Black VIRUS

A novel

by

Bobby Adair

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Text copyright © 2016, Bobby L. Adair

Cover Design and Graphics

Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a.  187designz

Editing, Research, & Proofreading

Kat Adair

John Cummings

eBook and Print Formatting

Kat Adair

Foreword

You might say I don’t really do anything the “traditional” way.  My new Black Rust series is no different.

I like action and I like fast-paced stories. I like novels so compelling that I can’t help but turn the page to see what happens next. Not surprisingly, those are the kinds of stories I strive to write. But I also love complex and flawed characters, and I enjoy reading about them in unusual and challenging situations where no easy solution exists. Sometimes trying to squeeze all of that action and character exploration into one book doesn’t work.

That’s kind of what happened in Black Virus and Black Rust.

Throughout the story development of Black Rust, I realized there wasn’t room for the main character’s backstory without digressing too far off the high-octane plot I was shooting for. However, the more I wrote about Christian Black, the more important his history became. So, even though Black Rust was written and released first, Black Virus is a short prequel to that story.

Odd, I know, but now that they’re both out, it works.

Christian Black’s story, which starts with the book Black Virus, grew out of ideas I’d been kicking around for nearly a year while I was trying to finish up most of my commitments to other projects. The ideas took a long time to coalesce into a story, which is unusual for me. In the end, though, I think the story was well worth it, and as I write more books in the series, my goal is to make them compelling as well.

So what is Black Virus?  Black Virus takes what I hope is a unique perspective on the apocalypse 10-15 years earlier than the Black Rust story.

Chapter 1

“I didn’t say he was degenerating, Mrs. Black. I said he was atypical.”

“What does…” my mom blubbered and buried her face in her hands, “What does that mean?”

“Please, Mrs. Black,” Dr. Rajan leaned close. His computer’s camera lens distorted the proportions of his head, making him look like an alien.

Mom sniffled and wiped her eyes before looking back up at her monitor.

“It’s not the spongiform encephalopathy. Your son never tested positive for the mutation that generates the prions. His behavior has nothing to do with the H5N1 virus.” Dr. Rajan looked away from the screen for a moment as he searched for the most delicate words. I’d seen the habit dozens of times when I’d been in therapy with him in person. I’d seen it plenty more after we transitioned to online sessions. “He’s different.”

The words weren’t delicate enough. Mom’s sobs came back. Eighteen months since contracting the disease and her emotions grew more volatile by the day. The prion affected everyone differently.

“Stop spying.” It was Levi, my older brother.

Without looking away from the gap in the door I was watching through, I silently shooed Levi to go somewhere else. I was keeping tabs on Mom, my way of getting a progress report on her well-being, while Dr. Rajan was trying to give her mine.

She typically met with Dr. Rajan just once a month but had pushed him into an impromptu meeting after my session because she was concerned. Our golden retriever, Lucy, had been mauled a few nights before. We’d found her remains behind the garage. She’d probably heard something in the backyard and had dutifully gone out through an open window to protect us while we slept.

My dad was the one who discovered her lifeless body and his wails brought the rest of us out to see what had happened. He used to love Lucy so much that Levi and I joked that she was his favorite kid. Until I saw him on his knees in the bloody grass stroking her matted fur, I’d thought the prions in his brain had eaten away every connection to Lucy. He hadn’t even acknowledged the dog’s existence since last winter.

My mom cried loudly and dramatically like a woman being beaten. Levi’s tears were silent and shamed. He hid them by hanging his head forward, letting his long hair drape around his face.

I looked at the smears of blood, mangled organs, and mashed grass, and understood that Lucy had not gone quickly. She’d fought, lost, and suffered as she tried to escape. I knew Lucy must have howled, in her way begging help from her pack—the rest of us. Somehow, we’d all slept while her killers tore at her body.

Levi’s shoulders shuddered, and he covered his eyes. He was drawing the same conclusions I was, and guilt was piling on top of his loss. We were all to blame.

That’s when I noticed Mom. She’d stopped looking at Lucy and was staring at me as floods of tears rained down from her cheeks. “What’s wrong with you?”

I’d loved Lucy, but I wasn’t crying. I wanted to kill the prion-twisted bastards who’d murdered the dog that had been a companion my whole life, but grief wasn’t an emotion that often visited in my heart. As far gone as mom was, she saw that in me, and it frightened her. I was different in a way that didn’t fit within the bounds of a mother’s generous concept of normal, in a way that horrified her.

I wasn’t a big kid. In fact, I was average in size. Maybe I was a little stronger than most, but not remarkably so. I was faster. I was pretty sure of that. Young boys are always devising games to measure themselves against one another. In some of those games, I excelled.

Mostly, I was decisive, and I was ruthless.

Those two were the biggest differences I saw when comparing myself to the other kids.

Many of them were cruel, as young boys often are, but none of them understood ruthlessness the way I did.

They’d grown up in a school system that jumped through every hoop to stifle violent outbursts of young boys coming to an age where they felt the mean kick of testosterone for the first time. Most kids readily respond to conditioning of their behavior, whether through the dreaded lecture, boring timeouts, useless suspensions from school, the wooden paddle, a leather belt, or a knuckly fist. I probably would have responded too, except that I understood from an early age the connection between behavior and punishment wasn’t always direct, it was chosen. I also understood that it was chosen for a reason. That made me question the reason. That made me understand that the adult authority figures in my life were attempting to manipulate my behavior in the same way they might manipulate the behavior of a leaky puppy, by connecting inappropriate actions to painful punishments.

I realized punishment wasn’t a consequence, but a price. I liked doing some things that were outside what they called the rules of normative behavior, and I understood the retributive cost of each.

There were times when punching another boy in the face once, twice, or a dozen times was what I wanted to do—it’s just the kind of thing that comes up when you’re a boy. I knew the price every time I swung a fist.

There were some boys in school whose newly coursing hormones spurred them to dominate all those around.

And I felt an equally powerful need to rebel.

One of them might say something. I might punch him, but not one of those movie punches where you poke someone in the nose to create a bloody fountain in his face. I wasn’t that kind of fighter. When a boy pressed his bullshit too far with me, especially if he was a bigger boy, I solved the problem with damage and pain.

A knee to the nuts was a favorite tactic. Throat punch, absolutely. Smashing a jaw shut on a wagging tongue, certainly. An elbow to the temple to daze him, without a doubt. Any of those would get me started and then it was all about bruises and blood. Not all of my would-be tormentors remembered what happened after that first elbow to the head, but they all saw the bruises in the mirror for the next few weeks, feared the next deep breath that would stretch their aching ribs, felt their scabbed lips crack open and bleed when they ate their lunch, and gasped at their swollen balls whenever their pants cinched up just the right way in their crotches.

That was important to me. It was how I used a cruder version of the corporal methods utilized by the school officials to teach the bullies to leave me and my two little brothers alone.

Because my dad couldn’t hold a job, we moved around a lot. Every year, sometimes midyear, I found myself in a new district. Levi was four years older than me so he and I never attended the same school. The twins, who were small for their age, were a year behind me, and we often found ourselves on the same campus with the same bullies.

It didn’t usually take more than two or three fights followed by some paddlings and suspensions to earn a peaceful school year for all three of us.

It was a good system until I wound up in the same school as that Ledoux cretin. He was a big kid, rangy, a full head taller than me, a genetic freak or a boy too stupid to get through school on the twelve-year plan.

Unfortunately, the breadth of his stupidity was eclipsed by his cruelty. Maybe he was born that way, maybe it was his upbringing, maybe he was the product of bullying by other kids all those years ago when he was small. He had the kind of face that makes a kid a target for that sort of thing. It wasn’t symmetrical. His ragged front teeth overlapped his bottom lip in a way that inserted misplaced F-sounds when he talked. His eyes bulged, and his wiry hair was never groomed.

Whatever hell the older kids had put him through when he was small, he seemed determined to parse it back out tenfold to students unlucky enough to be stuck in school with him.

Ledoux found me on my first day of eighth grade.

A last-minute move to a seedy neighborhood on the north side of Houston caused me and my brothers to miss the first two weeks of school. What seemed like a piece of luck for me was that the neighbors had a kid my age named Oscar—Oscar Camacho. He and I became instant friends, and since he’d lived in the neighborhood his whole life, he promised to introduce me around when we got to school the following Monday.

To me, it looked like a shortcut past outsider status that might also allow me to sidestep the seemingly inevitable fights.

As it turned out, my first class after homeroom was gym. All the kids were loitering on the basketball court before the bell rang. I was with Oscar, as we were on the same class schedule—a piece of luck or something my mom arranged, I didn’t know. As soon as Oscar and I walked onto the basketball court, he pointed out Ledoux and led me over, calling my name to Ledoux as we came near.

Ledoux looked at me and smirked in a way I’d seen once on a kid’s face right before he mashed a frog’s head flat with the end of a baseball bat.

It wasn’t a good sign.

When I stepped within range of Ledoux’s long arms, he swung one of his big-knuckled fists around in a ridiculous John Wayne punch to pound me in my sternum.  He had a plan, a well-rehearsed agenda for meeting new kids in school, every one of which was smaller than him.

His face telegraphed his hostility. His body leaned into the punch. I understood exactly what was happening. Ledoux’s punch wasn’t going to be a fun poke among new friends, he was going to knock the wind out of me and laugh when I fell on my ass trying to catch my breath. Ledoux wanted to establish the pecking order from the first moment between us. That was his game, and he thought he was the only one who knew the rules.

Oops for him.

When somebody is pouring all their weight into driving their fist through the center of your chest, redirecting them is easier than you might think. I swung my right hand up to push his forearm to the side. His fist didn’t hit my chest, it slipped past my right shoulder and the rest of Ledoux’s momentum followed, throwing him off balance. Had I been more like other boys, I might have stepped back at that point and let Ledoux fall to the floor to be embarrassed in front of all those kids in that basketball gym. But Ledoux stood a head taller than me, and he was mean enough that he’d rather punch me than greet me, so I had no choice but to teach him a lesson in Christian Black’s brand of savagery.

As Ledoux’s big fist sailed past my right shoulder, I pushed his forearm in that direction. As I spun to follow it, I put every ounce of my momentum into my left fist and smashed it into his temple as he fell.

When he hit the floor face-first, he may have been dazed, he may have been unconscious. I didn’t wait to find out. I jumped and came down, planting a knee just below one of his shoulder blades, hoping to crack a rib. A gasp of his breath burst out under my weight. I grabbed two handfuls of his wiry hair down close to the scalp and used his hair like a couple of handles to smash his face into the gym floor as hard as I could. Three times.

I jumped up, raised my fists, and looked around, ready for another fight.

The kids who saw the whole thing were stunned.

The ones who had been looking in another direction but had turned toward the ruckus had seen none of the fight, or only the end of it. It hadn’t lasted more than ten seconds. The gym teacher was in his office when it all went down and wouldn’t have known anything except for the sudden silence in the gymnasium. He rushed out to see an unconscious thug laying face down, blowing bloody snot bubbles on the floor.

It was a no-paddle school, so I got a week’s suspension not even a full hour into my first day. No big deal to me. I figured I’d saved myself a lot of hassle.

It took Ledoux a week longer to recover from his injuries than it did for me to work through my suspension. When he returned to school after those two weeks, I spotted him in the hall, and I saw a flame of hate burning so brightly in his eyes I knew things weren’t over between us.

That day in the cafeteria, I was eating lunch with Oscar and a few of his friends who were talking about my fight with Ledoux, reveling in the details as if they’d witnessed it themselves. The adulation felt kind of good until I saw Ledoux come into the cafeteria with a couple of guys I’d come to know as his toadies. The three didn’t get in line for a tray but instead made a beeline for my twin brothers who’d just come out of the serving line and were making their way toward a table.

Ledoux confronted my two brothers in the cafeteria’s center aisle. They stopped. Words were exchanged. I wasn’t able to make out what Ledoux said through the sound of a few hundred kids’ voices. His back was to me. But I heard his tone and so did everyone else. A hush spread through the students outward from Ledoux, moving in a slow wave toward the cafeteria walls.

I was on my feet before the hush reached my table, running, and thinking that if he’d been a smart boy, he’d have come into the cafeteria looking for me, or at least he’d have made sure I wasn’t there before he started tormenting my brothers.

In the hush, I saw a cafeteria lady at the cash register turn around to see what was happening in the dining room behind her.

Two teachers who were chatting each other up as they leaned in a doorway stopped talking to see what was happening.

Ledoux was spewing vile insults and telling my brothers what kinds of prison sex he had in store for each of them, but his plans were a waste of his pitifully sparse brainpower. I was already running near full-speed toward him and his two thug buddies.

I hit the toady on Ledoux’s right with an elbow to the middle of his back, letting his kidneys bring my momentum to a stop. He crumpled like he’d been deflated.

Ledoux turned to look at me and his falling buddy, just as I realized I’d made a mistake. I got my feet beneath me as I berated myself for not hitting Ledoux first.

I needed a quick method to deal with Ledoux in a way that would sink in even through his stupid, thick-boned head. I chose to escalate my assault beyond the range of known consequences.

While Ledoux was still queuing up a string of curse words to spit at me to gin up his courage for our second fight, I punched him in the balls, and pulled a pencil out of my back pocket. As he was doubling over from the pain in his groin, I jammed the sharp end of the pencil at his face.

It was luck, I think, that saved me from killing him right there in the cafeteria. Or maybe he reacted to the oncoming pencil and turned his head. As it happened, the sharp wood-and-graphite skewer didn’t go straight through his eye and into his brain as I thought it would, it went into his eye at an angle and came out through his temple.

He collapsed, hands to his face, screaming.

The students and monitoring teachers were aghast.

The toady still on his feet was petrified. His jeans turned a darker shade of blue around the zipper, and piss dribbled over one of his shoes.

That’s when I got expelled from school, found myself in front of a judge, and avoided a juvenile detention center only through a program of mandated visits with Dr. Rajan, a child psychologist.

The expulsion might have saved my life.

That was the autumn before the Brisbane strain of H5N1 slithered its way across the planet. That first wave was more immediately lethal than the ones that followed. When the newsies on TV were just starting to turn their wild-eyed mongering to an unusual epidemic exploding in Australia, the new flu strain ambushed the students at the school I no longer attended. Nearly every kid caught it, including my two brothers, Mason and Caden. On Thanksgiving, with the smell of a frozen turkey dinner baking in the oven, they both died, leaving the world the same way they came into it, together.

My mom’s crying found its end and she looked at Dr. Rajan’s face on the computer monitor.

“I assure you,” said Dr. Rajan through the videoconferencing app on the computer screen, “your son is not suffering any ill effects, either from the influenza or from the prion mutation. He’s just different.”

Chapter 2

“You shouldn’t do that.” Levi was back.

I turned away from the gap in the door. “She’s talking to Dr. Rajan.”

“Do you think he’s going to tell her something about you that you don’t already know?”

Looking back into the room, I said, “No.”

“Why spy? You don’t need to know what she says in private to your doctor. You know how she is.”

I shrugged. Maybe I was afraid Dr. Rajan was going to reveal something about me to my mother that he wasn’t telling me.

Levi tugged at my arm. “C’mon.”

I followed him up the hall. I usually did what he told me—we all did.

Mom was the adult in charge of the household, but it was a weird situation. The prion encephalopathy was liquefying her brain, burrowing microscopic wormholes by the million, maybe the billion. She was losing her intellect, morphing from a mother into a middle-aged woman with a child’s mind. Not consistently, either. In some ways, she still sounded like the mother I’d always known, a pragmatic problem-solver trying to hold a family together while managing bills that were always behind. Most nights now, she was afraid of the dark and the noises out in the night. She doted over Levi and me like we were favored dolls. With growing frequency, she failed to make it to the restroom in time, and she’d go to great lengths to hide her accidents—an early sign of the disease—from Levi, me, and Dad. Dad, though, was oblivious to Mom’s potty-training problems, just as he seemed unaware of most of what went on around him.

Levi and I passed through the living room and into the long, narrow kitchen. He stopped in front of the stove and turned to look at me. “I need you to feed Dad.”

I didn’t ask why. Maybe I was afraid to hear the reason. I faced him and leaned on the cupboard in front of the kitchen sink. “Mom usually feeds him.”

