Destroyer
Date: 2013-12-28 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Post Apocalyptic; Science Fiction; Apocalyptic; Fiction; Dystopia; Action; Survival; Thriller
Description: Destroyer finds Zed saying goodbye to one friend and pressing forward with two new ones to whom we are introduced in Book 2 – Infected. Mandi, whom Zed and Murphy rescued from the bunker, is immune to the virus. Russell, whose home the others plundered in search of food and other supplies, is also a slow burn, but lower-functioning, childlike and docile. After seeing the carnage at the dormitory, a raging, vengeful Zed wants only to kill Mark, his nemesis and the former leader of the ROTC squad. Since Mark has disappeared, Zed unleashes his fury on untold numbers of infected in his path as he
Rights: Copyright 2021 Bobby Adair. All rights reserved.

Slow Burn 10

Firestorm

Bobby Adair

Beezle Media, LLC

Links

http://www.bobbyadair.com

http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor

Cover Art by

Bobby Adair & Alex Saskalidis

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Final Words

Also by Bobby Adair

Dusty’s Diary

Freedom’s Fire

The Last Survivors

Ebola K

Prologue

I’m Zed Zane, but you know that.

What you don’t know is, it’s been fourteen years since the virus destroyed humanity’s hubris-happy, high-tech hyper-age. More than a decade since the electric grids last sparked across the wire and cool, clean water stopped flowing from the taps. A lifetime—the entire life of a teenager—since the cities collapsed.

All those millions of nifty gadgets that numbed us to the daily drudge of subsistence in a corpo-centric economy, all of our progress and knowledge, our universities and institutions, those cavernous stadiums and sprawling airports, and maybe most of all, our dreams of a sparkly future, were lost. Just more grist for the grind of time. And we owed it all to a half-alive microbe, a tiny virus that jumped from a monkey to a bat to a pig or whatever, somewhere in the jungles of Africa.

We were nearly eight billion strong at the time, splattered across the globe, ticking away in cities linked by weather-worn highways that rumbled under an endless rush of spinning tires. Jets crisscrossed the sky, hauling ogle-eyed travelers to the novel comfort of dinners at McDonald’s restaurants in faraway cities. Electronic toys blasted a 24/7 kaleidoscope of digital trifles at our faces, linking us into a communal, semi-conscious existence that none of us understood. All of it, compounding and congealing into a scab that shrank the world of humanity into something that felt small, false, and tenuous.

The virus shattered the foundations of that world and sent it crumbling into rubble.

Those of us who survived that first year did our best to rebuild. What else could we do? Mope and starve?

At the dawn of Year 14—fourteen years after the virus hit—I was living in Balmorhea. Even before the virus ravaged the world, Balmorhea was a dying town eight hours from everywhere in the remote desert of West Texas. It was the kind of place any pre-collapse suburbanite might have called a shithole.

The town was laid out in a tidy grid a half-mile square. Mostly houses and trailers, a school, some businesses, a few government buildings. It was a compact place, just big enough for the five or six hundred oil field roughnecks, farmers, and ranch hands who lived there. Balmorhea’s layout, coupled with the hundreds of miles of desert and arid hills surrounding it, made it easy to defend from the millions of infected who still lurked in the cities and dense forests of East Texas. Primarily because few had the motivation or the fortitude to cross the desert on foot.

What made Balmorhea a refuge, though, wasn’t only its isolation, but San Solomon Springs, which gushed twenty million gallons of fresh water out of the earth every day. The spring bubbled just four miles down Highway 17 from the town, providing an endless supply of water, which, before the collapse, had been used to turn the patch of dry desert dirt around Balmorhea into bountiful farm and pastureland. Well, bountiful is a relative term.

Originally, there were eighteen of us, me and the people I’d escaped Austin with. Through the years, we took in another four hundred or so who’d wandered out of the desert, hailing from Amarillo, Abilene, El Paso, Cotulla. Any other town you could name. Nearly all of them were “normals,” people with a natural immunity to the virus, brave survivors who’d fought their way through the infected hordes to get out of the cities and stumble upon us. Only thirteen of us were Slow Burns, the rare ones.

Together, we cultivated the fallow fields. We managed our herds of cattle, goats, and sheep. We hunted antelope on the plain and javelina in the nearby mountains, seldom venturing farther than a few miles from our fortified oasis—at least, most of us didn’t. Murphy, me, and a handful of others ranged all over West Texas and into New Mexico, scavenging what we could and looking for survivors to bring into the fold. We traded with the tiny clans and homesteads we found, especially a group who’d set themselves up in the oilfields south of Odessa, pumping petroleum and trading it for food.

Behind our wall and rings of defenses, we felt safe—successful, even. Because of the spring, we were immune to droughts, never suffering any shortage of food. Thanks to scavenged solar panels and small wind turbines, we were able to maintain a modest flow of electricity all through town. We traded for enough fuel to keep our tractors, a few pickup trucks, and our small fleet of Humvees running. We’d even reared some horses and were hoping to husband them into a large herd. We had an excellent hospital—by third world standards—a growing library, an underutilized school for the very few children who survived infancy, a bar with plenty of homebrewed alcohol, and a simple system of government.

Despite all that had happened to the world to our friends, our families, and to us, we felt like we were humanity’s chance to avoid extinction, a shining beacon in the desert. None of us realized that collective conceit was a symptom of the new version of the shrunken world we lived in—Balmorhea. We didn’t know, perhaps we didn’t want to know, what danger lay beyond the desert that swaddled us in relative comfort.

1

SAFETY, FOOD, and FRIENDS

GOOD PEOPLE WELCOME

NO SHITHEADS ALLOWED

The words were painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart Supercenter. I’d added that last part, to no one’s amusement but mine.

A red dotted line underscored the message and led the eye to the sidewalk below, where a reinforced steel cabinet sat bolted into the concrete. A combination lock kept the cabinet’s door secure. The combination for the lock was painted on the outside of the cabinet, making it accessible to anyone who’d retained their cognitive abilities—normal people, and Slow Burns like me and Murphy. Full Whites wouldn’t look twice at it.

The hordes of infected who still roamed the world so many years after the collapse had no chance of opening the cabinet. They wouldn’t even understand the significance of the cable pinned to the wall carrying electricity down from a few solar cells mounted on the roof. Those solar cells kept a battery charged that powered the shortwave radio located inside. Along with operation and contact instructions, sixteen radios like the one in the cabinet were scattered from the eastern edge of El Paso, all the way back to Odessa and Midland, down to Marfa, up through Pecos, and as far north as Carlsbad—most of the towns of any size on the roads that spiderwebbed out from Balmorhea.

That’s where we were, in Carlsbad, responding to a radio call from a woman and her friends, good people—we hoped—looking to join our ever-growing desert community. Murphy and I knelt behind a commercial-sized HVAC unit on the roof of a long-defunct industrial equipment business. I had my binoculars to my eyes to get a clear view across Highway 285 and the asphalt acres of the Walmart’s cracking parking lot. At least a hundred Whites lay scattered there, shot to pieces, buzzing with flies. None were more than a day or two dead. Thirteen people hung from the wall on the front of the Walmart, tied by their splayed feet, upside-down, stripped bare. They looked like they’d been trampled before being strung up. Blood ran in streaks down the wall. Vermin scurried across the asphalt below, scrapping over clotted bits of gore.

My thoughts slipped out into words I hadn’t meant to speak: “Suffering for suffering’s sake.”

“They’re dead.” declared Murphy.

“I think two or three might be alive,” I decided.

“It’s windy,” Murphy countered. “That movement you think you see, that’s the wind blowing their heads back and forth.”

He might have been right. Hell, he was most likely right, but to admit it meant abandoning the tortured people who’d taken a chance and called us on the shortwave, then waited for us to arrive. And waited. Until this happened. I felt responsible for their fate.

“What do you think happened?” asked Murphy. “What do you think it means?”

I stood to get a clear view up and down the highway. A scattering of rusting cars. Creosote bushes and tumbleweeds in the median. Countless squat buildings up and down both sides of the thoroughfare—hiding places for a hundred threats.

“You’re already being stupid,” Murphy told me.

“No. I’m looking to see if this is a trap.”

“Says the rat while he sniffs the cheese.” Murphy rolled his eyes. “Stupid. There’s that word again.”

“You think somebody killed them because they’re Slow Burns, or do you think they’re regular Whites?”

“I think somebody is going to shoot you for exposing yourself like a moron.”

“Not with the wind blowing like it is.” I pointed at a pair of multi-story hotels standing a full block back from the main road, well north of us.

Murphy groaned.

I said, “If a sniper with any kind of skill is lurking for a shot, he’d be there. Too far in this wind.”

“You’re an endless fountain of know-it-all bullshit, you know that?”

“Talent comes in all flavors.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive, and, like usual, you’re not listening.”

I told him, “I always listen, especially when you pretend you’re the only one who’s been shot at before. I just don’t agree with you right now.”

“And how often am I right?”

“Sometimes.”

“Most of the time,” Murphy argued.

“Are you two ever going to finish up here?” It was Dalhover. He’d climbed the ladder on the back of the building and was looking at us from the edge of the roof.

Murphy pointed at me. “Dumbass here wants us to walk into a trap.”

“You see a trap?” rasped Dalhover.

I quickly explained about the bodies we saw hanging from the Walmart. “At least one of them is alive. Maybe three.”

“Maybe one,” countered Murphy.

“And, this is our fault,” I claimed.

“Oh, good God,” groused Dalhover. “I thought we were past all that Null Spot bullshit.”

Murphy laughed. “You haven’t been out on a run with him in a couple years, Top. Dipshit here is hard-wired for White Knight knuckleheadism.”

“Responsibility is responsibility,” I argued, “even when it sucks. Especially when it sucks.”

Dalhover snorted and climbed down the ladder, calling, “Do whatever you want. You’re gonna do it anyway.”

Murphy slumped against the rusting air conditioner and groaned dramatically.

“If that woman is going to have any chance,” I told him, “we need to do this now.”

“It’s gonna be a terrible plan. It’s always a terrible plan. At least be quick about telling it to me. Can you do that for me, please?”

2

Grace and Jazz both wore the same infected white skin as Murphy and me, though Jazz was generously tattooed—a remnant of life before the collapse. They’d made the run into New Mexico with us, driving a pale green four-wheel-drive Suburban, a vehicle once been used by the border patrol for monitoring the wild desert between I-10 and the Rio Grande. Like the Humvee Murphy, Dalhover, and I rode in, it was a dependable workhorse—not pretty, but tough and reliable. All of us who regularly ventured into the badlands had our favorite vehicles.

Dalhover, though, hadn’t been out on a mission in years. I figured he’d come along because he wanted one last hurrah before his advancing age confined him to a rocking chair. He drove the Humvee. I rode shotgun—literally—and Murphy stood through the roof hatch, manning the .50.

A scrounged aluminum ladder lashed to the side of our Humvee, Murphy on the machine gun, and bold action made up most of my plan for riding into the teeth of what might well be an ambush. Dalhover gunned the Humvee’s engine and we lumbered onto the narrow street that would take us half a block over to the highway. I waved at Grace and Jazz who were going to remain in the lot behind the industrial supply building, listening on the radio, and staying ready to make a dash for safety should danger arise.

Dalhover paused at the corner stop sign—some habits die hard, others come back when you don’t expect them. The highway in both directions was littered with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. Power poles had fallen here and there, alerting us to keep an eye out for downed powerlines—always a hazard. The thick cables could get caught under a wheel and wrap around an axle. Through the intersection and across the highway, Dalhover drove straight into the Walmart parking lot. He slalomed the Humvee past some sand dunes that had accumulated over the shells of cars and blazed a path for the suspended semi-corpses. He called to Murphy, “You see anything?”

“Nothing alive,” he answered.

Dalhover skidded to a stop at the curb below the hanging bodies.

I flung my door open, and with Murphy’s help from above, unlashed the ladder. He stayed put behind the .50. Dalhover left the engine running and stepped outside with his weapon up, ready to kill anything that moved.

Being so close to the hanging wall, it was easy to tell that most of the unlucky hangers had been up there for more than just days. They were well-picked over by the scavengers. As for the three fresh bodies, the blood on the wall beneath them was still wet. Two were missing body parts. They’d bled out.

With no caution for keeping it quiet, I slammed the ladder against the wall next to the only person who looked like she could still be salvageable—a girl, twenty, maybe twenty-five. Pretty? Maybe. All I could tell for sure was she’d been beat to Hell.

“What if they’re on the roof?” Murphy asked loud enough for Dalhover and I to hear.

“Shit.” Dalhover took up a position beside the Humvee, using it for cover as he aimed his M16 at the top edge of the Walmart’s roof.

Murphy kept scanning the parking lot, the highway, and the gas station out by the road. Danger could come from anywhere.

I scrambled up the ladder, pulling off a glove as I reached the woman. I put two fingers to her throat to check for a pulse just as I heard her ragged breath. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“She’s alive.” I climbed higher and maneuvered her body over my shoulder to take her weight. Luckily, she wasn’t heavy. She didn’t resist. The ladder creaked under our combined weight.

Dalhover called, “You got it, Zane?”

The ladder’s feet slipped in the sand on the sidewalk, caught in a crack and stopped. Adrenaline zapped my heart. “A little help?” I asked.

Dalhover bounced across the sidewalk with surprising speed for a man his age. He braced the ladder, and I took another step up, taking the woman’s full weight again, reaching up to cut the thin rope on her ankles. Free from the rope, her legs swung out from the wall, throwing me off balance and nearly tumbling me off the ladder.

“Be careful, goddammit.”

I sarcastically thanked Dalhover for the belated advice as I stabilized the woman on my shoulder and steadied myself.

“Do you hear that?” asked Murphy.

Besides Murphy’s alarm, all I heard was my own panting and the ladder creaking as I rushed down the last few rungs. Dalhover helped take our damsel’s weight as soon as we were in his reach. That’s when I heard Grace blaring her truck’s horn from the other side of the highway.

“We got company,” shouted Murphy.

3

The woman I’d hauled down from the Walmart torture wall was in no shape to endure further rough treatment, but I had to get her into the back of our Humvee before the situation escalated into whatever was about to come next.

Just up the highway, in front of the Chili’s and behind a cluster of cars that had been rusting on the road since the collapse, sat two black vehicles, idling, waiting. By my guess, one was a Bearcat, one of those armored police vehicles SWAT teams and riot police had used extensively during the initial phase of the virus violence. The other vehicle was a Humvee with an MK 19 grenade launcher mounted on the roof. I had no doubts about that one. We had several in Balmorhea, though we were sorely short of ammunition.

As if to prove me right, the Humvee shot three rapid rounds in our direction. One hit a knee-high sand dune, exploding a dust cloud into the air. The other two detonated on the asphalt just short of us, showering our Humvee in rocks.

Dalhover already had the Humvee moving by the time I slammed the front passenger door shut. Through the dissipating dust, we lumbered toward a little strip center at the far corner of the parking lot.

Murphy called down from above, “Were those warning shots, or are they trying to kill us?”

Coughing through the dirt and dust, Dalhover shouted, “Open up with that .50.”

Murphy’s machine gun thundered.

Dalhover maneuvered around an overturned tractor-trailer, putting it between us and our assailants for a moment.

I laid my shotgun on the floor and took up an M16, hanging the barrel out the passenger side window. After all our years in the desert, I still wasn’t any good with a rifle, but in a moving vehicle bouncing across a rough parking lot, it wouldn’t have mattered if I were.

As we neared the strip mall Dalhover had been hoping to use as cover, a grenade round blasted a sandwich shop sign, battering the Humvee with shards of plastic and twisted sheet metal. A piece tore into my shoulder. I cursed.

“You okay?” asked Dalhover, as he bounced the Humvee over a curb. “Can you shoot?”

I answered by firing at a second pair of black vehicles I’d spotted a quarter mile south. “We have two more over here.”

Dalhover cursed.

Murphy continued firing short bursts at the Humvee with the grenade launcher.

Our radio squawked to life with Grace’s anxious voice. “Headed east on Center Av—” static hid a few words, “—hostiles.”

“Center Avenue,” I told Dalhover. “That’s where we left Grace and Jazz.”

“Hold on tight,” Dalhover hollered.

I braced myself on the dashboard.

Our front wheels hit the slope of a railroad embankment. I bounced up, hitting my head on the roof, and the woman behind me flew forward and nailed the back of my seat. We hit the actual tracks and I lost all sense of up and down for a moment as loose equipment rattled inside the Humvee.

In an eye blink we were across. Dalhover was, shockingly, still in control.

Two more grenades exploded in the dirt far behind us.

Muzzles flashed from the vehicles south of us. I answered by expending a full magazine in their direction.

Dalhover plowed over a sagging chainlink fence. The Humvee stabilized on a layer of hardpan and Murphy ripped a long burst downrange. He let up when the Humvee passed between a rusting shipping container and a two-story metal building.

For half a second, it felt like we could let our guard down.

“Watch those flanks,” ordered Dalhover.

I pointed my rifle at the upcoming building corner on my right. We zipped past. Nothing lay hidden back there but scrubby desert weeds and rusting pickups.

Dalhover swerved past a pair of rotting dump trucks and then cut a hard right to run down another section of chainlink fence. That put us in a junkyard lined with rows of rusting cars stacked two and three high. We didn’t have any room to maneuver, but neither could our pursuers shoot at us.

I took a fast peek through the gaps between the hulks. “I think we’re running parallel to Center Avenue.”

“I know,” Dalhover groused. “I need to find a way through all this shit.”

I glanced back to check on our guest. She didn’t look much worse than when I pulled her off the Walmart. “You alright up there, Murphy?”

He had his gun trained on our six, ready to hammer any pursuers. “All cool up here, man.”

Dalhover cut another hard turn. We smashed through a rickety little fence and sped into a large square plot of undeveloped desert surrounded by rows of ugly pink houses and mobile homes.

“There,” I pointed at a dirt road on the far side. “I’ll bet that cuts over to Center.”

Slogging through the loose sand, Dalhover told me, “See if you can raise Grace on the radio.”

“We lost ‘em,” Murphy was shouting about the guys who’d been shooting at us. “We need to get the hell out of this shitty little town, ‘cause that’s not gonna last.”

“Thank you, Einstein.” I dug around the mess in the Humvee, looking for our Carlsbad map.

4

After tearing ass across the scrubby plains and fallow fields south of Carlsbad, it seemed like we’d lost the butt scratchers in the black vehicles—for real. Along the way, we also lost radio contact with Grace and Jazz. I felt okay about that, knowing the range on our equipment wasn’t great. I figured they’d already forded the Pecos by then and were racing through the oil patch east of town. If I was correct, they had no visible pursuit, so they’d make for rendezvous Elmer. “Elmer” was our codename for the predesignated rendezvous point east of whichever town we happened to be in. That was part of our planning process. Before we pushed into a city of any size, we set our rally areas at the four points of the compass using the code words “Norbert,” “Sluggo,” “Elmer,” and “Wendell.” Why the code words? We typically communicated using encrypted signals on old military radios—Dalhover had his habits and he imposed them on the rest of us. Anyway, it made life interesting, as if we needed any more drama.

Following a dirt road into a gulley, Dalhover drove the Humvee onto a low-water crossing running ankle-deep with the Pecos River’s greenish water. He stopped halfway across and flung his door open. “See what you can do for the girl.” He climbed onto the roof with a pair of binoculars in hand.

We were still dangerously close to Carlsbad, but I didn’t object. I hopped out and opened the woman’s door. Her bloodshot eyes rolled in my direction as I told her, “I’m here to help you.”

She feebly nodded. Her skin was as pale as mine and every bit as dirty, but terribly bruised and scraped. Her feet were blackish purple. They looked like they belonged on a corpse. Every breath she exhaled sounded like it wanted to be a wail, only she was too weak.

I put my open canteen to her lips and she drank, spilling most of the water down her chest. She didn’t even have the energy to hold the canteen while I dug a sleeping bag out of the back to cover her with.

“My hands feel like they’re on fire,” she murmured. “My head...” she finished with a groan.

“It’s the blood, resettling in your system.” Total guess on my part. From our first aid pack, I opened up a small jar of THC-laced honey, homemade in Balmorhea. It wouldn’t do the pain relief trick like an old-school opiate, but it worked better than ten-years-expired ibuprofen. I scooped a spoonful of the bud honey into our guest’s mouth and left the spoon. “Suck on it. It’s disgusting, but it’ll help.”

She gagged, but kept the spoon in her mouth. I gave her a moment to catch her breath, then helped her with some more water. “What’s your name?”

“Bonny,” she whispered, and lay her head back.

From his position behind the roof-mounted machine gun, Murphy knelt and silently asked how Bonny was doing. Her eyes were closed then, so I shook my head. Her discolored feet worried the hell out of me.

“Top says get her stable. Make her comfortable. It’s going to be a long ride home.”

Bonny spasmed as a sharp pain cramped her spine.

I laid a hand on her crusty scalp, hoping I wasn’t causing her more pain with my attempt at comfort. Releasing her breath, she relaxed. I took another spoonful of the THC honey and scraped it beneath her teeth. I looked up at Murphy. “Tell Dalhover, the sooner we can get her to the hospital, the better off she’ll be. I don’t know what else I can do for her.”

“Top’s looking for dust plumes back the way we came. Doesn’t make sense we got away so easy.”

“Maybe they just wanted to chase us off,” I suggested. “Maybe they haven’t figured out how to refine their own diesel and they’re running too short to come after us.”

“Maybe if frogs had wings...” Murphy didn’t finish the wisecrack. “You got a couple minutes to see if she can tell you anything, then we’re back on the road.”

“I need to rearrange our gear so she can lay down.”

“Hurry it up. You know what a grumpy bitch Top turns into if you’re not ready to roll when he is.”

5

We’d been running through the maze of roads in the oil patch east of Carlsbad for over an hour and hadn’t seen anything anywhere that didn’t look like it hadn’t died or rusted out a long time ago. Dalhover kept the speed down to minimize the size of our dust wake. Murphy rode in the passenger side front seat.

Not that I could do anything, but I took the spot behind Dalhover where I could tend to Bonny. I had her stretched out on the wide console between the rear seats. It wasn’t a comfy place for anyone to lie, being bare metal, but I’d folded our sleeping bags to make a thin cushion under her. I rolled a blanket for a pillow. Still, every time one of the Humvee’s tires dropped into a pothole, the jolt ran right up through her bones. At least the THC had started to take effect. She was conscious but dreamy, death-gripping my hand like I was Jesus come to save her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Are you in pain?”

She tried to smile, but it looked like a grimace. “Henry? Mikey?”

Her two friends, I guessed. I shook my head.

Tears pooled in her eyes and rolled down the side of her face.

She was in pain, the emotional kind, and I was the last person in the world who could provide competent comfort for that. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Bonny sobbed. She pulled my hand over her chest and wrapped her other bruised hand over it.

“She alright?” Dalhover rasped.

Murphy glanced back, concerned.

I didn’t have the answers they were looking for, except that I figured she was going to die. I shrugged.

Guessing at my thoughts, Murphy scolded me with his eyes before telling her, “We’re taking you to a hospital. Just hang on. You thirsty or anything? Zed, give her some water.”

I had a bottle at the ready. “We can trade places if you want.”

“No rifle for you, Zed,” griped Dalhover. “You couldn’t hit your dick with a hammer made of rubber pussy.”

Murphy laughed at him. “You okay, Top? Dementia making your mouth say funny shit again?”

“I need a shooter up here to watch our flank,” Dalhover explained. “One who can hit what he aims at.” He slowed the Humvee to run through a dry creek bed.

Murphy scanned the horizon to our right. Nothing lurked out there but desiccated mesquite, yucca, and sandy dirt.

A silence settled over us as chalk-dust miles ground past. Even Bonny’s whimpers dissipated to nothing, leaving her to stare at the sky through the window. She didn’t let go of my hand, though. When she did speak, I had to ask her to repeat what she’d said.

She coughed, barely able to muster the breath for it. “I thought I was going to live forever.”

Live forever? I checked her forehead for a fever. Like everything in the Humvee, it felt gritty and hot. “You’re not going to die.” I couldn’t think of a better lie to comfort her delirium. “What happened back there?”

It took a handful of long moments before Bonny could process her memories into an answer that she babbled into an inaudible whisper.

I leaned in closer. “I’m sorry. I can barely hear you.”

“We happened on the message. We found the radio.” She meant the message we’d painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart. She was talking about the radio we’d stashed there. The two made up the gangway to Balmorhea’s informal immigration network, our preliminary vetting.

“We followed the instructions,” she said, growing sadder with each word. “We called for three days before we got an answer.”

Three days. I didn’t know what to say about that, either. We had someone back in Balmorhea assigned to monitor the shortwave channels 24/7. But sometimes signals were weak on the sending units—batteries ran low when too many clouds hid the sun, maybe too much dust coated the solar panel. Sometimes rats chewed through the wires or fire ants crapped out the connectors. Hell, even conditions in the atmosphere could hinder shortwave signal range or bounce them into an atmospheric layer that echoed them off to some other part of the world. “We came as quickly as we could.”

“Quicker would have been better,” she told me. “Richard found us first.”

“Who’s Richard?”

“Preacher Dick.” She tried to laugh. And failed. “Where…are you from?”

“Balmorhea.”

She looked at me blankly, like she didn’t understand what I’d said.

“A little nowhere town down in Texas. A hundred miles south.”

“Where they have the spring?”

“We have a colony there. Who’s this Richard guy?”

“Out of the ABQ.”

“What’s the ABQ?”

“Albuquerque.” Her eyes roamed past something only she could see—she’d lost hold of her lucidity again. Shortly after, she passed out.

Habit forced me to look outside, to the front, left, right, as I wondered about Albuquerque. The metro population had to be on par with Austin. Before, anyway. How could any normals survive in the remains of a city that size? Assuming Preacher Dick was a normal.

Bonny startled me by dragging a weak finger down the skin of my forearm. “You’re like me.”

“We’re both Slow Burns.”

She looked puzzled. She’d never heard our type called “Slow Burns” before. “They hate us.” She gasped and her voice grew weaker. “Go somewhere far away. If you stay here, they’ll kill you.”

6

Twenty miles east of Carlsbad, an hour before sundown, we spotted Jazz standing atop the pale green Suburban parked on a bump of a hill that marked rally point Elmer. Having reestablished radio contact twenty minutes before, we knew they’d made it. Jazz was up there with her binoculars, watching our distant dust plume materialize into a Humvee.

As Dalhover brought us to a stop, Grace walked up, nodding west towards Carlsbad. “What the hell was that back there?”

Dalhover flung his door open, hurrying for the sparse shrubs to relieve himself. “Talk to Zane.”

Already out of the Humvee myself, I reached to the sky to stretch and ease the kinks in my back. Jarring, cross-country treks had a way of wearing you down, even though you were mostly just sitting there.

Grace leaned in through my door to see what shape the girl was in. “She doesn’t look good at all.”

“She died a few miles back.” Saying it made me feel empty, because I didn’t feel any sadness for her. I didn’t even know if she had family—people. Hadn’t thought to ask, because sometimes the social graces just never come to mind like they should, even when maybe they’re the simplest, best thing to do.

Grace stepped away from the Humvee. She didn’t say “all that effort for nothing,” but it was clear on her face. “You okay?”

I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t in a mood to pencil all my feelings into words. “She was in pretty bad shape.”

Murphy slapped me on the back. “Can’t save ‘em all, Null Spot.” Not a joke, but a consolation between two men who’d spent so much time together they didn’t need to burden every moment with useless words. He headed for the scraggly mesquites to tend to his personal business.

Eyes still on me, Grace asked, “What was that all about, back there?” She meant the bodies dangling on the front wall of the Walmart.

I stared off into the desert, feeling a black mood starting to slip up on me. “A hate cult out of Albuquerque hung them up there.”

“A hate cult? She tell you that?”

I shrugged. That was my deduction, or guess, anyway, from the little she’d said. “She wasn’t all the way with it.”

“You give her some bud honey?”

Of course I did, but I didn’t feel like defending the choice.

Grace, ever being the one who could tune into other people’s troubles, wrapped me in her wiry arms and pulled me close. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She let me go and looked me in the face, seeing clearly through my façade. “After all this time…”

I shrugged because I didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation about anything going on inside my head.

“It’s okay to feel it when someone dies,” she told me. “It’s the human thing to do.”

I pointed back the way we’d come, back in the direction of Carlsbad. “She talked about a group or whatever led by some whacked-out preacher guy named Richard. Clearly, they’ve got military equipment, ammo to burn, and some degree of competence.”

“You think they’re a danger to us?”

I didn’t have a good feeling about that, but Grace already thought my hate cult theory was too much of a leap. “I don’t think we’ll be going back to Carlsbad.”

Having completed his business in the dry brush, Dalhover spread a map across the hood of the Humvee. Naturally, the rest of us gathered around. “Since we made hostile contact, we don’t go straight home.” He looked at each of us for agreement. Nobody argued. We lived by a set of safety protocols, not set in stone, but firm enough. We’d learned plenty of lessons through the years and did our best not to repeat mistakes for which we’d already paid in lives. “We’ll make our way up Highway 62 and then head north on 360. The map says that section is still clear.”

Indicating the road on the map, I said, “That was me and Murphy who scouted. Five months back.” I glanced around the group. A lot could change in that time. All of us knew it. No more needed to be said.

“We’ll try a high-speed run,” said Dalhover. “Forty, maybe fifty, if the road looks clear. Ten miles up, we’ll cut cross-country through the oil patch and head for Buckeye.” The oil patches all over the region were a maze of dirt roads connecting pump jacks spread in every direction for miles. “We’ll skirt north around Hobbs. That’ll put us in old ag country. After that, we’ll stay off the main roads and head south before we reach Seminole.” Dalhover took a pained gaze through the Humvee’s windshield. We all knew the girl was still inside. “We don’t have time to bury her, but we can’t bring her with.” His eyes settled on me and Murphy.

Jazz cut in with a meaningful glance at Murphy. “I’ll help Murphy with her. We’ll leave her in a nice spot where the coyotes will find her. Circle of Life.”

“Murphy, you’ll start out on the .50, and swap with Zane every couple of hours.” Dalhover knew as well as anybody in the scouts that I couldn’t shoot a rifle for shit. But put me behind a fifty-caliber machine gun with glowing tracers to mark the path of my bullets, and I would do just fine. “They got downed barbed-wire fences all through this region, so keep an eye out.”

“In the dark?” I asked. It went without saying we’d be running with the headlights off.

“You’ll have enough moonlight to see the fence posts running across the fields,” explained Dalhover. “I don’t want to have to waste an hour cutting rusty wire off our axles.”

“Not to mention the holes in the tires,” added Grace.

Dalhover pulled our attention back to the map. “We’ll pick up the highway again southwest of Andrews.” His finger traced the path he proposed. “Kermit, Wickett, Pecos, then home. We’ll make some high-speed runs wherever the pavement is smooth and clear. Otherwise, we’ll take it slow. Twenty, maybe thirty miles an hour. We’ll stop every hour or two to swap drivers, stretch, and stay fresh.”

Dalhover’s route called for a long, circuitous ride back to Balmorhea. The journey would take us ten to sixteen hours. Nobody complained. He looked at me anyway. “Any smartass shit to add?”

I paused to check—nothing came to mind. I shook my head.

He slapped the hood. “Let’s roll.”

7

It had been a tense night, driving through the dark, expecting an ambush that never materialized, but we’d made good time and were most of the way home. With the sun hinting at dawn from below the horizon in the east, I breathed a little easier. Taking a shift on the big machine gun, I stood up through the Humvee’s roof hatch and scanned both sides of the road and then up ahead.

We were running south on TX-17, a two-lane state road we’d picked up south of Pecos, and we’d just passed Verhalen. It wasn’t a town so much as an intersection of two country roads scattered with a few houses, ten miles north of Balmorhea. A two-mile kink in the road north of Saragosa sent us driving in a westerly direction for a bit. That’s when I spotted a bright little oddity in the dark western sky.

At first, I thought it was a star, and then a particularly bright satellite, because it moved relative to the few background stars that were still visible in the sky. At the same time, it didn’t look like any satellite I’d ever seen. And I’d seen thousands. Staring at the night sky with no light pollution had turned into an evening pastime for the residents of Balmorhea through the years. For some of us, it was a peaceful way to while away the dark hours, forgetting for a time the tragedies of the collapse. For others, the satellites were a reminder of all we’d lost—a reminder of how high our dreams used to soar.

As I watched the swift dot move, I realized it wasn’t that familiar, brilliant, satellite-white either. It was the color of the morning, and seemed to change its hue, slowly, from red to pink to yellow. It was in the atmosphere, not above it.

“Hey Murphy,” I called down. “Did you ever hear of the Marfa lights?” Marfa lay sixty miles south of Balmorhea, on the other side of the Davis Mountains.

“You need me to take over?” he asked. “We’re almost home.”

“UFOs. Used to be a big thing down there.”

“Well, there ain’t nobody there now,” Murphy reminded me. “Not unless the Chihuahua Gang came back for another ass-whoopin’.” Six years earlier, after suffering through months of raids on our herds, we’d ambushed them there. It had been a good day for us, and a very bad day for them. The raids stopped after that.

The strange little spot in the sky seemed to be climbing as it tracked us southwest.

Dalhover followed the curve of the road into the outskirts of Saragosa—mostly through the fields cultivated by a small commune there. “Stay on your toes, Zane. If we’re going to see trouble, it’ll be here.” He wasn’t talking about the few Saragosa residents. We were on good terms with them. From an overpass on I-10, Saragosa was visible across the flat desert just a half-mile north. It tended to be mostly a magnet for wanderers—those kinds of people kept to themselves and were just looking for a sheltered place to sleep for a night or two. Only, sometimes they were the kind of people who’d shoot you on sight, on the off-chance your crummy junk was worth stealing. A gassed-up, running Humvee and a 4x4 Suburban were tempting targets for any of those unscrupulous types.

Dust blew across the fields, hiding the road ahead in haze. That worried me more than usual, because I hated Dalhover’s instincts. They were too often right. Still, the lively dot in the sky had my curiosity. “Murphy, up in the sky, one o’clock high—”

Murphy belted out a big laugh. “One o’clock high? What are you, a bomber pilot all of a sudden?”

“Due west,” I told him. “See that tree way out there? Look right at it, and then keep going up until you see something.”

“Am I looking for a UFO?”

“Technically.”

“It’s been a while since Professor Zed lectured me on—” Murphy stopped talking. “What is that?”

“Don’t stare at it.”

“Say what?”

“Seriously, pretend like you don’t see it.”

8

Back before the world collapsed, back when bank account size made a qualitative difference in people’s lives, I was one of the many who’d spent most of his income on the necessities—rent, utilities, and groceries. Fancy dinners, expensive wines, and long weekends in Cancun were plastic-experience indulgences beyond my means. Real adventures, though, they were cheap, because they carried with them a legit risk. That’s why I asked Molly, a girl I was seeing at the time, to drive down to Port Aransas with me and watch a Cat-4 hurricane make landfall. Being more than a little bit crazy—just my type of girl—Molly agreed.

That’s how we came to be standing at the tip of the shipping channel jetty at the north end of Mustang Island, watching bulging gray clouds stampede across the sky, feeling the rumble of heavy waves rolling onto shore. The storm surge was only up around three feet by then, so we weren’t in imminent danger of getting swept into the ocean. With the howling wind, the rain pelting, and the chaos of nature’s power bearing down on us, every crashing breaker growled with danger. It felt like sticking a finger in death’s eye, exhilarating in being all the way alive.

I saw something in the sky that day that didn’t make any sense—something black and geometrical, tiny, and stationary. My first thought—mostly wishful thinking—was that it was a spaceship full of little green men from Mars. A spacecraft from a faraway star system. Come to haul me away from my less than stellar life. Of course.

As I gawked, it moved, hovered, and moved again, making it easy to visually understand that it wasn’t a UFO at all, but something small and not more than a hundred yards away. I noticed another couple out on the jetty slowly making their way toward us, watching the same little hovercraft in the sky. It turned out, the thing I’d seen was a small drone. The guy, one of the two people coming toward us, was piloting it, capturing video of the hurricane’s waves breaking over the sandbars.

Fascinated, Molly and I chatted with the guy about his drone for a while before the cops finally showed up and chased us off. I was sold. Or, that’s to say, I was so excited about that dude’s flying toy I decided I was going to buy one for myself. Unfortunately, my Starbucks gig barely provided enough of an income to keep me in gas money, frozen burritos, and rent, so I never did. I never forgot what they looked like in the sky, though.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on?” asked Murphy.

“It’s a drone.” I cut my eyes up toward it without moving my head.

“When I stop,” Dalhover told us, “jump out of the car and run as far as you can, as fast as you can.”

Dalhover’s drastic response took a moment to process through my tired brain. “No…it’s not a predator drone. It’s not military. It’s one of those little things you get at Best Buy.”

Oddly, that only seemed to make Dalhover more irritated. “Keep an eye on the damn buildings until we get through Saragosa. I don’t want to get ambushed because you’re staring at the stars.”

“I’m looking at it,” said Murphy, “but I’m pretending not to. I can’t tell what it is, and my eyes are better than yours.”

Still in tiny Saragosa, I scanned the street ahead of us. Everything looked clear. I moved my machine gun back and forth to put on a good show for my audience high above. “Murphy, do you have a pair of binoculars handy?”

“I can put my scope on it.”

“No!” I told him.

“Damn, you can be bitchy before you get your coffee.”

“I haven’t had coffee since…” I couldn’t remember the last time I had coffee.

Murphy asked, “Why can’t I glass it?”

“If you do that, they’ll know we see them.”

“They can make out that kind of detail from all the way up there?”

“The one I saw up close had a pretty powerful camera. Can you glass it without it seeing what you’re doing?”

Murphy grumbled and climbed into the back seat.

“Dammit, Zane,” grumbled Dalhover. “Don’t get so infatuated with that shiny spot in the sky you forget what your job is up there. Keep that .50 up.”

I did, but we were passing out of Saragosa, putting that danger behind us. The next trouble spot would be the highway overpass just ahead. We’d never been ambushed before at that particular spot—none in our community had—but trouble liked to linger beneath highway bridges, and bullets and blood taught hard first lessons. Dalhover slowed the Humvee and steered us through a shallow ditch to get off the road. The green Suburban behind us rattled over the rough terrain. Not in a hurry so close to home, Dalhover was giving the overpass a wide berth.

I looked down into the Humvee. Murphy had just pulled a blanket over his head like a sniper. I asked, “You ready? Can you see it?”

Dalhover ran through a deep hole, jostling me against the side of the roof hatch.

Murphy cursed. “Take it easy, Top.” A moment later, he said, “I got it.”

“Can you tell what it is?”

Murphy took a few more moments. “Hawkeye Zed gets a cookie.” Murphy wasn’t happy to tell me that, though. “It’s definitely a drone. One of those little hobby jobs. Not military.”

“Well goddamn,” groused Dalhover. “How are we set for fuel?”

“We still have two cans in the back,” I told him. Ten gallons. Maybe an extra hundred miles.

Dalhover cut the wheels west as we rolled onto the highway.

Not knowing who was operating the drone or what their intentions were, I guessed at Dalhover’s plan. “Trying to lead them away down I-10 won’t do any good. From way up there, they can already see Balmorhea.”

Dalhover cursed. “How long can those things stay aloft?”

“Half hour?” I wasn’t positive.

“You want me to keep watching?” asked Murphy.

“Don’t lose sight of it,” Dalhover told him. “Especially when it flies away.”

Murphy understood immediately. “I got you, Top. When it heads back to mommy, we’re gonna follow it.”

9

After driving west on the highway for a few miles, Dalhover came up with a better idea. In swerving to avoid an imaginary obstacle, he careened the Humvee through a scatter of debris along the side of the road. A cloud of pale dust engulfed us as we came to a stop. Dalhover flung his door open and jumped out. “Get down here with me, Zane.”

We were far enough away from anything that we were as safe as we were likely to get. In other words, I wasn’t needed on the big machine gun.

“Murphy,” ordered Dalhover, “you keep your eyes on that drone.”

Once on the ground, I found Dalhover making a show of climbing beneath our vehicle near the rear axle. “What did we break?”

“Nothing,” he told me. “This is a ruse.”

Having parked her truck on the road to our rear, Grace jogged up. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “Dalhover is faking it.”

“Why?” Of course, we’d filled Grace in over the radio about the drone that was following us. Like me, she didn’t know what Dalhover’s sudden change of plans had to do with the drone.

I peeked through the gear we had strapped onto the rear half of our roof. “Did you see it up there?”

Grace nodded and asked, “What are you thinking?”

Dalhover scooted out from beneath the Humvee and sat on the ground. There was no way the drone could see him down there. It was far off in the sky with the bulk of the vehicle blocking its view of us. But Dalhover hadn’t aged into a grizzly old man by betting on assumptions. “Like Zane says, that drone’s battery will run down soon. It’ll have to fly back to whoever is controlling it. I don’t imagine they could be more than five miles from here.”

I ran through some crude estimates in my head, trying to figure how long we’d seen the drone up there, how far it had to have flown to get from the pilot to its observation point up in the sky, how long it would take to get back. That brought to mind a flurry of questions with no firm answers.

Grace nudged me. “Zed, you’re spacing out.”

“I was thinking.”

Dalhover hawked a gob and spat it in the dust.

“I think Dalhover’s right,” I told them. “Or right enough, anyway.”

“How fast can those things fly?” asked Dalhover.

“Thirty miles an hour. Air speed.” That was the number I remembered. “Speed’s not the most important thing. They can aim the camera at us while they’re flying away. If we give chase before it’s out of sight, they’ll see us coming.”

“Better than nothing.” Dalhover climbed to his feet.

“We should separate,” suggested Grace. “Cover a wider area in our search.”

With Carlsbad still fresh in my memory, I didn’t like the idea of Grace and Jazz driving into a potentially hostile situation with only the pickup’s thin sheet metal to protect them. The Humvee, at least, was armored. I told her, “Give it a few minutes after that thing turns for home, and then you two head back to Bal. We’ll finish up this pretend repair, then load up and pursue. When you get back, fill them in on what happened up in New Mexico. I don’t know if this drone thing is part of that Carlsbad stink, following us here or—”

“Nothing is ever a coincidence,” rasped Dalhover.

“I’ll tell them to prepare,” said Grace.

“Get people in the towers with binoculars,” instructed Dalhover. “Watch the sky.” Turning to me, he said, “Let’s catch these bastards.”

10

We took the first exit off the highway, racing north past a field of a hundred matching mounds of winter road sand, heaped in tidy rows at the junction of FM 2903 and I-10. The years had slowly eroded the mounds, and desert flora had long since grown them over. From my position, standing through the roof hatch, ready to light up any threat with the .50, I watched for movement among the piles. In the flat desert, any terrain feature big enough to hide a person was worth keeping an eye on.

In the front passenger seat again, Murphy had the map out, checking for known obstacles and road hazards. “We’re clear for another two miles.” One good thing about our scouts and map tenders, they were meticulous about keeping info on nearby roads up to date. It was part of our home field advantage when threats arose.

Dalhover pushed our speed up past fifty. Wind noise drowned most of the conversation coming up from below.

I turned my attention back to the sky, alternatively scanning the airspace with naked eyes and binoculars, searching for any moving speck. I paid particular attention to the direction in which Murphy’d last glimpsed the drone. The pilot had to be over there somewhere.

“You think they have more than one drone?” called Murphy from below.

“Yeah.” It was one of the things that bothered me when I’d started on the logic of the situation. We were living in a post-apocalyptic world where everything I’d taken for granted as a kid had turned into a luxury. So the idea of someone having a functioning drone was unexpected and exciting, almost tech-miraculous. At the same time, if someone had happened upon a functioning drone, still in a package in a store or warehouse somewhere, what was to say they hadn’t discovered a hundred of them, stacked and dusty, just waiting for a scavenger to come by and recognize them for their value?

In the fourteen years since the collapse, it had never occurred to me to scavenge for a drone. Now I wanted to kick myself for not having thought of it. How handy would one have been in all manner of everything from scouting to hunting to keeping watch? But it wasn’t just me who’d missed that particular opportunity. The thought had never occurred to any of us in Balmorhea—I idly wondered what else we’d missed.

Mulling it over as we drove on, I decided our blindspot for drones made sense. Drone tech had still been new when the world collapsed. Most people were aware of it back in the day, but very few had any first-hand experience. After the collapse, people who were too dependent on their electronic toys tended to perish. Drones, being in that category, were therefore easily forgotten. Hell, most of our immigrants hadn’t seen electricity in years. As for the recent ones, they hadn’t had electricity in more than a decade.

“Hey Zane,” called Dalhover, “you didn’t fall asleep up there, did you?”

Of course I hadn’t, but Dalhover’s griping spurred a new thought into my mind. “You remember that old concrete factory up on 3334?”

“What about it?” snapped Dalhover.

“If I was flying a drone several miles out of my sight,” I told him, “I think I’d climb up there so the drone wouldn’t lose the signal from my controller.”

“Makes sense.” Murphy started scoping out the path on the map.

“What about those RVs?” Dalhover was asking about a caravan of a dozen RVs that had gotten ambushed way back before we’d even arrived in Balmorhea. Their deteriorating hulks were spread over a half-mile of an otherwise clear piece of 2903 like an ancient wagon train massacre. After some trouble in the early years, our patrols tended to avoid that section of road, unless we were on a mission specifically to clear them of transient bandits.

“There’s a cutoff,” Murphy told us. “A dirt road just north of the first RV that’ll take us diagonally over to 3334.”

“Keep that .50 trained on those RVs when we pass,” Dalhover ordered me. “You see anything move, you shred it. You hear me? I’m not slowing down.”

Thumbs on the big machine gun’s trigger, I pointed it at the scatter of RV bones up the highway ahead. Some still held their rough cubicle shapes. Others had burned down to their stout metal frames. Many lay sideways, blown over by the windstorms that plagued the region. Most had drifts of sand and tumbleweeds mounded around them.

True to his word, Dalhover didn’t slow as we approached the first of them. He steered the Humvee onto the shoulder to give the RV a wide berth. Bouncing through the rough dirt, it was only our proximity to the RV that made it possible to keep my machine gun pointed at it. To guard against a flanking ambush, Murphy laid his map down and pointed his M4 at the saltbushes in the desert outside the passenger window.

“I don’t see the turn,” growled Dalhover.

“It’s a dirt road,” Murphy told him. “About a hundred yards past the RV. You’ll have to slow down.”

I swung the .50 around to keep it trained on the next hulk up the road.

With a big bump, Dalhover pulled back onto the pavement.

“Right there!” hollered Murphy. “Just past that sign.”

“What sign?”

“That post,” Murphy corrected. All that was left of the sign was a single post.

Dalhover wheeled the Humvee into a fast right turn onto an angled dirt road. The centrifugal force pulled me hard to the left. When Dalhover tore through an eroded ditch he nearly bounced me out.

Murphy shouted, “Goddamn, Evel Knievel!”

Dalhover spurred our armored beast up the rutted dirt road.

11

After so many years of tactical experience together, we didn’t need a plan. Nothing beyond a few words, anyway. We knew our roles. We knew how to react, and each of us knew how the others would react. It wasn’t that way with just we three, but with most of us on the scout crews. We trained together. We learned from our mistakes and our successes together. We scouted and scavenged in teams. We were what passed for the professional military core of Balmorhea’s militia on those occasions when organized violence was the best response to a problem.

With the concrete factory looming in front of us, Dalhover cut the Humvee into a left turn onto the property. Rusting machines and vehicles dotted the site, leaving way too many places for bandits to conceal themselves. Murphy and I searched for targets among the silos, corroding conveyors, and the mounds of gravel. Dalhover helped us out with that by driving the perimeter of the gravelly yard in a wide arc. Unless snipers were hiding out in the desert scrub, we only had one flank to worry about.

Murphy hollered, “I don’t see nothin’, Top.”

We’d just raced around the rear side of the factory and Dalhover had us headed back toward the road. Unfortunately, he had to drive between the factory and a complex of long-dilapidated pole barns where a feedlot used to fatten up cattle before sending them to market. Always jumpy with danger in the air, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder several times in search of ambushers.

We reached the road again without incident. Dalhover pulled onto the pavement, rolling slowly west. “Where to next?”

Putting his typical positive spin on what now seemed like a waste of time, Murphy called up to me, “It seemed like a good guess.”

I wasn’t through with guesses. I dropped down into the Humvee. “Dalhover, take us over to the silos. I’m going to hop out and climb the ladder to the top.”

“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Murphy told me.

“Why?” asked Dalhover.

“From up there,” I answered, “I’ll be able to see everything for miles around.”

No more discussion needed. Dalhover revved the engine and steered toward the tall silos. “You both go. Jump out fast. I’ll head back out to the road after I drop you.”

Minutes later, panting from my climb, I stood atop of one of the concrete factory’s aggregate silos, scanning the desert with a pair of binoculars.

Murphy waved to Dalhover to let him know we’d made it to the top without incident.

I pointed. “There.”

Murphy hurried over to my side of the platform. “Where?”

“See those three ag circles?” After so many years going fallow, they were barely discernible from the surrounding plain. “That road running north of them. I see a dust plume.”

I heard a smile in Murphy’s voice when he said, “We got the motherfuckers now.” He ran to the other side of the platform to wave Dalhover to come back. Then he looked at me. “Why are you still standing there? Let’s get down so we can go.”

By my estimate, the drone pilots were already three or four miles away. And picking up speed. Turning onto a paved road, their driver left the telltale dust plume behind. “They’ll be ten miles from here by the time we’re rolling again.”

“Who cares?” argued Murphy. “It’s not like there’s anywhere to hide.”

“All they need is distance. I can barely see them now.”

“They have telescopes in the tower.” Murphy was talking about the observation tower back in Balmorhea that we’d constructed out of recycled high-tension power line tower parts. Up there, they had binoculars and they did indeed have a few powerful telescopes. Unfortunately, as we’d learned through the years since we’d built the tower, being able to see something the size of a car far out on the horizon depended not just on weather and wind, but on having the telescope pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right angle. Rotating one of those telescopes one degree left or right could move the focal point a quarter mile left or right. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—we still used it for visual observation.

“By the time we get down to the radio in the Humvee, they’ll be fifteen miles from Balmorhea.” The drone spies were going to get away. That realization angered me. Worse, I hated the feeling that we were being outsmarted and outmaneuvered. “The way they’re hauling ass up that road, they had to have known we were coming.”

“We know which road they’re on. We can still catch ‘em.”

“I think they had another drone up there we never saw.”

“You mean you never saw.” Murphy headed for the ladder. “You were up top.”

“We were lucky we saw the first one,” I told him. “Just luck. It was only because of the way the light was hitting it, making it glow against the dark sky. Under normal conditions, those little hobby drones more than three or four hundred feet up are near impossible to see.”

“You’re saying they saw us coming, so that’s why they bugged out. You’re saying by the time we start chasing, they could be set up somewhere else, watching us from above and we wouldn’t know it.”

“Yeah.”

“And once we start heading their way, they’ll bug out again.”

“Exactly.”

Murphy cursed, because he saw the implications piling up, just like I did.

“If they wanted to be friends with us,” I deduced, “they wouldn’t be trying so hard to get away from us.”

Murphy nodded.

I chased my caution to the next logical step. “We need to know who they are, and we need to know why they spied on us.”

“I got a guess.”

I didn’t like my guess, but I said, “I think we’re probably thinking the same thing.”

“That the drone belongs to those assholes who shot at us back in Carlsbad? And the reason we slipped out of town so easy is because they let us.”

I felt like a stooge, but the obvious had to be said. “They used their drones to follow us all the way down here.”

“We need to get back to Bal.”

12

The largest enclosed space in Balmorhea was the high school basketball gym. We used it for basketball games—no surprise—well, maybe so. We were more than a decade past the collapse of civilization. I didn’t know much about the world beyond our surrounding desert, but I imagined we had things pretty good in our little town. Elsewhere, anyone still alive probably spent too much time running from the infected or scrounging for food to have time for rubber-ball hoop games. In our gym, we held community movie nights, Saturday night dances, indoor swap meets, and any other activity that required an enclosed space, including hastily-called town council meetings.

The one inside had been humming along for three hours when I snuck out with Murphy close behind. Dalhover, being a council member, had to stay, and would answer the follow-up questions that were likely to arise when Mayor Ortega finally forced the discussion back to the urgent question of the drones and the Carlsbad skirmish. As things stood, two or three dozen spectating citizens were spewing this year’s incarnation of the rumor that a horde of mechanized Whites was terrorizing East Texas. And of course, they were spreading west, and they were the ones we ran into in Carlsbad. Conflating the Carlsbad belligerents with the East Texas imagined horde didn’t make any sense, but that didn’t stop anyone from pushing the lie—again.

Heading toward a pair of picnic tables in the sparse shade of a winter-bare tree, Murphy yawned. “Man, if Steph were still mayor we wouldn’t be—”

I stopped him there. “She ran Bal for seven years. You know she was tired of it.”

“I get that, man, but you know.” Murphy had expounded his opinion on the matter about a hundred times, which wasn’t going to stop him from telling me again, whether I wanted to hear it or not. We were like an old married couple that way. “Ortega does a good job, but she’s all rose-colored glasses and unicorn poop.”

“People respond to hope.”

“People who never go outside far enough to lose sight of the walls. Things around here are chill most of the time. It’s not like what we see out by El Paso, or even in Fort Stockton. Most of these people wouldn’t last five minutes in Fort Stockton. That place is turning into a zoo.”

“Most of them lasted for years before they found us.”

“You mean before we found them.” Murphy was right about that. At the same time, he wasn’t. We took in immigrants of both kinds—those who found us, and those we found. Nobody had actually run a survey to find out which we had more of.

I told him, “Ortega did put Bal on alert.”

“Because Dalhover’s on the town council. I’ll bet you a wet booger he pushed her into it.”

“Why would I want a wet booger?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t think I do.” I stretched and yawned. Fatigue from the Carlsbad escapade was catching up with me. “Ortega is good at what she does. She’s a nit-pickety busybody. It’s baked into her nature. That’s why she likes running Bal and putting up with the endless mothering.” That brought to the surface memories of Steph’s ongoing frustrations with the job. “You’d think after everything everyone here has been through, convincing them not to quibble over trivial crap would be easy.”

“Managing the equitable allocation of goat cheese is one thing but—”

I laughed. “Did you just use the phrase, ‘equitable allocation’?”

“Like you own all the big words.” Murphy punched me in the arm, nearly knocking me over. “What I’m sayin’ is, Ortega is the kind of lady you want running the DMV or organizing the annual cookie sale for the Girl Scout troop. What happens the next time we got a horde of Whites climbing the wall? I don’t know, man.”

“You think she’ll panic?”

Murphy shuffled around, not sure what to say—unusual for him. “She feels like the same kind of politician we used to get stuck with back before the collapse.”

“Media whore?”

Murphy found that particularly funny. “I guess what I’m saying is, she’s good at making people like her.”

“Not making them,” I argued, “She’s a natural. It just happens.”

“Yeah, whatever. Point is, she’s no George Washington.”

I sauntered over and sat down at an old picnic table and started to pick at the flaking paint. “Maybe we don’t need a George Washington anymore. Maybe we need a likeable bureaucrat.”

“Coming out here to Balmorhea, a million miles from everything, was a genius idea.” Murphy stopped himself and studied me for a moment. “Don’t let that go to your head, it being your idea to come out here and all. I’m just sayin’, being out here in the desert insulated us from a lot of what’s gone on in the world since the collapse.”

Letting one of my lingering worries out into the world, I asked, “You think we’re complacent?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe we are. I think Ortega is maybe proof that we turned complacent in exactly the wrong ways, and with what happened in Carlsbad, with that drone snooping over our shoulders…” Murphy shook his head and stared at the perimeter wall, visible just down the street. “What happens when it’s not just hordes of stupid Whites? What happens when a mob of Smart Ones comes at us? What if the shit we saw in Carlsbad is a preview of our future?”

“Look dude, I’m just as concerned about Carlsbad as you are. But you know, I can understand why a horde of Whites might attack us—it makes sense. For whatever dumbass reason it happens, a bunch of them get it in their heads to leave wherever they’ve been all this time, and they set out across the desert. They get hungry. They get thirsty. Because it’s the desert. The ones that make it this far and see Bal on the horizon must think it’s some kind of oasis. So, of course, they come at us. What other choice do they have?”

Murphy feigned awe. “Gosh, if I only I were as smart as you. Maybe just half, even. Because then—”

I heaved a sigh to shut him up. “What I’m getting around to saying is, why would anybody who’s gone to the trouble to scavenge together a mechanized military force care about coming all the way out here to Bal? There’s got to be a hundred thousand square miles of oil fields from here all the way up to Oklahoma, and we’re just barely on the edge. So, oil? Off the table. What about water? Farmland? Free for the taking all over the country. Anything anybody might need must be more easily had anywhere else.”

“We’re here,” argued Murphy.

I laughed. “They’re coming for us?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, jackass. We’ve been pretty safe out here. We have food, enough water. Hell, we have even electricity and A/C in most of the houses. In all the important ways, life out here is as good at it was back in Austin before El Vioriso showed up and karmakazied our asses backwards three centuries. That’s why we keep growing. People come, they see, they stay. I may not have a four-year state college smart-boy diploma, but it seems to me that history ain’t nuthin’ but a bunch of stories about a bunch of dickheads conquering the farmers in the valley next door, because the grass is always greener. So, the only question for us is, why wouldn’t somebody want to come and take this place from us?”

13

“I hate you guys.”

I looked up to see Steph walking toward us. After fourteen years together, I still couldn’t help but beam every time I saw her smile.

“If that means you’re available,” joked Murphy. “I’m sorta between bed warmers at the moment.”

Steph rolled her eyes. Like the rest of us, she was well used to Murphy’s humor. “I look like a tired, old hag and you two look like a pair of frat boys who just got their second wind. Is there a fountain of youth out there in the desert you two don’t tell anyone about?”

“Clean livin’ and good lovin’,” laughed Murphy.

“Lots of fiber and excessive masturbation is more like it.” I climbed off the picnic table and embraced Steph. “You do look tired.”

She kissed me and dropped onto the bench. “I wish I had your complexion.”

“White as a cue ball?” I laughed.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.” I glanced at Murphy. “But that’s been happening a lot today.”

Steph squeezed my hand between hers. “I heard things got rough out there.”

Eyes on Steph, Murphy said, “Should you be out here in the sun like this?”

She glared at him.

That was odd. “Did I miss something?”

Steph shined a radiant smile. “You better have missed me.”

I answered with a kiss and glanced down at Steph’s blue hospital scrubs. “Did you just get off duty?”

“I thought we were talking about Carlsbad,” she told me.

“That was two evasions ago,” Murphy laughed.

“We made it home safe,” I told her. “That’s the important thing.”

Steph glared at Murphy. “You didn’t let him do anything stupid, did you?”

Murphy looked around for a distraction, not wanting to answer the question. In the end, he settled on “Nothing more than usual.”

Steph turned her attention to me. “One day, you’re going to get yourself killed, and instead of ugly-crying by your graveside, I’m going to find me a hot young guy from town and screw him until the bed breaks.”

I squeezed her. “I’d want you to be happy.”

“You’re a shithead.” Sometimes it was one of her terms of endearment for me.

“So why are you in your scrubs?” I didn’t know she was scheduled for a shift.

“A girl from Coyanosa came in with contractions twelve minutes apart.” Steph’s sagging posture told me all I needed to know about how the pregnancy had turned out. “Full-term. I really thought she’d make it.”

Murphy, staring off at something in the distance didn’t notice Steph’s body language. “The mother?”

“Mother and baby,” clarified Steph. “Neither made it.”

That saddened him, more so because of what had happened to Rachel, his sister. She and her husband had wanted a child, thought they could beat the odds. Unlike most pregnancies, Rachel’s wasn’t an accident. The baby came three months early. It was born infected, skin as white as new paper. It didn’t live through the night. Uncontrolled hemorrhaging took Rachel’s life.

“While that was going on,” complained Steph, unloading her frustrations, “Heather came in, a month early.”

Murphy and I shared a silent question.

“From Saragosa,” Steph told us. “She’s been coming down to the hospital for checkups since she learned she was pregnant.”

That jarred the memory loose. I knew the girl Steph was talking about.

“An hour later,” added Steph, “Allison Escobar went into labor.”

Guessing at the outcome, Murphy said flatly, “I thought she wasn’t due for another two months.”

“Three pregnancies.” Anger rose in Steph’s voice, but it faded to grief as quickly as it came. “None of the babies lived. Only one of the mothers made it through.” Silent tears rolled down her cheeks as she nestled against my shoulder. “I feel so hopeless sometimes.”

“You help a lot of people—you are hope,” I comforted. “How many around are alive because of you?”

“I don’t do this by myself,” she told me.

“You know what I mean.” I hugged her hard.

“Last week it was that girl—God, I don’t even remember her name.” Steph rubbed her eyes. “Seventeen. Too young to be pregnant. She was with that bunch over at the track.”

