by Bobby Adair
“Say what?” asked Murphy.
Javendra turned to Murphy. “What if the strain you and Zed have—or even the one these people in San Angelo have—is the strain we should infect people with to give them immunity to the virus. That way they won’t turn into monsters. They’ll just have white skin.”
“What about the strain you have?” I asked. “You’ve come through it fairly normal?”
"Yes. Yes.” Javendra grew excited. "I hadn't thought of myself. But you're right, if I have a separate strain, and it turns out that it's not simply a case of my body reacting differently to the most common strain, then the answer might be in my blood."
“Man,” said Murphy. “It can’t be that easy.”
“I’m not sure easy is the right word,” argued Javendra. “This is just a first step, a hypothesis. Months, maybe years of work need to go into the testing just to see if it’s right. That’s before any therapy can be developed based on the idea.”
“Oh good,” said Murphy, “because for a moment there, I thought you were going to say you had the magic answer to the world’s problems.” He nodded emphatically. “But it’s just more of the same. You know, bad news. But that’s okay.” Murphy slapped me on the shoulder. “We’re used to that kind of shit, right Zed?”
I smiled weakly. He was right. We were used to that kind of shit.
Chapter 55
What a long, frustrating, fucking day.
Once we accepted the apparent truth that most of the Whites in San Angelo were docile, it made both Murphy and me overly cautious. We didn't want to kill them but getting them to sit still while we checked their temperatures was a pain in the ass. The tactic that finally worked out was when we spotted one or two, we'd hide Javendra behind a bush or whatever happened to be nearby. Then, I'd jog with Murphy following like we had somewhere to go. We'd pass close to the White and most of the time they'd jump at the end of our short line. At some point, I'd lead the little train into a backyard or a gap between a couple of houses with a fence at one end, and we'd turn on the White all of a sudden and tackle it.
I got punched, kicked, and bit. One bite was just a bruise in the shape of a woman’s dental imprint, the other bled badly for a while and served to piss me all the way off. I hated the damn bites. Murphy seemed to get out of every scuffle with nothing but a little more sweat and a grin.
Through it all, we had to kill six. They were the aggressive types. We ended up collecting temperature data from nearly twenty.
As we walked back to the warehouse grocery store, Murphy got Javendra's attention and said, "I hope you got enough because this is too much work."
I held up my arm, which was still bleeding a little bit through the duct tape I’d wrapped it with—duct tape was the first thing we’d found. “I’ve only got so much blood.”
“That’s because you spend too much time doing shit like we did today,” Murphy told me, “and you don’t eat enough.”
“It’s not like I can just stop by a McDonald’s and get a Big Mac,” I shot back. “I don’t know if you noticed, but most of them are closed now.”
“Do you two always bicker like this?” Javendra asked.
“It’s not bickering,” Murphy told him. “We’re just talking.”
“Yeah,” I added. “So what’s the story? Do you have enough data? Did you find anything interesting?”
“Twenty samples is hardly enough to extrapolate any—”
“Oh, Jesus!” Murphy stopped and slapped his hands over his head.
Javendra panicked and looked around for danger.
“You alright?” I asked, looking for blood coming out of a wound that I couldn’t pinpoint, my imagination running to a suspicion that Murphy had just been shot.
Murphy froze for a second, his eyes staring widely into the sky. “No, I’m okay.”
“What?” Javendra stepped close to Murphy, running through a cursory visual examination.
“For a second there,” said Murphy, “it’s like I was surrounded by two Professor Zeds.” He laughed loudly. “My brain couldn’t handle it, man.” He started walking again, laughing while Javendra stood without moving.
I sighed loudly. “C’mon, Javendra.”
“I don’t understand,” said Javendra.
“It’s just Murphy being Murphy,” I told him. “Ignore it.” I looked around to see if any Whites—the aggressive kind—were paying attention to us. We were talking too loudly and talking too much. “What did you see in the data?”
“A surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“The temperatures for most of them, most of the docile ones, were lower than your temperature.”
