Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (10 page)

Being close to Thanksgiving, the sun set earlier in the day. Murphy and I rearranged the cars just as we’d discussed, buttoned up the garage, and rolled down Mt. Bonnell Road with a full charge on the Mustang’s battery and a full charge on our night vision goggles. Unfortunately, we had less ammunition than we would have liked and few hand grenades.

Nothing is ever perfect.

We had a half moon and not many clouds. Through the night vision goggles the world looked bright and alive. Coyotes were prowling. Owls swooped silently down from the trees to skewer their talons through inattentive rats. Whites who happened to be looking at the road stopped what they were doing to piece together in their virus-diminished brains what the shiny black shadow was floating quietly past. Only a few made any effort to get close to the road for a better look, let alone a futile chase.

We passed Camp Mabry. It was on our way out. We went over the highway—Loop 1—on the bridge, thankfully still clear. That led us through a maze of residential blocks cut through by Shoal Creek.

“You know where you’re going?” Murphy asked.

I had a pretty clear idea of the destination. I was certain the helicopters had landed down near the Capitol building. Get there, and all I’d have to do was look around for a few minutes and there they’d be, surrounded by a bunch of assholes with guns. I wasn’t sure what would come after that, but if the opportunity arose to punch one of them in the face—well, I wouldn’t complain about that. Anyway, that was pretty much my plan. I pointed out over the hood. “That way.”

“Yeah, I know.” Murphy heaved an exaggerated sigh.

“I’m just working my way through this neighborhood, looking for open streets.”

Murphy nodded and started looking down the side streets. 

“I need to make a left if I can,” I said. “The last four streets we’ve passed were blocked.”

“You’re still thinking the Capitol building?” asked Murphy.

“Yup.”

We took our left turn, found a north-south road and made our way down to 15
th
Street. That wide thoroughfare had remained surprisingly clear, at least up to the point where it clogged with abandoned cars and military vehicles near Brackenridge Hospital. Driving on the clear road so close to our destination left me wary, however. It ran right past the northern edge of the Capitol campus, which is why I made a right turn three blocks before I reached the corner of the Capitol property.

“Hey?” Murphy said, pointing down 15
th
Street as we turned off. “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Don’t want to get shot at again in case those assholes are over there on the Capitol grounds.” I looked admiringly at the interior of the Mustang. “We just got this shiny new car.” I smiled. “I don’t want it to get messed up.”

Murphy laughed.

When we reached 12
th
Street I spotted a parking garage, zipped silently in through the entrance, and parked the car on a nearly deserted second floor. I pointed east. “The Capitol is about four blocks that way.” I pointed south. “You know what’s down there?”

“Is this a trick question?” Murphy asked.

I shook my head. “About four blocks that way.”

Murphy turned his palms up. “Should I?”

“The Travis County Jail.”

Murphy laughed. “Where it all started. For us anyway.”

I looked south and recalled the jail, the riot, and our escape. “That was some fucked up shit.”

“It’s
all
been some fucked up shit.” Murphy smiled again and got out of the car.

I got out, jingling the keys in my hand. “Leave ‘em or take ‘em?”

Murphy patted his jeans pocket where he had the extra key stashed. “We’ve had too much shit stolen already. We take the keys. If some other fucker runs through and needs to steal a ride, he better hope there are more cars upstairs ‘cause he’s not taking ours.”

We headed out.

We walked up a hill that ran east along 12
th
Street, staying in the darkest shadows behind cars and other debris left scattered on the roads by the storms and the post-virus chaos. When the hill crested two blocks west of the Capitol grounds, we saw that we’d come to the right place.

The Texas State Capitol complex covered a square in the center of Austin four city blocks long on each side. The Capitol building sat in the middle of what were mostly enormous old oak trees shading acres of green grass so thick and soft that it made visitors want to throw off their shoes to feel it between their toes.

The grass on the northern side of the Capitol grounds had been dug up years earlier to bury a massive state office complex connected into the historic Capitol building through what was its basement. They layered the whole thing in a couple acres of concrete except for one giant, perfectly round hole a hundred or more feet across and three stories deep. The round wall inside the hole was flanked by granite pillars, balconies, and tall windows through which sunlight poured to irritate the bureaucrats in their warrens.

Surrounding the whole complex on the inside edge of the sidewalk had been a decorative iron fence that stood about three feet tall with rows of little gold star spikes along the top edge. All of that iron was now gone or more accurately, relocated.

