Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (14 page)

“Sounds hideous,” Mandi said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s what I thought. We went there probably three or four times. Then, one night, we were upstairs in what was probably going to be a master bedroom or something. It had these great views over the cliffs of Lake Austin and we… you know, were doing our thing, when this dude with a flashlight and a gun came in and scared the crap out of us.”

“What?”
That surprised Mandi.

“It was a security guard, an off-duty cop. He was kind of
pervy about seeing Jackie naked. I think that’s why he didn’t arrest us for trespassing. After that, there was a cop there all the time. And I mean all the time.”

“Why?” Mandi asked.

“I think the place belonged to some reclusive rich dude or something. I’m not sure, but I think they built a wall around it. I mean, they were building something the last time I was there. But the way the terrain is there, you can’t see the place until you go through the trees and just kind of run into it. You can’t see it from the road. You can’t even see it from up at the park on top of Mt. Bonnell.”

“The owner must have been really paranoid,” Mandi deduced.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Murphy said, “If they finished that wall,
it sounds like it could be a safe place for us, if there’s nobody there.”

“Even without the wall, the place seemed pretty secure. I’m guessing the owner holed up there pretty quick once this whole infection thing started,” I said. “So going there might be a waste of time.”

“After what we just saw at that farm, I say we give it a shot.” Murphy looked over at Mandi, as if for permission. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

Mandi nodded, neither enthusiastically nor reluctantly.

Mt. Bonnell, like every hill in central Texas, is covered in a forest of squat cedar trees, sprinkled with stunted oaks over jagged limestone and thin dirt. Most trees are ten to fifteen feet tall, but thick from root to tip with dark green foliage, and look to be as much shrub as tree.

The uncurbed asphalt road disintegrated at its edge into gravel and dirt under the overhanging branches of cedars all along Mt. Bonnell Road, except where the forest was broken by wide patches of green grass, fronting oversized houses and lush flowerbeds. Relatively few people had lived in the area before the virus hit, so few of the infected, the formerly wealthy or their live-in domestic help were left to loiter.

Halfway up Mt. Bonnell Road, the houses on both sides of the street suddenly stopped and only the shadowy cedars remained. And we were alone. A few infected chased up the slope, but far behind. They’d lose interest soon enough.

“Slow down, Murphy.” I scanned ahead, looking for a familiar break in the trees.

Murphy let up on the gas and the Humvee coasted down to twenty-five miles per hour.

“The place we’re looking for is near the top, but it’s easy to miss,” I instructed.

“And you can’t see it at all from the road?” Mandi asked.

“No,” I answered. “You can’t tell, because of the trees, but the road we’re on isn’t on the crest of the hill. It’s on the Austin side of the hill. All the houses on the left, between the road and the river, are on the crest or on the other side of it. This house is like that, on the other side of the crest, and with all the trees, you can’t see it.”

“Why do that?” Mandi asked. “It seems like if you spent a bazillion dollars on a big house with a gorgeous view, you’d want to show it off.”

“The same reason that the Klingons have a cloaking device,” Murphy answered.

“I’m sorry, Murphy, I have a life.” Mandi’s tone was disdainful. “You’ll have to explain to me what that means.”

“If you don’t want to fight,” Murphy explained, “you hide. The cloaking device makes you invisible.”

“Just like the house,” I finished. “The people who own the place like their privacy a lot. I doubt they were thinking about fighting anybody when they built the place, but hiding the house is a big step toward making it secure. For us, if the infected never see the place, they won’t ever try to swarm over it.”

A narrow caliche driveway split the wall of cedars on the left. “I think that’s our turn,” I said.

Murphy slowed the Humvee and turned into the gap. Ahead, the narrow, dusty road curved almost immediately, allowing a view of nothing from the road but more cedars. Dalhover’s Humvee followed very close
ly behind.

Mandi said, “It’s like
a road to a trailer park.”

“Exactly,” I said.

The road made a wide arc and curved back to the left before coming up along a wall. We were headed back downhill again on the dirt road as it ran along the wall on our right, with Mt. Bonnell Road on our left, on the other side of a hedge of cedar trees.

“Looks like they finished the wall,” Murphy observed.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Mandi asked.

“It’s got to be,” I answered.

Murphy said, “That wall has got to be at least ten feet tall.”

