Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (7 page)

I didn’t know if it was Moe on the floor, but I decided that it had to be. The caricature of Moe painted on the side of the trailer led me to believe that he’d been a hefty fellow, which matched the body on the trailer’s floor. Putting on my Sherlock hat, it seemed to me that his relatives had locked him in the trailer early on in the outbreak. They’d had no desire to kill him, and judging by the cross in the yard and verses on the wall, had hoped to pray out a solution to the Moe problem. From the state of the town, it looked like everything had gone to shit quickly enough that the Moe problem was left to solve itself.

Given that everything went down in August, and the trailer was black except where painted with the jerky graphics, I guessed Moe had died of heat stroke. Inside, the doors were covered with red streaks, and the plywood panels were cracked. Moe had put in a good effort to get out. Obviously, he failed.

All of the Whites packed around me were looking at Moe. A few were licking their lips as they gave a thought to whether damp, smelly, Moe Jerky was worth feeding on.

Understanding the details of Moe’s demise was not the reason I opened the trailer. With a roll-down cover above a counter on one side, it was clear to me the trailer had been set up to sell Moe’s jerky. And that implied that Moe’s stock might be stored inside, which it was. Boxes and boxes were piled against one wall and bungeed in place. Mostly that worked, but it looked like Moe had made a mess of those when he was trying to get out of his trailer.

I yanked one of the boxes off the top of a tumbled pile and tore it open as the Whites watched me. The box was full of Moe-stink but inside were packages of Moe’s jerky, wrapped in plastic and labeled with the critter that had donated its flesh to the cause, along with a description of the seasonings that flavored its meat. I only hoped the seasonings were strong enough to overpower the stench of baked Moe.

I held a clear plastic package up for my mesmerized Whites to see. I ripped it open, pulled out a brown piece of meat and stuffed it into my mouth. It only took a few seconds before the smarter ones in my group grabbed packages of their own and had them open.

As the feast began, I took a handful of beef jerky packages, extra-hot, and shouldered my way past my Whites to get away from the smell. I found myself a wooden bench beside a detached garage and sat down to eat my breakfast as the morning sun rose over the horizon.

When I’d left my combine the night before, I’d done so with the urgent need to get my diesel and get back to it. My crop of sleeping Whites was in the field and ready for harvest. Now the sun was up, I guessed that the horde was on the move to find its own breakfast.

I was going to have to follow their path with my combine and hope to catch them asleep, so I could start my harvest tonight. I was in for another long day and another long night, but the result would be worth it. I’d lose a few nights of beauty sleep. That wasn’t going to hurt my non-existent chances of getting laid and Mark would be dead. A worthy trade.

I lost control of my little mob of fifty or so when we passed a park with a pond on the way to Walmart. They peeled off from the line one at a time at first, but before I could accept what was happening and pretend like I was leading them, they all ran toward the water. So I followed them down to the pond’s edge and reluctantly drank.

Even after months of drinking some of the vilest water, the thought of putting the green pond water into my mouth turned my stomach. More than my thirst, I thought of all the bacteria swimming in the green soup, eager to get into my gut and give me the shits. Thankfully, my system was developing immunity to the most common malicious microbes in the water. My bouts of diarrhea were coming less and less frequently as the months passed.

It was mid-morning by the time we stepped into the Walmart parking lot, which was a mess of abandoned vehicles. Some were jammed together in collisions. Others were abandoned where they’d been parked between the painted lines. I suspected the ones with broken windows marked the places where people had died inside.

And that was the thing with the state of the world: everything hadn't gone to shit at the same time, though now, it looked like it had. The virus had taken weeks, maybe months, to reach all the nooks and crannies where people lived on the face of an earth apathetic to their plight. But the last major event that humans experienced in their messy little spots on the map occurred when the number of infected in the vicinity grew too large for them to handle. And they acted mostly the same way everyone else acted. Some holed up and boarded the windows. Some ran to the big box store to stock up one last time. Others piled into the lines of cars jammed on the roads out of town, hoping to find a safe place that didn’t exist.

They all died in the act, leaving every locale in a morbidly similar state of chaos.

Inside, the Walmart was messier than the parking lot. A riot of looting and fighting had exploded up and down the aisles. The floors were covered in all manner of merchandise, the remnants of the dead, and the piles and piles and piles of feces left behind by the ones who’d done the killing and the eating.

As foul smelling as it was, at least it didn’t stink as bad as Moe’s trailer.

The grocery section of the store had been cleaned out. The canned foods were all gone, not even dented stragglers in the trash on the floor. Given that Whites can’t make sense of cans, that meant that people had time to prepare for what was coming their way. Or, I suppose, some people in the area had lived through the initial mayhem and had scavenged the goods at a later date.

My hope, as I led my band of Whites through the mess, losing many to shiny distractions along the way, was that the things I was shopping for never made it to the top of priority lists as end-of-the-world shoppers filled their carts.

The automotive section, being stuffed in the back corner of the three-acre sales floor, didn’t appear to have gotten much foot traffic when the end finally came. Plenty of packaged tools and car doodads hung on their display stands or sat on their shelves. Sturdy racks of car batteries and tall stacks of tires went untouched. That struck me as odd until I realized I was thinking in terms of old luxuries. People only had time or room or energy for the things they needed for survival right now, or maybe tomorrow or next week. Nobody was stocking up on auto accessories they’d need in the years ahead when such things were sure to be scarce.

