by Bobby Adair
“You Null Spot?”
With no expression on my face—on purpose that way—I looked at the guy sitting in the other corner at the front of the trailer.
“Bull said you’d laugh if I called you that. Guess not.”
I shook my head. “Inside joke.”
“I’m Joe Peck. I got the bunk next to yours.” Peck looked like an athlete who’d been put through the ringer a few times too many. He spoke in an East Texas drawl, and he wore a few tattoos on his arms that to me implied military, or the kind a military man might get. But he was quiet, meaning it wasn’t just me he never talked to in the barracks. He didn’t seem to like anybody there. Just like me.
“Murphy tell you to talk to me?”
“More than that. He told me to look out for you.”
“I don’t think I need a babysitter.”
“You got no friends. Pluta doesn’t like you, and now you’re on the outs with the Bull.”
I sighed. “Me and Murphy are cool. It’s just a thing.”
“A thing?”
I shrugged, because I didn’t have any intention of explaining my Murphy situation to him or anybody. Not that I had any way of explaining it to myself.
Peck let it go. He leaned against the humming metal wall and stared out into the night. After a while, he said, “It gets better.”
“What gets better?”
“Being here. Dealing with this midnight-run bullshit. All of it.”
I shrugged again. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
“You were with that bunch we pulled out of the desert, right?”
That piqued my interest. A little. “We?”
Peck pointed at the taints sleeping or sitting and staring at nothing. “Pluta’s whole outfit was there. All of us. Man, ya’ll had a lot of bullets. Most folks don’t these days.”
“And?”
“Looked like a nice little place you had out there. I guess I wanted to say I was sorry is all.”
I didn’t accept Peck’s apology. “Everybody’s got to do what they’ve got to do.”
“I know what you’re trying to say. Like maybe the opposite of what you just said, but here you are. Here I am. There’s the Bull down there, riding in the back of this truck going somewhere we don’t want to go, to do something we don’t want to do.” He tapped the buzz bolt on his head. “We all got one of these. So yeah, everybody’s got to do what they got to do.”
“Sorry.” I meant it. I was acting like a jackass. “I’m…I don’t know. Enraged.”
“Rage don’t make nuthin’ better.”
I didn’t have any argument to make to the contrary, so I nodded.
In a tired voice, Peck told me, “I’ve been here a long time.”
“What does that mean?”
“I done my year, and I’m just waiting for word to come down from the lifers.”
“It’s like you’re talking another language.”
Peck scrutinized me. “They said you were high yellow. The Bull told me you weren’t retarded like most of these dumbasses.”
“They threw me into solitary for a month in some prison out there in Bill’s Fucktopia. When they finally let me out, they handed me over to Pluta, who proceeded to zap me silly and leave me in the barracks. I suppose that’s where you first saw me. And that’s just about all I know about everything in New Tejas. So, no. I’m not a brain-fried taint. I just don’t know what the hell is going on here, except like you said, I’m in this goddamned truck going somewhere I don’t want to go to do something I don’t want to do, to somebody who surely doesn’t deserve it.”
65
“You want me to fill you in?”
I nodded. “Just not right now, because I’ll be honest with you, if I hear too much more crap about how screwed I am here, I’m as likely to pick up this flamethrower and burn every bastard in this trailer as I am to take another breath.”
“Bull said you had propensity to slip into a mood now and again.”
I laughed at that. “A propensity?”
Peck smiled.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I suppose.” I stared out into the night, feeling the cold wind blow across my face. I needed to talk to Murphy. I needed to smooth things over. I needed to get out of my mood, before it consumed me. “Tell me about yourself, Peck. Back before all this business with the virus went down, were you a happy kid? Leave it to Beaver family? Anything like that?”
“I’m afraid Leave it to Beaver was before my time. How old are you?”
“Not that old. The show used to come on one of those cable channels that played the old 60s and 70s sitcoms. It was a black-and-white show, about some kid with a perfect family living in a perfect house in a perfect little town, where everything was always just swell. The kid always got into trouble, of course. His dad would give him a talking to and teach him a lesson. The mom would bake brownies and lemonade and shit like that. Growing up, I always wanted to live in that house. In that show, where nothing really bad ever happened.”
Peck laughed. “You’re an odd one.”
“I think I’m tired, too. I think I’ve been tired for a long, long time and just didn’t know it.”
“We lived in Alaska when I was a kid,” Peck told me. “Four years. Clean air. Mountains and forests go on forever. I loved it there.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“I thought you only wanted the happy parts.” Peck paused while he waited for me not to respond. “You do a year in Bill’s service and you get a choice. Stay or go. Like I said, by my count, my year’s up. I’ve been thinking a lot about going back up to Alaska. Can’t imagine many folks are up there these days. Hard to believe any of these taints could make it through a winter up there.”
“Long way to Alaska.”
