Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind
Slow Burn
Grind
Book 8
A novel
by
Bobby Adair
Cover Design and Graphics
Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz
Editing, Research, & Proofreading
Kat Kramer
Cathy Moeschet
Weapons Consultant
John Cummings
eBook and Print Formatting
Kat Kramer
Text copyright © 2015, Bobby L. Adair
Book 1 – Zero Day
Zed Zane wakes up hung over one Sunday morning and begins to fortify himself with tequila before going to his mother’s house for lunch – and to beg for rent. There, he finds his mother and a neighbor dead, and his stepfather in full-throttle, crazed cannibal mode. Zed, fighting for his life, kills his stepfather in a scuffle, during which he sustains a nasty bite wound.
He tries calling 911, but the line is perpetually busy. That’s strange, but no stranger than the way that Zed is beginning to feel. He spends the next two days unconscious with a raging fever, and awakens as what soon becomes known as a “slow burn,” a carrier of a virus that destroys higher brain function and turns people into vicious, flesh-eating monsters.
Together with Murphy, a fellow slow burn who escapes with Zed in the aftermath of a prison riot following his erroneous arrest for the murder of his parents and their neighbor, we follow Zed on his quest for shelter, resources, and a plan for living in the strange new world in which he finds himself.
Although Zed himself has not “turned” completely, as have most of the other infected, the ambiguous, not-immune-but-not-dangerous category in which he finds himself will from this point forward direct his every thought and step if he is to survive.
Book 2 – Infected
Infected
finds Zed, Murphy, and their traveling companion, Jerome on the move again following what proves to be a brief respite in a university dormitory, in the company of some extremely, albeit justifiably, paranoid ROTC students and three coeds, one of whom befriends Zed. In the process of stealing a Humvee, Jerome is shot by soldiers and Zed and Murphy head on alone to find Murphy’s family.
With Murphy’s mother dead and his sister missing, their next stop is a house rumored to feature an underground survivalist bunker, where another surprise awaits.
Book 3 – Destroyer
Destroyer
finds Zed saying goodbye to one friend and pressing forward with two new ones to whom we are introduced in Book 2 – Infected. Mandi, whom Zed and Murphy rescued from the bunker, is immune to the virus. Russell, whose home the others plundered in search of food and other supplies, is also a slow burn, but lower-functioning, childlike and docile.
After seeing the carnage at the dormitory, a raging, vengeful Zed wants only to kill Mark, his nemesis and the former leader of the ROTC squad. Since Mark has disappeared, Zed unleashes his fury on untold numbers of infected in his path as he makes his way back to the hospital, in an attempt to rescue Steph, a nurse whom he befriended while seeking help for the feverish Murphy shortly after the prison riot. But the brave medical staff, holed up on the tenth floor of the hospital, and running out of provisions, has decided to take matters in hand by exposing themselves to the virus, and shooting those who “turn.” Zed is determined not to face another loss, but once again, time is running out…
Book 4 – Dead Fire
Dead Fire
picks up following an infected attack on Sarah Mansfield’s fortified house, during which 3 people seek shelter with Zed Zane and his fellow survivors. In the confusion, however, Murphy is gunned down, and an unthinking, emotional Zed strikes out to enact revenge. Unfortunately, the shooting and commotion have only attracted more Whites. A diversion plan emerges to rid the horde of the Smart One trying to figure a way through the gates, and lead the other infected away from the compound. Momentarily safe, the survivors turn to the matter of where to bury the dead. Zed, being now the only one available who would not attract the attentions of the infected, accompanies Freitag on this morbid mission. In short order, Zed is once more embittered and hardened against trust, when he finds himself stranded. After a series of developments that prove the Whites to be more formidable foes than he ever dreamed, he finds his way back to Sarah’s house to find the compound overrun with infected and his friends mysteriously vanished without a trace, leaving Zed to rely once more solely on his wits to survive…
Book 5 – Torrent
Following his none-too-soon reunion with his friends at the safe house, Zed is hoping things can finally fall into a stable routine, but in post-virus Austin, things are far from stable. On a mission to raid the ammunition bunkers at Camp Mabry, Zed and Murphy spot a group of the newer, naked infected, who are exhibiting some sophisticated and disturbing new behaviors, such as scouting and hunting – for them.
