Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 (14 page)

It wasn’t until all of the hair on my head was gone and blood was running off my scalp in rivulets and drips that the five let up. Hands rubbed over my head and palms dragged down my body from shoulder to buttocks before they separated.

I was a red and white monster, striped in my own blood.

The five went docile again and gave me some space. I rubbed blood out of my right eye and looked at the Whites harshly. I rubbed a hand over my hairless scalp and it came back solid red. I checked the whole of my head. There were no major wounds, just patches where the hair took some skin when it was ripped away.

I gave another thought to picking up the oar and bashing bloody the skulls of each of the Whites, but came to the realization that they’d actually done me a favor. Whatever kind of perverse acceptance ritual that was, I now looked like them, perfectly camouflaged to fit in, hairless and ghastly.

Fuck it.

Forward!

When I turned the knob on the back of the boathouse door, the five were wide-eyed with amazement. Apparently the problem of the doorknob had been beyond their abilities to solve. When I went through, though, they crowded in behind me and played follow the leader with me all the way to the elevator, where two more Whites were apparently stranded, staring at the silvery door.

I pressed the button next to the elevator door and it immediately slid open, empty.

Sweet.

All seven Whites shoved into the elevator with me.

Not so sweet.

Pushed against the back wall, it was difficult squeezing through the crush of bodies to push the button to get upstairs. Unfortunately, one of the Whites just wouldn’t fit, and the door wouldn’t close because he was in the way.

That was frustrating, but as I was coming to realize, nothing was going to go as smoothly as I wanted ever again.

Shoving and pushing came next, as I worked my way back out of the elevator. Of course, they all followed as soon as they realized what was happening. Once back out in the hall, I looked over the four females and three males—at least one of them needed to go—picking out the smallest of the men, an old guy with spindly arms and bad posture—the weakest one.

Without warning, I punched him hard in the face. Before he even knew what was happening, I punched him a second time. When I tried to knee him in the gut, he was staggering away and I missed. Two of the Whites closest to me, though, had already joined in and were slapping and pummeling as the old guy retreated.

He started to run. Blood was in his mouth and fear was in his eyes.

Several of my Whites went after him, but let up after a dozen steps, looking back to see that I wasn’t pursuing. They stopped and made monkey howls at the running man.

The guy got to the boathouse door far at the end of the corridor, put his back to it and looked at us with terror in his eyes. Whites weren’t bright—with notable exceptions—but they understood enough about social order and death to know when to run.

The elevator door had automatically closed while I was thinning my herd, so I pressed the button to open it back up. It was still empty and I stepped inside. This time, my entourage fit, the door closed, and we were lifted up toward Sarah Mansfield’s compound.

The elevator came to a stop at the rooftop pool deck
and the door opened up to the remains of a burnt orange and blood red sunset out across the western hills. The pool deck was in disarray; some of the loungers had been pushed over, cushions from others were strewn about. Over in the far corner, I spotted bloody remains. The Whites had fed there. But on whom did they feed?

That question would need an answer.

It took some shoving to get my Whites going through the door. As soon as we started to move, the two that had been stuck staring at the elevator downstairs ran immediately to the edge of the pool and knelt down to drink. The others had had plenty of water where they had stranded themselves.

Following the two to the edge of the pool, I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off of the blood and bones in the corner. I needed to go examine them and see if could figure out if those were remains of my friends. But dammit, I didn’t want to. I’d come into the house looking for proof that my friends had escaped, that they were alive. I wasn’t ready to deal with the opposite case.

Spinning up reasons in my mind to hold my position, I wondered how many days it had been since I’d last eaten. I wondered when I’d last gotten a full night’s sleep. I wondered what day it was. Had a record breaking hot and dry August been replaced on the calendar by an equally brutal September? Would the heat ever abate?

The sky overhead darkened as the last glimmer of sun sank below the horizon. Lights inside the pool winked on, casting a turquoise light over all of us naked Whites on the roof.

The lights!

The electricity still worked!

I turned and looked at the door that led into the house. The glass panel was broken out, but the hall inside glowed with nightlights. The house was not a total loss. That was good. But even better, I recalled something that I’d spotted on my first night up on the roof with Dalhover.

