Slow Burn (Book 9): Sanctum Read online

  Double damn.

  I looked up and down the hall and saw nothing moving. Fuck it. I was spoiling for a fight. “Hey.”

  Nothing responded to my call. So, I tried again. “Hey.”

  Nothing.

  No ambush.

  I walked up the hall to get back to my corner office, rolling all the possibilities over in my mind. Mostly, I needed to decide what to do with Martin while I went out to find Murphy. Could I leave him restrained? That might be a death sentence with so many of the naked horde still around. It was unlikely they’d pass up on an easy meal even if Martin were a white-skinned survivor.

  Taking him with me brought along a whole host of risks, but mostly for Martin. If some Whites decided he looked slow and scrumptious, there'd be little I could do to save him.

  I shoved the office door open, expecting to see Martin sitting against the wall beneath the far windows where I’d left him. What I saw instead was a long strip of crumpled tape and loose wire.

  About the time I was wondering where he’d disappeared to, Martin body-slammed me from the side and knocked me into the doorjamb.

  “Dammit!” My machete clattered to the floor as I fell with Martin’s bulk coming over on top of me.

  He punched me in the ribs, mustering all the strength his withered old muscles had left. Not enough, too bad for him. He rolled around on top of me, letting the weight of his big belly do the work of keeping me pinned down while he tried to position himself to put a fist in my face.

  As I struggled to get from underneath him, I was irritated—creeped-out at the feel of a doughy old man sweating all over me. "Dammit, Martin."

  He tried to hit me in the face with a blow that glanced off my cheek.

  I elbowed him in the head two times before I dazed him enough to subdue him. I pulled myself out from underneath and grabbed my machete. I looked out the open door to get a glimpse down the hall.

  Noise echoed from one of the floors below. Something in the building had heard us and was coming.

  Martin got up on his hands and knees.

  I muttered, “Whites.” I wanted to kick Martin in the face and run into the stairwell across the hall.

  Martin stuck his head out of the office and looked.

  Judging by the noise, more than one White was coming. Three to five was my guess. I looked down at Martin. “You woke them. I hope you were lying about how fast you can run.”

  Martin stared into the dimness at the far end of the hall. “I told you I can barely run at all.”

  "You should have thought about that before you figured Sumo wrestling me to the ground was going to save your life.” It was a merciless, mean thing to say, but I was pissed. "I'm going."

  “Where?” Martin got to his feet.

  I crossed the hall and grabbed the handle on the stairwell door. "I'm going to try this way. Come if you want. I'm not in the mood to save your ass, so you better keep up."

  “Keep up?” Martin was confused. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  "I haven't decided, but if you stay here, I won't have to.” I swung the door open and stepped into the stairwell, noticing immediately a White slinking up toward me.

  Sneaky motherfucker!

  The White’s eyes went wide as surprise worked its way through its slow brain. The White snarled and bounded up the stairs.

  Too bad. I was already three thoughts ahead of him. “Sorry buddy.” I stepped into a ferocious machete swing full of Martin-borne frustration and sent a huge section of the White's skull spinning against the wall and then rolling down the stairs. The White’s body slapped the smooth concrete floor at my feet.

  “Are there more?” Martin whispered from a few feet behind.

  Why waste the energy on an answer he could figure out himself? I motioned him toward the stairs and cautiously stepped over the White's twitching body. I peeked down through the gap between the alternating flights and saw only blackness. I heard nothing down there. I turned to Martin and whispered, "You gotta stay quiet. If we get trapped in here, we're fucked. Or I'll pretend I'm on their side so you'll be fucked all by yourself. I'm not dying to save your ass. You got me?"

  “We’re white-skinned,” Martin whispered. “They’ll leave us alone, mostly, right?”

  “Not these naked fuckers.” I headed down. “You saw what they did to your buddies, right?”

  Martin nodded without a word and followed after me. At the first landing, as I made my turn to go down the next flight of stairs, Martin grabbed my arm and brought me to a halt.