After a narrow escape, the two pass the home of Mr. Mays on the return trip, stirring Zed’s predictable rescuer impulse. Finding Mr. Mays dead, Zed brings fellow chain gang escapee Nico along to join the group, whose numbers have grown again, thanks to their merger with the girls on the riverboat, where the group has moved, as seems to be the safest hiding place… Or is it?
Book 6 – Bleed
Zed and Murphy are trying to find their surviving friends to finally get out of Austin and head west to safety, away from the zombie hordes. But trouble, their perpetual companion, dogs them at every turn as they discover that infected humans aren’t the only source of mortal danger.
After finding Murphy’s sister out at the lake, and a standoff with a group of survivors on Monk’s Island, Zed and Murphy separate from the group, finding refuge in Austin.
Book 7 – City of Stin
In th
e
aftermath of the battle for Monk’s Island, Murphy has been nursing Zed back to health in a remote house at the west end of the lake. But every day they see helicopters cross the sky, heading south and then back north again.
Zed wonders if the helicopters are proof that not all civilization has collapsed. He convinces Murphy to seek out the place where the helicopters are landing so they can find the answer to that question. As they acquire new transportation from an abandoned shop—an
electric 1968 Mustang
—they’re able to outrun the infected and discover others who are just like them. What they find
at the end of their journey is both more dangerous and hopeful than either would ever have guessed.
Well, here we are again.
Each time I sit back and start to relax after wrapping up another Slow Burn, it seems like it’s only a few weeks that go by before I start missing Zed & Murphy. As you know, I write other series in addition to Slow Burn, and they’re really wonderful books, but there’s something that really draws me in with my two favorite characters. If you’re reading Slow Burn 8, I’m guessing you can relate.
As a writer, I get the benefit of living vicariously through my characters, so the reality is that I although I might sit in my office with my two dogs all day, I see myself as the machete-wielding Zed—bold, fearless, exciting, with a wonderful sidekick. Instead of mundane things like emptying the dishwasher and mowing the lawn, I’m out hunting for food and mowing over Whites with farm implements. See what I mean? Does Zed ever have to get online and pay bills? NO! Going to the DMV? Uh-uh. Laundry? Nope. Cuss like a sailor? 24/7.
So did you ever wonder where story ideas come from? Road trips and restaurants. No, really. A lot of Slow Burn 8 came from a road trip. Slow Burn 7 was plotted out at Rudy’s BBQ in Austin, where I spread out Post-It notes with ideas all over the table and they fortunately don’t run me off. Ebola K came from a “what-if” discussion while driving in the mountains outside of Denver… what if terrorists weaponized Ebola? It’s a fantastic book that probably put me on an FBI watchlist, but I highly recommend it if you like thrillers.
Back to Slow Burn. We recently took a little drive across rural Texas to see my son graduate from college, actually along the same path that Zed and Murphy are taking toward College Station. On a drive that I used to think was kinda long and a little boring, Kat and I started brainstorming. If you were being chased by zombies, where would you hide? Where would you find food? What were the quirky things about the landscape you might find interesting?
As you pass out of Austin, the landscape changes dramatically, away from the live music venues, the University of Texas, and a horribly-outdated freeway system, to rolling hills, giant oaks, Victorian farmhouses, and miles of country roads. We passed John Deere tractor dealers, grain silos, antique oil pumpjacks, rusted old trucks. We even got out of the car, walked around, and listened to the crunch of gravel under our feet and the wind blowing through dried cornstalks as we examined the possibility of hiding from zombies on top of fertilizer tanks—a good thing the small-town police didn’t stop and ask what we were doing. But Texas is full of beautiful old courthouses on town squares, little cafes, mom-and-pop convenience stores and post offices. In many cases a land time forgot, and in some places it seems oddly post-apocalyptic, with not a soul in sight. Driving those country roads, you realize that there are hidden stories along the way, and a lot of places to hide if the need arose.