Paralyzing procrastination disappeared as I turned and stepped toward the outdoor kitchen. There was one White in the kitchen area, squatting on the floor by the grill, playing with his fingers on his knees. Annoyingly, three of my entourage followed me into the area and seemed to be doing their best to stay between me and whatever I wanted to get to.

A stainless steel cabinet built on top of the counter just to the side of the empty refrigerator opened right up on smooth hinges. After all, why lock it? The purpose of the stainless steel cabinet was not theft protection, but weather protection. Inside, a six-head soda fountain gleamed, ready to meet my needs with Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, root beer, and tea. I pushed a finger against a lever beneath a soda head. It clicked, and out poured a stream of cold, brown soda.

Calories!

Beautiful, sugary, carbonated, caffeinated calories.

I grinned.

The Whites around me, alerted by the noise, stared at the soda machine and me.

Not wanting them to get agitated and start having the wrong kinds of thoughts, I squatted behind the counter and searched the cabinets underneath. When I found several tubes of disposable cups, I took them out and lay them on the counter next to the soda fountain. All of the Whites were still watching with great curiosity or hunger. It was hard to tell the difference. I pulled off the plastic sleeve protecting the cups and lined up a dozen beside the soda fountain.

Stop and think, Zed!

I put two hands on the counter and leaned over, staring at the soda machine. It was chock full of sugary calories and caffeine. I was starving. If I drew out the sodas, would the Whites drink with me, or decide that I was being too much like a normal human to not eat me? Looking over to the far corner of the roof where the bloody mess of bones lay, I decided that these guys weren’t nearly as starving as I was.

Pure rationalization? Maybe.

Did I mention that I was starving?

Well, here goes nothing.

I picked up two cups, one in each hand, shoved them under a couple of soda heads, and pressed. The soda heads clicked. Something underneath the machine hissed and the soda flowed out with the sound of a tiny jet engine. Ignoring the Whites for fear of what they were doing, I held the cups under for as long as I dared and then spun around, shoving a cup in the clenching hand of the closest White. At the same time, I brought my cup up to my mouth and drank.

Monkey see, monkey do, don’t fail me now.

Something going into a mouth froze the attention of all
four Whites in the kitchen area. They were eager learners where food was concerned. The one with the cup, though, must have been slow because he just looked at me and licked his lips, I hoped because of what I was drinking.

Without lowering my cup, I reached out a hand, put it beneath his cup, and lifted. A little priming was all he needed. He proceeded to put the cup to his lips and tilt it up. Root beer flowed into his mouth and down his chin, but enough of it got where it was going to have the desired effect. Grinning, he lowered the empty cup.

As quickly as I could, I filled two more cups and thrust them into the hands of my spectators. Two more cups followed and by that time all the Whites in the kitchen area were crowding around me, trying to get their mouths under the soda heads to drink as the soda flowed out. I managed to squeeze out of the melee with two full cups of soda that I greedily chugged.

It took a span of time measured in seconds, maybe minutes, for the sugar and caffeine to hit me with the power of a nose full of cocaine. Energy and optimism, absent just moments before, bulged at my seams.

Every White on the roof figured out that some kind of foodstuff was flowing from the soda machine, and they all crowded around, pushing and shoving, trying to get their share of empty calories. My cups were empty, so I rejoined, and after getting jostled a bit, I had myself another nearly full cup of at least a couple of kinds of soda and pretty a good measure of spit. But fuck it. If drinking out of the river with its occasional floating body hadn’t killed me, zombie spit wasn’t going to do the trick. I gulped it down.

My belly was bulging and gurgling. No more soda would fit for the moment.

Laying myself over one of the kitchen counters, I was able to access a utensil drawer. Out of sheer luck, the first one I opened contained knives. I grabbed one with a good, long blade and substantial handle. At that moment, the urge to whiz hit me just as hard as that energy and optimism had a few minutes before. Squirming back off the counter, my feet hit the deck and I hurried over to the edge of the roof, where I rained a little unhappiness down on the Whites below. That’s when I noticed the long wall that bordered the front of Sarah Mansfield’s property.

Holy shit!

The entire length of wall had fallen over. How did that happen?

