Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (15 page)

We bolted out of the woods and ran past the blue house, fixing our bearing on the grain silos. Whites were crashing through the trees behind us, across a wide front, driving us with their frightful howls, but not gaining any ground.

But then, relatively few of them could have been on the narrow trail. The rest had to be moving slowly through the undergrowth.

Right?

Of course it was right, but
damn
. Something was fucked with that logic, but I was hauling ass too fast and my adrenaline was coursing too thickly with residual rage for me to put clear thoughts together.

Not good for me. Not one bit. I often kept a cool, analytical distance through a lot of this kind of shit, and it made me one lethal motherfucker. It was probably the only reason I was still alive and pounding the crumbly asphalt through the center of Creepy-ville.

Then it occurred to me.

We were being hunted.

An ambush was coming.

Holy shit.

The clarity of that thought slapped me so hard I nearly stumbled.

I had to act.

Right the fuck now.

I stopped and Murphy plowed into me from behind.

“What the fuck, dude!” He pointed at the grain silos, just three blocks ahead, on what passed for Creepy Town’s main street.

“Ambush,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, though I hadn’t yet spotted one White, now that we were back in town. “Follow me.”

I bolted into a gap between two closely spaced houses and leapt over big, plastic kids’ toys hiding in the tall brown grass. I rounded the back of a house and turned right to see three Whites at the other end of the house’s backside, peeking around the corner, looking in the other direction, at the road Murphy and I had been running down moments before.

I ran full-speed at them with my machete out at knee level. “Hey, assholes,” I said, just as I passed. I couldn’t resist. The blade ripped across the tendons on the backs of their legs.

I missed one, but Murphy, taking up the rear, elbowed her in the skull and slammed her into the house.

I turned further away from the silos and ran across a dirt road into a quarter-acre collection of rusty cars, aging propane tanks, and pieces of metal so old they looked like giant, bent flecks of rust. We burst through a web of twisted branches, each displaying rows of small dead leaves, and found ourselves in a fallow field on the edge of Creepy Town.

We were still a good three blocks away from the silos, but hopefully, out of the scope of the hunting Whites. I made another hard turn and ran toward the silos.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Murphy said through labored breaths. “You’re gonna wear us out before we get there.”

“I know,” I said. Cool, quick thinking and an absence of hesitation had just earned us a life-saving advantage. The Whites didn’t know their prey had given them the slip.

We stopped behind a house two short blocks from the towering silos and scanned the area. More Whites had to be waiting in ambush. I needed to find out where.

Murphy pointed and whispered. “By that yellow house. Four of ‘em.”

“I see.” I looked left and right. “Over there, back the way we came,” I pointed. “A couple behind that tractor.”

“They’re all still looking the other way for us,” said Murphy. “Was that a lucky turn back there? Or did you know?”

“What do you think?” I took off at a run and crossed behind two more houses.

A block and a half to go.

Panting, I stopped behind a dense honeysuckle vine growing through a chain-link fence, looking for Whites ahead.

Murphy ran by, slapping me on the shoulder, “C’mon. I think they saw us.”

Shit.

It was a race.

Another
race.

Murphy, being faster on his feet, put some space between us, but slowed as we crossed the last street. He stopped, swung his rifle around, and spent a half-dozen rounds at Whites he figured were too close. And if he figured they were, he was probably right.

I crossed the double railroad tracks first. My feet slipped and twisted through the big, loose rocks that made the tracks’ foundations. I thanked myself again for my decision to keep my boots. We passed a utilitarian cinder block building beside the tracks and ran beneath a pavilion with a twenty-foot roof overhead, pierced by a dozen wide pipes, the place where grain from the silos was filled into train cars.

With Whites screaming a hundred feet behind us, we rounded the last silo in the line, and spotted our salvation.

Murphy spun around and leveled his rifle at the closest infected. “Go!” he shouted, as he popped off several rounds.

I jumped onto the ladder and started to climb.

Before I was so high up that a jump back to the ground would injure me, I stopped and looked to make sure Murphy was coming.

He fired two more rounds and bounded over to the ladder.

I put myself in speedy monkey mode and started up as fast as I could climb, figuring before I was halfway up, Murphy would be right on my ass, because as with everything else, he was faster than me.

At about fifteen feet up, I entered the ladder cage, a round tube of mesh and braces, which I guessed were there to keep climbers from falling off. I laughed as I climbed. If a high wind blew me off, there was plenty of room inside the cage for me to do my falling without ever touching the ladder or cage.

