Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  “With no hands, heads, or feet.” It wasn’t a complaint. It wasn’t a judgement. I was so far into the danger zone of what-the-fuck, my mouth was starting to pick my thoughts at random and just pop them into the air.

  “You can see we got some pinky girlie girls in the pile.” Stinky Pete dragged his grimy hand across his mouth, spending a little too much time rubbing his lips. Most of the cadavers had been Whites before their demise. Three—a male and two females, if I was guessing correctly—given the jumble of limbs and torsos, had been normals. “You save them ‘til the end before you do ‘em. The boys sometimes wanna get a last use out of ‘em before they go in the pot.”

  “A last use?”

  “What kinda shit-shame dumbass are you, I gotta explain everything? They cold, but they warm up.”

  I felt an urge to puke the bile out of my empty stomach.

  “First you peel ‘em,” Stinky Pete told me. “Slice ‘em down the front, from throat to taint, and down the arms and legs. One piece. That’s what boss man wants. You scrape them skins of all them fatty goody bits. The bits go in the cookpot. Skins go in the brine.” He pointed out a barrel of rancid liquid with no cover. It was one of several swarming with flies.

  “The meat goes in the silver bin.” He pointed out a maggoty metal container, large enough to hold fifty gallons of water. “You cut them bits up about yea big.” He showed made an OK sign with his fat fingers. “No bigger or I’ll come back and cram all of it up your shit shame stink hole. You got it, taint? Or you want I should thump your melon ‘til your brain makes a grind?”

  I was starting to doubt whether me and Pete spoke the same language.

  He pointed out another bin with a worn black X painted on the front. “You take that tripe, and you squeeze ever sticky lump of that shit in there. Makes a good fertilizer that.” A third bin was marked with a white X. “Bones. We grind ‘em up and spread ‘em on the fields. Think about that next time you’re gnawing your corn off the cob.” Stinky Pete laughed himself silly over that. “Most important thing, don’t waste nuthin’. Them taints, they’ll eat all the rest ah this in one form or another. You get busy on them jibs. If I come in here and find you loafin’, I’ll stick my foot so far up yer ass you’ll have to chew my toenails to eat your shit shame breakfast.” At that, he stormed out like he’d lost his temper about something I couldn’t see.

  I stared at the corpse on the table. A man. Extra pale because he’d been drained of blood. Killing Whites, that was one thing. Seeing their bodies out in the wild, freshly dead, desiccated in a wrecked car, or crawling with vermin as they rotted, I’d grown numb to those through the years. But butchering one?

  “I don’t hear that cleaver cuttin’ nuthin’,” shouted Stinky Pete from the next room. “Work, you shit shame taint.”

  With no other options, and no ideas, short of running across the unplowed fields screaming like an idiot, I sliced.

  72

  In a world without clocks and watches, at least within my world as a high yellow taint trapped a living nightmare, I had no idea how late it was when I finished. I only knew it was full dark out. Most of the kitchen staff regulars were finished with their daily duties and were getting drunk on homemade hooch out behind the building and I was cleaning my workspace. Cleaning why? Only the heavens knew why. Stinky Pete hadn’t asked it or ordered it. I’d spent a day butchering humans for their meat while a train of deranged perverts took turns humping a cold corpse on the pile just behind me.

  At least I’d discovered a silver lining. The food for Stalag 17 was processed on two tracks—that for the yellows, and that for the Whites. I toiled at the first step of the taints’ food chain. From the glimpses I caught through the swinging doors into the cooking areas, yellows were fed normal foods—farm animal meats, grains, and vegetables. Granted, none of it looked first-rate. Likely the poorer quality products not fit for the normals in Taylor Town. And it certainly wasn’t prepared with any adherence to a health and safety code. It as a wonder ptomaine or salmonella hadn’t killed all of us already.

