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

by Bobby Adair

  “Does it tell you how many miles it’ll go?” Murphy asked.

  “I don’t see anything like that.” Reading across the instruments, I said, “It’s pretty simple. Speed. Voltage. And estimated time left on the battery.”

  “The video I saw on the Internet said this thing will do over 170.”

  I laughed and had to take care to quiet myself quickly. “There’s no need for us to ever go that fast. So, we won’t.”

  Bracing himself in his seat, Murphy said, “But don’t you just want to see what it feels like?”

  “You mean right before we run into a road jammed with abandoned cars?” I asked. “Or right before we hit some shit in the road that blows a tire and we lose control and roll the car like thirty-seven times? I don’t think so.”

  Murphy sighed. “You sound like my mom.”

  “We just need to be able to drive faster than the Whites can run,” I told him. “That’s it. Besides, going slow reduces our wind resistance and will extend our range. That’ll probably be the most important thing to us, going the maximum number of miles on a charge.”

  “Shut up, Professor,” Murphy told me. “Let’s see if this thing will move.”

  “Okay, get out and unplug the car.”

  Murphy made his way to the back of the car, removed the plug, then got back in.

  Seeing that I had a good ten feet between the front bumper and the garage door, I put the car in gear, or whatever passes for that in an electric car since they’ve got no transmission. At least I assumed this one was like a Tesla in that respect. In theory, it had a simple electric motor with an axle running through it. To go faster, you just increased the voltage. Easy-peasy, in theory.

  There were some unexplained switches, buttons, and a dial on the console behind the shifter, and on the shifter itself the letters usually there to indicate D for drive, P for park, R for reverse, instead spelled out “O SHIT.”

  Murphy and I looked at that. Neither of us had any guesses. Oh, well.

  I tentatively pressed the accelerator and the car rolled forward on a carpet of utterly silent magic.

  Murphy laughed out loud.

  “Dude,” I scolded, pointing at the insulated garage door. “If any Whites are out there they’ll hear you.”

  Murphy shrugged. “Fuck ‘em. This thing is as quiet as a ghost. I love it. If we take this thing out after dark and use our night vision goggles, the Whites will never even know we were there. This is the ticket, man. No more scrounging around for Humvees with no keys that shitheads steal from you the first time you look the other way.”

  With two stolen already, I couldn’t help but laugh at that. I jingled the keys dangling from the ignition switch, which on this Mustang was a two-position on/off switch. “We’ll need to check around the shop and see if we can find another set so we both have one.” I turned the key to the off position, then got out of the car. Murphy did the same.

  Examining the vulnerable windows on the Mustang and looking at the sleek lines of sheet metal on the hood and front fenders, I said, “You know, just in case, we should weld some kind of metal cattle guard across the grill.”

  “A brush guard?” Murphy laughed. “You mean a zombie guard.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I walked toward some long metal tubes and pieces of angle iron by the far wall. “Maybe we should also attach some strips over the windshield to keep bodies from going through. You know, in case we have to run them down while we’re going pretty fast. And on the side windows too so they can’t get in.”

  “Man,” said Murphy, shaking his head. “You make it sound like welding some extra metal on is as easy as gluing a model airplane together.”

  I looked at him with raised eyebrows. “It’s not?”

  He shook his head.

  I spotted some kind of big blue welding machine by the stacks of metal. “Really? I mean I’ve seen ‘em do it on TV. You just hook up the electric parts and stick the metal together. Sparks fly. It fuses. Right?”

  “Seriously?”

  Yes, I was serious. “It looks easy on TV. Didn’t you ever watch that Gas Monkey Garage show? Those guys made some really cool shit.”

  “Sometimes you can be such a dumbass.” Murphy shook his head. “Nothing’s as easy at it looks on TV. Tell me you know at least that much.”

  “Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “If you don’t think we should, then we won’t.”

  “Don’t put on that whiny bitch face,” said Murphy.

