Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind (4 page)

I ’d crossed most of the wide, flat valley floor and neared what looked like a stark border between the trampled black dirt and the white glow when I realized what I was seeing. Whites.

They were lying in an endless blanket across the valley, spooning, cuddled, skin touching skin, keeping each other warm by crowding themselves together tightly as they slept. That answered a question about freezing to death. I wondered how warm they stayed, snuggled together like that, with only one side of their bodies exposed to the cold air. Was it enough?

I looked north as I thought about Whites in the colder climates. What were they doing, with snows already having fallen in places and subzero temperatures coming? Surely, they’d have figured out already they needed to shelter indoors at night. And if not? Would they all freeze to death over the winter and leave the northern states open to normals? Would they migrate from north to south and back again with the seasons, and become a new-century version of America’s great buffalo herds?

That was something to think about in the long term—the possibility of leaving Texas and heading north. Of course, the same cold that could kill Whites could also kill normals and Slow Burns, like me. My thoughts ran down a rat hole, quantifying how much wood to chop for the winter and storing provisions for the long months with snow piled outside the door. And what about the smoke from the chimney? That would certainly draw in any Whites who’d figured out how to survive in the snow.

Thoughts for another day.

Standing at the edge of a blanket of sleeping white bodies that stretched as far as I could see into the darkness, I had real business at hand, the kind that required every speck of my attention. I needed to decide what to do next.

I raised my machete and looked up and down the battered edge of the blade. How many sleeping Whites could I kill with it?

Did I want to follow the herd, blending in during the daylight hours, looking like them and acting like them, risking getting busted with my boots on? It would be easy to wait for them to cuddle up to sleep for the night and run among their prone bodies, slashing their throats. I could be the monster of
their
nightmares.

Did I want that?

Oh, hell yeah, I did.

I looked across the acres and acres of them, knowing the horde had probably spread itself over the crest of the hill, down into the next valley, and who knew how far beyond that. Maybe for miles. How many throats could I slash in a single night? How many nights would it take to kill them all? Weeks? Months? Years? Would I ever finish?

I scanned across all those bodies, breathing in that slow rhythm of sleep, snoring, and mumbling through their dreams. I lost hope that I could kill enough of them with my machete to make a discernible difference in their numbers.

Still, it was a hard fantasy to let go of. The idea of it tempted me into indulging more thought on how I could kill as many of those evil white monsters as possible. The problem with my whole plan, I decided, wasn’t the futility of it, it was the method. Running among the sleeping with a swinging machete was a bad idea. If I wanted to kill Whites in the mass numbers that my aspirations required, I needed a more industrial-scale solution.

I sighed. The dirt and dark skies were not fertile ground for inspiration.

Looking back at the unnatural shape at the crest of the hill, I wondered if the Smart Ones, who directed the horde, were holed up inside. More importantly, I wondered if Mark was with them, keeping himself warm and comfortable.

That thought made me angry.

He deserved no comfort. He deserved to be shivering in the cold with ticks crawling on his skin, looking for hidden places to sink their mandibles and suck his tainted blood. He needed to be itchy from poison ivy exposure and scratching incessantly. He needed a cramping gut that forced him to squat every ten minutes for temporary relief from diarrhea. And he needed skin to be left raw from squatting so many times that it burned every time he relieved himself.

But how much of that would he feel? He had a brain numbed to most pain by the virus. Just like me.

With a tight grip on the handle of my machete, I reached down to my boot and took out my knife. I needed both handy as I waded into the blanket of sleeping Whites, carefully planting my feet in awkwardly spaced gaps, often squeezing my boot between bodies to find my footing.

The going was slow. Some Whites stirred as I pushed and nudged. A few looked up at me before laying their heads back down to sleep. None made any move to threaten me.

By the time I was halfway up the hill, I came to the realization that the big, black-silhouetted thing at the top wasn’t one thing at all, but two—a giant harvesting machine parked next to a semi-tractor trailer. I’m not a country boy, but I’m not completely ignorant either. So it was obvious to me the truck was there to run alongside the harvester for offloading whatever crop had been in the field.

Disappointment slowed my progress once I figured out what the massive machines were. The Smart Ones leading the naked horde wouldn’t be sleeping inside.

Of course, that didn’t mean the cab of one wouldn’t be a great place for me to bed down for the night. It would be better than the alternative—snuggling up with the Whites on the ground.

Another thought occurred to me. I could use the harvester for a lookout tower. From up on top, I’d be able to see for miles in all directions. Perhaps I could spot the place where the Smart Ones were holed up.

