Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm Read online

  Slow Burn 10

  Firestorm

  Bobby Adair

  Beezle Media, LLC

  Links

  http://www.bobbyadair.com

  http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor

  Cover Art by

  Bobby Adair & Alex Saskalidis

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Final Words

  Also by Bobby Adair

  Dusty’s Diary

  Freedom’s Fire

  The Last Survivors

  Ebola K

  Prologue

  I’m Zed Zane, but you know that.

  What you don’t know is, it’s been fourteen years since the virus destroyed humanity’s hubris-happy, high-tech hyper-age. More than a decade since the electric grids last sparked across the wire and cool, clean water stopped flowing from the taps. A lifetime—the entire life of a teenager—since the cities collapsed.

  All those millions of nifty gadgets that numbed us to the daily drudge of subsistence in a corpo-centric economy, all of our progress and knowledge, our universities and institutions, those cavernous stadiums and sprawling airports, and maybe most of all, our dreams of a sparkly future, were lost. Just more grist for the grind of time. And we owed it all to a half-alive microbe, a tiny virus that jumped from a monkey to a bat to a pig or whatever, somewhere in the jungles of Africa.

  We were nearly eight billion strong at the time, splattered across the globe, ticking away in cities linked by weather-worn highways that rumbled under an endless rush of spinning tires. Jets crisscrossed the sky, hauling ogle-eyed travelers to the novel comfort of dinners at McDonald’s restaurants in faraway cities. Electronic toys blasted a 24/7 kaleidoscope of digital trifles at our faces, linking us into a communal, semi-conscious existence that none of us understood. All of it, compounding and congealing into a scab that shrank the world of humanity into something that felt small, false, and tenuous.

  The virus shattered the foundations of that world and sent it crumbling into rubble.

  Those of us who survived that first year did our best to rebuild. What else could we do? Mope and starve?

  At the dawn of Year 14—fourteen years after the virus hit—I was living in Balmorhea. Even before the virus ravaged the world, Balmorhea was a dying town eight hours from everywhere in the remote desert of West Texas. It was the kind of place any pre-collapse suburbanite might have called a shithole.

  The town was laid out in a tidy grid a half-mile square. Mostly houses and trailers, a school, some businesses, a few government buildings. It was a compact place, just big enough for the five or six hundred oil field roughnecks, farmers, and ranch hands who lived there. Balmorhea’s layout, coupled with the hundreds of miles of desert and arid hills surrounding it, made it easy to defend from the millions of infected who still lurked in the cities and dense forests of East Texas. Primarily because few had the motivation or the fortitude to cross the desert on foot.

  What made Balmorhea a refuge, though, wasn’t only its isolation, but San Solomon Springs, which gushed twenty million gallons of fresh water out of the earth every day. The spring bubbled just four miles down Highway 17 from the town, providing an endless supply of water, which, before the collapse, had been used to turn the patch of dry desert dirt around Balmorhea into bountiful farm and pastureland. Well, bountiful is a relative term.

  Originally, there were eighteen of us, me and the people I’d escaped Austin with. Through the years, we took in another four hundred or so who’d wandered out of the desert, hailing from Amarillo, Abilene, El Paso, Cotulla. Any other town you could name. Nearly all of them were “normals,” people with a natural immunity to the virus, brave survivors who’d fought their way through the infected hordes to get out of the cities and stumble upon us. Only thirteen of us were Slow Burns, the rare ones.

  Together, we cultivated the fallow fields. We managed our herds of cattle, goats, and sheep. We hunted antelope on the plain and javelina in the nearby mountains, seldom venturing farther than a few miles from our fortified oasis—at least, most of us didn’t. Murphy, me, and a handful of others ranged all over West Texas and into New Mexico, scavenging what we could and looking for survivors to bring into the fold. We traded with the tiny clans and homesteads we found, especially a group who’d set themselves up in the oilfields south of Odessa, pumping petroleum and trading it for food.

  Behind our wall and rings of defenses, we felt safe—successful, even. Because of the spring, we were immune to droughts, never suffering any shortage of food. Thanks to scavenged solar panels and small wind turbines, we were able to maintain a modest flow of electricity all through town. We traded for enough fuel to keep our tractors, a few pickup trucks, and our small fleet of Humvees running. We’d even reared some horses and we
re hoping to husband them into a large herd. We had an excellent hospital—by third world standards—a growing library, an underutilized school for the very few children who survived infancy, a bar with plenty of homebrewed alcohol, and a simple system of government.

  Despite all that had happened to the world to our friends, our families, and to us, we felt like we were humanity’s chance to avoid extinction, a shining beacon in the desert. None of us realized that collective conceit was a symptom of the new version of the shrunken world we lived in—Balmorhea. We didn’t know, perhaps we didn’t want to know, what danger lay beyond the desert that swaddled us in relative comfort.

  1

  SAFETY, FOOD, and FRIENDS

  GOOD PEOPLE WELCOME

  NO SHITHEADS ALLOWED

  The words were painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart Supercenter. I’d added that last part, to no one’s amusement but mine.

  A red dotted line underscored the message and led the eye to the sidewalk below, where a reinforced steel cabinet sat bolted into the concrete. A combination lock kept the cabinet’s door secure. The combination for the lock was painted on the outside of the cabinet, making it accessible to anyone who’d retained their cognitive abilities—normal people, and Slow Burns like me and Murphy. Full Whites wouldn’t look twice at it.

  The hordes of infected who still roamed the world so many years after the collapse had no chance of opening the cabinet. They wouldn’t even understand the significance of the cable pinned to the wall carrying electricity down from a few solar cells mounted on the roof. Those solar cells kept a battery charged that powered the shortwave radio located inside. Along with operation and contact instructions, sixteen radios like the one in the cabinet were scattered from the eastern edge of El Paso, all the way back to Odessa and Midland, down to Marfa, up through Pecos, and as far north as Carlsbad—most of the towns of any size on the roads that spiderwebbed out from Balmorhea.

  That’s where we were, in Carlsbad, responding to a radio call from a woman and her friends, good people—we hoped—looking to join our ever-growing desert community. Murphy and I knelt behind a commercial-sized HVAC unit on the roof of a long-defunct industrial equipment business. I had my binoculars to my eyes to get a clear view across Highway 285 and the asphalt acres of the Walmart’s cracking parking lot. At least a hundred Whites lay scattered there, shot to pieces, buzzing with flies. None were more than a day or two dead. Thirteen people hung from the wall on the front of the Walmart, tied by their splayed feet, upside-down, stripped bare. They looked like they’d been trampled before being strung up. Blood ran in streaks down the wall. Vermin scurried across the asphalt below, scrapping over clotted bits of gore.

  My thoughts slipped out into words I hadn’t meant to speak: “Suffering for suffering’s sake.”

  “They’re dead.” declared Murphy.

  “I think two or three might be alive,” I decided.

  “It’s windy,” Murphy countered. “That movement you think you see, that’s the wind blowing their heads back and forth.”

  He might have been right. Hell, he was most likely right, but to admit it meant abandoning the tortured people who’d taken a chance and called us on the shortwave, then waited for us to arrive. And waited. Until this happened. I felt responsible for their fate.

  “What do you think happened?” asked Murphy. “What do you think it means?”

  I stood to get a clear view up and down the highway. A scattering of rusting cars. Creosote bushes and tumbleweeds in the median. Countless squat buildings up and down both sides of the thoroughfare—hiding places for a hundred threats.

  “You’re already being stupid,” Murphy told me.

  “No. I’m looking to see if this is a trap.”

  “Says the rat while he sniffs the cheese.” Murphy rolled his eyes. “Stupid. There’s that word again.”

  “You think somebody killed them because they’re Slow Burns, or do you think they’re regular Whites?”