  Ignoring his comment, I said, “That welder runs off electricity, doesn’t it? We’ve got solar panels on the roof to generate power. Maybe they’re enough?”

  Murphy walked over to the welding rig and looked it over. “That’s the beauty of this thing. This welder is a combo—it is a generator and welder and looks like it has a plasma cutter. Anyway, if you decide you want to use it and don’t manage to electrocute yourself—and I’ll be honest, I think there’s a pretty good chance you just might—then I think you’ll fuck the paint all up on this beautiful black car and you’ll get some pieces of metal stuck all over it and it’ll look like total shit and—”

  Interrupting, I said, “Aesthetics aren’t my top priority.”

  Murphy shook his head and said, “And the first time you hit something, your shitty little porous, brittle welds will break because getting it right is a lot harder than it looks. Your arc could be too long or too short, the current could be too high, you could go too fast or use the wrong filler. That’s why people go to school to learn how to do this stuff. That’s all I’m saying. But you just go right ahead if that’s what you want to do. You want to weld that metal over there to this metal over here.” Murphy rapped on the Mustang’s hood a few times. “You don’t even know if it’s the same kind of metal.”

  “The same kind?” I asked.

  “Do you know if Mitch what’s-his-name stuck an aluminum hood on this thing so it would go faster?”

  I shook my head.

  “Or if that tubing is aluminum?”

  I shook my head again as I turned away from the extruded tubes. “Fine. You made your point. Let’s find some keys and see what else we can scrounge up here.”

  Murphy struck a pose and put on a face of mock surprise. “Oh… my… God.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” I smiled. “That’s my job.”

  “I was just gonna say you’ve hit a milestone in your maturation process.” Murphy grinned.

  “I said you don’t have to be a dick.” I turned my back to Murphy and started rummaging through some drawers of neatly stored tools.

  “You listened to somebody,” Murphy went on, comically dramatic. “You learned something in a fashion other than the hard way. I think I need to call a newspaper. I can see the headlines already.”

  “Nobody reads newspapers anymore.”

  Chapter 17

  Murphy took his time manually opening the garage door. We didn’t want to take a risk on the electric garage door opener. Some were pretty loud. Stealth was our new motto. Quiet and invisible. No more macho shoot-‘em-ups for us.

  Yeah, right?

  It sounded good when we discussed it, though.

  At least we had the car.

  With my night vision goggles on, I slowly drove out into the night, cringing at the crunch of crushed granite under the tires. Murphy closed the garage behind us and got in through the Mustang’s passenger side.

  “Windows up or down?” I asked.

  Murphy spent a moment thinking about it.

  I said, “I know we didn’t really talk about it, except that with the windows down, you can shoot anybody that happens to need shooting.” I put a palm on the glass. “With this dark tint, nobody on the outside can see in. At least not through the side windows. And I think the car will be quieter with the windows up.”

  “How do you figure?” Murphy asked. “The engine doesn’t make any noise.”

  “Wind resistance,” I said. “That’ll be our biggest noise now. With the windows down, we�
�ll have more resistance. More noise, more chance the Whites will hear us when we zip by.”

  Nodding, Murphy said, “Stealth is the word. Let’s keep ‘em up. If I need to shoot something badly enough, I’ll shoot through the glass.”

  Chapter 18

  Our plan was simple. But then again, they all were when in the conceptual stage. We’d cut across northwest Austin, staying off the highways. That meant we’d take 2222. It cut through the hills with some pretty sharp curves and steep inclines. Nothing our hot rod Mustang couldn’t handle, but given the state of the world, who could guess what hazards lay on that route? It was a road we hadn’t driven since before the outbreak and before the flood. Hell, some of the low-water sections of that road might not even be there anymore.

