Slow Burn (Book 9): Sanctum Page 9

  Time to follow the footprints down the hall in the other direction.

  It took a few minutes to check each of the offices along the way. Some had closed doors we opened to peek inside. Other doors had been broken off the hinges. At one office, bullet holes riddled the walls, having ripped through the sheetrock on both sides of the hall. Inside were the remains of five or six humans. In the mess, it was hard to tell which were Whites and which were normal. We spotted only one gore-covered weapon under tattered clothing but plenty of bloody bones.

  However many Whites had come into this building, it had been enough to eat all the flesh that came onto the menu.

  We continued to the end of the hall, where it made the hard turn to the left. I stopped and peeked around the corner. It was the outpost.

  Chapter 21

  Gouges were torn out of the floor where bullets had ricocheted away. More holes pierced the walls and ceiling. The floor was a mess of rotting flesh, and the walls were splattered red. Looking down the hall, I saw part of a large room that opened up to more carnage.

  Windows had been barricaded from the inside, leaving gaps wide enough to fire through. Now they only served to let in slits of light that illuminated the mess and made it hard to piece together. The room had been a small library that looked to have been shaken by a giant hand, tumbling bodies, books, and furniture. Corpses with flesh still on the bones lay broken with clothing half-torn away. Whites lay dead, many looked untouched by the teeth of their cannibal brothers and sisters.

  And the sound.

  Breathing. Chewing.

  Live Whites were still in the room, wallowing in the filth, feeding.

  I stepped into the hall as Murphy tried to hold me back with a hand on my shoulder. Clearly he understood what lay at the end of the corridor as surely as I did. He knew there were no outpost survivors, just as I did. He saw no point in proceeding further. There was nothing more to be learned.

  He was right. But I’d already moved on, following a bubbling rage to a new goal.

  I saw the shredded clothing of people who’d been doing nothing except risking their lives for a higher purpose, a vaccine, and all that red I saw looked like livid revenge. I yearned to satisfy it with the feel of tearing cartilage, the sight of splitting white skin and spewing blood, the sound of surprised screams turning into gurgles through ripped throats. My blade needed to splinter bones.

  I needed to kill, as badly as I’d ever needed anything.

  I stepped into the library and bellowed a challenge.

  The chaotic mess of furnishings seemed to come alive. One red and white beast pulled itself up to his height—the alpha. He was going to put me in my place.

  “Come on fuckers.”

  The White pounced, and I cut him through the neck, half severing it as I sidestepped, jamming my knife into the heart of another White too slow and surprised to understand yet what was going on.

  I bounded over an upturned chair and hacked at the base of another’s skull as I slashed a fourth across the face. Two more long strides put me in the center of the room, spinning and swinging, hacking and stabbing, pushing my deadly fury to frenzy through a haze of blood sprayed from arteries, driven by pumping hearts.

  Whites screamed, fought, and fell until they stopped.

  I jerked my head back and forth looking for the next foe only to see dead Whites on the floor among others gasping, struggling to move, and whimpering.

  The greedy maelstrom in my soul needed more death, it needed to feed.

  I looked around the room again, frustrated to be left with no one else to kill. I screamed. I was a husk with no purpose.

  The loud crunch of a skull caught my attention, and I turned to see Murphy burying his hatchet in the cranium of a White. The White died instantly and fell to Murphy’s feet, and Murphy stared at me, worry on his face.

  I looked myself up and down. I was splattered with so much red that little of my white skin showed through, but it wasn’t my blood. It was restitution paid by a dozen sinners, some still dying.

  As I stood there, my emptiness turned to guilt and my guilt told me I was a murderer. It informed me that my victims were just diseased people not significantly unlike me. It insisted that violence was the solution chosen by simple minds. But it sounded like the Ogre’s voice in my head punctuating lessons about high-minded choices with bare-knuckled hypocrisy.

  And clarity returned.

  I’d given the naked fucks what they’d deserved. They got what they got because of what they’d done. They were vile monsters, and I was a righteous thunder god wielding a machete of steel justice. I was Null Spot the Motherfucking Destroyer!

  Chapter 22

  We left the outpost, and I marched across the street toward the veterinary sciences building with a scowl on my face. I was dripping in blood, still looking to sate the beast living in my skin. I didn’t know why my anger was racing. I don’t know why I was spinning my thoughts into fantasies of single-minded murder and dissatisfying deaths. I did know that my anger veiled me in an impervious armor that the Whites on the street saw as clearly as I felt. They veered away, some walking and glancing, others running and pissing down their knees as they went.

  When Murphy and me were making our way between the abandoned cars in the parking lot next to the veterinary sciences building with no Whites nearby, Murphy leaned close and muttered, “I don’t like swinging dick time.”

  I stopped, stared across the parking lot at the broken-down doors and busted windows on the building that had housed humanity’s hope. Or maybe just my hope that something could rescue me from what I was becoming. Because as suited as I was for life in the wild west of white-skinned monsters and mayhem on a genocidal scale, I still had a wispy dream of humanity, happiness, and peace. I remembered those hugs from my Aunt Nancy. She gave me a glimpse of a life that wasn’t only about fighting my way to the top of a suffering heap and meting out my internalized pain to the weaklings below. She made me believe that somewhere love existed.

