Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (16 page)

Standing in what used to be somebody’s living room up on the eighth floor, looking through a set of tall windows on the exterior wall, I saw the Capitol in the distance between two other tall buildings. I said, “I think they’re giving up.”

Murphy was in the kitchen rummaging through cabinets and pulling empty containers out of the pantry. “Be nice if they’d left us some food,” he said.

I took a quick glance around the apartment. It was orderly, for the most part. No one had fought for their lives within the apartment walls. No human remains were scattered on the carpet, leaving the stink of decay in every permeable fabric and cushion. That was our primary reason for selecting it among the other apartments we’d peeked into on the eighth floor. It was the first one where the owner appeared to have bugged out of town. His body was probably on some other street, or his bones were being gnawed on by rats as they lay in the wreckage of some car.

Fritz came over to the window to look at the Capitol in the distance. “You said you had a car close by, right?”

Shaking my head as I pointed off toward the northwest, I said. “Way up over there.” I looked around at the dark streets far below. “I didn’t realize we ran so far. I think that’s 6
th
Street down there.”

Behind me, the soldier with my shotgun laid it on the coffee table, sat down and started monkeying around with it. Cleaning or disassembling—I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I said, “Don’t get too attached to that. I’m keeping it when we go our separate ways.”

He looked offended, stood up, and reached the shotgun toward me. I waved it away. “You keep it for now.”

Murphy leaned on a kitchen counter. “I’m gonna check some of the other apartments on this floor and see what I can find.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told him.

“We don’t have much water,” he argued, “and we didn’t bring any food with us.”

The guy with my shotgun said, “I’ll go with you.”

I turned around, looked at Murphy and said, “Don’t leave this floor, okay?”

“Yes, dad.” Murphy headed for the front door with the other soldier following behind.

I rolled my eyes and looked at Fritz. “What’s your deal?” I pointed at the Capitol building, still glowing in the light of the fires burning around it. “What’s with these guys? Are they the army or what?”

Fritz leaned against the glass and crossed his arms. He looked at me, started to say something, then stopped. He was perplexed.

“What?” I asked.

He took a moment. “Your skin.”

I looked down at the scars on my arms, bites that had healed. “What about it?” I asked, trying to decide whether to feel proud or self-conscious.

“You look like them,” he said.

I looked down toward the street. “The infected?” Of course, the infected.

Fritz nodded.

“You say that like you haven’t seen this before.”

He shook his head. “I have. In the infected. Not in somebody like you. You seem normal.”

“That’s because I am,” I told him.

He leaned close to see my eyes. “And your pupils, they stay dilated? Just like the others?

Not comfortable having Fritz so close, I leaned back. “Yeah. And my temperature runs a little hot. What of it?”

Shaking his head, Fritz said, “I haven’t seen one like you, that’s all.”

“We’re everywhere.” I waved a hand toward the city.

“I haven’t seen one,” he said.

“I guess you live in a different neighborhood,” I told him. “I’ve run into a few.”

“Like you?” Fritz asked. “You clearly caught the virus. You recovered and now you’re normal. Mostly.”

I started to say yes. There had been Russell and Nico. The guy and the girl in that house up by the lake. Jerome.
Jerome the Liar
as Murphy would have called him. Crazy Mark. All those insane Smart Ones. Shaking my head, I said, “A few. Me and Murphy have come across a whole variety of infected. I guess some are like me.”

“Here in Austin?” Fritz asked.

That seemed like an odd question. “Of course. Where have you been through all of this?” I asked. “Here?”

Fritz shook his head. He pointed east. “Back by Houston.”

“How are things in Houston?” I asked, digressing, though not intending to.

“A mess,” said Fritz. “Like here. What isn’t burned is overrun with infected. Most of it burned, though, before the floods.”

“I think most of East Austin burned too,” I said, as I craned my neck to look toward that part of town. I couldn’t see anything but darkness and dimly lit silhouettes of buildings.

Looking vaguely east, Fritz said, “We saw that when we were coming into town.”

“From out east near Houston?” I said, to emphasize the ambiguity Fritz had left me with. He hadn’t said exactly where he was from. “How long have you been here?”

“A couple of days,” he answered.

“And there aren’t any like me in this unnamed town you lived in?”

“Not a one,” said Fritz. “They’re either White and totally crazy like most of ‘em or they’re like the dudes with the helicopters—Survivors, but whacked.”

“Whacked?” I asked.

“Not quite all there in the head,” said Fritz. “Most of them are kind of normal, but not really. It’s like some of their brain wiring short-circuited. They tend to behave irrationally, impulsively, too often violently.”

I laughed at a thought and said, “Zombie-lite?”

Fritz smiled. “You could put it that way.”

Something made a low, pounding sound. Both Fritz and I stopped talking and looked toward our open apartment door.

The sound pounded again, somewhere out in the hall.

On the third pound, a door crashed open.

We were already moving toward the door when an infected voice howled, lone and sad, hungry and vicious.

Somebody cursed.

