Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (23 page)

Ten minutes later, Murphy and I were up by the road in the trees, looking for Whites. None were out.

“How long do you want to wait?” Murphy asked.

“I want to get this done and get down the river.”

“Well, there aren’t any infected out.”

“Okay.” I gave Murphy a nod that said, “Watch this,” and hollered out into the street. “Hey monsters. Time for second breakfast.”

Heads immediately popped up out of bushes and from behind parked cars.

Murphy raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at an infected man two houses
down . The white was slowly standing up, looking back and forth, and searching for the source of the voice he’d just heard.

The rifle cracked. Blood erupted from a wound and the infected man crumpled into the bush.

I hissed. “Shit.”

“What?”

“That was loud.”

“That’s ‘cause we’re right here by it.” With the barrel of his rifle, Murphy gestured at a couple of Whites three houses down. “I don’t think those ones heard it, or they don’t know what the sound was.”

Indeed, the pair of infected women was walking gingerly down a driveway, looking around. They knew something was up, but they definitely weren’t running toward the sound from Murphy’s rifle.

With only one way to know for sure, I knelt, leveled my rifle at the nearest of the pair and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. Neither of the infected women fell. Neither of them ran in our direction. Neither of them even looked at us.

“You got blanks in that thing?” Murphy grinned. It was good to see a grin, but it still held an emptiness that would take a long time to fill.

“I missed. It’s no secret you’re a better shot.”

Murphy took the next shot and one of the infected women fell. The other jumped back, frozen in surprise.

“Show off.” I fired another round and then another. “Damn.”

None of the infected was coming at us. I counted seven on their feet up and down the street, suspicious, but with inadequate senses and insufficient brainpower to figure out what was going on. At least the silencers seemed to be working as hoped.

Murphy said, “Give me your gun. There’s got to be something wrong with it, unless you’re the only person in the world who gets worse with practice.”

Yeah, that had to be it. The rifle was faulty somehow. Maybe the sights were misaligned. I unclipped the rifle from my sling and we traded weapons. Murphy gave my rifle a quick inspection and raised it to his shoulder. With only a moment’s pause, he pulled the trigger. The rifle cracked. The second infected woman in the driveway fell.

“What the hell?”

Murphy shook his head as he lowered the weapon. “This rifle’s fine.”

“Crap, I suck with guns.”

“I’ll draw them closer in. Shoot at them when they’re near and see how that works for you. It just takes practice, is all.”

I shook my head at my frustration. “I’ve been practicing a lot.”

Murphy hollered, “Come and get it.”

That got the attention of the remaining five, who all started heading toward us, looking back and forth to find the source of the voice.

I pointed my rifle at a man who was jogging in the middle of the street and bearing down on us. At two houses distant, I fired. Miss.

I fired again. Another miss.

“Take a deep breath,” Murphy said.

The guy was in front of the house next door. I fired and missed. He looked right at the spot in the trees where we were hiding and ran straight for us.

At ten feet away, I fired again and hit him in the chest. At that point, the other Whites on the street, having seen the man run toward us with all of the certainty infected body language could convey, were also running at our position.

Murphy and I went to work shooting them down. That’s to say, I squeezed off another six rounds at the sky, houses and shrubs, while Murphy killed the rest of them.

Angry with myself, I asked, “What am I doing wrong?”

“Not sure. I was kinda too busy to watch.”

“Well, thanks.”

“For?”

“For killing them. Because if we were going to depend on me to shoot them, we’d be getting eaten right now.”

“Man, don’t get so down on yourself. We learned something pretty important.”

Sarcastically, I said, “That the silencers work.”

“More important.”

“And that is?”

“Zed, it’s like when you get mad, your brain stops working or something. Because this is exactly the kind of shit you’re good at figuring out. And then lecturing me on.”

“Just tell me what you want to tell me.” I wasn’t in the mood for guessing.

“When you missed that first dude, it was no big deal. He didn’t hear the sound of the gun, or he was too far away to figure out what the sound was. When he got close enough, though, he could tell. Did you see that just before you killed him? When you fired that last shot that missed, he made a beeline for us. He knew we were shooting.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly. Ah. The silencers are exactly what we hoped for, but when the infected are too close, the silencers aren’t silent enough.”