I knew the ones she was talking about. Murphy and I both did. Nineteen people, mostly older men, had taken up residence in some fairly secure structures on the grounds of an old automobile tire test track located in an oil patch thirty miles northeast of us. They didn’t grow much food there and didn’t have much in the way of livestock. They made their living keeping the pump jacks running and funneling the oil through a crude refinery they’d built onsite. Gasoline, diesel, and motor oil were coveted commodities in our world. We did a lot of business with them, trading meat and grains for petroleum products.

“The boyfriend,” said Steph, “eighteen, maybe nineteen, he wouldn’t leave the room. Couldn’t stop crying.”

“Too young to remember how bad the collapse was,” mused Murphy. “Probably been out here in the desert ever since. Hell, maybe he was out here the whole time.”

“Too many miscarriages. Too many stillborn babies. Too many dead mothers.” Steph drew a breath to dam her tears. “God, I wish we could figure this out—this one thing. Just this.”

14

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand—a quarter after two. I had a long way to go until sunrise.

From the rhythm of Steph’s breathing, I knew she was awake too. I pushed an arm under her pillow and snuggled closer. Without a word, she rolled over and laid her head on my chest. She’d been waking at night, silently worrying, for the past few months. Because of what? Given our earlier conversation and Steph’s raw emotions over the infant mortality rate and the dying mothers, that was my guess. But it could have been any of a handful or dozen problems plaguing our little oasis. Life in Balmorhea was good, but it wasn’t heaven.

Still, I never pressed her to talk about her troubles. Our relationship didn’t work that way. When she was ready to talk, she would. She let me get away with the same degree of solitude. Mostly. She often knew better than me when my crazy was getting too heavy to bear, and she’d push me into dumping it all out for examination. Pointlessly. She was well intentioned, but, unfortunately, the same demons had haunted me all my life and they weren’t going anywhere. I’d never dealt with them in a constructive way, and Steph, as much as she helped me live with them, wasn’t the cure. A high-dollar shrink passing out prescriptive happiness might have been a start, but we didn’t have either of those things in Balmorhea.

The heater cycled on, and the fan motor started its familiar, rhythmic clink. We were on the list for a repair, but we only had one HVAC repairman in Balmorhea—Arlen was his name. Arlen had a single, half-stupid apprentice. Half stupid, and his other half was lazy. They were always behind. The increasing difficulty we were having scavenging functioning HVAC parts didn’t help. A day would come, I feared, when we’d lose the luxury of hot and cold blowing air in our houses. Such was the slow decline of the world. How long could we struggle against it and still feel like we were holding our own?

Steph wrapped her arm around my chest and squeezed so hard it felt like she was silly with infatuation again, like we were two young lovers thinking their passion could conquer the world—exactly the way everybody feels when the hormone pumps are chugging 24/7 through a new relationship. And our relationship was like that, too, even after fourteen years. Despite the collapse of the world, and the countless horrors I’d become numb to, what Steph and I had together still felt real.

She said, “You’re not happy here.”

I wondered if that was the cause of her insomnia. “Is that what’s got you worked up lately?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

“You’re never going to grow up, are you?”

I laughed. She punched me, rolled over, and snugged the blanket up over her shoulder. Oops.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re just saying that because a long time ago, Murphy told you to apologize whenever I got mad at you. You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”

I spooned up behind her and ran my fingers through her lush, red hair. “Even when I think I know, I don’t. I’m sorry anyway, because I only want you to be happy. It’s what I live for. It’s all I think—”

“You’re so full of it.”

“Just tell me what I did. Then we’ll both know, and we can move on.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s go back to sleep.”

That wasn’t like her. She was one of the most direct people I’d ever known. Going back to the assertion that had derailed things, I said, “I am happy here.”

“No, you’re not.”

I pulled on her shoulder to put her on her back. Through the moonlight shining in the window, I looked into her eyes. “I’m happy because I’m with you. You know I’m sincere when I say that.”

“But you hate it here.”

I hesitated. “I never expected to be out here this long.”

“You despise the desert. You don’t like doing your community service. You—”

“Nobody likes doing their community service,” I argued. “We all do it, because it’s the key to everything—survival, growth, air conditioning.”

“You think you’re so funny.”

“Sometimes. But it’s true. You know it’s true, because this is the system you put in place when you were mayor and running the town council. Is that what’s been bothering you? Mayor Sylvia Ortega?”

“Zed, I resigned from the council. Why would you think Sylvia bothers me?”

“Sorry?” It sounded too much like a question, probably because it was a total guess. “I don’t know what we’re talking about and I don’t know why you’re upset.”

Steph looked me in the eyes. “We should have scrounged more sunscreen back at the beginning.” She turned to look back through the window. “So many priorities. That just never seemed to make it up the list.”

I laughed, pushed my pillow against the wall, and sat up. “What’s the matter?”

She rolled over again and laid her head in my lap. “Living in a desert was never a good idea for either of us. I’m too fair-skinned for the sun out here. Now I’m turning into a sun-scorched hag and you’re going stir crazy.”

“You’re as beautiful as ever.”

She huffed and laid back down. “I’m old, and you haven’t aged a day. You and Murphy both.”

“Do you think I’m going to go on the hunt for a younger girl? It’s not exactly a buyer’s market out there.”

Steph grabbed a handful of my genitals and squeezed, just hard enough to let me know I shouldn’t have said that.

“You know I’m joking, right?”

She let go. “I know you’re never serious when you need to be.”

“Javendra said he thinks the virus changed something about our skin.”

“I like Javendra, but it doesn’t take a biotech grad student to see that all who got the virus turned as white as a powdered donut.”

“Damn. I’d almost forgotten about powdered donuts. I used to—”

“Stop. You’re deflecting again.”

I was just talking. At least I thought I was. “Look, all I’m saying is, Javendra said there’s something about the way the virus affects us. He thinks it happens at the genetic level. It affects the way our cells express… something or other. He says that’s why we Slow Burns keep looking young.”

“You know Javendra’s not even a real doctor. It’s the pale uniformity of your skin that makes you seem young. There’s no magic mumbo-jumbo to it.”

“Then why’d you act like there was?”

“I didn’t.”

I sighed and banged my head lightly against the wall. “This isn’t like you. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Steph tensed and propped herself up on one arm. “Did you hear that?”

In its way, that question was as senseless as the rest of the conversation. She knew, everybody knew, the virus affected the victim’s hearing. I shook my head in answer.

She put a finger to my lips anyway and looked through the window to see what she could see in the moonlight.

Then I heard it. In the distance. Short and shrill. “Coyote?”

Steph swung her feet onto the cold floor, standing in one fluid motion, wide awake and alert. What she’d heard outside was not a coyote. “Get up and get dressed. Something’s happening.”

15

I climbed the ladder into the fortified guard tower next to the main gate. With room for ten shooters behind its sandbagged ramparts, the tower stood thirty feet tall at the northernmost corner of the palisade that encircled Balmorhea. From the tower we had a clear view up Highway 17—well, all the way to the kink in the road, anyway. Otherwise, we’d have been able to see the asphalt stretch for two straight miles up to I-10. On a clear day. But not in the dark.

“Watch the flanks.” Dalhover pointed down the northeast wall and then the northwest. Between the innermost barbed wire ring and the wall we’d built atop the berm we’d bulldozed around the town stood towers, one at each corner. They commanded a kill zone fifty yards wide and a half-mile long each. “Watch the goddamn flanks. You act like you never heard of a diversion before.”

Four militiamen—three men and a woman—were already in the tower before Steph and I arrived. How Dalhover got there so fast was beyond me. It was like he never slept.

With vigilant eyes scanning the night in all directions, Dalhover relaxed just a bit. He told Steph and me “I sent someone to let Ortega know.”

“Unless somebody starts shooting, she probably won’t come.” I regretted saying it even as the words came out of my mouth. In the semi-formal chain of command in Balmorhea’s military, I outranked the militia folk in the tower, and Mayor Ortega was my boss.

Dalhover looked at me but I couldn’t read a reaction on his face. He said, “I made the call on the yellow alert.” That meant people all over town—those who were assigned yellow alert duty this week—were being rustled out of bed to hurry to their posts in a tower or along the wall, weapons ready to kill anything that moved out in the darkness. We never took security for granted in Balmorhea.

I looked up Highway 17, past the zigzag concrete barriers we’d set up to force cars to crawling speed when approaching our front gate. Parked out there in the lanes, a ratty pickup idled roughly, coughing black smoke. Its headlights were broken out, but overhead lamps mounted on the roll bar illuminated three people from behind. Two were armed, helping an injured third to stand. The third was wailing like she didn’t know she lived in a world infested with prowling monsters and nasty bastards.

One of the guards—Samuel was his name—explained the situation. “They came hauling ass down from I-10. Stopped there and got out. I told them not to come any closer. They’ve been waiting there ever since. We haven’t seen nothing else.”

Dalhover yelled over the rampart, “Turn off your goddamned truck.”

None of the three in the road outside moved to comply.

“Probably can’t hear you over the noise of the muffler,” suggested Samuel.

“You yell at ‘em,” groused Dalhover, before he turned to me and Steph. “What do you think? Good folks in need of medical help or an ambush?”

I missed the days when we had the advantage at night. “Wish we still had some working NVGs.”

“Wish in one hand,” muttered Dalhover. “Beat off in the other and see—”

“We get the point,” Steph told him.

Out on the road, the truck’s engine finally ceased. The overhead lights went out. I stared into the darkness up the road and saw big spots in my vision where the truck’s lights had temporarily blinded me. “If these yo-yos are creating a diversion, they’re doing a thorough job of it.”

“You and I think the same way in these situations,” grated Dalhover. “Everything’s a danger until I know for a fact it ain’t.”

“Ditto, bro.” I raised a fist for a bump.

“Are you ever going to grow up, Zed?”

“Probably not.” I thumbed in the direction of our visitors. “What do you want to do with them?”

“That woman’s pain sounds real to me,” Steph told us.

Dalhover sighed, because he knew he wasn’t going to get his way. “They put their guns on the ground and leave them out there. They strip down bare and leave the clothes out there, too. They can come in through the sally port one at a time.”

“You think they’re suicide bombers?” Steph didn’t like the idea of making the woman strip down.

“We don’t know who they are, and we don’t know what they are.” I hated to side with Dalhover against her, but Dalhover was making the right choice. “We stay safe. That’s got to be our priority.”

It was Steph’s turn to sigh. She understood. She agreed, but she still didn’t like it.

“We’ll take it slow, one step at a time,” said Dalhover. “We’ll start with the injured girl.”

“I’ll get her over to the hospital.” Steph headed for the ladder and paused to look at me.

“I’ll gather a detail and put some security around the other two,” I said.

“And the woman?” asked Dalhover.

“I’ll ask for volunteers to come with us,” surrendered Steph.

“Don’t take them off the wall,” Dalhover instructed.

She headed down the ladder.

I asked Dalhover, “You staying out here, or do you want to talk to these guys when they come in?”

“Out here.” Dalhover scanned the night. He didn’t like anything about the situation. “You deal with those two. And Zane, be careful. I don’t want to have to dig a hole for you tomorrow.”

I laughed. “I’m unkillable.”

“Just like all the other dumbass corpses.”

16

Unless the girl was going to spontaneously combust, she wasn’t a danger to anyone. She’d been roughed up and stabbed. At least once. She could barely keep herself upright. In one of the electric golf carts we used for getting around, Steph rushed her to the hospital on the other side of town, literally eight blocks away. My layman’s prognosis for her was good—if she had a strong immune system. So far into the collapse, the rare antibiotics we scavenged were long-expired, putting any infected wound on the list of potential killers.

Neither of the men seemed to have a strong emotional attachment to the woman. That’s to say, neither bawled about not letting the woman leave their sight. Neither insisted on going with her to the hospital to hold her hand, or whatever. That struck me as odd and set my alarm bells ringing.

Since Ortega never climbed out of bed to join us, neither did any other member of the town council. I took charge of the situation with the two men. I sent one to a small conference room in the old city hall building to have one of our militia officers get his story. Set a few guards outside the door, just in case. The older guy, Lyle was his name—maybe fifty, give or take—sat across the table from me in the Balmorhea Café. The place had been a little café and beer garden before the collapse. We’d resurrected it to fill that same function. It was one of the luxuries our little community afforded itself.

It’s funny how good it can make you feel to go out for a burger and a beer after spending so many years struggling to stay alive in a world turned so unforgiving and brutal.

We worked hard in Balmorhea. All of us. Everybody had a job. Many were farmers or were involved in the production and preservation of our food supply. Some of us—me, the other Slow Burns, plus a handful of others—were full-time scouts and scavengers. We had that one plumber, a stack of electricians and mechanics, doctors and nurses, even a sheriff with a deputy. We had people in every role our community needed, though most didn’t have any pre-collapse experience in the jobs they did. The only way this worked was keeping everyone to their community service obligation, building and maintaining our fortifications, taking guard shifts on the wall and towers, hell, even collecting the garbage. Everybody had a role in the militia. That was mandatory. Sometimes we had to fight to protect the community’s survival—our survival.

People died. Sometimes during an attack by a wandering gang of Whites. Sometimes raiding bandits murdered them, or they were murdered for scavenging the wrong supplies. More frequently than anyone liked, residents died unexpectedly, for no reason we could figure until one of the doctors performed an autopsy and found a burst appendix, a festering infection, or cancer. We didn’t have the diagnostic tools to catch every illness, and we lacked the drugs to treat most ailments.

Hence, the Balmorhea Café, our oasis. Live music from time to time—though our local music talent wasn’t really much to speak of. We had a small theater that only played old movies, a gym, a growing library. We held dances, harvest festivals, and holiday parties. We had social clubs and competitions, most anything an old small town might have had back in the 1950s, before thousand-channel HD TVs and cellphones took over our lives.

I asked, “You want something to eat?” It was the middle of the night, maybe closer to four a.m., but Lyle looked haggard. “A drink?”

Lyle glanced over at Clive, the old guy who ran the café. Such was the cost of waking him to use his place—Clive eavesdropping and not being subtle about it.

The man asked, “What is this?”

I waved at Clive. He was behind the bar, busying himself with nothing. He was an older fellow, a little past sixty. Him and his wife—married after they met in Balmorhea—ran the café, since they were getting a little old to help in the fields. “Hey, Clive, would you bring us a couple of beers?”

That took Lyle by surprise. “You have beer?”

“It’s not very good,” I told him. “But the whiskey isn’t bad. We grow a ton of corn out here. We have plenty to experiment with. You want something to eat? We don’t have a lot of variety, but what we have is pretty good. Hell, you want a steak? Clive can grill you up a steak.”

Lyle shook his head, jaw slack, finding it hard to believe. “I heard tell ya’ll had a big herd of cattle over here.”

“Nearly three hundred head.” I felt pretty proud of that. Cattle were an enviable luxury in the post-collapse world. Though “luxury” might be misleading—those animals took a hell of a lot of work and resources.

“That’s too bad.”

It sounded like a threat, but I tried hard not to take it that way. “Why do you say that?”

“The reason we’re here.”

“Well, that saves me beating around the bush about it.”

“Is that what we’re doing? Beating around the bush?”

Clive sat the beers on the table.

Lyle picked up the bottle, surprised by the cold.

“We have refrigeration.” I pointed up at the lights overhead. “Electricity in every house. Solar power. We have backup generators, but we don’t use them that often.”

Lyle drank, and appreciation spread across his face. “We ain’t got no refrigeration back at the farm.”

“Where’s that?”

“This don’t have to be an interrogation,” Lyle retorted. “Or whatever it is we’re doing here.”

“It’s not an interrogation,” I told him, “we just need to be careful is all. I’m not trying to bribe the truth out of you. I’m just being nice, making conversation. You sure you don’t want something to eat?”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. And yeah, if you got a steak, I’d love one.”

“No potatoes, though. We can’t get the damn things to grow in the sandy dirt around here.”

Lyle laughed, a little sadly. “We had a farm the other side of Fort Stockton. Fifteen miles out of town. The farm was already there when we come across it right after things went belly up. Three irrigation circles. Coupla barns. Main house. A few others. Grew corn mostly, some squash, watermelon, beans. Some vegetables, enough for us, you know.”

“You been out there the whole time?” I asked.

“Took on some people as time went on. Lost some. Others left. Not everybody can take it out here. The desolation. The sun. Goddamned desert as far as you can see.” Lyle shook his head.

I nodded. I was one of those people and Steph had known it for years. Every now and then things would get rough, she’d bring it up. But we’d built a life in Balmorhea, not just for us, but for an entire community.

“No trees,” said Lyle. “No green grass. Just desert and mountains and heat. Me, I grew up in Odessa. This is home to me. After the world slid down the crapper, I never saw no reason to leave.”

“But here you are,” I said, “and in some trouble, too.”

“Yeah.” That bothered Lyle a lot. “Five, six years ago, had a young fellow with us, name o’ Marty. Broke his arm. We drove him over here for your doctor to look at. He stayed on with you folks.”

“Marty Blankenship,” I said. “Yeah, I know him. And his girlfriend, Rebecca, right?”

“Yep. Decided they liked it here better than out there with us. Can’t say I blame ‘em. How are they doin’?”

Of course, first thing that came to mind was the baby.

Lyle caught it. “They all right?”

“Fine,” I told him. “Rebecca got pregnant again last year.”

“Again?” Lyle wanted to be happy about the news.

“Stillborn,” I told him. “Just like the first one.”

The news broke through Lyle’s armor. “Four pregnancies out at our place. Four little graves. Goddamned virus.”

“We’ve got nearly thirty kids here. All born since the collapse. That’s not to say we’ve got it figured out. We lost three or four just in the last few days.”

“After all this time. I still lay awake at night, wondering if we’re gonna survive this goddamned virus—if the world will ever be the same.”

“All we can do is keep trying,” I told myself, as much as I was telling him.

We toasted with a swig.

“What happened to Cinnamon? That’s the girl’s name, right?”

He took a long slow drink of beer, and then he stared at me as a sadness grew out of his eyes. He clearly blamed himself. “The infected.”

17

“Ambush?” I was thinking Lyle and the other two must have been caught scavenging in Fort Stockton. Out here in the desert, we didn’t get a lot of the infected these days, and certainly not any in good enough shape to mount an ambush.

“About ten o’clock. Full dark. A truck came barreling down the road.” Lyle snorted. “Didn’t make any sense. Still don’t.”

Lyle’s story piqued my interest and aroused my suspicion. “The infected using a truck? Are you sure it wasn’t bandits?”

“Wasn’t bandits. Not like any I ever seen. But It might have something to do with what I heard at the swap.”

I jumped right to the topic most bothering me at the moment. “Did you see any drones?”

“Like military stuff?”

“No,” I told him, “more like those little hobby jobs regular people could buy.”

“Don’t know nothin’ ‘bout any of that.”

“No unusual dots flying around in the distance?”

“Like I said, didn’t see no drones.”

“Sorry. We had something weird happen here yesterday.”

“You wanna hear about the swap?”

I nodded.

“About a month back, I was at the swap out by Ozona.”

That swap meet was too far for us, but I knew about it. “Lots a people go to that one?”

Lyle shrugged. “Used to be maybe forty, give or take. Last coupla times, maybe half that or so. But you never know. People come and go.”

I wanted to ask about the kind of items being traded, whether many of the people were desperate, or if they had many transients looking for handouts. A lot could be learned about the state of the region by knowing what went on at the swaps. I needed to know about the attack on Lyle’s farm first. “What’s the Ozona swap got to do with the car at your place last night?”

“That’s when I first heard tell of the trouble back East.”

“Infected trouble?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Nobody does.”

“You’re being cryptic.”

“Back around Junction, there was a whole string of farms and ranches along the Llano River. I couldn’t tell you how many—twenty or thirty homesteads, maybe more. Kinda like our place out by Fort Stockton. Survivors from San Antonio, mostly. Five here, ten there. Plenty of water, good land. Remote enough so they didn’t get much trouble from the infected comin’ west from the cities—not much, but not nothin’. The Llano River flows into the Colorado, which runs right through Austin. Infected scavenge their way up the valleys now and again. That’s what I heard. The point I’m getting at is this—a month or two back, everybody in that valley disappeared.”

“They went somewhere else?” I asked.

“Don’t know. I only heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy. You know how it is. I tried to track it down at the swap meet, but nobody who’d seen it with their own eyes was around. Like every tall tale, I heard five or six versions. Alien abductions, new utopia out by Houston, running water, cable TV, grocery stores.” Lyle laughed at that. I did, too.

“They just plain disappeared.” Lyle let that thought sit for a moment. “Some things were busted up, but not like you’d expect. Doors or gates broken, windows busted. Food stores raided. Livestock gone, natur’ly. No bodies.”

“You think the infected did it?” I asked.

“The world ain’t that complicated anymore. It’s always them, isn’t it? That’s why I’m confused about what happened to us.”

I silently waited for the story to come. Finally.

“Our ranch sits a half-mile off 2023, down a dirt road, nestled between two mesas. Flattop hills, really. You can walk right up ‘em. No cliffs, nothing like that. Thing is, we got an old gate with a cattle guard just off the road, and we keep a chain and a padlock on it. It’s not secure from much of anything, but it keeps drifters from coming down the driveway. Mostly. Halfway in, we got another gate, another cattle guard, and another chain and padlock. Thing is, you can see both these gates from our lookout deck up top on the roof of the main house. You can see for miles in every direction, except for what’s behind them hills. Pretty much like here, I suppose.

“Had a lot of wind last night. Kicked up so much dust you couldn’t see down the road. Couldn’t hardly make out our gate in what moonlight there was. Happens all the time out here. You know.” Lyle looked at me for a nod. I gave it to him.

“Problem is,” he continued, “somebody’d cut through the chains on both gates and rolled down our dirt road so quiet we didn’t hear ‘em. Me, Cinnamon, and Alonso was up on the lookout deck. It was Alonso’s watch. Cinnamon followed him up there ‘cause…I guess she wants something to happen there. I headed upstairs because I was bored with sittin’ by the fire talkin’ about all we ain’t got no more. Been doin’ too much of that lately.

“Anyways, I was just sittin’ down to make myself comfortable, when a pair of headlights flashes out east of us. It takes a second for me to understand what’s happening, because it didn’t make sense. The truck these headlights were mounted on was already most of the way down our driveway and racing right at our main gate. Didn’t even have time to raise my rifle before it crashed right through.

“That was the signal, I guess, ‘cause they screamed like they just busted out of Hell. Nearly pissed myself, ain’t ashamed to say it. The infected. A thousand of ‘em, maybe more. Came running through the broken gate like they’d been hiding just outside our fence all night. We never knew they was there. More climbed the fence. Alonso opened up with his M16, full auto. I was shootin’, too, but I could barely see for all the tear gas in the air.”

“Tear gas? Are you sure?”

Lyle shrugged. “Something was burning my eyes like a mother. I was coughing so much, I don’t know if I hit anything. Cinnamon near fell down the ladder to warn everyone inside the house, you know, in case they didn’t already hear us shooting.

“You’re sure they were Whites? Pale skin, no hair?” The coordinated attack and the gear didn’t make sense for the infected.

Lyle looked me up and down. “Skin just as white as yours. Gas masks, so I can’t say about the hair. Happened so fast, though, with the gas in the air, infected all over the place, trying to get their hands on you. We barely got out, the three of us. Tore out across the desert in that truck. Nothing we could do for everyone else there. Too damn many of ‘em. Like the collapse all over again.” Lyle took a few moments after that, as the memories slowly turned to guilt in his mind. “Cinnamon got cut up. She was bleedin’ all over the pickup by the time we realized how really bad it was. We didn’t have anything to patch her up with.”

I didn’t say anything because I would have sounded like a judgmental prick. Every vehicle in Balmorhea was stocked with bug-out bags and provisions. Regularly checked and refreshed. It was a holdover policy from our experiences at the beginning. All of us had been forced to flee more than once back then. Danger never called ahead to let you know it was on its way.

“We cut across the desert,” said Lyle, “I figured the Lynaugh Unit was my best bet. You know, old prison, secure as hell.”

I didn’t say that the prison fences, walls, and bars hadn’t done the original residents any good. “They wouldn’t let you in?” I asked.

“Everything happening out at the ranch was tenfold worse at the prison.”

“They hit both places at once? Same uniforms? Coordinated? All infected?”

“I seen what I seen. I’m just tellin’ you what it was.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean anything by it; I’m surprised is all. Were the people at the Lynaugh Unit able to fend off the attack?”

“Couldn’t tell, us being so far away. Parked on a rise, lights off. The shooting over at Lynaugh petered out after twenty or thirty minutes. Them infected kept whoopin’ and hollerin’. I’d say they busted that prison open as easy as they overran my farm. Don’t know if anybody made it out. I didn’t see any headlights makin’ a run for it. If I was a bettin’ man, I put money on them all bein’ dead.”

18

We knew generally where we were going, and specifically because it was marked on the map. But we didn’t need the map. The column of smoke drifting into the early morning sky marked our destination.

Murphy parked the Humvee on a flattop hill a mile west of the prison. We were out there alone, nothing around but desert and scraggly mesquites as tall as me. They were plenty big to keep us hidden from anybody looking in our direction and dense enough to conceal any number of the infected. Murphy killed the engine and we climbed onto the roof for a look around. Using my binoculars, I saw the fields north of the facility were under cultivation. I scanned up and down the prison’s fences, checked out the grounds, and looked over the buildings.

Murphy said, “Familiar, in a way.”

“We’ve never been here.” Well, not so close. The Lynaugh clan didn’t like Balmorhea colonists because we harbored people like me and Murphy—Slow Burns. So, we didn’t trade with them. They didn’t bring their sick to our hospital. We kept our distance. With some fifty miles of desert between us, that last part tended to be easy.

Murphy still had his binoculars up. “What I’m saying is, the place looks like everything looked right after the collapse—freshly fucked up.”

“You see anybody moving down there?”

“I see fires.”

“The fence on this side looks intact, but on the north side, it looks like maybe it’s down. Hard to tell from this angle.”

“On the far side,” said Murphy, “at the vehicle entrance, those gates look like they’ve been broken through.”

The double set of gates on the far side were mostly hidden from view by one of the prison buildings situated directly between us and them. “I can see the top part of the gates, but I can’t tell.”

“See how those top bars aren’t straight across,” instructed Murphy. “Something’s not right. If you take that Lyle dude at his word, and the same bunch hit Lynaugh in the same way as his place, then they probably smashed a big truck through.”

“What do you think of Lyle’s story?”

“Man, you talked to him. What do you think?”

“He seemed credible.”

“His buddy, Alonso, told the same story. That girl with the stripper name, ah—”

“Cinnamon,” I filled in.

“Yeah. She said pretty much the same. For as much as she was able, being half out of it.”

“You think that Carlsbad bunch did this?”

Murphy shrugged. “From what Bonny said, that makes as little sense as a phantom horde marauding their way across the state.”

I sighed. Murphy and I were in the same place with all of it. Too many unanswered questions. That’s why we were out there watching the Lynaugh Unit burn. We needed to find what clues we could and piece together some dependable truth. With events over the past few days being what they were, and with the stakes, as usual, being the lives of my friends and, frankly, everybody I knew, guesses taken from miles away weren’t going to be good enough.

“I hear that bald noggin’ of yours rattling.” Murphy laughed as his humor. “You thinking we should go down there?”

“I am. We need to be careful. If anyone’s alive, they’ll likely shoot at us.”

“I’ll bet you a cold biscuit they’re all dead.”

19

Way back in the mid-nineties, The Texas Department of Criminal Justice built the James Lynaugh Unit to house 1,400 male prisoners. In the desert south of Fort Stockton, surrounded by marginally arable desert and a few squat hills, the terrain offered no constraints to the prison’s layout. So, the state-contracted designers applied a bureaucratic measure of creativity and constructed the prison in the shape of a big square, a quarter mile long on each side. A wide road, laid out in a square, marked the outermost boundary of the detention facility. Twenty yards inside that asphalt perimeter, a tall fence prevented reluctant residents from dashing off into the desert. If the chain-link palisade and miles of desert weren’t enough to discourage escapes, guard towers at opposite corners of the fenced square commanded kill zones down all four sides.

One of those towers loomed at the corner ahead of us, apparently empty. Manning the .50, Murphy stood through the Humvee’s roof hatch, watching for threats from the tower and the other prison buildings. I stopped the vehicle just outside the north fence, about halfway between the corners. With nothing but cropped creosote bushes and stunted yuccas spread across the desert behind us and zero cover around us, I figured anybody looking already knew we were there. I swung my door open and told Murphy, “Cover me.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”

I hurried over to where the perimeter fence gaped open, took a last look for hostile movement, and examined the cleanly severed wires. I was no forensic expert, but it looked to me like someone had used bolt cutters to split the fence from the ground up to six feet. They’d sheared it across the bottom edge and peeled the corners back to create a hole plenty large enough for an adult-sized anybody to run right through.

Your basic dimwit White couldn’t have cut that fence, not with tools, not in straight lines. If Lyle had been telling the whole truth about what he’d witnessed, and Whites had attacked Lynaugh, Smart Ones had to have been leading them. Still, that didn’t explain the trucks that smashed their gate. Smart Ones didn’t drive. They weren’t that smart.

I turned my attention to the sandy ground, looking for more clues.

“You lose your car keys?” asked Murphy. “Or your virginity?” he laughed.

“Why is that even funny?”

“I don’t make the rules of comedy, I just channel the muse.”

“Does your muse look like Ronald McDonald?”

“More like a monkey on roller skates.”

“Good god, Murphy. Are you keeping an eye on those buildings?”

“I’m multitasking.”

“Fine, yuk it up if you want, but if I get shot, Steph’s going to have your ass.”

Murphy didn’t say anything about that. Usually, he’d smartass something up out of nothing just to get the last word. I glanced up to make sure he wasn’t choking to death on a snot gob.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s it? No more funny remarks?”

Murphy concentrated on the buildings across the wide, dusty yard. “I just figured, you know, with Steph and all.”

“Whatever.” As in, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What are you looking for?”

“Jimmy Hoffa.”

“So, you can be funny, but I can’t?”

“You said it, not me.”

“Maybe I will let somebody shoot your ass.”

I pointed at the sand. “Footprints.”

“Good work Ke-mo sah-bee. Aren’t they, like, all over the place?”

“Yes.”

“Is that supposed to be a revelation?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let me see if I can catch up. Ummm, from all this riveting evidence, I deduce a whole bunch of chicken brains charged through that hole you so astutely observed from way the hell back on the hill.”

I sighed. Murphy could be exasperating.

“Don’t do me like that with the silent sarcasm. You’re not in junior high anymore and I’m not your mom. Why don’t you just tell me what you think you’re looking at?”

“Not what I’m looking at, what I’m looking for.”

“And that is?”

“Bare feet. Footprints of bare feet, that is.”

The lightbulb plinked on in Murphy’s head. “Wait—what?”

“Everybody who came through here was wearing shoes. By the look of the pattern, I’d say boots.”

That shut Murphy up. He knew as well as anybody who had spent any amount of time outside Balmorhea’s sturdy walls that feral Whites tended to go barefoot. Most didn’t even have the sense to wear enough clothes to keep their dangly parts warm in the winter.

“Smart Ones.” It was the only thing that made sense with the puzzle of clues I had so far.

“That would be a lot of Smart Ones not to have a bunch of dumb ones in tow.”

“Look at these,” I pointed to three clear rows of tracks in the dirt. “They were out here in three ranks. They stayed in line and took turns running through the hole.”

“A hole that’s only big enough to fit one person at a time.”

“Wearing shoes. Well-organized.” I didn’t like where these bits of data were leading.

“You’re not thinking Whites, are you? You’re thinking normals?”

I shrugged. “The shoe patterns are the same.”

Murphy followed that clue to the same place I did, and he had as much trouble believing it. “Military?”

As much as it didn’t make sense, I didn’t see any other possibility. Or, it made sense, a very scary sort of sense. “Somebody’s running around the desert with a regiment of militiamen and they’ve got the infrastructure to equip them with matching boots.”

After another minute of thought, Murphy disagreed with me. “Maybe they stumbled into a big stock in one of those discount warehouses or something.”

“Or something?” I asked.

“Yeah, or something.”

“Whatever. I think it’s clear they killed everyone inside.”

“Slow down, Sherlock. I already told you I think they’re all dead inside. What are those tracks telling you so you can pretend this is all your idea now?”

“These tracks are all headed inside,” I told him. “None are coming back out, and I don’t see their bodies spread out everywhere.”

Murphy agreed. “Don’t see any bodies.”

20

After circling the prison twice on the perimeter road and seeing no sign of life, I inched the Humvee through the smashed gates and stopped on an expansive parking pad just inside. Clearly, it was the area where deliveries and prisoners came and went. Which meant the area had to be well covered by guards with guns. I looked for sight lines to the perimeter guard towers—I couldn’t see either of them. That left only the thick-walled gatehouse, which looked like it had been built to withstand a Marine assault. In fact, with its front door blown off and scorch patterns above the narrow windows, it looked like the Marines had already been there.

Following my gaze, Murphy swung the .50 around to point at the stout building.

I hopped out of the Humvee, machete and shotgun in hand, and headed for the open door. “I’ll do a quick check inside to see what I see.”

“Anybody in there?” Murphy called. “You listen here! Behave or I’m gonna light you up.”

Peeking inside the dark door, I first noticed the stench: petroleum, ash, burnt plastic, and over-cooked meat. Familiar. Too familiar. Heinously so, because that was the kind of fucked-up world I lived in. Brass shell casings littered the floor. They looked freshly spent, shiny, like they’d been in a box somewhere since the collapse, waiting to get fired at somebody someday, just because. The shiny ones lay in clumpy patterns, here and there among hundreds of others, all discolored by intense heat. The walls were stained black by fire. The remains of some furniture lay in black crisps. The weirdest things were the outlines on the floor, crime scene corpse outlines with the bodies missing.

I’d seen death come in a hundred different ways a thousand different times, and those were lowball estimates. Fire, though, gave me the heebie jeebies ever since I torched those naked Whites at Sarah Mansfield’s house up on Mt. Bonnell and then saw the horror of my work. However I died, whenever that day came, I hoped it wouldn’t be in a fire.

Crossing to the stairs to check the second floor, glass crunched under each of my steps, and I stopped. I knelt. Broken glass blackened by soot lay everywhere. I picked up a piece in the shape of a bottle bottom and rubbed a clean spot with my finger. Translucent brown. Following a hunch, I kicked through the ash and debris until I came across a hunk of scorched leather wrapped tightly around a piece of glass with a few bits of wire running through. All roughly the size of a wine bottle cork. “Motherfucker.”

“You say something?” Murphy called from outside. “You alright?”

“I’m cool.” I wasn’t.

I looked for another bottle cork mechanism of leather and glass. I found the remains of a few. Earlier that year, in the spring, well before the heat set in, a drifter came through Balmorhea, carrying with him—along with his other survival stuff—three Molotov cocktails. Only they weren’t standard Molotovs. The ones he possessed, he explained, were corked with a mechanism that could be activated by yanking a dangling wire. Once armed, any impact would detonate a charge that would ignite the fuel mixture inside. No need to light them first. He said he picked them up at a swap in Brenham, back the summer before. He called them “pocket napes,” short for pocket napalm. Seeing the value of such weapons, we traded a hundred rounds of ammunition, four pounds of beef jerky and a quart of cooking fat, plus all he could eat during his three-day stay. For that we received one pocket nape, which we reverse engineered and started to manufacture for ourselves. We carried ten in the Humvee when we went out on patrol. They were in there with Murphy at that moment. Pocket napes, I deduced, had been used to torch the guardhouse.

But Brenham, if it truly was near the source of the impact Molotovs, was five hundred miles east of Balmorhea. That raised more questions than it answered.

I headed up the stairs to the second floor. It was much the same as the first—torched. No bodies. No blackened weapons. Nothing salvageable. I exited the guardhouse and took a pause beside the Humvee as silent images of flaming horror occupied my thoughts.

“What’s the word?” asked Murphy. “You okay?”

“Right as rain.”

“We live in a desert, dumbass.”

“It rains here, too.”

“Fire get to you?”

I shrugged.

“You look like you just realized your dick fell off. Was it bad?”

Scanning the buildings out in front of me, searching for the danger of movement, I gave Murphy the quick, no-frills version.

“No bodies?” he asked.

“Not a one.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Not for Whites. Not for normals.” Murphy didn’t like being there any more than I did. And I hated it. “You know how many people they had here?”

With no contact between us and the Lynaugh group, I only had rumors to go on. “Twenty, forty, something in that range.”

“Mostly dudes, is what I heard.” Murphy took a look around. “Some were inmates back before the collapse.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I’m just sayin’.”

“You think maybe they were a tough bunch because of the prisoners?”

“No,” he told me, “that’s just what I heard, that’s all. Damn, man. I know crispy critters give you the willies and all, but you need to lighten up and focus on the to-do list, bro.”

I sighed. “Sorry.”

“Man, let’s finish what we came here for and get the hell out.”

Murphy was right. We needed to get busy. We had a whole creepy ghost prison to search, and we still needed to drive over to Lyle’s place and figure out what happened there. But something was bothering me. “What did you mean, back there when we were outside the fence?”

Murphy shook his head and looked at me liked I’d just changed colors. “What are you talking about?”

“About Steph. You acted like you knew something about her that you expected me to know, too.”

Murphy took a long, hard look at one of the detention buildings before pointing the .50 at it. “You see that?”

“There’s nothing over there. You’re hiding something.”

“Man, I don’t—” Instead of finishing, Murphy rubbed his big hands over his face.

“What’s up with Steph? You know I’m not going to let it go.”

“This ain’t the time and this sure ain’t the place. This is a talk you need to have with her, when you can—” Murphy ran out of words again.

“Look, dude.” Anger edged its way into my voice. “What are you not telling me?”

“Trust me on this, Zed? Please? You don’t want to hear this from me.”

My imagination spun up a score of possibilities. Bad, all of them. Of course, because that’s just how my mind worked most of the time, as happy as I was with Steph. I even tolerated the desert, because it was the best place to keep her safe. But I was too conditioned by life’s twisted sense of humor to believe that happily-ever-after could last more than a minute.

“You’re snorting like a little bull,” said Murphy. “You know, like you do when you’re so mad you’re about to explode.”

“I’m not mad, Murphy. Not at you.”

“Don’t be mad at Steph, either. In fact, don’t be mad at anybody. It just is what it is, man. You know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t. Because you won’t tell me.” I glared over the unexplored prison buildings. Unanswered questions were turning into rage for no reason other than dusty old habit—habits I hadn’t indulged in so many years. Failing at finding a way to calm myself, I looked up at Murphy and pled more than asked. “Tell me.”

Murphy and I had been friends, close friends, for way too many years, for him not to see or to feel my desperation. Yet he couldn’t look at me when he finally spoke. “Steph has cancer.”

My whole world shrank down to an irrational dot of white-hot fuck, and all I could manage to say was, “What kind?”

“Does it goddamn matter?”

No. It didn’t. Balmorhea didn’t have the medical experts, the drugs, nor the advanced equipment that would allow us to evaluate and treat a cancer patient. A cancer diagnosis in Balmorhea, just like a cancer diagnosis anywhere in the post-collapse world, was a death sentence.

21

Without another word between us, Murphy killed the engine and climbed out of the Humvee. I was already marching toward the nearest building that wasn’t still burning, kicking through the dried corn kernels and hard brown wheat berries on the parking pad like they needed punishing. I noticed the blood stains, but I wasn’t in any state of mind to search an abandoned prison and reason my way through the clues to discover the nature of the danger marauding through the desert. Nor could I stand still. I ached for the catharsis of violence.

The wall of the building was scorched with burns splashed around a pair of second floor windows. The glass on the ground at the base of the wall made the source of the burns obvious. Murphy said, “Pocket napes. But do you smell that?”

I shrugged.

“Vinegar.” He sniffed the air. “And gunpowder.”

I didn’t have room for any thoughts about that. The door, like the one on the gatehouse, had been blown off its hinges. I charged into the dim light inside, hoping a wayward White would be there, setting an ambush.

No such luck. Only shadows and a musty stink, rusting prison bars, and cells for criminals. Inside the cages, corpses lounged on cots, slumped against walls, or lay in heaps on the floor where they’d died—lucky bastards. Each had been mummified by years of heat and dry air.

At the far end of the first floor, with Murphy trailing silently behind me, I climbed the stairs and stomped down the length of the second tier, not caring about all the noise I was making. The desiccated dead weren’t going to wake. Apparently, no lingering Whites were going to crawl out of their spider holes to try and feed on me, either.

I wished they would. Try, that is.

At the far end of the second floor, the one nearest the gatehouse, the cells had been cleared out. They looked lived in. Based on the number of recently used beds, my guess was six people had resided there. A pair of the cells had been modified into a bunker. Gunports cut through the concrete, up and down the wall that looked down on the gatehouse. They were the ones with the weird scorch patterns on the wall outside. Shell casings lay scattered across the floor. Blood stained the concrete and pooled in places, some still sticky. No bodies, though. No guns on the floor. No ammunition, no knives, food, or even water. Someone dumped a bookshelf and left the books scattered all over.

“Why take the bodies?” asked Murphy.

I didn’t have an answer. At least I was curious about it—it was a distraction from my turbulent emotions and my hunger to brutalize something.

Cancer seemed like such a cheat after all of our losses and tears, our times apart, and the happiness we worked so hard to build in Balmorhea. We’d grown into two halves of a whole, Steph and me. Something I never believed would happen, or could happen, back before the virus started its rampage across Austin, back when I was circling the drain of a loathsome existence.

With Murphy close behind, I worked my way through another cell block of mummies and bunkers, only half paying attention. Maybe not even that much. More looking for prey than clues, hoping to happen upon it, and lost in a helpless rage. Following my feet, not seeing any bodies, weapons, nor anything of value in a post-collapse world.

Standing in the shade next to the building we just searched, drinking, and deciding which building to search next, Murphy said, “You gonna be okay?”

“No. Probably not ever again.”

“I know it doesn’t do any good for me to say this right now, but one day, you’ll be able to hear it.”

I knew what he was going to say, but words of hope wouldn’t even form into complete thoughts in my head. I was lost without Steph, and I hadn’t even lost her yet.

“One day,” said Murphy, “the hurt goes away. You get better. You smile again. You laugh.”

I squatted and leaned against the wall. In my head, I knew Murphy was right, but in my heart, I knew I was fucked.

“We’ve been through it before, you and me. That’s just the way this world is now.”

I nodded.

“Man,” Murphy stepped out from the wall and spun in a slow circle, “I don’t know what happened here—not exactly—and I don’t think we’re gonna figure it out. I don’t know what went down at Lyle’s place, but it probably looks just like this. Raided. All beat to hell. More dead shit in a dying world.” Murphy took a long pause. “Zed, I gotta tell you, I’ve been hurtin’, too. You know I love Steph. You two are family to me, all I got left in this world. Fuck this fucked-up place. Let’s go home. No more scouting, no more hunting, no more crazy shit for a while. Let’s just stay in Bal. You two get whatever happiness you can get before things get bad. You hear what I’m saying?”

I felt like I should cry. It seemed like the thing that normal people might do in the face of the constant barrage of hurt we suffered and witnessed. I didn’t, though. I felt a numbness coming on, a defense mechanism from a long time ago, the armor that got me through so many difficult years. “You’re right. We won’t find anything at Lyle’s place that we won’t find here. No point going there. We’ll finish here, though. I mean, we’re already here. Let’s see what we see, and then we’ll go.”

The next building seemed to have been used as an educational facility—classrooms, desks, chalkboards, and the like. Didn’t look like anybody had set foot inside in a decade. Another building was a factory, and that’s where things got a little weird. The factory, back in the day, it seemed, had produced brooms, mops, scrub brushes, and other janitorial implements. The tracks through the dust on the floor made it clear the long-ignored building had been searched, recently. Every machine, the work benches, the conveyors, and even the storage racks were labeled with large, colored tags. The machines were all tagged red. The conveyors, yellow, and some specialty items were orange. Shelving was blue. No dust on the tags, no fading. Mint condition.

“What’s up with that?” asked Murphy.

I didn’t have a guess.

A support building housing the prison laundry and cafeteria contained similarly tagged pieces of equipment. Of note, while not being a huge surprise, not a scrap of food was left, though it was clear the erstwhile prison residents had been using the cafeteria facility as a dining hall.

In a separate facility, a small-scale cannery, the machinery was also tagged.

Murphy and I finally entered a dorm that didn’t smell of old death. It appeared to be the one where most of the residents lived. By counting beds and rooms, I put the total count of Lynaugh residents at sixty or seventy, at least twice the population I’d guessed. Again, we saw plenty of spent brass and blood smears, but not a single corpse.

We found a trio of petroleum storage tanks that looked large enough to hold thousands of gallons. It suggested the Lynaugh residents had also been trading grain and livestock for oil products from the small clans that maintained the pumpjacks around Midland and Odessa. I opened a spigot on a tank and a thin stream of diesel trickled onto the ground.

“The bastards stole the diesel,” guessed Murphy. “Do you think they brought a tanker truck with them?”

I didn’t want to say for sure, but that seemed to be the case. “Just how prepared were these raiders?”

Similarly, two small grain silos that looked to have been disassembled from nearby farms, moved inside the prison fence, and reconstructed, were empty. The rolls of hay inside a pole barn were each tagged.

It was when we entered a vehicle storage and maintenance facility that the tag system started to make sense. Inside, nearly thirty trucks and tractors were parked in neat rows. Each was labeled with a tag, half colored bright green—the first of those we’d seen. The others were marked in red and yellow, with only a few blacks. Doing a little research while Murphy looked on patiently, I discovered that the bright green tags were affixed to vehicles that seemed to run well. Red tags were attached to vehicles and tractors that ran rough. Black-tagged vehicles were under repair or were borderline junk.

“It’s a prioritization system,” I told Murphy.

He shrugged it off. “They were always a weird, standoffish bunch here.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You always say that when you feel like being contrary.”

“I don’t think these tags were being used by the people who lived here. I think—”

“Based on a half-assed guess.”

“No,” I argued. “Maybe if it was just the vehicles that were tagged, that might make some sort of sense. I think the raiders tagged this stuff.”

“And this is important to me, why?”

“They wouldn’t go to the trouble to prioritize the leftovers if they didn’t mean to come back later to collect them. It means the guys who raided this prison are coming back.”

“Or they couldn’t take it all with them because they got bigger game in their sights.”

I looked silently at Murphy, too numb to voice the guess he was getting at.

“Like Balmorhea, dumbass.”

22

Reassessing my risk matrix—so many years after the fall, the stink of corporate blabber-speak still found its way into my thoughts—I pushed the armored Humvee to give me all the speed it could muster, near fifty miles an hour. I-10’s desolate stretches passed under the hum of our off-road tires. Overhead, legions of fat, gray clouds paraded south. A nasty cold front was blowing down out of Canada, blasting sheets of sand across the road in front of us. It was going to be a cold night. Maybe wet. Maybe snowy.

Futzing with the radio, Murphy said, “I still can’t raise Bal.”

In response, I glanced at the sky. Tumultuous weather tended to play havoc with our signals.

He looked up and scanned for dangers. “How far?”

“Another fifteen minutes to the exit.”

Murphy turned his attention back to the radio. Balmorhea needed to know what we knew. What we suspected. ‘Feared’ was probably a better word. Either way, they needed to know it sooner than later.

“Try again in a few,” I told him. He nodded, understanding my thoughts.

Murphy looked left and then right. He checked his rifle without glancing down, and he scrutinized the road ahead. For whatever reason, a quirk of geology, wind patterns changing the soil composition, or subterranean moisture content levels, thorny huisache trees grew thick along the path of the highway for the next few miles, reducing how far I could see left and right. That section of I-10 always made me nervous.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” mused Murphy.

“Preacher Dick?” I asked. “The drone assholes? Lyle, and now Lynaugh?”

“‘Zactly.”

“The pieces don’t puzzle up into a cohesive picture.”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Murphy tried the radio again. Nothing but static. “Lyle said they were Whites. Dude didn’t seem like he was lying. I mean, why lie about getting attacked by Whites? Unless, what if Lyle was in on it?”

“You’re just pulling guesses straight out of your ass,” I told him.

“What if Lyle saw an opportunity when these shitheads showed up outside his door.”

“You think he stood by while they came in and killed his friends, and then decided to be their bitch? I don’t see it.”

“What if the new shitheads didn’t kill all of Lyle’s people?” Murphy looked down the road behind us, and then checked our flanks again. “What if they were all taken prisoner?”

“What for?”

“Doesn’t matter. All those people from Lynaugh are gone. Not just the people who lived there, but whatever marauders got killed raiding the place. Who does that? Whack jobs like those butt humpers we ran into out in Carlsbad, that’s who. I bet they did it. Some kind of freaky religious thing.”

“But Preacher Dick hates Whites, right? We know that. That’s the reason his people killed Bonny.”

“The Walmart girl?”

“Yeah,” I reminded him. “Seems to me, the Carlsbad people and the Lynaugh people would join forces and come after us, instead of fighting each other.”

“I could see that.”

“Except it doesn’t explain the Whites who overran Lyle’s place.”

“Unless Lyle is lying,” Murphy crowed. “Right?”

I shrugged. We weren’t doing anything but making jerkoff guesses we couldn’t prove one way or the other. Not while we were speeding down I-10, getting pelted by sand.

Murphy tried the radio again and received no response. He pounded the dashboard. “You think something happened? You think that’s why they’re not answering?”

We were maybe seven miles from our turnoff. “We’ll be there in—”

Tracer fire speared out of the stunted trees beside the highway, tearing into our engine compartment. Steam erupted from beneath the hood. Bullets pinged the Humvee’s armor, and one of the front tires blew. The rim hit the asphalt, careening us onto the shoulder.

I mashed the gas pedal to the floor as I struggled with the steering to keep us moving forward. Sprays of oil burst onto the windshield as our flat tire flew to pieces. The bare rim dug into the dirt, and the Humvee rolled onto its side, sliding into the ditch.

23

Steam poured out of the Humvee’s engine compartment. Cooling steel popped. Smoked roiled out through the open doors. I’d started that fire myself. I was shivering on a buzz of adrenaline overload—a natural result of being ambushed and crashing into the dirt—but I wasn’t so addled by intensity and surprise that I couldn’t think fast and clear.

Panting from my hiding place in the thorny scrub, my body bruised and gashed, I peered into the haze of sand blowing across the desert. The distance faded to orange and gray uniformity so near I could barely see fifty feet. A heavy diesel engine rattled out there somewhere, drawing close as fat tires crunched over the aging asphalt. I focused on steadying my hands and slowing my breathing. If me and Murphy were going to survive what was coming, I couldn’t afford to be impaired by primal reflexes.

The Molotovs inside the Humvee detonated from the heat. Fire and black smoke billowed up through the open doors.

I checked my gear, a mantra, in its way, that helped find my calm whenever mayhem was in the offing. I gripped my machete, just to make sure it was still in its scabbard on my back. I checked my shotgun—a sawed-off, double-barrel antique I could reload in a heartbeat with eyes closed and fingers half-frozen. A knife, pistol, and backpack with my survival gear. Some pocket napes that survived the crash.

Booted feet hit the pavement, hurrying, but not running. Voices carried on the gritty wind, men shouting in that brusk way they do when they’re ginning up their courage.

Rounds started to cook off in the fire.

I jumped to my feet, crouching in the tarbushes, hurrying away from the flames, homing in on the rattle of the idling diesel.

A shadowy man shouted commands.

Thorns tore my skin.

A dark silhouette grew out of the dirty orange haze, angular and brutal. It looked military, and it felt familiar, if only because it was black. It was a Stryker, a recycled Army APC from dirty, dead Carlsbad. Tortured Bonny hanging nude on the Walmart wall. Holding my hand while she wheezed, and me sitting there helpless and awkward, without any of the right words to comfort her pain. And then she died.

I needed to kill some motherfuckers.

Leaving my weapons holstered and my machete sheathed, I yanked the arming wires on my two pocket napalms and bolted through the desert scrub and blowing sand. With the fire roaring in the Humvee, and Preacher Dick’s militiamen focused forward, I reached a flanking position without being seen.

From behind, the Stryker’s big engine seemed to idle louder than anywhere else. Plenty loud to hide the sound of my running feet. I spotted a guy standing out through the top hatch, hands on a big machine gun, looking the other way, ready to support his comrades out front. Likely, the guilty bastard who’d shredded my Humvee. I hurled a bottle at him, knowing it only had to land close. It hit him square between the shoulder blades and detonated, dousing him with a jellied petroleum mix that burst into flames an instant later. He screamed and dropped down through his open hatch.

I jumped onto the back of the Stryker and climbed onto the roof, bounding up its length in a flash. The engine revved and the massive vehicle lurched forward just as I reached the flaming hatch. I heaved another pocket nape through, not caring what it hit inside, only that it detonated there.

Rifle fire erupted around the Humvee—Murphy was going to work.

Not wanting to risk a leap from the top of the rolling Stryker to the hard asphalt ten feet below, I scrambled down the side. Once on the ground, I sprinted toward the glow of the burning Humvee, estimating the geometry in my head as I went. I needed to keep the bulk of the wreck between me and where I knew Murphy was hiding—at least where he’d been at the beginning of the ambush. If I was going to get shot, I didn’t want it to be my buddy’s bullet that hit me.

Out of the orange haze, the flaming Humvee took shape. I spotted soldiers, two down, one crouching by the rear bumper, working his nerve up to try for a shot. He had tunnel vision for danger in front of him and didn’t hear me coming until I was close enough to blast him with my shotgun. From on the other side of the Humvee, three fast shots popped off, and then nothing moved except the sand in the air.

Rounds still cooked off inside the Humvee. The Stryker rolled slowly off the road as something inside it exploded, followed by a firecracker string of bangs.

“Zed,” called Murphy.

Panting from my effort, I looked around for more bad guys. “I don’t know how many there are.”

“I got three.”

“I nailed one by the bumper.”

“I thought that was a cannon I heard. I’m coming to you. Don’t shoot me.”

Beneath the thick, black smoke rising into the sky, I put my back to the Humvee and scanned for enemies.

Murphy ran up and took a position beside me, glancing back at the burning Stryker, which had rolled to a stop. “Anybody get out of that?”

“If they didn’t, they’re dead now.”

Murphy laughed. “We gotta check.” He dashed for the Stryker, angling to the side on our left.

I raced to the other side, meeting him at the rear. The armored back door there was open, exposing an inferno inside. Down the road, two bodies lay on the asphalt, burning. No chance they were alive. We spent the next half-hour searching the area for survivors and came up empty. That left us standing beside the road as the wind grew colder and smoke blew south. Balmorhea lay nine, maybe ten miles away, if we followed the road. Perhaps as little as seven, cross-country. The choice didn’t merit even a single word of discussion. Trouble was on its way to Balmorhea, and we had to warn them. We checked the gear we each intended to carry, utility versus weight, and jogged into the desert.

24

Three hills poked out of the featureless plain near Balmorhea. One stood a quarter mile due east, one, a half-mile south. Between, but a little farther east, sat the third, rising up from the shore of the town’s little lake. With me following behind, doing my best to keep the pace, that’s the hill we headed for when we heard the faint boom of a distant explosion followed by the glow of a fire on the bellies of the clouds. It was well past dark. Snow blew in sideways flurries as the temperature dropped below freezing.

“Something’s happening in town,” Murphy panted, as he slowed to a walk to catch his breath. He pointed to the northernmost hill. “Unless Preacher Dick is a dumbass, he’ll have some people up there, spotting and keeping a lookout.”

“Not that it’ll do him any good, now that it’s dark.”

“He might have NVGs that still work.”

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. I couldn’t argue.

Murphy’s gaze fell on the hill farthest east of town. “That’s our best bet if we want to see what’s going on.”

“My bet is they’re shelling Bal,” I brilliantly deduced, “and the reason they set up that ambush back on the highway is because they didn’t want anybody with an armored Humvee and a big machine gun driving up their ass while they were looking the other way. I say go to that northern hill, kill whoever’s up there, and then go commando at their flank.”

“Just the two of us, with no intel?”

“You and me can do a lot of damage, Murphy. You know that’s true. We’ll do what we can and skedaddle before anybody figures out we’re there.”

“And if Preacher Dick’s people aren’t a bunch of Bullwinkles and they do have NVGs and—” Murphy had an epiphany. “Didn’t you say those drones came equipped with night vision features?” He scanned the sky as if he could see anything up there in the blowing snow. “They could be watching us right now.”

“Not in this weather.” I felt pretty safe with that guess. “With all this snow and sand in the air, erratic wind…even if they had a whole fleet of drones up there watching the desert for incoming threats, there’s just too much desert. They’d only find us by luck.”

“And if they have people on the backside of that hill, wearing NVG’s and waiting to ambush any morons coming to the rescue.”

“Whatever.” I didn’t want to play the speculation game anymore. I needed to get moving to keep my anger and worries at bay. “Take us in, Ghost Rider.”

25

We burned through an hour of precious time following an arroyo down to the lake and then working our way up an erosion ditch that snaked all over the eastern slope of the hill. During the trek, we didn’t hear any more explosions from Balmorhea, and the fire that illuminated the night had died to sporadic flickers. It still lit the clouds and much of the desert around, but not steadily. In the blackness between, Murphy and I stumbled on unseen hazards. Luckily, the wind rustling the scrubby desert plants concealed the noise.

Just down from the hill’s ragged crest, I pointed out a gap between a pair of large rock mounds. “That’ll be a good place to see what we can see and maybe get out of this wind for a minute.”

“Extra careful,” Murphy told me. “If anyone is up top, we don’t want to give ourselves away.” Enough said. He trudged slowly forward, weapon up, ready to shoot, taking all the time he needed to stay silent. I followed, matching Murphy’s slow pace.

Twenty downhill paces from the gap, Murphy stopped cold. As though we were Siamese twins, I froze in place. He was staring, trying to discern something out of the dark, his danger hackles up.

Creeping out of the ditch to put some lateral distance between us, I slipped silently behind a sprawling cactus. My position gave me an alternate perspective on the spot that had Murphy concerned. And then, just as Murphy was doing, I waited. It took the patience of a minute, maybe two, before I saw something move in the gap between the rocks. When the Balmorhea fire flared a brighter orange glow on the clouds, the danger clarified. The black silhouette became a head—no, two heads, right at the crest. More of Preacher Dick’s wannabe soldiers, doing a piss-poor job at it, leaving their rumps exposed.

Murphy signaled that he saw them, too. Another few hand signals solidified our plan. We’d try and capture one, and if our luck held, both. If not, we’d kill them. And, because I have a terrible tendency to overthink when I have too much time, my mind ran through another handful of permutations, none of which were to my liking.

Murphy gave me a few minutes to work my way across the hill so I could sneak in close using the rock mound to our right as cover. He moved at a snail’s pace, coming directly up behind them.

Finally in position, I peeked around a hunk of stone the size of a Volkswagen and saw the pair lying on their bellies, clearly outlined against the pale ground. “Freeze!” I barked. “Move and you die.”

Neither of the targets moved. One said, “We surrender.”

I stepped out from behind the big rock, machete in one hand, sawed-off shotgun in the other. Cautiously stepping in close, I put the edge of my blade on the side of one’s neck, and barrel of my shotgun on the back of the other’s. “Very slowly. I mean very, very slowly, you on the right, move your right hand out and put it behind your back.”

“Zed? Is that you?”

“Say what?”

“It’s me, Grace.”

26

Houses blazed down in Balmorhea. They looked to be all on the same block. It was hard to tell with the distance, the darkness, and the blowing snow. Grace, however, assured us that the situation was static. We huddled in the lee of the rock mound—me, Murphy, Jazz, and Grace. We were just barely able to make out one another’s faces in the shadow behind the hill.

I figured I’d start. “What’s the deal?”

Grace related that they’d been staked out on Highway 17 in Verhalen. Well aware of the possibility of drone surveillance, they’d parked the truck inside a deteriorating Quonset hut, and were keeping themselves out of sight as they watched the road coming down from the north. Three assault vehicles, black like the ones that chased us out of Carlsbad, meandered toward them from different directions. Grace realized their position was known and that Preacher Dick’s scabs were trying to encircle them. Whether to capture or kill, neither wanted to find out. They jumped in their truck and raced away. To be extra careful, they didn’t run a straight shot down Highway 17, they headed east, on what they hoped would be an unexpected escape route. Two vehicles gave chase but didn’t open fire. Grace and Jazz spent the rest of the day trying to evade them. It wasn’t until nightfall that they finally lost their pursuers. By then, Preacher Dick’s militia had taken up positions around Balmorhea, so Grace parked their truck in a gulley a mile east of the hill.

“We hit an ambush back up the road,” Murphy told them.

“We’ve been hiking this way ever since,” I added.

Grace laughed. “What were you—halfway to Fort Stockton?”

“Hiking?” asked Jazz.

Murphy gave them the quick rundown, then said, “We got houses burning in Bal. What’s the situation?”

Jazz spat. “Naive Ortega.”

Murphy shared a knowing look with me as he asked Jazz, “Elaborate?”

