Slow Burn: Firestorm, Book 10

Prologue

I’m Zed Zane, but you know that.

What you don’t know is, it’s been fourteen years since the virus destroyed humanity’s hubris-happy high-tech hyper-age. More than a decade since the electric grids last sparked across the wire and cool, clean water stopped flowing from the taps. A lifetime—the entire life of a teenager—since the cities collapsed.

All those millions of nifty gadgets that numbed us to the daily drudge of subsistence in a corpo-centric economy, all of our progress and knowledge, our universities and institutions, those cavernous stadiums and sprawling airports, and maybe most of all, our dreams of a sparkly future, were lost. Just more grist for the grind of time. And we owed it all to a half-alive microbe, a tiny virus that jumped from a monkey to a bat to a pig, or whatever, somewhere in the jungles of Africa.

We were nearly eight billion strong at the time, splattered across the globe, ticking away in cities linked by weather-worn highways that rumbled under an endless rush of spinning tires. Jets crisscrossed the sky, hauling ogle-eyed travelers to the novel comfort of dinners at McDonald’s restaurants in faraway cities. Electronic toys blasted a 24/7 kaleidoscope of digital trifles at our faces, linking us into a communal, semi-conscious existence that none of us understood. All of it, compounding and congealing into a scab that shrank the world of humanity into a thing that felt small, false, and tenuous.

The virus shattered the foundations of that world and sent it crumbling into rubble. 

Those of us who survived that first year did our best to rebuild. What else could we do? Mope and starve?

At the dawn of Year 14—fourteen years after the virus hit—I was living in Balmorhea. Even before the virus ravaged the world, Balmorhea was a dying town eight hours from everywhere in the remote desert of West Texas. It was the kind of place any pre-collapse suburbanite might have called a shithole.

The town was laid out in a tidy grid a half-mile square. Mostly houses and trailers, a school, some businesses, a few government buildings. It was a compact place, just big enough for the five or six hundred oil field roughnecks, farmers, and ranch hands who lived there. Balmorhea’s layout, coupled with the hundreds of miles of desert and arid hills surrounding it, made it easy to defend from the millions of infected who still lurked in the cities and dense forests of East Texas. Primarily because few had the motivation or the fortitude to cross the desert on foot.

What made Balmorhea a refuge, though, wasn’t only its isolation, but San Solomon Springs, which gushed twenty million gallons of fresh water out of the earth every day. The spring bubbled just four miles down Highway 17 from the town, providing an endless supply of water, which, before the collapse, had been used to turn the patch of dry desert dirt around Balmorhea into bountiful farm and pastureland. Well, bountiful is a relative term.

Originally, there were eighteen of us, me and the people I’d escaped from Austin with. Through the years, we took in another four hundred or so who’d wandered out of the desert, hailing from Amarillo, Abilene, El Paso, Cotulla. Any other town you could name. Nearly all of them were “normals,” people with a natural immunity to the virus, brave survivors who’d fought their way through the infected hordes to get out of the cities and stumble upon us. Only thirteen of us were Slow Burns, the rare ones. 

Together, we cultivated the fallow fields. We managed our herds of cattle, goats, and sheep. We hunted antelope on the plain and javelina in the nearby mountains, seldom venturing farther than a few miles from our fortified oasis—at least, most of us didn’t. Murphy, me, and a handful of others ranged all over West Texas and into New Mexico, scavenging what we could and looking for survivors to bring into the fold. We traded with the tiny clans and homesteads we found, especially a group who’d set themselves up in the oilfields south of Odessa, pumping petroleum and trading it for food. 

Behind our wall and rings of defenses, we felt safe, successful, even. Because of the spring, we were immune to droughts, so never suffered any shortage of food. Thanks to scavenged solar panels and small wind turbines, we were able to maintain a modest flow of electricity all through town. We traded for enough fuel to keep our tractors, a few pickup trucks, and our small fleet of Humvees running. We’d even reared a small herd of horses and were hoping to husband them into many more. We had an excellent hospital—by third world standards—a growing library, an underutilized school for the very few children who survived infancy, a bar with plenty of homebrewed alcohol, and a simple system of government.

Despite all that had happened to the world, to our friends, our families, and to us, we felt like we were Humanity’s chance to avoid extinction, a shining beacon in the desert. None of us realized that collective conceit was a symptom of the new version of the shrunken world we lived in—Balmorhea. We didn’t know, perhaps we didn’t want to know, what danger lay beyond the desert that swaddled us. 