I smiled. That was a great thing to learn. I frowned. “So by the time they’re close enough for me to hit them, they’re close enough to figure out that I’m shooting at them. Great.”

We stashed the Humvee in the house’s garage, took on full loads of ammunition, about a half-dozen hand grenades each, and enough food to last several days. Then it was through the house, across the backyard and over the fence. With no wind and no rain, the jagged limestone slope down to the river was significantly less dangerous than it had been a few days before. Still, it took more than an hour for us to make our way to the water’s edge.

The river was flowing fast and it was still at least a foot higher than normal. But up in the branches of the trees – the ones that made it through the flood with roots still in the ground – were clumps of grass, gobs of mud and parts of houses. Up the slope of the bank were broken boats, coolers, boards, furniture, housewares, pretty much everything you could imagine, much of it shattered into puzzle pieces of the whole, covered in a film or a thick layer of mud. And in all of that were the bodies, naked, white and bloated with gasses of decay. The heat was accelerating the growth of putrefying bacteria and everything stank of death.

For the first mile of our trek along the river, we saw several ski boats, some intact, most not. But none close enough to the water so we could guess at how to get them afloat. We did come across a Sea-D
oo that looked plenty big to hold us both. We sweated and shoved it across fifty feet of rough ground to get it in the water, only to find it wouldn’t start.

Along the way, we didn’t see a single living White. We saw plenty more bodies with bellies distending in the heat, on the shore with arms or legs bobbing in the edge of the water. Some were half-buried in drifts of wooden debris. More than a few were lodged in tree branches over our heads.

Eventually, we found a plastic yellow kayak thing along with a canoe paddle and a fence board. We pushed it out into the river and used it to float with the current. But even that held a significant disadvantage. The current carried us too quickly to adequately survey the destruction on both sides of the river.

Struggling to slow the kayak with his paddle, Murphy said, “This isn’t going to work.”

“Yeah. That and I feel vulnerable in this thing.”

“Like it’s going to tip over any minute?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“It’s not even a real kayak. It’s like some kind of Fisher Price kiddy kayak or something.”

“How about if we just float with the current and whenever we see a boat that looks seaworthy, we’ll stop and see if we can start the engine?”

“What if the water got into the engines? Do you think they’ll start?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know much of anything about marine engines, but in principle, they’re just like car engines. Air and gas go in one end, exhaust comes out the other. Water can get in just as easily, I guess. If it does, the engine probably won’t start.”

“Makes sense.”

We pulled our paddles out of the water and watched the shoreline.

Murphy said, “If we don’t find a boat, you know we can’t paddle back up river with the current this strong.”

“We’ll have to hike it, then.”

Changing the subject, Murphy said, “I’m seeing lots of dead Whites.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder how many of them got killed in the flood.”

“Hundreds, at least. It seems like everywhere I look, there’s a body,” I said.

“Not to be a pessimist, but we need to prepare ourselves for what we might find downriver.”

“Meaning?”

“
Steph and them got away in that ski boat, but the way the river was flooding, you know there’s a pretty good chance they sank, right?”

I nodded. “I know that. I think I more than know that. I expect that. I’m just hoping for something else.”

“You don’t seem all broken up about it.”

“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me. I’m just trying to think, What Would Murphy Do?”

“Zed, I’m just trying to get through the day, here. I know you like to poke fun at me about trying to smile and move on. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m having a hard time. It’s like everything is weighing me down. I think if I just move my feet I can get back to a good place.”

“Murphy, that’s what I’m doing, too.” I looked at him. “Honestly. I just need to find out if the others made it. I need to help them out if they need the help. Heck, maybe they’re all sitting on a deck on the back of somebody’s house down here waiting for us. I want to give them their silencers. That’s their chance to survive. And we’ve already paid too high of a price for those silencers not to have them put to use.”

Murphy pointed at a ski boat on the bank. I looked over and shook my head. It wasn’t the one we were looking for.

Continuing with my thoughts, I said, “I want to go and kill Smart Ones. I don’t know how many I need to kill. I don’t even know if it makes any sense to do it or not anymore. I don’t know if it ever did. I don’t know if it wasn’t all just a rationalization to take some vengeance out on Mark’s stupid white ass. I really only know I
feel the need to kill them the same way I feel a need to eat and breathe. It’s a necessity to me. I can’t explain it better than that. I keep seeing what those Smart Ones are doing. It’s like they’re fucking up the whole Goddamned world and I want to punish them for it.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Punishing them would feel good.”

