Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (6 page)

Tentatively, Steph asked, “If he turned, you were going to shoot him?”

Gretchen nodded.

“And then yourself?” Steph asked.

“Yes.” Gretchen took Paul’s hand in hers. “We didn’t make any attempt after that to keep me from getting infected. I decided that if Paul was going to die, and I was going to die, then I was damn sure going to be affectionate with the love of my life.” Gretchen leaned over and kissed Paul on the lips.

Steph smiled, but I could see restrained tears.

“Neither of us turned.” Gretchen smiled. “We both got lucky with immunity.”

“That’s amazing luck.”

“Better than winning the lottery.” Gretchen said. “After that, we instituted the quarantine system for those coming on the island.”

“And that worked?” I asked.

“There were some difficult moments. But people were more understanding about it than you’d think. Everybody knew it was for the safety of all.”

“Wow.” I shook my head. “Reasonable people.”

Gretchen laughed at that. “I wouldn’t go
that
far. But about the quarantine, they were reasonable enough.”

“Reasonable enough,” Paul agreed.

“Have you had any infected on the island since that first family?” I asked.

“Not a one.” Paul answered. “But we were plenty worried before the flood.”

I asked, “Because of the lake levels? Did it get that low?”

“Yes.” Paul nodded emphatically. He pointed at a spit of land pointing down from the north shore. “This island and that peninsula are actually part of the same ridge. It dips down beneath the water out there but not by much. Before the flood came and refilled the lake, anybody could have waded across and never gotten more than chest deep.”

I looked in the direction of the peninsula. The islanders were surviving by little more than luck. Perhaps that was the story for everyone.

Gretchen said, “Because of that, we try to keep hidden out here. We don’t build cooking fires outside. We don’t walk around outside during the day, at least not where someone onshore can see us.”

“Sounds smart.”

“We got lucky with some of our choices,” said Paul. “They were the right ones and they worked out well. On the other hand, we don’t know what we’ll do about food in the long run. We can only scavenge along the shore for so long.”

Gretchen ignored Paul’s change in the subject and pointed at Steph, “And we got lucky with who came to the island. We didn’t have anybody with any medical knowledge. But now we have Steph and Amy, two nurses. I don’t know all of what we need to survive in the long term, but I have to think that having someone to treat the injured and sick could make all the difference.”

“I’m just a nurse,” said Steph.

“You’re more than that,” said Paul. “You’re hope.”

I liked Steph a lot, but I wasn’t sure I’d go that far.

Paul went on. “We used to take for granted that if we got sick, we could just go to a doctor, get a pill, and get better. It wasn’t always like that for people. It wasn’t that long ago that influenza was a deadly disease. People got sick and died all the time. Minor injuries could lead to infection and death. We never had to think about those things because we had modern medicine. With the world like it is now, all of those seemingly minor medical problems become major again.”

“I hadn’t thought that much about it,” I said.

“I don’t know why,” said Paul, “but the subject came up a lot when we islanders talked around the campfire at night. It worried everyone. You see, people today—ahem, yesterday—were all specialists. We did jobs and had skills that made us successful in the world we’d built. I studied rocks.” Paul laughed. “Not much need for that now. People were financial analysts, computer programmers, insurance adjusters, all totally useless now. But doctors and nurses, those are professional skills that humans took thousands of years to develop, and that we can’t afford to lose. They represent one of the major progressive steps away from barbarity and into civilization.”

Knowing that we had the whole next day to talk, Paul and Gretchen went downstairs to claim a bedroom. That left just Steph and me on the sun deck. The boat was silent, and I assumed by then that everyone else was asleep.

I was sitting at the end of a vinyl covered couch, and Steph was sitting on a twin of my couch, but set perpendicular to mine, leaving us close enough together that our knees were nearly touching. She asked, “Was Murphy serious about what he said?”

I raised my eyebrows to ask for clarification.

“About going out to kill Smart Ones? Is that what you plan to do?”

A path that had previously seemed so clear suddenly needed stuttered rationalizations. “We’re not safe. We have to. You saw what they did to…to Mandi, to Russell.”

Steph leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. “Zed, I hate them too. I really do. We all do. But there’s nothing you can do about it. Chasing revenge around Austin until you get killed isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“It’s not revenge.”

