Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (22 page)

With insecurity growing as the night grew blacker around us and only a long, narrow pool of light cast by my high beams ahead, I asked, “What do you see?”

Murphy scanned first on one side of the road and then the other. “Trees and bushes.”

“Whites?”

“Some coming out of a house over there.”

“Close?” I asked.

“Not close enough to catch us, unless you want to stop and wait.”

“No.”

He looked back at the house, still burning on the hill. “I think the commotion is bringing them out. I’m seeing more around than we did this afternoon.”

“A lot more?” I asked, expecting the answer to be in the affirmative.

“No. Some more."

We were on an upward slope with the road running straight. No curves, for a change. I checked my rearview mirror again, trying to gauge the distance to the fire that appeared to be burning down to embers as the distance grew behind us.

How far should we run to start the next fire? To the top of this hill?

The truck lurched with a loud thud.

“Shit!” I’d spent too much time looking in the rearview mirror.

A blood-spewing body smashed the windshield and rolled over the cab.

“Goddamn,” Murphy jerked around to look behind us.

I glance back as the White’s body came to rest in the bed of the truck, broken bones protruding through torn skin. “I swear to God! They’re like squirrels. Every time I take my eyes off the road one runs out in front.”

“Watch the damn road,” Murphy commanded.

I drew a deep breath, took a hard look at the dark edges around my headlight beams, grinned and said, “That scared the shit out of me.”

Murphy laughed. “Me, too.”

I cocked my head toward the pickup bed. “Is it dead?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not going anywhere.”

“We’re nearing the top of this hill.” I took my foot off the accelerator and let the truck coast. “You see any houses or barns we can burn?”

“You think we should go farther?” Murphy asked, letting a glance out the back of the truck betray what his answer to that question might be.

Taking another quick glance at my mirror, I said, “No. I’m thinking we need to keep stringing them along. Look at that fire.”

“What am I looking for?”

“I think it’s starting to burn down.”

“And?”

“I don’t think it’ll go much longer. Even if it does, pretty soon it’s going to be too small to be a beacon.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” said Murphy, checking our flanks.

“If we start the next fire close enough to the first, I think we’ll get the Whites in the lead stampeding from fire to fire, all the way to Fort Hood.”

Murphy sighed. “There’s a house and a barn and some shit up here on the right. You’ll come to the driveway pretty soon.”

Indeed, I did.

I turned onto a gravel drive just past a cluster of mailboxes.

Murphy said, “Cut the lights.”

I turned them off. Instinctively, I put my foot on the brakes to slow the truck.

Murphy reached over and took the wheel. “I’ll steer. Take it slow, but not too slow.”

I let go of the wheel and the truck coasted to about twenty. All I saw was blackness outside and the orange fire in the distance. “The darkness makes me nervous. It’d be nice to have a moon again.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed. “Or your night vision goggles that you left with Grace and them. You know, just like a dumbass would do.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

Murphy laughed. “I just think if you had to go off and kill Mark, you should have been smart about it. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“I’ll get—”

“Brake now.”

I stomped the brakes too hard and the truck skidded to a stop. Outside, I couldn’t see a thing.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Leave the lights off.” He pushed his pistol into my hand. “You can’t shoot for shit, so not being able to see anything isn’t going to make you any worse.” He laughed.

“It really isn’t that funny.” I laughed anyway. Hey, it was a little bit funny.

“You sit tight in the truck,” he told me. “I’ll go light the fire inside by myself.”

“I should—”

“You can’t see shit,” he said. “You’ll only slow me down.”

I turned the truck’s headlights on. They illuminated an old farmhouse. “We need to keep them coming this way. Turning the lights on helps us more than it hurts us.”

Shaking his head and letting himself out, Murphy said, “Unless a family of hungry golf ball heads still lives here. Now they’re awake and coming to have us for dinner.”

I opened my door and got out, leaving the truck idling. “You’ll get bored if all the houses we burn tonight don’t have any infected in them.”

Murphy didn’t hear me. He was running up to the front of the house. With my machete in one hand and the pistol in the other, I ran after him. Murphy stopped on the porch, took a look around at the barn, the sheds, and the nearby fields.