I nodded also. “Maybe when enough of them are dead, I’ll get in a Humvee and drive to Balmorhea and sit out there for a few years trying to forget about all of this shit. Maybe I’ll try to figure out if Steph and I can be happy together without all of this bullshit. Maybe I’ll figure out if we’re something more than convenient people to hold onto when the grief gets too heavy to bear. Hell, I want to just wake up in the morning and not have to worry about seeing any dead people, without mourning whoever got killed yesterday or worrying about who’s going to die tomorrow.”

I half-expected a smartass remark from Murphy after going off on my long rant. But I guess even he was past
that. And that was sad enough to hurt.

We
rounded the bend in the river at City Park and floated past a long row of concrete foundations for McMansions that once stood next to the water. Now those houses were just broken pieces piled into a single mound of debris twenty feet tall among the thick trunks of several dozen cypress trees.

“I’ll be damned.”

The little marina next to Ski Shores Café wasn’t demolished. Well, most of it was, but one of the structures for keeping the boats protected from the elements and hoisted up out of the water was undamaged and still held at least eight boats. The mound of mansion parts saved it from the river’s destructive rush.

Murphy and I paddled hard across the current to get to the mouth of the marina and into the relatively calm water of its shelter. Boards, bodies and other floating debris were caught in the backwater. I didn’t comment on the bodies. In fact, I did my best to ignore them as we pushed the boat past one after another.

We guided the plastic kayak into an empty slip where ropes hung with cleats or pieces of chrome still attached from dangling ends. The boat that had been there must have washed away in the flood. Coming up alongside the remains of a walkway that separated the slips, I took hold of a post and steadied the kayak while Murphy climbed out. He, in turn, gave me a hand out and we lifted our watercraft onto the dock.

“It feels good to be out of that,” Murphy said as he looked around.

I nodded and looked across the inlet to the parking lot where I’d found the food delivery truck. It seemed like such a stroke of luck at the time. It was gone. Well, not gone. Further down the bank, I saw the twisted trailer bent around the trunks of several trees. Ski Shores Café, the restaurant the truck had been parked behind,
was
gone. Much of its concrete foundation remained, as did several of the old cypress trees that shaded its deck. But not much else was there.

As for the dock we’d found, each of the boats hung several feet above the water on hoists to keep the hulls dry and algae free. Murphy climbed up to the first, a formerly shiny boat with some kind of fast-looking pink design painted on the side. It looked to be covered in a film of mud.

“This might not be the one,” said Murphy.

I couldn’t see anything wrong with the boat from where I stood. “How’s that?”

“It’s full of water.”

“Full?” I wondered how the cables on the hoist system could handle the weight.

“You know what I mean. It’s maybe a foot deep inside.”

Shaking my head, I asked, “Can you see into the others?”

Murphy climbed higher and reached up to take hold of an old black support beam beneath the tin roof. “They’ve all got water in them.”

“You want to try to start that one? Who knows, it might work.”

Murphy swung a leg over into the boat with a splash of shallow water. He sloshed himself over to the helm and fumbled around for a minute. “There’s no key.”

Duh.
Of course.

I hadn’t thought of that. I walked out to the end of the dock to see down the row of hanging boats.

Murphy leaned on the gunwale and looked at me. “What do you think?”

“There’s an old one down there.”

Murphy looked.

“The faded aqua one with the
Batmobile fins on the back.”

“We’re here. We might as well try it.”

While Murphy climbed out of his boat, I walked over to the main walkway and headed down to the aqua colored boat. Just as Murphy had, I climbed up the hoist equipment until I could step over the side of the hull into the water inside. The willies ran up my spine as I imagined mosquito larvae squirming through the dirty water to cling to my legs.

The boat’s dashboard was simple: a steering wheel, speedometer, fuel gauge and a starter button. I pressed the button, but nothing happened. I exhaled a long, disappointed sigh.

“Bad news?” Murphy asked.

“Won’t start.”

“Back in the kiddy kayak?”

“I guess.”