Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (22 page)

Twelve of us left the cove in the two boats we had used to attack Jay and his thugs on the island. Of the islanders, only Steph and one guy came along. The rest…well who cares about them? I was pissed. They could all go back to the island and fuck themselves. They hated both me and Murphy. They made that clear when they’d sided with Jay against Gretchen on that first night. Even on their knees with Jay’s gun to the backs of their heads, they still thought my White skin was a greater danger. Double fuck them.

Murphy was right. Other people’s fears would haunt us forever.

The islanders took their three boats with a few M4’s with suppressors—Goddamned valuable equipment—and two sets of night vision goggles. With a few thousand rounds of ammunition and a little patience, they wouldn’t have any trouble clearing their island of the infected. They just had to sit offshore and shoot the Whites. If the infected swam after them in numbers too great to handle, they only had to drive their boats up the lake a bit and come back when things settled down. Once they had their island back, there were rifles and handguns left there by Jay’s dead thugs. Provisions they’d had would likely be ransacked, but the canned goods they’d collected would still be there. None of the Whites we’d come across had yet been able to figure out what to do with canned products.

So without guilt for their future, I watched the islanders head back toward their home. Our group turned our boats into our cove late in the afternoon. Two of our three Humvees and the F-350 with the enclosed trailer still attached were parked just as we’d left them on a street a hundred yards up a hill from the water. They were ready to go.

We docked our boats at the floating boathouse where we’d been holed up for the past few days. We didn’t see nor hear a single White on shore as we got everyone moved inside. Once there, Dalhover spoke up. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. That’s when we’ll head out. By the time the sun comes up tomorrow, we’ll be far enough west of here that most of our troubles will be behind us. We might even be in Balmorhea.” He looked over to Gretchen and then to Steph. Both nodded. I guessed the pecking order still wasn’t clear. I didn’t care. They had plenty of time to talk about it on the trip west.

Dalhover continued, “We’ve got room to seat seventeen. There are thirteen of us. Figure out your seating arrangements, and let Gretchen know. We need primary drivers and backup drivers for each vehicle. Anybody with experience pulling a big trailer gets the F-350. I’ll be in the Humvee with the fifty, Murphy will be in the one with the grenade launcher. We need backup operators for those as well.” Dalhover looked around for questions.

Gretchen stood up. “Murphy, Rachel, and Molly will take a boat across the lake to get the Humvee we left over there last night. As soon as they get back here, if we don’t have any Whites around, we need to top off the fuel tank as quickly as possible, get loaded into our vehicles, and go. We’ll take it slow on the roads since we’ll be using the night vision goggles to drive. We’ll stay in a tight line with two Humvees in front, the trailer third, and a Humvee in back.”

Dalhover said, “The main thing is we need to get that Humvee gassed up and go as quickly as possible. We’ll be vulnerable at that point, climbing the hill up the lake to the Humvees with no protection.”

The islander guy whose name I didn’t catch said, “But we’ve got weapons.”

Dalhover told him harshly, “Don’t shoot unless you have to. Unless you absolutely have to. What you never had the chance to learn on the island is that shooting at the infected never ends well.”

“Nevertheless,” Gretchen interjected, “there are plenty of weapons and ammunition in the trailer. We’ll all be armed before we head up the hill tonight. Sergeant Dalhover and two other volunteers will head up there early, and mount the machine gun and the grenade launcher. They’ll bring back enough weapons so we’ll each have a rifle, a sidearm, and a bladed weapon of some sort.”

“The main thing,” Dalhover said, “is that we do everything quick and quiet. If the infected don’t know we’re out there, they won’t mess with us. If we lollygag and start making noise, things will go bad. If they go bad, run to get into a Humvee as fast as you can. But only if you can make it safely. If you can’t, get back to the boat and get away from the shore. We’ll work out the rally points at places along the shore up the lake. If we get separated, don’t panic. We’ll meet up at the rally points. We’ll get everybody loaded, and then we’ll head west together. Everybody good?”

People nodded. Nobody had any questions.

I was convalescing again while others busied themselves. They scoured the boathouse for anything that might be of value: screwdrivers, rope, empty gas cans, anything. The trailer still had room, so why not pack it with anything that might have any potential use at all?

Twilight was fading to full dark. The fifty-caliber machine gun and the grenade launcher had been mounted. Everyone had his or her weapons. Lookouts were standing on top of the boathouse, wearing night vision goggles. Two were up at the Humvees, with one standing behind the machine gun, using the height as a vantage point to see up and down the road. But not a single White had been seen or heard while preparations were underway.