The only limit is your imagination.
So I hope you like this installment of Slow Burn. There are a few new characters and your old favorites as well, plus some little surprises along the way. Hmmmm… I wonder what Mark is up to these days?
As always, your reviews (woot!) and interactions on Facebook are appreciated and keep me writing!
– Bobby Adair, September 2015
If only you could get your family far enough away or get there fast enough.
If only.
Maybe to Grandma’s house.
Or Uncle Jim’s.
If you could get to that safe bug-out cabin in the woods.
If only.
But there’s all that goddamn traffic.
And there you sit, thinking that instead of having spent the extra $2,500 on the four-wheel drive option that would have let you tear ass cross country and get off these goddamn clogged roads, you’d opted instead for the two-wheel drive model and spent the difference on that fucking giant flat screen television, so you could see even the tiniest of details, HD-clarified to the point of perverse intrusiveness. Like those tiny glistening bubbles of sweat on the football players’ skin when they were hammering it on fourth and one.
Sweat bubbles?
How fucking important are those details in the grand apocalyptic view of a highway clogged with cars all the way from San Antonio to Dallas, maybe beyond? Hell, maybe every damned highway in the country is constipated with four-wheeled steel, stalling in the heat, running out of gas, waiting for what all the panicked rumors said was coming.
Virus!
Worse. People—regular people—turned monster.
You don’t believe it even though you saw them on the TV with your own two eyes. You saw them on the Internet. Coworkers shared videos on your phone. You told yourself over and over again there had to be a rational explanation.
But there wasn’t one. Only terrifying truths.
And you’re afraid those truths will turn every one of these fucking cars into coffins full of diminutive corpses and fat, dead parents.
Don’t think that way.
Breathe slow. Solve the problem.
Don’t panic.
The kids are already tense.
Don’t make it worse on them.
The wife is bitching in the front seat about how you should have gone the other way, taken that shortcut that her friend Elva told her about, because Elva and her husband—number three, was it?—are already out of town. Yeah, that was her on the phone a moment ago. The wife just said so. And the kids are whining in the back seat because the girl needs to piss, and that little fucker of a son won’t stop agitating her.
And the virus is coming.
The radio is spewing fear like it's on a half-price Labor Day sale with a mattress thrown in and the wife is ratcheting up her crazy-ass coulda-shoulda’s like there’s one per-fuckity thing you can do about it now.
And still, the fear.
Every time you see somebody in the rearview mirror who’s not in a car, you think, that’s THEM.
That’s one of THEM.
But it’s not. Not yet.
Still, people are outside, loitering, acting like idiots, spewing their anger on anyone stupid enough to come within range of their shouty voices and balled fists.
Things aren’t right.
Understatement.
The traffic isn't moving, and your biggest fear is that you're fucked—not just you, but the kids in the back seat, the whiner, and the agitator. No matter how much they’re pissing you right the fuck off, you know you love them more than anything else in this whole traffic-jammed town, in this whole God-fucked world, and you reach over and grab your wife and bury your face in her shoulder, even while her bitching is burning your ears, because you don’t want her to hear you cry.
And you do cry, because you know all the way down to your balls that they’re going to die—your wife and your kids—because you fucked up.
You picked the route.
You drove the car up on the highway entrance ramp.
You watched the traffic back up, slow, and then stop altogether.
At so many points along the way, you could have made a different choice. You could have listened to her. You could have lost your temper and rammed your way between the assholes in the next lane and gotten away across the median five miles back, maybe.
Maybe.
But not now.
Now you’re stuck.
And the wife is stuck.
