Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (21 page)

Looking through the binoculars made it hard to find the horde. At least, at first it did. I scanned across field and forest, mostly field, in the distance. I came across a path of turned-up dirt—darker than the surrounding ground, leading across a field—and realized it was the path of the horde that I was seeing. I abruptly stopped. “Holy crap.”

“What?” Murphy had his weapon up before I pulled the binoculars away from my eyes.

I pointed. “They’re right there.”

Murphy looked.

“No,” I told him. “Right here. Close. In that valley, right there.”

“Shit, dude.”

“Like a mile away.”

“That’s a lot closer than I’d prefer to be right now.” Murphy walked around the observation tower, looking hard out the windows to see the ground around us.

“They’re not on the move,” I told him. “I think they’re getting ready to settle down for the night.”

I set the binoculars on the shelf and got behind the telescope, aiming it at the mob of Whites.

“Yeah, looks like they’re milling around,” Murphy confirmed. “They’re not going anywhere.”

With the telescope’s magnification, I saw right down into the horde. I saw individuals, naked, staring at nothing, squabbling, foraging in the dirt for edibles, and even coming to consensus about which of the nearest ones was the weakest.

It was frightening to watch as the first one, then several, stopped whatever they were doing and took to staring at a particular White among them. In the space of thirty or forty seconds, all the Whites close by did the same, until one White found herself looking around at staring eyes. Realization followed, and the targeted White tried to run, but failed. All the staring Whites converged on her and tackled her in a pile of wrestling bodies and dirty white skin. And then it was all splashed with red.

I inched the telescope across the crowd trying to find the center, the spot where I figured I’d find the Smart Ones.

“Okay, now that we’ve got ‘em, what’s the plan, Batman?”

I didn’t answer. I’d found the remains of an old gas station that looked to have been abandoned half a century ago. It was the structure closest to the center of the horde, as near as I could tell.

“Dude?” Murphy asked.

“Just a sec.” I examined the Whites near the gas station. Many were sitting down. A few looked to be stomping the grass into nests in which they planned to curl up for the night. Among a bunch of Whites already sitting down, I spotted a group of three walking together and I guessed they were the sentries, the same ones who had tried to ruin my night when I’d made my first attempt to assassinate Mark. No, not assassinate, punish.

I took that as confirmation that my intuition about the gas station was correct. I refocused the telescope at the building, at least, what wasn’t hidden from view behind a giant oak that had grown in an inconvenient spot.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Murphy asked. “I thought we had a plan for this part.”

There!

A White male walked out from behind the tree and whispered into the ear of a female. After listening to the instructions, the female ran off. An unusually thin male took her place and listened to the whispers. Other Whites lined up for instructions. Two more Whites came out from behind the tree and started whispering in ears.

“Check this out,” I said, stepping away from the telescope. “Hurry.”

Exaggerating his disinterest, Murphy took my place at the telescope and peeked through.

“See?” I asked.

“Damn,” he said. “It couldn’t be any clearer if I was listening to what they were saying. Those Whites are telling the others what to do.” He looked for a few more moments. He pulled his eye away from the telescope and glared at me. “You trying to figure a way to get through to that gas station tonight?”

“I would if I could,” I told him. “But I can’t think of a way to get past those sentries.”

“You didn’t see a combine over there?” Murphy laughed.

I rolled my eyes.

Murphy took the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. I took the opportunity to walk around the circumference of the silo for a good look at the grounds nearby and a cursory glance at the adjacent properties. Of course, I was looking for anything moving. All I saw were a few deer.

Murphy looked around for a table on which to spread the map. We had none, of course, so he pressed the map to the glass, took a confirming look at the naked horde beyond, and put his finger on a spot. “I think they’re here.”

I looked at the map, looked at the horde, and looked back at the map again. “I think you’re right.” I spent another moment finding our location. “I think this is us here.”

“And Fort Hood?” Murphy asked, although it was pretty clearly outlined on the map and shaded in yellow.

I traced a straight line from where the horde was planning to camp for the night to Fort Hood’s border. Our location was just a little below the line. "How far do you think that is?" I asked, as I looked at the scale on the map.

“What’s the distance between the gridlines?” Murphy asked.

“Two miles.”

“Fourteen miles from here to Fort Hood,” Murphy guessed. “Give or take.”

Nodding, I agreed.

“It’ll be full dark in another thirty or forty minutes,” said Murphy.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “What are you thinking?”

“I know the golf ball heads are settling down for the night,” answered Murphy, “but I was thinking about what Billy and Isaac told us about the fire at the silo.”

I looked west to try and make out Fort Hood on the horizon. No helicopters were in the air to mark it, and under the glare of the setting sun, all of the features on the horizon were hard to see.

“He said the Whites out here in the country were drawn to fire, especially at night.”

“I think we’re on the same page here,” I said. “We start a fire and give them some incentive to get off their asses and come this way.”

“We know they don’t mind losing sleep when they're hungry,” said Murphy. “We’ve dealt with them at night plenty of times.”

I looked at the main house. “I’ll bet being up on the hill, they’ll see that house burning.”

Murphy nodded.

“You stay up here and keep an eye on them,” I said. “I’ll go torch the house.”

“Don’t be a dumbass,” Murphy told me. “The horde will be there when we come back up to look. We’ll go torch the house together. No need to risk going by yourself.”

“Sure, Mom.”

With room for twenty or thirty guests at the bed and breakfast, the kitchen and the pantry were large. Unfortunately, not a crumb of food was to be found in either. That left Murphy and me standing at a doorway into the dining room. We’d already hollered into the house in case any Whites were inside. None obliged. I yelled a warning that we were going to burn the house, in case anyone normal was hiding upstairs. Nobody protested.