  “Help me.” He was dead serious. No defiance. No humility. “You know I fly helicopters. Save me and I can take you anywhere.”

  Still on the fence as to whether Martin was partially responsible for whatever befell Murphy, I yanked my arm away and started down again.

  “Please,” Martin begged. “Please. I can’t outrun them.”

  I nodded up the stairs. "Go up there and hide somewhere. Maybe you'll get lucky, and they won't search the building looking for the noise you made."

  Martin reached out and put a meaty, weak hand on my arm again, gentle this time. His eyes looked to be preparing for tears. “Everybody wants to go somewhere. Everybody dreams about sanctuary at the other end of the rainbow—a safe place. Wherever you think that is, I can fly you there.”

  "Where the hell would I want to go?” I snapped. "The whole world is fucked.” Of course, I was planning on going to College Station with Murphy, but I wasn't going to tell this knucklehead even if I did expect his life to last only another five minutes.

  "An oil rig,” said Martin. "There's got to be hundreds of them right offshore and farther out in the Gulf."

  “The ones they evacuate every time a hurricane comes?” I scoffed. “Yeah, that’s a viable plan.” I pulled away and started down the stairs. “Follow me. Stay close. Stay quiet. Or die.”

  Chapter 8

  Through the blackness, hoping no naked Whites were sleeping on the landings or waiting on the stairs to ambush us, I kept one hand on the rail. Martin had a handful of the back of my shirt as he wheezed behind me, clomping his heavy feet and groaning at the pace. More than once I shuffled my feet through the rotting remains of something that had once been human. And it wasn't just the putrefying flesh on the floor, it was the crusty texture of dried blood on the railing, and worse, the sticky stuff left from more recent kills.

  Then there were the goddamned maggots. On the rail. On the floor. On the walls. On the corpses, eating their way through the rotting flesh with tiny squishy sounds magnified by a million. The smell of the air trapped inside the stairwell was as foul as any I'd had to breathe. It felt like we were taking the maintenance entrance down to the devil's outhouse.

  Then we ran out of stairs. I found a wall in the darkness where I expected another flight to be. I turned around, felt my way along the wall, still with Martin clinging to my back, and found a door. I pushed on the bar with my hip and shouldered it open to a rush of cool, sweet air.

  I looked out as I slowly inched the door open. A helicopter sat in the grass halfway between our building and the nearest hangar. Several of the panels over the engines were off, and it looked as if someone had been working unsuccessfully to get it airborne again.

  Plenty of naked White corpses were scattered across the lawn. Some of the grass was blackened from small fires. A vehicle was overturned, showing me its undercarriage. I didn't see any Whites moving, at least not any nearby. Several hundred yards distant, I saw a few hunched over a corpse, feeding. In the other direction, I spied a half-dozen more, jogging in a line but going somewhere else.

  I gave Martin a look. I pointed at the helicopter and whispered, “Follow me like they follow each other. Stay right on my heels. I won’t go fast. We’ll get in the back of the helicopter and scope things out before we go farther.”

  Martin looked up into the blackness of the stairwell. The noises of Whites inside the building made it clear they weren’t far away. “If they come out after us
?”

  Don’t ask questions with unpleasant answers.

  "C'mon.” I jogged slow enough that Martin could keep pace, slow enough that walking would have been faster, but it was the appearance I was going for—just two Whites, out doing what they do. Our clothes were a problem, but I wasn't ready to ditch those just yet.

  Looking to my right as Martin plodded after me, I checked on the scavenging Whites I’d spotted. They didn’t have any interest in us. Way to our left, the jogging Whites disappeared behind a building. Good.

  With Martin huffing huge gulps of air and moving more slowly with each step, I jumped through one of the open doors in the back of the helicopter. Martin collapsed onto the helicopter’s deck, bent over at the waist with his legs hanging out.

  Cursing under my breath, I looked left and right as I grabbed his belt and hauled him the rest of the way inside.

