Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  The sergeant grinned. “Your brain still works for readin’ books and writin’ poetry and such? Well, you won’t need none of that faggoty shit spittle at Camp 17. Matter of fact, skinny bastard like you won’t be need’n much of any of this for long.” He grabbed a clicker-zapper off his desk and threw it at me.

  I snatched it out of the air.

  The sergeant laughed. “You got that high yellow hand-eye coordination. Maybe you can figure a use of that so you won’t get butt punched in the barracks tonight. My advice? Lube your ass with some soap before you go in. Maybe you don’t bleed as much.”

  Ignoring his taunting, I examined my clicker.

  “One button. Any yellow can operate it. You point it and tap that button to put a buzz on any taint in range. Ten, maybe twenty feet, depending on your battery. You want to keep that charged. Check it every day. We train them taints up good and tight, but they’re wicked evil things, they are. And they ain’t as dumb as you think. The stupidest ones, we cull out for cookin’ ‘n eatin’. The half-smart ones, we put ‘em in a muzzle mask and a pair of Jimmy gloves.”

  My curiosity slipped through.

  The armory sergeant snorted. “They’re like heavy-duty mittens. Taints can tackle somebody, hold ‘em still, but the gloves keeps ‘em from ripping the guts out as they’re wont to do.” He glanced at the clicker in my hand again. “Tap it once for a buzz. Twice for a zap. You want Pluta should zap you so you remember what it feels like?” He tapped the buzz bolt affixed to his skull. “We all know. Just so you know, you hold that button down for three seconds, it sends out a zap in all directions at once. Only use if you get in trouble with the taints. You understand?”

  It wasn’t rocket science.

  “You’re a smug one. Well, you best listen up to this next part. These yellow clickers, they’re for us. They affect taints. Red clickers, they’re for normals and high yellows who earned the privilege. They work on us, and the taints. Just so you know, if you get caught with your hands on one of those, you’ll lose ‘em both. Take maybe six months or a coupla years to grow back. I’ll bet you know all about that, too, a smart high yellow like you.”

  I didn’t answer. I figured my silence was worth more than an admission or a lie.

  “So, you think you’re a smartsy fartsy rebellious type, don’t ya?” The sergeant’s anger was starting to show.

  “That’s a fact.” Pluta rattled some papers behind me. “Bill wants this one to get some special attention. Says he’s got potential.”

  “Bill?” I asked. “There is a real Bill?”

  “Well,” the sergeant ignored my question as he laughed, “we know all about special attention.” He stood and leaned over the table, getting so close I could smell the stink on his breath of what he’d had for lunch. “Right now, you’re nuthin’. You wanna be anything, you wanna do anything, you wanna have anything, you earn by goin’ to fight when the Senior Man Pluta tells you to. Everybody fights, or nobody eats. All you gotta do is be the reason the dinner plate is empty one time.” He laughed about that, too. “Let’s just say, the taints are gettin’ their supper, whether we feed ‘em, or whether they take it out of your skinny ass.”

  Pluta’s chair scooted out as he stood up.

  He crossed the room to stand behind me.

  I felt his breath on my neck. I thought about butting his face with the back of my head.

  He whispered the word, “whisper,” and buzzed my bolt. As I wobbled on my feet, he zapped me with a full electric shock, dropping me to the floor.

  While I was slobbering into a puddle and watching snot run out of my nose, Pluta dropped to a knee beside me. “You’re one of those stupid stubborn ones who’ll always find some way to screw yourself and everybody around you. You’re a waste of my time, but that’s not my call to make. I’m just the Camp 17 Senior Man. Like Dorsey said to you, I’m God.” He buzzed me again. “Your personal god of thunder. If it were up to me, I’d jack your bolt to a car battery and fry every ounce of obstinance out of your head. I’d just as soon kill you as kneel here, smelling you piss all over yourself. But I can’t, because Camp 17 is a cesspool of backstabbing climber wannabes.” He looked up at the sergeant. “Isn’t that right, Dorsey? Every single one of you half-taints would sell me for a cold fuck in a cornfield.”

  Dorsey laughed nervously. “Maybe them others, Senior Man, but I’m as loyal as the day is long.”