The thing about climbing—as I came to understand pretty quickly—is that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. Yeah, I know, like anybody has to be told that. Climbing a ladder works the arm and leg muscles in a way they’re not used to, at least not in a repetitive, weight-bearing fashion.

My muscles were getting stiff and I stopped, thinking a good excuse for a pause would be to look down to see how Murphy was progressing.

I swung one foot and one arm away from the ladder and leaned my back against the cage. In another day, in an old, civilized world, I might not have done it. Too much risk for nearly nothing gained. But compared to the shit I did on a daily basis, it seemed a lot like no big deal. I looked down. Murphy was a good ways below and climbing a lot more slowly than I expected.

At least a half-dozen screaming Whites were crowded around the base of the ladder, with more of them close enough to spit on. A steady flow was piling into Creepy Town from the woods. All were heeding the call of their naked kin.

“You good?” I called.

Murphy looked up, worry on his face. “Yeah.”

He wasn’t good. He was having trouble with the rungs and he was coming up slowly.

I waited and watched, feeling the ladder vibrate with the weight of the Whites mounting it at the bottom.

“Dude?” I asked, concerned.

Murphy grimaced and raised his hand, palm up. His fingers were swollen as fat as sausages. “Whatever got me back in the woods—” He looked down at the Whites, then back up at me. “It keeps swelling.”

“Pass me,” I shouted. “Hurry.”

Murphy shook his head.

“Goddammit,” I yelled. “Just get the fuck up here.” I brandished my machete. “I can cut fingers off rungs all night long.”

Wrapping the arm with the swollen hand around the ladder, Murphy climbed with only his good hand to hold onto the rungs.

A clinking sound startled me into looking up instead of down. Way up at the top of the ladder, hanging right over the ladder cage, one of those wide-mouthed, metal grain chutes was pointing down. That didn’t make any sense to me, not one bit.

Why would the silo owners want to dump grain down through the ladder cage?

The pipe vibrated with a throaty, tinny noise.

Oh, shit.

I pressed my back against the ladder cage to get as far away from the center of the tube as possible. I yelled, “Murphy, off the ladder. Against the cage! Right fucking now!”

The pipe spat something black and round.

Before I could curse, a perfect black sphere swished past me, pushing a puff of air into my face. I looked down as it passed, hoping to God Murphy had heeded my order with the urgency that I’d shouted it.

His body was moving to the side, even as the bowling ball—it was a fucking
bowling ball
—brushed the front of his MOLLE vest. It hit the toe of his boot and deflected just enough to bounce off the ladder cage before it thudded with a wet crunch into the first White on the ladder.

Screams followed as I watched the weirdest piece of performance art I’d ever seen. Arms and legs flailed inside the ladder cage as they fell, spraying blood through grunts and howls.

However many Whites had been on the ladder, they were now crumbled into a squirming pile at the foot of it.

“Holy mother of shit.” Sometimes the words just come.

“What the hell was that?” Murphy shouted.

“Bowling ball. You okay?”

“I think.”

“Climb and be ready for more.” I started up the ladder again, shouting upward as I went, to whomever. “Hey! Hey! Give me a warning before you drop the next one. Please!”

Rusty metal hinges squealed from up at the top of the ladder. A head popped out directly above me, but way, way up. It disappeared again.

“There are people up there,” I called down to Murphy. I saw Whites below as I did, and felt the ladder take their weight as they took up the chase again. I looked back up and shouted, “We’re coming. We’re cool. Just let us up.”

“Say please,” Murphy called, his smile clear through the sound of his voice.

I swore to myself if he didn’t spend a least a little more time in a shitty mood, I was going to kick him in the ‘nads.

Nothing happened above. No more bowling balls.

As I got closer, heads kept popping out from up there for a look. Voices discussed and some shouted. Things were tense upstairs, I guessed, as they were deciding what to do with an intruder and his friend in the process of dragging the attention of God knows how many naked Whites up to the top of their silo.

My biggest fear as I neared the top was that they’d see the color of my skin.

“Bombs away.” The shout came from above.

I immediately pushed my back against the ladder cage and hollered down to Murphy, “Here comes another!”

Two seconds later, a bowling ball—not black, but glittery, with dark green swirls—whooshed past. It missed Murphy, thank God.

Another wet thud. A splatter of blood. Grunts. Screams. And falling bodies, adding to the pile of wiggling flesh and broken bones at the bottom.

