Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (18 page)

It was mid-afternoon before one of us went up to the top of the driveway to pull the sliding gate shut. The gate—like the black metal fence all around the property—was only six feet tall and wouldn’t stop any determined mob of Whites, but it would keep out any that were casually passing by.

Some of the girls I’d initially spotted sitting in the kennel staring at the sky turned out to be dead. In total, there were four still alive. The first thing they did, even before food, was to bathe themselves in the pool through the water had turned green with algae. Afterward, they scrounged clothing from around the house and gorged themselves on a smorgasbord of canned foods and snack foods laid out on the dining room table. I’d already eaten by that time, so Murphy was taking a turn while I loaded boxes of food, ammunition, and weapons into the back of our Humvee.

Molly was helping with the chore and was handing me cans of fruit when she said, “I used to live about a half mile up the road.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, wedging items into the back seat as best I could.

“My husband, my son, and both my daughters turned,” she said.

It wasn’t an uncommon circumstance, so I didn’t comment.

“My husband went first. I think he brought it home from work. That was in the beginning, a couple of days after the riot at the jail.”

I was out of the Humvee by then, looking at Molly and thinking about my escape during the jail riot. “What did you do with your husband?” I asked.

She said, “He was sick for a few days before he went after my youngest daughter.”

I was afraid to ask what happened there, but Molly wasn’t afraid to tell it. “I guess I knew what to expect. I mean, it was all over the Internet by then. I just didn’t want to believe it. I was downstairs in the kitchen when she screamed.” Molly slowly shook her head. “I told Annie not to go upstairs into Daddy’s room, but you know how kids are.”

No. But I nodded anyway.

“I dropped what I was doing and ran upstairs. By that time I’d taken to carrying a gun—a silver revolver that Jim bought me for Christmas. He liked his guns a lot. I hated it. I was so angry at him for putting a gun under the Christmas tree.” Molly laughed as a few tears found their way down her cheeks. “So, I had the gun. I got to the top of the stairs. Jim Junior was right behind me, and Sara was coming. The bedroom door was open and Jim was on his knees on the floor over Annie. His mouth was covered with blood. He looked like one of those mistreated pit bulls that just mauled some kid on the news.”

I just looked at Molly. I didn’t have any words of comfort for her. But she didn’t need any. She just needed to tell her story, and maybe after enough tellings the pain of it would subside.

“I screamed at Jim to get away from her, but he just hunched lower and snapped his teeth.” Molly slowly shook her head again. “Jim Junior was trying to get around me. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do, but if he’d gone over to help Annie, Jim would have killed him too. Sara was screaming and screaming and screaming. I thought it would never end, and it didn’t, not until I pulled the trigger.” Molly fell silent.

“You shot your husband?” I asked.

Molly nodded. “I didn’t even realize I had the gun up. It just happened. I didn’t kill him with the first shot. It nicked his shoulder. But that only made him angry, and he jumped to his feet and came at us. I shot three more times.” Molly looked down at the ground and her tears rolled off her nose and dripped into a tiny puddle between her feet.

When she looked up again, she said, “When I got to Annie, she was bleeding so badly. I…I tried to stop the bleeding, but it was gushing out of her neck.” Molly gulped another breath. “She died right there in my bedroom.”

I laid a hand on Molly’s shoulder. “That had to be hard.”

She nodded. “You know, the police never even came. I called them. I called an ambulance. Nobody came.”

“I know,” I said.

“Jim Junior got sick after that. He never woke up. He died with the fever, thank God.” Molly shook her head and laughed bitterly. “How twisted is it when a mother is thankful that her son died of a fever?”

“It was better than the alternative.” Out of curiosity, I started, “After they died—” I paused, not sure whether to continue with the question.

“What did I do with the bodies?” Molly finished for me.

I nodded.

Another bitter laugh that verged on tears. “That’s not the kind of problem I ever thought I’d have to solve.”

I shook my head, thinking back to Freitag’s friend with no hands who we went to dispose of downriver.

“I couldn’t keep them in the house,” Molly said. “I couldn’t bury them. We’ve only got a few inches of soil in our backyard, and then it’s just limestone. I wrapped them in layers of garbage bags and duct tape. I didn’t know what else to do. I left them by the back fence under some blankets. I took some rocks that bordered the garden and put them on the blankets to keep them from blowing away.”

Given the constraints, that seemed like a pretty good solution to me.

“A week or so later, they disappeared.”

At first that surprised me, until I realized the bodies had probably been dragged off by hungry Whites. “Was the fence knocked down?”

Molly nodded. “For a while it was only me and Sara. We did okay, considering. We were getting low on food, and I knew I needed to go see what I could find in the neighbors’ houses. I didn’t know whether it was more dangerous to leave her at home or bring her with me. But she was too frightened to stay by herself. She convinced me, and I brought her along. I told myself I had plenty of ammunition, and we’d be okay.” Molly shook her head again as she relived her choices. “We weren’t. It happened next door at the Buckley’s house.”

Molly took another moment to collect herself, and I waited patiently while she did.

“The front door was locked, and I didn’t think I could break it in.”

I looked Molly up and down. She weighed all of a hundred and ten pounds. She was probably right.

“We went around to the back yard. I opened the gate. I was so stupid. I should have checked first if anything was back there. They were. They rushed out at us, three of them, like they’d been waiting there for us all along.”

“Some of them can be pretty efficient predators,” I said. “They may have heard you coming and chose to be quiet and wait, hoping you’d open the gate and come in.”

