Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin

by Adair, Bobby

  “How far?” Fritz asked.

  “Three, Four miles?” I guessed. “A little farther than we’ve got to go to get back to our car.”

  It took a few minutes to draw out the map and explain it to Fritz and Gabe. After all the questions were out of the way, we each checked our gear and prepared ourselves to leave.

  Gabe stepped up in front of me and reached out with the shotgun. “Thanks,” he said.

  I looked at the gun. I looked up at Gabe. Without it, he’d be defenseless. With it, well, shooting was only a last resort, but it came in handy when you needed it. Still, he had no white skin, no night vision goggles, no machete, no pistol, and no spare hand grenades. As much as I was scolding myself for the stupid charity of it, I said, “You keep it.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “We both know you’ve got nothing,” I replied. “If you had anything—a good knife, or even a water gun—I’d keep the gun.” I looked around. “I can always find another.” I hoped. Rust-free guns were getting harder to come by.

  Under a shower of Gabe’s gratitude, I emptied my pockets and bag of shotgun shells. Without the shotgun, I had no immediate use for them. Sure, I could have held onto most of them, but choosing to carry something was always a complicated choice. In the equation of the decision was the amount of weight that would slow you when running for your life. It was a big factor.

  Fritz and Gabe thanked us a final time and headed for the door.

  Fritz undid the bolt.

  I nodded at Murphy when the other two weren’t looking. I wanted them to go first. I wanted them to leave the building ahead of us and head off in their own direction. Somehow, in my mind at that moment, it decreased the chance that they’d follow us. I wasn’t overly worried about them following and eventually harming us. It was just getting harder to trust.

  Fritz went out of the office with Gabe on his heels. Murphy followed with me in the rear. Fritz turned onto the narrow, dark staircase, navigating by flashlight.

  With the other three in front of me, I was halfway down when the group came to a sudden stop, with feet stomping heavily to catch balance and shoulders bumping walls. Fritz gasped.

  I was already moving backwards up the stairs. I didn’t need to wait to learn why Fritz gasped. I didn’t need to know why he’d stopped. All surprises anymore were dangerous ones, and nearly all dangerous ones were Whites.

  Crossing three steps at a time, I leapt to the second floor, pressed myself against the wall, and turned to point my pistol. Murphy’s bulk nearly filled the entire stairway. I saw elbows, knees, and feet hurrying and clomping as the first of the infected howled below.

  Murphy sprinted past me and headed through the door to the back office and toward the fire escape.

  The surprised moans from a hundred infected throats grew to a hungry wail.

  Gabe passed me by, and Fritz came up beside me as Whites shoved and wrestled their way past one another to be the first up the stairs.

  Shit.

  Tiny fractions of a second grew manageable under the rush of adrenaline. Would Murphy get the window open quickly enough? Would it matter? I didn’t know whether the four of us could pile out the window and onto the rusty old fire escape before the first of the infected got their hands on me, thinking I was Fritz or Gabe. Should I shoot the first three or four coming up the stairs? Would that delay the rest of them as they clambered over the falling bodies on stairs slippery with arterial blood? Should I toss a grenade and run? Both of those last two options were certain to buy me time, but at what cost? The noise would alert every White within a few blocks and turn this one problem into a much larger predicament.

  I gave a thought to the machete even as I unsheathed it. I could hack a few—maybe more—but the opportunity for escape would disappear almost as quickly as it arrived. Once I started hacking, once the Whites decided I was adversarial food, I might never be able to disengage from the melee quickly enough to get to and through the window.

  Or, I could step aside, let them see my White skin, and hope they would leave me alone while I sacrificed Fritz and Gabe. Hope?

  No. I couldn’t do that.

  I went with my only choice: Hack the horde, then escape. I glanced at the window thirty feet to my left—through a back office, over an obstacle-cluttered floor, around some desks, and barely visible through an open door—signaling my plan to Murphy and the others. As soon as the window was open and the last of my friends was passing through, I’d run.

