Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (2 page)

With Russell close behind, I went into the garage, hoping for a wink of good fortune in the form of a sturdy automobile. Instead, the rows of decorator lights twinkled on a fat, low-slung motorcycle built to rumble as much as roll. Its chrome sparkled. Its leather gleamed. To ride it would be tantamount to suicide.

Back through the kitchen door, on the wall by the fridge, I spotted a key hanger with three empty hooks and a fourth with a key ring dangling down. The leather key fob was adorned with a wicked death’s head logo hanging beside two keys and a garage door opener.

They had to be for the bike.

I stared at those keys for many long moments. My belly was full. My thirst was gone. Manufactured cool air, underappreciated just a week before, bathed me in its luxury. I was safe. I could
lay on a couch and watch a movie. I could pretend, at least for a while, that the world wasn’t going to shit.

But I burned with a hate and a need.

"Fuck it!" I grabbed the keys and marched back into the garage, slamming the door behind me to trap Russell in the house.

He howled.

I threw a leg over the dormant black machine and slipped the key into the ignition. With my heel, I pushed out the old-school kick-starter and put my weight into waking the engine. It rumbled to deafening life in the enclosed space. I doubted it could rocket down the road like my old repossessed Suzuki, but it sounded powerful enough.

The garage door clicked with a satisfying snap under my thumb and I slid my sling around to level my M4 at the tiny, widening gap of daylight.

The first White to crawl under the door got extinguished before his crazy eyes ever saw me. I shredded the legs of two more with 5.56mm bullets before the door was halfway up. They were busy bleeding out when the door stopped at the top. More infected ran up the driveway and were massacred for their trouble.

With no others in sight, I slipped the M4 around in its sling so that it was on my back. I ran my fingers over the handle of my battered machete and checked that my pistol was handy in its holster. I put both hands on the handlebar grips, revved the beast, and raced out into the street like a thunder god riding a storm.

The heavy bike hugged the pavement as I leaned hard into a left turn at a reckless speed. I took a right and then zigzagged through the neighborhood. A wall of sound stunned the infected as I blazed past. Pale white faces popped out of bushes and up from behind parked cars, all too late to make a dash for the road and cut me off.

At 38
th
Street, I headed east. I opened up the throttle and blew past North Lamar Boulevard at ninety. I had to brake and swerve through the cars that cluttered the roads around Seton Hospital. I turned into another grid pattern neighborhood and repeated my zigzag tactic to avoid collecting infected on the road ahead of me. Helpfully, the motor’s throaty growl echoed among the houses, sending the infected scurrying in wrong directions.

Wind pulled through my hair and tugged at my shirt. Parked cars, trees, and houses flew past in a blur. Whites appeared on the roadsides and disappeared behind. At Red River Street, I cut a hard right and let the bike’s big engine sweep me past the eastern edge of the university campus toward the looming basketball arena and the tall hospital buildings to the south.

Luck, rumble, and speed were the only things keeping breath in my lungs and infected teeth out of my flesh. But I’d lose two of those when it came time to get off the bike. With the hospital less than a mile south, only luck would be left.

Among the toppled barricades and abandoned military vehicles ahead, the infected froze in their steps and locked me in their famished stares. As I came up beside the basketball arena I checked my flanks for Whites.

None.

I squeezed both brake levers and the bike skidded to a stop.

A cannonade of sound echoed between the buildings as I held the clutch and revved the engine, tempting the infected into a run. Mouths stretched and white faces contorted in desperate need. Running feet stomped the asphalt, carrying the graceful fast and the clumsy slow.

Arms swung and dirty hands grasped.

Howls drowned in the storm.

In seconds, the horde bloated from hundreds to thousands, as debilitated brains reckoned that I represented a more attainable meal than those who defended themselves on the hospital’s upper floors.

As the Whites drew near, I let go of the clutch, leaned the bike into a turn, and blasted toward the north end of the arena, slowing enough to make certain that I didn’t elude my pursuers. I hopped the bike over a curb and drove up onto the wide plaza that encompassed the arena.

Compliant so far, my cohorts followed, tempted by the revving engine and a quarry that seemed too slow to lose them. I followed the curve of the building and came around into a southerly direction again. A few crazy Whites were off to my left and a few were dashing toward me from the front, teeth bared and fingers digging at the air.

I crested a concrete knoll on the south end of the arena and saw that the hospital complex was relatively clear. Nearly all of the infected were busy chasing the mob around the other side of the arena. Abandoned vehicles, barricades, bodies, and angry, straggling infected were the only impediments to speed. As fast as I could without skidding the bike, I slalomed down the grade, past frustrated crawlers and chasing Whites.