“When she was supposed to be cooking the grits for lunch,” said Levi, “I came into the kitchen, and she was stirring an empty pot.”

The pot we usually cooked our grits in was on the drying rack by the sink. I picked it up and examined it—a pointless forensic exercise, a search for an excuse that would let me pretend Mom’s behavior wasn’t tied to that damn prion. “Maybe—”

Levi shook his head. “She thought there was something in the pot. She thought she was cooking for all of us.”

“You, me, her, and Dad?” I asked.

“Mason and Caden, too.” Levi looked down to the end of the kitchen where our dining table sat near the window. “She had bowls set out for them, too.”

“She comes and goes…fades in and out.” But I didn’t really believe that. Levi and I both had seen it once already, the progression of the disease. We’d lost Dad in tiny pieces. He wasn’t dead. He still lived with us, but he was a soulless husk most of the time. Every time Mom lost a new bit of her intellect it hurt me to see. Now she thought Mason and Caden were alive again, which meant she’d eventually come across their graves in the backyard and realize they were dead, or she’d turn hysterical when they didn’t come home at night, and then Levi and I would have to comfort her through the grief of losing her two youngest sons all over again.

Watching from the outside, feeling like a stranger because the pain of their loss seemed to affect me in an abnormally superficial way, I’d seen my parents suffer after the deaths of Mason and Caden. Dad never got over it. Mom, though, felt it anew over and over again, once every month or two. It was difficult to watch.

“I don’t think we can trust her in the kitchen by herself anymore,” said Levi. “We need to make sure Dad gets fed, and I don’t think we can trust her to do that either.”

I accepted the truth of it with a nod. Mom was going to end up like Dad. With Levi and me to take care of them, at least neither of them was going to turn into one of the prion degenerates that roamed the streets, seeming to have lost every memory that had made them human.

Levi opened a cupboard near the stove, empty except for a single box, which he took out and sat down. “This is the last of it.”

The partial box of grits had been a pressure I’d not mentioned. Our weekly allotment had gotten so small it was hard to stretch it across seven full days. Neither Mom nor Dad was capable of working, so we had no money to buy food on the black market. The odd jobs Levi and I had been doing around the neighborhood weren’t going to be able to keep us fed if the cuts continued. I asked, “You got a new ration ticket last time, right?”

Levi nodded.

“When do you go?” It was Wednesday, our scheduled day for ration pickup, but Levi hadn’t gone that morning at the usual time.

“Six o’clock tonight.”

“Six o’clock!” It came out as a shout. The change in time made me angry. “It’ll be dark by then. You know how it gets.” Some of the people in the advanced stages of the disease turned violent, and when they did, they always seemed to do it more at night than during the day. Then there were the riots. We’d been lucky in our neighborhood, the closest riot had run through the subdivisions over by the high school, a few miles away. But the riots all over Houston were erupting more and more frequently, and they usually started around sunset.

Sometimes the riots were small things—a few dozen people with too many prions eating away at their brains and not enough food in their bellies would beat up a car, attack a house, or run together howling at bystanders. Unfortunately, the police didn’t have the manpower anymore to maintain control. The cops ignored the small mobs they hoped might burn themselves out by dawn. The police concentrated their resources on the big riots, which they’d attack in lines behind their shields, shooting teargas grenades and beating the degenerates with their nightsticks until the rioters dispersed. Some of those riots went on for days and left scores dead in their wake.

Into my anger and silence, Levi said, “They don’t give you a choice on what time you pick up your rations. You know that. They give you a punch ticket. You show up at the time they tell you, or you don’t get anything.”

“I’ll go with you,” I told him. “We’ll be safer together.”

Levi inched closer to me and made a point of looking down to emphasize his height. He was every bit as tall as Dad, though where our father was thick through the arms and chest, Levi was as thin as a skeleton wrapped in Christmas paper. It wasn’t the food shortages that made him that way, he’d always been skinny. He’d never played sports—never had any interest. He was born for a life of books and computers, for never going out into the sun. “One of us has to stay here, and it should be you.”

The point he was trying to make by imposing his height over me was lost. If anybody was going to go to the ration center alone in the dark, I was the best choice. “Give me the card,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”

Levi shook his head. “You have to be eighteen.”

“Give me your driver’s license,” I argued. “I’ll tell them I’m you.”

“No,” Levi said it firmly. He turned his back to me and poured the grits into the pan. “I’m twenty. You’re sixteen. You can’t pass for me. Hand me that jug of water over there.”

Only two of the gallon-sized plastic jugs we kept on the counter by the sink had any water remaining. We had nearly a hundred recycled plastic soda bottles full of water in the pantry, so we weren’t in jeopardy of going dry. I said, “This is the longest the water’s been off.”

“It’ll be on again tomorrow,” Levi assured me.

He had no way of knowing. Still, it was good to hear him say it, if for nothing else than the mildly contagious strength of his faith in a system that otherwise seemed to be slowly collapsing. I said, “You take the shotgun when you go, then.”

Levi shook his head and poured water into the pan. “It’d be nice if we had something to mix with the grits. Is Oscar’s cat still around?” He looked back at me and smiled to let me know he was joking.

“No.” Oscar’s cat had gone missing a few weeks back. When I’d asked Oscar about where it was, he was weird about the answer, weird enough that I suspected his dad had added the cat to their rations. “You really should take the shotgun.”

Levi stirred the grits in the pan. “You need it here, just in case.”

“We’ll be fine.” I looked out the kitchen window to get a glimpse of dad sitting in his weathered plastic chair in the backyard. “I’ll bring Dad in and stand him by the front door. If anybody tries to get in, he’ll scare them off.” Dad had never been a mean man, but his disappointments had worn lines in his face that looked like anger. Coupled with his imposing size, strangers had always been intimidated by him.

“Dad won’t do anything.” Levi turned away from the pot on the stove, and he put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s not like he used to be. You know that, don’t you, Christian?”

I nodded. Of course I knew that. Dad hadn’t been good for much of anything for at least half a year. He’d fallen ill with H5N1 back when he was caring for Mason and Caden, keeping them quarantined in a makeshift ward he’d hastily put together in the garage. After the twins died, Dad stayed in the garage until he’d recovered. A self-imposed quarantine because he wanted to protect his family. None of the rest of us caught it. At least, not then.

By the time Mom came down with the Brisbane strain of the flu four months later, Dad was already showing signs that something wasn’t right with him mentally. That was in the early days when people were still calling the deadly new influenza the Black Virus and nobody had come close to guessing that the virus was leaving a tiny but menacing mutation in the PRNP genes of most of the survivors.

Globally, people were dying by the millions, and none of the hurriedly prepared vaccines was doing anything to curb the mortality rate. Fear was in the air, thicker than the virions that carried the disease. People were funneling fortunes into the pockets of anyone unscrupulous enough to throw up a website that promised a cure or a method of prevention. Bunker wars broke out, as gangs of people who’d banded together in their desperation to escape the cities sought out the hideouts of those who’d prepared for the end. Every night the news carried video of massacres caught on camera.

The economic infrastructure started to collapse as inflation ran rampant. Nobody wanted to part with their valuable goods for mere paper money. Distribution systems slowed to a crawl. Not enough food made its way from the farms into the cities, and people started to starve.

One of the hundreds of things governments hastily did to stave off total collapse was to rebrand Black Virus into something a little less apt to engender alarm. Almost overnight, the words BLACK VIRUS disappeared from use on television, radio, print, and the Internet. Taking its place was either the scientific classification H5N1 or the name based on the location of the first major outbreak, the BRISBANE STRAIN.

By the time Mom started showing signs of what some people were referring to as post-virus dementia, Dad lost his job because he screwed up every engine he tried to repair. He was having so much trouble finding his words when he spoke that half the time he couldn’t name a fork if he had one in is hand. He got confused when any of us talked to him, and he took to spending most of his time sitting in a rickety plastic chair in the backyard.

To answer Levi, I said, “Dad doesn’t have to do anything. He just needs to stand up straight. He’ll frighten any troublemakers away.”

“I’m not taking the shotgun,” said Levi. “If I see trouble, I’ll run.”

I mocked him with a mean laugh. “You, run?”

Levi wasn’t fazed by my petty derision, and as though stating a fact, said, “I’m faster than you, I’ll bet.”

“We can go out in the street and find out right now if you want.”

Levi shook his head and turned to stir the grits. “We need to get Dad and Mom fed before I leave. I’m going to pick up the rations by myself. You’re staying here with the shotgun and keeping them safe. That’s how it’s going to be.” He glanced back at me and in a stern voice asked, “Got it?”

It was the same tone Mom always used to end the negotiations. “Got it.”

Chapter 3

Dad’s plastic chair sat with another beneath the boughs of a giant sugarberry tree that shaded most of the backyard. From his chair, Dad stared at two grassy, rectangular depressions that had once been mounds of dirt along the back fence. At the head of each stood a wooden cross, painted an off-white that matched the walls inside the house. To make them, Levi and I had used three boards we’d pried off the cedar fence. We’d painted them with a can of paint the landlord had left in the garage. Mason and Caden’s names were written with a black Sharpie on the rough wood, but the sun had faded the ink, and the letters were hard to read.

Mom had tried to get a funeral home to take the twins but none would. Nobody wanted anything to do with a Brisbane victim back then, and we didn’t have the kind of money that would make a funeral director forget what had killed my brothers. Communal gravesites had been set up for the indigent and unclaimed bodies. Anyone could bring their deceased loved ones wrapped in plastic and sealed with tape.

Dad wouldn’t take them there.

Even though we were renting, he believed our house was the last we’d ever live in—that’s a scary thing to hear when you’re a kid. Were we going to be here that long, or was life going to be that short?  In a biting cold wind under a stark blue sky, he dug the holes while Levi and I built and painted the crosses in the garage.

When Dad still had a job, he spent a lot of time in the evenings sitting in the backyard watching the graves. At first, Mom did too. After a few weeks, I guess she’d shed all of her tears, and she stopped going into the backyard.

Nearly two years had passed since Mason and Caden died. Dad didn’t speak anymore, but sometimes as he stared at the graves, he cried without making a noise, never raising a hand to wipe the tears away from his cheeks.

I sat in a chair beside Dad, happy that the cold nights over the past few weeks had killed off most of the mosquitoes for the winter. I handed him his grits and sat my bowl in my lap. He accepted his bowl and quietly placed it in his lap without giving it a second glance.

“C’mon, Dad.” I rattled my spoon around in my bowl and got Dad to look at me. I scooped up a spoonful of grits and put them in my mouth. “Eat.”

Dad followed my example. He almost always did.

I didn’t say anything more as we ate. In fact, the words I’d already used were just habit. Back at the beginning, I thought continuing to talk to him might be therapeutic in some way. Through the months, I came to realize I was talking at him rather than to him. Eventually, I stopped doing even that.

“Hey, man.” My buddy, Oscar, from next door, was leaning through the gap in the fence where the three boards were missing.

“Hey,” I responded.

He stepped through the fence and came over.

I pointed at the patio where another plastic chair sat against the back wall of the house. “Get one if you want.”

Oscar veered toward the patio, fetched a chair, brought it over, and sat it in the grass across from me. “Did you talk to Levi?”

I didn’t answer.

“You didn’t, did you?”

That was how it started, with questions. I put my attention on Dad because he’d stopped eating. I took a slow-motion spoonful of grits up to my mouth, making sure Dad was looking at me when I did. He started eating again.

Oscar said, “That law passed.”

Not knowing what law Oscar was talking about I looked at him with a silent question on my face.

“The one about the degenerates.” Oscar sighed and slumped in his chair. “I told you about it five or six times already. My dad complains about it all the time. He says he’s going to shoot anybody who comes and tries to take my mom.”

“What law?” In truth, so many new laws were being passed to deal with the Brisbane strain’s effects I wouldn’t have been able to keep up even if I had spent more time watching TV and surfing the web.

None of that was on my schedule, though. And even if it was, the electricity was out frequently and it was getting harder and harder to get an Internet connection.

Most of my time was spent taking care of Mom and Dad or working to get odd jobs around the neighborhood. I cleaned gutters, cleaned houses, turned the soil and weeded backyard gardens, and I even repaired windows and doors that were broken in the last burglary. I came across an old push mower, the kind that ran on kid power not gasoline, and I maintained lawns for the few old couples in the neighborhood who still wanted a presentable front yard.

I preferred to trade my services for goods, some squash or green beans from the backyard garden, a can of SPAM when I could get it—even some flowers for Mom would do because she always smiled when I brought some home. When I couldn’t get goods, I accepted paper money even though it grew more worthless by the day.

Most importantly, I was getting to know the people in the houses up and down my block and I knew which ones had suffered through the influenza and had tested positive for the PRNP mutation it left behind, and were slowly turning degenerate. The more resourceful were growing vegetables in their backyards. Some had hoards of canned goods stashed to supplement their diets. Others were just like my family, living off their ration cards, wholly dependent on allotments of food doled out by the government. One old couple always smelled of alcohol and I knew they had a stash of liquor and wine. I hoped they wouldn’t guzzle their way through all of their booze before they turned degenerate—we could trade that for a lot of food once they were gone. Most of the houses had at least one firearm and the ammunition to keep it loaded.

All of that stuff would be stolen by the first person who showed up after my clients finally turned too degenerate to know what was going on, like my dad. I was positioning myself to be the first to know when that day arrived. I was planning to take all I could carry.

“They made concentration camps legal,” said Oscar.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Dad calls them concentration camps. He says the government is going to start rounding up people who got the virus and…” Oscar paused and glanced at my Dad. Oscar discreetly tapped one of his temples and he shook his head with a grimace.

I didn’t believe it. “Everybody’s caught the flu by now. Everybody.” I’d caught the Brisbane strain just over a year ago. Levi never showed any symptoms, but the online doctor we’d sent the blood samples to said Levi had the right antibodies in his blood and must have been lucky enough to have caught a very mild case.

“Just the ones who got that prion thing afterwards,” said Oscar. “The ones that can’t, you know, think right anymore.”

Neither Levi nor I had tested positive for the PRNP mutation that produced the prion. I asked, “Why would they do that?”

Oscar leaned forward. “Dad says they’re forced labor camps because most of the people who used to work in the factories and stuff are too stupid now to work. He says the government is going to make the degenerates do the necessary jobs like farming and stuff.”

I looked at my Dad. I didn’t think he was capable of doing anything productive. “What about the ones who are too far gone?”

“That’s the question my dad keeps asking. He thinks they’re going to take the ones like my mom, and…” he nodded toward my dad, “and put them in a death camp. You know, just kill them.”

“That’s bullshit.” I didn’t want to believe. It couldn’t be true. Nobody was going to take my parents away and kill them. Without any conviction to bolster my words, I said, “This is still America.”

“Dad doesn’t think it’s bullshit.” Oscar threw himself back in his chair. He’d taken offense to what I’d said. His dad was a hothead and Oscar was his apprentice in that.

“I’m not saying your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” I didn’t feel like arguing with Oscar over the whole thing. I was just asking questions. “Have you looked any of this up online?”

“The law passed.” Oscar said it with a finality that promised a tantrum if challenged.

I pursed my lips and nodded.

Sensing his victory, Oscar decided to give me what I was fishing for. “Dad has that news station on all the time. You know how he is.”

I nodded again.

“It’s like he likes to hear old men yelling at each other all day.” Oscar smiled. “But not saying anything.”

I laughed.

Dad stopped eating, so I got his attention and took a few bites from my bowl to get him doing it again.

“The new law was all they talked about on the TV last night,” Oscar told me.

With my dad back on track, I turned my attention to Oscar. “What do you think your dad is going to do about it? He’s still got all those guns, right?”

“He traded a lot of them away for food,” said Oscar, shrugging. “But he kept enough. He’s got a couple of rifles, some pistols, and a shotgun, I think. And lots and lots of ammo.”

“He’s going to shoot it out with the police?” I thought about it for a second before I continued. “You think they’ll send the police for the degenerates? How are they going to round them all up? It doesn’t seem possible.”

Oscar took offense again. Damn, he was touchy. I had half a thought of urging him to go home until he was in a better mood, but instead, I told him, “I’m not saying they’re not doing it, I just don’t know how they’ll make it all work with the way things are everywhere.”

