Slow Burn: Zero Day, Book 1 Page 4

  We ran a short distance up the street then Earl ducked beside a parked car and looked over the fender. The popping of gunfire came from all directions. I got to the car a second later. Murphy bumped the car behind me, using its mass to bring him to a stop.

  I squatted about midway back on the car, its black-tinted glass blocking my view across the street. Immediately frustrated, I stood and leaned forward to look over Earl’s shoulder, trying to spot a path away from the chaos. Something slammed into my chest, and knocked the wind out of me. I fell to the sidewalk, gasping for a breath of air that wouldn’t come.

  Sprawled on my back, I saw stark blue sky above. Running feet stomped the concrete near my head as people hurried past. The pandemonium slowly became insignificant background noise. My only concern was the pain radiating through my chest and my inability to gulp a single, life-sustaining breath.

  Then it happened. Air filled my lungs. I could breathe.

  Wide-eyed, Murphy leaned over me. “That was a beanbag, you lucky dumbass! Get up.”

  Earl yelled, “We gotta go!”

  I rolled over onto my stomach. With my wrists still cuffed behind me, it was difficult, but I managed to get to my feet.

  Earl and Murphy were squatting again behind a car a little further up the street. They were making for the old neighborhood.

  With my feet back on the street and air back in my lungs, I awkwardly sprinted to catch them, bullets be damned.

  In the seconds it took me to catch up, Earl had squatted between the bumpers of two cars, looking for an opportune moment to cross the no-man’s land of the body-strewn street. I fell in behind him. Murphy squeezed in behind me.

  Earl looked up and down the street.

  “Now where do we go?” Murphy asked.

  “If we can get there, I know a place to hide for a while,” Earl said.

  “Where?” Murphy asked.

  “That survivalist dude that that got evicted a few years back.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Murphy looked up the street through the car windows. “Some dude built a bunker under his house or something.”

  “Fuck it!” Earl yelled. He burst into a run across the street.

  Without a thought about the danger, Murphy and I made tracks behind him.

  Three steps into the street, and just ahead of me, Earl’s head exploded in a fountain of blood and gore.

  Time slowed to a cold, syrupy drip.

  Fear froze me.

  In mid-stride, I mouthed a four-letter word. I lost all sense of how to proceed.

  Thankfully, Murphy was still moving, and his bulk slammed into me from behind. His momentum carried our entangled bodies across the street, where we landed roughly in a jumble of limbs and curse words, between two cars on the far side.

  Murphy rolled off me and sat up to look at Earl’s corpse in the street. I struggled again to catch my breath, sucking in baked air off of the hot asphalt.

  I peered under the car beside me and started in fright. A pair eyes fixed on mine in a frozen stare. In a nanosecond, I registered the uniform of a sheriff’s deputy on the man and I panicked, but he made no move, no sound.

  I drew another deep breath. The deputy remained still.

  He was dead.

  I knew what I had to do.

  I squirmed up to my knees. Murphy’s attention was stuck on his dead cousin.

  I peeked out along the sidewalk and saw the dead body of the officer lying on the curb, parallel to the car. A heavy cloud of smoke wafted across us, limiting visibility.

  I wormed my way out until I was beside the deputy, trying my best to look wounded, dead, and unthreatening all at the same time.

  I scraped my elbows on the concrete as I went. In moments, I was lying beside the deputy, feeling his front pocket for a set of keys. I located what felt like a metallic bulge. It took frighteningly long to sit up and angle my hand into his pocket but my effort was rewarded with the prize I sought.

  No sooner were they in my hand then I was up and running away from the car and into a driveway obscured from the street by a hedge.

  I turned and called, “Murphy!”

  He sat motionless. He couldn’t pull his attention away from Earl’s corpse.

  “Murphy!” I yelled, louder.

  He turned and for a second, looked at me like I was a stranger.

  In the next instant, he came back to reality and bolted across the gap between us, sliding to his knees next to me.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said.

