Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  “Hey.”

  Footsteps tromped down the walkway. Coming in my direction.

  I called again, “Hey.”

  Well out of arm’s reach, a yellow stopped in front of my cell. “Can you read, or are you too stupid?”

  My frustration over my helpless situation bubbled to the surface, and I wanted to punch him. I grabbed the bars instead. “What’s it to you?”

  He pointed at a sign on the wall across from my cell. It said:

  NO TALKING

  NO NOISE

  NO EXCEPTIONS

  “One thing I’m obligated to tell you because it’s not on the sign,” he explained, “is that buzz bolt on your head, you got to keep it charged if you don’t want it to blow a hole through your skull. See where your pillow is laying on your bunk? You sleep with your head on it. Wires or something underneath charge the bolt by being close using whatever they call it.”

  Before I could think of the best way to insult him, he pointed his clicker at me, and my head quaked.

  When I came to my senses, I was sprawled in an awkward position on the floor, with puke dribbling down my chest and stomach. My jailer was gone, but I yelled, “Fuck you, Biff.”

  Moments later, I heard the footsteps marching up the walkway again. I pulled myself to my feet, knees wobbling, and stood defiantly to face the front of my cell. The yellow seemed angry—maybe his name really was Biff. He pointed at the sign again and zapped me into unconsciousness.

  50

  I spent three days in the cell after that. Alone. Naked. And silent. No food to eat. What water I needed, I drank from the faucet of my sink. What sounds I heard came from out on the walkway, or from down below. I didn’t see another person. Not once. Except out my window, where yellows worked at training their Whites in the yard.

  I thought a lot about the black plastic puck screwed onto my skull. One corner of my bed frame looked like a tool I might be able to use to pry it off. But. That was the big word full of doubt. Was it really loaded with some sort of charge that could sense when it was being taken off? Would it really explode and kill me? All I knew for sure was that Grace’s buzz bolt, Murphy’s, and even mine, by the feel of it, were well-used. They’d been attached to someone before. Which meant they’d been removed, probably after death. Why take one off a living White, if, as the Pluta priss had told the Realtor, they were the foundation of discipline in the corps?

  Was it all a bluff? Was I willing to bet my life that it was?

  Maybe. I needed more information first.

  Being my only entertainment, I spent a good deal of time watching the yard, understanding what I could, deducing the rest. New Whites came in, usually in groups of five. Each group had an alpha White, one who could understand verbal instructions. And, of course, a few yellow instructors for each group. Much of what the Whites did after that was dependent on them utilizing their inherent need to follow and imitate. The training process seemed to be geared toward cementing that relationship with the ever-present negative reinforcement of the buzz bolt. Do, or suffer. Even the most simple-minded White could understand that.

  Maybe the most important thing I learned was something I already knew but hadn’t quite assimilated—Whites were being trained into an organized army. They weren’t using firearms—mostly fists and clubs. Some practiced at throwing bottles, dummy Molotovs, and tear gas bombs. Others—the advanced trainees, I guessed—threw live firebombs at target houses, groups of full-sized stick-figure people, and rusting automobiles. A small group, all yellows, put flamethrowers to work, sending boiling jets of fire into targets that lasted only seconds in the inferno.

  “You gonna stare out that window all day?”

  I turned to see my guard, clicker-zapper in hand, canvas bag in the other. I didn’t say anything—given enough pain, anybody was trainable.

  “Guess I lost that bet. You’re not as stupid as I thought.” He knelt on the floor outside my cell and took what looked like some kiddie toys out of his bag, sliding them through the dinner slot at the bottom edge of my iron-bar door. When he finished, he stood and fished a stopwatch out of his pocket. “I need to see how quick you can do that.”

  I didn’t move toward the toy. It wasn’t anything but what I’d immediately guessed—a tiny table frame supporting a little wooden panel with five shapes cut in the top: a circle, a triangle, a square, a star, and an octagon. Accompanying the toy were five pieces of wood, painted different colors, each matching the shape of one of the holes.

