Slow Burn: A Zombie Novel (29 page)

When we arrived back at Stephen’s place, I learned of Paul’s fate as well. Mattie agreed to take Vanessa the backpack containing the medicine and tell her how Paul bravely got the inhalers to safety before he died. Dan greeted us in the driveway to help unload Chris’ truck and informed us that in our absence the power flickered a few times and had now gone out, most likely for good. He continued to relate how he was almost ambushed by a disgusting zombie in the backyard. He made sure to let everyone know how revolting and sickening that particular creature was. As we finished unloading, Rob began firing from upstairs at several approaching zombies. It was evident that our situation was rapidly deteriorating and some tough decisions needed to be made.

“
Bastards don’t even give us time to mourn our dead,” I told Stephen as we secured his front door.

“
We lost two people on one fucking raid,” he replied. “And it’s not over yet.”

Everyone’s emotions were spent after the morning’s ordeal and very little was said over the next few hours. Mattie came back some time later and informed us that Vanessa took it hard and was personally blaming Stephen for getting Paul killed. Mattie left Holly, the new girl, over at Vanessa’s place to help her out. Holly said she had been a student counselor in college and had dealt with several cases of students losing family. With that, Mattie settled down on the couch and fell asleep. In an attempt to stay busy, I helped Dan fire up Stephen’s 8000 watt generator, which easily powered a good portion of the house. The only problem was that it was pretty loud and the noise drew in zombies immediately. After it was operating for a mere fifteen minutes, we watched a rapid increase of incoming infected and were forced to turn it off. Dan, after missing the morning shootouts, took it upon himself to help put down all of the new targets and stood at the front of the driveway in full view, firing his suppressed AR-15 until the last zombie was finally motionless. None got closer than twenty-five yards to the house, so Dan and I decided that maybe we could get away with running the generator in the morning for some hot showers. It would probably serve as a morale booster and would be worth the added attention the noise brought. With the refrigerator not working, Dan next emptied the ice from the freezer door into a cooler and iced down the rest of our beer, again remarking how cold beer would soon become a rare luxury.

“
Well until winter sets in, but that’s a long ways off,” I replied, and handed a cold Miller Lite to everyone, saying we all could use a couple after a day like today. Stephen also grabbed some chips and salsa from his stash for us to munch on.

After waking Mattie up from her hour nap, the five of us sat in Stephen’s office finishing off the beers while Dan handled guard duty. Dan mentioned that Rob was the only shooter left at Vanessa’s house, and there were now three women and three children there as well. Something would have to be switched up. Mattie, thinking that Dan may be trying to work an angle of some sorts, agreed to take the night watch at their place tonight as a short term solution. She then wondered aloud if her sister Liz in Kankakee was okay or even still alive. I could see the worry in her eyes as she thought about it, and I wanted to tell her that I was sure she was fine, but we both know after what we had seen that there was no way to know for sure.

Mattie kept catching Dan staring at her chest and finally called him on it.

"My eyes are up here, Dan!"

"And…?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.

She just shook her head and rolled her eyes as she continued to talk about her sister. This eventually got us all talking about family, and I was reminded how small mine was. My dad was the only family I had, and I spent most of my time as a kid hiding from him. He was an over-the-road trucker and loved to drink. He also was a mean drunk and drove my mother to an early grave, God rest her soul. Since the day we fought it out as men and he came out on the losing end, he left town and had never been in touch since.

“
After his discharge from the hospital,” I said, concluding my story, “and that was twenty years ago.”

As far as I knew, he still drove a big rig, and I didn’t really care where he ended up when this all went down.

Dan had a brother, Dave, who lived in southern Illinois but didn’t seem overly concerned, stating Dave could take care of himself. Chris' parents lived in a condo in Florida. By the time he had a chance to call, the phone systems were already down. Stephen had the most family of all of us. His parents and older brother John lived in Wisconsin, not far from Stephen's property where we had just been camping. I thought about how that now seemed like a lifetime ago, and how it was so sparsely populated out there that they might not even have had an idea how bad it had gotten everywhere else. Stephen's kid brother Glen was active duty U.S. Army, part of the Big Red One out of Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was currently deployed to Afghanistan, which we all got a good laugh over, agreeing it was probably a lot safer over there than in the States at this point.

After we finished off the dozen or so beers we had left, Mattie made us dinner, which was ham and cheese sandwiches and soup. Stephen always kept his deep freezer full of two liter soda bottles that he had filled with water. This would allow us several days of use out of it as a cooler for what little perishables we had left. It was nearly dark after dinner, and Stephen asked Chris and Mattie to come down to the basement to help him reload all their magazines after the day’s fight. He had his Eaton UPS battery unit running, and the LED Christmas lights he had strung up on the ceiling did an outstanding job of lighting up his basement. I spent the time arranging our gear and cleaning everyone's weapons.

Mattie finally got ready to go over to Vanessa’s for the night, and I decided to walk over with her.

“
I can’t believe we didn’t see a living soul today besides Holly,” Mattie said in amazement as we walked. “How did everyone disappear so fast?”

“
I don’t know.” We paused at Vanessa’s front door. “This just caught everyone off guard, I guess. What surprised me was how nobody else from work made it to Stephen’s. A lot of people knew he had preps built up, and we all heard several of them say the famous ‘I know where I’m heading when the shit hits the fan’ comment. Hell, even Nick and Brooks from our own group didn’t make it here. Both had families, great skill sets, and were in fantastic shape. Stephen and I decided a couple of days ago that if they didn’t show up something bad must have happened. We just need to be glad we did make it.”

“
I’m so glad you guys came for me, Mike,” Mattie said, and gave me a quick kiss on the lips, her tongue slightly teasing my mouth as she opened the door. “Now get some sleep, I’ll see you in the morning.”

