing was pretty crazy when I got to my mom’s for lunch. Look, don’t you have some kind of forensics team or something? Don’t you guys look at evidence before you start beating the crap out of suspects anymore? I mean, Christ.”

“We’ve got people at the scene,” Detective Wolsely told me.

“So what’s the deal then? Are we going to just sit in this room until you get tired of beating me, or are you going to look at the evidence and then apologize to me?”

“Look, Zed. Let’s just put all of that aside for the moment. You keep saying you went to your mom’s house yesterday morning––”

“I did.”

“––and you tell us the story. But your story is so full of holes that you could drive a truck through it.”

“What? What holes? How can there be any holes? It’s not like you talked to the other witnesses, because you can’t, because they’re dead.”

“Zed, calm down. I’m trying to help you here, and in return I’d like for you to help me, too.”

“By being your punching bag?”

“Now, Zed, that wasn’t called for.”

“I don’t see how any time could be called for better than this one, do you? I mean, I have been in here for hours, being beaten and called a liar, yelled at, and berated, threatened, and, oh, did I mention, getting beaten like a punching bag?”

Wolsely leaned back in his chair and froze in his cross-armed pose again.

“Whatever.” I sat back in my chair and drew a few deep, calming breaths.

“Zed, you say you got to your parents’ house yesterday morning, and you found your mom and the dead neighbor. Then you fought with your stepdad and that he was killed in the fight.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what happened.”

“Well, Zed, that’s not possible.”

“What do you mean? How could you even come to that conclusion?”

“Zed, we’re not complete idiots here in the police department. For one thing, our forensic guys are pretty good at determining time of death. It’s simpler than you think, especially when it’s recent. They just compare the core temperature to the ambient temperature, and get a pretty quick estimate of the time of death.”

“Okay, I watch TV, too. So what’s the problem?”

“Your stepdad has been dead for at least two full days.”

“What? What? That’s not possible.”

“See, Zed?” Wolsely said. “Holes in your story.”

“Wait, wait. What day is this?”

“What day is it?” Wolsely repeated.

“Yes. I told you I went to my parents’ house on Sunday afternoon. I told you I passed out…I guess from blood loss or something, but it must have been longer than I thought.”

“You passed out for two solid days and never woke up?”

“Why, what’s today?”

“Late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, you pick.”

“Wednesday?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. I guess so,” I said.

Detective Wolsely changed the subject. “Tell me about your mom, Zed.”

I huffed a couple of times and looked around the room while I thought about that.

After several minutes, I said, “You know, when I was a kid I used to watch this Tarzan show on TV, and there was this recurring concept in that show about an elephant graveyard. Kind of the African version of El Dorado, only with ivory instead of gold.”

Detective Wolsely asked, “What does this have to do with anything?”

“You asked me a question, Detective. I’m trying to answer it.”

“Fine.”

“So, Detective, when the white men came to Africa, they didn’t see any elephant carcasses lying about with all the free ivory they could carry, so they concocted this theory about the existence of an elephant graveyard, where all of the elephants would go to die. I used to think my mom was like that graveyard, only instead of elephants going there to die, happiness would.”

Detective Wolsely asked, “And now that she’s dead, you don’t think that anymore?”

“No, that’s not it at all. I think that like those white men that went to Africa, who’d erroneously deduced the existence of an elephant graveyard, I erred in my deduction that my mother was a passive graveyard for happiness.”

Wolsely was getting bored.

“Did you know that hyenas eat bone?” I asked.

Detective Wolsely shook his head.

“Yeah, they’ll eat pretty much anything. Even bone. They’re predators. They’re scavengers. They’re ugly. But most of all, they’re voracious. That’s my mother.”

“Your mother is a hyena?” Wolsely asked.

“In a way, I guess. You see, she’s not the graveyard where happiness goes to die. She’s a voracious scavenger, constantly searching for any waning happiness, so that she can kill it off and eat up any evidence that it ever existed. That’s my mom.”

Detective Wolsely looked at me like he’d just found me covered in dog poop. “What drugs are you on, Zed?”

“What?”

“What drugs are you on? Nobody loses track of two days and then just gets up all normal and calls the police.”

“Normal? I never said that. I told you I feel like crap. I was running a high fever. I still am.”

“So you say.”

“Yes, I do say. Get a thermometer and check for yourself. Holy freakin’ crap.”

“Just tell me what you were on, Zed. Tell me where you got it. There’s something seriously bad out on the street and it’s making people crazy. We need to catch the guy that sold it to you. Things might even go easier on you if we can prove it was the drugs that made you crazy.”

“What?”

“We took a blood sample while you were passed out, Zed. We’ll figure out what it was. I mean, whether it was crack or meth or whatever. But we need to figure out what it was laced with. We need to know where you got it, so we can get it off the street. There’s a lot of people going crazy on this stuff, Zed.”

“What about that flu in Europe or whatever it is? I saw rioting on TV.”

“Zed, let’s be realistic here. There is no flu that makes people crazy.”

“How can you say that?” I asked.

“Ratings,” Wolsely said. “Sure there’s a flu but the flu makes you puke and cough. It gives you diarrhea. It doesn’t make people crazy. Those were just frightened people, doing stupid things. Zed, the world is much simpler than all of you conspiracy nuts think it is. People make bad, irrational choices for the stupidest reasons every day. I see it all the time, believe me. There is no crazy flu going around. The answers are never that complicated. Trust me.”

“Whatever.”

“Besides, why Austin? Why not New York, or LA, or Chicago? There are a hundred cities more likely to get an outbreak of the flu than Austin. We’re not exactly a major point of entry here, are we Zed? Come on, just tell me what you were on and where you got it.”

I shook my head and looked at the floor. “Jeez, Tom. Listen to me, please. I didn’t take any drugs. I was drinking. I drank a lot on Saturday. I smoked some weed with my friends. I drank some tequila on Sunday morning before heading over to my mom’s house. I’ve told you this a thousand times.”

“When did you smoke the weed?”

“It was just weed.”

“When did you smoke it?”

“The night before, like I said.”

“When the night before? Zed, it may have been laced with PCP, or something worse. Surely you’ve heard of that before. PCP makes some people lose their shit, Zed. That may have happened to you.”

I shook my head again and weakly said, “No.”

“Where did you get the weed, Zed?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t even my weed.”

“Who did you smoke it with, Zed? They may be having problems too. They might be in worse shape, Zed. They could be dead for all you know.”

I gave up and told him the names of my buddies.

Chapter 5

The jail was old, like a hundred years old. The section I was in had been built in the late 1800s. It was dirty. It was smelly. Every surface was sticky beneath aged layers of oral ejecta and other human secretions.

I was in a holding cell about seven feet deep and thirty feet long. One long wall was brick. The other three were comprised of iron bars with layer upon layer of flakes, painted over by more layers of flakes. Two rows of bunks, one on the top and one on the bottom, hung from the wall for a total of eight. A single commode stood at one end, covered in stains and lumpy smears.

With my photograph taken and black ink on my fingers, I was shoved into the cell that already held twenty-five other guys, laying and sitting in the bunks and on the floor. At least a few of my fellow inmates were mentally unplugged. They stared blankly at the wall. Some paced across the spots of floor where a foot would fit. One very animated guy bounced around the cell like a chimp, screaming Tourette’s-like profanities and gibberish. Most looked drunk, hung-over, beaten up, or some combination thereof.

“I need to see a doctor,” I told the jailer, as he slammed the door shut.

He headed back to the end of the hall as though I’d said nothing at all.

“Hey, I need to see a doctor.”

Nothing.

“Hey.” I yelled.

The jailer stopped and glared at me. “Look, bud, you can see we’re having a busy day. So lighten up, would you?”

“But I need medical attention for my arm.”

“After you get assigned to a cell, you can ask your guard for permission to go to the infirmary.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” The guard turned and ignored further protests.

The Tourette’s guy shrieked at the ceiling from his perch on a top bunk. Nobody paid him any mind.

I looked around but there was no bunk space available. There was barely any floor space either, the only exception being a few feet next to a comatose giant of a black man leaning on the bars near the commode.

I stood, holding the bars of the door and looking up and down the short hall. Two long halls branched off at either end and led to rows of cells in the new section of the jail. I heard the rowdy noise of hundreds of other prisoners coming from down those halls.

Tourette’s guy shrieked again. “I’m hungry.”

I leaned my face against the sticky, flaky iron bars and closed my eyes. The bite on my arm throbbed noticeably but didn’t hurt. Infection was sure to set in. I worried about that, and about what Wolsely had said about drugs in the weed my buddies and I had smoked on Saturday night.

I wanted to feel angry about the lazy incompetence of the police who’d locked me up, but all I felt was drained and frustrated.

I wondered how long I’d have to wait for my inevitable release. I flexed the fingers of my left hand again, checking for loss of movement.

The lighting in the jail was too stark, unnaturally bright. It bothered my eyes. I longed for a pair of sunglasses.

I was mere minutes into my incarceration and I was already bored.

An old tube television hung from the ceiling across the hall from the cell. There was something on about riots again, something about the new flu virus. Having grown up with Mom and Dan’s addiction to the repetitive ravings of the non-stop cable news faces, I possessed a high tolerance for hysterical speculation. Football, baseball, even bowling would have been a better choice than news on the TV.

I looked down at my feet. “This place sucks.”

Off to my right, I heard Tourette’s boy start bouncing on his bunk.

“Man, shut up,” somebody over there said.

A few more voiced agreement.

I looked over. Tourette’s boy was getting more aggressive.

Then, he surprised everyone by bounding off of the top bunk and onto one of the sitting prisoners.

A frenzy of fighting exploded from the far end of the cell. Screaming, yelling, kicking, punching, and biting, lots of biting. The wave of pandemonium pushed toward me, and I decided the safest place in the cell was in the stinky muck in the corner behind the commode. I stepped quickly over the big black guy who was just starting to get up and I wormed my way into the corner.

Yelling from outside the cell told me that the guards already knew what was happening in the cell.

Arms and legs were wrestling. Fists were punching. Some guys were already down on the ground and other guys clambering into the bunks. The big black guy had his back to me and pretty much blocked all access to my end of the cell. I’m sure that defending me wasn’t what he intended. He just didn’t see me as a threat.

Suddenly, Tourette’s boy came flying out of the melee and landed in some sort of monkey grasp around the big guy’s head and shoulders. As the big guy grasped at him to pull him off, Tourette’s boy caught me with the craziest eyes I’d ever seen, opened his mouth wide, and chomped down on the big guy’s neck.

A canister clinked in through the bars. Smoke exploded into the cell, burning my eyes.

The heavy metal door swung open and the guards, dressed in riot gear, bulled their way in.

Chapter 6

Thirty minutes later I was sitting on one of the lower bunks with my hands cuffed behind me, shoulder to shoulder in a long row of cuffed, bloodied, coughing prisoners.

Tourette’s boy was gagged. His hands were cuffed and attached to the bars of the cell behind him. His feet were bound. He slumped forward, motionless. He had an enormous gash across his scalp. A couple of the guards had beaten him mercilessly after he’d bitten them during the fight. And just because they were covered in riot gear and pissed off, they beat several more of us into unconsciousness. Three of those were cuffed alongside Tourette’s boy, slumped forward and dripping blood into small pools on the crusty floor. Two of my former cellmates were bleeding so severely that they were dragged out of the cell—to the hospital, I presumed.

Of the rest of us, I was in the best shape, at least in terms of fresh wounds. I still had a scabby bandage on my arm that oozed red. Again, I flexed my left hand to make sure it still worked. The next link in my chain of new habits was to worry about my need to get some medical attention.

From around the corner, I heard noises of another cell erupting in violence. Not long after, a half-dozen guards in their gear clomped past us up the hallway.

The jail was exploding in craziness.

As luck would have it, the big black guy who’d been my shield during the scuffle was sitting right next to me on the bunk. Apparently more bored than I was, he looked my bloodstained clothing up and down and asked, “So, what’d you do?”

“How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked.

“Most guys like you make something up to seem all badass, you know, so they won’t get no shit while they’re in here.”

I laughed, and so did the black guy on the other side of me.

“What do you mean, guys like me?” I asked. “Is this a white thing?”

“No. You just don’t look like a thug. You look like a suburbanite or a cube farmer.”

“A cube farmer?”

“Somebody who sits in a cube all day,” the big guy explained.

The guy on the other side laughed and added, “Like a nerd.”

“A nerd?” I asked.

The big guy looked me over and nodded.

After their laughing subsided, I asked, “So do you want the truth, or a lie?”

“Man, you pick. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just tired of staring at that damned yellow wall. I can barely see the TV from here, and besides, all they want to talk about anyway is that flu, like they know what’s going on. They don’t know anything.”

I shrugged, “I killed my stepdad.”

The big guy looked down at me again. “With all that blood all over you, I guess I’d buy that.”

The guy on the other side said, “He probably got arrested while trying to steal some cherry syrup from a jellybean factory.”

That got some laughs from the guys nearby.

“I wish.”

“What’d you do him with?” the big guy asked.

“A knife,” I answered.

“I guess that explains the mess on your clothes.”

“That’s not actually his blood…I don’t think,” I said.

The guy on my left said, “I suppose you killed somebody else, too.”

“It’s a long story,” I told them.

The big guy asked, “How many times did you stab him?”

I looked down, ashamed for a moment though I didn’t know why. “The cops said thirty-seven times.”

The guy to my left said, “Man, that’s bullshit.”

“You must have been pissed. What’d he do?” asked the big guy.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “What’d you do?”

“Just fighting.”

“Fighting? Like a bar fight?” I asked.

“Exactly like a bar fight,” he answered.

I nodded. “By the way, my name’s Zed Zane.”

“Murphy Smalls,” the big guy answered.

“Murphy Smalls? That’s not a very appropriate name for a big guy like you.”

“Well, at least you didn’t make a stupid joke about it,” Murphy said.

The guy to my left said, “That’s why we’re in here, one too many small jokes. I’m Earl Walker.”

“Good to meet you, Earl. Good to meet you Murphy.”

Earl asked, “So, did you really stab your stepdad?”

I nodded.

Earl said, “He must have done some crazy shit for you to go stabbing him thirty-seven times.”

I nodded. “Some pretty crazy shit.”

“Looks like you and me might as well become good friends, because we’re both going to be here a while,” said Earl.

“For fighting?” I asked.

“He’s on probation,” said Murphy. “They’ll probably violate him and send him back.”

“That sucks,” I said.

“You got that right,” Earl agreed. “All because Mr. Smalls is sensitive about his name.”

“Man, you know it’s not like that,” Murphy said. “Don’t you be starting any shit.”

Earl said no more on the topic.

After a few minutes of listening to the inmates around the corner go nuts, Murphy asked, “So what’d he do? I’m curious now.”

“My stepdad?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I thought about those gruesome Sunday morning images stuck in my mind. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure he killed my mother.”

“Yeah?”

“I was going over to their house for lunch for Spam pie on Sunday.”

“On Sunday?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah, on Sunday.”

“Spam pie?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s gross,” Murphy replied.

Earl said, “Man, that was three days ago. Why are you still covered in blood? Dumbass white people don’t know shit about getting away with doing criminal stuff. No wonder you’re in here.”

“It’s not like that.”

“What?” Earl asked.

“He attacked me and bit my arm.” I tried to pull my left arm around front to show the guys.

Earl said, “Man, that’s nasty.”

“Anyway, I think I was bleeding so bad that I passed out.”

“No shit?”

I nodded.

“And the cops found you like that?” Earl asked.

“When I woke up, I called them.”

“And they arrested you?” Murphy asked.

“They must have thought you were black under all that blood,” Earl added.

The sound of three quick gunshots blasting through the corridors opened every eye wide and snapped every head toward the intersecting hallway. Tourette’s boy was no exception. He immediately started to squirm and grunt.

“Shit,” Earl muttered.

The echo of running footsteps came up the hall to our left.

Seconds later, two officers hurried past, followed by four crazed inmates in torn, bloodied clothes.

The sound of another scuffle erupted, followed by more gunshots.

“This is not good,” Murphy told anybody who was listening.

I looked from left to right.

I heard the sound of…well, it sounded like wild animals.

More gunfire.

An inmate rounded the corner and ran at full speed in front of us across the length of our cell.

Another inmate rounded the corner, shoeless, shirtless, and screaming like an enraged baboon. He leapt up on the bars of our cell as if he were the one in the cage. He reached through the bars, seemingly focused on Earl. We all pressed our backs to the wall.

He screamed again as more crazed prisoners, spattered in blood, rounded the corner and flowed freely through the hall.

Several tried to reach in and grab at us before moving past the wall behind us.

Gunfire rang with alarming frequency.

More prisoners spilled from the hall at our right. They looked relatively normal, but understandably terrified.

What followed close behind them was another bunch of the wild-eyed, screaming men.

“This is gonna get ugly,” Earl said.

“I think you’re a little late on that newsflash,” I said.

Smoke billowed out of the halls from behind us. My eyes started to burn. We all started coughing again.

“I guess this is a prison riot,” Murphy coughed out.

“In the county jail?” Earl asked, shaking his head.

Tourette’s boy ripped out an earsplitting wail of victory as he freed one bloody hand from the cuffs that secured him to the bars. He spun and tore mercilessly at the hand that was cuffed to another bar.

Guys in the cell got up off of the bunks and moved away. Nobody wanted to be near the crazy guy. Only the unconscious guys, cuffed to the bars, didn’t move.

Another scream of triumph ripped through the violence as Tourette’s boy tore his other hand free, slinging blood across the ceiling, walls, and us.

Several of the inmates cursed.

Tourette’s boy yanked the gag out of his mouth and with teeth gnashing pounced on an inmate not smart enough to have moved out of the way. His teeth found flesh before the inmate could squirm away. Blood gushed from the wound.

In a flash, Murphy was on the move and ran a dozen steps to the far end of the cell, leaned his shoulder forward and slammed Tourette’s boy in the side. All three hundred pounds of Murphy smashed his body into the bars.

When Murphy pulled away, Tourette’s boy lay on the floor, twitching and stunned.

Everyone in the cell was staring at Murphy and the downed psycho when the door buzzer sounded in three long, loud blasts, shifting everyone’s attention to the cell door as it sprang open.

We were all frozen in disbelief and indecision. Run out of the cell and into the riot, make a break for freedom, or stay put?

With mayhem raging through the jailhouse, safety was my first thought.

Pounding feet and animal sounds rang up and down the halls, mixing with jubilant cries and fearful screams. Tourette’s boy squirmed and pushed himself up from the floor. He shook his head and made a loud, angry noise.

Earl yelled, “Let’s go, Murphy.”

Everyone piled through the door, out of the cell, and into the melee.

“I’m with you guys,” I declared, and followed Earl.

Murphy fell in behind us.

We made the left turn down the smoke-filled hall we’d all come in through.

Bodies lay everywhere, both sheriff’s deputies and prisoners alike. Men ran both in front and behind us. The crazy-eyed screamers were among us, attacking anybody, tearing at flesh with their hands and teeth.

“Move.” Murphy yelled from behind.

Earl picked up the pace and ran blindly into the thickening teargas.

We coughed, struggled, and fought our way toward where we remembered the exit to be. Each barred door we encountered was unlocked and swung open. The rioting prisoners had seen to that.

We stepped on and over men until we burst into the entrance lobby, where we saw daylight through the glass door and three windows of equal size, all shattered.

Gunfire popped in the street outside and in the halls and cells behind us. To run into the street was to risk being shot down. To go back seemed like certain death by fire, or mauling in the teeth and tearing hands of the screamers.

Earl hesitated and glanced back at Murphy for a decision. I looked back as well. It was so far beyond any situation I’d ever imagined. I was decidedly in follow-mode no matter what course Murphy chose.

Whatever Earl saw in Murphy’s silence was enough for him. He spun and bolted through the door. Murphy and I hurried behind.

We came out near the southwest corner of the detention center into thin clouds of teargas drifting in the smothering hot air and blistering sun.

Across the street, to the south of the detention center, a hilly park filled a city block. To our west was an old neighborhood that had been converted to condos and offices for attorneys and bail bondsmen. Parked cars lined the streets. To the south and east, police cars blocked the roadways. Police officers and sheriff’s deputies were everywhere, but the eight hundred prisoners spilling into the streets dwarfed their numbers.

We ran a short distance up the street. Earl ducked beside a parked car and looked over the fender. The popping of gunfire came from all directions. I got to the car a second later. Murphy bumped the car behind me, using its mass to bring him to a stop.

I squatted about midway back on the car, its black-tinted glass blocking my view across the street. Immediately frustrated, I stood and leaned forward to look over Earl’s shoulder, trying to spot a path away from the chaos. Something slammed into my chest and knocked the wind out of me. I fell to the sidewalk, gasping for a breath of air that wouldn’t come.

Sprawled on my back, I saw stark blue sky above. Running feet stomped the concrete near my head as people hurried past. The pandemonium slowly became insignificant background noise. My only concern was the pain radiating through my chest and my inability to gulp a single, life-sustaining breath.

Then it happened. Air filled my lungs. I could breathe.

Wide-eyed, Murphy leaned over me. “That was a beanbag, you lucky dumbass. Get up.”

Earl yelled, “We gotta go.”

I rolled over onto my stomach. With my wrists still cuffed behind me, it was difficult, but I managed to get to my feet.

Earl and Murphy were squatting again behind a car a little further up the street. They were making for the old neighborhood.

With my feet back on the street and air back in my lungs, I awkwardly sprinted to catch them, bullets be damned.

In the seconds it took me to catch up, Earl had squatted between the bumpers of two cars, looking for an opportune moment to cross the no man’s land of the body-strewn street. I fell in behind him. Murphy squeezed in behind me.

Earl looked up and down the street.

“Now where do we go?” Murphy asked.

“If we can get there, I know a place to hide for a while,” Earl said.

“Where?” Murphy asked.

“That survivalist dude that got evicted a few years back.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Murphy looked up the street through the car windows. “Some dude built a bunker under his house or something.”

“Fuck it.” Earl yelled. He burst into a run across the street.

Without a thought about the danger, Murphy and I made tracks behind him.

Three steps into the road, and just ahead of me, Earl’s head exploded in a fountain of blood and gore.

Time slowed to a cold, syrupy drip.

Fear froze me.

In mid-stride, I mouthed a four-letter word. I lost all sense of how to proceed.

Thankfully, Murphy was still moving, and his bulk slammed into me from behind. His momentum carried our entangled bodies across the street, where we landed roughly in a jumble of limbs and curse words, between two cars on the far side.

Murphy rolled off of me and sat up to look at Earl’s corpse in the street. I struggled again to catch my breath, sucking in baked air off of the hot asphalt.

I peered under the car beside me and started in fright. A pair of eyes fixed on mine in a frozen stare. In a nanosecond, I registered the uniform of a sheriff’s deputy on the man and I panicked, but he made no move, no sound.

I drew another deep breath. The deputy remained still.

He was dead.

I knew what I had to do.

I squirmed up to my knees. Murphy’s attention was stuck on his dead cousin.

I peeked out along the sidewalk and saw the dead body of the officer lying on the curb, parallel to the car. A heavy cloud of smoke wafted across us, limiting visibility.

I wormed my way out until I was beside the deputy, trying my best to look wounded, dead, and unthreatening all at the same time.

I scraped my elbows on the concrete as I went. In moments, I was lying beside the deputy, feeling his front pocket for a set of keys. I located what felt like a metallic bulge. It took frighteningly long to sit up and angle my hand into his pocket but my effort was rewarded with the prize I sought. No sooner were the keys in my hand than I was up and running away from the car and into a driveway obscured from the street by a hedge.

I turned and called, “Murphy.”

He sat motionless. He couldn’t pull his attention away from Earl’s corpse.

“Murphy.” I yelled, louder.

He turned and for a second, looked at me like I was a stranger.

In the next instant, he came back to reality and bolted across the gap between us, sliding to his knees next to me.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

We took off at a run into the neighborhood with all of its sheltering old houses, trees, bushes, and parked cars.

Chapter 7

Still cuffed, but with the keys grasped tightly in my hand, Murphy and I ran between two houses, squeezed through the gap between a hedge and a detached garage, and crossed another street. Police sirens wailed in all directions.

“This is gonna be ground zero of a major shitstorm in about five minutes,” I panted, as we stopped behind a dumpster in an alley.

Murphy squatted down, trying to catch his breath. “We can’t stay in this alley,” he said. “We’re better off if we get behind the houses, hop a few fences, and hide in the bushes. It’ll be hard in these cuffs.”

I nodded. “I pulled some keys off of that dead deputy.”

“Who?” Murphy asked.

“There was a dead deputy by the cars. After Earl got hit.”

“I didn’t see him.” Murphy had a vacant look in his eyes.

“Murphy, you don’t look good. Did you get shot?”

Murphy shook his head. “No. I don’t feel good.”

I stood up straight and peered down the alley. Another hundred yards would get us across the next street, into some bushes, and another block further from the detention center. “Murphy, we need to get to those bushes over there. Then we’ll work on getting these cuffs off.”

“Okay.”

I nodded at Murphy. “You ready?”

“Yeah.”

I took off at a run as fast as my legs would carry me. I heard Murphy behind me at first, then all I heard was the air rushing in and out of my throat and my heartbeat pounding in my ears.

I got to the street and bounced into the fender of a parked car to come to a stop. I looked up and down the street. I saw no police cars, so I started running again.

I made it to the bushes.

Catching my breath, I looked back for Murphy. He was only halfway down the alley and moving at a jog.

“Shit.” I willed him to run faster.

Long, torturous seconds passed. Murphy came to the end of the alley and lumbered across the sidewalk, past the cars, and into the street, making no effort at all to conceal himself or check for police.

“Please, please don’t let there be a cop car,” I prayed aloud. “Hurry, Murphy.”

Passing another line of parked cars and crossing over the sidewalk brought Murphy beside the hedge. He didn’t slow but brushed past me. I turned and ran on past him into the space behind the converted houses.

I spied an area behind an old storage shed that would keep us hidden from the street and windows on the backsides of the houses.

We kicked some old metal trashcans to the side and squeezed into a gap between the shed and a tall privacy fence. I turned my back to Murphy and opened my hand. “Murphy, I’m going to hold the keys out one at a time. You tell me when I get to the one that looks like it’ll open the cuffs.”

“Got it,” said Murphy, after a few moments of jingling and fumbling.

The key felt distinctly different than the others. I hoped it would fit.

I fumbled around for a few more minutes before the keys slipped from my hands and dropped into the dirt.

“Shit.”

I fell to my knees, grabbed up the dirty keys, and tried again. The exercise was so much harder than it seemed like it should have been.

Click. I’d freed one wrist. “Thank God.”

The second cuff was off my wrist and lying in the dirt just seconds later.

“Murphy, you’re up. Turn around.” I looked up. Murphy was leaning against the wall of the shed, eyes closed, drenched in sweat.

I stood, concerned. “Murphy, are you okay?”

Murphy shook his head. I reached up and put a palm across his forehead. He was burning with a fever.

“We need to get you something for that fever, Murphy.”

The sound of a siren zoomed by on the next street over. Too close.

I drew a few slow, calming breaths. I needed to think.

We were out of the cell and three or four blocks away from the jail. We didn’t seem to be in any immediate physical danger, but that was only a guess. With the riot and mass escape, the police might have shot anybody that looked remotely like an escaped prisoner. Though we were missing our belts and shoelaces and had ink on our fingertips, we hadn’t been put into the orange jumpsuits that the jail’s long-term residents wore. There was hope. Our only sure safety lay far from the jail and far from the vindictive rage of the cops descending on us with every siren in the city.

Our one tiny advantage derived from the chaos of the jail riot and the hundreds of prisoners scampering for freedom in every direction.

I wasn’t at a hundred percent, but I knew I could run. I wasn’t so sure about Murphy. His condition was declining. Regardless, we had to move.

I turned Murphy around and removed his cuffs. He rubbed his sweaty face with his big hands and squatted back against the shed.

I considered abandoning him and making my escape alone, but guilt stopped me. That moment after Earl got shot and I had frozen in the street, Murphy had pushed me onto the other side. Had he not done so, I likely would have caught a sheriff’s bullet and died beside Earl. Murphy saved my life. Whether on purpose, or simply because I was in his way, I’d probably never know, but I felt the obligation of a debt.

“Murphy, can you move? Can you walk?”

Without opening his eyes, Murphy nodded.

I thought back to how dehydrated I was after my fever broke. I needed to get some water in him.

“Listen, Murphy. If we go another block or two west, we’ll hit Shoal Creek. From there, we can make our way north until we get outside of whatever perimeter the police have set up. We won’t have to run. I think we can walk, but we need to get moving.”

Murphy nodded. “I can do it.”

“C’mon.”

Chapter 8

Shoal Creek was a limestone crevice that snaked through Austin on a southwesterly course. During the frequent spring thunderstorms, it channeled flash-flood waters through its banks, six blocks west of the jail, before spilling into the Colorado River in downtown Austin, ten blocks south. It varied in depth from ten to twenty feet below street level and was lined with dense trees and shrubs. It could have provided an excellent avenue of escape. But with late afternoon temperatures over one hundred degrees, and the wind blowing over, rather than through the gulley, it was also a bone-dry oven.

The sound of sirens floated through the streets above. Occasional but frightening gunshots pierced the traffic noise. Trudging through the oppressive heat, Murphy and I made it to the 15th Street Bridge. At four lanes wide, with enormous old trees on the banks of the creek around the bridge beckoned, providing a shady and cool place to rest.

Stepping from sun to shade the temperature felt like it dropped twenty degrees. I motioned up the concrete embankment under the bridge. I said, “It’ll be cooler on the concrete that stays in the shade all day. Let’s go.”

Murphy looked at the concrete slope like it was an insurmountable obstacle.

I grabbed his arm and tugged him along.

Fifteen steps up, he dropped flat onto the cool concrete and lay motionless.

He should have climbed further up the slope. He would have been better hidden from searching eyes. But it was clear that he wasn’t moving.

I continued up to where the fat bridge supports lay on the upper edge of the embankment. Three expressionless transients watched me.

“I’m not staying,” I told them as the smell of urine and body odor hit me. I stopped. I was close enough.

I copied Murphy’s pose and lay flat, trying to get as much of my burning skin in contact with the cool concrete as possible. It wasn’t a cold swimming pool, but it worked. My irritating dizziness left me. The nauseous feeling in my stomach dissipated. The air I breathed seemed once again to contain oxygen. But we needed water. We needed it badly. Neither of us would make it more than another mile or two up the dry creek bed without it.

A thought occurred to me. I lolled my head around toward the transients, sitting above me in the shade. “Hey, is Pease Park close by?”

All three looked at me like I was speaking another language.

I waited.

And waited.

“Hey––” I started again.

“It’s right up yonder a piece,” one of them said, pointing up the creek bed.

“Like what? A half-mile? A mile?” I asked.

The speaker shook his head. “Just ‘round that bend in the creek.”

That perked me up. I knew there was an outdoor basketball court at the south end of the park. Right by the basketball court stood a public restroom and some water fountains. “Thank.”

I decided to give us five or ten minutes more to cool off. Then I’d try to drag Murphy to the park.

I dozed off.

The sound of heavy trucks slamming across the expansion joints of the bridge above aroused me. A dozen screaming sirens racing over the bridge got my full attention.

Wide-eyed and disoriented, I looked around. The transients were gone. I sat up quickly and paid for my haste with enough dizziness to give me pause. I looked down the embankment. Murphy hadn’t moved.

The creek bed was covered in the long shadows of early evening. Surprised, I guessed it was seven or eight o’clock. I’d slept for at least two hours but luck was with us. The police hadn’t found us.

I crab-walked down the concrete slope toward Murphy and shook him awake. It took more than a little shaking, but his eyes finally opened.

“I’m thirsty,” his voice rasped.

“There’s a park just up the creek a bit. We can get water there.”

“A bit?” Murphy asked.

“A hundred yards, two hundred at most. We can hide out in the restrooms and maybe get cleaned up a bit.”

Murphy nodded and with great effort pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook his head to clear it. “It better be close. I’ve never felt this bad.”

“It’s the heat and dehydration,” I lied.

It was the bite.

Chapter 9

The deserted park was dark in shadow when we arrived, with the sun having edged below the horizon. The sky still glowed a dull blue. The hot, stagnant air, only marginally cooler without the sun’s heat, draped us in its sticky blanket.

With an arm over my shoulder, Murphy leaned heavily on me as we made our way into a public restroom. We both drank greedily from the sink faucets. After guzzling what we could, I had the presence of mind to flip the deadbolt on the door and the restroom became our refuge.

I stripped off my dirty, bloody clothes and washed them in the sink. Murphy struggled to stay on his feet, but did the same. Afterwards, we hung our clothes over the stalls to dry, and sat on the floor in our underwear, resting against the walls.

After a while, Murphy said, “I need to go to the hospital.”

I nodded. “I need to see a doctor, too, before this bite gets infected any more than it is.”

Murphy nodded.

I said, “I think Brackenridge Hospital is about a mile or two up 15th Street. It’s closer than Seton Hospital. It’s walking distance, if you think you can make it.”

“Without that damned sun beating me down, I think I can.”

“It’s dark out now,” I offered.

In the distance we heard a series of angry human wails. We looked at one another.

Murphy said, “That sounds like that crazy fucker from the jail this morning.”

I nodded.

More screams followed, drawing closer.

“There must be a dozen of them,” said Murphy with worry in his eyes.

“Can you reach up and make sure that door is locked?” I asked, suddenly worried that I hadn’t latched it closed.

Murphy reached a long arm up and checked. He jiggled the door, but the lock held it closed.

That was a relief.

The sounds of the screamers quickly drew close. In seconds, they were outside the restroom. Something heavy slammed into the door and startled us both.

Not wanting to make a sound, I mouthed, “Holy crap.”

Outside, someone was beating his fists on the metal door and screaming in wild frustration. Thankfully, the door held strong.

Murphy’s face showed his concern. I’m sure he saw the same on mine.

After a few minutes, the pounding stopped and the sound of the screaming moved away, then faded into the background noise of cars, sirens, and occasional gunshots.

“This whole city is going to hell tonight,” Murphy observed.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think that’s all about the riot at the jail today?” Murphy asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“What then?”

“That crazy dude in the cell. Those crazy guys at the jail. The cops said something about PCP in the pot making everyone go nuts.” I shuddered to think about it. “But my stepdad…I don’t know. He was like that crazy guy in the cell. I don’t know what’s going on, Murphy.”

Murphy fell silent.

After a while, I said, “I’m sorry about Earl.”

Murphy nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

In the silence that followed, I thought about Earl getting so horrifically shot right in front of me. I thought about my dead mom and Dan. I thought about the dead guy in their living room. I thought about the mayhem at the jail.

I’d never in my life seen a dead person before seeing my mom being mutilated by Dan on the living room floor. Now, just days later, I had to struggle to count the corpses I’d seen.

Murphy said, “You know we’re screwed.”

I looked at Murphy, with a question on my face.

“They’re going to round us all up, eventually. We’ll get a year or more just for busting out of jail. We’ll get time for rioting, and maybe even capital murder for that dead cop you saw.”

My mouth hung open. I hadn’t thought of any of that. Finally, I said, “But we were running for our lives. We were in as much danger as the cops.”

Murphy shook his head. “A jury in Travis County might believe that about you, if you hadn’t already stabbed your stepdad thirty-seven times, but look at me.”

I nodded.

“No, look at me, Zed.”

I did. “What am I looking at?”

“You’re looking at a big black man who’s gonna be sitting in front of a bunch of white jurors in Texas who are gonna be looking to blame somebody, a lot of somebodies, for rioting in a jail and killing some cops.” Murphy shook his head and his gaze drifted down to the floor. “Damn, I get hauled off to jail for fighting and instead of a couple of nights, I’m gonna end up on death row.”

I thought the big man might start to cry. It was hard to watch, really hard. I wondered what would become of us.

More silence.

“There’s got to be something else going on here,” I finally said. “Too many people just going crazy.”

Murphy shrugged.

“What do you want to do, then?” I asked.

“I can’t do anything.” Murphy shook his head. “I can’t begin to tell you how bad I feel. I’ve never felt this sick. I have to get to a hospital, or I think I’m going to die.” Murphy’s eyes fixed me in place and I knew he was dead serious.

“You don’t think you’ll make the hike to Brackenridge?”

Murphy shook his head.

I pondered that for a minute. “Murphy, I have an idea. If you can make it out to the road, just across the basketball court, maybe I can flag down a car to take us over to the hospital.”

Murphy shook his head again, “Ain’t nobody in his right mind gonna stop for us with everything going on outside. I’m sure the jailbreak is all over the news.”

“It’s okay,” I disagreed. “This is Pease Park. Gay guys come down here all the time for…well, you know. They’re always getting busted down here for getting busy in the bushes.”

Murphy asked, “So?”

“So, I’ll get a car to stop. They’ll think I’m gay, and I’ll tell them that my good friend and I got mugged while we were walking in the park. Nobody is afraid of gay guys. Can you make it out to the road?”

Chapter 10

“This traffic is nuts,” I said.

Phil, the Good Samaritan who picked us up, agreed.

“Is there a concert tonight?” I asked. The Erwin Center, where all the big bands played when they came to Austin, sat across 15th street from the hospital.

“Not that I know of,” said Phil.

“Sorry you have to wait in all of this,” I said.

“No big deal,” Phil told me. “With the jailbreak today, I didn’t want to stay home by myself anymore, especially with all the sirens and gunfire. It’s not safe. Crazies are running around all over Central Austin.”

“I hear you,” I agreed.

“It’s just a few more blocks, anyway.”

A stoplight changed to green and we inched across the intersection.

“Those look like military trucks up there,” Phil observed.

I glimpsed between the cars ahead. I didn’t know what to think of that.

Phil checked his rearview mirror.

I glanced back at Murphy. “Are you doing okay, Murphy? We’re almost there.”

Murphy grunted and nodded.

“We’ll make it pretty quick now,” Phil reassured. “I wonder if this all has to do with that flu coming out of Europe.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t think so?” Phil asked.

“I was talking with a police detective about it and he assured me that the flu business in Europe was all hype,” I answered.

“What then?”

“He said something about the marijuana being laced with PCP or something.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Zed, but that doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why would the Army be at the hospital?” Phil asked.

“I don’t know.” I looked ahead at the military vehicles.

Phil said, “Maybe they’re preparing, just in case. I heard the mortality rate for the flu is pretty high. There’s lots of footage on TV about rioting in Europe.”

“I saw some of that,” I said.

“I think I’m safe though,” Phil told me. “I get a flu shot every year. Do you get a flu shot, Zed?”

I shook my head.

“You’re young and healthy. You’re probably safe anyway. As for me, I’m playing it safe and heading to Waco tonight. I think with all the craziness here, I’m going to stay with my parents for a few weeks.”

“Probably a good idea,” I agreed.

We passed another block and it became clear that the military had cordoned off the hospital complex and the surrounding blocks. They were diverting traffic off to side streets.

We got to the corner and a policeman waved us off to take a right turn.

“Can you drop us at the curb there, Phil?” I asked, pointing. “We’ll have to walk the last block.”

“There’s got to be a place for me to drop you guys at the emergency room.”

“We’ll be stuck in traffic for another hour trying to find it,” I said. “It’ll be faster to walk, I think.”

“Okay.” Phil pulled the car over.

The cop at the corner pointed and waved vigorously. He was none too pleased with our choice to stop.

“Can you walk a block, Murphy? We’re almost there.”

“I’ll try,” he grunted.

Moments later, we were on the curb. I thanked Phil as profusely as I could before he made his escape from the chaos.

With Murphy leaning heavily on me, we waded through the crawling traffic and up to a break in the barriers manned by four soldiers and three police officers.

“We were mugged,” I told them loudly, as we neared. “My friend got hurt. He needs to see a doctor.”

A soldier waved us forward. “To your left, sir, into the triage area.”

I looked left, past the entrance. Indeed, a large green tent stood back in a grassy area. We had no real choice on direction, the cordons guided us, and with all the uniformed men standing around with tense faces and ready weapons, I gave not a single thought to crossing a barricade and making straight for the hospital building.

The soldiers stood back with watchful eyes and made no move to assist me with Murphy, so I continued helping him myself.

As we entered the tent, I saw a soldier to the left and one to the right, weapons pointed down but with hands near the triggers. Two nurses wearing surgical masks met us, but were also in no hurry to provide assistance or even come close. They stood back five or six feet.

“What happened?” Asked a nurse with some of her red hair falling out from under her cap.

“He’s bleeding,” I told them, pointing up at Murphy’s shoulder with my free hand.

The nurse nodded and asked again, “Yes, but what happened?”

“Can he sit down?” I asked. “His name is Murphy. He needs medical attention.”

“Yes, but what happened?”

Damn, persistent bitch. “I was…we were…jumped by some guys, and during the scuffle, one of them bit my friend.”

Everyone tensed.

The words I’d planned to say next stopped in the back of my throat.

The nurse on the right turned and called over a few orderlies, also in protective gear.

Behind and to my left, I noticed one of the soldiers nervously level his weapon at Murphy’s back.

“He’s sick,” I pleaded. “He needs to see a doctor.”

The nurse on the left said, “It’s okay. Calm down. We have a ward set up, offsite.”

“A ward?” I asked, feeling lost in my inability to understand any of what was going on around me.

“Has he been violent?” the nurse asked me.

I shook my head. “He can barely walk. He’s got a fever.”

“When did this a happen?” she asked me.

“Um…earlier. A while ago. It took us a long time to get here,” I told them.

The orderlies took Murphy’s weight off of me and helped him toward a doorway on the left side of the tent.

I started to move after them and the nurse put a hand out to stop me.

“You need to stay here.”

“What?”

“You can’t go into the quarantine ward.”

“What?”

I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder and a voice said, “Sir.”

I turned to see a soldier there. I started to say something to him, but the nurse asked, “Sir, what happened to your arm?”

I looked down at my scabbed, oozing wound. “Um, I got bitten. I need to see a doctor about that too.”

“This looks days old,” the nurse said.

“It happened on Sunday.”

“On Sunday?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Was it an animal or a human?”

That seemed like a very odd question to me. “My stepdad.”

“And where is he now?” she asked.

“Um, I don’t know.”

The nurse didn’t believe me. I couldn’t see her face behind her surgical mask, but her lengthy pause gave her skepticism away.

“And this happened on Sunday?” she asked me again.

“Yes.” I nodded.

“Come over here for a moment.”

I followed her and one of the soldiers came along behind. She sat me on a cot and shoved a thermometer into my mouth. She pulled an otoscope from her pocket and pushed my forehead back with her hand.

“I think it might be infected. I need to get some antibiotics,” I said.

“Keep your mouth shut while you have the thermometer in.” She shined the light into each of my eyes, first in, then away, then in again.

I squinted at the harsh little light.

“Have you taken any drugs today?” she asked.

“No,” I told her indignantly.

“Mouth shut,” she told me. “Any sensitivity to light?”

I nodded.

“Fever?”

I nodded.

The thermometer beeped. She yanked it from my mouth and looked at it. Her shoulders sagged. She was disappointed.

“What?” I asked.

She looked to the soldier and nodded. The soldier turned and called for someone.

“What?” I asked again.

She turned to me. “I’m sorry, you’ll need to go with your friend to the quarantine ward.”

The quarantine ward. That didn’t sound at all like a good place to be.

“I’m fine. I just need some antibiotics.” I raised my voice. “What’s going on?”

The soldier’s rifle came up and pointed at my chest. Another soldier hurried over, as did a few orderlies.

“Calm down, please,” said the nurse.

“I am calm,” I told her in a not calm voice. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Please,” she said, “just go along with the orderlies. You’ll get all of your answers in the ward. I need to see to other patients.”

“What?”

“Please,” she begged.

One of the soldiers pushed the barrel of his rifle against my chest.

“Look.” It was my turn to beg. “I’m not sick. I don’t need to go to a ward. I’m fine. I just need some antibiotics.”

The nurse looked at me. She seemed torn between choices. Nobody moved. Finally, she said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

She walked across the tent and approached another nurse. They began talking in hushed tones, casting glances my way. They were not in agreement, that much was clear. The conversation came to an end and my nurse came back over, with her head hanging a little lower, and her shoulders sagging a little more.

“I’m not sick,” I said, as she walked up.

“You’re symptomatic. You’ve got a low-grade fever. Your pupils are fixed and dilated.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t contract when I shine a light on them.”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “I’m not sick.”

“Tell me about your stepdad. Was he sick?”

“I…”

“Was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“But he bit you. Why?”

“I don’t know,” I stammered. “There was something wrong with him.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn’t like where this was going. “He attacked me.”

“Were you having an argument?”

“No, he was just crazy. I––”

“I understand. What about after? What did he do after he bit you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? He just left you alone?”

I said, “He’s dead.”

That stopped the conversation.

The nurse took a moment to recover. “What happened?”

“The police shot him.” It was the first lie I could think of that seemed plausible.

“Because he was attacking you?”

I nodded.

“And this happened on Sunday?”

“What about you? What happened after?”

“I…I guess I passed out.”

“You fainted?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I think I lost a lot of blood. But I’m okay now.”

“Your fever; have you had this ever since the bite?”

I nodded. “It was higher at first. I felt pretty crappy. Now…I didn’t even know I had a fever. I thought it broke.”

“Look, Mr…”

“Zane.”

“…Mr. Zane. Let these men take you to the ward. I’m sure you’ll be fine, but we have to follow the protocols.”

“Why?” I asked.

“For everyone’s safety.”

“So this is that flu from Europe that I saw on TV?”

“I honestly don’t know, Mr. Zane. Please, let them take you to the ward.” She turned and walked away.

The orderlies grabbed me by my elbows and guided me out of the same doorway through which Murphy had gone a few minutes earlier.

Backed up outside the tent was an enclosed military truck the size of an ambulance, but with benches along the sides like a paddy wagon. Four people were seated in the truck. Murphy lay on the floor on his face, looking like a dead man.

A half-dozen soldiers stood by, ensuring that all of us quarantine patients made it from the tent to the truck without wandering off.

I was guided into the truck, ordered to take a seat, and told quite firmly not to get back out.

I felt angry and defeated, caught again in a net of rules backed by the force of guns, in the hands of people who prejudged me as guilty of something I wouldn’t even understand until it was probably too late. A glance up at the soldiers with their murderous weapons assured me that it was already too late.

I put my head in my hands and looked down at the floor. Murphy was moving slightly with each unconscious breath. How long would he live without medical attention?

I started second-guessing my choices: calling the police from my mom’s house, telling the police the truth, escaping the prison, and dragging Murphy to the hospital. They had all seemed like the right things to do at the time, but each had just led me further and further down a hole that seemed to have no bottom.

“Mr. Zane.”

I looked up. The nurse who’d examined me stood a few feet away.

One of the soldiers was immediately beside her. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be out here.”

“I need to give this patient some medication.”

“Ma’am, our orders––”

In a very stern tone she said, “Sergeant, this is a hospital. I am a nurse. It is my job to care for these people, no matter what is going on. Now, I’m going to give this patient his medication. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you talk to your commanding officer who can talk to my boss. But until you do that, you need to let me do my job.”

That was that. The soldier backed off.

The nurse came over to me and pushed a pill bottle into my hand.

“What’s this?” I asked. “Antibiotics?”

“No,” she answered in a hushed tone. “The bottle is empty. My name and cell number are written on it.”

“What?”

“Listen. You shouldn’t be going to the ward.”

“So I’m not sick.”

“Yes, you are but…listen, Mr. Zane. You have the symptoms. You caught whatever this is, but you seem to be recovering.”

That seemed like a curious thing to say. I asked, “Are you saying that most people aren’t recovering from this?”

She shook her head.

Crap.

“Mr. Zane, your blood probably has the antibodies that might help in making a vaccine, but nobody here wants to hear that. Avoid the ward if you can. Slip away if you’re able, but don’t lose my number. Call me. I need to see what I can do about getting you hooked up with a real doctor. And for God’s sake, please stay away from people if you do get away. We don’t know all the ways this can spread. You might still be contagious.”

“Why should I stay away from the ward?”

“Just avoid it if you can.” She turned and walked away.

“The other truck is back,” I heard one of the soldiers outside say. Without another moment’s pause, the doors of the truck slammed shut.

I looked around at my companions inside. None looked well. Two sat with elbows on their knees and faces in their hands. One stared at me with wide, fearful eyes. The last had passed out and fallen over sideways on the bench. All showed signs of recent, bruising struggles. Each of them wore the bloody evidence.

Not good.

Chapter 11

The engine started and the truck rolled across the grass. We bounced over a curb and accelerated away from the hospital.

In the dim light inside the truck I looked down at the empty brown pill bottle. “Steph G.” I memorized the number and stuffed the pill bottle into my pocket.

The link between the European flu and the insanity everywhere crystallized in my mind. Was I immune? Really? Or was it just a matter of time before I went nuts like Dan did, or like the men in the jail? I shuddered to think about it. Could there be a worse fate than losing one’s mind?

I flexed my left hand. My forearm felt stiff. I looked at the crusty scabs and surrounding puffy red flesh. I pressed a finger into the puffiness near one of the big scabs. I felt no pain but disgusting yellow pus oozed out. I felt sure it was only a matter of time before I lost my arm to infection.

I shook my head. My situation was dire. I was powerless to alter it. Despair washed over me, but my eyes stayed dry. If there was one thing that Dan and the dead harpy did for me, it was teaching me how to shunt away troublesome emotions before they caused me more problems.

I took a deep breath to clear my head. I needed to think. Steph said I needed to avoid the ward, and that’s what I intended to do. I needed to focus on escape.

The truck slowed. It bounced over another curb and maneuvered through some turns. It came to a stop and went into reverse, then stopped again.

The clink of metal on metal announced the opening of the doors.

Outside were more soldiers in protective gear, with guns either at the ready or pointing into the truck.

“Let’s go,” one of them ordered.

My quarantined companions who were able made their way to the rear of the truck.

I kneeled down to wake Murphy. His skin was hot to the touch—really hot.

“We’ll get him,” a soldier told me.

I looked at him, but ignored the order. “Murphy, c’mon. Get up.”

“Out of the truck, sir,” The soldier said harshly, pointing his weapon at me. Another stepped up to the open door and did the same.

I nodded and slowly stood. “You’re the boss.” I refrained from adding a vulgar aspersion.

Outside the transport truck, soldiers formed a corridor that led into a pair of open doors. There would be no escape at that point.

I walked through the doors and into an old, familiar-looking building. I quickly realized that we were on the university campus, which neighbored the hospital campus. They walked us through the entrance to a very old basketball arena. The soldiers herded us toward a pair of double doors that I knew to be one of many entrances to the main gym floor. They put us up in a tight line right at the center of the pair of doors.

One soldier spoke loudly to us, “Because of the infection, I’m going to open this door, and I need to close it as soon as possible. So, as soon as it opens, all five of you need to hurry through. Medical personnel in the quarantine area will take you from there and give you the medical attention that you require.”

Before anyone could ask a question or protest, the soldier ordered the door opened.

I was last in line and was roughly pushed forward by several strong hands on my back. I fell into the guy in front of me and we went down like walking dominoes. I bumped the edge of the door as they pushed me past and I tripped on a pile of bodies and fell. The door slammed shut behind me, locking us in.

Wicked thoughts blossomed with my anger and spilled out of my mouth in a long string of curses at the soldiers. I pushed myself up off of the guys below me and was silenced by what I saw in the gym.

Chapter 12

Gregory Gym was eighty years old but had been renovated nicely. The gleaming wooden floor had space for three full basketball courts. With the collapsible wooden bleachers pulled out and along with the upper level seating, the gym had room for a few thousand fans. With the doors locked and with platoons of soldiers ringing the building, it was a makeshift asylum for several thousand infected inside. More infected were being shoved through the door at discouragingly regular intervals.

Most of those in the gym were frenetic and aimless. They were noisy. They sniffed and prodded one another as though looking for a meal. They scuffled. They screamed. Most couldn’t remain still, though a good number sat catatonically or lay like corpses on the floor and benches. A few rattled on in nonsensical streams of words like crazed meth heads. More than a dozen ran around the gym, attacking and fighting with whomever they bumped.

It was a madhouse.

At one time, I guessed, hundreds of portable beds had been lined up in rows on the floor. By the time I arrived, they were in disarray. Random pieces of hospital equipment were scattered about. More than a few of those locked in the gym wore scrubs or hospital lab coats.

Very disturbing were frightening smears of blood and bits of meat in perhaps a dozen spots on the floor. More disturbing than that were the infected, who appeared to be licking at those spots or chewing on things I preferred not to look at too closely. It reminded me of Dan’s meticulous attention to the harpy’s carcass.

Many around the floor had bloody injuries, torn clothes, and quite often, bite marks. Many were unscathed, but all had dilated, crazy eyes. The same dilated, crazy eyes as me.

Having helped Murphy across the gym after the soldiers dumped him inside, I sat on the floor next to him. He’d since passed out on a cot next to a wall. He groaned and stirred. I reached out and felt his forehead. No change. He was still burning up with fever. The same fever I’d had that first night, I guessed.

Some guy with shaggy hair, a beard, and hippie sandals very suddenly came sprinting at me out of the crowd. I stood just as I noticed him, immediately on the defensive.

He made no effort to slow as he neared me, a fact I didn’t realize until it was too late. He hit me at full speed and slammed me into the wall, his face stopping at kissing distance.

“They’re gonna kill us all.” he screamed.

I put my hands to his chest and started pushing. “Get off me.”

He grabbed my shirt to pull himself closer.

I got the full stench of his hot, slobbery breath. His spit splattered my face.

“Get off me, motherfucker.” I pushed harder.

“Slaughter. Slaughter. Kill all the zombies.”

I knocked his hands free and pushed. The crazy guy fell on his back but bounced right up and ran off to accost someone else.

“Christ.” I looked around and saw a guy walking toward me in a bloodied lab coat. He seemed calm, normal even. I took a defensive stance and got ready to punch him in his glasses.

His palms went up in front of him and he said, “It’s okay.”

I relaxed a tad, but prepared myself for another kind of crazy.

“It’s okay,” he said again. “I’m like you.”

“What? What do you mean, like me?” I asked.

“Slow burn,” he responded.

“Back off, crazy man,” I told him.

“No, it’s okay. I’m not like them.”

“Just keep your distance,” I warned.

He stopped about five feet in front of me and put his arms down. “I’m Jerome, Jerome Barnett. I work for the CDC.”

I was taken aback. “The Center for Disease Control?”

Jerome nodded.

“The one in Atlanta?” I asked.

“The very same.”

“Okay.” I lowered my arms, then pointed out across the room, indicating the madness around us. “What the fuck?”

Jerome looked around, “Yeah. Kind of overwhelming isn’t it?”

“Overwhelming? Not my first choice of words,” I said.

Jerome said, “I guess your first choice was ‘fuck,’ wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “You gotta admit, Jerome, this is pretty fucked up. Do you know what the hell is going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got nothing but time, unless you believe that crazy dude that was just here.”

Jerome said, “I’ll talk quickly.”

That concerned me.

Jerome grabbed an upturned cot and pulled it over near the one Murphy laid on. He sat down in front of me. I found a bit of room on the corner of Murphy’s cot that wasn’t covered by Murphy and sat down to face him.

“This is a disease caused by a virus.”

“A virus?”

“Yes,” Jerome answered.

“Okay,” I prompted.

“There was an outbreak about two months ago in Africa at a refugee camp in Kenya, just across the border from Somalia.”

“What kind of outbreak?” I gestured around. “This?”

“Yes. You probably saw something in the news about it.”

I shrugged, “Bits and pieces I guess. I don’t really pay much attention to the news anymore.”

“I hear you,” Jerome agreed. “I work for the CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Services Officer.”

“Say what?”

“I’m an epidemiologist.”

I was impressed. Jerome didn’t look much older than me. He was clearly not the slacker I was.

Jerome continued, “I work in the field for the CDC. When there’s an outbreak of some disease somewhere, especially if they’re having trouble identifying it, they send me.”

“You’re the guy who actually does the identification?” I asked.

“No, there are doctors who specialize in that. I’m more of a response coordinator. When we don’t have a defined protocol, because we’re not sure what we’re dealing with, I usually get the call. Most times, it’s something run-of-the-mill, H1N1, Hantavirus, things like that, that aren’t getting identified correctly in the field. We rarely come across anything new, widespread, and deadly. I mean, we come across new strains and variants all the time, but nothing that meets all those criteria.”

“Widespread?” I asked. “Deadly?”

“I’ll get to that.”

I frowned.

Jerome continued, “So we started getting reports of something weird out of Kenya six or so weeks ago. It doesn’t take much to raise the CDC’s interest. A few cases of unusual symptoms is usually enough to get on our radar. So when this popped up, it was a few cases the first day, then a few dozen, mostly in refugees coming across the border. We realized immediately that something was happening in Somalia. But that place is pretty lawless, and we don’t go in there. Before you know it, I’m on a plane to Kenya and thirty hours later, I’m at the refugee camp. By the time I arrive, the cases are numbering in the hundreds, and it’s not just Somalian refugees fresh across the border anymore. Refugees in the camp are infected.

“Well, the first thing I try to do when I get there is try to quarantine the camp, but I’ve already missed that boat because it’s spread to neighboring villages. While I’m still figuring that out, it pops up in Sudan and Ethiopia.

“People from the WHO and CDC come pouring in, but at this point, there’s nothing in the media about it, because it’s just Africa and nobody really gives a crap about dead Africans, but everybody in the community…”

“The community?” I asked.

“CDC, WHO, all of us guys who watch this stuff. Well, we know it’s bad because it’s literally exploding out of control and we aren’t even close to knowing anything about it.”

“So that’s where we are?” I asked. “We don’t even know what it is?”

“You’re jumping ahead of me, ah…ah…”

“Zed. The name is Zed.”

“Well, Zed, things get pretty out of hand pretty quickly. People in charge start freaking out. The Kenyan army comes in and things start getting ugly. All of the expats, the aid workers, the volunteers…they start bugging out. The Chinese, the Europeans, the Americans, they all go. Everybody sees what’s going down and nobody wants to stay around for it.”

“What do you mean, ugly?” I asked.

“Look around, Zed. This is only the beginning. I don’t just mean the beginning of the infection, I mean the beginning of what the infected will start doing once their biological urges get the best of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hunger, sex, the basic urges, but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Okay, well, hurry up, because I’m waiting for the what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-me part.”

“Okay, let me talk about the disease for a minute.”

I nodded, dramatically, prompting him to move it along.

“The virus—we’re pretty sure that’s what it is—is transferred through bodily fluids.”

“Okay.”

“So, in your case, I guess looking at your arm, you were bitten. Saliva gets in the wound, you get the virus.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Intercourse, of course.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Kissing would do it. Heck, if somebody sneezed or coughed and the droplets got in your eyes or you inhaled them, that would do it. This thing is contagious as hell.”

“Wow,” I said, not even with any sarcasm. “So I’m infected because I got bitten.”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked. “I’m not acting all whacked out like the rest of these…” I wanted to say zombies, but couldn’t bring myself to use the word.

“You’re infected, Zed. Everybody who gets bitten gets infected.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody.”

“But you said you didn’t know that much about it,” I said.

“Yeah, I did, but we’re almost certain that biting is a 100% effective transmission pathway.”

“Crap,” I muttered. “Did you get bitten? Is that why you’re in here?”

“Actually, I think mine was a sneeze or a cough when I was in a ward. I caught it that way.”

“That sucks.”

“More than you know…well actually, I guess you do know. But Zed, it doesn’t suck as much as it could have, and that’s why we’re having this conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the infection doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Like the flu, some people get it bad, some don’t. Some die, most don’t.”

“So…” I prompted.

“When did you get bitten?” Jerome asked.

“Sunday.”

“And this is early Thursday morning.”

I nodded.

“And what symptoms did you have?”

“I felt feverish within fifteen or twenty minutes, and then within a half hour or so, I passed out and stayed out for two days.”

“What then?”

“Well, I woke up, disoriented, dehydrated, hungry as hell,” I told him. “I felt like crap.”

“And your eyes, they were dilated, like they are now?”

“Yeah, I guess, I mean I didn’t know until I got to the hospital. I just knew the sun and bright lights were bothersome.”

Jerome said, “Yeah, that’s because your eyes are permanently dilated now.”

“That sucks.”

“It could be worse.” Jerome looked around.

“Are you saying that I’m not going to wind up like them?”

“I can’t say for sure, but right now you and I are what they’re calling slow burners.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“When somebody catches this infection,” Jerome told me, “they develop a fever, usually pretty quickly, but sometimes it might take days to develop, depending on how they catch it. If the initial infection is small, it might take more time to develop enough of the virus in the body for symptoms to show.”

“I’m guessing that happens in the case of sneezing and coughing transmission?” I asked.

“We’re not certain yet, but maybe.”

“Okay.”

“So, the symptoms almost always include a fever, headache, nausea, and sometimes diarrhea.”

“Like the flu?” I asked.

Jerome answered, “Yes, but there’s more. The fever gets high, like in the 104 to 106 range, in a hurry.”

“I know that’s not good,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” said Jerome. “In most cases, brain damage occurs. Nerve damage as well.”

“What kind of brain damage?”

“In most cases the frontal lobe is severely damaged. Pretty much everything that makes us human, complex thought, emotion, and empathy are debilitated or destroyed.”

“Fuck,” slipped out of my mouth again before I could catch it.

“The basic functions mostly survive, though in ten to fifteen percent of the cases, the host just dies. The ones that don’t die, end up like these guys.” Jerome pointed to the aimless, chaotic mass in the room.

“We’ve figured out that the body temperature after the initial fever correlates very strongly with brain function loss.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Did anyone take your temperature, Zed?”

I shook my head. “Not until I got here.”

“You seem pretty normal, like you’ve got your wits about you. I’m guessing you’re between ninety-nine and a hundred.”

“Where are you?” I asked Jerome.

“I got lucky, Zed. I come in at ninety-nine point three. Just over a half-degree above normal.”

“You seem normal.”

“I am,” said Jerome. “I’m a little klutzy. I’m a little hyperactive, like I’m on a perpetual caffeine buzz, but I’m lucky.”

“And you think that’s where I’ll be?”

“I think so, Zed.”

“And you CDC guys call it a slow burn because the final temperature is above normal, but lower than these other guys?”

“Mostly right.” Jerome nodded. “For slow burners, the initial fever doesn’t go up to 106, and doesn’t stabilize too far above normal. The crazy guy that you were wrestling with when I walked up, he was probably running at about 102 to 103. The really whacked out ones in here, they’re above 104. With the high temperature, the metabolic rate shoots through the roof. They need calories like you wouldn’t believe. They probably need twice the calories that a normal person requires.”

“Wow.” I said.

“Like I said, their metabolisms are running amok. They need to feed.”

“So, are you sure I’m a slow burner?” I asked.

“Once the fever starts, the temperature can spike very fast, and they turn from normal to brain-damaged whack jobs pretty quickly, but for slow burners the whole thing usually runs its course in about two days. When you come out of it, based on what we know so far, you pretty much are what you are…mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Some continue to deteriorate.”

“You mean their temperature goes back up?”

“Yes, slowly.”

“And how many end up like us?” I asked. “How many are immune altogether?”

“Good questions, Zed. Our best data puts total immunity way below one percent, maybe a half, maybe a tenth.”

“And?”

“Of the infected, it looks like maybe one in a few thousand end up like you and me.”

“Is that genetic? Some kind of immunity?”

“We don’t know why,” Jerome answered. “This thing is moving so fast, it’s outpaced our ability to learn what we need to know.”

“So the others, the fast burners, what about them?” I asked.

“Over ninety percent of them end up with a total loss of higher brain function. They’re all over 104. The remaining ten percent or so mostly come in between 101 and 104, with the temperature determining how much human is left in them.”

“How much human?”

“Mostly, they’re just like a bunch of very violent, cannibalistic, chimpanzees. Most don’t think. They just want to eat and tend to their natural bodily functions. The ones that can think tend to lose any sense of empathy or morality. They’re dangerous. They’re vicious.”

“Like the crazy guy from earlier?” I asked

Jerome nodded. “Yes, like him.”

“Great. So, what’s the deal, then? All of these people are hungry and crazy? Are we in physical danger?”

Jerome shrugged. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“One of the things about people that is usually underrated is the importance of the sense of smell.”

“Go on.”

“Well this is my opinion, my theory, not the CDC’s position…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“I think that in the absence of the higher brain functions, the lower brain functions are no longer overlooked, even with all the confusion in a damaged brain.”

“So far this means nothing to me,” I said.

“When these guys start eating people, they prefer not to eat each other. I don’t think they like the way they smell. Maybe they smell the disease on each other.”

“Oh,” I interjected, “like those dogs that sometimes smell when their owners get sick. Yeah, I saw something about that on TV once.”

“Yes, I guess so,” Jerome agreed. “But, that doesn’t mean they won’t eat each other. They just aren’t their first choice.”

“So, are you telling me that they only eat people, and that they prefer healthy people?”

“No, they’re still human, just diseased humans. They’re still omnivorous. But, back in the refugee camp, where—and I hate to say it this way—the most plentiful food source was other people, that’s what they ate.”

I reluctantly pointed to the bloody spots on the floor. “Is that what happened here?”

Jerome got a distant look in his eyes and nodded. “Doctors and nurses.”

“But they ignored you,” I said.

“Yes and no.”

“Okay, what does that mean?” I asked.

Jerome said, “They’re ignoring me for now, because I have the infection. I smell like them. But you and me, Zed, we’re slow burners, we’re mild cases. We smell more like healthy humans than they do.”

“Wait, what?”

“Zed, this gym they have us locked up in. This isn’t an original idea. This is pretty much the same thing we did in Kenya. We couldn’t keep them all in hospital tents, so someone had the great idea to start corralling them all, just to get them under control. Because, I mean, what do you do with them?”

I shrugged.

“Well, when they got hungry, they didn’t go after each other first. I mean, not really. They went after the slow burners, because they smelled the most normal. Then they went after the crazy ones. The weak and injured ones, the ones that were easy prey and couldn’t defend themselves.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“They broke out of the corral and the refugee camp fell apart. It was a nightmare, and somewhere in that mess, the army just started shooting the infected down. That became government policy…maybe it already was, I don’t know. Maybe they thought it was the only way to contain the virus.”

“But it didn’t work,” I said.

“It was already too late when they started.”

“So,” I said, “by extrapolation, the longer we stay here, the more likely it is that we’re either going to be eaten, or the soldiers outside are going to come inside and just shoot us.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“Great.” I looked down at Murphy and tried to assimilate all that I’d just been told.

Jerome asked, “When did your friend get bitten?”

“Twelve, eighteen hours ago, I guess. So, he’s got a chance, right?”

Jerome pointed at the crazies walking around the gym. “Zed, they’re going to start getting hungry soon. If we go find some place out of the way, maybe up at the top of the bleachers by the windows, maybe they’ll ignore us for a while, especially if we leave your friend lying here helpless.”

“That’s fucked up,” I told Jerome.

“It is what it is,” Jerome said. “Once they start feeding again, they’re going to eat your friend. You won’t be able to do anything about it except get eaten too.”

I shook my head. “I have an idea for a way to get out of here. If you want, you can help me with Murphy and come along. If not, you can fuck off and we’ll give it a go without you.”

“If you have an idea of a way to get out, Zed, you and I should just do that now. Murphy might come out of this, like us, or he might not.”

I nodded. “I don’t care. Murphy is coming with me. Are you?”

Jerome looked around. He wasn’t pleased. “What’s your idea?”

“Do you have a quarter?”

Chapter 13

Murphy was half-delirious, but Jerome and I managed to stand him up between us with one of his arms over each of our shoulders. Together, we shambled around behind the bleachers. Working Murphy through the monkey-bar framework of bleacher supports was not easy. He bumped his head and grumbled, but he kept his feet under himself.

I kept hitting my shins on horizontal supports that ran along at twelve inches above the floor. Jerome ran into everything.

“I’m not getting a warm fuzzy about this,” Jerome told me. “Hiding under the bleachers isn’t going to solve our problem.”

“Be cool, man,” I told him. “I know what I’m doing.”

A shriek ripped the air, followed quickly by others. Scuffles broke out on the basketball courts.

I looked questioningly at Jerome.

“The same thing happened earlier. They’re feeding.”

“It sounds like…”

“I know. We need to get out of here,” Jerome urged.

We came to a stop at a square metal panel nearly half the size of a door on the wall.

“What’s this?” Jerome asked.

“Give me the quarter. I need to get these screws out.”

“Okay,” Jerome said, tentatively. He pulled some change out of his pocket, passed me a quarter, and knelt down beside the panel.

“Help me with the screws,” I told him. “I went to college here. When I was a freshman, we were out goofing around one night and we came across these utility tunnels. This access panel leads down to the tunnel system. This is how we used to sneak in to see the volleyball games and stuff. One guy with a sports pass could come in and open up the panel and let the rest of us in.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow,” I confirmed. “If we get into the tunnel system, we can go nearly anywhere on campus. All of the buildings have access panels or doors into the basements.”

Jerome went to work on one of the eight screws. It would have gone faster with a screwdriver but you work with what you have.

With a few screws out, I heard the noise of somebody clumsily coming through the tangle of metal supports under the bleachers.

Jerome and I both looked. It was the crazy guy with the hippie sandals.

“Shit,” said Jerome.

My fingers were getting sweaty and it was hard to hold on to the little quarter.

Another screw dropped to the ground followed quickly by the one Jerome was working on.

The crazy guy hollered, “They’re gonna eat me. They’re gonna eat me.”

Jerome stood and fished around in his pocket. He pulled out a folding knife with a four-inch blade, opened it and handed it to me. “Zed, I’ve got this. You need to take care of him before he draws the rest of them back here.”

There was no time to argue. I grudgingly took the knife. “Get that panel off.”

I made my way through the supports toward the crazy guy.

“They’re gonna eat me.” he yelled again.

“Be quiet,” I told him, trying to keep my voice down.

He jumped up on a lower support, grabbed two vertical supports and used the weight of his body to shake them. The bleachers above rumbled with the vibration. He probably got the attention of every infected freak in the gym with that.

I hurried toward him to push him off, but when I got close, he leapt at me with his hands grasping and his mouth screaming.

It reminded me of my encounter with Dan. I stepped back to avoid his grasp and tripped over a support. The crazy guy came down on top of me.

In the struggle, I pummeled him in the head with the handle of the knife but it had no effect. He just kept yelling, and kept trying to pull my face closer to his mouth.

I lost my temper. I turned the pointed end of the knife at the crazy guy’s skull and drove the blade deep through the bone. He went limp on top of me but his blood poured out onto me from the wound.

I pulled myself free and looked to the ends of the bleachers as I stood up. At least a dozen infected were trying to make their way underneath.

“Damn it.” I turned to Jerome. “They’re coming.”

By the time I got back down beside Jerome, there were two screws left. He was working on one. I went to work on the other.

Both ends of the bleachers were packed with the infected and they were coming our way. Whether to feed on the crazy guy or make a meal of us all, I had no intention of finding out.

Jerome’s screw plinked to the floor. He shouted, “We need to get out of here.”

My screw dropped out and the panel fell free.

I spun around and shook Murphy. “Murphy, you need to wake back up. We need to go, man.” No response.

“Murphy.” I slapped him across the face, once, then twice. His eyes opened. Good.

I dragged him up off of his butt.

The first few of the infected reached the crazy guy’s body and fell on him with their mouths open and their hands tearing at his clothes.

Jerome was already in the tunnel, climbing down the ladder.

I pushed Murphy’s bulk toward the tunnel opening. It was hard. It was slow. The infected from the other direction were getting close. They started yelling and howling. They were excited.

“Murphy, turn around. It’s a ladder.” I yelled. “Murphy, we gotta go.”

Murphy complied and we got his feet into the hole. He started down the ladder but halfway in, he stopped and stared at me in a daze.

“Damn it, Murphy. Move.”

Eight or nine infected were gorging themselves on the crazy guy. Other infected were flowing around the scrum and were eyeing me.

I leaned forward, put my hands on Murphy’s shoulders, and pushed. “Move, Murphy.”

I felt his bulk move and then slide into the darkness. I knew it was about eight feet down to the floor of the tunnel, far enough to chance an injury but the alternative was to stay and die.

I felt fingers on my back, grasping at my shirt. All choices were gone save one. I dove into the hole.

Chapter 14

Through pure luck, the pursuing infected fell over one another coming through the hatch into the tunnel. In a tangle of bodies, with more piling in on top, none of them were able to pursue us until we were out of sight around a corner, and a few hundred yards down another long, straight tunnel.

When we were spotted, we made a quick turn down another tunnel that brought us expeditiously to an alcove with an unlocked door. That door led up to my old freshman dormitory. We hustled through the door and bolted it behind us.

The dormitory building was at least as old as Gregory Gym, but its last renovation was forty years behind, so it had no air conditioning. That meant that it was empty for the summer session of classes.

With keys pilfered from the administrative office, I led Murphy and Jerome up to the fifth floor, thinking for whatever reason that height equated to safety.

It was well past midnight when I unlocked a dorm room door. We quickly piled into the room’s hot, stagnant air. Once inside, closing and locking the door was top priority.

The dorm held four bunks and four empty desks. Jerome and I wrestled Murphy into one of the lower bunks and he passed out immediately on hitting the prone position.

“Pillow?” Jerome asked.

I looked around the room and didn’t immediately see one. I shrugged. Just as well.

Two five-foot tall dormer windows faced south. The room was dark but I stood to the side and carefully opened each by about six inches, enough to let some air flow into the room, but not open wide enough to be noticed from the ground.

Below us, across a lawn the size of a football field and across an empty professor’s parking lot, the gym from which we’d just escaped was alive with activity.

Jerome came up beside me to see what I was watching.

Soldiers were nervously walking in the parking lot, facing the building, talking, smoking, and keeping a ready hand near the triggers of their weapons. A group of police officers stood together, talking and gesturing at the gym.

What was going on? What was there to do about it? Those were the questions on everyone’s mind, and no doubt, the topic of discussion below.

Still staring out the window, I said, “I need to go back down to the office on the first floor and see if the phone is working. There’s a nurse I need to call.”

“About what?” Jerome asked.

“She’s one of the nurses from the hospital. She thinks I may have antibodies in my blood that might be helpful. She asked me to call her when I could.”

Jerome shook his head vigorously. “That’s a bad idea.”

“Is she wrong?”

“Um…no. I mean…what’s she going to do? She’s busy caring for patients and shuttling them off to the gym over there. She won’t be able to do anything with the antibodies in your blood.”

“I didn’t say that she was going to do anything herself,” I argued.

A crashing sound pulled our attention back to the plaza below.

Several panes in the enormous gym windows had broken out and fallen to the concrete twenty feet below. Through the windows, I saw the full silhouettes of the infected standing along the top row of bleacher seats inside, pressing their hands on the glass panes in the old metal frames.

A loud pop caught the attention of every ear in the plaza. One of the windows’ frames flexed across its entire width—roughly ten feet. More panes popped out and fell to the sidewalk. Before anyone below could react, a huge section of one of the window frames busted away from the wall and fell to the ground. Like water from a spigot turned fully on, the infected flowed out through the window.

Soldiers hollered in surprise. Some shouted for assistance.

The first infected out the window hit the ground and were soon covered by others falling out on top of them. Bodies piled into a pyramidal mound up to the height of the window and became a squirming, screaming ramp that more of the infected stumbled down as they poured out of the gym.

Soldiers in the parking lot started shooting tentatively over the heads of the advancing wave of infected.

What I didn’t think of until that moment—and what I’m sure the soldiers didn’t realize until it was too late—was that they weren’t dealing with rational humans beings. The hoard wasn’t frightened by the popping noise of the rifles.

In moments, the soldiers were in danger of being engulfed by the mass running at them.

The soldiers backpedaled and started shooting into the crowd.

Bodies erupted in bloody explosions where the bullets found their marks. Some of the infected fell, and some continued forward in spite of their wounds.

Soldiers went down as the hoard overwhelmed them. Some retreated, but kept firing. Others broke and ran.

“Holy crap,” I muttered as I inched back a little from the window.

“You can say that again,” said Jerome.

More soldiers and police hurried around the corner from the front of the building to support the retreating men, but it was too late. The situation was beyond control. Their line collapsed under the onslaught of the infected.

Screams followed. Not the wild screams of the infected, but the terrorized screams of the dying. Gunfire died away or faded into the distance.

In the first battle I’d ever seen, the infected rolled over the soldiers without slowing down. As a reward for their victory, many of them feasted on the fallen bodies of the soldiers and policemen, who had been either too brave to flee or too slow to get away.

“God, that’s horrible,” I said.

Jerome backed into the darkness away from the window. “We don’t want them to see us up here.”

“The police?” I asked.

“The infected,” he answered. “If they do, they may come after us.”

“Can they?” I asked, “Figure it out, I mean. With their frontal lobes fried, is getting up here too complex of a problem?”

“I don’t know, Zed. But I don’t want to find out.”

I stepped back from the window. “I don’t either.”

The battle wound down. Gunshots became less frequent. Most of the infected dispersed from the plaza.

I asked Jerome, “What next?”

“What next?” Jerome asked me, anger putting an edge in his voice. “You led us here. I figured you had a plan.”

“Don’t get pissed at me. You’re the guy from the CDC, who’s supposed to know everything about this…this plague or whatever it is.”

Jerome’s anger disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. “Plagues are bacterial. This is almost certainly viral.”

“Whatever.”

“Call it a pandemic,” said Jerome.

“Double whatever,” I spat back. “I’m no doctor. I’m kind of on the user end of this disease thing, you know. From where I sit, plagues and pandemics are pretty much the same thing. Everybody catches cold. Everybody dies. Everybody turns into a mindless monster. It pretty much comes down to a bad something happening to everybody.”

“You don’t have to be a dick, Zed.”

I thought I did have to be a dick. I was still a little pissed about Jerome ordering me to take care of the crazy guy back in the gym. He had a PhD and worked for the CDC, but that didn’t make him my boss. I gave it a minute before I said, “Getting out of the gym was my only plan, at first. Like you said, we were in danger of getting attacked by the infected when we were in there. You were right about that. They seemed pretty anxious to get their hands on us when we were getting into the tunnel.”

Jerome nodded.

“Once we got into the tunnel,” I said, “the dorm was just the first place that came to mind as a place to hide out for a bit and figure things out. It seems to me that we’re in a pretty crappy situation. The infected see us as a meal. To the uninfected, we’re just more infected. To them, we’re a danger, and apparently the currently accepted cure for infection is a bullet.”

“The soldiers had to shoot them,” Jerome said. “You saw what happened. They didn’t have a choice.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

We stood there in the sweltering dorm room in silence for a good long while, listening to the sounds of the world falling apart outside.

Jerome broke the silence. “Whatever we do next, we need to keep an eye on Murphy.”

Jerome was probably right about that, so I said nothing.

He continued, “We don’t know for certain what he’s going to be when his fever breaks…or doesn’t break. If he comes out as a ninety-nine like us, then great. If he’s 104 or up, we need to be prepared to do something about him.”

“Do something?” I asked.

“Don’t be coy, Zed. You can see where this is going. You did what you thought was right in trying to get him to the hospital in the first place, but things are different now, and they’re going to hell in a hurry. We need to start thinking about survival.”

“Survival?” I asked.

“The police. The fire department. Hospitals. Doctors. They aren’t going to be here for us pretty soon. Maybe they’re gone already.”

I shook my head. “Will it really get that bad?”

“Zed, it’s that bad or worse everywhere this thing has spread.”

“But…”

“There aren’t any buts. Look out the window. The infected are taking over.”

What Jerome was telling me was a truth I didn’t want to accept.

“We’re going to have to look out for ourselves,” said Jerome. “At the very least, as you astutely pointed out, even if everything miraculously returns to normal, you and I are pariahs. We’re infected. We’ll have no one to take care of us but us. We’ll be lucky if we’re not gunned down. I don’t see any happy endings for you and me.”

I dropped into one of the desk chairs. Jerome was right, but I wasn’t quite ready to deal with that level of bleakness.

“All I’m saying,” said Jerome, “is that we need to talk about what to do with Murphy. If he goes full 104 or up, we’ll probably be able to escape if we decide quickly and execute our plan. But he’s a big guy. If he wakes up with a reduced brain capacity and a big appetite, he might kill both of us before we can do anything about it. Hell, he might kill both us if we’re fully prepared. He’s a big, really strong guy. Zed, he’s a time bomb.”

Jerome was right about that. I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t even want to acknowledge it, but he was right.

“Zed, I know you don’t want to talk about this but we need to. We need to be ready to put him down if it comes to that.”

“Kill him,” I said. “That’s what you mean.”

“Of course that’s what I mean. You know that. If he’s 104, then it’ll be him or us. We’ll need to run or we’ll need to kill him.”

“How do you propose we put him down?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jerome. “I don’t have an answer to that. That’s part of why we’re talking now. If we wait until he comes back around, and he’s a 104 and we’re sitting here, or worse, sleeping here, then we’re dead.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I think one of us should sneak outside once it settles down a bit and try to grab a gun or two from those dead soldiers or police down there.”

“Excuse me for saying so,” I said as I shook my head, “but that sounds a lot like suicide.”

“Yes, it’s a risk, but I think we need to get ‘em while the gettin’ is good. I don’t know how bad things will get but they’re likely to get worse before they get better. We’re going to need to be armed if we’re going to survive this, and I don’t just mean Murphy.”

“What do you think the odds of your going down and getting one of those guns and getting back up here alive will be?” I asked.

“Probably a lot better than the odds of our still being alive an hour after Murphy wakes up as a 104, if we’re not armed,” Jerome suggested.

“Better?” I asked, “Why would they be better?”

“Right now, all of the infected are feeding. You have to remember, Zed, we’re a food source of last resort for them. I don’t think they like to eat each other.”

I peered out the window. A hundred or more infected were feeding on the bodies of the fallen soldiers.

“Or we could leave him here,” said Jerome. “We could go find another place to hole up. I mean, what’s your attachment to this guy, anyway? Is he your brother-in-law or something?”

“No,” I shrugged. “Well, he helped me out at the jail this morning.”

“The jail? You were in jail?”

He said it in a condescending way that made me want to punch him. I decided that I didn’t like him very much. I said, “It was bullshit. My stepdad, who I guess was infected, killed my mom and some guy from their church. The police arrested me because they thought I murdered them all.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Yeah.”

“So you just met Murphy this morning?” Jerome asked.

I nodded.

“And you helped him get to the hospital after he got bitten. And you saved him when we were in the gym. What’d he do for you at the jail?”

I said, “It’s not important. But there’s more.”

“What?” Jerome asked.

“Murphy knows of a place in east Austin.”

Jerome said, “You seem to cringe when you say that.”

“It’s not the best part of town.”

“Pretty soon I don’t think any part of town will be good. What kind of place is this?” Jerome asked.

“It’s a bunker under some guy’s house.”

“And he’s going to let Murphy in?” Jerome was skeptical.

“He died a few years ago or something,” I said. “He built this bunker under his house.”

“And Murphy knows where it is?”

I nodded. I hoped.

“And he knows how to get in?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “His cousin Earl did.”

“He did?”

“He got shot at the jail.”

“Oh.” What little enthusiasm Jerome had for the bunker idea seemed to wane but he said, “If ever there was a time to need a survivalist’s bunker, now would be it. Clearly, Murphy has some value. I think it’s worth the risk to take a chance on him. I think you should go down and get a gun.”

“Me? It was your idea.”

“I know, but hear me out on this, Zed. I work for the CDC, I know about the outbreak. I’m an expert, the kind the world might need if we’re going to get out of this with an intact society and you work for…Where do you work?”

“I have the most fulfilling job in the world,” I said.

“What?”

“I put a legal, yet addictive, drug in the hands of jonesing addicts and make them happy.”

“What are you talking about?” Jerome looked at me, seemingly clueless.

“For a CDC employee you sure can’t figure things out. I hope you’re good at memorization.”

“Stop playing games,” Jerome told me. “C’mon, what is it, like Starbuck’s, or something?”

I nodded.

“I thought you went to college here. Did you party too much and drop out?”

“No, I got a philosophy degree,” I mumbled.

“Oh.”

I sighed. “I’ll get the guns.”

Chapter 15

I stood at the first floor doorway, looking out across the lawn and parking lot. To the east, bordering the plaza, stood the ROTC building and a maintenance building. To the west lay a street lined with enormous old oaks full of squawking grackles. Across the street was a six-story building full of classrooms and professors’ offices.

Scattered across the lawn and parking lot lay the bodies and remnants of soldiers and policemen, all being eaten by the infected clustered around them.

Gunshots echoed regularly in the distance. Sirens wailed without end. The smell of smoke tainted the air. Ugly, low clouds hung in the sky, dirty orange in the light coming off of the city below.

With the glass door open, I had one foot in the building, one foot out, as I weighed the risk of death on the bloody plaza against the risk of death tomorrow or the next day for having no gun to defend myself. I pondered the value of stealing rifles from men who’d died trying to defend themselves with those very weapons. Mostly, I tried to find a way around my fear.

I wondered if my fear was pointless. I wondered, with the infection coursing through my veins, if I was effectively dead already, whether I was just pretending to be alive until the virus finished destroying my brain.

I got angry for being afraid, for giving in to it. I swore to myself when I was twelve, on one of a thousand occasions when I cowered in my room, while the wrathful ogre stormed up the hall to scar my skin with his fists, his boots, and his belt, that I would not let fear rule me. I got up off my knees on that day and stood in the face of Dan’s wrath. Through the years of living with the ogre and the harpy, I paid heavily for that choice, but what I got in return was a defiant strength that was impossible to measure.

So fuck Dan. Fuck the police. Fuck the doctors. Fuck Jerome. And fuck the infected.

I kicked the door wide, reached over to a nearby garden, grabbed a heavy rock, and placed it between the door and the jamb.

Daring the infected to come at me, I stormed out onto the lawn.

I don’t know what wild animals feel when they see strength in other animals—strength that they can’t stand against—but I think they feel fear.

I walked up to the body of a policeman. The infected that were feeding there scampered out of my way. I picked up the officer’s pistol. I was ready to put a bullet in the head of any infected that challenged me. They didn’t. They kept their distance and went back to feeding.

I fished around in the remains of the officer’s bloody garments and came up with his belt. The leather was torn through, but it held his spare magazines. They seemed full of bullets. The poor guy didn’t have a chance to reload before they overwhelmed him.

One of the infected got bold and snarled at me. I ignored him while I looked for anything else of value in the officer’s remains.

With the officer’s belt hanging over my shoulder and a pair of handcuffs in my pocket, I headed for the body of a nearby soldier. Whether my safety among the infected was a result of their fear of my anger or the satisfaction of their full bellies, it didn’t matter to me at that moment. They showed little interest in me.

There wasn’t much left of the soldier. His gory bones, uniform, helmet, and equipment were scattered widely across a red stain on the edge of the parking lot. The infected were done with him and had moved on.

I fell to my knees among the soldier’s remains trying to figure out what to take. The rifle was a no-brainer. I reached over and scooted that over in front of my knees. The soldier’s harness was covered in blood but looked to be intact. He’d have his extra ammunition and equipment stowed in pouches on the harness. I wanted it.

On hands and knees, I crawled over to the harness. Coming down off of the rage I felt after thinking about Dan, I started to think clearly. I glanced around quickly to assess my situation. I saw nothing out of the ordinary, out of the new ordinary, and naturally assumed that if I couldn’t see a danger, then it didn’t exist.

I stuffed the pistol into the front of my pants, picked up the soldier’s rifle and harness, and stood.

“Hey,” someone yelled out of the darkness. The voice startled me. I froze, but the head of every infected in the parking lot turned toward a doorway at the end of the building across the street.

Suddenly, running seemed like a good idea. I turned and bolted away from the sound of the voice. A waist-high hedge cut across the lawn and would offer cover in case I needed it.

My intuition to run proved correct, because in the next moment, I heard the sound of gunfire. One, two, and then three shots shattered the relative calm in the quadrangle.

The infected were on their feet and staring at the source of the shots.

I jumped, rolling in the air as I cleared the hedge and landed hard on my back. Out of breath, I rolled immediately, then crawled away as fast as I could from where I landed.

Three more shots echoed and I saw the ground erupt in divots where I’d landed behind the bushes.

In a singular wave, the infected broke into a run toward the shooter. Howls from more of the infected carried up and down the street. Hundreds of running feet pounded on the asphalt.

I ventured a peek over the bushes and saw at least a dozen infected frozen in their poses, standing and staring straight at me.

It was time to go. I hoped the shooter came to that same decision and was bugging out in the other direction. I grabbed my equipment and sprinted for the dormitory’s door.

Chapter 16

Back on the fifth floor, I knocked lightly on the dorm room door. “Jerome?”

Feet shuffled softly. The locked clicked. The door eased open. Jerome’s face showed neither relief, nor surprise. He was a cold prick.

I stepped into the room, angry, but not sure at exactly who or what.

Jerome picked up on my mood as he closed and locked the door. “We both knew it was dangerous, your going out to get the guns.”

Because you were too big of a pussy to do it, I didn’t say.

He stepped toward me, expecting me to hand him one of the weapons.

I didn’t.

I was planning to. I was going to. Just not at that moment. Jerome and I were going to have to figure out who the alpha was and I’d lost the first few rounds in that stupid game already. I didn’t want to play, but I absolutely wasn’t going to be subjugated by Jerome, either. I sensed that with him, there were only two choices: lead or follow. Cooperation wasn’t on the table.

But at that moment, I had all the guns. I had all the power. I wanted that to be clear.

“Did anything change with Murphy while I was downstairs?” I asked.

Jerome shrugged and looked toward Murphy, leading my eyes along. Murphy hadn’t moved.

I dropped the soldier’s harness to the floor and fished a pair of handcuffs out of my heavy left pocket. “I got these for Murphy.” I held them out to Jerome who just looked at them.

“That’s a good idea, but he’s your friend,” said Jerom. “You put them on him.”

“Whatever,” I muttered, petulant.

I knelt by Murphy’s bunk, careful to lay the rifle on the floor beside me. I cuffed Murphy’s wrist to the bed frame by the wall.

“He’s still burning up,” I said.

Jerome hadn’t moved an inch from his spot near the door. “It’s the fever.”

“He’s starting to lose his color,” I observed. “Why does that happen?”

“It’s a complicated process.”

“When you guys were studying this in Kenya, did you learn anything that might give us a clear indication of what Murphy will be like when he wakes up?” I asked. “Should we take his temperature?”

Jerome shook his head. “No. Temperature is one of the first things we looked at as a predictor. The ones that max on body temperature but regain their mobility quickly tend to be the ones with the greatest loss of intellectual capacity. The ones that linger, like Murphy, tend to have a better chance of coming out as a slow burn, like us. They also have the highest mortality rate. But what you have to understand is that nothing is clear-cut on this. Anything could happen.”

I took a seat on a bunk across the room from Murphy.

Jerome grabbed one of the desk chairs and sat down near me. “That was a good idea, getting the cuffs.”

I took the compliment at face value and thawed a bit. “Thanks.” I reached into my waistband, withdrew the policeman’s handgun, and held it out toward Jerome. “Are you cool with the pistol?”

“I think I’d prefer a pistol.”

“Cool,” I said. I hefted the rifle. “I think I’d rather have this thing for now. Oh, I think I’ve got three more clips for that pistol. I don’t know how many bullets come in a clip, though.”

“Depends on the gun, I guess,” said Jerome.

“Oh.”

“Zed, I don’t really know that much about guns.”

“Great,” I laughed. “I don’t know anything about them either.”

Jerome looked down and started to explore the pistol in his lap.

“Be careful,” I said.

Jerome’s expression made it clear that he didn’t want my trite advice.

I shrugged and started fumbling around with my rifle, realizing quickly that I was out of my depth. I certainly knew what the trigger did and from which end the bullets came out, but I didn’t know anything about how to eject or load a magazine. I didn’t know how or when to clean the thing. I knew that it was necessary. Gun people always talked about cleaning their guns. I didn’t know what kind of gun I had. It was some kind of military rifle, I knew that. Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t know whether or not it was empty, or even how to check, aside from pulling the trigger.

After some time spent experimenting with his weapon, Jerome said, “Thanks for going out and getting the guns. I didn’t really think you’d get shot at. I figured the only danger was from the infected, and most of them were feeding.”

I gave Jerome a nod. “I didn’t want to go out, but it had to be done.”

“And now we have guns we don’t know anything about.”

I smiled at the irony of it. “Jerome, why does it feel like we’re screwed anyway?”

“Possibly two reasons,” he answered immediately.

“Those would be?” I asked.

“One, we are screwed.”

I chuckled. Sometimes laughter is all you have to deal with stress. I asked, “Is the other one better?”

“We don’t have a plan,” said Jerome.

“A plan. You might be right about that. What did you guys do in Africa? I mean, you made it out of there alive.”

Jerome nodded. “I don’t know. I think we got lucky. First, when it became obvious that the infected were crossing borders into the other countries, then especially when we lost containment in the camp…I told you about the corrals, right?”

I nodded.

“The military came in and just started killing anyone that looked infected. I think I got out because I was white. I think I only made it onto the plane because no one else on the plane knew any more than I did about the infection. All of the doctors and other CDC personnel were as frightened as I was. I thought I was going to end up like the other infected. I figured that if I could get back to the states, I might have a better chance.”

“It’s just lucky genetics that have saved you?” I asked.

“So far,” Jerome added.

“So far,” I agreed.

“The CDC didn’t know what to do with me except quarantine me,” said Jerome. “They left me in isolation until Austin started to blow up. By that time, they figured I wasn’t contagious, but they also figured I wasn’t going to get any sicker. So, I was the best candidate to send here. Well, a lot of other guys came, pretty much the A team. Austin is ground zero for the first outbreak in the states.”

“I guess that’s why I didn’t hear about it,” I said.

“You said you don’t watch the news,” Jerome chided.

“I’m not completely oblivious,” I said. “But like you said, news stories about people dying in Africa don’t register with me as unusual events. Like everybody in the western hemisphere, I’ve built up a tolerance to it. Why do you think the virus hit Austin, and not some place like New York, or Los Angeles?”

“Maybe it has by now,” Jerome said, “if Africa can be used as any kind of template for the spread of the disease. As far as LA and New York go, the international airports have been shutting down and commerce came to a halt as the infection broke out in Europe and Asia. I think it came to Austin with a slow burner like you and me, only one that finished turning. There was a church group from Austin that was doing some kind of charity work in Uganda over the summer. They escaped on a chartered plane and got back to Austin a few weeks ago, before people here knew the extent of the problem. I think it was someone in that group.”

“A church group?” That piqued my interest. “Which church?”

“It was a long name. The Blood of Christ the Holy Redeemer Church or something like that.”

“Christ.” That was a surprise. “That’s where my mom and stepdad went to church.”

“Probably where they caught it,” Jerome said as he glanced toward the window as though looking for something. It was probably just nervousness.

We stopped talking and I collected my thoughts for a few moments. “So, the bottom line is that it was luck that got you out of Africa alive.”

Jerome nodded.

“Too bad,” I said. “I was hoping you guys had some proven protocols for getting through this kind of crap.”

Jerome shook his head. “We need to figure it out as we go along.”

I nodded. “I don’t know what the worst case scenario is, but after everything I’ve seen since Sunday and after hearing about what happened in Kenya, I think we need to prepare for that.”

“I agree.”

So, plan we did, for the next few days anyway. The first decision we took was that we needed to take turns standing guard at night. It looked like literally anything could happen at any time. It wouldn’t do for us both to be sleeping when a bad situation developed.

We needed to store water in case things got really bad and it stopped flowing from the taps. Our most convenient source of food was the dozen vending machines in the recreation room on the first floor. With the fall semester just a week from starting, I hoped that those were fully stocked and waiting for freshmen’s quarters. Vending machine food would not be nutritious, but suffering through weeks of zero nutrition would be far better than suffering through long days of zero calories.

We needed information. The virus was in Europe, Asia, Africa, and now in the western hemisphere. The world was changing, and all we knew about it was what we could see through the dormer windows. That wouldn’t do.

My smartphone was somewhere in the police station. Jerome’s cell phone was dead, and we had no cord with which to charge it. There were televisions in the rec room, but the rec room was on the first floor with lots of large windows. Turning those televisions on would attract the infected. There were a few computers, presumably with internet connections, in the rec room as well. They were set up for student access and required a password, so they were useless to us.

We were going to have to leave the dormitory and venture back out among the infected again. That was an unappealing thought, especially with the sound of gunfire ringing across the city.

Aside from brainstorming, we came up with few specifics. The hour was late. I was tired. I was hungry. In fact, I felt starved. I thought about when I’d last drank or eaten anything. Was it the tequila shots I’d drunk on Sunday morning? No, perhaps the sports drink from the fridge on Tuesday.

I needed to eat something.

I said, “We need to go down and raid those vending machines tonight.”

“Do you think that’s wise?” Jerome asked.

“If not, then we need to chase down one of those infected bastards so we can eat him.”

“Are you serious?” Jerome asked, nervously.

“Dude, it was a joke.”

“You never know, nowadays.” Jerome smiled weakly.

I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t had anything to eat in days.”

Jerome said, “One of us should stay here and keep an eye on Murphy and one of us should go down.”

I looked expectantly at Jerome.

“What?” he asked.

“What, what?” I responded, “I went out and got the guns.”

“We talked about that. Not to say that my life’s more valuable than yours, because it’s not, but I have expertise that can help us fix all this.” Jerome shrugged. “You don’t.”

This was going to get old in a hurry. “Whatever.”

I stood up and headed for the door, then turned. “I don’t suppose you know how to break into a vending machine, do you?”

Jerome shook his head.

“Great.”

As it turned out, the damned things were resilient as hell. Kicking in the glass fronts, like they always did in the movies, proved to be a futile, noisy waste of time. I tried beating one with a fire extinguisher. Again, useless noise. What I finally settled on was a seat cushion I had pulled off of one of the couches in the rec room. With that folded around the barrel of my rifle, I pressed it against a vending machine’s lock and pulled the trigger. The front of the machine popped open.

It was louder than I’d hoped it would be, but not as loud as the kicking and beating I’d already tried.

I crept over to each of the nearby windows and checked on the state of the infected outside. None seemed to be paying the building any special attention.

I repeated the process on the lock of a soda machine, gathered up what I needed, and headed upstairs with ten thousand calories of assorted junk foods and carbonated drinks.

Chapter 17

Back in the room, I had first watch, so Jerome wasted no time in lying down on a bunk and closing his eyes. I took some pleasure in his squirming for twenty minutes as he tried to find a comfortable spot on the narrow, thin mattress.

The tower that stood at the center of campus showed that the time was close to three a.m. I drank two colas and ate a bag of chips, a candy bar, and some mixed nuts. I hoped the caffeine in the sodas would keep me awake for the next several hours.

I sat near the window, with Jerome’s light snoring and Murphy’s heavy breathing behind me. Gunshots sounded nearby and more rang from far away.

At around four in the morning, a battle erupted to the southeast near the hospital involving many guns and countless gunshots. Eventually it petered out, with no hint as to its resolution.

Far on the east side of town, I saw the glow of orange fire against a rising column of smoke. That was not good. Well into our third summer of drought, any fire, if not quickly controlled, would grow out of hand.

The smoke column rose and drifted to the north with the winds that flowed inland off of the gulf during the summer.

Fires were inevitable. Severe watering restrictions and months without rain left most lawns in Austin dry and brown. Non-native trees were dying all over the city. Even the old live oaks were under stress. For the first time in my life, I’d seen oaks killed by a drought. Any random spark from a gunshot had a chance of finding dry tinder on which it could feed.

Hours passed. The morning sun began to steal away the darkness in the eastern sky. It was my turn to sleep. With difficulty, I woke Jerome, planted him in the chair, and lay down on my bunk. I was out instantly.

Chapter 18

When I awoke, the room was stiflingly hot. I was drenched in sweat. The bright, late morning sun was shining in the window. The chair where I’d left Jerome was empty.

“Shit.” I sat up. Lightheaded, I swung my feet to the floor and looked at the door; it was closed. In a flash of panic, I looked down to the floor, where I’d laid my gun and shoes by the bed. They were just as I’d left them. I reached down and scooped up the rifle, a habit I figured I’d need to develop. The sound of Jerome’s snoring drifted down from the bunk above.

“Lazy bastard,” I muttered. I considered rudely slapping him back to consciousness but it would serve no purpose other than to satisfy my anger over his irresponsibility. He needed sleep as badly as I did, so I let him lie.

I walked over and checked on Murphy. He was still out. I shook him lightly to see if he’d wake and got no response.

Taking a seat in the chair I’d used for guard duty the night before, I looked out. The window was closed so I pushed it open to let the breeze flow in. It smelled of smoke and tasted of ash. The fires in east Austin had grown while I slept. Huge billows of black smoke hung in the eastern sky, casting an ominous threat over the old houses and ancient trees below.

I flexed the fingers on my left hand. They remained fully functional, though my arm still felt swollen around the bite. I needed antibiotics, or at least I thought I did. If I was going to survive the virus, I didn’t want to get killed off by a secondary infection.

I thought about running downstairs to grab some cold sodas from the vending machine I’d cracked open the night before, but with my two companions still asleep, it seemed like a bad idea. I settled for a breakfast of cold strawberry toaster pastries and warm soda. I leaned back in the chair and let the caffeine and sugar work their magic on my throbbing brain.

Loiterers wandered through the plaza below. As each came into view, I wondered whether they were normal or infected. In the bright morning light, especially with my dilated pupils, it was hard to discern the hue of their skin. It wasn’t until they came upon the remains of one of the fallen soldiers that I knew; they’d drop to the ground and scour for morsels.

Every single one was infected.

Just as when I went to bed, gunfire still rang in the distance, but at an ever-quickening frequency.

Over the buildings in my way, I saw an upper corner of Brackenridge hospital off to the southeast, but couldn’t tell if the military presence there had benefited them or not. I saw no movement. I wondered whether Steph the nurse was still there, still alive.

What appeared to be a traffic helicopter flew over from time to time, but I never saw the Star Flight helicopter land at the hospital. I suspected that was a bad sign for those at Brackenridge.

Alternatively, I spotted a contrail from an airliner high above. That was good. The whole country hadn’t fallen apart overnight, at least not that I could tell. But in truth, I didn’t know. The airplane could have been Air Force One spiriting the president off to safety on an isolated Pacific island.

At least Murphy, Jerome, and I were in a safe spot for the moment.

I wondered how long the crisis could last, how deeply everything would be affected. I felt foolish for even considering it, but I wondered how much of human civilization would be left when it was over. What if it was never over?

I needed information. I needed news. Absent that, I needed to prepare for the end of the world, or at least the end of modern civilization.

And what did that mean for me? I grew up in a city. I had a degree in philosophy; as useless an education as one could have in a world where figuring how to get your next meal and how not to become one might be as difficult as it had been a few thousand years ago. The great “why” questions of life very suddenly held zero importance.

There was only one real question. Did I want to live or not?

The future would tolerate no ambivalence, it would hold no room for anything but a desperate drive to survive another day, at whatever cost. Anything less would likely lead to death.

I considered for a moment how that would affect humanity in general, how it would affect my humanity. What would I become if I survived? Would I turn into a vicious brute?

I wanted to slap myself. I was already doing it. I was overthinking the problem.

If this was the beginning of the end of civilization, the only question was that of survival. That was it.

I amended the thought to include the survival of my friends. With the harpy rotting on her living room floor and Dan doing the same in their kitchen, at least I didn’t have to wrestle with the moral ambiguity of not having added them to the equation.

Information.

It occurred to me that I needed information on everything. I needed to know how to work that damned rifle in my lap. I needed to know about warfare and tactics. At least all those weekends playing in paintball tournaments hadn’t been wasted time...I hoped.

And what about survival in general? I could barely cook, let alone farm and hunt. What would it take to get clean water? How would I know it wasn’t infected? I needed medical supplies, not just for my arm, but for whatever might happen tomorrow or on any of a thousand tomorrows. What if I wanted electricity? How would I generate that? If this was the end of the world, our infrastructure would soon start breaking down. Water, electricity, the phone system would all go away, one at a time. And the internet…

The internet.

That was it. The internet was, if anything, the storage place for man’s accumulated knowledge. All of the information I needed was there, right now. I needed to find a way to get it. That, perhaps more than any other single thing, would be the key to long-term survival. Not just for me, but for anyone.

The sound of gunfire drawing near pulled my attention back to the now. I couldn’t guess how many people were shooting, but it was more than a half-dozen and probably less than twenty. I stood and tried to discern a direction, but I couldn’t. There were too many large buildings on campus, too many flat surfaces to echo off of.

I wondered if rescuers had arrived. I wondered if all of my thinking and planning were just wasted speculation.

Movement in the bushes down and to my left caught my eye. Between the cars, out of doorways and gaps between buildings, I saw dozens of heads pop up. Through the broken windows of the gymnasium across the quad, I saw movement...lots of it. The gym was brimming with the infected. Just as they had done the night before, they flowed out of the broken windows.

The blast of loud rifle fire caught my attention and I looked left. Coming around the corner on the east side of the gym was a squad of soldiers, weapons up, shooting the infected as they came into view.

The rate of fire increased as the soldiers filed into the plaza. Every infected in their line of sight was going down.

The soldiers were hunting them and killing them.

Holy crap.

Up close, the infected were humanoid monsters. At a distance, they still looked like normal people.

I was taken aback. Any doubt I had was erased. It was open season on the infected.

People like me.

The soldiers confidently moved into the quad, killing the dozens of infected that they had disturbed there. They shot at the mass flowing out of Gregory Gym. From the west, a growing trickle of infected ran in from the center of campus.

The eight soldiers stood in a rough line across the quad about five or ten feet apart and shot down the rabid infected as they appeared.

The rate of fire increased to a steady din. I looked behind me. Murphy lay as comatose as the night before. Jerome snored as though nothing was going on. It was time he woke up.

I stepped over and let some of my frustration toward him out in a slap across the face. It was mean, but it felt good.

Jerome sat up immediately. A hand went to his cheek and he looked blearily at me. “Wha–?”

He heard the gunfire and looked to the window.

“Something’s happening,” I said. “Time to get up.”

I knelt in front of the window, giving me a good view without making my presence too easily visible.

More and more infected were funneling into the quad from the west.

The soldiers started to glance toward one another and move closer together. They were getting nervous. I would have been too. The hunt was turning into something they hadn’t expected.

From my high vantage, I saw the beginning of the end.

From a gap between the buildings to the rear of the soldiers, I saw a few, then a dozen infected running up behind them. The soldiers were so focused on defending themselves from the flow of infected in front of them that they were unaware of those behind.

I flung the window open wide and leaned out. I yelled, waved my arms, and pointed, but the tunnel vision that focuses your attention on the mortal threat right in front of you prevented them from noticing me.

I vainly yelled some more as the infected behind the soldiers closed the gap.

I raised my rifle and pointed it toward the now solid mass of infected people flowing between the buildings behind the soldiers. There were thousands.

I pulled the trigger and a burst of several bullets ripped toward the horde. Whether I hit anything or whether the mass flowed over my downed targets, I couldn’t tell. The mob surged ahead in blind hungry rage.

I fired again.

Jerome’s lips were in my ear, yelling, “Don’t. They can’t know we’re here.”

Whether he was talking about the soldiers or the infected, I didn’t know or care in that moment.

The soldiers, like the ones the night before, were going to get slaughtered. I had to help.

I fired again but the soldiers were already doomed.

The first of the flanking infected jumped on one of the soldiers from behind. The soldiers beside the downed soldier turned and saw the horde coming. I tried not to imagine the terror he must have been feeling.

I thought to run downstairs, swing the dormitory door open, and find a way to get the soldiers to come in, but they were surrounded before I completed the thought.

The soldiers’ formation collapsed as they tried to retreat under the onslaught, but there was nowhere to go.

The frequency of gunshots rapidly diminished as one by one the soldiers fell.

I pulled my gun back in the window, squatted, and watched the horror of another eight humans getting shredded and eaten by a mob of rabid monsters.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

“I told you,” Jerome said. “It gets ugly.”

I turned my back to the wall, set my rifle down, put my face in my hands, and leaned back. There were tears in my eyes. The shock of what I’d just seen had gotten to me; all that I’d seen was getting at me. I had to get my emotions under control. I had to toughen up if I was going to survive.

The ogre and the harpy.

The ogre and the harpy.

They were shitty parents, but if anybody was emotionally prepared to deal with the world the way it was at that moment, it should have been me.

Chapter 19

Not far away, four or maybe five blocks, the sound of another battle echoed through the gaps in the buildings. Whether the gunfire represented a failed rescue attempt for the soldiers in the quad or another doomed hunting party, I would never know. All of the infected who couldn’t squeeze themselves close enough for a bite of one of the dead soldiers in the quad turned their attention to the sound of the new gunfire and ran off in that direction.

“How can there be so many, so fast?” I asked.

Jerome said, “I told you what Kenya was like.”

I nodded like I understood. Sure, I’d heard his description, but I hadn’t assimilated it. I didn’t believe it could be that bad.

“Do you know how many people are in Austin?” Jerome asked.

“In the city limits, or in the area?” I asked.

Jerome told me, “Diseases don’t see political boundaries.”

“A million, maybe more.”

“You can round off the numbers any way you want.” Jerome pointed out the window. “If there aren’t around a million infected out there right now, there will be by the end of the week.”

“That’s a pretty bleak outlook,” I complained.

“I’m just telling you what I know.”

“You don’t think––”

“No. I don’t think,” Jerome interrupted. “There is no hope. There is no cure. There is no way to stop it or slow it down.”

“Is that the CDC’s position, or your opinion?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter right now, does it?”

“Yes, it does,” I argued. “It tells us what we need to plan for.” Regardless of how much I agreed, I didn’t want to let go of the hope that this wasn’t the end. I liked drinking beer on Saturday night. I liked watching football. I liked casual sex. I loved air conditioning. I liked living without fear.

“Plan for the worst.”

I turned my attention back out the window.

We sat there and silently watched the infected feed.

After a while, I said, “We’ll need more weapons and more ammo.”

Jerome nodded. “Are you going down again?”

“Of course.” I made little effort to mask my irritation.

“I don’t think you’ll get shot at again,” Jerome told me. “I doubt there are any soldiers around that would mistake you for a zombie or a looter or whatever. It should be safe.”

“Provided the infected don’t eat me.” More sarcasm.

“They didn’t last time,” Jerome countered. “It should be safe.”

“But it’s still going to be going down there.”

“I could go,” Jerome said. “But you and I both know the unfortunate truth. I’m an epidemiologist. Expertise like mine isn’t going to be easy to come by in the future. If we as a society ever want to have a chance at returning to normal, we’re going to need people like me. You decide, Zed. I’ll go if you want me to.”

I turned away and picked up my MOLLE vest. I wished I’d taken the time the night before to rinse it off in one of the shower stalls. At least the blood on it was dry. It was serviceable.

As I checked my ammunition magazines, I told Jerome, “I agree that we need to prepare for the worst-case scenario. I thought about it a lot this morning.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know if this is where we’re going to end up for the long haul, but in the absence of an alternative, we need to hoard as much water, food, and ammunition as we possibly can. Do you know anything about this end of the world stuff? You don’t happen to be a closet survivalist, do you?”

Jerome shook his head. “I’ve killed zombies in video games, but that’s about it.”

“Did you grow up on a farm? Do you know anything about agriculture?”

“No, nothing,” Jerome answered.

I opened the door and said, “A couple of things. I think that if this really is going to get as bad as it looks right now, and if we manage to live through the first six months or a year, you know what is going to make the difference between long-term survival or starvation?”

“Lots of guns?” Jerome answered.

“No.” How could this guy have a PhD in anything? “Information.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Jerome, we don’t know jack about how to take care of ourselves once the grocery stores empty out. We don’t know how to farm. We don’t know how to hunt. We don’t know how to preserve food. We don’t know how to purify water. We don’t know anything about providing for ourselves that doesn’t involve a grocery store, an electric bill, or the internet. We need to gather up as much information on those subjects as we possibly can, before the internet goes down and we’re stuck with nothing.”

“But what good will it do in digital form?” Jerome asked. “There won’t be any electricity.”

It was time to talk to him like he was a child. “Jerome, there are solar chargers for laptops out there. We just need to find them. Hell, maybe we can even set up some solar panels on the roof and have electricity. But we don’t have any idea how to install that stuff. My point is that we can download a ton of information onto a flash drive. We’ll be able to work out a way to read it later when we need it, but we need to find a way to get busy on that as soon as possible.”

Jerome nodded. “Yeah. I agree.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” I said. “I’m not going to prop the door open downstairs with all of the infected running around. They could wander in here.”

“And?”

I tapped my index finger on Jerome’s sternum none too gently and said, “You need to come downstairs and mind the door while I go outside. If I come running back in a big hurry again, you need to be ready to open it up for me.”

Jerome just looked at me for several long moments as though I’d spoken another language.

“Jerome?”

“Who’s going to keep an eye on Murphy?” He asked.

“We have bigger problems than Murphy right now,” I told him. “I need your help here.”

“Yeah, fine.” Jerome nodded as he looked away from me. “I’ll take care of the door for you.”

Stepping toward the door, I said, “Then grab your gun and c’mon. Do you know how to work it yet?”

Touching his finger to the pistol’s trigger, he testily said, “I pull this.”

“Did you figure out how to change the clips last night,” I asked, “and turn the safety on and off?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I hope so,” I said as I opened the dorm room door. “Our lives are going to depend on these guns.”

“Yeah,” Jerome conceded. “I know.”

By the time we got downstairs, most of the infected had wandered off to chase other noises and presumably other prey. Less than a few dozen were still in the quad, squabbling over the scraps of the dead.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked.

Jerome looked through the glass at the carnage in the quad and nodded nervously.

“Okay,” I said, “when I go out, don’t let the door slam behind me. I don’t want the noise to call any attention to me.”

“Okay,” said Jerome, still looking past me and out through the glass door.

Fear elevated my heart rate, moistened my palms, and hastened my breathing.

I chanted my new mantra in my head. The ogre and the harpy. The ogre and the harpy.

There was no telling what might happen when I went out. Rational thought told me that the infected weren’t interested in eating me, but the world had just changed. I needed to change my assumptions along with it. My assumption last night that people wouldn’t randomly shoot at me had nearly gotten me killed.

I drew a deep breath and pushed on the door handle. “Here goes.”

I walked slowly out of the building, across the sidewalk, and onto the grass.

Please nobody pay attention to me.

The ogre and the harpy.

Only a few infected were left at the carcass of the first soldier I came to. I gathered up all that looked useful: another assault rifle, more ammunition, and a radio. The infected showed some interest in me at first, but realized quickly enough that I was one of them. My skin was pale. My eyes were dilated, like theirs. I wondered if I’d end up like them. I shuddered at the thought.

I went back to the door where Jerome waited. As planned, he opened the door and I dumped the goods on the floor inside.

Jerome smiled and nodded at me. “Good job.”

I smiled back, turned, and mouthed, “Fuck you, Jerome.” I headed out to scavenge from the next dead soldier.

By the time I arrived at what was left of the fourth soldier, I had a total of six full magazines for my assault rifle, plus a pistol in a holster and three magazines for it. An infected man was trying to pull some bloody, meaty bones out of the soldier’s tactical vest. I grabbed the vest and wrestled with it, hoping to shake the infected man’s grip on his prize. The vests, I was learning, held all the extra ammunition that the soldiers carried, plus other goodies.

A woman’s scream echoed from a few blocks to the west. I immediately looked up, as did every infected head in the quad.

While I squatted, frozen in the grass, evaluating the situation, the infected around me showed no evidence of such a paralyzing thought process. They were on their feet in an instant, heads swiveling to pinpoint the source of the sound.

Several of the infected started moving toward the chemistry building across and just down the street. Half of the rest followed at a walk or run. Many started to sprint.

I shot a glance toward Jerome, looking for advice I guess, but I only saw a reflection on the tinted glass of the closed door.

My survival instincts told me to run back to the door and get inside. With a live screaming human back in the picture, I had no idea what kind of feeding frenzy the infected might get into. I didn’t know if I’d get attacked.

The scream echoed again, closer this time.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

No infected were near me; they were all moving in pursuit.

I double-checked that the safety on my assault rifle was off and I brought it up to my shoulder. I pointed it out in front of me, the same way I used to carry my paintball gun. I checked over each of my shoulders to ensure that there were no infected flanking me.

Safe for the moment.

Chastising myself for the mistake I was sure I was making, I started walking toward the source of the sound.

It was coming from a fifty-foot wide breezeway cut through the building at its midpoint.

Another scream for help echoed out.

The infected from the quad swarmed toward the opening. More came from up the street. Those that could, sprinted. The injured among them hobbled or crawled.

The situation was clear. If the screamer came through that breezeway toward me, toward the hundreds of infected already running toward her, she was dead. They’d shred her before she made it to the street.

I flipped the switch on my gun to full auto and without an intelligent, restraining thought, I squeezed the trigger.

The infected I saw down my barrel fell. As the mass of them heard my gunfire, they skittered to a halt and turned toward me. I knew from watching the soldiers earlier that the balance of my life would be measured in seconds if I didn’t move my feet. The sound of my weapon would draw every infected from blocks around. Even if I did have enough ammunition to kill them all, they’d surround me—they’d come too fast.

My thirty-round magazine emptied. I ejected it, grabbed another from my vest and slapped it into the receiver. I mercilessly sent another thirty rounds into the horde moving in my direction.

I put in another clip. I checked my flanks and pulled the trigger.

No one came out. If someone had been running through, unless caught by the infected, they should have been out onto my side of the building.

I immediately lost hope and regretted my attempt to assist the screaming woman.

I backpedaled, and shot at the infected closest to me. I prepared to make a dash for the dormitory door and safety.

Movement to my left caught my eye. From around the end of the Chemistry building, just across the street from where I stood, a terrified girl came running.

“Uh oh.” I emptied another magazine to buy some seconds.

I ejected my clip and pushed in another as the girl started to cross the street. A half-dozen bloody infected pursued. She must have seen me as a chance to escape, because she ran right at me. I leveled my weapon at the infected behind her.

The three closest fell to my fire. I missed the fourth and got the sixth. Just as she got to me and with number four crossing the street, I fired another burst and his head exploded in a red mist. Number five tripped over the body. We had some seconds to work with.

The girl’s eyes were wide. She was gasping for air.

“We need to move,” I told her, fear and excitement turning it into a yell. I spun and raced for the door. She didn’t need further direction, and stuck with me step for step.

As we closed the distance to the door, I saw a few, then more infected coming up the gap between the buildings up ahead, the same gap they’d come through to get behind the dead soldiers in the quad earlier that day.

Panic was setting in as we reached the sidewalk in front of the door. It didn’t swing open.

“Damn it, Jerome.” I grabbed the handle and pulled.

“Hurry,” the girl screamed.

I pounded my fist on the glass. “Jerome.”

“Hurry.”

Chapter 20

I put my back to the locked door and scanned the quad. Perhaps twenty infected had just come off the street in front of the chemistry building and had rounded the corner off to our right. A half-dozen more were coming up in front of us, angling across the quad from the gap between the buildings to our left.

I could only think of one way out. “C’mon.”

I ran directly at the six infected who were angling across the quad and hoped the girl had the courage to follow or the good sense to run the other way while the infected were focused on me.

The gap closed between me and the infected rushing at me. I put the rifle to my hip, came to a sudden stop not ten feet from the closest in the group, and fired. They all fell as the magazine ran dry.

I switched my magazine and took out the closest of the pursuers behind. I shot another burst and realized that shooting more of the chasing infected was a futile effort. For each one shot, more filled in from those running up behind.

“C’mon.” I shouted at the girl. It was going to be a foot race for our lives.

I accelerated to a full sprint with the girl lagging behind. I slowed a tad, so that I didn’t leave her panicking and too far back.

I headed for the far side of the gym and prayed that when I rounded the corner, I’d be welcomed with an empty plaza.

Once at the corner, I overshot it at full speed. I didn’t want to make the turn blindly and step into the waiting arms of a lucky infected who might be there.

Fortunately, there was not one. Aside from those that I’d shot coming across the quad, any others from that side of the gym must have run around the gym in the other direction when they heard the noise of the gun and the screams.

The girl rounded the corner and she followed me toward the building’s entrance. The infected were getting close.

We made it to the doors and I thanked God that they weren’t locked. I swung one open and motioned the girl toward the door on the other side of the wide hall that led onto the basketball court where I’d been sequestered the night before with Murphy and Jerome. I stopped, fretted over my choice for half a second, and gambled. I shoved the barrel of the rifle through the looped metal handles of the double doors, effectively barring them. That wouldn’t keep the infected out, but it would buy us some time.

Just as I let go of the rifle, I heard the girl’s scream from inside on the court.

“Shit.” I drew my pistol and ran through the doors and onto the waxed wooden floor.

The girl had come to a stop just past the bleachers. I came in to see a bloody mess of bodies. Most were shot but not all were dead. None appeared to be completely mobile. Those that could move at all squirmed and crawled toward us.

“Let’s go.” I led the girl across the gym, hoping to get behind the far bleachers before the infected mob broke through the doors and saw our escape path.

The infected on the floor moaned and screamed their frustration at not being able to get their hands on us.

We made it under the bleachers and were halfway to the entrance to the tunnel system when I heard the gym’s door give way.

“We need to hurry.”

Stepping clumsily over the shin-high cross braces we arrived at the tunnel entrance. Dozens of the infected entered the gym, and their howls echoed through the cavernous space.

The girl saw where we were going and hesitated.

With no time for convincing, I simply said, “C’mon,” and jumped feet-first into the tunnel. I landed hard, eight feet below on the concrete floor and rolled forward into the pipe-covered wall.

I looked up. The girl was doing some combination of climbing and falling down the ladder.

Once she hit bottom, I held up a hand to bring her to a stop and a finger to my lips to beg her silence. Dead, noiseless air was our only friend at that moment.

If there were any infected in the tunnel already, the shadows kept the secret of their presence.

I pointed the pistol in front of me and waved for the girl to follow.

Chapter 21

We jogged quietly up the tunnel. I thought about the eventual failure of the electrical grid. How long would that take? The thought made me nervous. I had no flashlight and no matches. A failure at that moment would have left us in fatal darkness. I made a mental note of another assumption from the previous week’s life that I needed to discard—the dependability of electricity.

On one evening in the near future, nighttime would slither up over the horizon, and planet Earth would again know real darkness and the terrors that lurked there.

We followed the same route that Murphy, Jerome, and I had followed the night before. The tunnel sat parallel to the road that ran between the dorm and the chemistry building. It stretched the length of the campus from north to south.

Thankfully, I saw no movement in the distance in front of us, but that might not be the case once the infected that chased us into the gym discovered our escape route and followed us into the tunnel. The noise they’d make would alert anything in the tunnel to our presence. With only a few magazines for the pistol, I knew I couldn’t defend us for long if any infected swarmed toward us.

We needed an exit.

I made a right turn into the tunnel that led under the dorm that held Murphy and Jerome safely on the fifth floor. “Fucker,” I muttered.

The girl stopped, startled.

I shook my head to indicate that my utterance held no meaning.

“Almost there,” I whispered, pointing up the tunnel. “We’ll be safe when we get through that door at the end.” Of course, I didn’t mention that that was based only on the hope that the building wasn’t full of the infected.

I jogged down the tunnel with the girl close behind.

I had no faith that Jerome had come down and unlocked the door in the dormitory’s basement; so little, in fact, that I didn’t slow my pace as we came upon the alcove that kept the door to our dorm hidden from view. I focused instead on the doorway at the end of the tunnel that led into the building next to our dorm.

As I stepped in front of the shadowy alcove, I caught a blur of movement to my left. Before I could do little more than raise a protective arm, I was slammed hard against the other wall, with the weight of three struggling bodies pushing me to the floor.

They were infected.

For the second time in less than a week, a human jaw full of dirty teeth ripped into my left forearm.

I struggled to pull my pistol out. Just as I got hold of the handle, the infected biter threw her head back, grimaced in disgust, and spat my blood from her mouth.

She pushed forward with her arm to get off of me. The girl who’d been following me was apparently a tastier focus for her hunger. The other two infected gathered their feet beneath themselves.

As their weight came off, my pistol came free. I pressed it against the back of the head of the infected woman on top of me and pulled the trigger. Her face exploded onto the concrete floor of the tunnel.

The other two infected looked back, stunned by the explosive report of the pistol.

I raised the pistol and shot one through the neck. She fell across my legs as the other stepped to rush the uninfected girl. I shot him twice in the back. He fell but didn’t die.

The girl backed away from the writhing monster.

I squirmed out from underneath the bodies on top of me, stood, and fired a fourth bullet. It found home in the skull of the squirming man. He went limp.

The girl’s eyes were wide with shock. I probably had the same look on my face. We stood there for a second with overloaded brains and ringing ears.

A riot of screams echoed up the tunnel from whence we came.

“Oh, my God,” the girl mumbled.

We bolted at full speed toward the far end of the tunnel.

Please, God, let the door be unlocked.

A dozen seconds later, I was at the door with my hand on the knob. The life of the girl, and possibly my life, depended on whether it would turn.

I torqued the knob.

The locking mechanism inside clicked free.

I yanked hard on the door and the girl and I stepped into a dark, quiet basement.

I wasted no time in slamming the door shut, but there was no deadbolt, no latch. The only way to lock it was with a key. No key was in sight.

I scanned the dim room for something with which to secure the door.

“Damn it.” I said. “We need to keep going. They’ll figure out soon enough that we’re in here. When they do, we won’t be able to keep that door shut.”

The girl and I looked around. The basement was large, the size of a few classrooms. At its center stood an enormous heating and cooling unit. The walls were stacked with dusty junk and shelves. At the far corner, a staircase led down from a door at the top. The girl was already running toward it.

I gave one more glance to the door to the tunnel system, hoping desperately to see a lock that I knew wouldn’t be there. Confirmation of the lock’s absence sent me running to the stairs.

The girl reached the door at the top of the stairs before I made it to the first step. She grasped the handle with both hands and rattled it loudly in its frame. It was locked.

“No,” she yelled.

“Damn.” I looked around.

A chance at living returned when I spotted an elevator door to my left. It had been hidden from our view by the heating unit in the center of the room. I ran over and pressed the button. It responded with a faithful amber light.

I looked up at the girl with the last of my hopes on my face.

She looked back, frozen with the door handle in her hand, waiting for who knew what.

With my body language I urged the elevator to hasten its arrival. The sound of the infected filled the hall outside the basement door through which we’d just come.

Ding.

The elevator was arriving.

Relief.

The girl bounded down the stairs as the door to the tunnel banged hard. The infected were on the other side.

The girl yelped something I didn’t catch.

The light from the elevator seeped through the seam between the doors. It was one level up. I stepped around the heating unit to see the tunnel door. It was jiggling and coming a few inches open, before slamming shut again under the weight of the infected crowding the tunnel behind it.

The doors of the elevator opened. The girl jumped in and pushed a button. I was immediately beside her. I pressed the button to close the doors just as the infected burst into the basement. Their frustrated screams echoed through the space as the doors pulled together.

I inhaled a breath of relief, then raised my pistol and steeled myself for a danger I just knew would await us when the door opened again.

The girl looked at my unsteady hand holding the raised pistol. She put her back to the wall of the elevator.

The ogre and the harpy.

The elevator dinged to announce its intention to stop on the building’s ground floor. I looked down at the panel. The light for the top floor glowed.

I drew a full magazine from the pouch on my vest. I didn’t intend to die while fumbling for a cartridge full of bullets.

I pointed the pistol at the seam between the elevator doors. “Push that close button as soon as the door opens. I won’t be able to keep the infected out for long.”

“Okay.” Her voice cracked with fear, but she was steady enough.

The elevator stopped. I drew a sharp breath and braced myself.

The doors slid silently apart.

The girl lunged for the button and pressed it over and over.

People stood in the hall—men dressed in khakis. They didn’t move. Their eyes showed their fright.

They didn’t look infected.

They held what looked like wooden training rifles by the barrels over their heads, ready to swing.

Nobody moved. None of us knew what to do. We all had clearly expected something different when the doors opened.

The elevator dinged again and the doors started to close.

“Hey,” one of the guys said.

I pulled the pistol back by my chest, stuffed the extra magazine into my pocket, then put my hand out to stop the elevator doors. “Hey,” I replied, flatly.

“Hey,” another one said.

“Say something else,” I commanded. “I need to know you’re not infected.”

“We’re not infected,” the guy directly in front of me said. “You look like you are.”

All the guys tensed. Their toy rifles inched menacingly higher.

“Back off, fucktards,” I told them. “My gun is real.”

“He’s fine,” the girl told them. “He saved me from…from them.”

From the hall to the left of the elevator a hand reached around and grabbed my wrist.

A big guy next to the talker lurched toward me, raising his wooden rifle to strike.

I fired a deafening round into the wall beside the big guy. Everybody froze.

“If you don’t get your hand off my wrist,” I shouted, “I’m going to shoot your fucking arm off.”

The hand released and disappeared around the corner.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked harshly.

The talker said, “You’re infected.”

“I’m not,” I answered.

“When were you bitten?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m immune.”

“Nobody is immune,” the talker argued. “Your skin is pale. You’re bleeding from a bite. You’re just not done changing yet.”

With frustration dripping from my tone, I said, “There’s an epidemiologist from the CDC in the building next door. He can tell you whatever you need to know. But in the meantime, you need to believe that I’m immune because I have a gun to prove it.”

“What does the gun prove?” the talker asked.

“It proves I can shoot anybody else who lays a hand on me or tries to hit me with one of those dumbass toy rifles.”

“So you’re the guy from the building next door who was out picking up the guns this morning?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Why didn’t the infected attack you?”

I looked down at my bleeding arm. “I told you, I’m immune. They think I’m one of them, most of the time.”

The girl chimed in, “Please, you guys. Can’t any of you see what’s going on outside? The infected are everywhere, killing everyone. Why are we at each other’s throats?”

“We have to be sure,” the talker answered. “We have to keep the infected out of the building or we’re not going to get through this.”

I said, “Well your basement is full of them. They chased us up the tunnel.”

“The building is secure,” the talker said.

“Thanks for forgetting the elevator,” I told him.

“That’s the only other way out of the basement.”

“If the building’s not secure, we’ll know soon enough.” I glanced quickly between the guys in the hall, looking for any sign that one of them was going to try something again. “Listen, I don’t want to stand in this elevator all day. If you guys will back off, I’ll be happy to go and wait by a door until the infected calm down outside and I can leave.”

The talker told his four companions to lower their wooden rifles. “My name is Mark. I’m second in command here.”

“Second in command?” I asked. He appeared to be in charge.

“We’re ROTC.”

“Oh?”

Mark said, “Maybe we can help each other out.”

“Now you want to be friends?” I asked.

“Why don’t you come see our CO, and we’ll talk about it?”

I was apprehensive. Moments before, they were raring to bash my head in with their wooden guns.

Mark said, “You two can come out of the elevator. We won’t hurt you. The building is safe.”

I looked at the girl. She seemed willing. I lowered the gun, but didn’t put it away. We stepped out of the elevator, but being surrounded by uniformed men—who just moments before were hostile—made me very nervous.

Mark looked at the big guy beside him. “Tom, would you secure the elevator?”

Tom stepped into the elevator.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

“Us five and our CO,” Mark answered. “I’ll take you to meet him.”

Chapter 22

The CO was a retired military man with thinning hair, an expanding waistline, puffy cheeks, and a permanent scowl. We met him in a large storage room on the second floor that had long windows overlooking the plaza and the gym.

Mark saluted the CO when we came into the room. The CO returned his salute. Mark said, “Major Wilkins, these two entered the building through the utility tunnels and came up through the elevator.”

Wilkins asked, “Is the elevator secure now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The major turned his attention to me, “And you are?”

“Zed Zane.” I didn’t extend my hand to shake since I still held the pistol.

The major looked to the girl.

“Felicity Bingham,” she said. “I have friends in a dorm and…and we need help.”

Felicity was on the emotional edge. I expected her to burst into tears at any moment, but gave her kudos for keeping it together during our escape.

“We’ll get to that,” Wilkins said. He turned to me. “I saw what you did for Felicity out there, Mr. Zane. That was brave.”

Not comfortable taking the compliment, I shrugged.

Wilkins said, “You can holster your weapon. You’re safe in here.”

I shook my head. “Thanks for letting us in, I guess, but I think I’ll just hold it for now.”

“Why?” Wilkins asked, pointedly.

I gestured to the windows. “You’ve seen the infected. There are a lot of them.”

“They’re not in here,” Wilkins countered.

“Not yet,” I argued.

“You’re in no danger here,” Wilkins said.

“Your guys nearly attacked me coming out of the elevator.”

“When was the last time you looked in a mirror?” he asked. “You look like one of the infected.”

I looked down at myself. My skin had grown paler since I last checked. My arm was bleeding from another bite wound. I had blood and brain splattered on my shirt from when I shot the infected girl in the tunnel.

I looked back at Wilkins and shrugged. “I clean up nicely.”

Wilkins ignored that. “Let’s get right to it then. Are you infected?”

Yes, was the visible truth of it, but I had no desire to back away from my more complex version of the truth. “I’m immune.”

“Immune?” Wilkins said it slowly as though he’d just busted me stealing cookies from the jar on the counter.

“Immune,” I confirmed.

“When did you get bit?” he asked.

“About ten minutes ago in the tunnel.” True but certainly not the other true answer he was looking for.

“The utility tunnel?”

“Yeah.”

Wilkins looked hard at my forearm. “What about the other bite?”

“On Sunday,” I admitted.

“This past Sunday?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“You were bitten four days ago?”

I nodded.

“I’m assuming you’re not naturally an albino.”

“Where are you going with this?” I asked. “You can see I’m not albino. I have color in my skin, just not the normal amount. You can see I have a normal hair color.”

“But you got infected and you turned this way.”

“What do you mean, turned?”

“Turned into one of them,” Wilkins said.

“I think I’m still me.”

“You don’t seem crazed like the other infected,” Wilkins conceded.

I huffed. “I told you I’m immune.”

“Maybe you just haven’t finished turning yet,” Wilkins speculated. “There doesn’t seem to be any standard time for the infection to take over.”

“Look,” I said, coming to the end of my patience with the conversation, “there’s a guy from the CDC who’s holed up with me in the building next door. He says I won’t turn. He says I’m a slow burn.”

“A slow burn?” Wilkins asked. “What’s that?”

“Something about body temperature or something. Look, I’m fine.” I looked down at my ashen skin. “I’m just a little different now.”

“And the other infected, they won’t bother you.”

“I went over this with Mark,” I told him.

Wilkins stared me down.

I held up my arm. “They don’t like my flavor but they’re not very bright. They make mistakes.”

“So that’s why you were able to go out and strip the guns off of those dead soldiers?”

“Hey, that wasn’t you guys who shot at me last night, was it?” Anger rose in my voice.

Wilkins shook his head and patted his sidearm. “This is the only firearm we have. I’m not going to waste my ammo on a scavenger.”

“Yeah, well fuck you too,” I told him. “You can call me a scavenger or whatever, but you see what it’s like out there. We needed guns and I risked my life to get them.”

“I thought the infected didn’t like your flavor.”

“Wilkins, if you’ve been looking out the window, then you see what happens every time I go out there. I damn near get killed.”

Wilkins paused before altering course, “How many guns did you pick up altogether?”

“I’m not sure.” I wasn’t ready to give that information away.

Wilkins pushed on, “How many of you are over there?”

“What are you getting at?”

Wilkins took a deep breath, stood, and walked over to the window. “You’ve seen the news. You know what’s going on.”

I shook my head. “No, I haven’t seen the news. I don’t know shit. I know less than shit. All I know is that my stepdad went nuts, killed my mom, and bit me in the arm. I passed out for two days with a fever, and got arrested by some stupid police who thought I killed everybody. I got out of the jail during the riot…”

“The jail riot?” Wilkins interrupted. “You were in that?”

I brushed past Wilkins’ question and said, “So my friend and I made our way to the hospital, and instead of treating us, the Army tossed us over there in the gym with all of the infected. And now, the infected are running around everywhere killing everybody. Oh, and the CDC guy says it’s some incurable disease out of Somalia. There, that’s it. That’s all I know. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Wilkins nodded, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Ya think?” Sarcasm; my favorite hobby.

Wilkins softened, “Are you guys thirsty, hungry?”

The change in direction threw me off. I nodded.

Felicity said, “Yes, both.”

Wilkins turned to the cadet who’d come in with us and Mark. “Dawkins, get some sodas and some chips or something.”

“Vending machine food?” I asked.

“The same thing you have next door, I guess,” said Wilkins.

“Yep.”

Wilkins walked over to a chair that gave him a view out the window. “Why don’t you two pull up a chair? I’ll fill you in. Felicity, I’m assuming you’re not with him. At least you weren’t until you came running across the street.”

Felicity shook her head as she sat down. “No, I’m with some girls in Blanton Hall. There were four of us.”

“Blanton?” Wilkins asked, “That dorm is on the other side of campus. How’d you get over here?”

“My friend Margaret and I went downstairs to raid a vending machine for some food and…”

“And?” Wilkins asked.

“We thought we were being quiet,” she said. “We didn’t know anyone else was down on the first floor.”

“The infected were there?” Wilkins asked.

Felicity nodded. “A bunch were right there in the building, on the first floor, and we didn’t even know it.”

“So you ran?” he asked.

“I couldn’t get back to the room,” Felicity said admitted, her eyes drifting into a stare. “They caught Margaret but I just kept running. I didn’t go back to help her.”

“You couldn’t have helped her,” Wilkins told her. “If you’d gone back, you’d be dead too.”

Felicity nodded. “I just ran and ran. I couldn’t get away until Zed started shooting them.”

“And your other friends, are they still in Blanton?” Wilkins asked.

“I guess.” She nodded. “They were there when I left.”

Wilkins asked, “Do you guys have an internet connection and cable TV? Is everything still operating?”

Felicity nodded.

“So you know what’s going on?” Wilkins asked.

Felicity nodded again.

Wilkins leaned forward and put a comforting hand on Felicity’s knee. Suddenly, he seemed more like a father than a retired major with a stick up his ass. “Felicity, I don’t know if we can help your friends right now, but I’m sure they’re being smart and sitting tight in their dorm room, just like we’re sitting tight here. Why don’t you go with Mark? He’s got a connection on his laptop. Why don’t you see if you can contact them and let them know you’re all right and then we’ll see what we can do?”

Felicity said, “I have my cell phone.”

Wilkins said, “But you probably don’t have a charger with you.”

Felicity shook her head.

“I have the same problem with mine,” he told her. “Why don’t you conserve your battery and try the laptop.” He looked over at Mark. “He has it plugged.”

Felicity nodded and stood to leave the room with Mark.

Dawkins returned with cold sodas and packaged cupcakes. He handed me one of each.

“Thanks,” I told him.

Dawkins went over to stand by the door.

Without making a show of it, I slipped my pistol into its holster. I asked, “So what’s the story? What’s happening?”

Wilkins got a distant look on his face. “The infection came out of Africa about six weeks ago. Nobody really knew what it was at the time. But wait, let me preface what I know with this—we’re getting all of our information off of the cable news channels and the internet, so take everything with a grain of salt. Half of what we know is probably speculation.”

“I hear you,” I said. “Some things never change.”

Wilkins smiled and nodded. “The disease came up out of Africa. Nobody knew what it was at first. By the time that we started getting brief mentions on the news over here, there were already tens of thousands of infected in Africa, but your CDC man probably told you that.”

“He knew quite a bit about Africa, but we don’t know much of anything about how things are now.”

“So you didn’t hear about China or Europe?”

“Major, let’s just pretend I don’t know anything and go from there.”

Wilkins nodded. “China has been establishing a big presence in Africa for the past five or ten years, so they had a lot of people there. Once things got out of hand in Africa, China pulled their people. Some other countries did as well. Americans trickled out slowly because there isn’t any central authority with the power to make them all leave, but the smart ones got out. Or at least it was smart for them, but bad for the rest of us.

“China, with a sudden influx of people from Africa, suddenly had thousands of the infected on their hands. So while our news outlets were foaming at the mouth with stories about minor outbreaks in Europe, this thing was already running amok in Asia. Things got out of hand real fast.”

“Out of hand?” I asked.

“Nobody has heard a word out of China since last weekend, about the time the infection broke out here.”

“How long did all of that take in China?”

“They pulled their people from Africa about four weeks ago. Two weeks later, the internet lit up with videos and pictures of the infected. The rest of the Far East followed suit. That was two weeks ago. Now China is a black hole.”

“A black hole?” I asked.

“No television. No reporters. Very little internet traffic. It just died out. Other governments lost contact with their government.”

I shook my head. “Is that what’s happening here?”

Wilkins nodded. “Here in Austin last weekend, Dallas and San Antonio by Monday. It started in Houston on Tuesday. Some east coast cities, and now it’s all over the country.”

I asked, “But we’re a modern country. Most of China is third world. Surely we have the infrastructure in place to handle something like this?”

“I don’t know,” said Wilkins. “I’d like to think that we’re more capable, but from what I’ve seen on the news, it looks like things are going to get very, very ugly.”

“End of the world?” I asked, expecting him to disabuse me of the notion.

Wilkins nodded.

Crap.

Chapter 23

Wilkins asked, “The people you’re with, how do they feel about you being infected?”

Taking a glance in the direction of the dorm, I said, “They don’t care.”

“You must have some very understanding friends.”

“I don’t know them that well,” I said as I tried to figure out if whether to take his statement at face value. “I just met them.”

“Really?” Wilkins paused. “In the gym?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“They were infected too?” He asked.

I nodded again.

“Were there a lot like you in the gym? Immune?”

I shook my head. “We were the only three, and I’m not sure about one of us.”

“So there are just three of you?”

“You know we’re armed.” I told him, wanting to make that point clear. As much as I wanted to trust Wilkins, my first moments in the building were giving me pause.

“That’s not why I’m asking,” he assured me. “We mean you no harm. The cadets didn’t intend to threaten you when the elevator door opened. It’s just that we all have to be more careful now. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“I watched you through the window,” he said. “You picked up a lot of weapons for just three guys.”

“We were planning for the worst.”

“What can I do to talk you out of some of those weapons?” he asked.

That made me think. They were just people like me, trying not to get killed. They were wary. We all had a right to be. I asked, “What do you know about the rifles the soldiers were carrying?”

“It’s the standard weapon. It’s a military issue M-4.”

“Shows you what I know,” I said. “I was guessing an AR-15.”

“Same thing, Zed. One is for civilian use, the other, military.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, I don’t know anything about how to use or take care of one.”

“You looked like you handled it pretty well out in the quad,” said Wilkins, “when you were shooting the infected.”

“Well, as long as nothing goes wrong, I’m good. But like I said, I don’t know anything about taking care of a gun unless it shoots paintballs.”

“You’re a paintball player?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“So is my son,” he said.

“It’s a lot of fun.”

“Yep,” he agreed. “I hope he’s okay.”

“Is he here in town?” I asked.

“No.” he shook his head. “He’s in the Army, stationed up at Fort Hood.”

I didn’t know whether to offer encouragement or condolences. “Look, we’ve got more guns than we need right now. We can spare at least one M-4, and I may be able to go out and pick up those other guns. I mean, my luck has got to get better than it’s been. If you’ll show me how to handle one of these properly and how to take care of it, we’ll call it even.”

“That sounds good. How are you guys set for food?” Wilkins asked.

“Same as you, I imagine. We had eight vending machines and they all seem stocked—at least the ones I broke into.”

“We’ve got four in this building,” Wilkins told me.

“But there have got to be at least a thousand spread all over campus,” I speculated.

“You’re probably right about that,” Wilkins agreed.

“It’s not nutritious, but it’s a lot of food with a long shelf life.” I thought for a second about what else we might need. “How are you guys set for electronics? We don’t have anything.”

“I’ve got a cell phone with half a charge,” said Wilkins. “Mark may have a charger for his. Most of the guys have laptops, but again, only a couple have cords to plug them in.”

I nodded. It wasn’t great but it was better than nothing.

“Zed, you seem like a good guy to me.”

“Okay…”

“I don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” said Wilkins, “but we might all be better off if we combine forces, so to speak, and work together.”

I nodded. “Sure, we don’t have plans past getting through the day. I mean, we talked about some things, but frankly, it’s all guesswork. Do you guys want to move in together?” I laughed. “Your place or ours?”

Wilkins thought on that for a few moments. “Getting together in one building would be best. This building isn’t defensible—too many windows downstairs. Your building has fewer ground floor windows that we’d need to fortify. We might make do with that until we figure out something better.”

“That’s fine,” I agreed. “We’ve got plenty of room. We’re camped out on the fifth floor. The rooms up there have great views of the surrounding areas and they each have bunks for four.”

“That sounds good,” said Wilkins. “Are you sure you’re comfortable with us moving in?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m not worried about the elevator thing. The world is going crazy and we’re all on edge. Besides Major, you seem like a good guy.”

Wilkins asked, “And your CDC man won’t mind?”

“I doubt it,” I answered. “He’d welcome the company. I think he’s afraid to be by himself.”

“Okay,” said Wilkins, seeming satisfied with the progress of our little negotiation. “That leaves the girls in Blanton.”

I shook my head on that subject. “What are you thinking?”

“I have an idea,” he said, “but you might not like it.”

Chapter 24

With a sour look on his face, Mark swung the door open and I walked out into the blazing afternoon heat with a fully-loaded pistol in hand and half a magazine to spare. The air tasted of ash. The formerly ubiquitous traffic noise from the highway was gone. Howls of the infected echoed between the buildings. The sound of distant gunfire popped in the air—the sounds of civilization falling apart.

My feet crunched brown blades of grass as I walked out into the center of the quad. The infected lurking in the shadows of the giant oaks and behind the shady bushes gave me only a passing glance.

I squinted in the harsh light and realized that I needed sunglasses if I was going to function in the daylight hours with permanently dilated pupils.

I turned and looked up at the window on the fifth floor of the dorm where I thought Jerome would be cowering—unless Murphy had turned, broke free, and ate him. I waved an arm and watched the dormer window.

Nothing.

I waved again, but got no response. “What a pussy.”

I went about my business of collecting. With a specific prize in mind, I was lucky to find a pair of sunglasses in the pocket of the first dead soldier I came to. Seeing that the infected had no interest in me, I collected two full sets of gear including tactical vests, helmets, and weapons.

On my way back to the ROTC building I angled close by the dormitory to see what I might see.

The click of the mirrored glass door on the side of the dorm startled me. I stopped and looked over. Jerome poked his head out nervously and waved me over.

I looked around to check on the state of the infected in the area. I headed over toward Jerome, and harshly whispered, “What the hell, dude.”

Jerome nodded his head toward the infected and gave me a look that said ‘stay quiet.’ He swung the door open wide for me and noiselessly pulled it closed behind us.

In the long hallway that ran the length of the building, I laid the equipment on the floor and turned on Jerome. I made no attempt to mask my anger. “Damn it, Jerome, I could have been killed by those infected. You were supposed to open the door. What the hell?”

“Dude, dude. Be cool, man.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t need to be cool, man. What I need to do is beat your ass.”

Jerome stepped back. In a condescending tone, he said, “Don’t go all Neanderthal on me, Zed. Grow up. I did what I had to do.”

“You had to lock me out because you’re a pussy, you mean?”

“Zed, if I had let you in with a hundred infected chasing you and hundreds more coming up the street, how long do you think that door would have held once they saw you come through it?”

I didn’t answer. My rage had bubbled to the surface and my brain, impaired by anger, was in no mood to hear reason.

“Think about it, man.”

I huffed and picked the gear up off the floor just to keep my fists from balling up and beating Jerome.

“You know I’m right. They would have come in here and killed you, me, Murphy, and that girl. And then where would you be?”

I held up my freshly bitten and still oozing forearm for Jerome to see. “They wouldn’t have killed us. They don’t seem to like our flavor.”

“But one bit you anyway,” he argued.

“Duh.” It’s amazing how much you can make one syllable sound like “fuck you anyway,” when you really try.

“Don’t you see, Zed?”

“See what?”

“Just because they don’t want to eat us doesn’t mean they won’t injure us if they’re in an excited state. They might even kill us.”

I headed toward the elevator.

“By the way, what happened to the girl?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s in the building next door.”

As we rode the elevator up, I quickly related what had transpired. We were standing in the hall on the fifth floor when I finished and I told him about Wilkins’ idea that we join forces.

Jerome said, “That’s not a good idea.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have them here. We don’t know these guys.”

“Jerome, twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t know you. Forty-eight hours ago, I didn’t know Murphy.”

Shaking his head, he argued, “That’s not what I’m trying to say. They’re not like us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Infected.”

I snorted and looked away. “I talked to them. We’re cool. They know what the deal is. They know we’re fine. Speaking of which, how’s Murphy?”

“This is a bad idea.” We reached the door of our commandeered room. “Murphy started coming around about a half hour ago.”

“And?” I asked.

“And I think he’s going to be like us, a slow burner.”

I nodded and went in.

Murphy was sitting on the bed guzzling a sports drink. His cuffs were off.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Like crap,” Murphy answered.

“It gets better,” I offered. “Drink lots of liquids. Eat what you can. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be back to normal, or at least as normal as you’re ever going to be again.”

Murphy made a show of looking down at the light-colored skin on his arms. He shook his head. “Are you saying I’m staying this color?”

“Yes,” Jerome answered. “Just be happy you didn’t turn into one of the cannibals.”

“Cannibals?” Murphy asked.

I said, “You’ve missed a lot while you were out.”

“How long?” Murphy asked.

I turned to Jerome. “Why don’t you fill Murphy in? I’m going to get the people from next door.”

“Zed, I still think it’s a bad idea,” said Jerome.

“I know,” I answered. “But it’s a done deal, so let’s be big boys and deal with it.”

I picked up a couple of M-4s that were leaning against the wall, booty from my earlier trip outside. “Jerome, are these loaded?”

He nodded.

“I’ll take these two with me,” I told him. “Are those clips full?”

“The ones on the left are.” He pointed. “The ones on the right are empty.”

“Thanks.” I scooped up a few magazines.

Jerome said, “I know you’re mad, but you did the right thing, helping that girl. That was heroic.”

It was hard, really hard but I said, “You did too, Jerome. If you’d opened the door, we’d probably all have been killed.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Murphy asked.

“He’ll tell you.” I headed downstairs.

The dormitory and the ROTC building were rectangular buildings, erected in line with one another. They formed the southern boundary of the east mall, which lay on the opposite side of the buildings from the quad and Gregory Gym. Because of that, the door at the east end of the dorm fed directly into the door at the western end of the ROTC building with a mere twenty feet of sidewalk in between.

As Major Wilkins and I had arranged, his group was waiting at the western door of the ROTC building when I got to the dormitory’s eastern door. I leaned the extra M-4s against the wall just inside the door and checked the gap between the buildings for lingering infected. I saw that it was clear, and swung the door open. I held it wide and stepped out as far as I could into the gap. I saw infected in the distance, but there were no nearby threats.

I raised a finger to my lips to indicate quiet and waved Wilkins’ group across.

Moments later, Wilkins, Felicity, and the five ROTC guys were in the dorm—with the door closing behind—each exhaling breath they probably hadn’t realized they were holding.

Two of the ROTC guys, Mark and Tom, wasted no time in taking ownership of the weapons I’d leaned against the wall.

I said, “There’s more ammunition upstairs. We don’t have enough weapons for everyone, but there are a lot more outside.”

“Thanks,” Wilkins said, reaching out to shake my hand.

I grabbed Wilkins’ hand and noticed Mark flinch. I glanced and down at my hand to check for blood and gory bits. Nothing.

Mark’s reaction rattled me. Something wasn’t right.

Wilkins fished a pair of car keys out of his pocket and handed them to me. “I can go with you,” he said.

“I can go outside, because I’m infected,” I told him bluntly. “If you go out, the infected will come after you and we won’t stand a chance. Thanks for offering though.”

Wilkins silently agreed.

Felicity jumped between us and threw her arms around me. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

I shrugged as she let go. “Thank me when I get back with your friends.”

She pulled out her cell phone and gave it to me. “Remember, call Amber. She’s on my favorites list, the first one.”

“Okay,” I said. “They know I’m coming and they’re ready to go, right?”

“Yes,” Felicity confirmed.

“And your phone has enough of a charge?” I asked.

“About half a charge,” she said, “but that should be more than enough.”

“Yeah, okay.” I looked everyone over. “Jerome is up on the fifth floor. He and Murphy know you’re coming but be sure to say something when you get off the elevator, just in case.”

“Will do,” Wilkins told me.

With my pistol drawn, I opened the door and went back out into the heat.

Chapter 25

With a callousness that should never have grown so quickly, I walked among the scattered remains of the soldiers, picked out another M-4, and morbidly restocked my ammunition supply. An extra pistol seemed like a good idea, but I cut off my shopping trip there, not wanting to burden myself unduly for when I’d next have to run for my life.

A faculty parking lot lay two blocks over, just as Wilkins had told me. Among the half-dozen cars, I easily spotted his gray sedan. As I approached the vehicle, I clicked the remote once to unlock the driver’s side door. The car responded with a chirp and a flash of the parking lights.

Oops.

I looked around quickly as I realized that it would most likely be some old habit from a different world that would eventually get me killed.

A half-dozen infected were looking at or already running toward the car.

I ran the last twenty feet, flung the driver’s door open, tossed in the M-4, followed it in, and slammed the door shut just as two infected pounced on the car. One landed on the hood and immediately started to beat on the windshield with his fist. The other tried to press his face through the glass on the passenger side window.

“Stupid.” Adrenaline shook my hands as I found the ignition key and started the engine.

The sound of the relatively quiet engine was enough to send the infected into a frenzy. The car bounced as two more infected bodies slammed into its side. The windshield cracked under the persistent fist of the infected woman on the hood.

I shoved the car into reverse and spun the wheels as I backed out. I ran over a soft bump and counted one infected dead. With the crazy infected clawing at the glass all around, I backed into a parked pickup I didn’t see. I shifted the transmission, punched the accelerator to the floor, and the front-wheel drive pulled the car hard right, into two more infected. They rolled off the hood as I raced toward the parking lot exit. I swerved hard to make the turn, and the infected woman on my hood slipped away and skittered across the asphalt.

I raced out onto the street and caught another infected with the passenger side bumper, breaking out the headlight. I checked the rearview mirror. A dozen infected were running up the street in full speed pursuit.

When I hit forty, I figured I’d better dodge as many infected as I could, lest I damage the car’s radiator with an impact. They were everywhere—coming out into the street and onto the sidewalks, out on the expansive lawns, from the gardens and fountains. As I passed, every single head snapped in my direction. Every one of the infected flowed into the street after me.

Good God, there were thousands.

I pushed the car to sixty as another one of the infected glanced off the passenger side of the vehicle.

I smashed the brakes hard and rubber screamed on the asphalt as the car floated into a left turn. I spun the car out on a broad boulevard near the northern edge of the campus and headed west.

I regained control and accelerated toward a wide pedestrian bridge that linked the main campus with the buildings to the north. A hundred heads popped up above the rail on the pedestrian bridge as I rolled under. Just as the echo of the engine bounced back to me off of the concrete all around, I saw the dark silhouette of a body fall in front of me from the walkway above.

I braked and swerved as two more bodies fell. I hit one with the bumper just as the car jarred under the double impact of one on the hood and another on the roof. The windshield shattered into a translucent web.

My foot found the accelerator again and the infected rolled off, but I was nearly blind and speeding west.

I looked to my left and right to gauge my position in the road, and to judge how much further I needed to go. I prayed nothing lay in the street in front of me.

The car lurched from another impact. A body smashed partially through the windshield with a crunch of bones and a splatter of blood. The girl now stuck in the windshield had done me the favor of knocking out enough of the shattered glass for me to see ahead.

I spied a street to the left and cut the wheels hard, skidding loudly. I sideswiped a parked car and drew the attention of a few infected up the street, who immediately came at me.

I checked the rearview mirror. At least a hundred frenzied infected were rounding the corner behind me.

The car wasn’t going to last much longer. I needed to stop and get away from it as fast as possible, or the infected would shred me in their frenzy before they realized that I wasn’t tasty.

I aimed the car at a sharp right-hand corner ahead. Past caring about damage to the sedan, I ran down two more infected and watched parts of the bumper and parts of bodies fly past.

I slammed the brakes as I rounded the curve, and angled toward another parked car.

The collision crunched painfully loud. The airbag deployed and slapped my face hard enough to bloody my nose. The horn bleated and didn’t stop.

I tried the door but it was jammed shut. I elbowed out the fractured driver’s side window and crawled out as quickly as I could with no thought to cuts and scrapes.

I fell free and hit the asphalt with a slap.

I got my feet beneath me, pulled the pistol, and shot two infected who were only steps away.

Thanks to Wilkins’ demonstrably shitty plan, I only had seconds to live unless I put some distance between myself, the wailing car horn, and the infected mob coming up the street.

A quick glance around told me I might have time to grab the M-4 off of the passenger floorboard and get away. To face the frenzied infected without it was certain death.

I jumped back through the window, scrabbling forward. I got a hand on the M-4, smashed my forehead into the cracked passenger side window, and broke it out as I fell through.

I hit the asphalt and rolled into a somersault that put me back on my feet. I was so surprised that it worked that I almost forgot to move.

I made a beeline for the corner of the nearest building and faced eight infected as soon as I made the turn. They were running toward the sound of the car, but caught a magazine full of M-4 rounds for their trouble. I didn’t slow down at all.

Two infected came up out of a stairwell to the building’s basement just as I passed. I shouldered the first one and tumbled them both down the stairs.

I spied a door just ahead and prayed that it wasn’t locked.

Fast feet and adrenaline got me there. I cradled the M-4 in my right arm and pulled the door handle with my left.

It opened.

I stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind me, cutting off the howls of the infected running up the side of the building. I needed a place to hide, and I needed it now.

I ran into a stairwell as the vanguard of the infected horde hit the door. Thankfully, it was another door that opened out, rather than in. Their collective weight held it closed as they struggled to get in, but that would only last for a moment.

I bounded up the stairs and passed two, then three infected. I gasped for air. The first floor door burst open as hundreds of screams filled the stairwell.

I exited the stairwell on three. The hall was empty. Thank God.

Elevator.

If I could get inside, I might be safe.

I ran up the hall and hit the button. The light came on and I waited.

And I waited.

The infected were on the stairs.

“C’mon.”

The infected were close.

The stairwell door slammed open loudly and the infected tripped over each other, spilling into the third floor hall. They saw me.

The elevator chimed and I stepped inside, pushing the button to close the door.

Safe.

I flipped the emergency switch to lock the elevator to keep it from moving up or down— fell back against the wall, slid down to the floor, and finally breathed.

Two breaths later, the elevator doors reverberated with the impact of bodies smashing into it.

Damn. Persistent fuckers.

Fingers started to squeeze their way between the doors.

I jumped to my feet, unlocked the elevator, and pressed the button for the lowest level in the building. The elevator complied, and took me down to the basement. I reloaded the M-4, leveled it at the door, drew several deep breaths to steady myself, and prepared to run and shoot. The elevator chimed and the door opened. Nobody was there.

I stepped out just as I heard the sound of several pairs of feet running up the hall.

Infected.

I pointed the rifle, but knew that if I pulled the trigger, I would never get out of the building alive.

The ogre and the harpy.

It was time to gamble that these guys weren’t in the frenzied mob that was following me, but were lingering in the basement and simply attracted by the elevator noise. I stepped back against the wall, lowered my M-4, and drew the pistol.

The infected slowed as they neared me, stopped, looked me over, saw my white skin, and realized that I was one of them. They turned their attention to the closing elevator doors.

I drew a deep breath and stepped up next to them. Blending in couldn’t hurt.

They spent a full minute searching the elevator for something worth eating. They somehow decided amongst themselves that it was empty, and they followed one another through the open rooms on the basement floor, methodically searching for a live human. I searched with them. With the frenzied mob running through the floors above and howling in frustration, I figured the camouflage of being in a small group of infected might keep me safe.

None of the horde ventured into the basement, but it took a half hour before the noise above diminished.

One by one, the infected in my group gave up the search and settled themselves into a shadowy corner of one of the classrooms where they squatted and stared. I watched them for a bit and wondered how long they’d stay there in the absence of a stimulus.

I found an empty classroom as far from the infected in the basement as I could get. I went in and gently closed the door behind me. Calculus formulae and equations waited on the chalkboards for students who would never arrive. Desks sat in neat rows, waiting for years of rust and rot to erase them from the world.

Sunlight shone in from the west through three window wells that also provided me an ankle-level view outside.

I needed to be patient. The car’s incessant horn was keeping the infected feet outside hurrying urgently around in search of prey. I’d have to stay hidden until they lost interest or the battery died.

I took a seat on the floor where I could lean on the instructor’s desk and be hidden from any eyes peeking through the door.

I was drenched with sweat. I was thirsty and had an adrenaline hangover. At least the room was cool, the floor was wonderfully cold, and I felt somewhat safe.

It was time to think through the next steps. The original plan of loading up the girls and driving them back was off the table. That bad plan had been based on too many old world assumptions. The tunnels were likely still full of infected from my adventure with Felicity earlier in the day. Sneaking back on my own was an option, but the girls’ dormitory lay just across the street.

I needed to think.

The cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was Wilkins with a text message.

Wilkins: Zed, are you okay?

Me: I’m ok.

Wilkins: The girls said they heard a car crash.

Me: About that…

Wilkins: ?

Me: The car was an idea that sounded good but wasn’t. Your car is toast.

Wilkins: It’s wrecked?

Me: The car was a magnet for the infected. They swarmed it as soon as I opened the door.

Wilkins: But you’re okay?

Me: I got lucky, but yes.

Wilkins: Are you still going to try to get the girls, or will you come back?

Me: I don’t know.

Wilkins: Where are you?

Me: I’m in a basement classroom in the building across the street from Blanton.

Wilkins: I’ll let the girls know you’re there.

Me: Tell them to keep quiet. I need some time to figure this out. I’m open to any ideas you guys might have.

I got nothing back for several long minutes.

Wilkins: Nothing on this end. Will keep you posted.

Me: Ok.

I passed an hour in silence, with no ideas from Wilkins.

The shadows were growing long. The infected finally dispersed to wherever they preferred to lurk. I still had no idea how to get the girls back to the rest of the group, but sitting by myself in a basement wasn’t going to solve the problem. I texted Felicity’s friend Amber to let her know I was on the way, and that I’d knock very softly on their door when I arrived.

Chapter 26

Crossing the street was uneventful. Entering Blanton was no problem, as the first door I tried was unlocked. This made sense, since the dorm was in use for the summer session. In the recreation area, I passed at least a dozen infected women—former residents, I guessed—who squatted in a corner and eyed me as I passed by.

I passed the elevator, with its attractive chime, and slipped into a stairwell. I paused and listened. A few floors up, I heard the sound of the infected squabbling over scraps.

I quietly made my way up toward the sound. On the third floor landing, five infected girls were gnawing at someone’s remains—torn clothing, smears of blood, and ragged bones.

The infected snarled, and greedily pushed at me as I waded through. They had no intention of sharing with me.

A fat one squatted in front of the door at the top of the stairs and glared. She got irritated as I pushed past, but did nothing to harm me. I tried to close the door behind me, but she had shifted when I opened the door—her girth prevented it from closing.

The hall was empty in both directions. I took a guess and turned right, reading the door numbers as I walked. I arrived at the correct door and softly knocked.

No response.

Give me a break.

I knocked again.

A voice quietly asked from the other side, “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Zed,” I whispered. I heard noises from the stairwell and turned to my right. Nothing was coming, yet. “Open the door, please.”

I heard the working of the lock and then the door opened.

I stepped inside. A girl was behind the door ready to push it shut, but she pressed herself to the wall in fear when her eyes fell on me. A girl over by the window threw her hands over her mouth and screamed in wide-eyed terror.

“Damn it. Quiet.” I pushed the door shut, but heard a wail and the sounds of running footsteps coming up the hall.

The infected.

I turned to the girl and snapped, “What was that for?”

“I thought…I thought you were one of them,” she said.

“Damn it.” My frustration after a seemingly long sequence of fuck-ups was getting the best of me. “Does every fucking thing have to go wrong? Felicity should have told you about me. You two, get back.”

The girls moved over by the window. I stood in the center of the room and leveled my M-4 at the door, but I already knew that was a bad idea. Gunfire would draw every one of the crazy bastards from blocks around.

My mind raced for an escape plan but before the slightest inkling of a thought could gel, the door shook under the assault of a heavy body running at it. Fists pounded. The doorknob jiggled. The infected wailed and the door flexed.

“Shit.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that aloud. “Have either of you used a gun before?”

The screamer nodded. The other shook her head.

“It’s easy. Point and pull the trigger. But be careful and don’t shoot me.” I handed them each a pistol. “The safety is off.”

“Let’s block the door,” the screamer said.

D’oh. Good idea. “Is that desk bolted down?” I asked.

“It moves,” the screamer told me.

“Great,” I said, “Help me get it to the door.”

As fast as we could, we stacked the bulky desks in front of the door as it rattled in its frame.

I leaned into the wooden desks, adding my strength to the weight. I felt each blow to the door as the wood conveyed the vibration of each fist blow and headlong rush. The girls found every heavy object in the room and stacked them in and on the desks, adding to the dead weight supporting the door against the assault.

With everything moved, the screamer took a position beside me and leaned into the desk. She leaned close to and whispered, “Will they go away?”

I nodded. I hoped.

Chapter 27

Over the course of an hour, the beating on the door dissipated, then ceased. The girls and I silently maintained our positions, holding the desks against the wall for a good while past when we heard the last of the noises disappear.

Finally, we relaxed. I sat on the floor with my back to the desk. Each girl sat on a bed, exhausted, fearful, and hopeless.

No words were spoken between us. The hour-long assault taught us the value of silence when we didn’t know how close the nearest ears might be.

I reached into my pocket for the incessantly buzzing cell phone and handed it to one of the girls. Worried, the others had sent dozens of text messages. In the absence of a response, Felicity probably feared that her friends and I were dead. I’d leave it to the girls to sort it all out.

One of the girls put a hand to her mouth and pantomimed drinking something from a bottle. She pointed at me with a question on her face.

I looked around the room. Empty water bottles and soda cans were scattered on the floor, but nothing that looked like it held any liquid. They didn’t have anything and I didn’t bring anything to drink with me. My past life presumption on the ubiquity of clean water just got killed. I needed to stop learning things the hard way.

I shook my head.

One of the girls, the dark haired screamer, picked up a notepad and pen. She wrote on it and showed it to me.

Amber.

She pointed to herself.

I nodded.

She wrote another name and showed it to me and pointed to the blonde.

Marcy.

I nodded and smiled.

Amber handed the pad and pen to me.

I wrote my name and showed it to them. Didn’t they already know?

Amber took the pad, drew a large question mark and showed it to me.

I shrugged. She got a determined look on her face, but Marcy deflated and sagged against the wall. I thought she might cry.

I closed my eyes and let my head down into my hands, resting my elbows on my knees.

I needed to think.

I heard the very faint taps on the screen of the cellphone as Amber communicated with the other group. The other dorm was probably three quarters of a mile to a mile diagonally across campus. That distance was swarming with infected, all with apparently endless appetites and irritating persistence.

Options again?

Save my own ass and leave the girls? No.

A car? No fucking way.

The tunnels? A gamble with bad odds and no sure escape if things went sour.

I was stuck ruminating on those three options. There had to be others.

The last light of dusk faded slowly from the sky and another hour ticked past. Darkness and shadows from the streetlights were all I could see through the leaves of the oak trees outside the window. I thought about whether the darkness would offer us any advantage in an escape. I knew I couldn’t see any better in the dark, and I didn’t imagine the other infected could either. We all still had the same human physiology we’d had before the disease struck. They had diminished brain capacity. We all had less pigment and dilated pupils. Oh, and one other thing I was coming to suspect—sensations of pain seemed to be all but gone. I felt everything just as I had before, but things that should have hurt so much that I’d normally cry out in pain, didn’t. The painful part of sensation was gone. I’d need to ask Jerome about that.

An idea came to me but I needed to risk a conversation with the girls.

I scooted up on the floor and we all leaned in close together.

I bent forward and whispered, “So you guys texted Felicity, right?”

Amber and Marcy nodded.

“So you know the deal, then.” I looked at each until they nodded. “I have an idea to get us out of here so that we can join the others. Is that what you want to do?”

Marcy nodded.

Amber said, “If we stay here alone, it’s only a matter of time before…”

She was right about that; the fate that she couldn’t bring herself to speak. They would both die.

“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t know that we’ll make it all the way across campus.”

Mary asked, “You think we might get stuck somewhere?”

“No,” I told her. “We might get killed.”

“Killed?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to paint a rosy picture for them. They needed to know the honest reality in order to make their own choices. I didn’t want to carry the burden of a lie along with the burden of their deaths, if it came to that. “I think there’s very little chance that you’ll make it there alive.”

“But we have guns,” Marcy countered.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “There are too many of them. If we have to shoot, we’ll kill a few, but every infected on campus will come running. There are thousands.”

Marcy deflated and stared down at the nearly useless pistol. Fifteen rounds in a Glock would do little more than delay your death with a hundred infected coming at you. Guns were no solution when dealing with the infected. But guns bought time and time bought distance. Those were the things that could save your life. The only way for a normal not to get killed by the infected was to not be near them.

Amber asked, “If we stay, how long do you think it’ll be before someone comes to rescue us?”

I shook my head, “I don’t know. You probably know better than me. All I know is what Wilkins told me. I haven’t seen any news since, like, Saturday.”

Marcy hissed, “Amber, nobody’s coming. You’ve seen the news.” She dismissively pointed at me. “This is it.”

“Thanks.” Bitch.

Marcy interpreted my tone. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

Amber stepped in, “She didn’t mean it like that, Zed. We’ve just been stuck in here for two days. We look out the window and we see what’s going on. We’ve been online; we know what’s going on everywhere. Marcy hasn’t been able to get her parents on the phone since Monday. My dad tried to drive in from Lubbock to get me, but he can’t get past the roadblocks around Abilene. We’ve lost our friends. We’re tired. We’re hungry. We’re thirsty, and we’re scared.” Tears filled her eyes.

I looked down at the floor. I felt bad. I wasn’t emotionally attached to the ones I’d lost, and as long as my temperature didn’t continue to rise, at least I had a good chance at remaining alive. For the girls, however, the losses were real, and death loomed large.

“Look, I don’t mean to be a dick,” I said. “It just kind of happens by itself. Marcy, can you pop open your laptop and pull up a campus map? I have an idea that might work. It might take us all night to get to the other dorm, but if we’re careful, I think we can do it.”

With the map in front of us, I explained my plan and was rewarded with a tiny spark of hope in their eyes. I told them to pack up their backpacks.

Marcy said, “I don’t even know what to take.”

“Whatever you’ll need for the rest of your life,” I told her with a straight face, then smiled.

Marcy smiled and rolled her eyes. Amber suppressed a laugh.

In a tense situation, any joke will do.

“I don’t know anything about all this end of the world stuff,” I said, “but if I were you, I’d wear the most rugged shoes I owned. Wear some jeans. Bring some socks and undies, maybe an extra shirt. Bring your computer and charger if you want. Don’t bring more than you can run with. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few days, it’s that you’ll have to run.”

“Why do we need our computers?” Amber asked.

“As long as we have electricity and an internet connection, they’ll come in real handy,” I said.

Both girls nodded.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s get these desks moved as quietly as possible.”

Moving everything while making no sound took a while. When we finished, I very slowly opened the door and peeked out. The hall was empty. I looked to the girls for final confirmation. They nodded.

I headed to the north end of the building. The girls closed the door behind.

I walked as quietly as I could up the hall. I heard no sounds from any lingering infected, but every shadow I passed made me nervous.

At the end of the hall, I slipped into the stairwell and stopped on the landing to listen. No sound came up from below.

I made my way down to the first floor and out into the hall. Just outside the stairwell, the girls told me there was a public restroom. I entered and closed the door silently behind me. I methodically checked each stall to ensure it was empty. The window on the exterior wall had been replaced by translucent glass block. That was good.

On the way out, I checked the door, and indeed, there was a deadbolt lock that could be set from the inside. That was a piece of luck. I closed the door and went back upstairs. From the hall, I texted the girls. A moment later, they opened the door and let me in.

“The bathroom at the bottom of the stairs is clear,” I told them. “The way there is clear. If we go quietly, we can make it.”

Amber nodded.

Marcy’s fear was getting the best of her. She stared through me.

I said, “If you want to back out, now is the time.”

“No.” Amber shook her head and authoritatively said, “We need to go. It’s our only chance.”

“Okay,” I said. “Remember—quiet.”

It took several tense minutes, but we made it down the hall, down the stairs, and into the restroom. I locked the door as we stepped in, then rechecked each stall to ensure that it hadn’t become occupied during my short absence.

“Okay,” I whispered to the girls. “Are we cool?”

Moving was doing Marcy good.

Amber nervously smiled.

I said, “The entrance to the bio-chem building is just across the street from the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I’m going to head across and find us a room there on the first floor. I’ll be back. Keep the door locked while I’m gone. If the infected come, remember, stay quiet. I’ll find a place to hide close by until they wander off. If all goes to shit, then I’ll just shoot them all and we’ll run back up to the room and hope for the best.”

Amber said, “Go ahead. We’re good.”

“Yes,” Marcy agreed.

I left the restroom and crept out across the street and into the bio-chem building. I found our next leap-frog room there on the second floor, just a short distance inside the building. The first floor wasn’t an option. Many infected were silently squatting in the hall up at the other end of the building.

In that fashion, we very slowly worked our way across campus, staying mostly inside, sometimes traversing the length of a building on the first floor, sometimes on the second, and sometimes on the third or fourth.

Thankfully, the school was in a summer session. During the regular semester, there would have been ten times as many students around, hence ten times as many infected in the buildings. As it was, I suspected many of the infected outdoors had wandered onto the campus from the surrounding city.

It took hours, but we arrived at the last outdoor space we had to cross—the street near where Felicity had run earlier that day. Unlike Felicity’s crossing, ours was uneventful. The door on the western end of the dormitory opened as we approached.

We’d made it.

Chapter 28

I stirred when the sun came up and the room got warm, but I pulled my pillow up over my head and extended the darkness.

Later in the morning, voices crept through, but I kept my eyes closed tight and sleep came again.

When I finally did roll over and surrender to the strident sunshine, it was close to ten in the morning. I was alone in the room. I stared at the bunk above me, listening to the morning sounds coming in through the windows and thinking about the previous day’s events. The breeze disturbed the window blinds. Grackles annoyed one another in the branches of the giant oaks. A squirrel chattered a warning. Occasional gunshots in the background were starting to seem ordinary.

The door opened and I tilted my head to see Jerome come into the room. He looked worried.

“Hey,” I said.

“You’re up?”

He came over and sat in the desk chair nearest my bunk. He took a long look out the window at nothing, then said, “The ROTC guys don’t like me.”

“Jerome, I don’t think junior high social concerns are at the top of the list of things we have to worry about.”

He grimaced. “You say that now, but they don’t like you either.”

“Big deal.” I rolled over on my side and then sat up.

“Zed, they’re afraid of us. That Mark guy said we’re an abomination in the face of God.”

That took me by surprise. “Did God tell him that?”

Jerome ignored me. “They think that because we’re infected, we’re a danger to them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Did you tell them that they didn’t have to worry?”

“Of course, I did.”

“And they didn’t believe you?” I asked though I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t.

Jerome shook his head.

“Why not?” I asked. “You’re from the CDC, if anybody knows what’s going on, it’s you.”

Jerome stared at the floor. “Yeah, well, that’s just it.”

“What’s just it?” I asked.

More staring. More waiting. He said, “You’re going to find out soon enough, so I might as well tell you.”

“Okay,” I prompted.

“All that stuff I told you about the infection—I learned most of that on the internet.”

I swung my feet onto the floor and leaned forward, my interest piqued. “So, are you saying that the CDC didn’t send you to Africa?”

Jerome shook his head.

“So, you didn’t have any real experience with the infection when the CDC sent you to Austin.”

Jerome took a moment to respond. “The CDC didn’t send me to Austin.”

“So what, you just left Atlanta and came here on your own?”

“Zed, I’ve never been to Atlanta.”

“What? What are you saying, Jerome?”

Jerome sighed and looked out the window. “I don’t work for the CDC.”

I was taken aback. “But…”

He muttered, “I own a sub shop over on Guadalupe Street.”

“You own a sub shop across the street from campus?” I said more than asked as the volume in my voice grew.

Jerome nodded.

My temper flared. I wanted to punch him in the face. I wanted to punch him in the face a bunch of times. I jumped up from the bed and he flinched away. I paced around the room and drew several angry breaths. “Why are you telling me this now, Jerome? I already bought your line of bullshit about the CDC.”

Jerome stared out the window but didn’t answer.

“Well?” I prodded.

“Because those ROTC guys—Tom and Mark—they used to come into my shop all the time. They recognized me.”

“So, you’re just a lying pussy. That’s the bottom line here, right? You made up all that shit so that I’d get you out of the gym, so I’d take all the risks while you sat up here in the room all safe and sissy-like, too valuable to go outside.”

“It’s not like that.” Jerome was looking at the floor.

My fists were clenched. My voice was harsh. “I don’t see how it couldn’t be like that. But hey, why don’t you fuckin’ tell me what it’s like?”

Jerome didn’t.

“Well?” I demanded.

No reply.

“You fucker,” I muttered. I grabbed a warm can of soda and a package of plastic-wrapped something-or-other off of the stack on the desk and headed for the door.

In a weak voice, Jerome said, “Zed, I’m sorry.”

I ignored him and slammed the door shut on my way out of the room.

Wilkins was coming up the hall just in front of me. “Mad?” he asked.

“God damn Jerome,” I groused.

“I guess you found out he’s not with the CDC.”

“Yep.” I stomped down the hall. Jerome had literally sent me out among the infected, based on something he’d read on the internet. What really bothered me though, was the question of my prognosis. Was I going to turn? Was I going to become a mindless zombie, squatting in the shadows until a normal with a gun put me down?

I stomped into the common area with a scowl on my face. Murphy was sitting on a couch, chatting up Amber and Felicity, back to his loquacious self. The only difference from the time I first saw him was that he was a much paler brown than before.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Amber told me as I walked up. “You saved our lives.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t nothing, but what else was I going to do? “Anybody would have done it.”

“Not Jerome,” said Felicity.

Murphy laughed heartily at that. “Man, I would have come with, but I was passed out from the infection.”

“Yeah,” I agreed and sat down on the couch. I opened my tiny donuts and cola. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re downstairs, fortifying the windows, I think,” Felicity said.

“With what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“I guess it doesn’t matter.” I shrugged. “It needs to be done.”

Murphy spoke up, “Wilkins wants everybody to meet at three o’clock to talk about our situation.”

“Wilkins does?” I asked, unnecessarily.

“Yep,” Murphy said. “He’s in charge, right?”

I looked around. “Nobody told me.”

Amber shook her head and raised her palms. “We’re new.”

“We’re all new,” I told them. “Did you guys eat already?”

“Vending machine food never tasted so good,” said Amber.

“It’s going to get old in a hurry,” said Murphy.

We all agreed, then ran out of words. I started eating. Without the talking, the mood blackened as we were all left to our thoughts about what was going on outside—about what had happened over the past few days, the things we’d all seen, and the bleakness of the future.

It was Murphy who piped up first, “Man, the last thing I remember was you and me were in that creek bed. I don’t even know how we got in the creek bed, but I remember walking in the sun.”

I looked at him, “You don’t remember the transients? The guy who drove us to the hospital? The gym? Anything?”

“No man, nothing.” Murphy said loudly in a voice that was used to being at the center of attention, “Like I said, I was feeling like crap and walking up that creek bed with you, and that’s it.”

“I guess you were pretty sick.” I half smiled. “Probably delirious with the fever.”

“I guess, man,” Murphy agreed. “I didn’t know what to think when I woke up cuffed to that bed yesterday.”

“Jerome didn’t tell you anything?” I asked.

Murphy said, “No, mostly he just stared out the window. When I’d ask him a question, he’d shush me.”

I took some time to relate to Murphy the story of how we made it from the creek bed to the dorm. The girls listened with great interest. I purposefully didn’t mention the jail and Murphy didn’t bring it up.

When I finished, Felicity asked, “So you guys and Jerome are all infected.”

“It seems so,” I answered.

Amber scooted up in her chair but took a moment to formulate her question. In the end, she went with bluntness. “Are you guys going to turn out like…like the others?”

“The other infected?” I asked, though I knew what she meant.

Amber nodded.

“I don’t know.” I looked around and scratched my chin. “Jerome says no, but he just read that on the internet.”

“So you could turn any minute?” Amber pushed on.

“I don’t know. I think if it was going to happen, it would have.” Not really a lie—perhaps a hope.

Murphy added, “As long as I don’t get any whiter, I don’t care.”

We all laughed. We needed the levity.

“What does it feel like?” Amber asked.

“What?” I asked.

“Being infected,” she clarified.

“Like the flu, a really bad flu,” I answered.

“No,” Amber said, “I mean now. Do you feel normal?”

“Mostly, I guess.” I looked down at my hands, legs, and feet.

“I feel just fine,” Murphy added, “except bright light is hard to see in.”

“Our pupils are stuck in a dilated state,” I clarified.

“What?” Amber asked.

I said, “Jerome told me. When you’re infected, your pupils dilate and stay that way.”

“Does the bright light hurt?” Amber asked.

“No,” I shook my head, “it doesn’t hurt. It just feels uncomfortable.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I turned to Felicity. “Do you remember that infected guy that jumped out and bit me on the arm when we were in the tunnel?”

She nodded, shuddering at the memory.

“I felt the bite, but it didn’t hurt. I mean, I could feel the pressure of his teeth on my arm, I even felt my skin tearing, but there wasn’t any pain.”

“Maybe you hit your head too hard when you fell against the wall,” Felicity speculated.

I leaned forward and put Amber’s hand on the large knot on the back of my head. “I felt it hit. But this didn’t hurt either.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“So, you’re like a leper?” Felicity asked.

“I don’t know anything about that,” I answered. “I can feel things just fine. I just seem to be losing the ability to feel pain.”

“Do you think you’ll get to the point when you won’t be able to feel anything?” Amber asked.

“I hope not.” I really hoped not.

Amber took out her telephone, checked it, and started to put it away.

“Hey,” I said. “Can I borrow that to make a call?”

“Sure.” She handed it to me. “Do you have family to call?”

I shook my head. “I need to call one of the nurses over at the hospital.”

I dialed the number Steph had given me. Murphy and the girls started talking again.

The phone rang a half-dozen times and went to voicemail. Into the phone I said, “Steph, this is Zed. Murphy and I made it out of the gym and we’re okay. Call me at this number when you can. Bye.”

I handed the phone back to Amber.

She asked, “Girlfriend?”

“Nope. Just a nurse who helped me and Murphy out.”

Chapter 29

In dark sunglasses, Murphy and I were outside, scavenging what we could off the dead soldiers in the quad. I was picking through the remains, and he was hauling the booty. At the moment, he had three rifles, two vests with clips and whatever else attached, and a couple of helmets, all covered in crusty blood.

We’d been out in the heat all through the noon hour. I was sweaty, tired, and feeling angry.

Murphy and I had talked while we were inside after bringing in a previous load and rinsing the equipment in the downstairs showers. He confirmed what Jerome had told me earlier, that Mark and the other ROTC guys were afraid of us. As for Jerome, he was nowhere to be seen, though he could easily have been assisting us in equipment collection.

While outside, we didn’t speak much for fear of attracting unwanted attention from the infected. In the sweltering silence, I ruminated darkly about the social dynamic. I was angry at Jerome for being right about how I’d feel about that. I’d probably saved the life of every one of those toy rifle-toting ROTC pukes. Now, because of Murphy and me, they were all armed. They had a chance at survival. But they thought they were better than me. That pissed me off the most. I hated that.

Oh, and what was that abomination shit about?

A couple of the infected were rummaging through the remains of a policeman who lay in the shadow of the gym—one chewed on a bone, the other was starting to gnaw on the officer’s gun belt. I decided I wanted the belt. In my darkening mood, I didn’t see the infected man as an obstacle. I reached down and grabbed the belt.

The infected made a snarling sound, then clamped his teeth on the belt. I yanked it hard, pulling it away.

The infected’s eyes went wide with rage. He howled and lunged for the belt.

“All right,” I mumbled, “if that’s the way you want it.”

Both of the infected by the body stopped what they were doing and stared up at me. The words must have triggered something in their rotted brains that told them I might be lunch. One sniffed at my leg while the one with the gun belt slinked a few steps away and started to gnaw on the belt again.

My anger and disgust blossomed. I pulled the M-4 off of my shoulder. I turned its flimsy-looking stock downward, stepped over to the infected with my black leather gun belt grinding between his teeth, and smashed the butt of my gun down between his malevolent eyes.

A jolt went through his body, and he rolled over on his back, arms and legs moving in a random swimming fashion. I smashed his skull again, then again, then again—until it was deformed and bleeding heavily. He went still.

I stood over the infected man with the butt of my gun dripping with blood, breathing heavily from my exertion. I felt no cathartic release. If anything, I was more angry than before I’d beaten him to death.

What was going to happen to me? What was happening to me? Was I going to be like them? A mindless raging cannibal?

The infected who’d been gnawing on the bone dropped it and slunk over to sniff at the corpse of the one I’d just murdered.

“Fuck you too,” I shouted and smashed his head in a similar fashion—again and again—until he lay limp at my feet.

I stared down at the bloody mess, lost in the darkness of my anger.

I felt a tug at my shoulder and I turned, ready for more violence, but it was Murphy, wide-eyed and worried.

Without a word, he held my gaze, and then made a show of looking around us.

I followed his lead and looked over the quad, across the street, and into the gaps between the buildings. Every infected—standing, squatting, kneeling in the remains of some dead human—all stared at me, frozen in indecision. In their little rotted brains they couldn’t tell whether I was one of them, whether I was food, or whether I was the alpha zombie.

I wanted to kill them all.

Murphy emphatically nodded his head toward the dorm a couple of times and took a tentative step in that direction.

I understood what he wanted. It was the smart thing to do. Our situation out among the infected was on the verge of getting bad in a hurry.

I snatched up my gun belt and followed Murphy back to the dorm. The infected didn’t take their eyes off of us.

One of the ROTC guys opened the door for us when we arrived. He stared at me as wide-eyed as Murphy had just moments before.

He feared me.

In that moment, I reveled in it.

The door closed on our uncomfortable silence.

I looked out through the glass at the infected, going back about their business.

In a post-tantrum rationalization, I tried to reconcile my emotions with my actions. They didn’t make sense. I tried to blame my behavior on my anger at Jerome, Wilkins, Tom, the stress, anybody, anything but me.

Murphy said, “Hey man, we need to rinse this stuff off.”

“Okay,” I answered.

Murphy said to the ROTC guy, “We won’t need you on the door anymore today. We’re not going back out. You can go do whatever you do.”

The ROTC guy looked at me and asked, “What was that all about?”

I shook my head to brush him off.

Murphy stepped in to cover for me, and in his big gruff voice he said, “That infected dude was coming after him, man.”

The ROTC guy said nothing for a moment then asked, “He was coming after you?”

I nodded, “Sure.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Yes.” I said it like a fuck-you dare for him to ask me again. He didn’t bite.

“Let’s take this stuff to the shower, man, and get started,” said Murphy.

The ROTC guy said, “When you guys get done, you should get upstairs. It’s close to three, and Major Wilkins wants you at the meeting.”

Chapter 30

Murphy stood in the shower stall, scrubbing the MOLLE vest with soap and hot water. I stood outside the stall, taking the ammunition magazines out of the vest before passing them in. The helmets were all cleaned and drying, as were the guns.

“Besides rinsing these guns off, what else do we need to do?” I asked.

“I’ll show you later,” Murphy said.

“Do you know much about guns?” I asked.

“I was in the Army for four years,” he replied.

“What?”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “Hard to believe, right?”

Yes, it was hard to believe. “So you know all about this gear, then.”

“Yeah, I can show you whatever you need to know,” Murphy told me.

“Good, because I don’t know much of anything besides shooting and reloading.”

“I’ll set you straight, man, but it’ll have to be when I get back.”

“Back?” I asked.

Murphy’s face lost its smile. “I’ve got to go find my mom and my sister.”

I asked, “Did you try borrowing a cell phone and calling them?”

“No answer.” Worry flashed over his face. “Both numbers went straight to voicemail.”

“You think their batteries are dead?” I asked.

Murphy nodded and handed me the wet vest. I handed him an empty one and hung the wet one over a shower stall divider to drip dry.

“Murphy,” I said, “you know how things are out there, right?”

“Yeah, man.”

“So, you know the odds aren’t in their favor, right?”

Nodding, Murphy said, “I know.”

“What’s your plan then?” I asked.

“Based on your experience with driving yesterday, I think that driving to my mom’s house isn’t the best way to go.”

“Where do they live?” I asked

“Over off of Loyola, near 183,” he told me while he pointed vaguely northeast.

“How far is that, like, five miles?” I asked. “Ten miles?”

“Man, I don’t know. When you’re driving you don’t know how far things are—you only know how long it’s going to take to get there. ”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess you’re walking, right?”

“It’s kind of the only option. I could steal a bike, but that might send the infected into a frenzy, too. I don’t want to be the guy who gets to figure that one out.”

I asked, “What are you going to do after you find you mom and sister?”

“There’s this crazy dude that Earl talked about.” Murphy looked away from the vest he was rinsing off. He nodded as he spoke. “You remember right?”

I did.

Murphy said, “The dude used to live in our neighborhood. He was one of those doomsday-prepper guys and five or six years ago, the city found out that he’d built this three-story bunker under his house.”

“Three stories under his house?” I was amazed.

“Yeah, like he had more square footage in his bunker than in his house. But like, when the city found out, they condemned his house.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Murphy shrugged. “He never got a permit or it wasn’t built to code. Maybe they just thought his house might cave in on top of it.”

“So what happened, then?”

Murphy said, “So the dude fights with the city for years and finally just keels over and dies one day.”

“That sucks.”

“For him, yeah.” Murphy stepped out of the shower and handed me the vest. “The house has been sitting empty ever since. The city never did anything with it. They never tore it down or anything. It’s just got a chain link fence around it and the crackheads go in there at night.”

“Do you think it’s still there then?” I asked.

“Man, it’s gotta still be there,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of shape it’s in. The house looks like a crack house. But there are solar panels on the roof and what looks like a solar water heater. There are a couple of little wind turbine things in the back yard. I mean, I don’t know what the guy’s setup was down there, but from the outside, it looked like he had all the right pieces in place.”

“I know this sounds like a stupid question,” I prefaced, “but how do you know somebody isn’t already there?”

Murphy shook his head, “I can’t know that, but it’s the best thing I can think to try right now.”

“This place isn’t so bad,” I said as I looked around.

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Man, did you notice how they were fortifying downstairs?”

I shook my head.

“Man,” Murphy waved an arm expansively, “they were just taking desks and furniture and piling them in front of the windows. Once the infected figure out there are people in here, it’s gonna take them like five minutes to break the windows and tear through that junk. Then it’s gonna be all over for Major Wilkins and those girls you saved.”

“I’m sure that’s only temporary,” I said.

“Yeah, man, I’m sure you’re right.” Murphy shook his head. He didn’t really believe I was right. “Until they get those barricades right, they’re all in danger, and if the infected break in here all worked into a frenzy, you’re gonna get killed whether you taste good or not.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Chapter 31

When Murphy and I got to the common area on the fifth floor, Wilkins was already talking. I immediately noticed that Tom, Mark, and the other ROTC guys were all wearing MOLLE vests and had their M-4s with them. It made sense, but it made me uncomfortable. Wilkins had a sidearm, as did Marcy. Felicity, Amber, and Jerome were unarmed.

I had a Glock in a holster. Murphy however, was planning on announcing his departure and leaving directly after the meeting. He had a pistol, his M4, and carried twelve thirty-round magazines in his MOLLE vest, along with whatever else a real soldier would stuff in there.

The couches in the common area were arranged in a U-shape facing the hall. Jerome and the girls were on the couches. Wilkins stood in the hall, in front of everyone with Mark at his side. The other ROTC guys sat on stools behind the leather couches.

Murphy and I sat beside one another on one of the couches.

Wilkins acknowledged us as we sat. “As I was telling everyone, Marcy and I spent a good deal of the morning on the internet, trying to find what news we could of what’s going on.

“What we found isn’t hopeful. The infection is still spreading. San Antonio is in the same shape as Austin. It’s lost. Houston and Dallas are both a mess, with the infection spreading and the police trying to get a handle on the situation. The refugee center set up at Fort Hood fell apart overnight.

“The infection has shown up in nearly every major city in the country now and there’s hardly a place in the world that’s free. Most of Asia has followed China’s path. India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Korea are all in chaos or are silent. Nothing is coming out of Africa. Europe and Russia are in trouble. The infection has shown up in Brazil and Columbia.

“All over the country, the military has set up road blocks. All flights are grounded. All trains have stopped. Any travel between states and even cities is forbidden. The military has orders to shoot to kill anything or anyone that comes near the roadblocks.

“We’re effectively isolated here for the time being, at least until the military can get the situation stabilized.”

Amber asked, “How long will we be isolated?”

Wilkins answered, “It’s anybody’s guess, but it’s best that we plan for the long haul. We need to be prepared to take care of ourselves for at weeks or even months. It might be longer before we get help.”

“Longer?” Amber asked.

“It might be years,” Wilkins answered.

Felicity spoke up next, with heavy emotion in her voice, “Is this really the end of the world?”

Wilkins didn’t answer. Nobody spoke. The silent consensus was yes.

Wilkins said, “Human civilization is going to be very different going forward.”

Felicity looked down at the floor. I’m sure she already knew. Her question was little more than a desperate expression of hope.

I spoke up next, “Look, like I was telling Jerome yesterday, I’m not sure how we’re going to get through the next few weeks or months, but we need to get somebody online right now. I don’t know when or if we’re going to lose electricity. I don’t know when or if the internet is going to go out.”

I stood up to look at everybody, “Everything humans have ever learned or knew can be downloaded from the internet right now, for free, while the network is still up. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t know anything about farming and growing my own food. If what Wilkins is saying is right, we need to figure it out. It’ll be better for us if we figure it out with a book than by trial and error. There’s going to come a time when we run out of food to scavenge, and when that time comes, we’d better know how to grow something. We won’t be able to live through too many crop failures. And if we want to live anything remotely like the life we used to have, we’d better learn how to hook up some solar panels to an electrical grid. We need to learn how to manufacture gunpowder if we run out. There are a million little things that make life possible, and none of us knows much about any of them.”

I looked around the room for acknowledgment—for confirmation—but they just looked at me like I’d changed color again.

“Thoughts, anyone?” I asked.

“Well,” Wilkins started, “this is as good a time as any to talk about how you fit into that, Zed.”

“I don’t even have a computer,” I replied.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Wilkins asked.

What? That seemed odd to me. I looked around at the blank faces. Something wasn’t right.

As I stepped back toward the couch to take my place beside Murphy, I saw a very slight shake of his head. He was reading something that I’d missed.

As I turned to sit down, I noticed Murphy’s hand move discreetly toward the trigger on his M-4. He flicked the safety off.

“Zed,” Wilkins started, “we all appreciate what you‘ve done for us. Some of us definitely owe you our lives, and the rest of us probably do.”

I nodded, curious as to where this was going.

He said, “Because you and Murphy and Jerome are infected, you can move among the other infected with ease. You’re in no danger.”

“Mostly no danger,” I corrected him.

“Zed, please don’t take this the wrong way,” Wilkins gulped down a pause, “but you three are infected and that makes some of us pretty nervous. Not me, mind you. I’m not worried, but I have to speak for the group.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He said, “Again, as much as you’ve done for all of us, many here are afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?” This was starting to sound like bullshit.

Wilkins went on, “We don’t know if we can catch the infection from you or how. We don’t know when we’re going to wake up and find you standing over our beds and attacking us. We don’t know what you are, and we need to do something about that.”

I heard shuffling behind me, and then Murphy’s big voice stopped everything. “I don’t know where this conversation is going, but just so you all know one thing, I’m leaving when this is done. Actually,” he continued, very deliberately standing and stepping toward the hallway, “I’m leaving right now. I need to go find my sister and my mom.”

Mark butted in and said, very pointedly, “We need that ammunition you’re carrying.”

Murphy, beside Wilkins now, turned so that he’d have no one at his back. He was holding the M-4 with one hand over the trigger and one under the barrel, in a way that made it clear that he was fully prepared to operate the weapon if necessary. “Zed and I picked up all of this ammunition. Zed and I picked up all of the guns that you bunch of pussies have right now. If it wasn’t for Zed, you wouldn’t have shit. You’d be sitting in that building next door like a bunch of zombie bait, waiting to get eaten.

“All of you people piss me off. After everything that Zed has done for you, you’re going to tell him to hit the bricks, aren’t you? Oh, and you want to take our guns and our ammo while you’re at it. Well, fuck you. I’m leaving here with this gun and this vest and the twelve magazines I’ve got. Just so you know.”

Everybody was surprised into motionless.

I spoke first, “Is that what’s happening here, Wilkins? You’re kicking me out?”

“Of course we are,” Mark muttered. “You’re possessed by demons. All three of you are.”

Wilkins ignored Mark and continued, “No, no. Let me finish, Zed. Clearly some of us don’t feel comfortable being so close to you. We can continue to work together but we’d feel more comfortable if maybe you guys moved into the building next door.”

“Without our guns,” I said, shaking my head.

“No,” Wilkins said, “That’s not what we’re saying.”

“That’s what Mark just told Murphy,” I argued.

Wilkins pointed out the window toward the quad. “You guys can walk outside and get all of the ammunition you need. You have to admit, it’s more dangerous for us.”

Murphy interrupted, “Zed, you want to come with me? Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

“Wait.” I couldn’t believe what was happening. I looked over at Felicity. I didn’t mean to plead but it probably came out that way. “I risked my life to save you guys.”

Felicity quickly spoke, “We’re so, so, so thankful for that. But, we saw what you did to those infected outside a little while ago. You worry us. We don’t know what you’re capable of, or what you might turn into.”

Amber looked down and shook her head, “I don’t agree, Zed, but…”

“This is bullshit,” I said. “Fine. I’m outta here. I’m not going to live in the servants’ quarters next door and run around and do your dirty work. You guys are on your own.”

I turned and started to walk up the hall as Murphy backpedaled beside me.

“Just so you know,” I told them. “I’m gearing up before I leave. Me and Murphy went out and collected all of this shit. I’m not going out empty-handed.”

They’d all stood up by then, and walked into the hall to watch Murphy and me go.

I stopped and turned, “What about you Jerome, are you coming or staying?”

Wilkins spoke up, “Jerome, we’d like for you to stay. We just need to work out some kind of quarantine to keep us all separate. We can’t risk getting infected. You understand, right?”

“I’d be by myself?” Jerome asked.

“Well…” Wilkins started.

Jerome shook his head. “No, no. I don’t want that. I’m going with them.”

We headed up the hall to get our stuff from the room.

Mark walked a few steps further up the hall and stopped. “Begone demon. Begone mindless monsters. You’re all going to suffer and die.”

“Put a lid on it, Mark,” Wilkins told him.

Ten minutes later, Murphy, Jerome, and I walked out of the dormitory, each with an M4, a pistol, a full load of ammunition in our MOLLE vests, canteens full of water, and enough junk food for a few meals. We hustled around the corner of the building and out of sight of the dormitory, just in case Mark went even more nuts and decided to shoot at us from the windows.

With the afternoon sun blazing in the sky, the billows of black smoke roiling up out of southeast Austin, infected lurking everywhere, and the sound of gunfire in the distance, we started our trek northeast to search for Murphy’s mother and sister.

Slow Burn Book 2, ‘Infected’

Chapter 1

Mid-afternoon in August is not a pleasant time to be outdoors in central Texas. The sun scorches anything foolish enough to leave the shadows and risk its wrath. Humid air flows north off the gulf and heats to an angry, gaseous broth, in league with the sun to punish any soul it catches outdoors.

Every patch of grass without the blessing of a sprinkler system gets baked to crisp hues of tan and brown. Every concrete sidewalk and stretch of bleached asphalt shimmers radiated heat.

And, as if adding a million mindless infected to Austin’s empty streets wasn’t enough to make August suck more than usual, the smoke and ash from the fires devouring east Austin tainted the hot air. Great gray columns rose a thousand feet into the sky, boasting of destruction before drifting to the northeast.

Jerome spoke quietly, “We need to go somewhere and talk.”

Staying in the shadow of the ROTC building as we walked away from the dorm, Murphy said, “There’s nothing to talk about. I told you guys what I’m going to do—go find my mom and sister. Come if you want. Stay if you don’t. I don’t really give a shit.”

One of the things I’d learned about Murphy was that he had the ability to tell you he didn’t give a shit in a way that didn’t leave you offended. But that was irrelevant to my mood. I was already livid over getting evicted by Mark and his ROTC boys, and I needed to make a choice: go with Murphy, squat in a shadow across the quad from the dorm and think about revenge, or some other thing I hadn’t thought of yet. Long experience told me that choosing while angry, more often than not, led to bad outcomes. That never stopped me from doing it anyway.

I continued walking. “I’m going with Murphy.”

Jerome was miffed. “How can you just walk away? Mark and those guys hate us. They kicked us out of our own dorm for…for…”

“For being white?” Murphy laughed.

“For being infected,” Jerome answered, weakly.

So Jerome was seething as well. It seemed only Murphy could smile and let the eviction roll off his back.

Not me. Often times, anger was all I had, my sole defining characteristic. It clung to me like an insecure girlfriend, and I put as little effort into sloughing it off. Perhaps I could learn from Murphy.

Jerome sulked, but came along.

We followed a wide concrete staircase down past the fountain at the end of the east mall, skirted along a tall wall to keep out of sight of our old dormitory, and turned left past the drama department. If the ROTC guys had entertained any ideas of taking a shot at us as we left, they’d lost their chance.

Long minutes in the debilitating heat ticked by and took the edge off of my anger. We walked on a winding, shaded sidewalk that followed Waller Creek’s course north.

“That Mark guy was nuts,” I finally said.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

Numerous infected squatted in the shadows of the trees and the bushes all along the creek. I lowered my voice, “You saved us back there, Murphy.”

“I know.” Not a boast, just a fact.

“How did you know what was going to happen?” I asked.

“That things were going to go down the way they did?” He asked.

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t.” He looked around at the shrubs and shadows. “I just got a bad vibe from those dudes. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to waste any time getting out of there today. That’s why I went to Wilkins’ meeting geared up. When I saw things starting to turn in the wrong direction, I took a chance while everybody was watching Mark and Wilkins go at each other.”

“It worked.” A few steps later, I added, “I wonder if this is how it’s going to be now.”

Murphy asked, “What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like a drama queen when I say it. But it seems like every time I turn around, I’m on the verge of getting killed by something.”

“Is that why you’re so stressed out?” Murphy asked.

I stopped and gestured at the world around us. “Really?”

Murphy stopped and looked at me. “Yeah, that was a stupid thing to say. If we’re not careful, we may need to go see a shrink one day. Heh, heh, heh.”

“What’s up with that laugh? Did you have a favorite cartoon character or something that laughed like that?” I asked.

“No, man, that’s just my laugh.” He exaggerated it the second time as he smile. “Heh, heh, heh.”

Jerome came up and positioned himself on the wide sidewalk between Murphy and me. He looked around cautiously but kept his mouth pinched shut. He wanted us to know he was still pouting.

The ringing of a telephone caught everyone’s attention.

Murphy looked at me with a question on his face.

I had no phone. I looked around.

A moment later, it rang again.

All of the infected within earshot showed an interest.

On the third ring I identified a scatter of shredded, bloody remains by a building a short distance away.

The infected were on their feet and looking for the source of the sound.

“We should go,” Murphy whispered.

Jerome shuffled nervously. I nodded up the path and we moved away.

On the fourth ring, the infected swarmed over the clothes and bones.

The phone didn’t ring again.

Once we got thirty or forty feet distant from the spot where we’d heard the ring, I had a change of mind and announced, “I’m going to go back for the phone.”

Jerome shook his head, “When the networks go down, that phone won’t be worth anything.”

“They’re not down yet,” I hissed. “Murphy, do you mind waiting a few minutes? Once the infected calm down a bit and start to disperse, I’ll go over and find the phone.”

Murphy made a show of looking at a watch that wasn’t on his wrist. “Cool, man, just don’t take too long. I’m gonna head up the trail and see what I can see.”

Jerome said, “I’m going with Murphy.”

“Don’t go too far,” I told them.

“No sweat,” said Murphy.

Once I neared the infected going after the ringing sound, I stopped and watched the infected rip through the clothes looking for something to eat. Keys jangled out. A billfold hit the ground. A pair of torn jeans was cast aside and out of those jeans, a cell phone flew in a long arc.

Crap.

It landed in the grass and bounced.

Opportunity?

Keeping an eye on the squabbling infected, I walked over, picked up the phone, and quickly put some distance between them and me.

A half block away, I came across a shaded bench along the trail.

I sat down and examined the phone. It was the same brand of smartphone that I had before the police emptied my pockets during my arrest. I turned off the ringer. The infected had damaged brains, but they weren’t so damaged that they didn’t know which sounds to associate with people, with food. I checked the battery. It still had most of a charge.

I recalled the number that Felicity had given me for Amber’s phone the day before. Or was it two days before? So much was happening so fast that I was losing track. I opened up a text message window.

Me: This is Zed

I only had to wait a moment.

Amber: Zed…sorry.

Me: Nothing to be sorry for.

Amber: You saved our lives. I didn’t know what to do.

Me: NP. I won’t hold it against you. You did the right thing. Staying there is safer for you.

Amber: I’m worried. Mark frightens me.

Me: That was some crazy shit but your chances are better if you stay together than if you split up. Wilkins is a solid guy. He’ll keep Mark’s crazy ass in line. Stick with him if anything happens.

Amber: Okay

Me: You have weapons and food enough to last a good long while but feel free to text me if you run short of anything. I don’t know if I’ll be able to help but I may. I have a lot more freedom of movement than you guys do.

Amber: You’re a good man : )

Me: I have to go. The guys are waiting on me. I’ll try and find a charger for this phone. Keep in touch, if you want to.

Amber: I do.

Me: Me too.

Amber: Be careful out there. Please stay safe.

Me: Safe is my middle name.

Amber: LOL. I KNOW that’s not true.

Me: Gotta go. Bye.

Amber: Bye.

Stay safe? I hoped.

Chapter 2

When I caught up with the guys, I said, “There’s a University co-op up on the north side of campus.”

“You want to go shopping?” Murphy asked, exaggerating his surprise to reveal how bad he thought the idea was.

I said, “I keep getting ignored when I bring this up, but I need a computer and a flash drive.”

Both Jerome and Murphy made a point of ignoring what I’d just said.

I told them, “It’s only a block or two out of our way. It’ll take a few extra minutes.”

“Fine,” Murphy said. “It’s probably a good idea, but don’t be asking me to stop at an internet café along the way. You can have all the time online that you want after we get to my mom’s house.”

“I think it’s a waste of time,” Jerome butted in. “We probably won’t live long enough to run out of food, or electricity, or anything important.”

“Oh, you’ll live,” Murphy said, smiling. “I have no doubt.”

“Really?” Jerome asked, real curiosity in his voice. “What makes you think I’ll last?”

“Because you’re a pussy.” Murphy’s big laugh caught the attention of every infected in sight.

I shushed them both as I looked around. All of the infected were staring, but none were yet moving.

We walked the next block in silence and the infected along the way lost interest. I stepped out ahead of the guys and made a left turn onto the cross street that would take us to the co-op.

Through clenched teeth, Jerome told Murphy, “I am not a pussy.”

Murphy asked quietly, “Oh? Who went out to get the guns while the other one sat in the room?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Jerome responded.

“It sounded like that when Zed told me about it,” said Murphy. “Did I miss something?”

Jerome said nothing.

“So I didn’t miss anything,” Murphy continued. “Let me ask you, did you help Zed rescue those sorority chicks that were stuck in the other dorm?”

“They weren’t sorority chicks,” Jerome corrected.

“Are you saying that you did help rescue those chicks?” Murphy asked.

“I didn’t say that.” Jerome turned away as if looking for something to divert the subject to.

We walked another half a block in silence before Murphy added, “Sounds like you’re a pussy.”

Jerome shot Murphy a withering look and hurried ahead.

I shrugged.

Murphy grinned.

Another block passed and Murphy said, “Man, I didn’t thank you for getting me away from the jail after we busted out.”

“I think you did,” I said. “Besides, we helped each other that day.”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“You know,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head.

“You know,” I repeated. “When we were crossing the street when Earl got shot. I froze. You pushed me across. You probably saved me from getting hit, too.”

“Man, you were just in my way,” Murphy told.

I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. I said, “Whatever.”

Sweating heavily in the heat, we reached the university building across the street from the co-op and came to a stop in a shady spot behind a limestone block wall. I knelt down behind the short wall and scanned the broad intersection.

Two military Humvees sat in the middle of the intersection, empty. Bodies lay strewn about all over the asphalt, on the curbs, in the surrounding lawns, and in the parking lots.

“I guess there was a battle here,” I said.

“Do you think those Humvees have the keys in them?” Jerome asked.

That was the question on my mind as well.

Murphy said, “Humvees don’t have keys, dumbass.”

“I’m not a dumbass.” Jerome was irritated and probably regretting his decision to come along with us.

Murphy asked, “Did you lie about being a CDC scientist, when you really just owned a sub shop five blocks away?”

“That doesn’t make me a dumbass,” Jerome told him.

“No, but it does make you a pussy,” Murphy snickered.

Jerome fumed. “I’m not walking all the way across town in this heat. I am not a pussy. I’m getting a Humvee.” Jerome stepped out from behind the wall and with a determined look on his face, made his way through the maze of the dead toward the middle of the intersection.

“The infected don’t care if you step on them,” Murphy called.

“Quiet,” I told Murphy. “I’m not saying that Jerome doesn’t deserve it, but lighten up on him a bit.”

As Jerome neared the Humvees he slowed and glanced around.

I said, “I don’t know if driving is a good idea.”

“Those are up-armored Humvees,” Murphy told me. “They’re a lot more durable than that Toyota you totaled.”

“Okay.” I didn’t really agree, but I didn’t want to disagree either. I had no desire to walk six or seven miles in the heat, especially not knowing what dangers awaited us.

After a few moments of watching Jerome, Murphy looked back and forth across the wide intersection and said, “I don’t like this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He pointed in a few directions across the intersection. “Look around, man.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“All those bodies lying around,” he said. “Where are the dead soldiers?”

I looked. I didn’t see a single uniform. “Maybe they all got infected and wandered off.”

“All of them?” Murphy asked as though my explanation was an admission of stupidity. “Wouldn’t at least some of them have gotten killed? I mean, look how many dead infected are out there.”

“It’s a mystery,” I said, dismissively.

Jerome arrived at the nearest of the two Humvees, opened the driver’s side door, and peered inside.

“And those doors will keep out the infected?” I asked.

“Unless they have a rocket launcher,” Murphy answered.

“So driving one of those might really work out for us?”

“Depends,” he said.

“On what?” I asked.

Murphy answered, “What are you going to do when you get to where you’re going and your Humvee is being swarmed by frenzied infected?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose we could just wait for them to get bored and wander away. They eventually do.”

“So we wouldn’t want to use it for short trips,” said Murphy.

“No, I guess not,” I admitted.

Movement from the opposite corner across the intersection caught our attention.

Two soldiers in gas masks stepped out of some bushes and moved cautiously toward the Humvee into which Jerome was leaning. From Jerome’s position, his view of them was blocked by the other Humvee.

“MOPP gear,” said Murphy, softly.

“Mop?”

“The military protective gear,” he explained. “The gas masks, hoods, gloves, and stuff.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why those soldiers aren’t infected,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why they weren’t killed by the infected, like everybody else.”

“They may be able to help us,” I said, as I started to stand, but Murphy put a restraining hand on my shoulder. That annoyed me. “What?”

Murphy put a finger to his lips and shook his head. He hoisted his weapon.

I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t see the danger he saw. What danger could there be? This was the Army. They’d been only six blocks from the dorm the whole time, and doing fine against the infected. Things weren’t as bad as Wilkins and crazy Mark thought they were.

The soldiers came up on Jerome from behind and startled him. One of the soldiers said something harsh, but with the distance, I couldn’t make it out.

Jerome stiffened, dropped his weapon, and raised his hands.

One of the soldiers took a defensive position at the rear of the Humvee and the other stepped up toward Jerome, stopping several feet away.

They said some things back and forth.

Jerome made some excited gestures and spoke loudly.

The soldier said something else. Jerome opened his shirt and showed his chest, leaning forward with eyes wide open.

The soldier spoke into a radio headset.

Jerome started talking again, but in a different tone of voice. He was pleading. That worried me for a second, but then again, he was a pussy. For his sake, I hoped he didn’t wet his pants.

Three weird clicks echoed as fire spat from the end of the soldier’s gun.

A bloody mist erupted from Jerome’s back. For the smallest fraction of a second, surprise froze on his face.

I gasped.

“We gotta go,” Murphy hissed, as Jerome crumpled to the asphalt.

“Fuck that.” I was pissed. I threw the barrel of my M4 over the wall and pointed it at the soldiers. Before I could pull the trigger, Murphy grabbed my shirt and pulled me into the shrubs and mulch. Shards of limestone exploded off of the top edge of the wall and stung my skin.

“What the hell?” I didn’t hear any gunshots. Everything was very suddenly going to shit, and I wasn’t putting the clues together fast enough.

“C’mon,” Murphy whispered. Bent over as short as he could make himself, he ran away from the wall, back the way we’d come, back to where there was plenty of cover.

I crouched and ran as fast as my legs would carry me.

We got to a row of tall bushes and rounded a corner, putting an entire building between us and the intersection.

Murphy stopped at the corner and cast a quick look back.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he told me. “Run.”

Murphy took off at a full sprint under the sprawling branches of the old campus oaks. He angled toward a building across a street and ran further into campus. I matched him stride for stride past one building, a second, and a third, arousing interest from the infected as we sped past. Thankfully, none gave chase.

When Murphy decided that we’d put enough distance between us and the soldiers at the intersection, he found an unlocked door and we slipped inside one of the university buildings. Welcome air conditioning washed over us, but I had not a moment to appreciate it.

We bounded up a staircase to the second floor and ran down the length of the building. We glanced through the glass door windows into each classroom we passed. The floor was deserted. We entered a classroom at the end of the hall and closed the door quietly behind us.

I caught my breath. Murphy did the same.

Chapter 3

It took a few moments for us to recover enough to speak. Murphy gasped, “Shit. I should have seen that coming.”

“What the hell just happened?” I asked.

“We got ambushed,” Murphy told me, clearly distressed. His absent smile and vacant eyes told me he blamed himself.

“They killed Jerome, for no reason,” I said.

Murphy peeked out one of the classroom’s large windows, careful not to expose himself more than was necessary. “Yeah, it would seem so.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” I said.

“He was infected,” said Murphy. “They probably shot him because of that.”

“But he was a slow burn,” I argued. “He was talking to that dude. He wasn’t a danger to them.”

Murphy shrugged, shook his head, and said nothing.

“Is it open season on all of us?” I asked, wanting something to blame for wrong I’d just witnessed.

“I don’t know man,” said Murphy. “Maybe they were nervous. Maybe they were trigger-happy. Maybe they just like killing. With all of those dead infected laying around the intersection, they were definitely good at it.”

“Maybe they weren’t the Army,” I speculated. “Maybe it was just some guys.”

Murphy shook his head emphatically. “They were soldiers.”

I sat down at one of the desks bolted to the floor in neat rows, and stared out the windows at the oak branches and leaves that dappled the view of the buildings across the street.

It was murder.

Those soldiers murdered Jerome.

As that sank in, I muttered, “Fucking assholes.”

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Murphy said. “The cops, the doctors, the Army, nobody has been sympathetic, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m angry, Murphy. I’m really fucking pissed. That was such bullshit. I mean he was standing there with that stupid pussy-ass look on his face, with his arms in the air and that dickhead just shot, shot him three fucking times. Fuck.”

Murphy said, “I was there, man.”

Murphy left me to my fuming and took up a position by the wall where he had a clear view out the window. Murphy was getting over Jerome’s death, or at least getting past it. He was looking out for pursuers. He was looking out for our safety. And I was having a tantrum.

I needed to get control.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I breathed deeply and relaxed my clenched hands, then watched my palms as the blood flowed back in and filled the indentations left by my grip on my rifle.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Anger would kill me if I didn’t get it under control. Clear thinking would keep me alive. I needed to follow Murphy’s example.

I stood and went over to check the window into the hall. No one and nothing. I nudged the door open and listened. Silence.

Minutes passed with no change. I let the door close and went to stand beside Murphy.

I asked, “So were those silencers on their guns?”

“Yup, suppressors.”

“I think that’s why they’re not already dead,” I said. “The soldiers I mean. If the infected don’t hear the gunshots, the soldiers can stay hidden while they shoot. They don’t have to worry about drawing in more infected than they can handle.”

Murphy nodded, “That’s pretty much how I see it.”

I said, “I think if these guns are going to be good for anything but a last resort, we need suppressors.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“Where can we get those?” I asked.

“We could check gun shops or find the house of some gun nut who wanted one bad enough to go through the permit process,” he said. “But with all the shit going on, who knows? I’m guessing any gun shop that might have one is cleaned out already.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” I looked back out the window.

Murphy said, “We could come back in a few days and take theirs.”

Looking back at him, I said, “I don’t follow.”

“C’mon, man.” He waved a hand back in the direction of the intersection. “Those guys can’t keep their MOPP gear on forever. They’ve got to take it off sooner or later. They’re probably camped out in a building around here somewhere. And every time they go in and out, they risk tracking in the infection with them. Hell, that guy that shot Jerome today probably got at least a little blood on his gear. He was close enough for it. He probably doesn’t even know it. So, when he goes back to wherever him and his buddies are hiding out, he might touch it or his buddy might touch it.”

I said, “I don’t know how long the virus can live outside of the body but I’m guessing that if it’s in blood, it has a better chance of staying alive than if it just gets sneezed out or something. So you’re thinking that by killing Jerome, those soldiers are going to wind up infected.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I like the karma of it.” I put on a smile but there was no joy in it, only mean revenge.

“If they get infected, the odds are that none of them will be immune,” said Murphy. “At least it seems like nearly nobody is. In a few days they’ll be wandering around here like the rest of the infected, if they don’t kill each other first.”

“I’m good either way,” I said. “Do you think they’re coming after us?”

“Nope.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If they were coming, I think they would have by now,” said Murphy. “Besides, I think they’re doing pretty well ambushing the infected where they are. They don’t need to hunt. Whitey just wanders by. I’m not sure they were trying to kill us as much as scare us away. After all, they knew Jerome was infected when they killed him. They didn’t know if we were.”

“Whitey?” I asked.

“I’m tired of saying infected.” Murphy shrugged. “Three syllable words suck.”

“You know, you’re practically white now.” I felt like I had to remind him.

“I’m mocha frost, man.”

“Mocha frost?”

“Yeah.”

I asked, “So we have mochas and whites. Any other color distinction?”

“You tell me, you’re the one with the hang-up about it.”

I took another long look out the window. “Murphy, you’re just trying to keep my mind off of Jerome, aren’t you?”

“Yeah man, you dwell on shit too much.” Murphy took a deep breath as he paused. “That’s obvious to me already. I know everything sucks and all, but we can’t do anything about it. Lighten up, man. It’s better to die with a smile on your face than a frown.”

Time to change the subject. I asked, “Do you think those soldiers were an isolated group who were lucky enough to have the right equipment and the good fortune to figure out effective tactics, or do you think the whole Army is just around the corner and heading this way, cleaning up as they go along?”

“Isolated,” Murphy answered.

“Why?” I asked.

He said, “If there was a big force coming in and clearing out the infected, we’d have heard the gunfire when we were outside. We didn’t hear any of that.”

“I guess we didn’t,” I admitted.

We watched silently out the windows for a while longer and periodically checked the hall.

When the conversation started again, I asked, “What should we do next, do you think?”

“I hate to say it, but I think Jerome was right.”

“About what?” I asked.

“We need a better plan than just walking to northeast Austin,” said Murphy. “I’m going there. I have to. But if I want to get there alive, then I need to think it through.”

I said, “We need to think it through.”

“Yeah, let’s talk about that for a second.”

“What?” That surprised me. What was that supposed to mean?

“Zed, I’ve been thinking about this a lot while we’ve been in here. You almost got yourself killed out there when Jerome got shot. If I didn’t pull you down, those snipers would have got you.”

“Thanks for that,” I said.

“I’m not looking for thanks,” he said. “I want to know what you were thinking.”

My defenses flew up. Interrogatives always rubbed me the wrong way. My anger boiled for a second. I repressed it and calmly asked, “Why does it matter?”

“Let’s face it—we barely know each other,” he told me. “I don’t know you well enough to understand why you do what you do. I do know that your behavior is probably going to get you killed. I don’t want to be standing in the wrong place when that happens, because I might get killed too.”

“I don’t have the military training that you have,” I admitted. “When those soldiers shot Jerome, I didn’t think. I reacted. What they did was wrong.”

“And you were going to make it right?” Murphy asked.

“No, honestly, I didn’t think about that,” I said. “Not consciously anyway. Maybe I was just angry. Maybe…I don’t know.”

Murphy scrutinized me and said, “Let me ask you about what you did for Felicity, Amber, and Marcy. What about helping me when I was delirious? I mean, I’m thankful. I’m grateful. I know I owe you my life. But Zed, it’s like you’ve got some kind of hero complex or something.”

My simmering anger turned to laughter. “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong guy on that. I’m not a hero. I don’t want to wear a cape or have a secret identity, and I don’t need to hear anybody’s applause. I don’t even want a Batmobile. Well, maybe a Batmobile. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“But you keep trying to do all this heroic shit,” said Murphy. “It’s like you think you’re invincible.”

“I definitely don’t think that,” I told him.

Murphy turned and focused his attention back out the window, leaving me with my thoughts.

I recalled what happened with Felicity. I didn’t think then. I reacted. I’d heard her scream and saw her running. I knew she was going to die if I did nothing. I wanted to run back to the safety of the dorm, I really did. But something in me wouldn’t let that happen. I made a split-second decision and just got lucky after that. She and I both lived.

The choice to rescue Amber and Marcy was made with a lot more forethought, and was based on a ton of inaccurate assumptions. None of us expected the amount of danger that I’d put myself in. But why did I do it? I didn’t know them or anything about them. Yet, I’d risked my life to help them.

And Wilkins and the ROTC boys; what about them? I’d helped them too, but why?

I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t a soldier and I wasn’t a boy scout. Still, I did what I did, and would likely do it all again. Perhaps I was trying to live up to some image I had of myself, and living up to that image was more important than staying alive. Or maybe it was all just a big basket of psychological Easter eggs left in my brain by the Ogre and the Harpy.

When I looked up from my thoughts, Murphy was looking at me. He started in, “Before I say what I’m going to say, I want you to know that I appreciate your offer to help me find my mom and my sister, even though the odds of me finding them alive are pretty much zero. But they’re my family, Zed. It’s my duty to go, no matter how small the chances of finding them. Hell, I might get killed before I make it across the highway. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I said immediately and then added, “No. Not really.”

“I don’t know why you’re helping me,” he said. “I don’t understand it. But I don’t want you to get killed trying to save some people who are probably already dead, or worse.”

I stood up and paced around the floor. I took my time collecting my thoughts before I responded. “Murphy, I don't know about your hero theory. Maybe right, maybe wrong. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m just trying to do the right thing. It’s just that simple.

I said, “Last week, I would have told you that the world couldn’t get any more fucked up than it was. Then it did. Last week, I made a living just rolling down the hill with all the the other unhappy assholes in the world. I got drunk and I got high a lot just so I wouldn’t have to think about it. And you know why, Murphy?”

Murphy said, “I don’t think I want to know.”

I told him anyway. “Because I didn’t know who I was. I was just trying to be whatever I thought I was supposed to be and not trying very hard at it. Well, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m tired of taking the easy way out of everything. I’m tired of being ashamed of who looks back at me in the mirror. It’s just that simple. If that gets me killed, then I just don’t give a fuck about that. At least I’ll die proud of myself for a change.

“As for why I’m tagging along with you? I’ve got no family. All of my friends are probably dead. And if they weren’t they’d probably care as little about me as I do about them. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t even call them friends. They’re circumstantial companions. We all have crappy jobs and no girlfriends but we don’t like to drink alone. So, we hang out together and bitch about life. But none of us was ever going to do anything about it. It was always easier to just take another drink.

“On top of all that, you and I are the only people we know who are like us. I’m sure there are more out there, somewhere. There have to be. But in case you haven’t noticed, people like us are getting ostracized and killed just because we’re infected and we’re scary. Murphy, you and I are a persecuted minority.”

Murphy’s big laugh reverberated through the empty classroom. “Ain’t that a hoot? I go from being a mildly repressed minority to being a persecuted minority just because I got whiter.”

I laughed along with Murphy.

When we’d laughed ourselves out, Murphy said, “I think you’re right. Man, I think you’re a good guy, I mean, there’s a little bit of craziness in you, but maybe that’s what it’s gonna take to live in this fucked up world. I’ll stick with you if that’s what you want to do. We’ll have a better chance together than alone.”

Murphy reached out to shake my hand.

His hand engulfed mine and I nodded.

“And I’m giving you a superhero name,” he said.

“What?” A protest, not a question.

Murphy announced, “Null Spot.”

“What?” A question.

“That’s your superhero name,” he said. “Whenever you go off thinking about doing some superhero shit, I’m gonna call you Null Spot.”

“Whatever.”

Chapter 4

Murphy and I spent a long while talking about what we needed to do to get to his mom and sister, and what we needed to do to survive. Unfortunately, stealing an armored Humvee, if we could find one sitting around, seemed like the best idea considering all the other risks.

I said, “I could check with Steph, if she’s still alive. There might be a Humvee over by the hospital that we could swipe.”

Murphy asked, “Who is Steph, again?”

“She’s the nurse we saw when we went to the hospital the first night. You were too delirious to remember her.”

“Is she cute?” he asked.

Making it sound like a scolding, I said, “I don’t think that should be your top concern anymore.”

“It’ll always be my top concern,” he told me anyway.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “I think your first question should be whether a girl is going to chase you and eat you for dinner or whether she’s going to shoot you and run away. I don’t think you’ll have the luxury of picking the cute ones anymore.” I smiled to let him know I was joking.

“Yeah, man, I heard that.”

“Oh, and do you know which uses less power on a phone, calling or texting?” I asked.

“Man, do I look like I work at Best Buy?” he asked.

“At the one by my house, I think they only hire white kids,” I said.

“Mocha frost, buddy.”

I shrugged. “So you don’t know.”

“Texting,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. “How do you know?”

“I’m guessing.”

I said, “Sounds right to me.”

Murphy asked, “Wait, how do you know Steph’s number?”

“She gave it to me,” I told him.

“You’re a lot smoother than I thought.” Murphy grinned.

“I hear that a lot,” I said with a suave nod.

“I doubt that.” He grinned. “Hey, while you’re playing on your phone, why don’t you follow me downstairs and let’s see if we can raid any vending machines before we head out?”

I nodded and followed as I texted.

Me: Steph, this is Zed. Are you there?

Steph: OMG, you’re alive.

Me: Yes. Hey, are there any Humvees still parked around the hospital grounds?

Steph: Yes. Lots of Army trucks and stuff.

Me: Great. Any soldiers out there with them?

Steph: No. Why?

Me: I’m going to steal one.

Steph: Where are you?

Me: In a building up on the north end of the campus. How are things over at the hospital? I heard a lot of gunfire from over there the other night.

Steph: What do you know about what happened?

Me: Nothing. I’ve been hiding in a dorm since we escaped from the gym.

Steph: We?

Me: Murphy and I both made it out. He’s like me, infected but normal.

Steph: That’s great. There aren’t that many. The infected overran the hospital a few nights ago. That’s probably what you heard.

Me: Where are you now?

Steph: Those of us that could get away retreated into the hospital building. We’ve got it sealed off from the fifth floor up.

Me: We?

Steph: The soldiers barred the doors on the first floor but that didn’t last long. The infected came in through the windows and we lost a lot of people. We went up to the second but couldn’t hold there. There were lots of people among us who were exposed who started to turn. We tried to hold on to the third floor by blocking the stairwells but they found their way through somehow. We thought we had the fourth but some of us were infected and started to turn and we lost it. Now we have five and up but we keep losing people as we retreat from floor to floor.

Me: How many of you are there?

Steph: Hard to say. 30-40 soldiers. 40-50 of us. 150 patients that we’ve mostly moved to the upper floors. But anybody who starts to show symptoms, we’re putting on five. When we get to be too many, we’ll abandon five and move up to six.

Me: The soldiers aren’t shooting the infected?

Steph: The soldiers want to shoot anybody who shows symptoms but the doctors won’t let them. It’s tense.

Me: I’ll bet.

Steph: There are ideas being discussed on what to do about the infected.

Me: The Army has already decided. They’re shooting anyone that even appears infected.

Steph: That seems to be the universal solution. Did that happen at the gym?

Me: Sort of. It was a battle zone. All of the soldiers around the gym got killed when the infected broke out.

Steph: That’s awful.

Me: It was. Your situation doesn’t sound any better. Are there a lot of infected trying to get into the hospital?

Steph: They’re swarming everywhere. As far as we can tell, the lower floors are full of them. Outside, we can see thousands of them on the grounds. The soldiers think they were drawn here by all of the shooting.

Me: Thousands outside?

Steph: Too many to count.

Me: Do you guys have an escape plan?

Steph: Escape? Where to?

Me: I don’t know. I guess everyone is asking themselves that question right now.

Steph: I don’t think anywhere is safe.

Me: We’ve got a line on a place but who knows.

Steph: I don’t think escape even matters anymore.

Me: Why?

Steph: The virus is airborne. Nearly everybody who gets exposed, catches it.

Me: But some are immune, right? I mean completely immune.

Steph: Yes, very few. But with the infected killing everyone who isn’t also infected, what’s immunity worth?

Me: You sound like you’ve given up.

I waited a long time for a response after that.

Steph: Zed, are you there?

Me: Yes.

Steph: The truth is, we’re losing this fight. We all know we’re going to die. It’s just a matter of time. It’s a matter of the number of floors we have to retreat to.

Me: You’ve got lots to go, Steph. The Army could still come. There’s still hope.

Steph: You’re obviously not keeping up with what’s going on everywhere else.

Me: I just know what people tell me. If I’m not running, I’m shooting. If I’m not shooting, I’m hiding. What’s the situation?

Steph: Every time we find a city or a region that says that it has the virus in hand, it seems like they collapse a few hours later. Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio are no better off than we are. Lubbock and Amarillo are a mess. Waco is holding out but we’re getting fewer and fewer contacts from there. The only city we’ve even heard about where there is no infection is Leadville.

Me: What’s a Leadville?

Steph: Some place way up in the mountains in Colorado.

Me: Why are they safe?

Steph: Remoteness? Easier to quarantine? I guess there aren’t too many ways in or out of a place like that.

Me: You wanna run off to Leadville with me : )

Steph: That’s sweet. But I don’t think you’re their kind of people, Zed.

Me: Too white?

Steph: That’s one way to put it.

Me: Leadville pipe dreams aside, what will you do? How long can you hold out?

Steph: Everything is working against us.

Me: How so?

Steph: To start with, all of the stairwells are full of infected. The elevators are useless. The infected are always there when the doors open. There’s no way for us to get out. We’re stuck. But we’re dependent on the utility system. Once electricity goes, we’ll lose water. Once the water stops flowing it’ll only be a matter of days. So, the food shortage we’re having is problematic but we’ll all be dead long before we starve. If the infected don’t get in and kill us all.

Me: I can see why you feel hopeless.

Steph: There is half a hope, maybe less. It’s brutal and it feels wrong but no one here can think of anything else. I feel bad thinking about it. I feel worse talking about it.

Me: What?

Steph: Help me with my decision, Zed. You’re a disinterested third party.

Me: Not disinterested.

Steph: You know what I mean.

Me: Whatever.

Steph: We think we can fortify the top floors and keep the infected from getting in. If we had enough food and water, we might hold out for a long time after the utilities go.

Me: You said you didn’t have enough water.

Steph: Let me finish.

Me: K.

Steph: People inside get infected. It gets chaotic when they turn symptomatic and then we lose people and we lose a floor or two. Then we have to try and reconsolidate a few floors up. We’re killing ourselves from the inside. The infected outside just exacerbate the situation.

Me: Ok.

Steph: One of the doctors came up with an idea.

Me: Which is?

Steph: He thinks that in the general population the infection rate is nearly 100%. But for us, it’s got to be way lower.

Me: That sounds like wishful thinking.

Steph: No, I don’t think so. Hear me out.

Me: K.

Steph: There are a lot of healthcare workers and soldiers here. We’ve all been on the front lines of this outbreak from the beginning. We’ve seen most of our friends and colleagues get infected and turn.

Me: I’m with you so far.

Steph: Just because we’ve all been at risk of exposure so long and we haven’t been infected yet suggests that many of us may be immune.

Me: Or cautious.

Steph: Yes, maybe. But there were a lot of us at first between nurses, doctors, patients, and soldiers. If only ten out of a thousand were immune and nine-hundred of those got infected while the other hundred didn’t, in the remaining pool of a hundred, the immunity rate wouldn’t be 10 in a thousand anymore, it would be the same ten, but in a group of a hundred. So, if you’re in that last group, your odds of being immune go from a nearly zero chance to ten percent.

Me: Sure, the math works, but there are a lot of assumptions built into that. Where is this going?

Steph: Where we’re at right now is that we all know we’re going to die. That is a certainty. We’re either going to get infected, get killed by the infected, die of thirst, or if some fortunate miracle happens, die of starvation.

Me: Such a wonderful world we’re in now. Escape then. There’s got to be a way.

Steph: There are too many infected below. We can’t escape.

Me: What then?

Steph: We have a few infected people strapped into beds in a room at the end of the hall. We’re going to hoard all of the water and food we can on the top floor and then fortify it. Then we’re going to use our infected to infect ourselves in groups of ten or twenty.

Me: Say what?

Steph: A saliva swab from the mouth of an infected for each of us. That’s a very reliable transmission pathway. 100% reliable.

Me: Not exactly sanitary.

Steph: Exactly not sanitary. I just hope none of them has AIDS or herpes or TB.

Me: That sounds like suicide.

Steph: No. Some of us will be immune. This gives us a way to sort out who is and who isn’t in a controlled fashion. The ones who are immune will take the top floor and might be able to hold out with the supplies we have on hand.

Me: Everyone is okay with this?

Steph: No. Everyone is taking it pretty hard but if we don’t do something we all know that we’re dead. ALL OF US. This was the only idea that we had that might give some of us a chance. We are going to vote on it in a few minutes.

Me: What will you do with the ones that show signs of the infection?

Steph: Shoot them.

Me: I don’t know what to say.

Steph: It’s a hard choice. We’re doctors and nurses. We’re supposed to help people.

Me: What about the slow burns? They’ll show signs of infection but might turn out like me.

Steph: It doesn’t matter. Same solution.

Steph: Zed?

Steph: Zed?

Steph: Are you still there?

Me: Yes.

Steph: Are you angry that some slow burns like you will get killed?

I didn’t answer at first because the answer was yes. I was more angry because I couldn’t think of a better solution.

Me: Take the infection. Kill the infected. It’s your only chance.

Steph:  Thanks for being honest.

Me: How will the vote go?

Steph:  We’ll vote to infect. It’s our only choice.

Me: Tell me before they infect you?

Steph:  I’ll give my phone to my friend Liz. She’ll let you know if I don’t make it.

Chapter 5

Crowded isn’t the first word I’d choose to describe how many infected were in the dimly lit tunnel system beneath the campus, but there were a lot more loitering around inside than I would have preferred. There were places on our lengthy trek where we had to squeeze past groups of infected squatting and resting or others trying to push their way through a door to gain access to one of the university buildings.

It was a stressful hike, but at least the tunnels were cool and the infected showed little interest in us.

When we finally arrived at the door we were looking for, we exited the tunnel into the bowels of the university’s twenty-thousand seat basketball arena. We were just north of the hospital complex. We found a staircase that led up to the ground-level concourse that traced a path around the circumference of the circular building. Without speaking, we followed the echoes of our footsteps around the wide, deserted circle.

The ground floor concourse was walled in glass, so it was easy for us to gauge our location simply by looking outside.

When we arrived at the south side of the arena we saw the hospital complex across a concrete plaza and a lawn of dying grass.

Carnage left by the days-long battle with the infected was everywhere.

Military vehicles were scattered about. A few were burned. Most were just abandoned, some with heavy doors swaying in the breeze. The triage tent that Murphy and I had been in a few days earlier had fallen. The barricades were in shambles.

In the streets, all over the parking lots, and on the lawns, lay the dead. Brutal evidence of the efficacy yet insufficiency of military firepower. The live infected were everywhere, walking, squatting in the shadows, or running toward the hospital’s main building. The lower floors of the hospital were swarming with them.

Muffled gunfire sounded from the hospital, punctuated by occasional explosions. A window blew out and a shower of glass rained on the infected trying to get into the building. The soldiers inside were losing another battle. The hospital staff was losing another floor.

I stared at the upper floors of the westernmost building, wondering what would become of Steph. I tried to squeeze some inspiration for a rescue plan out of my brain, but all I got were thoughts of helplessness and frustration.

Murphy gave me a shove in the shoulder to get my attention. “Forget it, Null Spot. There’s nothing we can do for them.”

“I wasn’t…”

“Whatever, man.”

There was no point arguing. Murphy was right.

“If we want an armored Humvee, this is the place,” Murphy said. “The soldiers are too busy staying alive up there to stop us. Whitey might be a problem though. He gets mad when you steal his cars. Heh, heh, heh.”

“Murphy, if you’re trying to piss me off with your Whitey remarks, you know, I don’t care about that stuff, right?”

Murphy grinned. “Man, I’m just trying to get you to lighten up a bit.”

I pointed out through the tinted glass. “We’re looking at a thousand rotting corpses. Lighten up?”

“Life is what you make it, man.” He shrugged.

I gave it a derisive little headshake.

He said, “All these infected wandering around might be a problem.”

“Yeah,” I agreed

He said, “Once we’re in a Humvee, an armored one, I don’t think they can do anything to get at us.” It sounded to me like he was trying to convince himself.

“But if they swarm us like they swarmed Wilkins’ car?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just being honest, man. If we’re going to back out, now is the time to do it, because once I open this door, who knows what happens. It’s all a gamble.”

“Yeah, I know.” My experience in the Toyota was weighing on me.

“One of those Humvees could come in real handy,” he said.

Nodding, perhaps trying to convince myself, I said, “We could be at your mom’s house in twenty minutes.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “I’m still worried about getting out once we get where we’re going.”

“All we need is patience.” More convincing. “They’ll get bored and wander off.”

Murphy stared at field of corpses. He fell silent.

We both understood the size of the risk we were about to take.

Finally, I said, “If we’re going to do this, we need to move it along. What do you think?”

“All right. Let’s do it.” Murphy pushed the glass doors open and walked out into the full sun, without looking to make sure I was behind. Over his shoulder, he whispered, “Damn, it’s hot out here.”

It was damn hot. We walked toward the nearest armored Humvee that appeared to have an obscured view from the hospital windows, just in case.

The smell of the dead bodies rotting in the sun was overwhelming, but the smoke in the air helped to mask it.

Thick clouds of flies swarmed us.

Smears and pools of bodily fluids, not quite dry, made the footing treacherous.

“This is disgusting,” said Murphy.

“Yeah.” I opened my mouth to stop breathing the rancid stench into my nose, but when the flies tried to land in my mouth I felt like I could taste the corpses on my tongue. I felt nauseous.

Bodies lay about, ripped open by bullets. Bellies were distended where the gases of rot had no hole to escape. Faces were stretched in agony.

“Can people eat rats?” I asked.

Murphy stopped and looked at me. His expression told me that he thought I might be cracking up. “What are you even talking about?”

“I’m just thinking that this place is going to be infested with rats pretty soon. The whole city will be. They’d be a plentiful food source.”

Murphy shook his head. “I’ll learn how to grow potatoes or something long before I eat a rat.” He turned and hurried across the distance to the Humvee we’d selected.

The vehicle was empty. That was good luck. Rotting corpses baking in the heat of a closed vehicle might have made it unusable.

I looked around at the infected nearby. They were either rummaging through bloody scraps or focused on the sound of gunshots coming from the hospital.

Murphy jumped into the Humvee’s driver’s seat. I got in on the passenger side.

Murphy looked at me. “It’s do or die now, buddy. You sure you wanna do this?”

I shrugged. “You know, in this armored Humvee, we can probably drive around here a bit and maybe draw some of the infected away from the hospital. You know, give Steph and the others a chance.”

Murphy shook his head, but didn’t look at me. Without a word, he slammed his door shut, catching the attention of all the nearby infected.

“Damn.” I quickly yanked my door shut as Murphy waited for the glow plugs in the diesel engine to warm up.

Whites ran at us from all directions.

Murphy cranked the starter. As soon as the engine fired, Murphy floored the accelerator and we sluggishly accelerated away from the hospital.

I’d have been a lot happier if heavy beast of a Humvee was quicker.

We ran over one bump, then another. I knew what those bumps were, but put the thought of it out of my mind and focused on the clear pavement ahead.

The Humvee shuddered with the impact of an infected body running into the side at full speed. A few found a grip on the rear and were trying to climb on. The infected on the side slid away as Murphy pushed the truck to go faster.

When we hit clear asphalt, Murphy ran the Humvee up past forty and said, “Null Spot. Heh, heh, heh.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” I asked. “Null Spot.”

“You’re all kind of whited out, man,” he said. “It’s like you’re not there. Like a spot with nothing in it. Null Spot.” Murphy’s big laugh filled the vehicle.

“Whatever,” I muttered and looked out the window.

“Null Spot.” He laughed again. “You and your stupid superhero shit. Man, did you watch too many Star Wars movies as a kid, or what?”

I said, “I just thought we might be able to help them, that’s all.”

Murphy changed the subject with a hard swerve. The Humvee almost hit a curb. At the last second, Murphy angled back for the center of the street.

“What the fuck, man?”

Murphy said, “Dude, did you see that?”

“What?”

“That White was right in front of me and he jumped out of the way. So I tried to get him anyway.” He laughed again.

“Maybe he was smarter than the others,” I suggested

Murphy cocked his head as if giving that some thought.

I said, “Maybe he did it on purpose.”

Murphy smiled and looked over at me. “My mom always said, ‘Never trust Whitey.’”

Shaking my head, I asked, “Does anybody actually think you’re funny?”

“Everybody but you.” More grins.

“Did she really tell you that?” I asked.

“No, man, I’m just fuckin’ with ya.” Without warning, Murphy slammed the brakes hard. The Humvee skidded to a stop. He threw the transmission into reverse and mashed the accelerator to the floor.

“God damn,” I shouted. “You drive like shit.” I pushed myself away from the dashboard and back into my seat.

“That bridge over the highway back there was clear,” he said, pointing out my window. “I think we can get across.”

The infected were swarming up behind us. “Hurry.”

The brakes locked. Tires skidded again. More infected pounced on the Humvee.

I looked back and saw hands, elbows, and screaming mouths. “Shit.”

“Don’t worry, man,” Murphy told me over my cursing. “They can’t get inside.” Murphy turned the Humvee and maneuvered between the cars on the road leading to the bridge.

The infected beat loudly on the roof.

Murphy looked over at me, then laughed again.  He was having too much fun. He slammed the brakes hard and a body rolled off the roof and down over the hood just as he pushed the accelerator again. The Humvee bounced over the body. We crossed over the bridge.

“I’ll get the others off on the next turn.”

Chapter 6

The further we rolled into east Austin, the thicker the smoke got and the fewer infected we saw. Those that we did see were headed away. Our hitchhikers chose to join them. They were all brain-fried monsters, but they still knew enough to fear the fires that were burning their way across the eastern half of the city.

My phone buzzed and I gave it a look to see who was calling. It was a text message from Amber. I smiled.

Murphy said, “Man, you’re worse than a teenager.”

“It’s Amber.”

“She was the cute one, right?”

I shrugged.

“How many women is that?” Murphy teased. “Player Zed.”

I ignored him.

Amber: Are you there, Zed?

Me: Yup. What’s up?

Amber: Are you at Murphy’s mom’s house?

Me: No. We got hung up.

Amber: Anything bad?

“Dude, Amber just asked me if anything bad happened.”

“What’d you say?” he asked.

Raising my eyebrows, I said, “Nothing yet.”

“No point in sugarcoating it,” he said. “I have a feeling we all need to get used to bad news.”

Me: Jerome got shot.

Amber: Oh no. Bad?

Me: He’s dead.

No response.

Me: How are things there? You guys sitting tight? Any news?

Amber: Tense : (

Me: What happened?

Amber: One of the guys, Darren, I think, is infected.

Me: How do you know for sure?

Amber: He was lethargic for a while after you left. Nobody thought much of it but then he started acting weird. Now we think he’s infected.

Me: Did you take his temperature?

Amber: We don’t have a thermometer. They locked him in one of the dorm rooms. After they locked him in he screamed crazy gibberish for a while. He’s quiet now. Mark is sure he’s infected. But he has a gift for certainty.

Me: Those kind of people worry me.

Amber: Me too.

Me: Maybe Darren couldn’t take it all and just went nuts. Maybe all he needs is a Valium.

Amber: Mark wants to shoot him but nobody wants to open the door and go in. Wilkins is against that but again, nobody except Wilkins wants to open the door to find out for sure. Every time Wilkins brings it up, Mark goes ballistic.

Me: Not good.

Amber: I think Mark is really insecure. I don’t think he’s handling all of this very well. I think he and Wilkins are going to have it out at some point.

Me: Why do you say that?

Amber: It’s like every time they talk, Mark seems less respectful, more assertive. He doesn’t want to be a team player. He wants to be in charge.

Me: What did he say, exactly?

Amber: Mostly it’s subtle stuff. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m just worried.

Me: I don’t know what to say.

Amber: You don’t have to say anything. I’m just telling you because I need somebody to talk to.

Me: What about Marcy and Felicity?

Amber: Felicity has been sleeping on the couch in the lounge most of the afternoon.

Me: She’s not infected, is she?

Amber: No, she’s just tired. Marcy is following Mark around like she’s a puppy. I’m embarrassed for her.

Me: Sounds like junior high for grown-ups. I’m almost glad we got evicted.

Amber: Except for Jerome, I guess.

Me. Yeah.

Amber: Yeah.

Me: Well, like I said before. Wilkins is a good guy. He’ll keep it all under control.

Amber: I hope.

Me: Can you do me a favor if you’re not doing anything else?

Amber: You saved my life. You know I will.

Me: You know that stuff I talked about? That stuff about downloading whatever we could about farming, and solar power, you know, anything about how things work, or how to treat people when they’re sick. Anything about survival.

Amber: Yeah.

Me: Could you download as much as you can from the internet, please?

Amber: Sure. I’ve got a 64 gig flash drive. I can save it there. How will I get it to you?

Me: We’ll work something out. I’ll talk to you later on, okay?

Amber: Okay. Bye.

Murphy said, “Man, don’t look so down. What’s going on over there?”

I told Murphy about the conversation.

Chapter 7

The smoke thickened and reduced visibility down to several car lengths. The air got hard to breathe. Nothing was moving anywhere.

“The fire must be close,” I said.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked.

“More or less.” He shrugged. I didn’t feel the confidence.

I said, “It seems like we’re headed right for the fire.”

Murphy shrugged again. “I’m just looking for a wide street to head north again.”

“Okay,” I said tentatively. “I don’t think I want to get roasted or suffocated.”

“I hear you, man.”

A few minutes later, Murphy made a slow left turn onto a wide, car-strewn boulevard.

“Murphy, what are we going to do after we find your mom’s house?”

“Well, I’m not going to be your superhero sidekick if that’s what you’re going to ask me, Null Spot.” He laughed. He found that Null Spot thing really funny. He always found himself funny.

“Whatever.”

Murphy glanced over at me and said, “So, tell me about this peaches and cream world that you grew up in that made you wanna go and help everybody. It’s like you’re a Boy Scout trying to earn that merit badge you missed out on when you were fifteen.” Murphy laughed again.

“Not even close,” I told him. “I was never a Boy Scout. We spent all of our time at church.”

“You didn’t ride a bicycle around to people’s houses did you?”

I shook my head. “Definitely not. I never really bought into any of it.”

“I’ll bet your parents didn’t dig that,” he said. “Did they know?”

“Oh, yeah,” I answered. “I told them.”

“What’d they do about it?”

“My stepdad thought he could beat the Jesus into me.” I said in a matter-of-fact tone. I liked to tell myself it didn’t bother me.

“How’d that turn out?” Murphy asked, seriously for a change.

“Just like you’d expect,” I answered.

“I heard that, man. So, no brothers? No sisters?”

“Nope, just me,” I said. “My real dad has family around town. I never met any of them. My mom hated them all.”

“Your folks sound like real nice people.”

I shrugged.

Murphy said, “So you’re more of a Batman superhero, then.”

“What?”

“You know,” he said, nodding emphatically. “Childhood trauma makes you want to go out and do good in the world.”

I ignored Murphy and looked out the window into a dim gray bubble a few hundred feet wide. Nothing moved. Nothing attacked. Abandoned cars littered the road. Human remains lay here and there. Doors on houses hung open. Windows were smashed. Human clutter littered the streets, lawns, and parking lots.

Everything had changed so fast.

I wondered if each of those houses had their dead owners inside. I wondered if the occupants became infected and went rampaging into West Austin to kill and kill and kill. I wondered how many children’s bodies were lying under their beds or in their closets.

Those kids never knew that evil found you wherever you hid. Running and fighting were your only real choices.

I was getting depressed.

That was an emotional indulgence I couldn’t afford.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Breathe.

Move ahead.

Suck it up and don’t be a pussy.

We passed through a flashing red light at a large intersection.

“I know where we are now,” I said.

“Yeah. If we’re lucky, it’ll be smoky when we get to my mom’s house and we won’t have a swarm of the infected on us.”

“If they’re not there, then what?” I asked.

“My mom and sister?” Murphy asked, clarifying my question.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” Murphy answered.

“Do you have other family around?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, man,” he said. “Aunts, uncles, cousins. Most live close by. My mom is pretty tight with my uncle. He lives a few blocks over. She could be at his house. Who knows?”

“I assume you tried calling him.”

“Yeah. I tried calling everybody.” Murphy sounded irritated by my question. His face sagged a little. He looked much older without his smile.

“Your family means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” I asked. It was obviously true. But I thought Murphy might need some urging to talk about it.

“Yeah.”

Looking around at the impenetrable gray, I said, “With all the smoke chasing the infected away, we can probably check all of your relatives’ houses.”

With no enthusiasm, Murphy said, “Null Spot rides again.”

I ignored the comment. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find somebody.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Chapter 8

What little I could see of Murphy’s neighborhood through the smoke didn’t bode well. Bodies of the dead infected were scattered everywhere. Car windows were smashed. The small old houses had belched their contents and dead occupants out onto the lawns.

Under the boughs of the grand old oaks that had shaded the streets for decades, Murphy’s neighbors had fought the infected, and the guns they used to defend themselves drew more infected in. It was a difficult first lesson to survive through. Dried blood, torn clothes, and gnawed bones marked the places where men, women, and their kids had learned that lesson too late.

In spite of the body count, I saw no firearms among the dead. Someone had lived through the battle. The area had been scavenged. That was a hopeful sign.

Murphy stopped the Humvee by the curb in front of a house that looked like all the rest. Through the thickening smoke, I could barely see the front door.

Murphy turned to me with his mouth in a resolute crease. “You can stay here if you want. You don’t have to come in.”

I simply said, “We’re in this together.”

Without another word, Murphy opened his door and climbed out. I did the same.

When I came around the back of the vehicle, Murphy was halfway across the front lawn.

I hurried my pace.

The front door was ajar. Murphy cautiously pushed it open as I came up to watch his back.

I checked our flanks, a lesson I learned from watching the soldiers die on the quad by the dorm. They didn’t understand their adversary. They got sloppy and they paid for their mistakes in the only currency this altered world seemed content to accept. Blood.

Murphy stepped into the house. He was tense. He was tentative.

He feared what he might find.

His breathing was ragged, but we hadn’t exerted ourselves. His smile, a dam that held back a river of emotions, crumbled in the flood.

I paused halfway in and listened. A noise was coming from somewhere inside. I didn’t know where, but I guessed what.

Murphy crossed the living room and leaned into the kitchen as I closed the front door behind me.

The furnishings were thirty years out of fashion and worn. The carpet was its own kind of ugly.

A wall covered with framed photos chronicled the lives of Murphy and his sister. Murphy as a Boy Scout. Murphy as a football player. A younger, thinner Murphy standing proud and stern in a crisp Army uniform.

Murphy’s sister, sitting on a pony at a young age. Pirouetting as a third grader at a dance recital. The camera caught her, clad in a cheerleader’s uniform, high in the air in a gymnastic bounce. Her wearing a cap and gown with a big grin in two separate photos from two different graduations.

Murphy’s mom was in some of the pictures, arms around the kids, always smiling. No picture of any father, anywhere.

Murphy’s mother and sister came to life on that wall even as their deaths were about to be confirmed.

Murphy looked back at me, his face taut, and his jaw clenched. He shook his head.

The kitchen was empty.

I followed him across the living room to the hall.

The sound was louder. Just as I became certain what it was, Murphy bolted up the hall. He must have figured it out as well.

It was the infected.

I hurried to follow.

A closed bedroom door at the end of the hall proved no obstacle for Murphy’s momentum. It cracked and splintered. Hinge screws ripped through wood as Murphy’s wrath exploded into the room.

Murphy’s fury found voice in a primordial scream that was seconded only to the shots exploding from his rifle.

The house fell suddenly silent.

The ugly business in that room was finished. Only sorrow and rage remained.

In the hall, I froze in my footsteps.

In that room, heavy feet pounded the wooden floor. Furniture bounced against walls. Trinkets shattered. A beast fought with its grief.

I wondered, was Murphy’s smile dying while I listened, while I cringed? Would he now wear the frown of the emotionally damaged, the same one worn now by so many?

There was too much emotion in that room for me to enter the fray. I’d rather face the infected. I withdrew past the only other door off the hall. It was also closed. If something was inside, I’d know soon enough.

I took up a position in the living room at the entrance to the hall. From there, I could see the front door, the back door, and of course, the hall. Nothing moved.

Moments later, Murphy burst from the room with a grimace on his face and tears in his eyes.

I looked toward the second hall door, and in the time it took me to focus my attention there, Murphy crossed the distance and smashed through it.

Half in the hall and half in the room; Murphy looked back and forth across it several times and then froze.

After a time, I softly asked, “Murphy?”

Murphy didn’t move.

I listened for movement in the house. I heard only silence.

The only infected in the house were those Murphy had killed in the back bedroom. Whether those infected had killed his family or whether they were his family was the burning question.

I shuddered at the thought. Murphy wasn’t like me. He loved his mother.

For the moment, Murphy was frozen by grief.

Shots had been fired. If any infected were near enough, they would hear, and they would come. One of us needed to get back in the game and that had to be me.

I hurried into the kitchen, stepped across the avocado-patterned linoleum floor and peeked through the window above the sink. There was no movement on that side of the house.

I hurried to the front of the house and pushed aside a homemade curtain to get a view of the street. “Mother fucker.”

Our Humvee was rolling away from the curb.

I ran to the front door and flung it open.

From behind, Murphy called, “What?”

I ran into the front yard and saw the Humvee disappear into the smoke. “God damn it. God damn motherfucking criminal bastard fuck-shits.”

Then Murphy was beside me. He bellowed curses up the street and pointed his weapon.

I put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. “Don’t. It’s pointless.”

I looked around to see if we’d drawn any attention. In the small circle of the world that wasn’t obscured by smoke, I saw no movement. I heard none of the infected’s usual noises but I heard something. I heard a noise that didn’t belong.

With neither of us swearing at the moment, Murphy heard it too. "What's that?”

I looked south, toward the sound. It was a combination of a rumble and a rush of wind, growling and coming closer. The uniform gray smoke hanging over the houses started to glow in patches of orange and red.

"Shit. Murphy, we need to move. The fire is coming."

I ran a few steps and noticed that Murphy wasn't following. I stopped. "C'mon, Murphy. What the fuck?"

Murphy was fixated on the glow of the fire through the smoke. "We can't outrun that."

His voice was flat. Despondent.

Oh, no.

"I'm not quitting now,” I yelled at him. “I'm not dying here. Let's go.” I took a few more steps.

Nothing.

Fuck.

Suddenly, Murphy was back. He shouted, "We need a car."

"No time,” I argued.

"It's our only chance."

Damn.

Murphy was right.

I ran toward a car that sat in a neighbor’s yard with the driver’s door swung open. The front seat was a gory mess, but I jumped in. The keys were in the ignition. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks.
I cranked the engine. The starter groaned rhythmically, but the engine didn't fire.

"Shit," I shouted.

I cranked again.

Nothing.

It must have run out of fuel with the engine running after its driver had died. I was out of the car in a snap. Murphy was nowhere to be seen.

I looked around.

I heard a car engine crank and made out the shape of another car through the smoke across the street. I ran toward it and saw Murphy's big silhouette through the shattered driver's side window.

Just as my feet hit asphalt, the engine rumbled to life.

Murphy spun the wheels as he backed the car off of the curb.

I jumped and slid over the hood as the fire ignited the leaves of the oak tree shading above me.

A billow of heat singed my skin and seared my throat. Every tree I could see was engulfed in flames. It was all happening impossibly fast.

Beneath that flaming sky, I landed in the passenger seat and Murphy stomped on the accelerator.

The car fishtailed up the street. Embers from trees rained down from above. Lawns, bushes, and houses ignited.

Murphy pulled the car through the first left-hand turn and plunged us into thick smoke at thirty, forty, then fifty miles-per-hour. The oaks’ thick foliage crumbled into embers as the fire raced through the treetops in front of us. Visibility shrank to a deadly small margin for the speed we were moving. But with death's greedy hands grasping at our flesh, wild-eyed flight and long odds were our only chances for survival.

Murphy kept jerking the car from side to side to get past obstacles seen at the last moment. Four blocks passed before we got out from under the racing blaze.

I cast a morbidly curious glance at the conflagration behind us. "Jesus."

Murphy hit a hard right turn and then a quick left, angling across the path of the fire, but still moving away.

I was nervous about the choice. "Do you know a way out?"

"That dude with the bunker, his house isn't far. If we can get there ahead of the fire, we'll be safe." Murphy was tense. We weren’t out of danger.

"There’s a lot of hope in that plan," I told him.

"Do you have a better idea?" he asked.

“Drive like a mother fucker ‘til we run out of road?” Yeah, that seemed like the best choice to me.

“Once these streets burn, we’ll never find that bunker in the mess.” Murphy cast a quick, knowing glance at me.

“Shit.”

Chapter 9

Murphy stopped the car in front of a dilapidated two-story house with a chain-link fence falling down around it.

I looked back in the direction of the fire. Knowing what to listen for, I heard the distant roar but I saw no evidence of the glow. We had time—not a lot, but some.

Murphy grabbed his rifle and jumped out of the car.

I hurried behind. "Are you sure this is the place?"

"Yep."

The front door of the house was hanging on a single hinge. We ran inside.

The house had been vandalized to the point of worthlessness. Every window was shattered. The carpet was ripped from the slab. There were holes in the walls and holes in the ceiling large enough for someone to fall through. There were dirty, worn cushions on the floor, and graffiti on the walls.

Trash lay everywhere. Torn clothes were scattered with bones. The house stank like an overflowing port-a-potty.

We passed through the kitchen, which had been destroyed by vandals and copper tubing thieves.

Murphy flung open a door that led into the garage.

Infected.

“Shit.” I stumbled over my feet trying to back away.

Murphy, still full of pent up rage, wasn’t fazed. He barreled forward and popped off three rounds before swinging the butt of his gun around to work on the skull of one who was close enough to catch his fury.

I regained my footing and fired six shots at movement in the darkness.

Then it was still. My eyes adjusted and I saw eleven dead infected among the junk. That didn’t make sense. Some of them must already have been there. I also saw something very unusual. In the floor, there was a heavy, misshapen steel door. The rusty lock and handle had the look of having been pried open.

Murphy, pointed to my rifle, and pointed at the door in the floor.

I stood back and aimed my M4.

With one hand on his weapon, Murphy bent over, grabbed the door, and pulled.

It clinked on something, but it didn't open.

Murphy pulled on it again. It rattled in its frame.

It was jammed or locked.

Damn it.

How much time could we have?

He kicked it hard, and yelled, "If anyone's down there, get back. I'm blowing the door and then I'm coming in."

Murphy pulled a hand grenade from his MOLLE vest and placed it with both hands near the door's locking mechanism.

He looked up at me.

I needed no instructions. I ran back into the house and headed for the furthest end from the garage.

Murphy's heavy breathing behind me told me that I understood what was going to happen next.

We got to the end of a hall, and before I could get into the bedroom, the grenade's blast rocked the house.

I stopped and turned.

Murphy was already running back toward the garage.

As we passed the open front door on our way back, I saw the orange glow of the fire above the roofs of the houses across the street. All of our chips were on this one bet.

Time for delays and caution were gone. If the grenade had failed to do its work, we were dead.

The garage was full of floating filth and rearranged junk.

I coughed, inhaling more dusty crud.

It was hard to see. We made our way toward the center, where we knew the door lay on the floor. It had been swung open by the force of the blast, more bent than before.

Murphy looked at me for confirmation.

I nodded. What other choice did I have?

The first step creaked under his weight.

Chapter 10

No surprise; it was dark.

I’d expected a doomsday bunker that would generate its own electricity. It either wasn’t doing that, the light bulbs were shattered by the grenade’s concussion, or an ambush awaited us below.

The darkness implied only negative outcomes, hence my lack of surprise.

Murphy flicked on the flashlight mounted on the barrel of his M4, pointed the weapon into the gloom, and hustled down the stairs.

I let my M4 dangle from its harness, drew my Glock, shined my light over his shoulder, and followed.

The room was maybe a dozen feet wide and twenty or thirty feet long. It had a concrete floor and shelves with dusty boxes and unidentifiable equipment stacked within. At the far end of the room on the left wall, another door was shut. The mechanism was torn up. Someone had gone through that door as well.

And there were bodies. Some were clearly infected. Of others, I couldn’t be sure.

Murphy looked back at me. “If we can, we need to close that outer door. The fire will be here soon.”

“Yup.” I bounded back up the stairs, positioned myself on one end of the door, and lifted. Good God, it was heavy.

Murphy came up to help.

The hinges had been bent by the explosion, making it very difficult to swing the warped door up off of the garage floor.

As we got it back over the hole, in a position where gravity would close it once again, Murphy and I hurried down the stairs, chased by the roar of the approaching fire.

We ran to the far end of the bunker.

The second door hung slightly open, a fact I hadn’t noticed moments before in our hurry to check the room and reclose the outer door. We were carelessly racing into uncertainty, betting our lives on a guess that the bunker was safe.

We had no choice. The alternative was immolation.

Murphy took up a ready position outside the door. I put a hand on the handle. He nodded twice and on the third nod, I swung it open.

I jumped back and looked for movement in the blackness. I listened for sounds.

Nothing.

No, wait…I heard something.

I cast a fearful glance at Murphy. He looked back the way we’d come. The fire had to be on the house. Its roar filled the room.

Necessity drove us down the stairs.

In the beams of our lights, the room appeared to be a match for the one we’d just left, ten feet deeper in the earth, and set at a perpendicular angle.

No movement. That was good.

Murphy stopped at the bottom of the stairs and kept his rifle pointed down the length of the room.

I pulled the door shut behind us.

“Don’t worry about that,” Murphy said.

“No, we need to seal it if we can.”

“The fire?” he asked.

“I don’t know if it’ll suck all the oxygen out when it passes over,” I said, “but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“Do what you need to do.”

The door appeared to have a good rubber seal, but the door handle was missing and the metal around the hole was bent. That left a large gap for air to escape.

I shined my light on a nearby shelf and grabbed a handful of a rotten sleeping bag material and stuffed it into the hole. A fortuitously handy cinder block served to keep the door closed. “That’ll have to do.”

With the door sealed, the fire’s roar diminished significantly. I heard disturbingly familiar noises from the far end of the room.

Suddenly frightened and angry for having missed the infected in the darkness, I shined my light down the length of the bunker.

The room had rows of bunk beds along one wall, what appeared to be a kitchen area at the end, and the remains of some living room furniture in the middle. I counted three bodies but I saw no movement.

Where were they?

I scanned the room again, ready to shoot anything that wasn’t Murphy, but my light revealed nothing in the dark corners that it reached. No movement at all.

Still, I heard the sounds of the infected.

“There.” Murphy shined his light on the far end of the room, near the left corner. “Another door.”

“How big is this fucking place?” I asked, out of frustration.

With the fire roaring overhead and our situation stable for the moment, I should have been relieved, at least.

The door jiggled in its frame and the animal sounds of the infected behind grew louder.

They knew we were there.

I laid my flashlight on a shelf and pointed it down the length of the room. I ran a reassuring hand across the full magazines stored in my vest. I holstered my Glock and in a smooth, comfortable motion, I raised my M4 to a firing position.

I told Murphy, “We can’t beat that fire outside, but I’ll bet my ass that we can kill every brain-fried infected that funnels out of that door.”

“Make your shots count,” he told me.

“At this range, I can hit anything.”

The Ogre and the Harpy.

We stood in our ready poses for at least five minutes while the door rattled, the infected moaned, and the roar of the fire crescendoed above.

As time passed, I grew impatient. “I wish they’d just open the fuckin’ door and come out.”

Relaxing his stance, Murphy looked at me and in a hushed tone said, "I wonder if they're locked in."

I shrugged noncommittally.

Murphy said, "I'll bet those are folks from the neighborhood that hid down here when everything started. I’ll bet they bolted the door shut, not knowing that some of them were infected already, and now they’re all too stupid to figure out how to open it."

I said, “If I say I agree with your deduction, don’t call me your dear Watson.”

“Who’s Watson?” he asked.

“Murphy, there are some cultural gaps in your education that we need to discuss some time.”

“I take it Watson’s not a rapper,” he said.

“Whatever.”

Murphy said, "That must have been a nightmare when it all went down."

"Yeah,” I agreed. “The next time I start complaining, remind me about this and about how good I have it.”

“I will.”

“I know. So, what are our options, do you think?" I asked.

"We could stand here and wait for Whitey to come out.” Murphy half smiled. “That might take a few minutes or it might take a few days. They might never come out."

I asked, "Any other ideas?"

"Just bad ones."

I asked, “Like?”

He said, “We could try the grenade thing again, but if the shrapnel didn’t kill us, we'd get knocked senseless by the blast. Then, if we regained our senses in time, we might get to die while the infected down there eat us alive.”

“Yeah, I’m not a fan of that one.” I pursed my lips and thought for a second. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah?”

I said, “We could block the door.”

"Not we," Murphy corrected.

"This isn't a good time for you to get lazy," I told him.

"Not lazy,” he said. “Smart. One of us can pile enough of this junk between the wall and the door to keep it jammed shut. The other one needs to keep a rifle trained on that door in case the infected figure out how to get it open. Having us both standing around with boxes of crap in our hands when a hundred infected come pouring out…well, that won’t have a happy ending."

"Not for us, I guess." I said.

"Nope, not for us,” Murphy agreed with a laugh.

Chapter 11

The door was blocked.

I was exhausted.

Murphy and I made ourselves comfortable at the opposite end of level two, at the foot of the stairs that led up to the first level. The infected finally calmed down, and not much noise came from beyond the door. After what sounded like the collapse of the house above us a few hours before, all the noise of the fire had gone away as well.

I left my flashlight turned on and sitting on a shelf to provide some light in the gloomy space. At least it provided enough light so that I could see whether the bag of chips I pulled out of my bag were potato or corn.

“What do you got there?” Murphy asked.

I looked back in my bag. “Mostly chips, soda, and some donuts for breakfast.”

“Man, all I have are cupcakes, Peanut M&M’s, and three Dr. Peppers.”

“I’ve got like six bags of chips,” I said. “I’ll trade some for M&M’s.”

“Cool.”

“I need to find a watch,” I said, through a mouthful of corn chips. “I don’t want to burn up the battery on my phone by checking the time, but I hate not knowing what time it is.”

“There’ll be plenty around,” Murphy responded. “The trick is getting one that doesn’t require a battery.”

“Yeah. How do you tell?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Find one that looks old, I guess. Speaking of which, how’s your battery holding up?”

“Less than half. I need to get a solar charger for it.”

“That’s pointless, dude,” he said. “I don’t know when the cellular network will fail, but I know it will. I doubt that there’s anybody interested in keeping that stuff running anymore. The electric grid will fail, too. You can charge your cell phone in a wall socket until then. Besides, when the electric grid fails, the cellular network will go at the same time. So a solar charger for your cell phone is pointless.”

“Yeah, but I still need a solar charger for a computer.”

“Assuming you can get that flash drive from Amber,” said Murphy.

“I need to text her,” I said.

“You’re worried,” Murphy observed.

“Yeah, of course. She said Mark was going nuts.”

“He was already nuts.” Murphy smiled but his eyes betrayed his worry.

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“Does the Null Spot want to go back and save her?” he asked.

Fuck your Null Spot, Murphy.

I knew that if I ignored the Null Spot comments long enough, Murphy would give up on them. “I don’t know what we should do about her.”

“Or even if we have any responsibility to her,” he said. “You need to remember, we took them in and helped them. They repaid us by kicking us out.”

“It wasn’t a unanimous decision,” I argued.

“What you don’t seem to be getting here,” he said, “is that we’re different. You can think all of the ‘We Are The World’ thoughts you want, but we aren’t part of that club anymore.”

“Murphy, once things settle down…”

“No,” he stopped me. “Once people get a belief in their heads, it’s damn near impossible to change their minds. Once they decide all of us infected are a danger, they’ll always believe that, no matter what. Fear makes it all worse. Fear cements belief into people’s heads better than anything else. Right now, people are scared, right? As they should be.”

“That’s cynical,” I countered.

Murphy guffawed. “That’s what I like about you. You call me cynical and you don’t see the irony in it.” He laughed some more.

It was time to change the subject. “Do you mind if I ask what happened at your mom’s house? Were they both there?”

Murphy’s face instantly changed. The deep smile lines morphed into a furrowed frown. He didn’t say anything but started to stare at a shadow on floor. His mouth opened to start speaking a few times but nothing came out.

Feeling guilty for having asked, I said, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

It took a little time for Murphy to answer. “There were three infected in my mom’s room. My mom was dead. It was a hard thing to see.”

“Yeah, I’ve been there.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t true. “And your sister, was she in the house?”

Murphy shook his head and refocused on the shadows. “I don’t know if she’s alive or turned infected or what. I’ll probably never know.”

“What about your relatives’ houses?” I asked.

“Anybody I can think of probably got their houses burned down when the fire blew through.”

“Oh. What do you want to do, then?” I asked.

“Sit in this bunker tonight and get some sleep.”

Shaking my head, I said, “No, I mean, after that.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, still staring at the shadows. “I don’t know what to do after that. You got any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Since this all started, I’ve been mostly just trying to stay alive for the next five minutes. I mean, I keep thinking we need to plan. We need to think through these problems. But everything we plan for keeps falling to shit. We got a place set up in the dorm and got kicked out. We went to your mom’s house…I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought that up again. We stole a Humvee and some fuckers re-stole it. Jerome got shot for no good reason at all, except to teach us both a lesson that might keep us both alive for another day.”

Murphy cut in. “That’s what I’m saying. We need to expect that from the uninfected. Or at least be ready for it.”

I went on, “And now we’re in a bunker that we hoped might be a safe place for us to ride this whole thing out, and it’s a junked out shit hole full of the dead and infected.”

Murphy said, “It did save us from that fire.”

“Yeah.” He had a point about the fire. “Maybe I’m just being a whiny ass.”

I took a long drink out of a bottle of soda and said, “You know all that stuff I keep talking about? We need it. We need to know what to do to survive. The only things you and I really know are the stupid things we’ve seen in movies.”

Murphy shook his head. “I was in the Army.”

“Yeah man, you know I mean besides that.”

“You think too much,” he told me. “You’re still alive. That’s better than I can say for damn near everybody else. So, yeah, you are being a whiny ass. I’d say things have worked out pretty good for you so far.”

I looked around the dark, smelly bunker. “I wouldn’t say pretty good.”

“Well, I sure as hell would.” Murphy sat up straight and looked over at me. “You could be a brain-fried cannibal, but you’re not. Life is gonna be hard now. Get used to bad shit happening. If we want to make it, we need to suck it up and move on.”

“I didn’t realize that you were such an optimist.” It was sarcasm.

“I’m a pragmatist, man,” he said. “I think I’ve got a reasonably safe place to sleep tonight. I know I’ve got a pretty good load of ammo, an M4, and a Glock. I avoided getting barbecued. I’ve got a full belly and enough food and water to get me through breakfast. Hell, by today’s standards, I’m a rich man. If I had some fucked up hair, I’d be the new Donald Trump.” Murphy’s laugh found its way back.

I laughed along, and our laughter disturbed the infected in the lower level. They pushed on the door and it rattled. Too bad for them. It wasn’t going to open.

“Do you want first or second watch?” Murphy asked.

“I’m still on an adrenaline rush,” I said. “I don’t think I can sleep just yet. Besides, I want to check in with Amber and Steph if I can get a signal down here.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m dead tired. You take the first watch. Wake me when you get sleepy.”

“Will do.”

Murphy made himself comfortable on his pallet and closed his eyes. I checked my phone’s signal strength. One bar.

I texted Amber and hoped for the best.

Me: Amber, it’s Zed. Are you there?

I waited for an answer for a bit and tried again.

Me: Amber?

I wondered whether she was sleeping, and I worried about other possibilities. Thankfully, before I could spin up too many horrible scenarios in my imagination, the phone displayed a response.

Amber: Hey.

Me: Sorry if I woke you.

Amber: I’m guessing there was a delay between your texts but they both arrived at the same time on my end.

Me: Ah. I was getting worried.

Amber: I would say not to, but I guess there’s cause.

Me: Yeah.

Amber: Did you get to Murphy’s mom’s house?

Me: Yes.

Amber: And?

Me: The mom was dead.

Amber: And his sister?

Me: Don’t know.

Amber: Are you guys staying there tonight?

Me: That’s a long story but we’re holed up in some abandoned survivalist’s bunker.

Amber: That sounds promising.

Me: It’s not. It’s pretty much just a hole in the ground right now but at least we’re safe for the night.

Amber: That’s something.

Me: How are things on your end? Did you get a chance to download any of that stuff?

Amber: Grim and yes.

Me: What?

Amber: I downloaded a ton of stuff today. I’ve stayed in my room most of the day doing that. I’ve got it on my flash drive.

Me: You said, grim.

Amber: Felicity and Major Wilkins are down with the fever.

Me: Shit.

Amber: They’re in another room. The guys are guarding the door. There’s talk of shooting them now.

Me: What ever happened with Darren?

Amber: Nothing yet. The door is still locked shut. He stays quiet most of the time but gets loud and violent when he hears us in the hall. There’s no doubt he’s infected.

Me: Do you have a gun?

Amber: Yes. I’m in your old room by myself and I’m keeping the door locked. But Mark has the master key he found in the office so he can lock or unlock any of the rooms.

Me: Is that something to worry about?

Amber: I don’t know. I only go out into the hall when I have to go to the bathroom and I bring the gun with me. Mostly I hear what’s going on with the others through the door.

Me: What do you think is going to happen?

Amber: It’s like Blanton all over again. I think a couple of the guys have sequestered themselves in another of the rooms like me. Marcy and Mark are parading around like the king and queen, but only one of the guys is out there for them to boss around. It’s surreal.

Me: I’m sorry.

Amber: When I got here this place seemed like a refuge. Now I don’t know what it is.

Me: Do you want me to come and get you out? I can’t come tonight, but I could try tomorrow.

Amber: Not a good idea. Everybody thinks you guys are the cause of the infection in here. They think you’re carriers. If they see you, they’ll kill you.

Me: What do you think?

Amber: I don’t know. There’s speculation about it all over the internet.

Me: If that’s true, then I’m truly sorry. I didn’t know. By getting you from the dorm, I may have condemned you.

Amber: We were going to die there anyway. It was just a matter of time.

Me: I’m sorry.

Amber: Don’t be. Things are how they are now.

Me: Don’t give up hope, Amber. We’ll work something out.

Amber: Hope is irrelevant. The infection is spreading among us. It’s only a matter of time before all of us here get exposed, if we’re not already. The internet says that exposure is inevitable. The virus is too resilient, too contagious.

Me: Still, you might be immune. You haven’t contracted the virus yet. If the others were exposed, then you were too. Or you might end up like Murphy and me.

Amber: Those are very slim chances.

Me: Not really. For as much as you’ve been around the virus, especially at Blanton, and you haven’t come down with any symptoms yet, I think there’s a good chance that you’re immune.

Amber: Thanks for the sunshine doctor Zed.

Me: I’m not a doctor but I’m in contact with some people over at the hospital and that’s what they think.

Amber: What?

Me: That the longer you go without catching the virus, the higher the chances are that it’s because you’re immune.

Amber: Really? The doctors said that?

Me: Yup.

Amber: Okay. I’m going to keep the flash drive in my front pocket. That way, if I get infected and I turn and they shoot me, you can find it there.

Me: Amber.

Amber: It’s reality. That’s how it is now. Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning if you want.

Me: Absolutely.

I stared off into the darkness for a long time after my conversation ended while I ruminated over my choices. It was hard to tell which were good choices and which weren’t. They all turned sour at some point. They all seemed like mistakes.

Perhaps good needed to be measured in a new way. Perhaps good was just another day or hour of life. Was that as good as it was going to get? I wondered how Murphy would look at it.

It was time to check on Steph.

Me: Steph, are you there?

Steph: Will you be offended if I say again, wow, you’re still alive?

Me: It’s the new hello LOL.

Steph: Wow. You’re still alive.

Me: Wow. You’re still alive.

I took a few moments to convey my situation to Steph before proceeding.

Me: What’s the story at the hospital? Did you guys start infecting people?

Steph: Yes : (

Me: I’m sorry, but like you said before, it’s the only choice that gives some of you guys a chance.

Steph: That’s the logic but that doesn’t make it any easier.

Me: Are you okay with it all?

Steph: I don’t know. It was a hard thing to talk about. But imagining the difficulty was nothing compared to the reality of it.

Me: How many have you done?

Steph: We started right after you and I talked earlier.

Me: And?

Steph: We literally drew names and the first twenty names we pulled got infected. Eighteen of them started to show symptoms within a couple of hours, some right away.

Me: Did you follow through?

Steph: Are you asking if we shot them?

Me: Yes and no. I mean, you guys are doctors. I’m guessing you have drugs you could have used.

Steph: We decided that down the road, drugs would have more value. The soldiers have lots of bullets. An injection would be more humane but we’re still talking about killing people. Once you make the big moral leap, the question of how you do it loses significance. They were shot.

Me: So, eighteen shot and two left?

Steph: Yes. Everybody here is praying that the two make it. That’ll give credence to the theory underlying this fucking experiment. It’ll give us hope.

Me: Hope is important. When does the next group get infected?

Steph: About forty minutes.

Me: When will you know if you’re in that group?

Steph: We’re drawing right before we infect. That way nobody has to brood over their upcoming turn and maybe do something stupid.

Me: When will you know if the two that aren’t showing symptoms are immune?

Steph: We’re talking about that now but the consensus seems to be twenty-four hours.

Me: The doctors aren’t sure yet?

Steph: Nobody really knows.

Me: How are you holding up?

Steph: I’m alive.

Chapter 12

The darkness at the far end of the room grew as my flashlight battery slowly died. My eyelids got heavy. The hours wore on. I dozed off and jerked myself awake a half dozen times, taking deep breaths, and isometrically tensing my muscles each time to get my blood flowing again.

I stood up. I paced. I took care in keeping quiet. There was no point in disturbing the infected below.

I had the urge to check the hour on the phone for the hundredth time, but that would only serve to drain the remainder of my battery.

I sat on a storage bin, leaned back against the concrete wall, and let my thoughts wander. I tried to imagine a future when all of the infected were dead, all but the slow burns like me. I wondered how close life could return to normal. I wondered how many humans would be left when the chaos resolved to order.

I squirmed around and tried to find a comfortable spot on the hard surface.

Murphy’s heavy breathing taunted me with a temptation to sleep.

I wondered if Amber or Steph would be alive in the morning. I wondered whether I should go back to rescue Amber again. Undoubtedly, Murphy would tease me, but she had the flash drive. That flash drive was more valuable than gold.

And, in spite of all that was going on, I wanted to see her.

My eyelids grew heavy again.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

What the hell was that?

I sat up straight and stared into the shadows at the far end of the bunker.

I listened.

Was it my imagination?

Was I dreaming?

Breathing as quietly as I could, I slid slowly off of the storage container and walked to the center of the bunker.

Aside from Murphy’s heavy nighttime breathing, the bunker was as silent as a coffin.

I stilled my body and listened. I heard air flow through my throat. I heard my heartbeat in my ears. I strained at the silence, but no more noises revealed themselves.

Long minutes passed before I convinced myself that those three metallic tinks were my imagination.

I returned to my storage container. I checked the time on my cell phone. The light from the phone’s screen destroyed my night vision. When I turned it off, the previously dim bunker was nearly black. And the blackness was frightening.

I decided to go another twenty minutes before waking Murphy.

Tink, tink, tink.

I sat straight up, alert.

That was not my imagination.

I looked again into the shadows at the end of the bunker.

Tink, tink, tink.

My doubts were gone. It was metal on metal.

Was it one of the infected squirming in a dream as he leaned against the door? Was the noise a rodent hiding in the junk? There had to be an air vent leading to the surface somewhere. Could the noise be the wind blowing a metal flap on that vent?

I got to my feet and moved to the center of the room, my M4 up and ready. I made more noise than I’d wanted to, and as a result, I heard some stirring from beyond the door to the lower level.

I waited a long time for silence to return, and then I waited some more.

The noise was a mystery that I had to solve.

As quietly as I could, I stepped toward the door. I reached over the boxes blocking my way, steeled my nerves, lay a hand on the door’s cold metal, and listened.

Nothing.

I leaned close and pressed my ear to the door. I heard the breathing and night noises of half a hundred sleeping humans. No, not humans, not anymore. Monsters, in human skin.

Tink, tink, tink.

With my ear still pressed against the metal door, the sound was loud enough to startle me. I fell backwards.

The noise of my fall was more than sufficient to cause a stir beyond the door. At least a half dozen of the infected became animated and vocal.

I pulled myself to my feet as quickly as I could and leveled my weapon at the door. I waited.

The infected rustled around and pushed on the door but eventually calmed, and fell silent.

The metallic taps mystery was solved or at least the source identified. I asked myself whether someone could still be alive inside. If so, it had to be a slow burn.

I removed an ammo magazine from my vest and slipped out one round. I stepped back over to the door and with the brass end of the round, I tapped three times on the door: tink, tink, tink.

I inhaled a slow breath.

Tink, tink, tink.

Was it an answer or a coincidence?

I tapped twice more.

Two tinks answered my taps.

I tapped once.

I was answered with one.

Holy crap.

All doubt was gone. Someone was in there.

Chapter 13

Murphy and I stood about ten feet from the door to the lowest level. It was after three in the morning. I was dead tired, but the adrenaline was keeping me on my feet.

Murphy said, “What I don’t get is, if there’s somebody in there who isn’t infected, why didn’t they just come out?”

“I can’t answer that.” I looked over at the closed door. “But if they’re in there with all of those infected, my guess is that they’re not normal. They’ve got to be a slow burn, like us, or they’d have been killed.”

“So the Null Spot wants to save one of his own.”

I said, “I think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Well there’s that, and then there’s the smart thing,” said Murphy. “If they’re locked in and can’t get out, then we’re safe for the night, anyway.”

I was miffed. “You want to leave them in there?”

“Chill, Zed. I’m just saying that we need to evaluate our choices and our chances before we jump into another pile of shit.”

“Fine,” I said. “What are our choices and chances?”

“Our first choice is to spend the night here, bail out in the morning and forget this place,” he said. “That way we live through another night and don’t take any risks.”

“Yeah but…”

“Let me finish,” he told me.

“Fine.” I huffed.

He said, “Obviously if we do that, then whoever is trapped in there will die. They can’t get out by themselves. If they could have, they would have.”

“Agreed.”

“Our alternative is to bust open the door,” said Murphy, “kill all of the infected inside, and save any slow burns that we find.”

“I’m resisting the urge to say something sarcastic right now,” I told him.

“I know I’m stating the obvious,” he said. “We only have two choices. But all the risk to us comes with the second choice. We only have one way to get that door open and that’s with one of our limited supply of hand grenades. And we already talked about the risk of blowing a grenade in this confined space. Then we’ll have who knows how many infected coming out after us. Can we kill them? Probably. They can’t surround us. They can’t because they all have to squeeze through that door. They probably can’t overwhelm us. But you never know. Something unexpected could happen. A gun could jam. One of us might trip and fall. Hell, anything could happen, and if it does, one or both of us wind up dead. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Of course I saw it. I said, “I know there’s an unquantifiable risk. If there’s anything I’ve learned so far, it’s that we live in a new world. I know that last week, if I tripped and fell, the worst-case result was a bruise, or a tear in my clothes. Now if I trip at the wrong time, I die. Last week, if my flashlight batteries died, I went to the store for more. Today, I die. Last week, if I was thirsty, I just got a drink of water anywhere I wanted. Today, if I don’t have enough water with me, I have to find some and risk getting killed doing it, or I die.

“You see,” I told him, “I do get it. Every mistake carries the death penalty. But Murphy, I can’t leave somebody in that bunker to die. I just can’t do it. We may be in an every-man-for-himself world now, but it will only be that if that’s what we survivors make it. I’m not doing that. I won’t. Help me or don’t help me. You decide. But I’m opening that door.”

Murphy took some time with his response but eventually he acquiesced. “Okay, Null Spot.”

Looking back at the door again, as though urgency to get it open was growing, I said, “You’re just saying that so that I’ll shut up.”

Murphy smiled, “Yes, I am. At this moment, I can’t think of a fate worse than listening to you babble through another ten minutes of your Null Spot bullshit.” He laughed. “I’ll help you do this. But just so you know, when everything turns to shit, I’m gonna save my ass. I’m not gonna get killed just to save somebody who’s gonna end up dead anyway.”

“Thanks.” I was sincere.

“This is your deal,” he told me. “What do you want to do?”

I walked over to the door and whispered loud enough to be heard on the other side. “Tap once for yes and twice for no. Do you understand?”

Tink.

Predictably, some of the infected on the other side of the door started to respond.

I asked, “Can you open the door from your side?”

Tink. Tink.

Crap.

“Are there a lot of infected in there, with you?”

Tink.

“Are there any more normal people besides you?”

Tink. Tink.

The infected were starting to get excited. At least a few of them were pushing and pulling on the door. More and more infected moans seeped through the door.

“Do you have any other way out of there other than this door?”

Tink. Tink.

“Go to the far end of the bunker. Cover your ears and hide behind something, if you can. It’ll take a little while, but we’re going to blow the door. Don’t come out until the shooting stops or until you hear me call for you. Good luck.”

Tink.

Murphy said, “Just so you know, you’re moving all that shit away from the door. I’ll stand guard.”

“But you stood guard when I stacked it all in front of the door,” I complained.

“Like I said, it’s your deal.” He shrugged. “If you want it moved, you have to do it.”

I moved all of the boxes and junk away from the door. I then stacked it all into a wall about halfway up the length of the second level. I left room on one side to walk around the wall. That was my escape route.

To reduce the concussion effects of the grenade in the confined space, we needed to open the other doors.

Opening the first door and going into level one showed us a room was just as we’d left it except for a haze of smoke that hung in the air.

The door to the outside was still hot and was hard to get open. It was covered with a layer of ash and embers.  But for the absence of Satan, the world outside looked like Hell.

The thick gray smoke that had blanketed East Austin was mostly gone. Black skeletons of gnarled old oak branches reached into the sky. Hulks of gray automobile carcasses littered the landscape. Nearly everything combustible was burned or smoldering.

Hot mounds of glowing embers were everywhere.

Most of the houses in the neighborhood were simply gone, replaced with geometrical piles of ash and occasional brick facades that hadn’t crumbled in the violence of the fire.

There were spots however, that the fire had bypassed. Far in the distance I saw a few houses with green bushes and dead lawns, untouched by flame.

To the north, the fire glowed orange in the sky. To the west of the interstate, city lights glowed and illuminated the smoke from underneath.

High above us, enormous billows of black smoke flowed west, blotting out wide swaths of starlight and trailing an oily stink.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing up at the heavy black smoke.

“I’ll bet the refineries in Houston are burning,” Murphy answered.

“You think?”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “I worked at one between Houston and Galveston for a couple of years. We lost power once during a storm, and it was a big fucking deal. The place went on alert. The engineers had us running around and doing all kinds of shit, like they were afraid the place would blow up, or something.”

“Really?”

He said, “I don’t know. I was just a flunky. But I’m betting that if the power went out, something catastrophic happened. I’m betting that’s smoke from the refineries.”

“Jesus.” I looked back up at the black smoke. “How much oil is stored down there?”

“Enough to burn for months, I’ll bet.”

I scanned the area for movement, but saw none. I heard no human sound of any kind. Any infected that hadn’t run away from the fire had likely died in it. For the time being, it was safe to be out in the open.

Chapter 14

I was as prepared as I was going to get.

I stood in front of the steel door that blocked the way down to the third level. I looked to my left to confirm for the fifth time that my escape path was clear. I yelled to the person inside, “If you’re not at the back of the room yet, now is the time. I’m going to blow the door. Remember, hide behind something if you can. Cover your ears. Don’t come out right away.”

I took a few deep breaths.

I beat on the door with the butt of my pistol. The more infected that I could urge to crowd around the other side, the fewer I’d have to deal with after the grenade exploded.

Their excited screaming and pushing on the door let me know that we were all on the same page.

It was time. A thousand thoughts of what could go wrong flooded my brain. I pushed them aside. My course of action was set.

I pulled the pin on the grenade, but kept the spoon depressed. I carefully positioned it by a gap in the door created by previous work with a crowbar.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

In one smooth motion, I let the spoon slip from my fingers and spring outward as I bet my life once again on my fast feet and my ability to make quick decisions.

I shoved the grenade’s spoon into the gap on the door and wasted no time in evaluating how securely it was wedged there.

With my heart already beating a blistering rhythm, I sprinted around the wall of boxes I’d built and made for the stairs between level two and level one.

Making no effort to slow down, I bounded up to the fifth stair and let the wall stop my body as I made the ninety-degree turn to get through the door.

Two steps past the door on level one, I wondered why the grenade had not yet detonated. I wondered if I’d inadvertently depressed the spoon when I jammed it into place. I wondered whether it was a dud. I wondered how I’d work up the nerve to go back and check on what should be a live grenade. I wondered—

The grenade’s blast roared through the chamber.

The shockwave, confined in the long, narrow levels, blew up at me like a shotgun blast and knocked me onto my face.

I saw stars. I heard ringing in my ears.

I was confused.

The dirty, cold floor grated on my face. I tasted blood in my mouth. I needed to move. I needed to run but couldn’t remember why.

I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees.

I saw a rivulet of blood drain out of my nose.

Screaming?

Screams of pain, anger, and hunger raged up from behind me.

I shook my head.

“Get the fuck up,” a voice boomed above me.

The blood draining from my nose was so mesmerizing.

A hand grabbed the back of my MOLLE vest and pulled me roughly forward.

I made an effort to keep my hands and knees below me.

“God dammit,” the voice yelled again.

The hand let go of me and I nearly collapsed to the floor under the responsibility for my own weight.

The screaming behind me kicked up a notch.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

The gunfire was loud in the confined space.

My gun?

I needed to get my gun up.

Holy shit.

My thoughts cleared, but I was dizzy.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

I looked behind me.

Infected were pushing their way through the door from level two to level one.

Murphy yelled, “Run, God dammit.”

I staggered to my feet and made my way to the stairs.

Behind me, Murphy shot at the infected pursuing us.

I crawled up the stairs, afraid that my balance would fail me if I attempted them on my feet.

Murphy was beside me on the stairs.

The howling of the infected behind me didn’t diminish.

I got to the top of the stairs and rolled out into ashes on the concrete floor of what had been a garage.

“Go. Go. Dammit, Zed. You can’t stay there. You gotta move.”

I had to move.

I had to move.

I got my feet below me.

Why was this all so hard?

I got my M4 into my hands and turned to point it at the open stairway.

Murphy grabbed me by my collar and pulled me backward.

“You’re too close, God dammit.”

Holding his M4 in his other hand, thunder and fire blazed out the barrel and he fired wildly at the infected climbing out of the bunker.

Heads and bodies caught bullets and showered blood.

Ten or fifteen feet back from the doorway, Murphy let go of my collar and put both hands on his weapon.

I did the same. I depressed the trigger. My aim was non-existent, but the targets weren’t far away and I had lots of bullets.

The repercussion of each shot pounded my head like a hammer, but with each passing second, my thoughts grew sharper. Things started to make sense.

After several long minutes, the flow of infected coming out of the bunker ceased. I breathed heavily and stared at the body-filled bunker door.

Murphy scanned the surrounding desolation for any sign of life. “Holy shit, that was intense.”

I dropped to my knees then fell back on my butt. I sat with my mouth hanging open.

Murphy looked down and asked, “Are you all right?”

“No.”

Chapter 15

I sat in the darkness on a steel tire rim a short distance from the bunker’s door. My rifle lay across my thighs and I massaged my temples. My thoughts cleared and the confusion went away, but the headache chose to linger. The ash floating in the air coaxed me to cough every few minutes, and each time the pressure in my head tried to burst my skull.

Murphy stood patiently by, casting glances at the door, looking at me with worried eyes, but mostly scanning the distance for movement.

“How long have we been up here, do you think?” Murphy asked.

I laughed weakly and shook my head. “The battery on my phone is dead.”

Murphy asked, “Do you feel nauseous or anything?”

“No.”

“Dizzy?”

“No.” I gingerly shook my head and regretted the choice. “I just have a motherfucker of a headache.”

“You don’t have any blood dripping out of your ears or nose or anything, do you?” he asked.

“No, Mom.” Well, not anymore.

“Don’t be a dick,” he told me. “I’m worried about you, man.”

My fingers made a few more revolutions on my temples. “You’re being kind, and I am being a dick. I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s any damage that some aspirin and a bottle of tequila wouldn’t fix.”

“Breakfast of champions.” Murphy grinned. “Are you up for going back down, do you think?”

“I guess.” I don’t know why I said that. I’m pretty sure the answer was no.

“There’s no hurry,” he told me. “We can hang up here as long as you want.”

I asked, “How many clips do you have left?”

“None.”

What? I turned and looked over Murphy’s MOLLE vest. “Murphy, I can see clips right there in your vest. Are they all empty?”

“I don’t have any clips in my vest.”

I bore the pain in my head and stood up, walked over, and put an accusing finger on a pouch on his vest. “Right there, Murphy. What’s that?”

“That’s a magazine, Zed.”

“Same fucking thing.”

“No, they aren’t,” he told me. “If you didn’t get your weapons education by watching T.J. Hooker reruns, you would know that a clip holds bullets. A magazine feeds bullets. I have magazines. So do you.”

“Fine.” When is this headache going to go away? “How many maga-fucking-zines do you have?”

“I have a dozen MFZs.” He put on a smug face.

“MFZs?” I asked.

“Maga-fucking-zines.” He grinned.

“Murphy, you can be very frustrating. I emptied two clips. How many did you empty?”

“MFZs.”

I surrendered. “I emptied two magazines. How about you?”

“I fired all the MFBs in five MFZs.”

“What are MFBs?” I was getting frustrated.

“Motherfucking bullets, of course.” He grinned again.

I sat back down on the tire rim and put my head in my hands.

“I’m just trying to cheer you up, man. We’re wading in some pretty morbid shit, here.”

I flashed Murphy a weak smile. “I know.”

“Are you up for doing this?”

I shook my head gently, but said, “I think I’m as good as I’m likely to get for a while. I guess it’s not any worse than a bad hangover.”

“Man, I’ve been there.” Murphy laughed. “You were pretty dazed when I dragged your superhero ass off the floor down there.”

“I’m past that part of it,” I said. “Thanks. If you hadn’t come down to get me, I’d be dead right now.”

“Somebody has to ride shotgun in the Murph-mobile.”

“Somebody stole the Murph-mobile,” I reminded him.

“We’ll get another one.” Murphy looked around a bit more. “I don’t know how coherent you were, so you might not remember, but there were a lot more infected down there than I thought there’d be.”

“I wasn’t really paying attention to the count. Mostly, I think I was just trying to remember how many feet I had. How many of them do you think there were?”

“Two.” Murphy laughed.

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It seemed like forty, or fifty, maybe more.”

I said, “They must have really been packed in.”

“I guess.”

“And this is the place that guy built under his house without anybody knowing?” I asked.

“Yep.” He nodded. “This is the place.”

“The size of it is impressive.” I looked at the doorway, still packed with the dead infected. “I wonder how he got all that concrete down there.”

Murphy said, “I don’t know. Nobody does. The guy was a retired engineer or something. He lived alone. He never talked to his neighbors much. The newspaper never said much about how he did it. Mostly the stories were about his fight with the city.”

“How’d the city find it?” I asked.

Murphy pointed at two tall poles supported by guy wires in what used to be the house’s backyard. Each had a small wind turbine on top with charred fans spinning in the light breeze. “There was some kind of dispute about HOA rules and the wind turbines. Somehow, that brought the city inspectors out and they found the bunker.”

“I wonder if they still work.”

“I doubt it,” Murphy speculated. “Any insulation on the wires probably burned off in the fire.”

I looked around at the charred trees, ash, and embers. “If it wasn’t for the fire, this might have been a good place.”

“I don’t know.” Murphy shook his head. “It looked pretty trashed inside to me. I think it would take a lot of work to salvage it. Right now it’s just a hole in the ground full of dead people.”

“And some fucked up doors.” For some reason the memory of destroying them made me smile.

Murphy laughed out loud. “You’re right about that.”

“Man, there’d better be somebody alive down there,” I said. “I’ll be pissed if I got blown up by a grenade and it turned out to be rats or something.”

“If you want to be a drama queen and say you got blown up,” said Murphy, “I’ll go with it, but you didn’t actually get blown up.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re not the one who got blown up.” I managed another smile to let him know I was kidding.

“What do you say, are you ready to do this? I’m starting to feel uncomfortable standing around out here in the open.”

I nodded and pulled myself to my feet.

Murphy took the lead again. Feeling very naked without my M4 at my shoulder, I followed Murphy with my dying flashlight in one hand and my Glock in the other.

Unfortunately, going back into the bunker was a process. With a dozen infected lying about the entrance with bullet holes in them, it behooved us to ensure that each was indeed dead. In silent agreement, we decided that a couple of good kicks were enough to test for life.

The stairway was difficult to navigate. We had to push bodies off the sides as we went down.

Once into the darkness at the bottom, Murphy started lifting heads and looking at faces. That was at least a little odd, but I said nothing about it.

After checking all the bodies on the first level, Murphy pointed to the doorway down to level two and said, “Keep an eye on that other door for a second. I’m going to close the outer door, so that nobody wanders in behind us.”

“Will do.”

Murphy wrestled the heavy door over and let it fall shut with a deafening clang. Agitated moans from below let us know that we still had gruesome work ahead of us.

Murphy went to the other end of the bunker and retook the lead. He was up for it. I wasn’t.

On the stairs, he stopped and lifted the head of another woman.

Curiosity won out and I asked, “Murphy?”

“I need to check.”

“For?” I asked.

“This was my neighborhood, Zed. I’m checking for people I know.”

“Only the females?” I asked.

“My sister. I’m looking for my sister. She might be in here.”

“Oh.” I was embarrassed for not guessing. “Take your time.”

Murphy checked another body that was wedged between the stairs and the wall. It wasn’t her either.

Murphy worked his way down the stairs to a spot near the bottom and then stopped. I followed, close enough to support him, but far enough away that he’d have room to jump back.

From our positions on the stairs, we examined the second level with our flashlights. Only two infected lay on the floor at the terminus of long bloody smears. Both had been wounded by the grenade blast. They’d tried to come up after us, but there is only so much a body can do with broken bones, gaping wounds, and lost blood, even if it can’t feel pain.

One of the infected was a man, the other, a woman, shattered and dying, grasping for something they’d never reach, each a metaphor for the earth they’d soon leave.

I followed Murphy past the scattered containers on the floor. Without a hint of emotion, he put a bullet into each.

Pained moans still came from the lower room of the bunker.

I said, “More wounded. Be careful when you go down the stairs.”

Murphy nodded but didn’t speak. He was tense. His smile was gone. He clearly held unrealistic hopes or unwelcome fears that he would find his sister among the bodies. Perhaps the tiny comfort of knowing that she was dead was better than perpetual ambiguity.

The door to the lower level was completely blown off of its hinges. It lay bent on the floor. Murphy stepped around it and took up a position against the wall next to the doorway. Seeing that we weren’t going to go in blind, I positioned myself several long paces from the door but in a place that allowed me to see partially inside the room.

I shined my light in and saw blood and blast marks on the wall. That was just a preview of the carnage that awaited us.

Murphy called out, “Hey. Is there anybody down there?”

A weak, female voice called back, “Yes.”

I was both relieved and surprised.

“How many?” Murphy asked.

“What?” The voice was irritated.

Good God. I shouted, “Look, we’re coming in. Don’t shoot us. Okay?”

“Okay,” the girl’s voice said.

Murphy took a deep breath, and said, “Here goes.”

The stairs creaked and I followed him into the room in the same fashion that we’d come down to level two.

In my flashlight’s beam, I saw a severed leg and an arm on the stairs. Below, on the floor, in a large pool of blood, I saw their owners. At least five dead were on or around the stairs. The last of the wounded were on the floor at the bottom. Murphy dispatched those.

We stopped and listened as I shined my light down the length of the third level. The room was wider than the two rooms above and nearly twice as long, cut right into the limestone bedrock with a row of steel support beams down its center. Across the floor and against the walls were scattered the ghastly remains of more bodies than I could count.

In the far corner, I spotted a pair of eyes looking back at me from behind a large fiberglass cistern.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” the girl said.

“Are there any more infected that we don’t know about?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I think you killed them all.”

Murphy’s light illuminated the girl, adding to the glow of my light so that we could make out the features of her face.

Murphy’s shoulders drooped and his breath flowed out in a disappointed sigh. I guessed that she wasn’t his sister.

Chapter 16

When we stepped out of the bunker, the eastern sky was starting to grow gray.

The girl, Mandi, gasped and started to cry when she looked past the bloody bodies of the infected around the entrance and saw the devastation. It seemed that the final wisps of hope that had kept her alive in that bloody pit were blowing away in the wind with the ashes of her neighborhood.

Mandi was covered from head to toe in the most disgusting combination of blood and human filth that I could imagine, but Murphy didn’t hesitate to wrap a comforting arm around her.

Between her tears, Mandi said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You should have left me down there. I…I…”

“It looks worse than it is,” Murphy told her.

I shook my head, “No, no it doesn’t.”

Mandi shuddered and buried her face in Murphy’s shirt.

“Dude.” Murphy scolded me.

“Sugarcoating it doesn’t do any good, so I’ve heard,” I countered.

Murphy said, “But the whole world isn’t burned up. Just this part.”

“Yeah.” I glanced over at him. “But you know as well as I do that everything else in Austin isn’t any better than this. It’s just different.”

Murphy glared at me.

“Sorry.” I probably shouldn’t have been so blunt about it. But I was out of energy for niceties. I was used up. I needed sleep.

My body reached a point where the adrenaline and caffeine could no longer drive it forward. I wished that the desensitization to pain that came with the virus would find its way into my aching head.

While Mandi cried herself out and Murphy held her, I sat down on the tire rim I’d used earlier that morning and watched the dead, eastern sky slowly change color.

All the busy, buzzing noise of life was gone. No cars, no jets, no bugs, and no birds. All I heard were the very gentle sounds of grainy bits of ash moving in the wind and Mandi’s occasional sobs muffled in Murphy’s shirt.

Wind, tears, and gray sky over a gray land. Sad, but simple.

Simple.

I breathed in. I breathed out.

It was my only responsibility for the moment. It was all I wanted.

Breathe.

Mandi’s voice broke the calm when she told Murphy, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” She stepped out of his arms, disturbing the ash and kicking it up in the wind. She cast her puffy eyes across the smoldering gray. “How bad is it, really? No sugarcoating.”

I didn’t respond. I stared at the horizon and tried to tune out the sound of Murphy’s voice as he gave her the highlights. His version wasn’t harsh, but he was honest.

Mandi took it better than I would have guessed, given her tears only moments before.

When Murphy finished, the sun was attempting to paint the sky in vibrant morning colors that conflicted with my mood. I turned away and asked, “How long have you been down there, Mandi?”

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Saturday.” In truth, I wasn’t sure. “I think.”

Mandi told us, “I came down with my dad, my mom, and my brother on Wednesday, when everything really started to go crazy.”

Murphy asked, “So you’ve been down there since Wednesday?”

Mandi confirmed with a nod. “Yes.”

“How many of you were there?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t know.” Mandi looked at the bunker’s open door as she thought about it. “Maybe ten when we got here. We lived down the street. We knew the bunker was here. Everybody knew. When we arrived, we didn’t recognize most of the people. There was Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins, from a couple of houses down. There were some stoners that lived on the corner and there were some guys that looked like gangsters.”

Mandi drew a deep breath and sat down on a blackened metal something-or-other. “This big tattooed guy named Mutt was in charge.”

“Mutt?” I asked in disbelief.

“That’s what they called him,” she told me. “He wore a black sleeveless t-shirt and a do-rag. And he had tattoos all over his arms. And the guys with him all had tattoos and baggy gangster pants. A couple of them had guns. I’m sure they all had knives. Mutt had a face that looked like it was used to frowning. He looked mean. But he was in charge and everybody just accepted that. Maybe they were afraid of him. I was.”

I asked, “Do you think this was their gangster hideout, or hangout, or whatever?”

“I don’t know.” Mandi seemed exasperated by the question. “Is it important?”

“It might be,” I told her. “But go ahead.”

She said, “That first day, people kept coming down a few at a time, sometimes whole families. The bunker started to get crowded.”

Murphy asked, “Were you all down there on the third level?”

Mandi shook her head. “No, we were on all the levels.”

Then Murphy asked, “How did you all end up locked at the bottom?”

“I’ll get to that.” Mandi snorted. “By the end of the first day, Mutt and his guys decided that we didn’t have enough food and water so they started telling people that they couldn’t come in unless they brought some with them.”

“Where is that food now?” Murphy asked.

Mandi said, “It was stored down on three. There wasn’t that much. I think it’s all gone now.”

“Oh.” Murphy’s voice sounded as disappointed as I felt. Something besides vending machine food would have been good.

“On Thursday, Mutt started to send guys out to get provisions. Early in the day, they mostly came back. By the end of the day, they mostly didn’t. Fewer and fewer people showed up outside the bunker and wanted in. The bunker was crowded by then and the people didn’t always have food or water, but Mutt, as mean as he seemed like he was, still let them in.”

I asked, “Did you know what was going on outside?”

“Yes,” Mandi answered. “We had some radios. People’s phones were still working. I think in the end, that’s why Mutt still let people come in. Everybody knew how bad things were getting.”

Mandi paused to compose herself before she continued. “It was late Thursday night, maybe early Friday morning, I’m not sure. I’d already gone to sleep. My mom and dad and I were sleeping on the second level when the commotion woke us up. I don’t know if infected people were already in the bunker and just started to turn overnight. Maybe when they were letting people in, the infected rushed the door. I think maybe that’s what happened”

“Why?” Murphy asked.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” she told him. “I don’t want to get off track or I’ll lose my place.”

“Okay.”

She said, “I don’t know how many infected were on the first level but at first that’s where they all were. Everybody ran down to three. There was screaming and shooting. It was awful. My mom, dad, and brother were way back by the far wall. We were all so scared. After a while, Mutt came in and slammed the door shut behind him. We heard the infected screaming outside, beating on the door. Mutt put the bar on the door and then one of his guys put padlocks on the bar so that it couldn’t be taken off. That’s when he told us that nobody else was coming in. The padlocks were there to ensure that the door stayed closed.”

“That’s how you got locked in?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mandi answered, “and that’s why I think the infected came in from the outside. I don’t know if Mutt would have locked the door like that if there had been infected in the bunker already. I think he thought he was doing the right thing when he locked it but he wasn’t.”

“Because somebody locked in there with you was already infected?” I speculated.

Mandi nodded and silent tears rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t know how many of us were down there. It was so crowded. We only had a few flashlights. There was a battery-operated lantern that hung from the ceiling, but Mutt wouldn’t let us leave it on. Nobody wanted to be in the dark, but we knew we needed to conserve our batteries. It was late by then. People were tired, so they started to lie down and go to sleep.

“I was so afraid to go to sleep, but it was pitch black which made it worst. I kept staring into the blackness, imagining that I saw shapes forming and moving and coming at me. Eventually, I dozed off.”

Murphy asked, “What happened then?”

Mandi slowly shook her head. “I don’t know how long I slept. I woke up to an awful, horrible scream. People had flashlights turned on, but they didn’t provide much light, and they always seemed to be pointed at the wrong thing. The infected were in the room. I don’t know how many at first, two or three, maybe. Mutt was one of them.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“There was a fight that got bigger. It was like a slow-motion riot. Some people got injured. Some people turned. Others struggled. People were killed. More turned. When they finally shot Mutt, nobody could find the keys to the locks. Things were out of hand by then. It was hard to know who was or wasn’t infected. I could see flashes from gunshots, and they sounded like thunder claps bouncing off of the stone walls. Flashlight beams waved around the room. It was hard to see what was going on. Everybody was screaming or yelling. It was so, so bad.”

“What happened to you?” Murphy asked. “You’re not infected. How did you make it through?”

“Somewhere in the scuffle, with the crowd surging back and forth, I got knocked against the wall, and I blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out. I know that when I came to, the room was pitch black again, but it wasn’t silent. I heard what sounded like dogs eating and tearing at clothes and meat. I heard people snarl at each other like animals. Those were the sounds that the infected make. Somebody was laying on me and other people were laying by me, close enough to touch. They didn’t move. They didn’t breathe.”

“They were dead?” Murphy asked unnecessarily.

Mandi nodded. “I was so scared, I was afraid to move so I just laid there under the dead, dreading the moment when the infected would find me and kill me. I knew they would. I just knew it.”

“It sounds like you had a good hiding place,” I observed.

“It was never going to last,” she said. “Three separate times, while I was laying there in the darkness, the infected found somebody who was still healthy. Each time was the same; cursing, scuffling, shrieking. The infected would converge on the sound and then there’d be more screaming, awful screaming, tearing clothes, and breaking bones.”

Mandi shuddered, lost control of her tears, and cried out loud.

Murphy put his arm around her again and pulled her close.

After a while, Mandi said, “I knew I was going to die a horrible death. The infected were going to find me. It was inevitable. But then I heard you guys.”

Mandi took a deep breath to collect herself. “The infected in the room went crazy when they heard you outside the door. That’s when I knew that I had a hope, not a chance, but a tiny, nearly invisible bit of hope. While they were still being noisy, I crawled out from under the corpses that had kept me hidden and I followed the wall around the room. On the way, I found a big flashlight, one of those long old metal ones that’s shaped like a baton. That was my weapon. I was determined that if any of the infected got their hands on me, then I wasn’t going to let them kill me without a fight.

“After a while, I heard most of them go back to eating wherever they’d been eating. I found my way up to the stairs and I pushed myself into a corner and I waited. I don’t know how long I waited. Eventually, all of the infected started to make those sleepy sounds they make. But I didn’t hear you guys out here anymore. I was so afraid that I’d waited too long. You don’t know how difficult it was, how afraid I was.” More tears flowed.

I didn’t know what to say in the face of so much painful emotion. I was glad that Murphy had taken it upon himself to comfort her.

She said, “I found a quarter in my pocket. I used that when I finally got up the nerve to tap on the door. It took so long to get a response. Do you know what it feels like when your last hope dies?” Mandi cried some more.

I wanted to answer yes. The Ogre taught me that lesson a long time ago.

“I thought…I thought…” Mandi drew in a deep breath. “Well, it doesn’t matter. You did respond. One of you did, anyway. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“It was Zed who heard it,” said Murphy. “It was Zed who insisted that you were in there.”

“We got you out together,” I told her. “Neither one of us could have done it alone.”

Chapter 17

I awoke looking at the bunker’s concrete ceiling. Murphy sat nearby, busying his hands with the parts of a handgun that I didn’t recognize. He glanced at me and said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

Mandi was still asleep so I spoke softly. “Good morning, Murphy.”

“I thought you were going to sleep all day,” he said.

I tainted my tone of voice with a little indignation and said, “I think I earned it. What time is it?”

“How would I know?” he asked.

“What?”

Murphy pointed at his empty wrist and said, “You know my watch is still at the county jail.”

I rolled my eyes. “So it could be seven in the morning.”

Murphy chuckled. “Don’t get your panties in a wad, man. I’m just messing with you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I could use some coffee.”

“You and me both.”

Looking at the gun in his hands, I asked, “What’s that you‘ve got there?”

He said, “While you guys were sleeping, I went down to level three to root around and see what I could find, which was pretty much nothing. But I got this Ruger nine millimeter.”

“Is it a good gun?”

“As good as any, I suppose.” Murphy turned it over in his hand and looked at it. “It’ll take the same nine millimeter ammo as the Glocks.”

“Was there any ammo down there?” I asked.

“Just a few rounds.” Murphy went back to cleaning. “I found a couple of empty magazines. You and I both have plenty of ammo, at least for now. We can spare some nine mill to fill the Ruger magazines. Then Mandi will have a gun to protect herself.”

“I passed out when you guys were talking last night.” I ventured a question I wasn’t sure I should ask. “What do you think of her?”

“She seemed all right to me.” Murphy looked up from his work. “What are you asking?”

I scratched my head. “I don’t know. I mean, she seemed all right to me too. I guess I just don’t want to get backstabbed by another Mark.”

“I don’t think she’s like that, man. I have a good intuition about people. I think she’s a good one.”

I felt like I didn’t have any kind of intuition about people at all. “Sounds good. Was there any food down there?”

Murphy grinned. “Depends on your definition of food. What’s your temperature today?”

“It’s not high enough to start thinking other people are food, if that’s what you mean. Water?”

“Nothing.” Murphy shook his head to emphasize it. “That big cistern down there has holes like the ones on the other levels.”

“That’s too bad. This could have been a great place to ride this whole thing out, but with everything broken or missing...” I punctuated with a shrug.

“Maybe worse than that,” said Murphy. “Without a house on top to keep it hidden, it’s a deathtrap. It’ll probably keep the infected out. I mean, if you fixed the doors that we blew. But if anybody with a few weapons wants in, well, you saw how easy it was for us to get in here.”

I rummaged in my bag for something to eat and drink. I found two packages of donuts I didn’t realize were there as well as a bag of peanuts. I set the peanuts and a package of miniature donuts aside for Mandi and opened the remaining donuts. She was one of us for the moment, and she needed a share of the food.

Murphy added, “I saved her something too, a package of cupcakes.”

“Cool,” I said. “That’ll get her started. So what do you think? Are we still at square one? We’ve got almost no water and this is the last of our food. At the moment, we’ve got no communications, so we don’t know what’s going on anywhere, and we still need a place to stay.”

“Yeah, square one,” Murphy agreed.

“What about your sister?” I asked.

Murphy’s smile slipped off of his face. “She wasn’t at the house, but that was a thin hope, anyway. Now with the whole neighborhood burned down, my only chance of finding her, if she’s still alive, is to get lucky and run into her. There’s no point in searching.”

I said, “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that, but I think you’re right.”

With the pistol put together, Murphy started slipping nine millimeter rounds into a magazine.

I changed the subject. “I think Mandi is immune.”

“Maybe.”

I tilted my head toward the door down to level three. “She’s been down there with all of those infected for days. She would have caught it if she wasn’t.”

“Sure.” Murphy glanced up at me then turned his attention back to the pistol. “I don’t know anything about any of that. You’re the college boy, so whatever you think.”

“She’s immune, then,” I decided. “That’s goody-gumdrops for her, but also bad. I mean, you and I can walk around among the infected as long as they aren’t too hungry, but not Mandi. She’s lunch unless she stays hidden.”

“Yeah, but the uninfected won’t shoot her, like they will us.”

“Do you really think they’re all that way?” I asked. “It could be that those soldiers that killed Jerome were just…I don’t know, overzealous.”

“I’ll tell you what I think.” Murphy set the weapon down in his lap. “I think you’re a little bit naïve about people’s intentions.”

I shook my head. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“I think that is the problem.” Murphy leaned toward me. “You want to believe this is all going to blow over, and the ones of us who are left are going to sing ‘Kumbaya,’ and then go make babies and live happily ever after, or something.”

Yes, that is what I think. I shrugged. Murphy’s summary of my hopes made them seem ridiculous.

Shaking his head, Murphy said, “That’s not going to happen. Every time they see our white skin and our dilated eyes, they’re going to see the monsters that killed their brothers, or their mothers, or their sisters, or their sons. They’re going to see us as disease carriers. The uninfected hate us. They’re all afraid of us. They’ll kill us if they can.”

“No.” I didn’t want to believe that. “The longer we last, the more unlikely it is that anybody we come across will be immune. They won’t need to fear us.”

Murphy leaned back against the wall. My argument apparently wasn’t worth being fully engaged. He said, “That’s exactly the kind of suburban white-boy bullshit I’m talking about when I say you’re naïve.”

“What?”

“You don’t know anything about fear and hate,” he told me. “Fear and hate aren’t rational emotions, and they damn sure don’t depend on the existence of valid reasons. People hate because they’re afraid. People are afraid because they don’t understand. People don’t understand what we are, Zed. They don’t want to understand what we are, because they already have a belief that we’re monsters. Once people get beliefs into their heads, it’s fucking hard to change their minds, no matter how many facts come knocking on the door. As far as the world is concerned, you and I aren’t people anymore. We’re big-eyed white monsters, because we look like all the other big-eyed white monsters. White is the new black, man. How does it feel to be an oppressed minority?”

“I don’t have big eyes.” It was the best argument I could come up with.

Murphy laughed. “You don’t believe me now, but you will. Give it time.”

“Mandi isn’t afraid of us,” I argued.

“Not that you know,” he said.

“Amber –”

Murphy butted in, “—is one of the people who kicked us out of the dorm, Zed.”

Chapter 18

It was well after noon when Murphy pushed the bunker door open. Sunshine poured in, and I squinted behind my sunglasses. With my M4 at the ready, I climbed into the blowing smoke. Surprisingly, it wasn’t nearly as hot as I’d expected.

“An August cold front.” Murphy grinned widely.

“It’s still got to be in the low nineties,” I countered, as Mandi came up between us.

Murphy frowned and looked down at me. “What’s the thing with you? How can you be the Null Spot and still be such a stick in the mud? If you weren’t so white, I’d have to change your superhero name to Dark Spot.”

