Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (16 page)

The one with the paddle grinned. Just as I was about to conclude the pair was Slow Burns like me, the one with the paddle made some kind of monkey sound. The one making his way out of the water answered in kind.

“What’s that about?” Murphy asked.

“Turtle… fishing?”

“I can see that. Those ones aren’t afraid of the water.”

“
Uhm—”

The White with the paddle gave the White with the turtle a hand in climbing up the steep bank. Then, with only a quick glance back at Murphy and me, the two took their prize and walked casually into the trees.

“I’m not sure what to think about that,” I said.

“Those aren’t the same kind of crazy Whites we’ve been dealing with.”

“I’m starting to believe there’s a whole spectrum of mental abilities left in the infected brain after the virus does its damage. As a matter of fact—”

Murphy jerked and pointed to something on the other bank, shouting. “Is that a squirrel?”

On instinct, I turned to look as I was processing what he said. “What?”

“Man, I’m not in the mood for another Professor Zed lecture.”

“Man, fuck you.”

The
North Lamar Boulevard Bridge came into view. It was barricaded at the midpoint. Which side was barricading which was impossible to discern. Cars were jammed up pointing in both directions. Evidence of the intense fear that drove people to flee without the barest knowledge of whether the destination was any safer. Anywhere but here.

Anywhere but here.
What a desperate fear those people must have felt. To race off in the family car filled with crying children, teddy bears and a few insufficient bags of canned goods hurriedly gathered from the pantry.

Anywhere but here.

Most of those cars were burned black, probably with blackened skeletons, large and small, lying across metal springs of seats whose cloth and cushion had turned to ash.

The wide footbridge just downstream from the North Lamar Boulevard Bridge was blocked as well and packed with cars. None were burned, but most had broken glass. Below the barricades, a body hung from the bridge. It looked to have gotten a foot jammed between the barrier and the rail before falling over the edge. It was a woman’s body.
swaying in the wind, dripping with rain. Her arms were draped past her head, seeming to reach down toward us in a plea to be set free. Whether she was infected or normal when she went over the edge was impossible to tell. She’d been there a while.

The image of her dangling body stuck in my head.

I barely noticed the railroad bridge until we had to steer the canoe around one of its footings. Shortly after, the roar of rushing water drowned out most other sounds. Shoal Creek flowed into the river through a wide gap on the north bank.

Murphy pointed. “Looks like Top
was right about Shoal Creek. Waller Creek is probably full, too.”

Sergeant
Dalhover’s being right about the flooding in the creeks—minor flooding though it was—was turning into an annoying trend. “Has Dalhover been wrong about anything yet?”

Murphy shrugged. “Not that I can think of.”

“I hate that.”

Without seeing any more infected on either bank, we passed the old convention center on the south shore and floated under the South First Street Bridge, another battleground. Who in the hell thought they could contain the infection on one side of the river with tanks and guns?

At the Congress Avenue Bridge, the smell of ammonia was thick enough to taste. The squeaky chatter of a million and a half bats that lived underneath overwhelmed the sound of the rain hitting the water around us.

I looked back at Murphy. “This is where we get off.”

“At Congress Avenue? Six lanes wide, with tall buildings on both sides, and who knows how many of those naked crazy fuckers around to see us coming from a mile away? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Well, kind of.

“Waller Creek is up ahead several blocks. There are places right here where it’ll be easy to get on shore. Not so much up there. I’m thinking we can get up to street level and walk over to the creek. I wasn’t planning on going up Congress Avenue.”

“That’ll work.”

Downtown wasn’t quite a ghost town, but it was creepy as hell. Wails of the infected, individually and in groups, echoed between the buildings. Cars had run up on curbs. Some had collided with each other, trees or light poles. Some intersections were jammed solid with abandoned vehicles. Windows were broken. Anything that could be imagined was in the street. The looters had come through sooner than they should have, and left their bones as payment for the mistake.

The smell of old death had seeped into the concrete sidewalks and limestone walls. It dripped down with the rain and put the taste of maggots in my mouth. I resisted laying a hand on any surface for fear of what might crawl up through the moisture and infect my skin with some new kind of rot.

I’d found a couple of bloody, mismatched shoes shortly after coming on shore and asked Murphy to keep an eye out for a dead soldier from whom I could re-equip myself. But the smell urged me to change my mind. “Forget the soldier thing we talked about. Maybe I’ll find something later. This place gives me the willies.”

