Slow Burn (Book 9): Sanctum Read online

  “Sanctuary?” I guessed. “Hope?”

  Murphy stared out the window. “Home for people who thought they were going to live through this.”

  He was right about that. Now nearly all of them were dead, if what we’d seen at the outpost across the street was any indication. “You’re afraid that maybe Rachel, Dalhover, and the others might not have made it.”

  “They probably made it out there,” said Murphy. “You don’t know my sister when she gets an idea in her head. She runs people over.”

  “I’ll bet.” I slouched in my chair and let Murphy go at his pace.

  He took a bit before he spoke up again. “Truth is, I’m afraid if we go all the way the hell out to West Texas, we’ll find more of this.” Murphy pointed out at the campus again. “One more pot of gold at the end of the rainbow spilled over and full of shit. Everybody dead.”

  “With hope in their hearts,” I said, “thinking they were going to live happily ever after.”

  “That’s how every safe place has been so far.” Murphy seemed sadder than I’d seen him since Mandi died. “They all turn to shit.”

  I didn’t mean to nod, but I did anyway. The truth of what Murphy was saying overwhelmed any effort I could have put into denying it.

  “I think a lot about going out there, but I don’t want to,” said Murphy. “I think I’d rather not know. I like it when I can think that they’re all out there sitting on a beach beside the lake, sunning themselves, and thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner. Like that’s the biggest problem they have to deal with. I want to think they’re gossiping about the neighbors and being envious because some dude likes some girl and all that shit that used to be important before that shitty virus came and fucked up the whole goddamned world.”

  Murphy sat back and stretched a pained smile. “You’re starting to rub off on me, man, with all your dark-hearted shit. I spent too much time being afraid they’re all dead and it’s getting too hard to pretend that they aren’t.”

  “You want to go out there and see?” I asked, ready to go outside, find a running vehicle, and start the drive. “I’m in. Fuck all this shit. We can do it. Or get Martin to drop us off.”

  “Can’t,” said Murphy. “It’d be like going to the North Pole when you’re twelve and proving to yourself there’s no Santa even though you already knew there wasn’t one.”

  “Because you’d lose hope?”

  “Can’t live without hope, man.” Murphy looked into the distance. “Can’t do it.”

  Chapter 25

  The second building was built like a cube with two stairwells at opposite corners and a hallway on each floor that traced a square track around the shape of the building. Inside rooms and outside rooms all opened on the halls on each floor. Besides that, going through building two was no different that going through building number one: check a room, kill some Whites, move on. Things got different on the second floor. It looked like a battle had been fought. We didn’t find any living Whites, but the halls were littered with corpses of both infected and normal humans.

  Weapons lay on the floor amidst the dead. Murphy knelt down and checked nearly every weapon we saw but found none that had more than a bullet or two. The bodies had been stripped of extra magazines. It looked like Fritz’s people had come to the veterinary science building to protect the scientists from the naked horde. They fought in the halls until they had nothing left to fight with except their fists.

  Fists were nothing against the horde.

  I looked up and down the hall at all the dead and reaffirmed another lesson that didn’t stick with most people. Bullets weren’t much better than fists.

  Murphy and I worked our way around the third floor, checking each room, each office, each lab. We saw the remains of people I thought might be scientists, but it was hard to tell. And everywhere, Whites were dead, all of them. There weren’t even any cannibalizing the corpses.

  When we made our circuit around the square hall in the square-shaped building and stopped before going up the stairs. I asked, “What do you think? You ready for another floor?”

  “Seems like we’re getting warmer,” said Murphy, “but this place is starting to creep me out. I don’t see why we’re not finding any more live Whites. Makes me think they’re all ganging up somewhere to fuck with us.”

  “Maybe the scientists killed them.”

  “They’re all smart professors and stuff. Maybe they figured out how to kill all the Whites in this building and save their asses.” Murphy shrugged. “Maybe it pays to be smart.” Murphy made a point of looking at me. “Doesn’t seem to have helped you, though.”

  I feigned offense. “Fuck you.”

  Murphy swung the stairwell door open, and I jogged up the stairs, avoiding the corpses.

  At the fourth floor, the double doors leading to the hall were each open, held on each side by the dead on the floor. The walls were scarred from shrapnel and burns. Grenades had been put to use. The gore of shredded bodies on the floor attested to the certainty my guess was right.

  We stopped on the landing and saw down a hallway that stretched straight down one side of the building. The slaughter on this floor was worse than the ones below. We also saw live Whites, seven or eight of them, with faces buried in the bloody remains on the floor. One of them looked up at us but went right back to feeding.

  I leaned close to Murphy and whispered, “Back to work?”

  Murphy put a restraining hand on my shoulder.

  “What?”

  He pointed first at one body, and then a second laying on the floor in the hall that led off to our left.

  “That one’s still bleeding.” Murphy wagged his finger to emphasize. “That other one doesn’t look like it’s been dead long. Look at his mouth. It’s still drooling.”

  I knelt down but stayed inside the stairwell, content for the moment to keep myself somewhat concealed. “Doesn’t look like a bullet wound.” I looked up at Murphy for confirmation.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll bet it was an alpha White. Maybe this one got knifed in a squabble over food. Better yet, maybe one of them turned serial killer and is walking the halls doing our work for us.”