“Are the headlights interfering with your night vision goggles?”

“It’d be better if they were out,” he groused and turned to kick a frayed sofa sitting against the wall at the back of the wide porch. “Push that thing over to the front door.”

My mouth opened to protest the unfairness of it. It was an automatic response, but I kept quiet as Murphy charged the front door and broke it off its hinges.

Into the dark house, he shouted, “Hey, cue ball!”

I tucked the pistol into my waistband and shoved the couch. The legs screeched across the porch. I stopped when the far end of the couch reached the front door.

Murphy pointed away from the porch. “Angle it out there, we’re gonna shove it halfway through.”

Ah.
I understood Murphy’s intent. I swung my end of the couch around, stepping off the porch to get the couch aligned.

Murphy got out a lighter and touched the flame to the old cloth. It caught instantly. He lit a few more places. “Push.”

I rammed the couch forward a few feet. Murphy stopped me with a raised hand and lit the center section of the couch. I pushed it until only about a foot was sticking out through the front door. Murphy lit that and said, “Let’s go.”

I stepped back. The flames on the far end of the couch were already four feet high and glowing through flimsy curtains inside the front windows.

“It’ll go up in a hurry.” Murphy ran past me, heading for the truck.

I waited and watched. The fire needed to take hold inside before we left. There could be no broken link in our chain of destruction.

Screams in the darkness sounded. Whites were in the area, maybe five or six.

“C’mon,” Murphy called.

I listened. Most Whites were still fairly distant, but thousands were out there, coming this way. I could only hope it would be tens of thousands, and I could only pray it was the whole naked horde.

The curtains behind the window burst into flames. Smoke flowed out through the front door.

“Dammit, Zed. Let’s go.”

I ran toward the pickup.

Not everything we torched caught fire enough or burned brightly enough to be an effective beacon for the naked horde. But we were burning so many houses, barns, trailers, and abandoned cars along the way that they formed a chain of fires stretching for miles and miles behind us. All along the way, the Whites followed.

Things were working out exactly as I hoped.

We were having a good night.

We’d crossed I-35 by surprise, not having had time along the way to gauge our pyro-manic progress. A giant green highway sign told me we were just south of Belton. We’d stayed on course. That wasn’t luck, but it felt that way. We had managed to lead our mass of followers—what I suspected was indeed the whole naked horde—through the relatively undeveloped gap between Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir and the southern edge of Belton.

We drew them onto Highway 190, a five-hundred foot wide right-of-way, ribboned in strips of asphalt and grass, all leading the mind—even the simple White mind—to follow rather than cross. I knew then we’d make it the last few miles to Fort Hood because 190 ran right past the front gate.

Murphy and I had just torched a dozen cars that had been abandoned while in line at a gas station along the highway access road.  Murphy was inside the convenience store, looking for charcoal lighter fluid and more disposable lighters. I’d also suggested that we get some paper towels and try to fashion the charcoal lighter fluid containers into Molotov cocktails. They wouldn’t break, but they’d melt and the fluid inside would start a nice fire on whatever they fell upon.

At least, that was the hope.

Either way, the lighter fluid would make our jobs easier as we illuminated a path for the naked horde right up to the Survivor Army’s doorstep. Mayhem would follow.

With the engine on the pickup idling and the headlights shining up the access road for Highway 190, I stood some distance from the truck, but beneath the awnings over the gas pumps. I looked east into the dark and listened as I tried to estimate the distance to the vanguard of the naked horde. I saw black silhouettes pass in front of fires just a few tenths of a mile distant. The horde was close. It was time for me and Murphy to get moving.

As I took my first step back toward the pickup, I heard something different in the screaming noise. I leaned into the darkness and listened. The number of howling voices and the rumble of feet ensured that all or most of the horde was on its way.

That hadn’t changed.

In the rumble of all those tens of thousands of feet was a heavy beating sound, deeper and steadier than anything I’d heard.

The sound grew loud, quickly.

Helicopter!

The Survivor Army had sent out a scout.

I turned to look, to locate it in the sky as I ducked behind a gas pump. Unfortunately, with an awning large enough to keep a dozen cars out of the rain while they filled up, I was unable to see anything above me.