“The way they tell it around here, we might live forever, you and me.” Peck laughed. The idea of it seemed just as fantastical to him as it did to me. “I figure I can work my way up there. Might take a year or two. Find me a place by a river. Catch all the salmon in the run to keep me fed all year. Then, I’ll just wait. Spend me some time on the porch in the spring, listening to the birds and the wind in the trees. One day, all this shit down here, it’ll blow over. Things will go back to normal. Life could be good again. One day.” Peck ran out of things to say after that.
I kept my opinion about one day to myself, and the darkness rumbled past. One of my favorite rumination topics started chugging through my thoughts. “Hey Peck, you know anything about these buzz bolts?”
“Like?” he asked.
“You ever see anyone pry one off?”
He shook his head.
“You ever try?”
He shook his head again.
“Do you believe it’ll really explode if you try to take it off?”
“Nope.”
“Then why not yank it off and go over the wire?”
“Don’t matter much anymore.”
“Why?”
“My time’s almost up here. I’ll be a free man before you know it.”
Murphy stood up down at the far end of the trailer, and called, “Saddle up, dipshits. We got a silent hike through the dark for two miles. We do it fast and quiet, just like we practice it. We do that, and it’s done before you know it. Nobody gets hurt. We all go home. Wranglers, keep those damn taints silent. Zap them if you have to.”
Our semi crunched to a stop on a dirt road with dust drifting in through the trailer’s air holes. The rear gates clanged open.
“Let’s bail,” shouted Murphy. “Time to see if you got dicks or tits.”
66
I didn’t know where we were. It was dark. But sunshine wouldn’t have helped much. Most of central Texas looked the same—low rolling hills, stands of oak, mesquite or cedar, and pastureland, all crisscrossed by rugged little creeks and two-lane county roads. The few rivers and interstate highways were the major landmarks, but most of the signage had deteriorated, was stolen for raw materials, or was shot full of holes b
y bored survivors tired of the humdrum of starving between meals.
We had a partial moon, so I was able to make out the shape of our objective, a factory below us in a shallow valley. It wasn’t in town, but it wasn’t exactly out of it. Dilapidated houses stood along a dirt road that led into a grid of more houses that might have turned into a town somewhere in the darkness past the next rise. Didn’t matter. We weren’t there to scavenge the town. The rumor passing between the halfwit yellows and overheard by me held that we were raiding an ammunition factory run by eleven normals.
Was it an ammunition factory? That possibility seemed a little far-fetched to me, but people found their niche where they could. For someone who knew their pyrotechnic chemistry and had access to the chemicals, manufacturing bullets from recycled casings could be a lucrative living. On the other hand, given that most of the yellows in the platoon, and in our whole battalion, could barely count to five or speak a grammatically correct sentence, it really could have been any number of anybodies doing anything in the rusting building below.
I’d have asked my new friend, Joe Peck, but Pluta had commandeered him as a runner. Maybe his seven stooges had gone lazy.
I decided that none of that mattered, as long as I understood my role. This being a standard surprise-and-capture mission, much like the one that had taken out Lyle’s farm the night before the main force did pretty much the same thing to Balmorhea, my job didn’t involve doing anything except standing by. The halfwit wranglers with their squads of Whites had the main duty. They’d rush in and manually subdue any normals—all normals—taking as many casualties as necessary, because Whites were a dime a dozen—cheaper actually—and normals were rare and precious. If the plan went off the rails, I was along as the nuclear option. It would be my job, along with the flamers in the other units, to torch everything. By the Bill Doctrine (I was picking up new tidbits, practically by the minute) once he set his sights on some newly discovered band of survivors, if Bill couldn’t have them and their goodies, nobody would.
The signal to advance came, silently.
Murphy waved us to follow.
We jumped to our feet and jogged single-file down the slope.
Across the shallow valley, other units were doing the same thing. We were attacking from three sides. Again, if the bits and pieces of info I’d garnered from the rumor mill were correct. Strength-wise, we numbered four hundred. Plenty to capture thirteen sleeping factory workers.
At a hundred yards from a chain-link fence, we squatted in the grass while a pair of yellows ran forward with wire cutters to make a hole for us to file through.
All was dark and silent. Too silent, because all of us sneaking through the tall, brown grass had scared every noisy night critter into hiding.
We waited.
A yellow out in the darkness—almost certainly one of Pluta’s stooges—screamed for the attack. Four hundred more of us hollered as we jumped to our feet and charged.
Gunfire instantly erupted from the factory windows.
I knew enough about the way surprise was supposed to work to peg that gunfire as a bad sign.
Two machine guns in a tower just inside the fence on our side of the factory ripped through a hundred rounds, sending tracers across the compound and into the line of Whites I was following through the hole in the chain-link. White’s burst open as rounds tore through their bodies. Blood mist filled the air.
Without even thinking what to do, I raced to the right to get out of the line of fire that was way too accurate to be plain old eyeball work. I dove into a shallow ditch, with my flamethrower rig coming down hard on my back.
