Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (25 page)

We put down anchor in a wide cove and slept on the boat. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was the safest we could make ourselves for the least amount of effort.

I woke in the morning as the sky was making the slow transition to blue. A heavy dew had settled on my skin, making it difficult for the mosquitoes to make their way around on my exposed arms, face and neck. That’s when I realized the virus had a benefit I hadn’t thought about. The mosquito bites didn’t itch.

I stood up, stretched, yawned and put a big smile on my face. It wasn’t real, but it was worth a try.

I felt better.

The birds were singing in the trees like nothing in the world was out of place. The water in the cove was calm and inviting. I stripped off most of my equipment, keeping only my boots, pants and machete. I couldn’t hit a damn thing with the guns, so why bring them with me?

I went to the stern of the boat, climbed out onto a small swim platform and slipped silently into the water.

The cove wasn’t deep and I was able to stand on the bottom, which seemed to be covered with all manner of debris. I’d made a good choice to keep my boots on. I
lay back in the water and let myself float as best I could with the added weight of the machete. Still, it felt good, relaxing, otherworldly, with only the calming flow of the river water to hear.

I stayed there for a long time, thinking about everything, thinking a lot about Murphy and the way he accepted the tragedies crashing into him. He kept his head up and smiled, most of the time.

Was it so easy to lose the shackles the past burdened you with? Was it so hard to cry through the grief and then smile to face a new day? Was it so necessary to hold all of the pain so close to my heart I could feel it over and over and over?

The answer had to be no. Murphy’s bumper-sticker-simple philosophy worked for him. Why couldn’t it work for me?

I was alive in a world where I was likely to be confronted by a new sorrow every day until one of them killed me. To choose to live, to make that choice to fight for life every day, had to be a choice to accept all the sorrows of all of my tomorrows. But if that choice to live was to be bearable at all, I needed to let loose my embrace of the pain, both yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.

And it was that easy.

No, not really.

It would take work. I was too habituated to nursing my painful memories to lose them so easily. But if I tried, I might look back one day and say to myself it had been easier than I thought.

So I stood up straight in the water. Fish swam around me. Birds, still uncaring about the travails of humans, chirped and sang. The sky was a beautiful blue. The big trees that survived the flood swayed in the morning breeze. And I’d never had a better friend than Murphy.

The sound of running water startled me and I jerked my head around to find the source.

Murphy was standing on the swim platform, relieving himself into the river. “If the water gets warm, swim away. Heh, heh, heh.”

Back out on the river, Murphy and I repeated the previous day’s routine. I wasted some time and bullets on target practice, with no discernible improvement. We spent a few hours siphoning gasoline out of derelict boats. We checked each cove and marina. We hiked up on the shore a dozen times to look closer at boats that might have been the Malibu.

When we reached the point where the riverboat had snapped its anchor line, Murphy asked, “What do you think?”

I looked upriver. “Looking downriver for them seemed like the natural thing. It occurs to me now nothing was stopping them from going up that way.”

“Nothing but the current.”

“I’m sure that boat could have run against the current. I mean, what will these things do, forty or fifty miles per hour?”

Murphy shrugged. “How would I know?”

“It’s worth a look. We can probably check all the way up to the dam by sundown.”

“Another night sleeping on the boat. It’ll be fun.”

“Sarcasm is not your forte, Murphy.”

“Maybe I’m just so good at it, you can’t tell when I’m being sarcastic.”

“Whatever.” I looked up the hill on the north bank and spotted the glistening windows of the house where Murphy and I had ridden out the last of the storm. “We can climb back up there and crash tonight.”

Murphy looked up the steep slope. “If we get done soon enough, maybe. I don’t want to climb up there in the dark.”

“Another night sleeping in the boat won’t kill us.”

Murphy started the engine. “You’re the boss.”

“Whatever.”

Still in the absence of other humans, we made our way up the river. We came across fewer and fewer bodies as the miles passed. The destruction on the banks became less severe.

“You know–” I turned away from the trees on the bank to look at Murphy. “I just naturally assumed all of this flood water poured over Mansfield Dam. But I’m starting to think that storm dumped all the rain here in the hill country.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.”

“I’m thinking if they came upriver, their chances were pretty good.”

“Maybe.”

Reading Murphy’s tone, I made a guess. “But you don’t think they came upriver, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Who would? It’s not intuitive. Going upriver is like running toward the danger instead of running away from it. People don’t think that way.”

“Still, they could have.”

“Sure.” Murphy scrutinized me with a long stare.

“What?”

“When did you turn optimistic?”

“I wouldn’t go as far as to call it optimism.”

“Whatever.”

More hours passed before we rounded a bend to see the sand-colored monolith of Mansfield Dam filling the valley in front of us. Water was pouring out of the floodgates with a roar that rolled down the valley. And though the current was running faster than normal, it wasn’t over the banks. In fact, it looked to have peaked at four or five feet above normal. Not bad, considering how deep it had gotten downriver.