The mood of the dead city was starting to weigh on Murphy’s optimism and it was clear in the sound of his voice. “I hear ya.”

We’d been working our way slowly up Brazos Street, careful to conceal ourselves behind cars and trucks. We looked around to be sure nothing on two feet was taking any interest in us. At the intersection with Sixth Street, we turned right and headed east to get over near Waller Creek. Once there, we could make better time.

A full block down and across the street from us on the north side were five Whites on the sidewalk, with hands and faces pressed against the plate glass window of a storefront. It was at least noon by then. We were between rain showers and the sun’s heat was seeping through the clouds and magnifying the humid stink.

Murphy whispered first. “If we stay quiet and keep on this side of the street, they’ll never notice us.”

“They’re not the naked ones. Let’s see what’s up.”

“You know what they say.”

“What?”

“Curiosity killed the Zed.”

“Do you make this shit up, or do you have bad writers?”

“We should keep going.”

“I just want to see what’s up. Besides, we’re going that way anyway.”

Murphy shook his head. “
Dalhover would tell you this is a bad idea and he’d be right.”

“
Dalhover isn’t here.”

“Whatever, man.”

I snuck over to hide among the wreckage of two cars. I didn’t get so much as a glance from the five Whites. Looking over my shoulder, I watched Murphy come reluctantly after. I checked to make sure the safety on my rifle was off. Not that I wanted to use it in downtown Austin and draw in every White that still lingered.

A quick check in all directions assured me nothing was taking an interest in me. The next best spot for cover was a clump of a dozen cars near the center of the block. The first of them wasn’t more than thirty feet away, but once among those cars, I could sneak right up on the five Whites. If I stayed quiet about it, they’d never know I was there.

I gave Murphy a glance to let him know I was moving. He was not happy. I took off at a sprint.

Once at the clump of cars, I found myself a snug spot between two pickup trucks that afforded me a place to stand and see out through the trucks’ windows in all directions.

In seconds, Murphy was by the pickups, harshly whispering, “Dammit, I can’t fit in there.”

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

Murphy rolled his eyes, bent low and hurried down to find a place between two other cars. I pulled out of my tiny gap and followed. When we finally came to a stop, we were directly behind the five Whites, but exposed to any prying eyes from the other side of the street.

“Look and see what you can see,” Murphy whispered and turned his back to the Whites and the storefront holding their interest. He’d appointed himself lookout so I could indulge my dangerous curiosity.

So I looked. It only took a moment to see everything, but the situation hadn’t become any more understandable. The five Whites were in front of a tattoo shop. Shoddily attached inside the window—with what looked like duct tape—were wrinkled and sagging tattoos on stained, moldy paper.

The things the Whites found fascinating.

I shook my head and turned to look up and down the street. Was there anything to be learned from that? Was there any behavioral rule I could generalize?

A noise behind me startled me back to full attention and I spun around to see a skinny man, white with the virus but in a rumpled suit and tie, come storming out of the shop. In one hand he had what looked like a policeman’s baton, in the other hand…
A blind man’s red-tipped cane?

The man in the tie growled something harsh and poked the nearest White with the cane. The White jumped back and yelped.

A cattle prod.

The tie-wearing man swung the baton at another of the Whites and used the cattle prod on the third. Before I knew it, he had all five running away. He stood in front of his shop, made some kind of pissed off monkey sound and stomped back inside.

“What was that?” Murphy whispered.

“They’re all crazy, dude.”

Murphy seemed intently focused on the tattoo shop. He shook his head angrily and quickly slunk away, squeezing between two cars to get closer to the storefront.

Something had his curiosity.

After checking up and down the street, I followed.

By the time I was beside Murphy, he was squatting between two parked cars at the curb, in front of a piano bar next door to the tattoo parlor.

“Curiosity killed the Murphy,” I whispered.

Murphy ignored me, stood straight up and walked over to the window.

What the fuck?

Readying my rifle for action, I looked nervously around. “Murphy.”

He ignored me and started examining the tattoo designs hanging behind the glass.

From my hiding place, I whispered, “Murphy, what are you doing?”

