Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (9 page)

Black smoke mixed with the blood mist in the air.

Burned petroleum stink flowed into the cab.

My eyes started to burn.

The combine jerked forward in rolling stutter steps that were getting slower and more feeble.

However it had happened, my lovely green slaughter beast was on fire.

It was dying.

I glanced down at a terribly insufficient red fire extinguisher mounted to a part of the window frame in the corner of the cab. Would that keep me safe when the flames boiled into the cab?

Recalling all those burned Whites I’d seen on the shore of Lake Austin in the days after my gasoline vapor bomb fiasco, I knew one thing more certainly than any other. I wasn’t going to stay inside and find out.

Whites pounded on the sloping glass of my cab, I guess having given up on every other way to get inside the beast.

One was hanging off the edge of the roof and banging his head against the glass. At first it was ineffectual, as his feet were dangling. He had no leverage. Then his toes caught hold, and he put some force into his head butt. He knocked himself silly, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

I wanted to laugh, but a hairline crack reflected a purple light that had just started to glow out of the eastern sky.

I reached down for my machete.

Fighting my way out was a plan of the stupidest proportions. I had not even the wispiest hope of killing all those crazed Whites.

Brains over brawn, Null Spot.

Don’t be a dumbass.

Once the glass shattered, I needed to find a way to blend myself into the mob before their half-pint brains linked me with the combine monster. That was my chance. Because once they connected me with the Green Bug, I was dead.

It wasn’t a plan, but at least it was a goal.

I looked through the tinted glass into the face of a White who’d just started beating his head against it. I knew—hoped—he couldn't see me through the dark tint. Nevertheless, he was the first one I was going to kill. He was the focus of my blame. And just fuck it. Why not blame him?

He leaned his head back and swung it forward. A gout of blood, brain, and bone erupted off the top of his skull. The White fell.

“Damn!”

How the hell could a White hit the glass hard enough to rupture his skull?

The glass cracked in other places.

Two more Whites fell inexplicably away.

Whatever they were doing out there wasn’t working for them, but it was creating an opportunity for me. If I could swing the door open… just maybe.

Three Whites were pushing in on the glass door on the left side of the cab. But the door was designed to swing out. With them out there, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get it open and get out fast enough.

One of them fell miraculously away. A second jerked and lost his balance. I turned the handle on the door and threw my shoulder into it smashing into the third. He tumbled into the mob.

I stepped onto the platform just outside the door.

Outside the cab, the screaming of a hundred thousand Whites was overwhelming.

Blood was everywhere.

The mix of smells was overpowering.

Whites on the ground below me roared. Connection made. I’d emerged from the machine. That meant I and the machine were one. More importantly, it meant I was food.

Shit.

I scrambled to climb to the roof of the cab. Hands grabbed at my ankles.

Three small explosions shook the Green Bug.

Big orange flames billowed through thick clouds of black smoke over the grain bin on the back. Heat singed my eyebrows.

The Whites on the roof of the cab froze, wide-eyed, mesmerized by the flames.

None noticed me climbing to join them.

My first instinct was to shove each of them off, but I realized instantly what a bad idea that was. They were my camouflage.

The Whites from the mob below, the ones who had seen me come out of the cab, were clawing their way up behind, not having lost focus on their meal.

Then the weirdest thing happened. The two closest to the top of the cab sprouted bloody wounds and fell away.

Holy shit!

Somebody was shooting.

I looked around, seeing flames and black of night in one direction, graying light in the other, and a mass of Whites under my acre-lights’ illumination out front.

Way out across the road that bordered the field, from a silhouetted black structure, fire sparkled out in three rapid pinpricks. More Whites fell from the side of the cab.

Somebody was shooting the Whites around me.

Why?

Didn't matter to me. I needed to get off the combine before I was engulfed in its flames.

Only one way to do it quickly.

With the Whites on the unstable roof still hypnotized by the flames and trying to keep their balance, I spread my arms wide to engulf those nearest and I rushed forward. One fell into another and feet shuffled for balance, but still, I pushed, and off we all went, falling in a mass of elbows and knees, a rain of bodies pouring onto the Whites wailing on the other side of the combine.

One of the few benefits of a virus-infected brain is the attenuation of pain. Sure, I still felt stuff, but lots of things that should have hurt didn’t. Falling off the combine into a scrum of Whites knocked the wind out of me, but thank God, didn’t break anything. It all hurt, but only a bit. I can’t say how the White felt who’d been unlucky enough to catch my machete blade in his shoulder as I came down on top of him.

