Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin by Bobby Adair Page B

it between their toes.
    The grass on the northern side of the Capitol grounds had been dug up years earlier to bury a massive state office complex connected into the historic Capitol building through what was its basement. They layered the whole thing in a couple acres of concrete except for one giant, perfectly round hole a hundred or more feet across and three stories deep. The round wall inside the hole was flanked by granite pillars, balconies, and tall windows through which sunlight poured to irritate the bureaucrats in their warrens.
    Surrounding the whole complex on the inside edge of the sidewalk had been a decorative iron fence that stood about three feet tall with rows of little gold star spikes along the top edge. All of that iron was now gone or more accurately, relocated.
    Right on the curb, some bunch of somebodies had constructed a rampart at least fifteen feet tall that incorporated cars, pieces of cars, semi-trailers, metal doors, sheets of galvanized tin, and pretty much any piece of metal that could be scavenged from nearby. Whoever built it had welded all the pieces together to form a fairly smooth wall that ran perfectly parallel to the street. That black iron fence that used to keep tourists off the grass now topped the rampart.
    The wall was every color of post-industrial ugly with a wealth of rust spots where the parts had been tack-welded but not painted. Paint was a luxury. Pieces above overlapped pieces below—like shingles—leaving no apparent handholds. As much as the wall looked like a pile of junk at a glance, a second look revealed how formidable it was. No one would be scaling it without a rope. I suspected from the look of the pieces of cars and trucks incorporated into it, nothing short of an Abrams tank could knock it over or crash through it.
    At odd intervals along the top edge of the rampart stood what appeared to be deer blinds. Inside some of them crouched men with rifles. The rifles had the now-familiar bulky suppressors on the ends of their barrels.
    “You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.
    “Yup,” said Murphy. “The Hillbillies made themselves a fort.”
    “I wonder how they managed to get that built.” I looked up and down the length of the wall as it paralleled the street. Even through the night vision goggles, the sight was a familiar one. Four lanes of asphalt and concrete covered completely in the remnants of humans: clothes, shoes, bones, and bodies in various stages of rot. The carpet of the dead was not still. Among the corpses crawled rats, dogs, and even the brain-fried infected, so desperate for food that they were gnawing bits and bites of flesh off the decomposing bodies.
    “They’ve been killing a lot of Whites down here,” said Murphy. “More than up at Mabry, I think.”
    Pointing at all the pieces of clothing among the dead, I said, “I don’t think this wall was here when the naked horde came through town.”
    Murphy shrugged and put on an innocent face. “Jealous?”
    “What?” I shot him an angry look. “What does that mean?”
    “These guys held out. We didn’t.”
    Shaking my head, and recalling how easily the naked horde had knocked over the wall around Sarah Mansfield’s compound, I said, “You know as well as I do that if half a million naked Whites rolled up on this place, everyone inside would be dead now.”
    “Whatever you need to tell yourself.”
    I huffed and looked back at the wall.
    Murphy said, “So, what’s the plan, Batman?”
    Without looking away from the wall, I said, “I’m going in.”
    “Couldn’t you think of something stupider than that?”
    “Sarcasm?” I asked.
    Murphy shrugged. “It works.”
    “I’m not going to walk up to the door and announce myself.”
    “Good,” Murphy chuckled. “Because you never know, when you’re dealing with the Valiant Null Spot.”
    Ignore him. Ignore him.
    Peering at the dark deer blinds atop their flimsy metal-pole frames, I said, “That one is empty. I’ll bet