“How could it be anything else?” Steph wasn’t going to let me by without expressing her disagreement.

“It
isn’t
revenge.”

“Then what is it? Are you the Valiant Null Spot? Are you going to save the world?”

I put a hand on Steph’s. I put them both there and stared at the white fiberglass deck. I looked at the patterns of black grippy tape and looked for a good way to figure out what I was really feeling, the reason I really wanted to kill the Smart Ones, if not to indulge a desire for revenge. Finally, I said, “I’ll admit, it doesn’t make any sense. When I take a clinical step back and examine it, it does seem pointless.”

Steph laid her other hand on the pile of hands on my knee. “Then why do it?”

“I…I…” It was hard to deal with the truth of it. “I have a rage. I have this big black hole that I feel like I need to fill. I hate the Whites. I hate the Smart Ones. As irrational as I know it is, I think if I kill enough of them, maybe I’ll fill the hole. Maybe I’ll feel better at the end.”

“You won’t.” But she said it not as an insult but simply as a matter of fact, as though my assertion was so ridiculous on its face that it needed no thought. It was just wrong.

I sat back in my seat and leaned my head back to look up at the stars. Timidly, I admitted, “I know.”

“Then, why?”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“Stay here with us. Don’t endanger yourself for nothing. Stay here with me.”

With me?

“I worry that I’m turning into a monster,” I said. “I worry that this need I have to kill isn’t pointless revenge. I worry that I want to do it because my brain is changing. I worry that I want to kill because I like it.”

Steph sat up and pulled her hands to her own lap. She pulled her legs up onto the couch to sit Indian-style. “Is this about what happened with Nico?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think Nico was…He was just one in a long line. I’ve killed so many.”

“But they were all infected. They were all dangerous.”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think they were
all
dangerous.” I told her about the thin, bald kid in the Children’s Hospital, the one that looked at me and didn’t resist when I hacked him down with my machete. I wondered if he had been as innocuous as Russell. I told her about the girl who was sitting on the rock outside the front gate at Sarah Mansfield’s house. I’d heard her screams after the Whites chased her into the trees, and I knew she’d been a Slow Burn, just like me. I’d murdered her because I was too impatient, too stupidly certain about what I thought she was to figure out a way to discover the truth. “How many others have I murdered, Steph?”

“You can’t think about it that way.”

“And the worst part about it all,” I said, ignoring her comment, “is that sometimes the only time I feel better is when I’m killing more of them. How fucked up is that?”

“Most of them, nearly all of them, are monsters, Zed. They’ll kill us if they have the chance. You have to remember that. You’re doing things that are hard because you want to keep the people that you love safe.”

“Love?”

“Okay, like. Whatever.”

I looked across the bow of the boat and saw Monk’s Island, alone on the smooth black water. Softly, I said, “Love is fine. I’m tired of losing my friends. It hurts too much.”

Steph rearranged herself in her seat, leaned forward, and put her hands back on my legs. “It does hurt. But we can’t give up. We still have to try to be human. If we can’t do that, what’s the point of it all?”

“Exactly.” I shrugged. “What’s the point?”

Steph stood up, leaned over me, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the lips. She sat back down, not taking her eyes off of mine. “Don’t go. Stay.”

I’d both been wanting and dreading that first kiss for weeks, but the rush of feelings didn’t sit right with me. I deflected with humor. “Are you trying to manipulate me with your womanly wiles?”

Steph smiled and a few tears rolled down her cheeks. Shaking her head, she said, “Yes. Maybe I am trying to manipulate you, but please, please tell me you know there’s more to it than that.”

She was so beautiful in her severe, redheaded Steph sort of way. With that kiss she’d opened the door on the complex mess of emotions that had been troubling both of us. I said, “I think that kiss is the best thing that’s happened to me…fuck it. Let’s just say it’s the best thing that’s
ever
happened to me.”

Silent tears followed one another down Steph’s cheeks. “But?”

“I have to be honest with you about something.”

Steph shook her head and laughed through her tears. “You’re gay.”

That was so unexpected, I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can be funny.”

“See, I told you.” She wiped her cheek with her sleeve.

“No. I’m not gay.”

