Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 (7 page)

Up ahead, on the right, tethered to a tree by a chain, was a string of six Whites, burdened with backpacks and a few shopping bags. Each had a loop of chain around the neck. Each loop was linked to a longer chain that had one end wrapped around a tree.

I crept up beside
a stacked, white limestone mailbox and used it as cover while I stared, wondering what it was that I was seeing.

From behind the mailbox
, I saw a familiar-looking female White with skin of wrinkled leather and thin, dirty, artificial hair. Around her neck hung drapes of gold and silver chains. Her bony wrists were lost under glittery bangles. She came out of a yard on the far side of the street and made a show of scratching rudely at her crotch before making her way down the line of chained Whites, inspecting each as she passed. In a bag here or a backpack there, she’d drop a piece of metal. Beside one of the chained Whites, she stopped and rummaged through the backpack. Metal in the bag jingled and the woman’s fairy tale witch cackle crinkled through the air.

An
enormously obese woman, as white as snow, bounded out of the same front yard, prancing happily on her toes, with handfuls of sparkling jewelry. She also came to a stop at the line of docile Whites and began depositing her treasures in the bags while at the same time taking out bracelets that she’d slip on an off of her plump wrists, looking for some particularly pleasing combination.

A big man followed the obese woman, keeping subserviently a few steps behind
. He didn’t look around with any curiosity. He hurried when she hurried. He slowed when she slowed. He didn’t seem to have effort for anything besides maintaining a Russell-like position near the big woman.

I felt like Jane Goodall after stumbling upon a new troop of apes. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the previously unseen behaviors and unexpectedly complex social structure.

Another White came running from across the street toward the leathery woman, making me think he was attacking. But he stopped very suddenly in front of her and dropped to a knee, holding out his palms. They appeared to be full of forks, spoons, and knives.

The leathery one screeched and swatted the offering away, sending the silverware jangling across the asphalt.
She wailed in anger and windmilled her spider-fingered hands at the kneeling White, who passively accepted the beating. After a minute, she came to a stop and glared crossly down at him before leaning over and cupping her bony fingers over one of his ears. She then pressed her mouth to her hands. Her jaw moved up and down as though speaking but the pair was too far away for me to hear.

Communication!

What were these Whites? Were they Slow Burns like me?

If they were Smart Ones, then the communication was an ominous sign.

They were obviously coordinated in a communal activity, hierarchical in nature without a doubt. The collecting of shiny trinkets didn’t make any sense to me until I thought about Beanie Babies, baseball cards, and Franklin Mint Collector Plates. There was something weird hardwired into the human psyche that drove people to hoard too many of useless somethings, I mean, to collect things with no intrinsic value seemingly for the sake of collecting it, of possessing it.

Maybe the troop was a bunch of ho
arders, turned Slow Burn.

But the ones on the chains, that was frightening by itself. They were slaves. What did that have to say about
my fellow humans? Hell, about all of us? Once a few layers of empathy and humility were peeled away, was slavery such an easy vice to embrace?

I checked my watch.
It was getting late. I prepared to sneak off in the darkness toward the boat I’d seen tied to a dock nearby.

But surprise interrupted that when s
omething big and heavy hit me from behind, knocking the wind out of me and banging my head into the limestone mailbox. I saw stars and tried to catch my breath.

Legs wrapped around
my torso. An arm locked around my throat. I fell to the asphalt, very suddenly in a struggle for my life. I threw an elbow back and hit my attacker. I rolled, I flailed, but the monkey was locked onto my back, and no matter how much I squirmed, the clamp of the forearm on my neck grew tighter.

A circle of blackness grew at the edges of my vision
, compressing what I could see down to a narrow tunnel.

I was caught!

My brain cells started to malfunction as they waited for oxygen that was no longer being delivered in sufficient quantities. It occurred to me that I had finally used the last of my luck. In focusing so completely on the grotesquery of the gold-collecting wenches, I’d not maintained awareness of my surroundings. My guard was down and I was about to pay the bloody price for that mistake.