Behind me, the shrieks of the infected swarm swelled the hot air and pushed me to go faster, pushed me to greater risk. To my right the tail of the fetid host, the slowest among them, had not yet rounded the arena, and was in fact just coming up to it. They spotted me and changed course, howling their good fortune to the clouds.

I mocked them with my glare. I was Null Spot the Destroyer! Their greedy, grasping fingers would touch nothing but air.

But the Null Spot could extrapolate, and a quick mental exercise told me that I needed to get to my goal faster than my current course and speed allowed. The race was on.

The big bike’s engine thundered back to angry acceleration, trying to pull me off the back. A crawler under my wheels nearly sent me into a skid, but I was on a beeline and out of choices. The bike hit a curb hard and bounced up in the front. I thanked God that the back wheel didn’t shatter as it bumped over the same curb and spun wildly on dead grass. Seconds later I bounced off of another curb, and my tires caught asphalt just a few dozen feet from the entrance to the parking garage across from the hospital.

Five floors of concrete and empty automobiles would hold no interest for the infected so it had to be empty; such was the foundation upon which my hastily conceived plan was built.

With nothing ahead but empty asphalt, I pushed the bike hard as three or four particularly fast infected chased. I rounded the motorcycle into the garage’s east entrance as gravity’s fingers tugged me down. Rubber burned on concrete as I braked and slowed for a right turn up the ramp. I twisted the throttle. The engine’s reverberations hammered courage into my veins.

I flew up the ramp and braked into a hairpin turn onto the second floor. Now I was aligned for the ramp up to three. Empty cars sat alone in their parking spaces. Not a single White was in the garage. If I hadn’t needed both hands to control the beast beneath me, I would have patted myself on the back.

I passed the fourth floor too fast to think about it. The ramp to five spit me out into hazy gray sunshine on the top level. Bare, sun-bleached concrete, flaking yellow stripes, and a few dusty cars were all that waited for me there. I squeezed hard on the brakes and the bike skidded to a stop a near the door to an enclosed stairwell. Hopefully the only thing waiting inside would be the reek of fermenting transient urine and stale cigarette smoke.

The engine died when I turned the key and a peaceful silence existed for the second it took me to make out the wails of the infected, echoing up from the floors below. I dropped the kickstand, left the key in the ignition, and stepped off the bike. With my pistol in hand, I ran to the door of the stairwell and peeked in through the small glass window.

There was no movement, so I opened the door and slid inside, closing it silently behind.

I held my breath and listened.

Nothing.

A wicked grin stretched my lips. In spite of my supremely bad choice to ride that noisy motorcycle across town, my luck had held. I was alive. The stairwell was empty. I rushed downstairs, euphorically riding a wave of overconfidence that hid a riptide of anger churning in despair over Amber’s death.

I exited the parking garage on the south side, unnoticed and unaccosted by the infected trying to jam
themselves into the car entrance on the east corner. But the noise from above had ceased, and short attention spans were losing interest. The infected started to look around for other prey. Mostly, they were drawn back to the muffled gunshots coming from inside the hospital.

That wouldn’t last much longer.

Null Spot the Destroyer still had an imagination full of bad ideas and a pocket full of stupid to spend.

Far up the street, closer to the arena than the hospital, I spied a Humvee sitting on the grass. Its doors were swung open and a big machine gun was mounted on the top. With that, I could sweep my soul clean of the painful clutter and put it back into stark order.

A crust of blood covered the seats and floors of the Humvee, gluing down shreds of uniforms and bits of bone. Pieces of equipment and empty boots littered the ground around the vehicle. Keeping a wary eye on the infected still frittering near the parking garage entrance, I spent a few minutes looking for full magazines to top off the ammo for my M-4. Nothing for the Glock but I even found a grenade. Those were rare, but very handy to have around.

Back inside the Humvee, I climbed up through the roof hatch and familiarized myself with the mechanisms for opening, closing, and latching it. That was the kind of thing a careful, smart person would do, the kind of person who had a chance to live through the day, the kind of person I aspired to be, though the morning’s activities might have suggested otherwise.

I took my time fumbling around with the big machine gun while images gelled in my mind of dead Whites, all with Mark’s pious whack-job face piled high in the dirt.

A big rectangular box for fifty-caliber rounds was attached to the side of the gun. It was empty, but a glance down into the Humvee confirmed what I’d noticed on the way up: another half-dozen boxes. I slipped down through the hatch and checked each box. Two were empty and four were full of big brass cartridges stuffed with cordite and plugged with fat lead slugs, each nearly the length of my hand from wrist to fingertips. Some had colored tips, most didn’t.

I hefted a canister up to the roof as quietly as I could manage and replaced the empty canister mounted on the side of the gun. My heart started to pound with morbid excitement over the power that was coming together in my hands.

