Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 (13 page)

The garage smelled of machine oil, sawdust, and gasoline. It was clear that the old man used it for a workshop. What he worked on wasn’t at all clear.

“I’m Nico Wright.” Nico extended his hand toward the old man as he stood in the center of his garage, looking at several toolboxes stacked on shelves against the wall.

“Mr. Mays,” the old man answered, but didn’t offer to shake Nico’s hand. “Don’t wanna ketch it. Hope ya understand.”

“Sure, ah, Mr. Mays.” Nico dropped his hand.

“Not sure where I left them bolt cutters. Don’t use ‘em much.”

“Thanks for helping us out,” I told Mr. Mays.

“Yeah.” Mr. Mays didn’t look at me. “Don’t know what I’m gonna do about that door now. This house ain’t safe with no door.”

“You’re welcome to come with us,” I offered. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Where to?” Mr. Mays looked at me and grinned, exposing his old, yellowed teeth. “I’m guessin’ if you boys had a place to stay you wouldn’a been breakin’ into mine.”

“Well…” I didn’t really have a response that. Nevertheless, I pushed on. “My friends and I were staying up on the hill across the river…”

“Up ‘er with all of them nekkid ones?”

“They weren’t always there,” I found myself getting defensive for Sarah’s neighborhood. “I need to get back to them.”

“Think I’ll just stay here,” Mr. Mays told me. “I don’t know how you boys was raised, but it seems like you owe me a door before ya go.”

Nico chimed in, “I have an idea, Mr. Mays. After you cut these chains off, I could stay here and help you find a door. Zed can get back to his people.”

“His people?” Mr. Mays asked. “They ain’t yer people, too?”

While Mr. Mays went to work shuffling through the junk on the shelves, Nico and I related the story about how we came to be chained to one another. Of course, Mr. Mays didn’t believe us. Nevertheless, he did eventually find the bolt cutters, and he freed us. Afterwards, he apologized to both of us for being unable to offer us the hospitality of a meal. He’d run out of food in the house a week or so prior but had been tying fishing lines each morning to tree branches that overhung the river. He’d been having decent luck with that but hadn’t caught anything that day.

It was after seven o’clock and the sun was low in the western sky, taking the sharp edge off of the heat. The mosquitoes were starting to swarm, and I gave Mr. Mays and Nico a wave as I pushed the canoe out into the river, wondering what the chances were that I’d ever see them again.

It was Steph I thought about as the canoe glided over the glassy surface of the river. I remembered what she looked like on that first afternoon in Sarah Mansfield’s house when we were alone together in the living room. I watched her walk across the floor toward the kitchen
in a pair of salvaged blue jeans that looked like they had been tailored for her, effortlessly looking like the last beautiful thing left in the world.

Or maybe it was a mundane memory, enhanced by the hydrocodone that she’d stuffed into my mouth.

Stop being a dick about everything, Zed. Let it be real. Let it feel good.

Did she escape when the naked Whites overran Sarah Mansfield’s house? Or did Freitag fuck her like she fucked me? Wha
t of the others? Was Murphy’s body, or the remains of it, up there in that theater recliner, rotting away? Oddly, my anger didn’t boil. I wasn’t depressed over the possible death of my friends. Maybe I was past that. Maybe I was letting a cold malevolence toward Freitag grow in my soul, pushing everything else out.

As the water’s surface turned golden under a sun that was nearing the horizon, my canoe floated in front of Sarah Mansfield’s open boathouse. Seven or eight naked Whites were inside howling and
slavering at the sight of me—I guess the canoe made me look like a normal human, a tasty morsel—but not daring to enter the water and come for a bite.

Paddling the boat right up to the dock was probably a bad idea.

Instead, I scooted up the river for bit and paddled the boat over toward the shore, where I let the current carry me back down in the direction of the boathouse. Due to the overall secure design of the Mansfield estate, the boathouse had no windows. All of the walls were solid. So by coming at the boathouse from the side, the infected inside couldn’t see me.

They were quieting down when I pushed the boat up onto the bank just a dozen feet upriver from the boathouse. I didn’t tie it off. It seemed to be planted firmly enough on the bank that it wouldn’t float away by itself.

In a move I probably should have skipped, I looked down at myself as I pulled my T-shirt off and threw it into the canoe. My God, I was thin. My stomach muscles had definition that I hadn’t seen since high school, but my ribs were just as prominently displayed. When was the last time I’d eaten? I couldn’t answer that. I was loosing track of the days. All I really knew about that was that it had been long enough that I no longer felt hunger. What I did feel was an oppressive fatigue that made even the effort of paddling the canoe across the river difficult.

