Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (12 page)

Steph nodded.

“But it could just be the trauma, right? It could be that.”

Steph nodded again, but her eyes told me she was just going along with me so I’d feel better.

Crap.

I feared what that implied about my future and lost all desire to say anything else. The black water behind the boat seemed like the most interesting thing in the world.

Steph
left me alone with my thoughts for a good long while before she put a hand on my thigh and said, “Zed, don’t worry about this temperature thing. Okay? You’ve got enough to deal with when you and Murphy are out dodging the infected.”

I nodded
, but didn’t look at her.

“And I know you were just trying to do the right thing this morning. I appreciate that, I really do. We all do. But we all care about you, okay?”

I nodded again.

“I know you think you’re some kind of self-sufficient… I don’t know
. Whatever you think you are. And I guess maybe you are. But if you’ll just trust the rest of us to work together, we’ll help you the way you help us. Trust us all to work together as a team. That’s the only way we’re all going to make it. Okay?”

I nodded again.

“I’m serious, Zed. I know you have a problem with the whole depending-on-other-people thing.”

“I’ve never said that.”

“Anybody who pays attention can see it.”

I didn’t respond.

Steph put a hand on my cheek and turned my face to look at her. “Trust us, okay? We can all help each other. If we work together, we’ll survive.”

Our noses were just inches apart and I could smell her, almost taste her. Something in the pressure of her hand on my face made me want it to stay there forever. But it was just pressure. It may have been the caress of a lover, but I’d never know. That kind of sensitivity was gone from my skin. Robbed from me by a virus
, rotting my nervous system from the inside out.

That moment could have
been romantic. Maybe in another time, months or years back, it would have. But with so much weight from other emotions, current problems, there was room for little more than a wispy thought of a kiss.

I croaked. “I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

Half of us were in the candlelit galley, eating like there was no long-term shortage of food to worry about. Amy and Brittany were still on watch. Mandi and Megan had taken food up to them and hadn’t yet come down. I’d just made the ill-advised choice to take Murphy’s dare and guzzle a large cup of straight Coca-Cola syrup and was spinning up on a caffeine and sugar buzz that might take days to wear off.

And on that buzz, I figured I’d make an announcement. “We’ve got plenty of ammo and weapons now.”

The others quieted down and gave me their attention.

“We’ve got plenty of food and we’ve got a place to stay that’s as safe as any we’re likely to find anytime soon.”

“And?” Murphy asked.

“There’s something I’ve been thinking about and I think it’s time that I go take care of it.”

That dampened the mood immediately.

“Oh, no.”
Dalhover snorted.

I looked around at them. “If we’d had silencers for your rifles, we could have just shot that Smart One on the bank and wouldn’t have had to worry about drawing any more of them in.”

“Is that the excuse now?” Murphy scoffed without breaking his smile. “You just want to go out and hunt Smart Ones.”

“Yeah, but we need the silencers for the rifles.”

Steph, with a worried look, turned to Dalhover.

He understood she was putting it to him to dissuade me and smirked when he spoke. “You’ve watched too many movies, Zane.
Suppressors aren’t silent. They won’t do us any good.”

I shook my head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong.”

Dalhover dispensed with any sense of conversational politeness. “I’m not wrong.”

I nodded and pointed at Murphy. “Me and Murphy, we watched our friend Jerome get killed with silenced weapons and we didn’t hear anything. Tell him, Murphy.”

“I don’t think I’d say he was our friend.” Murphy looked at Dalhover, hesitated, looked at me and then back at Dalhover. “Top, we didn’t hear the rifle shots. They were quiet.”

Dalhover
straightened up in his chair. “Is it possible with everything going on, in the fog of war, the gunshots were there, but you just weren’t paying attention? You just don’t remember them?”

“No.” I was emphatic about my response, though I knew that
Dalhover’s explanation was plausible.

“Do you even know what a
suppressed weapon sounds like?” Dalhover asked.

“Like a crack? Like a firecracker, maybe,” Murphy said
, with no certainty.

“If you were listening for gunshots, you might not have noticed.”
Dalhover dropped his cigarette on the deck and clapped his hands together. “Suppressed weapons sound kind of like that, only louder.”

What the fuck?