Spanning the valley just downriver from the dam and a hundred fee
t over the river, the 620 Bridge stood mostly empty of cars. Further downstream, closer to us, a much older bridge reached from bank to bank just a few feet above the water level, surprisingly undamaged.

As we neared the low bridge, the point where we’d have to turn the boat around or get
out and walk, Murphy pointed to the right, shaking his head slowly. “That can’t be it.”

I followed the line from the end of his finger to a narrow old boat ramp of cr
umbling concrete and overgrown bushes. At the top of the ramp, on the muddy ground in the trees to one side, lay a black-hulled ski boat. I couldn’t contain my surprise. “Jesus, I think it is.”

Staying calm, Murphy said, “You’ve said that about every black-hulled boat we’ve seen.”

“No, I think that’s it. See that logo paint thing on the side? That’s what our boat had.”

“Just don’t get too excited, okay? I’m betting Malibu manufactured more than one boat like that.”

“Just drive the boat over there and let’s check it out.”

“Do you see any Whites?”

I was standing on my seat by then, steadying myself with a grip on the windshield, thoroughly scanning up and down the bank. “Same as it’s been all day. Nothing.”

“Just don’t get too comfy with that, okay? You know as well as I do they’re still out there somewhere. When we come across them again, I’d rather be ready than surprised. Know what I mean?”

“Yup.”

Murphy pulled the boat up to one of several half-rotted pilings that marked a lane for boat traffic coming on and off the ramp. Both of us took a moment to work through our preparedness habit. My rifle hung from the sling on my back. I still had my Hello Kitty backpack with some grenades, some plastic bottles of water and food for another day. My MOLLE vest held my full and empty clips…oops, did I say clips? Old habit. I looked over at Murphy in silent guilt.

He saw me in the process of running my hands over the magazines, making sure the Velcro on each pouch was secure. “You need ammo, man?”

“No. Just checking my magazines.”

Murphy looked at me quizzically. “You can’t hit anything, anyway.”

With my pistol in one hand and my new machete in the other, I said, “Ready when you are.”

Murphy gave me a nod and I jumped off the boat into waist-deep water.

While I waded to shore, Murphy stood on the bow of the ski boat with his rifle at his shoulder, pointing into the woods. It was the safe way to get to shore. He covered me while I was vulnerable in the water. Once my feet were firmly on the bank, I covered him while he came across.

Once we were both onshore, Murphy took the role of guard, scanning right and left through the trees, looking for and expecting a dozen infected to burst out with no warning.

I stepped over the ramp’s broken concrete and headed toward the boat. As I neared, I was surer it was
the
boat. But once I stepped up beside it, I was positive. Hanging from the ignition was a key. On the key ring was a small foam float in the shape of a Shiner beer bottle. I’d seen that before.

Steph
, Dalhover, Amy and Megan had made it to this point.

They were alive
. They had to be alive.

I grinned.

Murphy was beside me by then. “You’re grinning like a monkey. You’re sure this is the one?”

I pointed at the key chain.

“Can’t argue with that.”

I looked around and climbed into the boat, rocking it to the side with the addition of my weight. “Where do you think they went?”

“Quiet, dude.”

Steadying myself with a hand on the side of the hull, I said, “Sorry.”

I looked up and down the deck. I looked at the seats. I started lifting the seat cushions and looking underneath.

“They aren’t hiding under the cushions.”

“I’m looking for… clues.”

“Clues?”

“You know, whether they all made it here alive. Where they went. Stuff like that.”

“The boat’s tied to that tree, so somebody got here alive.”

I looked up at the rope tied from the bow to a narrow tree trunk.

Duh.

That’s when I spotted an odd pattern of white scratches in the black gel coat paint across the bow. Careful to keep my balance on the sloped deck, I crossed between the split windshield and the padded seats in the bow. I leaned over and looked at the words that were scratched onto the front edge of the bow as it curved down. “Look at this.”

I put a hand on the gunwale and jumped over to the ground, landing beside the rope that held the beached boat, a place where someone could have stood two days ago, out of the angry river, safe. That’s where someone had scratched a message into the paint.

Murphy gave it just enough of a glance to see the pattern of scratches was text before looking up the road that led down to the boat ramp. “What’s it say?”

“It says they’re going to Monk’s Island.”

Murphy grinned. “That sounds like a clue to me.”

It was late in the day and Murphy and I should have made the safe choice and found a sturdy house to hole up in. We could have spent another night feeding the mosquitoes while sleeping on the boat. But with our goal certain on the other side of the dam, we chose to press on.

The boat ramp led to a narrow asphalt road with too many patched potholes to be smooth. But that wasn’t important to us since we were on foot. Small houses were hidden at the ends of gravel driveways, back in the trees on both sides of the road. Many had cars parked in front, though my bet was at least half of those were broken down well before the virus hit. Front doors on some houses were open. Many had broken windows. A few bones and shreds of clothing lay in front yards. Several coyotes worked on the scraps in front of one house.

We crossed 620 where its four paved lanes entered the half-mile-long bridge over the river. It struck me as odd that only a few abandoned cars were visible. The number of bridges over the river that bisected Austin surely had to be less than ten. Given what Murphy and I had seen on the bridges in the center of town, I’d expected to see a barricade at one end or the other of every one.