  Like many things in life, the 2222 choice was a trade-off of unquantifiable risks. On the one hand, we had an unknown road, the shortest path to our destination. On the other hand, the road we’d driven before was along a highway that would cause us to drive twice as far to get to Camp Mabry. The risk there was the Mustang’s battery. We didn’t know how many miles we could get out of it. Ten? A Hundred? Five hundred?

  On our way across Austin, we planned to stop by Camp Mabry for a refill of lethal toys before making our way up to Mount Bonnell. A park at the peak of that hill, as it turns out, on property adjacent to Sarah Mansfield’s old mansion, would give us a view down on the whole city. If those helicopters were landing in Austin, all we had to do was wait for morning and we’d get a pretty good idea of where they were setting down.

  Simple.

  As it turned out, the trip down 2222 wasn’t bad. Like every road in Austin, it had its share of abandoned cars and long stretches where nothing on the road gave any clue that the world had run off its rails. At the bottom of the steepest hill, though, a pileup of a dozen cars was nearly impassable. That one looked to have been a bad accident, probably having happened during somebody’s rush to get to somewhere when everything was just starting to fall apart, and people still had hope that a somewhere existed that was better than where they were. As far as I could tell, nothing was.

  On the bright side, we did come to one stretch of a half mile that was slightly uphill and relatively straight with nothing in the road ahead. I decided to put the gas pedal—though the car had no gasoline in it—to the floor just to see if Murphy’s gushing about the car’s performance had any basis in fact.

  Holy microwaveable shit.

  I’ve ridden lots of amusement park thrill rides. I’ve jumped off my share of tall cliffs into murky, deep pools of water. I used to ride an overpowered Japanese motorcycle and came pretty close to killing myself on it racing on this very road. I’ve even ridden in some pretty fast cars that could clock a quarter mile in less than a dozen seconds. This thing, though, accelerated so fast it was frightening.

  In that second and a half it took for me to realize I was accelerating faster than even my adrenaline-junkie needs thought was a good idea, and in that other second and a half it took me to pull my foot off the accelerator, we were already going over a hundred miles an hour.

  Murphy was hollering and laughing, and I was too by the time the brakes started to slow the car before a turn that came up on us way, way too fast. He said, “I might have to change my pants.”

  “Uh, huh.”

  We made it to the gates of Camp Mabry in a little over an hour and a half, taking great care not to push that gas pedal too close to the floor.

  In normal traffic, before everybody turned into hungry Whites, the trip might have taken thirty or forty minutes. I felt pretty good about the commute time.

  I slowed the Mustang to a stop on the road just outside Camp Mabry’s southern gate.

  “You’re feeling it, too?” Murphy asked.

  Nodding, I said, “It seems like every time we come here things get fucked up.”

  “Most times,” Murphy agreed as he looked around for dangers in the darkness. “I see a few Whites down the road, but they don’t seem to be looking this way. I don’t think they know we’re here.”

  “That’s good.” I looked up the street leading into the center of the base, the memories of the place keeping my foot on the brake. All those thousands and thousands of dead covering that field outside the buildings where the immune soldiers and civilians made their last stand. All the desperate running and shooting to save our lives.

  “If you’re still wanting to go looking for those dudes in that helicopter,” said Murphy, “I’d prefer to do it with a few more hand grenades and bullets. If I could figure out how to mount a grenade launcher on the roof, I’d do that too. I’m pretty sure we’re gonna get into some trouble.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, pretending a lot more offense than I actually felt. “Just because those assholes shot at us from their helicopter?”

  “There’s that,” said Murphy. “More importantly, you want to do it. That almost guarantees something fucked up is gonna happen.”

  “What?”

  “You know it’s true,” he said. “I may have to change your superhero name from Null Spot to M&M.”

  “M&M?”

  “Mayhem Magnet.” Murphy laughed out loud. “Mayhem Magnet. I like it.”

  I huffed and rolled the car forward onto the base.