“She shut down comms with the scout units.” Jazz flipped an enthusiastic bird in the direction of Balmorhea.

“Why?” I asked.

“She thinks they’re compromised,” Jazz snorted.

“Out of her depth.” Murphy shook his head. “Everybody knows the radios are encrypted.” One of the advantages of using military hardware. “Didn’t Dalhover tell her you need to use the code to listen in?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Grace told us. “We haven’t received a message out of Bal since this afternoon. Before that, one of the scouts radioed that Preacher Dick had nabbed somebody and extracted our comm protocols. Now nobody’s talking. Nobody wants to give anything away.”

“Do we know how many scout units are still out?” I asked.

Jazz shook her head.

My other concern. “Do we know if the others were attacked?”

“How many drones to they have?” Murphy wasn’t looking for an answer or a guess, he was just expressing his frustration that we were behind the curve on tech.

Grace pointed toward the northern hill. “What we know is this—there’s an armored vehicle on the western slope looking down on Bal. Not hiding. Sitting out there, plain as day.”

“Or night,” Murphy laughed nervously, but none of us shared his humor.

“I think they have people up in the rocks on the crest,” added Grace.

“We saw some movement,” added Jazz. “It’s hard to tell.”

Grace nodded to the southwest. “They have a truck over there. Camper on the back. Hillbilly gun mount welded to the roll bar. Same deal as the other hill, right out in the open. Sitting at the peak.” That hill didn’t reach as high as the other two. It wasn’t rocky, but smooth over the crest and all up and down its gentle slopes. “They want Bal to know they’re up there. They have three armored vehicles parked out on 17, facing the main gate. We had some lightning earlier and we got some glimpses. One might be a tank.”

Murphy cursed. “Nobody’s got tanks anymore. It practically takes a whole platoon just to keep one running. Maintenance. Support. Spare parts. Ammo.” He shook his head.

“Like I said.” Grace shrugged. “I only got a glimpse. All I can tell for sure is it’s military. Three armored vehicles with big guns, all aimed at the front gate.”

“And firing,” I guessed.

“Yeah, well that’s that thing,” she responded. “It’s not those tanks or whatever doing the shooting.”

“Who is?” asked Murphy.

“Can’t say,” answered Grace. “We saw a few explosions a while back. They caused the fires.”

“We didn’t see any muzzle flashes,” added Jazz. “No rockets. Nothing.”

“Mortars?” I asked, looking at Murphy. “With incendiary rounds? How far could they be?”

“A mile,” Murphy guessed. “A little more. Depends on the type of weapon and the type of round. The skill of the crew.” He looked at Jazz and Grace. “The rounds hit those three houses?”

“All pretty close to there,” answered Jazz. “Only one hit a house, and that caught the other two on fire.”

“After that,” added Grace, “they stopped firing.”

Focused on Murphy, because I knew he’d know, I asked, “Any way to locate the mortars in the dark?”

“Luck,” Murphy scoffed.

“They’re not trying to destroy Balmorhea,” suggested Grace. “They’re trying to intimidate us into surrendering.”

I had an alternative opinion. “Perhaps they don’t think they can conquer us outright. Maybe that’s why they want us to surrender. Or they don’t want to suffer the losses from mounting a frontal attack.”

“They have a tank,” Murphy argued. “We don’t have anything that can stop a tank.”

“Maybe they don’t want to kill more of us than necessary,” Jazz optimistically suggested.

I didn’t think their motives had anything to do with preserving our lives. They’d made that clear enough already.

Unsure what to do, Murphy asked me, “What’s the plan, Batman?”

My plan was the same one I’d started with. “We’re armed. We’re experienced. We’ve got home-field advantage, and the weather to keep us hidden. I say we start working our way around the perimeter, killing whoever we come across.”

27

“Wait,” argued Jazz. “We’re just going to attack them?”

“Yeah.” The choice seemed obvious. “If they had a force large enough to overwhelm us, they’d have attacked already. The more we can thin them out the—”

“No,” Jazz told me. “Everything can’t be shoot first. Not every single time.”

I started to retort but Murphy laughed, and said, “He’s going to give you a speech.”

“I’m not.” I was. But then I decided I wasn’t. “We’ve all made it fourteen years because we understand what the world is like now.”

“Maybe it’s that way,” argued Jazz, “because we—I don’t just mean just us right here, I mean all of us who are still alive—have made it that way.”

“And the hillbillies who ambushed us?” I argued back. “And those people we found in Carlsbad? They were Slow Burns just like us. Preacher Dick and his shithead militia killed them for that. Just for that. He lured us into a trap so they could come here and do whatever this is.”

“Maybe they don’t know we’re good people, despite what the virus did to us,” argued Jazz. “Nobody ever gets it until they finally talk to us and see we’re just as normal as they are.”

“Or they don’t accept us anyway,” I shot back. “This isn’t new, people killing people because they’re different.”

“Just because it’s always been like that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change.” Jazz turned to Grace for support.

I couldn’t help but turn to her, too, and I didn’t like the uncertainty I saw. “You’re with Jazz on this?”

Grace slipped into the mediator role. “We talk a lot about this kind of stuff when we’re out on the road. Maybe it is time we start trying to build a better world.”

“We did build a better world.” I pointed down to Balmorhea, illuminated in the fires still burning. “These assholes are here to destroy it.”

“We don’t know that,” pushed Jazz.

“You can see the fires, right?” I was angry, but trying hard to contain it. “You see the siege, right? This is where we live. Where all of our friends live. You see that, right, sunshine?”

“Zed,” Grace was disappointed in me, “you don’t need to be an asshole to make your case.”

I disagreed. “Some of our friends are probably dead right now because of what these shitheads are doing.”

“And you killed some of theirs, too,” argued Jazz.

“They shot first!”

Grace put a hand on my shoulder, forcing me through kindness to give her my attention. I hated when women did that. I felt so manipulated.

“They’ve lived in the same world we have, Zed.” Grace meant the Carlsbad hillbillies, only she was much to kind to say that. “Maybe we have a chance to deescalate this. You said yourself, they don’t have enough force to overwhelm us, so maybe they’ll back off before it comes to an all-out fight. Maybe they’re here to negotiate and don’t know how to do it without a little intimidation to start with. Maybe this is the hard step that people have to take when they want to build a better world. Maybe there’ll be a lot more steps, but maybe this is what it is. Maybe this is what it feels like to initiate huge change. Kind of crappy. Maybe that’s why building a better, more just world has always been too hard to make happen.”

Murphy bellowed a big laugh.

I glared at him.

“You just got out-Professored.”

28

After sneaking through the wind and snow for forty minutes, we reached the goat pastures south of town. From there, we sloshed several hundred yards through the mud and frigid water of an irrigation ditch to reach Balmorhea’s outermost perimeter defense: another ditch. Only, to call it a ditch didn’t do it justice. Using earth moving machines we’d scavenged out of a quarry twenty miles north, our excavation crew had spent months cutting a dry moat in a rough circle around Balmorhea. The outer edge of the moat created a ten-foot drop off, straight down. The inner side of the moat sloped gently up toward the palisade. The design, it was hoped, and had worked out as such, was to create an impediment for any horde of Whites that might make a charge at our little town. They’d race across the desert, rabid and crazed, and tumble right into the drop off. Some would be injured. Those that weren’t hurt were, for the moment, stunned, or at least brought to a stop, so that the defenders manning the wall could then shoot them.

Any Whites that made it past the ditch found themselves in a barbed-wire trap. We’d scavenged miles of wire from fences in the area and created mazes to confuse and slow attacking Whites. We created funnels, to guide attackers toward strong points in our outer wall, fortified towers where we had machine guns mounted, though the wall itself wasn’t by any means weak.

Using the dirt and rock dug up to create the moat, we built a berm that completely encircled the town. Atop that berm, we built a ten-foot wall, clad in sheets of tin that overlapped like shingles on a roof. It provided no handholds for attacking Whites. It was impossible to scale without a ladder or rope. In total, the berm and wall stood twenty feet tall. A wall walk ran the entire interior circumference, so shooters could line up anywhere to defend the city.

The structure had taken years to build, and not a single White had set foot inside Balmorhea since its completion. Unfortunately, I started to think our success had a lot to do with luck—luck that we hadn’t been tried by normals, given that Murphy, Jazz, Grace, and me moved through the depth of the defenses unmolested and undetected until I pounded on the sally port door at the base of tower seven and asked them to let us in.

29

Murphy, Jazz, and Grace hustled off to find Dalhover. With an attack imminent, they all had responsibilities, and Dalhover would be at the center of our command structure. Knowing I was wrong for not going with them, knowing I was shirking my responsibility, I chose to accept whatever reaming Dalhover would eventually grant me. I’d deserve it. I’d take it. But I had to find Steph first, so, of course, I headed for the hospital.

It wasn’t a large facility. It didn’t have to be. The hospital operated out of a part of the high school and served only our community and the few hundred people who lived within a day’s drive. As I passed the full rooms, and saw the wounded lying on cots in the hall, I sensed an antipathy from them, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I wondered how much of that was me misreading their pain and worry, how much was because my anger over the situation was looking for a target.

I found Steph squatting in the hall, leaning against a wall, taking a rest. I croaked, “Hey.”

Her eyes welled with emotion as she hopped to her feet and wrapped me in her arms.

I squeezed her so hard, I let up for fear she might break. I whispered, “Murphy told me.”

“Oh, that?” she sobbed.

We held each other for a time that seemed to last for eternity, yet still felt too short. She let go of me, wiping her eyes, and pulling her composure together as she looked up and down the hall. She had to be strong for the injured, for me, for everyone. That was just her way. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”

“Like that was even a possibility.”

“The Mighty Null Spot.” She tried to laugh.

I smiled, and let it go. “You should sit down. Let me find you a chair or something.”

“No,” she told me. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Exactly what you’re doing right now. Treating me like…like I’m fragile.” She took my hand and squeezed it, gathered her emotions into a tight ball again, and said, “Thank you for coming to find me.”

I glanced at those up the hall. “What happened?”

“They rolled down Highway 17 with a tank, Zed.”

Highway 17 ran right through Balmorhea. Our town’s main gate blocked that two-lane road. Our southern gate blocked the road again where it exited town. Our defenses weren’t built to defend against tanks. Well, the perimeter ditch would function as a tank trap, but no tank needed to cross it. Nearly everything ever put on tracks and sent into war carried weaponry capable of razing Balmorhea from the other side of it.

Steph said, “It was an M1, an Abrams, the kind they used to—”

“Yeah, I know what they look like. How does anybody have the infrastructure to support tanks so long after the collapse?”

“Not tanks. Just the one.” It seemed as though a weight settled onto Steph’s shoulders. “It was enough.”

“Did it do this?”

“They showed up a few hours after you and Murphy left. After all the scouts went out.”

My anger flared. Murphy and I used an armored Humvee with a machine gun mounted on top, same as most of the other scouts. Those vehicles represented nearly all of Balmorhea’s mobile firepower. Worst of all, none of us had spotted Preacher Dick’s force, even though they had to have been close. It didn’t seem possible, but then again, they had drones to monitor our movements. They could stay a step ahead of us no matter what we did.

“The tank parked a quarter mile up the road,” said Steph, “just idling for—I don’t know, fifteen minutes, a half-hour—while Humvees and APCs encircled the town.”

“What did Ortega do while all of this was going on?”

Steph shook her head, and that told me a lot. Nothing specific, but plenty. “Without any warning at all, the tank started firing. It took out the tower adjacent to the gate. Exploded. Gone. After that, it blew the gate to pieces and then it charged in, machine guns firing at anyone stupid enough not to run away.”

Looking for a hint of hope, I asked, “How did you stop it?”

“We didn’t. It halted a block or so inside and fired three rounds into city hall, destroying the building. While everyone here was still too shell-shocked to react, it turned and roared out the way it came.”

“That’s why we never received a call about this.” It was an easy deduction. Our radio communication center took up a large room in the back of the old city hall building. “Besides taking out our comms, what was the point? Assholes doing a drive-by with their tank?”

“I was here, at the hospital by then,” Steph told me, “helping with the wounded. They said, about the time things settled down inside, one of those armored vehicles drove up and parked beside the tank down the road. Somebody with a bullhorn instructed us to send out representatives to listen to their demands.”

“Food? Fuel? All this for a robbery?”

“More than that. That preacher named Richard, out of Albuquerque, these are his people.”

“The Carlsbad bunch.” There it was. Confirmation. I wanted to punch myself in the face. “We led them here.”

“They want you and the other Slow Burns,” Steph told me. “Preacher Dick has his people convinced they’re on a mission from God. Zed, some of the people in Bal want to hand you over.”

30

Over my selfish objections, Steph stiffened her spine and told me she had to get back to work. While Balmorhea’s meager medical system was the envy of the western desert, it was bending under the stress of so many wounded. She grabbed two handfuls of my jacket and pulled me in close. “You listen to me, Zed. When you leave the hospital, you need—”

“Who says I’m leaving?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I know you’re not going to stay here and dote over me. You’re either going to be part of our response to this attack, or…” Steph choked on her words. Her eyes locked on mine. “I think I never really understood until now.”

“The bigotry?”

She lowered her voice and glanced to the sides, checking for anyone who might be too interested in what she had to say. “I thought we didn’t have any of that here. I thought what we’d built was better than that.”

I didn’t respond. It had been years since she and I had talked—argued—about the underlying hatred of my kind. The surviving normals never forgot. They never forgave. Whenever they looked at me with unguarded eyes, I saw it there. Despite the glad-handed smiles and hearty thank-yous, despite all the times we’d shared meals at the same tables, fought to defend the same walls from hordes of evil marauders coming out of the desert, to them, I was barely different from the white-skinned monsters that killed their family and friends all those years ago. To them, I was the crazy-eyed pit bull barking behind the fence, keeping the burglars out. I seemed friendly enough, but they never really trusted me.

And that’s just the way the world was. Maybe the way it had always been.

“Find Murphy and Grace,” she told me. “You stick with them. Do whatever they do. You hear me?”

Shaking my head, I told her no.

“Don’t be contrary. Not right now. People are angry, and they’re afraid. They aren’t rational. You never respond well to that kind of behavior. The crazy side of Null Spot comes out when people are like that. So, promise me Zed, you will find Murphy and Grace. Stick with them and don’t argue. They’ll make better choices than you will.”

I understood as much as I needed to understand. “Fine. I’m on my way. But just so you know, I won’t leave Balmorhea without you, if that’s where you’re going with this.” And that was that. I knew, for the moment, Steph wasn’t going to be negotiated with, but neither was I.

“Go.” She pushed me in the direction of the door. “I love you.”

I squeezed her ass. “Me too.”

“You’re such a pig.”

“I know.”

31

Marching up the hall, feeling a growing animosity to everyone I passed, I ran through my mental checklist as I physically inventoried my weapons and ammo—shotgun, shells (a little low), machete, knife, no hand grenades, not even the homemade jobs. I wore thick socks, long pants, and a warm jacket. I had my survival bag on my back, having carried it across the desert from where we’d been ambushed. I could go over the wall at a moment’s notice and never look back.

Except for Steph.

And my friends.

I knew Murphy, Dalhover, Grace, Jazz, and a handful of others would stand by me no matter what. Just as I would stand by them. We’d bleed and die for one another. How many others in Balmorhea could I say that about? I’d certainly risked my life for all of them at one time or another; how many would do the same for me? How many were scheming at the moment to hand me and the other Slow Burns over to Preacher Dick?

I slammed the door open as I exited the high school. A snowy wind blasted me in the face, biting deep into my anger. I cursed at it, wanting something on which to target my rage. Steph was right about me not coming back to Balmorhea. I should have stayed out in the winter storm, murdering our attackers one by one as they shivered in their APCs.

Could I still go do that?

I didn’t know what time it was, so I had no idea how much night I had left.

Mayhem didn’t require darkness, but against a mechanized enemy, it would surely help. I looked ahead into the dark, and saw Murphy crossing the street toward me. He said, “Dude, c’mon. They’re having a meeting to talk about this crap. We need to be there.”

32

I hurried to keep up with Murphy and his silent agitation. “Where are Grace and Jazz?”

“Gathering the others,” he answered.

“The Slow Burns?”

“So, you heard?”

“Steph told me this Albuquerque nutjob wants our skins.”

“You don’t seem too pissed about it.”

“I’m a little riled up.” An understatement. “About a couple things, at least.”

Murphy looked me up and down while chuckling through his simmering anger. “You’re not in Null Spot mode?”

“It’s not like I wear a cape.”

“It’s not like it isn’t obvious when you get in the mood to do that crazy shit you do.”

“I’m silently livid.”

“Because Ortega and the cheese-dicks didn’t tell this Richard prick to suck it right off the bat?”

“Something like that.”

Murphy stopped in the driving snow and turned on me. “You wanna bail, man? Get the hell out of here? Let them deal with this on their own?” He was ready to explode—unusual for Murphy. “Man, after all the shit we’ve done for this place. For these people.”

I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to endure it, but I felt betrayed. Most of the people in Balmorhea had never had to make a hard choice or take a real risk, not since they homesteaded behind our walls. “Where are we going?”

“Old post office.”

Balmorhea’s post office was a small brick building with a low, flat roof, barely the size of a doublewide trailer, with few windows. Since it had been a government building before the collapse, the town informally inherited it as one of its municipal buildings. That’s why no one had ever put it to use as a residence, though the town had never used it for much, either. It was, however, a reasonably secure place for low-key council meetings.

Four men were huddled outside the front door when Murphy and I walked up. It was readily apparent that they weren’t loitering, but doing an undisciplined job of guarding the entrance. All were armed.

Murphy stomped forward like they weren’t there.

One of them—Nate Porzingas was his name, a guy I didn’t know well—stepped in front of Murphy. “Tensions being what they are right now. No weapons inside. You’ll hafta—”

Murphy punched Porzingas in the chest, knocking him to the ground. The others stepped back, and Murphy flung the door open.

Snow blew in with us as we stepped inside a room that crackled with tension and reeked of sweat. The seven members of the town council, including Dalhover, sat around a table in the center of the room. Sixteen others leaned against the walls. All fell silent as their eyes settled on us. They weren’t used to seeing Murphy and me decked out for war, bristling with weapons, exactly the way we always looked when we were outside the wall, doing what we did most every day.

Into the silence, Murphy bellowed, “We havin’ a meetin’ about what to do with the Slow Burns?”

Mayor Ortega very naturally moved to defuse the tension. “Murphy, would you close the door, please?”

Murphy didn’t budge, he just glared down at the council members.

I pulled the door shut.

Dalhover spoke up. “No one is throwing you under the bus.”

Murphy asked, “Then what’s going on, Top?”

“We’re weighing our options,” answered Ortega. “We have a sit-down scheduled out on the road in front of the main gate at midnight.”

“Kinda dramatic,” I scoffed.

She scowled. “We need to decide how to respond.”

“What’s there to decide?” I’d already thought through the short list of possibilities on the walk over. None of them were good. “We fight. All-out offensive. Right now. Tonight, while it’s still dark and the storm is still blowing.”

“They have a tank,” some guy named Omar, standing by the wall, whined. “If you two hadn’t spent the whole day chasing your dicks around the desert, you’d—”

A volcano of visceral anger in my glare shut him down mid-sentence, leaving plenty of room for me to tell him, “You didn’t complain when we found you and Garrett half-dead out in the desert south of Odessa. What was that, eight years back?”

“And now you’ve got a wife, and a—” Dalhover stopped himself. He had started to say, wife and child, but the child had died before its first birthday. “You have a home and a life. We all do, because we worked together to build Balmorhea from a ghost town into what it is today.”

“Sounds to me,” Murphy fixed his stare on Ortega, “like the question of what to do with us isn’t yet settled.”

“Doesn’t matter whether it’s settled,” rasped Dalhover, daring anyone to contradict him. “Turning you guys over to those jackasses outside isn’t going to happen. It’s not worth considering. It’s not open for discussion.”

“And if they kill us all?” asked a woman who stood in a shadowy corner. “What then?”

“What if we bug out?” someone suggested. “We have the vehicles. All gassed up. Supplies stocked. We drill for this scenario, right? Bug out at a moment’s notice. We can be two hundred miles from here by sunup. All of us.”

Glances and whispers were shared around the room, though I could tell they’d already talked about it before Murphy and I had arrived. The idea wasn’t popular. Bugging out was a last-resort option, but one we’d been prepared for in Balmorhea since day one. It had been an easy sell in the early years, investing the time and resources into an escape plan. Back then we were still in flight mode, and we would have gotten out with little heartache. Now, well, we were settled in. If only communities everywhere’d had a well-maintained bug-out plan and the foresight to implement it when the virus first started to spread, we might not be so devastated now, nearly a generation later.

The problem facing us that night, was we barely had a week’s worth of food and water stocked in the vehicles because we’d prepared for a specific kind of danger—a horde of Whites so large they’d overwhelm our defenses and overrun Balmorhea. The thinking was that if such a horde showed up, we could use our trucks to escape into the desert, returning when the Whites moved on. We’d absorb the loss of our livestock, and the trashing of our homes, but our ever-overflowing grain silos would survive intact. We’d rebuilt the houses and herds before, we could do it again.

Unfortunately, if we ran away, there’d be nothing to stop Preacher Dick from moving into our abandoned town. Never to leave. That would strand the four hundred of us out in the desert at the beginning of winter without enough of anything to survive. Back to square one.

“What about that Lyle fellow’s farm?” asked a fat man. “What about what Lynaugh prison? These guys overran that place in one night.”

I told them, “Something about Lynaugh doesn’t make sense. So, I don’t—”

“We negotiate,” Ortega announced. “We sit down with them at midnight and we talk with them. Not every action requires a violent reaction. What kind of world are we building for our children if violence is our solution to every problem?”

“What children?” someone sniped, poking at a question too frequently avoided around Balmorhea, where we had just twenty-seven school-age kids, despite the number of cohabitating, sexually active couples. And for whatever reason people are the way they are, our low fertility rate and high infant mortality rate always became the most urgent topic to discuss, whatever the current issue.

After an hour of redundant yammer, I stepped outside for some frigid fresh air and ambled out into the road. Porzingas, shivering behind vindictive eyes, kept his distance from me. People moved about, prepping fortifications, looking nervously into the darkness.

Murphy walked up beside me, looking up and down the street, and over at the wall. “Waste of time?”

I nodded. We’d had to attend the meeting. We’d had our fate decided by others one too many times for us not to involve ourselves. “Looks like everyone is as ready as they’re going to get.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“We’re wasting precious hours of night when we could be on the attack.”

“There’ll be plenty of time after.” Murphy looked up at the black sky. “All these snow clouds will keep it dark longer than normal in the morning.”

“I hope we’ll have enough time to go on the offensive.” I glanced back at the old post office. “It’s pretty clear what they’re talking themselves into. Ortega is going to march out there and sit down with Preacher Dick. She’s going to say, ‘can’t we all just get along?’ And all those boneheads are going to go along with her.”

“She’s the boss.” Murphy was as unhappy about it as I was. “Everybody in town knew what they were getting when they voted her in. It’s not like she tried to hide it.”

“Peace at all costs?”

“That’s an exaggeration and you know it,” countered Murphy.

“I know.” But I didn’t. I just didn’t want to argue.

“What are we gonna do? You, me, and the other Slow Burns?”

“I don’t know.” I started counting through shotgun shells with just my fingertips. Habit more than anything. “I’m afraid when Ortega’s peace fantasy blows up in her face, we’re the ones who’ll suffer for it. So, whatever goes down out there, we need to be part of it.”

33

Beneath a blanket of heavy clouds, I followed Mayor Ortega and the rest of the town council through Balmorhea’s destroyed front gate and up Highway 17. Miserable gusts blew grit and mist across the road. Patches of dirty snow splotched the desert around us. Ice crystals rattled on the cacti and scrub.

“I hate this weather.” Murphy didn’t expect a reply. He was just complaining.

I double-checked right and left; eight of Balmorhea’s armed militiamen walked with me and Murphy. That was the deal. We were headed up the road to powwow with this Richard jerkwad and the ground rules allowed for ten armed soldiers to look after the council. Keeping to his word— at least in theory—Richard sat alone at a table in the insufficient shelter of a row of beach canopies his people had erected across the road. Portable construction lights lit the area. Exposed to the weather. In a row behind the beach canopies, sixteen of Richard’s faithful stood, clad in shades of faded black, all armed, all doing their best to intimidate.

Far in the distance, barely visible in the misty dark, sat the tank. Menacing turbine engines whined just loud enough for us to hear. Ortega had insisted that the tank back off. A pointless gesture. With a skilled crew, its 120mm main gun could probably hit me between the eyes from two miles away. Unlike Ortega, I’d wanted it close, so close I could make a dash for it if things went south at the negotiating table. Dalhover had told me how to disable the thing with a hand grenade shoved into some kind of vent above the engine compartment. I was anxious to try.

“You’re doing that thing,” Murphy told me.

“What thing?”

“That snorting bull thing you do when you’re stewing.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care. You don’t think clearly when you’re pissed off. Chill yourself out or go back with the others and send Grace out here.”

Murphy was right. As usual. For the thousandth time. I was letting emotions—anger, specifically—get the better of me. I sighed my surrender.

Murphy glanced around, looking for threats. “You make your mental plan on how you’re going to kill every single one of these motherfuckers. And then you go over it again, and again. That’s how you control it. You plan, you keep the gerbil wheel in your head spinning on useful shit.”

“WWMD.”

“What?”

“You remember,” I explained, “What Would Murphy Do?”

“Well, Murphy grew up. Have you thought about doing that?”

“If you think you act your age then I’ve—”

Dalhover threw a scowl over his shoulder. “Pipe down and focus on your jobs, dipshits.”

Murphy chuckled.

Ortega and the others arrived at the negotiating table—a pair of plastic folding tables, lined up end-to-end. Terse pleasantries were exchanged. Everybody sat down. Preacher Dick on one side of the table, smug and solitary. He was a lanky man with a wispy beard, unkempt hippie hair, and big glasses, those kind with a tint that’s dark at the top and near transparent at the bottom. He wore jeans and an old Frank Zappa concert t-shirt with black baseball-jersey sleeves. He looked more like a stoner than a leader of anything. Across from him, Ortega centered our delegation. Me and the other bodyguards stood out in the weather.

Richard stretched his arm out, pointing at me while looking at Ortega with oddly unblinking eyes. Though it was hard to tell, through his glasses. “I see you brought two of them with you.”

“We’re all people,” started Ortega. “Survivors. Humans. We’re all—”

Richard raised his hands, palms out to stop Ortega. “Do you intend to inspire me into abandoning God’s mission with an appeal to my higher humanity?”

“Of course, I do,” she told him. “We’re all the same. You, me, all of us. We’re all in this together. We survived a catastrophe that killed most of the world’s population or turned them into ‘the infected.’ But that catastrophe isn’t over yet. Not by far. Millions, maybe billions of them are still out there.”

“Billions,” Richard told her confidently. “Millions just here in Texas.”

“Which is why we survivors need to work together.”

“To survive?” Richard toyed.

“Yes.” Ortega didn’t see it. She was on her soap box and getting wound up for some version of her happily ever after speech. “And to fight together, to take our world back.”

“To fight?”

“Yes,” Ortega’s voice belied her frustration. “Of course. To fight when we need to fight. You have a tank, for god’s sake. You know we have to fight, but not with each other.”

“With the infected, then?”

“Yes, damn you.”

“What about them?” Richard pointed at me and Murphy again. “They’re infected. Perverted minds. Abominations in the face of God. They’re products of the disease. They carry the disease. They are with them, the infected, not with us.”

“Don’t sit there and pretend you think they’re all the same,” Ortega told him. “You didn’t live this long thinking they were all just stupid monsters.”

“On the contrary, Mizz Mayor, I know more about their abhorrent nature than I’d wish on you in your worst nightmares.” Richard turned to one of the men behind him. “Bring Matilda up.”

The man turned and made a radio call. I couldn’t make out what was being said.

“And who is this Matilda person?” asked Ortega.

Richard, though, wasn’t about to surrender control by answering Ortega’s question. “Do you have many children in Balmorhea Mizz Mayor?”

I whispered to Murphy, “This guy really is a dick.”

“You have your drones up there spying on us,” Ortega told him. “I’m sure you already know that answer.”

“I know all I need to know. I’m just making conversation until Matilda gets here. What do you have—ten, twenty children in your whole colony?”

“More,” Ortega told him defiantly.

“But not much more. Right?” He scrutinized her for a moment. “I’m right. I can see it. Maybe thirty. Tell me, Mizz Mayor, is that normal? You have what, four hundred people here? Plenty of food. Fresh water. Safety. You’re thriving. But your community grows because it takes in survivors, not because you’re having children. Oh, wait. I should say, you’re not having normal children, are you?”

Ortega seemed to shrink in her seat.

“How many are stillborn?”

“You’re really going to sit there and pretend to care about our children after what your soldiers did? Bombing our houses, destroying the gate that protects our town. Do you have any idea how many good people you murdered? How many you put in the hospital?”

Richard waved it off. “Fog of war. Soldiers get overzealous. Mistakes happen. We intended no harm. We just needed to get your attention. Now tell me, how many of your babies are stillborn?”

Ortega remained silent.

“Half? More? With a population of normals this large, I’ll bet you could give the world a more accurate idea of infant mortality than the smaller groups we’ve dealt with. So, what, half?”

Ortega weakly said, “Stillborn babies aren’t just a problem happening here.”

“No, they’re not,” Richard agreed. “How many die before their first birthday?”

“Why are you playing this game with us? Do you get some perverse joy in talking about dying babies?”

Richard stiffened. “Oh, I assure you Mizz Mayor, this brings me no joy. None whatsoever. Tell me, what do you do with the ones who contract the virus and turn? The ones that don’t do you the favor of dying. Do you leave them in the desert for the coyotes, or do you kill them outright?”

That made everyone on our side uncomfortable, because everyone hated the solution we’d implemented. We all felt guilty, because what we did, no matter how merciful and painless, felt like murder.

I noticed a flatbed pickup creeping out of the mist toward us.

“I can see it in your face,” Richard told Ortega. “You do what you have to do. We live in a different world than the one we grew up in. A harsh, cruel world.” He waved a hand back at Balmorhea. “We try to create our private little sanctuaries, some of us even do well. I’ll bet Balmorhea has a bar, maybe a restaurant or two, even Saturday night hoedowns to make your desert illusion seem a little more like the world you lost. But the dead children? You can’t get away from that, can you? You can’t close your eyes to that atrocity. None of us can.”

On that note, Ortega found her defiance. “We do everything we can for the children who survive. Everything. We feed them. We house them. We educate them. We keep them safe. And we’ll keep them safe from you and your pitiful Army surplus militia.”

Richard laughed in a weird, sad way. “Oh, Mizz Mayor, it’s not me you need to protect your children from. The danger, the real danger, is right there.” He pointed his accusing finger at me.

34

The truck came to a stop thirty yards behind Richard’s protectors. It looked to have been some type of delivery vehicle back before the collapse, as it had a metal box built on the back. The paint on the sides was too flaked and faded to read.

Ortega ignored the truck, and told Richard, “We’re not surrendering any of our people to you no matter what kind of lies you have to tell.”

“You get many of the infected out here in the desert?”

“Fewer every year,” Ortega told him.

“They ever get over the wall? Terrorize the town?”

“None of the infected has breached the wall since we completed it.”

“My tank did alright,” Richard reminded her. “But that’s not my point. Do any of your people come into contact with the infected who attack you?”

“We deal with them and we dispose of the bodies.”

“You pick up their corpses and burn them?”

“Wearing masks and gloves,” answered Ortega. “We take all the necessary precautions against infection even though everyone here is most likely immune.”

“Except the newborns.”

“Some of them are.”

“But most of them still get the infection in the womb or on the teat. And they die. How do you suppose the infection finds them way out here in the desert with your people taking the ‘necessary safety precautions’ and all?” Richard didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll give you a hint. Two of the reasons are covered in white skin and they’re standing behind you.”

“Doubtful,” scoffed Ortega.

“Truthful,” Richard countered. “They’re your Typhoid Marys. And if you thought them being responsible for killing all your children was the worst of it, you’d be wrong.”

“Be cool,” Murphy whispered to me. “You’re snorting again.”

I took care to steady my breathing, but I wanted to draw my machete, leap over that cheap folding table, and bury my blade right where Richard parted his shaggy hippie hair.

“Those things,” Richard continued, “they’re not even human anymore.”

I laughed out loud, harshly, derisively. “What a load of shit.”

Dalhover jumped up from the table, pointing a finger at Richard while addressing Ortega. “I’ve heard about enough of this idiot’s drivel.”

Ortega told him, “Please sit down, Sergeant. Please.”

“Yes, please,” added Richard.

Dalhover snorted and sat back down. “Can we get to the point of all this bullshit?”

“Yes,” Ortega agreed. “Can we move on with something productive? You’ve got your armored fighting vehicles spread out in the desert around our town. You attacked us with your tank, and you’ve killed three of our residents. Why don’t you just tell us what you’re willing to settle for to go away? Fuel? Grain? Cattle? Just tell me and we’ll come to an agreement. We don’t wish to go to war, but I’ll have you know, you aren’t the first bandits that have threatened us. This isn’t the first time we’ve been attacked by the likes of you, and we—”

“The likes of me?” It was Richard’s turn to laugh loudly and rudely. “You’ve never seen the likes of me, my dear, and you never will again. I was sent here by the Lord our God to do His work.”

“Which is, specifically?” Ortega asked.

Richard’s finger pointed at me again. “To cleanse Eden and wipe their kind from the face of the earth.”

Dalhover scooted away from the table without a word and came back to stand between me and Murphy. Murphy handed him a rifle.

Ortega, though, wasn’t ready to give up. “As you said, the world is swarming with the infected. Billions of them. You can drive east on I-10 and in an hour you’ll be in Fort Stockton. There are enough of the feral infected there to keep you busy ‘cleansing’ God’s Garden of Eden for months without ever having to level your threats at the good, productive members of our community.”

Richard raised his arms as though he were a ringmaster at the circus, and barked, “Bring out Matilda.”

Everyone shushed while several of Richard’s men went to work unloading a vicious, infected woman from the box on the back of the truck. Though she struggled and snarled, they restrained her with animal control poles, cattle prods, and ropes around her neck. What’s more, she was at a further disadvantage. One of her feet was terribly malformed, and one of her arms had been severed above the wrist, leaving her with a single hand. Still, she was strong, and resisted the men as they dragged her forward. Inexplicably, two men unloaded a large cooler from the same truck and hauled it forward.

Richard stood and walked over just out of Matilda’s reach. “We captured Matilda ten years back.”

“You keep one for a pet?” Ortega was disgusted. “You should kill it.”

“You have pets,” Richard argued, looking at me and Murphy again. That’s when he pulled a long knife from a sheath on his hip, spun, and smashed Matilda in the head with the butt. She collapsed, unconscious. Then he horrified everyone by using his blade to hack through her good arm, just below the elbow. Before anyone on our side could think to do anything but gawk, Richard threw the rudely amputated arm on the table in front of Ortega. To her credit, she flinched, but didn’t react more drastically.

Into the silence, Richard told her, “That’s the third time I cut that arm off.” He pointed his bloody knife at Matilda’s limp body, flinging a splatter of blood across our entire delegation. “They regenerate. In seven or eight months, she’ll have another hand just like this one. Brand new. That’s not normal. That’s not human. That’s devil magic. That’s immortality.”

“Immortality?” Dalhover leveled his rifle at Matilda. “I can disabuse you of that lunacy in a heartbeat.”

“Sure, you can kill it,” said Richard. “They can all be killed. But in the absence of us killing them, these things,” He pointed at me again, “those things, they’ll live forever. They’ll take over this Garden of Eden God created for man and they’ll drive us into extinction.”

“Bullshit,” Murphy bellowed, as he looked at Richard’s armed followers. “You bunch of rube dumbasses never change, do you? Always gotta find some looney tunes motherfucker to sell you a bucket of stupid juice so you won’t have to think for yourselves.”

Richard motioned to his followers with the cooler. They walked up to the table and dumped its contents—ice, an eye-popping luxury outside of Balmorhea—a foot, and two severed arms, just like Matilda’s, only frozen solid. “There you go. Nobody ever believes until they see for themselves. Take ‘em back inside with you. Compare them. Check the fingerprints if you can. All perfect matches. All three the same arm. And you can see for yourself, that foot’s growing back.” Richard let that sink in for a moment before he said, “Now, get outta here. You go back to your basketball gym hospital and you talk amongst yourselves. When the light of God finally opens your eyes, and you see I’m speaking with his voice, I have no doubt you’ll do the right thing. You’ll give me these two abominations and any others you have hiding in there with you. Wolves in sheep’s clothing, that’s what they are. You’ll give ‘em to me at sunup, or by God, I’ll smite every man, woman, and child who stands against me and turn your desert pit of inequity into Sodom and Gomorrah.”

35

On the silent, stunned walk back toward the front gate, Dalhover squeezed between me and Murphy. “Find Grace, Jazz, and the other Slow Burns and—”

I said, “They’re at their muster station.”

“Goddammit, Zed. Can’t you just shut the hell up for once and listen? Once we’re through that gate, you find them, ASAP. Don’t run. Don’t make it look like a panic. Once word of Richard’s fake arm bullshit spreads, shit is going to get very ugly. Everyone is already on edge.” He looked up at Murphy. “You stay with him, you two together. Don’t leave his side, and don’t let him do anything stupid.”

Murphy said, “You can count on me, Top.”

“I know.” Dalhover turned back to me. “Find Steph. Have the Slow Burns gather their significant others. Ready your bug-out vehicles but don’t be obvious about it. If things go bad, they’ll go bad fast. When that happens, you’ll need to get out of town as quickly as possible.”

“Can I talk now?” I was snitty about it.

Dalhover spat a gob on the cracked pavement. “I thought you grew out of that pubescent petulance.”

“I’m hard-wired for it, Mr. Hand.”

“As you prove me right,” he agreed.

“If we make a run for it, are you coming with us?” I asked. “You should. I can name at least twenty people who will side with us against a mob. If it comes to that.”

“Living here all these years has made you soft and stupid,” growled Dalhover. “Stupider. You used to know better than to believe that kind of Mary Poppins drivel. People do for themselves. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it’ll always be.”

“I know you don’t believe that,” I told him. “We built this place. Together. Not just for us, but for all the people who live here.”

Dalhover looked back up at Murphy. “Don’t let him do anything stupid, especially things like trying to talk to people. You got me?”

We were at the remains of our front gate. The council members melted in the crowd of bystanders, already talking a mile a minute. I grabbed Dalhover’s arm and turned him to face me. “Are you coming with us? Tell me you’re not going to try some stupid John Wayne shit and stay here if we go.”

“I’m trying to save your life, Zed. I’m trying to save you from yourself. I’ll stay because duty dictates it. I’m no general. I’m not even an officer.” He spat another gob on the asphalt. “But you know as well as I do, I’m the top military man in Bal, and a leader doesn’t run out on his troops.”

“But we’re supposed to?” I asked.

“You know it’s different, so don’t pretend like it’s not. Nobody’s gonna tie me up and hand me to Preacher Dick for crucifixion at sunrise.” Dalhover pointed his arthritic thumb at the crowd. “These people, they’ll do that to you. You wanna throw your life away for that kind of loyalty, be my guest.” He looked back at Murphy. “Ortega will want to call another goddamn meeting. War by committee—what a tragic joke that is. I’ll drag it out. Give folks time to rant their shit. Tell them we’ve got to wait for the results on those stupid amputated arms. Buy you some time. If a mob doesn’t materialize by the time that meeting is over, it will soon after. Before that happens, you need to take dipshit here and the others and get out through the south gate. I’ll have someone there I can trust to open it for you.”

36

“Zed,” Steph’s pause hung in the air for moments and moments that seemed like minutes and then hours.

Murphy and I had stopped by the empty lot we used for parking the scout Humvees and trucks. We had six running Humvees, four of those armored, and two trucks. Each of the Humvees had a machine gun or a grenade launcher mounted on top. Most of the other Slow Burns were already there, checking ammo loads and fluid levels. Gathering the Slow Burns together, we quickly passed along the details of what had happened outside the front gate. All were mortified. Murphy told them Dalhover’s plan. Everyone who had loved ones to gather hurried off, with at least one other Slow Burn or a dependable normal along. We agreed to gather back at our staging area in twenty minutes.

Hoping twenty minutes wasn’t too long, Murphy and I rushed off to the hospital. Murphy wasn’t attached to anyone at the moment, and his sister had passed years before. Steph and me, he insisted, were his only family left. I didn’t argue.

With Murphy just inside the door of the small room the hospital used for a pharmacy, keeping it private for Steph and me, I asked her, “What’s wrong? Do you understand the situation?”

“I don’t—” It wasn’t like Steph to lose her courage when saying something difficult.

“Just tell me.”

Her eyes glassed with tears. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to travel.”

That felt like a punch to the nuts, and I found myself unable to speak as I stood there, hands on her arms, trying to convince her to gather what she needed.

“I’ve been sick,” she explained.

“How—” I didn’t have a clue what to say, so many questions and emotions were running through my head. “I don’t—”

“Go for as long as you need,” she told me. “I can stay here. They’ll take care of me until you return.”

“What kind of cancer do you have? How sick are you?”

“Zed, please. We don’t have the time to even begin that conversation. Trust me when I tell you, please. Here at the hospital is the best place for me to be right now.”

“I don’t understand. You’re working crazy hours. How can you be too sick to travel?”

“Zed, listen to me.” It was her Captain Leonard voice. “I need you to go. I need you to be safe.” She turned to Murphy. “Get him in that Humvee and get him out of town. Murphy, I’m depending on you.”

Javendra burst into the room, brushing past Murphy, whose attention was on Steph. He blurted, “I just heard. The fingerprints match.”

“Wait.” I didn’t believe it. “Those frozen arms? You’re telling me those fingerprints actually match the one he cut off?”

“I was just there,” he continued,”when they checked. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. “It’s got to be some kind of trick, right?” I looked at Steph for the answer.

“I don’t know,” she told me.

“I can’t explain it either,” offered Javendra. “Perhaps with some more time. I could run a DNA comparison and—”

“We don’t have the equipment for that here,” Steph told him.

“None of that is gonna matter in about fifteen minutes,” Murphy told us. “Pretty quick, everybody in town is going to know, and then, Preacher Peppy Dick’s bullshit might start to smell pretty good to some of these folks. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Steph,” I begged. “I can’t leave you here.”

“You have to.”

“I’ll take care of her,” Javendra told me. “I swear to you, Zed.”

Steph wrapped me in a hug, squeezing me so tight I thought she wouldn’t let go. But when she did, tears were rolling down her cheeks. “You have to go. I promise, I’ll be here when you get back. All this…this, stuff. It’s not as bad as it might seem at the moment. Don’t worry about me. Get out of here while you can.”

An explosion rumbled through the night, followed immediately by another.

“What was that?” asked Murphy.

Machine gun fire rattled from somewhere outside the wall.

The tornado siren Balmorhea used to alert the town in case of attack wailed loud and strong.

Losing his temper, Murphy yelled, “That lying motherfucker. He’s attacking us now.”

37

We’d trained for it a thousand times—more likely an understatement than an exaggeration. Despite the relative peace of the previous few years, we’d never grown complacent about security. Not totally. Footsteps ran through the hospital’s halls. Outside, voices shouted. Everyone had a place to be when the town was attacked. An exact place.

I cast off all thoughts of flight, as well as the raging animosity I’d felt growing toward my neighbors.

Steph pulled me close and gave me a quick kiss. “Don’t die out there, Null Spot. I love you.” She turned and followed Javendra to wherever the hospital staff gathered at the beginning of a crisis. She had her duty. In moments, those tasked with protecting the hospital and its vulnerable occupants would bar the doors and barricade the windows, turning it into an Alamo they’d defend from fortifications on the roof.

Murphy grabbed my arm and dragged me toward an exit. “C’mon, dumbass.”

With legs that listened better than the rest of me, I started to run, knowing the best thing I could to do to keep Steph safe was to get to my assigned station, ready for war. Following Murphy into the cold dark, we sprinted across the old football field. Five blocks lay between us and our rapid-response vehicles, the six Humvees manned by the other Slow Burns and an additional eighteen militiamen and women. Altogether we were a solid unit. We’d been hardened by war with the hordes of infected, and especially the running battles we’d waged against a gang of thugs out of Chihuahua who’d tried to work their way up through the Davis Mountains some years back.

A series of violent explosions ripped through the night, flashing yellow against the low-hanging clouds. Dozens of fires glowed from the east. Machine gun and dispersed rifle fire popped all around. But not from inside our walls.

“Who are they fighting?” shouted Murphy. “Who’s out there?”

I didn’t know, but it made me mad that I was left out of it. That is, until I heard a familiar old sound and felt a feeling in my feet that seemed like it was from another life. I stopped in the road, just two blocks from the Humvees.

“C’mon,” Murphy shouted. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Listen.” I pointed at the ground. “You feel it?”

The howls outside the wall rose up on a thousand infected throats. No, ten thousand. Maybe ten times that. The ground rumbled with their footfalls. It felt like a horror from so, so long ago, so terrible it etched itself into my subconscious—the naked horde, when they attacked Dr. Evans’s family farm all those years ago, pouring over the far slopes, washing over the barn and farmhouse, killing everyone in minutes.

Murphy’s eyes went wide. “Shit. Holy mother of monkey fuckers!”

38

As we ran, I formulated my best course of action, where my mobile, lethal unit could maximize its killing power with what I knew raged towards us out there in the night.

Grace already had the Humvees running when Murphy and I arrived. I didn’t waste a second as I climbed into the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle. I was, after all, the captain of the rapid response unit. “Grace, are we all sorted out on the comms?”

“All set up,” she confirmed.

I strapped the radio headset on. Murphy climbed into his position behind the .50 through the roof hatch. I told Grace, “Roll for the rear gate.”

“We’re going outside?” She didn’t approve.

“Do it.”

She started the vehicle moving as I radioed the other Humvees in our unit to follow. “We’re under attack by a horde of Whites.”

That surprised everyone inside my Humvee just as much as it surprised those over the comm. I switched the radio to Balmorhea’s command channel. “This is Zed. I need Dalhover on the line.”

He answered almost immediately. “Are you with your unit?”

“Rolling,” I told him. “I don’t know what one has to do with the other, but there’s a White horde out there. A big one.”

“Just now figuring that out.”

“We can be more effective outside the wall, hunting, drawing them off, rather than inside plugging holes.”

“Agreed,” he rasped.

“This one feels big.”

“Yep. I feel it.” Dalhover wasn’t talking about transient emotions. He wasn’t that type of man. He felt the rumble in the ground, heard the howls shiver the air.

I was reluctant to say it over an open channel, but I needed to know 100% that Dalhover and I were on the same page. “This might be a bug-out scenario.”

“Get me some hard facts.”

“We’re headed for the back gate. Send the order to open it up for us.”

“Good luck, Zed.”

“Good luck to all of us.”

“A horde?” Grace asked, as she kept a sharp eye for any residents running across the road in front of us.

“You can’t hear them over the diesel.” I pointed at the fires glowing beneath the clouds. “Those explosions. That gunfire. That’s not directed at us.”

“Preacher Dick’s army is fighting them outside?” she asked.

“Yep.” I didn’t see any other possibility. I turned in my seat for a glance at Jazz, who had the seat right behind mine. “Once we get outside the wall. Shoot anything that moves. Make sure Murphy doesn’t run out of ammo for that .50.”

In front of us, the rear gate slowly rolled open. As soon as the gap was wide enough, Grace gunned the engine and our Humvee lumbered through.

“Josh,” I called over the radio.

“Yep?” he answered.

“You take Enrique and Alice around the west side of town. Make a wide loop. Slaughter all the Whites you see. Most of all, recon and report.” I didn’t want to let my fear out of the bag to infect the others, but we needed to assess that scope of the danger. “If this horde is too large to fight off, everyone in town will need to bug out. The sooner the better.”

“Got you, boss. Josh out.”

As Grace left the pavement to run through a cornfield, Josh’s three Humvees peeled off to the right. Fires, large and small, flickered in the darkness in front of us. A huge explosion detonated a mile or so away. The shadows in the distance seemed alive, wild. Dancing.

“Gabe, Hannah,” I called over the radio. They were the commanders of the two Humvees following us. “Stay on my six. Let’s keep a tight line. Things are going to get hairy out here. Grace, don’t stray too close to the wall.”

She looked at me in a way that made it clear she didn’t need detailed instructions. And she didn’t. Nobody on my team did. “Just tell me where you want this thing and how fast you want to get there.”

I smiled. “Sorry, boss.”

Tess, the girl in the seat behind Grace laughed.

“I got movement.” Murphy’s gun barked, sending tracers streaking into the darkness, seeming to ignite sporadic fires out of nothing.

“What the hell?” wondered Jazz aloud.

“Get us closer,” I told Grace.

She swerved. The Humvee bounced through the furrows as it picked up speed.

“Holy cow!” hollered Jazz. “One o’clock.”

I looked out front, just off to the right, and saw it. A mass of flames rolled down the southernmost hill, illuminating hundreds of running human forms in stark shades of guttering yellow and black.

“What is that?” Grace’s tension belied her unspoken guess.

“One of Preacher Dick’s APCs.” That was my guess. It was all it could be. But an armored vehicle, engulfed in flames? “Good Lord.”

Murphy fired again.

“Let me know if you need me shooting,” I told them.

Everyone laughed. Such was my reputation, which was why I still carried the sawed-off shotgun and manned the radio from my command seat. I was good at that.

“Good God,” muttered Grace as she tapped the brakes.

Flooding across the desert through our headlight beams, a mob of Whites dashed toward Balmorhea. Only, they didn’t look like any kind of Whites I’d ever seen.

39

I shouted, “Floor it.”

Murphy spun the .50 around to our front and ripped into the running horde. Jazz’s and Tess’s guns opened up.

Over the sound of gunfire, howling Whites and clinking bottles—clinking bottles? I called into the radio, “Gabe, Hanna, get right on our ass! Push if we get bogged down.” Those were the only orders I had time to give.

The Humvee smashed into the Whites, and they burst into splashes of flame as we ran them down.

“What the heck?” shouted Grace.

A noxious, eye-burning stink of vinegar and gunpowder blew into the Humvee.

Blinking to clear my eyes, I blasted a White within arm’s reach of my door. His head exploded in a red slurry as I fired again. I reloaded both my barrels in a heartbeat, taking the moment while my hands were running on muscle memory to realize that nearly all of the Whites I could see in the wildly changing light were wearing gas masks. All of the masks were of a similar design—some yellow, most brown. Most wore canvas jackets, coarse-cloth pants and military boots. Some carried knives, some machetes, others wielded truncheons and bats.

The Humvee slowed in the crush of bodies in front of us. I told Grace, “Gun it.”

“That’s the Lynaugh stink,” shouted Murphy as he loaded another belt into his .50.

I blasted two more rounds, pointed center-mass, and a White burst into flames as he crumbled. The sudden firelight gave me a glimpse of others with bottles dangling from clips on their belts.

Tess fell into a coughing fit.

Something crashed against our windshield, bursting in flames and broken glass.

“Shit!” hollered Murphy as he ducked inside.

A wave of fire engulfed our vehicle. I pulled back from the flames flowing past my window. Something hit us from behind, throwing me forward then back into my seat.

“It’s Gabe,” coughed Grace. “He’s pushing us.”

My radio crackled with calls from Gabe and Hannah, checking on our welfare.

“They got Molotovs,” hollered Murphy. “They are the fucking Molotovs!”

“I can see now,” Grace told me, calmer than any of the rest of us. “I can see.”

Flames still burned across my half of the windshield. The Humvee picked up speed and the ride got a little smoother. Murphy climbed back through the roof hatch, and I worried for a half second that his ammo would start to cook off and kill him. In the next moment, I realized if it was going to do that, it already would have. His weapon boomed to life.

“We’re out of it,” Grace choked, as the flames started to burn out on my side of the windshield. I didn’t need to add, for the moment.

A quarter mile ahead, a dragon flame blew across the desert, engulfing a pickup full of black-clad soldiers and illuminating another. Flaming people jumped, their screams lost in the thousands of howling troops. They were quickly engulfed by a tide of Whites.

“You see that?” Murphy called down. “Flamethrower.”

“Why is Preacher Dick using a flamethrower on his own guys?” asked Jazz, coughing and choking on her words. “That’s not Josh, is it?”

“No.” I knew he was miles away, far on the other side of Balmorhea, in an armored Humvee. I called him on the radio just the same. “Josh, you okay over there?”

“We got thousands of them all around us!” he hollered. “We lost Alice. We’re in trouble here.”

“Get out,” I ordered. “Get back to the south gate if you can. Protect that road.”

“Will do, boss. Josh out.”

“Oh, no.” Grace had overheard all of it.

I commed in to Balmorhea command. “Can Dalhover talk?”

“No, Zed,” the girl answered. “They’ve hit the outer defenses.”

I looked left and saw the flash of hundreds of guns firing along the top of our walls. The thunder of the gunfire hit me half an eyeblink later.

“Tell him it looks like a Sarah Mansfield situation out here.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Just tell him. He’ll know.”

I looked over at Grace. “Stop when you find a safe place.”

“Nothing is safe out there, Zed.”

“When you find a clear spot.”

She slammed the brakes, and the Humvee skidded in the desert dirt. “Whatever you’re gonna do, make it quick.”

Telling everyone to buy me as much time as possible, I jumped out of the Humvee and climbed up to the roof. Gabe and Hannah pulled their vehicles to a stop right behind ours, bumpers touching, guns blazing.

Using my binoculars, I scanned the darkness, focusing on the areas illuminated by the fires, to get an idea of how widely dispersed the attacking horde actually was. Dozens of Whites ran at us. Molotovs hit the ground nearby, shattering and bursting into flame.

The horde we’d driven through still flooded toward the wall. I spotted two more concentrations, one pouring through the dry moat, one far to the north—less organized, but just as numerous as the two close by. A noxious cloud blowing across the desert engulfed us, sending everyone into a coughing fit. I climbed quickly off the roof, blinking away the sting and trying to catch my breath.

“We need to move,” Grace told me.

“Roll,” I ordered, as I felt my worst fears bubble into reality. Steph was fortified in the hospital with dozens of patients who’d be difficult to move, maybe impossible to load into a vehicle in the time we had left. I opened the main comm channel. “This is Zed. I need Dalhover on the line. Right now.”

“Dalhover is busy. He can hear you, though.”

“I estimate thirty-thousand across three thrusts from the east. Armed with Molotov Cocktails, flamethrowers, and some kind of tear gas. They’re organized, better than any Whites I’ve ever seen.”

A mob of Whites materialized out of the darkness, flinging bottles and trying to jump into our Humvee. Flame burst into a fireball on our fender.

Murphy called for an ammo box.

“Preacher Dick’s army?” it was Dalhover asking the question.

“Neutralized,” I told him. “Annihilated, I think.”

The comm channel crackled wordlessly for a second.

We no longer had time for circumlocutions over an open channel. I needed to be as direct and clear as possible. “We need to bug out now, while we still can. Everybody.”

“Work your way back to Highway 17 South, keep the escape corridor open.”

“Gabe!” screamed Jazz.

I acknowledged Dalhover’s order and turned to look. Flames poured out of the windows on Gabe’s Humvee as it rolled directionless into the desert. Someone jumped out of a passenger door, burning from head to toe, running five steps before collapsing in the dirt.

Tess cried out.

Murphy cursed and let his machine gun carry his frustrations to the Whites.

“As fast as you can go,” I told Grace. “Get us to the back gate.”

40

After fighting our way across the cornfield, I spotted a pair of Humvees on the road outside the gate—one engulfed in flames, the other swarming with Whites. I hoped they were buttoned up tight.

“Hannah,” I called over the comm net, “push that burner off the road.” To Grace, I pointed at the swarmed Humvee. “Get us over there. Murphy, you keep this area clear.” To the girls in back, I said, “Let’s kill those bastards.” And that’s all I needed to say about that.

Grace raced in, aiming right at the swarmed Humvee, bouncing out of the ditch beside the road, and locking the wheels as we skidded within yards of our sister vehicle. I flung my door open before we stopped, and I was out on my feet, blasting Whites with my double-barrel as Jazz planted herself beside me, ripping through an entire magazine, scouring the monsters from the other vehicle.

Moving like a rabid monkey, I climbed onto the Humvee’s hood and blasted two more Whites, who disappeared in a burst of flame. Behind us, Murphy’s machine gun barked to life. Further down, Hannah’s Humvee pushed the burning hulk from the road as her gunner went to work.

Jazz and Tess finished off the Whites on Josh’s Humvee. Someone inside opened the roof hatch. “Thanks.”

“Get that 240 up,” I told him as I jumped off the roof.

Josh opened his door just wide enough for us to talk.

“Everybody in town,” I told him, “is going to be fleeing down this road. It’s our job to keep it open.”

With a grim face and angry eyes, he nodded. “Understood.”

“No matter what,” I added.

“No matter what,” he agreed.

The gate behind us rattled and rolled open. I ran back to my Humvee, hollering, “Spread out in a semicircle. Stay off the pavement!” I didn’t want another five-ton hulk blocking the road.

As soon as the gate was open wide enough, two pickups and an SUV sped through, racing for the safety of the Davis Mountains. Safety? Who the hell knew?

Over the wail of the tornado siren, a fire station alarm buzzed three times, obnoxious and loud, all over town. That was the bug-out signal. We knew it would happen—I’d all but pled for it on the radio with Dalhover. At the same time, everyone in the Humvee took it like a punch. The alarm sounded again, three rapid buzzes. It was one thing to talk about it in the abstract. It was another to prepare, train, and drill for it. Though, in truth, we’d drilled for that scenario less and less through the years. Deep down in our hearts, I suppose everyone else in Balmorhea believed just as I did, that we were so secure, that we’d built so much, had invested too much sweat, that we’d never have to leave it behind.

A bus rolled through the gate and accelerated. A Humvee followed a moment later.

I called over the general comm frequency, asking the driver to pull over to help us with the defense of the escape gate because I knew, even as we fired at the Whites coming at us in disorganized gangs, we’d not be able to hold for long. There were just too many. And when the Smart Ones behind this attack figured out the gate was open, they’d organize, and overwhelmed us. The driver of the Humvee ignored me and sped into the darkness.

“Chickenshit.” Far down the road, I saw gunfire and knew the first trucks were running into resistance. I didn’t have time for that, though. I was busy firing my shotgun, reloading, and doing what I could to watch over the vehicles I had left in my command as I tried to imagine what I could do to save them. Unfortunately, no inspiration came to mind.

The general comm channel came alive with defiant voices, people imploring others to stay on the wall, to fight, to protect their homes from the stupid monsters. Gunfire, explosions, and screams filled the air. The clouds above glowed so brightly orange, they looked like they were on fire.

I fretted for Steph. Could they clear the hospital and load the injured into the evacuation bus in time? What could I do to help that wouldn’t endanger everyone in my vehicle? Could I abandon my post? I’d told Josh, “no matter what.” That was a promise, a contract of blood and soul, pledging all we had left in the world, for any we could help.

More loaded SUVs raced past, gunners hanging out the windows, adding their fire to help us in the defense of the gate, if only for moments.

Dalhover called on the general comm, ordering everyone to bug out as quickly as possible. Whites were pouring through the main gate Preacher Dick’s tank had destroyed. Balmorhea was lost. Anyone who couldn’t get out needed to rally at the fortified high school, which served duty as Balmorhea’s hospital, where Steph would soon be trapped.

My heart fractured into a thousand shards of glass.

41

A tight convoy of nine vehicles raced through the gate, escaping south to the mountains. A flood of Whites rushed us out of the darkness. Molotovs shattered, lighting everything in flame. More bottles broke on the pavement, exploding noxious clouds of the vinegar and gunpowder gas. And that explained that. Some of the Whites carried tear gas in their little belt arsenals. Through the coughing and blinking, I blasted my shotgun out through my open window, needing only to point, not aim. The Whites were so close and numerous, even I couldn’t miss.

Jazz shouted, “They’re past us!”

I turned for a glimpse of the road between us and the south gate—hundreds bled and writhed on the asphalt. Scores dashed into Balmorhea through the open doors, and more followed. We just couldn’t kill them all.

Grace glanced at her watch. “The bug-out time we drilled for was nine minutes. Zed, we’ve been out here for seventeen. Anyone who’s still in there either can’t get out or doesn’t want to. You need to save the people you can still save.”

Quick decisions, no matter the stakes, were never a problem for me. I radioed my team, “Josh, Hannah, we can’t do any more. Bug out. I repeat, bug out. Get down the highway. Our responsibilities are to those who escaped.”

Both acknowledged. Hannah’s truck started to roll, Josh’s didn’t.