More infected wails joined in a chorus of rabid need. Bodies stumbled over furnishings and bumped walls.

More cursing.

I was running by then and I rounded the corner coming out the door. I saw Murphy down the hall. He was on his back on the floor with a foot wedged in some broken section of the door he’d just kicked in. The soldier with him had one hand on Murphy’s foot, trying to wrench it free. The other hand held the shotgun out to the side, useless.

An infected hand reached out of the doorway and grabbed at the soldier’s sleeve. The soldier jumped away, half dragging a skinny infected guy out through the door.

“Shoot ‘em!” I yelled as I sprinted toward the end of the hall.

Fritz ran along behind me.

Murphy stopped trying to wrestle his leg free and pulled his rifle around to shoot. I saw a flash from the end of his gun as the infected started to push through the door.

The soldier was struggling to wrest his arm free. He was no help to Murphy now. He had his own life to save.

I screamed some angry sound, so loud that the Whites coming through the door ceased what they were doing for half a moment and looked to see what was barreling up the hall toward them.

My machete was out, and I had a pistol in hand. I didn’t dare shoot as I ran. I had not a hope of hitting—

I realized it didn’t matter if I hit anything.

I shot twice into the ceiling, freezing all of those Whites in place—wide-eyed, and hungry.

The noise was the important thing at that moment.

I fired again and their attention turned away from Murphy and fell on me, the dumbass noisy human with a gun. At least that’s how their simple brains worked. Gunshots necessarily meant normal people. Normal people were food.

I knew they’d figure out quickly enough that Fritz’s comrade was the tastiest and closest of the human morsels in the hall, but that didn’t matter. That deduction would take their slow brains a few seconds to process. By then—

And I was there, in machete range, hacking through the forearm of the infected waif grasping the soldier’s sleeve. The waif howled a new kind of scream, not so much pain—well maybe something like that—but lots of frustration.

I kicked him in the face and sent him into a daze as I hacked an enormous woman through the neck.

The soldier had the shotgun up by then and told me to move.

I stepped out of the doorway and the shotgun blasted three rapid rounds.

Murphy took advantage of the diversion to yank his leg free, got his feet under him, and pointed his M4 into the doorway as the soldier fired a few more rounds.

Seeing that Murphy was ready to shoot, I raised a hand to stop the soldier from firing any more.

Murphy went to work killing the last of the Whites climbing over the dead in the apartment’s entryway.

I was already running toward the nearest of the building’s central stairwells.

Fritz was behind me, keeping up, asking, “Where are we going?”

I pointed at the stairwell door. “I need to know if anybody is on the way.”

“Gotcha.” He knew I meant the infected.

We reached the door and I pulled up to a stop in front of it and pointed down to the far end of the hall. “You check that one.”

I opened the door a little, peeked onto the landing, saw it was empty and stepped inside, keeping quiet feet and listening for noise either up or down.

Shit.

Something was down there, not in the stairwell, but in the building.

“Shit.”

I stepped out of the stairwell.

Run? Take our chances and stay? The infected were coming. I didn’t know how many. I only knew they weren’t at the moment coming up the stairwell I’d just stepped halfway out of.

Looking back up the hall, it was apparent that Murphy and the other soldier were done. “Hey,” I hollered while trying really hard to limit just how loud.

Murphy and the soldier both looked at me. I pointed up at the exit sign above my head and told them, “Check the stairs down there.”

With a quick nod, the soldier took off at a run.

Murphy came my way.

I turned to check Fritz’s status. He’d just arrived at his stairwell.

I had a second to think, and all my deductions came down to one simple thing. Our anonymity was lost. Whites were coming. It was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Fritz opened his door by maybe a few inches before he pushed it closed and turned to run back my way.

The fearful look on his face sealed it.

“They’re coming,” he hollered as he ran up the hall.

“Whites?” Murphy asked as he came to a stop beside me. “Or assholes?”

“I…” I smiled and almost laughed. “I guess it could have been the helicopter assholes.” I looked past him. The other soldier was standing with the door open, trying to indicate that the stairwell was clear. I asked, “What do you think, bud, this one or that one?”

Murphy looked over his shoulder, looked down at Fritz, and glanced at the stairwell door I was holding open. He thumbed up the hall, away from Fritz.

Good with me.

I turned, waved at Fritz and said, “Your guy is clear. Let’s go.”

We ran.

We bounded down the stairs so fast we all earned bruises hitting the walls at the switchbacks at the bottom of each flight. None of us broke a bone or sprained an ankle, real risks at our reckless speed, but risks that needed to be taken. We knew the infected were on the way up to the floor we’d just left, if they guessed the right one once they finished climbing their stairs. We didn’t know how many Whites were in the building on the lower floors. That made the stairwell a potential deathtrap, and the only way we could mitigate the risk of being inside was to minimize the time we spent in there.

We were all gasping for air when we hit the bottom.

We stopped, stood in the near blackness, and listened. Howls echoed in the building, but none yet in the stairway above. The Whites were running and they were searching. The shotgun blasts told them meat was on the table. They were manic to find it. It was only a matter of short moments before they entered the stairwell above.