I was lying on an empty worktable using a life preserver for a pillow. I’d told Steph at least a dozen times that I felt fine sitting up. Sitting in a folding chair beside my table, she insisted that I remain on my back. It was hard not to bow to her insistence. Somewhere over the hour or so that I’d been laying there talking with her, her hands came to be cradling one of mine, a situation neither of us was going to comment on but neither of us was going to change either. It made me feel optimistic about our impending ride off into the sunset.

We talked a bit about nothing. We talked about what life might be like for the next few years out in the middle of nowhere. We talked about when we might one day come back to Austin. We speculated about the state of the rest of the world and what life would be like in a world where humans had a second chance to try to get it right. And that was the thing about that conversation that struck me as the strangest of all. It was an optimistic conversation built on a foundation of assumptions that enough of we humans would live to rebuild.

Gretchen burst in through the boathouse door and stole everyone’s silent attention. She pointed to our parked Humvees up the hill. “They’re here.”

We whispered our cheers. Murphy, Molly, and Rachel had made it back safely.

Gretchen said, “Let’s go.”

Steph helped me to sit up as the others filed out the door and onto the deck on the backside of the boathouse. Feet stepped lightly on the roof. Knees and elbows bumped the siding as the lookouts climbed down.

Steph, doting over me, slowed us both as we walked toward the door. We should have hurried, but the attention of a pretty girl was never something I could shirk off. We were the last two out. Someone started up the engine on the pontoon boat with a muted rumble. It gurgled exhaust into the lake water.

The others were standing on the deck, excited. Our first real chance at peaceful sleep, at safety, lay out in west Texas, and if luck was with us, we’d be there before the sun went down tomorrow. Steph and I joined the others on the boat, taking a seat on one of the benches.

Out of habit, I adjusted my M4 in its sling, ready to shoot from the hip as Murphy had shown me days before. My machete was in its sheath across my back. My pistol was in a holster on my left. I opened my bag and reached in for extra magazines. I wasn’t wearing a MOLLE vest—a shortcoming I’d need to correct—but I did have pockets that could hold four magazines. Along with the one in my rifle, that meant I’d have one hundred and fifty bullets all ready to fly if I needed them.

Steph put a hand on my wrist and shook her head. She said, “Don’t worry about those. You’ve done your part. Just get yourself into the Humvee. That’s all you need to do.”

My hands lingered on the magazines. “But—”

“No buts, Zed. Just get yourself into the Humvee. Let the others do their part.” She smiled.

I let go of the magazines. “Yes, boss.” I smiled and zipped up my bag.

With the pontoon boat’s shallow draft, we ran it aground pretty close to shore, with a grind of limestone on its double aluminum pontoons. The passengers each jumped off the flat deck at the bow and waded across a dozen feet of shallow water. Once they were out of the water, they walked quickly or jogged up the hill toward the Humvees.

“Don’t run,” Steph told me as I started to follow. “You’ll open your wound.”

Just as well, I thought. The effort of getting out of the boat and through the water was more taxing than expected. With Steph on one side of me and Gretchen unexpectedly on the other, we started up the slope. At the top of the hill, Dalhover was standing up through the top of a Humvee behind the fifty-caliber machine gun, looking around. Murphy, Rachel, and Molly were out of their Humvee which they’d left idling loudly behind them. Molly had experience driving the big pickup truck with the trailer, and she was heading that way. Murphy would ride out to Balmorhea in the Humvee with the grenade launcher and Rachel was riding with him, so they were standing together.

With just seventy-five yards of rocky slope to cover, I had the thought that we were going to start our trip without incident, that maybe the Whites on this side of the lake had wandered off to other parts of west Austin, that maybe our luck had finally turned. But in truth, keeping your guard up one hundred percent of the time is hard work. I was tired. We were all tired. We hadn’t seen nor heard a White all day. That allowed us to indulge complacency, and complacency as we’d learned so, so many times, lay at the doorstep to disaster.

I heard one howl at first, barely recognizable over the sound of the Humvee’s diesel engine rattling as it idled. I thought for half a second that it was something strange in the engine noise, but before I even finished that thought, that single White’s howl was joined by a dozen, a hundred, maybe a thousand others. Somewhere off to our left and up the hill, a horde lurked in the trees.

I shouted, “Steph, Gretchen, run.” I pushed Steph from behind to urge her to move.

Gretchen took a few quick steps and turned to look at me with anxious eyes.

“Go,” I yelled at her. “Go.”

Gretchen’s face turned to worry, but she spun and rushed up the hill as fast as her old legs would carry her.

