Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (17 page)

“Murphy, are you sure you never took any philosophy courses?”

Murphy laughed. “I barely got out of high school. I just spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.”

“And you’re cool with it all now, I guess.”

“I made my peace. I made my peace with lots of stuff. That’s when I came to realize we’re all where we are in life because of our choices. Sure, shit happens we can’t control, but that’s exactly what it is: shit you can’t control. You can’t control what it is, or sometimes what it does to you. But like I’ve told you before, you can control how you feel about it, how you deal with it. I figured all this out when I was in the Army. I get to choose how I feel. I’m happy now.”

“Now?” I asked, in disbelief.

Murphy turned and looked around the grotesquery. “Yeah. The world is fucked up. Bad shit has happened. Hell, I’m looking at tattoo skins from dead people that might be my sister’s. How fucked up is that?” Murphy laughed at that, so I did too. “But I can’t do anything to change the past. I can only change today. I’ve got a cute, short girl back on the boat who loves me. I’ve got good people to spend my time with and I’ve got a dickhead of a best friend who would do anything for me.”

“If you keep calling me a dick, you might have to re-evaluate that.”

Murphy went back to work. “I don’t think so. So, yeah, I’m happy. I’m
doin’ all right with this.”

“One day, when the world is back to being something like normal, I’m going to write a book and call it
The World According to Murphy
.”

It took several hours to make our way through town following the meandering path of Waller Creek. We were careful, hiding or taking detours when we saw Whites. We took shelter when the lightning got too close.

By the time we got to Twelfth Street, the rushing water in Waller Creek was lapping at the undersides of the eastbound and westbound bridges. Waterloo Park, across the street from us and adjacent to the Brackenridge Hospital complex, was a deserted battlefield cradling the bones of
the dead.

“Murphy,” I whispered, “can you keep an eye out for a minute? I’ve got something in my foot.” I sat on the sidewalk and leaned against the side of a car. Blood leaked across my hand as I pulled my right foot up to examine it.

Crap.

At least a dozen pieces of glass were stuck in the sole of my shoe. I huffed and indulged a moment of frustration by looking out at the rain. Dangers large and small lurked around every corner, behind every bush, in every dark room and apparently under each footstep. I pulled each piece of glass from the shoe bottom taking care to slowly remove the bloody culprit that made it all the way through to bury itself in my foot. I removed the shoe and examined its ridiculously thin sole. I needed to get some real shoes.

I checked my other foot for any cuts I failed to feel. That foot was good. “When we pass through the park, keep your eyes peeled for any dead soldiers. If we see anything I can use, I need to gear up.”

Murphy shook his head
. “When we find the guys with the suppressors, we can use their stuff.”

I looked down at my bloody shoe and Murphy followed my gaze. “I don’t know what we’ll find when we get there. But I really need a pair of boots.”

Murphy nodded. “You know they’ll be disgusting, right?”

“Unless we come across a military surplus store, whatever I find will be disgusting. I can wash it all off in the creek.”

“Okay. But this is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s a long, long way back to the boat. I really didn’t want to have to find a place to hole up out here tonight.”

“That’s cool. I have an idea.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Don’t be that way.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Do you remember that story I told you about the parking garage by the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

I pointed at a multi-story parking garage up at the north end of Waterloo Park. “That’s the one.”

Murphy gave it a look. “I thought for sure you made up the part about sliding down that banner, but there it is, hanging on the side of that garage.”

“It probably still has some of my skin stuck to it.”

Murphy grinned.

“You know what else?” I asked.

Murphy shook his head and took a moment to check our flanks. The habit was ingrained in us both.

“There’s one of those armored Humvees up there. One with a machine gun on top.”

Murphy nodded wickedly.

“I’m thinking we get our silencers, stroll back down here and drive that Humvee back over to the river. We’ll be home for dinner.”

“And if all the Whites are chasing us when we get there?”

“We just drive it into the river, like we did the last one.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

“It worked.”

Murphy shook his head. “I’m driving.”

“Whatever. You ready to get going?” I stood up and scanned the area for movement.

We’d just crossed Twelfth Street and weren’t ten steps into the park when I found a MOLLE vest with five full magazines. I pulled one out. “Will these fit my rifle?”

Murphy nodded.

After taking the vest over to the rushing creek to rinse off all of the gnarly bits, I was inspired to put some effort into a search for the pants and boots. Pants would be easy. I was way skinnier than the average American and baggy pants could be cinched up with a belt. Boots pretty much had to fit just right.

