by Bobby Adair
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 d
eep 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 top
ic 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.”