  But fuck that.

  Double fuck it doggie-style.

  Every time I let hope shine it’s bullshit light into the darkness that thrived in my heart, every time its lies wore me down enough to make me believe, death came and stole my chances away. Cancer took Aunt Nancy. Fucking Mark raped and murdered Amber. I watched helplessly from a hill while Mandi and Russell were slaughtered on the deck of a boat. I stood by while Jay Booth put a bullet through young Megan’s skull. That goddamned naked horde, all of those hungry white fuckers buried their teeth into Steph while I feebly struggled to save her. Every time love raised its ugly head it was followed by painful failure. And as surely as I was breathing, I knew I’d failed Steph.

  I’d fucked that whole situation down to the quick.

  Sure, I’d been weak. Sure, I’d been slow. But why hadn’t I mustered the strength to fight the pain, to run to the Humvees when that’s what everyone else was doing. Had I done that, we’d have gotten in and drove away. We’d be sitting on a hill in desolate West Texas, drinking spring water, eating pecans, and watching sunsets far away from all these fucking monsters.

  And I knew that all my hate for the Whites was hate for myself for all my fuckups, one after another after another and another. The Harpy had been right all along. I was a worthless little shit, a lingering parasite from a night of back seat mistakes. The price of a risk taken. If my dad had only pulled his cock out a moment sooner. If only she’d finished him with her cold, bony hand instead of letting him plant me in her belly. If only she’d been brave enough to drive to Laredo, to cross the border and pay a dirty doctor to cut me out and leave me in an alley with the rest of the garbage.

  The Harpy was easy to hate.

  She mumbled on about him, my dad, when she was blitzed, and sliding slowly out of her chair in the living room for a night of sleeping on the carpet. She said he was a greasy-haired punk with a movie star smile. His brothers were all in prison, and he was revving down the fast lane to alcoholism.
Her affection for him then was all wet panties and sinful choices. Now it was regret barbed with hate. She despised him for coming into her life, and she loathed him for abandoning her, for leaving her with me.

  Leaving?

  Chased away. That was my bet.

  The Harpy was a cruel cunt.

  I needed to kill something.

  Chapter 23

  “Dude.”

  I looked at Murphy.

  “We gonna stand in this parking lot all day?”

  I looked around. I’d gotten lost in all the bullshit in my head, and Murphy had witnessed it. “I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  A lie. “How to get into that building.”

  “You were snorting like an angry little pug.” Murphy knew I was lying. “Don’t go space cadet on me. Stay in the game, dumbass.”

  “Yeah.” I heaved a sigh to evict my wayward thoughts.

  “You alright? I mean really, are you okay?”

  I glanced around. No Whites were nearby. Some were still moving away, looking over their shoulder, getting away from the Null Spot. They sensed that I was going to detonate. No White smart enough to like keeping his blood in his veins wanted to be near me. “Just shit I’m thinking about.”

  “We don’t have to do this,” said Murphy. “We can hole up somewhere. Get up on the roof in the morning and wait for our ride.” Murphy looked at the veterinary science building and his face looked old. He had a hope that had died too. “It’s probably a waste of time.” He looked back at the outpost and grimaced. “You know how these white fuckers are.”

  “Sometimes I feel like killing them is all I can do to hold on.”

  “That sounds like crazy-talk bullshit. You overthink things too much.”

  It was true. But it was the hand I’d been dealt. I breathed deeply of the cold air and looked up at the sky. The sun shined on my face. The clouds crawled across the blue and birds played among the branches of the nearby trees. The wind rustled fragile leaves across the ground.

  No matter what Null Spot was up to, no matter the shit I waded in to get through the day, the world moved on. I needed to roll with it. I pointed my machete at the veterinary sciences building. “I’m going in. I know you feel like you have to come if I go, but you don’t. You can go back to the pharmacy building. Wait for me on the third floor in the infirmary. That’s where I found Fritz and the others yesterday. I doubt you’ll find anything to eat, but you’ll have a bed and a blanket. I’ll be there by morning.”

  Murphy pointed at the veterinary sciences building too. “You think I’d leave you to go in there by yourself.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “We both know I’m kinda fucked in the head.”

  “You are crazy, but don’t pretend like that’s front page news. Anybody who spends five minutes with you knows that?”

  “Five minutes?” I didn’t believe it.

  Murphy stretched one of his wide grins across his face. “You know what I mean. Sometimes it takes the stupid ones all day to figure out you’re nuts.”

  “All day?” I laughed through a mix of emotions that didn’t know what to feel.

  Murphy looked back at the building. “I’m not worried about going in there. If too many Whites come at us, I’ll just stand behind you. I think I’ve maybe been underestimating what a deadly little white ninja you are with your machete.”

  I smiled. “Let’s get in there, then, and see if we’re wasting our time.”

  With Murphy beside me, I jogged across the rest of the parking lot and passed by another stand of trees, taking care to step around the carcasses of the dead Whites. To be spattered in a layer of fresh blood was one thing. To trip and fall on a half-rotten corpse and come up covered in its gory stench was a pitfall worth avoiding.

  We came to stop beside a big pickup truck with the doors swung open that contained the remains of a couple of people who’d died early on in the epidemic. The look of an old scalp stretched over a skull had a totally different look than that of one recently deceased. The smell changed with time as well. Good stuff to know at the end of the world but worthless to me at the moment.

  I looked up and down the length of the front wall. Murphy did too.

  Having seen the building from above, I guessed that it had started out as one building and then through the course of separate expansion projects through the decades it looked like five or six buildings merged into one—each large, each distinct. No attempt had been made to maintain a consistent look from one addition to the next. That didn’t bode well for how I expected the building to be laid out inside. It wouldn’t be organized. It certainly wouldn’t be intuitive. If anything, it would be like walking a maze.

  Well, that was bad for Murphy and me, but it might be a boon for any scientists who’d survived the initial attack. They’d be able to hide in the labyrinth of hallways and offices where Whites might get lost.

  But then again, even a rat was smart enough to find its way to the cheese at the end of a maze. “Dammit.”

  “What?” Murphy looked around, alarmed.

  “Nothing.” I continued to examine the building. “Just running through pros and cons in my head and getting frustrated.”

  “Like I keep tellin’ you man, you think too much when you’re not busy killin’ Whites.” Murphy pointed. “Looks like they slapped that plywood over the windows up and down the length of the building. Probably had windows all along the wall, just like up on the second floor. Fine choice for keeping out your run-of-the-mill White infestation but not for these naked fuckers.”

  Murphy was right about that. The plywood had been peeled back in half a dozen places. Whites must have poured into the building from what seemed like every direction.

  “I say we just go in right here at the corner.” Murphy looked to me for confirmation.

  A sheet of plywood had nearly a third broken away to reveal a shattered window and a shadowy room beyond. “Yeah. That’ll put us at the end of the building. We can work our way through systematically.”

  “Probably we won’t need to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once we’re inside, if anybody’s alive, they’re barricaded somewhere. My bet is the Whites know where they are, and they’ll be having a fit because they can’t get to ‘em. We’ll hear it.”

  “You’re probably right.” I jogged over to the window, took a peek inside, and saw an empty classroom. Using the backside of my blade, I ran it back and forth across the window frame to break away the jagged pieces. The Whites who’d gone through before me hadn’t done that and bled plenty for the oversight.

  Murphy looked around to watch for Whites.

  “I’m done.” I climbed in through the window. Murphy followed.

  We made our way to the door going into the hall, and I swung it open. One thing was sure, Whites were in the building, but they didn’t seem to be making that riotous, attacking noise, just their usual sounds when they were going about their daily business, searching for food, squabbling over scraps, or destroying anything they thought might have the warm flesh of an uninfected person inside.

  Chapter 24

  With no clue as to where the scientists might be in the building and no riot of White noise to guide us, Murphy and I settled into the systematic method. We worked our way down a long hall, looking inside rooms where the Whites preceded us, opening doors when they were closed. On that first floor of the first building, we found five or six Whites and we sent them to monster Valhalla. At the end of the corridor, instead of going through an oddly angled passage into the addition next door, we went upstairs and started on the second floor of the first building. We found more Whites and convinced them to become dead. The third floor was more of the same.

  By the time we were done, we’d killed nearly thirty—slaughtered them in ones, twos, and threes. It wasn’t defensive, it was straight up extermination. It wasn’t an adventure. It was a job, tiring work.

  When we felt confident that we’d cle
ared all the Whites out of the first building, Murphy sat down at a table in what used to be a break area, at the corner of the third floor, with tall windows on two walls, giving us a good view of nearby university buildings and green spaces—brown by then and likely to stay that way until native plants took over.

  I walked along a back wall lined with vending machines, swinging the broken doors open, looking for goodies that might have been missed when they’d been ransacked.

  “Anything?” Murphy asked.

  I shook my head as I shoved aside wrappers and empty cans with the tip of my machete blade.

  “Be nice if we had something to eat.” Murphy put a hand on his lean belly. “Killing Whites like this sucks. I know I’m gonna sound like a dick, but its boring.”

  “Yeah.” Having finished my unenthusiastic search of the vending machines, I cross through the upturned tables and chairs, picked one off the floor and sat it at the table across from Murphy. “Only like five more buildings to go.”

  Murphy stared out the window for a minute, watching the campus, and watching Whites wander aimlessly now that the commotion at the drill field had been over for an hour or two. He chuckled, sat up straight in the chair, and leaned on the table, drilling me with a serious look.

  “What?”

  “Mister Zane, we need to talk about your quarterly evaluation.” Murphy busted out in a big laugh.

  I laughed too. We laughed longer than the joke merited, but we needed it. The day had been tiring and demoralizing. We’d seen better days. But we’d seen so many that were worse.

  Murphy sat back when his laughter lost its steam. “You ever think that maybe we should just pack up our shit and head west?”

  “To Balmorhea?”

  Murphy nodded. “But I’m afraid when I think about it now.”

  “Why?”

  Murphy pointed out at the campus. “Until yesterday, this place was…was…”