Slow Burn (Book 5): Torrent (24 page)

It was early afternoon when the current carried us around the last long bend
before the river ran straight for a half-mile to the Tom Miller Dam. The rumble of water falling over the dam carried across the river’s surface. A surface covered bank-to-bank with bloated, naked, white bodies, lumber, capsized and swamped boats, trees and life preservers, but mostly white bodies.

It was Murphy who found his words first. “I think I’m
gonna puke.”

We had run out of river and had seen no hint of the black-hulled Malibu ski boat and no sign the others were alive.

We found the riverboat, though, or at least what remained of it. The pressure of the current had it pushed up against the dam, the stern deep in the water and the bow sticking at an angle up into the sky. Everything on the boat above the waterline was now mangled or gone. All of our supplies and weapons were in the river. The bodies of Mandi and the others, or what little remained of them, were in the flow of water downstream.

And the current carried us into the mat of white bodies.

“There’s a boat about halfway through that’s floating upright,” I said.

I looked back at Murphy. He was slowly shaking his head, his mouth a tight frown. How many dead can a person see before the pieces of his soul turn to ash and float off in the wind?

Finally, he said, “It’s your call.”

“It’s the first boat we’ve seen all day that looks usable. It’s even got a canvas cover stretched over the top.”

Murphy gave me a nod and a shrug, leaned into the gruesome task ahead and started paddling. When our bow neared the first of the floating dead, I used the broken fence board to push it out of the way. But the dead were packed so tightly together, we had no chance of floating untouched between them. We had to push through. In doing so, we disturbed swarms of feeding and breeding flies. Hundreds of birds had settled on the bodies and were picking at the flesh. Beneath, fish large and small tugged at what would fit in their mouths. Even rats were making their way from the shore out onto the floating feast.

The thick taste of humid rot on the air was bad, but not nearly as bad as it was going to get in the coming days.

A long forty-five minutes after starting the struggle through the mat of floating dead, I reached up and put a thankful hand on the ski boat.

“This thing better run.” Murphy looked back the way we’d come. The corridor we plowed through closed up behind us. “I’d prefer not to paddle back through that.”

“If it doesn’t start, we’ll hit the shore and hike it.”

“Back upriver?”

Was he really asking? Sure, after coming down the river in something of a hurry, we didn’t see any sign of the black-hulled Malibu, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t back there in the trees somewhere. “I still want to go back upriver.”

Murphy nodded. Whether to agree or just to stop the conversation, I couldn’t tell.

I cut a few of the ropes that held the canvas cover over the boat and took my time climbing off of the plastic kayak. The last thing I wanted was to turn the banana-colored toy over. Once I had a leg over the gunwale, I smiled at the most optimistic circumstance we’d come across all morning. “It’s dry inside.”

“Dry?” Murphy didn’t believe it.

“Well, there’s maybe a little water down in the bottom, probably from the rain. But not much.”

Murphy, reaching up from the kayak and holding onto a chrome rail along the port side, said, “See if it’ll start. I don’t want to chance climbing off of this thing and falling in unless I know there’s some gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“That’s a very un-Murphy-like attitude.”

“Today’s not a good day to mess with me, Zed.”

In little more than a mumble, I said, “Sorry.” I turned and went to work at pulling the canvas back.

The canvas was heavy and stiff. I tugged and pushed, and after several sweaty minutes, got it off the front half of the boat. While I was pushing it back to let it fall off the stern, the ski boat tilted and I turned to see Murphy climbing inside. He’d changed his mind. Without a word one way or the other, I went back to pushing on the canvas.

“You’re right.”

“About?” I asked.

Murphy came up beside me and added some muscle to the problem. The canvas fell off the stern, but didn’t hit water. It landed across several floating bodies.

Murphy took his backpack off and laid it on the deck. He pulled out a plastic water bottle and took several gulps before stashing it back inside. He sat in the seat opposite the helm and looked up at me. “I just need a couple of days to deal with this one. I don’t mean to be a Zed about it.”

“A Zed?”

Murphy grinned, the first real smile I’d seen on him all morning. “You know.”

I rolled my eyes and sat at the helm. “Let’s hope God likes us today.” I started searching around compartments under the instrument panel.

“Look under the seat.”

I stood back up and lifted the seat cushion. “I’ll be damned.”

A ring with three keys lay there just waiting for me. I scooped them up, dropped back into the seat and guessed right on the second attempt. The ignition switch turned, the starter cranked and the motor coughed, once, twice, three times. It was running.