There was a gap on the side of the gun that looked like the place where an ammo belt might feed into it. I played around with every moving piece I could find. I found the safety. I figured out how to load it and guessed that the curved lever on the back of the gun, perfectly positioned for a thumb to press while holding the two handles, had to be the trigger.

Satisfied that I had it right, I scanned the hospital grounds. There were perhaps twenty infected close enough to make a dash for me when the shooting started. Eight or nine were grouped in a dense shadow under an oak. They presented a nice, big target. They would die first.

A staircase attached to the side of the hospital caught my attention. It was encased in walls of glass filled to bursting with squirming white bodies. I had no idea what the effective range of the machine gun might be, but I was going to fire on the stairwell a block to the south and find out.

I crawled back down and took a moment to pull up the handles on the Humvee’s combat locks. I thought about putting a second ammunition canister on the roof beside the machine gun so that I could reload faster, but a look back at the infected spreading out as they exited the parking garage convinced me that wasn’t a good idea. I’d be lucky to empty the gun’s first belt before those infected were on me.

Back up through the top hatch, I pulled back on a big crank handle on the right side of the gun, guessing that was the first step to firing the weapon. I pointed the gun at the pod of infected under the tree.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

I pressed the trigger.

The gun bucked more than expected and half of the rounds went wild. But enough of them didn’t.

A head exploded. Gouts of blood burst from bodies. Limbs were severed. Bodies crumpled to the ground. Red mist hung in the air.

“Holy shit!”

It was loud, though nothing like I expected. It did command the attention of every infected in sight, and that was expected, as was what followed. They were all running directly at me.

With the power of leaden lightning in my hands and the Ogre and the Harpy to calm my breathing, I let loose again with the big machine gun and shot down all of the infected nearby, clearing a zone that stretched for a couple hundred rapidly shrinking yards.

A great host of Whites flowed out of the parking garage, running through the exits and tumbling over the waist-high walls. Their wails drove the wind before them, wavering my resolve. But fear was no newcomer to me. I measured my chances and pointed the gun at the glass stairwell, sending a stream of big bullets down range.

Tracers drew a fiery thin line of destruction through the shattering walls and disintegrating bodies. Razor sharp crystal shards and pieces of what used to be people rained down on the infected below. Blood and agony filled the air.

Then, with an anticlimactic click, the ammunition belt came to its end.

The raging horde from the garage was frighteningly close.

I let gravity pull me down into the Humvee, closing the top hatch as I fell through. I latched it just as the first infected hit the Humvee in a mad rush. I jumped into the driver’s seat as a second and third pounced on the vehicle. I needed to get moving! If the Humvee got swarmed, I was sure I’d die.

Realizing that I’d assumed that the Humvee had gas in it, knowing I should have checked, knowing it with that sinking feeling in my stomach that tardy knowledge always brings, I pushed the ignition button with a prayer on my lips.

The engine rumbled to life.

Thank God!

I slammed the vehicle into gear and mashed the accelerator to the floor and the Humvee started to roll. These damned things never seemed to have enough pep. Infected hands grabbed onto the Humvee where they could and dragged their owners on the ground as I lumbered away. A White was on the hood. More were on the roof.

Trundling toward the arena, I checked over my shoulder to make sure the mob was giving chase. But not wanting them to give up, I kept my speed controlled.

It worked once. Why not again?

Down to five miles per hour, the mass of infected
quickly closed the gap. Others who had been lurking around the arena saw the slow-moving Humvee and came at me. I felt their impacts on the vehicle as they tried to tackle it or jump on.

At the north end of the arena, I sped up a little. A few infected fell off of the Humvee. Those on the roof might become a problem if I didn’t get rid of them.

Rounding the west side of the arena, I headed back south toward the parking garage and coaxed some more speed out of the Humvee. There was still a trickle of infected coming out of the parking garage, but not enough to bring the five thousand pound vehicle to a stop when I ran them down.

I swayed the Humvee left and right and lost a few of the Whites that had been clinging to the roof. I jumped a curb without slowing and bounced a few more to the ground, breaking their bones and bloodying their skin as they skipped across the ground like stones on water.

Then I was in the trickle of infected coming out of the garage, and the Humvee’s heavy steel brush guard mowed down them down with little effect on my momentum.

With many dead in my wake and way too much blood on the hood, I turned into the parking garage just as another of my potentially foolish assumptions occurred to me. Was the garage tall enough to accommodate the Humvee and its roof-mounted machine gun?

I clenched my teeth as I passed under the first concrete support beam.

Nothing!

The height in the garage had apparently been designed to accommodate those big four-wheel drive pickups so popular in Texas. Good for me!

Goddamn good for me!