The man with the tie and the cattle prod came stomping noisily out his front door again. He made a threatening gesture with his police baton and jammed the cattle prod at Murphy. But Murphy wasn’t a stupid animal. He knew exactly how a cattle prod worked. He knocked it aside and caught the shaft in his hand.

The man in the suit lost his temper and smacked Murphy on the shoulder with his baton. Then he tried to hit Murphy a second time. In a blur of motion that sent the man falling back on his butt, Murphy took both weapons from him. He tossed the police baton away and pulled the axe out of his belt, simultaneously using the cattle prod to beat his assailant.

I jumped to my feet.

The man in the tie scrambled on his hands and knees to get back inside his shop, while the heavy handle of the cattle prod came down on his back again and again.

Through all of this, Murphy was silent, but he was boiling with anger. The kind of blazing silent anger I’d seen only one other time—when we were at his mom’s house.

Unrelenting, Murphy herded the man into his shop and the noise of things being knocked over and broken rattled out through the open door. That was the kind of noise that would bring attention.

I cast a quick look around and hurried inside.

The rotten smell was palpable. Flies buzzed on windows. Maggots crawled on the tattoo art, which wasn’t just on the window but all over the walls, held there by silvery tabs of tape.

The beating continued amidst sounds of whimpers and crunching bones.

The guy Murphy was beating to death was infected. And he had to be a Slow Burn like us, but that didn’t seem to matter to Murphy. He had to have his reasons. I decided one more murder didn’t matter to me either.

Fuck that dude.

I pushed the shop door closed.

The body lay in a pool of blood. The skull was broken
and bits of brain were stuck to the handle of the cattle prod on the floor beside him. It was a gory mess, but it didn’t faze me. Perhaps I was getting used to it.

Murphy went to
systematically looking at each of the fly-covered tattoos on one of the walls.

I didn’t
ask him what he was looking for. I figured he’d tell me the reason for his murderous tantrum and his weird little search when he felt like it. It was my job to cover his back when he lost track of his senses. I had no doubt he’d do it for me. Brothers in arms. Brothers in sin.

I peeked between the tattoos taped to the front window to get a good view of the street outside. Only the inanimate carcasses of cars lay out there, some shiny again in the rain. Murphy’s escapade seemed to have no consequences—yet. I reached up to push one of the pieces of tattoo paper out of the way, hoping to get a glimpse of a blind spot down the street.

Eek
.

I jumped back from the window, nearly stumbling over my own feet.

Holy shit.

The tattoos were all on human skin
.

I ineffectually rubbed the finger that touched the dead skin on my pants again and again and again before bounding across the room to kick the sick, dead fuck on the floor.

The big front window and every wall inside were decorated with tattoos skinned from Whites and, judging by the variance in skin color, from normal people as well. As gut-wrenchingly wrong as that was, most of the skin was just skin. But hanging in the center of one wall was the eyeless, tattooed skin of some man’s face, stretched out and surrounded by a starburst of tattooed patches of skin, each with a human nipple in the center.

I stomped on the dead man’s skull.

And that was that, at least for me.

The shop was a monument to uninhibited human depravity, the kind that scars souls with permanent shadows. I had enough shadows on my soul. All I needed were callouses. I turned my back on the perversion and silently begged for Whites to come up the street. I needed distractions.

Any distraction to get me out of this fucking shop.

The rain was coming down in a torrent by then, pounding the pavement in a comforting rumble, pouring off the roofs and running deep between the curbs.

I looked up toward the sky and saw a million glistening gray droplets falling down. I hoped it would wash away all the stink, all the evidence of evil littering the streets after the virus killed man’s inhibitions. Were the facades we all constructed to mask our wicked brutality so fragile that they could be crumbled by a tiny virus and a high fever? Were the Whites not monsters but simply our true selves, with the unwanted fetters of morality erased?

From the back wall where Murphy was looking at the tattoos, almost to himself, he said, “My sister had a tattoo.”

That explained
that
.

Without turning away from the window, I asked, “Do you want me to help you look? What kind of tattoo did she have?”

Murphy didn’t answer. He wanted to do it on his own.

I didn’t completely understand Murphy’s choice, but I was more than willing to accept it.

After a while, Murphy spoke again. “She got it when she was a freshman at Rice.”

“She went to Rice?” Perhaps talking might help us both deal with the situation. “That’s a really good school.”

