Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm

by Bobby Adair

  Not ready to take my attention away from the situation outside, no matter how well it might be going at the moment, Salgado’s sour attitude surprised me. “I thought you people loved it in Bill’s Utopia.”

  “Bill’s Utopia.” Salgado laughed bitterly. “Yeah. That’s about right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He glanced in the direction of the morning’s fun. “You think that was an accident, what happened in there?”

  “You mean with the power going out?” I didn’t want to admit it, but I hadn’t spent any thought yet on the dependability of the electrical grid or any of the infrastructure in New Tejas.

  “That,” spat Salgado. “The door locks tripping? They aren’t supposed to do that. Not on an outage.” He pulled the useless click-zapper out of his pocket, futilely trying to break it with his fingers. “And these damn things.” He threw it at the tin wall. It hit with an impotent plink.

  He’d earned a little more of my attention. “What are you, thirty, thirty-five?”

  My question took him by surprise, but he knew where I was going. At least at first. “I was eighteen when it hit. Just out of high school.”

  “College?”

  “I’d registered at ACC. Me and some friends had a lease on an apartment off Riverside. We’d just signed the lease when the riots started.”

  “How long were you out there before Bill’s people found you?”

  “Found me?” Salgado laughed bitterly. “Nobody found me. That’s why I made it so long. We made it.”

  “How many of you were there?”

  “Both my roommates caught it just like that.” Salgado snapped his fingers. “It was just me for a while.” His eyes grew a little distant. “For a long time. Those were hard times. Eventually, I hooked up with some kind of communal thing over at the Capitol.”

  “But the Survivor Army ran you out, right?”

  Salgado looked at me with suspicion.

  “I wasn’t with them,” I assured him. “My buddy and me were staying way out on Lake Travis then, in a remote house. There weren’t many Whites out there then.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Stupidity.” I laughed. “We saw the helicopters flying back and forth every day.”

  Salgado nodded. “Down to the Capitol. They reinforced quickly. I didn’t stick around, not once I saw they had the place locked down. Not when I figured those of us who made it out didn’t have a chance of taking it back. There was nothing for us downtown anymore. No reason to stay.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Here and there,” he answered. “You know how things were.”

  “Took me nearly a year to get to Balmorhea,” I told him. “The desert was good for us.”

  “We never stayed put that long,” Salgado admitted. “Always on the run.”

  “You had people then?”

  “Three of us were pretty tight for a long time. Guys. We’d hook up with other groups—two here, five there. Unfortunately, it’s hard to maintain social harmony when the guy/girl ratio isn’t even.” He laughed at a memory. “Stress brings out everybody’s inner asshole.”

  I nodded a silent agreement.

  “It’s weird how time just keeps going. You have your dreams, you know. You make your plans. At first you think, this will all blow over. I’ll be back in school next year. I’ll skip right past ACC and apply at UT. I mean, odds are I’ll be able to get in with half my competition no longer among the living.” Salgado laughed darkly. “It’s weird what seemed too bleak to think about then looks like optimism now.” He gulped a big breath. “We made it six, maybe seven years, I guess. At some point you lose track of time altogether. You just try to keep food in your belly and watch the weather because you know it’s going to suck in the summer, and it’ll be hard to find anything once winter sets in.”

  He looked up at me, eyes heavy with old emotions, and then he put on a plastic smile. “I never talk about this with anybody. Nobody here talks about it much. It’s like there’s a weird consensus. Like maybe if none of us acknowledges it, we can forget the horror. Both my buddies died of dysentery that last winter. It got cold as a bitch. We were eating anything we could find. Anything.” Another sigh. “We knew about this place by then. We didn’t know anything about Bill, his ambitions, or his army, but we knew somebody was rebuilding something out here in farm country. They’d been at it for a couple of years. At least. We didn’t make any effort to join up. We figured it would end like every attempt at rebuilding ended back in those days—blood and tears. Bones. Always the same.” Salgado waved a hand at our surroundings and half smiled. “Nobody’s right about everything. By the time spring was coming around, I was tired of being alone, tired of thinking the kinds of thoughts I was thinking and figured, ‘fuck it.’ I crossed the barbed wire out by one of the cow pastures, not far from where we are now, and pretty soon, Bill’s goons had me on my knees with guns pointed at my head, like I was under arrest. Been here ever since.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  Salgado nodded.

  “You see it grow. You see it change. You start to hate it. But memories of what it was like out there keep you where you are. Food and shelter.” He laughed. “I used to think my parents were middle-aged sellouts, working dull jobs and long hours just to pay the mortgage and watch Skinamax in the bedroom at night. I guess we all turn into our parents eventually.”

  “You have cable TV here?”

  Salgado laughed. “No. But we’ve got a helluva Blockbuster. Nothing new, though.” Salgado turned to me, eyes dispassionate again, back in evaluator mode. “That’s not the information you were hoping to learn when you got me talking, was it?”

  I saw no point in lying. “I figured anything I learned would be helpful.”