  “I got another bet says you can’t pass the retard test.” He laughed. “I’m supposed to tell you, if you do it in less than thirty seconds, you can eat.”

  With no desire to be the mouse in my guard’s game, I rolled my eyes and turned to gaze out the window.

  He waited a bit, and then left me with my untouched toy and my empty stomach.

  Another cold night passed with me alone in my seemingly empty wing of the prison.

  I woke from a dream of bacon and cream-filled doughnuts the next morning to see my guard sitting on a stool outside my cell.

  “I was hopin’ maybe you’d starved to death. You pig-headed ones never amount to much.” He lifted a plate of eggs, toast, and something that smelled a lot like bacon—smoky and salty. He stuffed a sloppy scoop of eggs into his mouth. “If you hop down there and put them shapes in them holes before I finish, you can have whatever’s left.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?”

  He pointed at the sign on the far wall, raised his zapper and buzzed my skull.

  I flinched away from the shock, but the electricity didn’t come. Despite my resistance, I was already being trained.

  He pointed at the toys on the floor. “I did tell you what I wanted.” Taking his plate, he headed up the walk.

  My hunger passed along with the smell of the food. I’d starved for days and weeks before. I knew how it felt, and I knew what to expect. The question on my mind wasn’t whether I was going to give in for a piece of bread, but how I was going to get out of the cell and retake control of my fate. More importantly, how was I going to find Steph and Murphy and escape all together.

  Three days turned into a week, and my captors, apparently deciding that starving wasn’t going to serve their purpose, started leaving me a hunk of coarse bread and a cup of rancid broth at midday. It wasn’t enough to sate my hunger, but I decided that wasn’t its purpose—again, Zed the genius at work. The meal provided just enough calories and nutrients to keep me alive while keeping me hungering. Food as torture—people can be so creative in their cruelty.

  Biff brought me some baggy pants and a plain T-shirt to wear. He replaced my infantile shape puzzle with a slightly more advanced ABCs puzzle. I ignored that for a week. A numbers game followed. Still, Biff sat in front of my cell, having his breakfast each morning. Not eggs and bacon every time, but always something aromatic and delicious.

  By the twenty-third day, I was fatigued all the time, and my muscles felt like they were wasting down to the bone. The truth of my situation was settling in—I was playing a game I couldn’t win. Biff stopped paying me visits. The first day that happened, I worried I’d been forgotten, and that I’d slowly starve to death. However, a silent orderly dropped off my broth and bread at midday and a good deal of my anxiety disappeared.

  At the end of my first month, I started each day with my morning calisthenics. I was intent on keeping my strength for as long as possible. After that, I watched the training exercises in the yard, and was so engrossed in memorizing every detail that I didn’t notice that someone had come to my cell until he said, “Let’s talk.”

  Startled, I failed at trying to hide it as I turned away from my window.

  At my cell door stood a black man with normal skin color. As much as I hated the bigotry I saw in others, skin color was the first thing I looked at when I came across someone new. Besides the skin, he was an average man, late 40s, thinning hair, soft around the middle. He wore a red neckerchief and uni
form shirt with jeans. He looked like a middle-aged scout master. I glanced at his hands.

  He noticed. “I’m not going to buzz you.”

  I pretended not to care.

  He shrugged. He didn’t care, either. “You’re a stubborn one. Just the same, I think you’ll break. Bill says otherwise.”

  “Bill?”

  “It’s hard to be in a situation where you don’t know anything, isn’t it?”

  True. But I wasn’t going to admit that. “What do you want?”

  “You’re Zed Zane. We know that. You’re married to a nurse whom you call Steph. Maiden name Leonard.”

  I exaggerated a sigh in case he hadn’t picked up on my apathy vibe.

