Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin (20 page)

Fritz had been a homebuilder before the virus, but I think his forte was sales. He convinced the girls he was for real, the program at A&M was real, and that it had a chance at success.

I’m not sure if any of them really believed it, but we all grew up in a culture where we bought lottery tickets against impossible odds if only for the small dose of hope. People need hope more than they know.

Maybe that was it. Fritz was selling hope to the hopeless.

We were all crowded into the utility building. Jazz had gone back up the tunnel to warn her people we were coming. Grace led the way down. Fritz and Gabe followed them, leaving only Murphy and me. Once the last of them was climbing down the ladder, Murphy said, “We could bail.”

“Leave ‘em?” I asked, not pointlessly. It was a delaying action. Murphy had a good point. Scrape Fritz and Gabe off on the girls, relieving myself of the responsibility for them after risking so much to get them out of the Capitol. But that plan also meant we’d leave Grace and Jazz—two Slow Burns—and possibly more up the tunnel. Our people?

I looked around as I thought about it. Every time we’d hooked up with normal people it hadn’t worked out. Would other Slow Burns accept us as equals?

Of course.

If we all had the same social handicap, why not?

I said, “I think we should head up the tunnel and see.”

“You think they live in the tunnel?” Murphy asked. “It’s got to be full of shit from the flood, right? I’ll bet it stinks.”

I pointed north. “The Seaholm Power Plant is across the street. I think the tunnel leads there. I’ll bet that’s where their people are hiding out.”

“You know me.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m up for anything. If you want to hang back and see if Fritz and Gabe get whacked, I’m cool. If you want to head over there and make some new friends, sure, why not? What’s the worst that could happen? They shoot us?”

“Or eat us,” I joked. I stepped onto the ladder leading down into the tunnel.

Just as Murphy had guessed, it stank of rotting swamp mud. Thick cables ran the length of the tunnel along one of the walls. They were coated with a layer of dirt, and pieces of debris were stuck on every bracket that held them in place. Two pipes, larger than I could wrap my arms around, ran one on top of the other along the other wall. Perhaps those were for pumping cooling water in and out of the old power plant. Most of the light fixtures on the roof were broken away. The floor was thick with dirt, mud, and random bits of junk that had flowed in and settled with the water after the flood.

Without a word between us, we followed the dim light of Grace’s flashlight down the straight length of the tunnel, hearing the growing sound of whispers and a tense voice or two echo back down toward us.

At the far end of the tunnel, there was no L-shaped elbow, nor ladder leading up. The tunnel opened straight into a basement-level room that was open to the ceiling four stories up, with three of those above ground level. The place appeared to have been going through a major renovation from power plant to trendy office space or expensive condos before the virus and before the flood. Much of the building’s concrete structure was still intact, leaving me with the feeling that I’d just walked inside the shell of some enormous dead beetle.

On concrete catwalks, looking down on us from the ground-level floor, nine people stared—most armed, all Slow Burns. A few of them, mostly the ones with no weapons in hand, stood and gazed blankly at nothing in particular. I knew that look. They were the Russells of the group.

As we all stood there, sizing up one another, silently evaluating whether we were a mutual danger, Fritz surprised me and spoke up. Not fazed by the threat of the guns held in the hands of the people above, he slipped comfortably into salesman mode. He told them his story about the professors sequestered in one of the buildings on the A&M campus. He told them about his job to collect samples.

I’d heard the story a few times by then and got bored until I realized it might all be a lie.

I wondered what that suspicion said about me. Had I lost all my faith in people or did I simply never have any?

Fritz told them about the dream of a vaccine. He told them he was risking his life for humanity’s children, and he told them the virus that had infected all of them once could come back in another mutation—maybe in six months, maybe in a few years. Maybe it would return in an attenuated, benign form, or maybe more deadly. He assured them, though, it
would
be back. Billions of people on the planet were now walking virus farms and in each of them billions of virions were growing and mutating into untold varieties. It was possible we had not yet seen the worst of it.

If anything, Fritz’s speech took everyone’s mind off the most salient problem at hand: The necessity that we all trust one another, strangers bonded only by skin color.

An hour after arrival, we found ourselves sitting in a conference room on the third floor. Two wide, tall windows cut through the thick concrete on one wall. Drawn curtains blocked the view out those windows and kept the dim candlelight inside.

Fritz, Gabe, Murphy, and me sat at a long oval conference table. Grace, Jazz, an older man named Bill, and another older woman named Janet sat across from us. They were curious about news, of which Murphy and I had little. Of course, their questions led to Murphy entertaining them for an hour talking about the things that had happened to us. I was happy to let Murphy tell it. He was a natural at having his mouth open while basking in the attention it drew. A lot of it was even amusing when spun with his sense of exaggeration and humor. When he got to the ugly, painful parts, he glossed over those with a pensive look and moved on.

I’m sure I’d have dwelled on the blackest of those times. Those were the memorable images that had pasted themselves all over the walls in the gallery of my soul. Blood. Teeth. Grasping hands. Death.

Murphy’s version was better.

