Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (18 page)

“Except last night,” I said, “They were chasing me and Murphy. That’s why they didn’t give up.”

“That’s right,” said Isaac. “They was chasin’ you, not climbing a ladder for no reason.”

“Got it.” Not wanting to get into an argument about infected behavior with the nice folks who’d probably saved my life the night before, I figured I’d find a better way to talk about it at a later time. “So you guys are good up here? You can stay a while?”

“You saw how much grain we got in these silos,” said Billy. “We don’t never need to go down if we don’t want to.”

“What about water?” Murphy asked.

Billy pointed at a row of three windmills, the kind spread across the ranches in Texas to pump water out of the aquifers and into the stock ponds. “We got ‘em piping water up here. We got everything we need. For stuff we want, we take a chance and go down.” Billy swung his finger across the horizon, pausing at each lookout. “When we’re clear, we go down and search for luxuries and such. Plenty of feral pigs around and plenty of cattle, too. No shortage of meat.”

I felt jealous again. My attempt to set up a post-apocalyptic commune of survivors at Sarah Mansfield’s mansion had failed. Billy, Isaac, and the other people on the silos were thriving.

Still, I was getting bored with hearing about how well the silo people had set themselves up. I had things to do. I spun around and looked for water towers and other silos on the horizon. I pointed northwest. “You have lookouts that way?”

Billy leaned close to my side and pointed so that I could see down the length of his arm, to where his finger landed on a couple of fat tanks with streaks of rust on weathered paint. He said, “See there, on top of that one on the left?”

I saw a brownish speck, but I couldn’t tell what it was. “Oil tanks?”

“Liquid fertilizer,” said Billy. “We got two fellas in that observation tower on top.” He turned to the south and pointed at a water tower taller and closer than the fertilizer tanks. “Got a couple there, too.”

“Did you guys see that big horde of naked Whites that went through that way over the past few days?”

Murphy groaned.

Billy nodded. “Ate a good many cattle when they passed. Most of ‘em I ‘spect.”

“Do your lookouts know where they are?” I asked.

Billy pointed northwest. “Seen ‘em out that way when they settled down last night. They were gone when the sun came up this morning. Moved on.”

Isaac cocked his head toward the ladder running down the side of the tower. “’cept stragglers. Still plenty of ‘em ‘round.” He pointed northwest. “Headed that way, mostly. Lookin’ to catch up, I guess.”

I took another peek at the Whites down below. Habit. “You guys have a pretty good idea where all the Whites are in the area, as well as which direction they’re moving? You certainly seem to have the infrastructure in place for it.”

“Got to,” said Billy, “If we want to stay safe when we send folks out to scrounge or work the gardens.”

“Is that where all the stuff came from in the houses down below?” Murphy asked.

“We store stuff there,” Billy told him. “Right now we got all we need. But with rodents, scavengers, infected, and the weather, it won’t be too many years from now when a good pair of jeans ‘ll be worth its weight in gold.”

“Or steaks,” laughed Isaac.

“You probably saw,” said Billy, “we got blankets, housewares, tools, pretty much anything you could think of. ‘Cept food. None of that down there. The infected would eat that right up. We store our food up here. We only keep things down there the infected won’t be interested in.”

“Mostly,” Isaac laughed in his deep rumble. “Some comes through and take anything they can find that’s shiny. Sometimes they take knives. Ya never can tell.”

“Makes sense,” said Murphy. “We saw some of that back in Austin. Right, Zed?”

I nodded but didn’t tell about my experiences with Nancy and Bubbles. Instead I asked, “Maps?”

Isaac laughed again.

“What?” I asked.

Looking at Billy, Isaac said, “Told ya.”

“Told him what?” I looked from Isaac to Billy and back again.

"I cleaned out a couple o' convenience stores." Isaac leveled an old calloused finger at Billy. "He told me I was wastin’ my time. Everybody here knows what’s ‘round. Most of us lived our whole lives here.”

“Could we get a map of the area?” I asked. “If you could show me on it where the Whites are and where they’re going, it’d sure make it a lot safer for Murphy and me to get out of here today.” I assumed Murphy was going to tag along. I looked at him. “How’s the hand?”

Murphy held it up for me to see. It looked much better. “Benadryl’s my new favorite drug.”

“Can you use it?”

“Stiff,” Murphy flexed his hand. “But it won’t slow me down.”

“You can have a map,” said Billy. “We don’t use ‘em.” He pointed at a gray-colored house at the edge of town. “Got ‘em stored down there. A stack of ‘em in a china hutch.”

That made me think of the clothes I’d stolen from their warehouse. I reached up and tugged at the collar on my jacket, deciding whether I should ask for what I’d already taken.

