Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 (16 page)

The guy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Yeah, yeah
.

With the lids on, I placed a pot at my feet and at the feet of each of my companions and then made a show of picking up the pot by the handles. The girl got it immediately, but the guy had trouble. I had to help him get his hands around the handles. Once there, he understood my meaning and picked it up with as little effort as any normal person.

After going back out through the dining room we crossed the foyer, taking care to avoid the glass shards, and exited the house via the catwalk. Thankfully, there were only a few Whites on the catwalk between the house and the garage. There were no infected near the door that led through the side of the garage.

Once we crossed the catwalk and reached the access control keypad beside the door, I flipped up the clear plastic cover and the buttons lit up from behind. The girl gasped in amazement. The guy got very nervous and couldn’t suppress his urge to repeat his phrase in my ear three more times.

I punched in my code and the door’s lock clicked. As soon as it did, I opened it and led the pair in, quickly closing it behind us. Leading them across the garage, I ditched my cooking pot and picked up a five-gallon plastic bucket that was sitting beside a bank of stylish lacquered cabinets. The search began in earnest after that. My plan called for a short list of items to MacGyver it to fruition. Some of those needed to be in the garage.

The first cabinet contained only car wax and various automobile cleaning products. Nothing of use to me. The next cabinet held something that made me smile, the one item that I thought I’d least likely find, a small electric air pump for inflating tires.

Sweet!

I stuffed it up under the woman’s arm and she understood immediately that it was now her job to carry the pump as well as the pot.

Further searching yielded a clear plastic hose and duct tape. Only one more item was needed from the garage: gasoline. Inside the garage were the Mercedes, the Humvee, the Tesla, and the old corvette. One of those was electric and two were diesel. But I needed gasoline. Diesel burns, but gasoline explodes.

As I started siphoning gasoline out of the corvette into my bucket, the female cupped a hand to my ear and asked, “For what?”

Hmm. “For Joel,” I answered, guessing at that moment that King Monkey Fucker’s name was Joel.

Happily, the bucket filled all the way up. After, I was able to fill the guy’s pot and the girl’s pot.

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

Of course
.

I put the lids on our containers and looked around. Was there anything else in the garage that I needed? No, probably not. We hauled our booty out of the garage, over the catwalk, through the broken front door, and up the stairs to the roof. Without incident, we deposited all our stuff there before getting into the elevator. Whether good or not, certainly without my consent, I picked up three of my entourage from earlier. So the six of us headed down.

The spindly guy with the slouch, the one I’d beaten before coming up to the house, was still stuck in the hall between the elevator and the boathouse. He ran and cowered in a corner when he saw me get off the elevator. When I passed him to get through the door into the boathouse, he was softly crying. He was a dim-witted monster who would kill me and gnaw on my bones given half the chance. But empathy is hard-wired in normal human brains, and I felt bad for the whimpering bastard anyway.

God, I hate this fucking world!

Turning back to the task at hand, the boathouse turned out to have exactly what I’d expected to find there: a large hundred-quart cooler, and a couple more gas cans with plenty of gasoline. I managed to get all of my slack-jawed followers on board and had them carry the items back up to the elevator and then back up to the top floor, where we deposited the items in the place I’d selected at a corner of one of the pergolas.

I looked over my items, checking them off of my mental list: gasoline, cooler, hose, duct tape, electric air pump. I still had my knife, so it looked like there was only one more optional item I needed, and of course several of a specific required item: incandescent light bulbs.

Leaving my stash where it sat, my entourage followed me around the rooftop pool deck, checking the light fixtures one by one. By the time I was halfway through, I knew what would be in the rest—energy–efficient, compact fluorescent bulbs. That kind would not suit my purpose.

