Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  Why the Rockies? Because I knew if Steph could go anywhere in the world, the Colorado Rockies would be the place.

  As for Murphy, he’d understand, but I couldn’t tell him. I knew he’d stop me. That left Grace and Jazz. I didn’t have an answer for them. All I could do was promise myself I’d come back and find them. Someday. Somehow. I only really knew that I was slipping deeper into bull-bore crazy, the more I imagined Steph lying alone in a hospital. I had no choice.

  I turned the handle installed where the keyhole had been before. I flipped the switch to warm the glow plugs and waited for the yellow light to change color. I didn’t know how to find my way to Taylor Town. I didn’t know how to find the hospital once I got there. I knew last-moment inspiration had never failed me before. That would have to do.

  A switch in the dashboard clicked and the glow plug indicator changed to green. With no reason to dwell on the unknowns or second-guess myself into paralysis, I cranked the engine. It rumbled right up. I gassed it, then shoved the big rig into gear.

  Rolling out of the parking lot, I picked a right-hand turn.

  I checked my big rearview mirror to see a pair of men dashing past the parked trucks, only to come to a stop as they watched my taillights disappear in the darkness. That meant I’d have chasers coming soon. Totally expected. The diesel was much too loud for me to get away clean.

  I pushed the pedal to the metal. I needed all the speed I could muster.

  75

  I took the first turn I came to, figuring that getting off the road I’d last been seen on was a smart thing for making me harder to find. After all, New Tejas was spread across three counties of mostly flat farmland. It was crisscrossed with hundreds of miles of pre-collapse roads. In the dark, it would be easy to disappear. And get lost.

  I cut my headlights and slowed, choosing to steer by moonlight. My eyes, always dilated because of the virus, adjusted as far as they could to the dark. I covered a few more miles, made a few more turns, and didn’t spend any thought as to where I was headed. And it didn’t matter. I only had a rough idea of where I’d started.

  Through my time at Stalag 17, and especially on our violent little excursions, I’d put together some clues from landmarks and faded signs I’d seen along the roads, pegging the camp’s location ten miles east, northeast of Lake Granger. Which meant we were twenty miles or so northeast of Taylor Town. My plan, as it developed, was to make my way south until I crossed Highway 79, an east-west road that cut through Taylor. After crossing 79, I’d drive another five miles or so south, and then cut northwest on a convenient county road so I could approach Taylor from an unexpected direction. With any luck, by the time I eventually arrived in Taylor, any of Bill’s militia on the hunt for me would think that I’d buggered off the reservation somewhere and was long gone.

  That was my hope, anyway.

  So, I stopped the truck and climbed out, scanning the sky as I slowly turned. With the moon not yet high in the sky, I found the Big Dipper down near the horizon. One thing about post-apoc skies—light pollution was a thing of the past. The two stars that made up the end of the Dipper’s scooper were Merak and Dubhe. Imagining a straight line through those two stars, I followed it across the sky until I found the end of the handle of the Little Dipper—Polaris, the North Star. It was a navigational trick Dalhover taught me long, long ago, one I’d used more times than I could remember. It was all I needed to find my cardinal directions and keep my stolen big rig running south.

  I burned three hours driving up and down roads almost too narrow for my rig to fit. I shattered the windshield on overhanging branches an hour into my maze run, and I’d had to back track three or four times after finding myself facing a low-water crossing that had been washed out, or was piled with so much flood debris, it was impassable. By then, half of the Big Dipper had sunk below the horizon. The moon was so high and brightening the sky—the Little Dipper was hard to find and Polaris nearly invisible.

  Nevertheless, all proceeded to plan. I’d come across a downed road sign just outside an eyeblink of a hamlet called Beyersville that confirmed I was on the road to Taylor. Four miles further, I crested a rise and noticed a faint glow so out of place I had to pull over and climb up on top of the truck’s cab for a clear looksee. It was the kind of light I’d seen a thousand times at night, but not once since before the fall. It had to be Taylor Town.

