Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected

by Bobby Adair

“I emptied two magazines. How about you?”

  “I fired all the MFBs in five MFZs.”

  “What are MFBs?”

  “Motherfucking bullets, of course.”

  I sat back down on the tire rim and put my head in my hands.

  “I’m just trying to cheer you up, man. We’re wading in some pretty morbid shit, here.”

  I flashed Murphy a weak smile. “I know.”

  “Are you up for doing this?”

  I shook my head gently, but said, “I think I’m as good as I’m likely to get for a while. I guess it’s not any worse than a bad hangover.”

  “Man, I’ve been there. Heh, heh, heh. You were pretty dazed when I dragged your superhero ass off of the floor down there.”

  “I’m past that part of it. Thanks, Murphy. If you hadn’t come down to get me, I’d be dead right now.”

  “Somebody has to ride shotgun in the Murph-mobile.”

  “Somebody stole the Murph-mobile.”

  “We’ll get another one.” Murphy looked around a bit more. “I don’t know how coherent you were, so you might not remember, but there were a lot more infected down there than I thought there’d be.”

  “I wasn’t really paying attention to the count. Mostly, I think I was just trying to remember how many feet I had. How many of them do you think there were?”

  “Two.” Murphy laughed.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure. It seemed like forty, or fifty, maybe more.”

  I said, “They must have really been packed in.”

  “I guess.”

  “And this is the place that guy built under his house without anybody knowing?” I asked.

  “Yep. This is the place.”

  “The size of it is impressive. I wonder how he got all that concrete down there.”

  Murphy said, “I don’t know. Nobody does. The guy was a retired engineer or something. He lived alone. He never talked to his neighbors much. The newspaper never said much about how he did it. Mostly the stories were about his fight with the city.”

  “How’d the city find it?”

  Murphy pointed at two tall poles supported by guy wires in what used to be the house’s backyard. Each had a small wind turbine on top with charred fans spinning in the light breeze. “There was some kind of dispute about HOA rules and the wind turbines. Somehow, that brought the city inspectors out and they found the bunker.”

  “I wonder if they still work.”

  “I doubt it,” Murphy answered. “Any insulation on the wires probably burned off in the fire.”

  I nodded. “If it wasn’t for the fire, this might have been a good place.”

  “I don’t know. It looked pretty trashed inside to me. I think it would take a lot of work to salvage it. Right now it’s just a hole in the ground full of dead people.”

  “And some fucked up doors,” I smiled.

  “Heh, heh, heh. You’re right about that.”

  “Man, there’d better be somebody alive down there. I’ll be pissed if I got blown up by a grenade and it turned out to be rats or something.”

  “Zed, if you want to be a drama queen and say you got blown up, I’ll go with it, but you didn’t actually get blown up.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re not the one who got blown up.” I managed another smile to let him know I was kidding.

  “What do you say, are you ready to do this? I’m starting to feel uncomfortable standing around out here in the open.”

  I nodded and pulled myself to my feet.

  Murphy took the lead again. Feeling very naked without my M-4 in my hands, I followed Murphy with my dying flashlight in one hand and my Glock in the other.

  Unfortunately, going back into the bunker was a process. With a dozen infected lying about the entrance with bullet holes in them, it behooved us to ensure that each was indeed dead. In silent agreement, we decided that a couple of good kicks were enough to test for life.

  The stairway was difficult to navigate, as we had to push bodies off the sides as we went down.

  Once into the darkness at the bottom, Murphy started lifting heads and looking at faces. That was at least a little odd, but I said nothing about it.

  After checking all the bodies on the first level, Murphy pointed to the doorway down to level two and said, “Keep an eye on that other door for a second. I’m going to close the outer door, so that nobody wanders in behind us.”

  “Will do.”

  Murphy wrestled the heavy door over and let it fall shut with a deafening clang. Agitated moans from below let us know that we still had gruesome work to do.

  Murphy went to the other end of the bunker and retook the lead. He was up for it. I wasn’t.

  On the stairs, he stopped and lifted the head of another woman.

  Curiosity won out and I asked, “Murphy?”

  “I need to check.”

  “For?” I asked.

  “This was my neighborhood, Zed. I’m checking for people I know.”

  “Only the females?” I asked.

  “My sister. I’m looking for my sister. She might be in here.”

  “Oh.” I was embarrassed for not guessing. “Take your time.”

  Murphy checked another body that was wedged between the stairs and the wall. It wasn’t her either.

  Murphy worked his way down the stairs to a spot near the bottom and then stopped. I followed, close enough to support him, but far enough away that he’d have room to jump back.

  From our positions on the stairs, we examined the second level with our flashlights. Only two infected lay on the floor at the terminus of long bloody smears. Both had been wounded by the grenade blast. They’d tried to come up after us, but there is only so much a body can do with broken bones, gaping wounds, and lost blood, even if it can’t feel the pain.

  One of the infected was a man, the other, a woman, shattered and dying, grasping for something they’d never reach, each a metaphor for the earth they’d soon leave.

  I followed Murphy past the scattered containers on the floor. Without a hint of emotion, he put a bullet into each.