But that wasn’t enough of an obstacle to deter me. I led my group through the broken glass door and onto the top of the stairs inside the house. We marched down to the interior catwalk that looked over the living room and Joel’s lounging courtiers. At the far end of the catwalk was Sarah Mansfield’s old room, the most likely place for me to find what I was looking for. On the way, I checked every room that I came to, but only found LED bulbs and more compact fluorescents. Frustration was starting to set in.

We made our way through Sarah’s expansive bedroom and into the master bath. Just inside, a twenty-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling mirror stopped me in my tracks. I stared at myself. My companions stopped with me, and because I was doing it, they stared into the mirror right along with me. I was just as white, bald, and crusted with scabs, blood, and grime as they were. We were all gaunt with wiry muscles, sallow cheeks, and desperate, sunken eyes. I was indistinguishable from them.

In my heart, I told myself that I wasn’t a monster, but the mirror insisted that I was a liar.

In an alcove that looked to have been constructed for exactly that purpose, a digital scale lay on the floor. On the wall to the right of the scale hung a chart with Sarah Mansfield’s weight, penciled in with dates, three or four weigh-ins per day, every day, with pages and pages and pages of aging sheets of paper, a history of her obsession. A small shelf by the chart contained a bottle of some diuretic, several kinds of laxatives, and at least a dozen herbs or supplements with which I wasn’t familiar.

Without thinking of the possible risk—that of activating the scale, a machine—I stepped up onto the scale. It wasn’t until I watched the black numerals on a silver LCD background illuminate from inside that I realized that what I’d just done was put my life at risk. Such were the powers of old habits.

The number that I’d just risked my life to learn was best left in the scale. A half-second of idle curiosity served only to depress me. I was wasting away.

Picking up the bathroom scale, I pressed it into the female’s hand, and she responded by cupping her free hand to my ear and asking, “Joel?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, in a whisper, of course.

The male, seeing his chance to communicate his predictable message, leaned close. I brushed past him and headed for the stairs that would take me down to the maid’s room and the laundry area.

More searching for bulbs. But damn, there wasn’t anything I could use.

That left the bottom floor with the theater and wine cellar. Maybe I’d get lucky down there. But not wanting to pass through the living room and get any unwanted attention from that room full of Smart Ones, I led the five back up the stairs from the maid’s quarters to the bedroom level and started out across the catwalk toward the main stairs.

Glancing down at King Joel Monkey Fucker and his semi-intelligent lackeys, wanting to know that they weren’t paying too much attention to me, my eyes scanned across a couple of side-by-side couches in front of the windows, and I nearly tripped. Sitting on the couch was a familiar-faced, blue-eyed beast, gnawing on a hunk of raw flesh. I caught myself in a stare, looked away, then stared again at his dirty, bloody face. I nearly came to a dead stop.

I couldn’t believe it.

It was only with a sense of near-physical pain that I maintained my nonchalance and kept my feet moving forward.

I looked again. I had to know. I had to kill the doubt.

Holy shit!

That flaming piece of shit!

It was him!

Fucking Mark!

Fucking rapist, pig, rat-fuck Mark!

His bald-headed, dumb ass was right there! Right fucking there!

Mark, Amber’s killer, was sitting in Sarah Mansfield’s living room on a couch with his rat-fuck Smart buddies, chewing on something bloody and raw. Every single bad thing I ever thought about that piece of shit was justified. Every rationalizing doubt that had crept into my brain as a good reason not to hunt him down and snuff him off of this earth was a mistake.

He needed killing, and I needed to know that I’d killed him.

I needed that satisfaction that way that I needed water to drink and air to breathe.

And all of his rat-fuck friends in the living room would die right along with him.

My cold malevolence was back. I led my simple-minded crew up to the roof, dropped off the bathroom scale and then took the elevator down to the theater level. There the light bulb search continued. There was nothing of use in the foyer. Nothing of use in the theater or on the marquee. Nothing in the video room and nothing in the wine cellar. And to think that there was a time when going green seemed like such a good idea to me.

How in the hell could there not be one single motherfucking incandescent bulb in a house this fucking big?

