Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (3 page)

I suppose I had been standing in the middle of the road for a minute, or two, or maybe an hour. The world of my thoughts obeys no clock’s arbitrary segmentation of time.

I found myself appreciating the exquisite blanket of an ink sky, dotted with pinprick stars and cast aglow in a faint silver from a thin crescent moon.

Shadows moved all around me under swaying trees and around the tall weeds. Crisp brown leaves crackled against one another as gusts rolled over the unharvested crops.

In the calm that came from stopping to listen for the first time in months, I knew no Whites were near. We were all, for the moment, safe.

I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time in a good, long while. Yet, as much as I indulged the meditative moment, I was fully aware of the others. Fritz was in the Humvee, conscious, but dazed and bleeding where the glass had split the skin on his forehead. Murphy was conversing tensely with Grace, who was asking questions, most of which sounded like some version of how crazy was I, and why was I off standing in the middle of the road, a good distance from the vehicles?

They didn’t know.

Neither was I sure.

I only knew that I had shit to get together.

Shit I
needed
to get together, or I was going to stay on the path I was on, and I was going to end up dead. And Murphy was going to be dead, too. And probably some of the others.

As I ruminated, I understood with more and more clarity that I needed to do something significant to break the cycle of habit I was in: imagine something stupid, do something stupid, run, kill, repeat.

Even as I realized that, I convinced myself that my habit was itself the key to breaking it. And I imagined a solution that I knew conflated all the shit at the roots of my bad choices. The epiphany of it all was in knowing my solution might very well be a lie, and accepting that as okay.

It was a lie I knew I could tell myself enough times to believe.

Hell, why not?

A person is nothing if not the product of the lies he believes about himself.  And if I believed that, why couldn’t I consciously select the specific lies that were going to define me?

Why the fuck not?

I shrugged in response to the conversation in my head.

I slipped the Hello Kitty backpack’s straps off my shoulders and let it drop to the asphalt. I lay my machete on the road and then took off my belt and holster. Each layer of clothing fell away until I was naked.

The voices behind me stopped talking.

I knew what they were thinking.

It didn’t matter.

I had problems to fix. Being ostracized from our little social circle wasn’t a worry that blipped on my radar.

“What are you doing, man?” Murphy asked from a few steps behind me.

I gave him a glance over my shoulder. His weapon was in his hands, ready for use. I turned toward the night and answered, “What I have to do.”

“What’s that?” His voice put his worry on full display.

I bent over and picked up the knife I’d taken from Mr. Mays’ house a few months prior. I tested the blade on my thumb. I kept the edge as razor sharp as I had time to. I ran a hand over the crop of short hair on my scalp. It wasn’t long enough yet to yank out again. I raised the knife, laid the sharp edge at the hairline on my forehead and scraped backward.

“Bald was never a good look on you,” Murphy said, with a fake laugh.

I shrugged. At least this time, someone was paying attention to the gesture.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Don’t make me explain it,” I said. “You guys take the cars.” I pointed down at my backpack and clothes. “And my stuff. I’ll meet you in College Station.”

“I
will
make you explain it,” Murphy told me. “We need to see if one of these little towns has a drugstore. I need to check your temperature.”

I laughed.

“Why’s that funny?”

“You don’t need to check temperature to know that somebody is a White. You just have to look at them.” I turned to Murphy. “You only have to look to know the crazy ones. You know that.” I didn’t believe the lie I was going to tell, but in time I knew I was going to make myself believe it. “I can tell, too, just by looking.”

Murphy nodded but kind of shook his head at the same time.

Murphy saw through the lie for the same reason I knew I was lying. We’d both killed Whites by the score, but we’d both also killed Slow Burns, and I knew I'd killed docile ones like Russell. I’d done so because I’d made the choice to live each time uncertainty arose. I always chose to kill rather than chance my death.

Did that make me bad?

Did the karmic scales of the deaths of the good and the bad balance out?

I dropped a big clump of short hairs and watched them spread through the breeze as they fell. I dragged the knife across my scalp and scraped another stripe bald.

