Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 (9 page)

Nico was his name, a man of forty years with a ninth grader’s face and slim body. Nearly emaciated and a little effeminate, Nico was definitely not masculine. He’d probably been picked on a lot when he was in school, but made up for it by earning a ton of money sitting behind a computer as an adult.

Considering the circumstances, Nico didn’t look bad. His short black hair wasn’t out of hand yet. His jeans didn’t show much dirt and his shoes were in good shape. His shirt wasn’t stained or torn. The only things that gave away anything about Nico’s predicament were the shadow of a beard on his chin, the bug bites on his neck and exposed hands, and the dirt collecting around his cuticles and under his fingernails.

Oh, and of course there was his blazing white skin. He probably wasn’t much for getting outdoors before the virus hit.

Given all of that, I should have noticed Nico earlier. The other infected on the chain gang had the disheveled, dirty look of violent transients, months past their last shower, with a penchant for messy cannibalism along with grime-smeared mouths and bloodstained shirts to prove it.

And the stench! The stupidest among the infected had forgotten their potty training when the virus had fried their brains.

Through scribbling in the dirt, Nico told me that he’d
been on the chain gang for five days. Bluto had nabbed him while he was sleeping off the fever alone in a house up near Bee Cave Road a few miles south of where we were chained to that tree. The house he’d been captured in wasn’t his. His neighborhood had been overrun with the infected and gun toting do-gooders—who didn’t—shortly after the outbreak. Nico, with a lot of luck, had made his way to the well-stocked Bee Cave Road house and had been waiting for things to settle down when the virus found him. Bluto found him next and pressed him into Nancy’s service.

On the subject of escape—the
question that dominated our tediously slow dirt based conversation—Nico was at a loss. He’d been watching and learning, just as I planned to do, but no opportunity had presented itself. The routine was much the same each day. Drink from the river in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. Carry looted jewelry for Nancy and Bubbles while their pet Whites methodically worked their way up and down the streets. They’d kill and eat normal humans, dogs, cats, squirrels, anything they could get their hands on. They’d just discovered the magic cornucopia of stocked pantries a few days before and that slowed the rate at which the pack mules were eaten. When Nancy and the other Whites did eat one of us from the chain gang, it was always the most tenured member on the front who filled the dinner bill. New chain gang members, always males, were added to the rear.

The day before I was collected for the chain gang, silverware boy had come out of a house with several kitchen knives. Nancy got pissed. The knives were scattered on a driveway and Nico managed to stash a big butcher knife in his canvas bag beneath the gold and silver jewelry. Unfortunately, the knife only stayed there for a few hours. Later that afternoon while Bubbles was rummaging through his bag, trading out her bracelets and necklaces, she found the knife in the bag, squawked, grimaced, and threw it away.

Nancy, Bubbles, and their pets slept in the house that night among the bodies of those that they’d murdered. Nico and I slept in the dirt with the rest of the chain gang. When the sun came up the next morning it became apparent that the guy in the lead, the one chained closest to the tree, had died. That left four of us: Nico, me, and two Whites. It didn’t take too long for the two with the rotted brains to figure that out that one of us was dead and start gnawing on his limbs.

Near noon, Nancy waddled out of the house, still carrying a bellyful of holiday feast. Unfazed by the dead White attached to her chain, she wrangled Bluto and gave him his whispered instructions. An hour later, two new Whites were attached to the chain behind me. We were six again, but Nico was just one position off of the menu.

The sun was high in a cloudless sky by then. It was going to be a scorcher.

We crossed an estate-sized back lawn, heading toward the river for our first drink of the day. The grass, however, didn’t slope down to the edge of the river like it did on most of the riverside lots. The yard had been leveled as flat as a pool table and spread all the way from the back of the house to a concrete retaining wall with the river lapping at its base three feet down. The only practical way to reach the water’s surface was immediately apparent to anyone with any mental capacity left.

Nancy saw it and led us to a set of wooden stairs that we descended to a wide, covered pier that extended twenty-five feet out into the river. The planked deck of the pier was less than a dozen inches above the surface of the river, putting the cool water within easy reach of us all.

Of course, Nancy squatted first and set the example for the rest to follow and we all lined up along the edge of the dock and started to scoop water up to our mouths. Bubbles, however, with her uncontainable enthusiasm for whatever caught her attention, started skipping up and down the dock, frolicking to the sound of her feet clomping on wood.

When I’d wet my parched throat with the smelly green water, I took some moments to look around. It was hard to see anything but Bubbles as she bounced up and down. Apparently the joy of eating fresh, uninfected meat the night before had added an extra spoonful of happiness to her energy level. She reached the end of the dock out in the river, pirouetted twice, then started back toward the stairs. But I didn’t see her return that time. There was something down at the end of the dock that was immensely interesting to me.

I stared.

All the components of an escape were right there in front of me: three scuba tanks with buoyancy compensators and regulators attached were lined up neatly along the edge of the dock—perhaps the remnants of somebody’s half-baked escape plan gone bad. The icing on that cake bobbed in the current, tied to a dock across the river: a canoe.

Thankfully, Nancy was infatuated with a large fish with glittery scales that was swimming just beneath the surface near where her toes were peeking over the edge of the boards. She didn’t have a thought to spare for me.

The wheels in my brain started to turn and spun quickly off of their axles. The money I’d spent on getting scuba certified was about to pay a dividend. My half-baked escape plan came together.

I checked out my captors to see how much attention they were paying to us on the chain gang. Nancy, I already knew, was fixated on the fish. Bluto was very busily scratching himself in a way that he never would have done in public a month prior. Bubbles still pranced. The two remaining Whites sat on the stairs up to the lawn and seemed very interested in nothing at all.