“You gonna make it, Murphy?” He was still moving slowly, and the distance between us was growing, though I’d been climbing more slowly since becoming aware of his swollen hand.

A few hundred Whites were below, most crowding the foot of the ladder, trying to be next to climb. Some took advantage of the free meal of their dying comrades. It occurred to me that a significant minority in the naked horde had probably developed a preferential taste for the easy meat that cannibalism offered. Spending your days in a massive herd of edibles, eating the weak and injured, had to be so much easier than going balls-out into the bullets every time a normal was spotted. I wondered if the cannibalistic ones—that I now decided had to exist—were relatively smart compared to the mass. I wondered if they had the good sense to hang back during an attack and feed lazily on the leftovers in the aftermath.

Probably.

In a way, I thought none of that was my problem, but it was. Or at least, it was in terms of my understanding of the scope of the problem at the bottom of the ladder. How many of those Whites, Smart Ones included, would continue to climb, only to be slaughtered before they started trying to find a better way to get to the meat at the top of the silos? I wanted to believe that this ladder was the only way up, but I’d seen the brutal intelligence of the naked horde at work too many times. They had an uncanny ability to quickly solve the hardest problems, to see past the staunchest defense, to overwhelm, and kill.

I guess I hoped that we’d kill enough of the crazed ones that the majority of those left below were the cannibalistic ones who’d content themselves to eat their own dead and then wander off.

Ah, hope.

Why did I even bother with it?

Once I was close enough to the top, I saw that the ladder terminated at the foot of a vertical wall of rusty diamond-plate steel, welded along the top edge of the silo where one would normally climb off the ladder to get onto the roof. It stood ten feet tall and extended at that height a good fifteen feet out to both sides. It was hard to imagine that any White had the gymnastic ability to get himself from the ladder’s highest rung over that smooth wall of rusty steel. Only the metal tube that the bowling balls rolled through broke the smooth surface.

A door was cut through the steel at the top of the ladder, but I had zero doubt about how firmly it was braced from the other side. Anybody going to the trouble to weld that wall and secure it to the top edge of the silo surely had the smarts to make sure the door wasn’t the weak spot. Even if it were relatively weak, no more than two or three Whites would ever be able to squeeze themselves into the top of the ladder cage in a position to push on the door at one time.

The silo, at least where the ladder was concerned, had a formidable defense.

A small door above the main door swung open. It had been cut just big enough for a person’s head to stick out for a look down. An old man looked at me.

“Hello,” I said, because it was the friendliest thing that popped into my head. I smiled widely. “May we come in?”

“Two of you?” the old man asked.

“Yes.” I nodded toward Murphy. “He’s going slow. He hurt his hand.”

The old man disappeared for a second and then popped back out again. “We got rules,” he said.

I laughed. “I don’t care if your rule is that I have to scrub your toilets for a week. We’re not in a negotiating position. We just need a favor.”

“We’ll help you,” he said.

“Thanks.” I hurried up the last few rungs. “Thank you very much.”

The main door swung open on rusted hinges that protested with loud squeals.

A very wrinkly, calloused black man’s hand reached out to take mine. I paused before taking it. I looked down. “Murphy, they’re letting us in.”

“Cool.” He was panting heavily from the exertion of climbing with a bum hand.

To the guy inside extending his hand to take mine, I said, “I’ll wait here a minute. Cool? I need to make sure he makes it.”

“Suit yerself,” he told me, in the same country accent as the other old man. “If them ‘nfected ones git up here, I’m closin’ this door.”

I brandished my machete. “I gotta protect my friend. You do what you gotta do.” I looked down, not wanting to hear the man’s response.

Murphy made it past another ten rungs. The ladder below was filling with Whites again, and the one in the lead was coming on fast.

“Tell yer friend to scoot back against the cage,” said the man inside.

“Bowling ball?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Murphy,” I called. “Another bowling ball is coming!”

Murphy quickly got himself into position.

“Ready,” I told the man inside.

He gestured at someone I couldn’t see.

The pipe above made its throaty, metal sound again and a bowling ball rolled out and accelerated past. The welcome wet thud followed. Whites screamed as the ball and the accumulated weight of falling bodies scoured the ladder.

Murphy climbed the rest of the way up. As he passed me, he said, “Damn, that’s a lot farther than it looks.”

Once he was through, I clambered in behind, falling on my back on the silo’s flat concrete roof. The steel door slammed shut. Four separate braces were latched on behind it, and I looked up at our saviors, who were standing in a circle, evaluating us with grim faces.