Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

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 a
t 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.”