“I think...” Oscar paused and his eyes showed a depth of worry that wasn’t coming through in his words. “My dad think’s this is the turning point.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“My dad says we’ve lost. He says the virus won. He says it’ll be generations before things get back to normal. He says the country is going down the shitter.” Oscar straightened up in his chair and he leaned forward. “He wants me to go down to Mexico. He says he’s not asking anymore, he’s telling. He says his brothers are doing fine. They have a place down there and it’s like a fortress. They’re rich and they’re safe.”

“Your uncles, the drug dealers?” I tried not to sound judgmental. Oscar had been floating the idea with me for over a month. I’d balked on any excuse I could come up with.

“Does that matter anymore?” Oscar asked. “They’ve got money and—”

Cutting in, I said, “Money’s not worth anything anymore.”

Shaking his head emphatically, Oscar said, “It doesn’t matter what they’re spending. They’ve got guys with guns to protect them. They’ll protect us if we go down there.”

“You’re going with your dad and your mom, then?”

Oscar shook his head and he looked away from me. He had sudden tears in his eyes. “Dad says they won’t take my mom because she’s got the prion thing. Dad won’t leave her.”

“It’s just you, then?”

Shaking his head, Oscar said, “He doesn’t want me to go alone. If you and Levi come, he says he’ll take care of your mom and dad while we’re gone.”

“You make it sound like we’ll be coming back but you know we won’t.” The Mexico thing seemed like a one-way trip to me.

It was Oscar’s turn to shake his head in silence.

“Why don’t you just go alone?” I asked, thinking that if Oscar’s dad honestly thought it was safe, then he’d send Oscar down by himself.

“He likes you. He likes Levi too.” Oscar thought for a moment and then added, “I think he doesn’t want me to be lonely.”

Was it really safe down in Mexico? Oscar’s uncles did have money. That had to make a difference. I looked at my dad. Could I leave him on the chance of a better life for myself? If my dad were still capable of creating a complex thought, would he urge me to go or tell me to stay?

Into my silence, Oscar said, “All we have to do is make the call. My dad will drive us down to Galveston. My uncles can send a boat to pick us up and smuggle us into Mexico. All three of us—you, me, and Levi.”

“Levi will never leave.”

“Have you asked him, yet?”

I didn’t answer. Oscar had pressured me to ask Levi at least a dozen times.

“You haven’t asked him, have you? I knew it.” Oscar huffed. “If you don’t think he’ll go, maybe just you and me can go. Maybe leave him here to help my dad take care of your parents. Why not, if that’s what he wants?”

The screen door to the kitchen banged loudly against the backside wall of the house as it swung open.

Startled, Oscar and I both looked.

Levi stumbled down the stairs, lost his footing, and rolled into the grass. At the top of the stairs, filling the doorway, an unshaven man with an ugly face and a big gun in his hand, barked, “Which one of you is Christian Black?”

Chapter 4

“Don’t move.” The unshaven man pointed the gun at Oscar, Dad, and me.

Oscar and me were too surprised to move. Dad was oblivious.

Levi lifted himself off the ground.

The big man told Levi, “That means you, too.”

Levi sat down in the grass, not appearing afraid, maybe defiant.

A banshee howl poured out of the kitchen through the door. A moment later, my mom slammed into the guy in the doorway, all fists and kicks. With his free hand, the man grabbed my mom and flung her into the grass beside Levi.

Mom bounced back up, unfazed, hollering at the man in the door. Levi grabbed her hand and held her back.

I jumped to my feet, ready to fight.

“Quiet her down,” the man ordered. “Or I’ll do it.” He brandished the gun to explain his method.

Levi got to his feet and put himself between Mom and the man in the door.

The guy looked over at me. His eyes lingered on Dad for a moment, but Dad hadn’t moved except to continue scraping at his bowl of grits. Then the guy focused on Oscar. “Mexican boy, what’s your name?”

“Oscar,” he answered timidly.

“I’m Christian Black.” I spat it like a dare. “Who are you and what are you doing in our house?”

Mom was starting to calm.

Training his pistol on me, the ugly man took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. He held it by one corner and shook it until it unfolded. He glanced first at the paper and then at me. “Picture looks like you, I suppose.”

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“I’m here for you.” He cocked his head toward the wall beside the door. “You come over here and put your hands on the wall.” He looked at Levi. “You two back off. Go over there by the Mexican boy. Go!”

Mom protested.

I crossed halfway to the patio and stopped. “This is all you get until you tell me why you’re here.”

“I’m a bounty hunter, boy.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“You got an assault conviction about two years ago?” He asked. “You’re on probation for it?”

“No, he’s not,” Levi argued. “The charges were dropped in lieu of counseling. He just had a session today.”

“Don’t mean shit to me, boy. Laws changed. You got a letter about a month back explaining everything. If you had something else going, you should have protested then.”

“The mail doesn’t come anymore,” Levi shouted.

Mom started to bawl as she fell to her knees. She lacked the capacity to understand the legal problem that was being crudely explained, but she’d already understood the bottom line of it. The ugly man was here to take me away.

Looking down the barrel of his pistol as he exaggerated his aim, he ordered, “Against the wall, boy. You’re going to a labor camp.”

“He’s just a kid,” Levi told him.

“Looks like a good-sized, law-breaking boy to me,” said the bounty hunter.

I still hadn’t moved.

The bounty hunter’s face turned to a smile, and he said, “Don’t matter if I bring you in alive. I get paid less, but I still get paid.” He glanced toward the wall, then back at Levi. “You get brave on me, boy, and you should know, I’m in my legal rights to put a bullet in your head. I’m acting as a duly authorized agent of the State.”

Not wanting to escalate the situation to the point where Levi or my mom might get hurt, I walked to the wall, leaned forward, and put my hands on it.

“Spread them feet, boy. Spread ‘em wide.”

I did.

A few minutes later, my wrists were strapped behind my back with plastic zip-tie cuffs. The ugly man shoved me through the kitchen and steered me toward the front door. Levi followed along but kept his distance. Mom cried desperately in the backyard.

Chapter 5

It could have been any generic Japanese commuter car that we rode in. It might have been American or Korean. It didn’t matter. They all looked the same, and they were all two sizes too small for the bounty hunter.

He was dressed like he should have been driving a Jeep with big tires, roll bars, and extra headlights. He looked tough when he’d been standing on my parents’ back porch wagging his gun, but with his oversized frame folded into the driver’s seat of the econobox, he looked like somebody’s dad griping about the traffic on his way to the company costume party, more disgruntled than tough, more old than grizzled.

He smelled like a summer armpit, and the upholstery had a baked puke scent that punched me in the nose every time the wind blew through just right.

“Child safety locks are on,” he called over his shoulder after we’d been in the car maybe fifteen minutes. “In case you try to open that back door.”

That was disappointing. Still, I wiggled my wrists in the plastic strap. The band around my right wrist was looser than the one on the left, and I was slowly working my hand free. At least I hoped I was. “Where are you taking me?”

“Astrodome.”

“Why there?” I asked.

“Lots of law-breaking punks like you in Houston. Need the space to process you.” He slowed when we neared a stop sign, looking both ways. His attention lingered on a gang of men and women down the street to the left. He sped through the intersection without stopping.

“What happens after that?” I asked absently, as I looked at the people who’d gotten the bounty hunter’s attention. I’d seen plenty of degenerates to know them just by looking. They had a way of moving that was distinct, the same way a puppy moves differently than a dog, only degenerates weren’t cute.

“Your paperwork says oil.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

The bounty hunter laughed gruffly. “Houston’s an oil town, boy.”

I rolled my eyes. Everybody knew that.

He looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re assigned to that industry. You’re too young to have any experience at anything. I don’t think they’ll put you to work at a refinery unless they need people to sweep the floors. They’ll probably put you in the oilfields. Or maybe on a rig in the Gulf. Be sure and mind your fingers, boy—that business is hard on fingers.”

“How long?” I asked. “I only had one more year of mandatory counseling.”

“Don’t plead your case with me. I get paid to pick you boys up and take you to the processing center. That’s it.”

I was trying to think of what Levi might say in my situation. “Will there be a judge at the processing center, somebody I can talk to?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“The law is what it is. You had your chance with that letter that got sent. This is a done deal.”

That was discouraging. I pulled harder to try and get my hand free. The bounty hunter looked like he might be twice my weight. I wondered if I could choke him out from the backseat. “What happens next?”

“They’ll assign you to a place after you get processed. They’ll put you on a bus and take you there. You’ll stay as long as they sentence you for. Five, ten years, don’t know. That’s what I’ve heard.”

The skin above my thumb, under the pressure from the plastic clasp on the strap and all that I was doing to pull my hand free, tore. I caught my squeal between my teeth. The restraint didn’t let me go, though.

“Don’t cry.” The bounty hunter glanced back at me, mistaking my pained gasp for tears. “Five years seems like a lifetime at your age but by the time you’re as old as me, you’ll figure out five years isn’t anything. It’ll pass in the blink of an eye. Besides, maybe you’ll get lucky, and they’ll put you on a rig in the Gulf. Matter of fact, if they give you a chance, ask for it. The way the world’s going, it might do you good to get away from all the shit until it settles back down. Hell, that might take five or ten years anyway. At least out on a rig, you’ll have a roof over your head and three squares a day.”

I wasn’t going to do five or ten years in any kind of labor camp. I didn’t know how, but I was going to get away. A chance was going to come, I was sure of that. When it did, I’d slip away and leave this bounty hunter to scratch his ass and wonder what happened to me. I’d go back home, maybe move into the Simpson’s house down the street. They’d disappeared six months prior. Nobody knew where they went. I’d be close enough to help Levi with Mom and Dad and when the time came—when they died—Levi and me could go down to Mexico and hook up with Oscar, who’d surely be there by then.

The bounty hunter cursed.

“What?” I asked, surprised out of my thoughts.

He pointed down the road.

I leaned over to get a view through the windshield between the front seats. Five or six blocks ahead, red and blue lights flashed in the road. The police. “Accident?” I asked.

“I hope.” The bounty hunter powered up his phone, and he fumbled with the screen as he drove, pulling up a map program. He was searching for an alternative route.

As we came within a block to the lone police cruiser parked in the road, a car ahead of us U-turned and came back toward us. I noticed dark smoke rising from several distinct points far ahead. It wasn’t a car accident that blocked our way.

We neared the police car, and the bounty hunter brought his toy-sized auto to a stop. One of two policemen came over to the driver’s side. The bounty hunter rolled down his window and asked, “Riots?”

Something buzzed by overhead and the bounty hunter flinched. “What’s that?”

The cop casually looked up. “The department started using drones to help track the riots.”

The bounty hunter looked up at the sky again, shrugged, and then he looked at the smoke spreading columns of gray into the dusky sky, he asked, “Bad?”

“Started about an hour ago,” said the cop. “Might be three or four thousand involved now. You know how it goes if you don’t nip it in the bud.”

The bounty hunter nodded. He knew. Even I knew. When gangs of degenerates got agitated about something and started running through the streets with mayhem on their minds, others joined in—they always did. And with the prion debilitating more and more people every day, the fuel for those riots was getting too plentiful.

“You got the riot squads down there taking care of it?” the bounty hunter asked. “If they’ve about got it under control I can wait. Otherwise, I need to backtrack five or six miles and then work my way around through the western suburbs.”

Shaking his head, the cop said, “We’ve got nobody in there. We barely have enough uniforms to keep traffic from driving in.”

“Why?”

“Big riots over by the rail yards,” said the cop, “been going nonstop since the night before last. We’ve got the national guard in there now trying to help.” The cop sighed and seemed to deflate beneath an unseen pressure. “We can’t even get all of them we need. Everybody in the state’s got the same problems we do.” The cop turned and looked at the columns of smoke. “It’s enough to make a man want to get his family and just go. Maybe find a ranch where the owners died from the flu and ride it all out.”

“I hear ya,” said the bounty hunter. “Anything going on down by the Astrodome that you know of?”

“Nothing significant on the south side since last Friday.” The cop was still looking at the smoke. “We’ve got plenty of uniforms deployed down there to keep the processing center secure.” The cop turned away from looking at the smoky sky, bent over, and leaned in for a look at me. “Young.”

“I don’t make the rules,” said the bounty hunter. “I just bring ‘em in.”

“Just as well,” said the cop. “We’re going to need all the able bodies we can get to keep industry running if we’re going to get through this. What’d the kid do?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon.”

A pencil? I resisted the urge to laugh.

“Gang-related?” the cop asked.

“I don’t have that information in the file,” said the bounty hunter.

The cop nodded and stepped back. He took another look at the smoke rising from down south of us. “You best find another way around.”

Chapter 6

After turning around and driving five blocks back the way we’d come, the bounty hunter turned right, drove a few more blocks down, and pulled into the parking lot of a shuttered convenience store. “You sit tight back there.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

He took up his phone again and concentrated on the screen. “Trying to find a way through.”

“The map doesn’t show the way?” I asked.

“Don’t be a smartass.”

“I’m serious,” I told him.

The bounty hunter pointed roughly west. “There’s been rioting in the neighborhoods over that way, on and off, for a couple of weeks. Most of the roads are blocked by burned-out cars and whatnot. Well, not most of them, but too many of them. It’s like a maze trying to get through there. We might get in and not find our way out for hours. These roads going south were all clear until this damn riot.”

He swung his door open and got out of the car. He didn’t go anywhere, he stood by the open driver’s side door, looking at his phone, then looking south. “If we go east, it’s the same story. The only safe way to avoid all this is to backtrack and then look for a way around out west of town.” He shook his head. “But the further you get out of town these days, the crazier shit gets. Know what I mean?”

“No,” I answered.

“You don’t know a lot, do you, boy?”

“I spend all my time trying to keep my family alive,” I told him.

He opened his mouth to retort but cut himself short, I guess realizing the danger he’d brought on my parents by taking me away from home.

“I don’t have a lot of time to keep up with the local news,” I said, pushing the point. “I work lots of jobs around the neighborhood to earn enough to buy food to cover what the rations don’t.”

He ignored me, still looking west. “In some of the suburbs out there, the police departments don’t exist anymore. The sheriff doesn’t have the manpower to cover the whole county. Some places are lawless. I try to avoid those kinds of places.”

“You could take me back home and drop me off.”

Not even pretending to hear me, he pointed south. “Judging by the smoke, it looks like maybe not everything down that way is in the riot zone. I’m going to drive east down this road and find a southbound street I can follow that’s not blocked by the cops, and work my way down between the fires.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know much about how bad the riots were, but I’d seen enough on TV to think this was a bad plan. “You think we’ll be safe?”

He nodded. “Seems that once those degenerate types get it in their head to riot, they usually act like they’ve got somewhere to go. They tend to bunch up and start heading in one direction or another—nobody knows where, I don’t think they know either. They just go. My bet is that a bunch of them maybe started over there,” he pointed roughly south and left, “where it’s clear, and moved off over in the other direction where most of the fires are.” He pointed right before bending over and looking through the window at me. “We’ll be fine.”

“No, we won’t.” I’d seen enough of the violence around the neighborhood to guess what it looked like on a large scale, and in the chaos that was a riot, survival was a matter of chance and little else.

Chapter 7

Like many bad ideas do, this one started out going well.  The bounty hunter found a winding street through a neighborhood of modest houses. He paused at nearly every intersection, checked street names, and compared them to the map on his phone. We missed turns, retraced our path, and seemed to be moving south. Tall trees on both sides of the road blocked my view of the sky so I couldn’t see the smoke from the riots. We might have been getting closer or farther away.

I asked, “How long have you been doing this?”

“Not that long.”

“What did you do before?”

“Other stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked.

“Why do you need to know?”

“I’m curious.”

“Do you think if you befriend me I’ll let you go?”

“No,” I answered. “But I can hope.”

“Put your hopes on something else. This is how I make my living.”

“Where did you work?” I asked.

“My job went away.”

“Why?”

“I owned a waffle shop.” He seemed sad when he said it. “Nobody goes to waffle shops anymore. Nobody wants to worry about whether a degenerate waiter is spewing snot-virus into their runny eggs. The restaurant industry is dead. People are scared.”

“Do you get paid a lot to pick up people like me?”

“With the ration card and what I get paid, I keep my kids fed.”

“How many kids do you have?”

