Slow Burn: Dead Fire Book 4 Read online

  Slow Burn

  DEAD FIRE

  Book 4

  A novel

  by

  Bobby Adair

  http://www.bobbyadair.com

  http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor

  Cover Design and Layout

  Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz

  Editing & Proofreading

  Cathy Moeschet

  Lindsay Heuertz

  Robyn Roopchan

  eBook and Print Formatting

  Kat Kramer

  A special THANK YOU to these readers of the series who were kind enough to volunteer a slog through a typo-infested early draft of the work and give me their thoughts.

  Jackie Bauerelen

  John W Van Deusen

  Julie Carrigan

  Christy O'Neil

  John Cummings

  Other Books by Bobby Adair

  Horror

  Slow Burn: Zero Day, book 1

  Slow Burn: Infected, book 2

  Slow Burn: Destroyer, book 3

  Slow Burn: Dead Fire, book 4

  Slow Burn Box Set: Destroyer and Dead Fire

  Satire

  Flying Soup

  Previously, in Slow Burn:

  Book 1 – Zero Day

  Zed Zane wakes up hung over one Sunday morning and begins to fortify himself with vodka 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

  Book 2 – 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

  Book 3 – 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…

  Chapter 1

  Steph, in nothing but a bra and jeans, was on her knees at Murphy’s side with two fingers divining for a pulse on the side of his throat. She pressed her t-shirt to the wound on his head and moved her lips in whispers, whether to herself or Murphy, who knew?

  Gunshots rang the driveway door’s steel sheets and punched three neat holes around Russell, who stood, oblivious, watching Steph and me.

  “Cease fire!” Dalhover ordered. “Cease fire!”

  Three more gunshots.

  “God dammit!” Dalhover yelled, with real anger in his voice. “This is First Sergeant Dalhover, US Army, retired. If you fire one more round, I’m gonna open this door and shove that weapon up your ass! Do you hear me?”

  Still on one knee beside Murphy, I was pointing my M4 at the door, ready to send a full magazine of punishment back through the sheet metal.

  “Move, Russell!” Dalhover ordered.

  Russell didn’t respond.

  “Russell!” I yelled sharply to get his attention. I pointed to where Dalhover had protected himself behind the abutment. “Go stand behind Sergeant Dalhover. Move!”

  Russell shuffled to his left.

  Once he was beside Dalhover, the situation hit a tense stasis. No one spoke. No weapons discharged. Steph’s lips moved in silent entreaties as she tended to Murphy. A bleeding man on the other side of the gate—too stupid to think before he acted—mewled while his remaining hand dangled by a tendon. The infected out in the cedar forest yowled and the popcorn bursts of distant rifle fire punctuated their cries.

  Dalhover broke the tension with, “Who is on the other side of this wall?”

  An uncomfortably long silence followed before a female voice answered, “Specialist Freitag and Specialist Harris, sir. We have a man down.”

  The expression on Dalhover’s face turned to something else too quickly to decipher, before switching back to apathy-masked danger.

  Fists pounding on the outside gate announced the arrival of the infected. I stifled a curse. The gunshots. The shouting. The noisy rolling of the gates. Every White within earshot was on its way.

  Dalhover looked to Steph and asked, “Captain, in or out?”

  Steph appeared frozen by the choice. I glanced at her, then back at the gate. But before she passed the point where my impatience compelled me to answer for her, in an emotionless voice she said, “In. If we can get them in safely. Any risk, and they can go back out with the infected.” She refocused her attention on Murphy and his wound.

  My simmering rage was coming to a boil, stoked by the sight of the bloody T-shirt pressed to the side of Murphy’s head. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. But the part of my brain that was still rational enough to slough off the anger reminded me that rage was not my friend. It was my favorite addiction, but it only ever led to tears and regret.

  Breathe!

  Breathe.

  Suck it up, bitch.

  Calm down.

  For now, anyway. For now.

  “Freitag,” Dalhover called softly, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Freitag answered, mimicking his volume.

  “We were trying to help you. You have a man down. We have a man down. Accidents happen…”

  And then my emotions slipped. “Accident, bullshit! That fucker shot Murphy on purpose!”

  “Quiet, Zane!” Dalhover lashed out with the practiced authority of a long-time sergeant. “Shit happens in the real world. Now grow up or shut your God damned mouth!”

  I was cowed.

  But Dalhover was right.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Don’t fuck this up more than it already is.

