by Bobby Adair
“Back to the facts, please.”
Freitag looked down at her feet. “Murphy told us about a safe house and that we should go there or something.”
I asked, “The one that he and I had been to before?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“And that’s where you went?”
Freitag nodded.
“Describe it to me.”
Freitag did and went into enough detail that she removed any doubts I had about her having been there. I tossed her several bullets.
Her eyes filled with fake tears again and her sad mouth said, “When everybody was inside, I was supposed to go out to the boat and bring the supplies inside. Steph had laid the boat keys on a counter in the kitchen and I took them when no one was looking.”
I shook my head.
Defiant, Freitag hissed, “You said you wanted to know.”
“Go on.”
“Once I was back on the boat, I…don’t you understand? I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t stay with them. They all hated me.”
“Go on.”
“I just started up the boat and left.”
“They didn’t try to stop you?”
“I don’t think they knew I was gone until it was too late. I didn’t see them come out of the house.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “And you didn’t run the boat around in circles for ten minutes to draw in every White in the neighborhood?”
Freitag looked at her feet.
“Well?”
“I didn’t do that.”
“You did it to me.”
Still looking at her feet, Freitag started to say something, but didn’t. She started to cry again. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t believe that. If anything, she was sorry that nobody believed her bullshit. She was sorry that she got caught. She wasn’t sorry she ditched me and called in the infected to kill me. “Did you circle the boat and draw in the infected when you ditched my friends?”
She shook her head.
I didn’t know whether to believe that or not. The only way I was going to know would be to head back down the river to the safe house and see for myself. At least I knew where to look. I hoped. How deep could Freitag’s vindictiveness run? I brushed the rest of the free bullets onto the floor. One magazine was still full, and I left it on the dresser as I headed for the door with both weapons.
“You said you’d leave the rifle!”
I stopped and turned. “I will. You have the bullets. I’m leaving your M16 on the grass in the backyard.”
“You asshole! You promised.” She jumped to her feet.
I gave her the coldest look I could pull together, and with the pistol I gestured for her to sit back down. “Here’s how that’s going to work. I’m going to leave this rifle out there in the grass. I’m going to get in the ski boat and get the pontoon boat and then use one to tow the other down the river. When I’m heading back down, I’ll get the attention of all of your friends outside and get them to follow me along on the bank. Once you see them go, run out and grab your M16. It won’t be far.”
“But what if some are still out there?”
“Be careful.”
“I hate you.”
“That’s nice. Listen, when you put the magazine in your rifle and you get back inside, be really careful about choosing to shoot it. Gunshots are like dinner bells to them. Oh, and don’t be such a duplicitous cunt if you find some other group of survivors. We were trying to help you guys when you came to our compound. We were ready to take you in. The whole deal with Harvey and Murphy was fucked up, but like Dalhover said, shit happens. So grow the fuck up.” I turned and headed out the door.
She stood up, following and rattling on about something I didn’t care to hear.
I hollered back up to her. “I’m not listening to you. Don’t follow me. If I don’t see you standing in the window up here when I go across the backyard, I’m not leaving the gun on the lawn. Got it? And I’m taking a couple of the pillowcases full of food that I saw in the kitchen. I scavenged that, and you stole it. Oh, and you shot a hole in your new canoe, so fuck you.”
Chapter 31
It is always a surprise to me when everything goes as planned.
So when I left the M16 in the yard, picked up the ski boat, tied it to the stern of the pontoon boat, and still managed to get the anchor free, all without getting shot at again by Freitag, I was surprised. And since she didn’t take any more shots at me, I fulfilled my promise to her and pulled the pontoon boat close to shore to get the attention of the infected around the house.
The Whites weren’t as cooperative as I’d hoped they would be, so I took a few shots with the pistol. After all, why not kill a few if I was going to use some bullets? It turns out that shooting moving targets from a distance with a pistol is a whole lot harder than it looks on TV.
What a fuckin’ surprise.
I didn’t hit any of them, but I did get their attention, after which they were more than happy to tromp through the woods on the bank and keep pace with me as I slowly motored down river. After half a mile, I pulled the pontoon boat away from the shore and watched them fade into the distance behind. Apropos to the situation, I gave them the finger for my own amusement.
Looking south and east, I saw billows of heavy, gray smoke several miles distant. It had to be coming from the Mt. Bonnell area. Those fires of my making had grown. More of Austin, perhaps the rest of it, was going to burn. That saddened me a little, but I rationalized away the guilt with an argument of inevitability. All of Texas was a dry tinderbox awaiting a spark. I hoped that a good number of the naked horde was roasting in the conflagration beneath that smoke. If that was the case, then the bomb hadn’t been a total waste.
My stomach rumbled, letting me know that the cookies and beer from earlier were digested and it was ready for a refill. Oh, and I had two pillowcases full of other items. My personal stash of food had, for the moment, grown into a big enough hoard to keep me fed for two or three weeks.
