Slow Burn | Book 10 | Firestorm Read online

  Grace stepped away from the Humvee. She didn’t say “all that effort for nothing,” but it was clear on her face. “You okay?”

  I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t in a mood to pencil all my feelings into words. “She was in pretty bad shape.”

  Murphy slapped me on the back. “Can’t save ‘em all, Null Spot.” Not a joke, but a consolation between two men who’d spent so much time together they didn’t need to burden every moment with useless words. He headed for the scraggly mesquites to tend to his personal business.

  Eyes still on me, Grace asked, “What was that all about, back there?” She meant the bodies dangling on the front wall of the Walmart.

  I stared off into the desert, feeling a black mood starting to slip up on me. “A hate cult out of Albuquerque hung them up there.”

  “A hate cult? She tell you that?”

  I shrugged. That was my deduction, or guess, anyway, from the little she’d said. “She wasn’t all the way with it.”

  “You give her some bud honey?”

  Of course I did, but I didn’t feel like defending the choice.

  Grace, ever being the one who could tune into other people’s troubles, wrapped me in her wiry arms and pulled me close. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She let me go and looked me in the face, seeing clearly through my façade. “After all this time…”

  I shrugged because I didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation about anything going on inside my head.

  “It’s okay to feel it when someone dies,” she told me. “It’s the human thing to do.”

  I pointed back the way we’d come, back in the direction of Carlsbad. “She talked about a group or whatever led by some whacked-out preacher guy named Richard. Clearly, they’ve got military equipment, ammo to burn, and some degree of competence.”

  “You think they’re a danger to us?”

  I didn’t have a good feeling about that, but Grace already thought my hate cult theory was too much of a leap. “I don’t think we’ll be going back to Carlsbad.”

  Having completed his business in the dry brush, Dalhover spread a map across the hood of the Humvee. Naturally, the rest of us gathered around. “Since we made hostile contact, we don’t go straight home.” He looked at each of us for agreement. Nobody argued. We lived by a set of safety protocols, not set in stone, but firm enough. We’d learned plenty of lessons through the years and did our best not to repeat mistakes for which we’d already paid in lives. “We’ll make our way up Highway 62 and then head north on 360. The map says that section is still clear.”

  Indicating the road on the map, I said, “That was me and Murphy who scouted. Five months back.” I glanced around the group. A lot could change in that time. All of us knew it. No more needed to be said.

  “We’ll try a high-speed run,” said Dalhover. “Forty, maybe fifty, if the road looks clear. Ten miles up, we’ll cut cross-country through the oil patch and head for Buckeye.” The oil patches all over the region were a maze of dirt roads connecting pump jacks spread in every direction for miles. “We’ll skirt north around Hobbs. That’ll put us in old ag country. After that, we’ll stay off the main roads and head south before we reach Seminole.” Dalhover took a pained gaze through the Humvee’s windshield. We all knew the girl was still inside. “We don’t have time to bury her, but we can’t bring her with.” His eyes settled on me and Murphy.

  Jazz cut in with a meaningful glance at Murphy. “I’ll help Murphy with her. We’ll leave her in a nice spot where the coyotes will find her. Circle of Life.”

  “Murphy, you’ll start out on the .50, and swap with Zane every couple of hours.” Dalhover knew as well as anybody in the scouts that I couldn’t shoot a rifle for shit. But put me behind a fifty-caliber machine gun with glowing tracers to mark the path of my bullets, and I would do just fine. “They got downed barbed-wire fences all through this region, so keep an eye out.”

  “In the dark?” I asked. It went without saying we’d be running with the headlights off.

  “You’ll have enough moonlight to see the fence posts running across the fields,” explained Dalhover. “I don’t want to have to waste an hour cutting rusty wire off our axles.”

  “Not to mention the holes in the tires,” added Grace.

  Dalhover pulled our attention back to the map. “We’ll pick up the highway again southwest of Andrews.” His finger traced the path he proposed. “Kermit, Wickett, Pecos, then home. We’ll make some high-speed runs wherever the pavement is smooth and clear. Otherwise, we’ll take it slow. Twenty, maybe thirty miles an hour. We’ll stop every hour or two to swap drivers, stretch, and stay fresh.”