“What?” That was surprising until I realized I ran a little hot for a Slow Burn. “You mean like Murphy or Grace?”
“A little lower than that, even,” he told me. “Not much above normal.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
Murphy looked over his shoulder at Javendra and said, “Man, you’re just like Zed, all full of half-ass theories and crazy reasons why this all happened.”
“It’s called the scientific method,” Javendra snapped. “It’s how we do—”
“Man,” Murphy interrupted, “tell it to Zed. He likes that kind of shit. You two twins go on if you want. I already know all the answers I need to know.”
Javendra started to speak but I put an arm over his shoulder and said, “Don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Murphy laughed. “It might be.”
“What answers?” asked Javendra.
He turned around to face us. "The world is fucked up. It's full of crazy white fuckers that want to have us for dinner. These Whites in Easy Town didn't get the memo about that, and that's nice. But it's not like this in the rest of the world. Hell, you guys know that. This isn't news. But you get all brain-whacked with your theories and shit and you forget all we need to do is keep ourselves fed and keep ourselves alive.” Murphy shook his head as his grin turned into something he was wearing for show. "And do the same for our friends and…"
“And?” Javendra asked.
I elbowed Javendra. “You know. The people we love. But it doesn’t always work out.”
Murphy walked on.
“We’ve all lost,” said Javendra.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We have.”
We walked on in silence for a little while before I asked Murphy if he was okay.
“Yeah, man. I’m fine.”
“As fine as you can be considering all the shit?” I asked. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yeah.” He nodded and drew a deep breath. “It’s hard staying on the Murphy plan lately. Know what I mean?”
“You sleeping alright?”
Murphy laughed again. “Man, I haven’t slept alright since I napped in jail before that dude went crazy-monkey on us.” Murphy grinned, for real this time. “You remember that shit?”
“Yeah.”
“That riot was intense.”
It was. That was the day it all started.
Murphy’s voice turned a little bit sad again. “Earl bought it when we were escaping.”
"You saved me that day.” It was the first thing that came to mind at the mention of our escape from the county jail, a memory inexorably linked to the image of seeing Earl's skull come apart as a bullet tore through it. "You pushed me out of the middle of the street, or I'd have gotten shot too."
"I told you, man,” said Murphy, "I don't really remember that part. Things got pretty hazy for me after we got out of the jail. The fever was beating me down pretty hard. I remember seeing Earl get shot and after that, pretty much the next thing I remember is sitting with you in that dorm room with Jerome The Liar."
"Jerome the Liar.” I laughed. I hadn't given him more than a passing thought in months. But at the time, I'd nearly hated him. And I'd been angry, so angry over his murder by those soldiers. Now, all those emotions had faded, and all I was left with were the memories of the events and
the words that described how I felt. The emotions hardly ever attached themselves to the memories anymore. I wondered if that would happen with all the painful shit one day. Maybe even all the painful shit that kept stabbing me in the heart every time I thought of Steph with her flaming red hair and intense green eyes. Maybe the memory of the feeling of her hand going limp in mine that day on the shore of Lake Travis when we'd all been so close to making our escape from the shit would fade too.
Chapter 56
I'm not sure how we decided it, but when we drove the pickups out of San Angelo the next morning, I was behind the wheel of the lead truck with Murphy riding shotgun. Grace was in the back seat with Javendra. I'd have preferred to have him in the other truck. Not that he was a bad guy—I'd gotten my fill of his company the day before. Fritz, Eve, and Jazz were in the truck following close behind. Both pickups were piled high with cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic garbage bags and thoroughly taped, just in case it rained. Not all of our cargo was in cans. Everything was strapped down with nylon cargo straps, way more than was necessary for a drive down a narrow country highway, but the warehouse store had cases of the straps packaged in sets of six, all untouched by post-apocalyptic shoppers and looters. We went overboard on securing our loads in case we had to go cross-country on our trip. We didn't want any of our valuable supplies bouncing out.