Knowing it was suicide, but knowing I was about to do it anyway, I called, “Grace, you’re in charge.” I kicked my door open. “Don’t try and stop me.” That was all I needed to say. Knowing I was me, with my desperate willingness to do literally anything to win, I told my crew everything they needed to hear. I wasn’t one of those lovey-dovey braggarts, who showed off his affection for the audience of his friends. Still, everybody knew the depth of my devotion to Steph. It was matched by hers to me. Our relationship was made from the kind of stuff that pre-collapse romance stories built a billion-dollar industry on.

Before I was out of my seat, Murphy’s big hand grabbed my shoulder and pinned me in place.

When I turned to demand he free me, I saw his sweaty face there—eyes urgent, voice forceful. “Don’t. I’m not talking you out of anything, but dammit, Dipshit, you got responsibilities, right here. You can’t do anything for Steph, or Dalhover, or any of them. They gotta get out on their own.”

“I have to go.”

“And if you go,” Murphy argued, “what do we do? You know we go with you. All of us. Because that’s who we are. We stick together. And we all die, because of you.”

“I’m not asking—”

“And you don’t have to. You’ll never have to. But don’t do it,” Murphy’s voice cracked. “I’ll ride with you to the gates of Satan’s Sphincterstan if that’s where you want to go, but don’t ask me to drag our friends down there with us.”

A cloud of tear gas blew across the Humvee. I coughed through it, blasted my shotgun, and reloaded. “Get back on the .50.”

Murphy didn’t let go of me.

“I need you on that .50, Murphy.”

“Not until you tell me you’re staying in that seat. I don’t care how much it hurts, that’s what you have to do.”

Josh’s voice crackled over my radio. “Our 240’s down. We’re out of ammo.”

“Go,” I told him. “Get out of here.”

“We’ll stay until our last mags.”

“Go now,” I ordered. “Go now.”

Josh’s Humvee took off.

“Heroes,” I bitched.

Murphy told me, “Close your door. Deal with the hurt later. Do your duty to the rest of us.”

With tears in my eyes, I slammed my door. “Get on that damn .50.”

Grace gunned the engine and ran down the Whites in the road as we followed Josh south. She glanced over at me. “They might hold out in the gym. You can’t know.”

I’d watched the videos of what happened at Sarah Mansfield’s mansion all those years ago. I knew what masses of Whites even a nickel smarter could do.

42

“Point Sluggo?” Grace looked at me, the question clear on her face.

“The courthouse in Fort Davis,” I confirmed.

“I thought Ortega changed it to the Dairy Queen in Marfa.”

“Ortega isn’t in charge of those sorts of things,” I argued. “They go through Dalhover.”

Grace shrugged. “Just what I heard.”

I peered back at Balmorhea, not even a full mile behind us. It looked like a war zone and sounded like a thunderstorm. The battle was far from over.

“Why’s the road so clear?” asked Jazz, nervously.

“Wondering the same thing,” added Tess.

I looked left and right, missing again the days when we still had NVGs to illuminate the night. “Stay alert. We’re not out of this yet.”

Grace asked, “You want me to cut the headlights? Run dark?”

With the overcast clouds blocking the moon, there simply wasn’t enough light for us to chance that and still maintain any speed. With Preacher Dick’s army destroyed or in flight just like us, having the headlights on wouldn’t put us in any more danger. “Keep up your speed. Leave the lights on.”

“Hey,” Murphy called as he squatted down through the roof hatch. “Something’s up there.”

“Fire?” Grace asked.

It was hard to tell. I definitely saw light, maybe a half-mile ahead, but it didn’t flicker like fire.

Grace tapped the brakes. “I don’t like this.”

I keyed my mic to call Josh and Hannah over the comm. They were up the road ahead of us. No response.

I told Grace, “Cut the lights and get off the road.”

“Now?”

Before I could answer we careened into a cloud of tear gas. Suddenly blind and coughing, Grace mashed the brakes just as Murphy shouted and ducked into the truck. Our front tires ran over a spike strip, blowing them out and sending us skidding. The flow of time slowed to a syrupy drip, as it so often does for me in those microseconds when catastrophe is unfolding, giving me plenty of time to blame myself as the Humvee went into a roll.

43

Lying with my cheek pressed on a sheet of cold rust, humming in a rhythmic, rough way, I realized I was awake, the sun was up, and the straw littered across the floor around me stank of excrement. From rows of ventilation holes cut through a grimy metal wall, I saw smoldering vehicles, bodies scattered across the desert, and the familiar shapes of the Davis Mountains south of Balmorhea. A powerful diesel engine rumbled. Somewhere nearby, people talked softly, cried, and comforted one another. My head started to clear—and throb. I realized I was in a semi tractor-trailer, a two-tier cattle hauler, creeping up Highway 17.

“You awake?” asked Murphy.

I pushed myself up, brushing the filthy straw off my face.

“You took a pretty good knock on the noggin.” Murphy sat with his back to the wall, opposite me. “I wasn’t sure you were gonna reboot this time. But then again, your head’s harder than Iron Man’s dick.”

My head felt too muddled with mush to come up with a wisecrack, so I looked up and down the length of the trailer. We were on the upper level. It was empty except for me, Murphy, Grace, and Jazz. Both of them were sleeping beneath the stenchy straw to stay warm.

“Where’s Tess?”

“Didn’t get a scratch.” Murphy pointed down through the floor. “Normals downstairs. Whites up here.”

I rubbed my bleary eyes. “I have questions.”

“I bet.” Murphy didn’t grin. A bad sign. As though my confinement inside a cattle trailer wasn’t.

“I take it this isn’t our ambulance.”

“Nope. The bag heads, they—”

“The bag heads?” My head throbbed too much to figure out what Murphy was talking about. “I didn’t check my email for updates this morning. Who are the bag heads?”

“Dudes with the gas masks. Or, I should say, Whites with gas masks. I thought about calling them shitheads, but I felt a rebellious creativity in the wee hours when they were shitting all over my life.”

“I take it this isn’t Preacher Dick’s doing?”

“You asking if they’re going to beat us half to death and hang us from the wall by the main gate?”

I wasn’t, until Murphy reminded me. I glanced over at Grace and Jazz. “Are they injured?”

“Catching zees,” Murphy told me. “You got the worst of it. In our Humvee, anyway.”

“Josh? Hannah? The others?”

“Might be down below. Might be dead. Things got out of hand there at the end.”

“They ambushed us escaping from Bal.” Obviously they had, but I’d just realized it in that moment. “But not just us.”

Murphy shook his head.

“They planned it that way?”

“Seems so.”

“Did anyone escape?”

Murphy shrugged. He couldn’t know that.

I glanced at the floor. “How many do they have down there?”

“The census man stopped by during the chaos, but he didn’t fill me in on the particulars.”

“You’re being a smartass.”

“You think?”

I rolled my eyes, not wanting to say any more until I was thinking clearly enough to stop saying stupid things. Looking outside, I saw we were passing the hundreds of acres of grain fields and pastures in the strip of land between Balmorhea and San Solomon Springs. Smoke blew past us, carried on the southbound wind, smoke from fires still burning in town. The vinegar and gunpowder concoction in the air burned my eyes, and I coughed.

“Same nasty stench we smelled at Lynaugh.” Murphy rubbed his eyes and sniffed. “There’s that burnt plastic diesel smell, too. Same Molotov formula we use.”

The semi slowed to walking speed. We were nearing Balmorhea’s south gate. Out in the cornfield Grace had driven us through the night before, hundreds of bag heads—I decided I liked the new name—worked like army ants, carrying corpses and loading them into refrigerated trailers in tow behind idling semis.

“Murphy, you seein’ this?”

“My eyes are open, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Look at that.”

“What?” Murphy sounded bored.

“The ones who have their gas masks off, what’s that hockey puck thing stuck to their heads?” It was attached to the skull, above and just behind the left ear.

“Just more crazy.” Murphy didn’t put much effort into looking outside. “I’ll save you some trouble trying to figure it all out. From what I saw last night, the ones with the yellow gas masks, usually wearing a yellow bandana or something, they’re the Smart Ones. A lot of those guys. They got the Molotovs and tear-gas bombs. Regular Whites, they wear the dirty brown gas masks. No weapons for them. Looks like one yellow handles four or five regulars. All of ‘em got one of those hockey pucks drilled into their heads. Why? Don’t know. That’s what I saw last night.”

Our truck passed through Balmorhea’s south gate. Inside the walls, bag heads were everywhere, hauling bodies, putting out fires, carrying loot, corralling prisoners and herding them toward the front gate. All wore roughly similar uniforms, just as we’d seen the night before. Inside the wall, though, nearly all kept their gas masks on, as the air was thick with smoke from the burning houses and lingering tear gas.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d have bet the days of massive infected hordes were behind us. But then, this bunch with the gas masks wasn’t just another horde of feral Whites. “There are thousands of them.”

“I never miss the latest news when you’re around.”

“Sometimes it’s okay to be serious about things.”

“Most of the time it’s not.”

I didn’t bother to glare at Murphy. There was too much to see outside. “A lot of our friends died last night.”

“Like every other night since the virus first showed up on TV.”

“You’re surly.”

“My bad. I was still going for funny.”

“We’ve had a pretty good run here.” I was trying to come up with a silver lining. “You have to admit that.”

“I do. But here we are again. In the shit, surrounded by assholes and bodies.”

“Maybe you need to stop acting like a—”

“A Zed?”

I spun on Murphy, ready to snap, but stopped when I saw him trying to mask his anguish with a grin. So, I apologized instead.

“Ain’t nuthin’, man. We all had a long night.”

I turned back to scowl through the holes in the wall, projecting my hate on my conquerors. “They’re not a mob. They’re an army. Organized. Uniformed. Disciplined.”

“I don’t know about disciplined,” argued Murphy.

“They’re not running around crazy like most Whites, killing every normal in sight.”

“You got me there, Tonto.”

“You still trying to be funny?”

“Trying.” It sounded more like he was trying not to cry.

44

I tried counting corpses, but it was hard to spot the dead residents of Balmorhea among so many bodies. I made a go of counting live bag heads but gave up on that endeavor as well. They were such a busy bunch, hurrying this way and that, following one another, a yellow-headed alpha in the lead, all looking pretty much the same. So damn many of them.

And so many questions came to mind.

One nagged at me more than others—most others How was it that the bag heads and Preacher Dick’s zealot brigade descended on Balmorhea at the same time? Coincidence didn’t seem sufficient to explain such a confluence of destruction. And the fact was, we were responsible for tempting Preacher Dick’s bunch down from Carlsbad, at least we believed we were. I couldn’t begin to shake my own guilt in this clusterfuck either, because for nearly a year, I’d been discounting the rumors of a White horde storming out of the east. The clues had all been there. I just didn’t want to believe it. Should I have taken a scout party a hundred or two hundred miles east to search out the truth? Should I have checked Abilene or Kerrville, even Austin or San Antonio? Probably.

So much danger lay on such a long trip, though. Van Horn, Pecos, Fort Stockton and Marfa marked the rough borders of the desert we typically ranged through. We ventured outside that area from time to time, but it was always a risk, and, like our recent venture to Carlsbad, too often lethal. Still, because my mental wiring had been laid wrong by nature or nurture, I couldn’t help but blame myself. I hadn’t done the right things. Hadn’t acted urgently enough. Hadn’t known for sure what was coming until it was too late.

I cursed myself for the hundredth time that morning, and then I thought about Steph. Staring at the endless scatter of bodies, I feared the worst. It made my heart feel like a lump of oxidized lead, slowly leeching poison into my veins. It made the world feel like a black hole, sucking me down into nothingness.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Murphy told me.

“What?”

“You know. Getting mad about all this isn’t going to help.”

“We don’t even know what all this is.”

“I know we’re gonna need your hairless melon percolating on all amps if we’re going to unfuck it. Your little mental tantrums never do anything except spin you up into doing something Stupid—That’s stupid with a capital S.”

What was I even supposed to say to that? I turned to stare outside again.

Our truck inched its way past the obliterated front gate, and all the metal junk hurriedly welded there to close the gaps. Now, it was all pushed into the ditches outside the wall, garbage again. In the open desert beyond, rows of large military tents had been erected and more were going up. Farther out on the plain, parked row upon row, were our vehicles. Not just our unused bug-out trucks and buses, but our farm pickups and tractors too, lined up like they were being arranged for an insurance auction. Only they weren’t our only vehicles. Black military trucks and some armored personnel carriers sat among them. What remained of Preacher Dick’s mechanized force. Strangest of all, though, were the normals in khaki uniforms, wearing red baseball caps and red neckerchiefs, out there around the vehicles, inspecting and arranging them.

I spotted a pair of trucks with the faded emblems of the Lynaugh prison unit painted on the door. “Murphy, check this out. Definitive proof this is the same bunch that hit the prison.”

“No, dude, you gotta see this.”

I scampered over to Murphy’s side of the trailer as Grace sat up from her slumber.

In a long line across the hay fields, I saw a row of tall travel buses, the kind with wide comfy seats, AC, tinted windows, undercarriage luggage compartments, and toilets. Normal, uninfected people milled around the buses, chatting and unloading their luggage, dressed just like normal regular people in normal regular clothes, nothing worn-out or holed, no backpacks, canteens, or guns. They looked like a coach tour, arriving at a golf resort for the night. No urgency. No particular interest in the thousands of dangerous white-skinned bag heads around, not a smidgen of interest in the bodies, burned-out vehicles, monsters, or pillars of smoke smudging the cold sky. Every one of them wore a blood-red neckerchief or winter scarf. Some even wore knit red gloves.

“What the hell?” asked Murphy.

Grace came over to gawk. “There’s got to be a couple hundred of them.”

Farther up the road, the emptied buses stopped at the next group of normals. These stood in dozens of lines, the entire array surrounded by hundreds of Whites still wearing their gas masks and looking on menacingly—as though there were any other way to stare down prisoners while wearing a dirty yellow gas mask.

“Those are our people,” realized Grace.

“Excuse me?” Murphy pressed his face to the wall to look through the vent holes.

I didn’t think it could be true. There were so many, but there they were, dressed like people typically dressed in Balmorhea, mixed in with scores of others clad in faded black fatigues. “You see anyone you recognize?”

Stirred by our excitement, Jazz rose from her stinky straw nest to see what was going on.

“That’s got to be most everybody,” guessed Grace. “Doesn’t seem possible.”

A row of folding tables stood across one edge of the field, each with a pair of people wearing blood-red neckerchiefs, sitting behind. On each table sat a laptop computer, open, with screen glowing. As we watched, prisoners were called up from the head of each line to stand before the pair at the tables. They were made to strip bare, whereupon, each was weighed and given a cursory medical exam. One of the clerks at each table entered whatever data they were collecting into the laptop, including answers to questions I couldn’t make out, given the distance and all the other noise. Once the exam was complete, each prisoner was sent naked and shivering to a station where they were sized for a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, a gray shirt, gray jacket, a thick red stocking cap and a red neckerchief or scarf. Each was then handed a saggy canvas grocery bag and shepherded onto one of the buses that had just disgorged of the oddly normal tourists.

“What do you think’s in the bag?” asked Murphy. “A sack lunch?”

I laughed. “That’s the first question that comes to mind?”

“Does it matter which question I ask first?”

“It doesn’t,” answered Grace for him. Her stern glance at me silently said, “Grow up.”

I didn’t think I’d done anything inappropriate.

Our truck lurched to a stop. None of us said it out loud, but we expected to be offloaded and thrown in with the other Balmorhean prisoners. The trailer’s outer set of doors creaked open. Bag heads herded everyone off the lower level and guided them into the lines of the waiting.

“There’s Josh.” Murphy nearly shouted it in his excitement. “And his crew.”

“And Hannah,” added Grace. “Looks like her squad is with her.”

Surprised, and relieved, I blabbered the obvious, “They made it.”

Looking through the vent holes by then, Jazz said, “I see Ortega.”

“Anybody see Top?” asked Murphy.

I didn’t ask if anyone saw Steph. It seemed too selfish, but she was the only person I was scanning the rows for.

“Javendra,” added Grace. “Down at the end of the sixth row.”

If Javendra was there…then maybe. I looked.

“Zed,” said Jazz, “I see Steph.”

My voice cracked. “Where?”

“Third from the end. Seventh row.”

And there she was, flaming red hair blowing in the cold wind, dazed, but alive.

45

The metal gate at the end of the top level clanged open. A man wearing the now-familiar pseudo-military garb, with a dirty yellow neckerchief and a yellow gas mask sticking out of a bag hanging from his shoulder, stood there, white-skinned and hairless, with a permanent scowl on his face.

“You four, get down here.”

Of course, my innate need to rebel toggled on and I stayed put. Jazz looked to me and followed my lead. Grace gave me a slight shake of her head but stuck with us. Murphy was always willing to go along with anything that involved defiance.

“Looky here, you hairless fucknuggets, you can come on down here like I told you, or I can send some of my taints up there to bruise you back to your senses.”

Grace shot me another disappointed look and made her way toward the end of the trailer.

“Sorry.” Jazz followed her down.

Murphy glanced at me and shrugged. My sit-down protest in the back of the cattle trailer lost its potency. I followed him down the ramp and out the back, glaring at our fucknugget jailer the whole time.

Once outside, under bag head guard, they led us very distinctly not off the side of the road where all of Balmorhea’s normal survivors stood lined up. Fucknugget led us beneath one of the recently erected tents, stood us in a line, and ordered us to stay put.

While our guards eyed us, more yellows came and went. One set up a sturdy little footstool. A pair hauled in some weighty boxes of equipment. Another took a seat at a folding table, opened a laptop, and started pecking away. Two men strolled in—one, a tall white-skin wearing a weathered battle coat with markings down the arms. He looked down on everyone, and not just because he was tall. He looked like he thought he was a royal heir, prissy and cruel, inspecting the peasants. The other was an uninfected normal wearing a scarlet sports coat, looking like a Realtor at a Sunday open house, or some soft and creepy uncle nobody wanted to leave their kids with. By the deferential reaction of the others under the tent, I guessed the pair were the big swinging dicks in their circus.

The Realtor pointed at us and asked the prissy soldier, “Senior Man Pluta, are these are all the taints we captured? The count seems low for a colony of this size, doesn’t it?”

“Statistically speaking,” Pluta answered, “you’re right.” He pointed vaguely toward town. “The jib crew marked five dead taints and a handful of maybes.”

“Maybes?” asked the Realtor.

“Fired too crispy to know for sure.”

I estimated the distance to Senior Man Pluta and figured I could have my hands around his throat before any of the yellows could stop me. Unfortunately, I also knew I wouldn’t have enough time to choke him out before they pulled me off and beat me senseless.

Casting a casual finger in the direction of the field where the normal prisoners were being processed, Pluta told the Realtor, “In an unusual coincidence, when we deployed for our assault, we found the town had already been surrounded by a militant cult from Albuquerque.

“Food grab?” asked the Realtor. “Were they hijacking fuel? I’m told we captured twenty-two military vehicles on the perimeter. Is that right?”

“Military gear and SWAT equipment,” Pluta confirmed. “Most of the cult captives are tight-lipped about their intentions. They make up nearly a quarter of all prisoners. It seems what they wanted most of all were the taints. Specifically, the intelligent ones. They were full of the usual devil spawn talk. That was the core ideology that held them together. Needless to say, they didn’t have any taints mixed in.”

“They had a leader, then?” asked the Realtor.

“The man calls himself Bishop Richard,” answered Pluta. “No last name.”

“We captured him, too?”

“Injured in a vehicle accident trying to escape. Mangled both legs, but he’ll survive. Asked God for a miracle when we took him, then he pissed himself.”

“Has he been tagged for special treatment?” asked the Realtor.

“Tagged and in the medical van. Gagged and under guard.”

The Realtor pointed at us. “What about these, then? How tainted are they? What I mean to say is, are they verbal?”

“Intel we’ve gathered indicates the dead taints and these four were part of Balmorhea’s military such as it was. At the beginning of our operation, six Humvees sallied from the south gate. A recon mission, diversionary attack, who knows? These taints were part of that group. They can drive, fire weapons, probably make independent decisions in a military situation. No doubt, they can talk.”

“Sounds promising.” The Realtor walked over and inspected us, pausing and poking me in the chest. “Tell me, taint, can you use your words?”

Because I just can’t help it sometimes, I spat, “Do the words ‘go fuck yourself’ count?”

Pluta and the Realtor laughed. As the Realtor stepped back to stand by Pluta, he said, “I’d like to see the rest of the onboarding process.”

“We typically take the alpha first. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier with the rest of them for onboarding, but by dropping the alpha down a peg, he loses respect. In the long run, the others are more malleable.”

The Realtor showed his appreciation with a hearty nod. “You really have this down to a science, don’t you?”

“Just following the protocols, sir.”

“Have you gathered enough intel to determine which one the alpha is?”

Fucknugget pointed me out. “They defer to this mouthy one right here.”

The Realtor glanced at Murphy. “Not that big buck?”

“Nope,” answered Fucknugget. “This is your boy. I’m sure of it.” He leaned close. “You’re gonna love this next part, taint.”

Bag heads grabbed me from behind before I realized they were there, two on my arms, and then two on my legs. With no leverage, and with strong hands on my ankles and wrists, I couldn’t break free, no matter how hard I struggled. I didn’t cry out, though. Whatever they were up to, I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

They hauled me over to the worn footstool and roughly shoved me to the ground in front of it. Well, not quite far enough in front. My face hit the block with a thunk that bloodied my nose and sent stars spinning through my vision. Before I could curse, a pair of strong hands turned my head to the side and pinned it down.

“This,” announced Fucknugget, “is a buzz bolt. All ya’ll gonna get one. For you stupid ones who don’t know no better, think of it like a shock collar. We use it to train ya. Do this. Don’t do that. Shit here. Don’t shit there. Ya’ll done had dogs before. You know how it works. All four ya’ll gonna know who’s in charge. We gonna buzz all the stubborn right outta your heads.”

Something cold and hard slapped down on the side of my head, just above and behind my left ear. I struggled, but the hands on my head pushed down so hard I thought my skull might crack. A drill whined to life, drawing so close I could hear nothing else, until the first screw burrowed into my bone. Then I screamed.

46

I came to, laying in the dirt beneath the tent. Jazz was screaming over the whine of the drill. Pluta was gesturing and explaining something for the Realtor. Murphy lay unconscious near me. Grace lay sobbing softly with a hand exploring the black puck bolted to her skull.

With my hands and feet free, I decided it was high time I did some killing. I pushed myself up and jumped to my feet, intent on rushing Pluta and the Realtor. As I tried to lunge, I lost my balance and fell on top of Murphy. Fucknugget laughed, and so did most of the yellows around.

“Get ‘em all up,” yelled Fucknugget.

Hands took my arms and pulled me up to my feet. I swayed, barely able to keep my balance.

They dragged Grace up beside me as one of them took to slapping Murphy across the face until he found consciousness again. Jazz, having just passed out from the buzz bolt install, puked when they helped her to stand.

The Realtor walked over for a closer look. With Jazz, he dragged two fingers through the blood trickling down her neck. “How long before the bleeding stops?”

Pluta told him, “Most of that blood is from the procedure. Generally stops once the bolts are torqued down.”

“And the brain?” asked the Realtor.

Pluta reached up and grabbed Grace’s buzz bolt, giving it a yank back and forth. “We use screws of a length that anchor the bolt to the skull without penetrating the cerebral tissue.”

“Are all skulls the same thickness?” asked the Realtor.

“Can’t say that it matters much,” answered Pluta. “We have a place in the corps for even the dumb ones. They’re all trainable.”

“Infection?” asked the Realtor.

“Nothing to speak of,” answered Pluta. “We use sterile, stainless steel screws.”

The Realtor turned his attention to Pluta. “How long will the buzz bolt stay on?”

“The bone solidifies around the screws,” answered Pluta, “It doesn’t push the screws out, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What’s to keep them from tearing the buzz bolt off?”

“The thing will explode and kill them the moment it loses contact,” answered Pluta. “We like to avoid that, so we keep a pretty close eye on them through the early phases of the induction process. It’s a simple thing to train a taint to do something, or not do it. Pain is a powerful educator.” Pluta guided the Realtor away from us as he glanced over at Fucknugget. “A demonstration.”

“You,” Fucknugget pointed at me, “mouthy one.” He waved at the two yellows holding me erect. “Why don’t you yank that buzz bolt off your head?”

His prompting me to do it was reason enough for me not to. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, too?”

Fucknugget pointed what looked like a garage door opener at me. “How ‘bout you learn sumpin’ ‘bout who tells who to do things.” He tapped a button. My bolt buzzed, shuddering my skull, and rattling my brain against the bone. The buzzing stopped after just a moment, but I realized I was on my knees, and my eyes felt like they were still wiggling inside my head. A wave of pain washed through my cortex like a caffeine headache, and as much as I wanted to find my balance again and pummel Fucknugget, I wished more that I had a few Excedrin and a hot espresso.

“That’s just the buzz,” Pluta told the Realtor. “A half-second is all it takes to get their attention.”

“And they learn? Just like a dog?” The Realtor seemed uncomfortable with the apparent brutality of the buzz bolt.

“The thing you’ve got to understand,” said Pluta, “is most of these taints are animals. Not much smarter than monkeys. Worse, they’ve got no sense of morality anymore. Left to their own devices, this one,” he pointed at me, “and all the rest of them, would tear out your lungs, eat your liver, and never think anything about it.”

Pluta walked over to me, close enough that when he made his next point, it started with a kick into my ribs. “Boy, I know you can understand what I’m telling you.” He glanced over at Fucknugget before telling me, “Now, you grab hold of that buzz bolt and try to yank it off.”

I spat on Pluta’s muddy boots. “You can fuck him, then fuck yourself.”

My bolt buzzed, and the world outside my head lost all relevance. All that mattered was the quake shaking my skull, my teeth coming loose, and my fragile brain beating itself to mush against the bone. When the buzzing stopped, I was on my belly, heaving bile onto the sandy ground.

“That was a second. Just one second,” bragged Pluta.

“But…” The Realtor seemed reluctant to finish his thought.

“But,” Pluta finished for him, “he didn’t yank on that buzz bolt. He didn’t do what he was told. And you’d be right. With most of them, it takes a little motivating before they feel the need to learn and obey. The stupid ones, it might surprise you to learn, are far easier to train. The smarter they get, the more trouble they give you. At least, they do at first. But that’s okay. We need the smarter ones to lead the stupid ones. The whole corps is built on that principle.”

“Does it hurt them?” asked the Realtor.

Pluta belted out a belly laugh and slapped the Realtor on the back. “That’s the whole point.”

“What I mean is, does it do permanent damage?”

“We got a whole army running on discipline enforced through the buzz bolt,” Pluta told him. “With the halfway smarter ones, after the first couple of days, you never need to buzz them again. They do what they’re ordered. With the really smart, stubborn ones, like this tough guy here, it takes a little longer. With the stupid ones, though, you need to remind them every couple of days or so to keep them in line.”

“So, no permanent damage, then?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Like I said, we got a place for all of them in the corps. If a stubborn one turns stupid in the process of learning how to be cooperative, I ask, what’s the downside? They heal up, move right into the grunt ranks.” Pluta held the palm of his white-skinned hand in front of the Realtor’s face. “We all heal up. In the short-term, in the long run, no matter which, we all have our place in the world. It’s better for everyone.”

“What about electric shock?” asked the Realtor.

Pluta grinned. “We only use shock when we have to. You see, after three seconds of buzz, the bolt automatically administers a shock.”

“And that?” asked the Realtor. “How does that affect their mental acuity and their performance?”

“It damn sure motivates them to hurry the hell up. Here, let me show you.” With a glance to get Fucknugget’s attention, Pluta turned back to me. “Boy, eat a handful of that dirt you puked on right there.”

It could have been a filet mignon, and I’d have said the same thing. “You can still go fu—”

Everything turned to pain.

47

Naked and cold, I woke up in a mound of stinking straw. Beneath me, the truck’s metal trailer floor carried vibrations up from the road. Outside, the wind blew by and the tires hummed, making me think of traveling down the highway back in the days when a road trip down to San Antonio or Houston for a metal concert was a normal thing. Back when titties and beer were almost all I ever thought about, back when getting behind on my rent was my only real worry. That, and whether my car would blow a transmission I couldn’t afford to repair.

Then the virus came.

It had been terrible at first, like nothing we’d ever seen. And for a time after, things sucked pretty hard.

Then we’d found Balmorhea.

We’d made something there. Something good.

Because I lived in a new world where all the shitty people couldn’t do the rest of us the courtesy of dying out, I was just as screwed as I’d been in the old world. Hence, I was naked and cold, in the back of a semi-trailer hauling me to a new nowhere I didn’t want to go to. Through the pattern of ventilation perforations in the trailer’s sheet metal walls, past the cow shit stains and rust, the landscape rolled past. Not the desert anymore. I hated the desert anyway. Always had. But it had been home—a place where I’d found the rarest feeling in life: happiness. With Steph. Outside, the land looked familiar. Timeless, even. Rolling hills and scrubby junipers. Lots of dry brown grass trying to grow through dirt that was more crushed limestone than organic matter. We were in Central Texas.

“You awake?” asked Murphy.

So, I wasn’t alone. I rolled over and then sat up, feeling a chill as a layer of straw fell away.

He laughed. “Looks like I lost a dollar on that bet.”

“Thanks.”

“My money was on comatose.” Murphy cocked a head at Grace, who was sitting against a wall, staring at the landscape. “She put two dollars on dead.”

That only left Jazz, who had the good sense to still be asleep.

“She didn’t bet,” said Murphy. “Said it was mean.”

“You know,” I told him, “if dollar bills were worth anything, I’d almost believe you.” I looked around to emphasize my coming question. “What’s the story?”

“No story.” Murphy tapped the appliance bolted to his head. “They gave us all a taste of what you got and told us to mind our manners. Kept our clothes and put us back in this truck. Been rolling east all day.”

“Did they say where?” I asked.

“You know they didn’t,” Grace told me.

“Why did they take our clothes?” I asked.

“They didn’t fry your brain so much you forgot how to deduce?” she responded.

That made me wonder, how much did they fry my brain? It made me worry, too.

“They’re trying to humiliate us,” Grace explained. “That’s why they took our clothes.”

Murphy laughed. “Guess they don’t know your history, Zed.”

I glanced over at Grace, not bothered by her nudity, and not particularly pervy about it, either. We’d run naked with the White hordes too many times that such things didn’t affect us anymore. “You think they don’t know about the naked thing? I mean, they have to know, right?”

“You asking about the naked horde?” Murphy wanted to know.

“Just the regular stuff,” I answered. Not most, but a pretty good share of Whites didn’t have the good sense to find warm clothes to wear once the garments they had on finally rotted to pieces and fell off their bodies.

Nobody said anything more about it, so the topic died on its own. It was all yammer and speculation, anyway, and none of us had much of an interest in that.

Grace pointed a lazy finger at me. “There’s a bottle of water there in the straw by you. Some food, too. Murphy wanted to take your share while you were sleeping, but…”

The but didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter enough to Grace to finish it. I rummaged through the loose straw and found the bottle, a twist-top glass one from before the fall. Not uncommon. Not really. The plastic ones had been ubiquitous back in the day, but didn’t tend to hold up long under daily use. A rough cloth bundle wrapped the food—a kind of coarse, dense, multigrain bread.

“Looks like a brick,” Murphy chuckled, “but it’ll keep the motor running.”

I gnawed on a corner. “What do you guys make of all this?”

Grace spoke up first. “We’re not prisoners.”

“Except for the confinement part,” Murphy laughed, “and the guards.”

Grace tapped the puck affixed to her skull. It had a ragged gouge running across it.

I pointed at her puck. “What happened?”

“Previous owner’s my guess.” She leaned over so I could get a good look at her puck. The hard, black plastic was chipped all along one edge.

“Used?” I chuckled, but didn’t feel it. “They didn’t even give us new buzz bolts. Cheap bastards.”

Grace said, “They’re going to put us to work in their stupid gas mask army or whatever they do wherever they’re taking us.”

I decided I liked Murphy’s mood better. I tapped my hard bread against the metal wall for a satisfying ring. “Maybe they’ll put us to work in the bread brick factory.” Nobody laughed. Not even Murphy. “What about the others?”

“The buses?” Murphy asked. “We’re all convoyed up. Headed east together.”

I leaned closer to the outer wall for a glance down the road behind us, but we were driving on a straight section, so I could see nothing but the landscape.

“Ten or twelve buses.” Murphy pointed forward. “Escort vehicles ahead and behind. Humvees with guns on top. Some pickups with machine guns mounted in the back. Livestock trailers full of bag heads, a few APCs.”

“And the tanker trucks,” added Jazz, apparently not asleep. “They filled them from our fuel stocks and they’re bringing them along.”

“That’s a hell of a convoy.” Obvious stuff, but I felt like I had to say something. “Does any of this make sense to any of you, because it doesn’t make sense to me. Who were all those people who unloaded from the tour buses? Did they conquer and colonize us in one day? Is that what happened?”

“Don’t forget mass deportation,” added Grace. “They stole Balmorhea right from under us.”

“Uh, huh.” Murphy looked at me. “Like I told you, bro, why wouldn’t someone come to Balmorhea and try and take it?”

“But these bag heads,” I argued, “I mean, look where we are. They’ve got a well-equipped, trained army of Whites. Buses. Humvees. Tanker trucks. APCs. They’ve got resources. They seem to be doing a lot better than us. Why come to Balmorhea?”

“Why did Preacher Dick come?” asked Murphy.

I laughed a little bit meanly. “You saying they’ve got some fanatical mission from God?”

“No,” he countered. “I’m sayin’, people can be covetous assholes.”

“It’s more than that,” Grace told us. “Only we’re not going to figure it out in the back of this cold truck. We’ll have to see what happens when we get wherever we’re going. Then we’ll know.”

48

Austin, that’s where we wound up, in a general sense. Familiar landmarks and signage that still stood gave it away.

The convoy didn’t drive through Austin. We skirted the city well to the south and crossed IH-35 down around Buda. We headed north through the black-dirt farm country well east of the interstate where the land laid flat as a griddle for mile after mile with nothing to break up the country except for the scattered homesteads, barns, and trees growing along the fence lines.

It was dark when the convoy drove through the rings of fortifications that surrounded the city of Taylor. Before the collapse, Taylor had been one of a thousand small towns in the state, one looking enough like the next that it was often hard to tell them apart. That was before the collapse. Now, Taylor stood out like a world-class city. It had functioning streetlights atop short poles on every corner, and down every block. Not obnoxiously bright, but enough to peel back the nocturnal black I’d become accustomed to out in Balmorhea, and in all the nights I’d spent in the empty desert. Even the tiny towns kept it dark—light, any light, could draw in the local cannibal talent.

We drove up the main street through the center of town. Restaurants and bars were well-lit and open for business. People, dressed warmly for the cold, strode in pairs and groups. They laughed and talked like their loud voices didn’t make them targets for Whites in the shadows. Not one appeared to be armed. That, I could barely believe. How could anyone who’d lived through the fall ever choose to go anywhere without a weapon in hand?

It didn’t seem sensible.

At the end of the road that ran through Taylor’s main business district, the buses and most of the protective vehicles turned left. The truck hauling the four of us turned right. A pair of Humvees with guns on top continued to escort us as we drove through a section of town where the old houses stood just as they’d stood for fifty or a hundred years, behind decorative fences, and surrounded by adequately trimmed yards. Porch lights shone, again, not obnoxiously bright, just enough to take the edge off the dark. People sat outside, enduring the cold for the comfort of the company of their neighbors. Through windows, I caught glimpses of people inside their homes, having dinner, playing board games, chatting on couches in front of the fireplace.

“Feels like we drove through a hole in time,” muttered Murphy, watching the town go by. “Landed ourselves right in the Mayberry town center. Hope the sheriff’s around.”

“And we’ve got some of this,” said Grace. “Think about the people who come to Balmorhea and—”

“Came,” I corrected. The present tense didn’t seem right anymore. We’d lost Balmorhea, and when we lost it, the name didn’t even seem to fit.

“Came,” Grace sighed. “People who haven’t seen electricity in ten years, think how dazzled they were by tiny Balmorhea. Think how they’d feel driving through this place.”

“You think they’re showing off?” asked Jazz.

“They didn’t have to drive us through town,” answered Grace.

We passed back through more fortifications on the edge of the city and passed into the dark farmlands that surrounded Taylor. The glow from all the lights was barely visible once we’d gone a half-mile past the gate, and the four of us settled back into silence. And remained that way. We were all pretty well talked out and tired from our long, jarring ride.

After a half hour, or an hour—it was hard to guess with no watch and nothing to pass the time except staring into the darkness—the truck stopped at a guarded gate. Again, they’d outclassed Balmorhea. We had one town, with one ring of defenses. The bag heads and their controllers had at least two.

Pulling inside, most everything was dark and quiet. The truck parked, and the driver killed the engine.

Jazz pressed her face against the metal trailer wall to get the best view outside. “I think this is a prison.”

49

Laying on my bunk, alone in my cell, I woke to the sounds of distant shouts and physical activity outside. The sun shone through my window, not brightly, at least not daytime bright. I decided it was still early.

Stiff from the ride and the bruises and bumps I’d earned in fighting for my life, I climbed out of the bed. I surveyed my cell, six feet wide, eight feet long. A double bunk, a commode and sink unit, a small desk attached to the wall, and a chair. The side walls were solid cinder block. At the front, I had the expected steel bars incorporating a door. On my back wall, I had a generous window, easily large enough for me to climb through, if not for the steel bars securing it.

I had a second-floor view of a wide exercise yard. The yard seemed too large to have been part of the prison’s original layout. It spanned the space of five or six football fields, and was, of course, surrounded by a tall fence. Several parallel tall fences, in fact. All across the yard, in groups of five to ten, men in yellow neckerchiefs and caps seemed to be training Whites, and frequently tormenting them with the buzz bolts screwed into their skulls.

Walking to the other end of my cell, I called through the bars, “Hey.”

The second-tier walkway outside my cell opened, I assumed, to a ground floor below. The wall across the gap had a row of windows, too high for me to see out of. At least they let in a good deal of light. And there I was, thinking like a prisoner already, evaluating my long-term accommodations, though I had no intention of staying in the jail. Although, that was nothing but an aspiration, as I was clueless on how to escape. Especially one I’d spent all of ten waking minutes inside.

“Hey.”

Footsteps tromped down the walkway. Coming in my direction.

I called again, “Hey.”

Well out of arm’s reach, a yellow stopped in front of my cell. “Can you read, or are you too stupid?”

My frustration over my helpless situation bubbled to the surface, and I wanted to punch him. I grabbed the bars instead. “What’s it to you?”

He pointed at a sign on the wall across from my cell. It said:

NO TALKING

NO NOISE

NO EXCEPTIONS

“One thing I’m obligated to tell you because it’s not on the sign,” he explained, “is that buzz bolt on your head, you got to keep it charged if you don’t want it to blow a hole through your skull. See where your pillow is laying on your bunk? You sleep with your head on it. Wires or something underneath charge the bolt by being close using whatever they call it.”

Before I could think of the best way to insult him, he pointed his clicker at me, and my head quaked.

When I came to my senses, I was sprawled in an awkward position on the floor, with puke dribbling down my chest and stomach. My jailer was gone, but I yelled, “Fuck you, Biff.”

Moments later, I heard the footsteps marching up the walkway again. I pulled myself to my feet, knees wobbling, and stood defiantly to face the front of my cell. The yellow seemed angry—maybe his name really was Biff. He pointed at the sign again and zapped me into unconsciousness.

50

I spent three days in the cell after that. Alone. Naked. And silent. No food to eat. What water I needed, I drank from the faucet of my sink. What sounds I heard came from out on the walkway, or from down below. I didn’t see another person. Not once. Except out my window, where yellows worked at training their Whites in the yard.

I thought a lot about the black plastic puck screwed onto my skull. One corner of my bed frame looked like a tool I might be able to use to pry it off. But. That was the big word full of doubt. Was it really loaded with some sort of charge that could sense when it was being taken off? Would it really explode and kill me? All I knew for sure was that Grace’s buzz bolt, Murphy’s, and even mine, by the feel of it, were well-used. They’d been attached to someone before. Which meant they’d been removed, probably after death. Why take one off a living White, if, as the Pluta priss had told the Realtor, they were the foundation of discipline in the corps?

Was it all a bluff? Was I willing to bet my life that it was?

Maybe. I needed more information first.

Being my only entertainment, I spent a good deal of time watching the yard, understanding what I could, deducing the rest. New Whites came in, usually in groups of five. Each group had an alpha White, one who could understand verbal instructions. And, of course, a few yellow instructors for each group. Much of what the Whites did after that was dependent on them utilizing their inherent need to follow and imitate. The training process seemed to be geared toward cementing that relationship with the ever-present negative reinforcement of the buzz bolt. Do, or suffer. Even the most simple-minded White could understand that.

Maybe the most important thing I learned was something I already knew but hadn’t quite assimilated—Whites were being trained into an organized army. They weren’t using firearms—mostly fists and clubs. Some practiced at throwing bottles, dummy Molotovs, and tear gas bombs. Others—the advanced trainees, I guessed—threw live firebombs at target houses, groups of full-sized stick-figure people, and rusting automobiles. A small group, all yellows, put flamethrowers to work, sending boiling jets of fire into targets that lasted only seconds in the inferno.

“You gonna stare out that window all day?”

I turned to see my guard, clicker-zapper in hand, canvas bag in the other. I didn’t say anything—given enough pain, anybody was trainable.

“Guess I lost that bet. You’re not as stupid as I thought.” He knelt on the floor outside my cell and took what looked like some kiddie toys out of his bag, sliding them through the dinner slot at the bottom edge of my iron-bar door. When he finished, he stood and fished a stopwatch out of his pocket. “I need to see how quick you can do that.”

I didn’t move toward the toy. It wasn’t anything but what I’d immediately guessed—a tiny table frame supporting a little wooden panel with five shapes cut in the top: a circle, a triangle, a square, a star, and an octagon. Accompanying the toy were five pieces of wood, painted different colors, each matching the shape of one of the holes.

“I got another bet says you can’t pass the retard test.” He laughed. “I’m supposed to tell you, if you do it in less than thirty seconds, you can eat.”

With no desire to be the mouse in my guard’s game, I rolled my eyes and turned to gaze out the window.

He waited a bit, and then left me with my untouched toy and my empty stomach.

Another cold night passed with me alone in my seemingly empty wing of the prison.

I woke from a dream of bacon and cream-filled doughnuts the next morning to see my guard sitting on a stool outside my cell.

“I was hopin’ maybe you’d starved to death. You pig-headed ones never amount to much.” He lifted a plate of eggs, toast, and something that smelled a lot like bacon—smoky and salty. He stuffed a sloppy scoop of eggs into his mouth. “If you hop down there and put them shapes in them holes before I finish, you can have whatever’s left.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?”

He pointed at the sign on the far wall, raised his zapper and buzzed my skull.

I flinched away from the shock, but the electricity didn’t come. Despite my resistance, I was already being trained.

He pointed at the toys on the floor. “I did tell you what I wanted.” Taking his plate, he headed up the walk.

My hunger passed along with the smell of the food. I’d starved for days and weeks before. I knew how it felt, and I knew what to expect. The question on my mind wasn’t whether I was going to give in for a piece of bread, but how I was going to get out of the cell and retake control of my fate. More importantly, how was I going to find Steph and Murphy and escape all together.

Three days turned into a week, and my captors, apparently deciding that starving wasn’t going to serve their purpose, started leaving me a hunk of coarse bread and a cup of rancid broth at midday. It wasn’t enough to sate my hunger, but I decided that wasn’t its purpose—again, Zed the genius at work. The meal provided just enough calories and nutrients to keep me alive while keeping me hungering. Food as torture—people can be so creative in their cruelty.

Biff brought me some baggy pants and a plain T-shirt to wear. He replaced my infantile shape puzzle with a slightly more advanced ABCs puzzle. I ignored that for a week. A numbers game followed. Still, Biff sat in front of my cell, having his breakfast each morning. Not eggs and bacon every time, but always something aromatic and delicious.

By the twenty-third day, I was fatigued all the time, and my muscles felt like they were wasting down to the bone. The truth of my situation was settling in—I was playing a game I couldn’t win. Biff stopped paying me visits. The first day that happened, I worried I’d been forgotten, and that I’d slowly starve to death. However, a silent orderly dropped off my broth and bread at midday and a good deal of my anxiety disappeared.

At the end of my first month, I started each day with my morning calisthenics. I was intent on keeping my strength for as long as possible. After that, I watched the training exercises in the yard, and was so engrossed in memorizing every detail that I didn’t notice that someone had come to my cell until he said, “Let’s talk.”

Startled, I failed at trying to hide it as I turned away from my window.

At my cell door stood a black man with normal skin color. As much as I hated the bigotry I saw in others, skin color was the first thing I looked at when I came across someone new. Besides the skin, he was an average man, late 40s, thinning hair, soft around the middle. He wore a red neckerchief and uniform shirt with jeans. He looked like a middle-aged scout master. I glanced at his hands.

He noticed. “I’m not going to buzz you.”

I pretended not to care.

He shrugged. He didn’t care, either. “You’re a stubborn one. Just the same, I think you’ll break. Bill says otherwise.”

“Bill?”

“It’s hard to be in a situation where you don’t know anything, isn’t it?”

True. But I wasn’t going to admit that. “What do you want?”

“You’re Zed Zane. We know that. You’re married to a nurse whom you call Steph. Maiden name Leonard.”

I exaggerated a sigh in case he hadn’t picked up on my apathy vibe.

“I can tell you more if you want. Philosophy degree. Abusive parents. Barista before the collapse. Barista? I mean really, why can’t we just say coffee boy? Did that ever make sense to you?”

“What’s your point?”

“No point I know of. I’m just the manager of this facility. I get instructions. I do as I’m told.”

“You’re the warden?”

“Bill isn’t a labels sort of guy.” He shrugged again. It seemed like a habit, like maybe he had a lot of things in his life he wanted to pretend not to care about. “Bill thinks it will be helpful that you know how much we know about you. We know you’re intelligent, so the evaluation puzzles were pointless after the first week or so. In fact, we knew after the first few days you weren’t one of the deviant morons most of your kind are. We kept putting the puzzles in your cell to taunt you. You know, simple pleasures and all. I guess the point is, you don’t want to work with us to onboard you in the usual way, so Bill wants to throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Well, there’s more of that ambiguity,” he chuckled. “The wages of being an asshole is nobody tells you anything.” He chuckled again, amused by his word play. “Let me shed a little light on the world for you—but just because Bill told me to tell you this. Well, not in these words exactly, but he’s not a micromanager that way. New Tejas is a meritocracy. Sort of.”

“This is New Tejas?” I asked. “What you call the place?”

The warden ignored my question. “At the same time, we’re an ultra-strict, class-based society. Now for the punchline. It’s based on skin color. What a big surprise, right?” He shrugged when I didn’t react. “Ultra-whites like you, those who aren’t psycho morons, obviously, you get the golden ticket.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You never saw Willie Wonka?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe we were wrong about you not being a moron. Do you know what a metaphor is?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you need to tell me. This game you’re playing is boring.”

He shrugged. “Keep your nose clean. Do what you’re told, and life will get better. Good food. More privileges. Freedom, or something like it. You’ll even get to play house with the sweet little red-headed thing again. Or, keep acting like an asshole, and you can beat off to memories while you waste away in a barracks full of lunatics until you die.” He turned to head up the hall. “Oh, they’ll be by to pick you up in a little bit. You have a nice day, you hear?” He laughed as he walked away.

51

Cuffs on my wrists and shackles on my ankles, they transported me in the open bed of a pickup, bouncing down a decaying paved road between cultivated fields spread for miles on both sides. After thirty, maybe forty minutes, the truck turned onto a dirt road and dust roiled into the bed, choking me with its grit. But there was nothing I could do about the dust, the racing pickup, or pretty much anything. I had to suffer the figurative boot on my neck until I found the opportunity to stand. Preferably with a machete in my hand.

So, I stewed. I thought about Steph. And Murphy, Grace, and Jazz. I wondered about Dalhover. I couldn’t imagine that hard old bastard in anybody’s chains. Which meant he was probably dead. One of the hundreds of corpses I saw them loading into the refrigerator trucks outside Balmorhea’s walls the morning after our defeat.

I thought about the buzz bolt. I was out in the country, apparently miles away from anything. The tropey Sci-Fi idea that my puck was somehow electronically connected to a master control system that would blow my head off if I messed with it couldn’t be true. Doh. Of course, it couldn’t be true. We didn’t have the infrastructure to support any such system out in Balmorhea when the yellows had overrun us. That meant the puck had to incorporate a physical trigger that depended on my body heat, or a pressure switch against my skull. Or maybe the screws themselves.

Then it occurred to me, because my puck was used, likely taken off the skull of a corpse, a boobytrap mechanism couldn’t be heat sensitive. That certainly wasn’t a huge deduction, but it was one more piece of the puck puzzle. Well, two, counting the absence of a WIFI or cellular connection.

I tugged at my cuffs and achieved nothing. The cuffs were linked to a steel loop welded to the truck bed. I was going nowhere until my captors wanted me to. My frustrations overcame me, and I roared at the sky. And not one speck of anything changed in the world. As usual—well, as was the case most times—my tantrum proved pointless.

I drew a deep breath. I knew if I were calm, I’d think clearly. Clear thinking would lead to better outcomes. And maybe warden what-his-name was being truthful about Steph—keep my nose clean and see her again. Play their game. Bide my time. Hide my rage. Wait for vengeance until I had the power to take it.

52

My delivery pickup pulled to a stop in a lot where seven eighteen-wheelers sat in a neat row, each with a livestock trailer attached. One of them could have been the one that hauled me east from Balmorhea. But it didn’t matter. One hauler was the same as the next. Behind the lot stood rows of shabby barracks. Paths worn in the dirt. It looked like an army camp or a concentration camp. Only there wasn’t a perimeter fence, at least none surrounding the buildings. Spread across the pasture behind the barracks, hundreds of Whites trained in squads and platoon-sized formations, all under the supervision of yellows. Far across the field, stretching to the horizons, barbed wire cattle fences ran in parallel rows, marking the border of New Tejas. Or so I guessed. Fences of that type would do little to stop a horde of Whites, but I figured Bill and his lackeys knew that and had other horde mitigation procedures in place. The very existence of Bill’s Bumfucktopia was proof of that.

My guards disconnected me from the pickup and led me toward one of the barracks.

“These cuffs necessary?” I asked.

“You got an evil eye on you,” stuttered one of them without looking at me. He reminded me of those half-smart knuckleheads I’d encountered in the survivor army all those years back. The other one yanked on my cuffs to drag me through a door into one of the barracks.

Inside, they removed the cuffs and left me standing in front of a long table with nothing on it. Sitting behind the table, a gruff yellow ordered me to strip naked. No big deal. I’d lost all sense of shame over nudity a long time back. I did as told—it wasn’t worth getting buzzed.

A voice behind me said, “He’s a skinny one.”

I glanced back. Two cushy chairs sat in front of a window. One of them was occupied by a tall, fastidious man picking at his fingernails and making a point of not looking at me. It was Pluta, the white-skinned pansy who’d gotten his jollies on zapping me the day they bolted me outside Balmorhea.

The gruff yellow behind the table ran his apathetic eyes over me. “Not much to look at, Senior Man.”

“Nope,” yawned Pluta.

The armory sergeant ordered his helpers to fetch my gear—boots, socks, t-shirt, shorts, long pants, a heavy combat coat, and a belt with a harness. Some of it looked new. The pants and coats each had a matching number stenciled on. My new ID, I figured. My weapon, a billy club, weighted on the end with an iron cuff. A yellow kerchief and a bright yellow gas mask, well-used, finished out my battle ensemble.

I reached for the shorts.

“What you doin’?” barked the sergeant. “I didn’t tell you to move.”

I wanted to jump across the table to put a beating on the sergeant. I figured with the weighted billy club, I had a pretty good chance against all four Whites in the room.

My bolt buzzed, purging my thoughts of everything except the rattle of the meat inside my head.

“I admire your defiance,” said Pluta. He didn’t sound like he meant it. “It’s an admirable trait. But here, at Camp 17, you’ll learn to channel it where I tell you to channel it, or by God you’ll come to fear me so deeply, you’ll piss yourself when you even imagine the whisper of my voice.”

He buzzed me again. No shock, but the second buzz was nearly enough to drop me to my knees.

The sergeant pointed at Pluta. “He’s Senior Man at Camp 17. For the likes of you, Pluta is God, and you best take that to heart.” He let that warning sink in for a moment before directing my attention back to my gear. “Don’t go nowhere unless you wear the kerchief or the gas mask. Both, if you’re smart. They mark you as a yellow. Ain’t no upside being a fuckwit taint in this world. Without your yellow, that’s all you are.”

I didn’t nod or acknowledge in any way—that damn defiance of mine, finding a way to express itself.

“Hey, you glassy-eyed ass maggot, you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“He understands,” said Senior Man Pluta. “He’s a high yellow.”

The sergeant grinned. “Your brain still works for readin’ books and writin’ poetry and such? Well, you won’t need none of that faggoty shit spittle at Camp 17. Matter of fact, skinny bastard like you won’t be need’n much of any of this for long.” He grabbed a clicker-zapper off his desk and threw it at me.

I snatched it out of the air.

The sergeant laughed. “You got that high yellow hand-eye coordination. Maybe you can figure a use of that so you won’t get butt punched in the barracks tonight. My advice? Lube your ass with some soap before you go in. Maybe you don’t bleed as much.”

Ignoring his taunting, I examined my clicker.

“One button. Any yellow can operate it. You point it and tap that button to put a buzz on any taint in range. Ten, maybe twenty feet, depending on your battery. You want to keep that charged. Check it every day. We train them taints up good and tight, but they’re wicked evil things, they are. And they ain’t as dumb as you think. The stupidest ones, we cull out for cookin’ ‘n eatin’. The half-smart ones, we put ‘em in a muzzle mask and a pair of Jimmy gloves.”

My curiosity slipped through.

The armory sergeant snorted. “They’re like heavy-duty mittens. Taints can tackle somebody, hold ‘em still, but the gloves keeps ‘em from ripping the guts out as they’re wont to do.” He glanced at the clicker in my hand again. “Tap it once for a buzz. Twice for a zap. You want Pluta should zap you so you remember what it feels like?” He tapped the buzz bolt affixed to his skull. “We all know. Just so you know, you hold that button down for three seconds, it sends out a zap in all directions at once. Only use if you get in trouble with the taints. You understand?”

It wasn’t rocket science.

“You’re a smug one. Well, you best listen up to this next part. These yellow clickers, they’re for us. They affect taints. Red clickers, they’re for normals and high yellows who earned the privilege. They work on us, and the taints. Just so you know, if you get caught with your hands on one of those, you’ll lose ‘em both. Take maybe six months or a coupla years to grow back. I’ll bet you know all about that, too, a smart high yellow like you.”

I didn’t answer. I figured my silence was worth more than an admission or a lie.

“So, you think you’re a smartsy fartsy rebellious type, don’t ya?” The sergeant’s anger was starting to show.

“That’s a fact.” Pluta rattled some papers behind me. “Bill wants this one to get some special attention. Says he’s got potential.”

“Bill?” I asked. “There is a real Bill?”

“Well,” the sergeant ignored my question as he laughed, “we know all about special attention.” He stood and leaned over the table, getting so close I could smell the stink on his breath of what he’d had for lunch. “Right now, you’re nuthin’. You wanna be anything, you wanna do anything, you wanna have anything, you earn by goin’ to fight when the Senior Man Pluta tells you to. Everybody fights, or nobody eats. All you gotta do is be the reason the dinner plate is empty one time.” He laughed about that, too. “Let’s just say, the taints are gettin’ their supper, whether we feed ‘em, or whether they take it out of your skinny ass.”

Pluta’s chair scooted out as he stood up.

He crossed the room to stand behind me.

I felt his breath on my neck. I thought about butting his face with the back of my head.

He whispered the word, “whisper,” and buzzed my bolt. As I wobbled on my feet, he zapped me with a full electric shock, dropping me to the floor.

While I was slobbering into a puddle and watching snot run out of my nose, Pluta dropped to a knee beside me. “You’re one of those stupid stubborn ones who’ll always find some way to screw yourself and everybody around you. You’re a waste of my time, but that’s not my call to make. I’m just the Camp 17 Senior Man. Like Dorsey said to you, I’m God.” He buzzed me again. “Your personal god of thunder. If it were up to me, I’d jack your bolt to a car battery and fry every ounce of obstinance out of your head. I’d just as soon kill you as kneel here, smelling you piss all over yourself. But I can’t, because Camp 17 is a cesspool of backstabbing climber wannabes.” He looked up at the sergeant. “Isn’t that right, Dorsey? Every single one of you half-taints would sell me for a cold fuck in a cornfield.”

Dorsey laughed nervously. “Maybe them others, Senior Man, but I’m as loyal as the day is long.”

Pluta leaned in close enough that I could feel his breath on my ear. “I can’t kill you quick, which would be a mercy for both of us. Bill would have my balls if I did that. To Bill, the real live Bill, taints are resources, and high yellows, oh how he thinks every high yellow is going to be his next little Attila the Hun to conquer the world and lick his boots.” Pluta shoved me over onto the floor. I couldn’t do anything to resist. “I am going to grind you down, shave off all the soft meat and see if there’s a hard nut in the middle. And then I’m going to crack it. Bill won’t mind if I do that. He thinks it builds character. He thinks that’s how hard men rise to the top. So, you think about that while you’re suffering and scheming, dreaming about that redheaded twat you got back in Taylor Town. And you spend some extra time thinking about how when you’re dead or too stupid to care, I’ll be comforting her with my big white-skinned cock.”

My anger erupted, and so did the electricity in my head as the bolt unloaded another zap into my brain.

53

The barracks door slammed shut behind me.

It took a moment for me to understand that I was no longer in the armory. I was standing. No, I wasn’t standing. Strong hands were under my arms, holding me up. I shook them off and pushed the two men away, nearly losing my balance and falling to the floor for my trouble.

As my eyes adjusted to the deep shadows and stark light shining across the room, I smelled a pungent dinner stew reeking of onions and greasy meat. Unwashed bodies packed too closely together. Open sewage holes in the floor. No commodes. No lids. Just holes mucked with the evidence of how filthy men could be when most of them were monkey-trained, white-skinned animals, and the rest didn’t give enough of a shit to do anything about it. At that moment, though, they all seemed to care about me, as every eye in the barracks was locked on mine.

On layers of racks, six-feet deep on the right-hand wall, forty, maybe fifty Whites stirred to life. Along the left wall, lounging on individual cots, or clustered in cliques of truncated conversation, yellows locked me in loathsome stares. Without a clue what I was supposed to say, let alone do, I eyed them one by one, working my way through, as each turned away. It was a dominance thing. The challenge, silent but clear. If I wanted to quell the violence I already felt in the air, I had to face them without flinching. At least, the little scenario that played out in my mind suggested that was the way to handle the situation.

Reality took a different turn when a mountainous man with a mule face stood from whatever had been keeping him busy in the close company of a few others. “You eyeballin’ me, Scrot?”

One of the yellows who’d already surrendered to my staring challenge said, “He’s eyeballing you, Mort. Betcha he’s that high yellow big boss said was comin’. He thinks he’s better’n you.”

“Yeah,” someone agreed.

The Whites crept to the edge of their racks, sensing the trouble rising in the room.

Mildly surprised that my plan to psych them all into submission had gone awry, I figured I’d double-down and run with it. Boldness in the face of long odds had served me well more times than I could count. “Mort, sit your ugly ass down and shut the fuck up. Leave your betters to their business.”

Mort didn’t take my advice. Instead, he marched into the wide center aisle that divided the Whites from the yellows in the barracks. He leaned on a long table scattered with empty pots and messy tin bowls and glared at me. Behind his cruel eyes, his halfwit brain ran through its own scenarios. He took just long enough for me to think I’d won, when he barked a big laugh that ended as artificially as it started. “Scrot don’t know his place, boys. We gotta do some teachin’.”

The yellows rushed me.

With nowhere to run, and no ability to do so, they overwhelmed me. They beat me from head to toe. They scattered the pots and bowls off the center table and bent me over, lashing my ankles to the table legs, and wrapping my arms around the tabletop in a forced hug, secured there by tied wrists.

I figured the grinding Pluta talked about was about to begin.

54

“Hey Mort, we supposed to do this without the bull?” asked someone behind me, back where most of the yellows had gathered.

“Bull ain’t here,” crowed Mort. “That makes me the bull again.”

“Only one bull.” More than one of the yellows were in agreement on that point.

One of them said, “Bull goes first. Always first. Always been that way.”

“He dissed me,” complained Mort. “I got a right.”

“Bull’s got a right,” argued one of the men. “You ain’t got shit, now. You’re one of us.”

“The first of you,” argued Mort.

“Everybody’s got a place,” followed the retort. “Everybody knows their place. Everybody keeps it. That’s the way of it.”

“Rules is rules,” complained someone else.

“Look at him,” pleaded Mort. “He needs it. He wants it. Hell, he all but begged us for a comeuppance, strutting in here like a diamond-dick untouchable. He ain’t nuthin’ but a dirty taint. We got a duty. That’s what Bill would tell the lot of you.”