  Pained moans still came from the lower room of the bunker.

  I said, “More wounded. Be careful when you go down the stairs, Murphy.”

  Murphy nodded but didn’t speak. He was tense. His smile was gone. He clearly held unrealistic hopes or unwelcome fears that he would find his sister among the bodies. Perhaps the tiny comfort of knowing that she was dead was better than perpetual ambiguity.

  The door to the lower level was completely blown off of its hinges. It lay bent on the floor. Murphy stepped around it and took up a position against the wall next to the doorway. Seeing that we weren’t going to go in blind, I positioned myself several long paces from the door but in a place that allowed me to see partially inside the room.

  I shined my light in and saw blood and blast marks on the wall. That was just a preview of the carnage that awaited us.

  Murphy called out, “Hey! Is there anybody down there?”

  A weak, female voice called back, “Yes.”

  I was both relieved and surprised.

  “How many?” Murphy asked.

  “What?” The voice was irritated.

  Good God. I shouted, “Look, we’re coming in. Don’t shoot us. Okay?”

  “Okay,” the girl’s voice said.

  Murphy took a deep breath, and said, “Here goes.”

  The stairs creaked and I followed him into the room in the same fashion that we’d come down to level two.

  In my flashlight’s beam, I saw a severed leg and an arm on the stairs. Below, on the floor, in a large pool of blood, I saw their owners. There were at least five dead on or around the stairs. The last of the wounded were on the floor at the bottom. Murphy dispatched those.

  We stopped and listened as I shined my light down the length of the third level. The room was wider than the two rooms above and nearly twice as long, cut right into the limestone bedroc
k with a row of steel support beams down its center. Across the floor and against the walls were scattered the ghastly remains of more bodies than I could count.

  In the far corner, I spotted a pair of eyes looking back at me from behind a large fiberglass cistern.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” the girl said.

  “Are there any more infected that we don’t know about?” I asked.

  “No. I think you killed them all.”

  Murphy’s light illuminated the girl, adding to the glow of my light so that we could make out the features of her face.

  Murphy’s shoulders drooped and his breath flowed out in a disappointed sigh. I guessed that she wasn’t his sister.

  Chapter 16

  When we stepped out of the bunker, the eastern sky was starting to grow gray.

  The girl, Mandi, gasped and started to cry when she looked past the bloody bodies of the infected around the entrance and saw the devastation. It seemed that the final wisps of hope that had kept her alive in that bloody pit were blowing away in the wind with the ashes of her neighborhood.

  Mandi was covered from head to toe in the most disgusting combination of blood and human filth that I could imagine, but Murphy didn’t hesitate to wrap a comforting arm around her.

  Between her tears, Mandi said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You should have left me down there. I…I…”

  “It looks worse than it is,” Murphy told her.

  I shook my head, “No, no it doesn’t.”

  Mandi shuddered and buried her face in Murphy’s shirt.

  “Dude!” Murphy scolded me.

  “Sugarcoating it doesn’t do any good, so I’ve heard,” I countered.

  Murphy said, “But the whole world isn’t burned up, Zed. Just this part.”

  I said, “Yeah, but you know as well as I do that everything else in Austin isn’t any better than this. It’s just different.”

  Murphy glared at me.

  “Sorry.” I probably shouldn’t have been so blunt about it. But I was out of energy for niceties. I was used up. I needed sleep.

  My body reached a point where the adrenaline and caffeine could no longer drive it forward. I wished that the desensitization to pain that came with the virus would find its way into my aching head.

  While Mandi cried herself out and Murphy held her, I sat down on the tire rim I’d used earlier that morning and watched the dead, eastern sky slowly change color.

  All the busy, buzzing noise of life was gone. No cars, no jets, no bugs, and no birds. All I heard were the very gentle sounds of grainy bits of ash moving in the wind and Mandi’s occasional sobs muffled in Murphy’s shirt.

  Wind, tears, and gray sky over a gray land. Sad, but simple.

  Simple.

  I breathed in. I breathed out.

  It was my only responsibility for the moment. It was all I wanted.

  Breathe.

  Mandi’s voice broke the calm when she told Murphy, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” She stepped out of his arms, disturbing the ash and kicking it up in the wind. She cast her puffy eyes across the smoldering gray. “How bad is it, really? No sugarcoating.”

  I didn’t respond. I stared at the horizon and tried to tune out the sound of Murphy’s voice as he gave her the highlights. His version wasn’t harsh, but he was honest.

  Mandi took it better than I would have guessed, given her tears only moments before.

  When Murphy finished, the sun was attempting to paint the sky in vibrant morning colors that conflicted with my mood. I turned away and asked, “How long have you been down there, Mandi?”

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  I answered, “Saturday, I think.”

  “I came down with my dad, my mom, and my brother on Wednesday, when everything really started to go crazy,” Mandi told us.

  Murphy said, “So you’ve been down there since Wednesday?”

  Mandi confirmed with a nod. “Yes.”

  “How many of you were there?” Murphy asked.

  Mandi answered, “I don’t know, maybe ten when we got here. We lived down the street. We knew the bunker was here. Everybody knew. When we got here, we didn’t recognize most of the people. There was Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins, from a couple of houses down. There were some stoners that lived on the corner and there were some guys that looked like gangsters.”

