Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (21 page)

Seven or eight Whites lay dead or wounded just outside the chapel doors. Others were on their knees around the dead, satisfying their hunger. More Whites were pouring through the chaos and running at the gunmen who were defending themselves as they retreated toward the boats anchored offshore. With their gunfire, they were unwittingly drawing the attention of most of the Whites in the compound. The price of ignorance is high.

I scanned quickly around for Steph’s blazing red hair. I looked for Jay.

The islanders who had been on their knees were up and running; many of them were in the lake, racing clumsily through the deepening water toward one of the boats anchored offshore. A White tackled a man in knee deep water. Another White jumped on.

And there was Jay with a handful of Steph’s hair, dragging her toward a boat behind the cover fire of his thugs. A man was already at the helm working on starting the boat. Jay waded toward the stern, and in water just up to his thigh, he raised his pistol and shot the man in the back. He threw himself over the transom without letting go of Steph’s hair. He apparently valued her as a bargaining chip, and he wasn’t about to let her go.

Just as well, that made my job easier. My two objectives were in the same place.

Jay’s thugs were backing into the water close to the boat Jay had just commandeered.

People were swimming. Not a single normal person was left on dry land. The Whites were pursuing them into the water. I ran across the courtyard, intent on making a flanking move at Jay’s men, and then thought better of it. I still had two grenades. I stopped, pulled a pin, and heaved one over the heads of the Whites who were attacking the last of Jay’s thugs.

My aim wasn’t perfect, but close is good enough with a hand grenade. It bounced on shore just a few paces’ distance in front of the gunmen. I saw one’s eyes go wide as I jumped to lay belly flat on the ground. The grenade exploded, and I sprang back to my feet.

All three gunmen were down, along with a dozen Whites who’d been closing in on them. I looked up in time to see Jay still flinching from the explosion. He shoved Steph into the seat beside his at the helm, and I saw the water at the stern boil as the propeller started to spin.

I ran at top speed and hit the water with a huge splash, raising my knees high to keep from tripping. But Jay’s ski boat was already starting to move as the engine revved loudly.

I wasn’t going to make it.

Jay was going to get away with Steph as his hostage.

I wailed a curse.

A stream of tracers cut a path into the stern of Jay’s boat. Fiberglass disintegrated, and sparks flew where bullets ripped into the engine. The boat stopped dead and immediately started to draw water and sink at the stern. Jay lost his balance and fell.

I put my faith in Dalhover to cease fire before I arrived at the back of the boat, and I didn’t slow.

Explosions sounded behind me up in the compound. Murphy was working on the Whites pouring through the chapel, trying to improve the odds of the relatively innocent islanders making their escape into the lake.

The fifty-caliber machine gun stopped shredding the stern of Jay’s boat just before I grabbed on. My weapon in hand was the machete, exactly the weapon Jay deserved to have used on him.

Inside the boat, Jay lay on his back, feet forward and head toward me. Steph had a hand on the windshield and the other on a seat, trying to keep her feet below her as the boat slowly angled its bow up out of the water. She was looking at the gun in Jay’s hand, pointed directly at her.

I was only halfway into the boat as I realized that Jay might shoot her at any second.

“Asshole,” I yelled.

Jay glanced up and saw me. His face turned to surprise, then fear, as he saw my raised machete.

I was up over the transom by then, tall enough to put some muscle behind my swing.

But Jay was quick and was bringing his pistol to bear as my blade came down. The gun fired, my machete split his skull. I felt the bullet tear a wound on my left side as I fell. The gun fired wildly twice more as Jay’s body twitched his dying response to a machete lodged deep in his big, squirmy snail brain.

Steph shouted or screamed. I’m not sure which.

I climbed into the boat as it listed to port. I wrenched my blade out of Jay’s skull as I spun around to look for threats that might be coming from shore. Suddenly, standing became difficult. Balance was lost. I was trying to face the shore, but I only saw a black sky speckled with a billion stars. I was looking up, and I was confused as I lost consciousness.

Drizzly, cold wind howled through the aluminum framework that held the canopy up over the pontoon boat. I found myself looking at the black metal legs of the grenade launcher from exactly where someone might sit on the deck of the pontoon boat to operate it. I heard the voices of people in contentious discussion. I felt the deck rock a little too vigorously on swells driven by the wind.

The boat’s motor wasn’t running. We were anchored or drifting. I lifted my throbbing head and looked around from where I lay on the deck. Two other people lay under blankets on the deck near me. One had a big, bloody bandage on his face. A woman I didn’t know sat at the stern, staring emptily at the shore. Beside her, a man I also didn’t know leaned on her and slept. To my left, Steph sat fallen over on a padded bench, eyes closed, sleeping, apparently unharmed.