Right on the curb, some bunch of somebodies had constructed a rampart at least fifteen feet tall that incorporated cars, pieces of cars, semi-trailers, metal doors, sheets of galvanized tin, and pretty much any piece of metal that could be scavenged from nearby. Whoever built it had welded all the pieces together to form a fairly smooth wall that ran perfectly parallel to the street. That black iron fence that used to keep tourists off the grass now topped the rampart.

The wall was every color of post-industrial ugly with a wealth of rust spots where the parts had been tack-welded but not painted. Paint was a luxury. Pieces above overlapped pieces below—like shingles—leaving no apparent handholds. As much as the wall looked like a pile of junk at a glance, a second look revealed how formidable it was. No one would be scaling it without a rope. I suspected from the look of the pieces of cars and trucks incorporated into it, nothing short of an Abrams tank could knock it over or crash through it.

At odd intervals along the top edge of the rampart stood what appeared to be deer blinds. Inside some of them crouched men with rifles. The rifles had the now-familiar bulky suppressors on the ends of their barrels.

“You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.

“Yup,” said Murphy. “The Hillbillies made themselves a fort.”

“I wonder how they managed to get that built.” I looked up and down the length of the wall as it paralleled the street. Even through the night vision goggles, the sight was a familiar one. Four lanes of asphalt and concrete covered completely in the remnants of humans: clothes, shoes, bones, and bodies in various stages of rot. The carpet of the dead was not still. Among the corpses crawled rats, dogs, and even the brain-fried infected, so desperate for food that they were gnawing bits and bites of flesh off the decomposing bodies.

“They’ve been killing a lot of Whites down here,” said Murphy. “More than up at Mabry, I think.”

Pointing at all the pieces of clothing among the dead, I said, “I don’t think this wall was here when the naked horde came through town.”

Murphy shrugged and put on an innocent face. “Jealous?”

“What?” I shot him an angry look. “What does that mean?”

“These guys held out. We didn’t.”

Shaking my head, and recalling how easily the naked horde had knocked over the wall around Sarah Mansfield’s compound, I said, “You know as well as I do that if half a million naked Whites rolled up on this place, everyone inside would be dead now.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

I huffed and looked back at the wall.

Murphy said, “So, what’s the plan, Batman?”

Without looking away from the wall, I said, “I’m going in.”

“Couldn’t you think of something stupider than that?”

“Sarcasm?” I asked.

Murphy shrugged. “It works.”

“I’m not going to walk up to the door and announce myself.”

“Good,” Murphy chuckled. “Because you never know, when you’re dealing with the Valiant Null Spot.”

Ignore him. Ignore him.

Peering at the dark deer blinds atop their flimsy metal-pole frames, I said, “That one is empty. I’ll bet they don’t have enough guards for all of them.”

“Or they’re asleep,” Murphy said, looking around behind us. “Or having dinner. Or maybe that guard is on the other side of the wall taking a dump.”

“More than just that one is empty,” I said. “Besides, if they had enough guys, then they’d have enough guys for the night shift. All of those guard towers would be full.”

“Okay, Sherlock,” said Murphy, “if I say you’re right, will you get on with telling me your plan?”

Diversion, is it the oldest trick in the book?

Maybe.

Under normal circumstances—

Who am I fooling? What do I know about “normal circumstances” with respect to military operations?

Nothing.

I guess where I’m going with my line of thought is this: I think people with military training expect diversions when they think an attack is imminent. Why? Because they work. The diversion worked on Monk’s Island. That’s why we used one there to rescue—or failed to rescue—those people from Jay Booth and his crazy fucks.

My thoughts about getting into the Capitol grounds undetected depended on a diversion I thought should work for one basic reason. The mix of military men—and whatever the rest of them were—didn’t expect an assault from an intelligent, organized enemy. They expected halfwit Whites. By the evidence of all the rotting corpses outside their walls, they were adept at handling those. Perhaps they didn’t even see Whites as a threat anymore, just a nuisance.

They must never have encountered the naked horde.

Anyway, that was the basis for my reasoning as I snuck toward the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion, which covered a city block adjacent to the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds.

At the intersection on the southwest corner of the mansion, an area where the guards in the deer blinds wouldn’t be able to see me, traffic barricades, burned out vehicles, bones, and spent brass bullet casings were everywhere. Rifles and pistols lay rusting on what remained of corpses under shreds of uniforms. As I crossed the intersection, I realized our days of scavenging weapons out in the open were over. Only those guns protected indoors were likely to be operable.

The fence along two sides of the mansion had been almost completely knocked over, and weeds had grown waist high through the wrought iron. Highway patrol cars were parked at odd angles on the formerly lush grass. The governor had clearly tried to make his stand in the mansion with as many state police as he thought necessary. Or maybe just all the ones he could gather.

