Slow Burn: Zero Day, Book 1 Read online

  With waning dizziness, I straightened up. I gulped down more of the sports drink and gingerly walked out of the kitchen.

  I stopped for a brief pause in front of a large mirror in the foyer.

  “Jeez.” I looked like crap, covered with blood, hair awry, an enormous makeshift bandage on my arm, and my skin so pale that I wondered how much blood I’d lost.

  I went into the laundry room, stripped off my clothes, and threw them along with my gory tennis shoes into the washer. Naked, and still covered in the most disgusting goo, I walked to the guest bath and got into the shower to scrub myself clean and peel the crusty bandage off of my arm under the warm water.

  After the shower, I sat naked on the bed and finished the sports drink as the sound of the washing machine in the next room vibrated. The wound on my arm oozed puss and blood. I’d need to rewrap it with whatever first aid supplies were left.

  I picked up the remote and turned on the television. My thumb went on autopilot surf mode as I thought about what to do. The police, the hospital, or both?

  News flickered to life on the screen.

  Click. News.

  Click. News.

  Click. Still nothing but news.

  “News sucks.”

  I settled for one of the national cable news channels and turned up the volume.

  The story was the same as Sunday, more rioting in France, but Germany, Italy, and England were added to the list. A panel of experts, or rather, speculators, argued about a virulent flu of some sort. International travel had been suspended by most countries. Airline stocks were tanking and the rest of the market was following their prices south. There was video footage of overwhelmed hospitals, and bodies lying in the streets. An announcement from the White House was expected in a few hours.

  The washer buzzed, so I went into the laundry room, put my things into the dryer, and started it up.

  Back in the guest room, I turned down the volume on the television and tried 911 again.

  This time, it rang.

  Chapter 3

  Meeting a naked psycho-creep in a house full of dead people was sure to leave a negative impression on the soon-to-be arriving police, so I retrieved my damp clothes from the dryer and dressed.

  Suddenly worried about disturbing the crime scene, I chose to sit in a tiny clean spot in the wide foyer, taking care to keep my hands in my lap.

  It wasn’t long before the doorbell chimed twice followed by a series of rapid beats on the door.

  “It’s the police. Open up.” A voice commanded from outside.

  “All right. Just a sec.” I stood as quickly as I could, considering my blood loss.

  Again, pounding on the door. “It’s the police. Open up.”

  “All right,” I croaked, then muttered, “Impatient bastards.”

  More beating on the door. “Sir, you need to open up.”

  I pulled the door open a dozen inches.

  Two policemen fixed me in the predatory stare of their big, black, bug-eyed glasses before glancing down to the blood-covered white marble floor. One officer’s hand landed on the butt of his gun followed quickly by the other officer’s.

  Very loudly, one of them commanded me to step slowly back from the door. The other officer ordered me

  to show my hands.

  “What?” was all I got out before the cop closest to me rushed forward, shouldered the door, and knocked me onto my back.

  Before I could react, a cop was on me. My arm was wrenched around behind my back and I was leveraged onto my belly. A heavy knee landed on my neck, smashing my face into the floor. A handcuff caught one wrist. My other wrist was yanked back and cuffed to the first.

  It all happened faster than I could come up with a snarky comment. “Hey! Hey! I’m the one who called you!”

  They pretended like I hadn’t spoken.

  “Don’t move!” one of the officers commanded, as he took his weight off of me.

  I found myself staring at his shiny black shoe, situated just inches from my face.

  I heard footsteps as the other officer went further into the house.

  “Oh, my God!” There was revulsion in the other officer’s voice.

  “What?” the cop standing over me asked.

  Nothing for a moment.

  “Oh, my God,” said the second officer again.

  “What?!” the first officer demanded. Then, to me he barked, “Don’t move.”

  I watched his feet back slowly toward the living room. “Everything all right, Bill?”

  Nothing.

  “Bill?”

  Just footsteps, shuffling backward.