As I
floated into unconsciousness, I pictured the leathery old woman and thought how much she looked like my Aunt Nancy, my mother’s fraternal twin. Aunt Nancy and The Harpy looked enough alike, twiggy and wrinkly, with harsh eyes and insufficient hair. But where my mother had tiny, misshapen breasts, Nancy’s were too large for her chest and always seemed on the verge of spilling out of her blouse, a blouse that was always cut too low or fastened a few too many buttons down from the top. I often suspected that those breasts were at the root of my mother’s antipathy toward her.

Nancy never married and never had any children. Dan always said she was too butch for any man in Texas. As a little kid, I had no idea what that
meant. I did know that while my mother’s attitude toward me lived in that spectrum of emotion between resentment and irritation, Nancy’s fell somewhere between negligence and kindness. Whereas the Harpy’s jaws always seemed clenched in anger, Nancy’s big yellow teeth clenched an ever-present cigarette and shone in a half-drunk grin against her dark, tanning bed skin.

When I was young, I’d often get dumped at her house for a weekend or a week while my parents traveled.
Once I was dropped on her doorstep, she would invariably lean down for a hug. As she bent over I’d get an unwanted glimpse into her blouse. She wore bras less often than she should have and as a result, I saw her swaying breasts and big brown nipples more times than probably anyone else ever did. I came to welcome the smell of her smoky alcohol breath because it would hit me just as we got close enough so that I could no longer see inside her shirt. But her hugs were long and she squeezed hard. They felt like an advertisement of maternal love.

On those visits, she seemed always to be on the phone, arranging some date with friends or gossiping about somebody or other. She’d plant me in front of a telev
ision and feed me fish sticks, French fries, or any other deep-fried microwavable meal that needed ketchup. All the food in Nancy’s house needed ketchup.

In a lot of ways,
Nancy’s house was an ephemeral refuge paid for with glimpses of tits and uncomfortably lingering pinches on my butt. That was a price I could afford. I told myself in those days that I only needed to stay on my best behavior and not fuck it up to make it all last.

On one of my last visits to her house
, Nancy was on the couch, cigarette in her lips, a sweating longneck perilously dangling between her fingers as we watched some game show around dinnertime. I’d already microwaved our tater tots and chicken fingers and left our paper plates between the empty bottles on the coffee table.

It was when I went
back to the kitchen to retrieve the thirty-two ounce bottle of ketchup that it happened. In my rush to get back to the living room, I’d snatched the glass bottle from the fridge too carelessly, and as I turned, it slipped from my small hand and shattered on the floor at my toes, covering my feet in a brilliantly red, cold, and viscous blob, slowly spreading shards of glass large and small across the linoleum.

I went
catatonic with fear. How fast could I clean it up? Had my toes, obscured in red, already numbing in the cold, been cut or severed by the glass? Did Nancy hear the noise? Was there a way to hide it? Could I run? Could I get out the back door fast enough?

All those questions were moot. I only
really knew one thing: through my haste, I’d unleashed the harpy that surely lived within Nancy and I was only moments from getting the shit beaten out of me.

I stared at the red, like blood, spreading so slowly on the floor, soon to be joined by my own blood, the price I’d pay for dropping the ketchup.

I didn’t breath. I didn’t dare. Tears were in my eyes and I wished myself to another place and time. In all those visits to Nancy’s house, I’d never fucked up enough for her to beat me, not once. Sure, she’d yell from time to time when the beer shortened her temper and I’d eaten all the tater tots before she’d gotten any.

But a
ll of that was at an end.

A noise in the kitchen door told me that she was
standing there behind me. From the living room, she’d heard. There was no getting away with it. I braced myself for what was to come, a fist to my head, a slap on the mouth, a belt on my back or across my legs. Maybe a spatula or wooden mixing spoon. It could have been anything.

In waiting
, I grasped tightly to my self-control, but my lip quivered, my eyes filled with tears, and I tried so, so hard to put those emotions somewhere where they couldn’t hurt me. There was always such a steep price to pay when my tears came too soon. But they did anyway. The fiction of my refuge was nearing obliteration and its end was more than I could bear.

I sobbed,
and then jumped when Nancy’s hand touched my shoulder.

But it didn’t hurt.

Her touch was gentle.

Nancy wrapped her bony arms around me and pulled into a hug
, burying my face between her pillowy tits.

I cried.

She cooed, “It’s all right, sweetie. It’s all right. We don’t need ketchup.”