With insufficiently masked impatience, Murphy stood watch as I worked my way through the park, picking through the remains of bodies.
A few Whites timidly crept out into the rain to root through the bones and clothing for scraps of anything that might ease the rumbling in their bellies. They were as intent on keeping some distance between us as we were them.

After spending a half-hour on the endeavor, I had a pair of pants, but no boots.
I led Murphy across Red River Street and onto the hospital campus. The closer we got to the main hospital building, the more thickly the ground was scattered with the remains of the dead.

Murphy whispered, “There’s lots of shoes. Do you really need boots?”

I looked around. None of the Whites I could see were paying us any attention. “Give me ten more minutes. If I don’t find some boots, we’ll go.”

Murphy checked his watch. “Ten.”

I gave him a nod and went back to walking among the gnawed bones, kicking over pieces of clothing, looking underneath for the prize.

T
he main hospital building loomed large on my right. The remains of the dead were still piled thick around the bottom of the glass stairwell I’d shot up with that fifty-caliber machine gun. No dismembered and scavenged remains of soldiers lay among them. Of that, I was sure. Bypassing that trove, I headed toward the far northwest corner of the complex and walked toward a large, collapsed military tent.

“Do you remember that tent?”
I asked.

“No.” Murphy
wasn’t liking the heavy rain. He kept looking at the sky when it rumbled thunder. He was nervous about the creeping Whites and didn’t have any patience for memory lane.

“That’s where we went when we first got to the hospital.”

Murphy looked around. “The Army doesn’t even use those old-ass canvas tents anymore.”

“Maybe it’s a Red Cross tent.”

Murphy shrugged.

The heavy green canvas didn’t lay flat on the ground. Beneath it were lumps, some roughly rectangular in shape, cots most likely. Some I could only guess were bodies. Others had to be medical equipment. The body shaped lumps looked intact. The bodies of the dead underneath must have been protected from the scavenging Whites by the heavy canvas. That meant if any were soldiers, all of their equipment would be on the body rather than scattered to who knew where.

“Murphy, I’m going to crawl under the canvas and see what I can find.”

“That’s a stupid idea.”

“I know.”

“You know, and you’re going to do it anyway?”

“I was just agreeing with you so I wouldn’t have to argue with you about it.”

“It’s like you
want
me to punch you in the face.”

All this talk of punching me in the face was getting worrisome. “Keep an eye out, okay? Give me a few minutes.”

“And if a bunch of those naked fuckers come along while you’re underneath?”

“Warn me and then go hide. I’ll just pretend I’m dead until they leave.”

“And how will you know when they’re gone?”

“You’ll tell me.” I didn’t wait for a response but dropped to my hands and knees and proceeded to burrow beneath the edge of the canvas, leaving my scavenged booty on the ground in the rain.

Like just about every other thing I’d attempted since the virus hit, crawling beneath the canvas was so much more difficult than I’d have guessed. With no breeze, it was hot, wet and muddy. The abrasive weight of the canvas worked against me for every inch of progress, leaving me with only one speed: slow.

Once I’d made my way about ten feet in from the edge, a sturdy cot supported the canvas. The weight on my head and shoulders eased and I crawled along the path of waning resistance, hoping to catch my breath. Just about the time I was able to see into the inky shadow beneath the cot, the familiar howl of a hungry White startled me and I slipped down onto my belly as I tried to push myself back the way I’d come.

A blur of gray with snapping teeth and greedy yowls exploded toward me out of the dark.

I tried to get away. I tried vainly to wrestle my rifle around under the heavy canvas.

I should have gone for my knife instead.

A handful of bony fingers grasped my wrist and pulled. I yanked back as teeth brushed my skin and I fell onto my belly again, trying my best to swing a fist.

The emaciated creature screamed in premature victory. Retreat wasn’t working. I steeled my nerves to make the best of a charge.

Just then, the sound of bone crunching under steel cut the monster’s voice. The crunch was followed quickly by two more wet crunches, and the White’s grasp on my wrist went limp.

Still tense, I looked for more threats from the darkness under the cot.

“You okay, man?” It was Murphy.

“Yeah,” I said.

A blade poked through the canvas a few feet from my head. Dim light and rainwater poured through.

The air from the outside felt relatively cool as it rushed in on me. I saw Murphy through the split in the canvas, kneeling down and cutting his way through. “I swear to God, Zed. Sometimes it’s like you don’t have one damn bit of common sense. It’s like you want to do everything the hard way.”

