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

by Bobby Adair

  I checked my pockets and realized I didn’t have a lighter. I looked up at Murphy. He exaggerated his disappointment as he tossed me one.

  I lit the paper at the base of my construction, stepped back, and waited for it to ignite some of the fabric. “We’re in business.”

  Murphy gave my fire a glance and said, “We should have opened a window upstairs first.”

  “Fuck that,” I told him. I picked up a chair and threw it through a big window on the front of the house. It shattered. I silently thanked the owners for not replacing the old windows on the house with modern, tempered glass. “Let’s go.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  We ran out the back door, crossed the wide yard, ran around our pickup, and went back into the silo, locking the door behind.

  Panting and grinning we reached the observation deck after running up the stairs. The day had turned to dusk. I didn’t yet see any flames inside the house.

  “How many fires you think we’ll have to set?” Murphy asked.

  “Four or five.” I shrugged. “Twenty or thirty. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “It might be a good idea to round up some gas cans along the way, if we can.” Murphy leaned on a rail and stared impatiently at the house.

  I took up a position at the telescope and watched my smart buddies hanging around the old gas station. Nine or ten were in front, whispering in one another’s ears, looking every bit like neighbors standing in the front yard and having a chat after dinner. Scanning across the mass of the horde, it looked like about half of them were on the ground, settling in to sleep.

  “Fire in the window,” Murphy announced.

  “Good.” I kept my eye at the telescope’s eyepiece.

  I’d guess it took maybe ten minutes for the fire to fracture the glass on the second-floor windows. Once that happened, with a big breath of oxygen flowing into the house, the flames roared out and lit up the whole area.

  Just as that happened, all across the horde, heads turned to look. Out on the fringe, some of the cliques were already on the move. Others were breaking off from the main group in bands of a few or a dozen.

  The Smart Ones, too, were interested. They’d all but stopped whispering and were looking at the burning house. Though through the telescope, it appeared as though they were all looking right at me.

  “They’re starting to come,” I said. “How long do you figure the house will burn?”

  “No idea,” answered Murphy. “Half hour, an hour. I don’t know.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take the Whites to get here?”

  “Cross country?” Murphy asked. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll get here a lot sooner than you’ll think they should.

  I laughed. “Isn’t that the truth.”

  “We should get moving.”

  I started down the steps. In my excitement over a plan starting to gel, I’d forgotten a necessary step, until I saw that Murphy wasn’t following, but taking a look around first.

  “We got about a dozen coming this way from across the road,” he said. “Regular ones, not naked.”

  Silently berating myself for the mistake, I said, “It’s time to get the hell outta here.”

  The infected had crossed the road and were running up the driveway and across the field toward the burning house by the time I flung open the driver’s side door to get into the truck. Murphy ran around the backside. I put the key in the ignition and waited for the glow plugs to warm. Murphy opened his door.

  “This better start,” he said. “If not, get ready to run.”

  Looking across the hood toward the infected on the driveway, I saw a few stumble at the surprise of seeing Murphy and me getting into the truck. The light was too low for them to make out our white skin. They didn't miss the pickup, though. As with most Whites, they knew food always came on four wheels.

  I cranked the starter.

  “They’re coming out from the other side of the cabins,” said Murphy, looking over his shoulder.

  “Shit.” I glanced at the rearview mirror. “How’d they get here so fast?”

  “They had to be in those trees over there.”

  “Then why the fuck didn’t they come when I honked the horn when we first got here?” It was damn frustrating dealing with Whites sometimes. They were not dependable.

  The diesel rattled to life. I gassed it. It lurched forward and shuddered, rolled like it might stall, sputtered, and fired up again.

  “Damn!” yelled Murphy. “We need a better truck.”

  I moved the gas pedal up and down trying to find the optimal place where the truck would accelerate without flooding itself with fuel. The clothed infected in front of us were only a few dozen feet away by then.

  “Gotta move,” Murphy told me as he brought his weapon to his shoulder, hanging the barrel out the window.

  Doing my best to keep cool and watching the Whites converge around us, I knew I needed to baby the engine back to life again. Once it was running, it chugged along. When it was a little cold, it was finicky.

  It shuddered and coughed out puffs of black smoke and suddenly found its rattling rhythm. I accelerated and aimed at the closest infected runners. They hit the brush guard. Two went under the truck, but one jumped at just the right time to land himself on the hood. Instinctively, I swerved to slide him off before he could get hold.

  Murphy jerked his weapon inside just as the White flew past on his side of the truck.

  Behind us, naked ones were sprinting and screaming.

  “Damn, they got here quick!” I shouted.

  “Probably scouts or something.”

  I drove the truck off the winding driveway and ran it over the field, directing it toward the ornate iron gates I’d knocked down when we’d arrived. With the illumination from the fire fading the farther we got from the burning house and with the sky turning dark, I turned on the headlights and glanced at Murphy, “Nothing to lose now. They’re already chasing us.”

  “Get up the road a bit.” Murphy dug in his bag for his night vision goggles. “Put these on when we stop.”