“We’re not talking about me anymore.” He slowed the car to a lazy roll and examined the map on his phone. “You’re a kid. I’m an adult. I’m not falling into your trap. Save that shit for your seventh-grade friends.”

“I’m too old for seventh grade.”

He ignored me and made a turn, nodded emphatically as part of a conversation in his head, and gunned the engine. Smiling and glancing back at me, he said, “We can get through up here.”

He was happier about it than I was.

A few moments later he rounded the corner onto a major thoroughfare running north and south. Welding shops, roofers, sign companies, and oilfield support outfits had signs posted on aging metal buildings down both sides of the road. Many were protected by fences topped with barbed wire that had been there since long before the virus came to American shores.

Now most of the fences were thick with weeds growing through them. The cars and trucks parked in front wore layers of dirt that told a prescient truth about the economy. The cars hadn’t moved in two years. The economy was shuddering to a dead stall.

The sky was starting to darken with the setting sun.

The bounty hunter wagged a finger down the road in front of us. “See, clear all the way down to Loop 610.”

For about three more seconds, he was right.

A sound like nothing I’d ever heard raised the hair on the back of my neck.

The bounty hunter heard it, too. He took his foot off the accelerator as he looked around.

A flood of shouting people poured out of a boulevard just ahead, running and shoving. Some carried pieces of wood and metal, swinging them like clubs. Others wielded stones and bricks. Many had nothing but their fists. The mob poured over abandoned cars, beating them with their weapons. They flowed into the parking lot of a ceramic supply company, shattering the windows, and knocking down the door.

They were bent on destruction.

“Christ!” The bounty hunter hit the brakes, and the car skidded to a stop.

He jammed the car into reverse and squealed the tires as he looked out through the rear window.

I looked over my shoulder, saw no dangers, and then looked back toward the windshield. Hundreds—no—thousands of rioting degenerates were coming up the street toward us.

“Shit!” The bounty hunter hit the brakes again.

I looked out the rear window and saw a relative trickle of crazed people coming out of a street behind us.

The bounty hunter stopped the car, put it back in drive, and raced toward a side street up ahead on the left.

The rioters in front, seeing us coming toward them, turned frantic in their efforts to reach us.

The car’s tiny Asian engine whined as the bounty hunter pulled out of it all the acceleration it could muster. He swung the car into a sideways skid as we approached our turn.

We hit a rioter broadside with the passenger side door, and he went down. Another attacked the back door window and broke it with her face as she collided with the car.

The wheels were spinning again, and the car was gaining traction to get up the side street.

Degenerates were scattered in the road ahead. Most weren’t doing anything but looking in the direction of the coming mob. Some were caught up in the excitement of the howls billowing between the houses. They were frantic with excitement, running and searching for a way to vent. More were coming into the street. The bounty hunter weaved between them as he tried to hold his speed.

We blasted past a stop sign without slowing down and dodged degenerates through another few blocks as they swarmed thicker.

We slowed.

Some kicked at the car as we passed. Others punched at the windows. They threw things.

The sound of the mob several blocks back kept us pushing forward.

We slowed to power our way through several dozen degenerates clumped in the road, unwilling to move.

Flashes of yellow burst from a house on the left side of the street. The sound of gunfire cut through the riot rumble.

Debilitated people in front of and around us fell.

The bounty hunter shouted something I didn’t understand. The car’s little engine whined as he depressed the clutch and shoved the car into reverse without coming to a stop.

The car lurched. It shuddered as the wheels chirped and bounced.

The engine banged loudly enough to ring my ears. White smoke spewed from under the hood. We jerked to a stop.

The bounty hunter’s curses filled the air. He pounded the steering wheel with his palms as he looked frantically around.

I fought to get my wrists free of the plastic cuffs. Things were going to shit.

The bounty hunter stopped beating the steering wheel and dug in his jacket for a moment before twisting in his seat to look at me. He tossed a folding knife into the backseat beside me and he pulled out the big pistol he’d threatened me with earlier.

The unbroken back door window beside me inexplicably fractured.

The bounty hunter glanced at the glass for the briefest of moments as he pointed at the knife on the seat and said, “Cut your—” One side of his head erupted in a gush of blood as the window beside him shattered.

Gunfire echoed between the houses again.

I sank low in the seat, though I didn’t think the car door’s thin sheet metal would protect me from the bullets in the air.

Chapter 8

People screamed and yelled unintelligible things. Men and women ran past, beating the car with whatever object they were using for a weapon. More gunshots cracked. Feet by the hundred pounded the asphalt.

The bulk of the mob was closing in.

Bullets were no longer tearing through the car, but my animal instinct told me to get the hell out and run.

I rolled around on the seat and got the bounty hunter’s knife in my hand and sawed at the plastic strap binding my wrists.

I poked myself with the blade, but didn’t relent. The strap had to go, and time was against me.

A degenerate woman punched her way through the shattered safety glass of the driver’s side window and started pawing at the body in the front seat.

The plastic strap around my wrists flexed and then separated at the weakened point as I yanked hard to pull my arms apart. I sat up straight and took a quick glance to assess the situation before getting out.

One of the back doors flung open.

I threw myself to the far end of the backseat and reached out with the knife, ready to stab.

Guns were still firing outside.

A fatherly man dressed in camouflage leaned through the open door. He was armed and anxious. He glanced at the dead bounty hunter lying across the front console. He grimaced and snapped his eyes back to me.  “You hit? You okay?”

Still holding the knife up, I contorted to reach the door handle behind me to let myself out.

“Don’t,” he told me. “Come with me.”

I didn’t move.

“We need to hurry. Most of these degenerates won’t hurt you, but with that riled-up bunch coming down the street and the dipshits back there shooting everything, things are going to get bad out here.” Glancing at the dead bounty hunter, he said, “That was an accident. C’mon.”

Go, stay, run the other way. None of my options were good, and the worst of the mob was bearing down on us. I took one last hard look at the camouflaged man, trying to find something I could believe in for the next few minutes. I didn’t. Instead, I took a chance, and I said, “Okay.” I climbed halfway over the front seat and snatched the pistol out of the dead bounty hunter’s hand.

“C’mon,” urged the camo-clad man. “Hurry.”

With a pistol in one hand and an open lock-blade knife in the other, I got out of the car. The degenerate woman pawing her way into the front seat through the door window didn’t pay us any attention. Manic people were running in every direction but many of them toward the house from where guns still fired.

At least a dozen people were down all around us, degenerates bewildered with their bloody wounds, those overwhelmed with the pain of their torn flesh, screaming to heaven, and the dead, fallen with arms and legs at awkward angles.

“You coming?”

I looked up at my would-be rescuer a dozen steps ahead of me, slowing down for me to catch up. Without realizing it, without thinking about the coming mob, the sight of the butchery had stopped me cold. I looked away from the carnage and sprinted.

He pointed toward a gap between two houses, one of which was the source of the shooting. The windows of that house were boarded over with layers of plywood and two-by-fours. Long slits, like those in a deer blind, were cut at shoulder level through each boarded window. As we passed between the houses, a volley of fire erupted from the guns poking out through the slits on the front of the house.

Ahead of us, a degenerate was fumbling with the gate that led into the backyard. The camo-clad man ran up behind him and splintered the back of his skull with the butt of his rifle. The degenerate stumbled to his left and fell, smashing his face into the wall of the house next door.

I was astonished by the cavalier attitude these people had for dishing violence out to the degenerates, not to mention the bounty hunter they’d shot.

The camo-clad man opened the gate and waved me through.

I ran into the backyard. The house’s back windows were boarded over just like those in front. All the fences were down—no—disassembled. The fences that had separated ten back-to-back yards on the block had been taken down and used to reinforce and heighten a perimeter fence now standing in the gaps between the houses, leaving a space the size of a football field where all of the decorative shrubs that had lined the fences had been cut away. The lower branches on all of the trees that hadn’t been sawed down to stumps had been pruned to let sunlight down to the gardens that filled the area.

But it wasn’t just a communal garden behind the houses on the block. It was a kill zone for anyone shooting out of the fortified house.

“Over here,” said a woman holding the fortified house’s back door open. “Get inside.”

I ran toward her, and the man who’d come to get me out of the car came along behind.

Once inside I looked around in a dim kitchen that smelled of cigarettes and sweat. Cigarettes? Those were rare these days. The woman who’d called me to come inside looked me over, her eyes settling mostly on the pistol in my hand. Two other men with rifles looked out through a slit in a window above the kitchen sink.

My rescuer came through the door and the woman slammed it shut and immediately went to work putting wooden braces in brackets mounted to the back of the door’s frame. She intended for it to stay closed when the mob arrived.

“Don’t,” the camo-clad man told her. “I’m leaving soon as I get my daughter.”

The gunfire intensified from the other rooms in the house.

The woman took on a derisive tone. “Don’t be an idiot, Jim.”

The camo-clad man—apparently Jim—spun on the woman. “Darlene, don’t. I told you that hothead Randy would get us all killed if you let him in here, and now he’s got everybody shooting and drawing every one of those degenerate bastards right to us because he can’t stop acting like Sylvester-Goddamn-Rambo. Half these dumbasses can’t shoot to save their lives. They killed this boy’s father while they were trying to shoot degenerates near the car.”

I said, “He wasn’t my dad.”

Jim paused and looked me up and down. His eyes stopped for a moment on the plastic straps still on each of my wrists.

“Ain’t nobody gittin’ in here,” Darlene spat. “Don’t matter if Randy shoots everybody or nobody.” She kicked the back door to demonstrate its strength.

“Yeah,” said Jim. He looked at me as he brushed by. “You can stay here with them or come with me. Hell, you can run off on your own. I don’t care. I’m sorry about your uncle or friend, or…” His eyes looked down at the straps on my wrist again. “Was he kidnapping you?”

I nodded.

“Then Randy did you a favor,” said Darlene, as she put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s a short-tempered putz most of the time, but he’s a good man in a fight.”

Jim disappeared deeper into the house.

Darlene sat herself in a kitchen chair that had been pushed against an interior wall. She pointed a cigarette-stained finger at my pistol. “That’s a big gun. You know how to use it?”

I’d never had a pistol of any kind in my hand before but knew enough to see that the safety was off and the trigger ready to pull. “Yes, ma’am.” I folded the knife closed and put it in my pocket.

Men started arguing in the front room. I recognized Jim’s voice.

“Don’t mind them,” said Darlene. “That’s just how they talk. You want me to cut them straps off your wrists?”

I nodded and held my left arm toward her, keeping my right hand by my side with the gun gripped tightly. I didn’t like the situation. Outside was hazardous in an obvious way. Inside, danger seemed to be all around me but hidden behind veils of yellow-toothed smiles and words that were almost kind.

Darlene pulled a big knife from a sheath hanging from her waist. She fumbled getting the tip between the plastic and my skin. In her clumsiness with the big blade, she gouged a shallow trough through the skin on my wrist. I flinched.

“Sorry, honey. You be still.”

I stayed quiet.

The blade cut the plastic, and the strap fell to the floor. I switched the gun to my left hand and let Darlene do her sloppy work with my right wrist.

Jim stepped into the kitchen, herding a dark-haired girl about my age. She had to be Jim’s daughter. Like everyone I’d seen in the house, she was armed. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip, and her hand rested on the butt. Through the doorway, Jim shouted, “What are you going to do, Randy, shoot every degenerate in Houston?”

“I got forty-thousand rounds,” Randy laughed as he called from the other room.

“It’s legal now,” someone else in the front room added. “Mayor said so himself.”

“That’s right,” Randy loudly told us as he came into the kitchen. “He said anybody that had to defend themselves is in their rights to shoot any degenerate on their property.”

“And you own the street?” Jim asked, as he guided his daughter toward the back door. “Is that it?”

“Don’t matter,” argued Randy. “They’re coming this way.”

“They’re all coming this way because you’re shooting them,” Jim argued. “They’re not as stupid as you think. They know you’re trying to kill them and the ones that are still smart enough to want to get revenge are going to come get it.”

“You can’t believe everything you see on the Internet,” Randy scoffed as he looked around for support from the other men in the kitchen.

Jim turned to Darlene. “Open the door, please.”

She looked at me. “What about him?”

Jim looked at me, too. “Like I said. Do what you like. Up to you.”

The only thing I knew about any of these people was that they’d gone trigger-happy on the car I was riding in, and Jim had taken a risk to come out and save me. I looked at Darlene and pointed at Jim. “I’m going with him.”

“Open the door, Darlene.” Jim’s tone made it clear he was ready to escalate if she didn’t comply.

His tone didn’t make sense given what little I knew about the situation inside the house, but I inferred a great deal from it. The fortified house was a dysfunctional mess, and whatever was the source of the tension, it had been building toward a breaking point that looked like it might come at any moment.

I stepped away from Darlene and put my back to the stove so everyone in the kitchen was in front of me. Whatever was going on, I didn’t plan to take any punches, and I wasn’t going to get shot for a load of crap that didn’t involve me. I put both hands on the pistol and held it the same way I’d seen cops hold guns in the movies.

The gun in my hand had a fat bore in the barrel, which meant it fired a big round. Aside from our family’s shotgun, stories from relatives who hunted, and loads of videos on the Internet, I didn’t have any experience with firearms. Guns were one topic of my Internet research in the early days of the H5N1 outbreak. Back then, driven by fear of the coming apocalypse, I’d tried to learn a great deal about things that I thought would help me navigate my future.

Long story short, I knew the gun would kick, maybe a lot. I needed to hold it with both hands if I wanted any control. I hoped the information I’d gleaned off the Internet was enough.

“Let him go,” announced Randy, as though he was pardoning a horse thief out on the range. To Jim, he said, “Don’t come crying back here when you find out you can’t defend your shitty little house.”

Looking at Randy, Darlene said, “Don’t be an asshole. You need to remember who this house belongs to—me. You don’t make the rules here.”

“We all fortified this place,” Randy shouted, redirecting his foul temper at her.

A man put a hand on Randy’s shoulder and said something softly to try and calm him down.

Darlene took a brace off the door, only one of several she’d put in place after Jim and I had entered. Looking at Jim, she said in a soft voice, “You come back if you want.”

Jim nodded slightly and looked down at his daughter. “You stay close, you hear?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Darlene opened the door.

Jim looked out. “The backyards are still clear.” He looked over at me. “C’mon.”

Jim jogged through the door. The girl followed, and I was right on her heels.

Degenerates were screaming everywhere. They were pissed.

The door slammed shut behind us, and Darlene banged the braces into place.

Jim continued jogging along a path through the gardens.

The rate of gunfire from Darlene’s house increased.

The reinforced fences between the houses swayed in places—rioters were pushing from the other side. Not one was yet through, but even I could tell the fence was going to come down. It was only a matter of minutes.

Chapter 9

Jim unlocked the back door of his house. He urged the girl and me to hurry inside before locking the door behind us. The girl pulled out a flashlight and turned it on, once we were inside. Like Darlene, Jim had to place two-by-fours in brackets mounted to the wall to bolster the door.

While he was doing that, I looked around and listened for the sound of other people in the house.

The girl noticed what I was doing and said, “It’s just us.”

In the flashlight’s dim glow, I saw that we were in another kitchen that was laid out much like the one at Darlene’s house. None of the windows was boarded over, though, and the house didn’t smell like cigarettes. The kitchen was clean and organized, but well-used. The top layers of vinyl on the floor had worn through to expose a black underlayment. The wallpaper, patterned with large yellow flowers amidst languid green foliage, was peeling at the seams. The Formica countertops were worn through in big browns spots beside the sink and stove.

Volleys of gunfire exploded from the direction of Darlene’s house.

“Fools,” grumbled Jim, as he turned on another flashlight.

“You’ve had riots here before?” I asked, guessing the reason all these people had put so much effort into preparation.

“Three or four.” Jim glanced at the girl as if for confirmation. She nodded.

“Are they always like this?” I asked.

“You don’t need to worry,” he told me. “We’ll be fine here.” He glanced at the girl. “We’ll all be fine.”

That sounded like bullshit to me. “I’m not an adult, but I don’t need to be soothed. We left Darlene’s house because you think they’re endangering themselves. Why?”