I looked over at Murphy. He looked back at me, just as surprised.

I immediately killed the engine.

“What?” he asked.

“Can you reach over and grab your paddle and my fence board?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Let’s use those to push that canvas away from the back of the boat. I don’t want it getting caught up in the propeller.”

Murphy gave me a big nod. “Good thinking. Wouldn’t that be just our luck lately, to find the last running boat on the river and then break it by being stupid?”

Five minutes later, with the engine purring like it had just been tuned, the bow of our new ski boat was pushing through the raft of reeking bodies and heading back toward clear water.

Just having a comfortable seat, a motor gently pushing me back upriver and a breeze blowing across my skin had a positive effect on my mood. I could tell it was doing Murphy some good as well. Maybe it was a minor thing, but we were no longer two powerless vagabonds in a world full of hostile apes. Technology was back on our side.

Murphy said, “Hey man, you should let me drive.”

I shrugged, wondering why. But I stood up and left the seat open for Murphy. As he put himself in it, he said, “Why don’t you find a comfy spot and squeeze off a few rounds at anything you see on shore and see if you can hit it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to waste the ammunition.”

“You waste it every time you shoot. Let me watch you and see what you’re doing wrong.”

“Wrong? How hard can it be? You point the barrel, look down the sight and shoot, right?”

“If it wasn’t hard, you’d be hitting the infected when you shoot at them.”

I sucked in a deep, exasperated breath. Murphy was right. It was harder than just pointing the gun. Somewhere over the past week, I’d picked up a bad habit of some sort and it was throwing off my aim.

With no seats in the bow, I put a foot up in the passenger seat and lay my M4 on the top edge of the windshield. I looked through the sight and was surprised by how perfectly clear the image was. “These military sights are really nice.”

“They make one with a laser dot you can see through the sight, but it doesn’t show up on the target. That way, you can see exactly what you’re shooting at.”

“I think I need one of those.”

“There’s a body floating out there about a hundred yards. See it?”

I scanned across the glimmer of the surface. “Got it.”

“Shoot a few rounds at that one and see if you can hit it.”

I angled the rifle and lined up the sights with the body. The shot was pretty far out for me, but I had my rifle laying on the edge of the windshield to steady it.

“Be patient. Take a breath. Time your shot with the rhythm of the boat going up and down.”

“Okay.” Murphy was right. The boat seemed to be riding pretty smoothly across the water, but through the scope, with the rocking movement magnified by distance, it definitely wasn’t.

I waited. I got the rhythm down. I fired.

“Damn.” Murphy was more surprised than critical.

I looked up and saw the remnants of a splash fifteen or twenty feet past the body and off to the side.

With a chuckle, Murphy asked, “Is there another body out there you can see through the scope that I can’t?”

“No. Just the one.”

“Try again. Breathe smoothly. Hold your breath,
then shoot. You’ve done it a thousand times.”

I fired again.

Miss.

This time, the bullet splashed far to the right.

Before Murphy could poke fun, I fired twice more. One came close, but one missed by so much, I couldn’t find the splash.

“Here, take the wheel. Let me see that thing again.”

I handed my rifle to Murphy as he stood up, hoping he’d find something wrong with it.

Murphy took a quick moment to look over the rifle. He pointed it at the body, which was only about fifty yards ahead of us by then. His concentration sharpened into focus. He fired. A reddish-gray clump of flesh seemed to jump up off of the body.

Two more quick shots followed and both found their targets.

“Crap.”

Murphy pulled the rifle down from his shoulder and handed it back to me. “I don’t know what to tell you. There is nothing wrong with your rifle.”

“So I saw.”

We switched places in the boat. With the body not more than twenty feet away, I shot several more rounds. I only got one hit.

Perplexed, I sat in the passenger seat and looked at Murphy. “What am I doing wrong?”

“Looks like you’re doing everything right to me.”

“What then?”

“Maybe it’s the rocking of the boat that’s throwing you off.”

I wanted to disagree. If that
was the case, my shots would either be long or short. That, they were, but they were also far to the left and right. They were everywhere. It was only the lucky shots that found their target.

“Maybe you just need to spend some time practicing. You’ll get it down.”

For the next twenty or thirty minutes, I burned through three full magazines. I fired with the scope and without the scope. I tried shooting with my pistol, hoping my shooting problem was just with the rifle. It wasn’t. I didn’t hit a single shot more than twenty feet out. Inside of that, my accuracy was maybe fifty percent.