Plenty disagreed with Mort on that point.

“We can’t do nothing ‘til Bull gets back from Taylor Town.”

“Hell,” bitched Mort. “No tellin’ when he’s comin’ back. We could be waitin’ here all night.”

“Don’t matter,” another one argued.

The barracks’ heavy door swung open, banging the wall. Everybody stopped talking. Even the rancorous Whites stopped fidgeting.

Mort’s bravery from before turned suddenly fawning. “Hey Bull. We got a high yellow strapped down for learnin’ lessons. Bad manners, this one. Thinks he’s better’n everyone.”

A handful agreed with Mort, though none with much enthusiasm.

Heavy footsteps clomped up the floor, purposefully loud. Or the man was absolutely huge.

A hundred lies and even more threats spun through my thoughts, as I searched for the words that would get me out of my predicament.

A big hand slapped my bare ass, and I yelped.

A chair’s feet scraped across the floor as it was dragged from somewhere behind, skidding into place beside the table. A big man dropped into it, looking at me with a familiar grin. “Hey Zed, been waitin’ up long?”

“Murphy, you’re the—” The slang felt weird to say. “You’re the bull?”

55

Somebody grabbed me by the hips and ground their crotch against my ass. Thankfully they were still covered in their coarse work pants. “We gonna teach this one what he needs teachin’?” It was Mort. Some of the others voiced their enthusiasm.

Murphy told them, “Go back to playing with your dicks for a minute.”

I said, “Murphy, you gonna untie me?”

He shook his head.

My temper flared, but I didn’t figure it was a good time to lose it. “You got a reason for that?”

Murphy nodded and yawned. “You got yourself in a spot, don’t you?”

“But you’re the bull. I guess that means you’re the boss, right?”

“Sometimes it pays not to act like a contrary little brat every day of the week.”

“What does the day of the week have to do with anything?”

“You’re deflecting.” Murphy looked at the men I knew were still arrayed behind me. “Maybe you do need some teachin’.”

“Stop fucking around and untie me before this gets out of hand.”

“You’re really worried, aren’t you?”

“Is that what this is now?” I ground my teeth, doing all I could to keep my temper down. “You want me to learn a lesson?”

Murphy laughed. “Something about old dogs and new tricks or whatever. You’ll never learn anything until you’re good and ready.”

“So, what are we doing here?” I glanced back at the anxious perverts behind me.

Murphy leaned in close. “Man, I’m just messin’ with you.”

“You’re an asshole.”

He belted out a big laugh and fell out of his flimsy chair, catching himself at the last moment and jumping to his feet. “Listen up,” he bellowed, addressing the yellows, “this kind of shit right here, whatever you bunch of butt pluggers think it is, we don’t do that in this barracks no more.”

“Always done it this way,” complained Mort.

“You got a problem with it,” Murphy challenged, “come at me. You know the rule as well as anyone here.”

Complaints grumbled through the room.

“That’s what I thought,” Murphy told them. “Now you bitches untie his skinny ass and square your shit. I told you to get this place clean. It stinks like ass crack in here.”

“Maybe you ain’t no kinda bull,” griped Mort. “Maybe, you’re a teat sucking—”

A bell rang outside, sounding like a church bell in the hands of a manic monk, freezing everyone into perfect silence.

“Everyone outside in five minutes,” Murphy commanded, “geared up and ready to roll. Go, go, go!”

56

Without a watch, I had no way of knowing how many minutes passed between the start of the frantic bell ringing and our formation in front of the barracks, but it was probably close to five. In that time, like everyone in Murphy’s platoon—if that was the right word for it—I was dressed in my combat boots, gas mask, cloth pants, and a well-used sleeveless jacket. Most of my gear was pre-owned, so, customized a bit, with blood stains still prominent, not all from the enemy.

We had four types of soldiers in our formation, the Whites, in groups of five queued up behind a yellow dressed like me. From what I’d seen in Balmorhea, they were the brute force of Bill’s army. There were the wranglers in charge of each group of five. Other yellows were decked out in harnesses dangling impact-Molotovs and tear-gas bottles, and then there was me, wearing forty pounds of flamethrower equipment, just like the two who’d hurriedly strapped it on me, giving me a thirty-second crash course in operating the device. The three of us were the platoon’s most powerful weapons. Murphy told me to do whatever they did, and I’d be fine. Roasting Whites on the hoof, he explained, was easy.

Before I had a chance to dread what was coming, Murphy led our platoon running toward the stock trailers in the gravel parking lot I’d arrived at an hour or two before. The diesels were already running on the semis’ engines. Several hundred—hell, maybe a thousand of us—were massed into the livestock trailers in a matter of minutes, and the trucks rolled into the settling darkness.

In the crush of bodies, I couldn’t move. Well, I could move my hands far enough to scratch an itch or adjust the straps of the flamethrower’s weighty fuel tank, digging into my shoulders. I could shuffle my feet, and fidget with my weapon’s big…gun? Whatever the right word was for it. All I really knew about it was how to turn the gas valve on, once we were boots on the ground at the scene of whatever was coming. After that, I needed to depress the pilot ignitor until a small jet of blue fire stayed lit at the tip of my weapon—also called an ignitor. Then, it was simple—point and hose. A dragon’s breath of flame would incinerate whatever stood in front of me.

Back to the point of me not being able to move, I was pinned in by stinking Whites and yellows around me, up near the front of the trailer. Murphy stood down at the far end. I couldn’t see him in the chaotic dark, but I could hear his big voice commanding my fellow knuckleheads.

Without warning, the truck hauling our platoon careened off the road, barreling over a plowed field, and bouncing us around inside the trailer. Fortunately, our extreme jostling lasted only minutes. The driver slowed into a wide arc and turned the semi around just as he came to a stop. The rear gate fell open, and we poured into the night, forming up in a sloppy copy of how we’d lined up in front of the barracks.

I barely knew what end was up as I tugged at the straps holding my flamethrower equipment on my back. It seemed like everything was overly noisy and moving, the bodies of the men, the rambunctious Whites, the semis’ growling engines, sweeping headlights, and somewhere out in the night, a horde of feral Whites was coming. A big one.

57

One of Pluta’s stooges, what I guessed might pass for a lieutenant in a pre-collapse army, ran up and conveyed a message to Murphy that I was too far away to overhear. Didn’t matter. Once Murphy had the info, he gathered us close to shout our orders over the cacophony. “A horde is in the forest just outside the wire.” He pointed into darkness—north, south, I had no idea which. I’d lost all sense of direction on the ride over. “Seven to ten thousand. That’s the guess.”

The yellows around me had a lot to say about that, mostly bellicose cliches about killing taints coupled with exaggerations of their sexual prowess. How the two subjects went together made no sense to me. But boys will be boys, and my fellow yellows were itching for a fight. They liked exactly the kind of danger that was lurking out there in the night.

As for me, I’d been in too many scrapes with Whites to entertain any of that nonsense. Just the opposite. The estimated count on the Whites we were to face concerned me. Deeply. Whites were always wild cards. Just like with drunk teenagers, the more of them there were, the more could go wrong. I glanced across what I could see of Camp 17’s platoons. My earlier guess of our count shrank. What felt like a thousand when we were crowding into the cattle trailers now looked like five hundred. At best.

“We double-time up to the wire,” Murphy told us. “When Pluta gives the word, we’ll spread out in a wide battle line, keeping the horde in front. At the platoon level, we’ll break into three mêlée squads, one supporting each flamethrower. We’re not capturing tonight. We’re killing. Let the flamethrowers do the work. Yellows and taints protect the flamethrower’s flanks. If they go down, we’re all hosed.” Murphy pointed at me. “I’ve got section one in the middle. Mort, you’ll take section two a couple hundred feet to my right. Gerici, you’ve got section three, same distance on the left.” His eyes settled on the taint wranglers. “Keep your clickers handy. You know how the taints can get around the wild ones.”

That didn’t sound good at all, but I didn’t have time to spin my imagination up over that problem either. The semis rumbled away.

“Once we engage,” Murphy focused on Mort and Gerici, “keep an eye on what I’m doing with first squad. We’ll fire the attacking front, run a tactical retreat, and fire again. Pluta wants them charging at us over the corpses. He thinks it’ll demoralize them.”

Everybody laughed.

Somebody said, “Let ‘em fry crawling over their burning dead.”

That’s when the tactic made sense to me. The wide gaps between mêlée squads hadn’t made any sense until then.

Murphy called the order for gas masks. We all pulled them over our heads.

Whistles tweeted over the noise of our voices and we jogged out to our positions, spreading into three suddenly very small groups that seemed much more widely spaced than I had imagined they’d be. In the darkness, I could barely make out the glow of pilot flames on the other flamethrowers.

Suddenly beside me, Murphy said, “You cool? You know what to do?”

“Point and fire,” I answered. “Literally.”

“They’ll come, just like you seen a million times. Just like they always do, when they do.”

“Been there done that. Gotcha.”

“What I’m sayin’ is, don’t worry about what’s going on behind you or beside you. If they get back here among us, there’s not a damn thing you can do with that flamethrower.”

“I could torch Mort, and some of those other assholes.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Right now, you—”

“I know what I’ve got to do, Murphy.”

He slapped me on the shoulder. “Sorry about that business back there with your ass.”

I shrugged. “How long will this tank last me? I don’t see a gauge or anything.”

“You’ll feel it getting lighter.”

“Not a very precise system, is it?”

“You keep that flame burning as long as they keep coming. Pluta says there’s a truck on the way with more tanks, more Molotovs, and whatnot. We can swap an empty tank in like a minute.”

“Good, ‘cause—”

A machine gun rattled across the dark field. I saw the burst from the barrel, not a hundred yards away.

Murphy shouted, “That’ll bring ‘em to us!”

Two more machine guns fired.

The horde in the forest screamed as one, and the ground rumbled. Everybody alive knew that feeling through the souls of their feet, and those monkey screams ripping the air. The sounds meant hide, haul ass, or die. I didn’t say any of that, though. Murphy had the dudes around me ready for a fight, and I had a big honkin’ flamethrower in hand. One I’d never used. So, not wanting a surprise, I figured a test was in order. I pointed my ignitor into the darkness and tapped the trigger. A belch of fire shot thirty feet out, torching the grass in front of me, and lighting up the night. The men around me roared with confidence, and the horde’s raw rage found its focus.

Murphy laughed. “Fucking Null Spot.”

58

In the fading firelight, out across the field, the horde looked like a single sprawling organism, rushing forward in an unstoppable wave.

Molotovs burst on the ground, well short of the coming charge. Murphy shouted orders at the premature tossers. The tension felt electric around me. An urge to drop my gear and run surged up through my feet and squeezed my balls. It took some effort to steady my breathing and calm myself for the coming onslaught. I’d been in the shit more times than I could count. If I had any talent in the world, it was the ability to stand in the storm without letting my emotions turn me into a frenetic mess.

“Fire!” ordered Murphy.

Knowing the pressure of my flame would push back on me, I braced myself and pulled the trigger. Fire blasted out in a narrow inferno that exploded into the mob a hundred feet in front of me. Whites shrieked as their flesh boiled in their own blood and their skin burned away.

Red and orange geysers sprayed up and down our line, and the White charge faltered. Before surging again.

Murphy ordered the tear gas, and the air filled with an acrid haze. He slapped my shoulder. “Back! Twenty steps back.”

I let the trigger on my fire shooter go and turned to run. Flames shot in every direction. Caustic gas and smoke surged and roiled. Molotovs burst in front and to the sides. However it happened, Whites were suddenly everywhere.

Murphy formed us into a rough defensive circle, and I turned to let loose again, blasting another hundred or two hundred Whites, watching them combust and run blindly forward, covered in flame, as those behind pushed through the fire.

“Go,” shouted Murphy. “Back twenty.”

I turned and ran into the chaos that, even through my yellow gas mask, stank like writhing hell.

When we stopped, feral Whites were running crazy in every direction. Yellows were running for their lives. Some held their formations and were fighting with fire. Our defensive circle was under assault from more Whites than I could count. I spun, saw the direction Murphy was pointing, and unleashed my inferno, sweeping back and forth, laying down a wall of fire so hot that no human, no matter how mentally impaired, could get through.

I spun to run again and realized Murphy hadn’t ordered me to. Our platoon had collapsed on the left. Some of our Whites had flipped their shit, slipped their conditioning, and turned on their yellow masters.

Murphy pointed at the scrum of thrashing bodies. “Torch ‘em. Now!”

From ten feet away, I let it rip, spraying my white-skinned cousins with a blast furnace of live fire that exploded their flesh in flaming chunks flying in every direction.

Well out past that, a flamethrower shot straight up in a fountain of fire, lighting squad three in a brilliant orange formation that turned into a dome-shaped inferno as flamethrower fuel rained down on them from above.

Murphy saw it too. “Fucking morons!” He pointed in the direction I guessed was our rear. I’d lost track. “Clear us a path.”

I fired again, torching a score of Whites and the dry grass around them. While most of those Whites were running in fiery circles, trying to escape the flames feeding on their flesh, Murphy charged through, leading us toward open ground. And I thought, We’re gonna make it, just before a massive explosion knocked us to the ground.

59

I don’t know how long we fought, ran, torched, and retreated. Somewhere in there, my tanks ran dry. Murphy, true to his word, had a fresh tank at the ready by then, hauled to our unit by an unlucky yellow whose sole purpose in the corps was—apparently—to run through the mêlée between wherever our supply truck sat and wherever we were fighting.

I didn’t envy him, but then, I didn’t envy any living being in the field that night, especially not my miscreant comrades in Gerici’s squad, whose flamethrower man had violated the first rule of throwing flame—never shoot straight up. He’d immolated his whole squad, and then when his tank exploded, blew them to well-crisped bits all over the field.

At the time, I didn’t know if we killed them all, if they broke through, or retreated. All I knew for sure was that they stopped attacking us in waves. By us, I meant the remains of Murphy’s platoon. Whatever organization and cohesion our battalion, or whatever, had, was gone. We’d been reduced to small units and individuals, fighting for our lives. Just another gang rumble between the monsters and the civilized men—for as much as we could call ourselves civilized men.

As if to underscore the irony of that thought, we spent the rest of the night working our way through the fields, killing and burning—more often killing by burning—any Whites too injured to drag themselves to safety. Those who’d learned to fear our two-fisted punch of fire and gas, but were too stupid to flee into the forest, we drove into cattle trailers and locked them. Where they were hauled from there, I didn’t know and didn’t care.

The sun rose through a caustic haze that obscured everything more than a few hundred yards away, leaving it impossible to discern the scope of the mayhem. It felt like it went on forever. Endless terror. Endless suffering, and all of us, dead-tired as we trudged through the mud and ashen gore.

A little after midday, with nothing left to kill and no Whites left to corral, we recorded the stenciled jacket numbers on our dead, and loaded bodies into refrigerator trucks. Where were they headed? Again, no idea. Eventually we boarded the trucks that hauled us home to our barracks. Our livestock trailer had plenty of room on the return trip. We’d lost most of our trained Whites and half our yellows. Just not Mort, which was unfortunate. I was the only one of the three flamers who made it. And that was that. No funerals. No ceremonies. No tears. They’d died. Evolution had deemed them unfit. We survived, and they didn’t. That was the way of it in Bill’s bullshit army. That was the way he’d designed it—it was a gauntlet Slow Burns had to live through, to excel within, to prove their worth.

It sickened me. Slaughter on such a scale wasn’t healthy for any human to live through.

We hosed off under an outdoor shower behind the barracks, washing the blood and mud off our gear and bodies. Back inside, big pots of stew steamed into the air, filling the room with the oniony stink I’d smelled the day before. Just the day before. It already felt like a week.

Murphy had the yellows in charge of the Whites direct them onto their resting rack, where they were fed from grey stew pots. After, he lined us up, each in front of a bunk, by seniority. Or so I thought at the time. He had the prime place by a window at the end of the building. The low man had the bunk right next to the latrine holes. Lucky me. Since half of us didn’t come back from the night’s battle, being the low man meant I got a bunk halfway up the wall.

Then, we ate. Only from the yellow pots of stew, or so it was pointed out to me. The dull, gray pots were for the taints. The stringy meat used in their stew came from dead humans. We got beef, chicken, goats, or pork. At least that’s what everyone believed. That was what we’d been told. I didn’t want to eat any of it, but I was so damned hungry, and my immediate future promised to be brutal and hard. I’d need every calorie I could gob down my throat if I was going to survive.

60

“C’mon.” Still half-asleep, I looked up to see Murphy standing at the foot of my bunk. “Morning is the best time of the day, Sunshine. Let’s roll.”

I groaned, “Give me a minute.”

Most everyone in the barracks, the half of us left alive, were still sleeping.

Murphy headed for the door. “I’ll be outside.”

I took care of my morning necessities and geared up, not just because it was my habit, but because Stalag 17 had a rule about it—when outside the barracks, everybody had to be ready to fight. I didn’t strap on my flamethrower, though. Molotovs, tear-gas bombs, and flamethrowers stayed in the storage racks near the door until we were on our way to an actual fight.

Once I hooked up with Murphy outside, he said, “In a lot of ways, it’s like being back in the Army again.”

“But in a stupid way,” I guessed.

Murphy laughed. “Half of what we got up to back in the day made as little sense as the stupid shit we do around here.”

“Like going out to fight a horde of Whites and not bringing enough guys with us?”

Murphy stopped and pointed between the ramshackle buildings that housed other platoons. A black dirt field stretched so far into the morning mist it disintegrated into gray and merged with the sky. “You know how large the perimeter is we have to defend? We’re spread across three counties.”

“Three whole counties?”

Murphy laughed and started walking again. “Same old Zed. Always want to argue about nuthin’. I didn’t say three whole counties, just…just whatever.”

“Sorry.” He was right. I was slipping into jackass mode because I was tired and grumpy. And hungry, again. I had a lot of low-cal days to make up for.

We walked along in silence until Murphy pointed out one of the barracks. Unlike the others, it had windows on every wall, a wide, covered porch surrounding it, and comfortable chairs scattered under the awning. “Pluta and the seven stooges.”

“They live there?” I asked.

“Officers’ country. Nobody who isn’t one of them is allowed to step on the porch.”

That sounded like a challenge to me.

Murphy laughed again. “Don’t get any stupid ideas. Ain’t nuthin’ in there but soft beds and private showers. It’s like a damn hotel. What I heard, anyway.” He pointed out a red barn down past the rows of barracks. “Whore house.”

It was my turn to laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

Murphy pulled a sad face and shook his head. “Whites. Females. The Russell kind. Too stupid to survive on their own or even fight back. They chain ‘em to a cot. Hose ‘em off once a day. It’s disgusting.”

“Seriously?”

“Serious as a sad clown.”

“You ever go over there and…check it out?”

“Man, I don’t care if Preacher Dick tells me I’m immune to every STD on the planet, I got no interest in slippin’ my snake to some Bullwinkle skank who’s been gargling Cletus meat since breakfast. Besides, that ain’t how it works. A unit does a good job, Pluta gives them an hour of plowin’ down at the little red barn. We’re scheduled down there after lunch. Reward for what we did yesterday if you wanna see if your dick still works.”

I had no intention of participating in any of that, but it brought to mind a question. “Is everybody here a male?”

“At Camp 17, yep. Odd-numbered camps are male.” Murphy turned and pointed east. “Evens are all female. Back that way four miles or so, is Camp 16.”

“Grace and Jazz,” I asked, “are they there?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t even know where Steph is.” I turned to see if the trucks with the cattle trailers were still parked where we’d left them.

“Don’t get any ideas about those things,” Murphy told me.

“Murphy, I don’t know what kind of GI Joe bullshit this is supposed to be, but I need to get out of here and I need to find Steph.”

“Just be cool,” Murphy told me.

“I don’t want to be cool. I want to—” I didn’t know specifically what I wanted to do, but those trucks were the only vehicles I could see. They looked like tickets to freedom. Or something. “I don’t know what I need to do, Murphy. I don’t know what the hell is even going on here.”

Murphy laughed.

And that pissed me off, more than just a little bit. “I’m serious. I need to find Steph.”

“Dude,” Murphy laid one of his big hands on my shoulder. “Chill, okay? Steph is fine.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw her.”

“When? Where?”

“Just the other day. At her house.”

“What!” We were out in the field, well away from the barracks and the yellows starting to stir with the morning.

“What did they tell you?”

“Tell me?” I got a little angry. “I don’t need more questions. I need to know about Steph.”

“First off, dude. Chill. Steph is cool. She’s fine.”

“She has a house?”

“And a job. She works at the hospital. No surprise, man, she’s a nurse.”

“What the fuck?”

“I told you, Zed. You gotta chill. They didn’t tell you anything? Where have you been all this time?”

“In jail. In solitary.”

Murphy laughed. “I should have guessed something like that. So, what, you decided to have one of your tantrums and not cooperate?”

“You’re goddamned right I didn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but these shitheads invaded Bal and killed everybody.”

“Not technically accurate.”

I stopped and spun on Murphy. “I don’t want to play any more games, Murphy. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Dude, I’m not playing any games. Let’s start with Steph. Like I said, she’s cool. They assigned her a cute little house four blocks from the hospital. They assigned her a job. A nurse, like I said.”

“She’s not well enough to—”

“They have a pretty good hospital here. At least that’s what Steph told me. It was actually a hospital before the collapse. Not a high school. They’ve about doubled the size of it since fall. Big place. All modern and shit.”

“And Steph?” I persisted.

“They’re treating her there. She works when she can. When she needs tests or treatments or whatever, they do that.”

I couldn’t believe it. “She’s getting chemo?”

“Some kind of…” Murphy took a moment, “Man, she told me. Had some fancy medical jabber about all of it. Gene therapy or something. Lots of cutting-edge research type stuff.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Dude, it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but one thing you need to take to the bank, is whatever we did out in Bal, it was bush league compared to what these people have going on here. We pretended like we were rebuilding what we lost. Here, they’re actually building something else.”

61

New Tejas, as Murphy understood it, started near Taylor, Texas, a small town of 15,000 before the collapse, sitting out in the farm country forty minutes northeast of Austin. Bill—nobody knew his last name—was a Slow Burn who discovered that he could capitalize on Whites’ inherent inclination to follow and mimic whichever one among them established itself as the alpha. Almost always the strongest, most brutish male.

Intelligence, Bill realized, as humans had understood since they first climbed down from the trees to chase zebra across the savannah, was a weapon more powerful than any animal’s brute strength. He gathered a band of compliant Whites and set about protecting a handful of normals who were trying to survive on the outskirts of Taylor. The details in the middle of Bill’s story were fuzzy and legendary at the same time. At least as Murphy understood it. Bottom line, Bill succeeded, and Taylor thrived. Bill grew his band of Whites into a loyal militia, and then an army, as he encouraged more and more normals to join his colony out in the farmlands where he could protect them.

Now, Bill commanded more than twenty thousand expendable Whites and yellows, mostly dimwits, through a command structure of Slow Burns like Pluta, and even Murphy, running his own platoon. Bill’s army protected and enforced his will on the ten thousand or so normals who lived in Taylor, a dozen hamlets spread across the vast farmlands New Tejas controlled around Taylor, and now a colony in Balmorhea. Bill governed his kingdom of normals like a benevolent authoritarian, but life in the army was barbaric, with discipline brutally and enthusiastically enforced.

Murphy went on to explain that after we arrived from Balmorhea and I was dumped at the prison, he, Jazz, and Grace were taken to an evaluation facility where they were run through a series of cognitive and physical tests before being separated and shipped out. Murphy wound up in Camp 17. He didn’t know where Jazz and Grace were, but assumed they were stationed in one of the female military units, guarding some section of the New Tejas border.

I asked. “Did they tell you what they did with everyone else?”

“Dalhover’s dead.”

That hurt a lot more than I’d have ever guessed it would. I felt like I needed to say something, fly into a rage, or cry, but just didn’t have it. For now, I was numb, only I knew that wouldn’t last. Eventually, the emotional Novocain would wear off, and I’d explode.

“At the hospital,” getting back to the question, Murphy told me, “they told us everybody else got onboarded.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pretty much what you’d expect. They interviewed them on and off for three or four days, gathered all the intel they could about Bal, and figured out what each was qualified to do.”

“You mean like jobs?” I asked.

“Exactly like jobs,” Murphy told me. “Gave them all a place to stay, spread out all over Taylor Town and the ag villages, all pretty close to where they were going to work.”

“Just like what you said with Steph.”

“Double exactly. I didn’t believe it. Not at first. But I seen it myself. I seen people in town.”

“They let you go there, all by yourself?”

“Perks of being ‘The Bull.’ I get a pass to go into town two or three times a week.”

“And you’ve seen people from Bal there?”

“Every time I go, I run into someone.”

“Not locked up? Not forced labor or anything?”

“Like I said, just normal people going about their business. Nobody’s dirty, starved, or cold.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Are they planning an escape? A revolt or something?”

Murphy shook his head. “Not one of ‘em said anything about none of that. They’re cautious. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, but mostly they like it here.”

“After all of our people who were killed? I—” I didn’t know what else to say.

“That’s just it,” Murphy told me. “Not that many of us were killed, and most folks blame the deaths on Preacher Dick and his bunch.”

“You know that’s not true,” I told him. “How many of us died fighting that night?” Murphy knew I was talking about the other Slow Burns, and the normals who burned to death in the Humvees.

“You don’t need to sell me, Zed. I know we lost people, but the number going around is twenty-eight. Most of the bodies we saw that morning were Bill’s Whites and Preacher Dick’s dumbasses.”

“One is too many.”

“I’m with you, but you and me and everybody else has been livin’ in this broke-down world for a long time now. A life isn’t worth what it once was. Principles ain’t what they used to be.”

“Sounds like cowardly rationalizations to me.”

“Really, Mr. Go-Fuck-Yourself off your high horse?” Murphy looked like he wanted to punch me. “How many people have we killed in the name of happily-ever-after? Now, these people have that. Or they think they do. I mean from where they’re sittin’, I’m sure it looks like it. And all it cost ‘em was a handful of folks who mostly looked different.” Murphy held up his hand to remind me how white his skin was. How white our skin was. “And in case you forgot, those same people were willing to throw us under the bus for a lot less happiness and security out in Bal when Preacher Dick showed up. So, don’t go off pretending now you’re all surprised that they’re willing to forget about twenty-eight dead for what they got here.”

Murphy was right, and it galled me to believe it. I knew those people, all of them, to one degree or another. We’d been through so much, built Balmorhea, fought on the walls, laughed and cried. It felt like textbook betrayal.

“I haven’t talked to everybody,” Murphy told me. “Not by far. But the ones I’ve talked to, they aren’t going to revolt, or make a break for freedom, or even show up late for work. They think they got it good, and they’re stayin’.”

62

I stewed while we walked. Even as I rolled it over and over in my head, I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was too upset about everything. “Did Steph ask about me?”

“Don’t be a dumbass. Of course, she asked about you. She asks about you every time I see her. I told her the same thing I always tell her. You’ll turn up. You always do. You’re like a cockroach that way.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Sarcasm.” Murphy let that rest for a moment before he asked, “So what happened to you? Where have you been?”

I told him about my time in jail, and how they’d finally gotten tired of me. Or this Bill character passed word down from on high that they should try something else. “Just like that,” I told him, “here I am.”

“So, there is an upside to throwing toddler tantrums.”

“I wouldn’t say I—”

Murphy punched me. “Man, I’m just twisting your dick a little bit. You need to lighten up, bro.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for anything, but it’s nice sometimes when you do.”

“Now you sound like Steph.”

“That’s because she and I are both emotionally healthy adults. You know, normal people, who like to—”

“Can we skip to fuck-off, and maybe you just tell me what the deal is here at Stalag 17? I feel like I’m stuck in one more mess I don’t understand.”

Murphy laughed. He really could always make the best of any situation. “Competition. Survival of the fittest. Bill wants the cream to rise to the top. That’s the story in the barracks. I’m the top dog. That’s why I got the bunk by the window. Low man gets the sleeps by the shitter.”

“How’d you get to be top dog so quick?”

“Pluta told me I was the man when I got here. Blabbered all that high yellow bullshit at me, because apparently being able to tie your own shoes is a big deal when you’re with this bunch of inbred ass potatoes.”

“So, it’s an IQ thing,” I brilliantly deduced. “That’s why they ran those cognitive tests on you.”

Murphy laughed again. “Like I said, the place is brutal, because even though I aced my moron quiz, and the powers-that-be decided I needed to run my own platoon, Pluta didn’t bother telling the current Bull there was a new sheriff in town.”

I couldn’t believe this excuse for an army had defeated us. “Are they that poorly organized?”

“That’s not it. Like I said, this place is brutal. The platoon was mine, but I still had to take it.”

I didn’t know whether to be appalled or impressed.

Murphy told me, “They started talking shit as soon as I stepped through the door. I figured Mort for the big pointy prick so I walked right over and popped him. Dropped like a bitch, spitting blood and curses like he could turn me into a newt if he shouted loud enough. Well, he shoulda stuck with that, because he made the mistake of getting up off the floor, promising to do this and that and gangbang me like they had planned for you. Instead of that, I put a beatin’ on him. Then, one of his homies tried to help, telling me all the ways he was gonna fuck me up my ass while he reached way back to punch me all John Wayne like. You know, like it never occurred to him I was gonna bust him in the mouth while he was cocking back his roundhouse. Knocked him out cold. Dumb as a bunch of two-headed ants, these motherfuckers.”

“And that made you the boss?”

“Yep. Now, they look at me like I’m Conan the Barbarian or something, all jumped out of the silver screen just to punk their asses. That’s what you gotta do, beat some asses. Or outsmart ‘em. However you get to the top, it don’t matter. For me, beating asses worked, and it’s quicker. I expect you’d go with boring them to sleep with a lecture.” Murphy laughed at his joke.

I didn’t find it funny.

“Stay at the top long enough, at least what I’ve been able to figure, and you move up. They make you one of Pluta’s stooges, an officer, and then you’re the bomb. Cush beds. Private masturbation stalls. Gourmet chef.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You didn’t used to be this gullible. I think your electroshock puck is making you stupid.”

While I was ignoring Murphy’s latest round of smartassedness, something suddenly made sense to me. “That’s why they put me in your barracks.”

Murphy groaned. “That’s your epiphany tone I’m hearin’.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything. Why don’t you just enlighten me with your brilliant insight. I’ll rub your little ego boner by pretending I’m impressed, and I can get back to telling you how it really is.”

I silently reminded myself it was best to ignore Murphy’s teasing. “Assigning me to your barracks is Bill’s way of pitting us against one another.”

“Look, if you think you’d have any sort of chance against—” Then Murphy got it. “Because he thinks our loyalty to each other will get in the way of our loyalty to New Tejas.”

“Forcing his pet monkeys to fight over a banana is the best way to make them hate each other.”

Murphy stopped walking and looked at me. “You really think he wants us at each other’s throats?”

I nodded.

Murphy’s cheer seeped away as he turned and started walking again. “Why would Bill care one way or the other about you and me?”

“Maybe loyalty to Bill is the glue that holds this whole place together. He runs this place like he’s a king. You said so yourself. Maybe Bill’s ego boner gets off on holding power over everybody.”

“If you’re right,” sighed Murphy, “then Bill is a manipulative bastard.”

“That’s why we need to get the hell out of here.”

“There’s the dumbass we all know and love.”

Miffed by Murphy’s response, I snapped, “Why does wanting to escape make me a dumbass?”

“Oh, let me count the ways.”

63

We walked in silence for a while, me ruminating, and Murphy, thankfully, silent.

“So, you want to stay here?” I finally asked.

“Setting aside the fact that things aren’t so bad, I wouldn’t—”

“So bad?” I shouted. “Did you forget what just happened?”

“I stopped those guys before—”

“Murphy, listen to yourself.”

“I can’t. You keep interrupting me.”

“We lost what, half our guys in that idiotic fight?”

“That was unusual.”

“How would you know? You’ve been here for like a month.”

“It’s called communication, Zed. You ask questions. People tell you stuff. You don’t have to guess. You should try it some time.”

“Fine. I’m asking you now. Why should we stay? Why are we better off here than back in Balmorhea? Communicate with me, please.”

“We shouldn’t stay, and I never said we were going to stay. But listen to me, Zed. For starters,” Murphy told me, angered, but doing his best to speak calmly, “Bal is four-hundred miles west, with nothing between here and there but Whites and bandits. No gas stations. No mini-marts. No shade tree hillbillies ready to replace your leaky radiator hose for a hundred bucks too much. For seconds, even if we could swipe one of Bill’s trucks, Balmorhea has a couple of hundred new residents, not to mention the thousand trained Whites and yellows they have living in tents outside the main gate. That’s some serious military power for that part of Texas, bro. We lived there for fourteen years. If we’d had a thousand hairless monkeys armed with firebombs and flamethrowers, nobody, not even that Mexican gang out of Chihuahua, would have messed with us.”

“Maybe we don’t have to go back to Bal.”

“Where then?”

“Anywhere.”

“Anywhere? Just go anywhere, right? Look, the thing I’m trying to tell you here, the thing that’s not sinking into that little bald head of yours, is you’re not thinking this through. You know as well as I do, all the good places are either full of Whites or some prickly bunch of well-armed somebodies. What do you want to do, just drive up, and say ‘Hey, Bill sent me. By the way, me and my four hundred friends are staying’? And what makes you think anybody would even come with you?”

“You wouldn’t come with?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Murphy heaved a big sigh. “Tell me this isn’t all about you and your bullshit authority thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You know as well as I do, that the thing you hate more than just about anything in the whole wide world is somebody tellin’ you what to do.”

“What? You think I want to be like Bill and be in charge of everything?”

“No. I’m not saying that at all. Worse? You don’t care if you’re the boss. You don’t even want to be the boss, not of anybody but yourself. That’s your thing. You were born to be the Lone Ranger. You’re hard-wired for it. And you know what?”

“I guess I’m supposed to ask, what?”

“The Lone Ranger doesn’t have anybody but Tonto and his damn horse. Is that what you want, a swayback nag to warm your dick in, and me to be your token minority tagalong while you roam the high plains doin’ good deeds for the yokels?”

“You know it was never like that,”

Murphy didn’t slow down long enough to hear my retort. “You know the Lone Ranger never had a girlfriend, let alone a wife. What’s your plan? You gonna leave Steph here to die alone in the hospital while you ride off into the sunset of your spaghetti Western tragedy?”

“Die?” I shouted, totally losing my temper. “You think I want to leave Steph here alone with Billdo’s fascist fucktards so she can die? Fuck! And fuck you Murphy!” I turned and stomped away.

64

I stomped around all that day, not looking at Murphy, and certainly not talking to him. I got into two fights, brief scuffles, really. Dumbass yellows in my barracks just did something that pissed me off. Things so insignificant they weren’t even worth remembering.

Lunch came and went. Dinner arrived early with one of Pluta’s stooges in tow. We had a mission very suddenly on the schedule. So, we wolfed down our onion-stink stew, geared up, loaded onto the livestock haulers, and were told to settle in for a long ride. Hours long.

I found my spot near the front of the trailer where I’d ridden the time before. With only half our number onboard, the yellows and Whites gave me plenty of room. Nobody, it seemed, wanted any of what I was serving up that day. Murphy took up a spot at the far end of the trailer, right by the doors. Once the truck started rolling, I shrugged off my flamethrower gear, figuring I’d have plenty of time to strap it on later when we got close.

We headed north into a cold wind, a convoy of four semis, following an old two-lane state highway. It was full dark when we passed through the New Tejas barbed-wire perimeter. That meant we wouldn’t be defending our home turf from white-skinned monsters, but attacking some bunch of someones somewhere, for some reason I had no clue about. That only served to make me more angry.

I felt a clash of contradictory feelings over what had gone down between Murphy and me. He and I almost never argued. When we did, we always settled it, right then and there. This thing, though. It was different. Maybe because he’d brought Steph into it. More precisely, he’d disparaged my commitment to her. At least it seemed that way to me when I was spinning it all through my head, justifying my anger, and telling myself how damn right I was. Or maybe, it was the possibility that Steph might actually die. Murphy was the one who’d seen her. He’d been privy to the cancer thing all along. I felt like an outsider, guessing at the clues he dropped, and the clues were scaring the flaming shit out of me.

For me, she was it. My love. My happiness. My everything. More than I’d ever hoped to get out of a life that had been circling the drain a long time before the virus reaved the world. The news of her cancer had been a punch in the nuts, but I knew, I just knew we’d find a way past it. We’d beaten too many odds, come too far to lose to mela-fuckin’-noma.

I got angry at myself. I blamed myself. Steph with her green eyes and flaming red hair, she never had the skin for the harsh West Texas sun. On all those scavenging runs to Roswell, Juarez, San Angelo, and even Lubbock, sunscreen never made it to the top of my shopping list. That made Steph’s condition my fault, as ridiculous as it was to think such a fault could be laid at anyone’s feet. Still, that toxic thought burned a path through my brain, giving me a raging headache, putting me in a dark black mood, but making the time in the truck pass like it was running on a different kind of clock.

“You Null Spot?”

With no expression on my face—on purpose that way—I looked at the guy sitting in the other corner at the front of the trailer.

“Bull said you’d laugh if I called you that. Guess not.”

I shook my head. “Inside joke.”

“I’m Joe Peck. I got the bunk next to yours.” Peck looked like an athlete who’d been put through the ringer a few times too many. He spoke in an East Texas drawl, and he wore a few tattoos on his arms that to me implied military, or the kind a military man might get. But he was quiet, meaning it wasn’t just me he never talked to in the barracks. He didn’t seem to like anybody there. Just like me.

“Murphy tell you to talk to me?”

“More than that. He told me to look out for you.”

“I don’t think I need a babysitter.”

“You got no friends. Pluta doesn’t like you, and now you’re on the outs with the Bull.”

I sighed. “Me and Murphy are cool. It’s just a thing.”

“A thing?”

I shrugged, because I didn’t have any intention of explaining my Murphy situation to him or anybody. Not that I had any way of explaining it to myself.

Peck let it go. He leaned against the humming metal wall and stared out into the night. After a while, he said, “It gets better.”

“What gets better?”

“Being here. Dealing with this midnight-run bullshit. All of it.”

I shrugged again. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

“You were with that bunch we pulled out of the desert, right?”

That piqued my interest. A little. “We?”

Peck pointed at the taints sleeping or sitting and staring at nothing. “Pluta’s whole outfit was there. All of us. Man, ya’ll had a lot of bullets. Most folks don’t these days.”

“And?”

“Looked like a nice little place you had out there. I guess I wanted to say I was sorry is all.”

I didn’t accept Peck’s apology. “Everybody’s got to do what they’ve got to do.”

“I know what you’re trying to say. Like maybe the opposite of what you just said, but here you are. Here I am. There’s the Bull down there, riding in the back of this truck going somewhere we don’t want to go, to do something we don’t want to do.” He tapped the buzz bolt on his head. “We all got one of these. So yeah, everybody’s got to do what they got to do.”

“Sorry.” I meant it. I was acting like a jackass. “I’m…I don’t know. Enraged.”

“Rage don’t make nuthin’ better.”

I didn’t have any argument to make to the contrary, so I nodded.

In a tired voice, Peck told me, “I’ve been here a long time.”

“What does that mean?”

“I done my year, and I’m just waiting for word to come down from the lifers.”

“It’s like you’re talking another language.”

Peck scrutinized me. “They said you were high yellow. The Bull told me you weren’t retarded like most of these dumbasses.”

“They threw me into solitary for a month in some prison out there in Bill’s Fucktopia. When they finally let me out, they handed me over to Pluta, who proceeded to zap me silly and leave me in the barracks. I suppose that’s where you first saw me. And that’s just about all I know about everything in New Tejas. So, no. I’m not a brain-fried taint. I just don’t know what the hell is going on here, except like you said, I’m in this goddamned truck going somewhere I don’t want to go to do something I don’t want to do, to somebody who surely doesn’t deserve it.”

65

“You want me to fill you in?”

I nodded. “Just not right now, because I’ll be honest with you, if I hear too much more crap about how screwed I am here, I’m as likely to pick up this flamethrower and burn every bastard in this trailer as I am to take another breath.”

“Bull said you had propensity to slip into a mood now and again.”

I laughed at that. “A propensity?”

Peck smiled.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I suppose.” I stared out into the night, feeling the cold wind blow across my face. I needed to talk to Murphy. I needed to smooth things over. I needed to get out of my mood, before it consumed me. “Tell me about yourself, Peck. Back before all this business with the virus went down, were you a happy kid? Leave it to Beaver family? Anything like that?”

“I’m afraid Leave it to Beaver was before my time. How old are you?”

“Not that old. The show used to come on one of those cable channels that played the old 60s and 70s sitcoms. It was a black-and-white show, about some kid with a perfect family living in a perfect house in a perfect little town, where everything was always just swell. The kid always got into trouble, of course. His dad would give him a talking to and teach him a lesson. The mom would bake brownies and lemonade and shit like that. Growing up, I always wanted to live in that house. In that show, where nothing really bad ever happened.”

Peck laughed. “You’re an odd one.”

“I think I’m tired, too. I think I’ve been tired for a long, long time and just didn’t know it.”

“We lived in Alaska when I was a kid,” Peck told me. “Four years. Clean air. Mountains and forests go on forever. I loved it there.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I thought you only wanted the happy parts.” Peck paused while he waited for me not to respond. “You do a year in Bill’s service and you get a choice. Stay or go. Like I said, by my count, my year’s up. I’ve been thinking a lot about going back up to Alaska. Can’t imagine many folks are up there these days. Hard to believe any of these taints could make it through a winter up there.”

“Long way to Alaska.”

“The way they tell it around here, we might live forever, you and me.” Peck laughed. The idea of it seemed just as fantastical to him as it did to me. “I figure I can work my way up there. Might take a year or two. Find me a place by a river. Catch all the salmon in the run to keep me fed all year. Then, I’ll just wait. Spend me some time on the porch in the spring, listening to the birds and the wind in the trees. One day, all this shit down here, it’ll blow over. Things will go back to normal. Life could be good again. One day.” Peck ran out of things to say after that.

I kept my opinion about one day to myself, and the darkness rumbled past. One of my favorite rumination topics started chugging through my thoughts. “Hey Peck, you know anything about these buzz bolts?”

“Like?” he asked.

“You ever see anyone pry one off?”

He shook his head.

“You ever try?”

He shook his head again.

“Do you believe it’ll really explode if you try to take it off?”

“Nope.”

“Then why not yank it off and go over the wire?”

“Don’t matter much anymore.”

“Why?”

“My time’s almost up here. I’ll be a free man before you know it.”

Murphy stood up down at the far end of the trailer, and called, “Saddle up, dipshits. We got a silent hike through the dark for two miles. We do it fast and quiet, just like we practice it. We do that, and it’s done before you know it. Nobody gets hurt. We all go home. Wranglers, keep those damn taints silent. Zap them if you have to.”

Our semi crunched to a stop on a dirt road with dust drifting in through the trailer’s air holes. The rear gates clanged open.

“Let’s bail,” shouted Murphy. “Time to see if you got dicks or tits.”

66

I didn’t know where we were. It was dark. But sunshine wouldn’t have helped much. Most of central Texas looked the same—low rolling hills, stands of oak, mesquite or cedar, and pastureland, all crisscrossed by rugged little creeks and two-lane county roads. The few rivers and interstate highways were the major landmarks, but most of the signage had deteriorated, was stolen for raw materials, or was shot full of holes by bored survivors tired of the humdrum of starving between meals.

We had a partial moon, so I was able to make out the shape of our objective, a factory below us in a shallow valley. It wasn’t in town, but it wasn’t exactly out of it. Dilapidated houses stood along a dirt road that led into a grid of more houses that might have turned into a town somewhere in the darkness past the next rise. Didn’t matter. We weren’t there to scavenge the town. The rumor passing between the halfwit yellows and overheard by me held that we were raiding an ammunition factory run by eleven normals.

Was it an ammunition factory? That possibility seemed a little far-fetched to me, but people found their niche where they could. For someone who knew their pyrotechnic chemistry and had access to the chemicals, manufacturing bullets from recycled casings could be a lucrative living. On the other hand, given that most of the yellows in the platoon, and in our whole battalion, could barely count to five or speak a grammatically correct sentence, it really could have been any number of anybodies doing anything in the rusting building below.

I’d have asked my new friend, Joe Peck, but Pluta had commandeered him as a runner. Maybe his seven stooges had gone lazy.

I decided that none of that mattered, as long as I understood my role. This being a standard surprise-and-capture mission, much like the one that had taken out Lyle’s farm the night before the main force did pretty much the same thing to Balmorhea, my job didn’t involve doing anything except standing by. The halfwit wranglers with their squads of Whites had the main duty. They’d rush in and manually subdue any normals—all normals—taking as many casualties as necessary, because Whites were a dime a dozen—cheaper actually—and normals were rare and precious. If the plan went off the rails, I was along as the nuclear option. It would be my job, along with the flamers in the other units, to torch everything. By the Bill Doctrine (I was picking up new tidbits, practically by the minute) once he set his sights on some newly discovered band of survivors, if Bill couldn’t have them and their goodies, nobody would.

The signal to advance came, silently.

Murphy waved us to follow.

We jumped to our feet and jogged single-file down the slope.

Across the shallow valley, other units were doing the same thing. We were attacking from three sides. Again, if the bits and pieces of info I’d garnered from the rumor mill were correct. Strength-wise, we numbered four hundred. Plenty to capture thirteen sleeping factory workers.

At a hundred yards from a chain-link fence, we squatted in the grass while a pair of yellows ran forward with wire cutters to make a hole for us to file through.

All was dark and silent. Too silent, because all of us sneaking through the tall, brown grass had scared every noisy night critter into hiding.

We waited.

A yellow out in the darkness—almost certainly one of Pluta’s stooges—screamed for the attack. Four hundred more of us hollered as we jumped to our feet and charged.

Gunfire instantly erupted from the factory windows.

I knew enough about the way surprise was supposed to work to peg that gunfire as a bad sign.

Two machine guns in a tower just inside the fence on our side of the factory ripped through a hundred rounds, sending tracers across the compound and into the line of Whites I was following through the hole in the chain-link. White’s burst open as rounds tore through their bodies. Blood mist filled the air.

Without even thinking what to do, I raced to the right to get out of the line of fire that was way too accurate to be plain old eyeball work. I dove into a shallow ditch, with my flamethrower rig coming down hard on my back.

A spray of bullets shredded the ground an arm’s length in front of me. I crawled toward some thorny shrubs, because I knew if I stayed put, I’d die.

I heard Murphy shouting orders, and guessed he had to be inside the compound already.

Screams cried out from all around, the blood-curdling yell of those still on the attack, and the pained wail of those whose bodies had been mangled by the gunfire.

Those damn machine guns in the tower, they were massacring us. I was watching their tracers cut across the ground like lasers, exploding in the dirt and shredding everything they touched. And I was okay with that, until I realized one was zeroing in on the area where I heard Murphy’s voice booming orders to my halfwit comrades.

Without even deciding how to react, my fuck-it meter overloaded and my rational thought processes slipped off the rails. I jumped to my feet and made a run for the fence, leaping over the butchery as the machine guns thundered down from above.

My foot caught on a coil of intestines and I stumbled.

The owner shrieked at the feel of his innards dragging through the grass.

I didn’t spare a thought on the gore, just pulled the loop off my boot, picked myself up, sprinted for the hole in the fence, and dove through.

A metal something banged loudly somewhere off to my left.

An explosion reverberated through the factory.

People screamed and both machine guns sprayed the far corner of the building.

That was my opening. I tore away from the fence, running as fast as I could directly at the tower. When I knew I was close enough, I took a few more long strides, and slid down to a knee. I dialed my gas on, primed the striker and lit the pilot, all in the space of a breath.

Whether the guys in the tower saw the blue flame or not, it didn’t matter.

I pointed my weapon up and blasted an engulfing geyser of fire at them.

They screamed and flailed in a wild fast-forward dance, like demons born of flame.

One leaped out of the tower, thudded on the ground not twenty feet in front of me, and writhed silently.

The inferno above popped as the ammunition stored up there started cooking off.

A cheer, or what passed for it among the Whites, erupted from down by the factory walls.

Our expendables had broken through the defenses to get inside. More Whites would die, and probably some of the factory people, too, but nothing would change the outcome. We’d won.

I hoped I’d saved Murphy with my quick action, but that hope arrived bound to the horror that I’d saved scores of Bill’s taints, and I’d immolated two normals to do it. All of it together left me feeling sick and bone-weary.

67

Being the keeper of the flame—all sarcasm intended—I didn’t have any duties in the aftermath, except to be ready to torch any gangs of feral Whites who might wander over hills to see what was up. There hadn’t been any, not on my side of the factory. My flame brother counterparts from another platoon had been assigned to the front gate of the compound, the one on the road leading into the town. They’d stayed pretty busy through the night, burning feral Whites by the hundreds. I guess the action had died down since sunup.

Bored, I spent most of my time watching Bill’s smash-and-grab operation in progress. It seemed Pluta and his counterparts had everything they came for, including twenty-three live prisoners kneeling in the dirt. A good mix of men and women. A variety of ages. Half of them looked like they were in their twenties, which meant they’d been children when the virus destroyed the world. They’d grown up in the current version of FUBAR Earth. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for them or proud.

Pluta was down there, preening in front of his stooges while they made sexual gestures in the direction of a pretty red-haired girl at the end of the line. Pretty and defiant. She reminded me of a younger Steph. Even with the distance, I saw she had the same severe eyes. She was captured, but not cowed. I figured she’d be one to go over the wire once let loose back in Bill’s Master-Planned Pick-Nose Paradise.

“You okay?”

I looked up from my trance to see Murphy, haggard and dirty, standing a few paces away, and realized I’d been spending way too many hours getting lost in my thoughts. It was a bad habit in a world with so many dangers. “Fucked up night.”

Murphy silently agreed.

“It’s gonna be pretty empty in the barracks tonight.” I meant it as a joke, except that it lacked any kind of humor.

Murphy half-assed a chuckle anyway.

I cocked my head at the teams of men hauling machinery and materials out of the factory. Other crews loaded the equipment onto waiting semis hauling flatbed trailers. “Did we get what we came for?”

“Intel said it was a munitions factory. Seems to be that.”

“And the workers, too. I feel so proud of myself.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”

“If it wasn’t for the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be suited for anything at all.”

“It’s not funny and it’s not true.”

“True enough.”

Murphy sighed. “They’re pissed at you.”

“They?”

“Pluta and the stooges.”

“Big fuckin’ deal.”

“You’ve got KP duty and you’re confined to camp for three months.”

“Wasn’t I already confined to camp?”

“After the first action, guys get a hall pass once a month.”

“A hall pass?” I laughed. “This place is more retarded than I thought.”

“Some guys have girlfriends down at Camp 16.”

“No interest, so no big deal.”

“Except, the hall pass gets you into town if you’re a high yellow. You could have seen Steph.”

“And nobody told me this?”

“Because you’ve been giving everyone the junior-high silent treatment, and they know you’re flipping them off when they turn around.”

I had no response for that what wasn’t going to make Murphy’s case for him. “Exactly why did big daddy ground me?”

Murphy glanced over at the charred tower I’d torched in the heat of the battle. “Their chemist was up there. Professor at Baylor before the collapse.” Murphy pointed at the crispy critter on the ground. “Probably him right there. Normals, especially the educated ones, are worth their weight in gold.”

“Wait. Pluta’s mad at me? His shitty intel and his knob-job plan were getting so many of us killed that we were going to lose this stupid battle, and because I took the initiative to pull his nuts out of the fire, he’s going to put me in time out so I can’t see my dying wife?” My temper was getting away from me again. I hefted my flamethrower over my shoulders. “How about I just walk down there and barbecue Pluta and all seven of his dwarf dicks.”

“Don’t be stupid?”

“Stupid? Are you kidding me? I wear a yellow gas mask in an army of white-skinned halfwits and attack good, healthy, normal people who are just trying to make a living in a fucked-up world, and if I fail to do this, a gorilla with a garage door opener electro-shocks my fucking brain. I think I passed stupid a long fucking time ago.”

“Damn, Zed. You’re a touchy bitch lately. What’s wrong with you? I mean really?”

“Murphy, I don’t mean to blow my own horn, but I think I saved your life last night. That was my intention, anyway. When those jerkoffs in the tower started shooting over there where you were, I torched them, because they don’t mean shit to me and neither does this mission. Especially not this mission. I know we’re supposed to capture the normals to make Bill’s Happy Harpo Homestead all work out, but I don’t give a shit. I really don’t. I only care about you and Steph, Grace and Jazz. And I guess the rest of the folks from Bal. But to be honest, I don’t give that much of a crap about them either. I mean. Christ. I don’t know what I mean.” I dropped onto my ass in the dirt. I was exhausted, inside and out.

“Zed, you’re losing it, man. You know that, right?”

I didn’t know what to say. Nothing in me could understand Murphy’s acceptance of this situation. I wanted to argue. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to bury my face in my hands and not move. I wanted to do any of a hundred things to push back, because that was my way. My stubborn, contrarian, anti-everything way of dealing with the world. And with my friends, apparently.

“You’re worried about Steph. It hurts. I get that.”

He was right, but I was more than worried. I felt like I was walking on the edge of a black hole. I was so afraid I was going to lose her, but at the same time, I kept telling myself we’d get out of Nuevo Tejas and live happily ever after somewhere far, far away. Only Steph’s ever-after was going to end a long time before mine did. No matter what happened in the hospital. One day, I was going to lose her, and I didn’t know how I was going to exist in any kind of world that didn’t include her. My voice cracked when I said, “I don’t know what to do for Steph.”

Murphy knelt in front of me. “Bro, I’ll do whatever I can to get you out to see her. I’ll snuff that putz, Pluta, if I have to. But I’ll find a way.”

I nodded, because if I’d tried to thank him with words, or apologize for acting like an ill-tempered little dickwad, or hug him for being the best friend I’d ever had, there would be a gushing river of snot and girlie tears I might never rein back in.

68

What seems like it should go pretty quick too often takes all day. And then some. Midday brought so much sunshine it was actually hot sitting out in the field, keeping watch with my flamethrower. The noon hour didn’t bring any lunch with it, though. Poor planning by Pluta, or so Peck told me when he shirked his share of duties to come sit in the grass with me. It was par for the course. Pluta found his talents in climbing the ladder in mysterious Bill’s moron military. As for any tactical or logistical gifts? Pluta was an idiot.

So, deprived of our breakfast while we were mopping up resistance around the factory, Pluta hadn’t planned for lunch either. The Whites all ate, though. They’d turn surly when hungry, surly and hard to control. Good thing we always had plenty of corpses around when we went to work. Most often their comrades, but Whites didn’t mind. Meat was meat.

Dinnertime came and went. The sun went down. The cold settled back in for the night, and they finally finished ransacking the factory, loading the dead into refrigerator trucks and lining up a convoy of some thirty vehicles for the long drive back to New Tejas. One of the stooges passed Pluta’s orders to Murphy, and we loaded into our cattle hauler. Laughably few of us.

I shed my gear and stretched out in my usual spot at the front of the trailer. I intended to sleep. Peck joined me, as did Murphy, once he got the taints and yellows settled in. Unfortunately, sleep didn’t come, despite my fatigue and hunger, so I asked Peck, “How does New Tejas survive casualty rates like these?”

“Taints and low yellows,” said Peck, “we round ‘em up like cattle. We go out every month or two. Round ‘em up, load ‘em in the trailers, and leave ‘em at the conditioning camps. That’s where they train ‘em. We’ll likely get a new shipment of taints any day now.”

I’d figured I’d spent a month watching that training process through my jail cell window. A more important question came to mind. “Joe, how did you survive this long?”

“Van Halen,” answered Peck.

Murphy laughed. “As in Eddie Van Halen?”

“Rick Van Halen,” Peck told him. “No relation to the guitar player. He was Senior Man before Pluta. We lost our share of taints under Van Halen, but that’s okay. That’s what they’re for. You see, when we go on a raid like we did at that place this morning, Van Halen always had us send in the wranglers with their taints first. That way, they catch all the bullets. Most times, bullets are in short supply, or guns jam up because they’ve reloaded the cartridges too many times, all the guns are old and just plain worn out.”

“We had that problem out in Bal,” Murphy told him.

“Pre-collapse ammo,” said Peck, “is getting hard to come by these days. Point is, us high yellows are smart enough to hang back, if the Senior Man is smart enough to let us. So, we live, and the taints don’t tend to last long. But with Pluta…” Peck leaned over and lowered his voice. “Word around the water cooler is Pluta whacked Van Halen and his stooges. Had Mort torch ‘em. No witnesses around, so can’t say for sure, but… In case you didn’t know yet, killin’ a high yellow will get you chopped around here. Bill values us too much. You know, in his special way.”

I was still stuck on the ID of the assassin. “Our Mort? Big dumbass Mort did it?”

“The same,” answered Peck. “That’s why Pluta made him the barracks Bull. They had a deal.”

I looked down the length of the trailer. “Speaking of Mort.”

“Didn’t make it,” Murphy told me.

“What a shame.” I laughed. For real, for the first time in—I couldn’t remember when.

69

The boom interrupted my dream.

The skidding tires woke me up.

Before I could piece any of that into a coherent thought, our cattle trailer careened into a ditch, tumbling us around like dice in a cup. One of the impact Molotovs exploded down near the door, dousing a handful of my halfwit comrades in liquid fire.

“Shit!” shouted Peck.

Murphy jumped to his feet, yelling to get control of the jabbering yellows and yowling taints before the fire spread through the stinking straw spread on the floor.

I was already gathering my gear and strapping on my flamethrower, because fourteen years of the world’s new rules had taught me all I needed to know about the feel of coming danger.

Down the road behind us, more tires skidded. Up the road, a second explosion detonated. Gunfire popped.

“C’mon, Peck! It’s an ambush.” Just an educated guess.

I rushed into the diesel barbecue stink as Murphy marshalled the yellows to extinguish the fire. Bullets, what sounded like a few strays, pinged against our trailer.

“We can’t get out of the trailer,” called Peck. “Not without word from a stooge.”

We were at the back door by then, and I glanced at Murphy. “We gotta go, bro.”

He pointed right. “You take Peck down that way, I’ll run these yahoos down the other side of the road.” We’d faced ambushes before, me and Murphy. More times than I could count. Going on the offensive, quickly and unexpectedly, was the best way to turn the tables.

Peck reached through the metal gate to undo the latch from the outside. I jumped down to the grass and ran to the fence line with Peck right on my heels. Murphy followed us out, yelling at the taints still inside to hurry.

I looked up and down the road to assess the situation. Up at the front of our convoy, flames roared out of one of our semis that was stopped at a T intersection. Behind us, a messy line of semis and pickups idled on the road or spun their tires on the muddy shoulders. We were on a two-lane country highway in the apparent middle of nowhere. The fence line, separating the wide ditch from the fallow fields behind, grew thick with trees, thorny blackberry canes, and dense shrubs. Muzzle flashes in the bushes ahead told me all I needed to know about the tactical situation.

“Let’s go.” I darted into the proto-hedgerow, swiping down with my free hand to find the rusty barbed wire I knew had to be stretched through the twigs and leaves. For the price of a ragged cut on my forearm and a few scratches, I found it. Using the trunk of a bent tree as a step to climb over, the wire caught my boot and I tumbled into the tall grass on the other side.

Panting, and looking at blood flowing from a cut in his own hand, Peck asked, “What next?”

“Watch my back.” I jumped to my feet awkwardly, as I had forty pounds of gear and combustible fluids strapped on. I clicked my striker until the pilot flame jetted blue. “Let’s ruin somebody’s day.” I charged down the backside of the fence line and loosed a gush of fire into the hedgerow. Shrieks followed me as my inferno grew. My fuel tank pounded bruises all up and down my back. The handles on my gun heated to scald my hands. I ignored all of it until I skidded to my knees at the end of the row, panting to catch my breath.

Looking back, I saw three hundred yards of fire licking at the dark sky. Burning people ran out from cover, falling in the grass.

Still, gunshots popped back down the road.

Peck dropped to a knee beside me with Molotov in hand. “It’s not over yet. You okay to go?”

I nodded because I didn’t have the breath to answer.

He dragged me to my feet, telling me, “Slower now.”

Peck led me past the last trees I’d torched, through the ditch and up onto the road, where the first two trucks of our convoy blazed.

In the flickering light, two more trucks down, I spotted a figure with a flaming Molotov in hand, busy at the gas tank of one of the idling semis. The truck’s door was open. A body lay in the road, and I didn’t need to see any more to know what was happening. “That’s the normals trailer,” I told Peck, as I raced forward, shouting, “Don’t!”

The guy with the Molotov reacted by stepping back from the gas tank, staring at me, confusion on his face. He was a normal, too. That’s the moment I realized the ambush had been laid by normals. In the same rush of realizations and instincts, I raised my weapon and blasted, telling myself—no, insisting—that I’d had to do it to protect the captured normals trapped in the trailer.