I felt relief.

I lay back on the deck and started putting together my memories from the night before.

Bang.

In all the pandemonium and the noisy violence of modern warfare, the sound of one gunshot stuck crystallized as clearly as a ringing Christmas bell over a frozen field. It was that one gunshot that killed Megan. It enraged and depressed me that a man would murder a child just to further his perverse ambitions. My anger seethed behind closed eyes, and I found solace only in recalling the satisfying crunch of my blade smashing through Jay’s cranium and slicing into his gray matter. I hoped when he saw my blade coming down at his forehead he had time in that tick of a second to feel the horror of his impending, gruesome death.

Please God, at least that.

Jay deserved so much worse.

“You awake?” Steph asked.

I looked over at her green eyes, vivid in the gray morning light. She was still laying sideways on the bench, a few strands of red hair stuck across her face, some of it blowing in the wind. Without thinking about it, I said, “You’re beautiful.”

She smiled, embarrassed. “How do you feel?”

I hadn’t thought about it. “Cold.”

“You banged your head pretty hard when you fell in the boat.”

Thinking back to the moment after I cleaved Jay’s skull, I said, “I lost my balance.” Remembering Jay’s pistol firing at me, I put a hand to my left side. It felt a little odd, just under the ribs. A bandage covered a wound on the left side of my abdomen.

“He shot you,” she said.

“I guess I’m not going to die.” I smiled as though I was making a funny joke.

“A few inches to the right and it would have hit the bottom of your lung.” Steph sat up. “You probably would have died.”

Feeling around on the bandage, I said, “A half inch to the left and the bullet would have missed all together.”

Steph rolled her eyes but didn’t smile. “The bullet went through your oblique muscle just below the ribs under your left arm. You were lucky. The Lucky Null Spot.” Steph smirked almost imperceptibly.

I ignored the wisecrack. “I’ll be all right then?” I felt the wound under the bandage. It was just about where my elbow would touch the side of my abdomen when my arm was at my side.

“I cleaned your wound when you were out and sewed you up. If you don’t get infected, you’ll probably be okay. And you bonked your head pretty hard when you fell.”

I put a hand to my head and felt another bandage on the back. I propped myself up on my elbow and felt a hammer inside my skull. “Whoa.” I laid back down.

“Murphy and Dalhover are on shore looking for antibiotics and whatever else they can find.”

“Dalhover shouldn’t be on shore,” I said. “The Whites will see him.”

“He thought you were worth it.” Steph smiled. “Besides, we drove the boats way up the lake last night after everything happened. Murphy said there aren’t many Whites around.”

“It always seems that way,” I said. “Then they are.”

“You’re not the only one who knows that, Zed. Let other people be responsible for themselves.”

I looked at her and my expression must have given away my thoughts.

She said, “Thank you for coming to get me.”

“Jay was crazy. I had to do something.”

Steph nodded but didn’t comment on Jay. “I know I’m wasting my breath when I say this, but you need a couple weeks of rest to let that bullet wound heal.”

“And my head?” I asked.

“I think history has shown what a hard head you have.” Steph shrugged. “You’ll probably be just fine.”

I made a slow, determined effort to sit up. I leaned on the grenade launcher, facing Steph. “Did Rachel and Molly make it?”

“We picked them up near where they dropped you into the lake.”

I looked away from her when I asked my next question out of the smallest of hopes. “What about Megan?”

Steph shook her head and from the sadness suddenly on her face, it was clear that Megan didn’t make it.

“Jay?” I asked.

She nodded and her face took on a harder edge. It was as I suspected. Jay shot Megan.

“How’s Amy taking it?”

“She’s on one of the other boats. She’s not talking about it.”

I asked, “How many made it off the island?”

“Eleven, counting me.”

“Eleven.” I slumped. There were probably nineteen people on their knees when I’d blown the wall to let the infected in. Had that choice cost the lives of eight people I’d been trying to save?

Steph got down off her bench, kneeled in front of me, and engulfed me in a hug. “You did what you could to help them. Most of us got away.”

“And Jay’s men?” I asked, feeling a frog in my throat for the dead and second-guessing my choices.

“Dead, as far as anybody knows.”

I wrapped my arms around Steph. “At least there’s that.”

I slept through most of the day. Had it not been for haunting thoughts of dying faces and guilt, it would have felt good to do nothing.