With a fenced-off transformer station down the hill on our left, we started a rugged climb up a rock-covered slope that made up the face of the dam on the north side of the river. The rocks were too large and jagged to provide any kind of decent footing. Both of us slipped countless times and got our feet jammed between the rocks on the way up. At the top, we were breathing hard and bleeding from new cuts on our shins, knees and hands. We climbed over the guardrail and were on the long-obsolete two-lane road that topped the dam.

The thing about Lake Travis I always found odd was it was called a working lake by the Lower Colorado River Authority. I think that meant it was a water supply for much of Travis County and had a primary purpose of regulating the flow down the river so it wouldn’t flood out Austin or the rice farmers further south. Nor would it leave their irrigation canals dry during droughts. As a result, the lake level moved up and down by ten to twenty feet or more through the course of each year.

At the moment, with the sun just a hair below the horizon and the sky glowing red and orange behind us, the lake was as full as I’d seen it. Looking down the length of the main basin as it spread mostly north, we saw Monk’s Island, named for an
old Spanish mission built on a hill that reached above the water in the center of the lake. Of course, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the weathered limestone walls were erected, the lake was a long way in the future. 

When Mansfield Dam was completed in the early ‘40s and Lake Travis filled, half of the mission was submerged. The old church at the top of the hill and several outbuildings still stood. They were surrounded on three sides by a thick wall that followed the line of the hill down into the lake.

The mission had been abandoned before the First World War and had been turned into a state park as part of the dam project. So, uninhabited with a couple of arable acres on top, surrounded by the widest moat anyone was likely to find, it wasn’t a bad place to go for safety.

Looking across the glistening water at the pale walls of the church, hued in blood red from the setting sun, Murphy asked, “You see anything?”

“Can’t tell from here.”

“You think they made it?”

I shrugged and hoped. “We’re not going to get there tonight. We should probably go find a place to stay.”

“It may be safer to find a boat in the dark than trying to clear a house of the infected.”

I was tired, but the possibility of reuniting with the others gave me a second wind. “I’m game if you are.”

Murphy looked over at the shore on our right, then left. “Which way, then?”

Pointing to the right, I said, “I think the shore on that side is pretty rugged, with cliffs and ravines and stuff.” I pointed left. “If we’re going to follow the shore and look for a boat, I think we cross the dam and go that way.”

“Sounds good.” Murphy started walking down the two-lane road.

We were nearly halfway across the dam when he decided it was a good time to pick up the conversation. “I know there was a flood and all, but it seems odd we haven’t seen any infected in two days.” He put on his big grin. “I think I’m kinda starting to miss them.”

I laughed. Given that I had a three-hundred-foot drop down the face of the dam on my left and a fifty-foot drop to the surface of the lake on my right, along with a half-mile of empty road behind and in front of me, I laughed loudly. It felt good for a moment not to care. Not a single White had a hope of hearing me.

Catching the mood, Murphy yelled at the top of his lungs, “Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

I faced the lake and did the same.

After that, we stood and watched the last of the sun’s glow turn to black on the lake’s surface.

When we started walking again, I said, “Yeah. It is kind of weird that we haven’t seen any of them.”

“If the others are on Monk’s Island, what do you think about staying there?”

“I don’t know.” It seemed tempting to have a place within reach that might be a sanctuary.

“Do you think the Whites could get to us there?”

“I don’t know, Murphy. I just know every time we underestimate them, every time we think we’re safe, it all goes to shit.”

“Ah, Pessimistic Zed. It’s good to have you back, man.”

I shook my head and smiled. “I’m just trying to work the Murphy plan. Shouldn’t you be encouraging me?”

“I was.”

“Whatever.”

As the sky above us blackened enough for the stars to sparkle, Murphy said, “I wonder how many normal people survived.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mr. Mays would have been the last one we saw, right?”

“There were a bunch of them holed up at Camp Mabry.”

“But they’re all dead now, right?”

I shook my head emphatically. “We don’t know that.”

“We saw the bones, man.”

“Yeah, we saw a lot of bones. But
Freitag and Harris got out with that skinny guy, what’s-his-name. More must have gotten away.”

Murphy shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so. You think there might be some all around then, just hiding?”

“Hiding seems to be the best solution. Or getting out of town. Holy shit. I forgot about the family we helped up on 183 the other day.”

Murphy smiled. “Yeah, I totally forgot about that. Zed, I feel good about that.” Murphy stopped walking and turned to look at me. “This is a big, fucked up world now. But I feel good about that. We did the right thing.”

I never was the sentimental type, nor the enthusiastic type, but Murphy’s happiness over the good deed rubbed off. It
was
something to feel good about. It was a sad little tragedy in the making that, because of our intervention, had a happy ending. Without the vocabulary to express how good it did feel, I simply said, “Yeah.”

With smiles buoyed by that one act of kindness, we walked down the dark road toward the other side of the lake.