I guess in the most important ways, my aunt Nancy wasn’t anything like my mother.

Nancy and my mother were the only two children of an oil field worker who owned a shack of a house near Houston. He was a kind, indulgent man with no ambition. But he was a compulsive saver. And when he died, when I was nine or ten, he left ninety-seven thousand dollars to Nancy. To my mom, he left nothing. There was no Grandma to consider in the will. She’d died of meanness before I was born.

I was too you
ng to understand much beyond The Harpy’s anger and her sense of being cheated, but I never saw Aunt Nancy again after that, at least not until her funeral when I was in high school. My mom didn’t go. Dan took me, clearly not because he wanted to. He did it out of some kind of obligation that he very reluctantly fulfilled.

The funeral was held on
one of those seething, humid Houston afternoons. Beads of perspiration rolled down foreheads and dampened shirts. Dresses clung to skin in unflattering places. I was wearing a shirt buttoned to the top with a collar that was too tight and wearing one of Dan’s ties so long that I had a portion of its length tucked between the buttons of my shirt.

It was some kind of cancer
with a long and unfamiliar name that had killed Nancy off. I could never remember what it was.

As I watched the shiny box full of Nancy
’s skin and bones—there really wasn’t much more left—lower into the ground amidst the tearless perspirers, I noticed with a boy’s attention to trivial details that the coffin’s boards didn’t stack smoothly on the sides. The corners didn’t look square. The hardware had flecks of rust and peeling chrome. Had the Harpy, Nancy’s only living family, somehow managed to find a hand-me-down coffin for her?

In retrospect,
I knew it had to have been some sort of shoddily constructed discount coffin. But that was just as bad.

Maybe if
I had ever been to see a psychiatrist and they had asked me that ever-so trite question as to when I started hating my mother, I would have told them about that day. That was the day when all of my loathing and years of fear solidified into a core of stony hate.

When I came to,
I was disoriented and laying on a grassy lawn, looking up through a canopy of oaks at a sky that was changing color from an early dawn gray to cloudless blue. My head hurt. My arms were rolled over behind me and I was damned uncomfortable.

As I tried to part the clouds inside my head, I felt pretty sure that I hadn’t gone to sleep o
n the grass. I couldn’t remember doing so. I remembered getting ditched by Freitag. I’d nearly been drowned afterwards. I remembered the big bouncing woman and her leathery partner. Then I remembered getting jumped while I hid behind that mailbox.

My arms wouldn’t
readily come out from behind my back. The position in which I’d lain, with my arms pinned behind me, had cut the circulation and left them numb. Looking to my right, I saw the dying grass of someone’s front lawn, on which I was lying. To my left, my eyes followed a length of chain for three feet to where it was connected by a padlock to another loop of chain wrapped around the throat of a sleeping White. The White had a backpack strapped over his shoulder and a bulging canvas shopping bag at his side. I raised my head to get a better look around and realized that I too had a heavy chain around my neck. I was attached to the string of Whites that I’d seen in the wee hours of the night.

Shit!

Anger started to simmer.

Did I really get captured by a stupid fucking White and
get harnessed like some kind of dray horse?

I managed to pull my arms out and wiggle them about until feeling returned.

The White that lay next to me snored through all of my efforts. With hands I could use again, I went to work on the chain around my throat. It wasn’t choking me, but it was too God damned tight to pull over my head. The only way out was to open the padlock that held it all together.

My anger
passed through the simmer stage and reached the boiling point. My frustration with my situation targeted smack dab on Freitag.

No!

Breathe!

Be cool.

Anger makes you stupid.

Think it through. Solve the problem.

Escape, obviously, was my top priority. But how?

What was my fate if I didn’t escape?

Pack mule for a couple of peculiarly greedy Whites?

More anger.
I wanted to scream out and beat something with my fists.

Get it under control,
God dammit!

Breathe.

Put it in the hole. Deal with it later.

I lay my head back on the grass and stared up between the leaves and tried to slow my breathing, calm my anger, and get back under control.

Chained!

Nothing made any sense whatsoever.

But that didn’t matter.

It didn’t need to make sense. It only needed to have a solution.

Productive thought started to flow.

