Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (8 page)

Murphy took his time manually opening the garage door. We didn’t want to take a risk on the electric garage door opener. Some were pretty loud. Stealth was our new motto. Quiet and invisible. No more macho shoot-‘em-ups for us.

Yeah, right?

It sounded good when we discussed it, though.

At least we had the car.

With my night vision goggles on, I slowly drove out into the night, cringing at the crunch of crushed granite under the tires. Murphy closed the garage behind us and got in through the Mustang’s passenger side.

“Windows up or down?” I asked.

Murphy spent a moment thinking about it.

I said, “I know we didn’t really talk about it, except that with the windows down, you can shoot anybody that happens to need shooting.” I put a palm on the glass. “With this dark tint, nobody on the outside can see in. At least not through the side windows. And I think the car will be quieter with the windows up.”

“How do you figure?” Murphy asked. “The engine doesn’t make any noise.”

“Wind resistance,” I said. “That’ll be our biggest noise now. With the windows down, we’ll have more resistance. More noise, more chance the Whites will hear us when we zip by.”

Nodding, Murphy said, “Stealth is the word. Let’s keep ‘em up. If I need to shoot something badly enough, I’ll shoot through the glass.”

Our plan was simple. But then again, they all were when in the conceptual stage. We’d cut across northwest Austin, staying off the highways. That meant we’d take 2222. It cut through the hills with some pretty sharp curves and steep inclines. Nothing our hot rod Mustang couldn’t handle, but given the state of the world, who could guess what hazards lay on that route? It was a road we hadn’t driven since before the outbreak and before the flood. Hell, some of the low-water sections of that road might not even be there anymore.

Like many things in life, the 2222 choice was a trade-off of unquantifiable risks. On the one hand, we had an unknown road, the shortest path to our destination. On the other hand, the road we’d driven before was along a highway that would cause us to drive twice as far to get to Camp Mabry. The risk there was the Mustang’s battery. We didn’t know how many miles we could get out of it. Ten? A Hundred? Five hundred?

On our way across Austin, we planned to stop by Camp Mabry for a refill of lethal toys before making our way up to Mount Bonnell. A park at the peak of that hill, as it turns out, on property adjacent to Sarah Mansfield’s old mansion, would give us a view down on the whole city. If those helicopters were landing in Austin, all we had to do was wait for morning and we’d get a pretty good idea of where they were setting down.

Simple.

As it turned out, the trip down 2222 wasn’t bad. Like every road in Austin, it had its share of abandoned cars and long stretches where nothing on the road gave any clue that the world had run off its rails. At the bottom of the steepest hill, though, a pileup of a dozen cars was nearly impassable. That one looked to have been a bad accident, probably having happened during somebody’s rush to get to somewhere when everything was just starting to fall apart, and people still had hope that a somewhere existed that was better than where they were. As far as I could tell, nothing was.

On the bright side, we did come to one stretch of a half mile that was slightly uphill and relatively straight with nothing in the road ahead. I decided to put the gas pedal—though the car had no gasoline in it—to the floor just to see if Murphy’s gushing about the car’s performance had any basis in fact.

Holy microwaveable shit.

I’ve ridden lots of amusement park thrill rides. I’ve jumped off my share of tall cliffs into murky, deep pools of water. I used to ride an overpowered Japanese motorcycle and came pretty close to killing myself on it racing on this very road. I’ve even ridden in some pretty fast cars that could clock a quarter mile in less than a dozen seconds. This thing, though, accelerated so fast it was frightening.

In that second and a half it took for me to realize I was accelerating faster than even my adrenaline-junkie needs thought was a good idea, and in that other second and a half it took me to pull my foot off the accelerator, we were already going over a hundred miles an hour.

Murphy was hollering and laughing, and I was too by the time the brakes started to slow the car before a turn that came up on us way, way too fast. He said, “I might have to change my pants.”

“Uh, huh.”

We made it to the gates of Camp Mabry in a little over an hour and a half, taking great care not to push that gas pedal too close to the floor.

In normal traffic, before everybody turned into hungry Whites, the trip might have taken thirty or forty minutes. I felt pretty good about the commute time.

I slowed the Mustang to a stop on the road just outside Camp Mabry’s southern gate.

“You’re feeling it, too?” Murphy asked.

Nodding, I said, “It seems like every time we come here things get fucked up.”

“Most times,” Murphy agreed as he looked around for dangers in the darkness. “I see a few Whites down the road, but they don’t seem to be looking this way. I don’t think they know we’re here.”

“That’s good.” I looked up the street leading into the center of the base, the memories of the place keeping my foot on the brake. All those thousands and thousands of dead covering that field outside the buildings where the immune soldiers and civilians made their last stand. All the desperate running and shooting to save our lives.

“If you’re still wanting to go looking for those dudes in that helicopter,” said Murphy, “I’d prefer to do it with a few more hand grenades and bullets. If I could figure out how to mount a grenade launcher on the roof, I’d do that too. I’m pretty sure we’re gonna get into some trouble.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, pretending a lot more offense than I actually felt. “Just because those assholes shot at us from their helicopter?”

“There’s that,” said Murphy. “More importantly, you
want
to do it. That almost guarantees something fucked up is gonna happen.”

“What?”

“You know it’s true,” he said. “I may have to change your superhero name from Null Spot to M&M.”

“M&M?”

“Mayhem Magnet.” Murphy laughed out loud. “Mayhem Magnet. I like it.”

I huffed and rolled the car forward onto the base.

The road into the base—the same one Murphy and I had nearly been ambushed on by the naked horde when we were escaping once before—was empty. We saw nothing as we silently rolled over it; a pale strip of sun-bleached asphalt between wide grassy shoulders and dense cedars. It wasn’t until we made the turn toward the bunkers that we saw tire tracks over the skeletons and mashed grass.

