Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (12 page)

Murphy was out of sight.

Good?

I ran for the spot in the trees where he’d disappeared.

A White wasn’t a dozen steps behind and coming fast.

I angled toward a break in the foliage where the ground fell away, eroded by the creek.

A muzzle flash gave away Murphy’s position.

The White behind me tumbled over the muddy furrows.

I looked back as another White’s chest splattered red.

Yet another group of four was nearly a hundred yards back—they were the nearest.

Without slowing, I took a chance and jumped from a full-speed run into the gap in the foliage with no idea how far I’d fall before hitting the ground below the ledge. Branches scraped and cut. Twigs snapped and leaves rattled. It seemed like the loudest announcement of my presence I could have chosen and I was cursing myself for the stupidity, even as I started to think I’d made a huge mistake by jumping into a hole I couldn’t see the bottom of.

My feet slipped on uneven, sloping ground and I fell through more bushes and dead limbs. I slammed into a pile of dirt that knocked the wind out of me.

Stars swam through my vision as I blinked to clear my head.

I was still trying to collect my senses when Murphy’s big hand landed on my shoulder. “You okay, man? What the hell were you thinking?”

“I thought I was Superman?”
Really?
I didn’t even know what I was saying.

Murphy dragged me to my feet. “We gotta go.”

My knees gave out.

Where’s my machete?

“Zed. Get it together. Dammit.” Murphy bent over, dragged my arm over his shoulder and lifted me to my feet.

Where’s my machete?

I started to panic.

I looked down at my hand. There it was.

Motherfucker!

My boots were dragging the ground and my shoulder felt like Murphy was going to pull it out of its socket. I realized I should have been walking. I started to move my feet as I blinked the last of the stars out of my eyes.

“I shouldn’t have jumped off the bank like that.”

“Ya think?”

Murphy loped through a muddy creek.

When the cold water seeped into my boots, I said, “That’ll wake you up in the morning.”

Murphy dropped me on the far bank and looked back the way we’d come. “You’re being a smartass. Now I know you’re okay. Can you stand? Can you run? Anything broken?”

“Yes. No. Um…” I shook my head and got up on my hands and knees. “I’m okay.”

Murphy put a hand under my arm and dragged me upright.

I brushed his hand away. “I’m cool. I’m fine.” I wasn’t. But I’d run anyway. Thoughts started to come in clear, single lines, rather than random, dreamy bits. I pointed up the eroded slope on the side of the creek we'd crossed. “That way.”

“Is this Superman or Zed talking?”

Murphy looked like he was sure I wasn’t ready to give him a clear answer so instead I answered by hustling through some bushes and scrambling up the slope while my feet slipped on loose clumps of dirt and mud. No surprise, Murphy passed me on the way up, reached level ground before I did, and grabbed my hand to help me the rest of the way.

Another impossibly wide field spread to the indistinguishable gray lumps at the horizon. I looked up and down the snaking path of the creek, picked a direction, pointed, and started to run. “This way.”

Murphy jogged along beside me. "You know something I don't? We need to stay out of sight, if we can."

“We’ll make better time up here on the flat dirt.” Yeah, that made good sense.

“They’ll see us when they come through.”

“I know.” I looked back to see if any Whites were already following our path out of the bushes. “If we chance a few hundred yards, maybe a half mile, we can get a big lead on these fuckers.”

Murphy looked back. He wasn’t a believer.

“If the Smart Ones are running the show,” I told him, “they’ll think we’re staying in the cover of the trees down near the creek bed. That’s the intelligent thing to do. If they look for us down there, they’ll be moving a lot slower than we are up here. We can gain some ground on them.”

“What if they come up on this side?” Murphy asked.

“We get back in the trees.” It didn’t seem to me we’d be losing much of anything. Something moving out in the field—far from the creek—caught my attention. I turned my back to the creek and squinted to make out the shapes. “Look.”

Murphy didn’t look where I was looking. Instead, he pointed in the direction the creek flowed, way off to my left and muttered, “Shit.”

Whites were climbing out of the creek bed several hundred yards downstream in the direction we’d intended to go.

How the hell did they get there?

Murphy turned around and looked up at the winding path the creek flowed from.

I’d already decided what we had to do. Though the trees and thick foliage blocked our view of the field on the other side of the creek, we knew a lot of Whites were over there. More Whites were downstream. For all I knew, even more were in the trees upstream. That left only the miles of flat field bordering the creek and the grazing cattle far out in it. I said, “The cows are our chance.”

“Goddammit, Zed. You need to quit doing stupid shit and bonking your head.” Murphy turned away from the Whites who were still clambering over the crumbling bank. He started to run. “You can’t think straight.”

One of the Whites was on his feet, swinging a big kitchen knife at the air and looking around.

Oh shit. A Smart One.

He spotted us. Or that’s to say, he spotted Murphy in his dirty military garb with rifle in hand. He screamed, raising the alarm. More Whites—all naked—got their feet beneath them. I couldn’t figure how any of the Whites in the group chasing us had gotten so far down the creek without us seeing them flank us.

I shouted, “Stop!”

Murphy turned around and paused, anxious anger on his face. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Can you shoot one of those cows from here?”

“No.” Murphy didn’t even glance at the cows. “They’re too far.”

"Goddammit, Murphy. I am fucking serious. Can you shoot one from here?"

Murphy looked at the cows that with our growing urgency seemed to be getting smaller and farther away. “No.”

Several of the Whites had knives. Were they all smart or just good imitators? That mattered less than the fact that they were starting to run toward us.

“If we can get close enough to shoot some cows,” I told him in rapid-fire speech, “the Whites will forget about us and go after them.”