  Dalhover’s route called for a long, circuitous ride back to Balmorhea. The journey would take us ten to sixteen hours. Nobody complained. He looked at me anyway. “Any smartass shit to add?”

  I paused to check—nothing came to mind. I shook my head.

  He slapped the hood. “Let’s roll.”

  7

  It had been a tense night, driving through the dark, expecting an ambush that never materialized, but we’d made good time and were most of the way home. With the sun hinting at dawn from below the horizon in the east, I breathed a little easier. Taking a shift on the big machine gun, I stood up through the Humvee’s roof hatch and scanned both sides of the road and then up ahead.

  We were running south on TX-17, a two-lane state road we’d picked up south of Pecos, and we’d just passed Verhalen. It wasn’t a town so much as an intersection of two country roads scattered with a few houses, ten miles north of Balmorhea. A two-mile kink in the road north of Saragosa sent us driving in a westerly direction for a bit. That’s when I spotted a bright little oddity in the dark western sky.

  At first, I thought it was a star, and then a particularly bright satellite, because it moved relative to the few background stars that were still visible in the sky. At the same time, it didn’t look like any satellite I’d ever seen. And I’d seen thousands. Staring at the night sky with no light pollution had turned into an evening pastime for the residents of Balmorhea through the years. For some of us, it was a peaceful way to while away the dark hours, forgetting for a time the tragedies of the collapse. For others, the satellites were a reminder of all we’d lost—a reminder of how high our dreams used to soar.

  As I watched the swift dot move, I realized it wasn’t that familiar, brilliant, satellite-white either. It was the color of the morning, and seemed to change its hue, slowly, from red to pink to yellow. It was in the atmosphere, not above it.

  “Hey Murphy,” I called down. “Did you ever hear of the Marfa lights?” Marfa lay sixty miles south of Balmorhea, on the other side of the Davis Mountains.

  “You need me to take over?” he asked. “We’re almost home.”

  “UFOs. Used to be a big thing down there.”

  “Well, there ain’t nobody there now,” Murphy reminded me. “Not unless the Chihuahua Gang came back for another ass-whoopin’.” Six years earlier, after suffering through months of raids on our herds, we’d ambushed them there. It had been a good day for us, and a very bad day for them. The raids stopped after that.

  The strange little spot in the sky seemed to be climbing as it tracked us southwest.

  Dalhover followed the curve of the road into the outskirts of Saragosa—mostly through the fields cultivated by a small commune there. “Stay on your toes, Zane. If we’re going to see trouble, it’ll be here.” He wasn’t talking about the few Saragosa residents. We were on good terms with them. From an overpass on I-10, Saragosa was visible across the flat desert just a half-mile north. It tended to be mostly a magnet for wanderers—those kinds of people kept to themselves and were just looking for a sheltered place to sleep for a night or two. Only, sometimes they were the kind of people who’d shoot you on sight, on the off-chance your crummy junk was worth stealing. A gassed-up, running Humvee and a 4x4 Suburban were tempting targets for any of those unscrupulous types.

&nb
sp; Dust blew across the fields, hiding the road ahead in haze. That worried me more than usual, because I hated Dalhover’s instincts. They were too often right. Still, the lively dot in the sky had my curiosity. “Murphy, up in the sky, one o’clock high—”

  Murphy belted out a big laugh. “One o’clock high? What are you, a bomber pilot all of a sudden?”

  “Due west,” I told him. “See that tree way out there? Look right at it, and then keep going up until you see something.”

  “Am I looking for a UFO?”

  “Technically.”

  “It’s been a while since Professor Zed lectured me on—” Murphy stopped talking. “What is that?”

  “Don’t stare at it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Seriously, pretend like you don’t see it.”