I stopped the car as I scanned the field, looking for any movement, especially around the bunkers.

“Somebody’s been here.” Murphy looked back and forth. “All those thousands of dead Whites were over by that building where we found the Humvee.” Murphy pointed. “Way past those trees over there. There weren’t this many dead here by the bunkers last time.” He pointed at the ground. “And look at those double-wide tire tracks. Somebody’s been tearing up the grass with big trucks.”

That concerned me. “You think someone else found our cache?”

“It’s not a secret.” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t see any Whites around.” He pointed at the open gate in the tall chain-link fence surrounding the bunkers. “Why don’t you cruise over there, turn this thing around for the fast escape by the fence, and let’s go in and see what’s left.”

Avoiding the human remains and the deepest of the ruts left in the soft ground, I crossed the field and swung the Mustang around. I backed it up through the open gate, noticing that the doors on both bunkers were open. The darkness inside kept the contents secret.

Once I stopped, just outside the first bunker, Murphy jumped out of the car and raised his weapon, pointing it at the black shadows inside.

A moment later, I had the car keys in my pocket and was standing at the rear of the car beside him, machete in hand, ready to defend myself from any White who might choose to come our way.

For a moment, we listened and watched.

Murphy nodded and moved forward, keeping his weapon up.

I followed.

As we got closer to the bunker door, I was able to see more and more clearly what was inside. I got more and more angry. Just a few steps outside the threshold we came to a stop. The bunker was empty all the way to the back wall. Unable to contain my frustration, I spat at the darkness, “Motherfucker.”

The sound of bodies and feet shuffling inside told me immediately what a mistake it had been to utter those words.

Howling followed.

A White rounded the corner to my right, stepping into the wide doorway. I didn’t even wait the fraction of a second it was going to take him to get all the way around. I hacked down with my machete, cutting through his cheekbone, knocking him half senseless, and slicing down through his clavicle. He stumbled, and the robust infected woman pushing from behind him howled as she tripped, exposing her neck for an easy kill on my next swing.

Beside me, Murphy was stepping backwards and firing. He put two rounds in a White coming from the other side.

“Damn things must have been up against the front wall on both sides,” I shouted as I swung at my third White.

“Duh,” Murphy hollered back as he killed another.

They came around the corner one at a time, apparently having been lined up and leaning on the wall as they sat on the floor. As they ran toward me, their pace was slowed as they stumbled over the bodies of those in line ahead of them. That made the killing on my side of the doorway easy, and by the time my blade got stuck in a skinny man’s skull, I was done. Murphy shot two more and we shared a look with the silent question, “Is that all?”

It was.

Murphy leaned in through the doorway and peeked into the dim corners on both sides. “It stinks in here, man.”

With my machete out, I headed toward the other bunker.

Murphy caught up and we cautiously rounded the corner in front of the second bunker’s entrance. It was empty, too—at least it was empty of weapons and ammunition. Two Whites were peeking around one wall, afraid to come forward.

I lunged at them even though they were well out of machete range. They both jumped back and I turned to grin at Murphy but didn’t say anything.

He nodded toward the car. Our trip to Camp Mabry had been a waste of time.

Minutes later, we were silently rolling back out through the entrance gate. I turned right and headed west on 32
nd
Street toward Mt. Bonnell Road.

“To Sara Mansfield’s house then?” Murphy asked.

Nodding and thinking about all the weapons and ammunition that had been in the bunkers on our last trip to Camp Mabry, I asked, “What do you think happened to everything?”

“Somebody brought some trucks and hauled it all off.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not at the moment,” I admitted, “but eventually, it could.”

It was when I turned right onto Mt. Bonnell Road and started heading up the long crest of the mountain, I saw evidence of the fires I’d started with that fizzled gasoline vapor bomb I’d tried to use on the naked horde a few months back. Any trees that weren’t black skeletons of wood were partially burned or covered with leaves left brown and dead by the heat. The shells of dozens of cars sat in driveways in front of ashen ruins. Not all the houses were burned. The fire had taken a haphazard toll on the neighborhood with no discernable pattern. Burned foundations sat next to houses that went untouched. Other houses were partially burned and some cars seemed to have made it through the firestorm unscathed.

One thing, though, was gruesome and satisfying at the same time. The remains of charred bodies, gnawed bones, and shredded clothing were scattered everywhere. I knew that I hadn’t killed all of the naked horde—not by far—but I’d killed many more of them than I’d suspected.

In that moment, thinking of all the dead, I grew angry with myself. If only I’d built a better bomb, I might have killed enough of them that they wouldn’t have been a danger to us when we were trying to load our people in the Humvees to drive out to Balmorhea. If enough of the naked horde was dead on this mountain, then maybe Steph would still be alive.

Repress the memories.

That’s the ticket to sanity.

Forget.

When we reached Sara Mansfield’s house, all of the cedars that had hidden it from the road were burned to fingery black sticks, reaching for the sky. The wall that I’d seen the horde knock down on the video a few months earlier was broken and scattered with the remains of the dead. The acres of green grass that had been kept mowed by those robotic lawnmowers were thick with bones and charred black lumps that used to be people.

The house itself was scorched, yet surprisingly intact. Most of the windows were not broken. It appeared not to have caught fire, although all of the tropical plants in the multi-colored, glazed pots on the front porch were burned away.

I pointed toward the city park that sat just up the road, at the peak of Mount Bonnell. “I know we were going to cruise on by and head up to the peak. But we could go in and get pretty much the same view from Sarah’s roof.”

Murphy grimaced. “I don’t want to mess up my shoes in all that shit.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Murphy laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. I think it’s a waste of time, but if you want to go in there…” Murphy finished with a shrug and a look of disgust.

I already had the Mustang rolling into the driveway.