Murphy’s voice was weaker than I’d ever heard it. “She had an academic scholarship. It wasn’t the kind of place my mom ever could have paid for. Mom never had enough money to pay the electric bill on time. You know what I mean?”

I’d been there.

“She never did anything crazy in high school.” Murphy was staring at one of the walls and had stopped moving. His voice was starting to crack. “My mom loved her so much.”

“I’m sure she loved you, too.” I probably should have just kept my mouth shut.

Murphy ignored me just the same. “She always got good grades. She was always popular. You know, cheerleader type and all that. She never drank. Never smoked any weed. A real goody two-shoes. She was three years younger than me.”

Whatever Murphy was doing, he needed it. The other things on our to-do list that day could wait.

“When we were in high school, she was a freshman and I was a senior. She’d try to hang around with me and stuff, but you know, she was my sister.”

“Yeah.” I nodded at my reflection between the flaps of skin on the glass.

“I was too busy being cool, I guess. I’d hang out with my football buddies and do stupid shit—drink too much, smoke too much weed, skip school, dumbass stuff.” Murphy drew a long slow breath. “It was close to the end of the school year and I was about to graduate. I was going to this party one night down on the east side. She begged and begged me to come and I kept saying no. But she wouldn’t let up. So finally I told her if she could get one of her friends to come, I’d let her tag. I figured, you know, if she had a friend with her, they’d be safe together. ‘Cause, you know, this party was down in far east Austin, and that ain’t the best neighborhood, not even for a black dude. And it really wasn’t the kind of place for a freshman girl to be hangin’ around. But, when you’re that age, you don’t know shit about life. You’re still invincible, and bad shit only happens to other people.”

I started to have my fears about where the story was going.

“I didn’t know what happened that night. I got so wasted. I remember going to the party. I remember some things, but somewhere in there, I don’t know what happened. I woke up the next day in my bed, in the same clothes I went to the party in.”

“I’ve been there, too.”

“Man, haven’t we all.” For a moment, Murphy’s laugh came back, but in it you could hear tears in his eyes. “So that next week, Rachel’s friend, she stops coming ‘round. And I mean, this is unusual, ‘cause she’s always at our house, like, every day. And Rachel, she’s not herself. You know those girls who never stop talking?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Rachel was like that. Always talking. I mean,
always
talking. Always smiling. Well, she wasn’t talking and she wasn’t smiling. At first, I figured she got a B in Chemistry or something. But one night, I was making a Chef Boyardee pizza for supper ‘cause my mom was workin’ at her second job. It’d been like a week since Rachel had said much of anything. So we had dinner and I ate, and she mostly just stared at her food and didn’t say anything. I mean, not one word.”

I craned my neck to see up and down the street. It was empty except for the five Whites that the sick fuck had chased off earlier. They were getting their nerve up to come and drool again over the human skin on display in the window.

“I had to interrogate Rachel that night. She didn’t want to tell me what happened, but I made her.”

The words stopped flowing. I looked around to make sure Murphy was still in the conversation. He was looking at the third wall of human skin trophies, back on task.

It took a while for Murphy to find his voice again and when he did, he was crying. “Her friend, Keisha, the one I made her bring to the party, she lived a couple of doors down. Her and Rachel, they were best friends since grade school. But Keisha was one of those girls that blooms real late. Fifteen years old and not even a pimple of a tit, if you know what I mean. Skinny as a two-by-four. She looked like a tall fifth grader. Not that bright. She did stupid shit all the time. Well, she went to this party and started drinking and doing whatever else was there. These three handkerchief-head gangster-wannabe motherfuckers took an interest in her and decided they wanted to figure out if she was a boy or a girl. She was dressed like a girl, but she had no tits. They thought she was a fag. These three limp dicks beat the fuck out of her and ripped her clothes off. They laughed at her when they saw she was a girl. That’s when she ran away. Can you imagine how she felt, Zed, how humiliated?” A hard pause followed. “That was my fault.”

“Keisha’s dad was a real pussy, you know? I mean, he was a scrawny little dude, smaller than you, Zed.”

I shrugged. Sure I was skinny. Regular meals were hard to come by.

