Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (15 page)

The sky in the east was starting to glow when we tied the boat to a tree pretty close to where the riverboat had initially run aground during the flood. I didn’t say anything about that. What was the point?

We left the ski boat and started our long slow hike up the mountain as the sky slowly turned orange, and the clouds glowed silver. Murphy led the way, hammer in hand. Despite our conversation on the bridge, he was ready to smash a skull.

After nearly an hour of uphill walking, we reached the back fence of the house where we’d stashed the Humvee and our weapons. The slope there was steep, and rather than hop over and try to make our way up the dew-slick grass, we used the fence for support and walked along it until we reached the house.

Then it was an easy walk across ground that grew more level with each step. When we passed the corner to the front of the house, Murphy stopped and his shoulders sagged. Stepping up beside him, mine did too. It was a gut punch. The garage door behind which we’d parked our Humvee, loaded with weapons and the last of the silencers, was open. The Humvee was gone.

All of the black-hearted rage that Murphy talked about, all of that darkness that at the time seemed like something that needed to be sloughed off for the sake of happiness, came screaming to a head as I ran out into the center of the courtyard, swinging my machete at nothing—cursing, yelling, and stomping.

In getting those weapons, we’d paid too high a price. But those weapons were my hope for rescuing Steph.

I ran over to the open garage on the ridiculously small chance that the Humvee was sitting hidden behind another of the doors. Of course it wasn’t, but in my rage-impaired brain, anything was possible. I ran into the house through the open door, just knowing that I would find one of the guilty thieves inside. I needed to kill, to hack something to pieces while it begged for its life.

I raced up the stairs. I checked the bedrooms and bathrooms. I looked in the closets and under the beds. I found nothing.

My search ended with me standing in front of an empty pantry. A few days before, enough food had been in there to feed our new group for at least a week. I screamed my anger into the emptiness.

People are good and people are bad, sometimes one right after the other, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell which is which. When my tantrum came to an end and I was spinning up black fantasies about how I was going to disembowel, behead, and hack at the thieves who took my Humvee—
my fucking Humvee
—any thoughts I’d had an hour earlier about aspiring to be a good person were gone.

As I walked through the foyer, I grabbed an edge of the front door and pushed it with all the force I could put behind it. I felt the weight of its nine-foot-tall, five-foot-wide, glass-paneled weight fly. It slammed and shattered, dropping shards of glass all over the foyer and porch.

“God dammit. God fucking dammit.”

I stomped forward, snorting and huffing like a distempered javelina and crossed the driveway to where Murphy stood. He hadn’t moved since we spotted the open garage. He was fuming, eyes black, hand gripping his hammer under white knuckles, ready to pound the life out of something.

“I hope we didn’t kill every White on this street,” I said as I marched past Murphy, heading up the steeply sloping, cobbled driveway, “because I need to kill something now.”

At the top of the driveway, I saw to my right the bushes in which Murphy and I had hidden the day we’d tested our suppressors, shooting at Whites up and down the street. Just in front of the bushes lay the remains of the only one I’d shot. His clothes were shredded and most of his flesh was gnawed away.

“Good,” said Murphy, looking down at the carcass.

I glanced back. He was standing just behind me, looking at the mauled body. Whether it had been chewed on by coyotes, dogs, or Whites, I didn’t care and probably wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already decided that the partially eaten body proved the presence of my prey. I cut hard to my left. Not that it mattered which direction. The house on the left was the first to catch my eye.

With Murphy stomping resolutely behind, we cut through a garden of cacti and decorative limestone chunks and kicked a lawn gnome hard enough to make it fly across the yard and bang that house’s front wall.

I hissed, “We’re here, fuckers.”

But no fuckers came out to meet us.

The front door of the house was open, and that angered me further as I crossed the lawn and stepped up onto the porch. Once inside, I smelled the miasma of old decay. Blood stained the floors and spattered the walls, dry and brown and red. Furniture in the dining room was disarrayed. A couch lay over on its back.

Rats, maggots, and flies crawled over the dead, uncountable in the scattered mess of their bones except that three skulls were on the floor.

“Hey,” I shouted into the house. No sound came back to me. The house was empty.

“Next door,” Murphy said as he spun on his heel and headed back out.

Running a few steps to catch up, I said, “Works for me.”

Instead of walking up to street level, we cut through the trees and underbrush that separated the two houses. Murphy pushed through, blazing the trail, and I followed.

When we burst out of the trees and back onto another lawn of crispy, brown St. Augustine grass carpeting ground still soft and muddy, our anger had dissipated an iota or two, but when I spotted another open front door, my anger found fuel to rekindle itself.

As we stepped up onto a large front porch, Murphy swung his hammer at the side of a five-gallon terra cotta flowerpot, shattering it and spilling dry black dirt into a mound that I tracked through on the way inside. The house had no smell of death, but it had been ransacked. Furniture was pushed over. Decorative items were on the floor, many broken. Paintings were knocked off the walls.

Seemingly frozen in indecision, Murphy came to a stop in the center of a patterned marble floor that gave him a view down two hallways, into the living room, and through the windows on the back of the house.

Standing beside him for a minute while I calmed a bit, I said, “We should check the house anyway.”

Murphy nodded and crossed the living room. I followed him as I looked over the mess: books, couch cushions, vases, a flat panel television, and lamps. Nothing of any value.

In the kitchen, the story was the same. It was a mess. Silverware was scattered on the floor, dishes were broken. Any knife of a reasonable size was missing. The pantry was empty. Nothing else in the house proved to be of any use. All the bedrooms had been gone through. There were clothes, blankets, and pillows. I did have the presence of mind to liberate some pillowcases. Sturdy cloth bags always came in handy for something. In the garage, we found some garden tools, though nothing that could double as a good weapon. And in the space large enough for three cars, all were gone.

