Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  “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 lon
g 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.”