“Wait. What?” Mandi asked. “Zed has a superhero name?”

“Thanks, Murphy,” I glared him.

Mandi said, “I think that’s neat. Why do you have a superhero name, Zed?”

Murphy laughed, “Because he keeps doing superhero shit. He’s always rushing around and saving this person or that person.”

“I think that’s valiant.” Mandi smiled at me and nodded.

I looked at Murphy. “Hah.”

Murphy grinned. “The Valiant Null Spot. I like that.”

Mandi asked, “Why is your superhero name Null Spot?”

“The Valiant Null Spot,” Murphy corrected.

“You’d have to ask Murphy,” I told her. “He made it up.”

Murphy said, “Man, it just sounded right.”

“Null Spot,” Mandi said, formally, “thank you for saving me from the bunker.”

“You already thanked me,” I reminded her. “And besides, it was both of us, not just me.”

“Thank you, anyway.”

Murphy nudged me. “Damn, dude, say ‘you’re welcome.’”

“You’re welcome, Mandi.”

Murphy looked at Mandi. “Don’t mind him. He’s a good guy. He always wants to do the right thing. He’s just moody.”

“I think it’s okay to be moody,” she told him. “With everything that’s happened, I think it can be expected.”

I scanned the area for potential dangers and said, “I’m not moody.”

The smoke thickened as the north wind picked up. Around us the fire-blackened world that faded into gray. I recalled the houses we’d seen the night before, the ones that had survived the fire. I couldn’t see them. They were obscured by the smoke.

I walked toward the street in front of the house, or what used to be the house. Murphy and Mandi followed. When we reached asphalt, we headed west.

We walked between rows of dead oaks, whose blackened branches reached futility for heaven. Burned kitchen appliances, mounds of unidentifiable junk, and partial masonry walls marked the remains of each structure we passed. Hulks of cars littered the lawns and roads. Among those lay the crusted, black bodies and bones of the dead.

Mandi spoke up. “Murphy, can I ask you a question?”

“You don’t need to ask me if you can ask me a question,” He told her. “Just ask it.”

“I’m just trying to be polite,” she said.

Murphy chuckled. “You don’t need to be that polite.”

“Fine,” Mandi said. “Why do you smile so much?”

“Why not?”

“Doesn’t all of this make you sad?” she asked.

“It doesn’t make a difference how I feel about all of this,” he said. “How I feel about it isn’t going to change any of it.”

“Why then?” she aked.

“Why not?” he answered. “It’s just how I am. The world is a fucked up place, but it’s always been a fucked up place. I just choose not to let it fuck me up, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess.” She sounded like she didn’t understand what he was talking about. It was too simple.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I get to choose how I’m going to feel about things. I don’t let the world tell me how I’m going to feel.”

I said, “That sounds like something you read on a motivational poster.”

“It doesn’t matter where I got the idea, does it?” asked Murphy. “I take life as it comes. I don’t complain about the bullshit. I make the best of it and I try to be happy.”

“Even in all of this?” Mandi didn’t believe. “Haven’t you lost anybody you love?”

“Mandi,” I said, a little too harshly. I shook my head when she looked at me.

Mandi’s face immediately creased in worry.

“Man, it’s okay,” Murphy told her. “I mean, it’s not okay, but it is what it is. I found my mother yesterday.”

Mandi timidly asked, “Was she dead?”

“She was,” Murphy answered.

“Didn’t you like her?” Mandi asked.

“No, man, that’s a Zed thing. Me, I loved my mom and my sister.”

“It didn’t make you sad?” Mandi’s voice was full of concern.

“More than that,” he admitted. “It breaks my heart. But I choose not to let it tear me up inside. I choose to put one foot in front of the other. In life, that’s one of the only choices you ever really have. You can choose to move ahead and take control, or you can sit and let life roll over you.”

“One of the only choices?” Mandi asked. “What are the others?”

Murphy stopped for emphasis and looked at both Mandi and me. “You get to choose how you’re going to feel about it. I choose to be happy.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, “how you can be happy when you just found out your mom was dead.”

“I’m a complex human being with complex emotions,” Murphy said theatrically. “I can be unhappy about my mom and still be the same happy guy I’ve always been. I don’t have to let it ruin me.”

We all walked on a bit and Mandi concluded, “I’ll have to think about your philosophy, Murphy.”

I muttered, “I think I need to get a what-would-Murphy-do bracelet.”

Murphy said, “They sell them online.”

“Really?” Mandi asked.

Murphy laughed.

“No, not really,” I told her.

“Well, I didn’t know.” Mandi got a little offended at being the butt of the joke. “I don’t know you well enough to know if you’re kidding.”

Half a block later, Mandi asked, “Is it safe to be out here?”

“We think the infected stay away from the smoke.” I looked around, just in case they were in the act of proving me wrong. “I think they understand that smoke means fire and like any animal with half a brain, they’re afraid of the fire. I think we’re fine for the moment.”

Mandi said, “I have half a brain and I’m not afraid of fire.”

Murphy burst out with a big laugh that carried for blocks. “That’s because you didn’t see the fire that we saw yesterday. Man, that damn near scared the shit out of me. And I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean, I nearly shit my pants.”

“Was it bad?” Mandi asked, “I mean to actually see it?”

I said, “I don’t know why we’re alive right now. We should be dead.”

Mandi’s face showed a pained expression. I couldn’t tell whether she was sincere or trying too hard to appear that way. She asked, “Can I ask another question?”

I said, “I thought you and Murphy agreed that you didn’t have to ask if you can ask a question.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a habit.”

“No sweat,” I answered. “What do you want to ask?”

“Why do you and Murphy act normal, but you look infected?”

I hesitated. “Murphy likes to talk. I’ll let him explain it.”

Chapter 19

We saw nothing alive as we walked through the destruction. Slowly, the smoke dwindled to a gray haze that floated around us like a thin layer of fog. Above was cloudless, peaceful blue. The sky was a hope of something better, but like everything better, it lay beyond reach.

Murphy and Mandi had fallen silent by the time we came to the block of houses left untouched by the fire.

On one side of the street lay nothing but mounds of ash and the metallic innards of family homes. On the other side of the street, the grass and leaves were wilted by the heat, the lawns cluttered with the detritus of a post-virus world. The houses bore their scars but were generally intact.

Still leading the way, I selected one of a dozen two-story tract homes and headed for the front door. With no vehicle in the carport and none parked on the street in front of the house, I deduced that the owners had gotten out of town when things got bad. Hence, there was little chance of us finding an occupant in the house, infected or otherwise. With Murphy’s arguments about the danger of people fresh in my mind, unoccupied houses seemed like the safest option.

The grass on the lawn was mostly green, but dry enough to crunch underfoot as we crossed it. The hedges were well-groomed and healthy. The flowers hanging over the edges of the pots on the porch were once lush but had turned dry and brown. Wilted petals lay scattered.

The front door was closed, so I stepped up to the porch and tried the knob. It refused to turn. Murphy stopped on the first step. Mandi stayed on the walkway.

I looked up and down the street, a developing habit.

I’m not sure why, but I rang the doorbell. It chimed inside.

Having chosen the path of good manners, I knocked on the door a moment later.

I waited but heard nothing from inside. I rang the doorbell again.

Murphy said, “That’s weird.”

“What?” I asked.

“The doorbell,” he said.

“Yeah?” I asked, not getting the point.

“They still have electricity,” he said. “You’d think the fire would have burned the lines or something.”

I felt a little stupid because that thought hadn’t occurred to me. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. What do you say we go around back and see if the back door is open?

Murphy looked the door up and down. “I can kick it in.”

“Let’s not.” I turned to step off the porch.

“Why?” he asked. “Nobody’s around to hear.”

“I don’t know where we’re going to end up in the long run,” I said, “but I’m starting to think that if we have a list of places like this one, with front doors that lock, they might come in handy one day.”

Murphy wasn’t convinced. “If you say so.”

“We might never come back here,” I admitted. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to start making better decisions. Let’s check around back.”

Murphy turned to Mandi. “C’mon, we’re goin’ ‘round back.”

Murphy and Mandi filed off toward the side of the house and I followed. We crossed the carport and skirted a large oily spot in its center. Murphy and Mandi walked through a gap in a hedge and disappeared beside the house.

A storage room at the back of the carport caught my curiosity and I called to them, “I’m going to check to see if there’s anything useful in here.”

“Okay,” Murphy’s answer carried back through the leaves.

In a nice surprise, the storeroom door was not locked. I cautiously pulled it open and softly said, “Hello?”

Nothing. No sound at all.

I waited a few seconds and peeked in. It smelled of oil, gasoline, potting soil, and dry grass. It was small, but well organized. A lawn mower sat on the floor. A few rakes, shovels, a hedge trimmer, and a tree branch cutter hung on the wall. Beside those tools hung a sledgehammer, an axe, and a machete. “Well how about that?”

Bags of fertilizer were stacked on the floor. My first thought was that those were useless. Then I wondered about the recipe for constructing a bomb with fertilizer and diesel fuel. I had no need of such a bomb at the moment, but the world had turned into a very violent place. Who knew what might prove useful in the future? I made a mental note.

Two gas cans sat on the floor beside the lawn mower, one full, one empty. Another mental note.

I slipped the sheathed machete into my belt. I grabbed the hatchet. The machete was a keeper, but Murphy might appreciate the hatchet.

I closed the door behind me as I stepped out, cautiously looking around as I did. Slow, smart, and safe was better than fast, dumb, and dead.

I walked through the gap in the hedge and into a shadowy tunnel under the thick foliage of overhanging trees. Mosquitoes, hungry for a snack, swarmed out of their hiding places and buzzed in my ears.

The gate to the chain-link fence hung open and I hurried through without a sound.

Once in the backyard, I saw a long row of charred yards bordered by burned-out houses and separated by a chain-link fence. Several backyard widths away, the fence was pushed flat against the ground by the weight of hundreds of immolated bodies caught by the flames in an apparent attempt to escape. Their piled corpses smoldered and stank.

Sobbing caught my attention. I looked to my left.

Mandi sat on the back porch on a piece of lawn furniture with her face in her hands, crying softly. One of Murphy’s big hands rested on her shoulder, comforting again. When he saw me, he shrugged, but said nothing.

I walked up beside them. I wasn’t the nurturing type so no words found their way to my lips. I laid the hatchet on the table and said to Murphy, “If you want it.”

Murphy nodded. I saw approval in his eyes.

I went over and checked the back door. The knob turned and the door swung open.

I didn’t expect anyone or anything to be inside, but I drew my pistol as a matter of course and went in. The house was warm and dimly lit. The curtains were all pulled closed. I sniffed the air. I smelled nothing dead.

Everything was tidy. Pictures hung on the wall. Desiccated houseplants sat on shelves. The furniture was sparse, but well-organized. The kitchen counters were clean. No dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

I thought about my apartment and hoped that no survivor found their way in. I hadn’t cleaned in weeks. The mess was embarrassing.

I went down the short hallway off of the living room and checked the first door on the left, a bathroom. No one was inside.

Across the hall, a door hung, nearly closed. I pushed it open with the toe of my boot, holding my pistol out in front of me just like the police and soldiers I’d seen in a thousand movies.

A bedroom. Empty.

Before heading up the stairs, I took a moment to listen to the sounds in the house. I heard no creaking from the floor above. I heard no human noises.

I took my time climbing the stairs, opting for silence over speed again.

An eight-foot wide rectangular landing at the top of the stairs provided access to three doors, two open, one closed.

One open door led into a small, vacant bathroom.

I stepped across the landing for a view into a room used as an office. It was orderly, with a tidy desk. I spied a phone charger I thought might work on my phone. I took a moment to pull the cord from the wall and pocket it. The closet held nothing of concern: a file cabinet and storage boxes.

Out of the room and back across the landing, the last door was ajar, just like the bedroom door downstairs. I nudged it gently with my elbow and it swung open.

I was startled by the sight of a man sat on the edge of a bed, straight back, feet flat on the floor, palms on his thighs, staring through partially open blinds at the mound of corpses in the distance.

I pointed the gun and braced myself to pull the trigger.

“Hey,” I said.

No response. No movement.

Could he be dead in that position?

“Hey.”

Not the slightest move.

What the fuck?

I edged my way into the room, careful to keep myself positioned with my pistol pointed at his chest.

The man’s skin was pale like mine. He was infected.

My finger rested on the trigger of my pistol and I wrestled with the choice of whether to shoot.

He’s infected. He’s a threat.

But he was just sitting there. Was he a monster? Was he like me? Or was he something else?

As I came around to his side, I saw that his eyes were open. Tears left shiny tracks down the coarse skin of his cheeks. His middle-aged face was frozen sadness. I saw his chest move ever so slightly in and out. He was alive.

“Hey, man,” I said.

Still, he did not respond.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to touch him. Mostly I didn’t want to put myself within arm’s reach of an infected man without Murphy’s gun there to back me up.

After several long minutes of indecision, I inched my way out of the room and quietly pulled the door shut behind me.

I stepped quickly down the stairs to the living room and got to the bottom just as Murphy and Mandi were coming in the back door.

Murphy’s smile flashed instantly to worry when he saw me. “What?”

“There’s an infected guy upstairs,” I answered.

Murphy’s M4 was up in an instant.

“I don’t know what his deal is,” I said. “He might be a slow burn like us, but I think he’s catatonic.”

“Catatonic?” Mandi asked.

I pointed toward the room upstairs. “He’s just sitting there, staring out the window. He wouldn’t answer when I talked to him. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t move. His skin was pale, so I know he’s infected, but he didn’t react to me at all.”

“That’s weird,” said Murphy. “What are you thinking we should do?”

“Honestly,” I admitted, “I almost shot him.”

Murphy said, “You almost shot him just because he was infected.”

I nodded.

Murphy went on, “Even though he wasn’t a danger.”

“I don’t know if he is or not,” I told him, feeling a little bit defensive.

“But he just sat there?” Murphy confirmed.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Uh, huh.” Murphy stared me down. “You know where I’m going with this, right?”

“The irony of it isn’t lost on me.” I huffed. “I don’t know what we should do about him, but I do know one thing.”

“And that is?” Murphy asked.

“You were right,” I answered.

“About?”

I hesitated. He was going to force the admission.

“C’mon, Zed. You can say it.”

I huffed and rattled, “You and me are infected. The uninfected will always fear us. To them, we’ll always be monsters.“

Murphy nodded.

I said, “I’m really starting to hate this fuckin’ world.”

“So what do you want to do with him?” Murphy asked.

“I’m not going to shoot him,” I said. “I guess we could get some food and water, get out of here, and just leave him alone. I don’t know.”

Mandi was incensed. “We can’t just leave him.”

“Mandi,” I said, “we don’t know anything about this guy. We don’t know if he’s dangerous, or what. Maybe he’s just sitting there until he gets hungry again, and then he’ll have one of us for lunch.”

Murphy added, “He might. These infected act pretty weird. Who knows what he’s up to.”

Mandi shook her head. “Or maybe he’s just like you guys.”

“Maybe something like us, but not just like us,” I admitted. “There’s something really wrong with this guy though.”

“What do you want to do, then?” Murphy asked me.

Mandi started toward the stairs. “If you guys can’t figure out what to do, I’ll go upstairs and see what’s wrong with him.”

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I raised a hand to stop her and said, “That big heart of yours is going to get you killed if you’re not careful. You can’t just run around acting like you acted last week. Things are different now.” I waited for her full attention. “There’s no telling what he’ll do when he sees an uninfected person come in.”

“Well, we can’t just do nothing,” she snapped.

“Yes we can.” Murphy nodded emphatically.

Mandi glared at me.

“Shit. Fine,” I said. “Murphy, you come up and keep your gun on the guy. I’ll go in and try a little harder to get his attention. But if he jumps at me or tries to bite me, shoot him. I don’t need any more God damned bites.”

Relieved, Mandi said, “Good.”

“One condition,” I said, turning to Mandi. “You’re staying down here.”

Mandi didn’t like that one bit. “You’re not my dad, Zed. You can’t just boss me around.”

Murphy grinned and giggled.

“Mandi,” I took a deep breath, “I’m not trying to be your dad. I’m just…Look, you just came out of that bunker, and you lived through that, so I know you’re tough, but when you saw all those bodies piled and burned out back, you fell apart and cried.”

Mandi threw her hands on her hips and stepped up in front of me. “That doesn’t make me fragile.”

“I’m just looking out for you,” I told her. “If we have to shoot this guy down, don’t you have enough gruesome images in your head? Do you really need one more right now? Look, you do whatever you want. Just don’t get in our way. Like I said, I don’t want any more of those fuckers biting me.” I turned and headed up the stairs, making no effort to be quiet.

Murphy clomped up after. Mandi’s tiny feet came up last.

I swung the bedroom door open and stepped in. Murphy took a position in the doorway with his M4 pointed at the guy’s back. Mandi peeked around Murphy.

I shuffled around the bed in the narrow gap between the mattress and the wall. The guy hadn’t moved a bit. He just stared at the pile of charred bodies spread across his neighbors’ back yards. I wondered if his friends, wife, or child might be among the dead. I wondered whether the mental stress was too much for his brain to handle, or whether in despair, he had just given up, just shut down.

“Hey,” I said as I stood just beyond arm’s reach.

Of course, no response.

Nothing ever just fucking works out by itself anymore.

I looked over at Murphy to ensure myself that his gun was pointed in the right place.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I pulled my pistol down to my hip but kept it pointed at the man, gunslinger style. I knew my aim would be terrible shooting from the hip, but at a distance of a few feet, I doubted I could miss.

I stepped closer and reached out with my other hand and touched the man on the shoulder. “Hey.”

He very deliberately turned his middle-aged face toward me, but the eyes that blinked at his tears were those of a child.

“Man, are you okay?” I asked.

He blinked twice more, but said nothing.

“Do you understand me?” I asked.

The man’s facial expression changed slowly. He was confused, but after a moment, he nodded.

I glanced over at Murphy. He shook his head and shrugged. Mandi looked anxious, but clearly happy that we weren’t shooting.

Yet.

I looked back down at the guy. “Can you speak?”

The guy just looked back at me.

“Is this your house?” I asked.

Another blank stare.

“Are you able to move?” I asked. “Can you stand?”

The guy furrowed his brow in concentration. He nodded.

Frustrating.

I asked him, “Will you stand?”

Slowly, the man stood up beside the bed and faced me.

I tried another. “Can you walk?”

Another nod.

I pointed toward the door. “Why don’t you follow me into the kitchen?”

I backpedaled in the narrow space between the bed and the wall until I was out of the room, keeping my eye on the guy and keeping my pistol pointed at him.

“Murphy,” I warned, “once he sees Mandi, be ready.”

Mandi asked, “Why?”

I glanced at her. “Because you’re not infected.”

“Oh.” She understood, finally.

Once we got downstairs to the living room, I looked over at Mandi. “Would you check around and see if you can find a thermometer, please?”

I brought the guy into the kitchen and asked him to sit down, which he did. He was certainly compliant.

“What do you think, Murphy?”

“I don’t know man.” He took a long look at the guy. “I think his brain is fried or he’s gone off the deep end. I’m surprised he’s not dead already. Man, what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said as something occurred to me. “I’m wondering about something Jerome told me.”

“Jerome the Liar?”

“Yeah, Jerome the Liar.” That seemed a little harsh thought it was completely true. “He said not all of us Slow Burns end up at the same temperature and that the higher your temperature, the lower your brain functions. Maybe this guy is high enough to be like this, but not quite high enough to be a monster.”

Murphy reiterated his point. “Based on what Jerome said, right?”

“Look,” I said, letting a little of my irritation show, “I don’t know if everything Jerome said was bullshit or not.”

Murphy shook his head and stepped back a bit, “But you do know everything he knew about the disease, he learned on the internet, right?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue,” I argued.

Murphy said, “When you have a liar tell you something he learned on the world’s biggest repository of lies, I don’t know how probability works, but I think whatever probabilistic equation explains that situation will tell you that he was probably full of shit.”

“What?”

“You know,” said Murphy, “x plus y times q squared equals turd.” He laughed loudly.

Mandi came into the kitchen. “I found this thermometer in the medicine cabinet. It’s one of those ones that you just shine in your ear and it reads out the temperature digitally.”

“Perfect.” I reached out to take the thermometer but when she Mandi raised her hand she pointed at something else she was holding.

She said, “I also found this.”

Murphy asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s his badge,” Mandi told him. “He worked at the highway department. His name is Russell Coronado.”

“Russell Coronado,” I repeated.

Mandi handed me the thermometer and I holstered my pistol. Russell was seeming less and less like a danger, but I didn’t know what to think of him. I got in front of him and said, “Russell, I’m going to check your temperature. Is that okay?”

Russell just looked at me.

Whatever.

I put the thermometer to his ear and clicked the trigger. Russell didn’t react.

I read the thermometer’s display out loud. “One-oh-two point three.”

“That’s high,” said Mandi.

“For a normal person,” I said. “Here, Murphy. Check Mandi.”

Mandi came in at 98.6, exactly normal. My temperature was 99.4 and Murphy was 99.9.

For Mandi’s benefit, I said, “This guy Jerome told us…”

Murphy interrupted, “Jerome the Liar.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jerome the Liar…”

Mandi asked, “Who’s Jerome, again?”

“Jerome got Karma-lized,” Murphy busted out laughing.

Mandi got cross and asked, “Caramelized? What?”

I didn’t know whether to smile, get angry at Murphy, or get angry at Jerome for all he’d done. I said, “It’s a pun, I think.”

“I’m not trying to be mean,” said Murphy. “Jerome got killed, but it’s like he was trying to deserve it.”

It was hard to deny.

Mandi asked, “Why do you call him Jerome the Liar?”

“Tell you what,” I said, “let’s see if there’s any food or water first around. Jerome is a long story. We can talk about it after we find something to eat.” I crossed the kitchen and opened a door that looked like it could be the pantry.

Murphy checked the kitchen sink for water pressure.

“I’ll check the fridge,” Mandi offered.

“No water,” Murphy said, playing with the knobs.

“There’s plenty of stuff in here,” I said.

“Jackpot.” Mandi said, pulling a bottled soda out of the fridge. “It’s cold.”

“I told you the electricity was still on,” said Murphy.

Mandi passed us each a soda. I opened mine up, gulped a third down, belched, and said, “I’m curious about the electricity thing.” I looked at Murphy. “Keep an eye on Russell.”

I headed for the back door. Russell got up and followed.

Oh, well.

Mandi pulled a single-serving frozen dinner out of the freezer. “I’m having lasagna. What do you guys want?”

Murphy was watching Russell follow me and asked, “What’s up with that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Mandi, cook me anything. Throw something in for Russell, too.”

Back outside on the porch, the site of the burned bodies piled along the fence line made me cringe. Russell stopped beside me and stared.

Out on the pile blackened hands reached out in permanent desperation. Faces were petrified in agony. They lay every which way imaginable, many trampled under the feet of the others, many clawing their way away from the terrible flames, all frozen in their dying pose, with clothes and hair burned away, skin blackened or gone, exposed red flesh rotting in the heat.

The macabre corpses grasped my attention and refused to let go. I wondered about the people in that pile, who they were, what they did for a living. I wondered how many used to be pretty girls, which ones were doctors or teachers. I wondered how many children in that pile would never grow up, how many of those kids’ last days and last hours were spent running and screaming in terror, chased by rabid white monsters.

I wanted to look away but was transfixed. I didn’t even blink. The image slowly cooked itself into my memory. It was the kind of vision that hardens your heart and slowly shatters your soul.

“Don’t stare at it, man,” Murphy said.

“You snuck up on me.” My words came out in a whisper as if under their own power.

“You were in a daze,” he told me. “Your sesame chicken is done. You want to eat out here?”

“No fuckin’ way.” I shook my head vigorously, taking my eyes off the pile of bodies. “Uhm, it’ll be safer in the house. I just came out to see what the deal was with the electric lines.”

Having reminded myself, I walked out into the yard. Russell followed. Indeed, there was a pole at the corner of the backyard. A line ran each toward our house and the house next door. Three broken, blackened cables hung off the other side of the pole. I pointed and asked, “What the hell?”

Looking at the burned line, Murphy asked, “So where’s the electricity coming from?”

I followed the lines back to the house with my eyes as I walked farther out into the yard. Russell stayed with me.

“Looks like you’ve got a new best friend, Zed.”

“Whatever.”

The line connected to the house just under the eaves at the back corner. Looking up onto the back roof I saw rows of shiny, dark gray glass. I pointed. “Look, solar panels. All across the roof.”

Murphy walked away from the porch so that he could see onto the roof as well. “I’ll be damned. They really do work.”

Like a puppy, Russell stayed on my heels and followed me back into the house. I went into the kitchen, where Mandi had set the table for four with a microwaved dinner and a cold bottle of soda at each place setting.

Using the cord I’d found in the office upstairs, I plugged my phone in and left it on the kitchen counter to charge while I sat down at the table. Russell took a seat beside me.

“I think he likes you,” Mandi joked.

I rolled my eyes. “We should have picked a different house.”

Murphy and Mandi sat down with us and I started to eat. I felt a measure of relief when Russell picked up his fork and started on his meal. If he hadn’t been capable of feeding himself, I didn’t know what we’d have done with him. Civilization had regressed past the luxury of providing care for invalids.

Also to my relief, Russell showed no undue interest in Mandi. Whatever cannibalistic tendencies lived in the squirming little brains of the other infected, Russell didn’t seem to have those.

As we ate, I told Mandi the story of Jerome, which, of course, led to the stories about our escapes from the gym and the jail. Mandi told us a little about herself. She worked part-time at a daycare for special needs children and went to school at the community college. She’d lived her whole life in Austin, in a house that was now ash, in a neighborhood that was now gone.

After we finished eating we sat around the table, enjoying a moment of anachronistic normalcy. Mandi asked, “Can I say something?”

“You’re too polite,” Murphy observed.

“I agree with Murphy,” I said, “but go ahead.”

Mandi sat up straight in her chair. She looked at both of us and announced, “I just want to say that I’m sorry.”

“Say what?” said Murphy.

I asked, “What are you sorry for?”

Mandi said, “I’m sorry for crying on the back porch when we got here.”

I waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

She nodded and said nothing for few moments while she collected her thoughts. “All those people burned to death back there…Do you think they were…do you think they were infected?”

“I’m sure they were,” I lied. In truth, I had no way of knowing.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “They were infected who got caught by the fire. The infected aren’t that bright.”

Mandi argued, “Smart people get caught in fires, too.”

“Mandi,” I said, “it doesn’t matter, not one single bit. Not to sound cruel, but they’re dead. We can’t do anything about it.” My voice rose, perhaps more as a way to hide from my own weakness than to scold Mandi for hers. “If we’d been here when it happened, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. We’re all alive in a world that isn’t like the one we grew up in. We need to figure out how to deal with it. If not, we’ll die.”

“Dude,” admonished Murphy.

Mandi looked down at her plastic tray and fidgeted with a noodle for a moment. When she looked up, her eyes held restrained tears. “You don’t have to be harsh, Zed.”

I took a moment to think about what I wanted to say before I continued. “Mandi, I don’t mean to be an insensitive prick, but our new reality is cruel and violent. We all know it. We’ve all dealt with it firsthand, or we wouldn’t be here.”

I took a deep breath and rolled on. “Mandi, like I said before, I know you can be tough. And I do appreciate that you’re such a sweet girl that you feel like you have to ask for permission to ask a question. That kind of overly polite bullshit behavior probably served you well before, but now it’ll get you killed. Now, you need to be that tough girl that survived all those days in that bunker.”

With an edge in her voice Mandi asked, “Why can’t I be both?”

“I’m sure you can,” I lied. Like I actually knew. “Just don’t be too polite to stay alive.”

“And who are you, Zed?” Mandi asked, derisively as her excessive manners would allow. That made what she said all the more harsh. “What part of yourself did you give up to be tough enough for today’s world?”

“Now kids,” said Murphy, “we don’t need to argue.”

In a calm voice I said, “It’s cool, dude.” I looked back at Mandi. “I’m not trying to offend you. I’m really not. You seem like a really, really nice person. I wish I’d known you before all of this went down. But to answer your question, I came into this world hardwired for success, and I think Murphy did, too.”

Mandi laughed out loud. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Murphy scoffed, “This one might be good enough to listen to.”

I looked over at Murphy. “It’s like you said this morning, when you were talking to Mandi. You put a smile on your face and take the world as it comes. You don’t attach your happiness to any false expectations of reality. You don’t expect the world to give you a big house and an expensive car and fat wife—”

“—Hey.” Murphy cut in, “Who said anything about a fat wife?”

I continued, “—you’re not going to be unhappy without those things. You’re happy with what you have, not with what you think you should have. More importantly, you don’t wallow in the tears over what you’ve lost. Not many people are like that.”

I took a big gulp of soda and continued. “As for me, I’m kind of the opposite of Murphy, but with a similar benefit. I had a pair of sub-optimal parents.”

Mandi giggled, “Sub-optimal?”

Murphy leaned over and whispered loudly to Mandi, “He has a philosophy degree. He makes things more complicated than they need to be.”

I ignored them both. “I don’t get attached to things and people, like most folks. That’s to say that in yesterday’s world, I could probably have been considered emotionally unhealthy. I was too detached. In today’s world, that works well for me. All the despair and horror drift by without affecting me.”

“Dude,” Murphy scolded, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“It’s true enough,” I argued.

Mandi said, “I like Murphy’s approach better.”

I said, “You don’t have to pick one or the other, just find a way within who you are to suck it up and deal with today. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Then why didn’t you just say that?” asked Mandi.

“Like Murphy said, I’m a philosophy graduate.”

Murphy laughed.

Chapter 20

It was after four o’clock. I was in the upstairs office since it had a window that opened to the front of the house and one that opened to the back. I sat at the desk, which, unfortunately looked out the back window and onto the grotesque heap of the dead. Russell squatted on the floor beside me. His inexplicable need to stay by me was already starting to creep me out.

Murphy was leaning on the windowsill, staring at the vastness of the fire’s destruction. Mandi was in the bathroom downstairs, using the water out of the toilet’s tank to wash all of the crap off of her skin from her time in the bottom of the bunker.

Murphy said, “I think we should stay here tonight.”

“It’s as good a place as any, I guess,” I said without looking away from the pile of corpses.

“But before it gets dark,” he said, “let’s go through some of these other houses and see if there are any goodies.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“What do you mean, like what?” Murphy turned to look at me. “I don’t know. You got a hatchet and a machete earlier. That’s good stuff.”

“We’ve got everything we need for the moment.” It wasn’t much of a protest. “There’s plenty of food downstairs to last us for three or four days. We’ve got nearly as much ammo as we can carry.”

“You’re not thinking ahead,” he said.

That rubbed me the wrong way, but I put a thin veneer on my irritation and said,  “I’m fuckin’ tired. My head is still pounding from when I got blown up by the grenade.”

Murphy laughed. “If you’re a pussy with a headache, just say, ‘I’m a pussy with a headache,’ and we’ll leave it at that. Don’t be such a drama queen.”

“Fine.” I wanted to say no. “Let me check my phone, and then I’ll go with you. But just a few houses, okay? I want to be back before it gets dark.”

“Fine by me. I’ll go check on Mandi.” Murphy left the office and tromped down the stairs.

I turned on my phone and saw that I had messages. I checked Steph first.

Chapter 21

Steph: Zed, are you there?

Steph: Zed, are you there?

Steph: Zed, I hope you’re alive to read this. But I know the truth of it. If you’re not answering this then it’s because you’re dead. Everybody is. So I’m just writing this to myself. Dear Diary, I can’t stop crying.

Steph: The first two groups all turned. Forty people infected and shot. We killed them. I feel like my heart is dying. We just infected twenty more.

Steph: It feels like suicide now. Nobody is talking here. Everyone stares at the walls or out the windows. There’s no hope. No hope, only prayers and tears.

Steph: If by some miracle you’re still alive and you read this, you need to know that I’m in the next group to get infected. I’m volunteering. Goodbye, Zed. Thank you for being a friend. I wish I’d gotten to know you better. I know I’ll die soon and I’m okay with that. I don’t want to be in this world anymore.

“Shit,” I blinked away tears and looked around, glad that I was alone. I wanted to do something for Steph, anything, but I knew there was nothing. The messages were hours old. Steph had lost hope. She was likely infected. She was dying or dead.

That thought left me with a hollow, black feeling that stuck in my throat. Life had been so much easier without emotional attachments.

I texted Steph back several times.

I stared at the pile of holocaust corpses as I waited for a response.

God, the world was so fucked up.

Chapter 22

With hopes that felt unrealistic as soon as they bubbled up, I tried calling Amber.

No answer.

After the last ring, my text message icon indicated that a message had arrived.

Amber: Zed, is that you?

Me: Yes.

Amber: I can’t talk right now. Text me back.

Me: Why can’t you talk? What’s going on?

Amber: I’m trying to stay as quiet as I can.

Me: Why? What happened?

Amber: Things got really crazy then it got real quiet.

Me: Tell me what happened, exactly.

Amber: I don’t know exactly. I’ve been afraid to leave the room. What I know is that Felicity and Wilkins turned. They’re locked in a room down the hall. Another of the guys got the fever and they locked him up. Afterwards, there was a lot of shouting in the hall. Mark and Marcy were yelling at the other guys. There were shots then and I only heard Mark and Marcy’s voices. Mark started to run up and down the hall yelling and talking crazy with Marcy egging him on. It was insane for a while.

Me: For a while?

Amber: Not now. Everything is quiet.

Me: I’m coming to get you out. Right now.

Amber: No!. Please don’t come here.

Me: Why not?

Amber: Please don’t. Mark is crazy. He’ll kill you.

Me: No he won’t.

Amber: If you rush over here and risk your life you might not make it this time. If you keep risking your life, you’re going to get killed. And for what?

Me: To help.

Amber: We don’t even know yet that I need help. Mark and Marcy are probably infected. They’ve probably got the fever. That’s why they’re quiet. If I’m patient then they’ll wander off like all the other crazy infected do. If I sit tight for a few days, I’ll probably be fine.

Me: Fine. That makes sense. I hate doing nothing.

Amber: Besides, I might be infected. I might turn into one of them.

Me: Let’s hope not.

Amber: Hope is all I have.

Me: Hope is important. Hang in there. I’ll check in later, okay?

Amber: Okay.

Me: If anything changes, call. I have a full charge on my phone.

Chapter 23

The house next door, the first in our search, yielded nothing. The neighbors had taken everything of post-apocalyptic value with them when they made out of town. There was, of course, a nice flat panel television, decent furniture, and plenty of clothing, none of which was of any value to me.

Would I eventually need a winter coat? Sure. But the world was my closet. I’d find a coat in the nearest house when it got cold. Not that it made any difference, but that was finally a tick on the pro side of my pros and cons list for the post-virus world—free clothes.

I smiled. It felt empty. I was still thinking about my conversations—if you could call them that— with Amber and Steph.

Murphy gave me a questioning look.

We moved on to the next house.

Prior to kicking in the back door, I beat on it with my fist, followed, of course, by Russell beating on the door as soon as I finished. It seemed like a good way to wake any infected before we made the mistake of letting ourselves in and letting them out. A man, a woman, and three children, all infected, came to the back windows of the house and pressed themselves against the glass as they howled their frustration at not being able to get their hands on us.

Seeing the family, every single one of them, turned into rabid Whites, had an effect on each of us. It put us all in a shitty black mood.

I muttered, “We should have skipped this house.”

Murphy nodded.

Mandi held her tongue.

We hopped a fence and repeated the process at the third house. I beat on the door, expecting more infected. Russell beat on the door. We got no response. So Murphy broke the door down.

Inside, the house’s floor plan looked to be the mirror image of Russell’s house. With Murphy in the lead, we searched the house, guns out, ready to kill anything that might be a threat.

No infected were there to be found.

With the house clear, Murphy and Mandi started searching downstairs. Russell followed me toward the stairs to look for goodies.

Almost immediately, Mandi cried, “Jackpot.” She liked that word.

She stood in front of the pantry, the first place she checked.

I shushed her and went over. I understood her glee when I saw the water. The water was a blessing that we all needed, and the bottles would make great little canteens for refill later. I tossed some in my bag and headed upstairs with Russell in tow.

We started in a kid's room because I'd spied a school backpack there when we’d cleared the house. It lay on a bed covered with crumpled sheets.

With Russell observing, I removed some textbooks and notebooks from the backpack and stacked them neatly on the dresser. I don’t know why a tidy stack of schoolbooks was important to me. The back pocket on the pack held pens, keys, some change, a few markers, and a student ID.

I took a moment to examine the ID. Patrick Henry Dubois was a good-looking kid with a big grin. He must have been thrilled when they photographed him on his first day of ninth grade at the Science and Math Academy. The green polo shirt that Patrick wore in that picture was rumpled on the carpet along with a pair of khaki shorts, beneath Russell’s feet. A band instrument case stood against the wall. Posters of favorite bands and a college football team decorated the wall. A dormant computer sat on a desk.

A kid had lived in this room, a kid who I’d taken for granted as dead.

I felt hollow.

I lay the ID on the dresser beside the book. I didn't need to see the Patrick Dubois’ face. I didn't need to know what school he went to. I didn't need to know what grade he was in. It was all personal, humanizing information that made everything in the room real. It changed my activity from a scavenger hunt to a painful rummage through the possessions of a dead child.

I drew a deep breath and tried stifle what I was suddenly feeling.

Empathy for the dead and infected was an emotional luxury I knew I couldn't afford. I had to find a way past it. I was having trouble enough paying for the empathy I felt for the living.

Russell complied when I asked him to stand still. Like a parent getting his child ready for school, I put the empty backpack on him and adjusted the straps. Russell wasn't proving to be useful for much of anything, but he could at least carry his share of the load, a burden we were all going to have to get used to.

I searched the closet and found a twenty-seven-inch aluminum baseball bat, probably left over from the kid's little league days. I picked it up and hefted it in one hand. It was long enough to be lethal, but light enough to be wielded in one hand.

I spent a moment debating whether I'd be better off with the machete or the baseball bat, for times when bullets weren't the right answer.

The primary advantage of the baseball bat was that there was no risk of it getting stuck in the skull of an infected, which could happen with the machete. A skull-stuck machete could be a life-ending dilemma.

In the end, I slipped the bat into Russell's backpack, with the handle sticking out of the top. Nothing else in the room appeared to be of any value.

The master bedroom held a big bed, a television mounted on the wall, and a closet full of the kind of clothes that were well-suited to the modern world.

A small pair of hiking boots found its way into Russell's backpack. They might fit Mandi.

In the nightstand, I found a drawer full of medicine. Murphy's insistence that we search suddenly seemed well worth it when I came across a half-full bottle of amoxicillin. I opened the bottle and swallowed two of the antibiotic capsules immediately. I looked at the crusty bite scabs on my arm. I was probably out of the woods on infection, but the antibiotics were good insurance.

The amoxicillin, a big bottle of hydrocodone, some aspirin, and ibuprofen all went into Russell's backpack. The prescription medicines I wasn't familiar with, I left at first. On reflection, I went back and picked them up. Medicines could be of great value to the people who needed them, and the supply would eventually run low. At that point, expiration dates be damned. People on maintenance drugs would trade away anything to get them.

I heard Murphy’s and Mandi’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

Murphy said, “You need to see this shit.”

“What?” I asked.

He led me over to the window that faced the street.

I pulled the curtains back and peeked out. “What the fuck?”

Murphy said, “Uh-huh.”

Mandi asked, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Murphy. “Some kind of crazy follow-the-leader bullshit?”

Several blocks up a street that came to a t-intersection with our unburned street, a line of about thirty infected were jogging in single file, following a serpentine path that was visible only to them.

“What the fuck?” I reiterated.

Mandi asked, “Are those infected? What are they doing?”

“Man that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” Murphy didn’t look away from the glass. “When I was looking out the front window downstairs, I thought I saw movement way down the street. Then I saw those Whites coming along, playing follow-the-leader up the street all lined up, just like that. Man, they do weird stuff, but this is really creepy.”

Mandi scooted away from the window. “It gives me the heebie jeebies.”

Murphy, Russell and I continued to stare. When the line of infected got to within half a block of our street, they all looked to their right in near unison. The group split in the middle and they jogged in their lines across a burned front yard, systematically around the remains of a house and a burned car, peeking through each gap and into each hole.

“What do you make of that?” Murphy asked.

“They’re searching,” I said, “Maybe they heard something.”

“Yeah, but look, they’re acting like a group,” Murphy emphasized.

“I see that,” I told him, “but it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, they’re all brain damaged. They aren’t that smart.”

With Russell standing silently beside me, I watched as the group of infected finished going around the house’s remains. They jogged back into the street where the relative disorder of the two groups resolved quickly into a single line. They resumed jogging a serpentine path toward our street. When the group arrived at the t-intersection a few houses over, the line made a right turn and jogged off to the north.

After a few minutes, Mandi asked, “Are they gone yet?”

“Yeah,” I answered, watching the empty street.

“What were they doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Are they learning how to work together?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Murphy said, “Creepy, huh?”

Both Mandi and I nodded.

“Snack?” Murphy asked, turning out attention.

“Yes.” Mandi said enthusiastically. She probably had several days’ worth of calories to catch up on.

We made ourselves comfortable in the master bedroom upstairs. Mandi sat on the bed and Murphy dropped down beside her. Russell and I sat on the floor. We shared a big box of kid’s cereal that we ate by the handful and washed down with warm soda.

Mandi and Murphy rattled on about the infected while I thought about the behavior and tried to squeeze it into the context of all the things I’d learned. When inspiration hit, I said, “Have you guys ever heard of emergent behavior?”

Mandi said, “I don’t even know what that means.”

I told her, “I have an idea about the infected we saw in the street.”

“Hey, Mandi, pass that cereal over here.” Murphy reached out a hand to take the box. “This sounds like it’s going to be a long answer, and I don’t want go hungry while I’m pretending to listen.”

Mandi giggled.

I said, “Emergent behavior is something you see in birds, for instance. Let’s say you have one bird and you want to understand everything there is to know about bird behavior. You can watch that bird all day long for years and years, from the moment it hatches until the moment it dies, and if all you ever have is that one bird, you’d never know anything about flocks of birds.”

Murphy was focused on his cereal, and making no effort to listen or pretend to.

Mandi though, was politely intent. “Okay, professor.”

I rolled my eyes. “When you see a flock of birds, they all seem to fly together. They move like one giant organism changing direction as one, going up and down, choosing to land and to take off.”

Murphy, who apparently was listening, asked through a mouthful of cereal, “Aren’t they just following the head bird or something?”

“No, that’s just it,” I said, getting excited about the subject. “They’ve done studies on bird behavior, and they don’t follow one bird. They all seem to turn at pretty much the same time. Nobody knows exactly how they decide that. It’s the same with fish. They school, and when they’re in a school, it’s like they stop being individuals and start being one organism. Again, without a leader that can be identified. It’s like they’re operating by consensus, but nobody knows how they come to their consensus decisions.”

“C’mon, man,” Murphy said, “there’s got to be one in charge.”

“Nope.” I shook my head vigorously. “They’ve studied the movement with video at multiple angles with computers. There doesn’t seem to be a leader.”

Mandi asked, “So the short version is?”

I rolled my eyes again. “The behavior of the group, that is, the behavior that can’t be predicted from observing the behavior of the individual, is called emergent behavior. There’s this interesting study this guy did with ants…”

Mandi cut me off. “That’s okay, Zed. I don’t need to know about the ants. Is there a shorter version?”

“But it’s really interesting stuff,” I protested.

“No, Zed. I’m good.” She took the box of cereal back from Murphy and grabbed a handful. “You make my brain hurt when you start talking all of your mumbo jumbo.”

I huffed and took a drink of soda.

Murphy said, “I don’t want to hear about the ants, but let’s say that you’re right about this emergent behavior thing. What does it mean for us in a practical sense? Do we need to be worried? Are the infected learning how to work in teams, like packs of wolves? Are they going to become more dangerous to us?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I guess that you could classify pack behavior in dogs and wolves as emergent. I’m not an expert in this stuff. So I’m kinda guessing. Wolves evolved to hunt together successfully, and they’re able to learn how to hunt certain animals in certain ways. I don’t know if the infected are learning to work together, or if what we saw was a manifestation of some kind of herding instinct that’s hardwired into the human brain. I’m going to guess that it doesn’t present any added threat to us, but I think we should keep an eye on them and see what happens. We are all in new territory.”

Mandi rolled her eyes and smiled. “Yeah, today’s world, not yesterday’s world. We’ve heard that speech already, Dad.”

Murphy laughed. “I think they’re all just a bunch of Russells.”

I said, “You guys can be a pain in the ass.”

That's when Murphy spotted another line of the infected jogging out of the distance. The group was larger than the last.

A lot larger.

I stood to look out the window. Mandi came over beside me. Murphy stood to see over us. As we watched, the group separated into a pair of lines that intertwined like a living double helix as they came up the street.

"There are hundreds in that bunch," Murphy said.

I nodded.

"Are we safe in here?" Mandi asked. "Is there somewhere we should go?"

I heard the sounds of the infected from somewhere behind us. I ran to the back window to look.

The group of thirty that had gone up the street much earlier had come around the unburned houses and found their way to the decaying corpses. I don't know if the sounds were jubilant, but they were loud. They fell on the pile of the dead and started to gorge themselves on the flesh.

I said, "Those guys must be starved."

From where Murphy stood by the front window, he said, "I think these guys heard that noise, because they're hauling ass now. Shit. They didn't turn at the street like the other guys.."

“Stay calm.” I ran to the front window and looked out. The wave of infected rolled across the street and broke on our block, spreading out and flowing between houses and into backyards. They became very vocal.

I heard them running past our walls outside.

"Shit,"." I shouted. "The back door is open."

"Oh, no." Mandi burst into frightened tears.

We all stood there for a second, frozen as the sudden danger of the situation sank in.

Murphy said, “The infected might bypass the houses and go straight for the burned corpses…Maybe.”

But as Mandi cried, and Murphy hoped, I’d passed hope and sprung to action with a few steps toward the bedroom door.

I was already too late.

The calm in the house shattered when the clumsy sounds of the infected burst into the living room below.

Mandi wasn't ready for another bout with danger. She fell to her knees, her face in her hands, trying to cover her mouth and muffle her cries.

Russell just stood beside me with a blank look on his face.

I looked back at Murphy, who raised his M4 and ran a hand across the bulges of grenades on his vest.

Thinking out loud, I looked around and mumbled, "No, this isn't going to happen. There's got to be a way out."

I glanced out the windows. There was no way to escape that way. I looked around the room and at the flimsy interior door. Its protective properties were nil.

I looked at the landing at the top of the stairs. Could Murphy and I shoot them all as they funneled onto the stairway?

I spotted a framed-out square in the center of the bedroom ceiling.

The attic.

The house was old. The ceilings weren't that high. It might work.

I pointed at the attic access panel. "Murphy, get Mandi up there, now."

Heavy footsteps pounded on the stairs.

I jumped out onto the landing. Over the rail on my left, several infected were hurrying up, likely prompted by the sound of my voice when I told Murphy and Mandi what to do.

I shouted, “God damn. We’re out of time.”

I drew my pistol and my machete. The last thing I saw before tunnel vision narrowed my sight to the lethal white monsters mounting the stairs was Murphy, jumping onto the bed and pushing the access panel out of the way.

The stairway was narrow, perhaps the only sparkling crumb of optimism in a rapidly deteriorating situation.

A shaggy-haired woman led the pack of infected charging up after me. As her foot landed on a step near the top of the stairs, her head came up above the edge of the rail.

Without a sliver of pause, I swung the machete in a powerful backhand that took off the top of her skull. A fountain of blood exploded in the air. She stiffened, but stayed upright as those behind her pushed ahead.

My momentum carried me the last four feet across the landing. Another half-turn put me face to face with the coming mob.

As the dead woman crumpled, I swung my arm down and cleaved another’s skull down through the eye socket.

Blood was everywhere, as the beating hearts of the two dying infected pumped the last life out of their bodies.

The infected behind the dying pushed and howled. The woman’s body was jammed up by my feet with the guy crumpled on top. As the next one climbed over, she caught my machete in the neck and went down.

Russell snagged my brief attention with a shrill scream, and swung down over the railing with the baseball bat I’d put in his pack. The bat connected with an infected woman’s head, but Russell was too uncoordinated to be much more than an irritating distraction. Still, he bounced his bat off the woman’s head again, and she stumbled.

With three dead infected and one down, it started to get harder for those below to push the mass. The count of infected below was swelling, their frenzy growing. In seconds they’d scramble over the dead.

I was in a losing position.

Murphy stepped into my field of vision with his M4 ready. He leaned over the rail and emptied his magazine down the stairs. In that moment, every one of those hundreds of infected outside knew we were there.

Firing the rifle was a mistake. That guaranteed our end.

Murphy yelled, “In the attic. Go.”

“But…”

“Go. God dammit.”

I spun and ran, shaking my head as I went.

Was Murphy sacrificing himself for the rest of us?

I felt my heart break.

I bounded up to the bed as a grenade explosion rocked the house. I fell off balance, bounced off the bed and hit the wall on the other side.

As I got up, Russell was standing on the bed, looking into the attic.

Murphy leapt into the room and screamed, “Get in the fucking attic. We only have a few seconds.”

I regained my feet and jumped up to the bed.

Murphy threw the front window open, pushed out the screen, and heaved a grenade.

I jumped and grabbed a two-by-four beam and hauled myself into the attic. Mandi tugged on my clothes to help me up.

A grenade explosion sounded from in front of the house just as Murphy ripped open the back window.

Russell screamed like an abandoned monkey and reached for the attic as tears poured across his face.

Another explosion rattled the house from the backyard.

I yelled, “Jump, Russell.”

Russell waved his arms and bent his knees but was afraid to make the leap.

“Jump,” I yelled.

Russell cried louder.

Then Murphy was on the bed, grabbing Russell in a bear hug around his thighs and lifting him up.

Mandi and I both grabbed whatever we could and pulled Russell in. As soon as his feet cleared the hole, Murphy hauled himself up.

“Get him quiet,” Murphy hissed. “Now.”

Mandi immediately put her arms around Russell and cradled his head on her shoulder.

Able to think of nothing else to do, I awkwardly hugged Russell. He started to calm.

Murphy slid the attic access panel back over the hole and whispered, “It’s time to pray. Silently.”

Outside, the infected were howling and screaming, preying on the wounded. Downstairs, it was much the same, until the sounds of infected running through the house reached the top floor.

Murphy drew his knife, reached over and pushed it into my hand. His look at Russell told me what he expected.

Mandi’s face turned to anguish.

If Russell made a sound, I’d need to kill him as silently as possible. It would be him or all of us.

But he wasn’t a monster anymore. He was just like me.

Wanting to cry out under the burden of my choice, I begged the gods of every form to please keep Russell silent. I breathed as quietly as I could and sat as still as a statue. Our options were used up. Meager shreds of hope were all that remained.

Chapter 24

With an outside temperature in the low nineties, the attic was dangerously hot. If not for a couple of attic fan domes sucking the oven-hot air out, we wouldn’t have survived for long.

As soon as the noise from the room directly below us dissipated, Murphy withdrew bottles of water from his bag and gave us each one. We had to hydrate.

Thank God for our luck in finding those in the pantry.

Russell settled down and sat quietly beside Mandi, content to do nothing at all except remain in our company. The rest of us sat still and poured sweat onto the insulation, despite expending no physical effort.

I returned Murphy’s knife to him, glad to be rid of it, glad to be rid of the mortal responsibility it implied. Mandi glared at both of us during the handoff.

I wanted to judge Mandi harshly for her resistance to the possibility of killing Russell. Mandi was too kind. I wondered if she’d be able to harden her heart enough to survive.

I knew I’d spent a lot of time wondering over the potential immoral necessity of killing Russell to preserve three other lives. I wondered who I’d see the next time I looked in the mirror. Would it be Zed, the underachiever, or Zed, the child murderer? After all, that’s what Russell was, a child in a man’s body. But those were thoughts for another day.

I let my breath drain out of me.

I spent a long time staring into the insulation between my feet after that, deciding whether I was worth the effort of inhaling another breath.

The sounds of the infected downstairs, fighting over the carcasses of their dead brought my thoughts back into the now. Like the infected who were eating the immolated corpses piled behind the house, those downstairs had to have gone hungry for days before happening upon us. Whether that meant that they’d run out of uninfected to eat, or if it meant the uninfected who were left had gotten good at staying off the dinner plate, I didn’t know.

I was coming to learn that well-fed infected were a lot less dangerous than the hungry.

An hour into our internment, the light coming in through the attic vents began to dim. An hour later, it was pitch black in the attic. Noises in the house below diminished significantly and finally disappeared. I pushed my flashlight into the loose insulation between the beams and turned it on. The dim light it provided was barely sufficient for me to make out the shapes of the others, but I couldn’t risk letting any amount of light leak out of the attic.

Murphy leaned very close and whispered, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

He said, “We can’t stay up here.”

“I know.”

Murphy said, “We can make it through the night, but when this attic heats up tomorrow afternoon, we’ll all overheat. We’ll stroke out or we’ll die of dehydration.”

I had no doubt that Murphy was right. We’d have to do something, which meant we needed to know the situation in the house below and outside. I said, “If we’re quiet about it, we can open the access panel and I’ll sneak down and scope things out.”

Murphy shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

He said, “If you go, Simple Russell might have a fit again. The dude has separation anxiety.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t think that’s what he was screaming about.”

Mandi leaned close and said, “Yes, it was, Zed. He’s attached to you.”

“I’ll go,” whispered Murphy. “I’ll check things out and come back, and we’ll figure out how to get out of here.”

The issue was settled. I turned off the flashlight and Murphy very quietly moved the attic access panel out of the way. A big breath of relatively cool air followed the dim moonlight that flooded up from below.

After checking that the room below was empty, Murphy stealthily lowered himself down to the bed.

I cringed as the mattress springs creaked under his weight. I strained to hear any other sounds in the house; only breathing and snoring. We were safe for the moment.

Once Murphy got to the floor, I slid the panel over and covered most of the hole, leaving a six-inch gap on one end. I positioned myself so that I could sit on a ceiling beam and watch the bedroom door through the gap. We waited.

Impatient minutes passed. I looked at Mandi’s and Russell’s ghostly gray shapes in the darkness. Whether Mandi was feeling as anxious as I was over the elapsed time, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t make out the features on her face.

I wanted to check my text messages, but that’s as far as that thought went. The bright light from the smartphone’s screen could give us away.

I wondered about Amber and Steph. I thought about the state of the world. I thought about the future. I tried to imagine a way for us to get out with all the infected below. They had to be down there. Otherwise Murphy would have returned right away with the good news. The primary question on my mind was what Murphy was up to. What was taking him so long?

Whether thirty minutes or an hour had passed, I didn’t know, but when I heard a creak from the stairs below, I sat up at full attention, put a ready hand on the access panel, and waited.

Several long moments later, I heard another creak. Another step?

I looked at Mandi for confirmation that I wasn’t imagining the sounds. That was just a habit of normal communication, nulled by the darkness.

A muffled bump on the wall from somewhere below refocused my attention. I scanned what I could of the room through the gap in the ceiling, but saw nothing.

No sounds distinguished themselves from the background noise.

Long minutes passed.

Another creak.

Another muffled bump.

Something was going on in the house below. The sounds were distinct, but so patiently dispersed that it had to be Murphy.

Through the bedroom door, in the shadows of the landing, I spotted movement and tensed. I put a hand on my holstered pistol and prepared myself for whatever might come next.

Another bump on the wall was followed quickly by a second and a muffled groan.

I was surprised when I saw the end of a ladder come through the bedroom door followed by Murphy, who was carrying it.

I exhaled a long breath and felt some of my tension melt away.

I slipped the attic access panel open. Murphy carefully pushed the top of the ladder in through the square hole and leaned the lower part of the ladder against the edge of the bed.

He climbed the first few steps as the aluminum ladder creaked. He stopped with his head and shoulders through the hole.

Mandi and I leaned close enough for whispers.

Murphy said, “They’re all still down there. Maybe twenty or thirty in the house. Hundreds outside.”

“Hundreds?” Mandi asked, her tone telling us all we needed to know about how defeated she suddenly felt. “You guys go. Leave me here.” She was on the verge of tears again. “You should save yourselves.”

Murphy shook his head. “No. I have an idea. It might not work, but…”

I finished, “…But if we stay here, we’ll die.”

Mandi said, “If our choices are between dying or taking a chance, I choose the chance. I’ll do whatever you want, Murphy.”

I said, “I’ve got nothing. What do you have in mind?”

After several long minutes of whispering reassurances and instructions into Russell’s ear, I asked him to follow me down the ladder and to do his absolute best to make no noise at all.

I swung my feet through the hole and onto the rungs. I stopped and motioned Mandi to come close. I whispered, “If Russell starts screaming again, things are going to go to shit pretty fast. If that happens, go to the far end of the attic, cover yourself in some insulation and pray.” I stepped down the ladder.

Half way through the hole, I stopped and coaxed Russell over. I guided his feet onto the rungs. It was just like dealing with a child.

Thankfully, Russell stayed quiet.

Murphy held the ladder steady under the combined weight of us both, but it creaked loudly in protest. I fretted with each step until my feet found the floor.

While Murphy held the ladder for Mandi, I pulled my machete and pistol and went to stand by the door. My hands felt electrically charged. My blood was ready to burst from my veins and my heart was beating a manic rhythm. I was frightened out of my wits but I was catching a familiar, addictive adrenaline wave. I was ready to taunt the reaper.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Russell came up behind me and looked over my shoulder. His baseball bat was in his hands, ready to annoy another infected.

When I turned to see how Mandi was progressing, she was already down and lying on the bed. Murphy wasted no time in wrapping the bed’s comforter around her and tossing her over his shoulder. She was small for a girl. He was big for a man. It was the only pair of factors in our favor.

Murphy hefted his hatchet in his right hand. Our eyes met. We understood each other. I crossed the landing at the top of the stairs.

The stairs were a bloody mess. I eased down, one slow, precarious step after another. Russell mimicked my motions and we reached the bottom without arousing any of the sleeping infected.

In the living room, the moonlight revealed the infected cuddled together on the floor and on the furniture. A path to the open back door was clear. All we needed was silence and luck.

I checked over my shoulder for Murphy. He carried his load with little difficulty.

I stepped over sprawled legs and avoided broken bits of porcelain. Russell and Murphy followed, placing their steps in the spots I’d chosen.

When my first foot landed on the patio outside the back door, I froze and surveyed the backyard. We had surpassed my most optimistic expectations for the plan. It was no time to let carelessness ruin it.

My night vision was adjusted for the darkness inside the house so the backyard seemed almost bright. I heard the familiar sound of feeding infected and had no trouble seeing the spot where the grenade Murphy had thrown out of the back window had destroyed the fence and left numerous dead infected. At least two dozen living infected were still greedily feeding on those bodies.

Alerted by my movement, heads turn in my direction. I waited. In turn, each went back to his or her meal. At the moment, I was of no interest.

Whether they’d show any interest when they saw Murphy’s makeshift camouflage, we’d know soon enough.

With Russell on my heels, I skirted the house going left. I stopped at the corner, one eye on the feeding infected, and held my breath.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Murphy came out of the house with his cargo.

No reaction.

I couldn’t believe our luck. Would the chips finally fall in our favor?

I rounded the corner of the house and stepped into the deep shadows among the shrubs between the houses. The ground was covered in a carpet of dead, crunchy leaves.

I pressed slowly forward with all following behind.

I turned at a gap between two tall shrubs to get onto the neighbor’s carport and out of the noisy leaves.

I froze.

A tall, infected man stood three feet in front of me, knees slightly bent, hands out to his sides, teeth exposed, ready to pounce.

He’d heard us coming through the bushes and waited on his prey. When he saw me, he paused, trying to understand what I was.

I didn’t take time to think so much as react.

His pause would come with a high price.

I stepped forward in a move that the predator never expects from the prey.

His inherent reaction was to step away, but with a move I’d learned from a high school buddy who studied Kung-Fu, I stomped my left foot down on one of his, and all of my weight came over on top of it, pinning the foot in place.

The infected man lost his balance and fell backward.

Whether he intended to roar in anger or try to catch his balance before he fell, his brain would never have a chance to tell his body. My machete was already following an arc through the top of his head, splitting his skull down to the bridge of his nose.

The infected man died as he collapsed with my machete lodged in his cranium.

The machete made a loud, metallic clank on the concrete.

Russell was immediately beside the dead man and smashed him once across the chest with his baseball bat.

I looked around for more danger. I spied no other infected, no other movement.

Murphy emerged from behind the shrub with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. His hatchet was up, ready for action.

I stepped up to the end of the carport and scanned what I could see of the yards and the ash-covered desolation beyond.

Nothing moved.

I breathed.

I scanned again.

I listened.

I heard nothing unusual. No frenzied infected howls, no running feet, no crashing bodies.

We were safe.

For the moment.

I walked down the driveway to get a better view up and down the street. I saw the spot where the grenade Murphy had heaved out the front window had exploded. The only human remains were torn clothes and scattered bones.

The other infected had finished their work there and were gone.

I went back and wrestled my machete out of the infected guy’s skull, then headed for what felt like sanctuary at the moment—Russell’s house.

Long minutes later, we were back in Russell’s upstairs office, having checked the house to ensure it was empty, and locked the doors shut.

Murphy said, “I can’t believe that worked.”

Mandi harshly whispered, “What?”

Chapter 25

We hauled the mattresses from both bedrooms to Russell’s upstairs office. They took up most of the floor.

I helped Russell get his shoes off and realized he hadn’t changed his socks in days. Well, not that I had either. I wondered how many months or years would pass before I wouldn’t be surprised by how different the mundane had become.

I sat Russell on a mattress and told him to lie down.

Murphy said, “I’ll take first watch.”

“Um…” I started to protest, but couldn’t think of any reason why Murphy shouldn’t.

“Be quiet, Null Spot,” he told me. “We need to get on some kind of watch schedule, anyway. Good sleep patterns are important to your health.”

Mandi smiled for the first time in hours, and said, “Look at you, Murphy. Mr. Mom.”

“You can make fun if you want.” Murphy chuckled. “But you know I’m right.”

“We can talk about a schedule tomorrow,” Mandi told us. “You two should sleep. I’ll stay up and keep watch. I owe you both that much, at least.”

“But…” I started.

“Null Spot, if you say anything about it, I’m going to decide that you’re a chauvinist.” Mandi’s voice was stern, but her smile was real.

“Whatever.” I dropped onto a mattress and started to untie my boots.

Murphy said, “I’m cool. Mandi’s up first.”

With a sour look on my face, I said, “I haven’t had these boots off in days. So forgive me if my feet smell worse than Russell’s.”

Murphy grinned, “I doubt they can be.”

“Right,” Mandi agreed.

Mandi sat herself in a chair where she could see the infected out the back window of the office. “When do you think they’ll all leave?”

“Who knows?” Murphy answered.

I laid my weapons on the floor beside my spot on the mattress. Three grown men going to sleep on a bed made of two mattresses. Talk about a new mundane. But that was my last thought about that. When my head hit the pillow, my body felt like I’d melted onto the mattress.

I was exhausted. I needed downtime, but I was so keyed up, my brain so alert, that my eyes refused to stay closed.

Murphy, apparently in the same predicament, asked, “So, what's the plan, college boy?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “We can stay here at Russell’s place for a while. We have electricity, food, and a secure place to sleep, but no water. We can drain the water heater. That'll be plenty for a while. The other houses on this block are still intact. We might have enough food and water to last a month or two if we're careful.”

Mandi told us, “You guys should sleep. I’m not doing this all night.”

Murphy ignored her. “Do you think this place is safe enough?”

I said, “I don't know. Is any place safe?”

Mandi said, “Fine, if you’re not going to try to sleep, I’ll tell you my opinion. I think the bunker would have been safer.”

Rising to the debate, I said, “Murphy and I already talked about that. The bunker was trashed. Nothing works there anymore. It's a hole in the ground that we'd have to build out from scratch. We’d need a way to collect rainwater. We’d need a way to generate and store electricity. We’d have to clean it out. Not just the bodies, but all the crap down there. I think its only advantage is that it's underground and relatively hidden.”

Murphy added, “If we're going to spend the time building a place to stay, I don't think that's the place to do it. There aren't any resources around. I mean, if the bunker was stocked and functional, then I'd say let’s stay there for six months or a year and wait for things to settle down. But as it is right now, no.”

“Whether we like it or not, we need to find a way to feed ourselves,” I said. “That means that at some point, we need to learn how to farm. We have to grow our own food, raise some chickens, stuff like that.”

“There's got to be plenty of food in houses and grocery stores,” said Mandi. “We should be able to scavenge that and eat for a long time. I don’t know how many people are out there doing the same thing right now but there’s got to be plenty for everybody. We might go for years. We might be able to eat canned food forever.”

I said, “Yum.”

“It's better than going hungry,” Mandi countered.

“And better than all the vending machine crap we were eating,” said Murphy.

“So, what are our choices, really?” I asked. “We need to be able to protect ourselves from the infected. We need places where we can scavenge. We need a water source. Are we going to rely only on scavenging, or are we going to grow our own chickens and carrots and stuff?”

“What’s your thing with chickens?” Murphy asked.

Mandi brushed by Murphy’s comment and said, “Assuming that we're not going to find a fully stocked doomsday bunker anywhere, it sounds like we’re deciding between a place in town or a place in the country.”

Murphy laughed. “That's one way to put it, isn't it?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “We could probably wander out east and find any one of a thousand farms or ranches with no living owners. They probably all have wells, so water shouldn't be a problem. If we could find one with solar panels or wind turbines installed to generate electricity, then so much the better.”

Mandi said, “That doesn't sound so bad, I guess.”

I shifted around to lie on my side so I could look at them and said, “If we stay in town, something centrally located is probably best. That would give us access to the most stuff to scrounge. But in the short run, there'll be a lot more infected to deal with in town than in the country, just because that's where they are right now. In the long run, who knows? I'm guessing that the infected will end up near whatever place has available food. If they start eating each other, like Jerome said—”

“Jerome the Liar,” Murphy corrected.

“Yeah, him,” I continued. “Then who knows? Maybe they'll all stay in the cities.”

Mandi said, “I want to go where they won’t be.”

“Like I said, who knows where that’s gonna be?” I rolled over on my back and stared at the ceiling for bit after that, figuring to give sleeping a real try. Murphy seemed content to try. Russell started to snore.

We all stayed quiet for a while when Mandi started in again. “I don’t see anything moving around out back anymore.”

I sat up and got to my knees to peek out the front window.

“Zed, lay down,” Mandi told me. “I don’t need your help keeping watch.”

“I’m still wide awake,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Murphy.

I sat back down on the mattress and leaned back against the wall. “You know, we could go with something of a hybrid solution.”

“What?” asked Murphy.

“On the housing choice,” I said. “We could go down by Lake Austin and find one of those big estates right on the water. You know, one of those ones with three or four acres of lawn. That would be perfect for converting to growing vegetables or whatever. It'll have plenty of water, because it’s right on the river, and it’s still kind of close to town. As a matter of fact, we could probably use a boat to zip up and down the river in safety, and we could go scavenging wherever there aren't that many infected around. The downside is that there wouldn't be any farm tools or farm infrastructure.”

Mandi asked, “What do you mean?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Grain silos. Hay barns. Plows. Chicken coops. I don't know anything about farms except what I read in picture books in elementary school. All I know is that there's got to be a ton of stuff I don't know.”

Murphy sat up. “I've been thinking.”

“About?” I asked.

He put on a pensive look. “To steal a page from Mandi's etiquette manual, may I ask a question?”

Mandi said, “Very funny, Murphy.”

Murphy asked, “Who's going to win?”

“What?” I asked.

Murphy continued, “It's an easy question. Let's face it, the uninfected and the infected can't coexist. We don't get along, right?”

I nodded tentatively, not sure where Murphy was going.

Murphy said, “So at some point, one group is going to get killed off. Either all of the infected will get killed, or die of old age, or all of the uninfected will get killed or die of starvation or something.”

“What makes you so sure about that?” Mandi asked.

Murphy told us, “Because that's the way it always is. There's only one biggest, baddest motherfucker on the block. If there're two, there's gonna be a fight, and then there'll be one again. That's the way it is right now. There are two kinds of people now, and they both want to kill each other.”

“I think there are three kinds,” I disagreed. “Don't forget us.”

“Oh, yeah, us.” He nodded.

“Thanks.” I straightened up. The topic was interesting. “Murphy, what you’re saying makes evolutionary sense. You don't generally have two animals in the same biological niche. When you do, they compete and one wins out. In the long run, there's only one left. One dies out or moves on to greener pastures.”

Murphy shot Mandi a conspiratorial look then grinned. “Yeah professor, that's what I'm saying.”

I ignored the jab.

“So, it's us or them?” Mandi asked. “Either the infected will kill all of us or we'll kill all of them?”

“Yep,” said Murphy. “That's it. I think we all agree on that.”

“But there are so many of them,” said Mandi. “I don’t feel good about that.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “Don’t feel bad. People win. People always win.”

“Okay, Happy Murphy, why?” asked Mandi.

I laughed. “Happy Murphy. I like that. Maybe Mandi is a keeper.”

Murphy chuckled along with us. “Mandi, the easy answer is that eventually all of the infected will die of old age or something. I guarantee you that at least some normal people will survive. Hell, there's probably a hundred bunkers hidden in the mountains or out in west Texas with a hundred years’ worth of food and water, and I’ll bet they’re full of people just waiting until all of this blows over. Then they'll come out and have the whole planet to themselves.”

“Unless the infected start reproducing,” I countered.

Murphy paused. “I hadn't thought of that. Do you think they can?”

“Unless the virus makes them sterile.” I wondered about that. “Which is possible given their body temperatures. I don't see why not. You don't have to be that bright to make babies. Every species figures it out, no matter how small their brains are.”

“Maybe you're right,” Murphy conceded. “Maybe it won't be as easy as just waiting them out, but in the end the result will be the same. The only question is, when will intelligent humans be the dominant animal on the planet again?”

Mandi asked, “Why are you so sure they will be?”

“The same reason it's always been true,” said Murphy, triumphantly. “Because people are smarter.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I agree with that too. People evolved in places where all of the predators were stronger, bigger, and faster, and so were most of the prey animals. Our only advantage was that we were smart. Evolutionarily speaking, brains always trump brawn. Brains trump speed. Brains trump size. Brains trump everything, at least so far.”

Mandi asked, “So far?”

Murphy said, “Don't listen to him on that last part, Mandi. He thinks too much.”

Sarcastically, I thanked Murphy.

“I call ‘em as I see ‘em,” he told me.

“Whatever. What's the point of all this, Murphy?” I asked.

“Man,” he said, “my point is that one day, not tomorrow, probably not even next year, maybe not even five years from now, but one day, this will all be over. One day, the infected will either get wiped out by smarter, uninfected people or they'll just be some minor annoyance, like wolves or mountain lions were a few hundred years ago.”

I said, “I'm not sure that getting eaten by a mountain lion is something I'd call a minor annoyance.”

“Zed, don't be a dick. You know what I mean. When you were growing up in white boy suburbia, you never walked to school worrying about whether a mountain lion was going to eat you. There was a time when people did worry about that, but not now, because people are afraid of mountain lions, so they killed most of them off. It's gonna be the same with the infected. It'll take a while, but eventually, people will learn how to deal with them and they'll all get killed off.”

“Fine,” I said. “Where is all of this going?”

“Patience, grasshopper.” He grinned. He was getting excited. “I'm getting there.”

“Grasshopper?” Mandi asked.

I said, “Murphy spends too much time watching old TV shows.”

“Let me ask another question,” Murphy said. “Since we all agree that one day, the infected will be a problem that gets solved, what will become of the human race?”

Mandi said, “I don't understand what you're asking.”

“What I mean,” Murphy asked, “is what will life be like once all the infected are gone? Let's say that you could get in a time machine and come back here a hundred years after the infected were all dead, or two hundred years, however long you think it will take things to get back to normal. My question is, what will normal look like?”

That was an interesting question. I needed a moment to think about it. Murphy was a lot smarter than he generally seemed. I asked, “How will humanity react when it realizes that it has survived an extinction event?”

Mandi ventured her guess. “Things will be just like they were before. Is that what you guys think? I mean they would, wouldn't they?”

I said, “Unfortunately the cynic in me agrees with you.”

“Why is that cynical?” Mandi asked. “That seems optimistic to me.”

I said, “It's cynical because I don't think that this will be a spiritually maturative event for humanity. I think eventually things will go back to being just the way they were. There'll be disgustingly rich people and abjectly poor people. Mankind will still find reasons to go to war. There'll still be starvation. There'll still be distrust between nations and people who are different. If anything, this virus might exacerbate that.

“The idealist in me wants to think that mankind will come out of this with a new perspective on how fragile a species we are, and how fragile an ecosystem we have. The idealist in me wants to think that we'll come out of this feeling like we've been given a second chance at building a civilization that doesn’t have all the evils of the old one, but it won't be that. We'll just rebuild the same thing we had before. That's how things have always happened in the past. After the Black Death, people just picked up the pieces and moved on, and things were just like they were before it happened.

“The pessimist in me says that this descent into chaos is forever, or at least for our lifetimes. All we have to hope for is a future where we'll scavenge for our meals and try not to become meals ourselves. Maybe in the long run, things will go back to the way they were, which, one day, will seem better than this. But I wonder how many people now see this as better.”

Mandi was shocked. “What?”

Murphy said, “You are a pessimist, Zed.”

I pressed on. “Before all this, how many people hated the reality of their meaningless, powerless, hopeless lives? That’s how most of us lived before. How many people want to face pointless materialism, debt, and anonymity? None of them. But that’s what we did. The world is a violent, terrible place now. But everything we do, from morning to midnight, is important. It’s all black and white now, live or die. There’s something real about that that our lives didn’t have before.”

“That’s what you want?” Mandi asked, her anger rising. “Everybody I know is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “and I know it sounds harsh, but that doesn’t make you special. That fact will be true for everybody you ever meet from this day forward?”

She settled back in her seat and said softly, “Yes, I know. I just don’t like how it is now. I want to sleep in a bed. I want to close my eyes without shivering in fear. I want to eat in restaurants. I want to go to movies. I hate what the world has become.”

“Mandi,” I said, “that’s where everyone will get eventually. People will hate watching their children starve. They’ll hate being afraid. They’ll romanticize the memory of how things used to be, and they’ll want to rebuild. We’ll stop being survivors and turn into teachers, and accountants, and mechanics. We may live in walled villages. We may never walk alone in the woods again. But things will go back to the way they were, one day.”

Murphy said, “Jeez, Zed, when you get on a roll, you just can't shut up, can you?”

“I’m sorry. I know. Isn’t that the point of this discussion, Murphy, that things will be just as they once were?”

Murphy said, “Yes and no.”

“Why no?” I asked.

“Because it was just one point in my argument,” he said. “We haven't made it all the way to my conclusion yet.”

“Can you just get to the point?” Mandi asked. “Because if I have to listen to another one of Zed's lectures, I think my head is going to explode.”

Murphy laughed.

“Whatever.” In the habit of our new social dynamic, that was my line. I smiled anyway.

Murphy said, “I just wanted to make sure that we were all in agreement on the assumptions before I made my point.”

I shook my head. “And you call me a professor.”

“And your point is?” asked Mandi.

Murphy said, “We can all go and just try and figure out how to stay alive if you want, but—”

I cut in, “Staying alive is a pretty good option, I think.”

“For once,” said Mandi, “I agree with Zed.”

“There's more,” said Murphy.

I said, “So far just staying a live is pretty much a full time job.”

“My point is that things will settle down a bit,” said Murphy. “We can go live on a farm, grow potatoes, and Zed’s chickens, and wake up one day five or ten years from now, only to find out that the world is right back the way it was. Then we're right back where we were, trying to pay the rent, trying to earn enough to feed the kids, and wishing we had the Mercedes we'll never be able to afford. What I’m saying is that instead of just surviving, we can choose to thrive.”

“Choose to thrive?” I asked.

“Yes.” He grinned.

“Because we’re slow burns?” I asked.

“They're saying that the immunity rate on this virus is something like one in a thousand,” said Murphy. “But slow burns like us are rare, maybe one in ten thousand. Maybe one in a hundred thousand.”

“And where'd you get that information?” I asked. “Somebody who got it off the internet told you, right?”

“That’s immaterial,” Murphy told me. “You know it’s true. There aren't that many of us.”

“Fine,” I admitted. “I'll give you that.”

He pointed his finger at me. “My point is that you and I have a special talent. We can move around among the infected with a lot less danger than other people.”

“True,” I allowed.

“We can take advantage of that to position ourselves for the post-virus world.”

“How?” I asked.

“It's easy.” He said. “Instead of becoming farmers or scavengers, we become traders.”

“Traders?” I asked.

Mandi asked, “Traitors?”

“No,” I told her. “With a D.”

“Oh.”

Murphy said, “People are eventually going to group together to survive. They're going to build walls to keep out the infected. People want safe places to raise their families. You know what will be between all of those little villages that spring up?”

Mandi shook her head.

I said, “If I say no, will you just tell me?”

“Zed, Mandi, between those little villages will be badlands. The badlands will be full of the infected and full of valuable stuff. Zed, you and me, we can collect that stuff and trade it to the villagers for their valuables.”

Shaking my head, I said, “They hate us. You said that, remember?”

“But they don’t hate Mandi,” said Murphy. “She’s one of them.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“We can carry goods from one village to another,” he said. “We can build a whole trading empire transporting goods, rebuilding the economy, taking our little slice off the top, and getting rich in the process. We'll be like the John D. Rockefellers of tomorrow.”

“To start with,” I argued, being contrary just for the sake of being contrary, “we'd be more like the Cornelius Vanderbilts, since he was a railroad tycoon. He transported goods.”

Mandi said, “I think I just had a tiny explosion in my head.”

“That's irrelevant,” said Murphy. And he was right. It was. “My point is that these rich dudes saw an opportunity, and they took advantage of it and got rich. We’re all three in a special position to take advantage of today’s opportunity.”

I said, “I'll give you one thing, Murphy, you are the most optimistic person I’ve ever met. Everybody you ever met is getting eaten by the infected right now, and you see past all that, and better yet, see a way to get wealthy in the process. What about money? I think it’s pretty worthless right now. Doesn’t trade depend on currency?”

“Details, man,” he told me. “We can get around that.”

I adjusted my sitting position to get more comfortable and felt the phone in my front pocket push into my thigh, reminding me of its presence.

Mandi asked Murphy some more questions, but I only half paid attention. I pulled my phone out, turned it on and waited.

The screen splashed the manufacturer’s logo. It took its time, but finally came to life.

I got three cellular bars.

The data icon lit up.

I waited.

The missed call badge didn’t flash red. The message badge didn’t flash. Those always took a few minutes to catch up after the phone booted.

Murphy and Mandi continued talking. My attention was fixed on the phone.

To hear nothing from Amber was good, based on our last conversation. To hear something from Steph would be a fantastic surprise. I was already taking the emotional steps toward accepting her death.

The phone vibrated and the phone’s missed call badge lit up.

Seven.

Holy crap.

I missed seven calls from Amber.

I checked for voicemail.

Nothing.

I checked for text messages.

Nothing.

I dialed Amber’s number, waited a moment, and listened to the phone ring again and again.

It switched to voicemail. I hung up.

Murphy said, “What’s up?”

I shook my head but didn’t answer.

I dialed again and listened to for the ringing.

Mandi asked, “Is everything okay?”

Voicemail.

Damn.

I dialed again. Murphy and Mandi were talking. I didn’t hear them.

Ring. Ring.

Voicemail.

“Shit.”

Chapter 26

The air outside was still warm, but it was a far cry from the heat that would come later in the morning after the sun came up.

I looked up at Murphy and asked, “Aren’t you going to call me Null Spot?”

Murphy’s face was cast in seriousness. “No. I don’t think you should go.”

“I have to go, Murphy.”

“You shouldn’t go by yourself,” he told me.

“I have Russell,” I answered.

Murphy shook his head. “You know what I mean, man.”

I did. I said, “Taking Mandi into that is likely to get us all killed. We can hardly leave Mandi here to fend for herself. So…”

Mandi had tears in her eyes, but she remained quiet.

“Look,” said Murphy, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you barely know this Amber chick. She was with them when they kicked us out.”

“Please stop saying that, Murphy.” I looked up the dark street. “She didn’t want that. She did what she had to do. It wasn’t any different than when you gave me the knife in the attic. To save ourselves, we would have killed Russell. It would have been wrong. But what choice would we have had? It was the same for Amber. She made a choice to survive.”

Murphy shook his head. “I’m going to tell you the same thing you told me about my mom and sister before we came up here. Just like I didn’t want to hear it. You’re not going to want to hear it. If she’s not answering phone it’s because she’s probably dead.”

I felt a lump in my throat. I nodded. I couldn’t chance a verbal answer. I needed a second to get a grip on my emotions.

“You like her, don’t you?” Murphy asked.

I nodded again. Then I shook my head. I managed to say, “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know what I feel. Like you said. I barely know her. It doesn’t make sense to me. I just know I have to do something to help her. She called me seven times, Murphy. She wouldn’t have called if she didn’t need help. She was counting on me.”

Murphy shook his head and softly said, “Zed…”

I said, “I have to do this.”

Murphy looked past me into the dark sky and didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did speak, he was as serious as I’d heard him yet. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I know we just met and all, but I love you like a brother, man.” He wrapped his big arms around me and hugged me tight. “Don’t get killed.”

I was stiff. My arms hung at my sides. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to respond, but through the gravel in my voice, I said, “Thank you. I…I…”

Murphy let go. “Man, you don’t need to say anything. It’s not like you’re trying to get laid, here, but maybe one day when you get that stick out of your ass, you can act like a normal person.” He gave me a smile and a nod. “Until then.”

Mandi came over and hugged me, too. “Please come back.” She stepped away and covered her face in her hands.

Murphy said, “You should have enough ammo and water.”

I said, “With any luck, we’ll be back by noon.”

“Luck? What the fuck is that?”

Chapter 27

The sky was clear and we had the light of the waxing moon over smokeless desolation. The wind had turned. It came out of the southeast, carrying humidity from the Gulf of Mexico.

With water, ammunition, and weapons, I was carrying at least twenty pounds. To balance the load between us, I put the bulk of the water and some food in Russell’s bag.

I cinched Russell’s backpack tight on his shoulders. I checked that his shoes were tied. “Are you ready for this Russell?”

Russell looked at me with his blank face and empty eyes.

“Good, me too.”

I turned and started a jog down the street. I set a slow, sustainable rhythm for my booted feet. As they clomped on the asphalt, I heard Russell’s steps fall in sync with mine. He stayed right behind me.

As the blocks passed, as the sweat ran over my skin, I slipped into a meditative state. Running always helped to clear my mind of anger and worries. As I ran, all that existed in the world was the breath in my lungs, the pounding in my chest, and the asphalt slapping the bottoms of my boots. But I missed the usual pain.

My knees didn’t feel the pounding of jogging with the extra weight. My lungs didn’t burn with exertion. My muscles didn’t complain about the burden.

I put two fingers on my neck to check my pulse. Without the feedback loop of pain to keep me from overexerting myself, even jogging could turn fatal.

Twenty or thirty minutes in to the run, I slowed to a walk to give Russell and me a chance to drink and rest. Five minutes was all I afforded us before I leaned back into a southwesterly jog.

Above us, enormous black plumes of smoke flowed out of the east. The Houston refinery smoke was back.

Miles passed. Sweat poured. Water bottles were emptied and returned to Russell’s pack.

I’d hoped to have found a car in which to chance a race to the campus by that time. But the fire’s ubiquitous destruction saw to it that no functioning car was anywhere to be had.

When we got to MLK Boulevard, we came across the first of several flocks of westbound infected that we’d encounter on our run. There were thousands in that first group, jogging up MLK with their pale sweaty skin glowing in the moonlight. They jogged in three serpentine, intersecting lines with marching band precision. Very creepy.

Russell and I waited on a side street and rested while the group passed. We needed to follow MLK down to campus but I had no desire to disturb the group, though the thought of jumping onto the end of a line did cross my mind. We were all infected. It may have worked.

It wasn’t until we encountered the third such group that I started to wonder if they were fleeing the Houston fires just as the infected in East Austin had fled our fires a few days before.

By six o’clock, the sky was painted a dull gray in the east and we crossed the MLK Bridge over IH-35. We were at the southeast corner of the university campus. Brackenridge Hospital was maybe a quarter mile south along the highway.

My clothes were drenched with sweat. Russell was soaked. I felt fatigue in every ounce of my flesh. I wondered why the virus couldn’t have damaged the part of my brain that made me feel that.

Russell and I downed more water and I pointed down toward the hospital campus. “It’s my favorite used car lot, Russell. I’m thinking I’d look good driving a tan Humvee. What do you think?”

Russell, of course, had nothing to say. He looked across the hospital complex with a pained expression on his face.

When I followed his gaze back, I noticed that there were a lot more infected around the hospital’s main building than there were when Murphy and I had stolen our last Humvee. I also noticed that the hundreds of bodies of the dead infected had been picked clean of flesh.

With the carrion gone, it wouldn’t be long before the infected started to turn on the weak among them, or any infected they came across.

“C’mon, Russell.”

We ran south on the highway’s access road, past the basketball arena.

It wasn’t long before we were among the bones and vehicles where Murphy and I had acquired our last Humvee.

The difference on this trip was that I wasn’t picky about which one I got. I wanted the first armored Humvee I could steal. With a vehicle under me, I’d be at the dorm in minutes with a means to get Amber free of that place.

I grew anxious as I thought about what I might find in the dorm but I steeled my heart for whatever I might have to do.

The first Humvee we came to had dry pools of blood on the floors. Blood stained the seats and shredded clothing lay scattered inside. It smelled of maggots and rot. It was disgusting, but bearable.

From the passenger side of the vehicle, I held the door open and told Russell to get in and sit down. He complied, but once I shut the door he became very agitated and started to howl as he fumbled with the door to try to get back out again.

I hurried around to the driver’s side of the vehicle. A hundred infected eyes were on me by the time I landed in the driver’s seat.

They came running at us as I closed the door.

“Jeez. Every fucking time. Are you kidding me?”

I started up the engine and lumbered away before any of the infected got close enough to lay a hand on the vehicle. Nevertheless, they were anxious to pursue.

“Russell, did I mention that things were going to get interesting? Oh, and if there are a bunch of infected by the dorm, things are going to get really interesting.”

The infected population appeared to have increased everywhere. I ran one down. Then another, and another. They flowed into the streets to chase us. Austin was thick with them.

I knew there were six million people in Houston before the virus. How many did the flames drive toward Austin? It seemed like all of them.

I cut hard at the first corner I came to, raced a short city block, and turned again. My goal was not to stay on any street long enough for the infected to see me coming and get out in front of us. Back and forth, right and left, I maneuvered the Humvee circuitously toward my goal.

We crossed MLK through an irrelevant red stoplight and sped north on Brazos Street. A quick left onto Jester circle and an almost immediate right put us on Speedway just two blocks from the dorm.

I swerved around cars in the street and made little effort to dodge the infected who got in my way, depending instead on the toughness of the vehicle.

In my growing excitement, I yelled at Russell, “This isn’t much of a plan, Russell. I hope it works.”

We passed the gym and I bounced the Humvee over the curb without slowing down. Its military grade suspension jostled us but didn’t fail. I took out a hedge as I angled across the grassy quad and headed for the gap between the dorm and the ROTC building.

I straightened the Humvee out as I neared the gap, and then dragged the front fender along the limestone wall of the old dorm. I slowed to align the front door of the Humvee with the alcove in which the recessed side door of the dorm waited.

I smashed the brakes and flung the Humvee door open. I wasted no time with subtleties in checking whether the door was locked. I blasted it with my M4. The glass shattered and mostly fell away.

The infected were already coming. The gunshots wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

I raced onto the first floor. Russell climbed over the driver’s seat and followed me through.

I took a quick glance back to gauge my chances of a successful exit and felt okay about it. The Humvee was wedged hard against the exterior wall of the building, completely blocking the entry. The only way for the infected to follow us into the building would be to crawl under. I had no doubt that some would, but relative to the horde that was gathering around the Humvee, the crawlers were a solvable problem.

I wasted no time with the elevator, but went straight for the stairs. I bounded up three and four at a time, with Russell chasing after.

When I flung the door open on the fifth floor, I was fully prepared to deliver some mayhem to Mark and whomever of his ROTC whack jobs were still there to get in my way.

Instead of a man with a gun, what assaulted me upon exiting the stairwell was the smell of death. From Amber’s texts, I knew that most of those we’d left in the dorm were dead or infected. Two of their bodies lay in the hall ahead of me.

I brought by M4 up to my shoulder and aimed it up the hall. “Hello.” I shouted.

No answer.

“Hello.”

“Amber.”

Nothing.

“Mark.”

Nothing.

“Marcy.”

I turned to check that Russell was with me. He stood a few paces back, breathing heavy, but blank-faced.

I weighed the choice between running straight for Amber’s room or taking the cautious route and clearing the rooms as I went.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

“Fuck it.” I ran up the hall at full speed.

I slid to a stop at Amber’s door and pounded. “Amber, it’s me, Zed.”

Russell pounded on the door.

I looked up and down the hall. No sign of life.

I pounded again. “Amber. It’s me, Zed.”

Russell pounded.

“Damn.”

I stood back to kick the door open then gave it a second thought and checked the doorknob. It turned.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

The door swung open and I rushed inside.

“No.”

Amber lay on the floor, naked except for a torn shirt. I dropped to my knees beside her motionless body. Russell dropped to his knees beside me.

I put hand on Amber’s heavily bruised face. I put two fingers to her neck to check her pulse.

“No. No. No.”

Russell started to sob. Of his own accord, he pulled her torn shirt together to cover her breasts.

He sat back on his feet and wailed like a dying beast.

I fell back onto my butt and felt my soul drain out of me.

Amber’s face was swollen and bloody. Her hands were bruised from defending herself.

Her skin was not white.

She’d never been infected. She was immune.

But she was dead.

I was numb. I was lost. I’d failed to save her.

I had failed.

I—

Breath came into my lungs and left.

Sounds fell on my ears and registered in my brain.

Amber’s body lying on the floor was the only thing in the universe that mattered at that moment.

Russell’s wails hurt my heart.

Amber hadn’t been killed by the infected. There were no signs of feeding. She’d been murdered.

I cut the deduction short and jumped to the only conclusion that made sense. She’d been beaten, raped, and murdered by Mark.

I barely knew her, but she was a friend.

She could have been more than that.

I cried.

In my head, the Harpy’s bony finger skewered my defenses and her harsh cackle poured in. The Ogre’s heavy fists punished me for my weakness and pushed me to rage.

Rage brought frustrated tears.

Tears brought humiliation.

Humiliation brought more rage.

In the little bits of my gray matter that could form a rational thought, I wondered whether the infection was for the best, whether we humans deserved to continue.

What did people ever do that didn’t end in tears?

What?

Two seemingly normal parents had raised the heartless Harpy, whose only joy in life was in ensuring that there was none in mine.

Who knew what had turned Dan into an iron-fisted Ogre?

Our culture made the cops that beat me. It trained the doctors that tried to dispose of me like a piece of hazardous waste.

But it made Steph who tried to save me from that fate. It made Amber, a sweet girl who was too afraid of her peers to stand against prejudice when Murphy, Jerome, and I were being cast out.

We humans made Mark, and Mark’s worth could only be measured in the blood and bruises on Amber’s skin.

My mind reeled, trying to find meaning for it all, just when meaning had lost its value.

Only one thing mattered anymore.

I had to find Mark.

Mark had to suffer.

Mark had to die.

Slow Burn Book 3, ‘Destroyer’

Chapter 1

With Amber’s legacy, a flash drive in my pocket, I walked.

Russell followed.

What else was he going to do?

Through the university’s campus and into a neighborhood of old wooden houses, I walked past cars, corpses, and clothes. The dead left their remains where they gasped their last breaths and all the tidiness of the world flitted away in the breeze.

I had no destination. I had no goal. Dark thoughts of revenge and the stupidity of it followed me like the half dozen infected who each fell in line behind Russell, keeping step as we walked. Was social conformity so hardwired into the human brain that even the fever rot couldn’t burn it out?

Shadows shortened.

Summer heat shriveled hope as it boiled toward midday.

I wanted to douse myself in the kind of cheap tequila that starts punishing you the moment it passes your lips, and mosh through my hate with some raging, slamming, metal music. Oblivion and numbness, so familiar, beckoned me. I wanted to forget everything.

Every single fucking thing.

I came to a stop. My entourage did the same. I stared at the sun and tried to sear the image of Amber’s bruised face out of my brain. But it wouldn’t go. Spots in my vision were all I earned for my trouble.

I wanted to squeeze Mark’s neck and see his eyes bulge, see his face twist, and hear the pinched sounds from his throat as he tried to gasp for breath. I wanted to revel in the ever-weakening pounding of his fists on my face, like a metronome winding down while his brain died from oxygen deprivation.

But he was more likely dead than alive, a probability that increased with each passing minute. He might be a slow burn or a raving cannibal, one of a million white faces, none of which I’d ever recognize again. Unless fortune one day smiled on me, I’d never find him. Revenge would only ever be a little nugget of unrequited, unfulfilled hate, weighing on my soul.

I needed to let it go, but I knew I never would.

Ahead of me, a medicine capsule of a car seemed suddenly to be in the middle of the road, offensively bland, obnoxiously shiny. It angered me beyond reason and my machete wanted sorely to punish it. So with black fire in my eyes, I attacked, hacked at a fender, and rent ugly scars in the soft metal.

Supportive even in violence, Russell was immediately beside me, beating on the hood with his baseball bat. And what the fuck was I going to do with him? Did I really need a Siamese twin?

My infected hangers-on assailed the car with their fists and smashed their skulls against the windows until the glass spider-webbed and caved in.

I jumped up on the hood and went after the roof with my blade.

The Whites tore at the car’s leather seats. Russell screamed. I roared. The infected joined. We were the destroyers, and our victim’s pieces fell to the asphalt.

Sweating and breathing heavily, I pointed my machete to the sky and screamed at God.

White clouds morphed into other white clouds and slowly slid across the blue and gray. Such was his answer.

I jumped down to the street and fell back on the hot asphalt—my dirty, matted hair my only pillow. The odor of unwashed sweat lingered over me. My knees and elbows were soiled and scraped. My arm, bandaged and scabbing still oozed pus from its own little infections. And the blood of the dead, of those Whites victimized by my bullets or my blade covered my clothes and skin in crusty, reddish-brown badges of every shape.

Tired, thirsty, hungry, spent, I stared into the mottled blue.

I was lost.

My childhood came to mind, and for the millionth futile time I tried to forget it all. But the Ogre and the Harpy had so branded the stench of their wicked ineptitude on my soul that I would forever carry those scars, cursed to hear the Harpy’s hiss, even when I breathed my last breath.

Forgetting is a skill learned by the lucky. I’d tried and tried, but always failed. In my failure, I’d watch over and over Jerome’s death while I hid behind a wall, I’d see Earl’s head explode in front of me as I ran across the street, I’d forever see Amber’s bloody, inanimate face.

Nothing in life is worth remembering. The past is something to escape from, nothing more.

On my feet again, I wandered through parts of Austin I’d never seen before. But no matter the street names, no matter the style of houses behind the curb, they were all the same—empty and lifeless, the realm of the infected.

But I was infected.

Was this realm now mine? King Zed and his dumb, white lackeys, destroyers of cars and screamers at the skies.

That was worth a laugh, but a laugh was a million miles from my heart. I was wallowing in self-pity over a girl I barely knew, and there was no rational explanation for it. I needed a way to get past it. I was rational enough to know that.

A house on a bend in Matheson Ridge Road with a wide, lush lawn and an open front door offered itself up as a distraction. The green grass was a thick carpet under my feet but it blackened my mood to imagine what would become of it when the electric grid failed and the automatic sprinklers stopped giving it life.

Curiously, there were no signs of violence on the porch and the front door was undamaged, apparently just left open, forgotten in a rush.

A soft, air-conditioned breeze whispered over me as I walked through the doorway. Behind me, Russell and our friends followed. Looking back, I saw that their faces showed no appreciation of the wonderfully cold air. “Oh, Russell. You poor, oblivious man.”

As soon as his feet landed on the tile of the foyer, I slammed the door in the face of the infected behind, knocking the first one back into the others, who fell on the porch and the stairs.

The doorknob clicked and I turned the deadbolt.

A few seconds later, the infected were beating and pushing on the door. It wasn’t the frenzied behavior that I’d seen so many times already—it was different. It reminded me of Russell in those moments after I jumped into that attic and he stood on the bed, yelling, reaching, and frustrated.

“Fuck ‘em.”

Russell followed me into a large living room with a fireplace twelve feet wide, built of raw stone stacked all the way to the ceiling twenty feet over our heads. The room was filled with expensive leather furniture and inexplicably ornate doodads. It sported a glass wall on the back that gave us a view over a wide, wooded ravine, with glimpses of Austin’s downtown buildings in the distance.

We had walked much farther than I’d have guessed.

Though I wasn’t conscious of it, I had to be dehydrated, and my stomach, tired of futilely telling me how hungry I was, had given up. Russell, poker-faced, quiet, unshaven, stinking of sweat, needed water and food as much as I, though I doubted he’d do anything to resolve it if I didn’t put it in front of him.

But should I?

The empathy that had allowed Russell to attach himself to me the night before was under assault from the blackness of my mood. Did the world have room for Russell? Could I, should I be his keeper? Would it be kinder to cut him loose and let him die or to let him chase me all over Austin until we both fell to the tearing hands of the hungry infected?

The kitchen, that’s where we needed to be.

It was portioned from the living room by a giant marble-topped island surrounded by a dozen stools. The kitchen itself was as large as my apartment. Dual refrigerators built into a cabinet-covered wall proved to be well-stocked. Whoever had left this house had left us with a bounty.

Bottled water was the first casualty of our refrigerator raid. I opened one and put it in Russell’s hand, then turned him around and put another seven or eight in his backpack. As Russell gulped his water, I opened another bottle and did the same. The cold water poured down my throat, bringing near orgasmic satisfaction. I was thirstier than I knew. Dangerously so, perhaps. Staying alive with my virus-dulled senses was going to require a little more introspective attention.

With the water downed, Russell looked over my shoulder while I gathered up cold cuts, wheat bread, lettuce, and condiments. I dumped the sandwich fixings on the island and went to work stacking several thick sandwiches of expensive deli meats, aged cheeses, lettuce, and ripe tomatoes.

I parked Russell on a stool and jammed a sandwich into his hands. We ate.

I thought about Murphy and Mandi. Were they safe in Russell’s house, eating microwaved meals, sipping bottled water, and staying hidden from the infected massed around the charred dead behind the fence? How many hours had passed since Russell and I left? Could Murphy and Mandi be dead? Had it been long enough for that? Of course it had. I needed to get back to them, but I was drowning in emotions I didn’t understand and couldn’t process. I needed an outlet.

With a full stomach and the distraction of Russell’s noisy chewing fading into the background, I sat on my stool and looked across the glossy expanse of marble, out the windows, and down the long ravine. The twenty-eight floor UT Tower stood several miles distant.

Smoke hung like an ashy fog over the city and washed color and clarity from the world until it just faded into horizonless gray. High above, black billows of smoke from the Houston refinery fires rolled west. What was it, a week since Dan killed the Harpy and bit me in the kitchen? And now the old world was casting about in messy throes of death.

Following the city’s skyline from the tower south, the basketball arena stood beside the highway like a giant snare drum. Just to the right of that lay the Brackenridge hospital complex. I strained my eyes to tease details out of the distance, but none would come.

Steph was in one of those buildings. Dead? Possibly. Probably.

I fished my phone out of my pocket. It was silent and held no unread messages.

I blinked as though tears were in my eyes, but I’d spent all of my tears over Amber’s body. There were no more left to fill the Harpy’s cup.

Wicked, destructive thoughts slowly coalesced in my mind. Trying to find Mark would be a waste of time at best, so killing him wasn’t going to happen. Perhaps surrogates would feed the hunger for now. I needed to busy my hands in the bloody work of catharsis.

Steph, dead or alive, somewhere up in Brackenridge, was convenient enough to rationalize the violence that was brewing within me. Better to know for sure if she was dead than to ruminate over it later. At least that’s how the rationalization came together.

Null Spot—no, Null Spot the Destroyer—had work to do.

Chapter 2

With Russell close behind, I went into the garage, hoping for a wink of good fortune in the form of a sturdy automobile. Instead, the rows of decorator lights twinkled on a fat, low-slung motorcycle built to rumble as much as roll. Its chrome sparkled. Its leather gleamed. To ride it would be tantamount to suicide.

Back through the kitchen door, on the wall by the fridge, I spotted a key hanger with three empty hooks and a fourth with a key ring dangling down. The leather key fob was adorned with a wicked death’s head logo hanging beside two keys and a garage door opener.

They had to be for the bike.

I stared at those keys for many long moments. My belly was full. My thirst was gone. Manufactured cool air, underappreciated just a week before, bathed me in its luxury. I was safe. I could lay on a couch and watch a movie. I could pretend, at least for a while, that the world wasn’t going to shit.

But I burned with a hate and a need.

"Fuck it." I grabbed the keys and marched back into the garage, slamming the door behind me to trap Russell in the house.

He howled.

I threw a leg over the dormant black machine and slipped the key into the ignition. With my heel, I pushed out the old-school kick-starter and put my weight into waking the engine. It rumbled to deafening life in the enclosed space. I doubted it could rocket down the road like my old repossessed Suzuki, but it sounded powerful enough.

The garage door opener clicked with a satisfying snap under my thumb and I slid my sling around to level my M4 at the tiny, widening gap of daylight.

The first White to crawl under the door got extinguished before his crazy eyes ever saw me. I shredded the legs of two more with 5.56mm bullets before the door was halfway up. They were busy bleeding out when the door stopped at the top. More infected ran up the driveway and were massacred for their trouble.

With no others in sight, I slipped the M4 around in its sling so that it was on my back. I ran my fingers over the handle of my battered machete and checked that my pistol was handy in its holster. I put both hands on the handlebar grips, revved the beast, and raced out into the street like a thunder god riding a storm.

The heavy bike hugged the pavement as I leaned hard into a left turn at a reckless speed. I took a right and then zigzagged through the neighborhood. A wall of sound stunned the infected as I blazed past. Pale white faces popped out of bushes and up from behind parked cars, all too late to make a dash for the road and cut me off.

At 38th Street, I headed east. I opened up the throttle and blew past North Lamar Boulevard at ninety. I had to brake and swerve through the cars that cluttered the roads around Seton Hospital. I turned into another grid pattern neighborhood and repeated my zigzag tactic to avoid collecting infected on the road ahead of me. Helpfully, the motor’s throaty growl echoed among the houses, sending the infected scurrying in wrong directions.

Wind pulled through my hair and tugged at my shirt. Parked cars, trees, and houses flew past in a blur. Whites appeared on the roadsides and disappeared behind. At Red River Street, I cut a hard right and let the bike’s big engine sweep me past the eastern edge of the university campus toward the looming basketball arena and the tall hospital buildings to the south.

Luck, rumble, and speed were the only things keeping breath in my lungs and infected teeth out of my flesh. But I’d lose two of those when it came time to get off the bike. With the hospital less than a mile south, only luck would be left.

Chapter 3

Among the toppled barricades and abandoned military vehicles ahead, the infected froze in their steps and locked me in their famished stares. As I came up beside the basketball arena I checked my flanks for Whites.

None.

I squeezed both brake levers and the bike skidded to a stop.

A cannonade of sound echoed between the buildings as I held the clutch and revved the engine, tempting the infected into a run. Mouths stretched and white faces contorted in desperate need. Running feet stomped the asphalt, carrying the graceful fast and the clumsy slow.

Arms swung and dirty hands grasped.

Howls drowned in the storm.

In seconds, the horde bloated from hundreds to thousands, as debilitated brains reckoned that I represented a more attainable meal than those who defended themselves on the hospital’s upper floors.

As the Whites drew near, I let go of the clutch, leaned the bike into a turn, and blasted toward the north end of the arena, slowing enough to make certain that I didn’t elude my pursuers. I hopped the bike over a curb and drove up onto the wide plaza that encompassed the arena.

Compliant so far, my cohorts followed, tempted by the revving engine and a quarry that seemed too slow to lose them. I followed the curve of the building and came around into a southerly direction again. A few crazy Whites were off to my left and a few were dashing toward me from the front, teeth bared and fingers digging at the air.

I crested a concrete knoll on the south end of the arena and saw that the hospital complex was relatively clear. Nearly all of the infected were busy chasing the mob around the other side of the arena. Abandoned vehicles, barricades, bodies, and angry, straggling infected were the only impediments to speed. As fast as I could without skidding the bike, I slalomed down the grade, past frustrated crawlers and chasing Whites.

Behind me, the shrieks of the infected swarm swelled the hot air and pushed me to go faster, pushed me to greater risk. To my right the tail of the fetid host, the slowest among them, had not yet rounded the arena, and was in fact just coming up to it. They spotted me and changed course, howling their good fortune to the clouds.

I mocked them with my glare. I was Null Spot the Destroyer. Their greedy, grasping fingers would touch nothing but air.

But the Null Spot could extrapolate, and a quick mental exercise told me that I needed to get to my goal faster than my current course and speed allowed. The race was on.

The big bike’s engine thundered back to angry acceleration, trying to pull me off the back. A crawler under my wheels nearly sent me into a skid, but I was on a beeline and out of choices. The bike hit a curb hard and bounced up in the front. I thanked God that the back wheel didn’t shatter as it bumped over the same curb and spun wildly on dead grass. Seconds later I bounced off of another curb, and my tires caught asphalt just a few dozen feet from the entrance to the parking garage across from the hospital.

Five floors of concrete and empty automobiles would hold no interest for the infected so it had to be empty; such was the foundation upon which my hastily conceived plan was built.

With nothing ahead but empty asphalt, I pushed the bike hard as three or four particularly fast infected chased. I rounded the motorcycle into the garage’s east entrance as gravity’s fingers tugged me down. Rubber burned on concrete as I braked and slowed for a right turn up the ramp. I twisted the throttle. The engine’s reverberations hammered courage into my veins.

I flew up the ramp and braked into a hairpin turn onto the second floor. Now I was aligned for the ramp up to three. Empty cars sat alone in their parking spaces. Not a single White was in the garage. If I hadn’t needed both hands to control the beast beneath me, I would have patted myself on the back.

I passed the fourth floor too fast to think about it. The ramp to five spit me out into hazy gray sunshine on the top level. Bare, sun-bleached concrete, flaking yellow stripes, and a few dusty cars were all that waited for me there. I squeezed hard on the brakes and the bike skidded to a stop near the door to an enclosed stairwell. Hopefully the only thing waiting inside would be the reek of fermenting transient urine and stale cigarette smoke.

The engine died when I turned the key and a peaceful silence existed for the second it took me to make out the wails of the infected, echoing up from the floors below. I dropped the kickstand, left the key in the ignition, and stepped off the bike. With my pistol in hand, I ran to the door of the stairwell and peeked in through the small glass window.

There was no movement, so I opened the door and slid inside, closing it silently behind.

I held my breath and listened.

Nothing.

A wicked grin stretched my lips. In spite of my supremely bad choice to ride that noisy motorcycle across town, my luck had held. I was alive. The stairwell was empty. I rushed downstairs, euphorically riding a wave of overconfidence that hid a riptide of anger churning in despair over Amber’s death.

I exited the parking garage on the south side, unnoticed by the infected trying to jam themselves into the car entrance on the east corner. But the noise from above had ceased, and short attention spans were losing interest. The infected started to look around for other prey. Mostly, they were drawn back to the muffled gunshots coming from inside the hospital.

That wouldn’t last much longer.

Null Spot the Destroyer still had an imagination full of bad ideas and a pocket full of stupid to spend.

Far up the street, closer to the arena than the hospital, I spied a Humvee sitting on the grass. Its doors were swung open and a big machine gun was mounted on the top. With that, I could sweep my soul clean of the painful clutter and put it back into stark order.

Chapter 4

A crust of blood covered the seats and floors of the Humvee, gluing down shreds of uniforms and bits of bone. Pieces of equipment and empty boots littered the ground around the vehicle. Keeping a wary eye on the infected still frittering near the parking garage entrance, I spent a few minutes looking for full magazines to top off the ammo for my M4. Nothing for the Glock but I even found a grenade. Those were rare, but very handy to have around.

Back inside the Humvee, I climbed up through the roof hatch and familiarized myself with the mechanisms for opening, closing, and latching it. That was the kind of thing a careful, smart person would do, the kind of person who had a chance to live through the day, the kind of person I aspired to be, though the morning’s activities might have suggested otherwise.

I took my time fumbling around with the big machine gun while images gelled in my mind of dead Whites, all with Mark’s pious whack-job face piled high in the dirt.

A big rectangular box for fifty-caliber rounds was attached to the side of the gun. It was empty, but a glance down into the Humvee confirmed what I’d noticed on the way up: another half-dozen boxes. I slipped down through the hatch and checked each box. Two were empty and four were full of big brass cartridges stuffed with cordite and plugged with fat lead slugs, each nearly the length of my hand from wrist to fingertips. Some had colored tips, most didn’t.

I hefted a canister up to the roof as quietly as I could manage and replaced the empty one mounted on the side of the gun. My heart started to pound with morbid excitement over the power that was coming together in my hands.

There was a gap on the side of the gun that looked like the place where an ammo belt might feed into it. I played around with every moving piece I could find. I found the safety. I figured out how to load it and guessed that the curved lever on the back of the gun, perfectly positioned for a thumb to press while holding the two handles, had to be the trigger.

Satisfied that I had it right, I scanned the hospital grounds. Perhaps twenty infected were close enough to make a dash for me when the shooting started. Eight or nine were grouped in a dense shadow under an oak. They presented a nice, big target. They would die first.

A staircase attached to the side of the hospital caught my attention. It was encased in walls of glass filled to bursting with squirming white bodies. I had no idea what the effective range of the machine gun might be, but I was going to fire on the stairwell a block to the south and find out.

I crawled back down and took a moment to pull up the handles on the Humvee’s combat locks. I thought about putting a second ammunition canister on the roof beside the machine gun so that I could reload faster, but a look back at the infected spreading out as they exited the parking garage convinced me that wasn’t a good idea. I’d be lucky to empty the gun’s first belt before those infected were on me.

Back up through the top hatch, I pulled back on a big crank handle on the right side of the gun, guessing that was the first step to firing the weapon. I pointed the gun at the pod of infected under the tree.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I pressed the trigger.

The gun bucked more than expected and half of the rounds went wild. But enough of them didn’t.

A head exploded. Gouts of blood burst from bodies. Limbs were severed. Bodies crumpled to the ground. Red mist hung in the air.

“Holy shit.”

It was loud, though nothing like I expected. It did command the attention of every infected in sight, and that was expected, as was what followed. They were all running directly at me.

With the power of leaden lightning in my hands and the Ogre and the Harpy to calm my breathing, I let loose again with the big machine gun and shot down all of the infected nearby, clearing a zone that stretched for a couple hundred rapidly shrinking yards.

A great host of Whites flowed out of the parking garage, running through the exits and tumbling over the waist-high walls. Their wails drove the wind before them, wavering my resolve. But fear was no newcomer to me. I measured my chances and pointed the gun at the glass stairwell, sending a stream of big bullets down range.

Tracers drew a fiery thin line of destruction through the shattering walls and disintegrating bodies. Razor sharp crystal shards and pieces of what used to be people rained down on the infected below. Blood and agony filled the air.

Then, with an anticlimactic click, the ammunition belt came to its end.

The raging horde from the garage was frighteningly close.

I let gravity pull me down into the Humvee, closing the top hatch as I fell through. I latched it just as the first infected hit the Humvee in a mad rush. I jumped into the driver’s seat as a second and third pounced on the vehicle. I needed to get moving. If the Humvee got swarmed, I was sure I’d die.

Realizing that I’d assumed that the Humvee had gas in it, knowing I should have checked, knowing it with that sinking feeling in my stomach that tardy knowledge always brings, I pushed the ignition button with a prayer on my lips.

The engine rumbled to life.

Thank God.

I slammed the vehicle into gear and mashed the accelerator to the floor and the Humvee started to roll. These damned things never seemed to have enough pep. Infected hands grabbed onto the Humvee where they could and dragged their owners on the ground as I lumbered away. A White was on the hood. More were on the roof.

Trundling toward the arena, I checked over my shoulder to make sure the mob was giving chase. But not wanting them to give up, I kept my speed controlled.

It worked once. Why not again?

Down to five miles per hour, the mass of infected quickly closed the gap. Others who had been lurking around the arena saw the slow-moving Humvee and came at me. I felt their impacts on the vehicle as they tried to tackle it or jump on.

At the north end of the arena, I sped up a little. A few infected fell off of the Humvee. Those on the roof might become a problem if I didn’t get rid of them.

Rounding the west side of the arena, I headed back south toward the parking garage and coaxed some more speed out of the Humvee. There was still a trickle of infected coming out of the parking garage, but not enough to bring the five thousand pound vehicle to a stop when I ran them down.

I swayed the Humvee left and right and lost a few of the Whites that had been clinging to the roof. I jumped a curb without slowing and bounced a few more Whites to the ground, breaking their bones and bloodying their skin as they skipped across the ground like stones on water.

Then I was in the trickle of infected coming out of the garage, and the Humvee’s heavy steel brush guard mowed them down with little effect on my momentum.

With many dead in my wake and way too much blood on the hood, I turned into the parking garage just as another of my potentially foolish assumptions occurred to me. Was the garage tall enough to accommodate the Humvee and its roof-mounted machine gun?

I clenched my teeth as I passed under the first concrete support beam.

Nothing.

The height in the garage had apparently been designed to accommodate those big four-wheel drive pickups so popular in Texas. Good for me.

Goddamn good for me.

Following the ramps back up one after another, I converted a dozen more infected from toothy hazards into slippery speed bumps. I reached the end of the ramp on the top level and brought the Humvee to a skidding halt near the waiting motorcycle and the stairwell door: my escape route.

The top level of the garage was once again empty.

Fantastic.

I jumped into the back of the truck and popped open the top hatch. As quickly as I could, I shoved three canisters of fifty-caliber ammunition up on the roof.

Enraged screeching welled up from the lower levels, confirming that my plan was working. The infected were pouring back into the garage.

I fumbled, trying to load a belt into the machine gun as fast as my one practice session allowed. But my luck held. Everything clicked into place and I pointed the utilitarian weapon down the ramp.

The infected would arrive any moment. And on cue, they did. First a few, then a few dozen, then a solid, riotous mass of white flowed around the corner and onto the ramp fifty yards down.

I depressed the firing lever.

Nothing.

“Shit.”

I looked down at the gun as though my anxious expression would admonish the weapon into proper performance.

“Shit.”

Aside from wishing I were elsewhere, the thing I wanted in that moment more than anything else was to kick Arnold Schwarzenegger in the balls. This kind of shit always worked in the movies.

Options?

The horde was too thick to drive through.

The door to the stairwell was just a dozen feet behind me.

It was time to bail.

Then I remembered…

With seconds that could have been used for escape dwindling away, I instead bet my life on the big handle on the right side of the gun. I yanked it back with all the strength that panic could bring to bear and pointed the weapon at the closest of the infected.

I pushed down on the firing lever with both thumbs and Null Spot was instantly transformed from frightened pants-pisser into fiery god of thunder.

Slaughter.

A heavy lead torrent ripped through packed bodies. Each bullet shredded two, three, and four deep among them. Instantly, a hundred surrogate Marks died most satisfyingly with agonized grimaces on their pinched faces.

The vanguard became a slippery, bleeding, red and white wall. The mass behind surged and stalled, but then flowed up and over, a river of rage and tearing fingers.

In a ridiculously small number of seconds, the first ammo belt ran dry and as I looked down the throat of a million gnashing teeth, I knew my plan was fucked.

In my imagination, I’d been able to kill so many Whites that they’d clogged the ramp with their bodies. I’d been able to bide my time as I sprayed the glass stairwell and hospital grounds across the street, clearing an escape path for everyone trapped inside. Then I’d walk leisurely down the stairs to my hero’s welcome.

Oops.

There was no time to load another belt and still kill the new vanguard of bloody runners sprinting to tear my lungs out.

It was time for me to run.

I wriggled up through the hatch and jumped off the roof of the Humvee, falling through the air with my eyes on the salvation of the stairwell door. With adrenaline pumping at full tilt and my heart banging out a fierce rhythm, I saw, but didn’t register, the absence of the stairwell’s light through the door’s window.

I hit the concrete running, closed the gap to the door in a flash, and grasped the handle. As I turned it, the crazed face of an infected woman smashed itself harshly against the glass. The door burst open, knocking me back. I tried to catch my balance as a mass of infected fell over one another, roiling through the gap.

“Oh fuck.”

Breathe.

Breathe.

My hands were instantly on my M4. My fingers, now practiced and intimate with the gun, sprayed a dozen rounds into the pile and bought me a few seconds of life in which I tried to think of a way out.

But there was none.

I ran toward a corner of the parking structure, not with a plan, but because that was the only direction that wasn’t already crawling with infected monsters bent on killing me.

I made it to the corner and emptied a magazine at the running Whites closest to me.

Out of some primal instinct, I climbed up on the top edge of the six-inch wide wall, trying to get above my pursuers and completely ignoring the five-story drop to the ground below. A large square support pillar on the corner offered me another two feet of height. A few fast, precarious steps ended with a teetering jump. I landed on a square of concrete, at face level with a thousand Whites and their grasping hands.

But what was a kick in the face to a beast that felt no pain?

They were going to tear my skin and shred my flesh. My heart would pump its last between the teeth of a virus-tainted horror.

With a million simultaneous thoughts of death and desperate deliverance blazing through my synapses, my hands automatically pushed another magazine into my rifle. Before the trigger sent the bullets flying, I caught sight of movement down to my right, on the side of the parking garage, where abso-fuckin’-lutely no movement should have been.

It took a few nanoseconds of full attention to process what I saw. But with only seconds left to live, that was an immeasurable investment.

It was a banner.

An enormous, nylon mesh banner fifteen feet wide and forty feet long hung from the top edge of the wall and reached down to somewhere around the second floor. That bottom edge was still too far off the ground to risk a jump, but that was thinking too far ahead. I’d likely be dead before that became a problem.

Was that it? Was that my only miniscule chance?

I glanced back up to the oncoming mob, emptied my magazine to clear the closest of them and jumped off the concrete corner support. Two seconds later, I had the top edge of the banner in my grasp with my boots slipping off of the wall’s gritty edge.

The Ogre and the Harpy. The Ogre and the Harpy.

Going off the side of the building was a terrible, shitty, awful choice, with an infinitesimally small chance of being alive at the bottom. But no matter how fast my brain spun, there was no other way. Once those clutching white fingers caught my clothes, my chances of continuing life would hit absolute zero.

Infinitesimally small looked good.

I squeezed my hands and tried to bunch the taut nylon into something easier to hang on to as my legs flailed out over the drop. Before I had time to hope for the best, gravity seized me and pulled me madly toward the sidewalk far below.

I held on to the banner as tightly as I could, but the nylon slipped rapidly through my grasp, friction heating and tearing my skin. To put a damper on my acceleration, I pulled my feet in to squeeze the mesh between the rubber soles of my boots.

I started to slow. I had half a thought that I might live.

My boots hit something solid and kicked my feet out to the sides. Before I could shit my pants at that surprise, my hands caught onto a round metal rod sewn into the bottom edge of the banner, and I came to a joint-rending halt, hanging twenty feet above the ground.

“Holy shit.”

I was alive?

Frustrated shrieks cascaded down.

I looked up. “Oh no.”

One was climbing over the wall.

Like a fish on a line, I wriggled my body to swing the banner and out it went. Then back. Not far enough.

A White fell past me, grabbing at my boots, screaming not out of fear, but out of frustration for my being beyond her grasp. She hit the sidewalk in a sickening combination of a thump and a splat. The banner swung out further, then back.

Trying to time the rhythm of my bodily gyrations to the slow rhythm of the banner’s swing, I went way out over the sidewalk just as another infected woman came sliding down the center of the sloping banner. Her weight helped push it back toward the garage. She missed me by five feet when she slipped past with just enough of an arc to drop her past the sidewalk and into the grass with a sound of breaking bones wrapped in tearing flesh.

On the backswing, I flew into the gap between the second and third floors. Suddenly, with concrete just four or five feet below me, I let go. I landed roughly, bruising knees and scraping elbows. My weapons clattered on the floor as I rolled but my sling didn’t slip off. My Glock stayed in its holder. Only my machete slipped away.

The few infected running through the second level looked at me but didn’t slow. The party was upstairs. Any White with ears could hear that.

With bloody, jittery hands, I gathered my machete and crawled to a shaded corner where my breath wheezed out in a nervous rattle. The coolness of the concrete offered what comfort it could while I assimilated the fact that due to little more than luck, I’d just lived through that ordeal. My heart started to slow and my nerves began the long process of winding back down.

I ventured a look down at my torn, blistered hands and thanked the virus that most sensations of pain were in my past. The hands were still functional, but they’d need attention, and soon. Such was the latest price I paid for my life.

Camouflaged in gleaming white skin, crusty bloodstains, and body odor, in that moment I exhibited none of the noisy behaviors of the tasty immune. The infected continuing through the second floor ignored me. I leaned my head against the wall, and for a moment, closed my eyes. Exhaustion was knocking at the door.

I was emotionally drained, empty, as lost as I’d felt before I tried to fill the hole in my heart with the murder of Mark’s proxies. After so many years of being the dog that Dan kicked, couldn’t violence cure my rage, salve my sadness just once?

Residual adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands were unsteady. I needed time to regroup. I breathed in hot, smoky air. I smelled blood and cordite.

The angry yowls of the infected mixed with the shrieks of the dying.

I tried to clear my mind and disappear, even for just a second, but images of dead faces haunted me: Jerome, Wilkins, Earl, the Ogre, the Harpy, Felicity, Marcy, and a thousand white faces that used to be human. No, were human. Just unfortunate, diseased humans.

Amber was in that procession. Steph’s dead face would join soon. The virus was very effectively killing off every person to which I had even the tiniest connection.

The virus was binging on humanity, one overflowing spoonful after another, and with each death, human civilization ticked inexorably toward its end. And what the virus didn’t destroy, the natural entropy of the universe would. Long held at bay by human arrogance, it would soon crumble the fragile foundations of the world. Fires burned in east Austin. Blazing refineries in Houston disgorged untold tons of toxicity. The reactors would eventually melt down, and our failing dams would wash the reactors’ Chernobyl waste into the oceans, killing everything in the marine world as well.

Empty skyscrapers would be tombstones to our dead cities. Satellites would fall from the sky. When the blood of our dead was washed away by time, the rusting carcasses of a billion cars would again stain the earth red.

How much of that would I live to see? Did I want to see any of it?

Did I want to face a future alone among the mindless monsters?

Alone.

Lost in the blackness of my mood, my scavenged cell phone buzzed in my pocket, teasing me with evidence of another life that would soon come to a violent end.

I wanted to cry, but the Ogre and the Harpy had beaten so, so many tears out of me, and nothing seemed to anger them more than a little boy’s tears.

I felt like I was twelve years old again, alone and imprisoned in a heartless world with countless days of pain in my past and endless days of fear in my future.

And I knelt at Amber’s body while Russell’s wails vocalized my pain.

The cell phone buzzed again.

And Jerome—cowardly, lying, useless Jerome—killed for no reason at all. What the fuck was that?

Was there a path forward, a road out of the darkness? Could I once again find in myself the strength that stood me before the Ogre’s wrath so many years ago, or would life’s cruelty finally prevail?

As I searched my heart for that answer, the cell phone vibrated for half a second, then cut short.

Whether the battery in the phone, the life at the other end, or the hope of the caller—something else had just died.

Chapter 5

I thought about a buddy of mine from seventh grade, Benny Clark. We met after school one afternoon to settle with our fists some little something so trivial that memory misplaced it almost immediately once it was over.

We fought that afternoon, or more accurately, we boxed. But I didn't try; not really. Benny was a smaller kid than me, and that made a real difference at that age. And though we were fighting, he was my friend, and I had no desire to hurt him. He wasn't big enough to pack a punch that could do more than bruise. So, the fight was destined to go unresolved.

But assistant principal McQuig, being much more observant than I’d have given him credit for, caught us both and hauled us to his office. He laid a choice on the table: we could take the paddle, or he would call our parents to explain the suspension.

Well, that was a no-brainer for both Benny and me. He opted for the combo pack—the call and a suspension. I asked to the point of begging for the paddle.

Paddling was punishment with an end. I'd bend over the desk and McQuig would haul back for a baseball-style swing and lay into my ass with all his gray-haired might. There was no defined number of swats for fighting, nor for any offense. Punishment ended when McQuig's temper settled, or his back and shoulders grew tired. This usually happened between three and five swats.

It was a difficult dynamic to predict. In the mornings, McQuig was full of energy and ready for five; not so much in the afternoon. But in the afternoons, his temper was short from a long day of dealing with the likes of me, so he was more inclined to shoot for five.

I took five that day. Perhaps my frequent flyer status was built into the equation somehow.

In spite of paying the price, however, I was too naïve at that age to understand how things really worked in the world. At the time, Dan was an assistant principal at another school in the district. I guess it only made sense that he knew McQuig.

Perhaps McQuig called to tell Dan of the favor he'd done him by tanning my hide. All I knew for a fact was that when Dan got home from work that day, he felt compelled to bellow at me for what seemed to me to be a thousand times, "You wanna fight? You wanna be a boxer? Is this what you wanna do? You wanna embarrass me?"

Of course the questions were all rhetorical. They were not to be answered with my words, nor Dan's.

The answers were in Dan's knuckles.

He beat me all the way through my fear and my pain, leaving only a crusty residue of anger and hate that I carried to school the next day, where a hundred snickering laughers pointed at my bruised face. Humiliation is such a powerful motivator in seventh grade.

So on the fourth day, when Benny returned to school, I found him in the hall. He smiled at me the way he always smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile back. Instead, I beat him down. With each pound of my fist, Dan's anger rolled through me and down to Benny. And when I was done, Benny looked like me, with fresh blood running from his mouth and nose. He had hollow, helpless eyes that understood something new about cruelty in the world.

I got eight swats from McQuig that day. Perhaps a new record. I got suspended, and Dan beat me daily until I went back. But what the fuck; he probably would have beaten me anyway.

What I should have learned about catharsis that day was the lesson that eluded me every time I ever let my anger run free. Catharsis is a bullshit concept.

Benny had been my best friend for years before that fight. After I beat him in the hall, he never spoke to me again. All that catharsis did for me was cost me a little piece of my humanity.

Slaughtering Whites for what Mark did to Amber was like that. When the rage flowed and the Whites died, it felt like something, something with a frightening name. But after, I felt like a death camp Nazi who’d finally looked into one too many pairs of sunken eyes.

And now I sat in a humid charnel house of my own making, having tried to assuage a vindictive rage with the murder of the wrong people. Mark had to die for the world to ever be right again. In my mind, it was a necessary step. But I knew that it was also an indulgence of the darkness, a choice to forever cultivate a hate. It was a backward path. And to chase Mark down that path, the easy path, was to shower myself in the blood of the Whites until my luck ran out and I was as dead as the pile of infected at my feet. And would Mark be in that pile? Not likely.

But what real choice did I have? To move forward instead? To what?

I’d only ever been an isolated spectator to an endless parade of tragedies. Being alone in the dark was all I knew. All my life I’d collected acquaintances and discarded them before they became real friends, before they became too much of an emotional risk. And as much as I had needed to find Amber, as much as I needed now to know what had happened to Steph, in my choices, I’d scraped off Murphy, Mandi, and Russell and isolated myself again. The cycle of my habit was at work under the guise of rational choice.

So what was forward for me?

That hard path was to pick up the fragile pieces of a nascent chance at life, a life that I’d very handily scattered across a dying city. That path seemed so difficult and so urgent, but the hard part, if I was still alive at the end of the day, was to chance a real relationship with another person, with other people.

And I know I didn’t think it through at the time that I let Russell latch on to me, but maybe that was Russell’s value. Non-judgmental, silent, and simple, Russell wholly accepted and needed me. He took those intangible but important parts of a relationship and put them on the table while asking for nothing in return. Was it possible that in helping Russell to stay alive he would unwittingly help me to take the baby steps of learning how to fit into normal society, or at least whatever might be left of society when this was all over?

Were the first few steps of the hard path forward to ironically be illuminated for me by Russell?

Perhaps.

So with Russell’s help, I chose to move forward, and all those parts that I was good at planning for came together in a snap. I was ready to go, alert and back in the present. My eyes were open and I was aware of my surroundings.

Three infected lurked near a support column at the top of a ramp, fixated on me, puffing up their courage. Their faces were gaunt, their hands very busy at invisible nothings that needed desperate attention. Their eyes were alert and shifting from focus to focus, but always finding their way back to me.

They looked hungry, but were unaware of the feast that awaited them for free, if they’d only follow the parking garage’s ramps up another three floors. Maybe they were just lazy. Maybe they thought I looked like I was dying, infected like them, but an easy meal.

I laid my machete across my thighs, its grip slippery in my bleeding palm. I decided that I wasn’t going to slaughter the three skinny Whites, and neither was I going to be eaten by them. But their hunger was going to make them do something stupid, very soon.

A step on the path forward was control and I was going to take it by bringing the situation to a head. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the concrete wall. I calmed my breathing.

It was time.

The infected couldn’t resist the temptation that my closed eyes presented. Just a moment after closing them, I heard the sound of a half-dozen feet running across the concrete floor.

And by choosing the path forward, my old mantra was outmoded, but still effective.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I drew a sharp breath, opened my eyes, and jumped to my feet just as the three stepped within machete range. Their eyes widened as they each struggled to halt their momentum. Even their malfunctioning brains were able to register surprise.

My machete swung up as I straightened and slashed deeply across the belly of the leftmost of the trio. Pushing my blade’s momentum in the same swing, I ripped it through the jaw of the one in the middle. Both went down and the third jumped back.

The first infected hit the floor immediately, unconscious and rapidly bleeding to death. The one with the jaw injury was flailing, half silly from the blow to his head, splattering blood in every direction.

I roared and charged at the last one still on her feet. She turned and ran.

Victory.

Chapter 6

When my feet hit the street that ran between the hospital and the garage, the infected on the upper floors of the were still in a tizzy over their lost meal, though many had fallen silent, perhaps feasting on their dead brethren instead. At street level, there were infected loitering and resting in shadows, and others gathered around the doors into the hospital, drawn by the promise of warm flesh upstairs.

But something was profoundly different. The world felt a little more dead than it had just hours before.

Was it me, or was I sensing something real?

I looked out across the street. All of the hospital windows were dark. The giant full color sign in front of the basketball arena had no advertisement for upcoming concerts. It was black. Its lights were out. The traffic signal at the corner flashed red in an unflinching rhythm.

Looking back into the garage, I saw that the overhead lights were out. The lights in the stairwells were off.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket. No cellular network. No data.

No, wait. There was a bar…then it was gone. I slowly waved the phone through the air, trying to catch a signal, but it would only come for a second or two at a time. It was out there, but it was weak. I concluded the only thing that made sense.

The power grid had failed.

Mankind had just taken another giant step backward.

Soon the batteries that powered the flashing stoplights would go dead, and the rapidly weakening batteries on the cell towers would follow. If the virus itself wasn’t the beginning of the end of civilization, the failure of the power grid surely was.

I pocketed my cell phone. It was no good now as a communication device, but it was still a pocket-sized computer, though I’d need to find a solar charger for it.

Looking back toward the hospital, I had a clear view of the glass stairwell that I’d shot to hell earlier. Nearly every pane on its glass walls was shattered. Bloody bodies of the infected lay on the stairs, hung out over the edges, or were piled on the ground below. At least a hundred Whites greedily fed on those bodies.

Still, there was barely any movement to be seen on the stairs themselves.

Perhaps an opportunity lay in that carnage.

With blood still glistening on the scarred blade of my machete, I hefted it in my right hand, drew my Glock with my left, and walked across the street toward the feeding infected.

They were noisy. They were sloppy. They tore at clothes with their hands, and with their teeth, they lacerated flesh that seethed with the same virus that had scorched their brains. All around, crimson painted the grass and pooled in the dirt. In the blood, bits of bone, eyeglasses, and shoes were strewn.

The infected paid no attention to me.

At the moment, I was one of them, a white beast from a child’s nightmare, strong and deadly, not worth a second thought when the ground was covered in a bounty of bleeding human meat.

At the bottom of the stairwell, I stepped through a shattered glass wall into the epicenter of the slaughter. The big fifty-caliber bullets had smashed the tempered glass into thousands of razor sharp bits of crystalline shrapnel. Every white body was broken, shredded, and bled out, dripping down the concrete steps. Agonized mouths stretched across broken faces. Bones splintered through skin. And the smell of death, blood, and everything ripped from stomachs and intestines was heavy in the air.

Up I walked, careful with each placement of my foot, lest I slipped. Live infected were among the bodies on the first few floors, feeding on the scraps of their brothers and sisters. By the third floor, their numbers thinned. By the fifth, there were only one or two per flight, faces buried in the work of gorging themselves on newly dead remains.

That made my task easy as I went to work with my machete, hacking at the backs of necks and severing heads. I wanted no breathing White nearby when I got to the top.

I passed the sixth floor and killed three. I passed the seventh and killed two more. Between the eighth and ninth, there were four. One struggled and attacked. As a result, I wore more of his blood than I did of the others.

When I finally reached the top of the stairs, I had to climb over a makeshift barricade of hospital beds, chairs, and cabinets. The barrier had no hope of stopping any infected from climbing over, but it did serve the purpose of slowing them down, and more importantly, it kept them from massing and pushing their combined weight on the door.

Once over the barricade, there was enough room for me to stand in front of the steel fire door. Above the doorknob, about eight inches wide and two feet tall was a long rectangular window.

Through the reinforcing wire mesh in the glass, I saw two soldiers standing across the hall with dispassionate faces and nervous eyes, aiming their weapons at me.

I shouted, “Hey.”

The soldiers shared a glance, but didn’t respond.

“Hey, listen,” I said. “I know you’re kind of freaked out about seeing me out here, but I need to talk to someone. Can I count on you not to shoot me?”

One soldier looked nervously at the other. He said something that I couldn’t make out through the heavy door.

I shouted again, “Look, I’m not going to stay out here all day. It’s only a matter of time before the infected hear me up here and come. So go talk to whoever you need to talk to and let me in. I’m not a danger. I won’t stay long. I need to talk to Steph.”

“Go away,” the previously silent soldier ordered.

I huffed. “Look, man, don’t be a dick. Go get your boss or whatever you need to do, but hurry up about it.”

“If you don’t leave, we’ll shoot.”

I guess I should have been happy that they didn’t start the conversation with bullets, but I wasn’t. I was impatient. “Look, let me be clear about a couple of things. First, there aren’t any infected out here. All the ones in this stairwell are dead. At least until you get down to the third floor or so. Second, I’m going to come in there and see Steph. I don’t mean anybody any harm, but I gotta tell you guys, I’m already tired of fucking around about it. I went to a lot of trouble to get here and if I’d wanted to hurt you, I would have just blown the door open with a grenade, come in, and shot your dumbasses.”

I pulled a pin from one of my three grenades, slipped the pin into my pocket, and then held it up to the glass for the soldiers to see. “You see what I have here, right? I know you’re thinking that you really want to shoot me through the door now, but if you do, this grenade goes off. The door gets blown open, and the infected come running. Do you know what happens after that? You do, don’t you? All of you die. But that’s not what I want and I know that’s not what you want. I just want to come in and talk to Steph. I don’t mean anyone in there any harm. I sure don’t want anybody to harm me. Just open the fuckin’ door. I’ll come in, and then I’ll leave.”

I peeked through the glass. The soldiers were talking again. As I watched, one ran off down the hall.

The other soldier said, “You’re infected, right?”

“I’m a slow burn.” I nodded. “I am infected. Aside from that, I’m just as normal as you.”

The soldier said, “You could infect us all if we let you in. Do you want that on your conscience?”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing already anyway?” I asked. “Infecting yourselves, trying to find the immune ones?”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Because I’ve been talking to Steph on the phone about it.” I glared through the window to be sure he saw my anger at him. “She’s a nurse. Cute, with red hair, about five-foot-five.”

The soldier asked, “The network is still up?”

I shook my head. “No. I think the power grid failed. I think there are batteries in the towers, but I guess they’re dying. I couldn’t get a signal when I checked.”

The soldier nodded. “The emergency generator here kicked on a few hours ago.”

With no more questions on his mind, the soldier stood and watched me.

Not concerned with small talk, I thought about racing my motorcycle several years ago out on FM 2222, blazing over the hills and around the sharp turns, trying to shake the carnivorous banshees that lived in my soul. No matter how fast I flew down the road, I couldn’t slip them. When I hit a guardrail and my body crashed through the upper branches of some trees on a downward slope, I ended up a summertime resident of the hospital.

The main building, the oldest, was laid out in something of a T-shape with the top bar of the T being too long for a properly formed letter. The upper floors each had a central hall down each branch of the T with patient rooms on both sides. An expansive nurses’ station stood at the intersection of the three branches on each floor. At least that was the layout of the upper floors. The lower two or three had grown maze-like with additions through the years. On the fourth floor, a breezeway connected at an angle from the shortest leg of the T to a roughly circular and relatively new children’s hospital.

Knowing the layout as well as I knew the house I grew up in, I started to plan how I was going to find Steph if I had to force my way in. Of course, I should rather have been considering what an all-around stupid idea that was, but that thought never really bubbled to the surface.

The other soldier came hurrying back into view with a guy in a soiled white lab coat. The three of them conferred quietly for a few minutes and then the guy in the lab coat came over to the glass.

I asked, “Are you the doctor in charge?”

“I might be.”

“Christ,” I said, letting my frustration show. “I’m not a Chinese spy. Are you in charge?”

The guy in the lab coat peered through the window, trying to see as much as he could see. After he was satisfied with whatever he was looking for he said, “Yes, I am in charge. I’m Dr. Paul Evans.”

“Zed Zane. Will you please open the door and let me in?”

Dr. Evans looked blankly at me, but said nothing.

Quietly, but sternly, I said, “Look, the infected downstairs are going to…”

Dr. Evans held up a hand to silence me and said, “I know, I know.”

He stepped back over near the others. More whispered conversations among the three and a few too many suspicious glances at my white face through the glass left me uneasy.

But they came to a decision. Dr. Evans raised a hand to the door and the lock clicked. He pushed the door open. I had one fist gripped around my fragmentation grenade and the other held my Glock with my finger on the trigger. I walked through.

The soldiers held their weapons pointed at the floor, but enhanced my distrust by surrounding me, one behind and one beside me. Dr. Evans stood in front.

“You’re in.” Dr. Evans’ tone was condescending and angry when he pointed to my hand grenade. “Do you intend to kill us with that?”

“No.” I glanced over my shoulder at the guy behind me. “I just don’t trust any of you.”

“Then why come here?” he asked.

“Like I told the guys.” I nodded at each of the soldiers. “I’m here for Steph.”

“Steph?” he asked.

The soldier to my left, the one I’d been talking to, said, “Nurse Leonard.”

So that was Steph’s last name. It had never occurred to me to ask.

Dr. Evans asked, “Are you a relative?”

Without an ounce of respect for authority left anywhere in me, I spouted, “Really? After all that’s happened, you’re going to stonewall me with a protocol that nobody gives a shit about anymore?”

That pissed him off. Dr. Evans’ face flashed anger, but returned quickly to an icy cold nothing expression, except for his lips, which remained pinched closed.

I stood half a head shorter than him, but having separated so many souls from so many different sized bodies over the past week, I was no longer intimidated by physical stature.

Dr. Evans forced his voice to sound calm. “I was curious, Mr. Zane, that’s all. No, no, I’m not curious. I need to know. For better or worse, I’m in charge here. I’m trying to keep as many of these people alive as I can. They’re my responsibility. So, unless you want to detonate that hand grenade right here and kill us all, then you’ll have to answer my questions, because you’re not taking one step further until I get some answers.”

I cocked my head at the soldier behind me. “Why is he back there?”

Dr. Evans looked at the soldier behind me and motioned to his right. “Corporal.”

The guy behind me walked around me to stand a few paces behind the doctor.

“Let me ask you something, Dr. Evans. How long have you been in charge here—since the beginning?”

“Why do you want to know?” He was cautious.

“Who set up all the triage tents outside?” I asked, not sure why I chose to go down that rat hole. “Who decided on the protocols that put all of the infected in that gym and then left them there to die? Was that you?”

“Is that what this is, then?” Dr. Evans motioned at the two soldiers. “You men go up the hall to a safe distance.” He looked down his long, narrow nose and said, “I did that. I was in charge here when those decisions were made. If you’re here to kill me over some grudge about that, then shoot me. Don’t detonate that grenade in here and compromise the safety of the others.”

“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to kill you, though now that you mention it, it sounds like an appealing idea. I was in that gym. I almost died there. I’m a person, you fucker. I’m not a piece of medical waste. But that’s how you saw me, right?”

Dr. Evans shook his head. His face softened. He was troubled. “Mr. Zane, don’t pretend to be naïve. You wouldn’t be alive if you were. I made hard decisions to try to contain the infection and save as many people as I could. I’m not going to ask you to understand. I’m not going to ask you to care how difficult it was. I’m a doctor, Mr. Zane. I’ve dedicated my life to saving other people’s lives. Maybe my decisions that night were wrong. Maybe they were the worst decisions. But maybe there weren’t any good choices. Mr. Zane, I did what I thought was the best, given what I knew at the time. If that caused you harm, then I apologize for that harm, but I can’t change what’s passed.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll be honest. I’m kind of pissed about all of that, but I’m not an idiot. I understand that choices were made for the greater good. I’m pissed because in any kind of greater-good choice, somebody always gets fucked. I was the guy who got fucked this time. But to get back to the point, I’m not here to kill you or anybody else.” Then, as sincerely as I could, given the tension, I added, “But I do respect you for taking responsibility, even though you thought I might be here to kill you for it.”

Dr. Evans exhaled a long breath and said, “That’s a relief. Can I ask you to put the pin back in that grenade?”

“Perhaps, in a minute,” I said. “Right now, let’s just say that I have trust issues.”

“Why are you here?” he asked.

At the root of it, that was a question I didn’t really have an answer to.

“Mr. Zane?”

“Like I said,” I nearly blurted, “I need to see Steph. She told me last night she was going to volunteer for the infection.” I took a deep breath. “She’s my friend. I need to know if she’s dead. Is she?”

Dr. Evans slowly shook his head, sloughing off his anger and exposing his sadness. “I don’t know.”

I relaxed a little. “Where is she?”

“She’s two floors down. What do you intend to do when you see her?”

“I don’t know.” I softened. “I…I’ve seen so many people…too many friends die. I guess I just have to know, one way or the other.”

Dr. Evans’ eyes examined my face for an uncomfortably long time after that. “I’m sorry I had you put in that infected ward. I really am.”

With some reluctance, I gave Dr. Evans a nod of acceptance.

“One thing you might want to know is that if I’d let you into the hospital that night, you’d probably be dead now.” Dr. Evans looked around as though trying to see something that wasn’t there. “I’m not trying to find some ex-post justification for my decisions that night, but if you’ve been talking to Nurse Leonard, you know how bad things have been here.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

Dr. Evans turned to the two soldiers. “You men keep this door secure.” To me, he said, “C’mon, Mr. Zane. I’ll take you down to see Steph.”

“Thank you.” Before following, I took a gamble. I holstered my Glock and fished the grenade pin out of my pocket and pushed it back into place in the grenade. I turned and handed it to one of the soldiers, noticing as I opened my palm that the grenade was red and sticky with my blood. “I’ve got two more clean ones if you don’t want that one.”

The soldier accepted the bloody grenade with a nod of thanks.

Then I doubled down and gave a grenade to the other guard. I said, “I can probably find some more outside eventually.”

The second guard thanked me, as did Dr. Evans.

Chapter 7

We walked together up the hall. “Was that you outside on the parking garage?” Dr. Evans asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“That was a real Tarzan stunt you pulled getting off of that roof.”

“Thanks,” I shrugged.

“Some of us were watching out the window,” he said. “None of us thought you’d make it.”

I half smiled. “Me neither.”

“Sliding down that banner, is that how you injured your hands?” he asked.

I looked down at one of my still-bleeding hands and nodded.

“How do you even make the decision, to go over the edge of a garage?” he asked. “Are you one of those adrenaline junkies that bungee jumps and does skateboard tricks?”

“Desperation,” I told him.

“Oh.” Dr. Evans looked me up and down. “Is it true that you don’t feel pain, Mr. Zane?”

“Call me Zed. That’s what everybody calls me. But yes, it’s true. I get some monster headaches and I feel tired when I should, but mostly things don’t hurt. My hands, I can tell they’re messed up. I can feel that, but they don’t hurt. And I’ve been bitten twice by Whites.” I showed Dr. Evans my arm. “Neither one hurts.”

Dr. Evans’ face grew pensive. “That is interesting. I read something about it on the internet, but there are so many people making guesses out there right now, it’s hard to know what to believe. Listen, do you want me to fix up those hands before we head down?”

That was a unexpected offer. I nodded enthusiastically. “I’d like that very much.”

“Do you have your insurance card?” Dr. Evans smiled for the first time.

I smiled back, acknowledging his attempt to lighten the situation with a little humor. “Could you look at the bites on my arm, too, if you don’t mind?”

“Sure.”

We sat at the nurse’s station while he patched up my hands and he said, “The volunteers are two floors down. When we’re finished, we’ll have to go to the other stairwell to get down there. We have that one blocked about five floors down. It’s secure for the moment.”

“Don’t bandage my hands too heavily,” I said as he worked. “I need to be able to handle my rifle and stuff.”

Dr. Evans nodded as he gingerly cleaned one of my hands with a gauze pad and disinfectant. “They look worse than they are. Your injuries are all superficial. If you could feel the pain, I’m sure they’d hurt a lot. I’d probably prescribe a pain killer and tell you not to use your hands for a week or so.”

“Superficial is good,” I said.

“But they can get infected,” he said. “You need to keep them clean.”

“I will,” I said, knowing that keeping a wound clean was an easy task in yesterday’s world. Now, with no running water, no corner drugstore, and not even a certain roof over my head every night, that was a much more difficult thing to do.

“I heard that things went bad at the gym.” Dr. Evans voice took on a distant air. “At first I didn’t believe it, but now, well, we’ve all learned something about how violent the infected can be. How did you get out?”

As Dr. Evans treated my wounds, I told him the story of my escape from the gym and everything since. Afterwards, he worked and I stared at the sparklingly waxed vinyl floor tiles, the faux cloth texture of the wallpaper wainscot, the black rubber-wheeled stainless steel medical devices, and I thought a lot about my yesterdays. All such things were commonplace in those days.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the rest of the world?” I asked, absently.

“Academically, it’s interesting to see the whole world in a panic,” Dr. Evans replied, without looking up from what he was doing. “If our species makes it through this, I wonder what kind of history from this period will survive.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Dr. Evans said, “In the beginning there’ll be news footage and a trove of personal accounts on the webservers if any of those survive. I wonder if anybody will record any of this on their cell phones, or if it’ll all be handwritten diaries and archeological records eventually.”

“At first,” I agreed, “I’m sure it’ll be cell phones. You know, pictures and video. The virus was probably documented on Facebook better than anywhere before things started to get really bad. You know how people are about posting anything unusual, anything special.”

“I don’t use it,” Dr. Evans said. “But my kids do, so I know what you mean.”

“Your kids?” I asked.

Dr. Evans ignored the question and kept working. “We’ve heard of islands that quarantined early and are infection free. Little places in the Pacific. Grand Cayman in the Caribbean.”

“I’ve always wanted to dive there,” I mused.

“The water is so blue and clear.” Dr. Evans looked up and stared, but not at anything in particular. “We were there a few years back, diving near a wreck. You could see for a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. The water was spectacular that day. A school of tarpon swam by us, five or six feet long at least, close enough to reach out and touch. Their scales were glittering in the sunlight. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“I wish I could have gone diving,” I said.

“Who knows?” Dr. Evans finished with my hands and went to work cleaning the wounds on my arm. “Most of Europe isn’t any better than here. There’s sporadic internet traffic, but it’s dying away.”

“I heard it started in Africa,” I added.

“As far as anybody knows, there’s not a single functioning human brain on that continent. Yes, that’s where it started.”

“And the Middle East?” I asked, the next region that came to mind.

Dr. Evans said, “Israel nuked Iran.”

That was a surprising change. “What?”

“Who knows why?” said Dr. Evans. “I don’t imagine it makes any difference anyway.”

“I guess not. What about South America, Australia, New Zealand, places like that?”

He said, “High population densities present favorable conditions for the virus to spread. South America went quickly. Australia, I don’t know. The infection is there, but it’s not bad yet. New Zealand quarantined itself and seems to be successful so far.”

“Good for them.” I wished I was in New Zealand. “How about here?”

“Here?” he asked.

“America,” I clarified.

“What’s not like Austin soon will be,” he said. “I can’t think of any major city in which the virus hasn’t been found.”

I asked, “Are any of them handling it?”

“None yet.” Dr. Evans shook his head slowly as he said it. “It’s so contagious, it’s nearly impossible to contain. Well, not nearly. It’s proven impossible to contain.”

“So this really is the end.” I looked at him, hoping to discern whether the forthcoming answer was honest, no exaggerated.

“The end?” he asked.

“Of us. Of humans.”

Dr. Evans shook his head and looked up at me. “No, I don’t think so. Some will survive. You’ll survive if you can make it out of this hospital.”

I certainly planned to make it out.

“It’ll be the beginning of another dark age,” he said. “Eventually, we’ll come out if it. Different, I hope. Better.” Dr. Evans taped a last bandage across my arm. He dropped his hands to his knees and exhaled to indicate he was finished.

“Am I in any mortal danger?” I asked. “Am I going to die of an infection?”

“Probably not.” Dr. Evans got up off of his stool and motioned for me to follow. But he looked like he was walking to his own hanging. “Lets go see the volunteers. They’ve got the whole floor down there.”

“So it wasn’t just Steph who volunteered?” I asked as I followed him.

“Did Steph tell you what the mood was like here?”

I nodded. “Hopeless.”

“Yes,” he said. “That word was all I heard last night. After the first few trials with no survivors, everybody was hopeless. You know, I’ve used that word all my life. I’ve read it in books. I saw it in movies, but I never really knew what it meant until last night. Maybe I learned slowly as the week went along, but now I know in the same way I know what love is.”

“Love?” What an odd analogy.

“Not just in my head, Zed. I felt it down to the marrow of my bones, with every beat of my heart, and with every blink of my eye. I felt it with the same all-inclusive intensity that I’ve felt love. You’re a young man; have you ever been in love?”

I shook my head. Lust, certainly. Infatuation, of course. Love, no. “I know the hopelessness you’re talking about.”

“Yet here you are?” he said.

“Here we both are,” I countered. “Dr. Evans, how many are down there?”

“Call me Paul. Formalities are for the past, I think.”

“Okay, Paul.”

Paul came to a stop and turned to face me. “When Steph volunteered last night, it was like she was the catalyst for everyone’s courage. Maybe she’s a natural leader. Or maybe she was everyone’s hope. When she gave up, everybody else did, too.”

“What do you mean, everybody else?” I asked.

“Look around.” Paul waved a hand at the empty corridor. “Do you see anybody up here?”

It occurred to me as I looked, I’d seen almost no one since coming onto the floor.

“Nearly everybody volunteered for infection,” he said. “There are only seventeen of us left who are keeping the place secure in case anyone comes out of the experiment with immunity.”

“How many are immune so far?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to go downstairs to watch. You see, there are one hundred and fifty-three people down there, Zed. All infected. And if the first trials are any indicator, half of them are dead already, and we’ll shoot the other half by midnight.”

“You have lost hope,” I observed.

“Hopelessness,” Paul reiterated, “is an emotion with so many ugly faces. You know, I was in the Army before I came here. I was a doctor in Iraq in both wars. I’ve seen my share of things that would make most people weep. I’ve had boys younger than you bleed to death right there on my table. Boys in uniform, who looked me in the eye, sometimes holding my hand, in that moment when they gave their lives for something they believed in.”

Dr. Evans’ eyes looked down the hall at something that wasn’t there. “You do your best, but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, they die anyway. When I thought of infecting us all to save a few, intellectually it was the right thing to do, the only logical thing.”

Dr. Evans seemed at a loss for words, so I said, “I think Steph felt the same way about it.”

“Everything about it feels wrong.”

I wrestled with a tactful way to express a harsh thought but went with, “Maybe you’d feel better about it if you’d volunteered to go first.”

“I couldn’t.” Dr. Evans’ wide, sad eyes fell back on me.

“Why?” I asked, expecting to hear some bullshit about how the whole place would fall apart without him at the helm.

“Because I’m immune.”

“What?” That was a surprise.

“I was exposed the Saturday before everything got bad.” Dr. Evans pulled up the sleeve on his left arm.

“How?” I asked.

“I was bitten by a violent patient.” Dr. Evans showed me a bandaged wound on his forearm. “He was infected with the virus. His skin was pale. His temperature was elevated. His pupils were dilated. His behavior was deranged.”

I said, “I got it on that Sunday. Obviously, I wasn’t as lucky you.”

“Or perhaps, I wasn’t as lucky as you,” Dr. Evans suggested. “You can walk among them. You’ll survive if you’re careful. I’m a prey animal now.”

“Is anyone else here immune?” I asked.

“There’s Sergeant Dalhover downstairs. He got bitten early on. Tuesday or Wednesday, I think. He never turned. Like me, he never showed any symptoms. He and I are the only two here who are immune that we know of.”

“So naturally, you assumed there had to be more?” I asked.

Dr. Evans nodded. “It was the logical conclusion.”

“Is Sergeant Dalhover the one in charge of shooting of the infected downstairs?” I asked, trying to mask the urgency I felt at the thought of finally arriving at Steph’s location, only to get there one bullet too late.

Dr. Evans confirmed with a nod. We arrived at the door to the stairwell that would take us down. He looked through the window to confirm there was no movement on the landing. In a new habit of all the living, Dr. Evans very quietly pushed the door open.

I followed him into the stairwell, carefully and without a sound. As much as I wanted to hurry, hurrying led to mistakes, and mistakes were paid for in blood. I stopped when he did. We listened to the sounds from far below. The infected were down there, and they were pissed.

Dr. Evans looked down the center gap between the stairs.

“Anything?” I softly asked, leaning over to look myself. The pungent smell of their unwashed bodies, thick enough to taste, wafted up in the confined space.

“We’re clear for now,” he whispered. “Let’s go. They're trying to get at the soldiers behind the barrier down there. They never give up."

“Can they see the soldiers through the barrier?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he answered.

“They won't give up as long as they can see your guys,” I said.

Evans stopped halfway down the first flight of stairs and gave me his attention.

“Look,” I said to him, “if they can't see you or hear you, they eventually lose interest and go away.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“I got lucky,” I said. “It worked the first time I tried it.”

Evans started downward and didn't speak again until we were on the next flight of stairs. “I don’t think Sergeant Dalhover would agree with you on that.”

I figured I’d give him another nugget of solid gold advice. “You know every time you shoot a gun all you accomplish is to draw more of them in.”

“It's been discussed,” said Paul.

“It's true,” I reiterated.

Dr. Evans said nothing else on the subject until he swung the door open for us to leave the stairwell. “Why don’t you talk with Sergeant Dalhover about what you know? If we need to alter our tactics, we will.”

We came out at the nurse’s station just like the one two floors up where Dr. Evans had treated my wounds. A skinny man in civilian clothes with a very unmilitary slouch and a droopy, broken man's face eyed us lazily.

A soldier far down the hall, his weapon at the ready, called, “Everything all right, Top?”

In a raspy, smoker's voice, the skinny sergeant replied, “Yeah.” Then with no change in his posture or facial expression, he looked me over and asked Dr. Evans, “What's this?”

“Slow burn,” Evans answered as though all the life had drained out of him. He hadn’t emotionally prepared himself to be down among the volunteers.

“So they’re real?” the sergeant asked.

“So it seems,” he said.

“I'm real,” I confirmed, “and just a normal as you.”

“Yeah.” The sergeant said it in a way that made it clear he didn't agree.

I already didn't like him.

The entire length of the long hall was lined with chairs spaced about five feet apart. In most of those sat a sagging person with a torn bed sheet gag between his or her teeth, arms and feet restrained. Some of them stared at the wall across the hall. Some slept with chins on their chests. A few looked at us with interested eyes. Ten or eleven were obviously transitioning from human to beast. One close to the nurse’s station was bleeding from his mouth while trying desperately to gnaw through his gag. Down from him, the skin of a woman’s wrists and ankles were worn through from her struggles against her bonds.

Many of the chairs were empty and sat below big, bloody stains on the wall. And like red entrance ramps to a highway that nobody wanted to be on, a trail of blood led from each chair to merge with a long bloody smear to the end of the hall. It was immediately clear what was going on. When the volunteers turned symptomatic, they were shot where they sat. I asked Evans, “What are you doing with the bodies?”

In his gruff voice, Dalhover answered for Evans, “Throwin’ ‘em out the window.”

Just listening to his voice made me want to cough the phlegm out of my own lungs. “That's a bad idea.”

Using apathy as a defense, the sergeant said, “Can't keep ‘em here.”

“But the infected are eating them below,” I protested. “You're giving them a reason to keep hanging around.”

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “They'll be eating us all soon enough.”

Dr. Evans cut in. “Zed Zane, this is Sergeant Dalhover.”

Sergeant Dalhover looked at me again, with no change in his droopy eyes. He made no effort to shake my hand.

I was apparently untouchable. Fuck him.

I said, “Hello.”

No response.

Double fuck him.

Dr. Evans, in a voice that saddened more with each word, asked of Sergeant Dalhover, “How many so far? I see lots of empty chairs.”

“Eighty-three.”

Eighty-three people, all shot in the head and tossed out a window.

Dr. Evans looked at me. “This was my idea. I’m the one who convinced these people to bet their lives on hope.”

Droopy-eyed Dalhover just stared at him.

Dr. Evans was getting hard to look at, so I scanned up and down the hall, searching for a head of red hair. “Is Steph alive or dead?”

“Steph?” Dalhover asked.

“Nurse Leonard,” I clarified.

With the smallest of gestures, he pointed. “She’s down the hall.”

My mood perked up, but I quickly tamped it down. “Fever?”

Dalhover croaked, “No.”

I didn’t ask for any more information, nor did I wait for permission. I stepped out of Dalhover’s sad gaze and hurried down the hall, looking at each face as I passed. I’d only seen Steph with a surgical mask on. Aside from red hair, green eyes, and fair skin, I had little idea what she looked like.

Chapter 8

To look down that long hall had the emotional effect of looking through a neighbor’s window while they beat a crippled dog. Walking down the hall, trying to avoid stepping on the viscous trail of coagulated blood, was viscerally painful.

Some volunteers, seeing only their last hopeless thoughts, let me pass like an invisible man.

One woman stared with tears on her cheeks at a mural of blood above an empty chair directly across the hall from her. Right there, over five or ten or twelve hours she had seen a person, perhaps someone she knew, perhaps a close friend, slowly turn from human into something else. She had watched the face lose hope when the fever came on. She witnessed the deterioration of the mind. She saw the animalistic gnawing at the gag and the scraping of skin until blood flowed. She saw the black, wild eyes where no human intellect lived anymore.

I wondered, when Dalhover’s revolver fired, ringing everyone’s ears, splitting that skull, whether she saw it as a mercy or a horror.

Down that trail of tears, blood, and utter despair, I spotted a redhead with tear-drained, but alert eyes turning to watch me approach. Recognition perked her to life and I couldn’t stop myself from running the last steps. Stopping beside her chair, I immediately started untying the strip of bed sheet that gagged her mouth.

“Hey,” Dalhover rasped from somewhere behind me.

I ignored him and removed the gag.

In a hoarse voice, Steph said, “Wow, you’re still alive.”

I swallowed hard on a lump in my throat as a faint, but real, smile stretched my lips. “Wow, you’re still alive.”

Steph’s smile was real, but it was competing with the pain on the rest of her face.

The guy in the next chair over started to squirm and grunt through his gag.

“Can you take his off too?” Steph asked.

“Okay.” I stepped over and started on the guy.

“God dammit.” Dalhover’s voice echoed up the hall.

I didn’t even look at Dalhover, but I heard his voice drop to background noise as he droned something at Dr. Evans.

To Steph I said, “And I thought I was uptight.”

Steph answered, “It hasn’t been easy for any of us.”

I shrugged as I removed the gag from the guy.

He thanked both Steph and me, then opened and closed his mouth several times to stretch his jaw muscles.

I squatted down beside Steph and started to untie her hands.

“Don’t,” she told me.

“Why?” I asked.

She said, “I might turn.”

I stopped and looked up at her. “But…”

“Leave them.” She was firm.

I stood up and stepped in front of her chair, but suddenly had no words.

The guy in the next chair over had no such problem and spoke very fast, “We were infected last night around seven. It’s like one o’clock now. We’ve got to wait until seven before we know if we’re immune, but we won’t be, though the theory is sound. Some of us, maybe a lot of us, should be immune. But so far, no winners. You know what I mean?”

“You’ll have to excuse him,” Steph said to me. “He gets excited and can’t shut up.”

The guy said, “I think fast. That’s just how I am. But not for long.” Then very softly he whispered to us. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got the fever.”

Steph tried to repress a sob.

The guy looked at Steph, pain in his eyes. Then at a normal talking speed, he said, “I’m sorry, babe.”

Babe?

Steph looked at me. “Put your hand on his forehead, see if he feels hot.”

I stepped over and laid my hand across the guy’s forehead, feeling his temperature on the skin between my bandages.

“I’m Jeff Aubrey,” he smiled weakly.

“Zed Zane,” I answered, looking down at him and shaking my head slightly. He was hot.

“I saw that,” Steph said. “He has the fever, doesn’t he?”

Jeff said, “If I hit one-oh-four before Dalhover checks us again…”

“Jeff, don’t say that,” Steph implored.

I checked Steph’s forehead for a fever. She was cooler than me.

“Babe,” said Jeff, “the odds of both of us being immune are astronomical. With me infected, that makes your odds better. I’m okay with that.” Jeff looked up at me. “Well?”

I told him, “She feels normal.”

Steph sniffled up another sob.

“Why the gags?” I asked.

“They’re to keep us from biting anyone when we turn,” Jeff answered.

Steph asked, “How did you get in here, Zed?”

I took a few minutes to convey an abbreviated version of my story.

“So, all that shooting outside a little while ago,” Jeff asked. “That was you?”

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“Tell me again, why did you come here?” he asked.

I looked at Steph, again wondering the same thing. I looked up and down the hall as I tried to cull my thoughts on the matter. I looked back at Steph before I spoke, “Hope. I think I was looking for hope.”

Jeff laughed bitterly. “If this is where you came to find hope, I’m glad I’m not out there.”

Without looking back to Jeff, I asked Steph, “Does he ever stop talking?”

“No,” she answered. “Now you know why I needed you to talk to.”

“For what its worth,” I said, “I’m glad you’re still alive. I’m glad that you still have a chance.”

“Hey, Zed.” Jeff demanded my attention like a needy toddler.

“Yes, Jeff?”

“I’m going to be dead in an hour or two,” he said. “I don’t know you, but you look like you like Steph.”

“It’s not like that,” I interrupted.

He asked, “Will you look out for her?”

“Jeff,” Steph implored.

“I’m already doing that,” I told him. “Besides, you might not turn. You might be a slow burn, like me.”

“That’s like hoping I win the lottery.” Jeff’s face show how little he thought of that. “Besides, that’s not what we’re doing here. Dalhover is going to shoot me at one-oh-four.”

“I can stop him,” I said, feeling the confidence of my dustup with the Whites.

“I don’t want to be one of them,” he said.

“You guys don’t need to shoot everybody as soon as they get the fever.” I looked up and down the hall at the men with guns and the evidence of what they’d been doing. It disgusted me. “You’ve got nothing to lose by waiting.”

Jeff said, “It’s been discussed. It’s been decided. I knew what I was getting into when I volunteered for the infection.”

I said, “I guess I did come to wrong place for hope.”

“There might be a speck of hope,” Jeff contradicted me.

I thought about punching him in the face. Not seriously, but the thought did cross my mind. Looking back at Steph again, I asked, “Does he always do this?” To Jeff I said, “Would you pick one side of the issue? Are you hopeless or not?”

“I analyze things,” he said. “I look at all sides. I’m a numbers guy. There is hope in the numbers.”

I looked back at Steph. “What does that mean?”

“This is new to me,” she said.

Jeff squirmed against his bonds, wanting very much to move his hands as he talked. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about things while I’ve been here, waiting for the infection to rot my brain.”

“And?” I asked.

“This whole thing is only going to last six to eighteen months,” he told us. “If you can find a way to last that long, then you’re home free.”

Steph asked Jeff, “What does that even mean?”

In his rapid fire speech, Jeff said, “The infection rate was over ninety-nine percent. Some of the infected died outright; most of them turned into white-skinned cannibals. For the Austin area, that meant we had nearly a million infected running around, trying to eat anything that moved.”

“Seems like I’ve heard this before.” It was like listening to Jerome all over again.

Jeff pressed on. “By the time the infection runs through the population, there might be ten thousand people who are either immune or slow burns, maybe less. Not very good odds.”

I looked up and down the hall again. I was already bored. Dalhover and Evans were talking quietly near the nurse’s station. The soldiers at each end of the hall were attentive, but hadn’t moved from their positions. About four chairs down, one of the tied-up volunteers was starting to get very agitated. He’d turned.

“Of those ten thousand,” Jeff continued, “who knows how many are still alive? It might be five thousand. It might be a couple of thousand. But with a million infected on the loose, the odds of an immune person staying alive are pretty bleak.”

Steph said, “And that’s one of the reasons everyone here was so hopeless. How can we to fight a million infected?”

“That’s just it,” said Jeff, his voice notching up a level. “We don’t have to. We just have to figure out a way to feed ourselves and stay hidden until the problem solves itself.”

Okay, I was interested. “What does that mean, solve itself?”

“When the infected get hungry, and there aren’t any of us around for dinner, they eat each other, right?” Jeff asked.

“I’ve seen that,” I confirmed.

“So that’s true?” Steph asked.

I nodded.

“People are omnivores,” said Jeff, “With a million infected running around Austin, they’ll eat every piece of biomass they can get their hands on, whether it’s a house cat, an acorn, or us. Pretty quickly, the most plentiful food source available to them is going to be each other. Do you know that the average American contains about two-hundred-thousand usable calories?”

“Really?” That was a surprisingly morbid bit of trivia. “How could you know that?”

Jeff went through the calculation with me. “If you take the average weight of a Texan and subtract the weight of the skeleton, then figure the body fat percentage, you can calculate the calories.”

“And that comes out to two-hundred-thousand per person?” I asked.

Jeff nodded. “The average calorie intake for a person of the average size is about twenty-five-hundred calories.”

“That seems high,” Steph countered.

“We’re talking averages,” Jeff shot back. “There are a lot of really big people out there.”

“I thought their metabolisms run a lot faster than normal,” I said.

“That’s been suggested, but not proven,” said Jeff. “If it’s true, then that works in our favor.”

“How’s that?” Steph asked, surprised.

“It works in our favor,” Jeff continued, “because if we can stay hidden, then the infected will eat each other up that much faster.”

“How fast?” she asked.

“If they are their only food source, they’ll probably eat each other up at the rate of eight to nine percent per month. So a million infected today turns into about a hundred thousand in six months and about ten thousand six months after that.”

“And all of the infected coming this way from the Houston fires?” I asked.

“Doesn’t change the math much,” said Jeff. “More infected means more mouths to feed. More mouths to feed means more infected get eaten. The result doesn’t change in the end.”

Steph’s face looked almost hopeful. “That makes it sound like we have a chance.”

“And you did all this math in your head while you sat there?” I asked with as much disbelief as I could put into my voice.

Steph said, “He’s really good with numbers.”

I shook my head. “I’d need a spreadsheet to figure all that out.”

“Jeff doesn’t,” Steph reassured me.

“Wow.” That was impressive. “You know, I saw a news story about the drought and the reduction of the state’s cattle herds, and one of the surprising bits of information I came across was that there were something like five or six million cattle in Texas. What do cattle weigh? Somewhere between five hundred and fifteen hundred pounds? That’s a lot of calories, right?”

“Enough to seriously change the math,” Jeff agreed.

“And then there are the other farm animals. Sheep, goats, horses, whatever,” I added.

“But to get those calories, the infected have to leave the city to find them,” said Jeff. “They have to figure out how to eat them. Cowhide is tough, probably too tough for our tiny blunt teeth to bite through. But that’s not the most important point.  The infected don’t know that all of those calories are out there for free. They’re not that smart. They only see the calories running around the cities with them. Those are the ones they’ll try to eat.”

“You may be right,” I agreed, “but it sounds like there are a lot of hopes and guesses built into your calculations.”

Jeff nodded. “There are lots of factors that can affect the final number, but the only real question about the end result is when we arrive at ten thousand infected, not if we arrive there. How long do you have to wait until the infected population kills itself off? That might be six months. It might be two years. It might be five years. But however you look at it, there’s a time in the not too distant future when the infected become a manageable problem. All you have to do is stay alive until then.”

Jeff talked for another five or ten minutes before he got a very glassy look in his eyes and then passed out mid-sentence. Steph had me check his pulse. He wasn’t dead, but he was burning up.

In the silence left by Jeff’s unconsciousness, I asked, “So you guys are a thing?”

“We’re engaged,” Steph said, with little enthusiasm.

I felt a pang of irrational jealousy.

What did I have to be jealous about?

“Zed, I should have told you that I had a fiancé.”

I shook my head, “No, it’s not… That’s not why I came.”

“At least now you know why I needed someone to talk to.” She nodded at unconscious Jeff. “There’s barely enough room in Jeff’s conversations for Jeff, let alone me.”

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“Thanks for coming. It means a lot to me.”

I shrugged. “I was worried. I had to know if you’d made it.”

“Was it worth risking your life to find out?”

That was a hard question. “I lived through it, so yes, I guess so. Do you think you’ll make it?”

Steph shrugged and shook her head with minimal effort and less result. “I don’t know. Maybe. None of the others that we infected lasted this long.”

Chapter 9

After talking with Steph for another half hour about the only things on our minds, the virus, the infected, and our experiences, I returned to the nurse’s station. Evans and Dalhover stopped talking and looked at me when I walked up. During my time down the hall, Dr. Evans seemed to have regained something of himself. He stood a little straighter. His face was a little more animated. Dalhover’s face retained its permanent disappointment.

“First off,” I said, “thank you for not trying to kill me yet.” It seemed like a good way to start the conversation.

“There are no evil people here, Mr. Zane,” Dr. Evans told me, instantly back into the harsh, stonewalling man I’d first met upstairs.

“That wasn’t sarcasm. I meant that sincerely,” I told him. “Things out there are pretty dangerous for people like me right now. I’m learning to expect the worst. So thanks for being good people.”

Dr. Evans said, “Sorry I got defensive.”

“Discourtesies are the least of my problems these days.” I shrugged then charged bluntly into my request. “I know all of you debated and decided to shoot the volunteers when they hit one-oh-four, but I think that’s a bad idea. There may be slow burns like me among them.”

Dalhover snorted and started walking away, “Oh, you’re one of those.”

I really didn’t like that guy.

Dr. Evans leaned close and in a soft voice said, “Sergeant Dalhover doesn’t actually shoot them as soon as they reach that temperature. Before we started this experiment, we all agreed that we would, but Sergeant Dalhover waits for the dementia and the violent behavior so he knows for sure.”

“Oh.” I turned toward Dalhover to apologize but he was walking toward the end of the hall, a thermometer in one hand and a pistol in the other. “I don’t understand, then.”

“He goes through the temperature checks every hour because that’s the procedure we agreed on.”

“But why?”

“Waiting for the volunteers to turn before shooting them presents a real risk to the rest of us. But Dalhover is the one who shoots them. Then he and these men carry the bodies to a window and throw them out. It’s gruesome, emotionally difficult work. Dalhover refused to shoot anyone until there was no doubt what they were.”

“And no one else would step up to do the dirty work,” I deduced.

Dr. Evans’ face turned sadder and he nodded.

“I guess it’s easier when they’re actively trying to kill you,” I surmised. “But tied up in a chair? Yeah, sitting there looking like normal people…for the most part. Yeah, it would be hard.” I looked back down the hall at Dalhover, who slumped as he walked under the burden of his duties.

“Sergeant Dalhover is a good man,” Dr. Evans said. “He’s prickly, but he’s a good man.”

“Is he organizing your defense? I mean, who’s in charge of that?”

“I retired as a colonel, but I was doctor. If anyone is in charge here, it’s me. After me, Sergeant Dalhover has been the ranking military man for three days now. Yes, he organizes our defense.”

“Will he listen to me if I talk to him about your tactics?” I asked.

“He’s prickly, but not closed-minded,” Said Evans. “Do keep in mind though, we’re all learning as we go.”

Down at the end of the hall, Dalhover started taking temperatures. More than a dozen volunteers were sitting up straight in their chairs with their attention focused on the proceedings. Steph was turned toward Dalhover, her thick red hair hanging down to her shoulders. I wondered how it must feel, watching the executioner working his way up the hall, not knowing if it was your turn to die.

I said, “That guy down there, Jeff Aubrey, he has some interesting thoughts on how the infected might kill each other off.”

“Really?” Dr. Evans was interested.

“Yeah, you should talk to him pretty soon,” I said flatly. “He’s got the fever.”

“I was hoping he’d make it,” said Evans. “He’s a bright guy.”

“He could turn out to be a slow burn,” I hoped aloud.

“I’m afraid that’s a lot rarer than you think.”

“But you don’t know for sure, do you?” I asked.

“Nobody knows for sure,” Dr. Evans conceded.

Changing the subject, I asked, “May I make an observation?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t want to come down here, did you?” I asked. “It was easy to see. But you seem a little better now.”

Dr. Evans nodded. “Seventeen of the volunteers haven’t shown any signs of the virus yet.”

“Meaning?”

“I hate to venture a guess,” said Dr. Evans, “I’m hopeful. After all of the volunteers in the first two groups died, I was afraid that we were making a big mistake. But with seventeen showing no symptoms eighteen hours after exposure, it’s a positive sign.”

“So Steph might make it?” I asked.

“Don’t get your hopes up unrealistically.”

“I’m learning new degrees of pessimism every day,” I said, “but I do know that good things can happen, even with everything that’s going on. Hoping that Steph or any of these other people will be okay isn’t the same as believing they will be.”

Dr. Evans gave me a half-dozen nods, I guess to emphasize his agreement. “We’re on the same page, then. I don’t know if Steph will make it, but I’m sure some of the seventeen will. At least for me, that was more hope than I came down here with. Let me ask you, Zed. Now that you’re here, are you staying?”

“No.” Through all the morning’s blood and despair, I’d chosen a path to my hope, and my own hope lay with those that desperate, shared struggle had bonded to me, my new family, Murphy, Mandi, and Russell. “I have people to get back to.”

“Leaving will be harder than coming,” said Evans.

“I don’t know.” I half smiled. “Coming was pretty hard.”

“Yes, I guess it was.” Dr. Evans caught a little bit of a smile himself.

“Listen,” I said, “after you finish your experiment with the volunteers, get up on the top floor, stay quiet, and don’t let the infected see you. Eventually, they’ll leave you alone.”

“I appreciate the advice,” said Dr. Evans, “and we may do just that, but please do talk to Sergeant Dalhover. He has some opinions about the behavior of the infected that you might find interesting.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I’m not in agreement, so it would be better if he explained his position.”

“Okay,” I said. “Listen, after I get out of here, I’ll try and find a way to get back in contact with you. My buddy and I are both Slow Burns; we can move among them without too much danger. We may be able to help you if you start running low on supplies.”

“Why don’t you both join us?”

I stifled a sarcastic laugh, “We haven’t had much luck with the uninfected so far.”

Dr. Evans put a fatherly, trusting hand on my shoulder. “You won’t have any problems here. I know you’re not a danger.”

“You’re the first.”

Chapter 10

With a small Styrofoam pitcher full of water—the kind put on the bed trays of patients—along with a few single-serving containers of applesauce, I sat on a chair by Steph while I waited for Dalhover to finish his rounds.

“You should eat some of this applesauce,” I said, holding a plastic spoonful up to her mouth.

She shook her head. “I may still turn. The food shouldn’t be wasted on me.”

“Drink some water at least,” I prodded.

After enough convincing, she finally did.

“Dalhover hasn’t shot anybody, and he’s almost done,” I said. “Is that a positive sign?

Steph shook her head, “I count seven or eight that are acting out. I’m surprised he didn’t shoot them. Maybe he doesn’t feel comfortable doing it while you’re here.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Who knows? Maybe it’s guilt. He probably feels bad enough doing it already, and having a stranger watch him do it makes it too hard, too monstrous.”

“How long have you been a nurse?” I asked.

“That’s a change of subject,” Steph smiled.

“Just curious,” I said.

“Seven years.”

“Really?” I hadn’t expected that number.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Ah…I was gonna say that that would make you thirty or thirty one…”

“Thanks,” Steph said insincerely.

“But you don’t look that old,” I said. “I mean, you seem mature but you look like you’re in your mid-twenties.”

“Mature?”

I shrugged as I fished for the right words. “Confident. Strong. Not hung up in pretending you are or aren’t something. Like back in the triage tent. You seemed in control. That was a crazy night, and everything could have fallen apart so much faster than I guess it eventually did. But you’re one of those people who’s kind of like a rock in a storm. It calms the people around you.”

Steph smiled and almost laughed, “That’s the nicest I’ve heard it said.”

“What’s that?”

Steph nodded over at Jeff, “He says I have a stick up my ass all the time.”

It was my turn for muted laughter.

“Thanks,” she said, sarcastically, again.

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve been told the same thing. Apparently I’m a bit uptight.”

Steph looked off to my right, and I followed her gazed to see Dalhover’s sour face looking down on me. “Oh, I didn’t hear you come up.”

Dalhover, of course, said nothing, but simply waited for me to proceed.

I said, “Dr. Evans asked me to talk to you about your tactics with the infected.”

“Okay,” Dalhover responded, as though the word took more effort than he had energy for.

“Okay,” I parroted, for no other reason than to be a dick. “My experience with the infected is different than yours, but when I’ve been trapped with people, kind of like you guys are here, I found that if I remained hidden and stayed quiet, they forget about me. They’re not smart. They don’t have long attention spans. They eventually go away.” I didn’t want to tell Dalhover outright that they were dealing with the infected all together incorrectly but it needed to be said. “Whenever people out there fire a gun, start up a car, or even start talking too loud, the infected hear and they swarm to the source. Every time. They know what sounds to associate with normal people. Whenever you fire a gun, it’s like ringing a bell for Pavlov’s dog.”

Dalhover’s flat expression didn’t change. He just looked at me.

I looked back and unsuccessfully tried to gesture a response out of him.

Nothing.

I got a little irritated. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Dalhover paused just long enough to hint at rudeness and said, “Yes.”

I decided to be blunt. “Do you think maybe you should change your tactics then? Maybe hide out here? Maybe give yourselves a chance?”

“No.”

“What?” The volume of my voice shot up a few notches.

“Zed,” Steph said, trying to defuse my rising temper.

“Why?” I asked Dalhover. “Why stick with what you’re doing when you know it’s not working?”

Over Dalhover’s shoulder, one of the soldiers was starting to fidget with his gun and look around. He was clearly uncomfortable with the tone of the conversation.

Dalhover decided to speak. “When Evans asked you to talk with me, did you think that you’d just tell me how it was because you’re the only one who knows anything about killing the infected? Or did he want us to share what we both know?”

“Well…” I started, immediately on the defensive.

Steph cut in. “Zed, listen to Sergeant Dalhover. Maybe with what he knows and what you know, you might figure out some more things about the infected.”

I wanted to protest and tell them I knew all the important things there were to know, but I didn’t. As much as I thought it was true, it also felt a lot like arrogance, which meant that’s probably what it was. So I nodded and tried my best to sound sincere. “I’m sorry, Sergeant Dalhover. I’d like to hear what you know about fighting them.”

Dalhover stared at me for another length of time that bordered on rudeness before his rusty voice said, “Everything you said is right, but you’ve missed the most important point.”

I jumped in with, “The emergent behavior.”

“What?” Dalhover asked, either surprised or not understanding a word outside of his vocabulary.

“Ah, how they follow each other around and stuff,” I explained.

“That’s part of it.” Dalhover told me. “Call that whatever you want. For some reason, they like to mimic. The part that’ll get you killed though, and I mean you because you think you already seem know everything, except this one thing, are the Smart Ones.”

“The Smart Ones?” I asked, my tone dripping with disbelief.

“Zed,” Steph cut in again, “the virus doesn’t have the same effect on everybody. Mostly it turns people into… into them.”

“The Whites,” I said.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “But there are others, well, like you. You’re fine. Normal. But there are lots in between with different levels of brain function.”

Like Russell, I thought. Then I recalled that Jerome had said something about it on that first night, but I’d taken to assuming that so much of what he’d said was just bullshit to sell his CDC lie.

“Between attacks,” said Dalhover, “I watch them out the windows. I see what they do down there in the grass. The Smart Ones go down there and walk around until they get a bunch of infected following them. Then they lead them up here to attack us. So we shoot as many as we can, but the Smart Ones are goddamned good at getting away. I keep seeing the same damn Smart Ones down there in the grass, rounding up herds of the dumb ones to do the dirty work.”

I shook my head. “But why? Why would they do that?”

“I think that some of them are like the criminally insane,” said Steph. “I don’t think there’s any way to explain their actions in a rational way. For some reason, some of the Smart Ones have decided that they need to attack us up here and that’s what they do.”

“That’s why hiding and staying quiet won’t work,” Dalhover told me. “They’ll come anyway. We have to fight them off.”

I didn’t want to believe it because it added a whole new dimension to the problem of dealing with the infected, a much more dangerous dimension. “You guys need to get out of here. We need to get you to a safer place.”

“Where would we go?” asked Steph.

Dalhover asked, “Where is this safer place?”

I was at a complete loss on that answer, and my silence let that be known. Finally, I admitted, “I don’t know. But listen, my buddy Murphy, he’s a slow burn, like me. Maybe there’s something we can figure out together to help you guys out a little. Hell, maybe he and I together can get one of those Humvees with a fifty cal on the top and drive by and do strafing runs and kill a bunch of them off for you. Fewer you’ll have to deal with up here, that way.”

Dalhover’s face grew darker and more disappointed, “Like you said, Zane, every shot draws more of them in. For every one you shoot, the noise will bring two. Hell, all that noise you made shooting the place up will probably bring in every infected within a mile.”

Shit. He was right. I’d very likely done more harm than good with my stupid Rambo stunt. My eyes fell to the floor and my heart sank.

Guilt.

Chapter 11

The glass-walled stairwell that I’d shot up had refilled with infected from the streets below, effectively ruining my chance to exit the hospital by the way I’d come in. That’s why Dalhover and I were in a short stub of a hall, just long enough for the bank of four elevators, with two doors on one wall behind us and two in front.

Dalhover said, “This is where I was going to get out after everybody died.”

“Was?” I asked.

“They won’t all die,” he said. “Some of them will be immune like me and the colonel.”

“So you’ll stay with the group, then?” I asked.

Dalhover nodded and grunted an affirmation.

I told him, “I’ll try and round up some radios or something and get you one so we can keep in contact.”

“Yeah.” Dalhover’s listless tone of voice verged on pissing me off, until it occurred to me that his complete lack of non-verbal communication made his words something of a Rorschach test, and I might be reading too many of my own emotions into it.  Which begged the question, why was I pissed off? Steph was alive and probably immune. I was happy about that. The situation in the hospital was deteriorating, but stable enough for the time being. Could it be jealousy over Steph and Jeff? I had to ask myself if I really was that immature.

I didn’t bother to answer.

I put a hand on the seam between the sliding elevator doors for no reason other than to turn my attention away from Dalhover.

He hefted a long crowbar that he’d gotten from who knew where and said, “The last time I had the doors open, the elevators were all down around the first or second floor. The shafts were clear. There’s a maintenance ladder over here on the right-hand wall of the shaft. You’ll have to hold on to the conduit and metal supports on the wall and climb around to it.”

“Too far to reach, huh?” I asked.

“It’s a six- or seven-foot gap over a hundred-and-twenty foot drop. You could jump it if you wanted to.” The barest smidgen of a smile crossed Dalhover’s face.

“My balls aren’t that big,” I told him. “I was always good on the monkey bars as a kid. I’ll climb it.”

Dalhover slipped the business end of the crowbar in the seam between the elevator doors and pried back and forth to create a gap.

I stepped back to give him room to work.

He got his fingers in the gap, handed me the crowbar, and then used both hands to pull the doors open.

As the narrow gap expanded from one inch to two, then suddenly a dozen, several sets of white fingers wrapped around the doors’ edges from the inside out. That took us both by surprise.

Dalhover lost his balance and fell back.

Infected howls poured through the gap as hands pushed the doors all the way open.

The dark interior walls of the shaft were crawling with Whites.

“Shit.” I drew my machete as a white face popped out past the door and looked down at Dalhover.

I jumped over and hacked, cutting a diagonal chasm across its face. Blood erupted from the wound along with an enraged scream that followed the White as it fell back into the shaft.

Dalhover yelled something, but my focus was on another White trying to climb out on the far side of the doorway. I swung the machete in an arc to the right and cleaved the infected’s hand between the fingers. The hand lost its grip and gravity pulled him down the shaft.

Howling swelled up from the bottom. The frenzy was on.

A pair of feet dangled down from the top edge of the elevator doorway. I hacked across the ankle and blood poured out.

Two heads came up from below. Neither survived long enough to get more than an arm through the door. I felt confident for about two seconds, believing that I could hold them off with the machete while Dalhover figured out how to fix the problem we’d just created. Movement to my left snuffed the life out of that line of thinking.

After seeing the first elevator door slide open, I guessed that the infected had enough brain capacity to apply that same solution to opening the second set of doors in the two-elevator wide shaft. Machete time was over.

“God damned Smart Ones,” Dalhover groused. He fired the first shots, hitting the Whites squirming through the gap between the other set of doors.

“They’ll be coming through all of the elevator doors on these shafts now.” Dalhover shouted with the decisive authority of a man who’d been listened to his whole life. “The two floors above will get ambushed.”

I grabbed my last hand grenade, pulled the pin, got as close to the elevator door as I dared, and tossed it underhand up into the shaft above.

Sergeant Dalhover understood immediately my intent and the risk of it. He was already scampering away from the elevator bank when I turned to follow. I had nothing by which to gauge where in the shaft the grenade would detonate. I only knew that I didn’t want to be standing in front of the open elevator door if it happened there on its fall back down. I ran after Dalhover and just made it around the corner when the blast reverberated through the halls. Sergeant Dalhover and I immediately spun on our heels to go back.

“I’ll hold them at the elevators as long as I can,” he shouted at me before we started to move. “You need to warn them upstairs. The Smart Ones will be coming through the elevators.”

I sprinted back toward the nurse’s station. The halls seemed to narrow and enhance my sensation of speed. I felt like I was flying, which was exactly what I needed to be doing.

Behind me, Dalhover’s rifle fired.

At the T-intersection with the main hall, I looked right and left. The guards that had been at each end were running at full speed toward me and were close.

“The infected are in the elevator shafts,” I shouted. “They’ve figured out how to open the doors.” I pointed at one of them. “You, run upstairs and warn them.”  I pointed at the other. “You, go help Dalhover.”

“What about them?” a guard asked, pointing at the volunteers as he moved.

“Go,” I commanded.

Both soldiers ran.

Up and down the hall, the volunteers that still had the mental capacity for it understood that danger was on the way and they were struggling against their bonds. The experiment was over. I ran at full speed down to Steph.

“What’s happening?” Jeff asked, conscious again.

“Zed?” Steph’s eyes were wide with terror.

I drew my knife and quickly cut her loose. I jumped over and proceeded to cut Jeff loose. As soon as his hands were free, I gave him the knife and told him, “Go cut loose anyone who’s not symptomatic.”

I turned and pushed my Glock into Steph’s hand. “Can you use this?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out four magazines and put them in her lap as I very urgently told her, “They’re coming in the through the elevator shafts. Take everybody upstairs to twelve.” Without another word, I ran back toward the sound of gunfire.

“Zed.” I heard Steph’s voice behind me. “Zed.”

I ran on. There was nothing more to say.

I rounded the nurse’s station and slid to a stop as the gunfire suddenly ceased. A half-second later, Sergeant Dalhover ran out of the short hall between the elevators. Five steps behind him, an infected man rounded the corner, screaming and grasping.

I dropped to a knee and aimed my M4.

Two more infected followed.

Dalhover ran right at me, and in his face I finally saw emotion. Fear.

Pointing my rifle at his chest, I yelled, “Duck.”

He took two steps to comprehend, then chose to trust me. He hit the floor like he was sliding into second base.

As soon as his body fell out of my sights, I fired a three-round burst at the infected man who’d been on his heels. His chest exploded in red and he lurched to the side. I fired again and again at the other two, and enough of my bullets hit flesh. Faster than I thought possible, Dalhover was back on his feet and hugging the wall as he ran toward me.

More infected ran out of the elevator bank. Five, seven, ten…

Oh, shit.

Dalhover took up a position on the opposite side of the hall and brought his weapon to bear. “The elevator shafts were full of ‘em.” He fired. “We won’t be able to hold ’em.”

There were at least a dozen dead or dying in the hall and another ten or twelve stumbling over the bodies of the fallen. They were coming around the corner faster than Dalhover and I could kill them.

“We need to retreat to twelve,” Dalhover yelled to me.

I leaned back and peeked up and down the hall full of volunteers. Five or six people were on their feet, two helping Steph to get someone free, the others running for the stairwell.

“Not yet,” I hollered. “We need a few minutes.”

“What?” Dalhover was livid. He jumped to his feet and stepped back into the main hall. He looked up and down then paused, red-faced with rage or urgency, I didn’t know. But without another word, he returned to his kneeling position and fired.

We were killing and killing and killing, but the infected were advancing. I wished I still had those two other grenades. We didn’t have a few minutes. I yelled back up the hall, “Steph. Jeff. You’re almost out of time.”

Dalhover dropped a magazine to the floor and reloaded with enviable speed. “Last mag.”

I ran a hand across my vest, pulled out a few, and flung them across to him.

He gave me a nod. I emptied another magazine, filling the hall with screams, before I paused to reload. As soon as the magazine clicked in, I looked back around the corner. Steph and five others were running toward me. The stairwell was just to my right around the corner. I yelled, “Dalhover, they’re coming. Go when you’re ready.”

Dalhover jumped across the hall and got right in my ear. “Go into the stairwell and yell. I’ve got two men manning the barricade five floors down. Make ‘em run. We have to hold the stairwell door until they get upstairs or they’re dead.”

I was around the corner in half a second and through the door. I screamed down the stairwell. “Hey. Hey.”

“Almost there,” an out-of-breath voice called from a floor below.

Steph and the other volunteers poured through the door, and I directed them upstairs before stepping back out into the hall to support Sergeant Dalhover. The infected were less than twenty feet away. I fired rounds as fast as they would pour out of the rifle, then dropped my magazine and started on another as soon as I loaded it.

I only had three full magazines left in my vest, one hundred and twenty rounds, less those flying from my barrel. I was on the verge of panic.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

The mantra calmed me. I thought clearly. The situation appeared to have only one end, but that wasn’t true. I was not going to die in this fucking hospital. With seventy people still tied to chairs in some state of fever or infection, the mass of our pursuers was likely to take pause on the tenth floor to gorge themselves on the unlucky before refocusing on us.

I felt no emotional attachment to the seventy lives I’d just clicked off. The infected volunteers were going to die anyway. At least their lives could be traded for time.

“Give me twenty seconds and get your ass in the stairwell,” I shouted, not out of fear now, but out of necessity.

In the blink of an eye, I was out of my firing position and bounding to the other end to the nurse’s station. I grasped the cold steel end of a gurney and wheeled it toward the stairway door.

The gurney smashed into the door, and Dalhover gave me a glance. I ran around, turned the handle and wrestled the wide gurney through the door.

Twenty seconds had passed. Dalhover was still firing. The gurney was heavier and more unwieldy than I’d hoped. But having pushed it through the door, I shouted to Dalhover to come as I manhandled it up the stairs to clear the swing of the door.

A second later, Dalhover squeezed past the door into the stairwell and I slammed the gurney back into it, turning it over, jamming it between the door and second step up. A second later, the infected hit the door from the other side. The door rattled. The gurney jiggled, but only slid far enough for the door to open an inch or two.

Dalhover climbed up over the gurney to the stairs beside me. “Good thinking.”

A different kind of whooping and yelling came through the door as the Whites noticed the bounty of living flesh tied to the chairs in the hall.

Seventy lives traded for time. Time would save lives that still had a chance.

I felt shame, but shoved it into a dark place for later, guilty rumination.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Dalhover peeked down the stairwell between the rails. “Anybody else down there?”

No human answer came, but the infected below were screaming and tearing at the barricade five floors down.

“Let’s go.” Dalhover ran up the steps and I followed. “If things are this bad on twelve, we’re done.”

Chapter 12

At the last flight of stairs, we passed two soldiers with grim looks on their faces and their weapons pointed down. Several of the hospital staff were starting to build a new barricade at the top of the stairs using chairs, beds, and pieces of equipment I couldn’t identify.

As soon as we exited the stairwell and stepped into the hall, I heard gunfire blasting from down near the elevators.

The battle for twelve was already on.

Dr. Evans was standing at the nurse’s station where he had a view of all three wings. He was pointing to a couple of the staff and giving them instructions.

Dalhover and I ran up beside him as the two staff members hustled off. To Dr. Evans, Dalhover said, “Colonel, ten is overrun. Zed cut the staff loose that weren’t symptomatic yet.”

Like a meth addict, my adrenaline rush had my attention blazing on overload and I couldn’t stand still. I noticed Jeff Aubrey, pale and unconscious again in a chair behind the nurse’s station. When he next awoke, he’d be one of the infected. We would need to deal with that.

Dr. Evans told Dalhover, “We’ve got everyone off of eleven. We’ve got six men at the elevator bank keeping them back, but all four doors are open. There’s no activity on the exterior stairway yet, but that will change with all of the commotion. You saw that we’re trying to seal off this stairway.  I think there are twenty-six of us now, but I’m not positive on the count. Half military, half infected hospital staff.”

Already bored with Evans’ status report, having deduced that much two seconds after I came out of the stairwell, I was watching the nurses and other doctors running in and out of rooms, gathering equipment. It was urgent, but organized, controlled. I didn’t see Steph among them.

“We’re setting up a fallback barricade on the north wing,” Dr. Evans said.

Fallback, fallback, fallback?

“No.” I didn’t shout it. I just said it.

Dalhover and Evans stopped, surprised, and looked at me.

“No?” Evans asked.

I spoke quickly, but not in panic. “Dalhover’s right about the Smart Ones. Some of them are trying to work cooperatively. The fact that the other elevator shaft is now open proves that. They must have opened it. They’re able to find the weaknesses in your defenses. It’s obvious that hiding here won’t end well. If we don’t escape, we’ll die.”

“Escape is suicide,” Dr. Evans disagreed.

Without a moment of hesitation, Dalhover nodded his head at me and said, “He’s right.”

Dr. Evans shrank and sagged back into the man I’d first met two hours before. That’s what despair looked like. Weakly, he asked, “How?”

Dalhover said, “We’ve probably got some time while the infected are on ten. We’ll have to figure something out and then take a chance. Some of us are bound to make it.”

Dr. Evans shook his head, not at us, but more at himself and some internal dialogue.

“We’ll go with Dalhover’s escape plan,” I said. “We’re going down the elevator shafts.”

Dalhover’s droopy, apathetic eyes found another new expression when they looked at me. The expression said, “Dumbass.”

Chapter 13

It was a suck plan, but our choices were sucky or shitty. You take what you can get.

Thirty minutes after my arrival on the twelfth floor, the flow of infected climbing up out of the elevator shafts had slowed to a trickle. Most were exiting on the tenth floor, drawn by the ecstatic howls advertising the feast below. I peeked down both shafts to confirm that. There was light coming in from some open doors twelve floors down and light from the open doors near the top, but most of the shaft was hidden in deep shadow. Any part of the walls illuminated with dispersed light was covered with fearless white climbers. The bottoms of both shafts were covered with dead Whites and those among the infected who were happy to eat their own.

Having done my final check of the shafts, I hurried back around the corner to where everyone and everything was staged. Dr. Evans and Sergeant Dalhover looked at me with expectant eyes. “Last chance guys. Are we doing this? If not, I’ll go out by myself or with whoever else wants to chance it.”

“I don’t expect more than half of us to make it, and that’s if we get lucky,” Dr. Evans said. He was back to being detached, efficient Evans. His analysis was probably right.

I looked at Dalhover. In his flat, gravelly voice he said, “Everybody’s in. They all see where this is going to end if we stay.”

“Then we run for it.” I pasted on my best fake smile. “Running has worked for me more times than I can count.”

Dr. Evans turned to the survivors arrayed by the wheeled hospital beds up the hall. He yelled, “Does everyone know what to do?”

Only silent, stern faces looked back. Heads nodded.

I looked for Steph’s face in the hall. Our eyes met. Hers were red from crying over Jeff. She wouldn’t allow anyone to shoot him, and she wouldn’t leave him at the nurse’s station. I’d given her a hand moving him into a small storage room near the end of the main hall. She locked the door from the inside and left him there. Sure, there was a chance he’d awaken in a day or two as a slow burn, like me, but…

“If anyone gets separated from the group, you’re on your own,” Dr. Evans said. “We can’t go back and look for you. We’ll have to presume you’re dead. Stay together.”

No response from the group. No questions.

We all stood in an awkward moment of silence, readying ourselves to rush into death’s greedy maw.

Dalhover’s gruff voice snapped everyone’s attention forward, not because it carried, but because they were used to listening to it and he was used to their listening. “This ain’t gonna be a pep talk, but soldiers, listen up. I don’t know if any of us will make it out of here, but these civilians volunteered to get infected. They’re probably all immune or they’d be dead down on ten right now. These civilians have a chance. Most of you don’t. Some of you may be immune, but the truth is that most of you will probably be infected and dead by the end of the week. You know that as well as I do. When we run outta here, I’m not telling you to sacrifice yourself for the civilians. I’m just tellin’ you to keep that in mind. If we get in a bad situation, remember why you put on that uniform. Be soldiers.”

Dalhover didn’t waste any time waiting for acceptance, agreement, or even a smile or a nod. He headed for the elevator shafts.

Dr. Evans looked around. He watched Sergeant Dalhover go, then looked at me. “Ready?”

I nodded.

Dr. Evans yelled, “Good luck and God bless. Let’s go.”

Hospital beds, gurneys stacked with computers, patient monitors, chairs, rolling cabinets, anything with wheels or any heavy object that could be piled on top were rolled toward the elevator bank.

Down at the corner by the elevators, Dalhover and I stood out of the way and watched as the soldiers guided each piece of heavy equipment into one each of the four open elevator doors. Each piece bounced down the shaft, making a hell of a noise, scrubbing the climbing infected from the walls, and hitting the bottom with the sound of a grenade explosion.

And more equipment followed.

The sound of automatic gunfire from far around the corner confirmed that the diversion had started. Three of the soldiers stood at the top of the exterior stairwell and fired at the hordes of infected who were either still on top of the garage or below on the west side of the hospital grounds.

If that worked, many of the Whites still outside would be drawn to that side of the hospital to feed on the dead.

A steady flow of beds rounded the corner and quickly disappeared down the shafts.

Fifteen minutes in the gunfire had stopped. Those soldiers handling the diversion secured the door and had come into the hall on rearguard duty.

A guy by the one of the shafts yelled, “Clear. I think.”

I ran over and stuck my head through the open elevator door. A single bald, white head leaned through the door on the tenth floor, looking up at me. There was no light coming from the bottom of the shaft. It was clogged with a thick tangle of stainless steel, hospital bedding, shattered equipment, and shattered white bodies, at least that’s what I imagined. It was black. On the parts of the walls I could see in the light coming through our open doors, there were no climbers. I hoped that no more would be able to make it up through the jumble at the bottom. Only those on ten would be a problem.

It was time to do or die, run or cry. I looked at Sergeant Dalhover and he gave me a nod. The two soldiers that I’d first met guarding the door to the exterior stairwell stood ready, along with a third, to follow me down.

Two deep breaths and I reached into the shaft, grabbed a sturdy piece of conduit, and swung a leg out over the chasm to find footing on the wall. I spider-crawled sideways, grabbing onto anything that looked like it would hold my weight. The three men followed me.

Sergeant Dalhover and three other soldiers were in the shaft across the hall doing the same.

After a frightfully long time that in reality couldn’t have been more than a minute, I put one bandaged, slippery hand on a rung of the service ladder and thanked God, though I don’t know why.

My feet found the rungs below and I wasted no time in working my way down to make room for the following soldiers. Moments later, I was down to the tenth floor, but well beyond the reach of rapacious hands.

Looking to solve that problem, a bold White leaned far out into the shaft and focused on the meals coming down the ladder. A moment later, a computer monitor crushed his head as it fell from above, dragging his big white body into the chasm. More infected were there behind him but it wasn’t my job to deal with them. That was for the three men above—soldiers to spread out on the walls around ten, opposite the elevator doors. They had side arms, and their job was to keep the infected focused on this shaft, another diversion.

I hurried down into the darkness, hoping nothing waited for me down there on the wall or the ladder.

The floor numbers were sloppily spray painted in large numerals on the concrete walls of the shaft beside each set of elevator doors. I had just passed the seventh and was barely able to make it out in the darkness when a white body and another piece of equipment crashed down not two feet away from me.

Gunshots echoed down through the shaft.

Two more bodies fell.

I passed the sixth floor. A computer monitor, terrifyingly close, whooshed by and crashed into the pile of medical equipment and bodies below.

Only two floors to go.

But I was in the blackness now, feeling my way down the ladder, pausing between labored breaths and listening for the sound of a White. The air was full of sound seeping through the walls from outside, echoing down from above and up from below. From down there, the sounds were of dying Whites, wrenched in the broken equipment at the bottom of the shaft. Or if my luck had turned to shit, it was the labored breathing of Whites climbing up out of the darkness toward me.

I hurried as fast as my bandaged hands allowed.

A very faint seam of light outlined the edges of a set of elevator doors. That was five.

More gunfire.

Another body.

I was breathing heavily from the exertion. My arms and hands were stiff.

Four.

I hollered up, “I’m here. Don’t drop anything else.”

I worked my way off the ladder and onto a thin metal support attached to the wall, wide enough for only my toes. I grabbed conduit and pieces of metal framework and went as swiftly as I could.

More gunfire from above. I pressed myself to the wall, in case a flailing infected body was coming.

More gunfire.

“Damn. I just need another minute.”

A body brushed me as it fell past.

“Fuck.”

“You all right?” a voice called from above.

“I’m good.” My hands were shaking. I was breathing a lot more rapidly than necessary.

Calm down. I have to do this. I have to.

Necessity pushed caution aside. The longer I stayed on the wall of the shaft, the more likely it was that I would die at the bottom. I grabbed hurriedly with my hands and shuffled my feet. I slipped, almost fell, but recovered.

In seconds, I was in position beside the door.

I drew my machete, reached across the smooth, stainless steel width of the door, jammed it into the seam, and pried.

A gap appeared.

Light.

I looked around me. There were smears of blood on the wall. Bits of scalp here and there where sharp edges of the supporting steel framework stuck out an inch or two into the shaft. And below me, nothing moved on the walls, but the dying moans from the white bodies crammed into the broken equipment drew me to look down. That was an image queued up for repression. I turned away quickly.

I wiggled, pried, and pushed.

The doors parted, then slid apart. I adjusted my footing and my grip so that I could avoid the sliding door, then I stopped and listened.

I heard howling. I heard gunfire. I heard screams, but I didn’t hear or see anything on the fourth floor.

Luck?

I climbed past the door to where I could peek into the hall through the gap between the doors. Two infected squatted in the hall between the elevators, looking at me as curiously as I was looking at them.

None of us made any aggressive moves, but the Whites looked around at the ceiling, the walls, and the closed elevator doors. Sound was everywhere and they were trying to identify a source they could get to. The elevator doors across the hall seemed to be piquing their interest the most.

I climbed out of the shaft and planted my feet firmly on the floor. With my machete in hand, ready to do the necessary work, I reached down for my Glock as a backup. It wasn’t there, and I recalled that I had given it to Steph. A curse was on my lips, but I felt better with her having it. She needed at least one weapon.

With both infected facing away from me for the moment, killing the first was easy. I swung hard at the back of her neck, severed her spine, and she crumbled. Blood spewed across the waxed floor. The other infected looked down at his partner rather than over at me. He seemed transfixed by the glossy, pooling blood. When he did see the blade of my machete swinging toward his throat, he tried vainly to block the blow but lost all the fingers on his right hand. The blade gashed his neck open anyway.

But he wasn’t dead.

His bloody, fingerless hand reached out for me. His mouth opened and closed, trying to scream or bite. I jumped back and he fell on his face, adding his blood to the pool on the floor.

I stepped over to the elevator door through which I’d come and waved up the shaft, holding out four fingers.

From above, a voice yelled, “Four.”

More gunfire followed.

I crossed the hall, jammed my machete into the seam between the elevator doors, and in moments I had them pried apart. Sergeant Dalhover was on the service ladder, looking back at me. I leaned in and looked up the ladder. It was full of our people. I didn’t look down to see if we’d lost any in their attempts to climb around the wall and make it over to the ladder. That was useless information that only held bad memories and nightmares.

Dalhover worked his way around the wall with the athleticism of a spider monkey, and within seconds was standing on the floor beside me.

“Any trouble on ten?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The diversion is working, but we lost one. She slipped and fell trying to get to the ladder.” Dalhover read the question on my face. “It wasn’t Nurse Leonard.”

“I’ll clear this floor while you get everyone out.”

Dalhover looked down at the two dead.

“There may be more.” I shrugged as though I needed to provide some kind of excuse for the two dead Whites. Intellectually, I knew they were murderous cannibals, but they looked as human as me. Some emotional artifacts of morality are hard to slough off.

I took off at a jog around the corner, peering into any open door, looking for movement. Closed doors I left alone.

Chapter 14

Five more infected on the fourth floor died under my blade by the time I rendezvoused with the group at the elevator bank.

Twenty or thirty of us stood close, shuffling nervously, pointing weapons up and down the hall.

A soldier was firing his pistol up the elevator shaft that I’d come down. I was wishing he wouldn’t, but he knew the risks as well as I did. A scream echoed out of the shaft and the soldier jumped back. The now-familiar sound of bodies crashing into the medical equipment below drew every eye to the door. The soldier anxiously frowned and said, “They’re coming down the shaft.”

Dalhover asked, “McWilliams, Cook?”

The soldier shook his head.

Two more dead.

Dr. Evans looked at me.

I knew my part. I was the scout. The infected didn’t see me as a meal or a threat, mostly, so it made sense. I took off at a run. One of the soldiers followed thirty or forty feet behind.

The breezeway to the children’s hospital building was angled off of the main hall, so I could see more and more of its length as I ran on. Through the glass walls of the breezeway, I saw down to the eight-lane highway that ran past the other side of the children’s hospital. It was clogged with cars and littered with human remains. East Austin was visible in the distance with its demarcation of charred black to the north and lucky, impoverished neighborhoods to the south.

Bodies in various states of consumption lay in the hall. Equipment was scattered among bits of medical supplies.

Dead soldiers. Yes.

I chastised myself for the moment of excitement. They weren’t just potential sources of ammunition and weapons. I had to remember that the soldiers had been people, too. Or maybe it was better that I didn’t.

I scrounged some magazines that seemed full and left the rest for those following behind. Though the evidence kept suggesting otherwise, it was hard to let go of the action-movie truism that more weapons in more good guy hands was a good thing.

I ran out onto the breezeway. The sun glared through the glass walls, casting painful reflections off of the gleaming floor. Other than the remnants of a barricade, there wasn’t much of anything in the breezeway: the remains of some bodies marked by their scattered detritus, brass bullet casings, and blood on the glass. It was disturbingly beautiful translucent red in the sun’s brilliance, hand prints smeared in long arcs from eye level to floor, sprays where severed arteries emptied. But lower, chest height and down, the blood was smudged into nothingness. That caught my attention. It occurred to me that it had been licked off of the glass.

Could it get any worse?

Gunshots from far behind urged us both forward. The infected from upstairs in the other building were coming down.

But there was motion ahead.

I raised a hand to signal the soldier following me to slow.

Down at the end of the breezeway, at the entrance to the children’s hospital, infected were feeding on the dead. As I moved closer, I counted seven heads bobbing up and down, tearing back and forth, grinding their teeth into the flesh of the corpses. I paused and almost stumbled.

The feeding infected were all children, white and skinny, in hospital gowns. One child looked up at me with wispy strands of hair over a bald head, dark circles under sunken eyes. That kid must have had cancer when the virus claimed him. Another face popped up, sallow cheeks smeared in blood, chewing teeth working on a stringy strand of muscle.

There were so few children among the infected that it was a surprise to see these. Children were slow, weak, and naïve; natural victims and easy prey. Of course there weren’t that many.

With the eyes of children, not beasts, they watched me approach, curious and innocent, innocent with mouths dripping the clotting blood of the dead.

They all needed to die, and I needed to kill them.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

As I got close, the wispy-haired cancer kid sat up on his heels and waited for me. With as much self-hate as I’d ever felt, I hauled my blade back and swung it around. He didn’t move. Like a young Russell, he just watched the blade arc toward his tiny skull, which nearly exploded as the machete tore through fragile bone. For the second time in a day, and perhaps just the second time since I was twelve, I wanted to cry.

A girl of eleven or twelve with long blond hair squatted beside the boy, blinking bits of his brain matter out of her eyes when my backhand swing severed her thin neck with little resistance. Her blond hair whipped across my eyes as her head spun into the air. A splash of her arterial blood splattered my face and open mouth. I wailed.

Another girl, maybe five, rolled over, grabbed my left foot, and tried to bite through my boot. I dropped to a knee and felt bones crunch as my weight came down her. She was coughing blood and trying vainly to move her arms when I slashed a dark-haired boy who’d figured out that I was a threat.

The last three children were coming at me by then and I hacked wildly at grasping hands, tiny arms, and vicious little teeth. It only took a few seconds and they were all down. I froze in a ready position, breathing heavily between the blood-splattered windows and dripping ceiling, hacked limbs and severed heads at my feet. Disgusted by the taste, I spit what felt like a mouthful of the blond girl’s blood onto the floor.

One child’s body jerked, headless on the floor, not yet all the way dead. The broken girl still coughed up blood as she cried and lolled her head, but wasn’t able to do more.

I looked back to the other end of the breezeway. The soldier’s expression was hard to read in the distance, but his mouth was hanging open, his arms dangling at his sides. He’d been as horrified watching as I’d been in the doing.

But it was necessary. Of course it was necessary.

It had to be necessary.

I felt like a monster.

A loathsome, shame-filled monster.

Move. Move.

Breathe.

Don’t think about it.

The hallway at the end of the breezeway split to the left and right into the children’s hospital. I pointed left and waited for a confirming nod from the still frozen soldier before moving cautiously ahead.

Rounding the corner, I was confronted by a thin girl of about thirteen with heavily bandaged arms. Further down the hall was a boy of a similar size. Behind me in the hall, leading in the other direction, a girl of four or five sat by the wall, gnawing on something.

Please, God, let this be all of them.

The thin girl with the bandages charged.

I turned away from the little gnawing one and hacked down with my machete. The blade tore through the thin girl’s collarbone and into her chest, lodging in her rib cage. I cursed myself for having notched the blade when I’d vented my frustration on the car earlier that morning. Deep red blood gushed from her mouth, and she coughed a wicked scream as she sank to the floor.

The patter of small feet and an asthmatic wheeze came from behind me. I spun and kicked the gnawing little girl hard under the jaw. Her head snapped back and she dropped to the floor, wide-eyed and bloody-mouthed, but motionless.

For the first time in my life, I wished the Harpy's harsh words and the Ogre's menacing fists had finished their work and beaten all of the humanity out of me when they had the chance.

Ill-prepared to bear the grinding of bone on metal, I placed a boot on the thin girl’s chest and wrestled my machete loose, freeing her blood to roll across the shiny floor. Up the hall, the gangly brown-haired boy stood, frozen and staring with a familiar blankness on his face, a blankness that wouldn’t last.

With dripping machete in hand, I ran at him, intent on chopping that accusatory blankness away. And he did nothing but watch as I hacked him down.

Once on the floor, he was just a pale skinned child, staring and silent. Blood oozed out of fresh wounds, capillary action pulling it into florid red blossoms on his hospital gown, gluing the gown to his bony ribs as it dampened. His mouth worked slowly, as if trying to tell me something important, but no words came, only burbles of blood and spit that splattered up in a little fountain driven by his dying breaths, staining his face with pain as it rained back down and flowed into his brown hair.

His eyes looked up at me for many long, accusing seconds before they glassed over with death.

His brilliant red blood crept across the floor in a sadly feeble attempt to drown its owner’s killer. Still the dead eyes stared.

And stared.

The boy hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t been aggressive. He hadn’t moved.

The familiarity of the blankness on his face clicked in my mind. Russell.

Had I just killed a younger version of Russell?

Every curse word I knew exploded in my mind, held back by my stifling lips. I wanted to scream and scream and scream.

The slap of bare feet on the smooth floor pulled my attention back into the moment.

Another girl was running up the hall, at me… or past me. It didn’t matter. When she got within range of my machete, I cut her down to bleed and die beside the docile, brown-haired boy. After she went down, there was silence in the curved hall. Nothing moved except the blood, crawling it’s way across the smooth floor and clinging to my soles.

My soul.

Was the children’s hospital the most horrific place yet?

It felt that way.

Stuff it away.

Stuff it away.

Put it all some place black and deep.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I ran around the curve of the hall until I reached a stairwell door. That was my goal. That was our planned escape route. Unfortunately, There was no window on the door to reveal the interior. I muttered a curse, turned the knob, and pushed it open.

“Shit.”

The stairwell was full of infected.

The big ones.

They howled as I pulled the door shut again.

My kingdom for a grenade.

A group too dumb to work a door, though—my favorite kind. At least there was that. But how long would the door stay shut now that they had seen me open and close it? The fear of being trapped kicked my brain into a higher gear. I needed to find another exit. The description of the children’s hospital provided by Dr. Evans included an atrium further up the hall with a wide stairway that curved all the way down to ground level. It was time to run again. If the atrium wasn’t clear, we’d have to chance another elevator shaft. But did we have time for that?

No.

Every moment in the halls of the hospital with no barricade between us and the infected was a risk, a big, big risk. We couldn’t hope to hold off any significant number of them with only bullets.

Ahead of me, the hall opened up to the four-story atrium, walled with glass, filled with tropical plants and sunshine. I came to a halt against a chrome railing, supported by waist-high glass panels. As promised, a wide, open stairway meandered down through the space to the lobby floor. Remains of the dead littered the lobby. Among the remains, a White that looked like a hobbit’s grandmother with fucked-up hair rambled in a circle. Her fitful grunts echoed off the sterile walls.

Choosing to gloss over any thoughts about why a grandmother might have been at the children’s hospital when the world went to shit a week ago, I instead focused on her physical unsightliness. She would die quickly when I got down there.

I repositioned to get a better angle on a view out the front doors. The infected were out there, but not many. The diversion had worked. We had a chance if I could get the others here in a hurry.

I bolted back up the hall.

Chapter 15

The tall glass wall on the front of the atrium gave us a slightly sterilized view of the world on the outside. It muffled the jagged edge of the wailing infected out there. The tint on the glass hid the ash that tainted the air.

Four vehicles were visible on the lawn: two armored Humvees, an ambulance like the one that transported Murphy and me to the gym on the first night, and an un-armored Humvee for anyone with more stupid in his soul than me. Squeezing us all into the two armored Humvees and the ambulance would be tight, but the ambulance was vulnerable.

Dalhover quickly separated the people into vehicle-sized groups and told them to organize themselves fast. Better to pick a driver and call shotgun now, in the momentary safety of the atrium, rather than out in the trampled grass, running for our lives. The small delay caused by two people trying to get through the same door at the same time might get them both killed.

Dr. Evans, apparently evaluating the vehicles just as I was, asked me, “Is that ambulance safe?”

“Only if it sticks close behind a Humvee,” I answered. “On its own, the infected will destroy it. Remember, they can’t feel pain like you can, so beating a windshield with their fists until it shatters won’t bother them one bit. They’ll jump on a moving car without a thought as to whether they’ll get injured or killed. Once they get all jazzed into hysterics, unarmored vehicles can’t survive.”

“What else is out there that we can’t see from here?” he asked. “Should we skip it, then?”

“No,” I shook my head, “it’s one of the closest vehicles to the door. There probably aren’t more than three or four more armored Humvees out there. The only other one that I know of for sure is too far to get to safely. Tell you what: I can walk out first and grab the farthest one and bring it back over. But I’ll warn you before I start the engine. Once I do that, shit gets crazy faster than you can imagine.”

Dr. Evans thought for a second. “We’ll do that. Don’t start the engine until you see us run out the door. Then drive back over and pick up who you can. I’ll ride in the ambulance with one of the soldiers driving.”

“No,” I didn’t agree at all. “You’re immune. You’re in charge. You need to be in a Humvee.”

“No, Zane. The biggest risk is in the ambulance. I won’t ask someone else to do it.”

Arguing was pointless.

“Be sure you have a weapon,” I told him.

“I want Dalhover with you in the lead vehicle.” Dr. Evans looked out across the grass as he talked. “You’ve been out there. You know what it’s like. The two of you leading works well. The ambulance will fall in right behind, with the other two Humvees in the rear.”

I followed Dr. Evans’ gaze out the window. As relatively calm as the lawn looked at that moment, it was deceptive.

I said, “We may not be able to straighten that out until we get into east Austin, but that depends on how far they chase us, I guess. Oh, and I’m taking Steph in my vehicle. I don’t care who else comes along.”

“That’s up to you,” said Evan. “Dalhover will organize the rest.”

Down on the floor of the lobby, Grandma Baggins was still circling. Far behind us, in the other building, gunfire still echoed. At least a few of the soldiers were back there paying for our escape with their lives.

I steeled my courage with their bravery and asked, “Would you let Dalhover get Steph and wait by the front door? I’ll pick them up there. I’ll head down and get that Humvee. I’ll probably be in it and ready by the time you guys get downstairs. But make sure I’m in the driver’s seat before you come out. Oh, and one more thing: once you’re outside, you’ve got about thirty or forty seconds to get inside those vehicles, get ‘em buttoned up, and start moving. Shoot anything in your way or anything nearby. Shooting will draw about a bazillion infected from the other side of the building, but if you’re not already in the vehicles and moving by the time they get here, it’ll be because you’re already dead.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” Dr. Evans smiled wryly.

Good. At least he wasn’t humorless.

I ran down the stairs, stepping as quickly and as lightly as possible, so as not to announce my presence to any infected in the off-shooting halls. When I hit the terrazzo floor of the lobby, the bloody-mouthed little troll of a woman was gawking at me with irritation in her eyes. At full speed, I ran at her and slashed my machete through most of her fat neck.

Not looking to see the results of my work, I spotted movement to my left near an information desk. Three Whites were there, feeding on the body of a child. I got only the usual glances as each infected greedily pulled the corpse closer to themselves, trying to set their territory.

I slowed down only enough to make the turn toward them. They were surprised that I was suddenly on them.

My machete swung at the back of the head of the man nearest me, but he turned to look up at the last moment, causing my machete to glance off of his skull, taking hair and skin, but little bone. He fell, dazed. I swung again and slashed one across the face. She rolled onto her back, not moving.

The third pounced at me, and I barely got my machete up to defend myself. We both fell over. I landed on my back with her on top of me, my blade jammed into her chest. She struggled and spewed blood, but was dying.

The scalped one had regained his senses enough to grab my foot and pull. I kicked at him with my free foot while I struggled to get the dying woman off of me.

The infected guy crawled and clawed his way onto me and tried to bite my leg. My knee smashed a solid blow to his temple and his eyes rolled back in his head.

That gave me a chance to get the bloody woman off of me and to get to my knees. I punched the guy twice in the face while noticing how much he looked like Mark. That made it easier. I jumped to my feet and finished him with three crushing kicks between his crazy blue eyes.

The dying woman was on her back, struggling and gurgling for breath.

At least they weren’t kids.

I stepped on her chest to pry my blade out. I yanked several times. Again, the nicks in the blade were a problem. I’d need to find a replacement.

Finished with the three, I hurried back out into the center of the lobby. Dr. Evans was leaning over the railing four floors up, looking down with wide eyes and a concerned face. Most of the group was already hurrying down the stairs.

Dripping in blood, again, thankfully none of it mine, I waved and ran through one of the wide rows of glass doors at the front of the lobby. Despite the circumstances, it felt better to be outside than in. The heat embraced me like an old friend and I ran toward a Humvee a full block away.

The sounds of the infected were all around, but there weren’t that many to be seen.

Something wasn’t right. Something really wasn’t right.

I looked left and right as I put distance between myself and the doors. The few infected I passed looked me over but made no aggressive moves. That would change soon enough.

I reached the Humvee. Its doors were closed and nothing was moving inside. I cupped my hands and looked in through the windows. No infected. No bodies and no blood. Empty and clean. It didn’t get any better than that.

I looked back toward the atrium doors. “Oh, shit.”

In my surprise, I’d said it too loud and caught the attention of a nearby White whose little goldfish brain connected the verbalization with the taste of food and rushed me. Unprepared for the attack, my machete caught him under the arm, almost too late but effective enough. His nearly amputated arm threw him off balance and he spun to the side with the momentum of it. My next blow cut a deep, blood-spewing gash across his neck and he fell to the grass to bleed out under the cruel sun.

The infected I’d heard, but hadn’t seen when I ran out of the building, were squatted along the wall of the building on both sides of the door, sheltering themselves from the sun among the shrubs in a narrow band of shade. There were hundreds.

Dr. Evans and the hospital survivors were arrayed at the glass doors, ready to push. Neither group was aware of the other. People were about to die.

I raised a palm and exaggerated a motion for them to stay.

Smiles and up-pointed thumbs were the response.

Fuck.

Hands were on the doors, ready to push. Freedom for them was a door-glass thickness away. Anticipating escape, they were going to come out any second now.

I could think of one thing to do to avert disaster. I swung open the door of the Humvee, tossed my machete in, and raised my M4. I looked left. I looked right. I had some space. I fired at the infected by the walls.

A thousand howls ripped the air and the squatting Whites moved as one, as though the hospital wall itself had jumped. The mass of them raced toward me as I emptied the magazine.

I jumped into the Humvee as the vanguard of the horde from the west side of the hospital rounded the corner, chasing a sound they’d heard and of which they were anxious to find the source. I was surrounded. I scrambled over the seats and set all of the combat locks. It wouldn’t do to have Smart Ones opening the doors while I was running for my life.

Back in the driver’s seat, I cranked the Humvee. Its engine rumbled to life. I floored it. The tires spun on the dry turf and sent dirt, grass, and dust into the air. If any infected had any doubt where their human morsel had gone, I’d erased that doubt for them. I steered straight for the infected mass rounding the corner and raced the engine.

The first infected I hit was obliterated by the bumper, and the next few died just as badly.

When the crowd grew thick, I angled to my right to stay out of the mob. I couldn’t let them bring me to a stop. Stopping was dying. The Humvee bounced over bodies, fallen barricades, and curbs. In a sea of screaming white faces and chomping jaws, I didn’t have a thought to spare for the survivors from the hospital. I’d done what I could. Personal survival trumped philanthropy.

The Humvee slowed under the press of human flesh.

I wondered if I’d done too much.

The vehicle lurched as it slowed and the tires spun on bloody wet humans, former humans. Whites were all over the vehicle, pounding on the roof, bashing their fists at the glass.

The Humvee swayed. I was losing control to the weight of the flowing bodies.

If the Humvee stopped, it was over. The Whites wouldn’t leave and I wouldn’t be able to get out. The Humvee would run out of gas. The AC would go. I’d die of heat stroke before day’s end.

But I wasn’t angry, as was my habit.

Fright gave way to acceptance of the high likelihood that I’d pushed my luck one too many times.

Chapter 16

The Humvee crept through the crush of bodies. I wrestled with the steering wheel, played with the gas, and fought for control. The infected screamed in frustration.

Inexplicably, the riot of bodies thinned on my right side, so I cut the steering wheel hard in that direction. I threw a prayer at the sky to aid in my escape. Who knew what might work?

With the diminished effects of the infected pushing on the right side, those on the left began to win the push-me-pull-you contest and the vehicle leaned hard to the right. I gunned the engine. The wheels alternately spun and caught, spun and moved, then miraculously caught and accelerated.

There were fewer Whites ahead than behind.

With the devil in my grin, I forgot the god of whom I’d just asked a favor and screamed in triumph. More bumps. More jerks. More Whites maimed under my wheels.

I saw spots of clear turf in the gaps between the infected piled on the hood. At twenty miles per hour, I jerked hard to the left, then back to the right, trying to induce a rhythmic sway in the cumbersome vehicle. Four or five fell off, and I was able to see well enough around the remaining ones that I wouldn’t hit a tree.

The hospital was to my right, and when a determined woman fell off of the driver’s side door, I saw over the heads of the mob. Neither the ambulance nor the Humvees that the survivors had planned to take were there.

Something about the plan had worked.

I let myself feel good about that without spending a thought on how many had died in the run for the vehicles.

The Humvee bounced over a particularly large pile of infected bodies and dropped over a curb.  My tires were on asphalt. I turned hard to the right and hit thirty. The street ahead was relatively clear. I had to slalom through the haphazardly scattered cars, but that worked to my purposes anyway. I lost one or two of my riders with each sway to the left and right.

I caught a right-hand turn and thought I might roll the Humvee as I headed back toward downtown. A curbed median appeared in the road and instead of braking, I accelerated toward it. When the tires hit the curb, I bounced out of my seat and hit the roof of the Humvee, hearing the infected bounce and roll across the Humvee’s roof as I landed back in my seat.

“Sweet.”

I was on the wrong side of the road, but what difference did that make to anybody anymore? I guessed that there were maybe three or four Whites still on the Humvee. Manageable.

I wondered how long the survivors would wait for me at the rally point, but that was a secondary concern to my other responsibilities. I’d left Russell in that house, and I needed to go get him. He wouldn’t survive on his own. I needed to get back to Murphy and Mandi. With what I now knew of the Smart Ones among the infected, they were in more danger than they knew.

I made a left turn and started my zigzag tactic through the square city blocks to work my way west.

Chapter 17

The drive through the infested city was time-consuming and strenuous. My arms were tired from constantly turning the steering wheel at each corner, to avoid large groups, or to run down solitary Whites. That last, a questionable practice. How durable was the armored Humvee, after all?

But some of them looked enough like Mark that each time, it seemed worth the risk to the vehicle.

I glanced down at the Humvee’s radio about a thousand times on my circuitous journey. Contact with Dalhover, Evans, and the other survivors waited for me through that little metal box, but each time I looked at it, I was immediately befuddled. It was nothing like Dan’s simple CB radio that I’d found stashed in the garage when I was a kid. That radio had an on/off switch, a channel selector, and a volume knob. It was easy, both to figure out and to operate.

But this thing had about a half-dozen knobs, only a few of which seemed to have an understandable purpose, several jacks, and a keypad. A keypad. What the hell was that for? Even what I thought was the on/off switch looked to have nine positions.

Frustrating.

Without an operator’s manual, figuring it out could take hours, or days. Certainly not something to be done while running like a mad mouse through west-central Austin. Perhaps Murphy knew how the thing worked.

With something resembling optimism, I finally made the right turn onto Matheson Ridge Road, committed to running over any infected anywhere near my path. One died on the asphalt as soon as I rounded the corner. Others were in front yards or driveways as I passed, and not worth the risk, though they did pursue.

As opportunity would have it, a huddle of Whites were on the driveway of the house where I’d left Russell, feeding on their dead, looking up at my Humvee as it bore down on them. But there just weren’t enough functional synapses left in their brains to process the lethal conclusion coming their way at forty miles per hour.

I braked hard into the turn and Humvee’s tires squealed loudly as the heavy truck bounced over the mailbox and up the driveway. Some of the Whites jumped at the last second. Most of those thudded against steel as I ran them down just before crashing into the garage door. Long panels of bent aluminum and shrieked as the Humvee barreled through. After all of that, to my surprise, two infected were pinned to the back wall of the garage by the Humvee’s bumper when I came to a stop. They were messed up and bloody as hell, but alive and pissed.

I jumped out of the driver's side door with my M4 in my hands. No point in trying to be quiet now.

A White came running at me from outside. I fired about three rounds before I got the guy. He fell back, squirming, but not a danger for the moment. It took three more shots to finish off the other two on the wall. I turned my attention back to the garage door, almost too late.

"Dammit."

The infected I’d shot was crawling at me, and close. I couldn’t miss at this range. I shot him twice in the chest and he stopped moving.

I saw no movement down the driveway and out into the street. That wasn’t going to last.

Now, for the moment that I’d dreaded.

Please, let Russell be okay.

With only a few rounds left in my magazine, I switched it for a full one. Ammunition was way low. That was a real concern. I positioned myself by the doorway to the kitchen, with one hand ready to pull the trigger and the other on the doorknob. I didn't expect anything dangerous inside, but caution could not be overrated.

I turned the knob, tugged the door, and jumped back several feet as I raised my weapon. The door slowly swung open, and the sunlight pouring in through the bank of windows on the back of the house silhouetted a man standing just inside the kitchen.

"Russell."

He didn't move.

I stepped closer and squinted at the light. Russell's face was streaked with tears. He stared emptily forward, back in the state in which I'd originally found him.

I felt like shit.

I wondered what emotions Russell could feel. I wondered what thoughts went through his simple brain. Did he feel abandoned? Did he think I was never coming back? I let my rifle dangle from its sling and put a hand on his shoulder. I looked into his unresponsive eyes and said, "Russell, are you okay?"

He, of course, said nothing.

I squeezed into the kitchen, closing and locking the door behind me. Pushing past him, I took his hand and said, "C'mon, Russell," hoping that he'd follow.

He did.

We walked back over to the granite-covered island. A room-temperature sandwich still sat there on a plate. I tore it in two and set a half in front of each of our stools. "Russell, let's sit down and eat. C'mon, sit down."

Russell complied, and together, we shared another meal.

Chapter 18

With Russell back to normal, or perhaps after no apparent change in Russell, but with my guilt assuaged, I did a quick search of the house for goodies. There were no firearms, but there was a good quantity of food and water. Twenty minutes of silence in the house had left the garage empty of infected, though there were several who’d started feeding on the newly dead in the driveway.

Bad choice for them.

With no trouble from the feeding infected, I loaded the Humvee with enough food and bottled water to last four people for a few days.

After getting Russell loaded into the passenger seat, it was a just a matter of running down the infected in the driveway again, and another long, tiring drive through the neighborhoods north of downtown. I found a passable bridge over the highway and lost a few platoons of chasing infected as I sped the Humvee into the ash-covered wasteland of east Austin.

Thankfully, it was still a dead zone.

I slowed the Humvee down to thirty miles per hour, a safe speed for navigating around road hazards. With nearly every structure burned to a black skeleton and piles of ash, and with all the street signs unreadable, there were few landmarks, but the towering concrete overpasses at the intersection of highways 183 and 290 were visible from the tops of hills miles away.

Knowing that I’d been too long in getting to the rally point, I chose to go there before picking up Murphy and Mandi. I felt sure they were safe for the time being.

As I approached the southwest corner of the highway intersection, in what had been a parking lot for a small complex of low-rent duplexes, I spotted a single Humvee with a thin slouched man standing on the roof keeping watch with a pair of binoculars: Dalhover. He had to have seen us as we approached, but remained vigilant in watching the other directions for threats.

Russell,” I said, as I pointed, “there they are.”

I spotted Steph’s flaming red hair catching in the breeze as she exited their Humvee. She was followed by one of the soldiers. Among the burned ruins of the duplexes, I saw no other vehicles and no other people got out of the Humvee. My heart sank. Surely they weren’t the only escapees.

I navigated my Humvee through the maze of streets toward Dalhover’s position. A straight line across the ruins of houses would have been quicker, but who knew what hazards lay under the ash and in the twisted metal and brick remains? There was no immediate need for urgency, so no need to risk the Humvee’s tires.

After stopping my Humvee close to the other and taking a moment to survey the surrounding area for movement, I got out. Russell immediately howled and I had to hustle around to let him out of the other side.

Dalhover, Steph, and the soldier were waiting between the Humvees, giving me odd looks as I led Russell back around.

Dalhover looked at me flatly. “You made it.”

The soldier shook my hand, and gave me a nod and wan smile. Steph stepped up close, and seemed for a moment caught between a hug and a handshake. In the end, she threw an arm around my neck and gave me a quick squeeze. “Wow, you’re still alive.”

“It’s the new hello,” I answered as she pulled away.

Both Dalhover and the soldier were looking at Russell suspiciously.

“Don’t worry about him,” I told them. “He’s harmless. Just ah…just…I think the virus fried his brain, but he’s not a danger. Are there more of you? Please don’t tell me this is all that made it out.”

Dalhover shook his head and said, “We lost seven.”

“So, how many?” I asked.

Dalhover answered, “Us and fifteen others made it.”

“Dr. Evans?” I asked.

“Yes,” Steph said. “He made it.”

I shook my head and looked down. “I didn’t know all of those infected were in the shadow of the building. I almost didn’t see them.”

With no change in his tone, Dalhover said, “Everyone knew the risk.”

“Where are the others?” I asked.

Dalhover pointed between the towering bridges of the highway interchange. “Dr. Evans’ family has a farm out near Taylor, maybe twenty miles northeast.”

“He knows that his family probably isn’t alive, right?” I asked.

Steph kindly said, “It kind of goes without saying, Zed.”

“Yeah,” I answered, “I guess so. And you guys waited here for me?”

Each of them nodded.

“Thanks.” That seemed insufficient for how I felt. They’d taken a risk and waited for me past the point where hope that I’d arrive had run out. That meant a lot to me. I struggled in search of a way to express that, but I was at a loss.

Dalhover gestured toward Russell. “You said you had three friends.”

“Two of them are in a house near here,” I answered. “I have to get them...um…or go there.” I suddenly realized that past the rendezvous point, I’d made no further plans with these people. Did they wait out of gratitude, or were they planning on sticking together now?

Into the ambiguity, Steph said, “We’ll go get them together.”

That’s what I wanted, or so I was thinking at the moment. But how would that turn out? I looked around at the burnt landscape to check for movement and to collect my thoughts. I looked at my feet. I glanced at their faces. My silence had grown awkward, so I just put it on the table. “I know what people see when they look at me and Russell. We’re monsters. Now that everybody has escaped from the hospital and they don’t need my help… well, I know how things go from here.”

“No,” Steph disagreed emphatically. “It’s not like that. Come with us. We don’t feel that way.”

I shook my head. “That’s how you feel, Steph.” I looked at each of them. “Maybe all of you do.”

Dalhover nodded, going back on word rations.

I went on, “The rest of them might feel that way, too, but right now they feel gratitude for me helping them get out. Or, maybe they’re angry at me for dragging them out of a place they thought was safe. Maybe they’re angry at me for getting their friends killed. However they feel right now, eventually all of that will fade, and what will be left is the fear, then the hate. It’ll always be like that.”

“Yeah,” Dalhover groused.

Steph was instantly angry. “I didn’t have you figured for a quitter. What are you going to do? Give up and go be a hermit in the woods?”

I laughed bitterly. “Considering what I did this morning, I don’t think that quitter is the right word.”

“But you’re giving up on people, aren’t you?” Steph asked. “You don’t even want to come with us and try?”

“Yes, I do,” I nodded. “But the last group of people I helped turned on me once they had full bellies and guns in their hands.” My voice was notching up. “They wanted to kill me and my friends. We had a good place to hole up, in a dorm over on the campus, and we took those people in. After they kicked us to the curb, a half hour later, one of us was dead. These were people just like all of you, people that needed my help, people that were grateful. But in the end, I was just another monster to them.”

Dalhover said, “Man, I need a cigarette. Do you have any?”

“Nope.” I shook my head.

“You mind if I check your vehicle?” Dalhover asked.

“It’s not really mine,” I told him.

“It is now,” Dalhover countered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead.”

Dalhover swung the driver’s side door open and started rummaging.

We all watched in silence, because it was better than what we were talking about.

“Goddamn.” Dalhover jumped out of my Humvee with a red and white package of cigarettes raised in one hand. “It’s my lucky goddamned day.” He took one out and placed it between his lips, then fished a lighter out of his pocket. He looked me in the eye and said, “We’ll go with you to get your friends if you want. We owe you at least that much. After, if you want to come along with us, we’ll talk to all the others when we get to Colonel Evans’ place. You can decide from there if you want to stay or go. But I personally guaran-god-damn-tee you that you won’t be harmed by anybody there.”

“A guaran-god-damn-tee,” Steph said, awkwardly stumbling over the curse with a smile. “That’s a pretty good guarantee.”

I looked over at the soldier with them. He smiled thinly and nodded.

I said, “You don’t say much, do you?”

“No, sir,” he answered.

“Let’s go get my friends.” I extended a hand to Dalhover. “If they want to join up with you guys, we’ll tag along.”

Chapter 19

We parked a quarter of a mile from Russell's old house, among a collection of burned out cars that would serve to hide the Humvees from a casual observer. With the pile of charred bodies located on the opposite side of the block of unburned houses, we had a good chance of remaining hidden from the infected feasting there.

Russell and I headed out on foot toward his old house. I didn’t see a single infected moving about as we approached. That made me nervous. I was getting conditioned to expect one to jump at me every time I blinked.

As we stepped up onto the curb and started across Russell's dead lawn, the front door opened and Mandi peeked out. She cast a nervous glance both left and right, but her smile glowed as bright as the sun.

I hurried the last few steps up onto the porch and through the door as Mandi swung it wide for both Russell and me. Without a word, she closed and locked the door behind us.

Murphy, who had been keeping lookout through the window on the back door, turned and grinned widely when he saw us inside.

Mandi threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly. She did the same with Russell and got pretty much the same response. Nothing. Though I, at least, did smile.

"Let's get upstairs," Murphy said, leading the way to the office.

Once we were all upstairs, Murphy pointed out the back window and said softly, "There's got to be at least a thousand of them out there now. They've been coming in groups all day. They wander in from the east, mostly. When they get close, I think they smell the dead and find their way here.”

Through the back window, I saw that the pile of corpses had been dragged all over the blackened grass. The burned yards were covered with infected, surrounding and mutilating each corpse as they fed. Bodies had been dragged right up to Russell's back fence, and fifty or sixty Whites fed on them, not thirty feet from where Murphy and I stood at the window.

Murphy nodded his head toward the infected out back, "They make me nervous, being that close."

"Yeah," I agreed.

"I'm so glad you made it back," Mandi’s voice burbled with excitement.

Murphy took that as a cue and slapped my back. "God damn, I am too, man. I figured you were gonna get killed running off in the middle of the night like that."

I shrugged.

"What's the story with Amber?" Murphy was suddenly very serious.

I shook my head and tried to say that she was dead, but the words got caught in my throat.

Crap. Why did that happen?

Mandi hugged me again. "She's in a better place."

I nodded at the cliché and drew a deep breath as I pulled away. "Mark killed her. I think he's a slow burn."

"If he's a slow burn, why'd he kill her?” Murphy nodded his head toward the infected behind the house. “Maybe he was just like them."

"Nothing fed on her," I said, trying to push an image of Amber's bruised face out my mind. "She was beaten to death."

"That doesn't make any sense. Are you sure it was Mark?" Murphy asked.

I nodded. "Everybody else was dead. The building was still closed up.”

"All of them?" Murphy was surprised.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "All of them were infected except for Amber."

"Getting kicked out of there was probably the best thing for us," Murphy said.

I didn’t want to agree, but we were alive. That was better than the alternative.

Mandi asked, "Could Mark be immune, do you think?"

"No," I answered. "Amber was pretty sure he got infected."

"Man, that just doesn't make any sense.” Murphy was shaking his head and starting to pace around the room. Amber’s death was at least as frustrating for him as it was for me. “I don't understand why he'd kill her if he was a slow burn. I don't understand why he didn't feed on her if he was infected."

"Dalhover has a theory that some of the slow burns aren't like us. More like the criminally insane. I’ve seen it myself. I think he’s right."

Mandi asked, "Who's Dalhover?"

It took nearly a half hour to bring Murphy and Mandi up to speed on what had happened. It took a little longer to discuss joining up with the hospital survivors. In the end, we decided to joining would be best. We headed for the Evans’ family farm.

Chapter 20

Ash and black turned to tan grass and rolling hills as we drove out into the country. Wind-tortured trees grew along the fence lines. Houses, trailers, sun-bleached barns, and rotted sheds dotted the hill crests or rested in valleys.

Cattle grazed in parched fields or huddled like Whites where the trees provided shade. Fields of dry corn stalks and cotton waited for harvests that would never come. We saw not one living human as we navigated the narrow county roads and farm-to-market roads.

Escape to the country was starting to seem like a really good idea.

Following Dalhover, Steph, and the soldier in the lead vehicle, Murphy drove our Humvee in uncharacteristic silence. He and Mandi kept sharing furtive glances and worried smiles; I guessed that their relationship had changed, perhaps significantly, in my absence.

In a shallow valley, the road bisected a grove of tall pecan trees that mercifully shaded us for a half-mile. At the end of the grove, we came upon a small collection of buildings at a T-intersection. A town name was painted on a green highway sign in reflective white, but I didn’t bother to read it. It was one of those towns so small that its name was only ever mentioned by people giving directions that included the phrase “down yonder.”

A closed store with a sagging wooden sign weathered away on one corner. A bar was boarded up with sheets of gray plywood, delaminating with age. The five or six houses in the speck of a town were in such a state of disrepair that the owners had to have died or stopped caring years before I was born.

Brown stains, clothing remnants, and a few bones littered the crushed caliche parking lot in front of the bar. At the edge of the road, coyotes fought over the remains of a child-sized body.

Mandi turned away from the sight outside her window and looked at Russell and me in the back seat. In a tone that made it clear that she was convincing herself, she said, “It’s better out here, I think.”

“Yeah,” I grunted, leaning my head on the glass, staring emptily out of the window. My ability to pay attention was starting to fade. My butt was in a cushioned seat. Cool air blew over my skin. Fatigue, held at bay all day by a river of adrenaline, was coming to collect its due.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Mandi bounced out in her squeaky wheel voice.

She said some more things, but my fatigue made her words seem like sing-song noise, not worth comprehending. My attention drifted. My eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep. I needed the sleep. But sleeping led to dreaming; running and chasing and killing and dying and murder and blood and screaming and screaming and screaming…

And those kids.

Those pitiful fucking kids.

I shot up straight in my seat. I had a crick in my neck and drool on my cheek. I was disoriented.

The Humvee was idling but not moving. Russell sat beside me and stared straight ahead. Through the windshield I saw the other Humvee sitting on the road. A longhorn—yeah, a big fucking cow with horns longer than my outstretched arms—trotted between the two vehicles.

“What the…?” I wondered if I was still asleep.

Another of the big cattle followed the first.

Murphy laughed, “Man, you know you’re in Texas when you see a stampede.”

Mandi giggled, “There’s only like ten cows. That’s hardly a stampede. And they’re not in a hurry.”

To our left, one of the big longhorns jumped over a barbed wire fence and walked out into a crop of dying sorghum. The rust-colored bull sniffed at the plants but didn’t seem interested in eating.

Murphy pointed down at a farm in the dip between the rolling hills. “Look, down there beside that barn.”

Mandi looked. “What?”

“That’s a Humvee. I’ll bet that’s the farm.”

Dalhover jumped out of his Humvee and trotted back toward us, giving the longhorns a wide berth.

Murphy opened his door a bit so that Dalhover could speak to him. “After these damn longhorns get out of the road ahead of us, we’ll get moving again.” Dalhover pointed to the farm down the slope. “That’s the place, over there.”

“Gotcha, Top,” Murphy answered.

Without another word, Dalhover hurried back to his vehicle.

To no one in particular, Mandi said, “I hope they have running water. I really need a shower.”

“I’ll say,” Murphy laughed.

“Don’t be a pig.” Mandi punched Murphy in the arm.

Something had definitely happened between them.

Outside, the longhorns had lost all sense of urgency. No one in the Humvee seemed to care. With our goal in sight, and no two-legged monsters in pursuit, our need to hurry was gone as well. My head lolled over against the glass and I closed my eyes again.

Rest.

“I like it here,” Mandi said. “If there’s not enough room for everyone in the house, I’ll bet there are empty farmhouses nearby that we could move into.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

“What kind of crops can you grow here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Murphy answered. “Whatever we need, probably.”

“We even have cows. I like steak. Do longhorns taste like regular cows?” Mandi asked.

Murphy chuckled. “They don’t have as much fat, I think.”

“Look,” Mandi said excitedly. “There’s someone on the porch. They’re waving at us.”

More things were said, but I was starting to fade back to dreamland, or maybe dream hell and sleep land. But there was a change in Mandi’s tone of voice. “Why are all the longhorns looking in that direction?”

I opened my eyes and sat up. Not alarmed, but alert.

The longhorns outside had all come to a stop and were looking back toward the farmhouse to our east. Two weeks before, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But running for your life at every turn changes a person. I put a hand on my rifle and looked around for the danger.

Murphy had tensed as well. He sat up straight in his seat, saying nothing.

“What is it?” Mandi asked, seeing the change in Murphy and looking back at me.

“Don’t know,” Murphy answered.

The longhorns bolted.

Given their thousand-pound weight, their quickness was surprising. The impact of their hooves hitting the ground vibrated up through the Humvee’s tires. They each hopped the fence to our left and plowed through the sorghum, sending clouds of rusty pollen up in their wake.

The people on the porch had stopped waving and were looking around. Whatever had spooked the longhorns had piqued their attention too.

I listened. Over the sound of the Humvee’s engine and the longhorn’s hoof beats, I couldn’t make out anything.

“Infected.” Mandi pointed, fear tweaking her voice.

Perhaps a mile away, on the other side of the valley, a double-helix of stark white infected were cresting the hill.

With the house between the people on the porch and the infected coming over the hill behind them, they had no way of seeing the Whites.

“Are they naked?” Mandi asked, her voice no less urgent.

Ahead of us, Dalhover jumped out of the Humvee and aimed his rifle into the distance. He fired. He had no hope of hitting anything at that range, but I assumed the sound was meant as a warning.

The people on the porch froze. Dalhover fired again.

“Get inside,” Mandi pleaded.

“They will,” Murphy comforted her, putting a hand on her thigh.

As if they’d been waiting on permission from Murphy, the people on the porch hurried into the house and closed the door. Several more helices of jogging infected crested the hill to the east.

Dalhover shot the rifle in the air three times in rapid succession and looked down at the house.

“They should be safe now that they’re inside,” Murphy said. “They just need to be quiet.”

More infected came. Then more. And more. It looked like God had dumped a city-sized bucket of Whites on the other side of the hill, and they were splashing over and pouring into the valley.

With my voice stressed to the point of betraying my fear for those below, I shouted, “They need to get out of there.” I swung my door open and pulled my weapon up to my shoulder as I ran around to the other side of the vehicle. Russell was on my heels.

Dalhover shot me a worried look. The far hill was solid with running Whites. They didn’t shout. They didn’t howl—they didn’t see the people in the house yet—but the sound of tens of thousands of running feet and heavy breathing rolled across the valley like a swarm of ghostly locusts.

Where the hell did they all come from?

“Good God,” Dalhover shouted, in a rare display of emotion.

I fired my rifle indiscriminately at the horde.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, naked and hairless (and what the fuck was up with that anyway?) were distracted by the crack of my gun and altered their direction to run at us. The rest washed over the house.

From below, gunfire popped. Glass broke. A great howl gathered the strength of every rabid voice in the valley and blew the hush all to hell.

The Ogre and the Fucking Harpy.

It took all my willpower not to run. I swapped my empty magazine for a full one.

A grenade explosion disturbed the mass of bodies on the porch, but its sound was lost in the tsunami of screams. The bloody void left in its passing was quickly filled with struggling white bodies.

Still the infected flooded over the hill. How many could there be?

Dr. Evans and a woman crawled out of a second floor window and onto the roof above the porch. Another woman clawed her way out as Dr. Evans climbed the rough brick chimney to get to the top of the house. The infected were out the window now. They caught the third woman. She was shrieking. That’s to say that her mouth was open wide, her face stretched in fear. But the sound was lost.

My finger hovered over the trigger.

Dr. Evans and the first woman made it to the roof. A dozen infected were on the porch roof, running about, searching. More climbed out through the window.

Dalhover aimed at the house and fired, but the million-legged anemone absorbed the bullets with no effect. I followed his example with thirty more futile bullets.

A White started the climb up the side of the chimney. When his head peeked over the edge of the roof, it exploded in a spray of brilliant red over white skin. He fell and bounced off the roof below where his body was swallowed by the mass.

More infected followed.

However many bullets Evans had in his pistol, it wasn’t enough.

Dalhover hung his head, and like a warped, wooden man, walked back to the front seat of his Humvee. The infected were starting to run up the long slope toward us. It was time to go.

My danger-driven talent for fast thinking kicked in and I ran up to Dalhover’s side of the Humvee, yelling at him through the window, “Follow us.”

“What?” He looked back at me with a stolid face and eyes that had seen too much pain. He didn’t nod or shake his head.

“Follow us.” I pointed at our Humvee.

I ran back to my Humvee and jumped in behind Murphy. “We’re taking the lead.”

Without a word, Murphy gunned the engine, ran through a ditch to get around Dalhover, and pushed the lumbering Humvee to speed away from the farm.

Chapter 21

"Murphy," I said, not an ounce of humor in my voice, "remember when you asked me whether emergent behavior in the infected would present any added danger? I think I can answer that now."

"I know the answer," Murphy responded, flatly.

Mandi, with tears in her eyes, said, "That was terrible. Those people didn't have a chance."

"No." I shook my head and wondered whether they'd still be alive if I'd left them in the hospital, probably the same question going through the minds of those in the other Humvee.

No, they wouldn't. Rationalization?

No. I told myself that wasn't the case. Whether I'd been there or not, the infected would have discovered access to the upper floors of the hospital through the elevator shafts. Had Dalhover and I not chanced on them coming up the shafts at the moment that we did, all of those in the hospital may have died that morning.

But they were all dead, just the same.

In helping them escape, perhaps I'd only succeeded in buying them a few more hours of life. What killed them wasn’t my help; it was an unlucky choice. Dr. Evans's family farm wasn't as secure as its isolation implied. As a result, they paid the price for the mistake.

Blood. Pain. Terror. Death.

It was a failure to understand the new rules. And every failure was paid in blood. That goddamned lesson insisted on repeating itself, and it was pissing me off.  Still, another dozen good people were dead. If any corollary was there to be learned, it was that nothing should be taken for granted. Not one single thing.

Houses were never safe. Escape plans must always be laid. Guards must always be posted.

Those in the house apparently hadn't posted a lookout; an oversight that had cost them their lives. Had they seen the flood of infected pouring into the valley, perhaps they could have escaped in their vehicles. They depended on flimsy doors and brittle glass to protect them. They fucked up.

And I knew that the doors and windows at Russell's house that Murphy, Mandi, and I thought had protected us the night before, in fact hadn’t. What had protected us was luck. The mountain of burned bodies behind Russell's house gave the infected a much more tempting distraction than a potentially fruitless search of abandoned houses.

I wondered whether my life or anyone’s was simply a measure of the number of lucky guesses made. That was depressing to think about. Disempowering.

Dr. Evans and company could have kept the vehicles near the doors and pointed away from the house, ready for a quick escape. They could have set up a diversion in the barn to draw any infected away and buy themselves some time.

They must have been at the farm for a few hours before we arrived. Surely they were all tired, frazzled by their experiences. Free from immediate threat for the first time in days. So they rested. They let their guard down. And that was another lesson for me. No downtime until all preparations that could be made were made.

All mistakes are paid for in blood. Again, the most important lesson of all.

The future promised to be grueling for those who survived, grueling and tense. Learning the new rules would be as important to continued life as eating, drinking, and breathing.

With no roadmap, no syllabus, and no list of requirements for the future, the hospital survivors who’d died had opened the book of tomorrow’s secrets to a page of useful knowledge, paid for with their lives. I silently thanked them, and took the lessons to heart.

“Why didn’t they have any hair?” Mandi asked. “Why were they naked?”

“They had hair,” Murphy argued.

Mandi shook her head for emphasis, but her shaking was slow, as though the work of doing it while under the burden of what she’d just seen was difficult. “No, they didn’t.”

“I’m not a fan of seventies porn,” Murphy told her. “I know the difference between hairy and hairless.”

Mandi turned to look out the window, and with no emotion in her voice she said, “You are a pig, Murphy.”

I said, “Murphy’s right. They were bald, not hairless.”

That seemed to settle the hair question with no resolution. After half a mile, Mandi said, “So.”

“So what?” I asked.

“So what does it mean?” She turned to look back at me.

“I’m not sure,” I answered, happy to take my mind off the horror and get lost for a second in the clinical questions on the quirkiness of the Whites. “It can’t be natural, I don’t think.”

“Am I going the right way?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah,” I pointed. “Just stay on this road for now.”

“What do you mean, not natural?” Mandi asked.

“I mean,” I said, “these are the only bald Whites that we’ve seen. And as porn king Murphy pointed out, they definitely weren’t hairless. I’m not a doctor or anything, but it seems to me that if the virus was going to make your hair fall out, it would all fall out, not just the hair on your head.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Mandi turned back forward in her seat. “What then?”

“I don’t know.” But that didn’t prevent me from speculating. “Maybe they do more than follow each other around. Maybe it’s another emergent behavior thing and they’re trying to look alike too.”

“So what,” Murphy scoffed, “one bald nudist walks down the street and all the other Whites say to themselves, hey, I wanna be like him?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

“It’s your idea,” Murphy countered.

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t going to put too much into defending a guess.

Nothing was said for a bit after that until we passed back through the small, nameless town and the pecan grove. Mandi said, “When they started to come up the slope toward, I think one of them had a knife.”

“What?” I asked in surprise.

“No way.” Murphy responded.

Mandi nodded and looked at us. “I think so. It was far away. I can’t be sure, but I think one of them was carrying a knife.”

That was enough to kill the conversation in the Humvee. Perhaps we all knew the ominous implications if some of the infected could use weapons. There was indeed a whole spectrum of intellectual capacities among them.

The Humvee bounced down the bumpy country roads, back in the direction we'd just come.

Without any of the usual pep in his voice, Murphy asked, "You're the man with the plan, Zed. Where are we going?”

“Not Russell’s house,” Mandi interjected, staring despondently out the window.

Pointing needlessly out through the windshield, I said, “Let’s head back to that bridge over I-35 that was clear.”

“At Thirty-Second Street?” Murphy asked

“Yeah, sure.”

“Are you thinking back to the university?” he asked. “Back to one of those big old buildings? You think we can hold out against…?” Murphy’s voice trailed off, as though mentioning the endless horde would confirm that they were more than a nightmare.

“I have an idea,” I said.

“Okay.” Murphy glanced back at me. “Let's hear it."

I scooted up in my seat. Russell mimicked. The mood in the Humvee was settling into a darkness from which it would be hard to come back. Mandi had gone silent and was staring at nothing. The absence of Murphy’s smile was hard to bear. He was in no shape at that moment to pick the mood up off of the floor, but it needed to be done before despair set in and we gave up. So it was up to me redirect our collective mood.

“Do you know where Mt. Bonnell Road is?” I asked Murphy.

“On the other side of town, where all the rich white people live.”

“Yeah, well not all of them, but some of them,” I said. “That's where we're going.”

“Back into the hornet’s nest,” Murphy absently muttered.

“It's not that bad, if we do it right,” I told him.

Murphy's voice flipped to defiance. “Yeah, I'll just run down any mother fuckers that get in our way.”

“Not any,” I disagreed. “There's an upper limit to that.”

“Yeah,” Murphy answered absently. His mind was back on the horde.

“If you see any really big groups, let's not try to plow through them,” I said. “We'll need to drive around.”

Murphy grunted an acknowledgement.

Mandi was still silent.

I took a moment to explain my tactic of zigzagging through the neighborhoods to keep the infected from clogging the streets ahead. I emphasized how important it was not to lose the other Humvee in our maneuvers.

With that taken care of, I changed the subject. “I used to date this short red-headed girl named Jackie.”

“War stories?” That surprised Murphy, but his tone suggested that he wasn’t in the mood.

Defensively, I said, “There's a point.”

Mandi looked over her shoulder at me, showing her watery eyes. Then she went back to staring through the glass.

“When I was a freshman at UT, I met her in my psychology class,” I said. “Well, she met me. I mean, she kind of picked me up in class and then we started going out.”

“Was she cute?” Murphy asked.

“Of course,” I answered. “Really nice little ah...” I looked over at Mandi, but she was working hard at ignoring me. “Well the thing is, she still lived at home and drove into school each day. Her parents had a big house up on Mt. Bonnell.”

Murphy raised his voice for emphasis, “God damn, Null Spot. How many women do you want to try to save?”

“That's not where I'm going with this,” I countered.

Mandi muttered, “I doubt that.”

“No, really,” I said. “Hear me out.”

“I'm guessing we don't have a choice.” Murphy smiled.

I continued with my story. “So, like, back when we were dating, I'd go over to her house and we'd watch movies and stuff and study together.”

“Uh huh,” Murphy's tone implied a lot inappropriate activity.

“I'm sure you were studying.” Mandi was sarcastic, not at all happy with my topic of choice. But at least she was starting to engage.

“Sometimes, maybe,” I said. “Well, the truth is, we were both eighteen and horny as hell, and it seemed like all she ever wanted to do was screw.”

Mandi scoffed, “Like you didn't.”

“Oh, no, don't get me wrong,” I answered. “I love sex. Lots of it.”

Murphy snickered.

I continued, “But Jackie, oh my God, she was like a nympho or something. She'd wanted to screw every day, more than once. Sometimes four or five times.”

“Oh, whatever,” Mandi scoffed.

“You'd be surprised how virile a motivated eighteen-year-old can be,” I countered.

Murphy raised his eyebrows and gave us a speculative, “Maybe.”

“Well, she wore me out, I'll tell you. There were times when I'd make up excuses not to go over to her house just so I could get a day of rest.”

Mandi shook her head. “This story is getting unbelievable. You said there is a point, right? It's not just you making up stories about your sexual exploits.”

I said, “Well, there is that part, but...”

Murphy laughed.

“…I’ll get to the point,” I finished. “Jackie liked to have sex everywhere. In her bed, of course. In the wine cellar when her parents were upstairs…”

“The wine cellar?” Mandi asked.

“Rich people,” Murphy muttered.

“Everybody who lives on Mt. Bonnell has money,” I said. “People with money have wine cellars.” At least that’s the way I saw it.

“A rich girl who likes to have sex all the time?” Mandi didn’t believe a word of it. “And why would you ever leave a girl like that?”

“She dumped me,” I admitted. “She said I was too emotionally distant.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “I’m so surprised.”

“Well, to get on with my point, we’d sometimes go for walks in the neighborhood, and whenever they were building a new house, she’d want to sneak in at night and have sex in it.”

“Say what?” Murphy grinned.

“No way,” Mandi scoffed again.

“No, I’m serious,” I said. “I told you. She was kind of a nympho and a little kinky.  And I’ll admit, it was kind of a turn-on.”

Mandi made a show of looking back out the window. She wasn’t ready to give up on her mood. “And the point is?”

I said, “There was this one house just off the street, kind of set back in the trees. It was an ugly kind of modern-ish box thing, like a tiny three-story Walmart or something. All concrete and not enough windows.”

“Sounds hideous,” Mandi said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s what I thought. We went there probably three or four times. Then, one night, we were upstairs in what was probably going to be a master bedroom or something. It had these great views over the cliffs of Lake Austin and we… you know, were doing our thing, when this dude with a flashlight and a gun came in and scared the crap out of us.”

“What?” That surprised Mandi.

“It was a security guard, an off-duty cop,” I said. “He was kind of pervy about seeing Jackie naked. I think that’s why he didn’t arrest us for trespassing. After that, there was a cop there all the time. And I mean all the time.”

“Why?” Mandi asked.

“I think the place belonged to some reclusive rich dude or something. I’m not sure, but I think they built a wall around it. I mean, they were building something the last time I was there. But the way the terrain is there, you can’t see the place until you go through the trees and just kind of run into it. You can’t see it from the road. You can’t even see it from up at the park on top of Mt. Bonnell.”

“The owner must have been really paranoid,” Mandi deduced.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Murphy said, “If they finished that wall, it sounds like it could be a safe place for us, if there’s nobody there.”

“Even without the wall, the place seemed pretty secure.” I said. “I’m guessing the owner holed up there pretty quick once this whole infection thing started. So going there might be a waste of time.”

“After what we just saw at that farm, I say we give it a shot.” Murphy looked over at Mandi, as if for permission. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

Mandi nodded, neither enthusiastically nor reluctantly.

Chapter 22

Mt. Bonnell, like every hill in central Texas, is covered in a forest of squat cedar trees, sprinkled with stunted oaks over jagged limestone and thin dirt. Most trees are ten to fifteen feet tall but thick from root to tip with dark green foliage. They look to be as much shrub as tree.

The uncurbed asphalt road disintegrated at its edge into gravel and dirt under the overhanging branches of cedars all along Mt. Bonnell Road. The only breaks in the forest were wide patches of green grass lawns fronting oversized houses and lush flowerbeds. Relatively few people had lived in the area before the virus hit.  That meant few of the infected—the formerly wealthy or their live-in domestic help.

Halfway up Mt. Bonnell Road, the houses on both sides of the street suddenly stopped and only the shadowy cedars remained. And we were alone. A few infected chased up the slope, but far behind. They’d lose interest soon enough.

“Slow down, Murphy.” I scanned ahead, looking for a familiar break in the trees.

Murphy let up on the gas and the Humvee coasted down to twenty-five miles per hour.

“The place we’re looking for is near the top, but it’s easy to miss,” I told him.

“And you can’t see it at all from the road?” Mandi asked.

“No,” I answered. “You can’t tell, because of the trees, but the road we’re on isn’t on the crest of the hill. It’s on the Austin side of the hill. All the houses on the left, between the road and the river, are on the crest or on the other side of it. This house is like that, on the other side of the crest, and with all the trees, you can’t see it.”

“Why do that?” Mandi asked. “It seems like if you spent a bazillion dollars on a big house with a gorgeous view, you’d want to show it off.”

“The same reason that the Klingons have a cloaking device,” Murphy answered.

“I’m sorry, Murphy, I have a life.” Mandi’s tone was disdainful. “You’ll have to explain to me what that means.”

“If you don’t want to fight,” Murphy explained, “you hide. The cloaking device makes you invisible.”

“Just like the house,” I finished. “The people who own the place like their privacy a lot. I doubt they were thinking about fighting anybody when they built the place, but hiding the house is a big step toward making it secure. For us, if the infected never see the place, they won’t ever try to swarm over it.”

A narrow caliche driveway split the wall of cedars on the left. I pointed. “I think that’s our turn.”

Murphy slowed the Humvee and turned into the gap. Ahead, the narrow, dusty road curved almost immediately, allowing a view of nothing from the road but more cedars. Dalhover’s Humvee followed very closely behind.

Mandi said, “It’s like a road to a trailer park.”

“Exactly,” I said.

The road made a wide arc and curved back to the left before coming up along a wall. We were headed back downhill again on the dirt road as it ran along the wall on our right, with Mt. Bonnell Road on our left, on the other side of a hedge of cedar trees.

“Looks like they finished the wall,” Murphy observed.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Mandi asked.

“It’s got to be,” I answered.

Murphy said, “That wall has got to be at least ten feet tall.”

After a few hundred feet of wall, we came to the end of the drive, a large semicircle that allowed room for cars to turn in and out of the gate. Rectangular blocks of limestone the size of coffee tables bordered the semicircle. Outside the ring of limestone, the terrain grew much more rugged. The gate itself was designed to roll on a track on the other side of the wall for opening and closing. It was covered from top to bottom in sheets of steel and hid the property just as effectively as the wall.

Murphy stopped the Humvee and we all shared a look. We were idling at the gates of a possible refuge with no obvious way to get inside.

I looked at the shadows in the cedars. “Do you guys see any Whites out there?”

All eyes peered into the darkness under the trees.

Nothing. We were momentarily safe.

“Keep an eye out,” I told them. I opened my door and very deliberately climbed out, allowing Russell to come along. I didn’t need him making a noisy scene. Who knew what could be hiding in the dusky shadows?

An obtrusive surveillance camera on the top edge of the wall was pointed down at an intercom on a post. I pressed the call button on the intercom, and a red light indicated something, so I spoke while waving up at the camera. “Hello in there.”

I watched the camera, listened, and waited.

Nothing.

I gave it another moment, then tried again. “Hello in there. Listen, we want to come in. If you’re in there and don’t want us inside, now’s the time tell me. Otherwise, we’re going to climb the wall.”

I waited. No response.

“Hello,” I tried again.

Still nothing.

I pressed the button a final time. “Listen, I’m coming over the wall. If you’re in there with a rifle, it’ll be easier to tell me to go away than it will be to shoot me. At least it’ll be easier on me. Hello. Hello.”

Nothing.

I looked around into the growing darkness under the trees. I had no idea if any Whites might be around, but if there were any close, the idling Humvees would eventually draw them in. I went back to the Humvee and maneuvered myself and Russell inside.

“Okay guys,” I said. “There’s either nobody home or they chose not to answer. Murphy, if you can angle this thing up against that wall, I may be able to get on top and climb over.”

“That’s your plan?” Murphy asked. His dislike for the idea sounded clearly in his tone.

I shrugged. “I’m making it up as I go along.”

“Yeah, aren’t we all?” Murphy nodded. “We don’t know what’s over there and you’re not exactly an expert with that rifle.”

“I’m getting better,” I protested. “I hit most of what I shoot at.”

“Eventually.”

“I’m not staying here by myself,” Mandi protested.

“It’s not safe for you to come with us,” Murphy told her gently.

I thumbed back at the other Humvee. “I’m gonna let them know what’s going on. I’ll get Dalhover to come up here with you, Mandi. Cool?”

“That’s fine. What about Russell?”

I looked over at Russell, who was staring out the front window with no expression on his face. “Mandi, he seems to respond well to you. Can you sit back here with him and keep him calm?”

“Okay.”

I cast another glance around before I swung my door open and hopped out. Better safe than dead. Once my feet were back on the ground outside, I looked around and listened. Russell was having a fit, but the sound was muffled through the armor and thick glass. The wind was blowing through the cedars. Birds were squawking. There was a sound of shuffling in the rocks and twigs somewhere off to my left. Something was out there, something noisy.

I raised my M4 to my shoulder, pointed it at the noise and said, “Hey.”

The noise stopped immediately.

I relaxed. It was more scared of me than I was of it. Probably an armadillo.

I hurried back to Dalhover’s Humvee. He got out halfway and looked around cautiously before settling his sad gaze on me. He softly rasped, “What’s this place?”

In as few words as I could manage, I explained that it might be a refuge for us and told him our plan for going over the wall.

“Will you be able to open the gate from the inside?” Dalhover asked.

“You know I can’t answer that. I’m just hoping.”

Dalhover nodded. “Yeah, I know. Listen, after you and Murphy go over the wall, I’m going to stay on the top of the Humvee and keep an ear out.”

“I’ll holler over and let you know what’s shakin’,” I told him.

“We need some tactical radios,” Dalhover groused. “Running around like a bunch of yahoos is going to get us all killed.”

I nodded. We needed a lot of things.

Murphy got the Humvee into position right up next to the wall and cut the engine. With both engines off, only the normal noises of the evening were left: the wind, the birds, the crickets. But somewhere in the background was the sound of electric motors. I angled my head but couldn’t pinpoint the direction of the source.

Dalhover heard it too, and looked at me with eyebrows slightly raised.

We both shrugged and climbed onto the Humvee.

From the top of the Humvee, the wall was still tall. I revised my guess to twelve feet or so. The top edge of the cinder blocks was at the top of my head, but a smooth round limestone coping added another ten or twelve inches. I reached over the top and ran my hands across the dry, chalky surface, finding nothing at all to grip.

Dalhover looked at me with a question on his face.

I pulled my arms down. “The wall’s got to be a foot or so thick. There’s nothing to grab onto.”

Dalhover stood on tiptoe and reached over the wall, straightening his curved spine. His rough hands scraped across the limestone.

“What’s up?” Murphy asked in a low voice as he climbed up beside us.

Dalhover shook his head. “Goddamned wall.”

Murphy stepped up next to the wall and reached over with as little success as I’d had.

Looking at Murphy, Dalhover shook his head. He leaned back against the wall and interlaced his fingers to form a stirrup. He looked at me. “You first, Zane. Put a foot in. Step on my shoulder if you need to, but don’t kick me in the face.”

It was little uncomfortable standing face to face with Dalhover, my nose only a half-inch from his, smelling his tobacco breath and un-brushed teeth. Personal hygiene habits were taking quite a beating. Toothpaste was going to have to find a place on my future scavenge list.

Putting two hands on his shoulders and a foot in his hands, I gave Dalhover a nod, and jumped while pushing up with my hands. As I reached the top of the wall, I stepped up to one of his shoulders and threw an arm over, twisting sideways to throw a leg up. To my surprise, I topped the wall and stopped there, draped like a sloth on a branch with one foot and one arm on each side and my face lying on the dusty limestone coping.

“Shit,” Murphy muttered. “I can’t believe that worked.”

“Your turn,” Dalhover said, scooting over near the end of the Humvee’s roof. “You’re a big guy. Don’t know if I can hold you. You might get bruised.”

“It won’t be the first time,” Murphy said as the two got into position.

I turned to look into the compound.

Chapter 23

The wall surrounded a couple of terraced acres that curved in steps that followed the contour of the mountain. At the bottom edge of the lowest terrace there was no wall, just an unbroken row of smooth limestone blocks laid flush with the grass from the north wall to the south wall. The sharpness of the edge and the invisibility of anything beyond implied a sudden drop down the steep slopes and cliffs to the river.

In the growing darkness, I spotted the source of the electric motor sound. On each of the five terraces, a green, turtle-like robot mower hummed across the grass. On the second tier down, the mower was followed by four infected, keeping pace with the slow-moving machine. Two of the infected wore some kind of private security uniform. One looked like a lanky high-school kid. One was a shapely naked woman with one of those stylishly expensive haircuts that looked like it was on backwards. She struggled in the rear to keep up while limping on an injured ankle. One of her forearms had an obvious extra angle.

“What do you see?” Dalhover hissed in a loud whisper.

Looking down at him, I whispered back, “Four infected. They don’t see me yet.”

“Nobody else?” Murphy asked, as he stood with one foot in the stirrup of Dalhover’s hands.

“No.”

“Nobody with rifles?” he asked.

“Nobody is shooting yet,” I answered.

“And the house?”

“Everything looks fine,” I said. “Perfectly normal for rich people, except for the Whites in the grass.”

Dalhover rasped, “What do you think?”

I looked over the house. It was built down the slope a bit and didn’t appear to have any windows or doors on the bottom floor. The only entrance was across a breezeway from the second floor that ran over a little ravine between the house and a six-car garage built around one side of a circular plaza of a driveway.

“I don’t see any movement in the house.” I looked back down at Dalhover and Murphy. “There are Whites, so the virus is inside. If it’s inside then everybody inside is probably infected. Except for the Whites, the place seems safe.”

“You wanna go in, then?” Murphy asked.

“This place looks safe as hell to me,” I answered. “I think it’s worth the risk.”

And that was enough talk. Dalhover boosted, Murphy jumped, and then worked on pulling himself up into the same sloth-like position I’d adopted.

Dalhover turned to scan the darkness in the cedars.

Murphy quietly said, “Man, it looks a lot farther down to the ground from up here.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back.

“It’s gonna hurt.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“You wanna go first?”

“No.” Nevertheless, I shifted my weight so that my feet started to slide over the wall and down inside the compound. It was slow at first, but as my clothes dragged across the chalky surface of the limestone, I quickly passed the point of no return. There was nothing to grab and no way to slow my descent. Any chance of landing safely was predetermined by my initial shift and the physics of friction.

Then I was falling.

I hit the ground and rolled out onto the crushed granite driveway. My joints were jarred from the impact and probably would have hurt enough to take my breath away if not for the virus. Everything felt suddenly stiff but nothing felt broken. I was on my back and rolled quickly onto my stomach and pushed myself up to my knees, pulling my weapon up to a firing position as I did so. Necessity makes you tough.

From above, Murphy whispered, “Is that crushed granite any softer to land on than the grass?”

“Yes,” I lied.

A sliding sound announced Murphy’s decision to join me, and a second later he grunted when the ground knocked the wind out of him.

“Damn,” he groaned after a deep breath, not making any effort to move from his prone position. “That sucked.”

I could no longer see the infected that were on the second terrace down. They either didn’t see us when we were on the wall or weren’t interested. They didn’t come after us.

“What first?” I asked. “Do we try to get the gates open or check the house?”

Murphy rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself to his hands and knees. “Did I say that sucked?”

“Yep.”

“There are lights on in the house,” Murphy said.

“Solar power,” I suggested.

“Convenient.”

“Yep.”

Murphy got to his feet, looked around, and then pointed to a security camera mounted on the corner of the house. “If somebody is still inside, they know we’re here.”

That made me uncomfortable. I looked around again, and now that I was looking for them, I spotted several cameras. “What do you think?”

Murphy said, “I’m with you. I don’t think there’s anybody home but we need to check it out before we try to figure out the gate.”

“Let’s go.” I jumped up and started a jog up the driveway with no cover except the fading light of evening. Murphy huffed loudly behind me.

At the end of the driveway, I angled across to the corner of the garage and stopped beside the wall, partially hiding myself from the house. Murphy came to a stop, breathing heavily beside me.

An old, two-door Mercedes convertible with oversized spinner rims and low-profile tires sat in the courtyard. I shook my head. “What a way to fuck up a car.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

Following the line of the curved garage, I spotted a set of double doors at the other end. That was a people entrance. The doors were decorative, after a modern fashion, but still managed to look formidable.

“You wanna try the doors?” Murphy asked.

“Might as well,” I answered. “If there’s someone in there, they know we’re here. They haven’t done anything yet, but if we sneak around, they might think we’re more of a danger than we are.” I walked out onto the courtyard and followed the curve of the garage.

“I’ll cover you,” Murphy said from behind.

At the first garage door, I checked to see if it would open, but was immediately befuddled. There was no exterior handle. The door was made of long metal slats that could, I presumed, roll up to the ceiling inside. I pushed it with my hand. If felt weighty and solid. This was no ordinary sheet metal garage door. Without even the smallest gap into which to push my fingers, I pressed my hands flat against the metal and pushed upwards. It didn’t budge, nor did it flex. It may as well have been a solid wall. I shot a look back at Murphy.

He wore a questioning expression, but refocused his attention on the house.

I bypassed the other five garage doors without stopping to test them. Once I reached the double door entrance, I was again stumped. The doors stood nine solid, patinated feet tall. I pushed one, then the other. Neither rattled in the slightest, nor were there handles to pull.

I looked back at Murphy and shrugged.

He returned the gesture.

A railing ran from the corner of the garage, from just beside the double doors, around a third of the plaza’s circumference. It kept people from falling off of the plaza and into the ravine that separated it from the house. Halfway along the garage wall, a breezeway extended out toward the house’s front door. There was no way to reach it from the outside.

I stepped back and looked up at the roof of the garage.

Crap.

The eaves of the roof stretched out at least three feet from the wall and were at least ten feet up. I’d need a ladder to get up there.

I went over and peeked around the corner again.

Double crap.

Even if I did get on the roof of the garage as a means to get onto the roof of the breezeway, I wouldn’t be able to get to the house. The roof of the breezeway was a tall V-shape, with a wide curved peak. Like the coppice on the walls, only made of smooth metal, it would be impossible to grip. Worse still, there was no way to get from the roof down to the house’s entrance without pulling some kind of crazy Spiderman move.

I looked back at Murphy, threw up my hands and shook my head.

He waved me back over.

I jogged back.

“Let’s go out behind the garage and see what we can see,” he suggested.

“Yeah.”

I followed Murphy along the featureless garage wall, around the corner, and down the slope of the mountain. We descended along the back wall of the garage, which grew taller and taller as we went down. At the opposite corner, we came out onto one of the terraces that formed the ravine between the garage and the house. The breezeway was fifteen or twenty feet above us by then.

“That sucks.” Murphy was not thrilled.

I didn’t say that I’d expected that, though I did. “We probably need some ladders to get up there. We may have to go back out and ransack the neighborhood.”

“It’s almost dark,” Murphy countered. “Let’s check around the other side of the house. If there’s no way in, I think it might be best if we all hop the wall and just camp here in the grass tonight. It won’t be comfortable but it’ll be safe.”

He was probably right, but the idea of trying to sleep on the ground with the fire ants and the scorpions didn’t sound like any kind of rest to me. On the other hand, when was the last time I’d had a full night’s sleep?

We made our way around to the side of the house and then to the back. The last colors of the sunset were fading from the western horizon. Below us, the terraces were separated by vertical walls of stacked limestone five or six feet tall.  Above us, the back porch of the house was too high up for any kind of ladder that we’d likely be able to scrounge from neighbors’ garages. Whoever had designed the house had designed it to have only one way in, over the catwalk.

We followed the wall back around to the other side of the house. The bulk of the two acres spread out below us on the terraces. The four infected we’d spotted earlier were at the far end of the terrace above us, near the car entrance, still following the mower.

“We need to take those Whites out before we get the others,” Murphy suggested.

“Okay.”

We climbed up a short terrace wall to get up to their level. From there, Murphy led the way down. I drew my machete as we went. He pulled his hatchet and held a knife in his other hand. I reached for my Glock as a backup weapon and recalled that I’d given it to Steph.

As we closed on the infected, the mower made a turn and followed the wall at the back edge of the terrace, leading the four infected toward us.

“The security dudes first,” Murphy whispered. “As we pass, I’ll take number two, you take number one.”

“Okay.”

The Whites were following each other in a tight formation, so instead of following directly behind Murphy, a position that would have left me no room to wield my machete, I stepped to my left, so that I was jogging directly at the oncoming lawnmower.

The infected saw us, but didn’t alter their behavior. We were just like them, two more Whites following one another across the grass. At least that’s what they thought, until Murphy came up beside guard number two and smashed him across the head with his hatchet.

As soon as I saw Murphy move, I slashed guard number one across his throat. He gushed blood and fell.

Guard number two was down, but wasn’t dead. Murphy’s hatchet was stuck in the guy’s skull at an odd angle and he was trying to get up. The kid was lunging at Murphy, but I was too far back to help. At the last second, Murphy jabbed and drove his knife up through the kid’s larynx.

In that moment, I pulled my machete up for another swing and punished guard number two for not dying right away. I caught him across his left shoulder and he rolled over, unable to support himself any longer with that arm. He rolled onto his back, his teeth still gnashing at Murphy’s ankle, until my machete cleaved his face and he died.

Looking up from that, I saw Murphy pulling his knife from the kid’s blood-spewing throat.

The naked, limping woman was howling and doing her best to close the gap between herself and Murphy. It only hastened her death as Murphy kicked her hard in her good leg and she went down. My machete ended her struggles, too.

With darkness in my eyes, but victory in my heart, splattered with another layer of fresh blood, I looked at Murphy. He shone his twisted grin back at me. It was gruesome, disgusting work. But winning a life or death struggle left you on an emotional high with a contradictory weight of guilt that was hard to reconcile.

“You all right?” Murphy asked.

I nodded. “You?”

“Yeah.”

The teenager made a gurgling sound and refocused our attention as his soon-to-be lifeless body struggled to breathe. Aside from the blood flowing from his mouth, nose, and throat, he looked normal. Just a regular kid, whose only concern a week before had been looking cool for his friends and getting his hands into the jeans of the cute girls at school. Now, he was dying on his lawn.

His gurgling went on, accompanied by raspy breaths as his empty eyes stared at the stars and blinked. Murphy stepped back beside me and looked down at the kid. I didn’t see Murphy’s face, but the change in his breathing told me he was as troubled as I was. Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke as first five, then ten minutes ticked by, while the kid so very painfully, very slowly finished dying.

When the last noise gurgled out of the kid’s slashed throat, the last light of the sun had gone from the sky, and the crickets chirped loudly into the hollow night.

In a hoarse voice, Murphy said, “We should go.”

Some were easy. Some were hard. Some were really hard. I asked myself how many infected I needed to kill before I would stop paying an emotional toll.

I climbed the short wall to the next tier and froze. “You know what?”

“What?” Murphy was immediately alert and looking around as he brought his rifle up.

“That’s the kid’s car up there.”

“That fucked up Mercedes?” Murphy asked.

I nodded and jumped down to the grass beside the kid and started going through his pockets. I found his billfold, of no use to me. Then I found his keys. I pulled them from his pocket. They glimmered in the light of the half moon as I looked up at Murphy and tried to smile. “Bingo.”

“House keys?” He asked.

I nodded. “And the car. I’ll bet he has a garage door opener in the car.”

“Fuck, yeah,” Murphy said with as much enthusiasm as could be mustered.

Chapter 24

“Zed, why don’t you run up there and check out the dude’s car? I’ll go let Dalhover know what’s up.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m sure they’re wondering by now.”

Together we clambered up the terrace walls and took off in our separate directions.

The run back across the property took an unexpected toll. When I reached the flagstones of the courtyard, I was breathing heavy, sweating rivers, and dragging my feet. I realized that I’d been pushing myself way too hard for too many days. I needed sleep, a full night of it, maybe a few. I bent over, putting my hands on my knees to catch my breath, and looked down along the line of the wall. Murphy was agitated and walking up and down in front of the section of the wall that we’d entered over. Uh oh. Something wasn’t right.

What do to? Run back down the hill and shout futilely at a wall, or proceed with the plan? We had no way to get back over the wall. I put my hopes on the Mercedes and ran as fast as my tired legs would carry me. When I got close to the car, I fumbled with the keys and then pressed the single worn button on what looked like a car’s keyless entry fob.

Click.

The noise didn’t come from the car. I looked to my right, at the double door entrance at the end of the garage.

“Oh.”

It clicked again. Relocking itself, I assumed.

I pressed the button again and the door clicked again. Sweet.

The door’s locking mechanism clicked again as I jammed the most likely-looking key on the ring into the old Mercedes’ door lock. Luck. I hopped in and a few seconds later, cranked the starter and the German engine purred.

Something was actually going right. Hard to believe.

With the headlights off, the agile little car zipped around the curve of the courtyard and crunched loudly on the crushed granite driveway. In seconds, I was rolling down my window and skidding up next to Murphy. His face was as worried as it had been the day we’d stormed into his mother’s house. In a taut voice he said, “No answer. I checked up and down the wall.”

“This is the spot where we came over.” I yanked a three-button garage door opener off the visor and showed it to him. I’ll bet one of these opens the gate.”

The wall on the front side of the house ran in a straight line that paralleled Mt. Bonnell Road. At one corner was the gate near where we’d parked the Humvees. Perpendicular to the front wall, and through the gate, was what I guessed was a long section of the driveway, that ran along the side wall of the property for eight or nine car lengths. That section of the driveway was blocked off from the main compound by another wall. At the far end of that section was an interior gate that matched the gate to the outside.

Murphy ran toward that gate as I drove toward it, pressing button two as I went. I didn’t know how the remote was programmed, but button two made sense. Button one for the exterior gate. Button two for the interior gate. Button three for the garage door. Or vice versa. Either way, two was the answer.

Over the revving engine, I heard the mechanical click from some large piece of machinery. The interior gate started its slow slide open. I killed the engine, pocketed the keys and ran with Murphy through the widening gap.

To my right, as I passed through the gate, I saw a guard shack built into the back wall. Beside that was parked a small black pickup truck. A peek through the shack’s windows revealed that it was empty. Good.

I caught up with Murphy as he ran down the length of the walled  gauntlet and I pressed the first, then the third button. Nothing happened.

“Fuck.”

I stopped and looked down at the three-button controller. I pressed button one, then three again.

Murphy stopped and looked at me with eyes full of anxious, silent questions.

Looking back at the door still open behind us, I quickly deduced that the outside door might not open until the interior door was closed. From a security perspective, that made sense. I pressed button two and the interior door started to close. With exaggerated body English I urged the interior gate to close while Murphy ran toward the exterior gate to wait.

Paranoid fucking owners.

But that was a good thing, assuming we could take control of the place.

The interior gate finally locked into place and I tried button one again as I ran toward the outer gate and was rewarded with the metallic sound of the outer gate sliding to the left.

As soon as the gap was wide enough, Murphy squeezed through. I followed him onto the moonlit dirt road between the compound wall and the cedar forest. Once through, I paused and thumbed the remote. As the gate stopped and reversed its motion, Murphy rushed toward the dark shapes of the Humvees parked along the wall.

I waited for the gate to come to a close before proceeding. It wouldn’t do to have any Whites running into the compound while we weren’t looking. Once the sound of the gate’s mechanism silenced, I heard disturbing noises coming out of the darkness up the gravel road: scuffling, shuffling, and sobbing.

Shit.

I ran toward the murky shadows by the Humvees and saw a cluster of black figures struggling in the dark. My rifle was up and I was ready to shoot, but as I drew closer, the details resolved.

What the hell happened?

Chapter 25

“Dammit,” I hissed, as I came in close.

Murphy was engulfing Mandi in his big arms.

Steph lay on the driveway, sobbing and trying to give instructions to Dalhover, who was working at trying to stop the bleeding on her neck, or shoulder, I couldn’t tell.

The other soldier, the guy whose name I’d never learned, lay face down on the caliche in a mess of blood and brains with his feet and legs still in the Humvee.

Kneeling down beside Steph, I asked, “What the fuck?”

Dalhover looked over at me with his permanently sad face and rasped, “Jackson turned and attacked Nurse Leonard.”

I grabbed Steph’s hand and leaned over. She was frightened and hyperventilating. Tears flowed.

She gasped, “I…I…don’t think…it’s bad...We…need…to stop…the…bleeding.”

“We will,” I said as calmly as I could fake. I looked over at Dalhover.

“It’s a nasty bite,” he told me. “Tore off part of the trapezius near her neck. It’s bleeding like crazy, but… I think we can stop it. This is a military first aid kit. The gauze has a coagulant in it.”

“Steph,” I said, leaning over and looking into her panicked eyes, “can we move you inside? Do we risk making it worse?”

She shook her head immediately. “No risk… Move me… Keep…the…pressure on…the…wound.”

“Okay.” I took a microsecond to collect my thoughts and devise a plan. I jumped to my feet and looked around. “Mandi, you come here and keep the pressure on Steph’s wound. Murphy, you pick her up and get in the passenger side of Dalhover’s Humvee. Dalhover, you drive it. I’ll take the first one. You follow me in. Let’s go. Now.”

They all jumped at my command. I ran to the Humvee in front and got into the driver’s seat. I looked back. All the others were getting loaded up. With the engine started, I pulled forward and pressed button number one on the remote. The gate started its slow slide open while Dalhover’s Humvee came up behind me.

Once the gate opened wide enough, I turned right and drove quickly inside, pulling all the way to the end of the gauntlet with Dalhover behind. I pressed button one again and the exterior gate obediently stopped, then reversed direction.

Again, I urged it forward. “C’mon.”

But it didn’t close fast enough.

First one, then two more infected came running through the shrinking gap and pounced on Dalhover’s Humvee.

“God dammit.”

I jumped out, drew my machete, and ran to the back corner of my Humvee. The gap in the door was almost closed. Another infected had just run through. I spotted movement through the gap in the gate. Whites were running through the cedars toward the opening, probably drawn by the noise of the opening and closing.

The time for machetes was past. Time to think clearly.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

There were four in the walled gauntlet and more on the way. I wanted to shoot those running for the door. Getting the door closed with the minimum number of infected inside had to be a priority. An open gate and an unknown number of Whites inbound, were the first ingredients in the recipe for disaster.

But fast moving targets in the dark over seventy feet away were targets I’d likely miss. And once I pulled the trigger, the ones already inside would charge. I only had one choice but I needed to be goddamned quick about it.

I pointed my rifle at the closest of the infected, the one trying to get through Dalhover’s door. He wasn’t more than six feet away. I fired and his chest erupted in a fountain of blood. The two infected on top of the Humvee immediately sprang at me. The female led and fell over the windshield. She spider-crawled across the hood, scraping her knees and palms to blood in her hurry to taste my flesh. She caught two rapidly fired bullets, one in the head, and one through the throat. Without missing a beat in my firing rhythm, I hit high on my next shot, but the fourth caught the next White in the shoulder, spinning him over the other side of the Humvee.

The running guy was closing fast, but Dalhover swung the Humvee door open at the last second and the running White collided with it and fell. Two shots accompanied by muzzle flashes from behind the door told me that that the infected was dead.

I looked back toward the gate. “Damn.” It had reversed direction after hitting an infected who was down, but struggling through. Apparently a safety feature built into the closing mechanism had reversed it.

I ran toward her, firing as I did.

Bam, bam, bam.

All three shots missed.

I stopped and steadied my gun. She was up and running at me with wild eyes and chomping teeth.

Breathe.

I pulled the trigger again, once, twice. She fell.

I reached into my pocket and fingered the remote again, pressing all the buttons. The gate stopped and reversed again.

I ran toward the closing gap.

I saw two more infected men jump over the big stone blocks that bordered the drive, running at me. I fired again and again and again, four shots at the two runners to get one down, but the gate closed. The last White outside hit the metal gate with a loud bang then went quiet, knocked out by his own anxious stupidity, perhaps.

“Jesus.” I gulped a deep breath and looked around. Dalhover was out of his Humvee and on the other side. He shot two more times and that last wounded White was dead.

I listened. Somewhere out there, I heard the sound of a few infected, screaming. I couldn’t gauge the distance with the walls, but they were few and far enough away that I felt safe for the moment.

Dalhover hurried around the back of his Humvee and checked each body as he went.

“All dead?” I asked as I ran by.

He nodded.

I pressed button two on my remote and the interior gate slid slowly open. I hopped into my Humvee and as soon as the gap was wide enough, I drove in. Once through the gate, the Humvee’s tires chewed up some of the lush green sod as I drove it around the little convertible I’d left on the driveway.

With both Humvees through, I fingered button two, then waited to watch the gate close and stop.

God damn.

With Dalhover behind, I sped up to the courtyard in front of the garage. I slowed once my tires hit the flagstones and I pressed button three. The door on the end of the garage, the furthest from the breezeway, opened and exposed a well-lit empty spot. I pulled in and to my left I saw an old blue mid-sixties Corvette convertible with the top down. To the left of that sat a Tesla.

I jumped out and ran past those two cars and a Bentley, then passed an empty space. At the other end of the garage sat a very shiny Mercedes. It was silver, sleek, and expensive as hell. That much was clear. It was also clear that it wasn’t locked.

I flung the door open and hopped into the driver’s seat, realizing immediately that I didn’t have the keys to start it. I wanted Dalhover’s Humvee in the garage and the Mercedes out, but I had no way to move it. I jumped out of the Mercedes and ran back up to the garage door that I’d left open.

Murphy, carrying Steph, came in with Russell who was glued to Mandi’s side, and Dalhover behind. I pressed the button on my remote and the garage door closed. Then, it was silent except for our labored breathing and Steph’s pained, soft moans. We were safe, but somehow, that concept didn’t sink through to attenuate our need for urgency.

Realizing suddenly that all eyes were on me, I said, “C’mon.” I hurried back toward a pair of double doors at the other end of the garage. They matched the two I’d seen outside, so I deduced that they must open onto the breezeway to the house. Once at the doors, I stopped. There was no knob. Of fucking course, it had no knob. “Really? Every fucking tiny little thing.”

I glanced at the faces of the others. They were expectant, anxious.

Fuck.

I jammed a hand into my pocket and pulled out the old Mercedes keys. The key fob with the other remote. That had to be it. I pressed that button and the door clicked and swung open. As though I’d planned it all along, I held it open and ushered the others through. As we hurried across the breezeway, the door clicked shut behind us.

A very roomy patio was inset into the house at the other end of the breezeway. Flowerpots of every size held tropical plants and flowers. The front door was way oversized compared to any house I’d ever been in. It was constructed out of black iron in an ornate pattern of ivy and flowers, with a sheet of glass behind. It had a large iron handle.

A handle. Thank God.

I pulled on the handle, but it didn’t budge. I tried the key fob again. A welcoming click followed. I pulled on the handle and we all stepped into the immeasurable comfort of an air-conditioned house.

Chapter 26

“Damn,” Murphy muttered.

The entryway was set on a dais four steps above the biggest living room I’d ever seen. It was a vast expanse of light-colored wood floors, modern furniture, stark white walls, and widely dispersed abstract art. The most stunning feature was the two-story wall of windows stretching around the convex curve on the back of the house.

Through the windows, the sky glowed a faint purple along the horizon. The black hills across the river were dotted with the tiny stars of solar-powered landscape lights and occasional fully lit houses. The wide Colorado River shimmered far below in the moonlight and stretched out around a bend heading west and south.

“Wow,” Mandi said.

To our left, a dining room held a very long table that looked to have been sliced vertically from a three-hundred-year-old tree and spanned enough length to seat twenty. To our right, a wide staircase of the same light-colored wood as the rest of the house rose and sank at intricate and unexpected angles like something designed by M. C. Escher.

Somewhere up those stairs, footsteps echoed.

We all shared a look. The house was not empty.

I nodded to Murphy, still with Steph in his arms. He backed into a corner to the left of the door. Mandi did the same. Thankfully, Russell stuck with her. Perhaps he’d tired of my abandoning him.

Dalhover tracked the barrel of his rifle back and forth across all the spaces, keeping an eye out for movement. That left the stairs for me, so I positioned myself at the foot of the staircase and waited.

The clomping footsteps above were awkward, careless, and urgent. It had to be a White, alerted to our presence by the sound of the opening and closing of the door. I reached again for a pistol that wasn’t there, and thought of taking back the one I’d given Steph. She was in no shape to use it.

Too late.

Through the gaps between the steps I saw jeans, a turquoise t-shirt, and white skin. The White was on the stairs. In no time, it tromped down, made its way around the last sharp corner, and howled.

She was a short, stout, Hispanic woman with her black and gray hair pulled back in a bun. She had blood smeared through the wrinkles on her face and down the front of her tent-like t-shirt. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t trip, stumbling and running as she was. Looking past my alabaster skin, she focused on Dalhover and rushed toward him, which made my task easy.

I stepped to the side and as she passed, swinging my machete around and catching her across the back of the neck. My machete, wedged between her vertebrae, was yanked out of my hand when she dropped. I reluctantly let it go, raised my M4, and pointed it up the stairs.

The paralyzed woman struggled to breathe as she bled out at my feet. I listened for more noises in the house, but couldn’t make anything out with the woman’s mouth making dying noises below me.

It stopped.

I glanced down to see Dalhover’s knife sticking out of the side of her head. He was standing back up and raising his weapon. Problem solved.

The relative silence revealed a noise somewhere down the stairs. Dalhover heard it, too. It was a muffled, thumping sound. We listened for a few moments longer. The sound wasn’t getting closer. It definitely wasn’t getting farther away. Someone was trapped somewhere below.

“Hey,” I called into the house, hoping to draw any more infected to us.

Still, the muffled thumping from below.

“Hey.” We waited.

I gave it a few more minutes and shouted again, “Hey.”

Nothing but the thumping.

Dalhover quietly told me, “We need to clear the house.”

I nodded my agreement, then looked back at Murphy. “You got this?”

“Yeah.” He laid Steph on the floor and brought his weapon up. Mandi kneeled down beside Steph to keep the pressure on her wound. Russell kneeled beside her. Steph seemed stable, not calm, but not hyperventilating anymore.

I looked at Dalhover with raised eyebrows. Which way first?

Dalhover tilted his head to his left and moved into the dining room. I followed. It was clearly empty, but there was a doorway at the far end, on the right.

Dalhover hurried down one side of the long table. I went down the other. Glancing to my left through the windows, I saw the walled gauntlet we’d driven through and the curved terraces of the lawn. The bodies of the two security guards, the naked woman, and the boy lay down there. But the only movement came from the lawnmowers.

Dalhover stopped against the wall beside the doorway into the kitchen. From across the dining room, I walked forward slowly, scanning across the kitchen in an arc. It was empty. I nodded the all-clear to Dalhover and he jumped through the doorway and down five steps to the kitchen’s tile floor.

I hurried across and joined him.

The under-cabinet lighting gleamed off the stainless steel counter tops and smooth black lacquer cabinets. Dalhover was moving left around the central island and opened a door to a pantry. A light came on automatically as the door swung. From where I stood it appeared to be large, but sparsely stocked.

Dalhover grunted something unintelligible and closed the door. He hurried over to the two refrigerators built side by side into the cabinetry. He opened one, then the other, bathing himself in the glow of the refrigerator lamp. Upon closing the second, he looked at me and his sad eyes turned angry. “Goddamned vegetarians.”

The far wall of the kitchen was just an extension of the floor-to-ceiling windows we’d seen from across the living room, but only half the height. There was apparently a room above the kitchen.

A long, stainless steel bar separated the kitchen from the living room and was lined with a row of barstools. I followed Dalhover around it and into the living room. On the other side of the glass ran a balcony the length of the house. Nothing out there but patio furniture.

The living room had plenty of furniture, but was devoid of anything alive. On the back wall of the living room, there were several doors and the entrance to a hall. Above those rooms, the doors on the upstairs rooms, swung out to an open hallway that ran the length of the house.

The first door off the living room led into an empty bathroom. The next, a library with a desk and more couches. Down at the end of the living room, a short hall opened up to a washroom on the right, a maid’s quarters on the left, and a downstairs guest room.

A narrow stairway in the washroom led us upstairs, where it came out beside a linen closet. From there we walked into the master bedroom, which took up one whole end of the house. It, of course, had the requisite floor-to-ceiling windows, along with a bathroom that might better be labeled a spa. It was larger than my apartment and decorated in dichroic glass tiles and translucent glass bricks. Off of that were two closets large enough to garage a car.

“Jesus,” I muttered to Dalhover.

“Yeah,” Dalhover answered. It was good to be rich.

We came out of the master bedroom onto the upstairs walkway, and I glanced down into the living room. Nothing moved down there, but the muffled thumping from somewhere downstairs could still be heard.

The first door led to a gym. No infected there. Another bathroom was empty. Next, a guest room with its own bathroom proved empty.

We crossed a catwalk near the stairs, and Murphy, Mandi, and Russell silently watched us pass.

The room at the other end of the catwalk had to be a kid’s room, probably the one we’d killed on the lawn. It looked like a cross between the master suite and a teenager’s room. Great views, enormous bathroom, cavernous closet. Our shock over the opulence was starting to wear off, and the stark reality of life’s unfairness was sinking in.

Satisfied that the second floor was clear, I followed Dalhover back to the stairs. Above us, the stairs climbed up to a landing with a glass door that opened to the outside.

“Up or down?” I whispered.

Dalhover shrugged, “The noisy one downstairs isn’t going anywhere. It’s the quiet ones that worry me right now.”

I whispered down to Murphy from the catwalk, “We’re going up. Are you cool?”

“I got it, man.” Murphy refocused his attention down the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed at the stairs.

Dalhover and I climbed.

Once at the top, looking through the glass door, I said, “I’ll go out first. You stay inside. I wanna be sure the door doesn’t lock us out.”

“Yeah,” was Dalhover’s reply.

I went outside and let the door close behind me. It closed with a click. I retried it and it opened.

Finally, a normal door.

Dalhover came outside with me.

On the roof, a large swimming pool was surrounded by pergolas, from which hung rows of hoses designed to spray a cooling mist over the tanning chairs.

I walked around the counters of an outdoor kitchen and looked over the rail at the edge. Dalhover’s Humvee sat undisturbed in the courtyard, just as we’d left it. The garage’s roof was a solid mass of solar panels. “I wonder if that provides enough electricity to power the whole house.”

“I hope so,” Dalhover answered.

After walking the roof’s perimeter and satisfying ourselves with the view of the property from the top, we let ourselves back inside and headed downstairs. We passed Murphy on the main floor with a nod and proceeded down.

At the bottom, the stairs flared wide into an expansive room set up like a theater lobby. Above a curtained entrance to what could only be a home theater, a marquee surrounded in little golden bulbs advertised some movie I’d never heard of. A snack bar complete with soda machine, popcorn machine, and candy counter stood off to the side. A pair of restrooms marked ladies and gents opened out of one wall.

One wall of glass panels separated the brightly lit faux lobby from the dim light of a wine cellar. An arched doorway of old-looking wood opened to a tasting area that was flanked by a dozen dark wooden shelves, full of bottles. The cellar was bigger than most of the liquor stores I’d been in, and I’d been in a lot. There was no one inside.

Dalhover and I shared a look. I was trying to do the math in my head. How much more money than me did the owner of this house have? I guessed something similar was going through his mind.

I looked around again. The sound that had been thumping from down there had stopped. But there was a White around somewhere.

The two restrooms had open entrances with angled halls inside, just like you might find in a theater. The entrance to the theater itself was draped with a heavy curtain. If we were going to get surprised by a White rushing out, it would be from either the restrooms or the theater. The doors, we’d hear opening.

I nodded to the theater and Dalhover gave me a minimal expression of affirmation. He stepped over to the side of the entrance, and put a hand on the curtain. I understood his intent and centered myself in front of the curtain, rifle at the ready.

He slowly drew the curtain back.

Beyond, I saw several rows of plush recliners facing a movie screen at least a dozen feet wide. Just as in the rest of the house, night-lights held the room in a dim glow. Nothing moved, so I proceeded cautiously in, looking left and right in rapid succession as I passed the curtain. No White was waiting there to ambush me. The walls, I noticed, were decorated with an assortment of movie posters, all featuring the actress Sarah Mansfield.

Oh, shit.

I connected the face of the naked woman on the lawn to the smiling face on the posters. This was her house. I’d killed Sarah Mansfield, hacked her to death with a machete.

…And watched her infected son drown in his own blood.

Of course, I didn’t know Sarah Mansfield, but her death felt personal. I’d seen so many of her movies—even finding some private satisfaction while I re-watched a particularly racy movie of hers when I was alone in my room—that I felt like I knew her.

I felt bad. The sadness was coming to crush me. Was it Sarah’s death, or was her death just a release valve for all the bottled up shit from the past few weeks?

My eyes welled up.

No.

No time for that now.

Stuff it down.

Put it somewhere dark.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Breathe.

Move the feet. Focus.

A quick circuit through the fat leather chairs proved the theater empty, and I exited. The restrooms were next, and I followed Dalhover into the ladies’ and then the men’s. Both were free of infected.

Back in the lobby again, I whispered, “This is Sarah Mansfield’s house.”

“The Sarah Mansfield?”

Before I could answer, a metal door to our left thumped with the sound of a fist pounding it from the other side. Well, that answered that question, and the next question. That was the source of the sound, and whoever was making it did know we were there.

Dalhover took up a position by the wall and off to the side, with his rifle leveled at the door. Just to be certain, I knocked on the door and said, “Hey.”

Fists on the other side went nuts and the door shuddered under their violence. It had to be a White.

I looked over at Dalhover. “This is going to be fun.”

He looked at the door, then back at me, all business.

I wished I had my pistol. I wished I’d taken the time to retrieve my machete. Alas, I only had the M4. Not the best weapon for very close quarters. I drew a deep breath and turned the knob slowly. The locking mechanism slid on lubricated brass, and as soon as the catch was free of the strike plate, I pushed.

The pounding stopped, and big white fingers immediately snaked around the edge of the door, flinging it back and dragging me off balance in the process.

I tried to raise my rifle as I fell, but an enormous beast of a man pounced out of the room, and with a brutal swipe of his arm, knocked my weapon away. Before I could react, two apelike hands gripped my head and pulled my face up to his gaping maw.

Putrid breath. Brilliantly white teeth. Black eyes. And I was a rag doll, too slow to keep the bellowing monster from ripping my face off.

Terror.

Dalhover yelled something. I may have heard gunshots. But those teeth were coming at my face and I could do nothing to stop them.

Then, in what looked like a thoughtful pause, the man looked up and down my white face, notched up to a new level of frustration, and discarded me. He tossed my head—thankfully with the rest of me still attached—as though he were passing a basketball, and it bounced off the hard floor in a similar fashion. Through the stars in my eyes, I saw the rabid mountain gorilla leap across the lobby and bound up the stairs.

Dalhover’s rifle erupted. Wood splintered. Sheetrock exploded with bursts of dust. Metal sparked.

The White disappeared upstairs.

Three staccato bangs were followed by three more, then the sound of a heavy body hit the wall and I watched as the giant man tumbled back down, bouncing on stairs until coming to a stop with the loud slap of skin on tile.

Dalhover wasted not a second. He crossed the lobby and smashed the butt of his rifle into the man’s skull. One, crunch. Two, crunch. Three…  The sound of bone mashing into meat.

“Holy Christ.” I tried to pull myself up off the floor, but ghostly hues of color and shadows swam across my vision. I blacked out.

Chapter 27

That tenuous state of awareness that lives between sleep and consciousness lasts for spans of time that feel like hours, but I know can only be minutes. Some mornings, in that time before waking, I cling to gossamer pornographic dramas and lusts that feel like love. Most mornings, and often in the middle of the night, I squirm away from a faceless, suffocating monster covered in dirty, dreadlocked fur. It waits in my dreams to rend my flesh, swallow my soul, and leech my bones. They are dreams of terror and trying so, so hard to run. But my feet never move. My hands are syrupy slow. I scream through dead vocal chords. I try to drag myself through the middle realm and open my eyes, but the nightmare sucks me back, tenaciously holding on.

It was Steph’s face I saw, washed in golden, late afternoon sunlight, when I finally caught my breath and opened my eyes.

“You were having a nightmare,” she said.

I blinked.

“You almost sounded like you were…” She said the next word like she thought it might be offensive. “…Whimpering.”

It sounded like screaming in my head.

“Are you okay?”

I managed a nod.

“What were you dreaming about?”

“Nothing,” I whispered the lie. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

Steph laid her hand on my forehead then touched my face. Satisfied with whatever information she gleaned, she straightened up in her seat, but her eyes didn’t leave my face.

I noticed a bulky bandage on her shoulder and she seemed be letting her right arm rest in her lap. “Your arm…?”

“I’ll be okay,” she said, “Murphy stitched up my shoulder.”

“Murphy?”

“I’ll have an ugly scar.” She smiled.

Won’t we all?

I crooked a tiny smile and nodded. Unexpected, unexplainable tears welled up in my eyes and I clenched them shut.

Where did that come from?

“Does your head hurt?” She asked.

I nodded a lie. Well, not really. My head felt like it was made of broken glass.

A plastic pill bottle rattled and the lid burped off as Steph said, “You have a nasty bump on your head. I don’t think you have a concussion, but...I’m not positive. Can you sit up?”

Everything in the world seemed to disconnect and slide around my field of vision as I pushed myself up on my elbows and closed my eyes. Steph’s fingers touched my lips and pressed two pills between. She said, “Swallow those. They’ll help.”

When I opened my eyes again, she was bringing a straw to my lips. I drank the pills down and sucked greedily on the straw, realizing suddenly how utterly parched I felt. After the straw slurped loudly on the bottom of the empty cup, I laid my head very, very gently back on a pillow and breathed deeply.

Steph’s hand came to rest on my forehead again and stayed. “You have a fever, but that’s expected.”

“What’s my temperature?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“Ninety-nine point six.”

I sank further into the cushions. That temperature was two tenths of a degree warmer than when I’d checked it at Russell’s house. Was the virus winning its battle with my immune system? Would my brain start dying?

Steph said, “I can give you something for the fever.”

Pills wouldn’t help with that. It was the first thing everybody tried. I squinted into the brightness of the room and asked, “Sunglasses? Do you have my sunglasses?”

“Yes.” She turned and picked them up off of the coffee table she was sitting on and slipped them onto my face.

“Thanks.” Under the protection of the sunglasses, I opened my eyes wide and let them linger on her face. Her eyes were kind but determined. She was lean, like a marathoner. She wasn’t pretty, not really. Plain, maybe. But when she smiled, she lit up. I asked, “What day is it?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter anymore?”

“No,” I said, “I was wondering…wondering… Is this tomorrow?”

A touch of a smile crossed Steph’s face. “Are you asking if you got injured last night?”

“Yes. Sorry. My brains are kind of rattled.”

Steph nodded, “Yes, it happened last night.”

“What time is it?”

“Late afternoon?” Steph craned her neck to look at a clock. “It’s quarter after four.”

“Wow.” Was it the blow to my head or was I just that exhausted? Probably both. “So, no concussion?”

“I don’t think so.”

I put a hand on the back of the sofa and very, very slowly pulled myself up to sit.

“You don’t have to sit if you’re not up to it,” Steph told me.

“I want to.” I finished getting myself upright and felt dizzy. “I do not feel good.”

“Do you feel nauseous?” The concern was heavy in Steph’s voice.

“No.” I started to shake my head to clear the cobwebs, but a sharp pain put a stop to that. “I feel crappy all over.”

“Besides the bump, you’re probably dehydrated. You need to get some food in you, too. When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know. I…I had a sandwich with Russell yesterday.” Yesterday? “Where is Russell?”

“He’s with Mandi.”

“Hmm. He must be mad at me.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Long story.”

“I’ll go fix you something. Are you hungry?” Steph jumped up from the giant square coffee table and headed off toward the kitchen. My answer to the question was apparently not going to matter. So I just watched her go. Nicely fitting jeans. A clean t-shirt draped just to the waistline. Her red hair shimmering like it belonged in a shampoo commercial.

What the fuck? Am I awake?

I looked around the living room. It was modern luxury. It was orderly. The glass wall was clean. No panes were broken. I saw no smoke on the horizon. I heard no distant gunfire. I saw no Whites. I breathed in cool, crisp, clean air and savored the essence of civilization: air conditioning.

Juxtaposed against the stark cleanliness of the living room, I realized that I reeked. My clothes felt crispy with the salt of evaporated sweat and things I didn’t care to think about. I hadn’t had a shower in more days than I could count. My hair was full of so much crud that it stood at weird angles on my head.

Water was running into the sink in the kitchen as Steph leaned over a counter.

“Water too?” I asked loudly, my voice echoing in the expanse.

“All we’ll ever need,” Steph called back.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“We think it’s piped up from the river and filtered. There’s a big water system downstairs.”

“That explains why you’re all cleaned up.”

Steph smiled at me and went about her business. A blender spun loudly in the kitchen. “And you know the best part?”

“No,” I said.

“There’s a whole closet full of clothes upstairs that fit me perfectly.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

I leaned my head back on the couch, closed my eyes, and found a position that let the lump on my head rest on a soft spot. I felt sure I could get on my feet if I needed to. It would be painful. Balance might be difficult. But I’d risen to the task so many times over the past several days that I had a new concept of what I could endure.

Perhaps the apocalypse had made me a better person.

Achieve personal growth through the end of the world.

That was a silly thought. Likely the most laudable achievement in my future would be surviving the day and going to sleep in a safe place. Perhaps that was as good as it would ever get again.

The noise of my weapons scooting across the wooden top of the coffee table caused me to jerk my head up faster than was prudent. Shards of pain radiated through my brain. “Ouch.”

Steph sat down on the table in front of me. “I made you a smoothie. It’s frozen strawberries, bananas, and blueberries. There was a big jug of some kind of organic protein powder in the pantry. I put some of that in there, too.”

“Thanks.” I sipped a big gulp through the straw. “Damn, that’s good.”

Steph smiled, but it evaporated as quickly as it came.

I sipped some more.

“It’s not a very substantial meal, but there isn’t much food around,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I think Ms. Mansfield was vegan,” Steph told me. “Lots of semi-wilted fruits and veggies in the fridge, along with some tofu. Enough pasta, beans, and some sauces in the pantry for a couple of days, if we’re not too hungry. Oh, and frozen fruit in the freezer.” Steph pushed a glass of water into my free hand.

“This might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said, only half-joking. The pureed, frozen fruit in my stomach made me realize how famished I was.

“Thanks. Cooking isn’t my forte.”

Silence settled in while I slurped. Thoughts of all that had gone on and all that was happening outside the walls started to sneak back in. Not wanting to think about any of that, I said, “You seem to be doing okay with your shoulder.”

Steph nodded, and with a confident look on her face said, “Yes, about that. I’m sorry, I kind of freaked out when it happened.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“If I stand too quickly I get a bit dizzy,” she said. “I think I must have bled out at least a pint by the time they got me stitched up.”

I shivered. “I’ll bet that didn’t feel good without anesthetic.”

“Sergeant Dalhover found a nice bottle of vodka to help out with that.” She smiled again. “I think my hangover this morning was worse than the pain in my shoulder.”

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” I said. “You know, I found a big bottle of hydrocodone in a house a couple of days ago. Murphy might know where it is.”

“He already gave me the bottle,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. So what’s the deal? What’d I miss while I was out?”

Steph looked around for a moment then said, “We’re staying in Sarah Mansfield’s house, but you know that, right?”

I grimaced. “I think I killed her.”

“The virus killed her, Zed. You just put her out of her misery.”

“That’s a nice way to think about it,” I said. “I guess that was probably her son out there on the lawn with her last night. He’s dead too.”

“I guess,” Steph answered. “I didn’t see them. I’ve been in the ward with you since they stitched me up.”

A small laugh was all I could manage. “This isn’t bad for a sick ward.”

“Actually, it’s everything for the moment. We all slept in here on the couches last night.”

“Really?”

Steph looked around the big living room. “I think everybody felt comfortable being in the same room together.”

“Did somebody stand watch?” I asked, concerned.

“I’m pretty sure. I was out of it once the hydrocodone kicked in, but they were talking about taking shifts in the video room when I passed out.”

“The video room?” That didn’t sound right at all. “You mean the theater?”

“No, not the theater.”

That puzzled me, and it showed on my face.

“That’s what Dalhover and Murphy called it,” said Steph. “I haven’t been down there yet.”

“Downstairs?”

“Yes, there’s a room for the security guards down there where they can monitor all of the video cameras. It was the room where you got…bounced around last night.”

I smirked. “Bounced around. That’s about right. How many cameras?”

“I think Dalhover said there are twenty or thirty. You can see all of the common areas in the house, anything on the grounds, and outside the wall.”

“No shit?” That was a nice surprise.

“It’s true,” Steph confirmed.

“I guess that’ll make it easy to stand watch at night.”

“Mandi is down there now,” Steph said. “Sergeant Dalhover insisted that somebody be on watch at all times.”

“So there is something to like about Dalhover.”

“He’s a good man,” she said. “He’s just surly.”

“I think he’s the saddest man I’ve ever met.”

Steph gave me a little, patronizing smile and said, “I’m going to try and take a shift tomorrow. I shouldn’t do any manual labor for a week or two, but I can take sitting in a rolling chair and watching video monitors.”

“I’m starting to have trouble focusing on what you’re saying.” I said, a little dreamily. “What were those pills you gave me?”

“Hydrocodone.”

“Oh.”

Somewhere in the next few moments, sleep stole everything away.

Chapter 28

Several days passed. 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.

We 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.

Chapter 29

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,” said Murphy. “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.”

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

“About?” I asked.

“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 us 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.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Murphy. “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,” said Murphy.

“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 catwalk roof 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.” He laughed.

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 suppressors, 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,” I said. “That’s 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,” she said.

“Was a captain?” I asked.

“I’m a civilian now.”

I pointed at Murphy. “And I knew you were in the Army.”

“Four years in the infantry,” he confirmed.

I looked at Dalhover.

“First Sergeant. Twenty years. Retired.”

I rubbed my hand across my face, as though that might have helped with my frustration at feeling suddenly very much like an outsider. “So, what exactly is going on here? Is Steph in charge? I’m just asking.”

“Somebody needs to be in charge,” Steph announced. “A squad of soldiers with a leader will survive where a leaderless gang of ruffians will get killed.”

“Man, I can agree with that,” Murphy added enthusiastically.

Dalhover nodded.

Steph said, “Zed, you’re a natural leader, though I don’t think you see yourself that way. You’re brave and you’re smart. But you don’t have any respect for your own life, so you do stupid, stupid, stupid things and you get lucky.”

“Do you think three stupids was enough?” I asked, a little petulantly.

“This isn’t a coup,” Steph told me. “As far as I can tell, everybody here owes you their life.”

“Uh-oh,” I interrupted. “I’m having déjà vu.”

“Grow up.” Steph didn’t yell, but her voice was as firm as a hard slap. “I respect you, Zed. And I like you. I really do. There’s nothing happening here that you’re not a part of. I think we all need somebody in charge. That’s just that truth of it. Running everything by committee will get us killed. You want to be the leader. I’m fine with that. I’ll bet my life on your instincts and your luck. Why not? You saved me. Is that what you want?”

Shit. She was being rational, authoritative, and firm. I was outclassed.

“We can vote on it. We can do anything you like,” Steph looked around at us. “I think Zed’s spot-on about the strategy. Hide and run. But, not to be sexist, that’s just not a strategy that a man is going to be good at implementing. You guys get your testosterone up and you all want to pull out your machine guns and go all Null Spot on the Whites.”

“Not you, too,” I interrupted with a feeble smile.

She said, “I think a woman is better at being able to make the choice to retreat. So if hide and run is our strategy, I think I’m the natural choice to lead us.”

Dalhover spoke up first. “I’m fine with that.”

Murphy followed immediately, showing me his apologetic face while he spoke. “I’m good with Steph.”

All eyes fell to me and frankly, I agreed. “Yeah, Steph, I can follow you.”

“Thank you.” Steph gave us a curt smile. “Just so you know, this isn’t the Army. We’re all in this together. We’ll talk about decisions as much as you feel like we need to, but when the chips are down, when the Whites are coming, we won’t have time to dicker. We do what I say and we argue about it later. Agreed?”

Nods all around.

Mandi excused herself ever so politely to get around Dalhover and came inside with the rest of us. “What’s everybody talking about?”

Chapter 30

Mandi looked at me with a face painted in several layers of empathy. “Zed, are you okay with this?”

“Steph is smart and brave, and I respect her,” I said.

“Don’t be a dick,” Murphy interrupted. It was the kind of thing a friend could say to another without starting a fistfight.

“I know it sounds that way,” I said, “I do. But I mean it. I think Steph is the right choice, the best choice. I’m good with it.” I smiled. I really was good with it. Steph was smart and I trusted her.

Mandi gave me an unnecessary hug. Still looking at me, she announced to the group, “If you guys are good with it, I am too.”

Steph looked at Dalhover and said, “Sergeant, will you put together a duty roster?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at the rest of us. “We have a roster for keeping watch, but unless we want this beautiful place to turn into a pig sty, we need to start taking turns keeping it clean, sweeping the floors and cleaning the bathrooms. Do you guys agree?”

Of course, we all did.

“We’re running short on supplies. Murphy, Zed, you guys are the obvious choice to go out and scavenge. That will probably be your primary duty on the roster.”