  With both of the rear doors open, the helicopter left us visible from two directions, but kept us hidden from the other two. Halfway was better than nothing. And we'd need it. Martin wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. The tense hike down the stairs and the short jog had taken everything he'd had in him.

  Why is this guy still alive?

  I helped Martin into a seat with his back to the rear bulkhead. He wasn’t hidden, but he wasn’t obtrusive. Hopefully, he’d have time to catch his breath before we made our way to the hangar.

  A grunt caught my attention, and I looked back toward the building. Three Whites were cautiously approaching but still at a distance.

  Fuck.

  I looked at Martin, I’m sure with some new anxiety on my face.

  His fatigue hadn't dulled his perception. He turned to see the Whites coming, and I saw despair wash over him. He shot a panicked glance toward the hangar, to the other buildings, and even the useless shelter of the overturned vehicle. Everything was too far away for him to have a chance of making it. He knew he was a dead man and his last moments under earth's happy blue sky would be spent feeling the dull teeth of dead-brained animals tear at his flesh until enough of it was ripped away that blood loss would steal his consciousness and death would follow. It was a slow, shitty way to go but it was damn near everybody's eventual future.

  Martin mumbled something as he tried to catch his breath from the run.

  “What?”

  He closed his eyes, took a huge breath and said, “Leave me.”

  Leave? Of course, that’s what I told him I’d do. It wasn’t my fault he was old and feeble. It wasn’t me who’d spent sixty years eating cheeseburgers and milkshakes. It wasn’t me who was hauling around a hundred pounds of excess weight on old, brittle joints with a heart too congested with cholesterol deposits to keep the blood flowing.

  “Save yourself.” Martin leaned his head against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. In a whisper barely loud enough to hear, he said, “This day was bound to come.”

  Save myself? Crap! He was playing the hero card on me.

  I don't know why I do what I do sometimes. Murphy might argue that was most of the time, and he might be right about that. I'm sure he'd have told me at that moment to do anything but ditch Martin and run was a mistake. I wouldn't have argued with him. There was no reason not to do just that.

  But I didn’t run.

  The hero card? Damn him.

  I jumped out of the helicopter, unzipped my coveralls and peeled them down to my waist, exposing my sinewy arms and bony chest, virus-white. I was one of them. They needed to know it. I raised my machete and barked a monkey challenge and dared the Whites with my eyes.

  Come on, fuckers.

  They did.

  I guess whatever passed for comparative math in their slug brains figured out that three-to-one were good odds with a large, tasty morsel like Martin draped over a flimsy jump seat in the helicopter behind me.

  Unfortunately, they were smart enough not to rush at me full speed, a White behavior that almost always worked to my advantage, some naturally being faster runners than others, hence spreading them out as they came so I could take them down one at a time.

  These three spread out in an arc and matched their speed as they jogged toward me, apparently not at all intimidated by my animal threat and big machete.

  Too bad for them I was still smarter than all of them combined.

  I lowered my machete, hung my head, and drooped my shoulders as I stepped aside, making it clear in animal body language my threat was bluster, and I was now surrendering. Tasty, tender Martin was all theirs.

  One of them brayed and bounced high on his steps. He might as well have put on a nametag that said, ALPHA.

  I positioned myself a few long steps away from the side door of the helicopter. Martin groaned as I went out of his sight.

  The way was open for the Whites, and their attention focused fully on Martin as though I'd become invisible.

  When they got within a few steps, still coming pretty fast, I jumped toward them, swinging my machete hard at the neck of the closest one. His momentum carried him into my blade, and his head flew into the air as his arms reached up following the last instructions they'd received before the connection to the brain was lost.

  The headless White's knees gave way, and he fell as I spun and kicked the alpha White in the side. That bought me a second to bring my machete back for another swing.

  Off balance, the alpha bumped into the female to his right, and their forward momentum smashed them into the Plexiglas cockpit window.

  I hacked as the two fell and alpha boy raised a hand to block the blow, only to see his forearm fly away through a fountain of his blood.