“I don’t know what’s up with you,” said Murphy. “You’re not a White. You’re not one of them.”

“Back after Mark killed Amber…” I choked on the words. Damn those emotions. "I think I lost it for a while there."

“All that Tarzan shit at the hospital?”

“That and more.” I stopped to collect my thoughts into sentences that I hoped wouldn’t leave me sounding insane. “I wanted to find Mark and kill him. I wanted to make him suffer. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted anything so badly. It was like all the evil in the world, all the fucked-up shit that ever happened to me, had found its focus in him, and I knew if I could just strangle the life out of him, see his eyes bulge, feel his last breath on my face, I thought…”

“What?” Murphy asked. “That maybe revenge would make you something you're not? That it might fix something?"

I nodded.

“It doesn’t.”

I turned away and scraped another row of hair off my head. My scalp was turning slick with blood from my poor barber job. "You told me that story of those three gangbangers you killed. I know you say you found a way to get right with it eventually. You felt like you were a bad person for a long time. Do you ever wonder if killing them was a necessary step in the transformation of the lesser Murphy into who you are today?”

“I…” Murphy lost his way through whatever argument was formulating in his head.

“I know you’re afraid to answer,” I told him. "You think I'm baiting you into agreeing with me, but I'm not. You had to find your way through life to get to where you are now." I looked at his face to see if I could read his feelings about what I was saying. “I need to do the same. I told myself after Amber’s death that revenge was a stupid, selfish endeavor. Now, and every day since Steph died, I can’t get past the thought that if I’d figured out how to find that bald-headed fuck and kill him, she might still be alive.”

Shaking his head vigorously, Murphy said, “You didn’t even see Mark there that night when Steph was killed. “All we saw were a bunch of dumb Whites. That’s it. You don’t even know he’s alive. Is that what you’re talking about, here? You’re just going to run around Texas with your dong hanging out until you find a bald-headed White that looks enough like Mark that you can kill him and feel good about yourself?”

I nodded, not caring that Murphy’s summation of my plan made it sound every bit as stupid as it was. “I need to kill him. I don’t know that I can find him. But I need to kill him." I pointed to the crest of a hill against the star-sprinkled sky. "The naked horde is over there somewhere. At least some of them are. If they're there, Mark won’t be too far. They all stick together.”

"No, they don't," Murphy argued. “Up at the lake we saw parts of the horde. Not the whole thing.”

“Maybe we only
saw
parts of the horde,” I told him. "With all the hills and trees up in that area the whole horde could have been within a mile of us, and we wouldn't have known."

“What?” Murphy’s face showed how little he thought of my counterpoint. “Am I supposed to accept that? Is that your whole argument?”

I shook my head. “I’m not making a logical argument. I’m just telling you what I need to do. I need to find Mark and I need to kill him. He’s a roadblock for me in my drive toward happy Murphy-ville. It’s that simple. It’s revenge. It’s justice. It’s catharsis. It’s whatever I want to call it. I only know I have to do it. I can’t move forward until I do.”

At the end of it, Murphy understood. At least, he said he did. Grace made a perfunctory effort to dissuade me, but in the end, she just shook her head and frowned, disappointment at a stupid choice. It was a combination of gestures I’d seen from people my whole life. Jazz told me I was crazy and made the biggest effort to change my mind. Gabe watched some of it, but mostly stayed close to Fritz.

After they all loaded up, they wouldn’t drive away. Maybe they didn’t want to feel the guilt of abandoning me. Maybe they were playing a mind game, allowing me to face the reality of my choice in hopes that I’d change my mind. Or maybe they thought I was being a junior high kid, acting out for attention.

What do I know? I’m not a shrink.

I waved at them and walked naked into the darkness.

Well, naked except for the boots. I kept those, along with Mr. Mays’ knife, tucked inside above my ankle. And, of course, I carried my machete.

