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

by Bobby Adair

  “What?” Murphy looked around, alarmed.

  “Nothing.” I continued to examine the building. “Just running through pros and cons in my head and getting frustrated.”

  “Like I keep tellin’ you man, you think too much when you’re not busy killin’ Whites.” Murphy pointed. “Looks like they slapped that plywood over the windows up and down the length of the building. Probably had windows all along the wall, just like up on the second floor. Fine choice for keeping out your run-of-the-mill White infestation but not for these naked fuckers.”

  Murphy was right about that. The plywood had been peeled back in half a dozen places. Whites must have poured into the building from what seemed like every direction.

  “I say we just go in right here at the corner.” Murphy looked to me for confirmation.

  A sheet of plywood had nearly a third broken away to reveal a shattered window and a shadowy room beyond. “Yeah. That’ll put us at the end of the building. We can work our way through systematically.”

  “Probably we won’t need to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once we’re inside, if anybody’s alive, they’re barricaded somewhere. My bet is the Whites know where they are, and they’ll be having a fit because they can’t get to ‘em. We’ll hear it.”

  “You’re probably right.” I jogged over to the window, took a peek inside, and saw an empty classroom. Using the backside of my blade, I ran it back and forth across the window frame to break away the jagged pieces. The Whites who’d gone through before me hadn’t done that and bled plenty for the oversight.

  Murphy looked around to watch for Whites.

  “I’m done.” I climbed in through the window. Murphy followed.

  We made our way to the door going into the hall, and I swung it open. One thing was sure, Whites were in the building, but they didn’t seem to be making that riotous, attacking noise, just their usual sounds when they were going about their daily business, searching for food, squabbling over scraps, or destroying anything they thought might have the warm flesh of an uninfected person inside.

  Chapter 24

  With no clue as to where the scientists might be in the building and no riot of White noise to guide us, Murphy and I settled into the systematic method. We worked our way down a long hall, looking inside rooms where the Whites preceded us, opening doors when they were closed. On that first floor of the first building, we found five or six Whites and we sent them to monster Valhalla. At the end of the corridor, instead of going through an oddly angled passage into the addition next door, we went upstairs and started on the second floor of the first building. We found more Whites and convinced them to become dead. The third floor was more of the same.

  By the time we were done, we’d killed nearly thirty—slaughtered them in ones, twos, and threes. It wasn’t defensive, it was straight up extermination. It wasn’t an adventure. It was a job, tiring work.

  When we felt confident that we’d cleared all the Whites out of the first building, Murphy sat down at a table in what used to be a break area, at the corner of the third floor, with tall windows on two walls, giving us a good view of nearby university buildings and green spaces—brown by then and likely to stay that way until native plants took over.

  I walked along a back wall lined with vending machines, swinging the broken doors open, looking for goodies that might have been missed when they’d been ransacked.

  “Anything?” Murphy asked.

  I shook my head as I shoved aside wrappers and empty cans with the tip of my machete blade.

  “Be nice if we had something to eat.” Murphy put a hand on his lean belly. “Killing Whites like this sucks. I know I’m gonna sound like a dick, but its boring.”

  “Yeah.” Having finished my unenthusiastic search of the vending machines, I cross through the upturned tables and chairs, picked one off the floor and sat it at the table across from Murphy. “Only like five more buildings to go.”

  Murphy stared out the window for a minute, watching the campus, and watching Whites wander aimlessly now that the commotion at the drill field had been over for an hour or two. He chuckled, sat up straight in the chair, and leaned on the table, drilling me with a serious look.

  “What?”

  “Mister Zane, we need to talk about your quarterly evaluation.” Murphy busted out in a big laugh.

  I laughed too. We laughed longer than the joke merited, but we needed it. The day had been tiring and demoralizing. We’d seen better days. But we’d seen so many that were worse.

  Murphy sat back when his laughter lost its steam. “You ever think that maybe we should just pack up our shit and head west?”