From the roof of the harvester, I searched. Out east, a series of black triangles and rectangles blocked the stars along the horizon. That had to be one of the countless tiny towns that dotted Texas’ farm country. Over the rolling undulations in the terrain in that direction, I saw only sleeping Whites, as though the crops that had grown in the fields had been replaced.

So many.

As I turned, looking for anything that might give me a bead on the Smart Ones, I uttered under my breath, “I’m your nightmare.”

I loved that thought.

It tantalized me with its power.

It made me feel like an invincible Ninja, a black beast, a long-toothed devil with an appetite for white killers’ blood that I could pour into the void in my soul.

I teased myself with vignettes of Whites waking in the morning and looking at the bloody, cold bodies lying around them. I decided that their wretched little brains had the capacity to fear what haunted their nights. I wanted them to know the price of their sins and to dread the moment when they’d wake with a machete through their throats, choking as they drowned in their blood.

The memory of Steph’s dying hand wounded my heart again as I felt her lifeless fingers slip away from my grasp, and I hoped to God every White beneath my gaze would soon feel the heart-rending fear of the night monster that stalked them, reaping his revenge.

I wanted them to walk through their days afraid to lie down to sleep. They needed to taste remorse. To suffer.

Movement along a hill crest off to my left caught my attention. A discoloration on the down slope of the hill showed vaguely against the background of the Whites sleeping there.   

I stared into the dark, missing my night vision goggles again, trying to discern what I was seeing.

A house?

A farmhouse?

Along the crest, something moved again, and I watched the pale silhouettes against the starred background. Three—thin, muscular, and naked—walking together.

Sentries?

I continued to watch. To the right of the house—it had to be a house—another three Whites cast silhouettes as they tiptoed through the sleepers along the crest.

Yes. Definitely sentries, walking in wide circles around that farmhouse.

Gotcha, motherfuckers.

The Smart Ones leading the naked horde had to be in that house. Why else would sentries be walking a perimeter around it?

My problem with Mark was going to find its solution before the night’s end. I wished I had some hand grenades. Then all of those smart white fuckers in the house would die. I entertained a fantasy of pounding a grenade into Mark’s mouth, breaking his teeth and watching the blood pour out, humiliating and hurting him before I pulled the pin.

Pointless, but fun to think about.

Still, I had my nicked-up machete. It had served me well in killing. It would do for turning Mark into a carcass.

I climbed quietly down from the harvester and made my way through the sleeping Whites.

As I drew closer to the house, the Whites seemed to get more aggressive. No longer did they docilely ignore my nudging and pushing as I stepped over them. Missteps earned me grunts and angry growls. More than once, I bumped a White too hard and the reaction knocked me off my feet. Of course, I landed on other sleeping Whites who woke, none too pleased.

Each time it happened, I brandished my machete and faced aggressive Whites with a silent promise to swing my blade. Their goldfish brains understood the threat because they’d seen blades kill. None pushed me past the threat to slice their throats. Not that I minded killing any of them. My concern lay in making enough of a commotion that I’d chance waking the Smart Ones in the farmhouse.

I was maybe a hundred yards from the house when I caught the attention of one of the trios of sentries. They were a good distance to my left, standing still and apparently staring at me.

I raised my machete and shook it at them, hoping to ward them off.

They were unfazed and continued staring.

I pressed on toward the house, keeping an eye alternately on it and on the three Whites, who were keeping an eye on me. It was only through the luck of hearing an animal scampering on the metal roof of a shed near the farmhouse that I looked to my right and realized I’d fucked up.

Six or seven Whites had fanned out to my right, the closest standing only a few dozen paces away as I tiptoed between sleeping bodies on the ground. A few sentries were coming directly at me. Others weren’t. The lizard core of my brain recognized the trap immediately and shouted inside my head, “Run, motherfucker!”

I ignored it as irrationality trying to raise a panic and I looked at the house where I suspected—knew—the Smart Ones were sleeping. I estimated the distance to the Whites closing in on my right. I looked at the three who’d been standing to my left, but were now hurrying past their sleeping brothers and sisters. There had to be Smart Ones, or semi-Smart Ones among them because their actions were too deliberate for stupid white monsters.

They were clearly coming at me, or at least encircling me.

But they weren’t running. Why?

Maybe they couldn’t because of all the sleepers littering the ground who might wake and make a mess of everything. Maybe the sentries weren’t sure what I was. Maybe they were afraid of me and my machete. Maybe they wanted to capture rather than kill me.

That last one was a frightening thought, because it implied a lot about the command and control abilities of my adversaries in the house.

The panic I’d felt a moment before was the correct response. It wasn’t irrationality.

It was time to move my feet.

Glancing back and forth for the safest vector, I spun around and took quick steps over the sleeping Whites.

No surprise, the pursuing sentries quickened their pace. And if anything, they were moving faster than I was.

