Slow Burn Box Set: The Complete Post Apocalyptic Series (Books 1-9)

by Bobby Adair

  “At the neighbor’s house?” I asked. The house on the neighboring parcel of land stood a couple of hundred yards distant through thick growths of cedars and live oaks. Murphy had come across the infected man while scavenging but hadn’t said much more about it.

  “He was starting to get pretty ripe.” Murphy threw in a shrug. “Catfish are bottom feeders. They like stink-bait. I figured since the White’s skull was already open, you know, I took a chunk of it and put it on the hook.” Murphy nodded down at the catfish on the platter. “Three feet long. We could’ve had a fish fry and fed the whole block.”

  “Back before,” I said, avoiding the thought of why the catfish in the lake seemed to be thriving.

  Nodding, Murphy agreed. “Before.”

  “We won’t eat all of that before it goes bad.” I patted my belly, feeling the ripple of muscles beneath my shirt. “I’ll try though. It won’t hurt me to put on a few pounds.”

  Murphy said, “I’ll bet you’ve put on twenty since we got here.”

  “You think?” I asked. “Am I getting fat?” I smiled.

  Murphy shook his head. “You should have seen yourself before. You were a skinny little fucker.”

  I recalled looking in the mirror after I was finally able to keep myself on my feet. I’d lost a lot of weight through the course of everything that had happened, a lot more than I could afford. I remembered thinking at the time I looked like a tweaker who’d been hitting the meth too long. Twenty pounds, or however many pounds I’d put back on, still left me pretty lean but looking more normal than not.

  As for Murphy, I’d have guessed he’d lost well over fifty pounds since it all started. Maybe a bit more. The difference was that he had the extra pounds to lose. Now he was thickly muscled with no fat at all.

  I put a few filets on my plate, with a handful of hushpuppies, and a big scoop of beans. Murphy did the same.

  The first bite of the catfish put a smile on my face. “Good,” I said through a full mouth.

  “It’s good to see you smile.”

  “Whatever,” I said as I chewed, swallowed, and stuffed in another bite. “What’s up with these hushpuppies? Aren’t they supposed to be round?”

  Murphy ignored the dig. He looked out at the lake through the frilly curtains hanging partially closed. He took another big bite of fish. “Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but this does taste like my mom’s.”

  I looked out the window to see what had Murphy’s interest. “What else is on your mind? What are you looking for out on the lake?”

  “Nothing,” said Murphy. “It’s pretty.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I nodded toward the window. “Spill it. What?”

  “You’ve been such a melancholy little bitch since we got here, it’s nice to see you smiling.”

  “I—”

  Murphy raised his big hands, palms facing me. “I’m not trying to start anything. I know what happened as well as you. I was there, remember?”

  It was something I tried hard to put out of my mind. I looked down at the floor as I thought about the feeling of Steph’s hand going limp in mine. Her death still hurt. I tried to change the subject back to the food. “Good thing you paid attention when your mom was in the kitchen.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes before Murphy said, “Look man, I know you got…” Murphy made a vague gesture at his head. “I don’t know. You like to hold onto your painful shit. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded and shrugged. I knew exactly what he meant. It still didn’t change anything.

  “You’re not like me. I get that.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “Murphy, I know what you’re going to say. We both went through it. We both lost—” It was hard to see the memory in my mind. It was hard to say—physically hard—because I started to choke up over it. “You watched Mandi die.” I took a deep breath. “We both did. And Russell too. Fuck. And everybody.”

  Murphy started to say something, but I raised a hand to keep him quiet. I said, “I lost Steph, as helplessly as you lost Mandi. I don’t know if that helpless part makes a difference. To me, it feels like it does.”

  “Pointless painful shit,” Murphy muttered.

  “I know how much it hurt you, losing Mandi.”

  Murphy nodded.

  “You were angry and bitter about it for a while.” I vaguely pointed across the table at him. “Now, the Murphy Philosophy has won out. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were back to normal. Happy fucking Murphy. Too many smiles. Too many jokes.”

