by Bobby Adair
“’Bout time. This creek is starting to worry me. It’s been rising the whole time you were doing your laundry.”
That was true. I looked upstream. I don’t know what I was looking for. Maybe a wall of water from a coming flash-flood? Dramatic, even for me.
The shuffler, seemingly oblivious to the rain, was getting pretty close.
“You think he’s going to follow us?” I asked.
Murphy hefted his hatchet. “I can see that he doesn’t.”
The shuffler came to a stop, not five feet away. He smiled.
What the hell?
That meant he had to have some degree of brain function. The worst of them never smiled.
Holy crap.
The shuffler looked at me and said, “Zzzz…”
Murphy turned to me. “You know him?”
Dumbfounded, I nodded. It was Jeff Aubrey. He’d survived.
Murphy shook his head and lowered his hatchet, but he didn’t put it away.
“Jeff?” I took a step forward.
Jeff’s grin widened. “Zzzz…”
Murphy’s face turned to worry and he put a hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting closer. He took a quick look around to make sure nobody else was close enough to hear. “He’s not right.”
That much was clear. “I met him in the hospital. He was passed out with the fever when we escaped. We locked him in one of the rooms.”
Murphy went from worried to confused. “And?”
“He was Steph’s fiancé.”
Murphy shook his head in disbelief and laughed out loud.
“Jeff, can you speak?”
After a pause, he answered. “Yez.”
“Yez?” I said.
“Yez.”
Murphy leaned in close to me. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a bad idea. Let’s ditch this dude and get the hell out of here.”
Sorely tempted to heed Murphy’s wishes, I said. “We can’t.”
“Hell yeah, we can. No good’s gonna come from this. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you need to do the right thing and reunite Jeff here with Steph. But that stupid little good angel that sits on your shoulder doesn’t know shit.”
“Anzel.” Jeff interrupted with another grin.
“He’s harmless,” I said.
“You don’t know that.” Murphy was getting a little bit pissed. “You don’t know anything about this guy. You met him before the virus fried his brain. Now you want to reunite him with Steph…”
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
“You didn’t need to. I know you. I know you always want to do the dumbass right thing. But it’s gonna get you killed one day.”
I shook my head.
“Killz,” Jeff said. “Killz.”
Murphy raised his eyebrows, as if to emphasize Jeff’s choice of words.
“Jeff, what have you been eating?” I asked.
“Hungry,” he said.
“Have you eaten anything?”
“Hungry,” he said again, as his smile melted away.
“If you bring him back, you know you can kiss any chance of getting into Steph’s pants goodbye,” Murphy said. “You know that, right?”
“It’s not about that.”
“It’s always about that.”
“I know you’re not like that, Murphy.”
Murphy smiled wickedly and shook his head. “Man, you wanna bet?”
The rain was coming down so hard, it was flowing off of us. Hushed conversation was impossible.
“I can’t leave him here,” I said.
“You can, and you should, but you won’t.”
I didn’t see any point in responding.
“Fine. I’m only gonna say one more thing about it. You won’t be doing anybody any favors,” Murphy said.
“How’s that?”
“Zat,” Jeff said.
We were already ignoring him.
“First off, he seems to be doing fine right here on his own.”
I shrugged. I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t argue. He was alive. Nearly everybody else he knew from the hospital wasn’t.
“You’re not gonna get any pussy.”
I shrugged again.
“Whatever.” Murphy said. “And how do you think Steph is gonna feel when you bring him back?”
I started to say she’d be happy, overjoyed maybe. But Murphy’s question made me give that some real thought.
He read my hesitation correctly and nodded. “You see, don’t you? Ask yourself how you would feel if your old girlfriend showed up and she had the IQ of a frog. You’d take care of her, out of obligation, like we do with Russell, but how could you still love her? She wouldn’t be the same person, Zed. This dude isn’t, either. He can barely speak one-syllable words.”
“Zyllble.”
“All you’re gonna do is make Steph feel bad and saddle her with a responsibility she can’t handle and that will probably get her killed. That’s if he doesn’t decide to kill her himself when he sees her. You gotta remember, Zed, you and me are Whites, like him. He doesn’t see us as food. He might be just as crazy as the rest of these fucks.”
“Fugz.”
We stood there in the rain for a bit, Murphy letting it all sink in.
Thinking about these things was bothersome. It was so much easier to just act on my whims. “What’s Steph going to say when I tell her I saw Jeff and just left him?”
“Dude.” Murphy looked around at the rain. “You don’t have to tell her anything. All that knowledge will do is make her feel bad. That’s it. There’s no upside to this situation unless we turn around and leave Professor Syllable right here and forget about him.”
Murphy was right. Jeff couldn’t make anything better for anybody. He was a burden at best. But the idea of leaving him felt bad, nevertheless.
The wind started to blow heavy, fat drops against my face in little slaps that irritated me before the drops ran down through my soaked clothes and filled my new boots. The world had turned to noisy gray.
“Damn, it’s comin’ down.” Murphy had to raise his voice to be heard just a few feet away.