“What then? Spit it out. I’m a big girl. Are you going to call HR and file a sexual harassment complaint?”

I favored her with a smile, but we were both past the jokes. “When Murphy and I went to get the suppressors, we were on the hospital grounds for a little while.”

“And?”

There was no good way to say it. “Jeff Aubrey is still alive. Or he was, anyway.”

Steph just looked at me for a long time after that.

I waited patiently, silently.

Finally, she asked, “Why didn’t you bring him back?”

I shook my head. “I thought about it. I wanted to. Kind of.”

“Kind of? So he wasn’t one of them, was he? If he was, you wouldn’t have had to think about it.”

“No, I don’t know what he was.” It was my turn to lean forward and take Steph’s hands in mine. “He wasn’t like me and Murphy.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t right. He had a hard time with single syllables. I don’t think he understood what Murphy and I were saying most of the time.”

Steph was crying again.

“Steph, I don’t know if he was dangerous or not. He didn’t attack us, but Murphy and I are both Whites.”

“Zed Zane, I hate this fucking world.”

“I know.”

Through her tears, Steph said, “It never stops hurting.”

“I know.”

Somewhere in the dark, we ran out of words and fell asleep on separate couches, with only our thoughts to hold us close.

When I woke, my wrists were being bound behind my back. “Hey!”

Steph was cursing and struggling.

I rolled off of my couch and hit the deck while kicking out at a dozen legs that danced sideways to avoid my boots. Then they kicked back. A kick hit my thigh. Another hit me in the stomach and a third bruised my ribs before the bravest of my assailants dropped onto my chest and put a cold revolver barrel against my face. “Don’t move, you white piece of shit.”

I stopped struggling.

Steph shouted, “You assholes.”

A man shouted, “Quiet!”

Everything on the top deck stopped.

Seething with fury, I looked up the barrel of the gun that was pressed into my cheek beside my nose. I memorized the face of the dark haired, mustached man who was using the weapon to hold me still.

“Don’t move,” he warned me.

Not yet. But one day.

The voice in charge said, “Take her down.”

Steph struggled. Feet moved. In my peripheral vision I saw her being manhandled toward the stairs.

“Get him up,” the voice ordered.

The man with the gun leaned close. “If it was up to me, you’d be dead already.”

Interesting that he and I were both thinking the same thing.

He got off of my chest. I was rolled over and dragged to my feet. There were four of them up there with me, two handling me, the guy who’d been on my chest, and the last—who I guessed was in charge—a dumpy, older man with white hair and glasses with thick, black frames.

At the spiral stairs that led down to the main deck, one of my keepers led the way. The other held my bound wrists behind me. As we rounded the descent into the houseboat’s main salon, Steph was being seated on a couch beside Dalhover. Rachel and Paul were on the same couch. Gretchen was in a chair at the end of the couch. Murphy was standing with his back to the wall at one end of the rectangular room with his hands bound behind him—apparently Whites like me and Murphy needed to be tied up. A man with a pistol stood a pace in front of Murphy, keeping the weapon pointed at Murphy’s chest. I was urged to move in that direction.

Eight men and one woman all had weapons—several handguns, a couple of shotguns, some rifles, and mine and Murphy’s M4s. The two guys that we’d rescued with Rachel were among them. That pissed me all the way off and then some, but rather than indulge the anger, I caught Murphy’s eye. We were on the same page: escape.

The older guy who’d been giving orders up on the roof went to stand next to another dumpy, white-haired man that looked just like him, but with different glasses.

Gretchen was the first to speak. To her credit, she didn’t sound angry. “What are you doing, Jay?”

Jay—apparently the twin with the different glasses—began to speak. “This has all got to stop, Gretchen.” Jay’s tone wasn’t bellicose, not angry. He was just a nice old man talking to the grandkids.

With anger starting to show on her face, but calm still in her voice, Gretchen said, “We all talked. We all agreed. But you weren’t happy with the majority decision, and now you’re going to get your way by force, is that it?”

Jay stepped to the center of the room and looked down at Gretchen. “You think that because you pushed everyone to agree with you, they all did.”

“They agreed with me.”

Shaking his head, Jay said, “You bullied them.”

“That’s not true,” Paul disagreed, loudly.

