Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (13 page)

"Murphy," I said, not an ounce of humor in my voice, "remember when you asked me whether emergent behavior in the infected would present any added danger? I think I can answer that now."

"I know the answer
," Murphy responded, flatly.

Mandi
, with tears in her eyes, said, "That was terrible. Those people didn't have a chance."

"No." I shook my head and wondered whether they'd still be alive if I'd left t
hem in the hospital, probably the same question going through the minds of those in the other Humvee.

No, they wouldn't.
Rationalization?

No.
I told myself that wasn't the case. Whether I'd been there or not, the infected would have discovered access to the upper floors of the hospital through the elevator shafts. Had Dalhover and I not chanced on them coming up the shafts at the moment that we did, all of those in the hospital may have died that morning.

But they were all dead, just the same.

In helping them escape, perhaps I'd only succeeded in buying them a few more hours of life. What killed them wasn’t my help; it was an unlucky choice. Dr. Evans's family farm wasn't as secure as its isolation implied. As a result, they paid the price for the mistake.

Blood. Pain. Terror. Death.

It was a failure to understand the new rules. And every failure was paid in blood. That goddamned lesson insisted on repeating itself, and it was pissing me off.  Still, another dozen good people were dead. If any corollary was there to be learned, it was that nothing should be taken for granted. Not one single thing.

Houses were never safe. Escape plans must always be laid.
Guards must always be posted.

Those in the house apparently hadn't post
ed a lookout; an oversight that had cost them their lives. Had they seen the flood of infected pouring into the valley, perhaps they could have escaped in their vehicles. They depended on flimsy doors and brittle glass to protect them. They fucked up.

And I knew that the doors and windows
at Russell's house that Murphy, Mandi, and I thought had protected us the night before, in fact hadn’t. What had protected us was luck. The mountain of burned bodies behind Russell's house gave the infected a much more tempting distraction than a potentially fruitless search of abandoned houses.

I
wondered whether my life or anyone’s was simply a measure of the number of lucky guesses made. That was depressing to think about. Disempowering.

Dr. Evans and company could have kept the vehicles near the doors and pointed away from the house, ready for a quick escape. They could have set up a diversion in the barn to draw
any infected away and buy themselves some time.

They must have been at the farm for a few hours before we arrived. Sure
ly they were all tired, frazzled by their experiences. Free from immediate threat for the first time in days. So they rested. They let their guard down. And that was another lesson for me. No downtime until all preparations that could be made were made.

All mistakes are paid for in blood.
Again, the most important lesson of all.

The future promised to be grueling for those who survived, grueling and tense.
Learning the new rules would be as important to continued life as eating, drinking, and breathing.

With
no roadmap, no syllabus, and no list of requirements for the future, the hospital survivors who’d died had opened the book of tomorrow’s secrets to a page of useful knowledge, paid for with their lives. I silently thanked them, and took the lessons to heart.

“Why didn’t
they have any hair?” Mandi asked. “Why were they naked?”

“They had hair,” Murphy argued.

Mandi shook her head for emphasis, but it was slow, as though the work of doing it while under the burden of what she’d just seen was difficult. “No, they didn’t.”

“I’m not a fan of seventies porn,” Murphy told her. “I know the difference between hairy and hairless.”

Mandi turned to look out the window, and with no emotion in her voice she said, “You are a pig, Murphy.”

I said, “Murphy’s right. They were bald, not hairless.”

That seemed to settle the hair question with no resolution, but after half a mile, Mandi said, “So.”

“So what?” I asked.

“So what does it mean?” She turned to look back at me.

“I’m not sure,” I answered, happy to take my mind off of the horror and get lost for a second in the clinical questions on the quirkiness of the Whites. “It can’t be natural, I don’t think.”

“Am I going the right way?” Murphy asked.

“Yeah,” I pointed. “Just stay on this road for now.”

“What do you mean, not natural?” Mandi asked.

“I mean, these are the only bald Whites that we’ve seen,” I answered. “And as porn king Murphy pointed out, they definitely weren’t hairless. I’m not a doctor or anything, but it seems to me that if the virus was going to make your hair fall out, it would all fall out, not just the hair on your head.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Mandi turned back forward in her seat. “What then?”

“I don’t know.” But that didn’t prevent me from speculating. “
Maybe they do more than follow each other around. Maybe it’s another emergent behavior thing and they’re trying to look alike too.”

“So what,” Murphy scoffed, “one bald nudist walks down the street and all the other Whites say to themselves, hey, I wanna be like him?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

“It’s your idea,” Murphy countered.

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t going to put too much into defending a guess.

Nothing was said for a bit after that until we passed back through the small, nameless town and the pecan grove. Mandi said, “When they started to come up the slope toward, I think one of them had a knife.”

“What?” I asked in surprise.

“No way!” Murphy responded.

Mandi nodded and looked at us. “I think so. It was far away. I can’t be sure, but I think one of them was carrying a knife.”

That was enough to kill the conversation in the Humvee. Perhaps we all knew the ominous implications if some of the infected could use weapons. There was indeed a whole spectrum of intellectual capacities among them.

The Humvee bounced down the bumpy country roads, back in the direction we'd just come, and without any of the usual pep in his voice, Murphy asked, "You're the man with the plan, Zed. Where are we going?”