  Then the Bill’s voice again, deflated this time. “Oh, my God.”

  The second officer’s voice came next. “That’s sick!”

  Then the footsteps got louder again.

  The first officer’s voice yelled, “No!”

  “You sick pig!” the second guy yelled, as I saw his shiny black shoe coming at my face.

  Chapter 4

  My right eye was swollen into a bluish lump. My lips were chapped. My throat was dry. My formerly clean shirt had a fresh coat of dried blood, some of it mine, all down the front. I was handcuffed to a metal table in a police interrogation room, alone and staring at the camera in the upper corner.

  With no windows and no clocks, I didn’t know what time it was. I only knew I’d been in there for many, many long hours.

  While I waited for my unscrupulous interrogator to return, I amused myself by tapping out a rhythm on the table, and alternately extending a middle finger from each hand at the camera above.

  I leaned over and lay my face flat on the table, drawing minor comfort from the temperature of the steel. I closed my eyes, knowing that as soon as I dozed off, my interrogator would return to deprive me of sleep.

  I heard the door open, but didn’t respond.

  The phonebook slammed down on the table next to my head. I was too exhausted to react.

  I heard a voice tell someone else, “This one’s still out. I don’t know what sent all the crackheads on a killing spree this week, but we’ve got to get that shit off the street.”

  “Yeah,” another voice agreed. “I’ve got mine next door. Let me know if you come up with anything.”

  A moment later, the chair across the table from me scooted out and I heard a heavy man sit down.

  He followed with a few exaggerated sighs. He loudly sipped from his coffee. He clinked the hard paper cup on the table next to my head.

  Silence passed as he decided what to do next. A sharp exhalation and a hard slap on the back of my head announced his decision.

  “Hey crackhead. Wake up.”

  I didn’t react to the slap. Pain was becoming surprisingly easy to ignore.

  I lolled my head in another direction and opened my eyes to look at my angry tormentor.

  “What were you on?”

  “What?” I feigned ignorance. I guess I was too hardheaded to cooperate.

  He slapped me again.

  “I thought police didn’t do this sort of thing anymore,” I said.

  That earned me another slap.

  The detective leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath and stared at me.

  “Look, Ezekiel…Ezekiel, that’s your name, right?”

  I picked my head up off the table. I straightened up in the chair, out of arm’s reach for the moment. “Yeah, but my friends call me Zed. Zed Zane.”

  “Look, Zed, maybe you got started off on the wrong foot here.”

  I looked down at the worn phone book on the desk and gave voice to my frustrations. “What? Is it your turn now to beat me with a phone book? Do you guys work in shifts or what? What time is it? Why can’t I get a lawyer? Why do you guys keep telling me the camera doesn’t work? Don’t you have one of those, ah…those, ah…who are those guys they have on TV? Oh, yeah, detectives. Why don’t you get one of them to look at the crime scene and confirm what I’ve been telling you all night? It has been all n
ight hasn’t it?”

  The detective ignored my outburst for a several long breaths. “Are you done?”

  In response, I chose a conversational technique that hadn’t failed me since junior high: I ignored him.

  The big man leaned his furry forearms on the table. “You gotta understand, Zed. You come in here in wet clothes that you just washed all the evidence out of. You assault the arresting officers.” He shook his head.

  “Bullshit.” I’d heard that accusation a thousand times at that point.

  “You talk about killing your stepdad…You did kill him right? I mean you admitted that much, right? It’s right here in the file.”

  Not any less irritated, I said, “I told you, it was self-defense. He was attacking me.” I drew a deep breath. “And where the hell do people even get phone books anymore?”

  The officer crossed his big fuzzy arms and said nothing for a moment.

  I did the same.

  “Are you through?”

  “Through with what?”

  “Acting like an ass?” he said.