  “To Balmorhea?”

  Murphy nodded. “But I’m afraid when I think about it now.”

  “Why?”

  Murphy pointed out at the campus. “Until yesterday, this place was…was…”

  “Sanctuary?” I guessed. “Hope?”

  Murphy stared out the window. “Home for people who thought they were going to live through this.”

  He was right about that. Now nearly all of them were dead, if what we’d seen at the outpost across the street was any indication. “You’re afraid that maybe Rachel, Dalhover, and the others might not have made it.”

  “They probably made it out there,” said Murphy. “You don’t know my sister when she gets an idea in her head. She runs people over.”

  “I’ll bet.” I slouched in my chair and let Murphy go at his pace.

  He took a bit before he spoke up again. “Truth is, I’m afraid if we go all the way the hell out to West Texas, we’ll find more of this.” Murphy pointed out at the campus again. “One more pot of gold at the end of the rainbow spilled over and full of shit. Everybody dead.”

  “With hope in their hearts,” I said, “thinking they were going to live happily ever after.”

  “That’s how every safe place has been so far.” Murphy seemed sadder than I’d seen him since Mandi died. “They all turn to shit.”

  I didn’t mean to nod, but I did anyway. The truth of what Murphy was saying overwhelmed any effort I could have put into denying it.

  “I think a lot about going out there, but I don’t want to,” said Murphy. “I think I’d rather not know. I like it when I can think that they’re all out there sitting on a beach beside the lake, sunning themselves, and thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner. Like that’s the biggest problem they have to deal with. I want to think they’re gossiping about the neighbors and being envious because some dude likes some girl and all that shit that used to be important before that shitty virus came and fucked up the whole goddamned world.”

  Murphy sat back and stretched a pained smile. “You’re starting to rub off on me, man, with all your dark-hearted shit. I spent too much time being afraid they’re all dead and it’s getting too hard to pretend that they aren’t.”

  “You want to go out there and see?” I asked, ready to go outside, find a running vehicle, and start the drive. “I’m in. Fuck all this shit. We can do it. Or get Martin to drop us off.”

  “Can’t,” said Murphy. “It’d be like going to the North Pole when you’re twelve and proving to yourself there’s no Santa even though you already knew there wasn’t one.”

  “Because you’d lose hope?”

  “Can’t live without hope, man.” Murphy looked into the distance. “Can’t do it.”

  Chapter 25

  The second building was built like a cube with two stairwells at opposite corners and a hallway on each floor that traced a square track around the shape of the building. Inside rooms and outside rooms all opened on the halls on each floor. Besides that, going through building two was no different that going through building number one: check a room, kill some Whites, move on. Things got different on the second floor. It looked like a battle had been fought. We didn’t find any living Whites, but the halls were littered with corpses of both infected and normal humans.

  Weap
ons lay on the floor amidst the dead. Murphy knelt down and checked nearly every weapon we saw but found none that had more than a bullet or two. The bodies had been stripped of extra magazines. It looked like Fritz’s people had come to the veterinary science building to protect the scientists from the naked horde. They fought in the halls until they had nothing left to fight with except their fists.

  Fists were nothing against the horde.

  I looked up and down the hall at all the dead and reaffirmed another lesson that didn’t stick with most people. Bullets weren’t much better than fists.

  Murphy and I worked our way around the third floor, checking each room, each office, each lab. We saw the remains of people I thought might be scientists, but it was hard to tell. And everywhere, Whites were dead, all of them. There weren’t even any cannibalizing the corpses.

  When we made our circuit around the square hall in the square-shaped building and stopped before going up the stairs. I asked, “What do you think? You ready for another floor?”

  “Seems like we’re getting warmer,” said Murphy, “but this place is starting to creep me out. I don’t see why we’re not finding any more live Whites. Makes me think they’re all ganging up somewhere to fuck with us.”

  “Maybe the scientists killed them.”

