Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  Pluta told him, “Most of that blood is from the procedure. Generally stops once the bolts are torqued down.”

  “And the brain?” asked the Realtor.

  Pluta reached up and grabbed Grace’s buzz bolt, giving it a yank back and forth. “We use screws of a length that anchor the bolt to the skull without penetrating the cerebral tissue.”

  “Are all skulls the same thickness?” asked the Realtor.

  “Can’t say that it matters much,” answered Pluta. “We have a place in the corps for even the dumb ones. They’re all trainable.”

  “Infection?” asked the Realtor.

  “Nothing to speak of,” answered Pluta. “We use sterile, stainless steel screws.”

  The Realtor turned his attention to Pluta. “How long will the buzz bolt stay on?”

  “The bone solidifies around the screws,” answered Pluta, “It doesn’t push the screws out, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “What’s to keep them from tearing the buzz bolt off?”

  “The thing will explode and kill them the moment it loses contact,” answered Pluta. “We like to avoid that, so we keep a pretty close eye on them through the early phases of the induction process. It’s a simple thing to train a taint to do something, or not do it. Pain is a powerful educator.” Pluta guided the Realtor away from us as he glanced over at Fucknugget. “A demonstration.”

  “You,” Fucknugget pointed at me, “mouthy one.” He waved at the two yellows holding me erect. “Why don’t you yank that buzz bolt off your head?”

  His prompting me to do it was reason enough for me not to. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, too?”

  Fucknugget pointed what looked like a garage door opener at me. “How ‘bout you learn sumpin’ ‘bout who tells who to do things.” He tapped a button. My bolt buzzed, shuddering my skull, and rattling my brain against the bone. The buzzing stopped after just a moment, but I realized I was on my knees, and my eyes felt like they were still wiggling inside my head. A wave of pain washed through my cortex like a caffeine headache, and as much as I wanted to find my balance again and pummel Fucknugget, I wished more that I had a few Excedrin and a hot espresso.

  “That’s just the buzz,” Pluta told the Realtor. “A half-second is all it takes to get their attention.”

  “And they learn? Just like a dog?” The Realtor seemed uncomfortable with the apparent brutality of the buzz bolt.

  “The thing you’ve got to understand,” said Pluta, “is most of these taints are animals. Not much smarter than monkeys. Worse, they’ve got no sense of morality anymore. Left to their own devices, this one,” he pointed at me, “and all the rest of them, would tear out your lungs, eat your liver, and never think anything about it.”

  Pluta walked over to me, close enough that when he made his next point, it started with a kick into my ribs. “Boy, I know you can understand what I’m telling you.” He glanced over at Fucknugget before telling me, “Now, you grab hold of that buzz bolt and try to yank it off.”

  I spat on Pluta’s muddy boots. “You can fuck him, then fuck yourself.”

  My bolt buzzed, and the world outside my head lost all relevance. All that mattered was the quake shaking my skull, my teeth coming loose, and my fragile brain beating itself to mush against the bone. When the buzzing stopped, I was on my belly, heaving bile onto the sandy ground.

  “That was a second. Just one second,” bragged Pluta.

  “But…” The Realtor seemed reluctant to finish his thought.

  “But,” Pluta finished for him, “he didn’t yank on that buzz bolt. He didn’t do what he was told. And you’d be right. With most of them, it takes a little motivating before they feel the need to learn and obey. The stupid ones, it might surprise you to learn, are far easier to train. The smarter they get, the more trouble they give you. At least, they do at first. But that’s okay. We need the smarter ones to lead the stupid ones. The whole corps is built on that principle.”

  “Does it hurt them?” asked the Realtor.

  Pluta belted out a belly laugh and slapped the Realtor on the back. “That’s the whole point.”

  “What I mean is, does it do permanent damage?”

  “We got a whole army running on discipline enforced through the buzz bolt,” Pluta told him. “With the halfway smarter ones, after the first couple of days, you never need to buzz them again. They do what they’re ordered. With the really smart, stubborn ones, like this tough guy here, it takes a little longer. With the stupid ones, though, you need to remind them every couple of days or so to keep them in line.”