I deflected. “How did you know you weren’t chopping my skull with the hatchet?” It was a crappy question, but it was the quickest one I could come up with.

Murphy let me know just how crappy it was. “Because I’m not retarded. I saw your dumb green lump ass crawling along the whole way.”

I huffed with as much dignity as I could in such a situation and wormed my way through the gap in the canvas. “Thanks,” I muttered.

Murphy stood up and looked around. “No biggie.”

Sitting down to collect myself, I looked back at the emaciated dead White through the tear in the tent. “I wonder how long he was stuck under there.”

Murphy looked down and grinned. “He’s not much skinnier than you.”

I noticed then the White was wearing a military uniform. I got up on my knees and grabbed him by the shoulder and tugged. His body came a few inches out of the hole. I pulled again and again.

Perhaps bored of seeing me struggling to pull the corpse out, Murphy reluctantly knelt down and gave me a hand. It only took a few more seconds to pull the body out into the rain.

“See?” I said. “He’s got a full kit.”

After a glance at the infected soldier, Murphy looked around for anything that might show an interest in us. I did too. It amazed me how natural it was to build that particular habit. I guess humans weren’t too far removed from a time in the past when fast critters with big teeth chased us around the savannah. No Whites anywhere in view seemed to care about us. One guy caught my attention. Over by the hospital wall, he was zigzagging through the shrubs while watching his feet. He seemed familiar.

Hmm.

I turned to Murphy, who was checking the magazines in the MOLLE vest of the dead White. I went for the boots. In a turn of fortune that made my under-canvas escapade worth it, the boots were my size. As a bonus, most of the magazines in the vest were full.

By the time I finished washing my newly acquired kit in the creek, the rain was coming down heavier than it had all morning.

Murphy was patient and uncharacteristically silent as I put on the pants and boots and arranged my gear. I looked up with a start when he said, “That shuffler is coming this way.”

The familiar-looking White who’d been dragging his feet in circuits around the shrubs by the hospital wall wasn’t more than twenty feet from us. I drew my knife from its sheath. Murphy had his hatchet ready.

But the closer he came, the more familiar he looked. I’d come into contact with plenty of people, both infected and not, on my previous visit to the hospital and they were all dead. Well, except for
Steph and Dalhover.

I glanced at Murphy. “I’m ready when you are.”

“’Bout time. This creek is starting to worry me. It’s been rising the whole time you were doing your laundry.”

That was true. I looked upstream. I don’t know what I was looking for. Maybe a wall of water from a coming
flash-flood? Dramatic, even for me.

The shuffler, seemingly oblivious to the rain, was getting pretty close.

“You think he’s going to follow us?” I asked.

Murphy hefted his hatchet. “I can see that he doesn’t.”

The shuffler came to a stop, not five feet away. He smiled.

What the hell?

That meant he had to have some degree of brain function. The worst of them never smiled.

Holy crap
.

The shuffler looked at me and said, “Zzzz…”

Murphy turned to me. “You know him?”

Dumbfounded, I nodded. It was Jeff Aubrey. He’d survived.

Murphy shook his head and lowered his hatchet, but he didn’t put it away.

“Jeff?” I took a step forward.

Jeff’s grin widened. “Zzzz…”

Murphy’s face turned to worry and he put a hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting closer. He took a quick look around to make sure nobody else was close enough to hear. “He’s not right.”

That much was clear. “I met him in the hospital. He was passed out with the fever when we escaped. We locked him in one of the rooms.”

Murphy went from worried to confused. “And?”

“He was Steph’s fiancé.”

Murphy shook his head in disbelief and laughed out loud.

“Jeff, can you speak?”

After a pause, he answered. “
Yez.”

“
Yez?” I said.

“
Yez.”

Murphy leaned in close to me. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a bad idea. Let’s ditch this dude and get the hell out of here.”

Sorely tempted to heed Murphy’s wishes, I said. “We can’t.”

“Hell yeah, we can. No good’s
gonna come from this. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you need to do the right thing and reunite Jeff here with Steph. But that stupid little good angel that sits on your shoulder doesn’t know shit.”

“
Anzel.” Jeff interrupted with another grin.

“He’s harmless,” I said.

“You don’t know that.” Murphy was getting a little bit pissed. “You don’t know anything about this guy. You met him before the virus fried his brain. Now you want to reunite him with Steph…”

“I didn’t say that,” I said.