I looked around. The rain was so heavy it was getting hard to make out the shapes of nearby buildings. Water ran ankle-deep across the ground where we were standing. Waller Creek was visibly swelling over its banks. It was a flash-flood in the making.
I shouted. “Fuck!”
Murphy brought his rifle to his shoulder and spun around, looking for targets. His head jerked left. Then right. He looked back at me, confused, tense.
I pointed at the creek. I had to shout. “It’s going to flood.”
“Who cares? Let’s get out of here.”
“That intersection we’re headed to is only a few blocks off Waller Creek.”
Murphy’s brows knit. “You think…?”
I nodded vigorously.
Floods in Texas came and went, usually a few feet here or there when a creek overran its banks. Carpets in nearby houses would need to get replaced. The drywall would need to be rehung. Sometimes, the floods washed down the creek beds with the wrath of God behind them. Twisted steel, piled masonry and smashed cars were left when the water subsided.
“Murphy, if the water rises too fast, it might make finding those silencers impossible.” I was getting hoarse from shouting. “I think we should go get that Humvee I left up on the roof of the parking garage and drive over there.”
“Drive?” Murphy’s face showed just how bad he thought that idea was. He looked around for any Whites that might materialize out of the gray sheets of rain.
“With it coming down like this—” I looked at Jeff and doubted what I was about to say “—all of the Whites with half a brain are hiding inside. They’ll never even see us drive by.”
Chapter 31
On the top level of the parking garage adjacent to the hospital, the Humvee was exposed to the rain. And just as I’d left it, the machine gun hatch was open, providing the only way to get
back inside the vehicle. All of the doors had their battle locks set. I’d set them before I used the fifty-caliber machine gun to shoot up the stairwell on the side of the hospital.
Climbing up on top of the Humvee and getting back down inside was easy enough. I went in first, leaving it to Murphy to close the hatch in the face of Jeff Aubrey, who’d followed us up through the parking garage’s five levels. He was tagging along, that was clear enough. I realized he’d understood so little of our conversation, he didn’t get that we were going to ditch him. The virus had left his brain too addled. At least, that’s how I rationalized it.
The last I saw of Jeff was him watching Murphy and me drive away, crying out loud, reaching his hands toward us, though his feet took no steps to chase.
I put that thought out of my mind as Murphy drove the Humvee down the ramp, which was littered with the bones of hundreds of Whites, gnawed clean by those who survived that day on the roof. The Humvee’s big tires rolled over them like so many bumps on the road. Thankfully, the noise of the rain pelting our metal roof covered the sound of crunching and breaking.
When we were down to the second level, Murphy said, “You’ll need to tell me where to drive this thing. I don’t know how to get around down here.”
“When we get down to the end of the bottom ramp, turn right. We can take the garage exit onto Red River Street.”
“I know you didn’t want to leave that dude there, but it was the right thing. I know you’re gonna want to make yourself feel all guilty about it. Don’t. The world is fucked up now. That’s just the way it is. You can’t fix everything. You can’t save everybody.”
We got to the bottom of the last ramp and, without a word, I pointed right.
Murphy drove slowly to push some barricades out of the way and then we were back out in the rain. The pounding on the roof made conversation impossible without shouting. So we didn’t talk, mostly. I pointed and Murphy turned the wheel.
On Red River Street, the water in the road had filled it to the tops of the curbs, and still the intensity of the rainfall did not let up. Things were starting to float with the current in the road. It all flowed toward the creeks, which flowed south toward the Colorado River, which ran through the center of town.
I hollered. “This thing will do okay with all the water, right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
We drove past the circular basketball arena and crossed over Martin Luther King Boulevard. We were back on the campus.
The road veered off to the right. Looking at the maze of abandoned vehicles in and along the road, Murphy gave me a look. He was wondering whether we could get through. Several weeks before, I’d driven that big motorcycle down Red River on the way to the hospital. I knew it was clear enough for us to pass. I motioned for him to head up the road.
Slowly, we went north. IH-35’s upper deck loomed out of the easing rain on our right. Several heads popped up to watch us. They were Whites, making a living off of scavenging rotten meat from the carcasses of motorists who’d died in the highway traffic jams. Those Whites probably still had bellies full of putrid flesh and little motivation to come after us. As we passed between one of the football practice fields and the LBJ Library, the road dipped down. Before I could form the words to shout, the Humvee was in a couple of feet of water. “How deep can we go before we’re stuck?”
Murphy shrugged. “I don’t think it gets that deep.”
“I thought you were afraid of water.”
“I can’t swim, but I’m not neurotic.”
We reached the bottom of the dip between the two hills and the pavement angled back upward. When we reached the top of the hill, the sky had opened up again and the rain was coming down as heavily as before.
“When you come to the next street, that’s Dean Keeton,” I shouted. “Turn left. That intersection where Jerome got shot is a few blocks down.”
Murphy stopped the Humvee halfway through the turn onto Dean Keeton Street. Looking at me, he asked, “What do you think?”
“Hell if I know. We’ve come this far. Let’s just drive over there and see what happens.”