I jumped to my feet. I felt a little dazed but had no time to clear my head before making my getaway. I was in a pile of confusion and broken bones that might soon turn ugly. I wrenched my blade out of the White and started to move.

The jumble of Whites on the ground shifted. One rolled into the backs of my legs and sent me to the ground. Immediately, another White stepped on the side of my head, pushing my face into the dirt. It then stepped on my back as it hurried over.

Surrounded by feet and ankles, feeling them kick and step on me, I realized I was in danger of being trampled.

I was being trampled.

I tried to roll to the side and push myself away from the ground.

The weight of thousands of bodies pressing in is something I’d never thought of as a problem when I was a stupid stoner, watching TV on my couch. Seeing heroes and villains swept up in a crowd always seemed like a false dilemma. In my mind, I always thought, yeah, right. I could get out of that. Whatever that was. “Why not just walk out?” I’d ask.

Turns out that the press of human weight, pushing down and pushing to the sides, is more than can be resisted. You become a speck of dust in a breeze, with little you can do to affect your circumstances. When the crowd flows, you flow, or you fall. When you fall, you die.

At least that’s what I extrapolated in short order.

Through urgent effort, I managed to pull my short knife out of my boot.

I slashed and stabbed.

Whites howled, but with so much violence and screaming all around, it went unnoticed.

I couldn’t tell if any Whites I stabbed noticed. At first.

Then they started to fall.

I dragged my knife across the Achilles tendon of every ankle I could reach. That, I found, was the quickest way to bring a White down.

And as the Whites fell, others tripped on them. Some of them got stomped.

Breathing room: that’s another expression that gets overused into meaninglessness. In the mass of Whites, with the weight of all those bodies pressing together,
breathing
—yeah, just having the space to expand your chest and take a breath—was hard.

In what seemed miraculous by the time I did it, I pulled my feet below me. A couple dozen Whites were on the ground around me, half bleeding, half trying to get back to their feet. Some of those were the ones I’d slashed.

A big explosion hit me in the back with a shockwave that knocked me back to my knees and sent a ripple through the mass.

I quickly jumped back up. The Whites surged forward, and I stabbed the throat of the one in front of me. She went down. I stepped on top of her, stealing the space she’d been in as I reached out and cut the one who’d been behind her.

The flames on the combine had grown four stories tall by then, casting an orange glow over everything. Whites close to the flames were screaming in pain, instead of predatory rage.

The mob stopped flowing, but I kept stabbing and slashing my way through.

Eventually, the numbers of infected thinned enough that I no longer needed to slash. I walked between Whites, with an occasional bump and shove, and I had time to stop and look around. I was up the slope of the field I’d been plowing, moving at an angle toward the road.

The combine was nearly a mile behind me. It still burned in an enormous pillar of orange fire and black smoke at the center of a sea of Whites, all seemingly wanting to get a hand on it. Everywhere, the injured were sprawled in the dirt, getting eaten by their brothers and sisters.

Not a bad thing.

I gave myself credit for sowing the chaos that had caused those injuries.

I wanted to pat myself on the back and congratulate the Valiant Null Spot. He was victorious again, and he probably should have turned back to scan the naked horde for some sign of the Smart Ones and Mark—they were probably holed up in some farmhouse near the center. But he was bruised and feeling lucky to still be breathing. Some brushes with death come at a steep price.

I worked my way toward the road because it looked relatively clear. Plenty of Whites were in the ditches on both sides. Hardly a spot existed in the field where I couldn’t reach out and touch one or be pressed in on all sides by them. The absence of them on the road gave me pause to wonder whether they had an aversion to asphalt that I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps it was a new phobia. Maybe one walked off the pavement chasing a toad and the rest didn’t have the good sense not to imitate.

You never know with Whites.

Down the road and across the field where I’d done my work stood a collection of buildings that could have been a hundred years old. A big farmhouse with steep rooflines and dormer windows had a porch that wrapped all the way around the first floor. Near it stood some barns, sheds, a chicken coop made out of discarded pallets, and a couple of smaller houses in various states of repair.

The house was full of Whites, going in and out through the doors and poking their heads through broken windows. The story was the same with the barns and sheds.

Whites can be curious fuckers.

One barn stood taller than the two-story house and was covered in a roof of rust-colored sheet metal, most of it still in place.

I didn’t know where those muzzle flashes came from, but my guess, my
hope
, was from up in that barn. Up there, the sniper could probably hide. If he’d been shooting from the house, I suspected he was already dead.