  8

  Back before the world collapsed, back when bank account size made a qualitative difference in people’s lives, I was one of the many who’d spent most of his income on the necessities—rent, utilities, and groceries. Fancy dinners, expensive wines, and long weekends in Cancun were plastic-experience indulgences beyond my means. Real adventures, though, they were cheap, because they carried with them a legit risk. That’s why I asked Molly, a girl I was seeing at the time, to drive down to Port Aransas with me and watch a Cat-4 hurricane make landfall. Being more than a little bit crazy—just my type of girl—Molly agreed.

  That’s how we came to be standing at the tip of the shipping channel jetty at the north end of Mustang Island, watching bulging gray clouds stampede across the sky, feeling the rumble of heavy waves rolling onto shore. The storm surge was only up around three feet by then, so we weren’t in imminent danger of getting swept into the ocean. With the howling wind, the rain pelting, and the chaos of nature’s power bearing down on us, every crashing breaker growled with danger. It felt like sticking a finger in death’s eye, exhilarating in being all the way alive.

  I saw something in the sky that day that didn’t make any sense—something black and geometrical, tiny, and stationary. My first thought—mostly wishful thinking—was that it was a spaceship full of little green men from Mars. A spacecraft from a faraway star system. Come to haul me away from my less than stellar life. Of course.

  As I gawked, it moved, hovered, and moved again, making it easy to visually understand that it wasn’t a UFO at all, but something small and not more than a hundred yards away. I noticed another couple out on the jetty slowly making their way toward us, watching the same little hovercraft in the sky. It turned out, the thing I’d seen was a small drone. The guy, one of the two people coming toward us, was piloting it, capturing video of the hurricane’s waves breaking over the sandbars.

  Fascinated, Molly and I chatted with the guy about his drone for a while before the cops finally showed up and chased us off. I was sold. Or, that’s to say, I was so excited about that dude’s flying toy I decided I was going to buy one for myself. Unfortunately, my Starbucks gig barely provided enough of an income to keep me in gas money, frozen burritos, and rent, so I never did. I never forgot what they looked like in the sky, though.

  “You gonna tell me what’s going on?” asked Murphy.

  “It’s a drone.” I cut my eyes up toward it without moving my head.

  “When I stop,” Dalhover told us, “jump out of the car and run as far as you can, as fast as you can.”

  Dalhover’s drastic response took a moment to process through my tired brain. “No…it’s not a predator drone. It’s not military. It’s one of those little things you get at Best Buy.”

  Oddly, that only seemed to make Dalhover more irritated. “Keep an eye on the damn buildings until we get through Saragosa. I don’t want to get ambushed because you’re staring at the stars.”

  “I’m looking at it,” said Murphy, “but I’m pretending not to. I can’t tell what it is, and my eyes are better than yours.”

  Still in tiny Saragosa, I scanned the street ahead of us. Everything looked clear. I moved my machine gun back and forth to put on a good show for my audience high above. “Murphy, do you have a pair of binoculars handy?”

  “I can put my scope on it.”

  “No!” I told him.

  “Damn, you can be bitchy before you get your coffee.”

  “I haven’t had coffee since…” I couldn’t remember the last time I had coffee.

  Murphy asked, “Why can’t I glass it?”

  “If you do that, they’ll know we see them.”

  “They can make out that kind of detail from all the way up there?”

  “The one I saw up close had a pretty powerful camera. Can you glass it without it seeing what you’re doing?”

  Murphy grumbled and climbed into the back seat.

  “Dammit, Zane,” grumbled Dalhover. “Don’t get so infatuated with that shiny spot in the sky you forget what your job is up there. Keep that .50 up.”

  I did, but we were passing out of Saragosa, putting that danger behind us. The next trouble spot would be the highway overpass just ahead. We’d never been ambushed before at that particular spot—none in our community had—but trouble liked to linger beneath highway bridges, and bullets and blood taught hard first lessons. Dalhover slowed the Humvee and steered us through a shallow ditch to get off the road. The green Suburban behind us rattled over the rough terrain. Not in a hurry so close to home, Dalhover was giving the overpass a wide berth.