  Chapter 19

  The road into the base—the same one Murphy and I had nearly been ambushed on by the naked horde when we were escaping once before—was empty. We saw nothing as we silently rolled over it; a pale strip of sun-bleached asphalt between wide grassy shoulders and dense cedars. It wasn’t until we made the turn toward the bunkers that we saw tire tracks over the skeletons and mashed grass.

  I stopped the car as I scanned the field, looking for any movement, especially around the bunkers.

  “Somebody’s been here.” Murphy looked back and forth. “All those thousands of dead Whites were over by that building where we found the Humvee.” Murphy pointed. “Way past those trees over there. There weren’t this many dead here by the bunkers last time.” He pointed at the ground. “And look at those double-wide tire tracks. Somebody’s been tearing up the grass with big trucks.”

  That concerned me. “You think someone else found our cache?”

  “It’s not a secret.” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t see any Whites around.” He pointed at the open gate in the tall chain-link fence surrounding the bunkers. “Why don’t you cruise over there, turn this thing around for the fast escape by the fence, and let’s go in and see what’s left.”

  Avoiding the human remains and the deepest of the ruts left in the soft ground, I crossed the field and swung the Mustang around. I backed it up through the open gate, noticing that the doors on both bunkers were open. The darkness inside kept the contents secret.

  Once I stopped, just outside the first bunker, Murphy jumped out of the car and raised his weapon, pointing it at the black shadows inside.

  A moment later, I had the car keys in my pocket and was standing at the rear of the car beside him, machete in hand, ready to defend myself from any White who might choose to come our way.

  For a moment, we listened and watched.

  Murphy nodded and moved forward, keeping his weapon up.

  I followed.

  As we got closer to the bunker door, I was able to see more and more clearly what was inside. I got more and more angry. Just a few steps outside the threshold we came to a stop. The bunker was empty all the way to the back wall. Unable to contain my frustration, I spat at the darkness, “Motherfucker.”

  The sound of bodies and feet shuffling inside told me immediately what a mistake it had been to utter those words.

  Howling followed.

  Chapter 20

  A White rounded the corner to my right, stepping into the wide doorway. I didn’t even wait the fraction of a second it was going to take him to get all the way around. I hacked down with my machete, cutting through his cheekbone, knocking him half senseless, and slicing down through his clavicle. H
e stumbled, and the robust infected woman pushing from behind him howled as she tripped, exposing her neck for an easy kill on my next swing.

  Beside me, Murphy was stepping backwards and firing. He put two rounds in a White coming from the other side.

  “Damn things must have been up against the front wall on both sides,” I shouted as I swung at my third White.

  “Duh,” Murphy hollered back as he killed another.

  They came around the corner one at a time, apparently having been lined up and leaning on the wall as they sat on the floor. As they ran toward me, their pace was slowed as they stumbled over the bodies of those in line ahead of them. That made the killing on my side of the doorway easy, and by the time my blade got stuck in a skinny man’s skull, I was done. Murphy shot two more and we shared a look with the silent question, “Is that all?”

  It was.

  Murphy leaned in through the doorway and peeked into the dim corners on both sides. “It stinks in here, man.”

  With my machete out, I headed toward the other bunker.

  Murphy caught up and we cautiously rounded the corner in front of the second bunker’s entrance. It was empty, too—at least it was empty of weapons and ammunition. Two Whites were peeking around one wall, afraid to come forward.

  I lunged at them even though they were well out of machete range. They both jumped back and I turned to grin at Murphy but didn’t say anything.

  He nodded toward the car. Our trip to Camp Mabry had been a waste of time.

  Minutes later, we were silently rolling back out through the entrance gate. I turned right and headed west on 32nd Street toward Mt. Bonnell Road.

  “To Sarah Mansfield’s house then?” Murphy asked.

  Nodding and thinking about all the weapons and ammunition that had been in the bunkers on our last trip to Camp Mabry, I asked, “What do you think happened to everything?”

  “Somebody brought some trucks and hauled it all off.”