  “I could get on my pulpit and try to sell you again on the Murphy Plan,” he said.

  “I don’t need to be sold,” I told him. “I know sometimes the burden of all the death gets to you. I see you out on the deck occasionally, staring at the water with that lost look in your eyes.”

  Murphy shook his head vigorously. “Just because I—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “I’m not saying I don’t believe your ideas about life aren’t working for you. I know you still feel the pain. That’s normal. I also know by actively choosing not to wallow in it like me, you’re moving on. You’re going to live. Hell, you’re keeping me alive, too. I appreciate it. Hell, I fucking envy it. I want to buy an economy-size box of Murphy Smalls bullshit so I can find a way past my own crap. I… I guess I’m just so hard-wired for my own shit, I don’t know if I can find my way down the Murphy road.”

  “You just gotta keep trying, man.” Murphy smiled. “And quit being a whiny pussy.”

  I looked away from Murphy. I don’t know if I was being a whiny pussy. I don’t know if I was grieving myself into a grave. I was feeling things I couldn’t set aside, couldn’t get past.

  I said, “I loved her.” There it was.

  Chapter 2

  Belching and feeling somewhat uncomfortable from all the food stuffed into my belly, I cleaned up the kitchen in the last of the evening light as Murphy pulled all the curtains closed on the back of the house. When everything was clean except for a pile of raw catfish filets laying on a plate beside the stove, I shook my head as I revived our earlier conversation. “It’s a shame all this catfish will go bad.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy agreed as he came back into the kitchen. “Nothing we can do with it, though.”

  “If the house had solar power, we could probably run the fridge and keep it cold, or freeze it.”

  Murphy shrugged. “I think staking your survival plans to solar panels is not a bad idea, but it’s irrelevant. We don’t have any panels. And we don’t know jack shit about running a refrigerator on solar.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” I picked up a piece of fish, looked at it, then dropped it onto the pile with a wet slap. “I’ll bet… I’ll bet we could dry this fish in the barbecue grill. It’s got a propane tank on it.”

  “Fish jerky?” Murphy grimaced.

  I laughed. “We’ve had plenty of days when a piece of fish jerky would have been a dream. I think if you coat it with enough salt and pepper or whatever seasoning we’ve got in the cupboard, it won’t matter anyway. It could be raccoon meat and we wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “Ugh,” Murphy replied, then changed the subject. “You getting restless?”

  “Why?” I turned and shot an irritated look at Murphy. “What do you mean?”

  “I see you out there every day looking at those helicopters.”

  “And?”

  Murphy laughed. “Sometimes you act like you’re the only smart person in the world. You watch the helicopters come and go, and every day I can tell you’re getting more and more curious. I know you’re going to tell me one day you want to head south and see where they’re going, or head north and see where they’re coming from. I know you.”

  I wanted to deny it, but Murphy was right. I knew in my heart I should probably get as far away from the helicopters as I possibly could, but still, some little part of me wanted to believe they represented a return to normalcy—hot food every day, Starbucks, bottled beer, hot showers,
civilization. I hesitated to answer. “I am curious about the helicopters.”

  Murphy leaned on a counter. “Stop playing with that fish. Wash your hands and let’s talk about this.”

  I held up my hands and looked at them. Okay, I shouldn’t have touched the raw fish. Still, clean hands were another one of those luxuries left behind. I wiped them on my pants. “Good enough, mom?”

  Murphy glanced into a kettle we kept beside the sink. We shared the chore of filling it from the lake, but didn’t boil it so it wasn’t for drinking. It was for pouring over dirty hands or dirty dishes, and unfortunately, I’d used the last of it cleaning up the dinner dishes. Murphy said, “If you get sick, don’t blame me.”

  I looked at my hands. “I’m conditioning my weak immune system for a dirty world.”

  “Whatever.”