  I looked down into the Humvee. Murphy had just pulled a blanket over his head like a sniper. I asked, “You ready? Can you see it?”

  Dalhover ran through a deep hole, jostling me against the side of the roof hatch.

  Murphy cursed. “Take it easy, Top.” A moment later, he said, “I got it.”

  “Can you tell what it is?”

  Murphy took a few more moments. “Hawkeye Zed gets a cookie.” Murphy wasn’t happy to tell me that, though. “It’s definitely a drone. One of those little hobby jobs. Not military.”

  “Well goddamn,” groused Dalhover. “How are we set for fuel?”

  “We still have two cans in the back,” I told him. Ten gallons. Maybe an extra hundred miles.

  Dalhover cut the wheels west as we rolled onto the highway.

  Not knowing who was operating the drone or what their intentions were, I guessed at Dalhover’s plan. “Trying to lead them away down I-10 won’t do any good. From way up there, they can already see Balmorhea.”

  Dalhover cursed. “How long can those things stay aloft?”

  “Half hour?” I wasn’t positive.

  “You want me to keep watching?” asked Murphy.

  “Don’t lose sight of it,” Dalhover told him. “Especially when it flies away.”

  Murphy understood immediately. “I got you, Top. When it heads back to mommy, we’re gonna follow it.”

  9

  After driving west on the highway for a few miles, Dalhover came up with a better idea. In swerving to avoid an imaginary obstacle, he careened the Humvee through a scatter of debris along the side of the road. A cloud of pale dust engulfed us as we came to a stop. Dalhover flung his door open and jumped out. “Get down here with me, Zane.”

  We were far enough away from anything that we were as safe as we were likely to get. In other words, I wasn’t needed on the big machine gun.

  “Murphy,” ordered Dalhover, “you keep your eyes on that drone.”

  Once on the ground, I found Dalhover making a show of climbing beneath our vehicle near the rear axle. “What did we break?”

  “Nothing,” he told me. “This is a ruse.”

  Having parked her truck on the road to our rear, Grace jogged up. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I told her. “Dalhover is faking it.”

  “Why?” Of course, we’d filled Grace in over the radio about the drone that was following us. Like me, she didn’t know what Dalhover’s sudden change of plans had to do with the drone.

  I peeked through the gear we had strapped onto the rear half of our roof. “Did
you see it up there?”

  Grace nodded and asked, “What are you thinking?”

  Dalhover scooted out from beneath the Humvee and sat on the ground. There was no way the drone could see him down there. It was far off in the sky with the bulk of the vehicle blocking its view of us. But Dalhover hadn’t aged into a grizzly old man by betting on assumptions. “Like Zane says, that drone’s battery will run down soon. It’ll have to fly back to whoever is controlling it. I don’t imagine they could be more than five miles from here.”

  I ran through some crude estimates in my head, trying to figure how long we’d seen the drone up there, how far it had to have flown to get from the pilot to its observation point up in the sky, how long it would take to get back. That brought to mind a flurry of questions with no firm answers.

  Grace nudged me. “Zed, you’re spacing out.”

  “I was thinking.”

  Dalhover hawked a gob and spat it in the dust.

  “I think Dalhover’s right,” I told them. “Or right enough, anyway.”

  “How fast can those things fly?” asked Dalhover.

  “Thirty miles an hour. Air speed.” That was the number I remembered. “Speed’s not the most important thing. They can aim the camera at us while they’re flying away. If we give chase before it’s out of sight, they’ll see us coming.”

  “Better than nothing.” Dalhover climbed to his feet.

  “We should separate,” suggested Grace. “Cover a wider area in our search.”

  With Carlsbad still fresh in my memory, I didn’t like the idea of Grace and Jazz driving into a potentially hostile situation with only the pickup’s thin sheet metal to protect them. The Humvee, at least, was armored. I told her, “Give it a few minutes after that thing turns for home, and then you two head back to Bal. We’ll finish up this pretend repair, then load up and pursue. When you get back, fill them in on what happened up in New Mexico. I don’t know if this drone thing is part of that Carlsbad stink, following us here or—”