  “They’re all smart professors and stuff. Maybe they figured out how to kill all the Whites in this building and save their asses.” Murphy shrugged. “Maybe it pays to be smart.” Murphy made a point of looking at me. “Doesn’t seem to have helped you, though.”

  I feigned offense. “Fuck you.”

  Murphy swung the stairwell door open, and I jogged up the stairs, avoiding the corpses.

  At the fourth floor, the double doors leading to the hall were each open, held on each side by the dead on the floor. The walls were scarred from shrapnel and burns. Grenades had been put to use. The gore of shredded bodies on the floor attested to the certainty my guess was right.

  We stopped on the landing and saw down a hallway that stretched straight down one side of the building. The slaughter on this floor was worse than the ones below. We also saw live Whites, seven or eight of them, with faces buried in the bloody remains on the floor. One of them looked up at us but went right back to feeding.

  I leaned close to Murphy and whispered, “Back to work?”

  Murphy put a restraining hand on my shoulder.

  “What?”

  He pointed first at one body, and then a second laying on the floor in the hall that led off to our left.

  “That one’s still bleeding.” Murphy wagged his finger to emphasize. “That other one doesn’t look like it’s been dead long. Look at his mouth. It’s still drooling.”

  I knelt down but stayed inside the stairwell, content for the moment to keep myself somewhat concealed. “Doesn’t look like a bullet wound.” I looked up at Murphy for confirmation.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll bet it was an alpha White. Maybe this one got knifed in a squabble over food. Better yet, maybe one of them turned serial killer and is walking the halls doing our work for us.”

  “See, that’s what I mean,” said Murphy.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes being smart doesn’t do you any good at all.”

  I peeked around the corner and saw no movement.

  Murphy stayed in the stairwell. “I got a bad feeling about this one.”

  I stepped over to the bleeding White out in the hall, thinking that a closer look at the wound would answer some questions, and thinking that I really should be paying more attention to Murphy. His intuitions in these matters were seldom wrong. But I was there, by the body, and nothing bad had happened. I nudged it none too gently with the tip of my machete, puncturing another wound, and draining more blood out of a body that wasn’t all the way dead yet.

  I knelt down, and the sound of something whooshing through the air startled me as I saw a dark streak.

  Something thunked.

  Murphy shouted, “Shit.”

  I rolled away as I fell over, not taking time to understand the threat, just trusting Murphy’s reaction. Trying to get my balance, I scrambled across the hall and tumbled toward the corner.

  In the milliseconds after I pulled myself around the corner, an arrow swished, hit the corner of the wall and ricocheted away just inches from my face.

  “What the fuck?” I looked at Murphy.

  He was still surprised, but he had dropped to a knee and peeked around the corner. “Hey!” he called. “Stop that.”

  I didn’t hear a response, but I did hear the Whites down the hall behind me—the same hall that had been my refuge from the arrows that just flew up the length of the other hall. It was now a trap. I jumped to my feet as I raised my machete.

  The Whites weren’t running, at least not fast, as they were having trouble finding footing with all the dead and debris on the floor.

  I stepped into the first one’s charge, and dealt a mortal wound that didn’t kill him instantly but would prevent him from ever getting off the floor again. Thank God for all the crap. It was keeping the Whites from massing and charging me, that and their inherent greed. They all wanted to have the first bite of warm flesh. They all wanted to taste hot blood pumping onto their tongues. I killed the second one, dead before his knees buckled.

  Behind me, Murphy was shouting, but I didn’t give a thought to what he was saying or what he was doing. I saw more Whites coming down the hall toward me and if I didn’t take them all out, I’d be dead. Either Murphy would handle his end of the problem or he wouldn’t.

  That’s just the way it goes.

  I sloughed off the fucked-up emotions that had been bothering me all day, calmed myself, and solved my problems, one at a time, clinically, efficiently, letting the Whites do the work with their zealous momentum and greed. I only had to make sure one of my blades was in the right place, held steady in a firm hand or swung with just enough force to get the job done.