I needed to get some food, but first things first.

I took off my boots and socks and left them in the bottom of the canoe. My pants fell down around my feet on the bank and then followed. I hesitated at the skivvies; all of those puritanical prohibitions against being naked in public kept the elastic drooped on the jutting bones of my pelvis; that, and the fear that starvation might have shrunken my manhood along with the rest of me. But all of the infected in Sarah Mansfield’s house were naked. The only way to fit in would be for me to be naked as well. With the slightest of efforts, I tugged down and my underwear dropped to my feet.

Nice surprise!

If anything, the lost weight made my favorite parts look larger by comparison.

Only a kitchen knife—a parting gift from Mr. Mays—separated me from the savages at that point. I was ready to fit in. The only tricky part would be swimming up to the dock and climbing up out of the water. What would the Whites in the boathouse think of that?

Into the cold water I went, wading through patches of sticky muck and over slippery stones. Sharp rocks seemed to animate themselves in their efforts to poke my bare feet. When the water was waist deep, the duckweed became a nuisance, dragging prickles and slime over my skin and finding its way into crevices where such things should never go.

Once I was within a few feet of the boathouse, I reached out a hand to the wall and slipped off of a wide, flat rock into water that was up to my neck. But as I went down, I got a grip on one of the metal bars beneath the boathouse. Underwater, it was constructed as a cage to let water flow through and to keep people like me out. On the top edge of the cage walls, just above the water’s surface, the solid walls were built.

With nowhere to put the knife, and wanting to keep my hands free, I put the blade between my teeth cowboy-movie-star-style and pulled myself along the wall of the boathouse. Hand over hand on the underwater bars I went, until I came to the wide boat door on the front.

The deck inside
was constructed in a U-shape along the back and side walls of the structure. The boat door, though, was offset from the center of the building so that one side of the doorway ended right at the edge of the interior decking. The other side—the side where I was—couldn’t be reached from the deck.

Ducking my head beneath the water, I confirmed that the bars of the underwater cage stopped a
t two or three feet beneath the surface where the boat door opened. That made perfect sense, of course. The boat and jet skis needed room for their draft.

Moment of truth.

I moved over in front of the open boat door. The infected inside immediately saw me and started to howl.

Twelve feet of water separated me from the nearest of them. Any one of them could easily have jumped in and waded across, but I was betting that they, like all the others so far, were hydrophobic.

That proved to be a good guess. Not one dipped so much as a toe in the water.

Using the boathouse wall for balance, I climbed up onto the top edge of the underwater cage and stood up straight in the open door. With the water up to the middle of my thighs, I wanted the Whites on the decks to see that the bobbing head they first spotted in the water wasn’t food at all, but a naked White, just like them. More importantly, a naked White with a knife. I don’t know if they understood what the knife was, or whether it implied a degree of status among them. But I hoped that guess would prove correct, as well.

As I stood there, waiting patiently, the infected in the boathouse came to realize that I wasn’t food after all, and one by one stopped making a fuss.

So far, so good.

The next part would be tricky. I needed to get over to the deck without them forgetting what I was. For all I knew, they had the memory span of goldfish and would start thinking I was food again three seconds after I was back down in the water.

Or was that three-second thing just another spurious urban myth of which I needed to disabuse myself? How many outright falsehoods had the protective umbrella of civilization allowed me the luxury of believing through the years? Without a single question, in most cases!

With no mortal consequences waiting in the wings, there were few limits on the indulgence of personal ignorance.

Mistakes are paid for with blood.

A first corollary had to be “Don’t take it on faith.” Or, “If you it learned from watching TV, don’t bet your life on it.”

Carefully, I slipped back down into the water, taking the knife out from between my teeth and gripping it in a much more utilitarian fashion. A couple of the Whites became immediately agitated. I worked my way along the length of the underwater fence toward the deck. All eyes were on me. Of the two agitated Whites, one ran over to take up an intercepting position on the deck. The other followed, but kept a little distance.

Damn.

But that didn’t concern me as much as another White I spotted glaring at me from the far deck by the back door, simmering, but calm. That one looked like trouble.

When I got near the deck, one of the two agitated Whites started grabbing at me.

Well, that just wasn’t acceptable.

The water was up to the middle of my chest, leaving me the freedom to move my arms and torso. The bottom was mucky, but not so slippery that footing was difficult.

Another swipe of the White’s paw nearly touched my nose.