  “I think somebody is going to shoot you for exposing yourself like a moron.”

  “Not with the wind blowing like it is.” I pointed at a pair of multi-story hotels standing a full block back from the main road, well north of us.

  Murphy groaned.

  I said, “If a sniper with any kind of skill is lurking for a shot, he’d be there. Too far in this wind.”

  “You’re an endless fountain of know-it-all bullshit, you know that?”

  “Talent comes in all flavors.”

  “I’m trying to keep you alive, and, like usual, you’re not listening.”

  I told him, “I always listen, especially when you pretend you’re the only one who’s been shot at before. I just don’t agree with you right now.”

  “And how often am I right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Most of the time,” Murphy argued.

  “Are you two ever going to finish up here?” It was Dalhover. He’d climbed the ladder on the back of the building and was looking at us from the edge of the roof.

  Murphy pointed at me. “Dumbass here wants us to walk into a trap.”

  “You see a trap?” rasped Dalhover.

  I quickly explained about the bodies we saw hanging from the Walmart. “At least one of them is alive. Maybe three.”

  “Maybe one,” countered Murphy.

  “And, this is our fault,” I claimed.

  “Oh, good God,” groused Dalhover. “I thought we were past all that Null Spot bullshit.”

  Murphy laughed. “You haven’t been out on a run with him in a couple years, Top. Dipshit here is hard-wired for White Knight knuckleheadism.”

  “Responsibility is responsibility,” I argued, “even when it sucks. Especially when it sucks.”

  Dalhover snorted and climbed down the ladder, calling, “Do whatever you want. You’re gonna do it anyway.”

  Murphy slumped against the rusting air conditioner and groaned dramatically.

  “If that woman is going to have any chance,” I told him, “we need to do this now.”

  “It’s gonna be a terrible plan. It’s always a terrible plan. At least be quick about telling it to me. Can you do that for me, please?”

  2

  Grace and Jazz both wore the same infected white skin as Murphy and me, though Jazz was generously tattooed—a remnant of life before the collapse. They’d made the run into New Mexico with us, driving a pale green four-wheel-drive Suburban, a vehicle once been used by the border patrol for monitoring the wild desert between I-10 and the Rio Grande. Like the Humvee Murphy, Dalhover, and I rode in, it was a dependable workhorse—not pretty, but tough and reliable. All of us who regularly ventured into the badlands had our favorite vehicles.

  Dalhover, though, hadn’t been out on a mission in years. I figured he’d come along because he wanted one last hurrah before his advancing age confined him to a rocking chair. He drove the Humvee. I rode shotgun—literally—and Murphy stood through the roof hatch, manning the .50.

  A scrounged aluminum ladder lashed to the side of our Humvee, Murphy on the machine gun, and bold action made up most of my plan for riding into the teeth of what might well be an ambush. Dalhover gunned the Humvee’s engine and we lumbered onto the narrow street that would take us half a block over to the highway. I waved at Grace and Jazz who were going to remain in the lot behind the industrial supply building, listening on the radio, and staying ready to make a dash for safety should danger arise.

  Dalhover paused at the corner stop sign—some habits die hard, others come back when you don’t expect them. The highway in both directions was littered with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. Power poles had fallen here and there, alerting us to keep an eye out for downed powerlines—always a hazard. The thick cables could get caught under a wheel and wrap around an axle. Through the intersection and across the highway, Dalhover drove straight into the Walmart parking lot. He slalomed the Humvee past some sand dunes that had accumulated over the shells of cars
and blazed a path for the suspended semi-corpses. He called to Murphy, “You see anything?”

  “Nothing alive,” he answered.

  Dalhover skidded to a stop at the curb below the hanging bodies.

  I flung my door open, and with Murphy’s help from above, unlashed the ladder. He stayed put behind the .50. Dalhover left the engine running and stepped outside with his weapon up, ready to kill anything that moved.