Billy looked me up and down. “You needed somethin’ to wear so don’t sweat it. We probably got more than we’re ever gonna need.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Now about these maps.”

The ladder on which we’d battled the Whites stood at one end of the row of silos. The surprise that neither Murphy nor I had guessed was that the silo on the other end was empty. A service hatch at the bottom of the silo was accessible via an internal ladder. The silo dwellers of Creepy Town had a hidden back door.

Good for Murphy and me. And probably them, too.

We’d retrieved a map from the gray house without the cannibal Whites at the bottom of the ladder even looking away from their meals. Once we got back to the top of the silo, Billy showed us on the map where both we and the visible groups of Whites currently were. The silo dwellers fed us breakfast the likes of which we hadn’t even dreamed of since before the virus. They gave us enough food and water to get us through a few days. No ammunition, though. At least, not until Murphy traded his spare silencer for a hundred and fifty rounds.

I told him he could have bargained for a lot more, but he was satisfied with the deal. He was probably right. The silo dwellers had been kind, and kindness was a rarity in the post-virus world.

When we left, Billy told us we were welcome to come back and join them.

It was tempting.

Really tempting. They were good people in a good situation, good considering how the rest of the world was doing.

When we left Creepy Town, we walked down the center of the road, because it was less tiring than trudging through the mud and weeds. It was also a risk. It made us visible to Whites who might be lurking in the trees or inside any house we passed along the way.

And they were there.

Despite the lookout towers spread over part of the county, unseen Whites were always there.

Scanning back and forth after a couple of miles of walking in silence, Murphy asked, “Do you think something is wrong with us?”

I laughed. “Besides what the virus did to us?”

“Sort of.”

I glanced at Murphy. He seemed bothered. “What do you mean?”

“Before all this, you said you worked at Starbucks.”

I nodded, not wanting to confirm that truth out loud. I guess I felt weird over my choice to work there. I felt like I should have done something more significant with my education.

“Not an exciting job, is it?”

I shook my head and got a little bit defensive. “It paid the bills.” Most of the time. Well, maybe not even most. “And I got free food and coffee. What are you getting at?”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

“What?”

“Look, man,” said Murphy. “You get that little attitude thing. I’ve been around you enough to see it. I’m not trying to bust your balls.”

“Sorry.” I took a hard look at the ditches beside the road up ahead. Whites could be anywhere.

“What I’m asking is, were you like this before?”

“Like what?”

Murphy took a second to find the right words. “Action junkie.”

“Were
you
?” It was natural deflection. An old habit.

He nodded. “But not like this.”

“You mean running around doing some of the crazy shit we do and getting off on it?” I asked. “You think you’d never have done this kind of stuff before?”

Murphy shook his head. “Some. I guess. But not this risky.”

"Do you think it's because you didn't have the opportunity back then?” I asked. “Maybe the crazy shit we do now seems so much crazier because the world we live in is that way. Maybe it’s all relative."

“Crazy. That’s a good word for it.” Murphy laughed. “I think about it a lot. I used to get in fights, you know. A lot, I guess. It wasn’t because I was angry. Like I told you about those dudes I killed behind that convenience store, I had to get that out of my system. Later on, I think I got in fights because it was exciting.”

“So you were always an action junkie?” I asked.

“A little bit,” said Murphy. "I think it's worse now. I think something in my brain changed. I think the virus changed me."

That was something to think about. I constantly worried about a deterioration of my mind, whether there was such a thing as virus dementia. I didn’t want to wake up one morning as a monster. I often thought about how much of the Whites’ minds were left when they started chasing normals and eating their flesh. Did they have the capacity to understand what they were doing, while at the same time being unable to control it? That had to be worse than being a simple killing machine.

I wondered if, in my way, I was becoming like the other Whites. I wondered if what suffered most when the virus ate away at a human brain was impulse control.

Looking over at Murphy and seeing that he was still thinking about it as well, I said, “I think the virus changed me too.”

He said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

“I wasn’t like this before, either. Well, like you, I was, a little. I did some crazy shit. I used to race my motorcycle on 2222 without a helmet.”

“That
is
nuts,” said Murphy.

“Nearly got me killed when I wrecked my bike,” I said.

“You weren’t one of those dudes that used to ride wheelies down the interstate, were you?”

“No.” I shook my head. It was a significant question. “No. I always thought those dudes were insane.”

Picking up on the tone in my voice, Murphy asked, “But you’d do it now. Wouldn’t you?”

I looked at my feet, feeling embarrassed, but not sure why. “I probably would. I probably wouldn’t give it a second thought.” I looked over at Murphy. “You’ve seen some of the crazy shit I’ve done, we’ve
both
done.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “That’s what I mean. I do things now that I wouldn’t have done before.”