“I’m cool with that,” Murphy answered.

“That sounds fair,” I answered. “Besides, we’re the only ones who can hide in plain sight out there. It makes sense.”

“We’re almost out of food,” Steph said. Everybody already knew that. “Zed, are you up to going out today or tonight?

I looked at the scabs on my hand and the mostly healed wounds on my arms. I ran a hand across the shrinking lump on the back of my head. “More ready than I’ve been for half the shit I’ve done in the last few weeks, I guess.”

“No, really, Zed.” Steph was all business. “We can all skip some meals if we need to. How are you feeling?”

Looking directly at her, I said, “I’m okay. Really. I’m not a hundred percent, but I’m good to go. Remember, I do have the advantage of not feeling most of the pain from my cuts and bruises. So as long as I’m not dizzy or bleeding out, I’m good.”

“You don’t need to hurt yourself or risk getting Murphy hurt because you’re trying to be the Valiant Null Spot.” She smiled at me.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not fine. I’m sure I don’t look fine, but I’m good. Murphy and I are a good team. We’ve been through some shit together. We’re both good.”

“I’ll leave it to you two to decide when to head out and where to go. But we need food…”

“Meat, if you can find it,” Dalhover spoke up, surprising everyone with the request. We were all becoming used to his economy with words.

“I’m with that, man,” Murphy agreed.

“The other priority will be a rally point,” said Steph. “We need a place to run to when this place is compromised.”

“Don’t you mean ‘if’?” Mandi asked.

“I think we can only hope for ‘if’,” I said. “But we need to plan for ‘when’.”

“I’ve got a satellite map here,” Murphy said. “Zed had Amber put it together for us, along with everything else. We can find some places along the river that might work, and check them when we go out.”

“That sounds good,” Steph told us, “but we need just one place tonight. Find one good one. We’ll try and get three or four safe houses lined up over the next week or two. The more options we have, the more likely that we’ll all live when we have to move.”

Chapter 31

The sun had slipped below the mountains west of the river an hour earlier. The sky had relatively few clouds and there was plenty of moonlight by which to navigate. I pressed the garage door opener on the boat’s dashboard and the boathouse’s door rose out of the water.

Murphy and I used paddles to push the ski boat out into the lazy current. Russell, who had re-glued himself to my side, waved a paddle to no effect except to splash the water around the boat.

“Hey, Murphy, when you guys came down here the first time, did you check under the water?”

“For what?”

“To see if someone could get in that way.”

“Yeah, man, Top jumped in the water and checked it out. There’s a metal fence from the wall all the way down to the river bottom. The biggest thing that can get in is a catfish.”

“Cool.”

Well away from the boathouse, we seated ourselves and let the current take us. The boat slowly spun and rocked. Tiny waves lapped the hull. Cicadas sounded like little monkeys with kazoos. Frogs and crickets chirped. The breeze rustled its way through the thick trees.

It was peaceful, mostly.

Heavy gunfire from Camp Mabry, easily heard from the pool deck on Sarah Mansfield’s roof, echoed off the houses on the far side of the river. It was the familiar sound of organized, well-armed people trying to hold out against the infected. It’s what the hospital sounded like before it was overrun.

Occasional staccato gunshots rang in the distance, though it was nothing like the frequency of gunshots in those first few days after the infection stomped on Austin with both feet. At first, the near constant sound of gunfire disturbed me. Now, it was a reassuring sound. It meant that there were other survivors out there. The virus hadn’t yet won.

After a long silence between us, Murphy asked, “How far downstream should we go?”

Looking around, I answered, “There’s a marina about a quarter of a mile up from the dam. I’ll start the engine when we get there.”

The plan was to exit the boathouse as stealthily as possible. Taking our new hide and run strategy into account, keeping Sarah Mansfield’s house and our presence there unknown was paramount. So we burned off forty-five minutes of the evening by drifting down the river before starting the boat’s engine. Once the engine was running, we’d glide upriver past hundreds of boathouses including Sarah Mansfield’s until we were at our destination. We’d wrap up business there, and on the way back down, cut our engine and let the current bring us home while hiding silently in the darkness.

As expected, the marina came up beside us. Murphy was sitting in the port side seat with his rifle at the ready. Russell sat on a bench seat in the stern, uninterested, as usual. The engine started easily with a muffled rumble that seemed unduly loud, but that, too, was expected.

I throttled the engine and we headed upriver.

At the bend in the river below the tan colored limestone cliffs of Mt. Bonnell, I saw the crenelated shapes of the houses along the crest and silently thanked Dalhover for his insistence on light discipline. All of them, including Sarah Mansfield’s house, were black.

Miles passed in silence. Murphy and I focused on scanning the banks for Whites lurking in the trees, but the only human forms we passed were occasional bloated bodies floating in the water.

After poring over the satellite photos of the river between the two dams, we’d picked out a house that was our first candidate for both scavenging and scouting as a possible rally point. The house was large, very large. It had two garages, enough space for four cars. It had a pool on the back porch between the house and the river. It sprawled across a large slice of riverfront property on an otherwise undeveloped isthmus, formed by the river and a wide tributary that flowed in from the north. At the landward end of the isthmus, what appeared to be a tall limestone cliff sealed it off from access through the trees. The only way on or off the property was across a gated bridge over the tributary.

The next closest houses were a group of five or six a quarter-mile away. That general area of the river was only sparsely developed, and there were many square miles of virgin forest behind it. So, although any number of infected could have wandered into the area, the indigenous infected might number only in the dozens. Depending on the depth of the water in the tributary and the height and slope of the cliffs, the place might be safe.

With a mile or two still to go, Murphy quietly said, “The river would make a good trading route.”

“You’re still on that idea?” I asked, as I steered the boat through the center of the river.

“Why wouldn’t I be? I’m not looking for a superhero job during reconstruction, like you. I told you, man, I want to take advantage of the opportunity.”

“Reconstruction?” I asked.

“Yeah, man. The post-post-apocalyptic period. You know, after everything has finished going to shit and we start picking up the pieces. That’s reconstruction.”

I looked back out across the river, thinking that I preferred the silence.

“I’m telling you man,” Murphy continued his pitch. “We’re in the position. We can make it happen.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Murphy took my lack of interest as a sign to change the subject. “So what’s up with you and Steph?”

“Nothing.” Deflection time. “What’s up with you and Mandi?”

Murphy grinned. “We have our own room and we sleep in the same bed. Is it a secret about what’s up with me and Mandi?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Then stop pretending we’re in junior high for a minute, and just answer my question.” Murphy grinned and then laughed.

“There’s nothing up with me and Steph,” I told him.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you mad because she’s the boss now?” He asked.

I laughed. “No. I honestly believe putting her in charge was a good move for us.”

“Okay, so you don’t think she’s cute?”

“I guess she’s pretty,” I said. “I mean, when she smiles.”

“So?”

“So, what?” I asked.

“What are you gonna do?”

“Murphy, she’s engaged.”

“Probably not. You may not have noticed, but damn near everybody is dead.”

“Maybe,” I said. “He was in the hospital with her. He was passed out with the fever when we left.”

Murphy was suddenly serious. “He was alive when you guys left him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t have a choice. He had the fever. He was probably going to turn. She couldn’t stay with him. If she had, she’d be dead now. We couldn’t carry him along. We barely escaped as it was.”

“That must have been hard on her,” Murphy allowed. “But we’ve all been through the shit, man. Or none of us would be here. You move on, or you die. That’s the way it is now.”

“Smile and get over it. Is that how the Murphy philosophy goes? I never got my wristband.” I put a smile on my face to try to mask the harshness.

Murphy was silent for a few moments, then said, “I like you Zed. You know that, right? But sometimes you’re just a dick for no reason at all. It’s like you wanna grow up to be a grumpy old bastard like Dalhover or somethin’.”

The boat skimmed around another long, slow bend and the silence lingered between us. I finally said, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

Murphy slapped me on the back and said, “It ain’t nothin’, man.”

A few minutes later, he said, “You should do something about Steph, though. She’s a good one.”

“Just so we’re clear on one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“When I get to be Dalhover’s age, I don’t want to be anything like him.”

Murphy laughed. “Man, we won’t live that long.”

Chapter 32

Murphy said, “Up there on the right, past that tree hanging over the bank.”

I followed the line of Murphy’s pointing finger and spotted it. “How can you tell?”

“That’s the boathouse from the satellite picture. It’s got that weird wooden roof.”

“I can see the boathouse,” I said, “but I can’t make out the roof details. You can see that?”

“Yeah, man. Angle over that way, Skipper.”

“Do you want to pass it and drift back?” I asked.

“No, man. Fuck that. I want to get out of this boat.”

I chuckled, “If you need to whiz, you can do it over the side.”

“No, man, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s the other thing.”

“You can sit on the side of the boat and hang over,” I said, “but if you make a mess on the hull, you’re cleaning it up.”

“Man, just pull up to the boathouse. I’ll use the bathroom inside.”

“Well, don’t forget to flush.”

Murphy ignored me after that.

At the boathouse I killed the engine and drifted the last few boat lengths toward the dock. Murphy jumped out, pulled the bow in by a rope, and tied it to a cleat. With that done, the back of the boat drifted downstream with the current, keeping it parallel to the dock.

Murphy picked up the stern rope. I shook my head, “Let’s just leave the bow line tied in case we need to leave in a hurry.”

“Okay.”

Unfortunately, with the stern of the boat not tied, it made exiting to the dock a tad tricky, but both Russell and I managed it without getting wet. Murphy was already halfway up the paved path between the house and the dock.

Underneath the pavilion-style boathouse, Russell and I hustled past a big pontoon boat and headed toward the house. We skirted the pool. Murphy already had his face pressed to a window, peeking into the dark house.

“Anything?” I whispered as we neared.

Murphy turned as we got close. “Another rich person’s bedroom.”

“Just because it’s a million dollar house on a million dollar piece of land doesn’t mean they’re rich,” I sarcastically countered.

Murphy ignored me and moved over to a door of rectangular panes of glass that gave us a view of the kitchen. It was empty as well. Murphy tried the doorknob. Not locked. He turned to me and grinned. We slipped into the darkness and were immediately alerted to the sound coming from the next room over: the familiar sounds of feeding infected.

I was turning to leave, thinking that was the prudent path, but with his pistol held close to his body and his hatchet raised, Murphy crept through the kitchen toward a wide doorway that led to the next room.

I hesitated, torn between using my M4 or the combination of the machete and the pistol that I’d gotten back from Steph. The lump was still on the back of my head. The humiliation of getting tossed about like a rag doll by that behemoth of a man still stung my pride and underscored the fragility of the invincibility lie I’d been telling myself.

But we were in the house. It was spacious with wide doorways, so it probably had wide halls. The sound wouldn’t carry far outside. And no matter how many infected were in the house, I had more bullets than they had lives. At least that’s how the rationalization went. I really wanted the power of the M4 in my hands.

I followed a few paces behind Murphy. Russell shuffled along with me.

Murphy paused at the doorway and looked at something in the darkness on the floor. He shook his head and his shoulders sagged. But he had to move. He made a hard right turn through the doorway, staying close to the wall on the other side.

With Murphy out of the way, I saw what he’d been looking at. It was a pink tennis shoe, sized for a little girl of four or five. My heart sank.

I sidled up to the doorjamb. Across a formal dining room, a ten-foot-long fish tank divided the next room, probably a living room, leaving space on either end to move from room to room. The sounds of feeding were louder: grunting, tearing, and breathing through mouthfuls of wet flesh.

Russell whimpered.

What the fuck.

Russell was staring at the shoe. His whimpering grew louder.

All sounds from the other room stopped.

Feet shuffled.

Murphy was on the move to the end of the table to cover the far entrance. I aimed my rifle at the near entrance and waited.

Russell wailed.

Might as well get things moving. I yelled, “C’mon, fucktards.”

Footsteps.

An old man, not frail, but old, with white hair, white skin, rabid eyes, and clacking teeth rounded the fish tank and took nearly a whole step toward me before I pulled the trigger and sent him falling back. To my right, Murphy was on the move. Chairs scooted. A body hit the wall.

An old woman, plump and garishly dressed in a blinding, flowered tent of a dress stepped on her dying husband as she rounded the fish tank and came at me. Three bursts from my rifle, plus her momentum, left her sprawled at my feet, bleeding out a rapidly expanding pool of red.

The sound to my right stopped.

I glanced.

Murphy stood, ready. Breathing heavily, but ready.

No more movement in front. Still, Russell wailed louder with each passing second as he cradled the shoe in his hands.

I watched my end of the fish tank, waiting for another threat, but was surprised when a fifty-pound bag of sticks hit me from behind. Balanced as I was against a frontal assault, I went down, cursing my surprise as I hit the floor.

I brought an elbow around to smash my attacker in the skull before he had time to sink his teeth in. Through layers of thin skin, bone hit bone. Once, twice, then a miss.

Russell was suddenly above me, slapping and punching at my assailant.

I felt hot breath in my ear as strong, thin arms worked their way around my throat.

Murphy’s big voice yelled, “Damn it.”

A sickening crunch of wet bone vibrated through my head as my assailant’s skull pushed hard against the back of mine. Then he went limp.

Russell still beat my attacker while I squirmed to roll it off of my back. I gathered my feet beneath me and looked down. It wasn’t a he, it was a she, a bony grade school girl with a bloody blouse and a vacant, dead stare.

Looking up, Murphy’s eyes were wide with concern.

“I’m okay,” I told him without an ounce of dignity in my voice. “Stop, Russell. Stop hitting her.”

Murphy was immediately back on alert, listening and looking in all directions.

Russell stopped beating, but fell to his knees and sobbed.

We waited there in the dining room for a good while, covering the entries in case anything else in the house should find us interesting. But nothing did. Afterwards, it took fifteen cautious minutes to search the sprawling house for others. It was empty. Nor were there any Whites on the lawn or in the empty lots next door. The isthmus was deserted.

We found ourselves back in the living room, on the other side of the fish tank, standing among the remains of five or six kids, probably the older couple’s grandchildren. Russell was on his knees among them, the tiny pink shoe still in his hands, crying like a father next to the body of his own lifeless daughter.

It was painful to see, so much so that I saw the glassiness of repressed tears in Murphy’s eyes. He’d murdered his first child just minutes before. Sure, he had been saving my life, but that just didn’t make it any fucking easier when a child’s dead eyes stared up at you from the floor, begging you for an answer to the question of why they couldn’t wake up from their nightmares. Why won’t the monsters go away? Please daddy… I’m so scared.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Move the feet.

Change the subject.

Look away.

Anything.

Murphy looked at Russell and asked softly, “You think he lost his kids?”

“Maybe in that fire,” I said.

“That would fuckin’ suck.”

“Yeah.” How hard would it be retain the full depth of human emotional pain while being completely incapable of understanding it? That was Russell’s burden, another measure of the virus’s cruelty.

Perhaps needing to redirect his attention as much as I, Murphy said, “I saw a gun safe in the library.”

“If it’s open, cool,” I said. “If not, I think we’re screwed.”

“You check that. I’m gonna go take care of some business, if you know what I mean. Then I’m going to see if I can raid grandpa’s toolbox. The guy had some serious tools in that workshop.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’ll make Dalhover happy. There aren’t many tools in Sarah’s house.”

“Nothing will ever make Dalhover happy.”

“Okay, do your business,” I said. “Then work on making Dalhover less unhappy. I’ll check the gun safe, then head upstairs and get the medicine cabinets. After, I’ll come back down and try to get Russell to help me with the pantry.”

“All right.” Murphy hurried off.

Before leaving Russell to wallow alone with his grief, I spotted a nice watch on the old man’s wrist. He wouldn’t need that anymore.

I went upstairs where most of the house’s bedrooms were located. I hurried through the rooms that appeared to have been used by the children visiting their grandparents. I stopped long enough to steal the pillowcases and backpacks. I dumped the contents of those on the beds without taking any time to look. No upside there. I also found three laptop computers and four cell phone chargers. Those weren’t at all necessary for our immediate survival needs, but could come in really handy in alleviating the inevitable boredom that was to come from being imprisoned in Sarah Mansfield’s house.

In the boat I stashed the laptops, two pillowcases full of medications raided from the master bedroom, and a couple of his and hers revolvers from the nightstands by the bed. Next, I checked the gun safe. It had a combination lock and a formidable appearance. I scratched that off the list.

Back in the living room, I went through the children’s pants pockets and found their phones. Then I took Russell by the hand and nearly had to drag him away from the carnage to help me with the pantry. Once back in the kitchen, where he could see no bodies, he started to improve.

Five cases of bottled water were stacked in the back of the pantry. We didn’t need that at Sarah’s house, but one case was going to the boat as part of our emergency supply, to be left there. The rest would stay in the pantry as part of our supply at this safe house. I also set aside several shelves’ worth of canned food for the same purpose.

Russell and I filled pillowcases with canned soups, canned meats, olive oil, pasta, and boxes and boxes of wonderfully sugary breakfast cereals, the kind that kids love, exactly the kind that was absent from Sarah’s house. We made five trips to the boat to carry it all. Once done loading, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Murphy the whole time.

Damn it.

I should have noticed sooner.

I instructed Russell to stay close and quiet. Mostly, I just hoped he would. We hurried off in the direction of the garage. After passing through a large washroom, I stood in the doorway to the garage and workshop. There were no windows in the garage. It was pitch black. I shined my flashlight around, but saw nothing. “Murphy.”

Nothing.

“Murphy.”

I went in and searched around a partially assembled antique pickup, inside, underneath, and in the bed. Murphy was nowhere to be seen. Tools were scattered everywhere. He had to have been there.

A loud noise from somewhere outside panicked me.

I reversed direction in the dark garage, nearly running Russell over in the process, and headed back toward the laundry room door. I sprinted through the house, pausing at each window I passed, looking for movement outside.

I reached the kitchen in seconds that passed like agonizing minutes. Through the windows, I was able to see out to the boathouse. I spotted a dark figure standing at the stern of the pontoon boat. I immediately thought the worst and rushed through the back door with my weapon up, aimed at the shadowy figure.

Fear didn’t occur to me in that moment. I was in Null Spot mode. If Murphy needed help, I’d help. I ran around the pool and down the slope toward the boathouse.

Getting closer and closer, I slowed. All of the detail, previously obscured by darkness and distance, resolved. It was Murphy standing by the stern of the pontoon boat.

When he turned, his big grin shone like a beacon. “Oops.”

“Oops?” I asked.

“Yeah, man.” Murphy pointed to a big red box, five feet long and three feet wide, lying on the flat deck of the pontoon boat. “I was trying to roll this toolbox onto the pontoon boat.”

“What?”

“I was trying to—”

“Why?” I asked impatiently. “We have a boat.”

“I scrounged up all the good tools in the garage, but there were a lot of them, and you never know what you’re gonna need.”

“So you brought all of ‘em?” I asked.

“There were more in there,” Murphy answered defensively.

“And?” I asked, very deliberately looking at the heavy toolbox causing the boat to list slightly to stern.

Murphy looked from the box to me as though I was a little slow for not figuring it out already. “We’ll just take both boats back.”

My first instinct was to say no, to argue, but then I thought, why not? The pontoon boat wasn’t fast. But we didn’t need fast. If anything, the pontoon boat might be better for scavenging than the ski boat. With its long flat deck, it was kind of the water equivalent of a pickup truck. It made sense.

I pointed over to the ski boat and said, “I think Russell and I got enough food for three or four days, maybe more.” I checked the time on my new wristwatch.

“Nice watch,” Murphy complimented me.

“It’s kind of loose.” I fished a second big gold watch out of my pocket. “Here, I got one for you, too. The guy had a whole collection of them in his closet. One for every day.”

“Man, you know what this watch is worth?” Murphy asked.

“Does it matter anymore?” I asked.

“More than my car,” Murphy told me anyway.

Chapter 33

We’d planned to be back at Sarah’s house by midnight, but it was just after ten o’clock. So we went upriver to check out a second location on the south bank. We left the pontoon boat at the safe house, with plans to pick it up on the way back.

I said, “I know I was the one who argued that Russell could be helpful in carrying stuff if we brought him along, but I think he’s too unpredictable.”

“Yeah, man,” Murphy nodded. “He’s a liability. You never know when he’s gonna sound off.”

“Nope.”

“Man, do you see that?” Murphy asked, tension suddenly in his voice.

“What…?” I slowed the boat. I peered into the darkness and was just able to make out a geometric shape on the river, maybe a half-mile ahead. It wasn’t an immediate danger. But it was out of the ordinary, and that was reason enough for caution.

Murphy stood and pulled his rifle up to the ready.

I looked at the shadows on first the right and then the left bank with ambush on my mind. There was nothing unusual, just the trees and the water.

When we’d halved the distance, I saw that the shape was a tourist boat with two decks made to resemble a riverboat from the eighteen hundreds. It was probably seventy or eighty feet long, with lots of space on the decks for a hundred tourists to eat fajitas, drink margaritas, and enjoy the sunsets. It looked deserted.

Pointing at the boat, I said, “It’s not drifting. It must be anchored there.”

“That’s not a bad idea, man.” Murphy was giving it some thought. “The infected can’t get to you out in the middle of the river. I mean, I guess. They can’t swim, can they?”

“Don’t know.” I’d assumed that they couldn’t, but realized that that was the purest of assumptions. I hadn’t seen one swimming, and that was all of the supporting evidence I had.

“Swing wide around it,” Murphy said. “I wouldn’t get too close yet.”

“Yet?” I asked, navigating the ski boat closer to the north shore.

“Man, it could be a great place to get away from the Whites.”

As we got a clear view of the starboard side, we saw three ski boats tied off there. I grew wary and stopped watching the shores, focusing instead on movement on the decks.

“You think there’s anybody alive on that boat?” Murphy asked.

Shaking my head, I said, “All I know is that I don’t like this one bit.” Not waiting for a response from Murphy, I pushed the throttle forward a little. I had a bad feeling about the derelict boat.

We were passing fifty or sixty feet off of the starboard side of the boat when Murphy said, “I think it’s deserted.”

“Murphy, if we were on that boat, we’d be hiding, right? We’d be doing our best to make it look deserted, right?”

“Exactly.” He said it with little enthusiasm.

“Exactly?” I asked. “That sounds like agreement, but I know it’s not.”

With the tourist boat behind us, but not yet at a safe distance, Murphy leaned over and pulled the throttle all the way back, leaving the boat to idle while the current sapped our momentum. “Either there’s nobody on the boat or there’s somebody.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I mocked. “And you call me professor.”

“Man, I’m just sayin’, if there were infected, we’d have seen them moving around.”

“Probably,” I nodded.

“If it was some kind of ambush,” said Murphy, rubbing his chin, “they would have shot us already.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

“If they were hostile, they probably would have been up there on the top deck, pointing guns and acting like assholes or something. So, it’s either empty, or there are some regular people up there hiding from us because they don’t know our intentions.”

“And?” I asked, prompting Murphy for a conclusion before our boat drifted too far back down the river.

Murphy told me, “It’s safe for us to get on the boat.”

“Look, Sherlock,” my tone heavy with sarcasm, “I don’t think those are all the possibilities. That boat looks like nothing but risk to me. I see every possibility of getting shot or chomped, and I don’t see any upside.”

“Man, it’s cool,” Murphy reassured. “Take us over there. I’m gonna check it out.”

“It’s a bad idea.” I didn’t make any move toward the throttle.

“Take us over there,” Murphy insisted.

Oh, well.

Murphy stood in the bow with a rope in his hand, ready to jump over to the lower deck of the pseudo-paddleboat when we got close. Having only driven a ski boat rarely, I was cautious in my approach, not wanting to bounce the bows together with enough force to damage anything. As much as I wondered what lay hidden behind the waist-high rails on both decks of the big boat, my attention was pulled back to driving the ski boat.

“Okay. Okay,” Murphy coaxed. “Another couple of feet.”

“Don’t come any closer,” a female voice commanded out of the darkness.

Chapter 34

Startled, I fumbled with the throttle as my eyes darted around for the source of the voice. I accidentally pushed the throttle forward. The engine revved, and a second later the ski boat glanced off the big boat. In the collision, momentum carried Murphy over the bow and he landed roughly against the railing that went all the way around the lower deck. The ski boat drifted back out, leaving a cursing Murphy hanging on the rail with his feet dangling in the water.

“You let go of that rail,” the female voice commanded urgently.

Above, over the second deck railing, I saw the silhouettes of three heads, and more importantly, I saw the long barrel of a rifle, angling down toward Murphy.

“Hey, hey,” I shouted.

Russell was suddenly on his feet beside me.

What the hell was he doing?

“I can’t swim,” Murphy hollered to anyone who would listen.

“You should have thought about that before you jumped on our boat,” the woman replied.

“I fell,” Murphy yelled back.

“Be cool,” I hollered to the people on the boat. “Just let me come back over and get him.” I steered the slow-moving ski boat toward Murphy.

The heads appeared to be conferring.

“Look,” I said, “we thought the boat was deserted. We don’t mean any harm.”

“If you guys try to get on, I’ll shoot.”

You guys?

I looked over at Russell and calmly said, “Russell, sit down, please.” I put a hand on his shoulder and guided him into the seat beside mine. I called back up, “We’re not trying to jump on your boat.”

“Yet, there’s your boy, hanging from the rail,” the voice replied.

“His boy?” Murphy’s tone suggested that he was offended by that.

Making my voice as smooth as possible, I pleaded with her. “We don’t want to hurt you. We thought the boat was deserted. Just let me get Murphy off of the boat and we’ll go, if that’s what you want. You don’t need to be afraid of us.”

“You’re all infected,” she said. “I can see that from here.”

The ski boat’s bow bumped the hull of the riverboat next to Murphy, and he danced his legs in the air until he managed to get a foot into our boat.

“Yeah,” I called back up, “we are, but we’re not like the other infected.” I got a little exasperated. “Hell, that much should be obvious just because we’re talking.”

Murphy hauled himself into our boat and as soon as he was all the way in, I reversed the boat and backed away to a distance of ten feet or so.

Then, with the engine idling, I asked, “You okay, Murphy?”

“Man, I’m fine.” Murphy grinned sheepishly. “As long as Crazy Bitch don’t shoot me.”

“Be nice,” the girl said, in a normal tone of voice.

“Be nice?” I laughed. “You were gonna shoot us a second ago.”

“You’re off of our boat now,” she answered.

Murphy said, “Man, let’s get out of here.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said. I called up to the girl, “Now that we’re back on our own boat, can we talk for minute?”

“As long as you keep your distance,” was the answer.

Great. What did I want to ask? “Look, we’re staying at a place downriver and we’ll probably be coming this way to look for food and stuff. Do I need to worry about you shooting us every time we pass by?”

Conferring again. “Just don’t get too close.”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” I assured them.

Then, another voice, a younger voice blurted out, “Why do you guys look infected, but act normal?”

Harsh, muffled words followed between them.

“We’re Slow Burns,” I answered. “We got infected but then we got better. Are you all immune? Do you know?”

“Slow burns?” Another female voice asked.

Well, that answered that question. They were all three girls.

“That’s just what they called us. We have a higher temperature than normal. Obviously we’re white. Well, except for Murphy, he prefers mocha frost. Besides that, we’re normal.”

“How many of you are there?” a girl asked.

“Don’t tell ‘em,” Murphy whispered.

“There are six of us,” I answered.

“Are they all like you?” she asked.

“No,” I answered, “the others are normal. They’re immune.”

“Immune?” There was excitement in the voice. “How do you know?”

“One’s a nurse. They were at the hospital until…until… Well. They’re with us now.”

“Until what?” the voice was suspicious.

“The hospital was overrun.” I paused and said, “Hey, my name is Zed. That’s Murphy there in the bow and this is Russell here beside me, but Russell doesn’t talk. Why don’t you at least tell me your names so I know who I’m talking to?”

The girl with the rifle stood up. “My name is Amy. This is Brittany and Megan.”

It was hard to make out their features in the darkness, but Brittany and Megan were shorter. They had higher pitched voices. I guessed they were in junior high or grade school.

“Null Spot,” Murphy scolded me in a low voice.

“Dude, chill,” I told him.

The girls had to be alone. If not, why send a woman and two young girls to defend the boat? They had to be poorly armed. Again, why send one hunting rifle against two heavily armed men?

“Are you guys okay?” I asked in a voice that showed sincere concern.

There was a hesitation, but in a voice that belied the truth, Amy answered, “We’re fine.”

“They’re not fine,” Murphy whispered, suddenly concerned.

“I know,” I told him.

“What are you saying?” Amy asked.

I answered, “We don’t think you’re fine. It’s just the three of you, right?”

Another pause and Amy answered, “No.”

“Yeah,” I answered with just enough sarcasm to let her know that I didn’t believe her. “We just scavenged some stuff from a house downriver. We’ve got some food and some bottled water. You guys can have some if you need it.”

I looked at Murphy, ready to defend my choice, but his face showed me that he agreed. He must have come to the same conclusion as me. The girls weren’t doing well.

The three conferred for a moment.

I called over, “We can pull alongside and put the stuff on the deck and pull away. We have a case of bottled water we don’t need. We saw some bodies floating in the river. It’s probably not safe to drink the river water.”

“We boil it,” Brittany answered.

“Good,” I said. “Do you have any food?”

“If you have some you don’t need,” Amy answered.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” I called, “but we could spare a few bags. A lot of it’s canned. Do you have a can opener?”

“There’s a galley in the back of the boat. Yeah, probably.”

“Good,” I said. “Can I pull alongside and put the stuff on?”

“Yes,” Amy answered, “but don’t get on the boat.”

It took a minute to maneuver the boat over. Once there, Murphy moved the case of bottled water and a few pillowcases full of groceries over to the big boat. As he finished up, I picked up one of the revolvers I found at the safe house and handed it to him. “Give ‘em that, too.”

“What?”

“They only have the one gun,” I told him. “We can get more.”

Murphy grudgingly took the revolver and laid it on the deck, along with a box of bullets.

When I pulled the boat away, one of the girls disappeared from above and reappeared on the bottom deck.

“We left you a gun and some ammo,” I called across the water. “You need more than one gun.”

“Thank you,” Amy said, with deep sincerity.

The other girls thanked us as well.

“I’m curious about how the boat thing is working out for you, but maybe we can stop back by tomorrow night. I don’t want to overstay our welcome tonight.”

“Yes,” Amy said. “You guys can stop back by tomorrow.”

“Cool,” I responded. “Oh, one quick thing. Do you know if the infected can swim? Have they been able to get to you in the boat?”

“No,” Amy answered, “they can’t. They come to the banks when they see us, but they never come out into the water.”

“Listen,” I said. “You know the movie star, Sarah Mansfield?”

Of course, all of the girls did.

Megan said, “She has a big house down the river. My dad showed it to me when we were skiing last summer.”

“Cool,” I answered. “That’s where we’re staying. I’ll make a deal with you, if you’re interested.”

“What’s that?” Amy asked, cautious again.

“We’ve got plenty of room down there. If you guys get in trouble and need to get out of here, you can come down.”

“How do we get up there?” Megan asked. “It’s way up on the cliff.”

“There’s eight or nine mansions right down on the water on that side of the river. A little ways past the last one on the left is a boathouse. Just come there.”

“How will you know we’re there?” Amy asked.

“Security cameras,” I answered.

“You said a deal,” Amy said. “What do you want from us?”

“Pretty much the same thing,” I answered. “If we get in trouble and have to bail out in a hurry, can we come here?”

Brittany was back on the top deck and the three of them deliberated for a moment. She answered, “It’ll probably be okay.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Well, Amy, Brittany, Megan, it was good to meet you guys. I think we need to get back before they get too worried about us.”

The girls thanked us across the water as I turned the boat around and headed downriver with the current.

With the tourist boat shrinking in the distance behind us, Murphy came over and stood on the deck between where Russell and I sat. “That was a good thing you did, Null Spot. It was the right thing to do.”

I smiled and nodded, hoping that he was right.

Chapter 35

At first, I thought it was thunder. But the sky was still clear. The wind hadn’t changed direction. Nothing was different. It was just another hot, mosquito-filled Texas night. But the rumble grew louder the further we went downriver.

Russell was growing agitated in the back of the boat. Murphy was looking up at the mountain crests on the north side of the river with worry furrowing his face.

“That can’t all be gunfire, can it?” I asked him.

Murphy slowly nodded. “It’s over in west Austin somewhere. I’m betting Camp Mabry. Sounds like they’re shooting everything they’ve got.”

“I’m glad I’m not a White over there right now.”

Murphy shook his head. “I’m just glad I’m not over there right now.”

“That’s all machine guns and grenades and stuff?” I asked.

“Yep.” Murphy was nodding again.

“I can’t even imagine how many Whites they must be slaughtering with all that.”

Murphy stood and looked off into the darkness. “I can’t imagine how many Whites are attacking them if they’re still shooting.”

“Fuck,” I muttered, as the realization of that sank in.

Murphy looked down at me with a request forming on his lips, but it didn’t need completion. I throttled forward. Noise be damned, and get the pontoon boat another night. Shit was going down. There was no time to waste.

The miles disappeared in a hurry as the ski boat slid over the smooth water. We skipped the drift phase and motored right into the boathouse. After docking, we ran up the tunnel with several pillowcases full of groceries and the extra revolver. When we exited the elevator in Sarah’s basement, Steph was waiting for us with a poker face, but with dread in her eyes.

“What’s the story?” I asked.

“Sergeant Dalhover and Mandi are on the roof—” Steph started.

“What are they doing there?” I interrupted.

“Listening.” Steph was terse.

Murphy asked, “What’s going on?”

Steph gave Murphy a stern look. “You take the video room. We don’t know yet what’s happening, but you know as well as I do that it’s big. Zed, all of the steel doors have been rolled down over the windows and the patio. We’re secure, but you take Russell and check every window and every door. Double-check the garage.”

“But we haven’t been out there,” I protested.

“Doesn’t matter,” she told me. “Double-check them all. Do it now.”

“Yes, ma’am.” That grated on me. I hated being told what to do. But she was the boss. And she was right about the double-checking. I ran toward the stairs.

“When you finish up here, go back down and double-check the boathouse.”

“Do you want us to bring up the rest of the groceries on our way back?” I asked.

Steph was surprised. “There’s more?”

I pointed to the pillowcases we’d laid by the wall. “That much and a little more.”

“Bring what you can, then come to the roof. That’s where the rest of us will be.” She turned to Murphy. “I’ll send Mandi down once we get upstairs.” Then she looked at all of us. “Stick together. Stay in your buddy pairs until this blows over. Now go.”

Murphy went to the video room. Steph headed for the elevator, and Russell and I ran up the stairs.

It took maybe thirty minutes to check all the windows, the garage doors, and the boathouse. It was a big house, but everything was as buttoned up as it could be. We were secure.

Russell and I got off the elevator on the roof to see Steph and Dalhover leaning on the rail looking east toward the sound. I looked too and saw nothing but trees.

“It’s all secure,” I told them I as I walked up.

“Thank you,” said Steph. “Double-checking all of the windows makes us more secure, you understand that right?”

“Of course,” I answered. “Mistakes are paid in blood.”

Both Steph and Dalhover gave me an odd look.

I shrugged, but didn’t think it needed explaining.

Steph said, “You’re right. We can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

“Murphy thinks there’s a battle over at Camp Mabry,” I said, diverting back to the salient issue.

“Yeah,” Dalhover agreed.

Steph pointed east over the trees. “We’ve seen flashes from explosions over there. Sergeant Dalhover doesn’t think they’re far away.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Camp Mabry is only a couple of miles that way. It sounds intense. Do you think that maybe the Army is finally here?”

Dalhover shook his head and looked back out into the night.

I didn’t pursue the point. I knew it had been a stupid question to ask.

“It sounds like it’s slowing down to me. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to learn anything up here that we can’t learn from downstairs,” Steph said. “All we’re doing is exposing ourselves to stray bullets, even if we are out of their effective range. Sergeant, what do you think?

“Can’t see dick up here,” Dalhover answered.

Steph pointed toward the door. “Let’s go down to the video room.”

So we all trooped downstairs.

When we got there, Murphy and Mandi were sharing cold Pop Tarts. It didn’t take much more than the smell of the sugar and the crinkle of a foil wrapper to tempt the rest of us to join in. After several days of perfectly healthy veggies, the Pop Tarts were delicious.

Steph spoke first. “Sergeant Dalhover, what are your thoughts?”

Dalhover spent a minute collecting those thoughts before he answered. “I’d say there’s a pretty good force over at Camp Mabry. National Guard. Maybe some regular Army. Maybe some civilians. Probably hiding out there the same way we were at the hospital.”

He paused for a long time.

“With the same result?” I asked.

Everybody silently looked at me.

Uncomfortable moments stretched through the silence.

“Looks that way,” Dalhover finally confirmed.

Steph asked, “Why do you think there are so many infected?”

Dalhover shook his head. “Don’t know. Maybe it’s the bunch from the hospital. Maybe it’s the bunch from the farm. Maybe the guys just started shooting at some Whites and didn’t stop soon enough, so everyone on this side of town came running. Maybe the Smart Ones found ‘em.”

“Any other guesses?” Steph asked.

There weren’t any.

“Are we in danger?” Mandi asked.

Murphy put a hand on her shoulder, but didn’t say anything one way or the other.

“We don’t know, Mandi,” Steph told her, “but we’re going to play it safe. Tonight, we’ll keep watch in pairs.” She looked at me and then Murphy. “You guys have been out doing your job. Sergeant Dalhover and I will take the first watch.”

While Steph was looking at each of us for questions, I said, “I think we should all stay down here tonight. Close. We can sleep in the recliners in the theater.”

“I can do that,” Murphy said. “Those things are comfortable.”

“We should probably keep a bug-out pack close too,” I added. “Just in case.”

“Hide and run,” Steph confirmed. “That’s our strategy. I agree.”

“Wait,” Murphy’s tone got everyone’s instant attention. He pointed up at one of the screens.

Three people were running across the road; two soldiers and a civilian. It took half a second to extrapolate their path through the trees, onto the dirt road, and right at our walls.

I did a quick check of my rifle, pistol, and machete and was stepping toward the door while asking, “Are we going to bring them in?”

There was a pause. Dalhover looked at Steph. Murphy looked at me. Mandi looked worried. Russell followed me over to the door.

“Somebody open the gate when they come to it,” I said. “Don’t let ‘em through the second gate until I’m there.”

“No,” Steph said, suddenly past her indecision. “Don’t go alone. Mandi, you stay here and watch the monitors. The rest of us will go. Let’s not take any chances.”

Chapter 36

We spread out in a semicircle around the end of the driveway, where the gate would slide open. I was by the wall, with Russell standing too close. I had my machete and pistol at the ready. Murphy stood away from the door and would likely be the first one the soldiers saw once the door slid open. Dalhover was off to Murphy’s other side, and Steph was opposite me with the door opener in her hand.

The howling of Whites in the trees was noticeable. They weren’t there when we left the video room, and with no way to communicate with Mandi, we had no idea how many were out there. It was more than a handful and less than a few dozen. In the distance though, there were hundreds. Their vocalizations were starting to overwhelm the sounds of battle, which were decreasing significantly. What did that mean?

So we stood there, not knowing for sure what was beyond the door. Had Mandi opened the outside gate for the soldiers, only to have them chased in by a mob of Whites? We should have left the decision to open the interior gate in her hands. At this point, she was the only one who knew what was beyond.

That’s what I was thinking when Steph raised the opener and very dramatically pressed the button. The gate’s opening mechanism clanged and the tall steel gate lurched.

Murphy readied himself in front of the gap. I hefted the machete.

“Hello,” Steph called a greeting, barely audible over the sound of the rolling gate.

When the gap created by the opening gate was maybe eighteen inches wide, it became time to pay a bloody price for another mistake. But I didn’t think about that until later.

A gun went off.

In the microseconds that it took to be surprised and process the sound, Murphy’s head snapped hard to the right and he seemed to have lost his balance. There was blood in the air. He was falling.

Dalhover cursed.

My mood flipped from caution to blinding, white-hot rage.

Two hands, holding a pistol out in front, policeman-style, pushed through the gap in the gate and without the tiniest hint of hesitation, I swung my machete in a big arc over my head and chopped across both wrists.

A severed hand and a pistol spun off toward Steph.

A man shrieked.

The other hand dangled from a forearm on ragged tendons. Blood spewed.

The gate stopped and reversed as I dropped my Glock and machete and pulled my M4 up to maximize my killing power, because it was time to do some killing. In half a second I was pushing my rifle barrel through the shrinking gap and pointing it at a handless, screaming man on the ground beneath a fountain of his own blood.

Steph’s voice was screaming, too, not in panic, but in harsh orders. The words didn’t process and I didn’t care. Only the trigger and the soon-to-be-dead man mattered to me. Just as I pulled the trigger, my rifle jerked hard upward and I sent three rounds over the wall.

“God damn it,” I raged.

Before I even knew what was happening, Dalhover had my rifle pushed back against my chest and pointed at the sky, while pinning me against the cinder block abutment where the gate closed. His eyes were hard to match with the blaze in mine.

The gate clanged shut.

“What the fuck,” I screamed at Dalhover.

With hands like stone and an expressionless statue face, he didn’t respond.

How could that skinny fucker be so strong?

My hands were shaking, I was so angry. But I fought to control the rage. Without that control, Dalhover wasn’t going to let go of me. And if Dalhover didn’t let go of me in those next few seconds, things were going to get very ugly.

Over Dalhover’s shoulder, I saw Steph kneeling at Murphy’s side. Her hands immediately went to work at his head. I had to get over there.

“Let me go,” I told Dalhover, in as calm a tone as I could muster.

He waited a few seconds before releasing me, using those seconds to reassure me that he was in control. But he let go and stepped out of my way.

I was immediately on my knees on Murphy’s other side.

“Cover that gate.” Steph ordered Dalhover, pressing a cloth to the side of Murphy’s head.

Murphy was breathing. His eyes were open, but didn’t appear to see anything. His left arm was busy trying to do something repetitive.

I felt helpless.

Slow Burn Book 4, ‘Dead Fire’

Chapter 1

Steph, in nothing but a bra and jeans, was on her knees at Murphy’s side with two fingers divining for a pulse on the side of his throat. She pressed her t-shirt to the wound on his head and moved her lips in whispers, whether to herself or Murphy, who knew?

Gunshots rang the driveway door’s steel sheets and punched three neat holes around Russell, who stood, oblivious, watching Steph and me.

“Cease fire!” Dalhover ordered. “Cease fire!”

Three more gunshots.

“God dammit!” Dalhover yelled, with real anger in his voice. “This is First Sergeant Dalhover, US Army, retired. If you fire one more round, I’m gonna open this door and shove that weapon up your ass! Do you hear me?”

Still on one knee beside Murphy, I was pointing my M4 at the door, ready to send a full magazine of punishment back through the sheet metal.

“Move, Russell!” Dalhover ordered.

Russell didn’t respond.

“Russell!” I yelled sharply to get his attention. I pointed to where Dalhover had protected himself behind the abutment. “Go stand behind Sergeant Dalhover. Move!”

Russell shuffled to his left.

Once he was beside Dalhover, the situation hit a tense stasis. No one spoke. No weapons discharged. Steph’s lips moved in silent entreaties as she tended to Murphy. A bleeding man on the other side of the gate—too stupid to think before he acted—mewled while his remaining hand dangled by a tendon. The infected out in the cedar forest yowled and the popcorn bursts of distant rifle fire punctuated their cries.

Dalhover broke the tension with, “Who is on the other side of this wall?”

An uncomfortably long silence followed before a female voice answered, “Specialist Freitag and Specialist Harris, sir. We have a man down.”

The expression on Dalhover’s face turned to something else too quickly to decipher, before switching back to apathy-masked danger.

Fists pounding on the outside gate announced the arrival of the infected. I stifled a curse. The gunshots. The shouting. The noisy rolling of the gates. Every White within earshot was on its way.

Dalhover looked to Steph and asked, “Captain, in or out?”

Steph appeared frozen by the choice. I glanced at her, then back at the gate. But before she passed the point where my impatience compelled me to answer for her, in an emotionless voice she said, “In. If we can get them in safely. Any risk, and they can go back out with the infected.” She refocused her attention on Murphy and his wound.

My simmering rage was coming to a boil, stoked by the sight of the bloody T-shirt pressed to the side of Murphy’s head. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. But the part of my brain that was still rational enough to slough off the anger reminded me that rage was not my friend. It was my favorite addiction, but it only ever led to tears and regret.

Breathe!

Breathe.

Suck it up, bitch.

Calm down.

For now, anyway. For now.

“Freitag,” Dalhover called softly, “can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Freitag answered, mimicking his volume.

“We were trying to help you. You have a man down. We have a man down. Accidents happen…”

And then my emotions slipped. “Accident, bullshit! That fucker shot Murphy on purpose!”

“Quiet, Zane!” Dalhover lashed out with the practiced authority of a long-time sergeant. “Shit happens in the real world. Now grow up or shut your God damned mouth!”

I was cowed.

But Dalhover was right.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Don’t fuck this up more than it already is.

Dalhover called back, “Specialist Freitag, you can wait until the Whites outside leave, we’ll open that gate, and you can go. Or you come in, and you won’t be harmed. But I swear to God, if you raise a weapon at one of my people, I’ll beat your ass so bad that you’ll God damned well thank me when I throw your stupid ass back over the wall. Your choice.”

I didn’t hear anything through the gate, though I guessed they were discussing their choices in hushed voices. The handless man had fallen silent, passed out or dead.

Freitag answered, “Sir, we’d like to come in.”

Dalhover looked back to Steph again. It was clear that she had the final say. She looked at both Dalhover and me, perhaps giving us a chance to voice dissent. We didn’t. She gave Dalhover a nod, raised the clicker, and pushed the button to open the gate.

The electric motor and rattling wheels echoed up through the flat metal panels of the gate and drowned out the sound of the Whites pounding outside.

I looked down the barrel of my rifle and tracked across the growing gap, ready to stop on the first target that came into view. But the bloody body of the handless man came first. I passed. A big, bald man in fatigues, with thick shoulders, Murphy’s size, knelt beside the handless man, tending his wounds. The gate rolled further open. A young, dark-haired woman in camouflaged fatigues, seemingly designed to camouflage her gender more than anything else, stood with a rifle in her sling, pointed at the dirt. Her round, young face held no expression, though her eyes immediately locked on Murphy.

“Specialist Freitag?” Dalhover asked.

“Yes.”

Another odd look on Dalhover’s face. He looked suspicious to me, and that put me on edge.

Dalhover said, “Get your man. And be quiet about it. Let’s get this gate closed.”

Using a two-man saddleback carry, the soldiers picked up and carried their injured companion into the compound.

Steph fingered the button on the clicker and the gate started closing behind them. She stood up, looking at the situation: two potentially hostile soldiers carrying a wounded man, the four of us with Murphy still on the ground, and Dalhover and me standing there with weapons at the ready. The rumble of a Humvee engine behind us caught our attention.

Racing one of the Humvees down from the house, Mandi brought the vehicle to a dramatic stop behind us, jumped out, and immediately fell to her knees beside Murphy.

As though she had planned it that way, Steph didn’t waste a second. She pointed to Murphy and then to the bleeding man. “Put them in the Humvee.”

The two soldiers immediately moved to comply. Dalhover looked at me, then nodded toward Murphy. It was clear from his stance and the placement of his hands on his rifle that I needed to figure out how to get Murphy loaded up without his help. Dalhover intended to stay at the ready.

Still at Murphy’s side, I shouted a command to Russell to come help me.

“How bad is it?” Mandi asked Steph through her tears.

“It might be superficial,” Steph answered, “but get behind the wheel. You’re driving us back to the house.”

Mandi started to protest, but understood enough about the situation to just nod and comply. She straightened back up.

Freitag and Harris had little trouble loading their skinny charge into the rear passenger side of the Humvee. For Russell and me with limp Murphy, the going was tougher, even with Steph’s help. He weighed so damn much. Not lifeless, but disturbingly close.

I closed the door on the Humvee and noticed Freitag and Harris standing to the side with blank faces and idle hands. I wanted to berate them for not helping with Murphy, but I held my tongue. Had they given us a hand with him, I would have wanted to berate them for that. Such was my anger. Any excuse would detonate it.

As the Humvee started to roll, Dalhover ordered,  “Up to the house. We’ll unload them and move them downstairs to the lobby outside the video room. Zane, you lead when we get to the house. I’ll take up the rear. Go.”

One step into my run, Dalhover said, “Zane, wait. Pick up the hand.”

“What?!”

“Pick up the hand.”

Fuck you, was the phrase on my lips, but I managed to say, “Why? We can’t reattach it without a doctor.”

“Just get it. Move. Let’s go!”

God damn!

The three soldiers jogged toward the house. I went over and picked up the wounded guy’s pistol. I slipped it into my belt, shivering. My fingers lingered in the air just above the severed hand on the ground. In spite of all the death I’d seen, the thought of picking up the amputated hand gave me the willies. But if I didn’t, I’d get shamed by Dalhover in front of the others when I caught up with them at the house. That would be worse than touching the macabre artifact.

I pinched the thumb between my fingers and lifted. It was supple, warm, just like living flesh. A silver bracelet slipped off of the wrist and jingled to the ground. I nearly ignored it, but paused instead, and bent back down to give it a closer look. Embossed on the silver was a six-armed red cross. I flipped it over to look at the back and rubbed the blood away with my thumb so that I could read the text.

Uh, oh.

Chapter 2

A stream of blood, maybe three inches wide, crawled slowly across the floor, forging a meandering path of deep red against stark white marble. The contrast of colors and slow, worming movement was hypnotic, even beautiful if you could forget for a moment that it was the essence of life, flowing from the open veins of a bird-thin man in blood-soaked clothes three sizes too big. He lay semi-conscious, smearing the pristine red into ugly smudges around his body, his face stretched into a silent grimace. Thin, brittle hair tried to cover an oversized skull. Bulbous elbow joints stood out from holocaust arms like the lump of his larynx riding up and down under pallid skin.

Most of us were there in the lobby between the theater and the video room. Freitag and Steph were tending to the wraith who had lost his hands. Well, he’d lost one hand. The other was for all practical purposes, lost. Murphy lay on the floor with a pillow under his head, eyes closed. Mandi was keeping pressure on his wound, tears silently slipping down her cheeks. Beside her, Russell, with his hands on Murphy, quietly stared. The well of his tears had run dry.

Dalhover stood in the doorway of the video room, passing occasional instructions over his shoulder to Specialist Harris, whom he had parked in front of the monitors.

The blood oozed its way past the toes of my boots and it occurred to me that I still had that amputated hand, somehow forgotten, as though it held onto me as much as I onto it. In my other hand, I grasped the bloody silver bracelet. “I don’t think you can save him,” I said.

In doing so, I accepted the reality of what my anger-fueled machete swing had been, justified or not— murder.

Freitag ignored me.

Without looking at me, Steph said, “Zed, go out to the Humvees and see if you can find some more of these bandages.”

I didn’t comply. My anger was gone. Harsh reason was back.

Irritated, Steph repeated, “Zed. I need you to get us more bandages.”

That snapped me out of my own thoughts. “He’s a hemophiliac.”

Both Freitag and Steph stopped working and turned to look at me. I reached out and presented the bloody silver medical ID bracelet to them. Steph took it and looked at it closely. “Where did you get this?”

I raised the amputated hand and showed it to them.

Freitag looked down at the bird-thin bleeder.

“All the more reason to get those bandages. Now!” Steph emphasized.

Separating my emotions from the situation, I said, “I don’t think we should.”

“You want him to die?” Freitag snapped, letting her anger run free.

“Calm down,” Dalhover ordered, his hands wrapped very comfortably around his rifle.

“I…” Freitag started, but couldn’t find the words to proceed.

“Zed,” Steph cut in. “We talked about exactly this kind of situation. The chips are down. You need to go get those bandages.”

“I will,” I told her flatly. “But it would be a mistake.”

Steph’s eyes went cold with anger, but her face showed no emotion at all.

I asked, “Can you save him? Even if I get the bandages, can you save him?”

Freitag was ready to explode. Steph’s face didn’t change.

“If we were at the hospital right now,” I asked, “in the emergency room, back before all this virus shit went down, could you save him?”

“I don’t think…”

I’d heard bullshit wrapped in authority enough times in my life that I didn’t need to hear any more to know what was coming. I cut Steph off. “Answer me honestly. Even if we were at the hospital, could you save him?”

Steph’s anger shot up in a rush. She ground her teeth and pinched her lips but she didn’t speak until she breathed in and out a few times. Finally, with an unexpected meekness, she answered, “A hemophiliac with a double amputation…maybe, but his odds would be low.”

“And here?” I asked. “Here, with no medical facilities, no coagulating agents, no doctors, no sanitary facility? Do we want to use our precious few medical supplies in an attempt to save a man who has…what, a one or two percent chance of living through the night?”

“We’re not even going to try?” Freitag let all of her disgust for the question flow through her words.

I pushed on, “And what if he does make it through the night? What are his chances of being alive once infection sets in? And you know it will. You have to put tourniquets on both arms to stop the bleeding, am I right? He’s a hemophiliac. His blood won’t clot. A tourniquet is the only way we can stop the bleeding. But with the tourniquets on, the flesh lower on the arm will die. Then what?”

Steph’s gaze fell to the floor. She couldn’t stomach giving up.

“He’s right,” Dalhover rasped.

Freitag slumped as she sat and draped her bloody hands across her knees, staring absently at the amputee. Strands of her black hair had come out from under her cap and were tipped with straw thin scabs of blood where they’d dragged across the bleeder’s wounds. Her light brown Hispanic skin was smudged with red where her dainty hands had wiped at her sweat.  Her smooth, doll-like face was failing completely at masking the hate.

“So we’re just going to let him die?” Steph stood up and looked each of us in the eye before settling on Dalhover. “Top?”

“Captain,” Dalhover answered. “Unless God himself comes down here and miracles him all better, he’ll die. If he makes it through the night, he’ll be dead in a week. The longer he lives, the more pain he’ll suffer. Letting him die now is the humane thing to do.”

Steph spun around to look at me with fire in her eyes. In her head, she knew that letting the man die was the only thing that made sense, but her nurse’s heart couldn’t accept it, and for that, her eyes showed me her blame.

Silence hung in the air, as heavy and slow as impending death.

I finally broke it. “I’ll get the bandages, if that’s what you want me to do.”

Steph didn’t answer.

Freitag reached over and put a hand on the dying man’s cheek. In an icy voice, she said, “He was a painter.”

Everybody seemed stuck between breaths at that.

Freitag continued, “His paintings were beautiful. He was really good. He was living his life’s dream when all this shit happened.”

Softly, Steph asked, “What was his name?”

Freitag ignored the question and continued to stare at the bleeding man. “He was my aunt’s boyfriend. He was good to her.”

Silence lingered, broken only by the rapid breaths of the man on the floor.

Steph finally admitted, “I can’t save him.”

“I don’t think he’d want to live without hands,” Freitag’s voice was harsh. “How can a painter paint without his hands?”

Steph looked down at her hands. They were covered in cold, wet blood that had climbed its way up to her elbows. To herself, she said, “I need to wash.” She headed for the restroom.

That was that.

I looked back down at the handless painter, whose blood wasn’t delivering enough oxygen to his brain, which in turn told his body to breathe faster. I stepped over the bloody amoeba on the floor and went to squat by Mandi and Murphy. I asked, “How is he?”

Mandi started to say something, but burst into tears.

Chapter 3

When I woke after a short, fitful sleep on a recliner in the theater, I got up and looked around in the darkness. Murphy lay just as he had when I’d gone to sleep. Mandi slept on a recliner pulled up beside his with an arm stretched over to him. Russell slept in a near-sitting position on his recliner. Specialist Harris hung off the edges of a recliner too small for his large frame. Quite the opposite, Freitag was as engulfed by her recliner as she was by her billowy fatigues.

Walking out into the dim glow of the lobby, I saw that the frail-boned bleeder had died in the night. His body was wrapped in blankets and lying next to the elevator. The crawling red floor amoeba and all of the bloody smears had been cleaned off of the white marble floor while I slept. There were no scattered bandages or red footprints. It was as clean as the day we arrived in Sarah Mansfield’s house.

A glow shone through the open door of the video room. A desk chair creaked. Plastic wheels rolled across a few inches of floor. Hushed conversation followed.

I looked back down at the bird man’s body and my gaze lingered across the contours of his head and his bony shoulders. His arms were crossed over his chest like a mummy. A couple of hours of sleep had done nothing but enhance my emotional separation from the corpse. He may as well have been a piece of abstract furniture or a long-dead museum exhibit. I felt nothing. No pain. No anger. No empathy and certainly no sorrow. It was just another corpse. Tidier than most, but just as dead.

“He died about an hour after you went to bed.” It was Steph’s voice behind me, informative in tone and frayed from fatigue.

I searched for words that would be right for the moment, but I couldn’t find them. So I just stared at the bird man.

“We have coffee.” Steph offered.

I turned. She leaned against the doorjamb with a cup in her hand. “We found it in the groceries you brought back.”

Thinking of going up to the kitchen to get a cup, I looked at the stairs, suddenly daunted by the climb. Maybe a cup wasn’t worth it.

As if reading my thoughts, Steph tilted her head into the video room and said, “I brought the coffee maker down here. Better to help us stay awake on the night shift.”

“I could use a cup.” I walked toward her and she stepped out of the doorway as I neared. I asked, “Did you sleep?”

She shook her head.

Dalhover eyed me as I walked in, his eyes no more or less tired than they always looked.

“Sergeant Dalhover and I took the night shift,” Steph said.

“The whole night?” I asked unnecessarily.

“That’s the plan,” Steph answered. “There’s creamer and sugar in the drawer to your left.”

Without a word, Dalhover turned back to one of the large monitors. It showed a mob of Whites in the dark at the front gate, beating it with their palms and fists.

“How many do you think are out there?” I asked Dalhover as I poured a hot cup.

“Least a hundred. Some are starting to walk around the wall, looking for a way in.”

“The ignorant fuckers should go away,” I said, frustration in my voice. “We’re not out there anymore. I mean, we haven’t made any noise in hours. Right?”

“They’re beating on the gate. That’s the noise.” Steph reasoned. “They’re too stupid to know it’s not us. Their numbers have been growing all night.”

Dalhover pointed to one of the Whites on the monitor. “That’s a Smart One.”

I moved over for a closer look. “Which one?”

“The one on the rock?” Steph asked, her surprise giving away a little of her disbelief. “She’s not doing anything.”

“Yep,” Dalhover replied.

“Yep?” Steph asked.

Dalhover motioned across the mob with his finger. “Look at ‘em. They’re all beating on the door. But that one, she’s just sitting there on that rock, staring at the gate.”

“Maybe she’s really stupid,” I hoped. “Maybe lazy. Maybe sick.”

Dalhover shrugged.

Steph asked, “You think she’s trying to figure the gate out, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.” Dalhover looked up at Steph to emphasize his point.

The White sitting on the rock cocked her head to the side, changing her perspective. It reminded me of a dog. Four more infected walked out of the cedars and passed her by as they joined the mob.

I blurted, “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Steph was immediately tense.

I pointed at an older man, one of the four that had just come out of the cedars. “I think I know that one.”

“Know him?” Steph asked in disbelief.

“I used to date a girl who lived down the road. I think that’s her dad.”

Steph drew a deep breath to calm herself. “That’s how you knew about this place? You’d been up here before.”

“Yeah.”

Together, we watched, and conversation died away. We were hypnotized by the surging mob, as they pushed and beat on the gate, the manifestation of death, trying vainly to storm the castle. Vainly, for the moment.

I broke the trance. “As much as I hate to say it, I think we’re coming to the end of our hiding phase here. It may be time to run soon. What are your thoughts, boss?”

“Boss?” Steph looked at me with the smallest of fragile smiles.

I shrugged.

“If you’re not going to call me Steph, I think I’d prefer Captain.” It wasn’t harsh; just a simple request between friends.

“Jefe?” I asked, trying for levity. I was finding that humor was often the only way past all of the repressively painful bullshit of life as it was.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” Steph said, sitting down in the empty rolling chair.

“Then how did you know what I was saying?”

“I think sometimes you think you’re still fifteen,” Steph said, looking intently at the large monitor in front of Dalhover. Her face still showed the fragile smile, though.

“Agreed,” Dalhover rasped.

Steph concluded, “It sounds too much like heifer. I’ll stick with boss if that’s what you want.”

I laid a hand on Steph’s shoulder. “You’re the boss. What about you, Dalhover?”

“You don’t want to call me anything but Dalhover or First Sergeant.” Dalhover’s tone gave no hint of allowing compromise.

“Top?” I asked.

Dalhover looked at me, and I understood that for some reason, that title was off limits to me.

“Whatever.” I looked back to Steph. “Back on topic, Boss?”

Dalhover withdrew a nearly empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket and put one in his mouth.

“In here?” I asked, a little offended.

“Secondhand smoke isn’t going to be what kills you, Zane,” Dalhover told me.

Steph came to his defense. “He can’t very well go outside and smoke.”

Of course he could. He’d be safe on the roof. Nevertheless, I dropped it.

The White on the rock cocked her head in the other direction.

Steph asked, “Sergeant, will that gate hold?”

Dalhover gave that some thought as he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke back out. “Hard to say.”

“Your best guess?” Steph asked.

“I think it’ll take a whole lot more of ‘em before they have any hope. Even then, the gate might not break. It might bend. If that happens, we won’t be able to open it.”

I said, “We need to start keeping a count of how deep the crowd is that’s pushing on the gate.”

Steph and Dalhover both turned with the same blank “What the fuck are you talking about?” stare. It didn’t bother me. I’d seen the expression too many times in my life to be bothered by it.

“Let’s say the gate does break down,” I lectured. “If we know how many people deep the crowd is at that moment, then we learn something very important.”

“That is?” Dalhover asked in his flat tone.

“The interior gate is on the right hand side of that driveway. The width of the driveway between the walls limits how deep they can stack up in front of it,” I explained. “For instance, if they have to be thirty deep to exert enough force to break the outside gate, the driveway between the walls may be too narrow for thirty people deep. If that’s the case, then they won’t be able to break the second gate and we’ll be safe.”

Steph was nodding when I finished. “That makes sense. Sergeant?”

“Makes sense,” Dalhover agreed. “I’ll set up a log and instruct the watch to track the mob depth every fifteen minutes.”

“I think you earned a Pop Tart, Zed.” Steph gave me a real smile.

I smiled back.

“Dammit,” Dalhover groused, and reached down to open a drawer of a file cabinet. From within, he pulled out a foil-packaged pair and handed them to me.

I accepted. “Thank you, hoarders. I love these things.”

Dalhover turned back to the monitors.

“I think we stay for now,” Steph announced. “When they breach the first gate, we’ll reconsider. Besides coffee and the other goodies, how did your trip upriver turn out?”

I briefly gave her and Dalhover the important points.

“Any trouble with infected at the house?”

I hesitated, then shrugged.

Steph knit her brows and asked, “They were in the house?”

“Some,” I answered.

“How many?”

“Some.”

“Were you in any danger?”

My hesitation gave me away.

“Zed,” Steph was a little more angry than the conversation warranted. “You can’t keep taking unnecessary risks. You’re going to get killed.”

“I’m fine,” I added a lie. “I know what I can get away with.”

Steph huffed and turned her attention back to the monitors.

I asked, “Do we know anything for sure about Murphy yet? Is he going to be all right?”

Steph shrugged. “The bullet didn’t penetrate the skull, but it did hit bone when it grazed his head.”

“And?”

“And we’ll see.”

“We’ll see?” I shot back at her. “What does that mean? He’s unconscious, right? He hasn’t been awake since it happened. Is he in a coma?”

“Zed, don’t be melodramatic,” Steph kindly scolded. “I cleaned the wound and put an antibiotic on before I bandaged it. It stopped bleeding. He’s probably got a concussion. Whether there’s more damage, swelling of the brain or something else, I won’t know until he wakes up.”

“Worst case?” I asked.

“It doesn’t do any good to talk about the worst case, Zed.” Almost pleading, Steph continued, “Don’t we all have enough…sorrow already?”

“Sorry. I’m just worried.”

Steph reached over, put her hand on my arm, and said, “Let me do the worrying, okay?  I’ll do everything I can for him, but it’s out of our hands for the moment. Either he’ll be okay or he won’t. Without hospital facilities and a neurosurgeon, there’s nothing more we can know, nothing more we can do.”

I gave Steph a weak smile and a nod.

Dalhover changed the subject and said, “About the gates.”

“Yes, Sergeant?” Steph asked.

“It’s a risk but we could drive one or both of those Humvees down there and park them up against the outside gate. They weigh three tons each. The infected won’t be able to move ‘em.”

“You wanna bet?” I thought about my Humvee back at the hospital, caught in the tide of screaming Whites. “Enough of them can.”

Dalhover continued, “Six tons of steel behind those gates might make the difference.”

“And the risk?” Steph asked.

“They’ll hear the diesel engines, even with all that banging they’re doing,” Dalhover answered.

Steph said, “They already think something is behind that gate. I don’t think the sound of the engines will make them any more or less determined.”

“It’ll make a difference with the Smart One on the rock,” Dalhover countered.

Steph thought about that for a second. “What do you think, Zed?”

“I could go over the wall and kill that infected girl on the rock,” I said with a callousness that surprised even me.

“The Smart One?” Dalhover asked, not bothered one iota by the girl or my indifference about killing her.

“With her gone,” I said, “I could hike down the hill a bit, create a distraction, and draw the mob away.”

“What kind of distraction?” Dalhover asked.

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I answered. “Let’s assume for the moment that I can.”

“That mitigates the risk,” Dalhover agreed.

“Not to Zed!” Steph’s voice jumped up an octave.

Neither Dalhover nor I responded.

Steph shook her head and pointed at the monitor. “I’m not sending Zed over the wall into that unless there’s no other choice.”

Dalhover smoked the last of his cigarette, stubbed it out on the bottom of his boot, and threw the butt in a trashcan. “By the time there’s no other choice, it’ll be too late. By the time you know that you should’ve killed the Smart One on the rock, it’ll be because there are more Smart Ones out there or because there are too many of them, or because they’ve already figured out a way to attack us. If we’re going to do it, then it’s got to be preemptive. If we move the Humvees to block the gate, then sending Zane over the wall is a necessary step.”

“You’re downright loquacious when the spirit moves you, Dalhover.” I slapped him on the shoulder.

Dalhover looked at me in way that said “Don’t touch me again.” It didn’t look like we were ever going to be best buddies.

“And how will you get over the wall and back in again?” Steph asked.

“We can figure it out,” I responded. “I think the primary question to answer is whether we should do something, not whether we can. We can figure out the how-to later. But you’re the boss. What do you want to do?”

Steph propped up a hard façade in front of emotions that were starting to frazzle. “Is that what you want to do, Zed? How many times can you roll the dice and win?” Steph took a long breath to collect her thoughts, looked up at me, and spoke. “Let me ask you, if we take the risk…no. Zed, if you take the risk, what do we gain?”

I didn’t need time to think about it. I’d already assessed the situation. I knew the answer. “Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.”

“So you understand where I’m going with this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Best case, I go over the wall, kill the Smart One, distract the mob and they move on. We stay here and live happily ever after. Worst case: I get killed. That’s the worst case for me, anyway. But somewhere in the middle, there’s the most likely case.”

“Which is?” Dalhover asked.

I answered, “We get rid of this group, and eventually a larger group shows up, with too many Whites or too many Smart Ones to get rid of. So we bail out and head upriver. The thing is, I don’t doubt that will happen. I just don’t know when. It could be later on today, or next week, or next month.”

“Sounds right,” Dalhover agreed.

“And if more show up this afternoon?” Steph asked. “Is risking your life worth a few more hours of luxury?”

“It’s not about that,” I argued.

“What, then?” she asked.

“Murphy.”

“Murphy?”

Serious and calm, I answered, “Like you said, we don’t know how bad Murphy’s injury really is. If jostling him around on a boat for a couple of hours could put him at more risk, then going over the wall is worth it to me. It’s that simple.”

Steph couldn’t find a good response, so she remained silent.

“Why?” Dalhover asked unexpectedly.

“Why?” I shot back at Dalhover, more harshly than I wanted to.

Not affected by my emotions, he repeated, “Why?”

“I need to.”

“Why?”

I looked around the room, maybe looking for an escape from the suddenly, uncomfortable question. But the need for secrecy with my motives was a childish remnant of junior high social dramas. I answered, “I would do anything for Murphy.”

“You’d even risk your life?”

I nodded.

“You’d die for him?”

I thought about it for a second, or pretended to. I knew the answer as soon as it was asked. “Yes.”

Dalhover didn’t take his eyes off of me, but took his time pulling out another cigarette and lighting it. “Why?”

I was getting a little irritated and snapped, “Because Murphy and I would both be dead if it weren’t for each other. He saved my life, more than once. He…” I wanted to say he cared about me. I wanted to say he loved me like a brother, but those words just couldn’t come out of my mouth.

Dalhover stared at me.

I looked over at Steph. She watched, but was unable or unwilling to intercede.

It took me a minute for me to put some thoughts together. “Murphy and I work well together. We…care for each other. Murphy will do anything for me. I’ll do anything for him.”

Dalhover nodded, “And what about the rest of us?”

“What are you asking me?”

“How do you feel about the rest of us?”

I spent a few moments looking at Dalhover and thinking about what he and I had been through. “I’ll be straight with you, Dalhover. I don’t like you very much. I know you don’t like me. But I respect you and I don’t think you’d let me down. I don’t think you’d fuck me over. We’ve fought together. I don’t know what makes that mean something, but I know that it makes me think I can trust you.”

Dalhover continued to appraise me as he sucked on his cigarette. “Yeah, you’re right that I don’t like you, Zane. I think you listen to your balls more than your brains. You make bad choices, but for the right reasons. Somehow it works out for you. You’re lucky, loyal, and brave. Or stupid. I’m not sure which.”

I was taken aback by that mix of compliments and insults, but I bit back a big “Fuck you.”

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Dalhover continued, “I’ll stand by your side in a fight. You can take that to the bank. You can trust me. I guaran-God-damn-tee it.”

“Does that mean we’re going steady?” I asked with an empty smile.

Dalhover gave me that stare of his that made it clear that my smart aleck remark wasn’t worth a response. But he did say, “You can call me Top if you want.”

I nodded, “Top.”

“What about me?” Steph asked, effectively masking any extra meaning that I might have read in her face.

With a little of the emptiness gone from my smile, I answered, “We haven’t been through enough shit together yet.”

Steph spun her chair back toward the monitors. “You’re such a fifteen-year-old.”

Chapter 4

The deck lounger made of heavy ipe wood seemed to have too many sharp corners, but at nearly eight feet long and with widely spaced slats that had supported its now-absent cushion, it would serve its new purpose—that of a ladder—quite well. Dalhover and Specialist Harris carried the lounger down from the pool deck and across Sarah’s back yard toward a part of the wall far from the front gate. They huffed and sweated under their burden—more so Dalhover than burly Harris—but refused my help. My duties in the remaining wee morning hours were yet to come.

As they wrestled the lounger down one of the tiers, I took a moment to double check my kit. My machete, a pistol, and a rifle, of course. Extra ammo, water, and a few snacks, just in case. A lighter and a knife.

“How long have you been here, First Sergeant?” Specialist Harris asked.

“A week, I s’pose,” Dalhover answered.

“Were you guys over at camp Mabry?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“No need to call me sir,” I told him. “I’m not in the military. I’m just some dude.”

“Habit,” Specialist Harris responded. “We were at Mabry from the beginning. At least my unit was.”

“You didn’t get deployed?” Dalhover asked.

“No, First Sergeant.”

Dalhover and Specialist Harris wrestled the chair down another tier.

“And the rest of your unit?” Dalhover asked, unnecessarily.

“I’m the only one left.”

“In that firefight we’ve been hearing since yesterday?” Of course the implied question, too uncomfortable to ask on its own, was how the rest of them died.

“No, sir,” Specialist Harris answered. “They all got infected before that.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Apparently the virus got just about everybody. I’m guessing that since you didn’t turn, you’re immune.”

Specialist Harris turned his melon-sized head and looked at me, but didn’t respond beyond that. I thought he was trying to intimidate me—maybe out of habit—with an ominous silence he’d practiced in the mirror to compliment his thick arms.

“How did the firefight start?” Dalhover asked.

“That’s hard to say, First Sergeant.”

“How’s that?”

“There was shooting from the first night. A little at first. We weren’t under orders to shoot. That’s not what we do. You know? Shooting civilians.” Harris came to a stop on the grass and drilled us both with his flat brown eyes, maybe looking for any sign of judgment from us. There wasn’t any. Dalhover and I held our silence and looked up at him.

“It’s hard to say what happened. Officers were getting the virus. Guys were getting the virus and falling out. For a week or so, it seemed like we had a new CO every couple of hours.”

Dalhover nodded, knowingly. Perhaps it wasn’t unlike his experience at the hospital.

Harris stroked his fingers across a thick black stubble of beard. “Somewhere in the first few days, more guys just took it upon themselves to preemptively shoot the infected. There were orders or rumors of orders to shoot, but nobody seemed to know for sure. We were designated as a rally point for the refugees and survivors. The survivors. Can you believe it? Man, we were only a couple of days in when word came down. I guess that’s when I knew things were bad. By that time, half my unit had the virus. Most of the rest went in the next couple of days.”

I asked, “Did a lot of civilians come in?”

Harris nodded, “Yes, sir. At first, yes. It slowed to a trickle by the end of the first week and then nobody.”

“How many of you were there?” Dalhover asked.

“Hard to say, Top. The number was always changing. We had partial units coming in and single guys, guys from units that got wiped out. We had civilians coming, and people kept getting infected. There was a time there when we were in control of a couple of buildings and the infected were outside trying to get in, coming at us at all hours of the night and day. I remember it feeling like a siege. There were maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us at that point. I thought it stabilized there. At least, it seemed like it did for a while.”

Dalhover sat down on the lounger, removed his crumpled cigarette package from his pocket, looked into it through the hole in the top of the pack, and made a sadder face than usual. He took one of the last few out and lit it.

“We were making runs to the ammo bunkers a couple of days ago…”

Dalhover interrupted. “The ammo bunkers. There are two there, right? How full are they?”

“Mostly,” Harris confirmed. “They’re secure and mostly full.”

Dalhover nodded. The gears in his head were turning.

“Our CO pieced together a unit from six of us and sent us out in two armored Humvees to ferry as much of the ammo and weapons back to our two buildings as we could. We were on a run when we saw them.”

“Them?” I asked. “Naked and bald? A whole shitload of ‘em?”

Specialist Harris crinkled his brow and nodded. “How did you know?”

“A guess.” I looked over at Dalhover. “The ones we saw out by Dr. Evans’ farm, you think?”

“They are the only naked ones we’ve seen,” Dalhover answered.

I recalled that Mandi said that she’d seen one out at Dr. Evans’ farm with a knife. I asked Harris, “Did you see any of them with weapons?”

“Some.” Specialist Harris nodded as his eyes fell to the ground.

“What kind of weapons?” Dalhover asked.

“Knives. Things they could use for clubs.”

Looking for more information, Dalhover continued, “How many had weapons, do you think?”

“Not many,” Specialist Harris answered. “Maybe ten or twenty.”

I added, “I’m guessing there were thousands of them.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Specialist Harris.

“From over here, it sounded like you killed a lot of them,” I observed.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you run out of ammunition or get overrun?”

“We didn’t run out.” Specialist Harris shook his head. “There were too many of them. We were overwhelmed.”

“How many do you think you killed?” Dalhover asked.

“Top, I want to say thousands, but there were so many, it didn’t seem like we killed any. Sorry, that sounds like a contradiction.”

“Not really,” I offered up the small comfort. “If it was that horde we saw out east of town, there were tens of thousands of them.”

“More.” Dalhover leaned down to pick up the chair. Harris followed his lead and the two of them carried the deck lounger the remaining distance to the wall in silence. Once there, they laid the chair flat and then propped it on its end against the wall. I stepped up onto the makeshift ladder and climbed halfway up. It was solid enough and it was tall enough.

Dalhover turned to Specialist Harris, “Go back into the house. On the first floor, not the basement, at the far end of the living room is a laundry room. There’s a linen closet there. Get four or five sheets and bring them back here.”

“Yes, First Sergeant.” Harris turned and hurried back up to the house.

“My rope?”

Dalhover nodded.

“That’s cool.” I continued my climb to the top of the ladder. “Throw it over when I get back, okay?”

“Are those your balls talking?” Dalhover commented.

“What?”

“Stop thinking with your balls. Use your brains.”

“What, you want me to wait for you guys to make a rope out of the sheets and then climb down that?”

Dalhover, his face serious, nodded.

“I made the jump when we broke in here.” I tried not to let my disdain show.

“That’s a twelve foot drop. With the curved coppice, there’s nothing to grab onto to slow your fall. In the dark, you won’t be able to see what’s on the ground outside. You could drop over the wall and sprain your ankle on a stump, or worse. You’re not gonna bounce on your balls, that’s for sure. Use your head, Zane. Wait for the rope.”

I hated being schooled, but Dalhover was right. To jump off of the wall again had all the hallmarks of a mistake in the making, a mistake I didn’t have the extra blood to pay for. I climbed down the chair-ladder and sat myself in the grass and waited for Specialist Harris to return. “What do you think of those two?”

Dalhover chose that moment to go back on word rations and pointed his expressionless face at me instead.

“This isn’t the Army anymore. You can talk to me about the other grunts, you know.”

The same look from Dalhover.

I waited, but after a moment it seemed pointless so I said, “I think Freitag hates me.”

Dalhover looked up toward the house then back at me.

“Every time she had the chance when they were taking care of bird man… I mean that guy I injured, she kept giving me hateful looks.”

Dalhover looked down at his watch, then back up at the house.

“Whatever.” I huffed, and ran my hands across my vest, belt, and pockets. Another check wouldn’t hurt.

Mistakes are paid for with blood.

After several long, silent minutes, Specialist Harris returned with the sheets. We worked together tying knots in the sheets every couple of feet and then attaching them end to end. When it was done, Dalhover looked at me and nodded. “Good?”

I made a show of yanking on two of the tied sheets to test the strength and said, “Yep.”

“We won’t stay out here to wait for you. I’ll be keeping an eye out for you on the monitors. We’ll come out and throw the sheets back over the wall when you’re getting close,” Dalhover told me.

I nodded and said, “But I may be in a hurry, and…”

Dalhover looked up at the wall. “You don’t worry about me. If I see you running, I’ll have those sheets over the wall when you get here.”

“But…”

Dalhover looked me hard in the eyes. “Don’t worry about that. You take care of what you need to take care of. You be careful. Don’t take more risks than you need to. Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t worry about the sheet. It’ll be there when you get to this end of the wall.”

Okay. Dalhover had a way of erasing doubts with his certainty.

“Now get up there, and use the sheets when you go down the other side. We’ll hold it here.”

I glanced at Specialist Harris. He said, “We’ve got you.”

I gave them a nod. That was enough. Time to get to work. Time to kill.

Chapter 5

With no pain and no noise, my feet gently touched the ground. I let go of the rope, and feeling the slack, Dalhover and Harris pulled it quickly back up over the wall. I was back in Indian Territory.

Silent in the darkness, I looked around and listened. Just like at the front wall, the cedar forest was set back from the side wall by a fifteen-foot wide clear-cut buffer. The moonlight revealed no infected along its length. Out in the night, pops of gunfire mixed with sounds of coyotes, monkeys, and crows—the infected. White fists beating on our gate would draw all of those infected in if I didn’t solve that problem.

Nervousness sweated my palms.

Stop thinking! Start moving!

I crossed the clear-cut band and stepped into the inky darkness among the cedars. My boots crunched too loudly across limestone gravel and I froze. Stealth was important, but the forest floor was mottled with shadows and pads of brown cedar needles that had accumulated in the low spots. Among the dark blotches, my feet needed to find those that were the rotting cedar needles. Those spots would be soft and silent.

Slowly, I made my way through the trees, careful to avoid prickly pears and thorny vines, careful to keep close enough to the edge of the trees so that I could see the compound walls and maintain my bearings. Nervousness melted away as I sank into the task.

Upon reaching the corner of the compound, I peered through the trees down to the front gate at the far end and made out the gray shapes of the raucous mob. The sound of their pounding fists and wails carried easily to me up the caliche road.

I thought for a second about taking a direct approach down along the wall, but thought better of it. I didn’t want that Smart One on the rock to see me coming. But with at least a half dozen thorns of one type or another already sticking through my pants and irritating my skin, I decided that the stealthy approach through the woods was more trouble than it was worth. Instead of continuing through the woods, I followed the caliche road back out to the street and made a right onto the asphalt. That put me on a path parallel to the compound’s front wall. Once down the street, a short traipse through trees would bring me up behind the Smart One and the mob.

Sticking close to the edge of the road, I moved. There were seven or eight Whites far down the street who caught my attention. Movement in the trees across the street gave away the presence of at least ten more. Up the street behind me, I spotted a group of three, very interested in something moving amongst the cedars.

My machete found its way into my right hand and I cradled my pistol comfortably in my left. Quick, deliberate steps moved me toward my goal. The Whites gave me little more than a passing glance. As far as they could tell, I was one of them. But what they couldn’t know was that I was walking death, hidden in plain sight among them. That thought brought with it a feeling of power. Nervousness, fear, and that sense of power made for a heady mix of emotions, and I had to suppress a laugh.

I was a wicked pirate assassin on my way to kill.

Argh!

My chosen spot in the cedars came up on the right. The sound of the infected beating on the gate and yelping made it clear that I was close enough. Off of the asphalt and into the trees I went, back to looking for dark spots on the ground between the trees and avoiding the prickly pears. Far off to my left, I heard the sound of at least a couple of Whites crashing through the trees as well, chasing the sound at the gate.

The moonlight ahead of me grew brighter. The light tan color of the caliche road that ran along the outside of the wall became visible. The wall itself looked black and ominous. I spotted white arms, legs, and heads as I came to a stop at the edge trees.

I was at the point where the road widened out to form the circular turning area in front of the gate. Not ten feet to my left, the Smart One still sat on her rectangular slab of limestone, scrutinizing. She was a small woman, just a hair over five feet tall, with the athletic look of an Olympic gymnast. She sat on the edge of the stone and dangled her feet, occasionally dragging her toes in the gravel. Her hands busied themselves in slow movements, fondling her fingers first on one hand and then the other, then starting over again. She was concentrating on the obstacle of the gate. Unlike the mob, she was silent.

She was thinking.

That was simply not acceptable. Death had arrived to reconcile that transgression.

I stepped out of the woods and meandered toward her, feigning attention on the mob.

She looked at me, but I didn’t look back. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her facial expression change. I froze, but after a few moments, she looked back at the wall.

I pretended to keep my attention on the mob as I slowly sidled to my left.

She looked at me again, but this time, didn’t look away.

I focused on the Whites in front of me.

Still, she stared.

And stared.

Three or four minutes passed until I couldn’t take the staring anymore. I looked back at her. Her concentration was gone, replaced by blank curiosity, but those eyes, deep brown and indecipherable, were almost human. How much was going on inside that diseased brain?

I tried my best to mirror her blank expression to no effect. Still, she stared.

I looked back toward the mob, hoping she might do the same. After a minute, she did. She looked at the mob, the gate, the wall. Whether it was my imagination or not, her expression didn’t go back to the concentrated look she had before. Only curiosity was left.

She was about four feet to my left, just beyond arm’s reach. With my machete, I knew I could spin and bring the blade around with enough force to cleave a mortal wound in her small body. She wouldn’t have a chance. By the time she realized what was happening, her flesh would be tearing open. The thought of it gave me pause, but she had to die. If she didn’t, Steph, Murphy, Mandi,—all of us—were at risk.

Pirate assassin.

Argh!

Like a striking cobra—at least in my mind—I made my move. The blade came up and out. My arm pulled it down over my head as I stepped and spun with all the fury and speed that virus-infected muscles could deliver. But in those microseconds it took for my blade to reach the diminutive woman, she not only saw me move, but reacted fast enough to jump to her left in a blink. My blade hit rock, ringing loudly and throwing sparks.

Surprised by her speed and my failure, I found my eyes glued in disbelief to the sight of the blade’s edge grating against stone, not buried in flesh.

But the mob, at least those in the back, were moving, turning their attention to me. Things were going to get very interesting very fast. I looked down the length of my blade and followed it up toward the gymnast. Her momentum was still carrying her to her left and she was trying to catch her balance, in a weird bit of awkwardness that seemed out of place for her apparent athleticism. Then I spotted it.

Blood.

She teetered two steps further from me, then another.

The blood was on her arm, halfway between the shoulder and elbow. Lots of blood. And her shirt was cut across the ribs. There was blood there too.

When she came to a stop ten feet away she stared at me with a look of horror that told me she understood, with every bit of imagination and intellectual abstraction, exactly what was coming next in all of its gory, painful, finality.

A White from the mob on my right screamed and started to move. Another scream of jubilation followed and was joined by more.

For an impossibly long time, the gymnast eyed me, accusing, hating. Then she ran. Eight or nine Whites with blood in their eyes chased her into the dark cedars—hounds on the hunt.

Full of ambivalence and remorse, I ran after.

Finish what you start!

She has to die!

Right?

On the heels of the other White chimps on the hunt, we screamed with one voice. We were a pack.

Branches snapped. Grunts. Breathing. Underbrush mashed underfoot.

The girl stayed in the trees and veered to her right, away from the road. She was prey. All she thought was escape, survive.

Something in the sound changed up ahead.

Struggle in the trees.

That was quick!

The girl was caught.

Screaming! Not the pursuing Whites, but the girl.

The hair on my neck stood. My blood flowed ice cold. It sounded like murder. The wolves had caught Little Red Riding Hood and were eating her alive.

I stopped and watched the last Whites ahead of me disappear into the darkness.

The girl’s voice didn’t sound like that of an animal. It sounded human. She sounded human.

“No!” A voice ripped through the black forest in a bloody gurgle, then squelched down to nothing.

Only the sounds of the beasts remained, triumphal, snarling at one another, staking their claim at the kill.

“No!”

Is that what I heard?

Like a jackboot kicking me in the head, a pariah of a thought hit my brain. What if she wasn’t a Smart One? What if she was a Slow Burn, just like me? What if she had simply been wondering how she could get inside and join us?

What if?

What if?

She screamed just a like a normal human.

What if?

No!

Fuck!

Chapter 6

In the blackest of moods, I marched down the center of the street, the tip of my blade still red with the gymnast’s blood. A long helix of Whites was rounding a corner far ahead. But my thoughts were elsewhere.

Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second-guessing.

“No!” That’s what she screamed, but it couldn’t have been.

I simply had to remember it differently.

Repression is your friend.

I had black holes aplenty in my heart for tossing in such memories. I just needed to keep shoving until this fucking memory let go and fell.

I angled toward a pair of Whites squatting beside a bed full of dead brown flowers beneath three enormous oaks in the front yard of an oversized, overpriced house, with ridiculously oversized white columns holding up a stupid little roof over a just-pissed-me-off-for-being-there front porch. When I stepped off of the asphalt and into the grass, I had their complete attention. They were both disheveled, with blood on their shirts and smears on their faces, indisputable evidence of what they were; mindless, murderous, monsters. Their death would cleanse the guilt I felt over the gymnast.

But she had to be a monster, too. She had to be.

I raised my machete to do the bloody work that was only necessary to rip the memory of that gymnast’s screams from my mind and push the whole episode into a forgettable black Hell. But the pair wasn’t mindless enough. I don’t know what they saw or what they deduced, but just before I got within machete range, they both jumped to their feet, ran across the yard, and around the corner, casting furtive glances behind.

I didn’t chase.

Fuck.

I squatted down beside the bed of dead flowers and stared at the grass.

Did she really scream “No”?

Should I have maybe made a sign with my hands? I didn’t know sign language. A thumbs up? An okay sign? How do you communicate without talking?

Repression skills, don’t fail me now.

I looked around. The next house over had an SUV sitting in the driveway. My plan was to blow it up. Well, not that one in particular, just the first one I came to. And that one was first. I’d need to break into the house and get a towel or a pillowcase or something to stuff into the gas tank. I could light it and run off. The explosion would draw the mob away from our gate. Hopefully.

It was a simple plan.

But as I sat there looking at the SUV, I started to ask myself some questions. Does it really work when you blow up a car like that? In all honesty, I didn’t know. It always worked in the movies. But in the movies, machine guns never ran out of bullets when a thousand monsters where running at you on the top of a parking garage. I realized that I seriously needed to disabuse myself of any truisms that I’d learned from my favorite action heroes.

I didn’t have any experience with blowing up cars. It made no sense to bet my life on getting it right on the first try.

What else, then?

Could I puncture that tank and then torch the leaking gasoline? Sure, but then there was the noise of puncturing the tank, noise that would be loudest when I was lying on my back halfway under a car, a very vulnerable position when making appetizing sounds among the ravenous predators.

No, that was a bad idea. Kick it to the curb.

What else?

I could start the engine, put the car in gear, and let it roll out into the street. There was little doubt that would attract the attention of every White in sight. But would it make enough of a commotion that the mob would be drawn away from the gate? I looked up the street and tried to gauge the distance to the gate hidden among the cedars. It was at least a hundred yards, maybe a couple of hundred.

The risk-to-reward ratio on that plan was too high.

What about the horn?

Hmm.

Noisy? Yes.

Easy getaway? Yes.

Well, probably.

But could I wedge something in the horn button to make it sound? I thought about the way that car horns were constructed. Sure, in an older car where there was a horn button of some sort, that idea might work, but how many modern cars had the horn button embedded with the airbag beneath the vinyl in the center of the steering wheel? Damn near all of them. So, wedging something in the horn was a crap plan.

I looked down the street. The helix of Whites had filled the road. If they kept coming, they’d soon join those at the gates.

I looked at the SUV for a moment longer, and then something obvious occurred to me.

Duh!

I looked around to see where the closest Whites were. There were many more around than I felt comfortable with, but the nearest was far enough away that my inspiration might bear riskless fruit. I pushed my pistol into its holster and put the machete into the scabbard I had rigged on my back. A hunk of limestone the size of a soccer ball, decorative, I guess, lay among the brown stalks in the flowerbed. I walked over and squatted down to it. Lift with your legs, the voice in my head told me. So I did, with a grunt. With another grunt, I pushed it up to rest on my shoulder, with both hands holding it steady.

Here goes nothing!

A few slow steps and then three quick ones toward the SUV gave me all the momentum I needed. With another grunt, I launched the stone toward the driver’s side window. The glass shattered, rocking the SUV back and forth. A siren under the hood bleated overbearingly. Without slowing, I ran past the SUV and around the corner of the garage to get myself out of sight. Best not to be associated with the noisy car. In the infected mind, noisy meant tasty. I had no plans to be tasted.

Once past the house and out of sight behind a large shrub, I looked back. The Whites I could see were running toward the car. At least six, then nine, then a bunch. The car very cooperatively switched to a different, but just as obnoxious, noise.

Ha, bitch!

I skirted around the back of the house to put some distance between me and the car, then made my way through the cedars again until I came to another yard of mowed, dead, grass. My machete and pistol were back in my hands. They felt comfortable there, necessary extensions of the new me.

The yard contained a big wooden play-scape and a big stone-covered patio with lots of outdoor furniture, but thankfully nothing that moved. I made my way out to the front yard, and as I rounded the house, the long helix of Whites that had been down at the end of the street were winding their way past, heading for the squawking SUV. There were at least twenty Whites already on the car, doing what they could to expose the tasty morsels that just had to be inside.

I stepped up onto a big terracotta flowerpot to get a view up the street. A steady trickle of infected were coming out of the cedars up around where the gate to Sarah Mansfield’s compound stood. The plan appeared to be working. A short distance down the road, I spotted another car, much newer and much smaller. If my luck held, it also had an obnoxious alarm. And that was the updated plan—smash, wail, repeat. Work my way down the street.

To my surprise, the plan worked without incident. I tripped the alarms on five cars, the furthest a mile down Mt. Bonnell Road and around a sharp bend. At that point, the street behind me was overrun with Whites, manic in their search for edible people in and around the bleating cars.

It was time to head home.

As promised, Dalhover and Specialist Harris were waiting for me when I arrived back at the wall. The knotted sheet-rope hung down from the top of the wall and I barely had to expend any effort as they dragged me up. The wide arc of the coppice worked in our favor for that.

Leaving our makeshift ladder in place, we headed back inside.

“I didn’t check the front gate,” I said. “Did it work?”

Dalhover gave me a nod and the faintest of smiles. High praise from him.

“Any trouble?” Specialist Harris asked.

I shrugged. What was there to say about that?

We climbed up a wall at the back of one of the tiers. I checked my watch then looked up at the sky. It was just starting to turn gray in the east.

Finally, the end of a long, long, fucked up night.

Chapter 7

Sleep came easier and deeper than I ever would have guessed possible. I didn’t dream. I didn’t stir.

When I woke again, laying flat in a recliner in the theater, the only sounds were those of Murphy’s deep breathing and Mandi’s light snoring. I checked my watch. It was after nine, and I was starved. Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleepers, I got up and exited the theater, visited the restroom to take care of necessary business, and threw some water on my face.

In the mirror, I looked thinner and couldn’t help but run a hand over the hollows in my cheeks. My hair wasn’t to the unruly stage yet, though I’d need a haircut soon. Well, I’d want a haircut soon. Wants and needs were different now. At least living in the Mansfield mansion afforded me the luxury of washing my hair and shaving every day. Electricity and water made personal hygiene so easy.

Feeling rested, but a touch groggy, I was wondering what troubles the new day would bring when I came out of the restroom and walked up to the theater-style snack bar, behind which Sergeant Dalhover had positioned himself with one foot propped up on a shelf, savoring a cigarette. He was watching across the foyer where Freitag was having a tense but hushed conversation with Steph. Steph was inside the video room. Freitag was in the doorway.

I leaned on the snack bar counter and gave Dalhover a nod. I asked, “Any update on Murphy?”

Dalhover shook his head. “Is he still unconscious?”

“Yeah.”

Dalhover shook his head again. “It would be better if he was awake.”

Of course! I nodded. “What does Steph think?”

“She says we won’t know until he wakes up.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s only been, what, nine or ten hours? That’s not abnormal, right?”

Dalhover’s eyebrows knit. “More like twenty-four, Rip Van Winkle.”

“What?”

Dalhover tapped a finger on the face of my watch. “P.m., not a.m.”

I looked at him like he’d lost his senses.

“You slept all day.”

“Wow.” I rubbed my hands over my face and shook my head. I looked back at Dalhover, still not sure whether to believe him.

“Go up top and look outside. It’s dark again.”

“I guess I must have needed the sleep.”

Dalhover nodded and reached under the counter. He pulled out a box of chocolate candies from inside the glass display case and laid them in front of me. “You should eat something.”

Chocolate candies for breakfast late in the evening. Hmm.

Dalhover read the look on my face and said, “Specialist Harris is in the kitchen making dinner for everyone. He says he was trained as a chef.”

“I think I’ll wait for that, then.”

“He just went upstairs. We were waiting for you and Mandi to get up before we ate dinner, but we’re all hungry. Nevertheless, it’ll probably be a bit before it’s done. Eat the candy.”

He was right. “Could you give me a Coke, too?”

Dalhover scooped up a cup full of ice and drew me a soda out of the fountain while I opened up the box of chocolate covered nuts. Over my shoulder, Freitag was getting animated with her irritation, and I turned to look, a little curious about what kind of bug she had up her ass. I was starting to think she probably had a whole crop of cultivated ass-bugs.

I thanked Dalhover for the snack and then he fell silent, watching the exchange between Freitag and Steph. I took my hors d’oeuvres, crossed the foyer, and planted myself on the floor with my back against the glass wall of the wine cellar.

Using one of Sarah Mansfield’s expensive, organically grown, hand-picked-by-a-happy-farmer-on-a-sustainable-farm Egyptian cotton towels, I started to clean the crud off of my machete blade. After that, I planned to spend some time cleaning up everything in my kit, at least until dinner was ready. I thought about asking Dalhover to give me some training on how to care for my rifle and my pistol.

But as I sat there wiping and re-wiping the nicked blade, I couldn’t help but see that bird man’s body was still lying next to the wall across the foyer, and in spite of the sugar and caffeine working their way into my bloodstream, that dragged my mood down.

Becoming transfixed on the amorphous, blanketed lump, I slowly wiped back and forth on the blade that had killed the man inside. I tried hard to put the memory of that clusterfuck out of my mind. I tried to think of something good to replace it with. My success at getting the Whites away from the gates the night before felt good to think about for nearly a whole second. But that led, of course, to memories of the no-screaming gymnast who’d paid for our safety with her life.

Why were those memories even back?

Repress!

Repress!

I gave nothingness a shot. The oblivious serenity of an empty mind, that’s what I longed for. How good would it be to shed all of my messy memories and live for a day in Russell’s blank mind?

A gray void swallowed my thoughts, and for a little while, all that existed in my world was the zen of a clean blade. There was no dead bird man. There were no harsh, hushed arguments across the room. There were no cannibals with virus-laden brains.

Somewhere in my nothingness, I started to feel okay.

Dalhover kicking a booted foot that was splayed out in front of me brought it all to an end. Awareness of reality was back. I looked up at him, too disappointed to be startled. I didn’t ask why he was getting my attention, I simply let the question hang in the expression on my face. Yes?

Dalhover squatted down and leaned in close, his tobacco breath assaulting my senses again.

Good Lord! There had to something going on in his mouth besides just poor dental hygiene.

I looked past him. I no longer saw Freitag in the door of the video room. I didn’t see anyone in the foyer.

“We need to get rid of the body.” Dalhover tilted his head slightly in the direction of the bird man.

“Okay.” I quickly deduced that I was going to have a role in that chore.

“Freitag wants to bury him outside.” Dalhover shook his head. His gesture made that idea seem like the stupidest thing he’d heard in a while.

“The noise of digging might bring more infected in?” I guessed.

Dalhover nodded.

“What did you do with the other bodies?” I asked.

Dalhover knew I was talking about Sarah Mansfield, her son, and the security guards. Dalhover, Murphy, and Mandi had gotten rid of those when I was passed out on the couch in the first few days of our residence in Sarah’s house. He answered, “The river.”

“You pitched them in the river?” The tone of my voice maybe contained a little antipathy for the idea. “What about the water supply for those downriver?”

Dalhover looked at me expressionlessly.

Of course, it was the only idea that made sense. The bodies needed to go. It was the least bad of several options. I nodded toward the dead man. “Is that what we’re going to do with him?”

Dalhover nodded.

“Me?” I asked. “You want me to do it?”

“You and Freitag,” Dalhover confirmed.

Good, she could at least help me with her dead brother-in-law or whatever the fuck he was to her. “What about Specialist Harris?”

Dalhover’s face went expressionless again. He shook his head.

It occurred to me why. I was a little slow of late. I wondered if the virus was starting its grizzly work on my synapses. “You don’t want them both down in the boathouse alone, do you?”

Dalhover didn’t respond, but his lack of response was enough to confirm it.

“You don’t trust them not to run off with our boat, do you?” I figured I’d push it. I already had a strong distaste for Freitag, but I still wanted to hear Dalhover’s reasons. “Why?”

Dalhover played the blank face on me again.

I persisted. “Why? I’m not saying I won’t do it. But I need to know why you don’t trust Specialist Harris and Freitag.”

Dalhover looked over each of his shoulders and seemed to have some difficulty dredging up a voice. “It’s her. Something’s not right about her.”

I raised my eyebrows in question.

Dalhover just looked at me.

He knew what I was asking, but he just didn’t like to offer up anything voluntarily. “What exactly is not right about her?”

Dalhover’s lips creased shut for a moment before he said, “I don’t think she’s military.”

“What?” I sat up straight. “Why?”

“Just things.”

“Like?”

“She doesn’t speak like she’s in the Army. She doesn’t stand like it.” Dalhover shook his head. “She doesn’t act like it.”

What the fuck?

“Why would she lie about that?” I wondered aloud. “And Harris?”

Dalhover nodded, but his face looked troubled.

“You think he is military, but you don’t trust him, do you?” I thought about that for a second. “That’s why you want me to go down with Freitag. In case something bad happens, you think I can handle the chick but you can handle Harris.”

Dalhover gave me a nearly imperceptible nod.

“He’s twice your size.”

Dalhover’s blank facial expression made it clear that that wasn’t a problem. “Can you handle the girl?”

Fuck you! “Yes.”

“Take the body down. Let her say whatever she needs to say. Put it in the river, then come back up. Don’t dick around. Got it?”

“Yes. Are you going to confront Freitag about the military thing?”

Dalhover shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Why?”

“Captain Leonard chose not to.”

“Why?” I was a little miffed about that.

Dalhover looked a tad angry. He was miffed because I’d questioned a decision that came down the chain of command.

Then it occurred to me. “Steph wants to wait until Freitag has time to get over the death of what’s-his-name.” I nodded toward the dead guy. “Can we have dinner first?”

“It’s not ready yet.”

Chapter 8

Freitag had his feet. I had the other end as we carried bird man down the tunnel to the boathouse. It was tense, nearly silent work, with Freitag spitting just enough words to facilitate the task. At least the guy wasn’t heavy.

Once in the boathouse, with dim moonlight reflecting through the open door, Freitag stared at sparkles on the surface of the water and scrutinized the dark cedar forests covering the hills on the far bank. Somewhere in that reverie, her face changed. What had been a bronze-faced Medusa morphed into a young, friendless girl. “We can’t leave him in the river,” she said, softly, almost to herself.

The change was disarming. Sure, she’d shown me nothing but repugnance since entering the compound, but she also had to watch somebody close to her slowly die a grisly death. How would that kind of thing affect me, I wondered? Somewhere in that thought process I concluded that only thing that made sense, was that Dalhover’s mistrust had been misplaced. He was just a sour old man who saw in others the empty disappointments of his own life.

That was something to remember for the future.

Still, I didn’t see any ready alternative to ditching the bird man’s body in the cold, black water.

I bent my knees slowly and Freitag picked up on the body language, and we lay bird man on the pier beside the ski boat. I looked around the boathouse, as though a solution to the dilemma might be hanging on the walls among the skis and water toys.

Ropes!

We had ski rope hanging on the walls. Good to know. Good to remember that they were there. How handy would rope become in our future?

But back to the task at hand. I cast an exploratory glance at Freitag and she was looking at me. She didn’t appear ready to cry, but she was sad, and looking like she had something to say. I ventured a question, “What are you thinking?”

“I can’t put him in the water.”

I nodded, but still had no alternative. So I listened.

Tentatively, Freitag asked, “Can we take the boat out and maybe bury him in somebody’s yard?”

Absolutely not! Conciliatorily, I said, “I… We can’t risk being out there, digging a hole. It would attract attention.” She knew exactly what kind of attention that would be.

She looked down at the body, then squatted and lay her hands on the legs. She looked up at me and I felt her pain. “Please.”

I looked out into the darkness and thought about it. Was there something I could do to assuage the guilt that was moldering on my soul? “Maybe… Look, we can’t bury him. But you know what? Maybe we can take him down the river a bit and find a peaceful place to leave his body.”

“Not in the water,” she pleaded.

“A peaceful place on the shore somewhere,” I offered.

She nodded and I felt a little better about the situation. Dalhover wouldn’t be pleased, but fuck him. He wasn’t my dad and sure wasn’t my fucking boss. “Let’s get him in the boat.”

We worked together quietly to lay bird man on the couch across the stern of the boat. I didn’t resent the silence anymore. I understood—I thought—and respected it. Time for logistics. “When we get where we’re going, it’ll be better if I take him ashore. There’s less risk that way.”

“Thank you,” Freitag gave me a doleful look. “I was afraid of running from those…”

“They don’t generally bother me. I’ll take care of him. Have you driven a ski boat before?”

Freitag looked at the controls, a steering wheel, a throttle, and a couple of gauges. “It doesn’t look hard.”

“It’s not. The two big things to keep in mind are first that the boat doesn’t stop on a dime. In that way, it’s not like driving a car. Secondly, the engine is noisy, like a hot rod. Don’t rev it or every White on the river will come out to see what’s up.”

“Okay.”

“Take the helm. I’ll loose the lines and push her out. We’ll drift down a bit before we start the engine.”

Freitag looked at me with a question on her face.

“It reduces the chance that anybody will see us coming and going from the boathouse. If they don’t know we’re here, then we have a better chance of keeping our presence here hidden and we’ll have better chance of staying alive. Know what I mean?”

Freitag gave me a nod and took her seat.

I took the ropes off of the cleats, pushed the boat and then jumped onto the deck. With an oar, I pushed the boat out into the river.

Moments later, the boathouse door was closed again and we were drifting down the green-black river, listening to the night sounds. I made myself comfortable in the passenger seat and stared up at the stars. Clouds passed in front of the moon, catching a glowing sliver lining as they went by.

Freitag wasn’t able to appreciate the calm as we drifted down the center of the river. She kept staring back at the body, playing what-if games in her head and grieving.

I checked my watch for no other reason than new habit. I looked around at both shorelines. “What was his name?”

Softly, Freitag answered, “Harvey Marin.”

“You said he was a painter.”

Freitag nodded.

“What kinds of things did he paint?”

She thought about that for a moment. “Do you know what Día de los Muertos is?”

“The Day of the Dead, right?”

Freitag nodded but didn’t take her eyes off of Harvey. “He painted Día de los Muertos art. Big flowery pieces. He sold them at festivals and a couple of shops downtown. He didn’t make a lot of money, but he made my aunt happy.”

I looked down at the deck of the boat. I thought an apology, no matter how sincerely expressed, would sound more insulting than remorseful. I stayed silent.

Some houses drifted past on the south shore and I let the silence smooth the abrasive edges off of my guilt. Harvey was dead because he fucked up and paid the price for that. I thought about Murphy and wondered if he was going to make it. I absently wondered how Russell would handle it if Murphy died. As my mind wandered, I thought about that day in the living room when I came to on the couch the day after the giant security guard nearly smashed my skull. I thought about how lovely Steph looked as she was walking toward the kitchen to make me breakfast, shiny red hair and clean clothes, a normal woman in a normal world.

I wondered if Murphy was right about her and me. There was something there, I felt certain about that. But that something was hard to define.

Freitag interrupted my thoughts when she asked, “They call you Zed?”

I nodded.

“Is that what you want to be called?”

I shrugged. I’d never really thought about it. It’s just what my friends have called me since forever ago. It fit well enough. “And you?”

“Specialist Freitag,” she answered.

“Do you have a first name?”

“Dianna. What’s your real name?”

“It doesn’t matter. It sucks anyway.”

Freitag looked over at me. “I don’t like my name either. I prefer Specialist Freitag.”

“Dianna is a good name. Can I just call you Freitag?”

“If you want.”

It seemed like as good a time as any, and something needed to be said. “I didn’t mean to kill Harvey.”

“Like Sergeant Dalhover said, it was a bad situation. Things got out of control. Bad things happened.”

I nodded.

“We were all under a lot of stress. It was… it was…” Freitag couldn’t find the words.

I helped her out. “We’ve all been there. It’s intense. We’re all fighting for our lives. None of us are used to it.”

“No,” Freitag agreed.

I pointed to a covered dock on the other side of the river. “We shouldn’t go much further. How about that place over there?”

Freitag stood up in the boat and looked around, taking her time to see every detail. “Can we go a little further?”

I nodded, thinking that she might have to reset her expectations. She wasn’t going to find the perfect spot. Nevertheless, I did want to smooth things over and I thought I could afford a little extra time and risk to do so.

Freitag sat up on the back of the skipper’s seat with her feet on the seat cushion and watched the shoreline, scrutinizing every house that passed.

I looked back and forth from shore to shore, focusing for movement in the black shadows under the trees, movement that seemed to be getting more and more frequent. Or perhaps my imagination was starting to see things in the blackness simply because I was looking so intently at it.

Finally, Freitag pointed to a particular house on the south bank and said, “There.”

We’d been drifting the whole time and there was no good reason to start the boat now. So together, Freitag and I paddled over to the almost-boathouse and up next to the dock. I hopped out and looped the bow line around a cleat on the dock and handed the rope to Freitag. “Here’s the deal. Don’t tie the rope. If you need to make a break, just drop the rope and push the boat out into the water. The Whites don’t swim. Start the engine once you’re out in the water. Go past our boathouse then drift back down in silence. Got it?”

“I won’t leave you here,” Freitag told me perfunctorily.

“No heroics are necessary. If you see me running this way with them after me, then yeah, it’d be cool if you waited. But if you’re out here alone and they come, just go. I’ll be okay. They generally leave me alone unless I do something that identifies me as normal, like talk, or shoot a gun, or start up a car. They get really excited about that kind of shit.”

Freitag gave me a nod. “Because you look just like them?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “If you have to bail out, I’ll just steal another boat and head upriver when things calm down. Like I said, they’ll probably leave me alone. I’ll probably be fine. There’s no point in endangering yourself for nothing.”

“You’re the boss.”

“No, Steph is the boss.” Sometimes, my urge to be contrary just can’t be contained. “I’ll leave Harvey up there in that flower garden by the house. It looks like a nice, peaceful place. Cool?”

“Yes,” Freitag agreed. “That’s a nice place. Thank you.”

I nodded. “After I take care of Harvey, if the house looks empty, I may do a quick check in the pantry. I mean, we’re here already and we have more mouths to feed.”

“How long will you be inside?” Freitag was looking up and down the river.

I looked up at the house. “Ten minutes at most.”

“And if there are infected inside?”

I shrugged. “I’ll skip it. Or we can skip it all together and go back and get some dinner while it’s still warm.”

“No,” Freitag told me. “We’re here. Like you said, we’ll need the food.”

“Are we cool?”

“Yes.”

I turned to look at the property and gave it one slow scan. Satisfied that we were safe, I worked with Freitag to get Harvey out of the boat. Thankfully, his body was light enough that I was able to carry it awkwardly over my shoulder.

Leaving Freitag behind with the boat, I walked quietly up the pier and onto a thick green lawn that sloped gently down to the river’s edge. Giant oaks supported a dappled canopy of dark green leaves scattered above like clouds. Twenty-foot crepe myrtles bloomed brilliant pink even in the darkness. A meandering stone path edged with monkey grass led to a lush flower garden, still alive in moist soil so close to the river. I kneeled, and as gently as I could, I laid Harvey on his back amongst the brightly colored blooms.

I stood up straight and took a long look down at Harvey’s blanket-wrapped corpse among the flowers. I felt a pang of envy. In the comforting darkness, in a fragrant bed of rich color, Harvey was at peace. Freitag was right. This spot was better than the river.

There were no words to be said for Harvey’s impromptu disposal, not by me anyway, so I said none. I waited a silent moment longer, whether to make myself of Freitag feel better, I didn’t know.

Such was Harvey Marin’s funeral. I could risk no more time. There were monsters about.

I looked around the grounds to see what I could see in the darkness. I heard noises. The infected were near, but nothing moved save the sway of branches in the light breeze. I glanced back to Freitag. She stood as I’d left her, a Hispanic Barbie in frumpy fatigues, holding a rope, waiting in the boat.

The risk of running a quick pantry raid seemed small. We had the time for it. Why not?

I followed a meandering stone path around the edge of the garden.

The house was old, probably built in the fifties or sixties on a middle-class income before Austin had sprawled out into the western hills and drove the value of even modest lake front properties into the millions of dollars. It was a single-story structure with clapboard siding, a shingle roof, and one of those enormous single-pane living room windows that had been so popular back in those days.

It was a security nightmare.

I tried the knob on the back door but it was locked.

I crept down near the end of the house to a sliding glass door. It didn’t fit with the architectural style and had probably been installed in later years. Good for me. I could break in through one of those with ease, something I’d learned as a kid when I’d broken into the house of a kid from school through just such a door to steal all of his Nintendo games.

It’s easy to guess how that turned out.

The sliding door was locked, so I jimmied my machete into a tiny gap near the door’s handle and jiggled as I wedged the blade through. It didn’t take much time and didn’t make much noise. The lock compliantly popped loose. Before sliding it open, I took a moment to look and listen.

Still and quiet, my new favorite state of things.

I slowly moved the door on its track, opening up the house and allowing stale, hot air, damp with the sticky smell of death, to flow over me. I felt my gorge rise.

The sliding door had opened to a bedroom. A corpse lay rotting, tangled in blood stained sheets, horrid black bite wounds on its arms and neck. Maggots crawled through wounds and across the skin giving the impression of movement, a grotesque living being. My grip tightened on my pistol. At the foot of the bed lay another body with a good portion of its skull gone. A brownish splatter of drips and lumps decorated the far wall. It was easy to see what had happened, a couple, one infected, one not. The White attacked the one on the bed, who’d waited a few bites too long before using the gun on her lover.

I stepped around a blackish spot on the floor and tried not to taste the fetid air. Leaning over the bed, I pried at the rigor mortis grip of the decaying fingers on the revolver. There was a disgusting sound as I yanked it free. I scooted away from the bed as quickly as three steps would take me. In a dresser, I found a flimsy shirt in the top drawer. I wrapped the shirt around the pistol before dropping it into my backpack. I had no desire to get that repulsive stink in my bag. I wiped my hands on another shirt and tossed it on the corpse.

Looking up from that task, it occurred to me that the bedroom door was open. And it occurred to me that I’d been in the house less than five minutes and I’d already fucked up. I should have cleared the house before I went to work scavenging the revolver. Once again, luck had carried me through a mistake. I went to the bedroom door and banged on the wall with the butt of my pistol and said, “Hey.”

I waited and listened, but heard no other sounds from inside the house.

I repeated the exercise and waited.

No Whites came.

“Anyone in here? If there’s anyone in here, just say so, and I’ll leave. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to raid your pantry. That is, unless you’re using it.” I felt stupid for saying all that. Was there a protocol for breaking into someone’s house if they were inside, hiding from people that looked just like me? I’d have to give that some thought.

After waiting for what seemed like a long enough time, I went back to search through the bedroom with the two corpses. In spite of the time I spent killing brain cells and memories as I wasted away the last years of my youth, I did read a lot. I did listen. And I learned. The world was a fountain of trivia and one bit of trivia that found a home in my brain was that though the number of guns per capita in America was on a steady rise, the number of gun owners wasn’t. Simple math led to the conclusion: if the two corpses had one gun, they might very well have had another. And they’d likely have bullets stashed somewhere nearby.

I checked the nightstand—nothing there but some lubricating gels and adult toys. I avoided touching any of that as I rummaged. I went back over to the dresser and went through it drawer by drawer. Again, nothing of real value to me, though I did nick a couple pairs of socks. I held up a lacy black thong to the light coming through the back door and imagined what they would look like wrapped tightly over Steph’s hips. But one glance at the body by my feet turned my stomach and reminded me that I didn’t have time to indulge those kinds of fantasies. In the guy’s underwear drawer, I paused. The size was right, but I felt really creeped out at the thought of wearing a dead man’s skivvies. I left them. A trip to Walmart was in my future.

The closet was next, so I stepped over and slid the door to the side. The hanger rack was packed with clothes and the floor was covered with shoes, mostly women’s. The shelf above the hanger bar held a dozen boxes, and I started pulling those down one by one and checking the contents as quietly as I could; a box of photographs, keepsakes, more photos, ski goggles, gloves.

Bingo!

One of the boxes contained a cleaning kit and three smaller boxes of ammunition. I couldn’t imagine anything else of value that might be in the other boxes so I stashed the goodies in my bag, slipped the only clean pillowcase off of its pillow and headed for the hallway.

Another small bedroom proved empty, though I did take two pillowcases from the bed in there. Pillowcases, it turned out, were awfully handy to have around.

The end of the hall opened up to a living room, stylishly done, with black lacquer furniture over natural wood flooring. The front door was open, though. Splinters of wood from the mangled doorjamb lay on the floor. I was immediately back on alert and stared into the shadows, looking, listening.

It took several long moments of waiting there at the end of the hall, convincing myself that I was alone in the house, before I crossed over the creaky floor. The kitchen had a window that opened to the front of the house and I leaned over the sink to get a good look out—no dangers, nothing of immediate interest. There was movement just down and across the street. Several Whites were at the side of the road, in the deep shadows under the oaks, squatting and tearing at something. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what.

I turned my attention to an open door in the wall at the end of the cupboard and was dismayed. Spilling out of it and covering the floor were packages of cereal and crackers, torn open and empty, as though wild animals had been here already. That was the pantry.

Careful to push the crunchy wrappers out of the way rather than step on them with my boots, I moved across the kitchen. It was messy. Every single box of any kind of food was ripped open. Every jar was broken. At least the canned goods were spared. That was something positive.

I started filling one of the pillowcases with cans and had it nearly half full when a loud rumble from outside startled me. I dropped the pillowcase, jumped to my feet, and pulled my weapons out, ready for a fight. In the moment it took to do that, I realized that the rumble was the ski boat’s engine.

I raced through the house, across the living room, down the hall, and over the corpse on the floor of the bedroom. I bounded out through the sliding glass door. The sound of the boat’s engine revved loudly.

“What the fuck?”

Freitag had the boat in the center of the river, throttled all the way forward as she circled, bouncing over waves, and making a noisy, tempting spectacle for every white within a mile.

Is she trying to warn me?

I looked left. I looked right. There were no Whites in the yard. None on the dock. I heard them, though. They were yelping. They were running. They were excited and they were coming, coming toward the sound of the boat in the river right in front of me.

I ran at a full sprint toward the dock and waved.

What had frightened her off?

My boots stomped noisily across the boards over the water and I stopped as I got to the edge, waving, and yelling “Hey! Hey!” She still had plenty of time to pick me up.

As I came to a stop, she looked at me, with an unreadable expression. She made one more full throttle circle, and as she straightened the boat out, extended her arm toward me, flipped a middle finger, and let it stand brazenly as she headed up the river.

Then it occurred to me that she was calling the infected down to my location and she was abandoning me.

Fucking Dalhover was right!

I screamed across the water at the top of my lungs, “Vindictive cunt!”

And as the reverberation of my scream faded from my ears with the receding sound of the motor, the clomping of running feet on wooden planks told me that I’d just fucked up in royal fashion. But that’s as far as that thought went, because a body slammed me from behind, knocking the wind out of me as I splashed into the cold green water with a hysterical, hairless monkey on my back.

Chapter 9

Bodies pressed me down through the cold water and into the muddy bottom. Hands tore at my clothes and grasped for my throat. Panicked arms and legs flailed. There were more than two of us in the water. My face was being pressed into the mud. My feet were above me. I squirmed.

Air!

I needed air so desperately!

I spun, wrestled, and lost my sense of which way was up. All reason was gone. Only mindless panic and my need for air were left. My feet hit something solid and I kicked out hard. My head broke the surface for half a second and I gasped as hands clawed at my face to drag me back down and lift themselves out.

I was back under.

Elbows, knees, fingers, and teeth. However many of us there were, we were all struggling at a primal level to use one another’s bodies to get our own heads above the water.

Escape or die!

I caught a second half-breath and then I was under again.

With some oxygen in my blood, I was able to form a thought. I pulled a knee to my chest and kicked out hard against a body as hands held firmly to my ankle. Paddling mightily with my hands, I got my head above water for another breath. The hands on my ankle wouldn’t release, so I kicked, and kicked, and kicked with my free leg, hitting flesh and bone. Then I was away from the grasping hands.

Underwater, I swam hard for a few strokes and got another face full of mud as my teeth ground against a stone buried in the muck. I pulled my feet under and pushed to shoot my head above water again, just barely. I sucked as much air as I could before the weight of my equipment dragged me back down.

Once under, I danced my feet around to find the bottom as I sank. It took several long seconds of sinking. The water was way too deep to stand. I didn’t know where the shore was. I needed to get several long breaths or I was going to drown. In desperation, I shed my rifle, my pistol, and my machete and pushed off of the bottom again to get my head above water.

With most of the weight off, I was able to get a good breath, but my vest, still full of magazines, dragged me back under.

It was harder to get rid of. I bounced off the bottom again, breathed, and saw that I was twenty feet off the end of the pier and drifting slowly downstream. A dozen Whites were on the shore, focused on me and following me down.

Dragged under again by the weight of my vest, I struggled to peel it away. I pushed to the surface for another breath. It took longer to get up through the column of water above me. The river was getting deeper. If I didn’t shed the vest on this breath, I might not get another chance. Back underwater, I tore at the vest with frantic hands until finally, it fell away. I kicked and struggled back up again until my head broke the surface. Just barely able to keep my face out of the water, I gulped precious air. The boots felt like weights on my feet. I caught a deep breath and floated for a moment on my belly as I ran my hands over my body, looking for anything I could shed. My belt and holster went next. All I had left were a t-shirt, pants, and boots. I’d have to suffer with the boots. Laced half way up to my knees, there’d be no way to shed those and not drown in the attempt. But with all the other weight off, I was able to swim.

A good fifty feet away from the last White still struggling—barely—in the water off of the end of the dock, I treaded water and floated with the current. Those on the shore still followed. A scream from the other shore caught my attention, and I saw that I had at least a dozen fans over there, as well.

“Shit.”

Getting out of the river would prove difficult. Sure, I was just as much of a White as all those on shore, but they couldn’t see enough of me to know that. All they did know was that I sounded like food when I went into the river. Most of those on shore didn’t see that part, though. Most of them knew only that the other infected were very interested in having me for a meal, and that was a good enough recommendation for them.

Spinning myself in a slow circle as I treaded water and drifted with the current, I looked for boathouses or docks with boats attached. Unfortunately, every dock in sight was empty. It occurred to me then that Freitag was a lot sneakier than I’d given her credit for. She wasn’t being picky about finding the most peaceful place to lay Harvey Marin to rest, she was looking for the most promising place to lay me to rest. She’d been looking for the most Whites—all those shadows I thought I’d seen moving under the trees on the banks—and the absence of nearby boats that I might escape with.

Bitch!

I continued kicking my legs to keep my head out of the water.

Was Freitag punishing me for what I did to Harvey, or was it that she just hated Whites? But the question of whether her motive was hate or revenge was moot at the moment. All of that would come later. At the moment, it promised to be another long night.

At least I was well rested.

I needed to find a way to elude my pursuers and round up a boat to take me back up the river. Before the sun set again, I’d give Freitag a harsh lesson in what hate and revenge looked like all wrapped up in the black heart of somebody who knew more about rage and hate than she ever would.

The water didn’t seem cold anymore.

An expanse of smooth, grass-covered acres flowed down from a plantation-style house on the south bank to the edge of the water. An eight-foot black metal fence bordered the estate and presented an opportunity for me to get my feet back on dry land without having to fight off a bunch of hungry brutes while I did so. Dog paddling silently in the direction of the empty dock, I’d soon be fading back into the anonymity of my Whiteness while I sought out a boat.

When I got within a dozen feet of the dock, my feet got tangled in the ubiquitous duck grass growing up from the shallow parts of the river bottom. It wrapped around my feet like grasping hands, forcing me to yank, tear, and struggle to get within reach of a ladder attached to the dock. But once one hand grasped solidly onto a rung, I relaxed, floated, and breathed.

The hardest part was done.

Twenty or thirty infected were at the fence a few hundred feet up the bank, straining to push their arms and legs through the narrow gaps between the metal bars. But their heads and shoulders just wouldn’t follow. In their frustration, they hollered, yelped, and growled.

I crawled up the ladder and stood on the dock’s wide boards, letting the river water drain out of my clothes. Across the wide lawn, in the bushes, and under the trees, I didn’t see anything moving except for swaying branches. The place looked safe, for the moment at least. No safety could be counted on to last for long.

The house sat on the inside bank of a bend in the river, a spectacular piece of property with a beautiful view, but a view of water, trees, and a mountain, few houses, and no boat docks, aside from the one I stood on.

What to do? Go through the house and possibly confront ravenously hungry Whites trapped inside, and me with no weapon in hand with which to dispose of them? But there’d most certainly be something I could use for a weapon inside.

No. Best to avoid the infected altogether.

I’d need to find a gate and go out to the street and work my way down, find that boat and get my ass back upriver to Sarah Mansfield’s house. Suspicious when Freitag returned without me, Dalhover would still be awake and probably in the video room. He’d see me out on the river and open the door for me to come in through the boathouse.

That was the solution that would most expeditiously put me back within the safety of Miss Mansfield’s walls. No need to go all Rambo on any Whites in the house only to find a butter knife as a weapon. No, I’d pushed my luck too far already. I needed to get home.

My anger about what Freitag did to me had boiled down to a simmer by then. I didn’t plan to kill her, not anymore. I would evict her and her buddy, Harris, though, and fuck ‘em both anyway.

The Whites who were still trying to figure out how to squeeze themselves through the fence howled louder when I started out across the lawn toward the far side of the house. They’d forget me soon enough.

I didn’t pass too close to the house when I came around the corner. No need to let myself get ambushed by anything that might be lurking there. Luckily, there was nothing, only a gate near where the fence abutted the side of the house. A tug on a pull-down latch was enough to free me back out into the world.

White, silent, and anonymous.

But weaponless too.

I looked back at the big house.

No! Just get a boat. Go home. No need to be macho about it.

The house’s front yard was as large as the back and was bordered with stands of wild oaks, cedar, and thorny vines. Going through the woods to get to the neighbor’s house would prove noisy, messy, and slow. It would be better to walk out to the end of the property and follow the street down to the next house on the street.

So I walked over an expanse of grass.

The sound of the river frogs faded as I got further and further from the water, leaving the cicadas, crickets, and grackles to mask most other sounds. Distant gunshots and the simian vocalizations of the infected found their way through the nighttime cacophony. There were plenty nearby. The topography on this shore of the river was more conducive to development. Pricey houses were built on expensive lots amongst the trees for miles in every direction. Lots of houses meant lots of people. Lots of people meant lots of infected.

At the edge of the crumbly asphalt, I looked up the street. It roughly followed the curve of the river that flowed past on the opposite side of the estate-sized lots. Just a short distance down the street, I saw mailboxes in the darkness, most on the far side of the street but at least two on the river side of the road. I walked toward them.

The first house I passed on the far side of the street looked to have been ransacked. The front door was open. Various items normally found inside the house littered the front porch and yard. There were empty food packages, couch cushions, and a couple of chairs from a dining room set. Slowing my gait, I looked over the mess. It wasn’t right. At least, it wasn’t right for a mess left by normal human scavengers.

The food packaging shouldn’t have been torn open and scattered. Not to say that all people are naturally tidy—they aren’t—but with the danger presented by all the lingering infected, sitting outside on the front lawn of any house was a fatally bad idea for any hungry looter.

The alternative explanation made frightening sense. The infected had figured out how to raid pantries. That jibed well with what I’d seen in the house where I’d left Harvey. The infected had found and were eating up our food supply! That dramatically changed the situation for the survivors. Simply hiding and running was not a sustainable strategy by itself. We’d need to get very busy hoarding every container of preserved food we could find.

With extra urgency, I hustled down the street toward the first mailbox and driveway on the river side of the street. Once there, I jogged down and around the house, across a large stone pool deck, and then over the grass. As I arrived at the boathouse, my heart sank. It was empty. I couldn’t see a dock at the next house over because of the river’s curve, but the dock attached to the boathouse allowed for me to walk out over the river and get a better look.

Thank God!

Two houses down, I spotted a ski boat tied to a neighbor’s dock.

It took a few minutes to jog back across the property and get back onto the street. Without slowing, I turned left and started around the curve, looking for the mailbox that would mark the driveway to the property I sought.

The sound of Whites close by gave me pause. I slowed to a walk to hide the sound of my footfalls. I slowed my breathing to make it easier to hear what was going on around me.

The road revealed itself by degrees as I made my way around the curve.

I stopped.

What the fuck is that?

Chapter 10

Up ahead, on the right, tethered to a tree by a chain, was a string of six Whites, burdened with backpacks and a few shopping bags. Each had a loop of chain around the neck. Each loop was linked to a longer chain that had one end wrapped around a tree.

I crept up beside a stacked, white limestone mailbox and used it as cover while I stared, wondering what it was that I was seeing.

From behind the mailbox, I saw a familiar-looking female White with skin of wrinkled leather and thin, dirty, artificial hair. Around her neck hung drapes of gold and silver chains. Her bony wrists were lost under glittery bangles. She came out of a yard on the far side of the street and made a show of scratching rudely at her crotch before making her way down the line of chained Whites, inspecting each as she passed. In a bag here or a backpack there, she’d drop a piece of metal. Beside one of the chained Whites, she stopped and rummaged through the backpack. Metal in the bag jingled and the woman’s fairy tale witch cackle crinkled through the air.

An enormously obese woman, as white as snow, bounded out of the same front yard, prancing happily on her toes, with handfuls of sparkling jewelry. She also came to a stop at the line of docile Whites and began depositing her treasures in the bags while at the same time taking out bracelets that she’d slip on and off of her plump wrists, looking for some particularly pleasing combination.

A big man followed the obese woman, keeping subserviently a few steps behind. He didn’t look around with any curiosity. He hurried when she hurried. He slowed when she slowed. He didn’t seem to have effort for anything besides maintaining a Russell-like position near the big woman.

I felt like Jane Goodall after stumbling upon a new troop of apes. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the previously unseen behaviors and unexpectedly complex social structure.

Another White came running from across the street toward the leathery woman, making me think he was attacking. But he stopped very suddenly in front of her and dropped to a knee, holding out his palms. They appeared to be full of forks, spoons, and knives.

The leathery one screeched and swatted the offering away, sending the silverware jangling across the asphalt. She wailed in anger and windmilled her spider-fingered hands at the kneeling White, who passively accepted the beating. After a minute, she came to a stop and glared crossly down at him before leaning over and cupping her bony fingers over one of his ears. She then pressed her mouth to her hands. Her jaw moved up and down as though speaking but the pair was too far away for me to hear.

Communication!

What were these Whites? Were they Slow Burns like me?

If they were Smart Ones, then the communication was an ominous sign.

They were obviously coordinated in a communal activity, hierarchical in nature without a doubt. The collecting of shiny trinkets didn’t make any sense to me until I thought about Beanie Babies, baseball cards, and Franklin Mint Collector Plates. There was something weird hardwired into the human psyche that drove people to hoard too many of useless somethings, I mean, to collect things with no intrinsic value seemingly for the sake of collecting it, of possessing it.

Maybe the troop was a bunch of hoarders, turned Slow Burn.

But the ones on the chains, that was frightening by itself. They were slaves. What did that have to say about my fellow humans? Hell, about all of us? Once a few layers of empathy and humility were peeled away, was slavery such an easy vice to embrace?

I checked my watch. It was getting late. I prepared to sneak off in the darkness toward the boat I’d seen tied to a dock nearby.

But surprise interrupted that when something big and heavy hit me from behind, knocking the wind out of me and banging my head into the limestone mailbox. I saw stars and tried to catch my breath.

Legs wrapped around my torso. An arm locked around my throat. I fell to the asphalt, very suddenly in a struggle for my life. I threw an elbow back and hit my attacker. I rolled, I flailed, but the monkey was locked onto my back, and no matter how much I squirmed, the clamp of the forearm on my neck grew tighter.

A circle of blackness grew at the edges of my vision, compressing what I could see down to a narrow tunnel.

I was caught!

My brain cells started to malfunction as they waited for oxygen that was no longer being delivered in sufficient quantities. It occurred to me that I had finally used the last of my luck. In focusing so completely on the grotesquery of the gold-collecting wenches, I’d not maintained awareness of my surroundings. My guard was down and I was about to pay the bloody price for that mistake.

As I floated into unconsciousness, I pictured the leathery old woman and thought how much she looked like my Aunt Nancy, my mother’s fraternal twin. Aunt Nancy and The Harpy looked enough alike, twiggy and wrinkly, with harsh eyes and insufficient hair. But where my mother had tiny, misshapen breasts, Nancy’s were too large for her chest and always seemed on the verge of spilling out of her blouse, a blouse that was always cut too low or fastened a few too many buttons down from the top. I often suspected that those breasts were at the root of my mother’s antipathy toward her.

Nancy never married and never had any children. Dan always said she was too butch for any man in Texas. As a little kid, I had no idea what that meant. I did know that while my mother’s attitude toward me lived in that spectrum of emotion between resentment and irritation, Nancy’s fell somewhere between negligence and kindness. Whereas the Harpy’s jaws always seemed clenched in anger, Nancy’s big yellow teeth clenched an ever-present cigarette and shone in a half-drunk grin against her dark, tanning bed skin.

When I was young, I’d often get dumped at her house for a weekend or a week while my parents traveled. Once I was dropped on her doorstep, she would invariably lean down for a hug. As she bent over I’d get an unwanted glimpse into her blouse. She wore bras less often than she should have and as a result, I saw her swaying breasts and big brown nipples more times than probably anyone else ever did. I came to welcome the smell of her smoky alcohol breath because it would hit me just as we got close enough so that I could no longer see inside her shirt. But her hugs were long and she squeezed hard. They felt like an advertisement of maternal love.

On those visits, she seemed always to be on the phone, arranging some date with friends or gossiping about somebody or other. She’d plant me in front of a television and feed me fish sticks, French fries, or any other deep-fried microwavable meal that needed ketchup. All the food in Nancy’s house needed ketchup.

In a lot of ways, Nancy’s house was an ephemeral refuge paid for with glimpses of tits and uncomfortably lingering pinches on my butt. That was a price I could afford. I told myself in those days that I only needed to stay on my best behavior and not fuck it up to make it all last.

On one of my last visits to her house, Nancy was on the couch, cigarette in her lips, a sweating longneck perilously dangling between her fingers as we watched some game show around dinnertime. I’d already microwaved our tater tots and chicken fingers and left our paper plates between the empty bottles on the coffee table.

It was when I went back to the kitchen to retrieve the thirty-two ounce bottle of ketchup that it happened. In my rush to get back to the living room, I’d snatched the glass bottle from the fridge too carelessly, and as I turned, it slipped from my small hand and shattered on the floor at my toes, covering my feet in a brilliantly red, cold, and viscous blob, slowly spreading shards of glass large and small across the linoleum.

I went catatonic with fear. How fast could I clean it up? Had my toes, obscured in red, already numbing in the cold, been cut or severed by the glass? Did Nancy hear the noise? Was there a way to hide it?  Could I run? Could I get out the back door fast enough?

All those questions were moot. I only really knew one thing: through my haste, I’d unleashed the harpy that surely lived within Nancy and I was only moments from getting the shit beaten out of me.

I stared at the red, like blood, spreading so slowly on the floor, soon to be joined by my own blood, the price I’d pay for dropping the ketchup.

I didn’t breath. I didn’t dare. Tears were in my eyes and I wished myself to another place and time. In all those visits to Nancy’s house, I’d never fucked up enough for her to beat me, not once. Sure, she’d yell from time to time when the beer shortened her temper and I’d eaten all the tater tots before she’d gotten any.

But all of that was at an end.

A noise in the kitchen door told me that she was standing there behind me. From the living room, she’d heard. There was no getting away with it. I braced myself for what was to come, a fist to my head, a slap on the mouth, a belt on my back or across my legs. Maybe a spatula or wooden mixing spoon. It could have been anything.

In waiting, I grasped tightly to my self-control, but my lip quivered, my eyes filled with tears, and I tried so, so hard to put those emotions somewhere where they couldn’t hurt me. There was always such a steep price to pay when my tears came too soon. But they did anyway. The fiction of my refuge was nearing obliteration and its end was more than I could bear.

I sobbed, and then jumped when Nancy’s hand touched my shoulder.

But it didn’t hurt.

Her touch was gentle.

Nancy wrapped her bony arms around me and pulled into a hug, burying my face between her pillowy tits.

I cried.

She cooed, “It’s all right, sweetie. It’s all right. We don’t need ketchup.”

I guess in the most important ways, my aunt Nancy wasn’t anything like my mother.

Nancy and my mother were the only two children of an oil field worker who owned a shack of a house near Houston. He was a kind, indulgent man with no ambition. But he was a compulsive saver. And when he died, when I was nine or ten, he left ninety-seven thousand dollars to Nancy. To my mom, he left nothing. There was no Grandma to consider in the will. She’d died of meanness before I was born.

I was too young to understand much beyond The Harpy’s anger and her sense of being cheated, but I never saw Aunt Nancy again after that, at least not until her funeral when I was in high school. My mom didn’t go. Dan took me, clearly not because he wanted to. He did it out of some kind of obligation that he very reluctantly fulfilled.

The funeral was held on one of those seething, humid Houston afternoons. Beads of perspiration rolled down foreheads and dampened shirts. Dresses clung to skin in unflattering places. I was wearing a shirt buttoned to the top with a collar that was too tight and wearing one of Dan’s ties so long that I had a portion of its length tucked between the buttons of my shirt.

It was some kind of cancer with a long and unfamiliar name that had killed Nancy off. I could never remember what it was.

As I watched the shiny box full of Nancy’s skin and bones—there really wasn’t much more left—lower into the ground amidst the tearless perspirers, I noticed with a boy’s attention to trivial details that the coffin’s boards didn’t stack smoothly on the sides. The corners didn’t look square. The hardware had flecks of rust and peeling chrome. Had the Harpy, Nancy’s only living family, somehow managed to find a hand-me-down coffin for her?

In retrospect, I knew it had to have been some sort of shoddily constructed discount coffin. But that was just as bad.

Maybe if I had ever been to see a psychiatrist and they had asked me that ever-so trite question as to when I started hating my mother, I would have told them about that day. That was the day when all of my loathing and years of fear solidified into a core of stony hate.

Chapter 11

When I came to, I was disoriented and laying on a grassy lawn, looking up through a canopy of oaks at a sky that was changing color from an early dawn gray to cloudless blue. My head hurt. My arms were rolled over behind me and I was damned uncomfortable.

As I tried to part the clouds inside my head, I felt pretty sure that I hadn’t gone to sleep on the grass. I couldn’t remember doing so. I remembered getting ditched by Freitag. I’d nearly been drowned afterwards. I remembered the big bouncing woman and her leathery partner. Then I remembered getting jumped while I hid behind that mailbox.

My arms wouldn’t readily come out from behind my back. The position in which I’d lain, with my arms pinned behind me, had cut the circulation and left them numb. Looking to my right, I saw the dying grass of someone’s front lawn, on which I was lying. To my left, my eyes followed a length of chain for three feet to where it was connected by a padlock to another loop of chain wrapped around the throat of a sleeping White. The White had a backpack strapped over his shoulder and a bulging canvas shopping bag at his side. I raised my head to get a better look around and realized that I too had a heavy chain around my neck. I was attached to the string of Whites that I’d seen in the wee hours of the night.

Shit!

Anger started to simmer.

Did I really get captured by a stupid fucking White and get harnessed like some kind of dray horse?

I managed to pull my arms out and wiggle them about until feeling returned.

The White that lay next to me snored through all of my efforts. With hands I could use again, I went to work on the chain around my throat. It wasn’t choking me, but it was too God damned tight to pull over my head. The only way out was to open the padlock that held it all together.

My anger passed through the simmer stage and reached the boiling point. My frustration with my situation targeted smack dab on Freitag.

No!

Breathe!

Be cool.

Anger makes you stupid.

Think it through. Solve the problem.

Escape, obviously, was my top priority. But how?

What was my fate if I didn’t escape?

Pack mule for a couple of peculiarly greedy Whites?

More anger. I wanted to scream out and beat something with my fists.

Get it under control, God dammit!

Breathe.

Put it in the hole. Deal with it later.

I lay my head back on the grass and stared up between the leaves and tried to slow my breathing, calm my anger, and get back under control.

Chained!

Nothing made any sense whatsoever.

But that didn’t matter.

It didn’t need to make sense. It only needed to have a solution.

Productive thought started to flow.

I had no advantage, save one. My brain still functioned at full capacity, so I knew I was the smartest motherfucker in my new little band of stupid Whites and crazy bitches. And none of them knew that. Intellect and surprise. That had been enough of an advantage for slow, weak, hairless monkeys to evolve into the dominant species on a planet full of big-toothed predators. It would be enough for me.

Over the next few hours, the sun heated up the morning and my chain gang comrades slowly woke. Each one sat up and remained still and quiet. So, that’s what I did. I sat still and quiet. It would be best to fit in while I watched and learned.

The seven of us sat there waiting for something to happen, tethered to a front porch support pole at one end and with me at the other. All of my comrades were male in varying stages of health. The weaker among us seemed to be near the front, the healthier in the rear. I made the very easy deduction—assuming new guys were added to the end of the chain—that staying on the chain gang was detrimental to one’s health.

It was late in the morning when the leathery woman came out through the house’s open front door, followed closely by the animated obese one. Behind them came the obese woman’s pet, the big man, and four other infected men. They squatted on the porch or in shady spots in the grass. The women sat down next to one another on the porch steps and had what I guessed was a lengthy conversation in whispers through cupped hands over each other’s ears. All the men watched, obliviously, patiently. When the two women reached an apparent decision, the leathery woman waved each man over to her individually and spent a moment whispering in his ear.

It was a curious thing, watching the communication, trying to understand which ones were intelligent and which ones weren’t. Certainly, they all understood speech and the two women still possessed the ability to use it. They all had the stark white skin of the infected. Like me, they were all Slow Burns, at least to some degree. How had they managed to band together under the direction of these two women? That would make for an interesting academic question. But it was irrelevant to me at the moment.

With all of the individual communicating done, the leathery woman waved her arm and wrangled all of the free men over to her as she got up off of the porch and went over toward the gaunt man at the head of the chain gang.

All of us in the gang were on our feet at that point. The leathery woman started jingling through a set of keys on a wire bracelet she wore around her wrist. On the lock that attached the lead man’s collar to the long chain, she tried each key in turn until the hasp sprung open.

Hands were immediately on the gaunt man, pushing and guiding him out into the center of the lawn. His backpack came off and fell to the grass. His shopping bag dropped as well.

Still tethered to the post, the rest of us on the chain gang watched.

The obese woman on the porch started to giggle and play with her fingers.

The free men surrounded the gaunt man in a tight huddle.

By some silent cue, the free Whites started beating the gaunt man with their fists and tearing at him with their teeth. His scream ripped the morning air and he fell under the assault, his brilliant red blood splattering into the air. His last shriek stopped abruptly as the free men fell to the ground to bury their faces in his entrails. It was time to feast.

The chain gang surged toward the warm flesh. They wanted to join but the chain looped around the porch post held fast.

A week before, I was Null Spot the Destroyer, rider of the storm, slayer of Whites, living on the edge of my luck. But the luck was gone and I’d become a pack mule and feedstock.

It took nearly an hour for the Whites to fill their bellies, and the rule I derived from the al fresco brunch was that those of us on the chain gang were going to get worked until near death, and then we’d be eaten. The alternative, that I hoped wasn’t true, was that they ate whomever was on an end of the chain, which meant my chances were just fifty-fifty at the next mealtime.

When brunch was over, the Whites each emptied their bowels nearby in the grass. Three of the men had diarrhea. Two of those were bloody. Either their bodies weren’t adjusting well to their new diet or the unsanitary conditions under which they were eating and drinking were taking a toll. I suspected that diseases could be transmitted through the consumption of raw human flesh, especially viruses like HIV and herpes. I wondered about more immediately deadly diseases, though never having paid much attention in my biology class, I couldn’t think of one.

I did know that deadly disease could spread through unsanitary drinking water, and I wondered how the infected were handling the acquisition of that. The drought had left most sources of groundwater dry. There were few running creeks and I’d heard news stories over the previous summer about many Texas springs drying up.

Where could an infected mind be smart enough to find water? Perhaps in a toilet tank. A freshwater aquarium. I didn’t think they’d be smart enough to drain a water heater. They might figure out how to open plastic bottles. But sodas and sports drinks on convenience store shelves were a finite supply. That left the rivers, lakes, and larger springs.

I’m sure Jeff Aubrey’s math didn’t take water into account. How many infected would just die of dehydration? Maybe most of them in Texas would. At least all of the ones either too far from a river to find one, or too dumb to remember where the closest river was, would die. That of course led to the conclusion that the infected would tend to be much more numerous near the natural water sources. So the further that normal people could find a defensible place away from a natural water source, the lower their chance of coming into contact with the Whites…eventually.

That led to another possibility, a way to kill them off en masse. Perhaps dumping bodies in the river would lead to polluting the water with so many diseases that the Whites who drank from it would die. But dead bodies contaminating a water source was a truism I’d learned from watching movies. Best not to put too much stock in that solution until I talked it over with Steph.

The sated Whites found comfortable spots to squat in the shade or lie on the porch. Some napped. We empty-stomached pack mules squatted where we were, in the dappled sunlight, and grew thirsty. With the shredded remains of the gaunt man buzzing with a black layer of flies, hunger didn’t cross my mind.

At some point, boredom and my own lack of sleep over the past weeks took its toll and I nodded off. When I woke again it was late in the afternoon, my stomach was rumbling, and the chain around my neck was being yanked. The free Whites were loitering and the leathery woman—Nancy, or so I unfairly labeled her—was wrangling her mules.

Once we were all on our feet, Nancy came around behind me with the gaunt man’s backpack and, in very much the same way I dealt with Russell, she dressed me in it, leaving forty pounds of weight on my shoulders. She next retrieved the dead man’s canvas bag, which she placed in my right hand. It weighed twenty or thirty pounds and was filled with every shiny-looking piece of jewelry that could be imagined. Most of it was costume junk, but it was weighty, nonetheless.

There was more whispering in ears between Nancy and the obese one—Bubbles was her new name—before anything else happened. But once we were organized, Nancy took hold of the long length of chain left where the gaunt man had been and led us across the street and down toward the river. We pack mules followed, of course. Obese Bubbles pranced along beside leathery Nancy. The free Whites who filled out the entourage came along.

We crossed over the front yard of one of the houses that I’d checked for a boat the night before. We weaved our way around the landscaping and then out across the backyard. Once at the river, all either squatted or lay on the bank and drank. I was more than reluctant at first but I knew I wouldn’t last through a blazing hot day under a burden of seventy pounds without water. So contaminated or not, I dropped to the grass and put my face to the river’s surface, sucking in as much water as my empty belly would hold.

Once full, I sat back and observed the others. I was a captive, but determined not to let despair eke its way in and make my situation anything but temporary. I was going to free myself. Of that, there was no doubt. I also decided that it was not captivation that I was suffering, rather tuition that I was paying. It was a chance to learn not only what I needed to know to get myself free, but to learn about my…enemy. And that’s what the Whites were, my enemy. They were not sick people, nor were they unfortunate people. What they were in the past had little to do with what they were now. They were semi-brain-dead, infected white monsters who would feed on my innards at the first chance. They did not deserve my empathy, nor my mercy. But the more I knew about them, the longer I was likely to live.

The Whites around me were all still nervously drinking. For them, it was a slow, difficult process. They’d each inch down to the water’s edge. Lips would touch the surface. Or, a single hand would reach in and scoop out handfuls while the other gripped the sod in white-knuckled fear. No feet, not even toes, ever touched the water. They were all afraid of it. At least it seemed so. That was good information to have, or at least good information to confirm. The girls on the riverboat had said as much to Murphy and me a few days before.

And what of Murphy? Was he still alive? Had the bullet bruised his brain, swelling it into bodily paralysis? Or was he awake and joking with Mandi? Thoughts for another hour, perhaps.

Once communal refreshment time was over, Nancy led us back across the lawn and over to the house’s wide, and thankfully shaded, back porch. Bubbles bounced along with us with her big white pet—Bluto—close behind. We came to a stop at the back of the house and Bubbles pulled Bluto close and whispered instructions into his ear. After, he stood up straight and looked at her with his blank face and dead eyes. Was he choosing to obey, or trying to interpret the instructions with his weak brain? Either way, after a few moments, he turned his attention to the back door, then ran toward it and slammed it with his massive shoulder. The door flew off of its hinges.

Bluto stepped back from the open doorway and Nancy pointed one of her long crab-leg fingers into the house. Without hesitation, the free Whites ran inside and the sounds of rummaging and breaking echoed out. We pack mules stood in the shade and waited. None in the train seemed the least bit curious about what was going on in the house, or even curious about anything going on anywhere around them. They all stood and stared, awaiting instructions with empty eyes and closed mouths. Mimicking them, I tried to appear just as mentally passive and disinterested.

The first of the free Whites to come back out of the house was the one that I’d seen Nancy beating the night before for bringing back handfuls of silverware. He dropped to his knees in front of her, and unfortunately for him, raised two more handfuls of silverware. Oops.

Bubbles giggled like a warbling turkey.

Nancy’s furious bony hands slapped at the silverware and sent it clinking across the patio before going to work at slapping the White in the face five or six times. Once her anger was vented, she leaned over, spent a good while whispering through cupped hands into White’s ear before pointing back into the house. He hurried inside. For a moment of personal entertainment, I speculated about what he might come back with next.

While the Whites rummaged for no reason that I could see, Bubbles started to prance around the patio floor on her toes. Unfazed by the dancing, Nancy glared through the back door and into the dimness inside. Bluto watched Bubbles.

As discreetly as I could, I looked over the scattered flatware: forks, spoons, butter knives, standard dinner sets, nothing that would serve as a practical weapon. Still, anything was better than nothing, or so I told myself, not considering what consequences might attach themselves to a weapon found on my person. The nearest butter knife was eight or nine feet away. I’d likely not get a chance to sneak it into my bag, but patience could work in my favor.

Another White came out of the house. This one had handfuls of blue glass beads, the kind that might be at the bottom of clear glass vase with fake flowers. Nancy recognized the shiny beads for what they were and was none too shy to express her displeasure in the usual way.

After his beating, the White hurried back into the house.

The third White came out with the good stuff. Nancy made a frighteningly joyous shriek. Bubbles giggled her way over and the two of them squatted on the patio with animated fingers. The White dropped the booty at their feet and Nancy pulled his head close to her mouth and whispered into his ear. He hustled back inside.

Nancy and Bubbles set themselves to work, sorting with meticulous attention through the necklaces, earrings, watches, and rings, tossing some aside, trying on others, but building a little pile of keepers between them.

After the free Whites had ransacked the house to Nancy’s satisfaction, they squatted near the back wall of the patio and squabbled over a box of baking powder, a half can of Crisco, and some saltines, all of which was disappearing bite by bite into their mouths.

When it was all done, Nancy took her time in distributing the pieces between the backpacks and shopping bags that we pack mules carried.

When it was all done, we moved to the next house down the street and repeated the process. And that was the whole of my existence for the coming days as my energy level drained away in the incessant heat and my body withered from lack of food. I struggled each day to carry my growing load. I daydreamed about a chance to eat. I glared hatred at Nancy and Bubbles when they weren’t looking. Once, as I was glaring, I got caught. My reward for that was few a bony-handed slaps from Nancy.

No matter what I observed, no matter what I imagined, I couldn’t find a way to escape. The hopelessness of slavery started to leech away my resolve to be free.

Chapter 12

It was late in the afternoon on some day that I’d lost count of. The tuition that I was paying to learn about the infected had surpassed what I could afford. Having successfully dehumanized my captors in my mind, I was having a little trouble accepting that the brain-dead bunch of them still had me in their control. I was slipping into dark anger at myself, a state of mind that wouldn’t help me get free.

We were working our way up a gently sloping street away from the river. Wrinkly Nancy was leading us across an intersection with a four-way stop when the sound of a nearby gunshot to our left locked all of us in our tracks and turned every head. All sounds were stifled in our throats. Ever-busy fingers froze in anticipation. All eyes were wide. All faces pointed in one direction.

These infected knew exactly what food sounded like.

A second gunshot sent two of the free Whites running up the street and started a third’s feet to shuffling like a toddler’s pee pee dance. Only Bluto and the stupid one with the silverware fixation stayed put, eyes on Nancy and Bubbles, waiting for instructions.

Bubbles pranced up to Nancy and leaned her ear close to Nancy’s mouth. Nancy cupped her hands and whispered. Bubbles whispered back. Nancy told her one more thing and then threw a bony finger into the direction from which the gunshots had echoed. Bluto, the dumb one, and the pee pee dancer bolted up the street. Big, round Bubbles bounded in deer leaps after them.

Nancy yanked our chain and we followed at a fast walk.

We’d passed a dozen or so widely spaced houses, set back in the trees, when Nancy turned off of the asphalt and guided us toward a house where a dozen Whites were dragging their hands across the brick walls, pressing their faces to the windows, tripping over the shrubs, and stomping down the dead flowers.

Bluto and the dumb White were standing near the curb, looking around at the other houses, but mostly following the movement of Whites around this particular house.

Nancy took only a moment to assess the situation. She led us across the yard and found a suitable tree at a corner of the garage, looped the length of chain around it, and padlocked our tether in place.

I was stuck. Again.

If the Whites’ instincts were right, there were normal people inside with at least one gun, a gun they shouldn’t have fired. Outside, there were more than a dozen Whites, two of those were Smart Ones, and four could follow verbal commands.

While the feral Whites continued their futile activity around the house, Nancy gathered up her pets and took her time in getting in the ear of each to provide instructions. She had formulated a plan of attack and she was capable of conveying that plan, or so it appeared.

That was not good.

It was so not good.

I racked my brain for a way to warn the people inside the house. They were in more trouble than they knew. I couldn’t yell a warning; to do so would be certain death for me with no guarantee that those inside would hear it, let alone heed it.

Crap!

I shuffled my feet and urged my chain gang buddies around to the side of the house, out of sight of Nancy, Bubbles, and the other Whites who were starting to gather in a group near the front door. I looked for a window that I could tap on, but there was nothing. We were on the outer wall of the garage, but not far from a privacy fence made of vertical cedar boards, and not far from the gate in that fence.

With my free hand, I gripped the chain and pulled hard, trying to take out all of the slack. The Whites connected to me didn’t protest. They let me have my way, apparently willing to accept anyone’s rule. But in the end, the three- and four-foot lengths of chain between each of us didn’t add up to enough chain for me to lay a hand on the latch that opened the gate into the backyard.

I deflated, but immediately chastised myself. Could I just quit when normal people’s lives were at stake?

Giving them a warning was something that couldn’t be done. Pushing the limit of my imagination in that moment produced only unworkable ideas.

I turned my thoughts to escape. I put my bag down, knowing that Nancy would beat me if she saw that I had. But she was preoccupied. I put my effort back into tugging at the loop of chain around my neck and tried vainly to pull it up over my head. It was just too damned tight.

I knelt down and started rummaging through my shopping bag, looking for anything that might be used to pick the lock, not that I had any experience with that. In fact, it was likely an endeavor borne from the desperation of having no other ideas.

A crash at the front of the house alerted me that Bluto had busted open the front door.

The Whites howled.

Time was up.

Escape was still on the table, but helping those folks in the house was not. That option had just expired.

There was a muffled scream from inside.

Lots of noise.

More gunfire. One shot. Two shots. Three.

More yelling, words I couldn’t make out.

A sound from the back of the house caught my attention.

More gunfire from inside.

Without warning, the cedar gate swung open. A girl and boy, late teens or early twenties rushed out, eyes wide with the surprise of seeing my surprised white face right in front of them.

The girl swerved to her right as she passed, keeping out of my arms’ reach. The guy, slow to react, lost his balance, teetered through a few running steps as he passed me, and tripped over his own feet, landing on his face. The girl was immediately bent over beside him, tugging his shirt to get him back to his feet. With the boy suddenly lying so close, the chain gang froze, as virus-slowed brains processed the good fortune that landed so very suddenly within reach. Before they could surge toward the boy, the girl’s eyes went wide with terror. Movement just past me inside the gate caught her attention.

I interpreted the fear as a warning and snapped my head around to look. A White with arms swimming in the air and mouth agape was running through.

Without a thought, I stuck a foot in front of the crazed White. He tripped and tumbled into a disoriented pile. While he was trying to figure out which way was up, I charged toward him. Too bad for him, he looked up just in time to catch my boot, in a full kick, right under his jaw. Bone cracked, blood gushed, and the White’s face dropped to the dirt.

One of the Whites in the chain gang gasped loudly.

I realized as I watched blood flow from every orifice of the White’s head that it was one of the free Whites, one of Nancy’s pets.

Good. One down.

I cast a guilty look over my shoulder to be sure that neither Nancy nor Bubbles had witnessed my crime. They hadn’t. The girl who’d just gotten the boy to his feet, looked at me, confused and surprised. I gave her a nod, and she turned and ran into the trees between the houses with the boy right behind.

A moment later, another White ran out of the backyard, but totally missed the fact that the boy and girl had run off into the woods. The White instead ran to the corner of the garage and made a left turn into the front yard.

There was another gunshot from inside and some more noise, and then the only sounds I heard were elated yowls. The Whites had won. They were starting their feast on the dead. At least none of us pack mules would be on the menu for dinner. I’d live through another night.

Chapter 13

As the sun sank behind the trees and the light started to fade, I wondered how many people had died in the house. Neither Nancy nor Bubbles had come out to check on us. I guessed that they were still gorging themselves on uninfected flesh or had passed out with bloated bellies into tryptophan-induced comas for the night.

Maybe Nancy and Bubbles were dead. Perhaps they’d been shot in their greedy rush to feed. But that was just wishful thinking. Well, sort of. If Nancy never came out of the house with the keys, I’d die of thirst chained to a tree.

Wrinkly Nancy certainly would have been smart enough to let the other Whites go in first and catch the bullets. As much as it pained me to think of them that way, Nancy and Bubbles were Smart Ones. They not only knew how to survive, but they were smart enough to organize other Whites to do their irrational bidding, and to domesticate draft animals, namely me. They were far from stupid.

The free White that I’d kicked in the face never moved again. He breathed for a long time through bubbly red snot and cracked teeth but eventually that petered out to lifelessness. Unfortunately for the Whites on the chain, I was the only one able to reach the downed man, which meant that none of them could get their teeth into his cooling flesh. That pissed them off for a long time, their agitation expressed in the bloody sores on their necks from the chain that yanked each of them back whenever they lunged for a bite. But all of that had come to a stop as they eventually accepted that it was going to be another long, hungry night under a buzzing blanket of feasting mosquitoes and crawling fire ants.

Through our boredom and hunger, the chain gang had slowly shifted into a semi-circle of prisoners, squatting in the sandy dirt off of the corner of the garage. The one chained closest to the front of our line, closest to the tree, now the skinniest of us, had passed out and was lying with his head on the tree roots. Whether he was asleep or something worse, I couldn’t tell. I just knew that my fate, if I didn’t find a way to free myself soon, was down the road that he was near the end of.

I thought about the people who had been inside the house. I wondered whether they’d still be alive if Nancy, Bubbles, and Bluto hadn’t been drawn in by the sound of their gunshots. The Whites who were already at the house when we arrived seemed perplexed. Walls, windows, and doors, taken for granted by normal people, were hard problems to solve for the infected mind. But for the Smart Ones, they were easy—too easy.

I crossed and uncrossed my legs while I looked up at the sky and watched it slowly grow dark. Little pin pricks of yellow and white sparkle grew out of the deepening blue. Several solar powered landscape accent lights flicked on around the dead garden. Something bigger than your average bug scratched my knee. I brushed it away without looking.

Thinking back to Jeff Aubrey’s calculations, the thought of just staying alive for twelve months hadn’t seemed like that difficult of a thing. I mean, it both did and it didn’t. But I thought at the time, what a hopeful thing his idea was, that just hiding out from a bunch of stupid cannibals would be enough to save at least some of humanity. It would save enough of us to start again.

There was a future out there for mankind that I wanted to hope would be better than our past. But the Smart Ones, they were changing those equations. The very real possibility existed that they might eventually root out all of the normal people left. If that happened, mankind would go extinct when the last of the Whites died of stupidity.

Again, something touched my knee and I swatted it away, irritated that some bug, fat on the carcasses of the dead, had the audacity to interrupt my thoughts.

Were those thoughts an indication that I was falling into one of my black moods, or was it a logical conclusion, inevitable, given the evidence? I thought it all through a few more times, and the more I thought, the clearer it became that the infected were a big problem, but the Smart Ones were the problem.

Stupid Whites could be avoided. Smart Whites though, might kill us all.

Again, the scratching on my knee. I looked down, expecting to see a fat tree roach or one of those creepy-ass fuzzy tarantulas on my knee. Instead, I saw a twig, and at the other end of the twig was a human hand. The infected man two mules up in the chain gang was poking me.

What the fuck, dude?! I glared at him but of course, said nothing.

The White looked down at the dirt.

I leaned my head back on my shoulders and looked back up in the sky.

Scratching on my knee again.

I jerked my head up and gave the White with the stick my meanest leave-me-the-fuck-alone look. He looked down at the dirt in front of him.

Irritating fucker!

I huffed to emphasize my anger and to discourage him from bothering me again. Instead of scratching me again with his twig, though, he tapped the twig on the ground in front of him.

I turned my body so that my knee would be out of his reach, looked out across the wide lawn and empty street, and tried to think of a way to get myself out of my predicament. But scratching on my arm flared my anger and I jerked around, ready to fight.

The guy with the twig very slowly, very deliberately, averted his eyes. Somewhere between my angry thoughts of pummeling him with my fists, it occurred to me to follow his gaze down.

Holy shit!

There in the dirt at the end of his twig was written the word Hello.

Chapter 14

Nico was his name, a man of forty years with a ninth grader’s face and slim body. Nearly emaciated and a little effeminate, Nico was definitely not masculine. He’d probably been picked on a lot when he was in school, but made up for it by earning a ton of money sitting behind a computer as an adult.

Considering the circumstances, Nico didn’t look bad. His short black hair wasn’t out of hand yet. His jeans didn’t show much dirt and his shoes were in good shape. His shirt wasn’t stained or torn. The only things that gave away anything about Nico’s predicament were the shadow of a beard on his chin, the bug bites on his neck and exposed hands, and the dirt collecting around his cuticles and under his fingernails.

Oh, and of course there was his blazing white skin. He probably wasn’t much for getting outdoors before the virus hit.

Given all of that, I should have noticed Nico earlier. The other infected on the chain gang had the disheveled, dirty look of violent transients, months past their last shower, with a penchant for messy cannibalism along with grime-smeared mouths and bloodstained shirts to prove it.

And the stench! The stupidest among the infected had forgotten their potty training when the virus had fried their brains.

Through scribbling in the dirt, Nico told me that he’d been on the chain gang for five days. Bluto had nabbed him while he was sleeping off the fever alone in a house up near Bee Cave Road a few miles south of where we were chained to that tree. The house he’d been captured in wasn’t his. His neighborhood had been overrun with the infected and gun toting do-gooders—who didn’t—shortly after the outbreak. Nico, with a lot of luck, had made his way to the well-stocked Bee Cave Road house and had been waiting for things to settle down when the virus found him. Bluto found him next and pressed him into Nancy’s service.

On the subject of escape—the question that dominated our tediously slow dirt based conversation—Nico was at a loss. He’d been watching and learning, just as I planned to do, but no opportunity had presented itself. The routine was much the same each day. Drink from the river in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. Carry looted jewelry for Nancy and Bubbles while their pet Whites methodically worked their way up and down the streets. They’d kill and eat normal humans, dogs, cats, squirrels, anything they could get their hands on. They’d just discovered the magic cornucopia of stocked pantries a few days before and that slowed the rate at which the pack mules were eaten. When Nancy and the other Whites did eat one of us from the chain gang, it was always the most tenured member on the front who filled the dinner bill. New chain gang members, always males, were added to the rear.

The day before I was collected for the chain gang, silverware boy had come out of a house with several kitchen knives. Nancy got pissed. The knives were scattered on a driveway and Nico managed to stash a big butcher knife in his canvas bag beneath the gold and silver jewelry. Unfortunately, the knife only stayed there for a few hours. Later that afternoon while Bubbles was rummaging through his bag, trading out her bracelets and necklaces, she found the knife in the bag, squawked, grimaced, and threw it away.

Nancy, Bubbles, and their pets slept in the house that night among the bodies of those that they’d murdered. Nico and I slept in the dirt with the rest of the chain gang. When the sun came up the next morning it became apparent that the guy in the lead, the one chained closest to the tree, had died. That left four of us: Nico, me, and two Whites. It didn’t take too long for the two with the rotted brains to figure that out that one of us was dead and start gnawing on his limbs.

Near noon, Nancy waddled out of the house, still carrying a bellyful of holiday feast. Unfazed by the dead White attached to her chain, she wrangled Bluto and gave him his whispered instructions. An hour later, two new Whites were attached to the chain behind me. We were six again, but Nico was just one position off of the menu.

The sun was high in a cloudless sky by then. It was going to be a scorcher.

We crossed an estate-sized back lawn, heading toward the river for our first drink of the day. The grass, however, didn’t slope down to the edge of the river like it did on most of the riverside lots. The yard had been leveled as flat as a pool table and spread all the way from the back of the house to a concrete retaining wall with the river lapping at its base three feet down. The only practical way to reach the water’s surface was immediately apparent to anyone with any mental capacity left.

Nancy saw it and led us to a set of wooden stairs that we descended to a wide, covered pier that extended twenty-five feet out into the river. The planked deck of the pier was less than a dozen inches above the surface of the river, putting the cool water within easy reach of us all.

Of course, Nancy squatted first and set the example for the rest to follow and we all lined up along the edge of the dock and started to scoop water up to our mouths. Bubbles, however, with her uncontainable enthusiasm for whatever caught her attention, started skipping up and down the dock, frolicking to the sound of her feet clomping on wood.

When I’d wet my parched throat with the smelly green water, I took some moments to look around. It was hard to see anything but Bubbles as she bounced up and down. Apparently the joy of eating fresh, uninfected meat the night before had added an extra spoonful of happiness to her energy level. She reached the end of the dock out in the river, pirouetted twice, then started back toward the stairs. But I didn’t see her return that time. There was something down at the end of the dock that was immensely interesting to me.

I stared.

All the components of an escape were right there in front of me: three scuba tanks with buoyancy compensators and regulators attached were lined up neatly along the edge of the dock—perhaps the remnants of somebody’s half-baked escape plan gone bad. The icing on that cake bobbed in the current, tied to a dock across the river: a canoe.

Thankfully, Nancy was infatuated with a large fish with glittery scales that was swimming just beneath the surface near where her toes were peeking over the edge of the boards. She didn’t have a thought to spare for me.

The wheels in my brain started to turn and spun quickly off of their axles. The money I’d spent on getting scuba certified was about to pay a dividend. My half-baked escape plan came together.

I checked out my captors to see how much attention they were paying to us on the chain gang. Nancy, I already knew, was fixated on the fish. Bluto was very busily scratching himself in a way that he never would have done in public a month prior. Bubbles still pranced. The two remaining Whites sat on the stairs up to the lawn and seemed very interested in nothing at all.

Only Nancy was between us six and the end of the pier, between us and the scuba tanks.

I discreetly reached across the White between Nico and I nudged him. When he looked up at me, I motioned with my head toward the end of the dock. He turned and stared for a moment then looked back with a big question on his face.

I motioned again. He looked again and turned back with the same question on his face.

Grrr.

With Nico’s attention on me, I cupped a hand over my mouth and dramatically drew a deep breath. The sound of that caught Nancy’s attention and I quickly put my hand back down to the water and scooped a palmful up to my mouth. That satisfied her suspicion and she looked back at the fish.

A few moments passed and I chanced a look back up at Nico. He was wide-eyed and shook his head very subtly but definitively. He was not on board. I didn’t blame him. The plan sucked. There were so many ways it could fail. I had no way of knowing, given the amount of time that would be available to me, whether the tanks had air in them. Cross that out. No, unless the regulators were leaky, the tanks almost certainly had air in them. They were probably brought out to the end of the dock to prepare for a dive which meant that they’d be full. And at the likely depth of the river, I could stay under for at least an hour and maybe two with a full tank. If the tanks had been left there by divers after cleaning the bottom of a boat, doing dock maintenance, or futilely clearing duckweed off of the river bottom, then the divers wouldn’t have come up when the tanks were empty. Divers always surface with air still in the tank. To do anything less would be courting disaster. The least that might be in a tank would be ten or fifteen minute’s worth of air, sufficient for my purposes, but not leaving much room for other errors.

Good enough chances for me.

To stay on the chain gang was to choose death; if not from getting eaten, then by starvation, or dysentery.

I chose my path. I was going, and I was taking the whole chain gang with me. Nico’s best chance for survival was to accept that and go along.

I started to think about all the things that could go wrong, but I forced those thoughts into the delete bin. There was no point in second-guessing.

I held up three fingers for Nico to see. He subtly shook his head again. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t getting a say. Just a warning. I pumped my arm once and dropped a finger. I pumped it again and dropped the second. By the third pump, my pulse was already racing.

I jumped to my feet and screamed the most shrill, fearful scream I could manage and started to run toward the far end of the dock.

Human nature, being what it is, knows at its reptilian core that when your neighbor screams and runs, your best chance to survive another day isn’t in spending time in evaluating the threat, but in simply accepting that a threat is real and then screaming and hauling ass right along with the first screamer. My bet was that the virus hadn’t destroyed that part of the Whites’ brains.

It turned out that I made a good bet. I didn’t have to drag any of the Whites on the chain gang. In fact, within a second, they were all running toward the end of the dock, screaming, outpacing me, and dragging Nico along for me.

Before Nancy had any idea what was happening, our leash was ripped from her hand. With the air suddenly full of unqualified fear, she backpedaled away from the most likely source, the shore. Similarly, Bluto, Bubbles, and the others were tentatively putting some distance between themselves and the stairs that led up to the lawn.

Knowing at that point that I had nothing to lose by talking, I yelled to Nico, “Grab a tank! Hold onto my belt! Don’t let go! I’ll take care of you!” And with those last words, the chained Whites started to process that one of their number was speaking, that one of us was tasty, and they slowed to an abrupt stop. But that stop put them right at the end of the pier. I didn’t slow, I pushed one into the water ahead of me as I grabbed a scuba tank by the valve, grabbed the chain around my neck with the other, lest I hang myself, and fell into the water.

I didn’t need to pull anyone else. I had a backpack with at least forty pounds of jewelry. The White that I pushed in had a backpack and a bag. We were both sinking to the bottom and dragging the other four with us.

Arms, elbows, knees, and skulls were suddenly thrashing wildly under the water. It was cold, dark, and disorienting. My chain was yanking hard in both directions.

I pulled myself into a ball, pinched my nostrils between my fingers to equalize the pressure in my ears and relieve the sharp pain that came with the depth. I opened the air valve on my tank and ran my other hand down one of the four hoses coming off the valve. The first hose I followed led to the connection on the buoyancy control device. My hand instantly flew back to the valve and followed another hose.

In seconds, my hand was on a regulator. I pushed the purge valve to clear it and the familiar sound of rushing gas bubbling through the water let me know I had air. I pushed it into my mouth and inhaled deeply.

I needed to take care of Nico before he drowned.

The heroic thing to do, I guess, would have been to take care of Nico first. But that was also the stupid thing to do. With my own air source stabilized, I could be a lot more help to Nico. Without air for myself, I’d risk drowning and killing him in the process. Given his reluctance to go along, I could only guess that he had very little or no scuba experience. Or maybe he was just smarter than me.

With the flailing arms and hands of the drowning infected pushing and punching from all around, I ran my hands around the circumference of my belt and found a hand, grasping tight near the small of my back. I followed the arm up to a shoulder, to a neck, and found a face.

From what I could tell, Nico was being very calm as the weight of his pack settled him onto the river bottom. I pulled the regulator from my mouth and shoved it into his, pushing on the purge button as I did so. I needed to be sure and put as little river water in his mouth as possible.

As soon as the regulator pushed against his lips, Nico’s hand let go of my belt and grabbed hold of the regulator in his mouth. With maybe a foot of visibility in the murky water, I was able to see relief in his open eyes.

I followed the hose back down to the tank and again ran my hand up another pressure line of the octopus. In a second my hand was on the second regulator. Thank God for safety-minded divers.

I purged the regulator as I pushed it into my mouth and breathed deeply.

It worked!

So far, anyway.

The struggling of the other Whites declined quickly as, one by one, they drowned. That left us in a jumble of chains and bodies in fifteen feet of water. But Nico and I had air, for the moment.

Chapter 15

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.

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

When we 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 one 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.”

Nico let all of that sink in. “Either you’re really good at bullshitting, or you think on your feet better than anybody I’ve ever met.”

“Well,” I shrugged, “I don’t know, but I did think about all of that before I jumped off the pier.”

“What’s the plan now?” Nico asked.

“A couple of miles down, just a little ways up from the dam, there’s a marina that I think has an engine repair shop.”

“Yeah,” Nico nodded, “I know the place.”

“I’m hoping we can sneak in there and find some tools to cut these chains off. Or at least get rid of Whitey back here.”

“Whitey?” Nico smiled.

“I picked it up from my buddy.”

Chapter 16

Nico Wright was a talker. He used to be a financial planner, had three kids and a wife—emphasis on the past tense—made good money, lived in this part of town, had a nice house and a German car. And if it weren’t for the dams on the river, he could have talked the canoe all the way down to the gulf.

I pretended to listen for a while. I guess he needed to talk about it all, the loss of his family, his dog, his cat, the kids’ goldfish. I’m sure that talking was the mentally healthy thing to do. It’s not easy for a person whose concept of risk is defined by high volatility in an undiversified portfolio to change that definition to something measured in agonizing, bloody death. Perhaps for Nico, words were a salve for the emotional wounds he suffered watching his children get murdered by the neighbors on the front lawn. His wife had died trying to save them. Nico, the analytical type, knew they didn’t have a chance, knew his wife didn’t have a chance when she ran out of the house to try, but Nico had to live with never knowing whether it was the coldest of pragmatic analyses or cowardice that kept him in the house that day.

I think his choice not to attempt escape from Nancy’s and Bubbles’ chain gang on his own was a way to punish himself for that choice.

He told the whole story without shedding a tear. He didn’t even look troubled. The further he went into the disturbing parts, the more matter-of-fact he became. It sounded like a recitation of a quarterly report for a boring company with average earnings.

Perhaps, one day way off in Nico’s future, when he told the part about his little blonde-haired five-year old daughter, wearing a party dress, gasping her last breath with the neighbor’s jaws clamped on her throat, he’d cry. Maybe then, he’d have a chance to find some peace with it. Until then, Nico was damaged, distanced from emotions he was ill-equipped to process.

In that, we had a kinship.

I felt like I understood Nico. And out of being able to identify with Nico grew a smidgen of trust. I wasn’t ready to bring him back to Sarah Mansfield’s house with me; Freitag had burned that bridge when she crossed over. Trust was going to be a hard thing to grant going forward.

Freitag. Ugh.

The thought of that bitch sent my thoughts back into a very dark place, a place where I murdered Mark in my thoughts and slaughtered Whites out of spite. It was a place where I would have killed Nancy, Bubbles, and Bluto if I had the means. If only I’d had the presence of mind to throw a loop of chain around Nancy’s skinny neck as we all ran toward the end of the dock. The world would have one less Smart One, and some normal people on the south side of the river would probably live to see a few more days.

The Smart Ones needed to die. All of them needed to die.

“That’s the marina you were talking about, right?” Nico pointed to the south bank.

“Yep.” I looked over the docks and into the shadows by the buildings on shore. I didn’t see any Whites, didn’t spot any movement, but they were there. The infected were always there, and for the next year or two, always would be.

“What’s the plan?”

I pointed to the longest of the three docs. “Let’s pull up to the end of that one. We need to get rid of this guy before we can do anything.” I thumbed back at the floater.

Nico looked at the body bobbing along behind us. His face slacked into a sickly expression.

“It’s messy, but we have to,” I told Nico. “We can’t carry him with us. He’s only manageable now because we’re in the water.”

“I know.” Nico’s tone told me he didn’t need or want to be told that obvious bit of truth.

“Same as last time. You pull the chain, I smash the head. You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

Nico shuddered. “You make it sound so…so…”

“Easy?” I finished for him.

Nico nodded. “You don’t feel…”

Into the long pause I said, “It doesn’t matter what I feel, Nico. The luxury of having good choices was a peculiarity of the modern world. For most of human history, life was brutal and bloody. Humanity just took a big backward step toward that. We can handle this. Humans are built for it. We’re just not used to it.”

“I don’t need a history lesson,” Nico responded, petulantly.

Of course he didn’t need a history lesson. But a slap on the head wouldn’t hurt. “Paddle us to that dock. Let’s make this quick. As soon as we’re done, let’s get back in the canoe and go back to the center of the river.”

“Why? We’ll be pretty close to the shop. Why not just go over there?”

“You can do what you want. Well, maybe you can’t, since we’re still chained together. But I’m not your boss. I’m just telling you that I’d like to be careful and go back out into the water for a bit and make sure that we haven’t riled up a bunch of hungry Whites with all the noise we’re going to make before we go onshore.”

Nico deflated. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.”

He paddled us over to the dock until the bow hit wood. I steadied the canoe as he climbed out and looped our bow line over a cleat.

The next few moments were awkward. I walked down the length of the canoe as it drifted with the current away from the dock. Dragging along two-hundred pounds of floating corpse didn’t make it any easier. But I managed, and together, Nico and I got the White in place before realizing that the scuba tank was still in the canoe.

“Shit,” I hissed.

Nico looked scolded.

“Not your fault.” I stood up straight and looked around again to make sure we were still alone. We were. “Let’s get this done.”

It took several long minutes to retrieve the scuba tank and get the White back into position with his head on the dock and his body in the water. Then it was time to smash.

Nico closed his eyes and looked away. I brought the cylinder down hard. Once. Twice. Thrice.

“Damn!” The guy had a hard head. I hammered it three more times with the tank before it was malleable enough to push through the loop of chain around his neck.

The body slipped off of the deck and into the water. A slick of blood pooled around the deformed head as it drifted on the slow moving current. There was blood on the dock and five or six teeth laying on the wood between my feet. Nico stared at it all for a moment and then fell to his knees and heaved out the clear, sticky liquid contents of his stomach.

I gave him a moment and kept a lookout for dangers before saying, “C’mon man, we need to go.”

Back in the center of the river again, we waited. I reached down and splashed my face with the cool water a couple of times, closing my eyes and reveling in another moment of feeling good.

“I don’t see any of them,” Nico informed me.

“Give it a minute.”

“We should go check the shop. I don’t feel comfortable sitting out here in the middle of the river.”

I wanted to ask Nico why was he was even alive. Hadn’t he learned anything? But then I remembered how much my own life depended on luck. “Nico, it pays to be careful. And when you fuck up, you usually get killed.”

“But anyone can see us out here.”

“You know the Whites don’t like the water. You saw that right?”

“What?”

I looked up at Nico and put little effort into hiding my contempt. “What do you mean what?”

Nico saw the look on my face and turned indignant. “What makes you think they don’t like the water? Just because they can’t swim.”

“Nico,” I started, but stopped and took a deep breath before my anger ran off with my words. “Nico, I noticed when were down by the water, they went to great pains to keep their toes out of the water. They’d drink, of course, but they were weirdly neurotic about touching the water with anything but their lips or their hands.”

Nico looked at me with storm clouds growing behind his eyes.

In soothing tones I added, “Sometimes I notice little details. Besides, I talked to some girls up the river a few days ago. They were hiding out on that riverboat thing they take the tourists on sunset cruises with.”

“I know that boat,” Nico said.

Anyone who spent any time on Lake Austin would know it. It was hard to miss. “The girls said that sometimes the Whites would see them on the boat but they’d never come in the water to get them. I just put two and two together. I think they’re all afraid of the water for some reason.”

Nico looked around. “Somebody could shoot us out here.”

I was going to ask why, but nobody seemed to need a reason for that anymore. Instead I said, “Anybody with a gun who’s still alive has figured out by now that you only shoot as a last resort.”

“What if they haven’t figured that out yet?”

“Then they’re already dead, Nico.” I said, with enough finality that I hoped to shut him up. I was getting peeved. Really, why was he still alive? “I think we’re cool to go in, if you’re ready.”

“If we see some food, any kind of food, a vending machine, a sugar packet, an armadillo, a squirrel… I could really use something.”

I smiled. “I’m with you, man.”

Cautiously, Nico and I took extra care to be quiet while we paddled the boat back toward the Marina. We glided between the boat slips, heading toward a boardwalk built over the water. On the other side of the boardwalk stood the workshop.

Once the bow bumped wood, Nico took the bow line, looped it over a piling and we both carefully climbed up out of the boat, doing our best to keep our links of chain from jingling.

We crossed the wide boardwalk and sidled up next to a faded blue corrugated steel wall. Still, there was nothing moving anywhere that I could see. Nico pressed his ear to the metal wall to listen.

Good idea!

After a moment, he pulled his head away and I whispered, “Anything?”

He shook his head and opened his mouth to say something but it hung there for an awkwardly long time before the words finally came, “I know you think I’m useless, but I’m not. I’m just out of my element.”

In a whisper, I lied immediately. “No, Nico. I don’t think you’re useless. Sorry, I’m just edgy. Murphy says I have a tendency to be a dick for no reason.”

“Murphy is your buddy?”

I nodded.

“Do you think he’s right?”

I nodded again. “Nobody’s perfect. So…no one inside?”

“None that I could hear.”

There were several rolled down garage doors on our side of the building. They were all padlocked shut. “I think I saw a door on the other side,” I said. I started to move.

Nico grabbed my arm to stop me. “I know you’re probably going to ditch me as soon as we get these chains off. But you don’t have to run off and leave me stranded or anything. If you want to go solo, just say so. I’ll respect that.”

Nico’s eyes told me that he feared that possibility more than he respected it.

“I’ll be honest Nico. I am thinking about ditching you, but it’s got nothing to do with you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’ve been running into some real problems when I trust people lately.”

Nico’s vulnerability was starting to show. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to since my wife…died. We could work together. We’d both have a better chance that way.”

I nodded. “Nico, I won’t run off and leave you when we cut the chains off. Cool? I’m not making any promises beyond that. Let’s see how all of this plays out and then we’ll go from there.”

“Okay.” Nico nodded. “Have you been with Murphy this whole time?”

I shushed Nico. “We’ll talk more once we’re back in the canoe.” I started off toward the corner.

There was indeed a door on the side of the building, painted white and easy to spot. I led Nico down to it, past a window with the blinds closed. I slowly turned the knob and was disappointed that it was locked. I looked back at Nico.

He shrugged.

“We can try the other side.”

Nico nodded agreement.

Together, we stealthily worked our way around the whole workshop. It was completely locked up. Frustrated, we found ourselves standing by the wall where we’d started, with the canoe across the boardwalk just a dozen feet away. Nico suggested, “We could break in.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, we probably could. I’m afraid we’d make too much noise and draw the Whites in.”

“But mostly, they leave us alone, right?”

“Not if we’re being noisy. When they hear certain noises, they think of food. It’s never good to sound like food with Whites around.” I looked around out of good habit while I came to a decision. “We can head upriver.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got some people up there. I don’t think they have any tools. Well maybe they do. We had a big toolbox on a pontoon boat a week or so ago but I don’t know if they ever brought it back to our place. Either way, at least we’ll have a safe place to sleep tonight.”

Nico didn’t give me an answer right away. “Were you going to tell me about these people if we got the chains off?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Thanks for being honest.”

“I’m not being honest. I’m being pragmatic. If we’d gotten the chains off, I was probably going to help you find a place to stay, and then I was going to leave you and go back on my own.”

Nico looked like I’d punched him in the gut.

“It’s not you Nico, really. I’m...I don’t know. I trusted some people and my buddy Murphy got shot. My buddy Jerome got shot for pretty much the same reason—trusting the wrong people.”

“Zed, I’m not going to shoot you or anybody else.” Nico slipped down into an uncomfortable introspective slope. “I think I’m a coward.”

“C’mon, let’s get going. It’s a ways upriver. It’ll take us the rest of the afternoon to paddle up there.”

Chapter 17

“So, what’s your deal man?”

In the front of the canoe, I was struggling to paddle up river on a stomach that had been empty for nearly a week, and it was hard. Any degree of exertion rushed my breathing and elevated my heart rate. In that state, it was easy to pass on the minimal effort it took to listen to Nico tell me about whatever he was telling me.

“So, what’s your deal man? Zed! Zed! Are you awake up there man?”

Pulling my paddle up across my lap to rest for a minute, I looked back at Nico. “What?”

“Man, you must be totally zoned out because I asked you like three times.”

“Asked me what?”

“I know you’re ignoring me but you could at least pretend to listen.”

“I thought I was.”

“You must be in worse shape than me. We need some food.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“We should slow the pace a bit. I’m really tired.”

I gave Nico a nod. “We can go easy for a while.”

“So what’s your deal man? I’ve practically told you my whole life story and I don’t know anything about you.”

I shrugged.

“What did you do before the virus hit.”

I hated that question but there was no point in hiding the answer. “I worked at Starbucks.”

That gave Nico a pause. “Did you ever think about going to college or something? I’ll bet you could get into the community college. That’s always a good place to start. I mean, if school isn’t your thing or whatever. It’s kind of a half-way-house to a real college. You know what I mean?”

“I have a degree, Nico.”

“Oh.” Nico was at a loss for words for a moment. But just for a moment. “The economy does kind of suck. A lot of people can’t find good jobs right now. What’s your degree in?”

“Philosophy.”

“Yeah, that might make it harder but you can work pretty much anywhere with that kind of degree. You know, and entry level gig. You seem like a smart guy. How long have you been at Starbucks?”

I shrugged out of habit and put my paddle back in the water for an easy stroke. “A couple of years I guess.”

“You’ve been looking for a job for a couple of years? Man, it must be worse out there than I thought.”

“Nico, I work at Starbucks because I want to.”

Nico was perplexed. “Are you a manager or something?”

I shook my head.

“What then? I’m curious.”

“Barista.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s to understand?”

“You seem like a bright guy. You’re educated. Why work at Starbucks?”

I thought about evading the question as I had so many thousands of times in the past. But really, what was the point anymore. “One job is as pointless as the next, Nico.”

“That sounds like some a philosopher’s answer.”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t you ever want to get married? Have some kids? Buy a house?”

“I’m not sure those questions are valid anymore, Nico.”

“You know what I mean. Didn’t you ever want those things?”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do?”

“What do you mean, yes you do?”

“Exactly that?”

“What are you, some kind of psychologist or something? I thought you were a financial planner.”

“You remind me of my daughter.”

“What the fuck are you even talking about?”

“You’re like my daughter, Zed.”

I turned back to look at him with an unasked question hanging in the air.

“She’s distant and tightlipped too.”

If his daughter was anything like me, I deduced that it was probably for many of the same reasons and replied with a tone dripping in accusations. “Yeah, why do you think that is, Nico?”

“What?” Nico was taken aback. “What are you saying, Zed?”

I shrugged and went back to paddling. “Nothing.”

Nico pulled his paddle out of the water and got his dander up. “No! What are you saying, Zed?”

I paddled a few more strokes. What the Hell? None if mattered anymore anyway. I let all of the accusations linger in my voice. “You tell me, Nico. Why does a little girl, what’d you say, five years old? Why does a little girl get tight lipped and withdrawn, Nico? Why would she do that?”

Nico became dead serious. “What are you asking me, Zed? Why don’t you quite pussyfooting around and just tell me what you want to say?”

“Okay. You say your daughter is just like me? Quiet. Distant. That’s not normal, Nico. That’s how damaged kids are, Nico.”

“Damaged?”

“Abused, Nico. Was she abused?”

“What?” Nico was shocked. “What are you saying? You were an abused child?”

I turned back forward and paddled some more, shaking my head. “So you’re not going to answer the question. Whatever man. You pushed it. You want to hide from it. What the hell do I care? None if it matters anymore.”

Bam!

I jerked around to look at Nico.

He’d slammed his paddled down across the gunwales. His face was red. His eyes were full of tears. His hands were shaking. His voice cracked when he spoke. “You listen to me you little bastard. I love my daughter. She may be gone, but she’ll always matter. You hear me! And just so you know, I would never, ever, ever, raise a hand to her. That’s just the way she was. Some people are just hardwired to be that way. They just don’t relate to people as well as others. That’s it, Zed. It’s not any more complicated than that. And I sure as hell didn’t abuse my own damn daughter so fuck you, Zed Zane. Fuck you!”

It was my turn to be taken aback.

I believed him.

And then I felt like a turd for making the accusation.

We floated silently on the river for a long time after that. Lost in our own thoughts, fearful of saying anymore until tempers settled. It was me who finally mustered the courage to speak. “I’m sorry, Nico. That was dickish of me. I…”

Nico shook his head as he accepted. “I loved my daughter, Zed. You don’t have kids, I assume. So you’ll never know how much a parent loves their kids.”

“I’ll have to take your word on that, Nico.” I turned to start paddling again.

We paddled together for a little while upstream with no words passing between us.

Nico deduced, “Your parents must have been real shits.”

I shrugged without looking back. “It’s not important, Nico. They’re gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Did you ever reconcile everything with them before they went?”

“I told you, Nico. It doesn’t matter.”

“It makes it easier to move on when you close the books so to speak.”

“They’re dead, Nico. Just like everybody else.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Are you sure you’re not a psychologist?”

“I told you, my daughter Stacy, she was hard to talk to too. I’m used to dredging answers out.”

“I’m truly sorry about Stacy, Nico. I’m sorry I said what I said.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

It was getting late in the afternoon. There were shadows cast over the water by the trees near the shore and it was tempting to paddle closer to the bank and take advantage of the shade. But so many dangers could be hiding among the trees and bushes there.

We continued up river and the conversation hit another lull. I was as comfortable as I could be with that. I was guessing that Nico was feeling a little burned by what I’d implied and was afraid to pursue another topic. But he finally asked, “What are your friends like?”

“They’re good people.”

“Did you know any of them before the virus hit?”

“Nope.”

“You met them all afterwards?”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t mind my speculating, I’m under the impression that you’re pretty attached to them.”

I shrugged.

“Does that mean no?”

“No.”

“So you are.”

“Yes.”

“Given what I think I know about you—you know, considering your childhood and all—you don’t seem like the type to bond easily with other people.”

“Are you calling me a sociopath, Nico?” I turned back to him and gave him a wan smile, to let him know that I was kidding.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know about that, Nico. Why is it important?”

“Just talking.”

I paddled a few more stroked.

“Would you say that you’re attached to them?”

“Sure, Nico. I’d say that.”

“Would you say that, or would it be true?”

“I’m sure Stacy loved it when you cross-examined her.” The sarcasm came easy to me.

“As much as you do.”

“I’m attached to them, Nico.”

“More than other people you’ve known?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.”

“I think you have.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You got a degree in philosophy for a reason, I think. You probably like to think about the reasons behind things. I’m guessing this is one of those things you’ve thought about.”

“I’ve been kind of busy lately, Nico.”

“You had plenty of time when we were on the chain gang.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So did you think about it?”

“Fine. It’s true. I’m probably more attached to these people than most other people I’ve known.”

“Why?”

“A. It doesn’t matter. B. I don’t know. C. If all your theories about me are true, then I’m probably too socially handicapped to know. D. I think that’s the boathouse down there on the right. Do you see it?”

“It looks like the door is open.”

Chapter 18

“How the fuck did they get in there?” My anger carried my voice across the water and caught the full, screaming attention of every naked White in Sarah Mansfield’s boathouse.

Nico said nothing. The question was clearly rhetorical.

My knuckles bleached stark white as I clenched my hands on my paddle. The boathouse door was open. The ski boat was gone. The jet skis were still inside. Life jackets were scattered; a few floated in the water. Everything that had been so organized inside was strewn where it shouldn’t have been. The infected had apparently scoured every inch of the boathouse in search of something to eat.

A dangerous calm came over me. Everyone I had any attachment to had been in that house up on the cliff. Mass murder was back in my black thoughts. The darkness was blazing fire, but I didn’t care that it was. I needed answers to suddenly open questions, and I felt a strong need to exterminate some Whites.

I looked at Nico, banal, blabbering Nico, and I was leashed to him. But through my mannequin’s calm, he couldn’t tell that I felt like a rabid dog. I drew a deep breath. “Nico, we need to get these chains off.”

“But…” Nico looked back at me. I don’t know what he saw at that moment, but he got enough information from it to make him nod in agreement instead.

I pointed to some houses on the north shore, right on the edge of the water a few hundred yards upstream.

Nico looked at the houses and looked back at me, worried. Rightfully so, they were crawling with naked Whites, the same ones that were in Sarah Mansfield’s boathouse, the same ones that overran Dr. Evans’ farm. Or so I deduced. That meant there were tens of thousands of them up on the mountain.

“Let’s try a house on the other side of the river,” Nico pleaded.

I looked at the forested bank across the water. The nearest house on that side was back downriver and maybe a quarter mile away. I looked back to the row of upstream waterfront mansions with hundreds of Whites rampaging over the property.

Safety first!

I reluctantly nodded.

“Good,” Nico smiled feebly. He cast another fearful glance at the overrun mansions. “Good.”

We paddled the canoe over to the far bank and sped up as we turned into the current. Before long, we neared the first of the waterfront houses.

I pulled my paddle into the canoe and Nico did the same. As we drifted, I surveyed the lawn and scrutinized the windows, looking for anything with arms or legs that might be a danger to us.

Nico turned back to look at me, “It’s as good as any, I suppose.” Translation: he didn’t see any Whites either.

I shrugged and we angled the canoe toward the bank. There was no boathouse, no dock, just green grass sloping down to a ragged bank that stood a meager twelve inches above the surface of the river.

Gravel ground under the keel as the bow neared the bank beneath an overhanging tree. Nico reached out and looped the bow rope round the tree trunk and put a single, loose knot in it. I used my paddle to pull the rear of the canoe around parallel with the bank. I had to step into the shallow water to get out of the canoe, and then step up to the bank, onto the sloping grass, slippery with river water running off of my boots.

Nevertheless, Nico and I found ourselves tethered by our chain, standing side by side, looking across a lawn at the back of a 1950s-style house, sharing the same hopes and the same fears.

I took the length of chain to my left, a length that had two unoccupied loops, and drew it back through my hand until I had a couple of dangling feet of iron weight left, enough for a passable weapon. Nico saw what I was doing and copied with a length of chain on his right side. There was nothing that could be done with the length between us.

“Through the back door and then we find the garage?” I asked, guessing that Nico would agree to whatever I suggested.

I guessed right.

He followed me across the grass until we stepped up onto a wooden deck covered with a maze of disorganized patio furniture. I didn’t see any blood, no torn clothing, and no human remains. There had been no attack by the infected here. Perhaps the owners were just sloppy people.

From my position on the raised deck, I was able to peer over a hedge into the next yard. Nothing there, either. Nico looked, then seemed to relax a bit before marching off toward the back door. I gently tugged the chain on his neck to slow him down. I raised a palm, imploring patience. Just because we didn’t see the danger didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Nico caught my meaning and his show of bravery came to an end. He let me lead.

The back door proved to be locked. That presented a dilemma. Go around front and expose ourselves to visibility from the street, only to come to a sturdier, probably locked door, or bust this flimsy looking one down? The noise would draw the attention of any Whites that were lingering silently nearby. I looked at Nico, “I think…”

“Bust it down,” he interrupted me.

That was decisive. I gave Nico a nod and stepped back to give the door a good hard look. Old. It looked old and flimsy, like an interior door repurposed to the wrong task. I gave Nico a here-goes look, aimed my shoulder at the middle of the door, and sprinted forward with all the momentum I could gather in three steps.

After so many years in the humidity by the river, the door had to have been partially rotted inside, because when my shoulder hit it, it splintered through the center and broke. With one of my feet caught on the lower edge of the door, I fell. I covered my eyes with my hands to protect them from shivered wood.

When the sound of the crash faded and I pulled my hands away from my face, I was on the floor, covered in pieces of wood, large and small, and—

Oops.

The business end of a rifle barrel was just inches from my face. Up at the other end of that rifle was an old man with a round, wrinkled face behind black plastic-rimmed glasses that tried to sit on a nose so flat and small that they rested more on his cheeks.

“Don’t shoot?” It came out sounding like something between a question and a plea, as I tried frantically to imagine any words more convincing to say that might save my life.

The bullet didn’t materialize, though. The old man’s expression was slowing changing from determination to confusion.

“I’m…not like them,” I added, hoping that would help my case.

He drew a deep breath and backed up a few steps. He clearly hadn’t expected to see a talking White. “Who are you?”

From outside, Nico whispered in, “Zed! Zed! Are you okay?”

“I’m Zed,” I answered. “Sorry about the door.”

“Zed?” The old man asked.

“That’s my name.” I nodded, then called softly out the door, “Nico, be cool for a sec’. There’s somebody in here.”

Ignoring my request, Nico stuck his head in through the hole in the door and spotted the gun. “Oh.”

The old man seemed stuck with his indecision, not moving, not speaking, probably trying to figure out what to do with us, trying to figure out whether I was about to attack him or not.

“I’m not a danger to you,” I tried to sooth his fears. “We’re just as normal as you.”

“Ya just broke my door down.” He was peeved.

“Yeah, but…” I started to answer, “but we didn’t think anybody…”

“Anybody, what?” He asked with an edge to his tone.

“I didn’t think anybody would be alive in here.”

“And why would you think that?” His voice was notching up with anger.

“Well, none of the houses we checked…”

“Y’er looters!” he concluded.

“No, no,” I argued. “Because of everything that’s going on.”

“And what’s that?”

“C’mon,” I responded, disbelief dripping from my voice. I motioned around at the world outside the house’s walls. “How could you not know about the virus?”

“I know ‘bout the virus,” he answered.

“Then you know,” I concluded.

“TV and radio have been off the air for a while now.”

“But you know…” I was at a loss for a new argument so I stuck with the one that didn’t seem to be working. “You know that pretty much everybody is either dead or one of them, right?”

“When you say one of them, you mean, like you, don’t you? Albinos.”

“No, no.” I raised my hands, palms open. “We’re not like them. I got sick, but I got better. I’m normal now. Well except for my color.”

The gun didn’t point away.

I asked, “When was the last time you talked to anybody? Family? Neighbors?”

The old man took a moment before he answered, reluctant to get drawn further into a conversation. “I haven’t talked to my son since I heard the news out’a Dallas. That’s where he lives, with my grandkids. I haven’t talked to a neighbor since the last one turned last week.”

“How do you know he was the last one to turn?”

“She,” he corrected.

“How do you know she was the last one to turn?”

“’Cause I seen ‘em all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I seen ‘em all out on the road, one or two at a time. First, I wouldn’t see ‘em for a day or two, then they’d turn up out in the road, walkin’ down the street or tearin’ stuff up. Tryin’ to break inta houses, ‘n I seen ‘em kill some folks out front.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m really sorry about your door. But it kind of just fell apart when I hit it.”

Angry again. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that was an accident?”

“No, no. I’m just saying that it broke a lot easier than I thought.”

“Yeah, me too,” the old man agreed.

“Hey,” I ventured a change of subject, “do you have a hacksaw or something?”

“Nope.” The old man’s eyes followed the chain from my neck up to Nico’s neck. “Fer them chains, I reckon?”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“I got some bolt cutters that’ll cut right through them locks.”

“You’re a life saver.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Can I get up off of the floor?”

The old man lowered the rifle. “Mabye. How’d you get them chains?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I answered.

“You in some kinda trouble?”

I laughed out loud at that.

Chapter 19

The garage smelled of machine oil, sawdust, and gasoline. It was clear that the old man used it for a workshop. What he worked on wasn’t at all clear.

“I’m Nico Wright.” Nico extended his hand toward the old man as he stood in the center of his garage, looking at several toolboxes stacked on shelves against the wall.

“Mr. Mays,” the old man answered, but didn’t offer to shake Nico’s hand. “Don’t wanna ketch it. Hope ya understand.”

“Sure, ah, Mr. Mays.” Nico dropped his hand.

“Not sure where I left them bolt cutters. Don’t use ‘em much.”

“Thanks for helping us out,” I told Mr. Mays.

“Yeah.” Mr. Mays didn’t look at me. “Don’t know what I’m gonna do about that door now. This house ain’t safe with no door.”

“You’re welcome to come with us,” I offered. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Where to?” Mr. Mays looked at me and grinned, exposing his old, yellowed teeth. “I’m guessin’ if you boys had a place to stay you wouldn’a been breakin’ into mine.”

“Well…” I didn’t really have a response that. Nevertheless, I pushed on. “My friends and I were staying up on the hill across the river…”

“Up ‘er with all of them nekkid ones?”

“They weren’t always there,” I found myself getting defensive for Sarah’s neighborhood. “I need to get back to them.”

“Think I’ll just stay here,” Mr. Mays told me. “I don’t know how you boys was raised, but it seems like you owe me a door before ya go.”

Nico chimed in, “I have an idea, Mr. Mays. After you cut these chains off, I could stay here and help you find a door. Zed can get back to his people.”

“His people?” Mr. Mays asked. “They ain’t yer people, too?”

While Mr. Mays went to work shuffling through the junk on the shelves, Nico and I related the story about how we came to be chained to one another. Of course, Mr. Mays didn’t believe us. Nevertheless, he did eventually find the bolt cutters, and he freed us. Afterwards, he apologized to both of us for being unable to offer us the hospitality of a meal. He’d run out of food in the house a week or so prior but had been tying fishing lines each morning to tree branches that overhung the river. He’d been having decent luck with that but hadn’t caught anything that day.

It was after seven o’clock and the sun was low in the western sky, taking the sharp edge off of the heat. The mosquitoes were starting to swarm, and I gave Mr. Mays and Nico a wave as I pushed the canoe out into the river, wondering what the chances were that I’d ever see them again.

Chapter 20

It was Steph I thought about as the canoe glided over the glassy surface of the river. I remembered what she looked like on that first afternoon in Sarah Mansfield’s house when we were alone together in the living room. I watched her walk across the floor toward the kitchen in a pair of salvaged blue jeans that looked like they had been tailored for her, effortlessly looking like the last beautiful thing left in the world.

Or maybe it was a mundane memory, enhanced by the hydrocodone that she’d stuffed into my mouth.

Stop being a dick about everything, Zed. Let it be real. Let it feel good.

Did she escape when the naked Whites overran Sarah Mansfield’s house? Or did Freitag fuck her like she fucked me? What of the others? Was Murphy’s body, or the remains of it, up there in that theater recliner, rotting away? Oddly, my anger didn’t boil. I wasn’t depressed over the possible death of my friends. Maybe I was past that. Maybe I was letting a cold malevolence toward Freitag grow in my soul, pushing everything else out.

As the water’s surface turned golden under a sun that was nearing the horizon, my canoe floated in front of Sarah Mansfield’s open boathouse. Seven or eight naked Whites were inside howling and slavering at the sight of me—I guess the canoe made me look like a normal human, a tasty morsel—but not daring to enter the water and come for a bite.

Paddling the boat right up to the dock was probably a bad idea.

Instead, I scooted up the river for bit and paddled the boat over toward the shore, where I let the current carry me back down in the direction of the boathouse. Due to the overall secure design of the Mansfield estate, the boathouse had no windows. All of the walls were solid. So by coming at the boathouse from the side, the infected inside couldn’t see me.

They were quieting down when I pushed the boat up onto the bank just a dozen feet upriver from the boathouse. I didn’t tie it off. It seemed to be planted firmly enough on the bank that it wouldn’t float away by itself.

In a move I probably should have skipped, I looked down at myself as I pulled my T-shirt off and threw it into the canoe. My God, I was thin. My stomach muscles had definition that I hadn’t seen since high school, but my ribs were just as prominently displayed. When was the last time I’d eaten? I couldn’t answer that. I was losing track of the days. All I really knew about that was that it had been long enough that I no longer felt hunger. What I did feel was an oppressive fatigue that made even the effort of paddling the canoe across the river difficult.

I needed to get some food, but first things first.

I took off my boots and socks and left them in the bottom of the canoe. My pants fell down around my feet on the bank and then followed. I hesitated at the skivvies; all of those puritanical prohibitions against being naked in public kept the elastic drooped on the jutting bones of my pelvis; that, and the fear that starvation might have shrunken my manhood along with the rest of me. But all of the infected in Sarah Mansfield’s house were naked. The only way to fit in would be for me to be naked as well. With the slightest of efforts, I tugged down and my underwear dropped to my feet.

Nice surprise!

If anything, the lost weight made my favorite parts look larger by comparison.

Only a kitchen knife—a parting gift from Mr. Mays—separated me from the savages at that point. I was ready to fit in. The only tricky part would be swimming up to the dock and climbing up out of the water. What would the Whites in the boathouse think of that?

Into the cold water I went, wading through patches of sticky muck and over slippery stones. Sharp rocks seemed to animate themselves in their efforts to poke my bare feet. When the water was waist deep, the duckweed became a nuisance, dragging prickles and slime over my skin and finding its way into crevices where such things should never go.

Once I was within a few feet of the boathouse, I reached out a hand to the wall and slipped off of a wide, flat rock into water that was up to my neck. But as I went down, I got a grip on one of the metal bars beneath the boathouse. Underwater, it was constructed as a cage to let water flow through and to keep people like me out. On the top edge of the cage walls, just above the water’s surface, the solid walls were built.

With nowhere to put the knife, and wanting to keep my hands free, I put the blade between my teeth cowboy-movie-star-style and pulled myself along the wall of the boathouse. Hand over hand on the underwater bars I went, until I came to the wide boat door on the front.

The deck inside was constructed in a U-shape along the back and side walls of the structure. The boat door, though, was offset from the center of the building so that one side of the doorway ended right at the edge of the interior decking. The other side—the side where I was—couldn’t be reached from the deck.

Ducking my head beneath the water, I confirmed that the bars of the underwater cage stopped at two or three feet beneath the surface where the boat door opened. That made perfect sense, of course. The boat and jet skis needed room for their draft.

Moment of truth.

I moved over in front of the open boat door. The infected inside immediately saw me and started to howl.

Twelve feet of water separated me from the nearest of them. Any one of them could easily have jumped in and waded across, but I was betting that they, like all the others so far, were hydrophobic.

That proved to be a good guess. Not one dipped so much as a toe in the water.

Using the boathouse wall for balance, I climbed up onto the top edge of the underwater cage and stood up straight in the open door. With the water up to the middle of my thighs, I wanted the Whites on the decks to see that the bobbing head they first spotted in the water wasn’t food at all, but a naked White, just like them. More importantly, a naked White with a knife. I don’t know if they understood what the knife was, or whether it implied a degree of status among them. But I hoped that guess would prove correct, as well.

As I stood there, waiting patiently, the infected in the boathouse came to realize that I wasn’t food after all, and one by one stopped making a fuss.

So far, so good.

The next part would be tricky. I needed to get over to the deck without them forgetting what I was. For all I knew, they had the memory span of goldfish and would start thinking I was food again three seconds after I was back down in the water.

Or was that three-second thing just another spurious urban myth of which I needed to disabuse myself? How many outright falsehoods had the protective umbrella of civilization allowed me the luxury of believing through the years? Without a single question, in most cases!

With no mortal consequences waiting in the wings, there were few limits on the indulgence of personal ignorance.

Mistakes are paid for with blood.

A first corollary had to be “Don’t take it on faith.” Or, “If you it learned from watching TV, don’t bet your life on it.”

Carefully, I slipped back down into the water, taking the knife out from between my teeth and gripping it in a much more utilitarian fashion. A couple of the Whites became immediately agitated. I worked my way along the length of the underwater fence toward the deck. All eyes were on me. Of the two agitated Whites, one ran over to take up an intercepting position on the deck. The other followed, but kept a little distance.

Damn.

But that didn’t concern me as much as another White I spotted glaring at me from the far deck by the back door, simmering, but calm. That one looked like trouble.

When I got near the deck, one of the two agitated Whites started grabbing at me.

Well, that just wasn’t acceptable.

The water was up to the middle of my chest, leaving me the freedom to move my arms and torso. The bottom was mucky, but not so slippery that footing was difficult.

Another swipe of the White’s paw nearly touched my nose.

I leaned forward, just enough to tempt the White to try again. He did. I slashed back with my eight-inch blade and sliced a long gash on his forearm. The wound didn’t seem to bother him so much as pique his curiosity, as he lifted his arm to his face to watch the blood flow. But that didn’t hold his attention long. He was hungry and he thought I was food.

I turned the knife around in my hand so that instead of slashing, I’d be stabbing when the next swipe came. And came it did, just as I tightened my grip on the handle.

The hand came at my face, throwing an arc of blood through the air as it swung. Leaning into my stabbing motion, I put all of my weight into jamming the knife straight through the White’s forearm.

The blade hit skin and went right through muscle and tendon, nicking bone and lodging between the ulna and radius. The White immediately tried to jerk his arm back, but only succeeded in losing his balance and falling into the water. I pulled the knife free as he fell.

He howled. He splashed. He was frantic.

That was my chance.

With all attention on the White flailing in the water, I scrambled up the slippery, algae-covered underwater fence, using the garage door rails as handholds. Just as I got my left foot onto the wooden deck, I noticed the glaring White who had been by the door poised just a few feet away, ready to pounce.

Shit! How did he get over here so quick?

Challenging him, I held his eye and very deliberately moved to get my feet below me on the deck, keeping my knife ready to jam into his skull at the first chance. But he was smarter than I gave him credit for. Just as I was planting my second foot, the White charged. I wasn’t in a good position to stab him, though I tried anyway. He deftly took advantage of my imbalance, swatted at my arm, and somehow punched me in the head as I fell.

Without knowing how I got there, I found myself empty handed and laying on my back on the deck, with the alpha White’s foot triumphantly pushing down on my chest.

I didn’t know what he planned to do next, but I guessed that his rot-brained plans weren’t likely to turn out in my favor. And that’s all the thinking I needed to do, because with his leg propped up on my chest, trying to smash me like a bug, his genitalia were terribly exposed above me and within easy reach.

You’re not gonna like this next part, bitch!

I grabbed two tight handfuls around the base of his penis and testicles and put everything I had into trying to rip them all the way off.

Of course nothing detached, but God, I know it hurt when his balls squeezed through the vice of my grip because he howled with an expression of pain the likes of which I’d never heard before or since. I rolled toward the water and my chest pressed up on the foot that was planted there. So focused was the alpha White on the pain in his nuts that he lost his balance. Of that, I took immediate advantage and pushed harder. He fell into the water, splashing and howling, just like his comrade.

Ha!

I jumped to my feet and grabbed the first solid something I could get my hands on, a wooden boat paddle, and brought the blade down edgewise on the alpha’s skull. It was a glancing blow, but it was enough. He was dazed and lost his footing on the river bottom. Using the paddle again, I pressed it into his chest to hold him underwater. He should easily have been able to push it away and regain his feet, but he was past panic, with a severely debilitated brain. He drowned.

When it was done, the boathouse was silent. Two white bodies were floating in the water. Five Whites were gawking at me in some sort of reverence. And I had learned that going pantless held disadvantages too significant to ignore.

Looking around for my knife, I realized that it was gone. It was probably in the mud on the river bottom.

The five Whites were all inching closer to me, but keeping their eyes averted like beaten dogs. I weighed the possibility of crunching their skulls with the boat paddle, but thought better of it. Better to know their full intentions before I went up the elevator where there had to be many more. If things went badly with five, I knew I could get away. With the water just to my left, escape was as easy as falling in. On the other hand, if things went badly up in the compound, surrounded presumably by hundreds… Well, that wouldn’t end well.

So I walked confidently down the deck toward the back door of the boathouse. The first White I came to bowed her head and scooted out of my way. Creepily, just as I passed, I felt her hand on my back. Not aggressively, though. It was more of a caress.

I kept moving.

Another White passed and another pair of hands was on my skin, then in my hair. A pair of Whites in front of me were less inclined to move, and were downright stubborn when I tried to bull my way through. The fifth White joined and then ten hands were on my body, up on my shoulders and throat, then suddenly in my face and on my head. Their sweaty, rank skin pressed on mine.

The first handful of hair they ripped out pissed me right the fuck off. There was no pain, of course. My reaction was all violation and surprise. I pushed at the hands and tried to get away. More of my hair was pulled away, and suddenly the hands were on my head, yanking at whatever they could grasp.

Their bodies were slick and oily with weeks of unwashed sweat. Soft breasts, oh such a desirable thing in a previous life, pressed me in a cage of poking elbows and bruising knees. Every breath I drew was full of their exhalations of maggot rot and spit. Their nails bit my skin and their soft vocalizations were perversely orgasmic.

It wasn’t until all of the hair on my head was gone and blood was running off my scalp in rivulets and drips that the five let up. Hands rubbed over my head and palms dragged down my body from shoulder to buttocks before they separated.

I was a red and white monster, striped in my own blood.

The five went docile again and gave me some space. I rubbed blood out of my right eye and looked at the Whites harshly. I rubbed a hand over my hairless scalp and it came back solid red. I checked the whole of my head. There were no major wounds, just patches where the hair took some skin when it was ripped away.

I gave another thought to picking up the oar and bashing bloody the skulls of each of the Whites, but came to the realization that they’d actually done me a favor. Whatever kind of perverse acceptance ritual that was, I now looked like them, perfectly camouflaged to fit in, hairless and ghastly.

Fuck it.

Forward!

When I turned the knob on the back of the boathouse door, the five were wide-eyed with amazement. Apparently the problem of the doorknob had been beyond their abilities to solve. When I went through, though, they crowded in behind me and played follow the leader with me all the way to the elevator, where two more Whites were apparently stranded, staring at the silvery door.

I pressed the button next to the elevator door and it immediately slid open, empty.

Sweet.

All seven Whites shoved into the elevator with me.

Not so sweet.

Pushed against the back wall, it was difficult squeezing through the crush of bodies to push the button to get upstairs. Unfortunately, one of the Whites just wouldn’t fit, and the door wouldn’t close because he was in the way.

That was frustrating, but as I was coming to realize, nothing was going to go as smoothly as I wanted ever again.

Shoving and pushing came next, as I worked my way back out of the elevator. Of course, they all followed as soon as they realized what was happening. Once back out in the hall, I looked over the four females and three males—at least one of them needed to go—picking out the smallest of the men, an old guy with spindly arms and bad posture—the weakest one.

Without warning, I punched him hard in the face. Before he even knew what was happening, I punched him a second time. When I tried to knee him in the gut, he was staggering away and I missed. Two of the Whites closest to me, though, had already joined in and were slapping and pummeling as the old guy retreated.

He started to run. Blood was in his mouth and fear was in his eyes.

Several of my Whites went after him, but let up after a dozen steps, looking back to see that I wasn’t pursuing. They stopped and made monkey howls at the running man.

The guy got to the boathouse door far at the end of the corridor, put his back to it and looked at us with terror in his eyes. Whites weren’t bright—with notable exceptions—but they understood enough about social order and death to know when to run.

The elevator door had automatically closed while I was thinning my herd, so I pressed the button to open it back up. It was still empty and I stepped inside. This time, my entourage fit, the door closed, and we were lifted up toward Sarah Mansfield’s compound.

Chapter 21

The elevator came to a stop at the rooftop pool deck and the door opened up to the remains of a burnt orange and blood red sunset out across the western hills. The pool deck was in disarray; some of the loungers had been pushed over, cushions from others were strewn about. Over in the far corner, I spotted bloody remains. The Whites had fed there. But on whom did they feed?

That question would need an answer.

It took some shoving to get my Whites going through the door. As soon as we started to move, the two that had been stuck staring at the elevator downstairs ran immediately to the edge of the pool and knelt down to drink. The others had had plenty of water where they had stranded themselves.

Following the two to the edge of the pool, I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off of the blood and bones in the corner. I needed to go examine them and see if could figure out if those were remains of my friends. But dammit, I didn’t want to. I’d come into the house looking for proof that my friends had escaped, that they were alive. I wasn’t ready to deal with the opposite case.

Spinning up reasons in my mind to hold my position, I wondered how many days it had been since I’d last eaten. I wondered when I’d last gotten a full night’s sleep. I wondered what day it was. Had a record breaking hot and dry August been replaced on the calendar by an equally brutal September? Would the heat ever abate?

The sky overhead darkened as the last glimmer of sun sank below the horizon. Lights inside the pool winked on, casting a turquoise light over all of us naked Whites on the roof.

The lights!

The electricity still worked!

I turned and looked at the door that led into the house. The glass panel was broken out, but the hall inside glowed with nightlights. The house was not a total loss. That was good. But even better, I recalled something that I’d spotted on my first night up on the roof with Dalhover.

Paralyzing procrastination disappeared as I turned and stepped toward the outdoor kitchen. There was one White in the kitchen area, squatting on the floor by the grill, playing with his fingers on his knees. Annoyingly, three of my entourage followed me into the area and seemed to be doing their best to stay between me and whatever I wanted to get to.

A stainless steel cabinet built on top of the counter just to the side of the empty refrigerator opened right up on smooth hinges. After all, why lock it? The purpose of the stainless steel cabinet was not theft protection, but weather protection. Inside, a six-head soda fountain gleamed, ready to meet my needs with Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, root beer, and tea. I pushed a finger against a lever beneath a soda head. It clicked, and out poured a stream of cold, brown soda.

Calories!

Beautiful, sugary, carbonated, caffeinated calories.

I grinned.

The Whites around me, alerted by the noise, stared at the soda machine and me.

Not wanting them to get agitated and start having the wrong kinds of thoughts, I squatted behind the counter and searched the cabinets underneath. When I found several tubes of disposable cups, I took them out and lay them on the counter next to the soda fountain. All of the Whites were still watching with great curiosity or hunger. It was hard to tell the difference. I pulled off the plastic sleeve protecting the cups and lined up a dozen beside the soda fountain.

Stop and think, Zed!

I put two hands on the counter and leaned over, staring at the soda machine. It was chock full of sugary calories and caffeine. I was starving. If I drew out the sodas, would the Whites drink with me, or decide that I was being too much like a normal human to not eat me? Looking over to the far corner of the roof where the bloody mess of bones lay, I decided that these guys weren’t nearly as starving as I was.

Pure rationalization? Maybe.

Did I mention that I was starving?

Well, here goes nothing.

I picked up two cups, one in each hand, shoved them under a couple of soda heads, and pressed. The soda heads clicked. Something underneath the machine hissed and the soda flowed out with the sound of a tiny jet engine. Ignoring the Whites for fear of what they were doing, I held the cups under for as long as I dared and then spun around, shoving a cup in the clenching hand of the closest White. At the same time, I brought my cup up to my mouth and drank.

Monkey see, monkey do, don’t fail me now.

Something going into a mouth froze the attention of all four Whites in the kitchen area. They were eager learners where food was concerned. The one with the cup, though, must have been slow because he just looked at me and licked his lips, I hoped because of what I was drinking.

Without lowering my cup, I reached out a hand, put it beneath his cup, and lifted. A little priming was all he needed. He proceeded to put the cup to his lips and tilt it up. Root beer flowed into his mouth and down his chin, but enough of it got where it was going to have the desired effect. Grinning, he lowered the empty cup.

As quickly as I could, I filled two more cups and thrust them into the hands of my spectators. Two more cups followed and by that time all the Whites in the kitchen area were crowding around me, trying to get their mouths under the soda heads to drink as the soda flowed out. I managed to squeeze out of the melee with two full cups of soda that I greedily chugged.

It took a span of time measured in seconds, maybe minutes, for the sugar and caffeine to hit me with the power of a nose full of cocaine. Energy and optimism, absent just moments before, bulged at my seams.

Every White on the roof figured out that some kind of foodstuff was flowing from the soda machine, and they all crowded around, pushing and shoving, trying to get their share of empty calories. My cups were empty, so I rejoined, and after getting jostled a bit, I had myself another nearly full cup of at least a couple of kinds of soda and a pretty good measure of spit. But fuck it. If drinking out of the river with its occasional floating body hadn’t killed me, zombie spit wasn’t going to do the trick. I gulped it down.

My belly was bulging and gurgling. No more soda would fit for the moment.

Laying myself over one of the kitchen counters, I was able to access a utensil drawer. Out of sheer luck, the first one I opened contained knives. I grabbed one with a good, long blade and substantial handle. At that moment, the urge to whiz hit me just as hard as that energy and optimism had a few minutes before. Squirming back off the counter, my feet hit the deck and I hurried over to the edge of the roof, where I rained a little unhappiness down on the Whites below. That’s when I noticed the long wall that bordered the front of Sarah Mansfield’s property.

Holy shit!

The entire length of wall had fallen over. How did that happen?

The compound below was covered with naked Whites. Some were lying down, resting for the night. Some squabbled. There were howls and screams. Some fed on their brothers and sisters. Some chose fucking to while away their nighttime hours. The cedar trees beyond the remains of the wall were full of them. There was scarcely a space I could see that didn’t have a naked white body in it.

In the culvert between the main house and the garage, the tiny Mercedes sports car was laying on its back. Rammed into that with its rear end pointing up to the sky as it leaned against the side of the culvert, and more importantly, against the catwalk, was one of the Humvees, a three-ton ladder.

It was time to get back on task. And the first task was investigating the dead at the end of the pool. It could be avoided no longer.

There were two skulls down there. That much was clear enough. As I walked along the side of the pool toward the corner, gory pieces of skeleton stood out from the mess—a tibia, the remains of a hand, a rib cage with the lungs and heart dug out through the bottom. A pelvis draped in yellowish red tendons.

But no clothes!

I looked around the area. There were no torn clothes anywhere. No bloody clothes. None!

That meant it wasn’t Steph, Murphy, or any of the others. In their hunger, the Whites had eaten some of their own. The Aubrey equations were at work. Good!

But there were still three floors of Sarah Mansfield’s house below me.

Startled by a sound behind me, I jerked around to see that a couple of the Whites that I’d picked up in the boathouse, apparently full of all the soda their stomachs could hold, were coming toward me. I put some distance between myself and the roof’s edge, just in case. But they had no nasty intent. Instead, they stopped and watched me, dogs waiting on a treat.

Hmm.

Chapter 22

There were five of us in the elevator that time when the door opened into the lobby in front of Sarah Mansfield’s theater room. Before I was able to make sense of anything that I was seeing, the smell hit me: sweat, death, feces, and urine.

My stomach heaved and I stumbled against a couple of my followers. The smell didn’t bother them, though. Not in the slightest.

Through the elevator’s open door, I spied fifteen or twenty infected scattered across the marble floor. The floor was no longer white, but smeared in the most disgusting mix of blood and shit. There were gnawed bones, and just about anything that could be torn or broken was. Amidst that mess, the Whites on the floor were scouring through remains for bits of anything fleshy. The fetid little prizes found promptly went into their mouths.

I feared that the plan I’d formulated before arriving was not going to work.

The entourage and I exited the elevator and none of the infected already there took notice. That much was good, at least.

Off to my left, the glass walls of the wine cellar were smudged, but unbroken. Inside, hundreds of bottles of wine were still safe. Good to know!

To my right, there were Whites standing in the doorway of the video room. They weren’t jostling one another nor vocalizing. Even their nervous hands were still.

Calm?

I led my group over among them and systematically pushed myself between their stinky bodies and got inside.

Thank God!

The video monitors were all intact and functioning, showing views of the road, the walls, inside and out, the house’s common spaces and the boathouse. All the infected inside the video room were motionless, mesmerized by the flashing colors on the screens. There was no sound to go along with the video. Either it had been turned down or the speakers had been broken. Probably best that it was quiet. Sound was a trigger for the weak-minded infected.

A cursory glance at the monitors showed Whites in all of the common areas of the house. What’s more, every bedroom door was open. So the remote possibility that the others had locked themselves into one of the bedrooms did not pan out. Good, I guessed. I’d have no way to get them out if they had locked themselves in.

Pushing my way to the front of the hypnotized Whites, I knelt down by the desk in front of the wall of video monitors. Where was the chair? A keyboard was pushed to the back of the desk and I slowly slid it out so that I could type. With no previous reason to look at any of the historical video footage, I didn’t know how much, if any, was stored, nor how to access it.

Doing my best to type lightly—no good reason to draw attention away from the pretty colors on the screens—I fumbled with shortcut key combinations for a while and finally lucked into the right set of keys to switch one of the forty-two inch monitors over to a graphical interface with all of the menu options that I was going to need.

A wireless mouse lay on the floor under the desk. I retrieved that, and put it to work selecting the menu option for historical video. I scrolled down through archived increments of an hour each. There looked to be a full week’s worth of them. For better or worse, I’d soon have my answer as to what happened to my friends.

I selected a video roughly eighty hours back in time and clicked. Once I saw whether there were Whites in the video, I would know which half of the rest of the videos contained what I was searching for.

All of the screens flashed black, and the patience of the Whites in the video room with me lasted through about two seconds of that. They started to shuffle and grunt. My heart raced. Before things got ugly, the bright, colorful images returned, filling the screens with video from eighty hours earlier. The Whites calmed, mesmerized once again.

Whew!

The video on the screens showed that the compound and the house were free of the infected. I watched for a few minutes, not anxious to turn the screens black again. The time stamp on the video read six a.m. several days ago. The surveillance camera in the theater showed me a view of five sleeping people—Dalhover, Murphy, Harris, Russell, and the vindictive cunt, Freitag. She’d come back. I wondered what she told them to explain my disappearance.

Steph and Mandi were nowhere to be seen. But the video room had no camera in it, so they were probably in there. Out on the street there were dozens of Whites, mostly squatting in sheltered spots under the cedars at the edges of the asphalt. There were eight or nine infected sitting on the driveway and leaning on the gate. Perhaps tired from a long night of beating with their fists.

Back on the archive list, I jumped forward twenty-four hours and clicked on that set of videos. The screens went black. The Whites in the room got perturbed, but the video feed returned, just as before, and displayed a compound overrun with Whites.

I had a twenty-four hour period bracketed, and in that time, the infected had swarmed the compound.

The next set of archived videos, from twelve hours sooner, showed much the same thing. My bracket of time was a twelve hour period three days prior.

I had to reload several more sets of archives before I’d bracketed down to the hour in which everything had happened, sometime during the ten o’clock hour that morning. I let the video run.

My friends were moving around in the foyer area, agitated. Steph appeared to be directing Harris and Freitag, who were collecting things and ferrying them down to the ski boat. She periodically stopped and spoke toward the video room. Dalhover was probably inside, and they were conversing.

Turning to look at the monitor with the theater view, I felt instant relief. Murphy was sitting up in his recliner, rubbing his head. Mandi was attentive, with a hand on his back, urging him to… stand, I guessed.  They were preparing to leave. Good. Very good! They didn’t know what was about to happen, but they were preparing for the bad possibilities.

At twenty minutes in, the camera outside the front wall showed hundreds of Whites assaulting the front gate with their fists and the combined weight of their surging bodies. The gate was flexing with each push. Down in the boathouse, the ski boat was loaded. Steph, Dalhover, and Harris couldn’t be seen. Presumably they were in the video room by then. The others were in the foyer. Murphy was sitting on the floor, looking half drunk. I had no way to gauge his state of recovery, but he was awake and he was mobile. That was good.

When everything went to hell, it started much like it had at the Evans farm. Helices of Whites emerged from the cedars across the road, slimy tentacles of an enormous white beast. There were three or four helices when I first noticed, but that quickly became a dozen, then more. In minutes, the helices were gone and there was only the horde, washing across the road and through the cedars, splashing against the compound wall.

The Whites didn’t focus on the gates. Whether through planning or the sheer weight of the mob just pushing forward, they spread out along the front wall, filling in the gaps between themselves and compressing together, shoving from behind, leaving no empty space. There was no inch of the wall that didn’t have white hands and infected bodies pressing against it. The gravel road was hidden by the mass of  bodies. The thicket of cedars was alive with them. The street was full, and still more pushed through the forest from the other side of the road.

Then, what I’d have bet was not possible, happened. The wall swayed.

The flexing of the wall energized the horde, and they redoubled their efforts.

All along its length, the wall leaned, then suddenly fell over. The pushing Whites fell on top of it, only to be trampled under the feet of those behind as they rushed onto Sarah Mansfield’s green grass.

After that, everything happened way too fast.

The failure of the wall marked bug-out time for everyone inside, and they hurried into the elevator. At the last second, there was a short, tense conversation, and both Mandi and Harris ran up the stairs. The elevator containing the others descended to the boathouse.

Outside, the horde had already covered most of the tiered compound. Fists were beating on the concrete walls of the house and the metal doors of the garage. The culvert below the catwalk was full of Whites, running or jumping to the grab the catwalk that was hopelessly out of their reach. Whether or not they knew that human meat was inside was irrelevant. For some reason, they believed it.

The elevator got to the bottom of the shaft. Freitag ran down the corridor to the boathouse. Steph assisted Murphy, who was slow and wobbly. Russell meandered along. Dalhover, with his rifle at the ready, kept an eye back up the corridor.

Harris and Mandi were in the kitchen by then, entering the pantry.

What the hell could be so important? Go! Go!

From within the mass of Whites in the courtyard, the Mercedes sports car unexpectedly emerged, pushed by a hundred hands. It fell into the culvert, crushing a dozen Whites as it flipped and landed upside down.

In the kitchen, Harris and Mandi both heard the sound and snapped their heads around to look from whence it came. They were frozen with indecision. They had no way of knowing what it was.

I urged them to run. None of us, me in the video room, or them across the span of three days, realized how urgent that need was.

Mandi ran across the dining room to look out the windows. She saw the Mercedes in the culvert. She saw the Whites climbing on top to try and reach the catwalk that was still too far above their heads.

Down in the boathouse, Freitag jumped into the ski boat, opened the outer door, and started the engine. If she decided to desert the others, there’d be little they could do except die.

Steph, Murphy, Russell, and Dalhover were still twenty yards from the door that led through the backside of the boathouse, and moving slowly.

Up in the courtyard, the horde parted, and the Humvee that had been parked in the courtyard appeared as though being birthed by a massive white beast. Just as they had done with the Mercedes, the infected pushed it over the edge of the culvert. It smashed headlong into the other car and leaned over against the catwalk. Just like that, the Whites had access to the house.

Mandi’s face twisted in a silent scream and Harris bolted out of the pantry with his rifle at the ready. He looked out the window. I couldn’t see his face then because of the angle of the camera, but his shoulders slumped, his knees seemed to bend. It was the body language of, “Oops, I fucked up.” Both Harris and Mandi ran.

The Whites were climbing over the Humvee and were pouring onto the catwalk.

Freitag loosed the lines that tied the ski boat to its cleats on the dock and quickly planted herself in the driver’s seat. She looked at the closed door on the backside of the boathouse. She looked out the open door to the river. She was thinking.

Don’t you do it, you bitch!

The Whites running up the catwalk hit the front door hard enough to shatter the glass. If not for its vine-patterned wrought iron innards, it would have given way and the infected would have caught Mandi and Harris right there in the foyer. The pair of them nearly tumbled down the stairs, they descended them so fast. But the catwalk was filling with pushing Whites.

Down at the boathouse, Murphy and Steph reached the back door and pushed it open. Russell followed them through. Freitag was still there, but didn’t budge an inch from her seat to assist Murphy into the boat.

Bitch!

Dalhover took up a position in the corridor just outside the boathouse’s back door and aimed his rifle up toward the elevator.

Up in the main house, Harris and Mandi got to the bottom of the stairs and ran across the white marble floor to the elevator. Mandi pressed the button, but the elevator didn’t open. They didn’t know it, but the elevator was still at the bottom of the two-hundred-foot shaft.

Shit!

The wrought iron front door gave way and the infected tumbled over one another into the house. Harris and Mandi froze, staring at the stairway they’d just come down. They had to have heard the door fall. Mandi was horrified. Harris’ face turned to stone. He drew a pistol and pushed it into Mandi’s hand, pointed at the elevator, took up a position that gave him a full kill zone on the last flight of stairs, and aimed his weapon.

Mandi pounded on the elevator doors, begging it to hurry.

Whites started down the stairs, and Harris’ rifle erupted with fire.

Down in the corridor to the boathouse, Dalhover perked up. He’d heard the familiar, but muffled sound.

Steph and Murphy were both in the ski boat with Freitag and Russell.

C’mon! I pleaded along with Mandi for the elevator to hurry, but the stairway was full of Whites now, and Harris was firing as fast as he could aim and pull the trigger. Still, they came, and each infected, grasping hand got closer and closer in spite of his efforts.

He was going to die.

They were both going to die.

Harris ejected an empty magazine and pushed in another, but that respite in the flow of bullets was enough to seal that outcome. A White had fallen at his feet and latched onto his leg. That threw him off balance and his next shots missed their mark. Another White grabbed a handful of his shirt. He turned to Mandi just as the elevator door opened.

Mandi’s face was running with tears and she was screaming. It was clear, even as Harris was being overwhelmed, that he was urging her to run.

Mandi fell into the elevator and pressed the button to close the door. A White bypassed Harris and ran toward the closing door, but Mandi fired three shots. Blood and brains exploded from the White’s head, and he fell short.

The elevator door closed, and the mass of bloody Whites shredded Harris’ body as he screamed.

Harris had made a bad choice, but he was a brave man. In the end, he’d sacrificed himself to save Mandi. How the hell did he get stuck with Freitag?

Pausing the video, I made a mental note of the timestamp and took several long, deep breaths. It was hard to watch.

They’re going to make it. They’re going to make it.

Apprehensively, I started the video again. After many painfully long seconds, Harris stopped struggling. By that time, Mandi, staggering under the weight of her tears and grief, had fallen onto Dalhover, who took a moment to understand what had happened before guiding her into the ski boat. Moments later, the ski boat rumbled out into the river and headed upstream leaving only dead Specialist Harris behind.

It was only video, but I still felt a sense of abandonment.

Back on the chain gang, I’d never doubted—well, almost never doubted—that I’d get free, never doubted that I’d be reunited with my friends. But I knew then exactly where they were. Now, I didn’t.

Disconnecting from those emotions, I focused instead on an academic question. I slid the progress bar on the video back to where the first of the White helices emerged from the cedars across the street, and did the simple math in my head. A feeling of helplessness fell on me so deep that it roiled nausea up from my stomach and through my throat.

Twenty-three minutes.

That’s it.

Twenty-minutes after the first of the helices came out of the cedars was all it took for Specialist Harris to fall under an onslaught of hungry Whites while the elevator door closed on Mandi’s tears.

Fast forward.

It took seventeen minutes for the horde to amass enough strength to push the wall down. After that, just a hair under six minutes was all it took for the Whites to figure out how to push the cars into the culvert to gain access to the catwalk, break in the front door, and get their grip on Specialist Harris.

How long had Murphy and I been in the compound before we finally got inside? An hour? Two? The Whites were inside for six minutes.

But it wasn’t the thought that the combined intelligence of the horde was smarter than me that was strangling my hopes. In Sarah Mansfield’s relatively hidden, seemingly well-defended compound, we’d fared no better than the hospital staff had at Dr. Evans’ farm in their hundred-year-old farmhouse with easily breakable windows and flimsy doors.

The emergent intelligence of the mob along with the guidance of the Smart Ones had broken down the defenses with ease. With Smart Ones in the world, perhaps no hideout was safe. The real lesson that I needed to learn, one that I kept avoiding with all of my running and hiding and hoping, was simple. If the Smart Ones lived, humanity would die.

Only one conclusion made sense after that. Genetics and luck had burdened me with the perfect camouflage for hiding among the infected. And with that luck, nature had granted me a license to kill them.

Especially the Smart Ones.

Chapter 23

Sorting back through the video archives, I found the one that contained Freitag’s return after she abandoned me down the river. Dalhover and Steph had been in the video room at that moment, so before Freitag had even closed the boathouse exterior door, they knew that she was alone.

When Freitag exited the elevator into the theater lobby, she stepped into a hornet’s nest of taut emotions. Everybody but Murphy was in the brightly lit foyer. Steph’s face was hard and her eyes were cold. Her body language was confrontational and she didn’t hesitate one second in starting her interrogation. But she didn’t get outwardly emotional.

Not so much for Mandi, who, with every word she spoke, spewed her emotions all over the lobby. She was yelling. She was crying. She was mad as hell. It was Specialist Harris’ big, restraining hands that kept her from physically assaulting Freitag.

Dalhover stood back, his poker face gone, his eyes ablaze. His hands were on his rifle, and I had no doubt he would have used it if the situation escalated. Or maybe if he had any good excuse to do so.

Freitag, for her part, was motionless. She let Steph and Mandi blaze through their anger in silence. When they wound down, though, tears were running down her face.

Good! At least you feel guilty, bitch!

Then Freitag said something, maybe five or six detached words. Mandi exploded and screamed at her again. I don’t know what Mandi said. I’m no lip reader. But she repeated it several times. Harris gently pulled her away from Freitag.

I wanted to turn up the volume and listen but felt sure that that would cause a problem with my infected peanut gallery.

When Freitag spoke again, she gestured to her shirt, and opened it up. The buttons were gone. The T-shirt underneath was torn.

What the fuck?

Her garments had not been in that state when she ditched me. Had she stopped on the way back and been attacked?

Freitag proceeded and her tears flowed in earnest. She gestured dramatically.

Without the context of her words, it was impossible to know exactly what she was telling them, but it was clear that she was conveying a story of violence. She had been attacked.

Steph seemed to soften. Specialist Harris’ face darkened. Mandi was having none of it.

Then it occurred to me. Her tears were a ruse, an act. She was selling them a load of bullshit about me. She was painting herself as a victim and me as some kind of villain.

I hated her.

In the end, I don’t know if they believed her, but they appeared to accept her story. What other choice did they have? I wasn’t there to present my side. Dalhover eyes still blazed, however, and his face was as cold as a chunk of weathered granite. He didn’t buy a word of Freitag’s bullshit.

Chapter 24

Back on real-time video, I spent some time looking at the Whites in all of the common areas. Some were feeding, some lying down to sleep, others very disturbingly engaged in sexual acts. I hoped that my guess about body temperatures being too high to produce sperm was correct. I shuddered to think what would become of babies born to infected, brain-fried mothers with insufficient calories and nutrients. How many would be stillborn or deformed? Would the survivors grow up to rule the world in a giant, intellectually-backward step, or would they become bloody little dinners for the other infected?

Surprisingly, the garage remained secure, protecting a Humvee and several very expensive cars in climate-controlled sterility. That prompted me to search on the computer for a program to manage the keypad codes on the doors around the compound. Having already figured out how to access the menu system, it was easy to find. It appeared to be a web-based application, and to my greater surprise, when I opened the admin screen, the password had been cached. I got right in. From there, it was a snap to grant my ATM PIN number—one number I was sure not to forget—a virtual all-access pass to the compound. I didn’t have any plans about what to do with that access, or if anything useful would be left of the compound when the Whites finally cleared out. It was just an inexpensive hedge against uncertainties in the future.

When I looked at the camera that had the best view of the living room, I was taken aback and switched the video feed to the one of the big screens. My first impression of the scene was that of Caligula’s throne room. Like every other room in the house, there were Whites, eating, squabbling, and fucking. But there was more going on there. The couches were rearranged along the walls. On those couches lounged a few dozen Whites, all men. Around them, servile infected women attended. The coffee tables were pushed together at one end of the room, creating a dais. In the center of the dais was a single chair where a naked White with intense blue eyes sat, looking out over his court like…

Like…

Like King Monkey Fucker!

Was this guy the head White in the naked horde or just a successful opportunist riding a wave of emergent behavior? No, fuck the emergent behavior theory. Sure, there was probably enough of that going on, but it was the hand of the Smart Ones that multiplied the lethal effectiveness of the Whites.

Whether right or wrong, I concluded that the bald-headed leader’s dumb ass was the reason all of these Whites, including me, were bald and naked.

Dammit, Zed!

I chastised myself for calling the dude a dumbass. He was at the head of an infected army tens of thousands strong, and very effectively destroying every pocket of human resistance in Austin. I was just a dipshit burglar with a stolen canoe, not in any position to besmirch King Monkey Fucker’s intelligence.

I hated him. But until that day in the future when I put a bullet into his squirmy, infected brain, I knew that I’d better respect him. And just as it had been when I was chained up by Nancy and Bubbles, intelligence and knowledge were my—were humanity’s—only advantages in fighting the Whites. After Jeff Aubrey’s lecture about the infected cannibalizing themselves, I had thought that time was on the side of humanity as well, but the Smart Ones were handily negating that advantage.

While thinking all of that through, the goals of my mission back into Sarah Mansfield’s house changed. I had learned what there was to be learned about Freitag and my friends. But I was, for the moment, in a unique position to garner a wealth of intelligence about the naked horde and its leaders. I’d likely never get that kind of chance again. So I sat and I watched, and all of my new, bright White friends in the video room helped.

I fumbled with keyboard for a few minutes to get the living room camera to pan and zoom. Once I had control, I started with King Monkey Fucker. I zoomed in and paid close attention. He sat still and confident. He definitely didn’t have that blank Forest Gump-like stare I’d seen on the faces of so many of the infected. He was watching those around him, and he was scheming.

A White came running into the room. The lackeys on the couch showed no interest. The White jumped up to the dais and bent over to whisper into the bald-headed leader’s ear, exactly as Nancy and Bubbles had conversed with their collection of halfwits.

Eventually the conversation came to an end and the bald guy pointed to a couple of indolent courtiers, whispered a final instruction, and the runner went to the two Whites who had been pointed out. The runner passed along the whispered instructions, and the three of them got up and jogged out through the house’s broken front door.

Very curious about what instructions could have been passed along, I watched the various cameras to see where the trio went—out onto the catwalk, down the Humvee ladder, across the compound, over the fallen wall, through the cedars, and down the street. I lost track of them among the infected in the distance.

Hmm.

I didn’t have any faith in the efficiency of a command-and-control system based on whispers and runners, but the results couldn’t be disparaged. There just had to be a significant emergent behavior component driving the horde. It had to be that the bald-headed leader and the other Smart Ones were adept, talented even, at nudging the horde in the direction that most fit their desires.

And as happens so often, my imagination, built on a foundation of a thousand grossly unrealistic action movies, switched gears, and ginned up a plan to slaughter King Monkey Fucker, his courtiers, and a pretty good number of his horde. With some luck and the right wind direction, I might kill off the whole damn bunch.

I smiled.

Switching the camera feed on the main screen to one of those in the garage, I had a look around in there. I switched to another camera in the garage, spent a moment scanning, and found that which I hoped would meet my needs.

Excellent! I can make this work.

And not like last time! I didn’t want any suicidal Tarzan moves in my future. Luck had its limits.

After switching back to the main menu, I searched around and found the house’s climate control system. I discovered that I could control the water purification system. I saw the status of the battery levels. I could change the house temperature and change when the outdoor lights came on and off. I could even see historical energy consumption reports and projections based on the schedule changes I was about to make.

Pretty spiffy.

I experimented with the lighting on the roof, and found that turning the lights off and setting them to turn back on at any time in the future was as easy as a few clicks.

Good.

I turned them off and killed the water in the misters attached to the pergolas as well.

Before getting up to leave, I gave some long, hard thought to whether I should spend more time surveilling the Smart Ones in the living room. In the end, my anxiousness to implement my plan eclipsed my desire to learn more. Besides, they’d all be dead in a few hours anyway. I knew enough.

Turning toward the door of the video room as I prepared to stand, I was startled.

Standing just to my right and looking down at me were two tall, wiry Whites, one male and one female, Yin and Yang in a match set. They didn’t look happy. And they were looking down at me. That one look up at them was enough motivation to make me tightly grasp my knife and prepare to use it. I could spring up and jam the blade up into the base of the brain through the throat just under the jaw. That would get one of them. The question was, would the other attack me if I did so?

Deciding which one to kill first came down to the eyes. In spite of the gender difference, they were equally formidable in appearance, covered with lean, athletic muscle. The male looked a little dim behind the eyes. The female looked just as sharp as King Monkey Fucker.

That settled it.

Just as I was about to launch myself at her, the female raised a finger to the side of her head. She left it there for a second, then pointed it at her mouth and then pointed it at me.

What?

She repeated the series of gestures.

I glanced at the man. He just stared.

The girl did it again.

She was trying to communicate with me!

Not knowing exactly how to react, I finally chose to mimic her gesture.

In return, I got the faintest of smiles, but the smile was only on the girl’s lips. It didn’t touch her eyes. She stepped back, pushing a mesmerized White out of her way as she moved. She gestured with her hand, making it clear that she wanted me to come along.

I hesitated.

She took another step. The guy moved to stay by her. She gestured again.

Steeling my nerves for what might come next, I slowly stood and followed, keeping my grip tight on the handle of my knife. If they’d found me out and had decided to kill me out on the lobby floor, I wasn’t going to go easily.

The girl continued to push through the Whites. Soon, I was following her out of the video room and across the marble-floored foyer. She guided me toward the ladies’ restroom, and as we neared, I spotted in the corner what I could only guess were Specialist Harris’ remains. In that bloody mess of clothing, boots, and  bones, I saw his rifle and his MOLLE vest. He’d never had a chance to reload when the Whites flooded down the stairs. Some of the magazines in that vest had to be full.

If I could make it work, those items were coming with me when I made my exit.

The girl and the guy went into the bathroom and I followed them in. Inside it was just like any public restroom you might come across. There were two sinks on one wall, along with a hand dryer. Two stalls were on the opposite wall.

The woman checked one stall to ensure that it was empty and then she led me—reluctantly I might add—into the other stall. Her man squeezed in with us. It was definitely not the kind of place for three people who, through choice or necessity, had given up on personal hygiene.

Unexpectedly, it was the guy who spoke first. He leaned in close, cupped his hands over my ear, and in a harsh whisper said, “Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

What the fuck was he telling me to do?

He pulled his cupped hands away, leaving the stench of his rotting breath hanging in the air around my head. I leaned away in what little space was available. He looked at me with the same dim eyes I’d first seen in him. Did he expect something from me? I looked at the girl and she leaned in close with her own whisper. “Blade hand has talk?” It was a question.

Was it advantageous to answer or not?

She leaned in again, breathing out a rotten halitosis that was as bad as her twin’s. “Blade hand has talk?”

We were in a confined space, and I decided that if push came to shove, I could kill them both before they did me any serious harm. Why not see where this would go? I nodded.

The insincere smile turned up on the girl’s face again and she nodded at me.

I shrugged.

She nodded at me again.

I shrugged. What?

She reached out and pulled my empty hand up to her ear. I figured that she wanted me to say something. That made me very nervous indeed. Nevertheless, I complied. Tiptoeing to reach her ear, I whispered, “Yes.”

When I pulled away, the guy leaned in close and cupped my ear. “Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Jesus, what a creepy bastard!

The girl leaned in. “More say.”

I was already impatient with this, but there was no way around it. I tiptoed up to her and asked, “More say? What do you want?”

When I pulled back, she looked astonished. She whispered to me again, with some urgency in her voice, “More say.”

I was perplexed. Their speech was obviously impaired by the virus. But how much could they understand? I whispered back, “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

Again she was astonished, and right away she whispered to me, “Many talks.”

The guy leaned in close. “Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

I ignored him and thought about what the girl was asking or telling. I wasn’t sure. I whispered back. “I can talk. Can you understand me?”

The girl was perplexed. She whispered back, “Underpants?”

Say what?

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

That dude needed to back off!

Inspiration struck. I tiptoed up to the girl. “You must follow me.”

She looked confused. She asked, “The Joel ass head?”

I nodded, and after a second of decoding, I confirmed with my whisper, “The Joel has said.”

Who the fuck is Joel?

She nodded at me and then whispered something to the male. Who knew what was going on in his insufficient maggot brain? But I think I had just put myself in charge.

With all three of us crowded into the stall, it was difficult getting the door back open. Some very close contact between smelly, sweaty bodies was required to get it done. I led the pair out of the stall, out of the restroom, across the messy lobby floor, and up the stairs. Wanting not to be seen by the Smart Ones in the living room, I led the pair through the dining room and then down the few stairs into the kitchen. Not going far enough into the kitchen so that I would be visible over the bar between it and the living room, I squatted down near a cabinet that I knew contained some pots and pans. Taking care not to clank them together, I withdrew the three largest pots and their companion lids.

The guy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Yeah, yeah.

With the lids on, I placed a pot at my feet and at the feet of each of my companions and then made a show of picking up the pot by the handles. The girl got it immediately, but the guy had trouble. I had to help him get his hands around the handles. Once there, he understood my meaning and picked it up with as little effort as any normal person.

After going back out through the dining room we crossed the foyer, taking care to avoid the glass shards, and exited the house via the catwalk. Thankfully, there were only a few Whites on the catwalk between the house and the garage. There were no infected near the door that led through the side of the garage.

Once we crossed the catwalk and reached the access control keypad beside the door, I flipped up the clear plastic cover and the buttons lit up from behind. The girl gasped in amazement. The guy got very nervous and couldn’t suppress his urge to repeat his phrase in my ear three more times.

I punched in my code and the door’s lock clicked. As soon as it did, I opened it and led the pair in, quickly closing it behind us. Leading them across the garage, I ditched my cooking pot and picked up a five-gallon plastic bucket that was sitting beside a bank of stylish lacquered cabinets. The search began in earnest after that. My plan called for a short list of items to MacGyver it to fruition. Some of those needed to be in the garage.

The first cabinet contained only car wax and various automobile cleaning products. Nothing of use to me. The next cabinet held something that made me smile, the one item that I thought I’d least likely find, a small electric air pump for inflating tires.

Sweet!

I stuffed it up under the woman’s arm and she understood immediately that it was now her job to carry the pump as well as the pot.

Further searching yielded a clear plastic hose and duct tape. Only one more item was needed from the garage: gasoline. Inside the garage were the Mercedes, the Humvee, the Tesla, and the old corvette. One of those was electric and two were diesel. But I needed gasoline. Diesel burns, but gasoline explodes.

As I started siphoning gasoline out of the corvette into my bucket, the female cupped a hand to my ear and asked, “For what?”

Hmm. “For Joel,” I answered, guessing at that moment that King Monkey Fucker’s name was Joel.

Happily, the bucket filled all the way up. After, I was able to fill the guy’s pot and the girl’s pot.

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Of course.

I put the lids on our containers and looked around. Was there anything else in the garage that I needed? No, probably not. We hauled our booty out of the garage, over the catwalk, through the broken front door, and up the stairs to the roof. Without incident, we deposited all our stuff there before getting into the elevator. Whether good or not, certainly without my consent, I picked up three of my entourage from earlier. So the six of us headed down.

The spindly guy with the slouch, the one I’d beaten before coming up to the house, was still stuck in the hall between the elevator and the boathouse. He ran and cowered in a corner when he saw me get off the elevator. When I passed him to get through the door into the boathouse, he was softly crying. He was a dim-witted monster who would kill me and gnaw on my bones given half the chance. But empathy is hard-wired in normal human brains, and I felt bad for the whimpering bastard anyway.

God, I hate this fucking world!

Turning back to the task at hand, the boathouse turned out to have exactly what I’d expected to find there: a large hundred-quart cooler, and a couple more gas cans with plenty of gasoline. I managed to get all of my slack-jawed followers on board and had them carry the items back up to the elevator and then back up to the top floor, where we deposited the items in the place I’d selected at a corner of one of the pergolas.

I looked over my items, checking them off of my mental list: gasoline, cooler, hose, duct tape, electric air pump. I still had my knife, so it looked like there was only one more optional item I needed, and of course several of a specific required item: incandescent light bulbs.

Leaving my stash where it sat, my entourage followed me around the rooftop pool deck, checking the light fixtures one by one. By the time I was halfway through, I knew what would be in the rest—energy–efficient, compact fluorescent bulbs. That kind would not suit my purpose.

But that wasn’t enough of an obstacle to deter me. I led my group through the broken glass door and onto the top of the stairs inside the house. We marched down to the interior catwalk that looked over the living room and Joel’s lounging courtiers. At the far end of the catwalk was Sarah Mansfield’s old room, the most likely place for me to find what I was looking for. On the way, I checked every room that I came to, but only found LED bulbs and more compact fluorescents. Frustration was starting to set in.

We made our way through Sarah’s expansive bedroom and into the master bath. Just inside, a twenty-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling mirror stopped me in my tracks. I stared at myself. My companions stopped with me, and because I was doing it, they stared into the mirror right along with me. I was just as white, bald, and crusted with scabs, blood, and grime as they were. We were all gaunt with wiry muscles, sallow cheeks, and desperate, sunken eyes. I was indistinguishable from them.

In my heart, I told myself that I wasn’t a monster, but the mirror insisted that I was a liar.

In an alcove that looked to have been constructed for exactly that purpose, a digital scale lay on the floor. On the wall to the right of the scale hung a chart with Sarah Mansfield’s weight, penciled in with dates, three or four weigh-ins per day, every day, with pages and pages and pages of aging sheets of paper, a history of her obsession. A small shelf by the chart contained a bottle of some diuretic, several kinds of laxatives, and at least a dozen herbs or supplements with which I wasn’t familiar.

Without thinking of the possible risk—that of activating the scale, a machine—I stepped up onto the scale. It wasn’t until I watched the black numerals on a silver LCD background illuminate from inside that I realized that what I’d just done was put my life at risk. Such were the powers of old habits.

The number that I’d just risked my life to learn was best left in the scale. A half-second of idle curiosity served only to depress me. I was wasting away.

Picking up the bathroom scale, I pressed it into the female’s hand, and she responded by cupping her free hand to my ear and asking, “Joel?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, in a whisper, of course.

The male, seeing his chance to communicate his predictable message, leaned close. I brushed past him and headed for the stairs that would take me down to the maid’s room and the laundry area.

More searching for bulbs. But damn, there wasn’t anything I could use.

That left the bottom floor with the theater and wine cellar. Maybe I’d get lucky down there. But not wanting to pass through the living room and get any unwanted attention from that room full of Smart Ones, I led the five back up the stairs from the maid’s quarters to the bedroom level and started out across the catwalk toward the main stairs.

Glancing down at King Joel Monkey Fucker and his semi-intelligent lackeys, wanting to know that they weren’t paying too much attention to me, my eyes scanned across a couple of side-by-side couches in front of the windows, and I nearly tripped. Sitting on the couch was a familiar-faced, blue-eyed beast, gnawing on a hunk of raw flesh. I caught myself in a stare, looked away, then stared again at his dirty, bloody face. I nearly came to a dead stop.

I couldn’t believe it.

It was only with a sense of near-physical pain that I maintained my nonchalance and kept my feet moving forward.

I looked again. I had to know. I had to kill the doubt.

Holy shit!

That flaming piece of shit!

It was him!

Fucking Mark!

Fucking rapist, pig, rat-fuck Mark!

His bald-headed, dumb ass was right there! Right fucking there!

Mark, Amber’s killer, was sitting in Sarah Mansfield’s living room on a couch with his rat-fuck Smart buddies, chewing on something bloody and raw. Every single bad thing I ever thought about that piece of shit was justified. Every rationalizing doubt that had crept into my brain as a good reason not to hunt him down and snuff him off of this earth was a mistake.

He needed killing, and I needed to know that I’d killed him.

I needed that satisfaction that way that I needed water to drink and air to breathe.

And all of his rat-fuck friends in the living room would die right along with him.

My cold malevolence was back. I led my simple-minded crew up to the roof, dropped off the bathroom scale and then took the elevator down to the theater level. There the light bulb search continued. There was nothing of use in the foyer. Nothing of use in the theater or on the marquee. Nothing in the video room and nothing in the wine cellar. And to think that there was a time when going green seemed like such a good idea to me.

How in the hell could there not be one single motherfucking incandescent bulb in a house this fucking big?

The lights in the old corvette! Of course! No. Those all ran on DC and wouldn’t fit in the sockets where I needed them to go.

What to do? What to do?

Anxiety was kicking in. I thought of missing the chance to kill Joel, a big chunk of the naked horde, and especially Mark. The solution was right there, just past the tips of my fingers. But it was trying its best to elude me.

I found myself standing amidst the shit, urine, and sweat smell of my entourage in the middle of the floor with the theater in front of me, the wine cellar to my left, and the video room behind me. I noticed the soda machine sitting the counter and figured I’d get some more calories in me. Perhaps the calories could prime my brain to think of an alternative to the incandescent bulbs in my recipe for destruction.

I marched my crew over behind the snack bar. First things first, the cups. I checked the cabinets one by one, opening each door in turn and found not a single cup. Had the incandescent bulbs and the cups gone off to the moon with the fork and the spoon?

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

All I heard was, “Please jam that knife into my head.”

Two drawers under the snack bar counter proved as empty as the cabinets. I found napkins, salt, and butter-flavored popcorn oil, but no cups.

A small, waist-high refrigerator was built into one end of the snack bar.

What the hell. You never know.

Squatting down in front of the fridge, I opened it up. It didn’t make any sense that the cups would be in there, but not everything makes sense.

Nothing.

Damn.

I stared at the cold, empty, white box and sighed. Couldn’t I even get a soda? There was always the option of drinking straight from the nozzle.

I swung the door shut and just as it closed, a light bulb of inspiration slapped me in the face. I reopened the fridge and leaned in. The light bulb inside the refrigerator was incandescent!

Oh, hell yeah!

Reaching in to unscrew the bulb, I completely forgot about the cups and the soda machine. There was a refrigerator and a freezer upstairs in the kitchen, a small fridge in the maid’s quarters, and a fridge in the outdoor kitchen on the roof. I was off on hurried feet, and my entourage followed.

Chapter 25

My footing on top of the pergola atop Sarah Mansfield’s pool deck was firm, but uncomfortable. There were ten feet of cedar slats between me and the fifty-foot drop to one of the lawn tiers below, with no railing to keep me from going over the edge. On the bright side, the sun had been down long enough that temperatures had fallen into the nineties, and the late afternoon winds, so common this time of year, had died off.

Just as when I’d climbed over the wall with Dalhover’s and Harris’ help, one of the deck chairs, stood up on its end and leaned against a support pole, proved to be a pretty good ladder. Hoisting all of my cumbersome supplies up on top of the pergola made for slow going, but it had to be done. The electric pump—a necessary component of my Rube Goldberg contraption—would be noisy once activated, and very attractive to the Whites around the pool.

Construction went slower than I’d have wanted, but I was meticulous with each element. I had plenty of time, but I only had one chance to get it right.

I drilled a hole in the cooler with my knife and cut the valve off the air pump’s hose, leaving an open end. That went through the hole in the lid of the cooler and was secured with duct tape. The clear plastic tube that I’d used to siphon gasoline in the garage got hooked up to the cooler’s drain valve. The diameters didn’t match, so it wasn’t a perfect fit, but a liberal application of duct tape made it functional.

I cut the water hose that fed into the misting system mounted into the pergola and patted myself on the back for having the foresight to turn off the water when I’d turned off the lights from the video room. Nevertheless, water that was still in the system drained out onto the heads of my entourage who waited below, watching everything I was doing with confused interest.

I gave Kill-the-All Boy a wink, a nod, and a smile.

He didn’t respond.

Oh well.

With the misting system empty of water, I spliced the free end of the clear hose to the misting system hose. I turned the scale upside down and slid it beneath the cooler so that I’d be able to read it from the deck below.

Most of the gasoline—maybe twenty gallons—went into the cooler, which I didn’t fill to the top. I wanted to leave room for air that would be put under pressure by the air pump and would drive the whole system. I closed the cooler and used my duct tape to wrap it with several bands to ensure that it would stay closed. More of the duct tape went to securing the air pump to one of the cedar slats. I didn’t want it vibrating its way off the edge.

After climbing down off of the pergola, I pushed the incredibly heavy deck chair that I’d used for a ladder into the pool. Being made of ipe wood, it sank. I didn’t know if any of the Whites would be able to connect the equivalency of that chair with the other deck chairs, but I knew that one or two might be able to recall what I’d done with that particular one.

I used the last of my duct tape to secure the electric pump’s cord down one of the support poles far enough to reach an electrical socket. It remained unplugged for the moment. I looked up at the scale and checked the weight. The weight was going to be an important bit of information to the timeline of my plan.

Light bulb time.

Breaking the glass off of the five incandescent bulbs without damaging the filaments took some care. After that, it was easy work to spread them out into light fixtures built on the underside of pergolas. Of course, the bulbs would burn out within seconds of turning the lights back on, but I only needed those bare filaments to burn for a second or two. Maybe not even that long.

I walked over and stood by the pool, looking up at my contraption sitting atop the pergola, and thought through every step in its construction. I reviewed all the steps that I needed to take next. There was no room to screw the pooch on this plan.

Once I was satisfied, I went back over to the electrical outlet with the air pump’s cord hanging in front of it. I took a look over at the outdoor kitchen area and made a note of the time displayed on the microwave clock. I plugged the pump in. It buzzed loudly.

Every White on the roof was immediately transfixed.

Two seconds later, they were running toward the sound or reaching up toward the pergola’s cedar slats to get their hand on the air pump. I was careful to stay out of their way as they congregated. I made my way over to the outdoor kitchen, got a good view of the microwave clock, and waited.

Five minutes to kill.

All of the misting heads mounted under the pergola, emptied of water, started to cough and spurt as air was driven from their lines.

The contraption seemed to be working.

While I waited, a television commercial played through my memory, one that I’d seen as a kid. I had no recollection of what was being advertised, but for some reason, a masculine fellow with a gravelly voice held up a measuring cup with a quarter cup of gasoline inside and told me that it had the explosive equivalent of one stick of dynamite. Pretty impressive stuff to hear as a little kid, when every cartoon and old western movie I’d seen that had a demolition problem to be solved did so with a bundle of dynamite that would fit in your hand. Need to blow up a bridge? A bundle of six sticks of dynamite would do it. Need a safe blown up? A bundle of six sticks would do it. Need the Road Runner blown up? Well, in the absence of some Acme TNT, a bundle of six sticks would do it.

The misters had stopped coughing and were spewing a fog of gasoline vapor.

Twenty gallons of gas measured to three hundred and twenty cups. That converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty quarter cups, which, if the gravelly-voiced television commercial pitchman was correct, converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty sticks of dynamite. Sarah Mansfield’s house, formerly an architectural highlight of green construction in central Texas, had just been converted to a platform for a totally awesome gasoline vapor bomb.

My eyes were burning from the fumes in the air. I was starting to cough and there was a disturbing, light oiliness on my skin stinging in the open sores on my head where my hair had so recently been. Gasoline! If nothing else, I’d just succeeded in turning myself into a holiday sparkler. The clock on the microwave told me that five minutes had passed.

I checked the weight on the cooler and did some quick math. I had twenty-five minutes before all of the gasoline in the cooler would be misted out into the air above the house.

I made for the elevator to get my flammable Tarzan ass back down to the video room. Time was short. From the computer in the video room, I needed to set the timer on the pergola lights to switch on in twenty minutes. The broken incandescent bulbs would spark the gasoline vapor, and I needed to be pretty far up the river when that happened, lest I participate in the coming conflagration more than I’d want to.

Chapter 26

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Wiping putrescent spittle off my ear for the last time, I glanced at my cooperative female and then over at her annoying counterpart. We stood on the deck inside the boathouse with nothing but water between us and the open exterior door. I was empty-handed except for my knife. But on the way out of the video room, I took a chance and waded through Specialist Harris’ remains, then put the MOLLE vest into the girl’s hands and the M16 in the guy’s. They were both outwardly agitated once the rifle was in play, but they complied anyway and subsequently followed me into the elevator and then down to the dock.

Getting the items back was a different story. When I reached out to take the MOLLE vest, the girl wouldn’t let go. I whispered to her in her peculiar vernacular, “The Joel ass head.” She spent a moment having what passed for a thought in her brain and concluded that I needed to have the vest.

Trying the same lie to circumvent the male’s reluctance to let me have the M16 proved fruitless. There was only one quick way to resolve the issue. I put a hand on the rifle’s handle, right beside his, held tight, and fell backwards, letting gravity carry me into the water. Unfortunately for the guy, he didn’t quite figure out that he was at risk of getting wet until it was too late to recover.

We splashed in together.

The girl shrieked. The male howled and panicked, but he let go of the rifle. I pushed myself away from his flailing arms and legs and ignored them. They’d just become a non-factor as I waded into deepening water.

Paying a heavy toll in stubbed toes and bruised shins, I moved quickly out of the boathouse and through the water toward my canoe, dunking myself a few times along the way to wash off as much of the gasoline on my skin as I could. I’d probably burned off five minutes since setting the light timer in the video room. Only fifteen minutes remained until detonation.

As expected—or maybe hoped—the canoe was where I left it, and with each step closer, the water got shallower and I moved faster. Once there, I dropped my knife, new rifle, and vest on top of the clothes that I’d left in the bottom of the canoe and quickly pushed it out into the water. A few hard paddle strokes put me out into the current, and I chose to go down rather than upriver. My destination was upriver—the direction that Murphy, Steph, and the others had gone—but I needed to maximize the distance between me and my bomb. Paddling downriver with the current would give me more distance than paddling against it.

When I floated past the boathouse entrance, the female saw me and renewed her shrieking. To my surprise, the male was out of the water and pushing his dripping self up off of the deck.

Well, how about that?

I wondered how that experience would affect his fear of the water, but at about that same time, I realized that it didn’t matter. In fifteen minutes, he’d be dead.

It was time to paddle like my life depended on it, because it did. It took just a few minutes to get my heart rate up to a pounding, rapid rhythm. I gasped for breath as I neared my physical limit, slicing the canoe through the water at a good pace.

Mr. Mays’ house passed on the far bank, and it occurred to me that my gasoline vapor bomb could be a danger to both him and Nico. Fortunately or not, I had the detached presence of mind to know that those dice were already rolling. If they both were in the house and away from the windows when the bomb exploded, they were far enough away that they might be okay. My pulling the boat up to the bank and running up to the house with a warning on my lips wasn’t likely to change the outcome for them. By the time I got up there and explained the situation completely enough that they’d be willing to do something about it, the bomb would have detonated. So I pressed on down the river.

Labored distance grew between my canoe and Sarah Mansfield’s mountaintop compound. Questions nagged my idle mind as I paddled. Would the bomb detonate at all? Had I screwed something up? I reviewed all of the steps I’d taken, all of the things I’d checked along the way. It had to work. How big would the explosion be? Was I far enough away? Did I have any hope of getting far enough away? Should I stop and watch the fire rip the sky and blow the top of Mt. Bonnell into the river?

Paddle on and let those questions answer themselves, dumbass!

There was only one variable left in the equation that I had any control over, and that was the distance that I’d be from my bomb when it exploded. No matter what else happened, the likelihood of my being alive afterwards was dependent on how far downriver I was when the bomb went off.

Paddle!

More gasoline trivia bubbled to the surface of my brain. There was a conversion factor I’d heard once. No, I think I read it. I couldn’t recall the source, but the conversion was for TNT to gasoline in terms of explosive power. The ratio was ten to one. One ounce of gasoline held something like ten times more explosive power than TNT. Yes, that was it. Was it true?

How much gasoline had I used? Um, twenty gallons or so…

Keep up the paddling pace.

I didn’t know what a gallon of gasoline weighed, but I did know that water weighed something like eight pounds per gallon and that gasoline was lighter. So, maybe six pounds per gallon. Twenty gallons, then, would weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds—it sure felt like it when I was hauling it up to the top of the pergola—and that implied the equivalent of an explosion with the power of twelve hundred pounds of TNT.

But that’s half a kiloton!

I just made a half-kiloton bomb?

There’s no fuckin’ way!

They measure nuclear devices in kilotons.

I could barely breathe in enough air to sustain my effort after that. I picked up my pace, going as hard as I possibly could, rerunning the calculations in my head. Surely that answer couldn’t be right. Could it?

Paddle, dumbass, paddle!

I remembered hearing once that a gasoline vapor bomb was the most powerful non-nuclear device in the military arsenal. Confirmation? Under the strain of trying to pull in enough air to support my effort, I couldn’t come up with where I’d heard all of that crap. Was it TV, hence bullshit, or was it books? Oh, where was the internet when you needed it?

More crap.

It was the sound of somebody punching a giant marshmallow that announced the detonation.

I snapped my head around to see.  The glow from an enormous disembodied flame burned in the sky above the peak of Mt. Bonnell. More sound. More flame. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, the fire spread and nearly died, then spread again with a hundred marshmallow punches as it crossed the mountain and spread down toward the river, an Aurora Borealis dying as it sank to the earth, torching a few trees as it settled over a mile-span along the north bank, then down onto the river. Flames danced across the water toward me.

I smelled gasoline in the air.

Fuck!

I pushed all my weight to the right and the canoe capsized with me as I fell into the water. Immersed in inky, cold blackness, the water around me lit up as though the sun had just gone supernova in the sky. As that light faded, I watched my purloined M16 sink into the darkness below. The blade of my knife twinkled as it sank, ten feet below, followed by my boots. Even my clothes drifted out of their place in the bottom of the canoe, semi-clad ghosts, searching in greenish water for souls to torment.

When it was done, my night vision was shot and I was out of breath, but I was still alive.

Alive and disappointed.

Coming up underneath the canoe, I took a few deep breaths, pushed myself under and scissor-kicked hard back up to right the canoe, which readily turned over. Hanging on the edge, I looked in. Nothing but water was inside, and too much of it.

Looking up at Mt. Bonnell, I saw the crenelated rows of houses along the crest, their geometrically precise silhouettes intact. They hadn’t exploded. Nothing had blown up but air and gasoline, too far above the ground and too dissipated to damage any property or kill any of the naked infected. The only result was some small, spotty fires in the trees.

It was all a spectacular fizzle. King Monkey Fucker Joel and Mark were probably sitting in Sarah Mansfield’s house, not even aware that I’d just tried to kill them and succeeded only in nearly barbecuing myself.

“Shit!”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Chapter 27

It was late. The fireworks show was over. A few small fires glowed dimly up on the mountain.

I’d pushed the canoe in near the shore where I could stand, empty the water, and get back in. Except for the paddle, everything I had was lost in the dark river. The only reason I had the paddle was that it was in my hand when I capsized the canoe. Had I waited another four or five seconds before capsizing the canoe, it would have been burned when the gasoline vapor flashed. Maybe that had happened to many of the naked horde up on the mountain. It was something to hope for as the disappointment over my failure weighed heavily on me.

I’d been paddling back upriver for over an hour when I pulled the paddle out of the water and drifted, feeling in my muscles the toll I was paying for so many days without food and with little good sleep. Sure, I’d drunk at least a quart of cola from the soda fountain on the roof, but those calories were gone, burned off on exertion and fear.

Mr. Mays’ house was far back downriver behind me by the time I started drifting. I realized that I should have stopped on my second time past, knocked on the door, and asked for a safe spot to spend the night. Well, if they had a door to knock on.

The canoe floated slowly into a spin, caught in the current flowing one way while the wind blew me in the other.

I supposed I could drift back down to Mr. Mays’ house and see if they’d let me in, but that bitter thought smacked of quitting. In the mood that was on me, one step onto that slippery slope would send me down a dark hole out of which I might not be able to climb back. To continue upriver was to endeavor toward the goal, to try and find my friends. Seeing Murphy get up off of that recliner and wobble his way down to the ski boat was troubling, but it did bring hope that I’d find them all alive. And that hope was something real.

But I was so tired. I was naked, crusted in dry blood and scabs. I was hungry, really hungry, and dehydrated again. Steph, Murphy, and the rest could be in any of a thousand places upriver and I had no idea where.

Or they could be dead.

Such a likely possibility now.

Zero. That was the depressing word emblazoned on the flag that had planted itself on the sad mound of my thoughts. I was back at zero again. No weapons. No food. No friends and no clothes.

Don’t lie down.

Don’t quit.

Paddle.

Just paddle.

So I paddled. Persistence for its own sake.

Upriver again. Slowly, against the current, but I was moving.

Houses along the shore passed by. I spotted a ski boat lifted on a hoist up out of the water, I guessed to protect the hull from the algae. I really wanted that boat. Motorized transportation was another of modern society’s underappreciated luxuries. Pulling my paddle across my lap, I gave the boat a long hard look and thought about what I could do to acquire it. I’d have to search the house for keys and then, assuming I lived through that, having only fingernails and fists to protect myself, I’d have to figure out how to manually lower the boat back into the water. The process of stealing the boat was that of unknown dangers and potentially unsolvable problems. The risk-to-reward ratio just wasn’t high enough.

Paddle on.

As housing development on the banks thinned, leaving mostly trees and few dark houses, the miles slowly dissolved behind me. It was all black water, bends in the wide river, and old trees. Frogs chirped like fat crickets in the wet shadows and the buzz of cicadas modulated in and out of obnoxiousness. Mosquitoes occasionally found me and had a meal on my bare skin before buzzing off to hide among the leaves on the banks.

Up ahead, I spied a familiar shape on the north bank, and my hopes sank a little. It was the pontoon boat that Murphy had almost acquired a week or so prior. It was tied next to the dock in front of the house that he and I had raided and prepped as a safe house. The ski boat, however, was nowhere to be seen.

The absence of the ski boat led to three possibilities: Freitag had killed them all and dumped the bodies in the river, they’d taken the food and moved on to someplace else because this house had become unsafe, or this house was unsafe again when they arrived. I went with the odds and decided that going into the house was a bad idea.

At least the pontoon boat was still there. That had been ready to go when Murphy and I had left it. I needed only to hop on, untie the ropes, start the engine, and head upriver with internal combustion assistance —which is exactly what I did.

Ten minutes after seeing the pontoon boat come out of the darkness on the north bank, I was motoring up the river with the canoe on a rope skimming along in my wake and feeling ever-so slightly better about my situation.

The tourist boat with the three girls was my next stop. With any luck, they could give me some idea what had happened to my friends.

It didn’t take long for the riverboat to come into view anchored just where I’d last seen it.

Careful to keep a distance of thirty feet or so between our two hulls, I came up alongside, looking for the silhouette of a girl’s head or a hunting rifle sticking above the upper rail. Of course, I didn’t see one. It was such a minor thing, not seeing at least one of the girls immediately, but I was starting to shade toward pessimism on every uncertainty I stumbled on. I called across the water. “Hey.”

I waited.

“Hey, this is Zed.” They were a timid, cautious bunch. “Amy, Brittany…ah…Megan, are you there?”

There were still three ski boats tethered off the stern of the faux paddle wheeler. The girls had to be on the big boat.

“Hey.”

Nothing.

Along the top rail, I thought I saw the barrel of a rifle peek over. Three shadowy head silhouettes popped up as well.

“Amy? I’m Zed. I came by a week or so ago with a couple of other guys and left you some food and a gun.”

“Why do you look like that? Where are your clothes? What happened to you?”

“That’s a long story.”

The girls whispered amongst themselves for a minute.

“Trust me,” I called up. “It’s really me. How else would I know your names and my name if it wasn’t me.” It seemed like a silly argument, but it was the only one I could come up with.

“We thought you were dead.”

“Why?”

“A couple of days ago, a girl came by in what looked like your boat.”

“A girl? Was she alone?”

“I asked about the boat when she came by. I said it looked like your boat.”

“And?”

Amy’s tone turned to disgust and anger. “She said you raped her.”

“What?”

“Did you?”

“No!” Feeling like I needed to add more to my defense than just a denial, I said, “She’s a crazy bitch. She tried to kill me.” It occurred to me then that I should have said nothing else. The crazy-bitch addendum made me sound guilty even to me. I slumped down in my seat. “Did she say anything about my friends, about where they were, if they were okay?”

“No.”

Could she have really killed them all? Was she that wicked? Or had she abandoned them somewhere? “Did you think that was kind of weird? Her being all alone in my boat and not with Murphy or Russell or anybody?”

“Murphy, he was the one that tried to get on our boat the first night we met you?”

“Yeah.”

The girls conferred for a minute. “It did seem a little weird. We didn’t trust her, so we didn’t let her come aboard.”

“That was a good choice.” There was a silence that lasted a bit while I thought of what else I could ask. They weren’t trying to help at all with the conversation. “Are you girls keeping a watch all the time, even at night?”

Suddenly suspicious. “Why do you want to know?

“It’s just that it took a little while for you to figure out that I was out here.”

“We knew.”

“Fine. Can I ask a favor?”

In a tone that carried a harsh laugh, Amy said, “You can ask.”

“It’s really late. I’m really, really tired.” I pointed up the river. “Can I anchor my boat over there tonight and get some sleep?”

“As long as you don’t try to come on our boat.”

“Just, if you don’t mind. Kinda keep an eye on me. Maybe warn me if you see danger.”

“Like what?”

I looked around. “I don’t know. Any of the usual stuff, I guess.”

The girls huddled again. “You were nice to us before. You gave us food and a gun. Yes. We owe you a favor. We’ll keep on eye on you if want to sleep over there on your own boat.”

That was a relief anyway. “How are you guys set for food? Did that stuff we dropped off last? Are you out?”

One of the younger girls shouted, “We’re almost out. Do you have any to spare?”

I said, “I’ve been through some shit. I’m running on empty at the moment, but I’ll need to raid a pantry tomorrow, if I can do it without getting killed. I can probably drop some surplus off, if you like.”

“You don’t have to.” It was Amy speaking again.

“I know. Hey, can I give you some advice?”

“About what? You’re naked and you look pretty beat up. I think we’re doing better than you are. Maybe we should give you some.” I could hear the smile in Amy’s voice on that one. She wasn’t being mean.

“I need to tell you a bit of a story first.”

Brittany asked, “Is it about why you’re naked?”

“Yeah, but it’s a long story.”

“We’ve got lots of time and no television to entertain us.”

I smiled. Maybe that was the worst aspect of the post-apocalyptic world for the modern human. No entertainment. How difficult would life get with no iPhone, no television, and no internet to fill in the boring parts? I told them about my experience at Sarah Mansfield’s house, taking extra time on the part about how quickly the naked horde had overrun what had seemed like pretty strong defenses. “I think you should take your ski boats and tie them up alongside, one midway on the starboard side and one midway on the port side. Leave one in the back, I guess.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know if those naked ones can get at you in the boat, but if they get some boats or start swimming at you from one bank or the other, if you have an escape boat hidden from their view, then you’ll have a better chance of getting away.”

“But they’re afraid of the water.”

“Don’t underestimate them if you see them on the shore looking at you,” I pleaded. “They are a very dangerous group.”

Chapter 28

I woke on a pallet of flat seat cushions next to the tool chest that Murphy had left on the pontoon boat a week or more before. It was late on a brilliantly sunny morning and my head was throbbing. My joints were stiff and my stomach was rumbling. When I sat up, I had to throw out a hand to steady myself on one of the benches that ran down the length of both the port and starboard sides of the boat.

I was sorely missing regularly scheduled meals. At least the warm morning air felt good against my skin.

Looking downriver, I saw that one of the girls was fishing near the bow of their big boat and I wondered how boring their daily routine must be, cooped up all day on that boat. Oh well, not my problem at the moment.

I checked both shores for anything that could be a danger and, seeing nothing, went to the stern and jumped into the river to clean myself up. The water was cold, of course. It was always cold, no matter what time of year. The water in the river flowed out of the bottom of the big dam upstream, so it came off of the bottom of the lake, where all the coldest water settled. After a few minutes, my skin got used to it, and I lay back, floating on the surface, truly relaxing for the first time in a week.

It felt good. And goodness had become such a rare commodity.

As I lay there, gently bobbing on the few waves and watching the puffy, white summer clouds, I noticed smoke. Raising my head and starting to tread water, I spun in the direction of the smoke. The fires on Mt. Bonnell that I’d started the night before with my fizzled bomb had grown. Hopefully some of the naked infected were still there, screaming and burning as their skin crisped black and flaked off.

It was a dirty, murderous thought, but the imagining of it didn’t feel bad.

I climbed back aboard my pontoon boat, sat my naked body out of sight of the young girls on the riverboat and thought about the day ahead. Food, clothes, weapons, friends. And fucking Freitag.

Food needed to come first. I was going to fall into uselessness if I didn’t get a lot more calories in me pretty soon. Clothes were a nice luxury. If I was going to be in a house collecting food, there’d surely be a closet with something to wear.

Some kind of weapon would be a necessity. Again, if I was in a house, a kitchen knife was kind of the least I’d expect to find there. And being in Texas, the sky was the limit in terms of potential firearm availability.

Then it came down to Freitag versus friends. If I knew where my friends were, I could get past my desire to get some vengeance on her. Really, all I wanted was to reunite with my friends and know that they were all okay. Everything else on my list was just a necessary step in the direction of seeing Murphy, Steph, and Mandi, distasteful Dalhover and simple Russell.

Freitag knew what had happened to them. That meant that the most expeditious path to my friends was through her because wherever she was—and I hoped she was still on the river—the ski boat would show me exactly where she’d gone ashore. I was betting that she’d be close by.

The river between the dams couldn’t be more than fifteen miles long, and I was somewhere near the midpoint of that stretch. So seven miles of river going upstream was what I had to check for the ski boat. Depending on how much of the morning I burned off finding food and weapons, I could find Freitag, and with any luck, my friends, before sundown.

I got up off the deck and checked my boat’s fuel gauge. There was about three quarters of a tank. That seemed like a lot, though I had no idea how much fuel the tank held or how far the pontoon boat could go on three quarters of a tank. It had to be enough to scoot up and down my fifteen-mile section of the river many times, at least.

As I stood there by the boat’s wheel, I noticed four, no, five bloated bodies drifting down river toward me. One wore a brilliantly colored turquoise skirt that spread out around her body in an enormous flowery semi-circle with graying white stamens. Two were children, and their skin wasn’t infected white. They were Hispanic and they floated face down in the water, with black halos of hair spread around them.

Another woman, a big girl, was of no consequence to me because I noticed at that moment that one of the flotilla was man with a broad, hairy back, and he was wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts, which, if I cinched up the belt, would fit me well enough.

Thinking back to my fight with the alpha in the boathouse who’d made the bad choice of victoriously dangling his manhood where I could grab it, a pair of risk-free shorts suddenly moved to the top of the necessity list.

A quick glance around the pontoon boat’s deck was enough to inventory my resources. The big red toolbox, of course, and several dozen seat cushions that I’m sure doubled as floatation devices. Two life preservers and a rescue hook, the kind found by nearly every swimming pool in the country. It was a twelve-foot-long aluminum tube with a rounded, body-sized hook at the end, perfect for fishing infected corpses out of the river. But what really caught my eye were a couple of things I hadn’t noticed and hadn’t thought to look for previously. Just below the cushions on several of the bench seats were latches, giving away the presence of storage bins beneath. At least one of those storage bins had to be a cooler. And a cooler might contain something edible, or at least a warm drinkable.

My stomach concurred with a growl.

First things first. I grabbed the aluminum hook pole and went to the port side of the boat and waited for the corpse with the shorts to float near enough by. I didn’t have to wait more than a minute.

I reached out into the river with the hook and looped it around the big man’s torso on the first try. When I tugged it to bring him closer, the hook compressed his bloated gut and his head—face down in the river—bobbed up on an eruption of bubbles, stinking gases of rotting flesh that floated my way on the wind and nearly made me vomit.

The shorts were risk-free, but there was still a price to be paid.

Hand over hand, I pulled the body toward the boat until I had it pressed up against the hull. In a quick move, I unhooked the man and dropped my pole to the deck as I got down to my knees and grasped, with no small measure of disgust, one of his ankles. I didn’t need my prize drifting off.

A slippery film covered the man’s skin, and if not for the thick hair on his leg, I might have lost my grip on his ankle.

I pulled his foot up onto the flat deck of the boat as I reached for his other. I didn’t have any desire to have the spewing end of the man in my boat. Pulling and tugging, I had to get the legs up onto the deck if I was going to have any hope of reaching the shorts. As I was working, the man’s belly pressed against the hull and several more puffs of gaseous rot belched out.

Remaining naked was starting to have some real appeal.

But I was close.

One more tug put the man’s thighs flat on the deck the belt within reach. In a most unflattering way, I straddled the man’s thighs—feeling the slime from his skin on my legs—to hold him down. I bent forward to reach down around his belly so that I could loosen the belt, then unbutton and unzip the shorts. I thought I heard giggles across the water, but I ignored them.

More gas seeped out of the man’s mouth and nose and bubbled up past his ears, giving me a full dose of the stink.

The shorts came loose and I pulled them off hurriedly, somehow getting the underwear as well. For some reason, that really grossed me out. I jumped up off of the man, and as he slid back into the water, his dirty underwear fell out of the shorts and onto my feet.

I yelped and shook my foot to get them off as I hopped around the deck in utter disgust, making a complete fool of myself.

When they finally flew free and landed in the water just past the edge of the deck, I again had attention for something besides the violation I felt at having the wet underwear plastered to my skin. That’s when I heard the laughter of the three girls coming from the other boat.

The white skin on my face flushed red, but I held my hard-won shorts over my head in triumph.

I spent a good while back in the river after that, scrubbing my skin and the shorts, and wishing for soap. A little bleach would have been desirable as well.

Finally, the shorts were hanging over a rail to dry in the morning sunshine, and I was drying in the sun as well when I recalled the storage bins underneath the boat’s seats.

Cooler time!

Sliding a wide bench cushion over, I flipped a latch and opened the storage bin hidden underneath. Fins, snorkels, masks, inflatable water toys, ski ropes—nothing of immediate interest to me. I stepped across the width of the deck, pushed the cushions out of the way on another bench, flipped the latch, and lifted the lid.

“Oh, my God!” It smelled so bad that I fell back on the deck trying to get away from it. It was just as bad as the smell that belched out of the hairy man’s mouth. That was the cooler. It had been packed with meats, cheeses, ice, and other perishable items in apparent preparation for an afternoon picnic on the water that never happened. Now, the cooler was a sealed container in which all of those items had been rotting in the heat.

Standing up and leaning over the rail, I spit into the water to get the remnants of the spoiled taste out of my mouth. As I was doing that, it occurred to me that in that cooler, in the putrid, warm liquid, there had to be bottles of beer or soda. What kind of picnic could it have been without those? And where else would such items go but inside the cooler? That, of course, led to the next question. What about the dry goods, napkins, paper plates, cups, and chips? Those things wouldn’t be in the cooler. I looked around at the seats and sure enough, there were two more storage bins. It turned out that one of those contained some tools, more rope, and an extra anchor. The second, however, held just what I was looking for: a dull paring knife, three big bags of chips, unopened jars of pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup, and cookies—manna from Heaven, if there ever was such a thing.

Resisting the urge to tear into the packages like an animal, I started with a bag of corn chips, and with deliberate slowness, sat in the sun on one of the cushioned benches and ate them, one by one. I had no desire to barf everything back up after rushing too quickly to shove it all down my throat.

After eating the equivalent of a few handfuls of the chips, I felt, for the moment, full, and I let myself bake for a while in the heat. And for the second time that morning, I let my thoughts of adversity slip away, and I felt good.

Deciding that a soda, a beer, or any liquid that wasn’t river water would make a tasty second course, I walked over to the cooler that held the rotting meats, held my breath, and kicked it open with my foot. The lid leaned up against the side rail and I stepped toward the bow of the boat, upwind from the cooler. Jumping up on one of the benches across the deck, I was able to see down inside from a breathable distance. The cooler was a disgusting cauldron of rot, but in the liquid, among congealed blobs of gray goo, floated dozens of canned sodas and bottled beers. Warm or not, one of those beers would taste so good. Holding my breath, I bounded across the deck, fished out a can and a few bottles and made my getaway.

Back near the bow, I leaned over edge of the boat once again and spent a good, long while washing the can, the bottles, and my hands until I could no longer smell the cooler’s stench on my skin. After that, I went back to my place in the sun and took my time drinking one of the beers and eating some cookies.

Calories in my blood unloaded in my brain and bounced around my synapses as the taste of alcohol brought with it the most vivid memories of my last normal night. My buddies and I were at a yuppie sports bar in the suburbs with dozens of enormous flat screen televisions and waitresses that wore tight blouses and skirts too short to take out in public. They always smiled sweetly with clean, white teeth though often their eyes were just as dead as the Whites I’d seen, betraying the lie of how they loathed serving the likes of me. Because one thing they knew, just as I did, was that I was no better than they were. I didn’t have a high-paying high tech job with a big future. We were all commuters, traveling, serially to the same unsatisfying future, the same dead end.

I was so hammered when I went home that night. I was so hammered after I drank that tequila the next morning and saw what the Ogre had done to the Harpy in the middle of their living room.

Oh, why weren’t those memories gone yet?

I tossed the beer bottle, still half full, into the river.

Chapter 29

Wearing only my warm, dry cargo shorts, I piloted the pontoon boat slowly up the center of the river, keeping a watchful eye on the banks and paying special attention to docks and boathouses. Occasional Whites were lurking in the shade to escape the midday heat, or were on their haunches on the banks, sipping from the river.

Much of the northern bank was undeveloped, an unbroken forest of oaks and cedars. The southern bank had regularly spaced houses, mostly of the opulent variety, and they slowly passed, turning mundane in their ubiquity as the sun crested in the sky. When I finally spotted Sarah Mansfield’s familiar ski boat, it was docked in front of a Mediterranean villa-style house with stucco walls, a terracotta roof, and dying landscaping. Taking care to keep myself concealed between the pontoon boat’s bench seats, I motored on past without seeing a single living soul.

When I was a quarter of a mile upriver, I killed the engine. Drifting back down and staying out of direct sight of the house would be safest. Unfortunately, guiding the clumsy pontoon boat with a single canoe paddle was a nearly futile endeavor for which I had no patience. When I came within thirty or forty yards of the dock, I dropped anchor and waited for it to catch on something as it dragged on the river bottom. The line straightened out, pulled taut, and the boat jerked to a stop, causing me to fall down as my momentum carried me forward on the suddenly motionless deck.

Secure enough for me.

I’d expected to have trouble pulling the anchor back up when I returned to the boat later on, but I’d deal with that problem when I got there. I patted my pocket to make sure the paring knife, my only weapon, was there. It was. Canoe time. Pulling the canoe’s bow line, I took the loop off of the cleat on the deck, tugged it up beside my pontoon boat, and very carefully put a foot in.

Well, carefully didn’t work out so well. With nothing to secure it to the boat, the canoe slipped away from the pontoon boat and my legs split wide apart as I lost my balance and fell into the river. The stupidity of it pissed me off, and I immediately feared losing the canoe. The canoe had real value in a world of hydrophobic cannibals.

When I got my head back above water and got my bearings, the canoe was skating across the water and getting caught in the current. I swam hard after it, figuring I could catch it in four or five strokes. I was wrong. It took closer to ten or twelve, and I was gasping for breath when I finally reached out of the water to grab it. My fingertips, instead of catching the edge of the canoe, barely caressed the top edge of the hull and slipped down the curved side, pushing it further away from me.

Crap!

When I did finally get a solid grip on the hull, before I could congratulate myself, the bow bonked into something solid. I looked up. It was the dock in front of the house. So much for a stealthy approach. If Freitag was in there, she knew I was out here.

The water wasn’t more than four feet deep, so close to the shore, so I stood up slowly and was able to see a good part of the lawn and the roof of the house. I tied off the canoe and considered how to proceed. Why not just get out of the water, do my best not to look like a threat, and stroll up the house? I’d lost maybe ten pounds since Freitag last saw me. I was bald, scabby, and nearly naked. She probably wouldn’t recognize me. In front of the mirror in Sarah Mansfield’s bathroom, I barely recognized me.

I hauled myself out of the water and up onto the dock in front of the canoe. The ski boat was tied off on the opposite side of the dock, and I eyed it with a detective’s curiosity as I straightened up. No blood, nor any evidence of violence. That was good. Neither were there supplies of any sort. The keys were also gone. It was just an empty ski boat waiting on the lake for its owner to take it out for a sunny day on the water.

Satisfied that I’d learned all I could from the ski boat, I turned to head up the dock.

A rifle cracked and shattered the shoreline’s bucolic facade.

The canoe’s aluminum hull rang from the impact.

Before I even had time to think about it, I was doing some combination of jumping and falling back into the greenish water beside the dock.

I let my momentum carry me down to the bottom under less than three feet and struggled through the duckweed as I put some underwater distance between me and the dock.

It was so hard to remember to see myself through the lens of others’ prejudices. It didn’t matter whether Freitag did or did not recognize me. It didn’t matter that I was acting like a normal, unarmed person. I was White. And she hated anyone with the virus. In my anger over losing the canoe, I had overlooked that.

When I popped my head back out of the water nearly twenty feet from where I’d splashed into the river, I heard another gunshot and saw a burst of splinters on the surface of the dock. Two more gunshots followed in rapid succession. Freitag thought I was hiding in the water under the dock and was hoping to kill me with little more than luck.

Out of sight from the house, I let the current carry me down and I waded in chest-deep water toward the trees and undergrowth that bordered the property. In the frighteningly close distance, I heard the howls of the infected. They’d heard the shots too. They were coming.

Stupid Freitag. Before the infected got their hungry hands on her, I needed to get to her and find out what she did with my friends.

I climbed up out of the water and took the paring knife with its meager four-inch blade out of my pocket and looked at it. As a weapon, it was better than nothing, but not by much. Dragging my thumb over the edge, I tried to gauge how sharp it was. Eh, sharp enough for a stabbing weapon, but I had doubts about what I could cut with it. Skin, maybe. Jeans? No way.

I was in the undergrowth about twenty feet from the shore when I saw the first of the infected run off of the street in front of the house and start searching the house’s walls for a way in. Choosing to wait and watch, to know what I was getting myself into instead of walking in stupidly—again—I spotted at least twenty of the infected. Half of those lollygagged around the yard, seemingly unable to figure out what to do next. Some of them looked around, searching for the tasty source of the sound they’d heard. A handful were working their way around the perimeter of the house, touching walls and pushing on windows. Whether Smart Ones, or just smart enough to know that houses sometimes contained food, those Whites were my biggest concern at the moment.

A heavily vined trellis was anchored at right angles around the front corner of what I guessed was the garage. The flat roof of the garage appeared to have some sort of patio on it. That looked to me like a way in.

As quietly as I could, I crept through the bushes, trying my best to avoid thorny vines and prickly pears. My appreciation for shoes was growing by leaps and bounds. When I came out of the trees, I caught the apathetic attention of several of the Whites on that side of the house, but they quickly deduced that I was one of them and left me alone.

I crossed the yard quickly, in case Freitag was stupid enough to take another shot at me with so many Whites so close. But no bullets came. I arrived at the trellis and examined the vines. There were no thorns. Good. The wood framework looked strong enough to support my weight. My biggest worry would be that of getting shot when I topped the wall and made for the doors that I presumed were on the other side of the patio. With any luck, Freitag was still looking for my floating body out of the back of the house.

Glancing left and then right, I figured I had enough space to get to the top of the trellis before I caught too much attention from the lackadaisical Whites on my side of the house. So I climbed. I was halfway up when I heard a noise below me.

Dammit!

An infected woman was doing her best to follow me. I moved up as quickly as I could. When I reached the top, I peeked over.

I saw patio furniture, big potted plants, and a gas grill. On the wall of the house, there were two sets of French doors and a couple of large windows. There were no blinds or curtains on the windows, and I was able to see into the room beyond. Not a single thing moved. Assuming that Freitag was still alone, there was no way she could cover all sides of the house on her own.

With a few quick heaves, I threw my legs up over the edge of the wall and got my feet planted before looking back down. The woman on the trellis was just a few feet below and another White was half way up.

Ugh.

Grizzly duty was up next. I glanced back toward the house to make sure that I wouldn’t be surprised from behind. I waited for the infected woman to arrive.

As soon as her head popped up over the wall, I jammed the paring knife into and out of her eye in one rapid motion. She stiffened, and at the same time seemed to open both of her hands to lunge at me. But her balance was gone and she was falling. Whether it was the knife thrust or the fall that killed her didn’t matter to me. It didn’t even matter whether she was dead. She hit the ground and didn’t move. That was all I really cared about.

To my right, the other White climber gave her a look and seemed stuck in a moment of indecision over whether to go back down and feed, or to keep climbing for the real prize: tasty, uninfected flesh.

He chose wrong.

When his head came up over the edge of the wall, I stabbed the blade hard into his temple, a move that was a mistake. As the White lost his grip and started to fall, my paring knife wedged in his skull, and I was barely able to keep hold of it as he fell. But I did. The infected man hit the ground near the woman’s expanding pool of blood. That problem was solved.

Infected were running toward the two downed Whites by that time, and I faded back toward the French doors to let them all forget about me while they dined. I bounded lightly across the patio and came to a stop with one hand on a doorknob, peeking into the windows. Still only furniture and fixtures in the room. Nothing moved. I turned the knob.

Locked!

Damn.

Well, no big deal. I hurried over and checked the other doors. Locked as well.

To break the glass would be a mistake. The sound would alert Freitag. I couldn’t have that.

Checking further, both windows were locked as well.

Hmm.

Quietly making my way over to the edge of the patio that overlooked the front of the garage, I stealthily peeked around the corner of the wall and quickly pulled my head back. No infected eyes on the front lawn spotted me, but neither did I see anything that looked like an alternative way to get into the house.

Across the patio again, I peeked around the back wall on the side of the house that faced the river and saw something that might work. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was my best chance of getting into the house quietly.

A sloped roof extended out from the back side of the house and the eaves overhead provided a path to a smaller patio further down on the back of the house.

As I jumped up onto the wall, my thoughts went, of course, to a hundred movies I’d seen in which the hero was running across a tile roof, only to have the tiles slip loose before sending him on a perilous skid to the edge of the roof.

Perhaps the guys who built this house had seen the same movies, learned a lesson, and had done a good job gluing these down.

I tested the stability of the first roof tile as I very, very slowly put my weight on it.

It held.

Away I went, slowly, so slowly, taking great care to check my footing with each forward step.

Before I knew it, I’d uneventfully arrived at the other patio. I hopped down to the concrete floor and made no sound at all beyond that of my bare feet slapping the cement.

A quick, deep breath and a quick look around were all I afforded myself before I checked the glass French door. It was open. I smiled.

I found myself in what appeared to be the master bedroom. It was decorated in a rustic Mediterranean style to match the house’s exterior. Lightly closing the glass door behind me, I listened, but heard nothing of importance. The infected weren’t inside the house. They didn’t know how to mask their victorious feelings with silence.

On the dark wooden floor, bare feet were a stealthy advantage, and I crossed the room noiselessly. The bedroom door opened with the slightest of creaks and I looked out into a hallway that opened at the end to the large sitting room I’d seen from the patio. In the house’s silence, every buffet of the wind against the windows, every yowl of a White outside was magnified. My heartbeat pounded its drum and my breathing shouted in my ears.

Trusting in the solidity of the floor, I stepped out into the hall. No boards sounded a complaint under my weight. Still, I stepped slowly, letting the weight of each of my steps come down gently on the bare wood. Off to my right, a wrought iron rail looked over a curving stairway that led down to the first floor. I suspected that the shots had been fired from downstairs, but I checked another upstairs bedroom and a couple of bathrooms to see if anyone was on the upper floor before I proceeded down.

The bottom of the stairs was hidden from view as I started around the curve at the top, so I stayed close to the wall, knife at the ready for Freitag, or anyone she might be with, or any infected. I expected Whites to be noisy, but assumptions kept getting me in trouble.

With each step down, the sound of rapid breathing from below became more distinct. My muscles were tense and my palms were sweating. It could be a White’s breathing that I heard, or it could be a fear-filled Freitag.

What came into view was the back of a petite dark-haired woman in camouflaged fatigues, holding an assault rifle in her hands, pointing it at the back of the house. It was Freitag!

Step lightly. Stay quiet.

The Whites were not in the house. If they were, she wouldn’t be standing out in the open at the bottom of the stairs.

Just four steps to go, nearly in arm’s reach, and Freitag was getting nervous. She hurried a glance at the kitchen off to her right.

Maybe it’s a sixth sense that people feel when someone is watching them that gives their spines the tingles. Maybe in Freitag’s case, it was just nervousness about the infected outside, coupled with an ominous sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. Either way, when I took another silent step down, her senses triggered and she looked back up over her shoulder like she expected something to be there. What she saw was a gaunt, bald creeper. She screamed as she tried to bring her rifle around to shoot me.

I pounced, blocked the rifle barrel toward the wall, and landed on her as she crumbled under my meager weight.

The gun went off, destroying the silence inside the house. We hit the floor with me on top, and I quickly wrestled myself into a position where I had her arms pinned under my legs with one hand pressing down on her forehead to hold her head against the floor. I pressed the warm metal of my dull blade against her throat.

Her eyes were wide with terror, but not recognition.

In a harsh whisper, I asked, “Are you alone?”

That did it.

She recognized my voice and her mouth fell open in a sad, silent wail. Tears flowed. The price for her sins had come due, and her murderer was sitting on her chest, or so she feared. It was a thought worth indulging, but I had more important problems to resolve than bleeding her stupid ass out all over that nice wooden floor.

“Do not scream,” I hissed. “Are there any others in the house?”

She was going catatonic, apparently focused entirely on her impending death.

“I’m not going to kill you. You deserve it, but I’m not going to. Where are my friends?”

Her continued silence made me realize that there weren’t others in the house. If assistance was available, she would have screamed for it already. She was alone. I pressed the point of the knife into her throat until it broke the skin. She needed some pain to bring her back into the moment. “If you don’t start fucking telling me where my friends are, I’m going to ram this knife through your throat and leave you for the infected to eat alive. Do you fucking hear me?”

“Don’t,” she pleaded.

“Talk!”

“I…”

“You’d better come up with a lot more than one fuckin’ syllable at a time.” I sat up and took my palm off of her forehead and let off a little of the pressure of the blade on her throat. “You’re a worthless bitch, but I’m not a murderer. At least I don’t plan to be. I just want to know where my friends are and what the fuck you did to them.”

“I didn’t…”

“I will kill you if I think you’re lying to me.”

Freitag looked to her right out across the floor and through the windows. Whites were on the back lawn and she could see them as well as I.

“They’ll be in here soon enough, and they’re not going to be coming after me when they come in. I’m tired of asking. Talk!”

Freitag looked back up at me and then looked away, “I didn’t leave you on purpose. I was in danger. I…”

“Don’t.” I pressed the knife against her throat again. “I don’t give a shit what you say about anything except my questions. Do you understand that? Your bullshit tears don’t mean anything to me. You are going to tell me what happened to my friends and then I’m going to leave, and if you’re lucky, I’ll leave you a gun to protect yourself with. Then I never want to see you again. There’s a whole big fuckin’ world out there. I live on this river now. Go be somewhere else. You got it?”

Chapter 30

We went upstairs where eyes peeping in windows wouldn’t be able to see us and whose owners, with any luck, might eventually wander off. Once we got to the master bedroom, she pointed at the pillow-laden bed and asked, “Are you going to rape me?”

I just shook my head and instructed her to sit on the edge of the bed.

The room was large, like all the room in all the mansions, on all the million dollar lots on the river. I took up a position beside a dresser, well away from her, but where I could keep an eye on her and see the dock out across the back lawn. Unfortunately, the canoe, holed by one of Freitag’s misplaced shots, had sunk. I had her pistol sitting on the dresser along with an extra magazine. Two full magazines for the M16 lay beside those. The rifle, I kept pointed at Freitag. “Here’s the way this is going to work. You’ll tell me everything I need to know. If I’m satisfied that your story isn’t completely bullshit, I’ll leave you a weapon. The more cooperative you are and the more truthful I think you are, the more bullets I’ll leave you. As for the boats, I’m taking the ski boat and the pontoon boat I came in. You can have the canoe.”

Freitag barely nodded. She hadn’t seen yet that she’d sunk the canoe with her bad shooting.

I raised the rifle with one hand and pointed to the pistol with the other. “Which one?”

“I can have either one?”

“Makes no difference to me.”

“I’ll take the M16.”

“Fine.” I removed the magazine from the M16, tucked the pistol into my belt, picked up one of the M16’s magazines and started removing the bullets, lining them up neatly on the edge of the dresser. “Speak.”

“Do you want to know what happened at Sarah Mansfield’s house?”

“No. Scratch that. First tell me about Murphy.”

Freitag shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

“How is he?”

“Steph said he was going to be okay.”

“And how was he when you ditched him?”

“I didn’t ditch him.”

“How is he?”

“He was a little out of it. But he was walking and talking. I think he’ll be fine.”

I tossed Freitag a bullet. “I watched the archived video at the house. I saw what happened when you guys got overrun. So just tell me what happened after you left together in the ski boat.”

“Everybody was hating on me.”

I huffed to show my impatience.

Freitag glared at me. “I know you think I’m some kind of evil bitch, but it’s not like that. You need to understand why I had to do it.”

I rolled my eyes.

“They all blamed me for what happened to you.”

Duh!

“They didn’t say much about it. Mostly they just gave me dirty looks when they thought I wasn’t looking. Sergeant Dalhover, though, he gave me dirty looks all the time. He frightened me.”

I repressed a smile about that.

“Once we were all in the boat and Murphy realized that you weren’t with us… Well, he got very angry. I thought he was going to hurt me. Steph and Mandi calmed him down and made him sit in the back with Russell. The way he looked at me after that, I think he was going to do something.”

I tossed her another bullet and started emptying another magazine. So far, the bullshit sounded true enough.

“See, I didn’t have a choice.”

“Back to the facts, please.”

Freitag looked down at her feet. “Murphy told us about a safe house and that we should go there or something.”

I asked, “The one that he and I had been to before?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“And that’s where you went?”

Freitag nodded.

“Describe it to me.”

Freitag did and went into enough detail that she removed any doubts I had about her having been there. I tossed her several bullets.

Her eyes filled with fake tears again and her sad mouth said, “When everybody was inside, I was supposed to go out to the boat and bring the supplies inside. Steph had laid the boat keys on a counter in the kitchen and I took them when no one was looking.”

I shook my head.

Defiant, Freitag hissed, “You said you wanted to know.”

“Go on.”

“Once I was back on the boat, I…don’t you understand? I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t stay with them. They all hated me.”

“Go on.”

“I just started up the boat and left.”

“They didn’t try to stop you?”

“I don’t think they knew I was gone until it was too late. I didn’t see them come out of the house.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “And you didn’t run the boat around in circles for ten minutes to draw in every White in the neighborhood?”

Freitag looked at her feet.

“Well?”

“I didn’t do that.”

“You did it to me.”

Still looking at her feet, Freitag started to say something, but didn’t. She started to cry again. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t believe that. If anything, she was sorry that nobody believed her bullshit. She was sorry that she got caught. She wasn’t sorry she ditched me and called in the infected to kill me. “Did you circle the boat and draw in the infected when you ditched my friends?”

She shook her head.

I didn’t know whether to believe that or not. The only way I was going to know would be to head back down the river to the safe house and see for myself. At least I knew where to look. I hoped. How deep could Freitag’s vindictiveness run? I brushed the rest of the free bullets onto the floor. One magazine was still full, and I left it on the dresser as I headed for the door with both weapons.

“You said you’d leave the rifle!”

I stopped and turned. “I will. You have the bullets. I’m leaving your M16 on the grass in the backyard.”

“You asshole! You promised.” She jumped to her feet.

I gave her the coldest look I could pull together, and with the pistol I gestured for her to sit back down. “Here’s how that’s going to work. I’m going to leave this rifle out there in the grass. I’m going to get in the ski boat and get the pontoon boat and then use one to tow the other down the river. When I’m heading back down, I’ll get the attention of all of your friends outside and get them to follow me along on the bank. Once you see them go, run out and grab your M16. It won’t be far.”

“But what if some are still out there?”

“Be careful.”

“I hate you.”

“That’s nice. Listen, when you put the magazine in your rifle and you get back inside, be really careful about choosing to shoot it. Gunshots are like dinner bells to them. Oh, and don’t be such a duplicitous cunt if you find some other group of survivors. We were trying to help you guys when you came to our compound. We were ready to take you in. The whole deal with Harvey and Murphy was fucked up, but like Dalhover said, shit happens. So grow the fuck up.” I turned and headed out the door.

She stood up, following and rattling on about something I didn’t care to hear.

I hollered back up to her. “I’m not listening to you. Don’t follow me. If I don’t see you standing in the window up here when I go across the backyard, I’m not leaving the gun on the lawn. Got it? And I’m taking a couple of the pillowcases full of food that I saw in the kitchen. I scavenged that, and you stole it. Oh, and you shot a hole in your new canoe, so fuck you.”

Chapter 31

It is always a surprise to me when everything goes as planned.

So when I left the M16 in the yard, picked up the ski boat, tied it to the stern of the pontoon boat, and still managed to get the anchor free, all without getting shot at again by Freitag, I was surprised. And since she didn’t take any more shots at me, I fulfilled my promise to her and pulled the pontoon boat close to shore to get the attention of the infected around the house.

The Whites weren’t as cooperative as I’d hoped they would be, so I took a few shots with the pistol. After all, why not kill a few if I was going to use some bullets? It turns out that shooting moving targets from a distance with a pistol is a whole lot harder than it looks on TV.

What a fuckin’ surprise.

I didn’t hit any of them, but I did get their attention, after which they were more than happy to tromp through the woods on the bank and keep pace with me as I slowly motored down river. After half a mile, I pulled the pontoon boat away from the shore and watched them fade into the distance behind. Apropos to the situation, I gave them the finger for my own amusement.

Looking south and east, I saw billows of heavy, gray smoke several miles distant. It had to be coming from the Mt. Bonnell area. Those fires of my making had grown. More of Austin, perhaps the rest of it, was going to burn. That saddened me a little, but I rationalized away the guilt with an argument of inevitability. All of Texas was a dry tinderbox awaiting a spark. I hoped that a good number of the naked horde was roasting in the conflagration beneath that smoke. If that was the case, then the bomb hadn’t been a total waste.

My stomach rumbled, letting me know that the cookies and beer from earlier were digested and it was ready for a refill. Oh, and I had two pillowcases full of other items. My personal stash of food had, for the moment, grown into a big enough hoard to keep me fed for two or three weeks.

It was time to kill the pontoon boat’s engine and drift. I was anxious to get back to my friends, to see Murphy’s grin and Steph’s smile. Even seeing Russell, Dalhover, and Mandi would do me good. But I knew where they were. At least I hoped that my confidence in my ability to tell the difference between Freitag’s lies and half-truths wasn’t misplaced. But the last thing I wanted to do was motor up to the dock in front of the safe house in broad daylight and alert every White on that side of the river to my presence. It would be better to arrive after dark and to drift silently in, as Murphy and I had done in returning to Sarah Mansfield’s house after that first trip out.

Given all of that, there was no point in running the engine to get down the river. If I drifted, I would likely arrive at the safe house after dark, and in the process, I’d conserve the fuel in the boat’s tanks. Conservation of our limited resources was something that all of us would need to start giving serious thought to, or we’d waste our way right back into the Stone Age and bemoan our stupidity when we arrived.

Flipping open one of the dry food storage bins, I carefully dumped the contents of one of the pillowcases in and took an eyeball inventory of the items as they fell. When a blue rectangular can with a big graphic of greasy pink meat fell past, I perked up. Spam! The lowliest of meats suddenly seemed to me to be the most delectable of entrees. It was high in fat and high in salt, two things my body sorely needed. A can of green beans was going to be my side dish, and along with those, another bottle beer would go quite nicely.

Both the Spam and green bean cans were designed to require no can opener, and I popped them open along with my beer open and sat in the shade on a cushioned bench with a plastic fork in my hand and a faint, but satisfied smile on my face. Things were looking up.

There’s something about sitting on a gently rocking boat in cold water on a hot summer day that is supremely relaxing. Birds were in the trees on the banks, some singing, some squawking. Sure, there were occasional gunshots, usually far in the distance, but I was learning to tune those out the same way I used to tune out traffic noise from the highway that ran right past my apartment.

I slowly filled my stomach and savored each salty bite as it went down. Even the beer was kind enough not to bring any unwanted memories with its flavor.

Eventually my lazy thoughts turned to more serious matters, and the problem of the Smart Ones, King Joel, and Mark. Murder Plan A, my bomb, had failed. I’d had such high hopes for that. Ratios of gasoline vapor to oxygen, barometric pressure, wind speed, and even humidity had likely played into the poor result. Perhaps on another day with even slightly different conditions, it might have worked exactly as planned and rid west Austin of its infestation of human roaches.

The failure was demoralizing, but it couldn’t be the end of my efforts.

The thunder of an oncoming brainstorm started me thinking.

The snipers with the silencers, the ones that had killed Jerome, had done well for themselves. The number of infected bodies in that intersection was impressive. Surely those guys were all dead now, and their weapons were lying by their corpses, or lying where they left them after getting infected and wandering off, but still, they’d done well while they lasted.

I wasn’t much of a marksman, but I’ll bet Murphy was, and I had no doubt Dalhover could shoot. But bringing Dalhover out on hunting trips among the infected was too dangerous for him. As for Murphy and I, with a little care and a little planning, we could blend in and out of the infected population without any of the Smart Ones ever noticing. Heck, we could follow the naked horde like the Indians used to follow the buffalo herds on the Great Plains and hunt the Smart Ones into extinction.

That brought up the next question: how to identify the Smart Ones. Could we identify them based solely on their behavior? Possibly. And if we made a mistake and killed a dumb one, well, no big loss. They all needed to die eventually. I wondered if night vision goggles or an infrared riflescope would be helpful in sorting out which of the Whites down range was burning cooler than the others. The cooler ones would be the smarter ones. But was the equipment sensitive enough to allow us to tell the difference of a couple of degrees? Probably not. That would leave us with behavior-based identification.

I wondered if Murphy would go along. It would be great, so much safer, to have him as a partner in the venture, but I would go it alone if I had to. I understood the danger posed by my list of targets. I was convinced that it was a matter of life or death for anyone with a normal capacity for thought.

When my pontoon boat drifted around a bend and the faux riverboat came into view, it surprised me. I’d been so lost in my thoughts and plans that I’d lost track of time. Hours had passed, and it was late in the day. I wondered if I’d dozed off without realizing it. Well, no harm done. At the moment, I felt better than I had in many days, and I was on my way home, so to speak.

As I drifted closer to the river boat, I waved and smiled. The girls recognized me and waved back. Good. We needed to talk.

I started the engine on the pontoon boat and made a large U-turn so that the ski boat would be behind the pontoon boat in the current as I navigated up to within ten feet of the tourist boat.

“Hey,” I called over, “I need to anchor here for a bit so that we can talk. Is that cool?”

By this time, all three girls were up on the top deck, curiously watching. It was Amy who answered, “Yes. What happened to your canoe?”

“I traded it in.”

“That looks like your old ski boat.”

“It is.”

“Should I ask about the girl who took it?” Amy’s smile disappeared.

I shrugged. “She’s fine. I mean, she’s got a rifle. She’s got food. She’s in a nice house. And she’s probably got a few extra bruises, but I didn’t shoot her or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s what I’m asking. What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, there’s a long, long story, but at the end, I’m gonna ask you if four of our people can stay here with you guys.”

The younger girls were excited over that. Amy wasn’t. “I think maybe you guys have too much drama for us. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I think we’re past the drama part. Have you got some time to talk?”

Amy looked around in a gesture that seemed to ask if I was kidding about that. So I dropped anchor and secured my boat.

I told the three girls about our group, about our attempt to take in Freitag and the others. I told them about my experience with Mark at the dorm and with the Smart Ones at the hospital. I told them about Nancy and Bubbles and King Monkey Fucker, and I told them that I planned to go out and kill the Smart Ones because that plan, of all the ones I’d schemed since the virus took down civilization, was the most necessary for giving us normal people a chance at rebuilding our old lives. That last part sounded just as corny when I told her.

In the end, she seemed ready to agree. “I’ll be straight up with you, Zed. I get the impression that you’re a good guy, but it seems like you’re a trouble magnet.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“If you want to bring your friends down here, we’ll meet them. I’m not going to make any promises, but we’ll meet them. You just have to be sure that they know before you bring them that we might choose not to let them come aboard.”

“Of course, I understand. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach. I’ll tell you what, though, if it helps with your choice, Murphy and I can keep you guys stocked up with food and other supplies between our hunting trips. It’s safer for us to go ashore than it is for you.”

Amy laughed out loud, “Based on what you’ve told me, I’m not sure about that.”

I laughed too. It was hard to argue, but I did say, “When he and I work together, we’re safe. And you know that even if it’s dangerous for us, it’s a lot more dangerous for you. You know that’s true, right?”

In the end, we agreed that I’d bring everyone by the next day and we’d go from there.

Chapter 32

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 was 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.

Slow Burn Book 5, ‘Torrent’

Chapter 1

In the pontoon boat, Murphy and I had been drifting with the slow current of the river for a few hours. We passed a row of mansions built onto a manmade peninsula just upriver from Sarah Mansfield’s mountaintop compound. That’s when we spotted our first Whites, glimmering in a sheen from a light rain in the morning’s gray light. At least forty of them squatted in a tight huddle in the short brown grass under the backyard oaks of one of the estates. Silent.

As we neared, I saw many had oozing burns flaking with blackened skin. Some had faces scorched so badly that all human features were gone. Skeletons wrapped in immolated flesh, by some vicious miracle, not yet dead.

It was difficult not to see them as the people they used to be. In that moment, it was harder still. Without the howling or attacking, chasing and killing, they were docile. Suffering with the most human misery on their faces. Tragic eyes pleading for mercy. And, in a curse perhaps worse than any other, the virus left them with the capacity to know their wretchedness and wallow in their tears. Naked on the bank, they looked like refugees waiting for the mercy of sepsis. It was growing in the pus under their scabs, soon to assist death in finishing its work and ending their torment.

No doubt they were burned as a result of my work. But in my imagination—as that gasoline vapor bomb came together—I thought only of them blowing up, disintegrating in a supersonic rush of hot gases. Even afterward, when it was clear the blast had been a dud, I hoped the resultant blaze would burn them, make them suffer. Just as they were, on the edge of the river. But while wishing the horror of fire-seared flesh on another living creature was relatively easy in the abstract, the reality felt as though something from the blackest depths of my hate had come to swallow what was left of my soul.

I turned away from the dying Whites and sat down on one of the pontoon boat’s long, padded benches. The motor wasn’t running—we were conserving fuel on our downstream journey—but Murphy was at the helm, alert. I looked ahead into the distance for a while, trying to let the gentle splashes of raindrops on the river bring me comfort. But before long, I found myself sitting up straight, watching my hands as they rested on my thighs, willing my fidgety fingers to remain still. I was thinking of my conversation with Steph earlier that morning.

***

A couple of dead grandparents, the former owners of the house to which we escaped, had built a deck at the highest point of their roof, maybe fifty feet up from the sunburned lawns. Accessible by a staircase that ran up through the center of the house, it was a square, fifteen feet on each side, beneath a roof built to protect from the sun rather than the rain. The old couple had probably taken their grandkids up there in the late afternoons to share smiles and watch the sun cast its red glow over water skiers trying to get in their last runs before dark.

But Grandma and Grandpa had turned white with the virus and slaughtered their grandkids in the living room two floors below. Murphy and I put them both down a few weeks before when we’d discovered the mansion and decided to make it a safe house for our band of survivors.

Unable to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I’d wandered around through the dark house and eventually found my way up to the deck. Steph was up there alone, taking her turn watching for ghostly Whites that might be creeping toward us across the peninsula.

“You’re up early.”

“Yeah,” I said as I climbed the last of the creaky cedar steps to join her.

Without looking at me she said, “You were supposed to get a full night’s sleep. That’s why you weren’t given a watch assignment tonight.”

Was she scolding me? “I think I passed out for a nap on the boat this afternoon. It threw me off my sleep rhythm.”

“It’s still two hours before sunup.”

“And?”

“And maybe you should go down and try to get some sleep.”

“I’m tired of trying. You’re being motherly about this.” I smiled to let her know that I wasn’t completely serious.

Steph glared at me before turning back to look across the stretch of dried-out lawn between the river and the back of the house. “I’m responsible for keeping all of us alive. And that requires discipline, Zed.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I sat on one of the empty chairs and took in the view. The black river snaked off to the west. The sky flashed dimly with far away lightning, but only scattered clouds rimmed in silver moonlight hung in the sky above.

Steph changed her position to look up the road that led to the bridge at the end of the peninsula.

The smell of rain blown in on the breeze earlier that day was gone. The dry taste of dust and lingering smoke was back. To make conversation with a seemingly impervious Steph, I asked anyway, “Did it ever rain?”

Steph shook her head and gently snorted as if to say, “Of course not.”

“Do you mind if I sit up here with you?”

“It seems like you’ve already decided. Is everyone else still asleep?”

“Yep.”

Steph strode over to the railing that gave her the best view of the front of the house, and then without a word, walked over to me and laid her hand across my forehead.

“What?” I reached up to push her hand away, but her stern expression told me I’d better let her go about her business.

She pulled her hand back. “Last night, when I hugged you, I thought you felt hot.”

