Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin

by Adair, Bobby

  Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. Seems like they’re using them for slave labor. Why, were you thinking something else?”

  I shook my head and started up the stairs, slowly and carefully.

  The Texas Capitol building looks quite a bit like the United States Capitol, except that it’s made of Sunset Red granite so it looks pink from the outside instead of white. The interior is laid out much like the U.S. Capitol with a high-domed rotunda at the center of two main wings: the Senate Chamber at the east end and House Chamber at the other.

  Murphy and I had just reached the landing on the Capitol’s ground floor when some of the tall wood and glass doors at the front of the building swung noisily open on heavy bronze hinges. I rounded a turn and bounded silently up the next flight of stairs with Murphy on my heels. The sound of voices on the second floor prompted me to continue running past that level and up to the third floor.

  Hearing nothing but voices echoing up from the floor of the rotunda, we stepped into the third-floor hallway leading down the length of that wing to the House Gallery. We tucked ourselves into an alcove in front of a large door and stopped to catch our breath.

  Murphy leaned close to me and whispered, “I hope you have a plan to get us out of here.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I told him, feeling certain the place had insufficient security to keep us in. I pointed at a bullet-riddled door across the hall and motioned Murphy to follow.

  After stepping lightly across the wide hall, I grabbed the door and swung slowly, hoping the old, ornate hinges wouldn’t creak and echo through the hall and up to the rotunda dome, then back down to the people who’d entered through the front door. Those people were down there arguing about something, but an out-of-place squeak of tarnished metal might interrupt them.

  Thankfully, the hinges were well-lubricated, and we entered quietly, pulling the door closed behind us.

  The office was huge with old windows that stood from waist height up eight feet tall. The square wooden desk in the middle of the office was of similar proportions and probably of a similar age. Its expansive top, large enough to park a small car, was clear except for smears of dried blood. The rest of the office was a shambles of shell casings, brownish-red stains, torn clothes, and bones. The clothes and bones were proof that the normal people who’d made their stand here had lost. At least that’s the way it looked to me. I supposed that some could have lived, abandoning their dead to scavengers who came later.

  Evidence of death was everywhere, in everything. Worth notice were the places I came across where it wasn’t apparent that someone had died there.

  Murphy walked over to one of the tall windows and peeked out into the fire glow between the blinds. “Hey,” he whispered, impatiently waving me to come over.

  I crossed over a pile of books that had fallen out of the shelves on the wall, taking up a place beside Murphy to look out the window. The Governor’s Mansion was in full blaze and the flames were spreading to the old oaks on the property. The streets on the far side were filled with the infected, thousands and thousands of them. They were surging up side streets and pulling back. They looked like they were trying to get up their nerve to rush the walls.

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “It’s like they’re afraid of this place.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I wonder what the trick is? You think it’s just conditioning, like training a dog?”

  “Man, I don’t know.” He looked back at the door and looked around the room. “I don’t get a good feeling about this place. I think these dudes are whacked, and I think they’re stupid.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Look out the window, man.” Murphy pulled the blinds apart. “It’s only a matter of time before all those Whites figure out they can tear down that wall. We got through, and it wasn’t that hard.”

  I nodded.

  “Hell,” Murphy said. “If the naked horde comes back this way, these guys are fucked. They’ll never get those helicopters out before they get overrun.” Murphy shook his head and rubbed his face. “It’s like they’re all kinda psycho-stupid or something. Who the hell sets up a fortress in the middle of Austin?” He gestured at the noisy mob out in the streets. “In the middle of all that?”

  He had a point. I said, “It doesn’t make any sense.” I looked out the window at the mass of Whites glowing red in the flames on the other side of the wall. Plenty of soldiers were out there. Well, not plenty. Relative to the number of Whites on the other side of the wall, the number of soldiers was laughable.

  I said, “Those guards in the hall didn’t sound as stupid as Don.”

  “Maybe they’re immune,” said Murphy. “Maybe they didn’t get the virus like Don did.”

  Maybe. Don did say there were Survivors though. I took the implication to mean they’d all caught and then survived the virus. “Maybe this Baird guy we heard those guards mention wants to be the next governor of Texas or something. Maybe he’s trying to reestablish the government in Austin by taking over the Capitol.”

  “News flash, Johnny Genius,” said Murphy. “There’s no more Texas. Just people like us.” He pointed at the soldiers out on the lawn, in their deer blinds, standing by their Humvees, or watching the wall. “I guess people like these fucktards. A few normal people who are being smart and hiding out.” He looked back at the horde in the street. “And them. Lots of them.”

  As much as I agreed with pretty much everything he said, some small part of me wanted to believe that the government was coming back, that order was returning. I shook my head and stepped away from the window.

  “What?” Murphy asked.

  “Nothing,” I said absently. Did I really want to go back to my previous life anyway?

  No.

  This life sucked most of the time but so did the old one, just in different ways.