In the same loud tone, Jay’s twin told Paul, “You don’t see it, Paul, because you’ve been pussy-whipped your whole life.”

Jay turned to his twin and raised a hand to calm him. “Jerry.”

Jerry made a show of glaring once more at Paul before he looked back at Jay. And that was the pecking order. Jay was in charge. Jerry was the lackey.

“I don’t do that,” said Gretchen.

Jay dismissed Gretchen’s argument with a wave of his gun. “We voted again after you came out here to camp with your new friends. And now you’re out.”

Gretchen shook her head. She was disgusted.

“Just like last time,” Paul shouted. “Everybody knows that you just want to be in charge.” Paul looked around the room for support. “That’s all this is. Little Jay Booth trying to feel important.”

Not one of Jay’s armed men gave any hint that they’d heard Paul speak.

Not good.

Slowly, so as not to attract any attention, I wiggled my wrists and turned my arms to see if there was any way I might get my hands free. The guy next to me had a pump action shotgun. All I needed to do was get that in my hands. On the coffee table in front of the couch lay my Hello Kitty bag next to Murphy’s bag. If we could get a grenade or two out, we could make our escape, just as we’d gotten out of that dorm when dipshit-crazy Mark was threatening us. Only this time we wouldn’t leave anyone behind with the whack jobs.

It felt like some kind of wire wrapped around my wrists. It was tight, but had been tied in a hurry. I felt it give ever so slightly as I twisted my wrists.

Looking at Paul, Jay asked, “Finished?”

Rachel sat forward and calmly said, “Jay, let’s—”

“Not a word from you,” Jay snapped.

Rachel froze and I thought Murphy was going to explode with anger and kill him, wrists bound or not.

“You’re just Gretchen’s silky-tongued lawyer mouthpiece.” Jay pointed his pistol at Rachel’s forehead. “Just say something else.”

Murphy started to lean away from the wall. Jay turned to him. Back in the kindly grandpa voice, he said, “Go ahead.”

Murphy was ready to kill, but chose wisely to do nothing.

Gretchen pulled Jay’s attention back to herself. “What exactly is happening here? Why all the guns? What are you going to do with us?”

“You ask that like you expect me to say I’m going to kill you. You’ve watched too many movies. You need to go, that’s all. You need to take your white monster friends and go away. They aren’t coming to our island and you’re not staying.”

“Fine. Paul and I don’t want to stay.” Gretchen looked around at Murphy and then at me. “If you’re just going to banish us then why are Murphy and Zed tied up?”

It was kindly Jay who spoke. “They’re monsters.”

“We shouldn’t let any of them go.” Jerry was agitated. “We should kill them all right now.”

That sent a ripple through the room and it became apparent that most of them didn’t mind participating in the coup. But they weren’t up for murder, at least not the murder of Gretchen and Paul.

Jay read it all. He was smart enough to see exactly what I was seeing. He and Jerry both wanted me and Murphy dead, at least, but he didn’t have the political support to have all of us killed. He said, “We’ll put them in a boat and drop them off on the shore.”

“Just drop us off?” Gretchen spat.

“Yes,” Jay answered.

“Where?”

“Wherever you like.”

“When?”

“Right now,” said Jay.

“In the middle of the night?” asked Gretchen.

“Right now.”

“Can we get our things from the island?” she asked.

“No,” Jay told her. “Those things belong to the community now.”

Gretchen shook her head. “And what can we take with us?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at Murphy. He was still angry but keeping it to himself. I was still having no luck with the wires on my wrists.

“You’re going to put us ashore with nothing,” said Gretchen, “but you’re not killing us?”

“What a load of shit.” Paul didn’t care about the risks of showing his derision.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave anytime you want,” said Jay.

“Leave?” Paul asked.

“Jump off the boat and swim to wherever you like.” Jay smiled insincerely.

Jerry laughed out loud. He, and no one else, found Jay’s little joke funny.

Paul glared at Jay, revealing all the hate he was feeling.

Freitag opened a side door and stepped in, a gun in her hand.

Fucking bitch.

I hadn’t even realized she was missing from the group of prisoners.

“Let’s not lollygag anymore.” Jay turned to Freitag. “Is the boat ready?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered.