Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected (5 page)

The smoke thickened and reduced visibility down to several car lengths. The air got hard to breathe. Nothing was moving anywhere.

“The fire must be close,” I said.

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

“Do you know where we are?”

“More or less.”

“Well, it seems like we’re headed right for the fire.”

Murphy shrugged. “I’m just looking for a wide street to head north again.”

“Okay, because I don’t think I want to get roasted or suffocated.”

“I hear you, man.”

A few minutes later, Murphy made a slow left turn onto a wide, car-strewn boulevard.

“Murphy, what are we going to do after we find your mom’s house?”

“Well, I’m not going to be your superhero sidekick if that’s what you’re going to ask me, Null Spot. Heh, heh, heh.”

“Whatever.”

“So, Zed, tell me about this peaches and cream world that you grew up in that made you wanna go and help everybody. It’s like you’re a Boy Scout trying to earn that merit badge you missed out on when you were fifteen.” Murphy laughed again. He always found himself funny.

“Not even close. I was never a Boy Scout. We spent all of our time at church.”

“You didn’t ride a bicycle around to people’s houses did you? Heh, heh, heh.”

I shook my head. “Definitely not. I never really bought into any of it.”

“I’ll bet your parents didn’t dig that. Did they know?”

“Oh, yeah. I told them.”

“What’d they do about that?”

“My stepdad thought he could beat the Jesus into me.”

“How’d that turn out?”

“Just like you’d expect.”

“I heard that, man. So, no brothers? No sisters?”

“Nope, just me. My real dad has family around town. I never met any of them. My mom hated them all.”

“Your folks sound like real nice people.”

I shrugged.

Murphy said, “So you’re more of a Batman superhero, then.”

“What?”

“You know. Childhood trauma makes you want to go out and do good in the world.”

I ignored Murphy and looked out the window into a dim gray bubble a few hundred feet wide. Nothing moved. Nothing attacked. Abandoned cars littered the road. Human remains lay here and there. Doors on houses hung open. Windows were smashed. Human clutter littered the streets, lawns, and parking lots.

Everything had changed so fast.

I wondered if each of those houses had their dead owners inside. I wondered if the occupants became infected and went rampaging into West Austin to kill and kill and kill. I wondered how many children’s bodies were lying under their beds or in their closets.

Those kids never knew that evil found you wherever you hid
. Running and fighting were your only real choices.

I was getting depressed.

That was an emotional indulgence I couldn’t afford.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Breathe.

Move ahead.

Suck it up and don’t be a pussy!

We passed through a flashing red light at a large intersection.

“I know where we are now,” I said.

“Yeah. If we’re lucky, it’ll be smoky when we get to my mom’s house and we won’t have a swarm of the infected on us.”

“If they’re not there, then what?”

“My mom and sister?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” Murphy answered.

“Do you have other family around?”

“Oh, yeah, man. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Most live close by. My mom is pretty tight with my uncle. He lives a few blocks over. She could be at his house. Who knows?”

“I assume you tried calling him.”

“Yeah, Zed. I tried calling everybody.” He sounded irritated by my query. Murphy’s face sagged. He looked much older without his smile.

“Your family means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” I asked. It was obviously true. But I thought Murphy might need some urging to talk about it.

“Yeah.”

“With all the smoke chasing the infected away, we can probably check all of your relatives’ houses, Murphy.”

With no enthusiasm, Murphy said, “Null Spot rides again.”

I ignored the comment. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find somebody.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

What little I could see of Murphy’s neighborhood through the smoke didn’t bode well. There were bodies of the infected scattered everywhere. Car windows were smashed. The small old houses had belched their contents and dead occupants out onto the lawns.

Under the boughs of the grand old oaks that had shaded the streets for decades, Murphy’s neighbors had fought the infected, and the guns they used to defend themselves drew more infected in. It was a difficult first lesson to survive. Dried blood, torn clothes, and gnawed bones marked the places where men, women, and their kids had learned that lesson too late.