Chapter 1

SAFETY, FOOD, and FRIENDS
GOOD PEOPLE WELCOME
NO SHITHEADS ALLOWED

The words were painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart Supercenter. I’d added that last part, to no one’s amusement but mine.

A red dotted line underscored the message and led the eye to the sidewalk below, where a reinforced steel cabinet sat bolted into the concrete. A combination lock kept the cabinet’s door secure. The combination for the lock was painted on the outside of the cabinet, making it accessible to anyone who’d retained their cognitive abilities—normal people, and Slow Burns like me and Murphy; full whites wouldn’t look twice at it. 

The hordes of infected who still roamed the world so many years after the collapse had no chance of opening the cabinet. They wouldn’t even understand the significance of the cable pinned to the wall carrying electricity down from a few solar cells mounted on the roof. Those solar cells kept a battery charged that powered the shortwave radio inside the cabinet. Along with operation and contact instructions, sixteen radios like the one in the cabinet were scattered from the eastern edge of El Paso, all the way back to Odessa and Midland, down to Marfa, up through Pecos, and as far north as Carlsbad, most of the towns of any size on the roads that spiderwebbed out from Balmorhea.

That’s where we were, in Carlsbad, responding to a radio call from a woman and her friends, good people—we hoped—looking to join our ever-growing desert community. Murphy and I knelt behind a commercial-sized HVAC unit on the roof of a long-defunct industrial equipment business. I had my binoculars to my eyes to get a clear view across Highway 285 and the asphalt acres of the Walmart’s cracking parking lot. At least a hundred Whites lay scattered there, shot to pieces, buzzing with flies. None were more than a day or two dead. Thirteen people hung from the wall on the front of the Walmart, tied by their splayed feet, upside down, stripped bare. They looked like they’d been trampled before being strung up. Blood ran in streaks down the wall. Vermin scurried across the asphalt below, scrapping over clotted bits of gore. 

My thoughts slipped out into words I hadn’t meant to speak: “Suffering for suffering’s sake.”

“They’re dead?” declared Murphy.

“I think one or three might be alive,” I decided.

“It’s windy,” Murphy countered. “That movement you think you see, that’s the wind blowing their heads back and forth.”

He might have been right. Hell, he was most likely right, but to admit it meant abandoning the tortured people who’d taken a chance and called us on the shortwave. Then waited for us to arrive. And waited. Until this happened. I felt responsible for their fate.

“What do you think happened?” asked Murphy. “What do you think it means?”

I stood to get a clear view up and down the highway. A scattering of rusting cars. Creosote bushes and tumbleweeds in the median. Countless squat buildings up and down both sides of the thoroughfare—hiding places for a hundred threats.

“You’re already being stupid,” Murphy told me.

“No. I’m looking to see if this is a trap.”

“Says that rat while he sniffs the cheese.” Murphy rolled his eyes. “Stupid. There’s that word again.”

“You think somebody killed them because they’re Slow Burns, or do you think they’re regular Whites?”

“I think somebody is going to shoot you for exposing yourself like a moron.”

“Not with the wind blowing like it is.” I pointed at a pair of multi-story hotels standing a full block back from the main road, well north of us.

Murphy groaned.

I said, “If a sniper with any kind of skill is lurking for a shot, he’d be there. Too far in this wind.”

“You’re an endless fountain of know-it-all bullshit, you know that?”

“Talent comes in all flavors.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive, and, like usual, you’re not listening.”

I told him, “I always listen, especially when you pretend you’re the only one who’s been shot at before. I just don’t agree with you right now.”

“And how often am I right?”

“Sometimes.”

“Most of the time,” Murphy argued. 

“Are you two ever going to finish up here?” It was Dalhover. He’d climbed the ladder on the back of the building and was looking at us from the edge of the roof.

Murphy pointed at me. “Dumbass here wants us to walk into a trap.”

“You see a trap?” rasped Dalhover.

I quickly explained about the bodies we saw hanging from the Walmart. “At least one of them is alive. Maybe three.”

“Maybe one,” countered Murphy.

“And, this is our fault,” I claimed.

“Oh, good god,” groused Dalhover. “I thought we were past all that Null Spot bullshit.”

