Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (13 page)

With some care
, we got Nico down into one of the ski boats. The one we chose had plenty of gasoline and, almost as importantly, had a bench seat set into the bow – a place for Nico to sit where we could easily keep an eye on him. Steph sat at the helm. In the seat beside her, I held the gun.

We drifted down the river for a half-mile before starting the engine and then heading back up.

I waved at the riverboat as we passed and that was all of the communication that took place on our trip. Steph was as silent as I’d ever seen her. She stared ahead as though Nico wasn’t there.

For my part,
I felt a hate for Nico grow the longer I looked at him sitting in the bow, feeling sorry for himself. I thought about his daughter, Stacy, and what he’d told me that day in the canoe before we’d found Mr. Mays’ house. He said she wasn’t sullen because of anything he’d done. She was just wired that way. That’s what he said. Some people are just wired that way.

Yeah, wired that way by parents who take the raw material of innocent children and fuck them up because they can’t control their own twisted urges.

And it was pussy-ass fucktards like Nico who let them die on the front lawn because they were too scared to come out of the kitchen and protect them. The day Nico chose to have children, he only had one job in the whole Goddamned world, and that was to protect those kids. But he didn’t. He was the predator they needed to be protected from.

God, how I hated him.

“Zed.”

Steph’s
voice startled me out of my thoughts. I’d been ruminating, completely lost track of time and everything around me.

“Zed,”
Steph asked, “are you okay?”

I looked around without seeing a house or structure of any kind.
Nico was sitting in the bow of the boat, transfixed by shadows on the heavily wooded bank. The engine was off and the boat was twenty feet from the shore.

Nico
turned back to plead with Steph, “N…not h…here. Th…there’s nothing. No sh…shelter. Nothing.”

“And no infected,” she
said, looking back at me. “What’s up with you, Zed? Are you all right?”

I nodded.

She scrutinized me for another moment before standing up, her hand deliberately on the butt of her pistol. “Grab that paddle there and paddle until we get close enough to the shore,” she said to Nico.

“I can’t p…paddle f…from up here,” he
said.

“Then jump out and swim.”

Nico grumbled and whined, but leaned over the bow and started the awkward process.

After four o
r five minutes of effort without much in the way of results, Nico sat up, breathing heavily from the exertion and laid the paddle across his knees. “Th…this is impossible. I c…can’t d…do this alone. Why d….don’t you st...start the engine again and j…just p…pull up to the shore?”

Steph
took a step toward him. “You can get out, then.”

I put a restraining hand in front of
Steph and stood up. “I’ve got this.”

Steph
moved back and cleared the way for me. “The sound of the engine will bring in any Whites in the trees. Is that what you want?”

It was only three steps to the front of the boat and I took just one. My pistol was in my hand and I was well within range if
Nico should he decide to swing the paddle at me.

I looked at the darkness on the shore.

Nico interpreted that along with the drawn pistol as a threat. “Are you g…going to sh…shoot me, Zed? Really?”

On that long, simmering boat ride upriver, the sins of The Harpy, Dan,
Nico and the world conflated in the self-pity stretched on a pedophilic coward’s face. My rage flashed white-hot, blowing away any rational sense of restraint.

In a smooth, natural motion, I raised my pistol, pointed it the center of that face and pulled the trigger.

For that tiniest bit of a microsecond, as that sad face ruptured, I was defined. I knew what I was. I was vengeance.

Nico’s
head snapped back and parts of his skull splashed across the water. Slowly, so slowly, his body leaned backwards and fell overboard.

Steph
gasped.

I leapt up onto the bow and fired two more vindictive rounds into
Nico’s chest.

Fright silenced the frogs and crickets as the night seemed to solidify into a tiny eternity. In the absence of guilt and second-guessing, emotion was satisfied. The scales were balanced. Purpose was fulfilled.

Nico’s body started to sink; black water gurgling red through the bullet holes in his lungs.

But purpose contorted into old, familiar emptiness. Emotionless, I was just a thing with a lethal weapon, trying to remember what I’d been before my bullet had so rudely shattered
Nico’s skull.

The body descended further and was gone.

Only cold, dark water and the curious, hungry howls of distant Whites remained to lament Nico’s passing.

