by Adair, Bobby
I pointed to one end of the rough crescent shape. “I’ll go that way first, and see if there’s a safe way over. Would one of you go the other way?”
Fritz said, “I’ve got it.”
I continued, “Murphy, you and Gabe stay here and keep an eye out back up the trail. You know, in case a White or two are following.”
“Got it, boss.” Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder and pointed it down the path we’d taken between the mounds.
Fritz took off, cautiously looking, stopping about twenty feet down the path to make an attempt to climb up and over the piled debris in front of him.
I hoped we wouldn’t have to do that, but said nothing. It might be the only way through without doubling back. Then again, we weren’t in a hurry. We weren’t being pursued. At the moment, we were safe and no Whites knew our whereabouts.
I walked along the path as the depth of the junk seemed to thicken underfoot, getting noisier. I had to step more and more gently. The jagged pieces of metal sticking randomly out from the sides seemed to squeeze me along a narrower and narrower walkway, making me feel very uncomfortable. If a White did come over the mound on either side, I’d be hard pressed to defend myself without getting injured, not by them, but by the debris.
Nearing the end of the crescent, I was nearly ready to give up and turn around when I spotted something curious, a break in the junk, along the wall of the building that had stood against the flood. I saw a concrete wall and a steel door.
Why not peek inside?
Maybe a window on the other side of the building would provide a path through the mound. That was my hope when I holstered my pistol, lifted my machete, and stepped up to the door. Slowly. Quietly. Of course, everything I did was quiet, and slow, especially if I wasn’t being chased by a herd of snappy-jawed Whites.
I turned the knob and pushed the door open, expecting to see jostled, moldy equipment. What I saw was some kind of electrical cabling snaked up out of a large round hole in the center of the floor. All the cables spread out along the floor and ran up the walls to big switch boxes mounted there. More importantly, some dim light down in the tunnel somewhere made it glow bright green through the night vision goggles while it silhouetted a thin, white-skinned girl with short, spiky hair and big, dark eyes, piercings, and tattoos.
Chapter 47
The sight of the girl startled me and I involuntarily took a half step back as I gulped. That gulp was all the time I needed to recover, raise my machete, and step back forward to cut her down.
That dim light down the tunnel gave me pause.
I wondered as I swung my machete at the female White whether that light in the tunnel was an anomaly in the night vision software or whether something was down there that shouldn’t have been.
In that moment as I paused, the girl stepped back. She didn’t howl. She didn’t bare her teeth. She didn’t lunge at me. She raised her arm in a useless defense and tried to stifle her scream as she mouthed, “No!”
I turned and let the machete whoosh past her as I pulled up on my swing.
No?
I froze.
The girl froze, perhaps wondering why she was alive.
Maybe planning her attack.
I raised my machete again, sticking my other hand out to push back if that was needed.
The girl’s face turned to pure fright as she softly said, “Please.”
“What?” I asked in the same low tones.
“Please, don’t.”
I looked around the small room again, double-checking that no ambush lay in there. How could there be? The whole space couldn’t have been more than ten feet square with only the tunnel and the cables. No furnishings. Only the girl.
I looked her up and down. She carried no gun but had a knife in a sheath on her hip, a bow in one hand, and a quiver over her shoulder.
She wasn’t a White. Well, she was. She had to be a Slow Burn.
I moved my mouth to speak, but in my surprise I couldn’t come to a choice of what to say first.
The girl’s free hand slowly slipped down to touch the handle of her knife.
My surprise clicked off and self-preservation kicked in. “Don’t,” I told her. “Don’t move.”
Don’t move? What the fuck kind of greeting is that?
She took another half step back, closer to the tunnel.
“Stop,” I said, much more gently. I slowly lowered my machete. “I’m… I’m not here to hurt you.”
That didn’t change the girl’s facial expression one bit. Her eyes darted from side to side, then went back to staring at me in what—for her at least—had to be very dim light. I realized she probably couldn’t see much more than my silhouette against the moonlight coming in through the open door.