  Pluta leaned in close enough that I could feel his breath on my ear. “I can’t kill you quick, which would be a mercy for both of us. Bill would have my balls if I did that. To Bill, the real live Bill, taints are resources, and high yellows, oh how he thinks every high yellow is going to be his next little Attila the Hun to conquer the world and lick his boots.” Pluta shoved me over onto the floor. I couldn’t do anything to resist. “I am going to grind you down, shave off all the soft meat and see if there’s a hard nut in the middle. And then I’m going to crack it. Bill won’t mind if I do that. He thinks it builds character. He thinks that’s how hard men rise to the top. So, you think about that while you’re suffering and scheming, dreaming about that redheaded twat you got back in Taylor Town. And you spend some extra time thinking about how when you’re dead or too stupid to care, I’ll be comforting her with my big white-skinned cock.”

  My anger erupted, and so did the electricity in my head as the bolt unloaded another zap into my brain.

  53

  The barracks door slammed shut behind me.

  It took a moment for me to understand that I was no longer in the armory. I was standing. No, I wasn’t standing. Strong hands were under my arms, holding me up. I shook them off and pushed the two men away, nearly losing my balance and falling to the floor for my trouble.

  As my eyes adjusted to the deep shadows and stark light shining across the room, I smelled a pungent dinner stew reeking of onions and greasy meat. Unwashed bodies packed too closely together. Open sewage holes in the floor. No commodes. No lids. Just holes mucked with the evidence of how filthy men could be when most of them were monkey-trained, white-skinned animals, and the rest didn’t give enough of a shit to do anything about it. At that moment, though, they all seemed to care about me, as every eye in the barracks was locked on mine.

  On layers of racks, six-feet deep on the right-hand wall, forty, maybe fifty Whites stirred to life. Along the left wall, lounging on individual cots, or clustered in cliques of truncated conversation, yellows locked me in loathsome stares. Without a clue what I was supposed to say, let alone do, I eyed them one by one, working my way through, as each turned away. It was a dominance thing. The challenge, silent but clear. If I wanted to quell the violence I already felt in the air, I had to face them without flinching. At least, the little scenario that played out in my mind suggested that was the way to handle the situation.

  Reality took a different turn when a mountainous man with a mule face stood from whatever had been keeping him busy in the close company of a few others. “You eyeballin’ me, Scrot?”

  One of the yellows who’d already surrendered to my staring challenge said, “He’s eyeballing you, Mort. Betcha he’s that high yellow big boss said was comin’. He thinks he’s better’n you.”

  “Yeah,” someone agreed.

  The Whites crept to the edge of their racks, sensing the trouble rising in the room.

  Mildly surprised that my plan to psych them all into submission had gone awry, I figured I’d double-down and run with it. Boldness in the face of long odds had served me well more times than I could count. “Mort, sit your ugly ass down and shut the fuck up. Leave your betters to their business.”

  Mort didn’t take my advice. Instead, he marched into the wide center aisle that divided the Whites from the yellows in the barracks. He leaned on a long table scattered with empty pots and messy tin bowls and glared at me. Behind his cruel eyes, his halfwit brain ran through its own scenarios. He took just long enough for me to think I’d won, when he barked a big laugh that ended as artificially as
it started. “Scrot don’t know his place, boys. We gotta do some teachin’.”

  The yellows rushed me.

  With nowhere to run, and no ability to do so, they overwhelmed me. They beat me from head to toe. They scattered the pots and bowls off the center table and bent me over, lashing my ankles to the table legs, and wrapping my arms around the tabletop in a forced hug, secured there by tied wrists.

  I figured the grinding Pluta talked about was about to begin.

  54

  “Hey Mort, we supposed to do this without the bull?” asked someone behind me, back where most of the yellows had gathered.

  “Bull ain’t here,” crowed Mort. “That makes me the bull again.”

  “Only one bull.” More than one of the yellows were in agreement on that point.

  One of them said, “Bull goes first. Always first. Always been that way.”

  “He dissed me,” complained Mort. “I got a right.”

  “Bull’s got a right,” argued one of the men. “You ain’t got shit, now. You’re one of us.”

  “The first of you,” argued Mort.

  “Everybody’s got a place,” followed the retort. “Everybody knows their place. Everybody keeps it. That’s the way of it.”

