Free Slow Burn: Dead Fire, Book 4 by Bobby Adair Page A

on to last for long.
    The house sat on the inside bank of a bend in the river, a spectacular piece of property with a beautiful view , but a view of water, trees, and a mountain, few houses, and no boat docks, aside from the one I stood on.
    What to do? Go through the house and possibly confront ravenously hungry Whites trapped inside, and me with no weapon in hand with which to dispose of them? But there’d most certainly be something I could use for a weapon inside.
    No. Best to avoid the infected altogether.
    I’d need to find a gate and go out to the street and work my way down, find that boat and get my ass back upriver to Sarah Mansfield’s house. Suspicious when Freitag returned without me, Dalhover would still be awake and probably in the video room. He’d see me out on the river and open the door for me to come in through the boathouse.
    That was the solution that would most expeditiously put me back within the safety of Miss Mansfield’s walls. No need to go all Rambo on any Whites in the house only to find a butter knife as a weapon. No, I’d pushed my luck too far already. I needed to get home.
    My anger about what Freitag did to me had boiled down to a simmer by then. I didn’t plan to kill her, not anymore. I would evict her and her buddy, Harris, though, and fuck ‘em both anyway.
    T he Whites who were still trying to figure out how to squeeze themselves through the fence howled louder when I started out across the lawn toward the far side of the house. They’d forget me soon enough.
    I didn’t pass to o close to the house when I came around the corner. No need to let myself get ambushed by anything that might be lurking there. Luckily, there was nothing, only a gate near where the fence abutted the side of the house. A tug on a pull-down latch was enough to free me back out into the world.
    White, silent, and anonymous.
    But weaponless too.
    I looked back at the big house.
    No! Just get a boat. Go home. No need to be macho about it.
    The house’s front yard was as large as the back and was bordered with stands of wild oaks, cedar, and thorny vines. Going through the woods to get to the neighbor’s house would prove noisy, messy, and slow. It would be better to walk out to the end of the property and follow the street down to the next house on the street.
    So I walked over an expanse of grass.
    The sound of the river frogs faded as I got further and further from the water, leaving the cicadas, crickets, and grackles to mask most other sounds. Distant gunshots and the simian vocalizations of the infected found their way through the nighttime cacophony. There were plenty nearby. The topography on this shore of the river was more conducive to development. Pricey houses were built on expensive lots amongst the trees for miles in every direction. Lots of houses meant lots of people. Lots of people meant lots of infected.
    At the edge of the crumbly asphalt, I looked up the street. It roughly followed the curve of the river that flowed past on the opposite side of the estate-sized lots. Just a short distance down the street, I saw mailboxes in the darkness, most on the far side of the street but at least two on the river side of the road. I walked toward them.
    The first house I passe d on the far side of the street looked to have been ransacked. The front door was open. Various items normally found inside the house littered the front porch and yard. There were empty food packages, couch cushions, and a couple of chairs from a dining room set. Slowing my gait, I looked over the mess. It wasn’t right. At least, it wasn’t right for a mess left by normal human scavengers.
    The food packaging shouldn’t have been torn op en and scattered. Not to say that all people are naturally tidy—they aren’t—but with the danger presented by all the lingering infected, sitting outside on the front lawn of any house was a fatally bad idea for any hungry looter.
    The alternative explanation made frightening sense.