  I went back over to the window and looked out. Could these yahoos really be the start of the effort to rebuild? “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s going to go bad eventually and all these knuckleheads are going to wind up dead.” I slapped Murphy on the back. “You were right. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Chapter 32

  As we left the office through the bullet-riddled door, we heard yelling echoing up through the vast space under the Capitol dome. Murphy and I paused and shared a look. I’m sure he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: Don had gotten loose and alerted his comrades.

  Time to test my confidence in my assertion that the assholes were too few and the Capitol complex too large to prevent our getaway.

  I leaned out of the door’s alcove to see what I could see up and down the length of the building.

  The third floor was clear. I listened for a moment. I asked, “Hear anything up here?”

  Murphy shook his head but continued to scan from side to side.

  I left the cover of the alcove, ran on light feet through the hall until I was near the edge of the balcony that circled the rotunda on the third floor. Getting down on my hands and knees and then onto my belly, I got close enough to see the round, decorative terrazzo floor with the state seal at the bottom. Thick stone balusters carved into decorative shapes by the prison laborers and Scottish stonecutters who built the Capitol offered pretty good cover, especially with the nighttime shadows inside the building.

  Below, I saw a half dozen armed men surrounding four others with hands bound behind their backs. The four with hands bound were wearing desert camouflage fatigues and boots. Looking disciplined even with no helmets and no hats, they wore nothing on their belts. They stood, not quite at attention but straight up, except for one. He had a familiar odd curve to his stance.

  The six surrounding them had the ragtag appearance of most of the other guys we’d seen in the Capitol gang. Some wore military clothing with t-shirts or sweatshirts. Some of them slouched. They fidgeted. They were a rabble.

&nbs
p; The guy I assumed was in charge stood in front of the four prisoners, ranting on about something. In the large space with the echoes coming back down from the dome above, it was hard to make out more than an occasional word of what he was saying.

  Murphy leaned in close to my ear and whispered. “Not our business. Take off your Null Spot cape and GTF.”

  I nodded but didn’t move.

  Wait. What?

  I looked at Murphy. “GTF?”

  “Get the fuck outta here.” He nodded dramatically toward the stairs.

  I whispered, “You’re missing some letters in your acronym.”

  “Fuck if I care.”

  I looked back down at the soldiers on the rotunda floor. Something about that one guy with the unusual stance was familiar, and I needed to figure out why. I got up on my hands and knees and started crawling to another place on the rotunda balcony, one that would give me a better view of the prisoners below.

  “Zed,” Murphy hissed. “Zed! What the hell?” He pointed down the hall away from the rotunda.

  I ignored him and continued.

  Once I arrived at the spot I wanted, I lay down again and looked.

  A second later, Murphy was by my side. “We can get down the stairs at the end of the hall and make our way into the annex on the basement level.”

  Then I saw it. I pointed, “See that dude there with the soldiers, the one who’s not quite standing straight up?”

  “Sure.” Murphy glanced perfunctorily. “Unless that’s the brother you never had or something, we should go.”

  Shaking my head, I whispered, “Doesn’t that guy look like Sergeant Dalhover?”

  “No,” Murphy told me. “It’s not him. Top is like a hundred years old. He’s out in West Texas. That dude down there is thirty, maybe.” Murphy nodded emphatically toward the stairs again. “GTF.”

  “I’m not saying it’s him.” I squinted to try and make out the face. “It looks like him is all I’m saying.”

  “What you’re saying is never all you’re saying.” Murphy sighed dramatically and shook his head. “You know they have guns, too. This isn’t going to be like shooting Whites. It’s not even going to be like shooting at Jay Booth and his bozos. We’re outgunned.”

  I said, “I wonder if maybe that’s Dalhover’s son.”

  “Top never said he had a son,” Murphy told me. “Not one word about his family.”

  “Still.” The more I looked, the more I convinced myself that the guy down there had to be at least related to Sergeant Dalhover. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “Maybe the virus is affecting your vision,” said Murphy, “but that’s not his son. Not unless he takes after his mom because that dude doesn’t look like Top.”

  The guy downstairs came to a loud conclusion and pointed. Some of his ragtag band led the four soldiers away.

  I looked at Murphy and said, “That may not be his son, but it’s got to be his nephew or something.”

  Murphy shook his head. “I hate Null Spot.”

  Chapter 33

  We trotted down the hall, silence more important than speed. I led the way into a stairwell just outside the House Chamber and looked down the gap between the stairs.

  Shit.

  I leaned quickly back and whispered to Murphy, “Someone is down at the basement level.”

  He leaned close to the edge and listened. He looked at me and shook his head.

  I peeked over the rail again and saw a light down near the bottom, moving lower. I continued watching until it disappeared into the long basement hallway that ran the length of the building. “We’re cool now,” I said, turning back to Murphy. “Lots of people around though.”

  Murphy looked at me and started to say something that I knew would have been rude but chose not to. Instead, he waved me forward and I led the way down the stairs, staying close to the outer wall to ensure that if by chance some of the ragtag bunch of assholes entered the stairwell, they wouldn’t see my white skin in the moonlight coming in through the windows.