“Zed?”
Steph said.

Feeling like a soulless White monster, I came back to the moment. I stepped down from the bow and slumped onto the padded seat, my pistol hanging limply in my hand.

“Zed, are you okay?”

I looked up.
Steph was worried.

I nodded but tears in my eyes exposed the truth of it.

In small, slow steps, Steph came over and sat on the cushion with me. She put her arms around me and pulled me to her. Somewhere in there, with my face buried in her thick red hair, the rage of a thousand repressed pains found a path to flow free.

The boat drifted with the current. Steph’s arms held me tight and secure. The cries of the infected faded into the distance behind us as the night sounds of the river took over. Black-windowed houses and cluttered docks drifted past. Silent trees ignored us and dark gray clouds continued to flow across the sky.

I f
inally found my voice. “I’m sorry.”

Steph
put a hand under my chin and pulled my face up to look at hers. “Don’t be.”

Wanting to stay there, feeling her heartbeat through our bodies pressed so close together, sharing the same breaths, wondering what it might be like to have
Steph’s embrace always there for me, I still pulled away. Too many other thoughts were bothering me.

“What’s my temperature?” I asked.

Not quite letting go, Steph said, “You said I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Please.”

Steph’s arm dropped off of my shoulder. She sat back on her cushion and took my hand in hers, concentrating on it as if the answer to my question was there. “Why is that important now?”

I looked out at the dark shore, futilely searching for accurate words to describe the complexity of my emotions and thoughts. “I feel like a monster. I need to know if I’m turning into one.”

Steph didn’t have a response for that.

I asked, “Is that what’s happening to me? Am I turning into one of them?”

“Zed, there isn’t any good answer, you know that, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

Steph took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. “Don’t you see? If I tell you your temperature has been going up, then you’ll believe you are a monster and shooting Nico is proof. If I tell you your temperature has stabilized, because of the way you are you’ll decide you’re more of a monster, because you won’t have the virus to blame.”

I didn’t know what to say about that, not at first. “I think I’d rather know. I don’t want to put my head in the sand anymore.”

Steph tried to change the subject, or at least divert it a bit. “Nico deserved what he got.”

“Tell me,
Steph, please.”

“I’m throwing away the thermometer when we get back to the boat.”

“And?”

Steph
shook her head, dropped my hand and crossed her arms.

“I need to know.”

She surrendered. “Your temperature has been stable since we started checking every day. Mostly. Maybe it’s gone up a little, but it’s hard to tell whether those are just normal fluctuations or not.”

I leaned over, put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. I realized she was right. I did feel like more of a monster. I was a civilized, thinking man. Yet I’d let my temper run away with me and I’d chosen to kill
Nico. I chose to murder him. Deserving or not, he paid for a lot of sins with his blood.

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.

Steph put an arm back over my shoulders and pulled me close.

The excuses I was telling myself seemed important enough to share. “
Steph, I can’t tell you I know that he molested his own daughter, but I think he did.”

“It’s not important, Zed.”

“It is to me. I guess I suspected it all along. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

“People like that don’t change. You know that, right?”

“No. Yes. I think I read that somewhere once. Something having to do with recidivism rates among pedophiles or something.”

“None of it matters. I don’t fault you for what you did. Maybe in a way, I wish I had the courage to do it myself.”

“I’m not sure ‘courageous’ is the right word to describe what I did.”

“It doesn’t matter what anyone calls it. It doesn’t matter why you think you did it.
Nico earned what he got. Besides that, nothing else means anything. None of this changes anything about what I think of you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re a good man.”

“A good man?” My laugh was mocking.

“You’re a good man, Zed. Learn to take a compliment.”

I sat up and leaned my head over on
Steph’s shoulder.

The emptiness started to fade and it felt good to be in her arms doing little more than watching the stars between the clouds.

T
he next morning, the rain was coming down heavier than I’d seen in a long time. It pummeled the pontoon boat’s canvas roof and added enough noise to make conversation difficult. That didn’t matter much, as the first few miles of our journey had passed in silence. Murphy spent a good deal of time in the stern looking back upriver. I think the more attached he got to Mandi, the more he hated to leave.