After a few
hundred feet of wall, we came to the end of the drive, a large semicircle that allowed room for cars to turn in and out of the gate. Rectangular blocks of limestone the size of coffee tables bordered the semicircle. Outside the ring of limestone, the terrain grew much more rugged. The gate itself was designed to roll on a track on the other side of the wall for opening and closing. It was covered from top to bottom in sheets of steel and hid the property just as effectively as the wall.

Murphy stopped the Humvee and we all shared a look. We were idling at the gates of a possible refuge with no obvious way to get inside.

I looked at the shadows in the cedars. “Do you guys see any Whites out there?”

All eyes
peered into the darkness under the trees.

Nothing. We were momentarily safe.

“Keep an eye out,” I told them. I opened my door and very deliberately climbed out, allowing Russell to come along. I didn’t need him making a noisy scene. Who knew what could be hiding in the dusky shadows?

An obtrusive surveillance camera on the top edge of the wall was pointed down at an intercom on a post. I pressed the call button on the intercom, and a red light indicated something, so I spoke while waving up at the camera. “Hello in there.”

I watched the camera, listened, and waited.

Nothing.

I gave it another moment, then tried again. “Hello in there. Listen, we want to come in. If you’re in there and don’t want us inside, now’s the time tell me. Otherwise, we’re going to climb the wall.”

I waited. No response.

“Hello,” I tried again.

Still nothing.

I pressed the button a final time. “Listen, I’m coming over the wall. If you’re in there with a rifle, it’ll be easier to tell me to go away than it will be to shoot me. At least it’ll be easier on me. Hello. Hello.”

Nothing.

I looked around into the growing darkness under the trees. I had no idea if any Whites might be around, but if there were any close, the idling Humvees would eventually draw them in. I went back to the Humvee and maneuvered myself and Russell inside.

“Okay guys,” I said. “There’s either nobody home or they chose not to answer. Murphy, i
f you can angle this thing up against that wall, I may be able to get on top and climb over.”

“That’s your plan?” Murphy asked. His dislike for the idea showed clearly in his tone.

I shrugged. “I’m making it up as I go along.”

“Yeah, aren’t we all,”
Murphy agreed, nodding. “We don’t know what’s over there and you’re not exactly an expert with that rifle.”

“I’m getting better,” I protested.
“I hit most of what I shoot at.”

“Eventually.”

“I’m not staying here by myself,” Mandi protested.

“It’s not safe
to come with us,” Murphy told her gently.

I thumbed back at the other Humvee. “I’m gonna let them know what’s going on. I’ll get Dalhover to come up here with you, Mandi. Cool?”

“That’s fine. What about Russell?”

I looked over at Russell, who was staring out the front window with no expression on his face. “Mandi, he seems to respond well to you. Can you sit back here with him and keep him calm?”

“Okay.”

I cast another glance around
before I swung my door open and hopped out. Better safe than dead. Once my feet were back on the ground outside, I looked around and listened. Russell was having a fit, but the sound was muffled through the armor and thick glass. The wind was blowing through the cedars. Birds were squawking. There was a sound of shuffling in the rocks and twigs somewhere off to my left. Something was out there, something noisy.

I raised my M-4 to my shoulder, pointed it at the noise and said, “Hey.”

The noise stopped immediately.

I relaxed.
It was more scared of me than I was of it. It was probably an armadillo.

I hurried
back to Dalhover’s Humvee. He got out halfway and looked around cautiously before settling his sad gaze on me. He softly rasped, “What’s this place?”

In
as few words as I could manage, I explained that it might be a refuge for us and told him our plan for going over the wall.

“Will you be able to open the gate from the inside?” Dalhover asked.

“You know I can’t answer that. I’m just hoping.”

Dalhover nodded. “Yeah, I know. Listen, after you and Murphy go over the wall, I’m going to stay on the top of the Humvee and keep an ear out.”

“I’ll holler over and let you know what’s shakin’,” I told him.

“We need some tactical radios,” Dalhover groused. “Running around like a bunch of yahoos is going to get us all killed.”

I nodded. We needed a lot of things.

Murphy got the Humvee into position right up next to the wall and cut the engine. With both engines off, only bucolic noises of the evening were left: the wind, the birds,
the crickets. But somewhere in the background was the sound of electric motors. I angled my head but couldn’t pinpoint the direction of the source.

Dalhover heard it too, and looked at me with eyebrows slightly raised.