  “Let me make it easy for you. First chance you get, run for it. New Tejas is just another version of hell.”

  I laughed. I shouldn’t have, but I did anyway. “Can you provide specifics?”

  “The more I say about it, the more risk I take myself. The only reason I’m telling you anything is because you saved my life this morning.”

  “About that. You don’t believe any of that was a coincidence. It wasn’t an accident?”

  “Games. Tests. All on purpose. And I was expendable, just like Mickey.”

  “The guard who was with you.”

  “He wasn’t very bright,” Salgado told me. “People don’t have any value here.”

  “But Bill said—”

  “Bill is a liar. And if you ever repeat that, I’ll deny it. But it won’t make any difference. You’re one of them.” He got all dramatic. “The rare ones. The immortals.” He settled back into sadness. “Bill is going to put you through the wringer. Your tests indicate you’re smart enough to see that coming. He thinks you’re part of the race of supermen who are destined to rule the world. If you prove yourself worthy. That’s what this morning was about. Just another buttfuck in Bill’s Machiavellian Monkey World. Unless you want to spend eternity turning into a sadistic prick, you should get out.”

  I tapped the puck bolted to my skull. “What about this?”

  “On foot, at night, with a little luck…the bolt doesn’t matter if there’s no one close enough to buzz you. You could slip away.”

  “And when the battery dies because I don’t recharge it?”

  Salgado had forgotten about that aspect. “They have a special tool for removing them at the jib hut.”

  “I’m guessing you mean the place where they preprocess the corpses before they go to the camp kitchens?”

  “That’s the place. They recycle gear, boots, masks, and stuff,” he confirmed.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. This place has lots of secrets.”

  “What about the tool? Where can I get one?”

  “Only at the jib hut is what I heard.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Never seen one. I just know they have them there.” />
  “So, if I want to get rid of this puck, I need to find one at the jib hut.”

  Salgado nodded.

  While he was talking, I moved on to the next thing. “What about my friends?”

  “The taints you were brought in with, you mean?”

  “I don’t know where Jazz and Grace are.”

  Salgado sighed. “I can help you with that. I can access their files and find out where they were assigned. I feel like I owe you that much, but it’s not like I’m going to give you a ride over there or anything like that.”

  “And my wife.”

  Salgado grimaced. “That cancer patient?”

  I thought about kicking Salgado in the face for saying that. “Steph is her name.”

  “She’s dead already.”

  “What?” I was too surprised to explode in rage. “I just saw her, and—”

  “My apologies. I have flare for drama sometimes. Too much TV in my formative years. What I meant to say was, I used to live with a girl who was one of the docs over there. Researcher. Smart as shit.”

  “Drama?” I had a strong urge to stomp his nuts. “You tell me my wife’s dead then you start in on a story about a past romance?”

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” said Salgado, “is that bunch at the hospital would make a death camp doctor blush. They think they’re all CRISPR geniuses. They engineer viruses and play with genetic code like they’re a bunch of teenagers with a brand new chemistry set. They inject their Franken-creations into untreatable patients right and left because the fastest way to know if their latest brain turds work isn’t double-blind test-tube experimentation—it’s in vivo trials.”

  “In what?”

  “They go straight to live human tests.”

  I was horrified. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Imagine you’re the village woodchopper and you stayed in the forest too long. Now you’re lost in the dark.”

  “Do you understand the idea that conversations should have a logical flow from one concept to the next?”

  “I’m drawing an analogy.”

  I took a peek outside to see if any trouble was coming our way.

  “You could grope through the woods in the dark, hoping you find your way back, or maybe you could burn a log and light the way. So, you find the path for a little way, and then you burn another log to find the next bit, and so forth, hoping you can find your way home before you burn all your logs.”

  “How long have you been working on that analogy?”

  “The logs are people. The fires are the experiments. The village is the cure.”

  “If you have to explain an analogy, that means it—”

  “What I’m telling you is, for as long as Steph’s been going to that hospital, I guarantee one of the dozens of concoctions they’ve injected her with is actively killing her. Not the cancer, the concoction. She just doesn’t know it.”

  97

  Cameron, Texas grew up out of the farm country forty miles northeast of Taylor. Before the collapse, five thousand people lived there, working at the Walmart, one of the dying businesses in town, or commuting to jobs in Temple or College Station. Fourteen years after the virus, a surprising number still lived in there, only now as infected Whites, preying on the bountiful herds of deer, goats, and cattle that thrived on the endless acres of abandoned fields that surrounded the town.

  Bill, or so our new Senior Man Steinhauser told us, had his eye on Cameron for a major colonial expansion. Hence, it was our job, with the help of three other camp garrisons, to clean it out. And to harvest as many taints as we could safely stuff into the available cattle trailers.