  Before leaving, I checked with Stinky Pete, or that’s to say, I asked his permission to be dismissed. He was so blitzed I don’t think he even recognized me. Just the same, I left, hoping for another mission out of camp to fight anybody, anywhere, the next day, so I wouldn’t have to go back to KP jib-chop duty. Or—well, that ‘or’ promised a host of possibilities. Could I tear ass across the empty fields outside Stalag 17 until I found the barbed wire perimeter? Getting through it would only take time and care. What security measures did New Tejas employ on its perimeter besides coils of spikey wire? Sadly, I had no idea. But they had to have something. That was certain. If I rushed into the darkness not knowing what lethal pitfalls awaited me there, I’d likely wake up in the morning dead. Except that I wouldn’t wake up, because I’d be a corpse, waiting to be processed into taint kibble in the back room of Stinky Pete’s Chophouse and Grotesquery.

  Not to mention Steph, Murphy, Grace, and Jazz. Had Grace or Jazz been killed in some FUBAR mission to rob a derelict convenience store in Waco? For all I knew, they were all dead, except that Murphy had seen Steph, just—how many days ago was it?

  God, I needed sleep.

  And I needed a meal. Despite how disgusted I was by what I’d been doing all day, my body was still in starvation mode from my time in lockup.

  Plodding in the general direction of the barracks, but lost in my head, as I’d been so much lately, I heard a scream and stopped. I wasn’t but twenty paces from the backside of the stooge hut. Raucous voices carried through the thin walls. Firelight flickered shadows across the windows. My curiosity tempted me to step up onto the forbidden porch for a peek through those windows.

  Someone—a woman—pleaded, “No. No…” Followed by another scream. A weak one. Definitely from inside.

  I stepped toward the stooge hut porch but stopped. The defect in my nature that drove me to jump feet-first into Null Spot mode sizzled in my head, compelling me to act despite the thousand rational reasons not to. But none of those reasons had ever stopped me before.

  In fact, they didn’t stop me then, as I was on the porch and peering through a window before I’d even decided to do anything but stand there in the dark and try to Sherlock my way through the clues, wasting valuable do-time in seduction. Inside, in what I guessed was a common perversity in Stalag 17, someone was stripped bare, bruised, and bent over the rough-hewn dining table, ankles bound to the table legs, arms wrapped around the top, wrists tied together.

  Pluta had his hands on her hips, riding her as she whimpered. More than one stooge masturbated as he watched. Then the girl raised her head and looked directly at me, more precisely, at her reflection in the dark window, and I saw who it was—the twenty-something redhead from the bullet factory we’d raided, the one Pluta and his stooges had their pervert sights set on, a normal, but too special to surrender to Bill, one of those who made up the missing difference between nineteen and twenty-three.

  I grabbed a chair off the porch and was lifting it to throw through the window when a strong hand grasped my shoulder. “Don’t.”

  73

  I looked at the hand, saw the familiar tattooed forearm. It was Peck.

  “Put the chair down and step off the porch,” he told me. “You know what they’ll do if they find you out here peepin’ on ‘em.”

  I glanced up at the chair I had poised to throw. “This isn’t a common peeping stance.”

  He tugged on my shoulder. “Let’s talk about it down there in the dirt.”

  “Can’t.”

  “You wanna jump through that window and go all Spider Spot or whatever it is Murphy says about you, I’m not gonna stop you. All I’m asking is that you put that chair down for a sec’, step down and think it through first.” Peck let go of me, quietly crossed the porch planks, and hopped down to the dirt. “C’mon. I’m just askin’ for a minute or two to talk.”

  Feeling on the verge of detonating, I silently pla
ced the chair back on its four feet. I painfully turned away from the window, away from the young woman who reminded me so much of Steph.

  “For just a minute,” Peck urged.

  I backed to the edge of the porch and hopped down.

  “That’s right,” Peck told me. “Breathe. It’ll make your brain start thinking again.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Like I told you in the truck. Bull told me to keep an eye.”

  “And you’ve just been wandering out here in the dark in case I came by?” It sounded like an accusation, but an accusation of what? I didn’t even know.

  “Bull rolled me off my bunk and asked me where you were.”

  “Didn’t we go through all of this with Pluta this morning? How did it turn into a mystery?”