I had no advantage
, save one. My brain still functioned at full capacity, so I knew I was the smartest motherfucker in my new little band of stupid Whites and crazy bitches. And none of them knew that. Intellect and surprise. That had been enough of an advantage for slow, weak, hairless monkeys to evolve into the dominant species on a planet full of big-toothed predators. It would be enough for me.

O
ver the next few hours, the sun heated up the morning and my chain gang comrades slowly woke. Each one sat up and remained still and quiet. So, that’s what I did. I sat still and quiet. It would be best to fit in while I watched and learned.

T
he seven of us sat there waiting for something to happen, tethered to a front porch support pole at one end and with me at the other. All of my comrades were male in varying stages of health. The weaker among us seemed to be near the front, the healthier in the rear. I made the very easy deduction—assuming new guys were added to the end of the chain—that staying on the chain gang was detrimental to one’s health.

It was late in the morning when the leathery woman came out through the house’s open front door, followed closely by the animated obese one. Behind
them came the obese woman’s pet, the big man, and four other infected men. They squatted on the porch or in shady spots in the grass. The women sat down next to one another on the porch steps and had what I guessed was a lengthy conversation in whispers through cupped hands over each other’s ears. All the men watched, obliviously, patiently. When the two women reached an apparent decision, the leathery woman waved each man over to her individually and spent a moment whispering in his ear.

It was
a curious thing, watching the communication, trying to understand which ones were intelligent and which ones weren’t. Certainly, they all understood speech and the two women still possessed the ability to use it. They all had the stark white skin of the infected. Like me, they were all Slow Burns, at least to some degree. How had they managed to band together under the direction of these two women? That would make for an interesting academic question. But it was irrelevant to me at the moment.

With all of the individual communicating done, t
he leathery woman waved her arm and wrangled all of the free men over to her as she got up off of the porch and went over toward the gaunt man at the head of the chain gang.

All of us in the gang were on our feet at that point.
The leathery woman started jingling through a set of keys on a wire bracelet she wore around her wrist. On the lock that attached the lead man’s collar to the long chain, she tried each key in turn until the hasp sprung open.

Hands were immediately on the gaunt man, pushing and guiding him out into the center of the lawn. His backpack came off and fell to the grass. His
shopping bag dropped as well.

Still tethered to the post, the rest of us on the
chain gang watched.

The obese woman on the porch started to giggle and play with her fingers.

The free men surrounded the gaunt man in a tight huddle.

By some silent cue, the free Whites start
ed beating the gaunt man with their fists and tearing at him with their teeth. His scream ripped the morning air and he fell under the assault, his brilliant red blood splattering into the air. His last shriek stopped abruptly as the free men fell to the ground to bury their faces in his entrails. It was time to feast.

The chain gang surged to
ward the warm flesh. They wanted to join but the chain looped around the porch post held fast.

A week before
, I was Null Spot the Destroyer, rider of the storm, slayer of Whites, living on the edge of my luck. But the luck was gone and I’d become a pack mule and feedstock.

It took nearly an hour for
the Whites to fill their bellies, and the rule I derived from the al fresco brunch was that those of us on the chain gang were going to get worked until near death, and then we’d be eaten. The alternative, that I hoped wasn’t true, was that they ate whomever was on an end of the chain, which meant my chances were just fifty-fifty at the next mealtime.

When
brunch was over, the Whites each emptied their bowels nearby in the grass. Three of the men had diarrhea. Two of those were bloody. Either their bodies weren’t adjusting well to their new diet or the unsanitary conditions under which they were eating and drinking were taking a toll. I suspected that diseases could be transmitted through the consumption of raw human flesh, especially viruses like HIV and herpes. I wondered about more immediately deadly diseases, though never having paid much attention in my biology class, I couldn’t think of one.

I did know that deadly disease could spread through unsanitary drinking water
, and I wondered how the infected were handling the acquisition of that. The drought had left most sources of groundwater dry. There were few running creeks and I’d heard news stories over the previous summer about many Texas springs drying up.

Where could an infected mind be smart enough to find
water? Perhaps in a toilet tank. A freshwater aquarium. I didn’t think they’d be smart enough to drain a water heater. They might figure out how to open plastic bottles. But sodas and sports drinks on convenience store shelves were a finite supply. That left the rivers, lakes, and larger springs.