One thing I knew for sure, with the fires from all those cars we’d just ignited getting larger by the minute and with the headlights of the pickup making it a target for the helicopter, I was suddenly in danger.

Dammit.

The possibility of the Survivor Army’s sending a helicopter out to scout the fires coming in their direction wasn’t something I’d considered. I bopped myself in the forehead with my palm. It was an obvious thing for the Survivor Army to do. I should have anticipated it.

Suddenly thinking the pump I was hiding behind might still have some stagnating gasoline within, I realized if the helicopter pilot decided for whatever reason to start shooting, I’d chosen a very bad place to hide. I ran for the convenience store entrance.

When I was halfway across the parking lot, Murphy leaned out through a broken window and waved me away. “Go hide behind the dumpster.”

I ran to my right, hearing the helicopter above, but still not seeing it. I rounded the corner of the convenience store, glancing back at the highway overpass and seeing shapes coming in the light of the car fires. The horde was here.

Shit.

It was time to run like a motherfucker again.

Nevertheless, I stopped, turned and ran back to the front of the convenience store, just as a stream of tracers ripped through the sky and the buzz of a rapidly firing machine gun sawed through all other sounds. The pickup erupted in sparks and animated shreds of flying metal. Then it exploded.

I dropped to the ground and covered my head, though the heat from the blast was already rolling over me. What glass on the front of the convenience store wasn’t already broken shattered under the shock. The pillars of flame standing above each of the burning cars all curved away from the blast.

“Get around the corner!” Murphy yelled at me. “Get the wall between you and the helicopter!”

I looked up to the point in the sky from which the tracers were spewing. They stopped coming, but I saw the glow of the fires on the helicopter’s skin. It hovered a wide arc around my pickup’s burning carcass, as though checking to make sure the rattly beast was indeed dead.

That kind of pissed me off.

Well, maybe it
totally
pissed me off.

I drew Murphy’s pistol from my waistband, knowing I didn’t have the range or the accuracy to harm the dimwitted bastards in that helicopter.

I looked around behind me instead. I needed to keep my head in the game. I shouted through one of the convenience store windows, “Murphy, the Whites are almost here. We need to get the fuck outta here.”

The helicopter floated out over the road, away from where Murphy was hidden and I was standing in plain sight. It descended.

I shouted, “I think they’re looking for our bodies by the truck. They want to make sure we’re dead.” It was a wild-ass guess.

Whites ran past the flaming cars and the convenience store. The helicopter had stolen their attention, though it was still a good thirty feet off the ground and way out of their reach.

The helicopter spun around, angling its nose toward the convenience store, and I got a bad feeling about what was coming next—a rocket or some such shit.

Unfair bastards!

Flashes coming from my right startled me.

Murphy stepped through the broken front door, seemingly intent on firing every round in his weapon.

Metal on the helicopter sparked as Murphy’s rounds found their target.

The helicopter lifted and veered.

“Fuck it!” I raised the pistol and pulled the trigger, sending my shots uselessly at the Black Hawk.

It tilted its bottom toward us. A rush of prop wash blew every loose bit of crap off the parking lot into our faces. The chopper accelerated away as it rose at a shallow angle.

I noticed a pair of tall metal framework towers, the kind that support high-tension power lines. The helicopter was going to fly between them. Against the dark sky, I didn’t see the power lines draped across the gap between, and I figured the lines must have been knocked down in the storms.

The helicopter jerked suddenly at an awkward angle and struggled as if caught in a giant butterfly net. The sound of breaking metal and snapping cable was too loud not to frighten even the Whites into crouching or jumping to the ground.

The Black Hawk spun around again as the tail fractured and bent. The cockpit smashed into one of the towers in a screech of bending metal. The whole helicopter angled toward the ground with the front end stuck in the framework of the tower. The tail rotor blew apart when it hit the ground and the tower groaned, bent, and slowly fell over.

“Holy mother of shit!” I said.

“Pussy!” Murphy shouted. “Those things are armored. The pilot panicked when the bullets hit.”

Thousands of White voices rose as one. They converged on the downed helicopter.

I ran past Murphy. “We need to go.”