  “So, no permanent damage, then?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. Like I said, we got a place for all of them in the corps. If a stubborn one turns stupid in the process of learning how to be cooperative, I ask, what’s the downside? They heal up, move right into the grunt ranks.” Pluta held the palm of his white-skinned hand in front of the Realtor’s face. “We all heal up. In the short-term, in the long run, no matter which, we all have our place in the world. It’s better for everyone.”

  “What about electric shock?” asked the Realtor.

  Pluta grinned. “We only use shock when we have to. You see, after three seconds of buzz, the bolt automatically administers a shock.”

  “And that?” asked the Realtor. “How does that affect their mental acuity and their performance?”

  “It damn sure motivates them to hurry the hell up. Here, let me show you.” With a glance to get Fucknugget’s attention, Pluta turned back to me. “Boy, eat a handful of that dirt you puked on right there.”

  It could have been a filet mignon, and I’d have said the same thing. “You can still go fu—”

  Everything turned to pain.

  47

  Naked and cold, I woke up in a mound of stinking straw. Beneath me, the truck’s metal trailer floor carried vibrations up from the road. Outside, the wind blew by and the tires hummed, making me think of traveling down the highway back in the days when a road trip down to San Antonio or Houston for a metal concert was a normal thing. Back when titties and beer were almost all I ever thought about, back when getting behind on my rent was my only real worry. That, and whether my car would blow a transmission I couldn’t afford to repair.

  Then the virus came.

  It had been terrible at first, like nothing we’d ever seen. And for a time after, things sucked pretty hard.

  Then we’d found Balmorhea.

  We’d made something there. Something good.

  Because I lived in a new world where all the shitty people couldn’t do the rest of us the courtesy of dying out, I was just as screwed as I’d been in the old world. Hence, I was naked and cold, in the back of a semi-trailer hauling me to a new nowhere I didn’t want to go to. Through the pattern of ventilation perforations in the trailer’s sheet metal walls, past the cow shit stains and rust, the landscape rolled past. Not the desert anymore. I hated the desert anyway. Always had. But it had been home—a place where I’d found the rarest feeling in life: happiness. With Steph. Outside, the land looked familiar. Timeless, even. Rolling hills and scrubby junipers. Lots of dry brown grass trying to grow through dirt that was more crushed limestone than organic matter. We were in Central Texas.

  “You awake?” asked Murphy.

  So, I wasn’t alone. I rolled over and then sat up, feeling a chill as a layer of straw fell away.

  He laughed. “Looks like I lost a dollar on that bet.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My money was on comatose.” Murphy cocked a head at Grace, who was sitting against a wall, staring at the landscape. “She put two dollars on dead.”

  That only left Jazz, who had the good sense to still be asleep.

  “She didn’t bet,” said Murphy. “Said it was mean.”

  “You know,” I told him, “if dollar bills were worth anything, I’d almost believe you.” I looked around to emphasize my coming question. “What’s the story?”

  “No story.” Murphy ta
pped the appliance bolted to his head. “They gave us all a taste of what you got and told us to mind our manners. Kept our clothes and put us back in this truck. Been rolling east all day.”

  “Did they say where?” I asked.

  “You know they didn’t,” Grace told me.

  “Why did they take our clothes?” I asked.

  “They didn’t fry your brain so much you forgot how to deduce?” she responded.

  That made me wonder, how much did they fry my brain? It made me worry, too.

  “They’re trying to humiliate us,” Grace explained. “That’s why they took our clothes.”

  Murphy laughed. “Guess they don’t know your history, Zed.”

  I glanced over at Grace, not bothered by her nudity, and not particularly pervy about it, either. We’d run naked with the White hordes too many times that such things didn’t affect us anymore. “You think they don’t know about the naked thing? I mean, they have to know, right?”

  “You asking about the naked horde?” Murphy wanted to know.

  “Just the regular stuff,” I answered. Not most, but a pretty good share of Whites didn’t have the good sense to find warm clothes to wear once the garments they had on finally rotted to pieces and fell off their bodies.