I looked at Murphy. He was, for the moment, quiet and perplexed like me.

I asked
Dalhover to do that again.

“Clap my hands?”

“Yeah.”

Dalhover
clapped his hands together again and then looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

I looked at Murphy. He had the same question on his face as me. “I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound right to me,” I said.

“Me, neither,” Murphy said.

“What do you mean?”
Steph asked.

“Clap your hands together,” I said.

“Why?”

“Please.”

With a puzzled look, Steph complied. She clapped her hands together.

“Harder,” I asked.

She clapped them again.

I looked at
Nico and asked, “You hear it too, don’t you? Or more precisely, you don’t hear it.”

Nico
nodded. “I w…wondered ab…bout that.”

“About what?”
Steph asked, barely able to contain her frustration.

“After I w…woke up from
th…the f…fever, I felt like I…I had c…cotton stuffed m…my ears,” Nico said. “Everything seemed k…kind of muffled, b…but not. You know what I m…mean?”

“No,”
Steph said.

I cut in. “I can hear you guys clap your hands, but it sounds dull and distant. It sounds like you’re clapping with gloves on. It’s like the high-end sound frequencies are gone.”

“When did you first notice this?” Steph asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. After the fever, my ears were ringing like I’d been at a concert the night before or something, but after a couple of days, I didn’t really think about it. Maybe I stopped hearing some higher frequencies and I just didn’t notice they were missing.”

Steph asked, “Murphy, is that your experience as well?”

“Man, I don’t know,” he said. “When I woke up from the fever, shit was
happenin’, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have time to think about it.”

“But you noticed the difference in the hand claps, right?”

“Sure. It’s like Zed said. It’s like you’re clapping your hands with gloves on or something.”

“So you’re both right,”
Steph said. “Sergeant Dalhover is right about the sound of a silenced weapon. But it seems the virus has damaged your ability to hear certain frequencies. So what sound you were able to hear from the silenced rifles was easily lost in the background noise.”

I picked up from there. “So all of you can probably hear silenced weapons just fine, but for the infected in the world, they’re out of our auditory range.”

Dalhover scooted up on the edge of the table he’d been sitting on. I think he was almost excited. “Silenced weapons might work for killing the infected. Suppressors might be worth their weight in gold right now.”

“Or worth their weight in Spam,” Murphy said, expecting a laugh, which he got. The tension of disagreement evaporated.

Dalhover said, “I don’t know about going out and killing Smart Ones, though the idea has merit. But if we could get our hands on enough suppressors, they could make the difference between whether we survive or not. It puts the advantage with us.”

Steph
asked, with a fair degree of trepidation, “And how do we get suppressors?”

Dalhover
answered first. “With the right materials, the right tools and a workshop with some electricity, I could probably make a usable suppressor in a half hour or so.”

“But we don’t have those things,”
Steph said.

I stepped in. “There’s a squad of soldiers over by the campus, probably all dead from the virus by now. I’m betting most of their weapons are lying right where they died, with silencers attached.”

“And you’re just going to go across town and pick them up?” Steph didn’t like that idea at all.

I nodded. “Yes ma’am, Captain Leonard. I think that’s what I should do.”

She shook her head. “You’re not fifteen, Null Spot. Don’t act like it.”

“Yes, boss.” I looked at
Dalhover to see if he’d come all the way over to my side. He didn’t nod, nor shake his head. He just looked at me with his emotionless stare, but somewhere in there, I thought I saw worry.

We talked for a long time after that, but the conversation circled around the same issues, with
Steph not changing her position. The after-dinner debate broke up with the changing of the guard. Steph and Dalhover had a shift together. It was getting late. Everyone drifted off to some other place on the boat and eventually went to bed.

A peculiarity of the riverboat’s design created a wide ledge outside the railing on the upper deck that ran all the way around the boat, except for the stern. Unsuccessful at sleeping, I got tired of staring at nothing and instead found my way up to sit on that ledge at the bow of the boat.

With my legs dangling over the black water, I watched bubbly gray clouds flow south beneath a starry black sky. The three-quarter moon was rising and provided plenty of light for me to see a hundred or so of the infected, squatting and sleeping among the trees and bushes on the north bank. They’d been collecting there for two days, unsettling all of us and proving the futility of my efforts to kill that one.