I’m sure Jeff Aubrey’s math didn’t take water into account. How many infected would just die of dehydration? Maybe most of them in Texas would. At least all of the ones either too far from a river to find one, or too dumb to remember where the closest river was, would die. That of course led to the conclusion that the infected would tend to be much more numerous near the natural water sources. So the further that normal people could find a defensible place away from
a natural water source, the lower their chance of coming into contact with the Whites…eventually.

That led to another possibility, a way to kill them off en masse. Perhaps dumping bodies in the river would lead to polluting the water with so many diseases that the Whites who drank from it
would die. But dead bodies contaminating a water source was a truism I’d learned from watching movies. Best not to put too much stock in that solution until I talked it over with Steph.

The
sated Whites found comfortable spots to squat in the shade or lie on the porch. Some napped. We empty-stomached pack mules squatted where we were, in the dappled sunlight, and grew thirsty. With the shredded remains of the gaunt man buzzing with a black layer of flies, hunger didn’t cross my mind.

At some point, boredom and my own lack of sleep
over the past weeks took its toll and I nodded off. When I woke again it was late in the afternoon, my stomach was rumbling, and the chain around my neck was being yanked. The free Whites were loitering and the leathery woman—Nancy, or so I unfairly labeled her—was wrangling her mules.

Once we were all on our feet,
Nancy came around behind me with the gaunt man’s backpack and, in very much the same way I dealt with Russell, she dressed me in it, leaving forty pounds of weight on my shoulders. She next retrieved the dead man’s canvas bag, which she placed in my right hand. It weighed twenty or thirty pounds and was filled with every shiny-looking piece of jewelry that could be imagined. Most of it was costume junk, but it was weighty, nonetheless.

There was more
whispering in ears between Nancy and the obese one—Bubbles was her new name—before anything else happened. But once we were organized, Nancy took hold of the long length of chain left where the gaunt man had been and led us across the street and down toward the river. We pack mules followed, of course. Obese Bubbles pranced along beside leathery Nancy. The free Whites who filled out the entourage came along.

We crossed over the front yard of one of the houses
that I’d checked for a boat the night before. We weaved our way around the landscaping and then out across the backyard. Once at the river, all either squatted or lay on the bank and drank. I was more than reluctant at first but I knew I wouldn’t last through a blazing hot day under a burden of seventy pounds without water. So contaminated or not, I dropped to the grass and put my face to the river’s surface, sucking in as much water as my empty belly would hold.

Once full, I sat back and observed the others. I was a captive
, but determined not to let despair eke its way in and make my situation anything but temporary. I was going to free myself. Of that, there was no doubt. I also decided that it was not captivation that I was suffering, rather tuition that I was paying. It was a chance to learn not only what I needed to know to get myself free, but to learn about my…enemy. And that’s what the Whites were, my enemy. They were not sick people, nor were they unfortunate people. What they were in the past had little to do with what they were now. They were semi-brain-dead, infected white monsters who would feed on my innards at the first chance. They did not deserve my empathy, nor my mercy. But the more I knew about them, the longer I was likely to live.

The Whites around me were all still nervously drinking. For them, it was a slow, difficult process. They’d
each inch down to the water’s edge. Lips would touch the surface. Or, a single hand would reach in and scoop out handfuls while the other gripped the sod in white-knuckled fear. No feet, not even toes, ever touched the water. They were all afraid of it. At least it seemed so. That was good information to have, or at least good information to confirm. The girls on the riverboat had said as much to Murphy and me a few days before.

And what of Murphy? Was he still alive? Had the bullet bruised his brain, swelling it into bodily paralysis? Or was he awake and joking with Mandi? Thoughts for another hour, perhaps.

Once communal refreshment time was over, Nancy led us back across the lawn and over to the house’s wide, and thankfully shaded, back porch. Bubbles bounced along with us with her big white pet—Bluto—close behind. We came to a stop at the back of the house and Bubbles pulled Bluto close and whispered instructions into his ear. After, he stood up straight and looked at her with his blank face and dead eyes. Was he choosing to obey, or trying to interpret the instructions with his weak brain? Either way, after a few moments, he turned his attention to the back door, then ran toward it and slammed it with his massive shoulder. The door flew off of its hinges.