It was time to kill the pontoon boat’s engine and drift. I was anxious to get back to my friends, to see Murphy’s grin and Steph’s smile. Even seeing Russell, Dalhover, and Mandi would do me good. But I knew where they were. At least I hoped that my confidence in my ability to tell the difference between Freitag’s lies and half-truths wasn’t misplaced. But the last thing I wanted to do was motor up to the dock in front of the safe house in broad daylight and alert every White on that side of the river to my presence. It would be better to arrive after dark and to drift silently in, as Murphy and I had done in returning to Sarah Mansfield’s house after that first trip out.
Given all of that, there was no point in running the engine to get down the river. If I drifted, I would likely arrive at the safe house after dark, and in the process, I’d conserve the fuel in the boat’s tanks. Conservation of our limited resources was something that all of us would need to start giving serious thought to, or we’d waste our way right back into the Stone Age and bemoan our stupidity when we arrived.
Flipping open one of the dry food storage bins, I carefully dumped the contents of one of the pillowcases in and took an eyeball inventory of the items as they fell. When a blue rectangular can with a big graphic of greasy pink meat fell past, I perked up. Spam! The lowliest of meats suddenly seemed to me to be the most delectable of entrees. It was high in fat and high in salt, two things my body sorely needed. A can of green beans was going to be my side dish, and along with those, another bottle beer would go quite nicely.
Both the Spam and green bean cans were designed to require no can opener, and I popped them open along with my beer open and sat in the shade on a cushioned bench with a plastic fork in my hand and a faint, but satisfied smile on my face. Things were looking up.
There’s something about sitting on a gently rocking boat in cold water on a hot summer day that is supremely relaxing. Birds were in the trees on the banks, some singing, some squawking. Sure, th
ere were occasional gunshots, usually far in the distance, but I was learning to tune those out the same way I used to tune out traffic noise from the highway that ran right past my apartment.
I slowly filled my stomach and savored each salty bite as it went down. Even the beer was kind enough not to bring any unwanted memories with its flavor.
Eventually my lazy thoughts turned to more serious matters, and the problem of the Smart Ones, King Joel, and Mark. Murder Plan A, my bomb, had failed. I’d had such high hopes for that. Ratios of gasoline vapor to oxygen, barometric pressure, wind speed, and even humidity had likely played into the poor result. Perhaps on another day with even slightly different conditions, it might have worked exactly as planned and rid west Austin of its infestation of human roaches.
The failure was demoralizing, but it couldn’t be the end of my efforts.
The thunder of an oncoming brainstorm started me thinking.
The snipers with the silencers, the ones that had killed Jerome, had done well for themselves. The number of infected bodies in that intersection was impressive. Surely those guys were all dead now, and their weapons were lying by their corpses, or lying where they left them after getting infected and wandering off, but still, they’d done well while they lasted.
I wasn’t much of a marksman, but I’ll bet Murphy was, and I had no doubt Dalhover could shoot. But bringing Dalhover out on hunting trips among the infected was too dangerous for him. As for Murphy and I, with a little care and a little planning, we could blend in and out of the infected population without any of the Smart Ones ever noticing. Heck, we could follow the naked horde like the Indians used to follow the buffalo herds on the Great Plains and hunt the Smart Ones into extinction.
That brought up the next question: how to identify the Smart Ones. Could we identify them based solely on their behavior? Possibly. And if we made a mistake and killed a dumb one, well, no big loss. They all needed to die eventually. I wondered if night vision goggles or an infrared riflescope would be helpful in sorting out which of the Whites down range was burning cooler than the others. The cooler ones would be the smarter ones. But was the equipment sensitive enough to allow us to tell the difference of a couple of degrees? Probably not. That would leave us with behavior-based identification.
I wondered if Murphy would go along. It would be great, so much safer, to have him as a partner in the venture, but I would go it alone if I had to. I understood the danger posed by my list of targets. I was convinced that it was a matter of life or death for anyone with a normal capacity for thought.
When my pontoon boat drifted around a bend and the faux riverboat came into view, it surprised me. I’d been so lost in my thoughts and plans that I’d lost track of time. Hours had passed, and it was late in the day. I wondered if I’d dozed off without realizing it. Well, no harm done. At the moment, I felt better than I had in many days, and I was on my way home, so to speak.
As I drifted closer to the river boat, I waved and smiled. The girls recognized me and waved back. Good. We needed to talk.
I started the engine on the pontoon boat and made a large U-turn so that the ski boat would be behind the pontoon boat in the current as I navigated up to within ten feet of the tourist boat.
“Hey,” I called over, “I need to anchor here for a bit so that we can talk. Is that cool?”
By this time, all three girls were up on the top deck, curiously watching. It was Amy who answered, “Yes. What happened to your canoe?”
“I traded it in.”
“That looks like your old ski boat.”
“It is.”
“Should I ask about the girl who took it?” Amy’s smile disappeared.
I shrugged. “She’s fine. I mean, she’s got a rifle. She’s got food. She’s in a nice house. And she’s probably got a few extra bruises, but I didn’t shoot her or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s what I’m asking. What do you want to talk about?”
“Well, there’s a long, long story, but at the end, I’m gonna ask you if four of our people can stay here with you guys.”
