Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (3 page)

I was getting a little perturbed. “You’ve got lots of questions for somebody who doesn’t seem to want our help. Can we just get going and get out of here? We’ll leave you to help your friends or whatever.” I pointed at the boat up the cove that Murphy was in. “Can you at least drop me off at that boat?  We’ll just paddle it across the cove and be on our way.”

The girl looked at me without giving away anything with her expression. I waited for a few moments for a response then said, “Whatever the fuck. Look, I’ll just swim back down and you can do whatever. But I want my knife back.”

The girl looked at my knife still in her hand.

“It was my grandpa’s knife.” Sure, it was a lie, but the next part wasn’t. “It has sentimental value. Will you at least hand it to me when I get back in the water? You’re not going to try and steal my fucking knife, are you?”

It took the girl a moment before she said anything. “Okay. I’ll give you a ride down there and I’ll drop you off a little north of the cove if that’s what you want.” She held my knife out toward me. “Sorry about your grandpa.”

“Me, too.”

“What was his name?”

“Mr. Mays.”

“You called your grandpa Mr. Mays?”

“It’s a long story.”

I put the knife back in its old leather sheath. The girl started the boat’s motor. A thousand white faces turned our way and a tremendous wave of jubilant screams drowned out all other sound.

As she pressed the lock button and shifted the throttle into reverse, the engine revved and the boat moved away from the shore. Still in the bow, I looked into the trees to see if any Whites were crazy enough to make the jump out of the shadows. But as soon as I put that thought together, the rope that was attached to the bow and to a tree on the shore lifted up out of the water snapped taut, and jerked the boat to a stop. Having no such rope attached to me, I kept going and fell backwards onto the deck, bouncing my skull on the fiberglass.

Through the stars, I heard the engine rev higher. I heard the rope snap and heard it whip through the air in the space where I’d just been standing. “Ouch.”

The boat was moving.

My feet were still in the bow, and I was on my back on the deck, my head next to the girl where she sat behind the wheel. She looked down at me. “You okay?”

“I guess.”

“Sorry about that. Can you get up?”

“Give me a sec’ for my brains to stop rattling around.”

The girl reversed the throttle, he sound of the engine changed, and the boat started to move away from shore. My head rolled to the side as the boat turned and I found myself looking at her feet, and especially at her ankle. She had an owl tattoo.

When I started laughing, she probably thought I was nuts.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and as I maneuvered myself into the seat opposite her, I asked, “Did you go to Rice?”

She looked at me and then down at her feet. “Oh, the tattoo. I’ve never had anybody laugh at it before.”

“Is that a popular tattoo for Rice alumni?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Your name wouldn’t be Rachel, would it?”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. Then her eyes turned angry. “How do you know that?”

We’d covered half the distance to the boat where Murphy was patiently waiting. “You’re never going to believe who I’m with.”

Still wary, Rachel asked, “Who?”

I thought about making Rachel wait on the answer but figured that her being on the edge of suspicion wasn’t good for either of us. “Murphy.”

Tears flowed. “Murphy.”

I nodded.

“My brother, Murphy Smalls.”

“Yep.”

She shook her head. “If this is some kind of trick…”

“We’ll be there in a second. You’ll see for yourself.”

Rachel slowed the boat and cut the engine so that we could drift up to the other boat.

It was my turn to worry. Murphy’s head didn’t pop up to see us coming. He didn’t wave. Something was wrong.

“Quiet,” I whispered.

The girl was immediately tense. “What? What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I stood and hurried to the bow of the boat. Out of some innate protective habit, I motioned for Rachel to stay behind. She didn’t.

The bow of our boat nudged the other ski boat on the port side and I grabbed a handful of chrome rail to hold the two boats together. I leaned over to get a look inside. Murphy was lying on the deck. His head was on a cushion. He was asleep. “Motherfucker!”

“What?”

I turned to Rachel. “He’s taking a nap.”

Rachel squeezed past me as I sheathed my knife. With all the grace of a gymnast, she hopped into the other boat and landed on the deck beside Murphy. Tears were flowing in earnest. She knelt beside him and shook him until he woke.

I don’t know what Murphy was dreaming about, but my bet was that it wasn’t as good as what he saw when he woke up. It took a few moments for him to figure out that he was really awake, but once he did, both he and Rachel hugged and smiled, cried, laughed, and hugged some more.

When they settled down, Murphy started to ask questions so fast that Rachel had no chance to answer. But Rachel knew how to get down to business. “Murphy, we’ll talk later. Right now, my people are trapped on a boat over there. You guys came down here to get them out. Do you have any ideas besides that John Wayne silliness your buddy told me about?”

“Hey!” I thought it was a reasonable plan, considering the circumstances.

Murphy looked at me with a question on his face, but talked to Rachel. “When did you get so bossy?”