Too bad for him.

Unless he’d fled out the back door when the mob of Whites that knocked down the fence showed up, he was likely dead for his bravado and so were all the policemen who’d died protecting him.

Under the dark night shade of the trees, I reached the wall of the two-story, plantation-style mansion and stopped to listen. Only birds in the trees and the breeze through the leaves made any sound.

Having taken a tour of the Governor’s Mansion with one of my freshman high school classes—in an old life that seemed like a different nightmare—I knew the rough layout of the place. I also knew the décor had plenty of overstuffed furniture, hideous wallpaper, and lots of useless decorative flammable crap everywhere. I only hoped that after the 2008 fire and subsequent renovation, most of that flammable stuff had been replaced with more equally useless flammable crap.

Climbing into the darkness of the mansion through a first-floor window, I was pleased to see that my memory hadn’t failed me. I found myself in the library, which stood two stories high with a walkway around the perimeter of the 2
nd
floor that provided access to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Half or more of the books had been scattered through the room as though a wind had blown them into dunes of sand with book-sized grains. The furniture was splintered, shredded, and overturned. Brownish spots and splatter were everywhere. It was clear that when the Whites overwhelmed the police outside, the monsters had poured in through the windows and the battle continued inside.

Brass shell casings, their shine lost, lay among the clutter on the floor. Grenade blasts marred and scorched the floor and walls. I wondered for a moment why the mansion hadn’t burned a second time, but figured that during the renovations seven years ago, a more robust fire suppression system had probably been installed. Looking at the ceiling to see sprinkler heads two floors up, I further guessed that those systems were now not functional. No water. No electricity.

No luck for an old building that was going to rot into nothingness anyway.

I hefted the gas can I’d collected along my way to the mansion and had filled two-thirds full with scavenged gasoline and diesel fuel. I dumped some of the wickedly aromatic liquid onto piles of books against two of the walls.

Having decided that I was only going to light two or three rooms before retreating, I hurried about my business and doused the couches in an adjoining room after pushing them against the walls. I definitely wanted the old wooden walls to catch fire. Lastly, I poured the remainder of my can over the desk, shelves, and furnishings in the governor’s personal office. Knowing that office was definitely going to burn left me satisfied for reasons I didn’t completely understand.

Maybe in my mind the governor was the kingpin on top of a pyramid of authoritarian fuck-sticks whose boot heels had been repressing me my whole life.

Maybe I just hated authority because my parents were a pair of belt-happy repressive pricks.

Maybe I never grew out of my third-grade fascination with flames.

After leaving the gas can on the governor’s desk, I went out into the central hall where curiosity got the best of me as I looked up at the grand staircase covered with a layer of human remains so thick it was almost impossible to see the individual steps. All up and down the wall, bullet holes had torn through the plaster, leaving gouges with shards of the underlying wood sticking out.

Stepping between the rotting bodies, I followed the course of the battle up the stairs and wondered how many policemen had been standing on the upper landing, shooting into the mass of screaming monsters as they flowed up toward them. It reminded me of the house in East Austin where Murphy, Mandi, Russell, and I had been trapped when the Whites were rushing up the stairs to tear at our flesh.

Once I reached the landing at the top, I saw that several sets of tall double doors made of thick wood had been broken off their hinges by the weight of the Whites pushing them to get at those inside. I thought about the terror those within the rooms must have felt as those seemingly impenetrable doors flexed and creaked. Then the oaken doors shattered, and the real screaming started as the last of the bullets failed to stop the wild-eyed hungry. It was a horrible tale—one that had been replayed over and over in nearly every home in the city, the country, maybe the world.

I looked at all the bodies in the governor’s bedroom, scattered among the shredded mattress, the overturned dressers, and the torn curtains. With one of several lighters I kept on me at all times—lighters were a handy thing to have—I lit the shredded mattress and watched the fire take hold before running downstairs to touch a flame where my gasoline was already soaking in.

The library was the last room I lit before jumping out the big broken window I’d come in through a short while earlier.

Peeking and sneaking, I worked my way through the governor’s yard, past the police cruisers, corpses, and fence. Few things were done in a hurry when Whites were about, especially when a bunch of assholes with rifles and a helicopter were just a block away.

When I reached the street, flames were visible through the broken windows on the south side of the mansion, and Whites were starting to peer out from the buildings where they lurked and from the inside of abandoned cars where they nested. I was half a block away when the first of them screeched and ran toward the fire.

I smiled. Diversion created.