  “What? Are you kidding me? Really? I go to my mom’s house on yesterday morning. I find my stepdad going all cannibal on her in the living room. He attacks me and I stab him with a knife to defend myself. I call the cops and then Dudley Do-Right and his partner show up, don’t even ask me a question, and decide instead to beat the shit out of me and drop me here. Does that about sum it up?”

  No response. I went on. “Now after who knows how long I’ve been in here, with you guys taking turns yelling at me, calling me a liar, oh, and beating me in the head with the phone book, you wanna say I’m acting like an ass? Well forgive me for being so goddamned rude!

  “Hi, I’m Zed Zane. I’m so pleased to meet you. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  He didn’t react. He just stared at me.

  So, we played the staring game for a good five minutes before I won and he said, “Are you through now?”

  “Whatever,” I responded.

  “Let’s start again. I’m Detective Tom Wolsely.” He extended a hand across the table to shake mine.

  I looked at his hand but made no move to respond. Of course, I did have two hands cuffed to the table.

  “Don’t be an ass, Zed. It’s polite to shake a hand when it’s offered.”

  “Maybe you guys should have thought about that whenever the hell it was that you locked me in here. How long have I been in here, anyway?”

  The hand still hung over the table, just inches above the metal loop that constrained mine. “Zed?”

  “Oh, good God.” I angled a wrist up and opened my palm.

  He jiggled my hand roughly in the cuffs.

  “Thank you, Zed.”

  I let go and let my hand drop to the stainless steel.

  “You have to understand, Zed, this story about your stepdad turning into a cannibal…what did you really think we’d think, Zed? It all sounds a little far-fetched, don’t you think? He was a deacon in the church. A member of the school board. A retired principal. Are we really supposed to believe he got all hopped up on crack and killed your mother and the neighbor?”

  I nodded. “Of course I do. I thought the whole thing was pretty crazy when I got to my mom’s for lunch. Look, don’t you have some kind of forensics team or something? Don’t you guys look at evidence before you start beating the crap out of suspects anymore? I mean, Christ!”

  “We’ve got people at the scene,” Detective Wolsely told me.

  “So what’s the deal then? Are we going to just sit in this room until you get tired of beating me, or are you going to look at the evidence and then apologize to me?”

  “Look, Zed. Let’s just put all of that aside for the moment. You keep saying you went to your mom’s house yesterday morning––”

  “I did.”

  “––and you tell us the story. But your story is so full of holes that you could drive a truck through it.”

  “What? What holes? How can there be any holes? It’s not like you talked to the other witnesses, because you can’t, because they’re dead.”

  “Zed, calm down. I’m trying to help you here, and in return I’d like for you to help me, too.”

  “By being your punching bag?”

  “Now, Zed, that wasn’t called for.”

  “I don’t see how any time could be called for better than this one, do you? I mean, I have been in here for hours, being beaten and called a liar, yelled at, and berated, threatened, and, oh, did I mention, getting beaten like punching bag?”

  Wolsely leaned back in his chair and froze in his cross-armed pose again.

  “Whatever.” I sat back in my chair and drew a few deep, calming breaths.

  “Zed, you say you got to your parents’ house yesterday morning, and you found your mom and the dead neighbor. Then you fought with your stepdad and that he was killed in the fight.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what happened.”

  “Well, Zed, that’s not possible.”

  “What do you mean? How could you even come to that conclusion?”

  “Zed, we’re not complete idiots here in the police department. For one thing, our forensic guys are pretty good at determining time of death. It’s simpler than you think, especially when it’s recent. They just compare the core temperature to the ambient temperature, and get a pretty quick estimate of the time of death.”

  “Okay, I watch TV, too. So what’s the problem?”

  “You stepdad has been dead for at least two full days.”

  “What? What? That’s not possible.”

  “See, Zed?” Wolsely said. “Holes in your story.”

  “Wait, wait. What day is this?”

  “What day is it?” Wolsely repeated.

  “Yes. I told you I went to my parents’ house on Sunday afternoon. I told you I passed out…I guess from blood loss or something, but it must have been longer than I thought.”