Murphy and I, along with Dalhover and Amy, had made another run down to Ski Shores with the pontoon boat and a ski boat. That whole area was still inexplicably free of the infected or any normal human. We uneventfully loaded both boats with as much as could be carried, fueled up at the marina and were in a pretty good position for supplies. We had all the ammunition we were likely to need for the next year. And we knew where to get more. We had enough food to last us a month without worrying about rationing.

Except for the infected on the north bank, our situation was good.

The wispy sound of soft talking caught my attention when a few words floated over the deck and found their way to me. I couldn’t make them out, just that the sound was familiar enough to be words. It came and it went for a while, soft enough that the infected on shore weren’t likely to hear, but loud enough that I could.

After some time, I decided I should go find the two loquacious guards and encourage them to be a little quieter. I hopped over the rail and landed noiselessly on the upper deck, finding no one there. I saw the silhouette
s of a few heads up on the roof of the pilothouse at the other end of the boat. That made sense. It seemed to be the preferred station for whichever pair was tasked with nighttime guard duty.

As I walked down the length of the boat and the sounds clarified a bit, I recognized the halting pattern of
Nico’s stutter. I heard a girl’s giggle and then nothing more. I was giving some thought to going back to my perch, as the talkers seemed to have silenced themselves, when it occurred to me that Nico should not have been up on the pilothouse. He wasn’t on the schedule. His odd behavior had not engendered enough trust with Steph to merit a night watch slot.

Recalling the schedule, I realized the watch for the last half of the night should have been
Mandi and Megan. It was possible Nico was suffering from insomnia, just as I was, and had found his way up to the roof of the pilothouse. But just as Steph’s trust for Nico was precarious, so was mine.

I continued toward the stern.

When I arrived at the ladder on the side of the pilothouse, I stopped and listened. The conversation had not restarted, at least not loudly. But the sound of bodies moving in clothing along with some dragging across the rough roof mixed with whispers and drifted down to me.

Something wasn’t right, but I resisted the urge to climb the ladder and immediately insert myself into whatever was going on. It wasn’t that I had any compunction about being rude. My intuition told me there was more to learn, especially about
Nico.

After a bit, the talking started again mixed with whispers and periodic giggles. I started to doubt the validity of my suspicions, but at the same time, I didn’t hear the sound of
Mandi’s voice at all.

The volume of
Nico’s voice grew as the conversation went on and I started to make out much of what he was saying. And mostly, it sounded creepy. He talked about how pretty Megan’s hair was and how he couldn’t help but stroke it. He told her it reminded him of his daughter, Stacy, only Megan was much prettier. He asked her about the school she went to, whether she had played volleyball or was a cheerleader, and what she liked about it. He asked if she liked any of her teachers and, if so, which ones. He asked if she had any boyfriends yet, or if she’d ever had a crush on any of her teachers.

For her part, Megan seemed embarrassed and giggled a lot. She may even have been thrilled to have the attention of a man who, though old enough to be her father, had a young look about him. But she was thirteen. He was in his mid-thirties.

Everything going on up on the roof of the pilothouse was in the realm of inappropriate. I wrestled choosing the right moment to climb the ladder and punch Nico in the face as I considered what I was going to say to Steph and Amy. Bringing him into the group had been a mistake. My mistake.

Then he asked if he could kiss her.

I was on my way up the ladder.

In the seconds it took me to get both of my feet on the roof,
Nico had pushed Megan over on her back and, though she was trying to squirm away, he was too strong. His face was buried in her neck, one arm was holding her close to him and one hand was doing its best to explore places where it didn’t belong.

With frightened tears just starting to flow, Megan’s squeaky voice pleaded, “No. No, don’t do that.”

With my mouth closed tightly and my anger boiling, I took three fast steps over to where Nico was pinning Megan to the roof. I grabbed the wrist of the hand worming its way down the front of Megan’s jeans and wrenched it savagely behind his back while I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him away. “
Stop
.”

Megan scampered away in a crab walk, trying to cover her chest with her torn blouse while tears streamed down her face. Her mouth moved, but no words came out.