“That’s right.” Jim walked to the kitchen doorway to get a look into other parts of the house. “Each time the riots come, they get worse. Last time, some people were killed a few blocks down. Over behind the Kroger supermarket, about a mile that way,” Jim pointed, “a couple of blocks got burned out. Nearly every house. Nobody knows how many people were killed there. After the last one, some of us neighbors who shared the gardens out back decided to set up Darlene’s house as a fortress to protect ourselves.”

“Why isn’t Darlene’s house safe for you and…” I looked at the girl.

“Addy,” she told me.

“I’m Christian,” I told her.

“Don’t know why we chose Darlene’s house,” said Jim. “Maybe because she was willing. We agreed before we started we’d only shoot the degenerates who tried to break in.”

“Randy agreed,” said Addy, “but you knew he was just saying it. You said so yourself.”

Jim nodded and frowned.

“Shooting them makes them more dangerous?” I asked.

Answering for her dad, Addy said, “People on the Internet say that when the degenerates get like this, they just want to break things and start fires. Shooting at them makes them mad, makes them want to get you.”

“Makes sense, right?” Jim asked me but didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re all degenerates out there, but not all of them are completely stupid. They’re still people. Most of them have the good sense to know when somebody’s trying to kill them, and they get real mean and vindictive when they think that.”

“But most of them aren’t smart enough anymore to be afraid of guns,” said Addy. “They say it on the news, too. At least on some of the channels.”

“That one fellow on Channel 13, though—” said Jim, “the one who’s always preaching about this and that, always complaining about how the law needs to change so we can just shoot ‘em all down in the street—Randy and some of them others in Darlene’s house like to listen to him. They think he’s right. And now with a riot going on, they know nobody’s gonna prosecute them for shooting degenerates. I suspect this is what they wanted all along, to set Darlene’s place up like a fortress so they could slaughter as many degenerates as they could. I think maybe all the riots pissed them off too much. I suspect they’re tired of seeing things go out of control.”

I listened for a moment to the sounds from outside. The guns were firing steadily now down at Darlene’s house. More and more wild voices were hollering angry nonsense. “Does it sound to you guys like the riot is growing?”

Jim’s lips tightened into a crease across his face as he cocked his head and listened. “Sure as Dickens, all that shooting is bringing them in. Dammit! Most times they move on through, just breaking stuff nobody cares about, sometimes getting into houses to look for food. People don’t understand it’s best to just stay out of their way.”

Addy asked, “What are we going to do, Daddy?”

Banging on the front door silenced all three of us.

Heavy pounding against the door stopped our hearts.

Feet kicked the front walls and fists beat the windows.

“Addy!” Jim pointed out the kitchen door. “Bug out!”

Addy ran through the door with Jim right behind her. I followed. Addy stood aside in the living room and let Jim lead down a narrow, dark hall.

Once halfway into the hall, Jim reached up and tugged hard on a braided piece of rope. An attic access panel swung down and a ladder unfolded. He turned to Addy. “Up.”

Addy squeezed by Jim and all but ran up the ladder. Jim waved me to follow behind.

The attic space was cramped and hot despite the cool autumn weather. Addy coughed on fiberglass dust kicked up from the insulation piled between the joists. The crap got into my throat and lungs, and scratched until I couldn’t help but cough, too.

Jim pulled the ladder up behind us as Addy scooted across the attic toward a wall covered in sheets of new pink fiberglass insulation.

I followed, thinking the wall had been built as a hiding place that would keep us from being seen by anyone taking a casual peek into the attic from the ladder we’d just climbed.

Once I rounded the thin plywood wall, I saw Addy pushing open a small roughly-made door through the roof.

I silently complimented Jim on the choice to build an escape hatch.

Addy climbed through the door on a homemade ladder. I followed her through and squatted on the roof near the door, just as she did.

Outside the house, the sound of the riot was deafening. Thousands of voices were raging. All around, I heard the sound of breaking fence boards and shattering glass. Degenerates were jumping up and down on cars parked along the road. Rifle fire was pouring out of Darlene’s house.

A large section of fence gave way down at the far end of the garden plot and a solid mob of degenerates poured into the space behind the houses. Weapons fired through the rifle slits in the fortified windows on the back of Darlene’s house. Rioters fell and were trampled.

“Daddy,” Addy urgently told her father, “the fence.”

Jim shook his head as he climbed out through the doorway in the roof. “No way that fence was gonna hold with those fools shooting like that.”

The gunfire coming from the back of Darlene’s house had no hope of stemming the tide of the mob. There were too many degenerates. And just like that, they were at the house, enraged, beating on the wood siding with their fists.

Something banged so loudly below us I felt it through my feet as I squatted on the roof shingles.

“They’re in,” Jim told us, closing the doorway behind us.

Addy stood up and looked around.

“Don’t,” Jim grabbed her shoulder and gently pulled her back down. “We’re behind the roof peak here. They can’t see you from the road.”

“Are we staying here?” she asked.

I was looking across the combined yards at the degenerates coming through the broken fence. “The ones in the backyard garden will see us up here, right?”

Jim nodded. “They might think we’re with them and leave us alone, but mad as they are right now, they’ll probably believe we’re with that bunch in Darlene’s house.”

The sound in the house below us changed.

“I think they’re in the attic.” I looked at the roof hatch to see if there was a way to lock it closed from the top side.

Jim crouched and walked into the midst of a tall tree’s branches that were overhanging one end of his roof. Addy went right after him, also in a crouch. I followed.

It was even darker being surrounded by the tree’s branches, but I saw where we were going. A ladder spanned the gap between Jim’s roof and the roof next door. Long two-by-fours were lashed along the ladder’s length to give it strength. The end of the ladder on Jim’s roof was loosely secured with brackets. I assumed it was secured on the far end as well.

“Go,” Jim told Addy, pointing at the ladder and looking through the tree’s branches and remaining brown leaves. He was worried the degenerates would be coming onto the roof at any moment.

Addy raced across the ladder, perfectly balanced on the rungs, as though the fifteen-foot fall off either side was nothing at all.

Once she had her feet on the roof of the house next door, Jim waved me to follow.

I crossed the ladder on all fours, going as fast as I could move, given that the ladder shifted in the loose brackets that held it in place on each end.

I guess I had a shamed looked on my face when I reached the other side and looked at Addy. As an explanation for her nimble crossing, she simply said, “Gymnastics.”

I turned to see Jim crossing the ladder, going slowly on all fours as if he expected the ladder to collapse beneath him.

When Jim had only a few paces to go, the doorway to his attic flung open, and a degenerate’s head popped through. The degenerate screamed and pointed at us.

“Hurry, Daddy,” said Addy.

Jim stood and bounded over the last few steps.

I dropped to a knee, lifted my pistol, and pointed it down the length of the ladder.

Jim squatted and went to work on the bracket securing the ladder to the roof. “Don’t shoot,” Jim told me, “unless he starts to cross.”

The degenerate was out of the doorway, and another was coming up behind.

“Why are they chasing us?” I asked.

“Like I said,” Jim cocked his head toward Darlene’s place without taking his attention off the metal bracket in his hands clinking against the ladder, “once you start shooting them, some of them go on a rampage.”

The degenerate reached the far end of the ladder, gave it one apprehensive glance, and stepped out to plant a foot on a rung. I lined the sight on the pistol with the degenerate’s chest, held the gun tightly, stiffened my arms, and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked and a red haze blew out behind the degenerate as the bullet knocked him backward. He bounced off the shingles on Jim’s roof and fell into the gap between the houses.

“Nice shooting,” said Addy.

“Yup,” Jim agreed, though he didn’t look up from what he was doing.

Another degenerate was working his way through the branches as a third was climbing out of the door through Jim’s roof.

Addy aimed her pistol.

The ladder clanged as the brackets came loose. Jim lifted it from our end, pushed it toward his house to collapse its length by a few feet, and let it go. It fell into the gap between the houses. He smiled grimly as he glanced at Addy and me. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 10

We ran across the roof of the house next to Jim’s and then crossed another ladder bridge to another roof. That’s when the familiar smell of a backyard barbecue blew past us on the breeze. It wasn’t mesquite wood slowly roasting beef, but was the smell of lighter fluid burning off as it started a fire.

Looking toward Darlene’s house, I saw a brilliant sheet of orange flames through the intervening trees. The back wall of her house was engulfed.

Stopping for a breather, Jim pointed at Darlene’s house. “That’s a shame. Those degenerates aren’t going to have any trouble lighting up that old wooden clapboard on all of these old houses.”

I looked at the flames and shook my head. “I don’t understand.” I glanced at both Jim and Addy. “My dad, he—” I pointed at my head, “he got the virus nearly two years ago. He’s degenerated. He couldn’t start a fire if I showed him how.”

“Speculation in the news is that the rioters aren’t that far gone,” said Jim. “They think it’s the ones who are still halfway smart that stir up the rest of them and get ‘em going. They’re the ones who start the fires. Troublemakers.”

“I smell lighter fluid,” said Addy.

“No telling how far this will go.” Jim grimaced. “We need to get away from here.”

Looking at the trees growing up between this house and the next one in line, I saw yet another ladder crossing the gap. “How far can we go before we have to go down to street level?”

“Down to the end of the block,” said Jim. “Six more houses.”

“Is that far enough?” It was a stupid question. None of us knew how far the rioters were spread out, but they sounded like they were down there, too.

Jim said, “We can’t know how many houses they’re going to burn.”

“Do you have a getaway plan?” I asked.

Jim nodded once and then shook his head. He cast a long, worried look down the street in the direction we were heading. His face showed the depth of his worry. He had a daughter to protect and apparently no good way to do it.

Chapter 11

Sirens were wailing—dozens, maybe more—some close, many far away. Blue and red lights splashed color through the trees from way down the street.

We weren’t in immediate danger, meaning we had a few minutes to breathe. No degenerate had his angry eyes on us. Darlene’s house was engulfed in flames reaching ten and twenty feet over the roof. Her next-door neighbor’s house was burning too, together flickering firelight through the neighborhood. Degenerates were starting on the next house down. The rioters’ pyromania wasn’t focused anywhere near us. Still, we all believed it was coming.

Jim wrapped an arm around Addy and cast worried looks at the row of houses in both directions and at the sea of rioters out in the nighttime street. He looked across the road and I followed his gaze, silently guessing that maybe he was looking toward the locations of alternate paths in his bug-out plan. He was doing well with escape routes up to that point and had made the prescient choice to get us out of Darlene’s house.

Despite all that, we couldn’t stay put. Violence and uncertainty were swirling around us, and if the mob didn’t motivate itself to move on down the road, our choices would slowly disappear.

I looked down at the pistol in my hand. It was raw power, but it was limited. It was a useful tool as long as I didn’t forget that. As soon as I started thinking it was a guarantee of safety, I’d likely get myself killed. The tacky blood on the barrel, left there by the gun’s previous owner, was a reminder of that.

Safety was mostly about doing the smart thing, or at least the smartest thing available. Sometimes that might be shooting, sometimes it might be running, sometimes hiding. So far, we’d utilized all three.

I realized then, maybe Jim was stuck with similar thoughts. He wanted to do the smart thing, but all the smart choices were off the table. We needed to take the least bad path available. I shuffled around to get Jim’s attention and spoke. “You said something about a bug-out plan or something?”

Jim didn’t look at me. “The hope was that we could hide in the attic or on the roof of one of the houses.”

“And?” I asked, knowing that someone who’d planned and prepared so much wouldn’t stop there. Did Jim’s plan end at a safe bunker in the woods? I hoped so. Such a place would be ideal for riding out the chaos, if I could convince him to let me bring my family along. But that part was a discussion for later.

Jim got up on his knees and peered over the roof’s peak. “I’m afraid the only open route will involve a truck I stole.”

“You didn’t steal it,” interjected Addy. “Nobody’s seen Mr. Porter in six months.” She looked at me. “He went degenerate.” She put a hand on her dad’s shoulder. “And Mrs. Porter died before Mom. I know the truck still belongs to Mr. Porter, but he’ll never need it again. I don’t know what it’s called for us to take it, but it’s not stealing.”

Jim’s plan for Mr. Porter’s truck sounded a lot like my plan for appropriating my neighbors’ things when they passed or degenerated too far to need them anymore. “Life changed,” I said, going through my rationalization on the matter, “rules need to change, too. The old ones don’t work anymore.”

“None of that matters,” said Jim. “It ain’t the stealing that bothers me. I’d break any law to keep Addy safe.” He pointed at the degenerates carousing around the fire at Darlene’s house. “You can hear them up and down the streets. I don’t know that we’ll be able to drive out of here. I don’t know why, but they hate cars especially the ones on the move.” He looked at me. “They might all come after us the way they chased the car you drove up in.”

“What other options do we have at the moment?” I asked.

“Stay here and hope the riot squads get here in time.” Jim cast a hopeful look in the direction from which the sirens seemed to be coming. “Or hide in one of these houses and hope it doesn’t burn. We’ve got cars and trucks stocked and stashed around. The Bronco at the Porters’ house is the only one we can get to right now. Or we can go on foot and maybe they won’t bother us once we’re among them. How do they know who’s who anyway?”

“Each option is a risk.” I stood in a crouch and looked around. “Staying up here is a mistake, I think. Things will only get worse for us.”

Jim nodded, so did Addy.

“Inside we might get caught in a fire,” I continued. “Is that what you think, Jim?”

“I don’t like the idea of being out in the street on foot with them.” Jim glanced at Addy again. If things went bad for us out in the mob, he’d not be able to protect his daughter.

“Mr. Porter’s house, then,” said Addy. “Let’s get to the truck. We can wait and see from there.”

Jim gave us a nod, and led us toward the next ladder bridge.

Following in the rear, I looked in the direction from which I thought most of the sirens were coming. Though I was crossways with the law at the moment, I was hoping they’d arrive in time to help.

With a concrete destination, we hurried quickly across the remaining houses and ladder bridges. Jim took pause when we arrived on Mr. Porter’s roof. The escape hatch was already open.

“Is someone inside?” asked Addy.

Jim stuck his head through the hole in the roof and listened.

I knelt on the rough asphalt shingles and leaned over the hole as well.

“I don’t hear anything,” Jim whispered.

With all the noise from the riot, it was hard to tell if the sounds I was hearing were coming from inside or outside of the house. “There might be someone down there.”

“Maybe,” Jim agreed. “If so, not many.”

I nodded before straightening up to scan across the other rooftops. “Other options?”

“This is the best one we can get to,” Jim told me.

Addy pointed. “Look. Mrs. Blumenthal’s is on fire now.”

Trees close to the house were burning, too. And it looked like the flames had jumped to the house on the other side of Darlene’s.

“We can’t stay,” Jim deduced. He pointed into Mr. Porter’s attic. “I’ll go down first. I’ll take care of whatever’s down there. You two follow in a minute, but give me some room.”

Jim waited for an acknowledgment from each of us. He laid his rifle down and then lowered himself through the roof. Once his feet were planted on the joists inside, Addy handed him his rifle. Jim crawled through the rafters, disappearing into the darkness.

Chapter 12

I moved to follow.

Addy grabbed my arm. “Give him a minute.”

I was at an age where having a girl put a hand on me in any way was enough to get my full attention, so I stopped and didn’t argue. “You say when.”

A cheer rose up from the degenerates watching the fires. They were dancing as though trying to conjure a demon from the flames. Addy and I both looked.

More sirens were wailing through the pandemonium.

Addy said, “They’re going to burn down the whole neighborhood.”

Nodding as I watched, I said, “You don’t seem frightened.”

“Neither do you.”

“My shrink says I’m unusually calm.”

Addy looked at me in a strange way.

“You know,” I added, “when most people get panicky, I don’t. What about you?”

“You have a shrink?”

I nodded. “I got in trouble at school.”

“You still go to school?” She didn’t believe me.

“The shrink was court-ordered, before they shut the schools down.”

“You must have done something pretty bad.”

A man shouted from inside the house below. Addy tensed.

A woman and other men added their voices to the ruckus.

I looked at Addy to see if she understood the same thing I did. Trouble.

She shook her head to tell me not to go in.

That was bad advice. I positioned myself over the hole in the roof and started to lower my feet. Addy grabbed my arm again with worry straining her face. “He can handle them. He’d want us to wait.”

A gun fired and I paused. The voices ceased.