Rachel looked at me like I’d said something. I pointed back at Murphy. “I thought you said she was nice.”

Rachel turned to Murphy. “You and your friends. How can you go through life without ever growing up?”

I said, “I’m getting kinda sorry about convincing you to get in the boat.”

Rachel shot me a blazing look, then turned to stare for a minute at the infected making a ruckus on the floating docks. She looked back at me, all the hardness gone. “Thank you for being patient enough to convince me to get in the boat with you.”

The switch took me aback. “You’re welcome.”

Murphy said, “Don’t be hard on him. He’s a good guy. He saved my life.”

“Thank you for that, too.” Rachel stuck out a hand. “You know my name…”

“I’m Zed.”

“Zed? Really?”

“Don’t ask. It’s not as interesting nor as immature as it seems.”

Rachel looked back at the floating docks. “I have an idea.”

“He can hold his breath forever. I seen him do it.” That’s what Murphy had said to convince Rachel that I should be the one to go into the water with the rope. I hadn’t wanted the job, but I wasn’t going to argue about it. Based on little more than the fact that I had dangling genitalia, I believed I could do pretty much any physically demanding task better than Rachel.

So there I was, holding my breath beneath one of the floating docks, trying my best to tie a knot in the rope that I’d just wrapped around a metal brace before I ran out of air. If I didn’t finish it, there was no room to surface beneath the dock, as it floated on giant cubes of Styrofoam. I’d have to swim away from the dock underwater, catch my breath, and come back for another try. But I’d already been under three times; I was losing my patience, and my endurance was shortening with each submersion. When I wrapped the end of the rope under and through a loop for probably the fourth time, I decided that was good enough, and I pushed myself off of the brace and swam through the black water until I ran out of air.

I surfaced a good twenty feet from the dock. Many of the infected were very interested in what I was doing, but I was too far out in the water for any of them to think about coming for me. I swam another ten or fifteen feet to the boat, and Murphy gave me a hand climbing in.

“All secure?” Rachel asked from the driver’s seat.

“Good to go,” I answered.

She started the boat motor and got the attention of any Whites on the dock that weren’t already sizing us up. She engaged the propeller, and the boat started its slow progress forward.

“Easy,” Murphy told her. There was a lot of slack in the ski rope that connected the boat to the floating dock. We didn’t want it to jerk and break. “Easy.”

We passed through a few more boat lengths.

“How am I doing?” Rachel asked.

Murphy was standing in the stern of the boat. I was standing there as well. The rope was attached to some ski rope thingy between us on the back of the boat. It was designed to pull skiers, and we deduced that it was the best place to attach the rope.

Murphy turned to Rachel. “All the slack is coming out. Almost there.”

The rope pulled up out of the lake and drew taut. As the tension squeezed all the water out of the rope’s fibers the boat stopped moving.

Murphy said, “Okay.”

Rachel revved the engine higher. The propeller churned the water to white foam behind the boat. The rope hummed under the added tension. The docks groaned and lurched, but the section we’d tied onto didn’t break away from the ones it was jammed against.

Rachel looked back. “Is it working?”

“More gas.” Murphy told her.

More water turned white. The dock didn’t move.

“C’mon,” I muttered.

Rachel pushed the throttle all the way forward. The engine whined. Whites were coming up on both sides of the cove. Still, the docks didn’t separate.

To Murphy, I said, “It seemed like a solid plan.”

With the sound of a gunshot, the ski rope snapped. A length of it ripped the air between Murphy and me, slung through the center of the boat and out over the bow, popping again before flinging itself up above the boat to fall harmlessly down.

“God damn!” Murphy looked at me. “You all right?”

To my surprise, I was. I nodded without a word.

“Damn, Rachel,” said Murphy “You almost put my eye out.”

“You sound like my mom,” she said. “Are you guys okay?”

“Except for the mess in my pants,” joked Murphy.

“Zed, you okay?” she asked.

“I might have to change my pants, too,” I answered.

Rachel rolled her eyes and huffed. “I guess we’re back to the John Wayne plan.”

Our boat floated sideways near the center of the cove, fifty or sixty feet from the nearest of the log-jammed docks. Murphy had his M4 ready. Rachel had my M4. I had my pistol and machete ready just in case any of the Whites fell into the water and figured that they could swim after us. We didn’t need any passengers besides the ones we were trying to collect.

Murphy looked at Rachel and me. “Here’s the way this is going to work. I count to three and we all throw a hand grenade.”

Rachel gestured toward the dock and hefted a grenade, testing its weight. “I don’t know if I can throw it that far.”

Murphy rolled his eyes. “Trust me. You
can
throw it that far.”

“Can’t we get a bit closer?” she asked.

“If we get closer we’ll get hit by shrapnel.”