  And then it was.

  All were dead. Too soon.

  I stood in the hall twenty feet down from the stairwell, unaware I’d even worked my way so far. Immersed in the Zen of heartless slaughter, I lost track of other things.

  It was all I wanted. All I needed.

  “Hey ninja boy.”

  I drew in one last breath of demon peace, felt one more moment of warm blood running over my skin, and turned to look at Murphy, who was out of the stairwell, standing in the hall and grinning like a little kid at a birthday party.

  “What the fuck, dude?”

  He waved me over and pointed up the other hall.

  I worked my way over the bodies.

  “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  I rounded the corner and looked. Down at the other end of the hall, two Whites stood naked but armed, one with knives in each hand, the other generously tattooed and carrying a bow. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately make the connection as to why.

  Murphy punched me in the shoulder. “Grace and Jazz, that’s them, dumbass.”

  My mouth fell open. “Holy shit.”

  “Wow,” said Grace. “I thought you’d be dead.”

  Jazz pulled an arrow back in her bow. “If you don’t stop looking at me that way, Zed, I’m going to put this arrow right through your pervert eyeball.”

  Chapter 26

  Awkward is the best word to describe it. Murphy and I walked to the far end of the hall. Lots of smiles. Everybody looking at everybody else’s private parts while pretending not to. No hugs.

  “I’m happy to see you guys made it,” said Murphy. Mostly he was looking at Jazz.

  Grace nodded at me. “We were out scrounging when the naked ones showed up. We didn’t get caught in the fight.”

  I couldn’t help but look her up and down again.

  Grace rolled her eyes and turned to Murphy. “We figured the best way to help was to take a page from Zed’s playbook and fit in with these naked ones and kill them while the
y were busy trying to kill everybody else.”

  Murphy scanned the hall. “All of these?”

  Jazz shook her head. “The Aggies did most of this.”

  “We didn’t realize the infected were in these buildings with the scientists until it was too late,” said Grace.

  “It was too late everywhere.” Jazz frowned but looked more hurt than angry.

  “We checked the outposts,” said Grace. “They had them set up all around the perimeter of the veterinary science complex.”

  “Fritz showed us,” I said.

  “Fritz made it?” Jazz asked, perking up. “Where is he?”

  I pointed vaguely northwest. “We put him and some other people from the infirmary on the helicopter to Fort Hood.”

  “Wait.” Grace stepped toward me, very interested. “Fort Hood. The Army is there? Is it a safe zone?”

  “It was a first.” Murphy shook his head. “The regular Army had it that way. But you know. The virus hit them like everybody else. Then that bunch of yahoos who chased your guys out of the Capitol—the Survivor Army—took over Fort Hood and made it their base.”

  Grace’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t understand.”

  “Long story,” I cut in. “Bottom line, most of the Survivor Army assholes are dead.”

  “How?” she asked.

  Murphy looked at me.

  Grace said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “These naked Whites got ‘em,” I told her. Not the whole truth, but not a lie. “Me and Murphy came across a helicopter pilot while we were scavenging.”

  “Wait.” Grace raised her hands. “What were you doing in Killeen? We dropped you naked in the middle of the night like seventy miles from there.”

  “Like I said. Long story.” I looked up and down the halls, thinking more Whites should be coming to find the source of our talking.

  Grace saw me looking and pointed toward the end of the hall where Jazz had nearly skewered me with a couple of arrows. “If you killed the ones down there, then I think this floor is clear.”

  “Anyways,” said Murphy. “We got this dude with a helicopter. Loaded it up with ammo and guns and came here because, you know, we said we’d meet you here.” He looked again at the dead on the floor and the happiness he’d been gushing since seeing the girls turned back to the morose mood he’d been in since the helicopter dropped us on the drill field. “But it looks like we’re too late to do any good.”