Murphy laughed. “You haven’t been out on a run with him in a couple years, Top. Dipshit here is hardwired for White Knight knuckleheadism.”

“Responsibility is responsibility,” I argued, “even when it sucks. Especially when it sucks.”

Dalhover snorted and climbed down the ladder, calling, “Do whatever you want. You’re gonna do it anyway.”

Murphy slumped against the rusting air conditioner and groaned dramatically. 

“If that woman is going to have any chance,” I told him, “we need to do this now.”

“It’s gonna be a terrible plan. It’s always a terrible plan. At least be quick about telling it. Can you do that for me, please?”

Chapter 2

Grace and Jazz both wore the same infected White skin as Murphy and me, though Jazz was generously tattooed—a remnant of life before the collapse. They’d made the run into New Mexico with us, driving a pale green four-wheel-drive Suburban, a vehicle that had once been used by the border patrol for monitoring the wild desert between I-10 and the Rio Grande. Like the Humvee Murphy, Dalhover and I rode in, it was a dependable workhorse, not pretty, but tough and reliable. All of us who regularly ventured into the badlands had our favorite vehicles.

Dalhover, though, hadn’t been out on a mission in years. I figured he’d come along because he wanted one last hurrah before his advancing age confined him to a rocking chair. He drove the Humvee. I rode shotgun, literally, and Murphy stood through the roof hatch, manning the .50.

A scrounged aluminum ladder lashed to the side of our Humvee, Murphy on the machine gun, and bold action made up most of my plan for riding into the teeth of what might well be an ambush. Dalhover gunned the Humvee’s engine and we lumbered onto the narrow street that would take us half a block over to the highway. I waved at Grace and Jazz who were going to remain in the lot behind the industrial supply building, listening on the radio, and staying ready to make a dash for safety, should danger arise.

Dalhover paused at the corner stop sign—some habits die hard, others come back when you don’t expect them. The highway in both directions was littered with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. Power poles had fallen here and there, alerting us to keep an eye out for downed powerlines—always a hazard. The thick cables could get caught under a wheel and wrap around an axle. Through the intersection and across the highway, Dalhover drove straight into the Walmart parking lot. He slalomed the Humvee past some sand dunes that had accumulated over the shells of cars, and blazed a path for the suspended semi-corpses. He called to Murphy, “You see anything?”

“Nothing alive,” he answered.

Dalhover skidded to a stop at the curb below the hanging bodies.

I flung my door open and, with Murphy’s help from above, unlashed the ladder. He stayed put behind the .50. Dalhover left the engine running and stepped outside with his weapon up, ready to kill anything that moved.

Being so close to the hanging wall, it was easy to tell that most of the unlucky hangers had been up there for more than just days. They were well-picked over by the scavengers. As for the three fresh bodies, the blood on the wall beneath them was still wet. Two were missing body parts. They’d bled out. 

With no caution for keeping it quiet, I slammed the ladder against the wall next to the only person that looked like she could still be salvageable—a girl, twenty, maybe twenty-five. Pretty? Maybe. All I could tell for sure was she’d been beat to Hell.

“What if they’re on the roof?” Murphy asked loud enough for Dalhover and I to hear.

“Shit.” Dalhover took up a position beside the Humvee, using it for cover as he aimed his M16 at the top edge of the Walmart’s roof.

Murphy kept scanning the parking lot, the highway, and the gas station out by the road. Danger could come from anywhere.

I scrambled up the ladder, pulling off a glove as I reached the woman. I put two fingers to her throat to check for a pulse just as I heard her ragged breath. “Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“She’s alive.” I climbed higher and maneuvered her body over my shoulder to take her weight. Luckily, she wasn’t heavy. She didn’t resist. The ladder creaked under our combined weight.

Dalhover called, “You got it, Zane?”

The ladder’s feet slipped in the sand on the sidewalk, caught in a crack and stopped. Adrenaline zapped my heart. “A little help?” I asked.

Dalhover bounced across the sidewalk with surprising speed for a man his age. He braced the ladder, and I took another step up, taking the woman’s full weight again, and reached up to cut the thin rope on her ankles. Free from the rope, her legs swung out from the wall, throwing me off balance and nearly tumbling me off the ladder. 

“Be careful, goddammit.”

I sarcastically thanked Dalhover for the belated advice as I stabilized the woman on my shoulder and steadied myself. 

“Do you hear that?” asked Murphy.