The lights in the old corvette! Of course! No. Those all ran on DC and wouldn’t fit in the sockets where I needed them to go.

What to do? What to do?

Anxiety was kicking in. I thought of missing the chance to kill Joel, a big chunk of the naked horde, and especially Mark. The solution was right there, just past the tips of my fingers. But it was trying its best to elude me.

I found myself standing amidst the shit, urine, and sweat smell of my entourage in the middle of the floor with the theater in front of me, the wine cellar to my left, and the video room behind me. I noticed the soda machine sitting the counter and figured I’d get some more calories in me. Perhaps the calories could prime my brain to think of an alternative to the incandescent bulbs in my recipe for destruction.

I marched my crew over behind the snack bar. First things first, the cups. I checked the cabinets one by one, opening each door in turn and found not a single cup. Had the incandescent bulbs and the cups gone off to the moon with the fork and the spoon?

“Kill the him. Kill the her. Kill the all!”

All I heard was, “Please jam that knife into my head.”

Two drawers under the snack bar counter proved
as empty as the cabinets. I found napkins, salt, and butter-flavored popcorn oil, but no cups.

A small, waist
-high refrigerator was built into one end of the snack bar.

What the hell. You never know.

Squatting down in front of the fridge, I opened it up. It didn’t make any sense that the cups would be in there, but not everything makes sense.

Nothing.

Damn.

I stared at the cold, empty, white box and sighed. Couldn’t I even get a soda? There was always the option of drinking straight from the nozzle.

I swung the door shut and just as it closed, a light bulb of inspiration slapped me in the face. I reopened the fridge and leaned in. The light bulb inside the refrigerator was incandescent!

Oh, hell yeah!

Reaching in to unscrew the bulb, I completely forgot about the cups and the soda machine. There was a refrigerator and a freezer upstairs in the kitchen, a small fridge in the maid’s quarters, and a fridge in the outdoor kitchen on the roof. I was off on hurried feet, and my entourage followed.

My footing on top of the pergola atop Sarah Mansfield’s pool deck was firm, but uncomfortable. There were ten feet of cedar slats between me and the fifty-foot drop to one of the lawn tiers below, with no railing to keep me from going over the edge. On the bright side, the sun had been down long enough that temperatures had fallen into the nineties, and the late afternoon winds, so common this time of year, had died off.

Just as when I’d climbed over the wall with Dalhover’s and
Harris’ help, one of the deck chairs, stood up on its end and leaned against a support pole, proved to be a pretty good ladder. Hoisting all of my cumbersome supplies up on top of the pergola made for slow going, but it had to be done. The electric pump—a necessary component of my Rube Goldberg contraption—would be noisy once activated, and very attractive to the Whites around the pool.

Construction went slower than I’d have wanted
, but I was meticulous with each element. I had plenty of time, but I only had one chance to get it right.

I drilled a hole in the cooler with my knife and cut the valve off the air pump’s hose, leaving an open end. That went through the hole in the lid of the cooler and was secured with duct tape. The clear plastic tube that I’d used to siphon gasoline in the garage got hooked up to the cooler’s drain valve. The diameters didn’t match, so it wasn’t a perfect fit, but a liberal application of duct tape made it functional.

I cut the water hose that fed into the misting system mounted into the pergola and patted myself on the back for having the foresight to turn off the water when I’d turned off the lights from the video room. Nevertheless, water that was still in the system drained out onto the heads of my entourage who waited below, watching everything I was doing with confused interest.

I gave Kill-the-All Boy a wink, a nod, and a smile.

He didn’t respond.

Oh well.

With the misting system empty of water, I spliced the free end of the clear hose to the misting system hose. I turned the scale upside down and slid it beneath the cooler so that I’d be able to read it from the deck below.