We left that house and headed to the next one down the street.

The street followed the curve of the ridge, and we tromped through the trees and stomped down the dead grass of people’s lawns, only to find each home thoroughly ransacked. And though we had no interest in taking a car, not a one was in a garage. None were parked in the driveways. None were parked up on the road. That was odd.

We’d been through maybe a dozen houses, each with a pre-apocalypse price upwards of a million or two. All were now in their first stages of decay with doors open, windows broken, everything inside strewn on the floor. Animals had moved in, some feasting on the remains of the dead humans inside. Many houses had water standing on the floor or soaked into the carpet. With the summer’s heat gone, the thick humidity would leave that water there a long time before evaporating it. Black mold was already growing up the sheetrock walls of some of the houses. Eventually the wooden frames would rot.

Once every four or five years, hailstorms blew across the Texas hill country, dropping hailstones large enough to disintegrate the shingles on most houses. The houses not already rotting would start, once rainwater got in through the holed roofs. Before long, houses would collapse, leaving their brick facades to crumble. Weeds would grow up through cracks in the foundations that appeared as the supporting clay soil dried and shrunk.

The asphalt streets would slowly fall apart under the assault of plant roots, rain, and seasonal temperature shifts. Ten, twenty, or thirty years in the future, cedar and mesquite forests would reclaim the endless suburban sprawl.

As Murphy and I trudged up a steeply sloping front lawn, I wondered if I would live long enough to hunt in the forest that would eventually grow to replace the houses we were searching through. Up at street level, we turned and followed an unbroken curb as it arced around into a cul-de-sac, the terminus of the ridgeline.

“What do you make of that?” Murphy asked.

Cars parked haphazardly on the street and up on the curbs nearly filled the cul-de-sac. A path wide enough to drive through bisected the scattered mess of vehicles and led to a driveway that fell away down the slope, to a house under the roof peaks that were just visible out past the edge of the pavement.

“I—” I didn’t know what to make of it.

Murphy stopped walking and turned slowly, looking at the trees all around. No houses were visible, only trees on undeveloped lots around the cul-de-sac, the scattered cars, and the driveway.

I said, “I’m guessing it’s a White like that tattoo guy. I think something goes haywire in their brains and some of them need to collect shit.”

Murphy grunted, nodded, and crossed the empty asphalt until he came to a late-model Japanese sedan. He laid a hand on its roof and looked around, still glowering.

We were near the center of the cul-de-sac, and being exposed was making me nervous. “We shouldn’t be out here.” I pointed to the shingled peaks out past the collection of cars. “I’m guessing the guy who rounded up all this shit is over there in that house.”

“Yup.” Murphy nodded, and kept nodding. He was coming to a conclusion that was getting more obvious with each nod. He pointed to the driveway. “I’ll bet our Humvee is down there.”

The self-evident deduction left me momentarily speechless. Yes. He was right. But that seemed at the same time too good to be true. I looked around at the trees again, looking for a trap. Nothing moved except branches swaying with the wind.

Murphy took a step toward the clear trail between the cars. I grabbed his shoulder and stopped him, feeling him tense as his temper started to flare. I said, “You’re right. But let’s be smart.” I pointed at the trees off to our left and took off at a jog across the asphalt.

A moment later, Murphy joined me in the trees.

Still looking around at what I could see of the cul-de-sac, I said, “We’ve been acting like reckless dipshits all morning.”

“Yeah.” Murphy didn’t take his eyes off the gap between the cars.

“It’s going to get us in trouble if we keep it up.”

Murphy agreed again.

“I know you whipped the shit out of that guy at the tattoo shop without any problem, but you know as well as I do that some of the these Smart Ones can be dangerous.”

Murphy drew a long, patient breath and looked down at his hammer, obviously thinking about applying it to some Smart One’s skull. He asked, “What are you thinking?”

I thumbed over my shoulder at the trees behind me. “We go down the hill a bit and work our way around that house and see what we can see. Then decide what to do.”

“All right,” Murphy said. “I say we stick pretty close to the road and see if we can get a look at what’s down that driveway.”

“You want to make sure the Humvee is there, first?” I asked.

“Yep.”

Murphy started through the trees and I followed. We moved away from the pavement as we went, using the curve and slope of the ridge as our guide. Murphy hefted his hammer as he gingerly stepped between cedars. I held my machete in a comfortable, familiar grip, telling myself to proceed cautiously, but wanting to hack a White.

I was trying to get a glimpse through the trees ahead for anything that looked like a limestone wall or a shingled roof when Murphy threw up a hand, a gesture to stop. I froze in place.

My heartbeat spiked and I slowly raised my machete, ready to fight as I looked left and right, listening. But nothing was around us that I could see.

When I looked back at Murphy, he was pointing at something on the ground.

I looked down, but couldn’t see it. I mouthed, “What?”

Murphy, with one hand still raised to hold me in position, bent his knees and lowered himself slowly until his pointing finger touched a thin wire running at shin height above the ground.

Holy shit!

Murphy saw on my face exactly what I was thinking, that the wire was part of a booby trap. He pointed along the wire, tracing its length. It came to a stop at an olive green box, partially hidden behind a sprout of branches at the base of a tree.

He pointed back in the direction we came from, motioned for me to stay where I was, and stood, taking great care to watch where he placed his feet. When he was up next to me, he whispered, “Follow me out. Stay close. Do exactly as I do. Don’t wander off on your own path.”

Without saying a word, I followed Murphy.