  Dalhover called back, “Specialist Freitag, you can wait until the Whites outside leave, we’ll open that gate, and you can go. Or you come in, and you won’t be harmed. But I swear to God, if you raise a weapon at one of my people, I’ll beat your ass so bad that you’ll God damned well thank me when I throw your stupid ass back over the wall. Your choice.”

  I didn’t hear anything through the gate, though I guessed they were discussing their choices in hushed voices. The handless man had fallen silent, passed out or dead.

  Freitag answered, “Sir, we’d like to come in.”

  Dalhover looked back to Steph again. It was clear that she had the final say. She looked at both Dalhover and me, perhaps giving us a chance to voice dissent. We didn’t. She gave Dalhover a nod, raised the clicker, and pushed the button to open the gate.

  The electric motor and rattling wheels echoed up through the flat metal panels of the gate and drowned out the sound of the Whites pounding outside.

  I looked down the barrel of my rifle and tracked across the growing gap, ready to stop on the first target that came into view. But the bloody body of the handless man came first. I passed. A big, bald man in fatigues, with thick shoulders, Murphy’s size, knelt beside the handless man, tending his wounds. The gate rolled further open. A young, dark-haired woman in camouflaged fatigues, seemingly designed to camouflage her gender more than anything else, stood with a rifle in her sling, pointed at the dirt. Her round, young face held no expression, though her eyes immediately locked on Murphy.

  “Specialist Freitag?” Dalhover asked.

  “Yes.”

  Another odd look on Dalhover’s face. He looked suspicious to me, and that put me on edge.

  Dalhover said
, “Get your man. And be quiet about it. Let’s get this gate closed.”

  Using a two-man saddleback carry, the soldiers picked up and carried their injured companion into the compound.

  Steph fingered the button on the clicker and the gate started closing behind them. She stood up, looking at the situation: two potentially hostile soldiers carrying a wounded man, the four of us with Murphy still on the ground, and Dalhover and me standing there with weapons at the ready. The rumble of a Humvee engine behind us caught our attention.

  Racing one of the Humvees down from the house, Mandi brought the vehicle to a dramatic stop behind us, jumped out, and immediately fell to her knees beside Murphy.

  As though she had planned it that way, Steph didn’t waste a second. She pointed to Murphy and then to the bleeding man. “Put them in the Humvee.”

  The two soldiers immediately moved to comply. Dalhover looked at me, then nodded toward Murphy. It was clear from his stance and the placement of his hands on his rifle that I needed to figure out how to get Murphy loaded up without his help. Dalhover intended to stay at the ready.

  Still at Murphy’s side, I shouted a command to Russell to come help me.

  “How bad is it?” Mandi asked Steph through her tears.

  “It might be superficial,” Steph answered, “but get behind the wheel. You’re driving us back to the house.”

  Mandi started to protest, but understood enough about the situation to just nod and comply. She straightened back up.

  Freitag and Harris had little trouble loading their skinny charge into the rear passenger side of the Humvee. For Russell and me with limp Murphy, the going was tougher, even with Steph’s help. He weighed so damn much. Not lifeless, but disturbingly close.

  I closed the door on the Humvee and noticed Freitag and Harris standing to the side with blank faces and idle hands. I wanted to berate them for not helping with Murphy, but I held my tongue. Had they given us a hand with him, I would have wanted to berate them for that. Such was my anger. Any excuse would detonate it.

  As the Humvee started to roll, Dalhover ordered, “Up to the house. We’ll unload them and move them downstairs to the lobby outside the video room. Zane, you lead when we get to the house. I’ll take up the rear. Go.”

  One step into my run, Dalhover said, “Zane, wait. Pick up the hand.”

  “What?!”

  “Pick up the hand.”

  Fuck you, was the phrase on my lips, but I managed to say, “Why? We can’t reattach it without a doctor.”

  “Just get it. Move. Let’s go!”

  God damn!

  The three soldiers jogged toward the house. I went over and picked up the wounded guy’s pistol. I slipped it into my belt, shivering. My fingers lingered in the air just above the severed hand on the ground. In spite of all the death I’d seen, the thought of picking up the amputated hand gave me the willies. But if I didn’t, I’d get shamed by Dalhover in front of the others when I caught up with them at the house. That would be worse than touching the macabre artifact.