  “You passed out for two solid days and never woke up.”

  “Why, what’s today?”

  “Late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, you pick.”

  “Wednesday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I guess so.” I said.

  Detective Wolsely changed the subject. “Tell me about your mom, Zed.”

  I huffed a couple of times and looked around the room while I thought about that.

  After several minutes, I said, “You know, when I was kid I used to watch this Tarzan show on TV, and there was this recurring concept in that show about an elephant graveyard, kind of the African version of El Dorado, only with ivory instead of gold.”

  Detective Wolsely asked, “What does this have to do with anything?”

  “You asked me a question, Detective, I’m trying to answer it.”

  “Fine.”

  “So, Detective, when the white men came to Africa, they didn’t see any elephant carcasses lying about with all the free ivory they could carry, so they concocted this theory about the existence of an elephant graveyard, where all of the elephants would go to die.

  “I used think my mom was like that graveyard, only instead of elephants going there to die, happiness would.”

  Detective Wolsely asked, “And now that she’s dead, you don’t think that anymore?”

  “No, that’s not it at all. I think that like those white men that went to Africa, who’d erroneously deduced the existence of an elephant graveyard, I erred in my deduction that my mother was a passive graveyard for happiness.”

  Wolsely was getting bored.

  “Did you know that hyenas eat bone?” I asked.

  Detective Wolsely shook his head.

  “Yeah, they’ll eat pretty much anything, even bone. They’re predators. They’re scavengers. They’re ugly. But most of all, they’re voracious. That’s my mother.”

  “Your mother is a hyena?”

  “In a way, I guess. You see, she’s not the graveyard where happiness goes to die. She’s a voracious scavenger, consta
ntly searching for any waning happiness, so that she can kill it off and eat up any evidence that it ever existed. That’s my mom.”

  Detective Wolsely looked at me like he’d just found me covered in dog poop. “What drugs are you on, Zed?”

  “What?”

  “What drugs are you on? Nobody loses track of two days and then just gets up all normal and calls the police.”

  “Normal? I never said that. I told you I feel like crap. I was running a high fever. I still am.”

  “So you say.”

  “Yes, I do say. Get a thermometer and check for yourself! Holy freakin’ crap!”

  “Just tell me what you were on, Zed. Tell me where you got it. There’s something seriously bad out on the street and it’s making people crazy. We need to catch the guy that sold it to you. Things might even go easier on you if we can prove it was the drugs that made you crazy.”

  “What?”

  “We took a blood sample while you were passed out, Zed. We’ll figure out what it was. I mean, whether it was crack or meth or whatever. But we need to figure out what it was laced with. We need to know where you got it, so can get it off the street. There’s a lot of people going crazy on this stuff, Zed.”

  “What about that flu in Europe or whatever it is? I saw rioting on TV.”

  “Zed, let’s be realistic here. There is no flu that makes people crazy.”

  “How can you say that?” I asked.

  “Ratings,” Wolsely said. “Sure there’s a flu but the flu makes you puke and cough. It gives you diarrhea. It doesn’t make people crazy. Those were just frightened people, doing stupid things. Zed, the world is much simpler than all of you conspiracy nuts think it is. People make bad, irrational choices for the stupidest reasons every day. I see it all the time, believe me. There is no crazy flu going around. The answers are never that complicated. Trust me.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Besides, why Austin? Why not New York, or LA, or Chicago? There are a hundred cities more likely to get an outbreak of the flu than Austin. We’re not exactly a major point of entry here, are we Zed? Come on, just tell me what you were on and where you got it.”

  I shook my head and looked at the floor. “Jeez, Tom. Listen to me, please. I didn’t take any drugs. I was drinking. I drank a lot on Saturday. I smoked some weed with my friends. I drank some tequila on Sunday morning before heading over to my mom’s house. I’ve told you this a thousand times.”