I wrestled quite a bit with the choice of whether to wear the boots. They could mark me as different when I went among the naked Whites in the horde. But I didn’t have four months’ worth of calluses built up on shoeless feet, as I was sure the naked Whites all did. I didn’t know how many miles of thorns and rocks and broken glass were waiting out there to mangle my soles with cuts and sores. They would surely turn infected from running through all the pissy mud and shit they left along their way.

I wondered how many Whites simply died of infection that festered in untended wounds. As many or more had to be succumbing to exposure on the nights when the air turned frigid. How many would make it through the winter? Jeff Aubrey’s apparently incorrect equations only took into account death by fratricide and starvation. What of the magnified lethality from sleeping naked outdoors, eating raw flesh, and drinking unclean water?

And the thought came to me, as it often did: what if Mark was already dead?

I stopped walking and looked back in the direction of the cars. I didn’t see anything. The black of the earth behind me was only distinguishable by the stars in the sky beyond.

I missed my night vision goggles, I think, as much as I’d have missed my machete, had I chosen to go empty-handed. As awkward as the bulky goggles felt when strapped over my head, I’d become accustomed to seeing through the blackness of the nighttime world.

I was alone with the weight of my choice.

No turning back.

Well, I guess I could have turned back to the original plan and started the long hike toward College Station. I could have ransacked some farmhouses along the way, and maybe even scavenged a running vehicle. If I put my mind to it and caught a little luck, I might even have made it there by dinnertime.

That thought comforted me.

It assured me I wasn’t trapped by the consequences of one bad choice. I was choosing to proceed based on my logical line of irrational thought.

Or it proved I was an idiot.

Roads seem so much longer when walking than driving. It’s a truth that’s obvious to the point of triviality, until you park your car and walk back the way you just drove, feeling the passing of slow miles in your feet and knees.

Landmarks, too, are different to the point of unrecognizability. They’re blurs of collage and detail that stand out by color and texture, as drivers race by at seventy miles per hour. At walking speed, the eye focuses on different things, and the mind imagines a distinct farmhouse in one place, for instance, to be another in a different field on a different stretch of road. 

At least, that’s what I was thinking about when I took a turn onto the road that I figured would lead me to the mob we’d seen chasing cattle across the road.

I wasn’t sure.

And that wasn’t taking into account the tizzy I was in when I’d sped away from the place earlier in the night.

All I could do was hope my memory was solid as I took a chance and headed north. If I’d remembered incorrectly, I’d walk and walk some more. One thing I figured I could count on was that I’d find the path of the horde, at least. A few hundred thousand Whites pillaging their way across the countryside would leave plenty of evidence of their passing.

I didn’t have to suffer my uncertainty long. I found the place in the road where we'd seen the Whites come through the bushes while chasing the cattle.

Blood coagulated in sticky spots on the road and puddled deeply enough to be slippery in others. Thick bones and pieces of cowhide lay in shreds and blankets, red with blood and white with fat on one side, dirty white and brown on the other. Up the road and in the ditches, naked Whites smeared in blood still gnawed on bones and gobbled bits of meat missed by their faster, stronger comrades.

I looked around at the trees growing up along the fence line. I looked at the bushes that were knocked down, and the fence pushed over by frantic cattle and thousands of chasing Whites.

A sizable band of them had been through. What I didn’t know was whether this band of naked Whites was a peripheral bunch, scouts, laggards, a splinter group, or even copycats. I only hoped that in pursuing them, I’d find my way back to the main horde, and from there, to the Smart Ones at their core.

And there, I’d find fucking Mark.

The cattle and the Whites had been moving from right to left across the road when I’d observed them from the Mustang. Looking across a field of flattened crops to the left of the road, I spotted stragglers moving off in that direction and Whites on the ground, filling their bellies on scraps of carcasses.

Null Spot, the stealthy Indian tracker, immediately realized the naked horde had a long tail and left a wide path.

The reality of seeing Mark bleed suddenly seemed within reach. On quick, excited steps, I scrambled down the steep incline of a roadside ditch and climbed the other side. I stomped my way through a trampled hedgerow of thorny bushes and twisted barbed wire, all the while patting myself on the back for my genius decision to keep the boots on my feet.