Through my rationalizations, he screamed. I released the trigger. As my fire disappeared from the air all I saw was that man, running in mad circles, swatting at flames, though he was wholly engulfed. And then he dropped to his knees, deathly silent, and fell face first into the ditch.

“Listen,” Peck told me. “The shooting stopped. It’s over.”

It wasn’t over. Not for me. The second-guesses and doubts were just starting to turn into guilt, because I’d killed more normals. At the same time, I believed I’d saved the lives of the normals we’d captured. And the taints too stupid to escape from their vulnerable cattle haulers and save themselves.

I didn’t know whether I was in the right or the wrong. Had I just done evil or good?

“What are you stupid shitheads doing out here?”

I turned to see Pluta with three of his stooges marching toward me.

“We have this under control,” Pluta shouted. “Get back to your transport.”

I raised my flamethrower, pointing at Pluta.

“Don’t,” whispered Peck.

I was too far into the realm of moral ambiguity to believe that torching Pluta would make a difference. I pulled my trigger. A spurt of flame burped onto the pavement just in front of me.

“You inbred taint,” Pluta cursed, his angry entourage in tow. “Don’t you have the good goddamned sense to swap your tank when it runs dry? What good is a torch man who can’t tell when his rig is empty. Peck, get this imbecile back to his transport or you can spend the next three months on KP with him. Get out of my sight.”

70

Squinting in the harsh morning light, I stood in a ragged line along with the rest of Stalag 17’s yellows in front of the officers’ hut. The taints and their wranglers were in their respective barracks, sequestered and fed as soon as we returned. For us mid and high yellows, the fifty or sixty of us still alive after a week of brutal losses, we watched Pluta, five of his stooges—two had died the night before—and Pluta’s boss man standing in the shade of the wide porch. The boss man had a lot of happy nothing to say about the great job we’d done securing the bullet factory and its nineteen experienced workers.

In the dribble of blah blah blah, as I was zoning out and thinking about how I was going to get out of Stalag 17 so I could rescue Steph, the number nineteen locked my thoughts in place. Nineteen wasn’t right. We’d captured twenty-three normals. I didn’t think we’d lost any in the ambush. Then again, anything could have happened. After all, what did I know? I was just a yellow-headed taint nobody, boarded in barracks of bozos in the middle of Billdo’s Bullshit Utopia.

“Dude.” Murphy pushed my shoulder, sending me stumbling to catch my balance.

“What the hell?” Some yellows from the barracks laughed at me until my glare shushed them.

Murphy grinned. “You fell asleep standing up.”

I didn’t think so, but honestly, I didn’t know. I was dead tired. The speech was already over, and somehow, I’d missed the big finale.

“Boss man’s giving us steak and eggs.” Murphy pointed at a fifty-foot-long wood-fired BBQ pit mounted on a semi tractor-trailer with faded custom wrap that said “BIG TASTE GRILL.” The last time I’d seen anything like it was at a barbecue competition way back before the collapse. As rusty as the whole contraption was, it looked to have been from that era. It still functioned, though. Guys were lined up in front of the open grills, cooking.

Murphy and Peck headed to where a line was queuing up. I followed as the smell of real food wafted over me.

No surprise, at least in retrospect, Pluta, flanked by a few of his stooges, stepped in front of us. He pointed one of his long, prissy fingers at me. “Not the retard.”

“What’s the matter?” I taunted. “Is ‘intellectually anomalous’ too hard to say?”

Pluta’s face reddened. “You little shit stain.”

“Senior Man.” Murphy stepped between us. “We just got back. Zed saved us in that ambush. At least let him have breakfast first.”

“Get Peck to tongue your hole, Smalls. Your love bunny is going to KP, and he’s doing it right now.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Murphy pleaded. “That’s nothing. Let him eat first.”

“You’re not a bull,” spat Pluta. “You don’t deserve to run a barracks. You shouldn’t be in charge of anything bigger than your little peppermint penis. You’re a weak, useless hillbilly who’s only alive because Bill—for some misbegotten reason—decided you had potential. Well, here’s the news of the day, Smalls, you don’t. One day, Bill is going to see his mistake, and he’s going to tell boss man, and boss man is going to let me bend you over the butt punch table at skank hut. Maybe when your mouth is full of taint dick for a month you’ll learn how to keep it closed when you’re supposed to.”

“Boss man’s happy now.” Murphy pointed to where the boss man was joking with his entourage of lackeys. “Look at him. See for yourself. We wrangled a herd of normals for him. We hauled all that munitions equipment back for the greater glory of New Tejas, and now he’s buying us breakfast.”

“Nobody buys anything in New Tejas,” Pluta sneered. His hard little eyes fell back on me. “This one goes. Now.”

Peck stepped up. “Senior Man, if I may. Give the retard a half-hour here with us. Afterward, I’ll go to KP with him. That way you get two-for-one for the rest of the day.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” Pluta laughed. “Giving him more work than he can handle is the whole point.”

“Guys,” I lied, “I’m not hungry.” I stepped up to Pluta, like maybe I was going to headbutt him, elbow him in the jaw.

Pluta inched back, as he raised his clicker-zapper.

I told him, “Tell me where this KP thing is supposed to happen and I’ll go.”

71

Holding a dull meat cleaver, I stood in front of a restaurant prep table with rusty legs and a stainless steel top. It was safe to say that stainless steel described the material, not the condition, which matched so much of everything in the world fourteen years after the fall. On the beat-down table lay a cold corpse, one I’d shlepped over from a stack by the wall. Yeah, a stack of cold corpses.

Flies buzzed everywhere—on the cold cadaver, on the greasy floor, and on my face.

“Jib day,” a foul man soiled in kitchen grime told me.

“What?” I asked. “Like every Tuesday or something?”

The guy—Stinky Pete, they called him—pointed at the corpses stacked against the wall. “The day they deliver the jibs.”

“With no hands, heads, or feet.” It wasn’t a complaint. It wasn’t a judgement. I was so far into the danger zone of what-the-fuck, my mouth was starting to pick my thoughts at random and just pop them into the air.

“You can see we got some pinky girlie girls in the pile.” Stinky Pete dragged his grimy hand across his mouth, spending a little too much time rubbing his lips. Most of the cadavers had been Whites before their demise. Three—a male and two females, if I was guessing correctly—given the jumble of limbs and torsos, had been normals. “You save them ‘til the end before you do ‘em. The boys sometimes wanna get a last use out of ‘em before they go in the pot.”

“A last use?”

“What kinda shit-shame dumbass are you, I gotta explain everything? They cold, but they warm up.”

I felt an urge to puke the bile out of my empty stomach.

“First you peel ‘em,” Stinky Pete told me. “Slice ‘em down the front, from throat to taint, and down the arms and legs. One piece. That’s what boss man wants. You scrape them skins of all them fatty goody bits. The bits go in the cookpot. Skins go in the brine.” He pointed out a barrel of rancid liquid with no cover. It was one of several swarming with flies.

“The meat goes in the silver bin.” He pointed out a maggoty metal container, large enough to hold fifty gallons of water. “You cut them bits up about yea big.” He showed made an OK sign with his fat fingers. “No bigger or I’ll come back and cram all of it up your shit shame stink hole. You got it, taint? Or you want I should thump your melon ‘til your brain makes a grind?”

I was starting to doubt whether me and Pete spoke the same language.

He pointed out another bin with a worn black X painted on the front. “You take that tripe, and you squeeze ever sticky lump of that shit in there. Makes a good fertilizer that.” A third bin was marked with a white X. “Bones. We grind ‘em up and spread ‘em on the fields. Think about that next time you’re gnawing your corn off the cob.” Stinky Pete laughed himself silly over that. “Most important thing, don’t waste nuthin’. Them taints, they’ll eat all the rest ah this in one form or another. You get busy on them jibs. If I come in here and find you loafin’, I’ll stick my foot so far up yer ass you’ll have to chew my toenails to eat your shit shame breakfast.” At that, he stormed out like he’d lost his temper about something I couldn’t see.

I stared at the corpse on the table. A man. Extra pale because he’d been drained of blood. Killing Whites, that was one thing. Seeing their bodies out in the wild, freshly dead, desiccated in a wrecked car, or crawling with vermin as they rotted, I’d grown numb to those through the years. But butchering one?

“I don’t hear that cleaver cuttin’ nuthin’,” shouted Stinky Pete from the next room. “Work, you shit shame taint.”

With no other options, and no ideas, short of running across the unplowed fields screaming like an idiot, I sliced.

72

In a world without clocks and watches, at least within my world as a high yellow taint trapped a living nightmare, I had no idea how late it was when I finished. I only knew it was full dark out. Most of the kitchen staff regulars were finished with their daily duties and were getting drunk on homemade hooch out behind the building and I was cleaning my workspace. Cleaning why? Only the heavens knew why. Stinky Pete hadn’t asked it or ordered it. I’d spent a day butchering humans for their meat while a train of deranged perverts took turns humping a cold corpse on the pile just behind me.

At least I’d discovered a silver lining. The food for Stalag 17 was processed on two tracks—that for the yellows, and that for the Whites. I toiled at the first step of the taints’ food chain. From the glimpses I caught through the swinging doors into the cooking areas, yellows were fed normal foods—farm animal meats, grains, and vegetables. Granted, none of it looked first-rate. Likely the poorer quality products not fit for the normals in Taylor Town. And it certainly wasn’t prepared with any adherence to a health and safety code. It as a wonder ptomaine or salmonella hadn’t killed all of us already.

Before leaving, I checked with Stinky Pete, or that’s to say, I asked his permission to be dismissed. He was so blitzed I don’t think he even recognized me. Just the same, I left, hoping for another mission out of camp to fight anybody, anywhere, the next day, so I wouldn’t have to go back to KP jib-chop duty. Or—well, that ‘or’ promised a host of possibilities. Could I tear ass across the empty fields outside Stalag 17 until I found the barbed wire perimeter? Getting through it would only take time and care. What security measures did New Tejas employ on its perimeter besides coils of spikey wire? Sadly, I had no idea. But they had to have something. That was certain. If I rushed into the darkness not knowing what lethal pitfalls awaited me there, I’d likely wake up in the morning dead. Except that I wouldn’t wake up, because I’d be a corpse, waiting to be processed into taint kibble in the back room of Stinky Pete’s Chophouse and Grotesquery.

Not to mention Steph, Murphy, Grace, and Jazz. Had Grace or Jazz been killed in some FUBAR mission to rob a derelict convenience store in Waco? For all I knew, they were all dead, except that Murphy had seen Steph, just—how many days ago was it?

God, I needed sleep.

And I needed a meal. Despite how disgusted I was by what I’d been doing all day, my body was still in starvation mode from my time in lockup.

Plodding in the general direction of the barracks, but lost in my head, as I’d been so much lately, I heard a scream and stopped. I wasn’t but twenty paces from the backside of the stooge hut. Raucous voices carried through the thin walls. Firelight flickered shadows across the windows. My curiosity tempted me to step up onto the forbidden porch for a peek through those windows.

Someone—a woman—pleaded, “No. No…” Followed by another scream. A weak one. Definitely from inside.

I stepped toward the stooge hut porch but stopped. The defect in my nature that drove me to jump feet-first into Null Spot mode sizzled in my head, compelling me to act despite the thousand rational reasons not to. But none of those reasons had ever stopped me before.

In fact, they didn’t stop me then, as I was on the porch and peering through a window before I’d even decided to do anything but stand there in the dark and try to Sherlock my way through the clues, wasting valuable do-time in seduction. Inside, in what I guessed was a common perversity in Stalag 17, someone was stripped bare, bruised, and bent over the rough-hewn dining table, ankles bound to the table legs, arms wrapped around the top, wrists tied together.

Pluta had his hands on her hips, riding her as she whimpered. More than one stooge masturbated as he watched. Then the girl raised her head and looked directly at me, more precisely, at her reflection in the dark window, and I saw who it was—the twenty-something redhead from the bullet factory we’d raided, the one Pluta and his stooges had their pervert sights set on, a normal, but too special to surrender to Bill, one of those who made up the missing difference between nineteen and twenty-three.

I grabbed a chair off the porch and was lifting it to throw through the window when a strong hand grasped my shoulder. “Don’t.”

73

I looked at the hand, saw the familiar tattooed forearm. It was Peck.

“Put the chair down and step off the porch,” he told me. “You know what they’ll do if they find you out here peepin’ on ‘em.”

I glanced up at the chair I had poised to throw. “This isn’t a common peeping stance.”

He tugged on my shoulder. “Let’s talk about it down there in the dirt.”

“Can’t.”

“You wanna jump through that window and go all Spider Spot or whatever it is Murphy says about you, I’m not gonna stop you. All I’m asking is that you put that chair down for a sec’, step down and think it through first.” Peck let go of me, quietly crossed the porch planks, and hopped down to the dirt. “C’mon. I’m just askin’ for a minute or two to talk.”

Feeling on the verge of detonating, I silently placed the chair back on its four feet. I painfully turned away from the window, away from the young woman who reminded me so much of Steph.

“For just a minute,” Peck urged.

I backed to the edge of the porch and hopped down.

“That’s right,” Peck told me. “Breathe. It’ll make your brain start thinking again.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Like I told you in the truck. Bull told me to keep an eye.”

“And you’ve just been wandering out here in the dark in case I came by?” It sounded like an accusation, but an accusation of what? I didn’t even know.

“Bull rolled me off my bunk and asked me where you were.”

“Didn’t we go through all of this with Pluta this morning? How did it turn into a mystery?”

“It’s late. KP don’t usually last this long. The Bull thought maybe you ran off. So, I come out lookin’ for you.”

“KP is a horror show.” I didn’t know what else to say about that.

“Jib day?” asked Peck.

That surprised me. But then, I had a tendency to personalize life’s troubles in a way that made it hard to see their ubiquity.

“Yeah,” Peck went on. “Anybody who gets KP duty gets jib day. Eventually. I didn’t eat for days after my first time.”

I looked back at the window. The gang rape was still going strong. “You’re going to blabber on about anything, because you think once my emotions stop running amok, you’ll be able to talk reason to me.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in those words, but does you guessing my intent make it a bad idea?”

I shook my head. “Murphy thinks I’m crazy half the time. He thinks I do things irrationally, but I—”

“Do you?” asked Peck. “I mean really, do you?”

“I’m like anybody else, I guess. I make emotional choices, and like everybody else, I rationalize my choices with a bunch of logic and facts so I can feel like I’m intelligent and sensible. Righteous, even.”

“I’m not sure if what you’re talking about has anything to do with anything, but I don’t think you should throw that chair through that window.”

“Fine. Why don’t you convince me why I shouldn’t kill Pluta and every stooge in that room?”

“For starters, every one of them has a clicker-zapper. Unless Spider Spot has a superpower—”

“Null Spot. Murphy calls me Null Spot when…whatever. That’s what it is, not Spider Spot or whatever.”

Peck rolled his eyes. “Unless Null Spot has a superpower nobody knows about, or an automatic weapon stuffed in his drawers, there’s no way he, meaning you, can take out every one of them before they zap your brain. Once they do that, you’re dead. It’s just a matter of getting’ around to the dyin’ after they’re done with makin’ you suffer.”

“That’s the thing about that part,” I told him. “That’s exactly the kind of shit I’m really good at making work out for me. I think people, in general, are never ready for the unexpected. They never prepare for someone who’s willing to go at them balls to the wall, risking everything to do it. Deep down, everybody expects everybody else to make rational, safe choices. So, I have an advantage.”

“The Bull sure was right about you,”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“You sure can lay down a fine layer of shiny bullshit.”

I put one foot back up on the porch. “Whatever.”

“I guess the real question is, why risk it?”

I looked through the window again. From my angle down on the ground, all I could see were roof joists and flickering shadows. “Go on.”

“A pretty girl like that, in an ugly world like this,” Peck shook his head and grimaced. “They probably got to her two or three times before she turned eighteen. Probably lost count by now how many times it happened.”

“That’s a shitty, shitty way to look at things.”

“Ain’t about point of view. It’s about seeing the world the way it is.”

“Maybe where you’ve been,” I told him. “Balmorhea wasn’t like that. And it sure as hell wasn’t anything like this gonzo shitshow.”

“Well, ya’ll must have had it good out there in the desert. Out here in the rest of the world, that pretty girl in there, this kind of thing happens all the time.”

I wasn’t willing to accept that as any kind of reasoning to do nothing.

“Let’s say you go in there,” Peck went on. “Let’s say you manage to kill Pluta and the stooges without getting zapped. You save the girl. What then? You gonna un-rape her?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Exactly what I’m saying. She’s already there. What’s done is already done. If she gets a little more or less, do you think you going in there to stop it right now is going to make a difference in how she feels about what’s already happened?”

I ground my teeth, trying to come up with a counterargument.

Peck told me, “What I’m saying is, you can’t undo it.”

“She’ll feel better if I kill Pluta.”

“Don’t you mean you’ll feel better? Are you honestly telling me that you know jumping through that window and slaying her attacker is going to save her? Will it all work out better for her now? What if she gets hurt while you’re in there going balls to the wall? What if you fail, and Pluta takes his anger out on the girl? What happens then?”

“You just want me to walk away from this nightmare clusterfuck?” I spat.

“What I’m telling you,” Peck grabbed my arm to hammer his point home, “is this ain’t the first time Pluta and his stooges skimmed a normal out of the round up. Everybody wants to fuck a normal. What you got to know is, they’re valuable. Pluta and his shitbirds always let ‘em go when they get bored. And they always get bored. Eventually. They drop ‘em off in Taylor Town or leave ‘em outside the wire.”

“So, she could be in there for days. Or weeks.”

Peck said, “If a man knew the girl was going to survive this, and he wanted to kill Pluta and the stooges the right way, he’d let this here mess go for tonight. He’d serve up his justice so he could get away with it, like out on a mission, like when he had a full tank of fuel in his flamethrower. If a man did it that way, especially if he had the good sense to look over his shoulder to make sure there weren’t no witnesses, he could burn every ounce of rotten flesh off Pluta’s bones. He could torch the stooges. Justice would be served. The girl would be safe. The man could fight another good fight later. No risk. No punishment. Now wouldn’t that turn out better than you just jumping through the window on a whim, armed with nothin’ but a wood chair and your sense of right?”

I turned and walked into the dark. “Just so you know, I am going to kill Pluta and all of those stooges. And if I can swing it, I’m going to find this Bill character and murder him, too.”

“While you’re doing all this killing, how you gonna have time to get your girl out and escape? Seriously, how?”

74

Four days passed.

I spent one of them peeling carrots, skinning onions, and dicing potatoes. I spent another chopping firewood and washing pots. It took me two full days in the grease traps to spoon rubberized tallow out of the clogged drainpipes. Those days left me standing under the frigid outdoor shower at night, using handfuls of mud to scrub rendered human fat off my skin while the rest of the camp slept.

With no missions for us to load up into the livestock trailers, yellows from the camp came and went. Some trundled off to Taylor Town. Many hiked down to the skank camp. Though, I scolded myself for thinking of it that way. Grace and Jazz were in just such a female battalion, or whatever the hell Bill’s corps called the military unit stationed at each camp. No one seemed to know. Or care.

I worried about Grace and Jazz but could do nothing at all but hope for the best for them. I had no way to contact them. Another of Bill’s military rules. No email—doh, almost. No cellphones for yellows. No mail. No long-distance communication of any type. Our only hope of finding Jazz and Grace was for Murphy to run into someone from Balmorhea in town, someone who happened to know something about them. Long odds.

Murphy hadn’t had any luck convincing Pluta to give me a compassion pass or something of the sort. Unfortunately, Pluta was a pucker-mouth asshat, and my answer was a hard no.

Murphy visited her, though. He told me she was having a hard time of it. His words, not hers. She didn’t want me to worry, but I’d badgered Murphy into total honesty. That honesty in its totality was harder to take than I’d imagined. Steph had first noticed an oddly shaped mole on the edge of her lip two years back. When I was out on a week-long scouting run with Murphy, Jazz, and Grace, Steph had the doctor surgically remove the mole. Turned out, it was cancerous. Melanoma. Since then, she’d had seven other spots removed. All while I was out of town, because her main concern was me. She guessed the worry would weigh too heavy on me, so she chose to bear the emotional burden alone. She wanted us to be happy with the time she had left.

Steph knew she couldn’t keep treating the melanoma with minor surgeries forever. Eventually it was going to metastasize. Before we were ousted from Balmorhea, she suspected the cancer was doing just that. The hospital there couldn’t confirm her suspicion because it didn’t have the diagnostic tools. The hospital in Taylor Town did. The cancer was in her lungs, liver, and lymph nodes.

Murphy had hope, because that was his way. Steph pretended to, but she wasn’t good with any kind of dishonesty. To me, it sounded like a death sentence, which meant only one thing—I absolutely, positively, needed to get to her.

Which is why I was out of the barracks in the middle of the night, sneaking into the cab of one of our battalion’s transport semis, looking at the controls, and trying to figure out how everything worked. Once I kicked the starter and the engine roared, half the camp would wake up. After that, my plan was little more than fuzzy aspiration, but it ended with me and Steph barreling through the perimeter gates and racing for the Rocky Mountains.

Why the Rockies? Because I knew if Steph could go anywhere in the world, the Colorado Rockies would be the place.

As for Murphy, he’d understand, but I couldn’t tell him. I knew he’d stop me. That left Grace and Jazz. I didn’t have an answer for them. All I could do was promise myself I’d come back and find them. Someday. Somehow. I only really knew that I was slipping deeper into bull-bore crazy, the more I imagined Steph lying alone in a hospital. I had no choice.

I turned the handle installed where the keyhole had been before. I flipped the switch to warm the glow plugs and waited for the yellow light to change color. I didn’t know how to find my way to Taylor Town. I didn’t know how to find the hospital once I got there. I knew last-moment inspiration had never failed me before. That would have to do.

A switch in the dashboard clicked and the glow plug indicator changed to green. With no reason to dwell on the unknowns or second-guess myself into paralysis, I cranked the engine. It rumbled right up. I gassed it, then shoved the big rig into gear.

Rolling out of the parking lot, I picked a right-hand turn.

I checked my big rearview mirror to see a pair of men dashing past the parked trucks, only to come to a stop as they watched my taillights disappear in the darkness. That meant I’d have chasers coming soon. Totally expected. The diesel was much too loud for me to get away clean.

I pushed the pedal to the metal. I needed all the speed I could muster.

75

I took the first turn I came to, figuring that getting off the road I’d last been seen on was a smart thing for making me harder to find. After all, New Tejas was spread across three counties of mostly flat farmland. It was crisscrossed with hundreds of miles of pre-collapse roads. In the dark, it would be easy to disappear. And get lost.

I cut my headlights and slowed, choosing to steer by moonlight. My eyes, always dilated because of the virus, adjusted as far as they could to the dark. I covered a few more miles, made a few more turns, and didn’t spend any thought as to where I was headed. And it didn’t matter. I only had a rough idea of where I’d started.

Through my time at Stalag 17, and especially on our violent little excursions, I’d put together some clues from landmarks and faded signs I’d seen along the roads, pegging the camp’s location ten miles east, northeast of Lake Granger. Which meant we were twenty miles or so northeast of Taylor Town. My plan, as it developed, was to make my way south until I crossed Highway 79, an east-west road that cut through Taylor. After crossing 79, I’d drive another five miles or so south, and then cut northwest on a convenient county road so I could approach Taylor from an unexpected direction. With any luck, by the time I eventually arrived in Taylor, any of Bill’s militia on the hunt for me would think that I’d buggered off the reservation somewhere and was long gone.

That was my hope, anyway.

So, I stopped the truck and climbed out, scanning the sky as I slowly turned. With the moon not yet high in the sky, I found the Big Dipper down near the horizon. One thing about post-apoc skies—light pollution was a thing of the past. The two stars that made up the end of the Dipper’s scooper were Merak and Dubhe. Imagining a straight line through those two stars, I followed it across the sky until I found the end of the handle of the Little Dipper—Polaris, the North Star. It was a navigational trick Dalhover taught me long, long ago, one I’d used more times than I could remember. It was all I needed to find my cardinal directions and keep my stolen big rig running south.

I burned three hours driving up and down roads almost too narrow for my rig to fit. I shattered the windshield on overhanging branches an hour into my maze run, and I’d had to back track three or four times after finding myself facing a low-water crossing that had been washed out, or was piled with so much flood debris, it was impassable. By then, half of the Big Dipper had sunk below the horizon. The moon was so high and brightening the sky—the Little Dipper was hard to find and Polaris nearly invisible.

Nevertheless, all proceeded to plan. I’d come across a downed road sign just outside an eyeblink of a hamlet called Beyersville that confirmed I was on the road to Taylor. Four miles further, I crested a rise and noticed a faint glow so out of place I had to pull over and climb up on top of the truck’s cab for a clear looksee. It was the kind of light I’d seen a thousand times at night, but not once since before the fall. It had to be Taylor Town.

I climbed back into the cab, revved the noisy metal monster under the hood, and rolled.

76

Well, the best laid plans…or so they say.

And damn them for always being so right about everything.

A pair of headlights, along with a set of blues and reds, flashed to unexpected brilliance on the road behind me.

“A cop car?” I hollered, as surprised as I was angry, pushing my gas pedal to the floor and turning on my headlights at the same time. Why not? Those hours of rolling slowly through the dark had clearly been a waste of time.

With the two-lane road illuminated ahead of me, I felt pretty comfortable pushing my rig up to fifty, then sixty. Even seventy felt safe on the long straightaway. Potholes and lumps in the pavement bounced me out of my seat, and rattled my trailer so loudly, I thought it might detach.

Undeterred, I buckled my safety belt, guessing what lay ahead—a trap.

Why else have the cop car illuminate, if not to herd me towards it?

I scanned the darkness for a turnoff that I already knew wouldn’t be there. After all, why lay a trap on a section of road where an exit existed? I glanced left and right. The ditches on both sides were thick with weeds. A culvert I passed betrayed their depth. There’d be no barreling through for a run across the open farmland.

But what lay ahead? My long-ago-disabused movie-based intuition led me to guess at a handful of cars blocking the road, with dudes in Smokey the Bear hats hidden behind, pointing their guns at me.

I blasted the truck’s air horn, and then did it again.

I lined my rig up on the road’s faded center stripe, and ran through a few thought experiments—wild-ass guesses, really—trying to figure out whether it would be better to slow down and push through a roadblock at low speed, letting my brawny engine and ten-speed transmission do the work, or to max my speed and depend on momentum to obliterate anything in my way.

As if reading my thoughts, a handful of police cruisers blinked on, beaming high-beam headlights and colorful flashers across the road.

Finally deciding that movie physics never really worked in the real world, and that a calamitous collision with a parked automobile would likely have a detrimental effect on my ability to drive, I let off the gas, and squeezed my brain for a big dose of instant brilliance. That’s when I caught a flash of bland color in the beam of my headlights, just off the road, realizing as I passed that it was a man. With his arm outstretched. With something in his hand.

My brain convulsed.

The electricity shocked me into a version of reality where my powerful momentum machine plunged into the ditch in a scream of skidding tires and shrieking metal.

77

Every time I wake after a bonk on the head, I’m confused. It’s like human brains weren’t designed for the sudden impacts of the modern world. Or devo-modern, if that was the right way to think of a society tumbling in the wrong direction on the technology tree.

Lying in the road with my face pressed against the asphalt, blue and red lights pierced the night at unexplained angles. I felt wet. Everything hurt, especially my head. My mouth tasted bloody. My mashed nose wasn’t letting any air through. My eyes were swollen to squinty slits. My arms were twisted behind my back, immobile. My ankles felt stuck together. Bound? Why not. Or my limbs were shattered, and that was why I couldn’t move. I vaguely recalled fragments of my escape, the chase—that paralyzing zap, and my eighteen-wheeled freedom beast rolling and crunching.

Men talked among themselves, though for some reason, the words wouldn’t process into sentences in my head. But their feet—their boots, to be precise—were way too close to my face for me to feel comfortable, so, suffering an enormous pain in my neck and all down my back, I lifted my head and turned away. That’s when I saw the overturned semi, twisted in the ditch, but still on the road, metal and glass scattered across the asphalt, and some kind of greasy green liquid running everywhere. Especially beneath me, soaking my clothes and making me wonder if I were moments from being roasted alive.

With my face literally right on the road and my nose not functioning in any fashion, I only had one way to measure my predicament—I licked. I’d expected diesel or high-octane gasoline, but tasted old rubber and burnt oil. Something deep in my subconscious presented me with a guess—radiator fluid.

At least I wasn’t going to flare into a puff of ash.

That was something.

Suddenly weary, too weary, I closed my eyes and drifted into never-never land.

78

I woke again, with strong hands under my arms, dragging me down the road. I didn’t care where. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. I didn’t have the wherewithal to stand, let alone resist in any sufficient sense. So, I said, “Ouch.”

I guess I passed out before I got a response.

When lucidity found me again, I was sitting in the back of a patrol car. Not the first time I’d been there. But it had been, so, so, so long since the last time. Deciding that sitting took more stamina than I had in reserve, and hurt more than I wanted to suffer, I let myself fall over onto the seat. Maybe not a great choice, because a pain in my hip felt like a knife starting to dig into the joint. I didn’t have the strength to sit myself back up, though. So, I lay there, breathing through my mouth and wishing I wasn’t such a reactionary idiot sometimes.

I wished I had one of those mental constitutions that allowed me to plot and scheme, bide my time, and get my revenge safe and cold. Kind of what Peck talked about. But that wasn’t me. Emotions too often ruled. It was one of the reasons Steph and I made such a prime pair—we were opposites. I was fire and she was ice. I was passion, and she was calm reason. My reason came straight from the gut—I was rage in a man-shaped wrapper. She was wisdom in a goddess’s stark beauty.

I dreamed of her when I fell asleep, or something like it. I just let myself slip out of the hurt of my reality, while my mind drifted through old memories. I recalled the time we sat atop the hill, looking down on Balmorhea and the desert plain all around. It was the day I decided to stay in Bal, the day I knew I couldn’t run from the love I felt for her. Not if I wanted to remain whole. Not if I ever wanted to smile again.

Something changed in the world that day. We became two halves of something more than either of us had ever been before. And we were always that. Through everything that happened in Bal, the good and the bad, the hard times and the easy years.

We used to share our dreams, she and I. Mostly her, because I didn’t have any. The future was something I’d spent too much of my life ignoring because it wasn’t anything special to me. Nothing but the tomorrow after tomorrow. Just another yesterday with a different calendar date attached. Until Steph.

She talked about Colorado when she was in a dreamy mood. Her father had been a doctor who owned a condo in Aspen. When she was a girl, she spent long weekends and winter holidays there, skiing the white powder snow. Her family often vacationed there in the summer. She hiked, biked, rafted, and fished. To her, Colorado was happiness. It was the escape she ran to when life got a little too tough. She dreamed about one day, when things got better, we’d be able to pull up stakes in the desert and resettle in Aspen. We’d retire there and live in her father’s condo. Because in Steph’s dreams, the world would turn back to a normal sort of version of what it once was, and we’d live in a million-dollar ski condo because Aspen wouldn’t be a ghost town haunted by voracious Whites.

I listened when she talked about it. I never told her how silly it all sounded. I never did much of anything but smile and dream right along with her, because the way she talked about Aspen—the snow, the trees, the clean crisp air, and happiness rolling down off the mountains—it sounded like heaven. Nirvana, where our love would burn as bright as a star forever, until a tired God finally decided to shit eternity into a giant black hole and big bang it into a new universe for another try.

“Wake up.”

A hand slapped my face and I squinted at the mean-ass morning light filtering down through an ugly gray fog.

“Time to pay the piper, Dillinger.”

79

They hauled me away from the twisted hulk of my runaway truck, no longer smoking, or crackling, just lying there on its side, twisted and murdered, waiting for the inevitable rust to settle in and oxidize it slowly into the soil. My boots scraped over the jigsaw-piece asphalt road, and through a ditch of tramped-down weeds, while a pair of wretched black trees looked down, not surprised by my utter failure. Following the furrows into a freshly plowed field, my captors dragged me into the mist. When they reached an old block of wood that looked like the hunk they’d pressed my head to when they drilled the buzz bolt onto my skull, they pushed me to my knees.

Men, obscured by the fog and lazily arrayed in a crude circle, stood watching me. Ominously silent. They were waiting.

Perhaps the piper really was finally coming to collect his due. I’d certainly rung up a debt through the years.

Staying on my knees, I straightened. As straight as I could manage, given everything inside me that was broken, bruised to the bone, or bleeding me to death slowly. And if death was what was coming for me, I was going to take it like a man, the way the heroes always took it in the movies once the inevitability sank in.

But nothing happened.

We just waited there.

Out in the mist, disembodied voices argued about something I couldn’t make out. That went on in gorilla grunts and whispers, until one voice passed a final judgment in brusque tones that sealed whatever fate was coming.

Looking in the direction I figured the mist-hidden men had debated, I watched, until I saw a handful of figures materialize as they marched toward me.

I stiffened my aching spine and raised my head while gritting my teeth to keep my mouth as close to closed as I could manage, considering my nose was so full of blood and snot crumbles, I’d likely never breathe through it again. I closed my eyes and silently wished my love to Steph, hoping it might fly to her like a prayer.

Plodding through the damp dirt, the gray walkers closed.

I opened my eyes to face my fate, as fearlessly as I could fake it, and my surprise nearly bowled me over. Among the armed assholes come to deliver my fate was Pluta, his boss man, and Murphy.

“If it were up to me,” spat Pluta, “I’d make you suffer and piss until I squeezed the last bit of life out of your tainted soul.”

“Pluta,” commanded the big boss man, “theatrics are pointless. Let’s get on with it.”

Men collapsed on me from behind, wrestling me into position with my left hand over the wooden altar, or whatever it was. Overkill. I was too weak to resist even one of them.

Someone handed Murphy a big rusty axe.

Big boss man told him, “Do it.”

Stepping over to me with the axe in his hands, Murphy knelt down in front of me.

“On your feet,” Pluta snapped.

Murphy jumped to his feet, facing down Pluta and brandishing the axe. “I’ll do this my way, or you won’t live to see the end of it, prissy man.”

To my surprise, nobody reacted, not even Pluta, except that he looked like he was about to piss himself.

“Do it your way,” big boss man told Murphy. “But do it. Or you can pay a meatier price for your own incompetence.”

Murphy stood for a long time, like a tree stuck in a swamp, unable to move.

“Do it,” commanded the big boss.

Murphy turned, slowly, with silent tears on his cheeks. He stepped over to me and knelt. “I gotta cut off your hand. They say hard cases like you can’t drive a semi with one hand.”

Horrified, I took a shot at humor. “Joke’s on them. It was an automatic.”

“You’re in my unit.” Murphy had great difficulty with the words, as he struggled with his tears and rage. “If I don’t…if I don’t do it, they’ll get one of these fucknuts to chop us both.” Murphy blubbered, but only for a moment, before he sucked it all back in. “I told ‘em…I’m not gonna—”

“No, Murphy.” It took all I could to keep from wailing myself. “You have to do it. This is my fuckup. I did this. You did your best to reel me in, but—” I managed a laugh, “—but I’m me. I’ll always be me. You do what you need to do.”

Murphy looked away, unable to meet my eye.

“Besides, it’ll grow back, right?”

Still not looking at me, Murphy said, “You don’t believe that stupid shit.”

“I’m sure Preacher Dick would be thrilled to know I converted.” I took a deep breath to settle out the emotion in my voice. “Maybe he’s right. All of these morons sure seem to believe in some kind of forever. Maybe everybody’s right and we’re wrong.”

Murphy leaned in close. “They’re all idiots, Zed. Every last one of them.”

“Hurry this along,” big boss man commanded.

“Idiots with all the power,” I snorted. “Same as it ever was. Do what you have to do. In fact, I’d prefer it to be you because one of these mongoloids would muck it up, and hack at my arm all morning.” I looked up at Murphy, barely able to control my own tears, then, because the reality of what was going to happen had sunk in. “I know you’ll do it right. One clean swing. Don’t say anything else. Do it. Now, please.”

Murphy closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and stood.

I looked up at him.

He cut his eyes out across the mist, urging me to look away.

I wanted to take his advice, but that rebellious prick that too often took control of my better senses insisted that I watch. “Cut it.”

Without another moment of hesitation, Murphy swung the axe over his shoulder and lopped my hand off in one clean chop.

Blood exploded out of my severed arm. The men holding me in place jumped away. I suddenly felt light-headed and collapsed in the dirt. How I stayed conscious is beyond me. I grasped at my forearm, as terror turned into a hurricane inside my head. It took every bit of control I could muster not to scream.

Around me, men hurried this way and that. Orders were shouted. Through it all, Murphy stood, looking down on me with abject remorse in his eyes and the bloody axe still in his hands.

I smelled hot roofing tar, and didn’t understand why, until a man yanked my shortened arm out of my good hand’s grasp, and before I could stop him, shoved it into a bucket of boiling tar.

That’s when I screamed.

80

They put me in the box because apparently, I wasn’t the only idgit who’d spent too much time before the crash assimilating movies as a viable version of reality. In that reality, every POW camp, prison, concentration camp, or really any kind of place where men were confined against their will, had some sort of smallish outhouse-sized structure where they used weather, hunger, thirst, and loneliness to up the punishment level on the recalcitrant ones.

The box wasn’t tall enough for me to stand up. It wasn’t wide enough for me to sit down. All I could do was wedge my knees against one wall and my hips against the other to scrunch into an ever-painful sort of propped squat. To enhance the experience, the box, having no floor of its own, was attached to a metal grate over a festering sewer pit swarming with biting flies.

The first two days, they didn’t give me any food or water. It wasn’t their plan to starve me, though. I learned that on the third day when my first serving of oniony stink stew arrived. In a silver bowl. Distinctly not yellow. A big cup of water followed, cloudy with mud and foul floaties, like they’d scooped it out of a stagnant ditch.

“You wanna act like a taint,” the guard told me when he shoved my bowl through the mail slot they fed me through, “you eat like a taint.”

My fever was burning hot by then. Which, I figured was part of their plan—hold off on the nutrition to weaken me further, just to make sure my body couldn’t fight the infection that was most likely to follow my unsanitary amputation. As though the actual pain of my severed wrist and the phantom pain in my missing hand weren’t enough.

By the end of my first week, spring crept into the weather pattern, leaving the sun to bake the box through the midday hours and the biting cold to settle in at night. Rainstorms blew south, soaking me through the leaky roof and leaving me shivering. By then, the stew they fed me three times a day drained through me and down through the grated floor so fast it hardly seemed worth the effort of eating it.

I spent most of the second week delirious with fever, watching red streaks creep up my arm, knowing I was going to die. Knowing Pluta was going to win. Knowing I’d never see Steph again, but taking comfort in the hope that maybe an afterlife did exist, and we’d soon meet up in a fairyland in the clouds or be reincarnated together into a pleasure garden of taffy and unicorns.

Somewhere in there, Pluta came to see me, blessing me with the only human words I’d heard since my guard told me to eat like a taint. I don’t know what he said, I was half out of my mind with fever, but I gathered my wits closely enough that I managed a threat, “You’re going to regret letting me live.”

“Oh, I assure you,” he laughed in the squeaky prissy way of his. “You’re going to regret being alive a long, long time before that happens.” He strutted away, taking my guard with him, explaining to the guard that I was too far gone to worry about on a 24/7 basis. However, the guard was still to check on me daily so he could let Pluta know as soon as I finally died.

That night, Murphy knocked on the wall of my box, waking me from a fitful sleep. With only a whisper, he shoved a big hunk of cornbread and a bowl of real stew through my mail slot. “Don’t eat that rancid crap they’ve been feeding you. I’ll be back tomorrow night with more.”

“Thank you,” I croaked.

“Stay alive, bro. I’ll get you through this.”

In the third week, my fever broke. My digestive express train slowed to a normal speed. The tar on my wound started to flake off, tearing rotten flesh away from good flesh as it did. With a clearing mind and only six kinds of pain to torment me all day and night, I put some thought into what would happen when they finally opened the door to let me out. Because I knew one thing, no matter which backhanded tricks Pluta kept trying to snuff me with, he couldn’t outright kill me. In nebulous Bill’s system, I was a high yellow, and I had value.

On the last day of my fourth week, with the yellows of Stalag 17 assembled outside, Pluta stood beside my box and bleated out a speech to underscore the lessons to be learned from my example. With a heart full of defiance, I decided my first act in turning my loss into victory was to stand up straight and strut past Pluta like I’d just spent four weeks at a Caribbean beach resort.

The door finally opened.

Squinting in the bright light, I took one step, and fell face first into the dirt.

81

A doctor—an actual, real-live doctor—awaited when Murphy and Peck carried me into the once-again crowded barracks and dumped me onto my new cot, right up near the window by Murphy’s. New rules, I guessed.

The doctor examined me head to toe and spent a good deal of time on my shortened arm. He scraped away the persistent hunks of tar that hadn’t flaked off. He poked at my scabrous stump and seemed pleased. He gave me a jar of salve, instructing me to apply it daily. He left me with several bottles of medications and vitamins. He then fitted me with a prosthetic, which consisted of a strap around my chest, a cuff around my upper arm, and a hinged framework at the elbow that held a plastic sleeve in place over my forearm. Where my hand had been, I instead had a looped metal hook. Being a valued torch man in the New Tejas corps, the hook was sufficient to wield my weapon in battle.

In a kindly surprise, the doctor assigned me ten days of recovery time in the barracks, told me more than once it was a wonder I’d survived the ordeal, and that his best guess, based on the healing he observed on my arm, was that I’d have a new hand in to six to eighteen months. It would be another year after that before it was as strong and fully coordinated as the old one.

I laughed, a little manically, because it still didn’t seem possible to me that a human, virus or not, could regenerate anything. Hell, I couldn’t even regrow my hair.

Ten days, unfortunately, passed in an eyeblink. I spent most of that time wandering the empty fields, plotting my next attempt to rescue Steph and escape.

On the eleventh day, I woke to see pucker-face Pluta leaving the barracks. I guessed that we were getting another serving of stupid. Murphy’s voice boomed, waking and ordering us out of our bunks, and giving us a scant few minutes to take our morning pisses, gear up, and march to the transports.

At the bottom of the loading ramp, Stinky Pete and his cook staff handed us each a good-sized loaf of mixed grain bread with a heavy portion of cornmeal. Fresh baked, and still warm. A very nice breakfast surprise.

Murphy told us we were in for an hour’s drive, at least, so we might as well get comfortable. Not likely. The weather was cold, but the sky was clear. I took my usual spot up near the front of the trailer, shrugged my flamethrower tanks off, and dropped to the floor. Warming my cold hand on my hot loaf of bread, I lifted it to my nose and breathed in the scent. It reminded me of home—home in Balmorhea, where cornbread had been on the table at most meals. Of course, those thoughts brought with them a whole parade of other memories, more than a few featuring Steph.

“Hey, bro.” Murphy dropped down beside me.

I told him, “Thanks.”

“Ain’t nothin’ I did. Cornbread’s for everybody.”

“No. I never thanked you for putting up with my shit through all of this. I know you saved my life.”

“Everybody needs a hobby.”

“I’m sorry I caused you so much trouble.”

“Don’t be sorry for something you’d do again. And probably will do again as soon as you figure out you’re not Captain Hook.”

“I know you’re trying to be funny. Do you want me to laugh even when you’re failing?”

“Ditto right back at you surly boy.”

“Hey, where’s Peck?”

“Pluta has him off on some bullshit deal doing something. They came for him last night.”

“I guess I slept right through it.”

“You need to get healthy again.” Murphy took a big bite of his bread, and through the chewing said, “He told me to tell you that if they cut him loose before he gets back, well, you know, he said all the usual shit.”

“I hope he does well out there.”

“He made it fourteen years out in the world. He only has forever to go.”

I stopped picking at my bread and looked at Murphy. “Do you really believe that forever shit?”

Murphy shrugged.

“I’m serious. Right now, all we have are rumors and propaganda about regeneration.”

Murphy glanced at my hook and chuckled. “You better hope it’s all true or you took the most expensive joyride in history.”

I held up my hook. “That’s my new middle finger in case you can’t tell.”

“At least you can still make your feeble-ass attempts at jokes.”

“Seriously, dude. What do you think about that immortality stuff?”

Murphy sighed. He didn’t like being dragged into these kinds of discussions. “What am I supposed to say, man? It’s not like they’ve got some thousand-year-old dude to point to as proof.”

“I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

“You can’t argue with that business about the scars fading. I mean you’ve seen your skinny ass in the mirror, right? How many times have you been scraped, cut, stabbed, bit, or shot? I mean seriously, dude. You and me both should look like retired circus freaks, but you look like a Highland Park frat boy with that milky-ass Oil of Olay skin, and I look like a marble-chiseled Greek god.”

“So, you believe?”

“Man, it doesn’t matter what I believe, because you’re just waiting for me to stop talking so you can tell me what you think.”

“That’s not true.”

“Why don’t we skip the rest of your pretend curiosity, and you just professor your way through some convoluted logic about this and that and whatever and tell me the answer you want me to give you.”

“Murphy, some days, you’re a bigger dick than usual.”

“That’s extra funny coming from you.”

I went back to eating my bread.

After a minute or two, Murphy said, “Are you gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What you think about all this immortality bullshit?”

“Honestly, I really was hoping you’d figured some of it out already.”

82

We’d been riding in silence for a while when I said, “You’ve been out of the barracks a lot lately. Have they let you back into town yet?”

Without answering, Murphy turned to stare outside.

“What aren’t you telling me.”

Murphy shook his head but stayed silent.

Irritation, and worry rose in my tone. “Murphy?”

Still without looking at me, Murphy told me, “You’re a smart motherfucker, Zed. You know that, right. I got nothing but respect for you in that department.”

It was my turn to sit silently, only I felt my anxiety rising again.

“I know how you feel about Steph. I really do. You know that, right?”

“This is a weird way to avoid answering my question.”

“What I’m trying to say is, you can figure stuff out most of us can’t. You see things most folks don’t. It’s like you can look around corners sometimes, read invisible Tarot cards. But this business going on with Steph, it turns you into a vampire who can’t see himself in the mirror.”

“Murphy.”

“It makes you crazy, man, and not in that funny ha-ha hanging with the bros sort of way, but legit, self-destructive, Mr. Potato Head insane. Now you got a hook for a hand. You somehow didn’t die after a month in the suck box, and you still got that psycho gleam in your eye when Steph’s name comes up.”

“That’s because I love her.”

“Enough to die?”

“Zero doubt about it.”

“Do you think she’d want you to get yourself killed for nothing at all?”

“She’s not nothing, Murph. She needs me.”

“She needs to know you’re okay. She needs to know you’re going to survive this, and that’s it. Dammit, Zed, I wish you could see yourself. You haven’t looked this bad since back in the Austin days when we were running crazy—goddamn, I still don’t know how we lived through that shit. We shoulda both been dead a long time ago.”

We both sat for a time after that, listening to the hum of the tires on the crumbling asphalt.

I spoke first. “I promise, I—”

“See?”

“See what?”

“That’s what I’m talking about. You act like you can make me a promise about what you’re gonna do when you and I both know you can’t. Insanity will take over, and it won’t matter what you promise me right now.”

I looked down at my breakfast loaf, still in my hand, inexplicably stuck. “Murphy, I know you’re probably right about all of that. I don’t know what to say. I still have to know, no matter what. And as insane as you say I get, I’m rational enough to know that ‘no matter what’ could mean I’ll die doing whatever it is the craziness compels me to do. I’ve made my peace with that.”

“Why?” Murphy asked.

“Reasons that will forever make sense in my heart, but not in my head, and never in any words I could twist into an argument.”

Murphy heaved a heavy sigh and he shook his head. He understood. I knew he did, because I knew the devotion he felt toward those he loved. “Whatever happens, I’ll do what I can for you. If you don’t get so crazy you forget you can ask me for help, then do that, ask me.”

“I won’t—”

“Ask. Promise me that much at least, or I won’t tell you a damn thing.”

I gave in with a nod.

Murphy drew a pained breath. “They let me go to town for a few hours yesterday afternoon.”

“And Steph?”

“Of course, I went to the hospital. Zed, she was worried sick. Because of your truck antic, I haven’t been there in a month, and these sadistic fuckwits….” He thumbed in the direction of the cab, though we had no idea where Pluta was. “Nobody told Steph what was going on. All she could do was worry about the worst.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t me you need to apologize to.”

“I know.”

“She asked about you.”

I raised my hook. “Did you tell her?”

“I told her enough. Zed, if you get yourself killed, you need to know this fact for certain, she’s not strong enough to survive the heartbreak.”

“That bad?” I asked.

“She says, some days, she wonders why she’s even in the hospital. Other days, she can’t get of bed to go to the bathroom without help. She looks like she’s hurting, but she keeps putting on that big smile of hers to hide it. I can see it, though. In her eyes, I mean. I’ve known her long enough to know.”

“From the cancer? Is that what’s causing it?”

“Cancer. The medications, maybe. I don’t know. She won’t tell me the details. Nobody up there will tell me anything. I know they give her stuff. They run tests all the time.”

“Is any of it helping?”

“Steph gets real cagey when I ask about that. Says I wouldn’t understand. Whatever. I know better than to argue with Steph about anything.”

“I don’t see how they’d be able to manufacture any or all of the drugs that go in a chemo cocktail for the specific kind of cancer she has. Dammit, Zed, it’s like they’re not doing anything but making her suffer.” Murphy caught himself, realizing he’d spilled too much. “I’m sorry, man. I know—” He stopped, not trusting himself to say any more about it.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything else, either. I stared through a ventilation hole, listening to the wind blow past, while I felt my rational mind slowly slipping toward raging black insanity.

83

We spent the entire day carrying bodies and stacking them in refrigerator trucks. Mostly Whites, ours and the feral kind. Lots of the feral ones. Looking at the scatter of corpses, I couldn’t figure out what happened, except that it was a chaotic mêlée. One more tactical masterpiece—double sarcasm intended—by one of Pluta’s counterparts from Camp 11, or 5, or whatever. A lot of people had died. The captive taints needed to be hauled to an evaluation center, and the corpses needed harvesting.

We didn’t get back to the barracks until well after midnight. At least it felt that way. Again, no clocks. No watches, at least not among the dregs of Bill’s army. When I lay on my bunk, with no tire hum to buzz through my brain, and no potholes to bounce me between breaths, I fell asleep. Didn’t even bother removing the sleeve support for my prosthetic hand tool hook thing.

I wish I’d been given more time to sleep that night. Maybe then, things would have turned out different.

One of Stinky Pete’s kitchen lackeys shook me awake when it was still full dark outside. “You still got KP duty, taint. It’s meat day. Hurry your stink ass to the jib room.”

Groggy, only half conscious, I rolled off my bunk and staggered outside. The cold air bit so hard I couldn’t help but snap awake. Not that being awake was better than sleepwalking into the slaughterhouse. Awake was a nightmare. In sleep, at least I had a chance of dreaming an escape from a world gone sour.

Before I realized it, I was standing in front of my familiar prep table, breathing the gooey dead stink of the piled cadavers. With the cleaver in one hand and my useless hook for the other, I wondered how I was going to do any of the macabre work that would fill my day.

“Pete don’t want you in here all night this time,” said Stinky Pete’s helper. “You hear me, fucktard? Hey, you awake in there?” Pete’s helper rudely rapped his knuckles on my forehead. “Anybody home?”

My temper snapped. I snagged his wrist with my hook, pinned it to the table, and raised the cleaver to whack it off. And stopped. If I did it, trouble would come. They’d zap me until I couldn’t see straight. They’d stuff me in the suck box.

“Don’t. Please.” Pete’s helper struggled, but my iron hook didn’t have any mercy forged into it.

I glanced over at the bins—one for meat, one for bones, one for skin and another for tripe and fecal matter. There didn’t need to be any evidence that Pete’s helper was ever even in the jib room. It’s not like anybody was going to run a DNA test on the blood spatter and body parts.

“Please, I was just joshin’ you.”

His begging didn’t mean anything to me. And that seemed weird, like I was choosing to cross a line, though I couldn’t define exactly where that line was, only that I used to be one thing, a creature of another world who lived on the other side of that line. Now, on this side, I was premeditating the murder of a man I could just as easily let live. And I didn’t know which side I wanted to be on.

My bolt buzzed, sending syrup through my joints, Jell-O into my brain. But I resisted, holding firm with the power of the cleaver in my hand.

“You let him go,” bellowed Stinky Pete, “or I shit-shame swear I’ll fry every syphilitic worm out your skull so fast you’ll think your brain is spurting out your ear holes.”

Which side of that line did I want to exist on?

“Only reason I ain’t zapped you already,” claimed Stinky Pete, “is you got that stack o’ jibs to skin.”

I lowered the cleaver and pulled my hook off his arm.

Pete’s helper scampered through the door to get away from me.

Stinky Pete told me, “Git busy.”

Gut, skin, debone, separate, repeat.

Just like my first time in the jib room, the hours doused me in so much blood I was sticky and red from head to toe. Splatters of fecal drippings mucked over my boots, because no matter how careful I tried to be, one hand and one hook just couldn’t get the job of squeezing a human intestine clean without making a mess.

Despite my early start, the day wore on, through noon and into the evening. Again, the hook made everything go slow. Stinky Pete came in four or five times throughout the day to berate me for my impressive degree of retardation and sloth. He didn’t buzz me again, though. Or maybe he did, and I’d numbed myself so deeply to the greasy red hell that I didn’t even notice.

As the evening wore on, Stinky Pete and his helpers finished with their dinner chores, ordered the kitchen to Pete’s liking, and prepped it for the next day’s breakfast.

Hour after hour, corpse after corpse, Stalag 17 wound down, until I figured I was the only one in camp still sweating through his duties.

I heaved a large body off the dwindling stack, hooked my prosthetic on the ribs and dragged it toward the table, then stopped. A pink skin showed in the pile. The body of a normal. A woman, beneath the jibs, twisted against the wall, as if she’d been hidden there, her feet and hands still attached.

Alarmed because of the hands and feet, I thought she might still be alive.

I leapt onto the pile and rolled the corpse of a skinny male off the normal girl’s head, seeing a thick mane of red hair that was matted with blood over her face. I peeled the sticky red hair back, realizing as I did, that the redhead wasn’t breathing. Nor was her body warm.

I felt like a fool.

A complete, irrational, idiot.

Still, I wiped the streaked blood off the girl’s face. Why? I didn’t know. Maybe sixteen hours in the jib room was more than my mind could handle. I froze, still touching her freckled face. The last time I’d seen it, I held a chair in two strong hands, on the verge of rescuing that face at any cost. But I didn’t.

Every bit of insane rage that had been bottled up inside me erupted. I fell to my knees, wailing—silently, painfully, without a sound, without a tear—because somehow in my head, my grief for the girl conflated with all the unnamable shit in my heart over what was going on with Steph, what was happening to me, to everyone I loved. That line I thought I’d crossed in wanting so badly to cleave that man’s hand, suddenly wasn’t even there. Not for me. The girl in the pile wasn’t a monster, she was a human with a past and a future, a family, and probably a lover, someone who thought she was the brightest star in all the universe. Only now, because of Pluta, she was a brutalized, bloody jib.

My rage then slipped into a familiar place where every emotional failsafe tripped, leaving only that part of me that I sometimes feared, and oftentimes loathed, but always got his shit done.

Null Spot the Destroyer had some motherfuckers to kill.

84

I crossed the compound, gory and red, silent as a ghost, cloaked in a mist the night was settling over the world—just for me—and the carnage I carried like a burden of coal on my back.

The barracks door, heavy and usually creaky, opened noiselessly, as though I’d willed it so. I didn’t need to go far inside—everything I required hung on the weapons racks just inside the door. I found my flamethrower rig just where I’d left it after the San Marcos just-for-kicks massacre. I hefted my tank, knowing by weight that it contained a full load. I slipped it over my back and cinched up the straps.

Without disturbing a soul inside, I closed the barracks door behind me and stood on the narrow porch, considering the promise I’d made to Murphy. If I lived through the night, I decided, I’d ask his forgiveness. As for what was going to become of me, it didn’t matter. I only knew that my conscience couldn’t tolerate another sick second in Bill’s turgid Tejas. It was everything I hated about the world since the collapse, everything I’d worked so hard to make Balmorhea not be. If I were to take one more breath and keep any part of my soul intact, then I absolutely had to take action.

Pluta’s misery hut stood at the center of my crosshairs.

I jumped off the porch and hit the dirt in a run, though I slowed to a silent sneak as I crept up the stairs and crossed the wide porch. Pluta and his stooges with their clicker-zappers would buzz me into oblivion if they knew I was there. I needed to take them by surprise.

At the door, I listened.

People moved around inside, in the middle of a subdued, but vicious disagreement. Feet shuffled. One pair walked across the floor and stopped. A moment later, he noisily emptied his bowels at the latrine in the corner. Most of them were awake in there. Odd, considering the late hour, but that was just as well. Preferable, in fact. I wanted them to see me, I wanted them to piss the floor when my fire exploded in their faces.

I tried the door. It wouldn’t open. It was latched from the inside.

I turned and hopped off the porch, taking several paces to give myself room.

Having chosen my course of action, I needed nothing more than to ignite my blue pilot jet and take a deep breath.

I launched myself forward, bounded up the stairs, and charged across the wide porch, hitting the door with my shoulder and all the momentum my boney body plus a forty-pound flamethrower could bring to bear.

The door flung open in a shower of wood splinters.

I stopped just inside, raising my torch.

Most of the stooges were gathered around the dining table in the center of the room, hands and faces red with blood, thick as Texas barbeque sauce, as they fed on the living body of a normal woman who lay there, twitching. Pluta had time for nothing but panic as his eyes met mine before glancing to where his zapper lay, well out of reach.

I fired.

My flame exploded across the room, swallowing the Senior Man and most of his stooges.

They screamed, flailed and flopped. I hosed them where they landed, torching the floor planks and furnishings, then the walls, then the sturdy ceiling beams.

Feet pounded the boards to my left, and I jumped, rolling forward as one of the stooges pounced through the air I’d just vacated. As he hit the floor in a roll, I pointed my flamethrower at him and let loose. At such close range, he disintegrated instantly in hunks of flaming flesh and falling bones. I jumped to my feet and raced out onto the porch as the raging fire inside shattered the glass out of the windows.

I’d reached the end of all that I’d planned, surprisingly, still alive.

It was time to improvise.

I burned the kitchen facility without going inside, figuring Stinky Pete and his complicit staff were all in there. I torched the armory, and most of the vehicles in the parking lot as I wrestled with whether to attack the barracks buildings. Killing everyone in Camp 17, I decided, would be a mistake, because I didn’t know how many good-hearted men had been Shanghaied just like me, doing their year or praying for a chance to escape.

In the end, I settled for the most foolish choice of all. I ran through the camp, shouting for revolution as Whites and yellows stumbled out of their barracks doors.

Tear-gas bombs and Molotovs started to fly.

The air flowed with acrid smoke, and I wished I’d grabbed my gas mask when I’d snatched my flamethrower.

The chaos felt like a death metal festival and Mayhem was the main act.

I came upon a horde of Whites rushing toward the sound of gas tanks exploding in the parking lot. I cooked them all as they ran.

Somebody shouted curses I couldn’t understand with so much noise coming from every direction.

I figured it was time to find Murphy and I turned to run back out of the barracks but stopped. Stinky Pete stood there, pants sagging around his knees, eyes angry, and mouth shouting. Before I could bring my flamethrower’s hungry fire to bear, my head buzzed, and I stumbled. When I tried to get back up, electricity jolted my brain into oblivion.

85

It was my third day in the box of suck, though they’d kept me fed and watered, which was a surprise. The fires had all gone out. Only the smell of ash lingered, and only when the wind blew just right. That is, when I could smell something besides the ripe sewer hole beneath me.

Murphy knocked on my door.

I said, “You sure you don’t want to let yourself in?”

“Funny.”

“That’s why I’m always the center of attention.”

“I thought you spoke fluent sarcasm.”

“I do. I just don’t know torture box etiquette.”

“Maybe I won’t knock next time, and I’ll surprise you when you’re taking a piss and thinking about jerking off. I mean, I know how you get when your dick’s in your hand and all.”

“Murphy?”

“Yeah?”

“I appreciate the visit, but did you really just come here to break my balls?”

“Check this out.”

I hunched over as much as I could to see through my dinner slot.

Murphy showed me an old wooden stool. He found a spot for it to sit level in the dirt and sat himself down. “Man, it stinks up here.”

“Nobody ever closes the lid on the toilet.”

“You should complain to management about that.”

“I did.” I laughed as I remembered the look on Pluta’s face before I washed it away with fire. “Sometimes I worry that I’ve gone crazy.”

“You’ve always been crazy, but you make it work.” Murphy pointed at what was left of the camp. “Man, when you go full Null Spot, you can sure fuck shit up.”

“I guess they’re not happy about it. What are they gonna cut off me this time?”

“Don’t know. Stinky Pete told me to bring this stool up here. So, I did.”

“Damn. I was sure I fried him in the kitchen.”