Besides Murphy’s alarm, all I heard was my own panting and the ladder creaking as I rushed down the last few rungs. Dalhover helped take our damsel’s weight as soon as we were in his reach. That’s when I heard Grace blaring her truck’s horn from the other side of the highway.

“We got company,” shouted Murphy.

Chapter 3

The woman I’d hauled down from the Walmart torture wall was in no shape to endure further rough treatment, but I had to get her into the back of our Humvee before the situation escalated into whatever was about to come next.

Just up the highway, in front of the Chili’s and behind a cluster of cars that had been rusting on the road since the collapse, sat two black vehicles, idling, waiting. By my guess, one was a Bearcat, one of those armored police vehicles SWAT teams and riot police had used extensively during the initial phase of the virus violence. The other vehicle was a Humvee with an MK 19 grenade launcher mounted on the roof. I had no doubts about that one. We had several in Balmorhea, though we were sorely short of ammunition for the MK 19. 

As if to prove me right, the Humvee shot three rapid rounds in our direction. One hit a knee-high sand dune, exploding a dust cloud into the air. The other two detonated on the asphalt just short of us, showering our Humvee in rocks.

Dalhover already had the Humvee moving by the time I slammed the front passenger door shut. Through the dissipating dust cloud, we lumbered toward a little strip center at the far corner of the parking lot. 

Murphy called down from above, “Were those warning shots, or are they trying to kill us?”

Coughing through the dirt and dust, Dalhover shouted, “Open up with that .50.” 

Murphy’s machine gun thundered.

Dalhover maneuvered around an overturned tractor trailer, putting it between us and our assailants for a moment.

I laid my shotgun on the floor and took up an M16, hanging the barrel out the passenger side window. After all our years in the desert, I still wasn’t any good with a rifle, but in a moving vehicle bouncing across a rough parking lot, it wouldn’t have mattered if I were. 

As we neared the strip mall Dalhover had been hoping to use as cover, a grenade round blasted a sandwich shop sign, battering the Humvee with shards of plastic and twisted sheet metal. A piece tore into my shoulder. I cursed.

“You okay?” asked Dalhover, as he bounced the Humvee over a curb. “Can you shoot?”

I answered by firing at a second pair of black vehicles I’d spotted a quarter mile south. “We have two more over here.”

Dalhover cursed.

Murphy continued firing short bursts at the Humvee with the grenade launcher.

Our radio squawked to life with Grace’s anxious voice. “Headed east on Center Av—” static hid a few words, “—hostiles.”

“Center Avenue,” I told Dalhover. “That’s where we left Grace and Jazz.”

“Hold on tight,” Dalhover hollered.

I braced myself on the dashboard.

Our front wheels hit the slope of a railroad embankment. I bounced up, hitting my head on the roof, and the woman behind me flew forward and nailed the back of my seat. We hit the actual tracks and I lost all sense of up and down for a moment as loose equipment rattled inside the Humvee.

In an eye blink we were across. Dalhover was, shockingly, still in control. 

Two more grenades exploded in the dirt far behind us.

Muzzles flashed from the vehicles south of us. I answered by expending a full magazine in their direction.

Dalhover plowed over a sagging chainlink fence. The Humvee stabilized on a layer of hardpan and Murphy ripped a long burst downrange. He let up when the Humvee passed between a rusting shipping container and a two-story metal building. 

For half a second, it felt like we could let our guard down.

“Watch those flanks,” ordered Dalhover. 

I pointed my rifle at the upcoming building corner on my right. We zipped past. Nothing lay hidden back there but scrubby desert weeds and rusting pickups.

Dalhover swerved past a pair of rotting dump trucks and then cut a hard right to run down another section of chainlink fence. That put us in a junkyard lined with rows of rusting cars stacked two and three high. We didn’t have any room to maneuver, but neither could our pursuers shoot at us.

I took a fast peek through the gaps between the hulks. “I think we’re running parallel to Center Avenue.”

“I know,” Dalhover groused. “I need to find a way through all this shit.”

I glanced back to check on our guest. She didn’t look much worse than when I pulled off the Walmart. “You alright up there, Murphy?”

He had his gun trained on our six, ready to hammer any pursuers. “All cool up here, man.”

Dalhover cut another hard turn. We smashed through a rickety little fence and sped into a large square plot of undeveloped desert surrounded by rows of ugly pink houses and mobile homes.