  I smiled. “So what did you want to say about the helicopters?”

  “Civilization is out there somewhere,” Murphy pointed toward the lake, “wherever those helicopters are taking off from and landing.”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “Every day I see those,” he said, “I wonder about Rachel.”

  “Do you worry whether she and the others made it out to Balmorhea?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that answer,” Murphy frowned. “I can only guess, and guesses aren’t worth shit.”

  “Yup.” I took a moment before I asked. “Do you think that by finding the folks with the helicopters you can get in touch with Rachel and Dalhover somehow?”

  “Yes,” Murphy answered. “I gotta believe these guys with the helicopters are setting up some kind of communication network at least. Maybe they’re trying to reestablish order. If that’s the case, at some point, they’ll come into contact with Rachel and the others.”

  “Murphy, you’re being unemotional about Rachel and kind of ignoring the underlying question.”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “Whether you made a mistake in staying here with me. Whether I made a mistake in choosing to remain.”

  Murphy shook his head in instant response. “Rachel’s tough. She’s smart. She doesn’t need me to protect her. Sure, I would have liked to stay with her but—” Murphy cut off his words for no apparent reason.

  “But what?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

  He frowned again. “What you said that night on the pontoon boat.”

  “That we’ll always be different?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “If we hadn’t showed up that night and saved Rachel and her hillbilly friends, I think they would have made it out of that cove. Hell, I’m sure Rachel and Freitag would have made it out anyway. Everything that happened after, happened because you and me are Whites. Regular people are afraid of us.” Murphy jumped up and sat on the counter.

  “You think what happened was our fault?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded again. “Some of it, all of it, I don’t know. Maybe eventually, Jay and his crazy brother would have backstabbed everyone anyway.”

  “Those guys were nuts.” That was a fact. They didn’t behave rationally. Something inexplicable was wrong with them. Their behavior was too far outside the norm. How they’d been so crazy and not been locked up somewhere was an unanswered question that bothered me a lot.

  Murphy nodded an acknowledgment. “You and me coming into the situation, we were like a powder keg. No, we were the sparks in a powder keg. We blew it all up. We didn’t mean to, you were just Null Spotting around and… I have to thank you for that. I would never have known my sister was alive if you hadn’t dragged me down to help those people stranded in the cove. I’m glad it happened. I just wish it didn’t go as far as it went. I wish all those people wouldn’t have died.”

  “Do you think that was our fault, then?” I asked.

  Murphy shook his head. “It was all Jay and his crazy brother. Without them, maybe we’d all be living happily ever after on Monk’s Island. Or maybe we’d have moved in and some of the other dipshits would have knifed us in our sleep. Jay was crazy, but plenty of those others hated us. A lot more of them—most of them—were afraid of us. That’s why most of them didn’t go out to Balmorhea, but instead back to Monk’s Island.”

  Nodding, I replied, “I think you’re right.”

  “Yup,” Murphy grinned. “So we’re cool. I didn’t think you were thinking straight that night they all left you and me here alone, but I think it was the right move. I’m a danger to Rachel just by being around her. She’s better off out there with Dalhover and the others.”

  “Okay.” It felt good to have that behind us. I’d been afraid that Murphy was staying with me through resentful loyalty only. “What about the helicopters, then?”

  “I told you what I think about ‘em,” said Murphy. “You tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I think they represent… ” I wasn’t sure exactly. “A threat. Possibly. They could represent something good, but it’s most likely a threat.”

  “Why do you want to go see, then?” Murphy asked.

  “We need to know,” I said. “It’s that simple. We just have to understand what all the threats are out there. Every time we go forward without all the information, we get in trouble. I don’t know if that’s something that can be fixed, but I know I’m going to mitigate that as much as possible.”

  “Really?” Murphy laughed.

  Clearly, he didn’t believe me. I huffed. “You tell me what you think my reasons are.”