Following the ramps back up one after another, I converted a dozen more infected from toothy hazards into slippery speed bumps. I reached the end of the ramp on the top level and brought the Humvee to a skidding halt near the waiting motorcycle and the stairwell door: my escape route.

The top level of the garage was once again empty.

Fantastic!

I jumped into the back of the truck and popped open the top hatch. As quickly as I could, I shoved three canisters of fifty
-caliber ammunition up on the roof.

Enraged screeching welled up from the lower levels, confirming that my plan was working. The infected were pouring back into the garage.

I fumbled, trying to load a belt into the machine gun as fast as my one practice session allowed. But my luck held. Everything clicked into place and I pointed the utilitarian weapon down the ramp.

The infected would arrive any moment.
And on cue, they did. First a few, then a few dozen, then a solid, riotous mass of white flowed around the corner and onto the ramp fifty yards down.

I depressed the firing lever.

Nothing!

“Shit!”

I looked down at the gun as though my anxious expression would admonish the weapon into proper performance.

“Shit!”

Aside from wishing I were elsewhere, the thing I wanted in that moment more than anything else was to kick Arnold Schwarzenegger in the balls. This kind of shit always worked in the movies!

Options?

The horde was too thick to drive through.

The door to the stairwell was just a dozen feet behind me.

It was time to bail.

Then I remembered…

With seconds that could have been used for escape dwindling away, I instead bet my life on the big handle on the right side of the gun. I yanked it back with all the strength that panic could bring to bear and pointed the weapon at the closest of the infected.

I pushed down on the firing lever with both thumbs and Null Spot was instantly transformed from frightened pants-pisser into fiery god of thunder.

Slaughter!

A heavy lead torrent ripped through packed bodies. Each bullet shredded two, three, and four deep among them.
Instantly, a hundred surrogate Marks died most satisfyingly with agonized grimaces on their pinched faces.

The vanguard became a slippery, bleeding, red and white wall. The mass behind surged and stalled, but then flowed up and over, a river of rage and tearing fingers.

In a ridiculously small number of seconds, the first ammo belt ran dry and as I looked down the throat of a million gnashing teeth, I knew my plan was fucked.

In my imagination, I’d been able to kill so many Whites that they’d clogged the ramp with their bodies. I’d been able bide my time as I sprayed the glass stairwell and hospital grounds across the street, clearing an escape path for everyone trapped inside. Then I’d walk leisurely down the stairs to my hero’s welcome.

Oops.

There was no time to load another belt and still kill the new vanguard of bloody runners sprinting to tear my lungs out.

It was time for me to run.

I wriggled up through the hatch and jumped off the roof of the Humvee, falling through the air with my eyes on the salvation of the stairwell door. With adrenaline pumping at full tilt and my heart banging out a fierce rhythm, I saw, but didn’t register, the absence of the stairwell’s light through the door’s window.

I hit the concrete running, closed the gap to the door in a flash, and grasped the handle. As I turned it, the crazed face of an infected woman smashed itself harshly against the glass. The door burst open, knocking me back. I tried to catch my balance as a mass of infected fell over one another, roiling through the gap.

“Oh fuck!”

Breathe!

Breathe!

My hands were instantly on my M-4. My fingers, now practiced and intimate with the gun, sprayed a dozen rounds into the pile and bought me a few seconds of life in which I tried to think of a way out.

But there was none.

I ran toward a corner of the parking structure, not with a plan, but because that was the only direction that wasn’t already crawling with infected monsters bent on killing me.

I made it to the corner and emptied a magazine at the running Whites closest to me.

Out of some primal instinct, I climbed up on the top edge of the six-inch wide wall, trying to get above my pursuers and completely ignoring the five-story drop to the ground below. A large square support pillar on the corner offered me another two feet of height. A few fast, precarious steps ended with a teetering jump. I landed on a square of concrete, at face level with a thousand Whites and their grasping hands.

But what was a kick in the face to a beast that felt no pain?

They were going to tear my skin and shred my flesh. My heart would pump its last between the teeth of a virus-tainted horror.

With a million simultaneous thoughts of death and desperate deliverance blazing through my synapses, my hands automatically pushed another magazine into my rifle. Before the trigger sent the bullets flying, I caught sight of movement down to my right, on the side of the parking garage, where
abso-fuckin’-lutely no movement should have been.

It took a few nanoseconds of full attention to process what I saw. But with only seconds left to live, that was an immeasurable investment.

It was a banner!

An enormous, nylon mesh banner fifteen feet wide and forty feet long hung from the top edge of the wall and reached down to somewhere around the second floor. That bottom edge was still too far off the ground to risk a jump, but that was thinking too far ahead. I’d likely be dead before that became a problem.

Was that it? Was that my only miniscule chance?