Slow Burn (Book 2): Infected by Bobby Adair Read Free Book Online Page A

door.
    I hurried my pace.
    The front door was ajar. Murphy cautiously pushed it open as I came up to watch his back.
    I checked our flanks, a lesson I learned from watching the soldiers die on the quad by the dorm. They didn’t understand their adversary. They got sloppy and they paid for their mistakes in the only currency this altered world seemed content to accept. Blood.
    Murphy stepped into the house. He was tense. He was tentative.
    He feared what he might find.
    His breathing was ragged, but we hadn’t exerted ourselves. His smile, a dam that held a back a river of emotions, crumbled in the flood.
    I paused halfway in and listened. There was a noise coming from somewhere inside. I didn’t know where , but I guessed what.
    Murphy crossed the living room and leaned into the kitchen as I closed the door behind me.
    The furnishings were thirty years out of fashion and worn. The carpet was its own kind of ugly.
    A wall covered with framed photos chronicled the lives of Murphy and his sister. Murphy was a Boy Scout. Murphy played football. A younger, thinner Murphy stood proud and stern in an Army uniform.
    Murphy’s sister, sitting on a pony at a young age. Pirouetting as a third grader at a dance recital. The camera caught her, clad in a cheerleader’s uniform, high in the air in a gymnastic bounce. She wore a cap and gown with a big grin in two separate photos from two different graduations.
    Murphy’s mom was in some of the pictures, arms around the kids, always smiling. No picture of any father, anywhere.
    Murphy’s mother and sister came to life on that wall even as their deaths were about to be confirmed.
    Murphy looked back at me, his face taut, and his jaw clenched. He shook his head.
    The kitchen was empty.
    I followed him across the living room to the hall.
    The sound was louder. Just as I became certain what it was, Murphy bolted up the hall. He must have figured it out as well.
    It was the infected.
    I hurried to follow.
    A closed bedroom door at the end of the hall proved no obstacle for Murphy’s momentum. It cracked and splintered. Hinge screws ripped through wood as Murphy’s wrath exploded into the room.
    Murphy’s fury found voice in a primordial scream that was seconded only to the shots exploding from his rifle.
    The house fell suddenly silent.
    The ugly business in that room was finished. Only sorrow and rage remained.
    In the hall, I froze in my footsteps.
    In that room, heavy feet pounded the wooden floor. Furniture bounced against walls. Trinkets shattered. A beast fought with its grief.
    I wondered, was Murphy’s smile dying while I listened, while I cringed? Would he now wear the frown of the emotionally damaged, the same one worn now by so many?
    There was too much emotion in that room for me to enter the fray. I’d rather face the infected. I withdrew past the only other door off the hall. It was also closed. If something was inside, I’d know soon enough.
    I took up a position in the living room at the entrance to the hall. From there, I could see the front door, the back door, and of course, the hall. Nothing moved.
    Moments later, Murphy burst from the room with a grimace on his face and tears in his eyes.
    I looked toward the second hall door, and in the time it took me to focus my attention there, Murphy crossed the distance and smashed through it.
    Half in the hall and half in the room; Murphy looked back and forth across it several times and then froze.
    After a time, I softly asked, “Murphy?”
    Murphy didn’t move.
    I listened for movement in the house. I heard only silence.
    The only infected in the house were those Murphy had killed in the back bedroom. Whether those infected had killed his family or whether they were his family was the burning question.
    I shuddered at the thought. Murphy wasn’t like me. He loved his mother.
    For the moment, Murphy was frozen by grief.
    Shots had been fired. If any infected were near enough, they would hear, and they would come. One