Most of the gasoline—maybe twenty gallons—went into the cooler, which I didn’t fill to the top. I wanted to leave room for air that would be put under pressure by the air pump and would drive the whole system. I closed the cooler and used my duct tape to wrap it with several bands to ensure that it would stay closed. More of the duct tape went to securing the air pump to one of the cedar slats. I didn’t want it vibrating its way off the edge.

After climbing down off of the pergola, I pushed the incredibly heavy deck chair that I’d used for a ladder into the pool. Being made of ipe wood, it sank. I didn’t know if any of the Whites would be able to connect the equivalency of that chair with the other deck chairs, but I knew that one or two might be able to recall what I’d done with that particular one.

I used the last of my duct tape to secure the electric pump’s cord down one of the support poles far enough to reach an electrical socket. It remained unplugged for the moment. I looked up at the scale and checked the weight. The weight was going to be an important bit of information to the timeline of my plan.

Light bulb time.

Breaking the glass off of the five incandescent bulbs without damaging the f
ilaments took some care. After that, it was easy work to spread them out into light fixtures built on the underside of pergolas. Of course, the bulbs would burn out within seconds of turning the lights back on, but I only needed those bare filaments to burn for a second or two. Maybe not even that long.

I walked over and stood by the pool, looking up at my contraption sitting atop the pergola, and thought through every step in its construction. I reviewed all the steps that I needed to take next. There was no room to screw the pooch on this plan.

Once I was satisfied, I went back over to the electrical outlet with the air pump’s cord hanging in front of it. I took a look over at the outdoor kitchen area and made a note of the time displayed on the microwave clock. I plugged the pump in. It buzzed loudly.

Every White on the roof was immediately transfixed.

Two seconds later, they were running toward the sound or reaching up toward the pergola’s cedar slats to get their hand on the air pump. I was careful to stay out of their way as they congregated. I made my way over to the outdoor kitchen, got a good view of the microwave clock, and waited.

Five minutes to kill.

All of the misting heads mounted under the pergola, emptied of water, started to cough and spurt as air was driven from their lines.

The contraption seemed to be working.

While I waited, a television commercial played through my memory, one that I’d seen as a kid. I had no recollection of what was being advertised, but for some reason, a masculine fellow with a gravelly voice held up a measuring cup with a quarter cup of gasoline inside and told me that it had the explosive equivalent of one stick of dynamite. Pretty impressive stuff to hear as a little kid, when every cartoon and old western movie I’d seen that had a demolition problem to be solved did so with a bundle of dynamite that would fit in your hand. Need to blow up a bridge? A bundle of six sticks of dynamite would do it. Need a safe blown up? A bundle of six sticks would do it. Need the Road Runner blown up? Well, in the absence of some Acme TNT, a bundle of six sticks would do it.

The misters had stopped coughing and were spewing a fog of gasoline vapor.

Twenty gallons of gas measured to three hundred and twenty cups. That converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty quarter cups, which, if the gravelly-voiced television commercial pitchman was correct, converted to one thousand, two hundred and eighty sticks of dynamite. Sarah Mansfield’s house, formerly an architectural highlight of green construction in central Texas, had just been converted to a platform for a totally awesome gasoline vapor bomb.

My eyes were burning from the fumes in the air. I was starting to cough and there was a disturbing, light oiliness on my skin stinging in the open sores on my head where my hair had so recently been.
Gasoline!
If nothing else, I’d just succeeded in turning myself into a holiday sparkler. The clock on the microwave told me that five minutes had passed.

I checked the weight on the cooler and did some quick math. I had twenty-five minutes before all of the gasoline in the cooler would be misted out into the air above the house.

I made for the elevator to get my flammable Tarzan ass back down to the video room. Time was short. From the computer in the video room, I needed to set the timer on the pergola lights to switch on in twenty minutes. The broken incandescent bulbs would spark the gasoline vapor, and I needed to be pretty far up the river when that happened, lest I participate in the coming conflagration more than I’d want to.