  We took off at a run into the neighborhood with all of its sheltering old houses, trees, bushes, and parked cars.

  Chapter 7

  Still cuffed, but with the keys grasped tightly in my hand, Murphy and I ran between two houses, squeezed through the gap between a hedge and a detached garage, and crossed another street. Police sirens wailed in all directions.

  “This is gonna be ground zero of a major shit storm in about five minutes,” I panted, as we stopped behind a dumpster in an alley.

  Murphy squatted down, trying to catch his breath. “We can’t stay in this alley,” he said. “We’re better off if we get behind the houses, hop a few fences and hide in the bushes. It’ll be hard in these cuffs.”

  I nodded. “I pulled some keys off of that dead deputy.”

  “Who?” Murphy asked.

  “There was a dead deputy by the cars. After Earl got hit.”

  “I didn’t see him.” Murphy had a vacant look in his eyes.

  “Murphy, you don’t look good. Did you get shot?”

  Murphy shook his head. “No. I don’t feel good.”

  I stood up straight and peered down the alley. Another hundred yards would get us down the alley, across the next street and into some bushes, another block further from the detention center. “Murphy, we need to get to those bushes over there. Then we’ll work on getting these cuffs off.”

  “Okay.”

  I nodded at Murphy. “You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  I took off at a run as fast as my legs would carry me. I heard Murphy behind me at first, then all I heard was the air rushing in and out of my throat and my heartbeat pounding in my ears.

  I got to the street and bounced into the fender of a parked car to come to a stop. I looked up and down the street. I saw no police cars, so I started running again.

  I made it to the bushes.

  Catching my breath, I looked back for Murphy. He was only halfway down the alley and moving at a jog.

  “Shit!” I willed him to run faster.

  Long, torturous seconds passed. Murphy came to the end of the ally and lumbered across the sidewalk, past the cars and into the street, making no effort at all to conceal himself or check for police.

  “Please, please don’t let there be a cop car,” I prayed aloud. “Hurry, Murphy!”

  Passing another line of parked cars and crossing over the sidewalk brought Murphy beside the hedge. He didn’t slow but brushed past me. I turned and ran on past him into the space behind the converted houses.

  I spied a space behind an old storage shed that would keep us hidden from the street and windows on the back sides of the houses.

  We kicked some old metal trashcans to the side and squeezed into a gap between the shed and a tall privacy fence. I turned my back to Murphy and opened my hand. “Murphy, I’m going to hold the keys out one at a time. You tell me when I get to the one that looks like it’ll open the cuffs.”

  “Got it,” said Murphy, after a few moments of jingling and fumbling.

  The key felt distinctly different than the others. I hoped it would fit.

  I fumbled around for a few more minutes before the keys slipped from my hands and dropped into the dirt.

  “Shit!”

  I dropped to my knees, grabbed up the dirty keys, and tried again. The exercise was so much harder than it seemed like it should be.

  Click. I’d freed one wrist. “Thank God.”

  The second
cuff was off and lying in the dirt just seconds later.

  “Murphy, you’re up. Turn around.” I looked up. Murphy was leaning against the wall of the shed, eyes closed, drenched in sweat.

  I stood, concerned. “Murphy, are you okay?”

  Murphy shook his head. I reached up and put a palm across his forehead. He was burning with a fever.

  “We need to get you something for that fever, Murphy.”

  The sound of a siren zoomed by on the next street over. Too close.

  I drew a few slow, calming breaths. I needed to think.

  We were out of the cell and three or four blocks away from the jail. We didn’t seem to be in any immediate physical danger, but that was only a guess. With the riot and mass escape, the police might shoot anybody that looked remotely like an escaped prisoner on sight. Though we were missing our belts and shoelaces and had ink on our fingertips, we hadn’t been put into the orange jumpsuits that the jail’s long-term residents wore. There was hope. Our only sure safety lay far from the jail and far from the vindictive rage of the cops descending on us with every siren in the city.

