by Bobby Adair
That didn’t sound good at all, but I didn’t have time to spin my imagination up over that problem either. The semis rumbled away.
“Once we engage,” Murphy focused on Mort and Gerici, “keep an eye on what I’m doing with first squad. We’ll fire the attacking front, run a tactical retreat, and fire again. Pluta wants them charging at us over the corpses. He thinks it’ll demoralize them.”
Everybody laughed.
Somebody said, “Let ‘em fry crawling over their burning dead.”
That’s when the tactic made sense to me. The wide gaps between mêlée squads hadn’t made any sense until then.
Murphy called the order for gas masks. We all pulled them over our heads.
Whistles tweeted over the noise of our voices and we jogged out to our positions, spreading into three suddenly very small groups that seemed much more widely spaced than I had imagined they’d be. In the darkness, I could barely make out the glow of pilot flames on the other flamethrowers.
Suddenly beside me, Murphy said, “You cool? You know what to do?”
“Point and fire,” I answered. “Literally.”
“They’ll come, just like you seen a million times. Just like they always do, when they do.”
“Been there done that. Gotcha.”
“What I’m sayin’ is, don’t worry about what’s going on behind you or beside you. If they get back here among us, there’s not a damn thing you can do with that flamethrower.”
“I could torch Mort, and some of those other assholes.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Right now, you—”
“I know what I’ve got to do, Murphy.”
He slapped me on the shoulder. “Sorry about that business back there with your ass.”
I shrugged. “How long will this tank last me? I don’t see a gauge or anything.”
“You’ll feel it getting lighter.”
“Not a very precise system, is it?”
“You keep that flame burning as long as they keep coming. Pluta says there’s a truck on the way with more tanks, more Molotovs, and whatnot. We can swap an empty tank in like a minute.”
“Good, ‘cause—”
A machine gun rattled across the dark field. I saw the burst from the barrel, not a hundred yards away.
Murphy shouted, “That’ll bring ‘em to us!”
Two more machine guns fired.
The horde in the forest screamed as one, and the ground rumbled. Everybody alive knew that feeling through the souls of their feet, and those monkey screams ripping the air. The sounds meant hide, haul ass, or die. I didn’t say any of that, though. Murphy had the dudes around me ready for a fight, and I had a big honkin’ flamethrower in hand. One I’d never used. So, not wanting a surprise, I figured a test was in order. I pointed my ignitor into the darkness and tapped the trigger. A belch of fire shot thirty feet out, torching the grass in front of me, and lighting up the night. The men around me roared with confidence, and the horde’s raw rage found its focus.
Murphy laughed. “Fucking Null Spot.”
58
In the fading firelight, out across the field, the horde looked like a single sprawling organism, rushing forward in an unstoppable wave.
Molotovs burst on the ground, well short of the coming charge. Murphy shouted orders at the premature tossers. The tension felt electric around me. An urge to drop my gear and run surged up through my feet and squeezed my balls. It took some effort to steady my breathing and calm myself for the coming onslaught. I’d been in the shit more times than I could count. If I had any talent in the world, it was the ability to stand in the storm without letting my emotions turn me into a frenetic mess.
“Fire!” ordered Murphy.
Knowing the pressure of my flame would push back on me, I braced myself and pulled the trigger. Fire blasted out in a narrow inferno that exploded into the mob a hundred feet in front of me. Whites shrieked as their flesh boiled in their own blood and their skin burned away.
Red and orange geysers sprayed up and down our line, and the White charge faltered. Before surging again.
Murphy ordered the tear gas, and the air filled with an acrid haze. He slapped my shoulder. “Back! Twenty steps back.”
I let the trigger on my fire shooter go and turned to run. Flames shot in every direction. Caustic gas and smoke surged and roiled. Molotovs burst in front and to the sides. However it happened, Whites were suddenly everywhere.
Murphy formed us into a rough defensive circle, and I turned to let loose again, blasting another hundred or two hundred Whites, watching them combust and run blindly forward, covered in flame, as those behind pushed through the fire.
“Go,” shouted Murphy. “Back twenty.”
I turned and ran into the chaos that, even through my yellow gas mask, stank like writhing hell.
When we stopped, feral Whites were running crazy in every direction. Yellows were running for their lives. Some held their formations and were fighting with fire. Our defensive circle was under assault from more Whites than I could count. I spun, saw the direction Murphy was pointing, and unleashed my inferno, sweeping back and forth, laying down a wall of fire so hot that no human, no matter how mentally impaired, could get through.
I spun to run again and realized Murphy hadn’t ordered me to. Our platoon had collapsed on the left. Some of our Whites had flipped their shit, slipped their conditioning, and turned on their yellow masters.
Murphy pointed at the scrum of thrashing bodies. “Torch ‘em. Now!”
From ten feet away, I let it rip, spraying my white-skinned cousins with a blast furnace of live fire that exploded their flesh in flaming chunks flying in every direction.
Well out past that, a flamethrower shot straight up in a fountain of fire, lighting squad three in a brilliant orange formation that turned into a dome-shaped inferno as flamethrower fuel rained down on them from above.