  At each landing, I paused for a moment to listen. At each floor, I stopped for a peek up and down the hall before proceeding.

  Once at the basement level, I took some extra time in examining the long, dark hallway. I saw no light in the blackness, save the little that came down through the stairwells. I gave Murphy a look to let him know to ready himself. I took off at a run.

  It was a nervous hundred yards, as I expected the guy we’d seen with the flashlight to come out of any of the doors ahead at any moment.

  He didn’t.

  At the corner leading up to the central stairs, I turned a little too hard and slipped on the smooth, waxed floor, landing with a slap of skin and a clatter of metal as my machete bounced and the shotgun barrel hit.

  I clenched my teeth and squinched my eyes shut involuntarily, hoping somehow to catch those sounds in the air and drag them back before the wrong ear heard.

  I held my breath and listened.

  Murphy reached down and grabbed me under the arm, yanking me to my feet, seemingly without slowing down.

  While I was still trying to catch my balance, he was already bounding down the stairs, waving for me to follow, and mouthing, “Hurry the fuck up.”

  I did.

  The stairs coming down from the Capitol’s basement led to the underground annex, where I suspected Baird’s ragtag men had led the soldiers.

  Murphy reached a landing and stopped as he peeked around a corner.

  I came to a stop with my back to the wall as I looked up the stairs toward the Capitol basement. I listened.

  Murphy glanced over at me. He grinned.

  He was as much a junkie for the adrenaline as I was.

  I smiled back and suppressed a laugh. Whoever had been on the basement level with the flashlight was either confused and looking around in the darkness or frightened and peeking around corners for noisy ghosts.

  I whispered, “Are they down there?”

  Murphy nodded, “About halfway up the length of the annex. Down on the bottom floor.”

  “You wanna follow along on the second floor?” I asked, knowing we could take quick peeks over the rail to see them all below.

  “Gotta stay quiet,” Murphy told me before rounding the corner.

  Running on our toes to keep the noise down, I pulled away from the wall for a few steps and took a quick glance over the railing. Indeed, the ragtag soldiers were leading the real soldiers down toward the helicopter.

  Murphy pulled up to stop at a side hall.

  Coming up beside him again, I said, “That’s where those other guys were going to get the White Skins.”

  Murphy said, “Maybe they’ve converted some rooms down there into holding pens or a jail or something. Do you remember what’s down there? You’re Mr. Capitol Tourist, right?”

  I pointed. “Some big ass conference rooms are past the helicopters.”

  “If they’ve got a bunch of Whites stored somewhere, it’ll make sense to put them in one big room,” Murphy said. “Easier to keep them corralled that way.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Murphy took off again, running silently to the next crossing hallway.

  From there, we saw directly out into the round atrium. Plenty of moonlight flowed in, casting us in much more light than I felt comfortable with. I crept back further into the hall’s shadows when I spotted loitering movement below and across the atrium. At least one guard was over there. I knew they had to have someone guarding the helicopters, even though I hadn’t spotted them earlier.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “You know the place,” Murphy conceded. “You’re the Mighty Null Spot.”

  “Valiant,” I muttered. “The Valiant Null Spot.” I pointed down the hallway into the darkness. “If we go that way we can loop around. Judging by where the stairwells came up on the plaza, I think there might be some stairs back around there we can use to get down to the bottom level and maybe sneak up on the guards from be
hind.”

  “Behind?” Murphy asked, shaking his head. “It’s not like the guys will know which direction to guard in.” He pointed all around. “There are stairs in every direction.”

  “At least we won’t be coming down the main hall,” I told him. “That seems to be the route everybody uses when they come and go.”

  “And when we get down there,” he asked, “then what?”

  I shrugged. “Do we ever know?” I took off at a run into the darkness.

  We found the stairs, just as I’d deduced. We made our way down to the lowest level undetected, crept silently up a short stub of a hallway and I peeked around a corner at a moment of complete luck.

  Two guards were standing less than a dozen feet away, looking across the floor of the atrium toward the main Capitol building as they stood between the helicopter and the stacks of crated munitions. Both men had rifles.

  I pulled my head back quickly, my nervousness clear on my face. I raised a finger to my lips so Murphy would know to stay quiet, and I raised two fingers more and pointed toward the corner. I motioned Murphy back toward the stairwell that we’d just used to enter the hallway. Once inside, with the door quietly closed behind us, I whispered, “I’ve got an idea.”

  Chapter 34

  Murphy, never shy about telling me just how bad my ideas were, made every effort to tell me about this one. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a better idea. So I said, “Unless you’ve got something else to say.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, “we’re guessing the supposed Dalhover relative is in one of the conference rooms right around the corner.”

  “That’s where the guards are,” I told him. It made perfect sense to me.

  Murphy glanced up through the stairwell. “Guys were up there too. Were they guarding people hiding in the bushes?”

  “Yes,” I told him, pretending complete seriousness with the lie.

  “Whatever.” Murphy shook his head and looked around. “Fine. But one more thing.”