  “Rules is rules,” complained someone else.

  “Look at him,” pleaded Mort. “He needs it. He wants it. Hell, he all but begged us for a comeuppance, strutting in here like a diamond-dick untouchable. He ain’t nuthin’ but a dirty taint. We got a duty. That’s what Bill would tell the lot of you.”

  Plenty disagreed with Mort on that point.

  “We can’t do nothing ‘til Bull gets back from Taylor Town.”

  “Hell,” bitched Mort. “No tellin’ when he’s comin’ back. We could be waitin’ here all night.”

  “Don’t matter,” another one argued.

  The barracks’ heavy door swung open, banging the wall. Everybody stopped talking. Even the rancorous Whites stopped fidgeting.

  Mort’s bravery from before turned suddenly fawning. “Hey Bull. We got a high yellow strapped down for learnin’ lessons. Bad manners, this one. Thinks he’s better’n everyone.”

  A handful agreed with Mort, though none with much enthusiasm.

  Heavy footsteps clomped up the floor, purposefully loud. Or the man was absolutely huge.

  A hundred lies and even more threats spun through my thoughts, as I searched for the words that would get me out of my predicament.

  A big hand slapped my bare ass, and I yelped.

  A chair’s feet scraped across the floor as it was dragged from somewhere behind, skidding into place beside the table. A big man dropped into it, looking at me with a familiar grin. “Hey Zed, been waitin’ up long?”

  “Murphy, you’re the—” The slang felt weird to say. “You’re the bull?”

  55

  Somebody grabbed me by the hips and ground their crotch against my ass. Thankfully they were still covered in their coarse work pants. “We gonna teach this one what he needs teachin’?” It was Mort. Some of the others voiced their enthusiasm.

  Murphy told them, “Go back to playing with your dicks for a minute.”

  I said, “Murphy, you gonna untie me?”

  He shook his head.

  My temper flared, but I didn’t figure it was a good time to lose it. “You got a reason for that?”

  Murphy nodded and yawned. “You got yourself in a spot, don’t you?”

  “But you’re the bull. I guess that means you’re the boss, right?”

  “Sometimes it pays not to act like a contrary little brat every day of the week.”

  “What does the day of the week have to do with anything?”

  “You’re deflecting.” Murphy looked at the men I knew were still arrayed behind me. “Maybe you do need some teachin’.”

  “Stop fucking around and untie me before this gets out of hand.”

  “You’re really worried, aren’t you?”

  “Is that what this is now?” I ground my teeth, doing all I could to keep my temper down. “You want me to learn a lesson?”

  Murphy laughed. “Something about old dogs and new tricks or whatever. You’ll never learn anything until you’re good and ready.”

  “So, what are we doing here?” I glanced back at the anxious perverts behind me.

  Murphy leaned in close. “Man, I’m just messin’ with you.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  He belted out a big laugh and fell out of his flimsy chair, catching himself at the last moment and jumping to his feet. “Listen up,” he bellowed, addressing the yellows, “this kind of shit right here, whatever you bunch of butt pluggers think it is, we don’t do that in this barracks no more.”

  “Always done it this way,” complained Mort.

  “You got a problem with it,” Murphy challenged, “come at me. You know the rule as well as anyone here.”

  Complaints grumbled through the room.

  “That’s what I thought,” Murphy told them. “Now you bitches untie his skinny ass and square your shit. I told you to get this place clean. It stinks like ass crack in here.”

  “Maybe you ain’t no kinda bull,” griped Mort. “Maybe, you’re a teat sucking—”

  A bell rang outside, sounding like a church bell in the hands of a manic monk, freezing everyone into perfect silence.

  “Everyone outside in five minutes,” Murphy commanded, “geared up and ready to roll. Go, go, go!”

  56

  Without a watch, I had no way of knowing how many minutes passed between the start of the frantic bell ringing and our formation in front of the barracks, but it was probably close to five. In that time, like everyone in Murphy’s platoon—if that was the right word for it—I was dressed in my combat boots, gas mask, cloth pants, and a well-used sleeveless jacket. Most of my gear was pre-owned, so, customized a bit, with blood stains still prominent, not all from the enemy.