The kiss caught me pleasantly off guard, and while I stood there as if someone had nailed my shoes to the porch floor, she was gone. I walked back into Stephen’s house with a smirk on my face and got a questioning look from Chris, who was on his way back upstairs for guard duty. Stephen was listening to the radio broadcast from the safe zone on 98.3. Dan was busy on the HAM but nothing could hold my interest. I read a book on my cot since I couldn’t sleep, thinking both about the friends I had lost to this strange disease and of the insanely hot colleague of mine. After some time had passed, the thoughts of lost friends sadly were replaced totally by the memory of her lips burning my mouth with pleasure. Soon I had fallen asleep without even knowing it and for once had nice dreams.

Matvei was deep in thought, watching yet another convoy of trucks head north. Much had gone wrong as of late, and it left him in a sour mood. The cartel tried to double cross him as he had expected they would. Although he made them pay dearly for it, they had in the process disrupted his invasion timetable and, in fact, managed to throw the whole operation into jeopardy. Matvei’s intuition had proven to be true. The cartel intentionally spread the virus throughout Mexico without telling him; the chance to settle some old scores against rival bosses and government officials was just too big a temptation. They also wanted to make sure they would be unchallenged by any outside governments in the future and unleashed the virus on all fronts. In fact, Matvei had received word that cases had been reported in South America, Asia and Europe, as well. He knew that it wouldn't be long before the entire globe was consumed.

Having eliminated their opposition by infecting the rest of the globe, the cartel set their sights on their one remaining threat, Matvei himself. He was no idiot, however, and saw this coming. He had won the trust of many of the lower ranked Los Zetas, and they warned him of an assassination attempt. A bomb had been planted in his vehicle and was to be detonated while he was traveling to a remote supply depot. That naive plan was set up by Juan, and Matvei used that very bomb to turn Juan’s Escalade into a burning pile of wreckage while Juan sat in the back seat. As luck would have it, his friend and fellow kingpin Marcos had also been in the truck along with a couple of Marcos’s whores.

In a panic, the two remaining leaders, Carlos and the head boss Cesar, hastily arranged a meeting with Matvei after word of the explosion reached them. They had been briefed of rumors suspecting U.S. involvement in the car bombing and fell for the bait. Matvei named the location for the meeting, and all of the guards present were loyal to Matvei. After the meeting started, the guards stood by as he shot Carlos in the head when he walked into the room. Cesar, the man Matvei held most responsible, was taken prisoner and injected with Variant Z before being locked in a cell with his extended family and personal bodyguards. It didn’t take long for the slow burn in Cesar’s blood to turn him. Matvei watched with fascination as his former boss gradually and painfully turned into a monster. Taking some satisfaction at outsmarting the man and his cronies, he felt little pity as the infected wretch devoured his own wife and children. In the cartel world you had to be brutal, and that was something he definitely was skilled at.

There had been consequences to their deaths, however. A small civil war erupted within the cartel, with several lower level leaders attempting to grab power in the chaos that followed. By the time it was over a few days later, Matvei had lost nearly half of his men. His entire command was now just under 2,000 fighting men but all were now firmly under his control. Most of the splinter groups had been chewed up by the growing outbreak in Mexico, and they soon received heavy pressure of their own from the south and west flanks. Thanks to a few greedy fuckers, he was going to be forced to move north into the United States before he was ready. His former employers had moved his timetables up considerably, and now he had to enter the hot zone long before the virus had a chance to die out.

After only a few days of the virus running rampant, the United States had gone almost completely dark to the outside world. The last reports he saw on television before the stations went off the air were of massive riots and genocide on an unprecedented scale. The military had been unable to cope with the large scale of unrest and had either pulled back or gotten overrun. In fact, his advance scouts had crossed the border into the United States completely unopposed. Matvei sent a platoon consisting of 33 of his best men up north to secure his ranch even before he was warned of the bomb plot.

“
At least that part of the plan worked,” Matvei said with a sigh of relief upon receiving news that they had arrived safely. “The United States is finally vulnerable!”

He did what no other country or tyrant had managed to do in over two hundred years…bring the United States to her knees.

With little time to prepare, Matvei pulled a scaled back plan together. He would try and set up a small empire in the remotely populated Southwestern United States. A force of nearly 300 men would move up along the coast, hunker down outside of Houston and attempt to secure a port and oil refineries in the area. He put his most trusted Lieutenant, Fidel Calderon, in charge of a 1,000 man contingent and had them begin to move north in the direction of Dallas, Texas. They were to gather survivors and supplies and set up several strong points in the area. Lt. Calderon was under strict orders to stay clear of heavily populated areas.

Four other groups consisting of 150-200 men would head to designated areas to the west of Dallas to set up refueling and supply points. Each of these locations had food, fuel and firearms cached before the virus was released. These locations also had allied gangs present who were to take over the town and hold it for the arrival of the mercenaries. Each one of these outposts would then spread out, gathering survivors and resources. The four locations chosen were Brownwood and , Brownfield, Texas, and Roswell and Silver City, New Mexico. The far left of Matvei’s territory would be marked by his ranch in Arizona. As he gathered strength in the future he hoped to expand from there.

But that was a long way off at this point.

Standing just inside the northern gate to the sprawling compound of now deceased drug lords, he watched the trailing vehicles of his mercenaries disappear into the distance. They were already engaging the heavy population of infected that swarmed the area but would have little trouble as long as they stayed on the move. The convoy traveled in eighteen-wheelers, cube vans and pickup trucks loaded with supplies, school buses and military style heavy transports loaded with armed men, SUVs, and motorcycles running as scouts. He spun on his heels and paced back into the courtyard knowing that time was running short to get his final plans in motion. With the majority of his men sent north on their mission, he was safe to begin his journey.