  Our one tiny advantage derived from the chaos of the jail riot and the hundreds of prisoners scampering for freedom in every direction.

  I wasn’t at a hundred percent, but I knew I could run. I wasn’t so sure about Murphy…his condition was declining. Regardless, I knew we had to move.

  I turned Murphy around and removed his cuffs. He rubbed his sweaty face with his big hands and squatted back against the shed.

  I considered abandoning him and making my escape alone, but guilt stopped me. That moment after Earl got shot and I had frozen in the street, Murphy had pushed me on to the other side. Had he not done so, I likely would have caught a sheriff’s bullet and died beside Earl. Murphy saved my life. Whether on purpose, or simply because I was in his way, I’d probably never know, but I felt the obligation of a debt.

  “Murphy, can you move? Can you walk?”

  Without opening his eyes, Murphy nodded.

  I thought back to how dehydrated I was after my fever broke. I needed to get some water in him.

  “Listen, Murphy. If we go another block or two west, we’ll hit Shoal Creek. From there, we can make our way north until we get outside of whatever perimeter the police have set up. We won’t have to run. I think we can walk, but we need to get moving.”

  Murphy nodded. “I can do it.”

  “C’mon.”

  Chapter 8

  Shoal Creek is a limestone crevice that snakes through Austin on a southwesterly course. During the frequent spring thunderstorms, it channels flash-flood waters through its banks, six blocks west of the jail, before spilling into the Colorado River in downtown Austin, ten blocks south. It varies in depth from ten to twenty feet below street level, and is lined with dense trees and shrubs. It could provide an excellent avenue of escape. But with late afternoon temperatures over one hundred degrees, and the wind blowing over, rather than through the gulley, it would also be a bone-dry oven.

  The sound of sirens floated through the streets above. Occasional but frightening gunshots pierced the traffic noise. Trudging through the oppressive heat, Murphy and I made it to the 15th Street bridge. At four lanes wide, with enormous old trees on the banks of the creek around the bridge it beckoned, providing a shady and cool place to rest.

  I stepped from sun to shade. The temperature felt like it dropped twenty degrees.

  I motioned up the concrete embankment under the bridge. “It’ll be cooler on the concrete that stays in the shade all day. Let’s go, Murphy.”

  Murphy looked at the concrete slope like it was in insurmountable obstacle.

  I grabbed his arm and tugged him along.

  Fifteen steps up, he dropped flat onto the cool concrete and lay motionless.

  He should have climbed further up the slope. He would have been better hidden from searching eyes. But it was clear that he wasn’t moving.

  I continued up to where the fat concrete bridge supports lay on the upper edge of the embankment. Three expressionless transients watched me.

  “I’m not staying,” I told them as the smell of urine and body odor hit me. I stopped. I was close enough.

  I copied Murphy’s pose and lay flat, trying to get as much of my burning skin in contact with the cool concrete as possible. It wasn’t a cold swimming pool, but it worked. My irritating dizziness left me. The nauseous feeling in my stomach dissipated. The air I breathed seemed once again to contain oxygen. But we needed water. We needed it badly. Neither of us would make it more than another mile or two up the dry creek bed without it.

  A thought occurred to me. I lolled my head around toward the transients, sitting above me in the shade. “Hey, is Pease Park close by?”

  All three looked at me like I was speaking another language.

  I waited.

  And waited.

  “Hey––” I started again.

  “It’s right up yonder a piece,” one of them said, pointing up the creek bed.

  “Like what? A half-mile? A mile?” I asked.

  The speaker shook his head. “Just ‘round that bend in the creek.”

  That perked me up. I knew there was an outdoor basketball court at the south end of the park. Right by the basketball court stood a public restroom and some water fountains. “Thanks!”

  I decided to give us five or ten minutes more to cool off. Then I’d try to drag Murphy to the park.

  I dozed off.

