Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (10 page)

“What are our choices then?” Paul asked. “Do we stay here and hope they don’t find us when they come back? Is that our only choice?”

I looked around at the room. Each of them was looking for better answers from the others. But none of us had a better idea.

Crap.

Hiding in the houseboat didn’t seem like a good idea. I turned to Murphy. “Do you know how to hot-wire a car?”

Grinning, he asked, “Why does everybody always ask the black dude that question?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, looking over at a shrugging Dalhover. “Here’s what I think. We see if we can find the keys to one of these boats and get out of this marina while Jay and his nutjobs are chasing their tails up at the other end of the lake.”

“Yes.” Paul was nodding enthusiastically. “We’ve got a window of time in which to get away. We can head back down the lake while they are going up. They’ll never know. Then when they get here on the way back and find the cabin cruiser, they’ll think we’re around here. We’ll have lost them.”

Yeah. Isn’t that what I said?

The sound of boat engines faded to nothing.

Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen stayed on the houseboat. Dalhover and Freitag went to work together to search the boats in the marina to see if they could get one started. Murphy and I headed up the dock toward the marina office. The hope was that we’d find the keys for the boats there.

Murphy hefted his insufficient little hammer. “I’ll feel better once I get a rifle back in my hands.”

“Soon enough.” I hoped. I looked around for signs of Whites.

We were crossing a long walkway that led from the boat slips to the shore.

Rubbing his hand over his head as he looked around, Murphy sighed and said, “I’m having second thoughts about going to hunt Smart Ones.”

I stopped and looked at Murphy, shaking my head. “What the fuck, dude? I thought we agreed on what we need to do after we get through all this bullshit with Jay.”

“C’mon.” Murphy pushed me forward. “We got work to do.”

“Why?”

“’Cause we need a boat.”

“You know what I’m asking.” I was mad.

“You said so yourself, didn’t you? What Would Murphy Do?”

“I thought Murphy would kill some motherfucking Whites,” I said. “Last I heard, that’s what Murphy would do.”

“It was at the time.”

I stopped again and planted my feet on the dock. This needed to be resolved. “What about Mandi?”

Murphy stopped and turned on me. For a second, he was an angry beast. I flinched. But Murphy’s temper flare passed as quickly as it came. He slowly shook his head. “If you want to chase off after the Smart Ones after we get the girls, I’ll go with you. I think it’s a stupid idea, but I’ll babysit you so you won’t get yourself killed while you’re being angry and stupid.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing changed.”

“A few days ago, you wanted to kill them as badly as I did.”

“I still do,” said Murphy.

“Then what the fuck, dude?”

Murphy’s face turned sad and he looked at the water, his thoughts getting lost in the lake’s cold depths. Then he looked across to the shore as though he’d just remembered that he needed to look out for Whites. “Is this the best time to talk about this?”

“Just tell me what changed, and we’ll go.”

“I can’t go back there,” he said.

“Where?”

“You remember how I told you I was, back after I killed those three…kids behind the 7-Eleven?”

“Kids?”

Shaking his head, Murphy said, “They were just teenagers.”

“Murphy, don’t make them more vulnerable in your memory than they really were. You know what they did to Keisha. You know as well as I do that if they did that to her and laughed about it, who knows what they did to other people? They were vicious monsters long before the virus ever showed up. They deserved what they got.”

Murphy nodded.

We started walking toward the marina office again.

Murphy said, “It took me a long time to get right after I killed those boys.”

“Guilt?” I asked.

“No,” Murphy was having a hard time with it. “I was in a dark place. It’s like I didn’t have a soul anymore.”

I knew that feeling.

“You joke about my philosophy,” he said. “I know you think it’s some kind of simple bullshit to make myself smile.”

I stopped then. “No. Honestly, Murphy, I don’t. Yeah, it seems too simple to be real, but it works for you. You’re happy. Do you know how many people in this world are happy, or were happy before all this shit went down?”

Murphy shrugged, and we started walking again.

“Pretty much none of them.”

“I feel like going to kill the Smart Ones, no matter how bad I want to—” He struggled for a moment and changed course. “I’ve got so much hate in my heart right now, Zed—” Murphy drew a long slow breath. “I don’t know if I can be both.”

“Both?”

“Me, the person I am now, the person I’ve been since I got right with all that shit about killing those three punks. Or that other guy, the angry one that needed his revenge. I can’t be both.”

The marina office was a square little building a short way up hill from the edge of the water. It had grids of windows stretching across three sides, leaving the marina and the entire cove visible from the counter inside. When we got there, the door was open. The doorjamb was broken and the strike plate was on the floor among splinters from the wood that had held it in place. Someone had already forced his or her way in. The office stank.

That gave Murphy and me pause as we stepped across the threshold. Papers were scattered on the counter and the floor. A desk behind the counter was in disarray. Murphy leaned over the counter and shook his head. “Dead guy.”

I leaned over to look. A body with a big chunk of skull shattered open lay rotting on the floor. I said, “Somebody ransacked this place.”

Murphy pointed to a tall, flat metal cabinet on the back wall. The sheet metal around the lock had been pried apart, leaving a wide rent.

I turned to look out through the windows. “I’ll keep an eye out for them. You check for the keys.”

“Probably right inside that cabinet.” Murphy shuffled through some office supplies scattered on the floor and stepped around the counter.

“Two of those Whites we chased off the dock are out there, watching us.”

“How close?” Murphy asked.

“A ways.” I scanned across the marina. “I don’t think they want anything to do with us, but they sure seem interested.”