“There,” I pointed at a dirt road on the far side. “I’ll bet that cuts over to Center.”

Slogging through the loose sand, Dalhover told me, “See if you can raise Grace on the radio.”

“We lost ‘em,” Murphy was shouting about the guys who’d been shooting at us. “We need to get the hell out of this shitty little town, ‘cause that’s not gonna last.”

“Thank you, Einstein.” I dug around the mess in the Humvee, looking for our Carlsbad map.

Chapter 4

After tearing ass across the scrubby plains and fallow fields south of Carlsbad, it seemed like we’d lost the butt scratchers in the black vehicles—for real. Along the way, we also lost radio contact, Grace and Jazz. I felt okay about that, knowing the range on our equipment wasn’t great. I figured they’d already forded the Pecos by then and were racing through the oil patch east of town. If I was correct, they had no visible pursuit, so they’d make for rendezvous Elmer. “Elmer,” was our codename for the predesignated rendezvous point east of whichever town we happened to be in. That was part of our planning process. Before we pushed into a city of any size, we set our rally areas at the four points of the compass using the code words, Norbert, Sluggo, Elmer, and Wendell. Why the code words? We typically communicated using encrypted signals on old military radios; Dalhover had his habits and he imposed them on the rest of us. Anyway, it made life interesting, as if we needed any more interest.

Following a dirt road into a gulley, Dalhover drove the Humvee onto a low water crossing running ankle-deep with the Pecos River’s greenish water. He stopped halfway across and flung his door open. “See what you can do for the girl.” He climbed onto the roof with a pair of binoculars in hand.

We were still dangerously close to Carlsbad, but I didn’t object. I hopped out and opened the woman’s door. Her terribly bloodshot eyes rolled in my direction; I told her, “I’m here to help you.”

She feebly nodded. Her skin was as pale as mine and every bit as dirty, but terribly bruised and scraped. Her feet were blackish purple. They looked like they belonged on a corpse. Every breath she exhaled sounded like it wanted to be a wail, only she was too weak.

I put my open canteen to her lips and she drank, spilling most of the water down her chest. She didn’t even have the energy to hold the canteen while I dug a sleeping bag out of the back to cover her with.

“My hands feel like they’re on fire,” she murmured. “My head...” she finished with a groan.

“It’s the blood, resettling in your system.” Total guess on my part. From our first aid pack, I opened up a small jar of THC laced honey, homemade in Balmorhea. It wouldn’t do the pain relief trick like an old-school opiate, but it worked better than ten-years-expired ibuprofen. I scooped a spoonful of the bud honey into our guest’s mouth and left the spoon. “Suck on it. It’s disgusting, but it’ll help.” 

She gagged, but kept the spoon in her mouth. I gave her a moment to catch her breath then helped her with some more water. “What’s your name?” 

“Bonny,” she whispered, and lay her head back.

From his position behind the roof-mounted machine gun, Murphy knelt and silently asked how Bonny was doing. Her eyes were closed then, so I shook my head. Her discolored feet worried the hell out of me.

“Top says get her stable. Make her comfortable. It’s going to be a long ride home.”

Bonny spasmed as a sharp pain cramped her spine. 

I laid a hand on her crusty scalp, hoping I wasn’t causing her more pain with my attempt at comfort. Releasing her breath, she relaxed. I took another spoonful of the THC honey and scrapped it beneath her teeth. I looked up at Murphy. “Tell Dalhover, the sooner we can get her to the hospital, the better off she’ll be. I don’t know what else I can to do for her.” 

“Top’s looking for dust plumes back the way we came. Doesn’t make sense that we got away so easy.”

“Maybe they just wanted to chase us off,” I suggested. “Maybe they haven’t figured out how to refine their own diesel and they’re running too short to come after us.”

“Maybe if frogs had wings...” Murphy didn’t finish the wisecrack. “You got a couple minutes to see if she can tell you anything, then we’re back on the road.”

“I need to rearrange our gear so she can lay down.”

“Hurry it up. You know what a grumpy bitch Top turns into if you’re not ready to roll when he is.”

Chapter 5

We’d been running through the maze of roads in the oil patch east of Carlsbad for over an hour and hadn’t seen anything, anywhere, that didn’t look like it hadn’t died or rusted out a long time ago. Dalhover kept the speed down to minimize the size of our dust wake. Murphy rode in the passenger side front seat. 