  I slashed the first White through her face at the farthest reach of my blade. It wasn’t a killing cut, it wasn’t meant to be. Her hands instinctively flew to cover her face as she screeched and fell, tripping up two others behind who were trying to squeeze past one another shoulder to shoulder. I poked one in the larynx and took a short swing across the other’s cheek.

  The larynx-cut White toppled onto the bleeding woman in front of him on the stairs. The one I’d hit in the cheek lost his balance and fell as he spun on his back, his feet in the air, helping block those behind. He was nearly in grasping distance of my boots, so he earned another hack and blood gushed from his chest.

  I cut a fourth in the back of the skull as I heard Murphy’s big voice yell, “Go!”

  With no hesitation at all, I turned and ran.

  Chapter 45

  All I heard were howls and the bumping and stomping of a hundred crazed Whites trying to mount the stairs at the same time. All I saw was the door and the window across the room. At the doorway, I grabbed the door jamb with one hand as I tried to round the turn at full speed.

  I passed a desk. Out in the moonlight, through the tall windows, I saw Murphy on the fire escape urging me on as he raised his rifle.

  The paper-strewn floor turned out to be more treacherous than I had expected, and I lost my footing, banging my head on the desk as I tumbled onto the floor.

  For a second, all I saw was black, then stars, then everything seemed confused.

  Murphy’s suppressed rifle was firing. Whites were screaming. The window near where Murphy was standing was shattered, its glass all over the floor.

  How did that happen?

  Murphy was yelling something.

  Fritz was leaning back in the open window, hand outstretched, hollering urgently.

  The wall on the other side of the room popped as bullets passed through it.

  Then, just as quickly as everything had shifted out of the realm of rational purpose, it came back into focus. I knew I’d knocked myself senseless for a few moments when my head hit the desk. I knew the Whites were pouring up the stairs. Murphy was shooting them in the doorway and shooting through the wall to clog the hall with their bodies and slow them before they got to us.

  The last thought to occur to me—damn, it should have been the first—turned into action just as soon as it came to mind. I clambered shakily back up to my feet as I moved toward the window.

  Fritz grabbed my sleeve and pulled me off balance as he dragged me through the door. He shouted, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

  I was nodding and trying to get my feet under me.

  He spun me around and positioned me by the ladder. “Go. Go.”

  I glanced down as I started to climb. Good. At least the fall from the second floor won’t kill me.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Gabe stood with his shotgun, looking up and down the alley. He was ready to slaughter anything that moved. It occurred to me that he didn’t understand that by pulling the trigger, he’d better be ready to die as well. Or maybe he had just given up hope.

  My feet hit crumbly old concrete. I staggered, and Fritz dropped down beside me, trying to balance me again.

  “I’m okay,” I told him, pointing at the rough footing. “I slipped. I’m cool.”

  Murphy was on the ground a half-second later, his face inches from mine. “Can you run?” he urgently asked.

  I nodded.

  We hauled ass up the alley, Murphy in the lead, Gabe behind, Fritz at my side nur
sing me along, although I didn’t feel like I needed the help.

  I put a hand to the side of my head and felt a pretty damn big lump growing there above my ear. A quick glance at my hand as I pulled it away revealed red fingers and a palm covered in blood.

  Thinking tangentially about the equipment soldiers took with them into the field, it occurred to me that perhaps I needed some protection for my head. Hell, even a bicycle helmet would have done the job. I said, “I guess that’s why they wear helmets.”

  Fritz glanced at me, worried.

  I opened my mouth to explain that I wasn’t babbling nonsense, but decided we had bigger problems to deal with at the moment.

  Murphy turned left, coming out of the alley. Two Whites were rummaging through an automobile across the street. One of them looked up and took a few long seconds to understand that what he was seeing was running warm meat—uninfected meat. He jumped to his feet on the hood of the car and gleefully yelped. As he lunged onto the street to come at us, two bullets from Murphy’s rifle caught him in the chest, knocking him back onto the hood. The second White took a bullet to the head as he looked at us from the driver’s seat.