“And if those dudes are still there?”
I rapped on the glass in my door. “Will this protect us?”
“It should. But if they are there, I doubt they’ll shoot at the Humvee. They’ll wait until we get out.”
“I’m sure they’re all dead. I mean, what are the odds of any of them making it through the infection?”
“Pretty slim.”
“Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we came all the way over here. The place might be underwater for all we know. If we can, we’ll go past by a couple of blocks and then loop around into that neighborhood north of campus. We can sneak up that way.”
Murphy shrugged. “And if it is flooded?”
“We go home.”
The Humvee rolled into the intersection and Murphy steered it toward the westbound lane and down a long slope toward Waller Creek. The rain was slacking again. Apparently, waves of heavy rain separated by waves of lighter rain were the order of the day. Lightning split the air a few car lengths ahead of us. The crack rattled me to my bones and I jumped in my seat. Murphy instinctively slammed the brakes and the Humvee jerked to a halt.
“Holy shit.” The afterimage was burned into my retinas.
“I think I just shit my pants.” Murphy looked right and left again. “We need to get out of this.”
With plenty of leftover fright in my voice I said, “Just keep going. It’s okay.”
Thunder from another strike rumbled over us.
“This shit’s dangerous, man.”
“Murphy, be cool. Trust me on this one. Inside of a car is a safe place to be in a thunderstorm.”
“What?”
“I’m serious dude. It’s a physics thing. We’re safe. Trust me.”
Murphy took his foot off the brake and the Humvee started to move. “Sounds like bullshit to me.”
“Have you ever heard of a Faraday Cage?”
“Nope.”
“Then don’t worry about it. Just keep going.”
We accelerated. As we neared the intersection where Jerome had met his end, Murphy slowed.
Only one Humvee was sitting in the intersection. On our first visit, three were there. Several inches of water were running down the street and through the intersection, burbling up over hundreds of carcasses, the success score of snipers hidden nearby.
“Just go on through like we’re not scoping them out,” I said.
The ride got bouncy as the Humvee drove over the rotting bodies.
Murphy looked quickly at the buildings on the corners. “Do you see anything?”
My attention was focused on the university co-op store on the northwest corner of the intersection. It had a second floor and an angled wall of windows. From there, snipers had command of the intersection and the roads leading up to it in three directions. Several of the windows were broken out, leaving jagged teeth of black, tinted glass hanging in the frames. Nothing moved in the shadows within.
Past the intersection, Murphy swerved the vehicle close to the right hand curb. “Where do you want me to pull this thing over?”
Looking behind at the co-op building, I said, “Keep going. If they’re still in there, I don’t want them to see us stopping.”
We passed a street on the right. We passed another and the road started to curve. Still looking back at the co-op, I said, “Take the next street, okay?”
The Humvee came to a stop.
I spun around in my seat. “Not now.”
Murphy directed my attention out over the Humvee’s hood.
“Shit.” I was stunned. Waller Creek, a deep, crooked ditch before the rain came, had turned into a river two hundred feet wide. The bridge ahead of us was completely immersed. Not even the rails were visible. Only the water rising up to flow over the submerged obstacles provided any evidence of their existence. “This is a lot worse than I thought it was going to get.”
“I’m worried about Mandi,” Murphy said.
“I’ve never heard of flooding on the part of the river where they are. I mean, with Mansfield Dam just upriver, how could it?”
Murphy dropped the concern and turned determined. “Let’s get this done and get the hell out of here. This is bad.”
“Yeah.”
To our right was a parking lot for a small apartment building. I pointed. “Just stick it there between those pickups. Do it quick.”
Murphy gunned the engine and cut the wheel, ran over a curb and bounced the Humvee to a stop just where I’d asked.
“Damn.” I’d have to be careful next time I asked for quick.
Murphy shrugged.
I was already soaked to the bone, but was still reluctant to open the door and go back out into the rain.
Murphy noticed me hesitating. “You good?”
“As good as I’m gonna get.” I flung the door open.
Chapter 32
Moments later, Murphy and I were well off the road and slogging through a park adjacent to the apartment building. Water was flowing or standing everywhere. In some places, it was just deep enough to soak into the toes of our boots. In others, it poured over the tops.
Broken limbs, fallen from the oaks in the park, were scattered. Fences were down. Shingles were blowing off of roofs. Garbage cans were sailing on gusts or floating in the water. Thunder continued to rumble.
“At least we don’t need to worry about being quiet. What do you say we just run the rest of the way?” Murphy didn’t wait for an answer. He jogged ahead and I fell in behind him.
We exited the park, crossed a backyard and ran between two widely-spaced houses. Caution wasn’t even an afterthought by then. We ran on across a street without slowing down to look. I saw no other living thing. We were apparently the only two infected people crazy enough to be out in the weather.
Once across the street, we had to weave our way between parked cars and some small duplexes laid out at unusual angles to the road and to each other. No front doors facing the street there. Past those, we were rewarded with a view of the backside of the co-op building, just across a narrow road. We squatted behind a car and looked.