I leaned forward, just enough to tempt the White to try again. He did. I slashed back with my eight-inch blade and sliced a long gash on his forearm. The wound didn’t seem to bother him so much as pique his curiosity, as he lifted his arm to his face to watch the blood flow. But that didn’t hold his attention long. He was hungry and he thought I was food.

I turned the knife around in my hand so that instead of slashing, I’d be stabbing when the next swipe came. And came it did, just as I tightened my grip on the handle.

The hand came at my face, throwing an arc of blood through the air as it swung. Leaning into my stabbing motion, I put all of my weight into jamming the knife straight through the White’s forearm.

The blade hit skin and went right through muscle and tendon, nicking bone and lodging between the ulna and radius. The White immediately tried to jerk his arm back, but only succeeded in losing his balance and falling into the water. I pulled the knife free as he fell.

He howled. He splashed. He was frantic.

That was my chance.

With all attention on the White flailing in the water, I scrambled up the slippery, algae-covered underwater fence, using the garage door rails as handholds. Just as I got my left foot onto the wooden deck, I noticed the glaring White who had been by the door poised just a few feet away, ready to pounce.

Shit!
How did he get over here so quick?

Challenging him, I held his eye and very deliberately moved to get my feet below me on the deck, keeping my knife ready to jam into his skull at the first chance. But he was smarter than I gave him credit for. Just as I was planting my second foot, the White charged. I wasn’t in a good position to stab him, though I tried anyway. He deftly took advantage of my imbalance, swatted at my arm, and somehow punched me in the head as I fell.

Without knowing how I got there, I found myself empty handed and laying on my back on the deck, with the alpha White’s foot triumphantly pushing down on my chest.

I didn’t know what he planned to do next, but I guessed that his rot-brained plans weren’t likely to turn out in my favor. And that’s all the thinking I needed to do, because with his leg propped up on my chest, trying to smash me like a bug, his genitalia were terribly exposed above me and within easy reach.

You’re not gonna like this next part, bitch!

I grabbed two tight handfuls around the base of his penis and testicles and put everything I had into trying to rip them all the way off.

Of course nothing detached, but God, I know it hurt when his balls squeezed through the vice of my grip because he howled with an expression of pain the likes of which I’d never heard before or since. I rolled toward the water and my chest pressed up on the foot that was planted there. So focused was the alpha White on the pain in his nuts that he lost his balance. Of that, I took immediate advantage and pushed harder. He fell into the water, splashing and howling, just like his comrade.

Ha!

I jumped to my feet and grabbed the first solid something I could get my hands on, a wooden boat paddle, and brought the blade down edgewise on the alpha’s skull. It was a glancing blow, but it was enough. He was dazed and lost his footing on the river bottom. Using the paddle again, I pressed it into his chest to hold him underwater. He should easily have been able to push it away and regain his feet, but he was past panic, with a severely debilitated brain. He drowned.

When it was done, the boathouse was silent. Two white bodies were floating in the water. Five Whites were gawking at me in some sort of reverence. And I had learned that going pantless held disadvantages too significant to ignore.

Looking around for my knife, I realized that it was gone. It was probably in the mud on the river bottom.

The five Whites were all inching closer to me, but keeping their eyes averted like beaten dogs. I weighed the possibility of crunching their skulls with the boat paddle, but thought better of it. Better to know their full intentions before I went up the elevator where there had to be many more. If things went badly with five, I knew I could get away. With the water just to my left, escape was as easy as falling in. On the other hand, if things went badly up in the compound, surrounded presumably by hundreds… Well, that wouldn’t end well.

So I walked confidently down the deck toward the back door of the boathouse. The first White I came to bowed her head and scooted out of my way. Creepily, just as I passed, I felt her hand on my back. Not aggressively, though. It was more of a caress.

I kept moving.

Another White passed and another pair of hands was on my skin, then in my hair. A pair of Whites in front of me were less inclined to move, and were downright stubborn when I tried to bull my way through. The fifth White joined and then ten hands were on my body, up on my shoulders and throat, then suddenly in my face and on my head. Their sweaty, rank skin pressed on mine.

The first handful of hair they ripped out pissed me right the fuck off. There was no pain, of course. My reaction was all violation and surprise. I pushed at the hands and tried to get away. More of my hair was pulled away, and suddenly the hands were on my head, yanking at whatever they could grasp.

Their bodies were slick and oily with weeks of unwashed sweat. Soft breasts, oh such a desirable thing in a previous life, pressed me in a cage of poking elbows and bruising knees. Every breath I drew was full of their exhalations of maggot rot and spit. Their nails bit my skin and their soft vocalizations were perversely orgasmic.