“I get that a lot.” I pasted on a grin.

“I’m serious.”

I put a hand to my face, then to my forehead. “What? I feel fine.”

“You have a fever, Zed.”

“I know.” We both knew the virus left me with a permanently elevated temperature.

“Have you had a chance to check your temperature since—?”

“Since?”

“When was the last time you checked it?”

“I’m fine.”

She was in Captain Leonard mode by then. “The last time I saw your temperature was after you got injured at Sarah Mansfield’s house. I’m guessing you haven’t touched a thermometer since?”

I shook my head.

“Do you think you should have?”

I shrugged, getting a little miffed. Sure, she was a nurse by training, but her tone didn’t sit well with me.

“I think you’re hotter than you were.”

“Maybe it’s just that you’re used to the cool air out here tonight.”

“Cool? It’s got to be at least eighty-five.”

“That’s cooler than a hundred.”

“Nobody thinks eighty-five is cool, Zed.”

I shrugged and tried to look for anything interesting out in the darkness to divert her attention.

“I have a thermometer in my bag downstairs. After my shift, we’re checking you.” Steph looked back across the grass toward the mountain and examined the near-vertical face of the white limestone cliff.

How would anybody be able to see the infected climbing down the jagged, pale-colored rock? “We need some night vision goggles.”

“You can change the subject if you want, but I’m still taking your temperature when we get back downstairs.”

“What’s the point?”

“We need to know.”

“Why do we need to know? We can’t do anything about it, can we?”

“That’s not the point, Zed.”

“Of course it is. If the virus is progressing, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to dread the morning I wake up half brain-dead. I’d rather… I’d rather just stick my head in the sand.”

Steph turned away from the cliff and came over. She looked down at me. Her stern face had softened and, for the moment, she stopped being my boss and was just green-eyed Steph, a girl with guarded emotions and a big heart.

“Please?” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

Steph reached out and laid her hand back on my cheek. Just as I started to think it was something more than another temperature check, she slipped it up to my forehead. “Zed, please understand. I have to do it for the safety—”

“Uh-huh.” I huffed as I pulled back. Her hand fell off of my face. “For the safety of the others.” I jumped up and stomped over to the railing, anger boiling. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I white-knuckled the railing and stared at the cold black water, wishing things were different.

Steph’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. “Please, Zed. Don’t be like that. You know how much we all care about you. Please don’t be an ass.”

I motioned my head out towards the darkness. “I…” The words got caught in my throat. I didn’t want to be out there on my own again. I’d gone through too much finding my way back last time.

Steph’s other hand found a place on my other shoulder. “Please, Zed. Please, look at me.” She turned me around. “You have to know this isn’t going to be like it was back at the dorms. You know that, right? Nobody here would ever do anything to hurt you. Or… or to push you out.”

I nodded. I knew she was right, but it felt like it was going to happen anyway.

“Let me take your temperature. Please, let me protect our friends. I know you’re not a danger to any of us right now. But I have to do more than just hope it stays that way.” She paused. “How about if I check it and I don’t tell you if it’s gone up?”

Her hands were on my face by then, and though the moment was full of emotion, there was no romance in it. I was dealing with a fear that haunted me every time I glanced at my stark white skin. Perhaps she was, as well. And as much as I feared turning into one of them, I couldn’t help but sympathize with Steph’s fear—that I’d wake up one morning as a mindless monster and she’d have to put a bullet through my heart.

Without indulging any thoughts about the awkwardness of it, I pulled her into a hug and whispered, “Okay. But I don’t want to know. I never want to know.”

After that, our silence had no room for words. I pulled away from Steph and put myself back in my chair to watch the black river’s lazy current in the reflection of the moonlight.

Cicadas pulsed their rhythm and nocturnal frogs chirped.

I thought only of my burning desire to move, to do anything kinetic. With motion—paddling, running, shooting, even toting heavy bags of costume jewelry—came a solace in which the strain of effort consumed my attention and washed away all of the blackness. To move was to live. To live… Well, living was better than not. Being a brain-dead flesh eater was some kind of hell in between.

Anything but that.

I’m not sure how long I sat there absorbed in my fears, but it startled me when Steph interrupted with a question. “Are you okay?”

I nodded out of habit. I wasn’t.

“What are you doing?”

I gave her a look that silently asked for an explanation. “Thinking.”

She looked down at my hands, which were resting on my thighs. “I mean… What are you doing?”

I followed her gaze and watched my thumbs tap out a sequence across each of my fingertips before repeating the sequence again, and again.

Fuck.

I clenched my fists tightly.

I hadn’t realized I was doing it. “Just fidgeting. I’ve always been fidgety.”

Fidgety, just like so many of those fucking white monsters.

A tear ran down her cheek.

Neither of us believed the lie.

Chapter 2

In a steady rain, the gray sameness of the morning made time flow as lethargically as the river’s current. Only the passing of trees, houses and hills gave us any sense we were moving forward with the day. Eventually we came to a wide inlet on the port side of the boat. It was something of a harbor for the marina that was to be where we left the safety of the river. The marina was part of a smallish country club at the foot of Mt. Bonnell, right where Mt. Bonnell Road cut hard east and changed names before it led past Camp Mabry on the way into central Austin.

From the country club, Camp Mabry’s munitions bunkers were only a few miles. Those bunkers were our destination.

Murphy and I paddled the boat toward the inlet, making as little noise as possible. It was no small effort to get the boat out of the current and into the mouth of the harbor. At that point, it became much easier to guide the boat, though no less difficult to move it.

Looking around for potential dangers, I saw a group of the infected huddled together against the rain in a grassy picnic area beside the docks. Just like the group I’d seen earlier, they all had burns, mostly bad, some horrendous. Not a one made any effort to look at our boat. They stared at nothing. In their rotted brains, they all knew the last days of their lives would be consumed by a single macabre task—awaiting death.

A pier that stuck prominently out into the marina was our target. Once close enough for our momentum to finish the job, I climbed up off my side of the boat and dropped my paddle on the deck. Murphy did the same.

Guessing the rain would kill my words before they drifted too far across the water, I softly asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Even in a world of bloody horrors, one could never be fully prepared for what might lie around the next corner. Murphy’s was transfixed on the burned Whites. Absently, he answered. “This is fucked up, man.”

The boat’s port side bounced against a rubber bumper attached along the edge of the dock and started to drift back out into the water.

I jumped across the gap with the rope in hand. Kneeling down on the dock near where a cleat was bolted, I looped the rope and pulled it taut. I glanced at the huddle of burned Whites to ensure they were still disinterested. Another glance up the length of the dock showed me it was empty. Using the rope, I then pulled the boat in close and wrapped the rope around and across the cleat several times. It would hold.

Stepping back onto the boat, I took up a position beside Murphy. I peeled off the T-shirt I’d gotten from one of the kids’ rooms and laid it on the bench seat. Looking down, I saw my toes hanging off the ends of my canvas tennis shoes—cut away so they’d fit my feet. I figured I could get away with wearing them among the infected. They looked enough like dirty bare feet at a glance. I intended to keep my shorts on as well. My pistol and one extra magazine were hidden in the big pockets. In two other pockets, I’d rolled up a couple of the kids’ school backpacks. We’d need those if our trip to scavenge some ammunition was to be successful.

Murphy shook his recently shaved head in disgust and looked down at me. He was more than willing to come along, but he thought my method of disguise was pointless. Without a word, he laid his rifle on the seat cushions and went to work removing his MOLLE vest. Once that was off, his shirt followed. He looked down at his pants and boots and shook his head again. He picked up his rifle to make it clear it was staying in his hands. “That’s all I’m taking off.”

“Okay.” I kept my voice as neutral as I could. The rifle was a bad idea.

He removed several magazines from his MOLLE vest and stuffed them into his pockets, then stowed the vest under the seat. He stood with his rifle in one hand and his hatchet in the other. “I know we talked about it, but I can’t leave my rifle. I’m not going out there without it.”

“The only way we’re going to fit in perfectly is to go naked. Knives are cool, but nothing else is,” I said.

“What are you saying, man?”

“I’m not going naked either. I’m not going to tell you to leave the rifle, though I think you should. We just need to be discreet.”

“Discreet.” Murphy grinned. “You crack me up, man.”

“You know what I mean.”

He nodded. “It’s not like we were gonna walk down the middle of the street looking for attention.”

“Yeah.” I looked down at my shorts and gave some serious thought to removing them and going out with just my knife. But what would I do with the school backpacks rolled up in the pockets?

“Don’t be a worry wart, Zed. You’re my lucky charm. Everything’ll be cool.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Your lucky charm?”

“Bad shit never happens when we stick together.”

Murphy’s ability to see sunshine through the thickest clouds almost made me laugh. “You did get shot in the head when we were together.”

“Ain’t nothin’. I’m fine now.”

“And I got blown up in that bunker.”

“You’re my lucky charm, not your own.” Murphy’s big grin brightened the boat. “Besides, you didn’t get blown up. You’re just a drama queen that got knocked down, is all.”

I shook my head. “Whatever.”

Together we exited the boat and walked quietly down the dock. The burned infected continued to ignore us.

At the end of the dock, we crossed over a paved boat ramp and a parking lot. Near the back of the country club’s main building and out of earshot of any infected, I said, “We should check this place out to see if there’s a kitchen. If we could score some food in bulk, that would help out the supply situation.”

“Right now?”

“No, let’s stick with the plan today.”

“I’d be cool to come back. Tomorrow?”

“I’ve got no plans.”

We skirted the building, crossed some wet grass, and came to a sloped driveway with a few inches of flowing rainwater. In front of us was a bend in Mt. Bonnell Road at the base of the mountain. A month before, that road would have been funneling the last of the morning commuters to their soul-deadening cubicles in the city. Besides Murphy and me, the only thing on the road that morning were some naked Whites, near and far, busy in their day of scavenging for something, a dog, a cat, an armadillo, anything, to eat.

I looked around, paying extra attention to the thicket of cedars across the street. Nothing was moving anywhere within a hundred yards. “If we cross the street and get into the trees, we can still follow the road, and with any luck, we’ll avoid attention,” I whispered, pointing to my right. “When we cross, I’ll keep an eye on the ones down there. You watch the ones up that way.”

Murphy gave me a nod and let me lead.

Doing my part to watch the Whites down the road to our right, I hurried across with Murphy at my side. It was clear that we caught the attention of several. They weren’t shy about staring. But they made no sounds of alarm and made no move to come after us. Perhaps Murphy and I had enough bare white skin on display to assure them we were as infected as them.

But something wasn’t right.

Murphy and I had been through enough together that I was tuned in to any tension in his body language, his breathing, even the sound of his steps. And that’s how I knew.

I shushed him with a hand gesture and crept back out to the edge of the covering trees to peek up the street. Kneeling to keep myself hidden behind some scrubby bushes, I peeked out at the Whites who’d watched us cross from up the road toward Mt. Bonnell. They were motionless, except their poses had changed from when I first saw them. They were all looking in our direction, save one who was leaning in close to a female, cupping his hands over her ear. He was whispering.

A Smart One.

Damn.

Chapter 3

With hushed urgency, I whispered to Murphy, “Follow me. As quietly as you possibly can.” I turned and ran through the trees, not along the road, but deeper into the forest.

Breathing heavily after ten minutes of dodging hanging branches, cacti, noisy shrubs and thorny vines, we came to a stop. All I heard was the heavy shush of rain falling through the cedars’ needles and the steady dripping of water onto the ground. The rain was killing our ability to hear anything at a distance. But that meant anyone following couldn’t hear us, either.

Advantage us?

Murphy wore a question on his face, but I held a finger to my lips. I put another to my ear to indicate he should listen. It was possible we had pursuers. He hefted his hatchet and slowly scanned for movement in the forest around us.

After listening, looking and hearing nothing, we traded speed for stealth and proceeded deeper into the forest, me in the lead, Murphy behind.

The roads in that part of Austin snake around the rugged terrain and along the crests of hills. Though our path took us away from the most direct route to Camp Mabry, we were bound to come across an alternative road soon enough. Once there, we’d need to be much more careful when crossing. We were showing enough naked white skin to camouflage our relative normalcy from most Whites, but something about us—our choice to wear pants or the rifle Murphy carried—had piqued the interest of a Smart One.

When we came to a six-foot privacy fence, we followed it for the length of four or five houses. We stopped at an empty lot and saw a residential street on the other side.

I whispered to Murphy, “If there aren’t any Whites in the street, we’ll head up the block in the front yards, staying close to the houses, so we have some cover.”

“We could stay in the woods.”

I looked down at my legs and arms, which were scratched and bloody. “Let’s check the street and then decide. Cool?”

Murphy glanced down at his arms, saw plenty of the same, and gave me a nod.

We crossed the empty lot and skirted a house sided in white limestone with little dead shrubs, bouquets of twigs and brown leaves that looked to have been planted that spring. With no time to develop a root system before the automatic sprinkler systems ran dry, they never had a chance.

Back down the road in the other direction, four Whites squatted on a porch, out of the rain. They were clothed—probably not a danger to us. Besides those four, the street was empty.

Off I went. Murphy followed. We kept close to the walls of the first house we passed and paused in the narrow gap between that house and the next to look up and down the street and make sure all was still safe.

We leapfrogged our way to the gap between the third and fourth house up the block and were looking back down the street behind us when Murphy thought he saw movement. Whatever it was disappeared so quickly, we couldn’t identify it. Unfortunately, I was growing confident with our stealth and discounted the apparition as a trick of the rain pouring out of a roof gutter. That was a mistake.

When we got to West 35th Street, Camp Mabry lay just across sixty feet of bare right-of-way, gravelly shoulders and two lanes of wet asphalt. We were positioned among some bushes with a view up and down the street. Both near and far, Whites loitered, enough of them to make me uncomfortable about making another crossing.

I gave Murphy a silent look of worry.

He understood and cast a glance both up and down the street before sinking back into the bushes and pulling me down with him.

“Damn those naked fuckers,” I whispered.

Murphy scooped up a handful of blackish-colored mulch from around the base of the bushes and smeared some on his arm and then some on his pants. It wasn’t enough to color him black, just enough to make some dirty spots. He looked over himself before grinning and whispering, “If we smear some of this around on ourselves, the black spots is what they’ll see from up the street. They won’t even notice we’re wearing pants.”

“It’s raining, Murphy.” My tone didn’t do much to mask my disdain for the idea. “It’ll wash off.”

Without losing a bit of his smile, Murphy said, “Don’t be retarded. It’ll take an hour or two for the rain to wash all this off of your skin. And you’d need some Tide and a long wash cycle to get it out of your pants.”

“Retarded?” I was a little offended.

“Don’t turn into a bitch on me, man.”

I rolled my eyes, scooped up a handful of the mulch and started making smears on myself.

It took only a few moments to camouflage ourselves as two dirty cannibals. When we were ready, Murphy said, “When we head out, walk beside me real close. I’m going to hold the rifle straight up and down between us so they can’t see it from either direction.”

“Good idea.”

As a matter of course, I looked around behind us. Nothing was there. Nothing was on our flanks. The apparition from the rainwater hadn’t materialized. Only the Whites up and down the road were visible.

We stepped out of the bushes together and started a comfortably paced, side-by-side walk across the street.

Of course, our movement caught the attention of every White on the road. All froze and stared. Murphy and I continued walking, doing our best to look like we belonged, which in a way we did. We were just as infected as those watching us, just not as symptomatic.

One by one, each of the Whites I saw turned away, busying themselves with staring at nothing and trying futilely to stay dry under the boughs of the oak trees.

Without incident, we made it across the street and angled our path toward a large section of chain-link fence pushed over flat, just as the wall in front of Sarah Mansfield’s house had been. We stepped carefully through the tangled mess of barbed wire that once topped the fence. We crossed a narrow band of brown grass and made it into the cedar forest on the undeveloped land inside the southern border of the base.

Together, we squatted between some trees. I looked up and down the road we’d just crossed.

“That went better than expected,” I said, just as I noticed Murphy wasn’t looking at the street we’d crossed. He was focused back down the side street we’d just snuck up. “What?”

“I think I saw something down there again.”

Through the rain, I didn’t see anything that aroused my suspicion. “We should get moving.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yeah.” I looked around. I was familiar enough with the road from all of the times I’d driven it on the way up to Mt. Bonnell to see my old girlfriend, Jackie. I was confident where we were. And my confidence in my ability to move unmolested among the Whites continued to grow.

“I wish we could have looked at those satellite maps that we put together back at Sarah Mansfield’s house,” Murphy said.

“Me, too. We’ll get to some place with solar power again. Based on that map that Dalhover drew of the base, if we cut straight north through these woods for a mile or so, we’ll come out pretty close to the ammo bunkers.”

“Yeah, but he said the last time he was on the base was twenty years ago.”

“Dude, they’re not going to move the ammo bunkers. You were right there when he told us Harris told him they left the bunker doors open after their last ammo run. They’re still there.” I took a glance at the thick woods behind us. “What’s up with you all of a sudden?”

Rainwater running down Murphy’s face gave it a peculiar animation that underscored his unease. “I feel like we’re being watched. I think we’re being followed.”

Of course, that flew in the face of the confidence I’d been cultivating. I looked back down the street we’d come up. “You think what you saw was something other than water running off the roof.”

Murphy nodded.

I was pretty sure Murphy was overreacting. “What are you thinking?”

Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

I huffed and looked around again. “Fine. We can go back to the boat today and try another time.”

Murphy looked down at me the way he’d look at a petulant nephew, but didn’t say anything for a long time. “No. We’ve come this far. Let’s get this done. We’re light on weapons and low on ammo. We need this stuff.”

“Are you sure?” I tried my best to get back to my neutral tone. I knew I was prone to unrealistic certainty when it came to pursuing my mistakes, and I knew that certainty carried with it a viral charisma that bulled its way over others’ doubts. I wanted to move ahead, but I was trying to apply a two-heads-are-better-than-one solution to the question at hand. “Everything we do out here is risky shit. If you’re not comfortable with moving forward, then let’s get back to the boat.”

“Any ideas how we’re going to get the stuff out of here yet?”

I patted the rolled up backpacks stuffed into my pockets. “Besides these?”

“We can’t get much in those.”

I grinned. “We’ll figure something out.”

Murphy stretched a smile over his concerns. “Just my kind of plan.”

“We may be able to get some ammunition and, with any luck, some grenades in the backpacks. But a lot of Whites are around and that Smart One we saw a little bit ago is a worry. We can’t be loading up and just walking out of here with armfuls of rifles.”

Murphy nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Let’s go check things out then. We’ll get what we can, and then get out of here. This’ll have to be just a mostly recon mission. Cool?”

“Cool.”

I stood up and backed deeper into the forest.

I was in the lead again as we worked our way through the trees. I realized then something had changed in the social dynamic between us. Somehow, I’d been promoted from rifle toting novice to squad leader. I still couldn’t shoot worth a shit but Murphy could, and that gave me comfort. Besides, if the situation got desperate enough that shooting became necessary, the Whites would be so close and numerous, I wouldn’t have any trouble putting my bullets into them.

Before long, we came to a curving trail through the woods and stopped. Looking up and down, I whispered, “What do you think?”

“Jogging path?”

That made sense. “You wanna take it?”

“It looks clear.” Murphy was still worried.

“It’ll be faster.”

“It’s up to you.”

I surveyed the trail again. The ground was all mud, cedar roots, and outcrops of limestone. Even without the rain falling, it would be near impossible to tell if anyone had recently passed.

“What do you think, Tonto?” Murphy asked.

“Tonto?”

“You’re looking at that trail like you’re some kind of Indian tracker.”

Ignoring the comment, I pointed to the left. “There’s a north-south road over that way.” I pointed right. “This is mostly woods over here. I think if we go that way, it might lead us up to the part of the base near where the ammo bunkers are.”

“Might?”

I shrugged. It was hard to tell where we were.

Murphy nodded in the direction of the path away from the road.

“Works for me.” I stepped out of the trees and started moving at a pace that I could quietly maintain.

After a short distance, we rounded a sharp bend to the left. The underbrush bordering the trail grew thick and the overhanging oak branches darkened it in dusky shadows. Murphy reached up from behind and tapped my shoulder. When I looked back, he made an urgent gesture toward the bushes among the tree trunks beside the trail.

It was time to scoot.

Chapter 4

Murphy hurried into the woods to our left, and I followed until we were well away from the trail. He squatted among some thick bushes and looked at the trail, pulling a finger to his lips to indicate quiet.

I didn’t need that much direction, but an immature retort could be disastrous if Murphy’s sense of danger was accurate.

I squinted between the branches and leaves but saw nothing, felt nothing but wet.

I knew my intuition for danger wasn’t as sharp as Murphy’s. All of the trouble I’d gotten myself into when he wasn’t around was proof enough. Drawing my pistol from my pocket with one hand, I gripped my kitchen knife in the other and checked the woods behind us and off to our sides. Murphy was focused on dangers that might be on the trail. So checking our flanks for sneaking infected or possible escape routes became my responsibility.

Noise from the direction of the trail got my attention and sent my heart racing. Moments later, I saw movement through the trees. Murphy crouched lower behind our concealing bushes, as did I.

A troop of Whites, maybe a dozen strong, came into view, moving on the trail, slowly, quietly, on the balls of their feet. Their heads swiveled, looking forward and back, peeking through gaps in the cedar fronds on the right and left.

Holy shit. They were hunting.

As we watched, a runner came up the trail from the other direction and stopped in front of the group’s leader. All halted. Most stood there doing nothing, staring at nothing. Some stayed alert, scrutinizing the woods.

The runner cupped her hands over the leader’s ear and whispered something brief. The leader whispered something to the runner and pointed up the trail in the direction from which the runner had come.

With a confused look on her face, the runner looked at the leader of the group.

This visibly angered the leader. His body language turned aggressive and when he was no longer able to contain his frustration, he slapped the runner hard across her face, dropping her to her knees.

The runner tried to escape, pushing herself backward on the rough ground.

The leader caught her by the shoulder, bent over and whispered again into her ear. He punctuated his message with another slap and pointed up the trail.

The girl crawled some more before standing up beyond the leader’s reach. Blood flowed from her mouth and nose. But she didn’t run off to deliver the message she’d been given.

The leader took another aggressive step toward her and raised his fist.

The girl finally seemed to understand. She turned and ran back up the trail.  The leader of the group looked around, listened, then followed the same path, taking the time to place his feet noiselessly as he moved.

Murphy and I waited.

When I felt sure the hunting party was far enough out of earshot, I whispered to Murphy, “I’d bet your balls they were looking for us.”

“Me, too.”

“Do you think that was that Smart One that saw us cross the road by the country club?”

Murphy nodded. “I don’t see who else it could be.”

“When I was naked among them, they thought I was one of them. I think that’s the only safe way to do this, to be just as naked and bald as they are.”

“And without weapons,” Murphy added. It was clear from his tone that he didn’t have any intention of being in their company without a rifle. “Why do you think they didn’t come after us on the road if the Smart One knew what we were?”

“I think they’re learning. If we have guns and if they don’t have numbers on their side, they know they shouldn’t come after us.”

“If they know what guns are, why don’t they just pick them up and kill us?”

“Being smart enough to know that a gun can kill you isn’t the same as being smart enough to use one.”

Murphy looked around a bit before he said, “I think they’re getting a big pack together to come hunt us down.”

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t thought of that. But it made perfect sense, considering what we’d seen with the messenger girl. Something was being coordinated.

“What do you think we should do?”

“We could bail out and I could come back later in spy mode.”

“Spy mode?”

“Naked. With a knife. Alone.”

Murphy shook his head. “Being out here alone is too dangerous. You should know that better than anybody.”

“I just need to be more careful.”

“You don’t even know what that word means.”

I shrugged, looked around between the trees and listened through the sound of the rain.

“I say we see what we can see on our way back to the boat and call it a day,” Murphy said.

It was a disappointing choice, but Murphy was right. We were in danger. Weapons, ammunition, and maybe even MREs were available somewhere on the base. But without a better plan to find and get away with some of it, we weren’t likely to have a happy outcome.

“We should stay off the trail.”

I agreed on that point, as well.

Murphy pointed through the woods. “I think the boat is back that way, if we’re cutting straight through the woods.”

I’d lost my sense of direction. I looked around as though that might help me get my bearings. “Sure.”

“Lead the way.”

So I did.

Murphy followed me through the dense cedar branches as I grew more and more nervous. While stealth was necessary, it was slow. If those Smart Ones were gathering their numbers for a hunt, time was definitely against us.

The smell of wet death embraced us in a clammy hug as we neared the edge of the forest. When we finally came out, to our right stood a row of widely-spaced buildings of painted cinder block and fifty-year-old brick. Among those was a gravel road with vehicles scattered about. Human bones with all but the smallest bits of rotting flesh gnawed off lay in puddles and on the grass across the empty space. Thousands had died there.

“Can you tell where we are?” Murphy whispered, aghast at the sight of so many dead.

Deal with it later. You’ve got more immediate problems.

I tried not to look at the bones. “I don’t know where we are. You have any idea?”

“Nope. This is my first time here. But I think on the other side of those buildings is the parade ground, the one you see when you drive by on the highway.”

“Loop 1, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we must be completely turned around. I thought we were heading back toward the river.”

Murphy shrugged. His face looked aged under a burden of worry.

Directly across the clearing stood some sheds, perhaps for maintenance. Behind those, another growth of cedar forest. “I think if we cut through there, those ammo bunkers might be on the other side,” I said.

“And?”

“I think I can find my way out from there.”

Murphy looked left then right, and took a long, hard look at the distance between the sheds and us. “Are we running or walking?”

“What do you think, about a hundred yards to get us into those trees?”

“About that.”

“With Smart Ones around looking for us, I think it’s best to keep out of sight as much as possible. Are you up for the run?”

“I haven’t been this thin since I was in the Army. Don’t lose sight of me. I might just run all the way back to the river.”

“Let’s go.”

Murphy took off at a sprint across the killing field. I lit out on his heels, glancing left and right as I went. Better to see coming danger than to simply run and pray. Though I could make a pretty good case for run and pray.

Murphy stumbled on a slippery skull and nearly fell, but caught his balance and kept his feet moving. I slowed to wait. We had to stay together.

We had just crossed over a gravel road and were nearly at the maintenance sheds when a line of Whites snaked out of the trees in front of us.

Shit.

Murphy slowed to a jog. I matched his speed.

The Whites saw us. We were upright and running across a flat field. They each cast glances our way as they formed a helix and paralleled the tree line, blocking our way with fifty, then sixty and more. And they kept filing out of a gap in the trees.

We veered to our right, and moved in the same direction as the Whites. They didn’t come after us. I guessed nearly all of them were of the variety with limited intellectual capacity. To them, Murphy and I were nothing special.

Through his heavy breathing Murphy said, “I say we shoot the one in front. He’s the Smart One.”

I shook my head. “Then the rest will charge us.”

“We need to do something pretty quick or we’re fucked.”

He was right. Of that, I had no doubt.

Another helix of Whites snaked out between the buildings off to our right.

“They’re herding us, Murphy.” I came to a stop and looked back. Whites were coming out of the woods behind us. We were surrounded. And they had more bodies than we had bullets.

Chapter 5

Murphy’s eyes went wide with the adrenaline.

I was sure my eyes were just as wide as I raced through options in my mind, trying to come up with an escape plan.

All three of the helices changed direction on some silent cue and started to spiral in on us.

My panic rose under my attempts to quash it.

Murphy shouted, “Fuck this. C’mon!” With his weapon on his hip, he took off at full speed toward our original destination, the forest behind the maintenance sheds.

My feet were moving before I even had time to think.

Our sudden choice to run sent the helices into turmoil as the leaders—presumably Smart Ones—each angled directly toward us.

I had my pistol up, ready to shoot, but was determined not to use it until the last moment. Once a gun sounded, all of those Whites running around in their helices would lose all sense of order, scream like bloody hell and rush us. Gnashing teeth and tearing fingers would be the last thing I’d see.

We were on a collision course with the leader of the first helix we saw, and the trees were just fifteen or twenty feet behind him, but so were a whole line of Whites.

With just a few steps between them, Murphy ripped out a guttural wail, braced his weapon in both hands across the front of his body and charged the Smart One. The Smart One’s brain made the sudden, instinctual switch from predator to prey, and fear hit him almost as hard as Murphy did an instant later. The White never had a chance to react. Murphy bowled over him and barely slowed.

The helix fell into disarray, but only for a moment.

A wave of howls tore through the rain, a call to charge, and the disorganized jogging Whites boiled over with berserk rage and came at us.

Murphy, with better instincts for fighting than me, immediately fired his weapon at a White in front of us. As that one was falling, I popped several rounds toward the Whites between us and the trees. As for those behind, I’d outrun them or I wouldn’t.

With our path momentarily clear, Murphy crashed into the cedars with me on his heels. Branches tore painlessly at my skin.

The horde hit the trees a handful of seconds behind us, breaking branches and jamming themselves into the gaps in the foliage. The dense branches would only give so far. The Whites tripped over one another, screaming in frustration.

We got some distance on them, but ran at a careless speed.

The thicket of trees was not as wide as the clearing we’d just crossed, and before I knew it, we broke out on the other side. We were on clear, bone-strewn ground again with another helix of Whites coming around a bend off to our left and bearing down on the ruckus. We were right in their path.

To our right, I saw a rectangular section of barbed wire-topped chain-link fence surrounding two berms, with flat concrete walls at the front of each. Centered on each wall was a doorway large enough to drive through. One bunker was sealed by a heavy metal door. The door on the other bunker was slid to the side on its tracks leaving it open.

“The ammunition bunkers!” I shouted.

Murphy veered right, willing to accept any idea, any direction.

It was a foot race between us and the helix rounding the bend.

We ran, demanding every painful spasm of speed we could wrench out of our lungs and legs. Our lives depended on it, and it was going to be close.

Without breaking stride, and with the leaders of the new helix just a few dozen feet away, Murphy let go with several bursts of his rifle and four or five Whites at the front fell. Those behind tumbled over.

That bought us the time we needed. We crossed through the open gate in the chain-link fence and headed toward the open bunker.

That’s when it occurred to me. “We can’t go in there.

“Fuck that.” Murphy crossed through the threshold and turned to make an attempt at closing the door.

“We’ll be trapped in here if we shut that door.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you want me to do, but you better figure something out, professor.” Murphy ran a dozen paces inside, turned, dropped to a knee, and brought his rifle to his shoulder. He started popping off rounds as the first of the infected tried to come in behind us.

The open door was nearly ten feet wide, wide enough to drive a vehicle inside for loading and unloading. Murphy wouldn’t be able to hold the mob at the door for very long. Once they massed outside, they’d overwhelm him easily. My pistol would be of no help when that happened.

Near frantic, I looked around as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Breathe.

Breathe.

The place was disorganized. Not full, but more crates, boxes and canisters were there than I imagined we’d ever need. Many were open. Some were spilled. Whomever had been in here last had been in one hell of a hurry.

Then I saw them. Grenades.

A box of fragmentation grenades laid broken open on the far side of the bunker. Those were probably the only weapons in the whole place we could put to lethal use in the short seconds available to us. The fact that they’d also alert thousands of Whites within a mile to our presence didn’t matter. If we didn’t use them, we’d die.

I ran over and grabbed as many as I could cradle in my hands and forearms, bounded back across the bunker and dropped a half-dozen on the ground at Murphy’s feet.

His face turned from grim to grin.

He reached down and picked one up. “Grab one, toss it, then get the fuck out of the way.”

He was already pulling the pin on one when I got my finger through the pin on mine. He tossed his through the open door and moved to the side to get out of the direct line of any fragments that the blast would send back in our direction. A half second later, my grenade followed his and I ran back over to the open box of grenades on the floor.

The twin blasts knocked me off of my feet and I landed roughly. Fragments sizzled the air.

As I picked myself up. Murphy was already pulling a pin from another grenade.

Writhing bodies of screaming Whites, their dead and their dazed brethren lay in the mud outside the door. Murphy threw the grenade through the rainy smoke and squatted to gather up more. He’d only just gotten out of line with the door’s opening when the grenade exploded.

Seconds later, I’d pulled a Hello Kitty backpack from my pocket and was loading it with loose hand grenades. The other bag got its share of grenades just as quickly. I yelled to Murphy, “We need to get the fuck out of here and make a run for it.”

“How many grenades you got?”

“Fuck. Does it matter?”

“Give me the word and we’ll make a run for it.”

Another grenade blast rang my ears.

Having stuffed my pistol back in my pocket, I jumped to my feet with a bag in each hand. They were heavy and awkward enough that running would be damn difficult. “Ready.”

“Beside the door,” Murphy shouted, running to put his back to the wall just inside. “We’ll toss out two more, and as soon as they blow, follow me out.”

“Right.” I was beside him in a flash and passed him a bag. We both pulled a pin from a grenade. Murphy tossed his around the corner. I did the same and immediately stepped around the corner to run.

Murphy threw an arm around my neck and jerked me roughly back, pinning me against the wall just as the first grenade detonated.

As the second one exploded, it occurred to me I’d forgotten to wait for the grenades to blow before chasing them through the door. Murphy had just saved my life. Again.

With ears ringing and my brains rattling, Murphy yelled, “A grenade in each hand. Pull the pins. If any motherfucker gets in my way I’m gonna run him down. Throw a grenade at any bunch you see, whether they’re coming or not. Stay on my ass. Now!” Murphy ran through the door and into the smoke.

Chapter 6

Blood.

Body parts.

Shrieks of the dying.

Ripped torsos spilling intestines.

Shattered bones. White skin that ran with red.

Severed arteries spewing fountains of blood that made the ground slippery under our feet.

Murphy was the devil and I was a demon. Together we’d created a little Hell at the entrance of the bunker. Dazed from concussions, Whites limped through smoke that hadn’t yet been washed out of the air.

True to his word, Murphy shouldered the first White that crossed his path and she bounced face first into the mud.

Thirty feet out of the bunker, we made it through the gate in the chain-link fence, and still not a hand had touched me. To our right though, a group of Whites looked wide-eyed at the horror outside the bunker’s door, stunned. Unfortunately for them, too many of their eyes were watching Murphy and me run by. That earned them the first of my grenades as I shouted, “Faster!”

Like we could run any faster.

Murphy caught sight of the grenade flying toward the group and veered left.

The explosion thundered behind us, and I didn’t look back to see the damage I’d done. We were headed for a tree line with no Whites in front of us. My heartbeat was pounding in my ears and my bag of loose grenades was beating bruises all over my back, but I had a moment to hope.

Murphy crashed between the squat cedar trees, stopped and turned to assess the situation.

Whatever the Smart Ones were doing at that moment, they weren’t leading the charge after us. Whites were all over the clearing, most in a state of confusion, some looking at us and more than a few moving to follow.

Across from us, at the tree line from which we’d come into the clearing, two helices of Whites were exiting and making no move at all toward the fresh feast at the bunker doors. They were still on target.

Murphy tossed a grenade at a small cluster of disinterested Whites not far from us. They’d be in the path of the helices coming out of the woods. A distraction for some of them, perhaps.

He dug another grenade out of my bag, pulled the pin and took off through the woods.

Just as the foliage grew thick enough to obscure any view of the clearing behind us, the sound of howling and crashing came from somewhere off to our right. And it was so damn close. Murphy stopped and looked at me, asking in urgent silence if I could pinpoint the direction.

With the shrieking Whites everywhere, I felt no compunction about yelling. “Throw them up high over the trees in the general direction! We don’t have to come close to anything! The noise will disperse them for a moment!” I heaved a grenade with all the force I could put behind it.

Murphy lofted two grenades into high arcs in the same direction. Before the first explosion sounded, we both had more grenades in our hands and were pulling the pins as we barreled through the trees with no idea where we were heading. We were running for our lives. That’s all either of us were thinking in that moment.

When we broke out of the trees again, under a blanket of stink, we were back in another field covered with decaying carcasses. A large building lay off to our right with corpses piled high near the walls, probably the last stand of those who had died at Camp Mabry.

Several vehicles sat about, some military, some civilian. One was an armored Humvee with the front doors swung open and a machine gun mounted on the top. Nothing in the world could have been a more beautiful sight.

On the far side of the clearing, several hundred Whites were coming at us, both organized and not. Behind us, in the trees, the infected were thrashing their way through. Off to our left, two long helices were inter-spiraling toward us.

Murphy said, “We’re so fucked.”

I shouted, “The Humvee!” I ran, knowing without looking Murphy would be right behind.

It was another race we had to win. It was the only thought I could afford to entertain.

My legs carried me faster than I thought possible, and when I was just ten feet from the Humvee, with dozens of Whites closing in, I tossed both of my grenades in rapid succession. Murphy did the same and jumped in through the driver’s door. I hopped in the passenger side.

The infected were closing fast. We had to get moving.

The wet ground would compromise our traction. We’d be dead if they hemmed us in.

I slammed my door and set the battle lock just as a White bounced off the glass.

Murphy already had his door buttoned up and was waiting for the diesel’s glow plugs to warm up.

“Murphy, let’s trade places.”

“What? No time.”

“God dammit, just do it.”

Under the duress of my urgency, Murphy squirmed up out of the driver’s seat and tried to push into the back to let me get around, but the back of the Humvee was stacked full of boxes.

It was awkward getting past one another in the cramped space. We earned more bruises for doing it quickly. But we could afford the bruises. We could barely afford the dozen seconds it cost us. As soon as my butt hit the driver’s seat, the glow plug indicator flashed off and I cranked the engine. The Humvee rocked against the impact of several more Whites. The engine rumbled and I mashed the accelerator.

The Humvee lurched and started to roll.

Across the hood, I saw Whites coming toward us from all over the clearing. I plowed into them as I turned the wheel to angle away from the buildings. They thudded against the grill with crunching bones and desperate screams as I ran them down. The mob was thick enough to slow the Humvee and Whites were climbing on top. But it wasn’t thick enough to stall us.

“You know where we’re going?” Murphy hollered.

“Yeah.”

Rolling out of the muddy field, our tires finally grabbed asphalt and we accelerated down a long straight road.

“Where?”

“This way.”

One of the infected fell off Murphy’s side, rolled across pavement, and tumbled over the rocky grass.

As the mass of Whites receded behind us, up ahead a group of a dozen infected stepped out of the cedar forest on the left. I let my foot off of the accelerator and braced myself for the impact of the bunch as I guessed they’d all jump in front of the Humvee or charge it from the side. But they didn’t. They walked purposefully toward the road, stopped and stared. It was more than weird.

As we passed, the closest of the group was just two feet outside of my window, glaring at me with cold, cruel eyes.

It took a second for recognition to kick in, but as I looked at him over my shoulder, I was sure it was Mark. Fucking Mark.

My toe touched the brake. Murphy felt the deceleration and shouted, “What the fuck, man?”

“That was fucking Mark.”

“Mark? What the hell are you talking about?”

“That was Mark back there. The one right by the road.” I looked back and forth across the road and the grassy shoulders. I could make the turn and go back to run his ass down.

“Dude, it wasn’t Mark. Just keep going.”

The Humvee was slowing. Mark was standing in the center of the road by then, daring me to come back.

Oh, to feel his bones break on my bumper.

Breathe.

Think.

My experience at the hospital, trying to drive that Humvee through the mass of white bodies, was a lesson that screamed at me not to be tried a second time. It was by little more than luck I made it out of that one alive. If I did a U-turn to go back and run down Mark, and if there were Whites in the trees in sufficient numbers, they could trap us on the wet ground. We’d die.

Murphy was trying to look back to see what he could, but the crates and boxes in the back of the Humvee blocked most of his view. “All of those bald-headed motherfuckers look alike, man. Let’s be smart and get the fuck outta here.”

The Humvee shook against several impacts.

I looked forward and cursed myself for focusing so much on Mark that I never saw them. Whites were pouring out of the trees on our right, already climbing on top and trying to destabilize the Humvee with their weight.

Chapter 7

The Humvee was picking up speed again.

“How many on the roof?”

“More than one!” Murphy shouted. “How the fuck should I know?”

I mashed the brakes hard. Murphy hit the dashboard as three naked, white bodies rolled down off the hood. I accelerated again and ran them over.

The Humvee picked up speed and we passed the bulk of the ambushers.

Several were still clinging to Murphy’s side of the Humvee. I swerved and scraped them off on an abandoned car.

And we were free.

Occasional Whites came out of the trees in front of us, a stupidity that cost them their lives. Some tried to catch us from the side. We were moving too fast by then.

Murphy exclaimed, “Holy shit!”

I tensed and jerked my head around to look.

Nothing.

Murphy was grinning.

“What the hell, Murphy?”

He nodded toward the back of the Humvee.

“What, the boxes?”

“Jesus must love us. It’s all ammo and shit.”

“No way.”

“Way. Do you know how to get back upriver from here?”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah, but you’re not gonna like it.”

We reached the base’s southern gate and turned onto 35th Street, headed west.

“This is the way to Sarah Mansfield’s house, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, don’t smile like that. You’re worrying me.”

“We’re not going to Sarah’s house.”

“Cool, man.”

The fork in the road was just ahead. Right led up the crest of Mount Bonnell. Left led into the country club parking lot. It was time to commit. I cut the wheels left and entered the country club grounds.

Murphy was alarmed. “Dude, there’s nothing down here. We can’t get out this way.” He turned in his seat. Whites were coming out of their hiding places behind us.

I swerved around the driveway, ran down a few of the infected, got to the parking lot and lined the Humvee up with the boat ramp. “Hang on.”

That’s when Murphy figured out what I intended to do. “I can’t swim,” he said.

“I know.” The Humvee pitched forward as it rolled onto the ramp and I braked to slow it a little. I didn’t want to hit the water so fast that we’d be injured by the impact.  A giant white splash exploded in front of us and my chest hit the steering wheel as my body was thrown forward. I pressed my foot to the brake more firmly but not enough to stop us as we rolled down the boat ramp.

Before I knew it, the water was up to the bottom edge of the windows and running in through the floor drains and inadequate door seals.

Murphy was freaking out and trying to open the door, but it wouldn’t open.

I expected that. “Be calm. Be calm.”

“Goddammit, Zed! Goddammit!” He was panicking.

I lowered my voice and spoke slowly as I reached over to put a hand on Murphy’s shoulder. “Be cool, Murphy. Be cool.”

“I can’t get the Goddamned door open.”

“Be cool, Murphy. It won’t open.”

He spun around in his seat, near frantic. “What the fuck?”

The water was more than halfway up the windows outside, then only a few inches from the top edges of the doors. The six ton vehicle, still rolling slowly down the boat ramp, lurched to a halt when I pushed the brakes all the way down.

The water inside was up over our legs.

Murphy stood as much as he could and tried to get his face as close as possible to the roof.

“Goddamn you, Zed.”

“Murphy,” I said calmly, “we’ve stopped. The Humvee isn’t going to roll any deeper into the water. We’re still on the ramp. We just need to wait a second before the doors will open.”

“They won’t open.”

“They will open. Just not yet.”

“We’re gonna drown.”

“No, Murphy, we’ll still have air up by the ceiling when the water stops rising. Look at where it is near the tops of the windows. Once it’s level inside with the water outside, we’ll be able to open the doors.”

The water had risen to my chest at that point and I deliberately got up out of my seat to get my face near the ceiling.

“How do you know that?”

“I just do. Okay? Trust me.”

“You should have asked me to trust you before you drove the damn truck into the fucking river, because I would have told you hell, no!”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

“I swear to God, Zed, if I don’t drown…”

The water was nearing the ceiling and Murphy was nearly hyperventilating.

“Be calm. It’ll be okay.”

The water stopped rising.

Moments passed before Murphy figured out I was right. The rising water had stopped. He looked at me, surprise etched into his face.

“Try the door. But be careful. You don’t want to fall out into the river. You can’t swim, remember?”

“Like I’m ever gonna forget that.”

Murphy turned away from me and reached down to pull on the handle of his door. It opened with ease. He stuck his head out and looked around. “I’ll be damned.”

“You gotta trust me sometimes, Murphy.”

“Okay, lucky charm, what’s next?” He pulled his head back in. “We’re in the middle of the marina and about a hundred Whites are back there on the ramp and more coming.”

“Okay. Listen, I’ve got to swim over and get the boat before they start coming up the docks and get on it. Are you going to be okay if I leave you here for a minute?”

“Whatever, man. I’m cool. Just get the boat. And just so you know, I’m going to punch you in the face when this is over.”

Chapter 8

I worked my way around the nearly submerged Humvee until I was on Murphy’s side. The pontoon boat was tied to a dock at least a hundred feet from that side. The mob of Whites collecting on the shore was growing rapidly. I took my pistol and extra magazines out of my pocket and lay them on the roof of the Humvee. The extra pounds of grenades in my Hello Kitty bag would make for hard swimming so the bag stayed on the roof of the Humvee. I kept the knife.

I inhaled deeply three times before submerging and using my feet to push myself off of the Humvee’s fender. I intended to cross the distance completely underwater. Any surfacing would get the attention of the White mob and might lead to their welcoming me when I reached the boat.

Staying just a few feet beneath the surface, I stroked with my arms and scissor kicked my legs. The wails of the Whites barely transmitted down to me through the water, which was noisy with raindrops falling on the surface.

Surrounded by cold green, I had nothing to guide me but the hope I could swim in a straight line.

As the distance dragged at me, my lungs cried out for oxygen.

The need for breath grew and doubt sat itself on my shoulder and whispered faithless, discouraging words.

But to come up for air was to advertise my presence to the Whites. To come up for air was failure. It was tantamount to stranding Murphy in the Humvee in the middle of the river.

I stroked through the cold green.

I thought about my buddy, Benny, the one I’d eventually beaten up in junior high. The summer before that, we were at the community pool with a couple of other kids from the neighborhood. We were all standing on the side when somebody said, “I’ll bet you can’t swim all the way across underwater.”

Without even taking a moment to brag, I dove into the pool and glided under the surface, kicking with my legs and using my arms to pull myself along as I watched the black lane markers pass beneath. I reached the other side of the pool, popped up and turned around. It was easy but my friends were amazed. I swelled with pride.

Benny, however, was having none of it. “I can do that.” He dove into the water and followed my path.

My pride dribbled quickly away as Benny’s wiggly form beneath the water closed the gap between us. The last smidgen of that pride winked out of existence when Benny’s grinning face popped out of the water beside me.

The little fuck had made it.

The guys on the other side of the pool started to talk. I climbed up out of the pool, looked at all my buddies and said, “Well, watch this.” I drew a deep breath, dove back in, and swam the width of the pool again. Only this time, instead of stopping at the other side, I turned, pushed off of the wall and, starting to feel a compelling need for air, swam across the width of the pool again.

I made it all the way back across and popped up next to Benny, breathing deeply to get some fresh air back in my lungs. The guys were back to being amazed.

But Benny wasn’t giving up. He’d felt the pride too when the boys seemed amazed at the initial feat. The chance to feel like a winner is a rare thing. Benny was determined to feel it again. He climbed up out of the pool. The boys were making noise. They were spectators to a challenge and loving it.

Benny drew a few deep breaths just as I had, shot me a defiant look and dove into the water.

I climbed up and sat on the edge of the pool, so I could better see Benny’s shimmery form beneath the wavy surface. Just as before, he made it to the far side of the pool without coming up for air. And just as I had, when he reached the other side, he turned underwater, pushed off and swam the distance back.

On the way across, I wished he’d come up for air and grant me the victory. But he didn’t. He wanted victory as badly as me. Or so he thought.

When Benny emerged from the water below me after swimming two widths of the pool, the boys cheered and shouted. They were impressed with us both, but I wasn’t willing to share the victory. I drew in deep breaths and prepared myself to try for three.

Benny saw what was coming next and climbed up beside me.

It was then that one of the kids from across the pool scoffed, “You can only do it because when you dive in, you go halfway across the pool before you have to start swimming.”

True. But fuck that kid, anyway. I shrugged and jumped down into the water. “I can do it either way.”

Some other kid said, “At the same time. Do it together.”

I looked at Benny. Do or die, buddy.

Benny, with a touch of worry on his face, jumped into the pool beside me.

I hollered back across the pool. “Somebody has to say ‘go.’” I grabbed the lip of the pool’s edge with one hand, pulled my legs up, planted my feet on the wall, and positioned myself for the biggest push I could.

Benny watched me and followed my example, letting no advantage slip by.

From across the pool, I heard, “Ready. Set.”

I looked at Benny. He looked at me. I didn’t know what he was thinking. It didn’t matter. I was going to win the challenge or I was going to suck in a lung full of water trying.

“Go.”

Off we went.

In an ideal world, the challenge should have been each of us against ourselves to see how far we could push ourselves beyond our beliefs and fears. But that world is a fantasy. Nothing like it has ever existed, nor will it.

Under the surface, I watched Benny and kept even with him as we swam across the pool.

When we reached the other side, it had indeed taken longer without the advantage of diving in. I was feeling the stress of insufficient oxygen in my blood.

I made my turn and started to swim back, expecting Benny to quit at the turn. When I looked though, he was coming up beside me. He hadn’t quit. Persistent fucker.

No biggie. I could make another lap. Benny wouldn’t make it to the other side. No fucking way.

The black lane lines passed beneath us and kept passing until I saw the bottom of the pool curve up to the wall ahead of me. My lungs were screaming for air. But Benny was still beside me.

He would stop at the wall. I was sure of that. I only had to make the turn, swim a few strokes and I’d win.

I could to it. I knew I could.

I hit the wall, negotiated my turn, pushed off with my legs and glided over a few of the black lane markers below. Just before I surfaced to finally grant relief to my lungs, I saw Benny glide on past me, stroking as he went.

Shit.

Every muscle in my body demanded I surface and breathe, but every ounce of my soul refused. Win or drown. I swam on. I sped up and came up beside Benny.

I’d laid claim to something when I’d jumped into the pool the first time, and whatever it was, whether pride or something less tangible, it felt better than anything I’d ever felt before. I would not lose. No matter how much my muscles begged to quit.

We made it to the halfway point and we were still underwater. Despite my resolve, I silently begged Benny to quit and end the irrational pain screaming in my head. Surface. Surface. Breathe.

But Benny swam. And swam.

I swam.

At three quarters of the way, my prayers were answered and I saw Benny’s body change its position in the water just before he pushed his head above the surface.

Victory.

But not enough victory, not yet.

Only a quarter of the way to go. I swam on.

I’d make three full widths.

To my surprise, my body complied.

Stroke. Kick. Stroke. Kick.

Black lane markers passed beneath me.

The pool wall curved up and I hit it with my outstretched hand.

But I wasn’t done.

I turned, pushed off with my feet and let my momentum carry me back out into the pool. Three full widths had passed underwater. I knew I wouldn’t make a fourth. But I pushed myself anyway and watched the black stripes slip past. Then I saw Benny, just ahead of me, standing on the bottom with his head above the water, feeling his defeat.

With the last anything that was left, I stroked past Benny and swam another ten feet before surfacing.

I hadn’t just beaten Benny. I’d beaten him in legendary fashion. The boys on the side of the pool were silently amazed.

I felt fucking fantastic.

So in that cold green water with a seemingly impossible distance to swim, I knew I could make it. No matter how much my lungs, my muscles, my brain protested. I knew I could.

I’d made an unspoken commitment to myself and Murphy when I chose to drive the Humvee into the river. And no way was I letting Murphy down.

But it was rationalization and the fear that almost beat me.

In the murk, every direction looked the same, just green fading to darker green. Distance passed without measure. Direction existed only in degrees of hope. Had I swam past the pontoon boat? Had I veered so far off course that I was swimming up the boat ramp and into the greedy hands of Whites brave enough to wade into knee-deep water for their supper?

It was at the end of a stroke with my arms back at my sides that I realized how little visibility I had. One of the boat’s pontoons materialized from a lighter green color in front of me into silvery aluminum. Before I could react, my bald head collided with a thin metal fin that ran the length of the pontoon just under the surface. It nearly knocked me silly and pissed me off to the point I grabbed my scalp while yelling my anger into a flurry of bubbles.

I ducked under and quietly surfaced between the pontoons, beneath the boat’s deck. Neither the burned squatters under the trees nor the infected on the boat ramp could see me. Grabbing onto a piece of the boat’s deck support to catch my breath, I reached up to evaluate my latest wound. The gash felt deep and enormous but probably wasn’t. Warm blood flowed down my face.

Dammit.

After several deep breaths, I slid back beneath the water’s surface, swam over to the far side of the boat and went under the other pontoon, and came up under the dock. I heard feet on the wooden planks overhead.

The footsteps belonged to Whites. Whether they were working their way around the marina trying to find a way to get to Murphy, or they’d seen me go under water and had deduced my destination, my time had expired. Retrieving the pontoon boat was going to get difficult.

After positioning myself near the rope I’d used to tie the boat to the dock, I reached up with my knife and started to saw at the rope. I wasn’t quick enough. First one, two, then three noisy Whites jumped from the dock to the boat.

More feet were coming when the rope finally separated. I wasted no time in using a support post for leverage to push the bow of the boat away. The Whites on the boat’s deck, seeing the widening of the water that separated them from dry land, started a whole different kind of yelling. They were afraid.

When the Whites on the dock reached the end, just above my head, the pontoon boat was ten feet out into the water and drifting slowly toward the center of the marina.

Given that my boat had unwanted passengers, a hard task was ahead. Climbing up onto the deck and starting the engine was not an option.

I swam out to the front of the boat and grabbed the rope. From there, it was slow going, dragging the heavy boat through the water with only the power of my kicking feet and a stroking arm.

After a lengthy effort, the boat neared the submerged Humvee. I looked up and saw Murphy had climbed up on top and had his rifle at his shoulder. With his feet on something solid, his big smile was back.

My three infected passengers were going completely nuts over being surrounded by water.

Murphy gave me a nod and a wink, but waited before shooting.

Good enough for me. He’d taken ownership of that problem.

By the time I was ten feet from the Humvee, the effort of tugging the heavy pontoon boat across the marina was taking its toll. I was starting to wonder whether Murphy was going to deal with my passengers. They were all leaning over the front railing by then, stretching their grasping hands toward me.

“Damn, dude, any time,” I said between breaths.

In rapid succession, three shots blasted across the water.

The Whites onshore started to run up and down the banks, frenzy driving them to find some way to reach us.

I turned back to look at the boat. All three Whites were down. I looked back up at Murphy.

He smiled and shrugged, as though he’d fully expected to get them all so easily.

Between my heavy breaths, I managed to say, “Fuck you.”

Murphy chuckled. He understood it just as I’d meant it. It was a compliment, and I was envious he was a better shot than me.

I stopped swimming, figuring the boat had enough momentum to float up next to the Humvee.

Just to be sure, I asked, “They’re dead, right?”

“Yup.”

“You sure?”

“Yup.” He nodded. “Your head’s bleeding.”

“I know.” I swam around to the back corner of the boat where I’d be able to climb up the swim ladder.

“It looks like it hurts.”

“I have the virus. It doesn’t bother me.”

Once on the deck, the wet wind gave me a shiver. I’d been in the cold water too long. Near the bow, the three Whites lay across one another, two shot through the center of the chest, one through the head. I’d deal with that mess in a minute. First, I retrieved a rope from one of the storage bins beneath the bench seats and tossed one end over to Murphy. “Tie it off to something and I’ll pull the boat over.”

“Tie it off?” Murphy asked.

“So we can get all the stuff out of the Humvee.”

Chapter 9

While we weren’t in danger of sinking, the pontoon boat was riding low in the water and we were making good progress. Still, Murphy spent a good deal of time looking down at how close the water was to washing up over the deck and gauging the distance to the shore.

“If you can’t swim, does it matter how far out we are when we sink?” I asked, putting a subtle emphasis on the “when.”

“I’m checking how far you’ll have to pull me. Keep us close to the shore. Make it easy on yourself.”

“When we came downriver this morning, almost no Whites were onshore,” I said, changing the subject. “Now I’m seeing lots of ‘em, and most of those seem to be interested in us.”

“Maybe they like to sleep late.”

I started to retort, but realized Murphy’s comment, intended to be funny – and it was – could be true. That would match my experience with the Whites when I was on Nancy’s chain gang.

“Besides,” Murphy said, “this morning we were drifting. Now the engine is on. That’s bound to make them more interested.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“You only say ‘probably’ because it bothers you when you’re not the only one with the answers.” Murphy was smiling, so I knew he was just giving me a hard time. “I’ll bet in school you were one of those kids who always raised your hand first so you could answer the teacher’s questions.”

“It’s no wonder you get in lots of fights.”

“Hey, don’t be reminding me of fighting. I think I still owe you a punch in the face.”

“More like a thank you for saving your ass again.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “Like when I kept you from blowing yourself up again? You mean that time? I swear to God, you’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.”

I shrugged. “That’s a two-way street, buddy.”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

I grinned back at Murphy. “I’m not wearing any underwear.”

“I don’t need to know that.”

The rain started to fall heavily again and Murphy moved to a seat on the other side of the boat to stay out of it. I watched the naked Whites on shore as I steered. To me, they seemed too interested.

A mile or two had passed when Murphy asked, “How do you think things turned out at the riverboat?”

On our way downriver that morning, we’d stopped by the riverboat where Amy and the two tweens were living. I’d introduced everyone and then headed out with Murphy.  “I guess we’ll find out when we get back whether we’ve been invited to stay. I think I’d feel safer sleeping on that boat than I would sleeping in that house tonight.”

“Me, too.” Murphy said. “How are we set for fuel?”

“Still about a half-tank.”

“We should maybe try and fill it up on the next run. One those marinas probably has gas.”

I nodded. “We should get some gas cans to keep on the boat.”

“I wonder how much fuel is in the riverboat.”

I shrugged. “I’m sure it’s diesel anyway. This is a gasoline boat.”

“We should get diesel, too. I’ll bet that boat has some big ass tanks. We can store diesel there for using with the Humvees later on.”

“We don’t have a Humvee.”

“’Cause you drove ours into the river.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Besides, you keep sayin’ that most of these white-skinned fuckers will kill each other off eventually. When we get there, having a good supply of gas to get around will come in real handy.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. Scrounging up everything we can get our hands on while we’re out killing Smart Ones is a good idea.”

An awkward silence followed.

“Zed, you know I’m not thrilled about that idea, right?”

“I hear you. But it needs to be done. If we don’t, then we’ll always be at risk. They aren’t going away, not completely.”

“They might go away. That big bunch came here from Houston. What’s to say they won’t just keep wandering west and die of thirst somewhere on the way to El Paso?”

“What if they decide they like it here and stay?”

Murphy shrugged.

“Mark was up there, you know.”

“So you said.”

“He screwed us over once already and would have killed us if you hadn’t been on your toes.”

“And?”

“And he needs to be killed.”

Murphy looked away from me and watched the waves float by for a minute. “Are you sure this isn’t about something else, Zed?”

“Murphy, playing coy isn’t your game. Don’t bother to sugarcoat it. Just tell me what you think.”

“The world is fucked, Zed. But we’ve got it all right at the moment. I mean, we don’t have it like we did at Sarah Mansfield’s mansion. That place was just a couple of cheeseburgers and a hooker short of Heaven, if you know what I mean. Right now, we’re safe. At least if they let us stay on that riverboat, we will be. We’ve got good people with us. You’ve even got a hot redhead who likes you if you’d pull your head out of your ass and do something about it. Forget the past. Forget revenge, man. Try to put on a smile and move ahead. That’s all you gotta do. Go with the Murphy plan.”

I didn’t respond.

He looked back at me and after a long time said, “So you’ve got nothing to say about that?”

“I didn’t think you were finished.”

“Of course I’m finished. I stopped talking, didn’t I?”

“You said my desire to kill Mark and the other Smart Ones wasn’t about our long-term survival, but about something else. I was waiting for you to tell me what that was.”

Murphy shrugged. “No sugarcoating. It’s about Amber. You want to kill him for what he did to Amber. But what you don’t know is, revenge is pointless. Sure, he was a prick, but he was just a prick. You can beat people up for that, but you can’t kill them.”

“What?”

“Let me finish. He turned into Mr. Psycho Killer Dude when he got the virus. You know the virus makes some people crazy. You’ve seen that. Now he’s just a crazy fuck. He does crazy fuck bullshit. He doesn’t have enough brain cells left to be normal. Getting revenge on him for killing Amber is like killing the neighbor’s crazy pit bull for shitting on your lawn. That’s what this is, right? Revenge?”

“No,” I lied. At least, I partially lied. Sure, at first it was revenge, but that turned into—or rationalized its way into—a necessity. “I told you. It’s about our survival. The Smart Ones are too good at using the rest of the Whites to hunt us down and kill us. Left unchecked, they will succeed. They’ll kill every last one of us.”

“And you’re going to go all Null Spot and save the world. Is that it?”

“Fuck you, Murphy.”

Murphy grinned. “You’re getting all bitchy again, man. You said no sugarcoating.”

I wasn’t angry about it, not really. “I meant it in the most loving way.”

“So what, then? Level with me, man. Tell me what’s really going on inside that big, white peanut head of yours.”

I laughed. “I don’t have a peanut head.” That reminded of my earlier collision with the boat. I touched the place where the metal had cut my skin. It was still bleeding, lumpy, and icky.

“I know, man. Like I said, it’s a fucked up world now. If you don’t lighten up, you’re gonna go nuts. If you don’t learn to let all of this shit go and be happy about what little we have left, you’re gonna explode one day. Or finally do something stupid enough to get yourself killed.”

“I know.”

“Well if you know, then why are we out raiding National Guard bases full of crazy white fuckers, instead of staying back home under the blankets and getting some pussy? You know Steph wants it, right? You can see that, right?”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Well, who cares, man? This isn’t seventh grade. Why don’t you just ask her? Or do you want me to ask her for you?” Murphy busted out laughing. “Do you? Want me to ask her, I mean.”

“I think I can handle it myself. Thanks anyway.”

“Man, lighten up. We might not be around much longer. We need to enjoy life while we can.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“What?”

“You remember those guys I told you about, Nico and Mr. Mays?”

“Yeah, the old guy and the dude you escaped with.”

“I think we should stop by Mr. Mays’ place and see if they want to join us.”

Murphy nodded but didn’t agree. “Steph’s the boss. Shouldn’t we run it by her, or at least ask the others first?”

I shrugged.

“Okay, tell me why this is a good idea.”

“Sure, but can we at least stop by and see if they’re interested before we try to sell it to the group?”

“We?”

“Yeah, look, their place is just up here on the left. To give you the short story, that old guy looks old enough that he was probably raised on a farm around here back when people still grew their own food.”

“And?”

“And if he knows how to farm in central Texas, he might be the most valuable person we’re likely to meet.”

“Fine, but you better practice that shit up before we get back to the boat, because you’re selling it to Steph, not me.”

Chapter 10

With the pontoon boat tied to the same tree where I’d secured the canoe on my first visit, I knocked on Mr. Mays’ back door. Murphy stood a few paces back, rifle at the ready, keeping an eye out for any infected lurking nearby.

“Nico, Mr. Mays, it’s me, Zed. Anybody there?” I didn’t want to yell, and I didn’t want to beat too loudly. But impatience came easily while exposed and making noise.

I knocked again. “Nico. Mr. Mays.”

“H…hello.” A voice came from the other side of the door.

“Nico?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s me, Zed.”

“Who’s the b… big dude?”

“That’s my buddy, Murphy. I told you about him. Man, are you going to open the door or what? It’s not safe out here.”

The long pause that followed made me uncomfortable. Something wasn’t right. I looked down to make sure the safety on my pistol was off.

Finally, I heard the heavy banging of some kind of braces being removed from the other side of the door. A moment later, it swung open and Nico retreated into the house. I stepped inside. The old man smell still hung in the air, but something else was there too. It was familiar, too familiar. It was death. My eyes darted around looking for danger I felt sure was waiting for me.

Nico was at the far end of the kitchen by then with Mr. Mays’ rifle resting awkwardly in his arms, dry blood crusted on his shirt and pants.

Murphy came in behind me. “Man, it stinks in here.” He spotted Nico at the far end of the kitchen. “No offense, man.”

“Murphy, close the door.” I looked at Nico. He looked to have eaten, but was otherwise unsettled. “Nico, what’s wrong, man? Where’s Mr. Mays?”

Nico looked away without answering.

I stepped closer. “Nico?” He was different, skittish, odd. “Dude, what’s wrong?”

Nico shook his head. “They uh…they g…got in.”

Murphy asked, “The Whites?”

“Yeah,” Nico looked through a doorway into the living room. “They got in. They k…killed Mr. Mays.”

“What?” I’d heard what Nico said, I just wasn’t willing to accept it. “What happened?”

Nico looked at the floor, at the cabinets, at the sink and then back into the living room. “There wasn’t anything I could do. I tried. I t…tried to stop them.”

I tensed. “They’re gone, right?”

Nico nodded.

I stepped closer to Nico’s end of the kitchen.

“You shouldn’t come in,” he said, looking out the kitchen window. “It’s bad. It’s…” He looked back into the living room. “He’s in th…there.”

I tried to soothe him using slow, calm words. “It’s cool, dude. We’ve all seen it. You know what I mean.”

Nico turned almost manic for no apparent reason. “T…take me with you, Z…Zed. Don’t leave me here. P…please, take me to your friends.”

“Um.”

“Please. Please.” Nico had tears in his eyes. Outside of anger, after I implied he’d molested his daughter a few days earlier, it was the first significant emotion he’d expressed. “I can’t do this alone. I just can’t. I n…need to be around p…people. I’m l…losing it in here.”

“It’s cool, Nico.” I had serious doubts about Nico’s mental state, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I glanced back at Murphy and then, out of pity, made a choice for the group. “You can come along, but you have to calm down. All right? Be cool. Okay?”

Nico nodded, unable to speak, his emotions were bubbling over.

“Are there any Whites still around?”

Nico didn’t say anything.

“Nico, any Whites still around?”

“No, I ch…chased them off.”

With disbelief heavy in his voice, Murphy said, “You chased them off?”

“I… I swung the rifle like a c…club and chased them b…back out the door.”

“How many were there?” Murphy asked.

“Two. Three. It…It all happened so fast. I was angry. I didn’t know what I was d…doing. I was so m…mad. I was trying to save him. I really was. I thought I was s…saving him.”

“It’s okay, Nico. Just be cool, okay?” I said.

Nico leaned on the counter and looked down at the floor.

I looked back at Murphy again.

He was worried about everything here and made sure I read it clearly on his face.

I shrugged as if to say, “It’s a done deal. Let’s make the best of it.”

“Nico, right?” Murphy said.

Nico nodded.

“I’m Murphy. You got any food in the house?”

Nico shook his head. “Nothing. We haven’t caught any f…fish at all. Nothing.”

“Anything else?” Murphy asked. “Canned food?”

Nico shook his head.

Something was really wrong, but I wasn’t putting the pieces together. I told myself it had to be Nico’s fragile emotional state. “Is there anything in the house we need to take with us?” I asked. “Ammunition? Tools? Weapons? Anything worthwhile?”

“We should just go.” Nico was deflating into sadness.

“No. We need to check the house first.”

“W…why do you need to ch…check the house?” Nico switched to defensiveness, but it was weak.

“We have to see if anything is here that we need.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Murphy’s voiced boomed out. “Zed, let’s get outta here, man. Nico, it was good to meet ya.” Murphy looked at me and motioned to the door. “C’mon.”

It was clear Murphy thought the virus or emotional weakness had broken Nico and he wasn’t worth trying to salvage. I was moments from following Murphy out the door.

“Please don’t.” Nico was coming towards us with one open, pleading hand. The other hand still held Mr. Mays’ rifle. “Please don’t leave me.”

My head was telling me to ditch Nico and go. My heart was hurting for Nico’s pain and lobbying hard to keep my word and let him come with us. Such is the stuff of which mistakes are made. “Nico, it’s okay. Just let us check the house, okay? Is that rifle loaded?”

“L…loaded?”

“Does it have bullets in it?”

“I d…don’t know.”

Murphy scoffed. “Man, you don’t know?”

Nico shook his head. “I don’t know anything about g…guns.”

Murphy shook his head and snorted. “How could anybody not know that?”

“Nico, give me the rifle,” I said. “I’ll have Murphy check it out while I check the house, okay? Afterward, we’ll all get on the boat and head upriver.”

Nico nodded. But it took several long, reluctant moments before he handed the weapon over to Murphy. In a desperate tone, he asked, “You’re n…not going to t…take it and leave me here, are y…you?”

“Man, I’m not taking your gun,” Murphy said.

“Okay, Nico, you stay here with Murphy. I’m going to see if I can find any ammunition, okay?”

Nico nodded more times than necessary as his eyes found their way down to look at the floor.

Trying to think of a way to get out of my promise to bring him along, I walked past Nico and went into the living room.

A shapeless red stain covered most of the rug under Mr. Mays’s body. He had bruises and gashes on bloody hands. His skull was smashed. His shirt was torn at the buttons. Underneath, his saggy skin was ripped to expose a thoracic cavity, empty except for the gore left when his organs had been eaten.

I looked away from the body and tried to repress the memories of a crotchety old man who’d done me a kindness and given me a small meal, probably the last of his food. “Fucking Whites.”

A lamp in the living room was on the floor. A recliner was lying on its back. Some of the pictures on the wall were no longer hanging straight. One, an old black and white photograph, colorized by hand with paint a half-century past, showed a strong young man in a military uniform, arm in arm with a blonde beauty in a wedding dress. That was Mr. Mays with his bride, probably when he was my age.

The young man’s smile radiated through the years. Eight decades had not been unkind to that face, but death had masked it in ghastly anguish. He didn’t deserve to go like that.

Nobody did.

From the living room, the hallway looked like a retreat. I moved my feet quickly in that direction.

It turned out to be no kind of retreat at all. It was covered with picture upon picture upon picture, documenting the life of Mr. Mays, his beautiful bride, their children, their grandchildren and more. It was a humble museum to happy, anonymous lives that ended and were now remembered by no one. The fragile mementos were destined to crumble under the moldy rot of time as if they never existed.

No wonder Nico had gone half-crazy in this house. Every picture was a poignant reminder of the virus’s toll.

The first bedroom I came to was a guestroom, or so I guessed. It held nothing worth my time. I took the pillowcases off of the bed—you could never have too many of those—and stuffed them into my pockets.

The master bedroom, not really different from the other bedrooms in a house so old, had a gun rack on the wall above the dresser. It cradled a lever-action rifle that looked like it belonged in an old cowboy movie. That prize made my depressing trip through the Mays Museum worth it.

No, not worth it, not at all.

The weight of so much death was becoming hard to bear.

More searching turned up a nice-sized hunting knife with a sturdy blade, surprisingly sharp. Mr. Mays knew how to take care of his things. The knife was nestled in a sheath of leather undoubtedly older than me, probably older than my mother. That found its way onto my belt. It was no machete, but it was so much better than a kitchen knife stuck in a pocket.

Chapter 11

Back on the pontoon boat with the extra rifle, some ammunition, a couple of fishing poles, and a fishing tackle box full of all kinds of stuff that had no meaning to me, the boat putted slowly upstream. It was a quiet speed, a fuel conserving speed. But it was a speed that would leave us a couple of hours of travel time to the riverboat.

Seemingly broken by the weight of events, Nico fell asleep on one of the benches near the stern.

Murphy was standing beside me as I piloted. “That dude ain’t right,” he said.

I cast a glance back at the sleeping Nico. “He’s not cut out for this, is all. He’ll be okay.”

Murphy shook his head.

“I know he seems like he’s losing it, but he’s been through some shit.”

“We’ve all been through some shit, Zed.”

“Yeah, but that’s not all I was going to say about it. He had to watch his kids get killed in his front yard. He’d been on Nancy’s chain gang for a week when they captured me. He held it together all through that. And if you think driving that Humvee into the river was bad, our escape from Nancy was on a whole different level of crazy shit.”

“So you said.”

“You know, he can’t swim either. Oh, and what the heck is up with people who can’t swim?”

Murphy ignored my pointless question. “I still think he’s going crazy, man.”

“He just needs a couple of days of safety to get back to normal. Whatever’s normal for him, anyway.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I mean he talks even more than you.”

“Yeah, whatever. We don’t even know if Amy is going to let us stay on that riverboat yet. What are you gonna do when Amy and Steph meet his whack job ass and decide he’s too crazy to come onboard?”

“They’ll let him stay.”

“Suddenly you’re the optimistic one.” Murphy belted out a big laugh. “Optimistic Zed. I don’t know how to deal with it, man.” Murphy pretended to have trouble with his balance and dropped into a seat.

I rolled my eyes. “Can we talk about Mark for a minute?”

“I told you that dude you saw wasn’t Mark. It was just some baldheaded dumbass too stupid to run away from the Humvee.”

I shook my head. “You can think whatever you want to think. I know what I saw. And even if I am wrong about it being Mark, I know he was a Smart One. You saw for yourself what the Smart Ones can do. You know they’re a danger to all of us.”

Murphy nodded noncommittally.

“They are organizing. They’re communicating. We’re at war, Murphy. We’re fighting to the death, and if we don’t go on the offensive and go start killing those bastards, they’re going to kill us.”

Murphy’s smile left his face. Only the serious, older Murphy remained. As much as he didn’t want to see it, he believed it. At least I think he believed it.

“We have to do something about them, Murphy.”

“What can we do?”

I looked back at the pile of weapons stacked all over the pontoon boat’s deck.

Murphy grinned and pointed at Nico. “He’s our secret weapon.”

I shook my head. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“What about the weapons, then?” Murphy waved a hand at the crates. “Are we gonna shoot all of ‘em? Everybody who thought that’d work is dead. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you have. It ain’t enough. You see that, right? Tell me you see that, Zed. ‘Cause you know the people who used to have all these weapons are dead now, right? You see that, right?”

As much as I wanted to argue, I couldn’t deny that truth.

Murphy pushed his point. “Your little nuclear bomb idea didn’t work.”

“It was a gasoline vapor bomb.”

“It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work. And do you know why?”

“Probably the humidity was too high. Maybe the wind mucked up the concentration of gasoline in the air. The ratio was wrong. Maybe if I’d detonated sooner—”

“No, Zed.” Murphy jumped to his feet and moved around to plant himself in front of me. “You don’t see what the problem is, but I do.”

In spite of the interruption, I was ready to hear the answer. Murphy served in the Army. Maybe he knew what to fix to make it all work next time.

“It’s because you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for, and in fact, it pissed me right off. I huffed and looked around Murphy to see out over the bow. “Just because my bomb didn’t work on the first try doesn’t mean I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“You don’t get it, Zed.”

“What don’t I get?”

“You think just because you know a bunch of random ass little shit that everything you try is going to work out like it did in some book you read or some movie you saw. The real world doesn’t work like that.”

“I know.” It was a weak protest.

“No, you don’t know. You say you know because you know that’s what a smart person should say, but you don’t know. You just think you know. And what you don’t know is when you’re running around, using up all of your luck, trying shit that shouldn’t ever have any chance of working, you’re wearing yourself out.”

I didn’t understand. “Wearing myself out? What?”

Murphy grinned. “You’re using up the luck so when I need it there won’t be any left for me.”

“So it’s all about you?”

Murphy grinned again. “Looks like that stick is back in your ass.”

I rolled my eyes again. “I thought we were having a serious conversation.”

We motored along a while longer. Whites were on the banks, peeking through the trees, or running along trying to keep up. At least their numbers were thinning.

“Murphy, you know I believe we’ve got to do something about the Smart Ones.”

“I know you believe that.”

“And you believe it, too.”

“Yeah, but believing something needs to be done isn’t the same as believing something can be done.”

“You don’t think we can kill all of the Smart Ones?”

“I won’t even talk about what a stupid hope that is.” Murphy shook his head. “Even if we could, we don’t even know which ones are which until it’s too late.”

I couldn’t argue with him. “That’s not an unsolvable problem. I don’t really think we’ll ever kill all of the Smart Ones, but we need to kill enough of them so we have a chance to be safe, so we’ll have a chance to survive.”

“So give me the bottom line here, Zed.” Murphy’s voice held a touch of anger. “You want to go off on some kind of zombie hunt? Is that it? And you want me to come along?”

I shrugged and nodded. That wasn’t how I’d summarize it, but that was exactly what I wanted.

“And just leave everybody on the boat, so when the shit goes down, we won’t be there.”

“When the shit goes down?”

“Don’t put on your dunce hat now and pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know sooner or later, riverboat or no riverboat, those fuckers are going to find a way to get to us. And when that happens, where do you wanna be? Off chasing some baldheaded motherfucker through the woods or back with your friends, helping them get to safety?”

Murphy made a good argument with a depressing conclusion. But it was exactly the same conclusion that drove my desire to hunt down the Smart Ones. “That’s why we need to do it.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. If I go out there to kill the Smart Ones on my own, I know I’ll end up dead. If you come along, then we’ve got a chance.”

Murphy turned to watch the water flow past the bow.

“We have to, Murphy. You said as much yourself.”

“How’s that?”

“They’ll eventually figure out how to get to us on the boat. They tore up Dr. Evans’ farm like it was nothing. They got into Sarah Mansfield’s house in less than twenty minutes. They’ll figure out how to kill every one of us, no matter where we hide. Our only choice is to kill the Smart Ones first.”

“But you’re forgetting one thing, aren’t you?” Murphy turned to look back at me.

He wasn’t being argumentative. He was making a point. And being unable to immediately guess what it was frustrated me. “What am I forgetting?”

“You might be wrong about the Smart Ones. Remember, at first you thought it was… What’d you call it? Emergent behavior? What if the Smart Ones aren’t running the show? What if it’s all just that collective intelligence thing? You know, a bunch of twenty point IQs adding up to genius level when they work together. What if that’s what it is? Then you’ll never kill enough of them.”

I shook my head even as I worked out my counterargument. “I think it’s some kind of hybrid of emergent behavior and the Smart Ones kind of guiding it. C’mon, you saw that for yourself, right? On that trail in the woods, one guy was clearly in charge. He was receiving and sending communications. All of those Whites on the trail were following him.”

“It did look that way. But it always looks that way. It always looks like one of them is in the lead, but it doesn’t seem to matter which one, does it?”

“I don’t know if that’s true. But I’m positive that is one of the things the Smart Ones take advantage of. They’ve figured out this follow-the-leader shit works. They do it spontaneously. The Smart Ones have figured out they can position themselves to be the leaders in that game, and when they do, they multiply their strength. It’s not just them going out and attacking regular folks, like us...”

Murphy laughed. “Regular folks like us?”

“You know what I mean. They get the dumb ones to do their dirty work. They get to have a meal of fresh meat and don’t have to put themselves in too much danger.”

“Be honest with yourself, man. We don’t know. We just don’t know. That’s why you keep changing what you say is going on with them.”

“I’m learning, and based on what I learn, I update my theory of their behavior.”

“That sounds like a fancy way of saying you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Chapter 12

Because we’d motored past the riverboat under the anxious eyes of all of our old and hopefully new friends, giving them a casual wave, they knew Murphy and I were safe. Perhaps not as important as our safety, but significant, was that they’d seen the boatload of crates, as well as our sleeping passenger. After going what seemed like a long enough distance up river, we cut the engine and drifted the silent miles back.

When we arrived, the rain was turning from a drizzle to a thick fog. Murphy tossed a rope over to Dalhover, who caught it and hauled us alongside. With our bow tied off, our stern drifted around in the current and swung up beside the big tourist boat. I jumped onto the boat’s deck and tied it off.

Nico slept.

Murphy climbed onto the riverboat and into Mandi’s waiting arms.

Steph and Dalhover were in front of me when I stood up after tying off the stern. Emotional and physical exhaustion were weighing on me and I let my guard down. For the moment, I was safe. I was home, at our new home, if all had gone well between Amy, Steph and the others. I found a smile for Steph and pointed to the crates of munitions on the pontoon boat’s deck. “We got a lot more than we planned.”

Steph put a hand to her forehead, reminding me of my gash. “What happened?”

My fingers came back with some blood on them. I guessed I looked terrible. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Maybe you can patch me up later.”

Steph took her worried eyes off of my wound, pointed to Nico and tersely asked, “Who’s that?”

Unprepared for anything but congratulations or possibly a hug, I was miffed. “Nico. He’s the guy I told you about. The one I escaped from the chain gang with.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Worn out.” Was I being interrogated? “I don’t think he’s slept since the last time I saw him.”

“You said you left him with an old man.”

I looked at Dalhover, silently asking why Steph was in a bad mood. Dalhover conveyed nothing. What a surprise. “Mr. Mays. His name was Mr. Mays.”

“Yes, where’s he?”

“Dead.” Sure, I used the word “dead,” but I made it sound as much like “fuck you” as possible.

Dalhover chose that moment to defuse the tension. “Can’t wait to hear how you guys got all of this.” He jumped down to the pontoon boat’s deck and started to examine the wooden boxes.

“You can’t just bring in any stray you come across,” Steph said.

“But…”

“You know how Freitag worked out.”

And that silenced me.

I looked down into the pontoon boat as I thought about it. Sure, I’d let Freitag and her companions into Sarah Mansfield’s compound. But what else could I have done? I’d ruminated on that mess so many times, searching my memories for clues that could have showed me how badly it would all turn out. I’d told myself a thousand times that if I had been patient, Steph and the group would have come to the same decision. But I didn’t wait. I was so certain at the time that I was doing the right thing. I was decisive. And because of that decisiveness, I bore the responsibility.

Life’s not fair.

I don’t know if Steph saw my clenched jaw and my combative stance, or whether she just came to the end of her own anger. Whichever it was, her tone softened. “Zed, we need to talk about these kinds of things first. Okay?”

One moment she was Captain Leonard and the next she was just redheaded Steph. She could switch modes faster than I could keep up. I glanced back at her to acknowledge she spoke. I wanted to turn away, to immaturely express my unhappiness with her hard words. But it was difficult. I was in the neighborhood of infatuation, at least when I wasn’t grating against her authority. I motioned toward Nico. “He’s an okay guy.”

“I thought you said he was a coward.”

“I probably said ‘pussy.’”

Steph rolled her eyes. “Is he a liability for us? I don’t think you’re capable of seeing people in that way, Zed. I’ll bet you fed every stray cat in the neighborhood.”

“I never had a pet.”

Steph brushed past that. “Please, don’t take this the wrong way, but we need to be pragmatic, harsh if necessary, when we make these kinds of decisions. I know you won’t understand what I’m about to tell you, but we can’t risk our lives unnecessarily.”

I smiled. “That was almost a joke, wasn’t it? You were trying to make nice-nice by being funny. You do have a sense of humor. Well, almost.”

“I can be funny under the right circumstances.”

“I’m sure.” I looked over at Dalhover, who was examining the crates.

“You know everything is different now.” Steph chose to continue with her lesson. Captain Leonard mode again. “You want to do the right thing, Zed. You’re a good person. But that’ll get all of us in trouble if you don’t think about the consequences.”

I nodded, just because I’d already decided I was probably going to do whatever it was I was going to do. And the sooner she stopped lecturing me about doing what she thought I should do the better.

She put a hand on my shoulder to urge me to turn around and give her my attention. “These are hard choices to make. Let me make them, okay? We can talk about it, if you want. But you guys put me in charge for a reason,” she said. “I can make the hard decisions when it’s necessary.”

I glanced at Nico. I was back in the conversation. “You want me to tell him to hit the road?” I sounded as though I was pleading.

“Listen, I’m not saying that. Let us talk to him when he wakes up and we’ll all decide. Okay? If he needs to go, I’ll tell him. I’ll do the dirty work. Okay?”

“We’ll just send him back out into the world? Alone?”

“He was alone when you found him, right? He won’t be any worse off if he needs to be alone again. If anything, he’ll be better off. We can probably give him some food. And it looks like you’ve got enough ammo and weapons for a whole company. I’m sure we can spare some.”

I shook my head. I’d been through all of this with Nico already. I’d already made the choice once not to bring him back and I’d left him with Mr. Mays. And Nico had paid the price. He was at the edge of his wits and it was my fault. I was ready to make up for that by letting him join us. “I don’t feel good about this.”

Steph put her hand on my other shoulder and looked into my eyes. “That’s why you have to let me decide. Well, me and Amy.”

“You and Amy?”

“We’ve talked. They’re letting us stay.”

“That’s good.” I felt one of my worries slip away. “I think this is the safest place for us right now, and they seem like good folks.”

“We all agreed I’m still in charge. But Amy needs to have a say in whether we bring anybody else on board.”

“Okay. Just give Nico some time to decompress. He was trapped in the house with Mr. Mays when we found him. The infected broke in and killed Mr. Mays. Nico’s in pretty bad shape.”

“Trust me. We’re not monsters, Zed. You know that, don’t you?” Steph waited for an answer.

“Of course.”

“We want to do the right thing, too. We just need to make sure we’re all protected first. We have to come first. That’s just the way the world is now. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Chapter 13

For such a large boat, there really wasn’t much to it. Above the water line it was a big, square-ish thing with two white decks painted with red trim. The lower deck was a rectangular space, open on all sides except the stern. On both the port and starboard sides, a structure was built to look like housing for a paddlewheel. They were purely cosmetic. In the stern, on the main deck, was a kitchen large enough to cater a hundred meals. In the superstructure above the kitchen, on the second deck, was the pilothouse.

Stretched out in front of the pilothouse was another open deck. In the evenings, as the boat cruised up and down the river, the sunset tourists would stand under clear Texas skies, watching them change from blue to orange and red while they sipped alcohol and pretended they were in love.

Restrooms were below deck, along with the engine room.

Outside of tables, chairs and benches, nothing was on the decks. Before we arrived, Amy, Megan and Brittany had put the pilothouse to use as their sleeping quarters. The rest of us set up to sleep on the lower deck on seat cushions removed from the other boats. That’s also where Steph chose to hold our first communal meeting, between the faux paddlewheel housings, to keep us somewhat hidden from curious eyes on the banks.

Amy, Megan and Brittany, the original tenants of the riverboat, were there, of course. Dalhover, Mandi and Steph rounded out the six normals. Murphy, Nico, Russell and I made up the infected four. We sat in a rough semi-circle around Steph who was standing, in charge.

Steph started the meeting. “First off, thank you, Amy, Megan and Brittany for letting us stay on your boat.”

Several of us added our thanks.

“We’ve all agreed I’ll be in charge,” she said. “Sergeant Dalhover will be my second in command. I’ll consult with Amy on major decisions and we can all talk about them whenever we get together like this.”

“Will this be a regular thing?” Mandi asked.

Steph nodded. “The first thing we need to talk about is whether to bring anyone else into the group.” Steph looked straight at me. “Amy and I have talked about it and we’re reluctant, but will consider people on a case-by-case basis. That’s the plan going forward.”

Nico jumped to his feet, looking plenty normal after having spent the afternoon napping. “Th…thank you all for tak…ing me in. W…words can’t express how g…grateful I am. I j…just want you all to kn…n…now that I’ll d…d…do my best to p…pull my weight.” Frustrated with his new stutter, Nico took a deep breath before finishing. Speaking in slow clear words, he said, “You won’t regret it.”

“Nico,” Steph said, “as we discussed earlier, you can stay for now. We’ll see how things work out, and in a couple of days, we’ll decide if you can stay permanently.”

“I…” Nico seemed overcome with gratitude or frustration. He slowly sat back down in his chair and muttered. “…won’t l…let you down.”

Did he say, “Won’t I?” Nico’s speech problem was more than just a stutter.

“I’ve posted a duty roster outside the door to the kitchen,” Steph said. “Please don’t see this as tyrannical. If our goal is to thrive and not just survive, we need to work together. That means we all have to share in the duties nobody wants, like standing night watch, washing dishes and cleaning latrines.” Steph was nothing if not anal retentive about organization.

Nods of agreement.

“I don’t have Russell on the duty roster for obvious reasons. He seems glued to Mandi for the time being, and appears more than willing to copy whatever she’s doing. I’ll try and take advantage of that as I assign her duties, so Russell can earn his keep along with the rest of us. Zed, Murphy and Nico won’t be assigned guard duty.” Steph looked around at all of us to gauge our acceptance of this. “They’ll be going out to collect food and whatever else we need. They’ll have plenty of dangerous, strenuous work without also having to stand guard at night. Does that sound fair?”

Mostly nods, but Nico jumped back to his feet again, shaking his head emphatically. “N…no, P…please. I can’t.” He pointed at the shore and tears gathered in his eyes. “P…p…please. I c…can stand guard.”

I wondered if he was shy in front of crowds. He was having a really hard time with his stutter.

“You have to pull your weight if you want to stay,” Steph said.

Murphy’s big voice boomed. “Man, he’s a pussy.” He looked over at Nico. “No offense, man. I’m just sayin’. I don’t want him putting me and Zed in danger if he’s out there doing stupid shit because he’s afraid. Me and Zed’ll handle it.”

“Zed, what do you think?” Steph said.

I looked at Nico, who was slumping in his chair, ashamed. “Nico, can you drive the boat?” I asked. “I’d feel better if we could leave someone in the boat, rather than leaving it alone when we’re on shore.”

With attention focused on his feet, Nico shrugged.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“C…can I have a few days first? I…I need time.”

“Time?” I asked. “For what?”

Nico looked up. Tears were running down his cheeks. “I…can’t go back out there again. Not yet. P…please.”

I turned to Steph. She was the boss. She could make the call.

“You can have a few days,” she said. “You need to understand we’ve all been through a lot, Nico. We all need to find a way to keep moving forward. You, too. You understand?”

Nico nodded. He’d hit the limit of what his brain could process. He was broken. I felt bad for him.

But Mandi wasn’t satisfied with what she saw. “If Murphy and Zed can go out there and risk their lives, then so can you, Nico.”

It was out of character for her. And it took us all by surprise.

With everyone looking at her, she got embarrassed. “What?”

“Let’s move on,” Steph said. “Zed, Murphy, thank you for going out this morning and getting those weapons and all of that ammunition. I know it turned out to be a lot more dangerous than we thought it would be.”

“That’s just how Murphy and the Null Spot roll, man,” Murphy said.

Steph giggled. “I almost forgot about Null Spot.”

I rolled my eyes. “Can’t we all just forget about that Null Spot business?”

Steph gave me a smile and changed the subject. “Amy and I put together a shopping list.”

“A shopping list?” Murphy laughed.

“It’s a list of things we need. Not really a shopping list,” Amy said.

“That’s all right. I gotcha.” Murphy grinned.

“We have enough food for maybe a couple more days, if we eat light.” Steph said. “But we could run out of propane at any time. Since most of the stuff we have is canned or boxed, propane isn’t a necessity, but if we catch any fish, we’ll need to cook them.”

“Most of these houses have grills on the patios,” I said. “We can start swiping the tanks when we stop by to raid the pantries. And while we’re on the subject of food, I think Murphy and I might be able to go back down to that country club where we parked the boat this morning. I think there’s a restaurant in there. We may be able to stock up with bulk supplies.”

“That’s a great idea.” Steph grew excited. “There’s got to be at least a dozen restaurants right on the water up and down this section of the river.”

“We could hit them all,” I said. “But we’re going to need more gas for the boat. We’ll have to scrounge up some of that, too. The marinas probably have some. We’ll need to work out something to pump it out with, though.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Dalhover said. “There’s a hand pump down in the engine room. That and ten feet of hose should be all you need.”

“We can always use a garden hose,” Murphy said. “Plenty of those lying around in peoples’ yards.”

“Speaking of boats,” Steph said, “we need to make a plan for ours.”

“What do you mean?” Amy asked.

“We have five boats at the moment.”

“Six.” Murphy grinned.

“Six?”

Murphy looked down at the deck.

Steph rolled her eyes. “Yes, six. But we have five small boats. Amy, where do you keep the keys for the boats?”

Amy reached into the pocket of her pants. “I’ve got them.”

“I think it would be best if we distribute the keys among the ten of us. Excluding Russell, because… Well, for obvious reasons. And Nico is provisional. That leaves eight people and five keys. I think if we ever find ourselves in a position where we need to get out of here in a hurry, we may not want to have all of our eggs in one basket.”

“In case I get killed,” Amy said.

Sergeant Dalhover spoke up. “We should leave the keys on the boats.”

Steph shook her head. “I don’t want to leave the keys dangling in the ignition switches. We all know how unscrupulous people can be. We don’t want anyone swimming up in the dark and running off with our boats.”

“We hide them on the boats,” Sergeant Dalhover said. “We can all do it together so everybody knows where the keys are.”

“And Nico?” Amy asked.

“If he doesn’t work out, he can’t steal more than one,” Steph said. “Everybody good with that? No offense, Nico.”

Nico stared at the floor and didn’t respond. The rest of us nodded.

Steph started talking about water consumption and conservation. That transitioned into a conversation about long-term food plans. I should have been interested in all of it. I’d been passionate about the subject since practically the first moment I realized the whole world was falling apart. But I was bored.

I was fidgety.

I wanted to move my feet.

I squirmed in my seat.

A debate about something or other went on and on and I found myself staring at Russell who, as it turned out, was also staring. I followed his gaze to Nico, who was also staring. At that point, it became a game. The angle between me and Nico wasn’t optimal for figuring out exactly what his gaze had settled on, but my guess was Megan.

She was bored and busy playing with a pocket knife, opening and folding the blade over and over. I wondered if Nico’s fixation on Megan had something to do with his deceased daughter, though Megan was probably six or seven years older.

Somewhere in there, Sergeant Dalhover droned off a list of the weapons he’d catalogued. He talked about training and maintenance, emphasizing the necessity of each if a weapon was to be depended on to one day save the life of the person holding it.

With the rain falling again and draining off of the upper deck into puddles on the lower deck, I became mesmerized by the relative silence of the splashing water and the sight of splashing drips.

“Zed. Zed, are you okay?”

I looked up. Everybody was looking at me. “What?”

“Mandi asked you a question,” Steph said.

I looked at Mandi. Everybody was still staring at me. I ventured a guess. “I’ll take care of it.”

Mandi laughed.

I looked around. “What?”

“You were kind of zoned out, there. Are you all right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I guess I just need to get some sleep.”

“Mandi asked if you still had your flash drive. You know, the one that your friend Amber made for you?”

I looked down at my feet, prepared to feel bad about the Amber situation, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything at all. That was progress. “I had it in my pocket and I lost my pants when my canoe capsized, after I tried to blow up Sarah Mansfield’s house.”

Steph reached into her pocket and showed everyone a flash drive she had stashed there. “I’ve still got mine.”

“Good.” I looked over at Murphy.

He patted his pocket. “I’ve still got mine.”

“So just the two, then.” Steph looked at Murphy. “When you and Zed are out, if you happen across any laptop with a charged battery, pick it up. We need to make more copies of that flash drive. These drives have information vital to our long-term survival.”

“You got it, boss.”

Steph shook her head. “You, too?”

“Zed calls you boss.” Murphy smiled.

“Speaking of our long-term survival, does anybody have any ideas on where we go from here?” Steph said.

“Let’s stay here. We’re safe,” Megan said.

Amy put a hand on Megan’s shoulder. “We’re just talking about possibilities, okay?”

Murphy spoke up. “We should go down to Corpus Christi, find a big yacht and sail out into the gulf until this whole thing blows over.”

Steph nodded, as did a few others. Heck, it sounded like a good idea to me. Plenty of logistical difficulties, but good nonetheless.

Sergeant Dalhover asked, “Does anybody here know how to sail?”

Everybody looked at one another for the answer. It was apparent that none of us did.

“We don’t need a sailboat,” Murphy said. “We just get one of those big motor yachts, turn on the engines, and away we go.”

“I’m not sure it’s as easy as that,” Steph said.

“Sure, it is,” Murphy said.

“Do you know how to read a nautical chart?” Steph asked.

“You mean a map?”

“How will you know to avoid the sandbars and reefs? What will you do in rough weather? Do you know how to handle a boat when the waves are twenty feet tall?”

“It’s the Gulf,” Murphy said. “How big could the waves get?”

Dalhover’s crusty laugh silenced everyone. “I used to work oil rigs back before I joined the Army. Let me tell ya’, on the news nowadays, you see helicopters flying out and getting guys off those rigs when a hurricane is coming. But back when I was doing it, helicopters were only for the engineers and managers. Roughnecks like me, we got ferried back and forth in boats.”

It was unusual for Dalhover to string so many words together, and that had everybody’s attention.

“There was one trip back when a hurricane was coming in… We were on a good-sized boat, at lot bigger than this tourist boat, maybe a hundred and fifty feet. The waves were already standing pretty tall when we boarded. But the boat looked pretty big to me, so I wasn’t worried. It started to get rough on our way in. Some of those waves were bigger than anything I thought I’d ever see. That boat didn’t seem so big, then. We were riding up the crests and crashing down into the troughs. And every time we did, that steel hull would slap the water so hard, it jarred all of your bones and felt like the keel would shatter. Let me tell ya’, ten or twelve hours of that, and you’ll be wishing you never put your boat out into the Gulf.”

A yacht in the Gulf didn’t seem like a good idea anymore.

“I was out at Carlos ‘n Charlie’s one night for dinner…” Mandi said.

“Up on Lake Travis?” Steph asked.

Mandi nodded. “Yeah. There’s a pretty big marina there. It’s only ten or twenty miles from here. There were maybe ten or twelve big houseboats in the marina. Maybe we could get some of those and anchor them out in the lake. That might be safe for us.”

“And comfortable, too,” Amy said. “With real beds. And maybe showers. That sounds like a good idea.”

Everyone agreed.

“Any other ideas?” Steph said.

“Balmorhea.” Everyone looked at me after I said it.

Murphy laughed. “Are you still speaking English? ‘Cause I don’t even know what you just said.”

“What’s a Balmorhea?” Steph asked.

“Have any of you guys been out in far west Texas?” I asked.

“I know where you mean,” Dalhover said. “I used to hunt out that way.”

Others shook their heads.

“When you say west Texas, do you mean by El Paso?” Mandi asked.

I pointed west. “About four hundred miles that way, about two hundred miles this side of El Paso, is a dinky little town right in the middle of nowhere called Balmorhea.”

“Is that near Big Bend?” Amy asked.

“On Highway Ten, just north of it,” I said.

“Eew.”

I nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I know. It fucking sucks out there. For any of you guys who’ve never taken the drive out to west Texas, there’s nothing out there. Nothing. Once you get out of the hill country, the cedars start to thin out, then there’s pretty much just scrubby little bushes. I’m not sure desert is the right word, but it might be. Mostly, it looks like nothing. In the summer it’s hot and dry, and it sucks.”

Steph smiled. “I’m getting that this place sucks?”

“Yep,” I said. “There’s like fifty or a hundred houses in Balmorhea. And then for hundreds of miles in every direction, there’s nothing.”

Dalhover had another idea. “Fort Stockton. Odessa.”

I shook my head. “But not any big cities. And even those towns are a long, long, dry hike away.”

“A dry hike?” Amy asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded again. “I mean, if there are infected in El Paso or Fort Stockton or Midland, there’s no way they could make the walk to Balmorhea without dying of thirst along the way. I think the place is safe.”

Mandi grimaced. “It sounds awful.”

“Yeah, it is awful. But did I say it was safe?”

Steph was thinking. “Let’s say we could make it out there, and if it’s as safe as you think, how could we hope to stay alive? You said it’s like a desert out there.”

“Yeah.” I stood up. I was getting excited about the idea. “That’s the thing. There are these big beautiful springs out there, and they feed into this lake. There’s more water there than we’ll ever need. The farmers use it to irrigate lots and lots of fields. What I’m saying is, though the place is ugly, hot, dry and it sucks, it’s safe and we’ll be able to grow whatever we need. And even if every person out there is infected, Murphy and I picked up enough ammunition this morning to kill them all a hundred times over.”

Silence followed. They were all thinking about it.

It was Dalhover who spoke first. “It’s a long way out there. But it could work.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We could all go out there and stay for a year or two until the infected in the cities have time to kill each other off, and then we can come back. If we want to, maybe we can move back into Sarah Mansfield’s mansion and live in the lap of luxury. If there’s anything left of it.”

“I don’t think any of us know anything about farming,” Amy said. “How are we going to grow anything out in the desert?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” I said. “First off, we’ve got the flash drives. Those have information on how to farm. Sure, we’ll have a lot of on the job training, and we’ll lose some crops before we get it right. But there are antelope to hunt out there. And there are some big-ass pecan orchards. It could get old, but in a pinch, I’ll bet those orchards produce enough pecans to feed all of us and more. And those trees are already there, getting ready to drop their nuts in a month or two.”

“So, Lake Travis or Balmorhea. Those are two good suggestions,” Steph said.

“Two?” Murphy feigned offense. “Nobody likes the yacht idea?”

Chapter 14

The slow, heavy breathing of those on the first deck made it clear they were still asleep. The absence of Mandi’s snore reminded me she was on watch. It was early, barely light outside. The rain had stopped falling, but a fog was on the river, thick and damp. Only the occasional tweet of a morning bird or the lap of water against the hull broke the silence.

Sitting up on my cushions, I looked around the deck. Russell was, of course, with Mandi. Nico was gone, though. His absence concerned me.

Getting up and stretching my muscles, I shivered and realized October was only a few weeks away. Heck, maybe days away. We still had plenty of days when the heat would add an extra helping of hurt to anything done midday, and make every effort to hammer the life out of us. But cooling nights with the promise of a respite also meant we’d soon need to add long-sleeved shirts and sweatshirts to our shopping list.

Habitually silent, I crossed the deck and climbed the rusty metal stairs. Coming out by the wheelhouse on the second deck, the fog was thinner and I could see the tops of trees on the bank, though nothing beyond. From above, soft whispers of conversation drifted down.

I climbed the ladder up to the roof, avoiding a rung I knew creaked.

Mandi, Russell, Megan and Nico sat on the roof, cross-legged, facing each other. The diminutive girls each had M16s lying across their thighs, looking just as out of place as they should. Nico, however, had no weapon. But what bothered me more than that was the narrowness of the gap between him and Megan.

“Hey,” Mandi mouthed across the roof when she spotted me.

I gave her a nod.

The others turned and silently greeted me. Russell, of course, just stared at the misty gray.

I crossed the roof and asked, “Have you talked to Dalhover about which weapons you two should have?”

Mandi smiled sweetly and shook her head.

“We need to be armed,” Megan said in her squeaky little voice.

“Yeah,” I said. My assumption, based on nothing but ignorance and speculation, was neither of the small girls could handle their big weapons. “Anything interesting going on?” I asked, sitting down.

Mandi pointed to the north bank. “We’ve been hearing things over there. But with the fog, we can’t see anything.”

“What kind of things?” I asked, making the instant switch from casual to concerned.

“It sounds like deer to me,” Megan said. “The noise comes and goes.”

Turning and looking over my shoulder, I peered into the thick fog.

“I…I don’t th…think it’s them,” Nico said.

Not sure yet what to think about the noises on the bank, I instead chose to deal with a question more easily investigated. “Nico, I don’t remember you stuttering.”

“Ah.” Nico paused for a long time. “It c…comes and g…goes.”

“Did it start at Mr. Mays’ house?” It seemed like a fair question. I really didn’t remember a single stutter during that long afternoon between our escape from Nancy and our arrival at Mr. Mays’ house.

Nico spent a little too long thinking about that answer. “I always st…stuttered a little.”

“Wow.” I don’t know why his stutter was important, but something about it didn’t fit right. “I just don’t remember you stuttering after we escaped from Nancy.”

Nico shrugged. “M…maybe b…because I hadn’t said anyth…thing for t…two or three weeks.”

Grinning, Megan offered an explanation. “Like a bunch of words were built up behind a dam that burst.”

“Yeah.” I agreed, but only as a way to change from a subject that didn’t seem likely to lead to any explanation.

The noise of rattling bushes carried across the water.

“That’s the noise,” Mandi said.

I was already looking at the bank. “What time do you guys get off guard duty?”

“We have another hour,” Mandi said.

Nico’s stutter was going to remain a mystery, but that noise on the bank needed to be identified. It could be danger. “Can I borrow Nico?” I asked, turning back to the group.

“You don’t need to ask permission.” Megan giggled.

I gave her a smile.

“Wh…what d…do you need?” Nico asked.

I looked back at the shore. “Now that it’s getting light, do you guys come down off of the roof?”

“Yes,” Megan said. “We try to stay out of sight on the decks during the day. That way the infected won’t see us.”

“We should go down,” Mandi said. “It is starting to get light out.”

“What d…do you n…need?” Nico asked again.

“I need you to help me paddle one of the ski boats over to the shore. I want to check out what’s going on over there.”

“It’s deer,” Megan said with exaggerated certainty, no doubt a trick she’d picked up from some long-dead adult in her life.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “I’m just a worrier. Should we go?”

Nico was shaking his head slowly. “I… I…”

Standing up, I slapped Nico on the back. “It’ll be cool, dude. We’re not getting out of the boat. We’ll just paddle over until we can see the bank through the fog, then we’ll come back.”

“I can go if he doesn’t want to,” Mandi said.

“You’re on guard duty.”

“I c…can watch f…for her.” Nico nodded vigorously.

“No.” I didn’t have room for negotiation. Although I figured I’d be better off with Mandi, I did know Steph would get pissed if I left Nico on guard while everybody else was asleep. “C’mon. Let’s get this done.”

Not waiting for any more debate, I headed for the stairs. The others followed.

Chapter 15

The ski boat we selected was the smallest of those available. It wasn’t that hard to paddle. But with all the noise Nico was making, you’d think it was a fully loaded pontoon boat.

“Shh.”

Nico looked blankly at me.

“Don’t make so much noise,” I whispered.

Nico muttered an apology and went back to work.

Jesus, how was this guy still alive?

Down at the river’s surface, the fog was so thick the riverboat disappeared into the gray behind us before we’d gone twenty feet. Around us there was only fog, the lapping of water against our paddles and the disembodied sounds of something moving on the bank.

Worry etched deep lines on Nico’s forehead. He took to sitting up straight and looking around for danger after every stroke. Of course, all he saw each time was more fog.

“Calm down,” I whispered. “Just take it slow. We’re still a ways from the bank.”

Rather than try to get Nico to put more effort into paddling, I instead continued paddling hard on my side. As a result, the boat angled upstream from where I thought the noise was originating. When we got close enough to shore to see the trees, we could drift back down with the current and give the shore a thorough check.

Everything on the river seemed to involve drifting with the current.

Eventually, dark green outlines took shape out of the fog on our right. I whispered, “Let’s get a little closer to shore now and start drifting.”

“G…good. M…my arms are getting stiff.”

Pussy.

I nodded and tried to put on a sympathetic smile.

We were less than a dozen feet from the shore before I was able to see among the trunks of the trees. Being that close, we were in danger of scraping the hull on the limestone riverbed. But with the boat’s motor definitely turned off, I figured any scraping would only produce cosmetic damage. Besides, we had plenty of boats.

I whispered, “Listen, you come over to my side of the boat. Help me look, in case I miss anything.”

The shore held all of Nico’s fears and he made a show of his reluctance to cross the meager width of the boat.

A squall line was coming toward us from upriver, announcing its impending arrival with a faint rumble of fat drops hitting the water. Both Nico and I instinctively looked toward the sound. So it was startling when I looked back at the shore and saw the bald, white head of a naked man staring at me from behind a thick tree trunk.

Dammit.

That White was the manifestation of a fear nagging at me since I’d seen the infected chasing along the bank after Murphy and I scavenged Camp Mabry. I was certain he was a scout. And if I didn’t do something about his presence, the fog would soon thin, he’d see the riverboat with us on it, and he’d figure out where we were and lead the rest to us. He had to die.

I turned to Nico to give him instructions, but his fear had backed him to the other side of the boat again.

He was going to be useless.

I laid my rifle on the deck, unsheathed my knife and, to make Nico aware of my intentions, pointed at the White on the bank as I stepped up onto the gunwale.

On a gust of strong north wind, the rain hit us.

I knew the gap between the boat and the shore was well beyond my ability to jump, but I tried anyway. I splashed into the water three or four feet from shore. Making a lot more noise than I’d hoped, my foot found the riverbed in knee deep water. It took two more noisy steps before I was able to land a foot on the shore.

The White was already out from behind the tree and coming at me with a mix of aggression and trepidation. Lowering my knife to my hip, I held it with the blade pointing up. Laying a trap, I slumped into a cowering stance.

The White’s misgivings disappeared in a flash. Seeing what its simple brain interpreted as fear, he rushed me.

At the last second, I stepped strongly toward him and shoved my blade up under his rib cage. His momentum drove his weight onto it. He made a sound like a cough and went limp.

Thinking how lucky I was to have put the knife right where I wanted it—into his heart—I turned to the left so the White’s momentum would carry him around, rather than over me. To my surprise, it worked as though I’d practiced the move a thousand times.

The infected man splashed into the shallow water and didn’t move.

Nico screamed, turning my fleeting confidence into fear. Instinctively, I crouched and turned to my right, just in time to see a white blur and a silver blade.

In a desperate move to dodge the blade, I fell to my left, way off balance. I rolled over the White I’d just killed and into the water as the blade was raised again. A Smart One was trying to slash me. Behind him, a mass of white, grasping hands were doing their best to clamp onto my flesh.

I rolled further into the water, scraping myself on algae-covered limestone as I went. A White fell in and screamed as she hit the water. She flailed in panic, but I was beyond her reach.

Followed by monkey squawks and yelps, I desperately tore handfuls of water to get myself away from the shore. I hit the boat with my shoulder and reached up to grab a rail that ran along the port side.

On the bank, not ten feet away, reaching hands, raging faces and gnashing teeth fought between their want of my flesh and their fear of the water. I was so close, but far beyond reach.

One White wasn’t reaching. He held the knife at his side while his muscles trembled. His rage was more cerebral than the others. He wasn’t just an angry white chimpanzee who’d lost his prey. He had complex thoughts in his head and real hate in his heart.

I turned myself around and clambered into the boat. Nico didn’t help. He hadn’t moved since I went in. With adrenaline blasting past rational thought processes, I wanted to unleash my anger at him. At the same time, I knew his well-timed scream had kept that Smart One’s blade out of my back.

Nico had just saved my life.

Nothing is ever black and white.

With my feet on the deck, I raised my pistol and aimed it at the Smart One with the knife.

He glared at me as if daring me to shoot. And I wanted to, badly. I wanted to teach that fucker a fatal lesson for daring to raise a blade to me.

But the adrenaline was waning and thoughts were starting to click. I paused. I looked around. Would one bullet cause too much trouble? Could the report of my pistol get lost in the fog before it advertised my location to too many ears?

I knew even as I conceived those thoughts that they were the product of rationalization. With a dozen cannibals screaming for my blood right in front of me, the dissipating fog would be no blanket over my mistake. The riverboat behind me was losing its gray shroud. To fire the weapon would link the sound with the sight of the riverboat, even in the feeble brains of those still standing when the bullet killed the Smart One. No good could come from such a link.

Lowering my weapon, I turned to Nico and whispered, “We need to go.”

Chapter 16

With all the speed of an arthritic old man, Nico collected his paddle and bent his frail body over his side of the boat.

I was digging into the water with deep strokes, but Nico was doing nothing.

“Dammit, Nico. Help me.”

On a stem of creaky old bones, his head slowly swiveled his blank face in my direction.

“What the hell, dude? Paddle.” I prompted him with some body language. “Now.”

Back on the riverboat, through the remaining fog, I saw a head peek from behind a railing, followed by another. But we couldn’t go back there, not with hungry Whites watching us from the shore. The infected were deathly afraid of the water. But on the short list of things I absolutely knew about the new world was all of those single-digit IQs could add up to some creatively lethal solutions.

At thirty feet from the shore, I pulled my paddle out of the water. Nico caught on to the change in sound and immediately pulled his paddle back into the boat, looking at me with a question on his face.

I whispered, “We can’t go back.”

“What?” he mouthed.

I pointed at the Whites on the shore. “Not with them watching.”

Nico turned and looked at the riverboat with a longing on his face that verged on tears.

Jesus, being trapped in that house with Mr. Mays had really fucked him up.

I waved at the riverboat, hoping that they understood from the gesture that Nico and I were okay. I pointed at the Whites on shore and then pointed downriver. They’d figure it out soon enough.

I dropped into a seat at the boat’s helm, second-guessing my choice to leave the riverboat and check out the sound on the shore. But aside from cowering behind a railing on my knees and praying to a God who no longer seemed to care, no other solution came to mind. A choice to do nothing was a choice to passively die at the hands of a cruel future. I just wasn’t wired for that. I had to do. I had to fight, even if that put me at risk of dying sooner.

Nico dropped his weary bones on a seat at the stern and slowly fell into himself, a sandstone sculpture of sadness, comatose, wearing away in a coarse wind.

The ski boat spun in slow circles as it drifted. The rain pounded us with heavy drops. We passed naked Whites on the bank and drew their interest. Many followed along, hoping to be there when we made the mistake of coming ashore. Apparently, our use of mechanical transport overrode the sight of our white skin when the infected brain was deciding whether or not we were food.

A mile or so downriver, with the tourist boat long out of sight, I said, “We’ll probably be out here all day. With all of those naked Whites on the north shore, I don’t feel comfortable returning unless it’s dark out.”

“I…I…I…” Nico pounded his fist on the seat cushion. “Damn.”

“Damn?” I calmly asked.

“I…j…just w…want to be able to t…talk.”

“Yeah?”

Nico tore his stare away from his feet. “I… w…was supposed to stay o…on the b…boat.”

I shrugged. He was being unreasonable and I didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Shit happens.”

Nico turned away to look at the water over the starboard side.

“We’ll float for a while and motor back upriver later this afternoon. We’ll drift back down to the riverboat tonight.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Yeah, me too, but life just sucks sometimes.”

“You don’t h…have to be a d…dick, Zed.”

And that was the last we spoke for a long time.

I thought about arguing that point, but didn’t. Instead I went through a mental inventory of our weapons. I had a rifle and one magazine, full. Dumbass Nico was unarmed. I had a sturdy bowie knife and my pistol, also with a full magazine. I’d made the mistake of leaving the riverboat without a full load of ammo. And though Nico and I were in no danger at the moment, we likely would be before we got back to the riverboat. If anything, the morning’s adventure was a reiteration of the lesson that danger lurked everywhere. Everywhere. To go into the world unprepared was to tempt tragedy.

The morning wore on in silence. The rain stopped and left spotty gray clouds across the sky. Between those, the sun, seemingly angry over its exile, scorched through the gaps.

As we were rounding a big curve in the river, City Park came up on the north shore. Nico decided he was ready for normal conversation again. He pointed up at one of the hills on the south side of the river and said, “Th…that’s W…Willie Nelson’s house up th…there.”

I looked up a glass walled structure at the peak. “That one with all the windows?”

“Y…yeah.”

“How do you know?”

Nico huffed. God, he was touchy. “I don’t doubt it’s true. I was just curious how you found out.”

“S… somebody t…told me.”

I nodded, as if rumor was sufficient proof. Hell, it probably was. No, of course it was, because it didn’t matter. Willie was probably dead too, along with nearly everybody who ever gave a shit about him. Well, not everybody. In a weird way, I missed him. Maybe in the same weird way I missed Sarah Mansfield. They were the faces of the culture in which I grew up. That culture was dead.

Turning away from Willie’s place, I looked back at City Park’s acres of dead grass. Curiously, not a single White was there. As I looked right, then left, none were in sight, and I tried to recall the last one I’d seen. “When was the last time you saw one of them?”

Nico was back in a pissy mood. “I’ve b…been seeing them all d…day.”

“Nico, chill. I haven’t seen one for a while. I was wondering if you had.”

Nico cast a perfunctory glance at both banks. “No.”

I gave some serious thought to walking to the back of the boat and giving him a smack. But the memory of Mr. Mays on the floor of his living room came to mind. Nico had been through more terror than he was capable of assimilating. So I put on my Dr. Freud cap, smiled sympathetically, and said, “That must have been some bad shit at Mr. Mays’ house. If you need to talk about it… Dude, I’ll listen.”

Tears bulged in his eyes, but didn’t flow. He snapped his head around and pretended to look at something of interest on the south shore.

After looking at him for several full minutes, I was about to give up and turn away when, without any hint of a stutter, he said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t talk about it?”

He shook his head.

Taking a risk at confirming a suspicion, I asked, “Are you ashamed?”

Nico shrugged and turned to the stern so I couldn’t see his face. His shoulders moved, but whether the gesture was a shrug or a sob, I couldn’t tell. I felt bad for him. At the same time, I loathed him. Perhaps loathe was too strong a word. But I felt a sense of blame boiling. Nico was a coward. I’d find out soon enough that wasn’t the worst of it.

We floated past the boundary of City Park. We watched the deserted shore as house after house went by. A small, dilapidated marina came into view. Ski Shores Café, a dumpy little place with decent food and great atmosphere, sat on the shore just past the marina. Giant cypress trees grew up through a deck that hung well out over the water. I thought about times before the world changed when I sat on that deck with friends or with a girl whose pants I was interested in removing. We drank sweaty summer beers, ate greasy burgers and listened to a raspy-voiced man strum a guitar and sing about a better life in another time and place. And life in those days was good. So good.

Through the haze of my nostalgia, I almost didn’t notice a big delivery truck sitting on the gravel parking lot behind the restaurant. That truck shouldn’t have been there. And its presence was best explained with a scenario that had the driver arriving with his weekly delivery. Unfortunate circumstances—most likely including his unhappy ending—had prompted him to abandon the truck. My guess, built on a foundation of my own wants, was the truck had plenty of food inside.

Without hesitation, nor consultation with cowardly Nico, I picked up one of the boat’s paddles and went to work guiding the boat over toward the boat slips adjacent to the restaurant’s picnic-table-covered deck.

“H…hey.” Nico wasn’t happy with the change in course. “Wh…what are y…you doing?”

I gave him a look that I hoped said “Leave me alone. I’m busy.”

Nico didn’t get any of that. “Wh…why are w…we g…going to shore?”

Completely discounting the lesson I should have relearned earlier, that one about danger lurking around every corner, I huffed. “Dude, there’s a delivery truck in the parking lot. I’m going to check it for food.”

Nico shook his head and made some sound I couldn’t identify. I understood disagreement.

“Listen, Nico, we haven’t seen a White in miles…”

Nico pointed vigorously at the shore. “B…but…” In his excitement, he couldn’t find the words to finish.

I stood up straight and looked at him. “Here’s the deal. There are no Whites around that we can see. I know they might be sneaking around somewhere. They always seem to find the most inconvenient time to make themselves known. But we need food and I’m going to check that truck to see what’s in it. And we’re already out here, so let’s not waste the day. If I see any Whites, I’ll get back in the boat and we’ll stick with plan A.”

“P…plan A?”

“Don’t sweat it.”

The bow bumped wood and I jumped out with a rope and wrapped it around a cleat. Leaning back into the boat, I whispered, “Don’t leave without me. Got it?”

Nico sheepishly nodded and watched me walk down the pier.

In no mood to fuck around, I had my rifle at my shoulder pointed out front. I’d already had one too many scares that morning. If anything moved, I’d shoot it, get back in the boat and spend the day relaxing while I stared at the clouds and let the water gently rock me off to sleep.

Orderly picnic tables on the deck gave no hint anything in the world had gone awry. The restaurant could simply have been closed. None of the windows were broken. All of the doors were closed. Not a single scatter of bones or torn clothes lay anywhere to mark the passing of the recently deceased. Ski boats in the marina hung dry in their lifts. Even the trashcans stood upright with nothing spilling out. For a moment, the world wasn’t dying. It had just taken a day off.

But that was a thought I needed to push off a cliff and maybe stomp on a few times. Those kinds of thoughts led to incautious behavior. And that led to bloody death.

I stopped and slowly scanned across all that I could see. Still, nothing moved. No infected monster made nonsensical howls.

As slowly and quietly as my feet could carry me across the gravel parking lot, I made my way over to the big delivery truck backed into the lot. The doors to the trailer faced the river. If it held food, it was optimally positioned for access from the river.

I could still see the ski boat. I could still see Nico, motionless and useless. He wasn’t even looking at me. It was as though fear of what might be on the shore had put him into his catatonic state. At least he didn’t seem to be thinking about starting up the boat’s engine and ditching me.

Coming up to the back of the trailer, I checked underneath.

Nothing there.

I looked right and left.

Nothing.

The situation was starting to have a too-good-to-be-true feel. With no Whites around to harass me, the trailer either had to be empty, and not worth the effort of checking out, or it was full of Whites who’d pile out once I opened the door.

With that in mind, I rapped on the trailer door with my fist and listened for noises inside.

Again, nothing.

I beat again, a little louder this time.

Nothing.

Taking one hand off of my rifle, I worked the overly complicated latching mechanism on the door. It was creaky with years of rust, but still failed to muster any sound from inside. Nevertheless, caution was my friend. I stepped as far away from the door as I could, braced myself, and swung it open. I jumped back and raised my rifle all in a single motion.

The door arced around its path, exposing a dimly lit interior down the end of my barrel. As I examined the darkness, the door banged against the side of the trailer. Nothing inside moved.

Despite the uncomfortably loud bang of the door, I smiled. Was it going to be easy? Really?

I looked left and right. I checked beneath the trailer again. Still nothing. No movement. No unnatural sounds. Where was the pitfall? Cases of food were stacked neatly in a mostly full trailer, with no associated danger I could see.

Had I, through some strange luck, stumbled upon the only place in Austin magically bereft of the infected?

I steeled my nerves, climbed into the trailer and got a clear view of everything inside. “Holy crap.”

The truck had to have stopped here early in its route. Cases of canned chili, beans, condiments and seasoning were stacked along one wall of the trailer along with fifty-pound bags of flour, sugar and corn meal. On the other wall, shrink wrapped on pallets, were stacked green five-gallon buckets full of sliced hamburger dills, cases of canned fruit, fifty-pound boxes of lard, boxes full of fortune cookies and dozens of cases of soda fountain syrup. The only thing missing from my post-apocalyptic gold mine was a rainbow and surly leprechaun.

It was time to check my flanks again, so I hustled to the back of the truck and jumped down to the ground. I saw nothing but trees, bushes, a few parked cars, boats and orderly picnic tables. Not a single, howling, angry White.

Fuck it.

I climbed back into the trailer, grabbed a dolly strapped to one of the walls and lowered it quietly to the ground. I then spent a short while stacking cases of food at the back of the trailer where I could reach them from the ground. Sure, I could have left it all and come back the next day with Murphy. That would have been the safer course of action. But who knew what the situation would be the next day? The trailer might have gotten ransacked by then, or the whole area might be swarming with the naked horde. No. It was better to take the food while the opportunity existed.

Without incident, I carted seven or eight dolly loads from the trailer, across the gravelly parking lot to the ski boat and cajoled Nico into helping me load them. I even took six heavy cases of the fountain syrup. I had no idea what exactly I’d do with them, but those, along with the lard, were concentrated calories. In spite of having little culinary value, those calories could keep us alive for a long, long time.

When I was done, I stored the dolly back inside the trailer, closed, and latched the doors. I got back into the boat, which was sitting low in the water with all the extra weight. But it would float, and that’s all that mattered. I loosed our rope from the dock and pushed the boat back out into the river. Once we were well away from the shore, I dropped the anchor.

“Wh…what are w…we waiting for?” Nico asked me.

“No point in going down river any further. We’ll wait ‘til dark, head back upriver past the boat and then drift back down.”

“I...I’m hungry.”

“We don’t have a can opener, but you can bust into those fortune cookies, if you want.”

Nico reached into a pocket and withdrew a Swiss army knife. He fumbled with it for a minute or more, but didn’t seem to be able to pull out the can opener blade.

“Here, man.” I put out my hand. “I’ll get it. What are you hungry for?”

Chapter 17

With full bellies and a relatively cool afternoon, Nico and I found it easy to nap. We may have even slept on into the evening, had the mosquito buzzing in my ear not woken me as the sun was setting. So according to the plan, we motored back upriver, passed the riverboat with a wave and drifted silently back down under the cover of darkness.

When we finally tied the ski boat to the riverboat and boarded, I’d pretty much forgotten the way the day had started and instead was feeling proud of the trove of food weighing the ski boat down .

Steph, though, had only the early morning’s events to think about all day, and she had fire in her eyes when she marched up to me. “What were you thinking?”

Deja vu. I pointed to the cases loaded into the ski boat. “Look at all the food.”

Murphy brushed past Steph and slapped me on the back. “Once again, Lucky Zed doesn’t get killed. Heh, heh, heh.”

Dalhover, who was looking into the ski boat by then, seemed almost happy. “Damn. That’s a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like Murphy said, we got lucky. And there’s more where that came from.”

Steph, not one to show too many emotions, especially not anger, poked me in the chest with her finger and leaned in close. “We need to talk. You go ahead and have your little party here, but we’re talking when you get done unloading.”

She was pretty pissed off, but I didn’t rise to the fight. I gave her a big smile instead. I felt like I’d turned a shitty situation into something good, even if part of the equation was luck.

Murphy loved instigating as much as he loved smiling. With a chuckle, he said, “Me and Top got this. You go right ahead and talk to him, boss.”

Steph glared at Murphy.

When she turned back to me, I simply said, “We’ve got weapons and ammo. We’ve got food. This is what I do for a living now, Steph. I scavenge.” Then I shrugged and looked back down into the boat. “I think I’m good at it.”

“Lucky, is more like it.”

I shrugged again and watched Nico shirk any pressure to help Murphy and Dalhover unload the boat. He sauntered past us to take a seat at one of the tables on the lower deck.

Steph had an extra glare for him as well.

“Look, quit shooting daggers at everybody,” I said. “It’s me you’re mad at. Just slap my wrist and get it over with, okay?”

And for the first time since I met her, Steph’s anger got the best of her. “Zed, you just don’t get it, do you? One day you’re going to run off without thinking and get yourself killed, and what then?”

The question was rhetorical, but I was feeling like something of a smartass. “I’ll be dead. What will I care?”

“And what about Murphy and Mandi and Sergeant Dalhover? What about them? What about us?” Steph was nearly yelling at that point. It was so uncharacteristic, she had everyone’s attention, whether she wanted it or not. “What are we supposed to do when you’re dead? Are we just supposed to mourn again? Is that what you want? Don’t you know how much we care about you, Zed? Don’t you know anything?”

Say what?

Steph spun on her heel and stomped off toward the stairs to the upper deck. Behind her, those of us on the lower deck were silent.

After a moment, Murphy said, “You better go talk to her, dude.”

I turned on Murphy. “What’s her deal?”

I glanced Dalhover’s way. He shook his head and went back to work.

I looked back at Murphy. “What?”

“That was kind of a dipshit thing you did this morning.”

In the background, Nico added, “Y…yeah.”

“I did what needed to be done to keep us safe, Murphy. Those naked ones know where we are. Something had to be done and I tried to do it.”

“Don’t tell me, man.” Murphy looked toward where Steph had disappeared up the stairs. “You know who you need to explain it to.”

“Why?”

Murphy laughed. “I wish you two would just sleep together and stop acting like junior high kids. Look, man, go talk to her. If nothing else, she’s the boss. We all agreed.”

I rolled my eyes and huffed. Few things irritated me more than having to answer to people in positions of authority. Of course, that train of thought completely circumvented the fact that I was attracted to Steph.

Murphy nudged my shoulder. “Go.”

“I should wait until she cools down.”

“Man, chicks never cool down.”

“Whatever.”

Murphy nudged me again.

“Fine.” I headed across the deck.

As I walked away, Murphy said, “Don’t forget to say you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

Murphy laughed again. “Does it matter?”

When I got to the stairs, Mandi, Russell and Megan were coming down. I asked, “Are Amy and Brittany on watch?”

“Yes,” Mandi said as she brushed by. Then she turned and called back in her usual bubbly tone, “Glad you weren’t killed this morning.”

“Thanks.” I climbed the stairs.

When I came out on deck two, I immediately spotted Brittany sitting in a chair, concealed behind the rail near the bow. At the stern starboard side of the boat, Amy was standing near the ladder that led up to the roof of the pilothouse. When I looked at her, she pursed her lips and pointed up.

I walked over to the ladder and grabbed a rung. Before climbing, I said, “We came back with a bunch of food. The guys are unloading it down on deck one.”

Amy looked up. “She worried about you all day.” She put a hand on my arm. “Really, she did.”

“She worries about all of us. She’s in charge.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

I started to climb the ladder.

Amy said, “I’m glad you made it back.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll bet you were a lot of fun to have around before all this virus crap happened.”

“Not really.” I made my way up to the roof.

Steph was sitting on the stern of the pilothouse roof, dangling her feet off the edge. I walked across the roof and peered over the edge. “That’s a long way down.”

“It’s not that far.”

“Mind if I sit?”

Steph looked up at me. “I lost my temper. I’m sorry. I’m always the calm one. That’s what people say about me. I’m even-keeled. I never get overly emotional about anything.”

“It happens.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it. Can I sit?”

“Of course.”

I sat beside her. “I’m sorry.”

“For?”

I chuckled. “Murphy told me that part wasn’t important.”

Steph shook her head, smiled wanly and punched my arm. “I’d hate to hear what men must really think of women.”

“In your case, we all respect you. That’s why you’re the boss.”

“I’m the boss because I’m bossy.”

“At the risk of getting all longwinded about it, that’s probably just one of those societal things. I think women—”

“Stop.”

I looked at Steph.

“I’m not in the mood for one of your rambling sociological theories.”

I shrugged. “It happens. Look, I’m sorry about going out on the boat this morning. I really thought I was doing what was best for us all. The girls heard noises on the bank. I thought it might be the infected and I went out to investigate. I didn’t mean to do something about it, but when I saw it was just one naked guy, I thought I might solve a problem at little risk to myself and keep us all just that much safer.”

Steph looked at me. “But he wasn’t alone, was he?”

I shook my head. Of course he hadn’t been alone.

“You don’t think these things through, Zed.”

“It was foggy.”

“You’re making excuses.”

Sure, that was true. I looked out at the water.

“I think maybe you’re so good at laying your bullshit on people that sometimes you believe it, too.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s nothing, Zed, just an observation. You knew more infected could be on shore. You acted on impulse—an impulse to do something for the good of the group—but an impulse just the same. Because you did, you put both you and Nico in danger.”

I took a few deep breaths as I tried to think of a good counterargument, but it was always hard to argue against the truth. “Yeah, but I don’t know what else I could have done. I really just went out to investigate. When I saw that White was alone, I knew I could take him out. It was…it happened so fast. I didn’t think about the possibility that other infected might be there.”

“Have you always been that way?”

“What way?”

“Impulsive.”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little bit.”

“You never think things through?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Looking at her, I said, “I think I tend to think things through. At least I used to. But things are different now. I don’t always have time to think things through. Lots of times, I just have to react. Sometimes that’s saved me.”

“Would you say you’ve gotten more impulsive since you got the fever?”

I was taken aback with that. “What? Are you saying the virus has maybe made me… I don’t know, maybe it’s made me less apt to think? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know, Zed. I’m just trying to understand.”

I got up and paced back and forth a few times, getting a little agitated. “I think it’s the situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. The world changed when the virus hit. People who did things the same way they used to do them are all dead now. People who adapted aren’t.”

“So impulsiveness is a survival adaptation?”

“I don’t know.” I was irritated with the line of questioning. “Maybe. I’m just saying I’m doing some things differently. I’m still alive. I’d like to think some of you guys are too because of me.”

Looking up at me, Steph said, “Come sit back down. Okay?”

I deliberately looked out into the darkness on both sides of the boat before I complied.

“Zed, it’s okay if you do things differently now. It’s even okay if maybe it’s the virus that made you a little more impulsive than you used to be. I just worry about you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You can’t just say that.”

“I can handle myself fine with the infected. I don’t know why, but I do. I’m good at it.”

“It’s not the infected you see that worry me, Zed. It’s the ones you don’t see.”

“I’ll be more careful next time. I’ll look more closely.”

“And that’s exactly my point, but not in the way that you think.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“You think your only danger this morning was that White you killed by the tree. And you think your only unseen danger were the Whites hiding in the bushes and the fog.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you even think about Nico?”

I didn’t know how to respond.

Steph read that on my face and continued. “I’m worried about him.”

“Did you think he was going to go all Freitag on me?”

Steph shook her head, obviously trying to come up with the best way to say something. “I’ll just be blunt. Zed, his temperature concerns me.”

“Is it high?”

Steph nodded.

I looked for the right words, daring to ask a question I might not like the answer to. “Higher than mine?”

Steph nodded.

“And Murphy’s?”

“His is higher than Murphy’s.”

“And Russell’s?”

“Close to the same.”

“His temperature is close to Russell’s?”

“Yes.”

“Holy crap. I wonder…”

“What do you wonder?”

I looked over my shoulder as though I might see down through the deck. “Do you think his temperature is going up?”

“I’ll check him again in the morning. Why do you ask?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share anything. I wasn’t sure if anything I shared might somehow cast a pall on me. “He’s been acting weird since we picked him up at Mr. Mays’ house.”

“I agree, but what do you mean?”

“It’s hard to say. But before, he was… I don’t know. He wasn’t emotional at all. Now he seems like he’s a basket case.”

“Trauma can do that,” Steph said.

“Before, he wouldn’t stop talking. Now…”

“He doesn’t talk that much.”

“And he stutters.”

“He didn’t stutter before?”

I shook my head emphatically. “Not once. He could say more in a minute than I could in a week. He definitely didn’t stutter. You think his temperature going up is causing that?”

Steph nodded.

“But it could just be the trauma, right? It could be that.”

Steph nodded again, but her eyes told me she was just going along with me so I’d feel better.

Crap.

I feared what that implied about my future and lost all desire to say anything else. The black water behind the boat seemed like the most interesting thing in the world.

Steph left me alone with my thoughts for a good long while before she put a hand on my thigh and said, “Zed, don’t worry about this temperature thing. Okay? You’ve got enough to deal with when you and Murphy are out dodging the infected.”

I nodded, but didn’t look at her.

“And I know you were just trying to do the right thing this morning. I appreciate that, I really do. We all do. But we all care about you, okay?”

I nodded again.

“I know you think you’re some kind of self-sufficient… I don’t know. Whatever you think you are. And I guess maybe you are. But if you’ll just trust the rest of us to work together, we’ll help you the way you help us. Trust us all to work together as a team. That’s the only way we’re all going to make it. Okay?”

I nodded again.

“I’m serious, Zed. I know you have a problem with the whole depending-on-other-people thing.”

“I’ve never said that.”

“Anybody who pays attention can see it.”

I didn’t respond.

Steph put a hand on my cheek and turned my face to look at her. “Trust us, okay? We can all help each other. If we work together, we’ll survive.”

Our noses were just inches apart and I could smell her, almost taste her. Something in the pressure of her hand on my face made me want it to stay there forever. But it was just pressure. It may have been the caress of a lover, but I’d never know. That kind of sensitivity was gone from my skin. Robbed from me by a virus, rotting my nervous system from the inside out.

That moment could have been romantic. Maybe in another time, months or years back, it would have. But with so much weight from other emotions, current problems, there was room for little more than a wispy thought of a kiss.

I croaked. “I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

Chapter 18

Half of us were in the candlelit galley, eating like there was no long-term shortage of food to worry about. Amy and Brittany were still on watch. Mandi and Megan had taken food up to them and hadn’t yet come down. I’d just made the ill-advised choice to take Murphy’s dare and guzzle a large cup of straight Coca-Cola syrup and was spinning up on a caffeine and sugar buzz that might take days to wear off.

And on that buzz, I figured I’d make an announcement. “We’ve got plenty of ammo and weapons now.”

The others quieted down and gave me their attention.

“We’ve got plenty of food and we’ve got a place to stay that’s as safe as any we’re likely to find anytime soon.”

“And?” Murphy asked.

“There’s something I’ve been thinking about and I think it’s time that I go take care of it.”

That dampened the mood immediately.

“Oh, no.” Dalhover snorted.

I looked around at them. “If we’d had silencers for your rifles, we could have just shot that Smart One on the bank and wouldn’t have had to worry about drawing any more of them in.”

“Is that the excuse now?” Murphy scoffed without breaking his smile. “You just want to go out and hunt Smart Ones.”

“Yeah, but we need the silencers for the rifles.”

Steph, with a worried look, turned to Dalhover.

He understood she was putting it to him to dissuade me and smirked when he spoke. “You’ve watched too many movies, Zane. Suppressors aren’t silent. They won’t do us any good.”

I shook my head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong.”

Dalhover dispensed with any sense of conversational politeness. “I’m not wrong.”

I nodded and pointed at Murphy. “Me and Murphy, we watched our friend Jerome get killed with silenced weapons and we didn’t hear anything. Tell him, Murphy.”

“I don’t think I’d say he was our friend.” Murphy looked at Dalhover, hesitated, looked at me and then back at Dalhover. “Top, we didn’t hear the rifle shots. They were quiet.”

Dalhover straightened up in his chair. “Is it possible with everything going on, in the fog of war, the gunshots were there, but you just weren’t paying attention? You just don’t remember them?”

“No.” I was emphatic about my response, though I knew that Dalhover’s explanation was plausible.

“Do you even know what a suppressed weapon sounds like?” Dalhover asked.

“Like a crack? Like a firecracker, maybe,” Murphy said, with no certainty.

“If you were listening for gunshots, you might not have noticed.” Dalhover dropped his cigarette on the deck and clapped his hands together. “Suppressed weapons sound kind of like that, only louder.”

What the fuck?

I looked at Murphy. He was, for the moment, quiet and perplexed like me.

I asked Dalhover to do that again.

“Clap my hands?”

“Yeah.”

Dalhover clapped his hands together again and then looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

I looked at Murphy. He had the same question on his face as me. “I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound right to me,” I said.

“Me, neither,” Murphy said.

“What do you mean?” Steph asked.

“Clap your hands together,” I said.

“Why?”

“Please.”

With a puzzled look, Steph complied. She clapped her hands together.

“Harder,” I asked.

She clapped them again.

I looked at Nico and asked, “You hear it too, don’t you? Or more precisely, you don’t hear it.”

Nico nodded. “I w…wondered ab…bout that.”

“About what?” Steph asked, barely able to contain her frustration.

“After I w…woke up from th…the f…fever, I felt like I…I had c…cotton stuffed m…my ears,” Nico said. “Everything seemed k…kind of muffled, b…but not. You know what I m…mean?”

“No,” Steph said.

I cut in. “I can hear you guys clap your hands, but it sounds dull and distant. It sounds like you’re clapping with gloves on. It’s like the high-end sound frequencies are gone.”

“When did you first notice this?” Steph asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. After the fever, my ears were ringing like I’d been at a concert the night before or something, but after a couple of days, I didn’t really think about it. Maybe I stopped hearing some higher frequencies and I just didn’t notice they were missing.”

Steph asked, “Murphy, is that your experience as well?”

“Man, I don’t know,” he said. “When I woke up from the fever, shit was happenin’, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have time to think about it.”

“But you noticed the difference in the hand claps, right?”

“Sure. It’s like Zed said. It’s like you’re clapping your hands with gloves on or something.”

“So you’re both right,” Steph said. “Sergeant Dalhover is right about the sound of a silenced weapon. But it seems the virus has damaged your ability to hear certain frequencies. So what sound you were able to hear from the silenced rifles was easily lost in the background noise.”

I picked up from there. “So all of you can probably hear silenced weapons just fine, but for the infected in the world, they’re out of our auditory range.”

Dalhover scooted up on the edge of the table he’d been sitting on. I think he was almost excited. “Silenced weapons might work for killing the infected. Suppressors might be worth their weight in gold right now.”

“Or worth their weight in Spam,” Murphy said, expecting a laugh, which he got. The tension of disagreement evaporated.

Dalhover said, “I don’t know about going out and killing Smart Ones, though the idea has merit. But if we could get our hands on enough suppressors, they could make the difference between whether we survive or not. It puts the advantage with us.”

Steph asked, with a fair degree of trepidation, “And how do we get suppressors?”

Dalhover answered first. “With the right materials, the right tools and a workshop with some electricity, I could probably make a usable suppressor in a half hour or so.”

“But we don’t have those things,” Steph said.

I stepped in. “There’s a squad of soldiers over by the campus, probably all dead from the virus by now. I’m betting most of their weapons are lying right where they died, with silencers attached.”

“And you’re just going to go across town and pick them up?” Steph didn’t like that idea at all.

I nodded. “Yes ma’am, Captain Leonard. I think that’s what I should do.”

She shook her head. “You’re not fifteen, Null Spot. Don’t act like it.”

“Yes, boss.” I looked at Dalhover to see if he’d come all the way over to my side. He didn’t nod, nor shake his head. He just looked at me with his emotionless stare, but somewhere in there, I thought I saw worry.

We talked for a long time after that, but the conversation circled around the same issues, with Steph not changing her position. The after-dinner debate broke up with the changing of the guard. Steph and Dalhover had a shift together. It was getting late. Everyone drifted off to some other place on the boat and eventually went to bed.

Chapter 19

A peculiarity of the riverboat’s design created a wide ledge outside the railing on the upper deck that ran all the way around the boat, except for the stern. Unsuccessful at sleeping, I got tired of staring at nothing and instead found my way up to sit on that ledge at the bow of the boat.

With my legs dangling over the black water, I watched bubbly gray clouds flow south beneath a starry black sky. The three-quarter moon was rising and provided plenty of light for me to see a hundred or so of the infected, squatting and sleeping among the trees and bushes on the north bank. They’d been collecting there for two days, unsettling all of us and proving the futility of my efforts to kill that one.

Murphy and I, along with Dalhover and Amy, had made another run down to Ski Shores with the pontoon boat and a ski boat. That whole area was still inexplicably free of the infected or any normal human. We uneventfully loaded both boats with as much as could be carried, fueled up at the marina and were in a pretty good position for supplies. We had all the ammunition we were likely to need for the next year. And we knew where to get more. We had enough food to last us a month without worrying about rationing.

Except for the infected on the north bank, our situation was good.

The wispy sound of soft talking caught my attention when a few words floated over the deck and found their way to me. I couldn’t make them out, just that the sound was familiar enough to be words. It came and it went for a while, soft enough that the infected on shore weren’t likely to hear, but loud enough that I could.

After some time, I decided I should go find the two loquacious guards and encourage them to be a little quieter. I hopped over the rail and landed noiselessly on the upper deck, finding no one there. I saw the silhouettes of a few heads up on the roof of the pilothouse at the other end of the boat. That made sense. It seemed to be the preferred station for whichever pair was tasked with nighttime guard duty.

As I walked down the length of the boat and the sounds clarified a bit, I recognized the halting pattern of Nico’s stutter. I heard a girl’s giggle and then nothing more. I was giving some thought to going back to my perch, as the talkers seemed to have silenced themselves, when it occurred to me that Nico should not have been up on the pilothouse. He wasn’t on the schedule. His odd behavior had not engendered enough trust with Steph to merit a night watch slot.

Recalling the schedule, I realized the watch for the last half of the night should have been Mandi and Megan. It was possible Nico was suffering from insomnia, just as I was, and had found his way up to the roof of the pilothouse. But just as Steph’s trust for Nico was precarious, so was mine.

I continued toward the stern.

When I arrived at the ladder on the side of the pilothouse, I stopped and listened. The conversation had not restarted, at least not loudly. But the sound of bodies moving in clothing along with some dragging across the rough roof mixed with whispers and drifted down to me.

Something wasn’t right, but I resisted the urge to climb the ladder and immediately insert myself into whatever was going on. It wasn’t that I had any compunction about being rude. My intuition told me there was more to learn, especially about Nico.

After a bit, the talking started again mixed with whispers and periodic giggles. I started to doubt the validity of my suspicions, but at the same time, I didn’t hear the sound of Mandi’s voice at all.

The volume of Nico’s voice grew as the conversation went on and I started to make out much of what he was saying. And mostly, it sounded creepy. He talked about how pretty Megan’s hair was and how he couldn’t help but stroke it. He told her it reminded him of his daughter, Stacy, only Megan was much prettier. He asked her about the school she went to, whether she had played volleyball or was a cheerleader, and what she liked about it. He asked if she liked any of her teachers and, if so, which ones. He asked if she had any boyfriends yet, or if she’d ever had a crush on any of her teachers.

For her part, Megan seemed embarrassed and giggled a lot. She may even have been thrilled to have the attention of a man who, though old enough to be her father, had a young look about him. But she was thirteen. He was in his mid-thirties.

Everything going on up on the roof of the pilothouse was in the realm of inappropriate. I wrestled choosing the right moment to climb the ladder and punch Nico in the face as I considered what I was going to say to Steph and Amy. Bringing him into the group had been a mistake. My mistake.

Then he asked if he could kiss her.

I was on my way up the ladder.

In the seconds it took me to get both of my feet on the roof, Nico had pushed Megan over on her back and, though she was trying to squirm away, he was too strong. His face was buried in her neck, one arm was holding her close to him and one hand was doing its best to explore places where it didn’t belong.

With frightened tears just starting to flow, Megan’s squeaky voice pleaded, “No. No, don’t do that.”

With my mouth closed tightly and my anger boiling, I took three fast steps over to where Nico was pinning Megan to the roof. I grabbed the wrist of the hand worming its way down the front of Megan’s jeans and wrenched it savagely behind his back while I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him away. “Stop.”

Megan scampered away in a crab walk, trying to cover her chest with her torn blouse while tears streamed down her face. Her mouth moved, but no words came out.

I pushed Nico to the pilothouse roof and dropped a knee hard between his shoulder blades. He grunted loudly as all the air spilled out of his lungs.

Turning to Megan, I asked. “Are you okay?”

She didn’t speak.

Nico, though, started to babble a litany of stuttery bullshit that only served to piss me off. With my hand still full of the hair on the back of his head, I ground his face into the rough wooden planking. “Don’t say anything. You hear me?”

I guess the anger in my voice was enough to convince him how serious I was, because he stopped talking immediately.

I looked up at Megan. “Go downstairs and wake up Steph and Amy, okay? You don’t need to wake everyone, but you get them to come up here.”

Megan nodded.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Megan didn’t look at me. She was looking at Nico. Her sense of violation had turned to anger. “You’re an asshole, Nico.” She got up and headed for the ladder.

“Steph and Amy, okay?”

“I’ll get them.”

Without another word, Megan climbed down, making no effort to avoid the rungs that creaked.

Nico pleaded. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Save it.” I pressed his face harder into the wood.

“You’re hurting me.”

“No shit.”

Even with his face pressed against the wood, Nico managed to say, “It’s n…not wh…what you think.”

I took my hand off of his head and he lifted it up and took full advantage of the opportunity to start saying something else. With my hand free, I drew my pistol and pressed the barrel to his temple. “Don’t speak.”

Nico understood at that point just how serious I was.

It didn’t take long before Steph and Amy were climbing up the creaky ladder to join us on the roof of the wheelhouse.

Steph was first up. “What happened?”

“Did Megan tell you anything?” I asked.

“No.”

Amy turned to look back down the ladder. “Megan, come up here too.”

“I don’t want to,” she called up from below.

Brittany’s voice called back. “She’s not.”

Amy looked at the gun I had pressed to the side of Nico’s head. She’d already seen Megan’s torn blouse. She was doing the math. “You need to.”

I looked at Amy and said, “Amy, I brought Nico here. This is my fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was this way.”

Nico said, “Wh…what way? I’m n…not any way.”

“Quiet.” I put my weight on the handle of the gun and the barrel pressed Nico’s face back against the wood.

Steph, in her business-like calm, said, “Zed, let him up.”

I let go of the arm I held behind Nico’s back. “Put your hands flat on the deck, out in front of your head.”

Nico hesitated and started to protest.

“Do it now.” Harsh talk seemed to work well on him, though the effects didn’t tend to stick for long.

Nico complied and I used my free hand to run over his pockets where I found his Swiss army knife. I took it. I picked up his rifle and stepped away from him. “Go over there.” I pointed to the far side of the wheelhouse roof where he’d be nearly ten feet from us.

Steph asked me, “What happened, Zed?”

With more than one interruption by Nico, I explained what I heard and saw.

Amy headed back toward the ladder. “I’ll go down and talk to Megan.”

Nico figured that was a good time to state his case. “I…it’s n…not true. I didn’t know sh…she was… I th…thought she was old enough… It w…was h…her. All her. Y…you d….don’t know what y…you heard, Z…Zed. You have to b…believe me. You—”

“Enough.” Steph’s tone was sharp enough to cut through Nico’s protests. “Zed, keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t move.”

“But…” Nico started again, but Steph’s glare shut him up.

She went over to the ladder, leaned on the upper rung and listened to the proceedings downstairs. I heard tense whispers mixed with tears. Emotions ran high. Voices forgot the necessity to remain hushed. Brittany seemed eager to climb the ladder and deal with Nico herself.

Eventually, Amy came back up. She and Steph stood at the opposite end of the wheelhouse roof, talking in harsh whispers.

It was clear Nico’s guilt was never in question. They were deciding what to do with him.

Finally, Steph stepped away from Amy and said, “Nico, you’re leaving here tonight. Zed and I will take you upriver somewhere and put you out on the shore. Don’t come back around us. If we see you again, we’ll shoot you.”

Nico collapsed on the deck and cried and pleaded, and cried more.

Steph looked at me. “Do you mind coming with me, Zed?”

“Nope. Not a bit.”

Steph said to Amy, “Will you girls keep watch until we get back?”

“Of course,” Amy said.

Chapter 20

With some care, we got Nico down into one of the ski boats. The one we chose had plenty of gasoline and, almost as importantly, had a bench seat set into the bow – a place for Nico to sit where we could easily keep an eye on him. Steph sat at the helm. In the seat beside her, I held the gun.

We drifted down the river for a half-mile before starting the engine and then heading back up.

I waved at the riverboat as we passed and that was all of the communication that took place on our trip. Steph was as silent as I’d ever seen her. She stared ahead as though Nico wasn’t there.

For my part, I felt a hate for Nico grow the longer I looked at him sitting in the bow, feeling sorry for himself. I thought about his daughter, Stacy, and what he’d told me that day in the canoe before we’d found Mr. Mays’ house. He said she wasn’t sullen because of anything he’d done. She was just wired that way. That’s what he said. Some people are just wired that way.

Yeah, wired that way by parents who take the raw material of innocent children and fuck them up because they can’t control their own twisted urges.

And it was pussy-ass fucktards like Nico who let them die on the front lawn because they were too scared to come out of the kitchen and protect them. The day Nico chose to have children, he only had one job in the whole Goddamned world, and that was to protect those kids. But he didn’t. He was the predator they needed to be protected from.

God, how I hated him.

“Zed.”

Steph’s voice startled me out of my thoughts. I’d been ruminating, completely lost track of time and everything around me.

“Zed,” Steph asked, “are you okay?”

I looked around without seeing a house or structure of any kind. Nico was sitting in the bow of the boat, transfixed by shadows on the heavily wooded bank. The engine was off and the boat was twenty feet from the shore.

Nico turned back to plead with Steph, “N…not h…here. Th…there’s nothing. No sh…shelter. Nothing.”

“And no infected,” she said, looking back at me. “What’s up with you, Zed? Are you all right?”

I nodded.

She scrutinized me for another moment before standing up, her hand deliberately on the butt of her pistol. “Grab that paddle there and paddle until we get close enough to the shore,” she said to Nico.

“I can’t p…paddle f…from up here,” he said.

“Then jump out and swim.”

Nico grumbled and whined, but leaned over the bow and started the awkward process.

After four or five minutes of effort without much in the way of results, Nico sat up, breathing heavily from the exertion and laid the paddle across his knees. “Th…this is impossible. I c…can’t d…do this alone. Why d….don’t you st...start the engine again and j…just p…pull up to the shore?”

Steph took a step toward him. “You can get out, then.”

I put a restraining hand in front of Steph and stood up. “I’ve got this.”

Steph moved back and cleared the way for me. “The sound of the engine will bring in any Whites in the trees. Is that what you want?”

It was only three steps to the front of the boat and I took just one. My pistol was in my hand and I was well within range if Nico should he decide to swing the paddle at me.

I looked at the darkness on the shore.

Nico interpreted that along with the drawn pistol as a threat. “Are you g…going to sh…shoot me, Zed? Really?”

On that long, simmering boat ride upriver, the sins of The Harpy, Dan, Nico and the world conflated in the self-pity stretched on a pedophilic coward’s face. My rage flashed white-hot, blowing away any rational sense of restraint.

In a smooth, natural motion, I raised my pistol, pointed it the center of that face and pulled the trigger.

For that tiniest bit of a microsecond, as that sad face ruptured, I was defined. I knew what I was. I was vengeance.

Nico’s head snapped back and parts of his skull splashed across the water. Slowly, so slowly, his body leaned backwards and fell overboard.

Steph gasped.

I leapt up onto the bow and fired two more vindictive rounds into Nico’s chest.

Fright silenced the frogs and crickets as the night seemed to solidify into a tiny eternity. In the absence of guilt and second-guessing, emotion was satisfied. The scales were balanced. Purpose was fulfilled.

Nico’s body started to sink; black water gurgling red through the bullet holes in his lungs.

But purpose contorted into old, familiar emptiness. Emotionless, I was just a thing with a lethal weapon, trying to remember what I’d been before my bullet had so rudely shattered Nico’s skull.

The body descended further and was gone.

Only cold, dark water and the curious, hungry howls of distant Whites remained to lament Nico’s passing.

“Zed?” Steph said.

Feeling like a soulless White monster, I came back to the moment. I stepped down from the bow and slumped onto the padded seat, my pistol hanging limply in my hand.

“Zed, are you okay?”

I looked up. Steph was worried.

I nodded but tears in my eyes exposed the truth of it.

In small, slow steps, Steph came over and sat on the cushion with me. She put her arms around me and pulled me to her. Somewhere in there, with my face buried in her thick red hair, the rage of a thousand repressed pains found a path to flow free.

Chapter 21

The boat drifted with the current. Steph’s arms held me tight and secure. The cries of the infected faded into the distance behind us as the night sounds of the river took over. Black-windowed houses and cluttered docks drifted past. Silent trees ignored us and dark gray clouds continued to flow across the sky.

I finally found my voice. “I’m sorry.”

Steph put a hand under my chin and pulled my face up to look at hers. “Don’t be.”

Wanting to stay there, feeling her heartbeat through our bodies pressed so close together, sharing the same breaths, wondering what it might be like to have Steph’s embrace always there for me, I still pulled away. Too many other thoughts were bothering me.

“What’s my temperature?” I asked.

Not quite letting go, Steph said, “You said I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Please.”

Steph’s arm dropped off of my shoulder. She sat back on her cushion and took my hand in hers, concentrating on it as if the answer to my question was there. “Why is that important now?”

I looked out at the dark shore, futilely searching for accurate words to describe the complexity of my emotions and thoughts. “I feel like a monster. I need to know if I’m turning into one.”

Steph didn’t have a response for that.

I asked, “Is that what’s happening to me? Am I turning into one of them?”

“Zed, there isn’t any good answer, you know that, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

Steph took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. “Don’t you see? If I tell you your temperature has been going up, then you’ll believe you are a monster and shooting Nico is proof. If I tell you your temperature has stabilized, because of the way you are you’ll decide you’re more of a monster, because you won’t have the virus to blame.”

I didn’t know what to say about that, not at first. “I think I’d rather know. I don’t want to put my head in the sand anymore.”

Steph tried to change the subject, or at least divert it a bit. “Nico deserved what he got.”

“Tell me, Steph, please.”

“I’m throwing away the thermometer when we get back to the boat.”

“And?”

Steph shook her head, dropped my hand and crossed her arms.

“I need to know.”

She surrendered. “Your temperature has been stable since we started checking every day. Mostly. Maybe it’s gone up a little, but it’s hard to tell whether those are just normal fluctuations or not.”

I leaned over, put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. I realized she was right. I did feel like more of a monster. I was a civilized, thinking man. Yet I’d let my temper run away with me and I’d chosen to kill Nico. I chose to murder him. Deserving or not, he paid for a lot of sins with his blood.

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.

Steph put an arm back over my shoulders and pulled me close.

The excuses I was telling myself seemed important enough to share. “Steph, I can’t tell you I know that he molested his own daughter, but I think he did.”

“It’s not important, Zed.”

“It is to me. I guess I suspected it all along. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

“People like that don’t change. You know that, right?”

“No. Yes. I think I read that somewhere once. Something having to do with recidivism rates among pedophiles or something.”

“None of it matters. I don’t fault you for what you did. Maybe in a way, I wish I had the courage to do it myself.”

“I’m not sure ‘courageous’ is the right word to describe what I did.”

“It doesn’t matter what anyone calls it. It doesn’t matter why you think you did it. Nico earned what he got. Besides that, nothing else means anything. None of this changes anything about what I think of you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re a good man.”

“A good man?” My laugh was mocking.

“You’re a good man, Zed. Learn to take a compliment.”

I sat up and leaned my head over on Steph’s shoulder.

The emptiness started to fade and it felt good to be in her arms doing little more than watching the stars between the clouds.

Chapter 22

The next morning, the rain was coming down heavier than I’d seen in a long time. It pummeled the pontoon boat’s canvas roof and added enough noise to make conversation difficult. That didn’t matter much, as the first few miles of our journey had passed in silence. Murphy spent a good deal of time in the stern looking back upriver. I think the more attached he got to Mandi, the more he hated to leave.

Amy, usually good for a conversation, seemed infatuated with her new M-16 and was keeping pretty much to herself.

Dalhover, who was driving the boat, surprised me when he looked over at me and opened the conversation. “What I don’t get is why Captain Leonard let you and Murphy go. I didn’t think it was decided.”

I shrugged. I was doing that a lot. It seemed to be such a handy gesture. “Don’t know. She woke me this morning and told me if I still wanted to go, I had her blessing.”

“You didn’t talk about it last night when you two went out to ditch Nico?”

“Not about this.”

Dalhover looked over to Amy. “Did you talk to her?”

Amy looked at me then back at Dalhover. “We talked for a long time.”

“When?” Dalhover asked.

“After Zed and she got back from taking care of Nico. Neither of us went to bed.”

“And that’s when you decided that going for the suppressors was a good idea?”

Amy got a bit defensive. “You don’t agree?”

“Didn’t say that.” Dalhover took his time digging a cigarette out of his pocket. He put it in his mouth and after a half-dozen attempts to get his lighter to flame, held it up to the end of the cigarette, which proved to be too damp to light. “Dammit.” He tossed the cigarette into the river.

“Those will kill you.” I grinned.

Dalhover shot me a dismissive look.

Amy asked, “So, you do agree that we should do this?”

“It’s Murphy and Zed that are going, if I understood correctly,” Dalhover said.

Amy huffed. “I meant ‘we’ as a group.”

“Don’t mind him,” I said to Amy.

“Do you agree?” Amy asked Dalhover.

“I said as much when we talked the other night.” Dalhover didn’t look at her. “I need a damn dry cigarette.”

Murphy, who’d walked up near the rest of us by the helm, reached up and wrapped his hands around one of the overhead supports to balance himself. “What’s up?”

Dalhover said, “It’s a stupid idea to do it today.”

“Waller Creek empties into Town Lake about four miles south of the university.” I spoke insultingly slowly. I didn’t like the implication I was acting stupid. “If Murphy and I hike up the creek bed, we can get to the university and back in three or four hours and nobody will ever see us.”

Amy said, “I think Sergeant Dalhover is right. With all the rain these last few days, the creeks might flood.”

“We always get flooding after a drought,” Dalhover said.

“That’s not true.” I didn’t know if it was true or not. I never really paid any attention to the weather back when I could sit in an air-conditioned apartment and drink myself into oblivion.

“How long have you lived in Austin?” Dalhover asked.

“All my life,” I said.

“Then you should know what a flash flood is. Don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“They’re always worse after the droughts.”

The boat bounced over some turbulent water and I gripped a rail to steady myself. “I don’t think that’s true.”

Almost to himself, Dalhover said, “I’ve lived in this part of Texas my whole life, which has been a lot longer than yours, Zane. We’re coming off the worst drought I’ve ever seen. Mark my words, it’s going to flood. Stay out of the creek beds unless you want to drown.”

“Yes, Dad.”

After that, we didn’t talk much for a while until Murphy said, “So what I wanna know is, what happened with the whack job?”

“You mean Nico?” Amy asked.

“You know another one?”

“Zed and Steph exiled him last night.”

Murphy busted out laughing. “Exiled? What the hell does that mean?” He looked over at me. “Oh no. I’ve seen that constipated face before, Zed. What happened? Nobody said anything about anything this morning and everybody was acting weird.”

Amy looked up at Murphy. “Steph said Nico’s temperature was up. He started acting crazy.”

“You mean crazier?” Murphy grinned. “What’d he do?”

Amy looked down at the deck. “He tried to…have his way with Megan.”

That surprised Murphy. “No shit. Man, I’d ‘a shot his ass.”

Amy glanced at me.

Murphy saw it and said, “Oh shit.” He looked at me. “That’s what you did. That explains the constipated face.”

I looked away. “I shot him.”

“Man, don’t beat yourself up about it. I didn’t say nuthin’ when we picked him up, but I don’t think it was Whites that broke into that house and killed your buddy, Mr. Mays. I think maybe Nico’s brain started to cook a little too hot and he got hungry.”

Chapter 23

We passed Sarah Mansfield’s boathouse, Mr. Mays’ house, with his remains still in it, the dock where Nico and I made our escape from Nancy’s chain gang and the country club with the Humvee still sitting in the water at the end of the boat ramp. We collected a solid-looking, aluminum-hulled canoe along the way.

Eventually we came within view of the old, gray concrete of Tom Miller Dam. It wasn’t a big dam, at least not compared to the three-hundred-foot-tall Mansfield Dam that divided this section of the river from Lake Travis some fifteen or twenty miles upriver.

Ahead of us on the left was a restaurant called The Hula Hut, with a wide wooden pier for a dining room. Having sat at a table on that pier, sipping a beer and waiting on my food many times with a summer breeze blowing across, I’d stared at the peculiarly constructed dam. Built into the near side was a small hydroelectric power plant. On the far end, a spillway effectively limited the level of the river. At most times, water didn’t flow over the spillway. Instead, the river’s flow ran through the hydroelectric turbines.

Through the center section of the dam were nine more spillways, taller than the main spillway, each topped with an enormous floodgate. If those gates were opened, the level of the river behind the dam would drop ten feet. I’d never seen them open. I’d also never seen the water running over them. But the water was roaring over them that morning.

I said to Sergeant Dalhover, “We shouldn’t get too close to the dam. It looks like the current gets pretty strong.”

Sergeant Dalhover nodded.

I pointed to a building on the southern bank where Bee Creek added its flow to the river. “It would be nice to be closer, but why don’t you drop us off over there?”

Is that close enough?” Amy asked. “You’ll have to carry the canoe for, like, a mile to get below the dam.”

I smiled. “I’ll make Murphy carry it. He’s a big dude.”

“Hey, man,” Murphy said.

“It won’t be more than a half-mile.”

Dalhover took a long, hard look at the building and the thick trees growing down to the edge of the bank. “Don’t see any of ‘em over there.”

Murphy looked intently at that part of the shore. “Looks clear to me, man. Let’s hit it.”

Dalhover caught my attention. “Listen, Zane.”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful going through the trees.”

“I know,” I said.

“You guys will be carrying the canoe. You’ll be vulnerable. Don’t rush. Take your time. Be careful.”

“Yep.”

“A low bridge is a couple of hundred yards downstream from the dam. With the river as high as it is, the water may be running over. If not, it’ll probably still be too high to go under.”

That made sense. I gave him a nod.

“Stay in the trees until you get past the bridge and the rapids, then put your canoe in.”

The water on both sides of the dam was normally smooth, with only a gentle current that could be felt, but seldom seen. But the water wasn’t usually flowing over the dam, either. “Okay.”

“Don’t rush to get back tonight if it’s not safe. Take your time.”

It was all good advice. “We’ll be careful.”

Murphy slapped me on the back. “I wish.”

I shot him a hard look. “We’ll be careful. As careful as we can be.”

Chapter 24

After stumbling through the fast-moving water between the pontoon boat and the shore, Murphy and I were soaked. We trudged up the steep bank, wrestling the canoe through tree branches along the way. Reaching level ground, we stopped for a breather.

Looking into the damp shade beneath the oaks and between the cedars, I whispered, “We can’t keep going this way. One of us needs to have a gun in hand.”

Murphy gave me a nod. “I can carry the canoe. You be the guard.”

Despite my earlier joke, I didn’t like that idea at all. “I’ll carry it.”

Murphy actually laughed out loud at that. “Whatever, man. You’re like an albino Somali. I’m surprised you can pick yourself up sometimes.”

“At least you think you’re funny.” I was mildly offended.

“Look man, put your end down. You know I can carry it easier than you.”

I huffed and looked at my wiry arms. I was stronger than I looked. I was sure of that.

“Don’t worry, dude. Steph likes your He-Man muscles.”

I stepped out from under the canoe and let it fall.

Murphy lost his balance for a moment, but to his credit, caught the weight before the canoe hit the ground. He took a moment arranging it at an angle on his back and shoulders, with the stern down low behind him and the bow up in the air in front. He gripped the gunwales with his hands, keeping it stable and making it look like the easiest thing in the world. He gave me a stern look. “Even you know that was stupid.”

He was right. If the canoe had banged on the ground, it could have brought unwanted attention. That was the only dumbass moment I could afford for the day. Actually, it was more than I could afford. I’d put us both in danger with a petulant choice.

I arranged my rifle into a comfortable shooting position before I turned to Murphy and said, “Sorry.”

He smiled, making it look less awkward to be carrying the canoe alone than with my help. “No sweat.”

And off we went, with little more than a destination and a skeleton of a plan.

Moving at a pretty good pace, we came out of the trees and onto a curved asphalt road that emptied into a small parking lot in front the windowless, two-story utility company building. Not a single infected person was anywhere to be seen. I waved Murphy to follow and we hurried across the empty parking lot. At the opposite end, a row of steel power line towers cut across the landscape. Below, all of the cedar trees had been cut to nubs, leaving only the prickly pear cacti and some hardy weeds growing up through the rough limestone.

The power lines went off in a direction that roughly paralleled the river. I pointed and in a soft voice said, “That’s our path.”

The canoe wobbled from left to right on Murphy’s shrug.

I led. Murphy followed.

Broken bits of limestone crunched under foot. Nothing in the trees seemed to notice the rhythmic noise. The infected were strangely absent. As I watched for movement in the trees, the reason for their absence occurred to me. The terrain on this side of the dam was hilly, cut by steep ravines, and dense with cedars, oaks and all manner of thorny bushes and vines. It was a difficult and expensive place to build. Still, the hilltops and ridge crests, with their breathtaking views of downtown Austin, were dotted with widely spaced, extravagantly priced houses. Any infected or their victims in this part of town were likely to be up there. Down where Murphy and I hiked were only fire ants, scorpions and swarms of mosquitoes.

The roar of the water pouring over the dam started to dissipate and I realized we were spending more time going up than down. The path under the power lines, as easy as it was to walk, was taking us inconveniently far from the river. I started examining the woods to our left, looking for a game trail that might lead back to the water.

But one of the habits keeping me alive in the post-viral world was paying attention to everything happening around me. I’d made plenty of mistakes by focusing too intently on things at the center of my attention, only to be blindsided by something else. So as we moved, as we searched for a game trail, I kept looking ahead, behind us and to the other side of the clear-cut power line easement.

That’s when I spotted movement.

I froze, but just for a second.

I spun and urged Murphy to move quickly behind some concealing cedar branches. I hustled over beside him, and whispered, “There’s something ahead. I’m going to sneak up through the woods and see what’s up. You wait here.”

“Wait here? Why? Ain’t like somebody’s gonna come and steal the canoe if I leave it. Besides, my arms are tired.”

“Sometimes I think you live to be contrary.”

“Talk about the pot calling the kettle white.” Murphy grinned, amused with himself.

“White?”

“Yeah, you know, ‘cause we’re all white now. It seemed apropos.”

“Apropos? How do you even know that word?”

“Just ‘cause I spent most of my educational career skipping class and getting laid doesn’t mean I don’t read.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” My frustration was coming out.

“Lighten up, man. You’re gonna give yourself an aneurysm.”

“Whatever. Put it down and c’mon.”

It took several long minutes of stealthy sneaking to get into a position with a good view. From our hiding place behind the dense cedars, we saw a six-foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire cutting across the power line easement, on a line running right down to the river. On the other side of the fence was Redbud Trail, a street that ran from the bridge Dalhover warned us about all the way to the top of the hills, south of the river. And an unending helix of naked Whites snaked their way up the steep road.

I squatted down to reduce the chance I might be seen. Murphy dropped down beside me. “I guess that explains why we haven’t seen any Whites since we came ashore.”

Murphy’s face asked silently for an explanation.

“The chain-link fence. I’ll bet this whole area, from the road, down to the river and back to Bee Creek belongs to the utility company, and it’s surrounded by that fence.”

“You know they could knock down the fence, right?”

“Of course,” I said, nodding. “But why? There’s nothing over here but trees as far as they can see.”

“Good point.”

“I wonder if they’re all migrating west, now that they’ve found a way to get over the river.”

“Do you mean south?”

“Jesus, does it matter?”

“Not to me.”

I rolled my eyes. “I wonder how many of them there are.”

“A shitload.”

“I knew that much.” I looked back over my shoulder through a gap in the foliage. “We can’t get across Redbud Trail with all of those Whites out there. You know as well as I do that Smart Ones are in the mix. They’ll spot us. With the canoe, we won’t be able to evade them.”

Murphy peeked around the tree. “What are you thinking?”

I shrugged and pointed toward the river. “I say we go cross country and see if we can get into the water somewhere on this side of the fence. Otherwise, we need to scrap this canoe plan and figure out another way to get across town.”

“Man, I wish I knew where we could find some silencers nearby. I’m not diggin’ this idea of going back over to UT.”

“They might be all over town, for all we know. But we don’t have any idea where.”

Murphy asked, “Do you know where any gun shops are on this side of town?”

“I’m not exactly from this neighborhood.”

“Yeah, my billfold’s too skinny for this side of town, too.”

I looked into the woods. “You want to give it a go?”

Murphy made no effort to move. “I’m not a whiz at maps and geometry and stuff, but if we’re on this side of the fence and the road is on that side of the fence, it seems to me if we go in the water back here somewhere, we’re gonna be upstream from the bridge Top told us to get downstream of. ‘Cause that road up there is the one that runs right down to that bridge.”

“Yep. I’m sure that’s right.”

Murphy gave me a flat stare. “You’re gonna try and drown me again, aren’t you?”

I grinned. “Let’s just go down there and look. Dalhover might be wrong.”

“It seems to me he keeps being right about stuff when nobody thinks he’s gonna be.” Murphy paused. “You want me to get the canoe?”

“Why? We might not even use it.”

It was Murphy’s turn to grin. “You hear that noise, right?”

“The water from the dam?”

Murphy nodded. “That’s not all the dam. That’s the sound of rapids.”

“And?”

“I know you, Zed. We’re gonna get down there and no matter what it looks like, you’re gonna come up with some crazy rationalization about why you think we’ll be able to get down the river in the canoe alive.”

“Leave the canoe. That’ll give you time to talk me out of my crazy idea on the way back up here to get it.”

Murphy shook his head. “If you give me the time, I’ll talk myself out of it. I say let’s take the canoe and if you think we should go, let’s go. You’ve been good luck for me so far.”

“You’re a frustrating man, Murphy.”

Murphy shrugged.

Chapter 25

It took a while to carry the canoe through the woods and down to the edge of the river. It was clearly running two or three feet over its banks, and water was rushing between the trunks of trees lining the shore.

Out in the main flow, the water rose up in white, frothy humps over submerged rocks and sank in deep eddies. It was rough. Not class five rough, but it bordered on dangerous for two city boys, one of whom couldn’t swim.

“A couple of things,” I said.

“Shit.”

“Shit?”

“You wouldn’t have started that way unless you were thinking about getting into that.”

“Well, a different couple of things.”

“You’re gonna shame me into going, aren’t you?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that.”

“You remember I can’t swim, don’t you?”

“That water’s not more than five or six feet deep.”

Murphy looked at the rushing water. “I don’t think that makes it any better when it’s like that.”

I pasted on a smile. He was right. We could both drown out there. “Yeah.”

“Remind me. Why do we need the silencers so bad?”

“We can kill all of the Whites we want. Our guns become an advantage, rather than a liability.”

“And we can’t make it without them?”

“Murphy, you know as well as I do that the only people we’ve seen who’ve had any success against the infected were those guys with silencers who killed Jerome. I think the silencers are the only thing that can ensure we’ll live through this.”

“And this has got nothing to do with hunting down Mark and killing him?”

I looked at the bridge. I didn’t want to answer that question. “We can try and figure out another way.”

“Why don’t you just tell me your couple of things and I’ll let you know if I’m stupid enough to follow along?”

“What couple of things?”

“The couple of things you mentioned when you looked at Niagara Falls out there and decided it might be a good idea to jump in.”

“Look, I can go myself if I need to.”

Murphy laughed derisively. “You’re going to jump in the river by yourself, somehow not drown, paddle all the way downtown, hike up through the middle of Austin and get to the university campus, all without getting killed. And then you’re going to find those silencers, like you even know what one looks like, pick them all up, again without getting yourself killed, and find your way all the way back across Austin to the river boat.”

I nodded.

Murphy finished. “And you base your optimism about being able to do this by yourself on what?”

“I’m not dead yet.”

Murphy rolled his eyes and shook his head. “If we go, we go together.”

“Fine.” I pointed inside the canoe. “First off, those bungee cords holding the paddles to the benches will keep them from floating away.”

Murphy’s face turned to worry. “Why would they float away?”

I turned and pointed to the bridge. “Because the canoe will be upside down.”

“This plan already sucks.”

“The water is only about two feet below the bottom of the bridge. We can’t be in the canoe and go under.”

Murphy scrutinized the bridge and nodded. “I’ll give you that. But why upside down? Why don’t we just hang onto the canoe’s sides and float down with it that way?”

“We could, but if we’re going to be in the water anyway, it doesn’t matter if the canoe is upside down or not.”

“It’ll sink.”

Pointing at the bow of the canoe, I asked, “See this compartment at each end of the canoe?”

“Let’s go back to that basic fact that I can’t swim, Zed. I don’t swim. I don’t canoe. I don’t kayak. I don’t ski. I don’t scuba dive. I don’t like it when you drive the Humvee into the river without warning me. I’m not into water sports, in case you haven’t deduced that yet.”

“You don’t need to get all pissy about it.”

“I’m not. Just stop asking me stupid questions.”

I decided to put the conversation back on a productive track. I pointed at the bow. “Lots of canoes have those watertight compartments at the bow and stern. This canoe won’t sink whether it’s upside down or right side up. Sure, it’ll fill up with water and swamp, but it’ll never sink.”

Murphy gave the compartments a long, hard look. “Are you sure about that?”

“Positive. I’m thinking if we turn the canoe over, it’ll work better for us in a couple of ways. First, we won’t have to hang onto the sides with one hand. We’ll be able to hang onto the cross braces with both hands. That reduces the chance the current will pull us away from the canoe and drown us.”

“Okay.”

“If we’re beneath the canoe, we’ll have a pocket of air to breathe, and the Whites on the bridge won’t ever see us. If they don’t see us, they’re not likely to follow us downriver and fuck with us when we try and get out.”

“You think they’d follow us all the way into downtown?”

“Murphy, I don’t know what they’ll do. All I really know is every time I make an assumption about how safe I’ll be around them, they surprise me and I end up in danger.”

“I heard that.” Murphy examined the river again. “So you really think this’ll work?”

I shrugged. I thought it would be easy, though I should have known better. “As long as we stick with the canoe, we’ll get wet, but I think that’s the worse that’ll happen.”

“Back to that point about me not being able to swim. You know if I lose my grip on the canoe, I’ll probably drown, right?”

“I’m a good swimmer, Murphy, and if I lose my grip on the canoe, that water is rough enough that I’d probably drown, too. So we’re even.”

“I’m not sure if that makes you dumber than me or not.”

“If I didn’t think we could both hang onto the canoe, I wouldn’t suggest we try.”

“And how sure are you that this’ll work?”

“Ninety-nine percent.”

Murphy laughed. “That’s bullshit.”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine.”

Murphy shook his head. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

We spent enough time on shore to make sure everything we had was secure.

I laced my shoes up tightly. I buttoned the flaps closed on the big pockets on the thighs of my shorts. Those held four magazines for my rifle. Two more magazines were stuffed into one of my back pockets, but they were long enough that they prevented me from buttoning the flap closed. I worried I’d lose those in the rough water. My other back pocket held a few magazines for my pistol, but I was able to stuff those in sideways. My knife was secure in the old leather sheath on my belt. As for the pistol, I’d been carrying that in a front pocket, but didn’t want to risk losing it. Tucking it into my belt wouldn’t work. So I set the safety, undid my canvas belt, rolled the end and pushed it through the trigger guard before lacing it back through the loops on my cargo shorts.

“You should take the magazine out and make sure there isn’t a bullet in the chamber.”

I looked down at the gun dangling on my hip.

“You don’t want that safety getting flipped off when the river is dragging you over some rocks. You could shoot your dick off.”

I grimaced. “I like my dick.”

After that, Murphy helped me adjust my sling so my M4 was strapped across my back, rather than dangling by one end.

And we were ready to go.

Together we lifted the canoe over our heads and carried it beside an outcrop of stone and bushes that would keep us hidden from curious eyes on the bridge. Knowing Murphy would not be the first to step into the river, I led the way.

By the time I was knee-deep, the current was tugging chaotically at my legs. It was strong enough to be a worry. When the water was up to mid-thigh, I was having trouble keeping my balance.

Murphy was just stepping into the river behind me.

“Be careful with the current.”

Murphy grunted something. All of his concentration was focused on making himself do something he must really have hated.

At waist-deep, bracing myself on the outcrop, I could proceed no further without getting washed away.

“Damn.” Murphy cursed as the canoe lurched to my left.

I bent my knees and prepared to go in, but Murphy caught his balance. For the moment, we weren’t moving. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Murphy was well into the water, mid-thigh. With our heads inside the upturned canoe, I said, “This is our last chance to bail out of this.”

Murphy grumbled something to underscore his reluctance, but he was willing to go forward with the plan.

“Hold on tight. We need to take a couple of steps to our left and just drop down into the water. Then we can let the current carry us. Don’t fight it, okay? If you do, you’ll lose your grip and then you’ll be fucked, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean. Let’s do this before I change my mind.”

“Here goes.” Not waiting for a response, I shuffled to my left, going deeper as I moved. The current pulled exponentially harder the more I submerged my body.

Just as my footing slipped and I knew I was going, I shouted, “Now.” I sank into the water and lifted my legs as the canoe torqued and jostled. With a big splash behind me, Murphy fell into the main current.

With the canoe settling into the water and the current pulling us rapidly downstream, I looked back over my shoulder and flipped my hands on the cross brace so I could face Murphy. He was wide-eyed and gripping his cross brace tight enough to leave hand prints.

“That was the hard part.” I hoped. My voice echoed oddly over the water and under the canoe’s aluminum hull. “Relax and flow with the water. Don’t try to walk or push against the rocks with your feet. That’s how you get hurt.”

The canoe bounced up over a wave.

“How do you know this shit?” Murphy asked, urgency heavy in his voice.

“I’m guessing.”

We started to float sideways in the current.

“I’m gonna punch you in the face when we get out of this.”

I couldn’t tell if Murphy was serious.

More jostling.

The canoe jerked hard to the right and I almost lost my grip. Water splashed my face.

Murphy cursed.

The ride was much worse than I expected.

My feet dragged through some underwater bushes and got caught. I panicked. The canoe jerked out of my hands. I got pulled underwater.

All of those moments over the past month when I’d chanted my calming mantra taught me how to quickly stuff my panic into a little black box and ignore it. Panic was the enemy of clear, quick thought and clear, quick thought was what I needed more than anything.

Murphy’s knees hit me in the face just as his boots kicked me in the gut. But that was okay, as okay as things were going to get. I threw my arms around his legs and hoped his grip on the boat was stronger than the bush’s hold on my feet.

The current bent me back and jerked my feet against the bush, but I didn’t come free. My arms slipped down Murphy’s legs and stopped on his boots. All I could hear was the bubbling thunder of rushing water.

The situation was momentarily static as the river tested Murphy’s strength against the bush’s grip on me.

But I was the weak link. I was only going to last another thirty seconds more without a breath.

As I was thinking rapidly through my alternatives, the bush gave way and the water jerked me downstream.

Thank God.

I needed air.

Using Murphy like a ladder as the current twisted me around behind him, I crawled my way up, gripping anything I could as the swirling water pulled me in every direction.

Miracle.

Nearly punching Murphy in the back of the head as I reached above the water’s surface, my hand caught onto the edge of the canoe’s rear seat. I fished my other hand around above the water’s ill-defined surface, caught onto Murphy’s shoulder and pulled my head above water for breath.

Thank God, for real.

“God damn, Zed.”

I got my other hand on the back edge of the seat and pulled my head as far up out of the water as I could. With my chin against Murphy’s shoulder and our skulls bouncing together with each rough wave, I shouted, “Thanks for not letting go.”

Murphy said something, but I couldn’t tell what.

The current jostled us some more and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, metal shrieked on concrete. The canoe lurched to a near stop and our bodies jerked forward in the current.

It was time to hang on for all we could.

“Shit.” It was my voice. It was Murphy’s voice. It was the cry of the metal wailing on and on and on until I was sure the canoe’s bottom had been ripped from its frame.

The bow of the canoe bobbed up.

The stern bobbed down and dunked me. But the canoe’s buoyancy compartment popped back to the surface and pulled me and my head up into the air inside the canoe just as the screeching stopped.

“We made it,” Murphy hollered, with all the joy of a man coming out of a near-death experience.

We hadn’t made it, at least not yet. But we’d gone under the bridge. The river would only deepen the further we floated, and the rapids would diminish. No, we hadn’t made it, but the hardest part was behind us.

Chapter 26

Lady Bird Lake was what they called the usually placid section of the Colorado River between the Tom Miller Dam and the Longhorn Dam, six miles downstream. But placid isn’t what it was that day. The water in the lake wasn’t dangerous, but it was swift.

Keeping a hand on one of the canoe’s cross braces, I submerged and came up on the outside of the capsized boat. Murphy did the same. The river was expanding up the wide, flat banks and the water’s surface was relatively calm. Well ahead of us, a concrete-pillared bridge spanned the river a hundred feet up.

Giant cypress trees lined the banks between enormous old oaks with fat trunks and long, crooked branches. Behind those trees, on the south shore, was some of the city’s most expensive real estate. On the north, the neighborhoods were giving way to short buildings, giving way in turn to taller buildings. Downtown Austin was only a few miles ahead.

Coming up on the south shore was a kayak and canoe rental business built on the edge of the river. It had several floating docks secured to the bank and the river bottom by steel cables. But the cables were breaking in the current and one section of dock, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, had swung out into the river moored by only a single, resilient cable. The corner nearest the bank was at least ten feet from shore.

“Let’s try to get over to that dock,” I said.

“You think it’s safe?”

“Safe?”

Murphy laughed. “Yeah. I keep forgetting that safe is your middle name.”

“No, it’s careful.”

“Whatever.”

I pulled myself along a submerged gunwale until I came to the bow of the canoe. I grasped a metal eye built into the bow and started to swim toward the dock. “Keep holding onto the canoe and kick,” I called back to Murphy.

“Just because I can’t swim doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

Murphy and I had spent so much time together, we were starting to talk to each other like a grouchy married couple.

“Just kick. I’ll steer.”

After swimming hard to pull the canoe across the current, I managed to grab hold of a bare cleat bolted on the edge of the dock before we were swept past. The stern of the boat swung around with Murphy holding on. “Give it a sec,” I hollered.

A few seconds was all it took. The aluminum hull banged against the floating dock and Murphy grabbed onto a swim ladder.

Not in any hurry to move, I caught my breath and looked at the trees to make sure we wouldn’t have any company. Despite the wide gap of water between the dock and the shore, I still worried. Who knew what a crazed White might do? I turned to Murphy. “I can hang onto the canoe if you want to climb up on the dock.”

“You sure you’ve got it?”

“No problem.”

Murphy hauled himself up out of the water a lot more quickly than he could have a few weeks before. The weight loss was doing him good.

Once he had both feet on the deck, I said, “Hey, see that yellow rope over there?”

Murphy looked toward the other side of the dock.

“Can you cut a length of it and tie it to this eyehole on the canoe? I can’t get out of the water until we tie it off.”

“Gotcha, boss.” In no time Murphy chopped a length of rope with his hatchet, tied it to the canoe and secured it to a cleat on the dock.

I climbed out of the water.

Murphy gave me a head-to-toe look. “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You lost your shoes.”

I shrugged. “They were free. Let’s get this canoe turned right side up real quick. That last cable might give way.”

Murphy looked at the cable. “So? The dock floats.”

“I suppose you’re right. Can you give me a hand anyway?”

Murphy knelt down at the stern of the boat. I leaned over the edge of the dock near the canoe’s bow. With a stable dock underfoot, righting the canoe was a snap. Doing so in the water was always a pain, left water in the boat and presented the difficulty of getting back inside without re-capsizing it.

“I hope we didn’t put a hole in the canoe under that bridge.” I examined the bottom to see if any water was bubbling in.

“We’re already wet.” Murphy grinned.

Satisfied enough with the seaworthiness of our boat, I stood up and looked back at the trees on shore. Still safe. I looked at Murphy’s equipment. “Looks like you didn’t lose anything.”

Murphy ran his hands over his MOLLE vest and weapons. “I’m good.”

“And you’re all right? No broken bones? No major cuts?”

Murphy shook his head. “Surprised I lived through that, but I’m good. A few bruises, is all.”

“Good.” I ran my hands over my pockets and checked my weapons. My pistol was still on my belt. I had the knife. All of the magazines from my back pockets were gone and one of my front pockets was empty. I was back down to a T-shirt, shorts, a usable rifle and a little extra ammunition. “We’ll have to scavenge on the way, if that’s cool.”

“I don’t have any other appointments today.”

“Did you get punched a lot in school?”

“That reminds me. I need to punch you in the face.”

I rolled my eyes and looked back at the woods. “I’ll tell you what. Next time I come up with a stupid idea, like jumping into a flood stage river with a shitty canoe, punch me in the face. Maybe it’ll bring me back to my senses.”

With a little too much enthusiasm, Murphy said, “Yeah, I can do that. You want to get going?”

“I don’t see any point in staying here. You take the stern, I’ll take the bow.”

“You got it, boss.”

Moments later, we were back in the canoe, right side up and moving quickly with the current.

I craned my neck so I could see Murphy. “With the water moving this fast, we don’t need to paddle to keep the canoe moving. We’ll be there before we know it. We just need to steer ourselves over to the north side of the river.”

“Works for me.”

I resituated myself in the canoe and went to work keeping the bow pointed roughly at the north shore. The rain was coming in squalls by then with drizzle in between. Thunder was rumbling in the distance. It wouldn’t be good to stay in the water too much longer.

With the kayak rental business receding behind us, the Loop 1 Bridge dominated my attention. The closer we got, the more it looked like a contested bridge from the last world war. Two sand-colored Abrams tanks with their severe angles and 120mm cannons squatted on one end of the bridge, daring anything to cross. As intimidating as they looked, they were no more than armored skeletons of dead beasts, as dead as the soldiers inside.

Nothing moved on the bridge among the carcasses of exploded vehicles, with their burnt innards and metal skin flowering out on rusty petals. The concrete and steel rail at the south end of the bridge was broken through. The rear ends of two cars stuck vertically up out of the water.

As we floated under, I looked up and wondered how many bones of how many people lay on the concrete above.

Ahead of us, trees grew thick on both banks, and a slight curve in the river kept the North Lamar Boulevard Bridge—the next one we’d pass—hidden from sight. Tall downtown buildings peeked above the treetops, far enough away that it was impossible to tell that anything was amiss.

Birds squawked in branches. Ducks swam in twos and threes near the shore. Turtles piled themselves on exposed logs and larger rocks, hoping the hot sun would return. Even the sound of rifle fire and the howls of the hungry infected were absent. Only the rain and thunder remained. The temptation was heavy to forget that beyond the trees was a broken world full of dead humans and white monsters.

Succumbing to that temptation, my paddle found its way out of the water and across my lap. I looked up at the sky and closed my eyes, letting the light rain between the squalls drip on my face.

I stayed that way for a long time.

I realized how tired I was, not just physically but emotionally. I’d been blazing away for weeks in full survival mode, riding a tsunami of rage, vengeance and fear. How long had it been? It was so easy to lose track of the days when all of the calendar-based events in life fell away.

The virus hit in mid-August and now it was mid-September, I guessed. I’d survived a month. According to Jeff Aubrey’s equations, I only had to make it another eleven months to earn a real chance at staying in this world long enough to see my hair turn gray.

But I doubted I could make it. Thinking about all that happened, I wondered why I was still alive.

The wooden paddle across my lap nagged at me to pick it up and put it to use in the now onerous task of pulling it through the water. The weight of my world, so precariously dammed behind my anger, burst through and smashed every bit of desire I had to move forward. The rain stopped feeling good. The bird’s songs were an irritating racket. The turtles were just stupid, slow reptiles whose heads would one day be bitten off in the jaws of hungry Whites.

I slumped forward, leaned on my paddle, and wondered how I was going to make it all the way across town to the university campus.

“You all right, man?” Murphy was concerned. He sensed the change in my mood.

I nodded. What choice did I have but to be all right?

Still, I leaned on my paddle and stared at the greenish water, at the splashes of tiny raindrops and little expanding circles, dying as they each drowned in the waves of other circles on the surface of the water.

I was one of those circles, and I felt like I’d expanded to my limit. I was waiting to get washed away. In that moment, I would have welcomed it.

The absence of the sound of a paddle in the water behind me told me Murphy had pulled his paddle into the boat as well. “Are you okay, Zed?”

Sitting up straight, I perfunctorily dipped my paddle back into the water. “I just need to keep moving.”

“What?” He heard me. He was one of those many people who use the single word “what” as a request for more information.

I stroked the paddle. “When I’m moving, I’m okay. When I stop and give myself time to think, all of this craziness starts to seep through the cracks.” I drew in a deep breath. My confession had a weight of its own. “It’s wearing me down, Murphy.”

Murphy didn’t respond immediately. Finally, he said, “You know what I think, man?”

I shook my head. “Do I want to know?”

“If we see a liquor store on the way, we need to get a few bottles of the hard stuff. And when we get back to the boat, we need to drink ourselves out of all this bullshit for a while.”

I turned back to Murphy. “Yeah, that sounds good.” It did indeed.

“Some pussy wouldn’t hurt either.”

“Don’t start that again.”

“Man, I’m tellin’ you. I can’t figure out why you and Steph aren’t bumpin’ uglies yet.”

I nearly laughed at that. Murphy did have a way. “Bumpin’ uglies? How old is that expression?”

Murphy shrugged.

“It’s complicated.”

“How complicated could it be? She likes you. You like her. I don’t know if you’re holding out for something better, but in case you haven’t noticed, there’s not likely to be anything else around. You know what I mean, man?”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then? She’s a little on the skinny side for my taste but we’re all gettin’ that way, right?”

I smiled and looked down at myself. I couldn’t afford to get much skinnier.

“So what is it? Spill the beans.”

“I don’t know.” I looked down the river. I looked at the trees. “Sometimes, all I think about is her. Other times, she pisses me off with her bossy bullshit, and all I want to do is go somewhere where I don’t have to listen to her.”

Murphy laughed loudly and the sound carried across the water. “You just don’t like being told what to do.”

“It’s not that.” It was.

“Don’t lie to me, man.”

I turned forward again and started paddling.

“When you get those bossy ones in bed, Zed, take my word for it, you won’t go away unhappy.”

I shook my head. I was steering the boat again. I was doing something. I was moving forward. Murphy was a better friend than I deserved.

To our right, the wide mouth of Barton Creek opened up onto the river. The banks of the creek were thick with trees and shrubs. I saw two of the infected squatting among the bushes on the shore. One of them had a canoe paddle over his shoulder, probably one of the many available at another canoe rental business a half-mile up the creek. Both Whites were intently watching a spot in the water just a few feet away from the bank. One of them looked up at us in our canoe and oddly, didn’t seem to have any interest.

The one with the paddle smacked it down hard on the surface of the water. The other jumped up and waded in, going chest deep just three steps from shore. As I started to wonder what was going on, the one in the water lifted a sizable turtle out by its back leg and showed it to the one with the paddle.

The one with the paddle grinned. Just as I was about to conclude the pair was Slow Burns like me, the one with the paddle made some kind of monkey sound. The one making his way out of the water answered in kind.

“What’s that about?” Murphy asked.

“Turtle… fishing?”

“I can see that. Those ones aren’t afraid of the water.”

“Uhm—”

The White with the paddle gave the White with the turtle a hand in climbing up the steep bank. Then, with only a quick glance back at Murphy and me, the two took their prize and walked casually into the trees.

“I’m not sure what to think about that,” I said.

“Those aren’t the same kind of crazy Whites we’ve been dealing with.”

“I’m starting to believe there’s a whole spectrum of mental abilities left in the infected brain after the virus does its damage. As a matter of fact—”

Murphy jerked and pointed to something on the other bank, shouting. “Is that a squirrel?”

On instinct, I turned to look as I was processing what he said. “What?”

“Man, I’m not in the mood for another Professor Zed lecture.”

“Man, fuck you.”

The North Lamar Boulevard Bridge came into view. It was barricaded at the midpoint. Which side was barricading which was impossible to discern. Cars were jammed up pointing in both directions. Evidence of the intense fear that drove people to flee without the barest knowledge of whether the destination was any safer. Anywhere but here.

Anywhere but here. What a desperate fear those people must have felt. To race off in the family car filled with crying children, teddy bears and a few insufficient bags of canned goods hurriedly gathered from the pantry.

Anywhere but here.

Most of those cars were burned black, probably with blackened skeletons, large and small, lying across metal springs of seats whose cloth and cushion had turned to ash.

The wide footbridge just downstream from the North Lamar Boulevard Bridge was blocked as well and packed with cars. None were burned, but most had broken glass. Below the barricades, a body hung from the bridge. It looked to have gotten a foot jammed between the barrier and the rail before falling over the edge. It was a woman’s body. swaying in the wind, dripping with rain. Her arms were draped past her head, seeming to reach down toward us in a plea to be set free. Whether she was infected or normal when she went over the edge was impossible to tell. She’d been there a while.

The image of her dangling body stuck in my head.

I barely noticed the railroad bridge until we had to steer the canoe around one of its footings. Shortly after, the roar of rushing water drowned out most other sounds. Shoal Creek flowed into the river through a wide gap on the north bank.

Murphy pointed. “Looks like Top was right about Shoal Creek. Waller Creek is probably full, too.”

Sergeant Dalhover’s being right about the flooding in the creeks—minor flooding though it was—was turning into an annoying trend. “Has Dalhover been wrong about anything yet?”

Murphy shrugged. “Not that I can think of.”

“I hate that.”

Without seeing any more infected on either bank, we passed the old convention center on the south shore and floated under the South First Street Bridge, another battleground. Who in the hell thought they could contain the infection on one side of the river with tanks and guns?

At the Congress Avenue Bridge, the smell of ammonia was thick enough to taste. The squeaky chatter of a million and a half bats that lived underneath overwhelmed the sound of the rain hitting the water around us.

I looked back at Murphy. “This is where we get off.”

“At Congress Avenue? Six lanes wide, with tall buildings on both sides, and who knows how many of those naked crazy fuckers around to see us coming from a mile away? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Well, kind of.

“Waller Creek is up ahead several blocks. There are places right here where it’ll be easy to get on shore. Not so much up there. I’m thinking we can get up to street level and walk over to the creek. I wasn’t planning on going up Congress Avenue.”

“That’ll work.”

Chapter 27

Downtown wasn’t quite a ghost town, but it was creepy as hell. Wails of the infected, individually and in groups, echoed between the buildings. Cars had run up on curbs. Some had collided with each other, trees or light poles. Some intersections were jammed solid with abandoned vehicles. Windows were broken. Anything that could be imagined was in the street. The looters had come through sooner than they should have, and left their bones as payment for the mistake.

The smell of old death had seeped into the concrete sidewalks and limestone walls. It dripped down with the rain and put the taste of maggots in my mouth. I resisted laying a hand on any surface for fear of what might crawl up through the moisture and infect my skin with some new kind of rot.

I’d found a couple of bloody, mismatched shoes shortly after coming on shore and asked Murphy to keep an eye out for a dead soldier from whom I could re-equip myself. But the smell urged me to change my mind. “Forget the soldier thing we talked about. Maybe I’ll find something later. This place gives me the willies.”

The mood of the dead city was starting to weigh on Murphy’s optimism and it was clear in the sound of his voice. “I hear ya.”

We’d been working our way slowly up Brazos Street, careful to conceal ourselves behind cars and trucks. We looked around to be sure nothing on two feet was taking any interest in us. At the intersection with Sixth Street, we turned right and headed east to get over near Waller Creek. Once there, we could make better time.

A full block down and across the street from us on the north side were five Whites on the sidewalk, with hands and faces pressed against the plate glass window of a storefront. It was at least noon by then. We were between rain showers and the sun’s heat was seeping through the clouds and magnifying the humid stink.

Murphy whispered first. “If we stay quiet and keep on this side of the street, they’ll never notice us.”

“They’re not the naked ones. Let’s see what’s up.”

“You know what they say.”

“What?”

“Curiosity killed the Zed.”

“Do you make this shit up, or do you have bad writers?”

“We should keep going.”

“I just want to see what’s up. Besides, we’re going that way anyway.”

Murphy shook his head. “Dalhover would tell you this is a bad idea and he’d be right.”

“Dalhover isn’t here.”

“Whatever, man.”

I snuck over to hide among the wreckage of two cars. I didn’t get so much as a glance from the five Whites. Looking over my shoulder, I watched Murphy come reluctantly after. I checked to make sure the safety on my rifle was off. Not that I wanted to use it in downtown Austin and draw in every White that still lingered.

A quick check in all directions assured me nothing was taking an interest in me. The next best spot for cover was a clump of a dozen cars near the center of the block. The first of them wasn’t more than thirty feet away, but once among those cars, I could sneak right up on the five Whites. If I stayed quiet about it, they’d never know I was there.

I gave Murphy a glance to let him know I was moving. He was not happy. I took off at a sprint.

Once at the clump of cars, I found myself a snug spot between two pickup trucks that afforded me a place to stand and see out through the trucks’ windows in all directions.

In seconds, Murphy was by the pickups, harshly whispering, “Dammit, I can’t fit in there.”

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

Murphy rolled his eyes, bent low and hurried down to find a place between two other cars. I pulled out of my tiny gap and followed. When we finally came to a stop, we were directly behind the five Whites, but exposed to any prying eyes from the other side of the street.

“Look and see what you can see,” Murphy whispered and turned his back to the Whites and the storefront holding their interest. He’d appointed himself lookout so I could indulge my dangerous curiosity.

So I looked. It only took a moment to see everything, but the situation hadn’t become any more understandable. The five Whites were in front of a tattoo shop. Shoddily attached inside the window—with what looked like duct tape—were wrinkled and sagging tattoos on stained, moldy paper.

The things the Whites found fascinating.

I shook my head and turned to look up and down the street. Was there anything to be learned from that? Was there any behavioral rule I could generalize?

A noise behind me startled me back to full attention and I spun around to see a skinny man, white with the virus but in a rumpled suit and tie, come storming out of the shop. In one hand he had what looked like a policeman’s baton, in the other hand… A blind man’s red-tipped cane?

The man in the tie growled something harsh and poked the nearest White with the cane. The White jumped back and yelped.

A cattle prod.

The tie-wearing man swung the baton at another of the Whites and used the cattle prod on the third. Before I knew it, he had all five running away. He stood in front of his shop, made some kind of pissed off monkey sound and stomped back inside.

“What was that?” Murphy whispered.

“They’re all crazy, dude.”

Murphy seemed intently focused on the tattoo shop. He shook his head angrily and quickly slunk away, squeezing between two cars to get closer to the storefront.

Something had his curiosity.

After checking up and down the street, I followed.

By the time I was beside Murphy, he was squatting between two parked cars at the curb, in front of a piano bar next door to the tattoo parlor.

“Curiosity killed the Murphy,” I whispered.

Murphy ignored me, stood straight up and walked over to the window.

What the fuck?

Readying my rifle for action, I looked nervously around. “Murphy.”

He ignored me and started examining the tattoo designs hanging behind the glass.

From my hiding place, I whispered, “Murphy, what are you doing?”

The man with the tie and the cattle prod came stomping noisily out his front door again. He made a threatening gesture with his police baton and jammed the cattle prod at Murphy. But Murphy wasn’t a stupid animal. He knew exactly how a cattle prod worked. He knocked it aside and caught the shaft in his hand.

The man in the suit lost his temper and smacked Murphy on the shoulder with his baton. Then he tried to hit Murphy a second time. In a blur of motion that sent the man falling back on his butt, Murphy took both weapons from him. He tossed the police baton away and pulled the axe out of his belt, simultaneously using the cattle prod to beat his assailant.

I jumped to my feet.

The man in the tie scrambled on his hands and knees to get back inside his shop, while the heavy handle of the cattle prod came down on his back again and again.

Through all of this, Murphy was silent, but he was boiling with anger. The kind of blazing silent anger I’d seen only one other time—when we were at his mom’s house.

Unrelenting, Murphy herded the man into his shop and the noise of things being knocked over and broken rattled out through the open door. That was the kind of noise that would bring attention.

I cast a quick look around and hurried inside.

The rotten smell was palpable. Flies buzzed on windows. Maggots crawled on the tattoo art, which wasn’t just on the window but all over the walls, held there by silvery tabs of tape.

The beating continued amidst sounds of whimpers and crunching bones.

The guy Murphy was beating to death was infected. And he had to be a Slow Burn like us, but that didn’t seem to matter to Murphy. He had to have his reasons. I decided one more murder didn’t matter to me either.

Fuck that dude.

I pushed the shop door closed.

Chapter 28

The body lay in a pool of blood. The skull was broken and bits of brain were stuck to the handle of the cattle prod on the floor beside him. It was a gory mess, but it didn’t faze me. Perhaps I was getting used to it.

Murphy went to systematically looking at each of the fly-covered tattoos on one of the walls.

I didn’t ask him what he was looking for. I figured he’d tell me the reason for his murderous tantrum and his weird little search when he felt like it. It was my job to cover his back when he lost track of his senses. I had no doubt he’d do it for me. Brothers in arms. Brothers in sin.

I peeked between the tattoos taped to the front window to get a good view of the street outside. Only the inanimate carcasses of cars lay out there, some shiny again in the rain. Murphy’s escapade seemed to have no consequences—yet. I reached up to push one of the pieces of tattoo paper out of the way, hoping to get a glimpse of a blind spot down the street.

Eek.

I jumped back from the window, nearly stumbling over my own feet.

Holy shit.

The tattoos were all on human skin.

I ineffectually rubbed the finger that touched the dead skin on my pants again and again and again before bounding across the room to kick the sick, dead fuck on the floor.

The big front window and every wall inside were decorated with tattoos skinned from Whites and, judging by the variance in skin color, from normal people as well. As gut-wrenchingly wrong as that was, most of the skin was just skin. But hanging in the center of one wall was the eyeless, tattooed skin of some man’s face, stretched out and surrounded by a starburst of tattooed patches of skin, each with a human nipple in the center.

I stomped on the dead man’s skull.

And that was that, at least for me.

The shop was a monument to uninhibited human depravity, the kind that scars souls with permanent shadows. I had enough shadows on my soul. All I needed were callouses. I turned my back on the perversion and silently begged for Whites to come up the street. I needed distractions.

Any distraction to get me out of this fucking shop.

The rain was coming down in a torrent by then, pounding the pavement in a comforting rumble, pouring off the roofs and running deep between the curbs.

I looked up toward the sky and saw a million glistening gray droplets falling down. I hoped it would wash away all the stink, all the evidence of evil littering the streets after the virus killed man’s inhibitions. Were the facades we all constructed to mask our wicked brutality so fragile that they could be crumbled by a tiny virus and a high fever? Were the Whites not monsters but simply our true selves, with the unwanted fetters of morality erased?

From the back wall where Murphy was looking at the tattoos, almost to himself, he said, “My sister had a tattoo.”

That explained that.

Without turning away from the window, I asked, “Do you want me to help you look? What kind of tattoo did she have?”

Murphy didn’t answer. He wanted to do it on his own.

I didn’t completely understand Murphy’s choice, but I was more than willing to accept it.

After a while, Murphy spoke again. “She got it when she was a freshman at Rice.”

“She went to Rice?” Perhaps talking might help us both deal with the situation. “That’s a really good school.”

Murphy’s voice was weaker than I’d ever heard it. “She had an academic scholarship. It wasn’t the kind of place my mom ever could have paid for. Mom never had enough money to pay the electric bill on time. You know what I mean?”

I’d been there.

“She never did anything crazy in high school.” Murphy was staring at one of the walls and had stopped moving. His voice was starting to crack. “My mom loved her so much.”

“I’m sure she loved you, too.” I probably should have just kept my mouth shut.

Murphy ignored me just the same. “She always got good grades. She was always popular. You know, cheerleader type and all that. She never drank. Never smoked any weed. A real goody two-shoes. She was three years younger than me.”

Whatever Murphy was doing, he needed it. The other things on our to-do list that day could wait.

“When we were in high school, she was a freshman and I was a senior. She’d try to hang around with me and stuff, but you know, she was my sister.”

“Yeah.” I nodded at my reflection between the flaps of skin on the glass.

“I was too busy being cool, I guess. I’d hang out with my football buddies and do stupid shit—drink too much, smoke too much weed, skip school, dumbass stuff.” Murphy drew a long slow breath. “It was close to the end of the school year and I was about to graduate. I was going to this party one night down on the east side. She begged and begged me to come and I kept saying no. But she wouldn’t let up. So finally I told her if she could get one of her friends to come, I’d let her tag. I figured, you know, if she had a friend with her, they’d be safe together. ‘Cause, you know, this party was down in far east Austin, and that ain’t the best neighborhood, not even for a black dude. And it really wasn’t the kind of place for a freshman girl to be hangin’ around. But, when you’re that age, you don’t know shit about life. You’re still invincible, and bad shit only happens to other people.”

I started to have my fears about where the story was going.

“I didn’t know what happened that night. I got so wasted. I remember going to the party. I remember some things, but somewhere in there, I don’t know what happened. I woke up the next day in my bed, in the same clothes I went to the party in.”

“I’ve been there, too.”

“Man, haven’t we all.” For a moment, Murphy’s laugh came back, but in it you could hear tears in his eyes. “So that next week, Rachel’s friend, she stops coming ‘round. And I mean, this is unusual, ‘cause she’s always at our house, like, every day. And Rachel, she’s not herself. You know those girls who never stop talking?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Rachel was like that. Always talking. I mean, always talking. Always smiling. Well, she wasn’t talking and she wasn’t smiling. At first, I figured she got a B in Chemistry or something. But one night, I was making a Chef Boyardee pizza for supper ‘cause my mom was workin’ at her second job. It’d been like a week since Rachel had said much of anything. So we had dinner and I ate, and she mostly just stared at her food and didn’t say anything. I mean, not one word.”

I craned my neck to see up and down the street. It was empty except for the five Whites that the sick fuck had chased off earlier. They were getting their nerve up to come and drool again over the human skin on display in the window.

“I had to interrogate Rachel that night. She didn’t want to tell me what happened, but I made her.”

The words stopped flowing. I looked around to make sure Murphy was still in the conversation. He was looking at the third wall of human skin trophies, back on task.

It took a while for Murphy to find his voice again and when he did, he was crying. “Her friend, Keisha, the one I made her bring to the party, she lived a couple of doors down. Her and Rachel, they were best friends since grade school. But Keisha was one of those girls that blooms real late. Fifteen years old and not even a pimple of a tit, if you know what I mean. Skinny as a two-by-four. She looked like a tall fifth grader. Not that bright. She did stupid shit all the time. Well, she went to this party and started drinking and doing whatever else was there. These three handkerchief-head gangster-wannabe motherfuckers took an interest in her and decided they wanted to figure out if she was a boy or a girl. She was dressed like a girl, but she had no tits. They thought she was a fag. These three limp dicks beat the fuck out of her and ripped her clothes off. They laughed at her when they saw she was a girl. That’s when she ran away. Can you imagine how she felt, Zed, how humiliated?” A hard pause followed. “That was my fault.”

“Keisha’s dad was a real pussy, you know? I mean, he was a scrawny little dude, smaller than you, Zed.”

I shrugged. Sure I was skinny. Regular meals were hard to come by.

“He was afraid to go to the police. They never do anything to really help anybody, not on the east side. Hell, the wannabes didn’t even rape her. The cops wouldn’t have done nuthin’. And I think Keisha’s dad was afraid the wannabes would retaliate if the police got involved. So what was he gonna do?”

I turned and gave Murphy my full attention.

“Me and Rachel went over there that night to see Keisha and her parents. I was going to apologize to her dad for getting her into that situation. I did that. But you know, when I saw Keisha, one of her eyes was still swollen shut and she had a big cut on her face with, like, thirty stitches. She hadn’t been to school in a week. I got mad. I got really mad. Somewhere in there, the girls and the mom were all in the kitchen talking ‘round the table, and me and the scrawny old man were in the living room, and he goes on to tell me how he’s all broken up about it. And he was. You could see it in his eyes. It’s like the last little bit of pride the man had was gone. He tells me he’s got this unregistered gun he bought and he’s been taking it and cleaning it every night ‘cause he can’t sleep. And he’s been going over and over in his mind how he’s going to kill these dudes. But I’m thinkin’ that’s not gonna end well. He won’t be able to do it. He’ll puss out when they start begging for their lives and he’ll either get himself killed or fuck it up so bad he ends up on death row.”

Murphy stopped talking after that. He gave me a long, appraising look before he said, “I told the old man it was my fault and my responsibility to make it right.”

I wasn’t expecting that.

“A few days later, I found those three motherfuckers that did it. They were hangin’ out behind a 7-Eleven, not two blocks from where that party was. They were selling rocks to little kids and toothless welfare hags. I went back there and I didn’t say nuthin’ about nuthin’. I told ‘em I wanted a rock and I held out my money. They figured I was just another crackhead customer. I mean, they kinda knew me and I kinda knew them. So one of them sticks his hand in his pocket to get my rock, while another one is stickin’ my money in his pocket. And I pulled that gun out and shot ‘em. I shot one right in the face and he never had time to do anything but look surprised. The second one started to back up and beg and I shot him twice in the chest. The third one was starting to run away and I shot him in the back. They all died at the scene. At least that’s what the newspaper said. They said it was gang related or drug related or something like that. I threw the gun in the river. After that, I joined the Army and got the fuck out of town. I didn’t come back for four years. By then, Rachel was already at Rice. And you know what she shows me the first time I see her after four years?”

I shrugged. I was out of guesses on that story.

“Rice’s mascot is an owl. She had a tattoo of that on her ankle.”

“And when you saw the tattoos, you thought hers might be here.” It was a stupidly obvious thing to say, but I felt like I needed to say something.

Murphy shook his head. “Not really. Maybe. I don’t know. I had to look.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t find hers.”

Murphy shook his head and went over to the front window. He started lifting and looking at each flap of skin taped to the glass. “For a long time after it happened, I felt bad about it.”

“Keisha?” I asked.

“Mostly the killing.” Murphy put on a smile that was little more than a mask. “You and me, we’ve done a lot of shit since the virus hit.”

“Yep.”

“I don’t know how I feel about all of it.”

I was continually troubled by it. “The things we did were necessary.”

“Do you think me killing those boys was necessary, Zed? Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Murphy, I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but I’m proud of you for doing it.”

“Proud?” Murphy didn’t turn away from his work, clearly thinking about how that word applied to his choices. “It bothered me for a long time. Matter of fact, my first couple of years in the Army, I was kind of a dick, like you.”

“A dick like me?” In spite of everything, I almost laughed.

“You know what I mean.” Murphy gave me one of his big smiles. “I was full of anger and always looking for a fight. That shit haunted me that way. It took me a long time to think it all out.”

“I guess.”

“I came to realize those three dumbasses made their choices. They didn’t know what the consequences would be, but they had to know consequences might come. You just don’t go ‘round beating the shit out of fifteen-year-old girls and not expect somebody to get mad as hell about it. They made their choice and I made my choice. I figured I had to live with it.”

Murphy took a moment to look for the right words. “I thought for a long time what I did was bad. Society says murder is bad. I guess I agree. As bad as I felt for killing those boys, I couldn’t get past the feeling I’d done the right thing. I came to think killing those boys was justice, the only kind of justice Keisha and her dad were ever going to get. I realized by my moral code, Murphy’s moral code, I’d done the right thing. The reason I felt bad was because my moral code didn’t exactly align with society’s moral code.”

“Murphy, are you sure you never took any philosophy courses?”

Murphy laughed. “I barely got out of high school. I just spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.”

“And you’re cool with it all now, I guess.”

“I made my peace. I made my peace with lots of stuff. That’s when I came to realize we’re all where we are in life because of our choices. Sure, shit happens we can’t control, but that’s exactly what it is: shit you can’t control. You can’t control what it is, or sometimes what it does to you. But like I’ve told you before, you can control how you feel about it, how you deal with it. I figured all this out when I was in the Army. I get to choose how I feel. I’m happy now.”

“Now?” I asked, in disbelief.

Murphy turned and looked around the grotesquery. “Yeah. The world is fucked up. Bad shit has happened. Hell, I’m looking at tattoo skins from dead people that might be my sister’s. How fucked up is that?” Murphy laughed at that, so I did too. “But I can’t do anything to change the past. I can only change today. I’ve got a cute, short girl back on the boat who loves me. I’ve got good people to spend my time with and I’ve got a dickhead of a best friend who would do anything for me.”

“If you keep calling me a dick, you might have to re-evaluate that.”

Murphy went back to work. “I don’t think so. So, yeah, I’m happy. I’m doin’ all right with this.”

“One day, when the world is back to being something like normal, I’m going to write a book and call it The World According to Murphy.”

Chapter 29

It took several hours to make our way through town following the meandering path of Waller Creek. We were careful, hiding or taking detours when we saw Whites. We took shelter when the lightning got too close.

By the time we got to Twelfth Street, the rushing water in Waller Creek was lapping at the undersides of the eastbound and westbound bridges. Waterloo Park, across the street from us and adjacent to the Brackenridge Hospital complex, was a deserted battlefield cradling the bones of the dead.

“Murphy,” I whispered, “can you keep an eye out for a minute? I’ve got something in my foot.” I sat on the sidewalk and leaned against the side of a car. Blood leaked across my hand as I pulled my right foot up to examine it.

Crap.

At least a dozen pieces of glass were stuck in the sole of my shoe. I huffed and indulged a moment of frustration by looking out at the rain. Dangers large and small lurked around every corner, behind every bush, in every dark room and apparently under each footstep. I pulled each piece of glass from the shoe bottom taking care to slowly remove the bloody culprit that made it all the way through to bury itself in my foot. I removed the shoe and examined its ridiculously thin sole. I needed to get some real shoes.

I checked my other foot for any cuts I failed to feel. That foot was good. “When we pass through the park, keep your eyes peeled for any dead soldiers. If we see anything I can use, I need to gear up.”

Murphy shook his head. “When we find the guys with the suppressors, we can use their stuff.”

I looked down at my bloody shoe and Murphy followed my gaze. “I don’t know what we’ll find when we get there. But I really need a pair of boots.”

Murphy nodded. “You know they’ll be disgusting, right?”

“Unless we come across a military surplus store, whatever I find will be disgusting. I can wash it all off in the creek.”

“Okay. But this is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s a long, long way back to the boat. I really didn’t want to have to find a place to hole up out here tonight.”

“That’s cool. I have an idea.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Don’t be that way.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Do you remember that story I told you about the parking garage by the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

I pointed at a multi-story parking garage up at the north end of Waterloo Park. “That’s the one.”

Murphy gave it a look. “I thought for sure you made up the part about sliding down that banner, but there it is, hanging on the side of that garage.”

“It probably still has some of my skin stuck to it.”

Murphy grinned.

“You know what else?” I asked.

Murphy shook his head and took a moment to check our flanks. The habit was ingrained in us both.

“There’s one of those armored Humvees up there. One with a machine gun on top.”

Murphy nodded wickedly.

“I’m thinking we get our silencers, stroll back down here and drive that Humvee back over to the river. We’ll be home for dinner.”

“And if all the Whites are chasing us when we get there?”

“We just drive it into the river, like we did the last one.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

“It worked.”

Murphy shook his head. “I’m driving.”

“Whatever. You ready to get going?” I stood up and scanned the area for movement.

We’d just crossed Twelfth Street and weren’t ten steps into the park when I found a MOLLE vest with five full magazines. I pulled one out. “Will these fit my rifle?”

Murphy nodded.

After taking the vest over to the rushing creek to rinse off all of the gnarly bits, I was inspired to put some effort into a search for the pants and boots. Pants would be easy. I was way skinnier than the average American and baggy pants could be cinched up with a belt. Boots pretty much had to fit just right.

With insufficiently masked impatience, Murphy stood watch as I worked my way through the park, picking through the remains of bodies. A few Whites timidly crept out into the rain to root through the bones and clothing for scraps of anything that might ease the rumbling in their bellies. They were as intent on keeping some distance between us as we were them.

After spending a half-hour on the endeavor, I had a pair of pants, but no boots. I led Murphy across Red River Street and onto the hospital campus. The closer we got to the main hospital building, the more thickly the ground was scattered with the remains of the dead.

Murphy whispered, “There’s lots of shoes. Do you really need boots?”

I looked around. None of the Whites I could see were paying us any attention. “Give me ten more minutes. If I don’t find some boots, we’ll go.”

Murphy checked his watch. “Ten.”

I gave him a nod and went back to walking among the gnawed bones, kicking over pieces of clothing, looking underneath for the prize.

The main hospital building loomed large on my right. The remains of the dead were still piled thick around the bottom of the glass stairwell I’d shot up with that fifty-caliber machine gun. No dismembered and scavenged remains of soldiers lay among them. Of that, I was sure. Bypassing that trove, I headed toward the far northwest corner of the complex and walked toward a large, collapsed military tent.

“Do you remember that tent?” I asked.

“No.” Murphy wasn’t liking the heavy rain. He kept looking at the sky when it rumbled thunder. He was nervous about the creeping Whites and didn’t have any patience for memory lane.

“That’s where we went when we first got to the hospital.”

Murphy looked around. “The Army doesn’t even use those old-ass canvas tents anymore.”

“Maybe it’s a Red Cross tent.”

Murphy shrugged.

The heavy green canvas didn’t lay flat on the ground. Beneath it were lumps, some roughly rectangular in shape, cots most likely. Some I could only guess were bodies. Others had to be medical equipment. The body shaped lumps looked intact. The bodies of the dead underneath must have been protected from the scavenging Whites by the heavy canvas. That meant if any were soldiers, all of their equipment would be on the body rather than scattered to who knew where.

“Murphy, I’m going to crawl under the canvas and see what I can find.”

“That’s a stupid idea.”

“I know.”

“You know, and you’re going to do it anyway?”

“I was just agreeing with you so I wouldn’t have to argue with you about it.”

“It’s like you want me to punch you in the face.”

All this talk of punching me in the face was getting worrisome. “Keep an eye out, okay? Give me a few minutes.”

“And if a bunch of those naked fuckers come along while you’re underneath?”

“Warn me and then go hide. I’ll just pretend I’m dead until they leave.”

“And how will you know when they’re gone?”

“You’ll tell me.” I didn’t wait for a response but dropped to my hands and knees and proceeded to burrow beneath the edge of the canvas, leaving my scavenged booty on the ground in the rain.

Like just about every other thing I’d attempted since the virus hit, crawling beneath the canvas was so much more difficult than I’d have guessed. With no breeze, it was hot, wet and muddy. The abrasive weight of the canvas worked against me for every inch of progress, leaving me with only one speed: slow.

Once I’d made my way about ten feet in from the edge, a sturdy cot supported the canvas. The weight on my head and shoulders eased and I crawled along the path of waning resistance, hoping to catch my breath. Just about the time I was able to see into the inky shadow beneath the cot, the familiar howl of a hungry White startled me and I slipped down onto my belly as I tried to push myself back the way I’d come.

A blur of gray with snapping teeth and greedy yowls exploded toward me out of the dark.

I tried to get away. I tried vainly to wrestle my rifle around under the heavy canvas.

I should have gone for my knife instead.

A handful of bony fingers grasped my wrist and pulled. I yanked back as teeth brushed my skin and I fell onto my belly again, trying my best to swing a fist.

The emaciated creature screamed in premature victory. Retreat wasn’t working. I steeled my nerves to make the best of a charge.

Just then, the sound of bone crunching under steel cut the monster’s voice. The crunch was followed quickly by two more wet crunches, and the White’s grasp on my wrist went limp.

Still tense, I looked for more threats from the darkness under the cot.

“You okay, man?” It was Murphy.

“Yeah,” I said.

A blade poked through the canvas a few feet from my head. Dim light and rainwater poured through.

The air from the outside felt relatively cool as it rushed in on me. I saw Murphy through the split in the canvas, kneeling down and cutting his way through. “I swear to God, Zed. Sometimes it’s like you don’t have one damn bit of common sense. It’s like you want to do everything the hard way.”

I deflected. “How did you know you weren’t chopping my skull with the hatchet?” It was a crappy question, but it was the quickest one I could come up with.

Murphy let me know just how crappy it was. “Because I’m not retarded. I saw your dumb green lump ass crawling along the whole way.”

I huffed with as much dignity as I could in such a situation and wormed my way through the gap in the canvas. “Thanks,” I muttered.

Murphy stood up and looked around. “No biggie.”

Sitting down to collect myself, I looked back at the emaciated dead White through the tear in the tent. “I wonder how long he was stuck under there.”

Murphy looked down and grinned. “He’s not much skinnier than you.”

I noticed then the White was wearing a military uniform. I got up on my knees and grabbed him by the shoulder and tugged. His body came a few inches out of the hole. I pulled again and again.

Perhaps bored of seeing me struggling to pull the corpse out, Murphy reluctantly knelt down and gave me a hand. It only took a few more seconds to pull the body out into the rain.

“See?” I said. “He’s got a full kit.”

After a glance at the infected soldier, Murphy looked around for anything that might show an interest in us. I did too. It amazed me how natural it was to build that particular habit. I guess humans weren’t too far removed from a time in the past when fast critters with big teeth chased us around the savannah. No Whites anywhere in view seemed to care about us. One guy caught my attention. Over by the hospital wall, he was zigzagging through the shrubs while watching his feet. He seemed familiar.

Hmm.

I turned to Murphy, who was checking the magazines in the MOLLE vest of the dead White. I went for the boots. In a turn of fortune that made my under-canvas escapade worth it, the boots were my size. As a bonus, most of the magazines in the vest were full.

Chapter 30

By the time I finished washing my newly acquired kit in the creek, the rain was coming down heavier than it had all morning.

Murphy was patient and uncharacteristically silent as I put on the pants and boots and arranged my gear. I looked up with a start when he said, “That shuffler is coming this way.”

The familiar-looking White who’d been dragging his feet in circuits around the shrubs by the hospital wall wasn’t more than twenty feet from us. I drew my knife from its sheath. Murphy had his hatchet ready.

But the closer he came, the more familiar he looked. I’d come into contact with plenty of people, both infected and not, on my previous visit to the hospital and they were all dead. Well, except for Steph and Dalhover.

I glanced at Murphy. “I’m ready when you are.”

“’Bout time. This creek is starting to worry me. It’s been rising the whole time you were doing your laundry.”

That was true. I looked upstream. I don’t know what I was looking for. Maybe a wall of water from a coming flash-flood? Dramatic, even for me.

The shuffler, seemingly oblivious to the rain, was getting pretty close.

“You think he’s going to follow us?” I asked.

Murphy hefted his hatchet. “I can see that he doesn’t.”

The shuffler came to a stop, not five feet away. He smiled.

What the hell?

That meant he had to have some degree of brain function. The worst of them never smiled.

Holy crap.

The shuffler looked at me and said, “Zzzz…”

Murphy turned to me. “You know him?”

Dumbfounded, I nodded. It was Jeff Aubrey. He’d survived.

Murphy shook his head and lowered his hatchet, but he didn’t put it away.

“Jeff?” I took a step forward.

Jeff’s grin widened. “Zzzz…”

Murphy’s face turned to worry and he put a hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting closer. He took a quick look around to make sure nobody else was close enough to hear. “He’s not right.”

That much was clear. “I met him in the hospital. He was passed out with the fever when we escaped. We locked him in one of the rooms.”

Murphy went from worried to confused. “And?”

“He was Steph’s fiancé.”

Murphy shook his head in disbelief and laughed out loud.

“Jeff, can you speak?”

After a pause, he answered. “Yez.”

“Yez?” I said.

“Yez.”

Murphy leaned in close to me. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a bad idea. Let’s ditch this dude and get the hell out of here.”

Sorely tempted to heed Murphy’s wishes, I said. “We can’t.”

“Hell yeah, we can. No good’s gonna come from this. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you need to do the right thing and reunite Jeff here with Steph. But that stupid little good angel that sits on your shoulder doesn’t know shit.”

“Anzel.” Jeff interrupted with another grin.

“He’s harmless,” I said.

“You don’t know that.” Murphy was getting a little bit pissed. “You don’t know anything about this guy. You met him before the virus fried his brain. Now you want to reunite him with Steph…”

“I didn’t say that,” I said.

“You didn’t need to. I know you. I know you always want to do the dumbass right thing. But it’s gonna get you killed one day.”

I shook my head.

“Killz,” Jeff said. “Killz.”

Murphy raised his eyebrows, as if to emphasize Jeff’s choice of words.

“Jeff, what have you been eating?” I asked.

“Hungry,” he said.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“Hungry,” he said again, as his smile melted away.

“If you bring him back, you know you can kiss any chance of getting into Steph’s pants goodbye,” Murphy said. “You know that, right?”

“It’s not about that.”

“It’s always about that.”

“I know you’re not like that, Murphy.”

Murphy smiled wickedly and shook his head. “Man, you wanna bet?”

The rain was coming down so hard, it was flowing off of us. Hushed conversation was impossible.

“I can’t leave him here,” I said.

“You can, and you should, but you won’t.”

I didn’t see any point in responding.

“Fine. I’m only gonna say one more thing about it. You won’t be doing anybody any favors,” Murphy said.

“How’s that?”

“Zat,” Jeff said.

We were already ignoring him.

“First off, he seems to be doing fine right here on his own.”

I shrugged. I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t argue. He was alive. Nearly everybody else he knew from the hospital wasn’t.

“You’re not gonna get any pussy.”

I shrugged again.

“Whatever.” Murphy said. “And how do you think Steph is gonna feel when you bring him back?”

I started to say she’d be happy, overjoyed maybe. But Murphy’s question made me give that some real thought.

He read my hesitation correctly and nodded. “You see, don’t you? Ask yourself how you would feel if your old girlfriend showed up and she had the IQ of a frog. You’d take care of her, out of obligation, like we do with Russell, but how could you still love her? She wouldn’t be the same person, Zed. This dude isn’t, either. He can barely speak one-syllable words.”

“Zyllble.”

“All you’re gonna do is make Steph feel bad and saddle her with a responsibility she can’t handle and that will probably get her killed. That’s if he doesn’t decide to kill her himself when he sees her. You gotta remember, Zed, you and me are Whites, like him. He doesn’t see us as food. He might be just as crazy as the rest of these fucks.”

“Fugz.”

We stood there in the rain for a bit, Murphy letting it all sink in.

Thinking about these things was bothersome. It was so much easier to just act on my whims. “What’s Steph going to say when I tell her I saw Jeff and just left him?”

“Dude.” Murphy looked around at the rain. “You don’t have to tell her anything. All that knowledge will do is make her feel bad. That’s it. There’s no upside to this situation unless we turn around and leave Professor Syllable right here and forget about him.”

Murphy was right. Jeff couldn’t make anything better for anybody. He was a burden at best. But the idea of leaving him felt bad, nevertheless.

The wind started to blow heavy, fat drops against my face in little slaps that irritated me before the drops ran down through my soaked clothes and filled my new boots. The world had turned to noisy gray.

“Damn, it’s comin’ down.” Murphy had to raise his voice to be heard just a few feet away.

I looked around. The rain was so heavy it was getting hard to make out the shapes of nearby buildings. Water ran ankle-deep across the ground where we were standing. Waller Creek was visibly swelling over its banks. It was a flash-flood in the making.

I shouted. “Fuck!”

Murphy brought his rifle to his shoulder and spun around, looking for targets. His head jerked left. Then right. He looked back at me, confused, tense.

I pointed at the creek. I had to shout. “It’s going to flood.”

“Who cares? Let’s get out of here.”

“That intersection we’re headed to is only a few blocks off Waller Creek.”

Murphy’s brows knit. “You think…?”

I nodded vigorously.

Floods in Texas came and went, usually a few feet here or there when a creek overran its banks. Carpets in nearby houses would need to get replaced. The drywall would need to be rehung. Sometimes, the floods washed down the creek beds with the wrath of God behind them. Twisted steel, piled masonry and smashed cars were left when the water subsided.

“Murphy, if the water rises too fast, it might make finding those silencers impossible.” I was getting hoarse from shouting. “I think we should go get that Humvee I left up on the roof of the parking garage and drive over there.”

“Drive?” Murphy’s face showed just how bad he thought that idea was. He looked around for any Whites that might materialize out of the gray sheets of rain.

“With it coming down like this—” I looked at Jeff and doubted what I was about to say “—all of the Whites with half a brain are hiding inside. They’ll never even see us drive by.”

Chapter 31

On the top level of the parking garage adjacent to the hospital, the Humvee was exposed to the rain. And just as I’d left it, the machine gun hatch was open, providing the only way to get back inside the vehicle. All of the doors had their battle locks set. I’d set them before I used the fifty-caliber machine gun to shoot up the stairwell on the side of the hospital.

Climbing up on top of the Humvee and getting back down inside was easy enough. I went in first, leaving it to Murphy to close the hatch in the face of Jeff Aubrey, who’d followed us up through the parking garage’s five levels. He was tagging along, that was clear enough. I realized he’d understood so little of our conversation, he didn’t get that we were going to ditch him. The virus had left his brain too addled. At least, that’s how I rationalized it.

The last I saw of Jeff was him watching Murphy and me drive away, crying out loud, reaching his hands toward us, though his feet took no steps to chase.

I put that thought out of my mind as Murphy drove the Humvee down the ramp, which was littered with the bones of hundreds of Whites, gnawed clean by those who survived that day on the roof. The Humvee’s big tires rolled over them like so many bumps on the road. Thankfully, the noise of the rain pelting our metal roof covered the sound of crunching and breaking.

When we were down to the second level, Murphy said, “You’ll need to tell me where to drive this thing. I don’t know how to get around down here.”

“When we get down to the end of the bottom ramp, turn right. We can take the garage exit onto Red River Street.”

“I know you didn’t want to leave that dude there, but it was the right thing. I know you’re gonna want to make yourself feel all guilty about it. Don’t. The world is fucked up now. That’s just the way it is. You can’t fix everything. You can’t save everybody.”

We got to the bottom of the last ramp and, without a word, I pointed right.

Murphy drove slowly to push some barricades out of the way and then we were back out in the rain. The pounding on the roof made conversation impossible without shouting. So we didn’t talk, mostly. I pointed and Murphy turned the wheel.

On Red River Street, the water in the road had filled it to the tops of the curbs, and still the intensity of the rainfall did not let up. Things were starting to float with the current in the road. It all flowed toward the creeks, which flowed south toward the Colorado River, which ran through the center of town.

I hollered. “This thing will do okay with all the water, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We drove past the circular basketball arena and crossed over Martin Luther King Boulevard. We were back on the campus.

The road veered off to the right. Looking at the maze of abandoned vehicles in and along the road, Murphy gave me a look. He was wondering whether we could get through. Several weeks before, I’d driven that big motorcycle down Red River on the way to the hospital. I knew it was clear enough for us to pass. I motioned for him to head up the road.

Slowly, we went north. IH-35’s upper deck loomed out of the easing rain on our right. Several heads popped up to watch us. They were Whites, making a living off of scavenging rotten meat from the carcasses of motorists who’d died in the highway traffic jams. Those Whites probably still had bellies full of putrid flesh and little motivation to come after us. As we passed between one of the football practice fields and the LBJ Library, the road dipped down. Before I could form the words to shout, the Humvee was in a couple of feet of water. “How deep can we go before we’re stuck?”

Murphy shrugged. “I don’t think it gets that deep.”

“I thought you were afraid of water.”

“I can’t swim, but I’m not neurotic.”

We reached the bottom of the dip between the two hills and the pavement angled back upward. When we reached the top of the hill, the sky had opened up again and the rain was coming down as heavily as before.

“When you come to the next street, that’s Dean Keeton,” I shouted. “Turn left. That intersection where Jerome got shot is a few blocks down.”

Murphy stopped the Humvee halfway through the turn onto Dean Keeton Street. Looking at me, he asked, “What do you think?”

“Hell if I know. We’ve come this far. Let’s just drive over there and see what happens.”

“And if those dudes are still there?”

I rapped on the glass in my door. “Will this protect us?”

“It should. But if they are there, I doubt they’ll shoot at the Humvee. They’ll wait until we get out.”

“I’m sure they’re all dead. I mean, what are the odds of any of them making it through the infection?”

“Pretty slim.”

“Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we came all the way over here. The place might be underwater for all we know. If we can, we’ll go past by a couple of blocks and then loop around into that neighborhood north of campus. We can sneak up that way.”

Murphy shrugged. “And if it is flooded?”

“We go home.”

The Humvee rolled into the intersection and Murphy steered it toward the westbound lane and down a long slope toward Waller Creek. The rain was slacking again. Apparently, waves of heavy rain separated by waves of lighter rain were the order of the day. Lightning split the air a few car lengths ahead of us. The crack rattled me to my bones and I jumped in my seat. Murphy instinctively slammed the brakes and the Humvee jerked to a halt.

“Holy shit.” The afterimage was burned into my retinas.

“I think I just shit my pants.” Murphy looked right and left again. “We need to get out of this.”

With plenty of leftover fright in my voice I said, “Just keep going. It’s okay.”

Thunder from another strike rumbled over us.

“This shit’s dangerous, man.”

“Murphy, be cool. Trust me on this one. Inside of a car is a safe place to be in a thunderstorm.”

“What?”

“I’m serious dude. It’s a physics thing. We’re safe. Trust me.”

Murphy took his foot off the brake and the Humvee started to move. “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Have you ever heard of a Faraday Cage?”

“Nope.”

“Then don’t worry about it. Just keep going.”

We accelerated. As we neared the intersection where Jerome had met his end, Murphy slowed.

Only one Humvee was sitting in the intersection. On our first visit, three were there. Several inches of water were running down the street and through the intersection, burbling up over hundreds of carcasses, the success score of snipers hidden nearby.

“Just go on through like we’re not scoping them out,” I said.

The ride got bouncy as the Humvee drove over the rotting bodies.

Murphy looked quickly at the buildings on the corners. “Do you see anything?”

My attention was focused on the university co-op store on the northwest corner of the intersection. It had a second floor and an angled wall of windows. From there, snipers had command of the intersection and the roads leading up to it in three directions. Several of the windows were broken out, leaving jagged teeth of black, tinted glass hanging in the frames. Nothing moved in the shadows within.

Past the intersection, Murphy swerved the vehicle close to the right hand curb. “Where do you want me to pull this thing over?”

Looking behind at the co-op building, I said, “Keep going. If they’re still in there, I don’t want them to see us stopping.”

We passed a street on the right. We passed another and the road started to curve. Still looking back at the co-op, I said, “Take the next street, okay?”

The Humvee came to a stop.

I spun around in my seat. “Not now.”

Murphy directed my attention out over the Humvee’s hood.

“Shit.” I was stunned. Waller Creek, a deep, crooked ditch before the rain came, had turned into a river two hundred feet wide. The bridge ahead of us was completely immersed. Not even the rails were visible. Only the water rising up to flow over the submerged obstacles provided any evidence of their existence. “This is a lot worse than I thought it was going to get.”

“I’m worried about Mandi,” Murphy said.

“I’ve never heard of flooding on the part of the river where they are. I mean, with Mansfield Dam just upriver, how could it?”

Murphy dropped the concern and turned determined. “Let’s get this done and get the hell out of here. This is bad.”

“Yeah.”

To our right was a parking lot for a small apartment building. I pointed. “Just stick it there between those pickups. Do it quick.”

Murphy gunned the engine and cut the wheel, ran over a curb and bounced the Humvee to a stop just where I’d asked.

“Damn.” I’d have to be careful next time I asked for quick.

Murphy shrugged.

I was already soaked to the bone, but was still reluctant to open the door and go back out into the rain.

Murphy noticed me hesitating. “You good?”

“As good as I’m gonna get.” I flung the door open.

Chapter 32

Moments later, Murphy and I were well off the road and slogging through a park adjacent to the apartment building. Water was flowing or standing everywhere. In some places, it was just deep enough to soak into the toes of our boots. In others, it poured over the tops.

Broken limbs, fallen from the oaks in the park, were scattered. Fences were down. Shingles were blowing off of roofs. Garbage cans were sailing on gusts or floating in the water. Thunder continued to rumble.

“At least we don’t need to worry about being quiet. What do you say we just run the rest of the way?” Murphy didn’t wait for an answer. He jogged ahead and I fell in behind him.

We exited the park, crossed a backyard and ran between two widely-spaced houses. Caution wasn’t even an afterthought by then. We ran on across a street without slowing down to look. I saw no other living thing. We were apparently the only two infected people crazy enough to be out in the weather.

Once across the street, we had to weave our way between parked cars and some small duplexes laid out at unusual angles to the road and to each other. No front doors facing the street there. Past those, we were rewarded with a view of the backside of the co-op building, just across a narrow road. We squatted behind a car and looked.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“We could try one of those doors, but if those dudes are still inside, that’d be like asking to get shot.”

“Those doors are built to keep burglars out. If they’re locked, we’re not going to get through anyway.”

“Around front, then?”

I nodded. “We wouldn’t be risking this if we didn’t think all those guys were dead inside. I say we sneak around front and go in through the broken windows. If by chance some of those dudes are still alive up on the second floor, they won’t see us sneaking up along the wall and won’t be expecting anyone to come in that way.”

Murphy didn’t like the plan. “That’s all hopes and ifs. Why not just say you wanna go out there and depend on your good luck to get this done?”

“Look, two of those Humvees are gone. They wouldn’t be gone if there were still soldiers up there, right?”

“How do you figure?”

“Either the guys who didn’t get infected drove off in the Humvees, or somebody came and stole them without getting shot. If they didn’t get shot, it’s because those guys are dead.”

Murphy, uncharacteristically silent, pondered that.

“Cool?”

“Fine, but when we get inside, we should announce our presence, rather than sneak up on anybody who might be up there. I’d rather they yell at us and tell us to go away before they see what we look like and shoot.”

“Agreed.” I was getting to the point I just wanted to get the task finished and get back to the riverboat. Just as Murphy was worried over Mandi, I was starting to worry about Steph.

I took off at a run with Murphy right behind. The water in the street was curb-deep again, nearly tripping me as I crossed. I leapt up onto a curb, crossed a sidewalk, and came to a stop at the corner of the co-op building. Murphy hit the wall beside me.

I gave him a nod. He nodded and peeked around the corner. The front wall of the building down its full length was unbroken by window or door. It was just a long, uniformly colored wall. In front of it, I was going to be a target nobody could miss. All of the big glass display windows and the front door were built into the corner of the building, facing the intersection.

With only the sagging crepe myrtles planted between the sidewalk and the street for cover, I took off at full speed down the length of the building. If someone had taken a shot at me, I wouldn’t have heard over the noise of the rain, my breathing and the sound of my feet splashing through puddles.

I came to a stop and dropped to a knee where the wall ended. Just around the corner was the main entrance. When Murphy fell in behind me, I asked, “Cool?”

He nodded.

I peeked around the corner and quickly pulled my head back, closing my eyes so I could concentrate on what I’d just seen. No movement. Broken glass. Dark interior. Books and merchandise on the ground. Closed door.

I risked another peek and pulled quickly back.

“Well?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean no one is hidden. The place looks like it’s been ransacked. It’s a mess. A million great hiding places.”

“So what, then?”

“I’m going to risk it. The entrance is a couple of feet above street level. It’s got, like, this big concrete platform under a portico with four or five steps leading up to it.”

“Porti-what?”

“The roof over the porch, with columns holding it up.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Is this really the time for a vocabulary debate?”

Murphy looked around. “If somebody was going to shoot us out here, they already would have.”

“I’m going to run over there and get in the bushes in front of the porti… porch,” I said. “From there, I can see inside. You stay here and don’t come until I wave you over. If somebody starts shooting, hurl a grenade inside and I’ll haul ass back. Cool?”

“It’s your ass.”

Rolling my eyes, I turned. Without taking the time to second-guess myself, I bolted around the corner. I crossed a sidewalk and dove onto the grass, sliding into the short hedge in front of the portico.

Ouch.

The grass had a few good-sized rocks hidden in it.

From my muddy, wet spot among the roots, I rolled over and gave Murphy a thumbs-up to let him know I was okay.

He was taking a risk by keeping his head around the corner to watch me.

Fuck it. If he can risk it, so can I.

I got up to my knees and lay my rifle up on the concrete landing, pointing into the darkness. The place was a shambles. Any one of a hundred gloomy lumps could have been a threat. My imagination started to brew up dangers, seeing rifle barrels and snipers’ helmets in every random shape.

Double fuck it.

I decided I was as safe as I was going to get. I jumped up onto the landing, bounded across and stepped silently through one of the big, broken windowpanes. Once out of the rain, I felt like I could hear again. The rain still roared down outside, but it was no longer the only thing I could hear.

Looking around in the darkness, I saw a wide staircase in the back corner. I slowly passed my eyes over what I could make out in the mess, first to my left, then my right. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. I waved Murphy in, turned and stepped gingerly through the junk on the floor to take up a position behind a checkout counter.

Murphy came in through the window I’d just entered and took a moment to do his own recon. He stepped silently through the scattered merchandise and dropped to a knee beside me. He looked at me, for an assessment I presumed. I made a show of looking around and shrugged to let him know I thought the place was deserted.

I whispered, “Did you see the stairs at the back?”

He nodded.

“What do you say we get over there and when we get near the top, we call out? If we holler from down here, nobody up there will hear anything.”

Murphy shook his head emphatically. “Let me take the lead on the stairs.”

Yeah, whatever. I shrugged.

With his rifle at his shoulder, panning from left to right, Murphy led the way through the ruined merchandise clothing, books and souvenirs. He was tense, and his tension kept me on edge. He clearly wasn’t as convinced as I was that the soldiers were all dead.

We were halfway across the store and making our way through the remnants of some kind of glass shelving units full of Longhorn doodads and trinkets, the kind of shit parents put on their desks at work to let their friends know their kids were students at UT.

It started out as a scraping sound. Before I knew it, Murphy’s feet were slipping out from under him. He reached a hand out to catch himself as he fell and instead cut his palm open on a piece of the glass shelving unit.

“Goddammit.” He hit the ground.

And that was a mistake.

A body doesn’t make much sound when it stands, except for the sound made by brushing against something nearby, or the sound of shuffling feet on a messy floor. Even the exhale or draw of a single breath isn’t that noticeable, especially when all the rain in the world seems to be falling outside. But when thirty or forty Whites jump to their feet to investigate an unexpected utterance of human speech, it makes a peculiar swoosh, distinct even under the noise of the rain.

If anything, the seemingly ubiquitous whisper made it that much more frightening.

Twenty feet away, between a wall of shoes and a mound of fallen clothing racks, all of those Whites rose. Every eye was on me and I knew in about two seconds, their frog brains were going to decide I was edible.

Without another thought, without taking a moment to warn Murphy—he’d figure it all out soon enough—I pointed my rifle at the nearest of the Whites and pulled the trigger.

Instant pandemonium broke out among them as I squeezed off a dozen rounds into their ranks.

Calm.

Breathe.

Think.

Breathe.

Murphy was on his feet in a ridiculously short second, blood splattering out of his wound and bullets blasting out of his rifle.

My intuition was sparking rapidly.

With too many Whites still screaming and charging me from the front, I spun around to look behind. Damn good thing I did.

Seven naked Whites were running at us from the far end of the store. Only the size of the store and their choice to take shelter so far from the door had saved us. Had they been closer when Murphy fell, they’d have been on my back and ripping into my throat before I’d squeezed off my tenth round.

I fired at them. Half my rounds went wild, but the Whites obliged me by coming closer and closer into a range where even I was deadly accurate. When the last one fell, I spun back around to see the last of the larger group fall under Murphy’s bullets.

“Damn. That was intense.” Murphy grinned.

I looked up at the ceiling. “I guess they know we’re here.”

Murphy looked toward the bodies of the Whites I’d killed. “Dude, I’d a thought more were back there. What’d you do, shoot ‘em all three times?”

“Yes.” Double helping of sarcasm.

Murphy chuckled. “It’s like the more you shoot, the worse you get. I know it’s hard, but just be calm and breathe. It’ll save your ass. And you’ll use a lot less bullets.”

Chapter 33

An explosion rocked the building and debris flew away from the stairs.

Jesus, what the fuck is this place?

I dropped to my belly without a thought for the cuts I earned for my haste.

Murphy took cover behind a counter.

I clambered across the floor until I was behind what looked like a sturdy shelf and threw the barrel of my rifle over it, aiming at the stairs.

C’mon, motherfucker.

I’d gotten surprised by the explosion and I was pissed. Two surprises in as many minutes was a trend that did not bode well for long-term survival.

I waited. Murphy waited. We exchanged a look to let each other know that we were okay.

Still, nothing happened.

One benefit of the storm outside was not a single White came running into the building after Murphy and I had emptied the better part of three magazines. And, oh, by the way, something tried to blow us the fuck up. Well, maybe not us, exactly, but, damn, it was just right over there.

Thank God for thunder. It made good camouflage for such noises.

My anger was dissipating and adrenaline was stoking impatience. I whispered, “I’m going to go over there and see what’s up.”

“Me first. You follow. Be careful.” With his rifle at his shoulder aimed at the stairs, Murphy made his way carefully across the store’s main floor until he was beside a wall near the bottom of the stairs.

As soon as Murphy stopped, I ran across the sales floor, passed him by and crossed the wide foot of the stairs. I came to a stop and positioned myself beside the banister, pointing my rifle uselessly up at an empty landing where the stairs made their turn to come back up over my head. From Murphy’s position by the wall, he could shoot anything coming down from the second floor on the flight of stairs above me. My position sucked. I couldn’t shoot anything.

Still, nothing moved. No more noises came from above.

While we were waiting, I looked back across what I could see of the sales floor. Nothing had moved since we’d stopped shooting.

Breathe.

Be calm.

Be cool.

We were in a dangerous situation. Riding a wave of adrenaline through a sequence of impulsive choices would only get me killed.

Breathe.

Up at the landing, an arm in what looked like a military MOPP suit lay down across a couple of stairs. A white-skinned hand dangled past the end of a sleeve. A steadily flowing rivulet of blood ran down over the hand and off of the index finger.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Murphy looked up at the empty staircase above my head and hollered. “Anybody up there?”

We waited, but no answer came.

“What just happened?” I asked.

He hollered again. “I’m coming up.”

Not liking the feeling of uselessness, I added, “Don’t shoot at us. If you’re up there and would prefer we leave, just tell us.”

“What the fuck is that?” Murphy chuckled. “Are good manners going to make a difference?”

I shrugged. “Go fu—“

Something, maybe a book, slid across the vinyl tiles on the floor at the top of the stairs.

I looked up as though I could see through the flight of stairs above me just as heavy feet started pounding the steps on the way down.

Murphy’s rifle tracked a target, but he didn’t fire.

“What is it?” I whispered, but I didn’t need to wait for Murphy to answer.

A tan-colored mass hit the wall at the back of the landing, slipped, scrambled around the corner, regained its footing and rushed down at me. It was one of the soldiers in a MOPP suit. Familiar, from the day I’d seen a soldier in just such a suit murder Jerome. The suit’s hood was gone. His skin was white. His eyes were crazy and his mouth was bloody.

I ripped off three shots, hitting the White in the center of his chest. He came to a dead stop and dropped into a seated position on a stair, with his legs splaying out in front of him. His breath hissed slowly out of the holes in his chest.

Standing there with my rifle still trained on the dying White, I realized something profound. I whispered to Murphy, “That could—”

“I don’t think you need to whisper anymore.”

“That could have been the one that shot Jerome.”

“Could have been.”

I started up the stairs and stopped. “Oh, you wanted to go first.”

Murphy shook his head and answered the implied question. “I thought the stairs might be booby trapped, but I think that dead one on the landing took care of it for us. You go ahead.”

“That was the explosion, then?”

Murphy nodded.

With two Whites in military garb dead on the stairs, I figured there was little chance of any normal soldiers still on the second floor. That boosted my courage. Whites I could deal with. The soldiers had lethally bested us on our last meeting.

The stairs were slippery with fresh blood. I was extra careful as I made my way around the body on the landing, keeping my weapon trained at the top. Murphy came up behind, close enough to support me, but not so close that we could both be easily shot by a single gunman.

The wall on the backside of the landing was blackened from the explosion we heard. The handrail was bent and sticking out from the wall. With the greatest caution, I continued up the final flight of stairs, examining every step and every metal support on the banister as I went. I didn’t want to find any booby traps not yet tripped.

At the top of the wide staircase was another sales floor stacked with shelves of mostly textbooks, much more orderly than the first floor. Unfortunately, the shelves limited what we could see. Anyone or anything had a hundred places to hide. At least the second floor was smaller than the first. Doors off to our right led to the administrative offices, or so I guessed.

I ran over to a checkout counter, kneeled and waited for Murphy to join me.

Once he was there, I whispered, “I don’t like this place.”

“We’re here. Let’s get this done.” Murphy ran off to the wall on the left side of the floor.

I followed. Once there, keeping some distance between us, we started working our way through the racks and display cases. All we found were bodies, soldiers in various states of decay. Each of them had been fed on, probably by the two dead Whites on the stairs.

It all appeared to have happened just as Murphy figured. One of the soldiers had brought the infection into the building, either on his gear or in his blood. At least a few of the soldiers succumbed. The others either caught the virus or were killed by those already infected.

When we were finished clearing the upper floor, we’d found the bodies of eleven soldiers. More importantly, we found six M4s with silencers attached to the barrels. They weren’t ideal sniper rifles, but they were perfect for our purposes.

Chapter 34

With five rifles in the back of the Humvee, Murphy took the passenger seat and was making himself comfortable with his new weapon when I got in on the driver’s side.

“How are we set for gas?” Murphy asked.

“Looks like three-quarters to me.”

“You have any idea how we’re getting back? Looks like the whole damn city is flooding.”

I rolled my eyes. “The whole city won’t flood.”

“You know what I mean, man. If the creek down the street has that much water in it, every creek in town is probably doing the same thing.”

“What are you getting at? Are you saying you want to stay down here tonight?”

Murphy looked at the rain pouring down around us. He shook his head. “If we can get back without drowning, that’s my preference. At least we can drive around right now without getting chased by Whites.”

Taking a moment to think about it, I said, “We can’t go directly across Austin. Even if we could find a way across Waller Creek, we’d never get across Shoal Creek. I think if we can make it up to Highway 183 and take that out to 620, we can head back south and hit the river that way.”

“That sounds like the long way around.”

“It is. But Highway 183 is raised. It won’t flood. 620 might be iffy, but mostly it’s built on high ground. At least, it looks that way to me.”

“You want to go all the way out to Mansfield Dam?” Murphy didn’t like the idea.

I shook my head. “Nope. I think if we cut through that subdivision up there…”

“Steiner Ranch?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Kind of in that area. If we get lucky enough to turn on the right streets, we should get pretty close, maybe a mile or two from where the boat is anchored.”

“Just so you know, if you drive this thing into a river again, I really am going to punch you in the face.”

I started the engine.

Lightning ripped the sky with scary frequency. The rumble and crack of thunder was nearly constant. Rain poured out of the clouds in torrents that made it difficult to see. The curbed streets we drove as we paralleled IH-35 were rivers flowing toward the creeks. The few infected we saw cowered under trees and made no attempt to come after us. With their intense fear of the water, the world must have seemed like zombie hell.

Nearly an hour passed by the time we found our way onto the southbound access road to Highway 183. On that access road, we headed north until we made a U-turn onto an entrance ramp. Unlike IH-35, which ran through the center of Austin and had lanes clogged in both directions with abandoned vehicles, almost no cars were on 183’s southbound lanes. Those lanes led into town. The northbound lanes were an escape route out of town and were full, bumper-to-bumper, with abandoned cars.

With visibility measured in a few dozen feet when the rain was coming down heavily, I kept the Humvee’s speed in what seemed like a safe range, below twenty.

From the gray blur of rain, a man materialized, coming into the traffic lanes, waving his arms. Before I knew it, he was in front of the Humvee. My first instinct was to accelerate and run him down.

Just as I pushed on the gas pedal, Murphy yelled, “That dude’s normal!”

I braked and swerved. The distance between the truck and the man was small and it was only our slow speed that saved his life. When we came to a stop, the man dropped his hands to the hood and looked in at us, shouting, “Help us, please!”

I looked at Murphy. Murphy looked at me. Neither of us was ready to jump out of the Humvee and do anything.

The man on the hood called again, “Please.”

“He thinks we’re soldiers,” Murphy said. “He thinks we’re the cavalry.”

I looked off to my left, then behind me to see what I could see through the drenching rain. “Or he thinks we’re targets.”

Murphy jerked around in his seat. “You think it’s an ambush? Maybe we should just get the fuck outta here.”

The man ran around to my side of the Humvee, pleading as he came. Once there, he slapped his palms flat on my window, pulled his face close to the glass, and shouted, “Please! Please! You have to help— Oh, my God. You’re a zombie!” He stumbled back a half-step.

I hollered. “I test zombie positive! But I’m just as normal as you!”

Murphy nudged my shoulder. “Let’s go, man. Let’s get outta here. If this isn’t an ambush, what’s he doing out here in the rain? I don’t feel good about this.”

That was good advice and Murphy’s instincts were usually on the mark. We were parked in the middle of four lanes of empty asphalt with rain pouring so heavily we could have been surrounded by men with automatic weapons and not even known.

I turned away from the guy on the road and moved my foot back to the gas pedal. Just then, a child of maybe seven or eight came running out of the rain, wrapped an arm around the man’s thigh, shouting, “Daddy!”

Murphy muttered. “Shit.”

The man put a protective arm over the boy and backed up a few more steps.

Murphy, without any discussion on the question, opened his door and stepped out into the rain.

Dammit.

Maybe it was the right thing to do, maybe it wasn’t. I was on the fence about it and couldn’t find my way off. So I stayed put and looked through the Humvee’s windows, trying to spy any danger from another direction.

When I looked back at the man and the boy, Murphy was on my side of the Humvee, three or four steps from the two. He had one hand on his rifle and one palm in the air as he talked. Both the boy and the man were frightened, and looked like they might take off at a run.

I couldn’t hear what Murphy was saying, but at some point, the man started speaking. He gestured toward the side of the road. He and Murphy spoke some more. More gestures. More pointing.

Maybe Murphy thought I could hear what was going on. Maybe he figured since he was already outside, exposed, he’d follow his instincts and make his own choices. Because that’s pretty much what he did. He looked over at me with a pained expression, turned and headed into the heavy gray rain.

Double dammit.

I checked through all of the windows again to see what I could see, which was pretty much nothing.

Nervously, I stayed on the lookout for something bad to happen. Time passed slowly.

The rain didn’t let up. The lightning seemed to dissipate, though the rumbles of thunder, some near, most far, told me that dissipation was a misperception at best.

Trying to trust Murphy’s intuition, I whiled away long moments. Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer. If he was in trouble out there where I couldn’t see, I wasn’t going to let him be in trouble alone. And according to that line of thinking, waiting was pointless. I swung my door open and stepped out of the Humvee.

Wet though I was, the new rain was cold when it pummeled me and soaked through my clothes. It took all of two steps for the cold water to seep back into my boots.

With my rifle at my shoulder, I scanned back and forth in front of me, ready to fire at anything that looked like danger. As I made my way across one empty lane and then another, the shapes of people and a big square-ish thing formed out of the rain. Murphy and the man were behind an SUV that had gone off the road and come to a stop at a precarious angle on a steep embankment.

Murphy saw me as I neared. He hollered, “Man, we need to pull them out of here.”

I looked at Murphy and looked at the man, still not sure I needed to do anything. Did I want to? Sure. But one of the many things I was learning about life was it so much easier to be a super hero in video games.

The man pointed toward the front of the SUV and motioned me over to the edge of the shoulder.

The SUV was stuck with only one rear wheel on pavement. The front wheel I could see, the one on the passenger side, was buried in mud up to its axle. I guessed the wheels on the other side were similarly buried. It was both bad and good luck wrapped in the same package. Had the ground not been so saturated, the heavy SUV would have barreled down the steep embankment and slammed into whatever was parked on the highway access road thirty feet below. But now they were stuck.

Just as I turned to walk back to the rear of the truck, a girl of four or five pressed her face to the foggy passenger side window and stared at me. A woman pulled her away from the glass.

Crap.

“Are these your kids?” I asked the man.

“Yes.”

“How many do you have?”

“Three.”

“Why aren’t any of you infected?”

“None of us ever got the virus. I think we’re all immune.”

“All of you?”

The man shrugged. “We were all exposed. All of our neighbors, all of our friends got it. None of us ever came down with the fever.”

That didn’t seem at all plausible. But what could I argue? The evidence was right in front of me.

Going back to the rear of the truck, Murphy was wrapping a chain around the ball on the SUV’s trailer hitch. “They hydroplaned when the water got deep and they skidded off the highway.”

“Got it, Sherlock.” Looking around, I asked the man, “Why not just get another car?”

He pointed to the back window of the SUV. It was packed full. “It would take too long. We have all of our stuff in here.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Maybe five minutes.”

I pointed at the SUV’s wheels stuck in the mud. “So this just happened.”

The man nodded.

“Are you guys from here in Austin?”

“Yeah. We noticed there weren’t any infected out on the street. We thought we’d use the rain to shroud us so we could get out of town.”

“Where to?” I asked.

The man clammed up.

My old world sense of manners urged me to get miffed over the rudeness, until it occurred to me that if I was in his shoes, I wouldn’t tell the location of my next hideout to two armed strangers either. “Never mind. I understand.” Then, not seeing a pistol or rifle on the man’s person, I followed my intuition. “Are you armed? Do you have any weapons?”

More silence.

“Look, we obviously have guns. You don’t have a weapon on you. So I’m guessing you’ve only got one, in the car, probably. Please don’t tell me you don’t have anything.”

Unable to contain the guilt showing on his face, the man said, “Our house has a safe room. We stayed in there. We’ve kept quiet. We didn’t need anything. Hiding was working out.”

Looking around to distract myself while I thought about my next choice, I finally said, “Listen. We’ve been pretty lucky with collecting weapons. We’ve got plenty. We can spare a few.”

The man stuck his hand out to shake mine.

I didn’t put mine out. “Better you don’t touch me in case you’re wrong about the immunity thing.”

He dropped his hand and said, “Thank you.”

Murphy hollered at me. “Man, get that Humvee over here. I don’t want to be out here all day.”

I motioned the man to follow me and jogged over to the Humvee. “Hop in the passenger side.”

Once we were both in, I started to maneuver the Humvee over to the edge of the road.

The man looked around and spotted all the rifles and pistols in the back seat.

“Here’s the deal.” I pulled the Humvee up behind the SUV and came to a stop when Murphy motioned with his hand. “Every time I do what seems like the right thing, it bites me in the ass. See those rifles with the silencers on the end? Take one of those. The infected can’t hear the silenced weapons when they fire.”

The man nodded.

“Listen, and this part is really important. Don’t ever shoot a gun without a silencer unless it’s a matter of life and death. These fuckers hear gunshots and come running like you’re giving away free french fries at McDonald’s. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Take another rifle, one without a silencer, and two pistols. Get as much ammo as you think you’ll need. We’ve got plenty back at the boat.”

“At the boat?” he asked.

More harshly than I wanted to, I said, “You can’t come with us. Trust me. That always ends badly. I’m giving you the weapons. Be cool with that, okay?”

The man was shaking his head, “No, I… thanks. The guns are enough. Thank you so much.”

“Just take care of your family. Okay? Be careful. I don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t, but get as far away from the cities as you can. Hordes of these things can tear down any house they think people are inside of. Don’t underestimate them.”

The man gave me a serious look. “I’m Greg. What’s your name?”

“I’m Zed. That’s Murphy out there.”

Murphy stood up straight and waved me to start pulling.

I nodded at the man, who wasted no time in gathering a couple of rifles and a couple of pistols.

“Take those and come back for the ammo.”

I gunned the engine. The wheels alternately caught and spun. We started to move.

With a jerk that seemed like it should have bent its frame, the SUV popped up onto the roadway. The SUV’s brake lights lit up and it came to a stop. I rolled the Humvee forward just a bit so Murphy would have enough slack in the chain to disconnect it.

The man hurried back to the Humvee to gather up some ammunition for his weapons.

I got out and went over between the vehicles with Murphy.

Working to disconnect the chain, he asked, “You didn’t give him a silencer did you?”

I looked over past the highway’s access road. The rain was starting to slacken, and I could make out a tall red and yellow sign for Rudy’s Barbecue. “Maybe.”

The chain clinked to the ground and Murphy gave me the look disappointed mothers save for when their children do something stupid. He unwrapped the chain from the trailer hitch.

“You’re the one that wanted to stop and help,” I said.

With the chain off, Murphy stood up, looking around out of habit. “Don’t do that, Zed. You know you would have done the same thing. I just came to the decision sooner.”

“They’re all immune. They may have the magic genetic combination to start over.”

“So you’re saying the Mighty Null Spot gave him the silencer to save the human race?”

“I’m just banking some good karma.”

The man came back around and Murphy handed him his chain.

Greg said, “Thank you so much.”

Murphy said, “Don’t sweat it, man.”

I gave him a nod.

The rain was rapidly settling down to something like a sprinkle and visibility was back. As if to punctuate that, the howls of a few hundred infected rose up from down the embankment and across the access road.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Murphy yelled at Greg. He moved to his left to get a better view and raised his new silenced M4 to his shoulder.

Greg started to mouth something else.

“Go,” Murphy yelled at him.

He ran for a door of the SUV.

I was beside Murphy by then, and without the SUV blocking my view, I saw the Rudy’s Barbecue down the steep embankment and across the access road. Wrapped around the front and one side of the building was a wide, covered patio large enough for tables to seat a couple of hundred people. It was also a great place for Whites to huddle and stay dry, which is what they had been doing until the rain eased enough for them to see us in our noisy vehicles.

But they were already pouring off of the patio and out across the parking lot. Some were on the access road and several were trying to run up the steep, slippery embankment.

Murphy fired his weapon at those closest.

The SUV’s starter cranked and the engine growled.

I fired my weapon toward the oncoming infected, but couldn’t tell whether I’d hit anything or not.

The SUV started to roll slowly forward. Murphy slapped the back window with his hand. “Go! Go!”

It did.

At least twenty Whites were already clawing their way up the muddy slope. The SUV was picking up speed and already beyond the hope of any White to reach it.

I shouted, “They’re safe. Let’s get out of here.”

Murphy gave the SUV one more look and bolted for the Humvee.

With the first of the infected just clamoring their way out of the mud and taking steps onto the asphalt, we accelerated our Humvee north on the highway.

Chapter 35

Not two miles up the highway, we were right back into another squall and I slowed the Humvee down to fifteen miles per hour.

“What is up with all this rain?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe Dalhover was right.”

“Top is right about a lot of shit.”

Then something occurred to me. It was only mid-afternoon, so unless something drastic happened on the way back to the river along the circuitous route we were taking, we’d get there well before dark. “There’s an Academy up here on the left.”

“An Academy?”

“You know, that store that sells all of that camping and sports stuff.”

“Tell me this isn’t going to be another inspiration of yours.”

I swerved the Humvee out of the center of the roadway until I was driving along the shoulder. “Hear me out on this one.”

“Whatever. You’re gonna do whatever you’re gonna do. That’s the way it works when you’re driving.”

“Don’t be petulant.” I U-turned onto an exit ramp, cut across the access road and jumped a curb beneath the Academy Sports and Outdoors sign. In the process, I ran down some crepe myrtle trees, really just tall bushes that had lost their bright pink flowers in the rain. The parking lot was mostly empty, at least what we could see of it. Coming to a stop about halfway across, I looked at Murphy for confirmation. “I’m going to crash right through the front doors.”

“Crash and grab? I like it.”

“Do you think it’ll damage the Humvee?”

Murphy shook his head. “Nope. It’ll make a hell of a noise when we go through, but I’m betting the Humvee will be fine.”

“Once we’re inside, there’ll probably be some infected. I mean, the damn things are everywhere right? They’ll probably be in there, too.”

“And?”

“Do we open the hatch and shoot them with the fifty caliber machine gun?”

“Nope. I say we jump out and shoot ‘em, unless there are a bunch standing right there when we drive in. If so, we drive out and leave.”

With a nod, I revved the engine and aimed at the entrance.

The pavement between us and the store disappeared quickly. I braced for the impact. The Humvee bounced over the curb and smashed through the glass and window frames. A second later, we rammed through another wall of glass at the back of the foyer and hit some product display shelves. Scores of multi-colored T-shirts exploded across the hood and windshield.

Still, the Humvee’s momentum was carrying it forward and I pushed hard on the brakes. Tires skidded on waxed floors and more display racks fell victim.

And we stopped.

The hood was covered with so much debris from the collision that we couldn’t see through the windshield. Murphy shouted, “Well, here goes!” He wrestled his door open and I did the same.

We’d made one hell of a mess out of the front of the store. Glass, bent aluminum and merchandise lay everywhere.

“Up top!” Murphy shouted.

I didn’t see any infected coming at me, so I followed Murphy’s order, turned and climbed as quickly as I could to the top of the Humvee. Murphy beat me there. He had his rifle up and was firing before I got my feet under me.

A long row of cash registers ran across the front of the store and Murphy shot down two infected who were running past those on their way from the fishing department.

On my side of the store, the weightlifting gear filled out the corner and a long wide aisle led up to the shoe racks. I assumed that to be my area of responsibility. Women’s sports apparel was directly in front of the Humvee. Murphy and I would have to share that.

An infected woman came out of the shoe section, wearing an employee’s blue smock. She was hungry and in a hurry. I fired.

Of course, I missed. My aim really was getting worse. I fired four more times before a round caught her just above her left eye. She did a grotesque pirouette as blood, brain and bone exploded out the back of her skull.

To my right, Murphy was firing again, but stopped by the time I looked over.

“Damn, there must have been a bunch of them on your side.” He grinned at me.

“Yeah.”

“Did you get them all?”

“Yeah.”

We held our positions for a few more minutes.

Murphy called into the cavernous store. “Hey, Whitey, it’s dinner time. Come and get it.”

No more of the infected came out.

Turning to Murphy, I said, “What I’m thinking is, we grab some coolers, some sleeping bags, winter coats, boots, Coleman stove, tents…”

“Yeah, yeah. I gotcha. Some of everything they’ve got here.”

“Let’s stick together while we’re shopping.”

“Yep. You push the basket. I’ll ride shotgun since I can hit what I shoot at.” Murphy couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah, yeah, funny man.”

Chapter 36

Having loaded the Humvee with nearly as much as we could stuff into it—the damn things just weren’t as roomy as they looked like from the outside—Murphy and I were in one of the aisles in the camping section. I found myself eyeballing a machete display.

“I think you miss your machete, Zed.”

“I do.” I picked up a particularly wicked-looking machete with a black plastic handle and black powder-coated blade. On the side of the blade was painted a white skull over the name “Zombie Killer.” Pointless curves and cutouts adorned the blade’s back edge. It was a frightening tool.

I tore off the plastic and cardboard wrapping and hefted it while I admired its inherent evil.

Murphy laughed. “Man, don’t get that piece of crap.”

Embarrassed, I asked, “Why?”

“Look at it. It looks like a movie prop.”

“So? It’s sharp.” I pointed it at him. “It’s got a pointy tip.”

“You’re not going to be sword fighting. I mean, get it if you want. I’m betting it’s a piece of shit.” Murphy grabbed a Zombie Killer off of the display rack, tore off the packaging and wrapped his fingers around the handle a couple of times until he had a good grip. He stepped over to the end of the aisle, gave me a smile and started hacking at the metal shelving.

I jumped back as pieces of merchandise flew. All along its forty feet, the shelf rattled with each impact.

On the third hack, the blade got stuck and Murphy had to wrestle it back out again. Breathing heavily from the exertion, he held the Zombie Killer out so I could see the blade.

“Holy crap.” The blade had big gouges where it had hit the shelf. One gouge looked like the blade had been bitten away by a sizable lizard. I looked down at my blade and back at Murphy’s. Was the Zombie Killer really that shoddy? Or was Murphy just that strong? “Let me try.”

I hauled back and swung the machete at the same shelf. Mine got stuck on the first swing. I wrenched it out and hacked twice more. When I was done, I held up my Zombie Killer and compared it to Murphy’s. It looked just as bad. Even the plastic handle was cracked. I couldn’t believe it. It had looked so damn lethal. “What a piece of crap.”

“Uh-huh.” Murphy tossed his Zombie Killer on the floor.

Looking at the price, I said, “I can’t believe this thing cost sixty bucks.” I dropped it.

Murphy pointed to the most utilitarian of the machetes on the display. It had a plain wooden handle and was wider at the end of the blade than near the handle. It looked quite a bit like my first machete. Its blade didn’t glisten and it didn’t have a name. It was just a machete. It cost seventeen dollars. I picked it up to see how it felt in my hand.

Murphy nodded at the shelf. “Try it.”

“Okay.” I went after the shelving unit just as before. The blade had more weight than the Zombie Killer and it hit the thin metal shelf and bit in deeply. I yanked it out and hacked twice more. When I was done, I held the blade up for inspection. It was nicked, but there was no significant damage.

“I know which one I’d buy, if I was a machete man.” Murphy nodded at the blade in my hand, just in case I needed a hint.

“I agree. And I’ll save forty-three dollars.”

“Plus tax.” Murphy turned and headed over to look at other bladed tools on the aisle.

I left the nicked machete on the shelf, put four more into our shopping basket and took the last for myself. While Murphy selected some hatchets, several axes, a few dozen knives and propane lanterns, I worked on fitting my machete sheath across my back so I could pull it out over my shoulder without cutting my ear off.

I practiced the movement several times and pumped myself up with badass confidence. I’d wielded my last machete through some pretty horrific business. Having one in my hand felt good.

We loaded the last of the gear into the Humvee’s back seats. Murphy put himself in the driver’s seat while I got in on the passenger side and we drove out into the rain.

Chapter 37

“What time is it?”

Murphy looked at his big gold watch. “Twenty after four.” He turned onto an exit ramp for Highway 183 and drove the Humvee north in the southbound lanes.

“The rain is letting up.” I looked through the windows to see behind us. The sky was black to the south and east.

Murphy took a long look at the clouds. “Looks like the worst of it is past.”

Every detention pond I could see was brimming. Every low spot in the road was a pond. Water flowed down every slope. “I think we’ve got plenty of time to make it back before dark.”

“I don’t want to spend the night out here.”

“With the rain past us, the Whites are going to start coming out again. It might be slow going.”

Murphy shrugged. “I’ll run ‘em down.”

The rain was falling lightly and we had good visibility. We made quick time running north on the highway. As we drove, I kept an eye out for the SUV we’d towed back onto the road. I wondered if they made it out of town.

Some of the infected were coming out of their hiding places in the stalled cars on the northbound lanes. A few were venturing out of businesses lining the access roads. None gave chase, however. Most seemed too distracted, frazzled by their experience in the storm. That was good to know. Thunderstorms were advantageous times for us.

We got off of 183 at Anderson Mill Road and Murphy deftly wove the Humvee through a jam of cars at the intersection. He manhandled it through a ditch with several feet of flowing water to get around a long row of parked cars with broken windows. Some of those held corpses.

After a few miles, the road was lined on both sides with six-foot stonewalls built to keep the noise of the traffic out of the neighborhoods. They also served to keep the infected residents corralled inside. At least, those not bright enough to find their way out along the roads that cut through the walls. As with every other street in the city, sometimes a few cars and sometimes many were in the road, on the shoulders and on the sidewalks. Some were wrecked, but many simply empty, with doors swung open.

At the intersection of Anderson Mill Road and FM 620, cars were crowded at every angle. To get through, Murphy used the Humvee’s bumper to push a minivan into a ditch. That opened a way across somebody’s lawn and a path into a shopping center parking lot. Of course, the section of the parking lot in front of the big grocery store which anchored one end of the shopping center was a maze of abandoned vehicles and shopping carts.

Some of the infected came out of their rain shelters as we navigated the parking lot. We were moving slowly enough that it was easy for a couple of them to jump onto the Humvee. But their presence didn’t bother either of us. Perhaps we were becoming used to the Whites.

“I’ll shake ‘em off when we get out on 620.”

I pointed to a restaurant in the strip center. “I used to go there for tacos.”

“Torchy’s?”

“They make some damn good tacos.”

“Never been.”

“That’s too bad. All mankind ever built or ever did, every war, every pyramid, every medical discovery were just sign posts on the way to the pinnacle of mankind’s greatest success, the Torchy’s taco.”

“I miss hamburgers.”

“You’re a burger man?”

“Not just any burger. There’s a place called Hopdoddy down on South Congress. Man, what I wouldn’t do for a big burger and a cold beer.”

“I hear ya.”

Murphy bounced the Humvee through deep running water in another ditch. Both of our infected riders lost their grip and fell off. That put us westbound on FM 620, finally heading toward the Colorado River and home.

We passed a dealership that specialized in exotic and restored cars. “I used to drive by that place all the time and drool.”

Nice old automobiles were still parked in the lot in front of the building. Murphy looked over. “You used to live around here?”

I pointed north. “My mom lived a couple miles that way.”

“So this is where you grew up.”

“Yeah.”

“This is memory lane for you, then.”

I thought about that for a moment. “No. Maybe. I hate this place.”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

“I know. Just keep driving.”

He did.

I looked around at the trees growing thicker along the roadsides as the number of businesses thinned out. Most of the property along FM 620—on the northern edge of Austin—hadn’t yet been developed. Now it never would be.

The sky was still matted in a thick layer of clouds, but the rain only sprinkled lightly down. We passed fewer and fewer abandoned cars the further we drove. Even the Whites were absent, another inexplicable black hole. I wondered about that until I slipped off into an old fantasy, imagining myself as the last living man on Earth, a fantasy not so far from my new truth. I thought about all of the things from the world I lost that I loved or hated. And oddly, in all of that, the loss that seemed most significant at that moment was Torchy’s Tacos.

Of course, that conclusion made me feel like a total shit.

Chapter 38

The thing people never think about when they speed up and down the streets and highways is how the road undulates up and down with the terrain. If the road doesn’t slope up and down too steeply, all roads seem flat. Car engines do all the work of climbing low hills at seventy miles an hour, and drivers seldom notice the change in effort. But when those once-a-decade floods come, the low spots make themselves visible by filling or running with water.

Our Humvee crested one of those undulations in the terrain along a road I’d always thought of as flat. But it wasn’t. Murphy brought the Humvee to a fast stop.

A river flowed a quarter mile wide across the road in front of us.

Without a word, Murphy got out of the Humvee, leaving the door open while he walked out in front. He stood and stared at the water.

I followed.

“You got another way down to the river, professor?”

I looked at a wall of cedars that paralleled the road. To the left, another forest of cedars and oaks bordered the thoroughfare. Water flowed out of the forest on one side and into the forest on the other. In between was no evidence any road lay underneath.

Shaking my head, I said, “There’s no river here to flood. There’s not even a creek bed that I remember.”

Murphy looked around. “What are we gonna do?”

I shrugged. “It’ll be like this all over town.”

“We made it here just fine.”

“We came this way on purpose, Murphy. All this water is flowing toward the river. We never would have made it across town. We’d have had to cross rivers like this everywhere there was a creek. You saw Waller Creek. All that rain water has to go somewhere.”

“The Colorado River.”

“Eventually.”

“How long do you think it’ll keep flowing like this?”

How the hell would I know that? “A couple of hours. A couple of days.”

Murphy looked at the sky to the north. “What are the chances we’ll get more rain, do you think?”

“A hundred percent.”

“I mean, really.”

“I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll rain more. But holy crap, how much longer could it possibly rain like it did this morning and this afternoon?”

“You live in this part of town.” Murphy pointed at the new river flowing over the road. “Does this usually flood?”

“Never.”

“And you’d know, right? You drive this way, right?”

I pointed down the road. “Mansfield Dam is four or five miles that way. This is the way to Lake Travis. I’ve gone this way a thousand times.”

Murphy put his hands on his hips and stared at the water for a while. He turned and looked back up the road. He and I were still the only living things we’d seen since turning on to 620.

While Murphy was coming to a decision about how to proceed, I took the time to take a hard look at the woods on both sides of the road. Nothing was there, nothing with a heartbeat anyway. I took a seat up on the hood of the Humvee and watched the water flow by. I wondered whether it would eventually finish draining off of the land to our north and allow us to pass.

Murphy walked around, silent, looking at the water, looking back up the road. We were stuck and he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, his face was showing more and more worry with each passing minute.

Finally, when he was standing beside the Humvee and looking at the water, I asked, “What are you thinking?”

“With all of this water flowing into the Colorado River, what are the chances it’ll flood below the dam?”

“I honestly don’t know, Murphy.”

“I’m worried.”

“I can see that.”

“I love her, Zed.”

“Say what?”

“Don’t be a dick. I just told you that I love Mandi.”

I wasn’t sure how that fit into the context. “I’m happy for you guys.”

“I’m not used to worrying like this.”

“I hear ya.”

Murphy looked back up the road, perhaps trying to think of another way to get back to the riverboat.

“You’re thinking they might get in trouble if the river floods?”

Murphy nodded. He was deeply concerned.

“I’ll tell you what. You know as well as I do, every time it floods, you see on the news how some dumbass tries to drive their car across a low water crossing and ends up drowning when the car gets washed down the creek. Right?”

“That’s what worries me, man. I’m thinking about doing the stupid thing and just driving across.”

“You’re that worried?”

Murphy gave me a nod.

“Listen. You get in the Humvee. I’m going to walk out there, you know, see how deep it is. See how strong the current is flowing.”

Murphy shook his head. “You can’t do that.”

“Don’t sweat it. Worst case, I get washed across the road and into the trees. If I’m in the trees, I can hold onto something until the current abates.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“But if you’re really concerned about Mandi…” I looked back at the wide new river. “I can handle myself in that. I’ll take the chance. Who knows, it might be safe enough to drive across. That’s what we need to find out, right?”

“Thanks, man. Wait, I’ve got a better idea.”

Chapter 39

One end of the rope was tied to the Humvee’s grill guard. One end was tied around my waist, with maybe fifty feet in between. I waded out into the water and Murphy drove behind, keeping the rope stretched loosely between us.

At a hundred feet across the new river, the water was still only half way up my calves. The current was noticeable, but not strong. I wasn’t in danger of losing my footing, though the current did tend to trip me up when my feet crossed.

To my surprise, the water at the halfway point was only just over my knees. I was having a little trouble keeping my feet under me by then, but the heavy Humvee seemed to be doing okay. I stopped, turned to Murphy, and raised my palms to the sky. “What you think?”

Murphy swung his door open and stuck his head out. “I’ll chance it if you will.”

“You always say I take too many chances.”

“We’ve come this far. Let’s do it.”

I pushed on through the water and hoped. But the thing Murphy and I hadn’t really thought about in our brief conversation was he was nearly fifty feet behind me and in slightly shallower water. That became clear when I heard the Humvee’s engine rev. I turned at the sound, just in time to see the armored vehicle slip to the left as the current got underneath and pushed it across the road.

It was touch and go. It would slip. It would stop. I was frozen in my footsteps, wondering what I should do. Murphy quickly passed the point of wondering what he should do and chose to rev the engine higher. The Humvee accelerated toward me.

With no desire to be run down, I took off at a clumsy run through the knee-deep water, angling to my left to get out of the Humvee’s way, working with little effect at the knotted rope around my waist as I sloshed.

I made it out of the Humvee’s path for the moment, with full faith Murphy wouldn’t run me over. But I also knew he didn’t have full control over the Humvee’s direction. He was accelerating to get through the deepest part of the water—maybe a good idea, maybe not—but that choice was dangerous to me. Hell, even if he did avoid getting me stuck under his tires, at some point those tires would gain full traction on the asphalt. Being tethered to the vehicle might not turn out well for me.

With a sigh of relief, I got the knot untied and dropped the rope.

The Humvee was passing me by then, about twenty feet to my right, and splashing up a heavy wave that hit me and knocked me off of my feet. Weighed down with my equipment, I sank in the shallow water and the current started dragging me across the asphalt. I tried to sit up. I caught a breath, but the current pushed me back over.

Dammit. I’m not going to drown in twenty inches of water.

Rolling over onto my belly, I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. The rough asphalt tore at my knees and palms, but the friction brought me to a stop. I breathed deeply and looked up.

The Humvee was back in ankle-deep water again and Murphy was hanging out the door, looking back. It was clear from the look on his face he was only seconds from abandoning the Humvee and coming after me.

I gave him a wave to let him know I was all right and his grin stretched wide.

The worst was behind us.

Chapter 40

At the corner of Ranch Road 2222 and Ranch Road 620, the largest intersection for miles in any direction, we had to navigate through the usual maze of abandoned cars. The infected from nearby apartment complexes and shopping centers found their way back outside. After days of being cooped up, staying out of the rain with nothing but the grumbling in their stomachs to keep them occupied, they were ravenous. And, if I dare say, more than a little rude about it.

We picked up four of them by the time we were moving southeast on 2222. One was on the roof, one on the hood, and two were hanging onto the passenger side.

Murphy said, “There’s a big hill up here in a couple of miles.”

“Don’t sweat it. We’re not going down that hill. About a mile ahead, there’s a light. Turn right.”

“How well do you know that road? Do you think we’ll get stuck in some more flood water?”

“The roads we’ll be taking run along the crests of the hills. You know, so the houses on both sides will have those million-dollar views. I’m pretty sure we’ll be good.”

“Did you used to date a girl in this neighborhood, too?”

“Nope. I had a stoner friend who lived out here.”

Murphy started to run through his maneuvers to shake off the four infected clinging to the Humvee.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said. “With the rain stopping and the Whites starting to come out, we’ll probably pick up some more going through these neighborhoods.”

“Yeah.” Murphy steadied the Humvee in the center of the road.

“We can try and lose them all once we get closer to where we’re going.”

“How close can we get to the river?”

“If we do get through on these roads, there’s a street called Far View. It runs along the crest of a big hill on this side of the river. When you’re driving on that road you can see between the houses. The river is down below.”

“How close do you think that is to the riverboat?”

“I think we’ll be able to see the riverboat from there.” I pointed at the intersection coming up in front of us. “This is the place. Turn right here.”

The intersection was blocked with too many stalled vehicles, so we had to turn around and go back a half-block. A few quick turns later, we were on River Place Boulevard, heading directly toward the Colorado River again.

Murphy gestured toward the backseat. “We got a lot of stuff here. What are you thinking we should do with it? How do we get it to the boat if we’re up on a hill?”

“I think we find a safe place to park, hike down to the river, find a boat of some kind to get home and come back here in a couple of days when things have settled a bit. Heck, maybe we can even drive the Humvee right down to the river once all the roads dry out. I know there are houses close to the river. I just don’t know how to get to them.”

“The infected will be out.”

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”

With more than one wrong turn on winding roads—most of my memories of the neighborhood were made when I had at least a few extra chemicals in my blood—we found our way to a narrow, little no-name ribbon of pavement that looked like somebody’s driveway. It cut between Narrow Ridge Drive and Glenlake Drive. After that, Far View Drive was the first right. By then, we’d driven too fast over too many speed bumps and our friends without pigment had lost their grip and fallen off.

Scanning across the road and looking into the yards on both sides of the street, I said, “I don’t see any infected around right now. What do you say we pull over and jump out while we can?”

“How close are we?”

“I won’t know until we get a clear view of the river.”

Murphy turned the Humvee into the first driveway on the left and followed a long, steep curve down to a courtyard big enough to turn around in. In front of us was a four-car garage. The house on our right had so much glass on the front and back, I could see right through to the low-hanging clouds above the hills on the other side of the river.

Murphy cut the engine and we both took a good look around before getting out.

Coming together at the front of the car, we continued to keep an eye on the dying landscaping while we situated our weapons. I adjusted my sling so my rifle was hanging down my back. In my left hand, I held my pistol, in my right, my new machete. I was ready. “You want to go around back? I’m betting the deck has a view of the whole river.”

“Let’s go straight through.”

I shrugged. Murphy led the way.

At the front door, he knocked with the handle of the hatchet.

We waited.

Knocking was a pretty effective way to bring infected residents out into view. But none obliged us by coming to the front door.

Murphy knocked again. It was a big house, after all.

We waited.

Nobody came.

“One more time?” I asked.

Murphy knocked, waited a few moments and tried the doorknob. It turned and clicked. The front door swung open on silent, well-lubricated hinges. In we went.

The air inside was hot and stale, but didn’t reek of rot. Everything appeared to be in order. Not even the usual clutter of life collected on the counters and tables of most peoples’ houses was anywhere to be seen.

Must be nice to have a maid.

“Hey,” Murphy called up into the towering space above us in the foyer.

I could see all of the main living room, much of the kitchen and down a hall to our left. Above us, a loft opened up to more space on the second floor. “I don’t think anybody was here when the virus hit.”

“Doesn’t look that way.” Murphy was already moving across the living room toward a pair of French doors that led to an outdoor living space with a view to envy. I closed the front door behind us and followed. Sizing the place up for possible refuge as I went, I quickly came to the conclusion too much glass on the ground floor meant the house was vulnerable.

Murphy swung the back door open and hurried across a wide, stone-covered deck, coming to a stop at the railing a dozen steps ahead of me. He looked downriver, then upriver. He stiffened visibly with tension.

Knowing something was up when I hit the rail, I looked upriver and spotted the riverboat, maybe a mile distant. But that wasn’t all.

Chapter 41

The naked horde was streaming up the north bank of the river, thousands and thousands of them, congregating in a screaming mass of angry arms and grasping hands, a hundred feet from the riverboat anchored in the current.

Everything I saw down the steep mountainside was wrong. Black diesel smoke was pouring out of the riverboat’s exhaust pipes. Someone was hoping the combination of anchor and engines would keep the boat from being washed downriver. The engines were straining in the current. The rough water behind the boat’s propellers was frothy white. The deep-throated diesels rumbled through the shouts of the infected.

The boat drifted from side to side on its bow anchor. The river’s surface wasn’t smooth. It was flowing. It was rough—I’d never seen it that way—and it was wide. Way up over its banks.

The remains of a boathouse floated past the riverboat. Debris, two-by-fours, siding and half of a house’s roof were jostled through the current and down the river. A capsized ski boat and a dozen white-skinned bodies were in the water. On the banks, the river flowed white between trees and around houses built too close to the bank.

Murphy’s voice, empty and sounding like it was speaking a thought that sneaked out without any conscious choice, said, “Holy shit.”

“This part of the river never floods,” I muttered in a pointless defense of what I’d said much earlier. “It never floods.”

But the water was rising, even as we watched.

A house on the south bank, directly across the river from us, collapsed and came to pieces in the water running over its foundation.

The wind picked up in a blast that blew needle-like droplets of rain into my eyes. Looking up, I saw a mass of roiling black clouds above a wall of torrential gray rain stretched across the sky north of us and moving our way. Lightning illuminated the clouds from within, and thunder rumbled over us.

The storm wasn’t done yet.

Murphy was the first to react. “We need to get down there.” He looked for a way to get off of the deck and down to the steeply sloping yard ten feet below.

Without the slightest inkling of a plan, without any idea of whether we could help or whether those on the boat needed it, especially without any idea of whether we could even get there, I hollered, “Fuck it!” With one hand on the rail, I vaulted over the side, trying to control my fall.

I hit the wet grass squarely with both feet, but they slipped out from underneath me, sending me skidding and rolling down the length of the backyard, until I hit the thin metal bars of a fence fifty or sixty feet down the slope.

With a grunt, Murphy hit the fence beside me.

Catching my breath, I asked, “You all right?” While waiting for an answer, I checked that I could move my arms, legs, fingers and toes. Nothing seemed to be broken.

Up on his knees, holding himself steady on a fence post, Murphy said, “I’ll live.”

Realizing that I no longer had my machete, I looked for it in the grass.

God, it was stupid of me to jump with that in my hand.

Thankfully, rather than being stuck in me, it was stuck straight up in the dirt near where I’d first hit the turf. My pistol, which I’d stuck in my belt just a second before jumping, was in the grass halfway up the slope.

“We should have looked for a better way down,” Murphy grumbled.

He was right.

Going back up the slippery grass slope easily ate up any time I’d saved by following my impulse to get down the hill quickly. Nevertheless, we were soon over the fence and doing some combination of jogging, slipping and falling as we cut across the steep slope toward the river and toward the boat that, for the moment, was keeping our friends safe.

Chapter 42

We were maybe a third of the way down the mountain, out of breath, standing on a limestone outcrop, looking for a path that didn’t seem to get steeper or more rugged as it went. Directly below us was a hundred-foot drop straight down a jagged cliff face. The wind was howling out of the north by then, carrying on it the haunting wails of the infected at the river’s edge.

Murphy was pointing to a path that looked like a promising way down when the riverboat’s anchor line snapped with a crack that cut through the wind and the voices of the Whites.

Even as the thick rope recoiled into the air, the riverboat was already spinning sideways. The current relentlessly drove it to shore, on our side of the river, where the Whites were screaming their excitement at their shift in fortune.

“You still have grenades?” Murphy hollered as he started to run.

I had four or five in my bag. I jumped off the outcrop and ran through the gap in the cedars that just swallowed Murphy. He wasn’t running down the hill so much as across it. It took only a moment to figure out he was headed to the top of another cliff that might put us above the bulk of the horde on shore. Well, not really above, but close enough.

The riverboat’s path was erratic as it struggled against the current. Figures ran across the top deck. One stopped and pointed. The boat listed hard to starboard and the figures on the upper deck tumbled toward the side rail.

“Faster,” I shouted.

Murphy and I were both running between scrubby cedars on a thirty-degree slope across rocky limestone so rugged that it promised to break ankles at any misstep. An impossibly loud scrape of metal hull on stone stopped us in our tracks.

We were out of time.

The current was pushing the riverboat across the rocky bottom close to shore. It listed further to starboard and the bow jammed between several large oaks just south of the horde’s main body.

Murphy already had a grenade in his hand and positioned himself at the edge of a thirty-foot drop. The nearest tree was far below. He heaved the grenade without a hope of reaching any White near the shore. It arced through open air.

As I awkwardly fished a grenade out of my Hello Kitty backpack, Murphy’s grenade flashed fire and exploded in the air just above the trees. A thunder crack of sound hit us a fraction of a second later and I understood Murphy’s purpose. Another of his grenades was already in the air.

I tossed a grenade, dropped to a knee and unscrewed my silencer as fast as I could. Once it was off, I started firing ineffectual, but noisy, rounds toward the mass of Whites below. Murphy and I were noisy bait, trying to draw the horde’s attention away from the riverboat.

But my rifle wasn’t the only one firing.

The riverboat erupted in gunfire as Whites climbed through broken oak branches and made their way onto the sloping decks.

Run. Go for the ski boat.

I aimed at Whites on the bow of the boat, but they were so far away. Round after noisy round blazed through the barrel of my rifle. Each seemed to evaporate in the air on the way to their distant targets.

More grenade explosions and then Murphy’s rifle came alive.

Far below us, tempted by our noise, hundreds of the horde were screaming up the cliff, making their way through the trees. But it wasn’t enough.

Down on the riverboat, three people were climbing to the roof of the pilothouse as a wave of Whites flowed onto the upper deck.

“Jump,” shouted Murphy.

It was Mandi and Brittany on the pilothouse, followed by slow Russell.

A ski boat with four occupants disconnected from the far side of the boat. It struggled in the current as it slipped fifty, then eighty yards downstream before it came around. Dalhover’s spidery figure stood in the bow with a rifle at his shoulder, spewing bullets at the Whites on the boat. Amy took up a position beside him and added her weapon to his fire.

Whites were on the ladder up to the pilothouse roof.

Russell stood at the back corner, pushing Brittany behind him as he screamed, face upturned to the clouds. Bravely, Mandi held her ground on the center of the roof and shattered each bald white head with bullets from her gun.

“Jump. Dammit, jump,” Murphy shouted.

It was thirty feet to the water from up on top, a scary height from which to jump into a violent current.

Please, jump.

I reloaded and emptied another magazine in the direction of the boat. The effort felt frustratingly futile. But I had to do something, and pulling the trigger on my weapon seemed the only thing I could do that had any hope of helping my friends.

Mandi stopped firing and fumbled with a magazine.

Dammit, she should have practiced that.

Dammit.

Fuck.

Whites were on the roof.

She got another magazine pushed into the receiver on her rifle and fired, but five or six Whites were on the roof by then. Jumping into the water was the only escape, but for some reason, she didn’t see that.

Whites fell in front of her as she pulled the trigger again and again, and again, backing up a step each time the fire shot out of the end of her gun.

Then she was empty and reaching for another magazine.

Murphy howled.

Mandi tried to reload but was instantly overwhelmed.

Horrified, I stopped firing.

Mandi kicked and punched and fought, but too many hands were clawing, too many jaws snapped.

More Whites flowed past the melee. Brittany hugged Russell from behind, burying her face in the small of his back, and then the Whites were on them, too.

For an impossibly long moment, Russell stood firm, as hands tore at his clothes and clawed at his skin, shielding little Brittany. But one grabbed her arm and pulled her away. It seemed the only thing I heard was Russell’s pained scream. The only thing I saw was bloody white skin.

Dalhover and Amy stopped firing and their boat started to drift down the river. The black clouds rolled over. The wall of rain hit us and hid the world from view. I could barely see a dozen feet in any direction. The wind threatened to blow us off the rock and lightning blazed all around.

With my voice cracking, I said, “We have to go, Murph.”

Chapter 43

I was torn between hunkering down in a safe place or rushing out into the storm—doubling down on futile action, which seemed to be the order of the day—in an effort to go all Null Spot and find Steph and the other survivors from the boat. But Steph was with Dalhover. Dalhover was as smart, resourceful and tough as he was abrasive. Hell, they were all smart, resourceful and tough. I couldn’t offer any help they would need. I chose instead to ride out the storm in the house with all the windows, the one on the ridge where we had parked our Humvee.

The storm blew itself out overnight and the sun rose to clear blue skies and blazing heat. The drought was broken. The heat wasn’t. Autumn should have been knocking on the door, but was tardy.

Murphy, who’d turned into a silent statue of himself, went out on the back deck early that morning and sat. He didn’t eat, though there was plenty of food in the house. He didn’t drink. Most noticeably, he didn’t speak. He stared at the sunrise. He watched the river below. He watched the sun go down later that day. He just sat in his chair and watched the colors of the world change.

I realized that as much as I wanted to go downriver and find Steph and the others, the person who was most likely to benefit from any help I could give was Murphy. And though I didn’t explicitly do anything to help, Murphy needed time to recover—he loved Mandi. I kept an eye out for him while he stared despondently at nothing and tried to find an open road to pass through his grief.

On the second day, I awoke on the couch in the living room. When I sat up, I saw Murphy standing at the rail on the deck with a box of dry cereal in his hand. I watched for a moment and saw him eat a handful and the concern I’d had the previous day started to fade.

I went outside and took up a position by the rail a few feet to his right. I glanced down at the cereal. He scooped a handful for himself and handed the box to me. It was a little stale after a month in the pantry, but it was better than no breakfast.

Far below us, the water level had dropped, but the current in the river was still running fast. All of the hills had been saturated in the storm and the runoff was filling the creeks, which flowed down to the Colorado River. All up and down the valley, wide swaths of debris, uprooted trees, and demolished houses littered the banks.

“Why don’t we ever see any normal people?” Murphy asked, eyes wandering over the flood destruction below.

For a few long minutes, I thought about that. Or I thought about what I should say about what had happened two days before. “Are you all right?”

Murphy nodded, turned to me and put on his familiar smile, but his smile was alone on his face. His eyes were sad and angry.

In the absence of an answer, I leaned on the rail and looked at the wall of trees growing just outside the backyard fence. Nothing was moving but branches swaying in the wind. We had no infected company that could be seen. “You know, Murphy. I admire you in a lot of ways.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re Murphy.”

No response.

“Do you remember that day when we went to your mom’s house?”

“Have you ever tried to cheer somebody up before, Zed? ‘Cause you’re not very good at it.”

“I’m not trying to cheer you up, Murphy.”

“My mistake.”

“I know it’s hard, what happened the other day.”

“Yep.” Sitting on the rail on the other side of Murphy was a coffee cup. Murphy picked it up and took a sip.

“I can’t imagine how hard it is for you to smile when you do, when the world just wants to be a big fucked up mess.”

Murphy didn’t say anything about that. Something down in the river seemed to have grabbed his attention and wouldn’t let go.

“What I’m saying is, I’m with you, no matter what you need to do. You want to stay here and stare at the walls, I’m here with you. You want to go downriver, I’m there with you. If you need to cry about it, I won’t shame you for it.”

“Big boys don’t cry.”

“Everybody who’s still alive cries. It might be the only thing that keeps us human.”

Murphy nodded and watched as a couple of mockingbirds swooped into the backyard, aerobatically chasing a grasshopper.

I figured I’d try humor. “You know, I already went online and ordered my What Would Murphy Do bracelet.” I smiled. “Don’t let me down, man.”

Murphy chose to answer. “You know what Murphy would do?”

“No.”

“Murphy would kill some Whites. Murphy needs to kill some fucking Whites.”

We said nothing for a long time.

To have Murphy wholly invested in my plan to slaughter Smart Ones was one of my goals. But the cost he paid, we paid, for that was too high. Hell, we didn’t yet know the full cost. Steph, Dalhover, Amy and Megan had all gone down the flooding river with the current. Who knew if they’d found a safe place or drowned?

Could it be they all died?

The thought sent a grievously sharp pang through my heart.

Thinking about all of that while the sun slowly rose in the late morning sky, I asked about something that had been bothering me. “Is this all my fault?”

Murphy shook his head and looked disappointed. “Self-pity?”

“No.” I looked up at him. “If we’d been there with them instead of going off and chasing across town, would it have turned out differently? Could we have saved them?” It wasn’t self-pity. I really wondered. I needed to know if I was making bad choices that were hurting people.

“As much as I’d like to blame you for dragging me off, Zed, as much as I’d love to punch you in the head until I felt better, I know I might as well go out there and punch a tree trunk. What happened wasn’t anybody’s fault. Nobody knew God was gonna drop a Noah flood on us. Nobody knew the anchor line was gonna break. After that happened, nobody could have done anything. Maybe if we’d been there, the outcome would have been different. Maybe we’d both be dead now. Maybe all of us would be.”

Did that make me feel better, blaming it all on random circumstance?

“We need to go downriver and see if we can find the others,” Murphy said.

I nodded and looked downriver. “Thanks. I need to know if they made it.”

Murphy looked at me. He knew I was mostly talking about Steph. “Seems the only way we’re gonna know for sure is to hike down there and find something that’ll still float. That’s the only way to get downriver that makes sense. Do you remember which boat they took?”

The picture of Dalhover and Steph firing from the bow of that boat was etched into my memory but the painful memory that followed. “Yep. It was the Malibu with the black hull.”

Changing the subject, Murphy pointed down to where the riverboat had run aground. “It’s gone.”

I looked down the length of river visible from our perch. Just to keep the conversation going, I said, “Do you think it sank, or washed down?”

Murphy shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“I don’t see any Whites down there anywhere.”

“Maybe they’re afraid to come out.”

“Should we test out these silencers to make sure they work like we hoped, before we put ourselves in a situation where we’re depending on them?”

“Might want to. When we get down there, we could shoot some Whites from the boat and see what the others do.”

“But they’ll be able to see us. It might be the visual cue of the gun will be enough to set them off. Hell, just them seeing us in the boat will be enough.”

“What do you think, then?”

Chapter 44

Ten minutes later, Murphy and I were up by the road in the trees, looking for Whites. None were out.

“How long do you want to wait?” Murphy asked.

“I want to get this done and get down the river.”

“Well, there aren’t any infected out.”

“Okay.” I gave Murphy a nod that said, “Watch this,” and hollered out into the street. “Hey monsters. Time for second breakfast.”

Heads immediately popped up out of bushes and from behind parked cars.

Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at an infected man two houses down . The white was slowly standing up, looking back and forth, and searching for the source of the voice he’d just heard.

The rifle cracked. Blood erupted from a wound and the infected man crumpled into the bush.

I hissed. “Shit.”

“What?”

“That was loud.”

“That’s ‘cause we’re right here by it.” With the barrel of his rifle, Murphy gestured at a couple of Whites three houses down. “I don’t think those ones heard it, or they don’t know what the sound was.”

Indeed, the pair of infected women was walking gingerly down a driveway, looking around. They knew something was up, but they definitely weren’t running toward the sound from Murphy’s rifle.

With only one way to know for sure, I knelt, leveled my rifle at the nearest of the pair and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. Neither of the infected women fell. Neither of them ran in our direction. Neither of them even looked at us.

“You got blanks in that thing?” Murphy grinned. It was good to see a grin, but it still held an emptiness that would take a long time to fill.

“I missed. It’s no secret you’re a better shot.”

Murphy took the next shot and one of the infected women fell. The other jumped back, frozen in surprise.

“Show off.” I fired another round and then another. “Damn.”

None of the infected was coming at us. I counted seven on their feet up and down the street, suspicious, but with inadequate senses and insufficient brainpower to figure out what was going on. At least the silencers seemed to be working as hoped.

Murphy said, “Give me your gun. There’s got to be something wrong with it, unless you’re the only person in the world who gets worse with practice.”

Yeah, that had to be it. The rifle was faulty somehow. Maybe the sights were misaligned. I unclipped the rifle from my sling and we traded weapons. Murphy gave my rifle a quick inspection and raised it to his shoulder. With only a moment’s pause, he pulled the trigger. The rifle cracked. The second infected woman in the driveway fell.

“What the hell?”

Murphy shook his head as he lowered the weapon. “This rifle’s fine.”

“Crap, I suck with guns.”

“I’ll draw them closer in. Shoot at them when they’re near and see how that works for you. It just takes practice, is all.”

I shook my head at my frustration. “I’ve been practicing a lot.”

Murphy hollered, “Come and get it.”

That got the attention of the remaining five, who all started heading toward us, looking back and forth to find the source of the voice.

I pointed my rifle at a man who was jogging in the middle of the street and bearing down on us. At two houses distant, I fired. Miss.

I fired again. Another miss.

“Take a deep breath,” Murphy said.

The guy was in front of the house next door. I fired and missed. He looked right at the spot in the trees where we were hiding and ran straight for us.

At ten feet away, I fired again and hit him in the chest. At that point, the other Whites on the street, having seen the man run toward us with all of the certainty infected body language could convey, were also running at our position.

Murphy and I went to work shooting them down. That’s to say, I squeezed off another six rounds at the sky, houses and shrubs, while Murphy killed the rest of them.

Angry with myself, I asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

“Not sure. I was kinda too busy to watch.”

“Well, thanks.”

“For?”

“For killing them. Because if we were going to depend on me to shoot them, we’d be getting eaten right now.”

“Man, don’t get so down on yourself. We learned something pretty important.”

Sarcastically, I said, “That the silencers work.”

“More important.”

“And that is?”

“Zed, it’s like when you get mad, your brain stops working or something. Because this is exactly the kind of shit you’re good at figuring out. And then lecturing me on.”

“Just tell me what you want to tell me.” I wasn’t in the mood for guessing.

“When you missed that first dude, it was no big deal. He didn’t hear the sound of the gun, or he was too far away to figure out what the sound was. When he got close enough, though, he could tell. Did you see that just before you killed him? When you fired that last shot that missed, he made a beeline for us. He knew we were shooting.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly. Ah. The silencers are exactly what we hoped for, but when the infected are too close, the silencers aren’t silent enough.”

I smiled. That was a great thing to learn. I frowned. “So by the time they’re close enough for me to hit them, they’re close enough to figure out that I’m shooting at them. Great.”

Chapter 45

We stashed the Humvee in the house’s garage, took on full loads of ammunition, about a half-dozen hand grenades each, and enough food to last several days. Then it was through the house, across the backyard and over the fence. With no wind and no rain, the jagged limestone slope down to the river was significantly less dangerous than it had been a few days before. Still, it took more than an hour for us to make our way to the water’s edge.

The river was flowing fast and it was still at least a foot higher than normal. But up in the branches of the trees – the ones that made it through the flood with roots still in the ground – were clumps of grass, gobs of mud and parts of houses. Up the slope of the bank were broken boats, coolers, boards, furniture, housewares, pretty much everything you could imagine, much of it shattered into puzzle pieces of the whole, covered in a film or a thick layer of mud. And in all of that were the bodies, naked, white and bloated with gasses of decay. The heat was accelerating the growth of putrefying bacteria and everything stank of death.

For the first mile of our trek along the river, we saw several ski boats, some intact, most not. But none close enough to the water so we could guess at how to get them afloat. We did come across a Sea-Doo that looked plenty big to hold us both. We sweated and shoved it across fifty feet of rough ground to get it in the water, only to find it wouldn’t start.

Along the way, we didn’t see a single living White. We saw plenty more bodies with bellies distending in the heat, on the shore with arms or legs bobbing in the edge of the water. Some were half-buried in drifts of wooden debris. More than a few were lodged in tree branches over our heads.

Eventually, we found a plastic yellow kayak thing along with a canoe paddle and a fence board. We pushed it out into the river and used it to float with the current. But even that held a significant disadvantage. The current carried us too quickly to adequately survey the destruction on both sides of the river.

Struggling to slow the kayak with his paddle, Murphy said, “This isn’t going to work.”

“Yeah. That and I feel vulnerable in this thing.”

“Like it’s going to tip over any minute?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“It’s not even a real kayak. It’s like some kind of Fisher Price kiddy kayak or something.”

“How about if we just float with the current and whenever we see a boat that looks seaworthy, we’ll stop and see if we can start the engine?”

“What if the water got into the engines? Do you think they’ll start?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know much of anything about marine engines, but in principle, they’re just like car engines. Air and gas go in one end, exhaust comes out the other. Water can get in just as easily, I guess. If it does, the engine probably won’t start.”

“Makes sense.”

We pulled our paddles out of the water and watched the shoreline.

Murphy said, “If we don’t find a boat, you know we can’t paddle back up river with the current this strong.”

“We’ll have to hike it, then.”

Changing the subject, Murphy said, “I’m seeing lots of dead Whites.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder how many of them got killed in the flood.”

“Hundreds, at least. It seems like everywhere I look, there’s a body,” I said.

“Not to be a pessimist, but we need to prepare ourselves for what we might find downriver.”

“Meaning?”

“Steph and them got away in that ski boat, but the way the river was flooding, you know there’s a pretty good chance they sank, right?”

I nodded. “I know that. I think I more than know that. I expect that. I’m just hoping for something else.”

“You don’t seem all broken up about it.”

“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. I’m just trying to think, What Would Murphy Do?”

“Zed, I’m just trying to get through the day, here. I know you like to poke fun at me about trying to smile and move on. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m having a hard time. It’s like everything is weighing me down. I think if I just move my feet I can get back to a good place.”

“Murphy, that’s what I’m doing, too.” I looked at him. “Honestly. I just need to find out if the others made it. I need to help them out if they need the help. Heck, maybe they’re all sitting on a deck on the back of somebody’s house down here waiting for us. I want to give them their silencers. That’s their chance to survive. And we’ve already paid too high of a price for those silencers not to have them put to use.”

Murphy pointed at a ski boat on the bank. I looked over and shook my head. It wasn’t the one we were looking for.

Continuing with my thoughts, I said, “I want to go and kill Smart Ones. I don’t know how many I need to kill. I don’t even know if it makes any sense to do it or not anymore. I don’t know if it ever did. I don’t know if it wasn’t all just a rationalization to take some vengeance out on Mark’s stupid white ass. I really only know I feel the need to kill them the same way I feel a need to eat and breathe. It’s a necessity to me. I can’t explain it better than that. I keep seeing what those Smart Ones are doing. It’s like they’re fucking up the whole Goddamned world and I want to punish them for it.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Punishing them would feel good.”

I nodded also. “Maybe when enough of them are dead, I’ll get in a Humvee and drive to Balmorhea and sit out there for a few years trying to forget about all of this shit. Maybe I’ll try to figure out if Steph and I can be happy together without all of this bullshit. Maybe I’ll figure out if we’re something more than convenient people to hold onto when the grief gets too heavy to bear. Hell, I want to just wake up in the morning and not have to worry about seeing any dead people, without mourning whoever got killed yesterday or worrying about who’s going to die tomorrow.”

I half-expected a smartass remark from Murphy after going off on my long rant. But I guess even he was past that. And that was sad enough to hurt.

We rounded the bend in the river at City Park and floated past a long row of concrete foundations for McMansions that once stood next to the water. Now those houses were just broken pieces piled into a single mound of debris twenty feet tall among the thick trunks of several dozen cypress trees.

“I’ll be damned.”

The little marina next to Ski Shores Café wasn’t demolished. Well, most of it was, but one of the structures for keeping the boats protected from the elements and hoisted up out of the water was undamaged and still held at least eight boats. The mound of mansion parts saved it from the river’s destructive rush.

Murphy and I paddled hard across the current to get to the mouth of the marina and into the relatively calm water of its shelter. Boards, bodies and other floating debris were caught in the backwater. I didn’t comment on the bodies. In fact, I did my best to ignore them as we pushed the boat past one after another.

We guided the plastic kayak into an empty slip where ropes hung with cleats or pieces of chrome still attached from dangling ends. The boat that had been there must have washed away in the flood. Coming up alongside the remains of a walkway that separated the slips, I took hold of a post and steadied the kayak while Murphy climbed out. He, in turn, gave me a hand out and we lifted our watercraft onto the dock.

“It feels good to be out of that,” Murphy said as he looked around.

I nodded and looked across the inlet to the parking lot where I’d found the food delivery truck. It seemed like such a stroke of luck at the time. It was gone. Well, not gone. Further down the bank, I saw the twisted trailer bent around the trunks of several trees. Ski Shores Café, the restaurant the truck had been parked behind, was gone. Much of its concrete foundation remained, as did several of the old cypress trees that shaded its deck. But not much else was there.

As for the dock we’d found, each of the boats hung several feet above the water on hoists to keep the hulls dry and algae free. Murphy climbed up to the first, a formerly shiny boat with some kind of fast-looking pink design painted on the side. It looked to be covered in a film of mud.

“This might not be the one,” said Murphy.

I couldn’t see anything wrong with the boat from where I stood. “How’s that?”

“It’s full of water.”

“Full?” I wondered how the cables on the hoist system could handle the weight.

“You know what I mean. It’s maybe a foot deep inside.”

Shaking my head, I asked, “Can you see into the others?”

Murphy climbed higher and reached up to take hold of an old black support beam beneath the tin roof. “They’ve all got water in them.”

“You want to try to start that one? Who knows, it might work.”

Murphy swung a leg over into the boat with a splash of shallow water. He sloshed himself over to the helm and fumbled around for a minute. “There’s no key.”

Duh. Of course.

I hadn’t thought of that. I walked out to the end of the dock to see down the row of hanging boats.

Murphy leaned on the gunwale and looked at me. “What do you think?”

“There’s an old one down there.”

Murphy looked.

“The faded aqua one with the Batmobile fins on the back.”

“We’re here. We might as well try it.”

While Murphy climbed out of his boat, I walked over to the main walkway and headed down to the aqua colored boat. Just as Murphy had, I climbed up the hoist equipment until I could step over the side of the hull into the water inside. The willies ran up my spine as I imagined mosquito larvae squirming through the dirty water to cling to my legs.

The boat’s dashboard was simple: a steering wheel, speedometer, fuel gauge and a starter button. I pressed the button, but nothing happened. I exhaled a long, disappointed sigh.

“Bad news?” Murphy asked.

“Won’t start.”

“Back in the kiddy kayak?”

“I guess.”

Chapter 46

It was early afternoon when the current carried us around the last long bend before the river ran straight for a half-mile to the Tom Miller Dam. The rumble of water falling over the dam carried across the river’s surface. A surface covered bank-to-bank with bloated, naked, white bodies, lumber, capsized and swamped boats, trees and life preservers, but mostly white bodies.

It was Murphy who found his words first. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

We had run out of river and had seen no hint of the black-hulled Malibu ski boat and no sign the others were alive.

We found the riverboat, though, or at least what remained of it. The pressure of the current had it pushed up against the dam, the stern deep in the water and the bow sticking at an angle up into the sky. Everything on the boat above the waterline was now mangled or gone. All of our supplies and weapons were in the river. The bodies of Mandi and the others, or what little remained of them, were in the flow of water downstream.

And the current carried us into the mat of white bodies.

“There’s a boat about halfway through that’s floating upright,” I said.

I looked back at Murphy. He was slowly shaking his head, his mouth a tight frown. How many dead can a person see before the pieces of his soul turn to ash and float off in the wind?

Finally, he said, “It’s your call.”

“It’s the first boat we’ve seen all day that looks usable. It’s even got a canvas cover stretched over the top.”

Murphy gave me a nod and a shrug, leaned into the gruesome task ahead and started paddling. When our bow neared the first of the floating dead, I used the broken fence board to push it out of the way. But the dead were packed so tightly together, we had no chance of floating untouched between them. We had to push through. In doing so, we disturbed swarms of feeding and breeding flies. Hundreds of birds had settled on the bodies and were picking at the flesh. Beneath, fish large and small tugged at what would fit in their mouths. Even rats were making their way from the shore out onto the floating feast.

The thick taste of humid rot on the air was bad, but not nearly as bad as it was going to get in the coming days.

A long forty-five minutes after starting the struggle through the mat of floating dead, I reached up and put a thankful hand on the ski boat.

“This thing better run.” Murphy looked back the way we’d come. The corridor we plowed through closed up behind us. “I’d prefer not to paddle back through that.”

“If it doesn’t start, we’ll hit the shore and hike it.”

“Back upriver?”

Was he really asking? Sure, after coming down the river in something of a hurry, we didn’t see any sign of the black-hulled Malibu, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t back there in the trees somewhere. “I still want to go back upriver.”

Murphy nodded. Whether to agree or just to stop the conversation, I couldn’t tell.

I cut a few of the ropes that held the canvas cover over the boat and took my time climbing off of the plastic kayak. The last thing I wanted was to turn the banana-colored toy over. Once I had a leg over the gunwale, I smiled at the most optimistic circumstance we’d come across all morning. “It’s dry inside.”

“Dry?” Murphy didn’t believe it.

“Well, there’s maybe a little water down in the bottom, probably from the rain. But not much.”

Murphy, reaching up from the kayak and holding onto a chrome rail along the port side, said, “See if it’ll start. I don’t want to chance climbing off of this thing and falling in unless I know there’s some gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“That’s a very un-Murphy-like attitude.”

“Today’s not a good day to mess with me, Zed.”

In little more than a mumble, I said, “Sorry.” I turned and went to work at pulling the canvas back.

The canvas was heavy and stiff. I tugged and pushed, and after several sweaty minutes, got it off the front half of the boat. While I was pushing it back to let it fall off the stern, the ski boat tilted and I turned to see Murphy climbing inside. He’d changed his mind. Without a word one way or the other, I went back to pushing on the canvas.

“You’re right.”

“About?” I asked.

Murphy came up beside me and added some muscle to the problem. The canvas fell off the stern, but didn’t hit water. It landed across several floating bodies.

Murphy took his backpack off and laid it on the deck. He pulled out a plastic water bottle and took several gulps before stashing it back inside. He sat in the seat opposite the helm and looked up at me. “I just need a couple of days to deal with this one. I don’t mean to be a Zed about it.”

“A Zed?”

Murphy grinned, the first real smile I’d seen on him all morning. “You know.”

I rolled my eyes and sat at the helm. “Let’s hope God likes us today.” I started searching around compartments under the instrument panel.

“Look under the seat.”

I stood back up and lifted the seat cushion. “I’ll be damned.”

A ring with three keys lay there just waiting for me. I scooped them up, dropped back into the seat and guessed right on the second attempt. The ignition switch turned, the starter cranked and the motor coughed, once, twice, three times. It was running.

I looked over at Murphy. He looked back at me, just as surprised.

I immediately killed the engine.

“What?” he asked.

“Can you reach over and grab your paddle and my fence board?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Let’s use those to push that canvas away from the back of the boat. I don’t want it getting caught up in the propeller.”

Murphy gave me a big nod. “Good thinking. Wouldn’t that be just our luck lately, to find the last running boat on the river and then break it by being stupid?”

Five minutes later, with the engine purring like it had just been tuned, the bow of our new ski boat was pushing through the raft of reeking bodies and heading back toward clear water.

Chapter 47

Just having a comfortable seat, a motor gently pushing me back upriver and a breeze blowing across my skin had a positive effect on my mood. I could tell it was doing Murphy some good as well. Maybe it was a minor thing, but we were no longer two powerless vagabonds in a world full of hostile apes. Technology was back on our side.

Murphy said, “Hey man, you should let me drive.”

I shrugged, wondering why. But I stood up and left the seat open for Murphy. As he put himself in it, he said, “Why don’t you find a comfy spot and squeeze off a few rounds at anything you see on shore and see if you can hit it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to waste the ammunition.”

“You waste it every time you shoot. Let me watch you and see what you’re doing wrong.”

“Wrong? How hard can it be? You point the barrel, look down the sight and shoot, right?”

“If it wasn’t hard, you’d be hitting the infected when you shoot at them.”

I sucked in a deep, exasperated breath. Murphy was right. It was harder than just pointing the gun. Somewhere over the past week, I’d picked up a bad habit of some sort and it was throwing off my aim.

With no seats in the bow, I put a foot up in the passenger seat and lay my M4 on the top edge of the windshield. I looked through the sight and was surprised by how perfectly clear the image was. “These military sights are really nice.”

“They make one with a laser dot you can see through the sight, but it doesn’t show up on the target. That way, you can see exactly what you’re shooting at.”

“I think I need one of those.”

“There’s a body floating out there about a hundred yards. See it?”

I scanned across the glimmer of the surface. “Got it.”

“Shoot a few rounds at that one and see if you can hit it.”

I angled the rifle and lined up the sights with the body. The shot was pretty far out for me, but I had my rifle laying on the edge of the windshield to steady it.

“Be patient. Take a breath. Time your shot with the rhythm of the boat going up and down.”

“Okay.” Murphy was right. The boat seemed to be riding pretty smoothly across the water, but through the scope, with the rocking movement magnified by distance, it definitely wasn’t.

I waited. I got the rhythm down. I fired.

“Damn.” Murphy was more surprised than critical.

I looked up and saw the remnants of a splash fifteen or twenty feet past the body and off to the side.

With a chuckle, Murphy asked, “Is there another body out there you can see through the scope that I can’t?”

“No. Just the one.”

“Try again. Breathe smoothly. Hold your breath, then shoot. You’ve done it a thousand times.”

I fired again.

Miss.

This time, the bullet splashed far to the right.

Before Murphy could poke fun, I fired twice more. One came close, but one missed by so much, I couldn’t find the splash.

“Here, take the wheel. Let me see that thing again.”

I handed my rifle to Murphy as he stood up, hoping he’d find something wrong with it.