  “Oh, I’m not saying those aren’t valid reasons,” said Murphy. “You like to overthink things, and you especially like to hide from your motivations. It’s because you hate yourself most of the time.”

  “Okay, Sigmund Freud.” I rolled my eyes dramatically. “Why don’t you tell me what I want out of the chasing-down-the-helicopter question?”

  “In a way,” said Murphy, “you’re like a cat sitting out on that deck every day, watching a mouse crawl back and forth across the floor. Not knowing where the helicopters are coming from or where they’re going is driving you crazy. You can’t help yourself. Now that the thought is in your mind, you don’t have the impulse control to put it back out again. It’s going to nag at you until you do something about it no matter how dangerous it might be.”

  “Wow.” I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or not. “You think my motivations are that simple? Really?”

  “Nobody is as complicated as they think they are.” Murphy shrugged. “For the most part, we’re all just a bunch of Whites with a thin layer of rationalizations and morality keeping us civilized. Mostly, we just want to eat, fuck, and play.”

  I laughed. “Sometimes, Murphy.”

  “Sometimes?”

  I said, “You’re a lot smarter than you think you are.”

  “You’re not gonna say that when I tell you the other reason we need to chase those helicopters.”

  Cautiously, I asked, “Okay what is my other reason?”

  “I’m not sure if you’ve got a death wish or what, but it’s like you’ve got this dark-hearted picture of yourself that you feel like you need to nurture. Or torture. Maybe if I find you a teddy bear in one of these houses you can start hugging it at night and you’ll get better. I don’t know.”

  “Fuck you about that teddy bear shit,” I told him, a little bit angry.

  “The other reason is that you’re an adrenaline junkie,” he said. “I don’t know if you were before, but I know you are now. You get off on the crazy shit like nobody I ever saw.”

  “And you don’t?” I accused.

  Murphy shrugged and smiled guiltily. “I do. Hell, maybe that’s the main reason we’re both not dead. As hard as all this shit is to deal with, I mean, they’re people. We kill sick people to survive. It’s a rush when you’re in the shit and you’re fighting just to stay alive. There’s nothing like it.”

  I nodded. I agreed with all of that.

  “And this is cool and all, relaxing and eating and getting fat, but you’re going to get
restless sitting around in quiet paradise. You need to go find some trouble.”

  “You know as well as I do that nothing is static anymore,” I said. “We’ve been lucky for six weeks. Only a few Whites have come out here to fuck with us. Eventually, more will come than we can handle and we’ll have to go. I think we head out on our terms, not theirs.”

  Nodding, Murphy said, “We need to prepare ourselves to go then.”

  I nodded.

  Murphy put his hand on his left side, just below the ribs, the place where I’d been shot on my side. He asked, “Does that cause you a problem when you swing your machete? Can you move around okay?”

  Holding my shoulder again, I swung my arm around to confirm. “It feels a little tight, but I think I’m okay. How are we set for M4 ammunition?”

  “I’ve got maybe three hundred rounds. You didn’t have any on you when I pulled your ass out of the shit. We’ve got your rifle but—”

  “But?” I asked though I knew what was coming.

  “But you can’t hit a goddamn thing with it. We need to ditch that rifle—I don’t know, leave it here or drop it off for those fucks on Monk’s Island, and get you something that fits with your abilities.”

  “And that would be?”

  Murphy grinned. “A shotgun, of course.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked. “It’ll be noisy as hell.”

  “Damn. You’re right.” Murphy thought back to all of the hassles we went through to get the damned silencers. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. You keep your M4. Whether you have a shotgun or an M4, you can only hit things that are pretty close. With the M4, you shoot from the hip. Spray a half dozen rounds in the direction that your Whites are coming from, and you might hit them with one or two. But thirty divided by six is only five.”

  “Say what?” Math. Never my strong suit.

  “The magazine holds thirty rounds. If you fire a couple of three-round bursts at every target, you’ll get five shots in before you have to reload. A pump-action twelve gauge might get you eight rounds.”