  Mandi drew deep a breath and sat down on a blackened metal something-or-other. “This big tattooed guy named Mutt was in charge.”

  “Mutt?” I asked in disbelief.

  “That’s what they called him. He wore a black sleeveless t-shirt and a do-rag. And he had tattoos all over his arms. And the guys with him all had tattoos and baggy gangster pants. A couple of them had guns; I’m sure they all had knives. Mutt had a face that looked like it was used to frowning. He looked mean. But he was in charge and everybody just accepted that. Maybe they were afraid of him. I was.”

  I asked, “Do you think this was their gangster hideout, or hangout, or whatever?”

  “I don’t know, Zed. Is it important?”

  “It might be. But go ahead.”

  “That first day, people kept coming down a few at a time, sometimes whole families. The bunker started to get crowded.”

  Murphy asked, “Were you all down here on the third level?”

  Mandi shook her head. “No, we were on all the levels.”

  Then Murphy asked, “How did you all end up locked at the bottom?”

  “I’ll get to that, Murphy.”

  Murphy nodded and Mandi continued. “By the end of the first day, Mutt and his guys decided that we didn’t have enough food and water so they started telling people that they couldn’t come in unless they brought some with them.”

  “Where is that food now?” Murphy asked.

  Mandi said, “It was stored down on three. There wasn’t that much. I think it’s all gone now.”

  “Oh,” said Murphy, flatly.

  “On Thursday, Mutt started to send guys out to get provisions. Early in the day, they mostly came back. By the end of the day, they mostly didn’t. Fewer and fewer people showed up outside the bunker and wanted in. The bunker was crowded and the people didn’t always have food or water, but Mutt, as mean as he seemed like he was, still let them in.”

  I asked, “Did you know what was going on outside?”

  Mandi answered, “Yes. There were some radios. People’s phones were still working. I think in the end, that’s why Mutt still let people come in. Everybody knew how bad things were getting outside.”

  Mandi paused to compose herself before she continued. “It was late Thursday night, maybe early Friday morning, I’m not sure. I’d already gone to sleep. My mom and dad and I were sleeping on the second level when the commotion woke us up. I don’t know if infected people were already in the bunker and just started to turn overnight. Maybe when they were letting people in, the infected rushed the door. I think maybe that’s what happened”

  “Why?” Murphy asked.

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. I don’t want to get off track or I’ll lose my place.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t know how many infected were on the first level but at first that’s where they all were. Everybody ran down to three. There was screaming and shooting. It was awful. My mom, dad, and brother were way back by the far wall. We were all so scared. After a while, Mutt came in and slammed the door shut behind him. We heard the infected screaming outside, beating on the door. Mutt put the bar on the door and then one of his guys put padlocks on the bar so that it couldn’t be taken off. That’s when he told us that nobody else was coming in. The padlocks were there to ensure that the door stayed closed.”

  “That’s how you got locked in?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mandi answered, “and that’s why I think the infected came in from the outside. I don’t know if Mutt would have locked the door like that if there had been infected in the bunker already. I think he thought he w
as doing the right thing when he locked it but he wasn’t.”

  I asked, “Because somebody locked in with you was already infected?”

  Mandi nodded and silent tears rolled down her cheeks again. “I don’t know how many of us were down there. It was so crowded. We only had a few flashlights. There was a battery-operated lantern that hung from the ceiling, but Mutt wouldn’t let us leave it on. Nobody wanted to be in the dark, but we knew we needed to conserve our batteries. It was late. It was dark. People were tired, so they started to lie down and go to sleep.

  “I was so afraid to go to sleep, but it was pitch black which made it worst. I kept staring into the blackness, imagining that I saw shapes forming and moving and coming at me. Eventually, I dozed off.”

  Murphy asked, “What happened then?”

  Mandi shook her head. “I don’t know how long I slept. I woke up to an awful, horrible scream. People had flashlights turned on, but they didn’t provide much light, and they always seemed to be pointed at the wrong thing. The infected were in the room. I don’t know how many at first, two or three, maybe. Mutt was one of them.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “There was a fight that got bigger. It was like a slow-motion riot. Some people got injured. Some people turned. Others struggled. People were killed. More turned. When they finally shot Mutt, nobody could find the keys to the locks. Things were out of hand by then. It was hard to know who was or wasn’t infected. I could see flashes from gunshots, and they sounded like thunder claps bouncing off of the stone walls. Flashlight beams waved around the room. It was hard to see what was going on. Everybody was screaming or yelling. It was so, so bad.”

  Murphy said, “What happened to you? You’re not infected. How did you make it through?”

  “Somewhere in the scuffle, with the crowd surging back and forth, I got knocked against the wall, and I blacked out. I don’t know how long I was out. I know that when I came to, the room was pitch black again, but it wasn’t silent. I heard what sounded like dogs eating and tearing at clothes and meat. I heard people snarl at each other like animals. Those were the sounds that the infected make. Somebody was laying on me and other people were laying by me, close enough to touch. They didn’t move. They didn’t breathe.”