  Nobody said anything more about it, so the topic died on its own. It was all yammer and speculation, anyway, and none of us had much of an interest in that.

  Grace pointed a lazy finger at me. “There’s a bottle of water there in the straw by you. Some food, too. Murphy wanted to take your share while you were sleeping, but…”

  The but didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter enough to Grace to finish it. I rummaged through the loose straw and found the bottle, a twist-top glass one from before the fall. Not uncommon. Not really. The plastic ones had been ubiquitous back in the day, but didn’t tend to hold up long under daily use. A rough cloth bundle wrapped the food—a kind of coarse, dense, multigrain bread.

  “Looks like a brick,” Murphy chuckled, “but it’ll keep the motor running.”

  I gnawed on a corner. “What do you guys make of all this?”

  Grace spoke up first. “We’re not prisoners.”

  “Except for the confinement part,” Murphy laughed, “and the guards.”

  Grace tapped the puck affixed to her skull. It had a ragged gouge running across it.

  I pointed at her puck. “What happened?”

  “Previous owner’s my guess.” She leaned over so I could get a good look at her puck. The hard, black plastic was chipped all along one edge.

  “Used?” I chuckled, but didn’t feel it. “They didn’t even give us new buzz bolts. Cheap bastards.”

  Grace said, “They’re going to put us to work in their stupid gas mask army or whatever they do wherever they’re taking us.”

  I decided I liked Murphy’s mood better. I tapped my hard bread against the metal wall for a satisfying ring. “Maybe they’ll put us to work in the bread brick factory.” Nobody laughed. Not even Murphy. “What about the others?”

  “The buses?” Murphy asked. “We’re all convoyed up. Headed east together.”

  I leaned closer to the outer wall for a glance down the road behind us, but we were driving on a straight section, so I could see nothing but the landscape.

  “Ten or twelve buses.” Murphy pointed forward. “Escort vehicles ahead and behind. Humvees with guns on top. Some pickups with machine guns mounted in the back. Livestock trailers full of bag heads, a few APCs.”

  “And the tanker trucks,” added Jazz, apparently not asleep. “They filled them from our fuel stocks and they’re bringing them along.”

  “That’s a hell of a convoy.” Obvious stuff, but I felt like I had to say something. “Does any of this make sense to any of you, because it doesn’t make sense to me. Who were all those people who unloaded from the tour buses? Did they conquer and colonize us in one day? Is that what happened?”

  “Don’t forget mass deportation,” added Grace. “They stole Balmorhea right from under us.”

  “Uh, huh.” Murphy looked at me. “Like I told you, bro, why wouldn’t someone come to Balmorhea and try and take it?”

  “But these bag heads,” I argued, “I mean, look where we are. They’ve got a well-equipped, trained army of Whites. Buses. Humvees. Tanker trucks. APCs. They’ve got resources. They seem to be doing a lot better than us. Why come to Balmorhea?”

  “Why did Preacher Dick come?” asked Murphy.

  I laughed a little bit meanly. “You saying they’ve got some fanatical mission from God?”

  “No,” he countered. “I’m sayin’, people can be covetous assholes.”

  “It’s more than that,” Grace told us. “Only we’re not going to figure it out in the back of this cold truck. We’ll have to see what happens when we get wherever we’re going. Then we’ll know.”

  48

  Austin, that’s where we wound up, in a general sense. Familiar landmarks and signage that still stood gave it away.

  The convoy didn’t drive through Austin. We skirted the city well to the south and crossed IH-35 down around Buda. We headed north through the black-dirt farm country well east of the interstate where the land laid flat as a griddle for mile after mile with nothing to break up the country except for the scattered homesteads, barns, and trees growing along the fence lines.

  It was dark when the convoy drove through the rings of fortifications that surrounded the city of Taylor. Before the collapse, Taylor had been one of a thousand small towns in the state, one looking enough like the next that it was often hard to tell them apart. That was before the collapse. Now, Taylor stood out like a world-class city. It had functioning streetlights atop short poles on every corner, and down every block. Not obnoxiously bright, but enough to peel back the nocturnal black I’d become accustomed to out in Balmorhea, and in all the nights I’d spent in the empty desert. Even the tiny towns kept it dark—light, any light, could draw in the local cannibal talent.