  “It’s late. KP don’t usually last this long. The Bull thought maybe you ran off. So, I come out lookin’ for you.”

  “KP is a horror show.” I didn’t know what else to say about that.

  “Jib day?” asked Peck.

  That surprised me. But then, I had a tendency to personalize life’s troubles in a way that made it hard to see their ubiquity.

  “Yeah,” Peck went on. “Anybody who gets KP duty gets jib day. Eventually. I didn’t eat for days after my first time.”

  I looked back at the window. The gang rape was still going strong. “You’re going to blabber on about anything, because you think once my emotions stop running amok, you’ll be able to talk reason to me.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in those words, but does you guessing my intent make it a bad idea?”

  I shook my head. “Murphy thinks I’m crazy half the time. He thinks I do things irrationally, but I—”

  “Do you?” asked Peck. “I mean really, do you?”

  “I’m like anybody else, I guess. I make emotional choices, and like everybody else, I rationalize my choices with a bunch of logic and facts so I can feel like I’m intelligent and sensible. Righteous, even.”

  “I’m not sure if what you’re talking about has anything to do with anything, but I don’t think you should throw that chair through that window.”

  “Fine. Why don’t you convince me why I shouldn’t kill Pluta and every stooge in that room?”

  “For starters, every one of them has a clicker-zapper. Unless Spider Spot has a superpower—”

  “Null Spot. Murphy calls me Null Spot when…whatever. That’s what it is, not Spider Spot or whatever.”

  Peck rolled his eyes. “Unless Null Spot has a superpower nobody knows about, or an automatic weapon stuffed in his drawers, there’s no way he, meaning you, can take out every one of them before they zap your brain. Once they do that, you’re dead. It’s just a matter of getting’ around to the dyin’ after they’re done with makin’ you suffer.”

  “That’s the thing about that part,” I told him. “That’s exactly the kind of shit I’m really good at making work out for me. I think people, in general, are never ready for the unexpected. They never prepare for someone who’s willing to go at them balls to the wall, risking everything to do it. Deep down, everybody expects everybody else to make rational, safe choices. So, I have an advantage.”

  “The Bull sure was right about you,”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “You sure can lay down a fine layer of shiny bullshit.”

  I put one foot back up on the porch. “Whatever.”

  “I guess the real question is, why risk it?”

  I looked through the window again. From my angle down on the ground, all I could see were roof joists and flickering shadows. “Go on.”

  “A pretty girl like that, in an ugly world like this,” Peck shook his head and grimaced. “They probably got to her two or three times before she turned eighteen. Probably lost count by now how many times it happened.”

  “That’s a shitty, shitty way to look at things.”

  “Ain’t about point of view. It’s about seeing the world the way it is.”

  “Maybe where you’ve been,” I told him. “Balmorhea wasn’t like that. And it sure as hell wasn’t anything like this gonzo shitshow.”

  “Well, ya’ll must have had it good out there in the desert. Out here in the rest of the world, that pretty girl in there, this kind of thing happens all the time.”

  I wasn’t willing to accept that as any kind of reasoning to do nothing.

  “Let’s say you go in there,” Peck went on. “Let’s say you manage to kill Pluta and the stooges without getting zapped. You save the girl. What then? You gonna un-rape her?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Exactly what I’m saying. She’s already there. What’s done is already done. If she gets a little more or less, do you think you going in there to stop it right now is going to make a difference in how she feels about what’s already happened?”

  I ground my teeth, trying to come up with a counterargument.

  Peck told me, “What I’m saying is, you can’t undo it.”

  “She’ll feel better if I kill Pluta.”

  “Don’t you mean you’ll feel better? Are you honestly telling me that you know jumping through that window and slaying her attacker is going to save her? Will it all work out better for her now? What if she gets hurt while you’re in there going balls to the wall? What if you fail, and Pluta takes his anger out on the girl? What happens then?”

  “You just want me to walk away from this nightmare clusterfuck?” I spat.