As Murphy recounted our exploits, I found myself thinking about all my missed opportunities with Steph, when I should have done something to act on what I knew we both felt. Of course, the way I tend to overthink things and twist them into negatives, I had to wonder if those lost opportunities only existed through exaggerations and selectively chosen memories, and that the reality was a hopelessness that I was avoiding.

And people used to wonder why I was a drunk.

It wasn’t until Murphy nudged me and told me to wake up that I realized that I’d completely disconnected from the present. I’d been staring at a wall and thinking of my own painful experiences. I looked around the table. All eyes were on me. I said, “Sorry.”

“You okay, man?” Murphy asked.

I smiled and shrugged. “You know me.” It was no kind of answer.

On my first inspiration of deflection, I looked at Bill. He was lanky and sallow-cheeked with a thin beard and a little wildness in his eyes. I asked, “What’s your story?”

He rubbed his hands across his face and looked over at Grace, “You should tell it.”

Grace said, “We used to live on the Capitol grounds before Justice Baird and his bunch came.”

“How long were you there?” I asked. “Murphy and I were downtown when the flood started. We passed by maybe a couple of blocks to the east.”

She spent a moment trying to remember the details. “We were there then.”

“We just missed you guys,” I said.

“We had a lot going on that day,” said Murphy.

“Why the Capitol?” I asked. “Why not out in the country somewhere?” Of course, as soon as I asked the question, I recalled that day in the first week of the infection after I’d helped the survivors in the hospital escape. Murphy, Mandi, and I were parked in a Humvee looking down into the valley at Dr. Evans’ family farm. We watched the naked horde swarm over their farmhouse and kill a dozen good people. Maybe out in the country wasn’t the no-brainer good idea it seemed to be.

“Father Ben,” said Grace.

“Father Ben?” I asked, making sure I understood correctly.

“He was a Slow Burn like the rest of us.” Grace’s face took on an absent look. It was clear that Father Ben was no longer with us. “He started—I don’t know what you’d call it—”

“A colony,” said Bill. “A leper colony for people like us.”

Grace smiled at Ben and said, “Yes, Father Ben’s colony at the Capitol. They took me in late in the first week.” Grace’s eyes glazed over with tears she held back. “I was in town from Dallas. My son was starting at UT in the fall and we’d found him an apartment and were getting him situated.”

Nobody asked about the son. In any conversation, anybody not present who was mentioned by anybody else was presumed dead or infected. That’s just the way the world was after the virus.

“I called home so many times,” said Grace. “At first, my daughter was there to pick up the phone. She said her father had never come home from work. She was alone. She was sixteen. I tried to get out of town after…” she paused. “Then I got sick. I was in the apartment with the doors locked, trying my best to keep the horrors outside. At one point, I got so sick I passed out on the bed, and I don’t think I woke up for a couple of days. When I did wake, I was like this. The phones were out. The water was off. All I had was the food and drinks in the apartment.” Grace took a deep breath. “That only lasts so long.”

Everybody starts out in pretty much the same way, I thought.

“I was scavenging through the other apartments in the building when Father Ben found me. Him and Bill.” Grace nodded and smiled at Bill.

“We weren’t alone,” Bill added. “There were four of us. We never went out in groups smaller than that. Too dangerous. The other Whites—the really crazy ones—they’ll attack anyone or anything that looks weak, normal or not.”

“I went with them back to the Capitol,” said Grace. “People like me were there, maybe thirty of them at the time. Is that right Bill?”

He nodded.

“All of you…” I looked for the right words to finish the question, “were high functioning? You know, white but not violent, not…” I pointed at the side of my head, “not debilitated?”

“We had about half Normal Ones,” said Bill, “and half Slow Ones—the ones who can’t talk.”

“We’ve seen some of them,” I said. “Maybe as many as we’ve seen Slow Burns like us. Russell, that guy Murphy mentioned when he told you about us. He was a Slow One.”

“Russell was a good guy,” said Murphy.

I nodded as another brutal ugliness came to mind. Russell was just one more person I wished hadn’t died.

“Father Ben felt like he had a duty to the Slow Ones,” said Grace. “He helped them. We all pitched in. We found them in the streets when we were out scavenging, often tagging along with a bunch of the violent ones. It got so you could pick them out pretty easily. They always seem to lag behind when the others are chasing something, never seeming to be in any hurry to eat and most of the time they didn’t. Most of the ones we brought in were half-starved to death.”

“But they weren’t useless,” said Bill. “You just treat ‘em like kids who ain’t too bright. They’ll pitch in and help as much as they can.”

“They helped us build the wall,” said Grace.

“Around the Capitol grounds?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Father Ben thought that would be best. We were farming the grounds when Justice Baird’s army showed up.” Grace pierced me with the hate in her eyes. I was glad her hate was meant for someone else. “There were over eighty of us by then.”

“Eighty?” I was shocked. With all the time Murphy and I had spent by ourselves, I doubted we’d ever find more than a few other Slow Burns.

“Not anymore,” said Grace. “Baird’s army saw to that. Those of us who could, escaped to this place.”

“I don’t get this whole thing with Justice Baird,” I said. “Why does he feel like he needs to be the Governor of Texas?”

Murphy laughed derisively. “Like that matters anymore.”