Molly shrugged. “It all happened so fast. I had the gun in my hand, and I was shooting even as I was falling. The infected were clawing and snapping. I killed the one that came down on top of me, and while I was laying there with that thing bleeding on me, I shot the other two who were attacking Sara. But—” Molly buried her face in her hands and sobbed loudly.

I wrapped my arms around her and lied to her that it was okay. Everything was okay.

It took a long while for Molly to cry herself out. When she did, she stood up straight and looked at me with red eyes. “I shot her. I shot Sara. I guess when I was falling. The bullet hit her in the neck. It went straight through. She was bleeding badly, so badly. I knew she was going to die, but I put my hand over her throat and I tried to stop the bleeding.” Molly shrugged as if to ask what else she could have done. “Sara looked at me. She didn’t scream or cry. She just tried to breathe. She didn’t move. That’s when I heard the infected screaming. They were close and coming.”

“Whites.” I muttered.

Molly nodded. “I checked my revolver. I only had one bullet left. There were four or five coming, maybe more.” Molly closed her eyes and put her hand over them as she turned away. In a hoarse whisper she said, “I put the last bullet in Sara’s head, and I ran.” More sobs followed.

When the sobs came to a stop I said, “It wasn’t your fault. What you did for Sara might be the bravest thing I’ve heard. I don’t know if I could have done it.”

Molly looked back at me and nodded as her lip quivered. “I feel like a coward. I keep telling myself I should have stayed with her or maybe used the bullet on myself.”

I looked at the house. “That’s why you weren’t beat up when they raped you.”

Molly nodded, and after gulping another breath she said, “I thought I deserved what those men were doing to me, for what I let happen to my kids. I let them do—” she cried some more.

“The world is a fucked up place now,” I told her after a bit.

Molly looked back at the house and laughed bitterly.

I shook my head and pointed at the house. “You lived through that and all the other stuff. You’re strong.”

“Aren’t you just the Mr. Positive Dr. Phil?”

“I’m just trying to make it through the day,” I told her.

Carrying some kind of tan-colored goggle things in one hand and his M4 in the other, Murphy walked across the driveway to where Molly and I were just finishing up by the Humvee. “What’s the plan, Batman?” he said, grinning.

I looked into the Humvee. “We’ve got about as much stuff in here as we’re going to get.”

“You got all the fifty cal ammo?” Murphy asked.

I nodded. “Eleven cans. All I could find.”

Murphy looked back at the house. “There’s a lot of shit in there.”

I shrugged. That was plainly true.

“You guys are just going to leave, then?” Molly asked.

“We are loading up the Humvee.” I pointed to the stuff piled in the back of our truck. “What exactly are you asking?”

Molly crinkled her brow. “Things are happening pretty fast. I haven’t thought about it.”

Murphy looked at me, “Before you go all Null Spot, dude, these chicks got everything they need here. Maybe enough food for—I don’t know—four or five months, and more guns and ammo than they’re likely to need. Shit like this.” He held up the goggle things.

I looked at them, but didn’t have a guess what they were.

“Night vision goggles,” he said.

“No shit.” That pleased me greatly. “They don’t look like what I’ve seen on TV.”

Murphy shook his head. “There are lots of different kinds.”

I reached out, and Murphy handed me the goggles. I started to examine them. “Do they work?”

“Yep.”

“Do they take batteries?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“And the batteries are still good?”

“These still work.”

As I slipped them over my head, I asked, “How many sets of these did you find?”

“Just the one so far,” he said.

Molly pointed toward one end of the house. “There are seven more inside.”

“Seven?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

Molly looked down at her feet. “They didn’t always have me locked up. I earned their trust at least a little bit. The goggles are in the rec room in that pile of stuff behind the pool table.”

Shaking his head and shrugging, Murphy said, “I didn’t really go through that stuff.”

Molly looked at me and went into sales mode. “I saw most of what they brought in. I think I know what they’ve got.”

“Had,” I corrected. “It’s
your
stuff now.”

“Or
our
stuff,” she suggested.

I looked at Murphy with the silent question on my face. What do we do about the girls?

Ignoring Molly, he said, “Man, you know what we got to do.”

“I can help,” she said. “We can all help.”

“This isn’t your fight,” I told Molly.

She replied, “Let’s team up. We’ll all be better off together than alone. You can see that, right?”

Shaking my head, I said, “Not necessarily.”

“Are you guys alone?” Molly asked.

“No,” I admitted. “It’s complicated.” I spent a while explaining the situation to Molly, not the history—I glossed over a few quick points—but mostly I told her about our plan to rescue Steph and get out of town. With a nod from Murphy, permission I guess, I told her we were planning to head west, far from all the danger of the Whites in the cities.

When I was done, Molly pointed at a freestanding garage that Murphy and I hadn’t checked when we cleared the house of threats. “There’s a trailer in that garage. It’s got a Porsche in it. I think the guy used it for racing or something and he towed it to the races with the car inside.”

“Wait,” I asked, “That’s why that garage was so big?”

Molly said, “The guy that lived here before the infection hit, he was that guy you killed on the bed—”

“You knew him before?” Murphy asked.

“Yes,” Molly answered. “Not well, but he had parties at his house for the neighbors. He’s got some old cars and things in there.”

“A trailer.” Murphy stroked his chin. He looked at me. He looked over at the garage. “Let’s go check it out.”

I glanced up at the front gate. To Molly, I asked, “How are those other girls doing? Can one or two of them keep an eye on things out here for a bit? I hate not having somebody on watch.”

“Considering what they’ve been through, Zed, they’re fine.”

“Okay,” I said, “I just didn’t know—” I groped for the right words.

Molly said, “We’re not fragile. If we were, none of us would have made it this long.”