“He doesn’t like to use the indoor shitter. Prefers to dump out in the field. That’s where he was when you showed up. He’s been bragging about his luck all over camp.”

“Wait, Stinky Pete sent you up here with a stool?”

“He’s in charge until they figure this mess out.”

“Huh.”

“You shoulda torched everybody when they were still half-asleep instead of running through the camp yelling like you were Che Guevara. You could have gotten away with it.”

I took a moment to explain to Murphy why I didn’t.

He laughed. “Same old stupid-ass Null Spot bullshit. Sometimes, I swear to god, you’re dumb as a brick.”

“I was trying to do the right thing.”

Pretty sure I heard a chuckle. “Ain’t no right things anymore.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“Last right thing I knew about was Bal. What we built out there.” Murphy kicked at the dirt. “Right never wins, and good guys get stuck in a stinky torture box until…until whatever’s gonna happen happens.”

“Can you get me out?”

“If I coulda, I already woulda. They’ve got four yellows following me around 24/7. Now, if I get the drop on ‘em, I might kill ‘em, all four. If it happens at night, and I can find some magic way to get past the guys they’ve got guarding your box all the time, I’ll get you out. Maybe we can kidnap Steph from the hospital and go live in happy unicorn land forever.”

“None of that was funny.”

“Really? When I tried it out on the guys in the barracks, everybody laughed.”

A whistle blew in the distance.

“Hey man,” Murphy told me. “My time’s up. I wish you would have warned me before you started this shit.”

“You’d have tried to stop me. Murphy, I needed to do this.”

“Man, you need to start having faith in other people. Sure, I’d have tried to talk you out of it, but dammit, Zed, I’ve known you since the shit just barely touched the fan. I know when to try and stop you and when to go along and make the best of it.”

The whistle blew again.

Murphy, standing up and leaning down to speak through my dinner slot said, “You had the crazy look in your eyes since you got out of here the first time. I’d have helped you. I don’t know if we’d have gotten away, but there’s one thing for sure, you wouldn’t be in this damned box again.”

“Murphy, you’re a good friend.”

“Hmph. No shit.”

86

Excitement started to buzz through the air.

The air outside the suck box, that is.

Putting my exemplary deductive skills to work, I figured it had to do with me. Somehow. So, I scrunched myself down for a peek through my dinner slot.

Out in the parking lot, past the burned skeletons of the trucks and trailers, an anachronistic convoy of pearly white SUVs with black-tinted windows were coming to a stop. Not that I had a clear view of the five vehicles—I was only able to get glimpses past the burned barracks buildings and blackened trucks, but the SUVs appeared to be not just rust-free, but shiny. No dents, no broken glass.

Given the state of the world, the vehicles were a wonderment. They didn’t belong to the big boss. I knew that. I’d seen his ride that day in the field when he’d presided over my chopping. These five had to belong to his boss, Bill. Why he’d come to watch whatever was going to happen, I couldn’t guess. But it felt ominous.

Deathly so.

That thought took a moment for me to fully appreciate as it spun through my mental gears on a wisp of hope that some other outcome could be in the offing. Unfortunately, no other guesses made sense.

Rather than working myself into a panic over the inevitable, I chose calm.

I closed my eyes and remembered Steph’s smile from one summer afternoon when we’d gone for a swim in the spring. That day was years ago, but I still felt the iciness of the water, like I’d just jumped in. Steph laughed a lot that day. She always laughed, smiled, and unwound when she was there in the water or lying in the sun on the grass. Something about that oasis worked magic against the weight of her responsibilities and the memories of all the tragedies she’d lived through. It was her fountain of youth, the heaven of her heart.

Booted feet tromped through the dirt outside my box.

Whatever was coming, the time was nigh.

Hands unlatched my door, and I prepared myself once again to stand and strut.

The door swung open. I squinted into the sunshine. Seeing a handful of brutish men standing back, I once again tried a step. My legs gave way, dropping me face first into the dirt.

Son of a bitch.

A voice I hadn’t heard before said, “So, you’re Zed Zane.”

Not making any effort to pick myself up, I looked to the right at the feet of someone sitting on Murphy’s stool outside my box. “Hello, Bill.”

That gave him pause. “Did they tell you I was coming?”

“I’m clairvoyant.”

“Unlikely.”

I spit the dirt out of my mouth. “Well, hey, we’ve both been around long enough to see some pretty strange shit, you and I.”

In a cordial tone, Bill asked, “Do you have the strength to lift yourself up?”

“My muscles are a bit cramped. You may not know it, but I’ve been in a bit of a tight situation for a few days now.” I rolled onto my back and pushed myself into a sitting position, forcing a smile I hoped was defiant. Bill gestured to the pain box, so I scooted around in the dirt and leaned against it as I sat. Of course, looking up at him. “I feel it’s only fair to warn you that I can use my telekinetic powers to kill you in a heartbeat.”

“You like trying to be funny, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “I never quite pull it off.”

“Even telling a bad joke is a sign of intelligence.”

“Yeah. I’m a genius.”

“But not smart enough to stay out of the pain box.”

“The meanest explanation I’ve heard is that, apparently, I’m emotionally retarded, so I can’t make good choices.” I didn’t intend to be that honest, but sometimes truth has a way of coming out all on its own.

“How about you and I—we make a deal?”

“What kind of deal?”

“With a word,” Bill told me, “I could have them put you back in the box until you die. Do you think you’re in a position to negotiate?”

“I’m in a position to decide whether to give you whatever it is you want from me. Clearly, you want something, or you could have just had me killed back in Balmorhea.”

“Is your ego so large that you think I knew who you were in Balmorhea?”

No, and no, but I wasn’t going to play into an argument he was winning. “Whatever dancing monkey game you’re winding up here, I really don’t want to play. I’m tired. You know, the box thing, and all. If you’re going to chop something else off, can we skip whatever this part is and just get on with the dismemberment?”

“Rest assured, that option and worse are still on the table.” Bill surveyed the camp and changed the subject. “For one man, you’ve made an impressive mess of things here.”

“Thank you?”

“Your exploits in battle are equally impressive.”

I’d not have guessed anybody who wasn’t dead knew how I performed in a fight. “You’re well-informed.”

“I’m clairvoyant.”

I laughed out loud. Not even sarcastically, then coughed hard. Bill waited.

“The deal I want to make,” he said, “is for you to demonstrate a degree of maturity, as your friends Murphy, Grace, and Jazz did when they arrived in New Tejas. Give me your word you’ll act like a normal human being, take a drive with me, and we’ll have lunch. I’ll answer the many hundreds of questions I’m sure you have, and you and I can decide where we go from there. You must admit, that deal is better than whatever you were imagining would happen here today.”

Yes. That was true, but the only promise I was willing to make to Bill was that I intended to kill him and as many of his yellow lackeys as I could manage. Telling him that would probably get me put back in the box, and I’d certainly miss lunch. Still, Bill’s anachronistic reliance on the honor of the spoken word created an obstacle I had difficulty ignoring. “Words are meaningless.”

“To me, a man’s word is everything.”

“Is that why you put a buzz bolt on everyone’s head?” I snarked.

“I can see I overestimated you. I apologize for wasting your time.” Bill stood to leave.

I’d overplayed my hand. I gave in. “I’ll take a ride with you.”

Bill looked at me blankly.

“And I’ll have lunch with you. I’ll listen to what you have to say, and I’ll act like a human. You have my word.” I felt like a dancing monkey, a hungry one.

87

They ran me through the cold shower behind the barracks, let me put my hook arm back on, dressed me in a new-ish set of work clothes, and I felt human again.

With Bill off engaged in whatever business he had to tend to, his toughs escorted me to one of the white SUVs. I looked around for Murphy.

“Don’t worry about your butt buddy,” said my escort. “He’ll be here when you get back.”

I repressed the urge to knee him in the nuts and throw an elbow at his mouth. “You want me to get inside?”

The tough looked at the other. “They were right. This one’s wicked smart.” He opened the door. The rear of the vehicle was laid out like a small living room, with two plush rows of seats facing each other. My escort directed me to the seat facing backward. “Bill always takes the forward-facing seat.”

I wasn’t picky—it seemed like I was living in the past these days anyway.

The SUV—manufactured before the collapse, of course—was the most luxurious vehicle I’d been inside of in years. It showed its age here and there, but was immaculately clean. In the front seat, the driver had the engine idling—burning precious gasoline just to keep the air inside perfect, not too hot, not too cold, no humidity, and nothing stinky drifting through.

One of my escorts climbed into the passenger side of the front seat. He said, “Look here.”

I craned my neck to look forward.

He flipped down the visor so I could see him watching me in the mirror. He raised a hand just high enough for me to notice that he held a clicker-zapper. The threat, or rather, the promise, was clear—behave, or suffer. Neither he nor the driver said anything else.

After a short while, one of Bill’s men opened the door for him to climb through. He seated himself across from me, and the SUV immediately headed out. “My apologies if you were kept waiting too long.”

Disarmed by his manners, I swallowed the smartass response that came to mind, and I told him, “Not a problem.”

In moments, we were floating smoothly and quietly over a country road. In some of the fields we passed, crops were beginning to sprout in bright green rows. In others, cattle grazed on new grass. I said, “You sure seem to have the Whites under control.”

“Whites?” asked Bill. “Oh yes, your people’s slang for the infected.”

“Yeah.”

“To answer your question, we maintain security in a zone that covers over a thousand square miles of farmland east and northeast of Austin. Millions of infected continue to thrive within the borders of old Texas, hundreds of thousands in Austin itself. The infected are a problem that will be with us for generations to come. They are also an opportunity and a resource.”

“Because you train them for your army.”

“Indeed, we do.”

“So, you can raid communities like Balmorhea and steal everything hard-working survivors have built.”

Bill looked at me like I’d just said something stupid. “Was Balmorhea not under siege when we arrived?”

“Preacher Dick was giving us a bit of trouble.”

“And did our forces not overrun your weak defenses in a matter of hours?”

That was a very sore subject with me.

“If you weren’t strong enough to keep what you’d built,” Bill told me, “then it was never yours. If we hadn’t conquered Balmorhea, then somebody else would have. In fact, this Bishop Richard and his militia were in the process of doing exactly that. Whatever it was you thought you possessed, you didn’t. The people of Balmorhea were merely maintaining it for the benefit of someone they hadn’t yet met. It’s only chance that that someone happened to be us.”

“And the people you killed?” I accused. “They didn’t matter?”

“The normal people were the only thing that mattered. They were who we were there to rescue.”

“Imprison you mean? Enslave?”

“Some people need a label to define their place in the world. Are you one of those people?”

“You claim to value words for their true meaning, so, you tell me what would you call a man you surgically tagged for discipline, kept in a locked cell for a month, then the pain box, mutilated him, and then the pain box again?”

“A slow learner.”

Ouch. I shifted tactics. “What do you call yourself? King? President? Viceroy?”

“Most people call me sir, as a sign of respect.”

“Was that the lesson I was supposed to slow learn in my incarceration? Respect for King Bill?”

Bill stared at me with flat eyes and an expressionless face, a shark’s look. “You like to toy with people when you’re trying to win your point. Tell me, Zed, has playing clever word games ever helped you achieve any worthwhile goal in life?” Bill cut deep with that jab, and he saw it. “Have you ever thought of applying your intellect to a constructive endeavor?” He dug into his pocket and retrieved what looked like a cell phone, an honest to God cell phone. “Perhaps you’ll be less combative once you’ve eaten. We’ll talk some more then. In the meantime, I have some calls to make. Please allow me the courtesy of remaining quiet.” He dialed.

So flabbergasted was I that I couldn’t help but blurt, “You have a cellular network?”

“You didn’t have cell phones in Balmorhea?”

Fucker.

88

We passed the outskirts of a tiny, walled hamlet, sitting alone in the vast fields. Guards in the towers waved as we passed. Farm vehicles and even a loaded semi drove past us as we traveled west, it occurred to me, on well-maintained roads—certainly better than the ones I’d driven on my midnight run. No burned-out hulks of cars blocked the lanes. No ambushers attacked us. Though not one of the solitary farmhouses we passed appeared to be doing anything but fading into ruin. More and more of the fields appeared to be under cultivation. As I watched it all go by, the world seemed normal in a way I hadn’t seen since before the collapse. Not totally normal, but trending in that direction.

When we passed through the fortified gates to get into Taylor, Bill hung up his phone for the last time. “Do you like barbecue?”

My first urge was to say something sarcastic, but I was still cowed from my earlier interaction. “Love it.”

“We’ve reopened many of the businesses in town. As you might imagine, almost none with the original owners, and few in the same business they were before the collapse. The restaurants—we tried to keep those as they were. I think you’ll be pleased with the barbecue.”

Out on the sidewalks, people in town—who had a place to be—traveled mostly by foot. A good number of bicycles whizzed this way and that. Few cars and trucks plied the roads, so, we were able to park at the curb right in front of the restaurant Bill had selected.

Inside, smoke stained the ceiling black. Old pictures of times gone by hung on the walls. Auto license plates nailed to the floor patched over holes in the century-old planks. Everything looked shabby, a touch greasy, and a little bit unsanitary. The place seemed normal—for an old Texas barbecue joint.

A dozen or so diners sat at tables—nearly all were normals, wearing blood-red neckerchiefs, caps, or jackets. A pair of yellows, obvious because of their white skin and yellow neckerchiefs, had a table to themselves. Nine patrons stood in line, waiting to order, and all happily stepped aside to allow Bill and I to go first.

As we walked past, Bill stopped to share platitudes with a few. He reminded me of a politician working a crowd. And though I’d have expected Bill’s normals to be intimidated by him, none of that was apparent in their eyes or the tone of their voices.

At the counter, we ordered brisket, sausage, beans, and beer. Bill even made me take a serving of mock-banana pudding—real pudding, though it contained no bananas.

As we ate, Bill talked about his boyhood growing up in Dallas. Plano, actually, an affluent suburb north of the city. His father taught algebra at the local high school and his mother commuted to a job as an accountant in downtown Dallas. Bill played baseball and soccer as a kid, wasn’t talented at either, but was proficient enough to earn a place on his high school teams. He attended Texas State University in San Marcos—Southwest Texas State in those days—where he’d earned a degree in mechanical engineering. After graduation, he found employment with a consulting firm back in Dallas and soon realized he had a flair for organization. By the time he was thirty, he was the firm’s managing partner and a millionaire many times over. Affluence and its trapping rained all over his life through the following decades. Then the virus came to Texas and made his hoard of money worthless.

I felt ashamed when it turned to me to recount my pre-virus existence. Impressive test scores and tons of potential could never flourish past the mess of my childhood. After so many years, it still contaminated everything I did and thought. I probably needed a shrink and a prescription for some happy pills. We had neither in Balmorhea. I didn’t tell Bill about any of that, though. I admitted to earning a useless degree in philosophy with unimpressive grades, and I taunted him with my dead-end job at Starbucks. That segued nicely into my asking why he believed he had anything to gain by lunching with me.

He brushed past the question, and I didn’t push for an answer. Just like our lives before the virus, where Bill had excelled and won all the prizes, and I’d struggled to keep the utilities turned on, Bill’s post-apoc accomplishments eclipsed my lifetime achievements. I’d helped establish Balmorhea. I’d thought it was a shining city in the desert, the one thing I could say I’d done. What Bill built in Taylor made Balmorhea look like a Podunk backwater.

But the way he defended and grew New Tejas with an army of dimwit yellows and monkey-trained Whites, disgusted me.

Bill told me his realm held nearly eleven thousand normals. Immune survivors from all over central Texas, brought together by him. Humans, he explained, succeed when they form communities and work together. Of even greater importance were Bill’s ideas on critical mass. Five hundred people—the approximate number we’d corralled out in Balmorhea—could indeed form a seemingly successful community. We’d proven that out in the desert. But five hundred wasn’t enough for much more than providing communal protection against regional threats. A community that size could create a blanket of food security. It could support specialized members not wholly consumed in agricultural production or infrastructure maintenance. By specialized, he meant people like me and my scouts, most of whom his yellows and taints had killed when they conquered us. That reminder made me so sore that I wanted to jump across the table and skewer his skull with my greasy barbeque fork.

But, I didn’t.

Having vented my rage all over Stalag 17, it was easier to control at the moment. Besides, Bill was info-dumping a mountain of intel on me. If I listened long enough, I’d gather all I needed to help me rescue my friends and Steph.

“You can scavenge and maintain,” Bill told me. He put his elbows on the table and leaned close to make his main point. “You have to understand, Balmorhea would never have grown to be more than it was when we arrived. In fact, it was on the road to dying away. In a generation or two, it would be just as you’d found it, a ghost town crumbling into the sand. Why? Critical mass.

“The larger a community grows, the more economies of scale create efficiencies in food production. The more people can be made available to contribute in other ways, and the more people are available to collaborate on problems. In Balmorhea, you were able to scavenge Humvees and trucks, and you had a handful of people who worked constantly to keep your small fleet running. That system would eventually have run out of scavengeable materials and would have failed. In New Tejas, we’ve gathered our mechanics, along with some engineers and factory managers, and created a facility that can salvage and re-manufacture any number of vehicles. What’s more, as we improve processes and are able to source more materials, we project we’ll never have shortfalls in vehicle availability. Ever.

“You had a hospital in Balmorhea, did you not?”

I nodded. Of course, Bill already knew that.

“You were able to treat most common ailments and injuries, but most previously curable diseases were fatal to Balmorheans. Including cancer. Am I right?”

That poked at my inner grizzly, and I thought about hooking Bill’s head with my left and smashing his face into his plate.

Bill smiled. “Now you’re giving me your full attention, I see.”

“You’re referring to Steph, of course.”

“If we hadn’t shown up to rescue you—”

“Rescue,” I laughed. “You do love your euphemisms.”

“To rescue you from the desert,” Bill persisted. “From yourselves. From Bishop Richard’s militia. If you’d lived through that, and we hadn’t arrived, you’d have found yourself standing by Nurse Leonard’s grave six months from now, bemoaning the high-tech world you lost, the world that could have detected her cancer early, and possibly saved her life with some commonly available drugs and therapies.”

My grip on my anger started to slip. “What are you saying, exactly?”

“I’m saying we have the kind of hospital that can treat her. Not just make her comfortable while she dies.”

“Murphy has been visiting her.” It pained me to make the accusation, not because I cared in the least how Bill would hear it, but because every time that reality came to the fore, it felt like a stab in my gut. “It doesn’t sound like you’re helping her at all.”

He shrugged. “We do what we can.”

“Sounds like salesman BS to me.”

“What could you do for her out there in the desert, dig a hole and wait?”

My fork held a round slice of sausage, dripping with slippery sauce that would lube it nicely into Bill’s skull.

Maybe Bill sensed my anger, because he leaned back in his chair. “It’s not my desire to speak harshly, but we live in a harsh world now.” He said it, maybe not quite harshly, but he definitely said it sternly. “Perhaps I misjudged you.”

“Perhaps?” I chided. “Do we live in a world of uncertainties or certainties now?” That tweaked a twitch out of Bill’s in-charge composure. “Why don’t you just finish telling me what you brought me here to tell me, and ask me what you brought me here to ask me. I’ve got an empty pain box to keep warm back at Stalag 17.”

“Petulance is for children.” Bill sliced a bite of brisket, deliberately put it into his mouth, and slowly chewed. “Defiance is for men. That’s what I think I see in you. That, and intelligence. You’re a gifted tactician, though you let your emotions rule your strategic choices. You’re a decisive thinker and a leader. You could be so much more than you are. That’s what I see. Tell me, am I wrong?”

“You want me to be all that I can be, huh? I think I saw that on a recruitment poster once.”

Bill wiped his face, scooted his chair out and stood. “I’d hoped this would be more enjoyable.” He headed for the door.

I didn’t turn my head. I didn’t look up. Still, I was losing again. “Wait.” I heard Bill’s feet stop walking. “I’ll behave. I promised I’d do that. My apologies for not keeping my word.”

Bill came back to the table and seated himself as he picked up his silverware. “How many chances should one give, do you think? Three? One? Five?”

“Forgiveness is situational.”

“Is that what you want from me, now? Forgiveness?”

I was still holding my greasy fork, knowing I couldn’t tell Bill what I truly wanted. “I acted inappropriately. I ask your forgiveness.”

Bill nodded, and that was that. “We interview everyone we bring in, whether normal, infected, or in-between, like you and I. We know a great deal about Balmorhea, about you, Murphy, Steph. Anyone of significance.”

Trying not to be combative, I asked, “How do you interview a White?”

“I can see by the look on your face, you’re confused. Perhaps ‘evaluate’ would be a better word where the infected are concerned. Those with the mental capacity, we put into our army and train them to fit. As for the normals, as I told you, critical mass is everything when trying to rebuild society. That is what we are doing here in New Tejas, rebuilding, as I assure you, countless other groups are attempting across the globe.”

“There was a guy in our barracks,” I told him. “he said people have to stay for a year, and then they get to choose. Now he’s gone. Is he free, or is he dead?”

“As hopeless as your long-term situation was in Balmorhea, you people had a good life. Thanks in large part to you, which is why you and I are having this conversation. Most communities we assimilate—”

“Assimilate?” I accused. “That sounds like a euphemism for conquer and kill.”

“Anyone who can be conquered will be. That is a simple truth of the way the world is now. No, that’s not true—that’s the way the world has always been. Always. You’re educated. You know your history. Think on it in those terms and you’ll see I’m right. You may have been able to pretend it wasn’t true in Balmorhea because a wide desert insulated you from the changing world, but now you know better, don’t you?”

“Murphy told me you killed twenty-eight of us. Is that true? Only twenty-eight?”

Bill nodded as he chewed. “Proportionally, that’s significantly more than our average, but Balmorhea was a special case, wasn’t it? The largest single community we’ve assimilated so far. Cohesive. Well-armed. Prepared defenses. It was expensive for us. We lost over fourteen hundred trained infected.”

“My God, how do you sleep at night?”

“I’ll not compare headcounts and clear consciences with you while you pretend to be blameless. How many did you murder just a few nights ago, and for what? Revenge over a girl who reminded you of Steph?”

All I saw was red then, as I calculated whether I could kill Bill before his bodyguards zapped my brain into a puddle of fried goo.

“As you simmer in anger over that girl Pluta and his savages brutalized, ask yourself, how many normal people did you kill on that mission to the munitions factory? Yet nobody raided your barracks in the middle of the night and burned you alive. Did they?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. Not once, when I was burning and killing.

Bill turned to one of his bodyguards. “Bring another beer for our friend. He is going to need one.” Looking back at me, he said, “Hypocrisy hurts when it shows up in your mirror.”

89

Bill left me with my thoughts as I finished my barbecue and ate my mock banana pudding. As I calmed, I took several gulps of beer, and I sat back in my chair.

“It’s sometimes easy to see the world in blacks and whites, heroes and villains,” Bill told me. “I get the impression that is the world you wish you lived in, as a way to hide from the pragmatism and ruthlessness you apply to the real world when you’re outside Balmorhea’s walls.”

My reflexive response was to disagree, and then argue, but I was still reeling from Bill’s body blow over my hypocrisy. Unfortunately, he was right about that, and I’d not even seen it. Emotions had clouded my ability to think clearly. Maybe they had for a long time.

“Zed—may I call you Zed?”

I nodded.

“I don’t want us to be enemies. I have a strong suspicion that you’re intelligent enough to truly understand what we’re building here. I also believe you have the fortitude to help us in reaching our goals.”

“I—” I didn’t want to fall into another cesspool of my own hypocrisy. “Forgive me for saying this, but life here is cheap. I don’t know that I could ever—” I didn’t even know what followed any ‘ever’ I could imagine.

“Human life, that of the normals, is infinitely precious to me. I traded over fourteen hundred trained infected to bring five hundred normals here. Because here, I believe they’re safe. As for the infected we lost, they represent a loss of resources, yes, but lives? No. Mindless monsters turned to a purpose, that’s all they were. If you honestly believed they were more than that, this world would have killed you many years ago.”

“If the normals are precious and the infected are worthless,” I asked, “then where do you and I fit in? Why do all this? I mean, you get an entourage and you can tell people what to do, but that’s an overrated benefit if there ever was one. Wealth isn’t really a thing anymore. Is this all about getting an extra serving at dinner and getting out of doing your share of work in the fields?”

“Whoever builds the world that grows out of the current chaos,” Bill told me, “is going to make the rules. Not just for today and tomorrow, but for the next thousand years.”

“A Thousand-Year Reich,” I scoffed. “I didn’t figure you for the Führer type.”

“Hitler killed himself in a bunker in 1945. I’ll still be here in a thousand years, reaping what I sow.”

I laughed out loud. I hadn’t pegged Bill for a crazy, but all of us intelligent infected had a few loose screws.

Totally serious, Bill asked, “You don’t believe?”

I held up my hook. “I sure hope it regenerates, but immortality? I want to believe, I just don’t.”

“The truth is right in front of you, Zed. It’s been there all along, getting more stark with each passing year. All of us who had their genome altered by the virus and survived, we don’t age. We regress to our optimal maturity. Tell me Zed, how old do I look?”

He looked twenty-something. All of us Slow Burns in Balmorhea did. I decided not to guess.

“I’ll be sixty-nine this year,” he told me. “I rarely get sick, and every wound heals. Tell me it’s different for you.”

I couldn’t.

“Our scars fade to nothing,” he went on. “We regenerate lost limbs. You’ll learn that over the coming months.” He raised a hand to his young face. “This is eternal youth. This is the face of immortality.”

90

Bill granted me a night in the hospital with Steph. I arrived late in the afternoon, and somehow, an hour evaporated into eternity as the tears fell, and we held each other like we could truly never let go. The staff brought her dinner on a tray and came back with an extra meal for me. Steph was horrified over the loss of my hand and enraged over the brutality of the people who owed their fealty to Bill. She decided that he was well worth her hate, and she wasn’t the type to hate easily.

She was weak, gaunt, and tired like I’d never seen before. I asked about the cancer, but she deftly steered things back to what had happened to me. I rushed through a watered-down version of all that had occurred after Balmorhea, but she already knew more than I admitted, because Murphy had ratted me out over the worst stuff.

She pushed for me to tell her about my lunch with Bill and explain the sudden shift in Zed policy. I refused, and raised my palms as if to reveal to her the presence of the hospital in which we sat. “We have to talk about this. I’m not saying another word about anything until we do.”

She took my remaining hand and sandwiched it between hers. She looked away, gathered her courage, and then her damp eyes settled on mine. “You talked to Murphy about this?”

“You know I did.”

“Then you know.”

“Can they do surgery and remove the tumors?”

“Here, in this hospital they could.” Steph took a long pause. “The doctors didn’t agree. If I’d had surgery, it might have bought me—”

“Might have?” I asked. “As in past tense?”

“If I’d had the surgery when I first arrived,” she took a moment to find the right words, “it might have bought me another three or four months. Maybe another six if I were lucky.”

I coughed to cover the sob that tried to climb out of my chest.

“I know this hurts,” she told me.

“Go on. Tell me.”

“Surgery in these cases is always a gamble. It could just as easily have killed me.”

“Wait.” I took a deep breath to try and keep my composure. “Murphy was really unclear about what they can do for you here. They can’t have chemo or radiation, can they?”

Steph shook her head.

I’d been through so much on such small odds so many times, I knew my intuition on such things was badly twisted. Still, I couldn’t help but say, “I don’t understand why you didn’t at least try the surgery.”

“Opting out of the surgery seemed like my best chance to see you again.” She gulped on her words, and then tears rolled, one-by-one, down her cheeks. “I knew you’d find your way to me, because I know how damn persistent you can be.”

I smiled and laughed through my own tears. “Persistent, that’s a good word for it.”

“Zed, I needed you to hold me when I told you goodbye.”

After that, we held one another in her hospital bed and cried ourselves out.

At her urging, I walked down to the basement cafeteria and picked up a few slices of sweet potato pie—ack. Steph assured me I wouldn’t regret it. I brought them back to the room and we ate. I was pleasantly surprised. I told her, “Murphy said some things about, I don’t know, gene therapy or something. Are they treating you at all, or just giving you drugs to make you comfortable?”

“You remember Preacher Dick, and that thing he did with the girl’s arm?”

“As if I could forget.”

She smiled and kicked me. “It’s a segue. Don’t be an ass all the time.”

“I love a girl who can use the word segue in a sentence.”

“You love a girl with a vagina,” she laughed.

That wasn’t true. Sure, a natural set of complementary sex organs was a prerequisite, but I laughed anyway, because it was good seeing her smile.

She said, “They did this orientation and evaluation thing with us when we arrived.”

“Are we still segueing?”

“Keep up, Zed. This is multifaceted.”

“I remember when you used to be a nice person.”

Steph rolled her eyes. “Bill, whom we never met, because none of us are special like you, has a theory about critical mass where you need—”

“Bill told me himself.”

“During lunch? The one you won’t tell me about?”

“You’re the one who decided on the double segue, otherwise we might be done already.”

She squeezed my sole hand. “It’s good to see you happy.”

“I’m happy because I’m with you, right here, right now, and I’m 100% serious about that. Out there, rolling dirt clods around on Bill’s anthill, I’m the worst version of myself all day long.”

“Sullen and angry?”

“As ever.”

“I can believe that.”

“What can I say? You light up my life.”

“If you start singing, I’m going to punch you in the nuts.”

“You were saying?”

“Medically, in this world, this hospital is pretty great. It outclasses what we had in Bal.”

I agreed. Of course.

She told me, “They only have enough medical critical mass to research one thing.”

“Immortality?” I guessed.

“Specifically, the way the virus alters human DNA.”

“They can do that kind of science here in Podunk, post-apoc, Taylor Town, Texas?”

“CRISPR editing isn’t as difficult as the layperson might think.”

“I don’t understand how all this means anything for our immediate cancer problem.”

“Zed, what they’re working on isn’t a Band-Aid or a maintenance drug. If Preacher Dick was right, if your buddy Bill and the doctors here are right, they’re working on the fix to everything. All illness. All cancers. Limb regeneration, even—”

“Immortality?” It still seemed too fantastical for me to buy.

“Perhaps just a reversal of senescence at the cellular level.”

“Which means?”

“The fountain of youth? Cell death and organ failure might still lead to death at a natural age. The doctors here don’t know one way or the other. I’m not sold on immortality, either.”

91

Daring to ask the question, I put it on the table. “Are you telling me there’s hope?”

“Not without a miraculous piece of luck. For a decade, they’ve been working on a method to deliver the virus’s benefits to the host without the negative side effects.”

“Like losing your mind or dying? Those side effects?”

“Those are the ones,” Steph confirmed. “They’ve made incremental progress.”

“Why are you here, then? What good is this hospital?”

“They’ve been giving me phase I and phase II drugs that—”

“Wait. What? They’re using you for a Guinea pig?”

“It’s not like that, Zed. In this world, nobody has the ability to fully test anything. At least here I have a chance.”

I nodded as my emotional circuit breakers did their usual thing, kicking me into numbness.

Steph wiped a few tears off her face. “Now, I’ve told you everything. You tell me about this Bill lunch. What does he want from you?”

I ran through the bulk of it and then told her, “He wants to run me through a battery of cognitive and physical tests so he can measure my potential, or something like that.”

“That’s it?” Steph didn’t believe me.

“For Bill, Taylor Town is just a seed. He wants it to grow, and the more it grows, the more bureaucrats he’s going to need. He didn’t come right out and say it, except for the creepy thing old guys do where they say, ‘You remind me of me when I was young.’ Total bullshit. The way he tells it, he and I never were—and never will be—anything alike.”

“The more he wants it to grow?” asked Steph, laughing at Bill. “Does he want to be the King of Texas?”

“Bill believes in this immortality business. He thinks that gives him enough time to conquer the whole world.”

“That’s crazy.” Steph laughed a little nervously. “Did he actually say that?”

“Not in so many words, but he thinks Slow Burns, those rare few of us who aren’t cognitively impaired, will rule everything. He thinks it’s inevitable.”

“Because you’ll live forever. Jesus.”

“Yeah, double jumpin’ Jesus.”

“Did he sound crazy when you were talking to him?” asked Steph.

“He sounded just as sane as you and me.”

“What are you going to do?”

I squeezed Steph’s hand. “What are we going to do?”

“No,” Steph told me. “I know how you are. You’re not wired for middle management in King Bill’s Crazy Circus. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do whatever I have to do to keep Bill happy, so his doctors will do their best to cure you.”

92

The place looked like it had been a county fair show barn before the collapse. Bill’s people called it an evaluation center. Two of them walked through the front door and shoved me down onto a long wooden bench, one of ten sitting on a dirt-floor reception area.

Seven others, all white-skinned infectees like me, already waited there. Two were restless, disgruntled, shackled by wrists and ankles and chained to the bench. A few waited listlessly, one staring at nothing, another being quietly interviewed by a man carrying a clipboard and pen.

Before the thugs abandoned me, a normal, a mousy man named Salgado, arrived to take up a spot on the dirt floor in front of me. Decidedly beyond my reach. “You can speak?” he asked me.

I nodded.

Exasperated, he turned to one of my thugs. “He can speak?”

The thug nodded. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the habit of being a dick for no reason at all.

Salgado turned back to me, eyes almost pleading. “Believe me when I tell you this. It’ll go easier for you here if you cooperate. If you can speak, then talk to me. Otherwise.” He glanced down at the end of the bench where a ragged woman struggled futilely against her chains.

“I can talk,” I told him.

“You’re cognitively capable?” he asked me.

I held out my hand to underscore the obvious color of my skin. “My only handicap.”

He glanced back at my thugs. “Has he exhibited any violent tendencies?”

“Not today.” It was the first word I’d heard either of them utter. “It has a rebellious nature.”

Salgado showed me the clicker he carried with him. “You understand what this is, right?”

I nodded.

“You understand what I’ll do if you fail to follow directions or if you turn violent?”

“I’m a frequent flyer.”

Salgado stared down at me as though he were reading my genetics through my skin. Coming to his conclusion, he told the thugs he had me under control. They turned and headed for the door. “You’re here at the evaluation center because you have a degree of mental capacity. I’ll be your personal examiner for the next several days because word came down from Bill that you’re to receive special attention. Do you understand?”

“This isn’t rocket science.”

“If you were a rocket scientist,” Salgado answered flatly, “you wouldn’t have been captured by a gang of taints so dumb they have a hard time learning dog tricks. Get over yourself, and this will be a lot easier for both of us. I see from your paperwork you go by the name, Zed. Is that correct?”

“It’s what people call me.”

“If people called you Dog Squat, would you want me to put that on your paperwork?”

“It’s not my paperwork. I don’t care what you put on it.”

“Did you not understand the part about making this easier on both of us? I can say it again. Slower if it’ll help.”

“Look, I’m going through your little monkey routine because Bill asked me to. I don’t have to like it.”

“Is that what your life has been since the collapse? All things you like? Nothing unpleasant?” Salgado flipped the sheets on his clipboard, scanning what was written there. “How did you like it when the taints overran your trailer trash oasis and took all your stuff? You’re from that bunch, aren’t you? How’d you like sitting in that jail cell for weeks thinking we were going to starve you to death? Your life must be all peaches ‘n cream. Oh, and looky here.” Salgado tapped the paper on his clipboard. “It says, before the collapse, you were a barista. Pouring coffee for caffeine-addicted assholes? Did you like that, too? What, were you, still in high school then? Were you livin’ the dream, jerking off in the shower and playing video games all night while your parents watched Seinfeld reruns in the living room?”

He was closer to the truth than he knew. It was disconcerting and certainly depressing. “How do you know that stuff?”

“Look around, numbskull. This isn’t your Mad Max desert fantasy anymore. We’re rebuilding here. We’re systematized. We’re thorough. We interview everyone we bring in.” That’s when Salgado’s enthusiasm for his dressing me down faded, and he slipped into what sounded like a rote recitation. “Bill wants to know what everyone’s talents, aptitudes, and skills are. Everybody has a place, and a potential.” He looked at me again and he seemed to be asking sincerely. “That’s what we’re going to spend these several days figuring out. I’m asking you nicely, can you please not act like an ass every time I ask you a question?”

93

Salgado led me along a wide walkway down the center of the show barn. To our left, inside a chain-link cage large enough to park a few school buses within, wild Whites, naked and foul, squatted, stood, or stared at the sunlight coming through the skylights, or fought with one another over scraps of meat in the dirt.

“We have a system.” Salgado pointed at the Whites in the first cage. “The worst of them go in Partition One. These are just animals in here. Worse than dumb animals acting on instinct, though. But you know that. Everybody knows that. They’re still smart enough to be dangerous. Incorrigible and useless. Most of the taints out in the world are like these.” He glanced over at me.

At the next cage, the Whites inside looked pretty much the same as those in the first cage.

“Partition Two, not as violent, but just as cognitively debilitated as Partition One. They tend to be followers out in the wild. Never the alphas. We haven’t found a use for this type that doesn’t take more effort than they’re worth.”

I thought about Russell all those years ago, unable to speak. Dumb as a brick. At least it always seemed that way, but there at the end, when the people he loved were in danger on that listing riverboat, he’d tried to protect them, in his way. He’d died doing it. The memory felt like an icepick to the heart, but the pain passed, repressed into numbness almost as soon as it rose. It was old. One more wound that would never heal.

Partition Three contained vicious Whites again. At least to my eye.

“These,” Salgado told me, “can be trained, though none of these in here have started the process. They’ve gone through their evaluation, and they’re awaiting pickup by the corps training group. These make up the muscle of our armed forces. No doubt you saw them in action out in Hillbillyville.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I asked you to be courteous. I need to be, as well. I shouldn’t have disparaged your settlement.”

We crossed a wide, yellow line in the dirt on the floor. A matching line had been painted up the walls and across the ceiling, separating the vast show barn into two sections. At the next partition, Salgado pointed. “Low yellows. These all go to the corps. These can understand basic English, a limited vocabulary. They are capable of acting as alphas for squads of the trained taints you saw in the last cage. If this were a traditional army, you might call these corporals. Potentially. Each of these will eventually act as an alpha for a handful of the stupid ones.”

“No women here?”

“They have their own evaluation facility. Mixing genders increases aggression in the males. Removing the females makes the males easier to control.”

We passed the mid yellows, fewer still. They could speak and understand. They were what I used to call Smart Ones. They all looked half-crazy and ready to tear my head off. All were smart enough to be useful, stupid enough to be fearless, and vicious enough to be extremely dangerous. They were the strength that pounded the hammer of Bill’s army.

We stopped at a near-empty cage.

“These,” said Salgado, “are the high yellows. You’ll be in this group. Most taints in here have some cognitive limitations or a kinetic handicap. They could function in the old society like normal people and nobody would ever notice if it weren’t for the white skin.” Salgado flipped through the pages on his clipboard, searching until he found something. “It says in here that you have trouble shooting guns.”

I felt terribly self-conscious about that. “I do fine with a shotgun. And a machine gun.”

“With tracers?” he guessed.

I nodded my admission.

“Because you can follow the line of lights onto your target. Don’t worry, everybody infected with the disease suffers some type of debilitation. Everybody. With some, like you, it’s obvious. With others, it’s subtle, maybe something that doesn’t show up in this world we now live in. Some have lost the ability to read. Others can no longer add numbers in their head. This virus manifests like a stroke in most brains, killing small parts here and there. You should feel lucky you only lost the ability to aim a gun. Some early ones lost control of a leg or hand. Some went blind. Very few with any degree of physical handicap survived. Easy targets, if you know what I mean.”

I did, and then a question occurred to me. “What’s Bill’s handicap?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You mean you’re not allowed to tell me?”

He shook his head. “I mean, I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew.”

94

They ran me through the infantile shape-matching test and then proceeded on to letter and number matching, as though they’d cleaned out a preschool of all the learning toys and were intent on getting some use out of them. For breaks from the boredom of that, Salgado started the physical evaluation. I had to climb a rope, cross monkey bars, and swim laps in a pool. That was all before lunch.

After a meal of coarse bread and a vegetable stew with stringy meat, I worked my way through the elementary school level tests—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, nouns, verbs, sentence structure, and basic reading comprehension. That was followed by a lengthy endurance test in the afternoon. Or more clearly, a series of them that culminated in a five-mile run.

On the second day, I started with an IQ test, and was then sent out on an obstacle course. After lunch, I took another lengthy test that felt a lot like an SAT. After that, I drove a car on a closed course, rode a bike, rappelled, pitched a tent, and built a fire. After dinner, they ran me through a battery of tests that I guessed had been designed by pscyhologists in the pre-collapse era to ascertain emotional stability, personality characteristics, and probably overall integrity—however that could be measured by some numerical value.

The third day was filled with strength and agility tests, mixed with increasingly difficult and subject-specific, college-level exams. By the time they let me go back to my bunk in the cage, I was so tired I went to sleep as the sun was setting.

I woke early the next morning to a quiet, dawning world. While I was taking my morning piss in the trough at the rear of the cage, I heard the Whites on the far end fighting over something. They always woke surly and hungry and didn’t settle down until after their morning feeding. A few of them were particularly interested in Salgado, who was also up early and walking down the central corridor with one of the guards. They weren’t in any hurry, as they seemed to be preoccupied with a menial task.

I stretched to get the kinks out of my abused muscles and groaned for no reason other than I wanted to. It didn’t help anything. I didn’t have an audience to dramatize in front of, but it felt good. For mental reasons, I decided. I put on my boots, figuring I might as well be ready for the next day’s simulated tribulations. As I was crossing the cage to intercept Salgado as he neared, the lights inside the vast show barn plinked off. The electronic locks on the White pens clicked loudly and popped open. A surprised silence followed, broken when the guard with Salgado muttered, “Shit.”

Walking hurriedly up the central concourse to get farther away from the feral Whites at the far end, Salgado withdrew his cellphone from his pocket and frantically dialed. The guard with him kept turning, stumbling over his feet, and rushing to catch up with Salgado as he made his case in rushed words for some action the two of them should be taking but weren’t.

One of the gates slammed open down at the far end. That was followed by a sound I’d heard a million times since I’d witnessed infected Dan mutilating my mother’s corpse on the day my life switched gears from pre-collapse cush to post-apoc survival—the Whites were out. And they were coming.

The guard with Salgado pointed his click-zapper at the mob while drawing a pistol, ready to defend himself with all means at his disposal.

Salgado shouted at his unresponsive phone.

The guard took half-steps back, deciding whether to bolt.

I’d seen too many versions of the unfolding tragedy to think anything but the worse was coming. I shouted, “Run!”

Salgado froze, looking at me, stuck between whatever choices seemed reasonable in his mind.

I glanced around for armed enforcer types rushing into the show barn, but saw no one, so I flung my gate open and took a step out, but stopped. Indecision froze me, too. What if I were outside my cage when the enforcers did show up? They’d not know me from the crazed white skins scrambling out of open doors all up and down the concourse.

The guard cursed again, clearly pressing the button on his clicker to no effect.

I ran to Salgado, grabbing his arm, and yanking him out of his stupor. His clipboard fell. Papers went flying.

The guard fired his pistol, popping through all the rounds in seconds, before turning to run as well. Unfortunately, he stumbled over his feet one last fatal time and tumbled into the dirt. Crazed Whites were on him before I could even shout a warning. He screamed in that terrifying, familiar way everyone screams when their flesh tears in the teeth of a wild animal.

Pushing Salgado toward my cage, I realized I was making a mistake. Without the lock on the door, and with nothing I could think to use to wedge it closed, I could never hold it shut once the Whites spotted Salgado’s normal flesh cowering inside. But I was already out of choices on the matter. The Whites were coming on too fast. They’d already cut off our path to a door at the far end of the barn.

“Where is the cavalry?” shouted Salgado, as he stopped, pointing his click-zapper and uselessly pressing the button.

I pointed up the chain-link wall of my cage. “Climb. Climb like your life depends on it.”

To his credit, he didn’t argue, but monkeyed up, heading for the top, knowing as well as I did, the chain-link top running across all the pens was no kind of escape from anything. It was only a delay. “Aren’t you coming?”

No, I wasn’t. I ripped off my shirt to expose my bare, white skin. I turned toward the coming gang of Whites, flexed my wiry muscles and roared, challenging them, daring them to take another step.

Those in front stumbled as they slowed, but those in back pushed through, and that was the whole of the effect I had on them.

When the first of them was close enough, I tried to deck him with a punch to the throat, but he was already dodging away from me as though he’d never planned to get within arm’s reach anyway. That was the real effect of my challenge, the mob had split past me, none daring to come close enough for me to attack them. But they were hitting the fence, climbing after Salgado. And that was good enough for my purposes.

I spun and reached for one who was already five feet up. I grabbed his ankles and tugged.

Not expecting to have his feet pulled out from under him, the White’s grip above wasn’t ready to support his weight and he slipped down the fence, bending backwards as the rough galvanized wire shredded his face to blood and meat. I wasn’t done with the cruelty I had in store for him. I shoved his ankles up over my head as his torso slipped past, bending his back into a hairpin twist and feeling something snap inside. That’s when I let go.

I jumped over his soon-to-be dead body and grabbed another White off the fence.

An opportunistic White pounced on the first White I’d pulled down, tearing at its throat.

I yanked another off the fence, stomped him across the neck, and kicked him in the face to add him to the breakfast menu.

95

Having climbed to the top of the fence, I positioned myself to kick another White in the face as he reached the top. That bought me and Salgado some time. Four bleeding Whites were on the ground. The others were focused on their warm meat. For the moment. With over a hundred running through the dirt along the concourse, I knew the few bodies wouldn’t keep the Whites busy for long. I knew, too, that I’d never hold them off, if enough of them decided to scale the fence at the same time, looking to get their teeth in Salgado.

I glanced at the ends of the big show barn, instantly spotting the doors. Neither had yet opened, no help poured through. When I turned to seek alternatives, Salgado was yelling at his unresponsive phone again. He was a hardheaded man, but he wasn’t going to live long if I didn’t find us a way out. That’s when I noticed the skylights. Of course, I knew they were there. But at the peak, where the roof stood nearly thirty feet up from the ground, making them inaccessible. Following the roof’s slope down to the outer edge, which stood only fifteen feet tall, I spotted skylights I could reach from the top of the cage. Each was spider-webbed with cracks from decades of punishment by the hot Texas sun. I shouted, “C’mon!” I was already running over the chain-link roof of my pen. “C’mon, dammit!”

He loped across the wire mesh as quickly as he could.

Reaching the skylight, I punched. Even through my virus-dulled nerves, it hurt too much to punch a second time. Especially for no effect. I went after it with my hook, punching and screaming, because my stump wasn’t fully healed. Finally, the thin Plexiglas shattered, and a large chunk broke away, giving me room to pound the upper layer.

“They’re coming,” pleaded Salgado.

I didn’t look. It didn’t matter. Either we’d get through, or we wouldn’t. If the Whites caught us, nothing I could do would save Salgado. In trying, I’d only get myself killed, too. I’d have to abandon him.

“Hurry,” he whined.

The top layer of Plexiglas shattered.

“Go!” I dropped to my hands and knees so Salgado could use my back to step up. He understood immediately and jumped, climbing through above me.

At the front edge of the pens, several Whites were climbing onto the top.

I leapt up through the hole. Salgado grabbed my belt and pulled, half dragging me onto the roof, as sharp edges of Plexiglas cut my chest and stomach. I came to rest on my back, panting, “Damn.”

We weren’t out of danger, yet.

Salgado scanned the vast roof for our next escape.

Leaking blood out of several deep wounds, I rolled up to my hands and knees. I was going to need stitches if I lived that long.

“There.” Salgado pointed. At a corner near the front of the building, a ladder stood up from the edge.

“No. This way.” I sprinted across the roof, my feet banging like thunder over the sheet metal. We reached the edge in seconds, and two or three minutes faster than we could have crossed the roof to get to the ladder. From there, I didn’t ask or suggest. “Roll when you hit.” I jumped, hit the ground hard and rolled as my knees stung from the impact.

Salgado, doing it the slow way, and maybe the smart way, was busy climbing over the roof’s edge, swinging his feet down closer to the ground.

“Hurry,” I urged. “If they see you, we’re lost anyway.”

He dropped in a clumsy heap.

I rushed over, thinking he’d injured himself.

Catching his breath, he said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

I dragged him to his feet. “Can you run?” I was already moving, pulling him along.

His feet caught up with events and carried his weight, but he was moving slowly, pointing out across the field toward the obstacle course in the distance.

“They’ll see us when they get onto the roof if we head that way.” I hoped they wouldn’t come rushing out through the door at the far end of the building we were racing toward. But that’s the way risk worked. You placed your bets and you rolled the dice. The rest was beyond your control.

96

From inside a small, flat-roofed barn, a hundred yards behind the show barn, we watched as squads of yellows mustered outside the show barn. They’d soon storm in.

Salgado dropped into the old straw on the floor and slumped against the wall. “I hate this more every day.”

Not ready to take my attention away from the situation outside, no matter how well it might be going at the moment, Salgado’s sour attitude surprised me. “I thought you people loved it in Bill’s Utopia.”

“Bill’s Utopia.” Salgado laughed bitterly. “Yeah. That’s about right.”

“What do you mean?”

He glanced in the direction of the morning’s fun. “You think that was an accident, what happened in there?”

“You mean with the power going out?” I didn’t want to admit it, but I hadn’t spent any thought yet on the dependability of the electrical grid or any of the infrastructure in New Tejas.

“That,” spat Salgado. “The door locks tripping? They aren’t supposed to do that. Not on an outage.” He pulled the useless click-zapper out of his pocket, futilely trying to break it with his fingers. “And these damn things.” He threw it at the tin wall. It hit with an impotent plink.

He’d earned a little more of my attention. “What are you, thirty, thirty-five?”

My question took him by surprise, but he knew where I was going. At least at first. “I was eighteen when it hit. Just out of high school.”

“College?”

“I’d registered at ACC. Me and some friends had a lease on an apartment off Riverside. We’d just signed the lease when the riots started.”

“How long were you out there before Bill’s people found you?”

“Found me?” Salgado laughed bitterly. “Nobody found me. That’s why I made it so long. We made it.”

“How many of you were there?”

“Both my roommates caught it just like that.” Salgado snapped his fingers. “It was just me for a while.” His eyes grew a little distant. “For a long time. Those were hard times. Eventually, I hooked up with some kind of communal thing over at the Capitol.”

“But the Survivor Army ran you out, right?”

Salgado looked at me with suspicion.

“I wasn’t with them,” I assured him. “My buddy and me were staying way out on Lake Travis then, in a remote house. There weren’t many Whites out there then.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Stupidity.” I laughed. “We saw the helicopters flying back and forth every day.”

Salgado nodded. “Down to the Capitol. They reinforced quickly. I didn’t stick around, not once I saw they had the place locked down. Not when I figured those of us who made it out didn’t have a chance of taking it back. There was nothing for us downtown anymore. No reason to stay.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Here and there,” he answered. “You know how things were.”

“Took me nearly a year to get to Balmorhea,” I told him. “The desert was good for us.”

“We never stayed put that long,” Salgado admitted. “Always on the run.”

“You had people then?”

“Three of us were pretty tight for a long time. Guys. We’d hook up with other groups—two here, five there. Unfortunately, it’s hard to maintain social harmony when the guy/girl ratio isn’t even.” He laughed at a memory. “Stress brings out everybody’s inner asshole.”

I nodded a silent agreement.

“It’s weird how time just keeps going. You have your dreams, you know. You make your plans. At first you think, this will all blow over. I’ll be back in school next year. I’ll skip right past ACC and apply at UT. I mean, odds are I’ll be able to get in with half my competition no longer among the living.” Salgado laughed darkly. “It’s weird what seemed too bleak to think about then looks like optimism now.” He gulped a big breath. “We made it six, maybe seven years, I guess. At some point you lose track of time altogether. You just try to keep food in your belly and watch the weather because you know it’s going to suck in the summer, and it’ll be hard to find anything once winter sets in.”

He looked up at me, eyes heavy with old emotions, and then he put on a plastic smile. “I never talk about this with anybody. Nobody here talks about it much. It’s like there’s a weird consensus. Like maybe if none of us acknowledges it, we can forget the horror. Both my buddies died of dysentery that last winter. It got cold as a bitch. We were eating anything we could find. Anything.” Another sigh. “We knew about this place by then. We didn’t know anything about Bill, his ambitions, or his army, but we knew somebody was rebuilding something out here in farm country. They’d been at it for a couple of years. At least. We didn’t make any effort to join up. We figured it would end like every attempt at rebuilding ended back in those days—blood and tears. Bones. Always the same.” Salgado waved a hand at our surroundings and half smiled. “Nobody’s right about everything. By the time spring was coming around, I was tired of being alone, tired of thinking the kinds of thoughts I was thinking and figured, ‘fuck it.’ I crossed the barbed wire out by one of the cow pastures, not far from where we are now, and pretty soon, Bill’s goons had me on my knees with guns pointed at my head, like I was under arrest. Been here ever since.”

“That’s a long time.”

Salgado nodded.

“You see it grow. You see it change. You start to hate it. But memories of what it was like out there keep you where you are. Food and shelter.” He laughed. “I used to think my parents were middle-aged sellouts, working dull jobs and long hours just to pay the mortgage and watch Skinamax in the bedroom at night. I guess we all turn into our parents eventually.”

“You have cable TV here?”

Salgado laughed. “No. But we’ve got a helluva Blockbuster. Nothing new, though.” Salgado turned to me, eyes dispassionate again, back in evaluator mode. “That’s not the information you were hoping to learn when you got me talking, was it?”

I saw no point in lying. “I figured anything I learned would be helpful.”

“Let me make it easy for you. First chance you get, run for it. New Tejas is just another version of hell.”

I laughed. I shouldn’t have, but I did anyway. “Can you provide specifics?”

“The more I say about it, the more risk I take myself. The only reason I’m telling you anything is because you saved my life this morning.”

“About that. You don’t believe any of that was a coincidence. It wasn’t an accident?”

“Games. Tests. All on purpose. And I was expendable, just like Mickey.”

“The guard who was with you.”

“He wasn’t very bright,” Salgado told me. “People don’t have any value here.”

“But Bill said—”

“Bill is a liar. And if you ever repeat that, I’ll deny it. But it won’t make any difference. You’re one of them.” He got all dramatic. “The rare ones. The immortals.” He settled back into sadness. “Bill is going to put you through the wringer. Your tests indicate you’re smart enough to see that coming. He thinks you’re part of the race of supermen who are destined to rule the world. If you prove yourself worthy. That’s what this morning was about. Just another buttfuck in Bill’s Machiavellian Monkey World. Unless you want to spend eternity turning into a sadistic prick, you should get out.”

I tapped the puck bolted to my skull. “What about this?”

“On foot, at night, with a little luck…the bolt doesn’t matter if there’s no one close enough to buzz you. You could slip away.”

“And when the battery dies because I don’t recharge it?”

Salgado had forgotten about that aspect. “They have a special tool for removing them at the jib hut.”

“I’m guessing you mean the place where they preprocess the corpses before they go to the camp kitchens?”

“That’s the place. They recycle gear, boots, masks, and stuff,” he confirmed.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. This place has lots of secrets.”

“What about the tool? Where can I get one?”

“Only at the jib hut is what I heard.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Never seen one. I just know they have them there.”

“So, if I want to get rid of this puck, I need to find one at the jib hut.”

Salgado nodded.

While he was talking, I moved on to the next thing. “What about my friends?”

“The taints you were brought in with, you mean?”

“I don’t know where Jazz and Grace are.”

Salgado sighed. “I can help you with that. I can access their files and find out where they were assigned. I feel like I owe you that much, but it’s not like I’m going to give you a ride over there or anything like that.”

“And my wife.”

Salgado grimaced. “That cancer patient?”

I thought about kicking Salgado in the face for saying that. “Steph is her name.”

“She’s dead already.”

“What?” I was too surprised to explode in rage. “I just saw her, and—”

“My apologies. I have flare for drama sometimes. Too much TV in my formative years. What I meant to say was, I used to live with a girl who was one of the docs over there. Researcher. Smart as shit.”

“Drama?” I had a strong urge to stomp his nuts. “You tell me my wife’s dead then you start in on a story about a past romance?”

“What I’m trying to tell you,” said Salgado, “is that bunch at the hospital would make a death camp doctor blush. They think they’re all CRISPR geniuses. They engineer viruses and play with genetic code like they’re a bunch of teenagers with a brand new chemistry set. They inject their Franken-creations into untreatable patients right and left because the fastest way to know if their latest brain turds work isn’t double-blind test-tube experimentation—it’s in vivo trials.”

“In what?”

“They go straight to live human tests.”

I was horrified. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Imagine you’re the village woodchopper and you stayed in the forest too long. Now you’re lost in the dark.”

“Do you understand the idea that conversations should have a logical flow from one concept to the next?”

“I’m drawing an analogy.”

I took a peek outside to see if any trouble was coming our way.

“You could grope through the woods in the dark, hoping you find your way back, or maybe you could burn a log and light the way. So, you find the path for a little way, and then you burn another log to find the next bit, and so forth, hoping you can find your way home before you burn all your logs.”

“How long have you been working on that analogy?”

“The logs are people. The fires are the experiments. The village is the cure.”

“If you have to explain an analogy, that means it—”

“What I’m telling you is, for as long as Steph’s been going to that hospital, I guarantee one of the dozens of concoctions they’ve injected her with is actively killing her. Not the cancer, the concoction. She just doesn’t know it.”

97

Cameron, Texas grew up out of the farm country forty miles northeast of Taylor. Before the collapse, five thousand people lived there, working at the Walmart, one of the dying businesses in town, or commuting to jobs in Temple or College Station. Fourteen years after the virus, a surprising number still lived in there, only now as infected Whites, preying on the bountiful herds of deer, goats, and cattle that thrived on the endless acres of abandoned fields that surrounded the town.

Bill, or so our new Senior Man Steinhauser told us, had his eye on Cameron for a major colonial expansion. Hence, it was our job, with the help of three other camp garrisons, to clean it out. And to harvest as many taints as we could safely stuff into the available cattle trailers.

The operational plan, not completely simple-minded for a change, had been organized like a hunt. The day before our arrival, a barbed wire funnel had been laid across the northeast corner of town, out past the junior high and elementary schools. The mouth of the funnel stretched a half-mile wide. The neck fed onto the ramps of ten livestock trailers parked side by side, close enough that a human couldn’t squeeze between them. Camp 21 had security responsibility for the trailers and any wild taints who managed to slip through without getting trapped inside. For the men of Camps 17 and 5, we formed a perimeter around the rest of the town. Our job was to slowly collapse the perimeter and drive the Whites toward the funnel. How? Tear gas. Even Whites avoided tear gas unless they were in a hyper-aggressive state. The Camp 29 battalion had jib duty. They spread out behind the other two battalions, collecting and loading the bodies that were sure to be a byproduct of our operation.

So, two hours after the evaluation center dumped me back in Stalag 17, I found myself in Murphy’s platoon with a flamethrower strapped across my back, full of simmering anger while I stood in the middle of South Houston Avenue. We were pretty close to the center of Cameron’s ruined downtown business district. Beside me, Murphy ordered the yellows—we didn’t bring any of our taints along—to fumigate the next two buildings as we worked our way up the street. Of the three flamethrowers our unit owned, only mine was filled with flammable petroleum products. The other two had been converted to spray copious clouds of tear gas. Two of the new yellow draftees handled that job, one on each side of the street as we inched our way down. The other yellows, with their tear-gas bottle bombs, aided in the effort.

With the platoons on the streets running parallel to ours and keeping pace with us, we were cleaning out every residence and building in town, using our noxious cloud to keep the feral taints moving toward the trap. Of course, all hadn’t gone as planned, hence my job. I’d had to torch twenty or thirty Whites that morning because they decided to run through the gas cloud to attack us. I roasted them for their foul intentions and didn’t feel a scintilla of guilt about it.

At the moment, though, things had settled down enough for me to ask Murphy about Peck. I didn’t see him in the livestock trailer on the ride out with us. “Did he get his walking papers while I was gone?”

Murphy shook his head.

“You got that big, sad face you get when you don’t want to tell me something.”

Murphy surveyed his crews on both sides of the street. “Peck got back from his off-base assignment and confronted Steinhauser about his anniversary.”

“Because they didn’t let him go, like they promised?” One more thing for me to be pissed about.

Murphy shook his head, but was reluctant to say what needed to be said.

“Did he die on an op?”

“Steinhauser gave him some song and dance about how Peck had screwed up this or that or some other such shit. Told him he had to do another year of service to earn his freedom. After that, Peck got real quiet for a couple days. I asked him if he was cool. He said he needed some time to get his head right about it. I figured, whatevs. You know? I mean, he’s not a moody bitch like you.”

“Thanks,” I huffed.

Murphy looked befuddled. “I just didn’t see it comin’.”

“What?” I asked.

“He snapped. One minute we’re all chillin’ on our bunks before lights out, and the next, he’s got a big knife and he’s prying at the buzz bolt on his head. Somebody yelled at him not to do it. He said he was tired of all the bullshit. And boom.” Murphy took another look up and down the street. “Blew half his skull off. Brains all over the wall. Taints went apeshit. I had to zap ‘em all quiet again.”