Two more shots followed as my feet came down on a beam.

I listened, stuck in place with waning bravery, not knowing how to proceed.

“Come back out,” Addy whispered.

I looked at her. I wanted to do what she was asking, but only because she was asking it. Jim had been kind to me. I felt an obligation to help him if he needed it, but guns were at play again. The world had escalated to a level of violence I’d not fully understood from the relative safety of my backwater neighborhood.

With my feet planted, I squatted and looked around the gloomy attic.

Addy gave in and shined her flashlight into the darkness.

A trail through the layer of dingy insulation between the joists led to the far end of the house. Cockroaches ran over stacks of dusty, misshapen boxes that surrounded an open access panel.

With the sound of the riot outside somewhat muffled, I heard people moving around in the house. A door opened. Clomping footsteps ran. Bodies bumped walls and furniture.

Having come to a decision on what I was doing, all hesitation disappeared. I crouched and all but ran from joist to joist to get to the other end of the attic.

A car’s starter screeched as it cranked a cold engine.

The Bronco!

I squeezed between boxes, brushing them and sending up plumes of attic dust. It got into my throat, and I clenched my teeth to suppress a cough.

The starter cranked again.

Inside the house, a man gasped, trying to catch his breath.

I braced myself at the edge of the attic access hole and looked. A kitchen chair sat on the floor below.

I leaned through the hole and swiveled my head but saw nothing but an empty hall and part of a living room. No Jim. No degenerates.

The starter cranked again, and the engine fired. It revved loudly through a rusty old muffler.

I turned quickly, dropped my legs through the hole, and let myself down. The wooden chair creaked as it took my weight.

The house vibrated, accompanied by a chorus of squeaks. The garage was opening. The sound of the mob and the sound of what must have been a hundred sirens poured into the house.

I hopped to the floor and raised the pistol.

A car door slammed shut.

I ran out of the hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where I saw an open door. Through it lay the garage, where a big brown Bronco was just starting to roll.

Face down on the floor in the kitchen lay Jim, bleeding from three holes in his back.

Chapter 13

With the Bronco racing out of the driveway and into the shouts of the rioters, I knelt beside Jim.

He turned his head to look at me but didn’t lift it off the linoleum. “Addy?”

“I’m here.”

I looked over my shoulder, surprised to see her coming silently into the kitchen.

Outside, tires squealed and the mob went nuts, screaming at the Bronco, I guessed.

“Addy,” Jim feebly reached out as he gasped. Blood sputtered out of his nostrils and dribbled from his mouth.

Tires continued to screech, but the sound was constant. The Bronco was stuck.

Addy came over and knelt beside her father.

I stood up, but Jim caught my ankle. “Stay.”

I squatted back down.

“Take care of her,” he told me.

“I can take care of myself, Daddy.”

“I will,” I told him, promising because he was dying. I had no idea what I could do that Addy couldn’t do herself.

“Who shot you?” asked Addy, her voice shifting from concern to anger.

“Randy.” Jim could barely muster enough breath to make the word audible.

Addy reached for Jim’s rifle lying on the floor beside him.

“Just,” Jim’s eyes settled on me, “go someplace safe.”

“We can go to my house,” I offered. “We don’t have riots in our part of town.”

“You will,” said Jim. “Don’t stay in Houston. Addy, go to your—” Jim stopped talking. All the air in his lungs flowed slowly out. The grip on my ankle relaxed. Jim was dead.

I jumped to my feet, revenge on my mind, and hurried into the garage through the open door.

Looking back, I saw Addy softly sobbing as she took the magazine out of Jim’s rifle, checking to see how many rounds she had in her father’s gun. Her sobs stopped with only a few tears left on her determined face.

She was my kind of girl.

Through the open garage door, I saw the mob flowing down the street, anxious and angry.

The Bronco’s tires were spinning on asphalt as the engine roared. It sounded like it was trying to pull a stump and going nowhere.

I ran a few steps toward the open door and looked down the street. The Bronco was engulfed in a solid mass of degenerates, all trying to get their hands on it while many of those closest rocked the Bronco from side to side. They were trying to roll it. Others were beating the vehicle with whatever they’d picked up. One of the occupants was being dragged out through a broken window and being beaten as if he was part of the truck.

Hothead, murdering Randy and his buddies were getting exactly what they deserved.

From behind me, Addy said, “I hope the degenerates kill them.”

A rhythmic pounding mixed in with the sound of the riot.

I nodded toward the Bronco. “They’re all pissed off at the truck.” I pointed down the street. “If we stay close to the houses, maybe they won’t notice us or maybe they won’t care.”

“Okay.” She said it with no emotion at all.

Teargas canisters spun through the air, landing among the rioters.

I looked up the street. The sound of the rhythmic pounding had to be nightsticks on riot shields. It was the police, down the street, close by.

The police were our chance.

I said, “Let’s go.”

Addy ran along beside me.

Chapter 14

Through the pounding of the nightsticks, the smoke, and the red and blue lights flashing everywhere, Addy and I made it to the corner and across the street before a degenerate took an interest in us. He was a squat man with a chest pumped so large on steroids it made his arms look stubby. It was Addy who caught his eye, and with no inhibitions left in his Swiss cheese brain, he stepped out from behind a tall bush where he’d been doing who-knew-what with some other degenerates. He grabbed her arm, dragged a hand across her chest on its way down to her pants and opened his mouth wide for what he thought was a kiss.

I was three steps ahead of Addy by then, and trying to get myself turned around to raise my pistol while thoughts of failing in my promise to Jim raced through my head.

Addy was well ahead of me.

I heard a muffled shot.

The squat man let go of her and staggered, with blood gushing from his nose, mouth, and throat.

Addy had jammed her small-caliber pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. Before the squat man fell, Addy was already on the move, urging me to follow.

Degenerate people were yelling everywhere. The mob was surging at the police line. Rocks, bottles, small flowerpots, whatever a rioter could pick up was being thrown at the police. Sirens wailed. Brilliant beams of yellow light speared down from a helicopter in the night sky above.

Through the mob I finally saw the police riot line down near the end of the next block. I suggested to Addy that we duck into an empty house and wait for the police to drive the rioters out of the neighborhood. Addy agreed, but insisted that we get to a particular house about halfway down the block.

We dodged and sprinted, running from bush to bush, porch to porch, keeping ourselves out of the mêlée. Injured degenerates started running past us, away from the police, bleeding from head wounds where nightsticks had found their mark.

The noise ahead of us grew overwhelming. The fire in the burning houses behind us spread and flamed tall into the black sky. Addy and I were swimming against a chaotic, violent sea, and if we didn’t get inside pretty soon, I knew we’d be in trouble.

Finally, Addy yanked at my arm and led me between two houses, over a wooden fence with a locked gate, and to the unlocked back door of a house as old and worn as the rest of those in the neighborhood. Turning on her flashlight, Addy proceeded inside as though it was her own home. I found out why when we went into the garage and found a Jeep. Just like the Bronco that Randy had taken, the cargo area in the rear of the Jeep was stocked with food, water, and some ammunition. A rack with packed tightly with five-gallon jugs was mounted to the trailer hitch. It was one of the group’s bug-out vehicles.

Outside, the riot raged.

Something banged the garage door loudly and startled both of us. We stood frozen by the Jeep until we were sure that whatever had made the noise passed by.

Addy got behind the wheel and belted herself in. I did the same on the passenger side. I didn’t ask whether she knew how to drive and she didn’t volunteer the information. She simply explained that our plan was to wait until the police drove the rioters out of the neighborhood, and then we’d leave. I hoped we’d be gone before the spreading fires reached us, or more men and women like Randy came to the house.

We waited there, silent for a long time, listening to the sound of the battle between police and degenerates grow louder, until it finally passed by. That’s when we both felt it was safe to start talking. She said that with her father gone, she had no more relatives in Houston. I asked her if she wanted to come stay with my family, but she told me she was driving the Jeep to her aunt’s house in Oklahoma. She said I was welcome to come along. I told her it was dangerous to drive up through Texas alone. She argued that it was just as dangerous to stay in Houston. She was leaving, and not waiting until dawn to do it. Her father was dead, and the thing that seemed most important to her was to put Houston as far in her rearview mirror as possible.

Still, she shed no more tears over her dad.

When the noise of the riot and the police had receded far enough into the distance, Addy drove the Jeep out of the garage with me in the passenger seat, holding Jim’s rifle, ready to shoot anything that gave us trouble.

Fires burned in every direction, dozens of dozens of houses were in flames. Bodies lay in the road and in the front yards. Wounded degenerates staggered. Some crawled. I took a look back up the street and saw the battle between the police and rioters several blocks down. One block away, the Bronco lay upside down with no sign of life inside.

Addy didn’t look back.

We dodged the bodies in the street and soon were out of the battle zone. We saw police cars—some parked, some on the move, all with at least two patrolmen. None gave us any trouble, probably because we were moving away from the riot.

As Addy drove the streets on the way to my house, I had the thought more than once that she and I were two of a kind. Or at least similar, made for one another, brought together by chance. Mushy romance movie crap. I fantasized about kissing her and doing more, but I did nothing like that. I watched the roads for hostiles and kept my finger ready to pull the rifle’s trigger.

People were out in the street all along our route. That wasn’t unusual. Lots of the degenerated people spent time walking around at night, going nowhere, doing nothing, just ambling. Some of them talked to themselves. A few were manic. Occasionally they were violent. Some wailed for no reason at all. Others sat on the curb and stared at the asphalt.

The world was an asylum, and the patients were out of their cages.

The prion encephalopathy was making the world worse by imperceptible degrees every day. Everyone who could still form a thought—me included—wistfully believed that things had gotten as bad as they were going to get, and that soon, maybe even in the next year, they’d start to get better again, they’d return to the way they were—a happy world of rush hour traffic, expensive lattes, summer blockbusters, and puppy love.

As flawed and cold as was the paradise created by all the generations who’d built it, nobody wanted to let it go.

It was a quiet drive until I pointed for Addy to turn off the main road to get into my neighborhood.

Instead of taking the turn onto the street, she drove into the parking lot of a long-closed grocery store that sat on the corner.

“What?” I asked.

The Jeep rolled to the center of the acre-sized patch of asphalt before Addy brought it to a stop.

I quickly looked around for degenerates who might be ready to give us trouble but spotted none. I turned back to Addy.

She focused her gaze on her hands on the steering wheel and seemed ashamed when she said, “We haven’t heard from my aunt in six months.”

Guessing where she might be going with her admission, I figured I’d give her another argument to sway her to stay in Houston with my family. “Do you think you’ll be able to find gas all the way to Oklahoma?”

Addy pointed at the rear of the Jeep. “There’s enough back there on the rack to get me all the way.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment until I tried another approach, “You want to believe your aunt is fine and waiting for you but you don’t believe it, not really.”

Addy slowly shook her head.

“It’s hard admitting that, isn’t it?” I silently wrestled with choosing to say the next part, but the world wasn’t one that suffered sugarcoated truths anymore. “Everyone in your family might be dead.”

Addy nodded and rubbed her eyes. Maybe trying to hide a tear. Maybe she was just tired.

“We don’t have much,” I told her. “You’re welcome to stay until you get in contact with your aunt. Maybe then you can go, when you’re sure.”

“And your parents?” Addy looked at me with a smile and damp eyes. “What will they say when you bring a girl home to stay?”

“My dad has the PRNP mutation,” I told her. “He’s not…” It was hard finding words that weren’t painful to utter. I pointed at my head. “Mom’s not gone, but she’s going. Me and Levi take care of them. Mom will be happy if you move in. I’ll move into Levi’s room and you can have mine.” I looked over at Addy, feeling like I was blurting all my arguments in no cohesive order.

Addy leaned over and unexpectedly pecked me on the cheek. “You’re sweet.”

I’d never been kissed by a girl until that moment and as much as I wanted to say something back to her, I couldn’t. I was tongue-tied, surprised, and spinning with unexpected emotions swirling in my head.

Addy, apparently having decided what she was going to do, put the Jeep in gear and got us rolling again.

Chapter 15

When we turned onto my block, Addy had the headlights on bright, illuminating the street all the way down to the next intersection. The street’s usual nighttime degenerates were out but where they usually were up to their random acts of nothing, many of them were scattered in the road down by my house, standing motionless and staring.

Addy saw it too, and she took her foot off the accelerator and looked warily back and forth.

As we neared, I saw that Oscar’s house was completely dark. Dark houses weren’t out of place on our street but it was unusual for Oscar’s house. They almost always left the porch light on.

Were the degenerates staring at Oscar’s house?

The dark windows worried me. I wondered if Oscar had gotten tired of asking me to leave with him and had gone to Mexico without me. I found myself hoping the utility company had cut their electricity. Maybe Oscar’s dad didn’t have as much money as he let on. Maybe he was even further behind on his bills than our family was.

Looking past Oscar’s, I saw the lights were on at my house. I tensed when I noticed the front door was open. That’s when I realized the motionless degenerates in the street were staring at our front door.

Addy asked, “Why would they be staring?”

“That’s where I live,” I told her in a voice that betrayed my concern.

The Jeep rolled slower.

I pointed for emphasis. We were still three or four houses away. “Pull up in front.”

“They’re in the way,” Addy told me.

There was no way past the degenerates, unless she ran them over or pushed them out of the way with her bumper. “Just go right—” I didn’t finish. I flung my door open, and ran.

None of the degenerates seemed to care that I was running past, but it was clear they were all staring at the yellow light glowing from our open front door.

A man’s wail pealed into the night, loud and long.

The degenerates around me cringed. A few stepped back. None turned away.

The wail found an abrupt end just as I came to understand that the sound was coming from inside my house.

I cursed and crossed the remains of our front lawn. With Jim’s rifle still in hand, I bounded up the front porch steps, stopped against the wall just outside the door, and listened.

Bad things were happening inside. A panicked thought in my head demanded that I rush in, unloading Jim’s rifle into anyone I didn’t recognize. My dispassionate side was in control though, and it said, “be quiet, be careful, be deadly.”

Shuffling of feet, bumping of bodies, and strange voices were coming from inside. None of it was happening in the front room. The sounds were coming from one of the bedrooms or from the kitchen in the back of the house.

I peeked around the doorjamb for a look into the living room and I involuntarily stopped breathing.

Something imploded in my chest, leaving a void where my heart had been an eye-blink before.

Amidst the shambled furniture in a spot in the center of the floor—a spot the furniture seemed afraid to venture close to—lay Levi. One of his arms was twisted around at a painful angle and bent where there was no joint. His shaggy hair was matted red—thick and gooey. Around his head, in a puddle on the floor that stretched wider than his boney shoulders, pooled his blood. He wasn’t wheezing. He wasn’t breathing shallowly. He wasn’t shuddering from the pain of his broken arm and bleeding wounds. Levi was dead.

Another wail ripped the air.

From back in the kitchen, my mother whimpered.

Men—no—big boys at the end of their pubescence, boys with deep clear voices, laughed and chided.

I stepped into the doorway and saw the family shotgun leaning against the wall just inside the door. That’s where we kept it, near the place where we expected threats to materialize.

Why hadn’t Levi picked it up and stopped what had happened here?

Why?

With my jaw clenching, I silently leaned Jim’s rifle against the wall and picked up the shotgun. It was the weapon with which I was familiar. Until earlier that night when I’d killed that degenerate with the bounty hunter’s pistol, it was the only firearm I’d ever pulled the trigger on. It was the weapon my dad had taught me to shoot with.

With the weight of the shotgun comfortably in my hands, I stared dry-eyed at the corpse of my last brother. People, in general, were of little value to me, little concern. Their problems were not my problems, but Levi wasn’t one of those slack-jawed generic-faced people out on the street, he was my brother. He’d taught me to count and taught me to read back when mom and dad were too tired from working to look after me when they got home from work. Levi played games with me. He taught me how to ride a neighbor kid’s bike. He taught me how to use a computer.

Levi was weak and gentle, but smart and loving. And now he was another piece of broken furniture in a house being destroyed by goons who were still in the kitchen.

I had no more time for Levi. I had shotgun business to tend to.

A hand slapped flesh back in the kitchen.

The young men laughed.

Another slap was followed by a grunt. Another.

I held the shotgun pointed forward and gripped it tightly as I crossed the living room.