  “I can tell you more if you want. Philosophy degree. Abusive parents. Barista before the collapse. Barista? I mean really, why can’t we just say coffee boy? Did that ever make sense to you?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “No point I know of. I’m just the manager of this facility. I get instructions. I do as I’m told.”

  “You’re the warden?”

  “Bill isn’t a labels sort of guy.” He shrugged again. It seemed like a habit, like maybe he had a lot of things in his life he wanted to pretend not to care about. “Bill thinks it will be helpful that you know how much we know about you. We know you’re intelligent, so the evaluation puzzles were pointless after the first week or so. In fact, we knew after the first few days you weren’t one of the deviant morons most of your kind are. We kept putting the puzzles in your cell to taunt you. You know, simple pleasures and all. I guess the point is, you don’t want to work with us to onboard you in the usual way, so Bill wants to throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Well, there’s more of that ambiguity,” he chuckled. “The wages of being an asshole is nobody tells you anything.” He chuckled again, amused by his word play. “Let me shed a little light on the world for you—but just because Bill told me to tell you this. Well, not in these words exactly, but he’s not a micromanager that way. New Tejas is a meritocracy. Sort of.”

  “This is New Tejas?” I asked. “What you call the place?”

  The warden ignored my question. “At the same time, we’re an ultra-strict, class-based society. Now for the punchline. It’s based on skin color. What a big surprise, right?” He shrugged when I didn’t react. “Ultra-whites like you, those who aren’t psycho morons, obviously, you get the golden ticket.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You never saw Willie Wonka?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe we were wrong about you not being a moron. Do you know what a metaphor is?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you need to tell me. This game you’re playing is boring.”

  He shrugged. “Keep your nose clean. Do what you’re told, and life will get better. Good food. More privileges. Freedom, or something like it. You’ll even get to play house with the sweet little red-headed thing again. Or, keep acting like an asshole, and you can beat off to memories while you waste away in a barracks full of lunatics until you die.” He turned to head up the hall. “Oh, they’ll be by to pick you up in a little bit. You have a nice day, you hear?” He laughed as he walked away.

  51

  Cuffs on my wrists and shackles on my ankles, they transported me in the open bed of a pickup, bouncing down a decaying paved road between cultivated fields spread for miles on both sides. After thirty, maybe forty minutes, the truck turned onto a dirt road and dust roiled into the bed, choking me with its grit. But there was nothing I could do about the dust, the racing pickup, or pretty much anything. I had to suffer the figurative boot on my neck until I found the opportunity to stand. Preferably with a machete in my hand.

  So, I stewed. I thought about Steph. And Murphy, Grace, and Jazz. I wondered about Dalhover. I couldn’t imagine that hard old bastard in anybody’s chains. Which meant he was probably dead. One of the hundreds of corpses I saw them loading into the refrigerator trucks outside Balmorhea’s walls the morning after our defeat.

  I thought about the buzz bolt. I was out in the country, apparently miles away from anything. The tropey Sci-Fi idea that my puck was somehow electronically connected to a master control system that would blow my head off if I messed with it couldn’t be true. Doh. Of course, it couldn’t be true. We didn’t have the infrastructure to support any such system out in Balmorhea when the yellows had overrun us. That meant the puck had to incorporate a physical trigger that depended on my body heat, or a pressure switch against my skull. Or maybe the screws themselves.

  Then it occurred to me, because my puck was used, likely taken off the skull of a corpse, a boobytrap mechanism couldn’t be heat sensitive. That certainly wasn’t a huge deduction, but it was one more piece of the puck puzzle. Well, two, counting the absence of a WIFI or cellular connection.

  I tugged at my cuffs and achieved nothing. The cuffs were linked to a steel loop welded to the truck bed. I was going nowhere until my captors wanted me to. My frustrations overcame me, and I roared at the sky. And not one speck of anything changed in the world. As usual—well, as was the case most times—my tantrum proved pointless.

