Slow Burn: Bleed, Book 6 (23 page)

We’d been drifting out in the lake well offshore from Pace Bend Park for several hours. The motor was off, and the pontoon boat bobbed on the waves while Murphy stood at the helm, night vision goggles on, watching.

Not a word was said between us.

I sat on the flat deck, holding onto a canopy support post, dangling my feet in the water, listening to the slosh of waves, and staring into the darkness. My gunshot wound had ripped open in the fight. It bled and didn’t seem to have any interest in slowing down.

I didn’t care. I felt the blood soak into my pants. I felt it trickle down over my knee and down my shin to mix with the cold lake water.

My life was never meant to have a happy ending, of that I was certain. Looking back, it was a surprise to me that the bits of happiness that tumbled serendipitously down even managed to stick to me long enough to ever make me smile. And though the intellectual parts of my brain told me that I should remember Steph’s smile, the smell of her hair, and the angelic way she looked wearing Sarah Mansfield’s jeans and t-shirt that day in her living room when she was caring for me after another losing round with a White, I couldn’t. I was drowning in numbness, and when I came up for air, all I felt was hurt.

Murphy said, “I see ‘em.”

I looked up into the darkness. In the night, I could barely make out the squat, white cliffs standing over the lake’s edge.

“One, two, three,” Murphy counted. “The truck and the trailer. They all made it.”

I didn’t care.

He said, “I don’t see any Whites anywhere.” He started the engine and headed the boat across the lines of waves, splashing me each time our starboard pontoon hit a crest. “You’ll be fine,” he told me. “We’ll all get to Balmorhea, and we’ll all be fine.”

Weakly, I said, “I’m not going.”

“What?”

Louder, I said, “I’m not going.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

We splashed through the short waves for another ten minutes or so, then Murphy cut the engine and we drifted up to the tip of the long peninsula on which Pace Bend Park lay. As we got close, I saw Dalhover, Rachel, Gretchen, and a few others coming down a wooden stairway built on the side of the cliff.

Murphy came up to the front of the boat. The port side pontoon bounced against a wooden swim platform at the bottom of the stairs. He jumped out and tied us off on the railing.

Feet were clomping down the stairs. Murphy came back onto the boat to help me up.

I said, “I was born to live in a world of Whites. I just never knew it.”

“You’re low on blood. You’re talking gibberish.”

I knew I wasn’t. Murphy didn’t want to hear what I was saying. “I’m staying here, Murphy.”

“You’ll die if you don’t get help. We need to go.”

“Help?” I asked. “Help from who? Steph is dead. Nobody has any medical training.”

Murphy looked up at the stairs and back down at me.

“Murphy, I know you think I’m half stupid from loss of blood—”

Murphy looked down at my shirt and shorts, drenched with my blood. His face was solid with worry. He started to reach under me to pick me up. I pushed him away with more strength than I thought I still had.

“We’re never going to fit in with them,” I said, half pointing to the people on the stairs. “Never. Maybe you can make a go of it. I can’t. I’m staying here.”

Rachel was suddenly down in front of me, pleading with me to go, but I could only half pay attention. I needed most of my mental energy just to keep myself upright. Dalhover said something. Gretchen’s voice turned urgent.

I was staying. Austin, Texas was my home. It was the place where I was born. It was where I had struggled to live. I was going to die in Austin, not out in some bumfuck West Texas desert where I’d be hated by everyone lucky enough to have immunity in their blood and pigment in their skin.

Somewhere in a blur of voices, I leaned over against the support post. I could no longer keep myself upright without it. I gripped it with all my might. I wasn’t getting off the boat.

Between the blood loss from the initial gunshot wound, along with all that bled away after reopening my wound while I was killing Whites after Steph died, I was too weak to be of much use for anything. Murphy carried me to a house near the shore. He poured too much good vodka on my wound and not enough into my mouth. He sewed me up as best he could and put me into a bed upstairs. I slept fitfully on and off for a few days. I guess it was a few days. It could have been a week. I remember it turning light, then dark again several times. Murphy fed me. He brought me water to drink. And neither of us spoke.