Murphy took a quick moment to look over the rifle. He pointed it at the body, which was only about fifty yards ahead of us by then. His concentration sharpened into focus. He fired. A reddish-gray clump of flesh seemed to jump up off of the body.

Two more quick shots followed and both found their targets.

“Crap.”

Murphy pulled the rifle down from his shoulder and handed it back to me. “I don’t know what to tell you. There is nothing wrong with your rifle.”

“So I saw.”

We switched places in the boat. With the body not more than twenty feet away, I shot several more rounds. I only got one hit.

Perplexed, I sat in the passenger seat and looked at Murphy. “What am I doing wrong?”

“Looks like you’re doing everything right to me.”

“What then?”

“Maybe it’s the rocking of the boat that’s throwing you off.”

I wanted to disagree. If that was the case, my shots would either be long or short. That, they were, but they were also far to the left and right. They were everywhere. It was only the lucky shots that found their target.

“Maybe you just need to spend some time practicing. You’ll get it down.”

For the next twenty or thirty minutes, I burned through three full magazines. I fired with the scope and without the scope. I tried shooting with my pistol, hoping my shooting problem was just with the rifle. It wasn’t. I didn’t hit a single shot more than twenty feet out. Inside of that, my accuracy was maybe fifty percent.

It didn’t make any sense. Years and countless dollars spent at the paintball field made me deadly accurate with a paintball gun. And those guns weren’t known for exceeding accuracy. I’d done well in the first weeks of the infection. It seemed my paintball skills had transferred directly to the M4 I’d acquired. But now, with time and maybe thousands of bullets fired, I couldn’t hit anything.

Maybe back at the beginning, I’d been so good with the M4 because I hadn’t thought about what I was doing – right or wrong. I just picked it up and did what came naturally. Perhaps now I was overthinking and layering on a full helping of frustration to boot. That combination could be ruining my accuracy.

So I put my weapon aside and concentrated instead on trying to find the black-hulled Malibu ski boat. If it had sunk, we were out of luck. I was hoping to find it in among the trees. If Steph and the others had pulled it out of the current to get on shore, that’s where it had to be. Because that’s where the shore was when the river flooded—up in the trees.

But the boat could have been covered in a film of dirt to match the surrounding ground, or caked in mud. It could have been behind a mound of flood debris, or covered in it. And the more scenarios I spun, the less I believed we’d find it.

Trying to escape all of those negative thoughts, I said, “Point out anything that looks like it has any chance of being a boat, okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

“No, Steph’s the boss.”

Murphy didn’t respond to that, a fact that made me think he had no hope of finding her alive.

And so our day went. We’d go a quarter-mile upriver, sometimes less, sometimes more. We’d see something, sometimes close to the water’s edge, sometimes not. We’d get close enough to identify it for sure. Or we’d get out and walk through the mud, broken limbs and the muddy trinkets that used to be inside houses, only to find something that wasn’t the boat we sought.

We floated into each cove and creek and searched.

As the afternoon heated up, the bodies of the dead kept floating down the river. More than once, the body of a white-skinned man or woman popped up from below the surface as the gasses of rot gave it enough buoyancy to break free of its bonds in the weeds on the bottom of the river.

Not once did we see a living person, normal or infected. Nor did we see any of the mule deer, which were normally everywhere in the hill country on the west side of Austin. Only bugs and scavengers dared chance the murderous river.

Late in the afternoon, with the sun inching toward the horizon, Murphy said, “We’re not going to finish this today, you know that, right?”

I looked up the river and nodded.

“Are we gonna try and sleep on the boat tonight, or do you want to hike up one of these hills and find a house that didn’t get washed away?”

“I don’t know.” I was despondent. The long, fruitless afternoon had worn away my hope.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get any more rain.”

I looked up at the clear sky. “Nope.”

“I think that was a hurricane.” Murphy was trying to take my mind off the search.

“You think?”

“We haven’t had one blow up this way in maybe ten years. I think we’re overdue.”

I rubbed my hand across my sweaty arm. “Yeah, makes sense. That explains why it’s still hot, anyway.”

“The heat can’t last much longer. It’s got to be late September, early October, right?”

“I don’t know.” I smiled and almost laughed at myself. “You know, I was going to say I don’t even know what day it is. But that expression is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? Days of the week don’t mean anything anymore, do they?”

“I don’t guess they do.”

“For the foreseeable future, I guess all we really need to care about are the four seasons.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

I looked back up the river. “Do you think we’ll find them?”

“Sugar, or no sugar?”

“No sugar.”

“Nope.”

“No chance?”

“Everywhere you look, you see dead Whites. That was a wicked storm. Not much of anything in this valley lived through it. If I had to bet, I’d bet they’re all dead.”

I slumped in my seat. “Do you think we should go hunting?”

“For Smart Ones?”

“Yeah.”

Murphy shook his head and looked around at the destruction. “Another day or two won’t matter. I’d like to wish all of the naked ones got killed in the flood. God knows thousands of their bodies are in the river. But you remember that farm, right? Out by Hutto or Taylor, or wherever it was?”

“Dr. Evans’ farm.”

“How many do you think we saw that day?”

“Tens of thousands. I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

“It could have been a hundred-thousand or more, right?”

I thought about it for a moment. “They covered that whole valley and they were still coming over that hill.”

Murphy pointed at a cluster of white bodies floating on the current. “This isn’t all of them.”

“We’ll never kill all of them. You know that, right?”

“Just the Smart Ones.”

“Yeah, the Smart Ones.”

Chapter 48

We put down anchor in a wide cove and slept on the boat. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was the safest we could make ourselves for the least amount of effort.

I woke in the morning as the sky was making the slow transition to blue. A heavy dew had settled on my skin, making it difficult for the mosquitoes to make their way around on my exposed arms, face and neck. That’s when I realized the virus had a benefit I hadn’t thought about. The mosquito bites didn’t itch.

I stood up, stretched, yawned and put a big smile on my face. It wasn’t real, but it was worth a try.

I felt better.

The birds were singing in the trees like nothing in the world was out of place. The water in the cove was calm and inviting. I stripped off most of my equipment, keeping only my boots, pants and machete. I couldn’t hit a damn thing with the guns, so why bring them with me?

I went to the stern of the boat, climbed out onto a small swim platform and slipped silently into the water.

The cove wasn’t deep and I was able to stand on the bottom, which seemed to be covered with all manner of debris. I’d made a good choice to keep my boots on. I lay back in the water and let myself float as best I could with the added weight of the machete. Still, it felt good, relaxing, otherworldly, with only the calming flow of the river water to hear.

I stayed there for a long time, thinking about everything, thinking a lot about Murphy and the way he accepted the tragedies crashing into him. He kept his head up and smiled, most of the time.

Was it so easy to lose the shackles the past burdened you with? Was it so hard to cry through the grief and then smile to face a new day? Was it so necessary to hold all of the pain so close to my heart I could feel it over and over and over?

The answer had to be no. Murphy’s bumper-sticker-simple philosophy worked for him. Why couldn’t it work for me?

I was alive in a world where I was likely to be confronted by a new sorrow every day until one of them killed me. To choose to live, to make that choice to fight for life every day, had to be a choice to accept all the sorrows of all of my tomorrows. But if that choice to live was to be bearable at all, I needed to let loose my embrace of the pain, both yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.

And it was that easy.

No, not really.

It would take work. I was too habituated to nursing my painful memories to lose them so easily. But if I tried, I might look back one day and say to myself it had been easier than I thought.

So I stood up straight in the water. Fish swam around me. Birds, still uncaring about the travails of humans, chirped and sang. The sky was a beautiful blue. The big trees that survived the flood swayed in the morning breeze. And I’d never had a better friend than Murphy.

The sound of running water startled me and I jerked my head around to find the source.

Murphy was standing on the swim platform, relieving himself into the river. “If the water gets warm, swim away. Heh, heh, heh.”

Chapter 49

Back out on the river, Murphy and I repeated the previous day’s routine. I wasted some time and bullets on target practice, with no discernible improvement. We spent a few hours siphoning gasoline out of derelict boats. We checked each cove and marina. We hiked up on the shore a dozen times to look closer at boats that might have been the Malibu.

When we reached the point where the riverboat had snapped its anchor line, Murphy asked, “What do you think?”

I looked upriver. “Looking downriver for them seemed like the natural thing. It occurs to me now nothing was stopping them from going up that way.”

“Nothing but the current.”

“I’m sure that boat could have run against the current. I mean, what will these things do, forty or fifty miles per hour?”

Murphy shrugged. “How would I know?”

“It’s worth a look. We can probably check all the way up to the dam by sundown.”

“Another night sleeping on the boat. It’ll be fun.”

“Sarcasm is not your forte, Murphy.”

“Maybe I’m just so good at it, you can’t tell when I’m being sarcastic.”

“Whatever.” I looked up the hill on the north bank and spotted the glistening windows of the house where Murphy and I had ridden out the last of the storm. “We can climb back up there and crash tonight.”

Murphy looked up the steep slope. “If we get done soon enough, maybe. I don’t want to climb up there in the dark.”

“Another night sleeping in the boat won’t kill us.”

Murphy started the engine. “You’re the boss.”

“Whatever.”

Still in the absence of other humans, we made our way up the river. We came across fewer and fewer bodies as the miles passed. The destruction on the banks became less severe.

“You know–” I turned away from the trees on the bank to look at Murphy. “I just naturally assumed all of this flood water poured over Mansfield Dam. But I’m starting to think that storm dumped all the rain here in the hill country.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.”

“I’m thinking if they came upriver, their chances were pretty good.”

“Maybe.”

Reading Murphy’s tone, I made a guess. “But you don’t think they came upriver, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Who would? It’s not intuitive. Going upriver is like running toward the danger instead of running away from it. People don’t think that way.”

“Still, they could have.”

“Sure.” Murphy scrutinized me with a long stare.

“What?”

“When did you turn optimistic?”

“I wouldn’t go as far as to call it optimism.”

“Whatever.”

More hours passed before we rounded a bend to see the sand-colored monolith of Mansfield Dam filling the valley in front of us. Water was pouring out of the floodgates with a roar that rolled down the valley. And though the current was running faster than normal, it wasn’t over the banks. In fact, it looked to have peaked at four or five feet above normal. Not bad, considering how deep it had gotten downriver.

Spanning the valley just downriver from the dam and a hundred feet over the river, the 620 Bridge stood mostly empty of cars. Further downstream, closer to us, a much older bridge reached from bank to bank just a few feet above the water level, surprisingly undamaged.

As we neared the low bridge, the point where we’d have to turn the boat around or get out and walk, Murphy pointed to the right, shaking his head slowly. “That can’t be it.”

I followed the line from the end of his finger to a narrow old boat ramp of crumbling concrete and overgrown bushes. At the top of the ramp, on the muddy ground in the trees to one side, lay a black-hulled ski boat. I couldn’t contain my surprise. “Jesus, I think it is.”

Staying calm, Murphy said, “You’ve said that about every black-hulled boat we’ve seen.”

“No, I think that’s it. See that logo paint thing on the side? That’s what our boat had.”

“Just don’t get too excited, okay? I’m betting Malibu manufactured more than one boat like that.”

“Just drive the boat over there and let’s check it out.”

“Do you see any Whites?”

I was standing on my seat by then, steadying myself with a grip on the windshield, thoroughly scanning up and down the bank. “Same as it’s been all day. Nothing.”

“Just don’t get too comfy with that, okay? You know as well as I do they’re still out there somewhere. When we come across them again, I’d rather be ready than surprised. Know what I mean?”

“Yup.”

Murphy pulled the boat up to one of several half-rotted pilings that marked a lane for boat traffic coming on and off the ramp. Both of us took a moment to work through our preparedness habit. My rifle hung from the sling on my back. I still had my Hello Kitty backpack with some grenades, some plastic bottles of water and food for another day. My MOLLE vest held my full and empty clips…oops, did I say clips? Old habit. I looked over at Murphy in silent guilt.

He saw me in the process of running my hands over the magazines, making sure the Velcro on each pouch was secure. “You need ammo, man?”

“No. Just checking my magazines.”

Murphy looked at me quizzically. “You can’t hit anything, anyway.”

With my pistol in one hand and my new machete in the other, I said, “Ready when you are.”

Murphy gave me a nod and I jumped off the boat into waist-deep water.

While I waded to shore, Murphy stood on the bow of the ski boat with his rifle at his shoulder, pointing into the woods. It was the safe way to get to shore. He covered me while I was vulnerable in the water. Once my feet were firmly on the bank, I covered him while he came across.

Once we were both onshore, Murphy took the role of guard, scanning right and left through the trees, looking for and expecting a dozen infected to burst out with no warning.

I stepped over the ramp’s broken concrete and headed toward the boat. As I neared, I was surer it was the boat. But once I stepped up beside it, I was positive. Hanging from the ignition was a key. On the key ring was a small foam float in the shape of a Shiner beer bottle. I’d seen that before.

Steph, Dalhover, Amy and Megan had made it to this point.

They were alive. They had to be alive.

I grinned.

Murphy was beside me by then. “You’re grinning like a monkey. You’re sure this is the one?”

I pointed at the key chain.

“Can’t argue with that.”

I looked around and climbed into the boat, rocking it to the side with the addition of my weight. “Where do you think they went?”

“Quiet, dude.”

Steadying myself with a hand on the side of the hull, I said, “Sorry.”

I looked up and down the deck. I looked at the seats. I started lifting the seat cushions and looking underneath.

“They aren’t hiding under the cushions.”

“I’m looking for… clues.”

“Clues?”

“You know, whether they all made it here alive. Where they went. Stuff like that.”

“The boat’s tied to that tree, so somebody got here alive.”

I looked up at the rope tied from the bow to a narrow tree trunk.

Duh.

That’s when I spotted an odd pattern of white scratches in the black gel coat paint across the bow. Careful to keep my balance on the sloped deck, I crossed between the split windshield and the padded seats in the bow. I leaned over and looked at the words that were scratched onto the front edge of the bow as it curved down. “Look at this.”

I put a hand on the gunwale and jumped over to the ground, landing beside the rope that held the beached boat, a place where someone could have stood two days ago, out of the angry river, safe. That’s where someone had scratched a message into the paint.

Murphy gave it just enough of a glance to see the pattern of scratches was text before looking up the road that led down to the boat ramp. “What’s it say?”

“It says they’re going to Monk’s Island.”

Murphy grinned. “That sounds like a clue to me.”

Chapter 50

It was late in the day and Murphy and I should have made the safe choice and found a sturdy house to hole up in. We could have spent another night feeding the mosquitoes while sleeping on the boat. But with our goal certain on the other side of the dam, we chose to press on.

The boat ramp led to a narrow asphalt road with too many patched potholes to be smooth. But that wasn’t important to us since we were on foot. Small houses were hidden at the ends of gravel driveways, back in the trees on both sides of the road. Many had cars parked in front, though my bet was at least half of those were broken down well before the virus hit. Front doors on some houses were open. Many had broken windows. A few bones and shreds of clothing lay in front yards. Several coyotes worked on the scraps in front of one house.

We crossed 620 where its four paved lanes entered the half-mile-long bridge over the river. It struck me as odd that only a few abandoned cars were visible. The number of bridges over the river that bisected Austin surely had to be less than ten. Given what Murphy and I had seen on the bridges in the center of town, I’d expected to see a barricade at one end or the other of every one.

With a fenced-off transformer station down the hill on our left, we started a rugged climb up a rock-covered slope that made up the face of the dam on the north side of the river. The rocks were too large and jagged to provide any kind of decent footing. Both of us slipped countless times and got our feet jammed between the rocks on the way up. At the top, we were breathing hard and bleeding from new cuts on our shins, knees and hands. We climbed over the guardrail and were on the long-obsolete two-lane road that topped the dam.

The thing about Lake Travis I always found odd was it was called a working lake by the Lower Colorado River Authority. I think that meant it was a water supply for much of Travis County and had a primary purpose of regulating the flow down the river so it wouldn’t flood out Austin or the rice farmers further south. Nor would it leave their irrigation canals dry during droughts. As a result, the lake level moved up and down by ten to twenty feet or more through the course of each year.

At the moment, with the sun just a hair below the horizon and the sky glowing red and orange behind us, the lake was as full as I’d seen it. Looking down the length of the main basin as it spread mostly north, we saw Monk’s Island, named for an old Spanish mission built on a hill that reached above the water in the center of the lake. Of course, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the weathered limestone walls were erected, the lake was a long way in the future.

When Mansfield Dam was completed in the early ‘40s and Lake Travis filled, half of the mission was submerged. The old church at the top of the hill and several outbuildings still stood. They were surrounded on three sides by a thick wall that followed the line of the hill down into the lake.

The mission had been abandoned before the First World War and had been turned into a state park as part of the dam project. So, uninhabited with a couple of arable acres on top, surrounded by the widest moat anyone was likely to find, it wasn’t a bad place to go for safety.

Looking across the glistening water at the pale walls of the church, hued in blood red from the setting sun, Murphy asked, “You see anything?”

“Can’t tell from here.”

“You think they made it?”

I shrugged and hoped. “We’re not going to get there tonight. We should probably go find a place to stay.”

“It may be safer to find a boat in the dark than trying to clear a house of the infected.”

I was tired, but the possibility of reuniting with the others gave me a second wind. “I’m game if you are.”

Murphy looked over at the shore on our right, then left. “Which way, then?”

Pointing to the right, I said, “I think the shore on that side is pretty rugged, with cliffs and ravines and stuff.” I pointed left. “If we’re going to follow the shore and look for a boat, I think we cross the dam and go that way.”

“Sounds good.” Murphy started walking down the two-lane road.

We were nearly halfway across the dam when he decided it was a good time to pick up the conversation. “I know there was a flood and all, but it seems odd we haven’t seen any infected in two days.” He put on his big grin. “I think I’m kinda starting to miss them.”

I laughed. Given that I had a three-hundred-foot drop down the face of the dam on my left and a fifty-foot drop to the surface of the lake on my right, along with a half-mile of empty road behind and in front of me, I laughed loudly. It felt good for a moment not to care. Not a single White had a hope of hearing me.

Catching the mood, Murphy yelled at the top of his lungs, “Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

I faced the lake and did the same.

After that, we stood and watched the last of the sun’s glow turn to black on the lake’s surface.

When we started walking again, I said, “Yeah. It is kind of weird that we haven’t seen any of them.”

“If the others are on Monk’s Island, what do you think about staying there?”

“I don’t know.” It seemed tempting to have a place within reach that might be a sanctuary.

“Do you think the Whites could get to us there?”

“I don’t know, Murphy. I just know every time we underestimate them, every time we think we’re safe, it all goes to shit.”

“Ah, Pessimistic Zed. It’s good to have you back, man.”

I shook my head and smiled. “I’m just trying to work the Murphy plan. Shouldn’t you be encouraging me?”

“I was.”

“Whatever.”

As the sky above us blackened enough for the stars to sparkle, Murphy said, “I wonder how many normal people survived.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mr. Mays would have been the last one we saw, right?”

“There were a bunch of them holed up at Camp Mabry.”

“But they’re all dead now, right?”

I shook my head emphatically. “We don’t know that.”

“We saw the bones, man.”

“Yeah, we saw a lot of bones. But Freitag and Harris got out with that skinny guy, what’s-his-name. More must have gotten away.”

Murphy shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so. You think there might be some all around then, just hiding?”

“Hiding seems to be the best solution. Or getting out of town. Holy shit. I forgot about the family we helped up on 183 the other day.”

Murphy smiled. “Yeah, I totally forgot about that. Zed, I feel good about that.” Murphy stopped walking and turned to look at me. “This is a big, fucked up world now. But I feel good about that. We did the right thing.”

I never was the sentimental type, nor the enthusiastic type, but Murphy’s happiness over the good deed rubbed off. It was something to feel good about. It was a sad little tragedy in the making that, because of our intervention, had a happy ending. Without the vocabulary to express how good it did feel, I simply said, “Yeah.”

With smiles buoyed by that one act of kindness, we walked down the dark road toward the other side of the lake.

Slow Burn Book 6, ‘Bleed’

Chapter 1

The sound of ten thousand wild apes was on the wind. It drifted over the terrain on an unsteady breeze. It floated over us and disappeared, only to come back. The naked horde was near. Where, we weren’t sure.

At the end of the dam, Murphy looked at me and said, “Well?”

“Bon Jovi concert?”

Murphy bit back a laugh. “It’s nice when you take that stick out of your ass. You’re almost a funny guy.”

“Sounds like envy talking, to me.”

The moon was on the rise and its light gave us a view of Lake Travis’ water level—well above normal. A park spread across a peninsula to our right. Picnic pavilions down near the water’s edge were partially submerged. Waves lapped over their concrete benches and tables.

Pointing almost directly north, across the base of the peninsula, I said, “If we cut straight that way, we’ll be in the woods that run along the shore.”

Murphy had no preference on direction, though he swiveled his head, trying to find the location of the horde. “Okay.”

“I don’t know if you ever came out to Lake Travis much…”

“Can’t swim.”

“Yeah.” I continued to point across the park. “The shore of Lake Travis is mostly a series of peninsulas separated by inlets that used to be canyons or creeks flowing down to the Colorado River.”

“It’s like I’m back in seventh-grade geography.”

I ignored Murphy’s comment. “And most of the inlets have marinas in them. Where there’s no marina, there should be plenty of private boathouses. I’m betting we won’t have to walk far to find a boat.”

“Sounds good.” Murphy looked off in the direction that the sound of the horde seemed to be coming from. “What about them?”

“Don’t know. The way the sound bounces around the hills, I can’t tell from one minute to the next where they are. What do you think? Should we go back across the dam and try the other side of the lake?”

Murphy looked back along the road across the top of the dam. “They could be over there too. Until we actually see ‘em, we’re not gonna know where they are for sure. I’d say let’s stay close to the water on this side. If we need to escape, we just go in.”

I pretended a double take. “You want to go in the water?”

Murphy said, “I can’t swim, but I’m not neurotic about it. The water’s calm, so if I have to wade in chest-deep to keep from getting eaten by a bunch of those skinny bastards, it won’t bother me a bit.”

I looked across the park. Nearly all of the dense cedars had been cut down, leaving only the big oaks. Despite the moonlight and shadows, I was able to see most of the park. I didn’t see any infected moving about. I could only hope they weren’t squatting in the deep shadows. “Let’s cut across the park, get on the other side of that cove over there, and start following the shore. It’ll take longer to get where we’re going, but it’s the safe play. You’re right, having the water as an escape route is a good thing. Besides, we might come across a stray boat along the way.”

“Rock on, brother.”

Keeping a vigilant eye all around, we followed the road as it curved off the dam. We turned right onto the paved park road and descended as quietly as we could while the pavement changed from smooth asphalt to crunchy chip seal.

Murphy leaned in close and whispered, “In this light, you damn near glow.”

I looked down at my arms and legs. He was right. I frowned. Anyone or anything in the shadows would easily see us.

Murphy grinned. “At least when the Whites see us, they’ll think we’re just like them.”

I shrugged. He was probably right about that.

“Maybe they won’t fuck with us.”

It was a valid hope.

We followed the road down past the ranger’s booth. Nobody was there to take our fee. I smiled at the thought of getting into the park for free, probably just a manifestation of my over-developed aversion to authority. Near the edge of the water, the road traced the curve of the cove on the north boundary of the park’s peninsula.

The sound of the Whites seemed to fade as we followed the shore. The thing we didn’t take into account, not really, as we walked along with the lake on our right, was that the hill rising to our left deflected most of the howls and cries above us, making the voices of the infected seem more distant than they actually were.

At the tip of the peninsula, as it started its curve back around to the next cove, the hill that ran the length of the peninsula was cut off, forming a cliff that grew to thirty or forty feet above the level of the water. Before starting up the hill, I asked, “If we go up there, we might find ourselves having to jump off. Are you afraid of heights?”

“I’m afraid of depths.” Murphy said, as though his meaning was perfectly clear.

“Depths?”

“You know, how deep will that water be when I splash down? Seems that if it’s deep enough for me to jump in without getting hurt, it’ll be over my head and I’ll drown.”

“You need to learn to swim.” I looked up the face at the highest point on the cliff. “Let’s take it real slow. If we hear or see anybody, we can run back down before getting in the water.”

With a nod, Murphy said, “Works for me.”

The light from the moon grew brighter and whiter the further up it moved in the sky. Shadows shortened, and it became easier to see between the trees and understand the shapes we saw in the shadows around us. Out across the lake, the pale limestone walls of the old church at the peak of the hill on Monk’s Island stood out prominently against the dark green and black background on the far shore.

“We’ll be there soon enough,” Murphy whispered, seeing that I was looking more toward the goal than watching for dangers.

As we neared the top of the hill, the sound of the naked horde grew exponentially louder, and it became apparent that they were somewhere down on the other side. I stopped, squatted, and looked back at Murphy. In a soft voice, I asked, “You hearing what I’m hearing?”

“Yup.”

“Should we go back?” I asked.

“To go back is to go all the way around the lake.” Murphy thought about that for a moment as his gaze followed the tall pale-colored dam standing high above the surface of the lake to where it merged with the far shore. “Or we cut through the woods and hope we don’t run into them somewhere out there.”

“So, what are you saying?”

Murphy nodded his head in the direction leading just over the crest of the hill. “They’re over there. There’s no doubt about that. But it doesn’t sound to me like they’re that close. Maybe they’re across the water, on the next peninsula over. If that’s the case, we might find a boat just down there in the water, and we’re home free.”

Stalling while I thought about it, I scanned the shadows through the thick cedar fronds. Usually, it was me rushing in with half a plan and my balls in my hand. Suddenly finding myself in the role of advocating the cautious path felt awkward. “Or there are a hundred of them squatting in the shadows just over the ridge and getting ready to eat us for dinner.”

“Here’s what I think.” Murphy patted a big hand across his M4. “We’ve got these. We’ve got suppressors. We’ve got lots of ammunition.”

“Murphy, you know as well as I do that I can’t hit a damn thing I shoot at anymore.” My frustration over that recent development came out in my tone.

“Don’t get all bitchy on me, dude. The Murphy’s got a plan. We’re not going to shoot at anything far away, just Whites that happen to be coming at us. With our suppressors, that’s kind of a safe thing for us. Sure, every White close by will come at us, but not every single one within a mile. Wear your gun down on your hip, like they do in the movies. Don’t aim. Just point and shoot. When they get close enough, you’ll hit them. You’ll use up lots of bullets, but as long as you reload in a hurry, they’ll never lay a hand on you.”

“And you think that’ll work.” I wasn’t sold.

Murphy grinned. “Sure it will.”

Murphy held his rifle up. “Look at the way I’m supporting the barrel with my left hand right now. See how I have my index finger pointing parallel to the barrel?”

“Looks awkward,” I said.

“It’s a night firing technique. You don’t aim. You just point your finger at what you want to shoot and you hit it. It’s supposed to be a more natural mental process, I mean pointing your finger rather than aiming your gun.”

It sounded like a lie, but what the fuck. I put my pistol in its holster and sheathed my machete. It took a moment to get my sling adjusted. I stood up, and feeling like a silent Rambo with both hands on my rifle, I practiced the grip and the movement.

“At least you look cool.” Murphy chuckled softly.

And I felt pretty cool, too. I only hoped that I could hit something before it was close enough to bite me. “Let’s go.”

With slow, silent footsteps, we crested the hill. The wide mouth of the cove was visible down through the trees. Wide implied deep, and that implied a marina might be off to our left somewhere, out of sight. Taking alternate looks into the trees, down the hill along the edge of the cliff, and across the wide mouth of the inlet, I didn’t see any white bodies glowing in the moonlight. The sound of the howling and hooting made it clear that the horde was close.

Halfway down the hill, a giant chunk of limestone jutted up to our left like a daredevil’s motorcycle jumping ramp, its highest point just above the height of the trees that grew out of the hill at the foot of the ramp.

I turned to Murphy and pointed up the ramp.

He looked up, thought about it for a second and nodded. “Careful, though. I’ll bet we’ll be able to see the whole cove from up there—”

I interrupted, “But anything in the cove will be able to see us.”

He nodded.

Double-checking the shadows in the trees to my right and left, I started my slow walk up the limestone ramp. At first, the soil was thick enough to support the growth of grass, but by the time I was halfway up, the soil had thinned to nothing. I sank to a crouch. The crouch became a crawl on my hands and knees, and at the top, that turned into a belly crawl. I poked my nubby-haired white head over the edge, silhouetting myself against the dark sky behind, hoping I’d go unnoticed.

Murphy scrambled up beside me.

Just below us, a dense canopy of cedars and oaks blanketed the slope all the way to the water’s edge. A crooked finger of an inlet a few hundred feet wide and a half-mile long cut back between the hills. Down at the end of the cove, the trees gave way to a solid mass of naked, angry white bodies covering the shores, roofs, and docks—the horde. They howled, they jumped, and they grasped. They were frustrated about the expanse of water that separated them from a ski boat floating in water down near the end, trapped there by a shamble of floating docks. Those docks appeared to have detached from their moorings during the flooding and jammed themselves together to form a floating barrier across the width of the cove. And that barrier was covered with hundreds of bald-headed Whites.

Those people trapped in the ski boat had to be normal.

“We can’t do anything to help those people.” Murphy looked down at his watch before whispering, “I’ll give you thirty seconds to lay your Null Spot bullshit on me before we get out of here.”

Without looking at him, I said, “Fuck you, Murphy.”

“Time’s a wastin’.”

I pointed to our right. “Look over there. I see three boats close enough to shore that we can get one. They’re all probably far enough away from the infected that they won’t notice.”

In a tentative tone, Murphy said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I know that’s not all.”

I shook my head and flatly replied, “Maybe if we float out close to the docks, shoot a few Whites, toss a few hand grenades, we can give those people a chance to get out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ll be in the boat,” I said. “We won’t be in any danger.”

“You know it won’t work out like that, right?”

“Don’t be such a pessimist,” I told him.

“Fine, but if I get bit—“

“Yeah, I know,” I said flatly. “You’re going to punch me in the face.”

Murphy grinned. “You’re my favorite, Null Spot. I’d never punch you in the face.”

We put our crawling skills in reverse and made our way back down the ramp.

Chapter 2

I chose the ski boat drifting closest to the mouth of the cove, the one furthest from the mob of Whites wreaking their havoc on the marina. The vessel wasn’t close enough to shore to wade out to, but it was no trouble to swim. I climbed in at the stern, up the ski ladder, through deep ankle deep rainwater still standing on the deck, and took a seat at the helm. That’s when the gaping hole in my plan exposed itself.

No key.

No fucking key.

Why in the hell did I have a blind spot in my brain for the necessity of boat keys?

“Dammit.” I huffed and tried my best not to throw a toddler tantrum, and thought about punching the steering wheel as though it was the boat’s fault for requiring the key. Well, I guess in a way, it was. But noise was bad, a lesson I’d been taught at least a dozen times already.

I calmed myself with a long, slow breath, looked over to where I’d left Murphy on the shore and signaled a thumbs-down. Murphy stepped out of his concealing shadow. I pantomimed turning a key in the ignition and shook my head. He deflated and looked around the cove. He was as disappointed as I was.

Nevertheless, I found a rope attached near the bow. Taking it in hand, I slipped silently into the water on the boat’s starboard side and went to work towing the boat back near the shore. It was slow going, of course, but I only had to cover half the distance before my feet hit bottom, fifteen feet from shore. I stood up and waved Murphy over.

A few minutes later we were both squatted in the boat, the hull hiding us from view. I whispered, “This one’s got no keys.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Murphy looked around inside the boat. “You thinking we should paddle this thing?”

Down at the end of the cove, the Whites erupted in an enthusiastic roar. I guessed that one of the people trapped in the ski boat had done something to raise their excitement and make them think their long-awaited meal was at hand.

“No paddling,” I told Murphy. “I figured you were safer here in the boat than on shore. You can wait here while I swim to the other boats and see if I can find one that’ll start.”

Murphy looked up over the gunwale. “Boats are scattered all up and down the inlet. Can you swim that far?”

I looked up, though I didn’t really need to. Whether I could swim that far or not was irrelevant. I’d already decided that I would swim that far and that was that. I ditched the rest of my equipment, save my knife and pants. I removed my boots and stood up to get a good look at the boats that were scattered around the cove. I figured I’d start with boats closer to the mouth of the cove and slowly work my way through the boats in order as they got close to the end of the marina. It was a choice of order that would mean more swimming than just going from boat to closest boat, but staying away from the Whites was my priority.

“If you can do it quietly, why don’t you bail this water out while I check the other boats? That way, if we have to paddle, this one will weigh less.” I slipped over the side. Before I swam away, I said, “Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

It was a hundred-yard swim to a pontoon boat floating in the middle of the cove’s mouth. In all the time I’d spent on our old pontoon boat down on Lake Austin, I’d developed an affinity for the cumbersome but useful watercraft. As I climbed up on the pontoon boat’s deck, I was hoping pretty hard that the keys would be aboard. I spent ten minutes silently searching in compartments and under seat cushions for a hidden spare set, but had no luck. I slipped back into the water and headed for the next boat.

Working my way from boat to boat, back and forth across the narrowing cove from mouth to marina, I spent an hour searching fourteen boats, getting more and more discouraged as fatigue set in. With each boat I reached, I got closer and closer to the drifting docks and the grasping hands of frenzied Whites. And though I knew the Whites I’d encountered so far feared the water like kryptonite, I’d also come to realize they’d eventually figure out how to swim. It was bound to happen, either on purpose or by accident. Considering how many times I’d bet my life on their fear, I knew at some point that bet would stop paying off. Nevertheless, some quirk in my psyche required that I finish searching the boats, though my hope was gone and my perception of the risk was growing.

I dropped myself into the water and started swimming another lap across the cove. On the way, I silently cursed the marina manager for his diligence in seeing to it that none of the owners of boats in his marina had keys left onboard. I reached the stern of a boat as I felt my toes kicking rocks on the bottom. Looking around at the shore and the floating dock, I stood up and was just able to keep my head above the surface as I caught my breath. All the swimming was wearing me down. I needed calories. And I needed to start getting them on a more regular schedule.

I managed a noiseless entry into the boat and rolled over on my back, laying my head on the deck for a moment as I reconsidered how committed I was to searching the final few ski boats. When I got up on my knees and looked around for a spot to start my search, my curiosity piqued. Each of the boats I’d already searched—I guessed—had been docked when the world had run off its rails. In every boat nearly everything inside was stowed. At least half of them had canvas covers. But this boat had two gas cans sitting in the stern beside a dirty cooler, and lengths of rope were coiled sloppily on the deck. It was littered with plastic food wrappers, empty soda cans, and brass shell casings.

I flipped back the cooler lid and looked inside. Unopened soda cans, bottled water, and snack foods.

Bingo?

Something wasn’t right.

I realized that this boat probably belonged to the scavengers trapped in the marina on the other side of the floating docks. They’d probably arrived on this boat to do their scavenging. The white horde showed up unexpectedly, and when they were running to get back to their boat, they got cut off and jumped into the first boat they could get to. Unfortunately for them, that boat was trapped in the end of the cove by the docks that were jammed across it.

A muted splash behind the boat startled me. I grabbed my knife and spun, peeking over the stern of the boat as I did so.

A head was on the surface and coming at me.

I got ready to stab as it occurred to me that the person in the water wasn’t white—not Caucasian white, and certainly not virus white. One of the trapped scavengers, a black woman, must have swum under the floating docks, managed to get far enough up the cove to surface unseen, and come over.

The scavenger was nearly within arms’ reach, and I extended a hand out to help her. But she looked up and gasped, making a sudden desperate effort to change her direction.

That confused me for half a second and I leaned farther out.

Duh!

I was white-skinned and still pretty close to bald. I was naked from the waist up and wielding a knife in one hand while I reached for her with the other. She saw that I was infected.

I laid my knife on the deck, raised my palms to show that I wasn’t a threat, and whispered, “It’s okay.”

The girl came to a stop as she started to tread water, confusion on her face.

I waved her over. “C’mon. It’s okay.”

The girl cast a look at the Whites on the floating docks, gave me the same fearful look, and continued to tread water.

I pointed over the ski boat’s port side, the side that couldn’t be seen by the Whites on the floating docks. “Swim over here. They won’t be able to see you.”

The girl stayed where she was.

“It’s okay. You can stand up over here. It’s not that deep.”

It took a few long moments of thought, but the girl eventually complied, swam over out of view, and stood up in water that came up to the middle of her chest. She kept herself well out of reach.

Whispering, I said, “Look, I know I look like them, but I’m a Slow Burn.”

“What’s that?”

“Doesn’t really matter. I got the fever, but I recovered. I’m normal now. Well, except for my skin color.”

“You look just like Them,” she said.

“I know. It’s a problem,” I conceded. “Look, we’re here to help you guys. You don’t need to be afraid.”

“We?”

“I’ve got a buddy in a boat, down over there.” I pointed toward the mouth of the cove.

“What are you doing in our boat?”

I gestured across the other boats in the cove. “I’ve been trying to find a boat with keys in it.”

“If you don’t have a boat,” she asked, “then how’d you get here?”

“We walked.” I was running low on patience. “Jesus Christ, do you want to get in or not?”

The girl looked around, thought about it for a minute, and said, “You had a knife a moment ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Give it to me,” she told me.

“You’re not going to stab me are you?” I smiled, not sure if I was serious or joking.

The girl glared back. “I just don’t want you to stab me. Give me the knife and I’ll come on board.”

“You know you’re not really in the best negotiating position, don’t you?”

“The knife.”

Rolling my eyes to show the pointlessness of it, I picked my knife up, took a good look into the shadows under the trees on the bank, turned it handle-out, and reached it out to her.

Not making any effort to reach up for the knife, the girl turned toward the woods and asked, “Who are you looking for?”

“Seriously?” I rolled my eyes again. “There are Whites everywhere.”

“Whites?”

I pointed at the infected on the docks, hooting and jumping but still focused on the survivors trapped in the boat on the other side. “That’s what we call them.”

“Not exactly politically correct.”

“Really?” I laughed harshly, but quietly. “Is that still a thing?”

The girl looked at me sternly.

I asked, “What do you call them?”

“Them,” she said.

“Just…Them?” I asked.

The girl nodded.

“Imaginative.” Sarcasm is such a handy device to communicate so much while saying so little. I asked, “Are you getting in the boat or not?”

The girl reached up and took the knife, finally allowing me to let go and drop my arm. She said, “Go up by the bow. I’ll get in at the stern.”

“Whatever.” I duck-walked to the front of the boat to keep myself out of sight. I squatted while she climbed over the stern, dripping a whole new puddle onto the deck.

With the knife held ready for use, she crouched and moved up to the middle of the boat next to the helm.

“Can we be friends now?” I asked.

“You said you were going to help us. What did you have in mind?”

I shrugged and looked around.

The girl heaved a long, tired sigh. “You were just going to steal the boat, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, well no. Not really.” I pointed back up the cove. “My buddy thought we should, but I was thinking maybe we could help you guys out.”

“Really.” She didn’t believe anything I was saying. It did sound like lies.

I said, “We were going to start up one of these boats, drive it over in the middle by the docks, and shoot a bunch of them so you guys could cross over and get out.”

“You watch too many action movies.” The girl looked at the mob of Whites.

“We have grenades, too.”

The girl shook her head.

“Do you have a better idea?” I asked. “I mean, you obviously swam over here. What’s your plan?”

The girl looked down at the deck.

I asked, “Are the others going to swim over as well?”

“I made it most of the way under water. None of the others can swim that far. If they come up for air too close to the floating dock, some of Them might jump in on top of them.”

I looked over at the Whites who were howling loudly again. “It could happen. So what’s your plan?”

“We have people.”

“People?” I asked.

“I was going to go get help.” The girl looked out at the dark lake.

“Cool, let’s start this puppy up. My buddy is down there in the boat by the mouth of the cove. We can pick him up on the way out, and if you could drop us off somewhere up the lake, that’d be great.”

The girl cast a worried look toward the mouth of the cove.

“Trust me,” I said. “You’ll like him. He never stops smiling except when he’s talking, which is a lot. You’ll love him.”

The girl wasn’t convinced.

“Look, I don’t want to steal your boat,” I said. “Just take us around the bend and let us out. That’ll get us past these Whites and we can go about our business. You can go get your people and we’ll all be cool.”

“What business do you have in the middle of the night?”

I looked back at the Whites and into the shadows. “Probably the same business you have, okay? Looking for food. Trying to find our friends. Trying to stay alive long enough to see the sun come up.”

“You’re looking for lost friends?”

I was getting a little perturbed. “You’ve got lots of questions for somebody who doesn’t seem to want our help. Can we just get going and get out of here? We’ll leave you to help your friends or whatever.” I pointed at the boat up the cove that Murphy was in. “Can you at least drop me off at that boat?  We’ll just paddle it across the cove and be on our way.”

The girl looked at me without giving away anything with her expression. I waited for a few moments for a response then said, “Whatever the fuck. Look, I’ll just swim back down and you can do whatever. But I want my knife back.”

The girl looked at my knife still in her hand.

“It was my grandpa’s knife.” Sure, it was a lie, but the next part wasn’t. “It has sentimental value. Will you at least hand it to me when I get back in the water? You’re not going to try and steal my fucking knife, are you?”

It took the girl a moment before she said anything. “Okay. I’ll give you a ride down there and I’ll drop you off a little north of the cove if that’s what you want.” She held my knife out toward me. “Sorry about your grandpa.”

“Me, too.”

“What was his name?”

“Mr. Mays.”

“You called your grandpa Mr. Mays?”

“It’s a long story.”

I put the knife back in its old leather sheath. The girl started the boat’s motor. A thousand white faces turned our way and a tremendous wave of jubilant screams drowned out all other sound.

As she pressed the lock button and shifted the throttle into reverse, the engine revved and the boat moved away from the shore. Still in the bow, I looked into the trees to see if any Whites were crazy enough to make the jump out of the shadows. But as soon as I put that thought together, the rope that was attached to the bow and to a tree on the shore lifted up out of the water snapped taut, and jerked the boat to a stop. Having no such rope attached to me, I kept going and fell backwards onto the deck, bouncing my skull on the fiberglass.

Through the stars, I heard the engine rev higher. I heard the rope snap and heard it whip through the air in the space where I’d just been standing. “Ouch.”

The boat was moving.

My feet were still in the bow, and I was on my back on the deck, my head next to the girl where she sat behind the wheel. She looked down at me. “You okay?”

“I guess.”

“Sorry about that. Can you get up?”

“Give me a sec’ for my brains to stop rattling around.”

The girl reversed the throttle, he sound of the engine changed, and the boat started to move away from shore. My head rolled to the side as the boat turned and I found myself looking at her feet, and especially at her ankle. She had an owl tattoo.

Chapter 3

When I started laughing, she probably thought I was nuts.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and as I maneuvered myself into the seat opposite her, I asked, “Did you go to Rice?”

She looked at me and then down at her feet. “Oh, the tattoo. I’ve never had anybody laugh at it before.”

“Is that a popular tattoo for Rice alumni?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Your name wouldn’t be Rachel, would it?”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. Then her eyes turned angry. “How do you know that?”

We’d covered half the distance to the boat where Murphy was patiently waiting. “You’re never going to believe who I’m with.”

Still wary, Rachel asked, “Who?”

I thought about making Rachel wait on the answer but figured that her being on the edge of suspicion wasn’t good for either of us. “Murphy.”

Tears flowed. “Murphy.”

I nodded.

“My brother, Murphy Smalls.”

“Yep.”

She shook her head. “If this is some kind of trick…”

“We’ll be there in a second. You’ll see for yourself.”

Rachel slowed the boat and cut the engine so that we could drift up to the other boat.

It was my turn to worry. Murphy’s head didn’t pop up to see us coming. He didn’t wave. Something was wrong.

“Quiet,” I whispered.

The girl was immediately tense. “What? What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I stood and hurried to the bow of the boat. Out of some innate protective habit, I motioned for Rachel to stay behind. She didn’t.

The bow of our boat nudged the other ski boat on the port side and I grabbed a handful of chrome rail to hold the two boats together. I leaned over to get a look inside. Murphy was lying on the deck. His head was on a cushion. He was asleep. “Motherfucker!”

“What?”

I turned to Rachel. “He’s taking a nap.”

Rachel squeezed past me as I sheathed my knife. With all the grace of a gymnast, she hopped into the other boat and landed on the deck beside Murphy. Tears were flowing in earnest. She knelt beside him and shook him until he woke.

I don’t know what Murphy was dreaming about, but my bet was that it wasn’t as good as what he saw when he woke up. It took a few moments for him to figure out that he was really awake, but once he did, both he and Rachel hugged and smiled, cried, laughed, and hugged some more.

When they settled down, Murphy started to ask questions so fast that Rachel had no chance to answer. But Rachel knew how to get down to business. “Murphy, we’ll talk later. Right now, my people are trapped on a boat over there. You guys came down here to get them out. Do you have any ideas besides that John Wayne silliness your buddy told me about?”

“Hey!” I thought it was a reasonable plan, considering the circumstances.

Murphy looked at me with a question on his face, but talked to Rachel. “When did you get so bossy?”

Rachel looked at me like I’d said something. I pointed back at Murphy. “I thought you said she was nice.”

Rachel turned to Murphy. “You and your friends. How can you go through life without ever growing up?”

I said, “I’m getting kinda sorry about convincing you to get in the boat.”

Rachel shot me a blazing look, then turned to stare for a minute at the infected making a ruckus on the floating docks. She looked back at me, all the hardness gone. “Thank you for being patient enough to convince me to get in the boat with you.”

The switch took me aback. “You’re welcome.”

Murphy said, “Don’t be hard on him. He’s a good guy. He saved my life.”

“Thank you for that, too.” Rachel stuck out a hand. “You know my name…”

“I’m Zed.”

“Zed? Really?”

“Don’t ask. It’s not as interesting nor as immature as it seems.”

Rachel looked back at the floating docks. “I have an idea.”

Chapter 4

“He can hold his breath forever. I seen him do it.” That’s what Murphy had said to convince Rachel that I should be the one to go into the water with the rope. I hadn’t wanted the job, but I wasn’t going to argue about it. Based on little more than the fact that I had dangling genitalia, I believed I could do pretty much any physically demanding task better than Rachel.

So there I was, holding my breath beneath one of the floating docks, trying my best to tie a knot in the rope that I’d just wrapped around a metal brace before I ran out of air. If I didn’t finish it, there was no room to surface beneath the dock, as it floated on giant cubes of Styrofoam. I’d have to swim away from the dock underwater, catch my breath, and come back for another try. But I’d already been under three times; I was losing my patience, and my endurance was shortening with each submersion. When I wrapped the end of the rope under and through a loop for probably the fourth time, I decided that was good enough, and I pushed myself off of the brace and swam through the black water until I ran out of air.

I surfaced a good twenty feet from the dock. Many of the infected were very interested in what I was doing, but I was too far out in the water for any of them to think about coming for me. I swam another ten or fifteen feet to the boat, and Murphy gave me a hand climbing in.

“All secure?” Rachel asked from the driver’s seat.

“Good to go,” I answered.

She started the boat motor and got the attention of any Whites on the dock that weren’t already sizing us up. She engaged the propeller, and the boat started its slow progress forward.

“Easy,” Murphy told her. There was a lot of slack in the ski rope that connected the boat to the floating dock. We didn’t want it to jerk and break. “Easy.”

We passed through a few more boat lengths.

“How am I doing?” Rachel asked.

Murphy was standing in the stern of the boat. I was standing there as well. The rope was attached to some ski rope thingy between us on the back of the boat. It was designed to pull skiers, and we deduced that it was the best place to attach the rope.

Murphy turned to Rachel. “All the slack is coming out. Almost there.”

The rope pulled up out of the lake and drew taut. As the tension squeezed all the water out of the rope’s fibers the boat stopped moving.

Murphy said, “Okay.”

Rachel revved the engine higher. The propeller churned the water to white foam behind the boat. The rope hummed under the added tension. The docks groaned and lurched, but the section we’d tied onto didn’t break away from the ones it was jammed against.

Rachel looked back. “Is it working?”

“More gas.” Murphy told her.

More water turned white. The dock didn’t move.

“C’mon,” I muttered.

Rachel pushed the throttle all the way forward. The engine whined. Whites were coming up on both sides of the cove. Still, the docks didn’t separate.

To Murphy, I said, “It seemed like a solid plan.”

With the sound of a gunshot, the ski rope snapped. A length of it ripped the air between Murphy and me, slung through the center of the boat and out over the bow, popping again before flinging itself up above the boat to fall harmlessly down.

“God damn!” Murphy looked at me. “You all right?”

To my surprise, I was. I nodded without a word.

“Damn, Rachel,” said Murphy “You almost put my eye out.”

“You sound like my mom,” she said. “Are you guys okay?”

“Except for the mess in my pants,” joked Murphy.

“Zed, you okay?” she asked.

“I might have to change my pants, too,” I answered.

Rachel rolled her eyes and huffed. “I guess we’re back to the John Wayne plan.”

Chapter 5

Our boat floated sideways near the center of the cove, fifty or sixty feet from the nearest of the log-jammed docks. Murphy had his M4 ready. Rachel had my M4. I had my pistol and machete ready just in case any of the Whites fell into the water and figured that they could swim after us. We didn’t need any passengers besides the ones we were trying to collect.

Murphy looked at Rachel and me. “Here’s the way this is going to work. I count to three and we all throw a hand grenade.”

Rachel gestured toward the dock and hefted a grenade, testing its weight. “I don’t know if I can throw it that far.”

Murphy rolled his eyes. “Trust me. You can throw it that far.”

“Can’t we get a bit closer?” she asked.

“If we get closer we’ll get hit by shrapnel.”

I said, “I vote we don’t move closer.”

Murphy rolled his eyes again. “Rachel, you toss yours right over at those Whites in front of us. Zed will throw one down that way, I’ll throw mine down this way. Try not to get them in the water. They’ll be useless if that happens.”

Rachel looked at the grenade in her hand and back up at the dock. She wasn’t sure.

“The first hand grenade will be easy,” Murphy explained. “Just throw it at one of them. It’ll hit and drop down to the dock. When you throw the second, hopefully there will be fewer of them still standing on the docks, so it’ll be harder to get the grenade to land there.”

Rachel answered, “Okay.”

I nodded.

Murphy continued. “This is the important part. I’ll count to three and we all throw on three. Both times. As soon as you throw, drop down onto the deck. You don’t want any shrapnel coming back and hitting you.”

“I thought you said we were far enough out for that not to happen?” Rachel asked.

“Stay on your feet if you want to.” Murphy closed one eye. “But you might put your eye out.” He laughed. “After the grenades, we shoot everything that moves on the docks. Questions?”

Looking at Rachel, I asked, “And your friends will know to start swimming this way when they see most of the Whites on the docks are preoccupied with us or busy bleeding out?”

“Yes.”

“Good, we don’t have enough bullets to kill all of them, and we’ll use them up pretty quickly.”

Murphy laughed, “The bullets will last a lot longer now that you’re not shooting.”

Rachel didn’t understand why Murphy was teasing me about my shooting. “They’ll come.”

“Ready?” Murphy asked.

Both Rachel and I gave him a nod.

“Pull your pins.”

We did.

“One. Two. Three.”

All three grenades flew at the dock and we dropped to the boat’s deck. Moments later, three near-simultaneous explosions rocked across the water. Bits of shrapnel smacked the boat’s hull.

The tenor of the White’s screams changed dramatically. The ones close by wailed in pain. Those on shore screamed in anger over their empty bellies and the number of white bodies standing between them and the feast left in the wake of the explosions.

Murphy jumped to his feet. Rachel and I were up a half second later, each of us already pulling a pin from a grenade.

The first three grenades had found their marks and left big gaps in what was a solid wall of white flesh. Bodies were down, broken and bleeding. Some of the infected were dazed and wounded but still on their feet. Others had been knocked into the water by the blasts. Most of those were drowning. Some were keeping their heads above the surface.

“One. Two. Three!”

Three more grenades arced toward the dock and again, Murphy, Rachel, and I dropped to the deck, with a little more conviction than on the previous time. We’d all heard the shrapnel hitting the hull and zinging through the air overhead.

Explosions followed, two on the dock, one in the water.

I jumped to my feet, machete and pistol ready to work. Murphy was already firing. Rachel squeezed off her first rounds a moment later. Bodies were down across seventy or eighty feet of the dock. Plenty were still standing upright, enraged and screaming. Others were starting to feed on their fallen brethren. Bullets ripped indiscriminately through them all.

Rachel stopped firing, waved a hand, and hollered to the passengers of the trapped boat. “Swim! Now! Go! Swim!” She went back to shooting.

I waved at the three to come.

It took a moment for them to reach a decision, or maybe just to figure out what was being requested, but one of them shed his weapon and dove over the side. The other two stood up, lost their heavy gear, and followed their partner into the water.

I shouted, “They’re coming!”

Whites pressed thickly together, trying to rush across the docks toward the middle. Some fell as Murphy and Rachel shot. Others were pushed into the water. Some were trampled in the mob.

The first of Rachel’s trapped friends made it to the dock, ducked under, and surfaced a moment later on our side. His eyes were wide with fear. He splashed rapidly and inefficiently as panic drove him to claw his way through the water.

I waved him over to me. “C’mon.”

A White howled nearby.

To my right, a White had somehow made it over to lay a hand on the stern. I hacked his wrist through with my machete and the White went under, getting a mouthful of water, leaving his hand behind.

The first swimmer reached the boat. I holstered my pistol and reached down. “I gotcha! C’mon.”

The man gripped my hand and I pulled. He got another hand on the rail. I let go and reached over his back to pull on his belt. As second later, he flopped over the gunwale and rolled onto his back on the deck.

One down!

I quickly searched across the water around us. No Whites were close enough to be a danger.

Under the cover of bullets, the other two swimmers had cleared the dock. I sheathed my machete and reached out across the gap to the one in the lead. He took my hand and I pulled him up. A moment later, he was in the boat.

The last of the swimmers was a woman. These guys definitely weren’t the chivalrous types.

I reached down, and the girl’s small hand grasped mine. I pulled her up, and about the time she was halfway into the boat, she stopped. I looked at her face. She seemed to deflate as the word, “Shit,” hissed past her lips.

I couldn’t believe it.

“Fucking Freitag.”

Chapter 6

I wasted zero time in getting my M4 back from Rachel, irritating her significantly, as her first priority once the other three were in the boat was getting her butt planted in the seat at the helm. As each of the three caught their breaths and realized just how completely virus-white Murphy and I each were, the tension shot up rapidly.

Murphy, always great at reading fucked-up situations, had positioned himself in the bow of the boat from where he could see all of us at the same time. He had his rifle pointed down at the deck, but both hands were still on it. It was clear that it would take only a fraction of a second to bring it back to a firing position.

In the seat amidships next to Rachel, one of her buddies sat himself down, glancing alternately at me and then at Murphy, while Rachel engaged the propeller and started the boat moving toward the end of the cove. Freitag, looking like somebody had just flushed her pet goldfish, dropped onto a bench seat across the stern next to the other guy who was busying himself with suspicious sideways glances at me.

I was standing on the deck in the center of the boat, suddenly trying to decide which of the two guys we’d just rescued was a bigger threat. That’s to say that I wasn’t certain that either of them was, but I was getting a bad feeling.

Accelerating the boat, Rachel glanced at each of her friends. “You guys okay?”

Nods only. No verbal response.

Bad sign.

I shot Murphy a quick look to emphasize my suspicion. He winked. He knew. His voice boomed, “Here’s the deal, motherfuckers. Me and my boy Zed just saved your dumb asses. So if you want to keep giving us the stink eye, you can get out and swim home.”

“Murphy.” Rachel scolded.

I moved over to stand right behind Rachel’s seat, keeping my back to the water on the boat’s starboard side.

The guy in the seat on the port side looked at me, then turned to Murphy, and with no intonation at all said, “Thank you.”

Murphy acknowledged with a nod and looked at the other guy.

“Thanks.” He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and his face in his hands. He muttered, “We’re dead.”

A little pissed, I asked, “What?”

The guy didn’t respond.

Freitag answered for him. “He thinks you’re going to infect him.”

“Hey, dipshit.” I said to the guy, “If you haven’t gotten the fever yet, you’re not going to.”

The guy on the port side replied, “You don’t know that.”

“Oh jeez.” I rolled my eyes. “Well, if you were worried about getting infected, you should have just stayed home. Why were you even out scavenging?”

The guy on the port side told the guy in the back, “You only get it if they bite you.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “Where have you guys been, watching reruns of old zombie movies?” He looked at Rachel. “What are you doing with these hillbillies?”

The guy on the port side shot Murphy a dirty look.

Rachel, taking control, said, “Everybody stop. Just stop. I swear.” She turned to look at each of us. The boat was out into the lake by then, so precise steering was not required. “Murphy, these are my friends—Bill, Karl, and Freitag.”

With a dramatic roll of his eyes, Murphy said, “Oh yeah, we know Freitag.”

To the man sitting next to her, Rachel said, “Bill, you’re probably immune. That nurse who showed up a couple of days ago said the virus was airborne—”

Talking right over Rachel, Bill said, “You can’t trust just anybody who says they’re a nurse.”

“A nurse?” I asked.

Freitag answered. “Your red-headed boss showed up a couple of days ago.”

“Steph?” It was hard to smile with my mouth hanging agape.

Rachel said, “You know each other?”

Freitag added, “And the codger sergeant.”

“Dalhover,” I confirmed.

“And two of those girls from the riverboat.”

“Amy and Megan?”

“Yeah.”

Rachel looked at Murphy. “Those are the people you’re looking for?”

“Yeah,” Murphy answered. “They were headed for Monk’s Island.”

“That’s where we are,” she said.

“Dammit!” Bill got pissed. “Rachel, you can’t just tell anybody where we are.”

In a stern, “don’t fuck with me” mode, Rachel pointed at Murphy and told Bill, “That’s my brother. I’ll tell him whatever I want to tell him, so you’d better figure out a way to deal with it.”

Bill turned to look at the water, and after a moment he muttered, “I didn’t know it was your brother.”

“He, not it,” Rachel corrected. “Murphy is a person.”

Cowed, Bill sulked with his mouth shut while the occupants of the boat silently appraised one another. Nothing was said for a good long while, until Freitag voiced out loud a question she’d probably been silently asking herself since the moment she got into the boat. “What did I do in a previous life to deserve this?”

Murphy heard her and laughed.

I couldn’t help but offer up my opinion. “It’s what you did in this life, is my guess.”

Freitag, with her vicious tongue, shot back, “You’ve got no room to talk, Mr. Fuck You Canoe.”

I smiled at the memory of the moment when I told Freitag that she’d shot a hole in the canoe that I left her. It was one of the highlights of my post-apocalyptic life. I said, “As far as I’m concerned, we’re even.”

“Like I believe that.”

I reached out an empty hand. “If you’ll promise not to fuck with me anymore, I won’t fuck with you. Like I said, we’re even.”

Freitag looked at my extended hand, clearly reluctant to put her own hand into the trap that she thought it represented.

“Up to you,” I added.

Just as I was about to withdraw the offer, she stood up, wobbled a bit with the rocking of the boat, and grabbed my hand in her tiny grip. She didn’t smile. She wasn’t angry. Maybe resigned. “Even.” It was a hard thing for her to say.

“Even,” I confirmed.

She let go and sat back down.

I looked at Murphy. He was amused and disappointed. That made me wonder.

Bill asked Freitag, “What’s that about?”

“Long story,” she said.

Chapter 7

In the wee hours of the night when we neared Monk’s Island, a row of seven school bus-shaped silhouettes floated a short distance offshore. I wondered if those were the rental houseboats that Megan mentioned back when we’d all been on the riverboat on Lake Austin, talking about coming to Lake Travis for refuge. It looked like the group staying on Monk’s Island had beaten us to it.

A ski boat motored slowly toward us from the island. I couldn’t tell how many people were inside, but rifles bristled on its silhouette.

Rachel reduced our speed.

Bill pointed a thumb at Murphy and in a defeated voice said, “They’re not going to let us come back because of them.”

Rachel shut Bill up with a harsh look.

Murphy adjusted his grip on his rifle and looked at the boat out in front of us.

If Murphy was nervous, that was all the indication I needed. I looked down at my weapon, checked the safety, and ran a hand across the magazines in my MOLLE vest, trying to recall which ones were empty. I had a system for that, but I had gotten confused during the firefight in the cove. Now I didn’t know where the empty and full magazines were.

“Murphy,” Rachel said. “It’s okay. They probably saw extra people in the boat, and they’re coming out to check on us.”

“Uh-huh.” Murphy’s tone made it clear that he didn’t accept Rachel’s assessment.

Rachel pulled the throttle back and let the boat drift to a stop in the water. She turned the engine off.

I glanced around. Bill was nervous, and judging by the way he was looking at me, it was clear that if trouble started, he was going to make a move on me. Unfortunately for Bill, just a few feet in front of me, he was at a range I could still hit with my M4. Karl still had his face in his hands. Freitag just looked bored.

The boat from the island got within twenty or thirty feet of us. It throttled down and came to a stop in the water nearby. Three armed men stood behind two seated people. A woman’s voice called across, “Rachel, who’s with you?”

The rifles pointed at us.

Rachel said to me and Murphy, “Keep your weapons down. Don’t aim at them, please. They’re just being careful.” Then, Rachel called back, “Gretchen, it’s my brother and a friend of his.”

“Really?” Gretchen’s voice carried a degree of disbelief. “Did you find everything we needed at the pharmacy?”

That seemed like an odd question.

Rachel answered, “We got everything we needed at the pharmacy.”

Tension seemed to disappear instantly on the other boat. Rifles lowered and the engine revved to bring it toward us.

Rachel looked up at me, “A code phrase.”

Bill hissed, “Don’t tell them that!”

“Bill, be quiet.”

“We can’t trust them.”

Rachel nodded her head toward Murphy. “What part of ‘he’s my brother’ don’t you get?”

Murphy grinned, “Yeah, hillbilly.”

Bill shot Murphy a dirty look. The other boat floated up beside us. The people on board saw mine and Murphy’s white skin. That made them nervous. Rachel stood up. “Gretchen.”

Gretchen, an Amazonian goddess of a woman stood up, taller than any of her men. “We saw that you were coming back with more people than you left with. That’s why we came out to meet you.”

“Of course,” Rachel answered.

Bill stood up, unable to contain his anger over the situation anymore. “They’re infected. They’re both infected.”

“Shut up, Bill.” Rachel, nearly as tall as Murphy and muscular for a woman, looked ready to make sure that he did.

Bill looked back at Rachel.

Rachel said, “Bill, I’m in charge. You know how we do things. Now stop being a stupid ass.”

Bill dropped to his seat, muttering, “They’re going to infect us all.”

The guys on the other boat were getting a little nervous with their rifles.

I called across, “We’re Slow Burns. We got the virus, but we’re okay. We got better. We’re normal.”

“Normal?” Gretchen smiled broadly. “Were you always an albino?”

“Mostly normal,” I answered.

Rachel looked at me with an expression that made it clear that she was indeed in charge and that I should let her do the talking. After that, Rachel conveyed the story about what transpired in the cove, emphasizing that Murphy was indeed her brother.

When Rachel finished her story, Gretchen thanked both Murphy and me for what we’d done. “Here’s the way it works here. I’m in charge. I’ve got some people who help me. Rachel is one of them.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “The women are taking over the world.”

Gretchen looked at him with a stern face. “Is that a problem?”

With a big grin, Murphy shook his head. “No ma’am. I’m cool with it. I’m just sayin’, is all.”

Gretchen pointed at a lone houseboat anchored a good distance from the row I’d spotted a few minutes before. “When people come back from scavenging, we quarantine them there for twenty-four hours to make sure they don’t bring the infection onto the island. When new people come, we quarantine them a little longer while we’re deciding whether to let them join us.”

I looked at Freitag. I didn’t mean to. It just kind of happened. I asked, “Are you picky about who you let in?”

Freitag scratched her nose with her middle finger while she looked at me.

I suppressed a laugh.

Gretchen said, “We’re not trying to build an exclusive country club, if that’s what you’re asking. We’ve taken in everybody who has come so far. We’re trying to do our part.”

Murphy said, “Cool.”

Gretchen looked at Murphy. “Don’t get too excited. You guys are the first—what did you call them—Slow Burns?”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Only normal people have come so far. We’ll all talk about it. I’m not going to make any promises about whether you’ll be accepted to come onto the island.”

“We’re not contagious,” I protested.

“We’re not staying, anyway.” Murphy told them.

Rachel was taken aback. “What?”

Gretchen said, “The quarantine boat is over there, if you want to get on it.”

Bill was back on his feet and pointing at Murphy. “I’m not getting on that boat with Them. If I’m not infected already, I don’t want to get that way.”

Gretchen was clearly disappointed. “Don’t then, Bill. You can stay in a ski boat anchored over there as close as you feel comfortable. They can stay on the quarantine boat if they want to. They saved your life. I think you owe them at least that much.”

Bill muttered, “We’d ‘a got out.”

Chapter 8

It was weird, I mean, it was really weird. I was sitting on the end of a couch in the living room of a houseboat.  Murphy sat at the other end, in an apparent talking race with Rachel, who was in a comfy-looking chair near his end of the couch. All of the windows were open and a comfortable breeze was blowing through. Better yet, the screens kept the mosquitoes outside. I felt safe and anachronistically normal.

Freitag had gone down a narrow hallway and laid claim to one of the bedrooms, probably asleep already. Some fifty yards away from our spacious houseboat, Bill and Karl were in quarantine on their ski boat, discontented and being quite verbose about it. But it was their choice. So fuck ‘em.

Through the open windows I heard a boat motor up alongside. Talking jumbled to incomprehensibility with the noise of the boat engine and splashing waves. Several pairs of footsteps clomped along the deck outside. I looked at the door that faced that deck and was not surprised when it swung open. I was surprised when Steph came into the living room, followed closely by Dalhover. My mouth probably fell open as I struggled for something witty to say.

Steph hurried across the living room as I stood up. She threw her arms around me and we shared a long hug. She shuddered as she buried her face against my shoulder. Any ambivalence I had about sharing what I knew about her fiancée disappeared. Better to let her think that Jeff Aubrey died at the hospital.

With red-rimmed eyes, Steph pulled away and stepped over to give Murphy a hug—less affectionate, but a hug just the same.

Dalhover slapped me on the shoulder. “You made it.”

Seeing an extra helping of sadness in his eyes, I said, “I’m glad you guys did, too.”

He leaned in close, “There are some things you need to know.”

“We saw.”

Dalhover’s face asked the silent question.

“We were almost back. We were on the mountain. We saw what happened on the boat.”

Dalhover slowly shook his head. He had more regret in his voice than I thought possible. “We did what we could.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know. I know.”

Dalhover looked at Murphy and turned back to me. In a just-you-and-me tone, he said, “I’d ’a thought he’d take it harder.”

Softly, I answered. “You know Murphy. He cries his tears and moves on. He loved her. I mean, he really did.”

Dalhover nodded, slapped me on the shoulder again, and stepped over to shake Murphy’s hand and pass along his condolences for Mandi.

Gretchen came in through the still open door. A wiry, tall man with John Lennon glasses followed her in, closing the door behind him. He said, “You don’t want to let the mosquitoes in.”

Seeing the questions on all of our faces, Gretchen said, “I’m here now, so I’ll have to stay the full twenty four hours. I hope you don’t mind.”

Steph nudged me in the arm and said, “She’s the boss.”

Gretchen announced, “I wanted to talk to you about this Slow Burn thing before we decide to let you guys on the island. The people there are afraid of the virus. I need to find a way to ensure them that you won’t be a danger.”

Murphy, face strangely absent his smile, answered for both of us. “You don’t need to worry about that. Me and Zed, we ain’t stayin’. We just came to make sure our friends were okay.”

Rachel was not pleased. “I don’t know what you think you’re thinking, Murphy, but we need to talk about this.”

Murphy said, “Me and Zed got some killin’ to do.”

Chapter 9

While Murphy was getting his ear bent by Rachel, I made my way up to the sun deck on the houseboat’s roof. Steph, Gretchen, and Paul all came along.

As I was taking a seat on one of the long vinyl couch cushions, I asked, “Any news from the outside world?”

“Some,” Paul answered.

Gretchen and Paul sat on a couch along the starboard side. Gretchen said, “We had a man with a shortwave radio.”

I nodded knowingly.

Paul said, “Walter had a place up the lake a bit.”

“We talked about disassembling everything and moving it to the island,” Gretchen said.

“I wish we had,” said Paul. “He had everything set up at his house and had a generator, as well.”

Gretchen said, “He’d go there once every three or four days, with a few of our people along for protection. They’d fire up the generator and try to contact anyone they could.”

“It’s much more complicated than you’d guess,” said Paul. “Talking with someone five or ten miles away is easy, depending on your antenna. But talking to someone in—say—Dallas, or Florida, or South America, that’s a completely different thing.” Paul paused and started to slowly shake his head. “Unfortunately, they got overrun.”

“The Whites,” I said.

Paul nodded.

“Is the equipment still functional?” I asked.

Gretchen leaned forward. “Do you know how to operate a short wave radio?”

I shook my head. “I was just curious in case we come across another person who does.”

“No one has been back there,” said Paul. “We don’t know what state it’s in.”

Steph joined the conversation. “Tell him what you told me.”

Gretchen made herself comfortable in her seat. They’d managed to contact seven other groups of survivors in Texas alone. That sounded like a lot to me, though when one group turned out to have renovated an old titan missile silo out in West Texas, I wasn’t surprised that they’d survived. There could be any number of groups whose doomsday plans actually worked out.

What did surprise me was the mention that some group was in Fort Hood, an hour north—at least back when we had a highway system—reconstituting a military and claiming to be the new seat of Texas government.

One group, thirty-six people, were on what they described as a tall ship, an old three-masted sailing vessel used for training some group that nobody seemed to know. At any rate, they’d set themselves up as some kind of census and data group, trying to assess the state of affairs, trying to figure out how many people had survived, who had what, who needed what, and who might need help. No mention was made of how help might be provided.

The upshot was that although we felt alone in a sea of the infected, we weren’t. Others were finding ways to survive.

I asked, “So what’s the deal here? Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, Gretchen, why are you in charge? I know why we picked Steph to be our boss, but what’s your deal?”

Gretchen giggled a little before answering. “First come, first served.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Paul said, “We were the first here on the island.”

With genuine admiration, I said, “That was quick thinking, coming up with a safe place to ride this out and getting here first.”

Paul and Gretchen both laughed, but Gretchen answered, “We were camping on the island when it started.”

“Really? Camping in the middle of the summer? With the heat that had to be miserable. I thought sane people only camped in the spring and autumn.”

Paul said, “I’m a geologist. I’ve been working on a speleological study of the Lake Travis area for the Texas Water Development Board all summer.”

“A speleological survey?” I asked. “You explore caves for the state? I saw something about a UT advertising professor exploring Texas caves in a Southwest Airlines magazine once.”

Paul shook his head. “Well, not exactly. I study the limestone formations and try to survey the underground structures for stability.”

That had me curious. “Why here?”

“Do you remember hearing about what happened at Lake Amistad?”

“I’m not even sure where that is.”

Steph piped in, “It’s a man-made lake down on the Rio Grande, by Del Rio.”

“That’s right,” Paul confirmed. “The limestone structures beneath the lake turned out to be less stable than anyone guessed. A sinkhole formed and pretty much opened a drain valve for the lake.”

“You’re kidding.” I looked at Steph and then at Gretchen. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Serious as a virus attack,” Paul answered.

“No shit. What happened?” I asked.

“The lake level dropped by ninety feet in a single day.”

“Holy crap.”

Even unexcitable Steph muttered something to that effect, but put the pieces together faster than I did. “So wait, are you telling me that you’re doing that speleological survey because you think that could happen here?”

Paul smiled and shook his head. “Nobody at the state—and I share this opinion—thinks there’s any immediate danger of that happening at Lake Travis.”

I asked, “Did anybody expect it to happen on Lake Amistad?”

“No.” Paul shook his head. “It came as a complete surprise.”

“So it could happen here.” Steph asked, looking back over at Monk’s Island, “And this place suddenly becomes open to attack.”

That was a depressing thought. I’d only just arrived. In fact, I hadn’t even officially arrived yet.

Paul stood up and paced around a bit. He waved a hand out at the water. “Lake Travis has been here for seventy years. There are one hundred and eighty-eight major reservoirs in Texas, and who knows how many smaller ones. I read one report that there are seventy-five thousand dams in the continental United States.”

“That many?” Steph asked.

Paul asked, “And how many have you ever heard of that drained because of a sinkhole?”

Steph answered, “None.”

“Exactly. The odds of it happening here are miniscule.”

Just because I’m a contrary pain in the ass, I asked, “But how many of those dams were built during the Depression, or in the decades after?”

“I know where you’re going with this.”

Steph shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Me neither,” said Gretchen.

Paul gestured toward me. “He’s wondering if the lakes have aged sufficiently that the problem will start to show up with more frequency.”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“That is one of the reasons for the survey. More importantly, we want to examine the rock that the dam is built on. Having a sinkhole open up and drain the lake would be bad, considering how many people depend on Lake Travis for their drinking water. To have the dam fail would be catastrophic.”

“And that could happen?” Steph asked.

“If the limestone under the dam was structurally unsound, yes. It could happen.”

“What did you find?”

Gretchen said, “We’re not anywhere near finishing our survey. So, no answers yet.”

“Nope.” Paul confirmed and sat back down.

“You know,” I said, “That sounds like super interesting stuff.”

Paul nodded. “But pretty much pointless now, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I think there will be little room in the days ahead for geological work. We’ll all be farmers, or hunters, or soldiers, I guess.”

“Or doctors,” Steph added. “And nurses.”

“Just the essentials,” I agreed. “Getting back to the beginning, so you guys were camping on the island and when people started showing up after the virus hit, they voted you in charge?”

Gretchen shrugged, “It just kind of happened. The first arrivals just deferred to me on decisions.”

Paul chuckled, “She’s a take-charge type.”

I looked at Steph, “Sounds like somebody I know.”

Steph punched me in the arm.

“Hey, that’s a compliment,” I protested.

“Eventually, we voted,” said Gretchen. “It seemed like the smart thing to do, having somebody in charge. And I won.”

“By a landslide.” Paul smiled at Gretchen.

“Congratulations,” I said.

With a formal nod, Gretchen said, “Thank you. I owe it all to the little people.”

We all laughed.

I asked, “So people just kind of trickled in as things got bad in town?”

Becoming more serious, Gretchen said, “Yes. We got six that first night after the riot at the jail downtown.”

I was thinking about my escape from that riot with Murphy when I noticed Paul looked down at his feet and shaking his head. I asked, “What happened?”

Gretchen had a little difficulty with it. “There were six of them, a family with four children. The oldest of the kids was fifteen, the youngest was eight.” Gretchen seemed to run out of words at that point.

I looked over at Steph. She was looking at Gretchen. I guessed she hadn’t heard the story yet.

Gretchen took a big gulp of air as though that might make the story more palatable. “It was the fifteen-year-old that turned first. It happened late that night.” Steph pointed at the silhouette of the old chapel at the top of the hill. “We were all sleeping in the church then. I was keeping guard. The family was exhausted. It seemed like the right thing to do to let them rest. I was outside, keeping an eye out for danger. Paul was inside.”

Another long pause. It was Gretchen’s and Paul’s first one-on-one experience with the infected, and it had scarred them more deeply than subsequent experiences.

Paul stuck his arm out. He had a nasty, bite-shaped scar. “The fifteen-year-old attacked me.”

Steph took hold of Paul’s arm and examined the nearly healed wound. “You’re lucky.”

“That I wasn’t infected?” Paul nodded. “Yes. I guess I’m immune.”

I looked at Gretchen. “And you think you’re immune, too.”

She nodded. “I have to be, or I’d have caught it by now.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Paul had to kill the boy to save his own life,” she said.

“The parents got angry,” Gretchen said. “They didn’t behave rationally.”

“I guess that’s to be expected,” I said. “That early on in the infection, I mean.”

Gretchen looked at Paul. “The father had a gun, and he threatened Paul with it. Even though his son was there, with pale skin and blood all over his face from biting Paul. His father—”

“—Jim,” said Paul. “His name was Jim.”

“I’d forgotten.” Gretchen admitted. “Jim was livid. He couldn’t accept that his son had turned. Even though he was frightened enough about everything going on to bring his family out to the island, he couldn’t accept the reality.” Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe none of us could, at first.” She pulled her hands together in front of her mouth, almost as though she were going to pray, as she thought about what to say next. “I thought Jim was going to shoot Paul. But I had a gun, too. We always have one when we’re out camping—not that we ever needed it before—but just in case, you know.”

Steph and I both nodded. Of course.

“I think that’s the only reason Jim didn’t shoot Paul.” Gretchen pointed to another old structure up on the hill. “Jim took his wife and kids and went to the old stable and told us to leave him and his family alone.”

“Yelled at us to leave them alone,” Paul said.

Gretchen nodded emphatically at that. “He was so angry with us.” Then she shook her head. “He made his wife hold their gun and picked up his son and carried the body with them to the stable. I begged them not to go.”

“Why?” I asked. “It sounds like the best thing, given what happened.”

Shaking his head, Paul said, “The other kids were infected.”

“Oh, no,” Steph said.

Gretchen said, “One of them appeared to be feverish. The other was lethargic. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. Jim was crazy over the death of his son by then. He was talking about revenge, and calling the police, and what not. He thought we just wanted to kill his kids.” Gretchen stopped talking after that.

After a few moments, I ventured a guess. “And they turned. They turned that night?”

Gretchen nodded. “Paul and I didn’t sleep after that. It was nearly sunup when we heard the ruckus from the stable. There was crying and screaming. There were gunshots.”

“What happened?” Steph asked.

“The children killed the mother. The father shot the children. I think he was feverish by then. He shot himself.”

In a lost voice, Steph said, “Oh, my God.”

Shaking his head, Paul said, “Probably not an uncommon story.”

We all agreed.

“We burned the bodies.” Gretchen said, after we’d had a moment to assimilate the story’s conclusion. She looked at Paul, and it was pretty clear that the two were close. “We both thought Paul was going to turn. He made me keep the gun after that. But I didn’t want to be here, not in this world, without him. We don’t have any kids. We never wanted any. We don’t have any family that we’re close to. We only have each other.”

Tentatively, Steph asked, “If he turned, you were going to shoot him?”

Gretchen nodded.

“And then yourself?” Steph asked.

“Yes.” Gretchen took Paul’s hand in hers. “We didn’t make any attempt after that to keep me from getting infected. I decided that if Paul was going to die, and I was going to die, then I was damn sure going to be affectionate with the love of my life.” Gretchen leaned over and kissed Paul on the lips.

Steph smiled, but I could see restrained tears.

“Neither of us turned.” Gretchen smiled. “We both got lucky with immunity.”

“That’s amazing luck.”

“Better than winning the lottery.” Gretchen said. “After that, we instituted the quarantine system for those coming on the island.”

“And that worked?” I asked.

“There were some difficult moments. But people were more understanding about it than you’d think. Everybody knew it was for the safety of all.”

“Wow.” I shook my head. “Reasonable people.”

Gretchen laughed at that. “I wouldn’t go that far. But about the quarantine, they were reasonable enough.”

“Reasonable enough,” Paul agreed.

“Have you had any infected on the island since that first family?” I asked.

“Not a one.” Paul answered. “But we were plenty worried before the flood.”

I asked, “Because of the lake levels? Did it get that low?”

“Yes.” Paul nodded emphatically. He pointed at a spit of land pointing down from the north shore. “This island and that peninsula are actually part of the same ridge. It dips down beneath the water out there but not by much. Before the flood came and refilled the lake, anybody could have waded across and never gotten more than chest deep.”

I looked in the direction of the peninsula. The islanders were surviving by little more than luck. Perhaps that was the story for everyone.

Gretchen said, “Because of that, we try to keep hidden out here. We don’t build cooking fires outside. We don’t walk around outside during the day, at least not where someone onshore can see us.”

“Sounds smart.”

“We got lucky with some of our choices,” said Paul. “They were the right ones and they worked out well. On the other hand, we don’t know what we’ll do about food in the long run. We can only scavenge along the shore for so long.”

Gretchen ignored Paul’s change in the subject and pointed at Steph, “And we got lucky with who came to the island. We didn’t have anybody with any medical knowledge. But now we have Steph and Amy, two nurses. I don’t know all of what we need to survive in the long term, but I have to think that having someone to treat the injured and sick could make all the difference.”

“I’m just a nurse,” said Steph.

“You’re more than that,” said Paul. “You’re hope.”

I liked Steph a lot, but I wasn’t sure I’d go that far.

Paul went on. “We used to take for granted that if we got sick, we could just go to a doctor, get a pill, and get better. It wasn’t always like that for people. It wasn’t that long ago that influenza was a deadly disease. People got sick and died all the time. Minor injuries could lead to infection and death. We never had to think about those things because we had modern medicine. With the world like it is now, all of those seemingly minor medical problems become major again.”

“I hadn’t thought that much about it,” I said.

“I don’t know why,” said Paul, “but the subject came up a lot when we islanders talked around the campfire at night. It worried everyone. You see, people today—ahem, yesterday—were all specialists. We did jobs and had skills that made us successful in the world we’d built. I studied rocks.” Paul laughed. “Not much need for that now. People were financial analysts, computer programmers, insurance adjusters, all totally useless now. But doctors and nurses, those are professional skills that humans took thousands of years to develop, and that we can’t afford to lose. They represent one of the major progressive steps away from barbarity and into civilization.”

Chapter 10

Knowing that we had the whole next day to talk, Paul and Gretchen went downstairs to claim a bedroom. That left just Steph and me on the sun deck. The boat was silent, and I assumed by then that everyone else was asleep.

I was sitting at the end of a vinyl covered couch, and Steph was sitting on a twin of my couch, but set perpendicular to mine, leaving us close enough together that our knees were nearly touching. She asked, “Was Murphy serious about what he said?”

I raised my eyebrows to ask for clarification.

“About going out to kill Smart Ones? Is that what you plan to do?”

A path that had previously seemed so clear suddenly needed stuttered rationalizations. “We’re not safe. We have to. You saw what they did to…to Mandi, to Russell.”

Steph leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. “Zed, I hate them too. I really do. We all do. But there’s nothing you can do about it. Chasing revenge around Austin until you get killed isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“It’s not revenge.”

“How could it be anything else?” Steph wasn’t going to let me by without expressing her disagreement.

“It isn’t revenge.”

“Then what is it? Are you the Valiant Null Spot? Are you going to save the world?”

I put a hand on Steph’s. I put them both there and stared at the white fiberglass deck. I looked at the patterns of black grippy tape and looked for a good way to figure out what I was really feeling, the reason I really wanted to kill the Smart Ones, if not to indulge a desire for revenge. Finally, I said, “I’ll admit, it doesn’t make any sense. When I take a clinical step back and examine it, it does seem pointless.”

Steph laid her other hand on the pile of hands on my knee. “Then why do it?”

“I…I…” It was hard to deal with the truth of it. “I have a rage. I have this big black hole that I feel like I need to fill. I hate the Whites. I hate the Smart Ones. As irrational as I know it is, I think if I kill enough of them, maybe I’ll fill the hole. Maybe I’ll feel better at the end.”

“You won’t.” But she said it not as an insult but simply as a matter of fact, as though my assertion was so ridiculous on its face that it needed no thought. It was just wrong.

I sat back in my seat and leaned my head back to look up at the stars. Timidly, I admitted, “I know.”

“Then, why?”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“Stay here with us. Don’t endanger yourself for nothing. Stay here with me.”

With me?

“I worry that I’m turning into a monster,” I said. “I worry that this need I have to kill isn’t pointless revenge. I worry that I want to do it because my brain is changing. I worry that I want to kill because I like it.”

Steph sat up and pulled her hands to her own lap. She pulled her legs up onto the couch to sit Indian-style. “Is this about what happened with Nico?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think Nico was…He was just one in a long line. I’ve killed so many.”

“But they were all infected. They were all dangerous.”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think they were all dangerous.” I told her about the thin, bald kid in the Children’s Hospital, the one that looked at me and didn’t resist when I hacked him down with my machete. I wondered if he had been as innocuous as Russell. I told her about the girl who was sitting on the rock outside the front gate at Sarah Mansfield’s house. I’d heard her screams after the Whites chased her into the trees, and I knew she’d been a Slow Burn, just like me. I’d murdered her because I was too impatient, too stupidly certain about what I thought she was to figure out a way to discover the truth. “How many others have I murdered, Steph?”

“You can’t think about it that way.”

“And the worst part about it all,” I said, ignoring her comment, “is that sometimes the only time I feel better is when I’m killing more of them. How fucked up is that?”

“Most of them, nearly all of them, are monsters, Zed. They’ll kill us if they have the chance. You have to remember that. You’re doing things that are hard because you want to keep the people that you love safe.”

“Love?”

“Okay, like. Whatever.”

I looked across the bow of the boat and saw Monk’s Island, alone on the smooth black water. Softly, I said, “Love is fine. I’m tired of losing my friends. It hurts too much.”

Steph rearranged herself in her seat, leaned forward, and put her hands back on my legs. “It does hurt. But we can’t give up. We still have to try to be human. If we can’t do that, what’s the point of it all?”

“Exactly.” I shrugged. “What’s the point?”

Steph stood up, leaned over me, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the lips. She sat back down, not taking her eyes off of mine. “Don’t go. Stay.”

I’d both been wanting and dreading that first kiss for weeks, but the rush of feelings didn’t sit right with me. I deflected with humor. “Are you trying to manipulate me with your womanly wiles?”

Steph smiled and a few tears rolled down her cheeks. Shaking her head, she said, “Yes. Maybe I am trying to manipulate you, but please, please tell me you know there’s more to it than that.”

She was so beautiful in her severe, redheaded Steph sort of way. With that kiss she’d opened the door on the complex mess of emotions that had been troubling both of us. I said, “I think that kiss is the best thing that’s happened to me…fuck it. Let’s just say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Silent tears followed one another down Steph’s cheeks. “But?”

“I have to be honest with you about something.”

Steph shook her head and laughed through her tears. “You’re gay.”

That was so unexpected, I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can be funny.”

“See, I told you.” She wiped her cheek with her sleeve.

“No. I’m not gay.”

“What then? Spit it out. I’m a big girl. Are you going to call HR and file a sexual harassment complaint?”

I favored her with a smile, but we were both past the jokes. “When Murphy and I went to get the suppressors, we were on the hospital grounds for a little while.”

“And?”

There was no good way to say it. “Jeff Aubrey is still alive. Or he was, anyway.”

Steph just looked at me for a long time after that.

I waited patiently, silently.

Finally, she asked, “Why didn’t you bring him back?”

I shook my head. “I thought about it. I wanted to. Kind of.”

“Kind of? So he wasn’t one of them, was he? If he was, you wouldn’t have had to think about it.”

“No, I don’t know what he was.” It was my turn to lean forward and take Steph’s hands in mine. “He wasn’t like me and Murphy.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t right. He had a hard time with single syllables. I don’t think he understood what Murphy and I were saying most of the time.”

Steph was crying again.

“Steph, I don’t know if he was dangerous or not. He didn’t attack us, but Murphy and I are both Whites.”

“Zed Zane, I hate this fucking world.”

“I know.”

Through her tears, Steph said, “It never stops hurting.”

“I know.”

Somewhere in the dark, we ran out of words and fell asleep on separate couches, with only our thoughts to hold us close.

Chapter 11

When I woke, my wrists were being bound behind my back. “Hey!”

Steph was cursing and struggling.

I rolled off of my couch and hit the deck while kicking out at a dozen legs that danced sideways to avoid my boots. Then they kicked back. A kick hit my thigh. Another hit me in the stomach and a third bruised my ribs before the bravest of my assailants dropped onto my chest and put a cold revolver barrel against my face. “Don’t move, you white piece of shit.”

I stopped struggling.

Steph shouted, “You assholes.”

A man shouted, “Quiet!”

Everything on the top deck stopped.

Seething with fury, I looked up the barrel of the gun that was pressed into my cheek beside my nose. I memorized the face of the dark haired, mustached man who was using the weapon to hold me still.

“Don’t move,” he warned me.

Not yet. But one day.

The voice in charge said, “Take her down.”

Steph struggled. Feet moved. In my peripheral vision I saw her being manhandled toward the stairs.

“Get him up,” the voice ordered.

The man with the gun leaned close. “If it was up to me, you’d be dead already.”

Interesting that he and I were both thinking the same thing.

He got off of my chest. I was rolled over and dragged to my feet. There were four of them up there with me, two handling me, the guy who’d been on my chest, and the last—who I guessed was in charge—a dumpy, older man with white hair and glasses with thick, black frames.

At the spiral stairs that led down to the main deck, one of my keepers led the way. The other held my bound wrists behind me. As we rounded the descent into the houseboat’s main salon, Steph was being seated on a couch beside Dalhover. Rachel and Paul were on the same couch. Gretchen was in a chair at the end of the couch. Murphy was standing with his back to the wall at one end of the rectangular room with his hands bound behind him—apparently Whites like me and Murphy needed to be tied up. A man with a pistol stood a pace in front of Murphy, keeping the weapon pointed at Murphy’s chest. I was urged to move in that direction.

Eight men and one woman all had weapons—several handguns, a couple of shotguns, some rifles, and mine and Murphy’s M4s. The two guys that we’d rescued with Rachel were among them. That pissed me all the way off and then some, but rather than indulge the anger, I caught Murphy’s eye. We were on the same page: escape.

The older guy who’d been giving orders up on the roof went to stand next to another dumpy, white-haired man that looked just like him, but with different glasses.

Gretchen was the first to speak. To her credit, she didn’t sound angry. “What are you doing, Jay?”

Jay—apparently the twin with the different glasses—began to speak. “This has all got to stop, Gretchen.” Jay’s tone wasn’t bellicose, not angry. He was just a nice old man talking to the grandkids.

With anger starting to show on her face, but calm still in her voice, Gretchen said, “We all talked. We all agreed. But you weren’t happy with the majority decision, and now you’re going to get your way by force, is that it?”

Jay stepped to the center of the room and looked down at Gretchen. “You think that because you pushed everyone to agree with you, they all did.”

“They agreed with me.”

Shaking his head, Jay said, “You bullied them.”

“That’s not true,” Paul disagreed, loudly.

In the same loud tone, Jay’s twin told Paul, “You don’t see it, Paul, because you’ve been pussy-whipped your whole life.”

Jay turned to his twin and raised a hand to calm him. “Jerry.”

Jerry made a show of glaring once more at Paul before he looked back at Jay. And that was the pecking order. Jay was in charge. Jerry was the lackey.

“I don’t do that,” said Gretchen.

Jay dismissed Gretchen’s argument with a wave of his gun. “We voted again after you came out here to camp with your new friends. And now you’re out.”

Gretchen shook her head. She was disgusted.

“Just like last time,” Paul shouted. “Everybody knows that you just want to be in charge.” Paul looked around the room for support. “That’s all this is. Little Jay Booth trying to feel important.”

Not one of Jay’s armed men gave any hint that they’d heard Paul speak.

Not good.

Slowly, so as not to attract any attention, I wiggled my wrists and turned my arms to see if there was any way I might get my hands free. The guy next to me had a pump action shotgun. All I needed to do was get that in my hands. On the coffee table in front of the couch lay my Hello Kitty bag next to Murphy’s bag. If we could get a grenade or two out, we could make our escape, just as we’d gotten out of that dorm when dipshit-crazy Mark was threatening us. Only this time we wouldn’t leave anyone behind with the whack jobs.

It felt like some kind of wire wrapped around my wrists. It was tight, but had been tied in a hurry. I felt it give ever so slightly as I twisted my wrists.

Looking at Paul, Jay asked, “Finished?”

Rachel sat forward and calmly said, “Jay, let’s—”

“Not a word from you,” Jay snapped.

Rachel froze and I thought Murphy was going to explode with anger and kill him, wrists bound or not.

“You’re just Gretchen’s silky-tongued lawyer mouthpiece.” Jay pointed his pistol at Rachel’s forehead. “Just say something else.”

Murphy started to lean away from the wall. Jay turned to him. Back in the kindly grandpa voice, he said, “Go ahead.”

Murphy was ready to kill, but chose wisely to do nothing.

Gretchen pulled Jay’s attention back to herself. “What exactly is happening here? Why all the guns? What are you going to do with us?”

“You ask that like you expect me to say I’m going to kill you. You’ve watched too many movies. You need to go, that’s all. You need to take your white monster friends and go away. They aren’t coming to our island and you’re not staying.”

“Fine. Paul and I don’t want to stay.” Gretchen looked around at Murphy and then at me. “If you’re just going to banish us then why are Murphy and Zed tied up?”

It was kindly Jay who spoke. “They’re monsters.”

“We shouldn’t let any of them go.” Jerry was agitated. “We should kill them all right now.”

That sent a ripple through the room and it became apparent that most of them didn’t mind participating in the coup. But they weren’t up for murder, at least not the murder of Gretchen and Paul.

Jay read it all. He was smart enough to see exactly what I was seeing. He and Jerry both wanted me and Murphy dead, at least, but he didn’t have the political support to have all of us killed. He said, “We’ll put them in a boat and drop them off on the shore.”

“Just drop us off?” Gretchen spat.

“Yes,” Jay answered.

“Where?”

“Wherever you like.”

“When?”

“Right now,” said Jay.

“In the middle of the night?” asked Gretchen.

“Right now.”

“Can we get our things from the island?” she asked.

“No,” Jay told her. “Those things belong to the community now.”

Gretchen shook her head. “And what can we take with us?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at Murphy. He was still angry but keeping it to himself. I was still having no luck with the wires on my wrists.

“You’re going to put us ashore with nothing,” said Gretchen, “but you’re not killing us?”

“What a load of shit.” Paul didn’t care about the risks of showing his derision.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave anytime you want,” said Jay.

“Leave?” Paul asked.

“Jump off the boat and swim to wherever you like.” Jay smiled insincerely.

Jerry laughed out loud. He, and no one else, found Jay’s little joke funny.

Paul glared at Jay, revealing all the hate he was feeling.

Freitag opened a side door and stepped in, a gun in her hand.

Fucking bitch.

I hadn’t even realized she was missing from the group of prisoners.

“Let’s not lollygag anymore.” Jay turned to Freitag. “Is the boat ready?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered.

Chapter 12

A thirty-foot cabin cruiser was tied alongside the houseboat. One of the men and the tough-faced woman from inside were already on the cruiser’s deck, holding weapons at the ready. Jerry, with my machete in his hand, joined them. The rest of us were motioned to get aboard. Paul led the way, followed by Rachel, Murphy, and Dalhover. Accepting the situation as just another reset, with wrists still bound, I climbed onto the deck of the cruiser.

“You first.” Gretchen motioned to Steph, then turned to Jay and asked, “What about Amy and Megan? Are you evicting them with us, or are you going to throw them ashore somewhere else where they can get killed?”

Jerry started to laugh again. Something wasn’t right in that guy’s head. I wanted to cross the four or five steps between us and shoulder him over the side. But that would probably get me shot by one of Jay’s assholes, not to mention losing my machete on the bottom of the lake.

“Amy and Megan are staying with us,” Jay told Gretchen. “Now get in the boat.”

A bearded man with a big gut and a sleeveless t-shirt pushed the barrel of his shotgun into Gretchen’s back. “Move, Queen Gretch.”

Gretchen shot him a dirty look and stepped over the gunwale to get into the cabin cruiser. “Let’s go, Steph.”

Steph turned on Jay. “You’re telling me that they decided to stay with you. Do they even know what you’re doing here?” It was clear that Steph didn’t believe Jay.

“Ask her yourself,” Jay answered.

The man with the beard pushed Gretchen and she tumbled into the boat, falling at my feet.

“Asshole.” I stepped toward the bearded dude.

He pointed the shotgun at my chest. “Uh-huh.” He smiled. “It’s a gun.”

I wanted so badly to kick in his perfectly white, good dental plan teeth.

“What do you mean, ‘ask her myself’?” Steph wasn’t moving. She got up in Jay’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jay nodded and a couple of his men took hold of Steph’s arms. “You’re staying with us, honey.”

“Fuck you!” I shouted.

Something, a gun butt maybe, pounded me on the head, and I collapsed to the deck, seeing nothing but stars. Gretchen was on her feet and raising her voice angrily at Jay. “What do you mean she’s staying? Jay, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Amy and Steph are nurses.” Jay wasn’t the least bit ruffled by Gretchen’s yelling. “They’re the first two medically trained people we’ve come across. We need a doctor, but short of that, a couple of nurses will do.”

“If you think I’m going to treat you when you get hurt, you’re crazy.” Steph left no doubt that she was serious. “I’m not about to help a bunch of kidnappers.”

Jay shrugged and looked at her with sad, kind eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’m the guilty one here. I don’t expect you to care for me when I’m sick. But those other folks on the island, they’re good people. They don’t have any guilt in this. You’ll help them. That’s all that matters.”

Jerry giggled away, like this was just the funniest thing he’d seen in years.

I tried to get up to my knees, but the barrel of a gun kept me down.

“You cannot be serious about this.” Gretchen’s voice was back to a diplomatic level. “These people are together. You’re just going to tear them apart to further your own goals?”

“You know the people on the island as well as I do, Gretchen,” Jay said. “You know they could use a nurse to treat them when they are injured or sick. Do you think sending Steph out into the world with these yahoos is going to be best for her or us? She’ll just get killed. We’re going to value her, give her a safe place.”

“You’re a lunatic.” Steph told him.

“Maybe,” Jay answered. “But that’s irrelevant. Take her back inside.”

The two men holding Steph pulled. She struggled, but couldn’t break away. She cursed at Jay, her captors, and everybody else. I was seething with anger and thirsting for revenge even before the door shut. But revenge would come later. First, I needed to be free.

Chapter 13

We prisoners were crammed in below decks on the cabin cruiser. A padded bench wrapped around inside the bow, and it was clearly designed to convert to a bed. The space was cozy for a couple looking for romance out on a weekend cruise. For us, it was tight.

On the fourth highest of five steps leading down from the outside deck, Freitag stood with a rifle in her hand pointed tensely at where we were seated on the benches. Jerry and two others were up on deck. A few small lights illuminated the darkness in the back of the boat, and I saw Jerry standing in the stern. One of the three was just outside the open door and one was at the helm.

What were they going to do with us, I wondered. Were they really just going to free us? Run along now. Shoo. Don’t come back. It didn’t make sense. If they planned to let us go, really, why not just give us a boat and tell us to hit the road? There were plenty of boats moored around the island. They wouldn’t miss one.

If they feared that giving us a boat would only give us a way to return to extract revenge for their kidnapping of Steph and Amy, then how would they keep us from finding one of the thousands of boats tied off around the lake and doing just that?

The look in Jerry’s crazy eyes told me all I needed to know about what he wanted to do. He wanted to kill me and everybody else with me. Jay couldn’t do that with everyone looking on. But he could pretend to let us go, only to have us killed somewhere out of sight by his most loyal of thugs.

That did make sense.

The cabin cruiser bounced over a wave, and Freitag, in adjusting her balance, stepped down to the third step up from the bottom. I glared at her, telling myself for the hundredth time that I should have killed her when I had the chance. There was no depth to which she wouldn’t sink.

For no apparent reason, Freitag slowly stepped down one more step closer to us.

From the back of the boat, Jerry leaned over for a better angle into the cabin and called, “You all right there?”

“Yes, sir.” Freitag called back without turning.

Jerry stepped out of view toward the back corner of the boat.

Freitag glanced back over her shoulder and quickly moved down to the last step.

Being that close, she wasn’t far from where I sat on the end of one of the padded benches. I thought through a scenario to free us. I could wait until we hit the next big wave. Like all of us sitters did each time we hit a wave, I’d bounce up a bit. My motion would be natural, expected. But instead of being a victim of gravity and momentum, I’d use it to my advantage. I’d push with my legs and jump toward Freitag. She was five feet from me, and by the time she realized I was coming at her, she wouldn’t have time to react.

I could plow into her stomach, shoulder first—my only available weapon—and knock the breath out of her. One of the others could take her gun. One of them could free me and Murphy. But that’s where the plan fell apart. Jerry and his thugs would hear the struggle below. Then we’d be trapped below deck with one weapon, trying to get our hands untied when three guns fired on us.

I looked at my companions. How many of us would die when that happened?

Did it really matter how many of us died? The question was how many would live? If we did nothing, we’d all be doomed. I looked around at my fellow prisoners, wondering which of them had also figured that out.

Freitag glanced nervously over her shoulder. She was the only one of our captors that we could see.

I waited. I focused on the rhythm of the waves. I turned to Murphy and caught his eye.

He was up near the bow, furthest from the door, furthest from Freitag. I motioned toward Freitag with my eyes.

With a barely perceptible motion, he nodded. He understood. More importantly, he agreed. He was smart, and he was intuitive. He knew what fate awaited us.

Turning back, I noticed that Dalhover was staring at me. He’d caught the exchange between Murphy and me. He shot me a bare nod. He was on board, and his hands weren’t bound. We had a chance.

Without any urgency, I turned slowly back to Freitag and fell into the rhythm of the waves.

There would be no mercy this time. Not for her. Not for any of them.

I felt a pattern in the waves. It seemed like one out of every eight or ten we hit was larger than the others and would bounce us all a little higher off of our seats. As we came over one of the big ones, I started counting the small ones. I was going to make my move on the next big wave.

Freitag’s expressionless doll face made a change.

I counted through two waves.

She was troubled. Her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes seemed sad.

Another wave.

Another.

Her left hand let go of her rifle’s barrel. My excitement ticked up a dozen notches, but I tried not to let it show.

We bounced over another wave.

Almost there.

Freitag’s hand slid into her pocket.

It was going to be easy, at least the Freitag part. Just a few more waves.

The hand came back out of the pocket with a lock-blade knife.

Before I formed a guess as to what she planned with the knife, she caught Dalhover’s eye and tossed it to him. She turned to me and said, “Don’t kill them.”

I was dumbfounded.

Dalhover opened the knife and bounced behind Murphy to cut his bonds.

Freitag looked up over her shoulder. Just loud enough for us to hear, she said, “The boat will come to a stop soon. Hurry.”

I turned in my seat so that Dalhover would have easy access to the wires binding my wrists. As soon as my hands were free, I was up on my feet. I stepped quickly over and put myself against the wall beside Freitag. Dalhover jumped to the spot on the other side. We weren’t visible from outside the cabin.

“What is this?” I asked.

She simply said, “Now we’re even, okay?”

“Even?”

“Yes,” she said. “So fuck you, too.”

The boat’s motor quieted as the helmsman throttled down.

I said, “Thank you.”

Dalhover handed the knife to me and said to Freitag, “Give me the gun.”

Chapter 14

Murphy was beside me before I knew he had moved.

Dalhover had the rifle in his hands and was ready to spring. Freitag held her position with her back to the stairs.

The engine noise had decreased to a low rumble, and the boat slowed to a drift.

From above, I heard the sound of Jerry’s laugh. I smiled. He was about to be surprised.

“Send ‘em up,” Jerry called.

Freitag remained frozen, pretending not to hear.

“Send ‘em up.” More loudly.

Still, Freitag did not move.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs above. “Can’t you hear me?”

Dalhover swung around in front of Freitag, using her for a shield as he held the rifle over her shoulder, pointed up the stairs. His shout at Jerry to freeze was so loud that Jerry would have been startled into inaction, even had he not seen the rifle.

I peeked around the corner. Jerry was indeed frozen, with surprise in his eyes and his mouth hanging open. He had a pistol in his hand, pointed down at the stairs. My machete hung from his other hand.

“If you move even the slightest bit, you’re dead. You understand me?” Dalhover’s voice was frighteningly harsh. “If you think there’s any chance that I can miss blowing your head off from this range, you’re a fool. You got me, Jerry?”

No one spoke, but feet were shuffling on the deck.

I squirmed around the corner, holding the handrail with one hand, leaning far forward and keeping well out of Dalhover’s line of fire. I reached out to Jerry and laid a hand on his gun.

“Let him have the gun.” Dalhover ordered. “Tell your people if I hear them move again, I’m shooting. Do it.”

In a wavering, weak voice, Jerry called, “Don’t move.”

I pushed the pistol into Murphy’s hand. “You know I can’t hit anything.”

Murphy grinned and took the weapon.

I reached back up and took my machete. Rearranging ourselves, Murphy aimed the pistol up the stairway.

Dalhover moved so that Freitag could come all the way into the cabin. “You come down here, Jerry.”

I couldn’t see the stairway, but I heard no movement.

“You can walk down here or fall down.”

“You don’t need to do this,” Jerry pleaded.

“Now.”

A stair creaked. Another creaked.

Dalhover backed into the cabin.

Murphy scooted back a bit, and Jerry stepped onto the floor. Murphy grabbed the back of his neck and drove his face to the floor, placing the pistol against the back of his head.

Dalhover called up. “You two. Lay your weapons on the stairs where I can see them.”

“No,” a man’s voice called back down. “I’ll shoot your ass.”

Murphy used the barrel of the gun to persuade Jerry to make a guess on what to do next.

Jerry guessed right. He called, “Do what he says, Gerald. Just do it.”

“Do it, Gerald.” Dalhover called.

Muffled voices conversed above, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Murphy harshly nudged Jerry with the pistol barrel again.

“Do it now!” Jerry ordered.

“Good man,” Murphy said to him.

I heard the sound of metal being laid on the deck. It was one of the guns. Another followed.

“You two,” Dalhover called, “go to the stern. Face away from me. Put your hands on the gunwale.”

Murphy kneed Jerry in the ribs.

Jerry called, “Go to the stern.”

Feet moved on the deck.

“Don’t move.” Dalhover started up the stairs.

Murphy looked at me, passing responsibility for Jerry.

As he got up to follow Dalhover, I dropped a knee between Jerry’s shoulder blades and laid the machete blade across the back of his neck.

“Don’t hurt me,” Jerry pleaded.

Five minutes later, we were all on the deck. I looked around at the lake to get my bearings. We were nearly a mile from either shore, far up the lake from Monk’s Island, and around several bends. No one still on the island had any chance of seeing or hearing what had been planned for us.

Hefting my machete, I looked at Jerry, Gerald, and the girl kneeling in the stern as they leaned over the gunwale.

Freitag must have seen the way I was looking at the three, because she guessed my thoughts. “You promised not to kill them.”

Implicitly, maybe. I looked at the three. Crap. “Sure. But they were going to kill us.”

“No, they weren’t,” Paul assured me.

I pointed my machete at the water around the boat. “Don’t you wonder why we were stopping in the middle of the lake?”

Paul looked around. His face went slack.

Gretchen asked, “Was that the plan, Jerry? Were you going to kill us?”

“Of course not.”

“Why were we stopping in the middle of the lake?”

Jerry turned to look up at Gretchen.

“Stay on your knees,” said Dalhover.

From an uncomfortably twisted position, Jerry asked, “How could you even think that?”

Gretchen repeated her question.

Gerald snapped, “We were looking for a marina.”

“A marina,” Jerry confirmed.

Gretchen looked around.

“Man,” Murphy said, “they’re lyin’.”

Freitag said, “We can’t kill them. Let’s put them ashore somewhere.”

“Or let ‘em swim.” Murphy was shaking his head and pointing at the water. “That’s what they were gonna do to us. If they didn’t shoot us first.”

“As much as I want to kill them, we can’t.” Dalhover made it clear that debate on the matter was closed.

“I agree,” Gretchen said.

Murphy shook his head. Mostly to himself, he muttered, “That’s a mistake.”

“Shit.” With the bulk of his heavy body already on the gunwale, Jerry pushed with his legs and slithered into the dark lake.

“Dammit.” Dalhover glared at Murphy.

Murphy said, “I wasn’t gonna shoot him, Top.”

Gerald decided that distraction was enough to try to save himself. He rolled over, swept his leg across Dalhover’s ankles and knocked him off his feet.

Rachel shouted, and Paul stepped back.

Gerald was on Dalhover in a flash, trying to wrestle the rifle out of Dalhover’s hands. Murphy jumped into the fight.

Gretchen shouted, “No!”

Another splash.

The girl was over the side.

While moving over to get my hands on the barrel of the rifle at the center of the wrestling match I said, “Let ‘em swim.”

Murphy hauled back and punched Gerald in the back of the head.

I got my hands on the end of the barrel, and though I didn’t have control of it, I was able to keep it pointed into the deck as the three struggled.

It only took another few moments.

Bleeding from his mouth and nose and drawing his breath in deep gasps, Gerald fell back against the stern, while Dalhover stood up, rifle in hand.

Murphy stood up, ready to punch Gerald again.

“Gerald, you didn’t need to do that,” Gretchen said to him.

Gerald glared back.

“Oh, my God,” Rachel shouted, “Where’s Jerry?”

I looked out at the water. I only saw one swimmer.

“He can’t swim,” Paul said.

Another one?

“Where is he?” Gretchen turned around and looked toward the bow.

I looked around. All of us did, except for Murphy. His job was to keep Gerald in place, and by the look on Murphy’s face, Gerald had better not try anything else.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” I’d seen enough James Bond movies to know that Jerry was hiding under the boat or something like that. “Turn off the engine.”

Paul was closest to the helm and did as asked.

“What are you thinking?” Gretchen asked.

I pointed at the water along the boat’s hull. “I’ll bet he’s hiding underneath and coming up for breaths.”

“That’s stupid,” Dalhover told me.

I asked, “Where is he, then?”

“Bottom of the lake.” Dalhover wiped some blood away from his mouth and looked down at Gerald in a way that should have given the man cause to worry.

Gretchen looked up and down the length of the boat. “Let’s check. Paul, you and Rachel go and look over each side of the bow.” She stepped over to the port side. “I’ll take this side. Zed, you take that side. Dalhover, will you look over the stern?”

Shaking his head, Dalhover leaned over the back of the boat.

Murphy leaned close to Gerald. “It won’t bother me to shoot you if you decide to get froggy.”

“Froggy?” Gerald was confused.

“If you jump,” Murphy explained.

Not even knowing why, I told Gerald, “Murphy is a comedian.”

“Nothing back here,” Dalhover announced.

Rachel said, “Nothing here.”

“Clear,” said Paul.

“We’ll keep looking for a few minutes. “I doubt Jerry can hold his breath for long.”

Gerald said, “He’s not under the boat.”

“And how do you know that?” Gretchen asked.

“Because that dude’s crazy.”

“Yet, you sided with him.”

Gerald looked at Murphy with plenty of hate in his eyes. “You were going to let these fucks on the island.”

“Don’t you understand that you’re immune?” Gretchen asked him.

“Nobody knows that for sure,” Gerald argued. “We might all still get it, and you would have turned us all into monsters.”

Murphy shot me a look. “Told you, Zed.”

I huffed and flatly said, “Yeah, you told me. Everybody hates us.”

Dalhover glanced at me and almost smiled. “If you whiners don’t be quiet about that shit, I’m going to hate you, too.”

Damn, even he had a sense of humor.

From the front of the boat, Paul mused, “Ignorance. Nothing ever changes.”

Gretchen asked, “Does anybody see anything yet?”

Nobody did.

“We’ll give it another few minutes, just to be sure.” She was sad about that.

I wasn’t. It saved me the trouble of killing crazy-ass Jerry and dealing with the guilt I’d feel about it later.

“If you’re going to kill me,” Gerald spat, “just do it.”

Gretchen wasn’t impressed with Gerald’s machismo. “You watch too many movies. Nobody wants to kill anybody.”

I said, “Hey, that chick out there looks like maybe she’s getting into trouble.”

Dalhover looked. “Dammit.”

From her side of the boat, Gretchen announced, “Jerry’s not here. Paul, will you come back here and drive the boat? We need to go get Melissa before she drowns.”

Paul hurried back. Rachel followed and went down into the cabin.

“Looks like crazy Jerry drowned himself.” I looked at the others for consensus on that.

Gretchen shook her head. “I was hoping we could trade him for Steph.”

Shit. She was right. We could have. I looked back at the water, hoping to see Jerry coming up for air.

The cabin cruiser’s engine started and Paul steered it toward Melissa. Rachel came out of the cabin with a couple of life preservers. She tossed one in Gerald’s lap and moved to stand beside him. Paul was guiding the boat so that when we came up beside Melissa, she’d be on our side.

I asked, “Gretchen, we can trade these two for Steph, right?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it.”

“Jay will go nuts when he finds out about Jerry,” Paul said. “He’ll want revenge.”

“Are Steph and Amy in danger?”

“Hurting them won’t make any sense.” Gretchen sat down in a seat by Paul. She reached out and took his hand in hers. “Jay is crazy, but he’s smart. The whole reason he kept Steph and Amy is because they’re nurses. They’re valuable.”

I asked, “What about Megan?”

“He won’t hurt a child.”

I couldn’t tell if Gretchen was certain or whether she was hoping.

Paul slowed the boat.

Rachel tossed the life preserver to Melissa. “Grab it.”

Melissa did, looking up at me with fear in her eyes.

I shook my head. That was disappointing.

Paul asked, “What do we do with them?”

Gretchen’s mind was somewhere else by then. Maybe she was thinking about our chances of starting over somewhere safe. Maybe she was thinking about what might happen to Steph and Amy when Jay found out about Jerry.

Rachel said, “They both have a life preserver. They can swim back from here.”

Wow. She had a pragmatic edge, just like Murphy.

She saw me looking at her and smiled. “They won’t drown.”

I said, “I think we should take them back and try to trade them for Steph and Amy.”

“No,” Gretchen answered. “That really won’t work. Honestly Zed, once Jay hears that Jerry is dead, he’ll stop being rational. He’ll want to kill us all. He won’t have any interest in negotiating.”

“Well, I’m not leaving her there.” I looked at each of them and let them see my defiance.

“Nobody says you have to,” Paul said. “Going there now won’t do anybody any good. That’s all we’re saying. But nobody’s your boss; you can do what you like.”

Gretchen stood up. “We shouldn’t go back.” She pointed at Melissa. "Get her in the boat. We’ll skirt the shore until we see a canoe or something with none of the infected around. We’ll drop them off, and they can find their own way back.”

Rachel put herself in charge of getting Melissa into the boat.

Chapter 15

We found a kayak in a boathouse filled with somebody’s water toys on the north shore an hour after the sun came up. In that kayak, Melissa and Gerald were paddling away in the distance, and our cabin cruiser was drifting maybe a hundred feet from shore.

With one problem solved to nobody’s satisfaction, I announced, “I don’t know what any of you guys have in mind, but I’m going to go get Steph, and Amy and Megan if they want to come along. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it.”

Murphy looked at Rachel and then back at me. “I’m with Zed.”

“Me, too.” Dalhover didn’t look up. He was watching the pair paddle away.

All eyes fell to Rachel, who was looking at Murphy. “I’m not losing you again, Murphy. I’m sticking with you.”

“I guess that leaves us,” Gretchen said.

“You two aren’t locked in with us if you don’t want to be,” I said, “You had it pretty good on your island, I guess, before we came along. I don’t want to cause you any further trouble.”

Gretchen looked at Paul. Paul looked at each of us, but settled on Rachel. “I trust Rachel’s judgment. Rachel trusts Murphy.” Paul nodded to me. “Murphy trusts you, and you trust Dalhover. It’s the transitive property of trust.”

Murphy laughed. “Oh, God, not another professor.

Paul looked a little hurt.

“Don’t mind him,” I said. “He doesn’t like big words.”

Rachel laughed.

“Hey.” Murphy feigned offense.

Gretchen, choosing to be the adult, said, “It’ll be better for us all if we stick together, if we can all work together.”

“Another female boss,” Murphy concluded.

Gretchen laughed and looked at Rachel. “Is he always this way?”

Rachel nodded.

“I don’t want to be anybody’s boss.”

Murphy reached over and gave Gretchen a friendly punch on the arm. “I’m just joshin’ ya. You seem a lot like Steph, a natural in-charge type. I’m good with it.”

“I don’t care who’s in charge or anything like that,” I announced. “We can do anything you guys want. I don’t care. I only want a couple of things. I want to get Steph, and I want to find a safe place to go and get away from all this shit.”

Rachel pointed at Gretchen. “She does a good job at keeping everybody organized and keeping everything running smoothly.”

Paul said, “I’m biased. She’s been my boss for twenty-seven years. I don’t want to be retrained.”

“Fine.” Gretchen looked around at us. “Zed, we’ll find a way to get the girls back.”

“I have a way,” I said. Whether it was macho bluster on my part or matter-of-fact confidence, I continued. “You guys can drop me off near the island after dark. I’ll swim over there with my machete, take care of anybody who disagrees with me, steal a boat, and leave with Steph, Amy, and Megan.”

Murphy looked at Gretchen, “I’m not saying he can’t do it. He finds ways to make shit work out for him, but I think he watched too many action movies in his formative years.”

Rachel laughed at that.

“Zed,” Gretchen said, “Let’s work together on this, okay? We’ll help you get the girls. There’s no urgency though. If you go tonight, Jay will be expecting you. Let’s wait, they’re in no danger. Remember, Jay values them. Let’s take care of priorities first. Let’s get a relatively safe place to stay. Let’s get some food. And when the time is right, we’ll go get the girls. Okay?”

I hated being patient, but Gretchen was right. “You’re the boss.”

Chapter 16

Those among us who’d spent any time with Jay Booth were certain of one thing: he’d blame us for the death of his brother, Jerry, no matter how honest Gerald and Melissa were when they related the story of his brother’s demise. It was also taken as a certainty that Jay would want revenge. With few weapons with which to defend ourselves, we fled, depending on Lake Travis’s two hundred and seventy miles of shoreline, wrapped in countless curves and coves, to give us plenty of places to hide.

Gerald and Melissa would spend the better part of their day paddling a kayak back to Monk’s Island. Once they arrived, Jay wouldn’t waste any time getting into the islanders’ fastest ski boat with his most loyal henchmen, bringing revenge in our direction. With that in mind, the cabin cruiser’s big engine rumbled under the deck and we split the water, racing up the winding length of the lake.

I was sitting in the back of the boat, eyes closed, the wind buffeting me while I seethed. I hated Jay for what he’d done to us the night before. It irked me to think about what he might be doing to Steph. I hated running away.

Murphy sat in the back of the boat with me. Unfortunately, so did Freitag. Dalhover was rummaging around in the cabin, seeing what he could find. The others were gathered at the helm, making a plan. I was making my own plans, thinking about the best time and the best way to get back on the island, perhaps administer a little rough justice to Jay and his buddies, and rescue Steph.

Murphy, never content with quiet time, said to Freitag, “Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m thankful and all for what you did. I just don’t get it. Why’d you help us? I thought you hated Zed.”

Curious about the answer, I listened, but Freitag said nothing.

Murphy asked again, “Man, you might as well spill the beans.”

That was apparently all the prodding Freitag needed. In her delicate, vulnerable voice—a guise, I was sure—she asked, “Am I in danger now? Did I make a mistake?”

I said, “Don’t buy it, Murphy.”

“Buy what?” he asked.

“She’s playing her helpless act on you,” I answered. “She’s a lot tougher than you or me.”

Murphy looked at Freitag. “So, you’re tough?”

“No,” she answered.

“Yes, she is,” I said.

Freitag turned angry dark eyes at me. She was regretting her choice to help us.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not being mean. You don’t need to play the woe-is-me game. I think you have a talent for manipulating—”

“You are a pig.” Freitag turned in her seat so that she could look out behind the boat. “I should have let them kill you.”

“Listen.” I waited for Freitag to look back at me.

She didn’t want to.

I tried to take any sense of confrontation out of my tone. “Please turn around. Let’s talk.”

Without saying a word, Freitag turned, making it seem as if she’d been tortured into compliance.

I said, “Thank you for helping us. Thank you for helping me.”

Freitag nodded, but just barely.

Continuing, I said, “I don’t mean to insult you. I really don’t. I think you’re really good at hiding behind a vulnerable façade, but—”

Freitag frowned and started to turn back away.

I reached over and put a hand on her arm.

She looked down at it as though I was diseased.

I guess I was. I pulled my hand back. “You don’t need to play games with people to get your way. You don’t need to pretend you’re something you’re not. All I was saying is that you’re a lot tougher and smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

“So you’re going to say nice things, so you won’t feel guilty because I just saved your life.”

“No,” I shook my head. “That’s not it at all. I still think you’re mean, ruthless, and vindictive, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see your positive characteristics, as well.”

Murphy laughed loudly.

Freitag spat, “And you’re a reckless, egotistical cockroach.”

Murphy laughed again, “Zed the cockroach. This is some funny shit.”

“A cockroach?” I was offended.

“Because no matter what anybody does,” she said, “you just crawl out of the rubble like nothing happened.”

I thought about it for a minute. “So that’s a compliment?”

“If it makes you feel good to be called a cockroach, then yes.”

“Jesus,” I said. “If you hate me so much, why’d you help us?”

Letting go of her control, Freitag raised her voice, “You may think you’re some high and mighty good person, running around and trying to be the hero all the time, but you don’t see that other people are good, too.”

Murphy laughed some more.

I nodded. “Okay. So you’re a good person. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I just saved your life.” Freitag sneered so expressively that I thought she might lean over and bite me. “You hate me and that’s fine. But you saved my life in the cove last night. I just repaid the debt, that’s all. We’re even.”

“Okay, but I don’t hate you. Why do you hate me?”

“For what you did to Harvey.”

“Who the fuck is Harvey?” I asked.

“You chopped off his hands,” Freitag spat, “with your stupid little sword.”

“Oh, Bird Man,” I said. “He shot Murphy in the head. What the fuck was I supposed to do?” I’d raised my voice. My anger was slipping out. I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. But you know what happened. You know it was a bad situation.”

Freitag looked at the deck and then back up at me. “I can’t forgive you for it. And I don’t want to.”

“Fine. Now that we’re even, do I need to worry about you fucking me over again?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because.” Freitag looked at me with open hate on her face. “You’re a piece of shit. You always will be. But I know you won’t fuck me over first.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because you could have killed me in that house when you stuck me with that canoe with the hole in it.”

Murphy laughed. “That was a funny story.”

“I told you,” I said, “I’m not a murderer.” Though just saying it I knew I was trying to convince myself as much as her.

Dalhover came up out of the cabin with a handful of items, one of which was a hammer. He crossed the deck and extended the hammer handle to Murphy. He said, “I thought you’d like it.”

Murphy accepted the hammer. “Not as good as my hatchet, but it’ll do. Thanks, Top.”

Dalhover nodded and turned to say something to Gretchen.

Freitag said, “I would have killed you if the tables were turned.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” I responded, shaking my head. “You may think you’re that kind of person, but you’re not.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

I looked her up and down as though I was going to read some information from her clothes, from her shape. Mostly I was just thinking. I said, “You could have killed me when you ditched me down the river.”

“I thought I was killing you.”

“No, if you’d really wanted to kill me, you could have shot me, or let me jump in the water to swim out to the boat and run me over. If you’d wanted to kill me, you could have.”

“Maybe I’m just not very good at killing.”

I sat back in my seat. “I think you’re just not as bad as you think you are.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know,” I countered, and then asked, “Are we good?”

“We’re fine. Just don’t ever try to touch me again.”

I reached a hand over the stern, cupped some water, and made a show of scrubbing my hands together in front of her, because I’m just that mature.

Chapter 17

We’d been on the water for maybe an hour and were cruising slowly past a marina hidden in a cove, looking for a suitable place to hide the cabin cruiser and ourselves. Conversation in the back of the boat had come to a halt after the hand-washing display, and my mood was sinking as I ruminated over the things that were bothering me. Primary among them were Steph and what Jay and his macho dipshits were up to with their hillbilly hunting rifles and their pigment-based sense of superiority.

Memories of what had happened to Amber haunted me. I never got past the guilt of leaving her in that dorm with that band of fucktards. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that was exactly what I was doing to Steph, leaving her alone in the hands of fucktards who were going to harm her. The more worked up I got, the more I believed I could wrap a Rambo bandana around my head, sharpen my machete, swim out to Monk’s Island, and kill bad people until the wrongs were righted.

I jumped to my feet suddenly enough that everyone in the boat looked at me, which was just what I wanted. I said, “So, here’s the deal. I’ve thought about this. I don’t care what Jay is or isn’t expecting. I’m going there and I’m getting Steph, Amy, and Megan, too. I don’t give much of a fuck about what Jay thinks he’s going to do about it.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Gretchen said. “I think it’s best if we wait.”

“I understood your argument the first time,” I told her. “Repeating it isn’t going to change my mind. I’m going to do this. I’m not asking for any help. I’m not asking any of you to take a risk and come with me. I’m going to do this because I have to. It’s that simple.”

Everyone was silent, probably still thinking about what, if anything, should be said to me about my announcement.

Dalhover, who’d been leaning against the windscreen, said, “You’re just going to head over there with no plan at all, no weapon to speak of except that machete, and hack your way through twenty or thirty people, all of whom might want to shoot you. Is that your plan?”

I wasn’t about to accept the condescension. “I don’t have to have a plan to decide to do something. I just have to decide. I’ll figure it out along the way. Who’s there on the island, Gretchen, a bunch of housewives and accountants? Does anyone there have any military experience? None of the guys that took over the houseboat looked military to me.”

Shaking his head, Paul said, “No, no. You can’t just go over there and kill people to get what you want. We know those people. They’re good people. Some of them are our friends.”

“Some of them might be good people.” I looked at Paul and then at Gretchen. “But the ones that put us on this boat, the ones that decided that we needed to die, those aren’t good people. I don’t know how many on that island are good and how many are bad. I really don’t know much of anything about what happened on your island while we were quarantined on that house boat, but enough of them backed Jay that he didn’t have any qualms about coming out to the houseboat with murder on his mind.”

Gretchen turned away. Paul put an arm around her.

Then I felt a little bit bad. “Look, Gretchen, Paul. I don’t want to hurt anybody but Jay, and maybe some of the dudes on that boat. But I’m not letting them do whatever it is they think they’re going to do. Because I know that whatever Jay is thinking, in the long run, it’ll turn out badly for Steph and everybody else on that island. Jay needs to die.”

Murphy said, “You’re getting a list.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’ve only got two on my list: Mark and Jay.”

“Here’s what I think,” Dalhover said. “I’ll help you, Zane. But we have to do this smart. The last thing we need to do is get Steph, Amy, or Megan hurt.”

“Thanks.” I gave Dalhover a nod.

Murphy said, “I’m in.”

Rachel said, “If you’re going, so am I.”

“No, you’re not,” Murphy told her.

Rachel stood up, nearly as tall as Murphy and, in her way, just as formidable. “I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but if you think you can tell me what to do, you don’t know me as well as you thought you did.”

I don’t know why—maybe I’d seen too many movies. I looked at Freitag.

She shook her head and said, “You must be dreaming.”

I shrugged. I didn’t expect her to lend a hand. In fact, I didn’t think I needed anybody’s help. I was more than ready to do it all by myself.

Dalhover said, “Now that we’re all on the same page…we can’t go off on a Zane crusade right this minute. We have to plan and do this smart.”

Chapter 18

We docked the cabin cruiser in an empty slip next to a houseboat among dozens of other boats. That kept it pretty well hidden. Of course, the smart thing to do would have been to sink it, erasing any clue as to our whereabouts. That thought never occurred to any of us at the time.

Murphy was the first one off the boat, and I was right behind him. Several Whites were hiding in the morning shade under the dock’s canopy, probably wondering what the cabin cruiser was and whether the people getting off of it were of the tasty variety.

Murphy and I were the first two off the boat for a reason.

A long, straight dock ran down the center of the marina, and the Whites were at the far end. Murphy and I headed right toward them. As we neared, they first seemed curious. They stood up and postured aggressively, hoping to drive us off, as whatever was left of their brains made the determination that we were coming for them. By the time we were a dozen steps away, the Whites were afraid and backpedaling until their heels were hanging over the water.

Murphy took a businesslike approach and raised his hammer as he got within a few steps. I had my machete up, ready to hack when the first one lunged. I was certain that one would. They were simple-minded beasts, and backed into a corner, would turn on us.

But they didn’t.

First one, then the others, turned and dove into the water.

“Motherfucker.” Murphy was surprised.

I looked at Murphy and agreed. “Motherfucker.”

“Fucking swimming Whites,” he said. “That island’s not going to stay safe.”

“No.” Watching the Whites swim slowly and clumsily across a hundred yards of water toward shore, I said, “This changes everything.”

Running footsteps on the boards behind us reminded me that talking out loud was almost always a mistake. I spun and raised my machete. A White was only a few dozen feet away and running at full tilt.

Murphy stepped back a bit, knowing what was coming.

Just as the White got within reach, I swung my machete around in a fast arc that ripped through his throat. The White tumbled to the boarded walkway, bouncing his face on wood as he came to a rest at my feet. Blood gurgled out of his open throat while he twitched and tried to move.

“Might as well get the rest of ‘em.” Murphy called up the dock, “Hey, buddy! We’re right here!”

Murphy’s hollering had the desired effect. Another White came running from the far end of the dock. Four more popped up from places where they’d been hidden on the decks of boats.

“You got it okay?” he asked.

I gave Murphy a glance. “As long as I don’t have to shoot any, I’m fine.”

“If you get in trouble, I’ll jump in. Cool?” replied Murphy.

I readied my stance and held my machete back, ready to hack.

The Whites tumbled out of their boats and rushed toward us. The one from the far end of the dock began sprinting in our direction. Murphy’s words had him convinced that we were edible despite our skin color.

When the runner got within reach, I swung my machete around and caught him across the throat just as I’d cut his predecessor. I had to step aside as his momentum carried him through the place where I’d been standing. He tumbled into the water.

The other Whites were busy doing me the favor of not coming together in a gang but at intervals of twenty or thirty feet, leaving me plenty of time to dispatch each before the next arrived. The last of them was a young blonde woman in one of the tiniest bikinis I’d ever seen. She was also the wiliest of the bunch.

My throat-slashing technique worked perfectly on all except her. When I swung, she was ready. She ducked under my blade and plowed into me with all of her momentum.

I fell, losing my machete as I hit the deck. She was immediately clawing and biting; whether trying to kill me or eat me alive, it didn’t matter. I was punching wildly and pushing, trying to keep her teeth off my skin.

Murphy grabbed a handful of her long, oily hair, pulled her head back, and punched her hard in the temple. That stunned her for a moment, and Murphy punched her again, and a third time. Her eyes rolled back and she went limp.

“Fucking bitch.” I crawled out from under her.

Murphy smashed her face into the dock a few times and rolled her into the water. She splashed and floated face down.

“You all right, man?”

I looked down at myself. “Embarrassed.”

“That you got tackled by a chick?”

“That I got taken down by somebody whose IQ is a hundred points lower than mine.”

Murphy chuckled. “Or both.”

Still checking myself, I nodded and bent down to pick up my machete. Looking up, I saw Rachel up on the deck at the bow of the cabin cruiser, worry on her face.

Murphy raised a thumb to indicate that we were okay.

She nodded, looked around, and squatted on the boat’s deck.

I followed Murphy over to the cabin cruiser. To Rachel, he softly said, “The marina is clear for the moment. Me and Zed’ll go check that brown houseboat up there. Get the others.” Murphy looked at me. “You ready?”

Smiling, I said, “Ready to get beat up by another blonde?”

Murphy chuckled, and we jogged half the length of the marina’s main dock to arrive at the stern of a houseboat similar to the one we’d been quarantined in the night before. Showing its age, its paint was oxidized and its metal fittings were rusted, leaving thin trails of orange down the sides of the boat.

Murphy stepped off the dock and onto the houseboat’s stern. I jumped across beside him.

Looking at me, he asked, “You wanna knock?”

I stepped over to a closed door and did so.

We waited. No sound came from inside.

I knocked again. I looked up and down the dock to see if any other attention was being garnered.

Nothing.

“Try the door?”

I tried the knob. It was locked.

Murphy looked around. “I don’t want to kick it in. Let’s check around.”

There was no side deck on the boat, so I climbed a stairway that led to the rooftop deck, but there was no door down from there to the boat’s interior. “No way in up here.”

Murphy looked around again. “You see anything?”

I shook my head.

He jumped over to the dock and walked up along the walkway beside the boat, reaching across to check each of the windows he passed. He cursed quietly under his breath after trying each one. They were all locked.

When he was walking around to the other side of the boat, I heard the sound of boat motors. “Hurry, dude. I think I hear something.”

Murphy looked up at me with a question on his face.

“Boats,” I told him in a harsh whisper.

He ran around to the other side of the houseboat. I climbed down the stairs, crossed the deck, and hopped over to the dock. When I went around to the boat’s port side, I saw Murphy’s legs sticking out of a window as he tried to crawl his way in.

Figuring he had that problem solved, I ran down the dock until Rachel and I made contact. I pointed toward the lake as I ran.

She understood immediately and jumped down from the bow to gather up the others.

The sound of high-revving boat motors grew more distinct. I looked toward the end of the cove and wondered how much time we had before Jay’s boats arrived.

Feet hit the wooden dock behind me. Fully expecting those feet to be one of the cabin cruiser’s occupants, I glanced over my shoulder. It wasn’t one of my new friends. “Damn.”

Just a dozen feet behind me, a strong-looking young man with short hair and white skin was looking at me, trying to figure out if I was food or friend.

“Hey, dude,” I said.

That was enough. He rushed at me and reached for my throat. I ducked under his arms and sliced his abdomen open as he ran by. He fell to the deck, writhing, feebly wheezing his pain with what little breath he could muster. I stepped over and hacked at the back of his neck, bringing his misery and noisy death to an end.

When I looked up, the rest of the boat’s passengers were running up the dock. I waved them forward and ran to the houseboat, jumping over to the houseboat’s deck as Murphy swung the back door open. A moment later, Freitag rushed past, followed by Rachel. Gretchen and Paul, older and slower, came next. Dalhover, self-appointed rearguard, was last. Murphy closed the door behind us.

Once inside, Dalhover found a window through which to peek and see up the cove. Murphy found a spot at another window.

“How did they get here so fast?” Gretchen softly asked anyone who would listen.

“Jay is crazy,” Freitag said, as if that was sufficient to answer the question. She started peeking through curtains.

Rachel said, “My bet is that when Jerry didn’t come back when Jay expected, he sent a boat out to see what happened.”

“And they came across Gerald and Melissa paddling back in that kayak.” Paul cast a worried look toward the windows. The sound of the motorboat engines was audible through the houseboat’s thin walls. “It was the right thing to do, but we spent too much time finding a boat for those two. We probably should have left them on the shore somewhere.”

“You survive. You help your loved ones. Fuck everybody else.” Even as I said it I knew I was being a hypocrite. I’d broken those rules and suffered the consequences too many times. “That’s just the way it is now.”

Paul looked at me and his mouth twisted as though he was chewing on a bitter grapefruit rind.

He seemed like a nice man, so I kept my “fuck you” to myself. He’d spent the whole epidemic on the island, trying to build an idealistic, mutually beneficial, post-apocalyptic utopia. The problem with any utopia is that it discounts the vile ability of humans to turn it into the same ugly world they create in every utopia. Jay and Jerry had just given Paul his first lesson in that course of study, and Paul hadn’t understood any of it yet.

“Jay is a hothead,” Gretchen said. “He will race his boats all the way to the next dam. That’s the way he thinks.”

“So we’re safe, then?” Paul asked.

The engines of the boats were louder inside than our voices, but they revved just as high. Murphy, Frietag, and Dalhover all crouched.

Dalhover, in a hushed voice said, “They’re at the end of the cove.”

Everyone froze.

“They aren’t slowing,” Murphy said.

More than one breath of relief escaped into the air.

The sound of the motors whined lower.

Dalhover changed his angle on the window. “They’re going by.”

I looked at Gretchen and said, “You were right.”

“Some people are easy to predict,” she said.

“But you didn’t predict that he’d mount a coup and try to kill us,” I said, some anger coming out in my tone. I was immediately ashamed for having said it. “That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

Gretchen looked away.

Paul looked like he wanted to slap me. Had he been a younger man, he might have.

Freitag said, “You’ll get used to him. He’s an ass.”

Well, fuck her. I gave her the meanest look I could put on my face. “Or you can ditch me somewhere for the Whites to eat while I’m doing you a favor.”

“Kiddies.” Murphy’s sounded like a dad threatening to stop the car and spank the children in the back seat.

“I knew Jay and Jerry were—” Gretchen took a moment to look for the right word. “Unusual.”

Rachel laughed nervously as she looked at one of the windows. “They’re more than unusual.”

“Nobody could have guessed they would plot to kill us,” said Paul.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about that. I’m just angry because he kidnapped the girls. I know this kind of stuff is hard to see coming.” Involuntarily, I looked at Freitag, but turned away before she saw it. For the moment, we were on the same side, even—or so she said. But I feared she might be as crazy as Jay and Jerry, and any insult might tip the scales of her stability in the wrong direction. That made me nervous.

“They’re gone,” Dalhover announced.

Everyone relaxed.

Turning back to the room, Dalhover said, “They’ll be back. They’re hauling ass up the lake trying to catch us before we get wherever they think we’re going, but they’ll be careful on the way back and search for us. They’ll come into this cove, and they might find the boat.”

After a short pause, he added,“They’ll have more guns than we’ve got.”

“Do we hide here?” Gretchen asked, “Or do we go onto shore and try to find a place?”

I looked down at the bloody machete, still in my hand. “There are Whites around. Plenty, I’d guess. If they see us making for a house, we might be double screwed. They’ll trap us inside, and if there are enough of them around when Jay’s men find the cabin cruiser, the Whites might give away our hiding place. I can’t imagine that will turn out any way but badly.”

“He’s right,” Dalhover told everyone.

“He likes being right,” Freitag sniped.

I ignored her.

“What are our choices then?” Paul asked. “Do we stay here and hope they don’t find us when they come back? Is that our only choice?”

I looked around at the room. Each of them was looking for better answers from the others. But none of us had a better idea.

Crap.

Hiding in the houseboat didn’t seem like a good idea. I turned to Murphy. “Do you know how to hot-wire a car?”

Grinning, he asked, “Why does everybody always ask the black dude that question?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, looking over at a shrugging Dalhover. “Here’s what I think. We see if we can find the keys to one of these boats and get out of this marina while Jay and his nutjobs are chasing their tails up at the other end of the lake.”

“Yes.” Paul was nodding enthusiastically. “We’ve got a window of time in which to get away. We can head back down the lake while they are going up. They’ll never know. Then when they get here on the way back and find the cabin cruiser, they’ll think we’re around here. We’ll have lost them.”

Yeah. Isn’t that what I said?

Chapter 19

The sound of boat engines faded to nothing.

Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen stayed on the houseboat. Dalhover and Freitag went to work together to search the boats in the marina to see if they could get one started. Murphy and I headed up the dock toward the marina office. The hope was that we’d find the keys for the boats there.

Murphy hefted his insufficient little hammer. “I’ll feel better once I get a rifle back in my hands.”

“Soon enough.” I hoped. I looked around for signs of Whites.

We were crossing a long walkway that led from the boat slips to the shore.

Rubbing his hand over his head as he looked around, Murphy sighed and said, “I’m having second thoughts about going to hunt Smart Ones.”

I stopped and looked at Murphy, shaking my head. “What the fuck, dude? I thought we agreed on what we need to do after we get through all this bullshit with Jay.”

“C’mon.” Murphy pushed me forward. “We got work to do.”

“Why?”

“’Cause we need a boat.”

“You know what I’m asking.” I was mad.

“You said so yourself, didn’t you? What Would Murphy Do?”

“I thought Murphy would kill some motherfucking Whites,” I said. “Last I heard, that’s what Murphy would do.”

“It was at the time.”

I stopped again and planted my feet on the dock. This needed to be resolved. “What about Mandi?”

Murphy stopped and turned on me. For a second, he was an angry beast. I flinched. But Murphy’s temper flare passed as quickly as it came. He slowly shook his head. “If you want to chase off after the Smart Ones after we get the girls, I’ll go with you. I think it’s a stupid idea, but I’ll babysit you so you won’t get yourself killed while you’re being angry and stupid.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing changed.”

“A few days ago, you wanted to kill them as badly as I did.”

“I still do,” said Murphy.

“Then what the fuck, dude?”

Murphy’s face turned sad and he looked at the water, his thoughts getting lost in the lake’s cold depths. Then he looked across to the shore as though he’d just remembered that he needed to look out for Whites. “Is this the best time to talk about this?”

“Just tell me what changed, and we’ll go.”

“I can’t go back there,” he said.

“Where?”

“You remember how I told you I was, back after I killed those three…kids behind the 7-Eleven?”

“Kids?”

Shaking his head, Murphy said, “They were just teenagers.”

“Murphy, don’t make them more vulnerable in your memory than they really were. You know what they did to Keisha. You know as well as I do that if they did that to her and laughed about it, who knows what they did to other people? They were vicious monsters long before the virus ever showed up. They deserved what they got.”

Murphy nodded.

We started walking toward the marina office again.

Murphy said, “It took me a long time to get right after I killed those boys.”

“Guilt?” I asked.

“No,” Murphy was having a hard time with it. “I was in a dark place. It’s like I didn’t have a soul anymore.”

I knew that feeling.

“You joke about my philosophy,” he said. “I know you think it’s some kind of simple bullshit to make myself smile.”

I stopped then. “No. Honestly, Murphy, I don’t. Yeah, it seems too simple to be real, but it works for you. You’re happy. Do you know how many people in this world are happy, or were happy before all this shit went down?”

Murphy shrugged, and we started walking again.

“Pretty much none of them.”

“I feel like going to kill the Smart Ones, no matter how bad I want to—” He struggled for a moment and changed course. “I’ve got so much hate in my heart right now, Zed—” Murphy drew a long slow breath. “I don’t know if I can be both.”

“Both?”

“Me, the person I am now, the person I’ve been since I got right with all that shit about killing those three punks. Or that other guy, the angry one that needed his revenge. I can’t be both.”

Chapter 20

The marina office was a square little building a short way up hill from the edge of the water. It had grids of windows stretching across three sides, leaving the marina and the entire cove visible from the counter inside. When we got there, the door was open. The doorjamb was broken and the strike plate was on the floor among splinters from the wood that had held it in place. Someone had already forced his or her way in. The office stank.

That gave Murphy and me pause as we stepped across the threshold. Papers were scattered on the counter and the floor. A desk behind the counter was in disarray. Murphy leaned over the counter and shook his head. “Dead guy.”

I leaned over to look. A body with a big chunk of skull shattered open lay rotting on the floor. I said, “Somebody ransacked this place.”

Murphy pointed to a tall, flat metal cabinet on the back wall. The sheet metal around the lock had been pried apart, leaving a wide rent.

I turned to look out through the windows. “I’ll keep an eye out for them. You check for the keys.”

“Probably right inside that cabinet.” Murphy shuffled through some office supplies scattered on the floor and stepped around the counter.

“Two of those Whites we chased off the dock are out there, watching us.”

“How close?” Murphy asked.

“A ways.” I scanned across the marina. “I don’t think they want anything to do with us, but they sure seem interested.”

The metal cabinet door swung open on creaky hinges. Murphy said, “Jackpot.”

Jackpot? That was Mandi’s word. She used it all the time. I thought it best not to mention Murphy’s use of it. Off to my left, a tall White came out from behind some kind of building that probably contained a repair shop. He was looking at something out on the docks. No good was going to come of that. “Murphy, hurry it up.”

“Man, I don’t know which keys are for which boat.”

I glanced back over my shoulder. Rows of keys hung on hooks beneath three digit numbers. “I’ll bet those are the slip numbers.”

“Like that does me any good, professor.”

The staring White had two other companions, and one of them was looking back in the direction from whence they came. My guess was that more were on the way. At least they were all of the clothed variety.

“Just grab four or five, and let’s go. There are some Whites out there getting really interested.”

Keys jingled.

“Interested in us?” Murphy asked.

I watched another couple of Whites come out from beside the building. All of them were staring at the docks. I looked over at the docks, but couldn’t see what they were seeing but it didn’t take a genius to know it was one of our people who had their interest.

Murphy shuffled back through the papers.

The Whites took off at a sprint for the dock, and several more that I hadn’t seen followed them out from behind the building.

“Shit.” I ran out through the door.

The Whites were fast and were going to reach the long wooden walkway that stretched out to the boat slips before me. Halfway down the slope, Murphy ran past me with his hammer swinging in his fist. I tried to keep up.

Seven Whites were stretched out in a widely spaced line, clomping on the deck when Murphy reached the boards just behind the last of them. I was still a good ten paces behind Murphy. I bounded onto the dock as Murphy reached the first of the running Whites. He swung his hammer at the side of the man’s head, knocking him off balance. As Murphy passed the reeling White, he pushed it into the water.

The White was flailing at the water and starting to howl when I passed him.

Murphy caught up with another White and shouldered her hard from behind, bouncing her face on the dock as she rolled off the left side and into the water. Two down, five to go.

I made up a few steps of the distance between me and Murphy.

A loud banging of wood on wood rang across the water from the right. That had to be the sound that had gotten their attention.

The first of the infected in our line made the right turn off the walkway and onto the main dock, followed closely by the second.

Murphy closed in on a pair of Whites running side by side.

A third made the turn.

I shouted, “Hey, motherfucker!”

The two Whites in front of Murphy turned as they tried to stop. Murphy barreled into both of them. One fell off the dock. The other hit the dock, banging his head, losing his senses.

The other three Whites that had already made the turn to run up between the boat slips were too focused on the noise they’d heard ahead of them.

Murphy ran on past the White he’d just knocked down, and I swung my machete to slice at his head as I passed. The blow caught him under the jaw, and while it probably wasn’t lethal at the moment, it would be. Whether I’d hacked all the way through the jaw or not, it was broken. The White would bleed out from the wound or starve to death in a month or two. Either way, it was out of the day’s fight.

Murphy rounded the turn onto the wide dock between the boat slips. A few seconds later, I did too.

Far down on the right, the houseboat that kept Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen hidden floated as innocuous and boring as every other boat in the marina. The tall, infected man leading all of us along passed the houseboat without showing an iota of interest.

The loud bang pounded from somewhere far down toward the end of the dock. It had to be Dalhover or Freitag.

Murphy caught up with an infected woman and pounded her in the back of the head as he passed. She tumbled. I clipped the back of her skull with my machete as I went by. She wasn’t likely to get up and join her two compatriots either.

The tall one cut hard to his left and jumped off the dock, over a gunwale, and landed on the deck of a blue-hulled cabin cruiser.

The infected woman following came to a stop on the dock at the stern of the cabin cruiser. She looked down at the water between the dock and the boat’s hull, fear on her face. From inside the cabin cruiser, fists pounded on wood.

The woman, too fixated on the terrifying water, looked up at the sound of Murphy’s running footsteps just a moment too late. He body slammed her full-on, and she flew off the dock, bounced against the walkway between the cabin cruiser and the sailboat in the slip next door, and sank into the green water. She didn’t resurface.

Murphy put a hand on the gunwale and jumped into the boat.

Not sure I could make the jump, I ran around to the side and leapt onto a set of four stairs up to the height of the boat’s gunwale.

Murphy grunted something harsh and mean just as his hammer thudded wetly into a skull.

But that wasn’t enough to kill the White. Bodies hit the deck and a struggle ensued.

I reached the top step and evaluated what I was seeing, even as I jumped into the boat. One White was leaning back against the door to the cabin, clutching his head, but he wasn’t the tall one—where did he come from? The tall one was on top of Murphy and seemed for half a second to be getting the best of him.

Unfortunately for that White, he never saw nor expected my machete. I hacked a deep gash between his shoulder blades.

Figuring that was all the help Murphy needed, I turned to the White sitting on the floor, grasping his head. He was just trying to get his feet under him, and I put an end to that with a chop into his already damaged skull.

When I turned back around, the situation had reversed. Murphy was on top of the White who was wriggling in an expanding pool of red. Murphy pounded his hammer into the White’s skull again, and again, and again, until the struggling stopped.

I looked around, breathing rapidly, trying to find any other threats that might be running our way.

Nothing was moving on the dock. I didn’t see anything on the shore.

“There’s an extra one,” Murphy said, coming to his feet and pointing to the White I’d hacked by the boat’s cabin door.

“I guess he was making the noise,” I said. “I thought it was Dalhover or Freitag, being stupid.”

“Not stupid.” It was Freitag’s voice, coming from the other side of the door. “Trapped.”

Chapter 21

Murphy and I went to work searching the boat slips for numbers that matched the tags on the key rings Murphy carried. We found a match and I said, “Talk about luck.”

Murphy climbed over the side and into a long monster of a speedboat with two enormous outboard engines on the back. Grinning, he said, “I’ll bet this is the fastest boat on the lake.”

“Just see if the key fits.”

Murphy dropped into the seat at the helm. Keys jingled. One slipped in the ignition switch. He turned and shined his Christmas present smile at me. “Heh, heh, heh.”

“I’ll get everybody else.” I took off at a sprint toward the other end of the long dock, keeping an eye on the walkway that led to the shore. Nothing there except a few downed Whites, one of whom was still rolling and moaning. That would soon attract more infected.

As I was nearing the houseboat, Dalhover’s head leaned out of the door on the back of the boat.

Coming to a stop, I urgently waved at him to come.

The head disappeared back inside. The door flung open, and Freitag ran out with Rachel right behind. I took another glimpse at the walkway. Gretchen and Paul came out, with Dalhover taking up the rear, as usual.

As Freitag neared, I pointed at Murphy’s new toy, “It’s the big two-engine thing, three from the end.”

She slowed just enough to understand and raced on.

“Thanks,” Rachel said as she ran by.

I started to backpedal as Paul and Gretchen neared. “Hurry. There’s no telling when they’ll show up.” Of course, “they” could have meant the Whites or Jay’s henchman.

“Go,” Dalhover told me. “I’m with them.”

I nodded, turned, and sprinted back down the dock.

When I got to the boat, Rachel was standing behind Murphy’s seat. Freitag was in a seat beside him. For such a large boat, there wasn’t much deck space, pretty much just a couple of couch-sized seats, one behind the other. We were all going to have to get chummy. I got onto the front couch beside Freitag.

She was just as happy about the arrangement as I was.

“Start it up,” I said to Murphy.

“You got it, boss.” Murphy turned the key.

Nothing happened.

“What’s the matter?” Freitag asked, panic pushing her thin voice up an octave.

“Murphy?” Rachel asked, putting a hand on his shoulder and leaning in.

“You’ve to be fucking kidding me.” Clearly violating the touching rule we’d agreed on, I reached across Freitag’s lap to get the extra keys from Murphy.

He misunderstood my intent. “I got this man. Give me a sec.” He was calm, but urgency was slipping toward panic. We both knew that being exposed, things could quickly go badly for us. The shores were full of Whites, and they might have already spotted our uninfected companions.

I quickly said, “Just give me the other keys while you work on getting this thing started.”

Paul was helping Gretchen onto the back of the boat.

Murphy handed me the keys.

Still leaning over Freitag, I looked at the numbers, pushed a few into her hand and said, “You check those two. I’ll check these two.” I jumped up and hopped over the gunwale, landing loudly on the dock. I was running toward a ski boat four slips over when I heard Freitag’s tiny feet land on the dock behind me.

Still, no sound came from the big engines on the stern of Murphy’s useless toy.

“Hurry,” Dalhover said to me as I cut the turn onto the main dock and headed toward the end. He readied his rifle and stood high on the back of the boat.

Glancing to my left as I ran, I saw what his concern was. A mob of twenty or thirty Whites was tentatively crossing the marina’s parking lot, closing in on the long gangway that led to the main dock.

I reached the boat at the end of the row of slips, and my first thought was junk. My second thought was to wonder why it was still afloat. Its paint was faded and flaked. Everything metal looked to be rusted to the point of uselessness. Shreds of a canvas cover dangled from places where it had once been secure.

Without slowing, I jumped up to step on the upper edge, and as I was landing in the boat, I saw that the place where I expected a deck to be was a hole instead, a hole where an inboard motor should have sat beneath a deck panel. Both were gone.

I rolled as I fell, and instead of breaking my leg in the hole, I hit the deck on my back, knocking the wind out of me and earning a few more bruises. Cursing and jumping to my feet, I clambered back over the gunwale and onto the walkway between the two slips. From down the dock, a little boat engine zinged to life. That had to be Freitag.

Good enough. I ran back over to the main dock. The Whites from the parking lot had lost all of their caution upon hearing the zinging little engine. They’d spotted our group and figured out quickly enough that most of us were edible. They were running toward the walkway.

Dalhover hollered a warning.

Gretchen and Paul were climbing their way slowly back out.

Running past Freitag’s boat, I was immediately concerned whether it would hold all of us. It was an old ski boat or fishing boat, or something. I cast a quick glance back at the Whites. My concerns about Freitag’s boat had suddenly turned irrelevant. We didn’t have time to be picky.

Paul was reaching over to hold onto Freitag’s little boat when Murphy’s two big Mercury Marine engines roared deafeningly over the water, stunning me, Dalhover, and all of the Whites. Unfortunately, the Whites recovered first and came charging at full speed. They were pouring onto the walkway, and the boat’s engines were so loud that I couldn’t hear their feet or their howls.

When I looked over at Paul and Gretchen, they’d changed direction and were running back to get into Murphy’s speed machine. The engines’ power was comforting and enticing.

I ran past the bow of Freitag’s boat and waved at her to get out.

Without any resistance she abandoned her newfound captaincy and climbed out of the boat.

Whites were on the main dock and coming toward us. Dalhover had loosed the rope at the stern of Murphy’s boat, and he turned to climb in. I ran up along the starboard side of the boat and hacked through the rope that had the bow tied tight. I tossed my machete up onto the expansive bow deck and jumped, catching a section of chrome railing and pulling myself up.

Dalhover’s rifle was firing. The boat was already moving out of the slip, and everyone inside was hollering at Freitag to hurry as she ran onto the walkway along the path I’d come, Whites on her heels. Without slowing, she reached the end of the dock and jumped for the boat. I reached out to her, catching her hand as she flew toward me.

The engines revved, and the boat accelerated.

Freitag’s feet swung out over the water and her face turned to fright. I fell to my belly, and her feet dipped into the water as I reached over with my other hand to get a grip on her that wouldn’t slip. As the boat made a turn away from the docks, the chasing Whites poured off the end of the dock and into the water, trying uselessly to catch us.

Dalhover yelled something, and as soon as Murphy understood, the big engines revved higher and the boat ripped across the cove, nearly dragging me into the water on top of Freitag.

“Don’t let go of me,” Freitag begged.

“I won’t.”

Hands grabbed at my belt and somebody jumped on my legs to hold me steady.

“We’re good,” I said to Freitag.

A moment later, an arm reached over my shoulder and grabbed a handful of Freitag’s shirt, pulling her up on top of me. I caught a knee in my face as Dalhover dragged her farther into the boat.

Dalhover let go of Freitag and Rachel got off of me.

I rolled over onto my back. “Thanks.”

Without any of the vitriol that I’d come to expect, Freitag said, “Yeah, thanks.”

We threw up a thirty-knot wake as we flew out of the cove and into the lake.

I sat up, and looked at the Whites far behind us, swimming stupidly toward us or turning back toward the dock. “That was exciting.”

Rachel laughed and Dalhover almost smiled. And for the moment—and it always ever just seemed like a moment—we were safe.

Over the wind and rumble of the engines, I looked at Dalhover. “My curiosity is nagging me, so I’ve got to know. What happened?”

Dalhover looked back into the marina as the boat picked up speed. We turned in the opposite direction that Jay’s henchmen had gone. He glanced at Freitag. “You go ahead.” Dalhover got up, cautiously climbed over the windshield, and got down into the cockpit beside Murphy.

I looked at Freitag.

Rachel asked, “What did happen? We couldn’t see anything from inside the houseboat. We heard the banging, and it wasn’t long after that all the running and shouting started.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I’ll say.”

With our eyes on her, Freitag said, “We were checking the boats one at a time, looking around inside for keys or anything else that might be of use. We got to that cabin cruiser, and I went down the stairs and opened the door to the cabin. I guess by then I was getting lazy and—” Freitag glared at me.

I understood the warning and kept my comments to myself.

“—I wasn’t expecting anything to be inside. Not really. I peeked and didn’t see anything, so I swung the door wide open and went on in. Sergeant Dalhover was at the top of the stairs, asking if the cabin was clear. I was halfway across the cabin by then, and something shrieked behind me.”

“A White?” I guessed.

Freitag nodded.

“Right there in the cabin?” Rachel asked.

Freitag nodded again. “I frightened him as much as he frightened me. He was sitting in the corner to the right of the door. I never saw him until he screamed. Then he jumped up and rushed through the door.”

“How did Dalhover get inside?” I asked.

She shrugged. “When the White screamed, I tripped and fell as I was turning around. I heard Dalhover shout something. I heard them fall, and when I got back up, Dalhover was on the floor and kicking the door closed with his feet. I guess the frightened White ran into him as it tried to get outside. They scuffled, and by the time the White figured out that we were just what he’d been waiting for, it was too late.”

“That’s crazy.” Rachel smiled, and her smile was just as big and shiny as Murphy’s.

Freitag said, “That’s when the White started to pound on the door.”

“You probably should have just shot him through the door,” I said.

“We talked about that. We didn’t know which would bring more trouble, the noise of the gunshots, or the White pounding on the door.”

“Good point.” I nodded.

“We all made it out.” Rachel summed up, or perhaps just changed the subject, before Freitag and I went back at one another’s throats. “That’s the important thing.” She looked over the bow that was starting to bounce on the waves.

I said, “Murphy needs to slow down, or we need to get in the cockpit with the others.”

Freitag got up on her hands and knees and made her way toward the windshield to climb over. Rachel and I followed.

Chapter 22

An hour later, we were idling into a cove just a few miles across land from Mansfield Dam, but because the shape of the lake was dictated by the river which had been dammed to make it, we were still ten or fifteen miles away by water. Monk’s Island was at least five miles further up the lake.

Like all of the docks and boathouses on the lake, they weren’t built on piers. They floated with the drastically changing level of the lake, which might vary by thirty or forty feet throughout the course of a year. The benefit of that for us at the moment was that during the drought, all of the boathouses in the cove had been re-anchored farther and farther from the houses of their owners as the lake receded. When the floods came, with no one left to reposition them, they simply floated up from their current positions. Of course, many broke loose and floated freely. Some floated, still anchored to the lake bottom, but at a good distance from the shore.

Murphy pulled the boat up next to one such boathouse floating near the center of a cove. It had been built to house three boats behind garage-style doors, all three of which were closed when we arrived. He looked around for consensus and received shrugs and nods. One boathouse was as good as the next.

Looking at me, Paul asked, “Anybody want to swim under and see if there are any Whites inside?”

I accepted the task and stood up to climb over the windshield to the long bow deck. “I don’t mind going, but just so you guys know, for the future, when you’re in the water, the Whites can’t see enough of you to figure out if you’re one of them or not. At least the ones we’ve been dealing with downriver thought anybody swimming was food.”

“Really?” That surprised Gretchen.

Having the luxury of being on the island since the infection started, the islanders had little experience with the Whites. I figured none of them would last long onshore.

“I’ll go, then,” Paul said, jumping to his feet.

I shrugged. “Come along if you like.”

Dalhover gave Paul a dismissive look as he stood. “I’ll go.”

Though the two were of the same age, Paul had spent his life in academics, and while he wasn’t overweight at all, he didn’t look like he was up to any strenuous task. Dalhover looked like any middle-aged man, beaten down by life and, at a glance, unable to even change his own car tires. But I knew he wasn’t that. He was hard, athletic, and accomplished in the suddenly valuable skill of butchering hostile former human beings.

I was happier to have Dalhover along.

With my machete in hand, I jumped into the water and let my momentum carry me down. Dalhover splashed in, and side by side we swam beneath the wall of the boathouse. In the shadow beneath, I saw the hull of a small boat in the first slip. It left plenty of room around its sides for us to come up inside.

We surfaced together at the stern of the small boat, far enough from the walkways on either side that we couldn’t be reached by any White who might happen to be there. I inhaled quietly as I looked around, listened, and sniffed the air: nothing but dim light, lapping water, and motor oil.

Dalhover silently moved through the water over to the walkway along the wall. Once there, he pulled himself up with a degree of silence I could only envy. I was never quiet going into or climbing out of the water.

Leveling his rifle to point up the dock, he slowly looked around the dark room. No Whites stood or squatted on the docks, and the only other boat didn’t seem to have anyone on it. He looked down at me and shrugged.

Good so far.

Making a splashy noise, I climbed up on the dock beside him. I hefted my machete, showed it to Dalhover so that he understood my meaning, and scooted around him on the dock so that anything coming at us from any other part of the boathouse would come to me first. I said, “Hey. Anybody in here?”

Nothing responded.

In a louder voice, Dalhover rasped, “Come out if you’re in here.”

We waited.

“I think we’re good.” I walked slowly up the dock, eyeing every shadowy corner as I moved. “Let’s check it out to be sure.”

“Right behind you.”

We worked our way past the old wooden ski boat that we’d come up beside, passed a couple of windsurfing boards hanging on the wall, and moved over to the slip on the far side of the boathouse. I leaned over to get a good look inside that ski boat and saw that it was empty. Dalhover took his time examining storage shelves and cabinets built into the wall.

He said, “We’re clear.”

“Yeah.”

He crossed the dock to a door on the backside of the boathouse and fumbled with the lock until it opened. He peeked outside, looked back at me, and uncharacteristically smiled.

That got my interest, so I crossed the decking and took a look. “Nice.”

On the backside of the boathouse was a wide covered deck, a table big enough to seat eight, several pool loungers, a barbecue, and a small refrigerator.

After looking around to make sure that nothing on shore was showing an interest, Dalhover walked over and opened the fridge. The smile returned. “Beer.”

I laughed. “You just made my day.” I hurried down the length of the deck, got to the corner of the boathouse, and motioned to Murphy to bring the speedboat around. The engines rumbled slightly louder and Murphy navigated the boat around and parked it along the deck, which, as it turned out, blocked the view of the outdoor deck from the shore.

Unfortunately, the fridge held nothing but beer—some kind of edible food would have been nice. The beer was the temperature of tepid coffee, but pickiness over which kinds of calories to ingest in the late morning was a luxury that none of us could afford. So we all got a little buzzed.

I maybe got a little more buzzed than I should have, but I didn’t have any plans until the sun went down. Bedsides, I had a mountain of memories that I wanted to forget for a while. After drinking my brunch, I laid down for a nap. Dalhover, Paul, and Freitag all chose to keep watch. Maybe overkill, but what else were they going to do?

Murphy, Rachel, and Gretchen were talking nearby about something that sounded more and more like burbling, random syllables as I drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 23

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty.”

I opened my eyes. Murphy was leaning over me in the dim light and nudging me none too gently.

“You gonna sleep all night?”

Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I said, “I feel like a hammered turd.”

Murphy chuckled. “Too many beers.”

“I wish.” I sat up. “Too many hard miles lately. I need some down time.”

“I hear ya, man, but you wanted to get this Steph thing rolling.”

Sitting up introduced me to a headache. I rubbed my temples. “We need to. I just need a sec.”

“Cool, man.” Murphy sat down on the dock beside me and leaned against the wall.

“What time is it?”

“A little after nine.”

I looked around in the dimness. One flashlight was in the far corner of the boathouse, sitting on a wire shelf, pointed at the floor. It made a good night light—not bright enough to attract any attention from outside but enough so that I could see two shadows standing at the windows, peeking through the shades.

Murphy noticed that I was looking at the guards, “Freitag is outside on the deck, keeping watch.”

“Everybody else is asleep?”

Murphy pointed to the other side of the boathouse. Shadowy people sat on the floor by the shelves, talking softly. “They’re worrying over what we’re about to do.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“I crashed for a couple of hours.” Murphy pushed a beer can into my hand. “Second breakfast. It’s all we’ve got.”

“It’ll have to do.” I popped the tab on the aluminum can. “We can’t live on this stuff.”

Murphy chuckled softly. “Lots of people do. At least it’s not light beer.”

“Thank God for that,” I agreed.

“It’s not ideal, but we could probably survive on warm beer for maybe four or five days.”

I shrugged and took a long, hideous drink of warm beer. “We should probably pull it out of the fridge and store it in a net in the water. I hate warm beer.”

“Tell the boss.”

“Is Gretchen the boss?” I asked. “Is that what was decided?”

“More or less. But you know, man. There’s nothing formal, so don’t start getting your panties in a wad about it.”

“Dude,” I was offended. “I didn’t say anything. I just wasn’t sure.”

“I know how you are, man. Finish that beer. You need some calories, and the alcohol might take the sharp edge off that stick in your ass.”

I rolled my eyes and drank some more. “Have you ever tried this whole friendship thing before?”

“No, you’re my first friend.” Murphy chuckled again and gave me a friendly push on the shoulder. “Lighten up, man. Shit could be worse.”

“I hear you. Sorry.” I lifted my beer and looked at the label. “Coffee would be better.”

Murphy shrugged. “When you’re done whining, we need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“We know what we’re going to do. We just need to do it. Is everyone still cool with it?” In truth, I didn’t care how cool they were. It was dark outside. I had calories in my belly and a machete to do my dirty work.

“Worried, but cool enough.”

I sat up straight and looked worriedly at the flashlight in the corner as a new thought occurred to me. “What happened with Jay’s thugs? Did they come back?”

“Dalhover said one of the boats did a quick run-through of the cove just before sundown. They weren’t very thorough. He thinks they found the cabin cruiser in that other marina and probably saw the dead Whites. Jay probably thinks we got munched there, or we got away. Either way, they weren’t looking for us here, not really.”

That was a relief. I said, “Cool.” I had no doubt in my mind that crackpot Jay was still fuming over his revenge, but he probably figured we were a problem that wouldn’t trouble him further.

Murphy opened up a beer of his own.

“You know, that thing with finding Rachel was a nice surprise,” I said.

“Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “I never thought I’d see her again.”

“How’s she been? How’s she dealing with all of this?”

“Better than you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What does that mean?”

Murphy grinned. “You brood too much.”

“I’m trying to follow the Murphy plan. How’d she get all the way from east Austin over here to Monk’s Island?”

“Luck.”

“What kind of luck is that?” I asked. “Oops, I took a wrong turn on the way home. What’s this lake doing here?” I laughed.

Murphy put a finger to his mouth to keep me quiet. The boathouse walls weren’t insulated. Sound would carry across the water. In a soft voice, he said, “That’s almost what happened.”

“Whatever. Really, how’d she get to the island?”

“A friend of hers from the office has a house out here on the lake. They wrapped up some big pain-in-the-ass deal at work and were blowing some vacation days waterskiing. When shit went down, she said she tried to call Mom but never got an answer. Her friends convinced her not to go home and check on her. They said it was suicide to try.”

“It probably was,” I said.

“True or not, it doesn’t make the guilt go away.” Murphy glanced at the others sitting in the shadows on the other side of the boathouse.

I asked, “Did her friends make it?”

“There were four of them. I guess one was her boyfriend.”

“Interoffice romance?” I asked.

Murphy nodded. “I never even met the guy. They’d been dating for six months or some shit.”

I nodded, knowingly.

“The boyfriend was the first of them to get infected. The others came down with the fever. Next thing she knows, she’s in a big house on a cliff looking over the lake with three people passed out with the fever. The TV and radio were still working then, so she knew what was coming.”

“She bailed out?” I hoped, for her sake.

Murphy shook his head as he frowned. “She stayed until the boyfriend turned.”

“I don’t see a happy ending.”

“She found a gun in the house. She had him locked in the wine cellar.”

“The wine cellar?” I asked, with an inflection in my tone that implied something, though I didn’t even know what it was. I was just trying to lighten Murphy’s mood.

“All rich white people have wine cellars.” Murphy put on a false smile. The joke wasn’t worth a laugh.

I said, “I’ll bypass the stereotype and ask how you felt about your sister dating a white guy.”

Murphy punched me in the arm. “You know that’s bullshit, right?”

“I know.” Letting the mood fall back into seriousness, I asked, “Did she have to shoot him?”

Murphy nodded.

“And the other two?”

Murphy shook his head. “After the boyfriend, she packed up all she thought to carry, loaded it in a boat, and headed out. She ended up on Monk’s Island.”

“How’s she dealing with the boyfriend thing?”

“She’s a tough girl.”

“I gathered that.” I finished the last of my beer and crunched the can. “When do you want to head out?”

Murphy nodded toward the others who were still awake. “Everybody wants to talk first.”

Chapter 24

Murphy looked at me with a face that told me to be quiet and keep my thoughts to myself. He’d been around me enough to know my moods. He could see that I was pissed. I was apt to say any number of stupid, insensitive things that wouldn’t make anything any better. Being a good friend, he was trying to keep me from doing that.

Sure, our new friends needed food. We all needed food.

But I’d run on an empty stomach for so many days that the concept of three meals a day had not only stopped being a luxury, but had also stopped seeming like a necessity.

In my head, a grub run was just one more obstacle.

I wanted so sorely to go and kill those Smart White motherfuckers all over Austin, but I needed first to get Steph out of Jay’s hands—hands that in my imagination, grew more lecherous with each passing hour. On top of that, I had to—well I didn’t have to, I agreed to—follow Gretchen’s advice, which was to follow Dalhover’s plan as a safer way to pull off Steph’s rescue.

Everybody thought my Rambo plan was—well, they didn’t say half-baked, but I saw it on their faces.

Peer pressure. Ugh!

But putting off Steph’s rescue meant pushing back my Smart One hunt even further. And it all started with logistical problems. The consensus in the group was to make our first step raiding the houses on the hills above the cove for food and—with any luck—weapons. I’d argued that beer was, in fact, just liquid bread, with a nice buzz as a fringe benefit. Nobody agreed. They all blabbered on about the benefits of real food.

Did it make sense?

Yes. It did. But that just pissed me off all the more.

To Gretchen, Paul and the others, Dalhover said, “We’ll leave two of the guns with you.”

“Why does Murphy have to go again? That’s what I don’t understand.” Rachel was not happy about the plan and didn’t mind letting her anger show.

In another pointless attempt at placating her, Murphy said, “We’ve talked about this plenty. You know it makes sense for me and Zed to go ashore. The Whites don’t see us the same way they see the rest of you.”

“How many stories have you told me already about the dangerous exploits of Mighty Murphy and his sidekick the Valiant Null Spot?” Rachel topped it off with a belittling laugh. “And I’m supposed to believe you’re going to be safe.”

“Let’s not pretend you’re telling me what to do.” Murphy had come to the end of his patience. The volume of what he said next made that clear. “I’m going.”

Rachel understood that whatever else she had to say on the subject was wasted breath. She crossed her arms and glared at me instead. Like it was my fault that Murphy was coming along. Well, maybe a little.

Getting back on track, Dalhover said, “I’ll have one rifle. Zane has his machete—”

Murphy raised his hammer. “It ain’t perfect, but it’ll do.”

“Do you think that’ll be enough?” Gretchen asked. “Should you take another rifle?”

Dalhover shook his head. “Another rifle won’t help. Besides, if we run into trouble, we’ll run down to the water and swim back.”

“Murphy can’t swim.” Rachel’s anger hadn’t abated.

“I’ll be fine,” Murphy told her.

Exasperated with the whole process, I finally said, “Can we just get in the boat and go? All this talking is pointless. We know what we’re going to do.”

“It never hurts to plan,” Paul said.

“Fine, when you guys are done, I’ll be in the boat.” I walked to the other side of the boathouse.

They kept talking.

I peeked out through the front window where Freitag was keeping watch. She said, “It’s clear.”

“Okay.” I lifted the handle on the garage door in front of the slip that held the bass boat. I stopped and looked up at the electric garage door opener and said, “Crap.”

“It’s okay,” said Freitag. “Sergeant Dalhover disengaged the mechanism while you were sleeping. It should come right up.”

“Thanks.” I lifted slowly, doing my best to minimize the noise.

Cool, fresh air blew in off the water as the door rose. By the time I had it all the way up, the discussion had ended, and both Dalhover and Murphy were getting into the boat; Dalhover at the stern, Murphy in the middle. That left the bow for me.

I asked Freitag, “Will you close it when we go?”

She nodded.

I took my spot in the front of the boat and turned back to Dalhover, who flipped a switch on the silent, electric trolling motor. The boat moved slowly out of the boathouse.

Once out in the water, Dalhover angled the boat to point the bow at the shore and reversed the direction. Freitag tiptoed and reached up to the garage door handle and brought it slowly down. The others stood on the dock with their emotions on their faces.

Chapter 25

We left the bass boat anchored in waist-deep water a dozen feet from shore, cautiously crossed a hundred yards of sloping backyard, and let ourselves in through a back door that had previously been kicked in. After closing the door behind us and positioning ourselves in the living room for what we thought might be a good defense, Murphy called into the dark house, “Anybody home?”

The house was quiet. But the smell of old rot let us know that death had visited well before us.

He called again, of course. “Anybody home?”

We listened to the silent house for a minute longer.

“C’mon.” Dalhover led the way toward the kitchen.

Despite the back doors having been broken through and the smell of the rotting corpse somewhere inside, everything about the house appeared to be in order. Once in the kitchen, Dalhover positioned himself in a corner between the sink and a Cuisinart appliance so he’d have a view of both entrances. He readied the rifle at his shoulder and said, “I’ll cover. You guys search.”

Murphy was closest to what appeared to be a pantry, and he peeked through its open door. “Somebody beat us here,” he said.

I crossed the kitchen. It was dark in the pantry, but the shelves were empty. Everything was indeed gone. “Let’s check the cupboards.”

We worked our way around the kitchen, but found nothing but dishes, coffee cups, pans, utensils, and cookbooks. Not even spice bottles were left.

When I found myself in front of the refrigerator, I glanced at the others. I didn’t want to leave the house empty-handed. “This probably won’t smell good.” I yanked on the door.

Before I could see inside, I knew already that it was pointless. There was no immediate clinking of bottles and jars as the door swung open. It had been emptied of anything salvageable. Only the rotting items remained. I closed it before too much of the stink clung to my clothes.

Murphy was disappointed.

“Do you want to check the rest of the house?” Dalhover asked.

I peered into the darkness through one of the kitchen’s doors and shrugged. “If someone beat us here, it may be a waste of time.”

“They may have missed some things.” Murphy was talking himself back into optimism. “There was a set of steak knives in that drawer. Those will be useful.”

“Any weapon is better than none,” I agreed.

“Zane, you lead the way.” Dalhover pointed the barrel of his rifle at one of the kitchen doors. “Let’s stick together and do this quickly.”

Chapter 26

With only the steak knives in the bag, we crossed through the trees toward the second house on our search.

Murphy whispered, “It’s weird how some parts of town don’t seem to have any Whites.”

“I wonder why?” That got me thinking about the peculiarities of the infected behavior. I wondered if there was something significant to learn about the empty areas. I especially wondered if there was something in these areas that repelled the Whites, and if so, was that something that could be replicated?

“Stay quiet,” Dalhover told us. “Keep looking.”

Yes, Dad. But again, he was right.

When we came out of the trees, we weren’t far from the next house, and Dalhover stopped and dropped to a knee with his weapon at his shoulder, scanning back and forth across the house.

That alarmed me and Murphy both. We both dropped to our knees on each side of him.

Murphy whispered first. “The ground floor windows are boarded up. The top floor windows are open.”

“You think somebody’s here?” I asked.

Dalhover shrugged. “Somebody tried to fortify it.”

Dalhover gestured for us to follow him back into the woods.

Once we were far enough in that we couldn’t be seen, he said, “Whether there’s anybody in there now, there was somebody in there, somebody that planned to survive this thing. My bet, they are the ones that ransacked that other house and probably all the other ones around here.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “So if we want to find anything, it’s already in that house.”

“But?” There was definitely a “but” in the situation, and I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one thinking it.

“But,” Dalhover answered, “we might find a frightened person or group in there who will shoot us if we get too close.”

Chapter 27

Murphy was tall, and with his fat melting away and uncovering powerful muscles, he could intimidate without having to say anything. Dalhover looked like a transient who collected money at an intersection and lived under a bridge. Not the sort anyone would welcome. But I was thin, pale, and still bald from the day when I’d been initiated into the naked horde in a creepy hair-pulling episode. I looked more like one of the crazed Whites than Murphy.

We had no good choices when deciding who to send to the front door to knock.

In the end, I went. Though we only had one gun with us, Murphy and Dalhover could both shoot. More precisely, they could hit what they shot at. What was I going to do if the chosen door knocker got into trouble on the porch, throw my machete across the yard and frighten someone when it clinked against a brick wall?

So I left Dalhover and Murphy in the bushes and crossed the yard. After stepping up onto the patio, I knocked and stepped back from the door and just a little to the side. It didn’t make sense that someone would unload a shotgun through the door to kill me for knocking, but I did look like a virus-laden monster, and I did have an overactive imagination.

I took another step back from the door and another to my left. No point in making it easy when the shooting started.

Hearing nothing but crickets, I looked over my shoulder and spotted Dalhover where he’d concealed himself behind some cacti and big landscaping stones. I shrugged.

He pointed at the door again. So I knocked again, already doubting anyone was inside.

Crickets kept chirping.

I stepped up to the door and pounded loudly three times, stepped to the side, out of prime shotgun range, and waited.

I was not rewarded with an answer. I looked around, back at the tree line, up the driveway, and at the corners of the house. Habit. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. Oh well. “Hey, if there’s anyone in there, let me know, okay?”

Murphy chuckled.

I pointed my middle finger at him and continued calling at the closed door, “I’m planning to come in upstairs and climb in through a window. If you want me to go away, now would be a good time to tell me.”

No response.

I turned my back to the door so that Murphy and Dalhover had a clear view of me. I pointed up.

We’d agreed beforehand that if no one answered, we weren’t going to bust down the door. The house, while being no real protection from the naked horde, looked secure enough to protect us from the disorganized infected that were always about.

Dalhover pointed to his left and moved back into the woods. Murphy followed. I sat down on a wicker chair at the corner of the wide porch and watched. Well, I couldn’t see them in the darkness once they got back in the trees, but I heard them moving. When they were in position where they had a view of the side and back of the house, it would be my turn to get to work.

As they crept through the woods, much more audibly than I’m sure they thought, I listened for any sounds from inside the house. Still nothing. If there were people inside, what could they be thinking? I shook my head for no reason other than to participate in the dialogue in my imagination. There wasn’t any reason for the residents not to say something. They were either long gone or dead.

The sounds from the woods stopped. Murphy and Dalhover were in position. Dalhover would have the rear and one side of the house covered. If anyone showed themselves with obvious ill intent, Dalhover wasn’t likely to miss. He’d put a bullet where it needed to go.

I walked around to the side of the house to a spot near the corner, where the patio roof attached to the house. A thick steel gas pipe ran up the wall, probably to provide gas for an upstairs laundry room. At least, that was my guess. Building codes back when the house was built required a pipe of monkey bar thickness on mounts that kept the pipe physically separated from the house by—as luck would have it—just enough space for me to wrap my fingers all the way around. How I learned that I could use a gas line to scale an exterior wall to gain access to upstairs windows and roofs is one of those details easily explained by my delinquent youth.

Once I laid a hand on the pipe, it took all of ten seconds to climb onto the patio roof that spanned the back of the house. Six windows were open across the back upper floor, letting a cool breeze blow in off the lake. I chose the closest to the corner of the house for letting myself in. I drew my machete and used the tip to pry up the edge of the screen. It popped right off. I set it to the side for reattachment later. Not many luxuries were left in the world, but screened windows allowed for mosquito-free sleeping. That was an underappreciated luxury in the recently passed land of air conditioned rooms and permanently closed windows.

Curtains billowed into the room, obscuring the deep shadows within. I poked my head inside. Just to the right of the window stood a tall chest of drawers. With a headboard against the wall to the right, a twin-sized bed stuck out into the room, unmade. Across the room, sliding closet doors were closed. A door in the far left corner exited, presumably to a hall.

I sniffed the air. No death. That was a relief.

Feeling pretty safe, I leaned back out, turned around, and stuck a leg inside. Bending over, I stepped inside and stood up.

Looking at the bedroom door as my eyes adjusted to the darker room, I nearly pissed myself when something metallic pressed against the back of my neck as a voice softly said, “Don’t move.”

Chapter 28

Then I got mad. “God dammit. I fucking knocked. Why’d you let me come in if you were going to put a gun to my neck when I got inside?”

He said, “Don’t alert your friends, or I’ll shoot.”

“What, so you can shoot them too? Well, fuck you. I don’t like this world anymore, anyway. I need a rest.” Then, without turning, I hollered, “Don’t come in. Fucktard has a gun on me.”

The man behind me cursed, hit me on the head, and pushed me forward.

I guess he’d planned to knock me out, but all he did was make me angrier as I stumbled forward. “Damn, dude.”

I pulled my machete out as I caught my balance and spun to face my assailant. The quick move surprised the guy, who’d apparently been hiding on the other side of the dresser. At least, it surprised him so much that he didn’t shoot. I swung the blade down hard at his wrists with the full intention of cutting off a hand just as I’d done to Bird Man, or whatever the fuck his real name was.

But, as the blade was coming down, I saw the stark white face of the man who held the gun and I stopped just as the blade touched his forearm. I stepped to the side and pushed down, letting the machete’s edge convince the man that lowering his weapon was a good idea. “Drop it.”

“No.”

I shook my head. “Really? If I was going to hurt you, don’t you think I would have just chopped your fucking hand off?” Yeah, I know, idiotic logic to use on a man I was currently threatening, but neither of us stopped to question whether I was making sense. “Now drop the gun.”

It fell to the carpet.

“Step back into the corner, Dipshit.”

Before stepping, the man glanced at the bedroom door, which was behind me by then.

Crap.

I quickly raised the blade and pressed it to his throat.

A woman’s voice from behind me said, “If you think that’s going to keep me from shooting you, you’re an idiot. I don’t even like him.”

“Whatever,” I answered, more confidently than I had any reason to be. “If you were going to shoot me, you would have already done it.”

“Lower the machete,” she ordered.

I leaned forward, putting my weight on the blade that was pressed against Dipshit’s throat. “You’re not shooting me already, so I’m guessing that’s because you think Dipshit here will get cut. So I think I’ll just leave it here. Come around here where I can see you.”

“You may think that you’re in charge, with your stupid little sword—”

“Ask Dipshit if he thinks my stupid little machete is sharp enough to cut his throat out.”

Dipshit said, “It is.”

Feet moved on the carpet.

With her weapon aimed at me—no surprise—a woman moved over to the other side of the bed where I could see her. She said, “Okay, asshole, what’s your plan? Because if you think there is any circumstance under which I’m giving up this gun, or even lowering it, I’ve got news for you. You’re the dipshit, because you don’t know anything.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “I know you don’t want Dipshit to die. You don’t even want to take the chance. So he’s your brother or your boyfriend or some shit. Good for me, I think. There’s also a pretty good chance that if you shoot that gun at me, you’ll miss.”

“I’m ten feet away from you, asshole. Why don’t you lower your machete and take that bet?”

I cut my eyes quickly in her direction. “You’re just as infected as me, but a Slow Burn, since we’re talking.”

“A Slow Burn?” she asked.

“You know. Infected people like us, who didn’t turn.”

“I’m already bored,” she said, pulling a face.

I said, “You’re kind of a smartass bitch, aren’t you?”

“Hey,” said Dipshit, offended.

“Be cool, Dipshit,” I told him, pressing the blade just a tad. Why? Why not? He at least needed to be totally convinced that I had him under my power.

“Steve, stay calm,” the girl said. “Don’t worry about him.”

Without turning his head, Steve looked at the girl. “You don’t have a giant sword at your throat.”

“Machete, Dipshit.” Sometimes being an ass just comes naturally to me.

“Jesus, Asshole, does it matter?” The girl’s voice was louder, her words more angry. The stress of the situation was getting the best of her.

“Look,” I said, “Let’s all take a deep breath, okay? I don’t want to cut Dipshit’s throat, or I would have done it already.” I glanced at the girl, “You don’t want to shoot me, or you would have done that already. Maybe none of us has bad intentions. Is it possible that we’re all good folks who’ve stumbled into a bad situation?”

The girl said, “You broke into our house, Asshole.”

“Jesus. Really? I knocked on the door like ten fucking times.”

“Three.”

“Whatever. Does it matter?”

The girl glared at me.

“When you and Dipshit raided the other houses around here,” I asked, “did you knock or just break in?”

“Stop calling him Dipshit, Asshole.”

“Tell you what, I’ll stop calling Steve Dipshit if you’ll stop calling me Asshole.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” she asked.

“I’m not totally against doing that,” I said. “But while you have that gun pointed at me, I’m not going to lower my machete.”

“So if I lower the gun, you’ll lower the machete?” she asked.

“I’d prefer that you put it down,” I said.

“I told you there’s no way that’s going to happen.”

“And how do I know you won’t just raise it and shoot at me once I lower the machete?” I asked.

“That’s a chance you’ll just have to take. Like you said, I probably can’t hit you anyway. Be a man, Asshole. Take a chance. You’ve got balls, right?”

I figured I take another tack and try to defuse the situation. “My name is Zed.”

“Did you make that up to sound like a badass?”

“Really? You’re going to make fun of my name? Are we back in third grade again?”

Dipshit—I mean, Steve—said, “Angie, lower the gun, please. Zed, she won’t shoot you.”

“How do I know that?” I asked.

Steve said, “She’s not like that.”

“Yes, I am.” The girl raised her voice to make the point.

“I think you’re not going to shoot, because you’re as likely to hit Steve as me if you shoot that thing.” I took a deep breath and then took a chance. “I’m going to lower the machete. I don’t want to hurt Steve or you either, Angie. I was just looking for some dinner.”

“What about your friends outside?” she asked.

“What? I can’t have friends to cover my ass? You have Steve, right?” I lowered the machete and let it hang straight down. “Thanks for not shooting me. Would you lower the gun please?”

Angie looked at Steve. Steve nodded. Angie glanced at the window, looked at me, and then looked back at Steve. “Don’t try anything.” She lowered her weapon, but kept both hands on it.

Not even aware that I’d been wound tight with the tension of the situation, I felt myself relax a bit. “Thank you.”

Steve said, “If you want some food, we can give you some before you go.”

“We can’t just give food to anybody who breaks in,” Angie argued.

“We have enough for a while,” said Steve.

“So you guys probably already raided most of the houses around here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Steve answered.

“Don’t tell him that,” Angie said, not at all pleased that Steve was divulging secrets.

“Listen, I’ll be happy to have whatever you can spare. The only thing I’ve found in the last twenty-four hours is warm beer. It’s better than nothing, but me and my friends could use a little solid food. But before we go too far with this, I need to lean out the window and wave to my friends to let them know I’m okay, or they’ll worry. Cool?”

Angie stepped to her side to get a better view through the window on the side of the room. “Just so you know, if you signal them to come in here, you’ll be the first one shot.”

“You’ll be dead before you raise that gun.” Dalhover’s voice startled all of us. With the barrel of his rifle aimed at Angie’s head, he stepped out of the hall and into the room. “Drop it.”

Angie face showed so much anger I thought she might try to raise the gun and shoot at Dalhover.

“Don’t,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“Please,” said Steve, “drop the gun, Angie. We weren’t going to hurt him.” Steve looked at me with promises of revenge in his eyes.

“Be cool, Steve,” I said. “Nobody’s going to get hurt.” I nodded toward Dalhover. “He’s just protecting me.”

Dalhover, in a voice that made it clear that compromise wasn’t on the table, said, “Lay the weapon on the bed. Do it slow. Do it now.”

Angie did as instructed.

“Murphy,” Dalhover called.

Murphy leaned in through the window that I’d climbed in.

Dalhover said, “Get their weapons.” To Angie he said, “Back up against that wall. You, too, Steve, step back to the wall.”

Murphy climbed in the window, moved around me, and gathered up both of the weapons.

I said, “You guys are like ninjas.”

Dalhover glanced at Murphy. “Cover them.”

From his position standing at the foot of the bed, Murphy raised a pistol and pointed it at both Angie and Steve. I stepped around behind him.

Dalhover turned around, sidled up behind the doorjamb, and pointed his weapon down the hall. “How many more are in the house?”

“Three,” Steve answered without hesitation.

Angie glared at Steve. Clearly she didn’t want us to know that. She looked at Dalhover, “They’ll come up here and kill you. You better leave.”

“Uh-huh.” Murphy’s tone made it clear that he didn’t believe her.

“Let’s all be calm, okay?” Steve asked. “You don’t need to worry about the other three.”

Angie hissed, “Steve.”

Steve shook his head. “They’re different. They’re harmless. Please, don’t hurt them.”

“Harmless?” I asked. “Are they kids or something?”

“No.” Steve shook his head and looked at the floor. “The virus, it changed them.”

I looked at Murphy. “Like Russell, you think?”

“Or Nico.” Murphy frowned and glanced toward the door.

Dalhover said to Murphy, “Give Zane a gun. Zane, you keep an eye on them. Murphy, you come with me.”

“You got it, Top.” Murphy handed one of the weapons to me and turned to follow Dalhover who was already moving up the hall.

Holding the pistol in the general direction of the wall where Angie and Steve were leaning, I said, “Why don’t you two at least sit on the bed and get comfortable?”

Defeated or pragmatic—I couldn’t tell which—Steve sat on the bed and leaned against the headboard.

Angie was defiant. “I don’t think you can hit me if you shoot at me.”

Steve said, “Angie, just because you can’t shoot doesn’t mean he can’t. Just sit down and be quiet.”

Angie took a half step at me.

I said, “Nope. I can’t shoot for shit anymore. But you know that, don’t you, Angie? Or at least you’re guessing it because you can’t shoot. So if you want to run over here and do something stupid, go ahead. I’ll probably miss you.” I raised my machete. “But that’s why I carry this.”

Angie’s face turned to fright before she masked it again in defiance.

“Don’t hurt us,” Steve implored.

Angie sat on the bed.

“Like I said, nobody wants to hurt anybody. I was just looking for some food.”

“Then let us go,” Angie told me.

“When Dalhover finishes downstairs, okay? I’m sure he just wants to make sure that nobody is going to shoot at us when we’re leaving.”

“I’m sure.” It was sarcasm. Angie just wasn’t the trusting type.

“Yeah, whatever.” I looked at Steve. Angie could be ignored now that she had no pistol in her hand. “You guys are both infected, but like me.”

“I guess,” Steve answered.

“Was Angie always a bad shot or is that recent?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Has her marksmanship declined lately?”

“I think it’s been getting worse all along,” he said.

“Don’t tell him that,” Angie told Steve.

Steve rolled his eyes. “And she’s got a shorter temper.”

“I hear ya,” I said. “I can’t shoot worth a shit anymore either. I’m starting to think the virus is deteriorating my eye-hand coordination.”

Steve nodded.

Angie looked away.

“Did you both get infected at the beginning? I mean, what’s your deal here?”

Angie turned to Steve. “Don’t say anything.”

I rolled my eyes again. “Like I said. We’ll go. We were just looking for some food, that’s all. We’re not looking to hurt anybody.”

Chapter 29

Downstairs in the living room, Dalhover took the pistol that I’d been holding, removed the magazine, checked that the chamber was clear, and handed the weapon to Steve, who was sitting in a big leather chair at one end of the coffee table. Opposite him, in a matching chair, Angie fumed and pretty much kept quiet. On the couch between them, three mute Slow Burns sat with blank expressions. One was a teenage girl. Another was in her mid-thirties. The third was a young man about my age. They were all some version of Russell, harmless and near useless.

Dalhover put the magazine on the mantle behind where Murphy, he, and I were standing. He said, “We’re going to leave. We’re not going to take your weapons or rob you of your food. If you could do me the favor of telling me if there are any houses left bordering the cove that you haven’t ransacked yet, I’d appreciate it.”

Murphy removed the magazine from the pistol he had and laid it on the mantle.

“You’re just going to leave us?” Angie snapped.

Nobody paid her any attention.

Steve said, “We’ve hit every house that borders the cove except that big one out on the point.” He pointed. We all three looked, but of course, saw nothing but plywood where the sliding glass doors used to be.

He said, “It’s that big Mediterranean house with all the statues and terraces and stuff.”

“Why not there?” Dalhover asked.

“It’s full of them.”

“Whites?” I asked.

“Yes,” Steve nodded. “Too many to worry about dealing with.”

I asked, “Are they trapped inside or do they live there?”

“I think they’re trapped inside. They don’t ever come out.”

Dalhover asked, “Besides climbing out a window, is there a door on the first floor that we can leave through?”

Steve shook his head. “No, we come and go the same way Zed came in. You guys are really just going to leave?”

Making a show of starting to go, Murphy said, “Man, let’s get out of here. I’m already tired of this shit.”

“Good, go,” Angie told us.

“Wait,” Steve said, standing half way up before Dalhover motioned for him to sit back down. “Do you guys know anything about what’s going on? You’re the first people we’ve seen in—”

“What about those assholes in that big boat?” Angie asked, reminding Steve with all the spite she could squeeze into her tone.

“We’re those assholes,” I told her. Turning to Steve, I said, “There’s a pretty good group of people out on Monk’s Island, but they don’t take kindly to folks like us, if you know what I mean. So I’d steer clear of them if I were you, Steve. Angie, you might want to go out for a visit.”

Steve ignored my jab at Angie and asked me, “Are there a lot like us?”

“No,” I said. “We haven’t met many.”

Murphy laughed. “More like none, unless you count crazy-ass Nico.”

“We’ve come across all kinds, but none that are as normal as we are,” I said.

“Is the…what about the government, the Army?” asked Steve.

I shrugged.

Steve looked at Dalhover.

He shook his head and shrugged.

“What does that mean?” asked Steve.

“We’re not aware of anything or anybody getting through this. Last I heard, New Zealand was doing okay because they quarantined early. But who knows? They might be overrun with Whites by now.”

“I’m not asking about rumors from the other side of the planet.” Steve looked at each of us. “Is it anarchy out there now? No government? No Army? No civilization? Is no one coming in to pick up the pieces?”

I passed along the information I’d heard from Gretchen and Paul on our abbreviated night in the houseboat, and then asked, “What’s the last thing you heard?”

Angie sat up in her chair and started to say something, but convinced herself to be quiet and slumped back down.

I was getting more and more convinced that she was going to become a problem for Steve. “Do you guys have a thermometer?”

“No. Why?” asked Steve.

I said, “You might want to scavenge one when you’re out. Check each other. When your temperature gets too high, you kind of lose it.”

“And turn into one of them?” Steve asked.

I cut my eyes in the direction of Angie and nodded.

Dalhover asked Steve, “When was the last time you talked to anyone?”

“Before the power went out,” he answered.

“Have you guys been here the whole time?” Dalhover asked next.

Steve nodded and pointed at the young girl on the couch. “I found her wandering when I was scavenging a couple miles from here, trying to keep hidden from the crazy ones. I figured early on that the power was going out, so I figured I’d find a place by the lake.”

“This place?” I asked.

“Yes, there was a guy here already, Manny. He was like us—what’d you call it—a Slow Burn. He took us in and we started scavenging what we could when there wasn’t any of them around.”

“What happened to Manny?” I asked. “He’s not here.”

“Shot. He was down by the shore getting water from the lake one morning when some guys came by in a ski boat. He called and waved them over. I don’t know if they couldn’t hear him over the sound of the engine or what. When they got close, they shot him, like five or six times. Like after he fell they were just being mean or something.”

“Did they come ashore after that?” I asked. “Did they find your house?”

Steve shook his head while his eyes fixed on some distant spot. He was still having trouble with Manny’s death at the hands of the guys in the boat. “No. The infected heard the shots and came running out of the trees from every direction. When the guys in the boat saw the infected coming, they shot a few more times and left. I don’t know why they shot Manny. They just shot and laughed and shot some more. I think they were just shooting because he had pale skin, and that was their idea of fun.”

Disturbing. I couldn’t help but glance down at my own white skin. I wondered if it was the guys in Jay’s bunch that did it.

“And those were the last people you saw, before us?”

“Yes.” Steve pointed at Angie and the others. “I took each of them in when I came across them.”

“How’d you know they weren’t like the Whites?” I asked. That was a point I needed to learn about. Ever since killing that girl outside the walls at Sarah Mansfield’s house, I wondered, when I killed a White, whether I was actually murdering a Slow Burn.

“They didn’t behave like the others. They seemed different. I took a chance that they were like me.”

His process seemed like guessing to me. I said, “Be careful with that, dude.”

Chapter 30

By the time we left, we were getting along with Steve fairly well. Even Angie toned down her anger and was tolerable. We worked out a trade: Steve fed us and gave Dalhover enough food to feed the others in the boathouse for a couple of meals. In trade for that and two more days of food that would come when we fulfilled our end of the bargain, we’d give Steve an M4 from our stash, along with a thousand rounds of ammunition. Since we had a dozen weapons and thousands upon thousands of rounds back in the Humvee that Murphy and I had acquired from the dead snipers, it seemed like a reasonable trade.

After we ate, Murphy and I escorted Dalhover down to the cove, saw that he got into the boat with no problems, and said our goodbyes. He had his tasks, we had ours. Murphy and I were back on foot and headed toward the dam. We crossed between the houses, got to the road, and started to follow it away from the lake.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Late,” Murphy told me.

“Dude, you’ve got that big super-fly watch. Just tell me.”

“Two a.m.” he said.

I looked at the trees on both sides of the road. I listened. “I’m thinking it’s a two- or three-mile walk to get to the dam.”

“Or four or five,” Murphy grunted.

“Maybe. When did you turn pessimist?”

“Hanging with you,” he said, without any humor.

I pointed through the trees to our left. “That group of naked bald ones that had Rachel trapped in the cove was off that way somewhere.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“They were rowdy because they had Rachel and the others trapped in that marina.”

Murphy rolled his eyes. “It was like two days ago. I remember. I’m just saying, I don’t hear anything now. Either they’re all napping in the trees around here, or they aren’t hassling anyone right now.”

“Dude, what’s up your ass?”

Murphy didn’t say anything. He just kept walking.

After a while, I said, “I think we’ll probably make better time if we just stay on the road. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I asked, “Are you in a bad mood about something that I don’t know about?”

Murphy ignored my comment. “If we stay on the road, it’ll be easier to see where we’re going, and it’ll be easier for Whites to see us. If we go through the woods, we’ll make more noise, and we’ll be easier to hear. There are pros and cons both ways. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Either we’ll run into Whites or we won’t. You never know where those dudes are gonna turn up, except it’ll be exactly where you don’t want them.”

I nodded. “You’re right about that.”

We walked by moonlight for several silent hours, watching the dark shadows in the trees and by the houses. We didn’t hear or see a single White. We didn’t see evidence that anything was still alive. We saw broken windows and abandoned cars. We passed ransacked houses, businesses with furnishings on the lawns, desks and chairs upside down in parking lots. Trash bins were spilled. Empty boxes tumbled with the breeze. The smell of rot floated on the wind. It felt like we were walking across the corpse of the world, and the deadness wore on me more and more every time I stepped over the bones of someone not as lucky as myself.

We reached a tall hill just south of the river with a view of Mansfield Dam’s tall face just off to our left, and a view of the river snaking off to the southeast, forming the upstream end of Lake Austin. We sat down and rested, with only another hour of darkness left to keep us hidden.

After taking a long drink from my water bottle, I said, “I wonder if, when the naked ones come through an area, they pick up all of the Whites and make them tag along.”

“Or kill them and eat them.”

“Yeah, I suppose that could be true. I wonder if that’s why some parts of town seem to be free of them or anything else.”

Murphy stood up and stretched. “So maybe instead of going out to hunt them, you need to be thinking about letting them kill each other off, like that dude said they would. Maybe you should just let them do their business without your help.”

“Is that what they did for you when they climbed all over the riverboat and—” The look on Murphy’s face told me I’d said enough.

He put his water bottle in his bag, very pointedly not saying a word to me, and started hiking down the slope. We weren’t going to cross over the dam as we’d done on the first night. Neither were we going to cross the tall 620 bridge behind the dam. That would leave us too exposed for too long. We were going down the steep mountain all the way to the old concrete bridge that stood just a few feet above the river’s surface below. We’d cross that. On the other side was the crumbled boat ramp where we’d tied our ski boat to an old piling.

We didn’t speak as we made our way down the steep slope between the trees, slipping on the loose limestone enough times to scrape our elbows and knees. Murphy even banged his head once, but kept pounding out a brisk pace as though nothing had happened.

It wasn’t until we were crossing the low bridge with our boat in sight that I said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“You’re bleeding on the back of your head,” I said.

Murphy reached up, touched the wound, and looked at his hand. “I know.”

“You’re probably going to need stitches.”

“I know.”

“This isn’t like you,” I said. “Stop saying ‘I know’.”

We were halfway across the bridge, as visible as we could possibly be, and Murphy turned toward me and stopped.

“I said I was sorry,” I told him.

“Sometimes you say shit and you don’t stop to think how it affects other people.”

“I’m sorry about the riverboat thing. I know you had a hard time with it.”

“I did. I need to move forward. I don’t need you blindsiding me with your snarky shit little comments just so you can be right about some stupid ass thing that nobody cares about. You got me?” Murphy turned and stomped off.

I didn’t follow; I’m not sure if I was being obstinate and getting myself ready for an argument, or whether I was concerned enough that I needed to get Murphy to talk about what was going on in that big white head of his.

After a dozen steps, Murphy spun and said, “You gonna stand there, or are you just being a dick?”

“Is that it?” I asked. “Is it me who’s being the dick here?”

Stomping again, Murphy came up to me, raised his fist, and though I saw it coming from ten steps away, I didn’t do anything to avoid it. He punched me in the face so hard that I didn’t even feel it.

When I opened my eyes, all I saw were stars, not the little ones that float in front of your eyes after you’ve been bonked in the head, but actual stars in the night sky. I was lying on my back on the bridge. As I sat up, I saw Murphy sitting on the edge of the bridge where a railing would have been on a modern bridge; I sniffled and realized that my nose was bleeding.

I touched my face and saw the blood on my hand. I spit it out of my mouth. Oddly, I wasn’t angry. In years past, I’d have been up already, punching, kicking, and cussing. That was kind of my thing, fighting for no good reason at all. I spit more blood out of my mouth, sniffled up a bit more, and stood. I was a little wobbly, but that was passing.

Murphy was a good dozen paces down the bridge, frowning at the water flowing below his feet as though the rest of the world had ceased to be a problem. When I walked up and got close, he said, “If you need to hit me back, you go ahead and do what you need to do. I won’t punch you again.”

Instead, I laughed and sat down beside him. I spit out another gob of clotting blood. “You know, you told me about a hundred times you were gonna punch me in the face. I thought you were joking.”

With sad eyes, Murphy smiled and looked at me. “That’s true. But I was kidding. I’m sorry ‘bout that, man.”

“What are friends for?”

“Not for that.”

I shrugged. “Maybe sometimes. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“This shit is just hard sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

Murphy rubbed his big hands over his face. “Everything.”

“Yeah?”

The water below our dangling feet was gurgling, and the sound seemed to have Murphy’s full attention. “Where do I start?”

“Anywhere. Mandi.” I shrugged. “You’re not past that yet.”

“That’s part of it. No, I’m not past it. I—” Murphy bit back his emotions.

I gave him a few minutes.

When he spoke again, he said, “It’s like I traded Mandi for Rachel. I know one has nothing to do with the other, but it feels like that, like I pissed God off so much about something that now he doesn’t want me to be all the way happy, just kinda part of the way there.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“No, I don’t.” Murphy exhaled a long breath, as though blowing out all the stale air trapped in his lungs might take his troubles with it. “All the killing is wearing on me.”

“The infected, you mean?” I asked.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Murphy asked.

“Sometimes. Less now than before.”

“I kinda figured you were some kind of black-hearted zombie killer and didn’t care much about them.”

“You know that’s not true,” I said.

Murphy shrugged and looked around for a bit. “It doesn’t bother me that much when we’re in the shit, you know, and they’re coming at us, and it’s us or them. But sometimes, it’s kind of a rush. I’m getting addicted to the excitement, I think.”

I nodded. I knew all about that.

“So when you drag me off to go do some crazy shit, part of me wants to say ‘fuck you’. Part of me doesn’t want any part of the killin’. ‘Cause you know, every time we head out, somebody’s gonna get killed.”

“Seems like that sometimes.” And it did.

“Part of me wants to go out and get that rush,” said Murphy. “It’s addicting. But part of me wants to go out and just kill those fuckers because I’ve got this anger ‘bout what happened and all, and I just want to kill as many of ‘em as I can.”

I was definitely with Murphy on that one.

He said, “Like that day when we were up there on the ridge testing out those suppressors, we didn’t need to stay out there and kill all of those Whites. They used to be people, just like us. But once I started shooting, I wanted to kill every single one of them. I wanted more of them to come running up the block.”

“I don’t think that’s unnatural,” I said. “Given the circumstances, I think that’s normal.”

“But that’s what you don’t get.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You don’t have a problem being a black-hearted killer. You’re different.” Murphy looked over at me, and his eyes looked sadder than when he started. “It’s like there’s some black hole in you that’s full of crazy shit, and it doesn’t matter how many dead Whites you throw in there. It’ll never be enough. So when you want to go off on a killing rampage, I think you should. It might be the only thing that ever fills all that up. It might be the only way you’re ever going to get past whatever all that anger shit is that you’re carrying around.”

Murphy’s guesses were hitting so close to home that I couldn’t come up with a smart aleck response to deflect the conversation.

“But I can’t do that,” he said. “I mean, I’ll go. I’ll watch your back. I’ll go all the way down into your black hole with you, if that’s what you want. But for me, killing those three dumb-asses behind that 7-Eleven was enough for me. I got all of my hate out of my system then. I figured that out. I told you that. But now, it’s like every time I kill a White, especially now, I know I’m not doing it to survive. I’m doing it ‘cause I hate ‘em. Every time, it’s like I’m digging my own black hole in my soul, and when it gets deep enough, I’m gonna fall in and I’m never gonna come out again.”

Murphy was done. I was left without anything to say.

Shit.

After a while, as we realized neither of us had any more to say, we got up. We walked through the trees over to the old boat ramp. We waded through the water in silence, got into the boat, untied it, and headed downriver.

Chapter 31

The sky in the east was starting to glow when we tied the boat to a tree pretty close to where the riverboat had initially run aground during the flood. I didn’t say anything about that. What was the point?

We left the ski boat and started our long slow hike up the mountain as the sky slowly turned orange, and the clouds glowed silver. Murphy led the way, hammer in hand. Despite our conversation on the bridge, he was ready to smash a skull.

After nearly an hour of uphill walking, we reached the back fence of the house where we’d stashed the Humvee and our weapons. The slope there was steep, and rather than hop over and try to make our way up the dew-slick grass, we used the fence for support and walked along it until we reached the house.

Then it was an easy walk across ground that grew more level with each step. When we passed the corner to the front of the house, Murphy stopped and his shoulders sagged. Stepping up beside him, mine did too. It was a gut punch. The garage door behind which we’d parked our Humvee, loaded with weapons and the last of the silencers, was open. The Humvee was gone.

All of the black-hearted rage that Murphy talked about, all of that darkness that at the time seemed like something that needed to be sloughed off for the sake of happiness, came screaming to a head as I ran out into the center of the courtyard, swinging my machete at nothing—cursing, yelling, and stomping.

In getting those weapons, we’d paid too high a price. But those weapons were my hope for rescuing Steph.

I ran over to the open garage on the ridiculously small chance that the Humvee was sitting hidden behind another of the doors. Of course it wasn’t, but in my rage-impaired brain, anything was possible. I ran into the house through the open door, just knowing that I would find one of the guilty thieves inside. I needed to kill, to hack something to pieces while it begged for its life.

I raced up the stairs. I checked the bedrooms and bathrooms. I looked in the closets and under the beds. I found nothing.

My search ended with me standing in front of an empty pantry. A few days before, enough food had been in there to feed our new group for at least a week. I screamed my anger into the emptiness.

Chapter 32

People are good and people are bad, sometimes one right after the other, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell which is which. When my tantrum came to an end and I was spinning up black fantasies about how I was going to disembowel, behead, and hack at the thieves who took my Humvee—my fucking Humvee—any thoughts I’d had an hour earlier about aspiring to be a good person were gone.

As I walked through the foyer, I grabbed an edge of the front door and pushed it with all the force I could put behind it. I felt the weight of its nine-foot-tall, five-foot-wide, glass-paneled weight fly. It slammed and shattered, dropping shards of glass all over the foyer and porch.

“God dammit. God fucking dammit.”

I stomped forward, snorting and huffing like a distempered javelina and crossed the driveway to where Murphy stood. He hadn’t moved since we spotted the open garage. He was fuming, eyes black, hand gripping his hammer under white knuckles, ready to pound the life out of something.

“I hope we didn’t kill every White on this street,” I said as I marched past Murphy, heading up the steeply sloping, cobbled driveway, “because I need to kill something now.”

At the top of the driveway, I saw to my right the bushes in which Murphy and I had hidden the day we’d tested our suppressors, shooting at Whites up and down the street. Just in front of the bushes lay the remains of the only one I’d shot. His clothes were shredded and most of his flesh was gnawed away.

“Good,” said Murphy, looking down at the carcass.

I glanced back. He was standing just behind me, looking at the mauled body. Whether it had been chewed on by coyotes, dogs, or Whites, I didn’t care and probably wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already decided that the partially eaten body proved the presence of my prey. I cut hard to my left. Not that it mattered which direction. The house on the left was the first to catch my eye.

With Murphy stomping resolutely behind, we cut through a garden of cacti and decorative limestone chunks and kicked a lawn gnome hard enough to make it fly across the yard and bang that house’s front wall.

I hissed, “We’re here, fuckers.”

But no fuckers came out to meet us.

The front door of the house was open, and that angered me further as I crossed the lawn and stepped up onto the porch. Once inside, I smelled the miasma of old decay. Blood stained the floors and spattered the walls, dry and brown and red. Furniture in the dining room was disarrayed. A couch lay over on its back.

Rats, maggots, and flies crawled over the dead, uncountable in the scattered mess of their bones except that three skulls were on the floor.

“Hey,” I shouted into the house. No sound came back to me. The house was empty.

“Next door,” Murphy said as he spun on his heel and headed back out.

Running a few steps to catch up, I said, “Works for me.”

Instead of walking up to street level, we cut through the trees and underbrush that separated the two houses. Murphy pushed through, blazing the trail, and I followed.

When we burst out of the trees and back onto another lawn of crispy, brown St. Augustine grass carpeting ground still soft and muddy, our anger had dissipated an iota or two, but when I spotted another open front door, my anger found fuel to rekindle itself.

As we stepped up onto a large front porch, Murphy swung his hammer at the side of a five-gallon terra cotta flowerpot, shattering it and spilling dry black dirt into a mound that I tracked through on the way inside. The house had no smell of death, but it had been ransacked. Furniture was pushed over. Decorative items were on the floor, many broken. Paintings were knocked off the walls.

Seemingly frozen in indecision, Murphy came to a stop in the center of a patterned marble floor that gave him a view down two hallways, into the living room, and through the windows on the back of the house.

Standing beside him for a minute while I calmed a bit, I said, “We should check the house anyway.”

Murphy nodded and crossed the living room. I followed him as I looked over the mess: books, couch cushions, vases, a flat panel television, and lamps. Nothing of any value.

In the kitchen, the story was the same. It was a mess. Silverware was scattered on the floor, dishes were broken. Any knife of a reasonable size was missing. The pantry was empty. Nothing else in the house proved to be of any use. All the bedrooms had been gone through. There were clothes, blankets, and pillows. I did have the presence of mind to liberate some pillowcases. Sturdy cloth bags always came in handy for something. In the garage, we found some garden tools, though nothing that could double as a good weapon. And in the space large enough for three cars, all were gone.

We left that house and headed to the next one down the street.

Chapter 33

The street followed the curve of the ridge, and we tromped through the trees and stomped down the dead grass of people’s lawns, only to find each home thoroughly ransacked. And though we had no interest in taking a car, not a one was in a garage. None were parked in the driveways. None were parked up on the road. That was odd.

We’d been through maybe a dozen houses, each with a pre-apocalypse price upwards of a million or two. All were now in their first stages of decay with doors open, windows broken, everything inside strewn on the floor. Animals had moved in, some feasting on the remains of the dead humans inside. Many houses had water standing on the floor or soaked into the carpet. With the summer’s heat gone, the thick humidity would leave that water there a long time before evaporating it. Black mold was already growing up the sheetrock walls of some of the houses. Eventually the wooden frames would rot.

Once every four or five years, hailstorms blew across the Texas hill country, dropping hailstones large enough to disintegrate the shingles on most houses. The houses not already rotting would start, once rainwater got in through the holed roofs. Before long, houses would collapse, leaving their brick facades to crumble. Weeds would grow up through cracks in the foundations that appeared as the supporting clay soil dried and shrunk.

The asphalt streets would slowly fall apart under the assault of plant roots, rain, and seasonal temperature shifts. Ten, twenty, or thirty years in the future, cedar and mesquite forests would reclaim the endless suburban sprawl.

As Murphy and I trudged up a steeply sloping front lawn, I wondered if I would live long enough to hunt in the forest that would eventually grow to replace the houses we were searching through. Up at street level, we turned and followed an unbroken curb as it arced around into a cul-de-sac, the terminus of the ridgeline.

“What do you make of that?” Murphy asked.

Cars parked haphazardly on the street and up on the curbs nearly filled the cul-de-sac. A path wide enough to drive through bisected the scattered mess of vehicles and led to a driveway that fell away down the slope, to a house under the roof peaks that were just visible out past the edge of the pavement.

“I—” I didn’t know what to make of it.

Murphy stopped walking and turned slowly, looking at the trees all around. No houses were visible, only trees on undeveloped lots around the cul-de-sac, the scattered cars, and the driveway.

I said, “I’m guessing it’s a White like that tattoo guy. I think something goes haywire in their brains and some of them need to collect shit.”

Murphy grunted, nodded, and crossed the empty asphalt until he came to a late-model Japanese sedan. He laid a hand on its roof and looked around, still glowering.

We were near the center of the cul-de-sac, and being exposed was making me nervous. “We shouldn’t be out here.” I pointed to the shingled peaks out past the collection of cars. “I’m guessing the guy who rounded up all this shit is over there in that house.”

“Yup.” Murphy nodded, and kept nodding. He was coming to a conclusion that was getting more obvious with each nod. He pointed to the driveway. “I’ll bet our Humvee is down there.”

The self-evident deduction left me momentarily speechless. Yes. He was right. But that seemed at the same time too good to be true. I looked around at the trees again, looking for a trap. Nothing moved except branches swaying with the wind.

Murphy took a step toward the clear trail between the cars. I grabbed his shoulder and stopped him, feeling him tense as his temper started to flare. I said, “You’re right. But let’s be smart.” I pointed at the trees off to our left and took off at a jog across the asphalt.

A moment later, Murphy joined me in the trees.

Still looking around at what I could see of the cul-de-sac, I said, “We’ve been acting like reckless dipshits all morning.”

“Yeah.” Murphy didn’t take his eyes off the gap between the cars.

“It’s going to get us in trouble if we keep it up.”

Murphy agreed again.

“I know you whipped the shit out of that guy at the tattoo shop without any problem, but you know as well as I do that some of the these Smart Ones can be dangerous.”

Murphy drew a long, patient breath and looked down at his hammer, obviously thinking about applying it to some Smart One’s skull. He asked, “What are you thinking?”

I thumbed over my shoulder at the trees behind me. “We go down the hill a bit and work our way around that house and see what we can see. Then decide what to do.”

“All right,” Murphy said. “I say we stick pretty close to the road and see if we can get a look at what’s down that driveway.”

“You want to make sure the Humvee is there, first?” I asked.

“Yep.”

Murphy started through the trees and I followed. We moved away from the pavement as we went, using the curve and slope of the ridge as our guide. Murphy hefted his hammer as he gingerly stepped between cedars. I held my machete in a comfortable, familiar grip, telling myself to proceed cautiously, but wanting to hack a White.

I was trying to get a glimpse through the trees ahead for anything that looked like a limestone wall or a shingled roof when Murphy threw up a hand, a gesture to stop. I froze in place.

My heartbeat spiked and I slowly raised my machete, ready to fight as I looked left and right, listening. But nothing was around us that I could see.

When I looked back at Murphy, he was pointing at something on the ground.

I looked down, but couldn’t see it. I mouthed, “What?”

Murphy, with one hand still raised to hold me in position, bent his knees and lowered himself slowly until his pointing finger touched a thin wire running at shin height above the ground.

Holy shit!

Murphy saw on my face exactly what I was thinking, that the wire was part of a booby trap. He pointed along the wire, tracing its length. It came to a stop at an olive green box, partially hidden behind a sprout of branches at the base of a tree.

He pointed back in the direction we came from, motioned for me to stay where I was, and stood, taking great care to watch where he placed his feet. When he was up next to me, he whispered, “Follow me out. Stay close. Do exactly as I do. Don’t wander off on your own path.”

Without saying a word, I followed Murphy.

Chapter 34

The ground in most places among the trees was just a layer of dried cedar needle clusters an inch or two thick over sandy bits of limestone or hard rock. So, following our footprints out the way we’d come wasn’t an option. There were no footprints, just trees that all looked pretty much alike.

A few steps back along our path, I grabbed Murphy’s shoulder. He turned to me. I pointed in the direction we were moving and whispered, “What are the chances there are booby traps back that way?”

Murphy shrugged and looked around.

I said, “We could have been walking in a minefield since we entered the trees.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it a minefield.”

I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter exactly what it is?”

Still looking around at the tree trunks and across the ground, Murphy said, “This whole place could be full of traps, or that could be the only one. There’s no way to know until we find some more or get blown up by one we don’t see.”

I turned back in the direction we’d originally been moving and looked deep into the trees. “Just luck.”

“What’s that?” Murphy asked.

“We’re only alive because of luck,” I said. “Again.”

“What’s your point?”

“One booby trap doesn’t change anything.” I pointed toward the place where the house lay out among the trees. “We have the same chance of getting killed by a mine no matter which direction we go.”

Nodding slowly, Murphy said, “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” His face stretched in a wicked grin.

“What are you thinking?”

“Bad thoughts.” Murphy looked back at the mine strapped to the tree behind me.

I asked, “Can you disconnect it and reuse it?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’re on the same page.”

I put a hand in my pocket and yanked out a couple of pillowcases, kept one for myself and handed one to Murphy.

He shook his head. “If I can disconnect them, you’ll have to carry ‘em. I’ll need both hands to keep from getting blown up.” Murphy pointed to pair of tree trunks that looked to be competing for the same spot in the ground. “Go stand behind those while I do this.”

“But—”

“Besides getting blown up, what are you gonna do to help? Go over there where you won’t get hurt.”

Sulking, I walked over and put the double trunks between me and the booby trap. Murphy knelt down by the mine and leaned in close. With his back to me, I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing.

It took only a few moments of work before Murphy started to laugh and waved me over.

Puzzled, I moved between the trees, keeping an eye out for any wires I might have missed on the way to my hiding place.

Once I was beside him, Murphy said, “Get down here. Look at this.”

I knelt so I could see.

Murphy had the thin branches pushed to the side, exposing the whole mechanism. The wire was still taut. He pointed a finger at the wire and said, “Look around the other side of the trunk and tell me what you see.”

I leaned around the small trunk. The wire that extended across the path was looped around the trunk. On the backside of the tree, held in place by the loop was some kind of clicking mechanism with a wire that ran up to an explosive device, a curved, green, rectangular container very roughly the size of a Pop-Tart box.

“So, you trip on the wire,” I surmised, “the wire pulls tight, the clicker switch closes and the mine goes off.” I looked at Murphy expecting a nod and a smile.

Instead, he was holding in a laugh. “Typical.”

“Typical? What’s that mean?”

“You don’t know what this is, or how to use it?”

I was a little bit offended. “No, but how hard could it be?” As I was saying that, I realized that my guess must have been wrong.

Murphy’s big fingers went to work with surprising dexterity on the thin wire, untying the knot that made the loop. “Untie the mine.”

I fumbled with the wires.

Murphy had his untied in seconds and brushed me out of the way, having little patience for my difficulty. Again, it took only seconds, and the wire loosened and the green mine fell. I gasped and caught it before it hit the ground.

Murphy laughed. “It needs an electrical charge to blow. Dropping it won’t hurt it.”

“The fall won’t set it off?” It was hard to believe.

“You could beat it with a hammer and it wouldn’t go off.” Murphy held his hammer out to me. “You wanna try?”

I shook my head.

He looked down at the mine I was holding gingerly in two hands. “Turn it over and see what it says.”

Looking at him like he was keeping a secret from me, I turned the mine over and read it out loud, “Front toward enemy.”

“It’s an M18 Claymore directional mine.” Murphy said. He held up the clicker. “This is the clacker. You gotta click it three times to make it go off.”

“Three times?” I asked.

“This booby trap wouldn’t work. You’d get one click when you tripped over the wire. The Claymore wouldn’t go off.”

I said, “I’m confused.”

“Whoever set this up, it wasn’t somebody who understood what he was doing.”

“Not soldiers?” I asked.

Murphy shook his head. “Like you said up on the street, probably some knucklehead White with a car fetish.”

That made me feel a bit better about sneaking up on the house. “So our Humvee might be sitting in the driveway and all we have to do is get in and drive off.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Murphy looked at me seriously. “Just because this guy doesn’t know how to set up a trap with his Claymores doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Where do you think he got the Claymores?”

“Probably the same place we got the grenades from.”

“The munitions bunkers at Camp Mabry?” I asked.

Murphy raised his eyebrows. Where else?

“I hope he had as much difficulty with it.” I put the Claymore, its wires, and clacker in my bag.

“Let me disconnect those clacker wires from the mine first,” said Murphy. “Don’t want you blowing us up when we’re traipsing through the woods.” I held the pillowcase open and Murphy reached in.

We collected two more Claymores while working our way through the trees on the way to a black metal fence that bordered an expansive property. Whether natural or excavated, the front yard was a half-acre of mowed—now dead—grass and flowerbeds, laid out in front of a ranch-style house that might have covered a half-acre all by itself. Across the front lawn, snaking between the flower gardens, a driveway was covered with cars. Some parked neatly, others halfway in the grass. By the front door sat two Humvees. Neither had a machine gun mounted on the roof. Out across the yard, halfway to the fence and visible from every window on the front of the house, sat another Humvee—our Humvee. The machine gun mounted on the roof was all the proof I needed.

“I can jump this fence and be inside in like, twenty seconds,” I said. “You run back up through the trees and I’ll pick you up in the cul-de-sac.” I looked over at Murphy for agreement.

He was shaking his head.

I looked over at the house’s dark windows. “Unless there’s some kind of super sniper in there, he’s not going to be able to hit me, as fast as I’ll be running across the lawn. Once I’m inside, I’m home free.”

Murphy’s brow furrowed as he looked at the house and back at the Humvee. “Any decent shot will get you before you get halfway across.”

I huffed and looked back and forth across the lawn. “I’ll be halfway there before anyone even sees me.”

“Maybe.” Murphy scooted further back into the trees. “You wanna take that chance?”

Yes. Some days I felt invincible, though I had to constantly remind myself that my delusions of invincibility were driven primarily by anger and stupidity. Reluctantly, I asked, “What do you think?”

“No point in chancing it. If we wait ‘til dark, we just hike across, get in and drive off. No danger. No risk.”

I looked longingly at the Humvees, knowing Murphy was right.

He said, “Let’s fade back in the woods a bit, walk around the perimeter, and see what we can see. We’ll gather up as many Claymores as we can. I’m thinkin’, in our future, shit that blows up will always be useful. At dusk, that’ll be the hardest time to be seen running across the lawn. Depending on what we learn when we’re checking this place out, that’s when we’ll steal our Humvee back.”

Chapter 35

We started on a zigzag path through the trees, going up near the fence where we could see the house, then  back downhill and away. With much of the day to burn, we had plenty of time for our Claymore Easter egg hunt, and we found them with ease. The tripwires had been strung with some silvery wire that was pretty easy to see over the brown and green background, at least when you knew to look for it.

After I’d put a fourth Claymore into my pillowcase, we rounded a curve on the hill and found ourselves in a haze of smoke. Murphy stopped and sniffed the air, looking in the direction of the house. “Damn, that smells good.”

I said, “I can’t believe those fuckers are up there having a barbecue.”

“We might have to steal some of that, if we can.” Murphy hiked up the hill, following the smoke back toward the house.

I followed as the smoke drifted through the tree branches overhead.

Murphy looked back at me and whispered, “I’m surprised they’re not drawing in every White in the neighborhood with that smell.”

“What are they cooking?” I asked.

“What?” Murphy sniffed the air.

“They can’t run down to the H-E-B to buy a brisket,” I said. “So what do you think? A deer? A dog? Maybe a wild pig?”

Murphy shrugged. “There are plenty of wild pigs in the woods in east Texas.”

“That’s wishful thinking. If anything, it’s deer, I’ll bet.” I took a look around us in the woods. Always checking for anything that might be sneaking up. “I’ve never seen a wild pig around here.”

Murphy licked his lips. “I don’t care if it’s a deer, or a dog, or a cat.” He started forward again.

The hill grew steeper the closer we got to the fence, and by the time we were at a level to see across the backyard, we were mostly invisible from the house, hidden by the slope. The backyard was only half as big as the front and was mostly covered by an expansive patio. On the near side of the patio, behind several cords of neatly stacked oak wood, I spotted the source of the smoke: a long barbecue smoker, chugging white clouds into the air. The tops of two heads were visible just on the other side of the smoker.

I nudged Murphy and pointed. He’d been looking across the pool to the other side of the yard and was frowning when he looked up. He said, “I see ‘em. C’mon.” Murphy took off, moving quickly across the slope, staying far enough down so that he couldn’t be seen from the backyard.

I hurried after, curious what had spurred him to hustle.

We dodged prickly pears that were scattered between the cedars and stayed away from loose, gravelly spots in which we might noisily slip, bringing unwanted attention from the people who stole our Humvee.

Eventually, Murphy came to a stop and crouched down as he started back up the slope on his hands and knees. I did the same and we worked our way up until we were able to once again see the backyard. I looked across the width of a swimming pool, across the patio, and saw the smoker, still spewing pungently delicious white smoke that drifted lazily with the wind in the other direction. The two people who’d been tending the smoker were now absent. Back in the house, or so I guessed.

Murphy nudged me and pointed to our left.

Along the fence at the back corner of the yard stood a rectangular construct of chain link fence, sealed across the top with fencing material and partitioned into four equal parts, each with a closed gate. It was a kennel, but it didn’t hold dogs, it held Whites. Some were standing, a few were lying in the dirt, but most were squatting and looking despondently out at the yard or into the trees.

Murphy scooted back down the slope a few feet. I stayed where I was, sneaking peeks at what I could see. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Why imprison Whites?” I asked.

Murphy shrugged and pulled a face. “Doesn’t matter why, I guess. Every time we come across some of these Slow Burn knuckleheads, we see something new.”

“Oh, shit.”

“What?” Murphy raised his hammer and looked around.

“No,” I said, “not that.”

“What?”

“I’ll bet they’re livestock,” I said, feeling disgust at voicing the thought.

“Livestock?” Murphy asked.

“I’ll bet I know what’s on that smoker.”

Shaking his head, Murphy said, “No, that’s disgusting.”

I looked back in the direction of the smoker. “They’ve got some kind of meat in that smoker.”

Murphy turned away and slowly scanned through the woods. “I find myself liking the world less and less every day.”

“I hear you.”

Murphy took a moment to think about the Whites in the kennels. “Barbecued Whites, I don’t give a shit. That doesn’t change anything for us.”

“Okay.”

Murphy pointed back up toward the house. “There’re at least two of them up there.”

“I wonder how they get them into the kennels,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Murphy said. “We probably need to steer clear of that kennel unless we want them making some noise when they see us. You never know what those fuckers will do.”

“Okay.”

“When you saw those two behind the barbecue pit, did you see any gun barrels sticking up or anything?”

“Nope,” I answered. “Just the tops of their heads.”

“Yeah, me too. So we don’t know anything about them yet, except maybe what they like to have for dinner.”

I asked, “So what are you thinking? Plan A? Go out front and wait ‘til dusk, then steal our Humvee back?”

“Or we get out of here.” Murphy rubbed a hand over his bald head. “We don’t know anything about how many are in there, what they’re up to, or what they’re capable of.”

“Is that what you want to do?” I was looking at the kennels when I asked the question, and I realized there was something odd about the occupants of one section. “Oh, shit.”

Murphy was immediately ready to fight again. “What do you see?”

I waved Murphy back up. “Come take a look at this.”

Murphy was beside me. “What?”

“Those Whites in the far section of the kennel.” I pointed.

Murphy squinted. “It’s hard to make ‘em out with the Whites in the other cages in the way.”

“Yeah.” I turned and sat down on a flat piece of limestone. “Keep looking and tell me what you see.”

“What am I supposed to see?” Murphy asked. After a moment, he said, “Wait.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. I don’t think those ones are Whites.”

I got up off my comfortable flat piece of stone, and together Murphy and I worked our way around the curve of the fence to a place that would give us an unobstructed view of the end of the kennel in question. It was only twenty or thirty feet away from us when we peeked up over the sloping edge of the backyard.

Shaking his head, Murphy lowered himself back out of sight. He took a deep, frustrated breath.

I knelt down beside him. “Looks like half a dozen naked girls with normal skin color.”

“Of course,” Murphy said, disgusted. “If you’re gonna have a rape kennel, you gotta have ‘em naked.” He pounded his hammer into the dirt a few times.

“A rape kennel?” I asked. “You think that’s what it is?”

Shaking his head again, Murphy said, “I don’t know. Does it matter? They’re people—normal people, girls—in that cage. This place is just as fucked as that tattoo parlor. Maybe more fucked.”

I was as disgusted as Murphy. “You know what I’m thinking.”

“Null Spot?”

I nodded. There was no point in pretending that I wasn’t.

“Me, too,” Murphy offered. “I want to smash somebody’s head with my hammer right now.”

I hefted my machete and agreed.

Chapter 36

We continued to work our way around the fence, keeping hidden in the trees and just down the slope until we came across a section of the property that was covered with oaks and barely visible from the house.

Murphy looked at me and said, “This is the place. You sure you wanna do this?”

“Stupid question, Murphy.” I scrambled quickly up the hill, made short work of climbing the fence, and took up a position behind a thick oak tree while I waited for Murphy to catch up. I peeked around the trunk and saw a window on the side of the house. It was open; the sun glaring on the screen made it impossible to tell what was inside.

Murphy came to a stop beside me, panting. “I slipped off the fence and fell on my ass.”

“You all right?”

“I’m good. You see anything yet?”

“Nope.”

Murphy nodded his head toward the house. “Lead the way, Null Spot.”

I sprinted to another thick tree trunk a few dozen feet ahead, came to a stop, and knelt. I looked past it at the window. Still only darkness within the house. A second open window revealed the same. I waved Murphy to come up beside me. The house was maybe another fifty or sixty feet away. Most of the covering oaks were behind us, between the fence and us.

I pointed at a series of three air conditioning units sitting on the ground, attached to the house by copper umbilical tubes and wires. Knowing it was just as dangerous crossing open ground on this side of the house as it was in front did nothing to quell my angry, fuck-it attitude. I took off at a crouching sprint, trying to keep the bulk of my body below the line of sight of anyone sitting inside one of those dark windows and casually gazing out.

Without incident, I came to a stop against the house’s stone wall, between two of the air conditioner units. I pressed myself against the limestone and looked back at Murphy. If someone inside either window noticed me, Murphy would see a reaction before I would. He looked from window to window a couple of times before giving me a thumbs up. I motioned with an upturned palm for him to stay put as I raised my head up from my hiding spot and looked up and down the length of the wall. I listened, but heard nothing. I pointed at the window to my left and Murphy gave me a nod.

Off I went, creeping along the wall, careful and slow as I stepped through dry mulch, avoiding sprigs of crisp brown flowers and crackly brown leaves fallen off the shrubs. Once I was below the window, I came to a stop and listened.

I heard breathing.

Someone was breathing, heavily and slowly.

The faint sound of a big man sleeping is what I heard. Looking first left, then right, and seeing no dangers, I chanced a peek in the window, quick up and then back down.

A big man with pale white skin—skin just like mine—was asleep on the bed, on his belly, head turned facing the other wall. But at the foot of the bed—

I took another peek in the window, longer than before.

Coming back down, I was shaking my head. At the foot of the bed a girl sat on the floor, legs curled up against her chest, head between her knees, wrist cuffed to the bedpost. Her skin color assured me she was normal.

That made three bad guys, at least. Two were up barbecuing. One was sleeping late or taking a nap after his morning rape session. The world had truly turned into a fucked up place.

When I looked back across the lawn, I saw Murphy looking at me with wide curious eyes. I held up one finger and then pointed to the window. I closed my eyes and put my hands together, then leaned my head over to indicate sleep. Murphy nodded and set his face in a hard frown. He was apparently thinking what I was thinking. That screen was a thin defense for the sleeping man.

Thinking the house’s occupants were sloppy in their security, I took off moving quickly to the next window, again taking care to avoid any dead garden plants that might give away my presence with an audible crunch. I stopped below the window, just as I’d stopped by the first one. I listened, heard nothing, and got sloppy myself.

Expecting nothing but an empty room or a sleeping man, I leaned over to gaze through the screen and found myself face to face with a surprised man on the other side of the screen, trying to get a look outside.

Startled, I jumped sideways and pushed myself against the wall.

“Hey,” the guy inside the window shouted. “Hey.” The screen bulged out on a feeble push but didn’t give.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Not being a fan of indecision, I put my balls on the table and made my bet, sprinting away from the window and arcing out from the wall, hoping that Murphy would figure out what I was up to in time to lend a hand.

The voice from the man in the room shouted back into the house. “We got infected in the compound!”

I made a hard turn left and angled toward the first window. Committed to my latest date with impulsive stupidity, I planted a foot and sprang at the opening, leading with a shoulder, and flew right through the screen. With a rattle of the screen’s metal frame, I hit the floor on the other side.

Rolling over to my feet and onto my knees I found myself facing a wide-eyed girl, still cuffed to the bedpost. I jumped up and hauled my machete back over my shoulder for a swing. I stepped forward as the big white-skinned man on the bed was just sitting up. The last thing his bleary eyes saw was the backhand swing of my machete splitting his skull horizontally across the cheekbones. Blood sprayed across the wall and spewed onto the sheets.

The girl gulped, but didn’t scream.

A commotion from the room next door accompanied the metallic sound of the screen being pushed out.

A man’s voice hollered, “Billy, he’s trying to get in your window.”

I looked at the slumping body on the bed. Billy was too busy dying to listen to his buddy next door.

“Jake! Keith!” The shout was followed by two dull cracks: sound suppressed rifle shots. I don’t know what made me madder at the moment, the fact that that hollering jackass was using my stolen rifle or that he was shooting at Murphy. Either way, I could still count, and I figured I had four—no, three—remaining adversaries, all armed with automatic weapons and all inside the house.

Bumping walls and scooting furniture from somewhere far across the expansive house told me I had some moments before I had more trouble than I could handle. For the moment, surprise was still on my side, but it was rapidly evaporating.

I ran into the hall and tore off at full speed toward another doorway. Caution was a commodity I couldn’t afford. I cut the corner into the room and immediately spotted the backside of the man I’d met just a few moments before. He was standing at the window, weapon at his shoulder, looking for a target.

I saw his shoulders flinch and his head started to turn as my machete came down vertically into his neck, cutting down between his shoulder blades. He grunted under the impact and fell forward out the window as I yanked my blade free of the bone in which it had stuck.

Choosing to ride my frenzied wave of surprise, I ran out of the room, around a corner, and into a long wide hall that appeared to run the length of the house. I figured my best chance was to catch the last two before they figured out I was in the house. I accelerated to full speed.

Oops.

Two men half-stumbled and ran out of a side room and into the hall in front of me. Urgency changed instantly to fright as the guy in front saw me coming at him. I screamed my wildest White howl, realizing I’d never reach him before he managed to get his rifle up to put a few holes in my chest. In a desperate hope, I threw my machete and dove through a door on my left. Bullets sizzled the air in the hall. I tumbled over a chair, scrambled over crates and things I didn’t have time to identify, and dove through another window screen. Coming down on a cactus plant, I howled and rolled into the dead grass even as I scratched at the ground to pull myself away. A moment later, I was on my feet and dodging between cars as I crouched and ran.

Not realizing how fast I was moving, or quite how I’d gotten away from the house, I found myself next to my Humvee and I grinned. I put it between me and the house as I looked through the windows to find my pursuers. Indeed, a man was poking his head and a rifle barrel out the front door. I slipped inside the Humvee, safe for the moment. I looked around inside. All of the weapons, ammo, and camping supplies were gone. Only canisters of fifty-caliber ammunition remained. Standing up inside the Humvee, I opened the top hatch and slowly climbed up to position myself behind the heavy machine gun.

My pursuer at the front door was looking around cautiously at the trees, bushes, and cars. I was guessing he thought I was just another brain-fried crazy White, not smart enough to open the Humvee door. Too bad for him.

My fifty-caliber machine gun had a belt dangling from it. The guys in the house had apparently gone to the trouble to load it for me. I pulled the handle back on the right side, stood up straight, and swung the barrel around at the house’s front door.

My pursuer saw the movement. He looked right at me, his eyes went wide, and he ducked back behind the front door as I let go with a burst of a dozen rounds. Bullets shattered limestone blocks, some tore into the roof, and others missed the house altogether, but some of them hit the front door—only a few of them needed to.

In the distance, I heard howls. Not many, but enough. From the backyard, the Whites in the kennels grew excited when they heard the shots. I panned the big fifty back and forth across the front of the house, hoping the other white-skinned, knuckleheaded fuck would think his balls were bigger then my fifty caliber rounds.

No such luck.

With adrenaline pumping, waiting for something to happen was hard. It was also a bad idea. I didn’t know where knuckleheaded fuck number four was. I did know that he had one of the sniper rifles that had killed Jerome in that intersection. If number four was good with his rifle, and if he had any smarts, he’d be sneaking around to get me in his sights. I immediately dropped down inside the Humvee. It was time to move.

Speed and surprise were treating me well enough so far. I got out of the Humvee and bolted for the shattered front door. The thick oak had split twice as it flew off its hinges, landing partially on top of Number Three. Blood was everywhere. The guy was dead. I pulled his weapon out of his hand and cursed silently. It had taken a round through the body right above the trigger. The suppressor looked to be in good shape and, in fact, became the handle for my new metal club. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was something.

Beyond the front door and the foyer lay some sort of living room with couches, chairs, and coffee tables. It looked liked a college dorm for the messy boys. Empty food packages, cans, and bottles lay scattered everywhere. The place stank of beer, urine, and vomitus. I raised my new club baseball bat-style and ran across the foyer, aiming toward a wide doorway at the far side of the living room. As I passed across that long hallway someone yelled, “Freeze.” Two gunshots followed, but I was already past the hallway and well into the living room. I came to a sudden stop and froze. That was Murphy’s voice.

“Murphy?” I called.

“Was that you?” he called back.

“Yes,” I said, irritation dripping from my answer.

“Sorry, dude.”

“There’s one more I know of,” I called as I worked my way across the living room to the wide doorway I’d been heading for originally. I added, “He’s got an M4.”

“Not anymore,” said Murphy. “I mean, he’s still got it, but he’s dead.”

I relaxed a little.

Chapter 37

After I retrieved my machete and stole a pistol off a corpse, Murphy and I hurried through the rest of the house, room after room after room. The place had to have been ten thousand square feet. It looked like a doomsday prepper and hoarder got married and spread their crap all over the house. The four Slow Burns we’d killed had to have been going through the whole neighborhood, meticulously collecting cars, weapons, ammunition, food, and alcohol. Mounds of it were in nearly every room.

Once we were sure we’d gotten the last of them, we went back into the main room. Outside, the infected were probably on their way because of my choice to use the fifty-caliber machine gun. Inside, the normal girl was still handcuffed to the bedpost—or so I assumed—and there was still a kennel of women locked up out behind the house.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you take one of the sniper rifles and grab a spot where you can target any Whites coming down the driveway? And you know they’re going to come.”

“Okay.” Murphy knelt beside the body of the man I’d machine-gunned through the front door. Murphy checked him for spare magazines, but found none. “What about you?”

“I’ll go unlock that girl in the bedroom and see what’s up.”

“Bring her back in here.” Murphy pointed back at the main room. “If we need to bail out, I’d rather not have to come find you.”

“Gotcha, boss.” I took off at a jog down the hall that led to the back bedroom where I’d slain the first of the Slow Burns in the house. When I entered the room, the girl was sitting up straight and looking at me with a blank face. Considering the circumstances, she looked to be in decent shape—not beat up, not bleeding.

“You okay?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Do you know where the keys are for the cuffs?” I asked. I waited for an answer.

The girl sized me up, I guess wondering if I was a hero or the next shift. She looked beside the bed and toward a nightstand. “In the drawer, I think.”

I stepped over to the nightstand and yanked the drawer open—junk inside slid across the wood. Indeed, the handcuff keys were right there. I retrieved them and went back to the end of the bed where I handed them to the girl. I stepped back and got both my hands back on my weapons.

The girl started to laugh.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re afraid of me?”

I shook my head then switched to a nod. “You never know. For all I know, he was your fiancé and you were playing S&M games when he dozed off.”

The girl got the cuffs off and rubbed her wrist before pulling her knees in close to her chest to cover her breasts. I realized I was looking at them.

“Sorry,” I said.

She looked down at herself. “It’s okay. Your looking at my tits is far from the worst thing that’s happened to me today.”

I stepped over to the closet as I looked across the floor. “Do you have any clothes?”

She shook her head and I opened the closet door to see if anything inside might work for her. A thick terry cloth robe was hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I held it up for her to see.

“Thanks.” She reached out a hand as she stood up while using one hand to cover her breasts.

I turned away for a second then turned back to watch her. Her modesty wasn’t as important as my safety. As she wrapped herself up in the robe, I asked, “What’s the deal here?”

The girl looked at the guy’s corpse on the bed. “You didn’t figure that out before you chopped his head in half?”

I shrugged. “Mostly. We saw the girls out back in the kennel.”

The girl looked through a back wall as though a window was there. “That’s where they keep us until they need us.”

“Need you?” I asked, stupidly.

“They do terrible things to us.”

“You don’t look bruised up or anything,” I observed.

The girl put a hand to her cheek as though touching an old wound. Emptily, she said, “You learn to cooperate.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

The girl looked back at the bed and we stood in awkward silence.

“I need to know you’re not going to hurt me,” I said.

She looked me up and down. “I need to know the same thing.”

I almost laughed. “Kind of a common problem these days, huh?”

She smiled. “Thank you for killing him. You did get them all, didn’t you?”

“Were there four?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then they’re all dead.” I used my machete to point through the open door. “My buddy, Murphy, is out there keeping watch for Whites coming up the driveway. He helped.”

“Whites?” The girl asked. “Your word for the infected?”

I nodded.

“You’re different than these,” she observed.

I shrugged again. “I got infected, but I’m okay, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“It’s hard to explain. My buddy, Murphy, he’s infected too. C’mon, we need to get out to the living room before Murphy gets worried.”

As we came into the living room near the shattered front door, I heard the distinct, but muffled, sound of Murphy’s suppressed M4. He was just outside standing behind a car with his weapon laying across the roof. Looking up at the end of the driveway, I spotted three bodies, but nothing moving.

“Just three Whites came?” I asked.

“That’s it.” Murphy glanced back at me and then at the girl. “I’m Murphy.”

“I’m Molly,” she said. “Thank you.” She walked outside and extended a hand to shake his.

Murphy looked at the hand. “You’re not worried about catching what I’ve got?”

With a look of disgust on her face, Molly glanced down at the dead man on the floor just inside the door. “I’m sure I’d have caught it already.”

“Guess not.” Murphy reached over and shook her hand.

To Molly, I said, “You’re probably immune. I think anybody who isn’t infected by now has to be immune.”

Molly just nodded and said, “I need to get my friends out.”

“Oh,” I looked toward the back of the house. “In the kennel. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking about them. Do you know where the keys are?”

Nodding, Molly knelt down and felt at the pockets of the prone man. “He’s probably got them.” She pulled a jingling key ring out and lifted it for me to see.

“You want me to tag along?” I asked.

The girl looked at me, deciding how to answer.

“You should go with her,” said Murphy.

The girl’s expression became suspicious. I said, “No, she’s cool.” To her, I said, “If any Whites are out there trying to come over the fence, don’t yell. Come in here and get me. Better yet—I handed her my pistol. “Use this, but only if you have to.”

The girl looked down at the pistol, extended to her grip-first. She took it, and I clenched my machete, ready to swing it if she decided that she was going to shoot me.

She gave me a nod. “I’ll be right back.” She ran for the back door.

Murphy said, “There’s nothing much happening here. I think we got lucky. Why don’t you go stand by the back door and keep on eye on her or something? If I get in a spot, I’ll holler.”

Chapter 38

It was mid-afternoon before one of us went up to the top of the driveway to pull the sliding gate shut. The gate—like the black metal fence all around the property—was only six feet tall and wouldn’t stop any determined mob of Whites, but it would keep out any that were casually passing by.

Some of the girls I’d initially spotted sitting in the kennel staring at the sky turned out to be dead. In total, there were four still alive. The first thing they did, even before food, was to bathe themselves in the pool through the water had turned green with algae. Afterward, they scrounged clothing from around the house and gorged themselves on a smorgasbord of canned foods and snack foods laid out on the dining room table. I’d already eaten by that time, so Murphy was taking a turn while I loaded boxes of food, ammunition, and weapons into the back of our Humvee.

Molly was helping with the chore and was handing me cans of fruit when she said, “I used to live about a half mile up the road.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, wedging items into the back seat as best I could.

“My husband, my son, and both my daughters turned,” she said.

It wasn’t an uncommon circumstance, so I didn’t comment.

“My husband went first. I think he brought it home from work. That was in the beginning, a couple of days after the riot at the jail.”

I was out of the Humvee by then, looking at Molly and thinking about my escape during the jail riot. “What did you do with your husband?” I asked.

She said, “He was sick for a few days before he went after my youngest daughter.”

I was afraid to ask what happened there, but Molly wasn’t afraid to tell it. “I guess I knew what to expect. I mean, it was all over the Internet by then. I just didn’t want to believe it. I was downstairs in the kitchen when she screamed.” Molly slowly shook her head. “I told Annie not to go upstairs into Daddy’s room, but you know how kids are.”

No. But I nodded anyway.

“I dropped what I was doing and ran upstairs. By that time I’d taken to carrying a gun—a silver revolver that Jim bought me for Christmas. He liked his guns a lot. I hated it. I was so angry at him for putting a gun under the Christmas tree.” Molly laughed as a few tears found their way down her cheeks. “So, I had the gun. I got to the top of the stairs. Jim Junior was right behind me, and Sara was coming. The bedroom door was open and Jim was on his knees on the floor over Annie. His mouth was covered with blood. He looked like one of those mistreated pit bulls that just mauled some kid on the news.”

I just looked at Molly. I didn’t have any words of comfort for her. But she didn’t need any. She just needed to tell her story, and maybe after enough tellings the pain of it would subside.

“I screamed at Jim to get away from her, but he just hunched lower and snapped his teeth.” Molly slowly shook her head again. “Jim Junior was trying to get around me. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do, but if he’d gone over to help Annie, Jim would have killed him too. Sara was screaming and screaming and screaming. I thought it would never end, and it didn’t, not until I pulled the trigger.” Molly fell silent.

“You shot your husband?” I asked.

Molly nodded. “I didn’t even realize I had the gun up. It just happened. I didn’t kill him with the first shot. It nicked his shoulder. But that only made him angry, and he jumped to his feet and came at us. I shot three more times.” Molly looked down at the ground and her tears rolled off her nose and dripped into a tiny puddle between her feet.

When she looked up again, she said, “When I got to Annie, she was bleeding so badly. I…I tried to stop the bleeding, but it was gushing out of her neck.” Molly gulped another breath. “She died right there in my bedroom.”

I laid a hand on Molly’s shoulder. “That had to be hard.”

She nodded. “You know, the police never even came. I called them. I called an ambulance. Nobody came.”

“I know,” I said.

“Jim Junior got sick after that. He never woke up. He died with the fever, thank God.” Molly shook her head and laughed bitterly. “How twisted is it when a mother is thankful that her son died of a fever?”

“It was better than the alternative.” Out of curiosity, I started, “After they died—” I paused, not sure whether to continue with the question.

“What did I do with the bodies?” Molly finished for me.

I nodded.

Another bitter laugh that verged on tears. “That’s not the kind of problem I ever thought I’d have to solve.”

I shook my head, thinking back to Freitag’s friend with no hands who we went to dispose of downriver.

“I couldn’t keep them in the house,” Molly said. “I couldn’t bury them. We’ve only got a few inches of soil in our backyard, and then it’s just limestone. I wrapped them in layers of garbage bags and duct tape. I didn’t know what else to do. I left them by the back fence under some blankets. I took some rocks that bordered the garden and put them on the blankets to keep them from blowing away.”

Given the constraints, that seemed like a pretty good solution to me.

“A week or so later, they disappeared.”

At first that surprised me, until I realized the bodies had probably been dragged off by hungry Whites. “Was the fence knocked down?”

Molly nodded. “For a while it was only me and Sara. We did okay, considering. We were getting low on food, and I knew I needed to go see what I could find in the neighbors’ houses. I didn’t know whether it was more dangerous to leave her at home or bring her with me. But she was too frightened to stay by herself. She convinced me, and I brought her along. I told myself I had plenty of ammunition, and we’d be okay.” Molly shook her head again as she relived her choices. “We weren’t. It happened next door at the Buckley’s house.”

Molly took another moment to collect herself, and I waited patiently while she did.

“The front door was locked, and I didn’t think I could break it in.”

I looked Molly up and down. She weighed all of a hundred and ten pounds. She was probably right.

“We went around to the back yard. I opened the gate. I was so stupid. I should have checked first if anything was back there. They were. They rushed out at us, three of them, like they’d been waiting there for us all along.”

“Some of them can be pretty efficient predators,” I said. “They may have heard you coming and chose to be quiet and wait, hoping you’d open the gate and come in.”

Molly shrugged. “It all happened so fast. I had the gun in my hand, and I was shooting even as I was falling. The infected were clawing and snapping. I killed the one that came down on top of me, and while I was laying there with that thing bleeding on me, I shot the other two who were attacking Sara. But—” Molly buried her face in her hands and sobbed loudly.

I wrapped my arms around her and lied to her that it was okay. Everything was okay.

It took a long while for Molly to cry herself out. When she did, she stood up straight and looked at me with red eyes. “I shot her. I shot Sara. I guess when I was falling. The bullet hit her in the neck. It went straight through. She was bleeding badly, so badly. I knew she was going to die, but I put my hand over her throat and I tried to stop the bleeding.” Molly shrugged as if to ask what else she could have done. “Sara looked at me. She didn’t scream or cry. She just tried to breathe. She didn’t move. That’s when I heard the infected screaming. They were close and coming.”

“Whites.” I muttered.

Molly nodded. “I checked my revolver. I only had one bullet left. There were four or five coming, maybe more.” Molly closed her eyes and put her hand over them as she turned away. In a hoarse whisper she said, “I put the last bullet in Sara’s head, and I ran.” More sobs followed.

When the sobs came to a stop I said, “It wasn’t your fault. What you did for Sara might be the bravest thing I’ve heard. I don’t know if I could have done it.”

Molly looked back at me and nodded as her lip quivered. “I feel like a coward. I keep telling myself I should have stayed with her or maybe used the bullet on myself.”

I looked at the house. “That’s why you weren’t beat up when they raped you.”

Molly nodded, and after gulping another breath she said, “I thought I deserved what those men were doing to me, for what I let happen to my kids. I let them do—” she cried some more.

“The world is a fucked up place now,” I told her after a bit.

Molly looked back at the house and laughed bitterly.

I shook my head and pointed at the house. “You lived through that and all the other stuff. You’re strong.”

“Aren’t you just the Mr. Positive Dr. Phil?”

“I’m just trying to make it through the day,” I told her.

Chapter 39

Carrying some kind of tan-colored goggle things in one hand and his M4 in the other, Murphy walked across the driveway to where Molly and I were just finishing up by the Humvee. “What’s the plan, Batman?” he said, grinning.

I looked into the Humvee. “We’ve got about as much stuff in here as we’re going to get.”

“You got all the fifty cal ammo?” Murphy asked.

I nodded. “Eleven cans. All I could find.”

Murphy looked back at the house. “There’s a lot of shit in there.”

I shrugged. That was plainly true.

“You guys are just going to leave, then?” Molly asked.

“We are loading up the Humvee.” I pointed to the stuff piled in the back of our truck. “What exactly are you asking?”

Molly crinkled her brow. “Things are happening pretty fast. I haven’t thought about it.”

Murphy looked at me, “Before you go all Null Spot, dude, these chicks got everything they need here. Maybe enough food for—I don’t know—four or five months, and more guns and ammo than they’re likely to need. Shit like this.” He held up the goggle things.

I looked at them, but didn’t have a guess what they were.

“Night vision goggles,” he said.

“No shit.” That pleased me greatly. “They don’t look like what I’ve seen on TV.”

Murphy shook his head. “There are lots of different kinds.”

I reached out, and Murphy handed me the goggles. I started to examine them. “Do they work?”

“Yep.”

“Do they take batteries?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“And the batteries are still good?”

“These still work.”

As I slipped them over my head, I asked, “How many sets of these did you find?”

“Just the one so far,” he said.

Molly pointed toward one end of the house. “There are seven more inside.”

“Seven?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

Molly looked down at her feet. “They didn’t always have me locked up. I earned their trust at least a little bit. The goggles are in the rec room in that pile of stuff behind the pool table.”

Shaking his head and shrugging, Murphy said, “I didn’t really go through that stuff.”

Molly looked at me and went into sales mode. “I saw most of what they brought in. I think I know what they’ve got.”

“Had,” I corrected. “It’s your stuff now.”

“Or our stuff,” she suggested.

I looked at Murphy with the silent question on my face. What do we do about the girls?

Ignoring Molly, he said, “Man, you know what we got to do.”

“I can help,” she said. “We can all help.”

“This isn’t your fight,” I told Molly.

She replied, “Let’s team up. We’ll all be better off together than alone. You can see that, right?”

Shaking my head, I said, “Not necessarily.”

“Are you guys alone?” Molly asked.

“No,” I admitted. “It’s complicated.” I spent a while explaining the situation to Molly, not the history—I glossed over a few quick points—but mostly I told her about our plan to rescue Steph and get out of town. With a nod from Murphy, permission I guess, I told her we were planning to head west, far from all the danger of the Whites in the cities.

When I was done, Molly pointed at a freestanding garage that Murphy and I hadn’t checked when we cleared the house of threats. “There’s a trailer in that garage. It’s got a Porsche in it. I think the guy used it for racing or something and he towed it to the races with the car inside.”

“Wait,” I asked, “That’s why that garage was so big?”

Molly said, “The guy that lived here before the infection hit, he was that guy you killed on the bed—”

“You knew him before?” Murphy asked.

“Yes,” Molly answered. “Not well, but he had parties at his house for the neighbors. He’s got some old cars and things in there.”

“A trailer.” Murphy stroked his chin. He looked at me. He looked over at the garage. “Let’s go check it out.”

I glanced up at the front gate. To Molly, I asked, “How are those other girls doing? Can one or two of them keep an eye on things out here for a bit? I hate not having somebody on watch.”

“Considering what they’ve been through, Zed, they’re fine.”

“Okay,” I said, “I just didn’t know—” I groped for the right words.

Molly said, “We’re not fragile. If we were, none of us would have made it this long.”

Chapter 40

It was as much a showroom as a garage. The guy owned seven cars, all old, all expensive, arrayed for display across a gleaming epoxy-coated floor. The walls were hung with neon signs and old metal car product signs. A row of red toolboxes lined one section of wall, filled with more tools than I’d ever need, likely more than I could identify.

The trailer, parked along one wall just inside one of the garage doors, was fully enclosed. Inside, the front eight feet were set up as a small overnight camper. The back held tool boxes, racks for tires, and a Porsche painted in red, white, and blue racing stripes and numbers. Inside was also mounted a fuel tank for storing a few hundred gallons of custom race fuel for the Porsche.

“If we ditch the Porsche,” I said, as though that was a decision we’d have to spend some time thinking about, “there’s a ton of room. We could haul off most—if not all—of the food and weapons these guys collected.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “And we’ll be set when we get to Balmorhea.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Murphy walked around the front of the trailer. “We just need to figure out how to make the trailer hitch work with the one on the back of the Humvee.”

Pointing around the room, I said, “I think there are enough tools here that we can make anything work.”

Murphy looked at the tool cabinets and nodded.

I looked at Molly. “You talk to the girls and make sure they’re on board. If so, we need to get to work.” To Murphy I said, “In the three Humvees we’ll have room for twelve, but we’ll have fourteen people. What do you think?”

“Instead of hooking the trailer up to a Humvee,” said Molly, “why not use that crew cab F-350 to haul it, then you’ve got room for at least five comfortably, and more if you need to squeeze them in.”

Shaking my head, I said, “Won’t work. The Whites go nuts when they see a running vehicle. They’ll break right through those windows and kill everyone inside.”

Molly said, “I’ll bet there’s a welding rig in here. We could cut some metal out of the fence and weld it across the windows or something. That’ll protect everyone inside.”

“And over the grill,” Murphy added. “That’ll protect the radiator when you have to run some over. And you will have to run some over.”

“That could work,” I agreed. “That’ll give us enough room for everyone.”

Chapter 41

While Murphy spent the afternoon in a shaded spot on the roof keeping an eye on our perimeter, two of the girls—one who’d had some experience welding—went to work with an acetylene torch cutting sections of fence and welding them over the grill and windows on the Ford pickup. Aesthetically, it was hideous. But it was functional. Molly, me, and the other girl spent the afternoon loading the trailer with every weapon, every bit of food, and all the ammunition we could find in the house.

Though the trailer already had tool cabinets built in, we loaded other tools we thought might be of use. After that, we siphoned the diesel out of the tanks of cars in the collection across the front yard and in the cul-de-sac. In doing so, we topped off the tanks of all three Humvees and the pickup. With no need for the high-octane gasoline stored in the trailer for racing the Porsche, we dumped it and put the rest of our diesel there.

It was after midnight when Molly and I climbed the ladder at the back of the house to get onto the roof. Murphy, by that time, had a lawn chair set up on the roof, though he wasn’t sitting in it. He was looking through his night vision goggles and scanning along the fence line. As we approached, he asked, “We ready?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

He flipped up his goggles and asked, “What’s the plan?”

I pointed out at the Humvee with the fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on the roof. “We head out in the dark. I’ll drive that one. Murphy, you’ll be up on the roof with the fifty. Molly will be right behind us with the trailer. We’ll put one of the girls—”

“Marissa,” Molly cut in, reminding me of her name.

“Yeah, Marissa,” I said. “Each of the other two girls will follow in the last two Humvees. We’ll take it slow and stay tight.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, that should work.”

“We shouldn’t get too many Whites out after us,” I said. “If we do, we’ll run down what we can. If we get in trouble, we’ll speed up or shred ‘em with the fifty.”

“We’ve got plenty of ammo for it,” Murphy confirmed.

“And you’ll never guess what we found,” I said, grinning.

“What?”

“A grenade launcher.”

“What?” Murphy asked. “Like an RPG or something?”

Shaking my head I said, “Like some kind of thing with a magazine on the side. It looks kind of like the machine gun but with a barrel this big.” I held my hand up and made a big circle with my fingers.

“Probably an MK19.”

“So it is a grenade launcher?” I asked.

Murphy grinned. “It’s like a big grenade machine gun. I think one of the Humvees has a mount for an MK19.”

Smiling, I looked at Molly. She smiled wickedly in return. She was probably thinking of slaughtering the infected. I was thinking of slaughtering Jay and his thugs.

“When are we heading out, then?” Murphy asked.

“We’re ready to go now,” I answered. “We can go back to the boathouse tonight, get everyone fed, then spend tomorrow afternoon getting ready. Tomorrow night we should be able to get the girls from Jay.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Then we bail out of town?”

“That’s the plan.”

Chapter 42

My experience in the post-apocalyptic world put me in a state of mind such that I was always surprised when things went as planned. And so I was surprised when our little convoy drove an hour without incident to a residential street that ran along the side of a hill, above the cove where our friends were hiding in the boathouse.

Without seeing a single White after we parked, we offloaded some food and enough weapons for our task. The rest of the night and the next day we spent planning, preparing, and of course, getting some sleep. At least that’s what Murphy and I needed most. The others in the boathouse, having spent their time being worried, bored, and hungry, had plenty of time to rest while waiting for us to return.

I’d tried to convince the others that I could rescue the girls all on my own. All I needed was a pair of night vision goggles, my machete, and a dark night. My plan was to swim out to the island, silent and invisible. I’d sneak around until I found Jay sleeping in his hut, dispatch him with a few brutal machete hacks, and maybe whack a few more of his fucktards. I’d then find Steph, Amy, and Megan, pilfer a boat, and get out of Dodge.

To me, it was that simple. But nobody liked my cowboy plan. They thought I might murder one too many innocents as I crept ninja-style around the island.

Dalhover and Gretchen had other ideas. They thought they could intimidate Jay with our newly gained superior firepower. They’d blow up or sink a few boats and threaten to sink the rest. Jay would read the writing on the wall and give over his hostages. The thing they just didn’t understand nor accept when I argued the point was that Jay was crazy. Gretchen had dealt with him, recognized his oddities, but couldn’t accept that he’d act more irrationally than he already had.

As for me, I’d seen enough crazy in the eyes of irrational people to know it when I saw it in Jay. So, while Dalhover was finding a way to secure the fifty-caliber machine gun on the bow deck of the cabin cruiser, Murphy had put the MK19 grenade launcher on its tripod on the pontoon boat. I’d insisted, to the point of leaving the group, that I was swimming out to the island. They’d all finally agreed to let me go on with what they saw as my heroic stupidity. I was the backup plan in case Jay went nuts.

The hard part in all of it was going to come when choosing who to kill. I knew there were good people on that island, frightened and following Jay’s lead just because he exuded those two most important of leadership characteristics: passion and certainty. Too bad people readily accepted that combination as a valid replacement for competence. History is littered with the fallen empires of kings, dictators, and fools who were passionate, certain, and wrong.

By the time night fell that next day, we were ready. What’s more, we couldn’t have asked for a better night—well, maybe not much better. Only a sliver of a moon shed light on the lake, but only when it could find a gap in the clouds. The near blackness of the night significantly enhanced the advantage of our night vision.

I looked down at a newly acquired watch on my wrist and looked out the Humvee’s window to get my bearings. Using night vision goggles, Rachel drove the Humvee slowly enough to be careful, and quickly enough that no White could follow our sound through the darkness. We’d crossed over the dam and driven up Ranch Road 620 until we made a left on Bullick Hollow Road and were roughly following the shore of the lake on a narrow, winding asphalt road through a dense forest.

Molly, who sat in the passenger side of the front, was also wearing night vision goggles. In her hands she held one of the M4s with a suppressor on the barrel. Rachel’s rifle lay between the seats. My machete, three pistols, extra magazines, hand grenades, a flare gun, a life preserver, and a pair of swim fins lay in the back seat with me. The life preserver would keep me afloat with all the extra equipment I’d be carrying. The fins would get me across the quarter mile of lake between the island and where I planned to enter the water.

Molly said, “I don’t know where we are.”

“That’s okay,” Rachel answered. “I know this area. We just follow the road and turn left at the T-intersection. Then we’re looking for a street I don’t know the name of, but I’ll know when we get there. That’ll take us down to the water, as close to the island as we’re likely to get.”

“And you guys will keep the Humvee parked back away from the shore, right?” I asked. “If you drive across somebody’s yard trying to get the Humvee down to the water’s edge, Jay’s thugs on the island might hear you.”

“We’ll stay up at the road,” said Rachel. “At least until the shooting starts. Once that happens, nobody will notice the sound of a Humvee coming down to the shore over here. Everybody will be looking at the boats on the other side of the island.”

A White wandered into the road in the darkness in front of us. Rachel didn’t speed up, she didn’t slow down. She didn’t swerve. She just ran it over without comment.

Not much was said after that. We drove on for another thirty slow minutes until Rachel made a left turn into a neighborhood of widely-spaced houses with plenty of natural tree growth in between. On our right side, I saw the surface of the lake between the houses. As we proceeded down the street, I spotted the silhouette of Monk’s Island out in the water.

I said, “This is the place.”

“We’ll go down just a bit further,” said Rachel. “The shore curves out a little up here. It’ll be a shorter swim for you.”

“Cool.” I watched the island as we passed each gap. “You guys be sure and stay in the vehicle, okay?”

“Yes, Dad.” It was Molly.

I huffed. “Whatever.”

“It’s just up here,” said Rachel as she slowed the Humvee.

Two more houses passed, and she pulled into a driveway and killed the engine. On the front porch of the house next door, five or six Whites stood up and looked into the darkness. They’d heard the sound of the engine but couldn’t see anything.

I tapped Rachel on the shoulder. I said, “Over there.”

Rachel patted her rifle. “We can take care of them if we have to.”

“Okay.” I looked out the other side of the Humvee. “You see anything out there, Molly?”

“Nothing close enough to worry about,” she answered.

I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. “We’ve made good time getting over here. I’ve still got an hour before the party starts.”

“Are you going to wait before you head out?” Rachel asked.

“Nope,” I answered. “It’ll be better if I get going. You know, just in case.”

“Just in case is what worries me,” she said.

“Me too. I haven’t had to run for my life in over twenty-four hours.” I grinned and swung my door open. I got out, looked around again, and gathered up my equipment. It took only a few moments before I gave the girls a nod and headed down past a house with a machete in one hand, a pistol in the other, a life preserver hanging around my neck, a backpack full of goodies, and a pair of fins tucked into the back of my waistband.

Chapter 43

I found myself standing by some oaks near the edge of the water, looking at a dock that extended thirty feet out into the lake. No boats were tied to it. Anything of use had apparently been scavenged by the people of Monk’s Island. The dock was just a row of bare planks with three Whites squatting near the end, staring out into the lake.

Off to my right, the shore curved into a cove. A few floating marina docks had come loose in the flooding and drifted. To my left, each of the neighbors had a boathouse or dock, each with Whites sleeping or looking around into the darkness. The closest of the structures was a boathouse with at least a dozen Whites on the roof, some sitting, some standing and looking in the direction of noises they couldn’t see. Most of them were looking in my direction. But I was wearing night vision goggles, they weren’t.

None of the Whites I saw were naked, though their clothes were tattered and soiled. I wondered if these, like the ones that had come after us in the cove where we stole the big speedboat, were swimmers. I’d need to be careful even as I got into the water. Too much noise might draw them to me.

The island lay four or five hundred feet off shore. The backside of the old Spanish mission faced me. From where the water lapped on the limestone shore, it would be a steep climb on my hands and knees up to the mission’s back wall. Halfway along the length of the back wall, it jumped to a height of twenty feet or so. That section was actually the back wall of the mission’s chapel building. On a front corner of the chapel a bell tower stood another twenty feet above the chapel’s flat roof. The bell had long since been salvaged for its brass, leaving the tower with only a single purpose, that of an observation post from where everything on this part of the lake could be seen—except for the blind spots behind the back wall.

The islanders had bet their security on being able to see any threats far out in the water, and that bet depended on sufficient light.

Of the two islanders currently tasked with that security up in the old bell tower, I saw one leaning over against a support pillar. He wasn’t moving, and I guessed that guard was sleeping. The other guard leaned on another support pillar and stared out at the blackness in the other direction. Both had hunting rifles of some sort, definitely not of a military style.

My chances of getting to the back wall unseen were more than excellent as long as I didn’t arouse the curiosity of too many Whites while I was getting into the lake.

I examined the shore for a spot to make my landing, and decided I’d observed as much as I was going to be able to observe given the distance. It was time to proceed. I took off my boots, tied the laces around my belt, and waded into the lake, careful not to splash. When I was up to mid-thigh, I sat down in the water and awkwardly put my fins on. Awkward is the only way to get that done, especially when dealing with a body’s natural buoyancy. I then put my life preserver in the water and lay on top of it. I kicked my way as quietly as possible toward Monk’s Island.

I looked around at the world of greenish sparkles through my night vision goggles. I looked across the lake. I looked at the trees on the far banks and spotted Whites here and there. It was a wonderfully surreal moment that made it easy, for a bit, to forget about all the craziness.

When I looked up at the tower growing more ominous as I approached, the two guards up there had changed position. They were both standing alert, looking—it appeared—in my direction. One held the rifle to his shoulder, pointed at me. But no shot came. No bullets splashed the water around me.

The more I swam, the more I worried about the guards, but nothing happened, and I started to wonder if the night vision goggles were playing tricks with what I thought I saw. Could it be the guards were looking in the other direction and my brain was taking insufficient visual information and imagining the rest?

When I swam into the blind spot behind the chapel I was no longer able to see the tower. Blind spots work in both directions. But with the tower and its curious guards out of sight, I felt confident that my stealthy approach to the island had worked.

I arrived at the shore, but it turned out not to be a shore at all—just a very steep rock wall from somewhere down deep in the water to ten or fifteen feet over my head. I grabbed hold of a protruding stone and steadied myself in the water as I looked back and forth. From back on the shore, it hadn’t appeared steep.

I checked the time. That hour I had when I’d gotten out of the Humvee had all but evaporated. There was no time to swim around to the side of the island searching for an easier point of egress. Climbing was my only choice. I reached down and pulled off my fins, letting them sink to the bottom of the lake. I put a leg forward and found a toehold. I grabbed some more rock in my other hand and slid off the life preserver, putting all my weight on bits of stone I held onto.

Tentatively, I started to climb. It took only a few moments to get myself nearly out of the water when it occurred to me that I should have kept the life preserver. If I slipped off and fell back into the water without it, the weight of the revolvers, the machete, the full magazines, and the hand grenades might drown me. Oh well, I was out of choices on that. My only path was up.

When I was nearing the top, a gravelly noise off to my right startled me and froze me in place.

I listened.

I waited.

Nothing.

I looked back and forth along the cliff and tried to see the wall above, but since it was set back from the edge of the cliff by several feet, I couldn’t see anything above me except the top edge of the wall.

I started my climb again.

Nearing the top, I thought I heard another gravelly noise. I stopped and listened again. But the noise didn’t repeat.

Once at the top, I felt thankful. Prematurely.

To my right, maybe ten feet away, stood a guard cast in green hues—one of the guys who had been with Rachel when Murphy and I rescued her. His name was Karl. He had a hand on the wall, one on a revolver, and he was staring into the darkness—staring at the sound of my breathing.

He couldn’t see me, but he knew I was here.

A quick glance to my left doubled my problems. Karl’s malcontent buddy, Bill, was doing the same thing not six feet away.

Chapter 44

Choices?

Jump into the water, confirming my presence for Bill and Karl while putting myself at risk of drowning. What would my next step be after that? My life jacket and fins were gone. I’d have to shed all of my equipment to make the swim back to shore. Risky, but doable.

Or, I could creep back down the wall far enough that the guards wouldn’t hear or see me in the near pitch-black night. But a cloud might move out of the way and let a little of the sparse moonlight through, enough for one of them to see me clinging precariously to the wall below them. Then I’d be back to option A, only with a much higher risk of being shot.

Or, I could try to scramble up onto the ledge. It was covered in loose gravel and sand with nothing there to grip. It would be a slow and noisy endeavor, one that would lead to certain discovery. If I got lucky enough to avoid a bullet or a knife during that attempt, I’d likely end up back on option A.

All of my choices sucked, but I still had an advantage—with my night vision goggles I could see in the dark. And I had a silent weapon that I wouldn’t mind using on Bill or Karl’s ungrateful skulls.

So, I got a solid grip on a piece of rock, and with my left hand I slowly drew my machete while I listened to the crunch of cautious foot steps from my left and watched Karl on the right. The sound of tearing paper on my left caught my attention. When I looked at Bill, my intended first victim, his rifle was dangling from a strap on his shoulder and his hands were busy with what at first glance I thought was a stick of dynamite. But as the incongruity of that sank in, I realized it was a flare. Bill ignited it, flashing my vision to white through the goggles, blinding me.

But, as I’d done on so many occasions, I skipped right through the panic step and chose risky, swift action.

Karl, surprised and still a dozen feet to my right, said something.

Startled, Bill grunted, and I heard the flare hit the ground.

Bullets would come before I was able to see again. I raised my machete and I leapt laterally across the face of the wall, swinging at the place Bill had been before my vision flashed white. Blade hit bone and stuck, a familiar sensation. For a fraction of a second, all my weight was hanging from my grip on the machete handle. I felt the blade wrench through a shinbone, and I heard Bill scream. Gunshots blasted through the air. I bounced against the wall, knocking the night vision goggles off my head. And in the red blaze of the flare, I fell as Bill fell over the side of the cliff above me.

I splashed into the water with the machete in my hand and a lungful of air. Bill splashed in just to my right. I rolled in the water and grabbed at what I could get a hand on, the near severed leg.

Under the weight of my equipment, we were sinking fast. My eardrums started to hurt, and I blew a bit of air through my nose to equalize the pressure. Bill was struggling above me. He’d hit the water while screaming. Screaming was just noisy exhalation when you stopped to think about it. Bill’s lungs were empty when he hit the water, and with me gripping his wounded leg, causing him even more pain, I heard his muffled scream continue under water until it cut short abruptly. Panic and habit overrode his logical processes, and he’d come to the end of his air and breathed in for another wail only to get a lung full of lake water.

I let go of the dangling leg. My work with Bill was done. He’d successfully completed his first attempt at drowning all on his own.

Professor Zed gives you an A, Bill.

I relaxed and looked up at a red glow above the water’s surface—the flare. I heard a few pops of rifle fire and saw bubbled trails of bullets drilling three or four feet into the water above me.

I wasn’t in need of air—well, not desperate need. I figured I’d been under less than thirty seconds. I took a moment to sheath my machete while I rolled over and started swimming into the blackness along the wall, feeling my way as I dragged my hand along the limestone cliff.

Karl, I guessed, would keep an eye on the spot where I’d gone into the water, a spot illuminated by the flare Bill dropped on the ledge, and a spot I intended to be well away from when I came up for air. I swam in Karl’s direction, then guessed that I passed beneath him. Pressure on my ears told me that I was getting deeper, not something I wanted. I was already well deep enough to avoid bullets. I kicked a few more times and came to the point where I was running short on air myself.

I reached out for the wall and started an underwater climb upwards. Patient and slow at first, I moved faster and faster as my lungs cried out to breathe. The blackness above glowed into a brightening red. I saw the underside of the wavy surface, and my head broke through. I inhaled.

Looking up, and with my night vision goggles somewhere on the bottom of the lake, I couldn’t see Karl on the ledge above. The red glow of the flare was far to my left. A few men shouted angrily from somewhere. All along the lakeshore, five-hundred feet behind me across the water, Whites howled. The flare and gunfire had piqued their interest.

I pulled a deep breath, let the weight of my equipment pull me under, and swam along the wall in the direction I’d already been going. Getting as much distance from my last known position would only work in my favor. When I came up for the second breath, I felt almost safe, at least from Karl, who I assumed was still up on the ledge looking in the other direction for me.

An explosion rumbled on the other side of the island.

I was out of time.

Chapter 45

Feet ran by on the ledge at the top of the cliff. Karl. Far to my left, the flare still spewed red fire and smoke. A fifty-caliber machine gun was peeling off volleys on the far side of the island followed by another explosion from the grenade launcher. Dalhover and Murphy were busy and probably both grinning like twelve-year-old boys with their first BB guns.

Knowing I had to hurry, and having lost my fear of drowning under the weight of my weapons, I abandoned any thought of caution and started up the slanting cliff face as fast as I could move. I reached the top in what felt like seconds. The adrenaline was pumping, and I was surfing on a wave of confident invincibility.

In the glow of the flare I was able to see up and down the length of the wall. I was alone. Out on the other side of the island, the shooting came to a stop. At least the shooting from the grenade launcher and the fifty-caliber had. A few other small arms popped off shots.

Our plan had been to fire the MK19 and the fifty-caliber machine gun from boats out in the darkness, and then to reposition before any bullets came back their way. Of course, as it was explained to me, the range on both weapons was beyond the effective range of nearly every rifle on the island; moving was more a precaution than a necessity. The goal of the whole exercise was to sink a few of the houseboats in dramatic fashion in hopes of intimidating Jay with our firepower.

From the cloaking safety of the darkness, Gretchen would then use a bullhorn to dictate the terms to Jay. The terms were simple. Free Steph, Amy, Megan, and any other islanders that might be disillusioned with Jay’s leadership style, give them as many boats as they needed, and let them go. The alternative, Murphy and Dalhover would systematically sink every boat anchored near the island. After, they would lay siege to the island, basically by floating offshore with their weapons ready in case anyone decided to make a swim for shore. Oh, and by the way, she’d tell him about the night vision goggles. Jay had no cards to play. He’d give up the girls. He’d give up anyone who wanted to leave.

At least, that’s how it was all going to work out according to the consensus among the boathouse gang. Unfortunately, reasonable people often have difficulty anticipating irrationality from unreasonable people.

I heard the sound of Gretchen’s voice, amplified by the bullhorn and carrying across the water. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I already knew the content, so it didn’t matter.

With Gretchen’s voice booming, all eyes on the island would be looking into the darkness on the other side, and nobody was likely to be looking my way, depending on how disciplined Jay’s thugs were. Of course, Karl would be inside the wall by now, telling anyone who would listen about Bill and…and what? What would he tell them? A White attacked? A commando attacked? He didn’t know.

He might come back with reinforcements if they suspected they were being attacked from the rear while Gretchen held their attention on the other side.

I scanned up and down the length of the wall. It was rough in spots and looked—

What was that sound?

I looked out toward the lakeshore. All I saw was black. But I heard the splash of a few hundred hands clapping the water.

The Whites were swimming toward the island.

The gunfire, the flare, the fire from a houseboat burning on the other side of the island was drawing them in. That was a kink in the plan that nobody had anticipated.

I decided that the best place to make my entrance into Jay’s compound was through a window on the back of the chapel, roughly ten feet up. The wall below the window was in rough shape with plenty of places to hold while climbing up. So, I ran down to the chapel wall and went to work as the sound of splashing in the water drew closer.

I slipped a few times when stones gave way and came loose, but I didn’t fall. I got a hand to the edge of the window, got another hand up, and pulled myself up to the opening.

A few candles burned inside the chapel. I saw the places where residents had made their beds on the floor, stacks of supplies, but no people. The old oaken double doors on the front of the chapel were swung open. The light from blazing houseboats poured in, dappled by the shadows of people moving around in the courtyard.

A rifle cracked from somewhere relatively close by.

Up in the bell tower.

But what could he be shooting at? Gretchen, of course, but why shoot randomly into the darkness?

Another shot followed. It didn’t seem like a random shot at all. I guessed aimed patience. And that immediately led me to a guess as to why Bill and Karl were waiting for me at the wall. I’d been spotted. One of the guards had a night vision scope on his rifle. And now he was using that scope to shoot at my unsuspecting friends out in the boats.

Null Spot the Destroyer was going to have to pay Mr. Sharpshooter a visit.

I pulled myself through the window and tumbled, landing roughly on the floor. I rolled back up to my feet and ran across the small chapel to an open doorway at the base of the bell tower. Inside, a spiral staircase made of steel had been installed so visitors to the island could climb and see the lake from the high vantage of the tower.

Another gunshot sounded from above.

I pulled my pack off my back and knelt on the floor. I reached in, took out a pistol, and tucked it into my belt. I fished around for the hand grenades, four in all, and put them in my pockets—two in the baggy pockets on the front of my pants, two each on the large thigh pockets. Those would beat up my legs if I had to run, but if I found myself in the position of having to run, those grenades would likely already be in the air toward my pursuers.

The rifle upstairs fired again.

Still being barefoot turned out to be an advantage for silence. I stepped onto the spiral staircase, started up, machete in my right hand, grenade in my left.

On the way up, I thought about whether a threat with the pistol from behind the snipers upstairs would be enough to quell their resistance, but my second thought won out. Some fucker was up there shooting at my friends, some fucker who knew Gretchen’s voice, who had survived on the island with her and Paul through all those weeks since the plague hit Austin. But despite all that, the guys had no qualms about betraying her to the point of killing her.

So fuck those dudes.

I pulled the pin from a hand grenade and slipped the pin into my pocket. I didn’t want to drop it and possibly alert the snipers with the tinkling of the metal pin bouncing on the spiral staircase.

I hurried up the stairs. As I neared the top, there was almost no light coming in from the burning houseboats in front of the island. I reached up and touched the bell tower floor above my head. Steel. A very nice modern upgrade. Leaving the old oaken floor up there for tourists to fall through would have been a bad idea. So, the park service, when they installed the stairs, had also installed the steel floor. I just hoped it was thick enough to protect me.

The rifle fired again.

Okay, buddy. Yours is coming.

I reached up through the stairway hole, put the grenade on the floor, and then gave it a hard push across the metal floor. It clinked on the metal above my head as I took off down the stairs.

My bet was on the table, my dice were rolling. If one of those guys up there figured out quickly enough that a live grenade was on the floor and had the presence of mind to kick it back down into the stairwell, I’d likely die.

I was almost halfway down the stairs, running and nearly falling as I went, when an explosion boomed through the stairwell and knocked me off my balance. The air was immediately full of dust. My ears rang. I coughed, but I was alive.

Chapter 46

Expecting something to fall from above, I stumbled down the spiral stairs and reached the bottom. I tripped on something and rolled through the door into the chapel with a villainous grin. I didn’t have a count on the number of Jerry’s hardcore thugs, but now there were three less of them alive than when I’d arrived at the island.

I scrambled to my left, stepping through what I was coming to think of as post-apocalyptic floor crap. Survivors tended to leave their useful belongings in whatever bag they carried, or they left it scattered near whatever passed for their bed. They were the usual sorts of things—blankets, jackets, and foods packaged in a time before the world went to shit. The other class of post-apocalyptic floor crap was those things that ended up on the floor of a ransacked house, things of no use in a survival situation, or things too heavy to carry. Scavengers didn’t tend to tidy up after themselves when they were searching houses for something to fill a belly that had been empty for days.

Anxious hollering from outside made it clear to me that curious armed men would very soon be coming to investigate what was going on inside the old church. I tucked myself into a shadowy corner piled with a bunch of floor crap and drew a pistol. I had no confidence that I could hit anything that wasn’t already in machete range, but if I found myself outnumbered by Jay’s thugs, noisy gunshots and a hail of bullets would put enough fright into my attackers to ruin their aim.

I heard Gretchen’s amplified voice echo through the open door, telling Jay to come to a decision or another houseboat was going to sink in flames.

Jay hollered something angry in return. Then his voice changed. He was ordering his people around, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying, at least not enough of his words to make any sense of it. Two explosions, one rapidly following the other, cut him off. Flashes through the open front doors cast the chapel interior into sharp shadows.

No one came in, though. Jay must have guessed the bell tower had been taken out by the grenade launcher.

Good for me.

I ran back into the bell tower and wound my way up the spiral staircase, not pausing at all when I stepped up through the metal floor at the top level. I didn’t think either one of the men who’d been up there could have survived the grenade explosion. It turned out to be a good guess. I only saw one mangled body, so the other must have been blown out. Just as well—the forty-foot fall would have killed him even if the explosion hadn’t.

I stood behind a roof support column and peeked out over the compound. Two houseboats, one anchored next to the second, fifty yards offshore, were both aflame. For the moment, the gunfire had ceased, the explosions had stopped. The splash of swimming infected seemed to be coming from all directions, though I could see nothing out in the darkness. Then I heard the howls—close by. Some Whites had made it to the bottom of the cliff and were scaling it just as I had. Soon, they were going to come over the wall and into the compound, and that was going to be bad for everyone.

Jay’s voice yelled back across the water. “Here are my demands.”

I looked down at the courtyard.

Shit.

Jay understood he was in a losing position and had apparently decided that no price was too high to avoid defeat.

A row of islanders was on their knees, facing the water. Jay stood at one end of the row with his pistol pointed at the back of little Megan’s head. Next to her knelt Amy. Next to her, Steph’s hair glowed red in the firelight. Three of Jay’s thugs stood behind the row, looking out into the darkness. Karl was a fourth, talking to one of them and gesturing toward the back of the compound, telling his companion about me, no doubt. The companion wasn’t interested though.

Jay yelled, “I’ll trade you these three twats for that fifty, that grenade launcher, and all your ammunition. And if you don’t scoot those boats up in the light where I can see you and do it in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to start shooting. And this little twat goes first.” He looked down at his watch.

“Don’t, Jay,” Gretchen called back through the bullhorn. She said some more things. She thought talking might help. I knew words were a waste. Jay was as ruthlessly smart as he was crazy.

But I was too.

I turned and went flying down the spiral stairs as fast as I could go. At the bottom, I leapt through the door and into the chapel. Outside, Gretchen was still talking. I crossed the floor toward the back wall of the chapel and spotted exactly what I hoped to find there—fissures in the old wall where stones had fallen away. I took a grenade and jammed it into the first fissure that looked like it was large enough to wedge the device inside. No luck. I tried another. Too small.

A gun outside fired a single shot.

Gretchen’s amplified voice turned frantic.

My rage boiled; I knew what Jay had just done. I found a fissure in the stone where the grenade fit. I jammed it in and pulled the pin.

Dammit.

The hole was too small and held the spoon down as if it were still in my hand. It’d never explode that way.

I quickly found another hole, large enough. I lay the grenade inside, and I ran to the other end of the chapel, diving through the door at the base of the bell tower.

The grenade exploded. Rock flew all through the chapel. Whites howled. A dozen voices out front were yelling at once. I peeked around the door hoping, hoping.

Gritty, thick dust blew through the chapel on a breeze that seemed to come from where the back wall had been. There was a hole, a massive hole, larger than the double doors at the front of the chapel. Through the hole, all I saw was black.

C’mon, Whites.

I still heard the howls. They were still out there.

I drew my pistol, ready to coax them in with the noise of a few gunshots. But I didn’t need to. They started to pour through the hole in the wall, running toward the light they saw through the open double door, running toward the people outside.

Nothing happened for a long, frozen moment. Everyone was still trying to process the sound of the explosion and the screams of the oncoming Whites. They were all a tad slow in realizing just how fucked they were. Then the gunfire started. The screaming followed. Someone shrieked, and I ran out of the bell tower enclosure and joined a line of Whites running out of the chapel.

Chapter 47

Seven or eight Whites lay dead or wounded just outside the chapel doors. Others were on their knees around the dead, satisfying their hunger. More Whites were pouring through the chaos and running at the gunmen who were defending themselves as they retreated toward the boats anchored offshore. With their gunfire, they were unwittingly drawing the attention of most of the Whites in the compound. The price of ignorance is high.

I scanned quickly around for Steph’s blazing red hair. I looked for Jay.

The islanders who had been on their knees were up and running; many of them were in the lake, racing clumsily through the deepening water toward one of the boats anchored offshore. A White tackled a man in knee deep water. Another White jumped on.

And there was Jay with a handful of Steph’s hair, dragging her toward a boat behind the cover fire of his thugs. A man was already at the helm working on starting the boat. Jay waded toward the stern, and in water just up to his thigh, he raised his pistol and shot the man in the back. He threw himself over the transom without letting go of Steph’s hair. He apparently valued her as a bargaining chip, and he wasn’t about to let her go.

Just as well, that made my job easier. My two objectives were in the same place.

Jay’s thugs were backing into the water close to the boat Jay had just commandeered.

People were swimming. Not a single normal person was left on dry land. The Whites were pursuing them into the water. I ran across the courtyard, intent on making a flanking move at Jay’s men, and then thought better of it. I still had two grenades. I stopped, pulled a pin, and heaved one over the heads of the Whites who were attacking the last of Jay’s thugs.

My aim wasn’t perfect, but close is good enough with a hand grenade. It bounced on shore just a few paces’ distance in front of the gunmen. I saw one’s eyes go wide as I jumped to lay belly flat on the ground. The grenade exploded, and I sprang back to my feet.

All three gunmen were down, along with a dozen Whites who’d been closing in on them. I looked up in time to see Jay still flinching from the explosion. He shoved Steph into the seat beside his at the helm, and I saw the water at the stern boil as the propeller started to spin.

I ran at top speed and hit the water with a huge splash, raising my knees high to keep from tripping. But Jay’s ski boat was already starting to move as the engine revved loudly.

I wasn’t going to make it.

Jay was going to get away with Steph as his hostage.

I wailed a curse.

A stream of tracers cut a path into the stern of Jay’s boat. Fiberglass disintegrated, and sparks flew where bullets ripped into the engine. The boat stopped dead and immediately started to draw water and sink at the stern. Jay lost his balance and fell.

I put my faith in Dalhover to cease fire before I arrived at the back of the boat, and I didn’t slow.

Explosions sounded behind me up in the compound. Murphy was working on the Whites pouring through the chapel, trying to improve the odds of the relatively innocent islanders making their escape into the lake.

The fifty-caliber machine gun stopped shredding the stern of Jay’s boat just before I grabbed on. My weapon in hand was the machete, exactly the weapon Jay deserved to have used on him.

Inside the boat, Jay lay on his back, feet forward and head toward me. Steph had a hand on the windshield and the other on a seat, trying to keep her feet below her as the boat slowly angled its bow up out of the water. She was looking at the gun in Jay’s hand, pointed directly at her.

I was only halfway into the boat as I realized that Jay might shoot her at any second.

“Asshole,” I yelled.

Jay glanced up and saw me. His face turned to surprise, then fear, as he saw my raised machete.

I was up over the transom by then, tall enough to put some muscle behind my swing.

But Jay was quick and was bringing his pistol to bear as my blade came down. The gun fired, my machete split his skull. I felt the bullet tear a wound on my left side as I fell. The gun fired wildly twice more as Jay’s body twitched his dying response to a machete lodged deep in his big, squirmy snail brain.

Steph shouted or screamed. I’m not sure which.

I climbed into the boat as it listed to port. I wrenched my blade out of Jay’s skull as I spun around to look for threats that might be coming from shore. Suddenly, standing became difficult. Balance was lost. I was trying to face the shore, but I only saw a black sky speckled with a billion stars. I was looking up, and I was confused as I lost consciousness.

Chapter 48

Drizzly, cold wind howled through the aluminum framework that held the canopy up over the pontoon boat. I found myself looking at the black metal legs of the grenade launcher from exactly where someone might sit on the deck of the pontoon boat to operate it. I heard the voices of people in contentious discussion. I felt the deck rock a little too vigorously on swells driven by the wind.

The boat’s motor wasn’t running. We were anchored or drifting. I lifted my throbbing head and looked around from where I lay on the deck. Two other people lay under blankets on the deck near me. One had a big, bloody bandage on his face. A woman I didn’t know sat at the stern, staring emptily at the shore. Beside her, a man I also didn’t know leaned on her and slept. To my left, Steph sat fallen over on a padded bench, eyes closed, sleeping, apparently unharmed.

I felt relief.

I lay back on the deck and started putting together my memories from the night before.

Bang.

In all the pandemonium and the noisy violence of modern warfare, the sound of one gunshot stuck crystallized as clearly as a ringing Christmas bell over a frozen field. It was that one gunshot that killed Megan. It enraged and depressed me that a man would murder a child just to further his perverse ambitions. My anger seethed behind closed eyes, and I found solace only in recalling the satisfying crunch of my blade smashing through Jay’s cranium and slicing into his gray matter. I hoped when he saw my blade coming down at his forehead he had time in that tick of a second to feel the horror of his impending, gruesome death.

Please God, at least that.

Jay deserved so much worse.

“You awake?” Steph asked.

I looked over at her green eyes, vivid in the gray morning light. She was still laying sideways on the bench, a few strands of red hair stuck across her face, some of it blowing in the wind. Without thinking about it, I said, “You’re beautiful.”

She smiled, embarrassed. “How do you feel?”

I hadn’t thought about it. “Cold.”

“You banged your head pretty hard when you fell in the boat.”

Thinking back to the moment after I cleaved Jay’s skull, I said, “I lost my balance.” Remembering Jay’s pistol firing at me, I put a hand to my left side. It felt a little odd, just under the ribs. A bandage covered a wound on the left side of my abdomen.

“He shot you,” she said.

“I guess I’m not going to die.” I smiled as though I was making a funny joke.

“A few inches to the right and it would have hit the bottom of your lung.” Steph sat up. “You probably would have died.”

Feeling around on the bandage, I said, “A half inch to the left and the bullet would have missed all together.”

Steph rolled her eyes but didn’t smile. “The bullet went through your oblique muscle just below the ribs under your left arm. You were lucky. The Lucky Null Spot.” Steph smirked almost imperceptibly.

I ignored the wisecrack. “I’ll be all right then?” I felt the wound under the bandage. It was just about where my elbow would touch the side of my abdomen when my arm was at my side.

“I cleaned your wound when you were out and sewed you up. If you don’t get infected, you’ll probably be okay. And you bonked your head pretty hard when you fell.”

I put a hand to my head and felt another bandage on the back. I propped myself up on my elbow and felt a hammer inside my skull. “Whoa.” I laid back down.

“Murphy and Dalhover are on shore looking for antibiotics and whatever else they can find.”

“Dalhover shouldn’t be on shore,” I said. “The Whites will see him.”

“He thought you were worth it.” Steph smiled. “Besides, we drove the boats way up the lake last night after everything happened. Murphy said there aren’t many Whites around.”

“It always seems that way,” I said. “Then they are.”

“You’re not the only one who knows that, Zed. Let other people be responsible for themselves.”

I looked at her and my expression must have given away my thoughts.

She said, “Thank you for coming to get me.”

“Jay was crazy. I had to do something.”

Steph nodded but didn’t comment on Jay. “I know I’m wasting my breath when I say this, but you need a couple weeks of rest to let that bullet wound heal.”

“And my head?” I asked.

“I think history has shown what a hard head you have.” Steph shrugged. “You’ll probably be just fine.”

I made a slow, determined effort to sit up. I leaned on the grenade launcher, facing Steph. “Did Rachel and Molly make it?”

“We picked them up near where they dropped you into the lake.”

I looked away from her when I asked my next question out of the smallest of hopes. “What about Megan?”

Steph shook her head and from the sadness suddenly on her face, it was clear that Megan didn’t make it.

“Jay?” I asked.

She nodded and her face took on a harder edge. It was as I suspected. Jay shot Megan.

“How’s Amy taking it?”

“She’s on one of the other boats. She’s not talking about it.”

I asked, “How many made it off the island?”

“Eleven, counting me.”

“Eleven.” I slumped. There were probably nineteen people on their knees when I’d blown the wall to let the infected in. Had that choice cost the lives of eight people I’d been trying to save?

Steph got down off her bench, kneeled in front of me, and engulfed me in a hug. “You did what you could to help them. Most of us got away.”

“And Jay’s men?” I asked, feeling a frog in my throat for the dead and second-guessing my choices.

“Dead, as far as anybody knows.”

I wrapped my arms around Steph. “At least there’s that.”

Chapter 49

I slept through most of the day. Had it not been for haunting thoughts of dying faces and guilt, it would have felt good to do nothing.

As it was, all I had was the peace of having no urgent expectations of me. When I woke from an afternoon nap, Murphy and Steph were sitting next to one another; Murphy had my backpack in his hands, stuffing things into it. Steph was reading the label on a plastic prescription bottle. She looked up. “You sleep a lot after you’ve been injured.”

Murphy laughed; not his big laugh, not the one he had before that day when we’d watched Mandi die. “Zed doesn’t know how to slow down until he’s exhausted.”

Murphy was right about that.

Steph popped the cap off the pill bottle and handed me a couple of small white tablets. She reached out with a plastic water bottle and said, “Take these.”

“Antibiotics?” I asked.

She nodded. “Murphy’s also got some pills for the pain—”

I stretched my left arm up over my head and felt my wound protest. “I don’t need the pain pills.”

“Don’t move your arm,” Steph scolded. “It’ll take longer to heal.”

Murphy took the pill bottles from Steph and put them in my bag. I noticed my machete and an M4 with a suppressor attached to the barrel were leaning on the bench next to him. He caught my look and said, “These are yours.”

Shaking my head emphatically, I said, “You know I can’t—”

“These are yours,” Murphy insisted. He leaned over and in a soft voice said, “Trouble in paradise.”

I sighed. “Already?”

In a calm, adult voice, Steph said, “People are afraid. Last night rattled them. Their friends died. They’re confused.”

Understandable. I looked back at Murphy for the straight scoop.

He said, “Amy says—” He thought about how to say what it was he wanted to convey. “Man, I like Amy, but she wants nothing to do with us.” He pointed a long finger at my chest. “You and me.”

“What?” I didn’t want to believe it.

Murphy leaned back. “She wants nothing to do with you, especially. She says you’re a train wreck. Everywhere you go, everything goes to shit.”

My mouth fell open as I shook my head to disagree.

Steph said, “Don’t listen to that.”

“It’s true,” Murphy argued.

“I’m not contradicting you,” Steph told him.

I wanted to say something in my defense, but what could I say? Both of Amy’s companions, Megan and Brittany, were dead. Was that my fault? Everybody from the hospital was dead except Dalhover. Russell and Mandi were dead. I looked away from Murphy and Steph.

Could it all be my fault?

“She says you’re a trouble magnet,” Murphy finished.

“That’s enough, Murphy.” Steph was in Captain Leonard mode.

Murphy shrugged, “She does like you, Zed. That’s what she told everyone. She just says it’s not healthy to be around you.”

Well, fuck these people.

I stood up as Steph protested. I reached my right arm out for my bag. Murphy handed it to me. As I took it, I felt a little lightheaded, but I held my balance, determined and pissed.

Murphy said, “Keep the M4. I loaded you up with some ammo, some grenades, and another set of night vision goggles. I don’t know how all this is going to shake out, but we’re not gonna be empty-handed again.” Murphy nodded for emphasis.

“Murphy,” Steph said, “it’s not like that.”

Murphy held his forearm up next to Steph’s, making the contrast of his white skin next to her naturally pale skin obvious. “I’m not gonna get brown again. I’ll always be white. Zed will too.”

Steph leaned forward and looked up at me. “There’s a lot of animosity between the group that stayed on the island and the ones that left with Gretchen. Amy and the others want to go back to the island.”

“It’s not safe there,” I said.

“Nowhere is safe, Zed.”

Looking at Steph, thinking about it, I couldn’t disagree.

She said, “If we leave them a few sets of the night vision goggles—”

“Those batteries won’t last,” argued Murphy.

“That’s their problem,” Steph told Murphy. “They can go find a solar charger or something.” She looked back at me. “And if we leave them a couple of M4’s with suppressors, they’ll be able to defend themselves on the island without attracting more Whites from the shores.”

My feelings were whirling around in confusion and growing angrier. We’d gone out of our way not to hurt those people on the island—well, except for Jay’s thugs. Some of the islanders died as a result. Well, maybe a lot of them died, but Jay would have killed them anyway. Or, the question I had to ask myself was, had we abandoned Steph and the others, would the islanders have lived happily ever after?

“Sit down, Zed.” Steph took my hand and tugged. “You’re getting worked up over this.”

I didn’t sit. I turned and looked at the survivors, sitting, standing, talking, deciding, spread over five boats all anchored in the cove. I glared at whoever would look in my direction. I said, “Fuck these people. We’ve got three Humvees and a trailer full of supplies. We’ve got diesel fuel, ammunition, food, even blankets and pillows. My vote is we take whoever wants to go, get in our Humvees and get out of Dodge. The rest of ‘em can do whatever they want. We don’t have room for everybody anyway.”

“Word.” Murphy fist bumped me.

Chapter 50

Twelve of us left the cove in the two boats we had used to attack Jay and his thugs on the island. Of the islanders, only Steph and one guy came along. The rest…well who cares about them? I was pissed. They could all go back to the island and fuck themselves. They hated both me and Murphy. They made that clear when they’d sided with Jay against Gretchen on that first night. Even on their knees with Jay’s gun to the backs of their heads, they still thought my White skin was a greater danger. Double fuck them.

Murphy was right. Other people’s fears would haunt us forever.

The islanders took their three boats with a few M4’s with suppressors—Goddamned valuable equipment—and two sets of night vision goggles. With a few thousand rounds of ammunition and a little patience, they wouldn’t have any trouble clearing their island of the infected. They just had to sit offshore and shoot the Whites. If the infected swam after them in numbers too great to handle, they only had to drive their boats up the lake a bit and come back when things settled down. Once they had their island back, there were rifles and handguns left there by Jay’s dead thugs. Provisions they’d had would likely be ransacked, but the canned goods they’d collected would still be there. None of the Whites we’d come across had yet been able to figure out what to do with canned products.

So without guilt for their future, I watched the islanders head back toward their home. Our group turned our boats into our cove late in the afternoon. Two of our three Humvees and the F-350 with the enclosed trailer still attached were parked just as we’d left them on a street a hundred yards up a hill from the water. They were ready to go.

We docked our boats at the floating boathouse where we’d been holed up for the past few days. We didn’t see nor hear a single White on shore as we got everyone moved inside. Once there, Dalhover spoke up. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. That’s when we’ll head out. By the time the sun comes up tomorrow, we’ll be far enough west of here that most of our troubles will be behind us. We might even be in Balmorhea.” He looked over to Gretchen and then to Steph. Both nodded. I guessed the pecking order still wasn’t clear. I didn’t care. They had plenty of time to talk about it on the trip west.

Dalhover continued, “We’ve got room to seat seventeen. There are thirteen of us. Figure out your seating arrangements, and let Gretchen know. We need primary drivers and backup drivers for each vehicle. Anybody with experience pulling a big trailer gets the F-350. I’ll be in the Humvee with the fifty, Murphy will be in the one with the grenade launcher. We need backup operators for those as well.” Dalhover looked around for questions.

Gretchen stood up. “Murphy, Rachel, and Molly will take a boat across the lake to get the Humvee we left over there last night. As soon as they get back here, if we don’t have any Whites around, we need to top off the fuel tank as quickly as possible, get loaded into our vehicles, and go. We’ll take it slow on the roads since we’ll be using the night vision goggles to drive. We’ll stay in a tight line with two Humvees in front, the trailer third, and a Humvee in back.”

Dalhover said, “The main thing is we need to get that Humvee gassed up and go as quickly as possible. We’ll be vulnerable at that point, climbing the hill up the lake to the Humvees with no protection.”

The islander guy whose name I didn’t catch said, “But we’ve got weapons.”

Dalhover told him harshly, “Don’t shoot unless you have to. Unless you absolutely have to. What you never had the chance to learn on the island is that shooting at the infected never ends well.”

“Nevertheless,” Gretchen interjected, “there are plenty of weapons and ammunition in the trailer. We’ll all be armed before we head up the hill tonight. Sergeant Dalhover and two other volunteers will head up there early, and mount the machine gun and the grenade launcher. They’ll bring back enough weapons so we’ll each have a rifle, a sidearm, and a bladed weapon of some sort.”

“The main thing,” Dalhover said, “is that we do everything quick and quiet. If the infected don’t know we’re out there, they won’t mess with us. If we lollygag and start making noise, things will go bad. If they go bad, run to get into a Humvee as fast as you can. But only if you can make it safely. If you can’t, get back to the boat and get away from the shore. We’ll work out the rally points at places along the shore up the lake. If we get separated, don’t panic. We’ll meet up at the rally points. We’ll get everybody loaded, and then we’ll head west together. Everybody good?”

People nodded. Nobody had any questions.

Chapter 51

I was convalescing again while others busied themselves. They scoured the boathouse for anything that might be of value: screwdrivers, rope, empty gas cans, anything. The trailer still had room, so why not pack it with anything that might have any potential use at all?

Twilight was fading to full dark. The fifty-caliber machine gun and the grenade launcher had been mounted. Everyone had his or her weapons. Lookouts were standing on top of the boathouse, wearing night vision goggles. Two were up at the Humvees, with one standing behind the machine gun, using the height as a vantage point to see up and down the road. But not a single White had been seen or heard while preparations were underway.

I was lying on an empty worktable using a life preserver for a pillow. I’d told Steph at least a dozen times that I felt fine sitting up. Sitting in a folding chair beside my table, she insisted that I remain on my back. It was hard not to bow to her insistence. Somewhere over the hour or so that I’d been laying there talking with her, her hands came to be cradling one of mine, a situation neither of us was going to comment on but neither of us was going to change either. It made me feel optimistic about our impending ride off into the sunset.

We talked a bit about nothing. We talked about what life might be like for the next few years out in the middle of nowhere. We talked about when we might one day come back to Austin. We speculated about the state of the rest of the world and what life would be like in a world where humans had a second chance to try to get it right. And that was the thing about that conversation that struck me as the strangest of all. It was an optimistic conversation built on a foundation of assumptions that enough of we humans would live to rebuild.

Gretchen burst in through the boathouse door and stole everyone’s silent attention. She pointed to our parked Humvees up the hill. “They’re here.”

We whispered our cheers. Murphy, Molly, and Rachel had made it back safely.

Gretchen said, “Let’s go.”

Steph helped me to sit up as the others filed out the door and onto the deck on the backside of the boathouse. Feet stepped lightly on the roof. Knees and elbows bumped the siding as the lookouts climbed down.

Steph, doting over me, slowed us both as we walked toward the door. We should have hurried, but the attention of a pretty girl was never something I could shirk off. We were the last two out. Someone started up the engine on the pontoon boat with a muted rumble. It gurgled exhaust into the lake water.

The others were standing on the deck, excited. Our first real chance at peaceful sleep, at safety, lay out in west Texas, and if luck was with us, we’d be there before the sun went down tomorrow. Steph and I joined the others on the boat, taking a seat on one of the benches.

Out of habit, I adjusted my M4 in its sling, ready to shoot from the hip as Murphy had shown me days before. My machete was in its sheath across my back. My pistol was in a holster on my left. I opened my bag and reached in for extra magazines. I wasn’t wearing a MOLLE vest—a shortcoming I’d need to correct—but I did have pockets that could hold four magazines. Along with the one in my rifle, that meant I’d have one hundred and fifty bullets all ready to fly if I needed them.

Steph put a hand on my wrist and shook her head. She said, “Don’t worry about those. You’ve done your part. Just get yourself into the Humvee. That’s all you need to do.”

My hands lingered on the magazines. “But—”

“No buts, Zed. Just get yourself into the Humvee. Let the others do their part.” She smiled.

I let go of the magazines. “Yes, boss.” I smiled and zipped up my bag.

Chapter 52

With the pontoon boat’s shallow draft, we ran it aground pretty close to shore, with a grind of limestone on its double aluminum pontoons. The passengers each jumped off the flat deck at the bow and waded across a dozen feet of shallow water. Once they were out of the water, they walked quickly or jogged up the hill toward the Humvees.

“Don’t run,” Steph told me as I started to follow. “You’ll open your wound.”

Just as well, I thought. The effort of getting out of the boat and through the water was more taxing than expected. With Steph on one side of me and Gretchen unexpectedly on the other, we started up the slope. At the top of the hill, Dalhover was standing up through the top of a Humvee behind the fifty-caliber machine gun, looking around. Murphy, Rachel, and Molly were out of their Humvee which they’d left idling loudly behind them. Molly had experience driving the big pickup truck with the trailer, and she was heading that way. Murphy would ride out to Balmorhea in the Humvee with the grenade launcher and Rachel was riding with him, so they were standing together.

With just seventy-five yards of rocky slope to cover, I had the thought that we were going to start our trip without incident, that maybe the Whites on this side of the lake had wandered off to other parts of west Austin, that maybe our luck had finally turned. But in truth, keeping your guard up one hundred percent of the time is hard work. I was tired. We were all tired. We hadn’t seen nor heard a White all day. That allowed us to indulge complacency, and complacency as we’d learned so, so many times, lay at the doorstep to disaster.

I heard one howl at first, barely recognizable over the sound of the Humvee’s diesel engine rattling as it idled. I thought for half a second that it was something strange in the engine noise, but before I even finished that thought, that single White’s howl was joined by a dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand others. Somewhere off to our left and up the hill, a horde lurked in the trees.

I shouted, “Steph, Gretchen, run.” I pushed Steph from behind to urge her to move.

Gretchen took a few quick steps and turned to look at me with anxious eyes.

“Go,” I yelled at her. “Go.”

Gretchen’s face turned to worry, but she spun and rushed up the hill as fast as her old legs would carry her.

Steph put a hand under my arm to pull me along.

“You go too, Steph. I’ll catch you there.”

“C’mon. We’re going together.”

“No.” I was breathing heavily with the exertion. That bullet had taken a lot more out of me than seemed possible. “I’ll be fine. I’m White too. They won’t fuck with me. Go.”

Steph ignored me and pulled harder. We were halfway up the hill. It looked like we were going to make it. But that changed.

A flood of naked Whites poured out of the trees.

“Shit.” It was immediately obvious that we weren’t going to make it to the Humvees.

Anxious but not yet panicked, Steph yelled, “We have to run, Zed.”

I tried to run, but I instead lumbered on molasses-slow feet.

All the others were in their Humvees already. The engines rapidly fired up one by one. Dalhover’s fifty-caliber machine gun thundered, and Whites fell all across the hill.

Steph figured out at that moment that we weren’t going to make it up the hill. She pulled me to a stop and yelled, “Back to the boat.”

Whites were among the Humvees up on the road. An endless wave of them poured out of the trees. Grenades exploded, and other small weapons fired. I turned with Steph and we started to run, but there was already a smattering of Whites behind us.

Dammit!

I stopped, raised my M4 to my hip and sprayed a full magazine of bullets across our path, then ran after Steph as fast as I could. I tripped over my sagging toes and tumbled across the rough ground. Steph’s pistol fired.

“Run for the boat,” I hollered at her. But she didn’t. She was trying again to help me to my feet.

“Run,” I commanded.

Screams filled the air, punctuated by gunfire. Whites were everywhere, but the boat was just ahead.

A blur of white flashed across my vision and before I realized it, Steph was being tackled. I let go of my empty M4, pulled out my machete and hacked at the White’s back, cutting through its spine. Blood gushed from the wound as Steph struggled out from underneath it.

But more Whites were around us. I hacked at another and drew my pistol. Whites were close enough that I could make every round count. And as much as I preached at others never to fire a gun at the Whites, Steph and I were past the point of caution. I was buying seconds of life with my bullets. I fired, and Whites fell around me.

Steph was getting to her feet with her rifle up. She let go with automatic fire in front of us, clearing a path to get us another dozen feet closer to the boat. I ran into the gap, swinging my machete with all the frail might I could muster.

Her pistol fired at the Whites around us as she came behind. When my foot splashed into ankle deep water, I thought we’d made it. The naked horde was afraid of water. With every step now we’d get closer to safety. I turned as I emptied the last of the bullets from my pistol, but Steph got tackled again. Without the slightest thought of anything but killing the beast on her, I stepped away from the water, hacking and screaming.

Another white jumped on Steph, and then another. I cut at them. I roared. I cut at the ones close by as she struggled to get up. I beat at whites with the butt of my pistol and I hacked, but there were so many. There were so, so many. They were all over Steph by then. She was struggling and screaming, screaming not from anger, but pain. They were ripping at her. I reached in for her hand and tried to pull her toward the water as I chopped at the monsters on her.

Just get to the water.

Just get to the water.

But all I saw were grasping Whites and blood. I pulled, and she held my hand, knowing instinctually it was mine, knowing—

Her hand went slack.

And in that one heartbeat, as I hoped for her to re-grip my hand, I knew she was dead.

I swung my machete and let rage run away with me. I was feet from the water, a dozen feet from the safety of the boat, but I didn’t know anymore in which direction it lay, and I didn’t care. I was surrounded by Whites who couldn’t get through the mass of their brothers to reach Steph’s warm body, and they focused on me, wounded, bleeding, and marked for death by my choice to shoot my gun.

But I didn’t care. I just wanted to spend the last of my living moments mauling them with my blade and watching their faces turn to fear as their blood spewed from their wounds.

A grenade exploded nearby, followed by a wave of White howls. A second later, another grenade exploded, knocking me and all the Whites down around me. When I looked up, a little dazed, I saw Murphy. He ran at me through the smoke, grabbed me by my backpack, and without slowing, pulled me into the water, splashing through to the pontoon boat.

At the boat, he turned and fired at the Whites brave enough to wade in after us. “Get in the goddamned boat,” he yelled.

Unable to think for myself, I did as I was told and crawled in, rolling onto the deck and gasping for air from the effort.

Murphy’s gun continued to fire, then his feet were pounding across the deck, and the boat’s engine was revving loudly. More firing. The boat lurched off the lakebed, and we were afloat, moving away from shore. I was still lying on the deck trying to breathe, wishing I had the energy to roll off the flat deck and wade back to shore.

Chapter 53

We’d been drifting out in the lake well offshore from Pace Bend Park for several hours. The motor was off, and the pontoon boat bobbed on the waves while Murphy stood at the helm, night vision goggles on, watching.

Not a word was said between us.

I sat on the flat deck, holding onto a canopy support post, dangling my feet in the water, listening to the slosh of waves, and staring into the darkness. My gunshot wound had ripped open in the fight. It bled and didn’t seem to have any interest in slowing down.

I didn’t care. I felt the blood soak into my pants. I felt it trickle down over my knee and down my shin to mix with the cold lake water.

My life was never meant to have a happy ending, of that I was certain. Looking back, it was a surprise to me that the bits of happiness that tumbled serendipitously down even managed to stick to me long enough to ever make me smile. And though the intellectual parts of my brain told me that I should remember Steph’s smile, the smell of her hair, and the angelic way she looked wearing Sarah Mansfield’s jeans and t-shirt that day in her living room when she was caring for me after another losing round with a White, I couldn’t. I was drowning in numbness, and when I came up for air, all I felt was hurt.

Murphy said, “I see ‘em.”

I looked up into the darkness. In the night, I could barely make out the squat, white cliffs standing over the lake’s edge.

“One, two, three,” Murphy counted. “The truck and the trailer. They all made it.”

I didn’t care.

He said, “I don’t see any Whites anywhere.” He started the engine and headed the boat across the lines of waves, splashing me each time our starboard pontoon hit a crest. “You’ll be fine,” he told me. “We’ll all get to Balmorhea, and we’ll all be fine.”

Weakly, I said, “I’m not going.”

“What?”

Louder, I said, “I’m not going.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

We splashed through the short waves for another ten minutes or so, then Murphy cut the engine and we drifted up to the tip of the long peninsula on which Pace Bend Park lay. As we got close, I saw Dalhover, Rachel, Gretchen, and a few others coming down a wooden stairway built on the side of the cliff.

Murphy came up to the front of the boat. The port side pontoon bounced against a wooden swim platform at the bottom of the stairs. He jumped out and tied us off on the railing.

Feet were clomping down the stairs. Murphy came back onto the boat to help me up.

I said, “I was born to live in a world of Whites. I just never knew it.”

“You’re low on blood. You’re talking gibberish.”

I knew I wasn’t. Murphy didn’t want to hear what I was saying. “I’m staying here, Murphy.”

“You’ll die if you don’t get help. We need to go.”

“Help?” I asked. “Help from who? Steph is dead. Nobody has any medical training.”

Murphy looked up at the stairs and back down at me.

“Murphy, I know you think I’m half stupid from loss of blood—”

Murphy looked down at my shirt and shorts, drenched with my blood. His face was solid with worry. He started to reach under me to pick me up. I pushed him away with more strength than I thought I still had.

“We’re never going to fit in with them,” I said, half pointing to the people on the stairs. “Never. Maybe you can make a go of it. I can’t. I’m staying here.”

Rachel was suddenly down in front of me, pleading with me to go, but I could only half pay attention. I needed most of my mental energy just to keep myself upright. Dalhover said something. Gretchen’s voice turned urgent.

I was staying. Austin, Texas was my home. It was the place where I was born. It was where I had struggled to live. I was going to die in Austin, not out in some bumfuck West Texas desert where I’d be hated by everyone lucky enough to have immunity in their blood and pigment in their skin.

Somewhere in a blur of voices, I leaned over against the support post. I could no longer keep myself upright without it. I gripped it with all my might. I wasn’t getting off the boat.

Chapter 54

Between the blood loss from the initial gunshot wound, along with all that bled away after reopening my wound while I was killing Whites after Steph died, I was too weak to be of much use for anything. Murphy carried me to a house near the shore. He poured too much good vodka on my wound and not enough into my mouth. He sewed me up as best he could and put me into a bed upstairs. I slept fitfully on and off for a few days. I guess it was a few days. It could have been a week. I remember it turning light, then dark again several times. Murphy fed me. He brought me water to drink. And neither of us spoke.

One morning arrived and I woke. Light came into the room at an angle and cast a yellow glow around the shadows. I sat up in bed. I felt a little dizzy, but I was lucid. To my right, Murphy was sitting in a cushy chair, his M4 across his lap. He looked tired, but he was awake. He looked at me with no trace of a smile. All he had were hard eyes and a clenched jaw.

I looked at him for a long time as I put the sequence of my memory’s events in order. I said, “Thank you, Murphy.”

He nodded.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I am.”

I nodded. He looked fine, physically.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I rotated my left arm around my shoulder and felt it stretch at the stiff wound under my rib cage. I breathed deeply. “I’ll need a couple of days, I think. But I’m okay.”

“You hungry?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Can you walk?”

I nodded, though I had no idea.

“I can bring you something.”

I shook my head and threw my legs over the side of the bed. “I need to get up.” I slid my feet down to the floor, careful to keep my hands on the bed. The effort was significant, and I had to pause to catch my breath.

“It’s the blood loss,” said Murphy. “What little you have left isn’t enough to do much at all. Do you remember passing out in the boat?”

I nodded.

“You were probably pretty close to kickin’ it. You’re lucky I got you here and sewed you up.”

“Thanks.”

“It might take a couple of weeks before you can get back to anything like normal activity levels.”

“Normal?” I smiled.

“You know what I mean.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.

“You lost a lot of blood that first night. Steph told me most of it after she fixed you up.”

I felt a stab of something in my heart. It was sharp and jagged. It tore, but fell away to bleak gray. I didn’t want to think about Steph. Every memory of her was wrapped in a layer of bloody, brokenhearted death. I had to wash those memories in gray. I had to forget.

With one hand on the bed, keeping my balance, I stood. Or that’s to say, I tried to stand. When I toppled over, Murphy jumped up to catch me. What started out as an effort to move my feet, to get away from a pain in my heart, turned into the humility of hanging from Murphy’s arms.

“If you need to do this,” Murphy said, “I’ll help you.”

I nodded. “I need to.” Feeling vulnerable and completely indebted to Murphy for his help, for being a friend that would do anything for me, I felt tears in my eyes and sniffled them back. I took a step. Murphy carried my weight forward. I took another step.

It was a slow, tiring process, but we made it from the upstairs bedroom down to the kitchen. Murphy put me in a kitchen chair near windows that looked out over the lake. I leaned on the table and thought about what an effort it was just to stay upright.

“I was planning on oatmeal,” said Murphy. “They got some brown sugar and pecans. No butter though.”

I shrugged and stared out at the glistening water. Behind me, I heard the clicking of an igniter on the stove, and then the sound of a jet of flame. Water poured into a pot and Murphy scooped a few cups of rolled oats into the water. The pan clinked as Murphy sat it on the stove.

What?

I turned to look at Murphy standing in front of the stove. “There’s gas?”

Murphy nodded. “There’s one of those big propane tanks or whatever outside. I guess it ain’t empty.”

“A hot meal.” I laid my head on the table. It had been so long since I’d eaten anything hot. “A hot meal.”

“I know.” Murphy said it with a pinch of his old enthusiasm, and I smiled as I looked at the lake.

While Murphy was cooking, I asked, “The others?”

“It’s just us here.”

“They went to Balmorhea?” I asked.

Murphy nodded.

“Even Rachel?”