“Do you worry where it’ll end up?” I asked.

“Probably with us getting killed.” Murphy laughed.

“No,” I said. “Not that. Do you wonder if the virus will change you more than it already has?”

Murphy's face turned sad and he nodded.

“Me, too,” I admitted.

“I’m afraid of what I’ll become,” said Murphy.

“You think you’ll turn into one of them?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. The longer I go without being a White, the more I’m sure I won’t turn into a knucklehead cannibal. What I don’t know is if I’ll turn, and not even know it.”

We walked a bit more before I admitted, “That worries me, too.”

“Dude.” Murphy pointed toward a house a short way off the road.

“What?”

“See that F-350 parked in that carport over there?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“I’m tired of walking. Let’s go see if we can get it started.”

Murphy drove the truck into a convenience store parking lot.

I asked, “Do you think this is a good idea?”

With a big helping of false confidence, he said, “It’s my idea.”

“Yeah but…” I decided not to push it.

Murphy laughed.

“Whatever.”

Murphy stopped the truck, swung his door open, and jumped out, raising his rifle to his shoulder and pointing it at the convenience store’s interior.

I left my door open as I got out, figuring that if we needed to leave in a hurry, the seconds I’d save in reopening it might make a difference.

With my machete ready to do its gruesome business, I walked to the front of the store and stepped through one of the wall-sized broken windows, looking for anything that might be alive inside.

Murphy stepped through the window, panning back and forth with his rifle.

I hollered, “Anybody home?”

An animal scampered through debris at the back of the store.

We waited for the sound to stop. Again, I called, “Anybody home?”

Nobody.

Murphy walked toward the cash register.

I went to the end of a long shelving unit to search the other end of the store.

“If you see any of that purple Gatorade,” Murphy reminded me.

“Yeah, I know.” I shuffled through the broken glass, empty plastic bottles, wrappers, and aluminum cans, ripped rather than popped open. I turned over large pieces of cardboard packages, looking for anything intact. “Looks like plenty of little critters have been in here eating whatever the Whites didn’t take.”

I peeked over a tall shelf to get a view of the refrigerator cases and got a nose full of a smell that I’d caught lingering in the air the moment I stepped past the broken glass. The floor was layered with the remains of people who were mostly intact skeletons in shredded clothing, with lumps of rotting flesh.

I counted skulls, nudging away debris to get a view of any piece of bone that might have been a living person’s cranium.

Four. No. Five. A couple were kids.

The two kid-sized skulls were sitting near one another under a spinning display rack, cockeyed at the ends of their spinal columns. I leaned closer and wished I hadn’t. Each skull had a small perfectly round hole on one side and a missing chunk on the other.

Kicking around in the debris revealed a revolver, partially shiny, partially rusty, resting in what was left of a big skeleton’s hand.

Quitters.

I stopped and stared some more. I felt like an asshole. Could I label what I assumed was a family? Maybe some of them were infected? Maybe they were all normal, but trapped in the store. Maybe the father or mother, whichever one held the gun, had given their children a merciful death.

But the family hadn’t been fed on by the infected. If so, the skeletons wouldn’t have been relatively intact. The bones would have been scattered. That’s just the way it was with the infected. No, these people had been eaten by rats or other small animals. The parents’ choice to take the easy way out had been a hasty and wrong decision.

I shook my head again and stood up. No need to dwell on the evidence of despair. That lay damn near anywhere I looked in my decaying world. Nothing good came from thinking about the past.

I looked over at Murphy’s end of the store. “Anything over there?”

Murphy waved some piece of something in the air. It clearly wasn’t food, a ticket, or anything recognizable.

“Whatever,” I muttered. “I’m going to look in the fridge.”

“Be careful.”

“Yes, Mom.” Looking back through the broken windows, I said, “Keep an eye outside while I’m in the fridge. I won’t be able to hear anything.”

“You got it, Boss.”

I glanced up and down at the empty, white wire shelves behind all of the glass refrigerator doors and had an optimistic moment. Perhaps the fridge had stayed closed up after the shelves had been ransacked. I swung one of the refrigerator case doors open and got a nose full of wet stink. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nasty smells lurked everywhere.

I pushed on the white wire shelves in front of me. They rattled and resisted, but one by one, each fell back into the fridge.

Murphy called, “It would be less noisy if you went into the back and found the door.”

Already committed to my choice to do it the hard way, I said, “Is there anyone outside?”

“Not that I can see.”

Muttering again, I said, "Then it doesn't matter." I knocked the last shelf into the refrigerator unit and stepped through. The glass door swung to a close, and I saw dimly lit stacks of inventory against the back wall. “Son of a bitch.”