I pushed Nico to the pilothouse roof and dropped a knee hard between his shoulder blades. He grunted loudly as all the air spilled out of his lungs.

Turning to Megan, I asked. “Are you okay?”

She didn’t speak.

Nico
, though, started to babble a litany of stuttery bullshit that only served to piss me off. With my hand still full of the hair on the back of his head, I ground his face into the rough wooden planking. “Don’t say anything. You hear me?”

I guess the anger in my voice was enough to convince him how serious I was
, because he stopped talking immediately.

I looked up at Megan. “Go downstairs and wake up
Steph and Amy, okay? You don’t need to wake everyone, but you get them to come up here.”

Megan nodded.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Megan didn’t look at me. She was looking at
Nico. Her sense of violation had turned to anger. “You’re an asshole, Nico.” She got up and headed for the ladder.

“
Steph and Amy, okay?”

“I’ll get them.”

Without another word, Megan climbed down, making no effort to avoid the rungs that creaked.

Nico
pleaded. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Save it.” I pressed his face harder into the wood.

“You’re hurting me.”

“No shit.”

Even with his face pressed against the wood, Nico managed to say, “It’s n…not wh…what you think.”

I took my hand off of his head and he lifted it up and took full advantage of the opportunity to start saying something else. With my hand free, I drew my pistol and pressed the barrel to his temple. “Don’t speak.”

Nico understood at that point just how serious I was.

It didn’t take long before
Steph and Amy were climbing up the creaky ladder to join us on the roof of the wheelhouse.

Steph
was first up. “What happened?”

“Did Megan tell you anything?” I asked.

“No.”

Amy turned to look back down the ladder. “Megan, come up here too.”

“I don’t want to,” she called up from below.

Brittany’s voice called back. “She’s not.”

Amy looked at the gun I had pressed to the side of Nico’s head. She’d already seen Megan’s torn blouse. She was doing the math. “You need to.”

I looked at Amy and said, “Amy, I brought
Nico here. This is my fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was this way.”

Nico
said, “Wh…what way? I’m n…not any way.”

“Quiet.” I put my weight on the handle of the gun and the barrel pressed
Nico’s face back against the wood.

Steph
, in her business-like calm, said, “Zed, let him up.”

I let go of the arm I held behind
Nico’s back. “Put your hands flat on the deck, out in front of your head.”

Nico
hesitated and started to protest.

“Do it now.” Harsh talk seemed to work well on him, though the effects didn’t tend to stick for long.

Nico complied and I used my free hand to run over his pockets where I found his Swiss army knife. I took it. I picked up his rifle and stepped away from him. “Go over there.” I pointed to the far side of the wheelhouse roof where he’d be nearly ten feet from us.

Steph
asked me, “What happened, Zed?”

With more than one interruption by
Nico, I explained what I heard and saw.

Amy headed back toward the ladder. “I’ll go down and talk to Megan.”

Nico figured that was a good time to state his case. “I…it’s n…not true. I didn’t know sh…she was… I th…thought she was old enough… It w…was h…her. All her. Y…you d….don’t know what y…you heard, Z…Zed. You have to b…believe me. You—”

“Enough.”
Steph’s tone was sharp enough to cut through Nico’s protests. “Zed, keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t move.”

“But…”
Nico started again, but Steph’s glare shut him up.

She went over to the ladder, leaned on the upper rung and listened to the proceedings downstairs. I heard tense whispers mixed with tears. Emotions ran high. Voices forgot the necessity to remain hushed. Brittany seemed eager to climb the ladder and deal with
Nico herself.

Eventually, Amy came back up. She and
Steph stood at the opposite end of the wheelhouse roof, talking in harsh whispers.

It was clear
Nico’s guilt was never in question. They were deciding what to do with him.

Finally,
Steph stepped away from Amy and said, “Nico, you’re leaving here tonight. Zed and I will take you upriver somewhere and put you out on the shore. Don’t come back around us. If we see you again, we’ll shoot you.”

Nico
collapsed on the deck and cried and pleaded, and cried more.

Steph
looked at me. “Do you mind coming with me, Zed?”

“Nope. Not a bit.”

Steph said to Amy, “Will you girls keep watch until we get back?”

“Of course,” Amy said.