Not that I could do anything, but I took the spot behind Dalhover where I could tend to Bonny. I had her stretched out on the wide console between the rear seats. It wasn’t a comfy place for anyone to lie, being bare metal, but I’d folded our sleeping bags to make a thin cushion under her. I rolled a blanket for a pillow. Still, every time one of the Humvee’s tires dropped into a pothole, the jolt ran right up through her bones. At least the THC had started to take effect. She was conscious but dreamy, death-gripping my hand like I was Jesus come to save her. 

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Are you in pain?”

She tried to smile, but it looked like a grimace. “Henry? Mikey?”

Her two friends, I guessed. I shook my head.

Tears pooled in her eyes and rolled down the side of her face.

She was in pain, the emotional kind, and I was the last person in the world who could provide competent comfort for that. “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

Bonny sobbed. She pulled my hand over her chest and wrapped her other bruised hand over it.

“She alright?” Dalhover rasped.

Murphy glanced back, concerned.

I didn’t have the answers they were looking for, except that I figured she was going to die. I shrugged.

Guessing at my thoughts, Murphy scolded me with his eyes before telling her, “We’re taking you to a hospital. Just hang on. You thirsty or anything? Zed, give her some water.”

I had a bottle at the ready. “We can trade places if you want.”

“No rifle for you, Zed,” griped Dalhover. “You couldn’t hit your dick with a hammer made of rubber pussy.” 

Murphy laughed at him. “You okay, Top? Dementia making your mouth say funny shit again?”

“I need a shooter up here to watch our flank,” Dalhover explained. “One who can hit what he aims at.” He slowed the Humvee to run through a dry creek bed.

Murphy scanned the horizon to our right. Nothing lurked out there but desiccated mesquite, yucca, and sandy dirt.

A silence settled over us as chalk-dust miles ground past. Even Bonny’s whimpers dissipated to nothing, leaving her to stare at the sky through the window. She didn’t let go of my hand, though. When she did speak, I had to ask her to repeat what she’d said.

She coughed, barely able to muster the breath for it. “I thought I was going to live forever.” 

Live forever? I checked her forehead for a fever. Like everything in the Humvee, it felt gritty and hot. “You’re not going to die.” I couldn’t think of better lie to comfort her delirium. “What happened back there?” 

It took a handful of long moments before Bonny could process her memories into an answer that she babbled into an inaudible whisper. 

I leaned in closer. “I’m sorry. I can barely hear you.”

“We happened on the message. We found the radio.” She meant the message we’d painted in twelve-foot letters on the front wall of the Walmart. She was talking about the radio we’d stashed there. The two made up the gangway to Balmorhea’s informal immigration network, our preliminary vetting. 

“We followed the instructions,” she said, growing sadder with each word. “We called for three days before we got an answer.”

Three days. I didn’t know what to say about that either. We had someone back in Balmorhea assigned to monitor the shortwave channels 24/7. But sometimes signals were weak on the sending units; batteries ran low when too many clouds hid the sun, maybe too much dust coated the solar panel. Sometimes rats chewed through the wires or fire ants crapped out the connectors. Hell, even conditions in the atmosphere could hinder shortwave signal range or bounce them into an atmospheric layer that echoed them off to some other part of the world. “We came as quickly as we could.”

“Quicker would have been better,” she told me. “Richard found us first.” 

“Who’s Richard?”

“Preacher Dick.” She tried to laugh. And failed. “Where…are you from?”

“Balmorhea.”

She looked at me blankly, like she didn’t understand what I’d said.

“A little nowhere town down in Texas. A hundred miles south.”

“Where they have the spring?”

“We have a colony there. Who’s this Richard guy?”

“Out of the ABQ.”

“What’s the ABQ?”

“Albuquerque.” Her eyes roamed past something only she could see; she’d lost hold of her lucidity again. Shortly after, she passed out.

Habit forced me to look outside, to the front, left, right, as I wondered about Albuquerque. The metro population had to be on par with Austin. Before, anyway. How could any normals survive in the remains of a city that size? Assuming Preacher Dick was a normal.

Bonny startled me by dragging a weak finger down the skin of my forearm. “You’re like me.”

“We’re both Slow Burns.”

She looked puzzled. She’d never heard our type called “Slow Burns” before. “They hate us.” She gasped and her voice grew weaker. “Go somewhere faraway. If you stay here, they’ll kill you.”