Or maybe she. You never know.

Nevertheless, I figured I owed the shooter a favor. I wasn’t ready to admit to myself that he’d saved my life when I was in the cab of the combine, but he had eased my escape.

I made my way toward the barn.

While the Green Bug burned, and I worked my way out of the mob and down the road, the sky had squeezed itself full of fat gray clouds and pushed beneath them a cold wind from the northwest. Weatherman Zed deduced that it was going to rain before the morning was out.

A logical leap from there told me I’d be better off inside than out when those cold rains came. Except for my boots and a crusty layer of dirt and gore on my skin, I was still naked.

I walked onto the farmer’s gravel driveway and gave the structures one more look. The barn was still my best guess for a place to snipe and hide. If it looked that way to me, it probably looked that way to the shooter.

A wretched tree grew out of one corner of the barn. It probably should have been cut down thirty or fifty years ago, before it’d had the chance to merge with the barn’s framework. Now, some of its twiggy fingers reached higher than the barn’s tall peak, while others grew up through gaps where wind had peeled sheets of tin off the roof. Down one side of the barn were doorless stalls, between supports that looked to have been tree trunks as big around as my leg, cut to the right height. Two were bowed by weather and age. One leaned so far that it appeared to hang from—rather than support—the beam above. Only one of the poles stood straight.

In one of the stalls sat a tractor so old that the tires were half eaten away, and most of the metal was reddish-brown rust. Farm tools, pieces of old plows, wheels, troughs, and all manner of metal, trash and weeds covered the floors of the other stalls.

The barn’s walls were mostly sheets of tin and aged gray boards. Holes in the tin had been patched with what looked like chewing gum and aluminum foil. Except for that one post in the stalls, nothing on the old structure stood at a right angle to anything. It looked like the next high wind might blow the whole thing down, but I knew better even as I had that thought.

I’d seen plenty of old barns, sheds, and houses on my excursion out of town. How the rotting things remained upright was a mystery that I’d have indulged a good deal of thoughtful curiosity on, but I had more pressing matters at hand.

I looked in through the open door on the front and saw a dozen Whites already inside. Half of those were rummaging through decaying cardboard boxes and shelves of dusty old jugs, bottles, and cans. The barn must have been used for storing what the owner thought of as antiques in the process of aging themselves into value.

A wide loft ran around the second level and was stacked with as much junk as the bottom floor. One side sagged badly and looked ready to collapse.

Above the loft was a flat ceiling—odd for a barn. In the ceiling, a flat door gave a clue that an attic existed above. On the loft level just below the door, three Whites were standing, looking up. A fourth was up there looking around and letting his gaze settle on different objects in the farmer’s vast collection. He seemed to evaluate each and then look back up at the doorway in the ceiling.

I didn’t know if he was a Smart One, but I knew some half-baked thoughts were squirrel-chasing around in his hairless head. If any of those thoughts bore fruit, things would go badly for the shooter whom I now decided had to be hiding in the attic.

The chilly wind gusted outside, sending dirt and dry leaves flying through gaps in the wall boards. Joints creaked, walls shuddered, and somewhere high above, a sheet of tin flapped against the roof beams.

I waded through corroding scraps and around a pile of junk to get to a staircase built into one of the walls.

A few Whites walked cautiously into the barn through the wide front doors.

The wind outside gusted again. Thunder rolled in the distance.

I climbed the stairs, careful to test each board before putting my weight on it.

At the second floor, I avoided the sagging side of the loft and walked the long way around to take up a place by the four Whites whose fascination with the attic had turned into action. The one I’d picked out as the smartest of the group was picking up boxes and stacking them beneath the door in the ceiling.

The three less-intelligent Whites joined the effort and a pyramid-shaped pile quickly grew.

Seeing an opportunity for a quick solution to a problem, I joined the Whites. I searched for items nearby that looked sturdy enough to support the weight of what might be piled on top of them, but too frail for much more. I found a box of old vinyl records. It was heavy, but the cardboard was disintegrating. It took some effort to pick it up and keep it intact, though it is worth mentioning that every two-handed job was awkward, given that I had no intention of setting my machete aside while I worked.

I got the record box onto the pile and went back to the mounds of junk to look for more. I found a gas can so rusty that I was able to poke a finger through the metal on the side and create new holes. That wouldn’t support much weight. I added it to the pile, and just like the box of records, I put it on the same side, the side facing the edge of the loft.