We both shrugged and climbed onto the Humvee.

From the top of the Humvee
, the wall was still tall. I revised my guess to twelve feet or so. The top edge of the cinder blocks was at the top of my head, but a smooth round limestone coping added another ten or twelve inches. I reached over the top and ran my hands across the dry, chalky surface, finding nothing at all to grip.

Dalhover looked at me with a question on his face.

I pulled my arms down. “The wall’s got to be a couple of feet thick. There’s nothing to grab onto.”

Dalhover
stood on tiptoe and reached over the wall, straightening his curved spine. His rough hands scraped across the limestone.

“What’s up?” Murphy asked in a low voice as he climbed up beside us.

Dalhover shook his head. “Goddamned wall.”

Murphy stepped up next to the wall and reached over with as little success as I’d had.

Looking at Murphy, Dalhover shook his head. He leaned back against the wall and interlaced his fingers to form a stirrup. He looked at me. “You first, Zane. Put a foot in. Step on my shoulder if you need to, but don’t kick me in the face.”

It was little uncomfortable standing face to face with Dalhover, my nose only a
half inch from his, smelling his tobacco breath and un-brushed teeth. Personal hygiene habits were taking quite a beating. Toothpaste was going to have to find a place on my future scavenge list.

Putting two hands on his shoulders and a foot in his hands, I gave Dalhover a nod, and jumped while pushing up with my hands. As I reached the top of the wall, I stepped up to one of his shoulders and threw an arm over, twisting sideways to throw a leg up. To my surprise, I topped the wall and stopped there, draped like a sloth on a branch with one foot and one
arm on each side and my face lying on the dusty limestone coping.

“Shit,” Murphy muttered. “I can’t believe that worked.”

“Your turn,” Dalhover said, scooting over near the end of the Humvee’s roof. “You’re a big guy. Don’t know if I can hold you.  You might get bruised.”

“It won’t be the first time,” Murphy said as the two got into position.

I turned to look into the compound.

The wall surrounded a couple of terraced acres that curved in steps that followed the shape of the mountain. At the bottom edge of the lowest terrace there was no wall, just an unbroken row of smooth limestone blocks laid flush with the grass from the north wall to the south wall. The sharpness of the edge and the invisibility of anything beyond implied a sudden drop down the steep slopes and cliffs to the river.

In the growing darkness, I spotted the source of the electric motor sound. On each of the five terraces, a green, turtle-like robot mower hummed across the grass. On the second tier down,
the mower was followed by four infected, keeping pace with the slow-moving machine. Two of the infected wore some kind of private security uniform. One looked like a lanky high-school kid. One was a shapely naked woman with one of those stylishly expensive haircuts that looked like it was on backwards. She struggled in the rear to keep up while limping on an injured ankle. One of her forearms had an obvious extra angle.

“What do you see?” Dalhover hissed in a loud whisper.

Looking down at him, I whispered back, “Four infected. They don’t see me yet.”

“Nobody else?” Murphy asked, as he stood with one foot in the stirrup of Dalhover’s hands.

“No.”

“Nobody with rifles?” he asked.

“Nobody is shooting yet,” I answered.

“And the house?”

“Everything looks fine,” I said. “Perfectly normal for rich people, except for the Whites in the grass.”

Dalhover rasped, “What do you think?”

I looked over the house. It was built down the slope a bit and didn’t appear to have any windows or doors on the bottom floor. The only entrance was across a breezeway from the second floor that ran over a little ravine between the house and a six-car garage built around one side of a circular plaza of a driveway.

“I don’t see any movement in the house.” I looked back down at Dalhover and Murphy. “There are Whites, so the virus is inside. If it’s inside then everybody inside is probably infected. Except for the Whites, the place seems safe.”

“You wanna go in, then?” Murphy asked.

“This place looks safe as hell to me. I think it’s worth the risk,” I answered.

And that was enough talk. Dalhover boosted, Murphy jumped, and then worked on pulling himself up into the same sloth-like position I’d adopted.

Dalhover turned to scan the darkness in the cedars.

Murphy quietly said, “Man, it looks a lot farther down to the ground from up here.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back.

“It’s gonna hurt.”

“Yeah,”

“You wanna go first?”

“No.” Nevertheless, I shifted my weight so that my feet started to slide over the wall and down inside the compound. It was slow at first, but as my clothes dragged across the chalky surface of the limestone, I quickly passed the point of no return. There was nothing to grab and no way to slow my descent. Any chance of landing safely was predetermined by my initial shift and the physics of friction.