  We had four types of soldiers in our formation, the Whites, in groups of five queued up behind a yellow dressed like me. From what I’d seen in Balmorhea, they were the brute force of Bill’s army. There were the wranglers in charge of each group of five. Other yellows were decked out in harnesses dangling impact-Molotovs and tear-gas bottles, and then there was me, wearing forty pounds of flamethrower equipment, just like the two who’d hurriedly strapped it on me, giving me a thirty-second crash course in operating the device. The three of us were the platoon’s most powerful weapons. Murphy told me to do whatever they did, and I’d be fine. Roasting Whites on the hoof, he explained, was easy.

  Before I had a chance to dread what was coming, Murphy led our platoon running toward the stock trailers in the gravel parking lot I’d arrived at an hour or two before. The diesels were already running on the semis’ engines. Several hundred—hell, maybe a thousand of us—were massed into the livestock trailers in a matter of minutes, and the trucks rolled into the settling darkness.

  In the crush of bodies, I couldn’t move. Well, I could move my hands far enough to scratch an itch or adjust the straps of the flamethrower’s weighty fuel tank, digging into my shoulders. I could shuffle my feet, and fidget with my weapon’s big…gun? Whatever the right word was for it. All I really knew about it was how to turn the gas valve on, once we were boots on the ground at the scene of whatever was coming. After that, I needed to depress the pilot ignitor until a small jet of blue fire stayed lit at the tip of my weapon—also called an ignitor. Then, it was simple—point and hose. A dragon’s breath of flame would incinerate whatever stood in front of me.

  Back to the point of me not being able to move, I was pinned in by stinking Whites and yellows around me, up near the front of the trailer. Murphy stood down at the far end. I couldn’t see him in the chaotic dark, but I could hear his big voice commanding my fellow knuckleheads.

  Without warning, the truck hauling our platoon careened off the road, barreling over a plowed field, and bouncing us around inside the trailer. Fortunately, our extreme j
ostling lasted only minutes. The driver slowed into a wide arc and turned the semi around just as he came to a stop. The rear gate fell open, and we poured into the night, forming up in a sloppy copy of how we’d lined up in front of the barracks.

  I barely knew what end was up as I tugged at the straps holding my flamethrower equipment on my back. It seemed like everything was overly noisy and moving, the bodies of the men, the rambunctious Whites, the semis’ growling engines, sweeping headlights, and somewhere out in the night, a horde of feral Whites was coming. A big one.

  57

  One of Pluta’s stooges, what I guessed might pass for a lieutenant in a pre-collapse army, ran up and conveyed a message to Murphy that I was too far away to overhear. Didn’t matter. Once Murphy had the info, he gathered us close to shout our orders over the cacophony. “A horde is in the forest just outside the wire.” He pointed into darkness—north, south, I had no idea which. I’d lost all sense of direction on the ride over. “Seven to ten thousand. That’s the guess.”

  The yellows around me had a lot to say about that, mostly bellicose cliches about killing taints coupled with exaggerations of their sexual prowess. How the two subjects went together made no sense to me. But boys will be boys, and my fellow yellows were itching for a fight. They liked exactly the kind of danger that was lurking out there in the night.

  As for me, I’d been in too many scrapes with Whites to entertain any of that nonsense. Just the opposite. The estimated count on the Whites we were to face concerned me. Deeply. Whites were always wild cards. Just like with drunk teenagers, the more of them there were, the more could go wrong. I glanced across what I could see of Camp 17’s platoons. My earlier guess of our count shrank. What felt like a thousand when we were crowding into the cattle trailers now looked like five hundred. At best.

  “We double-time up to the wire,” Murphy told us. “When Pluta gives the word, we’ll spread out in a wide battle line, keeping the horde in front. At the platoon level, we’ll break into three mêlée squads, one supporting each flamethrower. We’re not capturing tonight. We’re killing. Let the flamethrowers do the work. Yellows and taints protect the flamethrower’s flanks. If they go down, we’re all hosed.” Murphy pointed at me. “I’ve got section one in the middle. Mort, you’ll take section two a couple hundred feet to my right. Gerici, you’ve got section three, same distance on the left.” His eyes settled on the taint wranglers. “Keep your clickers handy. You know how the taints can get around the wild ones.”