Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Read Free

bothering to hide with some tact his concern that I might be slipping a little too far from reality.
    “Yeah.” Of course, I said ‘yeah.’ That's the only answer to that question, when what somebody is really asking is the rhetorical, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
    I put my foot to the accelerator and the electric Mustang rolled over the bridge above the highway, crossing from West Austin to East Austin. Along the access road on the other side of the interstate, rummaging through the lines of burned hulks of cars that four months ago had been waiting their chance to get into the unmoving line on I-35, white skinned monsters—formerly normal people—glowed in the moonlight.              
    They didn’t notice the silent Mustang. None had since I drove away from the old power plant down by the river. We’d passed hundreds on our rat-maze race through Austin’s gentrified warehouse district and into the high-rise condos and bank buildings closer to the Capitol. Along the way, as I caught glimpses of the statehouse, I saw that the fires I'd started in the subterranean Capitol Annex were still burning in the hundred-fifty-year-old domed building. Now, beneath the red granite dome, the building’s windows flickered orange and dribbled rivulets of acrid ash into the black sky, hiding the stars behind smoky ribbons of our ruin.
    The Whites did notice the rattling diesel engine and the noisy off-road tires on the Humvee Murphy was driving at a distance a few blocks behind. His vehicle loudly announced the coming of a meal and the Whites reacted accordingly, waking up, chasing into the street to catch him and his passengers, pouncing on the armored Humvee from the sides.
    It was all a futile effort on the Whites’ part. They weren’t fast enough to catch it from behind. They didn’t get out in front of it in sufficient numbers to do anything but die as Murphy ran them down. The ones that did get on top didn’t stay, as Murphy bounced them off by running over curbs or whatever lumps he might find in the road.
    With the bridge behind us, the Mustang glided silently through the ashen remnants of neighborhoods. The fire that burned most of East Austin back in August had left little intact. The pattern of the streets was deducible only from the ragged lines of rusty orange and brown car skeletons, each having had all non-metal components long since blazed away.
    Blackened brick chimneys stood as grave markers for each house that had smoldered to cinder around it. Trunks of trees still stood, some holding the thickest of their limbs to the sky. All of the storm drains along the curbs had clogged with ash and fire debris when the storms came. What was left when the rain clouds blew away and the flood waters receded was an even blanket of blackened gray over everything not tall enough to reach above it.
    That was what the Mustang rolled through, six-inches deep. I ran over brittle bone, which I’d come to know from the peculiar feel of the crunch it made under our wheels. Of the other metallic remnants of the East Austin disaster, I only hoped none hiding in the ash on the road in front of me were sharp enough to puncture my tires.
    Behind the Mustang, a cloud of fine ash thrown up by the tires hid the Humvee from sight. I knew that made it hard for Murphy to see, but it made it impossible for him to lose me. What's more, with East Austin burned nearly flat, any White who happened to be wandering through wouldn't be able to see the Humvee. They'd hear the noisy diesel, but they'd only see the big, gray cloud, instead of a rolling vehicle.
    Eventually, the ashen desolation turned to rolling hills, blanketed by farms. The fields were separated by barbed wire fences, draped in bramble and sprouting wind-tormented trees trying to birth hedgerows. Interspersed with the fields were homestead parcels, boasting anything from a decaying trailer to a plantation-style mansion. As often as not, something, or a whole host of