I said, “I know you can’t see in this light, but I’m like you.” I raised my hand and slowly turned it. “White skin, just like yours.”
The girl touched the skin on her arm, running her fingers over a full sleeve tattoo—or so I guessed based on how much of her arm was visible. She asked, “Who are you? How did you find this place?”
This place?
Okay, enough clues clicked into place. This little ten-by-ten concrete building was more than just some kind of switching station for the power company.
“I just came in through the door,” I told her. “I was curious.”
She glanced back at the tunnel.
“I’m wearing night vision goggles,” I told her. “You maybe can’t see them in this light, but I can see everything you’re doing. What’s in the tunnel?”
Chapter 48
Something shuffled in the tunnel.
The girl turned and started to speak.
I raised my machete again and hissed, “Quiet.”
She froze.
More shuffling in the tunnel, footsteps, the creak of rusty metal. A voice whispered, “Jazz.”
Jazz?
“Jasmine,” it whispered again. “Wait up.”
I slowly lowered my machete and deliberately laid the edge on Jasmine’s throat. I removed my pistol from its holster and pointed it at the tunnel. I tilted my head to the right, silently ordering Jasmine to move a little to her left. I needed a clear view of the tunnel. I stepped to the side so I’d be in a shadow, rather than silhouetted by the moonlight coming through the open door.
The dim light in the tunnel went out. Hands and feet were climbing a ladder.
A woman’s head came up out of the tunnel, looking around in the darkness of the small structure. She saw the open door and cursed. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see Jazz either. She stopped halfway out of the hole, hearing or sensing something and becoming suddenly tense. She had a pistol in a holster on her hip and she was reaching for it when I said, “Don’t do it. Come up out of the hole. Don’t put that hand on your gun.”
She looked toward my voice, I guessed seeing only blackness. Just moments before, she’d been down in the tunnel with a candle or flashlight on. Her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to darkness.
“I’m wearing night vision goggles,” I told her. “You’ve got medium-length, sandy-colored hair. Mid thirties. Good shape. You’re wearing a black leather jacket. I can see everything.”
The woman’s face turned hard, her eyes darting from side to side. She was going to try something.
“Don’t,” I said. “Take a deep breath. Stop looking around for something to hit me with, okay? Be cool for a sec’.”
Slow footsteps outside told me someone was coming up through the debris toward the hut. Not a surprise. I’d been out of sight long enough to make the guys curious.
A moment later, Fritz’s voice whispered, “Zed? Zed?”
I whispered back, “I’m in here. Take it slow. Some people are in here with me.”
To the girl coming out of the tunnel, I said, “You’re a White, I’m—”
“A White?” she asked. “What?”
“Your skin,” I told her. “You caught the virus. You got better, right? So
did I. My skin is white just like yours.”
“You keep saying you’re like us,” said Jazz. “Why don’t you put down your weapons and just go. Leave us alone.”
Why indeed? To trust or not to trust?
“My name is Zed.” It seemed like a good way to start the de-escalation.
From outside, Fritz asked, “You okay in there, buddy?”
“Come in slowly,” I said over my shoulder.
Fritz leaned around the edge of the doorframe, pistol first, pointed at the roof.
Both girls tensed on seeing Fritz.
“He’s immune, but he’s cool,” I told them. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to lower my machete and point my pistol at the floor. Please don’t do anything stupid.”
I took my machete away from Jazz’s neck and she relaxed by a small fraction. As promised, I pointed my pistol down. “We really don’t mean you any harm,” I told them. “We were just trying to find a way down to the river to see if we could find a boat or something.”
“For what?” the girl from the tunnel asked, immediately trying to poke holes in my story.
“For what yourself.” I took offense although I probably shouldn’t have. “Who are you, Sherlock Holmes? We want to get the fuck out of town. Do you think we’re going fishing?”
