Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (19 page)

I drove. Murphy rode shotgun for literally the very reason that term was invented in the first place—to keep the naughty people away from civilized traveling folks inside.

“Keep us going north,” I told him. He was the navigator, too.

Murphy looked around before laying his weapon across his lap. He unfolded the map. “How far north do you want to go before we head west to find them?”

“I don’t want to run into them from the side.” I scanned the field on both sides of the road while trying to keep my speed up. I didn’t believe the horde would move more than twenty miles in a day. A guess. With trying to keep themselves fed along the way, and with the Smart Ones probably knowing that driving the horde at too quick a pace would increase their mortality rate, they might move only five or ten miles in a day. Either way, when we came upon them, I wanted to approach from the northwest, on the off chance that if we had to run away, and if they chased, we’d all be moving in the direction I wanted them to go.

As it was, with the Whites last seen heading north, the next population center they came to—or former population center—would be Waco. They’d pass twenty or thirty miles to the east of Fort Hood.

“Again,” Murphy asked, “how far?”

“Let’s shoot for twenty or thirty miles,” I said. “Then we’ll cut west as much as we can, and see if we can pick up some sign of them.”

Murphy laughed. “I don’t think finding a sign of them will be the problem. What worries me is that we’ll round a curve in the road or come over some hill and see the whole damn horde in front of us.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “That would be our luck. You know, we could do the same things our buddies in the silos did and find a water tower to climb. We’d get a pretty good view of at least five miles around, maybe ten.”

“The horde would be hard to miss,” said Murphy, “even at that distance.”

I slowed the pickup and drove through a ditch to avoid several burned-out cars in the road. “That would keep us from getting surprised by a mob too big for us to handle.”

"Stop at the top of this next hill," said Murphy. "If you don't see any Whites around. I'll climb on top of the cab and see if I can spot a water tower for us to climb.”

I had to run over a trio of infected who were loping down the middle of the road. I don't know where they were going. I don't know why they didn't make any effort to get out of the way. They were a short distance down the road from a radio tower we were headed toward and they were jogging in that direction.

Better to exterminate them with the truck than to be surprised by them later.

Why not? The truck had the heavy steel brush guard and I didn’t think I was going fast enough to damage anything important.

When I drove the truck over the crest of a hill we found a radio tower standing next to a small, square building with a flat roof and concrete walls. A bundle of black cables ran out of the building and up the side of the tower. Around the building stood a chain link fence at a distance of about fifty feet on all four sides.

With no Whites around that we could see, I backed the truck into the fence and knocked it flat, quickly solving the problem of how we were going to get through it. I didn’t drive back so far that the pickup’s tires rolled onto the barbed wire that topped the fence, or any of the chain link fencing. I didn’t need a flat.

Murphy and I got out and walked around to give the tower a good look.

“How tall do you think it is?” he asked.

Looking from the base up the red and white painted framework reaching into the sky, I said, “Tall enough. I’ll either see the naked horde from up there or I’ll see the next water tower or silo that we’ll need to climb.”

"And if there are Whites on the way?" Murphy asked. "We've been lucky so far this morning, and that's starting to worry me."

“We’ll deal with them, like we always do.” Seeing that the ladder into the tower was blocked with a locked fence attached to the rungs, I walked around the small building with Murphy following behind. He was scanning across the tan-colored fields all around us. I was looking for a way to get onto the flat roof. Three runs of metal conduit attached to a wall and running from ground to roof turned out to be my path.

Without a word of what I was going to do, I wrapped my fingers around one of the pipes and used it for a ladder to pull myself onto the roof. It took only a few seconds. Looking down at Murphy, I asked, “How’s your hand?”

He flexed as he looked at his palm. “Still a little swollen, but I can use it just fine.”

“Can you make it up here?”

Murphy rolled his eyes, grabbed onto the conduits, and climbed to the roof beside me.

“You keep an eye out around us,” I told him. “I’ll go up.”

Murphy opened his mouth to protest, but we both knew it would be safer for me to go up than him.

“If you see any Whites,” I told him, “Shoot ‘em.”

"And if a bunch comes this way?"

I laughed. “I’ll see them a long time before you do.”

“Yeah,” said Murphy. “I suppose so.”

“Keep an eye on me as I’m going up,” I said. “I’ll take it slow and check for Whites in all directions. If I see any, I’ll point out the direction and call down how many.”

“And when you get too high to hear?”

“Won’t matter,” I told him. “If I’m so high that you can’t hear me, then the Whites I see will be so far away they won’t be able to get here before I get down.”

“Unless they’re close by,” Murphy argued.

“You’re not thinking, dude,” I told him. “For any that are close by, I’ll have told you about those before I get very high. Cool?”

Murphy pursed his lips and raised his rifle to his shoulder to scan the surrounding fields using the scope. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If I see any Whites, how ‘bout I just lay down so they don’t see me?” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes, climbed through the tower’s framework, got onto the ladder, and started up.

I don’t know how high up I was when I stopped and looked around. Maybe twenty feet, high enough to see the area around us, but not high enough to see much of anything Murphy and I hadn’t already seen from the roof of the little building below.

“Anything?” Murphy called.

“Nope.”

Up.

At fifty feet, I glanced around again. Nothing jumped out, so I pushed on.

The wind felt stronger and colder the higher I went. The horizon spread out farther in all directions.