I silently stepped over Levi’s body, and then moved sideways to get a peek into the kitchen through the open doorway.

“Pull it! Pull it out, you retarded bitch!” One of the young men was standing in front of my mother. She was on her knees just inside the kitchen, sobbing, but out of resistance. The goon held a handful of her hair, and he was grinding her face into his crotch.

I inched over to get a view down the length of the galley kitchen.

My father was bound to a wooden kitchen chair. His wrists were duct-taped to the chair’s arms. One of the goons was leaning against a nearby counter, smoking a cigarette, and looking gleefully down at my dad, telling his buddy, “Do it again. Do it again.”

The third and last intruder was trying to pull one of my dad’s fingers away from his closed fist.

“Pull it out, Bitch,” yelled the nearby goon, at my mother.

I silently stepped through the overturned furniture to get myself into a good firing position.

The guy wrestling with my dad’s hand pried the finger out. My dad struggled against his bonds. Tears were rolling silently down his face as his mouth struggled to form words that had escaped him months ago.

“Do it again.”

The guy with my dad’s finger in a tight grip produced a cigar lighter, one of those wicked little things that blasts out the butane under pressure and sounds like a tiny blowtorch. The goon clicked the lighter and put the flame to work searing the flesh on the tip of my dad’s finger.

My dad wailed so loud it drowned out all other sounds. When Dad’s lungs ran out of air, all that was left was the hysterical laughter of the three goons, all looking at my dad like he was the funniest damn thing they’d ever seen.

My mother’s sobs flowed in a new wave.

I got both feet planted and had a clear line of sight down the shotgun barrel at all three intruders. I said, “Hey, dead man.”

The guy with a handful of my mother’s hair snapped his head around to look at me. His face turned to surprise, and his mouth opened as some vulgar string of words lined themselves up for an exit from his soon-to-be disassembled brain.

From six feet away, with my shotgun pointing right at his mouth, I pulled the trigger.

The gun boomed.

The goon’s head disintegrated as the shot tore through bone and brain, splattering it on the popcorn-textured ceiling, cabinets, and floor.

I racked another shell as the body went over backward into the kitchen. The two goons at the far end looked up from their business to see me, their murderer.

Stepping toward them, I pointed the shotgun at the guy who hadn’t thought fast enough to get his leaning ass off the counter. I fired.

The satisfying boom of the gun sent lead shot through the man’s arm and chest. He spun off the counter and fell to the floor, leaving only a puff of red haze and cigarette smoke.

I pumped another shell into the breech.

The guy who’d used the lighter on my dad’s fingers dropped it and was scrambling to pull a gun out of his waistband. He was moving back, trying to get around my dad’s sprawled legs, hoping to use my dad as a shield.

I pointed the shotgun and aimed a little wide.

The shot ripped through the third guy’s arm and sent him spinning onto the table to roll off into the chairs on the other side.

Loading another round, I hurried into the kitchen, careful to avoid slipping in the first goon’s blood.

At the far end, I saw twitching legs of the guy who’d been leaning on the counter. Instead of mean laughter, he was wheezing with blood gurgling out of his mouth while his eyes silently pleaded.

I said, “This is what death feels like.” I fired again, putting a full load into his chest. He instantly stopped moving.

I pumped the shotgun and stepped to the other side of my father.

The last guy was struggling in the overturned chairs between the table and the wall.

I dropped to a knee and pointed my gun at him from under the table.

“No!” he pleaded.

Wasted breath. There was nothing he could have said or done to change what was going to happen.

I fired.

His face turned to red mush as the wall behind him splattered with his blood.

I stood back up. The shotgun was empty, and the extra shells were stored in Levi’s bedroom. I laid the gun on the counter and took the pistol out of my waistband.

I hurried through the house, looking for any more hooligans that needed extermination.

None.

Next, I checked the backyard. It was empty except for the weathered wooden crosses on my brothers’ graves. I came to a stop there, fixated on the crosses as my breathing calmed. I still felt a hollow inside me—the same one I’d felt the moment I saw Levi’s body. As for the men I’d killed, I had not one ounce of guilt. They were less than nothing to me.

Inside, Mom was sobbing, still lying on the floor. Dad was still bound to the chair, silent.

“Are you okay?”

I turned to see Addy standing in the kitchen door where the bounty hunter had stood earlier that night.

Again, I was at a loss for words.

Chapter 16

Three of my dad’s fingers on one hand were charred on the end. Two fingers on the other hand matched. The guy with the torch had been working from the pinky finger toward the bigger ones on each hand. Lucky for us, I guess. Dad still had enough strength in his hands to do most of the work.

In the dark, with my dad copying my movements, we dug three graves in a row beside the twins. They weren’t deep, maybe three or four feet. Through it, Dad kept forgetting that some of his fingers were ruined, and when he gripped the shovel handle too tightly he cried out. His mind had all but lost its ability to create new memories. Good for him. He didn’t have to live with the pain of another dead child. He didn’t have to have that pain compounded by the truth of the matter, which was that he was still tall and strong despite his years, and could have killed those three punks with his bare hands before they’d so much as put a bruise on anyone in the house. But his mind was too weak to figure out what needed to be done.

Addy was in the kitchen, trying futilely to comfort my mother. But Mom was suffering. She wouldn’t get off the kitchen floor. All the effort left in her had been spent on moving to a place on the floor where she could lay on her side and see through the doorway into the living room. There she bawled, watching Levi’s blood coagulate on the floor while his eyes stared unblinkingly at nothing.

Whatever was left of my mom in her debilitated brain was dying.

I stopped shoveling to wipe stinging sweat out of my eyes. Dad stopped too, and copied me. His eyes might have been stinging, or maybe they weren’t. I picked up a few water bottles I’d laid on the ground and handed one to Dad. I drank half of mine. He drank all of his, and we went back to work.

It took us most of the night to finish.

When we laid our shovels down, I tried to get Dad to sit and stay in the chair he used for watching the twins’ graves. He wouldn’t. He wanted to stay by my side. Maybe something down in the core of his brain was healthy enough to understand I was the last of his children. Maybe he wanted to protect me.

Dad followed me through the kitchen and into the living room. Addy moved silently out of our way.

As soon as Dad saw Levi, his face twisted and his mouth fell open and he wailed again, louder, more painful than when that dead goon under the dining room table had been burning his fingers with the lighter.

Dad fell to his knees beside Levi. He petted Levi gently, like a puppy.

I knelt beside Levi, rolled him on his back, and wedged my hands beneath his body. I strained to lift him. If Levi hadn’t been so thin, I’d have had to drag him. In my mind, that would have been too degrading.

Neither Mom nor Dad did anything to help. They didn’t stop me either, though Mom’s sobbing grew more intense.

I gingerly carried Levi’s body through the kitchen and out the back door. I crossed the dead lawn and laid him beside the hole nearest his two dead brothers. Mom and Dad followed me out, both getting down on their knees beside Levi’s lifeless body. I climbed down into the hole, lifted Levi again, and gently placed him in the bottom of the grave.

Addy stayed in the kitchen doorway, allowing my family its private moment burying their firstborn son.

As I was climbing out of Levi’s grave, Mom climbed in and lay down beside his body. She held him and sobbed. Dad’s tears flowed silently down his cheeks as he stared into the pit containing his wife and dead son.

“Mom,” I said, “You need to get out. I need to bury Levi.”

Mom didn’t acknowledge.

“Mom, please.”

Nothing but tears.

I let her cry. I gave her some time.

Looking for the right words with which to proceed, I said, “None of this is your fault.”

Fault, even if they understood it, didn’t matter. Grief consumed my parents. Still, it was a funeral, things needed to be said. “I don’t know if there’s a Heaven or Hell. You guys believe in that. I hope you’re right, and I hope Mason, Caden, and Levi are in Heaven. I hope all the bad people in Houston are in Hell, and I hope they suffer. But I sometimes wonder if Hell isn’t just down there anymore. I think maybe the world is turning into Hell too, and good people like you and Dad were accidentally left here by God, suffering, though you don’t deserve it.”

I sat down on the edge of the grave. I was tired, more from the burden of everyone’s pain than anything I’d been through that day. My legs dangled into the pit as the weight of what I was doing bore down on me. Those first shovels of dirt on Levi’s face were going to be hard.

I let Mom and Dad cry a little longer before I said, “You guys took me to church because you thought that’s what good parents were supposed to do for their kids. And when I told you I didn’t believe in any of that stuff you let me stay home on Sunday while the rest of you went. Mom, I know you believe in that church stuff with all your heart, but I never thanked you for not making me feel bad because I didn’t.”

Mom shuddered, and she buried her face in Levi’s bloody shoulder.

“We never had any money, but I know you guys always did your best for us. Mason, Caden, and Levi, they always appreciated that you were good parents. They loved you. And if it wasn’t for that damn Brisbane flu, I’ll bet they’d have grown up to be successful, good people. I think Caden would have been a doctor.” I looked at Dad. “Don’t you?”

Of course, Dad said nothing.

“Maybe Mason would have been a lawyer. And Levi, he was so smart, I’ll bet he’d have had started his own Internet company or something. I’ll bet he’d have been a billionaire one day.”

I took a look at both my parents. Maybe they understood what I was saying, maybe they didn’t. I like to think they did.

The next part was a lot harder than I expected it to be. “I reached out and put a hand on Dad’s shoulder. “I don’t want you to suffer anymore, Dad.” I looked down at Mom. “You don’t deserve to live in Hell.”

I got to my feet and walked over to the porch where I’d left the shotgun after I’d reloaded it.

Addy had seated herself on the back steps by then. She looked at me when I picked up the gun, no judgment in her eyes.

Mom stayed in the grave with Levi. Dad watched me until I came over to take his hand. “C’mon.”

He got up.

I led him away from Levi’s grave and stood him up at the foot of the empty grave on the far end of the row. I turned him to face the hole. “Close your eyes, Dad.”

He didn’t respond. He just stood where I’d left him. “I love you, Dad.” I raised the shotgun, aimed the weapon between his shoulder blades, and I pulled the trigger.

With the gun’s thunder echo rumbling through the neighborhood, my father collapsed into his grave.

Feeling the hollow again, the same one I felt when I saw Levi’s body on the living room floor, I walked back to Levi’s grave and looked down at Mom. In her eyes, I saw that she understood what I’d just done. I hoped she wouldn’t hate me for it.

She pulled Levi close, kissed his cheek, and held him so tight I thought she might not let go.

When she was done, she stood up and she looked up at me. “This is Hell, Christian.” She reached over, took the barrel of my shotgun, and raised it until it was pointed at her face. “Don’t let this haunt you. Don’t make this world a deeper Hell than it is. I hope you find whatever piece is missing from your soul that keeps you from being happy. I hope one day you learn how to love.”

“I already know, Mom. I love you and Dad, and Levi, and…”

She shook her head. “I know you think you do. But that’s okay. I know in your way, you feel something for us. I know you’d do anything for your family. I always knew it. In your own way, you’re stronger than we are. You’re able to do for us what we don’t have the strength to ask of you. It’s like Dr. Rajan said, you’re different. Maybe you were born at just the right time. Maybe the rest of us should have lived sooner so we never would have had to see what a wicked place the world has become. This world is for you, Christian, not for me, not for Dad, not for Levi or the twins.”

I didn’t know how to respond.

Through her tears, she smiled at me. “I’ll always love you, Christian.” She looked down at my brother and said, “Levi always needed me in a way you couldn’t understand. I’m going to go with him to Heaven.” She knelt down and then leaned over on an elbow as she closed her eyes. “Leave us together, please.” She lay down, pulled Levi tight to her breast, and closed her eyes. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy—”

Bang!

I looked down into the grave, hoping the one shot had killed her. I watched for movement, a breath, a twitch, but saw none of that. At least I hadn’t prolonged her suffering.

Chapter 17

The sun was up by the time Addy and me finished filling in the graves and building the crosses. I’d hammered each into the ground and was sitting in Dad’s plastic chair, staring at the memory of my family. My shotgun was reloaded again and laying across my lap. My pistol was tucked in my waistband. My shovel was on the ground between my chair and Addy’s.

Through the ordeal, she’d said nothing except a word or two necessary for us to work together in finishing the task.

“What will you do?” I asked.

“That’s not the question you want to ask me,” she replied.

That was true. That question was on my list, but it wasn’t at the top. “I killed my parents.” I nodded to the three fresh graves. “Am I a monster?”

Addy turned in her chair to look at me. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Why are you being evasive?”

“I’m not,” she answered. “I don’t honestly believe you need anyone’s approval for what you do. If there’s a question, it’s whether you believe you’re a monster for what you did.”

She was right about that, too. “I don’t have a label for what I am.”

“Do you think you did the right thing?”

I nodded. I did a brutal, terrible thing, the kind of thing I’d been raised to believe that only a monster could do. But the world those morals belonged to was dead and its rules needed to die with it. I did what I did because I believed it was the most merciful thing I could for my parents. It was the right thing. It was the loving thing. “I do.”

Addy reached across the gap between us and she took my hand. “I’ll never judge you for doing what you think is right.”

Never?

“I wish I was as strong as you.” She squeezed my hand for emphasis.

“You are,” I told her. “In your way you’re stronger than me.”

She shrugged.

I put my other hand over hers and turned to look at her. “Back to the first question.”

She almost smiled, and said, “We should stay together. I think Oklahoma is a bad idea.”

A noise from inside the house alerted us both to the presence of another intruder.

I stood up and put my shotgun to my shoulder, but left the barrel pointing down as I turned.

Whoever was in the house walked into the kitchen. I heard a gasp, and I recognized the sound. It was Oscar.

A moment later, he came out through the kitchen door and saw me.

“What happened?” he asked, pointing back inside.

“I don’t know.” That was the truth in some ways. I didn’t know any of the details about what had occurred before my return. “When I got home, Levi was dead.”

Oscar pointed at the carnage in the kitchen. “They killed him?”

“In the living room,” I confirmed.

“Your mom and dad, too?” Oscar asked.

I had the urge to look away to hide behind a lie, but I wasn’t going to. Maybe I’d tell him what had happened but it wasn’t the time. “I killed those three in the kitchen.” I nodded back toward the fresh graves. “That’s Mom, Dad, Levi.”

Oscar shook his head in disbelief. “Why?”

“Why’d those guys come here?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter now.”

Oscar pointed at Addy. “Who’s she?”

“Addy,” I told him. “She helped me get back home.”

“Is that your Jeep out front?” Oscar asked.

Addy nodded.

Oscar refocused on me as he motioned at the graves behind me. “What are you gonna do? Now, I mean.”

“You still want to go down to your uncles’ in Mexico?”

“Yeah.” Oscar almost smiled but it evaporated quickly.

I looked at Addy. “You want to go to Mexico?”

“Anywhere is better than here,” she answered.

I turned back to Oscar. “I can leave today. Nothing is keeping me here.”

The End

On to Black Rust, the next book in the adventure.

Check out these sample chapters from Black Rust, it picks up Christian’s story fifteen years down the road…

Chapter 1

I knelt behind a rusty stove and peered into the mist between the pine tree trunks, looking for the glow of flames in the distant dark.  The slightest of breezes shushed through the needles on the branches sixty feet over my head.

To my left in the waist-high undergrowth lay an upturned bathtub.  Beside that, a dishwasher and then a coffee table, all in line along a worn footpath that I knew from experience arced into a full circle.  With most of the path out of sight in the night forest, I guessed the circle was maybe two hundred feet in diameter, the largest of two or three concentric circles.  The outermost circle was always lined with the big stuff—refrigerators, couches, patio Pepsi machines, and occasionally the rusty hulk of a car.

The next circle might be lined with microwaves, desktop computers, a stand mixer or two, dining room chairs, and end tables.  The innermost circle would be laid solid with the surplus detritus of a million devolved lives—silverware, toasters, knickknacks, eyeglasses, anything shiny or jingly.

The three rings made up the boundary of a post-apocalyptic Stonehenge, constructed by diseased cretins to worship the gods who’d come before them and whose descendants still walked among them.  Whatever passed for logic in their deficient brains often led them to create simple, pagan religions with crude, open-air temples, almost always incorporating the discarded, inexplicable tools of their lords.

Lords like me.

Laughable, I know.