She shared a knowing glance with the other girl.
I heaved a dramatic sigh and looked at the girl who’d had my machete at her neck. “Your name is Jazz, right? And you?” I asked, looking at the other girl.
“Grace,” she said.
“This is Fritz,” I replied, nodding back toward the door where Fritz hadn’t moved or spoken since coming in.
He took that as a cue. “Are they like you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Slow Burns?”
Grace and Jazz both looked at Fritz with silent questions on their faces. “How could he not know that?”
At least that’s what it looked like to me. I said, “He’s not from around here. Apparently, we Slow Burns are a bit of a geographical oddity.”
“Are you with the soldiers at the Capitol?” Grace nodded in the general direction of the complex.
“You asking me or him?” I replied.
She was glaring at Fritz, but she said, “Both.”
“We’re not with them,” I said. “As a matter of fact, they got kinda pissed when I burned down the Governor’s Mansion and blew up one of their helicopters.”
“That was you?” Jazz asked.
Grace shot her a look that said be quiet.
Looking at Jazz, I replied, “You know about that?”
Glaring petulantly at Grace, she said, “We all saw the fires and heard the explosions. We were wondering.”
We all?
“Jazz,” Grace scolded.
“That was us,” I told them. “Look, I don’t know what y’all’s deal is here. I don’t know how many more people you’ve got hiding up the tunnel and I don’t care. We’ve been running around downtown Austin for a day and a half with assholes shooting at us and Whites trying to have us for dinner. We just want to get the fuck out of downtown. So we’re just gonna go and leave you to yourselves. Are we cool?”
Grace looked suspicious.
More footsteps crunched in the debris outside.
Jazz looked toward the door.
“There are four of us,” I said. “One like me—like us—another Slow Burn. Fritz and his buddy are on some kind of mission to collect blood samples.”
“Yeah,” Fritz said. “We don’t have our stuff. Justice Baird’s guys took it when they arrested us. I need to come back this way, though, and get samples from all of you.” Fritz looked around outside. “Can I come back here to find you?”
“No,” Grace told him. “Don’t ever come back here. You might bring them with you.”
“The Whites?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever you call them.”
“Let’s go with Whites,” I told her.
“How many of you are there?” Fritz asked.
Grace and Jazz shared a look.
“Everything all right in there?” Murphy whispered from outside.
“Cool,” I softly called back.
Fritz looked down at his uniform, looked back up at Grace and said, “I’ll bet you think that because I’ve got a uniform on I’m tied with those guys at the Capitol.”
Grace said nothing, but to me it was clear Fritz had guessed exactly right.
“I’m not,” he told them. “Neither is Gabe. We’re Aggies. We were in the Corps. We’ve got a safe zone—if you could call it that—set up at A&M on the campus. They’re trying to develop a vaccine.”
“A vaccine won’t do us any good,” said Grace. She raised an arm to show her white skin. “We already caught the virus.”
“It might do us some good,” said Fritz, “but it’s not for us. It’s for our future.”
Chapter 49
Fritz had been a homebuilder before the virus, but I think his forte was sales. He convinced the girls he was for real, the program at A&M was real, and that it had a chance at success.
I’m not sure if any of them really believed it, but we all grew up in a culture where we bought lottery tickets against impossible odds if only for the small dose of hope. People need hope more than they know.
Maybe that was it. Fritz was selling hope to the hopeless.
We were all crowded into the utility building. Jazz had gone back up the tunnel to warn her people we were coming. Grace led the way down. Fritz and Gabe followed them, leaving only Murphy and me. Once the last of them was climbing down the ladder, Murphy said, “We could bail.”
“Leave ‘em?” I asked, not pointlessly. It was a delaying action. Murphy had a good point. Scrape Fritz and Gabe off on the girls, relieving myself of the responsibility for them after risking so much to get them out of the Capitol. But that plan also meant we’d leave Grace and Jazz—two Slow Burns—and possibly more up the tunnel. Our people?