“Not Russell’s house,” Mandi interjected, staring despondently out the window.

Pointing needlessly out through the windshield, I said, “Let’s head back to that bridge over I-35 that was clear.”

“At Thirty-Second Street?” Murphy asked

“Yeah, sure.”

“Are you thinking back to the university?” Murphy asked, “Back to one of those big old buildings? You think we can hold out against…?” Murphy’s voice trailed off, as though mentioning the endless horde would confirm that they were more than a nightmare. 

“
I have an idea.” I offered.

“
Okay,” Murphy said, “let's hear it."

I scooted up in my seat
. Russell mimicked. The mood in the Humvee was settling into a darkness from which it would be hard to come back. Mandi had gone silent and was staring at nothing. The absence of Murphy’s smile was hard to bear. He was in no shape at that moment to pick the mood up off of the floor, but it needed to be done before despair set in and we gave up. So it was up to me redirect our collective mood.

“
Do you know where Mt. Bonnell Road is?” I asked Murphy.

“
On the other side of town, where all the rich white people live.”

“
Yeah, well not all of them, but some of them. That's where we're going.”

“
Back into the hornet’s nest,” Murphy absently muttered.

“
It's not that bad, if we do it right,” I said.

Murphy's voice
flipped to defiance. “Yeah, I'll just run down any mother fuckers that get in our way.”

“
Not
any
,” I disagreed. “There's an upper limit to that.”

“Yeah,”
Murphy answered absently. His mind was back on the horde.

“
If you see any really big groups, let's not try to plow through them. We'll need to drive around.”

Murphy grunted in acknowledgement.

Mandi was still silent.

I took a moment to explain
my tactic of zigzagging through the neighborhoods to keep the infected from clogging the streets ahead. I emphasized how important it was not to lose the other Humvee in our maneuvers.

With that taken care of, I changed the subject.
“I used to date this short, red-headed girl named Jackie.”

“
War stories?” That surprised Murphy, but his tone suggested that he wasn’t in the mood.

Defensively, I said, “
There's a point.”

Mandi
looked over her shoulder at me, showing her watery eyes. Then she went back to staring through the glass.

“
When I was a freshman at UT, I met her in my psychology class,” I said. “Well, she met me. I mean, she kind of picked me up in class and then we started going out.”

“
Was she cute?” Murphy asked.

“
Of course,” I answered. “Really nice little ah...” I looked over at Mandi, but she was working hard at ignoring me. “Well the thing is, she still lived at home and drove into school each day. Her parents had a big house up on Mt. Bonnell.”

Murphy raised his voice for emphasis,
“God damn, Null Spot. How many women do you want to try to save?”

“
That's not where I'm going with this,” I countered.

Mandi muttered,
“I doubt that.”

“
No, really,” I said. “Hear me out.”

“
I'm guessing we don't have a choice,” Murphy smiled.

I
continued with my story. “So, like, back when we were dating, I'd go over to her house and we'd watch movies and stuff and study together.”

“
Uh huh,” Murphy's tone implied a lot inappropriate activity.

“I'm sure you were studying.”
Mandi was sarcastic, not at all happy with my topic of choice. But at least she was starting to engage.

“
Sometimes, maybe,” I said. “Well, the truth is, we were both eighteen and horny as hell, and it seemed like all she ever wanted to do was screw.”

Mandi scoffed,
“Like you didn't.”

“
Oh, no, don't get me wrong,” I answered. “I love sex. Lots of it.”

Murphy snickered.

I continued, “But Jackie, oh my God, she was like a nympho or something. She'd wanted to screw every day, more than once. Sometimes four or five times.”

“
Oh, whatever!” Mandi scoffed.

“
You'd be surprised how virile a motivated eighteen-year-old can be,” I countered.

Murphy raised his eyebrows and gave us a speculative,
“Maybe.”

“
Well, she wore me out, I'll tell you. There were times when I'd make up excuses not to go over to her house just so I could get a day of rest.”

“
This story is getting unbelievable, Zed,” Mandi said. “You said there is a point, right? It's not just you making up stories about your sexual exploits.”

I said, “
Well, there is that part, but...”

Murphy laughed.

“…I’ll get to the point,” I finished. “Jackie liked to have sex everywhere. In her bed, of course. In the wine cellar when her parents were upstairs…”

“The wine cellar?” Mandi asked.

“Rich people,” Murphy observed.

“Everybody who lives on Mt. Bonnell has money.” I responded. “People with money have wine cellars.”

“A rich girl who likes to have sex all the time?” Mandi didn’t believe a word of it. “And why would you ever leave a girl like that?”

“She dumped me,” I admitted. “She said I was too emotionally distant.”

Murphy laughed out loud. “I’m so surprised.”

“Well, to get on with my point, we’d sometimes go for walks in the neighborhood, and whenever they were building a new house, she’d want to sneak in at night and have sex in it.”

“Say what?” Murphy grinned.

“No way,” Mandi scoffed again.

“No, I’m serious. I told you. She was kind of a nympho and a little kinky.  And I’ll admit, it was kind of a turn-on.”

Mandi made a show of looking back out the window. She wasn’t ready to give up on her mood. “And the point is?”

I said, “There was this one house just off the street, kind of set back in the trees. It was an ugly kind of modern-ish box thing, like a tiny three-story Walmart or something. All concrete and not enough windows.”