We left town heading southwest down Highway 67, keeping the speed around forty, with the sun coming up behind us. The two-lane highway with paved shoulders as wide as the traffic lanes lay clear, flat, and mostly straight, giving me views a half-mile ahead. On both sides of the road, rusty barbed wire fences bordered endless tracts of flat, dead ground blanketed with spiky gray-branched mesquite trees that had lost their leaves for the season.
Houses, some owned by the recently deceased, and some empty for years, were sprinkled at wide intervals along the road. Few businesses thrived along the desolate highway. The farther we drove from San Angelo, the more sparse the signs of civilization became.
In the back seat, Grace examined a map. Though the towns along the way were small—most of them a few dozen or fewer than a hundred houses—we planned to avoid as many as possible. We’d skirt them on small ranch-to-market roads and even dirt roads if needed. The towns presented a risk we wanted to avoid.
Ambushes were my main worry, I guess that and the possibility of running across a horde of Whites though I kept telling myself there should be no hordes so far west. The population density out in West Texas was low, severely low. Few people around meant few Whites left after the virus burned through the population.
As a matter of fact, that had been the foundation of my argument when I first proposed escaping to Balmorhea all those months ago. After visiting San Angelo with a population near a hundred thousand sitting just two hundred miles from our goal, I had cause to worry. Then there was Fort Stockton with a pre-virus population just under ten thousand, planted directly in our path and only fifty miles from Balmorhea. Those were significant numbers.
Would hungry Whites hike west on Highway 10 through fifty miles of desert in search of something to eat? If they did, how many would make it all the way to Balmorhea. When I'd conceived the idea, I knew, I just knew they couldn't. I'd taken the drive across Texas, heading through El Paso on the way to California a few years back, and it burned a memory into my brain of a dry, desolate desert with no water of any kind, anywhere.
As I pictured it, the central defensive characteristic of Balmorhea where Whites were concerned were the dry, endless miles of chalky dirt and scrubby, half-dead trees, crawling with scorpions and rattlesnakes.
But we'd passed a reservoir on the way out of San Angelo fed by a river that roughly paralleled Highway 67. It wasn't a deep-and-wide, sing-a-song-about-it kind of river—it was more of a collection of pools connected by a lazy creek down a gulley that got washed out during flooding thunderstorms in the spring. But it had water in it, and it ran for miles and miles near the road.
That made me worry.
The icing on my cake of bad assumptions and shitty plans was what I saw when we were throwing up huge plumes of dust behind our trucks while driving on a dirt road to get around a small collection of houses on the highway called Mertzon, Texas. We got farther and farther from town on a network of straight roads at right angles and started to see tracts where the mesquite trees had been chopped down, and the sparse vegetation had been scraped away, leaving only chalky white squares around pieces of oil pumping and storage equipment.
As we drove slowly through the oil fields, passing one chalky square after another, and another, I started to see what looked like low, earthen dams built in squares and rectangles on the barren oil field tracts. From behind those earthen dams, glints of sunlight reflected off of what I first thought were pools of oil. With an anxiety knot growing in my chest, I pulled my truck off the narrow dirt road and onto a driveway toward one of the pools. Murphy started to ask questions. Grace rattled her map and protested.
At the end of the dirt driveway, the truck rolled into the square of dirt, scraped clean of plants. As I slowed the truck, I looked around and didn’t see a living thing in any direction save thorny trees and plants.
Murphy and Grace had passed the point of worry, but I'd stopped caring what it was they were saying.
I brought the truck to a stop and set the parking brake, leaving the motor running, as I got out of the pickup. I marched over to the edge of one of the gravelly berms and climbed the slope up to the top edge—maybe five or six feet up—and stopped walking.
The others stood at the bottom, concerned but not asking any more questions. They were worried. Maybe they thought I’d finally cracked. The pressure of so many months of running for my life, killing, and murdering, slaughtering on a genocidal scale, doing things that would warp the mind of any sane man, should have broken me.