Three stacks of milk crates contained cartons, many of which were leaking. Some had exploded, probably due to gases created when the contents rotted in the late summer heat. Now they were growing greenish-brown slime mold all over the cases and down to the floor, where they puddled around a clogged floor drain. Worse, the surface squirmed, alive with maggots.

I squished through the slick dairy remnants on my way to get a closer look at what lay further along the back wall.

Luck!

Bottled and canned beer. Gatorade. Every kind of soft drink I could name, as well as fruit juices and energy drinks.

The Gatorade cases were stacked five high, each with a variety of unnaturally colored liquid in unnecessarily shapely bottles. The case on top had some of the weird purple ones that Murphy liked. I laid my machete across the top case and picked it up, feeling as I did, an intense vulnerability.

I’d disarmed myself.

I looked through the glass doors on the retail side of the refrigerator case and over the metal display shelves. Murphy was in the convenience store’s parking lot, standing near the truck, hands on his weapon, scanning slowly across the horizon.

I looked at the thick, insulated back door of the walk-in cooler. No doubt a stockroom lay on the other side, a room I hadn’t yet checked out. To walk into that room with two handfuls of Gatorade, rather than a ready machete, would be a mistake.

I hefted the case of drinks onto one of the wire shelves in the refrigerator, took my machete, and climbed out of the cooler the way I’d come in. From that side, I again picked up my case of Gatorade and hauled it outside.

“Purple?” Murphy asked looking back at me.

I nodded. “Fierce Grape. Nothing up the road?”

“Just us.” Murphy came over to me, cut the plastic wrapping on the case and pulled out a bottle of his favorite color.

I huffed and heaved the case into the truck’s cab.

Murphy unscrewed the cap and guzzled half the bottle down. “It’s better cold.”

Luxuries from a time gone by. I nodded and helped myself to a bottle of the neon green. I like the classics. “There’s plenty more of this in the cooler. Nobody ransacked that part of the store yet.”

“Any solid food?” Murphy asked.

“Some rotten sandwiches wrapped in plastic in the fridge. I didn’t check the stockroom. Did you find anything good behind the counter?”

Murphy reached into his pocket and half-pulled out a handful of brightly colored disposable lighters. He then reached into the truck’s cab and pulled out a roll of shiny lottery tickets. He showed them to me with a big grin.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Scratch-offs.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Why do we need them?” I took another gulp of my Gatorade.

“Pick one.”

“What?”

“Pick one.”

“Why?”

“Man,” said Murphy. “Humor me. Just pick one.”

“Just take the first one on the roll.” I turned away and looked up and down the road.

“Don’t ruin my fun. Seriously. Pick one.”

I sighed loudly, turned and looked at the roll of tickets strung from Murphy’s hand down across an empty parking space. “Any ticket?”

“Any ticket,” Murphy confirmed.

I pointed to one, and then knelt down and put my finger on it. “This one?”

Murphy chuckled and pulled the tickets up into his hand. “This one?” he confirmed.

What the fuck did I care? I nodded, took another drink, and gazed up and down the road. “It always makes me nervous when I don’t see any Whites. It’s like I know they’re out there. When I can’t see them, I think they’re sneaking up on me.”

“We’ll see plenty soon enough.” Murphy tore the ticket away and let the rest of the roll drop to the ground. “You got a quarter?”

I laughed. “I can’t remember the last time I touched actual money.”

"You never know." Murphy took a magazine out of his vest, removed one bullet, and set the magazine on the hood of the truck. He started scratching the lottery ticket with the brass edge of the cartridge.

“What are you doing?”

“Just checking.”

“Checking what?” I asked. “You know you can’t redeem those things, right?” I looked around, as though showing Murphy for the first time that the world had changed.

Murphy laughed loudly enough that I felt the need to crouch as I looked around again. If any Whites happened to be napping nearby, they’d be awake now. “What’s so funny?”

Still laughing, Murphy said, “Nothing.” He stuffed the ticket into one of his pockets.

“What?” I asked. “Was it a winner?”

“Not saying.”

“What do you mean you’re not saying?” I was getting perturbed. “Why’d you have me pick a ticket and then scratch it off?”

“Just checking to see if you’re as lucky as I thought you were.”

I shook my head and turned to go back inside the convenience store. “I’m going to get a few more cases. I’ll check the stockroom, too, and see if I can find any potato chips or something. You,” I shook my head to emphasize my disappointment. “You just keep amusing yourself.”

When I was halfway to the back of the store, Murphy called, "Do you want to know if you won?"

“No,”

“C’mon man. You’ve got to be curious.”

With no conviction, I said, “Fine. Did I pick a winner?”

Murphy laughed again. “I’m not sayin’.”

“Jesus Christ.”