“She’s better off out there than here.”

“You cool with that?”

“She doesn’t need me to hold her hand.”

When the oatmeal was ready, Murphy brought me a bowl and I slowly ate. It was fantastic. Murphy ate his much more quickly than me, but courteously waited in silence while I finished.

“Do you want more?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thanks. I’m full.”

Murphy smiled weakly. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“Thanks for taking care of me.”

“It’s nice outside this morning. Do you want to go out on the porch for a while?”

I looked up at the distance from the table to the back door, then from the door to the nearest deck chairs outside. I wanted more than anything to be out there feeling the warmth of the sun on my face. But I smiled and sniffled as another tear filled my eye. I shook my head. There was no way I could make it all the way out there, not even with Murphy’s help.

Murphy smiled. He stood up and said, “Put your arm over my shoulder. C’mon.” He lifted me in his arms. “Good thing there’s plenty of food here. We need to fatten you up before you blow away.”

Murphy carried me outside and put me in a chair, the one in the sun that I was hoping to get placed in. But I wasn’t going to ask. It was hard enough being carried around like a child, without making special requests.

“You good?” he asked.

I leaned my head on the chair’s back and let the sun shine on my face. “Yeah.”

Murphy took a chair on the other side of a small table. “You want any water or anything?”

I shook my head. “I just want to sit here.”

Some mockingbirds were making a racket in a tree nearby. Wind blew the branches, and the oak leaves, brittle but still green, sounded like Styrofoam packing peanuts rattling in a shipping box. But it was a familiar sound, a comforting sound. It was the sound of Texas in the autumn.

Somewhere out there in the world, a sound was different though—faint, guttural, thumping.

The sound grew.

I sat up straight and looked out over the lake. Murphy was already sitting up, looking.

“I hear it too,” he said.

We continued to scan the sky. As the sound grew louder in the distance we both knew what it was. It was distinct.

Murphy pointed far to the southeast.

I looked.

“That’s a Black Hawk helicopter,” he said.

“Army?” I asked.

Murphy nodded and sat back to watch it cross the sky in the far distance. No other helicopters joined it.

After a while, Murphy asked, “What do you think it means?”

I looked at the dark-colored dot making its noisy passage in the crisp blue sky and thought about it. Eventually, I laid my arm on the end table and pushed it up beside Murphy’s. He looked down at my arm. I said, “You’re white. I’m white. We’ll always be white. Whatever that helicopter means, it doesn’t mean shit to people like us.”

Slow Burn Book 7, ‘City of Stin’

Chapter 1

As I slowly recovered from my gunshot wound in the cabin on the south shore of Lake Travis, I spent long afternoons on the back deck staring at gray November clouds and watching the wind whip up whitecaps across the lake. I frequently sat in the drizzling rain until my joints were chilled to the point of aching, and my face turned so numb my lips wouldn’t form words when I spoke.

While I did my sitting and staring, Murphy mostly left me alone. Maybe he figured if I wallowed enough I’d eventually tire of feeling isolated and pitiful. I told and retold myself that everybody on the planet who was still breathing was doing the same thing under the burdensome grief of those they’d lost.

The thought I got good at avoiding was that the survivors who didn’t want to join the dead were dragging themselves up out of their grief and doing their best with what life had left them. The soon-to-be-dead were a lot more like me. Wallowing. Waiting.

For the most part, the Whites didn’t bother us. We were way out west of Austin on a peninsula sticking out into the lake. Around us were dense cedar trees hiding houses on neighboring properties. Most of the homes had been abandoned, or the owners had turned into Whites much earlier in the pandemic. They’d either been killed or had moved on.

At night, we sometimes heard them hunting out on the other side of the lake. They’d scream and make a racket, running in groups of a few dozen or a few hundred through the woods. During the day, we’d watch a helicopter or two—sometimes three—flying from north to south in the morning, and sometimes, early afternoon. They often flew back before sunset. Murphy and I became convinced the helicopters must have originated up north—we both guessed Fort Hood in Killeen—maybe an hour north of us by car back when a car could still be driven at seventy miles per hour on the highway. Now those same roads were ribbons of asphalt sprinkled with abandoned hulks, scattered with bones, and stained with blood.

“Hey, man.”

I turned to look at the door, a question on my face.

Murphy motioned toward the kitchen. “I cooked up that big-ass catfish I caught. Fried him up in a cornmeal batter like my mom used to make.”

I nodded and got out of my sulking chair.

Murphy closed the door and went back inside.

I reached my left arm up over my shoulder and leaned to my right. As the scars from my bullet wound stretched, the sensation of pain was barely there—because it had healed completely, or whether the virus had numbed that part of my sensation away, I didn’t know. I headed into the house. It smelled of home cooking. It smelled normal.

What is normal?

It’s the simple things you never guess you’re going to miss until they sneak back into your life, bringing with them a jumble of nostalgic feelings with the fucked-up parts of the memories scraped off.

On the kitchen table sat a big, picture-perfect platter of cornbread-coated catfish filets and a bowl of misshapen hushpuppies. Murphy placed a bowl of steaming pinto beans on the kitchen table and pulled a chair out to seat himself.

I grabbed a chair and took a seat as well, popping a warm hushpuppy into my mouth. “It’s going to suck when we run out of propane.”

Murphy shook his head, betraying a moment of frustration before he smiled. “That White I killed a couple weeks back—”

“At the neighbor’s house?” I asked. The house on the neighboring parcel of land stood a couple of hundred yards distant through thick growths of cedars and live oaks. Murphy had come across the infected man while scavenging but hadn’t said much more about it.

“He was starting to get pretty ripe.” Murphy threw in a shrug. “Catfish are bottom feeders. They like stink-bait. I figured since the White’s skull was already open, you know, I took a chunk of it and put it on the hook.” Murphy nodded down at the catfish on the platter. “Three feet long. We could’ve had a fish fry and fed the whole block.”

“Back before,” I said, avoiding the thought of why the catfish in the lake seemed to be thriving.

Nodding, Murphy agreed. “Before.”

“We won’t eat all of that before it goes bad.” I patted my belly, feeling the ripple of muscles beneath my shirt. “I’ll try though. It won’t hurt me to put on a few pounds.”

Murphy said, “I’ll bet you’ve put on twenty since we got here.”

“You think?” I asked. “Am I getting fat?” I smiled.

Murphy shook his head. “You should have seen yourself before. You were a skinny little fucker.”

I recalled looking in the mirror after I was finally able to keep myself on my feet. I’d lost a lot of weight through the course of everything that had happened, a lot more than I could afford. I remembered thinking at the time I looked like a tweaker who’d been hitting the meth too long. Twenty pounds, or however many pounds I’d put back on, still left me pretty lean but looking more normal than not.

As for Murphy, I’d have guessed he’d lost well over fifty pounds since it all started. Maybe a bit more. The difference was that he had the extra pounds to lose. Now he was thickly muscled with no fat at all.

I put a few filets on my plate, with a handful of hushpuppies, and a big scoop of beans. Murphy did the same.

The first bite of the catfish put a smile on my face. “Good,” I said through a full mouth.

“It’s good to see you smile.”

“Whatever,” I said as I chewed, swallowed, and stuffed in another bite. “What’s up with these hushpuppies? Aren’t they supposed to be round?”

Murphy ignored the dig. He looked out at the lake through the frilly curtains hanging partially closed. He took another big bite of fish. “Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but this does taste like my mom’s.”

I looked out the window to see what had Murphy’s interest. “What else is on your mind? What are you looking for out on the lake?”

“Nothing,” said Murphy. “It’s pretty.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I nodded toward the window. “Spill it. What?”

“You’ve been such a melancholy little bitch since we got here, it’s nice to see you smiling.”

“I—”

Murphy raised his big hands, palms facing me. “I’m not trying to start anything. I know what happened as well as you. I was there, remember?”

It was something I tried hard to put out of my mind. I looked down at the floor as I thought about the feeling of Steph’s hand going limp in mine. Her death still hurt. I tried to change the subject back to the food. “Good thing you paid attention when your mom was in the kitchen.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes before Murphy said, “Look man, I know you got…” Murphy made a vague gesture at his head. “I don’t know. You like to hold onto your painful shit. You know what I mean?”

I nodded and shrugged. I knew exactly what he meant. It still didn’t change anything.

“You’re not like me. I get that.”

Shaking my head, I said, “Murphy, I know what you’re going to say. We both went through it. We both lost—” It was hard to see the memory in my mind. It was hard to say—physically hard—because I started to choke up over it. “You watched Mandi die.” I took a deep breath. “We both did. And Russell too. Fuck. And everybody.”

Murphy started to say something, but I raised a hand to keep him quiet. I said, “I lost Steph, as helplessly as you lost Mandi. I don’t know if that helpless part makes a difference. To me, it feels like it does.”

“Pointless painful shit,” Murphy muttered.

“I know how much it hurt you, losing Mandi.”

Murphy nodded.

“You were angry and bitter about it for a while.” I vaguely pointed across the table at him. “Now, the Murphy Philosophy has won out. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were back to normal. Happy fucking Murphy. Too many smiles. Too many jokes.”

“I could get on my pulpit and try to sell you again on the Murphy Plan,” he said.

“I don’t need to be sold,” I told him. “I know sometimes the burden of all the death gets to you. I see you out on the deck occasionally, staring at the water with that lost look in your eyes.”

Murphy shook his head vigorously. “Just because I—”

“No,” I cut him off. “I’m not saying I don’t believe your ideas about life aren’t working for you. I know you still feel the pain. That’s normal. I also know by actively choosing not to wallow in it like me, you’re moving on. You’re going to live. Hell, you’re keeping me alive, too. I appreciate it. Hell, I fucking envy it. I want to buy an economy-size box of Murphy Smalls bullshit so I can find a way past my own crap. I… I guess I’m just so hard-wired for my own shit, I don’t know if I can find my way down the Murphy road.”

“You just gotta keep trying, man.” Murphy smiled. “And quit being a whiny pussy.”

I looked away from Murphy. I don’t know if I was being a whiny pussy. I don’t know if I was grieving myself into a grave. I was feeling things I couldn’t set aside, couldn’t get past.

I said, “I loved her.” There it was.

Chapter 2

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.”

Chapter 3

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 boat 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.

Chapter 4

Murphy pulled me out of the lake and retrieved my machete from the buoy, letting me sulk for a while as he motored up the lake.

After the wind had blown over my skin long enough to dry it out, leaving me with cold, wet pants and a soaked shirt, I said, “You remember how I told you I used to play paintball all the time, right?”

“You mentioned it,” said Murphy.

“There was this one time, I was down in San Antonio with some friends,” I said. “There was this indoor course set up in an old warehouse with lots of obstacles and stuff.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“They made ‘em out of plywood, little house-like things, and mazes and stuff, a couple of towers. They kept the place dimly lit. They had black lights and strobe lights. Hell, they even had a disco ball.”

Murphy laughed. “Sounds like a skating rink.”

“They wanted the players to be able to sneak around inside,” I said. “You know, to make it interesting.”

Murphy grunted an acknowledgment.

“My buddy Rusty and I were on different teams. And…” I looked back at Murphy. “You’ve played paintball, right? You know how the guns work?”

“Little hopper on top full of paintballs,” he said, “compressed air canister. Sure.”

I rolled my eyes. A yes or no would have been sufficient. “Well I’m not sure what happened exactly, but we were playing this game and it got down to just me and Rusty. I was running down to get behind this obstacle over by a wall, thinking I was going to flank him and shoot him in the back.”

Murphy laughed. “That’s always the best way to shoot somebody.”

I smiled. Paintball had been fun back in those days. “The real shock came when I realized he was thinking the same thing as me, running around the obstacle from the other direction. We both got there at the same time, surprised as hell.”

“I’ll bet.”

“We both came to a stop,” I continued, “and unloaded at each other from like ten feet away.”

“Sounds painful,” said Murphy. “Those paintballs leave a welt.”

“That’s the funny thing.” I shook my head to emphasize my point. “He never hit me.”

“He was a terrible shot,” Murphy concluded.

“I never hit him either.”

“Wait.” Murphy had been looking out over the bow but turned to look at me directly. “You used to be pretty good with a gun. Are you saying you’ve always sucked? I’m confused.”

“No,” I told him. “Not that at all. I think we surprised each other and our adrenaline was pumping and we were so busy trying to shoot as many balls off as we could that our aim went wild. Even from that close we couldn’t hit each other.”

“So your point is that you’re excited when you shoot now?” said Murphy. “That’s why you miss?”

“No,” I said. “Let me finish. I think something about the virus in my brain is making me a shitty shot. I think if we get in a situation where I need to be able to shoot something, I may be calm, I might not be. If I’m not, my aim will get worse. I think I’ll be useless with the M4.”

“Those buoys are smaller than people.”

“Yeah, but I need to hit a lot more than three or four out of thirty shots,” I said, “and from a lot farther away.”

Giving up, Murphy nodded. “What do you think then, no gun for you?”

“I think maybe a shotgun like you suggested is the best thing, at least for a last resort weapon.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Then we should saw it off if we can find a hacksaw.”

“I’m all for the cool factor of a sawed-off shotgun,” I said. “Besides that, why saw it off?”

“Sawing it off will make it spread faster so you’ll be more likely to hit what you’re pointing at.”

“Any downside?” I asked.

“Sawing it off reduces its lethal range, but that won’t matter to you,” Murphy laughed. “You won’t be able to hit anything that’s not pretty much standing next to you anyway.”

“I’ll update the shopping list.” Having made my attempt at humor, I thought to ask, “Do they make suppressors for shotguns?”

“Yes, but they don’t quiet the weapon down as much as you might think. And they’re long and bulky. One would make the shotgun too clumsy to do you any good.”

Chapter 5

I removed the suppressor from my M4 and put it in my backpack. It was too valuable to leave with the boat, which is where the M4 was going to stay with one full magazine attached, placed in a bin under one of the seats along the port side. With a weapon added to the stores of food already onboard, the pontoon boat would be a great backup plan for whatever crazy shit befell us as we tromped around town.

Murphy pulled the boat into shallow water near the bank as we started to survey houses for candidates—something pretty close to shore, no Whites around, looking like it might have a shotgun inside. We didn’t have any criteria for the shotgun part. Not really. I was looking for oversized pickup trucks parked by the houses. In my mind, guns and 4x4 pickups with big knobby tires correlated strongly. No point in risking a house search if the odds aren’t in your favor.

I didn’t ask Murphy what he was looking for.

Murphy throttled back on the engine, putting it briefly into reverse before cutting it off, letting the boat drift toward a dock extending out from the shore by a few boat lengths.

With the sound of the boat’s engine silenced, I noticed the whup-whup-whup of the helicopters moving across the sky on their morning run south. I stepped over to the port side of the boat and leaned out from under the canopy to see. The sound was louder than usual, closer.

Murphy leaned out to look up. He pointed. “That helicopter is circling back. You think they’re coming this way? It sure looks like it.”

Behind our boat, the white foam of our wake was dissipating in the waves, but would have been visible from afar. “Maybe they saw us.”

Murphy looked from left to right, I think searching for a place to hide.

I walked out from under the canopy and onto the bow deck. The helicopter was definitely headed our way. “If they come over here and land, it could save us a trip downtown.”

Murphy shook his head. He was nervous and I’d learned to trust his instincts. He was seldom wrong.

The helicopter descended down near the water fifty or so yards out. Waves flattened as the helicopter pushed a rush of air down. Engine noise drowned out our words. The rotors blew a spray of lake water over the boat and into our eyes.

Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder.

With my rifle stowed under a bench already, I raised my machete as I eyed the greenish, dark water, hoping it was deep enough for a dive, hoping I could swim the long distance down shore to the next dock. I didn’t know if I’d have to make the attempt, but if I found myself in the water, I’d need to find somewhere to hide.

The helicopter’s skids weren’t ten feet above the surface.

In the cockpit, the copilot stared at us. The side doors of the cargo area were pushed all the way open. Several men in ragtag military uniforms sat inside—some looking out, others bored and staring at nothing. One sat with his legs dangling out in the air from his seat beside a mounted machine gun on the side of the helicopter. Through the passing of a second or two they all saw us—faces showing first their surprise, then their fear.

Shit.

“Go!” Murphy shouted.

The guy by the machine gun scrambled to get behind it as the helicopter lurched left and started to rise.

Murphy jumped out of the boat and onto the dock.

The machine gun ripped a rapid series of wildly aimed, panicked bullets. They tore through our boat’s deck and aluminum pontoons.

I dove for the water as another burst shredded our boat.

Chapter 6

Well, I can’t outswim a helicopter underwater. Not even on the surface. No surprise. I could swim deep though, and I knew that all I needed was a little more than three feet. Hey, I used to watch TV before the Whites made a mess of everything. You can learn some stuff there. What I knew was that about three feet was plenty of water to keep me safe from bullets. The other factor in my favor was the pea-green murk of Lake Travis that left visibility near the surface at maybe five feet on a sunny day. Thankfully, the sun was still behind a layer of clouds, which meant less visibility.

I swam.

With my backpack and my machete weighing me down, it was no problem to keep my depth.

I spun in a barrel roll as I kicked, getting a long glance at the surface and seeing nothing but glowing green. If I couldn’t see the helicopter, it couldn’t see me. I still heard its repetitive thumping. I still heard the machine gun fire. I heard rounds splash the surface and I saw bubble trails emerge from the glow. I let myself sink deeper. After all, you can’t believe everything you see on TV.

Feeling momentarily invulnerable, I was glad the helicopter’s gunner was firing at me, probably the most prominent blur of fast-moving white skin he saw after pulling his trigger. That would give Murphy time to escape. I didn’t entertain the possibility that Murphy was laying on the dock full of holes and bleeding.

I swam away from the direction implied by the bullet’s bubble trails. The gunner had guessed where I was based on how I dove into the water. I wasn’t going to come up for air along that vector. I wasn’t going to be easy prey.

Instead, I turned on a path that paralleled the shore, putting me on an intersecting course with the other dock I’d seen. I didn’t think I had enough air in my lungs to reach the dock, but I needed to try.

No, I needed to make it.

It was that kind of situation. To come up for air with nothing to hide me—a bright, white-skinned head with little hair against the green water—would make me an easy target.

The dock was cover. If I could get there and swim below it, I could surface on the other side where the men in the helicopter wouldn’t see me. I liked the unrealistic idea of surfacing in the air gap beneath the dock, but those gaps were only under the docks on Lake Austin below the dam. The water there was kept at a constant level—when it wasn’t flooding. The water on Lake Travis rose and fell by dozens of feet through the course of a year of normal rainfall. All the marinas and docks were built on enormous cubes of foam to keep them afloat on the water’s surface leaving no room for coming to the surface beneath them.

The sound of bullet splashes grew faint.

The helicopter was so loud it was impossible to tell where it was.

The machine gun fire stopped.

I pushed on.

I needed air, but that was nothing new. It seemed like every time I got into the water anymore, I needed to hold my breath way past the point of comfort. I was becoming very familiar with how far past my perceived limits I could actually push myself.

I was way past the point of protests from my lungs and into that part of oxygen deprivation where my vision was starting to tunnel black around the edges. It was time to surface or drown. I curled into a ball, put my feet in the muck on the lakebed, and exhaled all of my air as I pushed to the surface. I was only going up long enough to suck in some air, then go right back down again.

My shoulder hit something hard and my head bounced against foam.

I’d made it to the other dock.

But I needed air, right now.

I scrambled through the water, grabbing for the dock’s edge, found it, and pushed my face above the surface. I sucked in my breath, got a quick glimpse at the sky, and went back down again, moving over beneath the dock.

I found a cable support on the bottom side of the floating structure to hold onto. I needed to keep myself still. I also needed another breath. After holding my breath too long the first time, the second one didn’t last.

Leaning my head back, I slowly surfaced while holding onto the cable support, putting just my face above the water. I grabbed another deep breath, pushed my luck and took a second, then went back under again.

I listened.

The sound of the helicopter’s blades beating the air wasn’t as loud as it had been a few moments before.

I waited.

Maybe they were leaving.

Maybe they were hovering over the house, looking for Murphy. Maybe they were just up higher where they could get a view over a larger area. I had no way to know. I only had a need to breathe, and a hope not to be seen when I surfaced.

I held my breath as long as I dared.

Moving slowly, I came out from under the dock and rose to the surface, looking for any movement, any shape against the grayness of the clouds. Nothing.

I took two more deep breaths and tried to get an idea of where the helicopter was. Somewhere high above the other dock was all I could figure. In fact, a lot higher. They were leaving. I sank myself back below the dock again and listened carefully.

The sound diminished while I continued to wonder, what were they doing? Did they see the pontoon boat’s wake from where they were flying? Did they come over to check on survivors? They must have been surprised when they saw two Whites on a boat. I wondered what was going through their heads now that they’d gotten past their knee-jerk choice to try and kill us. Were they familiar with Slow Burns and Smart Ones? They must have thought we were both of some dangerous variety of White.

I needed air.

I surfaced again and stayed up, looking around.

The helicopter was at least a mile distant and flying away.

Chapter 7

When the helicopter was far enough away that I couldn’t hear it over wind and waves I climbed up on the dock and looked around. The boards on the dock near where our boat had been were barbed with splinters where the machine gun’s bullets had ripped through.

I saw no body on the dock and none floating—good.

I saw no pontoon boat—bad.

The bastards had sunk our boat.

I looked around on the shore, thinking of calling out to Murphy—stupid idea. Any Whites already on their way to investigate the helicopter and machine gun noise would zero in on my voice and I’d soon be running from them instead of finding Murphy. The smart money would have been to hoof it down shore and put some distance between me and the scene of the attack. That was smart if saving my skin was the only thing I was concerned about. So, not an option. Just as I knew Murphy wouldn’t abandon me, I wouldn’t abandon him.

Keeping an eye on the trees and lawns I jogged off the dock and headed toward the house where we’d hoped to find the shotgun. I listened. I craned my neck to glimpse around corners.

And there it was. The sound. Whites were inbound.

I stopped and waited a second, listening to assess the threat. At least a few dozen were on their way, and the nearest were pretty close. I pulled my machete out. Depending on how crazed they were by noise and hunger, I’d have work to do while looking for Murphy.

I crossed a yard, shrunken by the high level of the lake, and worked my way through a copse with all the natural underbrush removed. Thank the previous residents for that. Too many of the natural undergrowth plants protected themselves from tromping feet with thorns.

Movement in my peripheral vision on the left caught my attention. Two Whites were on the road, just now coming off the asphalt and angling through the trees toward me.

Damn.

I guess one of their half-pint brains must have decided that the first moving, person-shaped thing they saw was the cause of the ruckus. The other was probably a me-too White, following along because he was too stupid to even come to a wrong conclusion.

I looked left and right again as I turned to face my two admirers. Nothing else around, yet.

I backpedaled, both to boost my pursuers’ confidence and to move into a space between the trees where I had plenty of room to swing my machete.

I took a calm breath, focused on my prey, and figured I’d seal the deal with a few words to put them into a thought-free frenzy. “Hey, buddy. I taste pretty good.”

The first one salivated. The second grunted some kind of weird happy pig noise. They started to run.

When the fastest of the two was within a few steps of me, I did a little matador sidestep and swung my machete up towards his throat. His momentum did all the work. Cartilage crunched. Blood exploded from his throat. He went down.

Surprised by all the blood, the grunter’s eyes focused on the wrong things and he didn’t see my backhanded swing slash down on the side of his head until it was way too late to do little more than blink.

At my feet, the first one twitched and got on with his dying. The second one dropped in a limp pile of white skin on top of his buddy.

I guessed—besides leaving an enormous gash across the grunter’s face, probably having broken if not cut through his jaw—he was probably knocked out. I glanced back toward the road looking for more Whites, saw none, and hacked down on the back of the grunting White’s neck.

Done.

I stepped away from the fresh corpses and surveyed the area around me again. Silent movement ten feet to my right startled me and I jumped back as I recognized the big white shape. “Dammit, Murphy. You sneaky bastard. You scared the shit out of me.”

Murphy chuckled. “We need to get out of sight.”

I looked around again—assessing, planning. Run or hide? “Those assholes sank our boat.”

“They shot that house up too.” Murphy pointed. “It’s got an attic I think we can hide inside for awhile.”

My shoulders sagged as I thought about the last time we’d used an attic for refuge.

“I checked it out while those guys were trying to shoot you,” said Murphy. “I figured they’d come after me so I was looking for a good place to hide and ambush them.”

“Ambush a helicopter?” I asked.

“No, man. The dudes if they landed and got out to come find me.” Murphy shook his head to make sure I knew the misunderstanding was all my fault. He pointed at the house. “It’s a pretty nice attic. It’s even got windows.”

Good enough.

I nodded toward the house. “Lead the way.”

Chapter 8

As attics go, it wasn’t bad. Nothing much was stored there. Indeed, it seemed to have been built out as a hideaway for children or grandchildren, accessible only by a pull-down ladder through the ceiling of the floor below. Three dormer windows facing the lake let a breeze blow in. The only drawback was a low, awkwardly shaped ceiling.

As Murphy and I sat up there in silence, we watched at least a hundred Whites show up outside, individually and in groups, there to investigate the noisy sounds of normal humans, the helicopter, and the gunshots. They wandered around the grounds. Some walked out onto the splintered dock and looked curiously at the holes. A few found their way inside the house.

It took a few hours for most of them to leave. Some stayed downstairs. We didn’t know how many.

Murphy whispered, “Let’s just hang here for the day. We’ll give those Whites a chance to get hungry, then they’ll take off to search for food somewhere else.”

It made sense. No point wasting ammunition and taking the risk when an afternoon of boredom would cause the Whites to lose interest and move on. “What do you think about the helicopter assholes?”

“They don’t seem like nice folks to me.” Murphy grinned at the understatement.

“Why do you think they shot at us?”

Murphy chuckled softly. “We’re Whites.”

“The world is full of Whites,” I argued.

Murphy pretended to put some thought into his response before he said, “Okay professor, why don’t you tell me what you think?”

“I think they thought we were survivors until they saw us up close. Then I think they deduced that we were Smart Ones because we were driving the boat. I think that’s why they spent a little extra time trying to kill us. Just like we learned about Smart Ones, it’s worth it to go out of your way to kill them.”

Murphy rubbed his hand over his chin. He was skeptical. “How’s that different than what I said?”

“Fuck you, Murphy.”

He laughed.

“Keep it down,” I scolded. “The Whites will hear you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Don’t get your skivvies in a bunch. I’ll play along. Do you think the helicopter assholes know the difference between Slow Burns and Smart Ones? Or do they know and not care? I mean, that’s why we stayed, isn’t it? Instead of going out to Balmorhea with the rest of them.”

“Because normal people are going to hate us no matter what.” I said it like a too-often uttered cliché, because it was.

Nodding, Murphy said, “They just proved that. So what do we do now?”

I crawled on my hands and knees over to a window to look out at the lake while I thought about our options. Murphy took off his backpack and laid it on the floor, leaned back against a wall covered in bright blue carpet, the same shaggy carpet that covered the floor.

“Here’s what I think,” I half-whispered.

“These people need to update their décor?” Murphy chuckled. “This shit looks like something from the seventies.”

I hissed, “Keep it quiet.”

“I sense a Null Spot moment coming.”

I shook my head. “Hear me out.”

“Unless I fall asleep while you ramble on about it, I don’t think I have a choice.”

“Nope,” I told him. “I know you’re not going to like it, but I think we stick with the plan.”

Sarcastically, Murphy said, “I can’t wait to hear why.”

“I thought you were going to fall asleep from boredom.”

“Oh, you’ve got my attention now.”

“Good,” I said, with a big fake smile. “First off, if these helicopter assholes are going to start flying around Austin shooting at us every time we take our boat out or presumably drive a car or anything, I’m going to get pissed. I don’t want to get shot by some machine gun-happy chucklehead in a helicopter. I think we need to know what these guys are about. I think we at least need to assess the danger. Do they think we’re dangerous Smart Ones? Or do they just shoot at all Whites? Finally, there’s the off-chance they’ll be friendly enough—”

“Tolerant is your best hope,” Murphy told me. “That they’ll have short-term tolerance.”

“Yeah, tolerant,” I agreed. “We need to find out if we can at least communicate with them well enough so you can find out whether they’re in contact with your sister and the others. Or we need to know if they‘re a new danger in the neighborhood.”

“And?”

“What do you mean, and?” I asked.

Murphy shook his head. “There’s always a hidden ‘and’ with you. That all sounds too rational, so I’m wondering about the hidden part. You know, that part that warms the Null Spot cockles.”

“You don’t even know what a cockle is.”

Murphy shrugged. “What was the ‘and’? I’m still listening for that part.”

I looked back out the window. “There doesn’t have to be an ‘and’.”

“But there is, isn’t there? Just tell me what it is.”

I huffed. “If they’re a danger to us,” I said, “I think I’d maybe like to toss a grenade or two in each of their helicopters when they park them for the night. I don’t like being at a disadvantage.”

“Just toss in a grenade.” Murphy laughed. “Yeah, right. It’ll be that easy.”

“No.” Of course it wouldn’t. “Let’s scout out the situation and go from there. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Whatever.”

Chapter 9

By the time the Whites left the house, it was late in the day and our best choice was to spend the night in the attic. The next morning, we went out on our shotgun hunt. We got lucky—in the second house we searched we found an old double-barrel shotgun with a pair of barrels so long that I thought the gun might be more effective at poking Whites from a distance to keep them away from me.

As much as I’d romanticized the lethal potency of a double-barrel shotgun—I’m a big action movie fan, but I’ve mentioned that before—the damn thing was impractical to the point of being more harmful than useful. The idea of two shots, reload, two shots, reload seemed only slightly more effective than my machete. Two Whites I figured I could handle pretty easily with my blade. I’d done that and more on countless occasions.

Murphy convinced me that any weapon—as a backup plan—was better than none. We started searching houses for a hacksaw to shorten the barrel; an idea I liked a lot. A short-barrel hand cannon with a spread I couldn’t miss with had an immeasurable movie-based cool factor.

It was nearing noon when we were searching through a house that had been somebody’s idea of a modern design forty years ago. Now it was just ugly. One day it would be a collection of concrete piers and rotten wood.

The house’s garage held nothing except a dusty sedan—no lawn equipment, no skis, no shovels, and no tools. We figured the house was a bust for finding a hacksaw. Nevertheless, we’d already determined it was free of Whites so why not search it?

I was rummaging through a cluttered home office with a view of the lake out a big window when Murphy called from another room. I went running through the house with my machete ready, expecting anything.

When I jumped through the door, prepared to hack, I saw Murphy looking at a tall gun safe hidden inside a closet. The door hung slightly open.

I said, “Makes sense.”

“How’s that?” Murphy carefully swung the door wide open, stepping back as he did so. Why? Why not? You just never know.

Craning my neck to get a better look inside the safe, I said, “You know, with everything happening, I’m sure the guy needed his guns handy. Why lock it?”

Murphy reached into the safe among a dozen rifles standing in a rack, all tidy, each with a space. He pulled one out—some kind of rifle-looking thing with a pistol grip. He turned to me with a wide grin as he reached the gun out toward me. “Get rid of that old shotgun. This is what you need.”

I leaned the long double-barrel grandpa gun against the wall and accepted the one Murphy handed me. It was compact. It didn’t have the shoulder stock, unnecessary since I couldn’t hit a damn thing when I shot that way. I was going to be shooting from the hip, literally.

“That’s a Mossberg Tactical,” he said. “Badass shotgun.”

“It’s a shotgun?” I asked. I held it up, hefting it in my hands to get a feel for the weight of it. I took a close look at the barrel, which extended maybe four or five inches past the pump mechanism. I liked it.

Murphy said, “Not enough extra barrel on that thing to make it worth sawing off.”

Nodding, satisfied, I said, “This will work.”

“That’ll have six or eight shots,” said Murphy. “I’m not sure.”

“Better than two,” I smiled. The Mossberg felt like a real weapon. “I need to test it out.”

Kneeling down in front of the gun safe and shuffling some boxes around on a shelf inside, Murphy said, “There’s a shitload of twelve gauge shells in here.” He started pulling them out and cradling them in his arm.

“I think I like this guy,” I said, as I looked around at the room. “I hope he made it.”

Murphy started handing me the boxes of shells. “Load up with as much as you feel comfortable carrying.”

I set the gun down, shed my Hello Kitty bag and opened it up. I had room. “What I need is a bandolier for these shells.”

“Yeah, so does everybody else, Poncho Villa.” Murphy laughed. “Keep on the lookout when we’re scavenging. Maybe you’ll come across something. In the meantime, get in the habit of carrying shells in your right front pocket. You can reload from there.”

“No problemos.”

“The good thing about a twelve gauge is that they’re popular and cheap. Everybody’s got one. Shells should be easy to find.” Murphy pointed at the stacks of ammunition boxes in the safe, “Like this.”

Chapter 10

We found another boat later that day that had run aground, just one more of hundreds, if not thousands of boats on the lake that had loosed its mooring lines and went adrift. It was a ski boat with a half tank of gasoline and a charge on the battery sufficient to crank the motor.

We drove it for a bit before shutting down the motor and paddling our way toward a long dock sticking out into the lake near a cluster of closely packed houses. The presence of so many houses all but guaranteed that some of their former residents turned white by the virus would still be lingering.

We anchored far enough from the end of the dock that no overzealous Whites would be tempted to make the jump if they decided they had reason. We needed to get down to the end of the lake, but didn’t want to leave a wake easily spotted by the helicopters when they made their afternoon trip from south to north, going back home.

Thankfully, it wasn’t too late when we saw a single helicopter cross below the clouds. Having seen them pass by twice a day for over a month, I knew that usually one trip was made in each direction each day. The number of helicopters varied from one to three, but on the days when more than one flew, they flew together.

As the sound dissipated and the helicopter turned into a black speck before disappearing, Murphy and I started to paddle our boat toward the dock.

We were safe to run our test.

Once we were at the end of the dock, I leaned out and looped the bow line around a cleat. I wanted it to be easy to remove so I didn’t wrap it. I climbed out of the boat and looked across fifty feet of wooden planks into somebody’s backyard.

Dead grass and knee-deep weeds covered the ground between a few tall oaks whose bows spread widely to shade the entire lawn. The only shrubs grew in a line along the wall of the house. As I looked at the yard, what I saw were only a few tree trunks and no significant bushes behind which Whites could conceal themselves. And that was nearly always my first thought when I looked at any area, where could the Whites be hiding?

For the purposes of my test, the yard was good—not perfect, but good. Any Whites coming would be easily seen a good while before they reached the dock. Bottom line, if my test was going to get out of hand, I’d see it getting that way in plenty of time to get my ass to safety.

With my Hello Kitty bag on my back and my pockets full of twelve gauge shells, I took up a position halfway up the length of the dock. I turned to Murphy who was standing at my side, looking up and down the shore. I said, “I’d feel better if I left my bag in the boat.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “That would be the smart thing, I guess. But you’ve swam with it before. If you end up in the water you’ll be fine.”

I sighed.

“Besides, you said you wanted a realistic test,” he told me. “We always have backpacks on. That’s just the way life is now. You gotta carry your shit with you. Why not run your test while you’re wearing it?”

Makes sense.

Murphy walked a few paces up the dock to put himself between me and the boat. He readied his M4, but kept the butt at his shoulder and kept it aimed at the water. “I’ll take ‘em out if it turns out you need a hand. Don’t want my Null Spot to get any more teeth marks on his pretty white skin.” He laughed.

“I’m not feeling the sincerity.”

Murphy grinned. “Start when you’re ready.”

I looked at the black shotgun in my hands and got a little bit of an excited tingle. It felt solid. It felt powerful. And it looked badass. I adjusted my stance, leveled the gun, and stabilized my wrist against my hip. I pointed the shotgun at the fat trunk of the nearest oak and fired. The thunder of the gunshot echoed off the house, obnoxiously loud. Instantly, the Whites nearby howled.

Murphy chuckled. “Your test will be here in a minute. Do you want to shoot a few more rounds before they get here? You know, to get a feel for the gun. Maybe reload too?”

Good idea. I pumped the gun and fired at the tree five more times. It was pretty far away, but I know at least some of the shot hit wood. I hurried to reload, moving my hands slowly, putting myself in my calm state as I did. Whites were howling all along the shore, dozens. A few were already crossing the yard, running toward the end of the dock, running toward the tasty stupid man with the noisy gun.

When the first of the Whites pounded his feet on the boards, I had six shells in the shotgun and I was as ready as I was going to be.

I felt the White’s steps vibrate through the dock. An infected girl followed the first one in his sprint toward me. I fired. He lost his balance, spun to his left, and fell into the water. It wasn’t a direct hit by any means, but enough of the pellets had hit him to get the job done. The second White, the girl, was a few paces closer when I fired the second time. She caught most of the shot in her chest. Her legs gave way and she hit the dock with the sound of a large slab of meat.

Excited, I glanced back at Murphy. “Damn. This works.”

With a calm face, he nodded and pointed across the lawn. More whites were trickling into view. Maybe ten were visible running through the knee-deep grass. I had a moment before some of them would be close enough for me to have any hope of shooting them. I pushed two more shells into my new gun and waited.

Twenty-five feet of weathered planks lay between me and the end of the dock. It seems like a good length when you say it, but when frenzied Whites are running at you full speed across the gap, you realize pretty quick that twenty-five feet is a lot like nothing. And as the Whites on the lawn came closer together, looking to mass themselves near the other end—not just two, but at least a dozen more Whites than I had shells loaded in my shotgun—I knew that I’d put myself into a life-or-death situation. Murphy’s well-armed, insuring presence behind me became an afterthought. The safety of the deep water to my left and right was a small comfort.

As soon as a White stepped onto the dock, I fired. My shot killed one following behind him and wounded another. The first White was two long paces closer when my second shot blew a large gout of red out of his chest. That left me three rounds, and at the moment, no Whites on the dock. I finished off the wounded one with a single shot and fired twice more at Whites running across the lawn. They were too far out. I missed both.

Calm.

Breathe.

I reloaded. I did it quickly. More Whites would be on the dock in seconds.

“You good?” Murphy asked, tension in his voice.

“I’m good.” I pushed in six smooth, quick rounds, raised the shotgun to my hip, and fired as a White reached the end of the dock.

Got her.

My confidence was growing with each burst of red blood from white skin.

A group of several more arrived at the other end of the dock.

Too many.

I emptied my shotgun at them in patient shots, giving the wounded and dying a chance to fall before sending my pellets at those behind.

When I was empty, two were still clambering toward me over the dead and writhing bodies.

The number of running Whites coming across the grass was way more than I knew I could handle.

I started to reload, keeping my eye on the two Whites. It was immediately clear that I wouldn’t get the shells into my shotgun in time. Everything happened in adrenaline-soaked fast time. I dropped the shells from my hand and pulled out my machete, hacking down in one motion as the first of the two neared me.

Murphy shot the second, and it fell to the dock in front of me.

I chopped down with my machete and lodged the tip into the boards at my feet, took a quick glance at the coming Whites, and decided I had time to reload, provided I didn’t let my nerves get away from me and fumble the attempt.

I didn’t. I finished reloading.

I killed four more Whites with six more shots.

By then, so many of the infected were converging on the end of the dock, Murphy said, “I think we should go.”

“Yeah.” Feeling good, I yanked my machete out of the wood.

Murphy ran to the boat and I followed. I loosed the bow line and shoved off. We floated out by nearly a dozen feet when a runner jumped off the dock and landed in the water close to the boat. I shot him.

Murphy started the engine and I fired at more Whites running up the dock.

As the boat started to pick up speed, I relaxed. We were safe.

“Good test?” Murphy asked.

“I think the shotgun was the right call,” I smiled.

It was good to have a guy who had some experience with real weapons.

“Just keep in mind the noise,” Murphy told me.

“It’s hard to ignore.” I sat down in the passenger seat. “I know panic is what leads to bad choices when it comes time to shoot. We both know all too well that once the shooting starts, things get bad in a hurry. The shotgun is a last resort.”

“Don’t forget it.” He started to chuckle. “Null Spot.”

Chapter 11

It was late in the day but still light outside when Murphy and I docked the boat at the edge of the lake where the water, a tree-covered slope, and a steep, rocky side of the levee converged. The levee extended the dam a quarter mile to the southeast and only ever held water back when the lake was overfilled like it was now.

No Whites were around. Better yet, no helicopters full of belligerent assholes were buzzing about to strafe us.

Murphy tied off the boat. I left the keys in it, and we carefully negotiated the long climb over the rocks to get to the top of the levee. Still, we were alone and the afternoon was starting to settle down to a quiet that belied the would-be dangers lurking when dark finally settled. The air was dead calm.

Prior to the arrival of the virus, the ambient noise of life was the sound of cars and trucks careening over the asphalt at high speed. It was a sound I’d learned to ignore. I’d recalled noticing when it was replaced by a new ubiquitous noise—gunfire. I remember that the gunfire peaked a few days after everything went to shit. For a time, it was near constant—sometimes close, sometimes far away. As the virus ate away at humanity, the gunshots grew more sporadic until a day came when I found myself standing and looking around, sensing something was missing but unable to figure out what it was. Like the absence of the traffic noise, the absence of the gunshots was hard to figure out.

By then, the world’s natural sound was that of birds which seemed to be thriving and tweeting everywhere—house sparrows, cardinals, and doves.  Coyotes loved the new order of things, as I heard their howls and yelps nearly every night. The only manmade sound left was that made by Whites. I guess when the virus fried their powers of speech away, it left them with the desire to vocalize anyway, howling and yelping like the coyotes, screaming when they were on the hunt or being hunted by other Whites. Near or far, their voices were almost always on the wind.

None of the loud ones were around when Murphy and I reached the top edge of the dam, and we didn’t see any moving nearby. Far below and downstream on the riverbank, I saw some Whites trying to corral a small animal. Unless it was able to get into the water and swim away pretty quickly, I didn’t hold out any hope for it.

Murphy and I climbed down the long, treacherous slope on the other side of the levee, coming off it near the shoulder of ranch-to-market road 620. Out of habit, I looked both ways before crossing the five lanes of asphalt, nearly empty except for those cars and trucks stopped on the bridge.

Once across, we concealed ourselves in the dense trees and took a moment to catch our breath.

“So far, so good,” said Murphy.

I shrugged and silently scanned the shadows under the trees around us, expecting a gang of quiet, sneaky Whites to be lurking there, ready to ambush us. I knew they were out there. They were always out there.

We started down toward the river, following the path of a narrow road that meandered its way through the trees toward the low-water crossing, the place where we had a boat tied off. Along the way, we didn’t see any Whites but we could hear them—there weren’t many, and they weren’t agitated, just regular Whites going about their business.

When we came within sight of the water, I saw our boat drifting on its tether just as we’d left it six weeks ago. Its shine was dulled under a layer of clingy dirt, dust that settled on dry afternoons, turning to mud when the dew settled overnight.

“You’re expecting trouble?” Murphy nodded as he said it. He was expecting trouble, too. Hell, we were always expecting it.

“I just don’t want it to be a surprise. Know what I mean?”

Murphy grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”

He was joking, of course.

“You cover me from up here,” I said. “I’ll head down. If any Whites come to fuck with me, well, shoot ‘em if you can. If not, and I can’t handle ‘em, I’ll jump in the water and swim downriver a bit. We can hook up down there.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I moved through the trees, crunching brown autumn leaves and hating them for making me noisy. I paused behind thick, gnarled trunks and took my time to look around. We’d gone too long without trouble. That worried me, but nothing happened.

I reached the bank, squatted, and scanned the other side of the river before I stepped through knee-deep water to climb into the boat. The keys were dangling in the ignition. All was just as we’d left it. I raised my shotgun to my shoulder, but the awkwardness of the pistol grip made me feel foolish. I lowered it and laid my wrist on my hip as I pointed the gun uselessly at the far shore. I leaned against a gunwale and waved Murphy to come down.

He made almost no noise at all as he worked his way through the trees. He untied the bow line when he arrived, then jumped into the boat beside me, shoving off as he did so. He said, “That was easy.”

Nodding, I replied, “You ride shotgun, I’ll drive.”

Chapter 12

We were out in the center of the river and starting to float downstream when Murphy lowered his rifle, glanced at me, then looked up at the far end of the dam. “We’re doing this the wrong way.”

I looked up at the tall hill on the other side of the river and saw houses built among the trees. I looked at the dam for a clue as to what Murphy was talking about and then I looked around the boat. “What?”

He said, “We need to start working the night shift.”

“Murphy, have you been smoking some weed I don’t know about? You’re not making any sense.”

“Hey man, I’m having an inspiration.” Murphy shot me a fake frown. “I’m trying to make a major improvement in our lives.”

“Uh, oh.” I cranked the starter on the engine.

“Don’t start the boat,” Murphy said as he came up to sit in the seat opposite me. “Hear me out on this one. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hiking around and riding boats up and down the river.”

I scanned the banks as we sat in the boat, starting to drift. “Assholes in the helicopter aside, it’s safe for us to travel this way… mostly. On the river, the Whites don’t mess with us. Even when we’re walking, they mostly don’t mess with us unless we start talking or shooting.”

Murphy replied, “What I’m saying is, we’ve got night vision goggles.”

“And?” There had to be more to Murphy’s epiphany than that.

Murphy scooted around in his seat and leaned forward, ready to sell. “What if we had a silent car to go along with our night vision goggles? Then we could go anywhere.”

“Okay, Batman, I give up,” I said as I looked downriver. “Are you saying we should maybe go back to Sarah Mansfield’s house and get her Tesla? I doubt it still has a charge on the batteries, but it’s electric. It’ll be silent.”

“No.” Murphy grinned and pointed out past the other end of the dam. “I was watching this video online a month or so before the outbreak. There’s this dude, Mitch something-or-other, who’s got a shop right up on 620 just past the dam.”

“And?” I asked.

“His thing was converting old muscle cars to electric.”

“Battery-powered muscle cars?” I wasn’t buying it.

“I swear man, it’s true,” said Murphy. “His first car was this old sixty-something Mustang he called the Zombie 222.”

“Okay, now I know you’re fuckin’ with me.” I cranked the boat engine and it started up.

“I’m serious.”

“Uh, huh.” I put the boat in gear to engage the prop.

“No, I really am,” he said. “It’s a real thing. He makes these cars and they’re fast as shit. They generate like eighteen hundred horsepower. No lie. And they’re quiet.”

“The reason I know you’re fuckin’ with me is that nobody, and I mean nobody, would ever put an electric motor in a muscle car. That’s pretty much a religious debate in itself.”

Murphy paused to think. “No, he retired from high-tech or something and it was his pet project. He said he could get more torque out of an electric motor, and he set a speed record. I’m not shitting you.”

Murphy did seem serious. I dropped my hands from the wheel and rested them in my lap. “So you’re thinking we get us an electric car and drive it around Austin at night when nobody can see us or hear us.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy, slapping a palm on his head. “We’ve got the advantage of the night vision goggles. I don’t know why we haven’t been doing this all along.”

“Me neither,” I sarcastically agreed. “Charging could be a problem. Half the time the roads are full of crap. An electric car doesn’t offer us any protection.” I rubbed my chin. “Anything else I’m forgetting?”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “You forgot to apologize for being a dick just because this isn’t your idea.”

I rolled my eyes and started to say something but realized he was probably right. I sighed and forced an apology. I turned off the boat engine.

Murphy laughed and slapped me on the back, hard enough that I nearly bumped my head on the windshield. “It’s just how you are, man. Don’t you think I know that by now?”

I rolled my eyes again. “Do you remember that map we made when we were at Sarah Mansfield’s house? Do you still have it?”

Murphy shook his head. “Long gone, dude. Too much wear and tear. Know what I mean? Too much shit goin’ on.”

I nodded. “If only we could have laminated it.”

“Why?” he asked.

“A satellite map would show us where all the houses in Austin with solar panels are.”

“Yeah.” Murphy grinned. “All of our gas stations.”

I started to accept the idea. “We could get a network of places around town where we could get a charge if we needed it. I went with a buddy once to look at a Nissan Leaf. They told him he needed to spend like fifteen hundred bucks to install a charging station in his garage, but if he was out somewhere away from home he could just plug the car into a regular outlet for thirty minutes or so and get a half charge or seventy-five percent or something like that.”

That pumped up Murphy’s confidence in the idea. “So we could charge it up anywhere if we had to.”

I shrugged. “Lots of houses in Austin have solar panels.”

“I think we need to go car shopping.”

“And this electric Mustang is a real thing?” I asked, still a little skeptical. In truth, any electric car would do. Plenty of them were around Austin. The old Mustang, though, appealed to me in a sexy, impractical way that made no good sense. But it felt good to think about it. And that good feeling was something I’d been missing for a while.

Murphy picked up a paddle and leaned over the side of the boat, ready to dig into the water to get us to the bank across the river. “Google it if you don’t believe me.”

Chapter 13

An hour later, with our boat tied to a tree overhanging the other side of the river, Murphy and I were standing at the peak of a cone-shaped hill looking up and down the length of 620. We were a little less than a mile from the dam but could easily see the road from our vantage. Plenty of cars littered 620’s lanes but it was passable. Trash and other things that had once been loaded in cars or hastily packed in suitcases lay on the road, in the trees, or washed into piles in the ditches. The remains of bodies—sometimes whole, most often not—lay all over the place with broken bones, clothes, and clumps of hair. More frequently, dark brownish stains on the bleached asphalt marked the spots where people had been slaughtered and devoured.

“Look,” said Murphy, pointing down 620 away from the dam. “Down just past those coyotes in the road. See on the left, maybe a quarter mile? That tan metal building back in the trees there?”

“Sure.” A dozen metal buildings were back in the trees along the road. The sun-faded color of any of them could be described as tan. But whatever.

“That one, there, with all the solar panels on the roof,” said Murphy.

“You’re thinking because he makes electric muscle cars, he’s got solar panels too?” I asked, guessing at the same time that it made sense.

“Sure, why not? Solar panels are cheap compared to what his cars cost.”

“How much?” I asked.

“I don’t know. A hundred to a hundred fifty grand, maybe?”

“Seriously?”

Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. A Tesla is around ninety, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” I stared blankly down the road, still not convinced we were doing anything but wasting our time. Murphy had already sold himself on the idea of the car, though. “Fuck it. Let’s go steal a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar car if it’s there.”

Chapter 14

Despite the obvious advantage of being able to read signs posted in front of the businesses along the way, we decided to stay off the main road—too much visibility being out in the middle of five paved lanes with so much of the day’s light still left in the sky. From the top of the hill we’d spied an indirect path down a few trails, along several short stretches of dirt road, and up a paved street that would lead us to the shop where Murphy guessed the electric Mustang waited. It didn’t look like much of a trek, maybe a half mile, maybe a little more.

I followed Murphy down a zigzagging trail off the peak of the hill. We came out onto a dusty stretch of bumpy road between thick cedar forests on both sides. We passed around a long, slow bend to the point where all we were able to see besides the dimming sky above was the dirt road curving away into the trees in front and back.

Murphy came to a sudden stop, snapping his M4 up to a firing position and glancing quickly back at me before looking forward again. He scanned back and forth across all the trees.

I gripped my machete and raised the blade as I stepped up beside him and stopped.

Without the crunch of our boots on the gravelly road to mask the subtleties of the sounds around us, I heard something out in the trees to our left. I hoped it was a noisy armadillo but knew it was Whites.

I looked around for movement in the trees far ahead. For some reason, Murphy suspected something in front of us. I had to believe he was right. I peered into the dark shadows in the trees behind and beside us. Nothing. I glanced at Murphy. He nodded forward. He whispered, “They’re going to ambush us.”

“How do you know that?”

His eyes passed over my machete as he glanced at my shotgun. “You may need to use that.”

“Should we go back?” I asked.

“I think they’re ahead of us and behind us,” he said just as a hail of jagged chunks of white limestone—roughly the size of baseballs—arced in our direction from the trees on both sides of the road. The stones weren’t aimed well enough to hit either of us except by luck. Plenty were coming, though.

“I guess they’ve run out of regular people to eat,” I said, keeping my calm despite the hail of stones, “and now they’ve banded together to hunt the weak.”

“Yeah Professor, whatever,” Murphy said, with urgency in his voice. He nodded in the direction we’d come from. “My guess is they’ll be weakest that way. I’ll lead. You keep an eye on our rear.”

One of the rocks hit me in the shoulder, missing my skull by inches. “Motherfucker.”

Murphy looked up at the other rocks still coming. “We need to go.” Scanning from side to side with his rifle, he hurried but didn’t run.

I followed, trying to use his massive size as a rock shield while I kept looking behind and to the sides.

The Whites way behind us—in the direction we’d originally been going—yelped and growled. They seemed frustrated that their plan wasn’t working out. The tree limbs around us rattled with the sound of bodies brushing past. Thankfully, the foliage was thick enough to keep them from simply running through and engulfing us. The Whites were smart enough to set the trap but not quite bright enough to figure out how to react once Murphy and I took some active steps to avoid being ensnared.

Murphy’s rifle popped off several suppressed rounds.

I looked forward in time to see two Whites dropping rocks as they fell.

“Faster,” he said as he picked up the pace.

Behind us, where my view of the road was cut off by the arc of the trees lining it, I saw several dozen infected gathering their courage to run after us.

A particularly brave White jumped out of the dense foliage to my right. He planted his feet in a defiant pose and snarled at me for all of two seconds before my machete cut a gash across his throat. He fell, probably wondering what had gone wrong with his simple-minded little plan to menace us into running back toward the others in the main group.

As I watched the bleeding White crumble, I hurried after Murphy, bumping into him from behind when he abruptly stopped. At least a dozen Whites were emerging from the trees ahead of us.

“I’ll take these,” I said, stepping around Murphy as I quickly slipped my machete into its scabbard and raised my shotgun. “They’re close enough for me to hit ‘em or they will be in a sec’.” Nodding my head to our rear I said, “You’ve got a bigger problem back up the road.”

Murphy spun and started firing immediately in a quick rhythm of well-placed shots.

I leveled the barrel of my shotgun and let my attackers get a few steps closer and a lot more tightly packed as they came out of the trees and onto the road. I pointed at legs and knees, not looking for kills as much as twofers, hoping to put a few on the ground with each shot, knowing I only had six before I’d have to choose between reloading and going to work with my machete.

Not worrying about what was behind me, I focused and fired. Murphy would handle his end or he wouldn’t. Either way, it was out of my hands.

By my third shot, three of the Whites coming at me were down and a few others were hobbled. The Whites surged faster and I fired the last three shots in a quick flurry. A couple of Whites stopped, still smart enough to understand the carnage among them. The remaining, those still brave enough or dumb enough to rush, found out just how quickly I could switch from empty gun to swinging machete. I killed two almost immediately.

It’s like the machete was a complete surprise to them. Maybe their brains think slower with the virus, I don’t know. But it’s like they kind of understood what the shotgun was doing to them and when they saw me drop it, they figured they were safe to bull rush me.

I ran a few steps forward to get past the two I’d just hacked. To my surprise, one of them wasn’t dead, which I realized about a half-second too late. As I was hacking a running White across the thigh, the dying woman already on the ground grabbed at my leg. I tried to dodge her grip, but I slipped on loose gravel and tumbled, rolling over sharp rocks on the ground, doing my best to spring back to my feet. I earned a few bruises and cuts for the effort.

The few Whites who were able retreated back into the trees. The dead, dying, and wounded cluttered the road. For a moment, we were clear.

I looked back at Murphy just as he was jamming a fresh magazine into his M4. The road back in his direction was littered down its length with bloodied Whites.

“We gotta go,” I hollered as I pointed up the corridor I’d just cleared.

Murphy glanced back, his face fierce. He looked forward. “To hell with these guys.” Keeping his weapon at his shoulder and firing, he started moving.

Out in the distance, I heard howls that were repeated across the hills we couldn’t see. That was the bill for use of the shotgun coming due.

I hurried after Murphy and nudged him from behind. “They’re coming.”

I raised my machete to take on any Whites that might still be alive enough to grab at our legs as we rushed by.

Back in the direction I’d cleared with my shotgun, some Whites were coming out of the trees again looking at me and Murphy. They were confused. Their weak quarry had turned out to be something brutal and deadly. At least that’s what I wanted to think. Maybe they were just eyeing their dead buddies bleeding out—fresh meat for free.

“Keep it going,” I said. “They’re starting to regroup.”

Murphy’s rate of fire dwindled as we moved.

We were getting out of the thick of it.

I hacked at a grasping hand and a White howled for losing it.

“Okay,” Murphy said. “You ready to haul some ass?”

“I’ve been ready.”

“Follow me.” He took off at a full-speed run.

Chapter 15

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.”

Chapter 16

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.”

Chapter 17

Murphy took his time manually opening the garage door. We didn’t want to take a risk on the electric garage door opener. Some were pretty loud. Stealth was our new motto. Quiet and invisible. No more macho shoot-‘em-ups for us.

Yeah, right?

It sounded good when we discussed it, though.

At least we had the car.

With my night vision goggles on, I slowly drove out into the night, cringing at the crunch of crushed granite under the tires. Murphy closed the garage behind us and got in through the Mustang’s passenger side.

“Windows up or down?” I asked.

Murphy spent a moment thinking about it.

I said, “I know we didn’t really talk about it, except that with the windows down, you can shoot anybody that happens to need shooting.” I put a palm on the glass. “With this dark tint, nobody on the outside can see in. At least not through the side windows. And I think the car will be quieter with the windows up.”

“How do you figure?” Murphy asked. “The engine doesn’t make any noise.”

“Wind resistance,” I said. “That’ll be our biggest noise now. With the windows down, we’ll have more resistance. More noise, more chance the Whites will hear us when we zip by.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Stealth is the word. Let’s keep ‘em up. If I need to shoot something badly enough, I’ll shoot through the glass.”

Chapter 18

Our plan was simple. But then again, they all were when in the conceptual stage. We’d cut across northwest Austin, staying off the highways. That meant we’d take 2222. It cut through the hills with some pretty sharp curves and steep inclines. Nothing our hot rod Mustang couldn’t handle, but given the state of the world, who could guess what hazards lay on that route? It was a road we hadn’t driven since before the outbreak and before the flood. Hell, some of the low-water sections of that road might not even be there anymore.

Like many things in life, the 2222 choice was a trade-off of unquantifiable risks. On the one hand, we had an unknown road, the shortest path to our destination. On the other hand, the road we’d driven before was along a highway that would cause us to drive twice as far to get to Camp Mabry. The risk there was the Mustang’s battery. We didn’t know how many miles we could get out of it. Ten? A Hundred? Five hundred?

On our way across Austin, we planned to stop by Camp Mabry for a refill of lethal toys before making our way up to Mount Bonnell. A park at the peak of that hill, as it turns out, on property adjacent to Sarah Mansfield’s old mansion, would give us a view down on the whole city. If those helicopters were landing in Austin, all we had to do was wait for morning and we’d get a pretty good idea of where they were setting down.

Simple.

As it turned out, the trip down 2222 wasn’t bad. Like every road in Austin, it had its share of abandoned cars and long stretches where nothing on the road gave any clue that the world had run off its rails. At the bottom of the steepest hill, though, a pileup of a dozen cars was nearly impassable. That one looked to have been a bad accident, probably having happened during somebody’s rush to get to somewhere when everything was just starting to fall apart, and people still had hope that a somewhere existed that was better than where they were. As far as I could tell, nothing was.

On the bright side, we did come to one stretch of a half mile that was slightly uphill and relatively straight with nothing in the road ahead. I decided to put the gas pedal—though the car had no gasoline in it—to the floor just to see if Murphy’s gushing about the car’s performance had any basis in fact.

Holy microwaveable shit.

I’ve ridden lots of amusement park thrill rides. I’ve jumped off my share of tall cliffs into murky, deep pools of water. I used to ride an overpowered Japanese motorcycle and came pretty close to killing myself on it racing on this very road. I’ve even ridden in some pretty fast cars that could clock a quarter mile in less than a dozen seconds. This thing, though, accelerated so fast it was frightening.

In that second and a half it took for me to realize I was accelerating faster than even my adrenaline-junkie needs thought was a good idea, and in that other second and a half it took me to pull my foot off the accelerator, we were already going over a hundred miles an hour.

Murphy was hollering and laughing, and I was too by the time the brakes started to slow the car before a turn that came up on us way, way too fast. He said, “I might have to change my pants.”

“Uh, huh.”

We made it to the gates of Camp Mabry in a little over an hour and a half, taking great care not to push that gas pedal too close to the floor.

In normal traffic, before everybody turned into hungry Whites, the trip might have taken thirty or forty minutes. I felt pretty good about the commute time.

I slowed the Mustang to a stop on the road just outside Camp Mabry’s southern gate.

“You’re feeling it, too?” Murphy asked.

Nodding, I said, “It seems like every time we come here things get fucked up.”

“Most times,” Murphy agreed as he looked around for dangers in the darkness. “I see a few Whites down the road, but they don’t seem to be looking this way. I don’t think they know we’re here.”

“That’s good.” I looked up the street leading into the center of the base, the memories of the place keeping my foot on the brake. All those thousands and thousands of dead covering that field outside the buildings where the immune soldiers and civilians made their last stand. All the desperate running and shooting to save our lives.

“If you’re still wanting to go looking for those dudes in that helicopter,” said Murphy, “I’d prefer to do it with a few more hand grenades and bullets. If I could figure out how to mount a grenade launcher on the roof, I’d do that too. I’m pretty sure we’re gonna get into some trouble.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, pretending a lot more offense than I actually felt. “Just because those assholes shot at us from their helicopter?”

“There’s that,” said Murphy. “More importantly, you want to do it. That almost guarantees something fucked up is gonna happen.”

“What?”

“You know it’s true,” he said. “I may have to change your superhero name from Null Spot to M&M.”

“M&M?”

“Mayhem Magnet.” Murphy laughed out loud. “Mayhem Magnet. I like it.”

I huffed and rolled the car forward onto the base.

Chapter 19

The road into the base—the same one Murphy and I had nearly been ambushed on by the naked horde when we were escaping once before—was empty. We saw nothing as we silently rolled over it; a pale strip of sun-bleached asphalt between wide grassy shoulders and dense cedars. It wasn’t until we made the turn toward the bunkers that we saw tire tracks over the skeletons and mashed grass.

I stopped the car as I scanned the field, looking for any movement, especially around the bunkers.

“Somebody’s been here.” Murphy looked back and forth. “All those thousands of dead Whites were over by that building where we found the Humvee.” Murphy pointed. “Way past those trees over there. There weren’t this many dead here by the bunkers last time.” He pointed at the ground. “And look at those double-wide tire tracks. Somebody’s been tearing up the grass with big trucks.”

That concerned me. “You think someone else found our cache?”

“It’s not a secret.” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t see any Whites around.” He pointed at the open gate in the tall chain-link fence surrounding the bunkers. “Why don’t you cruise over there, turn this thing around for the fast escape by the fence, and let’s go in and see what’s left.”

Avoiding the human remains and the deepest of the ruts left in the soft ground, I crossed the field and swung the Mustang around. I backed it up through the open gate, noticing that the doors on both bunkers were open. The darkness inside kept the contents secret.

Once I stopped, just outside the first bunker, Murphy jumped out of the car and raised his weapon, pointing it at the black shadows inside.

A moment later, I had the car keys in my pocket and was standing at the rear of the car beside him, machete in hand, ready to defend myself from any White who might choose to come our way.

For a moment, we listened and watched.

Murphy nodded and moved forward, keeping his weapon up.

I followed.

As we got closer to the bunker door, I was able to see more and more clearly what was inside. I got more and more angry. Just a few steps outside the threshold we came to a stop. The bunker was empty all the way to the back wall. Unable to contain my frustration, I spat at the darkness, “Motherfucker.”

The sound of bodies and feet shuffling inside told me immediately what a mistake it had been to utter those words.

Howling followed.

Chapter 20

A White rounded the corner to my right, stepping into the wide doorway. I didn’t even wait the fraction of a second it was going to take him to get all the way around. I hacked down with my machete, cutting through his cheekbone, knocking him half senseless, and slicing down through his clavicle. He stumbled, and the robust infected woman pushing from behind him howled as she tripped, exposing her neck for an easy kill on my next swing.

Beside me, Murphy was stepping backwards and firing. He put two rounds in a White coming from the other side.

“Damn things must have been up against the front wall on both sides,” I shouted as I swung at my third White.

“Duh,” Murphy hollered back as he killed another.

They came around the corner one at a time, apparently having been lined up and leaning on the wall as they sat on the floor. As they ran toward me, their pace was slowed as they stumbled over the bodies of those in line ahead of them. That made the killing on my side of the doorway easy, and by the time my blade got stuck in a skinny man’s skull, I was done. Murphy shot two more and we shared a look with the silent question, “Is that all?”

It was.

Murphy leaned in through the doorway and peeked into the dim corners on both sides. “It stinks in here, man.”

With my machete out, I headed toward the other bunker.

Murphy caught up and we cautiously rounded the corner in front of the second bunker’s entrance. It was empty, too—at least it was empty of weapons and ammunition. Two Whites were peeking around one wall, afraid to come forward.

I lunged at them even though they were well out of machete range. They both jumped back and I turned to grin at Murphy but didn’t say anything.

He nodded toward the car. Our trip to Camp Mabry had been a waste of time.

Minutes later, we were silently rolling back out through the entrance gate. I turned right and headed west on 32nd Street toward Mt. Bonnell Road.

“To Sarah Mansfield’s house then?” Murphy asked.

Nodding and thinking about all the weapons and ammunition that had been in the bunkers on our last trip to Camp Mabry, I asked, “What do you think happened to everything?”

“Somebody brought some trucks and hauled it all off.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not at the moment,” I admitted, “but eventually, it could.”

It was when I turned right onto Mt. Bonnell Road and started heading up the long crest of the mountain, I saw evidence of the fires I’d started with that fizzled gasoline vapor bomb I’d tried to use on the naked horde a few months back. Any trees that weren’t black skeletons of wood were partially burned or covered with leaves left brown and dead by the heat. The shells of dozens of cars sat in driveways in front of ashen ruins. Not all the houses were burned. The fire had taken a haphazard toll on the neighborhood with no discernable pattern. Burned foundations sat next to houses that went untouched. Other houses were partially burned and some cars seemed to have made it through the firestorm unscathed.

One thing, though, was gruesome and satisfying at the same time. The remains of charred bodies, gnawed bones, and shredded clothing were scattered everywhere. I knew that I hadn’t killed all of the naked horde—not by far—but I’d killed many more of them than I’d suspected.

In that moment, thinking of all the dead, I grew angry with myself. If only I’d built a better bomb, I might have killed enough of them that they wouldn’t have been a danger to us when we were trying to load our people in the Humvees to drive out to Balmorhea. If enough of the naked horde was dead on this mountain, then maybe Steph would still be alive.

Repress the memories.

That’s the ticket to sanity.

Forget.

When we reached Sarah Mansfield’s house, all of the cedars that had hidden it from the road were burned to fingery black sticks, reaching for the sky. The wall that I’d seen the horde knock down on the video a few months earlier was broken and scattered with the remains of the dead. The acres of green grass that had been kept mowed by those robotic lawnmowers were thick with bones and charred black lumps that used to be people.

The house itself was scorched, yet surprisingly intact. Most of the windows were not broken. It appeared not to have caught fire, although all of the tropical plants in the multi-colored, glazed pots on the front porch were burned away.

I pointed toward the city park that sat just up the road, at the peak of Mount Bonnell. “I know we were going to cruise on by and head up to the peak. But we could go in and get pretty much the same view from Sarah’s roof.”

Murphy grimaced. “I don’t want to mess up my shoes in all that shit.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Murphy laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. I think it’s a waste of time, but if you want to go in there…” Murphy finished with a shrug and a look of disgust.

I already had the Mustang rolling into the driveway.

Chapter 21

The crunch of bones under the tires made me ease off the accelerator as I tried vainly to steer the car around the bodies. By the time the Mustang rolled onto the wide, round courtyard in front of the house and garage, I’d given up that attempt. Too many bodies. Too many bones.

Before getting out, as I was looking around in the darkness, I said, “The garage looks surprisingly good.”

“Scorched a bit,” said Murphy.

“It had all those solar panels on the roof,” I said.

“You think they survived?”

I shrugged. I hoped. Or at least as I sat there looking at the garage, I started to hope. “I reset the access codes before I… you know. Before.”

“You still remember the number?”

“I set them to my ATM pin number so I wouldn’t forget.”

“Good idea.” Murphy took another look around. “Let’s go see, then.”

We both got out of the car. I stepped carefully through the human remains, trying to figure out which spots of blackened crud were the burnt pavers of the driveway and which were some part of an infected person who’d been killed by the fire I’d created. Anything remotely soft, anything that slipped under my boot sent a tingle of disgust up my spine.

We crossed over toward the catwalk and the previously impenetrable gate beside the garage. It was hanging on one hinge. The naked horde had managed to destroy it. I whispered, “How’d they do that?”

Murphy shook his head and continued to scan the area around us, keeping his rifle at his shoulder, ready to unload on what I’m sure he expected—a mob of naked Whites swarming out of the house.

We passed through the broken gate and walked along to the point where the catwalk to the house’s front door crossed the ravine between the house and the garage. I flipped up the panel covering the keypad beside the garage door. Although the cover was disfigured, it had protected the rubbery silicone buttons from the flames that had momentarily engulfed the whole complex. In a very nice little surprise, the display screen on the keypad lit up.

I tapped the keypad with my finger as I nudged Murphy to look. I smiled.

He shrugged and turned his attention to covering my back while I strayed off mission.

I keyed in my number, the door lock clicked, and with my machete raised I swung it open. “Holy crap.”

Murphy spun around and pointed the barrel of his rifle over my shoulder and into the garage.

“Dammit, Zed,” Murphy huffed. “Don’t startle me like that.”

“You’re quick when you’re startled.”

“I know,” he said.

“Look.” I pointed into the well-lit garage as I stepped across its pristine floor. “C’mon.” I waved Murphy to follow. “This place is clean. They never got in here.”

Murphy stepped inside, letting the door swing closed to a click of the lock. He started a search of the garage, looking for any Whites that might be inside. I stopped gawking at the well-lit orderliness and realized I should be doing the same.

Murphy passed by the rear of Sarah Mansfield’s Tesla sitting exactly where it was the last time I saw it. I hurried down to the front of the car, near the wall of closed garage doors, and started my walk, paralleling Murphy’s path—looking down the row of cars, looking between, looking inside, and looking beneath. We passed the old Corvette. We checked the Mercedes.

Once we’d looked over the Humvee, with doors still hanging open and old dried blood on the seats—some of it Steph’s—Murphy shook his head and broke his silence. “I can’t believe this is all still here.”

Still staring at the crust of blood on the seat, I thought about the night we’d arrived at Sarah’s house. I absently said, “I guess that means the solar cells didn’t get too damaged by my fire.”

“Or at least all of them didn’t.”

I turned away from the blood and closed the door. I looked back up to the other end of the five-car garage. I pointed at the Tesla. “We could pull the Mustang in and charge it there.”

“I guess,” Murphy agreed.

“We should at least bring it in and top off the charge.” I needed to get my mind off Steph. How do you move on without the guilt of trying to forget? How do you forget the painful parts without attaching the brief bits of happiness? I said, “This is exactly what we were hoping to find around Austin, right? Houses with solar power where we could recharge the Mustang.”

Murphy looked down at me with a cautious question on his face.

“What?”

He shook his head and glanced at the garage side door we’d come through.

“What?”

He sighed. “You’re thinking about moving back in, aren’t you?”

“No.” That was the truth. He’d guessed wrong at the meaning of the distance in my voice, the suddenness of my apparent absence. After all of Murphy’s prodding to get me moving out of my wallowing self-pity over Steph, I felt like I was letting him down by letting myself get lost in my thoughts about her. I chose a lie and ran with it. “Maybe. This was a pretty sweet place when we were staying here.”

“You’ve been back inside after that naked bunch of shit monkeys fucked it all up.” Murphy lowered his weapon and thumbed in the direction of the lawn. “Not to mention the corpse farm. Why would you even think about staying here? The place is too fucked up.”

“It’s like those ranchers out in the country,” I said, “the ones that hang the coyote carcasses on their fences to keep the other coyotes away. All of the dead Whites outside will keep the live Whites away.”

“Bullshit,” said Murphy. “I don’t want to hear it, man. Let’s just get the Mustang in here and get it charged.”

Chapter 22

It only took a few minutes to get the cars jockeyed around in the garage so that our Mustang was backed into the Tesla’s spot. In the Mustang’s trunk, besides a layer of electronic-looking stuff with hundreds of blue glowing LEDs—the battery system for the car, I guess—were adapters for the car’s plug and a long length of thick cord. It looked like we could plug it into just about anything, including the Tesla’s power station. Thank Mitch for spending the extra time and work on that choice. We decided that when we left the next day, we’d move the Tesla back to its spot in the garage so we could leave it plugged in. You never know when a fully charged car is going to come in handy. We found a spot outside to stash a garage door opener, just in case, and proceeded warily into the house.

To my immense surprise, nothing inside the house was burned. Definitely a good/bad sort of thing. Good in that there was hope the house could be salvaged. Bad in that all of the Smart Ones who were leading the naked horde had escaped the wrath of my fizzled gasoline vapor bomb.

The house stank of old urine, feces, rotting bodies, and mold.

My mind started clicking through renovation plans. I knew the house had been built with concrete walls—still visible—and concrete floors. I figured all we’d need to do was throw all the reeking furniture over the balcony and rip up the ruined wood flooring. From there, we could make the place more than livable. It still had running water, electricity, air conditioning, and heating.

It looked like much of the surveillance equipment survived the fire, and in a fortuitous turn that I still couldn’t believe, the vast wine cellar in the basement had never been fouled by the Whites who took over the house. The doors remained closed. And although the glass wall was smeared with all manner of human filth, inside the room was perfect—the right temperature, the right humidity, the right level of light, and no smell. None at all.

Whatever kind of system Sarah Mansfield had installed to maintain the atmosphere in the wine cellar was surpassing its design specifications in getting its job done.

That made it all the more attractive to slip a bottle of some nice red wine I’d never heard of into my bag. I assumed it was obscure to me because its price kept it off my radar when I was at the liquor store. That and it wasn’t sold in a box.

By the time we made it up to the roof, ground zero of my gasoline vapor bomb, we found evidence of the blast. Actually, we found almost nothing up there. It apparently had all been blasted off to kingdom come. That was proof that something big and violent had happened.

The charred concrete skeleton of the outdoor kitchen still stood. The metal columns that had supported the pergola stood straight, supporting nothing. All of the lounge chairs, tables, umbrellas, the potted plants, and more to the point, the bodies of any Whites who’d been on the roof at the time of the explosion were gone. The pool, however, remained perfectly intact, and whatever automated system had been installed to keep the water skimmed and filtered was doing a job just as spectacular as the climate control system in the wine cellar. It was perfectly aqua blue and as clear as Caribbean surf.

“I’ll be damned,” said Murphy when he saw the pool.

“Me too,” I agreed.

Chapter 23

The next morning, after a night spent at a comfortable seventy-two degrees on an uncomfortable—yet safe—concrete garage floor, Murphy and I were back on Sarah Mansfield’s roof. We were splitting a can of SPAM and each of us had a can of fruit. Peaches for me, fruit cocktail for Murphy.

“We need to find some sleeping bags or something,” said Murphy as he rubbed at a kink in his neck.

I nodded. It was too bad the Whites who’d taken over the house had fouled every piece of anything that might be used for a pillow, mattress, or blanket. “You know, we should check the elevator today and see if it still works.”

“The mad bomber evaluating his effectiveness,” Murphy laughed.

I ignored the wisecrack. “I’m just saying, we’ll have some time to kill today. I mean, if we’re sticking with the plan to drive after dark.”

“Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “It worked great on the drive down here. I don’t see any reason to start being more stupid now.”

“More stupid?” I asked, knowing exactly what Murphy was talking about. Damn near everything we’d done so far was arguably a stupid idea. However, we were both alive. I kept my favorite argument on that topic to myself: Most people weren’t alive.

“I’m gonna jump in the pool and wash myself and my clothes,” Murphy said as he stepped up to the edge.

Surprised into silence, I only had time to watch as he plunged in.

After a big splash, he stood up on the pool’s bottom and shouted, “Damn, that’s cold!”

I craned my neck to see over the edge of the roof. Any loud sound might draw the attention of Whites you didn’t know were listening. I turned to Murphy. “I thought you didn’t swim.”

“It’s only five feet deep.” Murphy splashed me. “You could probably use a dunk, too.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll keep watch. Besides, I just had a swim in the lake, with all my clothes on, if you’ll remember correctly.”

“Didn’t your mom ever tell you that you should bathe every day?” Murphy grinned.

I ignored him and walked over to lean on a wall from which I had a good view of the city.

We whiled away the morning doing not much of anything—talking about trivial nothings, pointing at places in the distance where we had a favorite restaurant or bar. We talked about old girlfriends, avoiding mention of Mandi and Steph. We speculated about what the world might look like five or ten years down the road.

We mostly ignored the carpet of bones and charred, rotting bodies spread across every visible open space below us. We watched the river flow by and listened to the birds in the trees. It was almost peaceful.

When the helicopters came—two of them, flying from north to south as was their habit—the sound grew up out of the silence. At that point, we stopped talking and simply watched. They flew over Austin’s skyline, but before reaching the tallest buildings, they both descended and circled in the area just south of the university.

I pointed. “It looks like they’re going to land on the Capitol grounds.”

Shaking his head, Murphy said, “I doubt it. They’re probably just shooting at some more Whites like us.”

“No,” I said. “Look.”

The helicopters sank lower and lower.

“See that pointy tip just behind that big blocky building. That’s the Capitol. I think they’re landing.” Sometimes stating your point twice helps it sink in.

Both helicopters disappeared.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Murphy. “That can’t be safe down there. Whites are all over the place.”

“Unless the naked horde cleaned them out when they rolled through town.”

“No way,” Murphy disagreed. “There are too many people in Austin to think those naked fucktards killed and ate all of ‘em.”

“According to Jeff Aubrey’s calculations,” I said, “something exactly like that was supposed to happen. How long has it been now?”

Murphy shrugged. “It’s what, late November? Early December maybe.”

“Everything started in August. Three solid months. A lot of them could be dead.”

“Yet we still see them everywhere, right?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but nothing like the massive hordes of them we were seeing. Not only that, but back in the beginning, they were like under every mattress, behind every door.”

“Whatever,” said Murphy. “You’re thinking about it all wrong. Just because we’ve been holed up in that house up by the lake for awhile with no Whites around most of the time, you think they all wandered off. We only left that place two days ago and how many Whites have we seen?”

“Lots,” I said. “But—”

“No buts,” said Murphy. “We saw them at the house where we got shot at. We saw them at Camp Mabry—”

“We always see them at Camp Mabry,” I argued.

“That’s right. And there they were, just like always.”

“No,” I argued. “Not just like always. Usually, there are like a million of them there. This time it was a few dozen hiding in those empty bunkers.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Murphy huffed. “All I’m saying is that we keep seeing them. They’re out there—a lot of them. As soon as you get to thinking that maybe we’ve turned some kind of corner and there aren’t that many, then you’re going to do something stupid and try to get us killed again. That’s all I’m saying. So, don’t think that stupid shit.”

“I can think whatever I want,” I told him, feeling a tad petulant.

“Then keep that stupid shit to yourself, because I don’t want to get munched by a pack of hungry Whites, okay?”

“Damn,” I forced a smile. “Somebody misses Starbucks.”

Chapter 24

Being close to Thanksgiving, the sun set earlier in the day. Murphy and I rearranged the cars just as we’d discussed, buttoned up the garage, and rolled down Mt. Bonnell Road with a full charge on the Mustang’s battery and a full charge on our night vision goggles. Unfortunately, we had less ammunition than we would have liked and few hand grenades.

Nothing is ever perfect.

We had a half moon and not many clouds. Through the night vision goggles the world looked bright and alive. Coyotes were prowling. Owls swooped silently down from the trees to skewer their talons through inattentive rats. Whites who happened to be looking at the road stopped what they were doing to piece together in their virus-diminished brains what the shiny black shadow was floating quietly past. Only a few made any effort to get close to the road for a better look, let alone a futile chase.

We passed Camp Mabry. It was on our way out. We went over the highway—Loop 1—on the bridge, thankfully still clear. That led us through a maze of residential blocks cut through by Shoal Creek.

“You know where you’re going?” Murphy asked.

I had a pretty clear idea of the destination. I was certain the helicopters had landed down near the Capitol building. Get there, and all I’d have to do was look around for a few minutes and there they’d be, surrounded by a bunch of assholes with guns. I wasn’t sure what would come after that, but if the opportunity arose to punch one of them in the face—well, I wouldn’t complain about that. Anyway, that was pretty much my plan. I pointed out over the hood. “That way.”

“Yeah, I know.” Murphy heaved an exaggerated sigh.

“I’m just working my way through this neighborhood, looking for open streets.”

Murphy nodded and started looking down the side streets.

“I need to make a left if I can,” I said. “The last four streets we’ve passed were blocked.”

“You’re still thinking the Capitol building?” asked Murphy.

“Yup.”

We took our left turn, found a north-south road and made our way down to 15th Street. That wide thoroughfare had remained surprisingly clear, at least up to the point where it clogged with abandoned cars and military vehicles near Brackenridge Hospital. Driving on the clear road so close to our destination left me wary, however. It ran right past the northern edge of the Capitol campus, which is why I made a right turn three blocks before I reached the corner of the Capitol property.

“Hey?” Murphy said, pointing down 15th Street as we turned off. “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Don’t want to get shot at again in case those assholes are over there on the Capitol grounds.” I looked admiringly at the interior of the Mustang. “We just got this shiny new car.” I smiled. “I don’t want it to get messed up.”

Murphy laughed.

When we reached 12th Street I spotted a parking garage, zipped silently in through the entrance, and parked the car on a nearly deserted second floor. I pointed east. “The Capitol is about four blocks that way.” I pointed south. “You know what’s down there?”

“Is this a trick question?” Murphy asked.

I shook my head. “About four blocks that way.”

Murphy turned his palms up. “Should I?”

“The Travis County Jail.”

Murphy laughed. “Where it all started. For us anyway.”

I looked south and recalled the jail, the riot, and our escape. “That was some fucked up shit.”

“It’s all been some fucked up shit.” Murphy smiled again and got out of the car.

I got out, jingling the keys in my hand. “Leave ‘em or take ‘em?”

Murphy patted his jeans pocket where he had the extra key stashed. “We’ve had too much shit stolen already. We take the keys. If some other fucker runs through and needs to steal a ride, he better hope there are more cars upstairs ‘cause he’s not taking ours.”

We headed out.

Chapter 25

We walked up a hill that ran east along 12th Street, staying in the darkest shadows behind cars and other debris left scattered on the roads by the storms and the post-virus chaos. When the hill crested two blocks west of the Capitol grounds, we saw that we’d come to the right place.

The Texas State Capitol complex covered a square in the center of Austin four city blocks long on each side. The Capitol building sat in the middle of what were mostly enormous old oak trees shading acres of green grass so thick and soft that it made visitors want to throw off their shoes to feel it between their toes.

The grass on the northern side of the Capitol grounds had been dug up years earlier to bury a massive state office complex connected into the historic Capitol building through what was its basement. They layered the whole thing in a couple acres of concrete except for one giant, perfectly round hole a hundred or more feet across and three stories deep. The round wall inside the hole was flanked by granite pillars, balconies, and tall windows through which sunlight poured to irritate the bureaucrats in their warrens.

Surrounding the whole complex on the inside edge of the sidewalk had been a decorative iron fence that stood about three feet tall with rows of little gold star spikes along the top edge. All of that iron was now gone or more accurately, relocated.

Right on the curb, some bunch of somebodies had constructed a rampart at least fifteen feet tall that incorporated cars, pieces of cars, semi-trailers, metal doors, sheets of galvanized tin, and pretty much any piece of metal that could be scavenged from nearby. Whoever built it had welded all the pieces together to form a fairly smooth wall that ran perfectly parallel to the street. That black iron fence that used to keep tourists off the grass now topped the rampart.

The wall was every color of post-industrial ugly with a wealth of rust spots where the parts had been tack-welded but not painted. Paint was a luxury. Pieces above overlapped pieces below—like shingles—leaving no apparent handholds. As much as the wall looked like a pile of junk at a glance, a second look revealed how formidable it was. No one would be scaling it without a rope. I suspected from the look of the pieces of cars and trucks incorporated into it, nothing short of an Abrams tank could knock it over or crash through it.

At odd intervals along the top edge of the rampart stood what appeared to be deer blinds. Inside some of them crouched men with rifles. The rifles had the now-familiar bulky suppressors on the ends of their barrels.

“You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.

“Yup,” said Murphy. “The Hillbillies made themselves a fort.”

“I wonder how they managed to get that built.” I looked up and down the length of the wall as it paralleled the street. Even through the night vision goggles, the sight was a familiar one. Four lanes of asphalt and concrete covered completely in the remnants of humans: clothes, shoes, bones, and bodies in various stages of rot. The carpet of the dead was not still. Among the corpses crawled rats, dogs, and even the brain-fried infected, so desperate for food that they were gnawing bits and bites of flesh off the decomposing bodies.

“They’ve been killing a lot of Whites down here,” said Murphy. “More than up at Mabry, I think.”

Pointing at all the pieces of clothing among the dead, I said, “I don’t think this wall was here when the naked horde came through town.”

Murphy shrugged and put on an innocent face. “Jealous?”

“What?” I shot him an angry look. “What does that mean?”

“These guys held out. We didn’t.”

Shaking my head, and recalling how easily the naked horde had knocked over the wall around Sarah Mansfield’s compound, I said, “You know as well as I do that if half a million naked Whites rolled up on this place, everyone inside would be dead now.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

I huffed and looked back at the wall.

Murphy said, “So, what’s the plan, Batman?”

Without looking away from the wall, I said, “I’m going in.”

“Couldn’t you think of something stupider than that?”

“Sarcasm?” I asked.

Murphy shrugged. “It works.”

“I’m not going to walk up to the door and announce myself.”

“Good,” Murphy chuckled. “Because you never know, when you’re dealing with the Valiant Null Spot.”

Ignore him. Ignore him.

Peering at the dark deer blinds atop their flimsy metal-pole frames, I said, “That one is empty. I’ll bet they don’t have enough guards for all of them.”

“Or they’re asleep,” Murphy said, looking around behind us. “Or having dinner. Or maybe that guard is on the other side of the wall taking a dump.”

“More than just that one is empty,” I said. “Besides, if they had enough guys, then they’d have enough guys for the night shift. All of those guard towers would be full.”

“Okay, Sherlock,” said Murphy, “if I say you’re right, will you get on with telling me your plan?”

Chapter 26

Diversion, is it the oldest trick in the book?

Maybe.

Under normal circumstances—

Who am I fooling? What do I know about “normal circumstances” with respect to military operations?

Nothing.

I guess where I’m going with my line of thought is this: I think people with military training expect diversions when they think an attack is imminent. Why? Because they work. The diversion worked on Monk’s Island. That’s why we used one there to rescue—or failed to rescue—those people from Jay Booth and his crazy fucks.

My thoughts about getting into the Capitol grounds undetected depended on a diversion I thought should work for one basic reason. The mix of military men—and whatever the rest of them were—didn’t expect an assault from an intelligent, organized enemy. They expected halfwit Whites. By the evidence of all the rotting corpses outside their walls, they were adept at handling those. Perhaps they didn’t even see Whites as a threat anymore, just a nuisance.

They must never have encountered the naked horde.

Anyway, that was the basis for my reasoning as I snuck toward the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion, which covered a city block adjacent to the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds.

At the intersection on the southwest corner of the mansion, an area where the guards in the deer blinds wouldn’t be able to see me, traffic barricades, burned out vehicles, bones, and spent brass bullet casings were everywhere. Rifles and pistols lay rusting on what remained of corpses under shreds of uniforms. As I crossed the intersection, I realized our days of scavenging weapons out in the open were over. Only those guns protected indoors were likely to be operable.

The fence along two sides of the mansion had been almost completely knocked over, and weeds had grown waist high through the wrought iron. Highway patrol cars were parked at odd angles on the formerly lush grass. The governor had clearly tried to make his stand in the mansion with as many state police as he thought necessary. Or maybe just all the ones he could gather.

Too bad for him.

Unless he’d fled out the back door when the mob of Whites that knocked down the fence showed up, he was likely dead for his bravado and so were all the policemen who’d died protecting him.

Under the dark night shade of the trees, I reached the wall of the two-story, plantation-style mansion and stopped to listen. Only birds in the trees and the breeze through the leaves made any sound.

Having taken a tour of the Governor’s Mansion with one of my freshman high school classes—in an old life that seemed like a different nightmare—I knew the rough layout of the place. I also knew the décor had plenty of overstuffed furniture, hideous wallpaper, and lots of useless decorative flammable crap everywhere. I only hoped that after the 2008 fire and subsequent renovation, most of that flammable stuff had been replaced with more equally useless flammable crap.

Climbing into the darkness of the mansion through a first-floor window, I was pleased to see that my memory hadn’t failed me. I found myself in the library, which stood two stories high with a walkway around the perimeter of the 2nd floor that provided access to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Half or more of the books had been scattered through the room as though a wind had blown them into dunes of sand with book-sized grains. The furniture was splintered, shredded, and overturned. Brownish spots and splatter were everywhere. It was clear that when the Whites overwhelmed the police outside, the monsters had poured in through the windows and the battle continued inside.

Brass shell casings, their shine lost, lay among the clutter on the floor. Grenade blasts marred and scorched the floor and walls. I wondered for a moment why the mansion hadn’t burned a second time, but figured that during the renovations seven years ago, a more robust fire suppression system had probably been installed. Looking at the ceiling to see sprinkler heads two floors up, I further guessed that those systems were now not functional. No water. No electricity.

No luck for an old building that was going to rot into nothingness anyway.

I hefted the gas can I’d collected along my way to the mansion and had filled two-thirds full with scavenged gasoline and diesel fuel. I dumped some of the wickedly aromatic liquid onto piles of books against two of the walls.

Having decided that I was only going to light two or three rooms before retreating, I hurried about my business and doused the couches in an adjoining room after pushing them against the walls. I definitely wanted the old wooden walls to catch fire. Lastly, I poured the remainder of my can over the desk, shelves, and furnishings in the governor’s personal office. Knowing that office was definitely going to burn left me satisfied for reasons I didn’t completely understand.

Maybe in my mind the governor was the kingpin on top of a pyramid of authoritarian fuck-sticks whose boot heels had been repressing me my whole life.

Maybe I just hated authority because my parents were a pair of belt-happy repressive pricks.

Maybe I never grew out of my third-grade fascination with flames.

After leaving the gas can on the governor’s desk, I went out into the central hall where curiosity got the best of me as I looked up at the grand staircase covered with a layer of human remains so thick it was almost impossible to see the individual steps. All up and down the wall, bullet holes had torn through the plaster, leaving gouges with shards of the underlying wood sticking out.

Stepping between the rotting bodies, I followed the course of the battle up the stairs and wondered how many policemen had been standing on the upper landing, shooting into the mass of screaming monsters as they flowed up toward them. It reminded me of the house in East Austin where Murphy, Mandi, Russell, and I had been trapped when the Whites were rushing up the stairs to tear at our flesh.

Once I reached the landing at the top, I saw that several sets of tall double doors made of thick wood had been broken off their hinges by the weight of the Whites pushing them to get at those inside. I thought about the terror those within the rooms must have felt as those seemingly impenetrable doors flexed and creaked. Then the oaken doors shattered, and the real screaming started as the last of the bullets failed to stop the wild-eyed hungry. It was a horrible tale—one that had been replayed over and over in nearly every home in the city, the country, maybe the world.

I looked at all the bodies in the governor’s bedroom, scattered among the shredded mattress, the overturned dressers, and the torn curtains. With one of several lighters I kept on me at all times—lighters were a handy thing to have—I lit the shredded mattress and watched the fire take hold before running downstairs to touch a flame where my gasoline was already soaking in.

The library was the last room I lit before jumping out the big broken window I’d come in through a short while earlier.

Peeking and sneaking, I worked my way through the governor’s yard, past the police cruisers, corpses, and fence. Few things were done in a hurry when Whites were about, especially when a bunch of assholes with rifles and a helicopter were just a block away.

When I reached the street, flames were visible through the broken windows on the south side of the mansion, and Whites were starting to peer out from the buildings where they lurked and from the inside of abandoned cars where they nested. I was half a block away when the first of them screeched and ran toward the fire.

I smiled. Diversion created.

Chapter 27

The night vision goggles gave me an advantage when jogging through the dark streets. I saw most of the Whites up ahead long before I was close enough for them to hear or see me. Nearly all of them were easy to avoid. Some forced me to take a detour. That being said, they might have left me alone, but that was always a gamble. You never knew which anachronistic behavior of someone acting normal would set the Whites off. Running car engines, talking, and shooting guns were the top three that nearly every White recognized as a sign of edible normals. Toting a gun, using a flashlight, or wearing clothes too clean and tidy seemed to be a trigger for a few.

Other Whites, as I’d seen too many times, were something akin to bullies. With their gangs of toadies, they might attack anything—person, animal, or another White—as long as the numbers were in their favor. With me alone, and exhibiting classic prey behavior of running in the dark, I was advertising myself as being in a vulnerable position. I could only hope that any problems that arose could be solved with bluster and blade.

At the northwestern corner of the Capitol grounds, I slowed and stopped behind a burned out car. Across the street, near the corner of the junk-puzzle rampart, partially concealed by low mounds of corpses, I spied Murphy. He was squatting, keeping himself concealed, signaling for me to come.

Straight down the street I saw past the intersection at the southwest corner of the Capitol campus. Whites were in the road on the far side of the Governor’s Mansion from the Capitol grounds. Some were loitering. Some were running toward the fire, which by then had engulfed the old white plantation house. Hundreds of them were howling. More were silent.

Infected voices were crying out from other directions. The Whites were aroused by the noise. The city was coming alive.

I found it interesting that the Whites down there hadn’t ventured onto the streets adjacent to the wall around the Capitol grounds. Did they understand that to be a killing zone? Were they all capable of learning?

Matters of concern.

I scanned down the length of the wall, letting my gaze linger on the deer stands where shortly before guards had watched. All the deer stands nearby were empty. To me, that seemed exactly the kind of move a shorthanded military commander would make when he believed he had an advantage in intelligence over his enemy. He’d sacrificed strength at the perimeter positions where no threats existed in order to fortify himself where the danger did exist—the growing horde of Whites around the Governor’s Mansion.

By virtue of them still being alive, the men inside must have understood the absolute necessity of preventing a breach in the walls. A breach would lead unavoidably to them being overrun and killed.

That being said, I also knew that any commander smart enough to still be alive would be smart enough to always watch his flanks. So though he’d moved his strength to the southwest corner of the Capitol complex, he most certainly had eyes watching the other walls.

I sprinted across the street and slid to a stop next to Murphy. I whispered, “We in?”

He nodded and noiselessly pulled back a flap of tin, creating a gap in the wall wide enough for me to slip through.

I was more than pleased to emerge on the other side of the wall into a hedge of ragged bushes, with a car on one side and a dumpster a little ways to the left, both components of the wall. Murphy squeezed in beside me and slowly let the tin flap spring back into place.

I sneaked forward to get a glimpse down the length of the inside of the wall. Whereas it had a smooth front, necessary to prevent the infected from climbing it, the back was a hodge-podge of all the things of various sizes that had been used to construct it.

I looked carefully at the dark windows of the Capitol building. I saw nothing there. But that didn’t mean there was no one inside looking back.

Murphy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed along a row of trees headed toward the buried annex behind the Capitol.

I nodded and whispered, “Ready to run?”

“Dude,” Murphy grabbed my shoulder as I started to stand and pulled me back down, “put your gun in your hands so you’re carrying it like a guard. Jump up real quick like, and we’ll walk together along the wall, back that way.”

“Ah,” I smiled. “In case somebody inside sees us. In the dark, they’ll think we’re a couple of them.”

“Ready, genius?” Murphy asked.

We got to our feet and walked, making a show of looking at the wall, pointing, and pausing.

“What do you see down there?” Murphy asked, nodding his head back toward the southwest corner of the grounds.

Looking back as we walked, I said, “I see at least a dozen dudes with guns, but with the trees and stuff in the way, I can’t tell for sure.”

“Look again.” Murphy nodded more emphatically.

I looked back and shrugged. “Dudes with guns? What do you see?”

“No helicopters.”

I stopped and turned to stare for a second. Damn. “Maybe they’re on the lawn on the other side.”

Murphy shrugged and moved on. “Maybe they aren’t here.” He went on to mutter, “Maybe we should get the fuck out of here the way we came in.”

“We’re here now.”

“You know what else?” Murphy asked.

Sarcastically, I said, “I love guessing but why don’t you just tell me.”

“No bodies.”

That put a stop to my sarcasm. I snapped my head around as I scanned the grounds. Murphy was right. No bodies. No bones. None of the usual detritus left when the dead had been scavenged for all that was edible. I said, “I guess they cleaned the place up when they moved in.”

From where we were, off to the west side of the Capitol building, we headed across the grass toward the rear. We passed through a cluster of brass sculptures—children frolicking on the grass. It made me wonder how long it would be before that scene became a reality again. Past the sculptures, we rounded a tall hedge and came to the edge of the spacious plaza that covered the underground office complex.

There, between two long rows of skylights, were parked two helicopters.

Murphy nudged me roughly with his elbow, and all but pushed me in a new direction as he quickened his steps.

I was already hurrying as I turned my head to see the danger.

We came to a stop behind a small square building built to house the elevators that Capitol employees rode up from down below.

“What?” I asked as I noticed chips out of the concrete wall. Bullets had hit it. Brownish stains not completely washed away by all the rains told me that some of those bullets had found their mark.

Nodding back in the direction we’d been going, as he looked at the darkness on the backside of the Capitol, Murphy said, “Three guys are over there smoking.”

“Fuck,” I chastised myself. I hadn’t seen them.

He peeked around the corner of the building and pointed. “Right there, you can barely see them past the row of skylights. By that stairwell.”

He leaned back and I took a quick look around the corner. Sure enough, there they were, glowing green in the night vision goggles with bright points of starlight shining from their lit cigarettes. “Got ‘em. What are you thinking?”

Murphy walked to the other side of the little elevator building and looked in the other direction. “I think if those guys are together, it’s because they’re bored of standing around by themselves and looking at the back of the wall.”

Seeing where Murphy was going with that line of thought, I said, “You think something’s not guarded right now.”

Murphy nodded.

We walked side by side across a long, wide piece of empty plaza to a small elevator building that mirrored the one we’d just been hiding behind. The whole plaza was built that way, one half a mirror image of the other.

I glanced back at the smokers more than once. I saw them looking at us in longer and longer glances, but after each glance, they apparently satisfied whatever curiosity or suspicion they had about us and they went back to their conversation and cigarettes. From a distance in the dark, Murphy and I did look like them.

We made a left turn at the elevator building and walked together toward another small house-like structure, the entrance to one of the stairways that led down into the office warrens. It stood on the opposite side of the plaza from where the three guards were killing time. Like its counterpart where the three men loitered, this one was set back into a square concrete alcove, presumably to protect those coming and going, at least momentarily, from any rain that might be falling, with space to open and close umbrellas.

With no more than idle curiosity from the guards, we arrived at the alcove. Hidden from view from nearly every direction, I tried the solid metal door to the stairs while Murphy kept lookout behind us.

Locked.

Damn.

I tried the door again, jiggling it quietly.

Damn.

“Locked?” Murphy asked.

I sighed.

“Try it again,” he said.

Shaking my head, I said, “Why?” I jiggled it again anyway.

“What’s the plan now?” he asked as he peeked out around the wall.

“I—”

The door clicked inside and swung open.

I tripped over my feet while stepping out of the way, and caught myself on the door frame halfway to hitting the ground.

Looking down at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, a guy in a half-assed military uniform stared.

Chapter 28

Pointing, and angrily waggling his finger, the guy in the doorway said, “You dumbasses. Go back to the front wall.” Then his face changed. He knew I didn’t look right, but for some reason he wasn’t making the logical leap to what the color of my skin implied about me. Maybe it was the moonlight that threw him off.

I tried to get my feet beneath me while not knowing what to say back to him.

“Move dumbasses,” he ordered, waggling his finger again. He looked away from me and eyed Murphy as the expression on his face changed. Something was clicking in his brain.

I said, “No habla de Spanish.”

“What?” The guy looked at me again, with his lip cocked up in an Elvis sneer, and he shook his head. “You stupid?”

With his attention focused on stupid me, the guy didn’t see Murphy swing his fist. The punch threw his head back as he crumbled and rolled backwards down the stairs.

I rushed inside, hurrying down the stairs after the tumbling asshole. As the guy hit the first landing, I pounced on top of him, pressing my hand against his mouth and putting my knee over his throat.

The door above clicked shut, and Murphy hustled down the stairs, stopping beside me.

“Nice punch,” I said, looking up. “He’s out.”

Chapter 29

Interrogation seemed like the best option. Why not? We had the guy. We couldn’t leave him in the stairwell. We wanted answers, and he surely knew more about what was going on at the Capitol than we did.

With little effort, Murphy lifted the guy and threw him over his shoulder.

From a tour I’d taken a few years back I knew the annex was full of offices, conference rooms, hearing rooms, and plenty of open spaces where the light flowed in from the skylights above to make the subterranean space more palatable. I’m thinking now that a Capitol tour for a twenty-something guy sounds like a pretty suck way to spend a Saturday. But hey, it was free. Me and my buddies had been drinking since before noon. Damn near anything is entertaining when you’re hammered especially when every ornament and every architectural feature looks like a phallus. Swear to God.

Taking advantage of the perspective, we even took turns posing for photos by a particular design on the terrazzo floor that looked like a giant pink penis. That was funny as hell until a security guard came to investigate.

There. That’s my excuse for voluntarily killing a Saturday in a government building.

Thankfully, I hadn’t been so wasted that I forgot the whole day. Well, parts later that evening never resurfaced in my memory. That’s why I never figured out which one of my buddies barfed on my couch.

As it was, I had a pretty good understanding of the Capitol Annex layout.

I led the way downstairs. Shoes, eyeglasses, and the remnants of cell phones lay scattered on the stairs along with random crap out of a girl’s purse or some guy’s briefcase. It was clear to me the Whites had caught and killed people in the stairwell. The bodies were gone but the evidence remained.

Three stories underground, I opened the stairwell door into darkness. The feeble moonlight coming in through the skylights over the hallway didn’t provide sufficient light. Only the night vision goggles allowed me to see anything clearly.

“Anything out there?” Murphy whispered as he bumped into me from behind.

“Not sure,” I said, scanning the darkness a couple hundred yards to my left where the long wide underground hall terminated at the foot of the Capitol building. To my right, an equal distance away at the bottom of the round atrium, three floors below ground level, sat one of the helicopters. All around on the lowest floor, in the hall and under the balconies, were stacked boxes that had a familiar look.

“You need to see this,” I said, glancing back at Murphy.

He leaned around the edge of the open door. “Anybody down there?”

Nodding, I said, “I don’t see any movement, but there’s a light way down there past all the boxes.”

Murphy peeked and then stepped back inside the stairwell, hefting the unconscious dude to keep him from slipping off his shoulder. “How’d they get the helicopter down there?”

I stepped into the stairwell with Murphy, letting the door close quietly behind me. “The only way they could do it is if some pilot with big balls flew down through the circular atrium. Seems kind of crazy but I guess it’s secure.”

“What were those boxes?”

“I think ammo and weapons,” I said. “Those looked like boxes we saw at Camp Mabry in the bunkers. I think they’re using this floor for an ammo dump.”

Murphy pushed the door open and leaned out far enough to get a good look. He came back into the stairwell. “Why store all that ammo here? Why are they setting up house at the Capitol?”

I shrugged. “Why did a bunch of assholes in a helicopter shoot at us and sink our boat? Why did they build a stupid fort around the Capitol building? Fuck, Murphy, I don’t know?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” Murphy pursed his lips and asked, “What’s the plan then? You want me to haul this dumbass back upstairs and ditch him?”

I took a moment to think about it. “Let’s go up a floor. With the helicopter and the ammunition down there, guys are bound to be down here sooner or later. The second floor seems to me like the best place to grab some state senator’s office and have a talk with this guy when he comes around.”

Chapter 30

Bodies, reeking and rotting, were still on the floor on level two. At least what was left of them. The floors were cluttered. I guessed the second level wasn’t being used by anyone. We found an unlocked door, walked right through the outer meeting room and commandeered the inner office.

Using a flashlight pointed at the ceiling for illumination, I looked at our prisoner. With all of the network cable Murphy and I could pull from the computers around the office, we had him wrapped tightly in a rolling office chair. He’d come awake as we were tying him up, and he wasn’t happy.

“What’s the deal here?” I asked him.

The guy spit some blood onto the floor and sniffled up some of what had been draining from his nose. He didn’t answer my question. Instead he asked me, in jumbled speech that was hard to follow, “Why you don’t tell me who you are and what the hell you’re up to?”

Murphy moved to punch him in the face but stopped before doing it.

The guy flinched and turned his head.

Murphy chuckled. “You macho boys crack me up.”

“Fuck you,” said the guy.

Murphy punched him in the face.

The guy’s head snapped back and more blood flowed.

I glared at Murphy.

The guy laughed. “The thing I wondered ‘bout you White Skins is…” the guy seemed stuck on finding the next word. “…Do you know? Stupid you are?”

I wanted to hit the guy myself, but I wasn’t sure if he even understood what he was trying to say.

He forced another laugh. “You… must be Einsteins of the White Skin world. You got guns and… shit. You still talk but you have to miss those… days when… you had a whole brain.” He spit some blood at the floor but mostly at me. “C’mon man. I smarter a lot than you. Let… me go. Leave. I forget it too.”

Murphy leaned and half whispered in my ear, “This dude’s an idiot.”

“You know that not hurts, right?” The guy looked at me. “I’m Survivor. Black eyes. No pain.” He grinned through bloody teeth.

I took the flashlight and shined it into the guy’s eyes. I pulled it away and shined it in again before aiming it away. “Shit, Murphy. Look at this.”

Murphy leaned in close.

I said, “His eyes don’t dilate.” I repeated the experiment.

The guy said, “Survivor. Black eyes. No pain.”

“You had the virus?” I asked.

“Fuck you, dumbass,” he answered.

Murphy balled a fist.

“No pain,” the guy grinned again.

Murphy shrugged and said, “Unless you want me to knock out all of your teeth you’ll quit being an asshole and tell us what we want to know. It might not hurt, but you’ll sure miss the teeth when they’re gone, I guarantee you that much.”

“Not telling,” said the guy.

“Jeez,” I laughed. “You act like you’ve never seen a movie in your life.” I stood up and started to pace. “That’s the way this shit works. We tie you up. You protest. We beat you. You get all macho. We beat you some more. In the end, you tell us what we want to know. That’s just the way it is.” I sat back down in front of him. “It’s not like you’re hiding any government secrets or anything.”

I stared at him for a moment longer and said, “We don’t want to beat you, man. I’m Zed. This is Murphy. You got a name?”

The guy glared at me.

“Dude,” I said, “being an asshole doesn’t get us anywhere. Just tell me your name or I’ll make one up for you.”

He glared some more.

I huffed. “Fine. You’re Marvin. Cool?”

“Marvin?” He got a sour look on his face. “Call Don.”

Murphy asked, “Who’s Don?”

“I Don,” the guy told him.

“Don,” I said. “Look, here’s the deal. It’s not like we’re Russian spies or anything. Some bunch of dipshits in a helicopter shot up our boat. We followed the helicopters down here, and low and behold, we find you. A Slow Burn, I guess.” I pointed at Don. “We’re just trying to find out what’s going on.”

“Slow Burn?” Don asked. “Survivor. I Survivor.”

“Whatever,” I shrugged. “Is that what you call yourself, a Survivor?”

“I am,” he said. “We all Survivors.”

“Cool,” I said. “Why aren’t you white like us?” I asked.

Don looked me up and down, “You a White Skin.”

I laughed.

Murphy grabbed his crotch and said, “I’ve got your White Skin.”

Still laughing, I looked over at Murphy. “I thought it was a mocha frost tea bag.”

Murphy found that pretty funny.

I turned back to Don. We needed to get serious again. I said, “You got the virus. That’s why you have the dilated eyes and you don’t feel much pain. But it didn’t affect your pigment.”

Don shook his head.

“So you’re saying any Survivors that lose their pigment are White Skins?” I asked. “Even if they’re still just as smart as you? You know, just so I understand.”

Shaking his head and letting his anger show, Don said, “All White Skins is stupid. Cannibals. White Skins is White Skins.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s the difference between you and me besides skin color. We both survived.”

Don pulled a face and said, “You stupid. You cannibal. No White Skin smart.”

“What about us?” I asked.

That seemed to confuse Don. “You first White Skins I seen could talk. Some talk nonsense. Some we train. Like dogs. Not smart.”

I stepped back and paced around a bit.

Murphy sat on a desktop and looked at me. “I think he’s lying.”

“No lie,” said Don.

I looked at Murphy and said, “Yeah. I hate to agree with Don, but I don’t think he’s bright enough to lie.”

“Unless that’s the lie,” said Murphy, “the act that the virus made him stupid.” Murphy looked at the door and then looked back at me. “We should get out of here. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

I slowly shook my head. I needed to learn more about what was going on. If Don was telling the truth. Hell, Don had to be telling at least a partial truth. He was clearly a survivor of the virus, but in a form we’d never seen before. I asked, “Where did you live when the virus hit?”

Don pursed his lips, reluctant to answer.

“Do you think it matters?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, here’s what I think.”

Murphy started laughing again. “Oh no, it’s Professor Zed time.” He yawned and looked at Don. “You should have talked.”

“Whatever.” I shot Murphy a withering look. Back to Don, I said, “You guys had to have gotten all these helicopters from Fort Hood. You can pretend that’s a secret if you want. It doesn’t matter to me. My point was that in Austin, we haven’t seen any like you.” I put a finger on Don’s chest. “I’m wondering if in different parts of the state if… I don’t know…” I thought about it for a minute. “Why would people up where you’re from survive in a different way than we did down here?”

“I Survivor,” said Don. “You Meat.”

Chapter 31

Further interrogation of Don turned out to be a waste of time. He didn’t tell us anything that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves by just sitting on a side street and watching the Capitol grounds. When my patience ran out, Murphy was kind enough to punch Don on the side of the head hard enough to knock him out again, sending him and the chair crashing to the floor.

We left him in the back office with the doors closed, lying on the floor still tied to the chair. I figured if he wound up stuck in there for a couple of days, eventually somebody walking in the hall might hear him holler. If not, well, I figured he would eventually work his way out of his binds.

At least that’s how I rationalized it. I didn’t want to think we’d left him to die of thirst while tied to a chair in a remote part of the Capitol.

Murphy said we should either kill Don or get off the Capitol grounds the way we came in. Any other plan, according to him, was stupid.

Nevertheless, Murphy reluctantly followed me down the hall on the second subterranean level, moving quietly toward the main building.

The clomping of boots coming down the stairs out of the Capitol alerted us to stop and squat in the deep shadows near the walls.

We waited and listened.

The boots came closer. They were on the level below us and had we looked over the balcony, we would have been able to watch them pass right below. That wasn’t necessary, as they were talking as they walked, making their position easy to track just by the sound.

“Justice Baird said six—bring six,” one guy told the other as they passed below.

“We never take them out at night,” said the other guy. “Did he say why?”

The first guy laughed bitterly. “You wanna ask Justice Baird why?”

“No,” the second guy muttered. “Where we supposed to take ‘em?”

The first guy said, “Out front. He wants ‘em to haul some of those deer blinds to the front wall so we can put more guns out there tonight.”

“They’re not that heavy,” said the second guy. “We could haul ‘em ourselves.”

“Why?” The first guy laughed. “We got White Skin labor. Why not use it?”

“They die when we work ‘em too hard,” said the second guy.

Laughing as they walked out of earshot, the first guy said, “We can get more.”

Murphy and I stayed put and silent while we waited for the two to pass through some doors down past the helicopter. Once they were inside, we hurried off.

At the end of the hall at the main stairway leading up into the Capitol building, we stopped.

“Which way, Batman?”

I huffed. “Stop calling me Batman.”

“You don’t like Null Spot.”

I pointed upstairs. “I think we should stay off the main floor.”

“Why are you so interested in scoping these dudes out?” Murphy asked. “Are we thinking about joining these yahoos? Because if that’s your plan, that’s one thing. If not, well you know what I think.”

I pointed back up the long hall we’d just come down. “You think those guys are talking about Slow Burns like Russell used to be?”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. Seems like they’re using them for slave labor. Why, were you thinking something else?”

I shook my head and started up the stairs, slowly and carefully.

The Texas Capitol building looks quite a bit like the United States Capitol, except that it’s made of Sunset Red granite so it looks pink from the outside instead of white. The interior is laid out much like the U.S. Capitol with a high-domed rotunda at the center of two main wings: the Senate Chamber at the east end and House Chamber at the other.

Murphy and I had just reached the landing on the Capitol’s ground floor when some of the tall wood and glass doors at the front of the building swung noisily open on heavy bronze hinges. I rounded a turn and bounded silently up the next flight of stairs with Murphy on my heels. The sound of voices on the second floor prompted me to continue running past that level and up to the third floor.

Hearing nothing but voices echoing up from the floor of the rotunda, we stepped into the third-floor hallway leading down the length of that wing to the House Gallery. We tucked ourselves into an alcove in front of a large door and stopped to catch our breath.

Murphy leaned close to me and whispered, “I hope you have a plan to get us out of here.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I told him, feeling certain the place had insufficient security to keep us in. I pointed at a bullet-riddled door across the hall and motioned Murphy to follow.

After stepping lightly across the wide hall, I grabbed the door and swung slowly, hoping the old, ornate hinges wouldn’t creak and echo through the hall and up to the rotunda dome, then back down to the people who’d entered through the front door. Those people were down there arguing about something, but an out-of-place squeak of tarnished metal might interrupt them.

Thankfully, the hinges were well-lubricated, and we entered quietly, pulling the door closed behind us.

The office was huge with old windows that stood from waist height up eight feet tall. The square wooden desk in the middle of the office was of similar proportions and probably of a similar age. Its expansive top, large enough to park a small car, was clear except for smears of dried blood. The rest of the office was a shambles of shell casings, brownish-red stains, torn clothes, and bones. The clothes and bones were proof that the normal people who’d made their stand here had lost. At least that’s the way it looked to me. I supposed that some could have lived, abandoning their dead to scavengers who came later.

Evidence of death was everywhere, in everything. Worth notice were the places I came across where it wasn’t apparent that someone had died there.

Murphy walked over to one of the tall windows and peeked out into the fire glow between the blinds. “Hey,” he whispered, impatiently waving me to come over.

I crossed over a pile of books that had fallen out of the shelves on the wall, taking up a place beside Murphy to look out the window. The Governor’s Mansion was in full blaze and the flames were spreading to the old oaks on the property. The streets on the far side were filled with the infected, thousands and thousands of them. They were surging up side streets and pulling back. They looked like they were trying to get up their nerve to rush the walls.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “It’s like they’re afraid of this place.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I wonder what the trick is? You think it’s just conditioning, like training a dog?”

“Man, I don’t know.” He looked back at the door and looked around the room. “I don’t get a good feeling about this place. I think these dudes are whacked, and I think they’re stupid.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Look out the window, man.” Murphy pulled the blinds apart. “It’s only a matter of time before all those Whites figure out they can tear down that wall. We got through, and it wasn’t that hard.”

I nodded.

“Hell,” Murphy said. “If the naked horde comes back this way, these guys are fucked. They’ll never get those helicopters out before they get overrun.” Murphy shook his head and rubbed his face. “It’s like they’re all kinda psycho-stupid or something. Who the hell sets up a fortress in the middle of Austin?” He gestured at the noisy mob out in the streets. “In the middle of all that?”

He had a point. I said, “It doesn’t make any sense.” I looked out the window at the mass of Whites glowing red in the flames on the other side of the wall. Plenty of soldiers were out there. Well, not plenty. Relative to the number of Whites on the other side of the wall, the number of soldiers was laughable.

I said, “Those guards in the hall didn’t sound as stupid as Don.”

“Maybe they’re immune,” said Murphy. “Maybe they didn’t get the virus like Don did.”

Maybe. Don did say there were Survivors though. I took the implication to mean they’d all caught and then survived the virus. “Maybe this Baird guy we heard those guards mention wants to be the next governor of Texas or something. Maybe he’s trying to reestablish the government in Austin by taking over the Capitol.”

“News flash, Johnny Genius,” said Murphy. “There’s no more Texas. Just people like us.” He pointed at the soldiers out on the lawn, in their deer blinds, standing by their Humvees, or watching the wall. “I guess people like these fucktards. A few normal people who are being smart and hiding out.” He looked back at the horde in the street. “And them. Lots of them.”

As much as I agreed with pretty much everything he said, some small part of me wanted to believe that the government was coming back, that order was returning. I shook my head and stepped away from the window.

“What?” Murphy asked.

“Nothing,” I said absently. Did I really want to go back to my previous life anyway?

No.

This life sucked most of the time but so did the old one, just in different ways.

I went back over to the window and looked out. Could these yahoos really be the start of the effort to rebuild? “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s going to go bad eventually and all these knuckleheads are going to wind up dead.” I slapped Murphy on the back. “You were right. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Chapter 32

As we left the office through the bullet-riddled door, we heard yelling echoing up through the vast space under the Capitol dome. Murphy and I paused and shared a look. I’m sure he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: Don had gotten loose and alerted his comrades.

Time to test my confidence in my assertion that the assholes were too few and the Capitol complex too large to prevent our getaway.

I leaned out of the door’s alcove to see what I could see up and down the length of the building.

The third floor was clear. I listened for a moment. I asked, “Hear anything up here?”

Murphy shook his head but continued to scan from side to side.

I left the cover of the alcove, ran on light feet through the hall until I was near the edge of the balcony that circled the rotunda on the third floor. Getting down on my hands and knees and then onto my belly, I got close enough to see the round, decorative terrazzo floor with the state seal at the bottom. Thick stone balusters carved into decorative shapes by the prison laborers and Scottish stonecutters who built the Capitol offered pretty good cover, especially with the nighttime shadows inside the building.

Below, I saw a half dozen armed men surrounding four others with hands bound behind their backs. The four with hands bound were wearing desert camouflage fatigues and boots. Looking disciplined even with no helmets and no hats, they wore nothing on their belts. They stood, not quite at attention but straight up, except for one. He had a familiar odd curve to his stance.

The six surrounding them had the ragtag appearance of most of the other guys we’d seen in the Capitol gang. Some wore military clothing with t-shirts or sweatshirts. Some of them slouched. They fidgeted. They were a rabble.

The guy I assumed was in charge stood in front of the four prisoners, ranting on about something. In the large space with the echoes coming back down from the dome above, it was hard to make out more than an occasional word of what he was saying.

Murphy leaned in close to my ear and whispered. “Not our business. Take off your Null Spot cape and GTF.”

I nodded but didn’t move.

Wait. What?

I looked at Murphy. “GTF?”

“Get the fuck outta here.” He nodded dramatically toward the stairs.

I whispered, “You’re missing some letters in your acronym.”

“Fuck if I care.”

I looked back down at the soldiers on the rotunda floor. Something about that one guy with the unusual stance was familiar, and I needed to figure out why. I got up on my hands and knees and started crawling to another place on the rotunda balcony, one that would give me a better view of the prisoners below.

“Zed,” Murphy hissed. “Zed! What the hell?” He pointed down the hall away from the rotunda.

I ignored him and continued.

Once I arrived at the spot I wanted, I lay down again and looked.

A second later, Murphy was by my side. “We can get down the stairs at the end of the hall and make our way into the annex on the basement level.”

Then I saw it. I pointed, “See that dude there with the soldiers, the one who’s not quite standing straight up?”

“Sure.” Murphy glanced perfunctorily. “Unless that’s the brother you never had or something, we should go.”

Shaking my head, I whispered, “Doesn’t that guy look like Sergeant Dalhover?”

“No,” Murphy told me. “It’s not him. Top is like a hundred years old. He’s out in West Texas. That dude down there is thirty, maybe.” Murphy nodded emphatically toward the stairs again. “GTF.”

“I’m not saying it’s him.” I squinted to try and make out the face. “It looks like him is all I’m saying.”

“What you’re saying is never all you’re saying.” Murphy sighed dramatically and shook his head. “You know they have guns, too. This isn’t going to be like shooting Whites. It’s not even going to be like shooting at Jay Booth and his bozos. We’re outgunned.”

I said, “I wonder if maybe that’s Dalhover’s son.”

“Top never said he had a son,” Murphy told me. “Not one word about his family.”

“Still.” The more I looked, the more I convinced myself that the guy down there had to be at least related to Sergeant Dalhover. The resemblance was uncanny.

“Maybe the virus is affecting your vision,” said Murphy, “but that’s not his son. Not unless he takes after his mom because that dude doesn’t look like Top.”

The guy downstairs came to a loud conclusion and pointed. Some of his ragtag band led the four soldiers away.

I looked at Murphy and said, “That may not be his son, but it’s got to be his nephew or something.”

Murphy shook his head. “I hate Null Spot.”

Chapter 33

We trotted down the hall, silence more important than speed. I led the way into a stairwell just outside the House Chamber and looked down the gap between the stairs.

Shit.

I leaned quickly back and whispered to Murphy, “Someone is down at the basement level.”

He leaned close to the edge and listened. He looked at me and shook his head.

I peeked over the rail again and saw a light down near the bottom, moving lower. I continued watching until it disappeared into the long basement hallway that ran the length of the building. “We’re cool now,” I said, turning back to Murphy. “Lots of people around though.”

Murphy looked at me and started to say something that I knew would have been rude but chose not to. Instead, he waved me forward and I led the way down the stairs, staying close to the outer wall to ensure that if by chance some of the ragtag bunch of assholes entered the stairwell, they wouldn’t see my white skin in the moonlight coming in through the windows.

At each landing, I paused for a moment to listen. At each floor, I stopped for a peek up and down the hall before proceeding.

Once at the basement level, I took some extra time in examining the long, dark hallway. I saw no light in the blackness, save the little that came down through the stairwells. I gave Murphy a look to let him know to ready himself. I took off at a run.

It was a nervous hundred yards, as I expected the guy we’d seen with the flashlight to come out of any of the doors ahead at any moment.

He didn’t.

At the corner leading up to the central stairs, I turned a little too hard and slipped on the smooth, waxed floor, landing with a slap of skin and a clatter of metal as my machete bounced and the shotgun barrel hit.

I clenched my teeth and squinched my eyes shut involuntarily, hoping somehow to catch those sounds in the air and drag them back before the wrong ear heard.

I held my breath and listened.

Murphy reached down and grabbed me under the arm, yanking me to my feet, seemingly without slowing down.

While I was still trying to catch my balance, he was already bounding down the stairs, waving for me to follow, and mouthing, “Hurry the fuck up.”

I did.

The stairs coming down from the Capitol’s basement led to the underground annex, where I suspected Baird’s ragtag men had led the soldiers.

Murphy reached a landing and stopped as he peeked around a corner.

I came to a stop with my back to the wall as I looked up the stairs toward the Capitol basement. I listened.

Murphy glanced over at me. He grinned.

He was as much a junkie for the adrenaline as I was.

I smiled back and suppressed a laugh. Whoever had been on the basement level with the flashlight was either confused and looking around in the darkness or frightened and peeking around corners for noisy ghosts.

I whispered, “Are they down there?”

Murphy nodded, “About halfway up the length of the annex. Down on the bottom floor.”

“You wanna follow along on the second floor?” I asked, knowing we could take quick peeks over the rail to see them all below.

“Gotta stay quiet,” Murphy told me before rounding the corner.

Running on our toes to keep the noise down, I pulled away from the wall for a few steps and took a quick glance over the railing. Indeed, the ragtag soldiers were leading the real soldiers down toward the helicopter.

Murphy pulled up to stop at a side hall.

Coming up beside him again, I said, “That’s where those other guys were going to get the White Skins.”

Murphy said, “Maybe they’ve converted some rooms down there into holding pens or a jail or something. Do you remember what’s down there? You’re Mr. Capitol Tourist, right?”

I pointed. “Some big ass conference rooms are past the helicopters.”

“If they’ve got a bunch of Whites stored somewhere, it’ll make sense to put them in one big room,” Murphy said. “Easier to keep them corralled that way.”

“Makes sense.”

Murphy took off again, running silently to the next crossing hallway.

From there, we saw directly out into the round atrium. Plenty of moonlight flowed in, casting us in much more light than I felt comfortable with. I crept back further into the hall’s shadows when I spotted loitering movement below and across the atrium. At least one guard was over there. I knew they had to have someone guarding the helicopters, even though I hadn’t spotted them earlier.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You know the place,” Murphy conceded. “You’re the Mighty Null Spot.”

“Valiant,” I muttered. “The Valiant Null Spot.” I pointed down the hallway into the darkness. “If we go that way we can loop around. Judging by where the stairwells came up on the plaza, I think there might be some stairs back around there we can use to get down to the bottom level and maybe sneak up on the guards from behind.”

“Behind?” Murphy asked, shaking his head. “It’s not like the guys will know which direction to guard in.” He pointed all around. “There are stairs in every direction.”

“At least we won’t be coming down the main hall,” I told him. “That seems to be the route everybody uses when they come and go.”

“And when we get down there,” he asked, “then what?”

I shrugged. “Do we ever know?” I took off at a run into the darkness.

We found the stairs, just as I’d deduced. We made our way down to the lowest level undetected, crept silently up a short stub of a hallway and I peeked around a corner at a moment of complete luck.

Two guards were standing less than a dozen feet away, looking across the floor of the atrium toward the main Capitol building as they stood between the helicopter and the stacks of crated munitions. Both men had rifles.

I pulled my head back quickly, my nervousness clear on my face. I raised a finger to my lips so Murphy would know to stay quiet, and I raised two fingers more and pointed toward the corner. I motioned Murphy back toward the stairwell that we’d just used to enter the hallway. Once inside, with the door quietly closed behind us, I whispered, “I’ve got an idea.”

Chapter 34

Murphy, never shy about telling me just how bad my ideas were, made every effort to tell me about this one. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a better idea. So I said, “Unless you’ve got something else to say.”

“Yeah,” he answered, “we’re guessing the supposed Dalhover relative is in one of the conference rooms right around the corner.”

“That’s where the guards are,” I told him. It made perfect sense to me.

Murphy glanced up through the stairwell. “Guys were up there too. Were they guarding people hiding in the bushes?”

“Yes,” I told him, pretending complete seriousness with the lie.

“Whatever.” Murphy shook his head and looked around. “Fine. But one more thing.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“We’re gonna run over there and bust those soldiers out because you think one of them kinda looks like Dalhover’s son.” Murphy rolled his eyes at that one. “The thing that gets me is this—you don’t know if these hillbillies around here are the good guys or the bad guys. And you don’t know if the soldiers are the good guys or the bad guys.”

“The good guys or the bad guys?” I interrupted. “This isn’t a cowboy movie.”

“People that want to kill you or not,” Murphy explained.

I understood that perfectly clear.

“What if they all want to kill us?” Murphy asked. “And they all might. You know that’s true, right?”

I nodded. I couldn’t argue. In fact, I more than half expected it. Still, I felt loyalty to Dalhover and if there was a chance the soldier was his son, though I felt pretty damn sure it was, then I had to get him out of a jam. If he wanted to kill me, well, he’d have to do that some other time. I said, “We’ll bust ‘em out, and if you don’t get a warm fuzzy, we’ll go our separate ways once we’re over the wall.”

“Warm fuzzy or not,” said Murphy, “you know as well as I do—matter of fact, you keep preaching it to me—us and normals don’t mix. It only takes time. Before long, things go to shit.”

I nodded. True enough. “We’ll bust ‘em out. Then we’ll split up.”

With all of Murphy’s objections tabled for the moment, I explained the plan. It was simple. They all were. Well, maybe not all of them. The ones that had a chance of working were. In complicated plans, things always went wrong.

Chapter 35

From inside the stairwell, I yanked the door handle once to loudly rattle it against its frame before pulling it open. A little louder than natural, I said, “I hear what you’re saying. I just don’t see why he always picks on us.”

“It’s because you won’t stop talking all the time,” Murphy said, playing his part in the charade.

We were already a few steps into the dark hall.

“If he doesn’t like me,” I argued, “why doesn’t he man up and tell me. That’s all I’m saying.”

One of the guards that had been in front of the two conference rooms leaned around the corner for a quick peek into the hall. Seemingly satisfied, he didn’t linger.

In the dark, it was hard to see that Murphy and I wore lighter skin than normal.

“Maybe you’re not listening when he talks to you.” Murphy looked at me with a question on his face.

I nodded. It seemed to be working.

“What if—”

A desperate cry echoed from up the hall.

Murphy and I both froze.

The cry came again.

Shit.

It was Don.

“What’s that?” I asked Murphy as I hurried to get to the corner.

“Um,” Murphy said, “I don’t know. A cat?”

Don hollered again, trying to get someone to come and help.

I rounded the corner and saw the two guards. They’d taken some steps in the direction of Don’s yelling, but they were waiting, hands on weapons, deciding what to do. One of them glanced at me.

“What’s going on?” I asked as he turned to look back up the hall. Then I saw him tense as he turned quickly back to me.

It was only a few long strides to reach him. Just as his mouth opened to say something, I lunged.

Words came out, but I hit him with a shoulder in his midsection and drove the air out of his lungs with a loud ‘oomph.’

We collided with the other guard, and all three of us went down in a tumble of arms and legs.

They cursed. They punched, elbowed, and kicked.

I absorbed the blows and tried my best simply to keep them entangled on the ground.

A moment later one froze and then the other did too.

I saw the barrel of Murphy’s M4, held in just one of his hands, pressed to a guard’s face. In his other hand, his pistol was pressed against the other guy’s cheek. Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, you figured it out. Now stay that way. If either of you moves, BAM! You got me?”

Don wailed again from down the hall.

I disentangled myself, taking the guards’ weapons and sliding them across the floor before I stood up.

“Somebody help me,” Don called.

I glanced up at Murphy.

He looked disappointed. It had been my choice to leave Don alive. I wondered if I would be able to afford the cost of that kindness. I told Murphy, “Don’t say anything.”

One of the guards started to plead, but a hard glare from Murphy shut him up.

Running footsteps echoed up the long corridor.

Murphy said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“You got these guys?” I asked, pointing at the prone guards.

Murphy nodded.

I bounded over to one of the conference room doors, hoping I was right. I yanked it hard. It didn’t open. I glanced back at Murphy. “Locked.”

Murphy pushed his M4 against the guard’s head so hard that the man’s head made an audible thunk when it hit the floor. “Keys now, motherfucker.”

I guess the guy understood Murphy’s tone of voice as well as I did. There would be no second request. The guard wasted not a second in digging into his pocket, retrieving the keys, and sliding them across the smooth floor toward me.

Murphy shot me a quick grin before turning his angry glare back at the two prone guards.

I picked up the key ring. Four keys. Argh. “Which one?” I asked.

Murphy pressed his barrel harder against the guy’s head.

“The brass one,” he answered. “The Schlage.”

I looked down at the keys. Two were brass. Only one had the brand name written on the side. It was a Schlage.

Murphy said, “They’re coming.”

I unlocked the door and swung it halfway open when the smell hit me with a mix of outhouse and body odor. The conference room with seating for maybe a hundred was full of Whites. “Shit.” I pushed the door closed and jammed the key back in the lock. “Wait,” I said aloud.

“Wait what?” Murphy asked.

“Whites,” I told him.

I ran over to the doors for the other conference room.

“Good ones or bad ones?” Murphy asked me.

I looked over at Murphy. “What?”

Murphy wasn’t asking me, he was asking the guys on the floor.

“Good?” the compliant guy answered.

“In here?” I asked as I put the key into the lock on the other door.

“Guys,” he said. “Aggies.”

“What?” Murphy asked.

The compliant guys stammered through an explanation as I opened the second door. I looked back at Murphy, “They’re here.”

“C’mon, c’mon,” I hollered into the room as I waved.

The four soldiers inside the room jumped out of their chairs and ran toward the open door. I let go of it as I stepped away.

Glancing past the helicopter and up to the second level, Murphy said, “They’re up there. Things are going to get exciting pretty quick here.”

“You two,” I said to the disarmed guards on the floor. “In there.” I pointed at the room the soldiers were coming out of.

“Now,” Murphy growled.

The two guys on the ground quickly got up and hurried into the room, pushing past the four soldiers.

I looked at the one I figured to be Dalhover’s son and said, “Dalhover?”

He looked at me, completely confused. “What?”

“Your name,” I explained, though I already knew I’d screwed up. He would have known the name if it had been his.

“Fritz,” he said. “I’m Parker Fritz.”

“Told you.” Murphy laughed.

I handed Fritz the keys. “Lock those guards up.” I pointed at the weapons on the floor as I glanced at the others. “Get those. We’re busting you out.”

Two of the soldiers jumped to grab the weapons. The third simply stared at me. He said, “You’re normal?”

“Get a gun, dumbass.” I pointed at the two rifles and two pistols being picked up by the others. “Everybody gets one.”

Fritz turned back to me, handing me the keys.

I didn’t want them. I pointed to the other door and said, “Unlock that one and prop it open. Careful. It’s full of Whites.”

“Whites?” Fritz asked. “You mean infected.” He was already putting the key into the lock.

“Yep,” I told him. “I think they’re the docile ones.” I looked up the hall. “If not, well, run like a motherfucker because things will get real interesting real fast. Know what I mean?”

One of the soldiers with a rifle asked, “What next? Which way?”

Chapter 36

“Hey you.”

I looked down the hall. Two guys were leaning over the railing on the second floor, looking at us.

“Oh fuck it.” I swung my shotgun in their general direction. They were way out of range, but if they were only half as far, I’d have had no chance of hitting them anyway. I pumped out three blasts. I looked over at Murphy while pointing at the helicopter. “You wouldn’t know how to fly that, would you?”

“You watched too many movies, dumbass.” Murphy laughed as he started toward the stairs we’d used to sneak up on the guards.

The escaping soldiers were following Murphy. Fritz had the door open and two of the infected were already coming out—not urgent, not chasing, just curious. I almost wished for the crazed ones. A hundred of them loose inside the Capitol would aid greatly in our escape.

I rounded the corner, running first at full speed then starting to slow. Murphy was in the doorway of the stairwell, looking up. The three soldiers were slowing down as they neared.

In the time it took for me to cover the distance, Murphy stepped out of the doorway, pushing it closed. “They’re coming down.”

I looked up at the ceiling, getting my bearings and thinking the only way the other guys could be coming down already was if they were at the top of the stairs when I fired the shotgun. I recalled the smokers we’d seen on the plaza. Damn crappy luck. They must have been outside the top of that very stairwell.

More voices bellowed from down the long corridor leading to the Capitol. Orders were being shouted. Men were coordinating an assault. Reinforcements were coming. Things were going to go from exciting to dire pretty quickly.

Fritz ran up beside me and pointed at two metal doors on a wall that I’d assumed contained a janitor’s closet. “Through there,” he said.

Two of the soldiers ran at the doors and slammed them hard. They didn’t budge. As they stepped back, I saw immediately that the two doors had been spot-welded down the abutment. Shit.

I stopped, turned, looked up the hall, took a long, slow breath and thought through the situation. I turned to Fritz, “Where does that hall lead?”

He pointed. The building next door. He pointed toward other corners of the underground complex. “Corridors connect to all of the neighboring government buildings.”

“This one’s welded,” said Murphy, I guess in case anyone hadn’t noticed yet.

“How many grenades you got left?” I asked.

“Four.” Murphy was already pulling one off.

“Find cover,” Fritz ordered his guys.

I turned and followed Fritz’s soldiers down a side hall. A second later, Murphy came running around the corner and stuffed himself into an alcove in which most of us were already huddled.

The grenade exploded with a bang, near deafening in the confined space.

For a moment after the blast, all was quiet. Feet stopped running. Voices stopped shouting. Or maybe my ears were stunned into a temporary deafness.

“Let’s go,” Fritz shouted.

I guess I still could hear.

Fritz ran up the hall. His guys took off after him. Murphy looked at me for a second with a question on his face. I thought we were in charge? He ran, and so did I.

Rounding the corner just ahead of me, one of the soldiers lurched sideways. I heard gunshots and saw blood splatter from his skull in one simultaneous instant of horror.

I shouted, “Motherfucker,” but didn’t slow, jumping over the dying man as I ran.

The two metal doors, welded shut a moment before, now swung open, a little cockeyed, but open nevertheless. Dust filled the hall and made each of us cough as we entered the cloud. Murphy ran between the doors and Fritz pushed him to the side as I followed. I raised a fist to pummel Fritz for what I at first thought was an attack, but I heard him yell at Murphy, “Give me a grenade.”

Murphy ducked behind one of the metal doors. I pushed through the gap and pressed myself against the other side of the hall, taking advantage of the door’s thick steel.

Guns were blasting. Bullets were pinging against metal and ricocheting off the concrete.

Murphy gave Fritz a grenade.

Fritz pointed up the hall to where two of his men were kneeling, aiming their rifles back down our way. He said, “Go. I’ll give these guys something to think about.”

Murphy looked at me as if for permission. I waved him to go.

Fritz got behind one of the bent doors and pushed. I copied him with my door.

When a gap of about a foot remained, the bent doors stuck. Fritz cursed.

Gunshots rang through the hall, pinging all over the doors. Fritz threw himself against the wall.

“Dude,” I shouted, “what are you trying to do?”

He held up the grenade, pin out, spoon depressed. “Close the doors, so I can wedge this thing in the gap.”

Shaking my head, I said, “Fuck that.” I bounded over to his side of the wide hall, grabbed the grenade, and spun around as I tossed it with all my might through the gap. I turned back around and shouted, “Run!”

Murphy, crouching by the kneeling soldiers, took off to get further up the hall. He’d been around me enough to know that ‘run’ meant run like a motherfucker.

Fritz hollered, “Run.”

The two soldiers got up and took off as we passed them.

Fritz slowed to look back.

“Don’t,” I told him. “I was aiming for that helicopter.”

“Oh—”

The grenade blew.

Another explosion followed.

A massive blast rocked the whole complex and sent us sprawling on the smooth floor.

I was already clambering to my feet as I skidded.

The others weren’t far behind.

Some kind of ordnance started firing off, sounding like a loud string of firecrackers.

We reached the far doors maybe a few hundred yards distant from the pair we’d blown open. Thankfully, they were not welded, and we pushed through as another powerful explosion sent a shock wave down the hall to knock us off our feet.

“Holy fuck,” I shouted as I mounted some stairs. I had no idea where I was going. Like anybody with things blowing up behind them, I didn’t care. I only wanted to get away.

At the top of the stairs, I pushed through another door and came out into a glass-walled lobby. Out across a street strewn with rotting corpses stood the Capitol complex’s ramshackle metal wall. We were on the outside.

Inside the wall, roiling up into the sky was a massive ball of red fire and black smoke. The Capitol, the wall, the surrounding buildings glowed in its illumination.

So fixated was I on the immensity of the explosions, I didn’t realize the others had stopped beside me.

“Thanks,” Fritz told me through his panting.

I looked at him, thinking at first he was being sarcastic because one of his men had taken a bullet through the skull. I started to say something harsh in return until I realized I was being the ass. Fritz was sincere. I said, “Sorry about your guy.”

The other guys said a few quick thank-yous.

“Where to next?” Fritz asked.

I pointed up a street going west. “We have a car that way maybe half a mile.” Even as I said it, Whites were coming out of buildings, walking, gawking, and running.

Murphy waved in the direction I’d been pointing. “That escape route is off the list.”

“We need to get away from here,” I said as if anybody needed me to help them with that deduction.

“Pick a direction with no Whites and nothing burning and let’s get moving.” Murphy started to jog across the lobby.

The rest of us followed.

Chapter 37

We burst out of a pair of doors on the northwest corner of the building. 15th Street ran between us and several empty parking lots across the street—empty except for a scattering of Whites moving toward the fire at the Governor’s Mansion, or the noisy, exploding fire burning out of the atrium in the buried office annex.

Murphy raced to the corner of a building to the west with all of us in tow. Way too many of the Whites in the parking lot saw the soldiers with us and immediately understood what was happening. Normals afoot.

“Damn.” I pointed at the Whites changing direction to run at us. I readied my machete and drew my pistol.

We arrived at a pair of glass doors on the new building. They were locked. Murphy stopped, thinking about the next step. The soldiers looked out at the Whites with their skin illuminated in the red flames. The soldiers raised their weapons, fear in their eyes.

“Murphy,” I shouted, “Put a few shots through the glass. We can’t stay out here.”

Murphy stepped back and fired three rounds sending a spider web of cracks through the glass. He rushed at it, breaking through in a shower of jagged little pieces.

“Let’s go!” Fritz hollered, leading the other two soldiers to follow Murphy.

I went in last and followed the line of the others past a desk in the lobby, past the elevator bank, down a hall and to another door—a metal one with a fire exit sign above.

I hoped the battery on the alarm was dead. I hoped no Whites were outside the door.

Murphy hit the door without slowing much, pressing down the locking mechanism with his weight. We all piled out onto the sidewalk.

A gang of Whites was coming around a corner to our right. Murphy immediately raised his weapon and fired.

Choices about silence weren’t available to us. The infected were too many. Fritz and both of his soldiers shot their weapons.

I raced into the mob, swinging my machete and shooting at any White who got too close.

A path opened up in front of me and I hoped the others fell in behind me. Gunshots echoed off the building’s walls. Explosions poured flames into the sky at the Capitol. Blood splattered in the air and Whites screamed in horror, or glee. It all sounded the same to me.

When the mob thinned, I cut a left turn down an alley, looking for another door. Actually, I was just running in the direction with the fewest Whites.

A huge explosion shook the night behind us. Another fireball billowed up casting more red light and sharp black shadows.

I hacked my way past a few Whites, spotted a fragile-looking wooden door on an old brick building, and bull rushed it, hoping for the best. I hit the screen door first, barely noticing it as the half-rotten wood of the other door behind it shattered—mostly. The bottom quarter held firm, and I tumbled into some restaurant’s kitchen full of rancid, slick oil and rotted bodies.

I got to my feet as the others piled in after me.

I adjusted my night vision goggles on my head to see through the cramped kitchen.

The soldiers behind me were shooting back out the door. That couldn’t last. They’d run out of ammunition soon. All they had was in the magazines loaded in the rifles.

Damn.

I cursed myself for not thinking of that. I cursed them for not thinking to strip the guards of their ammo when they picked up the weapons.

I ran out of the kitchen through a swinging door, past a waitress station, and into a jungle-gym mess of upturned chairs and tables. I kicked and shoved at the furnishings. I climbed over more as I made my way toward the door.

Behind me, the shooting stopped. I turned to see the two soldiers come out of the kitchen, followed by Fritz. A pause later, I called, “Where’s Murphy?”

“He’s coming,” said Fritz as he worked his way through the jumble.

I made my way to the front door, which had already been busted open by looters, vandals, or maybe just Whites. I turned and waited.

Shit. Where’s Murphy?

Just as I took my first step to go back, Murphy burst out of the kitchen, breathing hard with a big grin on his face.

Goddamn, that motherfucker can smile through anything.

Before Murphy had taken more than a few steps into the morass of dining room furniture, two Whites fought with each other as they tried to squeeze themselves simultaneously through the kitchen’s swinging door. I raised my pistol and shot—once, twice, again, and again—until I finally got lucky enough to hit both.

Murphy looked back. “Glad you can hit something.” He raced out into the street to follow the others. I chased on his heels.

Fritz was across the street already, trying to kick in a locked door. The two soldiers were nearly over to him.

A horde of Whites several hundred strong was running and screaming down the street from our right. Helicopter blades reverberated in the sky above.

I looked up as I ran. What the hell?

Chapter 38

The helicopter passed overhead and arced off to the left. Another helicopter hovered a few blocks away.

The door Fritz had been working on broke open.

Screw the helicopters.

I turned to run full-speed across the street and through the door.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

More Whites.

They were elbowing and kicking one another as they pushed themselves to get out through the door Fritz had just broken down. The room on the other side of the door had to have been full of them.

I stumbled trying to stop myself.

One of the soldiers was down, screaming and fighting, several Whites were on him with jaws snapping.

Fritz emptied his pistol into the Whites attacking his man. The other guy unloaded at those coming out the door.

Murphy was already there beside them, taking aim up the street.

The Whites on the soldier were dead or twitching by the time I dropped to a knee beside Fritz as he tried to staunch a pulsing gush of blood coming from the wide-eyed soldier’s neck.

“We gotta go,” Murphy hollered. He emptied a magazine and quickly pushed a new one into his rifle.

“I’m out,” the other soldier said, panicking.

“Take my shotgun,” I told him, handing it over.

Looking down at the bleeding man by our knees, Fritz shouted, “He’s dead.”

He wasn’t dead, but he was bleeding so profusely, it was clear he was going to die. I stood up, looking away. We were going to abandon the guy. It was necessary, the only thing to do. Trying to drag him off so he could bleed out a block or two up the road would almost certainly get more of us killed. But goddamn, it felt so wrong.

The soon-to-be-dead soldier reached out and grabbed my ankle.

Shit.

I looked up at the coming horde. Time was almost gone. I looked down at the guy as he mouthed something.

Fritz was on his feet. Murphy passed his pistol over to Fritz. We were all armed again with loaded weapons—for the moment anyway.

I dropped to a knee again and leaned in close to the soldier, now hoping he’d just die and make it easy on all of us. Still, it felt like a shitty thing.

He mouthed again. I couldn’t make out his words over all the noise. I leaned close.

“We’ve got to move,” Fritz shouted, stepping away.

Murphy kicked me. “C’mon dude.”

“Grenade,” said the guy. His mouth silently said it again.

He wanted a grenade.

I looked up at Murphy. He still had several.

“Murphy, gimme a grenade,” I hollered. “Right now.”

Without pause, Murphy yanked one off his MOLLE vest and dropped it down to me.

I pulled the pin. Guessing the dying soldier’s thoughts, I pressed the grenade into his hands.

He held it tight in a grip we both knew wasn’t going to last. He tried to smile through the blood in his mouth and the fear in his eyes. He didn’t want to die.

Who the fuck did?

“Thank you,” I told him as I jumped to my feet. I looked at the others as I started to move. “Run!”

We raced up the length of a short block. The grenade exploded behind us and I turned to see. The horde had reached the soldier, at least a dozen were lying in the street around him, now writhing and screaming with pain instead of bloodlust.

“That way,” Murphy shouted and led us all onto a side street.

For the moment, I saw no Whites.

Murphy took another turn into an alley behind a sprawling bank with a half dozen drive-thru teller lanes. Two Whites loitered in the middle of the alley, looking around like they couldn’t figure out what all the commotion was—like they couldn’t figure out what they should be doing about it.

Murphy shot them both down.

Thank God for the suppressor on his M4.

He pulled up to a stop beside a dumpster that was pushed up against the bank’s back wall and looked up.

With no Whites in view for the moment, it only took another half-second for everyone to guess what Murphy was thinking. We clambered onto the dumpster. I was last up. Still safe. Murphy was already helping Fritz onto the roof.

“C’mon.” Murphy looked at me.

He cupped his hand into a stirrup. I stepped in and he lifted as I jumped. Just like that, I was halfway on the roof and scrambling to get myself all the way over the edge.

As soon as I fell over the parapet and hit the gravel roof, the other soldier came climbing over. Fritz was already leaning back over, reaching down. I jumped up beside him and reached for Murphy. He grabbed our hands and climbed up, rolling over the wall and coming down in a tumble of elbows, knees, and bruises.

“Holy crap, that was intense.” Murphy got up on his knees, his eyes as wide as his smile.

I peeked over the low wall that surrounded the roof. Whites were already back in the alley. More were up the street. I couldn’t see the road out in front of the bank, not without standing and risking being seen from below. I said, “I think we’re safe for the moment.”

From our vantage point, we could see one, then the other helicopter angling toward the place a few blocks away where the soldier had detonated the grenade to buy us some time. I looked that way and put thoughts of the dead soldier out of my mind. One more death on a long, long list. At least his was over in one painless instant.

On his knees beside me and looking up at the sky, Murphy said, “We can’t stay here.” He pointed up at the helicopters. “I don’t know if those assholes are looking for us or just hunting Whites, but if they happen to see us on the roof, things will go to shit in a hurry for us.”

I looked around and said, “I sure wouldn’t want things to go to shit for us.” I put a smile on my face to support the joke, but it wouldn’t stay.

Fritz pointed up at the helicopters. “They are looking for us.”

Chapter 39

Murphy said, “I guess we missed some things when we were vacationing at the lake house.”

A helicopter passed on the other side of the building next door. We scampered to hide ourselves on the opposite side of a large air conditioning unit.

Pointing at the helicopter and looking at Fritz I asked, “Who are these guys and why do they want you so bad?”

“Who’s Dalhover?” Fritz asked, drilling me with his eyes.

“Hey, Interrogation Boy,” I said to him, letting some of my tension turn to anger, “Don’t cop that ‘tude with me. You can jump your bad little ass back off the edge of the roof and fend for your fucking self.”

Fritz’s expression didn’t change.

“Be cool,” Murphy told us.

Fritz’s soldier put a hand on my back and said, “Thanks for getting us out of there, man.” He leaned the shotgun on his knee and put his other hand out to shake mine. “It might not seem like it, but we really appreciate it.”

I nodded noncommittally. “Sorry about your guys.”

He shook his head. “We take the risk every time we go out.” He looked back to Fritz.

Fritz looked at his soldier then back at me. He said, “We do appreciate what you did. I don’t know why you did it, that’s all.”

A band of howling Whites ran past the bank, heading for the fires at the Capitol.

I looked Fritz up and down. “I thought you were somebody else.”

Murphy laughed and said, “I told you, man.”

“Who is this Dalhover guy?” Fritz asked.

“I didn’t think you were him,” I said. “I thought maybe you were his son or something. I’ll be damned if you don’t look like a younger version of him.”

“He’s a friend of yours?” Fritz asked.

I nodded and looked out at the circling helicopters. “They’ve figured out we’re not over there and they’re starting to look around.” I looked back at Fritz. “If they really do have a hard-on for you guys, we need to get off this roof.”

Diesel engines rumbled out of the distance and I half stood up to see out into the street in front of the bank. Three armored Humvees were speeding past, heading toward the spot where we’d lost the last soldier with the grenade. I looked back at Fritz. “Jesus, did we just piss off the whole army?”

Fritz shrugged. “We should get going.”

It seemed like every White in the city was coming out into the streets.

We all went to the edge of the roof where we’d come up. I leaned over and looked up and down the alley. Three Whites were trotting in our direction. I nodded at them. Murphy took the cue and laid his rifle across the parapet and aimed.

“Don’t,” said Fritz.

“I’ve got a suppressor.” Murphy motioned toward the device attached to the end of his rifle barrel.

“It’s not the noise,” said Fritz as he looked up into the sky. “There aren’t any lights down here except for the fire at the Capitol. Muzzle flashes might reveal our location.”

“Shit,” Murphy admitted, “You’re right.”

I holstered my pistol, put a hand up on the top edge of the short wall, and jumped down onto the dumpster, machete ready.

When my feet banged the dumpster lid, the three Whites found a purpose for their lives and sprinted toward me.

Fritz warned me with a grunt and half a syllable.

“I got this,” I told him.

Murphy started his climb off the bank’s roof.

The first of the infected leapt at the dumpster from a few paces away. He landed halfway on the lid and I hacked down across his neck just as he grabbed at my leg. His grip went slack and he slid off as the other two reached the dumpster, grasping and screaming in voices that shrank. I think the sight of me frightened or confused something in their slow brains.

While they were trying to figure out whether or not I was a White like them, I hacked the hand off a female and chopped the other White across the face. That one fell, but the female kept after me with renewed conviction. I finished her with a blow on the side of her head that opened her skull and sent a spray of blood and brain matter onto the tan brick on the side of the bank.

I looked up at Fritz and the other soldier as if they needed instruction. “Let’s go.”

A moment later we were jogging down the alley, staying close to the walls and taking advantage of the big dumpsters and trashcans to keep us out of view from anything passing by on the street.

We managed five or six blocks without incident, staying quiet while putting some distance between ourselves and the last place the helicopter assholes thought we were. The farther we got from the Capitol and the more the fires burned down, the less red and yellow light illuminated the streets. The sound of gunfire and explosions from back at the Capitol steadily increased, giving us some cover for any noise that we were making. The sound also drew in every infected from around the center of the city.

The battle for the Capitol building was underway.

Six or seven helicopters were in the air by then, shooting down at the Whites. Armored Humvees and armored personnel carriers rumbled through the streets, back and forth, going to no destination that we could determine, shooting everything that moved. Maybe they were just out hunting Whites.

Murphy led us into a building that had apparently taken a beating during the initial breakout. Most of the glass on the first floor was broken out. Burned-out cars were parked bumper-to-bumper on the surrounding sidewalk, creating an ineffective wall. In the lobby, the remains of hundreds of dead lay on the floor. Splattered, dried blood stained the walls.

Outside of a door that had been torn off the hinges, we waited by a stairwell.

How the hell did that happen, I wondered? The door was steel and heavy.

Murphy quietly walked into the stairwell, listened and scanned up and down between the flights to see what he could see. He shook his head to let us know the place appeared to be empty. He motioned us all to come in close. He whispered, “I think we need to find a place to hole up for the night.”

Fritz looked over the burned-out cars and asked, “Do you think we’re too close to the Capitol?”

Murphy shrugged. “How far is far enough? Can they search the whole city for you two?”

“No,” said Fritz. “They don’t have that many guys. Besides, they need to defend the Capitol.”

I said, “It’s dangerous out on the streets.” Sure, it was obvious. We all knew it, but it needed to be said.

We looked around at each other and came to a silent consensus.

Murphy led us up the stairs.

Chapter 40

Standing in what used to be somebody’s living room up on the eighth floor, looking through a set of tall windows on the exterior wall, I saw the Capitol in the distance between two other tall buildings. I said, “I think they’re giving up.”

Murphy was in the kitchen rummaging through cabinets and pulling empty containers out of the pantry. “Be nice if they’d left us some food,” he said.

I took a quick glance around the apartment. It was orderly, for the most part. No one had fought for their lives within the apartment walls. No human remains were scattered on the carpet, leaving the stink of decay in every permeable fabric and cushion. That was our primary reason for selecting it among the other apartments we’d peeked into on the eighth floor. It was the first one where the owner appeared to have bugged out of town. His body was probably on some other street, or his bones were being gnawed on by rats as they lay in the wreckage of some car.

Fritz came over to the window to look at the Capitol in the distance. “You said you had a car close by, right?”

Shaking my head as I pointed off toward the northwest, I said. “Way up over there.” I looked around at the dark streets far below. “I didn’t realize we ran so far. I think that’s 6th Street down there.”

Behind me, the soldier with my shotgun laid it on the coffee table, sat down and started monkeying around with it. Cleaning or disassembling—I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I said, “Don’t get too attached to that. I’m keeping it when we go our separate ways.”

He looked offended, stood up, and reached the shotgun toward me. I waved it away. “You keep it for now.”

Murphy leaned on a kitchen counter. “I’m gonna check some of the other apartments on this floor and see what I can find.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told him.

“We don’t have much water,” he argued, “and we didn’t bring any food with us.”

The guy with my shotgun said, “I’ll go with you.”

I turned around, looked at Murphy and said, “Don’t leave this floor, okay?”

“Yes, dad.” Murphy headed for the front door with the other soldier following behind.

I rolled my eyes and looked at Fritz. “What’s your deal?” I pointed at the Capitol building, still glowing in the light of the fires burning around it. “What’s with these guys? Are they the army or what?”

Fritz leaned against the glass and crossed his arms. He looked at me, started to say something, then stopped. He was perplexed.

“What?” I asked.

He took a moment. “Your skin.”

I looked down at the scars on my arms, bites that had healed. “What about it?” I asked, trying to decide whether to feel proud or self-conscious.

“You look like them,” he said.

I looked down toward the street. “The infected?” Of course, the infected.

Fritz nodded.

“You say that like you haven’t seen this before.”

He shook his head. “I have. In the infected. Not in somebody like you. You seem normal.”

“That’s because I am,” I told him.

He leaned close to see my eyes. “And your pupils, they stay dilated? Just like the others?

Not comfortable having Fritz so close, I leaned back. “Yeah. And my temperature runs a little hot. What of it?”

Shaking his head, Fritz said, “I haven’t seen one like you, that’s all.”

“We’re everywhere.” I waved a hand toward the city.

“I haven’t seen one,” he said.

“I guess you live in a different neighborhood,” I told him. “I’ve run into a few.”

“Like you?” Fritz asked. “You clearly caught the virus. You recovered and now you’re normal. Mostly.”

I started to say yes. There had been Russell and Nico. The guy and the girl in that house up by the lake. Jerome. Jerome the Liar as Murphy would have called him. Crazy Mark. All those insane Smart Ones. Shaking my head, I said, “A few. Me and Murphy have come across a whole variety of infected. I guess some are like me.”

“Here in Austin?” Fritz asked.

That seemed like an odd question. “Of course. Where have you been through all of this?” I asked. “Here?”

Fritz shook his head. He pointed east. “Back by Houston.”

“How are things in Houston?” I asked, digressing, though not intending to.

“A mess,” said Fritz. “Like here. What isn’t burned is overrun with infected. Most of it burned, though, before the floods.”

“I think most of East Austin burned too,” I said, as I craned my neck to look toward that part of town. I couldn’t see anything but darkness and dimly lit silhouettes of buildings.

Looking vaguely east, Fritz said, “We saw that when we were coming into town.”

“From out east near Houston?” I said, to emphasize the ambiguity Fritz had left me with. He hadn’t said exactly where he was from. “How long have you been here?”

“A couple of days,” he answered.

“And there aren’t any like me in this unnamed town you lived in?”

“Not a one,” said Fritz. “They’re either White and totally crazy like most of ‘em or they’re like the dudes with the helicopters—Survivors, but whacked.”

“Whacked?” I asked.

“Not quite all there in the head,” said Fritz. “Most of them are kind of normal, but not really. It’s like some of their brain wiring short-circuited. They tend to behave irrationally, impulsively, too often violently.”

I laughed at a thought and said, “Zombie-lite?”

Fritz smiled. “You could put it that way.”

Something made a low, pounding sound. Both Fritz and I stopped talking and looked toward our open apartment door.

The sound pounded again, somewhere out in the hall.

On the third pound, a door crashed open.

We were already moving toward the door when an infected voice howled, lone and sad, hungry and vicious.

Somebody cursed.

More infected wails joined in a chorus of rabid need. Bodies stumbled over furnishings and bumped walls.

More cursing.

I was running by then and I rounded the corner coming out the door. I saw Murphy down the hall. He was on his back on the floor with a foot wedged in some broken section of the door he’d just kicked in. The soldier with him had one hand on Murphy’s foot, trying to wrench it free. The other hand held the shotgun out to the side, useless.

An infected hand reached out of the doorway and grabbed at the soldier’s sleeve. The soldier jumped away, half dragging a skinny infected guy out through the door.

“Shoot ‘em!” I yelled as I sprinted toward the end of the hall.

Fritz ran along behind me.

Murphy stopped trying to wrestle his leg free and pulled his rifle around to shoot. I saw a flash from the end of his gun as the infected started to push through the door.

The soldier was struggling to wrest his arm free. He was no help to Murphy now. He had his own life to save.

I screamed some angry sound, so loud that the Whites coming through the door ceased what they were doing for half a moment and looked to see what was barreling up the hall toward them.

My machete was out, and I had a pistol in hand. I didn’t dare shoot as I ran. I had not a hope of hitting—

I realized it didn’t matter if I hit anything.

I shot twice into the ceiling, freezing all of those Whites in place—wide-eyed, and hungry.

The noise was the important thing at that moment.

I fired again and their attention turned away from Murphy and fell on me, the dumbass noisy human with a gun. At least that’s how their simple brains worked. Gunshots necessarily meant normal people. Normal people were food.

I knew they’d figure out quickly enough that Fritz’s comrade was the tastiest and closest of the human morsels in the hall, but that didn’t matter. That deduction would take their slow brains a few seconds to process. By then—

And I was there, in machete range, hacking through the forearm of the infected waif grasping the soldier’s sleeve. The waif howled a new kind of scream, not so much pain—well maybe something like that—but lots of frustration.

I kicked him in the face and sent him into a daze as I hacked an enormous woman through the neck.

The soldier had the shotgun up by then and told me to move.

I stepped out of the doorway and the shotgun blasted three rapid rounds.

Murphy took advantage of the diversion to yank his leg free, got his feet under him, and pointed his M4 into the doorway as the soldier fired a few more rounds.

Seeing that Murphy was ready to shoot, I raised a hand to stop the soldier from firing any more.

Murphy went to work killing the last of the Whites climbing over the dead in the apartment’s entryway.

I was already running toward the nearest of the building’s central stairwells.

Fritz was behind me, keeping up, asking, “Where are we going?”

I pointed at the stairwell door. “I need to know if anybody is on the way.”

“Gotcha.” He knew I meant the infected.

We reached the door and I pulled up to a stop in front of it and pointed down to the far end of the hall. “You check that one.”

I opened the door a little, peeked onto the landing, saw it was empty and stepped inside, keeping quiet feet and listening for noise either up or down.

Shit.

Something was down there, not in the stairwell, but in the building.

“Shit.”

I stepped out of the stairwell.

Run? Take our chances and stay? The infected were coming. I didn’t know how many. I only knew they weren’t at the moment coming up the stairwell I’d just stepped halfway out of.

Looking back up the hall, it was apparent that Murphy and the other soldier were done. “Hey,” I hollered while trying really hard to limit just how loud.

Murphy and the soldier both looked at me. I pointed up at the exit sign above my head and told them, “Check the stairs down there.”

With a quick nod, the soldier took off at a run.

Murphy came my way.

I turned to check Fritz’s status. He’d just arrived at his stairwell.

I had a second to think, and all my deductions came down to one simple thing. Our anonymity was lost. Whites were coming. It was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Fritz opened his door by maybe a few inches before he pushed it closed and turned to run back my way.

The fearful look on his face sealed it.

“They’re coming,” he hollered as he ran up the hall.

“Whites?” Murphy asked as he came to a stop beside me. “Or assholes?”

“I…” I smiled and almost laughed. “I guess it could have been the helicopter assholes.” I looked past him. The other soldier was standing with the door open, trying to indicate that the stairwell was clear. I asked, “What do you think, bud, this one or that one?”

Murphy looked over his shoulder, looked down at Fritz, and glanced at the stairwell door I was holding open. He thumbed up the hall, away from Fritz.

Good with me.

I turned, waved at Fritz and said, “Your guy is clear. Let’s go.”

We ran.

Chapter 41

We bounded down the stairs so fast we all earned bruises hitting the walls at the switchbacks at the bottom of each flight. None of us broke a bone or sprained an ankle, real risks at our reckless speed, but risks that needed to be taken. We knew the infected were on the way up to the floor we’d just left, if they guessed the right one once they finished climbing their stairs. We didn’t know how many Whites were in the building on the lower floors. That made the stairwell a potential deathtrap, and the only way we could mitigate the risk of being inside was to minimize the time we spent in there.

We were all gasping for air when we hit the bottom.

We stopped, stood in the near blackness, and listened. Howls echoed in the building, but none yet in the stairway above. The Whites were running and they were searching. The shotgun blasts told them meat was on the table. They were manic to find it. It was only a matter of short moments before they entered the stairwell above.

Murphy put a hand on the door to exit the building, looked at us and said, “I’ll peek out. If it’s clear, we’ll go. If not…”

If not?

I wasn’t sure we had any choice in the matter. Going back up to hide in one of the apartments wasn’t likely to end well. In fact, it was certain to end badly with the infected already scouring the building. Shooting our way out was a double-shit hemorrhoid of a plan, but we’d been doing it all night. We could only hope the odds weren’t going to catch up with us.

The door creaked on its hinges. Murphy looked through his night vision goggles into the shadowy night.

He pushed the door open a little wider and stuck his head out.

Above us, maybe three or four floors, a door slammed open against the wall and infected screams filled the stairwell. Fritz and his soldier pushed—whether they meant to or whether it was an innate reaction on frayed nerves, I didn’t know. Murphy tumbled forward, pushing the door wide open and muttering curses as he tried to keep his footing.

We were committed.

I followed them out. Being last, I closed the door as silently as I could, not wanting to alert the Whites upstairs that they were so close.

“There’s some about a block that way,” Murphy pointed.

I looked to my right. A scattering of Whites was down there, not yet paying us any attention. I looked left. Some were that way too. Every infected bastard in the city was awake. Why didn’t they just run toward the Capitol instead of loitering around to fuck with us?

Maybe it was the smoke filling the streets in a haze that turned everything a shade of gray in the darkness.

That could work to our advantage.

“C’mon.” Murphy waved to us to follow and took off at a jog onto the street between a tall pickup and an overturned delivery truck. He paused at the rear of the pickup to look left and right before hurrying forward.

We were running, crossing an intersection on the diagonal. All up and down the streets, Whites were out. Most seemed to be loitering with no place in particular to go. The darkness, though, was just as much a hindrance for them as us—well for Fritz and his man anyway. Murphy and I wore the night vision goggles. Unless we talked, made another stupid human noise, or got too close, we were probably safe. Safety is such a relative concept.

Hurry.

Murphy dodged a bus stop bench that had been dragged out into the street, bounded onto the far curb, took another few steps, and hurtled through a shattered plate-glass window on the front of a overly fancy barbecue restaurant on the corner. Fritz made the jump and so did his man.

I was sure I could hop over the short wall through the broken window, but I stopped instead and turned as I crouched, looking up and down, as well as across the street. I paid particular attention to the door on the side of the apartment building that we’d just exited. No raging mob of Whites was pouring out.

Satisfied for the moment that we were in the clear, I climbed through the broken window, careful to put my boot down slowly on the shards of glass, trying to reduce the noisy crunch.

Murphy and the soldier were already across the dining room and through a door that led into the kitchen. Fritz stood in the doorway and silently waved for me to follow.

Getting across the dining room wasn’t quick, but it was difficult to do quietly. It was another mess of chairs, tables, silverware, and broken plates on the floor. Broken plates on the floor. Who the hell serves barbecue on a plate? In Texas, it lays on a sheet of butcher paper with an optional puddle of barbecue sauce. I shook my head and muttered, “Damned Californians.”

Or maybe the owners were just from Dallas.

At the door, Fritz pointed to a narrow, dark staircase. When I got there, I looked up and saw nothing but stairs. I led the way, as I was sure it had to be pitch black to Fritz’s unaided eyes. I whispered, “Grab my shirt and follow.”

Up we went.

At the top of the stairs, a door opened to an office that seemed to take up a good part of the space on the front half of the building. A storeroom and another office occupied the remainder of the space on the back half. The storeroom looked to have been cleaned out. Not even canned goods were left on the shelves although torn boxes and other packaging covered the floor almost knee deep.

I crossed over to a half-open door, the place I guessed Murphy and the other guy had gone. I peeked inside and saw them at the other end, past the messy desks, trying to look out the windows without getting too close. I went over to stand beside them while Fritz silently closed and bolted the door behind us.

Safe.

Kinda.

Down in the street, Whites were running. They were coming from the direction of the apartment building. One of them must have seen the door closing from up there on the stairs, and they chased through it once they got the door open. Now they appeared frustrated as they slowed and glanced around. They’d lost us. As long as they didn’t put their pea brains together and figure out how to organize some kind of systematic search, we were safe.

Murphy chuckled softly. “That was fun.”

“Yeah,” Fritz agreed. He was being sarcastic. He didn’t understand that Murphy wasn’t.

I said, “I’m going to go check the back of the building for a fire escape. Maybe look around quietly for a water heater and see if I can score something to drink.”

“And food?” Murphy said, completely ignoring the ‘quietly’ part.

I said, “The storeroom looked like it had been ransacked already, but I’ll check.”

“I’ll come,” said the other soldier.

“By the way,” I asked, “before we have to run halfway across Austin again, you got a name?”

“Gabriel Billings,” he answered. “Call me Gabe.”

“I’m Zed, that’s Murphy. C’mon.”

Chapter 42

Dinner or breakfast—whatever people on the night shift call the meal they have right before the sun comes up—was a thoroughly dented gallon can of beans we found under the shredded paper products in the storeroom. We washed it down with the remnants of the water from the water heater. It had evaporated down or seeped out so much that the dissolved minerals gave it a taste of crushed aspirins and gritty rust.

It was what we had.

After we ate, we divvied up the day-shift guard duty and Murphy went to sleep on the floor as the sun started to illuminate the sky in the east. Gabe sacked out as well, leaving me and Fritz to keep an eye out for dangers.

“The night vision goggles really help at night, huh?” said Fritz as we watched Whites on the street.

“Yeah,” I said. “It gives us a pretty good advantage.”

“What about the White Skins?” Fritz asked. “Do they still attack you? Do they know the difference?”

I explained to him all the rules I’d learned about Slow Burns and Whites. It turned into a pretty lengthy conversation as he seemed to take as much of an academic interest in the subject as I did. I explained that we’d found an electric car that combined with the darkness allowed us to travel the streets at night, so that Murphy and I were starting down the path to becoming night creatures. We had all the advantages at night and none during the day. It only made sense.

Fritz told me what he knew about White behavior, which as it turned out wasn’t that much. He knew about the suppressors and how much they helped in controlling the infected. It seemed like anybody still alive pretty much knew that. It was almost a prerequisite.

“I know you guys said you rescued me because you thought I was someone else,” Fritz said eventually, “I don’t get why you betrayed your guys because of that. Why didn’t you check to be sure, first?”

“Our guys?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“The ones at the Capitol.” Fritz pointed vaguely in the direction of the Capitol building. “The Survivor Army. You guys really were with them, weren’t you?”

I laughed. “You think we were with those knuckleheads?”

Fritz nodded. “Why else would you be there?”

I smiled and went back to watching the Whites outside on the street. “Murphy thinks I’m an idiot,” I said. “We were staying up by the lake and saw the helicopters coming and going. I wanted to check them out.” I looked out at the sky. “I guess I thought, maybe hoped sort of, that civilization hadn’t completely broken down. I guess I thought maybe these guys were down here reestablishing order, you know, rebuilding.”

Fritz was perplexed. “Is Murphy that cynical? Does he think you’re an idiot for hoping for that?”

“No,” I shook my head and my smile melted away. “He never really said it, but he thought I was an idiot because every time we hook up with normals—”

“Normals?” Fritz asked. “Immune people?”

“Every time we hook up with them, things go to shit.” I put on a frown and shook my head. “They don’t like us. They think we’re virus-carrying, trouble-making, cannibal monsters.” I turned around, grabbed the edge of one of the desks, and scooted it quietly closer to the windows so I could sit on it and keep an eye out.

“Are you guys with a group of others, then?” Fritz asked. “Others like you?”

I shook my head. “Just me and Murphy.”

“Have you seen lots of others?” he asked.

“Some,” I answered. “Not as many as I’d hoped.” I pointed toward the Capitol. “That bunch of yahoos from last night is the first time I saw more than…” I was reluctant to reveal anything about the people on the island and especially about the ones who drove off to Balmorhea. “They’re by far the biggest group of normals we’ve seen.”

“It’s too bad they aren’t normal,” said Fritz.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Too bad about that.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You were pretty cagey about where you’re actually from.” I sighed, “I guess that’s the way it is now.” I recalled how I’d been reluctant to tell Nico about the group I was with after he and I had escaped from Nancy and Bubbles. “I guess it makes sense—you know to protect your people.”

“Yeah,” Fritz agreed. He shrugged. He looked around as he thought about it. Finally, he said, “I’m with a bunch from a university back east. You and Murphy should come back with us.”

Shaking my head and smiling, I said, “I think you missed the part about regular folks not taking a shine to people like me and Murphy.”

“We’re not like that there,” said Fritz.

“Everybody’s like that everywhere,” I argued. “Tell me you’re not that naïve, please.”

Shaking his head, Fritz said, “I’m sure we’ve got people back there who won’t want you around, but that’s not what I’m asking exactly. I’m not asking you to come live there.”

I laughed. “Fritz, what are you even talking about, then?”

He said, “You’ve heard of the Corps, right?”

I nodded. In Texas, everybody knew about the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. It was a student military organization. They dressed up in uniforms, marched a lot, and had nice boots. With Texas A&M being a rival of my alma mater, The University of Texas, I guess a lot more could be said, but the luxury of game-day rivalries was another memory slipping into the oblivion of things turned trivial and forgotten.

Fritz said, “When things were going bad, back at the beginning of the outbreak, the Corps decided it was their duty to protect the professors on campus from the Whites—that’s what you called them, right?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “Whites. How’d that protection thing work out?” I tried not to show my certainty that it had failed entirely.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Fritz, “I’ve been around a good part of East Texas since the outbreak started. I’m going to say, compared to that we did pretty good. We quarantined nearly sixty professors in one of the buildings, then set up a perimeter to defend it.”

“Didn’t the Corps guys get sick?” I asked.

Fritz nodded. “Look at me, do I look like I’m a college boy?” He laughed. “I graduated ten years ago. I used to build houses. I had a wife and four kids.”

I didn’t ask about any of them. The answer to those questions was always the same.

“Just like everybody else, the virus nearly annihilated the Corps, at least the students on campus anyway. When they saw the way it was going, they put out the call to alumni. Those of us who could, came. Going there to protect our intellectual heritage seemed like a better thing to die for than staying in my empty house protecting my flat screen TV and my pantry. I went.”

I laughed at that. “Yeah, I guess it was kinda like that in the beginning, wasn’t it?”

“Enough of us showed up who were immune,” said Fritz, “and enough of us survived long enough to learn how to fight the infected. We managed to keep it together. Now we’ve still got the sixty professors holed up in that one building. They haven’t been exposed yet. That’s why they’re all still alive. We’ve got just over a hundred volunteers, half of us from the Corps at one time or another, and we protect the professors.”

“So why are you all the way out here in Austin?” I asked.

“The professors, some of them are doctors and biologists and stuff—don’t ask me the details, I have a Construction Science degree—they’re working on a cure.”

“A cure?” I asked.

“Well, a vaccine,” said Fritz. “If we want to have a chance as a species, we need to find a way to inoculate our children against the virus.”

“Makes sense.” I nodded.

“I volunteered to go out and collect blood samples for their research,” Fritz said.

“Why?” I asked. “Shoot off a gun and they come running. Seems like the samples come to you.”

Shaking his head, Fritz said, “The docs say the virus mutates too fast. That’s why you’re different than the other Whites. We don’t have guys like you back in East Texas. There are too many strains. We need to find a vaccine, or a series of vaccines, that will fight all the strains of the virus.”

“So why do you need me and Murphy to go to A&M, then?”

“Blood,” said Fritz. “We need to get samples of your strain of the virus.”

Chapter 43

I tried to tamp down the derision in my laugh. “You just run around Texas trying to talk brain-fried Whites into taking a ride with you back to College Station?”

“No.” Fritz didn’t seem to pick up on how stupid I thought his endeavor was. “We had a Humvee that we drove—”

“Armored?” I asked. I already knew, though. Everybody who was still driving was in something with that level of protection—that is unless they had a stealthy quiet electric hot rod Mustang they drove around in the dark. Weird how that made me feel like a superior badass. I tried not to smile.

“Yeah,” said Fritz. “I guess you figured that out too?”

I nodded.

“We had a little refrigerator built into the back between the seats,” he said. “One of the engineers back in College Station put it together. As far as the samples, we got those using pretty much any method we needed to use.”

“Not much catch and release, I guess.” I half smiled at my witticism.

“Most times, we’d shoot ‘em and get a sample real quick,” said Fritz. “Through that effort we came to understand that different outcomes meant—”

“Outcomes?” I asked.

“You know,” said Fritz, “The crazy ones. Survivors. People who recovered completely, and now people like you. At first the thinking was that different people responded differently to the virus. I guess that’s true to a degree. I don’t know. The doctors figured out that lots of different strains are out there.”

“Sounds like dangerous work,” I said.

Fritz nodded. “We lose a guy or two nearly every time we go out.”

“Jeez.” That was bad. I asked, “How many times have you been out?”

“Five or six,” said Fritz.

“Not exactly sustainable.”

Fritz shook his head and looked absently out the window. “It’s necessary work. One day, people will want to have kids again. Murdering your kids when they turn white and crazy is the hardest thing a man ever has to do. If we can find a vaccine, it’s worth whatever price we pay.”

I didn’t ask Fritz to expound on that. The sudden blackness in his mood told me all I needed to know. I guessed that he’d been forced to kill his own children when they turned. God, that must have sucked.

We didn’t talk for a bit after that. The sun slowly rose in the sky. Murphy snored. Gabe stirred and woke frequently. When he did sleep, he mumbled and squirmed. Nightmares. It didn’t take Sigmund Freud to guess what those were about.

Finally, I asked, “So what was your beef with the knuckleheads at the Capitol? Why’d they lock you up?”

“We came across them a couple of days ago when we arrived in Austin,” said Fritz. “It was our first trip here. We were out east of town and saw the helicopters.”

“Same with us,” I said.

“We drove right up to the gates,” said Fritz. “We didn’t have any reason to believe they were anything other than a well-organized group of survivors. It wasn’t until they let us in, took our weapons, and locked us up that we knew they were a different kind of survivors—the kind that aren’t quite right in the head.”

I nodded. The guys looked normal enough at a distance. It wasn’t until you were close enough to see their eyes that you knew for sure, and then only when the light was bright. I said, “Me and Murphy were hiding up on the third floor of the rotunda when those guys were yelling at you downstairs. That’s the first time we saw you. What was up with that?”

Fritz half chuckled. “That was Justice Baird doing the yelling.”

I shrugged. The name and title meant little to me besides what I’d heard when Murphy and I were on the second floor of the annex and the talking guards walked by beneath us.

“The way the line of succession works in Texas,” said Fritz, “is if the Governor dies, the job goes to the Lieutenant Governor, then the Speaker of the House, then the Attorney General—”

“The Attorney General? Seems like a weird line of succession to me,” I said, realizing I should have paid more attention during my high school government class.

“It get’s better,” said Fritz. “After the Attorney General comes Chief Justices of the Texas Courts of Appeal, in order by the number of their district.”

I shrugged at the seeming arbitrariness of it. Then again, I guess any such system was.

“Justice Baird is from the 3rd District,” said Fritz. “He thinks he’s the legal Governor of Texas.”

“No shit.” I laughed. “That guy who was yelling at you in the Capitol rotunda? That’s our new Governor?”

Fritz nodded. “Legally, for whatever that means anymore.”

“Is that why he’s at the Capitol?”

“That’s what I understood,” said Fritz. “He’s trying to legitimize his power by sitting on the king’s throne, so to speak.”

“Wow.” That was interesting. “So why did he want to lock you guys up?”

“He was going to execute us at dawn,” said Fritz. “Being the Governor, and us being in uniform, he told us he was our legitimate Commander in Chief, at least until the President of the United States turned up. I told him my duty was to the Corps and to protecting the professors at Texas A&M.”

“And he didn’t like that?” I guessed the obvious.

“Exactly,” said Fritz. “He said he was going to send one of us back to College Station to lay down the law, that he was the boss, and they all worked for him now. The rest of us were going to be hanged over the fence.”

I asked, “Is Baird a Survivor? Or is he normal?”

“Survivor,” said Fritz.

Chapter 44

It was full dark again by the time Murphy nudged me with his boot. “Get up, Sunshine.”

I rolled over on my back, looking up at the underside of a desk. Apparently I’d been squirming a bit in my sleep. “What time is it?”

“Nighttime.” Murphy grinned and turned away. “Leftover beans for dinner. Get ‘em while they’re cold. Room temperature really.”

I leaned out from beneath the desk. Fritz and Gabe were also up. That made me the slacker. I groaned and crawled up off the floor, as the talking between Fritz and Gabe suddenly stopped. Murphy sat down in a chair near them. I looked over. “What?”

“What, what?” asked Murphy.

“You guys stopped talking,” I said, as I picked my pistol up off the floor, ejected the magazine, saw it held bullets, and made sure that the safety was off. I sheathed my machete and adjusted my gun belt. I picked my Hello Kitty bag up off the floor and sat it on a desk so I could grab it and go at a moment’s notice. That’s often the way it went. I was ready to face another night. The guys were still silent and looking at me.

“Nice bag.” Fritz pointed at my dirty pink and white pack. “Why not something—”

“More manly?” I asked.

“Less…” Fritz threw his fingers out as if in silent surprise. “Less dazzling.”

Murphy grinned silently.

“It’s my good luck bag.” I noticed a clean and empty plate sitting beside the bean can. They were all finishing up plates of their own. I figured the plate to be mine and helped myself to a big serving.

Murphy leaned back on a creaking chair and said, “What’s the plan, Batman?”

I shrugged as if I hadn’t already thought it through. “It’s dark.” I looked out the windows at the city. “Things have settled down. I’d say Fritz and Gabe can go find their way back to College Station, and we go get our car and go back to Sarah Mansfield’s place.” I’d wanted to say home, but the word ‘home’ didn’t seem right.

“Sarah Mansfield?” Fritz asked. “The Sarah Mansfield?”

Murphy nodded. “Sweet place up on—”

I shook my head and glared at Murphy.

“—up on a hill.” Murphy pointed west.

“You guys live with Sarah Mansfield?” Fritz asked. “Is she as pretty in person as she is on the screen?”

“She was, until Zed killed her.” Murphy laughed.

I didn’t laugh. Maybe I should have. I wasn’t in a good mood. I pasted on a fake smile. All I remembered about that night was hacking down a woman who’d been so brain-dead that she was following her robotic lawn mower around the yard. Was she even a danger? I had to wonder.

“Was she infected?” asked Gabe.

I nodded. “Of course.”

“I may be asking too much,” said Fritz, “But is Sarah’s place big enough that we could maybe crash with you guys if we’re back in Austin again.”

Murphy grimaced and shook his head. “The place is big enough, but you might not like it. Zed blew it up.”

“You must really hate her movies,” said Fritz.

“I didn’t blow it up,” I snapped back, sounding like a teased teenager. “It’s… it’s a mess. The naked horde came through.” I thought of all the bodies on the lawn and throughout the house. It smelled of burned flesh and rot. “Oh,” I asked, “have you guys run into the naked horde yet?”

Fritz said, “Murphy filled us in while you were asleep.”

“That’s a dangerous bunch,” I told him. “There are a lot of Smart Ones in the group and the rest are vicious as hell.” I put a spoonful of beans in my mouth and sat myself in a rolling office chair.

Looking at me, Murphy pointed a finger at Fritz. “Don’t know if homie gave you the recruitment talk, but he thinks we should go to College Station with them. You know, and get a job.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Not a job, exactly,” said Fritz.

I chewed and said nothing.

Fritz said, “Zed, when you and I talked last night, I told you we lose guys nearly every time we go out to collect samples.”

I nodded.

“Gabe and Murphy were talking about it last night, and it occurred to them that you and Murphy can go out among the infected without any risk.”

“Without any risk?” I laughed. “You saw ‘em chase us last night. Same as you?”

“After the shots were fired,” said Fritz. “I didn’t mean without risk. I should have said less risk.”

I shook my head. “It sounds like you guys are trying to do good work out there at A&M. I don’t think Murphy and I would fit in there.”

“Because you’re infected?” Fritz asked.

“Because we’re Whites,” I told him.

“I told you that won’t matter,” said Fritz. “You’d be doing us a great big favor. Hell, if we find a viable vaccine, you’d be doing humanity a favor.”

“Humanity?” I asked. “So far they haven’t treated us much better than the Whites.”

“Not everybody is an asshole, Zed.” Fritz got up off of his desk. “You know that, don’t you? There’s always been good people and bad people before the infection, after the infection—it doesn’t make a difference.”

“I heard that,” Murphy confirmed.

I nodded, focused back on my beans, but said nothing for a bit. Finally breaking the silence, I said, “I’ll think about it. Just don’t get your hopes up.” I looked over at Murphy. “What do you think?”

“I don’t have any plans.” He smiled and shrugged. “I have half a mind to find a Humvee, a bunch of diesel, and drag your dumbass out to Balmorhea.”

I glared at Murphy and pursed my lips.

“Balmorhea?” Fritz asked. “What’s out there?”

Murphy looked guilty for a moment and then glanced up at me. “The cat’s out of the bag now.” He looked at Fritz. “We had some people that went out there.”

“People?” Fritz asked. “Slow Burns like you?”

Murphy shook his head. “Normals. People who are immune.”

“How many?” he asked.

“Why is that important?” I asked suspiciously.

“A few or a lot?” Fritz asked. “I need to know whether it’s worth it to go all the way out there for samples.”

“Some.” I made it clear with my tone that was all the answer I was going to give.

“Well then.” Fritz stood up and paced around while he rubbed his hands together. “If you guys are going your way and we’re going ours, you wouldn’t happen to know where we can find an up-armored Humvee, would you?”

“I know where there’s one at the bottom of Lake Austin,” Murphy laughed.

“The last two abandoned ones we saw were up at the northeast corner of campus.” I got up, walked around the desk, opened a drawer and found a pen and paper. “I’ll draw you a map along with what I think might be the best way to get there.”

“How far?” Fritz asked.

“Three, Four miles?” I guessed. “A little farther than we’ve got to go to get back to our car.”

It took a few minutes to draw out the map and explain it to Fritz and Gabe. After all the questions were out of the way, we each checked our gear and prepared ourselves to leave.

Gabe stepped up in front of me and reached out with the shotgun. “Thanks,” he said.

I looked at the gun. I looked up at Gabe. Without it, he’d be defenseless. With it, well, shooting was only a last resort, but it came in handy when you needed it. Still, he had no white skin, no night vision goggles, no machete, no pistol, and no spare hand grenades. As much as I was scolding myself for the stupid charity of it, I said, “You keep it.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“We both know you’ve got nothing,” I replied. “If you had anything—a good knife, or even a water gun—I’d keep the gun.” I looked around. “I can always find another.” I hoped. Rust-free guns were getting harder to come by.

Under a shower of Gabe’s gratitude, I emptied my pockets and bag of shotgun shells. Without the shotgun, I had no immediate use for them. Sure, I could have held onto most of them, but choosing to carry something was always a complicated choice. In the equation of the decision was the amount of weight that would slow you when running for your life. It was a big factor.

Fritz and Gabe thanked us a final time and headed for the door.

Fritz undid the bolt.

I nodded at Murphy when the other two weren’t looking. I wanted them to go first. I wanted them to leave the building ahead of us and head off in their own direction. Somehow, in my mind at that moment, it decreased the chance that they’d follow us. I wasn’t overly worried about them following and eventually harming us. It was just getting harder to trust.

Fritz went out of the office with Gabe on his heels. Murphy followed with me in the rear. Fritz turned onto the narrow, dark staircase, navigating by flashlight.

With the other three in front of me, I was halfway down when the group came to a sudden stop, with feet stomping heavily to catch balance and shoulders bumping walls. Fritz gasped.

I was already moving backwards up the stairs. I didn’t need to wait to learn why Fritz gasped. I didn’t need to know why he’d stopped. All surprises anymore were dangerous ones, and nearly all dangerous ones were Whites.

Crossing three steps at a time, I leapt to the second floor, pressed myself against the wall, and turned to point my pistol. Murphy’s bulk nearly filled the entire stairway. I saw elbows, knees, and feet hurrying and clomping as the first of the infected howled below.

Murphy sprinted past me and headed through the door to the back office and toward the fire escape.

The surprised moans from a hundred infected throats grew to a hungry wail.

Gabe passed me by, and Fritz came up beside me as Whites shoved and wrestled their way past one another to be the first up the stairs.

Shit.

Tiny fractions of a second grew manageable under the rush of adrenaline. Would Murphy get the window open quickly enough? Would it matter? I didn’t know whether the four of us could pile out the window and onto the rusty old fire escape before the first of the infected got their hands on me, thinking I was Fritz or Gabe. Should I shoot the first three or four coming up the stairs? Would that delay the rest of them as they clambered over the falling bodies on stairs slippery with arterial blood? Should I toss a grenade and run? Both of those last two options were certain to buy me time, but at what cost? The noise would alert every White within a few blocks and turn this one problem into a much larger predicament.

I gave a thought to the machete even as I unsheathed it. I could hack a few—maybe more—but the opportunity for escape would disappear almost as quickly as it arrived. Once I started hacking, once the Whites decided I was adversarial food, I might never be able to disengage from the melee quickly enough to get to and through the window.

Or, I could step aside, let them see my White skin, and hope they would leave me alone while I sacrificed Fritz and Gabe. Hope?

No. I couldn’t do that.

I went with my only choice: Hack the horde, then escape. I glanced at the window thirty feet to my left—through a back office, over an obstacle-cluttered floor, around some desks, and barely visible through an open door—signaling my plan to Murphy and the others. As soon as the window was open and the last of my friends was passing through, I’d run.

I slashed the first White through her face at the farthest reach of my blade. It wasn’t a killing cut, it wasn’t meant to be. Her hands instinctively flew to cover her face as she screeched and fell, tripping up two others behind who were trying to squeeze past one another shoulder to shoulder. I poked one in the larynx and took a short swing across the other’s cheek.

The larynx-cut White toppled onto the bleeding woman in front of him on the stairs. The one I’d hit in the cheek lost his balance and fell as he spun on his back, his feet in the air, helping block those behind. He was nearly in grasping distance of my boots, so he earned another hack and blood gushed from his chest.

I cut a fourth in the back of the skull as I heard Murphy’s big voice yell, “Go!”

With no hesitation at all, I turned and ran.

Chapter 45

All I heard were howls and the bumping and stomping of a hundred crazed Whites trying to mount the stairs at the same time. All I saw was the door and the window across the room. At the doorway, I grabbed the doorjamb with one hand as I tried to round the turn at full speed.

I passed a desk. Out in the moonlight, through the tall windows, I saw Murphy on the fire escape urging me on as he raised his rifle.

The paper-strewn floor turned out to be more treacherous than I had expected, and I lost my footing, banging my head on the desk as I tumbled onto the floor.

For a second, all I saw was black, then stars, then everything seemed confused.

Murphy’s suppressed rifle was firing. Whites were screaming. The window near where Murphy was standing was shattered, its glass all over the floor.

How did that happen?

Murphy was yelling something.

Fritz was leaning back in the open window, hand outstretched, hollering urgently.

The wall on the other side of the room popped as bullets passed through it.

Then, just as quickly as everything had shifted out of the realm of rational purpose, it came back into focus. I knew I’d knocked myself senseless for a few moments when my head hit the desk. I knew the Whites were pouring up the stairs. Murphy was shooting them in the doorway and shooting through the wall to clog the hall with their bodies and slow them before they got to us.

The last thought to occur to me—damn, it should have been the first—turned into action just as soon as it came to mind. I clambered shakily back up to my feet as I moved toward the window.

Fritz grabbed my sleeve and pulled me off balance as he dragged me through the door. He shouted, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

I was nodding and trying to get my feet under me.

He spun me around and positioned me by the ladder. “Go. Go.”

I glanced down as I started to climb. Good. At least the fall from the second floor won’t kill me.

At the bottom of the ladder, Gabe stood with his shotgun, looking up and down the alley. He was ready to slaughter anything that moved. It occurred to me that he didn’t understand that by pulling the trigger, he’d better be ready to die as well. Or maybe he had just given up hope.

My feet hit crumbly old concrete. I staggered, and Fritz dropped down beside me, trying to balance me again.

“I’m okay,” I told him, pointing at the rough footing. “I slipped. I’m cool.”

Murphy was on the ground a half-second later, his face inches from mine. “Can you run?” he urgently asked.

I nodded.

We hauled ass up the alley, Murphy in the lead, Gabe behind, Fritz at my side nursing me along, although I didn’t feel like I needed the help.

I put a hand to the side of my head and felt a pretty damn big lump growing there above my ear. A quick glance at my hand as I pulled it away revealed red fingers and a palm covered in blood.

Thinking tangentially about the equipment soldiers took with them into the field, it occurred to me that perhaps I needed some protection for my head. Hell, even a bicycle helmet would have done the job. I said, “I guess that’s why they wear helmets.”

Fritz glanced at me, worried.

I opened my mouth to explain that I wasn’t babbling nonsense, but decided we had bigger problems to deal with at the moment.

Murphy turned left, coming out of the alley. Two Whites were rummaging through an automobile across the street. One of them looked up and took a few long seconds to understand that what he was seeing was running warm meat—uninfected meat. He jumped to his feet on the hood of the car and gleefully yelped. As he lunged onto the street to come at us, two bullets from Murphy’s rifle caught him in the chest, knocking him back onto the hood. The second White took a bullet to the head as he looked at us from the driver’s seat.

We ran through the intersection.

The howling of the white mob echoed off the buildings. They had to be coming down the fire escape. We needed to be out of sight before they came out of the alley or we’d be in trouble.

As it was, the howling was contagious. When one howled, all around heard. All around knew what it meant. Meat was afoot.

More howls.

We passed onto a stretch of sidewalk between a parked tractor-trailer and the wall of an old warehouse converted to a bar. For the moment, we were only visible from the front and the rear.

We cut another left turn into an alley, and for a second, no Whites were out in front of us. Some were several blocks back in the alley, hanging around trashcans and dumpsters.

All around us, the infected wailed. It was one of the ways they worked cooperatively to capture their prize. They were searching.

A metal door on the right was hanging open, swaying gently on the light breeze. Murphy ran in and we all followed.

Once inside, Murphy slowed and softly said, “Bolt that door.”

Gabe pulled the door shut, sealing us in near blackness. I pulled my night vision goggles down over my eyes and saw out through the storeroom and into an art gallery with colorful, abstract art hanging on the walls. The color, though, was lost. It was all shades of green and black.

The deadbolt clinked into place as Gabe whispered, “Got it.”

Murphy stuck his head out into the gallery and looked around. “Hey,” he called.

We all froze, waiting for a result.

Nothing.

“Hey,” Murphy said again.

Still nothing.

He came back into the storeroom, urgent but not panicked. Looking at me, he said, “How are you? Can you run?”

“I’m good,” I told him.

Murphy looked at Fritz. Fritz shook his head.

“No,” I said. “I’m good. Not one hundred percent but I’m in the game. Rock on, Mighty Murphy.”

He grinned.

Gabe said, “We should hide here.”

Murphy shook his head. “We can’t. The Whites are riled up. They’ll be running through all the buildings around here looking for us.” He slapped Gabe on the shoulder. “Those fuckers love the taste of uninfected virgins.”

“What?” Gabe spouted, clearly not expecting to be teased. But that was just Murphy’s sense of humor.

Murphy looked at me one more time, “If you’re good, then we’ll go out the front. If not, we’ll stick you upstairs in a closet or something and come back for you later. You’ll be good even if they find you.”

I touched a hand to the bloody wound on the side of my head again. I held my hand up where Murphy could see as I hefted my machete in the other. “I may have gotten a good whack, but I can still kill plenty of ‘em. With all the blood, though, the hungry ones will think I’m injured and weak. That makes me a target.”

“Word.” Murphy loved his outdated slang.

Chapter 46

We left the art gallery and crossed the street, climbing through the remains of the front door of a small printing company. We passed through the lobby, through another door, past a few empty offices, and onto the production floor where big machines rusted in the ten inches of water pooled on the sunken floor. A portion of the roof had collapsed. I guess during the storm.

Many roofs on commercial buildings in Texas are flat—or pretty close to it—with parapets that stand up several feet all around the edge, hiding mechanical equipment and giving the impression of a much taller, more impressive building. I suspected the drains on this one had become clogged, with somebody’s remains perhaps. During the hurricane, the roof had simply started to fill. Unable to support the extra tons of water in the new upstairs swimming pool, the roof collapsed.

We had to wade through the water to get to the back door, which stood at the top of four single stairs on the rear wall of the building. The door looked to be intact.

Going through that door put us out onto another street. Whites were out, but those who were moving seemed to be going in the opposite direction, to an area several blocks away where the Whites who’d spotted us were still searching, howling, and squabbling.

We passed two more blocks, sneaking through buildings and doing our best to stay behind cover when outside. We were heading south, away from the direction we’d all wanted to go, but also away from the latest mob of Whites who’d wanted to put us on the dinner plate.

We found ourselves crossing a wide road clogged with hundreds of cars, some abandoned while trying to head west toward one highway, others left there by drivers headed east toward the other highway. Whatever traffic mess had been on the road prior to the hurricane, the floodwaters had made it worse by floating many of the cars and pushing them into piles. Among the piles were trees, pieces of house walls and roofs, appliances, and the bones of the dead.

Murphy paused along the edge of one pile, pointed south past rows of giant cypress trees, and whispered, “The river is right over there. Maybe it’s time we found a boat and floated out of downtown. We’re gonna get killed if we stay here.” He looked at me. “Even the Valiant Null Spot’s luck doesn’t last forever.”

“The Valiant Null Spot?” Fritz asked.

I ignored him and said, “If we can find a boat washed up in the trees, I think that’s a good idea.” I looked at each of the others for consensus.

Gabe and Fritz nodded. Why not? They probably would have gone along with anything, just happy that Murphy and I hadn’t ditched them yet. I’m sure they felt like they could take care of themselves, but Murphy and I had the night vision goggles and the firepower.

Whites nearby were making some noise, bickering over something, perhaps a rotted body in the jumble of the flood aftermath.

Murphy led us off the road. Among the trees, even more debris had accumulated, so much, in fact, that we couldn’t cross through it to get to the river. Well, we probably could have at the risk of injury, while making so much noise that we’d certainly draw the nearby Whites.

We instead chose stealth, walking in single file as Murphy led us along a path that roughly paralleled the river, looking for a way to get through the mounds of debris between us and the water. It was treacherous going—even the relatively flat path we traveled was scattered with sharp pieces of metal bent and torn from cars, shards of glass, some small, some several feet in length and sticking out of the piles, ready to slice the leg of anyone passing by who wasn’t paying attention.

As we moved, the number of jagged, injury-threatening pieces of metal sticking out into the paths seemed to grow in number. So much so that I started to wonder if something peculiar in the topography had caused the receding waters to settle the debris in such an odd, spiky fashion.

I also noticed that more and more pieces of the metal bore stains of the blood from the last White who’d come this way, running at a speed too reckless.

We came to a bend where the debris had been pushed up onto some structure that hadn’t collapsed under the pressure of the waters flowing over it. We found ourselves standing in a crescent-shaped clearing, over a hundred feet from end to end, with no apparent way to get out, save climbing over the dangerous debris.

Murphy pointed to the old Seaholm Power Plant. The building had been derelict for years. He said, “City of Stin.”

Fritz looked puzzled. “What?”

I looked up at the side of the building and read, City of Austin Power Plant.

“Old joke,” said Murphy, pointing at the giant retro-style letters mounted high up on the three-story wall. He grinned and looked at me. “I know you know what I’m talking about. You’ve been to the bars down here plenty of times at night, I’ll bet.”

I looked up at the building and smiled. “You tell ‘em.”

Murphy said, “Gather ‘round kiddies.”

“Don’t make a career of it,” I said, “we got shit to do, you know.”

“The Grumpy Null Spot.” Murphy chuckled.

I looked around for danger.

Murphy looked at Fritz and Gabe. “It’s nothing. Lights behind the A and U in the sign were burned out forever. So at night, it said ‘CITY of STIN’ instead of ‘CITY of AUSTIN’. When we were drunk, and talkin’ shit, it seemed really funny that the power plant wouldn’t change their light bulbs.”

“Interesting,” said Fritz.

“Don’t humor him,” I said, “it only makes it worse. Tell him you don’t give a shit. Trust me.”

Murphy said, “I’m his only friend.”

That got a laugh from Fritz and Gabe. Did I say that when the tension is high, any joke will do?

Murphy looked at the piles of flood debris around us. “Should we go back?” He looked up the trail we’d followed to get there.

I pointed to one end of the rough crescent shape. “I’ll go that way first, and see if there’s a safe way over. Would one of you go the other way?”

Fritz said, “I’ve got it.”

I continued, “Murphy, you and Gabe stay here and keep an eye out back up the trail. You know, in case a White or two are following.”

“Got it, boss.” Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder and pointed it down the path we’d taken between the mounds.

Fritz took off, cautiously looking, stopping about twenty feet down the path to make an attempt to climb up and over the piled debris in front of him.

I hoped we wouldn’t have to do that, but said nothing. It might be the only way through without doubling back. Then again, we weren’t in a hurry. We weren’t being pursued. At the moment, we were safe and no Whites knew our whereabouts.

I walked along the path as the depth of the junk seemed to thicken underfoot, getting noisier. I had to step more and more gently. The jagged pieces of metal sticking randomly out from the sides seemed to squeeze me along a narrower and narrower walkway, making me feel very uncomfortable. If a White did come over the mound on either side, I’d be hard pressed to defend myself without getting injured, not by them, but by the debris.

Nearing the end of the crescent, I was nearly ready to give up and turn around when I spotted something curious, a break in the junk, along the wall of the building that had stood against the flood. I saw a concrete wall and a steel door.

Why not peek inside?

Maybe a window on the other side of the building would provide a path through the mound. That was my hope when I holstered my pistol, lifted my machete, and stepped up to the door. Slowly. Quietly. Of course, everything I did was quiet, and slow, especially if I wasn’t being chased by a herd of snappy-jawed Whites.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open, expecting to see jostled, moldy equipment. What I saw was some kind of electrical cabling snaked up out of a large round hole in the center of the floor. All the cables spread out along the floor and ran up the walls to big switch boxes mounted there. More importantly, some dim light down in the tunnel somewhere made it glow bright green through the night vision goggles while it silhouetted a thin, white-skinned girl with short, spiky hair and big, dark eyes, piercings, and tattoos.

Chapter 47

The sight of the girl startled me and I involuntarily took a half step back as I gulped. That gulp was all the time I needed to recover, raise my machete, and step back forward to cut her down.

That dim light down the tunnel gave me pause.

I wondered as I swung my machete at the female White whether that light in the tunnel was an anomaly in the night vision software or whether something was down there that shouldn’t have been.

In that moment as I paused, the girl stepped back. She didn’t howl. She didn’t bare her teeth. She didn’t lunge at me. She raised her arm in a useless defense and tried to stifle her scream as she mouthed, “No!”

I turned and let the machete whoosh past her as I pulled up on my swing.

No?

I froze.

The girl froze, perhaps wondering why she was alive.

Maybe planning her attack.

I raised my machete again, sticking my other hand out to push back if that was needed.

The girl’s face turned to pure fright as she softly said, “Please.”

“What?” I asked in the same low tones.

“Please, don’t.”

I looked around the small room again, double-checking that no ambush lay in there. How could there be? The whole space couldn’t have been more than ten feet square with only the tunnel and the cables. No furnishings. Only the girl.

I looked her up and down. She carried no gun but had a knife in a sheath on her hip, a bow in one hand, and a quiver over her shoulder.

She wasn’t a White. Well, she was. She had to be a Slow Burn.

I moved my mouth to speak, but in my surprise I couldn’t come to a choice of what to say first.

The girl’s free hand slowly slipped down to touch the handle of her knife.

My surprise clicked off and self-preservation kicked in. “Don’t,” I told her. “Don’t move.”

Don’t move? What the fuck kind of greeting is that?

She took another half step back, closer to the tunnel.

“Stop,” I said, much more gently. I slowly lowered my machete. “I’m… I’m not here to hurt you.”

That didn’t change the girl’s facial expression one bit. Her eyes darted from side to side, then went back to staring at me in what—for her at least—had to be very dim light. I realized she probably couldn’t see much more than my silhouette against the moonlight coming in through the open door.

I said, “I know you can’t see in this light, but I’m like you.” I raised my hand and slowly turned it. “White skin, just like yours.”

The girl touched the skin on her arm, running her fingers over a full sleeve tattoo—or so I guessed based on how much of her arm was visible. She asked, “Who are you? How did you find this place?”

This place?

Okay, enough clues clicked into place. This little ten-by-ten concrete building was more than just some kind of switching station for the power company.

“I just came in through the door,” I told her. “I was curious.”

She glanced back at the tunnel.

“I’m wearing night vision goggles,” I told her. “You maybe can’t see them in this light, but I can see everything you’re doing. What’s in the tunnel?”

Chapter 48

Something shuffled in the tunnel.

The girl turned and started to speak.

I raised my machete again and hissed, “Quiet.”

She froze.

More shuffling in the tunnel, footsteps, the creak of rusty metal. A voice whispered, “Jazz.”

Jazz?

“Jasmine,” it whispered again. “Wait up.”

I slowly lowered my machete and deliberately laid the edge on Jasmine’s throat. I removed my pistol from its holster and pointed it at the tunnel. I tilted my head to the right, silently ordering Jasmine to move a little to her left. I needed a clear view of the tunnel. I stepped to the side so I’d be in a shadow, rather than silhouetted by the moonlight coming through the open door.

The dim light in the tunnel went out. Hands and feet were climbing a ladder.

A woman’s head came up out of the tunnel, looking around in the darkness of the small structure. She saw the open door and cursed. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see Jazz either. She stopped halfway out of the hole, hearing or sensing something and becoming suddenly tense. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip and she was reaching for it when I said, “Don’t do it. Come up out of the hole. Don’t put that hand on your gun.”

She looked toward my voice, I guessed seeing only blackness. Just moments before, she’d been down in the tunnel with a candle or flashlight on. Her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to darkness.

“I’m wearing night vision goggles,” I told her. “You’ve got medium-length, sandy-colored hair. Mid thirties. Good shape. You’re wearing a black leather jacket. I can see everything.”

The woman’s face turned hard, her eyes darting from side to side. She was going to try something.

“Don’t,” I said. “Take a deep breath. Stop looking around for something to hit me with, okay? Be cool for a sec’.”

Slow footsteps outside told me someone was coming up through the debris toward the hut. Not a surprise. I’d been out of sight long enough to make the guys curious.

A moment later, Fritz’s voice whispered, “Zed? Zed?”

I whispered back, “I’m in here. Take it slow. Some people are in here with me.”

To the girl coming out of the tunnel, I said, “You’re a White, I’m—”

“A White?” she asked. “What?”

“Your skin,” I told her. “You caught the virus. You got better, right? So did I. My skin is white just like yours.”

“You keep saying you’re like us,” said Jazz. “Why don’t you put down your weapons and just go. Leave us alone.”

Why indeed? To trust or not to trust?

“My name is Zed.” It seemed like a good way to start the de-escalation.

From outside, Fritz asked, “You okay in there, buddy?”

“Come in slowly,” I said over my shoulder.

Fritz leaned around the edge of the doorframe, pistol first, pointed at the roof.

Both girls tensed on seeing Fritz.

“He’s immune, but he’s cool,” I told them. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to lower my machete and point my pistol at the floor. Please don’t do anything stupid.”

I took my machete away from Jazz’s neck and she relaxed by a small fraction. As promised, I pointed my pistol down. “We really don’t mean you any harm,” I told them. “We were just trying to find a way down to the river to see if we could find a boat or something.”

“For what?” the girl from the tunnel asked, immediately trying to poke holes in my story.

“For what yourself.” I took offense although I probably shouldn’t have. “Who are you, Sherlock Holmes? We want to get the fuck out of town. Do you think we’re going fishing?”

She shared a knowing glance with the other girl.

I heaved a dramatic sigh and looked at the girl who’d had my machete at her neck. “Your name is Jazz, right? And you?” I asked, looking at the other girl.

“Grace,” she said.

“This is Fritz,” I replied, nodding back toward the door where Fritz hadn’t moved or spoken since coming in.

He took that as a cue. “Are they like you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Slow Burns?”

Grace and Jazz both looked at Fritz with silent questions on their faces. “How could he not know that?”

At least that’s what it looked like to me. I said, “He’s not from around here. Apparently, we Slow Burns are a bit of a geographical oddity.”

“Are you with the soldiers at the Capitol?” Grace nodded in the general direction of the complex.

“You asking me or him?” I replied.

She was glaring at Fritz, but she said, “Both.”

“We’re not with them,” I said. “As a matter of fact, they got kinda pissed when I burned down the Governor’s Mansion and blew up one of their helicopters.”

“That was you?” Jazz asked.

Grace shot her a look that said be quiet.

Looking at Jazz, I replied, “You know about that?”

Glaring petulantly at Grace, she said, “We all saw the fires and heard the explosions. We were wondering.”

We all?

“Jazz,” Grace scolded.

“That was us,” I told them. “Look, I don’t know what y’all’s deal is here. I don’t know how many more people you’ve got hiding up the tunnel and I don’t care. We’ve been running around downtown Austin for a day and a half with assholes shooting at us and Whites trying to have us for dinner. We just want to get the fuck out of downtown. So we’re just gonna go and leave you to yourselves. Are we cool?”

Grace looked suspicious.

More footsteps crunched in the debris outside.

Jazz looked toward the door.

“There are four of us,” I said. “One like me—like us—another Slow Burn. Fritz and his buddy are on some kind of mission to collect blood samples.”

“Yeah,” Fritz said. “We don’t have our stuff. Justice Baird’s guys took it when they arrested us. I need to come back this way, though, and get samples from all of you.” Fritz looked around outside. “Can I come back here to find you?”

“No,” Grace told him. “Don’t ever come back here. You might bring them with you.”

“The Whites?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever you call them.”

“Let’s go with Whites,” I told her.

“How many of you are there?” Fritz asked.

Grace and Jazz shared a look.

“Everything all right in there?” Murphy whispered from outside.

“Cool,” I softly called back.

Fritz looked down at his uniform, looked back up at Grace and said, “I’ll bet you think that because I’ve got a uniform on I’m tied with those guys at the Capitol.”

Grace said nothing, but to me it was clear Fritz had guessed exactly right.

“I’m not,” he told them. “Neither is Gabe. We’re Aggies. We were in the Corps. We’ve got a safe zone—if you could call it that—set up at A&M on the campus. They’re trying to develop a vaccine.”

“A vaccine won’t do us any good,” said Grace. She raised an arm to show her white skin. “We already caught the virus.”

“It might do us some good,” said Fritz, “but it’s not for us. It’s for our future.”

Chapter 49

Fritz had been a homebuilder before the virus, but I think his forte was sales. He convinced the girls he was for real, the program at A&M was real, and that it had a chance at success.

I’m not sure if any of them really believed it, but we all grew up in a culture where we bought lottery tickets against impossible odds if only for the small dose of hope. People need hope more than they know.

Maybe that was it. Fritz was selling hope to the hopeless.

We were all crowded into the utility building. Jazz had gone back up the tunnel to warn her people we were coming. Grace led the way down. Fritz and Gabe followed them, leaving only Murphy and me. Once the last of them was climbing down the ladder, Murphy said, “We could bail.”

“Leave ‘em?” I asked, not pointlessly. It was a delaying action. Murphy had a good point. Scrape Fritz and Gabe off on the girls, relieving myself of the responsibility for them after risking so much to get them out of the Capitol. But that plan also meant we’d leave Grace and Jazz—two Slow Burns—and possibly more up the tunnel. Our people?

I looked around as I thought about it. Every time we’d hooked up with normal people it hadn’t worked out. Would other Slow Burns accept us as equals?

Of course.

If we all had the same social handicap, why not?

I said, “I think we should head up the tunnel and see.”

“You think they live in the tunnel?” Murphy asked. “It’s got to be full of shit from the flood, right? I’ll bet it stinks.”

I pointed north. “The Seaholm Power Plant is across the street. I think the tunnel leads there. I’ll bet that’s where their people are hiding out.”

“You know me.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m up for anything. If you want to hang back and see if Fritz and Gabe get whacked, I’m cool. If you want to head over there and make some new friends, sure, why not? What’s the worst that could happen? They shoot us?”

“Or eat us,” I joked. I stepped onto the ladder leading down into the tunnel.

Just as Murphy had guessed, it stank of rotting swamp mud. Thick cables ran the length of the tunnel along one of the walls. They were coated with a layer of dirt, and pieces of debris were stuck on every bracket that held them in place. Two pipes, larger than I could wrap my arms around, ran one on top of the other along the other wall. Perhaps those were for pumping cooling water in and out of the old power plant. Most of the light fixtures on the roof were broken away. The floor was thick with dirt, mud, and random bits of junk that had flowed in and settled with the water after the flood.

Without a word between us, we followed the dim light of Grace’s flashlight down the straight length of the tunnel, hearing the growing sound of whispers and a tense voice or two echo back down toward us.

At the far end of the tunnel, there was no L-shaped elbow, nor ladder leading up. The tunnel opened straight into a basement-level room that was open to the ceiling four stories up, with three of those above ground level. The place appeared to have been going through a major renovation from power plant to trendy office space or expensive condos before the virus and before the flood. Much of the building’s concrete structure was still intact, leaving me with the feeling that I’d just walked inside the shell of some enormous dead beetle.

On concrete catwalks, looking down on us from the ground-level floor, nine people stared—most armed, all Slow Burns. A few of them, mostly the ones with no weapons in hand, stood and gazed blankly at nothing in particular. I knew that look. They were the Russells of the group.

As we all stood there, sizing up one another, silently evaluating whether we were a mutual danger, Fritz surprised me and spoke up. Not fazed by the threat of the guns held in the hands of the people above, he slipped comfortably into salesman mode. He told them his story about the professors sequestered in one of the buildings on the A&M campus. He told them about his job to collect samples.

I’d heard the story a few times by then and got bored until I realized it might all be a lie.

I wondered what that suspicion said about me. Had I lost all my faith in people or did I simply never have any?

Fritz told them about the dream of a vaccine. He told them he was risking his life for humanity’s children, and he told them the virus that had infected all of them once could come back in another mutation—maybe in six months, maybe in a few years. Maybe it would return in an attenuated, benign form, or maybe more deadly. He assured them, though, it would be back. Billions of people on the planet were now walking virus farms and in each of them billions of virions were growing and mutating into untold varieties. It was possible we had not yet seen the worst of it.

If anything, Fritz’s speech took everyone’s mind off the most salient problem at hand: The necessity that we all trust one another, strangers bonded only by skin color.

Chapter 50

An hour after arrival, we found ourselves sitting in a conference room on the third floor. Two wide, tall windows cut through the thick concrete on one wall. Drawn curtains blocked the view out those windows and kept the dim candlelight inside.

Fritz, Gabe, Murphy, and me sat at a long oval conference table. Grace, Jazz, an older man named Bill, and another older woman named Janet sat across from us. They were curious about news, of which Murphy and I had little. Of course, their questions led to Murphy entertaining them for an hour talking about the things that had happened to us. I was happy to let Murphy tell it. He was a natural at having his mouth open while basking in the attention it drew. A lot of it was even amusing when spun with his sense of exaggeration and humor. When he got to the ugly, painful parts, he glossed over those with a pensive look and moved on.

I’m sure I’d have dwelled on the blackest of those times. Those were the memorable images that had pasted themselves all over the walls in the gallery of my soul. Blood. Teeth. Grasping hands. Death.

Murphy’s version was better.

As Murphy recounted our exploits, I found myself thinking about all my missed opportunities with Steph, when I should have done something to act on what I knew we both felt. Of course, the way I tend to overthink things and twist them into negatives, I had to wonder if those lost opportunities only existed through exaggerations and selectively chosen memories, and that the reality was a hopelessness that I was avoiding.

And people used to wonder why I was a drunk.

It wasn’t until Murphy nudged me and told me to wake up that I realized that I’d completely disconnected from the present. I’d been staring at a wall and thinking of my own painful experiences. I looked around the table. All eyes were on me. I said, “Sorry.”

“You okay, man?” Murphy asked.

I smiled and shrugged. “You know me.” It was no kind of answer.

On my first inspiration of deflection, I looked at Bill. He was lanky and sallow-cheeked with a thin beard and a little wildness in his eyes. I asked, “What’s your story?”

He rubbed his hands across his face and looked over at Grace, “You should tell it.”

Grace said, “We used to live on the Capitol grounds before Justice Baird and his bunch came.”

“How long were you there?” I asked. “Murphy and I were downtown when the flood started. We passed by maybe a couple of blocks to the east.”

She spent a moment trying to remember the details. “We were there then.”

“We just missed you guys,” I said.

“We had a lot going on that day,” said Murphy.

“Why the Capitol?” I asked. “Why not out in the country somewhere?” Of course, as soon as I asked the question, I recalled that day in the first week of the infection after I’d helped the survivors in the hospital escape. Murphy, Mandi, and I were parked in a Humvee looking down into the valley at Dr. Evans’ family farm. We watched the naked horde swarm over their farmhouse and kill a dozen good people. Maybe out in the country wasn’t the no-brainer good idea it seemed to be.

“Father Ben,” said Grace.

“Father Ben?” I asked, making sure I understood correctly.

“He was a Slow Burn like the rest of us.” Grace’s face took on an absent look. It was clear that Father Ben was no longer with us. “He started—I don’t know what you’d call it—”

“A colony,” said Bill. “A leper colony for people like us.”

Grace smiled at Bill and said, “Yes, Father Ben’s colony at the Capitol. They took me in late in the first week.” Grace’s eyes glazed over with tears she held back. “I was in town from Dallas. My son was starting at UT in the fall and we’d found him an apartment and were getting him situated.”

Nobody asked about the son. In any conversation, anybody not present who was mentioned by anybody else was presumed dead or infected. That’s just the way the world was after the virus.

“I called home so many times,” said Grace. “At first, my daughter was there to pick up the phone. She said her father had never come home from work. She was alone. She was sixteen. I tried to get out of town after…” she paused. “Then I got sick. I was in the apartment with the doors locked, trying my best to keep the horrors outside. At one point, I got so sick I passed out on the bed, and I don’t think I woke up for a couple of days. When I did wake, I was like this. The phones were out. The water was off. All I had was the food and drinks in the apartment.” Grace took a deep breath. “That only lasts so long.”

Everybody starts out in pretty much the same way, I thought.

“I was scavenging through the other apartments in the building when Father Ben found me. Him and Bill.” Grace nodded and smiled at Bill.

“We weren’t alone,” Bill added. “There were four of us. We never went out in groups smaller than that. Too dangerous. The other Whites—the really crazy ones—they’ll attack anyone or anything that looks weak, normal or not.”

“I went with them back to the Capitol,” said Grace. “People like me were there, maybe thirty of them at the time. Is that right Bill?”

He nodded.

“All of you…” I looked for the right words to finish the question, “were high functioning? You know, white but not violent, not…” I pointed at the side of my head, “not debilitated?”

“We had about half Normal Ones,” said Bill, “and half Slow Ones—the ones who can’t talk.”

“We’ve seen some of them,” I said. “Maybe as many as we’ve seen Slow Burns like us. Russell, that guy Murphy mentioned when he told you about us. He was a Slow One.”

“Russell was a good guy,” said Murphy.

I nodded as another brutal ugliness came to mind. Russell was just one more person I wished hadn’t died.

“Father Ben felt like he had a duty to the Slow Ones,” said Grace. “He helped them. We all pitched in. We found them in the streets when we were out scavenging, often tagging along with a bunch of the violent ones. It got so you could pick them out pretty easily. They always seem to lag behind when the others are chasing something, never seeming to be in any hurry to eat and most of the time they didn’t. Most of the ones we brought in were half-starved to death.”

“But they weren’t useless,” said Bill. “You just treat ‘em like kids who ain’t too bright. They’ll pitch in and help as much as they can.”

“They helped us build the wall,” said Grace.

“Around the Capitol grounds?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Father Ben thought that would be best. We were farming the grounds when Justice Baird’s army showed up.” Grace pierced me with the hate in her eyes. I was glad her hate was meant for someone else. “There were over eighty of us by then.”

“Eighty?” I was shocked. With all the time Murphy and I had spent by ourselves, I doubted we’d ever find more than a few other Slow Burns.

“Not anymore,” said Grace. “Baird’s army saw to that. Those of us who could, escaped to this place.”

“I don’t get this whole thing with Justice Baird,” I said. “Why does he feel like he needs to be the Governor of Texas?”

Murphy laughed derisively. “Like that matters anymore.”

Nodding at Fritz, Grace said, “I’m sure he knows a lot about Baird that we don’t, but I’ll tell what we do know.”

Chapter 51

“The first time we saw the helicopter fly over we were overjoyed,” said Grace. “The wall was done by then, so we didn’t worry too much about the Crazies outside. They were as fascinated with the helicopter as we were, but for different reasons.”

Nods all around the table. Everybody alive knew the Whites were attracted to any mechanical sounds. The louder, the better.

“Most of us ran out onto the Capitol grounds that first day and waved to get their attention,” said Grace. “We knew they saw us because they circled the area several times before they flew off to the north.”

“They didn’t land that first day?” I asked.

“No.” Grace shook her head for emphasis.

“Did that seem odd?” I asked.

Grace said, “All this sitting…” She got up out of her chair, stretched, and started slowly pacing around the conference room table. “You know how things were then, right? What would you do if you were flying the helicopter, Zed? You live in a world full of crazy, white-skinned people who want to kill and eat you. You probably know that at least some of them are smart and devious. Why would you risk landing among a bunch of them you’d only seen from five hundred feet up?”

I shrugged. She was right. I felt a little stupid for asking.

By that time, she was around behind me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “At first we thought it a little bit odd, too, but we had time to talk about it and that’s what we figured. We decided—or maybe we just fooled ourselves into deciding—the behavior was exactly what we should have expected. Later that day, we fashioned a message. In one of the fields we’d been preparing to plant, we instead took a bunch of the bushes from the hedges we dug up and planted them in the shape of the word ‘hello’.” She smiled as she walked down to the other end of the table, but her eyes showed her sadness.

Bill said, “It seemed like the friendliest, shortest message to write. Everybody understands that, right?” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes while he muttered, mostly to himself, “Naïve. Stupid.”

I didn’t say anything about that. From the ground, the helicopters overhead must have looked like hope.

“The next day the helicopter came back, but it had another one with it,” said Grace. “Again, they circled around for half an hour and flew off. They never came down, never gave any hint of what their intentions were. We saw soldiers inside through the open doors, or at least what we thought were soldiers. This all went on with the helicopters coming and going for about a week, usually in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Each time they’d come, we’d go out and wave and urge them to land. They didn’t.”

“Eventually they did,” said Bill.

“Yeah,” said Grace, taking her seat at the table again. “One night we heard something different. It turned out to be Humvees, speeding down 15th Street from east to west. It was a surprise for us when they came. They drew a lot of attention from the Whites. But they didn’t stop. They slowed down just outside the north entrance and then sped off. After that, maybe we made the biggest mistake.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“We made another sign and hung it on the gate facing the street. It said, ‘Welcome. We’ll open the gates for you.’” Grace shook her head. “A few days later they showed up in force with their six helicopters and a couple dozen Humvees. We opened the gate. They drove in. Once all twelve Humvees were in, they opened fire. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t make any attempt to communicate. They just started shooting.”

Bill nodded in confirmation and his face took on an angry scowl. He wanted revenge and he was proud of that desire. But who wouldn’t be?

“Father Ben was walking up to greet the convoy,” said Grace. “He was one of the first ones killed. A lot of the Slow Ones were outside. They didn’t know what to do. They just stood there and watched while the men with the machine guns on top of the Humvees mowed them down. Most of the rest of us ran.” Grace was staring at the table by then and shaking her head slowly as her memory of the day replayed in her imagination. “People… good people… were being killed all around me. I don’t know how I managed it, but I ran for the south wall and climbed over. By that time, all the Crazies in the area were getting excited and were running for the walls. The helicopters went to work shooting down everything and everyone in the streets around the Capitol.”

Bill said, “Grace and I found each other a couple blocks outside the wall, in the lobby of a bank building. We watched the helicopters do their work and listened to the machine gun fire inside the Capitol grounds. Long story short, we herded up some of the escapees and ended up here.”

“Did many get away?” I asked. “Did some go to other places?”

Shaking her head, Grace said, “Not that we’ve found. You’re the first Slow Burns we’ve seen since the attack.”

“That’s awful,” said Fritz. “I can’t believe they didn’t even give you a chance to talk before they started shooting.”

Bill took offense, “If you were their prisoner like you say you were, then you could believe it. You saw how they are.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, “ said Fritz. “I didn’t mean that literally. It’s just a figure of speech.”

Bill didn’t say anything about that. He glared at Fritz for a moment then looked over at Grace before saying, “Tell ‘em about Joseph.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Jazz and I drew scavenger duty tonight. We need to get out there before it gets too late.”

“I thought you guys said you go out in groups of four,” I said.

Shaking his head, Bill said, “Some things are a luxury. We don’t have that many of us left.”

I glanced at Murphy. He rolled his eyes. He knew what I was thinking. I said, “Murphy and I have been switching over to the night shift. We’ll tag along if that’s cool? I mean, if you don’t mind if we crash here for a day or two.”

“What?” asked Murphy. “I don’t work weekends.”

“Weekends?” asked Grace. “What day is this?”

“Ignore him.” I smiled. “Half of what he says is smart-ass bullshit.”

Chapter 52

We made quite an odd group, me with my machete and pistol, wearing my night vision goggles of course, Murphy in his goggles with his suppressed M4, and Grace and Jazz, both with knives, bows, and one pistol between them. They had nothing to aid their vision. They were taking a different tack on silent defense. Since they were still alive, it was obvious it was working for them.

Along the way through the tunnel, Grace explained that they’d fortified the lower levels of the old power plant, welding metal across all the windows, and sealing the doors. The only way in or out now was through the utility tunnel that led under Cesar Chavez Street over to the Town Lake side. All of the jagged pieces of metal and glass sticking out from flood debris mounds along the path had been placed there by our new friends to discourage Whites from wandering down. The thinking was that after a few sharp pokes, the Whites might turn around. Better yet, they were less likely to want to come back that way when they were out on their daily or nightly scavenging. The Whites were dimwits, but not completely stupid. They could be trained.

Along the way through the debris mounds, I whispered, “Do you guys have a plan on where we’re headed tonight?”

Jazz said, “We’ve mapped out the area, and we’re working our way systematically through. We’re headed to the Whole Foods grocery store tonight.”

“There’s still food there?” I asked.

She smiled and said, “The Crazies went through it early on and ate everything they could figure out how to put in their mouths. After that they made a mess of the place. Shelves are overturned. Trash is everywhere. The remains of the dead are in there, too.”

“Pretty much like everywhere,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Jazz nodded as she kept an eye on our surroundings. “Like lots of places. We’ve been doing pretty well there. We’ve been going there for maybe three weeks.”

We were coming to the end of the path through the debris mounds and Grace said, “You two be quiet.”

Murphy shot me a look and grinned. He wasn’t impressed with Grace’s authoritative air.

We found ourselves walking uphill over what had been a small park adjacent to North Lamar, near where it crossed the river on a wide bridge. A block downriver from the North Lamar Bridge, a pedestrian bridge crossed the river as well. Just as we’d seen on our boat trip downriver a few months prior, both bridges were still jammed with cars and military vehicles, many burned. Even the park we walked through was jammed with cars abandoned there by people who presumably were going to chance a bridge crossing on foot.

Once we made it up to the street level and were able to see across the North Lamar Bridge, Grace urged us to be silent and careful—unnecessary warnings. Murphy and I had been out among the Whites plenty of times.

Murphy climbed up onto a car, looking around as he did so. With the night vision goggles, he and I were able to see so much more, especially what lurked in the shadows cast by the moon. He slowly scanned right and left, taking a bit of time to examine the darkness under the trees across the road.

Standing up and looking over the top of the car, I saw for myself that plenty of Whites were around, depending on your definition of plenty. I guessed maybe twenty or thirty were walking or scavenging in groups of a few or a half dozen. Deep in the shadows at the inside corner of a building I saw a group squatting down and huddling close, settling down for the evening. Through windows on a few of the buildings, I spotted Whites peeking out.

The number of Whites concerned me. I knew for each one I saw, there had to be hundreds not visible, both near and far. Our experiences over the past few days had proven that. The thing that worried me about that was the question of how they were feeding themselves. Were Jeff Aubrey’s equations at work? Were his predictions true? I had no accurate way to take a headcount on Whites, but I’d hoped by now I’d be seeing a reduction in their numbers as they slowly cannibalized themselves. It didn’t seem like that was happening.

With all I’d seen with the Smart Ones and semi-Smart Ones and the whole spectrum of White behavior, I had to wonder whether they were intelligent enough to leave the city and search for food out on the farms, which had to be brimming with cattle and sheep. I wondered if they were eating the plentiful deer, maybe even the coyotes, stray dogs, and house cats. Jeff Aubrey’s equations never took any of that into account.

“Well?” Grace whispered to Murphy.

He wasn’t looking north up the three blocks to the Whole Foods grocery store, he was looking south at the battle’s aftermath on the bridge. Having been prompted by the sound of her voice, he hopped down and motioned for us all to lean in close. He said, “I saw a couple of those armored Humvees over there. I don’t know what shape they’re in, but there’s one that looks like we can get it out. It’s not jammed in by too many other vehicles.”

“For Fritz and Gabe?” I asked.

He nodded. “Unless we’re giving them a ride back to College Station, they need some transportation.”

“You’re always so thoughtful, Murphy.”

“You can’t get that Humvee,” said Jazz.

“Why?” I asked. “It’s right there. Like Murphy said, maybe we push a car or two out of the way but we can get it out.”

Shaking her head, Jazz said, “There’s a group of Crazies that live up there in the cars. They think the bridge is their turf.”

We didn’t have any normals with us, so our options for doing anything out in the open were greatly expanded. That included going out on the bridge and disposing of however many aggressive Whites lived up there. I said, “Fritz and Gabe need a safe vehicle.”

“We could always let ‘em get their own ride,” Murphy suggested.

Shaking my head, knowing I was putting a mask on my own reasons, I said, “They’ll get killed just trying to walk over there. I think there are way too many Whites around for them to get very far on their own.”

“Wait,” said Grace. “What are we talking about here? We’re supposed to be going to get groceries at Whole Foods.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Murphy slapped me on the back and looked at Grace. “Don’t mind him. Sometimes he looks for trouble for no good reason.”

“Why?” Grace asked sincerely as she gave me a look like I might truly be insane. “Doesn’t everybody get enough trouble for free these days?” She turned and headed for the sidewalk that led to Whole Foods.

Jazz smiled at me, shrugged, and followed.

Murphy said, “We’ll get the Humvee later.”

I huffed and tagged along.

Chapter 53

With Grace in the lead, and Jazz behind her spending too much time looking at the floor and nudging an occasional bottle with her toe to read the label, I followed them while Murphy took up the rear. We were working our way through an aisle of handmade soaps, shampoos, and lotions on the second floor of the Whole Foods grocery. Most of the bottles that had been on the shelves were now on the floor. They’d been trampled and kicked, and many opened as Whites had sampled what was inside to see if it was edible. When they’d discovered otherwise, they dropped the bottles and went on to other parts of the store. A tacky, multicolored mess now covered the linoleum underfoot and was evidence of all that had happened there.

Unfortunately, walking through it, peeling our feet off the ground with each step, and trying not to kick the empty bottles too loudly proved onerous and distracting.

At the end of the aisle, the wine section took up a whole corner of the store. Grace told us that among the countless broken wine bottles were hundreds of unopened ones. We all pretended that wine wasn’t a first choice and that calories were just calories these days, but we needed little convincing to head through the sticky shampoo aisle knowing what lay at the other end.

Clinking noises in the glass up ahead made it clear that something or someone was already rummaging among the overturned shelves and broken bottles. My guess was Whites. First off, they were being noisy. Normals still lucky enough to be alive and even Slow Burns had learned silence was always best. That and the noise didn’t seem to have any rhythmic order to it. Normal people engaged in tasks tended to do them in a steady fashion. So, any noise associated with the task tended to have a certain regularity. Whites were fidgety and random.

We were halfway up our aisle when a White peeked around the shelves to give us a look. He’d apparently heard us. No surprise.

He stared. He didn’t know what to make of us.

I hefted my machete. I already had a solution for him—him and what I was guessing were two or three others up in the wine section. They were the only ones making noise on this floor of the store. If any others were hidden, they were being quiet about it.

Grace looked over her shoulder in a quick glance at Jazz.

The White leaned out a little farther and stepped out into the aisle, exposing half of his body. He cocked his head.

Jazz nocked an aluminum-shafted arrow as she raised her bow.

Just loud enough for the sound to reach the end of the aisle, Grace whispered, “Are you a bad boy?”

The White’s eyes went wide. He tensed and took a step out from behind the aisle’s end cap as his mouth opened wide, baring his teeth. A howl just started in his throat as Jazz let fly the arrow that skewered the White’s head. He fell over, twitching and gurgling as he died.

Seeing the technique, I felt a little stupid. I’d have taken my machete and beat it on a shelf. Perhaps I’d have called out at the top of my lungs to get the attention of any Whites on the floor. Then, Murphy and I would have gambled that we could kill all that came running. Definitely a solution lacking the subtlety of Grace’s and Jazz’s method.

By the time we’d taken a few more steps, another White made her noisy way through the broken wine bottles and squatted beside her fallen comrade as she looked up at us.

Grace whispered, “Are you a good girl?”

The White immediately lunged as another of Jazz’s arrows buried itself in the infected girl’s chest, ending its life in an instant.

“Nice shot,” I whispered over Jazz’s shoulder.

She ignored me as she nocked another arrow.

Glass still clinked among the wine shelves. At least one more White was up ahead.

Stepping over the two Jazz had killed, we started to crunch glass under our shoes as we walked around the perimeter of what had been a large wine department.

Signs hung from the ceiling indicating the region the wine in the area below had come from. Beneath the Chile sign, we found a White, emaciated in clothes that hung off his thin frame. On his bloody knees with bleeding hands, he rummaged through bottles of wine both full and broken, catching cockroaches and stuffing the crunchy little beasts into his mouth. When he noticed us, he stopped what he was doing, looked blankly at us for a moment, and then went back to pushing bottles out of the way to scare up his prey.

“Are you a good boy?” Grace asked in her deathly whisper.

The White stopped and looked at her.

Jazz already had an arrow ready to fly.

After a moment of doing nothing more, the White turned back to his work.

“A Slow One,” she said to us.

Feeling a little guilt, I knew I’d probably have killed him had it been just Murphy and me in the store. We’d have dispatched the two predatory Whites with ease. Then, while our blood was running hot with the excitement of the kill, we’d have spotted Mr. Roach Wrangler, and I’d probably have lopped off his head. I asked, “You said you guys take the Slow Ones in. Is he coming back with us?”

Shaking her head with a sadness that seemed too profound for the situation, she said, “We can’t. Not anymore. When there were more of us. When we had a better place up at the Capitol we could take care of them. They could be productive. Now…” She shook her head and started to push through the broken glass with the toes of her boots again, looking for salvageable wine bottles.

Jazz left us and went back to the cosmetics and shampoo aisle, apparently making her way toward some coveted product she’d seen on our way through.

Murphy shrugged and followed her. He was thinking the same thing I was, “Don’t split up.”

I stayed with Grace. She picked up a couple of bottles of red wine. She read the labels, nodded approvingly and handed them to me. I pushed them into my backpack.

I said, “It really bothers you not to take them in, doesn’t it?”

Without turning my way, she nodded.

“Why?” For me, it was easy. Or at least it had grown easy. I recalled how I felt about Russell on first coming across him. If left up to me, I’m sure I’d have abandoned him in his house to fend for himself, just as he had been doing. Over time, though, I grew attached. He was a human. Perhaps that’s to say, in my mind I accepted him as a human and in a way, a friend. I felt a depth of responsibility for him that grew out of the attachment. It hurt like hell when he died.

Early on, I’d killed plenty of Whites. Hell, I was still doing it damn near every day. Some, I suspected afterward, were Slow Ones or even Slow Burns. That always bothered me when I had some downtime to think about it. The expressions on their faces—sometimes blank, sometimes vaguely pitiful—engendered a festering guilt that threatened my actions with doubt every time I faced a white-skinned monster.

Finally, Grace said, “It feels wrong.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yes.” She stood up straight and looked at me. She pointed at the Slow One rummaging for roaches. “You don’t feel bad about leaving him here?”

I shrugged and looked away. I knew I should have felt bad. But I didn’t. Mostly I felt hollow.

I couldn’t get past the thought that I’d have simply killed The Roach Wrangler and I was starting to feel just as guilty as if I had.

Grace went back to her work. “I understand. I really do.” She picked up a tall, skinny bottle of some kind of white wine—a moscato. “This is so much better when it’s cold.”

“Calories,” I muttered, accepting the bottle for the collection in my bag.

Jazz and Murphy came over, apparently finished shopping on the cosmetics aisle. She pointed a thumb at Murphy, “We’re going to check back in the deli.”

Grace looked across to the other side of the store. “Don’t go so far that we can’t hear you.”

With plenty of sarcasm, Jazz said, “Yes mother.” Murphy smiled.

Unfazed, Grace went back to looking through the bottles. She turned the conversation back to the Slow Ones. “I’ve seen plenty of people lose their humanity.”

I wasn’t sure that I started with my humanity intact. But that was a long story of shitty parents that I preferred to leave in the black hole of my memory for as much time as I could keep it there.

“With all the death, all the violence,” said Grace, “people have to protect themselves.” She patted the center of her chest. “In here. In their hearts. Turning a callous eye on the world helps. For some—the weak ones—it’s the only way.”

“The weak ones?” I asked. “Wait. Are you saying I’m weak?”

“Take it however you want,” said Grace. “We’ve all been through indescribable brutalities to get where we are now. Some of us were strong enough to keep the best parts of ourselves alive. Some of us weren’t.”

I wanted to say, ‘Fuck you.’ Yeah, I’m just that eloquent. Instead, I muttered, “For some of us, maybe this is the best part.” I stomped off to check what lay down another aisle. I can’t say I was any more or less interested in what was still on those shelves. I just wanted to get away from Grace. She was pushing me to think about things I’d rather not.

I’d grown comfortable—well maybe not comfortable—perhaps I’d just reached a state of détente with what I felt and what I thought I should feel. I was okay with my stupid choices and my addiction to danger. I was fine going from day to day with few emotional ties. I was fine with the killing.

The guilt was a price I paid, a necessary toll.

Something about the killing filled an empty hole in me.

I found myself looking at boxes and boxes of empty protein bars and empty bar wrappers. They were scattered near knee deep on the floor. The Whites had figured out how to tear open those packages. I guess not a hard thing, it was the intuitive leap of knowing that something might be edible inside—that was the part that seemed like it should have been beyond the abilities of their simple brains.

I took my time as I sorted through the trash, finding bars as I went, using my effort in the trivial search to focus my attention and hide from my thoughts. The darkest parts of my soul were thriving in the chaos of a world turned murderous black, and bereft of dreams. I was a downcast demigod, slayer of monsters. I bore the machete that drained their veins, stole their breath, and cut the life from their hearts.

I was the void.

I was the Null Spot.

Maybe I really was.

But still, the guilt.

By the time I was halfway down the aisle, I had collected a few dozen bars and they were stashed in my backpack along with the bottles of wine.

Grace came wading down through the cardboard and silvery wrappers. When she stopped beside me, she asked, “Any luck?”

“I’m finding plenty,” I said.

“Mind if I help?”

“Of course.” I looked at her. “I know sometimes I get pissed, but it’s nothing. I’m not entirely comfortable with the things I’ve done to stay alive. But that just is what it is. I’ve got to deal with it in my own way.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grace. “I didn’t mean to sound like I was judging you. It’s just the kind of things I think about when I can’t sleep at night.”

Lying, I said, “I don’t tend to think of anything except staying awake.”

“Afraid of what might happen if you go to sleep?” asked Grace. “The Crazies might come?”

I smiled and almost laughed before admitting, “The nightmares get pretty bad.”

“That’s normal.” Grace found a full box kicked up under the edge of a shelf and gave me a challenging look.

“Beginner’s luck,” I told her.

“What do you think of everything that Fritz and Gabe told us?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “What are you asking exactly?”

She said, “I’m thinking about going with them.”

Chapter 54

Grace’s announcement that she was thinking about going to College Station didn’t matter much to me. I barely knew her. I barely knew Fritz and Gabe. If I’d said I barely gave a shit, that would have been an exaggeration.

“Do you think they’re being honest?” she asked me.

I leaned an elbow on a shelf and said, “I think everybody lies about nearly everything.”

Grace shook her head and looked disappointed.

“But,” I continued, “I think it’s always been that way. Back in the old life, lies didn’t carry huge consequences so we just lived with them. Now, it’s different. When somebody deceives you, you end up dead.”

Murphy laughed.

I looked down to him and Jazz standing at the end of the aisle.

“See,” Murphy said, pointing at me and talking to Jazz. “That’s what I was talking about. When he goes into professor mode you might as well get a pillow. You can tell by that tone in his voice. It sounds like there’s a corncob in his butt.”

“Did you find anything good?” Grace asked.

Murphy slipped his backpack off his shoulder and held it open to show a load of cans and jars. He grinned. “This is my new favorite store.” Looking at Grace he asked, “What’s he lecturing you about?”

“Liars.” Grace smiled. “I was asking him if he trusted Fritz and Gabe. He went on about lying like he was the guy who discovered that humans don’t tell the truth sometimes.”

Murphy laughed loudly. “Oh my God. You already know what he’s like. I’ve been listening to this shit for like three months.”

Jazz giggled, looked at me and said, “What I heard sounded smart.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”

Grace looked at Murphy and said, “I’m thinking about going with them to College Station.”

Murphy nodded and put on a thoughtful face.

“If you go,” said Jazz, “I’m going too.”

Shaking her head, Grace said, “You don’t have to go just because I am. It could be dangerous. No, it will be dangerous. We don’t know these guys.”

“I don’t have any friends here.” Jazz looked down at the floor like she was ashamed of what she’d just admitted. “Just you.”

“You think about it,” said Grace. She looked back up at Murphy. “Well?”

“Man,” he said, “I don’t know. I hate to say it, but honestly, I’m with Zed on this kind of shit. People do some crappy stuff. As far as I can tell, Fritz and Gabe don’t have any motivation to lie. I’d be inclined to think Fritz is telling the truth. I don’t know if what they’re doing is worth the time or whether they can get it done. I know he believes it. I think he’s honest. If he was selling used cars, I’d sure buy one.” He looked at me. “What do you think, man? I mean without all the professor shit?”

I shrugged and looked back up at Murphy. “You about covered it, I guess. I pretty much think the same thing.”

Grace put a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you.”

“Why?” asked Murphy. “I know why the Valiant Null Spot crusades across Texas but what’s your deal?”

“The Valiant Null Spot?” I asked. “Are you ever going to let that go?”

Laughing, Murphy shook his head. He looked at each of the girls. “He’s got a thing about saving people and doing the right thing. I only hang out with him because he’s lucky as hell and he’s invincible. Those are his superpowers.”

Grace and Jazz were laughing by then. Grace said, “You guys are a hoot. I can’t remember the last time I actually laughed.”

I smiled and chuckled along. Why fight it? I said, “Murphy’s a comedian. That’s why I keep him around.”

When the laughing stopped, Murphy looked at us and said, “We should check and see if anybody heard us.”

He headed off to check the escalator by the deli.

I nodded at Grace and we waded back through the empty boxes. “We’ll check the stairs.”

When we were passing through the wine section, Grace said, “The Valiant Null Spot? He really gave you a superhero name?”

“It’s been amusing him since he woke up from the fever.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.” I headed down the cosmetic aisle that ran off in a direction perpendicular to the path of the protein bar aisle.

“Not nothing.” She punched me lightly in the arm. “Spill it. You’ve been pretending like you don’t care about people or anything and now I find out that’s not true. What’s the story?”

“You’ll have to ask Murphy,” I said. “As far as I know I’m just doing what anybody would have done.”

“Like what?” she persisted.

“You know,” I said. “You’re still alive. You’ve been through plenty of shit. Sometimes you have to make some choices.”

“Choices to help other people?” asked Grace. “That’s what it sounds like.”

Stopping and wheeling around to face her, I snapped. “And every time it turns to shit. Every single time. I’m not a fucking hero. I’m a bad luck charm who doesn’t mind doing all the evil shit I have to do to get from day to day. And I’m fucking good at it.”

We reached the staircase and I leaned over the rail to look and listen.

Grace whispered, “I think we’re safe. I don’t hear any more coming.”

Leaning back, I nodded.

“Why does he stay with you?” Grace asked me. “If you’re such a bad luck charm, feeling sorry for yourself so much, why doesn’t he ditch you?”

“Are you some kind of psychologist?” I asked.

“High school geometry teacher,” she said. “Along with algebra and trig. I’ve seen spoiled rich kids like you pull that sorry crap in my classes since you were putting your hands in your diapers and playing with your own shit.”

“I don’t feel sorry for myself,” I told her. “Look. I did a lot of crazy shit to help people when I thought I could do some good. I’m angry because most of those people ended up dead anyway. I’m angry at myself, not sorry.”

Shaking her head, Grace said, “Do you think you’re the only one? All of us have done good things to help each other and most of us are dead.” She pointed out through the glass wall facing West Austin. “All of those houses are empty except for corpses and Crazies. We’re all trying, Zed. We’re all failing, over and over and over. Despite that, you’re still here. I’m still here. Jazz and Murphy are here. We have to be doing something right. You can be a pussy if you want to—”

I laughed out loud.

“What?” she asked. “What’s so funny?”

“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting a geometry teacher to have the vocabulary of a sailor and call me a pussy.”

“Oh, God,” she said with a smile. “I’m stuck with a fifteen-year-old.”

“Pretty much.” How could I disagree? I’d been me my whole life.

Grace planted herself in front of me and said, “Don’t give up, Zed. Not now. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for Murphy. It’s clear to everybody that he loves you.”

“What?” Sure, I wanted to spin it into a joke. That was the easiest way to deflect.

“Grow up,” she told me seriously. “He can’t lose you. You can’t lose him. At least stay in the game for that.”

Chapter 55

Having slept that day while the sun was up, I was wide awake, even though we were in the dead silent hours of the morning well before the sun was due to rise. We’d been back from the run to Whole Foods for a couple of hours. Most of the residents in the power plant were sleeping. A few stood watch.

With Murphy along, we made our way to the upper floor of the power plant and climbed through a broken window up onto some giant piece of machinery on the north side of the building beside the smokestacks—all left there, perhaps, to keep the character of the old building and drive up rents with a steampunk appearance. The silhouette of the Austin skyline stood against the stars. Far to the northeast, lights glowing on the roof of the basketball arena made it pretty clear that Baird’s helicopter assholes were still around.

Murphy asked, “How long will the car hold a charge just sitting out on the street?”

“I don’t know.” In fact, it wasn’t something I’d thought about. Would the batteries slowly drain whether the car was plugged in or not?

“What do you think about Grace and Jazz going off to College Station with Fritz and Gabe?”

“She’s a do-gooder,” I said. “She feels compelled to go.”

“Like a Mrs. Null Spot?” Murphy laughed.

“There’s no Mrs. Null Spot.” I shook my head. “Besides, she’s too old for me.”

“Well, maybe Null Girl, you know, kind of a sidekick role.”

Flatly, I said, “I thought you were my sidekick.”

“No, man,” said Murphy. “You’ve got that wrong. You’re Mighty Murphy’s surly sidekick.”

“Surly?”

“Don’t be a denier, man,” said Murphy. “If you’re going to be a surly little prick the rest of your life, at least be honest about it.”

I shook my head and muttered, “Not you, too.”

“Seriously, man,” said Murphy. “It’s time to move on.”

I didn’t say anything in response. Instead, I let my thoughts slip into my introspective rationalizations as I tried to piece together who I thought I was with who I thought I wanted to be—existential bullshit that twenty-something philosophy graduates like to dwell on.

It was all pointless.

I was a man with a pistol and a machete in a world that required me to put them to use. I had a kill-or-be-killed life. Nothing more. When I got tired of killing, I’d die. Life was simple. No gray, ambiguous questions to mull, no uncertainty about the future, only bleakness and pain until death.

“Man,” said Murphy. “You should start talking or something, you sound like you’re sitting over there getting pissed off over nothing.”

“What?” I gave him a dubious look. “How can you say that? I’m not saying anything.”

“The way you’re breathing through your nose,” he said. “It’s like you’re snorting like a raging bull or something.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Seriously.”

I sighed.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

I took a moment before I asked, “Honestly?”

“Honestly,” he said. “I’ll be your shrink. Spill it.”

“I’m tired,” I said. “Steph’s death hurt too much. I just don’t give a fuck anymore. You know what I mean?”

Murphy crinkled his eyebrows and asked, “You’re not going to jump off a bridge, are you?”

“I’m just tired of the pointlessness of it all.”

Murphy thought about things for a few minutes before saying, “You gave up.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s not ‘how’ anything,” he said. “You gave up. You go through the motions. I know you still get off on the adrenaline when the Whites are chasing us and shit. But that’s all you’ve got. You don’t care anymore. You don’t want to try. After Steph, you quit.”

“Quit?” I asked.

“You’re not suicidal,” said Murphy. “Maybe you’re too big a pussy to whack yourself. I don’t know. But you don’t care anymore.”

“I dragged you down here to the Capitol,” I protested. “What was that about if I’d given up?”

“Doesn’t matter what it was,” said Murphy. “It can be whatever you tell yourself it was. The truth is you’ve quit. Now I’m going to have to chase you around town until you finally do something stupid enough to get yourself killed.”

“Sorry.” Of course, it sounded like I didn’t mean it, but the truth was I did. I just didn’t want to accept what Murphy was saying.

“I talked to Grace for a while after we got back,” said Murphy.

I didn’t ask what they talked about. Since Murphy brought it up, I guessed they’d talked about me.

“I’m gonna go with Grace and Jazz.”

That felt like a punch in the face. It felt like more than that. My heart started to hurt all over again. He said he was going. He didn’t say we were going. I looked off into the blackness of the sky and croaked out, “Okay.”

“Okay?” asked Murphy. “That’s all you got to say?”

I shook my head. It was actually all I could say. I’d never had a friend like Murphy before and with all of my wallowing and bullshit, I’d fucked it up. He was tired of it. He was moving on.

What the fuck was I gonna do?

Exactly what I wanted to do, walk around among the Whites and slaughter them until something in my soul finally felt better.

After some time, trying to get used to the idea of Murphy bailing out, I finally said, “Grace has a good head on her shoulders. I hope whatever you guys end up doing out there in College Station helps.”

Shaking his head, happy to show me all the disappointment he was feeling, Murphy said, “Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” I said, feeling admittedly sorry for myself. “You guys go ahead.”

“Man.” Murphy was frustrated. “This isn’t some kinda boyfriend-girlfriend-junior-high bullshit. Don’t do that. Look dude, I’m going with Grace because I want my life to be more than killing Whites and eating burritos.”

“Burritos?” I muttered. “I haven’t seen a burrito since August.”

“When I get killed,” said Murphy, “I want it to be for a good reason. I know you used to feel the same way. That’s why you tried to save Amber and her friends from the dorm that night. That’s why you blew open the door on that bunker and saved Mandi. That’s why you went all Tarzan at the hospital. That’s why you dragged me halfway across Austin and saved my ass after the riot at the jail. That’s why I’m trying to save your ass from yourself right now. You’re a surly little whiny shit, but you’re my friend. Pull your head out of your ass and listen to me. Let’s go do this thing with Grace and Jazz. Let’s do something with a little meaning to it instead of just running around this stinky-ass city waiting to die. Stop overthinking it. Life is simple now—fucked-up but simple. Get your shit together and come.”

I don’t know how long we sat there after that. I was shivering from the cold and staring at the stars, trying to work my way through the complex web of bullshit I’d woven inside my head.

Murphy, to his credit, stayed with me the whole time.

Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was Murphy’s patience. Whichever, I finally circled through all the thoughts enough times to realize that Murphy was right. I said, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a useless turd. If you guys want me along, I’d like to come. I really would.”

Chapter 56

Before the dawn, Murphy woke Grace and explained that I’d be going to College Station with them. She seemed pleased with the choice. Afterwards he and I hiked through town in the dark to retrieve the Mustang. We’d had such good luck driving it around, I didn’t see myself using any other form of transportation in my future.

When night fell again, Grace and Jazz said their goodbyes and packed their bags with essentials and whatever belongings were worth carrying while running for their lives. That’s what it came down to, really. Anything in your bag slowed you down, so if it didn’t contribute directly to your survival, it better have some significant sentimental value. For me, I had nothing but a change of underwear, a change of socks, a plastic poncho, a synthetic down coat that was warm and could be balled and packed in the space of my fist. I carried food, ammo, water, lighters, and a few other such things. The only sentimentality attached to my kit was the Hello Kitty bag itself. But it was only along because it had proven so damn resilient, holding up to all the abuse I put it through. At least that’s what I told myself most of the time. At other times, it felt like my good luck charm.

Without much trouble, Murphy and Grace heisted the Humvee we’d spotted on the bridge the night before. The resident Whites on the bridge got pretty pissed about it but could only chase so far.

With Murphy driving that vehicle using his night vision goggles, me behind the wheel of the electric Mustang, with the girls, Fritz, and Gabe along, we zigzagged our way out of town and started navigating the narrow country roads east toward Aggieland.

Slow Burn Book 8, ‘Grind’

Chapter 1

If only you could get your family far enough away or get there fast enough.

If only.

Maybe to Grandma’s house.

Or Uncle Jim’s.

If you could get to that safe bug-out cabin in the woods.

If only.

But there’s all that goddamn traffic.

And there you sit, thinking that instead of having spent the extra $2,500 on the four-wheel drive option that would have let you tear ass cross country and get off these goddamn clogged roads, you’d opted instead for the two-wheel drive model and spent the difference on that fucking giant flat screen television, so you could see even the tiniest of details, HD-clarified to the point of perverse intrusiveness. Like those tiny glistening bubbles of sweat on the football players’ skin when they were hammering it on fourth and one.

Sweat bubbles?

How fucking important are those details in the grand apocalyptic view of a highway clogged with cars all the way from San Antonio to Dallas, maybe beyond? Hell, maybe every damned highway in the country is constipated with four-wheeled steel, stalling in the heat, running out of gas, waiting for what all the panicked rumors said was coming.

Virus!

Worse. People—regular people—turned monster.

You don’t believe it even though you saw them on the TV with your own two eyes. You saw them on the Internet. Coworkers shared videos on your phone. You told yourself over and over again there had to be a rational explanation.

But there wasn’t one. Only terrifying truths.

And you’re afraid those truths will turn every one of these fucking cars into coffins full of diminutive corpses and fat, dead parents.

Don’t think that way.

Breathe slow. Solve the problem.

Don’t panic.

The kids are already tense.

Don’t make it worse on them.

The wife is bitching in the front seat about how you should have gone the other way, taken that shortcut that her friend Elva told her about, because Elva and her husband—number three, was it?—are already out of town. Yeah, that was her on the phone a moment ago. The wife just said so. And the kids are whining in the back seat because the girl needs to piss, and that little fucker of a son won’t stop agitating her.

And the virus is coming.

The radio is spewing fear like it's on a half-price Labor Day sale with a mattress thrown in and the wife is ratcheting up her crazy-ass coulda-shoulda’s like there’s one per-fuckity thing you can do about it now.

And still, the fear.

Every time you see somebody in the rearview mirror who’s not in a car, you think, that’s THEM.

That’s one of THEM.

But it’s not. Not yet.

Still, people are outside, loitering, acting like idiots, spewing their anger on anyone stupid enough to come within range of their shouty voices and balled fists.

Things aren’t right.

Understatement.

The traffic isn't moving, and your biggest fear is that you're fucked—not just you, but the kids in the back seat, the whiner, and the agitator. No matter how much they’re pissing you right the fuck off, you know you love them more than anything else in this whole traffic-jammed town, in this whole God-fucked world, and you reach over and grab your wife and bury your face in her shoulder, even while her bitching is burning your ears, because you don’t want her to hear you cry.

And you do cry, because you know all the way down to your balls that they’re going to die—your wife and your kids—because you fucked up.

You picked the route.

You drove the car up on the highway entrance ramp.

You watched the traffic back up, slow, and then stop altogether.

At so many points along the way, you could have made a different choice. You could have listened to her. You could have lost your temper and rammed your way between the assholes in the next lane and gotten away across the median five miles back, maybe.

Maybe.

But not now.

Now you’re stuck.

And the wife is stuck.

And the kids are stuck, and they don't even know what's going on, except that the smell of fear is in the car. It’s running up their nostrils and slamming their brains full of primordial get-the-fuck-out-of-here. But moving their feet is pointless because they’re seat belted into the upholstery tight enough to pillow it out around their spindly torsos. The taste of panic is in their mouths, and they’re spinning off so much frenetic movement, you have to keep looking to make sure the belts are still buckled.

Then the girl pisses her pants.

The boy shrieks a laugh because he’s half hysterical with new emotions that his little suburban-cocooned ass never knew existed. And because he’s just a little prick sometimes.

And what the fuck are you gonna do about all of it?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Just fucking nothing, except wait while the engine idles, the wife screams at the boy, and the gas gauge creeps ominously closer to E.

And you beat the steering wheel with your fist and you curse all the dumbasses in front of you, because you’re just sure that some accident by some idiot up there is the reason the traffic isn’t moving, and you want to jump out of the car, run up there, find the dipshit that caused this mess and punch him in the nuts.

But you don’t.

You can’t.

You can’t leave your kids. Not in this chaos.

Something changes.

The sounds are different.

Keening. Malicious. Hungry.

You turn the radio down, hoping it’s not a squealing belt in the engine, while you pray to God and your eyes plead with the apathetic clouds above that it is only that.

It’s not.

Then THEY come.

Fritz said, “Just drive across the bridge.”

I turned away from a Subaru with broken out windows, streaky stains of sunbaked blood on the hood, and the dark shapes of flesh-scavenged corpses inside. For some reason, that one, of all those packed on the highway below in a similar state, captured my attention and caught me up in imagining what had happened to its occupants.

I looked at Fritz, his words having woken me to the realization that I’d been staring and letting my imagination drag my mood down to an ugly depth. I turned toward the gaps between the burned wrecks on the bridge over the highway, exaggerating a nod as if I’d been going through a silent, evaluative process on whether to cross the highway at just that spot.

“You all right?” Fritz asked, not bothering to hide with some tact his concern that I might be slipping a little too far from reality.

“Yeah.” Of course, I said ‘yeah.’ That's the only answer to that question, when what somebody is really asking is the rhetorical, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

I put my foot to the accelerator and the electric Mustang rolled over the bridge above the highway, crossing from West Austin to East Austin. Along the access road on the other side of the interstate, rummaging through the lines of burned hulks of cars that four months ago had been waiting their chance to get into the unmoving line on I-35, white skinned monsters—formerly normal people—glowed in the moonlight.

They didn’t notice the silent Mustang. None had since I drove away from the old power plant down by the river. We’d passed hundreds on our rat-maze race through Austin’s gentrified warehouse district and into the high-rise condos and bank buildings closer to the Capitol. Along the way, as I caught glimpses of the statehouse, I saw that the fires I'd started in the subterranean Capitol Annex were still burning in the hundred-fifty-year-old domed building. Now, beneath the red granite dome, the building’s windows flickered orange and dribbled rivulets of acrid ash into the black sky, hiding the stars behind smoky ribbons of our ruin.

The Whites did notice the rattling diesel engine and the noisy off-road tires on the Humvee Murphy was driving at a distance a few blocks behind. His vehicle loudly announced the coming of a meal and the Whites reacted accordingly, waking up, chasing into the street to catch him and his passengers, pouncing on the armored Humvee from the sides.

It was all a futile effort on the Whites’ part. They weren’t fast enough to catch it from behind. They didn’t get out in front of it in sufficient numbers to do anything but die as Murphy ran them down. The ones that did get on top didn’t stay, as Murphy bounced them off by running over curbs or whatever lumps he might find in the road.

With the bridge behind us, the Mustang glided silently through the ashen remnants of neighborhoods. The fire that burned most of East Austin back in August had left little intact. The pattern of the streets was deducible only from the ragged lines of rusty orange and brown car skeletons, each having had all non-metal components long since blazed away.

Blackened brick chimneys stood as grave markers for each house that had smoldered to cinder around it. Trunks of trees still stood, some holding the thickest of their limbs to the sky. All of the storm drains along the curbs had clogged with ash and fire debris when the storms came. What was left when the rain clouds blew away and the flood waters receded was an even blanket of blackened gray over everything not tall enough to reach above it.

That was what the Mustang rolled through, six-inches deep. I ran over brittle bone, which I’d come to know from the peculiar feel of the crunch it made under our wheels. Of the other metallic remnants of the East Austin disaster, I only hoped none hiding in the ash on the road in front of me were sharp enough to puncture my tires.

Behind the Mustang, a cloud of fine ash thrown up by the tires hid the Humvee from sight. I knew that made it hard for Murphy to see, but it made it impossible for him to lose me. What's more, with East Austin burned nearly flat, any White who happened to be wandering through wouldn't be able to see the Humvee. They'd hear the noisy diesel, but they'd only see the big, gray cloud, instead of a rolling vehicle.

Eventually, the ashen desolation turned to rolling hills, blanketed by farms. The fields were separated by barbed wire fences, draped in bramble and sprouting wind-tormented trees trying to birth hedgerows. Interspersed with the fields were homestead parcels, boasting anything from a decaying trailer to a plantation-style mansion. As often as not, something, or a whole host of somethings—old cars, obsolete farm equipment, and kitchen appliances—stood in tall weeds, rusting their way into the black clay.

Within ten or twenty miles of Austin’s outskirts, oddly shaped plots of land that used to be farms had long since been sold to developers with a penchant for laying out little subdivisions with names like Green Hills, Vista Norte, or Sunny Shitboxes, probably on a landfill mound, all built from low-grade yellow pine and the cheapest Chinese siding the builder could import and staple together. Over the sub-standard constructs, built outside the city limits and beyond the reach of restrictive building codes, the builders slapped on one of six colors of fresh paint, all inspired by some shade of dried curb mud and cockroach turds.

The newer of the subdivisions looked squeaky-plain and tidy, with their ten-foot, two-leaf twigs of trees staked into the center of the cut-sod front lawns. None of the siding on those houses had yet warped. None of the paint had oxidized and washed away. Few of the shingles were yet blown off in the Texas wind.

The older subdivisions, those built a decade or more in the past, looked like slums more than suburbs. Hard-working, middle-class folk who couldn’t afford the obscene real estate prices closer to town bought those houses on adjustable rate mortgages, thinking they could afford growing future payments, because they’d long ago been infected by the blinding disease of optimism that convinced them that despite the evidence of all their dismal yesterdays, their tomorrows would be dipped in gold.

Fucked by the fine print, they were.

The promo periods on their mortgages came to an end. Monthly installments bounced happily higher—for the banks—at pretty much the same time that gasoline prices rocketed to a new record. Suddenly that twenty-mile commute into Austin, manageable a year before, ballooned into unaffordability along with their house payments. They missed a payment on a credit card and general default rules kicked in, doubling the interest rate and monthly payments on all of their revolving debt.

Stagnating wages couldn’t cover the difference. House repairs were skipped. Watering the lawn, a luxury in drought-parched Texas in those days, ceased. The twiggy trees died. The new sod turned to dirt. The house foundations, sitting on that porous, parched clay, shifted and cracked. Quarter-inch cracks zig-zagged down brick walls. Roofs opened at the seams.

On the occasions when it did rain, water leaked in. Mold followed, because even in the fucking Texas heat, the thick humidity makes sure that things never completely dry out. Because the insurance companies stopped covering mold damage a decade before, the houses turned unlivable and worthless.

For the hard working folk who hadn’t figured it out by then, they learned how ‘fucked’ was spelled, what it tasted like, what it smelled like. They knew it with all the intimacy of a herpes-infected lover. They loaded their shit into U-Haul vans, dropped their house keys into brown envelopes, and jingle-mailed their dreams away to the mortgage companies.

A cancer of bleak despair wormed its way across the face of America in those years, creating open sores of pre-apocalyptic rot for the virus to settle in.

Now it was hard to tell which houses had been abandoned for years and which held the recently deceased.

The farther we drove from Austin, the more my mood turned to shit, the more the whole shitty world looked like something tormented by a biblical plague and forgotten by God. And the more I felt like I was running away, though the promise of fledgling hope lived in College Station, our destination a hundred miles to the east.

Chapter 2

Fritz studied the map that was unfolded across his lap, running up the door panel and overhanging the console. Yeah, with the passing of the smartphone into history's long list of lost technological marvels, paper maps were back in fashion. Using a tiny flashlight, one of those with a single LED, designed for hanging on key chains he said, “Turn left up at this next corner.”

“I think that sign back there said 1704.” I looked at the trees lining the road and craned my neck as though that would help me see around the corner we’d just passed.

“That’s the one,” confirmed Fritz.

“You guys mapped this out on your way here?” I asked as I drove the car through another turn.

“Yeah.” Fritz dragged his finger through the spot of light left on the paper by his tiny LED. “It took us four tries to find open roads all the way to Austin.”

“The roads are that bad out here?” I asked.

“Some of them are,” said Fritz. “In some places the bridges are blocked. I guess the farmers figured if they barricaded the bridges, they’d protect themselves.”

I made no attempt to hide the bitterness in my laugh. “Most of these bridges run over dry creeks.”

“They were worried about people driving into their area, however they defined it, and bringing the infection with them,” said Fritz. “They didn’t think about all the infected coming on foot.”

“It’s hard to think of everything,” I allowed. I’d been through plenty of mistakes where the thing or things I’d missed nearly cost me my life. That led directly to thoughts of all the lives my mistakes did cost. That, of course, led directly to thoughts of Steph and even Amber.

Painful, festering shit.

We passed a cluster of a dozen houses centered on an antique shop and a convenience store with signs out front advertising shelled pecans and gooey nut-filled candies. I asked, “What’s the story with all the little towns out this way? Are they road-blocked?”

“Nope. Not all of them.” Fritz didn't look up from his map. "We'll have to go through Lexington. It's not that big, but we saw a bunch of the infected when we passed through on the way here. That could be trouble. In Dime Box, the locals tried to block the road but did a pretty bad job. Getting through was easier than it looked like it would be. Caldwell might be a problem.”

I nodded knowingly. Caldwell was one of the largest of the small towns between Austin and College Station. Bigger town, more infected. Simple logic.

With apologies hiding in the tone of his voice, Fritz said, “We couldn’t find a way without going through at least some towns. We tried.”

We crested a rolling hill that had a view of the paved road running over the terrain and across a bridge over a creek at the bottom. Past the creek, the road climbed back up to the crest of the next hill. Just ahead, a herd of cattle charged across, stampeding through the shrubs, weeds, and fencing.

Without even thinking that I was wearing night vision goggles, I asked, “You seeing this?”

Fritz looked up, raising his pistol as he tried to make out shapes in the darkness ahead.

The light coming off the thin sliver of moon was okay, but not great.

I pointed as I took my foot off the accelerator. “Way up there. The cows.”

“I see something moving across the road,” said Fritz. “It’s hard to tell.”

“It’s like a thousand cows on a stampede or something.”

“Stampeding?” he asked.

The slower the car rolled, the more the beat of those hooves hitting the ground vibrated up through the tires. I laid a hand on the dashboard. “You can feel it.”

Fritz put a palm on the dash and cocked his head. “I feel it. I hear ‘em, too.”

Looking to my left, across fields stretched over hills that rolled all the way to the black horizon, I said, "I don't know if you can make them out, but there are thousands of them—and I do mean thousands—already out there." I was hoping Fritz could make out the black silhouettes of individuals, separated from the herd, standing out against the tan-colored field.

“Yeah,” he said.

I looked back ahead at the cattle still crossing the road. “We can’t get through that.”

Fritz shook his head to agree, then looked out through the Mustang’s rear window.

I looked at the rearview mirror. Murphy was slowing the Humvee, matching my speed and maintaining the gap between us.

“You wanna check the map?” I asked. “Or you wanna wing it?”

I looked over my shoulder as I braked, preparing to turn around. That’s when something really important, something that I’d overlooked, became blazingly obvious.

The trees and shrubs growing up the fence on the right side of the road were glowing red.

The damned brake lights.

Why didn’t I think to take out those fucking brake light bulbs?

Maybe a better question was why it’d taken so long to notice. Was the virus cooking my brain into a new kind of dementia immune even to introspection?  And what about Murphy? Why didn't he signal me about the brake lights much earlier? Or maybe he did, and I didn't notice.

The sound of a bad tuba player reaching for octaves outside his range startled me. I jerked my head to my right. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of small and large branches snapped.

Twigs, grass, and leaves exploded through the fence ahead of us from the right side of the road. A massive Hereford burst out of the flying debris, trailing strands of barbed wire and spewing a bloody froth. Other cattle broke through between the trees. Some got tangled in the barbed wire and wailed.

Whites shrieked and poured through the holes in the fence, grasping at the big Hereford now in the center of the road.

One of the Whites pounced at the beast and in the slow-motion, liquid time of surprise, the White flew through the air like a Neanderthal Superman with a knife in hand, trying to catch his prehistoric supper.

As that image worked its way through my overindulgent imagination, I realized all of the Whites coming through the fence were naked and bald. Many of those closest to the cattle slashed and stabbed with kitchen knives, hunting knives, barbecue forks, and fireplace pokers.

The gasping beasts blew a mist of red through moos that sounded more and more like cries.

And my foot was still on the brakes slowing the car to a baby crawl, a speed that would tempt any predator.

The red light still glowed on the trees.

Whites stopped and looked away from their prey, surprised by the red glow. They apparently took just as long as I did to wrap their virus-addled brains around the same conclusion I was getting to: I was about five seconds from being totally fucked.

Chapter 3

I slammed the brake pedal down. The Mustang jerked and the tires chirped as they bounced and skidded. Just to make sure that I had the attention of every fucking White in the road.

Not really. I was startled by the noise and primal violence on the road in front of me. Instinctively, my emotions were revving up to full-blown scared shitless.

I wasn’t thinking.

The car lurched to a stop. I pushed the shifter into reverse, and the white reverse lights on the rear of the car illuminated the trees and bushes in a much brighter hue.

It was like I was trying to get every one of the white fuckers to notice me. The only stupid thing I didn’t do was lean on the horn.

I mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and the car rocketed backward on the kind of instant acceleration that only electric motors with a flood of amps pouring through them can deliver.

Still in liquid slow time, I realized that poor Fritz should have followed my seatbelt example—harness really—when he'd gotten in. Whereas I was buckled in tight, he was thrown against the dashboard, and his skull pounded a spider web of cracks across the glass, leaving a bloody smear.

When I cut the wheels and slammed the brakes again, having warp-drive jumped across a few hundred yards, Fritz’s limp body rolled back into the passenger seat, and his weapon, keychain flashlight, and map tumbled to the floorboard. Blood poured a red river over his face from the wound on his forehead.

Shit.

I hoped he was okay. But I’m a pragmatic fucker when I start to get my head cleared out, even while the shit is flying. Whatever damage I’d done wasn’t going to get undone with hope and worry.

The car spun as it came to a stop. I hadn’t managed to turn it all the way around, but I turned the wheels and got the Mustang straightened in the road before Murphy had reversed the Humvee more than a few more car lengths in the other direction.

I looked out the Mustang’s back window and got a quick glimpse of cattle trying to escape the mauling, while hundreds of Whites chased my red brake lights.

In front of me, Murphy maneuvered the Humvee into a lumbering Y-turn, spinning up gravel on the shoulder as he urged the heavy, armored vehicle to move.

The Whites behind me closed the gap.

I recalled how I’d been caught in that Humvee in front of the hospital back in August, with what seemed like a million infected screamers surrounding me. I’d lost control of my Humvee then. It was only through luck or answers to hasty prayers that I made it out.

As Murphy's Humvee plodded, I imagined all the Whites I couldn't see, running toward us at full speed from out in the fields on the other side of the trees. If enough of them surrounded the Humvee, our little expedition to College Station would have an unpleasant end.

“Fuck!” None of us is going to make it.

At least that was my thought, because I was still stuck in flight mode. I needed to reset and take control. It was time to put some dents in my fine electric machine and waste some Whites.

Reaching over and grabbing Fritz's collar to hold him steady, I put the Mustang back in reverse. Taking a half second to be careful, I accelerated the Mustang backward at the chasing Whites.

Some of them stopped. Many of them slowed. The stupid, aggressive ones kept after me at full speed.

And I knew—at least, I did all I could to convince myself—that no matter how many Whites got in front of the Mustang, I had enough power under my hood to burrow through. I only hoped the car would hold together when it came to that.

The Mustang lurched with the shock of the first White I plowed over. He went under the car, as I guess his knees buckled with the impact of the bumper. A second, third, and fourth went down.

Whites were beside me by then. I mashed the brakes hard to stop.

They grabbed at the car as I spun the wheels. The Mustang caught some traction, and the g-force pushed me into my seat.  All the infected who’d managed to grab on either let go or lost their fingers as a gap instantly formed.

Up ahead, Murphy had gotten the Humvee straightened out on the road and was rolling toward our escape when I drove up beside him. I goosed the Mustang and zipped out front. I needed to be in the lead again, not just because of the Mustang’s stealth, but because I needed to find a place to stop and look after Fritz, and I didn't want Murphy driving off into the countryside without noticing.

We only needed to get away from the naked horde first.

Chapter 4

Drooling and mumbling, as if through a dream, Fritz blinked disorientation and blood out of his eyes as he tried to figure out what was happening.

At least he wasn’t dead, though, with all the blood, I wasn't going to put a bet on his longevity.

On the crest of the hill’s roll, with a view of a mile or more in all directions, I brought the Mustang to a stop. A stand of trees crowded the road on one side, growing through a fence and filling a ditch. A billboard with its paper ads peeling away in layers under the gaze of bulbless lamps stood on warped pine creosote poles. A quarter mile down the slope in front of us, two neglected houses reigned over one-acre homesteads, sharing an artificial pond in between.

I studied those two houses through my night vision goggles, looking for Whites in the dim moonlight, expecting them to be there, just knowing that at any minute, those insufferable white monsters would come tumbling out the windows, running out from under the sagging roof of the squat barn, or pouring out from behind a row of round bales of hay.

Nothing moved.

My breathing slowed from adrenaline-driven, hyperventilated gasps to something in the vicinity of normal. I clicked the release on my harness, pulled it over my shoulders, swung the Mustang’s door open and got out in the middle of the road. Through habit more than thought, my machete found its way into my right hand, and the pistol filled my other. If any Whites were hiding close enough to come at me, they were going to die while their goldfish brains were still trying to formulate the complex emotion of surprise.

That thought turned my scowl into a narrow, wicked smile.

I hated running.

I liked killing.

Murphy rolled the Humvee up behind the Mustang. He and Grace looked at me through the glass.

I liked killing?

Did I really? Was that a nasty truth I’d been hiding from myself beneath layers of conflicted emotions, because it was such a reprehensible desire? To like killing, to crave it, maybe, what would that say about what kind of man I was down at my core?

Or did I need to kill because I was halfway fucked in the head, and killing Whites offered a perverse exorcism of the monsters that lived in my thoughts?

Jazz, Grace, and Murphy all got out of the Humvee, examining everything nearby for a danger that might lurk there. Gabe got out last, glanced at the Mustang and then at me, a question stuck in his open mouth.

Pointing at the car, I said, “Fritz got hurt.” I put my fingers on my forehead. “He’s bleeding pretty bad.”

Gabe’s face showed his alarm.

I said, “He bumped his head on the window when I was driving crazy. He’s conscious now, but he was out until just about the time we pulled up here.”

Gabe ran to the passenger side of the Mustang.

Murphy stepped up close to me. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I think so,” I said, as I looked back at Gabe.

“How’d it happen?” Murphy asked. “Did one of those Whites come through the window?”

“He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.” I slowly shook my head as I thought it through. Maybe the seatbelt seemed like a no-brainer necessity to me because I’d been in the car before with the pedal all the way to the floor. “I should have made him do it when we got in.”

Jazz jogged over to the Mustang, and Grace walked up beside Murphy and me. She asked about Fritz. I quickly explained again.

“Head wounds bleed a lot,” she said. “It might not be as bad as it looks.”

That was good news and did a lot to assuage the tinge of guilt I was feeling.

“What’s the plan?” she asked. “Move him back to the Humvee?”

I nodded.

“You need to be careful with that thing,” she said, pointing at the Mustang.

I ignored the directive and refrained from saying ‘You’re not my mother.’ I don’t know where the temptation to say immature shit like that comes from, but sometimes it seems like such a good idea.

“He knows all the clear roads to get us to College Station,” she said.

“I’m sure Gabe knows too,” I told her. “Besides, Fritz has a map. It’s in the Mustang on the floor. It’ll have the roads marked that are passable. All we’ll need to do is avoid the horde wherever they happen to be. We’ll be fine.”

“I’ll ride shotgun in the Mustang, then.” Grace looked at me, challenging me to disagree.

I shrugged. I frankly didn’t care who was navigating, as long as somebody was.

Gabe had Fritz out of the Mustang and on his feet. Together with Jazz, they guided him slowly toward the Humvee.

Murphy looked around, taking pause as he studied each shadow, a habit of the living.

I looked out across the fields, scanning for Whites, especially looking for a gang of them coming out of the trees, or the whole horde coming over the last hill we passed. Grace started talking, and the syllables sounded like unimportant monkey noises, because I was still hung up on the idea of killing for pleasure, if that was the right word for it.

Zed, the killer. The idea had a cobweb stickiness to it that wouldn't let go of my other thoughts, and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted it to. It's as if, in those gossamer tendrils, a truth, something much more profound, hid from me.

On their own, my feet carried me along the peeling double yellow line that traced the road’s center. Grace’s useless noise faded away from my ears. The sounds of the others busying themselves with Fritz became part of the night’s background.

Some significant answer was waiting for me in my subconscious thoughts. Somehow, the stark sky and the empty night were making it easier to get close to.

And I needed to find it.

Chapter 5

I suppose I had been standing in the middle of the road for a minute, or two, or maybe an hour. The world of my thoughts obeys no clock’s arbitrary segmentation of time.

I found myself appreciating the exquisite blanket of an ink sky, dotted with pinprick stars and cast aglow in a faint silver from a thin crescent moon.

Shadows moved all around me under swaying trees and around the tall weeds. Crisp brown leaves crackled against one another as gusts rolled over the unharvested crops.

In the calm that came from stopping to listen for the first time in months, I knew no Whites were near. We were all, for the moment, safe.

I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time in a good, long while. Yet, as much as I indulged the meditative moment, I was fully aware of the others. Fritz was in the Humvee, conscious, but dazed and bleeding where the glass had split the skin on his forehead. Murphy was conversing tensely with Grace, who was asking questions, most of which sounded like some version of how crazy was I, and why was I off standing in the middle of the road, a good distance from the vehicles?

They didn’t know.

Neither was I sure.

I only knew that I had shit to get together.

Shit I needed to get together, or I was going to stay on the path I was on, and I was going to end up dead. And Murphy was going to be dead, too. And probably some of the others.

As I ruminated, I understood with more and more clarity that I needed to do something significant to break the cycle of habit I was in: imagine something stupid, do something stupid, run, kill, repeat.

Even as I realized that, I convinced myself that my habit was itself the key to breaking it. And I imagined a solution that I knew conflated all the shit at the roots of my bad choices. The epiphany of it all was in knowing my solution might very well be a lie, and accepting that as okay.

It was a lie I knew I could tell myself enough times to believe.

Hell, why not?

A person is nothing if not the product of the lies he believes about himself.  And if I believed that, why couldn’t I consciously select the specific lies that were going to define me?

Why the fuck not?

I shrugged in response to the conversation in my head.

I slipped the Hello Kitty backpack’s straps off my shoulders and let it drop to the asphalt. I lay my machete on the road and then took off my belt and holster. Each layer of clothing fell away until I was naked.

The voices behind me stopped talking.

I knew what they were thinking.

It didn’t matter.

I had problems to fix. Being ostracized from our little social circle wasn’t a worry that blipped on my radar.

“What are you doing, man?” Murphy asked from a few steps behind me.

I gave him a glance over my shoulder. His weapon was in his hands, ready for use. I turned toward the night and answered, “What I have to do.”

“What’s that?” His voice put his worry on full display.

I bent over and picked up the knife I’d taken from Mr. Mays’ house a few months prior. I tested the blade on my thumb. I kept the edge as razor sharp as I had time to. I ran a hand over the crop of short hair on my scalp. It wasn’t long enough yet to yank out again. I raised the knife, laid the sharp edge at the hairline on my forehead and scraped backward.

“Bald was never a good look on you,” Murphy said, with a fake laugh.

I shrugged. At least this time, someone was paying attention to the gesture.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Don’t make me explain it,” I said. “You guys take the cars.” I pointed down at my backpack and clothes. “And my stuff. I’ll meet you in College Station.”

“I will make you explain it,” Murphy told me. “We need to see if one of these little towns has a drugstore. I need to check your temperature.”

I laughed.

“Why’s that funny?”

“You don’t need to check temperature to know that somebody is a White. You just have to look at them.” I turned to Murphy. “You only have to look to know the crazy ones. You know that.” I didn’t believe the lie I was going to tell, but in time I knew I was going to make myself believe it. “I can tell, too, just by looking.”

Murphy nodded but kind of shook his head at the same time.

Murphy saw through the lie for the same reason I knew I was lying. We’d both killed Whites by the score, but we’d both also killed Slow Burns, and I knew I'd killed docile ones like Russell. I’d done so because I’d made the choice to live each time uncertainty arose. I always chose to kill rather than chance my death.

Did that make me bad?

Did the karmic scales of the deaths of the good and the bad balance out?

I dropped a big clump of short hairs and watched them spread through the breeze as they fell. I dragged the knife across my scalp and scraped another stripe bald.

“I don’t know what’s up with you,” said Murphy. “You’re not a White. You’re not one of them.”

“Back after Mark killed Amber…” I choked on the words. Damn those emotions. "I think I lost it for a while there."

“All that Tarzan shit at the hospital?”

“That and more.” I stopped to collect my thoughts into sentences that I hoped wouldn’t leave me sounding insane. “I wanted to find Mark and kill him. I wanted to make him suffer. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted anything so badly. It was like all the evil in the world, all the fucked-up shit that ever happened to me, had found its focus in him, and I knew if I could just strangle the life out of him, see his eyes bulge, feel his last breath on my face, I thought…”

“What?” Murphy asked. “That maybe revenge would make you something you're not? That it might fix something?"

I nodded.

“It doesn’t.”

I turned away and scraped another row of hair off my head. My scalp was turning slick with blood from my poor barber job. "You told me that story of those three gangbangers you killed. I know you say you found a way to get right with it eventually. You felt like you were a bad person for a long time. Do you ever wonder if killing them was a necessary step in the transformation of the lesser Murphy into who you are today?”

“I…” Murphy lost his way through whatever argument was formulating in his head.

“I know you’re afraid to answer,” I told him. "You think I'm baiting you into agreeing with me, but I'm not. You had to find your way through life to get to where you are now." I looked at his face to see if I could read his feelings about what I was saying. “I need to do the same. I told myself after Amber’s death that revenge was a stupid, selfish endeavor. Now, and every day since Steph died, I can’t get past the thought that if I’d figured out how to find that bald-headed fuck and kill him, she might still be alive.”

Shaking his head vigorously, Murphy said, “You didn’t even see Mark there that night when Steph was killed. “All we saw were a bunch of dumb Whites. That’s it. You don’t even know he’s alive. Is that what you’re talking about, here? You’re just going to run around Texas with your dong hanging out until you find a bald-headed White that looks enough like Mark that you can kill him and feel good about yourself?”

I nodded, not caring that Murphy’s summation of my plan made it sound every bit as stupid as it was. “I need to kill him. I don’t know that I can find him. But I need to kill him." I pointed to the crest of a hill against the star-sprinkled sky. "The naked horde is over there somewhere. At least some of them are. If they're there, Mark won’t be too far. They all stick together.”

"No, they don't," Murphy argued. “Up at the lake we saw parts of the horde. Not the whole thing.”

“Maybe we only saw parts of the horde,” I told him. "With all the hills and trees up in that area the whole horde could have been within a mile of us, and we wouldn't have known."

“What?” Murphy’s face showed how little he thought of my counterpoint. “Am I supposed to accept that? Is that your whole argument?”

I shook my head. “I’m not making a logical argument. I’m just telling you what I need to do. I need to find Mark and I need to kill him. He’s a roadblock for me in my drive toward happy Murphy-ville. It’s that simple. It’s revenge. It’s justice. It’s catharsis. It’s whatever I want to call it. I only know I have to do it. I can’t move forward until I do.”

Chapter 6

At the end of it, Murphy understood. At least, he said he did. Grace made a perfunctory effort to dissuade me, but in the end, she just shook her head and frowned, disappointment at a stupid choice. It was a combination of gestures I’d seen from people my whole life. Jazz told me I was crazy and made the biggest effort to change my mind. Gabe watched some of it, but mostly stayed close to Fritz.

After they all loaded up, they wouldn’t drive away. Maybe they didn’t want to feel the guilt of abandoning me. Maybe they were playing a mind game, allowing me to face the reality of my choice in hopes that I’d change my mind. Or maybe they thought I was being a junior high kid, acting out for attention.

What do I know? I’m not a shrink.

I waved at them and walked naked into the darkness.

Well, naked except for the boots. I kept those, along with Mr. Mays’ knife, tucked inside above my ankle. And, of course, I carried my machete.

I wrestled quite a bit with the choice of whether to wear the boots. They could mark me as different when I went among the naked Whites in the horde. But I didn’t have four months’ worth of calluses built up on shoeless feet, as I was sure the naked Whites all did. I didn’t know how many miles of thorns and rocks and broken glass were waiting out there to mangle my soles with cuts and sores. They would surely turn infected from running through all the pissy mud and shit they left along their way.

I wondered how many Whites simply died of infection that festered in untended wounds. As many or more had to be succumbing to exposure on the nights when the air turned frigid. How many would make it through the winter? Jeff Aubrey’s apparently incorrect equations only took into account death by fratricide and starvation. What of the magnified lethality from sleeping naked outdoors, eating raw flesh, and drinking unclean water?

And the thought came to me, as it often did: what if Mark was already dead?

I stopped walking and looked back in the direction of the cars. I didn’t see anything. The black of the earth behind me was only distinguishable by the stars in the sky beyond.

I missed my night vision goggles, I think, as much as I’d have missed my machete, had I chosen to go empty-handed. As awkward as the bulky goggles felt when strapped over my head, I’d become accustomed to seeing through the blackness of the nighttime world.

I was alone with the weight of my choice.

No turning back.

Well, I guess I could have turned back to the original plan and started the long hike toward College Station. I could have ransacked some farmhouses along the way, and maybe even scavenged a running vehicle. If I put my mind to it and caught a little luck, I might even have made it there by dinnertime.

That thought comforted me.

It assured me I wasn’t trapped by the consequences of one bad choice. I was choosing to proceed based on my logical line of irrational thought.

Or it proved I was an idiot.

Chapter 7

Roads seem so much longer when walking than driving. It’s a truth that’s obvious to the point of triviality, until you park your car and walk back the way you just drove, feeling the passing of slow miles in your feet and knees.

Landmarks, too, are different to the point of unrecognizability. They’re blurs of collage and detail that stand out by color and texture, as drivers race by at seventy miles per hour. At walking speed, the eye focuses on different things, and the mind imagines a distinct farmhouse in one place, for instance, to be another in a different field on a different stretch of road.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about when I took a turn onto the road that I figured would lead me to the mob we’d seen chasing cattle across the road.

I wasn’t sure.

And that wasn’t taking into account the tizzy I was in when I’d sped away from the place earlier in the night.

All I could do was hope my memory was solid as I took a chance and headed north. If I’d remembered incorrectly, I’d walk and walk some more. One thing I figured I could count on was that I’d find the path of the horde, at least. A few hundred thousand Whites pillaging their way across the countryside would leave plenty of evidence of their passing.

I didn’t have to suffer my uncertainty long. I found the place in the road where we'd seen the Whites come through the bushes while chasing the cattle.

Blood coagulated in sticky spots on the road and puddled deeply enough to be slippery in others. Thick bones and pieces of cowhide lay in shreds and blankets, red with blood and white with fat on one side, dirty white and brown on the other. Up the road and in the ditches, naked Whites smeared in blood still gnawed on bones and gobbled bits of meat missed by their faster, stronger comrades.

I looked around at the trees growing up along the fence line. I looked at the bushes that were knocked down, and the fence pushed over by frantic cattle and thousands of chasing Whites.

A sizable band of them had been through. What I didn’t know was whether this band of naked Whites was a peripheral bunch, scouts, laggards, a splinter group, or even copycats. I only hoped that in pursuing them, I’d find my way back to the main horde, and from there, to the Smart Ones at their core.

And there, I’d find fucking Mark.

The cattle and the Whites had been moving from right to left across the road when I’d observed them from the Mustang. Looking across a field of flattened crops to the left of the road, I spotted stragglers moving off in that direction and Whites on the ground, filling their bellies on scraps of carcasses.

Null Spot, the stealthy Indian tracker, immediately realized the naked horde had a long tail and left a wide path.

The reality of seeing Mark bleed suddenly seemed within reach. On quick, excited steps, I scrambled down the steep incline of a roadside ditch and climbed the other side. I stomped my way through a trampled hedgerow of thorny bushes and twisted barbed wire, all the while patting myself on the back for my genius decision to keep the boots on my feet.

I took off across a field carpeted in the husks of the crops that had dried out in the autumn weather before they were run flat by the passing horde.

My breath flowed out in clouds of condensation. The night was turning a cold edge on all of us Whites running through it with naked skin. I knew I would have been feeling the cold were it not for the numbness the virus left with me. And I was well aware that pain is a biological feedback mechanism that tells a living thing to stop doing whatever it’s doing, lest it be injured or die.

Without sensations of pain, I needed to pay close attention to my body, or I'd risk hypothermia.

That thought gave me pause to look for the bodies of Whites in the field who might have died of exposure. Surely, some of them had succumbed to the elements. They couldn’t go all winter without clothing and not experience a pretty hefty casualty rate.

I saw none.

Then something else occurred to me. If any Whites fell, they’d likely be consumed by their hungry brothers and sisters, leaving nothing but scattered bones. That was the sum of life and death among every band of Whites. Run and kill until you die. Then feed your comrades with your dead flesh.

I jogged for a bit to get my blood flowing and to warm my body up. I walked and then jogged again, proceeding alternately as I focused on avoiding the divots in the dirt left by panicked hooves. To step in one of those at the wrong angle might result in a sprained ankle—a deadly injury with so many straggling Whites around. I guess those that followed the horde specialized in cleaning up the fallen, whether they were still alive or not.

I crested a few hills, seemingly getting farther and farther from civilization as I went. I saw shadowy copses where the terrain was too uneven to plow. Ponds with mirrored black surfaces sparkled starlight back at the sky. I realized I hadn’t seen a fence in a good while. Roads, rotting mobile homes, and barns seemed to have been stolen from the countryside.

All around me were only endless, cultivated fields, slowly turning fallow.

As I came to a walk at the end of one of my jogs, I realized I was getting thirsty. Necessarily, though, my water bottles were keeping company with a few days’ worth of food in my Hello Kitty bag in the backseat of the electric Mustang. The Mustang was probably fifty miles east by now.

Looking around for a water source, I spotted a stock pond, but didn’t want to chance a drink from one of those. Every kind of bacteria that lived in cow pies would be in that water and would probably leave me with a case of diarrhea, or worse.

I needed to find a creek. Flowing water had to be better for me than stagnant water.

On the question of food? Eh. I’d gone hungry before. And thanks to my time convalescing by the lake with Murphy, I had a store of fat to burn off. If I lost twenty or thirty pounds again, I could afford it.

I didn't think I'd be out that long, though.

I’d just started my quest and already I was tracking the naked horde. Once I found them, I’d find Mark, and I’d give him a few good whacks with my machete.

Problem solved. Walk off.

The Whites wouldn’t likely fuck with me, not while I looked like them, not while I carried my bloody machete.

Did I say how simple all of my schemes sounded as they rolled down the roller coaster of their momentum, turning surprisingly fast into adrenaline-laced screaming shit?

Yeah, I know I did.

Still, what else was I going to do? Sit in an abandoned Walmart somewhere and eat stale rice cakes until I died of old age, remembering all the people I used to know, ruminating over all the goddamned stupid things I’d done?

Fuck that.

At the crest of a hill, I spotted a geometric black silhouette across the valley, on the crest of the next long roll in the earth. The thing was, though, that I had no idea what the strange object was. I stopped and cocked my head like a dog, trying to figure it out.

What the fuck is that thing?

I hurried over furrows that ran across the slope, eager to explore the thing I was looking at. Maybe the eagerness grew out of the boredom of having spent what felt like hours crossing nothing but empty fields. In a way, I was hoping the thing I was seeing might be a house, and that I might find some food and water inside.

I stopped.

The ground on the hill across the shallow valley was odd. I stared at it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t as black as all the others I’d hiked up. Sure, some of them were covered in winter grasses that didn’t mind the chill in the nights. Others were little more than black dirt full of tan weeds and crops, tilled under by all the White feet that had passed this way ahead of me.

But this field seemed to glow a dull white in the darkness.

Chapter 8

I ’d crossed most of the wide, flat valley floor and neared what looked like a stark border between the trampled black dirt and the white glow when I realized what I was seeing. Whites.

They were lying in an endless blanket across the valley, spooning, cuddled, skin touching skin, keeping each other warm by crowding themselves together tightly as they slept. That answered a question about freezing to death. I wondered how warm they stayed, snuggled together like that, with only one side of their bodies exposed to the cold air. Was it enough?

I looked north as I thought about Whites in the colder climates. What were they doing, with snows already having fallen in places and subzero temperatures coming? Surely, they’d have figured out already they needed to shelter indoors at night. And if not? Would they all freeze to death over the winter and leave the northern states open to normals? Would they migrate from north to south and back again with the seasons, and become a new-century version of America’s great buffalo herds?

That was something to think about in the long term—the possibility of leaving Texas and heading north. Of course, the same cold that could kill Whites could also kill normals and Slow Burns, like me. My thoughts ran down a rat hole, quantifying how much wood to chop for the winter and storing provisions for the long months with snow piled outside the door. And what about the smoke from the chimney? That would certainly draw in any Whites who’d figured out how to survive in the snow.

Thoughts for another day.

Standing at the edge of a blanket of sleeping white bodies that stretched as far as I could see into the darkness, I had real business at hand, the kind that required every speck of my attention. I needed to decide what to do next.

I raised my machete and looked up and down the battered edge of the blade. How many sleeping Whites could I kill with it?

Did I want to follow the herd, blending in during the daylight hours, looking like them and acting like them, risking getting busted with my boots on? It would be easy to wait for them to cuddle up to sleep for the night and run among their prone bodies, slashing their throats. I could be the monster of their nightmares.

Did I want that?

Oh, hell yeah, I did.

I looked across the acres and acres of them, knowing the horde had probably spread itself over the crest of the hill, down into the next valley, and who knew how far beyond that. Maybe for miles. How many throats could I slash in a single night? How many nights would it take to kill them all? Weeks? Months? Years? Would I ever finish?

I scanned across all those bodies, breathing in that slow rhythm of sleep, snoring, and mumbling through their dreams. I lost hope that I could kill enough of them with my machete to make a discernible difference in their numbers.

Still, it was a hard fantasy to let go of. The idea of it tempted me into indulging more thought on how I could kill as many of those evil white monsters as possible. The problem with my whole plan, I decided, wasn’t the futility of it, it was the method. Running among the sleeping with a swinging machete was a bad idea. If I wanted to kill Whites in the mass numbers that my aspirations required, I needed a more industrial-scale solution.

I sighed. The dirt and dark skies were not fertile ground for inspiration.

Looking back at the unnatural shape at the crest of the hill, I wondered if the Smart Ones, who directed the horde, were holed up inside. More importantly, I wondered if Mark was with them, keeping himself warm and comfortable.

That thought made me angry.

He deserved no comfort. He deserved to be shivering in the cold with ticks crawling on his skin, looking for hidden places to sink their mandibles and suck his tainted blood. He needed to be itchy from poison ivy exposure and scratching incessantly. He needed a cramping gut that forced him to squat every ten minutes for temporary relief from diarrhea. And he needed skin to be left raw from squatting so many times that it burned every time he relieved himself.

But how much of that would he feel? He had a brain numbed to most pain by the virus. Just like me.

With a tight grip on the handle of my machete, I reached down to my boot and took out my knife. I needed both handy as I waded into the blanket of sleeping Whites, carefully planting my feet in awkwardly spaced gaps, often squeezing my boot between bodies to find my footing.

The going was slow. Some Whites stirred as I pushed and nudged. A few looked up at me before laying their heads back down to sleep. None made any move to threaten me.

By the time I was halfway up the hill, I came to the realization that the big, black-silhouetted thing at the top wasn’t one thing at all, but two—a giant harvesting machine parked next to a semi-tractor trailer. I’m not a country boy, but I’m not completely ignorant either. So it was obvious to me the truck was there to run alongside the harvester for offloading whatever crop had been in the field.

Disappointment slowed my progress once I figured out what the massive machines were. The Smart Ones leading the naked horde wouldn’t be sleeping inside.

Of course, that didn’t mean the cab of one wouldn’t be a great place for me to bed down for the night. It would be better than the alternative—snuggling up with the Whites on the ground.

Another thought occurred to me. I could use the harvester for a lookout tower. From up on top, I’d be able to see for miles in all directions. Perhaps I could spot the place where the Smart Ones were holed up.

Chapter 9

From the roof of the harvester, I searched. Out east, a series of black triangles and rectangles blocked the stars along the horizon. That had to be one of the countless tiny towns that dotted Texas’ farm country. Over the rolling undulations in the terrain in that direction, I saw only sleeping Whites, as though the crops that had grown in the fields had been replaced.

So many.

As I turned, looking for anything that might give me a bead on the Smart Ones, I uttered under my breath, “I’m your nightmare.”

I loved that thought.

It tantalized me with its power.

It made me feel like an invincible Ninja, a black beast, a long-toothed devil with an appetite for white killers’ blood that I could pour into the void in my soul.

I teased myself with vignettes of Whites waking in the morning and looking at the bloody, cold bodies lying around them. I decided that their wretched little brains had the capacity to fear what haunted their nights. I wanted them to know the price of their sins and to dread the moment when they’d wake with a machete through their throats, choking as they drowned in their blood.

The memory of Steph’s dying hand wounded my heart again as I felt her lifeless fingers slip away from my grasp, and I hoped to God every White beneath my gaze would soon feel the heart-rending fear of the night monster that stalked them, reaping his revenge.

I wanted them to walk through their days afraid to lie down to sleep. They needed to taste remorse. To suffer.

Movement along a hill crest off to my left caught my attention. A discoloration on the down slope of the hill showed vaguely against the background of the Whites sleeping there.

I stared into the dark, missing my night vision goggles again, trying to discern what I was seeing.

A house?

A farmhouse?

Along the crest, something moved again, and I watched the pale silhouettes against the starred background. Three—thin, muscular, and naked—walking together.

Sentries?

I continued to watch. To the right of the house—it had to be a house—another three Whites cast silhouettes as they tiptoed through the sleepers along the crest.

Yes. Definitely sentries, walking in wide circles around that farmhouse.

Gotcha, motherfuckers.

The Smart Ones leading the naked horde had to be in that house. Why else would sentries be walking a perimeter around it?

My problem with Mark was going to find its solution before the night’s end. I wished I had some hand grenades. Then all of those smart white fuckers in the house would die. I entertained a fantasy of pounding a grenade into Mark’s mouth, breaking his teeth and watching the blood pour out, humiliating and hurting him before I pulled the pin.

Pointless, but fun to think about.

Still, I had my nicked-up machete. It had served me well in killing. It would do for turning Mark into a carcass.

I climbed quietly down from the harvester and made my way through the sleeping Whites.

As I drew closer to the house, the Whites seemed to get more aggressive. No longer did they docilely ignore my nudging and pushing as I stepped over them. Missteps earned me grunts and angry growls. More than once, I bumped a White too hard and the reaction knocked me off my feet. Of course, I landed on other sleeping Whites who woke, none too pleased.

Each time it happened, I brandished my machete and faced aggressive Whites with a silent promise to swing my blade. Their goldfish brains understood the threat because they’d seen blades kill. None pushed me past the threat to slice their throats. Not that I minded killing any of them. My concern lay in making enough of a commotion that I’d chance waking the Smart Ones in the farmhouse.

I was maybe a hundred yards from the house when I caught the attention of one of the trios of sentries. They were a good distance to my left, standing still and apparently staring at me.

I raised my machete and shook it at them, hoping to ward them off.

They were unfazed and continued staring.

I pressed on toward the house, keeping an eye alternately on it and on the three Whites, who were keeping an eye on me. It was only through the luck of hearing an animal scampering on the metal roof of a shed near the farmhouse that I looked to my right and realized I’d fucked up.

Chapter 10

Six or seven Whites had fanned out to my right, the closest standing only a few dozen paces away as I tiptoed between sleeping bodies on the ground. A few sentries were coming directly at me. Others weren’t. The lizard core of my brain recognized the trap immediately and shouted inside my head, “Run, motherfucker!”

I ignored it as irrationality trying to raise a panic and I looked at the house where I suspected—knew—the Smart Ones were sleeping. I estimated the distance to the Whites closing in on my right. I looked at the three who’d been standing to my left, but were now hurrying past their sleeping brothers and sisters. There had to be Smart Ones, or semi-Smart Ones among them because their actions were too deliberate for stupid white monsters.

They were clearly coming at me, or at least encircling me.

But they weren’t running. Why?

Maybe they couldn’t because of all the sleepers littering the ground who might wake and make a mess of everything. Maybe the sentries weren’t sure what I was. Maybe they were afraid of me and my machete. Maybe they wanted to capture rather than kill me.

That last one was a frightening thought, because it implied a lot about the command and control abilities of my adversaries in the house.

The panic I’d felt a moment before was the correct response. It wasn’t irrationality.

It was time to move my feet.

Glancing back and forth for the safest vector, I spun around and took quick steps over the sleeping Whites.

No surprise, the pursuing sentries quickened their pace. And if anything, they were moving faster than I was.

Running wasn’t a solution I thought would work. That was only a path to twisted ankles and falling into a tumble of Whites, from which I suspected I’d never get up again.

Instead, I put my own virus-tainted brain to work and dredged out an inspiration. I usually have no trouble coming up with an idea on the fly, though I try not to evaluate the quality of those ideas too closely.

I smacked a sleeping White across the head with the flat of my blade and leapt across a few sleepers, not aiming my foot at a shadowy spot of ground between two prone Whites, but at the nearest, flattest spot I saw on a white body.

As my foot landed, driving the wind out of an unsuspecting dreamer, the guy I’d smacked with my machete was already winding up an irate bellow.

And before the sleeper was awake enough to catch his breath, I’d leapt to my next victim, taking care to swing my machete across as many Whites as I could reach, hoping to hit them hard enough to wake them.

Leap number two worked as hoped. I was off again.

The trick, it turned out, was to get off fast. To linger too long on a single step was to risk all kinds of bad outcomes. As that thought came to me, I figured the faster I ran, the better my chances, as long as I didn’t misplace a foot. So I bet my sense of balance and what I hoped was a traction advantage with the soles of my boots against my pursuers. I sprinted, leaving a wake of commotion I hoped would slow them down.

I’d made it a few hundred yards when I came to a clear spot and stopped, panting heavily. I turned to get an idea of the state of things behind me. My plan was working.

Oh yeah, bitch, that’s right. The genius is back in the game.

A wedge-shaped swath of pandemonium grew out along my path and pointed right at me. It was a sign that even the stupidest of Whites coming after me would be able to figure out. Too bad for them that they were caught up in the crowd of grouchy Whites waking from their sleep and bouncing to their feet.

Whites were sitting up in all directions or climbing to their hands and knees. Awakened by the sounds, many were already on their feet.

Things were about to get dicey, and if enough pissed-off Whites decided I was the entrée, things would zip right past dicey and on to straight-up fucked again.

It was time for a new tactic.

Time to put that ever-useful machete back to work. I spun in a quick circle and whacked or lacerated the skull of every White within reach. It’s surprising how quickly some of those damn things wake. They don’t waste any time groaning about needing a coffee. They bounce right up, ready to rumble.

I pushed between a pair of them and took off at a jog, zigzagging back and forth, kicking and slashing, running in circles. I was trying to raise as big a mob of them as I could in the twenty or thirty seconds of safety I figured I had before the first of the sentries reached that clear spot I’d just left.

I was putting the smell of blood in the air, wounding a bunch of Whites, some—enough—to make them vulnerable to their hungry comrades, and I was inciting a riot, or whatever passed for a riot among the naked Whites. I was betting that if I got enough of them up, the odds of the sentries finding me would sink to zero.

Whites started to howl as the smell of blood worked its way into their nostrils and reminded their empty stomachs that a meal would come in awful handy.

Screaming started as some saw the machete cuts as an invitation to partake of their comrade’s flesh. The noise woke more, and the undefined perimeter of my mob spread.

Before I knew it, thousands were up all around, and none seemed particularly interested in me.

I couldn’t have hoped for better.

It was time to go.

I hurried through the mob, keeping a wary eye out for any Smart One with a knife or any stupid one looking to make a bad decision. Bad, as defined by my possession of a machete I’d use without hesitation or guilt.

Soon enough, I found myself among Whites, of whom only about half were on their feet, the other half either still sleeping or lying down and looking around. I wasn’t irritating them with my kicks and slashes by then, just being careful as I passed, so as not to disturb any more.

I kept on in that fashion while I continually glanced back to make sure that no Whites were following along my path.

When I got to the crest of the hill from which I’d originally spotted the house that contained the Smart Ones, I figured I was home free. The valley floor was in a state of pandemonium, and still, no Whites appeared to be moving in my direction.

None was paying me any attention.

Off to my left, along the crest and a good distance away, that combine and its accompanying tractor trailer still stood, inviting me to go over and make myself comfortable sleeping on a padded seat. To do that would probably have been a mistake, as I figured that the sentries might look there for me if they suspected I was intelligent.

Instead, I dropped to the ground in a gap between two females, laid my machete in the dirt and lay down on top of it. I then spooned my way in close to one of the females and pretended at being as sleepy-still as I could manage, while I kept my eyes open and listened.

Well aware of the trouble that always seemed to come when I dared such thoughts, I congratulated myself for my quick wits and clever plan. I’d escaped my pursuers and slipped away from another brush with death’s dirty maw.

I wanted to laugh.

Of course, I didn’t. I snuggled with my new girlfriend, thankful the night was chilly enough to keep my little friend at bay, and I watched.

Chapter 11

For all the adrenaline pumping through my veins, stoked by the memory of my victory—escape—as I replayed the event in my mind over and over again, I didn’t sleep. What I wanted more than anything was for Murphy to have witnessed it or lived through it with me, so we could grin and laugh and retell the story to one another.

As it was, all I had to distract me from my story were naughty thoughts, as the female White in front of me kept pushing back, sandwiching me tight with the naked woman in back who’d embraced me and pressed her chest against me. When I wasn’t looking around, I laid my head on my bent arm, which put my face in the dirty mop of blonde hair on the head of the girl in front of me. Though I’d expected it to stink with all manner of rot, it didn’t smell bad. Or maybe I was just so used to the stench of my own unwashed odors that the woman’s smell didn’t bother me.

And then the smell of the blonde’s dirty hair would remind me of all the times I’d wished I’d run my hand through Steph’s hair and smelled it over my face as I held her tight, and that only served to bring my rage to a boil.

It took a few hours, I guess, but the mob I’d aroused down in the valley finally found their way clear to lying back down, and a kind of peace settled over the sleeping horde again. No Whites ever wandered up from the valley to the hill crest on which I lay. I did prop myself up on my elbow with some frequency to look around at the valley behind. There was always that possibility the White sentries had seen through my plan and had snuck up behind me. But they didn’t. It all worked out just as I’d hoped.

As the night wore on, I found myself looking again and again at that combine, thinking what I could do with that hulking beast of a machine. I started to think that if I could make my way over to it—and I surely could—I might be able to get it started up. And I bet myself I could get all that spinning harvesting machinery running at full tilt and just plow it over that farmhouse on the other side of the valley.

I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing Mark’s bulging eyes as I choked him to death, but there was always that remote chance that I might see his lopped-off head fly over the cab, eyes still blinking, when the farmhouse and its occupants disintegrated under the harvester’s violent might.

I almost giggled wickedly at that, but did my best to make it sound like a cough that twitched through my body and prompted the girls to snuggle closer.

It was time to go.

I extricated myself from the embrace of my girls and took another good look around. Nobody on his or her feet was nearby. I headed through the sleeping Whites.

I arrived at the side of the truck first and figured I’d check it out before moving on to the combine. Besides, I saw in a movie once where one of these big rigs had been driven through a house or something. I wasn’t married to the idea of the harvester. I just wanted to kill Mark and his smart, infected buddies. The first thing I noticed was that the truck had sunk into the dirt up to its axles. A result of the torrential rains back in September, I guessed. All that water had turned the field into a soupy mix of mud and chaff. I saw that the driver’s side door was swung open and pushed all the way forward on bent hinges. Likely caught in a howling wind in that same storm.

I didn’t have high hopes for the tractor trailer.

Inside the truck’s cab, a couple of Whites lay entangled across the seat, looking the part of two lovers, worn out after wrestling for hours to bring one another to pleasure. Pressed together as they were I couldn’t tell if they were male and female or two of a kind? Were they lovers or simply two beasts sharing the comfort of a padded, narrow bed, and the warmth of one another’s bodies, while the cold air bit at their skin?

Of course, the pair made me think of missed opportunities. Anger followed, and I hefted my machete, feeling ghoulish for wanting to hack and slash at two people, entwined and looking as human as any that lived before the virus came.

Why couldn’t the certainty of my hatred for these things stand a little more firmly?

I asked myself whether the pair had feelings for each other. Was it possible? Did any of these Whites still have clear thoughts about anything? Did they feel sorrow for those they killed to fill their bellies? Did they cry in the dark for the children they’d lost?

Or the ones they murdered?

I blinked away emotions that threatened to swell, as the shameful side of everything I’d seen and done found room to run in my thoughts.

I turned away from the two lovers and gritted my teeth, doing my best to embrace the hate I felt for all in the naked horde. I brought to mind memories of the friends I’d seen die, and that was all I needed.

Rage.

I turned away from the truck’s cab and nearly stepped on a gaunt-faced White, lying on his side, with a grimace on his sleeping face. I told myself it was meanness and rammed the pointy end of my machete down through his temple.

He jerked and choked and then a slow exhalation of his last breath leaked out of his throat.

He didn’t move after that, though a few of the Whites lying by him stirred.

I’d taken my first step toward being the nightmare beast I’d been imagining all evening. It wasn’t as satisfying as I’d imagined. It felt more like stomping on a rat and hearing it squeak as it died.

I wrenched the machete out of the dead White’s skull and made my way past the other sleepers until I was next to the combine.

It was a big green monster, shaped roughly like an enormous refrigerator pushed over on its side, with huge wheels on the back and large, triangular shaped tracks on the front. The tracks hadn’t sunk into the mud. That was good. On the front of the harvester, a glass cab bigger than the kitchen in my apartment was tinted in black and looked like a dark-colored head on a giant green bug. The yellow stripes painted down the sides were worn and scraped from years of hard work. Out of a big storage bin on the back, a boom swung, with its tip angled down toward the following truck’s trailer.

I made my way past the prone bodies to examine the wide, orange-colored corn harvesting device mounted on the front of the giant green bug. Wide enough to cut twenty or thirty rows of corn simultaneously, it looked to have been born from torture and crafted for violence.

Just above ground level, dozens of long, metal, arrow-shaped pieces served as guides to route everything back to the mechanical nightmare of big-toothed saw wheels, thrashing strips of metal, gears, and conveyors. Still across those wheels were stuck stalks of dry corn plants that had been too jammed in the machinery to blow away in the hurricane wind. All that sharp, spinning steel guided the corn toward the mechanical bug’s throat, a pipe that sucked all the mangled corn from the shredders into the beast’s belly. Whatever lay in there was designed to separate chaff from cob, and cob from kernel. What it would do to flesh and bone sent a shudder down my spine. I involuntarily stepped back.

My weathered green bug was violence on an industrial scale.

Lovely and wicked, it embodied my every sadistic dream.

Dim-witted, murderous Whites were going to spill torrents of red blood before my savage metal pet. And I was going to see Mark’s screaming fear as the spinning steel blades dismembered his body and juggled the warm, drippy pieces through the machinery.

No matter what ambivalence I felt over the gaunt White I’d just killed, I’d feel only satisfaction when Mark’s life leaked out of his veins.

Careful to step over the sleeping Whites, I made my way back to the side of the combine and climbed up the steps to the cab’s door. It wasn’t locked. With a care to be quiet that had become a natural way of interacting with the world, I ever-so-gently handled the door mechanism and let myself into the large, roomy cab. I pulled the door shut behind me and latched it closed. The Whites sleeping nearby paid me no mind. They might as well have been disinterested nudists on a camping trip.

The cab was clean, but smelled of old rot. The seat had no blood on it. I saw no signs of struggle. Even the keys remained. I spotted a personal-sized cooler on the floor in the corner of the cab, with the lid ajar. I guessed that was a lunch, abandoned months ago when the operator of the combine had hurried off to… well, he probably hurried off home. That was my guess. I was full of guesses. It was the Sherlock Holmes game I played in my mind when I wasn’t busy killing or running. In a world full of clues and murders, guessing the details of what had happened was becoming a morbid fascination.

Looking at the combine and its accompanying truck, I guessed the operators hadn’t been attacked. Their equipment had been left in too orderly a state for that. It was as if they’d been harvesting and offloading grain when they were suddenly called away, likely picked up by another vehicle. The combine and truck had been sitting here since, waiting for me to show up with my murderous imagination.

With the toe of my boot, I flipped the lid of the lunch cooler up and leaned over to look inside. Something wrapped in a sandwich bag had turned into a blob of mold and goo, long since dried out. I guessed that sandwich had been loaded with meat, cheese, mayo, probably some lettuce, and big, wet tomatoes. Moldy goo needs moisture to grow. Thankfully, a big bag of chips in its silvery, straight-from-the-store bag had been stuffed into the cooler next to the sandwich, thankfully not in a re-sealable—translate to: now tastes like mold—sandwich bag. Also in the cooler were a couple of Dr. Peppers.

I’ve never been a fan of Dr. Pepper, but, hey, I did mention that pickiness over food choices was a luxury I could no longer afford.

I sat myself in the cushy pilot seat with the chips in one hand and a soda in the other. The smell of the old sandwich in the cockpit didn’t bother me much. I’m sad to say, it’s a smell one gets used to. Having spent the last four months in a city with hundreds of thousands of decaying corpses, and more dying every day, the smell was commonplace. The thing I’d come to notice were those times when the breeze blew across my face, bearing nothing but the scent of the cedars and autumn weeds, absent the smell of death.

I gulped down a good portion of the Dr. Pepper and belched loudly. I stifled a laugh at myself as I looked out through the tinted glass to see whether my rudeness had garnered attention from outside. Nope.

The chips were stale, but again, freshness was a luxury afforded to residents of a world that no longer existed. To me, the bag contained calories and salt, both of which I needed, always needed.

With my bony ass on a cushy, clean seat, with delicious calories and caffeine molecules tickling my neurons, a shiny little bulb of inspiration plinked on brightly in my imagination. My big, green bug needed a name: Godzilla.

No. I liked Big Green Bug better.

I looked over the control console on my right.

A few yellow toggle switches stood out at the front of the panel, just below an LCD screen. It didn’t take much of an imagination to figure that’s where info on the status of the vehicle was going to be displayed.

Most of the panel below the switches was covered in buttons—at least thirty of them—in groups of different colors, some green, some orange, and some gray. Thankfully, most had graphics on their faces. Of the row of three orange buttons, one pictured a turtle, one a rabbit. I had to assume those buttons controlled how fast the combine would do something, maybe spin the blades out front.

Nothing here I can’t figure out.

Yeah, because nobody ever lets his arrogant assumptions get him into trouble.

I monkeyed with the buttons, dials, and switches, and I was quickly rewarded with an assumption-confirming illumination of the LCD screen that fried a rectangular blur of light onto my retina. I turned the LCD off and blinked away my temporary blindness, hoping no White outside had noticed the light inside the cab.

When I felt I could see well enough again, I scanned the darkness around the combine. Nothing out there seemed to have done anything in response to the flash of light. The cab’s darkly tinted windows were probably a significant factor in that.

I searched around the cab again and came up with a jacket, probably stored in the cab for those times when the weather turned cold or the driver got caught in the rain. I draped it over my head and over the LCD screen to limit the light that might escape. I brought the screen back to life.

I’d thought that I might have some difficulty understanding all the info the screen might display, but it turned out the default view was nearly as easy to understand as an automobile dashboard. The most prominent aspect was a graphic of a gas pump and an indicator that showed the combine’s fuel tank was empty.

Dilemma number one.

If I wanted my Big Green Bug to help me in mowing down the Whites, I was going to have to feed him first.

I wondered if the farmer who’d been running the combine had left the engine on when he took off or whether he’d just been low on diesel when everything went to shit.

I sat back and thought on that one for a second, because it was an important question. If the vehicle had been left running, it would have used up all the fuel in the tank and the fuel lines before it stalled out. Then, with the key left in the on position, the battery's charge would have slowly trickled out over the passing months, leaving an insufficient charge to crank the starter.

I looked down at the key and cursed myself for not having thought to remember what position it had been in before I started fiddling.

But the LCD was on.

Surely that meant something.

I knew the battery might hold enough charge for that, and still not hold enough to crank what had to be a big starter on the massive engine.

I leaned back in my seat, propped my feet up, and set about formulating my plan as sugary caffeine in my blood told me stories about my invincibility, and my intestines gurgled with all the carbonated water running through them.

I could make all of this work.

Chapter 12

The nearest source of diesel was likely to be the truck parked near the combine. Unfortunately, the two Whites were still entwined across the seat, so I wouldn’t be able to get inside without causing a stir. The windows on that truck weren’t tinted either, so any glow from dashboard lights would be easily visible from the outside. If I could even get the bent-hinged door closed. That meant I needed an alternative method to check for diesel, which, on the truck, wasn’t at all hard to figure out.

The ground was littered with brown corn stalks, some with leaves, many without, some short, some long. I merely had to pull one out from under an irritated White, strip off a few leaves, and voila, I had a three-foot-long diesel depth-measuring device.

Yeah, I’m cool enough to name my tools.

The diesel on the semi-tractor was stored in a drum-shaped tank, attached horizontally beneath and behind the driver’s side door. It had a big metal cap, covering a hole that left me way more room than I needed to shove the stalk of corn inside to check the depth. That seemed like an easy task until the stalk I was shoving inside hit what I guessed was a device to prevent siphoning the gasoline out.

Argh!

I stood back and stared at the tank for a moment, trying to imagine another method by which I could measure the depth of the fuel, until it occurred to me it was a pointless endeavor. Even if the tank were full, I couldn’t siphon it with the siphon protector inside. Could I remove that? Sure, but could I wrestle it out of there with a crowbar and hammer without making enough noise to wake a few hundred sleeping Whites? Nope.

I scratched the truck off my list of possible diesel sources.

My next move was to evaluate the status of the fuel in the combine.

After walking around the Big Green Bug twice, looking for a gas cap, I climbed up on top. It had to be on top. That was the only part I hadn’t examined on my meticulous walks around the beast. Unless it was there in plain sight, just not visible in the dark.

Once on top, I had to take care to avoid falling into what appeared to be a bin for storing grain before offloading, because down at the bottom of the bin was a nasty-looking augur for pushing grain up through the offloading pipe. It wasn’t spinning but still looked frightening.