Only Nancy was between us six and the end of the pier, between us and the scuba tanks.

I discreetly reached across the White between Nico and I nudged him. When he looked up at me, I motioned with my head toward the end of the dock. He turned and stared for a moment then looked back with a big question on his face.

I motioned again. He looked again and turned back with the same question on his face.

Grrr.

With Nico’s attention on me, I cupped a hand over my mouth and dramatically drew a deep breath. The sound of that caught Nancy’s attention and I quickly put my hand back down to the water and scooped a palmful up to my mouth. That satisfied her suspicion and she looked back at the fish.

A few moments passed and I chanced a look back up at Nico. He was wide-eyed and shook his head very subtly but definitively. He was not on board. I didn’t blame him. The plan sucked. There were so many ways it could fail. I had no way of knowing, given the amount of time that would be available to me, whether the tanks had air in them. Cross that out. No, unless the regulators were leaky, the tanks almost certainly had air in them. They were probably brought out to the end of the dock to prepare for a dive which meant that they’d be full. And at the likely depth of the river, I could stay under for at least an hour and maybe two with a full tank. If the tanks had been left there by divers after cleaning the bottom of a boat, doing dock maintenance, or futilely clearing duckweed off of the river bottom, then the divers wouldn’t have come up when the tanks were empty. Divers always surface with air still in the tank. To do anything less would be courting disaster. The least that might be in a tank would be ten or fifteen minute’s worth of air, sufficient for my purposes, but not leaving much room for other errors.

Good enough chances for me.

To stay on the chain gang was to choose death; if not from getting eaten, then by starvation, or dysentery.

I chose my path. I was going, and I was taking the whole chain gang with me. Nico’s best chance for survival was to accept that and go along.

I started to think about all the things that could go wrong, but I forced those thoughts into the delete bin. There was no point in second-guessing.

I help up three fingers for Nico to see. He subtly shook his head again. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t getting a say. Just a warning. I pumped my arm once and dropped a finger. I pumped it again and dropped the second. By the third pump, my pulse was already racing.

I jumped to my feet and screamed the most shrill, fearful scream I could manage and started to run toward the far end of the dock.

Human nature, being what it is, knows at its reptilian core that when your neighbor screams and runs, your best chance to survive another day isn’t in spending time in evaluating the threat, but in simply accepting that a threat is real and then screaming and hauling ass right along with the first screamer. My bet was that the virus hadn’t destroyed that part of the Whites’ brains.

It turned out that I made a good bet. I didn’t have to drag any of the Whites on the chain gang. In fact, within a second, they were all running toward the end of the dock, screaming, outpacing me, and dragging Nico along for me.

Before Nancy had any idea what was happening, our leash was ripped from her hand. With the air suddenly full of unqualified fear, she backpedaled away from the most likely source, the shore. Similarly, Bluto, Bubbles, and the others were tentatively putting some distance between themselves and the stairs that led up to the lawn.

Knowing at that point that I had nothing to lose by talking, I yelled to Nico, “Grab a tank! Hold onto my belt! Don’t let go! I’ll take care of you!” And with those last words, the chained Whites started to process that one of their number was speaking, that one of us was tasty, and they slowed to an abrupt stop. But that stop put them right at the end of the pier. I didn’t slow, I pushed one into the water ahead of me as I grabbed a scuba tank by the valve, grabbed the chain around my neck with the other, lest I hang myself, and fell into the water.

I didn’t need to pull anyone else. I had a backpack with at least forty pounds of jewelry. The White that I pushed in had a backpack and a bag. We were both sinking to the bottom and dragging the other four with us.

Arms, elbows, knees, and skulls were suddenly thrashing wildly under the water. It was cold, dark, and disorienting. My chain was yanking hard in both directions.

I pulled myself into a ball, pinched my nostrils between my fingers to equalize the pressure in my ears and relieve the sharp pain that came with the depth. I opened the air valve on my tank and ran my other hand down one of the four hoses coming off the valve. The first hose I followed led to the connection on the buoyancy control device. My hand instantly flew back to the valve and followed another hose.

In seconds, my hand was on a regulator. I pushed the purge valve to clear it and the familiar sound of rushing gas bubbling through the water let me know I had air. I pushed it into my mouth and inhaled deeply.

I needed to take care of Nico before he drowned.

The heroic thing to do, I guess, would have been to take care of Nico first. But that was also the stupid thing to do. With my own air source stabilized, I could be a lot more help to Nico. Without air for myself, I’d risk drowning and killing him in the process. Given his reluctance to go along, I could only guess that he had very little or no scuba experience. Or maybe he was just smarter than me.

With the flailing arms and hands of the drowning infected pushing and punching from all around, I ran my hands around the circumference of my belt and found a hand, grasping tight near the small of my back. I followed the arm up to a shoulder, to a neck, and found a face.

From what I could tell, Nico was being very calm as the weight of his pack settled him onto the river bottom. I pulled the regulator from my mouth and shoved it into his, pushing on the purge button as I did so. I needed to be sure and put as little river water in his mouth as possible.

As soon as the regulator pushed against his lips, Nico’s hand let go of my belt and grabbed hold of the regulator in his mouth. With maybe a foot of visibility in the murky water, I was able to see relief in his open eyes.

I followed the hose back down to the tank and again ran my hand up another pressure line of the octopus. In a second my hand was on the second regulator.
Thank God for safety-minded divers.

I purged the regulator as I pushed it into my mouth and breathed deeply.

It worked!

So far, anyway.

The struggling of the other Whites declined quickly as, one by one, they drowned. That left us in a jumble of chains and bodies in fifteen feet of water. But Nico and I had air, for the moment.