  The operational plan, not completely simple-minded for a change, had been organized like a hunt. The day before our arrival, a barbed wire funnel had been laid across the northeast corner of town, out past the junior high and elementary schools. The mouth of the funnel stretched a half-mile wide. The neck fed onto the ramps of ten livestock trailers parked side by side, close enough that a human couldn’t squeeze between them. Camp 21 had security responsibility for the trailers and any wild taints who managed to slip through without getting trapped inside. For the men of Camps 17 and 5, we formed a perimeter around the rest of the town. Our job was to slowly collapse the perimeter and drive the Whites toward the funnel. How? Tear gas. Even Whites avoided tear gas unless they were in a hyper-aggressive state. The Camp 29 battalion had jib duty. They spread out behind the other two battalions, collecting and loading the bodies that were sure to be a byproduct of our operation.

  So, two hours after the evaluation center dumped me back in Stalag 17, I found myself in Murphy’s platoon with a flamethrower strapped across my back, full of simmering anger while I stood in the middle of South Houston Avenue. We were pretty close to the center of Cameron’s ruined downtown business district. Beside me, Murphy ordered the yellows—we didn’t bring any of our taints along—to fumigate the next two buildings as we worked our way up the street. Of the three flamethrowers our unit owned, only mine was filled with flammable petroleum products. The other two had been converted to spray copious clouds of tear gas. Two of the new yellow draftees handled that job, one on each side of the street as we inched our way down. The other yellows, with their tear-gas bottle bombs, aided in the effort.

  With the platoons on the streets running parallel to ours and keeping pace with us, we were cleaning out every residence and building in town, using our noxious cloud to keep the feral taints moving toward the trap. Of course, all hadn’t gone as planned, hence my job. I’d had to torch twenty or thirty Whites that morning because they decided to run through the gas cloud to attack us. I roasted them for their foul intentions and didn’t feel a scintilla of guilt about it.

  At the moment, though, things had settled down enough for me to ask Murphy about Peck. I didn’t see him in the livestock trailer on the ride out with us. “Did he get his walking papers while I was gone?”

  Murphy shook his head.

  “You got that big, sad face you get when you don’t want to tell me something.”

  Murphy surveyed his crews on both sides of the street. “Peck got back from his off-base assignment and confronted Steinhauser about his anniversary.”

  “Because they didn’t let him go, like they promised?” One more thing for me to be pissed about.

  Murphy shook his head, but was reluctant to say what needed to be said.

  “Did he die on an op?”

  “Steinhauser gave him some song and dance about how Peck had screwed up this or that or some other such shit. Told him he had to do another year of service to earn his freedom. After that, Peck got real quiet for a couple days. I asked him if he was cool. He said he needed some time to get his head right about it. I figured, whatevs. You know? I mean, he’s not a moody bitch like you.”

  “Thanks,” I huffed.

  Murphy looked befuddled. “I just didn’t see it comin’.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “He snapped. One minute we’re all chillin’ on our bunks before lights out, and the next, he’s got a big knife and he’s prying at the buzz bolt on his head. Somebody yelled at him not to do it. He said he was tired of all the bullshit. And boom.” Murphy took another look up and down the street. “Blew half his skull off. Brains all over the wall. Taints went apeshit. I had to zap ‘em all quiet again.”

  I stopped right there in the street. “Everything about New Tejas is bullshit.”

  “Unless you’re normal and living on easy street back in town.”

  “Or terminally ill.”

  “What do you mean?” That got Murphy’s full attention. “That sounded like it meant a lot more than just what you said.”

  I told him what Salgado told me.

  “You believe him?”

  “I did just save his life.”

  “You said Salgado thought that mess at the eval center was one of Billdo’s Machiavellian tests, though, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Ho
w do you know Salgado’s story isn’t some new level of the same mind game?”

  “What about Peck?”

  Murphy sighed.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Kind of all the proof you need, right?”

  “You gonna steal another semi and joyride across the county?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I’d like your help.”

  Nodding as he thought things through, Murphy took a minute before finally saying, “First off, Zed, I’m proud of you.”

  “Gee willikers, Murph! That makes me so happy.”

  Murphy ignored the sarcasm. “You finally realized you can’t fight city hall alone, and you kept your promise to tell me before you let Null Spot come out and play.”

  “Geez, dude, you make me sound like a schizo. It’s not like that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it’s like. I’ll help you, but we need to be smart about it if we actually want to succeed.”

  “Fine.” I tried not to sound petulant.

  “I only have one problem with this whole thing. Salgado’s story doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “How’s that?” I didn’t hide any petulance on that one.

  “Dude, don’t get your dick in a twist. Salgado’s story about the hospital. I mean, I guess I can understand why some mad scientist types would want to find the fountain of youth. I mean, once you get past the low probability that somehow they’d survive the end of the world and then all find their way to the same dinky little hospital in bumfuck nowhere.”

  “Eternal youth is a pretty strong motivator.” That reason made total sense to me. “Since that day we met in the jail, we’ve had one hard lesson after another on just how shitty regular people can be when their backs are to the wall.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that one. But why does Bill let them do it? That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “I asked Salgado that same thing.”

  “And did he give you an answer?”

  I looked at Murphy in one of those ways that says, if you’d be quiet for a second, I’d tell you, but through my gas mask, he couldn’t see any of that.