The compound below was covered with naked Whites.
Some were lying down, resting for the night. Some squabbled. There were howls and screams. Some fed on their brothers and sisters. Some chose fucking to while away their nighttime hours. The cedar trees beyond the remains of the wall were full of them. There was scarcely a space I could see that didn’t have a naked white body in it.

In the culvert
between the main house and the garage, the tiny Mercedes sports car was laying on its back. Rammed into that with its rear end pointing up to the sky as it leaned against the side of the culvert, and more importantly, against the catwalk, was one of the Humvees, a three-ton ladder.

It was time to get back on task.
And the first task was investigating the dead at the end of the pool. It could be avoided no longer.

There were two skulls down there. That much was clear enough. As I walked along the side of the pool
toward the corner, gory pieces of skeleton stood out from the mess—a tibia, the remains of a hand, a rib cage with the lungs and heart dug out through the bottom. A pelvis draped in yellowish red tendons.

But no clothes!

I looked around the area. There were no torn clothes anywhere. No bloody clothes. None!

That meant it wasn’t Steph, Murphy, or any of the others. In their hunger, the Whites had eaten some of their own. The Aubrey equations
were at work.
Good!

But there were still three floors
of Sarah Mansfield’s house below me.

S
tartled by a sound behind me, I jerked around to see that a couple of the Whites that I’d picked up in the boathouse, apparently full of all the soda their stomachs could hold, were coming toward me. I put some distance between myself and the roof’s edge, just in case. But they had no nasty intent. Instead, they stopped and watched me, dogs waiting on a treat.

Hmm.

There were five of us in
the elevator that time when the door opened into the lobby in front of Sarah Mansfield’s theater room. Before I was able to make sense of anything that I was seeing, the smell hit me: sweat, death, feces, and urine.

My stomach heaved and I stumbled against a couple of my followers. The smell didn’t bother them, though. Not in the slightest.

Through the elevator’s open door, I spied fifteen or twenty infected scattered across the marble floor. The floor was no longer white, but smeared in the most disgusting mix of blood and shit. There were gnawed bones, and just about anything that could be torn or broken was. Amidst that mess, the Whites on the floor were scouring through remains for bits of anything fleshy. The fetid little prizes found promptly went into their mouths.

I feared that the plan
I’d formulated before arriving was not going to work.

The entourage and I exited the elevator and none of the infected already there took notice. That much was good, at least.

Off to my left, the glass walls of the wine cellar were smudged, but unbroken. Inside, hundreds of bottles of wine were still safe. Good to know!

To my right, there were Whites standing in the doorway of the video room. They weren’t jostling one another nor vocalizing. Even their nervous hands were still.

Calm?

I led my group over among them and systematically pushed myself between their stinky bodies and got inside.

Thank God!

The video monitors were all intact and functioning, showing views of the road, the walls, inside and out, the house’s common spaces and the boathouse. All the infected inside the video room were motionless, mesmerized by the flashing colors on the screens. There was no sound to go along with the video. Either it had been turned down or the speakers had been broken. Probably best that it was quiet. Sound was a trigger for the weak-minded infected.

A cursory glance at the monitors showed Whites in all of the common areas of the house. What’s more, every bedroom door was open. So the remote possibility that the others had locked themselves into one of the bedrooms did not pan out. Good, I guessed. I’d have no way to get them out if they had locked themselves in.

Pushing my way to the front of the hypnotized Whites, I knelt down by the desk in front of the wall of video monitors. Where was the chair? A keyboard was pushed to the back of the desk and I slowly slid it out so that I could type. With no previous reason to look at any of the historical video footage, I didn’t know how much, if any, was stored, nor how to access it.

Doing my best to type lightly—no good reason to draw attention away from the pretty colors on the screens—I fumbled with shortcut key combinations for a while and finally lucked into the right set of keys to switch one of the forty-two inch monitors over to a graphical interface with all of the menu options that I was going to need.

A wireless mouse lay on the floor under the desk. I retrieved that, and put it to work selecting the menu option for historical video. I scrolled down through archived increments of an hour each. There looked to be a full week’s worth of them. For better or worse, I’d soon have my answer as to what happened to my friends.

I selected a video roughly eighty hours back in time and clicked. Once I saw whether there were Whites in the video, I would know which half of the rest of the videos contained what I was searching for.