At the back of the combine, I found what I was looking for: a big gas cap. I unscrewed it, taking the requisite care to do so silently, lest I echo a few pings of metal through what I expected to be a big, hollow tank beneath.

Once it was off, I slipped my corn stalk down inside. Thankfully, no siphon protector guarded the hole.

My cornstalk worked, as imagined, and returned an unhappy result. The tank was nearly empty, but not completely so.

I decided that was good.

That meant the tank hadn’t been run dry by a combine left idling in the field. That meant the lines were still full of fuel. That meant the battery probably still held a strong enough charge to crank the starter. A potential list of problems had collapsed to just one. All I needed was more fuel.

I stood up and looked around, hoping I’d see something close by.

Nothing.

I guess I'd hoped that I'd see a fuel tender that I’d missed in the darkness. I mean, how much diesel did the Big Green Bug need to harvest a whole field? Surely, the farmer didn’t drive it down to the gas station when it needed a fill-up.

In the end, speculating on the topic didn’t matter. If I wanted to use my Big Green Bug to harvest the naked horde, I needed to bring some diesel to it. I recalled the shapes of roofs I’d seen when I’d been on top of the combine earlier, and I looked for them again. And there they were, maybe five miles distant.

I looked up at the sky and wondered how much night I had left. Could I find a way to get over to that town, acquire some fuel, figure out a way to transport it, and then get it all the way back here and into the combine, while my crop of ripe Whites still lay in the field?

Sure. Why not?

What the fuck else was I going to do with my time?

Chapter 13

Tiptoeing through the sleeping Whites, or at least treading carefully, I worked my way in the direction of the town I’d spotted. When I reached the edge of the sleeping horde, I was surprised it wasn’t as clearly defined as it was when I first came upon them. Small bands and cliques were nestled in sleep together, but separate from the main horde. Some lay just a few paces nearby. Other groups lay a few hundred yards away. Some were only made up of a few dozen Whites. Some were comprised of many more.

The social structures of Whites were proving to be a mystery of immeasurable depth.

That wasn’t what had my interest at the moment. Still riding a wave of confidence from my night’s little victories, I latched onto the first idea that sparked through the genius-engine wrapped within my bald skull.

I was going to commandeer one of the smaller bands of Whites and put them to work at hauling the diesel I needed. Helping hands. Why not? I’d had Whites follow me before, imitating everything I did. The less intelligent mass of them had a strong propensity to imitate, and they liked to glue themselves to whomever they perceived as their leader. Hell, that was the basis for the command structure of the whole naked horde.

I refrained from telling myself it would be too easy.

The band I chose was one of the easternmost. They were separated from the next nearest bunch by more than a hundred feet. And there weren’t that many of them. Maybe forty or fifty.

Could I control that many?

Perhaps control wasn’t the right word. Well, definitely not. Could I influence that many?

I was betting on it.

They were sleeping in a roughly circular bunch. I took off at a jog around their perimeter, smacking the ones on the edge of the circle with the flat side of my machete as I went.

They started to wake immediately. Which, of course, is exactly what I wanted.

By the time I’d made one trip around the circumference of the circle, half those I’d smacked were already on their feet and watching me come around for another pass. I tightened my grip on the handle and prepared to lop off a head as I came within reach of the first one.

You never know for sure what these fuckers are going to do.

The first one glared at me but made no move to attack.

I passed him by and cocked my head to urge him to follow.

He took a few tentative steps to follow before he broke into a jog behind me to match my pace.

I grinned.

Was it really going to be this easy?

Others fell into line as I made another trip around the circle. I kept smacking sleepers and laggards as I went. The Whites behind me started to reach down and slap their comrades as we passed, hurrying them to wake and join in.

When maybe half the group was following, and most of the others were waking up, a big White with a knife and a wide, ugly face jumped to his feet at the center of the sleepers and stared at me.

He was the alpha. This was his group. He knew I was stealing them, and he was pissed.

I quickly switched my machete to my right hand so I could conceal it behind my body as I jogged. I no longer needed to slap sleepers, anyway. My followers were doing that for me.

Knowing what was to come, I kept watch on the alpha at the edge of my peripheral vision, as I pretended to keep my attention focused in front. I wanted him to underestimate me. I wanted his wriggly, primitive brain to tell him that the skinny, white usurper with the odd, big clown feet was easy pickings.

As expected, he raised his knife and sprinted at me. Unexpectedly, he was damn fast.

I spun around, just a tad later than I should have. My machete caught him in the throat, but his momentum carried him forward, and we both fell as his body went into bloody spasms on top of me. The alpha’s twisting wrenched the machete out of my hand, and his warm blood gushed on my face and into my mouth.

But that didn’t matter.

The only thing that did matter was that I get myself off the ground before the other Whites in the band decided we were both injured, hence weak, hence breakfast.

They circled around me more quickly than if they’d been called to do so. It reminded me of kids forming a circle around two fighters on the school playground. Creepy. They shuffled on nervous feet. Their fingers fidgeted, and they looked down at us, trying in their squirmy, half-dead brains to figure out what to do next.

As I got to my feet, one laid a tentative hand on my throat. Perhaps he thought all the blood on me was my own. I batted the arm away and smashed both my fists into his chest, knocking him onto his butt.

I spun to see if any others were coming and instead saw a White reaching warily down for my machete as though it were a wriggling snake.

I jumped over and shouldered her aside, stomping on the alpha’s head, and yanking the machete out of his throat. I raised the blade high and dared the Whites around me with my scowl. Males and females averted their eyes.

I was the new boss.

I hacked the old alpha once across the head and jogged another circle around his body.

A couple of female Whites dropped to their knees and buried their teeth in the alpha’s warm flesh.

I smacked each with the flat side of my machete to scold them for following their desires instead of my lead. One sulked away. One stood up, stopped me by getting right in my way, and spit a gob of dripping red flesh into her hand, extending it to me as a gift.

All the Whites stopped. Most watched me and the piece of spit-covered flesh. Others dropped to feed on their old leader. Several of the males grew agitated, and their eyes lingered on mine in longer and longer increments. They were measuring me and building up their courage.

Sherlock Zed came to the unpleasant conclusion that he needed to partake of the old leader’s flesh to seal the deal on the transfer of power.

If you go, go all the way.

I hollered a monkey scream, and as everyone flinched away, I hacked down on the old leader's forearm, severing it completely. I scooped it up, opened my mouth wide, baring my teeth, and mashed it against my mouth as I closed it.

I wanted them to think I ate some of the other guy's flesh, but I had no desire to actually do so.

With blood over half my face and dripping from my chin I threw the forearm down and hollered again.

None of the males looked me in the eye.

Done.

I gave them all time to feed, and when they seemed to have enough in their bellies, I led them away. My band of Whites jogged behind as I followed a senseless, winding path across the field, heading east toward the small town.

Chapter 14

Despite my few successful intuitive leaps with respect to White behavior, some of their actions make no sense to me at all. After getting my Whites accustomed to following me, I figured I’d give up the serpentine running and make better time by proceeding along a straight path. It didn’t work. Stragglers fell off the back. Others started to wander after anything along the path that caught their interest. I figured that running along the serpentine path was just mentally taxing enough to keep the whole of their simple minds focused.

It was no surprise that my attempt to rest them with brief walks was also a failure.

So it was that we ran along a meandering back and forth path to cover the five-mile distance needed to put ourselves onto the potholed asphalt road into town.

The sky was turning brighter in the east as we entered the town. That angered me, but there was nothing to be done about it. I’d gotten my Whites to town as quickly as I could. I still had to find some diesel, find a way to transport it, and get it back to the combine. I only hoped the naked horde hadn’t gone too far away by the time I got the combine running to chase them.

After a long night of running, I figured my Whites needed water and something more to eat. I wasn’t attached to them. I was being pragmatic. If they got too hungry or thirsty, they might follow their instincts rather than me.

I looked from side to side at the houses, hoping to see something that looked like it might be a source of food. What I noticed, though, were crosses, all made from white PVC pipe, each roughly three feet tall, planted in the front yards of the houses along the road.

Doors were similarly marked with painted crosses, some neat, some sloppy. Bible verses were written on the sidewalks, on the curbs, and walls, mostly deliver-me-from-evil type stuff.

Every house we passed was open, with broken windows and doors swinging on hinges. Yards were littered with furnishings, books, torn food packages, and even some empty cans. Amidst the decaying litter lay the shreds of clothing, broken bones, and shattered skulls, some with dry remnants of brownish flesh, others bleaching to white.

It didn’t appear the crosses and verses had protected any of the residents of the houses we passed. Maybe God went bowling and forgot about the people in this town. Oh wait, he’d forgotten about everybody on the whole damn planet.

I looked nervously at the sky, concerned that my blasphemous thoughts might earn me some punishment.

When I reached the town’s main street, I turned left between rows of rundown buildings, many built back in the days when the farmers still rode horses into town and dreamed of the day they might ride the train into a big city like Austin or San Antonio. Some of those buildings looked like they’d been abandoned for nearly as long, or maybe just since the Walmart opened on the edge of town a few decades prior. I guessed there probably had to be one—every small town in Texas has a Walmart. In some of the old buildings, real estate agencies, nail salons, and antique dealers plied their trades behind big plate glass windows that were older than the business owners. Most of that glass was broken when we passed through.

At one end of the main street, an overpass grew like a small hill for traffic to pass unobstructed over the railroad lines beneath. I led my posse in that direction and climbed the steep bump of a bridge. Once at the top, I surveyed the town for a source of fuel. In the distance, I spotted a giant box of a building that, in the pale, early morning light—I couldn’t identify for certain—but I guessed was a Walmart. It was likely to have one of the elements in my fuel transportation solution.

On the other side of the bridge, it was hard not to notice how the character of the small town changed from a quaint, dying town, to something akin to a slum. The houses were smaller. Peeling paint was decades too old to protect the wood underneath, and some houses sagged or leaned, leaving me to wonder why they hadn’t already fallen down. The PVC crosses were present, as were the verses painted on walls and porches. One thing I could say for the town was that in the end, they’d united in their belief that God would step in and miracle away the zombie scourge.

I spotted a pickup and trailer parked beside one of the hovels. The house, like all others I’d seen in town, had been ransacked. The Whites had certainly done their business here. However, the trailer and truck looked untouched.

On the front and sides of the trailer, brightly painted advertisements showed pictures of Moe’s Smoked Jerky—Beef, Deer, Turkey, Chicken.

Chicken Jerky?

Odd, but I’d have eaten Rat Jerky if that’s all Moe had stocked in his trailer.

I led my band down the gravel driveway, past the pickup truck and around to the backside of the trailer where I stopped and grinned. A pair of double doors on the backside were closed and padlocked. I thanked God for the Whites’ inability to read. Otherwise, the trailer would have been broken open months ago.

I looked around on the ground and quickly spotted a line of rocks on the border of a flowerbed. Each rock was about twice the size of a softball and suited my purpose nicely. I picked one up, and the act was imitated by at least a dozen of my fifty-ish followers. I pounded the rock against the lock, and the others started to pound the trailer in a thunderous ruckus, not understanding it was the lock and not the trailer I was after.

No surprise.

On the fourth bash of stone on metal, the lock broke. I dropped my rock and heard other rocks thump into the dirt. My Whites were an impressionable lot. A few seconds later, I had the lock off, and I swung the door open to get a face full of wet, rotted flesh, slowly baking into a new kind of jerky inside the trailer.

Chapter 15

I didn’t know if it was Moe on the floor, but I decided that it had to be. The caricature of Moe painted on the side of the trailer led me to believe that he’d been a hefty fellow, which matched the body on the trailer’s floor. Putting on my Sherlock hat, it seemed to me that his relatives had locked him in the trailer early on in the outbreak. They’d had no desire to kill him, and judging by the cross in the yard and verses on the wall, had hoped to pray out a solution to the Moe problem. From the state of the town, it looked like everything had gone to shit quickly enough that the Moe problem was left to solve itself.

Given that everything went down in August, and the trailer was black except where painted with the jerky graphics, I guessed Moe had died of heat stroke. Inside, the doors were covered with red streaks, and the plywood panels were cracked. Moe had put in a good effort to get out. Obviously, he failed.

All of the Whites packed around me were looking at Moe. A few were licking their lips as they gave a thought to whether damp, smelly, Moe Jerky was worth feeding on.

Understanding the details of Moe’s demise was not the reason I opened the trailer. With a roll-down cover above a counter on one side, it was clear to me the trailer had been set up to sell Moe’s jerky. And that implied that Moe’s stock might be stored inside, which it was. Boxes and boxes were piled against one wall and bungeed in place. Mostly that worked, but it looked like Moe had made a mess of those when he was trying to get out of his trailer.

I yanked one of the boxes off the top of a tumbled pile and tore it open as the Whites watched me. The box was full of Moe-stink but inside were packages of Moe’s jerky, wrapped in plastic and labeled with the critter that had donated its flesh to the cause, along with a description of the seasonings that flavored its meat. I only hoped the seasonings were strong enough to overpower the stench of baked Moe.

I held a clear plastic package up for my mesmerized Whites to see. I ripped it open, pulled out a brown piece of meat and stuffed it into my mouth. It only took a few seconds before the smarter ones in my group grabbed packages of their own and had them open.

As the feast began, I took a handful of beef jerky packages, extra-hot, and shouldered my way past my Whites to get away from the smell. I found myself a wooden bench beside a detached garage and sat down to eat my breakfast as the morning sun rose over the horizon.

When I’d left my combine the night before, I’d done so with the urgent need to get my diesel and get back to it. My crop of sleeping Whites was in the field and ready for harvest. Now the sun was up, I guessed that the horde was on the move to find its own breakfast.

I was going to have to follow their path with my combine and hope to catch them asleep, so I could start my harvest tonight. I was in for another long day and another long night, but the result would be worth it. I’d lose a few nights of beauty sleep. That wasn’t going to hurt my non-existent chances of getting laid and Mark would be dead. A worthy trade.

Chapter 16

I lost control of my little mob of fifty or so when we passed a park with a pond on the way to Walmart. They peeled off from the line one at a time at first, but before I could accept what was happening and pretend like I was leading them, they all ran toward the water. So I followed them down to the pond’s edge and reluctantly drank.

Even after months of drinking some of the vilest water, the thought of putting the green pond water into my mouth turned my stomach. More than my thirst, I thought of all the bacteria swimming in the green soup, eager to get into my gut and give me the shits. Thankfully, my system was developing immunity to the most common malicious microbes in the water. My bouts of diarrhea were coming less and less frequently as the months passed.

It was mid-morning by the time we stepped into the Walmart parking lot, which was a mess of abandoned vehicles. Some were jammed together in collisions. Others were abandoned where they’d been parked between the painted lines. I suspected the ones with broken windows marked the places where people had died inside.

And that was the thing with the state of the world: everything hadn't gone to shit at the same time, though now, it looked like it had. The virus had taken weeks, maybe months, to reach all the nooks and crannies where people lived on the face of an earth apathetic to their plight. But the last major event that humans experienced in their messy little spots on the map occurred when the number of infected in the vicinity grew too large for them to handle. And they acted mostly the same way everyone else acted. Some holed up and boarded the windows. Some ran to the big box store to stock up one last time. Others piled into the lines of cars jammed on the roads out of town, hoping to find a safe place that didn’t exist.

They all died in the act, leaving every locale in a morbidly similar state of chaos.

Inside, the Walmart was messier than the parking lot. A riot of looting and fighting had exploded up and down the aisles. The floors were covered in all manner of merchandise, the remnants of the dead, and the piles and piles and piles of feces left behind by the ones who’d done the killing and the eating.

As foul smelling as it was, at least it didn’t stink as bad as Moe’s trailer.

The grocery section of the store had been cleaned out. The canned foods were all gone, not even dented stragglers in the trash on the floor. Given that Whites can’t make sense of cans, that meant that people had time to prepare for what was coming their way. Or, I suppose, some people in the area had lived through the initial mayhem and had scavenged the goods at a later date.

My hope, as I led my band of Whites through the mess, losing many to shiny distractions along the way, was that the things I was shopping for never made it to the top of priority lists as end-of-the-world shoppers filled their carts.

The automotive section, being stuffed in the back corner of the three-acre sales floor, didn’t appear to have gotten much foot traffic when the end finally came. Plenty of packaged tools and car doodads hung on their display stands or sat on their shelves. Sturdy racks of car batteries and tall stacks of tires went untouched. That struck me as odd until I realized I was thinking in terms of old luxuries. People only had time or room or energy for the things they needed for survival right now, or maybe tomorrow or next week. Nobody was stocking up on auto accessories they’d need in the years ahead when such things were sure to be scarce.

As shortsighted as that behavior was, I’d been doing much the same. Sure, I aspired to accumulate a stockpile of goods in a safe place to see me and mine through whatever was to come. In practice, I owned only things that I absolutely needed, and then only enough of those that would fit in my bag and not slow me down when it came time to run. And at the moment, I didn’t even have that. All I had were my boots—as yet unnoticed by my little band of white killers—my knife, my machete, and my unprotected pecker.

It was going to be nice to get pants on again when I finished my mission to kill Mark and as many of his murderous minions as I could.

I stopped walking. The White behind me bumped into me. A few more Whites bumped into him as the line came to a stop. Apparently Walmart was full of too many colorful distractions for them to give me their full attention.

I, of course, had to grab a five-gallon gas can off the shelf. That’s the foundational element of monkey-see-monkey-do. The White behind me in line copied and selected a gas can from the full shelf. The next White in line did the same.

Things got a little more time consuming after that. I had to make several trips through the Walmart to round up my mob and get them each loaded with a couple of empty red jugs. Several of us even carried green garden hoses coiled over our shoulders.

When I had them organized enough to stay on my heels, I led them back outside and to the filling station at the edge of the Walmart parking lot. It was the obvious first place to try. I didn't figure it had any fuel, but it was only a few hundred yards away, so why not?

Leading my band across the parking lot proved much easier than leading them through Walmart. They’d seen abandoned cars and the remains of bodies everywhere they’d been. Those things were not novel sights, not even for their simple goldfish memories.

Once at the gas station, I knelt down beside one of three steel plates that I knew contained the pipes the delivery trucks used to fill the underground storage tanks. I dragged the plate away and was apathetically pleased to see my imitators remove the plates from the other two holes. Inside, a pair of four-inch pipes looked at me. One was labeled Diesel. Sherlock Zed deduced that the fuel I wanted was down there. Of course.

I flipped a latch, opened the fuel pipe and leaned over to peer inside.

Motherfucker.

I’d hoped, unrealistically, to look down at a pool of diesel fuel. All I saw was a dark hole and a hint of the diesel’s reflective surface about twenty feet below.

To my right, relatively smart Whites were removing the caps on the other pipes.

Bored members of my group started to look around. Some started to wander. I sighed. Keeping them together was a chore.

I took the garden hose off my shoulder, cut off the brass fittings, and unwound it as I ran the length down into the tank. I hoped that I’d hit resistance when the end of the hose reached the bottom. I further hoped I’d hear a splash as the end dipped into the trove of diesel in the ground beneath my feet.

Neither thing happened.

I simply kept pushing the hose until I had only three or four feet left to shove. I sucked on the end of the hose, hoping to pull the diesel up so I could siphon it into my gas can. I’d never siphoned anything from one container to the next without the use of a pump. I knew how simple it all looked on TV. That should have been a red flag of stupidity for me before I even tried. As it turned out, I gave up when I became too nauseous to continue. Petroleum fumes and human lungs are not a good mix.

It probably goes without saying that I managed to get not one drop of diesel fuel into my can.

I rounded up my gang of empty gas can helpers and led them back to the park with the pond. There, I spent a good part of the afternoon lying on a concrete picnic table under a pavilion, waiting for my head to clear and my stomach to settle.

Chapter 17

As I lay and as my Whites wandered around the pond, chasing the ducks and trying to catch the big catfish that came near the surface, I started to think my situation through. That is, of course, after I considered giving up on my stupid combine plan altogether.

And it was stupid. I had to admit that. The problem I had with my inner voice advising me was that it always sounded like The Harpy telling me I was a loser and a quitter.

A quitter?

Fuck her and the asshole she married.

So giving up on even the most stupid of plans was a choice I was hardwired to reject. And that was how that thought process found its end whenever it came up.

That left me running thought experiments on how those apparently ingenious farmers were able to get those giant-ass combines up next to the gas pumps to fill them. That led me down the path of thinking how much time they wasted driving those monsters back and forth from field to gas station. I was feeling like a superior prick about what a waste of time that was, until I realized I was looking at the problem in completely the wrong way.

I sprang into a sitting position. “Duh!”

A dozen white heads snapped around, eyes glued on me.

Shit.

Deflect.

I turned and looked at an infected woman who was lollygagging near an iron garbage can holder behind me. I held the pose and hoped the other Whites’ attention would pass over me and land on her. I listened for the sound of footsteps coming through the dead, brown grass. As I listened, I couldn’t help but notice what a pretty girl the infected woman had been at one time. Impure thoughts came to mind. I shuddered and turned back to look at the Whites whose attention I’d attracted with my utterance. Thankfully, they’d all gone back to whatever they’d been doing before I spoke.

I chastised myself silently for the mistake.

Getting back to what I was thinking about, I realized the farmers probably had to have some petroleum storage tanks on their property for fueling tractors and such.

I got off the table and stretched. My posse of Whites was rested and watered, and I had a new idea. I simply had to stop by any farms I saw on the way back to where I'd left the combine parked in the field, and I was bound to find a fuel storage tank.

Problem solved.

The surprise in all that? It worked.

At the second farm I checked, I found a storage tank enclosed within a tin-sided barn. It was built on top of a framework of metal legs, so siphoning was no issue. Gravity did the work.

The little trick I played on my posse for the trip back to the combine with the full cans of diesel had me smiling through a good part of the afternoon. I left my can empty, leaving the hard work to the Whites.

After filling the combine’s tank. I had seven cans left over, some five-gallon sized, and several smaller. I attached those to the side of the combine using some rope I found in the cab.

It was time to get into some trouble.

Chapter 18

The afternoon was drifting into early evening, and I climbed onto the top of the cab of the combine, my watchtower position from before. I was irritated, but not surprised, that three of my Whites climbed with me, including the shapely female I'd noticed when I was back at the park in town.

The cab’s roof was plenty big for one person to stand on. With four it wasn’t crowded, but I didn’t appreciate the closeness of my Whites. All I’ll say about that is the absence of toothpaste and toothbrushes, coupled with a diet of carrion and whatnot, didn’t have a positive effect on oral hygiene. Okay, I’ll say two more things: bathroom habits and showers. Two under-appreciated benefits of modern civilization.

I was looking to the north, seeing trampled dirt, stomped grasses, piles and smears of human shit, and stragglers, some by themselves and some in groups. It was pretty clear in which direction the horde had gone.

I felt hands on my shoulders, rubbing their way down my back. Then they were on my butt. Instinctively, I spun around and pushed. It was the shapely girl from the park. She stumbled back and bumped a White who should have been paying attention. He got knocked off balance and fell over the side.

It wasn’t an exceedingly long way to the ground from up on top of the combine, maybe twelve or fifteen feet, definitely a survivable height. But the White wasn’t ready for the fall, and when he tumbled, he ended up landing on his head. His body crumpled over on top of him.

That got the attention of some of my posse, who’d been loitering around the combine after we filled it up with diesel.

The fallen guy didn’t move.

It didn’t matter whether he was dead. It was pretty clear to me from the way the others were closing in on him that he was going to be dinner.

The shapely girl reached a greedy hand for my genitals. I swatted her away, scowled, and grunted. She stepped back, and I thought about giving her a shove over the edge, but that suddenly seemed cruel, at least for her.

Hell, we were practically in a relationship.

But she was a beast; a hungry monster in a hot-chick wrapper with poor oral hygiene and a body stink that guaranteed any inappropriate temptation wouldn’t get far.

Still, she had been beautiful, once.

I climbed down from the combine while my posse started feeding on their dead brother. I walked twenty or thirty paces out front and gave the cab a long look. All the glass was tinted to near black. I couldn’t see inside, which meant the Whites couldn’t either, so I’d be safe during the day. At night, it might be a different story, with the LCD screen lighting the cab from the inside. There were plenty of flood lights mounted for illuminating crops to be harvested. Maybe with those blinding the Whites at night, they might not notice the glass-enclosed cab. When they attacked the Big Green Bug—and they surely would—maybe they’d focus their efforts on the metal parts they could easily reach.

That was a shallow hope. I knew they’d eventually come after the glass. I just hoped as my green death machine chewed through the horde I could find Mark and shred him before I had to abandon my plan and run for my life.

Chapter 19

Sleep. That’s what I was thinking of when I got myself back into the cab and seated in its comfortable seat. I’d skipped one night already. Could I pull a second? The alternative was to sleep in the cab and let the naked horde get a full day farther ahead of me. Would I run out of fuel before catching up? If that happened, would I then burn another day on refueling, only to find myself two days behind?

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Sleep was a luxury I’d have to forgo. I needed to suck it up through another long night and try to catch the white fuckers sleeping in a field again. If I could, I might run down thousands before they realized I was something besides a nightmare. And I might catch Mark in whatever comfy, warm place he had lain for the night.

I guzzled the Dr. Pepper that I'd left in the cab, and as the caffeine and sugar did their magic, I said, “Fuck it.”

I clicked on the glow plugs, and a buzz somewhere back in the engine compartment caught the attention of every White in my posse.

They stared at the Big Green Bug but made no move to attack.

Good for me.

When the glow plug indicator light told me the engine was ready, I cranked the starter, and the diesel fired right up. A nice surprise in what was turning into a string of victories.

The Whites around the machine attacked. Ineffectively, but still, they were a worry.

I needed to get the combine moving. Whether I got any of the spinning machinery working on the harvesting head was a secondary concern. Even with relatively slow movement came a degree of safety. Whites could only chase so far.

Or maybe they could. Who cares? I was already committed.

I flipped something—not sure what—and rows of lights illuminated an acre in daylight. Out in the field, Whites blinked, shaded their eyes, and looked away.

The combine started to roll forward.

“Ha, ha, motherfuckers!”

Without trying, I ran over my first White, apparently one too stupid to run away from the coming sunrise of the Big Green Bug. I didn’t even feel the body hit the harvesting head.

Dull thumps announced the arrival of Whites jumping on the harvester from the sides. That was expected and was a problem I could do only one thing about. Move and harvest.

I played with controls both on the console and the joystick. The combine had four subsystems all driven by its powerful diesel: the drive system that kept my Green Bug rolling, the corn cutters on the harvesting head which I was trying to get spinning, the thresher that moved the harvested corn from the cutting head and separated the grain from the chaff, and the offloading system which transferred grain out of the bin through the huge pipe on top and into a following truck. It seemed straightforward enough—grain went into the bin on the back of the harvester, and the chaff flew out the back of the combine.  All controlled from the comfy seat in the Green Bug’s cab.

Did I say it didn’t seem that complicated? If I did, I was lying.

Nevertheless, the harvesting blades spun into action.

Let the mayhem begin.

I accelerated.

Damn!

The combine lumbered along a lot faster than expected.

As I quickly learned, though, I didn’t need to chase Whites. Those out front were drawn to the noise and lights. They attacked.

The first attacker from the front leaped at my combine death machine. I don't know what his goal was, but from where I sat, it looked like he was trying to dive into the spinning saw blades. He disintegrated in a puff of red haze and flying bits of gore that both fascinated and horrified me.

Again, my horribly wonderful death beast didn’t so much as hiccup as it digested that first brave White.

The tenor of the motor changed as chunks of bone and wet muscle flowed up the flume and was sprayed into the storage bin in the back. I flipped a switch and turned on the motor that drove the auger that shunted grain into the boom for offloading grain.

I figured if I offloaded the dead Whites as they came on board, I’d scatter behind me warm, bite-sized morsels of their tastiness for any infected who might be coming up behind me. Surely, from their perspective, those bits would have to be a more appealing meal than whatever might be hiding inside the giant, noisy monster rolling away.

I tried a turn and was surprised by the tight arc of the Big Green Bug’s turning radius, and I found the machine aimed back along the meandering path I’d just driven. Illuminated in my acre-lights—yeah, my new name for them—a good part of my posse was on their hands and knees in the shredded debris of other Whites. Others ran around in aimless loops, apparently overwhelmed with mental inputs and unable to come to a decision on what to do next. Some ran at the combine’s noise, lights, and cutting blades. Some watched, maybe too terrorized to move as the Big Green Sunrise God ate their friends.

I pointed my invincible White harvester at the densest bunch of kneeling Whites and accelerated. With twelve tons of momentum rolling forward, I spotted Touchy-Feely girl in my path, staring. She was one of the frozen, not reacting.

She didn’t run away, neither did she charge. She made no motion with her hands to wave me away, as an unexpected thought occurred to me. Maybe she wasn’t a brutal monster. Maybe she was a slow one like Russell, or maybe one even a little smarter than that.

Was it possible?

After all this time, could any tag-alongs still be alive in a horde of monsters?

The blades cut into her ankles. Her face contorted agonizingly for the briefest of seconds before she was eaten by the harvester in a spray of blood and white skin.

I leaned over and puked on the floor.

Chapter 20

The combine scooted along at a pretty decent clip. I couldn’t find a speedometer on any of the display screens, so my speed was a guess. Maybe it was a number not important to the harvest. I had information on all kinds of other things: yield, grain to chaff ratio, moisture, and a whole list of things I didn’t understand or give a shit about. A harvest of actual crops was likely never to be in my future. I only had to worry about Whites and how best to adjust the various parts of the Big Green Bug to keep it from clogging when I finally found my crop of Whites.

Unfortunately, the naked horde didn’t stick to the roads while traveling. I kept finding myself rolling across fields, only to be deterred by fences—or the remnants of fences. I didn’t dare run those over. The last thing I wanted was for my cutting blades to be tangled with barbed wire. I continually had to backtrack to find a gate wide enough to get my monster through. Each time I had to find my way back to the horde’s path, which was never hard to spot.

If a mile-wide glacier had been dragged across the landscape, it might not have looked much worse. Trees were still standing but the lower branches were mostly broken away. Nearly all other vegetation was stomped flat. The dirt itself was damp with human waste spread and tilled by countless running feet. Houses looked like they’d been through a tornado, all glass broken, doors gone. Vehicles didn't usually fare better though my Green Bug had gone ignored when the horde had settled in around it for a night.

So in spite of keeping a decent speed, I felt like I was making slow progress.

At least I was getting practice on running the Big Green Bug over Whites, of which there were plenty, all naked, some lone stragglers, some in groups. Altogether, I may have run down hundreds or I may have killed thousands. Nevertheless, I was getting frustrated.

My fuel was down to about a third full. My head tortured me with irritating pains. My joints throbbed. I was tired to the point of dozing behind the combine’s controls. And with every mile I rolled, I had less nighttime left. At dawn, the naked horde would move again. If I didn’t catch them before they mobilized, I feared I might never.

I turned off the paved road I was following and rode up a dirt road incline, bouncing the big machine over uneven railroad tracks that paralleled the street. Rolling down on the other side, I drove into a field of dried maize about four feet tall. The combine cut the plants on the sides of the road and ran them through the Green Bug’s metallic guts. I kept an eye out ahead for a swath where the maize was stomped down. That would mark the path the horde had taken through the field.

Heads started popping up above the crops on both sides of the road. Stragglers. Or so I figured. I’d been running them down all night.

Then I heard something over the sound of the big engine and spinning machinery.

More Whites came to attention, head and shoulders above the maize.

The sound became a scream, a thousand screams piled on top of each other, a hundred thousand wails.

Maybe a frightening million, with a howl that made me shudder at the inadequacy of my Green Bug.

The great swath of flat crops I’d been searching for confused me when I saw it, because it undulated with what I thought for a second were waves on a wide river, but materialized into white heads, screaming mouths, and clenching grasps, all converging on me.

I’d found the naked horde, and they had found me.

The fastest of the Whites fighting to be the first to get their teeth into the owner of acre-lights and rumbling diesel disintegrated in a spray of blood and severed limbs. A red haze fogged the air and tainted it with the stench of ripped intestines and torn stomachs.

The combine lurched.

I revved the diesel higher, slowed my forward speed, and put more power to the harvesting head with all of its spinning blades and thrashing steel.

The sound of bowling balls being dumped down a water slide startled me as vibrations rattled my Big Green Bug. It had to be bony chunks of Whites and skulls going through the auger that moved corn into the bin on the back.

Blood and flesh flew in all directions as the Green Bug chewed through the horde.

Whites were trying to climb the sides of my green monster, pounding their fists and beating their skulls. They wanted inside, bad. Everything was slick with blood, and the Whites slipped off. I felt them—barely—get caught in the tracks and go under the wheels.

Racket from the back of the combine grew to a dismaying combination of clangs and groans. The engine strained under the load.

Could these fuckers kill my Green Bug?

Did I underestimate them again?

Flirting with panic, I fidgeted with my array of controls.

Necessary! What was necessary?

I slowed some more.

Speed was unimportant to me as long as I didn’t stop.

The only other thing I needed was to keep my cutting blades and thrashers spinning.

Clear the head.

Use your brain.

Calm.

The Green Bug was still inching forward. Whites were still dying.

As brilliant as the combine’s designers were, the thing just hadn’t been engineered to harvest a field full of skinny Whites. It was trying to thresh grain out of the bony, bloody flesh coming through the system and to offload the goodies out the back.

I needed to divert the massive engine’s power away from those subsystems, but I was moving too fast over the controls to truly understand them.

Some things I could power directly. That was clear. Others seemed only to be controlled through setting power ratios for maximizing crop yields.

Dammit!

If I couldn’t turn off the thresher and off-loader, I needed to find the hundred-percent chaff setting. Yeah. That’s what I needed. Where the hell was that?

The whole combine started to shake. A circumstance that wasn’t conceivable until I rolled into the maw of my white nemesis.

I maxed the engine output and thought to look out the window, realizing I’d been completely absorbed in the machine’s controls, trying desperately to make all of those scary mechanical sounds go away.

Whites were fucking everywhere.

And what wasn’t a White trying to kill me was a part of a White that seconds before had been shredded by the spinning blades on the harvesting head.

The shuddering in the Green Bug intensified, with all the engine power trying to grind its way through so much bone.

It swayed and the attachments to the cutting head flexed.

Fuck!

How do I turn off the goddamn conveyor dragging the bodies into the thresher?

Oil burned somewhere and mixed in with the smell of shit and blood.

I toggled a switch. I flipped a button.

Behave, you damn Green Bug!

But they still died in numbers I saw, but couldn’t dare estimate.

Whites on the sides of the Green Bug had climbed on top of the cab. They went up on some instinct, thinking they'd find the driver of my great beast up there. None had yet figured out the secret of the dark tinted glass.

I guess.

What the fuck did I know?

A great groan preceded a screech of metal and something big banged deafeningly in my machine. The whole thing jerked hard to the left. If it wasn’t for the harvesting head sticking out so far on both sides, I think it would have turned over.

Big chunks of metal rang as they banged around in the Green Bug behind me. Vibrations rattled through everything. An anvil-shattering smash of steel on steel sent another jolt through the combine. Relative silence. Only the sound of the engine rumbled behind me as it revved higher.

Something in the threshing system had blown apart and whatever drive system connected it to the engine was no more. That was my guess.

The harvesting blades spun blindingly fast.

Amazed that the suffering machine hadn’t exploded in the violence behind me, I backed off on the engine power as I tried to save the Big Green Bug’s life.

For a moment, I was in control and grinding forward through bone and flesh.

A line of trees materialized through the haze of red.

The edge of the field.

I turned in as slow of an arc as I dared. I couldn’t surrender my momentum. I couldn’t get bogged down.

The smell of burning oil was getting stronger. A new worry.

Still, my cutting heads shredded, and Whites seemed more than willing to attack my monster from the wrong end.

I finished my turn and was heading across the field again.

Whites beat on my Green Bug with their puny fists and only succeeded in making a futile din.

My panic evaporated in a swell of confidence. I smiled wickedly at myself and shouted insults through the glass at all the stupid Whites who were dying under my creative cruelty.

I was Null Spot the Destroyer once again. Bringer of death. Reaper of white-ass zombie motherfuckers.

How many Whites was I killing? I tried to do a quick count of the number of Whites who could stand shoulder to shoulder in front of my murder-beast. I tried to guess how long it took to engulf a row before my blades tore into the next.

How many per minute?

How many minutes had I been shredding?

I knew I’d killed at least a thousand.

Ten thousand?

Twenty?

Oh, fuckin’ A, yes!

Now, where the fuck were Mark and his smart buddies?

An explosion jerked my combine and bounced me in my seat.

I looked at the wall of steel behind me as though it might reveal something.

Still, my beast rolled forward.

I discounted the noise as a fluke.

Two more pops shook the beast, and my screen flashed through a series of alerts. An alarm sounded inside the cab.

Uh, oh.

I looked out across the sea of Whites dripping in the blood of their brothers.

The beast’s smooth roll forward turned into a series of jerks.

Not good.

So not good.

Null Spot started to think he might be in trouble.

Chapter 21

Black smoke mixed with the blood mist in the air.

Burned petroleum stink flowed into the cab.

My eyes started to burn.

The combine jerked forward in rolling stutter steps that were getting slower and more feeble.

However it had happened, my lovely green slaughter beast was on fire.

It was dying.

I glanced down at a terribly insufficient red fire extinguisher mounted to a part of the window frame in the corner of the cab. Would that keep me safe when the flames boiled into the cab?

Recalling all those burned Whites I’d seen on the shore of Lake Austin in the days after my gasoline vapor bomb fiasco, I knew one thing more certainly than any other. I wasn’t going to stay inside and find out.

Whites pounded on the sloping glass of my cab, I guess having given up on every other way to get inside the beast.

One was hanging off the edge of the roof and banging his head against the glass. At first it was ineffectual, as his feet were dangling. He had no leverage. Then his toes caught hold, and he put some force into his head butt. He knocked himself silly, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

I wanted to laugh, but a hairline crack reflected a purple light that had just started to glow out of the eastern sky.

I reached down for my machete.

Fighting my way out was a plan of the stupidest proportions. I had not even the wispiest hope of killing all those crazed Whites.

Brains over brawn, Null Spot.

Don’t be a dumbass.

Once the glass shattered, I needed to find a way to blend myself into the mob before their half-pint brains linked me with the combine monster. That was my chance. Because once they connected me with the Green Bug, I was dead.

It wasn’t a plan, but at least it was a goal.

I looked through the tinted glass into the face of a White who’d just started beating his head against it. I knew—hoped—he couldn't see me through the dark tint. Nevertheless, he was the first one I was going to kill. He was the focus of my blame. And just fuck it. Why not blame him?

He leaned his head back and swung it forward. A gout of blood, brain, and bone erupted off the top of his skull. The White fell.

“Damn!”

How the hell could a White hit the glass hard enough to rupture his skull?

The glass cracked in other places.

Two more Whites fell inexplicably away.

Whatever they were doing out there wasn’t working for them, but it was creating an opportunity for me. If I could swing the door open… just maybe.

Three Whites were pushing in on the glass door on the left side of the cab. But the door was designed to swing out. With them out there, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get it open and get out fast enough.

One of them fell miraculously away. A second jerked and lost his balance. I turned the handle on the door and threw my shoulder into it smashing into the third. He tumbled into the mob.

I stepped onto the platform just outside the door.

Outside the cab, the screaming of a hundred thousand Whites was overwhelming.

Blood was everywhere.

The mix of smells was overpowering.

Whites on the ground below me roared. Connection made. I’d emerged from the machine. That meant I and the machine were one. More importantly, it meant I was food.

Shit.

I scrambled to climb to the roof of the cab. Hands grabbed at my ankles.

Three small explosions shook the Green Bug.

Big orange flames billowed through thick clouds of black smoke over the grain bin on the back. Heat singed my eyebrows.

The Whites on the roof of the cab froze, wide-eyed, mesmerized by the flames.

None noticed me climbing to join them.

My first instinct was to shove each of them off, but I realized instantly what a bad idea that was. They were my camouflage.

The Whites from the mob below, the ones who had seen me come out of the cab, were clawing their way up behind, not having lost focus on their meal.

Then the weirdest thing happened. The two closest to the top of the cab sprouted bloody wounds and fell away.

Holy shit!

Somebody was shooting.

I looked around, seeing flames and black of night in one direction, graying light in the other, and a mass of Whites under my acre-lights’ illumination out front.

Way out across the road that bordered the field, from a silhouetted black structure, fire sparkled out in three rapid pinpricks. More Whites fell from the side of the cab.

Somebody was shooting the Whites around me.

Why?

Didn't matter to me. I needed to get off the combine before I was engulfed in its flames.

Only one way to do it quickly.

With the Whites on the unstable roof still hypnotized by the flames and trying to keep their balance, I spread my arms wide to engulf those nearest and I rushed forward. One fell into another and feet shuffled for balance, but still, I pushed, and off we all went, falling in a mass of elbows and knees, a rain of bodies pouring onto the Whites wailing on the other side of the combine.

Chapter 22

One of the few benefits of a virus-infected brain is the attenuation of pain. Sure, I still felt stuff, but lots of things that should have hurt didn’t. Falling off the combine into a scrum of Whites knocked the wind out of me, but thank God, didn’t break anything. It all hurt, but only a bit. I can’t say how the White felt who’d been unlucky enough to catch my machete blade in his shoulder as I came down on top of him.

I jumped to my feet. I felt a little dazed but had no time to clear my head before making my getaway. I was in a pile of confusion and broken bones that might soon turn ugly. I wrenched my blade out of the White and started to move.

The jumble of Whites on the ground shifted. One rolled into the backs of my legs and sent me to the ground. Immediately, another White stepped on the side of my head, pushing my face into the dirt. It then stepped on my back as it hurried over.

Surrounded by feet and ankles, feeling them kick and step on me, I realized I was in danger of being trampled.

I was being trampled.

I tried to roll to the side and push myself away from the ground.

The weight of thousands of bodies pressing in is something I’d never thought of as a problem when I was a stupid stoner, watching TV on my couch. Seeing heroes and villains swept up in a crowd always seemed like a false dilemma. In my mind, I always thought, yeah, right. I could get out of that. Whatever that was. “Why not just walk out?” I’d ask.

Turns out that the press of human weight, pushing down and pushing to the sides, is more than can be resisted. You become a speck of dust in a breeze, with little you can do to affect your circumstances. When the crowd flows, you flow, or you fall. When you fall, you die.

At least that’s what I extrapolated in short order.

Through urgent effort, I managed to pull my short knife out of my boot.

I slashed and stabbed.

Whites howled, but with so much violence and screaming all around, it went unnoticed.

I couldn’t tell if any Whites I stabbed noticed. At first.

Then they started to fall.

I dragged my knife across the Achilles tendon of every ankle I could reach. That, I found, was the quickest way to bring a White down.

And as the Whites fell, others tripped on them. Some of them got stomped.

Breathing room: that’s another expression that gets overused into meaninglessness. In the mass of Whites, with the weight of all those bodies pressing together, breathing—yeah, just having the space to expand your chest and take a breath—was hard.

In what seemed miraculous by the time I did it, I pulled my feet below me. A couple dozen Whites were on the ground around me, half bleeding, half trying to get back to their feet. Some of those were the ones I’d slashed.

A big explosion hit me in the back with a shockwave that knocked me back to my knees and sent a ripple through the mass.

I quickly jumped back up. The Whites surged forward, and I stabbed the throat of the one in front of me. She went down. I stepped on top of her, stealing the space she’d been in as I reached out and cut the one who’d been behind her.

The flames on the combine had grown four stories tall by then, casting an orange glow over everything. Whites close to the flames were screaming in pain, instead of predatory rage.

The mob stopped flowing, but I kept stabbing and slashing my way through.

Eventually, the numbers of infected thinned enough that I no longer needed to slash. I walked between Whites, with an occasional bump and shove, and I had time to stop and look around. I was up the slope of the field I’d been plowing, moving at an angle toward the road.

The combine was nearly a mile behind me. It still burned in an enormous pillar of orange fire and black smoke at the center of a sea of Whites, all seemingly wanting to get a hand on it. Everywhere, the injured were sprawled in the dirt, getting eaten by their brothers and sisters.

Not a bad thing.

I gave myself credit for sowing the chaos that had caused those injuries.

I wanted to pat myself on the back and congratulate the Valiant Null Spot. He was victorious again, and he probably should have turned back to scan the naked horde for some sign of the Smart Ones and Mark—they were probably holed up in some farmhouse near the center. But he was bruised and feeling lucky to still be breathing. Some brushes with death come at a steep price.

I worked my way toward the road because it looked relatively clear. Plenty of Whites were in the ditches on both sides. Hardly a spot existed in the field where I couldn’t reach out and touch one or be pressed in on all sides by them. The absence of them on the road gave me pause to wonder whether they had an aversion to asphalt that I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps it was a new phobia. Maybe one walked off the pavement chasing a toad and the rest didn’t have the good sense not to imitate.

You never know with Whites.

Down the road and across the field where I’d done my work stood a collection of buildings that could have been a hundred years old. A big farmhouse with steep rooflines and dormer windows had a porch that wrapped all the way around the first floor. Near it stood some barns, sheds, a chicken coop made out of discarded pallets, and a couple of smaller houses in various states of repair.

The house was full of Whites, going in and out through the doors and poking their heads through broken windows. The story was the same with the barns and sheds.

Whites can be curious fuckers.

One barn stood taller than the two-story house and was covered in a roof of rust-colored sheet metal, most of it still in place.

I didn’t know where those muzzle flashes came from, but my guess, my hope, was from up in that barn. Up there, the sniper could probably hide. If he’d been shooting from the house, I suspected he was already dead.

Or maybe she. You never know.

Nevertheless, I figured I owed the shooter a favor. I wasn’t ready to admit to myself that he’d saved my life when I was in the cab of the combine, but he had eased my escape.

I made my way toward the barn.

Chapter 23

While the Green Bug burned, and I worked my way out of the mob and down the road, the sky had squeezed itself full of fat gray clouds and pushed beneath them a cold wind from the northwest. Weatherman Zed deduced that it was going to rain before the morning was out.

A logical leap from there told me I’d be better off inside than out when those cold rains came. Except for my boots and a crusty layer of dirt and gore on my skin, I was still naked.

I walked onto the farmer’s gravel driveway and gave the structures one more look. The barn was still my best guess for a place to snipe and hide. If it looked that way to me, it probably looked that way to the shooter.

A wretched tree grew out of one corner of the barn. It probably should have been cut down thirty or fifty years ago, before it’d had the chance to merge with the barn’s framework. Now, some of its twiggy fingers reached higher than the barn’s tall peak, while others grew up through gaps where wind had peeled sheets of tin off the roof. Down one side of the barn were doorless stalls, between supports that looked to have been tree trunks as big around as my leg, cut to the right height. Two were bowed by weather and age. One leaned so far that it appeared to hang from—rather than support—the beam above. Only one of the poles stood straight.

In one of the stalls sat a tractor so old that the tires were half eaten away, and most of the metal was reddish-brown rust. Farm tools, pieces of old plows, wheels, troughs, and all manner of metal, trash and weeds covered the floors of the other stalls.

The barn’s walls were mostly sheets of tin and aged gray boards. Holes in the tin had been patched with what looked like chewing gum and aluminum foil. Except for that one post in the stalls, nothing on the old structure stood at a right angle to anything. It looked like the next high wind might blow the whole thing down, but I knew better even as I had that thought.

I’d seen plenty of old barns, sheds, and houses on my excursion out of town. How the rotting things remained upright was a mystery that I’d have indulged a good deal of thoughtful curiosity on, but I had more pressing matters at hand.

I looked in through the open door on the front and saw a dozen Whites already inside. Half of those were rummaging through decaying cardboard boxes and shelves of dusty old jugs, bottles, and cans. The barn must have been used for storing what the owner thought of as antiques in the process of aging themselves into value.

A wide loft ran around the second level and was stacked with as much junk as the bottom floor. One side sagged badly and looked ready to collapse.

Above the loft was a flat ceiling—odd for a barn. In the ceiling, a flat door gave a clue that an attic existed above. On the loft level just below the door, three Whites were standing, looking up. A fourth was up there looking around and letting his gaze settle on different objects in the farmer’s vast collection. He seemed to evaluate each and then look back up at the doorway in the ceiling.

I didn’t know if he was a Smart One, but I knew some half-baked thoughts were squirrel-chasing around in his hairless head. If any of those thoughts bore fruit, things would go badly for the shooter whom I now decided had to be hiding in the attic.

The chilly wind gusted outside, sending dirt and dry leaves flying through gaps in the wall boards. Joints creaked, walls shuddered, and somewhere high above, a sheet of tin flapped against the roof beams.

I waded through corroding scraps and around a pile of junk to get to a staircase built into one of the walls.

A few Whites walked cautiously into the barn through the wide front doors.

The wind outside gusted again. Thunder rolled in the distance.

I climbed the stairs, careful to test each board before putting my weight on it.

At the second floor, I avoided the sagging side of the loft and walked the long way around to take up a place by the four Whites whose fascination with the attic had turned into action. The one I’d picked out as the smartest of the group was picking up boxes and stacking them beneath the door in the ceiling.

The three less-intelligent Whites joined the effort and a pyramid-shaped pile quickly grew.

Seeing an opportunity for a quick solution to a problem, I joined the Whites. I searched for items nearby that looked sturdy enough to support the weight of what might be piled on top of them, but too frail for much more. I found a box of old vinyl records. It was heavy, but the cardboard was disintegrating. It took some effort to pick it up and keep it intact, though it is worth mentioning that every two-handed job was awkward, given that I had no intention of setting my machete aside while I worked.

I got the record box onto the pile and went back to the mounds of junk to look for more. I found a gas can so rusty that I was able to poke a finger through the metal on the side and create new holes. That wouldn’t support much weight. I added it to the pile, and just like the box of records, I put it on the same side, the side facing the edge of the loft.

Chapter 24

Fat raindrops tapped on the barn’s tin roof. More Whites found their way inside through the wide, open door. Some turned enchanted eyes at the pseudo antiques that lay in every direction. Others turned back to the open doorway, warily watching the clouds bring in the storm.

Up in the loft, the pile of boxes had reached a height that satisfied the semi-Smart One who’d put himself in charge.

The other three infected worker bees with us became distracted with the influx of rain refugees downstairs and the head guy smacked a couple of them in the head to refocus their attention. When he looked at me with a raised hand, I drilled him with a look that dared him to slap. He glanced at my machete, and he turned away.

Perhaps that was a rule in the social structure of the naked horde: the guy with the biggest knife is the boss.

The smart White mounted the first level of boxes at the base of the pyramid we’d built and looked at the four of us to be sure we understood what was to come next.

Imitation time.

One of the other Whites jumped up beside him.

The head guy stepped higher and the last two Whites figured it out. They climbed onto the pyramid. The head White, full of expectations, looked at me and waited for me to join in.

I climbed onto a sturdy metal thing on the lowest level of the pyramid, but on the opposite side of the loft railing. The others took that as a cue to race to the top of the rickety construct. When the Smart One was just reaching his hand up to the doorway through the floor above us, and the others were shouldering each other to be the first to follow him through, I pushed on a big box two of them were standing on.

The pyramid swayed.

A White grunted, surprised.

The guy at the top looked down and spat an angry sound at me.

I pushed with all my strength. Rusty metal on the other side of the pile crunched. Boxes crumbled and the pyramid of dusty antiques fell onto the railing.

A White fell with a scream, hitting the rail and spinning down to the barn floor.

The loft railing held the weight of the leaning pyramid for a moment, giving me just enough time to jump off the box I was on.

The old wood creaked and gave way. Most of the pile and the other three Whites went over the side with a crash of wood, metal, glass, and screams.

A billow of dust and straw flew into the air, filling the barn and making everyone cough.

I stepped close to the edge of the loft and looked down at my handiwork. Junk and jumble, bodies and blood. Whites moved and groaned. Maybe a dozen were off their feet. At least half of those wouldn’t be getting back up. Already, the uninjured Whites on the perimeter were eyeing their downed comrades.

I didn’t need to see any more of that sort of thing. I turned away.

The rain on the roof grew into a steady pounding of big drops that drowned the sounds of dying growing from below. I looked back up at the doorway into the attic. If I was going to get up there, it was time to figure out how.

The tree growing up through the corner of the barn looked to be the easiest way up, with caveats of course. The loft sagged the most on that side. The wood all around that corner looked to be the most rotted because rain came in so easily through holes in the roof above, where sheets of tin were missing.

So as long as I didn’t fall through the floor with a mound of rusty shit, it looked easy.

I scanned the second floor for another way. Besides the door above me—a door visible to every White in the barn, hence bad news for anyone upstairs if the Whites saw me go through it—the tree in the rotted corner of the barn was the only way.

So screw it.

Across the creaky, sagging boards I went, testing the strength of each before I put my full weight on it, hoping the floor’s groans would be masked from the Whites below by the noise of the heavy rain. I came to a point where an exceptionally large mound of junk blocked my way. I had to climb over, taking care not to let any piece of jagged, rusty metal cut my legs.

It was slow going.

When I reached the other side, the rain outside had all but ceased, and I cursed myself for not having made the transit across the loft more quickly. I was hoping the heavy rainfall would hide me from view outside the barn when I started my climb through the tree’s branches. Given that the tree was partially in and out of the barn, Whites outside had the ability to see me, and any adventurous ones could follow.

I stepped onto a fat limb, reached outside the barn through missing boards, and grabbed a wet branch to pull myself up. Fat drops of rain started to fall again. Before I could thank my luck, a howling wind drove the drops sideways and brought more sheets of rain with it.

I scrambled out through the gaps in the wall and dragged myself onto a tree limb. I didn’t waste time to look around to see who might be watching. The rain was so heavy that I could see little besides gray and ill-defined shapes.

With my machete still in hand—where else was I going to carry it, being naked and all?—I awkwardly climbed. I didn’t have to go far, just up three or four thick branches, until I was able to lean over and reach the edge of a hole where a large sheet of tin had blown off the roof.

I peeked inside and didn’t see anything except more hoarded trash and dark shadows. I whispered as loud as I dared, “I’m coming in. I’m not one of them. Don’t shoot.”

A shadow with a rifle at his shoulder stood up from behind a mound of refuse. In a familiar voice, it said, “Null Spot the Farmer, Dumb as a Pumpkin, Annoyer of Zombies.”

“Hello, Murphy.”

Chapter 25

By the time I woke, the rain had blown past, leaving a blustery blanket of gray cold in the sky. The last stragglers of the naked horde were slowly flowing north, following the path of the main body. The barn below us had cleared out, as did the neighboring farmhouse. Or so we guessed. It looked empty.

Peeking out of the barn between a gap in two warped boards, Murphy softly said, “I think it’s safe to talk now.”

I rubbed the crusty bits out of my eyes. “Thanks for letting me sleep.”

“You had a long couple of nights.”

Looking around the attic, I said, “I can keep watch if you need to pass out for a while.”

“I’m good.” Murphy stood up, stretched, and walked over to look out through a gap to see a different side of the barn. “How many do you think you killed with the combine?”

Feeling proud about the numbers and a little bit sickened by the parade of carnage, I said, “I don’t know. Seemed like thousands.”

“Maybe.” He pointed through the gap between the boards. “Lots of bones out there in the field. I’m guessing you didn’t get Mark.”

“No.” I told him about the house where I thought they were holed up the first night. “I thought maybe if I chased the horde with the combine, I’d disrupt things enough that I could get to the Smart Ones wherever they were hiding.” It was one of those things that became true in retrospect. It fit the facts closely enough.

“You hungry?” Murphy came over and sat down beside me.

“Yeah, I think all I’ve had to eat over the last few days are some Dr. Peppers I found in the cab of the combine. And some jerky.” The memory of Moe’s stench came back to me and I shuddered. Some corpses smell worse than others.

Murphy dug a couple of candy bars out of his bag. “Start with those.” He handed me a bottle of water.

“Thanks for following,” I said. “Thanks for keeping an eye on me.”

Busying himself with something inside his backpack, he said, “You need to find a way to work through your shit, man. What you’re doing isn’t healthy for you. I mean you don’t think your luck is going to hold out forever, do you?”

Yeah. I wanted to think that. At the same time, I didn’t feel lucky at all, but skillful. I was a quick, decisive thinker. I kept a cool head, most of the time. I did the things that had to be done when they had to be done, no matter how gruesome and cruel. Maybe that made me a little bit special. “I just need to kill Mark.”

“And that’s gonna make it all better?”

“Better enough.” I’d already sold myself on that lie. I wasn’t going to back away from it.

Murphy pulled another candy bar out of his bag. “I’m saving the canned soup for supper.”

I stuffed a big bite into my mouth and chewed on the stiff caramel. “It’s not all that different than Pop-Tarts. You know, when you think about it. Mostly sugar and fat.”

“Whatever it is, you need all you can get,” said Murphy. “I don’t want you turning into a skeleton again. Now let’s get down to business. Do you have a plan to kill Mark? Because what you’re doing so far isn’t working.”

“Yeah.” I laughed. “I’m kinda making it up as I go along.”

“No shit? I hadn’t guessed that.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, I said, "The Smart Ones that run the show keep mostly to the center of the horde. They post guards at night. They've probably got some loose command structure with Smart Ones scattered all through the horde. Getting to them is going to be hard.”

“You think maybe when they’re on the move, you could just sort of tag along with the horde and walk right up?” Murphy waved a hand at me. “You do look like one of them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Maybe that’ll work. Maybe if I can shadow the leadership for a while, hiding in plain sight among the stupid ones, I can pick off Mark when he goes off to take a dump or something.”

“Could work.”

"The things that worry me are these." I pointed at my boots and hefted my machete. "All the Whites in the horde go naked, completely naked. I’m sure by now they’ve got the calluses on their feet to make that work for them. I don’t, so trying to keep up with them barefoot is a plan that won’t work. Eventually, my boots will give me away. Then there's the machete. They see knives as a status symbol or intelligence badge. The ones with knives tend to be in charge of the stupider ones. If I wander around shadowing the leadership with my machete in hand and don’t have a band of Whites in tow, that might look suspicious too.”

"You could gather up a posse again like you did when you filled the combine with diesel,” Murphy suggested.

“So you pretty much followed me the entire time?” I asked.

“Yup,” answered Murphy.

“Why?”

“Are you complaining?”

“No.” I was a little offended. I didn’t need a babysitter. “I guess not.”

We finished our afternoon breakfast in silence and were preparing ourselves to leave the barn when Murphy said, “I’ve got a Null Spot idea.”

“I’m listening.”

"I'm regretting telling you already, but it might help us with two of our problems simultaneously, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.”

“You’ve got my attention.”

“We’re all in agreement that the Survivor Army is probably based up at Fort Hood, right?”

Shrugging, I nodded. I turned and walked over to the door in the floor, the one the Whites had been building a pyramid of boxes to get through.

Pointing at one wall, Murphy said, “The ladder’s over there. I pulled it up behind me.”

I opened the floor door and looked around in the barn below.

Murphy fetched the ladder. He said, “How far do you think Fort Hood is from here?”

“Fifty, sixty miles I guess?”

“How far do you think the naked horde moves in a day?”

I sat down on the edge of the hole in the floor, dangling my feet. “I don't know. I suppose if they wanted to they could go fifty or sixty miles in a day, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I’d guess ten or twenty depending on what kinds of food or distractions they find along the way.”

“What if we wanted to lead the horde to Fort Hood?” Murphy asked.

Finally understanding what he was getting at, I said, “You mean, lead them there and let them fight it out with the Survivor Army? Dude, that’s a genius idea. There’s no downside. And it at least partially solves those two problems we’re going to have if our plan is to go live happily ever after in College Station.”

Murphy chuckled. “I don’t know about happily ever after, but maybe for a while.”

“Doesn’t matter I guess, but with the Survivor Army and the naked horde around, whatever is going on at College Station isn't going to last. Once one of these bunches gets there, it's all over."

“Exactly,” confirmed Murphy. “The question is, how do we lead the horde to Fort Hood?”

“Don’t know.”

“While we’re thinking about it,” he said, “I think we maybe drive for a while, get out in front of where your buddies are headed, and wait for ‘em.”

“Bad idea.”

“Maybe in the city,” Murphy disagreed. “Out here you can drive away when you see ‘em. I know where a truck is.”

“Whatever.”

Chapter 26

In the distance, along a barbed wire fence a group of stragglers nestled under some trees. Farther away, a line of them walked toward an unknown destination, not in the direction the whole horde left in. In ones and twos, others strode aimlessly as though in having become detached from the main group, they’d lost their way altogether. I wondered if those solitary stragglers were the docile, stupid ones, in need of close supervision.

We were outside, standing against the rear wall of the barn when Murphy pointed east. “That truck I told you about. It’s a couple of miles that way.”

“And it’ll start?” I asked, skeptical and looking for an excuse to unwind our tacit agreement.

“I told you, man,” Murphy shook his head, “I got inside, the keys were in there, the back seat was loaded up with stuff like the dude was going to go somewhere but never left.”

“You said you turned it on.”

“No.” Murphy frowned. “I said I turned the key, and the dash lights came on, and the fuel gauge said the tank was full. I didn't start the engine.”

“So the battery could be nearly dead,” I said. “It might not have enough of a charge to crank the starter.”

“Is that what happened when you started up the engine on the harvester?” Murphy shot back.

I shook my head.

“You got a better idea, then?” Murphy stepped away from the corner of the barn and looked around. “You see another combine sitting around, maybe?”

“Be cool, dude.” One of us needed to say it. We were both tense and grouchy from not enough sleep. “I’m just trying to understand what we’re dealing with.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Murphy with a sudden grin. “Just because we’re planning on going over to find that truck doesn’t mean something won’t go wrong along the way. Hell, the truck probably won’t even be there anymore.”

That was the irony of the little tiff we were cultivating. I laughed darkly.

“You know what I’m talkin’ about, right?”

I nodded. I did indeed. The virus had a way of finding its way into every plan and ruining it.

“It’s cold as your mama’s titties out here.” Murphy exaggerated a shiver.

“And?” I asked, trying to recall how much I’d told Murphy about The Harpy.

“And we need to get you some clothes,” said Murphy. “I’m tired of seeing your dong hanging out every time I look at you.” Murphy took off at a jog toward a line of trees and bushes across a trampled field behind the house.

I followed.

He looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re gonna get frostbite if it gets any colder.”

We were maybe halfway across the field when the clack of wood on wood startled me. I turned to see a screen door on the farmhouse swinging open. Whites were shouldering their way through. One was already off the porch and running across the muddy ground toward us. Or, toward Murphy since he was dressed and carrying a rifle, clearly a human of the tasty variety.

I swung my machete through the air as though I was chasing Murphy. Sometimes plans come together just that quickly. “Make for the trees,” I said. “I’ll lag back.”

“What?”

“Do it,” I ordered. I cocked my head at the coming Whites. “I’ll handle these guys when they run past me. When you get to the trees, get ready to shoot, just in case.”

Murphy sprinted away as I slowed, growing a gap between us. That was needed. The Whites had likely already seen us in close proximity. Some of them might already have made the connection between Murphy and me.

I needed to change that. My little plan depended on me selling my identity as a member of the naked horde.

I exaggerated my machete swings and grunted an angry monkey sound. Hopefully, that would do it.

I swung my machete a few more times as I looked over my shoulder. Maybe ten or eleven Whites were out of the house and coming our way.

I changed course a tad, wanting to be out of the direct line of the Whites chasing Murphy, just to be safe. If they were focused on him, my hastily conceived plan would work. If they were after me, then I needed some extra space and a whole lot of luck. As fast as they were coming, I couldn’t kill all ten before they overwhelmed me.

I slowed a bit more and looked around, knowing from experience I was focused too keenly on the most prominent threat. Too often, other dangers lurked unseen, ready to kill.

Other Whites were pretty far away, but none was coming toward us. Yet. If any of those coming out of the house started their screaming as they often did when they were on the chase, every infected golf ball head within earshot would come.

Everybody knows what the dinner bell sounds like.

The first of the Whites passed to my right with only a glance in my direction.

Good.

Two more Whites ran by, and I picked up my pace.

Timing it just right, I fell in at the end of the group of running Whites spaced out over thirty or so yards. The female in the rear shot a glance over her shoulder. I was of no interest to her. We were both infected and naked, obviously the slow ones.

I hacked her across the back of her knee, not at all interested in expending the effort to attempt a cut through her leg. That wasn’t going to happen anyway. I was a skinny, infected monster awkwardly swinging a nicked up machete, not a samurai with a razor-edged katana.

Her knee bent in a painful direction and she tumbled, hollering something.

A female White just ahead of us looked back at her fallen sister, slowing as she did. Maybe she was going through the mental process of deciding if the menu had just expanded. To her misfortune, she wasn’t paying me any attention. I ran by, cutting across the back of her knee as well.

She fell, far from dead, but not getting up.

Two down, with ease.

I was learning to take pride in the simple pleasures.

Two big guys were running side-by-side ahead of me, oblivious to what was going on behind them.

I sped up to get within machete range.

Our target, Murphy, disappeared into the bushes at the edge of the field, and the Whites ahead of me wailed a familiar, frustrated scream.

Damn.

Without looking, I knew that noise caught the attention of any Whites still around.

I swung my machete and caught one of the big guys on the calf. He stumbled.

His buddy slowed and glared at me with bared teeth as I ran by.

The uninjured White knew who to blame for what had just happened. He lunged toward me while raising his hands to attack.

I dug my heels into the soft ground, trying to stop in the shortest space of feet and seconds. I raised my machete and aimed it at the guy’s throat.

The White didn’t react fast enough. It probably never occurred to him I’d do anything but keep running. The White’s momentum drove my machete through his neck. He went limp, and I rolled to my right as his dead weight tumbled through the spot of dirt I’d just vacated.

Covered in smears of mud and leaves, I bounced back to my feet and ran to catch up with the next of my victims.

Three muzzle flashes from the hedge along the fence told me exactly where Murphy was. The three Whites farthest ahead of me fell—one wounded, two dead or getting that way pretty quickly from wounds to their heads. Damn, Murphy was a good shot.

The other Whites slowed. The taste of blood was in the air. Warm meat had just fallen at their feet. While they were thinking about what to do, I killed two of them. Murphy shot the other two.

Wearing a grin, I ran on toward the trees. As gruesome as it was, we’d just won another round.

“Hurry,” Murphy shouted. He wasn’t feeling the victory at all and that changed my mood instantly.

I looked back and heard the sound of stampeding feet. A quarter mile away, coming over a rise, three or four hundred Whites were running. They were coming right at us.

Chapter 27

“What the hell?” The words fell out of Murphy’s mouth as he stood beside a tree, watching.

I bulled through the thick bushes, grabbed a fence post, and vaulted over the barbed wire. I looked back at the bunch of Whites coming our way. I pointed at the Whites we’d just killed, “I don’t know if it was their yapping or what, but that bunch is coming this way, and you can bet your ass there're a couple of Smart Ones in there.”

Climbing quickly over to my side of the fence, Murphy asked, “What makes you think that? Because—”

“Because that’s the worst-case scenario.” I looked over my shoulder to make sure another mob wasn’t coming from behind us. That would have been really worst case. Still, a sorghum field stretched off for… for… Christ! It was a long-ass way.

Out here in the country with seemingly endless fields, the distances—I was learning—were deceptive.

That tree line way over there on the other side of the field wasn't a couple hundred yards away, though that's what my city-born intuition told me, because nothing I was used to seeing in the city was ever very far. The tree line was a quarter or a half or even three-quarters of a mile distant. It was plenty far that if Murphy and I sprinted for the other side, it would be a damn near-wasted effort because Whites would be coming through these trees and over this fence a long time before we got to the other side of the field. They’d see us out there in the knee-high stalks of cut sorghum, and they'd chase us—Murphy specifically, because he was dressed and armed like a normal human.

And everybody with virus-bleached skin knew normal humans tasted best of all.

I pointed down the fence we were standing beside. It cut a line perpendicular to the path the mob of Whites was taking toward us. “Let’s go that way. We need to stay close to the bushes and trees so that once the Whites get here, we can jump back in and hide. If they see us in the open…”

Murphy was already running. “C’mon Professor. I don’t need the explanation. This isn’t my first day on the job.”

I ran after him. Full speed and not sustainable but we didn’t care. We’d be able to catch our breaths in a moment when we were sneaking along at a much slower speed through the bushes and trees. Right now, we needed distance.

We’d gone maybe a few hundred yards when Murphy jumped off the dirt path we'd been following at the edge of the cultivated field and dove into the bushes. I was right behind him.

Before I got myself turned around he’d already put a boot onto a low tree branch and pulled himself up for a better view.

“What do you see?” I whispered as I leaned out from the bushes to look down our side of the hedgerow.

Whites were pouring over the fence in the spot we’d left seconds before and were fanning out into the sorghum field. A gust of wind rustled the dry, brown leaves and startled me as my brain told me it was the sound of Whites coming through the crops behind me.

It wasn’t. But God, I was jumpy.

I was in adrenaline-junkie-haul-ass-shoot-some-motherfuckers mode.

“C’mon,” said Murphy, letting himself down from the tree. “Stay close. Don’t let ‘em see you.”

“Yes, Professor.” I grinned as I followed.

He smiled widely, and his eyes looked a little bit crazy. His adrenaline was running hot too.

Junkies for the thrill.

Staying in the bushes and behind the trees that grew thickly on both sides of the fence made for slow going. It took us an unsettlingly long while to get to the corner of the field, our momentary salvation. That gave us three directions to move in while staying close enough to a hedgerow to use it for cover.

When we stopped, Murphy and I both climbed a tree just high enough to get a view over the scrubby bushes and between the mostly bare branches of the other trees along the fence.

The Whites who’d gone into the sorghum field were still spreading out, regularly spaced, staring at the dirt and shuffling slowly. Two Whites among them stood out for the fact that they didn’t appear to be searching but cajoling the others to work in certain patterns. Those two were Smart Ones. Not only that, but they weren’t casually trying to find a meal. Their search had more purpose—maybe a guess—and they were employing a process.

On the other side of the fence, a Smart One was busy kicking, punching, and herding other Whites who’d taken an interest in feeding on the infected Murphy and I had slain. Whites liked an easy meal. A second Smart One on that side of the fence was working more Whites along the hedgerow, searching for us there.

“This doesn’t look right to me,” said Murphy.

“No.” I was past understatement, past process, and was on to motive. “I think they’re looking for me.”

“For you?” Murphy laughed and sarcastically added, “You are the special one.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I climbed down from the tree. “Obviously that’s not the whole naked horde.”

Murphy jumped to the ground, turning to look at an empty field behind us. “And?”

“I wonder if the Smart Ones who run that naked horde left some of their boys to look for me after what happened last night. They have to be smart enough to know that somebody was driving that combine. They lost a lot of their minimum-wage help, and I’ll bet they’re pissed about it.”

“Not so many they’ll notice,” Murphy disagreed.

I pointed down the hedgerow in the direction from where we’d just come. “I think they did notice. I think these guys are their revenge.”

“Fine. You’re right.” More sarcasm. Murphy looked back and forth, leaning over as he did so he could see between branches into the neighboring field. “Which way, Professor?”

I pointed. “If we go that way, then we'll be moving back in the direction those Whites were coming from. I don't think any of them are smart enough to think we'd run that way.” I pointed the other way. “I think they'll likely keep searching in the last direction they saw us moving in.”

“Except that some are coming this way down the fence.” Murphy’s nervousness was clear in his fidgeting. He wanted to stop talking and get moving.

I huffed and pointed again in the direction of my choice. “That’s our best bet. But whatever.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Murphy shrugged, took a deep breath, and grinned. “Why don’t you just admit it’s all a guess and any direction is as good as any other. Let’s stop talking and get a move on?”

I rolled my eyes, pursed my lips, pushed through some bushes, and hopped the fence. I’d made my choice, even if Murphy thought it was an unfounded guess.

With no Whites able to see us for the moment, we ran at full speed. We only needed to cross a few hundred yards to reach the next fence line. Because trees and bushes grew up through most fences, they acted as barriers, limiting from how far away we could be spotted. At least where the fields were relatively small. Not all of them were.

Once over the next fence, we stopped to breathe and unfortunately re-evaluate. We were at a road. Across the potholed asphalt, a field spread flat for miles in all directions. To our right and down the road a little was the barn we’d just left and the combine still smoldering black trickles of smoke into the air. Roughly to our rear and probably to our left, the band of Whites was searching for us.

“How many rounds you got left?” I asked.

Murphy patted the magazines on his MOLLE vest. “These two and what I’ve got in the rifle.”

Shit.

Seventy or eighty rounds.

All I had were my machete and knife.

A White made a long, undulating wail from back along the fence line we’d just come down.

Murphy and I shared a look. We both knew that wail meant nothing but bad news.

I pushed my face back through the bushes to look. Near the far corner of the field we’d just crossed, a White was standing with his face to the sky, shrieking at the clouds. Kneeling beside him and staring at the dirt while he touched it with his fingers, was another White.

“Shit they’re tracking us.” I pulled my head back through the bushes.

“No way.” Murphy peeked through. “Dammit,” he said, as he jumped through the bushes. “Let’s go.” He leapt over a ditch and onto the asphalt. “They’re coming.”

I ran after Murphy.

More infected voices howled behind us. And then, like nighttime dogs frightening one another with barks spreading through a neighborhood, hundreds of Whites screamed.

At least we knew in which directions not to run.

“You hear that?” Murphy panted.

We were running through another field of knee-high sorghum stalks, and I was trying to gin up an idea to get us out of a mess that looked to be escalating past our ability to handle it.

“You hear that?” Murphy persisted.

I looked back the way we’d come. “Yeah. Of course, I do.”

“No.” Murphy pointed. “I think more are over there.”

No.

I looked. I didn’t see anything but another fence with the shrubs and trees growing through it. I listened. More Whites were over there. They weren’t as close as those we were running from. If they came through that tree line, though, we were in trouble.

Murphy veered away from the new band of screamers while he sped up.

It was a long, long way to the next bit of useless cover, a collection of oil pumps, piping, and rusty tanks. A place great for hiding if no one saw you go in. That wasn’t a luxury we had. Whites were already on the road behind us. Their screaming made it clear we had already been seen.

“Trees.” I pointed as we ran. A band of green and gray stretched across the horizon.

“Why did they have to find us in the flattest part of the whole damn state?”

Because that’s just the way being fucked works.

I kept that to myself. I didn’t have the breath to spare. Whites were behind us. More were crossing the expansive flat field off to our left, but moving on a parallel course. Way back and toward our right, a mob of several hundred was coming.

“We may,” I panted, “need some luck on this one.”

“If things,” Murphy gulped a big breath, “go bad,” another breath, “same as before.” He looked at me. “Fall back with them.”

“No way we can kill them all,” I pieced together between rapid breaths.

“You’ll have a chance that way,” Murphy argued. “I should have gone naked like your dumbass.”

“We’re in this together,” I told him. “Mighty Murphy and The Valiant Null Spot.”

Chapter 28

Despite the benefit of general painlessness—a gift from the virus—we passed the dormant oil well, feeling the strain of running so far so fast. The chasing Whites were stringing out behind us, faster ones in front, slower falling behind. Some jogged off in the wrong direction. A few stopped and stared. Some stayed on task—chasing Murphy and me—and gained ground.

It had to be quite a job for the Smart Ones in those bands to keep their minions on task. Infected brains seemed unable to hold a thought in the center of attention for long.

Bad for them. Good for us.

Maybe if we ran far enough, that attrition rate would winnow down the number of chasers to a quantity we could successfully kill.

Yeah, right.

I find it helps to lie to myself in hopeless situations. It keeps me trying, and it keeps me thinking. And I knew that if I did enough trying and thinking, I tended to still be alive when opportunities arose—so far.

The line of trees we’d seen on the horizon when we’d started racing across this particular giant flat field was now close enough for me to see that it was a line of tall trees and greenery, not straight along a fence, but snaking from south to north across our path. It had to be a creek or a river, with dense foliage and steep banks towering above a deep, rocky bed, with a shallow sputter of water running through.

That’s what most of them looked like through the farm country.

I glanced back to measure the distance of our nearest pursuers. Some were scarily close.

We weren’t going to get caught in the open but were going to make it to the creek.

Was I lying to myself?

Who the fuck knows.

Things had gotten pretty grim, but I was still breathing. I was still on my feet. I had a pair of boots and a utilitarian machete with which I’d killed more Whites than I could count. And Murphy still had a decent load of ammunition.

One way or another, we were getting to that damn creek.

Whether that would give us enough of an advantage to leverage into an escape remained to be seen. But it was hope, and hope can keep your feet moving no matter how much your body tells you to succumb to exhaustion and give up.

“You gonna make it?” I asked.

Murphy didn’t spare a breath for an answer. He nodded as he glanced over his shoulder.

We passed out of the chopped sorghum, knee-high obstacles that had been slowing us for what seemed like a marathon of miles. With the resistance of having to push my feet through the dried stalks suddenly gone, I felt like I could run forever.

We bounded over a narrow dirt road and into a smaller field of nothing but scattered weeds growing in deep furrows that had been tilled but never planted. And of course, all the damn furrows were running across our path.

I immediately stumbled because of a bad landing, but I kept my feet under me and continued running.

“You okay?” Murphy asked.

“The ground,” I answered, watching it closely now to make sure my feet landed on the top edges of each furrow. It made for an awkward gait, trying to measure my paces by the regularly spaced ridges of dirt.

Murphy was doing the same but moving faster. The ridges between the furrows seemed better spaced for his natural stride.

He looked over at me and eased off his pace.

“Don’t,” I hollered.

“No martyrs,” Murphy scolded.

“Dammit,” I shouted. “Just get there.” I gulped a big breath. “Catch your breath.” More air. “You'll shoot better if you're not gasping.”

Murphy didn’t speed up.

“Go,” I ordered. “They won’t catch me.”

Murphy’s burst of speed immediately created a widening gap between us.

Damn, I didn’t know he was so fast.

I risked a glance over my shoulder.

Damn, again.

Three sprinters weren’t fifty yards behind me.

My foot landed badly and I went down, rolling and scrambling to my feet as I cursed myself for the mistake. Still, I looked again at my chasers as I got myself moving again.

Maybe I wouldn’t make it.

A pack of three were well ahead of the rest of the Whites who were spread out in a line behind, one or two every ten to twenty yards back until their numbers grew into a running mob of so many Whites it wasn’t worth guessing a number.

Murphy was already more than halfway from where I was to the trees, which were looming large.

Just as my foot landed, I chanced another glance back. I had some fractions of a second to spare.

The three sprinters would never catch Murphy, but they were going to catch me. Another glance back confirmed that.

It was time to make a choice between two crappy options. I could hope that my machete, boots, and choice to run beside Murphy all that way hadn’t marked me in the Whites’ minds as a target. If I wasn’t marked, I could let them pass and dispatch them as easily as I’d cut the legs out from the Whites who’d chased us away from the barn earlier.

I didn’t have any faith in that choice.

My alternative was to slow down and try something else. That appealed to me most, whether through logic or fatigue I couldn’t swear to know, but I told myself it was logic.

I started taking efficient, slow leaps from furrow to furrow. My breaths instantly felt fulfilling rather than insufficient. Sweat still poured off my skin even though a chill flew on the wind.

I thought through what I was going to do. I went through it again. Mental preparation, intellect, and imagination were my main advantages over the infected.

The sound of rapid breathing came up behind me. I glanced back to get the timing right.

A few more steps, slower and slower.

I leapt with both feet, planted my heels in the bottom of a furrow, covered my head with my arms, and pulled my body into a tight ball.

The Whites tumbled over me in a flurry of elbows, knees, and grunts.

Knocked to the side, I caught my balance and jumped to my feet, swinging my machete at any body part I could reach. An ankle took a gash. A wrist spewed a fountain of red. I wasn’t going for lethal cuts. I’d only bought seconds to slow the three fast bastards down. More Whites were coming on quickly.

Bleeders were on the ground with brilliant red—stark and tempting—on their white skin.

That might give my other pursuers pause. But not me. My work was done.

Successfully.

Ha! Bitches.

I stepped into a run as a hand grabbed my ankle.

My face hit the dirt, as a mouthful of it mixed with the breath I was gasping for.

The ankle-grabber, probably thinking he had me, was crawling on his knees and chortling through snapping teeth when I rolled over and cut a chunk of his skull away. Blood exploded into the brisk wind.

Running Whites howled.

I rolled over, bounced up, and sprinted for the trees.

Chapter 29

Murphy was out of sight.

Good?

I ran for the spot in the trees where he’d disappeared.

A White wasn’t a dozen steps behind and coming fast.

I angled toward a break in the foliage where the ground fell away, eroded by the creek.

A muzzle flash gave away Murphy’s position.

The White behind me tumbled over the muddy furrows.

I looked back as another White’s chest splattered red.

Yet another group of four was nearly a hundred yards back—they were the nearest.

Without slowing, I took a chance and jumped from a full-speed run into the gap in the foliage with no idea how far I’d fall before hitting the ground below the ledge. Branches scraped and cut. Twigs snapped and leaves rattled. It seemed like the loudest announcement of my presence I could have chosen and I was cursing myself for the stupidity, even as I started to think I’d made a huge mistake by jumping into a hole I couldn’t see the bottom of.

My feet slipped on uneven, sloping ground and I fell through more bushes and dead limbs. I slammed into a pile of dirt that knocked the wind out of me.

Stars swam through my vision as I blinked to clear my head.

I was still trying to collect my senses when Murphy’s big hand landed on my shoulder. “You okay, man? What the hell were you thinking?”

“I thought I was Superman?” Really? I didn’t even know what I was saying.

Murphy dragged me to my feet. “We gotta go.”

My knees gave out.

Where’s my machete?

“Zed. Get it together. Dammit.” Murphy bent over, dragged my arm over his shoulder and lifted me to my feet.

Where’s my machete?

I started to panic.

I looked down at my hand. There it was.

Motherfucker!

My boots were dragging the ground and my shoulder felt like Murphy was going to pull it out of its socket. I realized I should have been walking. I started to move my feet as I blinked the last of the stars out of my eyes.

“I shouldn’t have jumped off the bank like that.”

“Ya think?”

Murphy loped through a muddy creek.

When the cold water seeped into my boots, I said, “That’ll wake you up in the morning.”

Murphy dropped me on the far bank and looked back the way we’d come. “You’re being a smartass. Now I know you’re okay. Can you stand? Can you run? Anything broken?”

“Yes. No. Um…” I shook my head and got up on my hands and knees. “I’m okay.”

Murphy put a hand under my arm and dragged me upright.

I brushed his hand away. “I’m cool. I’m fine.” I wasn’t. But I’d run anyway. Thoughts started to come in clear, single lines, rather than random, dreamy bits. I pointed up the eroded slope on the side of the creek we'd crossed. “That way.”

“Is this Superman or Zed talking?”

Murphy looked like he was sure I wasn’t ready to give him a clear answer so instead I answered by hustling through some bushes and scrambling up the slope while my feet slipped on loose clumps of dirt and mud. No surprise, Murphy passed me on the way up, reached level ground before I did, and grabbed my hand to help me the rest of the way.

Another impossibly wide field spread to the indistinguishable gray lumps at the horizon. I looked up and down the snaking path of the creek, picked a direction, pointed, and started to run. “This way.”

Murphy jogged along beside me. "You know something I don't? We need to stay out of sight, if we can."

“We’ll make better time up here on the flat dirt.” Yeah, that made good sense.

“They’ll see us when they come through.”

“I know.” I looked back to see if any Whites were already following our path out of the bushes. “If we chance a few hundred yards, maybe a half mile, we can get a big lead on these fuckers.”

Murphy looked back. He wasn’t a believer.

“If the Smart Ones are running the show,” I told him, “they’ll think we’re staying in the cover of the trees down near the creek bed. That’s the intelligent thing to do. If they look for us down there, they’ll be moving a lot slower than we are up here. We can gain some ground on them.”

“What if they come up on this side?” Murphy asked.

“We get back in the trees.” It didn’t seem to me we’d be losing much of anything. Something moving out in the field—far from the creek—caught my attention. I turned my back to the creek and squinted to make out the shapes. “Look.”

Murphy didn’t look where I was looking. Instead, he pointed in the direction the creek flowed, way off to my left and muttered, “Shit.”

Chapter 30

Whites were climbing out of the creek bed several hundred yards downstream in the direction we’d intended to go.

How the hell did they get there?

Murphy turned around and looked up at the winding path the creek flowed from.

I’d already decided what we had to do. Though the trees and thick foliage blocked our view of the field on the other side of the creek, we knew a lot of Whites were over there. More Whites were downstream. For all I knew, even more were in the trees upstream. That left only the miles of flat field bordering the creek and the grazing cattle far out in it. I said, “The cows are our chance.”

“Goddammit, Zed. You need to quit doing stupid shit and bonking your head.” Murphy turned away from the Whites who were still clambering over the crumbling bank. He started to run. “You can’t think straight.”

One of the Whites was on his feet, swinging a big kitchen knife at the air and looking around.

Oh shit. A Smart One.

He spotted us. Or that’s to say, he spotted Murphy in his dirty military garb with rifle in hand. He screamed, raising the alarm. More Whites—all naked—got their feet beneath them. I couldn’t figure how any of the Whites in the group chasing us had gotten so far down the creek without us seeing them flank us.

I shouted, “Stop!”

Murphy turned around and paused, anxious anger on his face. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Can you shoot one of those cows from here?”

“No.” Murphy didn’t even glance at the cows. “They’re too far.”

"Goddammit, Murphy. I am fucking serious. Can you shoot one from here?"

Murphy looked at the cows that with our growing urgency seemed to be getting smaller and farther away. “No.”

Several of the Whites had knives. Were they all smart or just good imitators? That mattered less than the fact that they were starting to run toward us.

“If we can get close enough to shoot some cows,” I told him in rapid-fire speech, “the Whites will forget about us and go after them.”

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Murphy turned his back to the creek and started to run for the cows. “This better goddamn work.”

I lit out after him. “When you get close enough to take a shot, stop and do it." I looked back at the Whites who'd come up out of the creek bed. By running perpendicular to the flow of the creek, we’d pretty much negated the advantage they had over us when they were unseen down in the gulley. "Just make sure you do it before we get close enough to spook them.”

"This gun is made for killing people. You know that, right?"

“Yeah.” It’s hard to put all the disdainful inflections you need to communicate into one syllable when you’re running for your life and gulping every precious breath.

"It's not made for killing two-thousand-pound cows."

I wanted to smack myself in the head. All those times when I’d filled my magazines with those surprisingly small bullets. I knew that. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, hoping I sounded confident.

Murphy laughed as he panted and ran. “You’re so full of shit.”

Whites were now running from the creek from where Murphy and I had climbed out. Those were definitely the ones who’d been chasing us already. All my hopes of them running up and down in the brushy, sunken banks along the creek disappeared when the white bastard with the kitchen knife had screamed the alarm.

“Shoot one broadside,” I hollered at Murphy. It was a guess. Hell, I wasn’t a hunter, but I’d watched them on TV. “If you get three or four rounds into its lungs, you won’t kill it right away. But…” I had to take several breaths. All the running was taking a toll. I couldn’t keep it up for many more miles.

“The cow won’t be able to run away,” Murphy finished.

“It’ll bleed like crazy,” I said. “That’ll slow it down.”

“I’ll get a couple of them, if I can.”

First one, then several of the cows looked at us. Or they saw the seventy or eighty Whites spread out behind us.

When Murphy and I were less than a hundred yards away, the first cow bolted. He’d apparently been conditioned by the new behavior of humans. Made sense. Most of the cattle that weren’t now afraid of humans were probably already dead.

Murphy dropped to a knee, raised his weapon, and took a second to steady his hand. I spun around to watch for oncoming Whites. We had time, but not much. The rifle popped off three fast rounds.

A cow mooed loudly.

Sounded like a hit to me.

All of the cows mooed sounds that grew to panicked, higher pitches.

Murphy fired again.

In all the sound coming from the cows, in all the screaming coming from the Whites, in the vibrations in the ground from now running hooves, I couldn’t tell if Murphy’s bullets hit a target for sure.

Whites were closing fast. I raised my machete and got ready to swing. “Murphy?”

He fired several more bursts and then shouted, “C’mon, man.” He jumped to his feet and ran.

I followed as fast as my feet would carry me.

Ahead, four-dozen cattle were pushing their bodies close together as they stampeded away. Their direction shifted first to our left, then to our right. With me and Murphy so close and the Whites spread out in such a wide area behind us, the cattle were confused.

“Well?” I panted.

"Got three," Murphy told me in clipped words between breaths. "One, with only a couple of bullets."

“How many in the others?”

None seemed to be injured. None was visibly lagging. I was worried that my hastily conceived plan was a failure. I looked far across the flat field at shapes faded gray in the distance. Could I outrun the Whites all the way there? If I did, then what?

“Just run,” Murphy commanded. “Run.”

I looked over my shoulder. The two closest Whites both held knives. We had maybe a fifty-yard lead on them.

I started looking around for a Plan B, or C, or Q, or R. I didn’t know what letter I was up to by then. It’d been a busy day of failures.

A thunder of shouts rolled through the white mass behind us and I found some extra speed in my feet.

“You sure,” I breathed, “got some?”

“Just run,” Murphy told me. He looked back at the chasing Whites, then up at the cows in front.

Three cows separated from the herd.

I felt a tinge of hope.

One of the cows stumbled as it swung its head and veered. A bloody mist plumed from its snout. A long, baritone squeal followed. Something in me wanted to hurt at the sight of the poor, dumb animal struggling. Something in me wanted to celebrate. Most of me wanted badly not to be a poor, dumb Zed, getting eaten by the Whites on our tail.

Another cow slipped back from the group.

“Damn.” Murphy’s impatience was as strong as mine. We needed something to happen. “Fall, cow!”

The cow’s run turned to a trot and over the space of a few steps it slowed to a walk. It made a pitiful sound as a living version of every herbivore’s nightmare unfolded before it. The herd ran ahead while the slavering predators snapped their jaws and charged up from behind.

The cow wailed.

Murphy and I were close enough that the bullets’ holes stood out red with blood flowing down the cow’s hide.

The cow breathing out the red mist stumbled to its front knees, raised its head and mooed loudly.

“We’re gonna make it!” I shouted to Murphy, still hoping the Whites would choose fresh cow lying on the ground to skinny people running away. They had to. Basic White nature demanded it.

The uninjured cattle ahead of us were extending their lead.

The Whites behind were getting closer and it was my fault. Murphy ran slower to stay with me.

“Do you want me to shoot it again?” Murphy panted. “When we pass?”

“No,” I told him. “Not necessary.” If the Whites weren’t going to go after a wounded animal that could no longer run, a few more bullet holes wouldn’t make a difference.

The downed cow barely raised its head to look at us as we ran by. A dozen paces ahead, the other cow, still on its feet, wailed loudly as we ran past. I sprinted as hard as I was able. Distance was my friend.

Murphy matched my speed with seemingly no added effort. I focused on keeping my feet under me.

He looked back again and grinned through his words. “They’re stopping.”

I looked. The two Whites with knives were stabbing and cutting the downed cow. It bellowed sadly each time a blade sank into its flesh. Other Whites were falling on it and tearing futilely at its thick hide with their fingers and dull teeth. Not one was still running after us.

Chapter 31

We ran another mile or two before coming to a place where the fields gave way to a thick forest of pine, pecan, and oak. Having not seen a naked White since we left that group by the cows, we ran into the trees, and when we could see nothing around us but tree trunks and undergrowth, we slowed to a walk.

Murphy stopped, leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “We can’t keep getting lucky forever.”

“You been holding that in all morning?” I asked.

“It needed to be said.” He stood up and fished a bottle of water out of his bag. He drank half of it down and offered the rest to me.

I guzzled it and looked around, listening closely as I did.

Murphy grinned and put the empty bottle back in his bag. “That was some intense shit.”

I nodded with a chuckle.

Murphy looked around and started through the trees again. “You can only flip a coin so many times before it comes up tails. We can’t keep pushing our luck.”

Following along, I said, “I don’t agree.”

Murphy laughed loudly enough that animals hiding in the brown leaves skittered away. “Of course, you don’t agree. Okay, Professor, why don’t you explain to me why we haven’t been pushing our luck? I just can’t wait to hear this one.”

The undergrowth thinned out. The trees stood taller overhead. They were spaced widely enough that I was able to catch up a few steps to walk beside Murphy.

“You’ve got goosebumps all over you,” he said with a glance. “You feel cold?”

I looked at my arms. Indeed, they were covered with goosebumps, under a sheen of sweat that was evaporating away. "I don't feel chilly.”

Murphy blew out a big puff of condensation. “It’s getting colder. We need to find you something to wear.”

Still looking at my arms, I nodded and wondered again how the growing cold would affect the naked horde. "We're bound to find a house or something. I'll find some clothes and get dressed until I to go back out hunting for Mark again."

“And pushing your luck,” said Murphy.

“You know everything you’re calling luck isn’t luck, right?”

Murphy didn’t look at me when he replied. “Every time we make it through some sticky-ass situation, it seems like luck to me. Like it was pretty damn lucky those cows were there just when we needed them, right?”

“No.”

“No?” Murphy laughed some more. “I think the virus in your brain is turning you into a golf ball head who hasn’t figured out he stopped being smart about four months ago.”

“Maybe,” I allowed, “and I don’t disagree that we’ve gotten lucky plenty of times, but I’ll tell you what I think happened this morning. We got unlucky a lot more than we got lucky.”

“And here we are, unlucky enough to still be alive.”

I ignored the comment and said, “When we left the barn this morning there weren’t any Whites around, at least none close enough to bother us. We got unlucky when those Whites from inside the house spotted you in your GI Joe outfit and came after us.”

“I’m not going naked,” said Murphy. “I don’t care what you think you’re doing with all of your naked, undercover bullshit." Murphy looked around for Whites. Habit dictated it.

“I’ll do what I need to do to kill Mark." I looked around, as well. It was like yawning at that point. When one person looked around, everybody else did too. You just never knew when some white fuckers were trying to sneak up on you for a meal.

“So because we had some bad luck when those Whites from the house spotted us,” Murphy said, “that’s your argument for why we don’t always have good luck?”

“Not completely,” I told him. “But when they came after us, we didn’t get away from them by luck. We used our brains to figure it out.”

“And my marksmanship,” said Murphy.

I waved a hand at my naked white skin. “And my ability to fit in and hobble the ones I could. None of that was luck. We were smart about using what advantages we had to get away.”

“But we didn’t get away,” Murphy argued. “Because they started screaming and alerted all those other golf ball heads to chase us. Bad luck or good luck?”

“More bad luck,” I said. “And what did we do? We got into the trees and would have gotten away from those guys, too, if not for that other mob that was out searching for us. And at each turn of bad luck, we didn't depend on good luck to get away. We evaluated the situation for what it was, and we used our brains and brawn to take what was there and turn it to our advantage. The fact that none of the things we tried this morning worked out proves that it wasn’t luck that saved us. We only needed to stay ahead of the Whites long enough for one of our plans to work out. One eventually did: the cows.”

“And if the cows weren’t there?” Murphy asked. “If we didn’t have the good luck of the cows being there, then what?”

“Something else.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

We came out of the trees and into another field, not large compared to the one we’d spent a good part of the day running through, maybe the size of a football field. One side was bordered, of course, by the forest, and two other sides by a dirt path and a narrow asphalt road. Across the field from us stood a collection of houses; several dozen spread over ten or twenty acres. Standing a hundred feet tall above the village were five Siamese twins—concrete grain silos connected across their tops by a rusty, metal-framed catwalk and some weird-shaped roofs that didn’t make any sense to me.

Murphy stared at the silos, fascinated by something up there.

I was already past my interest in the aging grain silos and studied the field as we shuffled between the short, green plants—plants that hadn't been trampled by white feet and hadn't been grazed to nubs by herds of passing cattle and feral pigs.

I stopped walking. “Murphy.”

He kept going. “What?”

We were maybe halfway across the width of the field. “Murphy, stop for a second.”

He looked around at the tree line and the houses and turned to face me nervously. We were exposed in the open, and he wanted to make sure I understood that.

I pointed at the ground. “These plants. They’re small.”

“Duh. It’s almost winter.”

“No.” I shook my finger at the green sprouts. “This looks like a vegetable garden. These were all planted recently, like in the last month or so.”

Murphy’s rifle flew to his shoulder in an instant. He scanned back and forth across the houses in front of us.

Chapter 32

We walked slowly forward, the barrel of Murphy’s rifle pausing on anything that moved—leaves floating down from an autumn tree, a sheet flapping on a clothesline, a window screen slapping when the wind gusted.

In a cautious voice, he said, “This place already gives me the creeps.”

I looked for more signs someone might be nearby. I saw no footprints, not even in the tilled furrows beneath our feet. I realized those would have been washed out in the heavy rain, but the plants were here, and no weeds were among them. They'd been tended.

I looked hard at the windows of each house, the broken ones and the closed ones. I saw nothing but faded curtains and shadows.

We stopped when we reached a clapboard back wall of an old house with peeling paint. Even from outside, it smelled faintly of mildew and rancid bacon fat.

Murphy peeked through a curtained window, held his head up for a moment and put his back to the wall.

I raised my eyebrows in a silent question.

Murphy shook his head. He’d seen no one inside.

I pointed to the smallish porch under an awning on the back of the house to let Murphy know what I intended. I took off, skipped the porch steps, and bounded up to put my back to a wall beside a windowed back door. I looked in, but saw only a kitchen. Dirty dishes filled the sink. The cupboard doors hung open on their hinges. Nothing moved.

Murphy had followed me over and took up a spot by the wall next to the porch. With urgency on his face, he pointed at something over my shoulder.

I crouched and spun, ready to hack. Nothing.

I looked at him and mouthed a silent “What?”

He waggled his finger at the wall again.

Frustrated, I looked back at the wall and this time whispered, “What?”

Murphy pointed again. “The thermometer.”

I huffed and looked at a big round thermometer with a dial on its face.

“Thirty-nine, man. We need to get you in some clothes.”

“Yes, Mom.”

I turned back to the door and tried the knob. It turned on gravelly innards that clicked satisfactorily, quietly. I tugged the door open. One of the hinges squeaked. Not loud. Just irritating. I stepped through.

Murphy reached from his spot on the ground and took hold of the door. He shook his head, pointed at me, patted his rifle, and patted his chest.

I shook my head and raised my machete as I stepped onto the worn, green linoleum inside. Boards creaked. Another step and I was fully inside, out of the wind. The sound of rustling tree branches and shrubs—loud background noise a moment before—became dull outside noises.

Something thumped on wood inside the house. I jumped in fright, but nothing moved that I could see.

Another thump.

And while I stared at the part of the house’s interior I could see, it pounded again.

It sounded like a baseball bat beating a wall. It reminded me of the sound of that monstrous White’s fist on the door in the basement that first night when we broke into Sarah Mansfield’s mansion. That thought slapped me with a repressed fear and a feeling of terrible inadequacy. That monster of a man would have killed me if Sergeant Dalhover hadn’t had the composure to put some bullets into him.

Bam.

I figured a White must be trapped somewhere in the house.

I leaned out of the door and waved Murphy inside.

A moment later, we were both standing in the narrow space between the messy counters in the kitchen, with a view through a doorway into the dining room. I wanted to see around the corner into the living room but all I saw were piles of folded clothes stacked high on the dining room table.

Bam.

I turned to Murphy and whispered. “What do you make of that noise?”

“White.”

What else?

He tried to push past me to take the lead. I blocked him and all but bounded into the dining room, raising my machete as I did, ready to hack down whatever might attack me.

Nothing did.

Murphy came up behind me.

Stacked in the dining room chairs against the walls, clothing piles towered. Various garments, all sorted by type, were piled on a sagging, flowery couch and the puffy chairs beside it. They were heaped on an old cabinet-style television and draped on hangers from the moldings above the doorways.

Bam.

I craned my neck to see if I could determine the source of the sound, which came from down the hall. Probably one of the bedrooms—both doors down there were open.

What the fuck?

Turning to Murphy, I said, “The bedroom doors are open.”

Murphy stepped into the living room and peered down the hall. “Yup.”

“But the noise is coming from down there.”

He nodded.

Gripping my machete, I crossed the living room, seeing where the ceiling had flowered in patches of greenish black. That explained the mildew smell, though the house had plenty of other stale odors to compete.

A peek into the first room revealed nothing but an open closet packed full of clothing, and a bed piled up to chest level with neatly folded shirts.

“Hoarder,” Murphy whispered.

Bam.

The sound was louder. It came from the room down the hall.

Murphy nodded toward it. I once again brandished my machete. Maybe I had something to prove to myself. It didn’t make sense, but in a mind that’s been fucked with for so long by so many things, I figured it was par for the course.

On silent feet, I exited the bedroom and tiptoed up the hall toward the only other door.

Chapter 33

Just outside the room, I stopped.

Bam.

Without a doubt, something inside was making the sound. I put a palm on Murphy’s chest and pushed him back a few steps. With the blunt edge of my machete, I tapped the door jamb. Better to let the White come out into the hall and die in surprise than for me to risk being ambushed by unexpected circumstances inside the room.

Bam.

No change. Just a randomly-timed noise.

“Hey, dipshit.” I gripped my machete handle and readied it to swing.

Nothing happened.

I listened for footsteps. I heard no grunt from a startled White. Only the wind gusting through the branches in the trees outside.

“C’mon, you silly monster,” I called. “Come play with us.”

Bam.

I braced myself, but nothing followed the noise.

Bam.

I glanced over my shoulder to let Murphy know what was coming next.

I stepped quietly into the doorway. A bed. A dresser. Every horizontal surface stacked with folded clothes, and hanging clothes in an open closet, but no sign of anything moving in the room.

A shadow moved outside the curtains. I gasped and jumped back.

Bam.

The shadow moved again.

Nothing came at me.

“It’s outside,” I announced, turning to run up the hall.

Murphy stopped me and put a finger to his lips. He whispered, “How many?”

Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t know.”

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“I saw something through the curtains.”

“Beating up the house?” Murphy asked.

“What do you mean, beating up the house?”

“That sound,” said Murphy. “That White is hitting the house with something. Why?”

“Man, you know what they’re like. They don’t need reasons for stupid shit.”

Murphy conceded the point by cocking his head. He nudged me to move aside. "I'll peek out the window and see what's what before we go out front."

Shaking my head, I hurried into the room. I whispered, “I’ve got it.” Okay, so I was being a little pissy.

After a quick glance into the blind spot on the other side of the dresser, inside the closet, and to the floor on the other side of the bed, I put myself beside the window.

Bam.

The sound outside was loud enough to startle, powerful enough to send a vibration through the house’s old boards.

I pushed the curtain to the side just wide enough that I could get a clear view out with one eye.

No Whites. Only some half-dead shrubs and a tree planted too close to the house.

What the hell?

The wind gusted again, and the tree branches swayed. I involuntarily ducked as a branch as thick as my arm swayed past and smacked the eaves.

Fuck!” I yelled as I jumped back, startled. Then I laughed.

“What?” Murphy asked from the doorway, concern on his face.

“It’s a tree branch.”

Murphy laughed too.

Chapter 34

“It’s like a used clothing store,” I said, as I sorted through a stack of jeans, looking for the right size.

Murphy had already selected a t-shirt, sweatshirt, and jacket for me. He laid them on the arm of a couch beside the piles of blue jeans I was looking through. He groused, “This is some weird shit.”

Nodding, I said, “You know how some Whites get obsessed with weird habits. At least this one works for us. You need anything?”

He pointed to a jacket lying over the back of a chair. “Got me one already.”

“Did you see any food?”

“Not a scrap.”

Wondering how far our luck could run on this one, I suggested, “Maybe the food is in a different house.

Murphy walked over to the back wall as I slipped on a pair of jeans. I sat down to put a clean pair of socks on my feet before putting my boots back on. He looked out a window at the field of tiny, new plants. “Maybe this isn’t the work of Whites.”

“Because of the vegetable garden out back?”

“Yeah,” said Murphy.

“You think maybe regular people did this? Normals?”

Murphy shrugged. “Could still be around here in one of these houses.”

I pulled the T-shirt over my head. “Maybe they aren’t hostile.”

“Maybe they’re sneaking around outside to ambush us when we come out of the house.”

I walked over to get a look out a window on the front of the house.

“Finish getting dressed,” said Murphy. “We need to decide whether we’re going out the way we came or whether we’re going to check out what’s in town.”

“I don’t want to restart our conversation on luck,” I said, “but I don’t want to press mine anymore today.” I stuffed my arms into the sweatshirt’s sleeves. Looking out, I said, “Something’s off about this place.”

Murphy crossed the room, flipping a few sweaters off the top of a pile on the television. “This place creeps me out.”

“Back to the woods then?” I asked. “Maybe head down the road a bit and see if we can find a place to hole up before dark.”

Murphy pushed a curtain to the side to look across the green field. “That sounds like a—”

“What?”

Murphy scooted out of the window as he peeked around the edge, waving a hand to hush me down.

Shit.

I hurried as fast as I could to finish dressing and get my machete back in my hand. Once I was ready, I jogged across the room and took a spot on the other side of the window.

“Watch the line of trees,” Murphy whispered.

It took thirty or forty seconds to see, but a line of naked Whites jogged out of the trees, following one after the other. Twelve—no, thirteen. They cut a goodly-sized arc through the vegetable field, stomping on the new crop like so much grass. They curved back into the trees.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

“That’s all they’re doing,” said Murphy. “Running in and out of the forest in that stupid curvy path they follow when they’re going nowhere in particular.”

“That might be the key,” I said. “When they're going nowhere in particular, they do that. When they're chasing, well, we got a pretty good idea of what that looks like."

“Yup.”

"Have you seen any more?" I asked.

“None yet.” Murphy rubbed a hand over his face, clearly thinking about how this new development affected our options.

“But you think there are more in the trees.”

He looked at me, angrily surprised. “Don’t you?”

“Just thinking out loud, I guess.” I shrugged. It was a stupid question. We both believed more Whites were in the woods. Whether they were the ones looking for us or just more stragglers from the naked horde didn’t matter. Naked Whites were fucking dangerous. And like roaches. For every one you saw, a hundred more lurked out of sight. “We should get out of here.”

Murphy turned and headed for the front door.

I followed. The decision was made. We were going to take our chances with the invisible townsfolk. Perhaps being chased by naked Whites for a good part of the day and thinking we were going to end up as food diminished our fear that we might be ambushed by farmers with guns when we went out the front door.

However, we had a short menu of choices, and they all sucked.

Murphy put a hand on the worn brass knob and paused, giving me a look that asked whether I was ready.

I raised a finger to indicate that he should wait for a moment. I peeked out a front window, a necessary step Murphy forgot in his moment of decisiveness. That’s why we were a good pair. We caught one another’s mistakes.

“Clear as far as I can see,” I said.

With a nod at me, Murphy swung the door open. He put the rifle to his shoulder, stepped out, and panned his aim across the other houses, pausing at items of interest. I stepped onto the porch beside him, machete in one hand, knife in the other, ready to do some killing.

The wind blew a tumble of big, crispy leaves across the yard and street. The branch beat on the eaves of the house. Trees rustled in the gust. Nothing alive moved anywhere.

“Follow me." Murphy leapt off the squat porch and hurried toward the street.

On his heels, I followed him to a house across the street not very different from the one we’d just left. It, too, was tidy enough. The doors were closed. Most of the windows were intact, with curtains opened wide. I couldn’t help but peep inside.

It didn’t appear to have been ransacked. Well, not much. All the cupboards and closets were open. In the rooms where the windows weren’t broken were stacks and stacks of dishes, pots, pans, and piles of utensils—all sorted. Forks in one, spoons in another. One for spatulas, one for knives.

“This place is fuckin’ weird,” Murphy whispered.

“No shit.”

We snuck around a garage with no door. I stopped Murphy and motioned toward a dusty car sitting inside. “I’m going to check it.” Driving a car, especially in the daylight hours with so many Whites around, was a damn risky proposition. But Whites were in the woods close by and we were stuck in creepy town with a hearty desire to get the fuck out—quickly.

“Don’t lollygag,” Murphy told me. “If the keys aren’t in it, let’s just go.” He tucked himself between a big bush and the garage wall and scanned for movement.

I hurried back around to the front of the garage and slipped inside. Out of the wind, it was suddenly quiet again. I avoided touching the car as I passed it. I didn’t want to knock away any of the accumulated dust, which would be evidence of my passing. After seeing Whites looking for our tracks in the field earlier, I didn’t want to leave any sign.

The car’s front door was unlocked. I swung it open and squeezed inside, feeling the awkward bulk of my clothing and thinking how quickly I’d gotten used to running around naked. Once in the driver’s seat, I saw the keys were not in the ignition. Having seeing way too many movies, I, of course, checked the visor. No keys. "Damn, doesn't anybody understand the rules?" I chuckled at my stupid little joke while I wished more people would have watched the same movies I’d seen. I checked under the floor mat, under the seat, and in the glove box. No keys.

Crap.

I got out of the car, crept back out of the garage and took up a spot beside Murphy and his bush.

“No luck?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I thought I heard you saying something in there.” Murphy turned to me and grinned. “Did you try asking nicely for it to start?”

“Yes.” Lies are always a good defense against sarcasm. I stepped out from behind the bush and jogged to a house about fifty yards across two unfenced backyards. Murphy followed, trying to suppress his chuckles as he kept his rifle at his shoulder.

A peek through the windows showed stacks and stacks of blankets, sheets, and pillows. “What is up with this crazy place?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

We crossed a few more yards.

We came to a row of houses in various states of disassembly. Not destroyed, but methodically taken apart. One house had little left except concrete block foundation pillars, pipes, and a fireplace. One was torn down to the frame. In another, much of the wood used to frame it was missing, leaving mostly just the floor.

Still, we saw no more Whites, no living humans, and no houses stocked with food. Given the separation of items in each house by type, I figured we'd maybe come across one filled with canned goods, or bottled soft drinks. Hell, one of the houses might be full of liquor. I found myself looking at all the homes in sight, trying to guess which one was hiding the beer.

I thought I saw something moving between the houses in the distance. It was getting late in the day, and with the overcast sky, it was hard to make out shapes in the dimming light. Maybe they were bushes moving in the wind.

Murphy nudged me and pointed at the grain silos. A rusty ladder cage ran up the side of one, all the way to the top, where an unusual metal tower with numerous platforms stood precariously on the edge. Two of the towers appeared flat across their tops. Three others had some irregular constructions on the roofs.

I didn’t indulge Murphy’s pointless worry. Movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention and I looked, but saw nothing.

“What?” Murphy asked.

“Not sure,” I said, even though I was thinking pretty hard in that moment anything with enough energy to move probably had enough energy to try and eat me. “What’s your thing with the grain silos?”

“Might be a place to go up and spend the night in safety,” said Murphy. “Only one way in and one way out.”

I turned to Murphy. “I thought you wanted to get out of this creepy little village. Besides, with all the wind, I’ll bet it’s cold as shit up there.”

Murphy pointed back at the house with all the blankets. “Plenty in there to keep us warm.” He tensed as he finished his sentence.

That alarmed me and I looked toward the blanket house.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

I shook my head and pointed in the other direction. “Nope. But I’ve been seeing some other things. Over there and over there.”

“Whites?”

“I don’t know.” I looked around again. “If it’s Whites, they’re being sneaky.”

“And you saw them over there,” Murphy looked around behind us again, “and now back there. They’ve got us surrounded.”

“Run for it?” I asked.

“It’s worked for us so far.”

I heaved a big sigh and leaned on the wall of the house as I thought about our situation. “If it’s Whites, there’s got to be Smart Ones with them.”

“’Cause?”

“They haven’t attacked yet.”

Murphy nodded. “Okay, Professor, but make this quick. I’m getting itchy feet.”

“I don’t think this is the bunch that chased us this morning,” I said. “If it was, they wouldn’t be sneaking around. They’d come right for us.”

Murphy shrugged and nodded. “I’ll give you that. Or it’s the creepy people who live here.”

“Either way,” I said, “I don’t think there are that many of them. Again, if they had overwhelming numbers, they’d have come at us already.”

“Whatever,” said Murphy. “What direction haven’t you seen anything moving in?”

I pointed.

“You ready to scoot your ass?”

I nodded.

Murphy gestured in that direction. “We’ll run as fast as we can that way.” He paused and looked at me. “As fast as you can. To that blue house way over there. That looks like the edge of town. If I stop by the garage to look around, stop with me. If I don't stop, it'll be because I spotted a White, and I'll keep hauling ass to the woods on the other side."

“If I see a White?” I asked.

“Same deal. Don’t stop. I’ll keep running with you.”

“Got it, Sarge.”

“Stay close.” Murphy took off running.

A White howled to warn his buddies of our attempt to flee before we'd made it a dozen steps.

Shaking his head, Murphy muttered, “Motherfucker.”

If the situation didn’t feel so suddenly dire, I’d have laughed. We were having a run of shit luck.

Chapter 35

Way off to our left, in the gaps past the houses, I saw a trio pacing us, running parallel to our path.

Off to our right, Whites were scattered, maybe six or seven of them, trying to close in before we got to the blue house. More Whites were behind, but I didn’t spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. It’s damn difficult to maintain a sprint while looking backwards.

As we got close to the blue house, Murphy panted, “How many do you see?”

“Maybe fifteen.” I glanced around. It was mostly a guess.

“Two choices,” he said. “In the house or in the woods.”

The advantage of either choice was dependent on the number of Whites coming. If many more than my guess of fifteen were out there, any benefit of using the house for defense would be negated by so many attacking through the doors and windows all at once. If we ran into the woods, well, that might put us back in the situation we’d been in for most of the day, being chased by an ever-growing mob of infected boneheads.

Or, I suppose, we could have stood our ground and spent a good deal of Murphy’s last two magazines, while I hacked and stabbed as many as I was able.

“The woods,” I told him.

We ran past the blue house without pause.

Despite the cold temperatures, I wished I was still naked and able to fit in with our pursuers. That one thing would give me a lethally stealthy advantage that, so far, the naked horde hadn’t been intelligent enough to counter.

Murphy crashed between bare branches growing over a narrow path. I tore in behind him.

Whites were in the yard we’d just crossed. Moments later, they burst through the bushes to get on the path behind us.

I listened for Whites in the trees, skipping the path altogether. I knew they would. They had to. It was an intelligence thing. If a regular White saw you on the other side of a fence, he’d try all day to go through the fence before it occurred to him to go over. It was a different story with Smart Ones. I knew at least some of the Whites had to see us among the trees and wouldn’t go to the path to chase us, but rather, would run a beeline from where they stood to the spot where they saw us, even if bushes and vines were in the way.

Advantage us. Those Whites would come more slowly and be dispersed.

The ones bright enough to follow the path would get strung out in a single-file line. Whites are easier to kill that way than when they all come at you at once.

I don’t know why, but that made me think of the attack by that mob of white-skinned motherfuckers when Steph and I were caught on the shore of Lake Travis a few months ago. And like every time that memory found its way into my mind, it hurt. A fresh dose of adrenaline pumping through my veins mixed with that pain, and blurred into a rage with a biting hunger for revenge.

My rationality switch flipped to fuck it.

I skidded to a stop on the trail. I turned to face the Whites coming up behind me and roared all of my hatred into a dead, gray sky.

I ran back up the trail, swinging my machete-shaped best friend.

Predators hate it when the prey turns and says, “Fuck you!”

The first White in line fell onto his ass as he tried to come to a stop. The two Whites behind him tripped and tumbled over.

Too bad for them.

I slashed and cut a chunk from two heads as I leapt over.

A fourth White, this one with a blade in hand, made a running Tarzan leap at me. I spun and ripped out his guts with a two-handed swing of my machete as I sidestepped his momentum.

The White who’d been leading the line on the trail struggled through the bodies of his three dying buddies to reach for my leg. He caught a big mouthful of steel-toed boot and went limp.

A quick little woman came around a curve in the trail before I had my blade up to hack her down. She made a quick move to get her face out of my fist’s way, but earned a throat full of elbow instead. Her larynx collapsed and the crunchy noise of it followed the gobs of spit on the last breath out of her wide-open mouth.

My blade found another White woman coming up the trail.

I ran further, seeing no Whites, only hearing them in the woods around me. I shouted, “C’mon, fuckers!”

I was full of victory and invincibility, thinking I could handle any number. I was loving the taste of revenge and the feel of warm Whites’ blood on my face and hands.

A big fellow tripped out of the trees and fell onto the trail a few paces away. Too bad for him, I was faster at covering the distance than he was at regaining his feet. I hacked him across the back of his neck and he collapsed face first onto the muddy path.

“There you go, motherfucker!” I shouted. “You want some more? Come on, I’ll kill every one of you shits!”

No more came.

Murphy said, “They’re dead, dude.”

I caught a big breath and found that the pace of my breathing was uncomfortably fast.

“You got most of ‘em,” he said, with his bloody hatchet in hand. “I finished off the ones who needed it.”

I nodded and pursed my lips. “Thanks.” Rational thought slowly returned as my anger settled to a simmer. “You have to shoot any of ‘em?”

“A few.” He turned back up the trail. “What do you say we get the hell away from Creepy Town and see if we can find us another barn to crash in tonight? Oh, and next time, let me know if you decide to run off in the other direction. I was a long way down the trail when I figured out that you weren’t behind me.”

I nodded and started to follow as Murphy moved up the trail.

Murphy said, “That was some shit.”

“Needed to be done.” It was the first excuse I came up with, though I wasn’t entirely sure I needed an excuse.

Murphy grunted noncommittally. A moment later, he asked, “You get hurt?”

“No.” I did a quick mental inventory of my parts—wiggled my toes, bent my elbows, swung my shoulders, and flexed my fingers. “I’m good.”

“None of that’s your blood, then?”

“You know how it goes sometimes,” I answered.

“Yeah.”

We’d gone a piece up the trail when I thought to ask, “You didn’t get hurt, did you? Bit or anything?”

“Nope,” said Murphy, as he held up his hand and flexed his fingers. “Something in the bushes got me.” He looked closely at his palm. “Maybe thorns or a scorpion, or something.” He shrugged and put the hand back on his rifle. “The ones coming through the woods weren’t hard. The ones on the trail were dazed, or too busy dying to pay me any mind after you tore through ‘em.”

“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”

Shaking his head, Murphy turned. “Don’t sweat it. You gotta do what you gotta do.” He reached up and tapped the side of my head with a big finger. “Before you can deal with some of the crazy that lives in here.”

I had no response. He was right.

Murphy turned and started forward again. “You forget, I’ve been there. There’s only one way past that shit for people like you and me.”

“To kill Mark.”

Murphy nodded.

Somewhere in the shadows far off to our left, a White screamed an alarm. Another added her voice. One by one, all through the woods, in the direction we were moving, White voices joined in.

“I knew we didn’t get them all,” whispered Murphy. “But—”

“But there’s always more than you think,” I finished.

The hunt was on again, and there were way too many Whites in the forest for me to kill, no matter how manic I let myself get.

We needed to evade them until dark. With Murphy’s night vision goggles, nighttime was the advantage that could save us.

We turned and ran back up the trail toward Creepy Town.

Chapter 36

We bolted out of the woods and ran past the blue house, fixing our bearing on the grain silos. Whites were crashing through the trees behind us, across a wide front, driving us with their frightful howls, but not gaining any ground.

But then, relatively few of them could have been on the narrow trail. The rest had to be moving slowly through the undergrowth.

Right?

Of course it was right, but damn. Something was fucked with that logic, but I was hauling ass too fast and my adrenaline was coursing too thickly with residual rage for me to put clear thoughts together.

Not good for me. Not one bit. I often kept a cool, analytical distance through a lot of this kind of shit, and it made me one lethal motherfucker. It was probably the only reason I was still alive and pounding the crumbly asphalt through the center of Creepy-ville.

Then it occurred to me.

We were being hunted.

An ambush was coming.

Holy shit.

The clarity of that thought slapped me so hard I nearly stumbled.

I had to act.

Right the fuck now.

I stopped and Murphy plowed into me from behind.

“What the fuck, dude!” He pointed at the grain silos, just three blocks ahead, on what passed for Creepy Town’s main street.

“Ambush,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, though I hadn’t yet spotted one White, now that we were back in town. “Follow me.”

I bolted into a gap between two closely spaced houses and leapt over big, plastic kids’ toys hiding in the tall brown grass. I rounded the back of a house and turned right to see three Whites at the other end of the house’s backside, peeking around the corner, looking in the other direction, at the road Murphy and I had been running down moments before.

I ran full-speed at them with my machete out at knee level. “Hey, assholes,” I said, just as I passed. I couldn’t resist. The blade ripped across the tendons on the backs of their legs.

I missed one, but Murphy, taking up the rear, elbowed her in the skull and slammed her into the house.

I turned further away from the silos and ran across a dirt road into a quarter-acre collection of rusty cars, aging propane tanks, and pieces of metal so old they looked like giant, bent flecks of rust. We burst through a web of twisted branches, each displaying rows of small dead leaves, and found ourselves in a fallow field on the edge of Creepy Town.

We were still a good three blocks away from the silos, but hopefully, out of the scope of the hunting Whites. I made another hard turn and ran toward the silos.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Murphy said through labored breaths. “You’re gonna wear us out before we get there.”

“I know,” I said. Cool, quick thinking and an absence of hesitation had just earned us a life-saving advantage. The Whites didn’t know their prey had given them the slip.

We stopped behind a house two short blocks from the towering silos and scanned the area. More Whites had to be waiting in ambush. I needed to find out where.

Murphy pointed and whispered. “By that yellow house. Four of ‘em.”

“I see.” I looked left and right. “Over there, back the way we came,” I pointed. “A couple behind that tractor.”

“They’re all still looking the other way for us,” said Murphy. “Was that a lucky turn back there? Or did you know?”

“What do you think?” I took off at a run and crossed behind two more houses.

A block and a half to go.

Panting, I stopped behind a dense honeysuckle vine growing through a chain-link fence, looking for Whites ahead.

Murphy ran by, slapping me on the shoulder, “C’mon. I think they saw us.”

Shit.

It was a race.

Another race.

Murphy, being faster on his feet, put some space between us, but slowed as we crossed the last street. He stopped, swung his rifle around, and spent a half-dozen rounds at Whites he figured were too close. And if he figured they were, he was probably right.

I crossed the double railroad tracks first. My feet slipped and twisted through the big, loose rocks that made the tracks’ foundations. I thanked myself again for my decision to keep my boots. We passed a utilitarian cinder block building beside the tracks and ran beneath a pavilion with a twenty-foot roof overhead, pierced by a dozen wide pipes, the place where grain from the silos was filled into train cars.

With Whites screaming a hundred feet behind us, we rounded the last silo in the line, and spotted our salvation.

Murphy spun around and leveled his rifle at the closest infected. “Go!” he shouted, as he popped off several rounds.

I jumped onto the ladder and started to climb.

Before I was so high up that a jump back to the ground would injure me, I stopped and looked to make sure Murphy was coming.

He fired two more rounds and bounded over to the ladder.

I put myself in speedy monkey mode and started up as fast as I could climb, figuring before I was halfway up, Murphy would be right on my ass, because as with everything else, he was faster than me.

At about fifteen feet up, I entered the ladder cage, a round tube of mesh and braces, which I guessed were there to keep climbers from falling off. I laughed as I climbed. If a high wind blew me off, there was plenty of room inside the cage for me to do my falling without ever touching the ladder or cage.

The thing about climbing—as I came to understand pretty quickly—is that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. Yeah, I know, like anybody has to be told that. Climbing a ladder works the arm and leg muscles in a way they’re not used to, at least not in a repetitive, weight-bearing fashion.

My muscles were getting stiff and I stopped, thinking a good excuse for a pause would be to look down to see how Murphy was progressing.

I swung one foot and one arm away from the ladder and leaned my back against the cage. In another day, in an old, civilized world, I might not have done it. Too much risk for nearly nothing gained. But compared to the shit I did on a daily basis, it seemed a lot like no big deal. I looked down. Murphy was a good ways below and climbing a lot more slowly than I expected.

At least a half-dozen screaming Whites were crowded around the base of the ladder, with more of them close enough to spit on. A steady flow was piling into Creepy Town from the woods. All were heeding the call of their naked kin.

“You good?” I called.

Murphy looked up, worry on his face. “Yeah.”

He wasn’t good. He was having trouble with the rungs and he was coming up slowly.

I waited and watched, feeling the ladder vibrate with the weight of the Whites mounting it at the bottom.

“Dude?” I asked, concerned.

Murphy grimaced and raised his hand, palm up. His fingers were swollen as fat as sausages. “Whatever got me back in the woods—” He looked down at the Whites, then back up at me. “It keeps swelling.”

“Pass me,” I shouted. “Hurry.”

Murphy shook his head.

“Goddammit,” I yelled. “Just get the fuck up here.” I brandished my machete. “I can cut fingers off rungs all night long.”

Wrapping the arm with the swollen hand around the ladder, Murphy climbed with only his good hand to hold onto the rungs.

A clinking sound startled me into looking up instead of down. Way up at the top of the ladder, hanging right over the ladder cage, one of those wide-mouthed, metal grain chutes was pointing down. That didn’t make any sense to me, not one bit.

Why would the silo owners want to dump grain down through the ladder cage?

The pipe vibrated with a throaty, tinny noise.

Oh, shit.

I pressed my back against the ladder cage to get as far away from the center of the tube as possible. I yelled, “Murphy, off the ladder. Against the cage! Right fucking now!”

The pipe spat something black and round.

Before I could curse, a perfect black sphere swished past me, pushing a puff of air into my face. I looked down as it passed, hoping to God Murphy had heeded my order with the urgency that I’d shouted it.

His body was moving to the side, even as the bowling ball—it was a fucking bowling ball—brushed the front of his MOLLE vest. It hit the toe of his boot and deflected just enough to bounce off the ladder cage before it thudded with a wet crunch into the first White on the ladder.

Screams followed as I watched the weirdest piece of performance art I’d ever seen. Arms and legs flailed inside the ladder cage as they fell, spraying blood through grunts and howls.

However many Whites had been on the ladder, they were now crumbled into a squirming pile at the foot of it.

“Holy mother of shit.” Sometimes the words just come.

“What the hell was that?” Murphy shouted.

“Bowling ball. You okay?”

“I think.”

“Climb and be ready for more.” I started up the ladder again, shouting upward as I went, to whomever. “Hey! Hey! Give me a warning before you drop the next one. Please!”

Rusty metal hinges squealed from up at the top of the ladder. A head popped out directly above me, but way, way up. It disappeared again.

“There are people up there,” I called down to Murphy. I saw Whites below as I did, and felt the ladder take their weight as they took up the chase again. I looked back up and shouted, “We’re coming. We’re cool. Just let us up.”

“Say please,” Murphy called, his smile clear through the sound of his voice.

I swore to myself if he didn’t spend at least a little more time in a shitty mood, I was going to kick him in the ‘nads.

Nothing happened above. No more bowling balls.

As I got closer, heads kept popping out from up there for a look. Voices discussed and some shouted. Things were tense upstairs, I guessed, as they were deciding what to do with an intruder and his friend in the process of dragging the attention of God knows how many naked Whites up to the top of their silo.

My biggest fear as I neared the top was that they’d see the color of my skin.

Chapter 37

“Bombs away.” The shout came from above.

I immediately pushed my back against the ladder cage and hollered down to Murphy, “Here comes another!”

Two seconds later, a bowling ball—not black, but glittery, with dark green swirls—whooshed past. It missed Murphy, thank God.

Another wet thud. A splatter of blood. Grunts. Screams. And falling bodies, adding to the pile of wiggling flesh and broken bones at the bottom.

“You gonna make it, Murphy?” He was still moving slowly, and the distance between us was growing, though I’d been climbing more slowly since becoming aware of his swollen hand.

A few hundred Whites were below, most crowding the foot of the ladder, trying to be next to climb. Some took advantage of the free meal of their dying comrades. It occurred to me that a significant minority in the naked horde had probably developed a preferential taste for the easy meat that cannibalism offered. Spending your days in a massive herd of edibles, eating the weak and injured, had to be so much easier than going balls-out into the bullets every time a normal was spotted. I wondered if the cannibalistic ones—that I now decided had to exist—were relatively smart compared to the mass. I wondered if they had the good sense to hang back during an attack and feed lazily on the leftovers in the aftermath.

Probably.

In a way, I thought none of that was my problem, but it was. Or at least, it was in terms of my understanding of the scope of the problem at the bottom of the ladder. How many of those Whites, Smart Ones included, would continue to climb, only to be slaughtered before they started trying to find a better way to get to the meat at the top of the silos? I wanted to believe that this ladder was the only way up, but I’d seen the brutal intelligence of the naked horde at work too many times. They had an uncanny ability to quickly solve the hardest problems, to see past the staunchest defense, to overwhelm, and kill.

I guess I hoped that we’d kill enough of the crazed ones that the majority of those left below were the cannibalistic ones who’d content themselves to eat their own dead and then wander off.

Ah, hope.

Why did I even bother with it?

Once I was close enough to the top, I saw that the ladder terminated at the foot of a vertical wall of rusty diamond-plate steel, welded along the top edge of the silo where one would normally climb off the ladder to get onto the roof. It stood ten feet tall and extended at that height a good fifteen feet out to both sides. It was hard to imagine that any White had the gymnastic ability to get himself from the ladder’s highest rung over that smooth wall of rusty steel. Only the metal tube that the bowling balls rolled through broke the smooth surface.

A door was cut through the steel at the top of the ladder, but I had zero doubt about how firmly it was braced from the other side. Anybody going to the trouble to weld that wall and secure it to the top edge of the silo surely had the smarts to make sure the door wasn’t the weak spot. Even if it were relatively weak, no more than two or three Whites would ever be able to squeeze themselves into the top of the ladder cage in a position to push on the door at one time.

The silo, at least where the ladder was concerned, had a formidable defense.

A small door above the main door swung open. It had been cut just big enough for a person’s head to stick out for a look down. An old man looked at me.

“Hello,” I said, because it was the friendliest thing that popped into my head. I smiled widely. “May we come in?”

“Two of you?” the old man asked.

“Yes.” I nodded toward Murphy. “He’s going slow. He hurt his hand.”

The old man disappeared for a second and then popped back out again. “We got rules,” he said.

I laughed. “I don’t care if your rule is that I have to scrub your toilets for a week. We’re not in a negotiating position. We just need a favor.”

“We’ll help you,” he said.

“Thanks.” I hurried up the last few rungs. “Thank you very much.”

The main door swung open on rusted hinges that protested with loud squeals.

A very wrinkly, calloused black man’s hand reached out to take mine. I paused before taking it. I looked down. “Murphy, they’re letting us in.”

“Cool.” He was panting heavily from the exertion of climbing with a bum hand.

To the guy inside extending his hand to take mine, I said, “I’ll wait here a minute. Cool? I need to make sure he makes it.”

“Suit yerself,” he told me, in the same country accent as the other old man. “If them ‘nfected ones git up here, I’m closin’ this door.”

I brandished my machete. “I gotta protect my friend. You do what you gotta do.” I looked down, not wanting to hear the man’s response.

Murphy made it past another ten rungs. The ladder below was filling with Whites again, and the one in the lead was coming on fast.

“Tell yer friend to scoot back against the cage,” said the man inside.

“Bowling ball?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Murphy,” I called. “Another bowling ball is coming!”

Murphy quickly got himself into position.

“Ready,” I told the man inside.

He gestured at someone I couldn’t see.

The pipe above made its throaty, metal sound again and a bowling ball rolled out and accelerated past. The welcome wet thud followed. Whites screamed as the ball and the accumulated weight of falling bodies scoured the ladder.

Murphy climbed the rest of the way up. As he passed me, he said, “Damn, that’s a lot farther than it looks.”

Once he was through, I clambered in behind, falling on my back on the silo’s flat concrete roof. The steel door slammed shut. Four separate braces were latched on behind it, and I looked up at our saviors, who were standing in a circle, evaluating us with grim faces.

Chapter 38

“Yer’ both white as that bunch of ‘fecteds down there,” said the old man, the one who’d opened the door for us. He placed a worn straw hat on his head and looked at our other three defenders:  one black, and two younger people, a man and a woman, both with skin as pale as mine.

“Looks like white skin isn’t as rare as I thought,” I said, as I sat up.

Murphy elbowed me, as though I’d said something wrong.

The defenders didn’t seem to feel any urgency about the Whites trying to climb to the top of their silo. I looked past them to see if others were tending to the defense. No one was.

Odd.

“All together, we got four,” said the man in the hat. He reached out to help me up. “The rest of us ‘er normal.”

“I’m Zed.” I got my feet beneath me. “This is Murphy.”

“Pleased to meet ya.” He extended a hand to shake mine. “I’m Billy.” He nodded at an ancient black man, “That’s Isaac.” Billy pointed a thumb at two people with skin as white as mine. “Travis ‘n Holly.”

In a voice too deep for his wiry frame, Isaac said, “Howdy. Isaac Brooks.”

“Please to meet ya,” said Holly.

They all spoke in a drawl that seemed purposeful to the point of exaggeration, an affectation to prove membership in a group, The Rural People of East Texas Club.

It was just an observation, not a judgment, though my mind tried to make it such. And whose doesn’t? We were all human. Well some of us were—the rest were Whites—and that’s just the way human brains work: Like me equals good. Different equals bad.

I needed to stop letting my thoughts wander off on their own. They needed adult supervision, and I needed to take off my asshole cap and spend more time appreciating the nice folks who’d just saved my life.

Holly went over to get a peek through the window in the wall at the top of the ladder. Travis fetched a bowling ball from a bin that looked to contain a hundred or more. The bin and the balls struck me as strange.

“Had to raid the bowling alley in Caldwell to get most of those,” said Billy, noticing my curiosity.

Murphy laughed and shook his head. “Bowling balls.”

“They work,” said Isaac.

“No doubt.” How could I not agree? I’d seen their effectiveness up close.

I looked around the top of the silo. The roof was concrete and flat. The tower structure built behind the wall that protected the roof from the ladder looked to have been modified with plates of metal welded on to protect those within. All the way up here, I didn’t know what they were protection from, but I was full of guesses.

An elevated catwalk ran from the tower back down the centerline of the five silos. However, halfway across the silo on which we stood, the catwalk was blocked by a steel wall that bisected the silo roof.  It was smooth, except for the diamond plate pattern on its surface. Whatever support structure was required to hold it up was on the other side. It stood easily fifteen feet tall and extended over the edges on each side, such that there was no way a human could reach from this side of the wall to grasp anything around the edge. Any attempt would lead to a fall to the ground below.

A door similar to, but larger than the one at the top of the ladders, was cut through the steel wall. No other holes or features existed.

Along the top edge, on the other side, several heads peered over. Obviously, the wall had been fashioned as a rampart, and the people who lived here figured if they were going to have to fight for it, they’d fight from up there. Having planned for the event, they left this half of the silo’s roof mostly empty. They had the bin of bowling balls and four fifty-five gallon drums. A couple looked pretty new. Two bore some rust. Sticking out of the cap on one was a hand pump.

Beside the drums were stacks of jars, all with screw top lids. Each lid was holed, with a piece of cloth sticking out. Molotov cocktails. The drums had to contain gasoline or diesel. Plan B, if the bowling balls didn’t do the trick.

“You guys put some work into fortifying this place,” observed Murphy.

“It keeps us safe,” said Billy.

“You mentioned some rules,” I said. I tightened my grip on my machete as my suspicious imagination came up with worst-case guesses. “What are they?”

Billy cut a glance at my machete and Murphy’s M4. “Ain’t much. The usual do-unto-others type of stuff. That, and if you want to stay, we’ll give ya a couple of weeks to let you know if we like ya. Then you gotta pull yer’ weight, same as everybody else. Or you can stay the night and clear out tomorrow.”

“Thanks for letting us up,” Murphy stuck out his swollen hand for a shake, then grimaced. “Sorry, something bit me.”

Billy waved at someone on the wall. “Patty, would you help Murphy out, please? See if we got something we can give him for his hand?”

“Will do, Billy,” Patty called back.

A moment later, the door in the wall opened and Murphy went through.

I said, “Thanks for letting us in. We really appreciate it.”

“You can run along, if you want,” Billy told me. “You look like you could use a rest.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll stay.” I pointed at the wall that blocked the ladder. “At least until we take care of the Whites.”

“Suit yer’ self.”

Holly said something I didn’t catch.

Travis dropped another bowling ball into the pipe.

It rolled through, making that throaty sound I’d become familiar with on the other end. A silent moment of free fall followed and I waited for the thud when it crushed a White’s skull.

Instead, something banged the hell out of a piece of metal.

Billy and Isaac looked at each other. Both wore worry in the wrinkles on their faces.

Holly cursed and pulled her little door closed. She looked back at us and said, “We got a problem.”

Billy hurried over to take a look through the viewing door. He spent a few moments looking down and then pulled his head back through. “I’ll be damned. Holly’s right.”

Isaac waited for Billy to step aside and quickly put his head out for a look. When he pulled it back in, he said, “Ain’t good. Seems they’re gittin’ smarter.”

Smarter? Haven’t you guys seen Smart Ones?

“I knew something was wrong the second that ball hit and busted,” said Holly. “It took me another second to figure out they was carryin’ some piece of metal for a shield. At least, the first one is. Thick metal, too. Maybe a piece of scrap we left down there.”

I took a deep breath and took a longer look at the silo’s defenses. A few minutes before, they had seemed impenetrable. Could the naked horde get through the metal wall at the top of the ladder?

Seeing the structure of the ladder-wall from behind, I couldn’t think of any way the Whites would be able to break through. But I’d never seen them fail when they corralled their half-pint brains and got them all herded in the same direction on a problem.

Pessimist Zed needed to figure out how we were going to get off the silo alive.

Chapter 39

Might as well enlighten my friends where they seemed to have a blind spot. I said, “I don’t know what kinds of Whites you guys have seen out here—”

“Whites?” asked Isaac.

I pointed in the general direction of the ladder. “Infected.”

They all understood. Infected was the name floating around in the media when everything was going to shit. I suppose we all had slang we developed along the way, but infected was our common word.

“Have you guys seen these naked ones before?” I asked.

“They’ve been ‘round fer ‘bout a week,” said Bill. “We can see fer a good ways up here.” He pointed to something I couldn’t see on the dark horizon. “Got some outposts, too. Them nekked ‘fecteds been running ‘round in bunches, killin’ cattle, ransacking houses. A big mess of ‘em moved out yonder a few days back.”

By the time he finished, I felt like I’d heard about twice as many words as I needed to get the point, but that was Billy’s way, or so I figured. I said, “They’re oddly intelligent, more so than most infected. In the group, they’ve got some pretty smart ones mixed in, just as smart as you and me.”

Billy held his white-skinned hand up next to mine. “Like us?”

I nodded, changed my mind, and then shook my head. “Kind of. But when these guys got the disease, lost their pigment, and kept their intellectual capacities, they lost any sense of humanity, I guess. They’re like the criminally insane.”

Isaac asked, “What ‘er you gittin’ at?”

“They work together, like ants,” I told him. “They figure shit out in a hurry.”

Billy’s face looked skeptical. He turned to where Holly was peeking through her little door to view the ladder again. “The shield?” Billy asked.

“I’m guessing you haven’t had any try to climb up with a shield yet,” I said.

“Them bowling balls roll through that pipe, right nice,” said Billy. “Later, we go down, pick ‘em up and reuse ‘em. Been all we needed.”

“Pretty much,” Isaac added, laying a hand on a long-barreled rifle strapped across his back. “Pretty much.”

I pointed at the barrels of diesel. “What about that?”

“Last resort,” said Billy. “We ain’t had to use it yet.”

“They’re more than halfway up,” announced Holly, in high-pitched, quick words.

Billy looked at Isaac and cocked his head at the diesel. “Can’t see’s we got a choice.”

Isaac shook his head and then bounded over to the drums. “Travis, give me a hand.”

“What’s the risk?” I asked Billy, understanding he had reservations about putting the Whites to the flame.

“Couple,” said Billy, walking quickly over to the wall. He tapped Holly on the shoulder. “Ya mind?”

Holly stepped aside. Billy took off his cowboy hat and took a look through the hole in the wall. He pulled his head back, shaking it. He looked at me. “If we drop the diesel on ‘em, light ‘em up, this silo will look like a Roman candle for ten miles in every direction.” He looked around at the night. “Every infected with an eyeball left ‘ll see it. They’ll come.”

“Might come,” I corrected.

Billy shook his head. “Maybe ‘nough thangs burned up in the city that them infecteds you got over there ignore it. Out here, fire draws ‘em like nothing else. Unless you was down there hollerin’ at ‘em, I s’pose.”

“What about the grain?” Holly asked. “We talked about that last time.”

“We almost used the fire once before,” Billy told me. “Before we thought to get them bowlin’ balls.”

“And?” I asked.

“Ended up shooting a bunch of ‘em,” said Billy. “They fell off the ladder. The ones at the bottom, well, they ate the dead ones. You seen ‘em do that?”

I nodded.

“Stayed down there a couple days, I guess,” he said. “Then one morning, the sun come up and they was gone. Nothing but bones left down there.”

“The grain,” Holly reminded us.

Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not following. What’s the grain got to do with anything?”

Billy stomped his foot on the concrete roof. “This one’s about half full of dried corn kernel. They’ll burn. Hell, they’ll burn for a month maybe, probably even blow up if the gases inside mix up just right.”

“What?” I didn’t believe it. Grain, blowing up.

“It ain’t uncommon,” said Billy. “If we torch them ‘fecteds comin’ up the side, I don’t think the fire ‘ll burn hot enough to warm the concrete walls of the silo enough to catch the grain inside on fire, but you never know.”

Isaac called over, “I don’t see’s we got a choice on this one, Billy.” He pointed a bony finger at me. “If it’s like he says, and they smarter than most ‘fecteds, we can’t take a chance on them gittin’ up here. They already using a damn shield.”

“No.” Billy shook his head as he peeked out the window again. “No, we haven’t.” He stood back up and looked me in the eye. “You sure ‘bout this?”

“I’m sure they’re a lot smarter than any you’ve dealt with yet,” I told him. “They’re a lot more dangerous. I could tell you a hundred stories to make you a believer, but you know as well as I do that we don’t have time. You gotta make the call, buddy, or let me know if you’ve got a secret escape hatch, because we may need to get out in a hurry.”

That created a silence that seemed weird. Not because I thought I frightened them, but because I felt like they were choosing to keep something from me.

That was worrisome. I didn’t want to distrust my new friends.

Billy looked at his boots for a long, awkward time, while the others kept quiet. He looked up and drilled me with his bright blue eyes. “We got a way out. Maybe. But we’ll use it as a last resort.” He stomped his boot on the concrete again. “If this thang catches fire, it won’t all happen at once. We’ll have plenty of time to get through the wall, pack up, and leave. These things don’t happen like in the movies—”

I laughed.

“What’s funny?” Billy asked.

“Nothing,” I said, as I shook my head. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that. I mean, now that I have to live in the real world.”

Billy nodded and smiled. “Anyways, this thang won’t blow up all of a sudden. Hell, it might not even do that. All I can tell you is, if it starts to burn, the other silos eventually will, too. We’ll have plenty of time. Days, weeks. Hell, maybe months.”

“Ya’ll need to stop yackin’ and do somethin’,” Holly told us.

“Yes ma’am,” said Billy.

Travis brought the first two Molotov cocktails over. One was a mayonnaise jar, the other a pickle jar, each containing about a quart of diesel.

“If we’re doin’ this, we need to do it now,” said Holly. “They’ll be here ‘fore you know it.”

“You tossin’?” Billy asked.

Holly unlatched and swung the larger of the two metal doors open. She picked up the mayonnaise jar and held it out to Billy, who already had a lighter with a flame on it.

I took a quick glance through the door. The Whites were less than twenty feet down. The one on top held a roughly circular piece of metal over his head. Holly nudged me over, singeing my eyebrows as she brought the burning Molotov through the door. She leaned out. She aimed.

I put a hand on her shoulder to bring her to a stop. “If you drop it right on top of that shield, I’m afraid it all might splash out to the sides, and not burn any of them off the ladder.”

She huffed, looked down again, turned to me, and said, “Yup.” She leaned way out into the ladder cage and tossed the jar. “Give me another!” she shouted. It fell as she came back through the hole.

The flaming Molotov hit the ladder just above the White carrying the shield. Because of the angle at which Holly threw it, the diesel splattered down the side of the silo as it burst into flames. Smoke and heat rose up. Whites screamed. The guy with the shield kept coming.

“Higher,” I said to Holly, as she got the next flaming jar of fuel from Bill. “Hit the rungs above him. Make him have to climb into the fire.”

Holly leaned out, threw, and pulled herself quickly back inside to get another firebomb.

I peeked out.

The pickle jar burst on the ladder four rungs above the lead climber and just a dozen feet below us. Diesel spread down the wall and onto the shield. Everything burst into flames.

Billy shouted, “Ain’t got nothing to lose. The ladder’s already burnin’ with diesel stuck to it.” A second later, more Molotovs dropped off the silo and into the mob of Whites crowded near the ladder, waiting their turn to go up.

The climber with the metal shield seemed to have stopped. Holly leaned out, looked down, then at me, “Where do you want this one?”

“Same place as before,” I guessed, having no better answer with which to fulfill my new role as Chief Targeting Officer. “On the rungs, just above him. Keep it on fire.”

Holy shit, she hit the same spot. Damn, she had a talent for it.

The shield fell away and apparently the White holding it did, too. Through all the fire and rising heat, it was hard to tell.

Suddenly excited, Holly announced to everyone, “The ladder is clear.” She looked at me for confirmation.

I nodded. “I think it worked.”

“Close it up?” She asked of anyone willing to answer.

At the side of the steel wall, Travis looked down at the ladder. He had a better angle to see the length of it. “They’re all off, fer sure.” He tossed another Molotov into a crowd of Whites on the ground at the bottom.

Billy looked at Holly, then Isaac, “Y’all keep an eye on things.” He thumbed toward the wall. “Tell Todd and the others to git out here.” He walked over and knelt beside a rusty, man-sized hatch in the roof I hadn’t noticed until that moment. He pointed at me, “C’mon. We’re going inside.”

Chapter 40

The only light inside the silo came from the dim moonlight shining through the round hatch above our heads. We stood on a metal grate attached to the inside wall as we looked into the darkness. Billy selected a couple of big flashlights from a box they’d apparently left on the platform.

Billy turned on his light and shined it on the corn far below. “’Bout half full, like I said.”

I nodded. He pointed to a harness with a twenty-foot tether on it, something like a bungee cord. “Put that on. Clip the other end to the ladder as you go down.”

“Okay.” I was apprehensive. “I know we dropped the firebombs down the side of the silo but I don’t think there’s any chance the fire burned hot enough or long enough to warm the concrete let alone ignite the grain in here. I don’t think we need to go down and check it.”

“Don’t know what ya’ll been doin’,” said Billy, “but we like to be over careful ‘round here. It’s worked out fer us.”

I looked down the ladder, not anxious to climb up and down another.

“I’m too old to git up an’ down these ladders, lessen you want to be in here all night.”

Nodding, I picked up the harness and stepped in through the leg holes. “I got it.” I pulled it over my shoulders.

Billy helped with the adjustments as I said, “I’ve done shit a lot more dangerous than this without a harness.”

“Yup,” said Billy. “No sense in takin’ chances when ya don’t need to.”

I nodded. It was good advice. I guess. Still, it seemed to me that if I fell, I’d land in a mound of corn that, at least in my imagination, would be as soft as water, or maybe snow. It’d splash. I’d sink in. I wouldn’t get hurt.

Oh, the wonders of an active imagination and unrealistic expectations.

A few moments later, with a shining flashlight dangling from a strap around my wrist, I worked my way down the ladder on the inside of the silo wall. Rust from the rungs flaked off into my hands. A few of the rungs flexed under my weight, they were so thin from corrosion.

“Tell me if you see any smoke or smell any popcorn,” hollered Billy.

“Popcorn,” I chuckled, as I tested my weight on a rung below my right foot.

“What do you think it’s gonna smell like before it starts burning?”

I didn’t have a response for that. I focused on climbing down, testing my weight while trying to keep my grip on rungs that sloughed off layers in my hands.

Instead of the relief I’d expected to feel when I stepped off the final rung, I felt surprise instead. The grain was solid underfoot. My feet didn’t sink in at all. Rather it felt like I was standing on asphalt.

I looked around for marks to indicate from the inside how full the silo was. Not entirely sure why, I figured it’d help me with my bearings. No mark existed. Nothing, just the ladder and the concrete walls.

“Over there,” Billy pointed.

Doing a little geometry in my head, I realized the inside ladder was ninety degrees around the arc from the outside ladder. I unclipped my tether and took a step in the direction Billy had pointed.

“Leave it on,” he called. “You got ‘nuff line to go over there.”

Starting to feel a bit like a child under Billy’s direction I muttered, “Whatever.”

“What’s that?” He called down.

“Nothing,” I answered. I re-clipped my tether to the ladder.

When I got to the spot in the silo where I figured the exterior ladder was attached, I laid my palm on the wall.

“A couple steps to yer right!” hollered Billy.

“You sure?” I asked, looking around inside the silo, realizing I couldn’t really tell if I was at three o’clock, two o’clock, or four. I stepped a little further around the circle before Billy told me to stop.

I ran my hands over the curved wall. It felt cool to the touch. I stepped to the right and put my hands on other spots. All felt the same temperature.

“Yer missing it,” Billy told me.

“Looking for comparison spots,” I called back.

No spot on the wall felt remotely warm. I guessed most of the heat dissipated into the air rather than into the massive silo. But could there be hot spots below the level of the corn? I knelt down on the hard crust and laid my hands on the kernels.

“Anything?”

“No.” I aimed the flashlight at the surface to look for anything that might indicate fire.

“Smell anything yet?”

I stood and sucked in a few long breaths. “Just corn.”

I shined my light around and noticed a peculiar gray shading on the corn at the center of the silo. Could that be from the fire outside? Could some layer of the corn fifty feet below me be smoldering with the smoke filtering up through the kernels to rise through the center?

I walked toward the powdery discoloration, sniffing, but smelling nothing different.

“Careful.” Billy had worry in his voice. Maybe he saw the discoloration, too. Maybe he suspected the same thing as me.

At the center, I knelt down on the powder and touched it. I didn’t smell smoke. I looked at my palm, now gray with the dust. I rubbed grayed fingers under my nose. It didn’t smell like ash.

A swoosh of grains and a crackle beneath me startled me to jump as I imagined in a panic that Whites were burrowing up through the grain.

The crust beneath me collapsed.

I fell.

Before I understood that I wasn’t being attacked by Whites from below, I was at the bottom of a collapsing, funnel-shaped hole in the grain that was filling in around my knees and my waist, and I knew I only had a few seconds before I was totally fucked.

Billy was hollering.

I probably was too, but not listening to either of us as I swam and kicked, knowing with innate desperation that I needed to keep my head above the collapsing kernels if I wanted to live.

I was in full panic.

A spark of rationality reminded me of the tether to which I was attached. The other end of the tether was attached to a ladder rung corroded thin by time.

Who knew hope had a diameter?

I grabbed the tether and pulled, one hand over the other, taking up the slack as the grain filled in around my chest, making breathing difficult. I struggled to move my legs but they were already constrained.

The tether resisted, and then stretched.

The corn was at my armpits and would easily cover my head in moments.

The tether stopped giving way. I gripped two hands full and pulled as hard as I could.

Slowly, my body came along, but the grain was still caving in on me.

When I shifted my grip, I lost some ground. The grain was filling in over my shoulders.

I heaved again, barely able to catch half a breath.

The sound around me changed.

Fewer kernels rolled over one another.

Billy was frantic and still hollering.

The grain stopped filling in.

I was at the bottom of a big—but shallow—divot in the grain.

I pulled, and with difficulty, dragged myself out.

When I was able to take a full breath, I felt like I’d won.

Around me in the loose grain were chunks of kernels fused together like broken pieces of asphalt.

“You okay?” Billy called, his voice starting to calm. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I called. “I think maybe some of this corn is gonna taste funny now.”

Billy laughed, coughed up some phlegm, and laughed some more.

I dragged myself slowly out of the corn. Keeping the tether tight in my hands, I proceeded back to the ladder. “Thanks for making me wear the harness.”

“Sometimes when they’re offloadin’, the grain ‘ll form an air pocket underneath, like a cave.”

“That’s what happened?” I asked.

“Ain’t uncommon, ‘specially if the grain ain’t dry.”

“You want me to check anything else while I’m down here?”

Billy waved me up.

Chapter 41

I woke the next morning nestled under a layer of blankets plenty thick to keep me warm, but I was working hard to kick them off, as I’d been having a nightmare of being swallowed by a hungry corn monster. What a surprise. Gray-filtered sunlight shone in through the windows and glowed red through my eyelids. I wasn’t ready to get up. I pulled the pillow over my head.

Somewhere outside my pie slice-shaped dormitory room, the residents of the silo fort were making muted noises, doing whatever they did in the morning. The sound of Murphy’s deep breathing wasn’t in the room. He had to have gotten up before me and gone outside.

The smell of bacon and maybe eggs, coffee, and something baking crept through the pillow’s thick foam innards and tempted me to give up on extra sleep. An odor, a terribly familiar one, a scent I’d have preferred never to smell again, seeped in with the smoky bacon aroma.

Burning flesh.

Too many gruesome images were connected to that smell in my recollections. I shuddered and tried to cram all of that into the part of my memory that I liked to pretend didn’t exist.

That was interrupted when I got the feeling that I wasn’t alone.

I jerked up to a sitting position, knife in hand, feet on the floor.

Two blonde girls, kids, one maybe twelve, the other six, stood watching me.

Kids?

Even if they hadn’t been strangely observing me while I slept, I’d still have been surprised. Children were no longer a common sight in the world.

I settled my gaze on the tall one and asked, “What?”

The little one squirmed and grinned. “We need to know your name.”

My name? That was unexpected.

The little one said, “For the book.” She giggled and squirmed some more.

“The book?” I asked.

The tall one held up a hardbound journal wrapped in flower-printed cloth, with gold edges on the pages and a tiny lock. Not entirely enthusiastic, maybe a little bit embarrassed, she said, “It’s our job.”

“Roll call?” It was a guess that seemed bad even as I said it.

The little one giggled. The tall one smiled and rolled her eyes.

“We’re historians,” said the little one, taking time to sound out each syllable as though she was getting comfortable with a new, big word.

“Historians?” I asked, smiling to indulge what I guessed was a fantasy game.

"We have to add your name, or you won't be in history," she told me.

“I’m Zed Zane. What are your names?”

The tall one said, “I’m Khyla, and this is Kinsley."

“Write it down,” Kinsley urged Khyla. She looked at me and giggled again. “We’re sisters.”

“Ah.” I nodded, feeling like I should have guessed, but with a three or four year age difference, kids that size don’t tend to look a lot alike.

Khyla opened her book and put pen to paper.

Kinsley proudly said, “I write in the book, too. We take turns.”

“Really.” What else was I supposed to say? Good job? I wasn’t used to dealing with kids.

“Are you staying for Thanksgiving dinner?” Kinsley asked. “If you are, we have to write it down.”

“Thanksgiving?” I asked. “When’s that?”

“Today.” Khyla waggled her pencil in the direction of the door. “Isaac went turkey hunting but couldn’t find any. We’re having chicken.”

“You’re kidding me.” The morning was turning surreal. Was it possible I was still dreaming? “Is today really Thanksgiving?”

“Yep.” Kinsley nodded her head with too much emphasis. Her corn-silk hair flopped around her ears and she folded her arms across her chest.

Khyla nodded. “We keep the calendar, too.” She leaned forward with her journal and showed me a page. It displayed the month, day, and year, as well as a pretty little horn of plenty for the holiday. Khyla had already written a good deal on the two facing pages.

“Busy day?” I asked.

“They came last night.” She half smiled and said. “You know.”

I nodded. ‘They’ had to have been the Whites chasing Murphy and me.

Khyla said, “They’re still down there.”

I tensed. “The Whites?”

“The infected.” Her face turned sad for a brief second.

“How many? A lot?” I worried that more had come during the night.

“No,” she said.

I relaxed. Billy and his people seemed more than able to handle the ones that had come the night before. “You put that kind of information in your book?”

Khyla looked at Kinsley. Kinsley grinned widely and said, “Whatever we think is important.”

“I see.”

“And anything they tell us to put in the history,” added Khyla.

“They?” I asked.

“The adults,” answered Khyla. “My dad said one day people will read it and it will be their history.”

“We’ll be famous.” Kinsley grinned proudly.

With shy enthusiasm, Khyla said, “It’s our contribution.”

“I think it’s important,” I replied. I guess I even believed it.

After putting my name in their book, the girls hurried out of the room, leaving me feeling a little bit shortchanged. I thought they might ask me about some of the things that I’d done and seen. I’d have deferred the question to Murphy, but still, it would have been nice to have been asked. Instead, I felt left out, one of nearly seven billion forgotten infected, an insignificant remnant of a lost civilization.

I put on my boots, tucked my knife beside my calf, and slid my machete into my belt. I had no sheath for it. That was with my clothes and bag in the Mustang that I presumed was in College Station.

I looked out the window over my bed and saw a layer of low, gray clouds hanging over miles of fields and farms. I spotted movement, too. A troop of Whites running along one of their snaking paths was coming toward the silos. A wisp of black smoke floated by the window. All of those infected at the bottom of the ladder were still burning from the night before. That explained the smell that was tainting the tantalizing aroma of cooking bacon.

The sounds of people moving around in nearby rooms brought a familiar comfort that turned almost immediately to trepidation.

That casual commotion had no place in the post-virus world.

Murphy and I had developed quiet habits. When we walked we did it in a way that kept our steps silent. When we moved things or opened doors, we did it while making as little noise as possible. And when we spoke, we mostly talked in low tones that could only be heard between us and wouldn’t carry.

The people outside my door were making the kind of noise that pre-virus people blared as they chattered their way through a world brimming with a cacophony of machines—grinding, chugging, humming, squealing, and blasting.

Did they have it so good up here on the silos they didn’t need to sneak through life on quiet mouse feet?

Had Murphy and I stumbled upon a pocket of old normalcy?

I was jealous.

I took another long scan across the miles of fields and turned to leave my quarters. I followed my nose into a common area at the center of a ring of dorm rooms that had been constructed around the perimeter of the silo’s flat roof. As had been explained the night before, boards from disassembled houses in Creepy Town down below had been used to construct the dwellings on top of the silos.

The roof of one silo was dedicated for sleeping quarters. On the roof of the next silo were large common areas, a library, a kitchen, and dining room. One held chicken coops, and a section had been set aside for some pigs. They had a smokehouse next to the pigpen—kind of morbid for the pigs. The structures on the roof of yet another silo was still under construction.

At over fifty feet in diameter, the flat silo roofs provided a lot of safe space from marauding Whites.

A catwalk across the top of all five silos served as a hallway, terminating at the fortification across the silo at the end—the one with the ladder Murphy and I had climbed. Behind the wall on that silo, rooms had been built to store weapons and there was a workshop with metal and woodworking tools, storage for canned foods and other things the silo dwellers had scrounged.

A few people passed through the hall toward the construction area, looking every bit like they were on their way to work. Each greeted me with a nod and a “Good morning.”

When I walked into the kitchen and common area, I saw a teenage boy, a man, and a woman preparing the meal. The woman looked at me, and said, “Breakfast will be ready in about ten minutes, so don’t wander too far.” The three chuckled. I smiled, guessing that was silo humor.

More people were congregated in a lounge area, sitting on couches, talking intently about some papers laying on a coffee table between them. A couple of them glanced at me, but didn’t seem disturbed by my white skin and bald head.

I went outside and passed between the storage buildings and through a gate in the steel wall. On the top level of the tower structure on the far side of the rampart silo, I spotted Murphy, Billy, and Isaac. They were talking and pointing at things far enough away that I could only guess what they might be.

From down on the ground at the foot of the silo, I heard other sounds—Whites. They were feeding and squabbling. Nobody on the tower appeared to be concerned about the Whites.

“Mornin'," Isaac called down to me.

“Mornin'," said Billy.

“Hey, dude.” Murphy waved me to come up to the platform where the three of them were having their conference.

The tower stood three stories above the top of the silo. On each story was a platform with an expanded metal mesh floor on a steel framework, big enough for eight or nine people to stand comfortably around. I could only make rudimentary guesses as to the original purpose that the platforms served for the silos, but large pipes—I assumed for moving grain—ran up and angled through the platforms. Intermixed with the pipes were machines that, again, did things about which I could only guess. The sides of the platforms had been fortified with welded sheet metal and steel plates, much like the rest of the first silo.

Also built into the tower was a swiveling boom with a block and tackle hanging on loops of steel cable, wound back to a large spool on the tower’s second level. That explained how the silo clan had been able to hoist everything up.

If nothing else, this band of survivors was industrious.

I climbed the zigzagging stairs until I reached the top.

Billy was pointing to a water tower that had to be at least seven or eight miles away. To Murphy, he said, “You can just make out the outpost we built atop that tower.”

Murphy shrugged. “Maybe I see a rusty spot but I can’t tell. It’s too far away.”

“We got two people there, too,” said Billy. “All three towers got radio and solar chargers for the batteries.”

“Lasers, too,” added Isaac in his deep drawl.

“Zombie lasers?” Murphy laughed.

“To signal,” said Billy. “Just in case.” He reached into a small metal cabinet and showed Murphy some high-powered laser pointers they’d scavenged from somewhere.

Murphy looked at me and said, “They’re trying to convince us to stay.” He grinned. “Mostly me, probably. I told ‘em you had a stick up your ass about Mark and had to knock him off before you could resolve your existential crisis.”

Isaac laughed. “Whatever that means.”

I leaned over the top edge of the wall around the platform so I could get a look at the ladder at the base of the silo. Dead Whites lay mangled and burned, some still smoldering. Among them, noisy Whites fed. I figured it had to be said, just in case, “You guys know you’ve got Whites down there, right?”

“Course,” said Billy. “Got some more headed this way.” He pointed east. “Back that way. A pretty large group of ‘em.”

"How many?" I squinted at the horizon, wondering if it was the small group I’d spotted from my room, or if it was the large group that had chased Murphy and me the day before.

“A hundred, maybe,” said Isaac.

Billy pointed at the smoke trickling into the sky from the smoldering bodies below. “That’s probably why they’re coming.”

“Do we need to do something?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Don’t seem like the ones down at the bottom have any interest in us up here.”

“They don’t remember long,” said Isaac. “Ones still alive prolly forgot us.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not sure that’s completely true.”

“Least ways,” said Isaac, “we ain’t gonna do nuthin’.”

“Nope,” Billy agreed. “We’ll sit tight up here. The healthy ones will clean up the mess down there and save us the trouble. We’ll haul the bones away later when things settle down.”

“They won’t try to come back up the ladder?” I asked.

“Prolly not,” said Billy. “If they do…” He pointed at the bin of bowling balls.

Isaac chuckled. “Long as they don’t see us, they don’t know we’re up here. We drop a bowling ball on whoever tries to climb the ladder. Ones at the bottom are too dumb to know it ain’t rainin’ bowlin’ balls. Far as they know, that kinda stuff just happens. They don’t think nuthin’ of it.”

“Except last night,” I said, “They were chasing me and Murphy. That’s why they didn’t give up.”

“That’s right,” said Isaac. “They was chasin’ you, not climbing a ladder for no reason.”

“Got it.” Not wanting to get into an argument about infected behavior with the nice folks who’d probably saved my life the night before, I figured I’d find a better way to talk about it at a later time. “So you guys are good up here? You can stay a while?”

“You saw how much grain we got in these silos,” said Billy. “We don’t never need to go down if we don’t want to.”

“What about water?” Murphy asked.

Billy pointed at a row of three windmills, the kind spread across the ranches in Texas to pump water out of the aquifers and into the stock ponds. “We got ‘em piping water up here. We got everything we need. For stuff we want, we take a chance and go down.” Billy swung his finger across the horizon, pausing at each lookout. “When we’re clear, we go down and search for luxuries and such. Plenty of feral pigs around and plenty of cattle, too. No shortage of meat.”

I felt jealous again. My attempt to set up a post-apocalyptic commune of survivors at Sarah Mansfield’s mansion had failed. Billy, Isaac, and the other people on the silos were thriving.

Still, I was getting bored with hearing about how well the silo people had set themselves up. I had things to do. I spun around and looked for water towers and other silos on the horizon. I pointed northwest. “You have lookouts that way?”

Billy leaned close to my side and pointed so that I could see down the length of his arm, to where his finger landed on a couple of fat tanks with streaks of rust on weathered paint. He said, “See there, on top of that one on the left?”

I saw a brownish speck, but I couldn’t tell what it was. “Oil tanks?”

“Liquid fertilizer,” said Billy. “We got two fellas in that observation tower on top.” He turned to the south and pointed at a water tower taller and closer than the fertilizer tanks. “Got a couple there, too.”

“Did you guys see that big horde of naked Whites that went through that way over the past few days?”

Murphy groaned.

Billy nodded. “Ate a good many cattle when they passed. Most of ‘em I ‘spect.”

“Do your lookouts know where they are?” I asked.

Billy pointed northwest. “Seen ‘em out that way when they settled down last night. They were gone when the sun came up this morning. Moved on.”

Isaac cocked his head toward the ladder running down the side of the tower. “’cept stragglers. Still plenty of ‘em ‘round.” He pointed northwest. “Headed that way, mostly. Lookin’ to catch up, I guess.”

I took another peek at the Whites down below. Habit. “You guys have a pretty good idea where all the Whites are in the area, as well as which direction they’re moving? You certainly seem to have the infrastructure in place for it.”

“Got to,” said Billy, “If we want to stay safe when we send folks out to scrounge or work the gardens.”

“Is that where all the stuff came from in the houses down below?” Murphy asked.

“We store stuff there,” Billy told him. “Right now we got all we need. But with rodents, scavengers, infected, and the weather, it won’t be too many years from now when a good pair of jeans ‘ll be worth its weight in gold.”

“Or steaks,” laughed Isaac.

“You probably saw,” said Billy, “we got blankets, housewares, tools, pretty much anything you could think of. ‘Cept food. None of that down there. The infected would eat that right up. We store our food up here. We only keep things down there the infected won’t be interested in.”

“Mostly,” Isaac laughed in his deep rumble. “Some comes through and take anything they can find that’s shiny. Sometimes they take knives. Ya never can tell.”

“Makes sense,” said Murphy. “We saw some of that back in Austin. Right, Zed?”

I nodded but didn’t tell about my experiences with Nancy and Bubbles. Instead I asked, “Maps?”

Isaac laughed again.

“What?” I asked.

Looking at Billy, Isaac said, “Told ya.”

“Told him what?” I looked from Isaac to Billy and back again.

"I cleaned out a couple o' convenience stores." Isaac leveled an old calloused finger at Billy. "He told me I was wastin’ my time. Everybody here knows what’s ‘round. Most of us lived our whole lives here.”

“Could we get a map of the area?” I asked. “If you could show me on it where the Whites are and where they’re going, it’d sure make it a lot safer for Murphy and me to get out of here today.” I assumed Murphy was going to tag along. I looked at him. “How’s the hand?”

Murphy held it up for me to see. It looked much better. “Benadryl’s my new favorite drug.”

“Can you use it?”

“Stiff,” Murphy flexed his hand. “But it won’t slow me down.”

“You can have a map,” said Billy. “We don’t use ‘em.” He pointed at a gray-colored house at the edge of town. “Got ‘em stored down there. A stack of ‘em in a china hutch.”

That made me think of the clothes I’d stolen from their warehouse. I reached up and tugged at the collar on my jacket, deciding whether I should ask for what I’d already taken.

Billy looked me up and down. “You needed somethin’ to wear so don’t sweat it. We probably got more than we’re ever gonna need.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now about these maps.”

Chapter 42

The ladder on which we’d battled the Whites stood at one end of the row of silos. The surprise that neither Murphy nor I had guessed was that the silo on the other end was empty. A service hatch at the bottom of the silo was accessible via an internal ladder. The silo dwellers of Creepy Town had a hidden back door.

Good for Murphy and me. And probably them, too.

We’d retrieved a map from the gray house without the cannibal Whites at the bottom of the ladder even looking away from their meals. Once we got back to the top of the silo, Billy showed us on the map where both we and the visible groups of Whites currently were. The silo dwellers fed us breakfast the likes of which we hadn’t even dreamed of since before the virus. They gave us enough food and water to get us through a few days. No ammunition, though. At least, not until Murphy traded his spare silencer for a hundred and fifty rounds.

I told him he could have bargained for a lot more, but he was satisfied with the deal. He was probably right. The silo dwellers had been kind, and kindness was a rarity in the post-virus world.

When we left, Billy told us we were welcome to come back and join them.

It was tempting.

Really tempting. They were good people in a good situation, good considering how the rest of the world was doing.

When we left Creepy Town, we walked down the center of the road, because it was less tiring than trudging through the mud and weeds. It was also a risk. It made us visible to Whites who might be lurking in the trees or inside any house we passed along the way.

And they were there.

Despite the lookout towers spread over part of the county, unseen Whites were always there.

Scanning back and forth after a couple of miles of walking in silence, Murphy asked, “Do you think something is wrong with us?”

I laughed. “Besides what the virus did to us?”

“Sort of.”

I glanced at Murphy. He seemed bothered. “What do you mean?”

“Before all this, you said you worked at Starbucks.”

I nodded, not wanting to confirm that truth out loud. I guess I felt weird over my choice to work there. I felt like I should have done something more significant with my education.

“Not an exciting job, is it?”

I shook my head and got a little bit defensive. “It paid the bills.” Most of the time. Well, maybe not even most. “And I got free food and coffee. What are you getting at?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

“What?”

“Look, man,” said Murphy. “You get that little attitude thing. I’ve been around you enough to see it. I’m not trying to bust your balls.”

“Sorry.” I took a hard look at the ditches beside the road up ahead. Whites could be anywhere.

“What I’m asking is, were you like this before?”

“Like what?”

Murphy took a second to find the right words. “Action junkie.”

“Were you?” It was natural deflection. An old habit.

He nodded. “But not like this.”

“You mean running around doing some of the crazy shit we do and getting off on it?” I asked. “You think you’d never have done this kind of stuff before?”

Murphy shook his head. “Some. I guess. But not this risky.”

"Do you think it's because you didn't have the opportunity back then?” I asked. “Maybe the crazy shit we do now seems so much crazier because the world we live in is that way. Maybe it’s all relative."

“Crazy. That’s a good word for it.” Murphy laughed. “I think about it a lot. I used to get in fights, you know. A lot, I guess. It wasn’t because I was angry. Like I told you about those dudes I killed behind that convenience store, I had to get that out of my system. Later on, I think I got in fights because it was exciting.”

“So you were always an action junkie?” I asked.

“A little bit,” said Murphy. "I think it's worse now. I think something in my brain changed. I think the virus changed me."

That was something to think about. I constantly worried about a deterioration of my mind, whether there was such a thing as virus dementia. I didn’t want to wake up one morning as a monster. I often thought about how much of the Whites’ minds were left when they started chasing normals and eating their flesh. Did they have the capacity to understand what they were doing, while at the same time being unable to control it? That had to be worse than being a simple killing machine.

I wondered if, in my way, I was becoming like the other Whites. I wondered if what suffered most when the virus ate away at a human brain was impulse control.

Looking over at Murphy and seeing that he was still thinking about it as well, I said, “I think the virus changed me too.”

He said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

“I wasn’t like this before, either. Well, like you, I was, a little. I did some crazy shit. I used to race my motorcycle on 2222 without a helmet.”

“That is nuts,” said Murphy.

“Nearly got me killed when I wrecked my bike,” I said.

“You weren’t one of those dudes that used to ride wheelies down the interstate, were you?”

“No.” I shook my head. It was a significant question. “No. I always thought those dudes were insane.”

Picking up on the tone in my voice, Murphy asked, “But you’d do it now. Wouldn’t you?”

I looked at my feet, feeling embarrassed, but not sure why. “I probably would. I probably wouldn’t give it a second thought.” I looked over at Murphy. “You’ve seen some of the crazy shit I’ve done, we’ve both done.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “That’s what I mean. I do things now that I wouldn’t have done before.”

“Do you worry where it’ll end up?” I asked.

“Probably with us getting killed.” Murphy laughed.

“No,” I said. “Not that. Do you wonder if the virus will change you more than it already has?”

Murphy's face turned sad and he nodded.

“Me, too,” I admitted.

“I’m afraid of what I’ll become,” said Murphy.

“You think you’ll turn into one of them?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. The longer I go without being a White, the more I’m sure I won’t turn into a knucklehead cannibal. What I don’t know is if I’ll turn, and not even know it.”

We walked a bit more before I admitted, “That worries me, too.”

“Dude.” Murphy pointed toward a house a short way off the road.

“What?”

“See that F-350 parked in that carport over there?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“I’m tired of walking. Let’s go see if we can get it started.”

Chapter 43

Murphy drove the truck into a convenience store parking lot.

I asked, “Do you think this is a good idea?”

With a big helping of false confidence, he said, “It’s my idea.”

“Yeah but…” I decided not to push it.

Murphy laughed.

“Whatever.”

Murphy stopped the truck, swung his door open, and jumped out, raising his rifle to his shoulder and pointing it at the convenience store’s interior.

I left my door open as I got out, figuring that if we needed to leave in a hurry, the seconds I’d save in reopening it might make a difference.

With my machete ready to do its gruesome business, I walked to the front of the store and stepped through one of the wall-sized broken windows, looking for anything that might be alive inside.

Murphy stepped through the window, panning back and forth with his rifle.

I hollered, “Anybody home?”

An animal scampered through debris at the back of the store.

We waited for the sound to stop. Again, I called, “Anybody home?”

Nobody.

Murphy walked toward the cash register.

I went to the end of a long shelving unit to search the other end of the store.

“If you see any of that purple Gatorade,” Murphy reminded me.

“Yeah, I know.” I shuffled through the broken glass, empty plastic bottles, wrappers, and aluminum cans, ripped rather than popped open. I turned over large pieces of cardboard packages, looking for anything intact. “Looks like plenty of little critters have been in here eating whatever the Whites didn’t take.”

I peeked over a tall shelf to get a view of the refrigerator cases and got a nose full of a smell that I’d caught lingering in the air the moment I stepped past the broken glass. The floor was layered with the remains of people who were mostly intact skeletons in shredded clothing, with lumps of rotting flesh.

I counted skulls, nudging away debris to get a view of any piece of bone that might have been a living person’s cranium.

Four. No. Five. A couple were kids.

The two kid-sized skulls were sitting near one another under a spinning display rack, cockeyed at the ends of their spinal columns. I leaned closer and wished I hadn’t. Each skull had a small perfectly round hole on one side and a missing chunk on the other.

Kicking around in the debris revealed a revolver, partially shiny, partially rusty, resting in what was left of a big skeleton’s hand.

Quitters.

I stopped and stared some more. I felt like an asshole. Could I label what I assumed was a family? Maybe some of them were infected? Maybe they were all normal, but trapped in the store. Maybe the father or mother, whichever one held the gun, had given their children a merciful death.

But the family hadn’t been fed on by the infected. If so, the skeletons wouldn’t have been relatively intact. The bones would have been scattered. That’s just the way it was with the infected. No, these people had been eaten by rats or other small animals. The parents’ choice to take the easy way out had been a hasty and wrong decision.

I shook my head again and stood up. No need to dwell on the evidence of despair. That lay damn near anywhere I looked in my decaying world. Nothing good came from thinking about the past.

I looked over at Murphy’s end of the store. “Anything over there?”

Murphy waved some piece of something in the air. It clearly wasn’t food, a ticket, or anything recognizable.

“Whatever,” I muttered. “I’m going to look in the fridge.”

“Be careful.”

“Yes, Mom.” Looking back through the broken windows, I said, “Keep an eye outside while I’m in the fridge. I won’t be able to hear anything.”

“You got it, Boss.”

I glanced up and down at the empty, white wire shelves behind all of the glass refrigerator doors and had an optimistic moment. Perhaps the fridge had stayed closed up after the shelves had been ransacked. I swung one of the refrigerator case doors open and got a nose full of wet stink. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nasty smells lurked everywhere.

I pushed on the white wire shelves in front of me. They rattled and resisted, but one by one, each fell back into the fridge.

Murphy called, “It would be less noisy if you went into the back and found the door.”

Already committed to my choice to do it the hard way, I said, “Is there anyone outside?”

“Not that I can see.”

Muttering again, I said, "Then it doesn't matter." I knocked the last shelf into the refrigerator unit and stepped through. The glass door swung to a close, and I saw dimly lit stacks of inventory against the back wall. “Son of a bitch.”

Three stacks of milk crates contained cartons, many of which were leaking. Some had exploded, probably due to gases created when the contents rotted in the late summer heat. Now they were growing greenish-brown slime mold all over the cases and down to the floor, where they puddled around a clogged floor drain. Worse, the surface squirmed, alive with maggots.

I squished through the slick dairy remnants on my way to get a closer look at what lay further along the back wall.

Luck!

Bottled and canned beer. Gatorade. Every kind of soft drink I could name, as well as fruit juices and energy drinks.

The Gatorade cases were stacked five high, each with a variety of unnaturally colored liquid in unnecessarily shapely bottles. The case on top had some of the weird purple ones that Murphy liked. I laid my machete across the top case and picked it up, feeling as I did, an intense vulnerability.

I’d disarmed myself.

I looked through the glass doors on the retail side of the refrigerator case and over the metal display shelves. Murphy was in the convenience store’s parking lot, standing near the truck, hands on his weapon, scanning slowly across the horizon.

I looked at the thick, insulated back door of the walk-in cooler. No doubt a stockroom lay on the other side, a room I hadn’t yet checked out. To walk into that room with two handfuls of Gatorade, rather than a ready machete, would be a mistake.

I hefted the case of drinks onto one of the wire shelves in the refrigerator, took my machete, and climbed out of the cooler the way I’d come in. From that side, I again picked up my case of Gatorade and hauled it outside.

“Purple?” Murphy asked looking back at me.

I nodded. “Fierce Grape. Nothing up the road?”

“Just us.” Murphy came over to me, cut the plastic wrapping on the case and pulled out a bottle of his favorite color.

I huffed and heaved the case into the truck’s cab.

Murphy unscrewed the cap and guzzled half the bottle down. “It’s better cold.”

Luxuries from a time gone by. I nodded and helped myself to a bottle of the neon green. I like the classics. “There’s plenty more of this in the cooler. Nobody ransacked that part of the store yet.”

“Any solid food?” Murphy asked.

“Some rotten sandwiches wrapped in plastic in the fridge. I didn’t check the stockroom. Did you find anything good behind the counter?”

Murphy reached into his pocket and half-pulled out a handful of brightly colored disposable lighters. He then reached into the truck’s cab and pulled out a roll of shiny lottery tickets. He showed them to me with a big grin.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Scratch-offs.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Why do we need them?” I took another gulp of my Gatorade.

“Pick one.”

“What?”

“Pick one.”

“Why?”

“Man,” said Murphy. “Humor me. Just pick one.”

“Just take the first one on the roll.” I turned away and looked up and down the road.

“Don’t ruin my fun. Seriously. Pick one.”

I sighed loudly, turned and looked at the roll of tickets strung from Murphy’s hand down across an empty parking space. “Any ticket?”

“Any ticket,” Murphy confirmed.

I pointed to one, and then knelt down and put my finger on it. “This one?”

Murphy chuckled and pulled the tickets up into his hand. “This one?” he confirmed.

What the fuck did I care? I nodded, took another drink, and gazed up and down the road. “It always makes me nervous when I don’t see any Whites. It’s like I know they’re out there. When I can’t see them, I think they’re sneaking up on me.”

“We’ll see plenty soon enough.” Murphy tore the ticket away and let the rest of the roll drop to the ground. “You got a quarter?”

I laughed. “I can’t remember the last time I touched actual money.”

"You never know." Murphy took a magazine out of his vest, removed one bullet, and set the magazine on the hood of the truck. He started scratching the lottery ticket with the brass edge of the cartridge.

“What are you doing?”

“Just checking.”

“Checking what?” I asked. “You know you can’t redeem those things, right?” I looked around, as though showing Murphy for the first time that the world had changed.

Murphy laughed loudly enough that I felt the need to crouch as I looked around again. If any Whites happened to be napping nearby, they’d be awake now. “What’s so funny?”

Still laughing, Murphy said, “Nothing.” He stuffed the ticket into one of his pockets.

“What?” I asked. “Was it a winner?”

“Not saying.”

“What do you mean you’re not saying?” I was getting perturbed. “Why’d you have me pick a ticket and then scratch it off?”

“Just checking to see if you’re as lucky as I thought you were.”

I shook my head and turned to go back inside the convenience store. “I’m going to get a few more cases. I’ll check the stockroom, too, and see if I can find any potato chips or something. You,” I shook my head to emphasize my disappointment. “You just keep amusing yourself.”

When I was halfway to the back of the store, Murphy called, "Do you want to know if you won?"

“No,”

“C’mon man. You’ve got to be curious.”

With no conviction, I said, “Fine. Did I pick a winner?”

Murphy laughed again. “I’m not sayin’.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Chapter 44

I drove. Murphy rode shotgun for literally the very reason that term was invented in the first place—to keep the naughty people away from civilized traveling folks inside.

“Keep us going north,” I told him. He was the navigator, too.

Murphy looked around before laying his weapon across his lap. He unfolded the map. “How far north do you want to go before we head west to find them?”

“I don’t want to run into them from the side.” I scanned the field on both sides of the road while trying to keep my speed up. I didn’t believe the horde would move more than twenty miles in a day. A guess. With trying to keep themselves fed along the way, and with the Smart Ones probably knowing that driving the horde at too quick a pace would increase their mortality rate, they might move only five or ten miles in a day. Either way, when we came upon them, I wanted to approach from the northwest, on the off chance that if we had to run away, and if they chased, we’d all be moving in the direction I wanted them to go.

As it was, with the Whites last seen heading north, the next population center they came to—or former population center—would be Waco. They’d pass twenty or thirty miles to the east of Fort Hood.

“Again,” Murphy asked, “how far?”

“Let’s shoot for twenty or thirty miles,” I said. “Then we’ll cut west as much as we can, and see if we can pick up some sign of them.”

Murphy laughed. “I don’t think finding a sign of them will be the problem. What worries me is that we’ll round a curve in the road or come over some hill and see the whole damn horde in front of us.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “That would be our luck. You know, we could do the same things our buddies in the silos did and find a water tower to climb. We’d get a pretty good view of at least five miles around, maybe ten.”

“The horde would be hard to miss,” said Murphy, “even at that distance.”

I slowed the pickup and drove through a ditch to avoid several burned-out cars in the road. “That would keep us from getting surprised by a mob too big for us to handle.”

"Stop at the top of this next hill," said Murphy. "If you don't see any Whites around. I'll climb on top of the cab and see if I can spot a water tower for us to climb.”

Chapter 45

I had to run over a trio of infected who were loping down the middle of the road. I don't know where they were going. I don't know why they didn't make any effort to get out of the way. They were a short distance down the road from a radio tower we were headed toward and they were jogging in that direction.

Better to exterminate them with the truck than to be surprised by them later.

Why not? The truck had the heavy steel brush guard and I didn’t think I was going fast enough to damage anything important.

When I drove the truck over the crest of a hill we found a radio tower standing next to a small, square building with a flat roof and concrete walls. A bundle of black cables ran out of the building and up the side of the tower. Around the building stood a chain link fence at a distance of about fifty feet on all four sides.

With no Whites around that we could see, I backed the truck into the fence and knocked it flat, quickly solving the problem of how we were going to get through it. I didn’t drive back so far that the pickup’s tires rolled onto the barbed wire that topped the fence, or any of the chain link fencing. I didn’t need a flat.

Murphy and I got out and walked around to give the tower a good look.

“How tall do you think it is?” he asked.

Looking from the base up the red and white painted framework reaching into the sky, I said, “Tall enough. I’ll either see the naked horde from up there or I’ll see the next water tower or silo that we’ll need to climb.”

"And if there are Whites on the way?" Murphy asked. "We've been lucky so far this morning, and that's starting to worry me."

“We’ll deal with them, like we always do.” Seeing that the ladder into the tower was blocked with a locked fence attached to the rungs, I walked around the small building with Murphy following behind. He was scanning across the tan-colored fields all around us. I was looking for a way to get onto the flat roof. Three runs of metal conduit attached to a wall and running from ground to roof turned out to be my path.

Without a word of what I was going to do, I wrapped my fingers around one of the pipes and used it for a ladder to pull myself onto the roof. It took only a few seconds. Looking down at Murphy, I asked, “How’s your hand?”

He flexed as he looked at his palm. “Still a little swollen, but I can use it just fine.”

“Can you make it up here?”

Murphy rolled his eyes, grabbed onto the conduits, and climbed to the roof beside me.

“You keep an eye out around us,” I told him. “I’ll go up.”

Murphy opened his mouth to protest, but we both knew it would be safer for me to go up than him.

“If you see any Whites,” I told him, “Shoot ‘em.”

"And if a bunch comes this way?"

I laughed. “I’ll see them a long time before you do.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “I suppose so.”

“Keep an eye on me as I’m going up,” I said. “I’ll take it slow and check for Whites in all directions. If I see any, I’ll point out the direction and call down how many.”

“And when you get too high to hear?”

“Won’t matter,” I told him. “If I’m so high that you can’t hear me, then the Whites I see will be so far away they won’t be able to get here before I get down.”

“Unless they’re close by,” Murphy argued.

“You’re not thinking, dude,” I told him. “For any that are close by, I’ll have told you about those before I get very high. Cool?”

Murphy pursed his lips and raised his rifle to his shoulder to scan the surrounding fields using the scope. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If I see any Whites, how ‘bout I just lay down so they don’t see me?” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes, climbed through the tower’s framework, got onto the ladder, and started up.

I don’t know how high up I was when I stopped and looked around. Maybe twenty feet, high enough to see the area around us, but not high enough to see much of anything Murphy and I hadn’t already seen from the roof of the little building below.

“Anything?” Murphy called.

“Nope.”

Up.

At fifty feet, I glanced around again. Nothing jumped out, so I pushed on.

The wind felt stronger and colder the higher I went. The horizon spread out farther in all directions.

With no intuition for height, and no way to know how far up the tower I’d gone, I slowed my ascent. I might have been a hundred feet or two hundred feet off the ground. The section of ladder stretching into the sky above could have been as long as the one below. As I stepped from rung to rung, looking up and down, I saw no difference. Maybe I was halfway up. Maybe it was impossible to tell from my perspective. Either way, I was high enough that the wind seemed to be blowing twice as hard as it did down on the ground. The guy-wires that Christmas treed down from the tower at different heights in different directions vibrated with Star Wars laser sounds that changed pitch with the speed of the wind. Despite all those guy-wires, the tower swayed enough to make me worry it might fall over or break somewhere along its length.

Logic told me that was impossible. After all, the tower’s resilience was proven by the fact that it stood at all. It made it through the storm a few days prior. It survived the hurricane several months ago, and had been enduring the weather for years. One reason it did not collapse in any of those winds was probably its ability to flex and sway. Nevertheless, it was hard to keep logic in mind while the framework moved around me.

I stopped, wrapped an elbow over a rung, and locked my hands to hold myself in place. I took a hard look at the fields near the base of the tower and saw Murphy looking up at me. I let go my hand-locked death grip and gave him the thumbs up. No Whites were nearby that I could see.

As I looked farther and farther out, I spotted the movement of cattle and horses. I saw Whites in groups of a few here and there, and even saw a long line of naked ones winding their way on a road leading into a small town a mile north of us.

I looked east to see if I could spot the silos where we’d stayed the night. The horizon was spiked with water towers and silos of varying heights and diameters—some clustered, some attached, others in pairs, and many standing solo. Unable to find the line of five silos, I tried to piece together the landmarks we'd passed along the way to find the path back; instead I only managed to lose myself.

Realizing I was wasting time for something that served only to satisfy my curiosity, I looked down again at the fields below, to see if I could spot any Whites closing in on Murphy’s position. Nothing. I stuck my arm out through the tower’s metal frame and showed Murphy another thumbs up.

I looked west, thinking I’d see a giant black smudge snaking over the rolling farmland to where it terminated at an amorphous white splatter.

Nothing so obvious presented itself.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I noticed how all the colors seemed to lose their brilliance and distinction as they slowly faded to shades of gray the farther away I gazed.

Way off to the west, I spotted black specks floating across the sky. Three of them. Those specks were familiar to me. They were the Survivor Army’s helicopters flying south. Probably toward Austin, unless they got bored with that plan. Well north of the three specks flying south, I spotted two more that seemed to go nowhere, other than to circle the same patch of gray ground below.

I examined the landmarks between my position and theirs, thinking that I’d be able to reconcile those with Murphy’s map when I got back down. My hope was that I’d be able to confirm our strong suspicion that the Survivor Army was indeed making Fort Hood their home.

I continued to look west and south, thinking I was plenty high enough up the tower.

Then I spotted the horde.

Chapter 46

We spread the map out on the tailgate. With a finger, I traced a road on the map that ran past the radio tower. I looked up. “See those two barns up there?”

Murphy looked across the field.

I tapped the map on an intersection, and pointed at an adjacent road. “This road goes north just on the other side of those barns.”

“Okay.” Murphy looked again, though we couldn’t see the road from where we stood.

"Then about a mile up that road is a little town,” I said. “I saw a line of about forty, maybe fifty Whites running into that town.”

“Let’s avoid that place.” Murphy took his attention away from the map and slowly turned, scanning the area around us.

“Yeah,” I agreed absently, keeping focused on the map, looking at the roads, and trying to associate the map with the landmarks I’d seen from up on the tower.

I missed my smartphone.

I traced roads and tried to figure out where the horde was on the map. I groaned.

“What?” Murphy asked.

Frustrated with what I figured out, I shushed Murphy and went through my analysis again.

“You need to go back up and look again?”

Shaking my head, I said, “We don’t have time.”

“How could we not have time?” Murphy looked around again. Second-nature paranoia.

“See this road here?” It was labeled a highway, but it was just a two-lane road with a wide shoulder and a seventy mile per hour speed limit.

“Yeah?” Murphy acknowledged.

“They’re headed toward it right now," I told him. “They’ll cross it before too long. I think it’s our best chance to get ahead of them.”

Murphy traced his finger back along the road to that little town a mile or so away, the one I’d seen the line of Whites run into. He frowned and shook his head. “Why’s this road important?”

I showed him another way to get ahead of the naked horde. The detour would send us on a road that cut across their path, but at a point much farther north. “To skirt around the town to get to this other road,” I said as I showed Murphy the path, “assuming we don’t have to detour again to get there, we might burn off an extra hour or two. I think the horde might get too far north by then.”

“What do you mean by that?” Murphy asked.

I showed him where Fort Hood lay on the map. “I saw some helicopters flying around over here. I’m pretty sure that’s where the Survivor Army is. If we want to get the naked horde over there, I think it will be easier to get them to veer that way than to coax them into a hard left turn. The farther north they go, the more they’ll have to turn, and the harder it will be to get them to do it, I think.”

Murphy sighed and rolled his eyes. “I know where this is going.”

“The urgency is real,” I said.

“So is the risk,” Murphy told me.

“I think getting the Survivor Army and the naked horde together is worth it.”

Murphy shook his head in defeat. “At least it’ll be exciting.”

“The other thing is, we can’t take the main road through town,” I said. “It’s blocked. But when I was up there, I think I saw a way through town. When we get to the other side, we can get back on this highway.”

“Did I say exciting?” asked Murphy. “I meant excitinger.” He laughed at his word joke.

I smiled. “Don’t be a pussy. You know you dig this shit. Stop whining and let's go kill some golf ball heads.”

“Killing Mark better be worth it. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Chapter 47

The road curved on the way into town, passing old houses built of native stone, some of institutional reddish-orange brick under flat roofs, and even a tall, Victorian-style house in disrepair, with vehicles that hadn’t run since the seventies on the lawn. The trees in what was left of the yards stood tall and broad enough to hang over the road and muffle some of the sound that our big, diesel engine rattled out from underneath its hood.

Half the trees had large boughs broken and lying beneath. Other limbs were partially ripped from the trunks and hanging from tree to road. Smaller limbs lay everywhere. Most roofs were partially torn away or had wide sections with missing shingles.

The town had gotten hit hard when that hurricane blew into central Texas a few months back.

We passed a grocery store with all the plate glass windows across its front broken away. The metal shelving units and cashier stations were piled into ramparts around the front of the store. Bare bones lay scattered across the asphalt. The folks in this small town had made their last stand at the Piggly Wiggly.

A road scattered with vehicles in disarray straightened out as it ran through the center of town. Among those vehicles, several dozen Whites jumped to attention, pulled away from whatever they were scavenging by the sound of our engine.

I floored it.

The exhaust roared and spat out a cloud of smoke.

The heavy truck accelerated faster than a Humvee, but didn’t instill any confidence in me as for how well it would maneuver through town, where lots of slow turns and subsequent accelerations would be necessary to keep infected hands off its faded paint. Still, all the engine and exhaust noise had the effect I'd hoped for when I pushed the pedal down. Whites ran into the street several blocks ahead of us, eager to be the first to get a bite.

“Put on your seatbelt.” My voice ratcheted up with excitement. “It’s gonna get fun.”

Murphy quickly strapped himself in, left his M4 in his lap, and readied his pistol.

I swerved around a dead pickup. Pickups were the most common form of transportation in that part of Texas.

I ran down some Whites with a bang of bone against steel. The truck bounced as it rolled over their bodies.

We passed a feed store on the left and a barbecue shack on the right. After that, the one- and two-story buildings on both sides of the street filled in wall to wall.

“You see the road blocked up there?” Murphy asked.

“I’m turning left at the corner." I didn't slow the truck much. Instead, I swerved to the right side of the road and cut a wide turn through the intersection, smashing more Whites with the pickup’s heavy-duty brush guard. The truck leaned hard and the tires complained loudly, but they held the road.

Murphy pointed his pistol at some Whites who got close to his side, but not close enough for him to waste a bullet.

Just as well. The truck fishtailed coming out of the corner and slammed a running White full on the side, batting him twenty feet across a sidewalk and into a wall.

Murphy laughed out loud. “Damn, did you see that?”

I was laughing, too, as I proudly checked my mirror to see whether the White was getting up.

“Dude!” Murphy shouted.

I looked forward just in time to avoid slamming into a parked delivery truck.

“Keep your eyes out front.” Murphy was getting revved up with the excitement, too.

“Yes, sir.” I sped the truck past two more blocks. “I think this next one is where I turn.”

Murphy reached out and held onto the dashboard. We were going too fast to corner. I braked and the truck skidded into the turn. I gunned the engine again and straightened out on the road.

“Oh, shit.” I mashed the brakes to the floor. A tree was down across the road in front of us.

The tires skidded and bounced. The engine knocked and stalled as we smashed into the branches.

"Good thing you put on your seatbelt," I told Murphy as I turned the key to crank the starter.

He turned in his seat to see if any Whites were coming around the corner behind us.

The engine didn’t start.

“Let me know if you see any,” I told him loudly.

“Oh, you’ll know.” Murphy holstered the pistol and swung the barrel of his rifle over the truck’s backseat to point out the rear window.

I cranked again as I looked for what I could see through brown leaves and gray branches. “C’mon, you old piece of shit.”

“Don’t pump the gas pedal,” Murphy told me without looking. “You’re flooding it.”

“Can you flood a diesel?” I asked, wondering if old diesels had carburetors or fuel injection, but mostly thinking we should abandon the truck before Whites came around the corner. It would be easier to evade them before they got eyes on us.

Murphy fired his rifle. The bullets shattered the truck’s rear glass.

So much for running away.

Murphy fired off several more rounds.

I looked over my shoulder and saw a half-dozen Whites sprinting around the corner behind us.

I cranked the starter, keeping my foot off the gas pedal. The engine rattled to life. I pushed the shifter into reverse and floored it again. The rear tires spun and then caught, dragging the truck backward toward the Whites.

The hood was barely out of the downed tree branches when the first White disappeared under the rear bumper.

I had an arm up on the back of the seat and was half turned around by then as I raced.

A female jumped onto the back of the truck. Another thumped against the tailgate.

Murphy shot the woman climbing into the bed and two more jumped up to take her place.

I hit a clump of Whites at the corner and cut the wheels hard. The truck spun sideways into the cross street.

One White fell out of the back. The other hit his head and fell over, bleeding and unconscious.

“Go. Go!” Murphy shouted.

I shifted into forward and put the pedal to the floor, keeping my eyes ahead.

Murphy fired at least a dozen more shots.

“I think I took the wrong turn back there.”

“No shit?” Murphy laughed. He glanced forward. “What about staying on this road? It looks clear.”

“Can’t,” I told him. “We need the road going out of town to the west. This will take—”

“Don’t care,” Murphy shouted. “Just get us out of here.” He fired a few more shots.

We didn’t have much of a lead and didn’t have many choices. The road we were on only had three more cross streets before running out of town. If any roads existed out past the edge of town that would get us to where we were going, I didn’t know which ones they were. I hadn’t looked at the map in that kind of detail.

I chanced the next right turn we came to. "Hang on." The truck wasn't moving fast enough for the tires to squeal much, but it leaned hard anyway.

The truck started to bounce.

“Damn,” Murphy complained.

“Potholes,” I told him. “Write a letter to the mayor.”

The way ahead looked clear for several blocks between houses roughed up by the storm. I slowed and tried to avoid the biggest holes in the road. By the time we passed the first intersection, Whites were rounding the corner behind us and coming our way.

At each intersection, I looked right to get a glimpse at the road through the center of town, the one we needed to be on when we drove out the other side. We were paralleling it, and if we could get past the roadblock and get back on that road, we’d be home free.

At least that was my plan—or hope.

We came to a jumble of branches that looked more and more impassable the closer we came. Rather than risk getting hung up, I took a right turn, hoping we’d gone far enough to get past the roadblock. Whites, the clothed variety, came at us out of the houses as we passed. Not in big numbers; a couple here, a couple there.

More debris had to be avoided, so I drove through somebody’s front yard. Murphy had to shoot a White who was waiting on a front porch for the opportunity to pounce on us as we passed.

I made a left turn onto the main street as Murphy shouted, “Dude, perfect!”

In my rearview mirror, I caught a glance of overturned pickups blocking the road just behind me. The thump of a White hitting the brush guard pulled my attention forward again. We were back among the naked ones. Not many, but enough.

I raced the big noisy engine and swerved back and forth in the road. I needed to avoid stalled vehicles and debris that looked like it could put a hole in a tire. Murphy shot down a few Whites who took advantage of our reduced speed.

Moments later, we were out of the center of town and racing past storm-thrashed houses again. I kept an eye on the road signs, hoping the ones I needed hadn’t been run down by fleeing motorists.

At a Y-intersection, I saw the sign I’d been looking for, along with an arrow pointing right. I sped the truck up over sixty and took the right leg of the intersection. The road up ahead looked clear. Farms spread out on both sides of the road and the last of the town's houses disappeared behind us.

I was riding high on my victory and shouted, “All right! Let’s get this show on the road!”

Chapter 48

We made the first ten miles pretty quickly over roads that were mostly clear. That’s when we reached a blocked bridge over a shallow river. The terrain along the banks took the possibility of attempting a crossing in the truck off the table. We spent nearly an hour backtracking for a way around.

When we finally got back on course, we were getting into the later hours of the afternoon. Murphy spotted a tall sign for a bed and breakfast standing on a hill across a wide field planted in a uniform, grassy, green crop that hadn’t died. The two-story main house, the barns, and a silo—which stood half again taller than the house—were all painted in red with white trim, and looked just as unperturbed as if awaiting weekend visitors from a pre-virus world.

From up there, I immediately guessed I’d be able to see for miles in all directions.

We needed to stop and get our bearings.

The dude ranch, or whatever it was, had a fancy iron gate that stood fifteen feet tall at least, and looked to have successfully kept out the casually wandering Whites. It, however, was designed for ornamental value rather than security. I drove through it at twenty and my much-abused farm truck jolted, but didn't lose any momentum. The caliche drive crackled under our tires as I rolled the truck cautiously around the curves on a winding driveway up through the green grass toward the house.

I stopped the truck with the passenger side facing the house.

Murphy said, “Honk the horn a few times. I’ll shoot whoever comes out.”

What didn't need to be said was that if too many Whites came out, I'd drive off, and we'd try somewhere else. I leaned on the horn. That, along with the noisy diesel, was bound to bring any infected residents out to greet us.

We waited.

I honked again, and before the sound ended, three Whites came running around a corner of the house, vocalizing and grabbing, though the truck sat thirty yards beyond their reach.

Murphy squeezed off five shots to get them all.

Two were dead. That was easy enough to tell. The last was badly wounded and writhing on the ground, babbling nonsensical sounds full of anger while blood pulsed out of the torn artery that would soon be the cause of its death.

Another White was kind enough to come running around the same corner, and Murphy shot her through the throat. She collapsed, twitching and gurgling blood.

“Honk it again,” Murphy told me.

I did.

No more Whites came to greet us.

Taking time to look around in all directions, Murphy said, “Drive ‘round back.”

I drove the truck over the lawn, giving the main house a wide berth. Once we got around behind the house, I skirted a large pool full of green water and floating vegetation. Spread just below the crest of the hill, facing west, stood a row of seven cottages, each with a view over miles of rolling hills toward a spot where the sun would set.

“Damn pretty view,” I observed.

“Don’t make your reservations yet,” said Murphy.

I honked the horn before he had a chance to tell me to do it.

A couple of Whites pushed their way through the open door on one of the cabins. Because they were on my side of the truck, Murphy didn’t have a shot.

“Go,” he ordered.

“I got this.” I pushed the pedal to the floor and spun gravel and turf into the air.

Before I created too much of a gap between me and the Whites coming for us, I skidded the truck to a stop, threw it into reverse, and backed toward the Whites, who—in their eagerness to get at us—didn’t bother to get out of the way. The rear bumper hit them and at least one of them went under the tires, not unlike a speed bump. I stopped, reversed course, and ran them over again going forward, trying my best to gas the truck just as the wheels rolled over the bodies.

Did spinning the wheels on a dying White’s body seem unnecessarily brutal? Yeah, sure. But what the fuck? My guilt over the killing of Whites who maybe didn’t deserve it because they might have been Slow Burns was manifesting itself in a weird way.

We made a few more trips, weaving through the farm buildings, honking the horn and making as much noise as we could before we decided it was safe to get out.

I stopped the truck in front of the silo and looked at Murphy for protests before I killed the engine. He said nothing. Off it went.

I flung the truck door open and leapt out with my machete at the ready.

Murphy took up a position at the front of the truck with his rifle aimed at a pair of double doors at the base of the silo.

Without hesitation, I opened one wide and stepped aside as I yelled, “Hey!”

I waited from my position against the wall and watched Murphy. From where he stood, he had a view inside the silo. After a moment, he shrugged.

Good enough. I turned and ran inside.

The silo was clearly not functional for storing grain, I decided, based on my recent experience inside an operational one. This silo was configured with a spiral staircase up the center to what had to be a viewing platform. The silo was just a façade for nostalgic guests. I didn’t care. It was perfect for my needs.

I started up the stairs.

Murphy ran inside and I told him, “Close and lock the doors. Then come up.”

Once I reached the platform at the top, I was pleased. All around the circumference of the silo at the platform level were tall windows, giving me an unobstructed view of the countryside in every direction. And if that wasn’t enough, a large telescope stood ready for use, along with a shelf housing several pairs of binoculars.

“Nice,” said Murphy as he stepped up to the observation floor with me.

“You get the doors locked?” I asked.

“Nobody’s gonna wander in,” he told me. “If a bunch of ‘em decide to bust those doors down, they won’t have any trouble.”

Spinning around for a cursory glance at the nearby property, I said, “Unless there are a bunch of ‘em hiding in the barn, I think we’re good. You didn’t happen to bring that map up, did you?”

Murphy slapped a pocket on his vest.

“Good.” I stepped in front of a window and looked in the direction I figured the naked horde should be. “Help me search. We need to find them before it gets dark.”

Chapter 49

Looking through the binoculars made it hard to find the horde. At least, at first it did. I scanned across field and forest, mostly field, in the distance. I came across a path of turned-up dirt—darker than the surrounding ground, leading across a field—and realized it was the path of the horde that I was seeing. I abruptly stopped. “Holy crap.”

“What?” Murphy had his weapon up before I pulled the binoculars away from my eyes.

I pointed. “They’re right there.”

Murphy looked.

“No,” I told him. “Right here. Close. In that valley, right there.”

“Shit, dude.”

“Like a mile away.”

“That’s a lot closer than I’d prefer to be right now.” Murphy walked around the observation tower, looking hard out the windows to see the ground around us.

“They’re not on the move,” I told him. “I think they’re getting ready to settle down for the night.”

I set the binoculars on the shelf and got behind the telescope, aiming it at the mob of Whites.

“Yeah, looks like they’re milling around,” Murphy confirmed. “They’re not going anywhere.”

With the telescope’s magnification, I saw right down into the horde. I saw individuals, naked, staring at nothing, squabbling, foraging in the dirt for edibles, and even coming to consensus about which of the nearest ones was the weakest.

It was frightening to watch as the first one, then several, stopped whatever they were doing and took to staring at a particular White among them. In the space of thirty or forty seconds, all the Whites close by did the same, until one White found herself looking around at staring eyes. Realization followed, and the targeted White tried to run, but failed. All the staring Whites converged on her and tackled her in a pile of wrestling bodies and dirty white skin. And then it was all splashed with red.

I inched the telescope across the crowd trying to find the center, the spot where I figured I’d find the Smart Ones.

“Okay, now that we’ve got ‘em, what’s the plan, Batman?”

I didn’t answer. I’d found the remains of an old gas station that looked to have been abandoned half a century ago. It was the structure closest to the center of the horde, as near as I could tell.

“Dude?” Murphy asked.

“Just a sec.” I examined the Whites near the gas station. Many were sitting down. A few looked to be stomping the grass into nests in which they planned to curl up for the night. Among a bunch of Whites already sitting down, I spotted a group of three walking together and I guessed they were the sentries, the same ones who had tried to ruin my night when I’d made my first attempt to assassinate Mark. No, not assassinate, punish.

I took that as confirmation that my intuition about the gas station was correct. I refocused the telescope at the building, at least, what wasn’t hidden from view behind a giant oak that had grown in an inconvenient spot.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Murphy asked. “I thought we had a plan for this part.”

There!

A White male walked out from behind the tree and whispered into the ear of a female. After listening to the instructions, the female ran off. An unusually thin male took her place and listened to the whispers. Other Whites lined up for instructions. Two more Whites came out from behind the tree and started whispering in ears.

“Check this out,” I said, stepping away from the telescope. “Hurry.”

Exaggerating his disinterest, Murphy took my place at the telescope and peeked through.

“See?” I asked.

“Damn,” he said. “It couldn’t be any clearer if I was listening to what they were saying. Those Whites are telling the others what to do.” He looked for a few more moments. He pulled his eye away from the telescope and glared at me. “You trying to figure a way to get through to that gas station tonight?”

“I would if I could,” I told him. “But I can’t think of a way to get past those sentries.”

“You didn’t see a combine over there?” Murphy laughed.

I rolled my eyes.

Murphy took the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. I took the opportunity to walk around the circumference of the silo for a good look at the grounds nearby and a cursory glance at the adjacent properties. Of course, I was looking for anything moving. All I saw were a few deer.

Murphy looked around for a table on which to spread the map. We had none, of course, so he pressed the map to the glass, took a confirming look at the naked horde beyond, and put his finger on a spot. “I think they’re here.”

I looked at the map, looked at the horde, and looked back at the map again. “I think you’re right.” I spent another moment finding our location. “I think this is us here.”

“And Fort Hood?” Murphy asked, although it was pretty clearly outlined on the map and shaded in yellow.

I traced a straight line from where the horde was planning to camp for the night to Fort Hood’s border. Our location was just a little below the line. "How far do you think that is?" I asked, as I looked at the scale on the map.

“What’s the distance between the gridlines?” Murphy asked.

“Two miles.”

“Fourteen miles from here to Fort Hood,” Murphy guessed. “Give or take.”

Nodding, I agreed.

“It’ll be full dark in another thirty or forty minutes,” said Murphy.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “What are you thinking?”

“I know the golf ball heads are settling down for the night,” answered Murphy, “but I was thinking about what Billy and Isaac told us about the fire at the silo.”

I looked west to try and make out Fort Hood on the horizon. No helicopters were in the air to mark it, and under the glare of the setting sun, all of the features on the horizon were hard to see.

“He said the Whites out here in the country were drawn to fire, especially at night.”

“I think we’re on the same page here,” I said. “We start a fire and give them some incentive to get off their asses and come this way.”

“We know they don’t mind losing sleep when they're hungry,” said Murphy. “We’ve dealt with them at night plenty of times.”

I looked at the main house. “I’ll bet being up on the hill, they’ll see that house burning.”

Murphy nodded.

“You stay up here and keep an eye on them,” I said. “I’ll go torch the house.”

“Don’t be a dumbass,” Murphy told me. “The horde will be there when we come back up to look. We’ll go torch the house together. No need to risk going by yourself.”

“Sure, Mom.”

Chapter 50

With room for twenty or thirty guests at the bed and breakfast, the kitchen and the pantry were large. Unfortunately, not a crumb of food was to be found in either. That left Murphy and me standing at a doorway into the dining room. We’d already hollered into the house in case any Whites were inside. None obliged. I yelled a warning that we were going to burn the house, in case anyone normal was hiding upstairs. Nobody protested.

Murphy led the way past two long dining tables lined with wooden chairs and into a sitting room with a big stone fireplace. Beside the fireplace, half a cord of wood was stacked neatly against the wall as more of a choice in interior design than necessity.

“Some gasoline would come in handy,” I said.

“We don’t have any to spare,” said Murphy. “Do the best with what you have. I’ll keep an eye on things.” He turned his back to me and watched the stairs and the front door.

I went to work with curtains, pillows, and magazines, collecting them in a pile. I fetched the wooden chairs from the dining room. On the chairs, I stacked the firewood so that the fire I was going to start would have plenty of room to breathe. I laced the pile with the magazines and cloth from the upholstery on the chairs. When it was done, the bonfire in the sitting room stood ready to burn at six feet tall.

I checked my pockets and realized I didn’t have a lighter. I looked up at Murphy. He exaggerated his disappointment as he tossed me one.

I lit the paper at the base of my construction, stepped back, and waited for it to ignite some of the fabric. “We’re in business.”

Murphy gave my fire a glance and said, “We should have opened a window upstairs first.”

“Fuck that,” I told him. I picked up a chair and threw it through a big window on the front of the house. It shattered. I silently thanked the owners for not replacing the old windows on the house with modern, tempered glass. “Let’s go.”

“It’ll have to do.”

We ran out the back door, crossed the wide yard, ran around our pickup, and went back into the silo, locking the door behind.

Panting and grinning we reached the observation deck after running up the stairs. The day had turned to dusk. I didn’t yet see any flames inside the house.

“How many fires you think we’ll have to set?” Murphy asked.

“Four or five.” I shrugged. “Twenty or thirty. Hell, I don’t know.”

“It might be a good idea to round up some gas cans along the way, if we can.” Murphy leaned on a rail and stared impatiently at the house.

I took up a position at the telescope and watched my smart buddies hanging around the old gas station. Nine or ten were in front, whispering in one another’s ears, looking every bit like neighbors standing in the front yard and having a chat after dinner. Scanning across the mass of the horde, it looked like about half of them were on the ground, settling in to sleep.

“Fire in the window,” Murphy announced.

“Good.” I kept my eye at the telescope’s eyepiece.

I’d guess it took maybe ten minutes for the fire to fracture the glass on the second-floor windows. Once that happened, with a big breath of oxygen flowing into the house, the flames roared out and lit up the whole area.

Just as that happened, all across the horde, heads turned to look. Out on the fringe, some of the cliques were already on the move. Others were breaking off from the main group in bands of a few or a dozen.

The Smart Ones, too, were interested. They’d all but stopped whispering and were looking at the burning house. Though through the telescope, it appeared as though they were all looking right at me.

“They’re starting to come,” I said. “How long do you figure the house will burn?”

“No idea,” answered Murphy. “Half hour, an hour. I don’t know.”

“How long do you think it’ll take the Whites to get here?”

“Cross country?” Murphy asked. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll get here a lot sooner than you’ll think they should.

I laughed. “Isn’t that the truth.”

“We should get moving.”

I started down the steps. In my excitement over a plan starting to gel, I’d forgotten a necessary step, until I saw that Murphy wasn’t following, but taking a look around first.

“We got about a dozen coming this way from across the road,” he said. “Regular ones, not naked.”

Silently berating myself for the mistake, I said, “It’s time to get the hell outta here.”

The infected had crossed the road and were running up the driveway and across the field toward the burning house by the time I flung open the driver’s side door to get into the truck. Murphy ran around the backside. I put the key in the ignition and waited for the glow plugs to warm. Murphy opened his door.

“This better start,” he said. “If not, get ready to run.”

Looking across the hood toward the infected on the driveway, I saw a few stumble at the surprise of seeing Murphy and me getting into the truck. The light was too low for them to make out our white skin. They didn't miss the pickup, though. As with most Whites, they knew food always came on four wheels.

I cranked the starter.

“They’re coming out from the other side of the cabins,” said Murphy, looking over his shoulder.

“Shit.” I glanced at the rearview mirror. “How’d they get here so fast?”

“They had to be in those trees over there.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t they come when I honked the horn when we first got here?” It was damn frustrating dealing with Whites sometimes. They were not dependable.

The diesel rattled to life. I gassed it. It lurched forward and shuddered, rolled like it might stall, sputtered, and fired up again.

“Damn!” yelled Murphy. “We need a better truck.”

I moved the gas pedal up and down trying to find the optimal place where the truck would accelerate without flooding itself with fuel. The clothed infected in front of us were only a few dozen feet away by then.

“Gotta move,” Murphy told me as he brought his weapon to his shoulder, hanging the barrel out the window.

Doing my best to keep cool and watching the Whites converge around us, I knew I needed to baby the engine back to life again. Once it was running, it chugged along. When it was a little cold, it was finicky.

It shuddered and coughed out puffs of black smoke and suddenly found its rattling rhythm. I accelerated and aimed at the closest infected runners. They hit the brush guard. Two went under the truck, but one jumped at just the right time to land himself on the hood. Instinctively, I swerved to slide him off before he could get hold.

Murphy jerked his weapon inside just as the White flew past on his side of the truck.

Behind us, naked ones were sprinting and screaming.

“Damn, they got here quick!” I shouted.

“Probably scouts or something.”

I drove the truck off the winding driveway and ran it over the field, directing it toward the ornate iron gates I’d knocked down when we’d arrived. With the illumination from the fire fading the farther we got from the burning house and with the sky turning dark, I turned on the headlights and glanced at Murphy, “Nothing to lose now. They’re already chasing us.”

“Get up the road a bit.” Murphy dug in his bag for his night vision goggles. “Put these on when we stop.”

I shook my head. “We’re starting fires to draw them this way. The headlights won’t hurt.”

He shrugged and put the goggles on his head.

Chapter 51

With insecurity growing as the night grew blacker around us and only a long, narrow pool of light cast by my high beams ahead, I asked, “What do you see?”

Murphy scanned first on one side of the road and then the other. “Trees and bushes.”

“Whites?”

“Some coming out of a house over there.”

“Close?” I asked.

“Not close enough to catch us, unless you want to stop and wait.”

“No.”

He looked back at the house, still burning on the hill. “I think the commotion is bringing them out. I’m seeing more around than we did this afternoon.”

“A lot more?” I asked, expecting the answer to be in the affirmative.

“No. Some more."

We were on an upward slope with the road running straight. No curves, for a change. I checked my rearview mirror again, trying to gauge the distance to the fire that appeared to be burning down to embers as the distance grew behind us.

How far should we run to start the next fire? To the top of this hill?

The truck lurched with a loud thud.

“Shit!” I’d spent too much time looking in the rearview mirror.

A blood-spewing body smashed the windshield and rolled over the cab.

“Goddamn,” Murphy jerked around to look behind us.

I glance back as the White’s body came to rest in the bed of the truck, broken bones protruding through torn skin. “I swear to God! They’re like squirrels. Every time I take my eyes off the road one runs out in front.”

“Watch the damn road,” Murphy commanded.

I drew a deep breath, took a hard look at the dark edges around my headlight beams, grinned and said, “That scared the shit out of me.”

Murphy laughed. “Me, too.”

I cocked my head toward the pickup bed. “Is it dead?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not going anywhere.”

“We’re nearing the top of this hill.” I took my foot off the accelerator and let the truck coast. “You see any houses or barns we can burn?”

“You think we should go farther?” Murphy asked, letting a glance out the back of the truck betray what his answer to that question might be.

Taking another quick glance at my mirror, I said, “No. I’m thinking we need to keep stringing them along. Look at that fire.”

“What am I looking for?”

“I think it’s starting to burn down.”

“And?”

“I don’t think it’ll go much longer. Even if it does, pretty soon it’s going to be too small to be a beacon.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” said Murphy, checking our flanks.

“If we start the next fire close enough to the first, I think we’ll get the Whites in the lead stampeding from fire to fire, all the way to Fort Hood.”

Murphy sighed. “There’s a house and a barn and some shit up here on the right. You’ll come to the driveway pretty soon.”

Indeed, I did.

I turned onto a gravel drive just past a cluster of mailboxes.

Murphy said, “Cut the lights.”

I turned them off. Instinctively, I put my foot on the brakes to slow the truck.

Murphy reached over and took the wheel. “I’ll steer. Take it slow, but not too slow.”

I let go of the wheel and the truck coasted to about twenty. All I saw was blackness outside and the orange fire in the distance. “The darkness makes me nervous. It’d be nice to have a moon again.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “Or your night vision goggles that you left with Grace and them. You know, just like a dumbass would do.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

Murphy laughed. “I just think if you had to go off and kill Mark, you should have been smart about it. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“I’ll get—”

“Brake now.”

I stomped the brakes too hard and the truck skidded to a stop. Outside, I couldn’t see a thing.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Leave the lights off.” He pushed his pistol into my hand. “You can’t shoot for shit, so not being able to see anything isn’t going to make you any worse.” He laughed.

“It really isn’t that funny.” I laughed anyway. Hey, it was a little bit funny.

“You sit tight in the truck,” he told me. “I’ll go light the fire inside by myself.”

“I should—”

“You can’t see shit,” he said. “You’ll only slow me down.”

I turned the truck’s headlights on. They illuminated an old farmhouse. “We need to keep them coming this way. Turning the lights on helps us more than it hurts us.”

Shaking his head and letting himself out, Murphy said, “Unless a family of hungry golf ball heads still lives here. Now they’re awake and coming to have us for dinner.”

I opened my door and got out, leaving the truck idling. “You’ll get bored if all the houses we burn tonight don’t have any infected in them.”

Murphy didn’t hear me. He was running up to the front of the house. With my machete in one hand and the pistol in the other, I ran after him. Murphy stopped on the porch, took a look around at the barn, the sheds, and the nearby fields.

“Are the headlights interfering with your night vision goggles?”

“It’d be better if they were out,” he groused and turned to kick a frayed sofa sitting against the wall at the back of the wide porch. “Push that thing over to the front door.”

My mouth opened to protest the unfairness of it. It was an automatic response, but I kept quiet as Murphy charged the front door and broke it off its hinges.

Into the dark house, he shouted, “Hey, cue ball!”

I tucked the pistol into my waistband and shoved the couch. The legs screeched across the porch. I stopped when the far end of the couch reached the front door.

Murphy pointed away from the porch. “Angle it out there, we’re gonna shove it halfway through.”

Ah. I understood Murphy’s intent. I swung my end of the couch around, stepping off the porch to get the couch aligned.

Murphy got out a lighter and touched the flame to the old cloth. It caught instantly. He lit a few more places. “Push.”

I rammed the couch forward a few feet. Murphy stopped me with a raised hand and lit the center section of the couch. I pushed it until only about a foot was sticking out through the front door. Murphy lit that and said, “Let’s go.”

I stepped back. The flames on the far end of the couch were already four feet high and glowing through flimsy curtains inside the front windows.

“It’ll go up in a hurry.” Murphy ran past me, heading for the truck.

I waited and watched. The fire needed to take hold inside before we left. There could be no broken link in our chain of destruction.

Screams in the darkness sounded. Whites were in the area, maybe five or six.

“C’mon,” Murphy called.

I listened. Most Whites were still fairly distant, but thousands were out there, coming this way. I could only hope it would be tens of thousands, and I could only pray it was the whole naked horde.

The curtains behind the window burst into flames. Smoke flowed out through the front door.

“Dammit, Zed. Let’s go.”

I ran toward the pickup.

Chapter 52

Not everything we torched caught fire enough or burned brightly enough to be an effective beacon for the naked horde. But we were burning so many houses, barns, trailers, and abandoned cars along the way that they formed a chain of fires stretching for miles and miles behind us. All along the way, the Whites followed.

Things were working out exactly as I hoped.

We were having a good night.

We’d crossed I-35 by surprise, not having had time along the way to gauge our pyro-manic progress. A giant green highway sign told me we were just south of Belton. We’d stayed on course. That wasn’t luck, but it felt that way. We had managed to lead our mass of followers—what I suspected was indeed the whole naked horde—through the relatively undeveloped gap between Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir and the southern edge of Belton.

We drew them onto Highway 190, a five-hundred foot wide right-of-way, ribboned in strips of asphalt and grass, all leading the mind—even the simple White mind—to follow rather than cross. I knew then we’d make it the last few miles to Fort Hood because 190 ran right past the front gate.

Murphy and I had just torched a dozen cars that had been abandoned while in line at a gas station along the highway access road.  Murphy was inside the convenience store, looking for charcoal lighter fluid and more disposable lighters. I’d also suggested that we get some paper towels and try to fashion the charcoal lighter fluid containers into Molotov cocktails. They wouldn’t break, but they’d melt and the fluid inside would start a nice fire on whatever they fell upon.

At least, that was the hope.

Either way, the lighter fluid would make our jobs easier as we illuminated a path for the naked horde right up to the Survivor Army’s doorstep. Mayhem would follow.

With the engine on the pickup idling and the headlights shining up the access road for Highway 190, I stood some distance from the truck, but beneath the awnings over the gas pumps. I looked east into the dark and listened as I tried to estimate the distance to the vanguard of the naked horde. I saw black silhouettes pass in front of fires just a few tenths of a mile distant. The horde was close. It was time for me and Murphy to get moving.

As I took my first step back toward the pickup, I heard something different in the screaming noise. I leaned into the darkness and listened. The number of howling voices and the rumble of feet ensured that all or most of the horde was on its way.

That hadn’t changed.

In the rumble of all those tens of thousands of feet was a heavy beating sound, deeper and steadier than anything I’d heard.

The sound grew loud, quickly.

Helicopter!

The Survivor Army had sent out a scout.

I turned to look, to locate it in the sky as I ducked behind a gas pump. Unfortunately, with an awning large enough to keep a dozen cars out of the rain while they filled up, I was unable to see anything above me.

One thing I knew for sure, with the fires from all those cars we’d just ignited getting larger by the minute and with the headlights of the pickup making it a target for the helicopter, I was suddenly in danger.

Dammit.

The possibility of the Survivor Army’s sending a helicopter out to scout the fires coming in their direction wasn’t something I’d considered. I bopped myself in the forehead with my palm. It was an obvious thing for the Survivor Army to do. I should have anticipated it.

Suddenly thinking the pump I was hiding behind might still have some stagnating gasoline within, I realized if the helicopter pilot decided for whatever reason to start shooting, I’d chosen a very bad place to hide. I ran for the convenience store entrance.

When I was halfway across the parking lot, Murphy leaned out through a broken window and waved me away. “Go hide behind the dumpster.”

I ran to my right, hearing the helicopter above, but still not seeing it. I rounded the corner of the convenience store, glancing back at the highway overpass and seeing shapes coming in the light of the car fires. The horde was here.

Shit.

It was time to run like a motherfucker again.

Nevertheless, I stopped, turned and ran back to the front of the convenience store, just as a stream of tracers ripped through the sky and the buzz of a rapidly firing machine gun sawed through all other sounds. The pickup erupted in sparks and animated shreds of flying metal. Then it exploded.

I dropped to the ground and covered my head, though the heat from the blast was already rolling over me. What glass on the front of the convenience store wasn’t already broken shattered under the shock. The pillars of flame standing above each of the burning cars all curved away from the blast.

“Get around the corner!” Murphy yelled at me. “Get the wall between you and the helicopter!”

I looked up to the point in the sky from which the tracers were spewing. They stopped coming, but I saw the glow of the fires on the helicopter’s skin. It hovered a wide arc around my pickup’s burning carcass, as though checking to make sure the rattly beast was indeed dead.

That kind of pissed me off.

Well, maybe it totally pissed me off.

I drew Murphy’s pistol from my waistband, knowing I didn’t have the range or the accuracy to harm the dimwitted bastards in that helicopter.

I looked around behind me instead. I needed to keep my head in the game. I shouted through one of the convenience store windows, “Murphy, the Whites are almost here. We need to get the fuck outta here.”

The helicopter floated out over the road, away from where Murphy was hidden and I was standing in plain sight. It descended.

I shouted, “I think they’re looking for our bodies by the truck. They want to make sure we’re dead.” It was a wild-ass guess.

Whites ran past the flaming cars and the convenience store. The helicopter had stolen their attention, though it was still a good thirty feet off the ground and way out of their reach.

The helicopter spun around, angling its nose toward the convenience store, and I got a bad feeling about what was coming next—a rocket or some such shit.

Unfair bastards!

Flashes coming from my right startled me.

Murphy stepped through the broken front door, seemingly intent on firing every round in his weapon.

Metal on the helicopter sparked as Murphy’s rounds found their target.

The helicopter lifted and veered.

“Fuck it!” I raised the pistol and pulled the trigger, sending my shots uselessly at the Black Hawk.

It tilted its bottom toward us. A rush of prop wash blew every loose bit of crap off the parking lot into our faces. The chopper accelerated away as it rose at a shallow angle.

I noticed a pair of tall metal framework towers, the kind that support high-tension power lines. The helicopter was going to fly between them. Against the dark sky, I didn’t see the power lines draped across the gap between, and I figured the lines must have been knocked down in the storms.

The helicopter jerked suddenly at an awkward angle and struggled as if caught in a giant butterfly net. The sound of breaking metal and snapping cable was too loud not to frighten even the Whites into crouching or jumping to the ground.

The Black Hawk spun around again as the tail fractured and bent. The cockpit smashed into one of the towers in a screech of bending metal. The whole helicopter angled toward the ground with the front end stuck in the framework of the tower. The tail rotor blew apart when it hit the ground and the tower groaned, bent, and slowly fell over.

“Holy mother of shit!” I said.

“Pussy!” Murphy shouted. “Those things are armored. The pilot panicked when the bullets hit.”

Thousands of White voices rose as one. They converged on the downed helicopter.

I ran past Murphy. “We need to go.”

Chapter 53

With the Whites all focused on the crashed Black Hawk, Murphy and I made our escape and ran a good way down the road before we slowed. Any further and it would have been too dark for me to see anything, anyway. It was time to torch.

We came across an old school bus that had been shabbily converted into a recreational vehicle. It was off the side of the road, parked halfway in a culvert and leaning precariously. Just like so many houses we’d seen, the door was open, and many of the windows were cracked or broken out. A chair, picture frames, and magazines lay scattered among pots, pans, and dishes, as though a giant had shaken them out of the bus through the open door.

“The things that get their attention when they ransack a house,” I mused.

Murphy leaned in through the front door. “Hey honey, I’m home.”

I readied my machete.

Footsteps banged across the metal floor inside.

Nonsensical grunts.

A White was coming.

“I got it.” I stepped back and raised my blade.

The White stumbled down the stairs and burst out of the door, catching my machete right through the bridge of his nose, dying as he tumbled down the embankment.

“Dammit.” My machete got stuck in the White’s skull as he went past.

Murphy leveled his M4 at the open door.

I scrambled down the sloping concrete and took hold of the handle of my machete, jiggling it fiercely to get it free. Without it, I was defenseless meat on slow feet.

“Anybody else in there?” Murphy asked of the darkness inside.

No other sounds came.

Murphy looked back up the road, worry on his face.

In a crowd of so many Whites, most had no hope of getting within reach of the dead in the helicopter. The infected who couldn't were losing interest in it and needed a new goal.

I had my machete in hand, and I jumped up the steps to put myself beside the driver’s seat. “We need to set this bus on fire.”

Murphy pulled a bottle of lighter fluid out of his bag and tossed it up to me. “We need to get a move on.”

I popped the plastic bottle open and liberally squirted anything that looked flammable. I tossed the bottle back to Murphy and used my lighter to get it all burning.

I jumped down the stairs and stepped quickly away from the bus as the flames glowed brightly through all the windows.

“Shit works,” said Murphy, already hurrying up the road.

I looked back to see how close the horde was and noticed the sky in the east was turning a dull gray. “Damn.”

Murphy looked east. “Time flies.”

We ran. Before we'd made it more than a few hundred yards, Murphy put a hand on my shoulder to slow me down. He cocked his head and looked at the dark western sky.

I listened.

“More helicopters.” He pointed into the darkness.

I nodded. “A couple, you think? I don’t see ‘em.”

“Let’s find some cover.”

I followed Murphy to a billboard standing on a metal post the girth of a small redwood tree, tall enough to be seen for a mile in either direction on the highway.

“Keep the pole between you and the choppers,” he said. “They’ll never see us, even if they have infrared.”

“Infrared?” I asked, “Do they have that?”

“How would I know?”

“You were in the Army.”

“That doesn’t mean I know everything. I rode in ‘em. I didn’t fly ‘em.”

“Do you try to be difficult?” I searched the sky. The helicopters were getting close.

“No,” he answered. “It just happens. Mostly just to you.”

Murphy leaned around the post to look as well.

One of the helicopters flew directly overhead and caught the attention of the horde. It slowed and turned a wide circle in the air above the downed Black Hawk.

The bus we’d just torched had enough flames roiling out of its windows to illuminate thousands and thousands of screaming Whites.

The other helicopter flew by, following the course of the highway east. It didn’t slow when it passed its downed comrade.

No one in either helicopter fired.

“Recon,” Murphy deduced.

“Let’s go set that next fire.”

Murphy put a hand on my arm. “Wait.”

“What?”

He pointed at the helicopter that had been circling. It was coming back toward us.

“Other side of the pole.” Murphy quickly hid himself.

I did too, while keeping an eye on the coming copter. Moments later, it passed overhead, going back toward Fort Hood. The sound of White voices changed and grew distinctly closer.

I pointed at the retreating helicopter. “They’ve done our work for us. The horde is going to chase them all the way to the front gate.”

“It can’t be more than a mile or two now,” said Murphy. “Just up the highway here.”

I heaved a deep breath. “How many miles do you have left in your legs?”

“Won’t matter,” said Murphy. “If these dipshits aren’t bright enough to hide their position from the horde with the first helicopter, the second helicopter will come right back this way, too. You’re right. They’ll do our work for us. We don’t need to burn anything else. All we need to do is get out of their way and let nature take its course.”

“Survival of the fittest.” I had another thought and laughed. “Or death of the stupidest.”

“Don’t get too cocky, dude. They’ve nearly gotten us plenty of times.”

“Can’t argue with that.” I looked at the billboard towering above us, wondering how I could get myself up there before the horde closed in. “We need to find a place to observe from.”

“Observe?” Murphy asked, emphasizing the question in the word.

“You know,” I admitted, “until I spot the Smart Ones. You know what I need to do.”

Shaking his head, Murphy jogged away, not down the highway, but away from it. “If you were a Smart One, you'd let the dipshits kill each other and you'd stay out of it."

“It won’t work that way,” I told him as I matched his pace. “The Smart Ones will keep themselves out of harm’s way.”

“Sounds like Null Spot rationalizations to me.”

Chapter 54

Even though we were running away from the main body of the horde moving up the highway, the sound of their screaming was everywhere. If I hadn’t known where they were, I wouldn’t have been able to guess.

As the sky turned brighter with the coming of morning, I saw everything around us and realized that we'd run our way into a semi-rural area with lots of houses and long rows of fences. But I couldn't see anything of the horde or the helicopters.

“It’s too flat here,” I said as I slowed and stopped.

Murphy stopped and turned to look at me.

I told him, “We can’t see anything.”

“We’ll find a spot. A building or something to get on top of.”

I looked east to where the helicopter had gone, but not yet returned.

"It hasn't been that long," said Murphy. "It'll come back.”

“I’ve put too much into this to take a chance.”

Murphy heaved a sigh.

I laid my machete on the ground, took off my jacket, and pulled my shirt over my head. “It’s time for Null Spot to do his work.” I expected a laugh out of Murphy.

“It’s dumbass time.” He wasn’t amused.

“Give me a quart of lighter fluid—a full one—and a lighter. A couple of lighters,” I told him. “I’ll get out in front of the horde and keep burning things, if I have to. If not, I’ll infiltrate and hunt for the Smart Ones.”

Murphy reluctantly took a quart out of his bag.

I finished undressing. “That silvery stadium thing that looks like a tiny Astrodome—”

“The Bell County Expo Center,” Murphy confirmed.

I nodded my head north. “It’s up that way a couple of miles. Just off the highway.”

“I know where it is.”

“Go there.”

“What am I supposed to do there?” Murphy frowned and added, “Boss.”

“Don’t be a bitch.” I put my boots back on. “Things are going to get chaotic pretty quick, here. If the naked horde finds you, they’ll kill you, unless you want to strip down and come with me.”

Murphy shook his head. “Going without clothes and a gun is for Null Spot dumbasses. Not me.”

“You said you were behind me on this.”

“I figured you’d come to your senses by now.”

I forced a harsh laugh. “We’ve been through too much shit together for you to believe that.” I tucked two lighters into my boot beside my extra knife. “This thing with the naked horde and the Survivor Army is going down today, right now. By tonight, it’ll be over, one way or the other. Find a place on the roof of the Expo Center. You’ll be able to see everything you need to see from up there. You still got those binoculars, right? You didn’t leave them in the truck, did you?”

“Got ‘em.”

“I’ll come to the Expo Center when it’s over.”

Murphy didn’t respond.

“If you keep an eye out, you’ll find the Smart Ones. Just keep looking. They’ll be near the center of the horde, out of danger. If you don’t see them, just scan around until you see a White running in the wrong direction. That’ll be a messenger. Follow the runners. They’ll lead you back to the Smart Ones. If you see the Smart Ones, you’ll see me. I’ll be nearby.”

Murphy sighed.

“You know I need to do this.”

“You tell yourself that.”

“Doesn’t matter why, I need to. I need to.” The reasons I felt like I needed to boiled up from repressed feelings to rage. Too many people I cared about were dead because of these naked white fuckers.”

“I’m not going to try and talk you out of this anymore.” Murphy looked away from me, apparently scouting out which direction he was going to go. “I’ll keep an eye on you from a distance, and—”

“No,” I told him. “You can’t follow and snipe anymore. That worked out in the country, because they stayed together and there were plenty of hills for you to use as a vantage point." I waved at the houses around us. "It’s only going to get worse the closer we get to Fort Hood. The risk is too great. The Whites will find you and kill you."

Murphy shook his head.

“You know I’m right. Let me do what I need to do without worrying about you. I’ll see you when it’s over.” I turned and walked away. It was time to do what only I could get close enough to do.

Chapter 55

Following the sound of frenzied howling, I found myself behind a big box store. I made my way around it and crossed the parking lot, being careful to use the abandoned cars for cover, when I heard a helicopter come close. When I came to the tall store sign at the end of the parking lot, I climbed up on its footing, a three-foot concrete cube, to get a view across the highway.

A river of Whites flowed five hundred feet wide, shoulder to shoulder, back to chest, running and angry. They covered the highway lanes, the shoulders, the medians, and the access roads, solid as far as I could see from east to west. Their numbers had to exceed a hundred thousand. Hell, there might have been twice that many.

No wonder they destroyed everything they came across.

Half a dozen helicopters were in the air, some hovering over the highway up ahead. Others were flying around in no particular pattern, perhaps trying to measure the size of the threat coming their way.

I scanned across the horde, looking for Whites moving in the wrong direction. As I told Murphy, those would be the messengers carrying instructions from the leadership out to their subordinates in the front or on the flanks.

Far ahead, probably from Fort Hood itself, another five helicopters rose into the air.

Things were getting ready to happen. I had the urge to jump off my vantage point and run with the horde, thinking that from within, I might better be able to see what was hidden from me at the moment.

A line of Whites peeled away from the main horde, right in front of me. All behind one leader, snaking as it went, the line grew quickly past a hundred, then two hundred strong. All along the flanks of the horde, more lines peeled off, a thousand strong, two thousand strong. All still going in the general direction of Fort Hood, but spreading out.

The Smart Ones saw the helicopters overhead just as easily as I did. They knew what those Black Hawks represented. They knew bloodshed was coming. They were moving their forces into formations to surround and overwhelm.

I spotted several Whites beneath an overpass, not running, but hugging the concrete poles and looking around, doing much the same thing I was doing.

Shit.

Those were the messengers. They weren’t running, they were waiting for the horde to come to them and watching for the recipients among the mass. That meant the Smart Ones had to be somewhere up ahead.

I jumped down from the sign’s concrete base and ran with the flow of the horde, but that flow was losing its distinction. The single file lines of Whites that had been peeling away were growing into tentacles of the infected, running four, five, and six abreast.

I stayed on the fringes as I proceeded, keeping off the highway and running through fast-food restaurant parking lots, around muffler shops, and past business parks.

I came to the crest of a rise, hoping that I’d get a clear view of the horde, a good part of Killeen, and maybe even some of the Fort Hood buildings in the distance. A Red Lobster restaurant stood on the corner, and I crossed the parking lot and jogged around back. Access to the roof via a ladder for servicing the air conditioners and vent hoods would be located there.

Indeed, it was, and with no security device on the ladder to prevent unauthorized access.

I tossed my bottle of lighter fluid up on the roof and then climbed in a hurry. Thankfully, the mansard style of the roof gave me what was effectively a wall to stand behind and look out. I glanced east and saw the horde still flowing up the highway toward me, though thinning in the far distance.

Nearly a dozen helicopters were still flying in no specific direction, maintaining an altitude that would leave the Whites below in range of their weaponry.

In front of the horde's leading Whites, I saw Humvees, a couple of tanks, and armored fighting vehicles. They didn't seem to be organized in any way I could discern, except that they formed a ragged line of about thirty vehicles across the highway and spread out a good distance on both sides.

A muzzle flashed from the machine gun mounted on the roof of a Humvee near the center of the line. More muzzles flashed along the line and the sound of several dozen machine guns hit me, along with the screams of hundreds of Whites, suddenly shrill with pain.

The helicopters spat fire down in any direction where Whites charged forward, which was every direction.

A war cry from the horde swelled so loudly for a moment that it drowned out the sound from all the guns.

Explosions burst in the main body of the Whites, but it didn't slow the mass down. The horde absorbed the explosions and the bullets and kept on at full speed toward the vehicles.

A couple of Humvees retreated from the line, got several hundred yards away from where they’d left their comrades to fight, and were ambushed by a line of Whites pouring out of a side street. In seconds, the Humvees were hidden under mounds of writhing white bodies, fighting for a way to get inside. Both Humvees stopped moving.

I crouched behind the mansard. The firepower and destruction were awesome and frightening.

A tank accelerated forward into the horde, the commander perhaps thinking that running the Whites over might be a more effective way to slaughter them. Another tank moved in.

Some of the other vehicles moved—some closer together, some in retreat. The naked horde had them surrounded, but had to be taking massive losses, with all the bullets flying at such close range. From where I stood, it was hard to see the dead and wounded, since they were immediately run over by the ones charging forward from behind.

I looked for a pocket of control in all the chaos. Somewhere out there, the Smart Ones had to be passing out orders and listening to whispered messages.

Chapter 56

Thirty minutes or an hour into the battle, I started to question my choice to tell Murphy to go to the Expo Center, as I realized my perch on the roof of the Red Lobster was exactly what we’d wanted to find. Then I recalled what I’d gone through to get here. I’d been surrounded by naked Whites nearly the whole time after separating from Murphy. They’d have killed him.

Sending him away was the best thing.

It wasn’t clear yet which way the battle was going to go. It wasn’t quite winding down, but the intensity was diminishing. Maybe half the helicopters had disengaged one at a time and flown back to Fort Hood. I assumed they’d run out of ammunition and had gone to resupply or refuel. The fact that none had yet returned left other possibilities on the table. They might have seen the fight as lost and fled while they still had sufficient ammunition and fuel to get away. The other possibility was that some of those Whites who’d peeled off from the main horde had run onto the base. The Smart Ones had to know Fort Hood lay up the road. They had probably deduced where the copters and armored vehicles had come from. Whites may have been waiting to ambush the helicopters when they landed for resupply.

Without the helicopters, it looked to me like it would be very hard for any in the Survivor Army to live through the day.

The two tanks that had brutishly plowed into the horde had indeed left carnage in their wake. But they’d been completely swarmed by Whites, such that the tanks became invisible under the layers. Their drivers were probably blind, as well. One of them ran into a concrete drainage ditch with vertical sides, and got stuck. Another drove through the wall of a welding supply store. Shortly after, a huge explosion blew the roof off the building and took out one of the helicopters that had the misfortune to be flying nearby. It had been burning and exploding ever since.

At least a third of the Humvees were out of action. Some were gone, though it was clear that they were fighting a running engagement through the streets, using their mobility to their advantage.

As for the horde, naked bodies were everywhere, in many places, forming a carpet so thick that I couldn’t see the color of the ground around them.

I grew anxious as I realized that the battle might fizzle out in the next hour or so. I’d scanned over the horde so many times that I started to doubt that the Smart Ones were there at all. I wondered if they’d taken cover in one of the buildings in the area and how I’d figure out which one, because as much as I tried to see messengers running across the current of the moving horde, that became impossible. Minutes after the gunfire started, it seemed every White was moving in a different direction, although the mass of them still flowed toward the guns.

The more I thought about the idea of cover, the more it made sense. I’d been looking for the Smart Ones out in the open, but I wasn’t out in the open. At least, not out in the killing zone. Why? Because I wasn’t stupid. It was too easy to die out there with all those bullets flying. That meant the Smart Ones wouldn’t be out there, either.

I strained my eyes as I looked from building to building for any Whites behaving unusually.

I’d taken a hard look at four or five when I noticed a large culvert running beneath the highway—actually a series of four culverts, one under each access road, one beneath each set of highway lanes. In the flat creek bed on both sides of one of the culverts, dozens of Whites stood, all looking into the pipe.

They weren’t looking at the battle around them. They didn’t look up at the helicopters when they flew over. They didn’t crouch when something exploded nearby. They were waiting in line.

As I watched, one after another ran out from under the road in an unexplained direction. Other Whites ran down into the ditch and into the culvert.

I’ve got you fuckers now.

All I needed was a plan. Short that, I had my machete, my knife, and enough confidence that I knew I could stroll right into that culvert and do some real damage before I fought my way out or they all ran away like a bunch of pussies.

At least, that’s how it all looked when I pictured it in my imagination.

Chapter 57

Plenty of Whites were still running up Highway 190 toward the battle. They were the slowest of the horde, spread out thinly for miles. Lucky for them, I thought. They’d miss most of the chances to be killed by the time they joined the battle. The good thing for me about running with them was that the helicopter pilots were largely ignoring the highway, as the density of the horde there was thinnest relative to most everywhere else.

As I crossed the distance to the culvert, my excitement subsided a bit and I had time to think. Most importantly, I had time to realize that my Rambo plan, that of running into the culvert with blades flying, was doomed to failure. It was a plan born of impatience and a need for vengeance, built on an intuition for slaughter learned from watching action movies.

I’d realized a long time ago how useless that intuition was. I just needed the presence of mind not to listen to it when it prompted me into something extra stupid.

I chose not to listen.

Instead, I calmed myself, thought about my goal, and considered—given my limited resources—the best way to achieve it.

Given the variables, it wasn’t a difficult problem to solve.

When I neared the culvert, I stopped running and dropped down to a knee beside the guardrail. It had to be there to keep inattentive drivers from running off the shoulder and crashing into the creek next to the road.

I caught my breath, unscrewed the cap on my quart of lighter fluid and broke the foil seal on the bottle. I put the cap back on and then tested one of the lighters, just to make sure. I’d had too many little things go wrong too many times to have my plan fail on account of a malfunctioning disposable lighter.

Out of habit, I took a look around. The battle still raged. Naked Whites were dying by the thousands against a well-armed army of dipshits. But the dipshits were losing, they just didn’t know it.

I got up and jogged along the guardrail until I was over the culvert. I leaned over. Just below me, where the concrete walls had been poured to funnel floodwaters into the big pipe beneath the highway, at least thirty Whites were standing, patiently waiting to be told what to do. Those messengers could speak, at least in a rudimentary fashion. Some of them were probably even of normal human intelligence. Either way, the mix was good for my purposes.

I reached out with my lighter fluid and squirted it, squeezing hard to empty the bottle as quickly as possible, trying hard to get at least some on every one of the Whites waiting below.

A few protested with grunts and dirty looks. Some wiped at their faces and eyes. Most shuffled around as the lighter fluid rained down. The Whites on the right-hand side got the biggest dose.

As soon as the bottle emptied, I bounded a few quick steps and leapt over the guardrail onto the sloping ground beside the road. My boots skidded down the slope as I kept my balance and made a turn into the gaping concrete mouth of the culvert.

Most of the messenger Whites were looking at me by then, I suppose wondering what craziness I was up to. The ones I’d doused with the biggest dose of lighter fluid were closest to where I came to a stop.

I wasted no time. I rushed them, keeping a tight grip on my machete, holding it in front of me to keep their bodies from touching mine. I flicked my lighter to get a flame. In the confusion, the first White didn’t notice the lighter come close to her skin. Too bad.

The fluid on her shoulder caught fire, and the flame spread instantly around her neck, over her face, and onto her bald head. She screamed as any animal would, no matter how stupid. Fear of the flame is burned deep into the instincts.

She turned, waving her arms, trying to flee, spreading the flames to those beside her.

I jumped back a step and started to swing my machete.

Whites pushed back and tried to run away from me. They’d all been in the horde long enough to know that when a blade came out, the White on the business end of it turned into supper. They’d learned to fear the blade.

The flames spread across the whole bunch of them as they panicked, screamed, and pushed for all they were worth into the culvert.

They stampeded into the Smart Ones inside.

I dropped my lighter, quickly pulled my knife out of my boot, and followed, hearing nothing but agonizing fear echoing out of the big metal pipe.

Whites were falling and scrambling forward on hands and knees. Some went down and stayed there, injured by trampling feet.

As I ran by, I slashed at any who weren’t on fire, taking an extra swipe at ones who resisted. Those, I guessed, were the Smart Ones.

When I was halfway through the pipe, I came to a White nursing a wrist as he got up on his knees, looking at me with the clearest blue eyes and the most intense stare.

I’d seen that fucker before.

He was the one who’d set himself up on that makeshift throne all those months ago in Sarah Mansfield’s living room—King Monkey Fucker. He was the leader.

I raised my machete.

“Don’t,” he said, “I’m not like them.”

Exactly!

I swung down as he raised his good hand to block. My blade cut his hand in half and sank into his skull.

I wrenched the machete out as he fell over, twitching and gulping.

I yelled into the darkness, “Mark!”

At the other end of the culvert, out in the daylight, I saw a silhouetted figure on its hands and knees look up.

I ran, feeling a rush of joy so profound I nearly cried. But that shifted to rage in a rush of blame I’d attached to him for the pain of all my losses.

When I came into the light, Mark was looking up at me, confusion on his face.

I kicked him in the face and he fell over backward.

All around us, injured and dazed Whites were on the ground crawling away or just laying there. Plenty were still on fire and running while they screamed.

I put a boot on Mark’s chest and put the blade of my machete to his throat. “You remember me?”

He laughed and sputtered blood through his teeth. He shook his head.

“Speak, fucker.”

Mark looked cautiously left and right. He had his habits, too.

“You recognize me?” I asked again.

“No.”

“I’m Zed Zane. I saved your dumb ass back at the dorm on campus.”

Mark laughed again. Blood flowed out of his mouth, courtesy of the boot I’d planted there. He said, “You didn’t save me. I’m a god. We’re all gods. This is our world now.”

“Gods?” I asked. “Gods don’t bleed.”

“And they don’t die, either.” Mark laughed again, as though the joke were on me.

I swung my blade down to prove him wrong, but he moved his head and grabbed my ankle. The end of my blade ripped through his face, cutting a long slash all the way down through his sinus cavity. His grip on my ankle relaxed. Mark’s mouth opened and closed a few times, and his eyes blinked.

I raised my machete and cut straight down, burying it through the center of his head.

He didn’t move after that.

Habit took over, and I looked around, right, left, and behind, not taking any time to revel in the feeling. No White was paying any particular attention to me.

Machine gun fire was still everywhere. Helicopters still flew over and strafed. Whites still screamed.

It was time for me to go.

I ran.

Chapter 58

It was late in the day, and I was tired as hell.

After spending the day sneaking and running through Killeen, Harker Heights, and part of Belton, I came out of the trees on the backside of the Expo Center. In front of me was a fairly small, fenced parking lot, probably reserved for exhibitors and what not. An easy deduction, since a giant rolling steel door on the back of the building opened onto the parking lot.

I climbed the fence, being extra careful to keep my man parts off the barbed wire loops at the top. I crossed the parking lot and walked in through the open door.

“Hey.”

It startled me at first, but I calmed instantly. “Hey, Murphy.”

“I see you made it.”

“Did you find a way to get up top?” I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "I've been up there all day. I saw you coming across those fields over that way, so I came down to meet you."

“Thanks.” I smiled.

“You got him?”

I nodded.

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Murphy dug into his pocket and came up with the scratch-off ticket he’d taken from the convenience store. “You won.”

“How much?”

“Does it matter?”

I shook my head. “You didn’t happen to pick up my clothes after I left you this morning, did you?”

Murphy shook his head again. “There's a custodian's locker room or something like that.” He pointed to the other side of the arena. “I think you might be able to find something there.”

“Good.” I walked onto the arena floor. Murphy came along.

“You really did kill him?”

I nodded again.

“How did he go?”

“Badly,” I said. “Very badly. For him, anyway.”

“Good.” Murphy heaved a dramatic sigh. “So we got that out of our system?”

I nodded.

“What next then?”

“You still wanna go to College Station?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

Slow Burn Book 9, ‘Sanctum’

Chapter 1

“I’m tellin’ you man, they just disappeared.” Murphy lowered his binoculars and waved a hand toward the horizon.  “See?”

“Poof.” I pantomimed a little explosion between my hands.  “Like David Copperfield disappeared?”

Murphy handed me the binoculars.  “Don’t be a dick.  Look for yourself.”

From our vantage on the roof of the Bell County Expo Center, I looked west over brown winter fields dotted with bare trees and resilient green cedars.  A four-lane highway strewn with abandoned cars and trucks ran directly west through a grid of lifeless neighborhoods and business districts.  Only a smattering of naked Whites moved among them.  I followed the line of the highway between Stillhouse Hollow and Lake Belton, past Harker Heights and Killeen, and spotted where the battle between the naked horde and the Survivor Army had mostly taken place.

What had been an expansive tract of largely undeveloped land in the suburban sprawl had been transformed from a grassy boredom between the suburbs into a killing field carpeted in white-skinned corpses—bruised, bloodied, broken.  Hundreds of cannibal Whites gorged themselves on the carrion.  Dogs, coyotes, and swarms of blackbirds feasted.  Invisible because of the distance, countless rats were devouring what the others left behind.  Feral pigs had come for a share and would eat even the bones.

Only there weren’t enough pigs to eat them all.  The bones of the Whites—twenty, thirty thousand or more—would be cleansed by maggots and fire ants and would dry out through the winter.  They’d bleach white in next year’s hot summer.  Then they’d lay in the soil for a millennium or two when an archeologist, or maybe a housing developer might dig them up.

What would those people think happened here? Would they be horrified at the scale of the slaughter? Would they be indifferent? Would everyone in that future know that in the soil beneath their feet, a few thousand years down, lay the remains of seven billion homo sapiens, over a trillion bones?

A trillion bones?

So many dead.

Countless miles of crumbled asphalt.  Billions of collapsed houses.  Cars turned to rust.  Plates.  Forks.  Plastic molded to every conceivable shape, but to every inconceivable purpose from the perspective of our eventual descendants.

Would those people know the virus was our downfall? Or would our propensity to violence run deep in their blood, too?

Would they find the remains of a tank’s composite armor, resisting nature’s deteriorating grind? Would they deduce the circumstances of its demise—the building burned to the ground around it, the black stain among the white corpses?

Would they find the mummified bodies of men trapped in their vehicles by the crush of a thousand Whites trying to get them from the outside? Did those men in their armored tombs suffocate? Would our descendants find the overturned Humvees? Would they find some crashed into houses or mashed around a concrete pillar under a highway bridge?

How many hundreds of thousands of lead bullets would our descendants discover among the shattered bones?

Would the people digging through the dust a few thousand years from now simply think we hated one another so much that we couldn’t help but destroy all we’d built for the pleasure of indulging a genocidal mania?

All that death put too many dark thoughts in my head.  I said, “I don’t know.”

“Then take my word for it,” Murphy told me, “because I do know.”

“You’re confident.”

“If you were me, you’d be confident too.”

"Oh, right, Mighty Murphy.” I panned across miles and miles of brown grass and dull-colored homes of the dead.  "I don't know.  Maybe they're just spread out in the suburbs.  Maybe they're taking naps or moving into the houses.  Hell, maybe they all took up residence in that big Walmart down the highway."

Murphy looked west.  “They won’t all fit in there.”

“Yeah, I know.”  I lowered the binoculars and passed them back to Murphy.  “What are you thinking?”

“Don’t ask like that.”

I looked at Murphy.  “Like what?”

“Like somebody pissed in your Cheerios.”

I turned away from Murphy and leaned on the wall.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re in one of those moods again.”

"I'm not in a mood.”  It was a response born of habit.  In fact, I didn't know if I was in a mood or not.  I didn't feel like I was anything at the moment.  I was in some weird, post-climax void.

“We need to get out of this damn building.”  Murphy put on one of his big smiles.  “Being cooped up here isn’t doing you any good.”

I shook my head.  It wasn't that.  We'd been trapped in places plenty of times.

“You need to get chased by a hungry cue ball.  That would wake your ass back up.”

I shrugged.  Maybe he was right.  Something was off.  Over the days we'd been hiding in the Expo Center, my mood had been slowly sliding, and it didn't make any sense.  Fucking Mark was dead.  King Monkey Fucker got what he deserved.  I torched his skin and split his skull with my machete.  The Survivor Army was all but destroyed, and the naked horde was falling apart, peeling off in bands and heading in all directions.  Null Spot the Destroyer and the Mighty Murphy had made the world a better place.

I looked again at the subdivisions fading across the grasslands and hills into sprawling grids of roads lined with convenience stores and chain restaurants where nothing with a human soul lived anymore.

What was truly better about the world?

Had Null Spot the Fucker Upper done anything to be proud of?

Murphy said, “You’re breathing that funny way you do when you’re stewing about something.”

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about.  Like a little white troll, snorting and huffing.”

I shook my head.  “Whatever.”

“You can’t hide in your troll hole forever?” Murphy grinned.  He loved his sense of humor.  “Spill it.”

I leaned on my elbows, fidgeted with my fingers, and watched the tiny stick figures of Whites among the nearby houses and tiny specks of grayish-white moving in the distance.  I didn’t feel like I needed to say anything until I’d sorted out what was bothering me.

“I told you,” said Murphy.

Told me? I looked at him.  “Told me what?”

“Revenge ain’t all that.”

A Murphy Smalls motivational speech.  I grimaced and grabbed the binoculars back from Murphy.  Maybe if I looked long enough at the Whites loitering around Killeen, it would be as obvious to me as it was to Murphy that most of them were gone.

He said, “Killing Mark didn’t fix anything, did it?”

I ignored the question.

Murphy nudged me.  “Answer me, man.”

Ignoring Murphy never worked.  I said, "Yes, it did.”  Of course it did.  It didn't undo any of the evil that had been done.  The killing didn't bring Steph, or Mandi, or Amber back to life.  At least, a measure of justice had been served.  I just didn't have any idea of what justice was outside of a lofty aspiration from a dead world crumbling to waste.  Was justice now anything but revenge? Yes! It had to be something more.  "At least, he won't kill anybody else."

Murphy turned serious.  "That's one of the things I told myself about those thugs behind the convenience store that time we talked about."

“It was true wasn’t it?” I argued.  “It wasn’t just something you told yourself.  It was true.  Those punks would have gone on to hurt other people.”

“True.”  Murphy leaned on the wall.  “But you know as well as I do, when you chased these naked dipshits halfway across the state you weren’t on a mission to do anything like that.  You were bent on killing.  All that saving-somebody-somewhere-in-the-future stuff is just bullshit icing on your revenge cake.”

“My revenge cake?” I laughed.  “Is that like a metaphor or something?”

“Yes.”  Murphy straightened up and proudly looked to the horizon.  “Zed Zane’s revenge cupcake.  Hell, you got about a dozen of them, right, when you torched those Whites with the lighter fluid and ran them through that drainage tunnel?”

I nodded and smiled.  Whatever demon lived in my soul, he'd loved it.  The bit of justice had been gruesome and brutal.  Nothing about killing those Smart Ones that day felt immoral.  Nothing in the act felt wrong.  It felt satisfying and victorious, but none of the gruesome good lasted.  It morphed into an emptiness in my heart that made no sense to me.  "I don't think it's that."

“What?” asked Murphy.  “You lost me.”

"It's not the revenge thing.  The killing needed to be done.  It's that simple.  It's in the past now.  A prerequisite for my future."

“Uh oh,” said Murphy.  “I know overthinking when I hear it.”

“I just need something to do.  I need a purpose.”

“You need to get laid.”

“Are you offering?”

Murphy leaned an elbow on the waist-high wall around the edge of the roof and looked at me.  “You’re deflecting.  You never want to give me a straight answer to anything.”

“That’s not true.”

Murphy laughed.  “You just did it.”

I shook my head and thought more about it as I futilely tried to focus on counting Whites out on the streets I could see.  “I miss Steph.”  I had no idea why that came to the surface.  It found its own way out.

Murphy let that lie for a bit before he stood up straight and announced, “Here’s what I’m thinking.  Tonight, we head out, search the convenience stores in the area and find some batteries for the night vision goggles.  There aren’t that many Whites in the neighborhoods nearby so we shouldn’t run into any trouble.”

“You mean no more than usual?” I asked.

“Yeah, of course.  Then with the goggles, we’ve got the nighttime advantage again.  We head over to the base, get what we need, and get out of Dodge.”

“Get what we need?” I asked.

"You've got a knife, a machete, and some janitor guy’s coveralls with shoes that don't fit.  I'm low on ammo, and I'd like to load up with grenades and maybe some other good stuff.  If you're still thinking we need to head to College Station—hell, even if you're not—one of those Humvees down there would come in handy loaded up with food, if we can find any, and things that go boom."

I turned away from the wall and started walking across the Expo Center's big flat roof.  Why stay and sulk? I needed to be moving.  "Sounds like a plan to me."

Chapter 2

"Westcliff Road.”  Murphy pointed at a street sign.  "That's how you know we're on the right track."

I glanced at the sign, but mostly I watched the darkness for Whites.  I heard them around us but couldn't tell if they were blocks away or behind the next house.  "Westcliff?"

“My mother’s maiden name.”

“I hope you’re not reading portents from the road signs.”

“I’m just saying it’s good luck.”

“Sometimes it’s like we don’t even speak the same language.”

Murphy punched me in the arm.  “That’s what I’ve been saying since August.”

No point in responding.  I sighed instead.

We’d left the Expo Center after dark and found a convenience store with empty shelves.  We spent at least an hour searching through garbage and shit—literal shit—on the floor to find several unopened packages of batteries.  Looters often knocked or dropped inventory on the floor in their hurry to be on their way.  Murphy and me spent the next few hours working our way carefully across Killeen, heading roughly west toward Fort Hood.

We found ourselves finally on a corner of an L-bent street, crouching behind a burned out car on rusty rims in somebody’s yard.  The car was one of many along the roads and in the grass in both directions.  Across the street to our right stood a concrete water tank, old and discolored, part of a pumping station for the local utility.  Nothing but scant moonlight, dark empty fields, and scattered trees lay behind the pumping station.

Across the other street around the corner lay a downed chain link fence that had marked one of the boundaries between Killeen and Fort Hood property.  The barbed wire that topped the fence had been ripped away and spread across a wide field beyond, curling among the bodies of naked Whites, bloody and broken, burnt and shredded.  Scattered among the rotting corpses lay bones of those who had died earlier, gnawed clean and bleaching whiter with each passing day.  The US Army and later the Survivor Army had made the Whites pay a severe price for their attacks.

Past the carnage, spread over the hundreds of yards of killing ground stood dozens of fifty-year-old, utilitarian buildings that were part of Fort Hood.  Behind the widely spaced buildings and parking lots stood what looked like airplane hangars.  I pointed and asked, "What do you make of those?"

“Buildings.”  Murphy answered.  “Is it that dark that you can’t see the buildings? Is it the virus? Are your eyes going bad?”

“Says the guy with the night vision goggles.”

"I didn't leave mine in a badass electric car.  And I didn't give the keys to some chicks we just met.  And I didn't watch them drive away with all your shit.  So I've got my night vision goggles, fresh batteries, and I can see stuff."

“If you want to get all technical about it,” I countered.  “I gave the keys to you.  You gave them to the chicks we just met.”

“It was your dumb ass that decided to run around naked in the middle of the winter.”

I didn't want to argue pointlessly, so I pointed at the dark shape across the field.  "Are those airplane hangars?"

"Looks like it,” said Murphy.  "They don't have airplanes here, though.  Tanks.  Humvees.  MRAPs.  Strykers.  All kinds of support trucks.  And helicopters."

Of course.  “This is where the Survivor Army got their helicopters, I’ll bet.”

“You think?”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

“You think?”

Jesus.  I took one more look around and said, “C’mon.”  I ran across the street, aiming roughly in the direction of the nearest buildings.  Murphy followed.

Chapter 3

We had to take care as we waded among the carcasses.  Plenty of skulls lay ready to turn an ankle when stepped on by anyone expecting flat ground.  Rib bones arched up in the weeds to catch a foot and trip.  The bones of the dead had become obstacles to slow future Whites on the rampage.

We came to a parking lot with the usual assortment of cars, parked between painted stripes, left there by owners who’d never returned.  Others were burned, still more were wrecked.  Most had broken glass.  We took care as we crossed.  Some Whites liked to use cars as places to take shelter at night.

We came to a building bordered by tall bushes, thriving despite an obvious lack of human attention.  I followed as Murphy plowed through the shrubs.  We pressed our backs against a brick wall as Murphy used his enhanced vision to look back the way we’d come to ensure nothing was on our trail.

I slipped along the side of the building behind the bushes, until I came out on a sidewalk to peek through a pair of doors with all the glass broken out.  No surprise, it was darker inside than out.

I stepped back behind the bushes and whispered, “You want to go in and check it out?”

“I doubt there’ll be anything in here we want.”  Murphy stepped around me and looked through the doors.  “Looks like an administration building to me.”

I took a turn to peek inside, and Murphy followed me out of the bushes.  I said, “Looks like the hall runs straight through.  The hangars are on the other side.  We might find something useful over there.”

Murphy shrugged.  “Lead the way if that’s what you want to do.”

I slipped around the corner and crunched through the shattered glass on the ground.  By the time I was five steps inside, I realized the dim moonlight glowing in through the doors at the far end of the long hall had given me the impression the hallway was brighter than it was.

I slowed down, trying to make out shapes on the floor—chairs, papers, computers—anything that had been inside the offices lining both sides of the hall.  Clearly Whites had been in the building, tearing their way through everything that wasn’t attached, looking for food in all the wrong places.

Thankfully, most of the offices had plenty of windows on the exterior walls and some moonlight filtered into the halls through the doors that were open.  I was stepping in front of one such door and leaning forward to look inside when a human shape jumped toward me.  It raised its arms and shouted something unintelligible.  I jumped back, slipped, and fell.

Murphy swung the barrel of his weapon around to fire.

“No, don’t.”  The guy who’d startled me fell back into the office, pleading, “Don’t shoot.  Please.”

Murphy cursed.  “Drop the gun.  Now!”

Metal hit the floor.

I jumped to my feet with my machete raised.

“I’m like you,” said the guy.

Murphy cut a glance at me.  “He’s one of them.”

All I could make out was the silhouette lump of a man sitting on the floor.  “Survivor Army?”

Murphy nodded.

“You’re…”  the guy started, “you’re…”

Murphy huffed.  He was conflicted.  He wanted to kill the guy, but useless, old-world morality was holding him back.

I stepped forward, getting within machete range.

“Please!”  The guy raised a hand to block my blade as he scooted farther into the office.  “Please.  I’m not like the others.”

“The others?” I asked, doubt taking hold, as I thought for a moment that maybe he wasn’t a member of the Survivor Army but a Slow Burn just like me.  It was too dark to tell with unaided vision.  My raised blade didn’t move.

“Crap.”  Murphy’s angry breath was all the sound between us for several long moments.

“Please.”  The guy inched deeper into the office.

“Stop!”  I commanded, as I tried to make out details in the darkness.  I glanced at Murphy.  “Is he armed?”

“Just that gun on the floor by your feet.”  Murphy nudged me to the side with the barrel of his rifle, so that he’d have a clear shot at the guy.  “We can’t leave him here.  We can’t let him go.  It’s too late for that.  He’ll kill us first chance he gets.”

“No, no,” the guy pleaded.  “It’s not like that.  I’m not like those guys.”

“The Survivor Army?” I spat.

“No.”  He sounded ready to cry.  “I just fly.  That’s it.  I don’t do—”

Into the truncated phrase, I asked, “Do what?”

“My name’s Martin.  I’m just a pilot.”  The guy turned away.

“A helicopter pilot?” I asked.

“Yeah.”  He scooted a little farther from my raised machete.  “What else?”

Murphy said, “He’s too old and fat to be a helicopter pilot.”

“I’m retired,” he pleaded.  “They made me fly.”

“And where are they now?” I asked.

“I’m alone,” he said.

“You know he’s lying,” said Murphy.  “Wouldn’t you if you were him? Don’t listen to him.  I think we should shoot him and just get out of here.”

I asked the guy on the floor, “Why aren’t you dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everybody else is dead.  Why not you? Why are you in this building in the middle of the night with an empty gun? You should be dead.”

“What makes you think it’s empty?” he asked.

“Because you’d have shot me if it wasn’t.”  Yeah, I’m a pro with the logical deductions.

“I’ve got a place,” he said.

“A place?”

“To hide,” he answered.  “I hid there when it started.  I mean after I turned white.”  He held up his hand to show me his skin but in the dark I couldn’t tell the shade.  He looked in the direction of the center of the base.  “They would have killed me.”

“They?” I asked.  “The soldiers?”

He nodded.  “You don’t know what it was like then?”

Murphy laughed.  “This dude’s an idiot.”

“Show us where you were hiding,” I ordered.

“Okay,” said the guy.

“This is a mistake,” said Murphy.  “This is stupid.  What’s it gonna prove if homie shows us where he’s been hiding?” Murphy huffed.  “Nothing.  Not a damn thing.  That’s if he’s not gonna lead us into an ambush with his little knucklehead Army buddies over there.”

I nudged the guy with my boot.  “Roll over on your belly.”

“Don’t kill me,” the guy pleaded.

“What are you gonna do with him?” Murphy asked.

“On your belly, dude.”  I’m sure I sounded angry.  Murphy’s attitude was affecting my tone.

“Man, listen,” the guy scooted farther away from me.

“Dammit.”  I stepped toward him and brandished my blade.  “If you don’t quit squirming, I swear to God—”

“Okay, okay.”  He lay down and rolled over.  “There’s a helicopter out there, the one I was flying.  I can pilot it.  I can take you anywhere you want to go.”

Chapter 4

“Bullshit.”  Murphy looked up and down the hall and stepped into the office with me and the guy who’d finally complied and rolled over onto his belly.  Murphy closed the door and flipped his night vision goggles up.  He planted his foot between our new prisoner’s shoulder blades and looked at me.  “If you want to be stupid again, okay.  At least, let’s be smart about it, all right?”

I chuckled.  “What does that mean?”

“You want to believe knucklehead boy here, that’s fine, I don’t.  You want to follow him to his non-existent hideout.  You go ahead.  You want to believe he can fly a helicopter, I don’t care.  Just because he’s wearing a raggedy uniform doesn’t mean anything.  You’re wearing a janitor’s uniform, and you’re not a janitor.”

I sighed.  Murphy was right about that.

“I get that you don’t want to kill him, I understand that.  I don’t want to kill him either, but you know how these Survivor Army assholes operate.  Five seconds after we leave him, he’ll find whatever friends he still has alive, and he’ll try to kill us.”

“No I won’t,” said the prisoner.  “I’m alone.  I told you.”

I kicked the prisoner.  Honestly, it was more of an ambivalent nudge with my shoe.  “You shut up.”  I looked at Murphy.  “I don’t know what to do.  I want to believe him because I don’t want to kill him.  I’m tired of feeling guilty about…everybody who’s dead and shouldn’t be.  Even the ones I wasn’t sure about.”

“Like that Smart One, that gymnast chick you killed outside of Sarah Mansfield’s gate that time?”

“Her.”  I nodded.  Murphy was right on the money.  “And others.  One day the world has to get normal again.”

“Man,” said Murphy, “you get a little revenge out of your system, and suddenly you’re an idealist.”

“It’s not like that.  I just don’t want to kill him if we don’t need to.”

“Please,” said the prisoner.  “You don’t have to kill me.”

I kicked him again, just as impotently as the first time.  “You don’t have a say in this.”

“That’s the spirit.”  Murphy’s grinning teeth nearly glowed in the dark.  “Kick him a few more times.  But stop being a sissy bitch about it.”

“Maybe he’s not like them.  He’s not an idiot like that guy we interrogated back in the Capitol annex.”

“I’ll give you that,” Murphy agreed.

I pointed down at the prisoner.  “He seems just like you and me, a Slow Burn.”

“Whatever, man,” said Murphy.  “You decide.  I’ll go along with it.  I just don’t wanna go walking into any traps.  We need to be smart about this.”

“Fine.”  I took a moment and thought it through, then nudged the prisoner with the toe of my boot.  “Tell me exactly where this hiding place is.”  Looking back up at Murphy, I said, “You’ll stay here with him.  I’ll go check it out and see if he’s lying.  Then I’ll come back here, and we’ll decide what to do with him after we know whether or not he’s a liar.”

“Nope.”  Murphy tapped his night vision goggles.  “You stay with your new buddy.  I’ll go check things out.  That’s the only way I’m doing this.  I’m tired of bailing your ass out of the shit you get yourself into.”

“No, you’re not.”

Chapter 5

We moved Martin to a corner office on the building’s third floor that gave me a view through windows in two directions.  Martin—that was his name—sat on the cold tile in the corner beneath the windows with his wrists and ankles bound.  Office network cables were proving to be a ubiquitous and handy commodity.  For my safety, as much as it could be called that with remnants of the naked horde around, I had the sturdy office door shut and locked.  As long as Martin and I stayed relatively quiet, we’d be good until Murphy returned.

“You still see him?” Martin asked.

Looking out the window, I mostly saw dark shapes and darker shadows.  Nothing moved.  I shook my head.

Rather than going directly to the hangars, Murphy had crossed the lawn between our office building and the next one.  He was working his way into a flanking position on any ambushers—potential Martin friends—that might be waiting for us.  Now that he was out of sight, I was worried.

“When did you get it?” Martin asked.

“Get what?”

“The virus.”

My last day of normalcy? I recalled my mom’s spidery corpse on the floor that Sunday morning with crazy-eyed Dan tearing through her innards.  I still felt nothing for her.  I harbored no guilt over killing Dan.  Who says no good can come from hate? “First day.”

Martin looked puzzled.  “You were in Somalia?”

I didn’t want to talk.  I wanted to stare at the darkness, distraction-free, but I answered anyway.  “First day in Austin, near as I can tell.”

“If the world wasn’t so screwed up, you’d be something of a celebrity.”

But here I was talking, responding to this stupid talk of celebrity for doing nothing at all.  “Maybe on Facebook, but who gives a shit, right?”

Martin scooted around to arrange himself in a more comfortable position.  “How’d you come to get it?”

“Missionaries from my parents’ church brought the virus to Austin from Africa near as I can guess.  Parents caught it.  I got it from them.”

“So you were ground zero in Texas,” said Martin.  “You must have been through a lot.”

I looked down at Martin, trying to gauge him.  Things about him hadn’t added up to trust yet.  Far from it.  Still, I was having a hard time hating him.  “We’ve all been through a lot, but you look like you’ve done all right for yourself.”

Martin looked down at his big belly.  “They take care of me because I’m a pilot.

He wasn’t grossly obese, just surprisingly so.  Nobody was fat anymore.  He looked like somebody’s grandpa—round belly, a bald head two sizes too big, white beard hiding a stubby neck.

“You’re pretty old to be a pilot.”

“I told you, I’m retired.  I lived here in Killeen.”

I focused my attention back out the window.  How long had Murphy been gone? Where was he?

“When things got really bad,” said Martin, “they set up a refugee center here at Fort Hood.  That’s how I came to be on the base.”

“And the Survivor Army?” I asked.  “How’d you come to work for them?”

“It’s not as clear-cut as you seem to think.”

I looked at the darkness, missing my night vision goggles.

“When the refugee center collapsed, I found a place to hide.”  Marty nodded in the direction of the hangars.  “That’s when I found the storage room that Murphy is going to check out.  I stayed there for awhile, maybe a month.”

“And the virus?” I asked.  “Your skin is white like mine.”

“While I was hiding out in the storeroom I contracted it.”

“And you recovered.”

Martin raised his bound wrists to display his white hands.  “So it seems.”

“And you were alone? No wife? No kids?”

“Never had any kids.  The wife couldn’t.”  Martin’s face looked a little sad.  “Breast cancer got her seven years ago.”

“So you hid by yourself?” It was an accusation, and I let my tone tell the meaning clearly.

“When the infected overran Fort Hood the first time, things were chaotic.  Everybody was trying to get away to save themselves.  Nobody had time to organize.  You don’t know what it was like.”

I did know how it was like but I said nothing more about it.  I started to feel like I was a bit of an ass.  What if this chubby old man was telling the truth?

“Eventually, the Survivor Army showed up,” said Martin.  “They caught me when I was out scrounging food.  They probably would have killed me, you know, just like you and Murphy were going to, but I told them I could fly the Black Hawks.”

“And it worked,” I accused again, “so you tried it on us.”

“Yes,” Martin admitted, “it did work.  But I really can fly them.  That’s what the Survivor Army had me doing.”  Martin thumped his belly with his bound wrists.  “That’s why they took care of me.  Not too many people left who can fly a Black Hawk.”

“How often did you fly?” I figured I’d let Martin elaborate and then look for holes in his story.  Nobody lies as well as they think they can.

“Every day.”

“To Austin? San Marcos?”

Martin nodded.  “All over the place.”

“So you know a lot about how things are out there.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean you flew to all the Survivor Army bases and stuff, right?”

Martin shook his head.  “There’s just the one base, here.”

“What about Austin?”

“We were trying to set up in Austin,” said Martin, “down at the Capitol mostly.  The judge wanted to be the governor.  I never understood how he figured he wanted that or what good it would do him.  Didn’t matter though.  It didn’t work out.”

“Why?” I knew why.  At least, I knew Murphy and me had a big part in why it didn’t work out.

“Things seemed fine at first,” said Martin.  “We chased a bunch of people off the Capitol grounds.”  Martin shook his head and his lips curled down as though he had something bitter on his tongue.  “A lot of what the judge had these idiots do was just wrong.  Those people at the Capitol were like me mostly—infected, got better.  White skin.  But lots were different.”

“How so?” I asked.

Martin looked me up and down.  “They had white skin like you and your buddy, like me, like I said.  But lots of them weren’t right in the head.  Not very bright.  Not stupid and mean like these Survivor Army boys, just really stupid.  Least it seemed that way when we finally went down there and did what we did.  Most of them just stood there like they didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late.”

“What did you do?” I asked, having already heard the story from Grace.  I figured I’d catch Martin in a lie.

“The judge had me do some recon flights early on.  I saw them farming on the Capitol grounds.  They built a wall around the place.  Looked to me like they were set up pretty good.  You know, rebuilding.  I figured we were checking them out to make sure they weren’t hostile before we contacted them to start trading with them or whatever.  But the judge, he isn’t like that.  He already had his plans for them.  He gave a big speech to everybody one day, like these people at the Capitol were stealing our birthright or some such shit.  Got the idiots all riled up.”

“The idiots?” I asked for clarification.”

“The Survivor Army guys,” said Martin as though there was no doubt about who he meant.  “Mostly idiots.  The virus left their brains half-rotten.  Long story short, we went down to Austin and slaughtered them folks at the Capitol.”

“You just attacked for no reason?” It came out like an accusation, though I tried hard not to make it sound that way.  Some things are just too reprehensible to cover with a lie.

“I’m not proud,” said Martin.  “You don’t know how it is here.  I didn’t have a choice.”

“Everybody has a choice.”

Martin laughed darkly.  “Look at you, young and strong.  I’ll bet you can run pretty fast, too.  But you’re arrogant like everybody your age.”

I huffed and looked out the window.  Fuck you.

“Thing you don’t realize,” Martin continued, “one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll be an old man too.  Your knees will go gimpy.  You might be fat like me if things ever get back to normal.  You won’t get around so good.  Sure, I had a choice, I could have told those Survivor Army idiots I wasn’t going to fly, but they’d have put a gun in my hand and made me a soldier.  First time I had to shoot it out with the infected I’d be dead.  Hell, before all this happened I was lucky to be able to walk all the way ‘round the block with the dog.  If I’d ever had to run for my life in all this mess I’d a got caught if I didn’t have a heart attack and die on the spot.”

I took another look at old man Martin, tied up on the floor.  That part was probably true.  He wouldn’t have been able to do anything to save himself.

“The only reason I’m alive now,” he went on answering the question I was getting ready to ask, “is because I was smart to find me a good place to hide and sneaky enough to stash away what I could so that I wouldn’t starve.  Being old and slow you learn to survive with what you’ve still got.”

Shaking my head, I said, “Still, you didn’t have to attack those people and slaughter them.”

“You are an arrogant little bastard,” spat Martin.  “You don’t hear anything I’m saying, do you? Just because I couldn’t resist outright doesn’t mean I didn’t resist.”

“How?” I asked.

“When we were attacking the Capitol, I made sure to keep my helicopter far enough away as to be out of range for any of the guys shooting out of it.  I even kept the gunners at lousy angles so they couldn’t fire directly at the Capitol grounds.  Hell, I’d do anything to keep the idiots in back from hitting anybody.”

“How’s that?”

“There was this one time,” said Martin, “I was on a ferry run—”

“A ferry run?”

“After we took the Capitol, we used to ferry men and supplies back and forth from here every day.  The judge planned to make the Capitol his base, but he didn’t want to leave all of our equipment and ammo up here.  So we moved it a little at a time.”

I nodded an acknowledgment.  I’d seen those helicopters going back and forth when Murphy and me were holed up in the lake house way up on Lake Travis.  That was the whole reason we ran into those knuckleheads.

“We were coming south one day, and we see this boat on the lake with a wake.”  Martin looked at me for understanding.  “A wake, you see.  It wasn’t drifting, it was motoring down the lake.”

That piqued my interest.  “What kind of boat?”

“It’s not important.  A pontoon boat or something.  Not that big.”

I gave Martin my full attention.  So far the situation sounded exactly like the one Murphy and me got caught up in.  “Tell me what happened.”

“I brought the helicopter down for a look-see.  We always did that when we saw survivors.  That’s how we recruited people.  What we saw surprised everybody onboard.  It wasn’t regular people who were driving the boat.  It was the same kind of white-skinned infected we’d seen down at the Capitol.  I knew right away they were normal just like me—I mean they had to be, they were driving the boat down the lake.  They’d just docked and tied off.”

“How many?” I asked.

“A couple of them, I think.”  Martin straightened himself up.  “What you’ve got to understand is, as soon as the boys in the back realized it was the White infecteds, they opened fire.  As soon as I realized what was happening, I started jerking the helicopter around and complaining about turbulence from the water.  I tried to keep them from hitting anything.  I did that kind of stuff all the time.  The idiots in the back never figured anything out.  And I don’t think any idiot in my helicopter ever managed to shoot anybody.”

“So you didn’t kill them?”

Martin shrugged.  “One of them jumped in the water.  One of them ran into the trees.  The guys in back all claimed they killed three or four, but I never saw any bodies.  Hell, I never saw more than two down there.  I figured they was lying.”

I decided that no matter what else was true, Martin was probably a helicopter pilot.  “That was me and Murphy on the boat that day.”

“You’re lyin’.”  Martin looked at me, trying to figure out what my new game was.

“Not lying.”  I’m not sure why I felt the need to add it, but I said,  “I don’t know if I owe you a thanks or not but you did sink our boat.”

“Plenty of boats on the lake for free.  At least, I kept them boys in the back from shooting you.  Like I said, I jerked the helicopter around a bit.  It’s a wonder none of them fell out.”

I looked out the window and scanned the dark ground for Murphy.

“Do you see him coming back yet?” Martin asked.

Nothing was moving out there.  “You getting nervous?”

Martin started to say something but coughed and cleared his throat.  “You know there are a lot of reasons he might get delayed.”

“Or killed?” I hefted my machete and looked down at Martin like a slab of butcher’s meat.  Could I kill a fat old man? If Murphy turned up dead, I figured I could.

Chapter 6

When the sun started to show itself on the horizon the next morning with no Murphy, I found myself in a spot.  Had Martin's compatriots ambushed and killed Murphy or had Murphy been killed by Whites? Was he injured? Was he somewhere on the base, waiting for me to find and help him?

The answers to those questions would go a long way to determining what I did with Martin.  And as much as I wanted to blame him, to murder him to assuage my festering worry, my rational side told me over and over again that Martin might not be guilty.  The practical side told me not to take the chance.  The most likely reason Murphy wasn't back was that Martin had lied, and his buddies were out in the hall waiting to ambush me when I left to find Murphy.

Nodding at the conversation in my head, as I stared across one hundred yards of dead grass and damaged vehicles between our building and the nearest hangar, I put together a plan.  I spun around and opened the drawers on the nearest desk.

“What are you doing?” Martin asked, worry in his tired voice.  Like me, he hadn’t slept a wink.

The top drawer held nothing of interest.  The drawers down the side held papers and office supplies but none of what I was looking for.

“Would you answer me, please?” Martin’s voice was tinged with desperation.  He knew the worry I was facing.  He knew my suspicions.  He was able to make deductions.  “Did you see your buddy out there?”

“Murphy,” I spat.  “His name is Murphy.  I’m Zed.”  I marched across the floor and pushed the blade of my machete against Martin’s throat.  “Just so you know, if I find out you’ve lied about anything, if you’ve gotten Murphy killed, I’m going to gut you.  I’m going to make you suffer before you die.

Martin slowly shook his head as his mouth opened and closed on words that wouldn’t form.

I spun around and searched another desk, finding in the second drawer exactly what I was looking for, a roll of packing tape.  Going back to Martin, I knelt down beside him and put my machete on the floor.

Martin immediately struggled to push me away and get his feet beneath him.  I elbowed him hard across his temple, and Martin's eyes rolled back in his head.  With him dazed, I pushed him on his belly and put a knee between his shoulder blades.  I took my roll of tape and sealed a strip over his mouth before unwinding the roll and wrapping it around his head several times.

Martin had come back to his senses by the time I finished, and was turning his head to try and see me.

I was feeling like an asshole because I’d let my concern over Murphy turn into anger, which turned into an elbow in Martin’s head when I could have just pushed him over and sat on him.  I got off his back and told him, “Sit up.”

Martin struggled to get back into a sitting position.

I picked up my machete and leaned in close.  "I've got some things to do.  While I'm doing them, you're going to sit here, still and quiet.  If I hear one sound out of you, I'll assume you're a liar, and we're not on the same side.  You know what happens then, right?"

Martin’s eyes were on my machete as he nodded.

"Good.”  I crossed the room to an interior wall.  A neighboring office had to be on the other side.  I ran my fingers across the texture and paint and rapped gently on it with my knuckles.  Just as I suspected, sheetrock, not cinderblock.

I put myself in position in front of the wall with one hand on my machete's handle and the other on the dull side of the blade near the tip and started to dig, pushing and wiggling the tip of the blade back and forth.  I was going to get through the wall, I had no doubt about that.  I didn't mind getting through slowly because my most important need at the moment was to do it quietly.

Still, it went quickly.  Sheetrock simply isn't that durable.  In a few minutes, I'd made a hole large enough to allow me to squeeze between the two-by-fours.  Unfortunately, the room I found myself in was not large, the door leading to the hallway had no window, and it opened into the hall at a place in the wall that had to be less than five feet from the door to the office where Martin sat imprisoned.

I guessed that the ambushers waiting for me had to be farther down the hall.  If I was going to get behind them, I needed to go through a few more walls, but that would put me farther and farther from Martin.

I stuck my head back into Martin’s office and made sure he saw me watching him before I pulled back through.  I went to work on the far wall with my machete.

Chapter 7

After cutting through sheetrock to get into the fourth office since leaving Martin, I figured I'd gone far enough.  The flaw in my plan that hadn't occurred to me until I was standing behind that office's door was that if I were an ambusher waiting for someone to come out of a door down the hall, I wouldn't be standing in the hall, I'd be partially concealed in a doorway for cover, which meant I should have run into one or two of them when I came through the wall.

That got me worried.  Would I have to work my way all the way down to the other end of the building? And if I did, why wouldn't the knucklehead taking cover in the office doorway not just shoot me when I started to break through the wall?

Then again, the guys I was dealing with were Survivor Army types, not bright.  Maybe they were all outside, lined up across the hall.  Hell, maybe they’d all grown bored while waiting for their ambush to develop and they’d fallen asleep.

Or the most likely scenario? It was all in my mind.  I was getting worked up because I was stuck babysitting Martin when I should have been out killing White shitheads and searching for Murphy.

I crossed the office to the door.  I quietly turned the knob and shoved the door open just enough to get a peek into the hall.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Sure, there were papers on the floor, a few rolling chairs, some shattered computers, and the remnants of a desk, but nothing that looked out of the ordinary considering the end of the world and all.

I was disappointed and a little bit angry.  The absence of ambushers meant my guess was wrong.  Or at least, it was wrong for the moment.  I was still stuck with not knowing whether Martin was a good guy or a bad guy.  I wasn't any closer to knowing Murphy's fate.  I'd wasted too much time digging through flimsy walls while Murphy was still out there, perhaps waiting for me to come to his aid.

Dammit.

I pushed the door open, wanting to slam it against the outside wall to vent some frustration, but the damper attached at the top edge slowed the door and left it hanging open and creeping back to closed.

Double damn.

I looked up and down the hall and saw nothing moving.  Fuck it.  I was spoiling for a fight.  “Hey.”

Nothing responded to my call.  So, I tried again.  “Hey.”

Nothing.

No ambush.

I walked up the hall to get back to my corner office, rolling all the possibilities over in my mind.  Mostly, I needed to decide what to do with Martin while I went out to find Murphy.  Could I leave him restrained? That might be a death sentence with so many of the naked horde still around.  It was unlikely they’d pass up on an easy meal even if Martin were a white-skinned survivor.

Taking him with me brought along a whole host of risks, but mostly for Martin.  If some Whites decided he looked slow and scrumptious, there'd be little I could do to save him.

I shoved the office door open, expecting to see Martin sitting against the wall beneath the far windows where I’d left him.  What I saw instead was a long strip of crumpled tape and loose wire.

About the time I was wondering where he’d disappeared to, Martin body-slammed me from the side and knocked me into the doorjamb.

“Dammit!”  My machete clattered to the floor as I fell with Martin’s bulk coming over on top of me.

He punched me in the ribs, mustering all the strength his withered old muscles had left.  Not enough, too bad for him.  He rolled around on top of me, letting the weight of his big belly do the work of keeping me pinned down while he tried to position himself to put a fist in my face.

As I struggled to get from underneath him, I was irritated—creeped-out at the feel of a doughy old man sweating all over me.  "Dammit, Martin."

He tried to hit me in the face with a blow that glanced off my cheek.

I elbowed him in the head two times before I dazed him enough to subdue him.  I pulled myself out from underneath and grabbed my machete.  I looked out the open door to get a glimpse down the hall.

Noise echoed from one of the floors below.  Something in the building had heard us and was coming.

Martin got up on his hands and knees.

I muttered, “Whites.”  I wanted to kick Martin in the face and run into the stairwell across the hall.

Martin stuck his head out of the office and looked.

Judging by the noise, more than one White was coming.  Three to five was my guess.  I looked down at Martin.  “You woke them.  I hope you were lying about how fast you can run.”

Martin stared into the dimness at the far end of the hall.  “I told you I can barely run at all.”

"You should have thought about that before you figured Sumo wrestling me to the ground was going to save your life.”  It was a merciless, mean thing to say, but I was pissed.  "I'm going."

“Where?” Martin got to his feet.

I crossed the hall and grabbed the handle on the stairwell door.  "I'm going to try this way.  Come if you want.  I'm not in the mood to save your ass, so you better keep up."

“Keep up?” Martin was confused.  “I thought you were going to kill me.”

"I haven't decided, but if you stay here, I won't have to.”  I swung the door open and stepped into the stairwell, noticing immediately a White slinking up toward me.

Sneaky motherfucker!

The White’s eyes went wide as surprise worked its way through its slow brain.  The White snarled and bounded up the stairs.

Too bad.  I was already three thoughts ahead of him.  “Sorry buddy.”  I stepped into a ferocious machete swing full of Martin-borne frustration and sent a huge section of the White's skull spinning against the wall and then rolling down the stairs.  The White’s body slapped the smooth concrete floor at my feet.

“Are there more?” Martin whispered from a few feet behind.

Why waste the energy on an answer he could figure out himself? I motioned him toward the stairs and cautiously stepped over the White's twitching body.  I peeked down through the gap between the alternating flights and saw only blackness.  I heard nothing down there.  I turned to Martin and whispered, "You gotta stay quiet.  If we get trapped in here, we're fucked.  Or I'll pretend I'm on their side so you'll be fucked all by yourself.  I'm not dying to save your ass.  You got me?"

“We’re white-skinned,” Martin whispered.  “They’ll leave us alone, mostly, right?”

“Not these naked fuckers.”  I headed down.  “You saw what they did to your buddies, right?”

Martin nodded without a word and followed after me.  At the first landing, as I made my turn to go down the next flight of stairs, Martin grabbed my arm and brought me to a halt.

“Help me.”  He was dead serious.  No defiance.  No humility.  “You know I fly helicopters.  Save me and I can take you anywhere.”

Still on the fence as to whether Martin was partially responsible for whatever befell Murphy, I yanked my arm away and started down again.

“Please,” Martin begged.  “Please.  I can’t outrun them.”

I nodded up the stairs.  "Go up there and hide somewhere.  Maybe you'll get lucky, and they won't search the building looking for the noise you made."

Martin reached out and put a meaty, weak hand on my arm again, gentle this time.  His eyes looked to be preparing for tears.  “Everybody wants to go somewhere.  Everybody dreams about sanctuary at the other end of the rainbow—a safe place.  Wherever you think that is, I can fly you there.”

"Where the hell would I want to go?” I snapped.  "The whole world is fucked.”  Of course, I was planning on going to College Station with Murphy, but I wasn't going to tell this knucklehead even if I did expect his life to last only another five minutes.

"An oil rig,” said Martin.  "There's got to be hundreds of them right offshore and farther out in the Gulf."

“The ones they evacuate every time a hurricane comes?” I scoffed.  “Yeah, that’s a viable plan.”  I pulled away and started down the stairs.  “Follow me.  Stay close.  Stay quiet.  Or die.”

Chapter 8

Through the blackness, hoping no naked Whites were sleeping on the landings or waiting on the stairs to ambush us, I kept one hand on the rail.  Martin had a handful of the back of my shirt as he wheezed behind me, clomping his heavy feet and groaning at the pace.  More than once I shuffled my feet through the rotting remains of something that had once been human.  And it wasn't just the putrefying flesh on the floor, it was the crusty texture of dried blood on the railing, and worse, the sticky stuff left from more recent kills.

Then there were the goddamned maggots.  On the rail.  On the floor.  On the walls.  On the corpses, eating their way through the rotting flesh with tiny squishy sounds magnified by a million.  The smell of the air trapped inside the stairwell was as foul as any I'd had to breathe.  It felt like we were taking the maintenance entrance down to the devil's outhouse.

Then we ran out of stairs.  I found a wall in the darkness where I expected another flight to be.  I turned around, felt my way along the wall, still with Martin clinging to my back, and found a door.  I pushed on the bar with my hip and shouldered it open to a rush of cool, sweet air.

I looked out as I slowly inched the door open.  A helicopter sat in the grass halfway between our building and the nearest hangar.  Several of the panels over the engines were off, and it looked as if someone had been working unsuccessfully to get it airborne again.

Plenty of naked White corpses were scattered across the lawn.  Some of the grass was blackened from small fires.  A vehicle was overturned, showing me its undercarriage.  I didn't see any Whites moving, at least not any nearby.  Several hundred yards distant, I saw a few hunched over a corpse, feeding.  In the other direction, I spied a half-dozen more, jogging in a line but going somewhere else.

I gave Martin a look.  I pointed at the helicopter and whispered, “Follow me like they follow each other.  Stay right on my heels.  I won’t go fast.  We’ll get in the back of the helicopter and scope things out before we go farther.”

Martin looked up into the blackness of the stairwell.  The noises of Whites inside the building made it clear they weren’t far away.  “If they come out after us?”

Don’t ask questions with unpleasant answers.

"C'mon.”  I jogged slow enough that Martin could keep pace, slow enough that walking would have been faster, but it was the appearance I was going for—just two Whites, out doing what they do.  Our clothes were a problem, but I wasn't ready to ditch those just yet.

Looking to my right as Martin plodded after me, I checked on the scavenging Whites I’d spotted.  They didn’t have any interest in us.  Way to our left, the jogging Whites disappeared behind a building.  Good.

With Martin huffing huge gulps of air and moving more slowly with each step, I jumped through one of the open doors in the back of the helicopter.  Martin collapsed onto the helicopter’s deck, bent over at the waist with his legs hanging out.

Cursing under my breath, I looked left and right as I grabbed his belt and hauled him the rest of the way inside.

With both of the rear doors open, the helicopter left us visible from two directions, but kept us hidden from the other two.  Halfway was better than nothing.  And we'd need it.  Martin wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.  The tense hike down the stairs and the short jog had taken everything he'd had in him.

Why is this guy still alive?

I helped Martin into a seat with his back to the rear bulkhead.  He wasn’t hidden, but he wasn’t obtrusive.  Hopefully, he’d have time to catch his breath before we made our way to the hangar.

A grunt caught my attention, and I looked back toward the building.  Three Whites were cautiously approaching but still at a distance.

Fuck.

I looked at Martin, I’m sure with some new anxiety on my face.

His fatigue hadn't dulled his perception.  He turned to see the Whites coming, and I saw despair wash over him.  He shot a panicked glance toward the hangar, to the other buildings, and even the useless shelter of the overturned vehicle.  Everything was too far away for him to have a chance of making it.  He knew he was a dead man and his last moments under earth's happy blue sky would be spent feeling the dull teeth of dead-brained animals tear at his flesh until enough of it was ripped away that blood loss would steal his consciousness and death would follow.  It was a slow, shitty way to go but it was damn near everybody's eventual future.

Martin mumbled something as he tried to catch his breath from the run.

“What?”

He closed his eyes, took a huge breath and said, “Leave me.”

Leave? Of course, that’s what I told him I’d do.  It wasn’t my fault he was old and feeble.  It wasn’t me who’d spent sixty years eating cheeseburgers and milkshakes.  It wasn’t me who was hauling around a hundred pounds of excess weight on old, brittle joints with a heart too congested with cholesterol deposits to keep the blood flowing.

“Save yourself.”  Martin leaned his head against the bulkhead and closed his eyes.  In a whisper barely loud enough to hear, he said, “This day was bound to come.”

Save myself? Crap! He was playing the hero card on me.

I don't know why I do what I do sometimes.  Murphy might argue that was most of the time, and he might be right about that.  I'm sure he'd have told me at that moment to do anything but ditch Martin and run was a mistake.  I wouldn't have argued with him.  There was no reason not to do just that.

But I didn’t run.

The hero card? Damn him.

I jumped out of the helicopter, unzipped my coveralls and peeled them down to my waist, exposing my sinewy arms and bony chest, virus-white.  I was one of them.  They needed to know it.  I raised my machete and barked a monkey challenge and dared the Whites with my eyes.

Come on, fuckers.

They did.

I guess whatever passed for comparative math in their slug brains figured out that three-to-one were good odds with a large, tasty morsel like Martin draped over a flimsy jump seat in the helicopter behind me.

Unfortunately, they were smart enough not to rush at me full speed, a White behavior that almost always worked to my advantage, some naturally being faster runners than others, hence spreading them out as they came so I could take them down one at a time.

These three spread out in an arc and matched their speed as they jogged toward me, apparently not at all intimidated by my animal threat and big machete.

Too bad for them I was still smarter than all of them combined.

I lowered my machete, hung my head, and drooped my shoulders as I stepped aside, making it clear in animal body language my threat was bluster, and I was now surrendering.  Tasty, tender Martin was all theirs.

One of them brayed and bounced high on his steps.  He might as well have put on a nametag that said, ALPHA.

I positioned myself a few long steps away from the side door of the helicopter.  Martin groaned as I went out of his sight.

The way was open for the Whites, and their attention focused fully on Martin as though I'd become invisible.

When they got within a few steps, still coming pretty fast, I jumped toward them, swinging my machete hard at the neck of the closest one.  His momentum carried him into my blade, and his head flew into the air as his arms reached up following the last instructions they'd received before the connection to the brain was lost.

The headless White's knees gave way, and he fell as I spun and kicked the alpha White in the side.  That bought me a second to bring my machete back for another swing.

Off balance, the alpha bumped into the female to his right, and their forward momentum smashed them into the Plexiglas cockpit window.

I hacked as the two fell and alpha boy raised a hand to block the blow, only to see his forearm fly away through a fountain of his blood.

Oddly, he still tried to reach at me with the stump as I hauled back on my blade to finish him with a hack through his face and into his brain.

His skull caught my machete, and when I tried to pull it away, I felt it jam as I watched the female crawl out from under the body, snarling and glaring death at me.  She was pissed.

Oh, well.

I let go of the machete and put all my might into a kick at her chin, which she clearly wasn’t expecting because she did nothing to dodge it.  Teeth broke, bone crunched, and her head snapped back and then fell limp as she collapsed.  I jumped forward and finished her with a hard stomp of my heel on her temple.

Breathing hard and grabbing my stuck machete to wrench it free, I looked up at Martin, who was wide-eyed and frozen.  "You all right?” I asked softly.

He nodded.

“We should go.”

You think?

Chapter 9

Martin opened the door and stepped inside.  He didn’t want to, but with the machete in hand, I insisted.  Yeah, I'd just saved his ass by the helicopter, but that didn't mean that I trusted him.

Nobody was inside to ambush me when I followed Martin in.

We entered a shop with worktables along the walls and a few long tables in the center of the room, all on metal legs with thick wooden tops capable of supporting a lot of weight.  Engine parts large and small, electronic parts, and pieces I had no hope of identifying lay everywhere, some organized on shelves, others in disarray or disassembled on the tables.  The shop smelled of machine oil, a welcome change since so many new rooms I entered held the smell of those who'd died there.

"Is this where you've been hiding?” I softly asked.

Martin pointed to the right where the L-shaped shop continued out of sight around a corner.  “Over there.  I had me a place after the Army collapsed and before the Survivor Army moved in.”  He patted his gut.  “They were a bunch of mean idiots but they took care of their pilots.  After I earned their trust, I used to sneak in here and stash extra food in case I had to use this place again.  Turns out I did, after all those naked ones attacked.  Happened a few days back.  Did you know about that?”

I cocked my head in the direction Martin had indicated.

Martin took the silent instruction and led.

I carefully stepped over metal pieces—of helicopters, I guessed—strewn on the floor, not wanting to kick anything and make noise.

When I was able to see down the leg of the L-shaped room, Martin pointed to the far end at a rolling metal staircase twenty feet tall.  “I use that to get into a storeroom up there on top.”

I followed the line of his pointing finger and saw a balcony that looked to have been rudely constructed over an interior room.  The balcony was stacked with pieces of sheet metal, and behind the sheets I made out the shape of a door, dingy and hidden so much I'd have missed seeing it altogether had Martin not pointed it out.

“You wheel the ladder away when you come down so no Whites will accidentally wander up there when you’re gone?”

Martin nodded.

“But they could come up when you’re in there, right?”

“No,” answered Martin.  “Once I get up, I sit on the edge and give the ladder a good push with my feet.  It usually rolls ten or fifteen feet away and sits in the middle of the floor over there just like it is now.”

That made me suspicious.  I looked Martin up and down again.  He was far from athletic.  The balcony was at least fifteen feet up.  “How do you get back down with the ladder pushed out in the middle of the floor?”

Martin pointed at a support beam running down the wall near the edge of the balcony.  “I have a pair of leather welding gloves.  I put them on and slide down the beam.”

“You slide down?” I didn’t believe it.

Martin nodded and started forward.  "I leave them there on the steps after I come down.  That way I won't forget to bring them back up with me."

I followed Martin toward the ladder.  Sure enough, a pair of elbow-length gloves, blackened with grease and soot, lay on a step.  "Dangerous way to come down."

He raised his hands and showed me the grip.  "I have to hold on tight when I slide down the beam, so I don't hit the bottom too hard.”

We reached the ladder, and I gave Martin a look that said, "Go ahead."

He wheeled it quietly over to the wall below the balcony.  He looked at me.  “I lube the wheels whenever one starts to squeak.”

“You first.”

“Of course.”  He hauled his weight up the steps.  “You still don’t trust me.”

“You did just attack me.  I get why, but that kinda eroded the little trust I was building, so you first.”

Martin turned to look at me.  “Why’d you stay out there and save me from the infected? You could have ran away and left me there.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it?” I looked around the room and scanned across all the windows for any movement outside.  “Why don’t you just thank me and we’ll leave it at that.”

“Thank you.”  Martin extended a hand to shake.

I looked at it for a moment but was unwilling to put my machete down.  I grasped his hand awkwardly with my left.  "You're welcome.”  I pulled my hand back.

“You want me to fly you somewhere, don’t you? You believe me now that I’m a pilot, right?”

“No,” I looked up at the balcony, urging Martin to get moving.  “I’m just tired of feeling shitty about things I’ve done.  Leaving you out there to die without knowing you’re a lying bastard who’s trying to get me killed would have been one more of those things to keep me awake at night.  So you don’t need to thank me.  I didn’t save your ass for you.  I did it for me.  That’s it.”

"That's selfish.”  Martin took the next step up.  "I'm still alive, though.  I appreciate it no matter why you did it."

At the top of the stairs, Martin said, “Walk softly on the balcony.  It makes a lot of noise down below if you go stomping across, alright?”

I urged Martin toward the door.  “Open it quietly and slowly.  You go in first.  Stay where I can see you.”

Martin crossed the balcony carefully, avoiding pieces of sheet metal that were extending corners and edges from out of their piles.  He whispered, “Don’t want to hit any of those.  They make a hell of a noise.”

I took his advice and stayed behind him.

He turned the handle on the door and swung it open.

“Inside,” I told him.

He gave me a last look and stepped into the dim light of the storeroom.

I followed, ready for the ambush I kept expecting.

Martin stopped in the center of a space the size of an average living room.  All the shelves in the storage room had been scooted to one side, leaving about three-quarters of the room usable.  Along one wall, beneath a small window, some chair cushions had been fashioned into a bed.  Stacks of cans and cartons of food were piled by one wall.  A dozen five-gallon plastic buckets, all previously opened, were stacked in a corner.

The place clearly had only a single occupant, and that had to be Martin.  There was no gang of compatriots, no ambush.  At every turn, Martin's story checked out.

I pointed at the buckets.  “What are those for?”

“You know.”  Martin looked embarrassed.

I shook my head, suspicious again.

“Guys told me the way the infected find hiding people is by the smell.”

“The smell?” I asked.

"You know.  Stuff people don't think about.  A family hiding in an attic might have a latrine dug in their backyard to sneak down to and take care of business.  Some afraid to go outside might drop their business in a bucket and dump it out a window, so it doesn't stink up the hiding place.  The infected smell it.  They only have to be downwind, and a smelly latrine pit will give away a hiding place.  They follow their noses.  Then they search around and find the hiding place or they just wait behind a bush until somebody comes out to take a dump, and bam! They got you."

“So the buckets.”  I sniffed the air, guessing what was inside them.

"They've got rubber seals, most of ‘em,” said Martin.  "I pop a lid, do my business,” Martin walked over to a few rows of bleach bottles I hadn't noticed before.  "I pour in a little bleach, and I seal it up.  It's a temporary solution, you know.  I'll run out of buckets at some point, and I'll have to dump them somewhere.  I was thinking of waiting for a big rain and dumping them in a ditch nearby."

I nodded.  “Good thinking.  But you know the Whites, they’ll take a dump anywhere, right? Seems like I step in a pile of shit damn near every day.”

“But they spread it out, you know, wherever they happen to be.”

“Or when they hole up in a house somewhere, they leave it on the floor and stink up the place.”

Martin shrugged.  "I guess the infected who are out hunting by smell find those guys, too.”  Martin patted the top of a bucket.  "At least, they don't find me."

He was right about that so far.  I crossed the room and peeked out the window to see another hangar and a section of the tarmac.  A long line of Whites was running that slalom path they run, crossing from right to left through a row of helicopters sitting unperturbed, seemingly ready for use.  "Those all work?"

Martin nodded.  “They all need fuel and some of the guns need ammunition.”

I stepped away from the window and relaxed, lowering my machete to hang at my side.  I decided that Martin wasn’t a danger.  I still needed to find Murphy, though.  “Any ideas on where Murphy might be?”

Martin shook his head.  "Instead of sneaking off to come from an unexpected direction, he should have just come straight over here."

“We didn’t know if we could trust you.  Murphy did what he had to do.”

Martin pointed right.  “A couple hangars that way for the Black Hawks.”  He looked left.  “Two more for the Chinooks down that road, spread over a mile or so.”  He thumbed over his shoulder.  “Way out across the runways a couple more hangars over there for the Apaches.  Then it’s the yards for the tanks and Humvees and fuel trucks.  By now, I suppose he could be anywhere.”

“He’s not anywhere.”  I rubbed my hand over my forehead as though the act might do something to soothe a headache that was growing with my worry over Murphy.  “He wouldn’t wander away.  He’s not like that.”

“You guys been friends a long time?”

“Since the day it started.  We helped each other out.  We’ve been through some shit.”

Martin sat down on his makeshift bed.  “What do you want to do?”

“That’s not what you’re asking,” I spat, my fatigue and my worry turning a hard edge on my tone.  “You mean what do I want you to do?”

“You’ve got the machete.”

I glared at Martin and saw his right hand on the edge of one of his bed cushions, not resting, not taking the weight he was pretending to lean on it.  “You’ve got a gun stashed under that cushion, don’t you?”

Martin’s face froze in a fake smile.

I measured the distance between us and figured if he went for the pistol, I could pounce across the room and remove his hand with my blade before he could bring the weapon up high enough to shoot.

From the look in Martin’s eyes, he was doing the same calculation.

“If you had a loaded gun here, why’d you go out with an empty one?”

Martin pursed his lips as he thought about his answer.  “I used all the bullets.”

I laughed.  "You're a shitty liar?” And that was a lie too.  The only thing I was sure about was that Martin had not emptied his magazine shooting at Whites, or he'd be dead.

Martin looked at his feet.  “I brought the empty gun with me in case I came across some ammunition.  Then I wouldn’t be unarmed.”

“Tough luck on that.”  I looked at Martin’s hand again, still poised.  “Or that’s the lie.”

“Yeah,” Martin agreed.  “Or that’s the lie.

Shit.  Being honest with myself, I couldn’t tell.  “Pull your gun out if you want.”

Martin looked at the nicked blade of my machete.  He knew it earned every one of its metallic scars from killing people just like him—infected.

“I’m not going to kill you.  I think you’ve been truthful with me.  You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

Martin grinned and rubbed a hand over his wrist.  “After keeping me tied up all night, I might.  But like you said, the gun must be empty.”

I rolled my eyes and went back to look out the window, hoping I hadn’t just made a fatal mistake.

Chapter 10

After checking the chamber for a round, Martin laid the pistol in his lap and looked at me.  He ejected the magazine and tossed it over.  It was full.  I looked at Martin and didn’t know what to say.

“Like I said, I used all my bullets in the other gun.  I got trapped in the building, killed a bunch of infected, and then hid out where you guys found me.  I’ve been there most of the day waiting until the middle of the night to come back here.”

I looked at the full magazine in my hand and tossed it back to Martin.  “I guess that kind of establishes where we stand.”

“What do you mean?” Martin asked.

"I'm not going to kill you for no reason, and apparently you're not going to kill me.  We're the good guys."

“Do I get a white hat?”

"You were talking about flying somewhere,” I said.  "Do you have anywhere in mind?"

"Like I said, oil platforms, an island somewhere.  Thing is, I don't have the range to get to any island in the Caribbean.  I could make it to an oil platform, though.  As safe as a place like that might be, I'm not in any kind of shape to handle a problem, you know.  Suppose I land on a big platform and some infecteds are already there.”  Martin looked himself up and down.  "Gun or not.  With this old body, I think I'd be taking a chance."

“So you were fishing for friends to tag along with you when you brought it up.”

“Couldn’t be any worse than wherever you’ve been.”

I shrugged.  “Some places were better.”

“But they didn’t last, did they?”

"Wouldn't be here if they did.”  I looked back out the window.  The long helix of Whites out on the tarmac had finally passed by.  I didn't have a count, but I guessed five hundred, maybe a thousand.  "I've got to go find Murphy.  You going to be here awhile?”

“I’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Is it cool if I come back?”

“You gonna tie me up again?”

I smiled and shook my head.  I walked over and extended a hand—my right hand.

Martin shook and said, “Come back.  Think about those oil platforms.  They could be the ticket.”

“I think I know a place that’ll be better for us both if you’re game.”  I crossed over to the door.

“Where?”

“I’ll tell you when I get back.”

“Don’t trust me yet?” Martin said with a chuckle.  “I didn’t shoot you.”

“I know.  But it’s one thing to gamble my life on trust.  I’m not gambling other people’s lives on it.”  I stepped through the door.  “Mind if I use your gloves to slide down the support beam?”

“As long as you toss them back up so I can use them if you don’t make it back.”

“Will do.”

“Good luck.”

Chapter 11

I closed the door behind me.  I carefully avoided the sheet metal leaning against the wall, scooted around a rail, and gripped the I-beam edges.  I put one foot against the beam and stepped off the balcony.  The gloves took all the heat from the friction and protected my hands as I slid down.  My boots hit the ground softly enough.  I peeled off the gloves and tossed them back up to the balcony and crossed the shop to a door that I guessed would lead me into the hangar's main bay.

Luckily, the double doors both had windows that gave me a view of most of the hangar.  All I saw were helicopters—six of them—all in some state of disassembly, caught mid-repair when the world changed.  No Whites, though.  That long helix I'd spotted must have kept going on by.  Neither did I see any of the Survivor Army knuckleheads—in fact, none alive since the battle a few days ago.  I pushed through the swinging doors, silent and slow, then stopped to listen.  I heard nothing but wind blowing through the open hangar door and swirling through metal joists high overhead.

I worked my way along the wall, keeping an eye out for anything that might be of use to me, mostly an M-16 or M-4, any military rifle that might have been dropped by somebody on their way to becoming dinner for a gang of hungry Whites.  Unfortunately, the only guns I saw were those mounted in the door gunner positions on the helicopters—powerful and badass, the machine guns action movie heroes carry into the climax to shoot all the bad guys.  Too unwieldy for me to remove and tote around.

When I reached the front of the hangar, I peeked out at the tarmac.  More helicopters.  One had crashed and burned, leaving a black skeleton of aluminum and a broad, burnt smudge on the sandy-gray concrete.  The remains of plenty of corpses lay everywhere I looked, scattered bones and tattered remnants of the clothes they'd been wearing when their god had called them home.

Knowing the direction Murphy had gone when he’d left the night before, I decided to move toward the next Black Hawk hangar to my right in the half-mile long row.  As soon as I turned to jog in that direction I spotted movement and froze.  I dropped to a knee and pressed against the hangar’s door.

A helicopter was lying at an angle with broken rotor blades.  It had landed hard.  The concrete all around it was scarred with huge scrapes and spilled petroleum.  Murphy stepped out from behind it, waved at me, and I saw his grin.

I didn’t know whether to smile or curse.

Murphy took a long scan across the empty spaces.  Satisfied himself about the safety, and jogged toward me.

I slipped back inside the hangar and waited in the shadows, out of sight of any hidden Whites or Survivor Army assholes that might be lurking.

After a minute or two, Murphy rounded the corner into the hanger and stopped next to me.  “Dude.”

"Dude?” I shook my head with my mouth hanging open in dramatic offense.  It was a look my mother had used on me a thousand times when I'd come home late.  I just didn't realize in that moment I was channeling the Harpy.  "You disappear all night long.  I think you're dead somewhere, and all I get is a ‘dude'?"

Murphy laughed and slapped my shoulder.  Then he hushed and looked around.

“It’s cool,” I told him.  “This place is empty.”

Murphy walked deeper into the hanger.

I followed, taking a last look outside.  “What happened?”

"I think I need to make up some dramatic shit, or you're gonna act like a bitch about it."

“Whatever.”

“No, seriously.”

I stopped by one of the partially disassembled helicopters and positioned myself to see anything that might come through the open hangar doors.  Murphy watched the doors to the shop and other storerooms at the back.  I said, “I’m cool.  I’m just tired and grouchy.  I need to get on a regular sleep schedule.”

“I think maybe we need to make coffee a priority on our scrounge list.”

I rolled my eyes.  “What happened? Why didn’t you come back? Did you run into trouble?”

“After I snuck out last night I went down to the far end of the row of hangars,” Murphy pointed, “thinking if that dude was—”  Murphy cut himself off and looked around.  “Where’s that dude?”

“In a storeroom over there.”  I nodded toward the back of the hangar.

“Why’d you come over here?”

“Long story.  Tell me what happened.”

"Like I said,” Murphy pointed again, "I was coming around way down by the other end and, well, there's nothing to tell.  I was sneaking along, doing my thing.  Lots of bodies down there, by the way.  I was trying not to step in anything when I noticed a bunch of Whites coming in my direction.  They didn't act like they saw me, being so dark and all, so I hid in a helicopter.  I wasn't in the mood for running and shooting and shit so I thought I'd give them a little bit and after they passed by I'd go about my business."

“But?” I asked.

“They hung around and started scavenging the dead up there.  You know those kind of Whites that’ll eat any dead guy.”

I nodded.  “And?”

"Well I ended up sitting in that helicopter a long time, and I got comfortable.  And like you said, neither of us have been getting enough sleep lately."

“You dozed off?”

Murphy’s expression turned sheepish.  “Woke up a little while ago, just in time to see those Whites run off.”

He was probably talking about the same band I’d seen spiral by when I was looking out the window from Martin’s room a while ago.

“So what’s the deal with that dude?” Murphy asked.

“Martin.  He’s up there in his hideout.  It’s a storeroom above one of the machine shops just like he said.  Looks like only he’s been up there.  You know, one bed.  Some supplies.  Everything he’s told me checked out.”

“He could still be lying.”

“He’s got a gun.”

"He picked one up when you guys were coming over here?” Murphy asked, "With his hands tied?"

“I untied his hands.”  It was my turn to look sheepish.  “He had it hidden under his mattress.”

“He drew it on you?”

“He was acting squirrelly when he sat down on his bed.  I figured he had something.”

“What’d you do?”

“I told him to pull it out.  I pretty much trusted him by then, well you know, as much as I’m going to trust anybody like that, and I told him to take out his gun if he wanted to.”

“You two must have buddied right up overnight.”

“I had to smack him a time or two,” I admitted.

“A time or two?” Murphy laughed.  “What’s that mean?”

“It’s a long story but he kinda got free and tried to wrestle my machete away.”

Murphy laughed some more.  “And you trusted him with the gun?” His face changed.  He was suspicious.  “You’re fuckin’ with me, right?”

“No.”  I felt embarrassed over the choice.

“You’re an idiot sometimes.”

“It worked out,” I countered.

"A lucky idiot."

Yeah, lucky me.  I knew I’d taken a big risk, a stupid risk, but it was my risk to take.

“What’s the plan now?” Murphy patted a big palm on the drab green side of a Black Hawk.  “Can Martin really fly one of these?”

I started walking toward the storeroom.  “Seems like you’re already thinking the same thing I’m thinking.”

"To fly one of these to College Station instead of driving.”  Murphy put an arm around my shoulder and jostled me.  "Because I've heard that driving can be dangerous these days."

“Yeah.  That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

Chapter 12

Among other things, Fort Hood had been a stockpile of the Army’s tried and true tools for killing folks on an industrial scale, a temple to our culture’s conceit as to how effectively we figured we could slaughter all comers.  Unfortunately, the enemy that showed up, a virus and the people it twisted to its purpose, wasn’t on the list of foes the army had prepared for.  Still, it was hard not to fall under the infatuating spell of all that firepower, even with the evidence of its failure spread nearly everywhere I looked, the bodies of the dead.  Now Fort Hood was an Easter egg hunt and the prizes hidden in the carnage were weapons and ammunition.

Aside from being crusted in the blood of the last person to pull the trigger, most of the M4s we found looked damn near worn out.  Murphy assured me that wasn’t uncommon.  The taxpaying public liked the Army to get their money’s worth out of the weapons they bought.  I found a set of night vision goggles, military boots, camouflage pants, and a shirt that fit.  All were gory, but cleanliness wasn’t the showstopper while shopping for a new wardrobe.  Finding garments that hadn’t been ripped off the previous owner’s body was the trick.

I found a serviceable pistol with enough magazines to make me feel well-armed.  Well, that along with my knife and indispensible machete.  Better yet, I discovered that rummaging through the remnants of the dead, I came across hand grenades, one here, a couple there.  They totaled several dozen by the time I stopped searching.  Not all for just me, of course, they were good additions to our arsenal.

We spent two days loading a Black Hawk helicopter Martin selected for our trip.  We topped off the fuel, scrounged what little food could be found, loaded up our weapons, and gathered ammunition for the door guns on the helicopter.  Murphy was loaded up with everything he needed, and Martin, who we were building a trust for by then, was armed as well.

Martin told us that the Black Hawk had a payload of a couple thousand pounds so we had plenty of weight to spare if we wanted to continue loading.  Neither Murphy or me wanted to.  We’d been in Fort Hood long enough.  It was time to move on.  We had enough extra that our new employers in College Station would be grateful.  When we needed more, we could come back.

All we had to do after that was to wait for morning to leave.  The flight to College Station would take maybe an hour.  I wanted a full day just in case we needed it.  I’d been around the block enough times to know that every plan, no matter how simple, goes to shit when Whites get involved.

