Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  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 Orteg
a. “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.”