“You didn’t need to. I know you. I know you always want to do the dumbass right thing. But it’s gonna get you killed one day.”

I shook my head.

“Killz,” Jeff said. “Killz.”

Murphy raised his eyebrows, as if to emphasize Jeff’s choice of words.

“Jeff, what have you been eating?” I asked.

“Hungry,” he said.

“Have you eaten anything?”

“Hungry,” he said again, as his smile melted away.

“If you bring him back, you know you can kiss any chance of getting into Steph’s pants goodbye,” Murphy said. “You know that, right?”

“It’s not about that.”

“It’s always about that.”

“I know you’re not like that, Murphy.”

Murphy smiled wickedly and shook his head. “Man, you wanna bet?”

The rain was coming down so hard, it was flowing off of us. Hushed conversation was impossible.

“I can’t leave him here,” I said.

“You can, and you should, but you won’t.”

I didn’t see any point in responding.

“Fine. I’m only
gonna say one more thing about it. You won’t be doing anybody any favors,” Murphy said.

“How’s that?”

“Zat,” Jeff said.

We were already ignoring him.

“First off, he seems to be doing fine right here on his own.”

I shrugged. I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t argue. He was alive. Nearly everybody else he knew from the hospital wasn’t.

“You’re not gonna get any pussy.”

I shrugged again.

“Whatever.” Murphy said. “And how do you think Steph is gonna feel when you bring him back?”

I started to say she’d be happy, overjoyed maybe. But Murphy’s question made me give that some real thought.

He read my hesitation correctly and nodded. “You see, don’t you? Ask yourself how you would feel if your old girlfriend showed up and she had the IQ of a frog. You’d take care of her, out of obligation, like we do with Russell, but how could you still love her? She wouldn’t be the same person, Zed. This dude isn’t, either. He can barely speak one-syllable words.”

“
Zyllble.”

“All you’re
gonna do is make Steph feel bad and saddle her with a responsibility she can’t handle and that will probably get her killed. That’s if he doesn’t decide to kill her himself when he sees her. You gotta remember, Zed, you and me are Whites, like him. He doesn’t see us as food. He might be just as crazy as the rest of these fucks.”

“
Fugz.”

We stood there in the rain for a bit, Murphy letting it all
sink in.

Thinking about these things was bothersome. It was so much easier to just act on my whims. “What’s
Steph going to say when I tell her I saw Jeff and just left him?”

“
Dude
.” Murphy looked around at the rain. “You don’t have to tell her anything. All that knowledge will do is make her feel bad. That’s it. There’s no upside to this situation unless we turn around and leave Professor Syllable right here and forget about him.”

Murphy was right. Jeff couldn’t make anything better for anybody. He was a burden at best. But the idea of leaving him felt bad, nevertheless.

The wind started to blow heavy, fat drops against my face in little slaps that irritated me before the drops ran down through my soaked clothes and filled my new boots. The world had turned to noisy gray.

“Damn, it’s
comin’ down.” Murphy had to raise his voice to be heard just a few feet away.

I looked around. The rain was so heavy it was getting hard to make out the shapes of nearby buildings. Water ran ankle-deep across the ground where we were standing. Waller Creek was visibly swelling over its banks. It was a
flash-flood in the making.

I shouted. “Fuck!”

Murphy brought his rifle to his shoulder and spun around, looking for targets. His head jerked left. Then right. He looked back at me, confused, tense.

I pointed at the creek. I had to shout. “It’s going to flood.”

“Who cares? Let’s get out of here.”

“That intersection we’re headed to is only a few blocks off Waller Creek.”

Murphy’s brows knit. “You think…?”

I nodded vigorously.

Floods in Texas came and went, usually a few feet here or there when a creek overran its banks. Carpets in nearby houses would need to get replaced. The drywall would need to be rehung. Sometimes, the floods washed down the creek beds with the wrath of God behind them. Twisted steel, piled masonry and smashed cars were left when the water subsided.

“Murphy, if the water rises too fast, it might make finding those silencers impossible.” I was getting hoarse from shouting. “I think we should go get that Humvee I left up on the roof of the parking garage and drive over there.”

“Drive?” Murphy’s face showed just how bad he thought that idea was. He looked around for any Whites that might materialize out of the gray sheets of rain.

“With it coming down like this—” I looked at Jeff and doubted what I was about to say “—all of the Whites with half a brain are hiding inside. They’ll never even see us drive by.”