Murphy saw it too. “Fucking morons!” He pointed in the direction I guessed was our rear. I’d lost track. “Clear us a path.”
I fired again, torching a score of Whites and the dry grass around them. While most of those Whites were running in fiery circles, trying to escape the flames feeding on their flesh, Murphy charged through, leading us toward open ground. And I thought, We’re gonna make it, just before a massive explosion knocked us to the ground.
59
I don’t know how long we fought, ran, torched, and retreated. Somewhere in there, my tanks ran dry. Murphy, true to his word, had a fresh tank at the ready by then, hauled to our unit by an unlucky yellow whose sole purpose in the corps was—apparently—to run through the mêlée between wherever our supply truck sat and wherever we were fighting.
I didn’t envy him, but then, I didn’t envy any living being in the field that night, especially not my miscreant comrades in Gerici’s squad, whose flamethrower man had violated the first rule of throwing flame—never shoot straight up. He’d immolated his whole squad, and then when his tank exploded, blew them to well-crisped bits all over the field.
At the time, I didn’t know if we killed them all, if they broke through, or retreated. All I knew for sure was that they stopped attacking us in waves. By us, I meant the remains of Murphy’s platoon. Whatever organization and cohesion our battalion, or whatever, had, was gone. We’d been reduced to small units and individuals, fighting for our lives. Just another gang rumble between the monsters and the civilized men—for as much as we could call ourselves civilized men.
As if to underscore the irony of that thought, we spent the rest of the night working our way through the fields, killing and burning—more often killing by burning—any Whites too injured to drag themselves to safety. Those who’d learned to fear our two-fisted punch of fire and gas, but were too stupid to flee into the forest, we drove into cattle trailers and locked them. Where they were hauled from there, I didn’t know and didn’t care.
The sun rose through a caustic haze that obscured everything more th
an a few hundred yards away, leaving it impossible to discern the scope of the mayhem. It felt like it went on forever. Endless terror. Endless suffering, and all of us, dead-tired as we trudged through the mud and ashen gore.
A little after midday, with nothing left to kill and no Whites left to corral, we recorded the stenciled jacket numbers on our dead, and loaded bodies into refrigerator trucks. Where were they headed? Again, no idea. Eventually we boarded the trucks that hauled us home to our barracks. Our livestock trailer had plenty of room on the return trip. We’d lost most of our trained Whites and half our yellows. Just not Mort, which was unfortunate. I was the only one of the three flamers who made it. And that was that. No funerals. No ceremonies. No tears. They’d died. Evolution had deemed them unfit. We survived, and they didn’t. That was the way of it in Bill’s bullshit army. That was the way he’d designed it—it was a gauntlet Slow Burns had to live through, to excel within, to prove their worth.
It sickened me. Slaughter on such a scale wasn’t healthy for any human to live through.
We hosed off under an outdoor shower behind the barracks, washing the blood and mud off our gear and bodies. Back inside, big pots of stew steamed into the air, filling the room with the oniony stink I’d smelled the day before. Just the day before. It already felt like a week.
Murphy had the yellows in charge of the Whites direct them onto their resting rack, where they were fed from grey stew pots. After, he lined us up, each in front of a bunk, by seniority. Or so I thought at the time. He had the prime place by a window at the end of the building. The low man had the bunk right next to the latrine holes. Lucky me. Since half of us didn’t come back from the night’s battle, being the low man meant I got a bunk halfway up the wall.
Then, we ate. Only from the yellow pots of stew, or so it was pointed out to me. The dull, gray pots were for the taints. The stringy meat used in their stew came from dead humans. We got beef, chicken, goats, or pork. At least that’s what everyone believed. That was what we’d been told. I didn’t want to eat any of it, but I was so damned hungry, and my immediate future promised to be brutal and hard. I’d need every calorie I could gob down my throat if I was going to survive.
60
“C’mon.” Still half-asleep, I looked up to see Murphy standing at the foot of my bunk. “Morning is the best time of the day, Sunshine. Let’s roll.”
I groaned, “Give me a minute.”
Most everyone in the barracks, the half of us left alive, were still sleeping.
Murphy headed for the door. “I’ll be outside.”
I took care of my morning necessities and geared up, not just because it was my habit, but because Stalag 17 had a rule about it—when outside the barracks, everybody had to be ready to fight. I didn’t strap on my flamethrower, though. Molotovs, tear-gas bombs, and flamethrowers stayed in the storage racks near the door until we were on our way to an actual fight.
Once I hooked up with Murphy outside, he said, “In a lot of ways, it’s like being back in the Army again.”
“But in a stupid way,” I guessed.
Murphy laughed. “Half of what we got up to back in the day made as little sense as the stupid shit we do around here.”
“Like going out to fight a horde of Whites and not bringing enough guys with us?”
Murphy stopped and pointed between the ramshackle buildings that housed other platoons. A black dirt field stretched so far into the morning mist it disintegrated into gray and merged with the sky. “You know how large the perimeter is we have to defend? We’re spread across three counties.”