I took off across a field carpeted in the husks of the crops that had dried out in the autumn weather before they were run flat by the passing horde.

My breath flowed out in clouds of condensation. The night was turning a cold edge on all of us Whites running through it with naked skin. I knew I would have been feeling the cold were it not for the numbness the virus left with me. And I was well aware that pain is a biological feedback mechanism that tells a living thing to stop doing whatever it’s doing, lest it be injured or die.

Without sensations of pain, I needed to pay close attention to my body, or I'd risk hypothermia.

That thought gave me pause to look for the bodies of Whites in the field who might have died of exposure. Surely, some of them had succumbed to the elements. They couldn’t go all winter without clothing and not experience a pretty hefty casualty rate.

I saw none.

Then something else occurred to me. If any Whites fell, they’d likely be consumed by their hungry brothers and sisters, leaving nothing but scattered bones. That was the sum of life and death among every band of Whites. Run and kill until you die. Then feed your comrades with your dead flesh.

I jogged for a bit to get my blood flowing and to warm my body up. I walked and then jogged again, proceeding alternately as I focused on avoiding the divots in the dirt left by panicked hooves. To step in one of those at the wrong angle might result in a sprained ankle—a deadly injury with so many straggling Whites around. I guess those that followed the horde specialized in cleaning up the fallen, whether they were still alive or not.

I crested a few hills, seemingly getting farther and farther from civilization as I went. I saw shadowy copses where the terrain was too uneven to plow. Ponds with mirrored black surfaces sparkled starlight back at the sky. I realized I hadn’t seen a fence in a good while. Roads, rotting mobile homes, and barns seemed to have been stolen from the countryside.

All around me were only endless, cultivated fields, slowly turning fallow.

As I came to a walk at the end of one of my jogs, I realized I was getting thirsty. Necessarily, though, my water bottles were keeping company with a few days’ worth of food in my Hello Kitty bag in the backseat of the electric Mustang. The Mustang was probably fifty miles east by now.

Looking around for a water source, I spotted a stock pond, but didn’t want to chance a drink from one of those. Every kind of bacteria that lived in cow pies would be in that water and would probably leave me with a case of diarrhea, or worse.

I needed to find a creek. Flowing water had to be better for me than stagnant water.

On the question of food? Eh. I’d gone hungry before. And thanks to my time convalescing by the lake with Murphy, I had a store of fat to burn off. If I lost twenty or thirty pounds again, I could afford it.

I didn't think I'd be out that long, though.

I’d just started my quest and already I was tracking the naked horde. Once I found them, I’d find Mark, and I’d give him a few good whacks with my machete.

Problem solved. Walk off.

The Whites wouldn’t likely fuck with me, not while I looked like them, not while I carried my bloody machete.

Did I say how simple all of my schemes sounded as they rolled down the roller coaster of their momentum, turning surprisingly fast into adrenaline-laced screaming shit?

Yeah, I know I did.

Still, what else was I going to do? Sit in an abandoned Walmart somewhere and eat stale rice cakes until I died of old age, remembering all the people I used to know, ruminating over all the goddamned stupid things I’d done?

Fuck that.

At the crest of a hill, I spotted a geometric black silhouette across the valley, on the crest of the next long roll in the earth. The thing was, though, that I had no idea what the strange object was. I stopped and cocked my head like a dog, trying to figure it out.

What the fuck is that thing?

I hurried over furrows that ran across the slope, eager to explore the thing I was looking at. Maybe the eagerness grew out of the boredom of having spent what felt like hours crossing nothing but empty fields. In a way, I was hoping the thing I was seeing might be a house, and that I might find some food and water inside.

I stopped.

The ground on the hill across the shallow valley was odd. I stared at it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t as black as all the others I’d hiked up. Sure, some of them were covered in winter grasses that didn’t mind the chill in the nights. Others were little more than black dirt full of tan weeds and crops, tilled under by all the White feet that had passed this way ahead of me.

But this field seemed to glow a dull white in the darkness.