  I pinched the thumb between my fingers and lifted. It was supple, warm, just like living flesh. A silver bracelet slipped off of the wrist and jingled to the ground. I nearly ignored it, but paused instead, and bent back down to give it a closer look. Embossed on the silver was a six-armed red cross. I flipped it over to look at the back and rubbed the blood away with my thumb so that I could read the text.

  Uh, oh.

  Chapter 2

  A stream of blood, maybe three inches wide, crawled slowly across the floor, forging a meandering path of deep red against stark white marble. The contrast of colors and slow, worming movement was hypnotic, even beautiful if you could forget for a moment that it was the essence of life, flowing from the open veins of a bird-thin man in blood-soaked clothes three sizes too big. He lay semi-conscious, smearing the pristine red into ugly smudges around his body, his face stretched into a silent grimace. Thin, brittle hair tried to cover an oversized skull. Bulbous elbow joints stood out from holocaust arms like the lump of his larynx riding up and down under pallid skin.

  Most of us were there in the lobby between the theater and the video room. Freitag and Steph were tending to the wraith who had lost his hands. Well, he’d lost one hand. The other was for all practical purposes, lost. Murphy lay on the floor with a pillow under his head, eyes closed. Mandi was keeping pressure on his wound, tears silently slipping down her cheeks. Beside her, Russell, with his hands on Murphy, quietly stared. The well of his tears had run dry.

  Dalhover stood in the doorway of the video room, passing occasional instructions over his shoulder to Specialist Harris, whom he had parked in front of the monitors.

  The blood oozed its way past the toes of my boots and it occurred to me that I still had that amputated hand, somehow forgotten, as though it held onto me as much as I onto it. In my other hand, I grasped the bloody silver bracelet. “I don’t think you can save him,” I said.

  In doing so, I accepted the reality of what my anger-fueled machete swing had been, justified or not— murder.

  Freitag ignored me.

  Without looking at me, Steph said, “Zed, go out to the Humvees and see if you can find some more of these bandages.”

  I didn’t comply. My anger was gone. Harsh reason was back.

  Irritated, Steph repeated, “Zed. I need you to get us more bandages.”

  That snapped me out of my own thoughts. “He’s a hemophiliac.”

  Both Freitag and Steph stopped working and turned to look at me. I reached out and presented the bloody silver medical ID bracelet to them. Steph took it and looked at it closely. “Where did you get this?”

  I raised the amputated hand and showed it to them.

  Freitag looked down at the bird-thin bleeder.

  “All the more reason to get those bandages. Now!” Steph emphasized.

  Separating my emotions from the situation, I said, “I don’t think we should.”

  “You want him to die?” Freitag snapped, letting her anger run free.

  “Calm down,” Dalhover ordered, his hands wrapped very comfortably around his rifle.

  “I…” Freitag started, but couldn’t find the words to proceed.

  “Zed,” Steph cut in. “We talked about exactly this kind of situation. The chips are down. You need to go get those bandages.”

  “I will,” I told her flatly. “But it would be a mistake.”

  Steph’s eyes went cold with anger, but her face showed no emotion at all.

  I asked, “Can you save him? Even if I get the bandages, can you save him?”

  Freitag was ready to explode. Steph’s face didn’t change.

  “If we were at the hospital right now,” I asked, “in the emergency room, back before all this virus shit went down, could you save him?”

  “I don’t think…”

  I’d heard bullshit wrapped in authority enough times in my life that I didn’t need to hear any more to know what was coming. I cut Steph off. “Answer me honestly. Even if we were at the hospital, could you save him?”

  Steph’s anger shot up in a rush. She ground her teeth and pinched her lips but she didn’t speak until she breathed in and out a few times. Finally, with an unexpected meekness, she answered, “A hemophiliac with a double amputation…maybe, but his odds would be low.”

  “And here?” I asked. “Here, with no medical facilities, no coagulating agents, no doctors, no sanitary facility? Do we want to use our precious few medical supplies in an attempt to save a man who has…what, a one or two percent chance of living through the night?”

  “We’re not even going to try?” Freitag let all of her disgust for the question flow through her words.

  I pushed on, “And what if he does make it through the night? What are his chances of being alive once infection sets in? And you know it will. You have to put tourniquets on both arms to stop the bleeding, am I right? He’s a hemophiliac. His blood won’t clot. A tourniquet is the only way we can stop the bleeding. But with the tourniquets on, the flesh lower on the arm will die. Then what?”

  Steph’s gaze fell to the floor. She couldn’t stomach giving up.

  “He’s right,” Dalhover rasped.