Amy, usua
lly good for a conversation, seemed infatuated with her new M-16 and was keeping pretty much to herself.

Dalhover
, who was driving the boat, surprised me when he looked over at me and opened the conversation. “What I don’t get is why Captain Leonard let you and Murphy go. I didn’t think it was decided.”

I shrugged. I was doing that a lot. It seemed to be such a handy gesture. “Don’t know. She woke me this morning and told me if I still wanted to go, I had her blessing.”

“You didn’t talk about it last night when you two went out to ditch Nico?”

“Not about this.”

Dalhover looked over to Amy. “Did you talk to her?”

Amy looked at me then back at
Dalhover. “We talked for a long time.”

“When?”
Dalhover asked.

“After Zed and she got back from taking care of
Nico. Neither of us went to bed.”

“And that’s when you decided that going for the suppressors was a good idea?”

Amy got a bit defensive. “You don’t agree?”

“Didn’t say that.”
Dalhover took his time digging a cigarette out of his pocket. He put it in his mouth and after a half-dozen attempts to get his lighter to flame, held it up to the end of the cigarette, which proved to be too damp to light. “Dammit.” He tossed the cigarette into the river.

“Those will kill you.” I grinned.

Dalhover shot me a dismissive look.

Amy asked, “So, you do agree that we should do this?”

“It’s Murphy and Zed that are going, if I understood correctly,” Dalhover said.

Amy huffed. “I meant ‘we’ as a group.”

“Don’t mind him,” I said to Amy.

“Do you agree?” Amy asked
Dalhover.

“I said as much when we talked the other night.”
Dalhover didn’t look at her. “I need a damn dry cigarette.”

Murphy
, who’d walked up near the rest of us by the helm, reached up and wrapped his hands around one of the overhead supports to balance himself. “What’s up?”

Dalhover
said, “It’s a stupid idea to do it today.”

“Waller Creek empties into Town Lake about four
miles south of the university.” I spoke insultingly slowly. I didn’t like the implication I was acting stupid. “If Murphy and I hike up the creek bed, we can get to the university and back in three or four hours and nobody will ever see us.”

Amy said, “I think Sergeant
Dalhover is right. With all the rain these last few days, the creeks might flood.”

“We always get flooding after a drought,”
Dalhover said.

“That’s not true.” I didn’t know if it was true or not. I never really paid any attention to the weather back when I could sit in an air-conditioned apartment and drink myself into oblivion.

“How long have you lived in Austin?” Dalhover asked.

“All my life,” I said.

“Then you should know what a flash flood is. Don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“They’re always worse after the droughts.”

The boat bounced over some turbulent water and I gripped a rail to steady myself. “I don’t think that’s true.”

Almost to himself, Dalhover said, “I’ve lived in this part of Texas my whole life, which has been a lot longer than yours, Zane. We’re coming off the worst drought I’ve ever seen. Mark my words, it’s going to flood. Stay out of the creek beds unless you want to drown.”

“Yes, Dad.”

After that, we didn’t talk much for a while until Murphy said, “So what I wanna know is, what happened with the whack job?”

“You mean
Nico?” Amy asked.

“You know another one?”

“Zed and Steph exiled him last night.”

Murphy busted out laughing. “Exiled? What the hell does that mean?” He looked over at me. “Oh no. I’ve seen that constipated face before, Zed. What happened? Nobody said anything about anything this morning and everybody was acting weird.”

Amy looked up at Murphy. “Steph said Nico’s temperature was up. He started acting crazy.”

“You mean crazier?” Murphy grinned. “What’d he do?”

Amy looked down at the deck. “He tried to…have his way with Megan.”

That surprised Murphy. “No shit. Man, I’d ‘a shot his ass.”

Amy glanced at me.

Murphy saw it and said, “Oh shit.” He looked at me. “That’s what you did. That explains the constipated face.”

I looked away. “I shot him.”

“Man, don’t beat yourself up about it. I didn’t say
nuthin’ when we picked him up, but I don’t think it was Whites that broke into that house and killed your buddy, Mr. Mays. I think maybe Nico’s brain started to cook a little too hot and he got hungry.”