The next day, the early morning air was chilly but tolerable as Martin piloted the helicopter into the air.  I sat in the gunner seat behind the pilot’s seat, looking through an open window.  Murphy was behind me at the machine gun on the other side.  We all wore helmets and were able to communicate over the Black Hawk’s intercom.

We were a hundred feet off the tarmac with Whites coming out of their nighttime hiding places to gawk or run toward us.  Murphy said, “Okay, now I believe Martin.”

“What?” Martin asked over the intercom.

“That you can really fly this thing.”

Martin laughed.

I didn’t say anything.  I still had my doubts but was willing to make the bet.  Few things were certain anymore.

Martin announced, “The air seems stable this morning.”  As we passed over the hangar we’d spent the previous few nights in, he added, “We should have a smooth ride.”  We started west, climbing as we went.

We flew over the field where the Whites and the Survivor Army clashed.  Below, along the streets, naked ones came out to watch us fly over.  Some made the choice to chase.  Their sad little brains just couldn’t extrapolate the logical conclusion that we were too far away and moving too fast.  They saw us, they thought they could catch us.

Through the decay they ran.

Houses had burned, leaving surrounding yards and neighboring properties blackened.  Trash blew across streets and open fields.  Bodies, when they could be identified, or at least those smudges they left, discolorations, shredded clothes, and scattered bones were just about everywhere.  On the two-lane country roads between the subdivisions and through the farms leading out into the country, cars littered the shoulders and roads, some alone, some stalled in convoys—crooked, metallic caterpillars.  The contents of suitcases and provisions were scattered across the asphalt and into the ditches.  Spreading out from the vehicles, like poisonous clumps of pollen, lay the smudges and bones, often close, sometimes forty, fifty, a hundred feet away.

For the people trying to get out of Killeen, driving to escape failed.  Running to get away from cars jammed on the road failed them.  Fighting the infected with whatever they’d had on their person failed too.

Futile struggle and death.

By the time we were over Stillhouse Hollow Lake, we were high enough that the coming extinction of humankind wasn't so obvious.  I spotted the Bell County Expo center looking much smaller from up in the sky than I expected it to be.  Interstate 35 slipped behind us, and then we were over farm country.

The morning landscape was peaceful.  A fog filled the creek beds and low valleys in white—sometimes thick white, sometimes just a gossamer haze over the fields with cattle grazing, oblivious.  In places, all I saw were treetops and roofs floating on clouds that hid the earth below.

Heading southeast, we paralleled the road Murphy and I had led the naked horde down on our way to Fort Hood.  It was dotted with the houses we’d burned, and the ground all along it was scarred by the destructive passage of tens of thousands of naked Whites.

We didn't have a plan in the detailed sense for what lay ahead.  We were going to fly over College Station and hope that showing up in a helicopter didn't spark an incident.  The Survivor Army had given a lot of people in Texas good reason to greet them with bullets instead of talk.  We needed to find a safe place to land—no Whites nearby, and none close enough to draw in.  Of course, I suggested landing the Black Hawk on a roof on campus, but Martin told me the helicopter had an empty weight of five tons and a loaded weight twice that.  Martin explained to me that he didn't want to die caving in a roof.

Not hard to understand.

Chapter 13

When the Texas A&M campus came into view, Martin turned the helicopter in a wide, clockwise circle so we could get a look at what we were getting ourselves into.  I got out of my seat and stepped carefully through the narrow space in front of a forward-facing row of jump seats across the helicopter’s main bay.  I looked over Murphy’s shoulder, out the window.  Murphy had both hands on his machine gun, ready to fire.  Everything new required caution.  That’s just the way the world worked.

“What do you think?” Martin asked over the intercom.

“Looks like every place else,” Murphy answered.

“We’re about fifteen hundred feet,” said Martin.  “You want me to take it down some?”

“Yeah.”  I didn’t think we were going to see anything we needed from so high.

As we descended, the world below clarified into shit again.  Disappointment festered through hopes I hadn’t realized I’d been fostering until they started to fracture.  When Fritz talked about what his group had done in College Station I’d created a picture in my mind, unrealistic for sure, an idyllic oasis, a remnant of the old world surrounded by a tall-enough, tough-enough barrier to keep the grotesque savagery of the new world out.

And why the fuck does it hurt when hopes shatter? Isn’t the world full of enough pain over real things, like when our loved ones die?

All I saw was the evidence of death, and it was depressing.  It gave the impression that nothing below was alive except for the Whites who moved in their helices and gangs.  Some hunted individually and in small groups with no organization.  They all looked up, though, when they heard the sound of the Black Hawk.  Though it wasn’t likely any of them had heard the sound of an engine or seen a moving vehicle on the ground or in the air for months, their snail brains still remembered the smorgasbord from those first days and weeks, when cars were everywhere, full of fleeing food.  In those days, a White barely needed to do anything to feed except wait by a road for a car to come to a stop.  Then it was only a matter of breaking the glass or taking advantage of humans’ bad choices to get out of their cars.

As Martin drew the Black Hawk into tighter circles around the campus, Murphy pointed and said, “You see what I’m seeing?”

“Yeah.”

The density of remains got thicker and thicker near the western corner of the campus, and the flowery pattern of death seemed to be centered on a cluster of buildings.

Martin's voice crackled over the intercom.  "Tell me where to go, fellas."

Murphy pointed to the carnage around the buildings at the western corner of the campus.  “If they’re here, that’s got to be where.”

“Can we go lower?” I asked into the intercom.

“We can go all the way down to the ground,” Martin laughed.

Rolling my eyes for no one to see, I said, “You know what I mean.”

“Somewhat.”  He asked, “How low do you want to go?”

“Low enough to tell what kind of cars are parked down there?”

Martin laughed.

Murphy turned and looked at me.

I pointed at the ground.  “If the Mustang is down there, then we’re in the right place.  Right?”

Martin said, “I could drop down to about five hundred feet.”

Murphy turned back to his window and resituated himself in front of his machine gun.

I put a hand on a bulkhead and leaned forward.

“You’re crowding me, man.”  Murphy shouldered me over a bit.  “Why don’t you go back to your side?”

“Everything is on this side of the helicopter.”

Martin said, “The copilot seat is empty.”

I leaned away from Murphy and seated myself in one of the four jump seats facing forward.  Looking to my right gave me a view out the same side of the aircraft as Murphy.  It also left me feeling unnerved to have floor to ceiling open doorways to my left and right, because of the angle of the Black Hawk, one showing nothing but sky and the other ground.  It didn’t help that Martin was descending, leaving my feet feeling a little light, with a little less friction under my soles than I preferred.

I grabbed the frame of the jump seat tightly as I watched the ground.

Martin turned the Black Hawk into a tighter circle and the helicopter banked more steeply.

With growing worry that I’d slip right out the side, I’d have gotten myself strapped in, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go of anything.  “This is more exhilarating than I thought it would be.”

Murphy chuckled, telling Martin, "He's afraid he's going to fall out."

Martin laughed and angled the helicopter into another steeply banking turn.

“Asshole!”  I yelled.  “Why don’t you just hover?”

Martin leveled out and straightened it up again.  “Sorry.  Couldn’t help myself.”

“I think I see it,” said Murphy.

“It?” Martin asked.

“The car.  The Mustang,” Murphy clarified.  “Look, Zed.  Down there by the four-story building.”

I scanned below.  “The one with the solar panels all over the roof?”

"Yeah, back at the corner in the parking lot.  By that loading dock.  I think it's attached to a cable.  I think they're charging it."

“That your Mustang?” Martin asked as he found a spot in the air to hold the Black Hawk steady for a moment.

“Black with green stripes,” Murphy confirmed.

“You see the roof of the building?” I asked.

“The solar panels are all fucked up,” said Murphy.

“Look again.”

“Oh.”

"Oh, what?” Martin asked.

“Whites,” I told him.  “On the roof.”

“Take us in closer,” I ordered.  With Whites on the building that I assumed Grace, Jazz, Fritz, and Gabe were in, I felt guilt.  Grace and Jazz wouldn’t have come to College Station if they’d never met me and Murphy.  Fritz and Gabe would have anyway.  Now they were all down there somewhere, in trouble, or dead.  I forgot about my fear of slipping out the side of the helicopter, got to my feet, and took a few steps over to lean into the cockpit.

As I moved behind him, Murphy said, “Hold on there, cowboy.”  He was probably guessing I had bad ideas in mind.

I patted Martin on the arm, careful not to touch any of the knobs and dials on the wide console between the pilot and copilot seats.  “Get us down close.  I want to see inside the windows.”

Shaking his head, Martin said, “So things here aren’t what those guys said they would be.”

“Things go to shit,” I told him.  “You know that.”

“What’s the plan?” he asked.  “What are we looking for?”

“Our friends.”  I straightened up and turned to look over Murphy’s shoulder out the window.

Over the intercom, Murphy muttered, “Null Spot rides again.”

Chapter 14

At a hundred feet off the ground and just thirty or forty feet higher than the top of the building with the solar panels, Martin piloted the Black Hawk in a tight, slow circle around the building, giving us views of all sides.  The Whites on top of the roof crowded the edges, following us around, trying to reach toward the sky and grab across an impossible distance, yelling their frustration through angry faces and bared teeth.  More and more came out of the stairway and onto the roof.

I struggled to get the microphone on my headset positioned.  “Lower,” I told Martin.

“No.”

“What? Take us closer.”  I let my anger over Martin’s response show.

“No,” he replied.  “Too many hazards flying that low with so many buildings around.”

I started to say something and Murphy elbowed me hard in the ribs as he covered the mic with his other hand.  “Chill, dude.  Let Martin do his job.  He’s the pilot.  All you know about flying in helicopters is what you learned playing video games.”

Murphy was right.  I tried not to sulk.

“You can see all you need to see from here,” Martin added.

I scanned the grounds as we circled.  Naked Whites were all over the place, coming out of buildings, out from behind bushes, out of broken-down cars.  The loud whup-whup-whup of the rotors was getting the attention of every White around the campus.  “You think that’s the naked horde, some of the ones who disappeared from Fort Hood?”

“That’s not the whole horde, or at least all that’s left of it, but there’s a lot of them down there.”  Murphy pointed at a lawn in the direction of the campus center.  Several hundred naked Whites were running in our direction.

“Why’d they come back here?” I asked, as much of myself as anyone.

“They scattered in every direction after the battle,” said Murphy.

A mob of Whites was starting to run a circle on the ground to match the one we were making in the air.  On brown grass between the buildings in every direction, Whites wound their way toward us.

All around the base of the building, I noticed fortifications.  The building across the street, the Veterinary Sciences Building—it said so on a big sign—was similarly fortified.  Several nearby structures also showed signs of fortification, though to a lesser degree.  In and amongst the buildings were strewn the remains, both old and fresh bodies.  These had to be the buildings where Fritz’s people had built their home and from where they protected the sequestered scientists who were working to bring hope back to the world.

And now Whites were everywhere, and I couldn’t help but conclude that had I not led the naked horde into battle with the Survivor Army, had I not assassinated their leadership, then maybe the horde would have kept heading north toward Dallas and hiked themselves onto my list of yesterday’s problems.  Instead, the horde had dispersed, and thousands of them were down below on the campus with plenty of Smart Ones among them.  And they’d done what they were best at doing, they’d found the normal humans, and they’d overwhelmed their defenses.

Over the noise of the helicopter’s rotors, the Harpy’s voice cackled as she insisted that it was my fault.

Not true.

But enough of it was.

Through my desire to get revenge, I’d inadvertently killed mankind’s only hope, their only chance at a vaccine.  As I ruminated myself into guilty despair, a rational thought in my head told me that these couldn’t be the only scientists the whole world over who’d survived and were working on a vaccine, but the irrational part won out.  I knew about the ones who’d been working in the buildings below.  I didn’t know about any others.

Murphy bumped me again and pointed down at the building.  I looked just in time to see a dark glass curtain wall panel shattering and falling away.  The classroom behind the falling glass held people—normal people—waving to get our attention.

I said, “They need our help.”

Murphy groaned.

Chapter 15

It was time for commands.  “Martin,” I called into the intercom, “take us down, level with the roof.”  I patted Murphy on the shoulder.  “Ok, machine gun boy.  Kill ‘em all.”

Murphy turned to look at me.  “I can clear the roof from up here.  What’s your plan?”

I leaned out the side window to get a full look at the situation.  “I don’t know how desperate those people are, but they broke out that window knowing the noise will give every White inside a woody, not to mention the ones running across the grass.  Those people are desperate.”

“Murphy?” Martin asked.

“I don’t know about this,” said Murphy.

“Look,” I told them, “I’ve been down this road before, at the hospital, we don’t have time to dick around.  Either we get down there and we do it now, or we bail out on these people.  And Murphy,” I pointed, “those might be our friends in that classroom.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Murphy shot back into his mic.  He huffed and yelled over the noise.  “As usual, this is stupid.”

I grinned.  “When has that stopped me?”

“If you’re going in,” said Murphy, “I am too.”

“No way,” I told him.

“Just so you guys know,” Martin interrupted, “we can stay here for an hour, maybe two if we want to push our luck.  But if we go much longer than that, we won’t make it back to Fort Hood.”

“Can’t we just set down by a convenience store and gas up?” I asked, urgency rushing my words.

“No,” said Martin.  “She’ll run on diesel, but we’ll only get about four hours of flight time.  After that, we’re done.  We’ll have to get another Black Hawk.  Regular diesel gums things up.”

“Take us down then,” I ordered again.  “Murphy, you clear the guys off the roof.  I’ll get a couple of rifles, a load of ammo, and as many grenades as I can carry.  I’ll hop off on the roof, run down the stairs, liberally applying my grenades to clear my way.  I need to get down two floors and possibly down a hallway.  If things look too hairy, I’ll turn around and come back to the helicopter.”

“No you won’t,” said Murphy.

“No, I won’t.  You know me too well.”  I patted Murphy’s machine gun.  “I need you here.  This is a lot of firepower.  This will make it work.”

“It won’t do you any good inside the building.”

“I don’t plan to be in there long.”

“Every White in a mile is already comin’ this way.”  Murphy looked at me expecting that argument to sway me.

It didn’t.

Shaking his head, Murphy spoke into the intercom.  “Martin, take us down.”  He looked at me.  “Gear up, buddy, in two minutes, every White on that roof will be dead.  And I’ll probably fuck up most of those homemade solar panel arrays, so don’t cut yourself.”

Martin orbited the building just above the level of the roof.  At that range, the Whites didn’t have a chance.  Murphy opened fire and slaughtered them.  For my part, I had as many full magazines stuffed into my tactical vest as I could fit.  I had an M4 on a strap over my shoulder, my machete in a sheath, a pistol in my holster, a dozen hand grenades tucked in wherever I could put them, and another loaded M4 in my hands.  I wasn’t worried about my aim.  I figured I’d be close enough to anything I was shooting at to be deadly.

As soon as the last of the Whites on the roof fell, Murphy shouted, “Now or never.”

Martin swung the Black Hawk over the roof, came down close, and held it steady.  Murphy nodded at me, but his face was wrinkled with worry.

“Don’t worry mom,” I stretched a big smile.  “I’ll be right back.”  I jumped out of the helicopter and landed on the roof, running toward the stairwell as soon as my boots touched down.

Chapter 16

My adrenaline was coursing.  My heart was pounding.  Shredded Whites were dead or bleeding out all around me.  I knew I might also be dead in the next five minutes but I was back in the shit, and I didn’t care.  I was where I belonged, surrounding myself in a fragile illusion of immortality that expanded with each splash of warm blood around my boots.

I stopped running with my back to a brick wall beside a closed steel door.  Stairs leading down were on the other side.

Best way to proceed?

I’d brought a dozen grenades for a reason.

I took one in hand, flipped off the grenade’s thumb clip, let go of my rifle to hang in its sling, and pulled the grenade’s pin.  With my free hand, I pulled the door open and swung my arm to toss the grenade in.

Wide-mouthed hollers and white-skinned beasts bursting out the door bowled me over, and I fell.

The grenade got away from me.

Whites tumbled on top of me while others rolled off.  I got stepped on, elbowed, and kneed as my anger and urgency flared.  Frenzied Whites tried to get to their feet, spellbound by the sound of helicopter machinery and a chattering machine gun.

My bubble of immortality popped, and I scrambled with only a single purpose: to get through the door and on the other side of the brick wall before my few seconds of grenade fuse time expired.

I rolled, kicked, and crawled, got a hand on the edge of the door and pulled myself through, not giving the slightest thought to shins kicking my face or feet stomping my back as the Whites flowed through the doorway.

I got my torso through and just inside the wall.  I pulled my legs inside and tucked into a ball as the grenade detonated.  Whites’ screams notched up and were suddenly snuffed.  The shockwave punched the air out of my lungs, thumped my skull, and put a deadening ring in my ears.

Damn.  Too close.

But I’m still alive.

Ha!

I shook my head and blinked my eyes, consumed for the moment with regaining my senses and trying to figure out if all my pieces still worked—shoulders, elbows, hands.  So glad to still have hands! Legs, knees, ankles, feet.

I looked around.

Whites outside were groaning.  One in the doorway was sitting up, hands rubbing across a face that was red mush with a messy hole where a mouth used to be.  More Whites were on the landing just inside the open door, dazed and bloody.  They had no way of knowing the blast was coming.  They hadn’t protected themselves behind a brick wall like I’d done.  Tough shit for them.

Time to move.

I got up on wobbly knees, put a hand on my M4 and pointed it in front of me while grabbing a railing to keep my balance.  My head was still spinning but getting rapidly better.  I’d be fine—fine enough.  I had a momentary advantage, and I needed to push it.

The stairs were slippery with blood.  More coated the rail and dripped down the walls.  The grenade’s shrapnel had blown through the open door and done a lot of damage.

At the first landing on the way down, a White was getting to his feet and trying to orient himself.  He looked at me with uncertainty on his face.  I kicked him in the face as I came forward.  His head bounced off the cinderblock wall and he fell.  One less problem to deal with on the way back up.

The next staircase was empty, and I moved faster down that one to the next landing.  That put me one floor toward my goal with another to go.

A White was just coming up from the next landing.  I fired.  Chips of brick sprayed all through the stairwell where my bullets missed—most of them.  The White toppled as blood spewed from a hole in the center of his chest.  At least one of my bullets found its mark.

My ears were ringing again from shooting in the confined space.  I hurried down.  More Whites were in the stairwell, maybe a dozen on the floors below.

I rounded another landing, saw the last stairway clear, and bounded down, stopping by the door.  I paused.  I was on the floor where the people had broken out the window.  That meant there had to be Whites in the hall.  With more Whites coming up the stairs, my time for figuring out my next step was limited, severely so.

Think.  Think.  Sequence.  Be calm.

I took a deep breath, let go of my rifle, removed a couple of hand grenades, one in each hand, flipped the thumb clips, and pulled the pins.

One more breath.

Don’t fuck this one up like the last one.

I flung the door wide and saw twenty or thirty Whites, some nearby, gnawing on the dead, many far down, tearing at a barrier of piled desks and chairs.  Some of them looked at me.

I heaved a grenade toward the barricade.  I tossed another in hopes of getting it to land halfway down the hall as I stepped behind the protection of another brick wall.  The steel door slowly closed as feet came running and howls in the hall swelled.

Two explosions blasted in rapid succession, both dulled by the ringing still in my ears.  I felt them both, but nothing like I’d felt on the roof a minute before.

Whites from downstairs went crazy at the sounds.

I took one more grenade, pulled the pin, and dropped it through the gap between the handrails and ran into the hall.  Eight left.

The floor was slick with blood, and it smelled of cordite and torn intestines.  Whites screamed through a fog of dust.  I leveled my M4 and jogged, firing in the direction of anything that moved.

Halfway to the barriers, the dust grew so thick I could only make out the glow of light coming from windows at the far end of the hall, no detail inside.  I planted my feet, leveled my rifle and emptied the magazine at the hall ahead, hoping my bullets found their home in anything but walls and floors.  I popped the empty magazine out and put a full one in to take its place.

I moved into the cloud of dust, careful with my footing.  Whites were on the floor.  One made a half-hearted grab for my ankle.  I put a bullet in his head.  I shot another for making the mistake of coughing out the blood filling its lungs.

I had plenty of bullets and wasn’t taking chances.

I reached the barricade, the tumble of office furniture crammed into a doorway.  I called, “Anybody in there?”

“Yeah,” someone immediately shouted back.  “You from the helicopter?”

“Who gives a shit where I’m from?” I laughed.  “You need help?”

“Zed?”

Say what? “Fritz?”

“You’re still alive?”

You’re still alive?

That brought an unexpected memory of Steph.  We’d greeted each other that way over countless text messages when she was stuck in the hospital all those months ago.  But fuck wayward memories.  I had urgent shit to tend to.  “We need to hurry this along, Fritz.  Know what I mean?”

The sound of desks tumbling on the other side of the barrier confirmed the people inside were rushing to tear it down.

“We’re about out of ammunition,” Fritz called through the pile.  “A handful of rounds between us.”

“I brought some with.”  Noises from the far end of the hall got my attention, but I couldn’t make out the doorway to the stairs through the settling dust.  “I’ve got M4 magazines along with some grenades.”  I scooted a desk into the center of the hall, kneeled down behind it, and rested an elbow on it as I steadied my aim at where I figured the stairwell door was.  “I brought an extra M4, too.”

The steady slap of bare feet on tile floor echoed up the hall, jogging, and then sprinting.

All I saw was white dust.

I held my fire and kept my weapon pointed down the center of the hall.

The steps drew closer, and more footsteps sounded.

“Oh fuck it.”  I fired in three-round bursts.  Once, twice.

A scream from down the hall told me I hit something.

A white-skinned figure materialized out of the white cloud so close to me that I pulled the trigger as I ducked to my right.

Red holes burst through the White’s chest as he tumbled over the desk and came down on the floor behind me.  I jumped to my feet and stomped him twice in the face.

“You okay?” Fritz shouted.

“Fine,” I told him as I leveled my weapon down the hall.  “We’re running out of time.”

I turned, knelt, positioned my rifle on the desk, and emptied another magazine.

Groans and screams.  No footsteps for the moment.  That wouldn’t last.

I unslung the extra M4 and pulled the magazines out of my vest and laid them on the table.  I wasn’t preparing for a last stand, I was preparing to hand off my weapons and the ammunition.  Nearly anybody would be better with the gun than me.  With proficient, armed men to back me up, I’d do just fine with my machete and pistol.

A moment later, a gap opened up in the barrier and Fritz climbed through, panting heavily from the effort.

I nodded at the magazines on the table.  “First come, first serve.”

Fritz, carrying an M16 already, ejected a magazine, letting it clatter to the floor.  He slammed another into his receiver and tucked a few more into his pockets.  “We weren’t ready for them when they came last night.”

I shrugged.  I’d heard a thousand versions of the story and witnessed enough myself that I didn’t need to be told again.  “You can’t see the stairwell door at the end of the hall, but they’re coming in that way.”

Fritz nodded and raised his weapon.

A woman came through the door with a shotgun in hand.  Her eyes immediately landed on the pile of magazines.  “You got any 12-gauge?”

I shook my head and raised my M4.  “You ever use one of these?”

She looked astonished.

“I can’t hit shit I shoot at,” I told her.  “Have you ever shot—”

She reached out for the weapon.  “I hunt with an AR-15.  Same thing.”

“Take it.”

She took the weapon and gave it a quick look, checking the chamber and the magazine before loading herself up with more ammunition.  She stepped around the desk and brought the weapon to her shoulder.  Her and Fritz covered the hall as more people helped each other through the hole in the barrier.

I drew my pistol and pulled out my machete.

“How many?” I asked.

“Us and those three,” answered Fritz.

“Any more in the building?”

“I don’t think so,” he told me.  “I haven’t heard any fighting from the other floors since before the sun came up.”

“Okay, here’s the plan.  As soon as you guys are ready, we’ll hit the stairs at the end of the hall, get up to the roof, and the helicopter will pick us up.”

Fritz nodded and looked at the woman with my M4.  “Remember the guy I told you about, the one we left out by Caldwell in the middle of the night, not wearing a stitch of clothes? He shows up here with a helicopter.”  Fritz laughed a manic sound.

Fear affects everybody differently.

The woman looked me up and down.  She didn’t seem impressed.  “He the one that bumped your head, Fritz?”

Fritz ran his finger across a bandage on his forehead.  “It’s nothing.”

One of the guys helping the injured woman said, “Ready.”

Fritz gave us all a glance and said, “Follow me.”

The woman with my M4 looked at me and said, “You go.  I’ll take the rear.”

A dozen more dead Whites, a couple of empty magazines, and five minutes later, we were all squeezed into the Black Hawk with all of the weapons and ammunition we’d brought along.  Martin was bitching about the load, but we rose into the air above the building anyway.

I took the unused copilot helmet and passed it to Fritz so that we could speak over the noise of the rotors using the intercom.  I asked, “What’s the story?”

“Now that we know you’re okay,” said Murphy as he put on an enthusiastic face to make a joke of it, “what he wants to know is what happened to Jazz and Grace.  Did they make it?”

Chapter 17

Fritz looked at me, then back at Murphy.  “Like I said inside, they came last night.  Thousands of them.  We got complacent.  We weren’t ready.  We didn’t expect it.”

I leaned in close, though the intercom didn’t get any louder or softer.  “Are you saying you’re the only survivors?”

Fritz pointed down at the building we’d just rescued him from.  It slowly shrank below as the helicopter rose.  “From where we were in the pharmacy school, in the infirmary we set up there, we didn’t have the best view of things.  The veterinary school was northwest across the street, but we were only able to see part of it.  That’s where all the uninfected doctors and professors were working on the vaccine.  We had our people in the structures all around the veterinary buildings, like guard towers, to watch the perimeter and keep the infected off the defenses from the outside.”

Murphy stuck his head out the window and took a long look.  “That’s a lot to defend.”

“We did alright for a long time.”  Fritz leaned against a bulkhead, feeling the weight of everything sink in.  He’d just lost his friends, possibly all of them.  “We were spread too thin to defend against so many at once.  When it started, everyone in the infirmary who could handle a weapon went out to help.  Some of us went up on the roof to shoot at infected down in the street.  Others went downstairs to defend our building.  The pharmacy school was our base of operations.  We lived there.”

“The outposts fell pretty quickly.”  Fritz seemed pained as he worked through his fresh memories.  “As soon as the shooters opened up, the horde focused on where the sound was coming from and just washed over them.  They found the weak spots in the buildings’ defenses.”  Fritz shook his head slowly.  “It happened so fast you wouldn’t believe.”  He looked at me, pleading almost.  “I mean, we’ve held up just fine for months now, and none of the infected even came close to getting through until now.  There were too many.  They were too smart.”

“It was the naked horde that attacked you,” I said, “and just a small part of it.  They’re not like the other infected.”

“No, they’re not,” Fritz agreed.

“Did any of your people in the other outposts survive?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t know,” answered Fritz.  “We stopped hearing concentrated gunfire just after sunrise.  Then just sporadic shots.  To tell you the truth, we got so caught up in trying to protect our own building, then our own floor, then just the infirmary, that we weren’t paying much attention.  Just trying to stay alive, you know.”

I nodded.  We’d all been there.  “Where were Grace and Jazz when it started?”

Fritz shrugged.  He pointed at the woman in the back with my M4.  “Eve, one of our doctors—I guess our only doctor now—kept me in the infirmary.  Grace and Jazz got acclimated and introduced around when they arrived, but I don’t know where they were assigned.”

“What about your scientists in the veterinary building?”

“I don’t know,” answered Fritz.  “I think the infected got in.”

Murphy asked, “Their work, their vaccine?”

Fritz slumped down on the floor.  “We were doing something here.  We were trying to give humanity a chance.”

I turned away.  It was hard watching optimistic Fritz lose his hope.

Chapter 18

We flew high above the veterinary science and surrounding buildings for twenty or thirty minutes looking for signs that more survivors might be down there, but we saw only Whites slowly moving across campus.  The noise of the Black Hawk was drawing them in.

Martin finally asked, “What’s the plan, boss.  Head back to Fort Hood?”

I looked at Murphy.  He frowned and looked out the window.  He was feeling the same guilt I was.  It had been Grace’s choice to follow Fritz to College Station, but I’d brought Fritz and her together.  And what of Jazz, a young girl, tagging along, looking for meaning like anybody her age—my age—does.  The whole situation was another bucket of shit in a sewer pit world.

My hate flared and coaxed my murderous desires to the surface.  Killing things helped when my moods turned dark.

I clenched my jaw and fixed my eyes on a nowhere spot out across the horizon.  Emotions and rationalizations spun through my brain until flecks of clarity coalesced into something that wasn’t a plan—more a guideline—to support a rash choice.  I loosed my tactical vest and slid it off my shoulders.

Surprised by my sudden animation, Murphy asked, “What are you doing?”

I looked at Murphy.  “I can’t fly away without knowing.”

Martin cut in.  “We need to get back and refuel.  We can come back tomorrow.”

“How much longer can we stay?” I asked.

Martin heaved a big sigh.

“Without pushing our luck,” I said.  “What’s the safe amount of time we’ve got?”

“Maybe another fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.”  I looked out the window as I peeled off my shirt.

“Oh shit,” mused Murphy.  “Naked Null Spot.”

I pointed out the window.  “That field over there.  Left of the stadium a bit.  Do you see it?”

“I see it,” Martin confirmed.

Fritz jumped up to look out the window.  “The drill field.”

“Yeah, whatever.”  I went to work on my boots.  People in the back started to look at me like I was crazy.

“What’s going on in that cue ball head?” Murphy asked.  “Because I’m thinking it’s the usual.”

I untied my second boot and glanced up.  “The usual?”

“Stupid.”  A wicked smile found its way onto Murphy’s face.

“Martin,” I said over the intercom.  “I want you to drop me in that field.  Then I want you to hover at like twenty or thirty feet and just stay there.”

“Why?”

I looked at Murphy and then at Fritz as I reached out and patted Murphy’s machine gun.  “You guys get on these.  When the Whites start to come, slaughter them.”

“Just like that?” Fritz asked.

I nodded.  “They’ll come in droves.  With the noise of the helicopter and the noise of the shooting, they’ll come.  From all over campus, but from over by the veterinary school, too.”

“And that’s where you’re planning to go?” Murphy asked.  He knew.

I dropped my pants, leaving myself naked and then sat down to put my boots back on my feet.

“I’m going to scout things out.”

“We don’t have time for that,” said Martin.  “You’ll barely have time to walk over there.  Where am I supposed to pick you up?”

“You’ll pick me up tomorrow,” I said.  “I’ll signal you somehow.  I’ll try to make it to the roof of the pharmacy school where you dropped me today.”

Murphy shook his head.  “Dammit, Zed.”

“What?” I asked.

Murphy drilled me with a hard stare, slowly shaking his head.  He stopped.  “I’m going with.”

“You can’t,” I told him.

“Why?”

I looked down at my bare skin.  “You know why.”

Murphy took off his vest.  “You’re not the only one who can run around naked as a hillbilly at a swimmin’ hole.”

“No rifle,” I told him.

Murphy slipped his hatchet out of his belt and brandished it.  He pulled his knife.

“You sure?” I asked.  “Things can get fucked up.  Besides, you know you’ve bailed me out more than once by showing up with your gun at the right time.”

Murphy slipped his vest off.  “Seems like every damned day to me.”

I laughed grimly.  “Maybe so.”  I turned to Fritz.  “Can one of your people operate the other machine gun?”

Fritz nodded.

“Martin,” I said, “Fritz is a good guy.  I know him from Austin.  We were in some shit together.  And besides, he owes me.  He’ll treat you right.  Take them back to Fort Hood.  Fuel up and stay safe.  We’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“What time?” Martin asked.

“I don’t have a watch.”  I showed him my bare wrist.  “Besides, whatever we plan, the Whites will screw it up anyway.  Let’s shoot for mid-morning.  I’ll be here sun up to noon if I can.  If you don’t find me, come back the next day.”

Martin said, “You’re the boss.”

My first thought was, “Steph’s the boss.”  I’d sarcastically said it so many times it was ingrained.  “Get us over to the drill field.”  I gave Murphy a glance to see how he was coming along.  “By the time we get there, Murphy and me will be ready to jump out.”

Chapter 19

Martin brought the helicopter so close to the grass near the northwest corner of the field I thought he’d landed.  I hopped to the ground and ran.  Murphy came out after me.  The helicopter’s rotors blasted dirt and debris at us as Martin powered the engines to regain his altitude and angle toward the center of the drill field.

With no Whites anywhere near us, Murphy stopped and turned to watch the helicopter.

I looked around behind us—several dozen trees stood off to one side with a building behind.  Another building bordered the drill field on the other side.  I watched the doors and windows for anything that might move.  And I saw it.  Whites inside were looking through the glass.  More Whites were coming out from behind cars and around the corners of buildings, near and far.  As expected, the noise of the helicopter was drawing them in.  My hope was that any Whites who had seen us get out of the Black Hawk had already lost the connection between us and the noisy machine.

“You alright?” I asked.

Murphy nodded.  “First time going undercover.  Wishing I’d kept my rifle.”

“You remember how it worked that time at Camp Mabry, right?”

Murphy didn’t move, didn’t say anything.

“The naked Whites spotted the rifle and came after us.  They damn near caught us.”

“That was some shit.”  Murphy smiled widely and nodded.  “I thought we were dead that day.”

“If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll feel the same way about this little thing in about twenty minutes.”

Murphy took his eyes off the helicopter.  “I hope not.  I think I’m getting tired.”

“What?” I looked around again.  More Whites were coming onto the field, more were howling in the distance.  “Maybe we can talk about this on the way.  I think things are going to get pretty hairy here, pretty quick.”

“Yeah.”  Murphy turned.

I stepped into a comfortable run down the long edge of the field, looking back to make sure Murphy was right behind me.  He took a few long strides and pulled up beside me as we passed a tall, thin clock tower.

I wanted to scold him for not staying in line, literally.  That’s the way the Whites liked to run, at least when they weren’t crazy for fresh blood.

“This the right way?” He asked.

“Yup.”

“Good.  I kinda lost my bearings.”

“It’s cool.  I know where we are.”  We ran among dozens of cars scattered in a parking lot, and I pointed ahead.  “See between those buildings over there, you can see the corner of that sand-colored one? That one’s attached by a walkway to the Pharmacy building we got Fritz from.”

“They’re all sand-colored,” said Murphy.

“Just follow me.”

We crossed a road and ran into a field as hundreds and hundreds of Whites poured out from between the widely spaced buildings in front of us.  They were the ones who’d been lingering around the veterinary science building and the outposts.  I veered toward a collection of maintenance buildings so we wouldn’t find ourselves running right through them.  I didn’t want their follow-the-leader wiring to make them turn around and follow us.  They needed to keep running to their deaths, toward the helicopter’s waiting machine guns.

We came to a stop against a wall near the corner of a building with a view into the maintenance yard.  Along one side stood a rusty, tin hangar-like building with covered bays along one side and open doors facing the yard.  Mounds of dirt, tractors, cars, and other such things seemed spread in no organized way.

The machine guns started to blaze, ripping through hundreds of rounds as the sound of White screams rolled over us.

I pointed catty-corner across the yard.  “If we cut through there, we’ll come out across the street from one of the outposts.”

“And you just want to walk right up to the place looking like the naked Whites who attacked them?”

“I doubt they’ll shoot.”

“Really Sherlock?” Murphy stepped along the wall and took a peek around the corner of the building.  “What makes you think that?”

“All the shooters are dead.  Any smart enough to stay quiet are still alive.”

“Or they’re all just dead,” Murphy argued.

“Which side of this debate do you want? You can’t just be contrary to whatever I say.”

“I think I can.”  Murphy glanced at me.  “You ready?”

I nodded.

He ran to a corner of the rusty tin building and looked down the length of the far wall.

Coming up close behind him, I asked, “Anything?”

“Nothing near.”

Murphy jogged across the yard, looking left and looking right.  We passed through a narrow gap between two maintenance buildings sitting perpendicular to one another.  I followed Murphy through a thick stand of oaks and we came to a stop by a tree trunk thick enough to keep us both hidden from view.  An intersection lay in front of us.  Across the intersection and surrounding parking lots stood the veterinary science buildings.  The first floor of one was fortified with boarded windows and doors, and plenty of two-by-four bracing.  In several places Whites were climbing in and out past boards they’d ripped away from the walls.

“You seeing this?” asked Murphy.

“The Whites in the veterinary science building?”

“Yeah.”  Murphy looked around, as did I.  “I don’t have much hope for the vaccination those guys were working on.”

“Maybe they barricaded inside somewhere.  Like a safe room or something.”

Murphy turned and looked at me.  “Optimism? From you?”

I don’t know why, but Murphy’s snarky remark felt like an attack.  So, I deflected.  “At least, I’m not ‘tired.’“

“What?”

“Back there, after we got out of the helicopter.  You said you were tired.”

Murphy went back to scanning the street.  “Still lots of Whites out there.  We should wait before we cross.”

“What did you mean?”

“I should have kept my underwear.”  Murphy leaned against the tree to rest.  “My balls are cold.”

“They’ll go numb.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I’m sure you can massage them back to health.”  I took a few steps to conceal myself behind another tree and get a view of the area past the building on our left.  “What did you mean about the tired remark? All the craziness wearing you down?”

Murphy didn’t answer.

I gave him a long while before I pursued it.  “Is it this life? All this? Running, chasing, killing? Living from one crisis to the next and barely stopping to take a breath? Is that what you’re tired of?”

Murphy shrugged.  “When I’m in the shit, I dig it.  You know that.”

“No doubt.”  I examined the building directly across the street from us.  It was a one-story structure with a long greenhouse attached to the rear.  If I’d understood Fritz’s description correctly, it was one of the outposts.  Judging by the number of fresh, naked corpses in the grass around it, I was sure.

“Jumping out of the helicopter today,” said Murphy, “and watching it fly off, knowing we were stepping in it again, knowing I had a choice, it felt like a weight coming down on me.”

“You afraid you’re going to die?”

Murphy shook his head.  “It’s not that simple.  I mean, there’s that risk, you know.  But I don’t think about it that way.  I think I’m too stupid to know I’m not immortal.”  He laughed.

“I think I’ve got that same disease.”

“I know you’ve got it.”  Murphy laughed again.  “Hell, you’ve got it so bad, I probably caught it from you.”

“I think you’ve always had it.”

“Yeah,” Murphy answered, absently.

“What is it then?” I asked.  “For real.  What’s bothering you?”

“I think it’s the killing.  I think it’s finally starting to get to me.”

“Killing is living,” I told him.  “It’s the way things are now.”

Chapter 20

The helicopter’s guns fell silent, and the sound of the rotors changed.

Murphy looked back in the direction we’d come.  “They’re leaving.”

I peeked out at the intersection in front of us.  Whites were still in the street, still running in the direction of the mayhem, but not as many as there had been.  I pointed to the one-story outpost across the street.  “I’m thinking we cross over and check that place first.  I mean, it’s right there.”

Murphy nodded without a word.

I cocked my head at the veterinary science building.  “Then we head over there and see what’s up unless you want to check all the outposts first.”

“Don’t care.”  Murphy examined the veterinary science building.  “I don’t have high hopes.  But maybe we’ll find some survivors.  The Whites couldn’t have killed everybody, right?”

I half smiled and didn’t answer.  Of course, the Whites could have killed everybody.  Individually, they were mostly stupid, but collectively they made up a deadly killing machine that seemed always able to surprise with how effective it was at exterminating superior dipshits like me.  Being smarter wasn’t everything.  I stepped out from behind the tree trunk and waved Murphy to follow as I jogged toward the street.

We headed for the far end of one of the greenhouses and saw rows of dead stems in hydroponic troughs through the broken glass panes.  At the far end of the greenhouse, we came to a closed doorframe.  Most of the door’s dirty glass was broken out and lying in our path.  Bloody footprints on the concrete walkways ran through it in both directions.

Murphy elbowed me and nodded down at the footprints, making sure I saw them, making sure I understood what they meant.  Of course, I did.  Naked Whites had been here before us.  They were probably inside.

I led, crunching glass under the soles of my boots and scanning back and forth through the jumble of metal troughs, pots, water hoses, and crunchy leaves, looking for lurking Whites I knew had to be there.  And they always were, sneaky bastards, ready to pounce as soon as I let my guard down.

My machete was up, keen to cleave a skull.  My knife was wrapped tightly in my other hand, eager to split some ribs and rip through a heart.

A third of the way in, I decided I didn’t want to wait to be surprised.  “Hey, dickhead.  If you’re in here, come out.”

“Typical Zed shit,” Murphy groused.  “Let me know next time before you do that.”

Nothing in the greenhouse moved except for the brown leaves rustling when the breeze moved them.  I looked over my shoulder to see Murphy on the walkway behind, hatchet and knife ready.  “You’re in a bitchy mood.”

“I should take the lead.”

“If we had guns, I’d agree.  But this is my thing now.  I’ve had more swinging dick time than anybody.”

“Swinging dick time?” Murphy laughed.  “Is that what you call it when you run around naked with the Whites?”

I turned and smiled, glad to see Murphy lighten up a little.  “Sure.”  I looked over the greenhouse one more time and pointed to the door at the far end of the walkway leading into the building.  “Let’s get inside.  There’s nobody in here.”

I hurried up the length of the narrow walkway.  At the end, at the doorway into the building, the bloody tracks turned into a collage of curdled red.  The Whites had gathered around the door, trying to break it in.  But the door was open, swung outwards from the building, undamaged.

To the right and left, windows opened through the brick wall into the building.  Clearly the greenhouse had been added some time after the small, one-story building had been constructed.  Otherwise, the windows wouldn’t have been there.  It was a deduction that made sense to Detective Zed.

Most of the small square panes on one of the windows were broken out, and the framework for the panes was bent or ripped away.  The bloody footprints and smears on the wall told me that’s the way the Whites had gotten into the building when the door had been closed.  The door was only open because when the Whites made their exit with bellies full of warm, fresh meat, they were able to open the locked door from the inside.  More deductions.

I stepped through the doorway, careful not to swing it either further open or closed.  It was time for sneaking, and a squeaky hinge would not do me any favors.  The hall inside was dim and narrow with institutional, shiny floors, streaked with bloody marks and footprints.  The walls were smudged by the dirty skin of Whites pushing through the hall to get to their prize.

I sniffed.  Fresh shit.

The Whites had gorged themselves and then emptied their bowels on the floor before leaving.  Or not leaving.  They might still be napping inside, too sated to worry about the sound of a helicopter and machine gun fire somewhere across campus.

I proceeded quietly to an intersection at the end of the short hall and looked around the corner.  We were near one end of the building, so the hall leading left was short with only two open doors.  To the right, the corridor extended a ways before it cut left at a ninety-degree angle.  Most of the footprints led that way.  With light glaring through a window to my left, pools of urine glistened.

The infected fucks were here, somewhere.

I nodded left.

Murphy peeked down the short hall, and pointed to himself and then to one of the open doors.  He pointed at me and then to the other door.  Planning meeting concluded.  Proceed to action items.

We moved down the hall, side-by-side, each watching the doorway we’d assigned ourselves.  It only took a few tense seconds.

I peeked inside my assigned office to see nothing but two big wooden desks facing one another with chairs knocked over and papers strewn, phones on the floor, some of the drawers open.  Somebody had put a half-ass effort into ransacking the room before giving up, but no living thing hid inside.  I turned to Murphy.  He was already looking at me, shrugging.  The office he’d checked was also empty.

Time to follow the footprints down the hall in the other direction.

It took a few minutes to check each of the offices along the way.  Some had closed doors we opened to peek inside.  Other doors had been broken off the hinges.  At one office, bullet holes riddled the walls, having ripped through the sheetrock on both sides of the hall.  Inside were the remains of five or six humans.  In the mess, it was hard to tell which were Whites and which were normal.  We spotted only one gore-covered weapon under tattered clothing but plenty of bloody bones.

However many Whites had come into this building, it had been enough to eat all the flesh that came onto the menu.

We continued to the end of the hall, where it made the hard turn to the left.  I stopped and peeked around the corner.  It was the outpost.

Chapter 21

Gouges were torn out of the floor where bullets had ricocheted away.  More holes pierced the walls and ceiling.  The floor was a mess of rotting flesh, and the walls were splattered red.  Looking down the hall, I saw part of a large room that opened up to more carnage.

Windows had been barricaded from the inside, leaving gaps wide enough to fire through.  Now they only served to let in slits of light that illuminated the mess and made it hard to piece together.  The room had been a small library that looked to have been shaken by a giant hand, tumbling bodies, books, and furniture.  Corpses with flesh still on the bones lay broken with clothing half-torn away.  Whites lay dead, many looked untouched by the teeth of their cannibal brothers and sisters.

And the sound.

Breathing.  Chewing.

Live Whites were still in the room, wallowing in the filth, feeding.

I stepped into the hall as Murphy tried to hold me back with a hand on my shoulder.  Clearly he understood what lay at the end of the corridor as surely as I did.  He knew there were no outpost survivors, just as I did.  He saw no point in proceeding further.  There was nothing more to be learned.

He was right.  But I’d already moved on, following a bubbling rage to a new goal.

I saw the shredded clothing of people who’d been doing nothing except risking their lives for a higher purpose, a vaccine, and all that red I saw looked like livid revenge.  I yearned to satisfy it with the feel of tearing cartilage, the sight of splitting white skin and spewing blood, the sound of surprised screams turning into gurgles through ripped throats.  My blade needed to splinter bones.

I needed to kill, as badly as I’d ever needed anything.

I stepped into the library and bellowed a challenge.

The chaotic mess of furnishings seemed to come alive.  One red and white beast pulled itself up to his height—the alpha.  He was going to put me in my place.

“Come on fuckers.”

The White pounced, and I cut him through the neck, half severing it as I sidestepped, jamming my knife into the heart of another White too slow and surprised to understand yet what was going on.

I bounded over an upturned chair and hacked at the base of another’s skull as I slashed a fourth across the face.  Two more long strides put me in the center of the room, spinning and swinging, hacking and stabbing, pushing my deadly fury to frenzy through a haze of blood sprayed from arteries, driven by pumping hearts.

Whites screamed, fought, and fell until they stopped.

I jerked my head back and forth looking for the next foe only to see dead Whites on the floor among others gasping, struggling to move, and whimpering.

The greedy maelstrom in my soul needed more death, it needed to feed.

I looked around the room again, frustrated to be left with no one else to kill.  I screamed.  I was a husk with no purpose.

The loud crunch of a skull caught my attention, and I turned to see Murphy burying his hatchet in the cranium of a White.  The White died instantly and fell to Murphy’s feet, and Murphy stared at me, worry on his face.

I looked myself up and down.  I was splattered with so much red that little of my white skin showed through, but it wasn’t my blood.  It was restitution paid by a dozen sinners, some still dying.

As I stood there, my emptiness turned to guilt and my guilt told me I was a murderer.  It informed me that my victims were just diseased people not significantly unlike me.  It insisted that violence was the solution chosen by simple minds.  But it sounded like the Ogre’s voice in my head punctuating lessons about high-minded choices with bare-knuckled hypocrisy.

And clarity returned.

I’d given the naked fucks what they’d deserved.  They got what they got because of what they’d done.  They were vile monsters, and I was a righteous thunder god wielding a machete of steel justice.  I was Null Spot the Motherfucking Destroyer!

Chapter 22

We left the outpost, and I marched across the street toward the veterinary sciences building with a scowl on my face.  I was dripping in blood, still looking to sate the beast living in my skin.  I didn’t know why my anger was racing.  I don’t know why I was spinning my thoughts into fantasies of single-minded murder and dissatisfying deaths.  I did know that my anger veiled me in an impervious armor that the Whites on the street saw as clearly as I felt.  They veered away, some walking and glancing, others running and pissing down their knees as they went.

When Murphy and me were making our way between the abandoned cars in the parking lot next to the veterinary sciences building with no Whites nearby, Murphy leaned close and muttered, “I don’t like swinging dick time.”

I stopped, stared across the parking lot at the broken-down doors and busted windows on the building that had housed humanity’s hope.  Or maybe just my hope that something could rescue me from what I was becoming.  Because as suited as I was for life in the wild west of white-skinned monsters and mayhem on a genocidal scale, I still had a wispy dream of humanity, happiness, and peace.  I remembered those hugs from my Aunt Nancy.  She gave me a glimpse of a life that wasn’t only about fighting my way to the top of a suffering heap and meting out my internalized pain to the weaklings below.  She made me believe that somewhere love existed.

But fuck that.

Double fuck it doggie-style.

Every time I let hope shine it’s bullshit light into the darkness that thrived in my heart, every time its lies wore me down enough to make me believe, death came and stole my chances away.  Cancer took Aunt Nancy.  Fucking Mark raped and murdered Amber.  I watched helplessly from a hill while Mandi and Russell were slaughtered on the deck of a boat.  I stood by while Jay Booth put a bullet through young Megan’s skull.  That goddamned naked horde, all of those hungry white fuckers buried their teeth into Steph while I feebly struggled to save her.  Every time love raised its ugly head it was followed by painful failure.  And as surely as I was breathing, I knew I’d failed Steph.

I’d fucked that whole situation down to the quick.

Sure, I’d been weak.  Sure, I’d been slow.  But why hadn’t I mustered the strength to fight the pain, to run to the Humvees when that’s what everyone else was doing.  Had I done that, we’d have gotten in and drove away.  We’d be sitting on a hill in desolate West Texas, drinking spring water, eating pecans, and watching sunsets far away from all these fucking monsters.

And I knew that all my hate for the Whites was hate for myself for all my fuckups, one after another after another and another.  The Harpy had been right all along.  I was a worthless little shit, a lingering parasite from a night of back seat mistakes.  The price of a risk taken.  If my dad had only pulled his cock out a moment sooner.  If only she’d finished him with her cold, bony hand instead of letting him plant me in her belly.  If only she’d been brave enough to drive to Laredo, to cross the border and pay a dirty doctor to cut me out and leave me in an alley with the rest of the garbage.

The Harpy was easy to hate.

She mumbled on about him, my dad, when she was blitzed, and sliding slowly out of her chair in the living room for a night of sleeping on the carpet.  She said he was a greasy-haired punk with a movie star smile.  His brothers were all in prison, and he was revving down the fast lane to alcoholism.  Her affection for him then was all wet panties and sinful choices.  Now it was regret barbed with hate.  She despised him for coming into her life, and she loathed him for abandoning her, for leaving her with me.

Leaving?

Chased away.  That was my bet.

The Harpy was a cruel cunt.

I needed to kill something.

Chapter 23

“Dude.”

I looked at Murphy.

“We gonna stand in this parking lot all day?”

I looked around.  I’d gotten lost in all the bullshit in my head, and Murphy had witnessed it.  “I was thinking.”

“About what?”

A lie.  “How to get into that building.”

“You were snorting like an angry little pug.”  Murphy knew I was lying.  “Don’t go space cadet on me.  Stay in the game, dumbass.”

“Yeah.”  I heaved a sigh to evict my wayward thoughts.

“You alright? I mean really, are you okay?”

I glanced around.  No Whites were nearby.  Some were still moving away, looking over their shoulder, getting away from the Null Spot.  They sensed that I was going to detonate.  No White smart enough to like keeping his blood in his veins wanted to be near me.  “Just shit I’m thinking about.”

“We don’t have to do this,” said Murphy.  “We can hole up somewhere.  Get up on the roof in the morning and wait for our ride.”  Murphy looked at the veterinary science building and his face looked old.  He had a hope that had died too.  “It’s probably a waste of time.”  He looked back at the outpost and grimaced.  “You know how these white fuckers are.”

“Sometimes I feel like killing them is all I can do to hold on.”

“That sounds like crazy-talk bullshit.  You overthink things too much.”

It was true.  But it was the hand I’d been dealt.  I breathed deeply of the cold air and looked up at the sky.  The sun shined on my face.  The clouds crawled across the blue and birds played among the branches of the nearby trees.  The wind rustled fragile leaves across the ground.

No matter what Null Spot was up to, no matter the shit I waded in to get through the day, the world moved on.  I needed to roll with it.  I pointed my machete at the veterinary sciences building.  “I’m going in.  I know you feel like you have to come if I go, but you don’t.  You can go back to the pharmacy building.  Wait for me on the third floor in the infirmary.  That’s where I found Fritz and the others yesterday.  I doubt you’ll find anything to eat, but you’ll have a bed and a blanket.  I’ll be there by morning.”

Murphy pointed at the veterinary sciences building too.  “You think I’d leave you to go in there by yourself.”

“Why not?” I asked.  “We both know I’m kinda fucked in the head.”

“You are crazy, but don’t pretend like that’s front page news.  Anybody who spends five minutes with you knows that?”

“Five minutes?” I didn’t believe it.

Murphy stretched one of his wide grins across his face.  “You know what I mean.  Sometimes it takes the stupid ones all day to figure out you’re nuts.”

“All day?” I laughed through a mix of emotions that didn’t know what to feel.

Murphy looked back at the building.  “I’m not worried about going in there.  If too many Whites come at us, I’ll just stand behind you.  I think I’ve maybe been underestimating what a deadly little white ninja you are with your machete.”

I smiled.  “Let’s get in there, then, and see if we’re wasting our time.”

With Murphy beside me, I jogged across the rest of the parking lot and passed by another stand of trees, taking care to step around the carcasses of the dead Whites.  To be spattered in a layer of fresh blood was one thing.  To trip and fall on a half-rotten corpse and come up covered in its gory stench was a pitfall worth avoiding.

We came to stop beside a big pickup truck with the doors swung open that contained the remains of a couple of people who’d died early on in the epidemic.  The look of an old scalp stretched over a skull had a totally different look than that of one recently deceased.  The smell changed with time as well.  Good stuff to know at the end of the world but worthless to me at the moment.

I looked up and down the length of the front wall.  Murphy did too.

Having seen the building from above, I guessed that it had started out as one building and then through the course of separate expansion projects through the decades it looked like five or six buildings merged into one—each large, each distinct.  No attempt had been made to maintain a consistent look from one addition to the next.  That didn’t bode well for how I expected the building to be laid out inside.  It wouldn’t be organized.  It certainly wouldn’t be intuitive.  If anything, it would be like walking a maze.

Well, that was bad for Murphy and me, but it might be a boon for any scientists who’d survived the initial attack.  They’d be able to hide in the labyrinth of hallways and offices where Whites might get lost.

But then again, even a rat was smart enough to find its way to the cheese at the end of a maze.  “Dammit.”

“What?” Murphy looked around, alarmed.

“Nothing.”  I continued to examine the building.  “Just running through pros and cons in my head and getting frustrated.”

“Like I keep tellin’ you man, you think too much when you’re not busy killin’ Whites.”  Murphy pointed.  “Looks like they slapped that plywood over the windows up and down the length of the building.  Probably had windows all along the wall, just like up on the second floor.  Fine choice for keeping out your run-of-the-mill White infestation but not for these naked fuckers.”

Murphy was right about that.  The plywood had been peeled back in half a dozen places.  Whites must have poured into the building from what seemed like every direction.

“I say we just go in right here at the corner.”  Murphy looked to me for confirmation.

A sheet of plywood had nearly a third broken away to reveal a shattered window and a shadowy room beyond.  “Yeah.  That’ll put us at the end of the building.  We can work our way through systematically.”

“Probably we won’t need to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once we’re inside, if anybody’s alive, they’re barricaded somewhere.  My bet is the Whites know where they are, and they’ll be having a fit because they can’t get to ‘em.  We’ll hear it.”

“You’re probably right.”  I jogged over to the window, took a peek inside, and saw an empty classroom.  Using the backside of my blade, I ran it back and forth across the window frame to break away the jagged pieces.  The Whites who’d gone through before me hadn’t done that and bled plenty for the oversight.

Murphy looked around to watch for Whites.

“I’m done.”  I climbed in through the window.  Murphy followed.

We made our way to the door going into the hall, and I swung it open.  One thing was sure, Whites were in the building, but they didn’t seem to be making that riotous, attacking noise, just their usual sounds when they were going about their daily business, searching for food, squabbling over scraps, or destroying anything they thought might have the warm flesh of an uninfected person inside.

Chapter 24

With no clue as to where the scientists might be in the building and no riot of White noise to guide us, Murphy and I settled into the systematic method.  We worked our way down a long hall, looking inside rooms where the Whites preceded us, opening doors when they were closed.  On that first floor of the first building, we found five or six Whites and we sent them to monster Valhalla.  At the end of the corridor, instead of going through an oddly angled passage into the addition next door, we went upstairs and started on the second floor of the first building.  We found more Whites and convinced them to become dead.  The third floor was more of the same.

By the time we were done, we’d killed nearly thirty—slaughtered them in ones, twos, and threes.  It wasn’t defensive, it was straight up extermination.  It wasn’t an adventure.  It was a job, tiring work.

When we felt confident that we’d cleared all the Whites out of the first building, Murphy sat down at a table in what used to be a break area, at the corner of the third floor, with tall windows on two walls, giving us a good view of nearby university buildings and green spaces—brown by then and likely to stay that way until native plants took over.

I walked along a back wall lined with vending machines, swinging the broken doors open, looking for goodies that might have been missed when they’d been ransacked.

“Anything?” Murphy asked.

I shook my head as I shoved aside wrappers and empty cans with the tip of my machete blade.

“Be nice if we had something to eat.”  Murphy put a hand on his lean belly.  “Killing Whites like this sucks.  I know I’m gonna sound like a dick, but its boring.”

“Yeah.”  Having finished my unenthusiastic search of the vending machines, I cross through the upturned tables and chairs, picked one off the floor and sat it at the table across from Murphy.  “Only like five more buildings to go.”

Murphy stared out the window for a minute, watching the campus, and watching Whites wander aimlessly now that the commotion at the drill field had been over for an hour or two.  He chuckled, sat up straight in the chair, and leaned on the table, drilling me with a serious look.

“What?”

“Mister Zane, we need to talk about your quarterly evaluation.”  Murphy busted out in a big laugh.

I laughed too.  We laughed longer than the joke merited, but we needed it.  The day had been tiring and demoralizing.  We’d seen better days.  But we’d seen so many that were worse.

Murphy sat back when his laughter lost its steam.  “You ever think that maybe we should just pack up our shit and head west?”

“To Balmorhea?”

Murphy nodded.  “But I’m afraid when I think about it now.”

“Why?”

Murphy pointed out at the campus.  “Until yesterday, this place was…was…”

“Sanctuary?” I guessed.  “Hope?”

Murphy stared out the window.  “Home for people who thought they were going to live through this.”

He was right about that.  Now nearly all of them were dead, if what we’d seen at the outpost across the street was any indication.  “You’re afraid that maybe Rachel, Dalhover, and the others might not have made it.”

“They probably made it out there,” said Murphy.  “You don’t know my sister when she gets an idea in her head.  She runs people over.”

“I’ll bet.”  I slouched in my chair and let Murphy go at his pace.

He took a bit before he spoke up again.  “Truth is, I’m afraid if we go all the way the hell out to West Texas, we’ll find more of this.”  Murphy pointed out at the campus again.  “One more pot of gold at the end of the rainbow spilled over and full of shit.  Everybody dead.”

“With hope in their hearts,” I said, “thinking they were going to live happily ever after.”

“That’s how every safe place has been so far.”  Murphy seemed sadder than I’d seen him since Mandi died.  “They all turn to shit.”

I didn’t mean to nod, but I did anyway.  The truth of what Murphy was saying overwhelmed any effort I could have put into denying it.

“I think a lot about going out there, but I don’t want to,” said Murphy.  “I think I’d rather not know.  I like it when I can think that they’re all out there sitting on a beach beside the lake, sunning themselves, and thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner.  Like that’s the biggest problem they have to deal with.  I want to think they’re gossiping about the neighbors and being envious because some dude likes some girl and all that shit that used to be important before that shitty virus came and fucked up the whole goddamned world.”

Murphy sat back and stretched a pained smile.  “You’re starting to rub off on me, man, with all your dark-hearted shit.  I spent too much time being afraid they’re all dead and it’s getting too hard to pretend that they aren’t.”

“You want to go out there and see?” I asked, ready to go outside, find a running vehicle, and start the drive.  “I’m in.  Fuck all this shit.  We can do it.  Or get Martin to drop us off.”

“Can’t,” said Murphy.  “It’d be like going to the North Pole when you’re twelve and proving to yourself there’s no Santa even though you already knew there wasn’t one.”

“Because you’d lose hope?”

“Can’t live without hope, man.”  Murphy looked into the distance.  “Can’t do it.”

Chapter 25

The second building was built like a cube with two stairwells at opposite corners and a hallway on each floor that traced a square track around the shape of the building.  Inside rooms and outside rooms all opened on the halls on each floor.  Besides that, going through building two was no different that going through building number one: check a room, kill some Whites, move on.  Things got different on the second floor.  It looked like a battle had been fought.  We didn’t find any living Whites, but the halls were littered with corpses of both infected and normal humans.

Weapons lay on the floor amidst the dead.  Murphy knelt down and checked nearly every weapon we saw but found none that had more than a bullet or two.  The bodies had been stripped of extra magazines.  It looked like Fritz’s people had come to the veterinary science building to protect the scientists from the naked horde.  They fought in the halls until they had nothing left to fight with except their fists.

Fists were nothing against the horde.

I looked up and down the hall at all the dead and reaffirmed another lesson that didn’t stick with most people.  Bullets weren’t much better than fists.

Murphy and I worked our way around the third floor, checking each room, each office, each lab.  We saw the remains of people I thought might be scientists, but it was hard to tell.  And everywhere, Whites were dead, all of them.  There weren’t even any cannibalizing the corpses.

When we made our circuit around the square hall in the square-shaped building and stopped before going up the stairs.  I asked, “What do you think? You ready for another floor?”

“Seems like we’re getting warmer,” said Murphy, “but this place is starting to creep me out.  I don’t see why we’re not finding any more live Whites.  Makes me think they’re all ganging up somewhere to fuck with us.”

“Maybe the scientists killed them.”

“They’re all smart professors and stuff.  Maybe they figured out how to kill all the Whites in this building and save their asses.”  Murphy shrugged.  “Maybe it pays to be smart.”  Murphy made a point of looking at me.  “Doesn’t seem to have helped you, though.”

I feigned offense.  “Fuck you.”

Murphy swung the stairwell door open, and I jogged up the stairs, avoiding the corpses.

At the fourth floor, the double doors leading to the hall were each open, held on each side by the dead on the floor.  The walls were scarred from shrapnel and burns.  Grenades had been put to use.  The gore of shredded bodies on the floor attested to the certainty my guess was right.

We stopped on the landing and saw down a hallway that stretched straight down one side of the building.  The slaughter on this floor was worse than the ones below.  We also saw live Whites, seven or eight of them, with faces buried in the bloody remains on the floor.  One of them looked up at us but went right back to feeding.

I leaned close to Murphy and whispered, “Back to work?”

Murphy put a restraining hand on my shoulder.

“What?”

He pointed first at one body, and then a second laying on the floor in the hall that led off to our left.

“That one’s still bleeding.”  Murphy wagged his finger to emphasize.  “That other one doesn’t look like it’s been dead long.  Look at his mouth.  It’s still drooling.”

I knelt down but stayed inside the stairwell, content for the moment to keep myself somewhat concealed.  “Doesn’t look like a bullet wound.”  I looked up at Murphy for confirmation.

He shook his head.

“I’ll bet it was an alpha White.  Maybe this one got knifed in a squabble over food.  Better yet, maybe one of them turned serial killer and is walking the halls doing our work for us.”

“See, that’s what I mean,” said Murphy.

“What?”

“Sometimes being smart doesn’t do you any good at all.”

I peeked around the corner and saw no movement.

Murphy stayed in the stairwell.  “I got a bad feeling about this one.”

I stepped over to the bleeding White out in the hall, thinking that a closer look at the wound would answer some questions, and thinking that I really should be paying more attention to Murphy.  His intuitions in these matters were seldom wrong.  But I was there, by the body, and nothing bad had happened.  I nudged it none too gently with the tip of my machete, puncturing another wound, and draining more blood out of a body that wasn’t all the way dead yet.

I knelt down, and the sound of something whooshing through the air startled me as I saw a dark streak.

Something thunked.

Murphy shouted, “Shit.”

I rolled away as I fell over, not taking time to understand the threat, just trusting Murphy’s reaction.  Trying to get my balance, I scrambled across the hall and tumbled toward the corner.

In the milliseconds after I pulled myself around the corner, an arrow swished, hit the corner of the wall and ricocheted away just inches from my face.

“What the fuck?” I looked at Murphy.

He was still surprised, but he had dropped to a knee and peeked around the corner.  “Hey!”  he called.  “Stop that.”

I didn’t hear a response, but I did hear the Whites down the hall behind me—the same hall that had been my refuge from the arrows that just flew up the length of the other hall.  It was now a trap.  I jumped to my feet as I raised my machete.

The Whites weren’t running, at least not fast, as they were having trouble finding footing with all the dead and debris on the floor.

I stepped into the first one’s charge, and dealt a mortal wound that didn’t kill him instantly but would prevent him from ever getting off the floor again.  Thank God for all the crap.  It was keeping the Whites from massing and charging me, that and their inherent greed.  They all wanted to have the first bite of warm flesh.  They all wanted to taste hot blood pumping onto their tongues.  I killed the second one, dead before his knees buckled.

Behind me, Murphy was shouting, but I didn’t give a thought to what he was saying or what he was doing.  I saw more Whites coming down the hall toward me and if I didn’t take them all out, I’d be dead.  Either Murphy would handle his end of the problem or he wouldn’t.

That’s just the way it goes.

I sloughed off the fucked-up emotions that had been bothering me all day, calmed myself, and solved my problems, one at a time, clinically, efficiently, letting the Whites do the work with their zealous momentum and greed.  I only had to make sure one of my blades was in the right place, held steady in a firm hand or swung with just enough force to get the job done.

And then it was.

All were dead.  Too soon.

I stood in the hall twenty feet down from the stairwell, unaware I’d even worked my way so far.  Immersed in the Zen of heartless slaughter, I lost track of other things.

It was all I wanted.  All I needed.

“Hey ninja boy.”

I drew in one last breath of demon peace, felt one more moment of warm blood running over my skin, and turned to look at Murphy, who was out of the stairwell, standing in the hall and grinning like a little kid at a birthday party.

“What the fuck, dude?”

He waved me over and pointed up the other hall.

I worked my way over the bodies.

“You’re not gonna believe this.”

I rounded the corner and looked.  Down at the other end of the hall, two Whites stood naked but armed, one with knives in each hand, the other generously tattooed and carrying a bow.  They looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately make the connection as to why.

Murphy punched me in the shoulder.  “Grace and Jazz, that’s them, dumbass.”

My mouth fell open.  “Holy shit.”

“Wow,” said Grace.  “I thought you’d be dead.”

Jazz pulled an arrow back in her bow.  “If you don’t stop looking at me that way, Zed, I’m going to put this arrow right through your pervert eyeball.”

Chapter 26

Awkward is the best word to describe it.  Murphy and I walked to the far end of the hall.  Lots of smiles.  Everybody looking at everybody else’s private parts while pretending not to.  No hugs.

“I’m happy to see you guys made it,” said Murphy.  Mostly he was looking at Jazz.

Grace nodded at me.  “We were out scrounging when the naked ones showed up.  We didn’t get caught in the fight.”

I couldn’t help but look her up and down again.

Grace rolled her eyes and turned to Murphy.  “We figured the best way to help was to take a page from Zed’s playbook and fit in with these naked ones and kill them while they were busy trying to kill everybody else.”

Murphy scanned the hall.  “All of these?”

Jazz shook her head.  “The Aggies did most of this.”

“We didn’t realize the infected were in these buildings with the scientists until it was too late,” said Grace.

“It was too late everywhere.”  Jazz frowned but looked more hurt than angry.

“We checked the outposts,” said Grace.  “They had them set up all around the perimeter of the veterinary science complex.”

“Fritz showed us,” I said.

“Fritz made it?” Jazz asked, perking up.  “Where is he?”

I pointed vaguely northwest.  “We put him and some other people from the infirmary on the helicopter to Fort Hood.”

“Wait.”  Grace stepped toward me, very interested.  “Fort Hood.  The Army is there? Is it a safe zone?”

“It was a first.”  Murphy shook his head.  “The regular Army had it that way.  But you know.  The virus hit them like everybody else.  Then that bunch of yahoos who chased your guys out of the Capitol—the Survivor Army—took over Fort Hood and made it their base.”

Grace’s shoulders slumped.  “I don’t understand.”

“Long story,” I cut in.  “Bottom line, most of the Survivor Army assholes are dead.”

“How?” she asked.

Murphy looked at me.

Grace said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

“These naked Whites got ‘em,” I told her.  Not the whole truth, but not a lie.  “Me and Murphy came across a helicopter pilot while we were scavenging.”

“Wait.”  Grace raised her hands.  “What were you doing in Killeen? We dropped you naked in the middle of the night like seventy miles from there.”

“Like I said.  Long story.”  I looked up and down the halls, thinking more Whites should be coming to find the source of our talking.

Grace saw me looking and pointed toward the end of the hall where Jazz had nearly skewered me with a couple of arrows.  “If you killed the ones down there, then I think this floor is clear.”

“Anyways,” said Murphy.  “We got this dude with a helicopter.  Loaded it up with ammo and guns and came here because, you know, we said we’d meet you here.”  He looked again at the dead on the floor and the happiness he’d been gushing since seeing the girls turned back to the morose mood he’d been in since the helicopter dropped us on the drill field.  “But it looks like we’re too late to do any good.”

I elbowed Murphy.  “Don’t be such a pessimist.  We saved Fritz and those people from the infirmary.  We’re rescuing Grace and Jazz now.”

Jazz laughed harshly.  “We’re doing fine, Sir Galahad.”

“Sorry,” I told her.  “That’s not what I meant.”

Chapter 27

We organized ourselves with Murphy watching the stairs at one corner of the building and Jazz watching the stairs at the opposite corner.  The only other way to get to the fourth floor was to use the elevators, and they didn’t function.  The roofs of the veterinary sciences buildings had been covered with a hodgepodge of solar panels just as the pharmacy building had been, but non-essentials like the elevators had been disconnected from the limited supply of electricity.

Of course, thinking back to my experience in Brackenridge Hospital back in August, the Whites bravely climbed the elevator shafts.  Conclusion: the veterinary sciences building was indefensible.

Grace and I walked a third of the way down a hall that I hadn’t yet seen.  The inside wall of the corridor was lined with glass-faced oaken cabinets, eight feet tall and six feet wide, that looked antique and weighty as well.  I guessed the cabinets had been moved to this much newer building when their original home on campus had been repurposed.  The myriad of taxidermied animals and formaldehyde-preserved specimens that had been in the cabinets were on the floor among the dead.  Most of the stuffed animals had been ripped open, probably by Whites disappointed at what they found inside.

One cabinet was out of place against the opposite side of the passageway.  When we got to it, Grace said, “Help me slide this out of the way.  The stockroom door is behind it.”

“Good idea,” I told her.  “The Whites didn’t know there was a door, so they didn’t move the cabinet and try to break in.”

“Brilliant, Sherlock.”

“Sherlock?” I would have complained about the sarcastic nickname but I was sure I already sounded whiney.

“I heard Murphy say it,” replied Grace.

I sighed, and we both got on one side of the cabinet and pushed.  The cumbersome thing must have weighed four hundred pounds.

The cabinet’s feet screeched on the floor, and Jazz leaned out of her stairwell to hush us with a gesture.

In a voice just loud enough to reach the stairwell door, Grace asked, “Infected?”

Jazz shook her head.  “Just be quiet.”

Grace looked at me, and we put our shoulders back into moving the cabinet.  It screeched again, but exposed the door hidden behind.

Grace stepped away to catch her breath.  She looked me up and down.  “I thought I was going to have to trade you in for Murphy.”

I tried not to pant and reveal what an effort it had been to move the massive oak display case.  “I’m stronger than I look.”

Grace stepped up to the door and knocked gently.  “It’s me.”

The doorknob clicked, and the door swung open.

The room wasn’t as small as I expected, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet with metal shelves around the walls and a row of shelves down the center, filled with jars and bottles of who knew what—specimens, chemicals, and whatnot.  The shelves didn’t leave a lot of space for the men and women squatting on the floor and standing inside.  Some of them had weapons in their hands—a few rifles, a pistol.

One of them, an older man who looked to be a skeleton with a bowed back and bald head, stepped out of the stockroom as he looked at Grace through thick glasses.  “Well?”

“The building is clear,” said Grace, “though more infected can come in downstairs and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

“That’s disheartening,” said the old man.  He looked at me.  “Who’s this? Another white-skinned survivor like you?”

“He’s from Austin,” said Grace.  “We met him and Murphy, also a white-skinned survivor, before we left to come here.”

“They’re the ones you came with?” he asked.  “The ones who you lost along the way?” He smiled, showing old yellow teeth as he looked at me.

I extended a hand to shake.  “Zed Zane.”

“Pleased to meet you.”  He took my hand.  “Dr. Oaks, but I suppose you can call me Melvin if you want.  Mel, if you’re the casual type.”

“Dr. Oaks.”  I smiled though the casual encounter was making me nervous.  Slipping into old-world habits had never done anybody any good.  I looked over my shoulder for Whites who weren’t there, and I cringed when the people from inside came out into the hall, relatively quiet but making entirely too much noise.

“Don’t go too far,” said Grace.  “In case we have to get you back inside.”

“They’re tired,” said Dr. Oaks.  “And they’re frightened.”

“They need to get used to that,” I told him.

“That they do,” said Dr. Oaks.  “Things are changing for the worse again.”

“Yes, they are,” Grace agreed.

Dr. Oaks started walking up the hall, stretching his legs in slow steps.  “I need to get the circulation going.”  He reached over and patted my belly.  “I’m not a lean young man anymore.  Not for about fifty years, I guess.”  He laughed at his joke, and that turned into a series of coughs.  When he got past that, he pointed at the bodies strewn on the floor in front of us.  “It’s going to smell pretty bad in here by this time tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Grace agreed.

Dr. Oaks stopped and looked Grace in the eye.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t thank you.”

Grace shook her head uncomfortably.

“My dear.  Just say, ‘you’re welcome.’”

“You’re welcome.”  She smiled thinly.

“What is the state of things?”

Grace looked down the hall.  “There were no more survivors in the veterinary science building.”  She pointed up and down the corridor.  “You’re it.”

Dr. Oaks frowned and set his jaw purposefully.  “We lost more than thirty of our colleagues.  That’ll be hard to recover from.”  He heaved a sigh into his rattling old lungs, and he frowned.  “It will get worse.”

“Because of the others?” Grace asked.  “Nearly none of the volunteers survived the attack.”

“It may not matter,” he said, in a quiet voice.  “They won’t have much to protect soon anyway.”

“Don’t give up now, Dr. Oaks.”  She patted her chest.  “There are four of us like this.  The infected don’t know what we are, and that gives us a big advantage.”

“It’s not the infected that worries me now,” said Dr. Oaks.

“It’s the infection,” I said, giving away the answer Dr. Oaks was circling around to.

Dr. Oaks nodded.

I looked at Grace.  “Fritz told me these guys were never exposed to the virus.  That’s why they were able to save so many doctors and professors in one place.  It wasn’t a fortuitous number of immune cases, it was good quarantine procedures.”

“Now,” said Dr. Oaks, “quarantine is broken.  We’ve all been exposed.”

Grace slumped against the wall.

Dr. Oaks pointed down the hall at the other academics.  “We may all be goners, we’re just not dead yet.”  He smiled as though there had been some dark humor there to qualify it as a joke.  Maybe he was correct.

“Still,” I said, “we need a plan.  Grace is right, staying here won’t end well.  The Whites will come.  They will get up to this floor.  They will find you in your stockroom.  You can take my word for it or not.  I can’t offer you anything to prove that I know what I’m talking about except to say that I’m alive, so far.”

Dr. Oaks smiled at that.  “Best resume I’ve heard all day.”

I chuckled.  I liked his wry wit.  “If any of you are going to make it, we need to get you someplace safer.”

Grace straightened up again.  “It throws me off when you turn optimistic, Zed.”

“There’s a chance some of you are immune,” I told Dr. Oaks as if I might know more about the disease than him.  “If not, some of you may survive the infection with your brain functions intact.”

“Some.  That’s a gross overestimation.”  Dr. Oaks laughed.  “However, I agree with your intent.”

“I’ve got a suggestion, then.”  I looked at Grace and Dr. Oaks, the apparent man in charge of the academics, for tacit permission to proceed.  Neither objected.  “It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours.  There are four of us.”  I patted myself on the chest for clarity.  I meant the Slow Burns.  “Two of us can stay here to watch things.  Two of us can go out and find a better place to hide.  Something defensible.  Something easily hidden.  Camouflage works better as a defense than nearly anything else with the naked horde.  Hopefully, we’ll find a place where it’s easy to get food and water.  We need somewhere larger than your storeroom because we’ll be there for three or four days.”

“Waiting for the disease to run its course,” said Dr. Oaks.  He looked at me.  “That’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?”

“I am,” I told him.

“Before you take the survivors to your sanctum, right?” he guessed.

“Sanctum?” The oddity of the phrase caught me off guard and I laughed.  “I wouldn’t get all formal.  Safe places don’t tend to last.”

Getting down to more serious questions, Dr. Oaks asked, “What will we do with the ones who the virus doesn’t kill? The ones who don’t recover?”

“You mean the ones who turn into monsters?” Grace asked.

“There’s only one solution.”  I didn’t want to say it, but it needed to be said.  “It sucks, but it’s the only way.  They went through something like this at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin.”  I looked at both of them, as though they might not know the place.  “They restrained the infected ones before they infected—”

“They infected?” Dr. Oaks interrupted.

“It was a fucked up situation,” I told him.  “They had their reasons for doing it that way.  They infected everyone in groups.  They restrained them.  The ones who recovered, they let loose.  The ones who turned symptomatic, they killed.”

“They didn’t wait,” Dr. Oaks asked, “to see if any got better, like you two?”

I shook my head.  “I don’t agree completely with their methods, but I wasn’t there when they started the whole thing.  I didn’t have a say in it.  Not sure it would have made a difference anyway.  Everybody was desperate then and willing to try anything to avoid what looked like the inevitable.”

Dr. Oaks frowned and looked at his wrists as he mused, “Restraints.”

“It may be best,” said Grace.  “It could work.”

“But we need to find a place,” I told them.  “We need to do it quickly.  If your people were exposed, then they’ll start showing symptoms any time.”

“And what if they weren’t all exposed?” Grace asked.  “What if they don’t get exposed until we think they’re immune, and they turn later?”

“We make sure,” said Dr. Oaks.”

I replied, “At Brackenridge they used—”

“All it takes is a big wet kiss,” said Dr. Oaks.  “That’s enough.”

Grace sighed and stepped up to Dr. Oaks and pursed her lips.  “If this is what you’ve decided.”

He pecked her on the lips and laughed.  “I’m sorry.  I haven’t been kissed by a pretty young woman in a long time.”

Grace stepped back and blushed.

“We need to wait until one of us turns feverish,” said Dr. Oaks.  “That person needs to do the kissing.  Like most viruses, it’s not likely to be contagious after the fever subsides.”  Dr. Oaks looked up and down the hall.  “I hope it’s one of the young ladies who gets it first.”

“Okay, then.”  I decided to move things along.  “Me and Grace will head out to scout for a place to hole up.  Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated since you know the campus better than either of us.  Murphy and Jazz will stay here to guard you guys, but you’ll have to get back inside the storeroom, just in case.”

“We can’t,” said Dr. Oaks.

Grace and Dr. Oaks shared a glance.

I was being left out of something.  “What?”

“We need to save what we can of our research.”  Dr. Oaks pointed at Grace.  “She gets motherly when I bring it up.”

I rubbed my eyes as I fought with competing requirements.  “You stay on this floor, you won’t be safe.  If you go into the adjoining buildings, you probably get killed and draw in enough Whites to kill everyone else.”

“No, no,” said Dr. Oaks.  “Most of us work in this building on the top two floors.”

“Get what you can on this floor,” I told him.  “We’ll get the most important stuff off of the third floor when we get back.  Either way, you can’t take anything with you now.  I’d say secure it as best you can,” I glanced at Grace, “some of us will come back after things cool down here and gather everything up.”

Dr. Oaks nodded.  “Food and water.  If we can do something about that.  We don’t have any stored here.  The volunteers protecting us kept us supplied with food.”

Skip a meal! I didn’t say that.  These people had a lot to learn about life in the world nowadays.  “We’ll see if we can find something.”

Grace put a hand on Dr. Oaks arm.  “We’ll find some food.”

“And something we’re not thinking about,” said Dr. Oaks, “if we go somewhere else on campus—”

“When,” I interrupted, “not if.  You can’t stay here.  Everyone will die, probably by this time tomorrow.  It’s that simple.  I’m not exaggerating.  This place is risk-factor central.  Believe me on this point.”

“I do,” said Dr. Oaks, “but how will we cross the campus? The infected will see us, won’t they?” He looked at Grace.  “They’ll come after us, won’t they? We’re not like you two.”

He was right.  My ease at walking among the Whites was turning into a false generalization to all other people, normal people.

“What if we disguise them,” said Grace, “maybe put them in gloves and hoodies? Hide as much skin as possible.”

“The naked ones will see the clothes,” I said, “and come after them.”

“I have an idea,” said Dr. Oaks.  “It might solve both problems at once.”

“Both?” I asked.

He smiled.  “Dinner and disguise, of course.  If you find some food, maybe find some flour as well.”

Chapter 28

I followed Grace across the street toward the four-story pharmacy building.  When we’d started down the stairs from the fourth floor of the veterinary sciences addition, I’d thought I was running the show, but she had a way of slowly taking charge that trumped my anti-authoritarian tendencies.  Or perhaps it was the sight of her naked body that kept me in line.  Sure, she was maybe twenty years older than me.  She had a few wrinkles, some gray hair, but those seemed unimportant with her clothes gone.

We ran through the grass and around to the side of the building, avoiding the dead Whites and live ones grazing on their fallen.  We stepped into a hedge of fat, round bushes standing taller than us despite the extreme weather and loss of irrigation.  Grace stopped, put a finger to her lips, and looked from side to side.

I kept quiet and scanned.  No Whites were in the bushes that I could see.  The nearest live ones were thirty or forty yards away.

Grace leaned in close.  “You need to stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” I didn’t think she’d noticed.

“There are naked infected everywhere,” she huffed.  “I’d have thought you’d be used to it by now.”

Busted.  Why not just go with it? “Sorry.”  I pointed at the Whites across the lawn, naked females were among them.  “Something in my brain clicks off when I see them.  To me, those ones are just monsters.”

“Really?”

Mostly.  I didn’t think it was good to mention the females I’d spooned with that night before I took that combine and ran down a few thousand of them in a cornfield.

“Listen, Zed, you’re cute, but you’re stupid.  I’m not going to make an emotional investment in somebody who’s intent on getting themselves killed.  Okay?”

Emotional?

Honestly, I was only thinking about sex, but the truth I didn’t tell myself was I knew sex would lead to something more, something that I was never good at dealing with even before the world fell apart—emotional attachments.  I was still a newbie in that department, fucking my relationships up at every turn.  I wasn’t an abusive monster like Dan, and I wasn’t a sharp-tongued, screeching cunt like the Harpy.  I had tried to navigate the hormone-charged high school and college years having not had the opportunity to see a healthy relationship at work, no template, so to speak.  That left me with trial and error, which so far hadn’t produced good results.

“Don’t pout.”  Grace smiled and looked me up and down.  “If you were the last guy on earth,” she shrugged and thought it through, “you’d do.  We could find a little house on the prairie and make little pale-skinned babies to repopulate the earth.  I’d stay home and make doilies and biscuits, and you could go out and hunt for buffalo.  It’d be fun.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Be careful what you joke about.  I am just about that last guy on earth.  You might end up with a half dozen toddlers that look just like me.”

Grace shook her head.  “You’ll be dead a long time before that.”

“That’s what everybody says,” I smiled.  “Yet here I am.”

“It defies all logic.”  Grace peeked through the foliage.  “Well, we can’t stand out here in the bushes all day.  We’re not middle-schoolers anymore.”  She pointed down the side of the building.  “There’s a way in over here.  They kept the food stored in one of the rooms on the second floor down at the far end of the building.  They figured if they ever got the service elevator running it would make sense.  You know, they wouldn’t have to carry it as far.”

“They have canned stuff in there?”

“That’s pretty much all there is left to scavenge.  Pretty much.  The infected get most everything else.”

That was true.  It didn’t take much brainpower to figure a box of cereal with a giant picture of Fruit Loops on the front might have something yummy inside.  Then there was the meager effort required to find out.

“They’ve got some of those canvas grocery bags in there,” she said.  “Grab one when we get there.  Don’t overfill it.  You want to be able to run.”

I knew how to handle the loads of things I needed to run with.  I didn’t need Grace telling me.  “Yes, mother.”

“That’s why you never get laid.”  Grace turned and punched me in the arm.  “You always say the wrong thing.”  She hurried through the bushes toward the door.

A little too loudly, I called after her, “Or because most of the girls are dead?” I followed, muttering, “We do have this virus thing going on.”

Chapter 29

Inside, the dead lay on the floor as thick as they were in the veterinary science building.  Plenty of live ones worked on filling their bellies from the corpses.  We didn’t kill any of them.  We were on a different mission than that.  Instead, we went into the stairwell and climbed up to the second floor.  More dead.  Fewer Whites feeding.  A handful down the hall near the other end.

Grace and I headed down the hall to the room that had been dedicated for the pantry.  It was the first classroom on our right.  The feeding Whites barely gave us a glance.  That was hopeful until we neared the pantry door and I heard sounds from within.  Whites were in there, and they sounded pissed.

Nodding to the door, I pointed at the knob, then raised my machete and stood to the side so I could ambush and kill any beast that sprang out when Grace opened it up.

She positioned herself behind the door, gave me a confirming glance and pulled, stepping far out of the way.

The noise from inside didn’t stop, at least not immediately, but after a moment of waiting, I was rewarded.  A White ran out the door, right past me.  I swung my blade at the back of his neck.  He dropped as a second came out the door.  I wasn’t in position to get her with my machete, so I jabbed at her throat with the knife in my left hand and shoved the blade all the way through the back of her neck.  She crumbled, limp, gurgling blood through her breath.

I straightened up and stepped into the pantry.  The last of the Whites—a wiry guy with a full sleeve tattoo on his naked arm—glanced at me and then went back to smashing a gallon-sized can against the floor, holding it up to look at the picture of sliced peaches on the label after every couple of tries.

I motioned Grace to come in.  She followed, closing the door behind her.  I headed straight for the White, deciding to take care of him so he wouldn’t become a distraction while we sifted through the mess to find some groceries.

The White, though, eyed me suspiciously and stopped pounding the can immediately after I started toward him.  By my second step, he was on his feet and moving to the other side of a shelf.

Damn, a skittish one.  Unusual.

I looked back to make sure the door was closed, set my feet, and raised my machete.  “Here, Whitey, Whitey…”

The White looked at me but didn’t move.

“Come here, buddy,” I said.  “I’m going to kill you.”

Still, he didn’t move.

To my left, Grace started to work her way around to the White’s other side.  He got nervous, glancing back and forth between us, and stepping toward the far corner of the room.

Then I stopped.  This was different.  “Can you understand me?”

It looked at me blankly, still glancing between us.

“Hey,” I said.  “Nod your head.  Blink.  Wave your hand.  Say something if you can.  Do you understand me?”

It stepped closer into the corner.

I sighed.  It wasn’t a Smart One.  It wasn’t a Slow Burn.  It wasn’t as smart as Russell had been but it seemed relatively harmless to me.  It didn’t wig out and attack me when I’d spoken.  Killing it didn’t feel right.  “Grace.”

“Yes?” she responded in a soft voice.

“Go open the door again, and stand out of the way.”

“Are you sure that’s how you want to handle this?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s a mistake.”

“Yeah.”  I looked at her.  “I don’t need any more guilt.  Let’s let it go.”

Grace shook her head and stepped quickly to the door.

Once she had it open, I grunted a gorilla sound, raised my machete and charged the White in the corner, doing it slowly enough, and leaving him plenty of room to run along the windows, cross the room, and disappear out the door.  All I heard after that was the sound of his feet running down the hall.

Grace came back into the pantry and closed the door behind.

“Easy enough,” I told her softly.

“We’ll see.”  In the dim moonlight coming in through the windows, I scanned the room.  “You guys had a lot of food in here.”

“They were stocked enough to last for a while.”

“Besides the flour Dr. Oaks asked for? What should we bring back?”

“Anything they can eat right out of the can.”

I asked, “Can’t you eat everything right out of the can?”

Grace looked at me, puzzled.  “I suppose.”  She started searching through the remains of flour, sugar, beans, and rice that had been stacked on a couple of pallets and shredded by the Whites.  “Everything is mixed up.”

“Maybe there’s a bag of flour down in the pile that isn’t open.”

Grace continued to dig.

I found where the canvas grocery bags had fallen to the floor, and I pulled several out and shook them off.  They all had big looped handles, and I slid one up my arm and wrapped the handle over my shoulder.  I moved around, trying the bag on for size.  If I didn’t put too much in the bag, I might be able to carry one over each shoulder and still keep my weapons in hand.  It would make for awkward movement, but I liked the idea better than going out with a bag in one hand rather than a knife.

Grace stopped digging through the mess on the pallets and started looking through the cans and boxes on the floor.

I put a grocery bag on my other shoulder and turned around to face Grace.  “What do you think? Stylish?”

She laughed and put a hand over her mouth to keep the sound in.  “You look like an idiot.”

I grinned.  “But it’s functional, right?” I waved my machete and knife to demonstrate.

“Hey.”

“What?” I tensed.

Grace knelt on the floor, reached down, and lifted a clear plastic jug full of something white.  “Baking powder.  We don’t need the flour.  This will be perfect.”

I stepped closer.  “Is there another one?”

Grace found a second jug.

I tossed her a grocery bag, and she loaded them in.  “You think two will be enough?”

“We can make another trip if we need more.”

It took a few more minutes to get our food loaded up along with our baking powder for dusting the academics in white before taking them out of the veterinary sciences building.  Just before we left, I asked, “Do they have an armory in here?”

Grace pointed down.  “On the first floor.”

“You think we should go down and pick up a couple of guns and some ammo, just in case?”

Grace shook her head, deciding instantly.

“I’m not saying it’ll do any good in the long run,” I explained.  “I was just thinking they might feel—I don’t know—hopeful, having a weapon in hand.”

“I think putting a loaded gun in their hands is a mistake,” she countered.  “They haven’t been out among the infected like you and I have.  We’ve seen enough people learn the hard way that noise draws the infected in.  With the naked horde everywhere, if one of the academics gets nervous and fires, then they’re all dead—all of them—whether they’re hidden in a stockroom, walking across the campus, or in their new hiding place.”

“You’re right,” I sighed.  “Let’s just take what we’ve got.”  I pushed the door open and peeked into the hall.  Nothing but the Whites far down, still eating.  I led the way out and crossed over to the stairwell, opened the door slightly to listen, peek inside, and proceeded.  It was clear as far as I could tell.  Grace followed me silently down the stairs, avoiding the slipperiest spots where the blood was thick and hadn’t yet dried.

At the bottom floor, we paused again at the door that led out of the building.  I pushed it open a little and listened.  No unexpected sounds.  I opened it wide enough to slip through and stepped out with Grace right behind.

She gasped and froze.

My machete was immediately up as my head snapped right, then left, looking for the danger.

She nudged me with her elbow and pointed across the grass.

A line of jogging Whites, twenty or thirty of them, was winding its way toward us.  The first White in the line had a full sleeve tattoo on his left arm, and was looking right at me.

“Motherfucker!”  I pushed Grace back inside.

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

I should have killed that fucker in the pantry.  He was a Smart One.  He was smart enough to play docile and stupid when he saw my machete, and now he’d rounded up some of his motherfucking naked White buddies to come and get us.

Dammit.

“What do you think?” Grace asked, urgently.

I shrugged the grocery bags off my shoulders, and bounded over to tuck them beneath the staircase.  I planned to pick them up later, tattoo-sleeve asshole Smart One or not.  “Leave your stuff there with mine.”  I pointed up the stairs.  “Run.  Back to two.”

Grace shook her head.  “That’s stupid.  They’ll find us.”

“Go.”

I bounded up the stairs after Grace.  At the landing, she wanted to continue up, but I stretched an arm out to stop her.  I whispered, “Go up if you want to.  I’m going to make my stand on two.”

“Not even you can kill them all, Zed.  Not with a knife and a machete.”

“I don’t need to kill them all.  I just need to kill one.”

“What if they don’t come to two? What if they don’t fall into whatever stupid little trap you’re planning?”

“That’s why I want you with me,” I told her.  “I don’t want them to skip over two and find you first.  I know you can’t kill them all, either.”

Grace closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and huffed.  She looked at me with a steely glare.  “You better not fuck this up.”

We ran onto the second floor just as the Whites slammed into the outer door at the bottom of the stairs.

Chapter 30

Across the hall from the commissary, I swung the door open on a room full of supplies that I glanced at too quickly to identify.  Nothing moved.  That was the important thing.  I pointed and told Grace, “Inside.”

Grace resisted.  She wasn’t one to take orders.  She wasn’t one to shirk.  “Whatever you have in mind, we’ll do it together.”

I shoved her through the doorway.  “No time.”

Whites were running up the stairs.  They were in pursuit mode and the Smart One had worked them into a hunting frenzy.

I looked Grace in the eye and said, “Another person won’t help.  Don’t risk yourself for no reason.  But get inside or do exactly what I do or you’ll kill us both.”  I spun around, planning my next move, leaving it up to her to choose.

A white-skinned corpse, one of dozens in the hall, lay just feet away.  I dropped to my knees beside it, sliced its belly open with my knife and tucked my machete beneath its leg.  With my empty hand, I scooped a palm full of blood and splashed it over my head.  I scooped more, drenching my skull and face in dripping red.  I shoved the hand with my knife gripped tight into the gaping wound, burying my fist in the decedent's innards.  The knife punctured the intestine, releasing a fume of stink.  I reached under the leg and grabbed the handle of my machete and lowered my face to the wound to pretend like I was feeding.

The door to the room where I tersely told Grace to hide clicked closed with her inside.  She’d made the right decision.

The door to the stairwell swung open, and the tattooed Smart One ran onto the floor with his troupe of rabid White monkeys in tow.  He sprinted straight for the door to the pantry, grabbed it and swung it open.  The Whites fell over one another pouring into the room, screaming for blood as they did.

When the last of them passed inside, the Smart One held the door wide and stepped around to get a view of the coming mayhem.  His back was toward me.  And why not?  At the moment I was just another cannibal feeding on a dead brother.  He was hunting two loquacious Slow Burns.

I pulled my legs beneath me so I could pounce—the sound of my feet sliding across the messy floor must have seemed odd to the Smart One because he turned to look, confident and slow.

Too bad for him that his earlier skittishness had been an act.  Otherwise, he'd have dodged away from the unexpected sound and might have had a chance.

I jumped as I raised my machete high.

His eyes went wide, and the tattooed arm came up to block my blade.

Silly White.  That never works.

My machete came down with all the force I could bring to bear.

His tattooed forearm separated and spun through the air.  His bald White skull split down through the forehead to the bridge of the nose and blood exploded from the wound.  His body stiffened.  His eyes turned dead glassy, and his mouth froze.  That fucking asshole of a Smart One was dead, and he fell over with my machete jammed in his cranium.

Null Spot, motherfucker!

With his dead hand off the doorknob he'd been holding, the door closed, for the moment, trapping his new posse.  They were busy denting cans with pretty labels and knocking over shelves.  They didn't notice the door.

I stepped on tattoo boy’s face and pressed his head to the floor with my foot as I wrenched my machete free.

I heard a noise behind me, and I swung my blade as I turned, ready to cleave whatever it was sneaking up from behind to do to me what I'd just done to tattoo boy.

Grace's eyes went wide, and she froze in the open door.

My machete and body were carrying too much momentum to stop, so I redirected up, burying my blade in the side of the thick, wooden door above her head.  The loud thunk got the attention of the feeding Whites down the hall.  They all stared.

Grace blinked, caught her breath, and stepped into the hall beside me.  She brandished her knives at the Whites up the corridor, and I guess they decided she was too badass to fuck with.  They went back to eating.

I wrenched my blade out of the door, looked at Grace, and nodded toward the stairwell door.

She ran.  I followed.

We collected our bags at the bottom of the stairs, and exited the building, taking care to stay behind the bushes that had concealed us when we'd first arrived.  We made our way to the end of the building and paused to take a good look around before exposing ourselves.  Of course, we were white-skinned and naked, but carelessness was what got people killed more than anything else.  We were alive because we'd developed good habits for staying that way in a world full of unpredictable predators.

Grace gently grabbed my arm just as I was about to step out of the bushes.

I looked at her and mouthed a silent, "What?” I snapped a look all around me to see what I'd missed.

“Sorry,” she said softly.

“For what?”

“I thought you were trying to be a hero.  I didn’t know you had a plan.”

“I always have a plan.”  It was only half a lie.

She tapped her temple with her finger.  “But you have that hero thing going.  You know that, right?”

I nodded.  Everybody knew that about me.  It was a terminal character flaw I'd managed to live with.  So far.

“I almost ruined it.  I almost got us both killed.”

I stepped closer to the wall of the building and looked over the bushes for listening ears and white skin.  None.  “We haven’t done this kind of thing together enough to know each other.  We don’t have that teamwork thing yet.  You don’t know to trust me fully, yet.  You think I’m a half-cocked whack job.”  I smiled, even though I was starting to wonder how much that last part was pure truth.  “I’m still alive.  I’m good at what I do.  Murphy and me, we’re good at it together because we trust each other.  Like you and Jazz, I know what to expect from him and he knows what to expect from me.”

“But you didn’t bring Murphy with you.”  She looked at me hard, searching for a deeper truth than I was admitting.

Why not put it all on the table? “I think maybe Murphy is coming to the end of what he can deal with.”

“Murphy?” Grace looked across the street to the veterinary science building.  “Murphy seems like he’s adjusted to this better than anybody.”

“Maybe he’s finding his limit.  I don’t know.  He said some things.”

“Like?”

“Stuff.  I’m worried about him now.  I think maybe I’ve dragged him through too much shit.”

Grace laughed.  “Everything isn’t about you, Zed.  We all have to deal with this world whether you’re around to make it worse or not.”

“Worse?” That hurt.  It was bad enough when I thought it.  It was painful when someone else said it.

“Sorry.”  Grace put a hand on my shoulder.  “I didn’t mean to say that.”

I stepped out of the bushes.  “You ready to go?” I jogged toward the street, knowing Grace would follow but not looking back to make sure she did.

Chapter 31

Things had gone well in the veterinary sciences building.  Murphy had to kill a pair of Whites working their way up the stairs.  They’d probably heard the professors making too much noise and were hoping for a meal.  I guess even Whites’ plans tended to go awry.

The academics had emptied the stockroom of most of the boxes, jars, and old, useless junk that it had accumulated through the years.  Instead, they stored what they could of their work and the work of their dead colleagues, notebooks, samples, and whatnot.  Getting those things together in a safe place seemed to be more important to them than their personal safety, though more than half of them had taken the time to scavenge weapons from their dead defenders.  That was a problem.

Everybody got something to eat and drink.  They took care of their personal business and then it was time for the hard part.  Dr. Oaks got everyone’s attention.  He held up one of the jugs of baking powder.  “For this to work, we all need to strip naked and cover ourselves with this.”

Some mumbled.  A few disagreed more loudly.

“Here’s the deal,” I told them in a voice that carried over their unhappy bitching.  “First off, don’t be a prick.  Lots of people died trying to keep you alive.  I know you appreciate it but if you’ve got a better idea, be constructive about it, bring it up, don’t complain pointlessly.”  I looked them over.  “Anything?”

None of the grumblers looked at me.

“Okay.  I don’t know if this is going to work.  Feel free to stay in the storeroom if you want.  The rest of us are leaving.”  I glanced at Murphy and Grace.  Jazz was out of sight somewhere.  But it was clear to the academics who I was talking about.  “Any of you who want to come along can—naked, covered in baking powder.  It’s dark outside.  As long as you don’t speak when you’re out there or do anything to bring attention to yourselves, like carry a gun, you’ll probably be okay.  If you want your gun, stay here.  You’re not coming with us.”

One of the grumblers raised his weapon, not pointed at anyone, but showing it to all of us.  “We can’t even defend ourselves.”

I rolled my eyes.  I didn’t want to get into it again.

“How many bullets do you have in there?” Grace asked him.

“Six.”  He patted the magazine on the rifle.

“How many infected do you think are out there?” she pressed.  “Are you going to kill them all with six bullets?”

Murphy laughed.

“If you shoot,” I told him, “then you’ll all die.  That’s it.  That’s the simple fact.  One shot will bring every White who can hear it down on you.  That’s the way it works out there.  They know the only things that use guns are uninfected people.  The Whites always come when shots are fired, always.  Guns are the absolute last resort.”

“And if they attack us out there?” the grumbler asked.

It’s hard to convince people to change their mind to a proven truth from a strongly held belief.

“If they attack just you,” I said, “or any one or two of us,” I brandished my machete.  “We’ll do what we can.  But we’ll probably just leave you to save the rest.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “It is.  But we don’t get to make the rules anymore.  We live in their world now.  Their rules.  And it sucks.  So if you get behind, if you get separated, if you get attacked, then whisper your prayers to yourself and take one for the team.  If you start hollering for help, the rest of the Whites will come running faster than you can imagine.  You’ll get everyone killed.”

Silence.

I let them stew for a few seconds before I continued.  “I told you, it sucks.  But it’s a take-it-or-leave-it deal.  Accept the rules or stay here.  We’ll leave in five minutes.”

I walked away, not going anywhere, just pretending like I had things to do so I wouldn’t have to entertain any belated questions.  Grace walked up beside me.  Murphy came along behind.

"You come across well in front of people,” she said.  "Sometimes people, even people with PhDs, just want to be told what to do."

"Thanks.”  I was still pissed at her but didn't want to seem like I was pouting.  I looked up at Murphy.  "What do you think?"

He shoved the head of a corpse with his foot—just fidgeting—as he gave the question a thought.  “We need to do something.  We can’t stay here.”

“Not the endorsement I was hoping for.”  I sighed.

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.”  Murphy grinned.

I couldn’t tell if it was a real grin or the fake one.

He said, "It's as good a plan as any.  Hell, better than most.  I never thought about that baking powder thing.  As long as we don't get close to any Whites, I can't see why they'd bother us."

"And we're not going far,” said Grace, looking back at Dr. Oaks, who was talking with someone else.  "He said the food service commissary is down the road three blocks, going away from campus.  Good sized building.  No windows.  Only a few doors.  We could be safe there—safer there than anywhere else we can think of for the moment.”

“Let’s hope so.”  I looked at them both.  “We need to do this single-file and run in one of those stupid helix patterns like they do.  Emphasize that to everyone before we go out the door, okay? We need to sell this to the Whites outside.”

“Will do,” said Murphy.

“Of course,” Grace added.

“I’ll lead,” I told them.  “I’ll keep it slow.  I don’t want to lose Dr. Oaks by jogging too fast.”

“I’m worried about him,” said Grace.  “I don’t know if he can even run.  And that other old guy.”  She pointed.  “If he dropped on the ground and died on the way, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What do you want to do then?” I asked.

“Put the slowest ones at the rear,” she said.

Murphy looked surprised.  “And leave ‘em if they can’t keep up?”

“I’ll stay with them,” she told us.  “We’ll walk if we have to.”

“That’s a bad idea.”  I tried to imagine an alternative.

She looked at Dr. Oaks again, her face concerned.

"Odds are,” I said, "He's going to die anyway.  All of them have been exposed, or they soon will be.  We know where that leads.  Don't risk your life for nothing."

Grace nodded.

I didn’t believe her.  “You stay with the old ones at the rear.  Talk to Jazz before we go.  If she hangs back with you, that’s cool with me.”  I looked at Murphy for agreement.  He nodded.  “Murphy and me will take the rest down the street.”  I turned toward Dr. Oaks.  “Even as slow as he’ll be going, what do you think it’ll take, maybe twenty minutes?”

“If it takes longer than that,” Murphy chuckled, “he might die of old age.”

Grace rolled her eyes.

Chapter 32

We started down the street and just as Grace predicted, Dr. Oaks and the other guy whose name I didn’t know fell immediately behind.  They didn’t even attempt to run.  I guess they knew their limitations.

Or they’d already given up.

That thought angered me, but I put it aside.  I didn't want Grace or Jazz risking their lives for people who'd already decided to let themselves die.  But I had other contrary charges to take care of.

I jogged slowly, making a serpentine path across the parking lot and kept periodic watch over my shoulder to make sure all were doing as told, follow-the-leader.  Whites were all over the place, some heading somewhere, some feeding on a carcass, many settling down inside of abandoned cars, in the buildings, or in the shrubs.  Everybody wanted a warm, dry place to sleep.

As we crossed over a sidewalk and a strip of dead grass, I saw the outpost on the corner where I’d killed the Whites in the library.  That brought back a lot of weird emotions I tried to turn into a memory of victory.  I’d killed a lot of them in that room, single-handed.  But I didn’t feel like Null Spot the Destroyer at the moment.  More like a serial killer.

What did I need to do to get back in a Null Spot state of mind? Null Spot was confident and invincible.  Zed Zane worried too much about shit that didn’t matter.

We passed non-descript little buildings on our right and another parking lot on the left.  I kept my group jogging a slalom down the turn lane in the middle of the road.  Ahead, it looked like the number of Whites thinned.  Not many in the roads, and not many near the buildings along the way.  Or they were there and just lurking in the night shadows, ready to fuck up my evening as soon as I started to think things were going well.

We passed over a crosswalk and past a bus with a wheel up on the curb.  A couple of windows broken out.  No surprise.  We went past a row of greenhouses on the left, and through the glass walls I saw lots of movement.  Nothing came out, though.

I was getting worried.  Something had to go wrong.  Something always did.

And suddenly, there it was, a building with tall concrete walls, and no windows.  Kitchen-style exhaust vents on the roof ensured we’d reached the place Dr. Oaks had described.  I crossed the parking lot with my little band behind, took a look way up the street, and saw Grace with her slow followers still coming.

We entered the building through the front door and spread out into a lobby that contained no Whites.  I stopped at the door and looked back up the street.

Murphy put a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Don’t even think about it.  They made their choice.  You and me can’t go back to help them.  We need to make sure this place is secure.  There might be Whites.  C’mon.”

Chapter 33

Our powder-coated people waited nervously in a hall while Murphy and I started the search.  We were armed, and used to being naked—at least I was.  They weren't.  They were still holding hands over their private parts and looking at the walls and ceiling rather than each other.

Sorry kids.  All the niceties of our old life are luxuries we can’t afford.

Murphy and I checked the front offices.  Easy enough.  A few had been ransacked.  My guess was looters rather than Whites.  The infected were much more vigorous and thorough than normals when they were looking for something to eat.

The industrial kitchen in back was too dark to see anything but the largest of black shapes against a murky background with glints of dull moonlight off stainless steel equipment.  Skylights in the roof let the moonlight in.

“What do you think?” Murphy whispered as we stood in the door.

I shook my head.  The kitchen might have been empty or a hundred Whites might have been sitting inside on the floor.  I stepped out and pushed the door closed.  I bit my lip while I thought about it.  “We don’t have a light.  We can’t run around campus trying to find one.”

Murphy agreed.  “We’ve been lucky so far.  Who knows what happens if we take these knuckleheads back outside.

I crossed the lobby and looked out the front door again.  Grace and Jazz had covered half the distance with the two old professors.

Murphy came up beside me.  “They’ll make it.  What are we gonna do?”

I heaved a labored sigh.  The only solution that came to mind was the unpleasant one.  I crossed the lobby again to the hall that led to the offices, and pointed toward one of the doors off the corridor and told them, "Go in that office.  Close the door.  Be quiet about it.  Oh, and if you hear a bunch of screaming in a minute, shove a desk in front of the door and hope for the best."

“What?” It was the grumbler from earlier.  “You can’t just—”

Murphy stopped him with a raised hand and an angry face.  "We're doing the best we can here, buddy.  Okay? This is a risk for us too, man."

A woman grabbed the grumbler’s arm and tugged him toward the office.  The other powder-coated people filed silently in.

“See if you can find a lighter or something in the desk,” I told them.  Maybe we’d get lucky if the office belonged to a smoker.

Murphy and I crossed the lobby to get back to the kitchen door.  We stopped, and he looked at me, feigning patience.

“You wanna hold the door open or ambush the ones who come out?” I asked.

“If there are a bunch of them in there it won’t matter.”

“Don’t be a pessimist,” I told him.  “You take the door.”

Murphy stepped to one side and put a hand on the knob.  I stood against the wall far enough from the doorway that I’d be able to get a full swing at anybody who came out.  I nodded at Murphy.  Ready.

He nodded back and swung the door open.

I tapped my machete on the doorjamb and waited.

Nothing but the echo of the sound came back to us.

I stepped closer to the door and leaned into the dark opening.  “Dinner time, dipshits.”

I jumped back and raised my blade high.

Nothing.

“We can’t be this lucky,” Murphy whispered.  He turned to face the dark kitchen.  “Come on out of here and I’ll let you eat Zed first.”

No howls.  No bare feet running on the unglazed tile floor.  No kitchen equipment getting knocked around.

“I think it’s empty,” I said.  “Maybe it was too dark for the Whites to want to go inside.”

“Maybe.”

“Go get them.”  I pointed at the closed office door.  “Get them inside the kitchen.”  I went back to the front door and looked out the window and waited.  The girls were almost to the parking lot in front of our new building.

Murphy, still whispering, just in case, herded the academics from the office into the kitchen.  They shuffled around.  They bumped things.  They knocked metal utensils and pans, cursing through whispers when they did.

Still, no White in the building made a noise.  We had to be alone.  Unlikely, but there it was.

With tension building, because I just knew something had to go terribly wrong somewhere, I watched the girls shepherd their charges across the parking lot, up the few steps, and to the front door.

I swung it open, looking from side to side for the mob I expected to ambush me.  They didn’t materialize.

"Thanks,” Dr. Oaks was out of breath, but he grabbed my arm for emphasis.

I pointed to the kitchen door at the back of the lobby.

Jazz asked, “Is everything okay? Are we safe?”

I nodded.  “The place seems empty.”

“Seems?” Grace asked.

“Too dark to tell in the kitchen,” I told her.  “But we checked it best we could.”

“We’re good, then?”

I was almost afraid to say it, like accepting that nothing had gone to shit would be akin to springing the trap on our good fortune.  “Yes.”

Nothing bad happened.  The trap didn’t spring.

I followed them into the kitchen.

Chapter 34

Not an hour after we got settled into the kitchen, one of the professors got the chills and started shivering with loudly chattering teeth.  Everybody whispered among themselves in their little cliques while looking at barely visible black silhouettes of each other.  They were cold, we all were.  They tried to convince each other that the fever hadn’t caught one of their own.  They reassured one another it couldn’t be happening so fast.

It had.  They cultivated their pointless doubts.  I had none.  Soon, they’d all be infected.  The comas would follow, then they’d start to wake, and mercy killings would necessarily follow.

Shiver.  Sizzle.  Coma.  Die.  My recipe for a successful conclusion.

I can be a real asshole in my thoughts.

But I prayed some of them would make it.  They were still humanity’s hope.

Grace and Jazz went into the offices of the lobby for a meticulous search.  A lighter or matches were our need.  Hell, flint and steel would have been terrific if we could have found those.

I sat down on the floor in the lobby, just outside the door to the kitchen, leaning against the wall.  Unless some Whites popped out to surprise us or came to break through the door in the lobby, my part in everything was finished until I went out to meet the helicopter in the morning.

Murphy came out of the blackness of the kitchen and stood in the doorway, leaning on the doorjamb.  “Another sleepless night.”

“Yeah.”  I agreed.

Inside, Dr. Oaks was talking softly to the feverish woman and a couple of others.  He was trying to rally them around the plan we’d all agreed on.  It was time to spread the infection.

Murphy squatted down and in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “If it doesn’t go well for her, she could turn by morning.”

I ran my fingers across the scarred blade laying on my knees.  “Not a good way to go.”

“A bullet would be better,” he said.  “Maybe she’ll last until Martin gets here with the helicopter.”

“What good would it do?” I asked.  “He’s meeting us at the top of the pharmacy building.  How would you get back here with your rifle? Hell, how will we get back here at all? We’ll need to have Martin pick us up and drop us somewhere else on campus.”

“Maybe we do a repeat of yesterday’s performance,” said Murphy.  “Drop on the drilling field.  They had to have reloaded the machine guns, right? There was plenty of that ammo in the other helicopters.”

"I don't see why they wouldn't, but you never know, right?” I looked over at Murphy.  "Landing at Fort Hood won't be much less dangerous than landing here.  And getting rearmed? It’ll be harder for them than us.  We’re Whites.  We can move among the infected.  They can’t.”

“What if they don’t show?” Murphy asked.

I shrugged.  I'd worried about it too.  How trustworthy was Martin?

“Fritz is a good guy,” said Murphy.  “He’s dependable.  I trust him more than Martin.”

“I suppose you’re right.  I guess if they don’t show tomorrow, then we go back to the roof the next day, maybe the day after.”

“After that?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah.”  Murphy sat his hatchet and knife on the floor and rubbed his hands over his face.  “If they don’t come by then, they’re not coming.”

“Anything can happen.  Hell, for all we know, the helicopter sucked a bird into an engine and crashed just over the horizon.”

“You can stop with the sunshine now.”  Murphy sat down.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.  I know how you are.”

“Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”

Murphy looked at the door we’d entered the building through.  “They’re out there.”

“I’ll wake you up if something happens.”

Murphy looked guilty.

"You sleep for an hour or two, and then I'll wake you, and I'll lie down.  Cool?"

Murphy nodded and laid himself on the floor in the doorway.  Why not? It was as good a piece of floor as any.

Chapter 35

The morning was grim.  A dozen powdery people streaked in sweat and smudged from the dirty, cold floor were shivering because the temperature overnight had fallen to near freezing outside and our building didn't hold heat well.  The professors who weren't shivering from the cold were shaking with fever or near comatose, lying motionless except for their breathing.

Some of those would wake later in the day as brain-fried Whites.  We’d have to put them down.

I got off the floor after watching the academics silently suffer, as much from thoughts of what was coming as what they were physically enduring.  Maybe it had been a mistake to take them out of the veterinary science building and infect them.  Maybe we should have stayed—clothed, warm, and waiting for an influx of white-skinned scavengers to kill them all.  And they’d have come.  Too many rotting bodies lay in that building not to draw in the scavengers and their buddies.

Both choices sucked.  Had I wanted to put the effort into thinking of a third or fourth choice it would have been a waste of time.  We were in a world where all options sucked all the time.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and yawned.  A headache was coming.  I was in a black mood.  It was going to be a shitty day.

I thought about the killing, the running, and the hoping.  I didn’t know why I bothered with the hoping.  But still, there was that little something inside that kept telling me that if I just rolled the dice enough times, I’d one day win.

Had that ever happened? Or was every day snake eyes?

I dredged my memories for anything, but came upon images of tragedy and echoes of screams from people I knew, liked, and loved.

What about the people on the silos?

I nodded in response to the questions in my head as I recalled our time there.  Those people were in good shape, considering all that had happened.  They were secure and well fed.  They had a future.  And I hadn’t left them worse than I found them.

Not everything is your fault!

Most of it wasn’t.  I guess.

Most times, it didn’t matter.  Tragedy was on the hunt for all of us.  Nobody had to fuck up to feel its bite.  It just had to be time.  Everybody’s luck ran out eventually.

I noticed Murphy chuckling, and I turned away from the dim kitchen, and I looked through the door into the lobby.  He was leaning against a reception counter talking to Jazz, who was nearby and keeping an eye out through the tinted windows on the other side of the lobby.

“You’re awake?” It was Grace.

“Yeah.”  I turned back into the kitchen to see her sitting against the wall just inside the door.  The room was cast in a dull, gray light coming in through a few dozen skylights.  “This place is huge.”

Grace pointed to a wall on one side of the kitchen.  “Walk-in refrigerators over there.  And a storeroom.  Might be something good inside.”

I wrinkled my nose and shuddered.  “I wouldn’t open the walk-in fridge or freezer.  Everything inside has got to be rotten.”

"You want to check the storeroom with me?"

“I don’t know.”  I looked back out through the windows in the lobby, unable to get a gauge of the brightness of the light through the dark tint.  “What time is it?”

“Early.”  Grace straightened herself up.  “It only just got light outside.  I don’t know.  Maybe a half hour ago.”

“You get any sleep?”

Grace nodded.

“You guys find any matches or a lighter or anything?” That’s when I realized I’d never awakened Murphy after my watch.  I’d never talked to Grace and Jazz when they finished searching the night before.  I didn’t remember going to sleep.  “Holy shit.”

Grace smiled weakly and nodded.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“I just realized,” I said, “I fell asleep.”

“I know.  Jazz and I took turns keeping watch.”

“Shit.”  I sat up straight and rubbed my face again.  I wanted to beat my fists on something.  I’d fallen asleep while it was my turn to stand watch.  I could have gotten all of us killed.

Grace put a hand on my leg.  “Don’t worry about it.  We had it covered.  You’re tired.  It happens.”

Yes.  Sure.  But dammit.  The cost of a mistake is all the blood in your veins and all the blood in your friends’ veins.  I couldn’t afford to fuck up.  Nobody could.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it.”  Grace sat back against the wall and looked around the room.  “Or do.  If that’s your thing.”  She scanned across the wretched professors.  “It’s done.  It’s in the past.  We’re still alive.”

I looked at her.  She wasn't judging, just offering advice, I guess—advice that worked for her.  "Sorry.”  I got up on my feet and offered a hand to Grace.  She accepted the courtesy and stood up beside me.

A phlegm-choked cough came from down the hall.  I tensed and hefted my machete.

“Dr. Oaks,” said Grace.  “He went down there to use the restroom.”

“It was clear?” Dammit.  Another mistake.  I didn’t check the restrooms when we’d arrived.  I didn’t think to tell anyone to.  All the sleep deprivation and skipped meals were catching up with me.

“We checked them last night.”

“Thanks.”  I relaxed and looked back in the kitchen at the storeroom door.  “I’ll tell Murphy and Jazz.  Then let’s check that stockroom.  After that, we need to figure out what we’re going to do about meeting the helicopter.”  I discreetly pointed at the professors.  “And we need to decide what to do about them.”

Chapter 36

It turned out that the storeroom was empty of everything except a case of packing tape, enough boxes of napkins to overflow a pickup, cases of plastic straws, and disposable sporks.  No food.  No water.  But no Whites either.  The good with the bad.

When Grace and I came out of the storeroom, she walked down the length of the wall that held the refrigerator and freezer.  Four metal doors opened into the refrigerated section of the building, each wide enough to roll a pallet through.  Black tracks on the floor, ground into the concrete through years of traffic, showed the paths from each of the loading dock doors on the back of the building to the refrigerator doors and the stockroom.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” she said as she came to a stop, looking one of the refrigerator doors up and down.  “It’s going to stink.”

"Yeah.”  I walked over and stopped behind her, but not too close, hoping the smell of the opening door would diffuse before reaching me.

"But I wonder if they stored bottled water and sodas in here.”  Grace looked at me hopefully.  "Makes sense, right? If this is the commissary for the dining halls on campus, then maybe the dining halls might not have the room to store bottled water on site.  And students would want it cold when they bought it, right?"

"Sure.”  Why not? It made sense, but a hundred other things could make sense too.  "Just open the door.  You don't need to sell me on it.  I need to bounce out of here pretty soon and go wait for the helicopter, but for the next ten minutes, I've got no plans."

“It’s not just the stink.”  Grace turned serious.  “Every door is a risk, right? The walk-in might be full of infected.”

She was right.  I stepped up to a spot on the floor where I could get a look inside before the door was fully open, right in the path of the tsunami of stink that was going to flow out, right where any White inside would come running by.  I raised my blade and looked at Grace.  “Open it just a little at first.  If I don’t see anything, then we’ll open it all the way.”

Grace put a hand on the handle and braced herself to pull the heavy door.  She paused.  “You know what?”

“I’ll know when you tell me.”

“That packing tape in the storeroom.”

“Yeah?” I had no idea where she was going with that.

“We can twist it into ropes.  Not good ropes, but functional enough to…you know…”  She looked over at the infected academics who were starting to spread out in the kitchen, some looking for scraps of food or something to drink.  “Good enough to restrain them before they start to turn.”

“That’s a good idea.”  I nodded at the door.  “Let’s get this done first.”

Grace braced herself again and pulled the handle.

Rotten fruit.  Rotten milk.  Mold.  For those of us who’d become connoisseurs of all the variations of rot, the smells weren’t too hard to distinguish.  No feces or urine smells.  That was good.  No feces meant no Whites.  And the smell was all I had to go on because I saw very little inside, just what the light coming in through the open door exposed.  Back in the depths of the walk-in refrigerator, I only saw pitch black.

Grace looked at me with a question on her face, ready to push the door shut.

I held up a hand for her to wait a moment.

I stepped up and peeked in.  No White was hiding just inside the door.  Good.  “Hey, anybody in here?”

Not a sound came from inside.

“Hey.”  It was my personal protocol.  Ask them at least twice, maybe thrice.  “Anybody?”

Nothing.

“Sounds empty.”  Grace swung the door wide, freeing the stench and letting light inside.

We stood for a few moments, staring into the dark, both of us reluctant to venture in.

One of the nearby academics gagged.  I guess life sequestered in their research facility hadn’t forced them to develop a resistance to the overpowering stenches of the new world.  Oh well.  It was likely to be a short-lived problem for them.

“You ready?” Grace asked.

I motioned for her to go first.  “I’m a gentleman.”

At first, the floor was dry and mostly clear.  The walk-in had gotten little attention during the looting.  I guess the looters knew that they wouldn't be able to preserve anything taken that needed refrigeration.

The walk-in was pretty large, maybe half the size of a tennis court, with rows of shelves and lines painted on the floor to mark the spaces where pallets needed to be parked.  It was the pallets of dairy products and the pallets of vegetables that proved problematic.  The cartons of milk had rotted and burst.  The tomatoes had decayed and released fetid liquids into the boxes that held them.  The saturated boxes collapsed, leaving a pallet-sized, misshapen mound covered in blackish-green mold with a river of ooze flowing across the floor toward a drain.  The dairy pallets had formed their own stinking, slippery river.

Grace didn’t comment on the smell once we got inside.  She was all business, methodical, scanning the shelves, top to bottom, one by one, looking for anything that might have survived.

I walked along a row of pallets, trying to read the labels on boxes in the dim light.  I came to one containing plastic-wrapped flats of plastic bottles, all clear except for the labeling.  Bottled water.  Literally a ton of it.  “There is a God.”

Chapter 37

We needed to divvy up again.  Some of us had to stay with the infected academics, some of us had to meet the helicopter.  Jazz wanted to stay.  Murphy wanted to stay with Jazz but was reluctant to remain with the professors.  He knew what was coming—we all did.  Nevertheless, there were no hunky-dory choices in our daily planner.  No surprise.

Jazz remained.  So, Murphy stayed.  The scientists got sicker.  Grace and I left the commissary kitchen before the morning got too late and before the dirty work started.  And it was going to start.

In the time between when I awoke and when Grace and I were preparing to leave, all but two of the formerly healthy professors had turned feverish.  Dr. Oaks was among them.  Another anti-surprise.  I figured some of them might turn before lunch.  Others before sundown.  For nearly all, the disease would run its course within the next forty-eight hours, and we'd be lucky if any of them survived.

Grace and I left the building and walked up the street into a brisk northerly wind.  I was armed with my machete and knife, of course, along with a couple of empty grocery bags over my shoulder.  Not a lot of Whites were out.  The weather was keeping them in.  It was not pleasant, even with attenuated sensations of pain.  By the time we were halfway to the pharmacy building, we started to jog, both to warm up and to get us out of the cold a little faster.

Just as we’d done the night before, we slipped behind the bushes and looked back out to see if any Whites were following.  We then made our way around the building and into the stairwell.  On the way to the top floor, we stopped on three to scrounge some blankets from one of the classrooms that until just a few days ago was being used as a barrack.  Grace grabbed a few pillows as well.

When we reached the roof of the pharmacy building, we decided not to sit outside while waiting.  The wind was blowing too hard so high up, and we figured the chill would lead to hypothermia.  So, after dragging White bodies out of the way, we bundled on the landing at the top of the stairs just inside the door that opened to the roof.

All we needed to do then was wait and listen for the approaching helicopter.  That, and periodically check outside just in case the noise of the rotors got lost in the wind.

“What’s the plan then?” Grace asked as we each sat against a wall, looking at one another.

The nice thing about not being tied to others was that nobody expected you to share with them plans that you know weren’t going to work out.  But I wasn’t alone.  “I have some thoughts.”

“How about the helicopter?” she asked.  “What do we do when they get here? Obviously, we can't all go.  Or is that what you're thinking?"

I laughed—but not too loudly—and then peeked down the stairwell.  I hadn’t heard one of the doors open down below since we settled in.  Still, Whites could be sneaky when they wanted to be.  “Where would we go?” I asked.  “Back to Fort Hood? It’s not safe there either.”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

"We need to check in with Martin and Fritz,” I said.  "When the helicopter gets here, it'll come down to the roof, we'll hop on.  Martin can fly around campus or whatever while we talk.  My vote is that we have them drop us off at the drill field like they did yesterday with Murphy and me, hover for a bit after, and shoot as many Whites as are dumb enough to come see what all the noise is about."

“The field might be full of the infected feeding on the dead from yesterday,” said Grace.

“I don’t care,” I told her.  “Martin can drop us anywhere on campus.  Just so long as we don’t have to go too far to get back to the commissary.”

Grace pointed at my grocery bags.  “And those?”

“Guns.  Ammunition.  Grenades.”  I thought for a second whether I could figure a way to sneak Murphy’s M4 but knew I couldn’t conceal it.  “The Whites let us get away with carrying around these bags yesterday.”

“Then what?” she asked.

“Well these are just my ideas,” I said.  “I don’t know what everybody wants to do.  You know?”

She shook her head and looked at me like a slow high school student.  “Are you purposefully avoiding the responsibility or do you truly not get that everybody looks to you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You act like you know what you’re doing.  You always have an answer.”  Grace’s face soured.  “That appeals to people.”

“I’m appealing?”

"No,” Grace told me.  "You're charismatic and self-centered, and you think you're always right.  You're no Abraham Lincoln if you think that's what I'm saying, but you're the best we've got at the moment."

My mouth opened up to retort, but I got lost between the compliment and the insult and came up with nothing.

“The point is, Zed, they’ll do whatever you tell them.  That’s it.”

“What about you? What about Fritz?”

“She shook her head.  Maybe after you get killed.  I’m probably the next choice.  I don’t mind being in charge.  I’m used to it.  I don’t have the kind of presence you have, though.”

"You mean I'm a two-year-old who demands everybody's attention and has to have things my way.  That's what you're saying, right?"

Grace shook her head.  "You can take it that way if you need to but I'd say you're more like twelve or thirteen.  That doesn't matter, though.  You keep getting yourself into bad situations, and you come out fine.  That means something to people."

I sighed and thought about sulking, but chose instead to open the door to check on the helicopter.

“What about after we get the guns and are dropped back off?” Grace asked.

“I think we tell Martin to fly back to Fort Hood and to come back in two days to pick us up.”

“As a first step,” said Grace, “that sounds good.  We’ll know by then how many of the professors make it.  You think that’s enough time?”

I nodded.  “Do you?”

“Maybe a few of the professors will make it,” said Grace, more to herself than to me.  “I’m with you so far.  Good decisions.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s the petulance again,” Grace told me.  “Learn to take others’ opinions at face value, Zed.  You don’t need to wrap everything in sarcasm to keep your feelings protected.”

“Jesus, were you a psychologist too? Or do you like fucking with people.”

“I was a guidance counselor for a long time.  I’ve dealt with lots of kids with problems.  Some talented, most not.  Sorry if I sound too much like—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m trying to help,” said Grace.  “I’m on the team.  Let me help.  Or don’t, it’s up to you.”

“That’s not what I want.”  I heaved a dramatic sigh.  “I’m sorry.  I appreciate your input.  Half the time—hell most of the time—I’m just guessing and hoping things work out.  I don’t understand why I’m even alive.”

“It’s called intuition, Zed.  You’ve got good instincts for this life.  Learn to trust yourself.”

“I will.”

“You frowned when you said that.  Why?”

I looked down the stairs for no reason except to turn away.  "Maybe I do have good instincts for this life, but I don't know anymore if keeping all this up is worth it."

“What do you mean?”

“Running around, trying to do…whatever I’m trying to do half the time.  It seems like I keep running after a goal that keeps moving.”

“Chasing a carrot?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s just life,” she told me.  “It was like that before the virus.  It’s like that now.”

“But the stakes are different now.”

“Sure,” said Grace, “but what do we do if we don’t keep moving? What’s the alternative?”

“The next hope, I guess.”

“And what’s that?”

It took a minute for me to dredge through all the memories of all the bad choices and ugly images until I came to the last hopeful goal I’d believed in.  “I think we need to go to Balmorhea.”

Grace was puzzled.  “What’s there?”

I sat up straight and told her about Dalhover and Rachel and the others.  I told her why I thought it would be safe.  I told her I thought Murphy was hitting his limit.  He needed some downtime.

“What about you?” Grace asked.  “You and Murphy have been through the same things.  Are you at your limit? After we get to Balmorhea, are you going to stay?”

Damn, she was insightful.  “Sometimes I want to.”

“But?”

“I don’t know if I can.”  I looked uncomfortably down the empty stairs again, at the bodies of the Whites I’d killed the day before.  “I don’t know if I’m wired for happily ever after.  I don’t know if I can sit in the middle of nowhere tending my pecan orchard and watching sunsets for the rest of my life.”

“After all this,” Grace laughed, “that sounds pretty good to me.”

“Sometimes it sounds pretty good to me, too.”

Grace froze.

“What?” I had my machete and knife in hand.  I jumped to my feet, ready.

“I think I heard the helicopter.”

"Good.”  I opened the door, and we went outside to see Martin's Black Hawk coming toward us from the west.

Chapter 38

After I stepped out of the door to meet the helicopter that morning, I spent the next two days wondering if I'd somehow popped through a portal into a world where nearly everything went as expected—for better or worse—and the only surprises were innocuous.  It was safe, and it was boring.

It started with the helicopter’s arrival.  Martin piloted it down to the roof and picked up Grace and me.  We weren’t attacked.  The Black Hawk didn’t crash.  No Whites showed up, pushing us to board in a hazardous hurry.  Nobody shot anybody.  The only surprise—innocuous—had to do with the number of occupants in the helicopter when Grace and I got in: only Martin, Fritz, and Eve, the doctor who seemed to have an affinity for firearms, especially the machine gun mounted in the door behind Martin’s seat.  The other people we’d rescued the day before had opted to stay in Martin’s hideout at Fort Hood.  Safe and boring.

I explained the plan to Martin and his passengers—we’d infected the professors, we were going to babysit them for two days hoping a few survived, then Martin would come back with the Black Hawk and ferry us all out to Balmorhea for a deserved dose of happily ever after.  And maybe one day the professors would develop their vaccine.  Except for the part about exterminating the professors who turned into crazy Whites, it was a happy-ass plan.

Fritz and Eve were in.  Martin was enamored with the idea of a place where he'd not have to worry about running to save his life—maybe I'd oversold the positive qualities of Balmorhea.  Martin's only reservation was that once there, we were stuck, or, at least, the helicopter would be stuck.  After refueling at Fort Hood before the trip to pick us up, a hundred mile hop to College Station followed by a five-hundred-mile flight west across the wide part of Texas—or only part of the wide part—would leave the Black Hawk with enough fuel for only another hundred miles of flying.

We talked, not pointlessly, but near so, about loading one of the huge fuel trucks at Fort Hood with J8—the Black Hawk fuel—and driving it across Texas and keeping it in Balmorhea.  Then we'd be able to use the Black Hawk for whatever we needed.  That was a tempting idea, but it was something that needed to be done another day.  Maybe six months or a year in the future, after more of the Whites had cannibalized themselves or died of natural causes.  Then a fuel run to Fort Hood might work.

At the end of our discussion, Martin dropped Grace and me in a field not too far from the campus commissary.  Fritz and Eve spent an hour shooting nearby Whites and then the helicopter flew away once again.

Later that day, after Grace and I returned to the commissary kitchen, Dr. Oaks awoke from his fever.  He was feeble but anxious to feed on warm flesh.  He was a brain-fried White.  Jazz killed him just like she'd killed other Whites, without emotion or hesitation.

Through the night and into the next day we killed them one by one when their fevers settled down to whatever their permanent temperature was going to be and they came out of their comas.  That was the expected outcome.

The pleasant surprise was our plan to hole up in the commissary kitchen worked.  None of the naked horde ever attempted to enter the building.  Maybe the vast numbers of their dead all over campus kept their bellies full.  Maybe it was the cold weather keeping them indoors.

An Indian grad student named Javendra awoke just before sundown on the second day.  Grace stayed close by his side, ready with her knife.  It was her turn to do the deed.  I squatted in front of him, getting his attention, urging him to say something intelligible.  To everyone’s pleasant surprise, he looked at me and said, “Dude, may I please have some water?” He wasn’t a Slow Burn like us, but he was a survivor with normal skin, and perhaps, a normal mind.

The last of them, a woman, couldn’t handle the fever and died in her sleep.

Out of the forty-some professors, grad students, and assistants working on the vaccine, most had been slaughtered when the Whites breached their building.  Of the remaining dozen, one survived, and he wasn't a medical doctor.  He was a post-doc veterinary student who'd been doing work on anthrax before the virus hit.

After our brutal process to weed out the Whites, he was the residue on the bottom of the glass after the rest of our hope evaporated.

Better than nothing? Who’s to say? Time will tell.  We’ll see.  Fingers crossed.  Hope for the best.

Yeah, that’s what it felt like.  Clichés to plug into the gaps where I wasn’t able to rationalize a way to feel good about the mess.  I decided to tell myself that every doctor, professor, and researcher had died and leave it at that.  Nothing against Javendra, he just didn’t inspire much confidence.

If one day way out in desolate West Texas he finds a way—with no support, no equipment, no reference material, and no samples—to surprise everybody by suddenly revealing he'd bloomed as the Isaac Newton of virology and that he'd formulated the elusive vaccine, I'd be happily surprised then.

In the meantime, I’d settled for being happy we’d stayed safe for two straight days.

The next morning, the five of us—Grace, Jazz, Murphy, Javendra, and me—left the commissary and marched to the pharmacy building.  We let ourselves in the usual way and climbed the stairs to the roof where we waited just inside the door at the top of the stairwell.

I was thinking of Balmorhea, thinking it’d be nice to see gruff Dalhover again.  And as I tried to recall all the other names on the list of people I wanted to see, it occurred to me that everybody else I knew from back in the first few weeks of the outbreak was dead.

Chapter 39

When the helicopter descended, close enough to the roof for all of us to climb in, I was immediately pissed.  Martin was flying.  Fritz and Eve were on the door guns.  A few boxes of supplies were loaded in the rear, but the other passengers were missing.  Had I not been clear in my instructions? Did they not realize a trip back to Killeen might add enough miles to put us in jeopardy on the flight to Balmorhea?

Or was Killeen on our flight path? Maybe I was overreacting.  Events had been cruising along with no major surprises for two days.  Maybe I was already spoiled.

As the Black Hawk ascended with all of us on board, I got on the intercom and asked, “Where is everybody?”

“Gone,” Martin answered flatly.

I was sitting in a jump seat facing forward beside Fritz, so I bumped him on the shoulder and asked, “What does that mean? Did they get killed?”

“Don’t know.”  Fritz gave me his attention now that we were high enough to be out of danger from Whites below.  “We couldn’t find them.”

“They were in Martin’s hideout, right?”

“Of course,” Martin told me.

“When we got back after seeing you two days ago,” said Fritz, “they were gone.”

“Whites didn’t get them?” I asked.  It was a universal cause for missing companions.

Fritz shook his head.  “Everything was in its place.  No blood on the floor.  No bodies.”

“Did they say anything when you left that day?” I was sure an answer had to be right there under the surface.

“Not a word,” answered Fritz.  “Nothing out of the ordinary.  We were as surprised as you.”

“Did you look for them?”

“Of course.”  It was Eve who answered.  She was getting irritated with my questioning.

“We looked,” Fritz told me, “for two days.”  He shook his head and shrugged.  “Either they ran off, or, I don’t know.  They’re just gone.”

More dead.

“Are there still a lot of the infected at Fort Hood?” I asked.

“Most of ‘em cleared out,” said Martin.  “Looked that way to me.”

Fritz confirmed.  “Plenty of them still around, but most of them disappeared along with our friends by the time we got back.”

I sat down and shook my head.  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nope,” said Fritz.  “It frustrated us, too.  We’ve been dealing with this for two days.  We looked everywhere.  We flew over the base a few times.  Nothing.  Maybe they got tired of trying to save the world and decided to save themselves.”  He looked into the back, and his eyes settled on Javendra.  “Is he the only one who made it?”

“The odds weren’t in favor of even one surviving,” I told him.  “I guess we’re lucky.”

Fritz smiled grimly.  “Lucky.  Yeah.”

Martin cut in, “We done with that, then?”

“I suppose so.”  I didn’t have any more questions and apparently there weren’t any more answers.  In the end, it was curiosity driving my questions more than anything.  I had no attachment to the missing people.  I didn’t even know their names.  “What’s on your mind?”

“I had an idea about our fuel dilemma,” said Martin.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“San Angelo,” Martin went on.  “It’s a little over halfway to Balmorhea and a little out of the way.”

“How far out of the way?” I asked.  “And why are we talking about San Angelo?”

“It might add thirty or forty miles to the trip,” he said.  “Goodfellow Air Force Base is there.  If we stop, and things look safe, maybe we can top off our fuel tanks.  Then when we land at Balmorhea, we’ll have six hours of fuel left.  Plenty to use the helicopter if we need it.  Plenty to get back and forth to Goodfellow to fill up.”

Good news.  Not counting the missing three or all of the dead professors, the last few days had given us a long string of wins.  Maybe things were starting to go our way.  “Sounds good to me.”

Chapter 40

College Station disappeared behind us as Martin flew the Black Hawk to an altitude he felt comfortable cruising at.  Those of us who were naked sorted out our clothes and got dressed.  Mine and Murphy’s were on the helicopter from when we’d stripped down a few days ago.  The others got what Fritz and Eve guessed would fit, mostly military gear.  I had to admit, I was disappointed when Grace got dressed, and Jazz draped clothing over her collection of tattoos.

At first, everyone talked, sharing stories of the past few days, asking if we’d come across any other survivors of the attack on campus.  Of course, we hadn’t.  Everybody knew we hadn’t.  But sometimes words helped ease frayed emotions no matter what’s being talked about.  Eventually, the conversation died down, and everyone settled in for the trip, parked in their seats, heads bobbing every time the helicopter bounced through some turbulence, eyes closed, or staring at the passing landscape below.

I was in the staring club, watching the ground change as it moved past.  First, forests of oak and cedar, or tall pines.  Formerly cultivated fields—mostly brown, some bare with smatterings of weeds—patterned acres and acres between thin gray roads.  Little towns and farmhouses came into view and went past beneath us perhaps never to be seen from the air again.

When we neared I-35, the main north-south highway running up from San Antonio to Austin, to Dallas, and on to Oklahoma, the land below turned mostly to farms and field.  Whites moved around below, some in small groups, some in herds, but I didn’t spot any significant remnant of the naked horde.  That worried me.

I didn’t see a single moving vehicle, not on the highways, not in the towns, and not on the country roads.  We saw plenty of destruction though, of course.  It was surprising how many houses and whole neighborhoods had burned.  Fire had blackened wide swaths of farmland as well, but all that barren ground was starting to turn green with native plants that thrived in Texas’ mild winters.

Eventually, most signs of civilization disappeared behind us, and though I saw thin roads, barns, and lonely houses, each seemingly miles from their neighbors.  The ground below turned hilly and rocky.  The pine forests didn’t grow so far west, and the number of oaks declined the farther we flew.  Only scrubby forests of cedar, huisache, and mesquite were left.

Murphy leaned close to me, and over the noise asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.  I’m just staring.”

“What are we gonna do if we get out to Balmorhea and nobody’s there?”

I looked at Murphy, thinking he was asking if I thought Rachel was alive.  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Murphy shook his head and turned to look at the ground slowly passing below.  “There’s a smart person word for that.”

“What?”

“I’m not a kid whose goldfish died,” he told me.

He was right.  I’d been trying too hard to wrap an ugly possibility in syrupy sweetness.  “Sorry.”

Murphy raised a single finger.  “Maybe they made it to Balmorhea, and they’re all fine.”  He raised a second finger.  “They made it, but now they’re dead.”  He raised a third finger.  “Or we get there and find out they never made it.  No sign of ‘em.”

I didn’t say anything, not sure where Murphy was going.

Murphy stared out the window as he said, “Seems to me the most unlikely situation is them being there and being alive.”

I opened my mouth to disagree, but Murphy raised a big palm to hush me.

“Don’t.”  He drilled me with a hard stare.  “We’ve been through too much together.  Okay?”

I searched around for the right way to voice my thoughts.  It took a minute, but it all distilled down to me confronting a truth I’d been avoiding.  They were probably all dead.  “Back when they left to go out there, I truly thought it was the safest thing and I—”

“I know,” said Murphy.  “I thought the same thing, they’d get there.  They might have some trouble along the way, but they were driving armored Humvees with Fifties mounted on the roofs.  They had a ton of supplies in that trailer.”  Murphy pointed a finger across the landscape below us.  “All they needed to do was get out of town.  Hell from where they left, there wasn’t a whole lot of town to get out of, just mansions on hills and condos by the lake.  Once they got out this way,” Murphy looked down for emphasis, “there’s just not a lot out here.  Trees.  Hills.  Dirt.  But not a lot of people to turn into Whites.  They could have made it.  They should have made it.”

“But,” I said.

“But.”  Murphy nodded, stopped, and nodded again.  “But you see how things go.  Everybody’s plans go to shit.  Everybody dies.”

“Not everybody.”

“Everybody.”

“We’re still alive.”  I thumbed at the others in the helicopter.  “Jazz.  Grace.  Fritz.  Eve.  Hell, even Martin is still alive, and he couldn’t outrun a legless frog.”

Shaking his head and looking disappointed, Murphy said, “Maybe we’re the all-stars of the apocalypse.  Maybe we’re the best.”  He looked over his shoulder at the others.  “Maybe we were all cut out for this shit from the get-go.  We never fit into the old life.  It wasn’t until the virus ruined the world that we turned spectacular.”

“And?” I asked.  “Where are you going with this?”

“Maybe everybody else dies because they’re not like us.  Maybe regular people who fit in well with the way things used to be all died.  Most of ‘em, anyway.  And the rest of ‘em,” Murphy hung his head and looked down at the ground, “they’re just not dead yet.”

“I disagree.”  At least, I mostly did.  I did believe that Murphy and me were made to order for the way the world was now.  I just didn’t believe everybody needed a special talent to survive, though I may have made the argument in the past.

“Either talent or luck,” said Murphy.  “And I don’t like to think it’s all luck.  Because that means we can’t do anything about it.”

“Fine.”  I sat up straight.  “Say you’re right, then you have to believe that Dalhover and Rachel are both talented.  You know what they’ve been through.  A lot of the same stuff we have.  And some worse shit, too.  You can’t argue with that.”

“Maybe.”  Murphy sighed.  “It still doesn’t answer the question—what are we going to do if we get to Balmorhea, and they’re not there, or they’re dead?”

“And that’s the real question isn’t it?”

Murphy nodded.

I wished I could help Murphy find his missing optimism.  He was a lot easier to be around when he was positive.  I didn’t linger on the thought long enough to apply it to myself.  Thoughts for another day, is what those were.  “If we get to Balmorhea, and it isn’t what we hoped for, we’ll go on to the next place.”

“When?”

“When we’re ready.”

“Where?” Murphy asked.

I shrugged.  “Wherever we find food, water, and Whites to kill.”  Those words just slipped out.  Whites to kill? Was that really it? Was it a Freudian slip, my truest goal coming to the surface, unmasking itself?

“I think we need to plan ahead.”

“Okay,” I said.  “What do you have in mind?”

“I think we need to go north.  Way up in the mountains.  Not Colorado.  Not even Montana.  Up in Canada where it gets cold as hell in the winter and the snow stays for six months.”

I grimaced.  “Sounds like heaven.”

“In its way, probably no worse than Balmorhea.”

I laughed.  Southwest Texas was dry and desolate.  “Why Canada?”

“These Whites don’t have any sense.  They’ve got to be getting trapped out in the snow up there and dying.  They have to be.  They’re people just like us.  They’ve got to be freezing to death this winter.”

“Going up there in the winter with no supplies and no warm place to stay might be just as dangerous for us.”  I looked at Murphy, hoping for some agreement on that point.  “If you’re convinced on this idea, maybe we head north in the spring and try to find a place this summer.  That’ll give us a chance to stock up on food and enough wood for a fire to keep us warm before the snows come again next winter.”

Murphy nodded, seemingly satisfied to be taking a role in planning our future.  “For the rest of the winter, I think we need to do what Martin suggested.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“If there’s nobody in Balmorhea, I say we let him fly all of us to an oil rig in the Gulf.  Find one that’s deserted and ride out the rest of the winter there, safe as can be.”

“As long as it’s just for a few months,” I told him.  “As great as that idea seems, I think it’s a death warrant.  All you’ve got to do is lose your helicopter in a storm, or your boat if you’ve got one, and then you’re stranded on a steel island with no fresh water and no way to grow food.  You’ll starve to death or die of thirst.  It’s inevitable.”

“I’d go nuts being on a rig too long anyway,” Murphy told me.  “I need more room.  Know what I mean?”

“I do.”  I put a hand on Murphy’s shoulder and lied.  “Let’s not write off Dalhover and Rachel just yet.  I’m sure they’re out there in Balmorhea and they’re okay.”

Chapter 41

We’d been noticeably descending for a short while when Martin announced San Angelo was just ahead and we’d be on the ground at Goodfellow Air Force Base in ten minutes.  Unless the place was swarming with infected.

I looked out as Martin took the Black Hawk into a wide turn, well away from the runways.  His plan for safe landings back at Fort Hood, he’d told us, was to fly one wide circle to make sure the landing spot was safe and then to rush in at a steep angle, get the wheels on the ground, and kill the engines.  The tricky part, he told us, was to stay far enough away so as not to draw the infected to the landing zone, but not so far that he failed to see Whites that were lurking near where he wanted to touch down.

All of us kept a sharp eye out the window for Whites.

The base lay at the southeast edge of town, and most of what lay past its southern and eastern fences were empty brown fields that stretched for miles.  A river cut through the southeast corner of San Angelo, separating the base and a few neighborhoods from the rest of the city.  That seemed like a good thing to me.  Though San Angelo wasn’t large, it had a population of maybe ninety thousand before the virus hit.  The river was a natural barrier that hopefully kept most of the Whites corralled in the center of San Angelo, well away from the base.

The base itself was small—two runways that crisscrossed forming an X surrounded on three sides by brown grass.  On the northern side of the X, between the runways, some hangars had been situated for maintaining and storing aircraft.  Most of that area was paved over and scattered with a few dozen aircraft—old and new planes and helicopters in no apparent order.  The western third of the base was covered with buildings.

I didn’t see a single White moving inside the base’s fence.  I did see the charred remains of a large plane in the center of a black smudge laid over the end of one runway and a single coyote, loping along without any interest in the noisy helicopter overhead.

Martin came over the intercom.  “I’m going to try and set it down by that big petroleum tank up on the north side.

Murphy spotted it before me and pointed it out.

As the helicopter rushed toward the ground for its landing, Murphy pointed again and ran his finger along a line that followed a wide roadway running across the northern edge of the base.  “Look.”

I looked, didn’t see anything of interest, and shrugged.

He leaned in close.  “The fence.  It’s not down.  That’s good.”

I looked.  He was right.  A tall chain-link fence surrounded the base.  That meant the only Whites we had to worry about were the ones who’d been on the base the whole time and had managed to stay alive.  Maybe a few hundred at most.  Purely a guess but with the machine guns mounted on both sides of the helicopter and a good supply of ammunition onboard, a few hundred Whites would not be a problem.

Martin told us, “Hold on.”

I didn’t, but should have.  The ground rushed up so quickly I thought that we were crashing.  My stomach felt light, and my feet tingled.  Martin swung the Black Hawk into an unexpected tight turn just after passing over a tall petroleum tank, dropped the final feet and slowed just before the helicopter sank gently down to the tarmac.

The wheels settled on the concrete and the rotors still spun noisily, blowing away every bit of loose debris nearby.  I noticed Martin didn’t cut the engine.

Murphy jumped out, as did Fritz and Jazz.  They were in charge of gassing us back up.  The trio ran toward one of the squat buildings adjacent to the fuel tank.

Eve stayed on her gun, and I took Fritz’s seat because nobody else seemed eager to fill the vacancy.  Javendra sat where he’d been since we left College Station, looking outside, worry on his face.  Grace got out and stood nearby, scanning for movement.

We’d been on the ground for maybe two minutes.  We hadn’t yet pumped a drop of fuel into our tanks.  I was looking at the rotors spinning when I also noticed Grace tense and point.

I looked past the other helicopters on the ground between us and the hangars sitting nearer the intersection of the two runways.  Then it occurred to me what might have Grace concerned.  The helicopters I’d looked past bore no Air Force markings.  They were Army Black Hawks remarkably similar to ours.

Grace shouted at the others.  She was agitated about something.

Eve was swiveling her machine gun to point it past Grace.

Uh, oh.

I’d missed something.  I looked again at the helicopters and then noticed movement on the other side.

Soldiers were running toward us.

Chapter 42

Confusion.

The Army at an Air Force Base? Why not? The world had changed.

What would they do with Grace, Jazz, Murphy, and me? We were Whites.

I looked out the other side of the helicopter.  Maybe it was better not to stay and find out.

Grace jumped into the Black Hawk and shouted, “We need to go!”  She bounded out the other side, yelling at Murphy, Jazz, and Fritz.

Seconds later, Martin shouted from the pilot's seat, "Survivor Army! That's them!"

I turned and took a hard look at the running men who'd crossed half the distance to us from the buildings.  They were armed.  They were sloppy, partially uniformed, and they were pointing their rifles at us.  "Oh, shit.”  I leaped to the other side of the helicopter, pointed through the window past the barrel of Eve's machine gun, and yelled, "Shoot or they'll kill us!"

Our helicopter’s engines blasted louder, and the sound of the spinning blades changed.

Eve pulled the trigger as she swept the end of the barrel across the line of running soldiers.  Some dropped, some ran away, others fired back.

Grace had a rifle in hand by then and was shooting.  Fritz and Murphy dropped their hose and were running toward us.  I grabbed an M4 and started firing, not in hopes of hitting anything, but hoping the sound of rifle fire and bullets in the air would keep the Survivor Army thugs at bay until we could get airborne.

The helicopter’s metal skin pinged with bullet strikes.

The blades started to spin in earnest, and I felt the helicopter come off the ground, taking its weight on the rotors.

Men were climbing into the helicopters across the tarmac.  Guns were firing everywhere.

Murphy, Jazz, and Fritz jumped in through the open door, as did Grace.  Eve yelled at Martin that we were all in, and Martin yelled into the intercom, "Hold on!"

The Black Hawk jumped into the air, shooting thirty or forty feet straight up in the span of a second or two, then it lurched and bucked.  Something had just gone terribly wrong.

The helicopter started to spin in a slow circle, and it angled and drifted away from the hangars, still gaining altitude, but slowly.

Knowing I was the wrong man on the machine gun, I tumbled out of the seat behind the gun, trying to keep my balance by grabbing onto anything attached to the floor, walls, or ceiling.  Fritz climbed over me, to get back behind his machine gun.  Somebody was yelling at everyone to get strapped in.  Javendra was scared out of his mind and trying to wrap himself in the smallest ball possible.  Good thing for him, he’d never unstrapped himself when we sat down.  Grace and Murphy got themselves into their seats, as did I.

Jazz was on the floor, on her belly, locking her legs around the seat legs and trying to aim a weapon.

The helicopter lurched again, and I banged my head hard enough to knock me senseless for a moment.

We passed over the highway, maybe a hundred feet off the ground, rising, and spinning slowly out of control.

Out above the tarmac, I saw other helicopters in the air, and I saw yellow fire from weapons.  I braced myself and pointed an M4 and fired, depending on nothing but luck for hitting a target.

Eve and Fritz were firing the machine guns in turn as their side of the helicopter came around to face the Survivor Army assholes.  Martin urgently shouted words nobody understood in a tone that needed no words to let us all know we were in trouble.  That’s when I knew we were going to crash.

Tracer fire streaked the blue sky around us.

I spied a helicopter through an open door, and I fired.  It spun out of view, and I saw another.

In one moment I saw neighborhoods and shopping centers below us as our Black Hawk leaned.  In the next, I saw blue sky.  Whenever a helicopter came across my view, I pulled the trigger.  And they were getting closer each time I saw them.

One of the helicopters started to spew black smoke and spun out of control, and for half a second, I felt hope.  Then our Black Hawk erupted in sparks and pings followed immediately by a drop.  For a second, I was weightless, free-falling inside the crew compartment, lucky to be strapped to a seat, and then our helicopter stopped falling, and the press of the seat against my back pushed all the air out of my lungs.  Everybody was screaming, or cursing, or shouting, but firing when they could.

Our helicopter heaved sharply to one side, and down below us another helicopter was flying past.  I watched as a string of tracers flowed into the engines.  The helicopter burst into a ball of flame, black smoke, and spinning parts.  A pressure wave punched me as hard as a fist and a rush of heat singed past me.

Martin was screaming into the intercom again.  We were going down.  We were definitely going down.

Chapter 43

We were still spinning and sinking closer and closer to the ground.

Other helicopters were in the air, one at a distance close enough that tracers sprayed through the air, going wild in our general direction.  But he was too far to hit us except by luck.  Two other helicopters were black dots against the blue sky back toward the base.

I realized then we’d come several miles though it seemed like we’d only been in the air for a few seconds.

Whites were in the street below.

Fritz still fired.  Eve was losing the contents of her stomach.  Everyone else was holding on, screaming, or praying.

The helicopter hit something solid, bounced and skidded, grinding and spinning as gravel flew into the air all around us.  I spotted a glimpse of a wall and a half spin later the helicopter smashed into the bricks, cockpit first.

We were down.  We’d stopped.  We were alive.  The rotor was tearing itself apart above us and flying away in pieces.  Smoke enveloped us as if catching up now that we’d stopped moving.

One of our engines was still running through a metallic grinding that squealed to a deafening screech.  Our peril was not yet over.

I unstrapped myself and jumped to my feet, lost my balance, and fell out.

It took a second for me to realize we’d crashed on the roof of a building.  The helicopter cockpit had rammed into the wall of a tier of the building that stood one story higher than the one we were on.

Dust and smoke were in a swirling cloud all around, obscuring everything.  Our engine was still shrieking.

I jumped back to my feet as Jazz tumbled out of the helicopter, bleeding from scrapes and cuts.  She fell to the ground, and I was at her side immediately.  "You okay?"

She nodded as blood flowed out of her mouth onto the flat roof we were standing on.

“Where’s your gun?”

She shook her head.

I looked into the helicopter.

Murphy was out the other side, Grace was climbing out behind him.  Javendra was crawling out, scrambling for solid ground.  I looked toward the cockpit and saw Fritz leaning in.  I caught his eye.  "Get Martin."

Fritz shook his head.

Damn.

I picked a rifle up off the floor and tossed it out.  Boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, and canned food were scattered everywhere.  I dug through and found another rifle.  "Eve?” I called.

Fritz said, “I’ve got her.”

Something inside the engine shattered and a grinding shriek of tearing steel followed.

I ducked and covered my head.  Instinct.  If the engine blew apart, a pair of bony hands over my skull weren’t likely to save me.

I found Jazz’s bow and tossed it out.

Fritz had Eve were piling out Murphy’s side of the aircraft.

I jumped away from the helicopter and glanced at the wall we’d smashed into—solid brick, no windows.  I looked at Murphy through the helicopter’s open door and yelled, “You got a door on that side?”

He couldn’t hear me.  He was busy getting everyone over there away from the helicopter.  I realized I should be doing the same.

I turned back to Jazz who'd just picked up her bow and stood.  I grabbed some rifles under one arm and grabbed her by the arm and started guiding her away.  "You okay?” I asked as we ran.  She had so much blood on her face I couldn't tell.

“Yes.”  Blood spattered out with her response.

Machine gun fire started raining down from above as a helicopter neared our crash site.  The dust and smoke that had been concealing us was starting to thin.  We needed to get inside before the assholes had a clear view of us.

Jazz and I rounded the tail rotor, giving it a wide berth, and ran to the farthest corner of the roof, as I looked over the tops of the rooftop air conditioning units for the rest of the group.  Through the smoke, I spotted them—all bloody, all running, Javendra with a limp.  They were headed for a door hanging partially open, showing darkness inside.

I bet myself the room or stairs inside were full of Whites, but it didn't matter.

“C’mon, Jazz.”  I pulled her and hoped she’d stay on her feet.

I saw the others get to the door well ahead of me.  In all the noise, I couldn’t hear whether shots were fired or whether people were screaming.  Everyone was swallowed by the dark inside and just disappeared.

When Jazz and I got to the door, we didn't slow, we tumbled into the stairwell as bullets raked the brick wall and steel door behind us.  We all but fell down the first flight of stairs to come to a stop at the first landing, the place where everyone else had paused to catch their breath and assess their wounds.

Once Murphy looked Jazz and me up and down, and determined we were strong enough to keep going, he pointed down the stairs, bounded halfway down the next flight, and told all of us, "We need to move."

More bullets hitting the wall outside underscored just how right he was.

"Grab the rail,” I instructed, doing the same as I started down the steps on the next flight of stairs.  I stopped and waved everyone to hurry past.

I looked down into the stairwell and saw that the dim shadows turned black on the lower floors.  To Murphy, I said, “Take ‘em down one flight and we’ll get away from this side of the building.”

Murphy, with a rifle at his shoulder, aimed it downstairs and led at a cautious pace.

Chapter 44

We exited the dark stairwell into a dimly lit hall on what turned out to be the second floor of a hospital.  It looked and smelled like a storehouse for corpses, one central place for them all to rot.  The walls were lined with bodies lying or sitting where they’d died, decomposing, flesh slowly collapsing over their skeletons, fluids running across the floor.  Few looked to have been scavenged by anything except the rats, flies, and roaches.  The cockroaches skittered everywhere I looked.  Fly buzz filled my ears as they clouded the air in the hall.  The rats, fat and malicious, staked out their claims to the decaying meat beneath their feet.

Eve wretched.  Jazz and Fritz did too.

It wasn't the best place to pause and take stock, but I needed to know where we stood before we moved on.  We were all scraped and bruised.  I asked, "Anyone hurt too bad to run? Broken bones?” I tapped my head.  "Concussions? Anything like that?"

Graced stepped up to Jazz and started checking her, looking into her mouth and examining the blood on her face to find the wound.  Eve checked Fritz.

“Quick,” I told them.

Everyone went through whatever they figured was enough of an evaluation to see they were in full working order.  I took one of the two rifles I’d been carrying and handed it to Eve.  I gave the other to Fritz.  That left only Javendra unarmed and he seemed okay with that until I put the extra pistol in his hand.  “You might need this.  But by God, don’t shoot unless one of us shoots first.  Got it?”

Javendra, wide-eyed and frightened, nodded as his teeth started to chatter.

“Adrenaline.”  I reached out and turned his face to make him look right at me, to assure him I knew what I was talking about.  I was hoping I was, too.  Mostly I was hoping he wasn’t a raving coward.  Cowards make bad choices.  Bad choices get people killed.  I turned to Murphy.  “You wanna lead?”

“You’re the man with the mojo.”  Murphy stepped between some corpses to get close to a wall so everyone could pass through the narrow floor space between the bodies in the center of the hall floor.  “I’ll take up the rear.”

No time to argue.  I headed down the hall with my machete in one hand, and my knife in a sheath on my hip beside a pistol I was now carrying there.  I was ready to do some killing.  But mostly I needed to get everyone away from the hospital as quickly as possible.  Every hungry White in San Angelo would be descending on us.  More helicopter assholes were probably on their way from the Air Force base.

I started jogging, looking back to make sure everyone was coming, and to make sure everyone was matching the pace.  At the end of the hall, I rounded a corner, careful with my feet in the slippery mess between the bodies.  In a nice surprise, a long catwalk branched out of the corner of the building to stretch catty-corner across the intersection below, toward what looked like an older, taller hospital building.

I had a flash of a memory of a similar walkway between the buildings back when I was trying to get Steph, Dalhover, and all the others out of Brackenridge hospital, but I had no time to dwell on that.

I called over my shoulder, "We need to get across here as fast as possible.”  Made sense to me.  If I were in one of the helicopters overhead, it wouldn't take me long to decide to spray the walkway with bullets, just in case.

I sprinted.

At the far end, I rounded a corner as I was slowing down and looking back.  I should have been looking where I was going instead.  I bumped into a pair of Whites who'd been running to access that end of the catwalk.  We all fell onto the decaying corpses that lined the walls.  I rolled as I fell, trying to keep my body moving forward.  I'd need to get back to my feet in a second or two, and I didn't want to be trying to do that within the grasp of a crazed cannibal.

Two shots thundered in the hall.  Two more followed right after, ringing my ears.

I looked up to see Fritz with his rifle against his shoulder, looking down the barrel at the Whites who were motionless on the floor.  Just then, an explosion rumbled up the length of the catwalk, rattling all the windows and vibrating through the floor.

Fritz looked at me.  “What the fuck?”

“The helicopter?” I asked.

“Had to be.”

I was up and looking back into the catwalk as everyone stumbled into the hall around us, shaken but still on their feet.

So far so good.

But the hairy part was yet to come.  Every second that passed gave the Whites in town more time to trap us in the building.  The longer we stayed in the connected buildings, the less time we’d have to escape out the other side without the nosy eyes of a bunch of helicopter assholes watching us go.  Because if they saw us come into the street, they only had to hover over us to make sure every White in San Angelo knew where we were.

It was time to run again—not jog, but run.  I led everyone through a hall that ran the length of the building, dodging decaying bodies, rubbish, and enormous rats.

At the end of the hall, we raced down a stairwell with windows to the outside, bringing in plenty of light for us to avoid the dead who lay on the landings and the steps.  At the bottom, I pushed an exit door open and peeked.  The door opened to a parking lot jammed solid with abandoned cars next to a street that didn’t look much different.  Across the street, I spied a tall, white steeple on a red brick church at the corner of a complex of buildings the same color.

“Anything?” Fritz asked from right behind me.

I shook my head as I scanned the blue sky.  I heard the helicopters.  They were up there even though I couldn't see them.  I turned to face everyone crowded at the bottom of the stairs.  "It's a maze of cars.  I didn't see any Whites, but you can bet your ass they're out there.  We're going to sneak through.  Keep down.  Go as fast as you can.  Stick together.”  I looked at Fritz, at Eve, and then at Javendra.  "For those of us handicapped with normal skin color, stay behind the rest of us if we come across any Whites.”  I focused on Javendra.  He was nervous, and I didn't trust him not to fuck up.  "And don't shoot unless somebody else does."

“You told me before,” he muttered.

“Because it’s fuckin’ important,” Murphy said with a fake grin before slapping Javendra on the back.  “Be cool.  Pay attention.  And we’ll all live through this.  Okay?”

Leaving the Javendra problem to Murphy, I leaned out the door, scanned what I could see of the sky, and figured it was time.  I jogged out, looking back and forth as I headed for a spot between two tall pickups.  The others followed.

I spotted a White almost immediately.  She was working her way through the maze of cars, trying to find the source of the noise the helicopters were making.  She’d just come around the front of one of the trucks as I was coming into the gap between them, and suddenly, we were face to face.

She froze, surprised to see me, slow to react.

I wasn’t slow.  I had my machete up, ready to do its bloody work, and I brought it down and across, slashing at her throat.

Her arm came up to block my blade, but only after the machete had cut through her neck and banged against the fender of the truck to my left.

She collapsed, grasping at my flesh and struggling to catch a breath through all the blood flowing down her windpipe.  She was going to die, one more to add to the mounds of corpses in my wake.  I stepped over her and moved on.

Other Whites were in the parking lot but not as many as I expected.  I saw them through the dirty windows of cars that separated us.  Mostly they didn’t give me more than a glance.  The helicopters were so much more tempting than a skinny bald White carrying a bloody machete.

We made it through the parking lot and crossed the street and then wove our way between closely jammed cars on the sidewalk and narrow lawn in front of the church.  Once through those, I bounded up a handful of steps and crossed a portico to a pair of double doors, painted white and streaked with smears of dry blood.  They sat ajar, a clear invitation for us to come on in.

We passed through a foyer and another set of doors into the chapel.  Far at the other end of the oblong room, a lectern stood in front of a baptismal pool with a giant cross on the wall above.  Row after row of pews was filled with the dead lying on the benches, laying on one another, some seated but bent over.  Others were on the floor.  Among them were some dogs, feeding on the carrion, more rats, and thick clouds of flies.

“What the fuck?” Murphy asked, talking more to himself than the rest of us all standing there with feet momentarily glued in place.

Nobody answered.

None of us had an answer to give.  San Angelo was different than the other places we'd been.  In all those places, the Whites had gnawed the corpses down to the bone, and they'd killed the dogs and the cats in their need to feed.  And it had occurred over the whole of the cities and towns we'd visited.  It had happened so fast that no hospital, no overflow church across the street had become overwhelmed with so many dying patients.

More to worry about later.

"C'mon,” I told them and jogged down the center of the chapel, past the pews.  When I reached the front of the church, I didn't pause at the lectern, I turned left toward the door in the corner.  Once there, I cautiously opened it, found a nearly empty room beyond, empty of the living, that is.  A few bodies were rotting inside.  A door on the other side of the room looked like the way to go.

Minutes later, after we’d passed through a building attached to the church, we were out the back and running through another packed parking lot, seeing disinterested Whites by the handful but certainly not by the hundreds.  Behind us by a few blocks now, four helicopters were circling the hospital building we’d crashed on.  Another Black Hawk was flying in from the Air Force base.  No one was shooting.

We crossed another street and ran down a narrow alley, passing dumpsters and grease barrels behind restaurants that faced the street on the other side.  Still, we weren’t seeing many Whites.  The ones we did see at a distance didn’t howl, they didn’t chase, and they certainly didn’t attack.

I decided to push our transient luck and follow the alley through two more blocks before Fritz tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention.  I stopped by a dirty brick wall where the dumpsters on both sides would keep us from view of anyone passing by on the roads at both ends of the alley.  Fritz pointed up at a sign on a door we'd just passed.  The building was a bar.  He said, "We're far enough away.  Maybe we should hide."

I looked up at a narrow slit of blue sky I could see between the buildings on both sides of the alley.  "We're not far enough from the hospital."

Grace stepped close.  Panting, she put a hand on my shoulder.  “We’re far enough.  They’re not going to search door-to-door for us.”

“No,” Fritz agreed.  “They can’t have that kind of manpower.  They’ll fly overhead like they did back in Austin.  That’s all.  We’re better off inside, hiding, than outside where we risk being spotted when they conclude we’re not all dead in the helicopter crash.”

I glanced at the sky again, remembering our run through Austin after Murphy and me had helped Fritz and his friends escape from the Survivor Army.  The Whites that night had been more dangerous to us than the helicopters and the Humvees.  I climbed a few greasy steps and put a hand on the knob on the tavern’s back door.  I glanced at the others for any objections.  None.

I opened it.

Chapter 45

There wasn’t much to it, the same retro shit you see in every warehouse-district bar in every town—worn old brick on a wall or two, a ninety-year-old wooden floor covered in character-enhancing scars and varnish, an old-style stamped-tin ceiling that was probably plastic tiles with a faux patina.  The genuine part of the bar was the stink of cigarette smoke and the smell of piss coming from the restrooms.  No decay, though.  No bodies were rotting away inside.  That made the bar primo property for short-term guests like me and my friends.

“Somebody needs to go to the front and keep watch.”  I pointed at the big windows that faced the street.  “Maybe turn over some tables to hide behind so you won’t be noticeable.”

Eve said, “I’ll take guard duty.”

“I’m with her.”  Fritz followed her toward the front.

Murphy took Jazz, and they went through a swinging door into what had to be the kitchen.

Grace went around behind the bar, and Javendra said, "I feel useless.  Should I do something?"

I looked him up and down, standing, doing nothing, not knowing the first thing about staying alive in the world as it was.  He was a fumbling liability no matter how valuable he might be in finding a vaccine.  “Just watch what we do.”  I nodded my head toward Grace.  “We’ve got some experience at things you need to learn.”

Fritz called over from where he was by the front windows.  “Don’t listen to him, Javendra.”

I turned to Fritz, a little offended.  “What?”

“You’re talking down to him.”  Fritz walked back toward us.  He looked at Javendra.  “Zed’s a good guy.  He knows what he’s doing, but he gets stuck in dick mode.”

“What?” Didn’t I just save your ass? Again?

Fritz put a hand on my shoulder, and his salesman smile made everything seem okay.  "Look, man, you've got to understand, this is a big change for Javendra.  He's been living the good life—the safe life—inside the veterinary science building.

“I know that,” I said.  “I want to keep him alive.  We went to a lot of trouble for his sake.”  In truth, it was for my sake and for everyone else’s.  A small part of me believed there was still hope that Javendra, last of the scientists, would be able to come up with a vaccination to protect humanity’s future children from the virus.  But to do that alone, with the jack-shit equipment he was likely to have out in Balmorhea, he’d have to be a fucking genius.  Otherwise, I’d wasted my time and risked my life for pretty much nothing.  I looked at Javendra.  “You wouldn’t happen to be a fucking genius, would you?”

Javendra stuttered through a response that came out sounding like babbled noise.

Fritz put an arm over Javendra’s shoulder and guided him away.  “If you’re going to learn from somebody, it’s better you learn from me or Eve.  We’re not infected.  We don’t have white skin.”

“Isn’t that a little bit racist?” I asked them as they walked away.

Fritz turned to look at me, laughing.  "Jesus, Zed.  All I'm saying is you can walk out there, and the Whites won't mess with you.  Me, Eve, Javendra, we can't.  The rules are different for us.  We still look like normal people used to look."

Javendra stepped back over to me, his hand extended.  “Thank you.”

I shook his hand.  “Don’t worry about it.”

He looked at Grace.  "Thank you, too.”  He called to the back where Murphy and Jazz were in the kitchen, "Thank—"

I shushed him with a harsh look and a raised hand.  “Don’t call out.”  I pointed outside.  “The Whites will hear you.  Like I said, don’t do anything you don’t see someone else do first.”

Javendra shrank and turned to walk to the front of the pub.

Fritz said to me, “He’s a smart guy.  He’ll be fine.  He just needs some time.”

“Yeah.”  I scooted out a stool and sat down at the bar.

“What can I get you?” asked Grace from behind the bar.  “Doesn’t look like the place was ransacked.”

“How’s that possible?” I peered over the bar.  “Fritz, why don’t you grab a seat and let’s figure out what we’re doing next.”

Grace put a beer bottle down in front of me and popped the top open.

Fritz looked at it and told Grace, “Same for me.”

She put a bottle down for him and opened one for herself.

I drank.  The temperature didn’t matter.  It tasted like food.

Chapter 46

Murphy and Jazz bounced out of the kitchen with grins, paper towels, and a gallon-sized can of cheese sauce.

Murphy dropped the can on the bar and pushed it hard enough to slide down the smooth surface until it came to a stop in front of Fritz, Grace, and me.  The viscous cheese sauce inside flowed up into a wave but settled back into the can before spilling over the edge.

Jazz placed a good-sized cardboard box in front of us and quickly opened it up, exposing a plastic bag full of tortilla chips.  As an apology, she said, "They're stale."

We all reached in.  Nobody cared about the loss of crunch or the slightly rancid taste.

Murphy came around behind the bar and opened a jar of sliced jalapeños he’d also found in the kitchen.  He sat a few more bottles on the counter.  Grace pulled some plates out from beneath the bar and spread them out for us.

“Hey you guys,” Murphy called, not too loudly, to Javendra and Eve.  “We got nachos.”

I stuffed my mouth with chips and yellow cheese-like goo while I picked up one of the bottles Murphy had placed on the counter with a label that read, IRN-BRU.  I looked up at him and asked, “What’s this?”

Murphy took the cap off the other bottle.  "Man, I loved these when I was in Scotland."

“Scotland?” I asked.  “When were you in Scotland?”

"You say that like it's a big surprise,” said Murphy.  "Why wouldn't I go to Scotland if I wanted to?"

I started, “I just never thought—”

Fritz laughed and elbowed me.  “Pissing off everybody, aren’t you?”

“Whatever.”  Murphy put the open bottle down in front of me.  “Try it.”

I picked it up, sniffed it, and examined the liquid through the clear plastic.  “Looks like rust juice.  Did it go bad?”

“Man,” said Murphy, as he opened the other bottle, “just try it.”  He took a long drink from his bottle.

I tentatively put it to my lips.

“Try it,” he persisted.

I rolled my eyes and took a drink.

“Well?”

“It’s okay.”

Murphy shook his head.

Grace reached over.  “You mind?”

I handed her the bottle.  She drank and seemed to like it.  “Not bad.”

Fritz reached out.  “I’ll give it a shot.”

She passed the bottle to him.

“See?” Murphy taunted me.  “Everybody likes it but you.”

Fritz drank and smiled.  “Cold, I think I’d like it a lot.”

I glared at Fritz.  “You’re just saying that because you’re in the mood to fuck with me.”

Fritz shook his head as he went to work piling chips on a plate and scooping out cheese with a big spoon.  Eve took the plate when it was finished and turned back to the front.  “C’mon Javendra, we’re still on duty.”

We ate for a while, letting the high-calorie food fill our stomachs while sugar or beer put us all on a nice buzz.  We talked.  We relaxed.  We let some of the day’s tension unwind.

Eventually, Fritz got Murphy’s and my attention and said, “Sorry about Martin.”

"Yeah.”  I put another cheese-drenched chip in my mouth and didn't want to think about the loss of another new friend—I was reluctant to call him a friend, but I suppose he was.  "He was alright.  But that's the way it goes, right?"

Murphy nodded and raised a bottle.  The rest of us silently toasted Martin.  All the others who’d died along the way weren’t mentioned.  Was it that they’d died more than a day ago, ancient history in the post-virus world? Was the act of forgetting the dead and forgetting the grief one of the tricks of keeping one’s sanity? Whatever it was, it wasn’t fair, and nobody gave a shit about that either.  We were breathing.  They weren’t.

And that’s the way it goes.

“So what’s the plan?” Murphy asked.  “Stay here until dark, then get out of town? We’re only a couple hundred miles from Balmorhea, right?”

I shook my head.

"Oh no.”  Grace wasn't pleased.  "I'm no expert in Zed body language, but I'd say one of the gerbils in his head is giving him bad ideas."

Fritz pretended to look closely at me.  “Yes, Grace.  You’re right.”

Murphy laughed.

“Look,” I started, “we can’t just leave town.”

Murphy sighed loudly.  “Oh, no.  Here it comes.”

I leaned forward and looked around to see all eyes on me.  "These helicopter assholes keep fucking with us, probably like they fuck with everybody they see.  If all of today's crap happened when we were back at Fort Hood, and we were heading out to West Texas, I'd say, who cares?"

"No, you wouldn't,” Murphy interrupted.

“I’m with Murphy on this,” Grace added.

“It’s true,” said Fritz.

Jazz stayed out of it.

“Balmorhea is an hour away by helicopter,” I pointed in the direction I thought it laid.  “With these assholes here, it’s only a matter of time before they come out there to do whatever they do.”

“Kill people for no reason,” said Grace, empty-eyed, recalling what had happened to the people at the Capitol, the ones who’d saved her life back at the beginning of it all.  “That’s what they do.”

“When it gets dark,” I announced, “I’m going to go back to the base and fix this shit once and for all.”

Murphy shook his head.  “No sleep again tonight.”

“I’ll help,” said Grace as she looked at Jazz, who nodded and shrugged.

"We should just go,” said Fritz.  "These guys don't deserve to live, but they're trouble.  They've got us outnumbered, and they're armed."

I shrugged.  “Makes no difference to me.”

Murphy said, “He’s not lyin’, Fritz.”  He cocked his head at me.  “You know how he is.”

“I’m not recruiting anybody,” I told them.  “I’ve got an idea.  I don’t need any help.”

“He always says something stupid just like this.”  Murphy laughed.  “It always starts this way.”

Chapter 47

It wasn’t a complicated plan.  It wasn’t even original.  I had a problem that required a straightforward solution—kill the fuckers.  By the number of Black Hawks we’d seen, I guessed there could be as many as seventy or eighty helicopter assholes on the base, and that’s if all their helicopters were packed when they escaped from Fort Hood.  I knew I couldn’t kill them all by myself.  I knew my band of survivors couldn’t do it either.  I needed to outsource some manpower.  That meant Whites.

We spent the rest of the day in the bar, eating, napping, and talking through what needed to be done.  And second-guessing.  Was this something that needed to be done? I was adamant.  I was doing it, alone or with help.  I didn’t see it as a choice.  It was a preemptive necessity.  I’d learned too many lessons the hard way and the hard way always cost the life of somebody I was attached to.

I was done paying the price.  It was time to start charging.

We left the bar at midnight.

I jogged on a slow serpentine path down the street with Grace behind me.  No surprise, we started collecting a following, but way too slowly for our purposes.  Still, not many Whites seemed to be in San Angelo.  Of those, I guessed many had bedded down for the night.  So, I started to make noise—I banged car fenders with my machete and circled individual blocks, coming back around to collect any Whites who woke up and came out to see what the noise was about.  Some fell into line, and others watched us go by, not reacting at all.

Persistence paid.

Grace and I spent nearly two hours collecting a troop of a few hundred Whites as we worked our way through the dark streets, over the bridges, out of the center of town toward the Air Force base.  I’d wanted twice that many in my line but the longer the night wore on, the more I rationalized that I had enough to do the job—I hoped.

We were heading to the southwest corner of the small base, where a complex of buildings I’d spotted on our way into Goodfellow looked like dorms or barracks.  But that wasn’t a linchpin in the plan.  I didn’t need to be right about where the helicopter assholes were bedding down for the night.  I only needed a starting place.  The base wasn’t large.  We could search all the buildings before sunup.

Of course, there was the risk that grew the longer we searched—that we'd be found out and would lose the opportunity to surprise the assholes in their sleep.  Things would get dicey then, but Grace and I had already decided that if the shooting started, we'd scrape our Whites off near the Survivor Army barracks, just as the Smart Ones liked to do, and let nature take its course.  I didn't need for the Survivor Army dudes to die, though it would be nice if they all did.  What I needed was for my Whites to distract them enough with saving their lives that Murphy and Fritz could handle their part of the plan.

I only hoped once the bullets started flying, my well-laid plan didn't go too far to shit.

Running along the base's western perimeter fence, Grace and I found a hole that had been cut with the chain-link pulled wide to allow us to pass through with our Whites in tow.  Eve, Jazz, and Javendra had cut the hole while Grace and I were rounding up our minions.  That was their part in the night's mission.  All Eve and Jazz had left to do was to get our great hope, Javendra, back to the pub and keep him safe while the rest of us did our parts.

Once on the base, I led the train of compliant Whites between buildings, working my way to the collection of dorms I just knew had to be the place where the Survivor Army was sleeping.  I only wish I had been less certain and perhaps had allowed Eve and Jazz to reconnoiter the base after they cut the fence rather than retreat to the pub.  But there's an arrogance that comes from guessing right too frequently—it made me blind to planning for contingencies I should have considered.

We passed some maintenance buildings where Air Force guys did whatever they did when they were at work.  We ran past several blocks of two- and three-story apartment buildings, coming in close enough to glance in windows and through open doors, looking for any signs of life.  We saw nothing but a few cats and some dogs.  It made me wonder how the Air Force had been able to clear the base of the infected so thoroughly.  It also made me wonder, in the demonstrable presence of their success, why none of them seemed to have survived.

We passed by the Base Exchange and commissary, seeing signs posted for several familiar fast-food operations.  Across the vast parking lot and across another that lay on the other side of a road, I spotted the complex of dorms that were my objective—dark, without the slightest hint of life.  But that was okay.  It didn’t diminish my resolve.  Anybody holed up for the night these days had the good sense not to broadcast their location.  I was still certain I was right.

I looked over my shoulder, got Grace’s attention, and pointed at the buildings.  She said nothing—of course we couldn’t speak with so many Whites on our heels.  Her face showed her concern.  She wasn’t as confident as I was.

We crossed the street, weaved our way through stray cars in the parking lots, and crossed another road onto an overly large, dead lawn surrounding the complex of dorms.  Past them, I saw the end of one of the runways.  In the distance to my left, I saw the silhouettes of hangars that stood at the intersection of the base's two runways.  On the other side of those hangars were parked the Survivor Army's helicopters.

Once at the building, I scanned the shadows meticulously, looking for a sign of the assholes.  We ran down the side of one building, peeking in the windows with no luck.  I led the Whites around two more, and I started to worry.  I looked several times back at Grace, who responded with a silent question on her face.

After running around all the buildings in the complex and feeling frustration worm its way into my plan, I decided I needed to check inside a building and took the risky move of running up to a door, flinging it open and jogging into the dark inside.

For my risk, I was rewarded with nothing but a messy building, some rotten bodies, and open-door apartments, but not one hint that anyone had been alive inside for months.

Damn.  Where the hell were they?

We passed out the other end of the building.  The frustrated part of my brain insisted that we run a thorough check of the apartments on the upper floors, but the rational side of my mind told me it was more than a waste of time.  The more time I spent inside the building, the more of my Whites I'd lose as they spotted things interesting enough to distract them and pull them out of line.

We needed to do the hard work of checking the whole base.

Chapter 48

I led the Whites to run in several big circles out in the fields beside the runway to get them out of the abandoned apartment buildings and to get them all rounded up and following again.  While I jogged, I thought about where to go next as the thought that nagged me the most was the exercise had been a waste of time.  What if the Survivor Army had flown away in their helicopters instead of returning to the base after they shot Martin's helicopter out of the sky.

It was possible.

We hadn’t seen a single one of them since coming to the base.  I hadn’t gone to the other side of the base to confirm the helicopters were still there.

Frustration grew, but I still had a few hundred Whites behind me, ready for mayhem, I hoped.  We were certainly building up an appetite.

I crossed the road and jogged behind the commissary complex and checked the perimeter of a building whose purpose I had no guess for.  We came out onto a wide, north-south road that we followed past some small office buildings the size of houses and we crossed another intersection.  From there I saw a set of buildings that looked enough like apartments that I knew they needed to be checked.

We ran onto a sidewalk and started into a mostly empty parking lot when I got excited because I thought I saw shadows moving on the upper floors.  In the next breath, my excitement poofed into scared shitless as dozens of muzzles flashed along the second-floor balconies and the crack of gunshots pounded my eardrums like a slap in the head.

Whites howled.

Instinctually, I cut hard left and sprinted for the cover of a pavilion at the formal entrance of the complex.  I glanced back to make sure Grace was coming and was surprised as she ran up beside me, just as anxious to get out of the hail of bullets.

Whites were following us, but mostly the train disintegrated and ran in all directions.

Wait.  What?

A few of them ran toward the buildings.  Many of them cowered behind abandoned cars.  Some simply stopped and stared at the source of the gunfire.  Others squatted beside downed comrades.

What the hell? They weren’t attacking.

The bullets still poured off the second-floor balconies.

Some Whites—the aggressive, nasty ones—were at the sides of the building, busting out windows and pounding on doors, but it wasn’t many, maybe twenty or thirty.  The others were apparently fucked in the head a different way.  They seemed to have no interest in the fight.  By the number of bodies I saw in the parking lot and on the lawn, I guessed that a third were already down.

“We need to go.”  Grace tugged on my arm to pull me in a direction she figured was safe.

I stood my ground.  My plan was turning into a disaster as I watched, trying to think of some way to salvage it.

"C'mon, Zed.  These infected are different than the ones in Austin.  This isn't going to work.  The Survivor Army saw us coming.  They ambushed us."

I shook my head.  The plan had to work.

I looked toward the nearest building.  I knew I could run there, get through a door, get inside, and kill.  I had my machete.

“Don’t,” Grace told me, as though she was reading my mind.  “They’ll shoot you.  There’s nothing you can do.”

I snapped around to look at her.  “Wait here a second, I’ll be right back.”  I sprinted toward the building.

As I passed Whites running in every direction, I called to them, asking them to follow, knowing the words were unintelligible except that it got their attention, and made them chase me.  And that was fine for the moment.  I ran down the front of the building, just below the balconies the helicopter assholes were shooting from, but just past the windows and patio doors, the craziest of the Whites were trying to break in.  I asked them to follow as well.

At the end of the building, with a few dozen aggressive Whites and more following too closely now that my status had changed from follow-the-leader boss to running food, I hoped the doorway I came to was not locked.  I slammed it with my full body weight, flinging it open and tumbling inside.  It took a half second for me to get my bearings as I jumped back to my feet.  I found a door to a stairwell, flung it open, and jumped behind the door before the first of my following Whites ran in through the outer door.

The first one arrived with a howl as the sound of the gunshots from the second floor echoed down the stairs.  He ran up, more of the crazy ones followed.

Minor success.  I hoped.

Once the last of the Whites had passed, I leaped out of the stairwell and sprinted down an interior hall, running for a door I figured would put me outside again but close to the pavilion where I’d left Grace.

People started screaming upstairs.  The battle had moved inside.

I hit the door at full speed, flinging it open as I ran through.  I crossed the gap between the building and the pavilion before anyone on an upper floor had a hope of bringing his aim around to shoot me.

Grace waited anxiously by a post at the far side, ready to run.  “You okay?”

I nodded as I paused to catch my breath.

She pointed and said, “That way.  If we run, I think we’ll be safe.”

“Lead the way.”

She took off.  I followed.  Just as we crossed the street, a huge explosion from the other side of the base shook the night.  A fireball rose up from the other side of the hangars, out where the Survivor Army’s helicopters were parked.  Another explosion followed and then two more detonations sent more fire into the sky.

Grace led me past a brick-walled warehouse, and we were out of sight for any shooters in the apartment building.  The helicopters had been taken care of by Fritz and Murphy.  At least four had exploded.  At least, I hoped that's what blew up.

“Slow down,” I told Grace.  “Let’s take a block or two and catch our breath.”  It had been a long night with a lot of running.

“Don’t be a pussy,” she told me.  “We’re running as fast as we can until we get back through the fence.  Come on, or from now on, I’m going to call you The Walking Zed.”

Chapter 49

Murphy and Fritz were already at the pub when the rest of us arrived.  We took a moment to compare notes—all of the Black Hawks were destroyed.  I had no way of knowing how many of the Survivor Army's soldiers had died, but at least our objective was met.  Without helicopters, the remnants of the Survivor Army were just another bunch of assholes slugging it out in the dirt with the Whites and the rest of us.

It was time to plan, time to move.  Staying so close to our helicopter's crash site wasn't a good idea in the realm of worst-case scenarios.  For all we knew, the Survivor Army had another dozen helicopters and a thousand assholes in armored Humvees parked just outside of town, pissed-off about their buddies and ready to charge into San Angelo and root us out.  It wasn't far-fetched considering what had happened in Austin the night we sprang Fritz and Gabriel, from Judge What's-his-fuck's prison.

Everyone got something quick to eat.  Nachos swimming in room-temperature cheese-goo with enough jalapeños to make the flavor irrelevant was the top choice.  Bottles of beer and warm soda washed it all down.  We loaded what we could into our bags, checked that the street was empty, the sky was clear, and headed down a dark street toward the west side of town, looking for a place to bed down for the night.

Chapter 50

I had the last watch of the night, so I was already awake when gray, early-morning light exposed the street outside to be just as lifeless as it had probably been before the virus came.  Little San Angelo out in West Texas was such a backwater compared to Austin.  But people in Dallas probably thought the same thing about where I'd lived.  And New Yorkers probably thought Dallas was full of hillbillies.  The people in San Angelo probably felt sorry for New Yorkers being trapped in a noisy maze of tall buildings hiding the sky.

The circle of life.

Cars were parked in driveways, all fading to the sandy color of the dust settling in layers over their fenders, hoods, and windows.  In the street and in the yards, few cars were abandoned.  Just like the houses, few windows were broken, few doors open.  Not a lot of clutter had been dragged into the grass by brain-fried scavengers or looters.

Even the house we’d spent the night in was in a state of absence, as though the owners simply forgot to come home from work one day or were raptured up to heaven.  All their food was in the pantry.  Their fridge was full of moldering vegetables and rotting meats.  The litter box still held turds though the cat was long gone, escaped through the kitty door when the free food and water stopped appearing in its bowl.

And no human or White moved out in the street.  No voices howled.  No gunshots rang.

A pack of dogs trotted up the street, sniffing apathetically at upturned garbage cans they’d dug through months ago.

Dogs?

I’d seen almost no dogs in Austin and few anywhere since the virus arrived.

Murphy shuffled into the living room, rubbing his eyes.  "Man, it's good to sleep in a real bed, but I think my body was so not used to it, it woke me up early.”  He grinned.  "Maybe I should have slept on the floor."

I didn’t turn away from the window I was looking through.  “I’m sure somebody would have traded their spot on the floor with you.”

Murphy crossed the living room into the kitchen.  “Anybody else up yet?”

"I heard somebody go out back earlier for a whiz in the bushes—Javendra, I think.  He went back to bed, though."

“I’m awake,” said Javendra, quietly coming down the hall.

“You see anything out there?” Murphy called from the kitchen as he dug in the pantry.

“Korean food,” I answered.

Javendra looked at me like I might be a little bit crazy as he crossed the living room.

Murphy came out of the kitchen and looked at me from the doorway.  “You look like you’re over there thinking about that professor shit again, Zed.  What’s up?”

"San Angelo,” I said.  "It's different here."

“What?” Murphy asked.  “You still pissed because those Whites you gathered up last night didn’t attack the Survivor Army assholes like you wanted.”

"There's that.”  I looked up and down the street before turning around to face Murphy and Javendra, who'd come to a stop to include himself in our conversation.  "I've never seen Whites not go after the guys shooting the guns before.  And this whole place, I mean, besides those Whites in the hospital, we haven't been attacked at all."

“What about the parking lot when we were running away?” Murphy asked.

"I killed that one,” I agreed, "but she wasn't being aggressive, she just happened to be there."

“It doesn’t matter,” argued Murphy.  “I think you’re starting to spin up a different memory for whatever theory you’re mushing together in that golf ball head of yours.  Man, you don’t wait to see if they’re going to bite you before you put ‘em down.”  Murphy looked at Javendra for support.  “You know what I mean?”

Javendra, uncomfortable to be put on the spot, nodded.

“You don’t know dick,” Murphy told Javendra.  “You’ve been hiding in a castle this whole time.”

“It was a science building,” Javendra shot back though Murphy was already ignoring him and looking at me.

I took another glance up and down the street before looking back at Murphy.  “Hardly anything’s been looted.  It looks like everybody just left.  There aren’t corpses everywhere.  Things are different here.  Why?”

“There were plenty at the hospital and in that church,” Murphy argued.

“But they hadn’t been grazed on by the Whites,” I told him.  “Everywhere else, the Whites eat their own when they’re hungry.  I think the disease was different here.  Maybe another strain.  Again.”  I turned to Javendra.  “You’re the scientist.  What do you think?”

“I…”  Javendra looked at Murphy, uncomfortably.

I pointed at Murphy.  “Don’t mind him.”

“Whatever.”  Murphy went back to the pantry.

I refocused on Javendra.  “Tell me what you think.”

Javendra moved over in front of the couch.  “Mind if I sit?”

“You don’t have to ask for permission.”

“Nobody else was sitting.  I thought there might be a rule.”  Touché.  Javendra had a sarcastic streak.  He smiled and sat down.  “The virus mutates quickly.  It creates new strains all the time.  Most of them die in the host.  Some of them are viable and go on to infect other hosts.”

“Other people,” I clarified.  “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“Of course.”  Javendra shuffled around in his seat.  “That was the point of our work at A&M.  We were trying to develop a vaccine that would be effective for all the strains, not just one.”

“Because a vaccine for only one is nearly useless,” I confirmed.

Javendra nodded.

“And what we’re seeing here in San Angelo?”

"Based on what you're saying,” said Javendra, "because I haven't been outside seeing all you've seen, but I have read and heard about how the disease has affected different parts of the country and different cities around the world, at least, when we had some communications, and—"

“Yeah,” I interrupted, “get to the point.”

“I was saying, it seems that the mortality rate of the strain that affected San Angelo was much higher than in most places.  And if what you say is true about the aggressiveness of the survivors, perhaps the negative effects on the brain weren’t as severe as in most cases.  In one way, a worse virus, in another way, a better strain of the virus, but a strain that we could potentially learn a lot from.”

“Hear that Murphy?” I called across the living room.  “I’m right.  The doc here says so.”

Murphy stopped what he was doing with a can in the kitchen and said, "I don't think he said that exactly.  I think he's humoring you so you'll think you're right, and you'll shut up.  Maybe somebody told him how you are.”  Murphy laughed.

I said, “You seem like you’re back to your usual self.”

Murphy stuck his head out of the kitchen and looked at Javendra.  “Now he’s changing the subject because he knows I’m right.  Pay attention and you’ll learn how to deal with him.”

I rolled my eyes and went back to looking out the front window.

Chapter 51

Most of us were sitting around the breakfast table late that morning.  We’d all eaten.  We were all rested at least a little.  Jazz was keeping watch through the front windows.  Murphy was keeping watch on her and trying to chat her up with all the entertaining nothing-talk Murphy was good at.  Fritz was trying to be discreet at keeping an eye on them while he, Grace, and Eve talked through a wish list of supplies we might gather before proceeding the final two hundred miles to Balmorhea.

We were going to be loading up two long-bed pickups for the trip.  We’d have no trouble finding them.  In fact, probably half the vehicles in town were pickups.  Hell, maybe more.  We’d have to be picky and find the four-wheel-drive models with brush guards and crew cabs—room in the back seat for passengers.  Even at that, there were plenty around.  This was West Texas.

It didn't seem like we'd have any trouble collecting food.  It seemed most of the residents had died so quickly that few had time or need to loot and hoard.  Guns and ammunition were on the list.  We didn't anticipate a big problem there either—again, the West Texas thing.  Most houses had, at least, a hunting rifle.  It was the medical supplies that Eve requested and Javendra's wish list I didn't think we'd be able to fill.  Judging by all the dead we'd seen at the hospital, I figured most medical supplies in town got used.  As far as equipment for setting up a lab for Javendra, the hospital was the best place to scavenge, and none of us wanted to venture back over there.  The Survivor Army remnants might be lying in wait to see if we had any inclination to revisit the crash site of our helicopter.  It wasn't a chance worth taking.

We decided to stay in San Angelo for two or three days while we gathered up what we needed and prepared ourselves for the trip.

It was when the meeting was breaking up that Javendra caught me by the arm to get my attention.  He produced a thermometer and reached toward me.  “May I take your temperature?”

"Why?” I shook loose of his lax grip and stepped back.

“I need it,” he said innocently.  “We recorded body temperatures for Grace and Jazz when they came to join us in College Station.  Their temperatures run a few degrees warmer than normal but two or three degrees cooler than the aggressive, mindless infected ones.”

“I’m the same.”  I turned to leave the kitchen.

Fritz said, “Let him take it, Zed.”

“I need more than two data points,” Javendra persisted.  “For Slow Burns—that’s what you call yourselves, right? You four are the only ones we…I’ve seen.”

Suddenly Murphy was there by Javendra.  “Hey man, take mine.”  He pointed at me.  “He’s antsy about it.  He thinks by knowing it’ll somehow make him turn into one of the crazy ones sooner.”

“Whatever.”  It was the only thing I could think to say.  Murphy wasn’t entirely wrong.

Javendra scanned Murphy’s forehead with the digital device, looked at it and said, “Pretty much the same range as Jazz and Grace.  Do you know how high your fever went when you first succumbed?”

Murphy glanced at me.  “You’ll have to ask him.  He nursed me through.”

Javendra turned back to me.

I shook my head.  “Don’t know.”

Murphy reached out and grabbed my arm in a grip that let me know I wouldn’t be stepping away again.  “Your turn, Zed.”

I huffed and told Javendra, “Take it, but I don’t want to know what it is.”

“Told you,” Murphy laughed.

Javendra scanned my forehead, looked at the results and said, “A little higher than the others.”

I yanked my arm away from Murphy and spat at Javendra, “I told you I don’t want to know.”

“Why?” Javendra asked, puzzled.

"Because, it's just what Murphy said.  If my temperature keeps going up, I'd rather not know I'm turning.  I deal with too much shit already.  Hell, we all do.  I'd rather just wake up one morning not knowing who I am than worry every day about how soon it's going to happen.”  I stomped my way through the living room and took up a position at the front of the house looking out the window.

Javendra apologized as I walked away but I ignored him.  He went on to talk with Fritz, Murphy, and Eve, “I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d like to get some sample temperatures from some of the infected here in San Angelo.”

Murphy busted out laughing.  “You hear that, Zed?”

I did, but I didn’t respond.

“Why?” Eve asked.

Javendra pointed at me.  "Zed and I were talking this morning.  He and Murphy have seen thousands of the infected all over Central Texas, mostly in Austin.  He believes these in San Angelo are less aggressive than most.  He may be something of an expert on the matter, and I'd like to run some tests on local specimens to see if it will lead anywhere."

Murphy laughed again, “You hear that, Zed? Javendra wants us to go trapping.”

Chapter 52

We prioritized our do list and concluded collecting data for Javendra, while a worthy endeavor, was not the highest priority.  Transportation and fuel were at the top of the list.  With the possibility of Survivor Army assholes still around and with the naked horde still fresh in everyone's memory, having the ability to get out of town in a hurry was what everybody wanted.

It was a toss-up deciding whether to leave Fritz, Eve, and Javendra at the house while the rest of us went searching for trucks.  On the one hand, leaving the normal-skin-toned people hidden would keep them and the rest of us safe.  On the other hand, splitting up carried mortal risks as well.  What started out as a discussion eventually turned into an argument and tempers flared, and people took sides.  The point I made that nobody seemed to want to listen to was it didn’t matter which we did.  Both options sucked.  Apparently none of them had come to realize that it was the current state of affairs—not just for me, or for us, but for all of humanity.

I concluded they were all stuck in a pre-virus paradigm, and most of them would end up dead.  But for better or worse, they were my people.

They reached a point where they got tired of arguing, and we gathered up our gear, and we all went out together, four Slow Burns and three normals, most of us in a bad mood because of the pointless bickering.

Thankfully, the mood changed instantly when ten minutes into our search, working our way through the neighborhood, block by block, we found a diesel pickup that matched our list of requirements exactly.  Like I said, Texas.  It was a buyer’s market for big pickups.

The truck still had paper plates, so it couldn't have been more than a month old when the owner had parked in the driveway for the last time.  Murphy and Jazz went into the house to search for the keys and found them in the pants pocket of a man, sitting in his recliner in front of a television, slowly decaying.

Two blocks over, we found another truck, not as new as the first but in good condition with plenty of tread on the tires, a good spare, and a manual transmission, nearly a necessity if we were going to get it started.  The batteries on cars, sitting for so many months, were more often than not, dead.  We could push-start a truck with a manual transmission, not an automatic.

Getting them both started was a bit of a trick.  That worked out in San Angelo but would have had disastrous consequences in Austin where the Whites were more numerous and aggressive.  We push started the first in the street in front of the house where we'd found it.  It took three tries popping the clutch before the engine fired.  Then it was loud, as big diesels tend to be.  We all piled in the back and Fritz, who was behind the wheel, drove us around to the house with the second pickup we intended to commandeer.

Leaving the engine in the first truck running, Fritz jumped in the bed along with Eve and they stood there, rifles at the ready, keeping watch over the rest of us as we worked on push-starting the second truck.

By the time we drove away, Fritz had only needed to shoot a single White.  Three or four curious Whites had come into the street but kept their distance.

We didn’t want to attract Whites to the house we were staying at by driving the trucks up and parking them in the driveway, so we drove them to the parking lot at a warehouse grocery store not far from the house where we were staying.  At least, a handful of Whites saw us drive up, park the trucks and get out.  Not one of them made an aggressive move toward us.  They watched and then went back to scavenging or wandering aimlessly.  It was hard to tell which.

The surprise came when Fritz suggested we go inside the store to see what might be left for us to find.  I wasn't optimistic given that grocery stores tended to be empty everywhere—they were the first obvious place to stop for people who saw disaster looming.  Hell, in Texas people flock to the grocery store when the weatherman predicts a hard freeze.  The consensus was against me, though, maybe because everybody was in a good mood over our luck with the trucks and nobody wanted to fall back into an argument over nothing.

With limited expectations, we filed through the front door.

Sunlight coming in through the skylights on the ceiling high above provided enough light to see that a hurricane of shoppers had blown through some time ago, leaving a carpet of cardboard, trampled packages, and overturned shopping carts.  Looters had likely come after, but it was clear whoever had come had only taken the low-hanging fruit.  The warehouse racks, in rows from the front to the back of the giant store, stood thirty feet tall and were not empty.  Sure, the lower two levels had been ransacked, and in some cases, pallets looked to have been pushed off the upper racks, all but exploded on the floor below, but most pallets on the top level were wrapped in plastic, untouched.

Easy pickings.

All the food we'd need to feed ourselves, possibly for a year, maybe two if we decided to stay.  Staying wasn't an option any of us seriously entertained, but San Angelo was a place we were likely to return to.  A few days with a semi truck and enough people to load it would give us a huge haul to take back to Balmorhea, the pot of gold at the end of our rainbow.

At least, that was the idea I'd sold everyone on.

Chapter 53

After spending the night in the warehouse grocery store, the group decided to split up.  I was past giving a care one way or the other, so I didn't say much.  In truth, I was sinking into a mood, and I didn't know where it was coming from.  Things were going well in Easy Town—as Murphy had taken to calling it—where we weren't harassed by Whites, we weren't attacked, and besides Martin, none of us had died.  Against the odds, we'd won a victory against the Survivor Army—hopefully, the final victory.  And we were finding all the food and drink we needed, along with a bounty to load in our trucks and take with us.

Everyone was in a good mood.  Some of us were getting complacent, not me, Murphy, or Grace.  It was hard to tell with Jazz.  She didn't talk much, and she wasn't big on letting anyone know what was on her mind.  Eve, Fritz, and especially Javendra, seemed to have completely forgotten that real danger was out there, waiting to ambush us when we weren't looking.

The lineup for the day put Fritz, Eve, Jazz, and Grace at the warehouse store.  They were charged with shopping through the chaos to get the trucks loaded with a good mix of supplies.  Murphy and I got Javendra duty.  The group decided Javendra's data was well worth accumulating, and all seven of us weren't needed to load the trucks.

I’d have felt better leaving Javendra behind, given the handicap of his skin tone, but he insisted his presence was necessary to ensure his data was recorded correctly.  He was clueless about the dangers out in the world.  Had he not been lucky enough to be sequestered and protected early on, I was sure he’d have been long dead.

So, we recycled the trick we’d used getting the professors out of the veterinary sciences buildings.  We put Javendra in long pants and a hoodie—it was chilly outside so no big deal there.  On his skin that was showing, we dusted him in baby powder we'd found among the ignored personal hygiene products, and we set out.

“What do you think?” Murphy asked as we filed out a door into the warehouse grocer’s parking lot.  He pointed at a pair of Whites a hundred yards away who were squatting and digging through a weathered cardboard box, tossing out torn bits of plastic wrapping.  “You want to start with these?”

Javendra said, "These will do for a start, but I would like to get samples from as wide an area as possible."

I looked right and left, feeling the pressure of things going well.  “Stay on your toes, Javendra.  Be ready to run if I say so.  All right?”

“Yes,” Javendra huffed.  “You told me a dozen times already this morning.”

“Lighten up, man,” Murphy chuckled.

“It’s not me who’s going to get munched,” I told them.

Murphy looked back at Javendra.  "We'll get as many as we can, but we don't want to wander too far.  It's not safe for all of us to be split up all day.  Cool?"

“We’ll start with those two.”  Javendra walked toward the pair of Whites.

I jogged a few steps ahead to get beside Murphy.  “How do you want to handle this?”

Murphy shrugged.  "You've spent more time in close company with them than I have.  I'd say I hang back with Javendra, and you go up there and take the temperatures.”  Murphy looked over at Javendra.  "You cool with that?"

“I’d like to take the temperatures myself,” he said.

"I'll have to kill them,” I told him, not happy to have to do it.  I’d been feeling guilty all morning about the Whites I'd led to the slaughter at the hands of the survivor assholes.  Most of them weren't the aggressive type.  Most of them didn't need to be killed.  At least, that's what I was starting to believe about many of the infected in San Angelo.  "They're not likely to sit still once they figure out you're normal."

“I had the fever,” he argued.  “I got better.  Maybe they’ll sense that.”

I stopped and pointed at the Whites.  “You want to do this your way? Go ahead.  Walk over there and take their temperatures.”

Murphy chuckled again.  “This is going to be a fun day.”

I reached out an empty hand.

Javendra put on a pouty face but handed me the thermometer.

Armed with my machete in one hand, knife in a sheath, a pistol in a holster, and a white plastic thermometer, I crossed the rest of the parking lot as Javendra and Murphy slowed their pace to let me get ahead.  Javendra's job, whether he liked it or not, was to observe.  Murphy's job was to stay by him to keep him safe, just in case.

As I closed in, the Whites stopped rifling through the garbage and watched me.  The nearer I got, the more worried they seemed to get.  I don't know if it was my machete or just skinny, bald Zed with a perturbed scowl on my face.  Maybe to them, I looked like the monster that hides in their closet.  I had the urge to say something soothing, like something I might say to a stray dog I was trying to feed.

Of course, I didn’t say anything.

When I was just three steps away from the Whites, they jumped up and ran away.

What the hell?

From a few dozen steps back, Murphy laughed.

Chapter 54

Javendra, still watching where the two Whites disappeared around the corner of the warehouse asked, “Why did they run?”

“They’re afraid of Null Spot the Destroyer.”  Murphy laughed some more as he looked around to see if any Whites were near enough to care.

I walked back toward them.

“Null Spot the Destroyer?” Javendra asked, realizing he was outside of an inside joke.

Murphy stopped laughing and started to explain to Javendra the Null Spot story but couldn’t stop laughing.

I focused on Javendra.  “When we were in the commissary in College Station, did Murphy tell you about a guy who was with us named Russell?”

“I don’t know.”  Javendra rubbed his forehead.  “He talked a lot.  He mentioned a lot of names.”

Murphy was starting to wind down.

"Russell was infected,” I told Javendra.  "We found him in his house.  He had white skin like us.  But he was docile.  You could talk to him and tell him to do simple things, but he couldn't speak."

“What happened to him?” Javendra asked.

I started to tell him the story of Russell’s death but the words caught in my throat, unexpectedly bringing a sense of loss.  I’d been a lot more attached to him than I wanted to admit.  I settled for a shake of my head.  Javendra didn’t need to know the details of how Russell had died.

Murphy's laughter came to a sudden end, and he took up the answer.  "Lots of people died,” He told Javendra, before turning away to scan the area for danger.

“Sorry.”  Javendra understood that some things in our past were still raw with unresolved emotions.  “You didn’t happen to take his temperature, did you?”

"Yeah.  I'm sure Steph did.  And back at the house where we found him.”  I almost said Mandi checked his temperature that day, but I didn't want to mention her name.  It had taken Murphy a long time to get past her death, and I sometimes wondered if he had ever completely put it behind him.  "I don't recall what the number was.”  I looked at Murphy for the answer.

“Don’t remember.”  He didn’t look at us.  He stayed on task, watching for threats.

“That’s okay,” said Javendra.  “Why do you bring him up?”

“I was just wondering,” I said, “if maybe a lot of these people in San Angelo are like Russell.”  I nudged Murphy.  “It kind of seems that way, doesn’t it?”

“You gave us a speech yesterday about danger this and danger that,” he told me.  “You need to decide which side of the fence you want to be on.  Should we be afraid, or are we in Russell land?”

“I’m just asking what you think of these Whites here,” I said.  “Mostly they seem kind of docile, like Russell.”

Murphy nodded.  "Yeah, maybe you're right.  Like that dude you ran into near the hospital when it was flooding back in Austin."

“Aubrey?” I asked.  “Jeff Aubrey?”

“Who’s that?” asked Javendra.

“What if they can talk?” Murphy asked me, pointing at San Angelo in general.  “All these Whites.”

Turning to Javendra, I said, “Aubrey was a grad student I ran into at Brackenridge hospital when it was all still happening.  He’d just contracted the virus.  He had a fever.”

“But he survived?” asked Javendra.

“Yeah.”  I nodded at Murphy.  “We ran into him again, like a month later.  He was brain-fried but functional.  I mean, he could speak.”

“He was whacked, man.”  Murphy twirled his finger beside his head.  “That dude didn’t know what was going on.”

“But he wasn’t aggressive.”  I thought about it for a second before I looked to Javendra.  “Do you think maybe Russell and Jeff Aubrey might have had a different strain of the virus than us?” I looked up and down the road in front of the grocery store.  “Do you think maybe most of the people in San Angelo maybe got infected with that strain and not the crazy strain?”

“And maybe you and Murphy have a different strain altogether.”  Javendra added.  “That’s possible, too.  It might be the answer we’ve been searching for at A&M was the wrong one in the sense we were looking to create a universal vaccine.  Perhaps what we should have been searching for was a strain with attenuated effects.”

“Say what?” asked Murphy.

Javendra turned to Murphy.  “What if the strain you and Zed have—or even the one these people in San Angelo have—is the strain we should infect people with to give them immunity to the virus.  That way they won’t turn into monsters.  They’ll just have white skin.”

“What about the strain you have?” I asked.  “You’ve come through it fairly normal?”

"Yes.  Yes.”  Javendra grew excited.  "I hadn't thought of myself.  But you're right, if I have a separate strain, and it turns out that it's not simply a case of my body reacting differently to the most common strain, then the answer might be in my blood."

“Man,” said Murphy.  “It can’t be that easy.”

“I’m not sure easy is the right word,” argued Javendra.  “This is just a first step, a hypothesis.  Months, maybe years of work need to go into the testing just to see if it’s right.  That’s before any therapy can be developed based on the idea.”

“Oh good,” said Murphy, “because for a moment there, I thought you were going to say you had the magic answer to the world’s problems.”  He nodded emphatically.  “But it’s just more of the same.  You know, bad news.  But that’s okay.”  Murphy slapped me on the shoulder.  “We’re used to that kind of shit, right Zed?”

I smiled weakly.  He was right.  We were used to that kind of shit.

Chapter 55

What a long, frustrating, fucking day.

Once we accepted the apparent truth that most of the Whites in San Angelo were docile, it made both Murphy and me overly cautious.  We didn't want to kill them but getting them to sit still while we checked their temperatures was a pain in the ass.  The tactic that finally worked out was when we spotted one or two, we'd hide Javendra behind a bush or whatever happened to be nearby.  Then, I'd jog with Murphy following like we had somewhere to go.  We'd pass close to the White and most of the time they'd jump at the end of our short line.  At some point, I'd lead the little train into a backyard or a gap between a couple of houses with a fence at one end, and we'd turn on the White all of a sudden and tackle it.

I got punched, kicked, and bit.  One bite was just a bruise in the shape of a woman’s dental imprint, the other bled badly for a while and served to piss me all the way off.  I hated the damn bites.  Murphy seemed to get out of every scuffle with nothing but a little more sweat and a grin.

Through it all, we had to kill six.  They were the aggressive types.  We ended up collecting temperature data from nearly twenty.

As we walked back to the warehouse grocery store, Murphy got Javendra's attention and said, "I hope you got enough because this is too much work."

I held up my arm, which was still bleeding a little bit through the duct tape I’d wrapped it with—duct tape was the first thing we’d found.  “I’ve only got so much blood.”

“That’s because you spend too much time doing shit like we did today,” Murphy told me, “and you don’t eat enough.”

“It’s not like I can just stop by a McDonald’s and get a Big Mac,” I shot back.  “I don’t know if you noticed, but most of them are closed now.”

“Do you two always bicker like this?” Javendra asked.

“It’s not bickering,” Murphy told him.  “We’re just talking.”

“Yeah,” I added.  “So what’s the story? Do you have enough data? Did you find anything interesting?”

“Twenty samples is hardly enough to extrapolate any—”

“Oh, Jesus!”  Murphy stopped and slapped his hands over his head.

Javendra panicked and looked around for danger.

“You alright?” I asked, looking for blood coming out of a wound that I couldn’t pinpoint, my imagination running to a suspicion that Murphy had just been shot.

Murphy froze for a second, his eyes staring widely into the sky.  “No, I’m okay.”

“What?” Javendra stepped close to Murphy, running through a cursory visual examination.

“For a second there,” said Murphy, “it’s like I was surrounded by two Professor Zeds.”  He laughed loudly.  “My brain couldn’t handle it, man.”  He started walking again, laughing while Javendra stood without moving.

I sighed loudly.  “C’mon, Javendra.”

“I don’t understand,” said Javendra.

“It’s just Murphy being Murphy,” I told him.  “Ignore it.”  I looked around to see if any Whites—the aggressive kind—were paying attention to us.  We were talking too loudly and talking too much.  “What did you see in the data?”

“A surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“The temperatures for most of them, most of the docile ones, were lower than your temperature.”

“What?” That was surprising until I realized I ran a little hot for a Slow Burn.  “You mean like Murphy or Grace?”

“A little lower than that, even,” he told me.  “Not much above normal.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

Murphy looked over his shoulder at Javendra and said, “Man, you’re just like Zed, all full of half-ass theories and crazy reasons why this all happened.”

“It’s called the scientific method,” Javendra snapped.  “It’s how we do—”

“Man,” Murphy interrupted, “tell it to Zed.  He likes that kind of shit.  You two twins go on if you want.  I already know all the answers I need to know.”

Javendra started to speak but I put an arm over his shoulder and said, “Don’t.  It’s not worth it.”

Murphy laughed.  “It might be.”

“What answers?” asked Javendra.

He turned around to face us.  "The world is fucked up.  It's full of crazy white fuckers that want to have us for dinner.  These Whites in Easy Town didn't get the memo about that, and that's nice.  But it's not like this in the rest of the world.  Hell, you guys know that.  This isn't news.  But you get all brain-whacked with your theories and shit and you forget all we need to do is keep ourselves fed and keep ourselves alive.”  Murphy shook his head as his grin turned into something he was wearing for show.  "And do the same for our friends and…"

“And?” Javendra asked.

I elbowed Javendra.  “You know.  The people we love.  But it doesn’t always work out.”

Murphy walked on.

“We’ve all lost,” said Javendra.

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “We have.”

We walked on in silence for a little while before I asked Murphy if he was okay.

“Yeah, man.  I’m fine.”

“As fine as you can be considering all the shit?” I asked.  “Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah.”  He nodded and drew a deep breath.  “It’s hard staying on the Murphy plan lately.  Know what I mean?”

“You sleeping alright?”

Murphy laughed again.  “Man, I haven’t slept alright since I napped in jail before that dude went crazy-monkey on us.”  Murphy grinned, for real this time.  “You remember that shit?”

“Yeah.”

“That riot was intense.”

It was.  That was the day it all started.

Murphy’s voice turned a little bit sad again.  “Earl bought it when we were escaping.”

"You saved me that day.”  It was the first thing that came to mind at the mention of our escape from the county jail, a memory inexorably linked to the image of seeing Earl's skull come apart as a bullet tore through it.  "You pushed me out of the middle of the street, or I'd have gotten shot too."

"I told you, man,” said Murphy, "I don't really remember that part.  Things got pretty hazy for me after we got out of the jail.  The fever was beating me down pretty hard.  I remember seeing Earl get shot and after that, pretty much the next thing I remember is sitting with you in that dorm room with Jerome The Liar."

"Jerome the Liar.”  I laughed.  I hadn't given him more than a passing thought in months.  But at the time, I'd nearly hated him.  And I'd been angry, so angry over his murder by those soldiers.  Now, all those emotions had faded, and all I was left with were the memories of the events and the words that described how I felt.  The emotions hardly ever attached themselves to the memories anymore.  I wondered if that would happen with all the painful shit one day.  Maybe even all the painful shit that kept stabbing me in the heart every time I thought of Steph with her flaming red hair and intense green eyes.  Maybe the memory of the feeling of her hand going limp in mine that day on the shore of Lake Travis when we'd all been so close to making our escape from the shit would fade too.

Chapter 56

I'm not sure how we decided it, but when we drove the pickups out of San Angelo the next morning, I was behind the wheel of the lead truck with Murphy riding shotgun.  Grace was in the back seat with Javendra.  I'd have preferred to have him in the other truck.  Not that he was a bad guy—I'd gotten my fill of his company the day before.  Fritz, Eve, and Jazz were in the truck following close behind.  Both pickups were piled high with cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic garbage bags and thoroughly taped, just in case it rained.  Not all of our cargo was in cans.  Everything was strapped down with nylon cargo straps, way more than was necessary for a drive down a narrow country highway, but the warehouse store had cases of the straps packaged in sets of six, all untouched by post-apocalyptic shoppers and looters.  We went overboard on securing our loads in case we had to go cross-country on our trip.  We didn't want any of our valuable supplies bouncing out.

We left town heading southwest down Highway 67, keeping the speed around forty, with the sun coming up behind us.  The two-lane highway with paved shoulders as wide as the traffic lanes lay clear, flat, and mostly straight, giving me views a half-mile ahead.  On both sides of the road, rusty barbed wire fences bordered endless tracts of flat, dead ground blanketed with spiky gray-branched mesquite trees that had lost their leaves for the season.

Houses, some owned by the recently deceased, and some empty for years, were sprinkled at wide intervals along the road.  Few businesses thrived along the desolate highway.  The farther we drove from San Angelo, the more sparse the signs of civilization became.

In the back seat, Grace examined a map.  Though the towns along the way were small—most of them a few dozen or fewer than a hundred houses—we planned to avoid as many as possible.  We’d skirt them on small ranch-to-market roads and even dirt roads if needed.  The towns presented a risk we wanted to avoid.

Ambushes were my main worry, I guess that and the possibility of running across a horde of Whites though I kept telling myself there should be no hordes so far west.  The population density out in West Texas was low, severely low.  Few people around meant few Whites left after the virus burned through the population.

As a matter of fact, that had been the foundation of my argument when I first proposed escaping to Balmorhea all those months ago.  After visiting San Angelo with a population near a hundred thousand sitting just two hundred miles from our goal, I had cause to worry.  Then there was Fort Stockton with a pre-virus population just under ten thousand, planted directly in our path and only fifty miles from Balmorhea.  Those were significant numbers.

Would hungry Whites hike west on Highway 10 through fifty miles of desert in search of something to eat? If they did, how many would make it all the way to Balmorhea.  When I'd conceived the idea, I knew, I just knew they couldn't.  I'd taken the drive across Texas, heading through El Paso on the way to California a few years back, and it burned a memory into my brain of a dry, desolate desert with no water of any kind, anywhere.

As I pictured it, the central defensive characteristic of Balmorhea where Whites were concerned were the dry, endless miles of chalky dirt and scrubby, half-dead trees, crawling with scorpions and rattlesnakes.

But we'd passed a reservoir on the way out of San Angelo fed by a river that roughly paralleled Highway 67.  It wasn't a deep-and-wide, sing-a-song-about-it kind of river—it was more of a collection of pools connected by a lazy creek down a gulley that got washed out during flooding thunderstorms in the spring.  But it had water in it, and it ran for miles and miles near the road.

That made me worry.

The icing on my cake of bad assumptions and shitty plans was what I saw when we were throwing up huge plumes of dust behind our trucks while driving on a dirt road to get around a small collection of houses on the highway called Mertzon, Texas.  We got farther and farther from town on a network of straight roads at right angles and started to see tracts where the mesquite trees had been chopped down, and the sparse vegetation had been scraped away, leaving only chalky white squares around pieces of oil pumping and storage equipment.

As we drove slowly through the oil fields, passing one chalky square after another, and another, I started to see what looked like low, earthen dams built in squares and rectangles on the barren oil field tracts.  From behind those earthen dams, glints of sunlight reflected off of what I first thought were pools of oil.  With an anxiety knot growing in my chest, I pulled my truck off the narrow dirt road and onto a driveway toward one of the pools.  Murphy started to ask questions.  Grace rattled her map and protested.

At the end of the dirt driveway, the truck rolled into the square of dirt, scraped clean of plants.  As I slowed the truck, I looked around and didn’t see a living thing in any direction save thorny trees and plants.

Murphy and Grace had passed the point of worry, but I'd stopped caring what it was they were saying.

I brought the truck to a stop and set the parking brake, leaving the motor running, as I got out of the pickup.  I marched over to the edge of one of the gravelly berms and climbed the slope up to the top edge—maybe five or six feet up—and stopped walking.

The others stood at the bottom, concerned but not asking any more questions.  They were worried.  Maybe they thought I’d finally cracked.  The pressure of so many months of running for my life, killing, and murdering, slaughtering on a genocidal scale, doing things that would warp the mind of any sane man, should have broken me.

I looked again across the uninteresting landscape, seeing for miles and miles.  Flat, white patches spread to the horizon, each with an oil pump or tank, many with square-shaped dikes, all of those with dark pools reflecting the sky.

The pool at my feet was water.  The dike I stood on was one side of a retention pond to hold the water for whatever purpose it served in drilling for oil.  Whatever compounds it was retaining besides the water had settled to the bottom, leaving what looked like clear, drinkable water near the surface.  I wouldn’t drink it because I had a brain and I could deduce that it was probably laden with enough exotic chemicals to give me a dozen varieties of cancer.

But a White wouldn’t have the brain capacity to worry about cancer.  A White wouldn’t even know what a harmful chemical was.  A thirsty White hiking across miles of desert in search of food wouldn’t think twice about drinking from one of these pools.

And with that, I realized there was nothing to keep a horde of Whites from walking from Houston all the way across Texas to El Paso, killing and eating every normal in every little town along the way, including Balmorhea.  There was more water out here than I ever imagined.

My plan for West Texas salvation was a crock of shit.

The realization felt like a brass fist punching me in the chest and crushing my ribs.  I fell to my knees and stared at the water.

I'd seen everybody I liked or loved die at the hands of Whites and assholes, and I'd sent the ones lucky enough to survive out to chase a West Texas dream that was a rerun of a nightmare they were trying to escape.  The only thing I'd accomplished was that I gave them a different name for the place they were going to die.

Zed Zane was a guilty fuck.

Chapter 57

"Say man.”  It was Murphy.  He'd climbed the berm beside me.  He looked at the glistening square pool of tainted water, perhaps wondering what it was that had me transfixed.

Grace was crunching her way up through the loose gravel on the slope of the dike.  They were going to tag team me.

“You’re not going to strip down and run off with your machete again, are you?” Murphy added a chuckle.  “You know, like you did that night before we chased the naked horde all the way to Killeen.”

I shook my head.

“What is it, then?” Grace asked with no judgment in her voice, just concern.

A despondent weight was coming down on me.  “What if we don’t go to Balmorhea?” I turned and looked up at Murphy.  “What if we go up in the mountains like you said.  Maybe drive to New Mexico—not too far north, where the snow won’t be too bad—then work our way up the Rockies when spring comes.  Maybe stop in Montana or Canada like you said.”

Grace put a gentle hand on my shoulder.  I wanted to brush it away, torn between accepting the kindness of a friend and the feeling of being placated, manipulated by someone used to dealing with adolescent misfits like me.  “Talk to us,” she said.

"Yeah, man,” Murphy added his weight to the request.  "Whenever you get like this, some shit's about to go down, or you're gonna do something crazy.”  Murphy exaggerated his look around at the flat ground and the spiky mesquites.  "Unless you wanna start choppin' firewood, I don't know what's got you riled up."

I didn’t want to tell them because I knew in my heart I was right.  Now, I was right about what to expect when we arrived.

Either way, they'd insist on finishing the journey.  They'd say, "We've come this far.  We can't know for sure.  Let's just go and find out."

I stared at the water and saw through the clear layer to the settled murk at the bottom as it oozed in unnatural, transfixing colors that didn't mean anything.  For a moment they were just distracting me from my fear.  And my fear was certain, and it was painful.  I didn't want to see another dead friend.

Somewhere along the road I’d been ticking through a quota of murders and a quota of dead friends without knowing it, without knowing it existed, until that moment as the idea of seeing one more person die felt too painful to face.  I’d seen enough.  I’d killed my share.

The Ogre and the Harpy in all their attempts to forge a remorseless malcontent, a pale-faced demigod, a haunting demon, a heartless destroyer to thrive in the aftermath of humanity's fall, had failed.  Their nasty words, their shitty apathy, their brutal fists, their leather belts, and their hard hearts had done nothing but make a man who could still see one too many broken bodies.  There was nothing special about Zed Zane.  I was as fragile as everybody else, and I was afraid to put a voice to the confession because speaking the words would cement my mediocrity into reality.

Null Spot the Destroyer was dead.  He died of a daunted heart in an introspective moment when nobody was looking.

“We need to get going,” said Grace.  “Maybe you should sit in the back for a while.  I’ll drive.  You want to get back in the truck?”

“We’re safe here.”  It was a deflection.  I looked around the dead landscape.  “Not a White for miles.  There’s no hurry.”

“If we want to get there by dark,” Grace countered, “we need to go.”

I dropped to the ground and sat in the dirt, still facing the pond.  Grace and Murphy shared some silent glances, trying to figure things out.  Eve came over to the bottom of the dike, and Grace urged her to give us some room while hinting that she take the opportunity to top off the gas tanks with the full cans in the rear of the truck.  Then, Grace sat down beside me.

Murphy huffed and sat down too.

“We can stay a while if you want,” she said.  “It’s pretty here in a desolate sort of way.”

Murphy laughed.  “It’s fuckin’ ugly.  It’s like the Devil’s butthole or something.”

That took me by surprise, and I couldn't help but laugh.  "It is fuckin' ugly out here."

“I bet we’ll have pretty sunsets.”  Grace pointed west.  “No buildings to block the view.  Nothing really.”

Murphy added, “Not until you get to the mountains.”

“The Davis Mountains,” Grace confirmed.

I took a deep breath.  “I know you guys think I’m half crazy half the time.”

“More than half on both counts,” Murphy told me.

I looked over at Murphy.  "Back in College Station after we got off the helicopter that first day.  You were in a weird mood, and you've been different ever since.  I was thinking at the time maybe you'd had your fill.  You were done with the killing and running.  Is that true?"

Murphy looked at me for a long time, but he wasn't looking at me as much as he was looking into his own heart, maybe deciding what he was going to say, maybe deciding if I was speaking the truth.

“People can only take so much,” said Grace.  “It’s natural.”

“So much death?” I asked.

“It’s all emotional trauma,” she told me.  “Everybody’s got their limit.  Murphy has his.  You have yours.  Everybody does.  Is that what this is? Do you think you’ve hit yours?”

I glanced over at Murphy, who was still wending through the maze of his thoughts.  I looked back at Grace, and I wanted to wrap my bullshit in another lie, but I nodded.  I said, "Yeah.  I think maybe so."

Murphy smiled in the heartbreaking way he does sometimes when his eyes are stuck with the depth of all the sadness he's trying to work through.  "I think I've been cooked for a while.”  He shook his head in answer to an unasked question and wrapped his arm over my shoulder.  "But you're my brother, man.  We've been through the shit, and we get more shit every day.  I can't let you down.  Seemed like you had some crazy you needed to work out of your system and if I didn't come along to watch your back, you'd have got yourself killed."

I wanted to insist that I'd have been okay on my own, but I knew it was a lie.

“Is that why you don’t want to go to Balmorhea?” Grace asked.  “You’re afraid of what you might find there?”

I chuckled through the briefest of seconds as I looked back up at Grace.  “You’re insightful.  I’ll give you that.”

“People aren’t as hard to read as they think they are,” she said.

I shrugged.  Maybe she was right.

“Why the change of heart?” asked Murphy.  “You were optimistic about it.  I mean, optimistic for you.”  He added a pained laugh.  “What’s different today?”

I pointed out at the arid landscape.  “That’s how I remember this part of Texas.  I didn’t think a White could ever cross the distance to get all the way out here, not from Austin, hell, not even from Fort Stockton.”  I pointed at the water.  “But they could.  I wouldn’t drink this shit but Whites will.  There’s nothing to stop them.”

“It’s still a long, long way,” said Grace.  “Like we talked about, there aren’t that many people out here.  So no matter what else is a factor, the chances are better for somebody out here than back in Austin or College Station, let alone Dallas and Houston.”

“And in Easy Town,” said Murphy, hope in his voice.  “What if most of the Whites out here are the docile ones? What if most everybody died from the virus and never turned into a White.”

“He’s right,” said Grace.  “Maybe things aren’t as bad in Balmorhea as you think they’ll be.”

“Maybe,” I allowed.  “Maybe.”

Murphy said, "Look, man if you want to wait out here in the desert or whatever the fuck this dry ass place is, and sit here watching the stinky water, I'll sit here with you.  If that's what you want.  But I need to go to Balmorhea.  It doesn't have to be today.  It can be tomorrow or the next day.  You don't have to come if you don't want, but I have to go.  I'll take a truck and go by myself if I need to.  No big deal.  I need to know if Rachel is okay."

And that was a fear I didn’t want to face.  If she was dead, it was my fault.  “What if she’s not?”

Murphy pursed his lips, and the pain showed deep in his eyes again.  He shook his head slowly, and a few tears rolled down his cheek.  "She's my sister.”  His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat.  "It's a fucked up world.  I understand what might be there.  I just need to know."

“I’ll come with you.”  I took a deep breath.  “We’ll deal with it together.”

Chapter 58

West of Fort Stockton we wound up on Interstate Highway 10, the main artery for traffic crossing through Texas from Houston to El Paso.  It was two lanes in each direction with a barren median a hundred feet wide and right-of-way bordered by thin barbed wire fences thirty or forty feet from the shoulders.  When we did see abandoned cars, they were off the roadway and where the passengers had gone was anybody's guess.  The desert, dotted with scrubby brush, stretched flat all the way from a row of smooth mountains far in the south to the horizon in the north.

We made good time driving west on the highway, as there was no reason to slow.  The road was clear and flat for miles.

Grace, who'd been driving the lead vehicle since my pit stop in the oil fields, took the exit off Highway 10 to Balmorhea, and that put us on a two-lane road heading toward the foothills of the mountains in the south.

Grace slowed the truck to thirty.  It was time for caution.

Houses, barns, and dilapidated buildings with no apparent purpose dotted the lots along the road.  They gave the impression we were nearing a ghost town.  When we passed a green sign that marked the city limits, Balmorhea looked like any of the dozens of dead little towns I'd seen on the trip—abandoned cars, houses with broken windows and open doors.  One thing was missing, though, the remains of the dead.

My sense of normalcy had altered since the virus came.  The dead were supposed to be in the streets.  Their absence felt creepy.

Alternatively, the missing dead were signs of hope.  Somebody had disposed of the bodies.

Grace turned left when we reached a yellowish-tan brick building the size of a small house, the post office.  We drove through a grid of streets maybe eight blocks long and eight blocks wide that made up the whole town.  We saw no sign of life.

“Which way?” Grace asked, stopping the truck in an intersection no different from most of the others.

Murphy shook his head, silently.

I nudged Javendra as I looked through his side window.  “You see anything out that side?”

“No.”

I didn't see anything either, at least, nothing like what I was looking for—one of the Humvees, one of the pickups, Sergeant Dalhover, and Rachel.  But no Whites either.  Not one.

“The place isn’t that big,” said Grace.  “We can check every street.”  She looked at Murphy.  “It’ll take us what, fifteen minutes?”

Murphy nodded.

Grace looked over her shoulder at Javendra.  “Jump out and go tell Fritz what we’re doing so he won’t think I’m going nuts.”

“Okay.”  Javendra reached for his door handle.

I flung my door open and said, “I got it.”  I jumped out of the truck, not wanting to risk humanity’s hope with such a trivial task.  I let Fritz know the plan, went back to sit behind Grace, and we drove.

Indeed, it took all of fifteen minutes to go up and down every street in town, passing the cars and houses, seeing no signs of life.  We found ourselves back on the two-lane road we’d exited onto from Highway 10.  Our pickups stopped in the middle of the road with engines idling and we were all out, standing, drinking water or warm soda, taking our necessary breaks, and sharing a box of stale crackers.

“I don’t want to be the one to say it,” said Grace, “but if they’d driven those Humvees here, we’d have seen them.  Town’s not that big.”

“Do you think there’s a place they could have stopped on the way?” Fritz asked Murphy and me.  “Maybe a better place.”

Murphy and I shared a look.  We understood Fritz was trying to make us feel better with the suggestion, but neither of us was inclined to believe it.  We’d seen too many hopes dashed.  Murphy’s face turned hard.  He was accepting the same thing I was accepting.  Dalhover, Rachel, and the others had never made it.  They’d been ambushed somewhere along the way, or were overrun by Whites, or broke down and been killed one by one as they tried to scavenge and survive, one of a thousand stories we’d heard or seen.  There wasn’t a lot of room in the post-virus world for hope.

It was time to stop pretending and focus on practicalities.  It was late in the day.  We had a few more hours of sun.  I told the others, “We should probably find a place to stay tonight.”

“Where’s this spring you told us about?” Jazz asked.  “I mean, that’s the whole reason for coming here, right? An unending supply of clean water to drink and irrigate the fields.  Where is it?”

I looked around to get my bearings, then pointed down the two-lane highway.  "A mile or two down that way.  It's a state park."

“A state park?” Grace asked.  “So they’ve probably got a few buildings for the rangers or something?”

“Something like that.”  I’d been to the park once, years ago.  “Some cabins too.”

Fritz stepped away from the group and looked down the highway as though the room around him would help him to see better.  “Remote?”

I looked around at the empty landscape outside of town.  “Even more remote than this.”

“Maybe we stay there tonight,” offered Grace.  “Should be safe.”  She looked around at each of us.  Silent consensus.  We loaded up in the trucks.

It took all of a minute to pass the city limits sign on the way out of town.  Houses grew sparse again and the bleached land stretched into nothingness in the north.  In the southwest, the direction we were heading, the bald, brown mountains grew taller with our approach.

I watched through the windshield, looking across the plain at an irregularity far down the road.  It grew larger and slowly clarified until I was able to make out a flat, white building with a red tile roof just off the highway on the left—the park's visitor cabins.

They weren’t cabins, not as anyone would think of a cabin.  Lodge might be a better word, though it resembled one of those roadside motels from the 1950s.  The lodge was made up of two L-shaped buildings, five small apartments each, laid out in roughly the configuration of a horseshoe with a narrow gap at the top, opposite the open end.  At the open end, there was a driveway a few cars wide, which provided access to a central courtyard for parking between the buildings.

The layout gave the feeling of an old Spanish mission laid out a bit like a fort to defend from the Apaches in the area.  To enhance the impression, canals drained water away from the spring and down to a lake that lay southeast of the city.  The canals looped around the horseshoe fortress adding an extra defense for anyone inside.  As Grace had guessed, it would be a relatively safe place to stay.

After a few more minutes of slowly driving, we passed a sign for the park and Grace slowed the truck to make the turn into the entrance.  We drove right by the ranger’s booth.  Nobody there to charge us an entry fee.  What a surprise.  Off to our left, the driveway led to the mouth of the courtyard between the two main buildings and Murphy said, “Holy shit, Zed! You see this?”

Just inside the mouth of the horseshoe, hidden from the road, sat two Humvees with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on top.  Behind each gun, the figure of a person stood, training the weapons on us.

“Stop the truck!”  Murphy told Grace.  “Stop!”  He jumped out while the truck was still rolling, letting the door swing open behind him.

Seeing Murphy go, I followed quickly.

Murphy ran ahead and slowed to a walk, as I came up beside him.  We were still twenty or thirty yards from the Humvees and several people were moving around behind them, armed, not ready to show themselves.  I couldn’t tell if they were our friends or some bunch of hostile assholes with the same idea I’d had.

Come to Balmorhea.  Be safe.

Three figures walked out from between the two Humvees—a tall, older woman, an athletic black woman, and an unimpressive older man with bad posture.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.  It was Gretchen, Dalhover, and Rachel.

They’d made it.  They were fucking alive and they’d made it all the way across Texas.

Rachel shrieked and the tears flowed as she ran to Murphy, who grabbed her in his arms, hugged her, and cried as well.

“Figured you were dead,” Dalhover rasped as he drew close, his hand extended to shake mine.  Gretchen trailed behind, a smile on her face as well.  Others stepped out from behind their cover.

“It’s—”  My voice cracked as I grasped Dalhover’s hand.

In a very unlikely move, he reached an arm around my back to give me a hug.  “Never thought I’d say I was glad to see you, but I am.”

We separated.  I wiped some creeping moisture out of my eyes and was immediately engulfed in a big hug from Gretchen.

“Didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” said Dalhover shaking his head and looking back toward the Humvees.  “Guess you don’t know.”

Gretchen let me go, grasped my shoulders and held me still to look me up and down.  "I'm not sure if you look better or worse but it's good to see you, really good."

"It's good to see you guys too,” I told them.  It was better than good.  It was fantastic.  It was the refutation of all my irrational dread.  It was a genuine reason to be happy.  Wait.  I looked at Dalhover, guessing immediately some of them hadn't made it.  Some of them were dead.  "What don't I know?"

Dalhover looked toward the Humvees again, drawing my eyes in that direction.  Walking toward us, with pale skin, green eyes, flaming red hair blowing in the breeze, looking bewildered, was Steph.

I think my heart stopped beating for a second, maybe a minute.  The world stood still around me.  Everything went silent.  I thought I might explode from a mix of confused feelings.

Reaching her arms around me to pull me tightly to her, close enough for me to feel her breath blow across my ear, she said, "Wow, you're still alive.”  She started to cry.

A rush of confusion slapped me in the face.  A mountain of guilt poured over me.  I’d abandoned her on the shore all those months ago.  I thought she was dead.  I fucked up.  I so fucked up.

“Wow,” my mouth said, running on autopilot, as my arms tried to remember how to hold a woman like I never wanted to let her go again.  “You’re still alive.”

Chapter 59

Murphy was so goddamned happy, his happiness seemed to wash over everyone in range of his big voice.  People were smiling all around us, introducing themselves, asking questions and trading answers.

Not Steph and I.  It was like they were all outside a bubble, the center of which stood me with her, separate from them.  Looking at her face, seeing a ragged scar on her forehead running up into her hair, another on her cheek below her left eye, I felt a stab of pain at what she’d gone through.  But the scars didn’t make her ugly.  They made her real.  They made her on the outside what she was on the inside—tough and beautiful.

The wind blew her hair across her face and when she brushed it away, I saw the marks where teeth had torn at her forearm, and across the top of her hand.  They’d healed, too.  I recalled all the cuts, the bites, the bullet hole, the bruises, and the scrapes that left marks all over me I’d carry until the day I died.  In that way, she and I were a match, damaged survivors, still standing when so many others had fallen.

Steph started to shake her head as she looked at me, as if to answer an unasked question, she said, “It was my fault.  It was my choice.”

I choked on my words but I managed to say, “I thought you were dead.”

“I let go of your hand.”  She reached up and traced her fingers over a scar on my face.  It was new since she’d last seen me.  I didn’t remember how I’d gotten it.  “It was a bad situation.  I didn’t want you to die with me.  I knew you wouldn’t leave.”

“I wouldn’t have.”  I took her hand in mine and I squeezed.  How could I have let it go that day on the beach? “I didn’t.  After you died—I thought you died—I don’t know what happened.  I probably would have stood there in a stupor until they killed me.  Murphy hauled me to the boat.  He saved me.”

“He saved us both.”

“I don’t understand.”  The memory of that day on the shore surrounded by a mob of Whites was so deeply etched into my mind I didn’t see how I could have missed a thing so important.  Steph had been tackled by Whites.  I was low on blood, barely strong enough to walk, and was trying to fight them off, trying to drag her into the lake.  The naked ones were afraid of water, mostly, and I knew if I could get her to the water I could save her.  But there were so goddamned many of them.  And then her hand went limp.

"It was the hand grenades,” said Steph, "I think.  I heard the first ones.  I felt the last ones.  I think one of them must have detonated right next to the Whites who were on top of me.  It killed them, maybe wounded them.  I'm not sure.  The concussion knocked me unconscious."

Was that possible? It had to be.  It just fucking had to be.  Steph was right here in front of me.  She was alive.

"When I came to,” she said, "it was over.  Most of the horde that attacked us was gone.  Maybe they followed the Humvees when they drove away.  I don't know."

“Only the cannibals stayed,” I said.  “There are some in the horde who prefer to hang back and eat dead Whites.”

“When I crawled out from under the bodies on me,” she said, “there might have been a few dozen on the beach, feeding.  I was so covered in blood I don’t think they understood what I was.”

“You just walked away?” It was an incredible story.

She shook her head.  “I was hurt pretty bad.  I crawled to the water and swam out to the boathouse we’d been staying in.  I found a boat and took it back to Monk’s Island.”

"You were at Monk's Island?” She'd been so close, the whole time, maybe an hour away.  "Murphy and me stayed in a house on the shore way up the lake until I got better.  If it wasn't for Murphy,” I shook my head to finish the sentence as I remembered how I felt at the time.  Had I died, it wouldn't have mattered to me.  "He nursed me back to health.”  But she was only an hour away.  Damn.  "How long were you on Monk's Island."

"Three weeks.”  Steph looked down as though she was guilty.  "I didn't search for you in Austin.  I guessed that you made your way out here with everyone else.”  Tears started to flow down her cheeks again.  "After I got settled enough, I found a Jeep, stocked it with supplies, found a rifle and a sidearm, and headed west.  It took me about a week to get all the way here.  I took the long way, I guess.  I avoided anything that looked like trouble.”  She smiled weakly through her tears.  "When I got here and they told me the shape you were in the last time they saw you, I figured you must have died."

Steph’s tears were flowing in earnest.  Mine were, too.

“That’s why I didn’t come back to find you,” she said.  “I thought you were dead.”

"Don't,” I told her.  "You don't have anything to feel guilty about.  You couldn't have known.”  All of my guilt was threatening to smother me, though.  "You didn't do a single thing wrong.  Not one.  You tried to save my life.  That's it.”  I blinked through my tears to focus on her face.  "If anybody's guilty, it's me.  Will you forgive me for leaving you?"

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, half laughing through her tears.  “Will you forgive me?”

In what might have been my smoothest move ever with a girl, I answered her with a kiss.

Chapter 60

It was weird—exceptionally so—sitting down at a picnic table, one of three, lined up on the grass under the trees between the lodge and one of the canals, which seemed much more like a mountain creek with cold, clear water burbling by.  We were having a celebration feast.  The Balmorhea group had been smoking a javelina—a crazy-ass-mean wild pig with big tusks—since the night before.  With plenty of mesquite around and plenty of javelinas, smoked wild pork was a dietary staple.  We new arrivals provided canned corn and rice from our trip to the warehouse grocery in San Angelo, as well as a variety of canned sodas and beer for everyone to choose.  For dessert, we had peanut M&M's, of which somebody had loaded thirty pounds into one of the pickups.

Everybody was happy.  Murphy was back to his usual self now that he’d reunited with his sister.  And that made me happy.  For all that I’d dragged him through, I was afraid I’d ruined him.

When darkness fell, we moved the party inside, though all through the feast and then afterwards, at least two people stood watch on a tower they'd constructed at the center of the courtyard.  It provided a view of the barren plain in all directions.  The watch was always up there, never any exceptions.  Everyone took a shift.  Safe time in Balmorhea hadn’t made my friends complacent.

All eleven who’d gotten into one of the Humvees or the pickup that night on the shore of Lake Travis made it out to Balmorhea.  The trip hadn’t been easy.  They’d had some hiccups along the way, but nothing that stopped them.  What was better, not one of them had been killed since arriving.  Now with the addition of my new companions, we were eighteen strong.

Lonely little Balmorhea, so far from everything, had indeed been a good destination.

When the first group arrived in Balmorhea, there'd been fifty or so Whites in town or nearby.  Dalhover organized a hunt and the eleven efficiently exterminated them all.  Over the following few months, they'd gone to work setting up their new home in the cabins out at the remote state park.  In town, they collected and burned all the bodies, so as not to draw in scavengers of the two-legged and four-legged varieties.  They systematically searched every house and business for all food, drugs, and weapons they could find.  They stored some at the ranger's residence on the state park property.  They stored the overflow in the high school.

And what might be the best part, they’d contacted a group of survivors in Saragosa, a tiny agricultural community a few miles north of Highway 10, not ten minutes away by car.  The survivors—seven of them—were mostly from the area.  They were farmers or ranchers before the virus came and killed damn near everybody.  That group of survivors was willing to give all the guidance our group needed for farming the local fields once spring came.

Chapter 61

After spending my first night in Balmorhea with Steph, we got up before the sunrise and hiked out from the lodge heading southwest.  We crossed the canals and walked along a flat path for half a mile before we started up a winding path on the side of a tall hill.  The sky turned from black to a light, pre-dawn gray as we neared the top and I saw the desert plain stretch north and east.  To the west, mountains ten or twelve miles away blocked my view in that direction.

The peak we were hiking to was the top of a bald hill three hundred feet up from the flat ground below.  It was the first small peak in a ridge of mountains in the Davis range that grew taller and spread wider to the south and west.  It was where the day-watch guards came, a pair every day.  The group of eleven kept four people on watch full-time through all the daylight hours, two on the hill, two on the watchtower in the courtyard, and then two more on the tower at night.  It was a big investment in man-hours, but security couldn’t be compromised.  All of us were alive because we’d learned that lesson the hard way and had been lucky enough to live.  Nobody wanted to pay that tuition again.

We reached the top of the hill as the sun was just peaking over the horizon and the landscape was turning from black shadow to gray and tan.  Steph pointed north and east.  Catching her breath, she said, "You can see twenty miles from here."

Pointing south and then west toward the mountains, she said, "We can see the mountains, obviously, but we can't see what's on the other side.  We can't see all the canyons and draws.  If Whites come from that direction, we might not have much time to react.”  She pointed west.  "The nearest town with more than a couple thousand residents in that direction is El Paso, two hundred miles away.  All desert.”  She turned south and we both looked at the mountains cast in stark shadows by the rising sun.  "Presidio is a hundred miles that way with maybe four or five thousand residents before the virus.  Past that is the Rio Grande."

“We’re remote,” I agreed.

I followed her over to an old pickup with a camper shell that had been driven up the dirt road to the top of the hill and left there.  She opened the camper door and folded down the tailgate, setting her backpack on the gate once it was open.

I took mine off with some reluctance.  It wasn’t heavy.  I was used to the weight of it on my back so much that I felt naked without it.  In fact, I felt a little less secure when it wasn’t on me.  Taking it off meant I’d have to waste extra seconds in putting it back on when it came time to run.

Steph reached in, pulled out a folding lawn chair, and handed it to me before taking one out for herself.  She next handed me a flimsy cardboard box nearly four feet long.  It contained a telescope.  She pointed to a spot a dozen yards away just where the peak of the hill started to drop away on the slope.  “Set it up over there.”  She reached into the pickup and grabbed a pair of mismatched cases for binoculars.

I walked over to the spot she directed me to, saying, “You’ve got everything up here.”  It was a nothing comment but it was a compliment too.

“If you see something far away,” said Steph, as she walked over beside me, “even with the binoculars, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s an antelope or a White.  With the telescope, we can see all twenty miles toward the horizon and make out everything.”

“Everything?” I asked.

"Cars coming up the highway,” she unfolded her chair and set it up, "Whites, cattle, and javelinas like the one Sergeant Dalhover shot.  I think that's what he does when he's on watch.  He looks for herds of javelinas so when he goes out to hunt, he knows where to find them."

“Not a bad idea.”  I unfolded my chair and faced it toward the rising sun.  Neither of us sat down.  “How does he do…with the javelinas?”

Steph worked on setting up the telescope’s tripod.  “We get fresh meat at most meals.  You’d be surprised how much game is out here.”

I looked across the landscape.  “I would.”

She laughed.  “All of us were.”  She pointed at the rows of trees in groves north of us along the highway.  “You were right about those.”

“The pecan trees?” I asked.

“Do you remember?” she asked, as she mounted the telescope on the tripod.

“You need help with that?”

She smiled at me and for a moment, the scars were invisible.  “Best time to ask.”  She clicked something in place and pulled her hands away.  “Done.”  She seated herself in her chair and I sat down in the other chair beside her.

“We were on the river,” said Steph, “in that riverboat thing when you told us about this place.  Fresh water.  Pecan trees.  Antelope.  You said it was remote and safe.”

I smiled as I recalled that night, trying not to linger too long on the faces of those who’d died.  “And ugly.”

“Yes.”  Steph drew a deep breath.  “But pretty in its way.  And fresh air.  It’s everything you promised.”  She pointed down at the state park cabins where everyone else was either sleeping late or getting up to do whatever they did out here with their days.  “All those people down there would probably be dead if you hadn’t told us to come here.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that.  I had mixed feelings of guilt over all those who’d died along the way, all those I’d had a part in killing, and for what, to save a couple dozen?

“You’re beating yourself up again,” said Steph as she turned to face me.

I shook my head.  “Probably the same shit everybody goes through when they finally get a minute to stop running and shooting and scavenging for their next meal—they stop, take a deep breath, and reflect.”

“That’s exactly right,” said Steph.  She opened up her binocular case and took them out.  “Get yours out, too.  We need to see if anything snuck up on us during the night.”

“Does that happen?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question, but it came out anyway.

“Sometimes cars on the highway.  Sometimes bands of Whites.  Never those hordes like we saw in Austin.  I think the biggest bunch was maybe thirty or so—weak, nearly dead from thirst and starvation.”

“What about the cars?” I asked.  “Survivors?”

“I suppose.”  She traced her finger along the path of the highway across the desert.  “East to west.  Sometimes west to east.  People looking for something.”

“Do they stop?”

“Some stop in Balmorhea.  They scrounge for fuel or food like everybody everywhere, I guess.  But nobody comes down to the state park.  A lot of them see the pecan trees by the highway and get out to search for what they can find.  We don’t bother them.  Best not to, I think.”

“Not looking for any more people?” I asked.

“Playing it safe.”  Steph looked at me.  “Another lesson.  Maybe we learned it together.  Maybe we learned it from you and Murphy.  It’s hard to trust people these days.  Right now, we’re being cautious, taking care of our own.”

“What does that mean for us?” I asked.  “Me, Murphy, Grace, Fritz, and the others?”

Steph laughed and let her binoculars hang from the strap around her neck.  She reached out and took my hands.  “You and Murphy are family.  We’re all family down there.  We’re what we have now.  Each other.  If you think your friends are good people, that’s good enough for us.”

“You’ve talked about it already?”

“Of course,” she said.  “Not formally, but we all talk.  Like you said on more than one conceited occasion, half those people down there—maybe all of them—owe you and Murphy their lives.  You’re with us.”

With us? Family?

It had the too-good-to-be-true sound to it.

“What? “Steph asked, suddenly hurt showing on her face.  “You don’t seem—I don’t know—happy about that.  Why?”

“Always direct, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”  She was hard again, all business, her guard was up.  She let go of my hands and put the binoculars back to her eyes.  “You didn’t answer my question.”  She gulped and asked, “Are you staying?”

"I…”  I wanted to say yes, of course.  I was next to a gorgeous redhead who I'd told Murphy I loved.  My only friends in the world were down there in those cabins.  But I was still a White.  And there were more than a dozen people down there who weren't.  "When people get together, when there are a bunch of normals, I'm a White.  Murphy's a White.  Grace and Jazz are, too.  It never works out."

“What are you telling me?” Steph kept the binoculars to her eyes, but I saw a tear on her cheek, heard her sniffle.

I reached up and pulled her binoculars down.  She blinked and turned her face away as she started to cry in earnest.  Never being one to figure out the best thing to do in these situations, I awkwardly reached my arms around her and pulled her to me and took a risk that didn’t seem as huge a deal as it would have been a year before.  “I love you.  I’ve thought about you every day since I left you on the beach.”

Steph turned her wet face up to mine and kissed me, then pulled me into a tight, tight hug.  “But?”

“I want to stay but I’m afraid.”

Chapter 62

We were doing a shitty job keeping watch.  Steph was more diligent than me, taking time every few minutes to scan the horizon, but mostly we held each other and kissed, not talking much, just taking the rare opportunity to feel the comfort of being in another’s arms.

Finally, she pushed me away and told me to sit.  She wiped her face and took another look across the horizon.  She pointed to my binoculars and then pointed west.  "Take those and scan the mountains over there.  Then look at the mountains behind us."

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell me what you’re afraid of? Surely, it’s not the infected.  I’ve seen what you do with them.”

I chuckled and felt awful for it.  Do all murderers do that? "I'm good at killing Whites."

“Are you afraid I won’t love you back?”

"It would be reassuring if you said it."

“I love you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.  She was looking in the other direction through a pair of binoculars.

“Don’t be a dumbass, Zed.”

I laughed.  “Now you sound like Murphy.”

“Maybe he knows how to talk to you in a language you’ll understand,” she told me.  “I’ve loved you a lot longer than you’ve loved me.  I never said anything because I didn’t want to get hurt.”

“I wasn’t exactly playing the field,” I said, as I scanned across the smooth brown ridges.  “Did you think I was interested in other girls?”

“I thought you were going to get yourself killed.”

“Yeah.  I suppose that’s a real risk these days.”

Steph lowered her binoculars and turned to look at the mountains as well.  “Anything that way?”

“Nothing I can see.”  I lowered my binoculars.

“I think we have a chance here,” she said.

“All of us?” I asked.  “Or you and me?”

“Both.  And don’t give me that crap about thinking you’ll get rejected by the group.”  She patted the pistol in the holster on her hip.  “If anybody gives you any shit, I’ll shoot ‘em.”

I laughed.

"I'm serious.”  She did smile, though.

“Fine.”

“Fine doesn’t sound definitive.  What else are you afraid of?”

That was a harder question to answer.  I thought about it for a second before I said, “Fucked-up family.  Fucked-up mother.  I’ve never been good at managing my relationships.  No positive role models.  Know what I mean?”

“That’s what on-the-job training is for,” said Steph.  “I can cut you some slack.  But you have to talk to me.  You have to, or it won’t work.  Can you do that?”

What she was asking for was going to be a harder for me than she thought it would be, but I said, “Okay.  I can do it.”

“If you don’t,” she patted her pistol again, “I’ll shoot you, too.”

I laughed.  “So it is true love.”

She wrapped me in another hug and kissed me.  “We can make this work.  You and me.  All of us.  We can live here for the rest of our lives if we want.  We really can.”

“I hate deserts.”  I smiled to let her know it wasn’t a deal killer for me.

She patted my flat belly.  “Get used to eating real food again, and doing it every day.  Get used to taking a bath, even if the water in that damn spring is cold as hell.  Get used to feeling safe.  Get used to being with me and this place won’t seem so bad.”

“I think I could get used to it.  I really do.”

The End

Slow Burn Novella, ‘Alpha’

Chapter 1

Three years, three months, and eleven days.

That was the shelf life of my desert heaven in Balmorhea. I just didn’t know it that morning as the sun was peeking over the horizon in the east, while Murphy and me were bicycling down the centerline of Highway 17, coming out of the Davis Mountains toward Balmorhea State Park.

Behind Murphy, the wheels on the cart attached to his bicycle squeaked under the weight of the three dead javelinas lying inside. “We gonna tell Dalhover we got these from the same herd?”

I shrugged. “The reservoir herd is getting too big. If we don’t thin it out some more, they’ll forage every ounce of food in that area and move on.”

“Are you practicing what you’re going to tell Dalhover?”

I scanned the scrubby desert from left to right and took a glance behind us—just in case. “It’s the smart thing to do.”

Murphy grinned. “That’s not an answer.”

“Nobody’s hunted the reservoir herd since those two new litters took to the hoof. Dalhover doesn’t have an accurate count.”

“Killin’ three adults,” argued Murphy. “The rest might run off anyway.”

“Dalhover says they’re too territorial to run off.”

“I think they stay for the scraps we dump out there for ‘em.”

“I’m sure it helps.”

I stood on the pedals to push the bicycle up a rise in the road. Murphy did the same, pulling the load of javelinas with a little more effort. When we crested the hill, the ground flattened out and we were able to see the state park complex several miles ahead.

As had become the norm, nothing seemed awry. No alarm sounded. No gunshots cracked. No sound carried over the flat desert ground except the wind, droning bugs, and the distant yap of coyotes. Still, I carefully scanned, looking for movement, scrutinizing the faraway hills for evidence of any out-of-place lump  or a dust plume that most certainly didn’t belong.

“See anything?” asked Murphy.

I shook my head.

“Me neither.” He paused in one of those ways that tells you something else is coming. “I think it’s time.”

I looked over at him. The subject had come up over dinner last night before we’d headed out on our hunting trip. “Seems like that’s all anyone talks about anymore.”

“Like I said, it’s time.”

“Is Jazz with you on this?”

“Why’s it gotta be like that?” asked Murphy.

“You’re practically married.”

Murphy huffed.

“I’m just asking.”

We rode in silence for a bit before Murphy said, “Yeah. We’re agreed.”

“That’s a majority, then.”

“We got food enough for two years stored up,” argued Murphy. “There’s no shortage of antelope and these mean-ass pigs. We wouldn’t have no trouble feeding another fifty or even a hundred.”

“If they pulled their weight.”

“Anybody who won’t pull their weight is already dead,” said Murphy. “That’s the way the world is now.”

I laughed, because the logic was flawed. “Based on everything we can see from Balmorhea.” I laughed a little more. “None of us has talked to an outsider in more than two years.”

“Those farmers from Saragosa—”

“Who were all killed by that horde that came through last spring. They don’t count anyway. Saragosa is only ten miles away.” That simmered up an old pot of anger that refused to be gotten over. But then again, there were lots of those pots on my stove. “They should have moved in here with us. With our combined firepower, they wouldn’t have been killed and we wouldn’t have lost two of ours.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Say it again, then, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are only sixteen of us now,” continued Murphy. “That’s not enough of us to survive. Not in the long run.”

“And bringing more people in—strangers—will make that all better?”

Murphy didn’t have a response.

“Dude, you know how normal folks treat people like us.”

Murphy pedaled on for a while before he said, “The world’s different now. It’s gotta be.”

Chapter 2

A half-mile out, we rode past the defensive ditch we’d started building the previous winter. Fifteen feet deep, twenty wide, with scraps of barbed wire scavenged from area ranches coiled in the bottom. The dry moat was supposed to be the colony’s first line of defense. None of us believed the ditch would stop a hungry white, and especially not any sizable horde of them. Its purpose was to slow down and disperse an attack.

The way Dalhover explained it was if a White horde attacked, they wouldn’t be able to hit our compound’s chain-link fence en masse. They’d get stuck navigating the ditch. They’d climb out in ones and twos, giving us plenty of opportunity to shoot them in the open ground between the moat and the fence. Maybe most importantly, it would buy us time to decide whether to make our stand at the final ring of fortifications built around the horseshoe-shaped lodge, or to load up in our vehicles and flee.

Unfortunately, the ditch proved a project too large for a single winter. The backhoe we used for the digging drank through the supplies of diesel and broke down once every few days. Scavenging barbed wire from the nearby ranches proved just as time- and resource-hungry. As a result, very little of the ditch had been completed.

Murphy, clearly thinking about the ditch as we passed, said, “We could finish the moat if we had more people.”

“Maybe.”

“We keep four people on watch all day long, and two all night.”

“And?”

“That’s nearly half our manpower.” Murphy slowed and let his gaze wander over the compound. “That’s not sustainable with what we’ve got.”

“I won’t argue—”

Something caught Murphy’s attention. “What the—”

I followed his eyes to see Jazz standing outside the gate, waving.

“Hurry,” she hollered.

Taking a quick glance to our rear for threats, I pushed my bicycle hard, yet not so hard as to leave Murphy behind with our load of javelinas.

“Come quick,” Jazz yelled again, “It’s Steph.”

Chapter 3

When I entered our room, Steph was lying on the bed, unconscious and wheezing. I rushed over to her, on the edge of panic.

Javendra—the veterinary grad student who’d specialized in farm animal diseases at Texas A&M—jumped to his feet and shook his head as he made way for me.

“She’s breathing and she’s stable,” explained Dalhover, as I sat on the bed beside Steph and put a hand to her face.

“Snakebite?” guessed Murphy, glancing at Javendra, Grace, and Jazz, all doing their best to conceal the worry on their faces.

Steph’s shallow breaths seemed to be so tenuous it sent my fears spinning to the dark places where all my pent-up rage lived, where the irrational side of me shook constantly at the bars of his cage, wanting to come out and rule my actions.

I lay a hand on Steph’s forehead. Her skin was blotched with hives. Her lips were hued in a dangerous blue. “She’s not getting enough air.”

“Anaphylactic shock,” said Javendra.

“An allergic reaction?” I asked.

“Yeah,” confirmed Dalhover.

I searched my memory for things that Steph was allergic to and came up with only one—scorpions. “Don’t we have an Epipen in the medical supplies?” It came out as an accusation.

Grace, always the mature one, didn’t bite. “If we did, we’d have used it already.”

“And it would be expired,” added Jazz. “My aunt used to keep those things around. They only last something like 18 months.”

“So everything we have,” countered Grace, “is expired, or getting close.”

“Not necessarily,” said Javendra. “I read a paper once about the long-term stability of drugs. Many were found to be able to deliver a therapeutic dose even four years after the expiration date.  Unfortunately, heat can be a problem, but most would have been kept indoors, at least.”

I cursed silently. How could we have forgotten to stock an Epipen? “Claritin? Benadryl?”

“Not while she’s unconscious,” answered Javendra, our default doctor in Balmorhea. “She’d choke.”

I focused back down at Steph.  My mind was spinning and I was starting to feel panic.  She looked every bit like she might stop breathing at any moment. “Do we need to give her a tracheotomy? She’s not breathing.”

Dalhover stepped over and put a calming hand on my shoulder. “She is breathing.”

“Her lips,” I told him. “She’s not getting enough air.”

“There’s nothing we can do for her right now that won’t make things worse,” said Dalhover. “Not with what we have.”

That wasn’t an answer I could accept, and the first thing that came to mind was a half-assed drugstore in a tiny podunk town thirty-five miles south of us, up in the mountains. I turned to Murphy. “When we were in Fort Davis last fall. Wasn’t there a pharmacy? Do you remember?”

“Grace and I checked that place out,” said Jazz. She’d been on the excursion with Murphy and me. “When you and Murphy were searching through that little gas station down the street, we took all they had—”

“—which wasn’t much,” added Grace. “No Epipens.”

“Fort Stockton.” That was my next guess. It was the biggest town in a hundred miles with a pre-fall population over 8,000. Big enough to have its own McDonald’s. Damn well big enough to have a pharmacy or two. “It’s like fifty miles. A straight shot down I-10. I can take the Humvee. Be there and back in two hours.”

“A couple thousand Whites live there,” Dalhover reminded me. “The aggressive kind. That’s the reason we don’t go there. You know that, Zed.”

Dalhover was right. Several times we’d tried a quick scavenging run into Fort Stockton over the past few years, only to make a hasty exit when the population of local Whites grew too numerous and dangerous to make the risk of staying worth it.

“With all those Whites,” I reasoned, as I turned to Murphy. “If we thought it was too risky to go, then I guarantee nobody else has. We’ve got to give it a shot.” I was on my feet, my resolve set. I knew what I was doing.

Murphy did, too. “I’m with you, man.”

“You don’t need to go there,” said Javendra, nodding over at Steph. “She just needs time. It’ll pass.”

I drilled him with a hard stare, certain he was blowing useless comforts up my ass. “You don’t know that.”

Grace stepped forward, maybe sensing that all the shit bubbling over in my heart for Steph’s condition might explode in Javendra’s face. “Look at me,” she said. “It’ll pass. It did last time.”

Those words hit me like a brick. I didn’t know whether to be mad or surprised. “Last time? There was a last time? And nobody told me?” Through their silence, I stormed out of the room. “I’m going to Fort Stockton.”

Murphy was right behind me.

Chapter 4

I headed for the nearest Humvee with a .50 cal mounted on the roof. I told Murphy,  “Check the fuel.”

“You got it, bro.”

Jazz, hurrying to keep up with us told no one in particular, “What we need is a doctor. If we explored getting more—”

“Not now.” Murphy glared at her. He could tell Jazz was wanting to open up the discussion about bringing more people in.

“Without modern medication,” said Grace, coming along as well, “we might as well get a shaman as a doctor.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” argued Jazz.

“A shaman would know how to use local plants…”

Ignoring the pointless discussion, I climbed into the back seat of the Humvee, with Dalhover coming to a stop outside. He pointed. “There’s a full belt on the .50.”

I was already standing between the back seats, up through the hole in the roof, behind the gun, and peeking into the ammo can. It was full.

“You can take that one,” said Dalhover, “if you’re going through with this. You can’t take the rest.”

I lowered myself through the roof. “I understand.” I reached for one of the full ammo cans stored in the rear to pass it to Dalhover.

“Fuel’s full,” Murphy said.

Dalhover took the ammo can and said, “There’s enough food and water back there to keep you for a week.”

I knew Dalhover kept all the vehicles topped off and stocked, ready for immediate bugout. Still, I gave the supplies in the back a quick glance. “We’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Nothing ever goes as planned,” said Dalhover. “You should be patient about this.”

“I can’t,” I told him. “You saw her.” I still couldn’t believe this had happened before and nobody—not even Steph—saw fit to let me know. Was I that much of a loose cannon? Could I not be trusted with the information? “Was it this bad last time?”

“No,” admitted Dalhover. “This is worse.”

“Then I have to go. You know that.”

Dalhover stepped back to let me climb out of the Humvee. He pointed back inside. “We’ve got that GoPro mounted on the dash.”

I nodded.

“Record as much as you can,” he told me.

I agreed. We’d taken to using salvaged GoPro cameras on anything we could mount one to every time we left the compound. The videos helped us recon new areas when we reviewed them afterwards, and they helped us keep track of changes to our environment. It was good to know which roads were degrading over time and which were blocked by rusting cars. In fact, if anything in the environment moved, it was good to be able to spot it ahead of time, because moving things implied the presence of people—infected or otherwise—and people of any kind could be dangerous.

Having situated himself in the driver’s seat, Murphy called, “Ready when you are, bud.”

“No.” Unexpectedly, Grace was at the driver’s side door, swinging it open. She told Murphy, “You get in the back. I’ll drive.”

“What?” Murphy wasn’t moving.

“You have the most experience on the .50,” she explained. Casting a stern look in my direction, she said, “If we get into a situation where we need to open up with that gun, it should be Murphy doing the shooting.”

“She’s got a point,” Dalhover admitted.

I was still looking at Grace and shaking my head. “You don’t need to risk coming along.”

She laughed at the absurdity of my assertion. “I’m not getting out of the Humvee. I’m not risking anything.”

“Like Dalhover said,” I argued, “nothing goes as planned.”

Grace pulled Murphy’s arm to coax him out of the driver’s seat, and as he climbed out, Jazz came up, geared up and ready to fight. Without a word, she climbed into the passenger side seat.

Murphy started to say something about her coming, but she shot him a hard look that told him he had no right to argue.

Ten minutes later, before anyone in the Balmorhea compound had started preparing breakfast, the Humvee was rolling up Highway 17 toward I-10. Fifty miles further lay Fort Stockton.

Chapter 5

With my arm hanging out the window, feeling the bite of the cold wind, I watched the morning desert grind past. Just south of the highway, sitting on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, an uncaring coyote watched our Humvee roll by. Farther south, squatting on the pale desert floor, the dark mounds of the Davis Mountains separated earth from sky. Hell from heaven.

My thoughts ran to dark places as my emotions twisted themselves into knots.

Murphy, to his credit, let me alone to stew in my ruminations. He sensed I needed it.

Outside of an Epipen, I didn’t know what I needed. Then again, I wasn’t a doctor. My layman’s knowledge of what that magic syringe could do could have been all wrong. With Steph  struggling to hold onto her life, I knew I had to do something. Do.

Grace pushed the Humvee into the wind blowing out of the east, keeping us cruising at 40, the max safe speed, or so we’d all decided in a group meeting some time back. Because even on flat Highway 10, running in a straight line for miles at a time, hazards and assholes had a way of jumping out and fucking up your day when you weren’t expecting it. A slower speed gave us time to react—a chance to live through an incident with our lives and vehicles intact.

Both were precious.

As much as I wanted to demand that Grace mash the pedal to the floor and wind out the Humvee’s engine at 70, I couldn’t risk the lives of my friends more than I already had when I’d accepted their help with my impromptu expedition to Fort Stockton.

In the passenger side of the front, Jazz had the map unfolded, examining it for hazards marked there by Javendra. Maintaining the maps was one of his roles. Everybody in our little community had their duties.

The master versions of our maps hung on the wall in our command post—the CP. Javendra used the recon video from the GoPro cameras and info we each provided after each excursion to update the master maps. He then translated that information to the maps we kept stored in every vehicle. Dalhover was pedantic about keeping every vehicle in a state of readiness and Javendra maintained the maps with all the anal-retentive devotion that Dalhover demanded.

Highlighted on each map were the roads deemed safe, roads we’d travelled in the past. Navigable dirt roads were marked and color-coded with a highlighter to classify them as to how smooth and drivable they were. Any road not marked was one none of us had yet driven.

Concentrations of Whites were marked as well. Tiny Fort Davis, thirty miles south of Balmorhea was highlighted in green. It was inexplicably deserted. Not a living normal human. That wasn’t unexpected for a town that small, given the infection and eventual mortality rates. Yet no Whites lived there either. Even the bodies were all gone. The remains of barricades still stood on the two-lane highway. Brass casings littered the ground, slowly oxidizing in the weather, testaments to the townsfolk’s desire to keep their little mountain hamlet buttoned up.

The virus had come, hard and fast. At least that was my guess. The houses appeared to have been abandoned in an instant. Hardly any held the body of an occupant. Neither was there much evidence of violence in town, although there was a spot on the courthouse lawn blackened by a bonfire and sprinkled with shards of crisped bone. Probably the final resting place of many of the town’s dead, probably a key factor in the town’s plan to control the spread of the virus among them. A failed plan. Of course.

No bodies or bones lay on the streets, though the shreds of clothing lay blown along the sidewalks, in trees, and wrapped around stop sign poles. Proof the dead had been dragged off by scavengers of the two-legged or four-legged variety.

Grace looked back at me from the front seat and broke the silence. “It all started awhile back with that scorpion sting.”

I looked up, recalling instantly the event she referred to. Me, Steph, and some others had been in the main barn, readying the tractor to plow up the cornfield before the spring planting. A scorpion, one of those little brown ones, had been making its home inside a leather work glove Steph had slipped her hand inside. Odd, because we were all used to squashing the fingers of gloves and listening for the occasional crunch, but this time she forgot.

As scorpions do, it stung her immediately.

At the time, Steph had never had an allergic reaction to a bug bite, so she didn’t freak out. She cursed, like anybody would. The rest of us laughed because those little brown scorpions were an annoyance more than anything and weren’t much to fear. Their stings felt like bee stings, nothing more. But Steph’s hand swelled so fast it shut us all up. She grew pale and faint, and we knew she was in trouble.

We rushed her back to the stockade, and followed her instructions as a rash reddened her skin. The treatment amounted mostly to making sure she swallowed a half-dozen Benadryl capsules over the next twenty-four hours and slathering her hand with cortisone cream.

Javendra’s and Steph’s combined medical opinion was that there was something unique in the scorpion’s venom that Steph was allergic to. It was her first scorpion sting, so the allergy had never been discovered. The explanation made perfect sense to everyone.

After a few days, her finger had swelled and turned red, the skin cracked and peeled, and she recovered completely. Afterwards, she was always careful about checking for the nasty little bastards before she put her feet in her shoes or before she reached inside of something she was unable to see into. And she always carried a few Benadryl capsules in her pocket. The scorpions weren’t a big problem for her. They were around, but Balmorhea wasn’t swarming with them. Anyone might see one once every three or four weeks.

“Could the poison still be in her body?” I asked.

“No,” answered Grace. “Steph told me she thought her reaction then was something else. Not just an allergic reaction.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Back in August,” Grace told me. “When you and Murphy got stuck up in Pecos.”

“Yeah.” I knew when she was talking about.

“After all the corn dried out in the field,” said Grace, “we were bringing it in, and she was stung by a bee.”

I looked over at Murphy. He shrugged. Nobody had mentioned it to him either. “What happened?”

“Anaphylactic shock,” answered Grace.

“Like this morning?” Anger slipped through, laced among my words. Anger at who? I didn’t know.

“Not like today,” said Grace. “It wasn’t this bad.”

“And she recovered,” I said. “Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t anyone?”

“She didn’t want to worry you for nothing.”

“Nothing?” I gritted my teeth and turned my attention to the barren hills off to the south. “Why didn’t she tell us she was allergic to bee stings?”

“She wasn’t,” said Grace. “That scorpion was the first to ever sting her, but she’s been stung by bees and wasps before.” Grace glanced back at me. “Who hasn’t?”

“People who never go outside,” muttered Jazz without looking up from her map.

“What did Steph say about it?” I asked. “Did she develop the allergy late in life? Is that a thing?”

“She didn’t have a way to explain it,” said Grace. “But she was worried. She didn’t say as much, yet I saw it in her eyes. She thought her reaction to the stings might have been caused by something else.”

“She didn’t say what?”

“I asked, but she said none of it made sense to her.”

“What about Javendra,” I persisted, “did he have any thoughts on it?”

Grace shook her head.

“So this morning,” I asked, “was it another scorpion?”

“No. Fire ants,” answered Grace. “That’s what she told me. She said she was walking across the courtyard to take her watch at 2:00 am and kicked an ant mound on the ground she didn’t see. She was stung three or four times, and said before she reached the ladder she already knew something was wrong. She swallowed the two Benadryls in her pocket, and passed out.”

I wanted to punch something.

“Rick was on watch, saw it all happen, and alerted us right away. She didn’t lay out there in the dark or anything.”

“Fire ants?” I asked. “Was she sure?”

Grace nodded.

“I found the mound,” said Jazz. “I obliterated it with Amdro.”

“Dalhover had somebody treat the entire compound before you and Murphy got back this morning,” added Grace.

“How can she be allergic to fire ants?” I asked. “Who lives in Texas and doesn’t get bit by a fire ant? How could she not know?”

“That’s just it,” said Grace. “She’s been bitten countless times, just like anybody else. This shouldn’t have happened.”

Only it did. I said, “This is only the third incident, and now she’s—” I couldn’t bring myself to follow the thought to its conclusion.

Murphy put a strong hand on my shoulder, though he didn’t have any words to add.

“Something is wrong,” I said. “This can’t be just an allergy.”

Grace nodded. “We don’t have a doctor to figure it out.”

“Might not matter if we did,” said Jazz. “I’m not trying to be Debbie Downer, but I’ve never heard of anything like this before.” She looked at Murphy and Grace.

Grace scowled at her.

Unfortunately, I was in agreement with Jazz. I was no doctor but I could see whatever was going on with Steph, it was a ticking time bomb, and if we didn’t figure out how to cure or mitigate it, it would kill her.

Chapter 6

Jazz had us heading east on West Gomez Road, a roughly paved path through the oil patch north of Fort Stockton.

“Will there be a sign when we hit 18?” asked Grace.

Jazz took another look at the map. “No. Yes. Doesn’t matter. The road tees into Highway 18. Go right when we get there and it’s three or four miles into Stockton.” She glanced around the cab like maybe she was making sure we were all satisfied with the circuitous route.

I was, but my mind was on other things.

Murphy slipped down through the roof to take his position back in his seat as he stowed the binoculars.

“Anything?” asked Grace.

Shaking his head, he said, “Roadrunners. Rabbits. Tumbleweeds.”

“How do we want to do this?” Grace was addressing us all.

“We don’t know where anything is,” said Murphy, though we all knew that already. “I say we take the two main roads across town, north to south, then east to west. If there’s a pharmacy, it’ll be on one of those two roads.”

“East-west is our best bet.” Jazz held the map up to show us in the backseat. “See how 10 skirts around on the north side of town?” She dragged her finger across the map on a straight line connecting I-10 east to I-10 on the west side of town. “I think that road across there is the main road through town.” She pointed out Highway 18. “We’ll be coming in this way.”

Murphy reached up to steady the flapping map and nodded. “If there’s a pharmacy—”

“There’s a pharmacy,” I corrected. There had to be a one.

“The pharmacy,” Murphy emphasized, will be on that road. He smiled at Jazz. “So we blaze straight into town until we hit that road and then turn. Left or right?”

“It’s a coin toss.” Jazz turned forward in her seat and started to refold the map.

“Doesn’t matter,” I told them, trying to convince myself that if Steph had made it this long, then another twenty minutes wouldn’t matter. “The town can’t more be than three miles across. How long will it take us to drive up and down the major roads?”

Nobody had an answer. Because my question didn’t need an answer. It was our plan.

“If we come across a hotel or something,” said Murphy, “and if we’re not swimming in Whites yet, maybe we can stop and see if there’s a phone book or something.”

Jazz looked back at him, not immediately understanding.

“Addresses,” said Murphy. “We can use it when we get back to Bal to mark all the important places in town on the map.”

“Duh.” Jazz smacked her forehead with her palm.

“Besides crisscrossing town and drawing out every White with two feet and a set of teeth,” asked Grace, “how are we going to do this once we find the drugstore?”

I’d been dwelling on just that point since we saw the first highway sign for Fort Stockton back when we were still heading east on 10.

Murphy glanced over at me. “We don’t have time to spend all day being sneaky about it.”

Taking the urgency of Steph’s condition off the table, that would have been the way to handle it—park the Humvee next to a pumpjack a few miles out of town, and let me and Murphy hike in naked to spend a day scouting around.

Despite the chill in the air, I started to pull off my gear, intending to strip down naked. “Once we find a place, Grace, if you’ll pull around back or somewhere out of sight for a sec’, I’ll hop out, and then you speed off.”

“Not a fan,” said Grace.

“I’ll run inside,” I explained, “find what we need, and be back out before you know it. Then you can pick me up on another pass through.”

“Only about a hundred things can go wrong with that,” replied Murphy.

“I’ve done it a hundred times before,” I argued.

“Then you had time to do it right,” he told me. “Not in a rush, like this.”

“You don’t know,” added Jazz. “There might be survivors holed up inside who’ll shoot you on sight. There—”

“There won’t be,” I countered.

“Probably not,” she admitted, “but you can’t know that.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

Murphy growled a sigh and started to remove his gear. “I’m going with you.”

“Like hell you are,” shouted Grace. “Murphy, you’re the only one in the truck with any real experience on that .50. We talked about this before we left. We’ve got one box of ammo and we’re probably driving into a hornet’s nest of Whites.” The Humvee skidded to a stop at the T-intersection with Highway 18. Grace turned in her seat to look at all of us and to settle her motherly eyes on me. “I don’t like you when you put your stupid side in charge.”

I liked Grace, I liked her a lot, but when she condescended from her pedestal of maturity, it pissed me right the fuck off. I bit back a sharp comeback and spun right into thinking up another.

“Hey.” Murphy put a hand on my arm. “Be cool, dude. We’re all worried about Steph. You know that, right? Man, we all love her. We’re family.”

I nodded. I did know that.

“Grace doesn’t want you to get yourself killed,” he said. “I mean, how’s Steph gonna take that when she comes out of her ‘phylactic shock thing, or whatever, and has to go to your funeral.”

I glared at Murphy. “You know me.” I gripped the handle of my machete. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Murphy busted out in a loud belly laugh.

It hurt, because it punched my ego right in its soft spot—the honest part.

Jazz dramatized a teenager sigh. “I’ll go with him.”

Murphy’s laugh came to an abrupt halt. “No.”

Jazz turned a pair of cold eyes on Murphy. “We talked about this. I won’t be your pet. You can’t be my protector.” Her eyes turned soft, even loving. She reached a hand over and grabbed one of Murphy’s big mitts. She put on a frail smile, and a whole conversation passed silently between them. She turned to me. “I can’t tell you how much this hurts me to say it, but you’re the expert in this kind of shit. Do we go in doing your naked thing, or do we keep our jeans on our asses and weapons in our hands?”

Chapter 7

The Humvee skidded on the gravelly concrete behind the Walmart, just by the loading dock.

“Go!” Murphy shouted from above, standing up through the hole in the Humvee’s roof, both hands on the machine gun.

Jazz's door opened in concert with mine, and we both hopped out.

Grace had the Humvee moving as we swung our doors closed behind us. She gunned the engine, and the heavy beast plodded away, with Murphy looking back to watch us.

Whites were howling all across Fort Stockton. It sounded like thousands, and they knew what the sound of that Humvee meant.

Grace turned the corner at the far end of the Walmart without slowing down.  Jazz and I listened as the sound of the rattling diesel started to fade.

I was naked again, in the winter’s chill with nothing but a worn pair of boots, my dinged-up machete, a hand-sized flashlight, and a raggedy little backpack.

Wearing only a pair of boots, Jazz had a pack of her own on her back with a pistol and several magazines inside, along with a flare gun and three rounds for it. She carried a big camp knife in one hand and a small flashlight in the other.

My adrenaline was spiking in a familiar way I’d almost forgotten.

Jazz turned to me, the cool façade she liked to wear showing its cracks.

“Just us,” I whispered as I headed for the loading dock.

Jazz followed.

As if to cement the reality of our choice, a handful of screaming Whites came running through the dark holes on the loading dock where the metal doors used to be. Giving Jazz and me barely a glance, they hopped off the concrete dock and tore-ass around the corner of the building, chasing the sound of the departing Humvee.

The sound of more echoed out of the darkness inside.

Chapter 8

Coming to a stop against the wall, just before going inside, I looked over at Jazz, the unspoken question plain on my face—go in, or run away?

She was conflicted.

Dirty handprints smeared the walls around the loading dock. The concrete dock under our feet was worse. Filthy trails blossomed out from the hole in the wall, spreading across the driveway and leading around the corners of the building. Single-serving piles of shit lay intact or smashed into stains. The smell of urine and feces flowed from within.

Jazz had made the same obvious deduction as me. Whether or not most of them were home, Whites lived in the Walmart.

Her mouth was sealed in a razor slit across her face. Her eyes were hard, desperately trying to hide her apprehension.

Going inside might get us killed.

I leaned in close, putting my lips to her ear. "I have to go in. You understand that, right?"

She nodded.

“You can wait out here.” I looked around. “Maybe—” The sound of slapping feet froze my words in my throat. I turned, machete ready for business.

Three more Whites came running out of the darkness. Two passed right by, one gave us a long stare, but the howling of the others drew him forward.

I pointed at a motel across the street, sitting alone on the face of the flat desert, surrounded by dirty scrub, cracking asphalt, and the carcasses of cars. “Hide there. If I’m not out in fifteen, don’t wait. Go to rendezvous one. I’ll meet you there or at one of the other two.”

Jazz shook her head. She cut her eyes inside. She had made her decision.

I raised my eyebrows, looking for confirmation.

She stepped away from the wall and headed for the loading dock.

I followed.

The reek engulfed us in the rear stockroom. Pallets, shredded boxes, crashed shopping carts, a forklift, metal shelving, mounds of clothing, plastic bottles, broken glass, and packaging of every variety lay mounded against the walls, leaving goat paths open for our passage.

The stench of death mixed with sewer reek.

I spotted bones in the gloom, broken in pieces, the marrow sucked out.

The voices of Whites echoed through the vast building. I had no way to guess how many. Dozens maybe. Twice that.

We pushed on. We needed to get out of the stockroom and onto the main floor. The pharmacy would be in one of the corners, probably near the front. At least that's the way it seemed to me from what I could remember of the way Walmarts were laid out.

The doors leading from the stockroom onto the sales floor were—of course—gone. As we passed through, we found ourselves in a maze of the Walmart's inedible inventory and shelving, shoved into stinking piles that towered over us. Paths led into the disorder in three directions. Two of those paths branched into more. Rows and rows of tinted skylights illuminated the interior in a twilight gray speared with shafts of brilliant sunlight where the Plexiglas on some had been shattered. Everything smelled of mildew and unwashed armpits.

The sound that stopped us there in the entrance, though, was one neither of us expected to hear, certainly not one we'd heard in more than three years—it was a baby crying.

Chapter 9

‘What the fuck?’ mouthed Jazz.

A live baby didn’t make any sense, unless there were normal humans somewhere inside, in some kind of impenetrable fortress. Was that what kept Whites lingering in the building? Humans? And how had a band of humans not just survived, but managed to thrive holed up in a Walmart?

If the Fort Stockton survivors had seized the Walmart early enough into the collapse, they could have taken control of years worth of food stocks, medicines, and nearly everything anyone might need for long-term survival. But what about water? Did they have collectors and cisterns to capture the meager rainwater that fell out here? Had they drilled a well through the floor?  My mind spun through a thousand logistical and tactical questions.  Only one thing was sure—if survivors were holed up inside, then no matter what everything else in the Walmart looked like, they had to have the cream of the crop, supply-wise, already stashed in their fortress. If medical supplies were here, they’d have them.

They were the people we needed to talk to.

The major chink in that plan, though, was that Jazz and I looked the part of the naked White, brain-fried and savage.

However, half-rotten clothes lay within reach in every direction. All the ingredients for a successful meet-n-greet were on hand.

I leaned in close, lips-to-lobe and whispered, “Survivors?”

Jazz nodded.

“We have to find them.”

She agreed.

Machete at the ready, I headed into the goat-path maze, following the sound of the crying baby. Jazz followed close behind. We were both running on max alert, ready to pounce on anything that moved. My breathing was coming in rapid pants and I was starting to sweat, despite the chilly temperatures.

Jazz put a hand on my shoulder to get my attention.

When I turned to look, she made a show of drawing a long, deep breath.

I understood. I needed to calm down. It had been a long while since I'd run swinging-dick naked through enemy territory with nothing but my machete and a pair of boots. The habit of it, built-in from those long, horrific months after the collapse had worn thin in my years of comfort and relative safety out in Balmorhea. I'd lost my edge.

A drew a few more breaths and focused on my heart rate.

I used to be a stone-cold killer of Whites. I used to be Null Spot, the Destroyer. That's what kept me alive through all of that shit. That's what would keep me alive over the next ten minutes, two hours, or ten weeks. Whatever life looked like when I got back to Balmorhea with the Epipen, I needed to find a way to stay in practice for the kind of deadly work I was good at.

I realized, my heart had stopped racing. My breath was flowing evenly and calmly. My hands had steadied out. I looked at Jazz and gave her a nod of thanks.

We proceeded.

Other sounds started to grow louder as we crossed the vast floor—the sounds of kids playing. Not many, but definitely kids. Young ones. Four, maybe five of them. Hell, maybe six, but definitely not a whole daycare's worth. Whites were out there in the maze, too, making noises that didn't make any sense. They weren't words, nothing like it, but it wasn't that raging-mad howl Whites seemed to prefer when they were on the chase.

The slap of bare feet jogging over linoleum grew from somewhere off to our left.

I hurried toward a branch up ahead, determined to take the rightward path and avoid a confrontation.

I didn’t make it.

A pair of Whites, both males, came running around a curve on the path to the left. Both stopped and froze when they saw Jazz, and I poised there at the intersection of the three routes.

I don't know if they noticed the boots or the backpacks we wore. I don't know if they recognized us as strangers. Given the broad spectrum of debilitative effects the virus had on the human mind, it was impossible to know. What I did know, though, was that their eyes settled on the machete in my hand. That, they understood. Which meant there had to be armed Smart Ones in Fort Stockton.

In a flash of inspiration, I lowered my machete and raised my left hand, palm up, metallic orange flashlight looking shiny and tempting. I held it out in offering.

Both Whites fixated on the strange bauble.

I grunted softly and nodded my head toward the flashlight.

The first one stepped timidly closer. The second followed, a little more boldly, trying his best to push past the other.

Jazz shuffled behind me. She was nervous. She didn’t know what I had in mind.

Once the Whites were within five or six feet, I flicked the flashlight on.

The light startled them, and before their slow brains could think to come up with a response, I dropped the flashlight. It clinked on the floor but didn’t go out.

The bold White dropped to his knees, trying to gather up the flashlight as the other stepped near and bent over for a closer look. That was his fatal mistake.

I heaved my machete around, putting all my weight into a swing that cut right through the back of the timid White's neck. Its head fell away in a spray of blood as I pulled my machete back near my hip. The bold one looked up, his face covered in surprise, his eyes clouded with his buddy's blood. I drove the tip of my machete through his throat. He collapsed, grasping at the blade as I ground it into his spine, severing the connection from brain to body. He went limp and gurgled his way toward death.

From behind me, Jazz muttered, “Shit.”

Feeling the warmth of the splattered blood turning cold on my skin, I looked back at Jazz. “Shit?”

“I—” She shuffled her feet away from the head oozing a puddle of red near her boots. “I didn’t expect that.”

In truth, I didn't either, but self-preservation eclipsed every other thought, and I did what I did. Rationalizations followed as the blood ran across the floor. Would the Whites have passed us by on their way to whatever mischief was already on their minds? Were they the standard vicious ones, like most were, or were they the gentle Russell types like the ones we came across in Easy Town. Did I just murder two Whites who were still partially human?

I filled in all the answers I needed to shore up my sanity, and once again, assure myself that I wasn't a murderer. I was Null Spot the Destroyer, and they were savages in need of the only thing that would cure them. I provided. They received. If anything, I gifted them a mercy. And that was all the rationalization I needed to cling to as the nebulous count of my victims ticked up by two notches.

Jazz nudged me. “You okay?”

The mouth of the guy on the ground was still gulping at the air, tongue smacking, popping each time the mouth opened. The eyes were blinking like it was trying to make sense of what was happening.

I turned my attention to our surroundings, trying to put the atrocity out of my mind and listen for more Whites coming our way. “We need to move.”

Chapter 10

We came to the outer wall of the fortress in what used to be the girls’ clothing section. Where I'd been expecting to see cinderblocks and embrasures, iron bars and murder holes, and the bodies of Whites who'd made the mistake of coming too close, instead, I saw debris, piled to the ceiling. The sounds of toddlers seemed to be coming from the other side of the debris wall. To me, none of it made sense.

Jazz pulled me close to whisper, “If this is the fortress, where the hell are all the Whites?”

She was talking about the Whites that should have been laying siege and tearing through the barriers. I shrugged in answer. We had little choice but to keep searching. I pointed along the debris wall, thinking the apparent thought that there had to be a fortified entrance somewhere.

Jazz tapped a finger on top of her wrist. Our time was growing short.

I nodded in the direction we needed to go. Jazz silently agreed, and off we went. Careful. Apprehensive. Ready to bolt.

Or kill.

Chapter 11

The entrance was only visible because of the trails stained on the floor by the coming and going of dirty feet. It wasn't a gate or a steel door, but a burrow through the base of the debris pile. The sound the children were making was definitely coming from the other side. The hushed tones of human voices were in there, too, though I couldn't make out a single word.

Jazz shook her head at me as I stared down at the burrow entrance, deciding how to proceed.

She took a glance around, saw that for the moment we were safe, and leaned in close for a nervous whisper. "I don't like any of this."

“We can’t leave,” I whispered back.

“We should, right now.”

“It’s not that different from where Murphy and me found you and Grace.”

“This is wrong.”

She was one-hundred-percent right about that. But, I told myself we were both still running on pre-collapse intuition, and I made my decision—nothing else to discuss. I dropped to my knees to crawl through the tiny tunnel.

“Don’t,” she hissed.

“Have to.” I crawled inside.

Knowing that splitting up was not in our best interest, Jazz accepted the folly or genius of my plan and dropped to her knees to follow.

Inside, the tunnel reeked. The floor was sticky, and junk above and beside us stuck out with sharp edges to tear skin and leave infection.

The tunnel was long enough for me to second guess my choice while being much too narrow for me to change my mind about it. Fortunately, it started to widen as we approached the end, and I couldn't help but think what a poor design choice that was. Better to narrow and lower it. Better to have potential entrants crawling in flat on their bellies to leave them at their most vulnerable when coming out the other side.

With plenty of room, Jazz came up beside me, and seeing nobody in front of us as we reached the exit, I stuck my head out of the tunnel for a look around. The curved debris wall separated a considerable space from the rest of the Walmart.

“Wha—?” Jazz gasped.

Back along the exterior wall, near a collection of dirty bedroll nests and little hovels, seven or eight female Whites squatted or lay on the ground, nursing babies, and watching their toddlers play in the detritus of a bygone world.

Whites. They were fucking Whites.

One of the mothers spotted us, and mouthed what passed for a word of alarm. The other mothers were on their feet in an instant, gathering their children up and corralling them with the nursing mothers while they formed into a perimeter, five of them, glaring and growling, showing their teeth.

Jazz punched me in the ribs, not at all gently. “We need to—”

From somewhere outside, far, but close enough, Murphy’s heavy machine gun rattled off a burst and every White inside the Walmart howled.

The White mothers charged at us.

Chapter 12

Scraping knees, shoulders, and elbows, we rushed through the tunnel, Jazz in front, me behind, glancing back into the darkness to see the White women coming for me, screaming their anger with a promise to kill us both. With no room to wield my machete in the tight space, I could do little except crawl as fast as I could go.

Just as I emerged into the relative light outside the debris-walled fortress, one of the women in the tunnel got close enough to grab my ankle.

Jazz was already on her feet, knife raised, ready to take on any of the Whites coming through goat paths in every direction.

I kicked. Fingernails dug into my skin. I jerked my leg, yet couldn’t shake the tight grip.

I dropped my machete to use both hands to pull myself against the junk surrounding me.

More hands grasped at my kicking foot.

Jazz grabbed my arm and pulled.

“The machete!” I told her, as I lay on the floor, tugging and kicking.

Jazz immediately understood. She scooped up the machete, and half-crawled over me into the tunnel to get in range. Jabbing the blade at my assailants, she gashed my foot. I shouted, but the hands let go. In a rush and tumble, Jazz and I were suddenly out of the tunnel, trying to find our feet and arm ourselves with our meager weapons.

Coming up one of the two goat paths we could see a gang of angry Whites, eyeing us for the intruders they seemed to know we were.

Jazz was already running toward the clear path, and I took off at a sprint to keep up.

I didn’t know where we were going, and she didn’t either, except that danger was closing.

The Whites though, as dimwitted and as they were, as slow as they tended to think, didn’t waste too many thought cycles figuring out where we’d gone, and I heard them yelping and howling as they ran up the path after us.

Jazz cut a hard left at an intersection. A dozen steps further, she took another turn, trying to get us lost in the maze.

I checked over my shoulder to see how close our pursuers were and ran into Jazz as she came to a stop. Together, we crashed into a big White who'd been lumbering through the maze to find the cause of all the excitement. From there, it was elbows, teeth, and blades as we wrestled with the beast to kill it before it injured one of us.

Luckily, we were both armed, and it died quickly. Both of us were panting when we finally climbed off the bloody monster and started to run again.

We soon found ourselves in what had been the pharmacy section of the store. Whites seemed to be closing in on us from two directions, though I told myself they couldn't know where we were, and what I was hearing was more an artifact of my panic than actual reality. My feet had stopped running, and my eyes were shooting from one spot to the next, over all the medical shit on the floor, desperately thinking that luck would smile on me and I'd see one of those goddamned Epipens laying there like a golden egg.

Jazz grabbed my arm and pulled. “We don’t have time.”

Moments later, she’d dragged me through a heavy steel door into a room built along one of the Walmart’s outer walls. It had no windows and no skylight above, so as I pushed the door through the crap on the floor and the hinges squealed an alarm to every White within earshot, we lost the last of our light. In the darkness, I shouldered the door until the doorknob clicked home and then I fumbled with the deadbolt until it latched.

As my eyes adjusted to the scant light coming in through the gap under the door, I saw Jazz looking around in the room, trying to figure out our next move.

The door reverberated when a body slammed it from the other side.

“They’ll get in,” I told her, though I knew she knew that.

“I can’t see anything,” said Jazz.

“Flashlight?” I asked. I’d sacrificed mine on those first two Whites.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Despite the tension, and panting, the adrenaline made me chuckle. “Yeah. It wasn’t a priority to hold onto, at the time.”

I felt around on the floor for the folding tables and chairs I’d seen tumbled over before the lights were extinguished.

More Whites were outside, smashing into the door with all their weight.

I started piling anything I could find in front of the door, wedging things under the handle to keep it closed. “We’re gonna need a way out of here.”

“What is this, some sort of break room or something?” Jazz was feeling around in the dark noisily, but the sound didn’t matter at that point.

“Can you see if there’s another door?” I asked, as I started to push a metal storage cabinet across the floor.

The door’s metal hinges were straining under the onslaught from outside. Screws were tearing out of the wall.

"We don't have long," I told her.

“Look up.”

“What?” I was already looking up and saw ten, maybe twelve feet up, the faintest of lights showing in a regular grid pattern.

“Ceiling tiles,” shouted Jazz.

As my eyes continued to adjust, I stumbled through the junk on the floor toward another metal storage cabinet on the back wall. “Here.”

I was pushing a table against the storage cabinet when Jazz arrived at my side. An agile hop put her atop the table, and she was climbing onto the top of the cabinet. Needing no guidance from me, she pushed a ceiling tile out of the grid above us, and a cloud of dust and rodent turds billowed down through a pillar of dull light from above. There were skylights above the ceiling tiles.

I was already climbing.

The doorjamb signaled its surrender with a loud crack, and the door broke free of the wall. The junk I’d piled in front kept it from falling. The Whites outside, though, knew they were almost in, and their frenzy drove them to push harder.

Jazz was already through the ceiling, perched along the top edge of a steel-framed interior wall, pointing back down. “Get that ceiling tile I dropped.”

Anger flashed across my face as I was already on top of the storage cabinet, and then I understood. If we replaced the ceiling tile to hide our escape, the Whites wouldn't know where we went. "Gotcha." I laid my machete across the ceiling grid and hopped back down to the table, which promptly collapsed under my weight. I hit my head on something as I fell, and my vision filled with stars.

Chapter 13

When my senses finally returned, Jazz was screaming at me from above. I sat up and put a hand to the back of my head, like that was the most important thing I could spend five seconds on. I felt a big knot on my skull, and my fingers came back sticky with blood.

“Zed!” Jazz shouted. “Get up here.”

The noise from the door caught my attention. My hastily stacked pile of junk was collapsing. Arms and hands were pushing through the gap between the door and the jamb. The Whites were going to break through at any moment.

“Forget the ceiling tile, Zed. Get up here now!”

That's when I noticed the emergency medical station sign on the wall by the door, a big red cross, a white box that at a glance I knew contained first aid supplies, a yellow box containing a defibrillator and a—I pointed as I wobbled to my feet. "What's that?"

“Zed!”

I made my way through the junk on the floor toward the emergency station beside the door, and the Whites on the other side went nuts. I had the same skin as them, but I was the object of their ire, and all logic was gone from their minds.

The white box bolted to the wall just to the right of the defibrillator said, ALLERGY EMERGENCY KIT. Behind the glass face were what I quickly deduced to be just what I needed—Epipens, two them, labeled for anyone over 66 pounds, two for—

“You need to come!” shouted Jazz.

I smashed the glass on the front of the emergency cabinet, grabbed two pens, and bounded across the room, feeling my balance come and go as I moved. I shoved a chair against the storage cabinet and handed the Epipens up to Jazz.

She tried to take my wrist instead.

“Take the pens, dammit!”

She did, and quickly stuffed them in her bag as the pile of metal chairs and plastic tables crashed to the floor along with the steel door.

I scrambled onto the top of the storage cabinet, cutting my arms and knees on the sharp edges, and before a White could get across the room, I pulled myself into the space above the ceiling. I sat on the top edge of the interior wall and kicked the storage cabinet over on top of a pair of Whites who’d just gotten close enough to jump for me.

“You’re bleeding,” Jazz told me as she did a quick survey of the space above the ceiling tiles and below the roof. It was a 3-D maze of wires suspending the ceiling tile framework, ducts, and dust spread over the Walmart’s admin offices, the break room, part of the pharmacy, and who knew what else.

The Whites were below, jumping and screaming.  I was out of their reach.

My heart was pounding a mile a minute, my breath was coming in gulps as I tucked my legs up beneath me and grasped some metal conduit for balance.

Jazz was already moving. "Don't forget your machete, Batman."

I grabbed it and moved away from the hole, knowing it was only a matter of minutes or moments before the Whites figured out how to stand that metal cabinet back upright and come up after us.

“This way,” called Jazz. She was climbing quickly through the network of cables and conduit, throwing up a cloud of decades-old dust in her wake.

Choking the dust in and coughing it out, I hurried to follow. Not far ahead of her, a rusty ladder ran up into the sunshine above, through a roof access door, or hatch, or whatever the right word was. It had been left open. The smell of mold grew strong, and the insulation I kicked out of my way was mushy. Every pipe I grabbed was slick with slime.

Jazz was already at the ladder, pulling a hand away from a rung to look at it with disgust on her face. “Careful when you get here.”

A ruckus from behind told me our short head start had just ended—a White was climbing into the ceiling space. Thankfully, he was as dumb as the rest of them..  He found his footing on the interior wall I’d been perched on a moment before, as others climbed up after him. He spotted Jazz and me and pounced in our direction, making a run for us, crashing through the flimsy ceiling tiles and back into the break room below.

“Hurry,” called Jazz from the top of the ladder as she pulled herself onto the roof.

The Whites who’d seen their buddy fall through the ceiling were more careful about where they put their feet, but more careless about their safety as they rushed through the 3D maze to catch me.

When I reached the ladder, I looked up as I climbed, and Jazz was standing on the roof, urging me to hurry. I didn’t need her coaching. Every White in the Walmart was aware of our location and seemed to be coming our way.

“What now?” asked Jazz, as I climbed onto the gravelly roof, earning more bloody scrapes for my rush.

I took a quick glimpse around to see the bubbles of the skylights running in regular rows over the sales floor for a few acres around us. Oxidizing green HVAC units as big as sports cars sat at regular intervals among them. Way across the roof, at the back edge, I spied the curving rails of a ladder built up and over the back wall. I knew, however, even as Jazz spotted the ladder and started to run in that direction it was no guarantee of a safe escape path.

“Go!” I positioned myself next to the access hatch so I’d be behind any White climbing the ladder to get through. I bent my knees and raised my machete, ready for the fight.

Twenty yards away, Jazz stopped and shouted, “What the hell are you doing, you stupid asshole? You don’t need to be a hero. What the—”

“Go!” I shouted again. “Make sure the way is clear. I’ll hold them here until you find us a sure way off this roof.”

She understood, and took off.

From somewhere across the rooftops, I heard the familiar sound of an M4 firing, and definitely not the .50 cal mounted on the Humvee. I didn’t know whether to worry more or less about that, but all thoughts of gunshots moved to the bottom of my worry list because a White was on the ladder below me and coming up fast.

Chapter 14

From behind the White, I hacked her in the side of the neck and she fell back into the hole, knocking others off the ladder below and enraging those trying to scramble up.

It only took seconds for the brainless mob to reorganize their upward assault, and the next White lost half its hand as it reached up to grab the top rung. He fell, and a satisfying second crash meant some of the Whites had dropped through the ceiling tiles to the floor far below. Far enough they'd be out of the chase.

Thirty feet to my left, a fist started to pound one of the skylights from below.

"How the hell?" I didn't have time to finish the thought, as it was time to hack again as a White was trying to monkey-rush his way up the ladder. He got a hand around my ankle as he wrenched his body into an attack that exposed his throat to my downward thrust. Blood exploded out of his larynx, and he slid back into the hole, nearly pulling me down with him.

I scolded myself for my careless mistake and gathered my feet beneath me just in time to pound the backside of my blade into the skull of a female trying to top the ladder.

On the skylight off to my left, the beating fist was replaced with a piece of metal. The skylight wasn’t going to withstand the assault for long.

Way over by the curved ladder, Jazz was leaning, hands on the rails, looking down.

I murdered another White and waited for Jazz to give me the signal to come. She didn’t. She glanced up, shook her head, and ran along the wall, still on the search.

Crap.

I killed another White.

And another. Each time, buying us a few moments of respite before the next mounted the ladder to come after me. With a distinct snap, the acrylic cover on the skylight to my left cracked, and that was the death knell of our safety.

“We’re out of time,” I hollered, as I glanced toward Jazz.

She was standing near the far corner of the building, peering over the edge. She turned back and waved me to come.

“Don’t wait for me,” I called back.

“I won’t—”

“I’ll meet you at the rendezvous.”

Jazz jogged a few paces in my direction, pleading for me.

“Dammit, just go!” I shouted, not because I planned to hero my way into an early death, but because I was betting that with me up here killing hungry fuckers, she could get away clean. I was just going to have to figure out my escape on my own.

Chapter 15

More Whites died under my blade.

Still, they came, as I tried to guess how much longer I needed to hold out before Jazz would be safely away. I gave up on that idea, though. I was buzzing hard on adrenaline and rage—rage at all the fuckers trying to climb through the roof to kill me. I knew from experience that time had a way of dilating when I was in the shit, meaning I had no idea how many actual seconds had ticked off the clock since Jazz went over the edge of the roof—maybe twenty, maybe five hundred. I decided my exit moment needed an alternative trigger.

The  skylight off to my left was breaking away from the roof at the seam and fracturing into shards and gaping holes across the top. Every arm that reached through bloodied itself in the attempt, but none of that was an immediate danger to me. It was all impending, an important distinction.

I hacked again and again, then glanced back to my left.

When a head finally pushed through the skylight, I hacked my last White coming through the roof access panel and sprinted. I didn't run in the direction that Jazz had gone, instead, I detoured hard to my left.  Just as the White with this head through the skylight turned to see me coming, I whipped my machete across his forehead and converted the crown of his skull into a bloody Frisbee.

Not looking back to admire my work, I raced for the far corner of the roof where Jazz had made her escape.

Once at the edge, I peeked over the parapet and saw the path to safety—or maybe the exit for the safety scenic overlook. A semi-tractor trailer sat parked by the building, maybe three feet from the wall, and about ten or eleven feet down. A glance over my shoulder told me all I needed to know about whether I had time to contemplate the height, fret jumping too far and rolling off the edge of the trailer, or any other of a dozen things that could go wrong. Whites were on the roof, climbing out of the roof-access hole, looking like a bunch of angry fire ants streaming in my direction.

Over I went.

I landed with a bang on the empty trailer, clomped loudly up the length of it and hopped onto the cab of the truck, down to the hood, over to the fender, and then I made my last leap to the asphalt.

In the vast, barren spaces between the sparse buildings, scores of Whites were on the move, though they weren’t organized. They weren’t even set on a goal. The local Smart Ones weren’t running the show yet. That was good.

Before putting any thought into what might be a good, bad, or optimal escape route, I made a beeline for an oversized DIY carwash for semi-trucks on the lot next to the Walmart, though the word ‘next’ implied a proximity that most city folks would misconstrue. I had to cross fifty yards of cracked asphalt and another hundred yards of bleached dirt to get there, with nothing but sparse, ankle-high scrub to give me cover.

When I ducked into the first carwash bay to catch my breath and look back, Whites were hopping off the roof, and the first handful of them was already running in my direction. Worse, all the running and howling had caught the interest of the random Whites from around the area.

Shit.

I looked myself up and down. Of course, I was still wearing my boots. I held my big machete tight, and I was spattered head to toe in blood. Though I was as White and hairless as all the beasts coming after me, at the moment, I didn't look anything like them.

Knowing I couldn't kill them all—no chance of that—and knowing I probably couldn't outrun them, I needed a new plan—a desperate plan that Murphy would most definitely frown on. I spun my wheel of fortune and picked the first idea that popped up.

I sprinted toward a nearby hotel.

Chapter 16

Once past the hotel, things got a little easier for me. A gas station, a McDonald’s, and several other hotels lay close by, meaning more cover, and more directions for my pursuers to guess where I went. I ran with every ounce of speed I could muster to reach the next hotel over before any interested White saw where I was headed.

Gasping for breath as I trudged through loose sand to reach the parking lot, I crossed the asphalt and flung myself against a wall next to a burned-out car. I hurriedly stripped off my boots and hid them beneath the car, along with my machete. I then ran and dove into the sand, quickly rolling in it as it gritted its way into every open cut. I had no time to dwell on the pain, and in moments I was on my feet again, running.

With the  building keeping me hidden for the moment, I ran past the empty swimming pool toward the office and came across an opportunity—several vending machines, broken up by the pool fence. Empty cola cans and candy wrappers still lay inside. From a scavenging perspective, it was a common and utterly useless sight to come across, but for my purposes, it was perfect.

I ran up to the first of the machines, squatted beside it, reached in for a handful of wrappers, and scattered them on the ground around me. Another handful I held onto, pushing them against my face to make it seem as though I’d found a hidden morsel. My panting served to make it seem as though I was feasting.

The mob of Whites looking for me was breaking up, and I heard them howling from several directions. But when a group of them came running around the far end of the hotel, I looked up to watch them, because that’s what any curious White would do.

Several of them found me just as interesting, not because I was bloody—I wasn’t, not really.  Most of that was obscured by the sand stuck all over me. I looked for the most part like any other dirty White, trying to scavenge a meal. That meal part was on the minds of a few of my pursuers as they came over to root around in the vending machines with me.

The mob moved on.

Chapter 17

When I got up to leave, my new scavenger buddies bounced to their feet to follow. I accepted their company. The three of them were a perfect disguise for moving around White-infested Fort Stockton. Well, out of it, really. The backup rendezvous with Grace and Murphy was set for a place northwest of town, out in the oil patch.

As my three new followers looked on with awe, I retrieved my machete from where I'd stashed it beneath the car, and then went about searching the hotel for shoes. They weren't hard to find, me not being picky about finding pairs. I had my followers carry them as we collected them, finally finding our way back to the car where I'd stashed my boots.

That’s when I took a gamble and put my boots on. With shoes in their hands, my followers did their best to mimic me. I had to help them with tying the knots. Then we were off, jogging north to get out of town.

Chapter 18

We followed Highway 285, passing the remains of a golf course, the Pecos County Sheriff's Department, and an airport. The Texas A&M Forest Service had a big metal warehouse-style building sitting beside the road. Why? I hadn't a clue. I hadn't seen anything that looked like a forest in years. Southwest Texas is a desert.

Building-wise, things thinned out considerably after we passed the forest service warehouse. I kept my pace, though, jogging, putting ground between me and Fort Stockton, heading into the desolate emptiness.

We'd gone maybe a mile or two more when I led my little entourage to squat in the shade of an awning extending from the front of a portable building that had served a long-forgotten purpose. We were all panting to catch our breath, and I was starting to devise how best to scrape them off now that their utility had run its course.

Murder?

I looked them over, squatting and watching me with faithful eyes, their new leader, a man with a blade. Their new alpha, their ticket to post-apoc prosperity.

Ugh.

I felt like a shit.

All three of them, two women and a man, had been perfectly normal people until the virus had baked away their higher brain functions. Now they were just trying to make the best of the lives they had. Apparently, part of that was following whomever around them seemed smarter than they were.

On a whim, I sat my machete on the ground, looked each of the whites in the eye, and then started to rub my belly.  I had time to kill.  I might as well have some fun.

All three copied me.

I then started to pat my head while continuing to rub.

The three struggled with it, got frustrated, looking from one to another, and then the most unexpected thing happen. One started to giggle, and they all burst out in laughter, and I laughed to.

I couldn’t kill them, no way.

I looked up the road. The meeting place was maybe another three miles out. Could I pick up the pace and just run them into the ground? Losing them when they finally gave up trying to keep up? What about bringing them back to Balmorhea with me? Were these three docile enough we could tame them, put them to work in the field, show them how to earn their keep? Could they be reintroduced to society in some subservient role?

I didn’t like where those thoughts led. There was no upside to building a plantation of brain-fried Russell types. It was time to run, and see if I could make them abandon me.

Chapter 19

Three miles later, I was exhausted, but I was alone.

I was standing at the corner of 285 and West Gomez Road, looking at a manufactured home standing there every bit as lonely as me. My entourage dropped off a few miles back and I couldn't see anything moving along the long flat road back toward Fort Stockton. Unfortunately, I didn't see the Humvee parked anywhere, though I could see for miles in every direction.

Looking up at the sun to guess at the time, I figured I was late. Grace, Murphy, and Jazz had come to wait for me and then left, which meant they'd swing back by again tomorrow before checking the place south of town we'd picked out.

I headed for the house and noticed that it hadn't fared well through three years of neglect. Windows were broken and shreds of curtain flapped in the tired wind. The skirting around the base was mostly blown away, and several sheets of aluminum were curled over and hanging off the roof. No cars sat outside. No sign of recent occupation existed. Hence, I decided to claim it as my own, at least for the night. Staying inside beneath the shreds of a blanket would be more comfortable than trying to keep myself from freezing to death out in the open.

As I neared the house, the front door swung open, and Murphy stepped out. “Where you been, man?”

“Tell me Grace and Jazz are on their way back to Bal.”

Murphy smiled. “You think I’d have stayed here to babysit you if they weren’t?”

No, but I still had to ask. “Tell me.”

“Man,” loosen up. “They’re on their way back. After we picked up Jazz, she told us what was going on. I figured you’d make your way here.” Murphy waved me to come inside. “Grace will be back in the morning to pick us up.”

Chapter 20

In the house I found a pair of old jeans cut for a waist ten inches wider than mine and an old belt to keep them cinched around my hips. I finished my outfit with a t-shirt, a flannel shirt, and a one-sleeved coat that I cut the other sleeve off of. It wasn’t stylish clothing by any measure, but it would keep me warm through the night.

Murphy and I broke the late afternoon and night into four-watch shifts. Neither of us had slept in 36 hours because we’d gone out the night before on a javelina hunt, so we both needed some sack time as soon as we could get it.

Murphy took the first 3-hour nap, and I watched the empty desert around the trailer slowly turn from dusk to dark as my worries for Steph multiplied. By the time we switched out, I was dead tired, and struggling to keep my eyes open. So I laid on a couch that didn't smell much worse than me, and in moments, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

Hours later, I awoke with sunlight on my face and sprang off the couch, knowing instantly that something was wrong.

From the kitchen, Murphy burst out in laughter.

“Dude.” I rubbed my eyes. “You didn’t wake me.”

Murphy, leaning in a chair and looking out a window that gave him a view of the road down to Fort Stockton, said, “You needed the sleep.”

“You did, too.”

"I figured I’d wake you when my eyelids got heavy." Murphy nodded to a cup on the table. "Found some coffee."

“You’re shitting me!”

Murphy shook his head and smiled again. "It's cold brew. You know, out of necessity." He pointed at the cupboard in the kitchen. "In that big mixing bowl over there. Pour some, if you want."

“Where’d you get the water?” I asked.

“Well out back. Took me a while to pump it, but it came out clear and cold.”

“You did that last night?”

“Wasn’t anything going on.”

I walked into the kitchen for a look through the big windows by the dining table. “It’s still early.”

“’bout 7:30.”

That felt late. “What time will they be here?”

“They probably headed out at first light.”

I did some rough math in my head, and figured they might arrive any time now. Or they might wait until later and show up at the originally agreed-upon rendezvous time.

“Man.” Murphy scooted his cup across the table to me. “Have some of this coffee. Lighten up. Steph will be fine.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but if that shit was gonna kill her, it woulda done it before we got back from that pig hunt. She got through the worst of it.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I sipped at the cold coffee. Under other circumstances, it would have been awful, but coffee was such a luxury these days, it was a welcome treat no matter how it was prepared. “We need to find a doctor.”

“Yeah, but not right this minute.”

“I’m not saying right this minute.”

“I know.”

“You’re just fucking with me.”

Murphy laughed.

“I’ll agree with the rest of you. We need to find more people. Or we need to go where more people are. If we try to keep to ourselves isolated out here in the desert, eventually we’ll all die.”

“I think that’s gonna happen anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

Murphy got out of his chair and crossed over the cupboard to pour another cup of cold-brew coffee out of the mixing bowl. “Some sugar would be nice.”

I shrugged. I was starting to feel the caffeine buzz through my veins, convincing me I was invincible. It was like Null Spot juice.

“Looky there,” said Murphy, pointing out the window.

I looked up 285, in the opposite direction of Fort Stockton. Something was coming, and I was already betting it was Grace in the Humvee.

We stood there in the kitchen, watching the Humvee grow out of the distance, waiting until we were sure.

“That’s Dalhover,” said Murphy.

I saw someone standing through the roof hatch, manning the .50. “You sure?”

“Look at the way he’s hunched over that thing.” Murphy was already heading for the front door, gathering his things as he went. “It’s him.”

I drained the rest of my coffee. “Was there any more of this?”

Murphy raised his backpack before he swung it over his shoulder. “Nearly two pounds.”

I followed him out of the mobile home, and we stood there in front until the Humvee slowed down and pulled off the pavement.

Grace pulled up in front of us, sending a plume of thick of chalky dust over us, sending Murphy into a coughing fit.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

Jazz was already out from the other side and rushing around to hug Murphy.

Dalhover remained in his perch. Scanning the desert once more before he looked down at me.

“Steph?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine?”

Grace told me, “She was already getting better when we got back yesterday.”

“Better?” I asked. “What does that mean exactly? Did you inject her with the epinephrine?”

“No,” answered Grace.

“There are three Whites down the road, jogging this way,” warned Dalhover. “We need to load up. We can talk on the way.”

Three harmless Whites, my recent entourage. I ignored Dalhover, keeping my focus on Grace. “Tell me.”

“Zed, she was sitting up. She was conscious. Javendra made her take as many Benadryl as they thought were safe. This morning, when we left, she was weak, a little loopy from the bennys, but she’s going to be fine.”

I tried to say, 'Great!' but my voice caught in my throat, so I nodded and headed for the back door.

Jazz caught me and wrapped me in a hug. “She’s fine, Zed. Really.”

I hugged her back and sniffled up my weakness.

“Really,” she told me as she pulled away. “Oh, and thanks for yesterday. I’d have been pissed if you’d gotten yourself killed.”

I managed a laugh as I climbed into the backseat.

Murphy loaded up on the other side as Grace turned the Humvee around to head back home.  And I felt safe. Steph was going to be alright. Jazz was fine.

All was well in the world again, but questions about our future lingered.

The End?

Tell a Friend, Reviews, and Other Books

I should also take just a moment to plead for a review. And if you really liked this bargain of a box set, I’d love it if you recommended it to friends and family!

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Newsletter and Facebook

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Book Credits

Cover Design and Layout

Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz

Editing, Proofreading, and Beta Reading at least one of the books

Cathy Moeschet

Lindsay Heuertz

Robyn Roopchan

George Mathew

Linda Tooch

Rebecca T. Dickson

Jackie Bauerelen

John W Van Deusen

Julie Carrigan

Christy O'Neil

John Cummings

Kat Kramer-Adair

eBook and Print Formatting

Kat Kramer-Adair

Text copyright © 2013-2019, Bobby L. Adair & Beezle Media, LLC

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.