  “See, that’s what I mean,” said Murphy.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes being smart doesn’t do you any good at all.”

  I peeked around the corner and saw no movement.

  Murphy stayed in the stairwell. “I got a bad feeling about this one.”

  I stepped over to the bleeding White out in the hall, thinking that a closer look at the wound would answer some questions, and thinking that I really should be paying more attention to Murphy. His intuitions in these matters were seldom wrong. But I was there, by the body, and nothing bad had happened. I nudged it none too gently with the tip of my machete, puncturing another wound, and draining more blood out of a body that wasn’t all the way dead yet.

  I knelt down, and the sound of something whooshing through the air startled me as I saw a dark streak.

  Something thunked.

  Murphy shouted, “Shit.”

  I rolled away as I fell over, not taking time to understand the threat, just trusting Murphy’s reaction. Trying to get my balance, I scrambled across the hall and tumbled toward the corner.

  In the milliseconds after I pulled myself around the corner, an arrow swished, hit the corner of the wall and ricocheted away just inches from my face.

  “What the fuck?” I looked at Murphy.

  He was still surprised, but he had dropped to a knee and peeked around the corner. “Hey!” he called. “Stop that.”

  I didn’t hear a response, but I did hear the Whites down the hall behind me—the same hall that had been my refuge from the arrows that just flew up the length of the other hall. It was now a trap. I jumped to my feet as I raised my machete.

  The Whites weren’t running, at least not fast, as they were having trouble finding footing with all the dead and debris on t
he floor.

  I stepped into the first one’s charge, and dealt a mortal wound that didn’t kill him instantly but would prevent him from ever getting off the floor again. Thank God for all the crap. It was keeping the Whites from massing and charging me, that and their inherent greed. They all wanted to have the first bite of warm flesh. They all wanted to taste hot blood pumping onto their tongues. I killed the second one, dead before his knees buckled.

  Behind me, Murphy was shouting, but I didn’t give a thought to what he was saying or what he was doing. I saw more Whites coming down the hall toward me and if I didn’t take them all out, I’d be dead. Either Murphy would handle his end of the problem or he wouldn’t.

  That’s just the way it goes.

  I sloughed off the fucked-up emotions that had been bothering me all day, calmed myself, and solved my problems, one at a time, clinically, efficiently, letting the Whites do the work with their zealous momentum and greed. I only had to make sure one of my blades was in the right place, held steady in a firm hand or swung with just enough force to get the job done.

  And then it was.

  All were dead. Too soon.

  I stood in the hall twenty feet down from the stairwell, unaware I’d even worked my way so far. Immersed in the Zen of heartless slaughter, I lost track of other things.

  It was all I wanted. All I needed.

  “Hey ninja boy.”

  I drew in one last breath of demon peace, felt one more moment of warm blood running over my skin, and turned to look at Murphy, who was out of the stairwell, standing in the hall and grinning like a little kid at a birthday party.

  “What the fuck, dude?”

  He waved me over and pointed up the other hall.

  I worked my way over the bodies.

  “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  I rounded the corner and looked. Down at the other end of the hall, two Whites stood naked but armed, one with knives in each hand, the other generously tattooed and carrying a bow. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately make the connection as to why.

  Murphy punched me in the shoulder. “Grace and Jazz, that’s them, dumbass.”

  My mouth fell open. “Holy shit.”

  “Wow,” said Grace. “I thought you’d be dead.”

  Jazz pulled an arrow back in her bow. “If you don’t stop looking at me that way, Zed, I’m going to put this arrow right through your pervert eyeball.”

  Chapter 26

  Awkward is the best word to describe it. Murphy and I walked to the far end of the hall. Lots of smiles. Everybody looking at everybody else’s private parts while pretending not to. No hugs.

  “I’m happy to see you guys made it,” said Murphy. Mostly he was looking at Jazz.

  Grace nodded at me. “We were out scrounging when the naked ones showed up. We didn’t get caught in the fight.”

  I couldn’t help but look her up and down again.

  Grace rolled her eyes and turned to Murphy. “We figured the best way to help was to take a page from Zed’s playbook and fit in with these naked ones and kill them while they were busy trying to kill everybody else.”

  Murphy scanned the hall. “All of these?”

  Jazz shook her head. “The Aggies did most of this.”

  “We didn’t realize the infected were in these buildings with the scientists until it was too late,” said Grace.

  “It was too late everywhere.” Jazz frowned but looked more hurt than angry.

  “We checked the outposts,” said Grace. “They had them set up all around the perimeter of the veterinary science complex.”

  “Fritz showed us,” I said.

  “Fritz made it?” Jazz asked, perking up. “Where is he?”

  I pointed vaguely northwest. “We put him and some other people from the infirmary on the helicopter to Fort Hood.”

  “Wait.” Grace stepped toward me, very interested. “Fort Hood. The Army is there? Is it a safe zone?”

  “It was a first.” Murphy shook his head. “The regular Army had it that way. But you know. The virus hit them like everybody else. Then that bunch of yahoos who chased your guys out of the Capitol—the Survivor Army—took over Fort Hood and made it their base.”