Steph put a hand under my arm to pull me along.

“You go too, Steph. I’ll catch you there.”

“C’mon. We’re going together.”

“No.” I was breathing heavily with the exertion. That bullet had taken a lot more out of me than seemed possible. “I’ll be fine. I’m White too. They won’t fuck with me. Go.”

Steph ignored me and pulled harder. We were halfway up the hill. It looked like we were going to make it. But that changed.

A flood of naked Whites poured out of the trees.

“Shit.” It was immediately obvious that we weren’t going to make it to the Humvees.

Anxious but not yet panicked, Steph yelled, “We have to run, Zed.”

I tried to run, but I instead lumbered on molasses-slow feet.

All the others were in their Humvees already. The engines rapidly fired up one by one. Dalhover’s fifty-caliber machine gun thundered, and Whites fell all across the hill.

Steph figured out at that moment that we weren’t going to make it up the hill. She pulled me to a stop and yelled, “Back to the boat.”

Whites were among the Humvees up on the road. An endless wave of them poured out of the trees. Grenades exploded, and other small weapons fired. I turned with Steph and we started to run, but there was already a smattering of Whites behind us.

Dammit!

I stopped, raised my M4 to my hip and sprayed a full magazine of bullets across our path, then ran after Steph as fast as I could. I tripped over my sagging toes and tumbled across the rough ground. Steph’s pistol fired.

“Run for the boat,” I hollered at her. But she didn’t. She was trying again to help me to my feet.

“Run,” I commanded.

Screams filled the air, punctuated by gunfire. Whites were everywhere, but the boat was just ahead.

A blur of white flashed across my vision and before I realized it, Steph was being tackled. I let go of my empty M4, pulled out my machete and hacked at the White’s back, cutting through its spine. Blood gushed from the wound as Steph struggled out from underneath it.

But more Whites were around us. I hacked at another and drew my pistol. Whites were close enough that I could make every round count. And as much as I preached at others never to fire a gun at the Whites, Steph and I were past the point of caution. I was buying seconds of life with my bullets. I fired, and Whites fell around me.

Steph was getting to her feet with her rifle up. She let go with automatic fire in front of us, clearing a path to get us another dozen feet closer to the boat. I ran into the gap, swinging my machete with all the frail might I could muster.

Her pistol fired at the Whites around us as she came behind. When my foot splashed into ankle deep water, I thought we’d made it. The naked horde was afraid of water. With every step now we’d get closer to safety. I turned as I emptied the last of the bullets from my pistol, but Steph got tackled again. Without the slightest thought of anything but killing the beast on her, I stepped away from the water, hacking and screaming.

Another white jumped on Steph, and then another. I cut at them. I roared. I cut at the ones close by as she struggled to get up. I beat at whites with the butt of my pistol and I hacked, but there were so many. There were so, so many. They were all over Steph by then. She was struggling and screaming, screaming not from anger, but pain. They were ripping at her. I reached in for her hand and tried to pull her toward the water as I chopped at the monsters on her.

Just get to the water.

Just get to the water.

But all I saw were grasping Whites and blood. I pulled, and she held my hand, knowing instinctually it was mine, knowing—

Her hand went slack.

And in that one heartbeat, as I hoped for her to re-grip my hand, I knew she was dead.

I swung my machete and let rage run away with me. I was feet from the water, a dozen feet from the safety of the boat, but I didn’t know anymore in which direction it lay, and I didn’t care. I was surrounded by Whites who couldn’t get through the mass of their brothers to reach Steph’s warm body, and they focused on me, wounded, bleeding, and marked for death by my choice to shoot my gun.

But I didn’t care. I just wanted to spend the last of my living moments mauling them with my blade and watching their faces turn to fear as their blood spewed from their wounds.

A grenade exploded nearby, followed by a wave of White howls. A second later, another grenade exploded, knocking me and all the Whites down around me. When I looked up, a little dazed, I saw Murphy. He ran at me through the smoke, grabbed me by my backpack, and without slowing, pulled me into the water, splashing through to the pontoon boat.

At the boat, he turned and fired at the Whites brave enough to wade in after us. “Get in the goddamned boat,” he yelled.

Unable to think for myself, I did as I was told and crawled in, rolling onto the deck and gasping for air from the effort.

Murphy’s gun continued to fire, then his feet were pounding across the deck, and the boat’s engine was revving loudly. More firing. The boat lurched off the lakebed, and we were afloat, moving away from shore. I was still lying on the deck trying to breathe, wishing I had the energy to roll off the flat deck and wade back to shore.