  Oddly, he still tried to reach at me with the stump as I hauled back on my blade to finish him with a hack through his face and into his brain.

  His skull caught my machete, and when I tried to pull it away, I felt it jam as I watched the female crawl out from under the body, snarling and glaring death at me. She was pissed.

  Oh, well.

  I let go of the machete and put all my might into a kick at her chin, which she clearly wasn’t expecting because she did nothing to dodge it. Teeth broke, bone crunched, and her head snapped back and then fell limp as she collapsed. I jumped forward and finished her with a hard stomp of my heel on her temple.

  Breathing hard and grabbing my stuck machete to wrench it free, I looked up at Martin, who was wide-eyed and frozen. "You all right?” I asked softly.

  He nodded.

  “We should go.”

  You think?

  Chapter 9

  Martin opened the door and stepped inside. He didn’t want to, but with the machete in hand, I insisted. Yeah, I'd just saved his ass by the helicopter, but that didn't mean that I trusted him.

  Nobody was inside to ambush me when I followed Martin in.

  We entered a shop with worktables along the walls and a few long tables in the center of the room, all on metal legs with thick wooden tops capable of supporting a lot of weight. Engine parts large and small, electronic parts, and pieces I had no hope of identifying lay everywhere, some organized on shelves, others in disarray or disassembled on the tables. The shop smelled of machine oil, a welcome change since so many new rooms I entered held the smell of those who'd died there.

  "Is this where you've been hiding?” I softly asked.

  Martin pointed to the right where the L-shaped shop continued out of sight around a corner. “Over there. I had me a place after the Army collapsed and before the Survivor Army moved in.” He patted his gut. “They were a bunch of mean idiots but they took care of their pilots. After I earned their trust, I used to sneak in here and stash extra food in case I had to use this place again. Turns out I did, after all those naked ones attacked. Happened a few days back. Did you know about that?”

  I cocked my head in the direction Martin had indicated.

  Martin took the silent instruction and led.

  I carefully stepped over metal pieces—of helicopters, I guessed—strewn on the floor, not wanting to kick anything
and make noise.

  When I was able to see down the leg of the L-shaped room, Martin pointed to the far end at a rolling metal staircase twenty feet tall. “I use that to get into a storeroom up there on top.”

  I followed the line of his pointing finger and saw a balcony that looked to have been rudely constructed over an interior room. The balcony was stacked with pieces of sheet metal, and behind the sheets I made out the shape of a door, dingy and hidden so much I'd have missed seeing it altogether had Martin not pointed it out.

  “You wheel the ladder away when you come down so no Whites will accidentally wander up there when you’re gone?”

  Martin nodded.

  “But they could come up when you’re in there, right?”

  “No,” answered Martin. “Once I get up, I sit on the edge and give the ladder a good push with my feet. It usually rolls ten or fifteen feet away and sits in the middle of the floor over there just like it is now.”

  That made me suspicious. I looked Martin up and down again. He was far from athletic. The balcony was at least fifteen feet up. “How do you get back down with the ladder pushed out in the middle of the floor?”

  Martin pointed at a support beam running down the wall near the edge of the balcony. “I have a pair of leather welding gloves. I put them on and slide down the beam.”

  “You slide down?” I didn’t believe it.

  Martin nodded and started forward. "I leave them there on the steps after I come down. That way I won't forget to bring them back up with me."

  I followed Martin toward the ladder. Sure enough, a pair of elbow-length gloves, blackened with grease and soot, lay on a step. "Dangerous way to come down."

  He raised his hands and showed me the grip. "I have to hold on tight when I slide down the beam, so I don't hit the bottom too hard.”

  We reached the ladder, and I gave Martin a look that said, "Go ahead."

  He wheeled it quietly over to the wall below the balcony. He looked at me. “I lube the wheels whenever one starts to squeak.”

  “You first.”

  “Of course.” He hauled his weight up the steps. “You still don’t trust me.”