Running wasn’t a solution I thought would work. That was only a path to twisted ankles and falling into a tumble of Whites, from which I suspected I’d never get up again.

Instead, I put my own virus-tainted brain to work and dredged out an inspiration. I usually have no trouble coming up with an idea on the fly, though I try not to evaluate the quality of those ideas too closely.

I smacked a sleeping White across the head with the flat of my blade and leapt across a few sleepers, not aiming my foot at a shadowy spot of ground between two prone Whites, but at the nearest, flattest spot I saw on a white body.

As my foot landed, driving the wind out of an unsuspecting dreamer, the guy I’d smacked with my machete was already winding up an irate bellow.

And before the sleeper was awake enough to catch his breath, I’d leapt to my next victim, taking care to swing my machete across as many Whites as I could reach, hoping to hit them hard enough to wake them.

Leap number two worked as hoped. I was off again.

The trick, it turned out, was to get off fast. To linger too long on a single step was to risk all kinds of bad outcomes. As that thought came to me, I figured the faster I ran, the better my chances, as long as I didn’t misplace a foot. So I bet my sense of balance and what I hoped was a traction advantage with the soles of my boots against my pursuers. I sprinted, leaving a wake of commotion I hoped would slow them down.

I’d made it a few hundred yards when I came to a clear spot and stopped, panting heavily. I turned to get an idea of the state of things behind me. My plan was working.

Oh yeah, bitch, that’s right. The genius is back in the game.

A wedge-shaped swath of pandemonium grew out along my path and pointed right at me. It was a sign that even the stupidest of Whites coming after me would be able to figure out. Too bad for them that they were caught up in the crowd of grouchy Whites waking from their sleep and bouncing to their feet.

Whites were sitting up in all directions or climbing to their hands and knees. Awakened by the sounds, many were already on their feet.

Things were about to get dicey, and if enough pissed-off Whites decided I was the entrée, things would zip right past dicey and on to straight-up fucked again.

It was time for a new tactic.

Time to put that ever-useful machete back to work. I spun in a quick circle and whacked or lacerated the skull of every White within reach. It’s surprising how quickly some of those damn things wake. They don’t waste any time groaning about needing a coffee. They bounce right up, ready to rumble.

I pushed between a pair of them and took off at a jog, zigzagging back and forth, kicking and slashing, running in circles. I was trying to raise as big a mob of them as I could in the twenty or thirty seconds of safety I figured I had before the first of the sentries reached that clear spot I’d just left.

I was putting the smell of blood in the air, wounding a bunch of Whites, some—enough—to make them vulnerable to their hungry comrades, and I was inciting a riot, or whatever passed for a riot among the naked Whites. I was betting that if I got enough of them up, the odds of the sentries finding me would sink to zero.

Whites started to howl as the smell of blood worked its way into their nostrils and reminded their empty stomachs that a meal would come in awful handy.

Screaming started as some saw the machete cuts as an invitation to partake of their comrade’s flesh. The noise woke more, and the undefined perimeter of my mob spread.

Before I knew it, thousands were up all around, and none seemed particularly interested in me.

I couldn’t have hoped for better.

It was time to go.

I hurried through the mob, keeping a wary eye out for any Smart One with a knife or any stupid one looking to make a bad decision. Bad, as defined by my possession of a machete I’d use without hesitation or guilt.

Soon enough, I found myself among Whites, of whom only about half were on their feet, the other half either still sleeping or lying down and looking around. I wasn’t irritating them with my kicks and slashes by then, just being careful as I passed, so as not to disturb any more.

I kept on in that fashion while I continually glanced back to make sure that no Whites were following along my path.

When I got to the crest of the hill from which I’d originally spotted the house that contained the Smart Ones, I figured I was home free. The valley floor was in a state of pandemonium, and still, no Whites appeared to be moving in my direction.

None was paying me any attention.

Off to my left, along the crest and a good distance away, that combine and its accompanying tractor trailer still stood, inviting me to go over and make myself comfortable sleeping on a padded seat. To do that would probably have been a mistake, as I figured that the sentries might look there for me if they suspected I was intelligent.

Instead, I dropped to the ground in a gap between two females, laid my machete in the dirt and lay down on top of it. I then spooned my way in close to one of the females and pretended at being as sleepy-still as I could manage, while I kept my eyes open and listened.

Well aware of the trouble that always seemed to come when I dared such thoughts, I congratulated myself for my quick wits and clever plan. I’d escaped my pursuers and slipped away from another brush with death’s dirty maw.

I wanted to laugh.

Of course, I didn’t. I snuggled with my new girlfriend, thankful the night was chilly enough to keep my little friend at bay, and I watched.