Murphy led the way past two long dining tables lined with wooden chairs and into a sitting room with a big stone fireplace. Beside the fireplace, half a cord of wood was stacked neatly against the wall as more of a choice in interior design than necessity.

“Some gasoline would come in handy,” I said.

“We don’t have any to spare,” said Murphy. “Do the best with what you have. I’ll keep an eye on things.” He turned his back to me and watched the stairs and the front door.

I went to work with curtains, pillows, and magazines, collecting them in a pile. I fetched the wooden chairs from the dining room. On the chairs, I stacked the firewood so that the fire I was going to start would have plenty of room to breathe. I laced the pile with the magazines and cloth from the upholstery on the chairs. When it was done, the bonfire in the sitting room stood ready to burn at six feet tall.

I checked my pockets and realized I didn’t have a lighter. I looked up at Murphy. He exaggerated his disappointment as he tossed me one.

I lit the paper at the base of my construction, stepped back, and waited for it to ignite some of the fabric. “We’re in business.”

Murphy gave my fire a glance and said, “We should have opened a window upstairs first.”

“Fuck that,” I told him. I picked up a chair and threw it through a big window on the front of the house. It shattered. I silently thanked the owners for not replacing the old windows on the house with modern, tempered glass. “Let’s go.”

“It’ll have to do.” 

We ran out the back door, crossed the wide yard, ran around our pickup, and went back into the silo, locking the door behind.

Panting and grinning we reached the observation deck after running up the stairs. The day had turned to dusk. I didn’t yet see any flames inside the house.

“How many fires you think we’ll have to set?” Murphy asked.

“Four or five.” I shrugged. “Twenty or thirty. Hell, I don’t know.”

“It might be a good idea to round up some gas cans along the way, if we can.” Murphy leaned on a rail and stared impatiently at the house.

I took up a position at the telescope and watched my smart buddies hanging around the old gas station. Nine or ten were in front, whispering in one another’s ears, looking every bit like neighbors standing in the front yard and having a chat after dinner. Scanning across the mass of the horde, it looked like about half of them were on the ground, settling in to sleep.

“Fire in the window,” Murphy announced.

“Good.” I kept my eye at the telescope’s eyepiece.

I’d guess it took maybe ten minutes for the fire to fracture the glass on the second-floor windows. Once that happened, with a big breath of oxygen flowing into the house, the flames roared out and lit up the whole area.

Just as that happened, all across the horde, heads turned to look. Out on the fringe, some of the cliques were already on the move. Others were breaking off from the main group in bands of a few or a dozen.

The Smart Ones, too, were interested. They’d all but stopped whispering and were looking at the burning house. Though through the telescope, it appeared as though they were all looking right at me.

“They’re starting to come,” I said. “How long do you figure the house will burn?”

“No idea,” answered Murphy. “Half hour, an hour. I don’t know.”

“How long do you think it’ll take the Whites to get here?”

“Cross country?” Murphy asked. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll get here a lot sooner than you’ll think they should.

I laughed. “Isn’t
that
the truth.”

“We should get moving.”

I started down the steps. In my excitement over a plan starting to gel, I’d forgotten a necessary step, until I saw that Murphy wasn’t following, but taking a look around first.

“We got about a dozen coming this way from across the road,” he said. “Regular ones, not naked.”

Silently berating myself for the mistake, I said, “It’s time to get the hell outta here.”

The infected had crossed the road and were running up the driveway and across the field toward the burning house by the time I flung open the driver’s side door to get into the truck. Murphy ran around the backside. I put the key in the ignition and waited for the glow plugs to warm. Murphy opened his door.

“This better start,” he said. “If not, get ready to run.”

Looking across the hood toward the infected on the driveway, I saw a few stumble at the surprise of seeing Murphy and me getting into the truck. The light was too low for them to make out our white skin. They didn't miss the pickup, though. As with most Whites, they knew food always came on four wheels.

I cranked the starter.

“They’re coming out from the other side of the cabins,” said Murphy, looking over his shoulder.

“Shit.” I glanced at the rearview mirror. “How’d they get here so fast?”

“They had to be in those trees over there.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t they come when I honked the horn when we first got here?” It was damn frustrating dealing with Whites sometimes. They were not dependable.

The diesel rattled to life. I gassed it. It lurched forward and shuddered, rolled like it might stall, sputtered, and fired up again.

“Damn!” yelled Murphy. “We need a better truck.”

I moved the gas pedal up and down trying to find the optimal place where the truck would accelerate without flooding itself with fuel. The clothed infected in front of us were only a few dozen feet away by then.

“Gotta move,” Murphy told me as he brought his weapon to his shoulder, hanging the barrel out the window.

Doing my best to keep cool and watching the Whites converge around us, I knew I needed to baby the engine back to life again. Once it was running, it chugged along. When it was a little cold, it was finicky.

It shuddered and coughed out puffs of black smoke and suddenly found its rattling rhythm. I accelerated and aimed at the closest infected runners. They hit the brush guard. Two went under the truck, but one jumped at just the right time to land himself on the hood. Instinctively, I swerved to slide him off before he could get hold.

Murphy jerked his weapon inside just as the White flew past on his side of the truck.

Behind us, naked ones were sprinting and screaming.

“Damn, they got here quick!” I shouted.

“Probably scouts or something.”

I drove the truck off the winding driveway and ran it over the field, directing it toward the ornate iron gates I’d knocked down when we’d arrived. With the illumination from the fire fading the farther we got from the burning house and with the sky turning dark, I turned on the headlights and glanced at Murphy, “Nothing to lose now. They’re already chasing us.”

“Get up the road a bit.” Murphy dug in his bag for his night vision goggles. “Put these on when we stop.”

I shook my head. “We’re starting fires to draw them this way. The headlights won’t hurt.”

He shrugged and put the goggles on his head.