And the kids are stuck, and they don't even know what's going on, except that the smell of fear is in the car. It’s running up their nostrils and slamming their brains full of primordial get-the-fuck-out-of-here. But moving their feet is pointless because they’re seat belted into the upholstery tight enough to pillow it out around their spindly torsos. The taste of panic is in their mouths, and they’re spinning off so much frenetic movement, you have to keep looking to make sure the belts are still buckled.
Then the girl pisses her pants.
The boy shrieks a laugh because he’s half hysterical with new emotions that his little suburban-cocooned ass never knew existed. And because he’s just a little prick sometimes.
And what the fuck are you gonna do about all of it?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Just fucking nothing, except wait while the engine idles, the wife screams at the boy, and the gas gauge creeps ominously closer to E.
And you beat the steering wheel with your fist and you curse all the dumbasses in front of you, because you’re just sure that some accident by some idiot up there is the reason the traffic isn’t moving, and you want to jump out of the car, run up there, find the dipshit that caused this mess and punch him in the nuts.
But you don’t.
You can’t.
You can’t leave your kids. Not in this chaos.
Something changes.
The sounds are different.
Keening. Malicious. Hungry.
You turn the radio down, hoping it’s not a squealing belt in the engine, while you pray to God and your eyes plead with the apathetic clouds above that it is only that.
It’s not.
Then THEY come.
Fritz said, “Just drive across the bridge.”
I turned away from a Subaru with broken out windows, streaky stains of sunbaked blood on the hood, and the dark shapes of flesh-scavenged corpses inside. For some reason, that one, of all those packed on the highway below in a similar state, captured my attention and caught me up in imagining what had happened to its occupants.
I looked at Fritz, his words having woken me to the realization that I’d been staring and letting my imagination drag my mood down to an ugly depth. I turned toward the gaps between the burned wrecks on the bridge over the highway, exaggerating a nod as if I’d been going through a silent, evaluative process on whether to cross the highway at just that spot.
“You all right?” Fritz asked, not bothering to hide with some tact his concern that I might be slipping a little too far from reality.
“Yeah.” Of course, I said ‘yeah.’ That's the only answer to that question, when what somebody is really asking is the rhetorical, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I put my foot to the accelerator and the electric Mustang rolled over the bridge above the highway, crossing from West Austin to East Austin. Along the access road on the other side of the interstate, rummaging through the lines of burned hulks of cars that four months ago had been waiting their chance to get into the unmoving line on I-35, white skinned monsters—formerly normal people—glowed in the moonlight.
They didn’t notice the silent Mustang. None had since I drove away from the old power plant down by the river. We’d passed hundreds on our rat-maze race through Austin’s gentrified warehouse district and into the high-rise condos and bank buildings closer to the Capitol. Along the way, as I caught glimpses of the statehouse, I saw that the fires I'd started in the subterranean Capitol Annex were still burning in the hundred-fifty-year-old domed building. Now, beneath the red granite dome, the building’s windows flickered orange and dribbled rivulets of acrid ash into the black sky, hiding the stars behind smoky ribbons of our ruin.
The Whites did notice the rattling diesel engine and the noisy off-road tires on the Humvee Murphy was driving at a distance a few blocks behind. His vehicle loudly announced the coming of a meal and the Whites reacted accordingly, waking up, chasing into the street to catch him and his passengers, pouncing on the armored Humvee from the sides.
It was all a futile effort on the Whites’ part. They weren’t fast enough to catch it from behind. They didn’t get out in front of it in sufficient numbers to do anything but die as Murphy ran them down. The ones that did get on top didn’t stay, as Murphy bounced them off by running over curbs or whatever lumps he might find in the road.
With the bridge behind us, the Mustang glided silently through the ashen remnants of neighborhoods. The fire that burned most of East Austin back in August had left little intact. The pattern of the streets was deducible only from the ragged lines of rusty orange and brown car skeletons, each having had all non-metal components long since blazed away.