  I shook my head. “We’re starting fires to draw them this way. The headlights won’t hurt.”

  He shrugged and put the goggles on his head.

  Chapter 51

  With insecurity growing as the night grew blacker around us and only a long, narrow pool of light cast by my high beams ahead, I asked, “What do you see?”

  Murphy scanned first on one side of the road and then the other. “Trees and bushes.”

  “Whites?”

  “Some coming out of a house over there.”

  “Close?” I asked.

  “Not close enough to catch us, unless you want to stop and wait.”

  “No.”

  He looked back at the house, still burning on the hill. “I think the commotion is bringing them out. I’m seeing more around than we did this afternoon.”

  “A lot more?” I asked, expecting the answer to be in the affirmative.

  “No. Some more."

  We were on an upward slope with the road running straight. No curves, for a change. I checked my rearview mirror again, trying to gauge the distance to the fire that appeared to be burning down to embers as the distance grew behind us.

  How far should we run to start the next fire? To the top of this hill?

  The truck lurched with a loud thud.

  “Shit!” I’d spent too much time looking in the rearview mirror.

  A blood-spewing body smashed the windshield and rolled over the cab.

  “Goddamn,” Murphy jerked around to look behind us.

  I glance back as the White’s body came to rest in the bed of the truck, broken bones protruding through torn skin. “I swear to God! They’re like squirrels. Every time I take my eyes off the road one runs out in front.”

  “Watch the damn road,” Murphy commanded.

  I drew a deep breath, took a hard look at the dark edges around my headlight beams, grinned and said, “That
scared the shit out of me.”

  Murphy laughed. “Me, too.”

  I cocked my head toward the pickup bed. “Is it dead?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “We’re nearing the top of this hill.” I took my foot off the accelerator and let the truck coast. “You see any houses or barns we can burn?”

  “You think we should go farther?” Murphy asked, letting a glance out the back of the truck betray what his answer to that question might be.

  Taking another quick glance at my mirror, I said, “No. I’m thinking we need to keep stringing them along. Look at that fire.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I think it’s starting to burn down.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t think it’ll go much longer. Even if it does, pretty soon it’s going to be too small to be a beacon.”

  “I don’t like where this is going,” said Murphy, checking our flanks.

  “If we start the next fire close enough to the first, I think we’ll get the Whites in the lead stampeding from fire to fire, all the way to Fort Hood.”

  Murphy sighed. “There’s a house and a barn and some shit up here on the right. You’ll come to the driveway pretty soon.”

  Indeed, I did.

  I turned onto a gravel drive just past a cluster of mailboxes.

  Murphy said, “Cut the lights.”

  I turned them off. Instinctively, I put my foot on the brakes to slow the truck.

  Murphy reached over and took the wheel. “I’ll steer. Take it slow, but not too slow.”

  I let go of the wheel and the truck coasted to about twenty. All I saw was blackness outside and the orange fire in the distance. “The darkness makes me nervous. It’d be nice to have a moon again.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “Or your night vision goggles that you left with Grace and them. You know, just like a dumbass would do.”

  “Don’t be a dick.”

  Murphy laughed. “I just think if you had to go off and kill Mark, you should have been smart about it. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  “I’ll get—”

  “Brake now.”

  I stomped the brakes too hard and the truck skidded to a stop. Outside, I couldn’t see a thing.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “Leave the lights off.” He pushed his pistol into my hand. “You can’t shoot for shit, so not being able to see anything isn’t going to make you any worse.” He laughed.

  “It really isn’t that funny.” I laughed anyway. Hey, it was a little bit funny.

  “You sit tight in the truck,” he told me. “I’ll go light the fire inside by myself.”

  “I should—”

  “You can’t see shit,” he said. “You’ll only slow me down.”

  I turned the truck’s headlights on. They illuminated an old farmhouse. “We need to keep them coming this way. Turning the lights on helps us more than it hurts us.”

  Shaking his head and letting himself out, Murphy said, “Unless a family of hungry golf ball heads still lives here. Now they’re awake and coming to have us for dinner.”

  I opened my door and got out, leaving the truck idling. “You’ll get bored if all the houses we burn tonight don’t have any infected in them.”

  Murphy didn’t hear me. He was running up to the front of the house. With my machete in one hand and the pistol in the other, I ran after him. Murphy stopped on the porch, took a look around at the barn, the sheds, and the nearby fields.

  “Are the headlights interfering with your night vision goggles?”

  “It’d be better if they were out,” he groused and turned to kick a frayed sofa sitting against the wall at the back of the wide porch. “Push that thing over to the front door.”

  My mouth opened to protest the unfairness of it. It was an automatic response, but I kept quiet as Murphy charged the front door and broke it off its hinges.

  Into the dark house, he shouted, “Hey, cue ball!”

  I tucked the pistol into my waistband and shoved the couch. The legs screeched across the porch. I stopped when the far end of the couch reached the front door.

  Murphy pointed away from the porch. “Angle it out there, we’re gonna shove it halfway through.”

  Ah. I understood Murphy’s intent. I swung my end of the couch around, stepping off the porch to get the couch aligned.