In spite of the body count, I saw no firearms among the dead. Someone had lived through the battle. The area had been scavenged. That was a hopeful sign.

Murphy stopped the Humvee by the curb in front of a house that looked like all the rest. Through the thickening smoke, I could barely see the front door.

Murphy turned to me with his mouth in a resolute crease. “Zed, you can stay here if you want. You don’t have to come in.”

“We’re in this together, Murphy.”

Without another word, Murphy opened his door and climbed out. I did the same.

When I came around the back of the vehicle, Murphy was halfway to the front door.

I hurried my pace.

The front door was ajar. Murphy cautiously pushed it open as I came up to watch his back.

I checked our flanks, a lesson I learned from watching the soldiers die on the quad by the dorm. They didn’t understand their adversary. They got sloppy and they paid for their mistakes in the only currency this altered world seemed content to accept. Blood.

Murphy stepped into the house. He was tense. He was tentative.

He feared what he might find.

His breathing was ragged, but we hadn’t exerted ourselves. His smile, a dam that held a back a river of emotions, crumbled in the flood.

I paused halfway in and listened. There was a noise coming from somewhere inside. I didn’t know where
, but I guessed what.

Murphy crossed the living room and leaned into the kitchen as I closed the door behind me.

The furnishings were thirty years out of fashion and worn. The carpet was its own kind of ugly.

A wall covered with framed photos chronicled the lives of Murphy and his sister. Murphy was a Boy Scout. Murphy played football. A younger, thinner Murphy stood proud and stern in an Army uniform.

Murphy’s sister, sitting on a pony at a young age. Pirouetting as a third grader at a dance recital. The camera caught her, clad in a cheerleader’s uniform, high in the air in a gymnastic bounce. She wore a cap and gown with a big grin in two separate photos from two different graduations.

Murphy’s mom was in some of the pictures, arms around the kids, always smiling. No picture of any father, anywhere.

Murphy’s mother and sister came to life on that wall even as their deaths were about to be confirmed.

Murphy looked back at me, his face taut, and his jaw clenched. He shook his head.

The kitchen was empty.

I followed him across the living room to the hall.

The sound was louder. Just as I became certain what it was, Murphy bolted up the hall. He must have figured it out as well.

It was the infected.

I hurried to follow.

A closed bedroom door at the end of the hall proved no obstacle for Murphy’s momentum. It cracked and splintered. Hinge screws ripped through wood as Murphy’s wrath exploded into the room.

Murphy’s fury found voice in a primordial scream that was seconded only to the shots exploding from his rifle.

The house fell suddenly silent.

The ugly business in that room was finished. Only sorrow and rage remained.

In the hall, I froze in my footsteps.

In that room, heavy feet pounded the wooden floor. Furniture bounced against walls. Trinkets shattered. A beast fought with its grief.

I wondered, was Murphy’s smile dying while I listened, while I cringed? Would he now wear the frown of the emotionally damaged, the same one worn now by so many?

There was too much emotion in that room for me to enter the fray. I’d rather face the infected. I withdrew past the only other door off the hall. It was also closed. If something was inside, I’d know soon enough.

I took up a position in the living room at the entrance to the hall. From there, I could see the front door, the back door, and of course, the hall. Nothing moved.

Moments later, Murphy burst from the room with a grimace on his face and tears in his eyes.

I looked toward the second hall door, and in the time it took me to focus my attention there, Murphy crossed the distance and smashed through it.

Half in the hall and half in the room; Murphy looked back and forth across it several times and then froze.

After a time, I softly asked, “Murphy?”

Murphy didn’t move.

I listened for movement in the house. I heard only silence.

The only infected in the house were those Murphy had killed in the back bedroom. Whether those infected had killed his family or whether they were his family was the burning question.

I shuddered at the thought. Murphy wasn’t like me. He loved his mother.

For the moment, Murphy was frozen by grief.