  We ran through the intersection.

  The howling of the white mob echoed off the buildings. They had to be coming down the fire escape. We needed to be out of sight before they came out of the alley or we’d be in trouble.

  As it was, the howling was contagious. When one howled, all around heard. All around knew what it meant. Meat was afoot.

  More howls.

  We passed onto a stretch of sidewalk between a parked tractor-trailer and the wall of an old warehouse converted to a bar. For the moment, we were only visible from the front and the rear.

  We cut another left turn into an alley, and for a second, no Whites were out in front of us. Some were several blocks back in the alley, hanging around trashcans and dumpsters.

  All around us, the infected wailed. It was one of the ways they worked cooperatively to capture their prize. They were searching.

  A metal door on the right was hanging open, swaying gently on the light breeze. Murphy ran in and we all followed.

  Once inside, Murphy slowed and softly said, “Bolt that door.”

  Gabe pulled the door shut, sealing us in near blackness. I pulled my night vision goggles down over my eyes and saw out through the storeroom and into an art gallery with colorful, abstract art hanging on the walls. The color, though, was lost. It was all shades of green and black.

  The deadbolt clinked into place as Gabe whispered, “Got it.”

  Murphy stuck his head out into the gallery and looked around. “Hey,” he called.

  We all froze, waiting for a result.

  Nothing.

  “Hey,” Murphy said again.

  Still nothing.

  He came back into the storeroom, urgent but not panicked. Looking at me, he said, “How are you? Can you run?”

  “I’m good,” I told him.

  Murphy looked at Fritz. Fritz shook his head.

  “No,” I said. “I’m good. Not one hundred percent but I’m in the game. Rock on, Mighty Murphy.”

  He grinned.

  Gabe said, “We should hide here.”

  Murphy shook his head. “We can’t. The Whites are riled up. They’ll be running through all the buildings around here looking for us.” He slapped Gabe on the shoulder. “Those fuckers love the taste of uninfected virgins.”

  “What?” Gabe spouted, clearly not expecting to be teased. But that was just Murphy’s sense of humor.

  Murphy looked at me one more time, “If you’re good, then we’ll go out the front. If not, we’ll stick you upstairs in a closet or something and come back for you later. You’ll be good even if they find you.”

  I touched a hand to the bloody wound on the side of my head again. I held my hand up where Murphy could see as I hefted my machete in the other. “I may have gotten a good whack, but I can still kill plenty of ‘em. With all the blood, though, the hungry ones will think I’m injured and weak. That makes me a target.”

  “Word.” Murphy loved his outdated slang.

  Chapter 46

  We left the art gallery and crossed the street, climbing through the remains of the front door of a small printing company. We passed through the lobby, through another door, past a few empty offices, and onto the production floor where big machines rusted in the ten inches of water pooled on the sunken floor. A portion of the roof had collapsed. I guess during the storm.

  Many roofs on commercial buildings in Texas are flat—or pretty close to it—with parapets that stand up several feet all around the edge, hiding mechanical equipment and giving the impression of a much taller, more impressive building. I suspected the drains on this one had become clogged, with somebody’s remains perhaps. During the hurricane, the roof had simply started to fill. Unable to support the extra tons of water in the new upstairs swimming pool, the roof collapsed.

  We had to wade through the water to get to the back door, which stood at the top of four single stairs on the rear wall of the building. The door looked to be intact.

  Going through that door put us out onto another street. Whites were out, but those who were moving seemed to be going in the opposite direction, to an area several blocks away where the Whites who’d spotted us were still searching, howling, and squabbling.

  We passed two more blocks, sneaking through buildings and doing our best to stay behind cover when outside. We were heading south, away from the direction we’d all wanted to go, but also away from the latest mob of Whites who’d wanted to put us on the dinner plate.