It didn’t make any sense. Years and countless dollars spent at the paintball field made me deadly accurate with a paintball gun. And those guns weren’t known for exceeding accuracy. I’d done well in the first weeks of the infection. It seemed my paintball skills had transferred directly to the M4 I’d acquired. But now, with time and maybe thousands of bullets fired, I couldn’t hit anything.

Maybe back at the beginning, I’d been so good with the M4 because I hadn’t thought about what I was doing – right or wrong. I just picked it up and did what came naturally. Perhaps now I was overthinking and layering on a full helping of frustration to boot. That combination could be ruining my accuracy.

So I put my weapon aside and concentrated instead on trying to find the black-hulled Malibu ski boat. If it had sunk, we were out of luck. I was hoping to find it in among the trees.
If Steph and the others had pulled it out of the current to get on shore, that’s where it had to be. Because that’s where the shore was when the river flooded—up in the trees.

But the boat could have been covered in a film of dirt to match the surrounding ground, or caked in mud. It could have been behind a mound of flood debris, or covered in it. And the more scenarios I spun, the less I believed we’d find it.

Trying to escape all of those negative thoughts, I said, “Point out anything that looks like it has any chance of being a boat, okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

“No, Steph’s the boss.”

Murphy didn’t respond to that, a fact that made me think he had no hope of finding her alive.

And so our day went. We’d go a quarter-mile upriver, sometimes less, sometimes more. We’d see something, sometimes close to the water’s edge, sometimes not. We’d get close enough to identify it for sure. Or we’d get out and walk through the mud, broken limbs and the muddy trinkets that used to be inside houses, only to find something that wasn’t the boat we sought.

We floated into each cove and creek and searched.

As the afternoon heated up, the bodies of the dead kept floating down the river. More than once, the body of a white-skinned man or woman popped up from below the surface as the gasses of rot gave it enough buoyancy to break free of its bonds in the weeds on the bottom of the river.

Not once did we see a living person, normal or infected. Nor did we see any of the mule deer, which were normally everywhere in the hill country on the west side of Austin. Only bugs and scavengers dared chance the murderous river.

Late in the afternoon, with the sun inching toward the horizon, Murphy said, “We’re not going to finish this today, you know that, right?”

I looked up the river and nodded.

“Are we gonna try and sleep on the boat tonight, or do you want to hike up one of these hills and find a house that didn’t get washed away?”

“I don’t know.” I was despondent. The long, fruitless afternoon had worn away my hope.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get any more rain.”

I looked up at the clear sky. “Nope.”

“I think that was a hurricane.” Murphy was trying to take my mind off the search.

“You think?”

“We haven’t had one blow up this way in maybe ten years. I think we’re overdue.”

I rubbed my hand across my sweaty arm. “Yeah, makes sense. That explains why it’s still hot, anyway.”

“The heat can’t last much longer. It’s got to be late September, early October, right?”

“I don’t know.” I smiled and almost laughed at myself. “You know, I was going to say I don’t even know what day it is. But that expression is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? Days of the week don’t mean anything anymore, do they?”

“I don’t guess they do.”

“For the foreseeable future, I guess all we really need to care about are the four seasons.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

I looked back up the river. “Do you think we’ll find them?”

“Sugar, or no sugar?”

“No sugar.”

“Nope.”

“No chance?”

“Everywhere you look, you see dead Whites. That was a wicked storm. Not much of anything in this valley lived through it. If I had to bet, I’d bet they’re all dead.”

I slumped in my seat. “Do you think we should go hunting?”

“For Smart Ones?”

“Yeah.”

Murphy shook his head and looked around at the destruction. “Another day or two won’t matter. I’d like to wish all of the naked ones got killed in the flood. God knows thousands of their bodies are in the river. But you remember that farm, right? Out by Hutto or Taylor, or wherever it was?”

“Dr. Evans’ farm.”

“How many do you think we saw that day?”

“Tens of thousands. I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

“It could have been a hundred-thousand or more, right?”

I thought about it for a moment. “They covered that whole valley and they were still coming over that hill.”

Murphy pointed at a cluster of white bodies floating on the current. “This isn’t all of them.”

“We’ll never kill all of them. You know that, right?”

“Just the Smart Ones.”

“Yeah, the Smart Ones.”