Murphy put a hand on the door to exit the building, looked at us and said, “I’ll peek out. If it’s clear, we’ll go. If not…”

If not?

I wasn’t sure we had any choice in the matter. Going back up to hide in one of the apartments wasn’t likely to end well. In fact, it was certain to end badly with the infected already scouring the building. Shooting our way out was a double-shit hemorrhoid of a plan, but we’d been doing it all night. We could only hope the odds weren’t going to catch up with us.

The door creaked on its hinges. Murphy looked through his night vision goggles into the shadowy night.

He pushed the door open a little wider and stuck his head out.

Above us, maybe three or four floors, a door slammed open against the wall and infected screams filled the stairwell. Fritz and his soldier pushed—whether they meant to or whether it was an innate reaction on frayed nerves, I didn’t know. Murphy tumbled forward, pushing the door wide open and muttering curses as he tried to keep his footing.

We were committed.

I followed them out. Being last, I closed the door as silently as I could, not wanting to alert the Whites upstairs that they were so close.

“There’s some about a block that way,” Murphy pointed.

I looked to my right. A scattering of Whites was down there, not yet paying us any attention. I looked left. Some were that way too. Every infected bastard in the city was awake. Why didn’t they just run toward the Capitol instead of loitering around to fuck with us?

Maybe it was the smoke filling the streets in a haze that turned everything a shade of gray in the darkness.

That could work to our advantage.

“C’mon.” Murphy waved to us to follow and took off at a jog onto the street between a tall pickup and an overturned delivery truck. He paused at the rear of the pickup to look left and right before hurrying forward.

We were running, crossing an intersection on the diagonal. All up and down the streets, Whites were out. Most seemed to be loitering with no place in particular to go. The darkness, though, was just as much a hindrance for them as us—well for Fritz and his man anyway. Murphy and I wore the night vision goggles. Unless we talked, made another stupid human noise, or got too close, we were probably safe. Safety is such a relative concept.

Hurry.

Murphy dodged a bus stop bench that had been dragged out into the street, bounded onto the far curb, took another few steps, and hurtled through a shattered plate-glass window on the front of a overly fancy barbecue restaurant on the corner. Fritz made the jump and so did his man.

I was sure I could hop over the short wall through the broken window, but I stopped instead and turned as I crouched, looking up and down, as well as across the street. I paid particular attention to the door on the side of the apartment building that we’d just exited. No raging mob of Whites was pouring out.

Satisfied for the moment that we were in the clear, I climbed through the broken window, careful to put my boot down slowly on the shards of glass, trying to reduce the noisy crunch.

Murphy and the soldier were already across the dining room and through a door that led into the kitchen. Fritz stood in the doorway and silently waved for me to follow.

Getting across the dining room wasn’t quick, but it was difficult to do quietly. It was another mess of chairs, tables, silverware, and broken plates on the floor.
Broken plates on the floor
. Who the hell serves barbecue on a plate? In Texas, it lays on a sheet of butcher paper with an optional puddle of barbecue sauce. I shook my head and muttered, “Damned Californians.”

Or maybe the owners were just from Dallas.

At the door, Fritz pointed to a narrow, dark staircase. When I got there, I looked up and saw nothing but stairs. I led the way, as I was sure it had to be pitch black to Fritz’s unaided eyes. I whispered, “Grab my shirt and follow.”

Up we went.

At the top of the stairs, a door opened to an office that seemed to take up a good part of the space on the front half of the building. A storeroom and another office occupied the remainder of the space on the back half. The storeroom looked to have been cleaned out. Not even canned goods were left on the shelves although torn boxes and other packaging covered the floor almost knee deep.

I crossed over to a half-open door, the place I guessed Murphy and the other guy had gone. I peeked inside and saw them at the other end, past the messy desks, trying to look out the windows without getting too close. I went over to stand beside them while Fritz silently closed and bolted the door behind us.

Safe.

Kinda.

Down in the street, Whites were running. They were coming from the direction of the apartment building. One of them must have seen the door closing from up there on the stairs, and they chased through it once they got the door open. Now they appeared frustrated as they slowed and glanced around. They’d lost us. As long as they didn’t put their pea brains together and figure out how to organize some kind of systematic search, we were safe.

Murphy chuckled softly. “That was fun.”

“Yeah,” Fritz agreed. He was being sarcastic. He didn’t understand that Murphy wasn’t.

I said, “I’m going to go check the back of the building for a fire escape. Maybe look around quietly for a water heater and see if I can score something to drink.”

“And food?” Murphy said, completely ignoring the ‘quietly’ part.

I said, “The storeroom looked like it had been ransacked already, but I’ll check.”

“I’ll come,” said the other soldier.

“By the way,” I asked, “before we have to run halfway across Austin again, you got a name?”

“Gabriel Billings,” he answered. “Call me Gabe.”

“I’m Zed, that’s Murphy. C’mon.”