Then I was falling.

I hit the ground and rolled out onto the crushed granite driveway. My joints were jarred from the impact and probably would have hurt enough to take my breath away if not for the virus. Everything felt suddenly stiff but nothing felt broken. I was on my back and rolled quickly onto my stomach and pushed myself up to my knees, pulling my weapon up to a firing position as I did so. Necessity makes you tough.

From above, Murphy whispered, “Is that crushed granite any softer to land on than the grass?”

“Yes,” I lied.

A sliding sound announced Murphy’s decision to join me, and a second later he grunted when the ground knocked the wind out of him.

“Damn,” he groaned after a deep breath, not making any effort to move from his prone position. “That sucked.”

I could no longer see the infected that were on the second terrace down, but they either didn’t see us when we were on the wall, or just weren’t interested. They didn’t come after us. “What first?” I asked. “Do we try to get the gates open or check the house?”

Murphy rolled over onto his stomach,
then pushed himself to his hands and knees. “Did I say that sucked?”

“Yep.”

“There are lights on in the house,” Murphy said.

“Solar power,”
I suggested.

“Convenient.”

“Yep.”

Murphy got to his feet, looked around, and then
pointed to a security camera mounted on the corner of the house. “If somebody is still in that house, they probably know we’re here.”

That made me uncomfortable. I looked around again
, and now that I was looking for them, I spotted several cameras. “What do you think?”

Murphy said, “I’m with you. I don’t think there’s anybody home but we need to check it out before we try to figure out the gate.”

“Let’s go.” I jumped up and started a jog up the driveway with no cover except the fading light of evening. Murphy huffed loudly behind me.

At the end of the driveway, I angled across to the corner of the garage and stopped beside the wall, partially hiding myself from the house. Murphy came to a stop, breathing heavily beside me.

An old, two-door Mercedes convertible with oversized spinner rims and low-profile tires sat in the courtyard. I shook my head. “What a way to fuck up a car.”

“Yeah,” Murphy agreed.

Following the line of the curved garage, I spotted a set of double doors at the other end. That was a people entrance. The doors were decorative, after a modern fashion, but still managed to look formidable.

“You wanna try the doors?” Murphy asked.

“Might as well,” I answered. “If there’s someone in there, they know we’re here. They haven’t done anything yet, but if we sneak around, they might think we’re more of a danger than we are.” I walked out onto the courtyard and followed the curve of the garage.

“I’ll cover you,” Murphy said from behind.

At the first garage door, I checked to see if it would open, but was immediately befuddled. There was no exterior handle. The door was made of long metal slats that could, I presumed, roll up to the ceiling inside. I pushed it with my hand. If felt weighty and solid. This was no ordinary sheet metal garage door. Without even the smallest gap into which to push my fingers, I pressed my hands flat against the metal and pushed upwards. It didn’t budge, nor did it flex. It may as well have been a solid wall. I shot a look back at Murphy.

He wore a questioning look, but refocused his attention on the house.

I bypassed the other five garage doors without stopping to test them. Once I reached the double door entrance, I was again stumped. The doors stood nine solid, patinated feet tall. I pushed one, then the other. Neither rattled in the slightest, nor were there handles to pull.

I looked back at Murphy and shrugged.

He returned the gesture.

A railing ran from the corner of the garage, from just beside the double doors, around a thir
d of the plaza’s circumference. It kept people from falling off of the plaza and into the ravine that separated it from the house. Halfway along the garage wall, a breezeway extended out toward the house’s front door. There was no way to reach it from the outside.

I stepped back and looked up at the
roof of the garage.

Crap!

The eaves of the roof stretched out at least three feet from the wall and were at least ten feet up. I’d need a ladder to get up there.

I went over and peeked around the corner again.

Double crap!

Even if I did get on the roof of the garage as a means to ge
t onto the roof of the breezeway, I wouldn’t be able to get to the house. The roof of the breezeway was a tall V-shape, with a wide curved peak. Like the coppice on the walls, only made of smooth metal, it would be impossible to grip. Worse still, there was no way to get from the roof down to the house’s entrance without pulling some kind of crazy Spiderman move.

I looked back at Murphy, threw up my hands and shook my head.

He waved me back over.