Shots had been fired. If any infected were near enough, they would hear,
and they would come. One of us needed to get back in the game and that had to be me.

I hurried into the kitchen, stepped across the avocado-patterned linoleum floor and peeked through the window above the sink. There was no movement on that side of the house.

I hurried to the front of the house and pushed aside a homemade curtain to get a view of the street. “Mother fucker!”

Our Humvee was rolling away from the curb.

I ran to the front door and flung it open.

From behind, Murphy called, “What?”

I ran into the front yard and saw the Humvee disappear into the smoke. “God damn it! God damn motherfucking criminal bastard fuck-shits!”

Then Murphy was beside me. He bellowed curses up the street and pointed his weapon.

I put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. “Don’t. It’s pointless.”

I looked around to see if we’d drawn any attention. In the small circle of the world that wasn’t obscured by smoke, I saw no movement. I heard none of the infected’s usual noises but I heard something. I heard a noise that didn’t belong.

With neither of us swearing at the moment, Murphy heard it too. "What's that?”

I looked south, toward the sound. It was a combination of a rumble and a rush of wind, growling and coming
closer. The uniform gray smoke hanging over the houses started to glow in patches of orange and red.

"Shit! Murphy, we need to move! The fire is coming!"

I ran a few steps and noticed that Murphy wasn't following. I stopped. "C'mon, Murphy! What the fuck?"

Murphy was fixated on the glow of the fire through the smoke. "We can't outrun that."

His voice was flat. Despondent.

Oh
, no!

"I'm not quitting now, Murphy! I'm not dying here! Let's go!” I took a few more steps.

Nothing.

Fuck!

Suddenly, Murphy was back. He shouted, "We need a car!"

"No time!"

"It's our only chance!"

Damn!

Murphy was right.

I ran toward a car that sat in a neighbor’s yard with the driver’s door swung open. The front seat was a gory mess, but I jumped in. The keys were in the ignition. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks.
I cranked the engine. The starter groaned rhythmically, but the engine didn't fire.

"Shit!"

I cranked again.

Nothing.

It must have run out of fuel with the engine running after its driver had died. I was out of the car in a snap. Murphy was nowhere to be seen.

I looked around.

I heard a car engine crank and made out the shape of another car through the smoke across the street. I ran toward it and saw Murphy's big silhouette through the shattered driver's side window.

Just as my feet hit asphalt, the engine rumbled to life.

Murphy spun the wheels as he backed the car off of the curb.

I jumped and slid over the hood as the fire ignited the leaves of the oak tree shading above me.

A billow of heat singed my skin and seared my throat. Every tree I could see was engulfed in flames.

Beneath that flaming sky, I landed in the passenger seat and Murphy stomped on the accelerator.

The car fishtailed up the street. Embers from trees rained down from above. Lawns, bushes, and houses ignited.

Murphy pulled the car through the first left
-hand turn and plunged us into thick smoke at thirty, forty, then fifty miles-per-hour. The oaks’ thick foliage crumbled into embers as the fire raced through the treetops in front of us. Visibility shrank to a deadly small margin for the speed we were moving. But with death's greedy hands grasping at our flesh, wild-eyed flight and long odds were our only chances for survival.

Murphy kept jerking the car from side to side to get past obstacles seen at the last moment. Four blocks passed before we got out from under the racing blaze.

I cast a morbidly curious glance at the conflagration behind us. "Jesus!"

Murphy hit a hard right turn and then a quick left, angling across the path of the fire, but still moving away.

I was nervous about the choice. "Do you know a way out?"

"That dude with the bunker, his house isn't far. If we can get there ahead of the fire, we'll be safe." Murphy was tense. We weren’t out of danger.

"There’s a lot of hope in that plan, Murphy."

"Do you have a better idea?"

“Drive like a mother fucker ‘til we run out of road?”

“Once these streets burn, we’ll never find that bunker in the mess.”

“Shit.”