  “What I’m telling you,” Peck grabbed my arm to hammer his point home, “is this ain’t the first time Pluta and his stooges skimmed a normal out of the round up. Everybody wants to fuck a normal. What you got to know is, they’re valuable. Pluta and his shitbirds always let ‘em go when they get bored. And they always get bored. Eventually. They drop ‘em off in Taylor Town or leave ‘em outside the wire.”

  “So, she could be in there for days. Or weeks.”

  Peck said, “If a man knew the girl was going to survive this, and he wanted to kill Pluta and the stooges the right way, he’d let this here mess go for tonight. He’d serve up his justice so he could get away with it, like out on a mission, like when he had a full tank of fuel in his flamethrower. If a man did it that way, especially if he had the good sense to look over his shoulder to make sure there weren’t no witnesses, he could burn every ounce of rotten flesh off Pluta’s bones. He could torch the stooges. Justice would be served. The girl would be safe. The man could fight another good fight later. No risk. No punishment. Now wouldn’t that turn out better than you just jumping through the window on a whim, armed with nothin’ but a wood chair and your sense of right?”

  I turned and walked into the dark. “Just so you know, I am going to kill Pluta and all of those stooges. And if I can swing it, I’m going to find this Bill character and murder him, too.”

  “While you’re doing all this killing, how you gonna have time to get your girl out and escape? Seriously, how?”

  74

  Four days passed.

  I spent one of them peeling carrots, skinning onions, and dicing potatoes. I spent another chopping firewood and washing pots. It took me two full days in the grease traps to spoon rubberized tallow out of the clogged drainpipes. Those days left me standing under the frigid outdoor shower at night, using handfuls of mud to scrub rendered human fat off my skin while the rest of the camp slept.

  With no missions for us to load up into the livestock trailers, yellows from the camp came and went. Some trundled off to Taylor Town. Many hiked down to the skank camp. Though, I scolded myself for thinking of it that way. Grace and Jazz were in just such a female battalion, or whatever the hell Bill’s corps called the military unit stationed at each camp. No one seemed to know. Or care.

  I worried about Grace and Jazz but could do nothing at all but hope for the best for them. I had no way to contact them. Another of Bill’s military rules. No email—doh, almost. No cellphones for yellows. No mail. No long-distance
communication of any type. Our only hope of finding Jazz and Grace was for Murphy to run into someone from Balmorhea in town, someone who happened to know something about them. Long odds.

  Murphy hadn’t had any luck convincing Pluta to give me a compassion pass or something of the sort. Unfortunately, Pluta was a pucker-mouth asshat, and my answer was a hard no.

  Murphy visited her, though. He told me she was having a hard time of it. His words, not hers. She didn’t want me to worry, but I’d badgered Murphy into total honesty. That honesty in its totality was harder to take than I’d imagined. Steph had first noticed an oddly shaped mole on the edge of her lip two years back. When I was out on a week-long scouting run with Murphy, Jazz, and Grace, Steph had the doctor surgically remove the mole. Turned out, it was cancerous. Melanoma. Since then, she’d had seven other spots removed. All while I was out of town, because her main concern was me. She guessed the worry would weigh too heavy on me, so she chose to bear the emotional burden alone. She wanted us to be happy with the time she had left.

  Steph knew she couldn’t keep treating the melanoma with minor surgeries forever. Eventually it was going to metastasize. Before we were ousted from Balmorhea, she suspected the cancer was doing just that. The hospital there couldn’t confirm her suspicion because it didn’t have the diagnostic tools. The hospital in Taylor Town did. The cancer was in her lungs, liver, and lymph nodes.

  Murphy had hope, because that was his way. Steph pretended to, but she wasn’t good with any kind of dishonesty. To me, it sounded like a death sentence, which meant only one thing—I absolutely, positively, needed to get to her.

  Which is why I was out of the barracks in the middle of the night, sneaking into the cab of one of our battalion’s transport semis, looking at the controls, and trying to figure out how everything worked. Once I kicked the starter and the engine roared, half the camp would wake up. After that, my plan was little more than fuzzy aspiration, but it ended with me and Steph barreling through the perimeter gates and racing for the Rocky Mountains.