I looked around as I thought about it. Every time we’d hooked up with normal people it hadn’t worked out. Would other Slow Burns accept us as equals?
Of course.
If we all had the same social handicap, why not?
I said, “I think we should head up the tunnel and see.”
“You think they live in the tunnel?” Murphy asked. “It’s got to be full of shit from the flood, right? I’ll bet it stinks.”
I pointed north. “The Seaholm Power Plant is across the street. I think the tunnel leads there. I’ll bet that’s where their people are hiding out.”
“You know me.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m up for anything. If you want to hang back and see if Fritz and Gabe get whacked, I’m cool. If you want to head over there and make some new friends, sure, why not? What’s the worst that could happen? They shoot us?”
“Or eat us,” I joked. I stepped onto the ladder leading down into the tunnel.
Just as Murphy had guessed, it stank of rotting swamp mud. Thick cables ran the length of the tunnel along one of the walls. They were coated with a layer of dirt, and pieces of debris were stuck on every bracket that held them in place. Two pipes, larger than I could wrap my arms around, ran one on top of the other along the other wall. Perhaps those were for pumping cooling water in and out of the old power plant. Most of the light fixtures on the roof were broken away. The floor was thick with dirt, mud, and random bits of junk that had flowed in and settled with the water after the flood.
Without a word between us, we followed the dim light of Grace’s flashlight down the straight length of the tunnel, hearing the growing sound of whispers and a tense voice or two echo back down toward us.
At the far end of the tunnel, there was no L-shaped elbow, nor ladder leading up. The tunnel opened straight into a basement-level room that was open to the ceiling four stories up, with three of those above ground level. The place appeared to have been going through a major renovation from power plant to
trendy office space or expensive condos before the virus and before the flood. Much of the building’s concrete structure was still intact, leaving me with the feeling that I’d just walked inside the shell of some enormous dead beetle.
On concrete catwalks, looking down on us from the ground-level floor, nine people stared—most armed, all Slow Burns. A few of them, mostly the ones with no weapons in hand, stood and gazed blankly at nothing in particular. I knew that look. They were the Russells of the group.
As we all stood there, sizing up one another, silently evaluating whether we were a mutual danger, Fritz surprised me and spoke up. Not fazed by the threat of the guns held in the hands of the people above, he slipped comfortably into salesman mode. He told them his story about the professors sequestered in one of the buildings on the A&M campus. He told them about his job to collect samples.
I’d heard the story a few times by then and got bored until I realized it might all be a lie.
I wondered what that suspicion said about me. Had I lost all my faith in people or did I simply never have any?
Fritz told them about the dream of a vaccine. He told them he was risking his life for humanity’s children, and he told them the virus that had infected all of them once could come back in another mutation—maybe in six months, maybe in a few years. Maybe it would return in an attenuated, benign form, or maybe more deadly. He assured them, though, it would be back. Billions of people on the planet were now walking virus farms and in each of them billions of virions were growing and mutating into untold varieties. It was possible we had not yet seen the worst of it.
If anything, Fritz’s speech took everyone’s mind off the most salient problem at hand: The necessity that we all trust one another, strangers bonded only by skin color.
Chapter 50
An hour after arrival, we found ourselves sitting in a conference room on the third floor. Two wide, tall windows cut through the thick concrete on one wall. Drawn curtains blocked the view out those windows and kept the dim candlelight inside.
Fritz, Gabe, Murphy, and me sat at a long oval conference table. Grace, Jazz, an older man named Bill, and another older woman named Janet sat across from us. They were curious about news, of which Murphy and I had little. Of course, their questions led to Murphy entertaining them for an hour talking about the things that had happened to us. I was happy to let Murphy tell it. He was a natural at having his mouth open while basking in the attention it drew. A lot of it was even amusing when spun with his sense of exaggeration and humor. When he got to the ugly, painful parts, he glossed over those with a pensive look and moved on.