Blackened brick chimneys stood as grave markers for each house that had smoldered to cinder around it. Trunks of trees still stood, some holding the thickest of their limbs to the sky. All of the storm drains along the curbs had clogged with ash and fire debris when the storms came. What was left when the rain clouds blew away and the flood waters receded was an even blanket of blackened gray over everything not tall enough to reach above it.
That was what the Mustang rolled through, six-inches deep. I ran over brittle bone, which I’d come to know from the peculiar feel of the crunch it made under our wheels. Of the other metallic remnants of the East Austin disaster, I only hoped none hiding in the ash on the road in front of me were sharp enough to puncture my tires.
Behind the Mustang, a cloud of fine ash thrown up by the tires hid the Humvee from sight. I knew that made it hard for Murphy to see, but it made it impossible for him to lose me. What's more, with East Austin burned nearly flat, any White who happened to be wandering through wouldn't be able to see the Humvee. They'd hear the noisy diesel, but they'd only see the big, gray cloud, instead of a rolling vehicle.
Eventually, the ashen desolation turned to rolling hills, blanketed by farms. The fields were separated by barbed wire fences, draped in bramble and sprouting wind-tormented trees trying to birth hedgerows. Interspersed with the fields were homestead parcels, boasting anything from a decaying trailer to a plantation-style mansion. As often as not, something, or a whole host of somethings—old cars, obsolete farm equipment, and kitchen appliances—stood in tall weeds, rusting their way into the black clay.
Within ten or twenty miles of Austin’s outskirts, oddly shaped plots of land that used to be farms had long since been sold to developers with a penchant for laying out little subdivisions with names like Green Hills, Vista Norte, or Sunny Shitboxes, probably on a landfill mound, all built from low-grade yellow pine and the cheapest Chinese siding the builder could import and staple together. Over the sub-standard constructs, built outside the city limits and beyond the reach of restrictive building codes, the builders slapped on one of six colors of fresh paint, all inspired by some shade of dried curb mud and cockroach turds.
The newer of the subdivisions looked squeaky-plain and tidy, with their ten-foot, two-leaf twigs of trees staked into the center of the cut-sod front lawns. None of the siding on those houses had yet warped. None of the paint had oxidized and washed away. Few of the shingles were yet blown off in the Texas wind.
The older subdivisions, those built a decade or more in the past, looked like slums more than suburbs. Hard-working, middle-class folk who couldn’t afford the obscene real estate prices closer to town bought those houses on adjustable rate mortgages, thinking they could afford growing future payments, because they’d long ago been infected by the blinding disease of optimism that convinced them that despite the evidence of all their dismal yesterdays, their tomorrows would be dipped in gold.
Fucked by the fine print, they were.
The promo periods on their mortgages came to an end. Monthly installments bounced happily higher—for the banks—at pretty much the same time that gasoline prices rocketed to a new record. Suddenly that twenty-mile commute into Austin, manageable a year before, ballooned into unaffordability along with their house payments. They missed a payment on a credit card and general default rules kicked in, doubling the interest rate and monthly payments on all of their revolving debt.
Stagnating wages couldn’t cover the difference. House repairs were skipped. Watering the lawn, a luxury in drought-parched Texas in those days, ceased. The twiggy trees died. The new sod turned to dirt. The house foundations, sitting on that porous, parched clay, shifted and cracked. Quarter-inch cracks zig-zagged down brick walls. Roofs opened at the seams.
On the occasions when it did rain, water leaked in. Mold followed, because even in the fucking Texas heat, the thick humidity makes sure that things never completely dry out. Because the insurance companies stopped covering mold damage a decade before, the houses turned unlivable and worthless.
For the hard working folk who hadn’t figured it out by then, they learned how ‘fucked’ was spelled, what it tasted like, what it smelled like. They knew it with all the intimacy of a herpes-infected lover. They loaded their shit into U-Haul vans, dropped their house keys into brown envelopes, and jingle-mailed their dreams away to the mortgage companies.