  The sound of heavy trucks slamming across the expansion joints of the bridge above aroused me. A dozen screaming sirens racing over the bridge got my full attention.

  Wide-eyed and disoriented, I looked around. The transients were gone. I sat up quickly and paid for my haste with enough dizziness to give me pause. I looked down the embankment. Murphy hadn’t moved.

  I looked up and down the creek bed. It was covered in the long shadows of early evening. I guessed it was seven or eight o’clock. I’d slept for at least two hours but luck was with us. The police hadn’t found us.

  I crab-walked down the concrete slope toward Murphy and shook him awake. It took more than a little shaking, but his eyes finally opened.

  “I’m thirsty,” his voice rasped.

  “There’s a park just up the creek a bit. We can get water there.”

  “A bit?” Murphy asked.

  “A hundred yards, two hundred at most. We can hide out in the restrooms and maybe get cleaned up a bit.”

  Murphy nodded and with great effort pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook his head to clear it. “It better be close. I’ve never felt this bad.”

  “It’s the heat and dehydration,” I lied.

  It was the bite.

  Chapter 9

  The deserted park was immersed in shadow when we arrived, with the sun having edged below the horizon. The sky still glowed a dull blue. The hot, stagnant air, only marginally cooler without the sun’s heat, draped us in its sticky blanket.

  With an arm over my shoulder, Murphy leaned heavily on me as we made our way into a public restroom. We both drank greedily from the sink faucets. After guzzling what we could, I had the presence of mind to flip the deadbolt on the door and the restroom became our refuge.

  I stripped off my dirty, bloody clothes and washed them in the sink. Murphy struggled to stay on his feet, but did the same.

  Afterwards, we hung our clothes over the stalls to dry, and sat on the floor in our underwear, leaning against the wall.

  After a while, Murphy said, “I need to go to the hospital.”

  I nodded. “I need to see a doctor, too, before this bite gets infected any more than it is.”

  Murphy nodded.

  I said, “I think Brackenridge Hospital is about a mile or two up 15th Street. It’s closer than Seton Hospital. It’s walking distance, if you think you can make it.”

  “Without that damn sun beating me down, I think I can.”

  “It’s dark out now,” I o
ffered.

  In the distance we heard a series of angry human wails. We looked at one another.

  Murphy said, “That sounds like that crazy fucker from the jail this morning.”

  I nodded.

  More screams followed, drawing closer.

  “There must be a dozen of them,” said Murphy, with worry in his eyes.

  “Can you reach up and make sure that door is locked?” I asked.

  Murphy reached a long arm up and checked. He jiggled the door, but the lock held it closed.

  That was a relief.

  The sounds of the screamers quickly drew close. In seconds, they were outside the restroom. Something heavy slammed into the locked door and startled us both.

  Not wanting to make a sound, I mouthed, “Holy crap!”

  Outside, someone was beating his fists on the metal door and screaming in wild frustration. Thankfully, the door held strong.

  I saw worry on Murphy’s face. I’m sure he saw the same on mine.

  After a few minutes, the pounding stopped and the sound of the screaming moved away, then faded into the background noise of cars, sirens, and occasional gunshots.

  “This whole city is going to hell tonight,” Murphy observed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think that’s all about the riot at the jail today?” Murphy asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “What then?”

  “That crazy dude in the cell. Those crazy guys at the jail. The cops said something about PCP in the pot making everyone go nuts.” I shuddered to think about it. “But my stepdad…I don’t know. He was like that crazy guy in the cell. I don’t know what’s going on, Murphy.”

  Murphy fell silent.

  After a while, I said, “I’m sorry about Earl.”

  Murphy nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

  In the silence that followed, I thought about Earl getting so horrifically shot right in front of me. I thought about my dead mom and Dan. I thought about the dead guy in their living room. I thought about the mayhem at the jail.

  I’d never in my life seen a dead person before seeing my mom being mutilated by Dan on the living room floor. Now, just days later, I had to struggle to count the dead I’d seen.