I stopped right there in the street. “Everything about New Tejas is bullshit.”

“Unless you’re normal and living on easy street back in town.”

“Or terminally ill.”

“What do you mean?” That got Murphy’s full attention. “That sounded like it meant a lot more than just what you said.”

I told him what Salgado told me.

“You believe him?”

“I did just save his life.”

“You said Salgado thought that mess at the eval center was one of Billdo’s Machiavellian tests, though, right?”

I nodded.

“How do you know Salgado’s story isn’t some new level of the same mind game?”

“What about Peck?”

Murphy sighed.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Kind of all the proof you need, right?”

“You gonna steal another semi and joyride across the county?”

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I’d like your help.”

Nodding as he thought things through, Murphy took a minute before finally saying, “First off, Zed, I’m proud of you.”

“Gee willikers, Murph! That makes me so happy.”

Murphy ignored the sarcasm. “You finally realized you can’t fight city hall alone, and you kept your promise to tell me before you let Null Spot come out and play.”

“Geez, dude, you make me sound like a schizo. It’s not like that.”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s like. I’ll help you, but we need to be smart about it if we actually want to succeed.”

“Fine.” I tried not to sound petulant.

“I only have one problem with this whole thing. Salgado’s story doesn’t make sense to me.”

“How’s that?” I didn’t hide any petulance on that one.

“Dude, don’t get your dick in a twist. Salgado’s story about the hospital. I mean, I guess I can understand why some mad scientist types would want to find the fountain of youth. I mean, once you get past the low probability that somehow they’d survive the end of the world and then all find their way to the same dinky little hospital in bumfuck nowhere.”

“Eternal youth is a pretty strong motivator.” That reason made total sense to me. “Since that day we met in the jail, we’ve had one hard lesson after another on just how shitty regular people can be when their backs are to the wall.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that one. But why does Bill let them do it? That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“I asked Salgado that same thing.”

“And did he give you an answer?”

I looked at Murphy in one of those ways that says, if you’d be quiet for a second, I’d tell you, but through my gas mask, he couldn’t see any of that.

Somebody screamed, and then a lot of somebodies did. A handful of yellows ran out of an old furniture store on the left side of the street. Not far behind them, twice their number in feral Whites dashed through the broken glass display windows, coughing and trying to see through the caustic haze.

I didn’t waste a moment. My instructions had been clear. I fired up my pilot light and sprayed a fountain of molten death down the sidewalk, torching the chasing Whites before they realized what was happening.

They shrieked.

They fell.

A few ran on for a car length or two before they tumbled. Didn’t matter. It all ended the same—burning corpses on the concrete.

Disappointed that no cathartic relief came to me through the violence, I turned back to Murphy. “In his perverted way, Bill is trying to save the human race. If he doesn’t find some kind of virus immunity, the child mortality rate will drive normal humans into extinction.”

“What does that have to do with the price of piss in Paris?”

“Salgado told me the genetic problems are linked. He says Bill doesn’t want to cure anybody. He definitely doesn’t want to give anyone eternal youth. He wants to be able to give them something like a flu shot. If you stay in his good graces, you get your annual shot. Your children don’t die, and oh, by-the-way, you live forever.”

That’s when Murphy got it. “As in, indentured to Bill, one year at a time, forever. What an asshole.” He took another moment before he said, “I’m in, dude. Whatever you want to do, I’m in.”

I looked down Houston Avenue, in the direction we’d come from. The jib crew wasn’t yet visible. We had some time to work with. “You’re not gonna like what I have in mind.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

98

While our yellows filled the street with tear gas and moved on to the next set of buildings, I laid out the briefest version of my plan I could manage. “This is about as good a chance as we’re gonna get.”

“Did you graduate from the Wile E. Coyote School of Project Planning?”

“You’ll have time to whine later. In or out?”

“Already told you, I’m in.”

“Talkers talk, walkers walk.” I ran toward the Whites I’d just torched on the sidewalk. Most were still burning. “Strip.”

Murphy groaned, “You’re not witty.” He came along, anyway.

I glanced up the street again. “We have to be done with this before the jib crew shows up.”

Murphy shed his jacket and tossed it on the sidewalk. I slipped my rig off, following with my jacket, shorts, and boots.

“The boots, too?” Murphy complained.

“I’m not going to ruin them, just blacken them a bit.”

“Just so you know, I’m not doing this shit barefoot.”

“Don’t be a wuss.” With our clothing scattered near the wall, I told Murphy to stand back, and I realized I’d made my first mistake. “Put your boots back on.”

“Jesus, dude. Did you think this plan through?”

“Think of it as a first draft.” I slipped my boots on without tying them. I stepped back from the clothing, aimed my weapon, and shot them with a quick squirt of fire. Not wasting a moment, I ran over and stomped on my flaming jacket and shorts, doing my best to extinguish the flames.

Keeping his hands cupped over his genitals, Murphy did the same. He noticed me looking. “What?”

“Protecting the family jewels?”

“You might want to burn your dick off, but—”

“Now for the icky part.” I knelt by a horribly burned corpse, and dug out a handful of bloody, burned flesh from its back.

Murphy gagged. “That’s just about the most disgusting—”

I smashed the charred gore on my chest and rubbed it around. “Do it, Murphy. Cover yourself.” I pulled another handful and rubbed it on my arms.

With a great deal of reluctance, Murphy went to work.

In moments, we both looked as bad as the burnt bodies on the sidewalk. We dressed in our partially charred clothing. I strapped my flamethrower rig on and slumped onto the sidewalk beside the body of a still-smoldering taint. With my gas mask on, I could watch up the street but not have to worry about anyone from the jib crew seeing my open eyes. Well, open eyes that sometimes blinked and looked around.

Murphy lay close by and dragged a gory corpse over himself. He had a view down the street. “This better work.”

“Have I ever failed you?”

“You do know I know the answer to that, right?”

“We don’t have to stay perfectly still or even quiet right now, but as soon as I spot the jib crew—”

“Zed, stop telling me things I already know and start thinking about all the things that could go wrong.”

Murphy was right about that. I didn’t have a plan so much as a beginning for a plan that only existed in general terms—play dead, get the jib crew to haul us to the recycle center, escape, find Jazz and Grace, whack Bill, rescue Steph, and ride off into the sunset. Everything hinged on us being able to get the buzz bolts off without them exploding our heads. The recycle center was the only place I figured that could be done.

“What happens when we get out of New Tejas?” asked Murphy.

“More crazy shit. Probably.”

“Besides reading my mind, do you have any specifics?”

“If you want, we can find a safe place for you and the girls to chill until I get back.”

“Get back? From where?”

I spotted movement down the street. “The jib crew’s coming.”

99

Playing dead was easy back in grade school when the stakes were only giggles and fun. In the real world, jib crews didn’t handle corpses with any care whatsoever. Because of the gore I’d smeared over my skin, I slipped from the grip of the people handling me and hit the sidewalk a little too hard more than once. Luckily, my gas mask muffled my grunts.

They stacked me in the refrigerator trailer of a semi. I took advantage of a moment when none of the jib crew were in the trailer to position myself atop a finished stack of corpses so that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day beneath several hundred pounds of dead meat. When the chill of the truck’s refrigeration unit seeped into my bones, I thought twice about that choice, but it was too late to do anything to change it.

When they finally closed the door and the truck started to roll, I whispered, “Murphy?”

“Let me guess,” he answered, sarcastically loud, “now we wait. Right?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t understand what was coming.”

“I have somebody’s stinky feet on my face.”

“Could be worse.”

“Are you trying to one-up me?”

“No. I climbed up on top first chance I got.”

Murphy groaned. “You didn’t mention that part of the plan.”

“We were in a hurry. I figured you’d improvise.”

“I didn’t think we were taking stupid risks for the sake of commuter comforts.”

“Is that what we’re doing? Commuting?”

“I think a smart man wouldn’t mock my humor when I’m trying real hard to put myself in a better mood.”

“That commuter joke was some top-shelf funny shit, Murphy. Ha ha.”

“Quiet, Lefty.”

100

The truck had been idling with the back door open for at least a half-hour when I poked my head out of the trailer’s open rear door and realized the jib hut was anything but an actual hut.

“What do you see?” asked Murphy.

I slipped back inside. “It’s some kind of warehouse. Giant place. Maybe an old distribution center for a shipping company.”

“People?”

“Four bays down, they’re unloading a truck. Taints doing the work, rolling bodies on gurneys and in shopping baskets and stuff.”

“Yellows?” asked Murphy. “Normals?”

“Some yellows down there a ways. They’re gabbing. Not paying much attention.” I looked Murphy up and down.

“Uh oh. I hear your gears whirring. What are you thinking?”

I shed my gas mask and the remains of my charred jacket. “Find me something to wipe all this crud off.”

Murphy slipped his jacket off.

“Don’t,” I told him. “You’re gonna be the corpse. I’m going to be one of them.”

“That’ll work.” Murphy started searching the bodies and immediately tore a shirt off one of them.

Peeking outside again, I spotted dozens of unused body carts not far outside our trailer door. I finished wiping myself clean—as in, the worst of the gore was gone, leaving me only grimy with bloody stains on my skin. Wearing only my work shorts and boots, I strolled out of the trailer, crossed the wide concrete floor and grabbed a gurney sitting among several shopping baskets.

“Hey!” shouted someone from farther down the warehouse. “Hey!”

I ignored him and rolled the gurney into the refrigerator truck.

“Trouble?” Murphy whispered.

“Get on. Quick.”

Murphy was reluctant.

“Do it, and then be still.”

As soon as Murphy was on, I wheeled him out.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” yelled the yellow who marched toward me, pointing at the truck being emptied by the taints. “One is this, stupid, stupid you.” He was clearly one of those Whites who had trouble with full sentences.

I lowered my eyes and rolled Murphy forward.

“Great Lord on heaven, stupid, stupid you.” He slapped the back of my head as I passed.

I didn’t react, except to hurry to join in with the ragged line of taints rolling corpses to wherever they were all going. Breathing a little easier, I passed a pair of loitering yellows who shared a mumbled joke and laughed at me. I ignored them, too. Having successfully herded me back into line, the angry yeller joined them. I sauntered a bit farther before I chanced a look around. The line I followed led to a large, rolling door that separated a section of the warehouse. Smoke wafted out in sweaty clouds before rising to the warehouse’s ceiling high above. I reached down and nudged Murphy’s head so that—through the lenses of the gas mask he still wore—he’d be able to see ahead and understand that whatever lay inside would be our next obstacle.

At the slow pace the line proceeded, it took many long minutes to reach the door.

When the first smoke cloud wafted over me, I realized it wasn’t smoke at all, but steam. That was a bit of a relief.

I stepped through, following the line into a chaos of taints, noisy and busy, hurrying out of and back into clouds of steam in every direction. Some appeared to have the job of stripping the bodies of clothing and gear. Others hosed hot water over the bodies to wash away the filth. Only a few obvious yellows prowled the mess, clickers in hand, buzzing and yelling to prod the taints to stay focused on their work.

An industrious White took hold of Murphy’s gurney and tugged, expecting that I’d let it go.

I didn’t.

He tugged again, so I skipped over the rest of our negotiation and rushed him, giving him a hard shove.

He stumbled back onto another gurney, knocking it to the floor and creating a racket that brought too many eyes in our direction.

With sudden urgency, I pulled Murphy’s gurney into a thick cloud of steam, getting away from the line, hoping to get lost in the pandemonium. When I felt I was safe enough, I tried to blend into a different role. I yanked Murphy’s gas mask off his head, and started on his war jacket, pulling out one arm and then rolling him on his side to pull it out from beneath him. That’s when I noticed a pair of yellows and a normal standing over us.

The normal pointed in the direction of the rolling door. “Go back.”

The yellow stepped around to my side of the gurney and pushed me. “Go. Do.”

I pushed him back, “I’m high yellow, you ignorant taint.”

The yellows in earshot gasped.

The normal stepped over, demanding, “What are you doing in here?” Something about Murphy caught his eye and surprised him. “You’re alive?”

Unfortunately, the normal was an overly cautious man. Before I could think what to say, he had his normal’s forbidden red clicker-zapper in hand.

My bolt buzzed, and kept buzzing, until electricity zapped me to my knees.

When I was able to do something other than hold myself on my hands and knees watching my snot run onto the floor, I turned to see Murphy lying beside me, his gurney toppled over, trying to shake off the effects of the buzz. Around us, as far as I could see into the clouds of steam, taints were down, moaning and trying to understand how they’d screwed up.

The yellow who’d pushed me was babbling gibberish at the floor.

The normal was leaning over Murphy, trying to figure out something he should already have guessed.

I realized that my troubles—and certainly Murphy’s—were about to very quickly multiply out of hand. So, with all the strength and balance I could muster, I pulled my feet beneath me, hopped over Murphy’s gurney, and punched the normal in the crotch, hitting him so hard it lifted him off his feet.

The shock of mashing testicles, when done right, can be a fiercely painful, momentarily debilitating event.

I’d done it right.

The normal’s hands forgot for a moment what they were supposed to be doing and dropped the zapper as he fell. He hit the floor with a slap of wet skin, and the wooden thunk of skull on concrete.

Whether he deserved it or not, I staggered over and kicked him in the head, hoping to knock him unconscious long enough for Murphy and me to escape. I snagged the red clicker-zapper and grabbed Murphy by his half-on, half-off battle jacket. “We gotta go, bro.”

101

Taints yowled as I hurried through the steam, not knowing where I was going, just that I needed to get away from the scene of the crime.

Murphy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to a stop. He leaned in close enough for only me to hear. “I’ll bet they take the bolts off in here somewhere.”

It didn’t much matter that he was likely right, we were in steam-filled space the size of a Walmart, with a thousand taints, and twice that many bodies. I pointed in a random direction. “You go that way. I’ll go this way. Holler if you find something.”

“Holler?”

“What have we got to lose?” I hurried off, wanting to run, but not. My balance was barely sufficient to keep me upright while walking.

Rude taints bumped me as they pushed past, going this way and that.

Looking over my shoulder to see what I could see behind me, I plowed into a gurney, falling over with a clatter of metal, and pissing off the White who’d been rolling it.

Shoving the taint away as I stood back up, I realized the body, now at my feet, was naked and clean. More importantly—maybe—it lay across a wide, blue line painted on the floor. Following the line into mist, I saw other taints pushing gurneys along it, both in the same direction. I took a chance that the line was the order in the chaos and hollered, “Murphy, follow the blue line on the floor.”

“On it,” he called back, though I couldn’t guess from how far away.

Faint voices shouting from somewhere told me yellows were coming.

Our time was running short.

Hoping my blue-line guess would turn into something, I ran, shoving taints out of my way who were trudging through their lazy duties, and only serving to slow me down.

Unexpectedly, though it was the something I was searching for, the entire floor turned blue.

Looking up, the first yellow I spotted held a bent tool that he was slipping beneath the puck on the skull of a dead taint. As loud as I could, I shouted for Murphy, and before I’d be able to talk myself out of it, pressed the button on my click-zapper. My skull buzzed. The yellows in the mist around me stiffened. Then the electricity came on and dropped me out of reality.

102

I was puking when Murphy grabbed my arm and all but carried me through the steam. All around, taints and yellows wailed and heaved. Somewhere in the vague distance of the thick air, angry voices shouted.

By the time I was able to walk unassisted, we were in a cold storage room among endless stacks of corpses, all headless, handless, foot-free, and stiff. I had no clue how we’d gotten there. Murphy planted me on my ass behind a stack of jibs.

He draped one of his big hands over the top of my skull. “Be still.” I felt the cold metal of the tool slide under my puck, felt skin tear, and blood flow. He jiggled the tool until it seated in place. He torqued it, with a loud snap. “There. I think that does it.” He slipped the tool out and held it up for me to see.

I reached up. The puck was still on my head.

“It’s a two-step operation. You have to deactivate it, and then unscrew it. Can you do me without blowing my head apart?”

Still feeling out the dimensions of the bolt on my head, I asked, “Will it still buzz?”

“I’ll take ‘Shit I Don’t Know’ for a thousand, Alex.” Murphy tapped the tool against his puck. “Can you do me, or not?”

With some effort, I climbed to my knees as Murphy sat down. He handed me the tool, a flat piece of metal, bent and slotted in a peculiar way.

“Slide it under,” he told me, “until it snaps into place. Don’t worry about the blood.”

Holding Murphy’s head still with my shaking hand, I shoved the tool beneath his puck. Indeed, skin tore, blood seeped out.

“Jiggle it,” he told me, flinching from the pain.

I did, and the tool snapped into place.

“Turn it.”

“What?”

“The arrow,” Murphy ran his fingers blindly over the flat tool to where an arrow had been stamped in. “Turn it that way until it clicks.”

I did, and it clicked.

He relaxed.

“Can we take them off?” I asked.

“No time. We have to hope this deactivated them.” Murphy jumped to his feet. “We need to get out of here and do it now. Can you stand? Can you run?”

My head was still swimming. “Do you know how to get us out of here?”

“I got an idea.”

“Good. I don’t know if I can—”

Murphy grabbed my arm and propelled me down an aisle between the jibs. “Just try to stay on your feet.”

103

I wasn’t super clear how we escaped from the jib hut, stole a pickup, and wound up in the middle of a plowed field under a blanket of twinkly stars. I’d dozed off on the ride. Or zoned out. All I was sure about was my skull felt like it was full of broken glass and Murphy stood atop a mound of dirt, pissing into a furrow.

I said, “Hey,” because I’m eloquent like that.

“So, you’re not dead.” He finished up and strolled back over to the truck. “One thing I can say for the end of the world, you can’t beat the night sky.”

“Thanks.”

Murphy shrugged. “You took one for the team when you zapped those yellows with the puck tools. At least, when I got there and saw everybody blubbering and puking that’s what I figured you did. You did do it on purpose, right?”

I nodded, and immediately regretted the movement.

“You gonna be okay?”

“This truck didn’t come with a bottle of tequila, did it?”

“‘Fraid not. I mean, I didn’t check it out, you know, before I bought it.” Murphy reached through my window and flipped open the glove box. It held gloves, several pair.

“Huh.”

Murphy laughed. Out in the middle of the field, there was no one to hear.

I pulled in a deep breath and rubbed my temples. The puck was still attached. “You didn’t happen to steal the screwdriver to remove it, did you?”

Murphy thumbed at some tools scattered on the back seat.

“Murphy?”

“Yeah?”

“Am I hallucinating, or is that a normal all tied up in the back seat?”

“Yeah, that’s what it is.”

“Do you think a hostage will make a difference when they come for us?”

“That’s not a hostage,” Murphy told me. “That’s a talking road map. You know, because we don’t know where anything is around here.”

I looked at the normal again.

Murphy said, “Say something.”

He said, “Don’t hurt me.”

Murphy smiled proudly. “I told him he could only speak if spoken to.”

“I’m guessing you did just a bit more than tell him.”

Murphy grinned. “Some folks do what you ask. Some folks need a thump before they get what the deal is. Although, in your case, I guess neither works.”

“So, what about these buzz bolts, then?”

“I figure maybe we leave ‘em on.”

“I’m not figuring much of anything at the moment, so why don’t you tell me why.”

“We still gotta pick up Grace, Jazz, and Steph. Yellows running around with no puck will get noticed. With the buzz bolt still attached, we look like everyone else.”

I was tempted to nod. Instead, I grimaced. “Makes sense.”

“You okay, man? You look like shit.”

“A million volts through your skull a couple of times in a row kinda sucks.”

“I seriously doubt it was a million volts.”

“Does it really matter?”

“Not to a whiney ass, I guess.”

A downside of Murphy’s puck idea occurred to me. “If we’re going to leave the buzz bolts on, we need to know for sure they won’t shock us.”

Murphy groaned. “You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”

“You know we have to know.” I pulled my door handle.

Murphy stepped away so I could swing it open. “I’ve seen that martyr look before. Give me the clicker. We don’t both have to do this.”

I swung my feet out and slid down to the dirt, steadying myself on the doorframe. I pointed out into the field. “I’ll head over there a ways and zap myself.”

“No.”

“It can’t be you, Murphy.”

“You’ve taken two jolts already. If you take another, I’ll have to stop by the store and buy you some diapers.”

“And if you take the zap, we’ll both be like I am right now.”

“Only for a few hours,” Murphy argued. “You need to sit back down. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

My head was clear enough to know we only had one option. “We’re on the clock, dude. After what went down at the jib hut, Billdo’s boneheads will put out the dragnet.” I drew a deep breath, because just talking seemed to wear me out. “If we don’t do all of this tonight, and get out of Happy Land by dawn, we won’t be getting out. Probably not ever.”

“Don’t be a drama queen.”

“Murphy, this is my third strike. Bill isn’t going to buy me a Big Mac and make nice this time.”

“Wait. They have a McDonald’s in Taylor Town?”

“We had barbecue.”

“Why’d you say it was a Big Mac?”

“Jesus, dude.” I started walking, made it five steps and turned. “If I zap out, you can find Jazz and Grace without my help. Hopefully, I’ll be functional by the time we go after Steph. If you zap out, with me already like this—” I didn’t need to say the rest again. I turned and walked on.

“But—”

“You know I’m right.”

Murphy did let me go.

I stumbled over the furrows, putting fifty, then a hundred feet between me and the pickup, before calling back to Murphy. “Go behind the truck and get down.”

“You don’t have the range to—”

“Just to be on the safe side. Please.”

Murphy groaned and moved to the other side of the truck.

As an extra precaution, I knelt on the ground, and pushed the clicker into the furrow below me. Would a mound of dirt add just enough protection for Murphy if I’d misjudged the range?

“You do it yet?” Murphy called.

“No.”

“I thought you said we don’t have all night.”

I gritted my teeth, tensed for the pain, and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I exhaled the breath I’d been holding. I clicked the zapper a few more times, just to be sure. My puck didn’t punish me. I stood, looked up at the stars, and thanked whichever ancient god ruled the apocalyptic world.

“You good?” hollered Murphy.

“Golden like a honey bear.”

“Stop trying to say funny shit. You don’t have a sense of humor.”

104

We rolled into Camp Four with the headlights on, acting every bit like we were supposed to be there. Besides some tall trees scattered between the buildings, the place was laid out just like Stalag 17. Murphy parked the pickup in front of the armory and killed the engine.

“You good to do this?” he asked me.

“I was born good.”

“Good better be real good, because I’m tired of dragging your limp ass around.”

Murphy had our road map safety-belted onto the seat, and had added a gag a few miles back up the road. His wrists and ankles were still bound tight. “You gonna try and slip away, Houdini?”

He shook his head.

I didn’t figure any more needed to be said. Murphy had taken a moment earlier to lay out the threat/benefit contract—cooperate, and we’ll let you go unharmed, screw us over, and we’ll kill you. Murphy wasn’t the empty threat type of guy. I hated the idea of harming normals, normal normals anyway, obvious exceptions aside. At the same time, I hated New Tejas, and all who willingly contributed to the evil it stood for. Also, I didn’t particularly like the way the good normals of Balmorhea had found it so easy to forsake me.

Murphy killed the engine, flung his door open and marched up to the armory door. I followed, clicker-zapper in hand. He stepped back to kick the door open, and I stopped him, instead opening it quietly with the handle. “There’ll be plenty of time later for pandemonium.”

“This advice, coming from you?” Murphy laughed at me.

I stepped inside, as a bleary-eyed yellow stumbled into the front room through a door on the back wall. Rubbing his eyes, he said, “Who are you, and—”

I buzzed him for three seconds, watching him fall and then stiffen as the electricity jolted his nervous system into the land of puke and pain. Thumping bumps from the back room made it clear his helpers still in their bunks were in range.

Murphy hurried into the armory stockroom.

“Grab me a flamethrower,” I reminded, as I stepped over the yellow’s prone body.

Coughing on the bile in his throat, he told me, “You dogshit piece of—”

I zapped him and his crew a second time, knowing that would incapacitate him until Murphy and I had finished our business in Camp Four.

“Go get the girls,” Murphy called. “I’ll finish here.”

“I need my fire gun first.”

105

I found Grace in barracks seven, exactly where Salgado told me she’d be. The taints on their communal bunk were all agitated to have me in the room, and everyone was stirring when I shook Grace awake.

She sat up in her bed. “Zed?”

I leaned in close. “Murphy and me, we’re making a break. Do you want out of this place?”

“You!” someone shouted. “What are you doing in here?”

“How?” Grace asked me.

“You!” the shouting came again. Grace stiffened, as did the women in the bunks around us. They started to groan. They’d all just been buzzed.

I looked up to see the Bull, a rough woman with a burr haircut smacking her click-zapper against her palm, because she’d just figured out that it wasn’t working on me. I pointed my zapper at her and buzzed her to her knees. Putting the directional functionality of my zapper to use, I stepped over to her, pointed, and gave her an electric shock to follow.

“Zed, what are you doing here?” asked Grace, shaking off the effects of the zap. “What happened to your hand?”

“If you want to go, we’ve got to go now.”

She shook her head, still dazed. “I don’t need you to save me, Zed.”

“I’m not here to save you. I need your help.”

“Oh, no. You’re on a crusade.”

I pocketed my clicker-zapper and dragged her off the bed. “Get your boots on.”

She slowly complied. Whites and taints in the barracks were coming to life. I half dragged her out onto the porch and told her, “Run to Jazz’s barracks. I’ll catch up.”

She stumbled down the steps and staggered over the rough dirt.

“Hurry.” I stepped back through the door.

Those who had their wits about them looked at me. As for the rest, it didn’t matter. When I figured Grace was far enough away, I held my clicker button down and administered a wide-area zap. Again, that would knock them all senseless enough for me to help Grace with Jazz.

I ran through the door, and spotted Grace in the darkness down a path a few hundred feet away. I ran as fast as I could with the flamethrower mounted on my back. As I caught up, I panted, “Are you okay?”

She stopped at the steps of a building, looking at them like they were an obstacle she might not be able to negotiate. “This one.”

“Wait here.” I bounded up the steps, flung the front door open and rushed in. I ran to the far end of the bunk room and administered a directional shock to the Bull wench before turning back to the waking barracks to spot Jazz already on her feet.

I pointed at the door.

She didn’t need any time to decide. She slipped her boots over her feet, grabbed her battle jacket, and dashed for the exit with me right behind.

Once outside, I grabbed Grace’s arm to steady her.

“I’m okay,” she told me.

I pointed in the direction of the armory. “Murphy has a pickup.” We didn’t walk, but we didn’t quite run, either. When we were close enough that I could make out Murphy in the dark, loading something heavy into the pickup’s bed, somebody yelled, “Stop!”

Grace and Jazz collapsed, like they’d both been hit in the head.

Spinning on my heel, and sparking my flamethrower’s ignitor, I already knew what had happened before I spotted the three yellows, not twenty paces behind us. One had a clicker-zapper in her hand, pointed at me, thumb depressing the button. Too bad her concentration was on the wrong thing. She never saw my geyser of fire until it swallowed her and her tagalong stooges.

I relaxed my grip on the trigger and the roar of my fired died away, along with the last of their screams.

I heard footsteps running up behind me and spun, ready to blast again, but saw Murphy.

“Dude.” It was all he could manage.

Glancing down at the girls, who were up on their hands and knees by then, I told him, “Get them to the truck.”

“What are you going to do?”

I charged toward the officer’s hut, knowing full well that Murphy had already guessed. I didn’t look back, but trusted him to get the girls to safety, even stubborn Grace.

All around me, the camp came to life.

Just as I got within range of the officer’s barracks, the door swung open and one of the Senior Women’s stooges sauntered out, looking around for clues as to what was going on.

I slid to a stop in the dirt, leveled my torch, and unleashed the inferno. It blasted the stooge back through the door, and splashed across the building’s wide front porch, setting the wood alight. Jumping to my feet, panting from the effort, I sprinted as close as I dared to the fire and sent another long jet through the already burning doorway. Inside, taints screamed as the windows exploded and plumes of flame rose into the sky.

I turned to run, but saw the pickup barreling toward me over the rough ground. Murphy skidded to a stop, yelling, “C’mon, dumbass. You can’t burn the whole damn world.”

I shed my flamethrower rig, heaved it into the pickup bed, and then jumped into the cab. Grace and Jazz were wedged in the back seat, on either side of our guest. I said, “Grace, take that dude’s gag out of his mouth.”

Murphy spun the wheels on the loose dirt and raced into the night.

Grace asked, “Who is this guy?”

I glanced into the back seat. “I didn’t ask his name.”

Grace huffed. “Is this the right time to be a wise ass, Zed?”

Murphy told her, “His name is Garmin. Now, don’t mind Zed. He got zapped twice. He’s not all there.”

Jazz broke into a laugh. “Is that what happened to his hand?”

“No,” Murphy chuckled. “He got caught playing hooky.”

Not expecting an answer, I asked, “Why are all my friends shitheads?”

“I feel like I’m stuck in a classroom full of seventh graders again.” Grace wasn’t amused. “Zed, at least tell me we have a plan.”

I tossed her the tool we stole from the jib hut. “You and Jazz use that to deactivate your buzz bolts. Slide it under and turn.”

Handling the tool to get a feel for it, Grace asked again. “The plan?”

“We’re going to snatch Bill,” I told her, “and use him for leverage.”

“The Bill?” she asked.

“Yup,” I answered.

“What’s the matter,” she snapped, “didn’t plan A work out?”

Murphy laughed again. “Man, we’ve been through plans A, B, and C already. Hell, I’m not even sure where we are now. Probably plan F.”

Grace sighed. “I knew when I saw you with a prosthetic, Zed, I should have stayed in the barracks.”

“That’s not true,” Jazz told her. “You’ve been whining about getting out since we got here.”

“I just—” Grace searched for the right words. “I just don’t want to be stuck in another Zed scheme.”

“Hey,” I countered. “Most of the time they work out.”

“In a way,” Murphy taunted.

“Just tell us what you have in mind,” Grace asked.

I scooted around in the seat. “I call it ‘Operation Karma is a Bitch’.”

“Oh, no,” she grumbled. “He named it.”

106

We started at the Evaluation Center, because that’s where the live taints we’d rounded up in Cameron that morning were being processed.

We drove up. The semis were lined up in front of the building with livestock trailers still connected. Half were still full of hungry Whites. The scores of yellow sentries guarding them were easily neutralized with the clicker-zapper I’d stolen from the jib hut. We didn’t even raise the interest of the security guards inside the facility. Murphy checked the big rigs and found a few automatic transmissions for Jazz and Grace to drive. Neither had ever been inside the cab of a semi—no surprise. Murphy, though, had driven one before, so he didn’t care what kind he took possession of. As for me, I got the pickup, because it was easier to drive with a single useful hand. That was our convoy, speeding through the night with headlights on, me in the lead with three tractor-trailers behind, carrying two to three hundred irritated taints. And the four of us, stripped down to boots and shorts, to display as much infected pale skin as possible.

“It’s the next turn up here on the left,” the navigator told me. “Then a mile or so. The road runs right up to it.”

I slowed, made the turn, pulled off the road and stopped so Murphy could pass me. That was part of the plan at work. Bill’s personal residence compound, as our navigator had explained to us, lay on a rise, well out of town. It was an old spartan farmhouse Bill hadn’t had the heart to desecrate by fortifying. Apparently, he had a soft spot for old architecture. He did, however, surround it with three concentric rings of tall fence, each separated by a few hundred yards of killing field. Not one tree or shrub grew in that bare dirt. As for weapons or bunkers, or the number of guards Bill employed to keep his home secure, nobody outside of Bill’s personal protection detail knew anything. At least, that was all our navigator was willing to tell us.

Grace passed me in her truck, as did Jazz.

I pulled in behind, accelerating to keep up.

Murphy was already pushing the speed.

“You’re going to let me go after this?” my navigator asked.

“I’ll stop just outside the first gate. You can get out.”

He looked down at the cord wrapped around his wrists.

“There’s a pocket knife in the center console. I saw it there earlier.”

He looked at me for permission.

“Get it, dude. I’m sure we’re almost there.”

He dug into the console. “Thank you for keeping your word.”

“We don’t kill normals.” That sounded wimpy as it hit my ears, so I added, “Unless they deserve it.”

Jazz’s brake lights flashed. I tapped mine. I heard a crash of wrenching metal—Murphy hitting the gate.

I hit the brakes, as the navigator dug frantically. The truck skidded to a stop. “This is your stop, dude.”

He pulled the pocket knife out of the console and showed it to me.

I reached over and unbuckled his belt. “Get out and then cut yourself free. I’m on the clock here, buddy.”

He swung his door open and tumbled out.

I called, “You don’t want to be here when we let these Whites out.”

A crash ahead told me Murphy had just destroyed the second gate.

I looked up the road rising in front of me and gunned the engine to race after the taillights speeding uphill.

Men climbed out of the wreckage of a gatehouse just to the side of the road, as I passed through the remains of the first gate.

The third gate shattered with a familiar screech of bending metal. Brake lights glared red. Muzzles flashed across the crest of the hill as the report of gunfire reached me. I urged my old truck to go faster, though I’d just passed sixty on the dirt road, zipping past the wreckage of the second gate.

That left me with mere seconds to make a choice—stop at the rear of the first trailer and release our secret weapon, or make the brazen move to run those gunners down with the steel bumper of my truck.

Deciding to trust Murphy, Grace, and Jazz to do their part in the plan, I cut my headlights, and tore through the final gate, swerving off the gravel road to avoid hitting Jazz’s trailer. In the chaotic beams from the trucks’ headlights, I raced for the first pair of muzzle flashes I spotted.

Gunfire sparked off my hood and raked across the windshield.

Bodies thumped against my bumper, one flying over the truck and the other going under the wheels as I cut a tight right to steer away from the residence that I was sure had to be—

The collision threw me against the steering wheel as steam and shivers of timber exploded over my hood. But the truck still rolled forward. Roughly, chugging and banging with belts screeching so loudly I couldn’t hear the gunfire anymore.

A little disoriented, I reached down to turn the headlights back on. And failed. My hook slipped off the knob. I fumbled over with my right hand to turn on the surviving single headlight as I struggled with the truck’s splashy steering and hard left pull.

Just down the hill, I spotted a gunman jogging toward the semis, coyote-focused on the prey in his sights. That prey could only be one thing, one of my friends. I leaned hard to pull my steering wheel into a wide, sloppy turn, gunned my smoking engine, and came around behind him. He heard the noise and looked over his shoulder, but way too late to avoid being launched fifty feet before being crushed under my wheels.

More sparks erupted on the truck’s metalwork. Glass shattered, and I heard bullets pinging the cab all around me. I mashed the brakes and tried to duck, sliding the truck sideways in the dirt and back up.

Without wasting a breath, I flung my door open and jumped out. Immediately, I opened the rear cab door, yanking my flamethrower rig out with my good hand, racing behind the truck to use it as cover. It took only seconds for me to get my rig up over my shoulders and the flame gun mounted on my hook, trigger in hand.

A screaming chorus of Whites cut through the night, telling me that one of my friends had succeeded in opening their trailer. For just a second, as that surprise sank in, the gunfire stopped.

I sprinted away from the truck and toward the flat, one-story farmhouse. Spotting a trio of men shooting their rifles at my truck, still fatally focused on the surviving headlight, I pulled my trigger and blasted them into briquets. I shot another torrent of flame down the side of the house. Men screamed as it scorched away their skin and seared into their flesh.

In the moment I’d bought myself, I raced toward the trucks.

Murphy’s truck was turned over, mangled steel ripped off its front and sides. That cab, though, was empty, and the trailer, thankfully, still stood upright. When I reached the back of the truck, Whites were still climbing out and running in the direction of gunfire, which seemed to be multiplying from every direction. Out past the left side of the farmhouse, I spotted Murphy, silhouetted by a wall of fire. He was putting our other flamethrower to work.

Seeing that Grace’s cab was empty, I dashed down the length of her trailer to find her and Jazz opening the livestock hauler to free another mob of Whites. As hoped, they ignored us because of our copious display of skin.

Grace hurried over to me and leaned in close to whisper. “We got this. Go help Murphy. We’ll find you.”

Of course, she was right. Our flames would be hard to miss. I charged off to support Murphy.

107

“We came. We conquered,” joked Murphy. Of course. “What’s next, little Caesar?”

With hundreds of taints scampering around and feeding on the bodies of those they’d killed, Murphy, Grace, Jazz, and me huddled behind Murphy’s overturned eighteen-wheeler. None of Bill’s men outside were still alive, or they’d stopped shooting and were fleeing.

“The way they’re shooting from the gunports,” suggested Grace, talking about those of Bill’s thugs who were trapped inside the house, “there might be a handful in there, or even ten, maybe twenty.”

I pointed at the far corner of the house. “I smashed through the wall down there by the corner. I figure we assault there. I’ll run up and flame the room, and then—”

“No,” Jazz interrupted. “You can’t get in there.”

“The hole isn’t big enough?” I asked, figuring she had to be wrong. I’d splintered a lot of wood in that collision.

“There’s no hole,” she explained. “The wood is a façade. The wall behind it is concrete.”

“No shit?” Murphy laughed as he took a peek toward the house. “Sneaky little bastard.”

“Well,” I paused, while I thought through what to do next, “that explains why we thought Bill made a mistake by living in such a vulnerable place.”

“Because it ain’t,” said Murphy.

“Except,” I disagreed, “it still is.”

“If he’s got thick concrete walls disguised as a rickety old farmhouse,” Grace countered, “it’s not likely we’ll be able to kick the door in.”

“Whatever we do,” Jazz added, “we need to do it quickly. You can bet Bill called in the cavalry.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “We might have a thousand yellows here in fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.” My half-baked idea gelled. “I’ll run up, shove the nozzle of my flamethrower through a gunport, and roast them.”

Grace shook her head. “If we’re not going to make a run for it right now, then we’re going to need Bill alive. Burning the house out through a gunport, well, you can’t control who inside lives or dies. You know that, Zed. Does your truck still run?”

With no shortage of ideas, I said, “We blow the door, then.” I explained what I intended, got no objections, and then showed Murphy exactly how he needed to help me.

Once he was ready, I bolted into the darkness up near the house and hosed the front of the building, setting the wooden façade alight. Knowing those inside wouldn’t be able to see through the flames flickering over their gun ports, Murphy made for the front door. He laid his flamethrower’s main fuel canister on its side in front of the threshold and opened the release valve. Wasting no more time up there than necessary, he zipped past me as he headed for the safety of his overturned truck. Following him to the limit of my flamethrower’s range, I stopped, turned, and aimed at his tank on the porch, unleashing a full gush of burning fuel.

“That’s enough,” shouted Murphy.

“One more sec,” I told him.

“C’mon!” called Grace.

I released my trigger and flew for the cover of the truck. Just as I stepped behind, Murphy’s tank detonated in a thunderous explosion, sending an enormous fireball into the sky.

Grace shouted, “In case they didn’t know we were here already.”

Jumping to my feet. I shouted, “We’ve got to go now!” I charged between flaming splashes of flamethrower fuel and leapt over smoldering bodies. Some still suffering.

Murphy passed me, as did Jazz and Grace. They reached the porch ahead of me and tossed tear-gas bombs inside. I stormed in after, leveling my flamethrower, ready to torch any who resisted, but before I could shout my demand, I looked across the hazy room. “What the hell?”

108

Murphy pushed in beside me.

Mangled bodies lay scattered in the area of the doorway. As for the door itself, the explosion blasted a big chunk of it through a smoking hole in the back wall. The rest had turned to shrapnel and shredded those closest to the explosion. All of that was expected, though. At least it was on the list of possible outcomes. What I didn’t expect to see was the interior of the house being a single open space, like a barracks, though all of the bunks had tumbled over.

Murphy realized the same thing. “This place isn’t a house.”

“It’s a bunker,” added Grace.

“Everybody,” I commanded, talking to the thugs and stooges still able to understand me. “If you don’t want to burn to death, get on your knees against that wall.”

Nobody listened, though many of the soldiers were still alive, and coughing. Grace picked up a machine gun, to help me cover our prisoners. Murphy rounded up the compliant detainees and herded them toward where I’d directed. Most knelt, some lay, unable to hold themselves upright.

“Jazz,” I called. “How are things outside?”

She stood just inside the door, keeping watch behind us. “Nothing new, yet.”

Checking the faces of the living and the dead, Murphy called, “I don’t see Bill.”

“Is there a,” I didn’t know, “a trapdoor, or a basement or something?”

“I don’t see anything,” Murphy told me.

“It’s a decoy,” guessed Grace.

I wanted to disagree because I hated what it implied. Unfortunately, the logic of her guess made a whole lot of sense. I pointed out a guy that looked to be in pretty good shape. “Murphy, bring that dude over here.”

“We should go,” Grace told me. “Every yellow in the county is on their way here. Right now.”

“Five minutes,” I told her. “We’ll get what info we can, and then bounce.”

Shaking her head, she hustled over to the wall and grabbed the prisoner I’d picked out. Wasting no time, she hurried back, and knelt him in the center of the room.

“Where’s Bill?” I demanded,

Eyes locked on the pilot light still flaming in front of my weapon’s nozzle, he said, “I don’t know.”

“You’re one of his guards,” I accused.

“We guard this place,” he told me, “not him.”

“What’s this place?” I asked.

“Exactly what it looks like,” he answered. “A trap.”

“Oh, no,” muttered Jazz.

Murphy bounded over to the blasted doorway. “Well, General Custer, here come the Indians.”

In a rare display of anger, Grace rushed over and peeked out. “Twenty vehicles, racing up the drive. They just passed the outer fence.”

That meant we had only moments. We’d never escape in one of the two running tractor-trailers. Outside, three pearly-white SUVs sat, decoys to advertise the presence of a man who clearly slept elsewhere. Did they even run? “We’ll have to fight it out from in here.”

“Yeah.” Graced glanced at the body parts on the floor. “That worked out so well for this crew.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“They’re passing the second fence,” called Murphy.

“Gather up all the guns,” I told them. “And all the ammo.” I turned to the prisoners by the wall. “All of you, I want you kneeling over here, blocking the door.”

“You’re using them for shields?” Grace was horrified.

“I can’t have them behind us when the shooting starts,” I explained. “We can let them go if you want.” The reality of my defeat was sinking in. “You should all surrender. I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Won’t make a difference, Batman,” Murphy laughed, because he had a way of dealing with the inevitable better than any of us.

“He’s right,” added Grace.

“If this whole ‘live forever’ thing is real,” suggested Jazz, “then why not surrender? What’s another year in this place compared to what we have to lose by fighting for no reason at all?”

“We march out with our hands in the air,” announced Grace.

“They’re here,” called Murphy.

I heard the trucks rolling over the gravel outside. Machine gun fire rattled as Whites howled and swarmed.

On a desperate hope, I said, “The taints might—”

“No,” Murphy cut me off, “they won’t. Too many guns. Not enough Whites.”

Jazz peeked through a gun port. “He’s right.”

“Once the shooting stops,” Murphy told us, “I’ll go out first, and make sure everything’s cool.”

“You think they’ll shoot us?” asked Jazz.

“Not if we go out one at a time,” Murphy told her. He looked at me while pointing at our prisoners. “You keep all of them in here, until everybody’s out.” He turned to Grace. “I don’t care if they are hostages, as long as they keep us alive.”

Grace reluctantly nodded.

It took ten or twenty minutes, but the shooting outside petered out.

Murphy laid his weapon on the floor, raised his hands, and gave us all a wink. “Wish me luck.” Without waiting for any last-second protests, he marched outside, calling, “Hey, don’t shoot! I’m giving up. Don’t shoot.”

I peeked out through one of the gun ports. Forty or fifty of Bill’s personal guards were out there, all taking cover behind their vehicles, pointing their guns, mostly at Murphy. It looked like a hostage stand-off between cops and criminals. Bill’s bodyguards rushed up to restrain Murphy. With his hands cuffed behind his back they hauled him to one of the trucks.

“Jazz,” suggested Grace, “you go next.”

“But, I—”

“Just go,” Grace told her.

She laid her gun on the floor, slipped off the harness with her unused Molotovs and tear-gas bottles, and laid it gently on the floor. She turned her big, dark eyes on Grace and me. “I’m sorry. I really hoped this would work.” Her arms raised, she slowly walked through the door.

Outside, I saw Bill get out of a pearly-white SUV with two of his mountainous bodyguards following. He strode forward, in no hurry at all, to watch as a handful of his men converged on Jazz.

“It’s down to you and me, now.” Grace laid her weapon on the floor and sloughed off her harness. “Don’t do anything stupid, Zed.”

“‘Anything Stupid’ is my middle name.”

“Exactly.” Grace didn’t move, though. “Oh, Jesus. You’re not going to come out, are you?”

“You should go.”

“Zed, if they’re right about this immortality stuff—”

“Next,” called someone from outside. “Send out the next one.”

“On the way,” called Grace as she stepped over to me. Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t do whatever it is you think you’re going to do here. Please.”

“You should go.”

“No.” A few tears rolled down her cheeks and she wiped them away. “I won’t let them kill you. I won’t let you do this.”

“Listen, I have an idea.”

“Zed, just stop with the ideas, okay. It’s over. They beat us. Again. Let’s learn to live with it. Okay?”

Irritated and louder, the voice called again from outside, “Send the next one. Now!”

“Go.” I gently pushed Grace toward the door. “You have to go now, or this won’t work.”

Shaking her head, Grace turned, raised her arms, and sobbed softly as she walked through the door. In moments, they had her restrained and stuffed in the back of a truck.

With my boot, I nudged the guy prisoner I’d threatened. “I want you to follow my instruction exactly. Do you understand?”

Wary, he nodded.

“Good. Go outside, walk with your hands up, and when you’re ten steps outside the door, lay down on your belly and put your arms behind your back. You understand?”

“You know they know what you look like, right?”

I tapped my flamethrower with my hook, just to remind him that pilot was still shooting a blue flame. “Do exactly as I told you, or you’ll spend the last three seconds of your life wishing you had.”

He walked out. As he was following my instructions outside, and somebody out there started complaining, I prepped the next hostage.

Bill’s man hollered, “We know you’re still in there, Zed Zane.”

The next guy I sent out, I told him to lie on his back with his arms and legs straight up. I forced the third guy to do jumping jacks and got the response I hoped for. Bill marched forward, but stopped after one of his bodyguards put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Enough of these games.” He shrugged off his bodyguard’s hand. “Zed, you had so much potential. You could have helped me build New Tejas into the envy of the new world. Unfortunately, it seems your psych exam told the real truth about you. You’re too twisted in the head to do anything but trip yourself up and complain about the disparities of life. Why don’t you come outside and show me you at least have the character to take your punishment like a man.”

I hollered, “That’s what she said.”

Bill’s poker face pinched up in an angry twist. He raised his hand and pressed a finger into his empty palm, kind of like Spiderman. My remaining hostages spasmed and dropped to the floor, jerking and kicking. That was my cue. I laid down on the floor and waited.

Lying near the back wall, staying still to sell the ruse, I held my hook just above the clicker-zapper that I’d placed on the floor in exactly that spot. My good hand held the flamethrower, with my fingers on the trigger, the pilot jet burning blue.

Still wearing my gas mask, hence, able to keep my eyes open, yet hidden, I watched two of Bill’s linebacker bodyguards stalk into the room, giving it a good look around. When Bill followed, he surveyed the damage we’d done and walked over to me as a few more of his militiamen entered.

He nudged me with his boot. “What a shame.”

With the smallest of movements, I depressed the button on the clicker-zapper.

Bill’s toughs stumbled. The shock kicked in and they went stiff and collapsed. That’s about how long it took Bill’s ultra-smart brain to process that something was seriously amiss, and he took a quick step for the door.

Unfortunately for him, I hooked his ankle.

Down he went.

I rolled over, bringing my flamethrower to bear, holding the blue pilot jet just inches above his crotch, the nozzle pointed up at his face. I said, “Yes, Bill, what a shame.”

109

Bill’s cellular network brought an ease to the negotiation and fulfillment process that made me envy pre-collapse criminals who’d gotten themselves stuck in hostage situations. Bill telephoned his number two and provided a list of our demands, a schedule, and the specifics of the horrors that would befall Bill in the event of noncompliance—basically, Bill would start losing pieces of himself.

To me, the deal seemed like a no-brainer. What I asked for, New Tejas didn’t need and wouldn’t miss. What I offered in exchange was priceless and irreplaceable—Wild Bill, their god, alive and relatively unharmed.

Our supplies arrived in less than two hours on a flatbed trailer behind a pickup—food, water, diesel, ammunition, guns, full tanks for the flamethrowers, various medications, and warm clothing. Not being the trusting type, I utilized our abundant supply of Bill’s thugs and put Murphy and Jazz to work forcing the thugs to taste test every container of food provided. One of the diesel cans was dumped and then refilled from another so that each could be checked individually for explosives or even tracking devices. In that way, we worked our way through the supplies, loading them into Bill’s personal pearly-white SUV and one belonging to the bodyguards who followed him everywhere.

While that was going on, Grace and I kept Bill inside the bunker, out of sight and under threat.

Steph arrived as dawn was breaking across the sky. Her accompanying doctor pushed her wheelchair up to the blasted front door.

“You can’t take her in this condition,” he told me when I peeked out.

“Lay down and put your hands behind your back,” I told him. “Don’t move until I come back for you.”

Steph stood and walked inside on wobbly legs. Of course, we hugged. She cried, but I was too amped out of my gourd on danger and adrenaline to let any of those kinds of emotions bubble up to distract me.

“I’ve got Bill,” Grace told me, as she nodded toward one of the overturned chairs in the room.

“If you care for her,” the doctor outside called, “you’ll let me take her back to the hospital.”

“You will not say another word unless I ask you a question,” I called back. I grabbed a chair and righted it for Steph to sit on. “Are you alright?”

“Zed, I’m dying.”

Something about that sounded terribly certain and final, so much so, that I didn’t know what to say. In fact, I found myself unable to speak as I stared at her. I couldn’t move. I don’t even know if I breathed. It felt like I’d hit a wall in time, one that dunked me in morphine and left me disconnected from the world.

Steph reached up and touched my cheek, as tears crept down her own. “Talk to me. Tell me you’re alright.”

I nodded. Still unable to get a word through my constricted throat.

She stood and took me in her arms, whispering her love into my ear and apologizing for her condition.

All I could do was shake my head, until I finally said, “It’s not your fault. I was never your fault. I—” I wanted to tell her what Salgado had told me, that Bill’s staff of Mengeles were experimenting on her, stealing what little time she had left, but I couldn’t bring myself to crush what little hope she might have left, no matter that it was built on a foundation of lies.

She pulled back, kissed me, looked around at the destruction, and forced a smile. “You’ve been busy.”

I smiled, too, and sucked in my blubbery tears. “Some people won’t listen to reason.”

She pulled me tight again. “Zed, you’ll be alright. Okay? You will. Promise me you will.”

“I can’t. I don’t think I’ll ever breathe again.”

“You have to.” She glanced over at Grace. “They depend on you. You know that, don’t you? We all depend on you.”

I shook my head, because I couldn’t believe it. And didn’t care. Not in any way that made any sense at the moment.

“Murphy, Grace, and Jazz, they’re your family,” she told me. “You have to take care of each other.”

“I can get you out of here. We can all go right now.” I steeled my nerves to ask the hardest question I ever had to speak. “Do you want to escape, or go back to the hospital?”

“I’d rather have a day with you than a lifetime alone.”

It was my turn to wrap her in my arms and sob.

110

Three weeks later, Steph died in Oklahoma, in the flat grasslands out in the panhandle where you can stand in the dirt and see all the way to forever.

One morning before the wind kicked up, I pulled the hood off of a Dodge pickup, laid her body down on it, and cremated her in the parking lot of a highway gas station. Afterward, I took great care in sweeping her ashes into an empty paint can that had to serve as her urn.

We lost an SUV and half our supplies in an ambush just east of Pueblo. We proceeded with the one SUV and the supplies we had left.

It was early summer by the time we finally found ourselves on the winding dirt road up to Pike’s Peak. Despite the season, a cold wind blew through a bright, blue sky and the temperature fell to near freezing as we climbed.

Grace was driving and Murphy was in the front with her. Jazz and I were in the back. I was staring at a pair of lakes far below when Grace pumped the brakes and Murphy said, “What’s this?”

In seconds, we were all out of the vehicle, weapons at the ready. It wasn’t an ambush. There wasn’t any cover from which to mount one. Scattered around the parking area at the peak of the mountain, some group of twisted zealots had planted scores of upside-down crosses. Hammered onto the heavy timbers, in various states of decay, hung crucified bodies.

“We can go back down.” Grace was spooked. “Find another mountain.”

Feeling somewhat fearless with my flamethrower on my back, I marched forward. Murphy followed. And then so did Jazz and Grace. I stopped in front of the first crucified body, stripped bare and desiccated. It looked like a mummy with no wrappings. It had been a woman, with skin as infected and white as my own.

Out in the desert, I’d seen what sun and wind could do to a body if the scavengers didn’t get to it. “She’s been here for years.”

Shaking his head at the atrocity, Murphy walked over and touched the woman’s leathery old skin. “These have all been up here a long time.”

“They’re Whites,” realized Grace.

For no one, or everyone, Jazz’s voice cracked when she asked, “Why does everybody hate us so much?”

We searched the barren landscape and found nothing. A few vehicles rested on flat, brittle tires—those that weren’t burnt down to their shells—looking like they hadn’t moved in ten years. The expansive Summit Complex that housed the souvenir shop, restaurant, and convenience store didn’t hide any living creatures of any sort. And then we relaxed. At least as much as we ever did when we’re out in the world.

I fetched my paint can containing Steph’s ashes and climbed up to the roof deck where tourists used to stand to take photos of the countless green and gray mountains to the west, or the boundless tan plains stretching off to Kansas to the east. Far below, Interstate 25 wound north and south through a gridwork of broken streets and colored rectangles that used to be Colorado Springs.

Standing several paces behind me, Murphy said, “Probably should stay up here tonight. Don’t want to get caught on those roads down there in the dark.”

I nodded as I stared at the sky starting to change hue far in the east.

“It’s gonna get cold as your mamma’s tits up here,” he added. “We can hole up in the visitor’s center. Still plenty of stuff in there we can burn to stay warm.”

Without looking back, I said, “You’re a good friend, Murphy.”

“I know.”

“And Grace and Jazz, too.”

“They know.”

I shed my flamethrower rig, laying it carefully on the deck, and placed Steph’s urn on the rickety rail.

“Don’t lean on that,” Murphy warned,

Though I could see Colorado Springs eight-thousand feet down, the rocky ground just below me was only a fifteen-foot fall away. Plenty far to break an ankle or fracture a skull. I took care to keep my weight on my feet.

As I stared across the infinite, empty sky, spread over a vast, dying world. I imagined myself as a bird, soaring over everything, without a single complicated care to drag me into the pain of human existence. I swayed with the wind. Felt its cold bite. Wishing its currents would carry me so far away I’d never have to look back.

But that was never going to happen.

The world was just one small, rocky sphere that I was going to be stuck on forever. Forever, if Bill and Preacher Dick were right.

For how many lives would immortality last? And who would really want it, when the pains of one single life were so hard to bear.

I popped the lid off of Steph’s paint can and poured her ashes over the rail. The wind gusted, swirling them away like they were flying, never touching the ground, dispersing into nothing, becoming part of the Colorado sky.

I heaved the paint can down the slope. It bounced on the rocks until it came to a clanking stop.

My strength broke and my knees buckled. I fell to the ground wanting to wail, but I’d been all cried out for weeks. Still, standing back up and taking my first steps in a life without Steph seemed too difficult to contemplate. So, I sat there.

The sun slowly sank behind me.

The wind died and the evening’s deep cold set in.

Thoughts and memories paraded through my head.

“You’re not alone,” Murphy told me.

“What?”

“You mumbled something about being alone.”

He was probably right. My thoughts too often turned into words when I wasn’t paying attention. “You’re a better friend than I ever deserved. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Mostly you just tell me how you’re right all the time.”

“Well, you’re a better…”

“Stop. I got it. Do you need a hug?”

“I just needed to get that out of my system.”

“At the risk of being a downer here, some of that shit never gets out of your system. You carry it forever.”

“Mandi?” I asked. “Rachel? Your mom?”

Murphy was beside me then, nodding. “It gets easier. You remember the happy times. But the pain still comes back at odd times. It’s like somebody smashing you in the head with a hammer when you’re just gettin’ on with your day.” Murphy took a long, deep breath, like he was trying to keep his own tears from flowing. “But you know what? You know what that is?”

I didn’t.

“That’s proof,” he told me, “that the love was real. That it still is.”

I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse about that.

After giving me a moment to assimilate his wisdom, Murphy asked, “What’s next for two immortal dipshits like us, do you think?”

“You mean, if we don’t freeze to death up here tonight or get eaten by a bear?”

“Grace and Jazz are setting us up a spot in the souvenir shop. We’ll be fine.”

I looked southeast. Down that way, across the grassy plains and deserts, lay Texas. Still. What was left of it. “I say, we go back to Billdo’s Buttfuck Heaven and burn it to the ground.”

Murphy laughed. “Sometimes you get the stupidest, most self-destructive ideas, and somehow, the social filter in your brain doesn’t catch them before they spew out of your mouth. It’s like you’re training to win the gold medal for dumbest thing I ever heard.”

“Yeah? And what’s your plan, Grasshopper? Walk the earth and do good?”

“Wow. Another medal. You’re a prodigy.”

“You know I’m trying to grieve here, right?”

“You’ve wallowed enough, dude. I know it hurts. It hurts me, too, but we gotta get used to that kinda shit. Unless we start following every dumbass idea you come up with, then we’re gonna be on this earth a long, long, time.”

The End

Final Words

It’s a little bit odd writing a brief something at the end of a book, something from today’s perspective that will be linked to the book forever—or as long as forever might last in this fast-paced digital world.

I remember back in Book 2 or Book 3, when I used to write this stuff into the preface, I joked a big thank-you to “all my millions of readers who’d made Slow Burn such a success.” At the time, I’d probably only sold a few thousand copies. The thought of selling millions was just a fantasy, and more a self-deprecating joke on myself than anything.

Somewhere along the way, several years ago, my Slow Burn sales passed two million books and I stopped keeping track of that number. I was humbled by the success of the series—thanks to you, it was a dream come true.

Now, five years after I released Sanctum, the 9th book in the Slow Burn series, I’ve released Firestorm, the 10th book, which you’ve just finished reading. Has it really been five years?

For all of you who’ve kept track of me through the years on Facebook and through my email list, you know Book 10 has been an on-again, off-again promise, primarily because I didn’t want to muck up what I felt was a nicely complete story that ended with Book 9. The question of Book 10 was always the subject of any other book announcement…I’d announced a sci-fi book, and readers would say, “that’s nice, where’s Slow Burn 10?” It became the humorous subject of skeleton-waiting-on-a-park-bench memes, and good-natured ribbing on my page. I find it deeply satisfying that readers found such an attachment to the characters—characters that allowed me to channel my twisted sense of humor and observations of our world.

I always attempt to create the best story of which I’m capable. I want every book I write to be better than the last. Now that Firestorm is done, I’m pleased. This year has been a challenge for all of us, and the story has given me an outlet, a way to escape.

As to the question of whether I’ve succeeded in sending Zed and Murphy into a new direction where they may experience many new adventures, I think I have, and I hope I’ve succeeded in doing it such a way that doesn’t taint the 1-thru-9 saga.

As always, I would love to hear your feedback on the story. The easiest way is to leave a star rating or even a brief review with the retailer from whom you purchased the book. It truly makes a huge difference for us indie authors when readers take the time to do so.

Thank you for reading Firestorm. If you’re one of the many who finished Book 9 five years ago, thank you so very much for waiting so long for Book 10.

- Bobby

Also by Bobby Adair

Dusty’s Diary

Fun and crass, Dusty’s Diary has become a fan favorite! Has some great advice about what to pack in your post-apocalyptic bunker (don’t forget the porn!). This series also has a fantastic audiobook on audible, narrated by the award-winning Ray Porter.

Freedom’s Fire

A sci-fi adventure, set in the near future. Plenty of signature Bobby Adair humor, with Dylan Kane and his trusty band of travelers on an interstellar road trip.

The Last Survivors

A collaborative series with fellow zombie author T.W. Piperbrook, this series has a little more of a Sci-Fi feel. It explores what happens 300 years in the future after the apocalypse, when man has rebuilt and gone back to an almost medieval society. Another book with a great audiobook companion, narrated by Sean Runnette.

Ebola K

A really great terrorism thriller with a bazillion reviews. It focuses on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the possibility of weaponized Ebola by terrorist organizations. Not the heart-pounding action of Slow Burn book but a little more in-depth and complex. This series follows an American college student teaching in Uganda as the country comes under attack from the deadly virus as he tries to make his way back to the States. The audiobook, available on audible.com, is narrated by Adam Verner

It’s also historically accurate, so you’ll learn a little about the history of the disease as well…did you know that Ebola has been airborne in the US in the past? An interesting observation of how a pandemic can get out of hand quickly…sound familiar?

Text copyright © 2021, 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.

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