The closest I came to being a god was that I was a reaping Lucifer, stealing the souls of their faithful and flushing them down to hell.  I liked that picture of myself.  I liked it a lot.  But it wasn’t me.  I was more like a lethal high school bully, an armed mall cop, a death camp guard.  Sure, we had long, euphemized official titles prescribed by the laws that made our services legal.  But nobody used those titles.  Truth be told, I got paid by the head for snuffing violent dimwits.  So maybe exterminator was the best name.  It was accurate.

Christian Black, the exterminator.

I smiled at the thought of it.

Most people called us Regulators.

Other Regulators, the ones who knew we cheated, called us Front-runners.

I looked down the line of deteriorating appliances and saw Lutz standing behind a tree trunk that had no hope of concealing all of him.  His foot was propped up on a water heater lying on its side, and he was fumbling with the video recorder attached to his assault rifle.

“Lutz.”

He looked over at me.

I cocked my head in the direction of the glow, in the direction of the chanting of jibber-jabber syllables I suspected did little more than keep the degenerates’ mouths busy.

He nodded.  He heard them, too.

Even without the spotter drone intel that had led us to the scene, we both knew what was going on—a ceremony for the moon, or the stars, or maybe the fog, since that’s pretty much all they could see in the air tonight.

And a sacrifice.

Of course, they were sacrificing one of their own.

If they were just dancing, chanting, and burning a pile of brush, Lutz and I wouldn’t be here.

Speaking softly into my headset, I said, “You go left, I’ll head straight in so we can catch them in a crossfire.”

“No,” Lutz replied, still panting from the effort of the hike we’d taken to get so deep into the woods.  “I’ll go straight.  You circle ‘round to the right.”

I looked into the shadowy trees to the right knowing the ground opened up to a cornfield in that direction—the spotter intel had provided us with a wide view of the area.  I wished for the hundredth time I’d been able to replace my night vision goggles after they’d gone on the fritz a few months back.  But like everything worth spending a dime on these days, used NVGs were hard to find and expensive to buy.  New, they were impossible to get.

“Okay,” I whispered, knowing I shouldn’t have wasted the breath on telling him to take the longer path in the first place.  He was unashamedly lazy and had been eating his way toward a heart attack since before I was born.

I stood up and walked quietly over the thick mat of pine needles, doing my best not to rustle the bushes and doing my damnedest to stay away from the poison ivy.

“Watch out for all the shit on the ground,” said Lutz.

Something pathetic buried in Lutz’s ego needed to pretend he knew more about what we were doing than I did.  “Thanks, Detective.”  Pure sarcasm.

His breathing grew labored.  He was moving through the underbrush. “Must be some houses close by.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t carry all this shit out into the woods this far.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

“Doubtful.”

Yeah, of course, you’re right.  More sarcasm, even if it was just in my head.

I was following the curved arc past a row of rotting nightstands and easy chairs, having lost sight of Lutz.  I crunched through a layer of dry twigs as I tried to gauge my progress.  From overhead, I heard the whispery buzz of drone rotor blades.  More than one was up there.  They were moving in close for a good view of what their operators knew was coming: bloody slaughter, video to sell to the internet voyeurs—the violence pervs who got their rocks off on that sort of thing.

Everybody got a payday when degenerates died.

“I see ‘em,” Lutz told me.

“Sit tight.”  I stepped between a cracked flat-screen television and a terracotta flowerpot and made straight for the glow of the fire.  “I’ll be in position in a minute.”

“Dancing,” whispered Lutz.  “Naked.  Got some streaks on their skin.  Blood, I think.”

Blood.  That’s what the report from the spotter had said.  “You see the kid?” It was always a kid who drew the short straw when the d-gens decided their imaginary god wanted a sacrifice.  Usually it was a young girl.

“Can’t tell,” said Lutz.  “Lots of blood.  I think they’ve gone cannibal.  I hate this kind of shit.  Know what I mean?”

No answer required.  I knew exactly what he meant.  I’d heard about a thousand versions of why he hated “this kind of shit.”  I’d heard it through my earpiece.  I’d heard it over donuts and coffee.  I’d heard it over beers.  I’d heard when he explained it to me over the sound of the music blaring in the car.  And it didn’t matter how high I turned the music up, Lutz spoke louder.  It was some kind of hater-mouth magic to always be the loudest goddamn thing around.

And it wasn’t the kind of shit they were doing they he hated.  He hated them.  Simple.  Straight-up.  Period.

Now, I don’t have any love for them myself.  Nobody who can still do simple addition in their head has any reason to like the d-gens even though most of them are nonviolent and useless.  Most of them wouldn’t raise a finger to harm another human, but most of them won’t raise a finger to feed themselves, either.  That turned into a problem for the rest of us.  When the disease came and worm-holed their brains, they’d pretty much ruined everything for everybody.

Exaggeration?  I think not.

I was a kid when it all happened.  I could have grown up to be a doctor spending my afternoons on the golf course and my summers in the Bahamas ogling tanned girls half my age and drinking myself into a stupor by the pool.  Instead, I spend long hours every damned day hunting violent degenerates through the woods and through the crumbling suburbs, so I can pay my rent on time and dream about getting out of debt.

Looking at the light through the trees and trying to get a measure of how far away I was from the fire, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was putting my feet, and I got tangled in bramble.  “Dammit.”

“What?” Lutz asked, instantly panicked.  That was his way, always expecting the worst.

“Be cool,” I told him.  “I’m fine.”

“We need to hurry this along,” he said.  “How close are you?”

“Does it matter?  Do it yourself if you can’t wait.”  It was a threat more than permission.  Lutz didn’t trust himself to take twenty-three d-gens on his own.  Sure, he had a thirty-round magazine and another half-dozen mags on his belt, but in the trees, as close as we’d need to get before we had clear shots at them all, he’d miss, and half or more might get away.  Or they might rush him.  He was too old and too slow to run away if it came to that.  His only choice would be to kill ‘em all or die.

That’s why he’d paired with me—not because we liked each other, but because I was a killer.

Twenty-three d-gens at pistol range?  Not a problem.

Mostly not a problem because I’d be using an M4 on full auto and I could swap an empty magazine in just over a second.  That, and I carried two Walther PPQs with fifteen-round magazines.  With those, I could kill thirty of anything within fifty feet of me before I needed to reload.

Good?  Yeah, I’m that good.

In his nasally voice, Lutz said, “I see the kid.”

I froze.  “The kid?  Live?” That’s not what the intel said.  That’s not what the pictures showed.  Or kinda showed.  The damn fog had made everything hard to make out from the perspective up there.

“A couple kids.”  Lutz’s hate was trying to override his good sense and telling him to pull his trigger.

“Dead or alive?”

“I think there’s one on the fire.”

“Calm down,” I spat as I yanked my foot free and started to run.  I’d worked with Lutz long enough to know he was about to do something stupid, and I didn’t even have eyes on a d-gen yet.

That was bad.  Lutz might get injured—no big deal.  Lutz might get sidelined—big deal, as that would have a negative impact on my income.  Lutz might get killed—he had all the spotter contacts, which he made a point of never sharing with me.  So a dead Lutz meant I’d be back to scraping by like all the other suckers without any inside info.  To hell with that.  I had debts to pay.

“Do you have your video on?” I asked Lutz in order to get his mind out of his hate for a moment and into the land of rational thought.  Just like me, Lutz had a digital video recorder.  Mine was on an elastic strap on my head, pointed forward to record my kills.  His was mounted on his rifle.  It was legally required for Regulators, but more importantly, video met half the documentation obligation we needed to get paid for our kills.  Two videos from separate points of view, not of the kills—that would be near impossible—but of the whole scene, fulfilled the government requirement.  That was the main reason Lutz and I worked together rather than alone.  No Regulator worked alone.  At least none who made a living at it.

“Damn camera!” Lutz was frustrated again.  He wasn’t keeping his voice down.

“Lutz, turn on your video.”  It was an order, but I tried to keep my voice unemotional to keep him calm.

“I think my batteries are dead.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”  No more calm.  “Change your batteries.  Quick!  Before they see you.”

I heard breathing and frustrated grunts in response.  I didn’t know if he was changing his batteries or beating his camera with his fist.  With Lutz, it could have been either.

Speaking slowly, I said, “You need to read the VC Act.  I’m too far away to get a solid view of the proof.”

“Can’t.”

I burst through a stand of thick bushes and stopped.  I had a view of some of the d-gens but too many tree trunks were in the way.  Still, I could tell they were dancing aboriginal-style around a bonfire, naked, streaked in glistening blood, with two live children off to the side, held in the strong grip of an older woman.

On a spit, over the fire, the bodies of some toddlers were cooking.

Motherfucker!  They were planning a goddamn smorgasbord.

I dropped to a knee to get out of view as my heart gushed blood through my veins so hard I could hear it rushing through the capillaries in my eardrums.

I flipped my cam on and pointed my head toward the clearing while I whispered into my headset, “I am Christian Black, Independent Degenerate Regulator number 77379, and Franco Lutz, IDR number 14634.  We’ve witnessed approximately twenty-three degenerates engaged in violent or cannibalistic behavior.  In accordance with the H5N1 Brisbane Strain Prion Mutation Violence and Cannibalism Act, sections three dash two and seven dash two, IDR Lutz and I will attempt to terminate the offenders under verified Sanction Case Number—”

Shit.

I didn’t have the Sanction ID, which should have been relayed from the Degenerate Oversight Authority Office through the spotter drone and down to my phone.

I fished in my pocket to get my phone.  No cellular signal out this far, but I did have the direct Wifi connection with the spotter drone, which had provided the data on the pending sanction when we were parking the truck before hiking into the woods.  I’d taken the precaution to dim the brightness on the screen down to the lowest level, a habit I always used in the field.  I keyed the phone on and the screen instantly blinked to life, displaying a red flashing pending notification over the Sanction Certificate.

Pending?  What the hell?

I had to be looking at the wrong case.  There was a dead toddler cooking on the goddamn fire.  Lutz saw it.  The spotter drone had to have seen it.

Lutz shouted through my earpiece, “They heard you!”

Chapter 2

I looked up from my position, still squatting behind a bush, too far out for a clear shot at any more than a few of the degenerates.

Some of the dancers had stopped.  A woman—a young, blonde-haired d-gen—was staring into the dark, right at my position.  Only, she couldn’t have been staring at me.  With the light of the fire ruining her night vision, she had to be seeing nothing but black.

A rifle shot cracked.

“Dammit, Lutz!” He should have waited for me.  I raised my rifle and started to run.

Lutz answered me by squeezing his trigger and emptying what sounded like a full magazine into the dancers.

D-gens screamed.

Lutz yelled.

I heard the sound of his pistol shooting.

D-gens were running in all directions up ahead and their shadows were strobing black through the trees, making it impossible to tell exactly what was happening.

I lost sight of the blonde, staring woman.  I couldn’t see the two kids.

Lutz yelled something I couldn’t make out and I feared he might have a d-gen’s teeth at his throat.

I burst into the clearing, planted my feet, leveled my M4, and started shooting at a handful of d-gens who were charging Lutz.

The degenerates all tumbled to the ground at his feet.

He looked over at me with a silent pistol in his hand.

“Reload!” I shouted at him as I aimed and shot at other d-gens.

They were standing, running, attacking us, or already on the ground, trying to die.

They fell.

They screamed.

They scattered.  But not fast enough.

I shot down three running into the woods on the far side of the clearing.  One crawling away got a bullet in the back.  Two more were in the trees but still visible.  I dropped them both.

And just that quick, it was over.

No d-gen was on his feet though many were still moving.

I scanned the ring of light around the fire, looking for anything that might still be a danger.  Once you started shooting them, they tended to take a violent dislike to you.  Go figure.  You couldn’t leave any alive.  That’s just the way it was, regulating degenerates.  “Lutz.  You okay?”

Lutz grumbled.

“Are you hurt?”

“No, goddamn it.”  Futzing with his pistol, Lutz stepped over a writhing d-gen to get closer to the fire.  “You get ‘em all?”

“All I could see.”

Lutz looked at a d-gen squirming on the ground near him.  He holstered his pistol, switched out the magazine in his rifle, aimed, and pulled the trigger.  Nothing.

He was shit for taking care of his weapons.

He hadn’t run the magazine dry.  He had a jam.

I scanned the dark forest for movement.  Over the groans of the dying and wounded, I listened for the sound of anything running, either toward me or away.

Lutz got his weapon unjammed and fired a round through the skull of the d-gen at his feet.  Then he methodically and quickly pointed his rifle and finished off every wounded degenerate on the ground.  “There.  I killed more than you.”  Lutz crossed the clearing, stepping over bodies, focused on something that had his interest.

I was certain he was wrong on the count, but said anyway, “Good for you.”  I heard a noise in the cornfield, coming from the edge of the clearing.  I looked but couldn’t make out anything in the dark.  I reached into my pocket to fish out my phone, hoping.  “When I tried to get the Sanction ID for the mandated recording the case was still pending.  They never approved the sanction.”

“The hell they didn’t.”

Lutz stared at me as I pulled out my phone.  Only the crackle of the fire and chirping cicadas made any noise.  I activated the device and looked at the screen, reading the details slowly, trying to confirm a mistake.

No mistake.

Lutz saw the truth on my face and ran to the other side of the fire for a look at the roasting kid.

I cautiously stepped in that direction for a clearer view.  Evidence of the dead toddler would undo the sanction mistake.  The cops would flip the sanction to active.  Lutz and I would get paid.  No problem.  Pretty much.

Lutz came to a stop, staring.  “These aren’t kids.”

I took another step to get a view of what Lutz was seeing—carcasses on a spit, legs splayed, tiny torsos split open, roasting, crusted in black.  I saw claws on feet but no fingers, and snouts, not flat faces.

“They’re raccoons or dogs or something,” Lutz whined, looking up at me, worry drenching his features.

Raccoons?

What the hell?

The d-gens are barbecuing little forest critters, not children?

And where were those two kids I saw?  Thought I saw?

Lutz looked up.

I did, too.

A white spotter drone with flashing red LEDs, a pregnant Frisbee the size of a trashcan lid with a half-dozen little rotors around its circumference hovered over the tops of the trees at the edge of the clearing.  It had led us to the kill site.  It had gotten us into what was looking like a mess.

Two more white drones, a little farther away, floated higher in the night sky.  They were smaller—the voyeurs spying, recording video, witnessing.

“These d-gens aren’t cannibals,” Lutz muttered.  “It’s a dirty kill.”

A dirty kill.

One year mandatory in a work camp, per head.

Every Regulator knew that.  It was the wrinkle in the law that kept men like Lutz from joyriding through the d-gen neighborhoods and shooting down every one he saw because it satisfied his hate and filled his billfold.

He looked at me and made a show of fumbling with his gun, raising it for the cameras on the drones to see, as he said too loudly for normal conversation, “My gun jammed.  I only got off a couple shots.”  He pointed into the darkness, arguing his defense for an invisible jury.  “Into the ground.  Over there.”  He looked at me.  “This is your dirty kill.  You’re fucked.”

Check out Black Rust, the next book in the adventure!

Stuff I Usually Say at the End

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www.amazon.com/Black-Virus-Rust-Book-ebook/dp/B01IUFLY7E

Other Books by Bobby Adair

Black Rust (NEW) Bobby’s newest adventure series. Currently available in print, and audiobook available in late Fall of 2016.

Slow Burn series, Books 1-9 (Complete)
A best-selling post-apocalyptic adventure series.  Also available in audiobook and print.

The Last Survivors series, Books 1-6 (1-5 complete as of June 2016)
A futuristic post-apocalyptic tale with a Game of Thrones medieval feel.  Collaboration with author T.W. Piperbrook.  Also available in audiobook and print.

Ebola K trilogy, Books 1-3 (Complete)
Another bestseller.  What happens when a pandemic takes over the world?  An American college student finds himself in Uganda and in the midst of a sinister terrorist plot to weaponize Ebola.  Also available in audiobook and print.

Dusty’s Diary:  One Angry Man’s Post-Apocalyptic Story
A short-story read by Bobby that he used to blow off steam after the seriousness of writing Ebola K.  A little raunchy and rough around the edges, Dusty finds himself stuck in a bunker after the zombie apocalypse.

Text copyright © 2016, 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.