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Murphy turned his back to the creek and started to run for the cows. “This better goddamn work.”

I lit out after him. “When you get close enough to take a shot, stop and do it." I looked back at the Whites who'd come up out of the creek bed. By running perpendicular to the flow of the creek, we’d pretty much negated the advantage they had over us when they were unseen down in the gulley. "Just make sure you do it before we get close enough to spook them.”

"This gun is made for killing people. You know that, right?"

“Yeah.” It’s hard to put all the disdainful inflections you need to communicate into one syllable when you’re running for your life and gulping every precious breath.

"It's not made for killing two-thousand-pound cows."

I wanted to smack myself in the head. All those times when I’d filled my magazines with those surprisingly small bullets. I knew that. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, hoping I sounded confident.

Murphy laughed as he panted and ran. “You’re so full of shit.”

Whites were now running from the creek from where Murphy and I had climbed out. Those were definitely the ones who’d been chasing us already. All my hopes of them running up and down in the brushy, sunken banks along the creek disappeared when the white bastard with the kitchen knife had screamed the alarm.

“Shoot one broadside,” I hollered at Murphy. It was a guess. Hell, I wasn’t a hunter, but I’d watched them on TV. “If you get three or four rounds into its lungs, you won’t kill it right away. But…” I had to take several breaths. All the running was taking a toll. I couldn’t keep it up for many more miles.

“The cow won’t be able to run away,” Murphy finished.

“It’ll bleed like crazy,” I said. “That’ll slow it down.”

“I’ll get a couple of them, if I can.”

First one, then several of the cows looked at us. Or they saw the seventy or eighty Whites spread out behind us.

When Murphy and I were less than a hundred yards away, the first cow bolted. He’d apparently been conditioned by the new behavior of humans. Made sense. Most of the cattle that weren’t now afraid of humans were probably already dead.

Murphy dropped to a knee, raised his weapon, and took a second to steady his hand. I spun around to watch for oncoming Whites. We had time, but not much. The rifle popped off three fast rounds.

A cow mooed loudly.

Sounded like a hit to me.

All of the cows mooed sounds that grew to panicked, higher pitches.

Murphy fired again.

In all the sound coming from the cows, in all the screaming coming from the Whites, in the vibrations in the ground from now running hooves, I couldn’t tell if Murphy’s bullets hit a target for sure.

Whites were closing fast. I raised my machete and got ready to swing. “Murphy?”

He fired several more bursts and then shouted, “C’mon, man.” He jumped to his feet and ran.

I followed as fast as my feet would carry me.

Ahead, four-dozen cattle were pushing their bodies close together as they stampeded away. Their direction shifted first to our left, then to our right. With me and Murphy so close and the Whites spread out in such a wide area behind us, the cattle were confused.

“Well?” I panted.

"Got three," Murphy told me in clipped words between breaths. "One, with only a couple of bullets."

“How many in the others?”

None seemed to be injured. None was visibly lagging. I was worried that my hastily conceived plan was a failure. I looked far across the flat field at shapes faded gray in the distance. Could I outrun the Whites all the way there? If I did, then what?

“Just run,” Murphy commanded. “Run.”

I looked over my shoulder. The two closest Whites both held knives. We had maybe a fifty-yard lead on them.

I started looking around for a Plan B, or C, or Q, or R. I didn’t know what letter I was up to by then. It’d been a busy day of failures.

A thunder of shouts rolled through the white mass behind us and I found some extra speed in my feet.

“You sure,” I breathed, “got some?”

“Just run,” Murphy told me. He looked back at the chasing Whites, then up at the cows in front.

Three cows separated from the herd.

I felt a tinge of hope.

One of the cows stumbled as it swung its head and veered. A bloody mist plumed from its snout. A long, baritone squeal followed. Something in me wanted to hurt at the sight of the poor, dumb animal struggling. Something in me wanted to celebrate. Most of me wanted badly not to be a poor, dumb Zed, getting eaten by the Whites on our tail.

Another cow slipped back from the group.

“Damn.” Murphy’s impatience was as strong as mine. We needed something to happen. “Fall, cow!”

The cow’s run turned to a trot and over the space of a few steps it slowed to a walk. It made a pitiful sound as a living version of every herbivore’s nightmare unfolded before it. The herd ran ahead while the slavering predators snapped their jaws and charged up from behind.

The cow wailed.

Murphy and I were close enough that the bullets’ holes stood out red with blood flowing down the cow’s hide.

The cow breathing out the red mist stumbled to its front knees, raised its head and mooed loudly.

“We’re gonna make it!” I shouted to Murphy, still hoping the Whites would choose fresh cow lying on the ground to skinny people running away. They had to. Basic White nature demanded it.

The uninjured cattle ahead of us were extending their lead.

The Whites behind were getting closer and it was my fault. Murphy ran slower to stay with me.

“Do you want me to shoot it again?” Murphy panted. “When we pass?”

“No,” I told him. “Not necessary.” If the Whites weren’t going to go after a wounded animal that could no longer run, a few more bullet holes wouldn’t make a difference.

The downed cow barely raised its head to look at us as we ran by. A dozen paces ahead, the other cow, still on its feet, wailed loudly as we ran past. I sprinted as hard as I was able. Distance was my friend.

Murphy matched my speed with seemingly no added effort. I focused on keeping my feet under me.

He looked back again and grinned through his words. “They’re stopping.”

I looked. The two Whites with knives were stabbing and cutting the downed cow. It bellowed sadly each time a blade sank into its flesh. Other Whites were falling on it and tearing futilely at its thick hide with their fingers and dull teeth. Not one was still running after us.