  We found ourselves crossing a wide road clogged with hundreds of cars, some abandoned while trying to head west toward one highway, others left there by drivers headed east toward the other highway. Whatever traffic mess had been on the road prior to the hurricane, the floodwaters had made it worse by floating many of the cars and pushing them into piles. Among the piles were trees, pieces of house walls and roofs, appliances, and the bones of the dead.

  Murphy paused along the edge of one pile, pointed south past rows of giant cypress trees, and whispered, “The river is right over there. Maybe it’s time we found a boat and floated out of downtown. We’re gonna get killed if we stay here.” He looked at me. “Even the Valiant Null Spot’s luck doesn’t last forever.”

  “The Valiant Null Spot?” Fritz asked.

  I ignored him and said, “If we can find a boat washed up in the trees, I think that’s a good idea.” I looked at each of the others for consensus.

  Gabe and Fritz nodded. Why not? They probably would have gone along with anything, just happy that Murphy and I hadn’t ditched them yet. I’m sure they felt like they could take care of themselves, but Murphy and I had the night vision goggles and the firepower.

  Whites nearby were making some noise, bickering over something, perhaps a rotted body in the jumble of the flood aftermath.

  Murphy led us off the road. Among the trees, even more debris had accumulated, so much, in fact, that we couldn’t cross through it to get to the river. Well, we probably could have at the risk of injury, while making so much noise that we’d certainly draw the nearby Whites.

  We instead chose stealth, walking in single file as Murphy led us along a path that roughly paralleled the river, looking for a way to get through the mounds of debris between us and the water. It was treacherous going—even the relatively flat path we traveled was scattered with sharp pieces of metal bent and torn from cars, shards of glass, some small, some several feet in length and sticking out of the piles, ready to slice the leg of anyone passing by who wasn’t paying attention.

  As we moved, the number of jagged, injury-threatening pieces of metal sticking out into the paths seemed to grow in number. So much so that I started to wonder if something peculiar in the topography had caused the receding waters to settle the debris in such an odd, spiky fashion.

  I also noticed that more and more pieces of the metal bore stains
of the blood from the last White who’d come this way, running at a speed too reckless.

  We came to a bend where the debris had been pushed up onto some structure that hadn’t collapsed under the pressure of the waters flowing over it. We found ourselves standing in a crescent-shaped clearing, over a hundred feet from end to end, with no apparent way to get out, save climbing over the dangerous debris.

  Murphy pointed to the old Seaholm Power Plant. The building had been derelict for years. He said, “City of Stin.”

  Fritz looked puzzled. “What?”

  I looked up at the side of the building and read, City of Austin Power Plant.

  “Old joke,” said Murphy, pointing at the giant retro-style letters mounted high up on the three-story wall. He grinned and looked at me. “I know you know what I’m talking about. You’ve been to the bars down here plenty of times at night, I’ll bet.”

  I looked up at the building and smiled. “You tell ‘em.”

  Murphy said, “Gather ‘round kiddies.”

  “Don’t make a career of it,” I said, “we got shit to do, you know.”

  “The Grumpy Null Spot.” Murphy chuckled.

  I looked around for danger.

  Murphy looked at Fritz and Gabe. “It’s nothing. Lights behind the A and U in the sign were burned out forever. So at night, it said ‘CITY of STIN’ instead of ‘CITY of AUSTIN’. When we were drunk, and talkin’ shit, it seemed really funny that the power plant wouldn’t change their light bulbs.”

  “Interesting,” said Fritz.

  “Don’t humor him,” I said, “it only makes it worse. Tell him you don’t give a shit. Trust me.”

  Murphy said, “I’m his only friend.”

  That got a laugh from Fritz and Gabe. Did I say that when the tension is high, any joke will do?

  Murphy looked at the piles of flood debris around us. “Should we go back?” He looked up the trail we’d followed to get there.