The metal cabinet door swung open on creaky hinges. Murphy said, “Jackpot.”

Jackpot?
That was Mandi’s word. She used it all the time. I thought it best not to mention Murphy’s use of it. Off to my left, a tall White came out from behind some kind of building that probably contained a repair shop. He was looking at something out on the docks. No good was going to come of that. “Murphy, hurry it up.”

“Man, I don’t know which keys are for which boat.”

I glanced back over my shoulder. Rows of keys hung on hooks beneath three digit numbers. “I’ll bet those are the slip numbers.”

“Like that does me any good, professor.”

The staring White had two other companions, and one of them was looking back in the direction from whence they came. My guess was that more were on the way. At least they were all of the clothed variety.

“Just grab four or five, and let’s go. There are some Whites out there getting really interested.”

Keys jingled.

“Interested in
us
?” Murphy asked.

I watched another couple of Whites come out from beside the building. All of them were staring at the docks. I looked over at the docks, but couldn’t see what they were seeing but it didn’t take a genius to know it was one of our people who had their interest.

Murphy shuffled back through the papers.

The Whites took off at a sprint for the dock, and several more that I hadn’t seen followed them out from behind the building.

“Shit.” I ran out through the door.

The Whites were fast and were going to reach the long wooden walkway that stretched out to the boat slips before me. Halfway down the slope, Murphy ran past me with his hammer swinging in his fist. I tried to keep up.

Seven Whites were stretched out in a widely spaced line, clomping on the deck when Murphy reached the boards just behind the last of them. I was still a good ten paces behind Murphy. I bounded onto the dock as Murphy reached the first of the running Whites. He swung his hammer at the side of the man’s head, knocking him off balance. As Murphy passed the reeling White, he pushed it into the water.

The White was flailing at the water and starting to howl when I passed him.

Murphy caught up with another White and shouldered her hard from behind, bouncing her face on the dock as she rolled off the left side and into the water. Two down, five to go.

I made up a few steps of the distance between me and Murphy.

A loud banging of wood on wood rang across the water from the right. That had to be the sound that had gotten their attention.

The first of the infected in our line made the right turn off the walkway and onto the main dock, followed closely by the second.

Murphy closed in on a pair of Whites running side by side.

A third made the turn.

I shouted, “Hey, motherfucker!”

The two Whites in front of Murphy turned as they tried to stop. Murphy barreled into both of them. One fell off the dock. The other hit the dock, banging his head, losing his senses.

The other three Whites that had already made the turn to run up between the boat slips were too focused on the noise they’d heard ahead of them.

Murphy ran on past the White he’d just knocked down, and I swung my machete to slice at his head as I passed. The blow caught him under the jaw, and while it probably wasn’t lethal at the moment, it would be. Whether I’d hacked all the way through the jaw or not, it was broken. The White would bleed out from the wound or starve to death in a month or two. Either way, it was out of the day’s fight.

Murphy rounded the turn onto the wide dock between the boat slips. A few seconds later, I did too.

Far down on the right, the houseboat that kept Rachel, Paul, and Gretchen hidden floated as innocuous and boring as every other boat in the marina. The tall, infected man leading all of us along passed the houseboat without showing an iota of interest.

The loud bang pounded from somewhere far down toward the end of the dock. It had to be Dalhover or Freitag.

Murphy caught up with an infected woman and pounded her in the back of the head as he passed. She tumbled. I clipped the back of her skull with my machete as I went by. She wasn’t likely to get up and join her two compatriots either.

The tall one cut hard to his left and jumped off the dock, over a gunwale, and landed on the deck of a blue-hulled cabin cruiser.

The infected woman following came to a stop on the dock at the stern of the cabin cruiser. She looked down at the water between the dock and the boat’s hull, fear on her face. From inside the cabin cruiser, fists pounded on wood.

The woman, too fixated on the terrifying water, looked up at the sound of Murphy’s running footsteps just a moment too late. He body slammed her full-on, and she flew off the dock, bounced against the walkway between the cabin cruiser and the sailboat in the slip next door, and sank into the green water. She didn’t resurface.

Murphy put a hand on the gunwale and jumped into the boat.

Not sure I could make the jump, I ran around to the side and leapt onto a set of four stairs up to the height of the boat’s gunwale.

Murphy grunted something harsh and mean just as his hammer thudded wetly into a skull.

But that wasn’t enough to kill the White. Bodies hit the deck and a struggle ensued.

I reached the top step and evaluated what I was seeing, even as I jumped into the boat. One White was leaning back against the door to the cabin, clutching his head, but he wasn’t the tall one—where did he come from? The tall one was on top of Murphy and seemed for half a second to be getting the best of him.

Unfortunately for that White, he never saw nor expected my machete. I hacked a deep gash between his shoulder blades.

Figuring that was all the help Murphy needed, I turned to the White sitting on the floor, grasping his head. He was just trying to get his feet under him, and I put an end to that with a chop into his already damaged skull.

When I turned back around, the situation had reversed. Murphy was on top of the White who was wriggling in an expanding pool of red. Murphy pounded his hammer into the White’s skull again, and again, and again, until the struggling stopped.

I looked around, breathing rapidly, trying to find any other threats that might be running our way.

Nothing was moving on the dock. I didn’t see anything on the shore.

“There’s an extra one,” Murphy said, coming to his feet and pointing to the White I’d hacked by the boat’s cabin door.

“I guess
he
was making the noise,” I said. “I thought it was Dalhover or Freitag, being stupid.”

“Not stupid.” It was Freitag’s voice, coming from the other side of the door. “Trapped.”