One morning arrived and I woke. Light came into the room at an angle and cast a yellow glow around the shadows. I sat up in bed. I felt a little dizzy, but I was lucid. To my right, Murphy was sitting in a cushy chair, his M4 across his lap. He looked tired, but he was awake. He looked at me with no trace of a smile. All he had were hard eyes and a clenched jaw.

I looked at him for a long time as I put the sequence of my memory’s events in order. I said, “Thank you, Murphy.”

He nodded.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I am.”

I nodded. He looked fine, physically.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I rotated my left arm around my shoulder and felt it stretch at the stiff wound under my rib cage. I breathed deeply. “I’ll need a couple of days, I think. But I’m okay.”

“You hungry?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Can you walk?”

I nodded, though I had no idea.

“I can bring you something.”

I shook my head and threw my legs over the side of the bed. “I need to get up.” I slid my feet down to the floor, careful to keep my hands on the bed. The effort was significant, and I had to pause to catch my breath.

“It’s the blood loss,” said Murphy. “What little you have left isn’t enough to do much at all. Do you remember passing out in the boat?”

I nodded.

“You were probably pretty close to kickin’ it. You’re lucky I got you here and sewed you up.”

“Thanks.”

“It might take a couple of weeks before you can get back to anything like normal activity levels.”

“Normal?” I smiled.

“You know what I mean.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.

“You lost a lot of blood that first night. Steph told me most of it after she fixed you up.”

I felt a stab of something in my heart. It was sharp and jagged. It tore, but fell away to bleak gray. I didn’t want to think about Steph. Every memory of her was wrapped in a layer of bloody, brokenhearted death. I had to wash those memories in gray. I had to forget.

With one hand on the bed, keeping my balance, I stood. Or that’s to say, I tried to stand. When I toppled over, Murphy jumped up to catch me. What started out as an effort to move my feet, to get away from a pain in my heart, turned into the humility of hanging from Murphy’s arms.

“If you need to do this,” Murphy said, “I’ll help you.”

I nodded. “I need to.” Feeling vulnerable and completely indebted to Murphy for his help, for being a friend that would do anything for me, I felt tears in my eyes and sniffled them back. I took a step. Murphy carried my weight forward. I took another step.

It was a slow, tiring process, but we made it from the upstairs bedroom down to the kitchen. Murphy put me in a kitchen chair near windows that looked out over the lake. I leaned on the table and thought about what an effort it was just to stay upright.

“I was planning on oatmeal,” said Murphy. “They got some brown sugar and pecans. No butter though.”

I shrugged and stared out at the glistening water. Behind me, I heard the clicking of an igniter on the stove, and then the sound of a jet of flame. Water poured into a pot and Murphy scooped a few cups of rolled oats into the water. The pan clinked as Murphy sat it on the stove.

What?

I turned to look at Murphy standing in front of the stove. “There’s gas?”

Murphy nodded. “There’s one of those big propane tanks or whatever outside. I guess it ain’t empty.”

“A hot meal.” I laid my head on the table. It had been so long since I’d eaten anything hot. “A hot meal.”

“I know.” Murphy said it with a pinch of his old enthusiasm, and I smiled as I looked at the lake.

While Murphy was cooking, I asked, “The others?”

“It’s just us here.”

“They went to Balmorhea?” I asked.

Murphy nodded.

“Even Rachel?”

“She’s better off out there than here.”

“You cool with that?”

“She doesn’t need me to hold her hand.”

When the oatmeal was ready, Murphy brought me a bowl and I slowly ate. It was fantastic. Murphy ate his much more quickly than me, but courteously waited in silence while I finished.

“Do you want more?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thanks. I’m full.”

Murphy smiled weakly. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“Thanks for taking care of me.”

“It’s nice outside this morning. Do you want to go out on the porch for a while?”

I looked up at the distance from the table to the back door, then from the door to the nearest deck chairs outside. I wanted more than anything to be out there feeling the warmth of the sun on my face. But I smiled and sniffled as another tear filled my eye. I shook my head. There was no way I could make it all the way out there, not even with Murphy’s help.