The younger girls were excited over that. Amy wasn’t. “I think maybe you guys have too much drama for us. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“I think we’re past the drama part. Have you got some time to talk?”
Amy looked around in a gesture that seemed to ask if I was kidding about that. So I dropped anchor and secured my boat.
I told the three girls about our group, about our attempt to take in Freitag and the others. I told them about my experience with Mark at the dorm and with the Smart Ones at the hospital. I told them about Nancy and Bubbles and King Monkey Fucker, and I told them that I planned to go out and kill the Smart Ones because that plan, of all the ones I’d schemed since the virus took down civilization, was the most necessary for giving us normal people a chance at rebuilding our old lives. That last part sounded just as corny when I told her.
In the end, she seemed ready to agree. “I’ll be straight up with you, Zed. I get the impression that you’re a good guy, but it seems like you’re a trouble magnet.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“If you want to bring your friends down here, we’ll meet them. I’m not going to make any promises, but we’ll meet them. You just have to be sure that they know before you bring them that we might choose not to let them come aboard.”
“Of course, I understand. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach. I’ll tell you what, though, if it helps with your choice, Murphy and I can keep you guys stocked up with food and other supplies between our hunting trips. It’s safer for us to go ashore than it is for you.”
Amy laughed out loud, “Based on what you’ve told me, I’m not sure about that.”
I laughed too. It was hard to argue, but I did say, “When he and I work together, we’re safe. And you know that even if it’s dangerous for us, it’s a lot more dangerous for you. You know that’s true, right?”
In the end, we agreed that I’d bring everyone by the next day and we’d go from there.
Chapter 32
The sun was getting close to the horizon and I was drifting down the river again. At one point when I was standing on the deck, watching the shore slide by, I caught a whiff of a familiar smell. But it was a smell I hadn’t sniffed in so long, I found myself walking around the deck, trying for a better whiff.
It was near the stern, out in the sun that I breathed in a full dose and sighed.
Rain!
Somewhere, over the hills and out above the blazingly hot dirt and dead grasses, a thunderstorm was pouring rain down on a land whose need was beyond desperate. The smell of the ozone from the lightning, and the water evaporating off of the hot ground and streets had a distinctive scent that floated on the wind, down between the hills, over the river, and to me.
It smelled like hope.
Energized by the possibility of rain, I used the time on my hands to clean out the cooler and salvage twenty-two bottles of beer and thirty-four cans of soda. Thankfully, none of them were diet drinks. Diet food and drinks were made obsolete the moment that dining in America changed from recreation back to a matter of survival. The sodas and beers got packed into the pillowcases, tied off, and lowered into the cold river, hanging by a rope off of the deck railing. It was the only refrigeration I had.
As I neared my destination, I sat down on the flat deck at the bow of the pontoon boat, dangling my feet in the water, and using a paddle to nudge the boat in the direction I hoped to go. I use the word ‘hope’ because I’m not sure if my paddling had any significant effect on the direction of the boat. Eventually, I spied the boathouse, emerging out of the darkness on the peninsula, where I remembered it to be.
So it was back to sweating and struggling with the paddle to urge the pontoon boat to a place in the current where I had a chance of catching one of the posts in the boathouse with the rescue hook when I floated by. As I reached that point, I jumped up to
the starboard railing, took the long hook out and braced myself against falling into the river.
It all went in slow motion at first, and I was thinking it would be too easy. But everything seemed to accelerate as the dock drew closer. I hooked the end of the rescue pole around a thick wooden pier and gripped it tight as the starboard railing pulled back against my torso, anchoring the boat at a spot in the water and creating a pivot point around which it slowly spun. The ski boat had a slow-motion collision with the stern of the pontoon boat, then slid out and around in a wide arc.
As soon as the bulk of both boats was out into the river and roughly perpendicular to the shoreline, I hauled in hard on the rescue hook to bring the bow of the pontoon boat closer to the dock. A rope was lying at my feet, attached to my boat and just waiting to be looped around a cleat or piling.
Maybe a minute or two after catching the pole, I found myself attaching that line. It had all come off just as planned. Both boats straightened out into the flow of the current. I gave a thought to bringing them both into the boathouse to secure them more thoroughly, but decided against it. It would be better to do that after I checked the house for whoever might be inside. My arrival at the house was predicated on the truth of Freitag’s story. A hurried exit could still be in the cards, and I didn’t want to lose my boats if that became necessary.
Without hesitation, I jumped onto the wooden dock, naked except for my shorts, with my knife in one hand and my pistol in the other. The house ahead was dark. It looked abandoned. But then, that was the smart way to make it look from the outside. No attention was good attention these days.
At the end of the dock, I stepped up onto the grassy lawn and walked under the deep shadows of the live oaks.
The stone patio that surrounded the pool was up the slope fifty or sixty feet ahead. The kitchen door was my target. I’d go there and knock. If my friends were inside, they’d see me through the glass. From there, the story in my head jumped unrealistically to happily ever after. It was the kind of thought that could only be entertained on a full stomach and a slight alcohol buzz.