All of the screens flashed black, and the patience of the Whites in the video room with me lasted through about two seconds of that. They started to shuffle and grunt. My heart raced. Before things got ugly, the bright, colorful images returned, filling the screens with video from eighty hours earlier. The Whites calmed, mesmerized once again.

Whew!

The video on the screens showed that the compound and the house were free of the infected. I watched for a few minutes, not anxious to turn the screens black again. The time stamp on the video read six a.m. several days ago. The surveillance camera in the theater showed me a view of five sleeping people—Dalhover, Murphy, Harris, Russell, and the vindictive cunt, Freitag. She’d come back. I wondered what she told them to explain my disappearance.

Steph and Mandi were nowhere to be seen. But the video room had no camera in it, so they were probably in there. Out on the street there were dozens of Whites, mostly squatting in sheltered spots under the cedars at the edges of the asphalt. There were eight or nine infected sitting on the driveway and leaning on the gate. Perhaps tired from a long night of beating with their fists.

Back on the archive list, I jumped forward twenty-four hours and clicked on that set of videos. The screens went black. The Whites in the room got perturbed, but the video feed returned, just as before, and displayed a compound overrun with Whites.

I had a twenty-four hour period bracketed, and in that time, the infected had swarmed the compound.

The next set of archived videos, from twelve hours sooner, showed much the same thing. My bracket of time was a twelve hour period three days prior.

I had to reload several more sets of archives before I’d bracketed down to the hour in which everything had happened, sometime during the ten o’clock hour that morning. I let the video run.

My friends
were moving around in the foyer area, agitated. Steph appeared to be directing Harris and Freitag, who were collecting things and ferrying them down to the ski boat. She periodically stopped and spoke toward the video room. Dalhover was probably inside, and they were conversing.

Turning to look at the monitor with the theater view, I felt instant relief. Murphy was sitting up in his recliner, rubbing his head. Mandi was attentive, with a hand on his back, urging him to… stand, I guessed.  They were preparing to leave. Good. Very good! They didn’t know what was about to happen, but they were preparing for the bad possibilities.

At twenty minutes in, the camera outside the front wall showed hundreds of Whites assaulting the front gate with their fists and the combined weight of their surging bodies. The gate was flexing with each push. Down in the boathouse, the ski boat was loaded. Steph, Dalhover, and Harris couldn’t be seen. Presumably they were in the video room by then. The others were in the foyer. Murphy was sitting on the floor, looking half drunk. I had no way to gauge his state of recovery, but he was awake and he was mobile. That was good.

When everything went to hell, it started much like it had at the Evans farm. Helices of Whites emerged from the cedars across the road, slimy tentacles of an enormous white beast. There were three or four helices when I first noticed, but that quickly became a dozen, then more. In minutes, the helices were gone and there was only the horde, washing across the road and through the cedars, splashing against the compound wall.

The Whites didn’t focus on the gates. Whether through planning or the sheer weight of the mob just pushing forward, they spread out along the front wall, filling in the gaps between themselves and compressing together, shoving from behind, leaving no empty space. There was no inch of the wall that didn’t have white hands and infected bodies pressing against it. The gravel road was hidden by the mass of  bodies. The thicket of cedars of was alive with them. The street was full, and still more pushed through the forest from the other side of the road.

Then, what I’d have bet was not possible, happened. The wall swayed.

The flexing of the wall energized the horde, and they redoubled their efforts.

All along its length, the wall leaned, then suddenly fell over. The pushing Whites fell on top of it, only to be trampled under the feet of those behind as they rushed onto Sarah Mansfield’s green grass.

After that, everything happened way too fast.

The failure of the wall marked bug-out time for everyone inside, and they hurried into the elevator. At the last second, there was a short, tense conversation, and both Mandi and Harris ran up the stairs. The elevator containing the others descended to the boathouse.

Outside, the horde had already covered most of the tiered compound. Fists were beating on the concrete walls of the house and the metal doors of the garage. The culvert below the catwalk was full of Whites, running or jumping to the grab the catwalk that was hopelessly out of their reach. Whether or not they knew that human meat was inside was irrelevant. For some reason, they believed it.