As shortsighted as that behavior was, I’d been doing much the same. Sure, I aspired to accumulate a stockpile of goods in a safe place to see me and mine through whatever was to come. In practice, I owned only things that I absolutely needed, and then only enough of those that would fit in my bag and not slow me down when it came time to run. And at the moment, I didn’t even have that. All I had were my boots—as yet unnoticed by my little band of white killers—my knife, my machete, and my unprotected pecker.

It was going to be nice to get pants on again when I finished my mission to kill Mark and as many of his murderous minions as I could.

I stopped walking. The White behind me bumped into me. A few more Whites bumped into him as the line came to a stop. Apparently Walmart was full of too many colorful distractions for them to give me their full attention.

I, of course, had to grab a five-gallon gas can off the shelf. That’s the foundational element of monkey-see-monkey-do. The White behind me in line copied and selected a gas can from the full shelf. The next White in line did the same.

Things got a little more time consuming after that. I had to make several trips through the Walmart to round up my mob and get them each loaded with a couple of empty red jugs. Several of us even carried green garden hoses coiled over our shoulders.

When I had them organized enough to stay on my heels, I led them back outside and to the filling station at the edge of the Walmart parking lot. It was the obvious first place to try. I didn't figure it had any fuel, but it was only a few hundred yards away, so why not?

Leading my band across the parking lot proved much easier than leading them through Walmart. They’d seen abandoned cars and the remains of bodies everywhere they’d been. Those things were not novel sights, not even for their simple goldfish memories.

Once at the gas station, I knelt down beside one of three steel plates that I knew contained the pipes the delivery trucks used to fill the underground storage tanks. I dragged the plate away and was apathetically pleased to see my imitators remove the plates from the other two holes. Inside, a pair of four-inch pipes looked at me. One was labeled
Diesel
. Sherlock Zed deduced that the fuel I wanted was down there. Of course.

I flipped a latch, opened the fuel pipe and leaned over to peer inside.

Motherfucker.

I’d hoped, unrealistically, to look down at a pool of diesel fuel. All I saw was a dark hole and a hint of the diesel’s reflective surface about twenty feet below.

To my right, relatively smart Whites were removing the caps on the other pipes.

Bored members of my group started to look around. Some started to wander. I sighed. Keeping them together was a chore.

I took the garden hose off my shoulder, cut off the brass fittings, and unwound it as I ran the length down into the tank. I hoped that I’d hit resistance when the end of the hose reached the bottom. I further hoped I’d hear a splash as the end dipped into the trove of diesel in the ground beneath my feet.

Neither thing happened.

I simply kept pushing the hose until I had only three or four feet left to shove. I sucked on the end of the hose, hoping to pull the diesel up so I could siphon it into my gas can. I’d never siphoned anything from one container to the next without the use of a pump. I knew how simple it all looked on TV. That should have been a red flag of stupidity for me before I even tried. As it turned out, I gave up when I became too nauseous to continue. Petroleum fumes and human lungs are not a good mix.

It probably goes without saying that I managed to get not one drop of diesel fuel into my can.

I rounded up my gang of empty gas can helpers and led them back to the park with the pond. There, I spent a good part of the afternoon lying on a concrete picnic table under a pavilion, waiting for my head to clear and my stomach to settle.

As I lay and as my Whites wandered around the pond, chasing the ducks and trying to catch the big catfish that came near the surface, I started to think my situation through. That is, of course, after I considered giving up on my stupid combine plan altogether.

And it
was
stupid. I had to admit that. The problem I had with my inner voice advising me was that it always sounded like The Harpy telling me I was a loser and a quitter.

A quitter?

Fuck her and the asshole she married.

So giving up on even the most stupid of plans was a choice I was hardwired to reject. And that was how that thought process found its end whenever it came up.

That left me running thought experiments on how those apparently ingenious farmers were able to get those giant-ass combines up next to the gas pumps to fill them. That led me down the path of thinking how much time they wasted driving those monsters back and forth from field to gas station. I was feeling like a superior prick about what a waste of time that was, until I realized I was looking at the problem in completely the wrong way.

I sprang into a sitting position. “Duh!”

A dozen white heads snapped around, eyes glued on me.

Shit.

Deflect.

I turned and looked at an infected woman who was lollygagging near an iron garbage can holder behind me. I held the pose and hoped the other Whites’ attention would pass over me and land on her. I listened for the sound of footsteps coming through the dead, brown grass. As I listened, I couldn’t help but notice what a pretty girl the infected woman had been at one time. Impure thoughts came to mind. I shuddered and turned back to look at the Whites whose attention I’d attracted with my utterance. Thankfully, they’d all gone back to whatever they’d been doing before I spoke.

I chastised myself silently for the mistake.

Getting back to what I was thinking about, I realized the farmers probably had to have some petroleum storage tanks on their property for fueling tractors and such. 

I got off the table and stretched. My posse of Whites was rested and watered, and I had a new idea. I simply had to stop by any farms I saw on the way back to where I'd left the combine parked in the field, and I was bound to find a fuel storage tank.

Problem solved.

The surprise in all that? It worked.

At the second farm I checked, I found a storage tank enclosed within a tin-sided barn. It was built on top of a framework of metal legs, so siphoning was no issue. Gravity did the work.

The little trick I played on my posse for the trip back to the combine with the full cans of diesel had me smiling through a good part of the afternoon. I left my can empty, leaving the hard work to the Whites.

After filling the combine’s tank. I had seven cans left over, some five-gallon sized, and several smaller. I attached those to the side of the combine using some rope I found in the cab.

It was time to get into some trouble.