I said, “I vote we don’t move closer.”

Murphy rolled his eyes again. “Rachel, you toss yours right over at those Whites in front of us. Zed will throw one down that way, I’ll throw mine down this way. Try not to get them in the water. They’ll be useless if that happens.”

Rachel looked at the grenade in her hand and back up at the dock. She wasn’t sure.

“The first hand grenade will be easy,” Murphy explained. “Just throw it at one of them. It’ll hit and drop down to the dock. When you throw the second, hopefully there will be fewer of them still standing on the docks, so it’ll be harder to get the grenade to land there.”

Rachel answered, “Okay.”

I nodded.

Murphy continued. “This is the important part. I’ll count to three and we all throw on three. Both times. As soon as you throw, drop down onto the deck. You don’t want any shrapnel coming back and hitting you.”

“I thought you said we were far enough out for that not to happen?” Rachel asked.

“Stay on your feet if you want to.” Murphy closed one eye. “But you might put your eye out.” He laughed. “After the grenades, we shoot everything that moves on the docks. Questions?”

Looking at Rachel, I asked, “And your friends will know to start swimming this way when they see most of the Whites on the docks are preoccupied with us or busy bleeding out?”

“Yes.”

“Good, we don’t have enough bullets to kill all of them, and we’ll use them up pretty quickly.”

Murphy laughed, “The bullets will last a lot longer now that you’re not shooting.”

Rachel didn’t understand why Murphy was teasing me about my shooting. “They’ll come.”

“Ready?” Murphy asked.

Both Rachel and I gave him a nod.

“Pull your pins.”

We did.

“One. Two. Three.”

All three grenades flew at the dock and we dropped to the boat’s deck. Moments later, three near-simultaneous explosions rocked across the water. Bits of shrapnel smacked the boat’s hull.

The tenor of the White’s screams changed dramatically. The ones close by wailed in pain. Those on shore screamed in anger over their empty bellies and the number of white bodies standing between them and the feast left in the wake of the explosions.

Murphy jumped to his feet. Rachel and I were up a half second later, each of us already pulling a pin from a grenade.

The first three grenades had found their marks and left big gaps in what was a solid wall of white flesh. Bodies were down, broken and bleeding. Some of the infected were dazed and wounded but still on their feet. Others had been knocked into the water by the blasts. Most of those were drowning. Some were keeping their heads above the surface.

“One. Two. Three!”

Three more grenades arced toward the dock and again, Murphy, Rachel, and I dropped to the deck, with a little more conviction than on the previous time. We’d all heard the shrapnel hitting the hull and zinging through the air overhead.

Explosions followed, two on the dock, one in the water.

I jumped to my feet, machete and pistol ready to work. Murphy was already firing. Rachel squeezed off her first rounds a moment later. Bodies were down across seventy or eighty feet of the dock. Plenty were still standing upright, enraged and screaming. Others were starting to feed on their fallen brethren. Bullets ripped indiscriminately through them all.

Rachel stopped firing, waved a hand, and hollered to the passengers of the trapped boat. “Swim! Now! Go! Swim!” She went back to shooting.

I waved at the three to come.

It took a moment for them to reach a decision, or maybe just to figure out what was being requested, but one of them shed his weapon and dove over the side. The other two stood up, lost their heavy gear, and followed their partner into the water.

I shouted, “They’re coming!”

Whites pressed thickly together, trying to rush across the docks toward the middle. Some fell as Murphy and Rachel shot. Others were pushed into the water. Some were trampled in the mob.

The first of Rachel’s trapped friends made it to the dock, ducked under, and surfaced a moment later on our side. His eyes were wide with fear. He splashed rapidly and inefficiently as panic drove him to claw his way through the water.

I waved him over to me. “C’mon.”

A White howled nearby.

To my right, a White had somehow made it over to lay a hand on the stern. I hacked his wrist through with my machete and the White went under, getting a mouthful of water, leaving his hand behind.

The first swimmer reached the boat. I holstered my pistol and reached down. “I gotcha! C’mon.”

The man gripped my hand and I pulled. He got another hand on the rail. I let go and reached over his back to pull on his belt. As second later, he flopped over the gunwale and rolled onto his back on the deck.

One down!

I quickly searched across the water around us. No Whites were close enough to be a danger.

Under the cover of bullets, the other two swimmers had cleared the dock. I sheathed my machete and reached out across the gap to the one in the lead. He took my hand and I pulled him up. A moment later, he was in the boat.

The last of the swimmers was a woman. These guys definitely weren’t the chivalrous types.

I reached down, and the girl’s small hand grasped mine. I pulled her up, and about the time she was halfway into the boat, she stopped. I looked at her face. She seemed to deflate as the word, “Shit,” hissed past her lips.

I couldn’t believe it.

“Fucking Freitag.”