  I climbed back into the cab, revved the noisy metal monster under the hood, and rolled.

  76

  Well, the best laid plans…or so they say.

  And damn them for always being so right about everything.

  A pair of headlights, along with a set of blues and reds, flashed to unexpected brilliance on the road behind me.

  “A cop car?” I hollered, as surprised as I was angry, pushing my gas pedal to the floor and turning on my headlights at the same time. Why not? Those hours of rolling slowly through the dark had clearly been a waste of time.

  With the two-lane road illuminated ahead of me, I felt pretty comfortable pushing my rig up to fifty, then sixty. Even seventy felt safe on the long straightaway. Potholes and lumps in the pavement bounced me out of my seat, and rattled my trailer so loudly, I thought it might detach.

  Undeterred, I buckled my safety belt, guessing what lay ahead—a trap.

  Why else have the cop car illuminate, if not to herd me towards it?

  I scanned the darkness for a turnoff that I already knew wouldn’t be there. After all, why lay a trap on a section of road where an exit existed? I glanced left and right. The ditches on both sides were thick with weeds. A culvert I passed betrayed their depth. There’d be no barreling through for a run across the open farmland.

  But what lay ahead? My long-ago-disabused movie-based intuition led me to guess at a handful of cars blocking the road, with dudes in Smokey the Bear hats hidden behind, pointing their guns at me.

  I blasted the truck’s air horn, and then did it again.

  I lined my rig up on the road’s faded center stripe, and ran through a few thought experiments—wild-ass guesses, really—trying to figure out whether it would be better to slow down and push through a roadblock at low speed, letting my brawny engine and ten-speed transmission do the work, or to max my speed and depend on momentum to obliterate anything in my way.

  As if reading my thoughts, a handful of police cruisers blinked on, beaming high-beam headlights and colorful flashers across the road.

  Finally deciding that movie physics never really worked in the real world, and that a calamitous collision with a parked automobile would likely have a detrimental effect on my ability to drive, I let off the gas, and squeezed my brain for a big dose of instant brilliance. That’s when I caught a flash of bland color in the beam of my headlights, just off the road, realizing as I passed that it was a man. With his arm outstretched. With something in his hand.

  My brain convulsed.

  The electricity shocked me into a version of reality where my powerful momentum machine plunged into the ditch in a scream of skidding tires and shrieking metal.

  77

  Every time I wake after a bonk on the head, I’m confused. It’s like human brains weren’t designed for the sudden impacts of the modern world. Or devo-modern, if that was the right way to think of a society tumbling in the wrong direction on the technology tree.

  Lying in the road with my face pressed against the asphalt, blue and red lights pierced the night at unexplained angles. I felt wet. Everything hurt, especially my head. My mouth tasted bloody. My mashed nose wasn’t letting any air through. My eyes were swollen to squinty slits. My arms were twisted behind my back, immobile. My ankles felt stuck together. Bound? Why not. Or my limbs were shattered, and that was why I couldn’t move. I vaguely recalled fragments of my escape, the chase—that paralyzing zap, and my eighteen-wheeled freedom beast rolling and crunching.

  Men talked among themselves, though for some reason, the words wouldn’t process into sentences in my head. But their
feet—their boots, to be precise—were way too close to my face for me to feel comfortable, so, suffering an enormous pain in my neck and all down my back, I lifted my head and turned away. That’s when I saw the overturned semi, twisted in the ditch, but still on the road, metal and glass scattered across the asphalt, and some kind of greasy green liquid running everywhere. Especially beneath me, soaking my clothes and making me wonder if I were moments from being roasted alive.

  With my face literally right on the road and my nose not functioning in any fashion, I only had one way to measure my predicament—I licked. I’d expected diesel or high-octane gasoline, but tasted old rubber and burnt oil. Something deep in my subconscious presented me with a guess—radiator fluid.

  At least I wasn’t going to flare into a puff of ash.

  That was something.

  Suddenly weary, too weary, I closed my eyes and drifted into never-never land.

