Slow Burn (Book 8): Grind Read Free Page A

somethings—old cars, obsolete farm equipment, and kitchen appliances—stood in tall weeds, rusting their way into the black clay.
    Within ten or twenty miles of Austin’s outskirts, oddly shaped plots of land that used to be farms had long since been sold to developers with a penchant for laying out little subdivisions with names like Green Hills, Vista Norte, or Sunny Shitboxes, probably on a landfill mound, all built from low-grade yellow pine and the cheapest Chinese siding the builder could import and staple together. Over the sub-standard constructs, built outside the city limits and beyond the reach of restrictive building codes, the builders slapped on one of six colors of fresh paint, all inspired by some shade of dried curb mud and cockroach turds.
    The newer of the subdivisions looked squeaky-plain and tidy, with their ten-foot, two-leaf twigs of trees staked into the center of the cut-sod front lawns. None of the siding on those houses had yet warped. None of the paint had oxidized and washed away. Few of the shingles were yet blown off in the Texas wind.
    The older subdivisions, those built a decade or more in the past, looked like slums more than suburbs. Hard-working, middle-class folk who couldn’t afford the obscene real estate prices closer to town bought those houses on adjustable rate mortgages, thinking they could afford growing future payments, because they’d long ago been infected by the blinding disease of optimism that convinced them that despite the evidence of all their dismal yesterdays, their tomorrows would be dipped in gold.
    Fucked by the fine print, they were.
    The promo periods on their mortgages came to an end. Monthly installments bounced happily higher—for the banks—at pretty much the same time that gasoline prices rocketed to a new record. Suddenly that twenty-mile commute into Austin, manageable a year before, ballooned into unaffordability along with their house payments. They missed a payment on a credit card and general default rules kicked in, doubling the interest rate and monthly payments on all of their revolving debt.
    Stagnating wages couldn’t cover the difference. House repairs were skipped. Watering the lawn, a luxury in drought-parched Texas in those days, ceased. The twiggy trees died. The new sod turned to dirt. The house foundations, sitting on that porous, parched clay, shifted and cracked. Quarter-inch cracks zig-zagged down brick walls. Roofs opened at the seams.
    On the occasions when it did rain, water leaked in. Mold followed, because even in the fucking Texas heat, the thick humidity makes sure that things never completely dry out. Because the insurance companies stopped covering mold damage a decade before, the houses turned unlivable and worthless.
    For the hard working folk who hadn’t figured it out by then, they learned how ‘fucked’ was spelled, what it tasted like, what it smelled like. They knew it with all the intimacy of a herpes-infected lover. They loaded their shit into U-Haul vans, dropped their house keys into brown envelopes, and jingle-mailed their dreams away to the mortgage companies.
    A cancer of bleak despair wormed its way across the face of America in those years, creating open sores of pre-apocalyptic rot for the virus to settle in.
    Now it was hard to tell which houses had been abandoned for years and which held the recently deceased.
    The farther we drove from Austin, the more my mood turned to shit, the more the whole shitty world looked like something tormented by a biblical plague and forgotten by God. And the more I felt like I was running away, though the promise of fledgling hope lived in College Station, our destination a hundred miles to the east.

Chapter 2
    Fritz studied the map that was unfolded across his lap, running up the door panel and overhanging the console. Yeah, with the passing of the smartphone into history's long list of lost technological marvels, paper maps were back in fashion. Using a tiny