Murphy smiled. He stood up and said, “Put your arm over my shoulder. C’mon.” He lifted me in his arms. “Good thing there’s plenty of food here. We need to fatten you up before you blow away.”

Murphy carried me outside and put me in a chair, the one in the sun that I was hoping to get placed in. But I wasn’t going to ask. It was hard enough being carried around like a child, without making special requests.

“You good?” he asked.

I leaned my head on the chair’s back and let the sun shine on my face. “Yeah.”

Murphy took a chair on the other side of a small table. “You want any water or anything?”

I shook my head. “I just want to sit here.”

Some mockingbirds were making a racket in a tree nearby. Wind blew the branches, and the oak leaves, brittle but still green, sounded like Styrofoam packing peanuts rattling in a shipping box. But it was a familiar sound, a comforting sound. It was the sound of Texas in the autumn.

Somewhere out there in the world, a sound was different though—faint, guttural, thumping.

The sound grew.

I sat up straight and looked out over the lake. Murphy was already sitting up, looking.

“I hear it too,” he said.

We continued to scan the sky. As the sound grew louder in the distance we both knew what it was. It was distinct.

Murphy pointed far to the southeast.

I looked.

“That’s a Black Hawk helicopter,” he said.

“Army?” I asked.

Murphy nodded and sat back to watch it cross the sky in the far distance. No other helicopters joined it.

After a while, Murphy asked, “What do you think it means?”

I looked at the dark-colored dot making its noisy passage in the crisp blue sky and thought about it. Eventually, I laid my arm on the end table and pushed it up beside Murphy’s. He looked down at my arm. I said, “You’re white. I’m white. We’ll always be white. Whatever that helicopter means, it doesn’t mean shit to people like us.”

Before forcing you to read a bunch of blah blah crap that you might not find interesting, I’ll tell you right up front:

There WILL be some more Slow Burn books

This is obviously a reversal for me. I’d planned to end the series at six, well as you read, with everyone who is left alive riding off into the sunset to live happily (or not) ever after. But, just as many of you have, I’ve gotten very attached to both Zed and Murphy through the course of six books. Admittedly, Zed is hard for me to write. Because of Zed’s past he has difficulties dealing with people in an emotionally healthy fashion. To write him believably, I have to put myself as best I can, in his mindset. I have to believe I’m in the situations that he’s in. I have to imagine myself as him. I don’t know if other writers do the same when they write but that’s what works for me.

Imagining myself in Zed’s shoes takes an emotional toll that’s sometimes hard to pay. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to draw the series to a close. I didn’t know how long I could keep writing him and still hold onto my own emotional stability—okay, that sounds melodramatic, but hey, I’m a writer.

On the other hand, Murphy is fun to write. He’s gregarious. He’s funny. He doesn’t get too hung up in the bullshit of life even if life is full of zombies. He makes the post-apocalyptic world kind of fun.

My other concern for the characters and the story is that I didn’t want to take the simple idea of seeking a safe place to live and wear it out. I didn’t want to write a zombie version of Gilligan’s Island where the whole series is predicated on the fact that the castaways want to get off the island but never do.

In ending book 6 in the way I did, I left some of the survivors going to find safety which seemed like a good way to bring the story to an end. Zed and Murphy, plausibly, and in character, choose to stay behind in Austin. For them, the quest for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—sanctuary—is over. Instead, they’re going to get into some trouble in a post-apocalyptic Austin and the books that follow those adventures will be stand-alone, 1-book novels. Maybe they’ll even track down Mark and finally kill him. And who doesn’t want to see that happen?

I’m not going to make any promises about when the next Slow Burn book will come out. I may write one or two next year. For the moment though, I need some time away from Zed and Murphy so I can torment other characters in my imagination.

Thank you so much for reading the series. All of the feedback you’ve given me through Amazon, Facebook, and the other social media sites has meant a lot to me and helped me keep writing even on those long, long nights after working a full day in the cubicle. I really do appreciate it.

Bobby