With no intuition for height, and no way to know how far up the tower I’d gone, I slowed my ascent. I might have been a hundred feet or two hundred feet off the ground. The section of ladder stretching into the sky above could have been as long as the one below. As I stepped from rung to rung, looking up and down, I saw no difference. Maybe I was halfway up. Maybe it was impossible to tell from my perspective. Either way, I was high enough that the wind seemed to be blowing twice as hard as it did down on the ground. The guy-wires that Christmas treed down from the tower at different heights in different directions vibrated with Star Wars laser sounds that changed pitch with the speed of the wind. Despite all those guy-wires, the tower swayed enough to make me worry it might fall over or break somewhere along its length.

Logic told me that was impossible. After all, the tower’s resilience was proven by the fact that it stood at all. It made it through the storm a few days prior. It survived the hurricane several months ago, and had been enduring the weather for years. One reason it did not collapse in any of those winds was probably its ability to flex and sway. Nevertheless, it was hard to keep logic in mind while the framework moved around me.

I stopped, wrapped an elbow over a rung, and locked my hands to hold myself in place. I took a hard look at the fields near the base of the tower and saw Murphy looking up at me. I let go my hand-locked death grip and gave him the thumbs up. No Whites were nearby that I could see.

As I looked farther and farther out, I spotted the movement of cattle and horses. I saw Whites in groups of a few here and there, and even saw a long line of naked ones winding their way on a road leading into a small town a mile north of us.

I looked east to see if I could spot the silos where we’d stayed the night. The horizon was spiked with water towers and silos of varying heights and diameters—some clustered, some attached, others in pairs, and many standing solo. Unable to find the line of five silos, I tried to piece together the landmarks we'd passed along the way to find the path back; instead I only managed to lose myself.

Realizing I was wasting time for something that served only to satisfy my curiosity, I looked down again at the fields below, to see if I could spot any Whites closing in on Murphy’s position. Nothing. I stuck my arm out through the tower’s metal frame and showed Murphy another thumbs up.

I looked west, thinking I’d see a giant black smudge snaking over the rolling farmland to where it terminated at an amorphous white splatter.

Nothing so obvious presented itself.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I noticed how all the colors seemed to lose their brilliance and distinction as they slowly faded to shades of gray the farther away I gazed.

Way off to the west, I spotted black specks floating across the sky. Three of them. Those specks were familiar to me. They were the Survivor Army’s helicopters flying south. Probably toward Austin, unless they got bored with that plan. Well north of the three specks flying south, I spotted two more that seemed to go nowhere, other than to circle the same patch of gray ground below.

I examined the landmarks between my position and theirs, thinking that I’d be able to reconcile those with Murphy’s map when I got back down. My hope was that I’d be able to confirm our strong suspicion that the Survivor Army was indeed making Fort Hood their home.

I continued to look west and south, thinking I was plenty high enough up the tower.

Then I spotted the horde.

We spread the map out on the tailgate. With a finger, I traced a road on the map that ran past the radio tower. I looked up. “See those two barns up there?”

Murphy looked across the field.

I tapped the map on an intersection, and pointed at an adjacent road. “This road goes north just on the other side of those barns.”

“Okay.” Murphy looked again, though we couldn’t see the road from where we stood.

"Then about a mile up that road is a little town,” I said. “I saw a line of about forty, maybe fifty Whites running into that town.”

“Let’s avoid that place.” Murphy took his attention away from the map and slowly turned, scanning the area around us.

“Yeah,” I agreed absently, keeping focused on the map, looking at the roads, and trying to associate the map with the landmarks I’d seen from up on the tower.

I missed my smartphone.

I traced roads and tried to figure out where the horde was on the map. I groaned.

“What?” Murphy asked.

Frustrated with what I figured out, I shushed Murphy and went through my analysis again.

“You need to go back up and look again?”

Shaking my head, I said, “We don’t have time.”

“How could we not have time?” Murphy looked around again. Second-nature paranoia.

“See this road here?” It was labeled a highway, but it was just a two-lane road with a wide shoulder and a seventy mile per hour speed limit.

“Yeah?” Murphy acknowledged.

“They’re headed toward it right now," I told him. “They’ll cross it before too long. I think it’s our best chance to get ahead of them.”

Murphy traced his finger back along the road to that little town a mile or so away, the one I’d seen the line of Whites run into. He frowned and shook his head. “Why’s this road important?”

I showed him another way to get ahead of the naked horde. The detour would send us on a road that cut across their path, but at a point much farther north. “To skirt around the town to get to this other road,” I said as I showed Murphy the path, “assuming we don’t have to detour again to get there, we might burn off an extra hour or two. I think the horde might get too far north by then.”

“What do you mean by that?” Murphy asked.

I showed him where Fort Hood lay on the map. “I saw some helicopters flying around over here. I’m pretty sure that’s where the Survivor Army is. If we want to get the naked horde over there, I think it will be easier to get them to veer that way than to coax them into a hard left turn. The farther north they go, the more they’ll have to turn, and the harder it will be to get them to do it, I think.”

Murphy sighed and rolled his eyes. “I know where this is going.”

“The urgency is real,” I said.

“So is the risk,” Murphy told me.

“I think getting the Survivor Army and the naked horde together is worth it.”

Murphy shook his head in defeat. “At least it’ll be exciting.”

“The other thing is, we can’t take the main road through town,” I said. “It’s blocked. But when I was up there, I think I saw a way through town. When we get to the other side, we can get back on this highway.”

“Did I say exciting?” asked Murphy. “I meant excitinger.” He laughed at his word joke.

I smiled. “Don’t be a pussy. You know you dig this shit. Stop whining and let's go kill some golf ball heads.”

“Killing Mark better be worth it. That’s all I’ve got to say.”