A spray of bullets shredded the ground an arm’s length in front of me. I crawled toward some thorny shrubs, because I knew if I stayed put, I’d die.
I heard Murphy shouting orders, and guessed he had to be inside the compound already.
Screams cried out from all around, the blood-curdling yell of those still on the attack, and the pained wail of those whose bodies had been mangled by the gunfire.
Those damn machine guns in the tower, they were massacring us. I was watching their tracers cut across the ground like lasers, exploding in the dirt and shredding everything they touched. And I was okay with that, until I realized one was zeroing in on the area where I heard Murphy’s voice booming orders to my halfwit comrades.
Without even deciding how to react, my fuck-it meter overloaded and my rational thought processes slipped off the rails. I jumped to my feet and made a run for the fence, leaping over the butchery as the machine guns thundered down from above.
My foot caught on a coil of intestines and I stumbled.
The owner shrieked at the feel of his innards dragging through the grass.
I didn’t spare a thought on the gore, just pulled the loop off my boot, picked myself up, sprinted for the hole in the fence, and dove through.
A metal something banged loudly somewhere off to my left.
An explosion reverberated through the factory.
People screamed and both machine guns sprayed the far corner of the building.
That was my opening. I tore away from the fence, running as fast as I could directly at the tower. When I knew I was close enough, I took a few more long strides, and slid down to a knee. I dialed my gas on, primed the striker and lit the pilot, all in the space of a breath.
Whether the guys in the tower saw the blue flame or not, it didn’t matter.
I pointed my weapon up and blasted an engulfing geyser of fire at them.
They screamed and flailed in a wild fast-forward dance, like demons born of flame.
One leaped out of the tower, thudded on the ground not twenty feet in front of me, and writhed silently.
The inferno above popped as the ammunition stored up there started cooking off.
A cheer, or what passed for it among the Whites, erupted from down by the factory walls.
Our expendables had broken through the defenses to get inside. More Whites would die, and probably some of the factory people, too, but nothing would change the outcome. We’d won.
I hoped I’d saved Murphy with my quick action, but that hope arrived bound to the horror that I’d saved scores of Bill’s taints, and I’d immolated two normals to do it. All of it together left me feeling sick and bone-weary.
67
Being the keeper of the flame—all sarcasm intended—I didn’t have any duties in the aftermath, except to be ready to torch any gangs of feral Whites who might wander over hills to see what was up. There hadn’t been any, not on my side of the factory. My flame brother counterparts from another platoon had been assigned to the front gate of the compound, the one on the road leading into the town. They’d stayed pretty busy through the night, burning feral Whites by the hundreds. I guess the action had died down since sunup.
Bored, I spent most of my time watching Bill’s smash-and-grab operation in progress. It seemed Pluta and his counterparts had everything they came for, including twenty-three live prisoners kneeling in the dirt. A good mix of men and women. A variety of ages. Half of them looked like they were in their twenties, which meant they’d been children when the virus destroyed the world. They’d grown up in the current version of FUBAR Earth. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for them or proud.
Pluta was down there, preening in front of his stooges while they made sexual gestures in the direction of a pretty red-haired girl at the end of the line. Pretty and defiant. She reminded me of a younger Steph. Even with the distance, I saw she had the same severe eyes. She was captured, but not cowed. I figured she’d be one to go over the wire once let loose back in Bill’s Master-Planned Pick-Nose Paradise.
“You okay?”
I looked up from my trance to see Murphy, haggard and dirty, standing a few paces away, and realized I’d been spending way too many hours getting lost in my thoughts. It was a bad habit in a world with so many dangers. “Fucked up night.”
Murphy silently agreed.
“It’s gon
na be pretty empty in the barracks tonight.” I meant it as a joke, except that it lacked any kind of humor.
Murphy half-assed a chuckle anyway.
I cocked my head at the teams of men hauling machinery and materials out of the factory. Other crews loaded the equipment onto waiting semis hauling flatbed trailers. “Did we get what we came for?”
“Intel said it was a munitions factory. Seems to be that.”
“And the workers, too. I feel so proud of myself.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”
“If it wasn’t for the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be suited for anything at all.”
“It’s not funny and it’s not true.”
“True enough.”
Murphy sighed. “They’re pissed at you.”
“They?”
“Pluta and the stooges.”
“Big fuckin’ deal.”
“You’ve got KP duty and you’re confined to camp for three months.”
“Wasn’t I already confined to camp?”
“After the first action, guys get a hall pass once a month.”
“A hall pass?” I laughed. “This place is more retarded than I thought.”
“Some guys have girlfriends down at Camp 16.”
“No interest, so no big deal.”
“Except, the hall pass gets you into town if you’re a high yellow. You could have seen Steph.”
“And nobody told me this?”
“Because you’ve been giving everyone the junior-high silent treatment, and they know you’re flipping them off when they turn around.”
I had no response for that what wasn’t going to make Murphy’s case for him. “Exactly why did big daddy ground me?”