I jogged back.

“Let’s go out behind the garage and see what we can see,” Murphy suggested.

“Yeah.”

I followed Murphy along the featureless garage wall, around the corner, and down the slope of the mountain. We descended along the back wall of the garage, which grew taller and taller as we went down. At the opposite corner, we came out onto one of the terraces that formed the ravine between the garage and the house. The breezeway was fifteen or twenty feet above us.

“That sucks.” Murphy was not thrilled.

I didn’t say that I’d expected that, though I did. “We probably need some ladders to get up there. We may have to go back out and ransack the neighborhood.”

“It’s almost dark,” Murphy countered. “Let’s check around the other side of the house. If there’s no way in, I think it might be best if we all hop the wall and just camp here in the grass tonight. It won’t be comfortable but it’ll be safe.”

He was probably right, but the idea of trying to sleep on the ground with the fire ants and the scorpions didn’t sound like any kind of rest to me. On the other hand, when was the last time I’d had a full night’s sleep?

We made our way around to the side of the house and then to the back. The last colors of the sunset were fading from the western horizon. Below us,
the terraces were separated by vertical walls of stacked limestone five or six feet tall.  Above us, the back porch of the house was too high up for any kind of ladder that we’d likely be able to scrounge from neighbors’ garages. Whoever had designed the house had designed it to have only one way in, over the breezeway.

We followed the wall back around to the other side of the house. The bulk of the two acres spread out below us on the terraces. The four infected we’d spotted earlier were at the far end of the terrace above us, near the car entrance, still following the mower.

“We need to take those Whites out before we get the others,” Murphy suggested.

“Okay.”

We climbed up a short terrace wall to get up to their level. From there, Murphy led the way down. I drew my machete as we went. He pulled his hatchet and held a knife in his other hand. I reached for my Glock as a backup weapon and recalled that I’d given it to Steph.

As we closed on the infected, the mower made a turn and followed the wall at the back edge of the terrace, leading the four infected toward us.

“The security dudes first,” Murphy whispered. “As we pass, I’ll take number two, you take number one.”

“Okay.”

The Whites were following each other in a tight formation, so instead of following directly behind Murphy, a position that would have left me no room to wield my machete, I stepped to my left, so that I was jogging directly at the oncoming lawnmower.

T
he infected saw us, but didn’t alter their behavior. We were just like them, two more Whites following one another across the grass. At least that’s what they thought, until Murphy came up beside guard number two and smashed him across the head with his hatchet.

As soon as I saw
Murphy move, I slashed guard number one across his throat. He gushed blood and fell.

Guard number two was down, but wasn’t dead. Murphy’s hatchet was stuck in his skull at an odd angle and he was trying to get up. The kid was lunging at Murphy, but I was too far back to help. At the last second, Murphy jabbed and drove his knife up through the kid’s larynx.

In that moment, I pulled my machete up for another swing and punished guard number two for not dying right away. I caught him across his left shoulder and he rolled over, unable to support himself any longer with that arm. He rolled onto his back, his teeth still gnashing at Murphy’s ankle, until my machete cleaved his face and he died.

Looking up from that, I saw Murphy pulling his knife from the kid’s blood-spewing throat.

The naked, limping woman was howling and doing her best to close the gap between herself and Murphy. It only hastened her death as Murphy kicked her hard in her good leg and she went down. My machete ended her struggles, too.

With darkness in my eyes, but victory in my heart, splattered with another layer of fresh blood, I looked at Murphy. He shone his twisted grin back at me. It was gruesome, disgusting work. But winning a life or death struggle left you with an emotional high and a contradictory weight of guilt that was hard to reconcile.

“You all right?” Murphy asked.

I nodded. “You?”

“Yeah.”

The teenager made a gurgling sound and refocused our attention as his soon-to-be lifeless body struggled to breathe. Aside from the blood flowing from his mouth, nose, and throat, he looked normal. Just a normal kid, whose only concern a week before had been looking cool for his friends and getting his hand into the jeans of the cute girls at school. Now, he was dying on his lawn.

His gurgling went on, accompanied by raspy breaths as his empty eyes stared at the stars and blinked. Murphy stepped back beside me and looked down at the kid. I didn’t see Murphy’s face, but the change in his breathing told me he was as troubled as I was. Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke as first five, then ten minutes ticked by, while the kid so very painfully, very slowly finished dying.