I looked again across the uninteresting landscape, seeing for miles and miles. Flat, white patches spread to the horizon, each with an oil pump or tank, many with square-shaped dikes, all of those with dark pools reflecting the sky.
The pool at my feet was water. The dike I stood on was one side of a retention pond to hold the water for whatever purpose it served in drilling for oil. Whatever compounds it was retaining besides the water had settled to the bottom, leaving what looked like clear, drinkable water near the surface. I wouldn’t drink it because I had a brain and I could deduce that it was probably laden with enough exotic chemicals to give me a dozen varieties of cancer.
But a White wouldn’t have the brain capacity to worry about cancer. A White wouldn’t even know what a harmful chemical was. A thirsty White hiking across miles of desert in search of food wouldn’t think twice about drinking from one of these pools.
And with that, I realized there was nothing to keep a horde of Whites from walking from Houston all the way across Texas to El Paso, killing and eating every normal in every little town along the way, including Balmorhea. There was more water out here than I ever imagined.
My plan for West Texas salvation was a crock of shit.
The realization felt like a brass fist punching me in the chest and crushing my ribs. I fell to my knees and stared at the water.
I'd seen everybody I liked or loved die at the hands of Whites and assholes, and I'd sent the ones lucky enough to survive out to chase a West Texas dream that was a rerun of a nightmare they were trying to escape. The only thing I'd accomplished was that I gave them a different name for the place they were going to die.
Zed Zane was a guilty fuck.
Chapter 57
"Say man.” It was Murphy. He'd climbed the berm beside me. He looked at the glistening square pool of tainted water, perhaps wondering what it was that had me transfixed.
Grace was crunching her way up through the loose gravel on the slope of the dike. They were going to tag team me.
“You’re not going to strip down and run off with your machete again, are you?” Murphy added a chuckle. “You know, li
ke you did that night before we chased the naked horde all the way to Killeen.”
I shook my head.
“What is it, then?” Grace asked with no judgment in her voice, just concern.
A despondent weight was coming down on me. “What if we don’t go to Balmorhea?” I turned and looked up at Murphy. “What if we go up in the mountains like you said. Maybe drive to New Mexico—not too far north, where the snow won’t be too bad—then work our way up the Rockies when spring comes. Maybe stop in Montana or Canada like you said.”
Grace put a gentle hand on my shoulder. I wanted to brush it away, torn between accepting the kindness of a friend and the feeling of being placated, manipulated by someone used to dealing with adolescent misfits like me. “Talk to us,” she said.
"Yeah, man,” Murphy added his weight to the request. "Whenever you get like this, some shit's about to go down, or you're gonna do something crazy.” Murphy exaggerated his look around at the flat ground and the spiky mesquites. "Unless you wanna start choppin' firewood, I don't know what's got you riled up."
I didn’t want to tell them because I knew in my heart I was right. Now, I was right about what to expect when we arrived.
Either way, they'd insist on finishing the journey. They'd say, "We've come this far. We can't know for sure. Let's just go and find out."
I stared at the water and saw through the clear layer to the settled murk at the bottom as it oozed in unnatural, transfixing colors that didn't mean anything. For a moment they were just distracting me from my fear. And my fear was certain, and it was painful. I didn't want to see another dead friend.
Somewhere along the road I’d been ticking through a quota of murders and a quota of dead friends without knowing it, without knowing it existed, until that moment as the idea of seeing one more person die felt too painful to face. I’d seen enough. I’d killed my share.
The Ogre and the Harpy in all their attempts to forge a remorseless malcontent, a pale-faced demigod, a haunting demon, a heartless destroyer to thrive in the aftermath of humanity's fall, had failed. Their nasty words, their shitty apathy, their brutal fists, their leather belts, and their hard hearts had done nothing but make a man who could still see one too many broken bodies. There was nothing special about Zed Zane. I was as fragile as everybody else, and I was afraid to put a voice to the confession because speaking the words would cement my mediocrity into reality.