  78

  I woke again, with strong hands under my arms, dragging me down the road. I didn’t care where. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did. I didn’t have the wherewithal to stand, let alone resist in any sufficient sense. So, I said, “Ouch.”

  I guess I passed out before I got a response.

  When lucidity found me again, I was sitting in the back of a patrol car. Not the first time I’d been there. But it had been, so, so, so long since the last time. Deciding that sitting took more stamina than I had in reserve, and hurt more than I wanted to suffer, I let myself fall over onto the seat. Maybe not a great choice, because a pain in my hip felt like a knife starting to dig into the joint. I didn’t have the strength to sit myself back up, though. So, I lay there, breathing through my mouth and wishing I wasn’t such a reactionary idiot sometimes.

  I wished I had one of those mental constitutions that allowed me to plot and scheme, bide my time, and get my revenge safe and cold. Kind of what Peck talked about. But that wasn’t me. Emotions too often ruled. It was one of the reasons Steph and I made such a prime pair—we were opposites. I was fire and she was ice. I was passion, and she was calm reason. My reason came straight from the gut—I was rage in a man-shaped wrapper. She was wisdom in a goddess’s stark beauty.

  I dreamed of her when I fell asleep, or something like it. I just let myself slip out of the hurt of my reality, while my mind drifted through old memories. I recalled the time we sat atop the hill, looking down on Balmorhea and the desert plain all around. It was the day I decided to stay in Bal, the day I knew I couldn’t run from the love I felt for her. Not if I wanted to remain whole. Not if I ever wanted to smile again.

  Something changed in the world that day. We became two halves of something more than either of us had ever been before. And we were always that. Through everything that happened in Bal, the good and the bad, the hard times and the easy years.

  We used to share our dreams, she and I. Mostly her, because I didn’t have any. The future was something I’d spent too much of my life ignoring because it wasn’t anything special to me. Nothing but the tomorrow after tomorrow. Just another yesterday with a different calendar date attached. Until Steph.

  She talked about Colorado when she was in a dreamy mood. Her father had been a doctor who owned a condo in Aspen. When she was a girl, she spent long weekends and winter holidays there, skiing the white powder snow. Her family often vacationed there in the summer. She hiked, biked, rafted, and fished. To her, Colorado was happiness. It was the escape she ran to when life got a little too tough. She dreamed about one day, when things got better, we’d be able to pull up stakes in the desert and resettle in Aspen. We’d retire there and live in her father’s condo. Because in Steph’s dreams, the world would turn back to a normal sort of version of what it once was, and we’d live in a million-dollar ski condo because Aspen wouldn’t be a ghost town haunted by voracious Whites.

  I listened when she talked about it. I never told her how silly it all sounded. I never did much of anything but smile and dream right along with her, because the way she talked about Aspen—the snow, the trees, the clean crisp air, and happiness rolling down off the mountains—it sounded like heaven. Nirvana, where our love would burn as bright as a star forever, until a tired God finally decided to shit eternity into a giant black hole and big bang it into a new universe for another try.

  “Wake up.”

  A hand slapped my face and I squinted at the mean-ass morning light filtering down through an ugly gray fog.

  “Time to pay the piper, Dillinger.”

  79

  They hauled me away from the twisted hulk of my runaway truck, no longer smoking, or crackling, just lying there on its side, twisted and murdered, waiting for the inevitable rust to settle in and oxidize it slowly into the soil. My boots scraped over the jigsaw-piece asphalt road, and through a ditch of tramped-down weeds, while a pair of wretched black trees looked down, not surprised by my utter failure. Following the furrows into a freshly plowed field, my captors dragged me into the mist. When they reached an old block of wood that looked like the hunk they’d pressed my head to when they drilled the buzz bolt onto my skull, they pushed me to my knees.

  Men, obscured by the fog and lazily arrayed in a crude circle, stood watching me. Ominously silent. They were waiting.

  Perhaps the piper really was finally coming to collect his due. I’d certainly rung up a debt through the years.