  Murphy got out a lighter and touched the flame to the old cloth. It caught instantly. He lit a few more places. “Push.”

  I rammed the couch forward a few feet. Murphy stopped me with a raised hand and lit the center section of the couch. I pushed it until only about a foot was sticking out through the front door. Murphy lit that and said, “Let’s go.”

  I stepped back. The flames on the far end of the couch were already four feet high and glowing through flimsy curtains inside the front windows.

  “It’ll go up in a hurry.” Murphy ran past me, heading for the truck.

  I waited and watched. The fire needed to take hold inside before we left. There could be no broken link in our chain of destruction.

  Screams in the darkness sounded. Whites were in the area, maybe five or six.

  “C’mon,” Murphy called.

  I listened. Most Whites were still fairly distant, but thousands were out there, coming this way. I could only hope it would be tens of thousands, and I could only pray it was the whole naked horde.

  The curtains behind the window burst into flames. Smoke flowed out through the front door.

  “Dammit, Zed. Let’s go.”

  I ran toward the pickup.

  Chapter 52

  Not everything we torched caught fire enough or burned brightly enough to be an effective beacon for the naked horde. But we were burning so many houses, barns, trailers, and abandoned cars along the way that they formed a chain of fires stretching for miles and miles behind us. All along the way, the Whites followed.

  Things were working out exactly as I hoped.

  We were having a good night.

  We’d crossed I-35 by surprise, not having had time along the way to gauge our pyro-manic progress. A giant green highway sign told me we were just south of Belton. We’d stayed on course. That wasn’t luck, but it felt that way. We had managed to lead our mass of followers—what I suspected was indeed the whole naked horde—through the relatively undeveloped gap between Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir and the southern edge of Belton.

  We drew them onto Highway 190, a five-hundred foot wide right-of-way, ribboned in strips of asphalt and grass, all leading the mind—even the simple White mind—to follow rather than cross. I knew then we’d make it the last few miles to Fort Hood because 190 ran right past the front gate.

  Murphy and I had just torched a dozen cars that had been abandoned while in line at a gas station along the highway access road. Murphy was inside the convenience store, looking for charcoal lighter fluid and more disposable lighters. I’d also suggested that we get some paper towels and try to fashion the charcoal lighter fluid containers into Molotov cocktails. They wouldn’t break, but they’d melt and the fluid inside would start a nice fire on whatever they fell upon.

  At least, that was the hope.

  Either way, the lighter fluid would make our jobs easier as we illuminated a path for the naked horde right up to the Survivor Army’s doorstep. Mayhem would follow.

  With the engine on the pickup idling and the headlights shining up the access road for Highway 190, I stood some distance from the truck, but beneath the awnings over the gas pumps. I looked east into the dark and listened as I tried to estimate the distance to the vanguard of the naked horde. I saw black silhouettes pass in front of fires just a few tenths of a mile distant. The horde was close. It was time for me and Murphy to get moving.

  As I took my first step back toward the pickup, I heard something different in the screaming noise. I leaned into the darkness and listened. The number of howling voices and the rumble of feet ensured that all or mo
st of the horde was on its way.

  That hadn’t changed.

  In the rumble of all those tens of thousands of feet was a heavy beating sound, deeper and steadier than anything I’d heard.

  The sound grew loud, quickly.

  Helicopter!

  The Survivor Army had sent out a scout.

  I turned to look, to locate it in the sky as I ducked behind a gas pump. Unfortunately, with an awning large enough to keep a dozen cars out of the rain while they filled up, I was unable to see anything above me.

  One thing I knew for sure, with the fires from all those cars we’d just ignited getting larger by the minute and with the headlights of the pickup making it a target for the helicopter, I was suddenly in danger.

  Dammit.

  The possibility of the Survivor Army’s sending a helicopter out to scout the fires coming in their direction wasn’t something I’d considered. I bopped myself in the forehead with my palm. It was an obvious thing for the Survivor Army to do. I should have anticipated it.

  Suddenly thinking the pump I was hiding behind might still have some stagnating gasoline within, I realized if the helicopter pilot decided for whatever reason to start shooting, I’d chosen a very bad place to hide. I ran for the convenience store entrance.

  When I was halfway across the parking lot, Murphy leaned out through a broken window and waved me away. “Go hide behind the dumpster.”

  I ran to my right, hearing the helicopter above, but still not seeing it. I rounded the corner of the convenience store, glancing back at the highway overpass and seeing shapes coming in the light of the car fires. The horde was here.

  Shit.

  It was time to run like a motherfucker again.

  Nevertheless, I stopped, turned and ran back to the front of the convenience store, just as a stream of tracers ripped through the sky and the buzz of a rapidly firing machine gun sawed through all other sounds. The pickup erupted in sparks and animated shreds of flying metal. Then it exploded.

  I dropped to the ground and covered my head, though the heat from the blast was already rolling over me. What glass on the front of the convenience store wasn’t already broken shattered under the shock. The pillars of flame standing above each of the burning cars all curved away from the blast.