The elevator got to the bottom of the shaft. Freitag ran down the corridor to the boathouse. Steph assisted Murphy, who was slow and wobbly. Russell meandered along. Dalhover, with his rifle at the ready, kept an eye back up the corridor.

Harris and Mandi were in the kitchen by then, entering the pantry.

What the
hell could be so important? Go! Go!

From within the mass of Whites in the courtyard, the Mercedes sports car unexpectedly emerged, pushed by a hundred hands. It fell into the culvert, crushing a dozen Whites as it flipped and landed upside down.

In the kitchen, Harris and Mandi both heard the sound and snapped their heads around to look from whence it came. They were frozen with indecision. They had no way of knowing what it was.

I urged them to run. None of us, me in the video room, or them across the span of three days, realized how urgent that need was.

Mandi ran across the dining room to look out the windows. She saw the Mercedes in the culvert. She saw the Whites climbing on top to try and reach the catwalk that was still too far above their heads.

Down in the boathouse, Freitag jumped into the ski boat, opened the outer door, and started the engine. If she decided to desert the others, there’d be little they could do except die.

Steph, Murphy, Russell, and Dalhover were still twenty yards from the door that led through the backside of the boathouse, and moving slowly.

Up in the courtyard, the horde parted, and the Humvee that had been parked in the courtyard appeared as though being birthed by a massive white beast. Just as they had done with the Mercedes, the infected pushed it over the edge of the culvert. It smashed headlong into the other car and leaned over against the catwalk. Just like that, the Whites had access to the house.

Mandi’s face twisted in a silent scream and Harris bolted out of the pantry with his rifle at the ready. He looked out the window. I couldn’t see his face then because of the angle of the camera, but his shoulders slumped, his knees seemed to bend. It was the body language of, “Oops, I fucked up.” Both Harris and Mandi ran.

The Whites were climbing over the Humvee and were pouring onto the catwalk.

Freitag loosed the lines that tied the ski boat to its cleats on the dock and quickly planted herself in the driver’s seat. She looked at the closed door on the backside of the boathouse. She looked out the open door to the river. She was thinking.

Don’t you
do it, you bitch!

The Whites running up the catwalk hit the front door hard enough to shatter the glass. If not for its vine-patterned wrought iron innards, it would have given way and the infected would have caught Mandi and Harris right there in the foyer. The pair of them nearly tumbled down the stairs, they descended them so fast. But the catwalk was filling with pushing Whites.

Down at the boathouse, Murphy and Steph reached the back door and pushed it open. Russell followed them through. Freitag was still there, but didn’t budge an inch from her seat to assist Murphy into the boat.

Bitch!

Dalhover took up a position in the corridor just outside the boathouse’s back door and aimed his rifle up toward the elevator.

Up in the main house, Harris and Mandi got to the bottom of the stairs and ran across the white marble floor to the elevator. Mandi pressed the button, but the elevator didn’t open. They didn’t know it, but the elevator was still at the bottom of the two-hundred-foot shaft.

Shit!

The wrought iron front door gave way and the infected tumbled over one another into the house. Harris and Mandi froze, staring at the stairway they’d just come down. They had to have heard the door fall. Mandi was horrified.
Harris’ face turned to stone. He drew a pistol and pushed it into Mandi’s hand, pointed at the elevator, took up a position that gave him a full kill zone on the last flight of stairs, and aimed his weapon.

Mandi pounded on the elevator doors, begging it to hurry.

Whites started down the stairs, and Harris’ rifle erupted with fire.

Down in the corridor to the boathouse, Dalhover perked up. He’d heard the familiar, but muffled sound.

Steph and Murphy were both in the ski boat with Freitag and Russell.

C’mon
!
I pleaded along with Mandi for the elevator to hurry, but the stairway was full of Whites now, and Harris was firing as fast as he could aim and pull the trigger. Still, they came, and each infected, grasping hand got closer and closer in spite of his efforts.

He was going to die.

They were both going to die.

Harris ejected an empty magazine and pushed in another, but that respite in the flow of bullets was enough to seal that outcome. A White had fallen at his feet and latched onto his leg. That threw him off balance and his next shots missed their mark. Another White grabbed a handful of his shirt. He turned to Mandi just as the elevator door opened.