  Staying on my knees, I straightened. As straight as I could manage, given everything inside me that was broken, bruised to the bone, or bleeding me to death slowly. And if death was what was coming for me, I was going to take it like a man, the way the heroes always took it in the movies once the inevitability sank in.

  But nothing happened.

  We just waited there.

  Out in the mist, disembodied voices argued about something I couldn’t make out. That went on in gorilla grunts and whispers, until one voice passed a final judgment in brusque tones that sealed whatever fate was coming.

  Looking in the direction I figured the mist-hidden men had debated, I watched, until I saw a handful of figures materialize as they marched toward me.

  I stiffened my aching spine and raised my head while gritting my teeth to keep my mouth as close to closed as I could manage, considering my nose was so full of blood and snot crumbles, I’d likely never breathe through it again. I closed my eyes and silently wished my love to Steph, hoping it might fly to her like a prayer.

  Plodding through the damp dirt, the gray walkers closed.

  I opened my eyes to face my fate, as fearlessly as I could fake it, and my surprise nearly bowled me over. Among the armed assholes come to deliver my fate was Pluta, his boss man, and Murphy.

  “If it were up to me,” spat Pluta, “I’d make you suffer and piss until I squeezed the last bit of life out of your tainted soul.”

  “Pluta,” commanded the big boss man, “theatrics are pointless. Let’s get on with it.”

  Men collapsed on me from behind, wrestling me into position with my left hand over the wooden altar, or whatever it was. Overkill. I was too weak to resist even one of them.

  Someone handed Murphy a big rusty axe.

  Big boss man told him, “Do it.”

  Stepping over to me with the axe in his hands, Murphy knelt down in front of me.

  “On your feet,” Pluta snapped.

  Murphy jumped to his feet, facing down Pluta and brandishing the axe. “I’ll do this my way, or you won’t live to see the end of it, prissy man.”

  To my surprise, nobody reacted, not even Pluta, except that he looked like he was about to piss himself.

  “Do it your way,” big boss man told Murphy. “But do it. Or you can pay a meatier price for your own incompetence.”

  Murphy stood for a long time, like a tree stuck in a swamp, unable to move.

  “Do it,” commanded the big boss.

  Murphy turned, slowly, with silent tears on his cheeks. He stepped over to me and knelt. “I gotta cut off your hand. They say hard cases like you can’t driv
e a semi with one hand.”

  Horrified, I took a shot at humor. “Joke’s on them. It was an automatic.”

  “You’re in my unit.” Murphy had great difficulty with the words, as he struggled with his tears and rage. “If I don’t…if I don’t do it, they’ll get one of these fucknuts to chop us both.” Murphy blubbered, but only for a moment, before he sucked it all back in. “I told ‘em…I’m not gonna—”

  “No, Murphy.” It took all I could to keep from wailing myself. “You have to do it. This is my fuckup. I did this. You did your best to reel me in, but—” I managed a laugh, “—but I’m me. I’ll always be me. You do what you need to do.”

  Murphy looked away, unable to meet my eye.

  “Besides, it’ll grow back, right?”

  Still not looking at me, Murphy said, “You don’t believe that stupid shit.”

  “I’m sure Preacher Dick would be thrilled to know I converted.” I took a deep breath to settle out the emotion in my voice. “Maybe he’s right. All of these morons sure seem to believe in some kind of forever. Maybe everybody’s right and we’re wrong.”

  Murphy leaned in close. “They’re all idiots, Zed. Every last one of them.”

  “Hurry this along,” big boss man commanded.

  “Idiots with all the power,” I snorted. “Same as it ever was. Do what you have to do. In fact, I’d prefer it to be you because one of these mongoloids would muck it up, and hack at my arm all morning.” I looked up at Murphy, barely able to control my own tears, then, because the reality of what was going to happen had sunk in. “I know you’ll do it right. One clean swing. Don’t say anything else. Do it. Now, please.”

  Murphy closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and stood.