  We drove up the main street through the center of town. Restaurants and bars were well-lit and open for business. People, dressed warmly for the cold, strode in pairs and groups. They laughed and talked like their loud voices didn’t make them targets for Whites in the shadows. Not one appeared to be armed. That, I could barely believe. How could anyone who’d lived through the fall ever choose to go anywhere without a weapon in hand?

  It didn’t seem sensible.

  At the end of the road that ran through Taylor’s main business district, the buses and most of the protective vehicles turned left. The truck hauling the four of us turned right. A pair of Humvees with guns on top continued to escort us as we drove through a section of town where the old houses stood just as they’d stood for fifty or a hundred years, behind decorative fences, and surrounded by adequately trimmed yards. Porch lights shone, again, not obnoxiously bright, just enough to take the edge off the dark. People sat outside, enduring the cold for the comfort of the company of their neighbors. Through windows, I caught glimpses of people inside their homes, having dinner, playing board games, chatting on couches in front of the fireplace.

  “Feels like we drove through a hole in time,” muttered Murphy, watching the town go by. “Landed ourselves right in the Mayberry town center. Hope the sheriff’s around.”

  “And we’ve got some of this,” said Grace. “Think about the people who come to Balmorhea and—”

  “Came,” I corrected. The present tense didn’t seem right anymore. We’d lost Balmorhea, and when we lost it, the name didn’t even seem to fit.

  “Came,” Grace sighed. “People who haven’t seen electricity in ten years, think how dazzled they were by tiny Balmorhea. Think how they’d feel driving through this place.”

  “You think they’re showing off?” asked Jazz.

  “They didn’t have to drive us through town,” answered Grace.

  We passed back through more fortifications on the edge of the city and passed into the dark farmlands that surroun
ded Taylor. The glow from all the lights was barely visible once we’d gone a half-mile past the gate, and the four of us settled back into silence. And remained that way. We were all pretty well talked out and tired from our long, jarring ride.

  After a half hour, or an hour—it was hard to guess with no watch and nothing to pass the time except staring into the darkness—the truck stopped at a guarded gate. Again, they’d outclassed Balmorhea. We had one town, with one ring of defenses. The bag heads and their controllers had at least two.

  Pulling inside, most everything was dark and quiet. The truck parked, and the driver killed the engine.

  Jazz pressed her face against the metal trailer wall to get the best view outside. “I think this is a prison.”

  49

  Laying on my bunk, alone in my cell, I woke to the sounds of distant shouts and physical activity outside. The sun shone through my window, not brightly, at least not daytime bright. I decided it was still early.

  Stiff from the ride and the bruises and bumps I’d earned in fighting for my life, I climbed out of the bed. I surveyed my cell, six feet wide, eight feet long. A double bunk, a commode and sink unit, a small desk attached to the wall, and a chair. The side walls were solid cinder block. At the front, I had the expected steel bars incorporating a door. On my back wall, I had a generous window, easily large enough for me to climb through, if not for the steel bars securing it.

  I had a second-floor view of a wide exercise yard. The yard seemed too large to have been part of the prison’s original layout. It spanned the space of five or six football fields, and was, of course, surrounded by a tall fence. Several parallel tall fences, in fact. All across the yard, in groups of five to ten, men in yellow neckerchiefs and caps seemed to be training Whites, and frequently tormenting them with the buzz bolts screwed into their skulls.

  Walking to the other end of my cell, I called through the bars, “Hey.”

  The second-tier walkway outside my cell opened, I assumed, to a ground floor below. The wall across the gap had a row of windows, too high for me to see out of. At least they let in a good deal of light. And there I was, thinking like a prisoner already, evaluating my long-term accommodations, though I had no intention of staying in the jail. Although, that was nothing but an aspiration, as I was clueless on how to escape. Especially one I’d spent all of ten waking minutes inside.