“Three whole counties?”
Murphy laughed and started walking again. “Same old Zed. Always want to argue about nuthin’. I didn’t say three whole counties, just…just whatever.”
“Sorry.” He was right. I was slipping into jackass mode because I was tired and grumpy. And hungry, again. I had a lot of low-cal days to make up for.
We walked along in silence until Murphy pointed out one of the barracks. Unlike the others, it had windows on every wall, a wide, covered porch surrounding it, and comfortable chairs scattered under the awning. “Pluta and the seven stooges.”
“They live there?” I asked.
“Officers’ country. Nobody who isn’t one of them is allowed to step on the porch.”
That sounded like a challenge to me.
Murphy laughed again. “Don’t get any stupid ideas. Ain’t nuthin’ in there but soft beds and private showers. It’s like a damn hotel. What I heard, anyway.” He pointed out a red barn down past the rows of barracks. “Whore house.”
It was my turn to laugh. “You’re joking, right?”
Murphy pulled a sad face and shook his head. “Whites. Females. The Russell kind. Too stupid to survive on their own or even fight back. They chain ‘em to a cot. Hose ‘em off once a day. It’s disgusting.”
“Seriously?”
“Serious as a sad clown.”
“You ever go over there and…check it out?”
“Man, I don’t care if Preacher Dick tells me I’m immune to every STD on the planet, I got no interest in slippin’ my snake to some Bullwinkle skank who’s been gargling Cletus meat since breakfast. Besides, that ain’t how it works. A unit does a good job, Pluta gives them an hour of plowin’ down at the little red barn. We’re scheduled down there after lunch. Reward for what we did yesterday if you wanna see if your dick still works.”
I had no intention of participating in any of that, but it brought to mind a question. “Is everybody here a male?”
“At Camp 17, yep. Odd-numbered camps are male.” Murphy turned and pointed east. “Evens are all female. Back that way four miles or so, is Camp 16.”
“Grace and Jazz,” I asked, “are they there?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t even know where Steph is.” I turned to see if the trucks with the cattle trailers were still parked where we’d left them.
“Don’t get any ideas about those things,” Murphy told me.
“Murphy, I don’t know what kind of GI Joe bullshit this is supposed to be, but I need to get out of here and I need to find Steph.”
“Just be cool,” Murphy told me.
“I don’t want to be cool. I want to—” I didn’t know specifically what I wanted to do, but those trucks were the only vehicles I could see. They looked like tickets to freedom. Or something. “I don’t know what I need to do, Murphy. I don’t know what the hell is even going on here.”
Murphy laughed.
And that pissed me off, more than just a little bit. “I’m serious. I need to find Steph.”
“Dude,” Murphy laid one of his big hands on my shoulder. “Chill, okay? Steph is fine.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw her.”
“When? Where?”
“Just the other day. At her house.”
“What!” We were out in the field, well away from the barracks and the yellows starting to stir with the morning.
“What did they tell you?”
“Tell me?” I got a little angry. “I don’t need more questions. I need to know about Steph.”
“First off, dude. Chill. Steph is cool. She’s fine.”
“She has a house?”
“And a job. She works at the hospital. No surprise, man, she’s a nurse.”
“What the fuck?”
“I told you, Zed. You gotta chill. They didn’t tell you anything? Where have you been all this time?”
“In jail. In solitary.”
Murphy laughed. “I should have guessed something like that. So, what, you decided to have one of your tantrums and not cooperate?”
“You’re goddamned right I didn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but these shitheads invaded Bal and killed everybody.”
“Not technically accurate.”
I stopped and spun on Murphy. “I don’t want to play any more games, Murphy. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Dude, I’m not playing any
games. Let’s start with Steph. Like I said, she’s cool. They assigned her a cute little house four blocks from the hospital. They assigned her a job. A nurse, like I said.”
“She’s not well enough to—”
“They have a pretty good hospital here. At least that’s what Steph told me. It was actually a hospital before the collapse. Not a high school. They’ve about doubled the size of it since fall. Big place. All modern and shit.”
“And Steph?” I persisted.
“They’re treating her there. She works when she can. When she needs tests or treatments or whatever, they do that.”
I couldn’t believe it. “She’s getting chemo?”
“Some kind of…” Murphy took a moment, “Man, she told me. Had some fancy medical jabber about all of it. Gene therapy or something. Lots of cutting-edge research type stuff.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Dude, it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but one thing you need to take to the bank, is whatever we did out in Bal, it was bush league compared to what these people have going on here. We pretended like we were rebuilding what we lost. Here, they’re actually building something else.”
61
New Tejas, as Murphy understood it, started near Taylor, Texas, a small town of 15,000 before the collapse, sitting out in the farm country forty minutes northeast of Austin. Bill—nobody knew his last name—was a Slow Burn who discovered that he could capitalize on Whites’ inherent inclination to follow and mimic whichever one among them established itself as the alpha. Almost always the strongest, most brutish male.