  Grace’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t understand.”

  “Long story,” I cut in. “Bottom line, most of the Survivor Army assholes are dead.”

  “How?” she asked.

  Murphy looked at me.

  Grace said, “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “These naked Whites got ‘em,” I told her. Not the whole truth, but not a lie. “Me and Murphy came across a helicopter pilot while we were scavenging.”

  “Wait.” Grace raised her hands. “What were you doing in Killeen? We dropped you naked in the middle of the night like seventy miles from there.”

  “Like I said. Long story.” I looked up and down the halls, thinking more Whites should be coming to find the source of our talking.

  Grace saw me looking and pointed toward the end of the hall where Jazz had nearly skewered me with a couple of arrows. “If you killed the ones down there, then I think this floor is clear.”

  “Anyways,” said Murphy. “We got this dude with a helicopter. Loaded it up with ammo and guns and came here because, you know, we said we’d meet you here.” He looked again at the dead on the floor and the happiness he’d been gushing since seeing the girls turned back to the morose mood he’d been in since the helicopter dropped us on the drill field. “But it looks like we’re too late to do any good.”

  I elbowed Murphy. “Don’t be such a pessimist. We saved Fritz and those people from the infirmary. We’re rescuing Grace and Jazz now.”

  Jazz laughed harshly. “We’re doing fine, Sir Galahad.”

  “Sorry,” I told her. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Chapter 27

  We organized ourselves with Murphy watching the stairs at one corner of the building and Jazz watching the stairs at the opposite corner. The only other way to get to the fourth floor was to use the elevators, and they didn’t function. The roofs of the veterinary sciences buildings had been covered with a hodgepodge of solar panels just as the pharmacy building had been, but non-essentials like the elevators had been disconnected from the limited supply of electricity.

  Of course, thinking back to my experience in Brackenridge Hospital back in August, the Whites bravely climbed the elevator shafts. Conclusion: the veterinary sciences building was indefensible.

  Grace and I walked a third of the way down a hall that I hadn’t yet seen. The inside wall of the corridor was lined with glass-faced oaken cabinets, eight feet tall and six feet wide, that looked antique and weighty as well. I guessed the cabinets had been moved to this much newer building when their original home on campus had been repurposed. The myriad of taxidermied animals and formaldehyde-preserved specimens that had been in the cabinets were on the floor among the dead. Most of the stuffed animals had been ripped open, probably by Whites disappointed at what they found inside.

  One cabinet was out of place against the opposite side of the passageway. When we got to it, Grace said, “Help me slide this out of the way. The stockroom door is behind it.”

  “Good idea,” I told her. “The Whites didn’t know there was a door, so they didn’t move the cabinet and try to break in.”

  “Brilliant, Sherlock.”

  “Sherlock?” I would have complained about the sarcastic nickname but I was sure I already sounded whiney.

  “I heard Murphy say it,” replied Grace.

  I sighed, and we both got on one side of the cabinet and pushed. The cumbersome thing must have weighed four hundred pounds.

  The cabinet’s feet screeched on the floor, and Jazz leaned out of her stairwell to hush us with a gesture.

  In a voice just loud enough to reach the stairwell door, Grace asked, “Infected?”

  Jazz shook her head. “Just be quiet.”

  Grace looked at me, and we put our shoulders
back into moving the cabinet. It screeched again, but exposed the door hidden behind.

  Grace stepped away to catch her breath. She looked me up and down. “I thought I was going to have to trade you in for Murphy.”

  I tried not to pant and reveal what an effort it had been to move the massive oak display case. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  Grace stepped up to the door and knocked gently. “It’s me.”

  The doorknob clicked, and the door swung open.

  The room wasn’t as small as I expected, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet with metal shelves around the walls and a row of shelves down the center, filled with jars and bottles of who knew what—specimens, chemicals, and whatnot. The shelves didn’t leave a lot of space for the men and women squatting on the floor and standing inside. Some of them had weapons in their hands—a few rifles, a pistol.

  One of them, an older man who looked to be a skeleton with a bowed back and bald head, stepped out of the stockroom as he looked at Grace through thick glasses. “Well?”

  “The building is clear,” said Grace, “though more infected can come in downstairs and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

  “That’s disheartening,” said the old man. He looked at me. “Who’s this? Another white-skinned survivor like you?”

  “He’s from Austin,” said Grace. “We met him and Murphy, also a white-skinned survivor, before we left to come here.”

  “They’re the ones you came with?” he asked. “The ones who you lost along the way?” He smiled, showing old yellow teeth as he looked at me.

  I extended a hand to shake. “Zed Zane.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He took my hand. “Dr. Oaks, but I suppose you can call me Melvin if you want. Mel, if you’re the casual type.”

  “Dr. Oaks.” I smiled though the casual encounter was making me nervous. Slipping into old-world habits had never done anybody any good. I looked over my shoulder for Whites who weren’t there, and I cringed when the people from inside came out into the hall, relatively quiet but making entirely too much noise.

  “Don’t go too far,” said Grace. “In case we have to get you back inside.”