  I drew a deep breath. I knew if I were calm, I’d think clearly. Clear thinking would lead to better outcomes. And maybe warden what-his-name was being truthful about Steph—keep my nose clean and see her again. Play their game. Bide my time. Hide my rage. Wait for vengeance until I had the power to take it.

  52

  My delivery pickup pulled to a stop in a lot where seven eighteen-wheelers sat in a neat row, each with a livestock trailer attached. One of them could have been the one that hauled me east from Balmorhea. But it didn’t matter. One hauler was the same as the next. Behind the lot stood rows of shabby barracks. Paths worn in the dirt. It looked like an army camp or a concentration camp. Only there wasn’t a perimeter fence, at least none surrounding the buildings. Spread across the pasture behind the barracks, hundreds of Whites trained in squads and platoon-sized formations, all under the supervision of yellows. Far across the field, stretching to the horizons, barbed wire cattle fences ran in parallel rows, marking the border of New Tejas. Or so I guessed. Fences of that type would do little to stop a horde of Whites, but I figured Bill and his lackeys knew that and had other horde mitigation procedures in place. The very existence of Bill’s Bumfucktopia was proof of that.

  My guards disconnected me from the pickup and led me toward one of the barracks.

  “These cuffs necessary?” I asked.

  “You got an evil eye on you,” stuttered one of them without looking at me. He reminded me of those half-smart knuckleheads I’d encountered in the survivor army all those years back. The other one yanked on my cuffs to drag me through a door into one of the barracks.

  Inside, they removed the cuffs and left me standing in front of a long table with nothing on it. Sitting behind the table, a gruff yellow ordered me to strip naked. No big deal. I’d lost all sense of shame over nudity a long time back. I did as told—it wasn’t worth getting buzzed.

  A voice behind me said, “He’s a skinny one.”

  I glanced back. Two cushy chairs sat in front of a window. One of them was occupied by a tall, fastidious man picking at his fingernails and making a point of not looking at me. It was Pluta, the white-skinned pansy who’d gotten his jollies on zapping me the day they bolted me outside Balmorhea.

  The gruff yellow behind the table ran his apathetic eyes over me. “Not much to look at, Senior Man.”

  “Nope,” yawned Pluta.

  The armory sergeant ordered his helpers to fetch my gear—boots, socks, t-shirt, shorts, long pants, a heavy combat coat, and a belt with a harness. Some of it looked new. The pants and coats each had a matching number stenciled on. My new ID, I figured. My weapon, a billy club, weighted on the end with an iron cuff. A yellow kerchief and a bright yellow gas mask, well-used, finished o
ut my battle ensemble.

  I reached for the shorts.

  “What you doin’?” barked the sergeant. “I didn’t tell you to move.”

  I wanted to jump across the table to put a beating on the sergeant. I figured with the weighted billy club, I had a pretty good chance against all four Whites in the room.

  My bolt buzzed, purging my thoughts of everything except the rattle of the meat inside my head.

  “I admire your defiance,” said Pluta. He didn’t sound like he meant it. “It’s an admirable trait. But here, at Camp 17, you’ll learn to channel it where I tell you to channel it, or by God you’ll come to fear me so deeply, you’ll piss yourself when you even imagine the whisper of my voice.”

  He buzzed me again. No shock, but the second buzz was nearly enough to drop me to my knees.

  The sergeant pointed at Pluta. “He’s Senior Man at Camp 17. For the likes of you, Pluta is God, and you best take that to heart.” He let that warning sink in for a moment before directing my attention back to my gear. “Don’t go nowhere unless you wear the kerchief or the gas mask. Both, if you’re smart. They mark you as a yellow. Ain’t no upside being a fuckwit taint in this world. Without your yellow, that’s all you are.”

  I didn’t nod or acknowledge in any way—that damn defiance of mine, finding a way to express itself.

  “Hey, you glassy-eyed ass maggot, you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “He understands,” said Senior Man Pluta. “He’s a high yellow.”