“He was afraid to go to the police. They never do anything to really help anybody, not on the east side. Hell, the wannabes didn’t even rape her. The cops wouldn’t have done
nuthin’. And I think Keisha’s dad was afraid the wannabes would retaliate if the police got involved. So what was he gonna do?”

I turned and gave Murphy my full attention.

“Me and Rachel went over there that night to see Keisha and her parents. I was going to apologize to her dad for getting her into that situation. I did that. But you know, when I saw Keisha, one of her eyes was still swollen shut and she had a big cut on her face with, like, thirty stitches. She hadn’t been to school in a week. I got mad. I got really mad. Somewhere in there, the girls and the mom were all in the kitchen talking ‘round the table, and me and the scrawny old man were in the living room, and he goes on to tell me how he’s all broken up about it. And he was. You could see it in his eyes. It’s like the last little bit of pride the man had was gone. He tells me he’s got this unregistered gun he bought and he’s been taking it and cleaning it every night ‘cause he can’t sleep. And he’s been going over and over in his mind how he’s going to kill these dudes. But I’m thinkin’ that’s not gonna end well. He won’t be able to do it. He’ll puss out when they start begging for their lives and he’ll either get himself killed or fuck it up so bad he ends up on death row.”

Murphy stopped talking after that. He gave me a long, appraising look before he
said, “I told the old man it was my fault and my responsibility to make it right.”

I wasn’t expecting that.

“A few days later, I found those three motherfuckers that did it. They were hangin’ out behind a 7-Eleven, not two blocks from where that party was. They were selling rocks to little kids and toothless welfare hags. I went back there and I didn’t say nuthin’ about nuthin’. I told ‘em I wanted a rock and I held out my money. They figured I was just another crackhead customer. I mean, they kinda knew me and I kinda knew them. So one of them sticks his hand in his pocket to get my rock, while another one is stickin’ my money in his pocket. And I pulled that gun out and shot ‘em. I shot one right in the face and he never had time to do anything but look surprised. The second one started to back up and beg and I shot him twice in the chest. The third one was starting to run away and I shot him in the back. They all died at the scene. At least that’s what the newspaper said. They said it was gang related or drug related or something like that. I threw the gun in the river. After that, I joined the Army and got the fuck out of town. I didn’t come back for four years. By then, Rachel was already at Rice. And you know what she shows me the first time I see her after four years?”

I shrugged. I was out of guesses on that story.

“Rice’s mascot is an owl. She had a tattoo of that on her ankle.”

“And when you saw the tattoos, you thought hers might be here.” It was a stupidly obvious thing to say, but I felt like I needed to say something.

Murphy shook his head. “Not really. Maybe. I don’t know. I had to look.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t find hers.”

Murphy shook his head and went over to the front window. He started lifting and looking at each flap of skin taped to the glass. “For a long time after it happened, I felt bad about it.”

“
Keisha?” I asked.

“Mostly
the killing.” Murphy put on a smile that was little more than a mask. “You and me, we’ve done a lot of shit since the virus hit.”

“Yep.”

“I don’t know how I feel about all of it.”

I was continually troubled by it. “The things we did were necessary.”

“Do you think me killing those boys was necessary, Zed? Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Murphy, I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but I’m proud of you for doing it.”

“Proud?” Murphy didn’t turn away from his work, clearly thinking about how that word applied to his choices. “It bothered me for a long time. Matter of fact, my first couple of years in the Army, I was kind of a dick, like you.”

“A dick like me?” In spite of everything, I almost laughed.

“You know what I mean.” Murphy gave me one of his big smiles. “I was full of anger and always looking for a fight. That shit haunted me that way. It took me a long time to think it all out.”

“I guess.”

“I came to realize those three dumbasses made their choices. They didn’t know what the consequences would be, but they had to know consequences might come. You just don’t go ‘round beating the shit out of fifteen-year-old girls and not expect somebody to get mad as hell about it. They made their choice and I made my choice. I figured I had to live with it.”

Murphy took a moment to look for the right words. “I thought for a long time what I did was bad. Society says murder is bad. I guess I agree. As bad as I felt for killing those boys, I couldn’t get past the feeling I’d done the right thing. I came to think killing those boys was justice, the only kind of justice Keisha and her dad were ever going to get. I realized by my moral code, Murphy’s moral code, I’d done the right thing. The reason I felt bad was because my moral code didn’t exactly align with society’s moral code.”