Nodding at Fritz, Grace said, “I’m sure he knows a lot about Baird that we don’t, but I’ll tell what we do know.”

“The first time we saw the helicopter fly over we were overjoyed,” said Grace. “The wall was done by then, so we didn’t worry too much about the Crazies outside. They were as fascinated with the helicopter as we were, but for different reasons.”

Nods all around the table. Everybody alive knew the Whites were attracted to any mechanical sounds. The louder, the better.

“Most of us ran out onto the Capitol grounds that first day and waved to get their attention,” said Grace. “We knew they saw us because they circled the area several times before they flew off to the north.”

“They didn’t land that first day?” I asked.

“No.” Grace shook her head for emphasis.

“Did that seem odd?” I asked.

Grace said, “All this sitting…” She got up out of her chair, stretched, and started slowly pacing around the conference room table. “You know how things were then, right? What would you do if you were flying the helicopter, Zed? You live in a world full of crazy, white-skinned people who want to kill and eat you. You probably know that at least some of them are smart and devious. Why would you risk landing among a bunch of them you’d only seen from five hundred feet up?”

I shrugged. She was right. I felt a little stupid for asking.

By that time, she was around behind me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “At first we thought it a little bit odd, too, but we had time to talk about it and that’s what we figured. We decided—or maybe we just fooled ourselves into deciding—the behavior was exactly what we should have expected. Later that day, we fashioned a message. In one of the fields we’d been preparing to plant, we instead took a bunch of the bushes from the hedges we dug up and planted them in the shape of the word ‘hello’.” She smiled as she walked down to the other end of the table, but her eyes showed her sadness.

Bill said, “It seemed like the friendliest, shortest message to write. Everybody understands that, right?” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes while he muttered, mostly to himself, “Naïve. Stupid.”

I didn’t say anything about that. From the ground, the helicopters overhead must have looked like hope.

“The next day the helicopter came back, but it had another one with it,” said Grace. “Again, they circled around for half an hour and flew off. They never came down, never gave any hint of what their intentions were. We saw soldiers inside through the open doors, or at least what we thought were soldiers. This all went on with the helicopters coming and going for about a week, usually in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Each time they’d come, we’d go out and wave and urge them to land. They didn’t.”

“Eventually they did,” said Bill.

“Yeah,” said Grace, taking her seat at the table again. “One night we heard something different. It turned out to be Humvees, speeding down 15
th
Street from east to west. It was a surprise for us when they came. They drew a lot of attention from the Whites. But they didn’t stop. They slowed down just outside the north entrance and then sped off. After that, maybe we made the biggest mistake.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“We made another sign and hung it on the gate facing the street. It said, ‘Welcome. We’ll open the gates for you.’” Grace shook her head. “A few days later they showed up in force with their six helicopters and a couple dozen Humvees. We opened the gate. They drove in. Once all twelve Humvees were in, they opened fire. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t make any attempt to communicate. They just started shooting.”

Bill nodded in confirmation and his face took on an angry scowl. He wanted revenge and he was proud of that desire. But who wouldn’t be?

“Father Ben was walking up to greet the convoy,” said Grace. “He was one of the first ones killed. A lot of the Slow Ones were outside. They didn’t know what to do. They just stood there and watched while the men with the machine guns on top of the Humvees mowed them down. Most of the rest of us ran.” Grace was staring at the table by then and shaking her head slowly as her memory of the day replayed in her imagination. “People… good people… were being killed all around me. I don’t know how I managed it, but I ran for the south wall and climbed over. By that time, all the Crazies in the area were getting excited and were running for the walls. The helicopters went to work shooting down everything and everyone in the streets around the Capitol.”

Bill said, “Grace and I found each other a couple blocks outside the wall, in the lobby of a bank building. We watched the helicopters do their work and listened to the machine gun fire inside the Capitol grounds. Long story short, we herded up some of the escapees and ended up here.”

“Did many get away?” I asked. “Did some go to other places?”

Shaking her head, Grace said, “Not that we’ve found. You’re the first Slow Burns we’ve seen since the attack.”

“That’s awful,” said Fritz. “I can’t believe they didn’t even give you a chance to talk before they started shooting.”

Bill took offense, “If you were their prisoner like you say you were, then you
could
believe it. You saw how they are.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, “ said Fritz. “I didn’t mean that literally. It’s just a figure of speech.”

Bill didn’t say anything about that. He glared at Fritz for a moment then looked over at Grace before saying, “Tell ‘em about Joseph.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Jazz and I drew scavenger duty tonight. We need to get out there before it gets too late.”

“I thought you guys said you go out in groups of four,” I said.

Shaking his head, Bill said, “Some things are a luxury. We don’t have that many of us left.”

I glanced at Murphy. He rolled his eyes. He knew what I was thinking. I said, “Murphy and I have been switching over to the night shift. We’ll tag along if that’s cool? I mean, if you don’t mind if we crash here for a day or two.”

“What?” asked Murphy. “I don’t work weekends.”

“Weekends?” asked Grace. “What day is this?”

“Ignore him.” I smiled. “Half of what he says is smart-ass bullshit.”