As it was, all I had was the peace of having no urgent expectations of me. When I woke from an afternoon nap, Murphy and Steph were sitting next to one another; Murphy had my backpack in his hands, stuffing things into it. Steph was reading the label on a plastic prescription bottle. She looked up. “You sleep a lot after you’ve been injured.”

Murphy laughed; not his big laugh, not the one he had before that day when we’d watched Mandi die. “Zed doesn’t know how to slow down until he’s exhausted.”

Murphy was right about that.

Steph popped the cap off the pill bottle and handed me a couple of small white tablets. She reached out with a plastic water bottle and said, “Take these.”

“Antibiotics?” I asked.

She nodded. “Murphy’s also got some pills for the pain—”

I stretched my left arm up over my head and felt my wound protest. “I don’t need the pain pills.”

“Don’t move your arm,” Steph scolded. “It’ll take longer to heal.”

Murphy took the pill bottles from Steph and put them in my bag. I noticed my machete and an M4 with a suppressor attached to the barrel were leaning on the bench next to him. He caught my look and said, “These are yours.”

Shaking my head emphatically, I said, “You know I can’t—”

“These are yours,” Murphy insisted. He leaned over and in a soft voice said, “Trouble in paradise.”

I sighed. “Already?”

In a calm, adult voice, Steph said, “People are afraid. Last night rattled them. Their friends died. They’re confused.”

Understandable. I looked back at Murphy for the straight scoop.

He said, “Amy says—” He thought about how to say what it was he wanted to convey. “Man, I like Amy, but she wants nothing to do with us.” He pointed a long finger at my chest. “You and me.”

“What?” I didn’t want to believe it.

Murphy leaned back. “She wants nothing to do with you, especially. She says you’re a train wreck. Everywhere you go, everything goes to shit.”

My mouth fell open as I shook my head to disagree.

Steph said, “Don’t listen to that.”

“It’s true,” Murphy argued.

“I’m not contradicting you,” Steph told him.

I wanted to say something in my defense, but what could I say? Both of Amy’s companions, Megan and Brittany, were dead. Was that my fault? Everybody from the hospital was dead except Dalhover. Russell and Mandi were dead. I looked away from Murphy and Steph.

Could it all be my fault?

“She says you’re a trouble magnet,” Murphy finished.

“That’s enough, Murphy.” Steph was in Captain Leonard mode.

Murphy shrugged, “She does like you, Zed. That’s what she told everyone. She just says it’s not healthy to be around you.”

Well, fuck these people.

I stood up as Steph protested. I reached my right arm out for my bag. Murphy handed it to me. As I took it, I felt a little lightheaded, but I held my balance, determined and pissed.

Murphy said, “Keep the M4. I loaded you up with some ammo, some grenades, and another set of night vision goggles. I don’t know how all this is going to shake out, but we’re not gonna be empty-handed again.” Murphy nodded for emphasis.

“Murphy,” Steph said, “it’s not like that.”

Murphy held his forearm up next to Steph’s, making the contrast of his white skin next to her naturally pale skin obvious. “I’m not gonna get brown again. I’ll always be white. Zed will too.”

Steph leaned forward and looked up at me. “There’s a lot of animosity between the group that stayed on the island and the ones that left with Gretchen. Amy and the others want to go back to the island.”

“It’s not safe there,” I said.

“Nowhere is safe, Zed.”

Looking at Steph, thinking about it, I couldn’t disagree.

She said, “If we leave them a few sets of the night vision goggles—”

“Those batteries won’t last,” argued Murphy.

“That’s their problem,” Steph told Murphy. “They can go find a solar charger or something.” She looked back at me. “And if we leave them a couple of M4’s with suppressors, they’ll be able to defend themselves on the island without attracting more Whites from the shores.”

My feelings were whirling around in confusion and growing angrier. We’d gone out of our way not to hurt those people on the island—well, except for Jay’s thugs. Some of the islanders died as a result. Well, maybe a lot of them died, but Jay would have killed them anyway. Or, the question I had to ask myself was, had we abandoned Steph and the others, would the islanders have lived happily ever after?

“Sit down, Zed.” Steph took my hand and tugged. “You’re getting worked up over this.”

I didn’t sit. I turned and looked at the survivors, sitting, standing, talking, deciding, spread over five boats all anchored in the cove. I glared at whoever would look in my direction. I said, “Fuck these people. We’ve got three Humvees and a trailer full of supplies. We’ve got diesel fuel, ammunition, food, even blankets and pillows. My vote is we take whoever wants to go, get in our Humvees and get out of Dodge. The rest of ‘em can do whatever they want. We don’t have room for everybody anyway.”

“Word.” Murphy fist bumped me.