A new flu strain has been spreading across Africa, Europe, and Asia. Disturbing news footage is flooding the cable news channels. People are worried. People are frightened. But Zed Zane is oblivious.

Zed needs to borrow rent money from his parents. He gets up Sunday morning, drinks enough tequila to stifle his pride and heads to his mom’s house for a lunch of begging, again.

But something is wrong. There’s blood in the foyer. His mother’s corpse is on the living room floor. Zed’s stepdad, Dan, is wild with crazy-eyed violence and attacks Zed when he comes into the house. They struggle into the kitchen. Dan’s yellow teeth tear at Zed’s arm but Zed grabs a knife and stabs Dan 37 times, or so the police later say.

With infection burning in his blood, Zed is arrested for murder. But the world is falling apart, and he soon finds himself back on the street, fighting for his life among the infected who would kill him and the normal people who fear him.

5-star praise for SLOW BURN:

Intense, Gripping, and Impossible to Put Down!
“…highly visceral, gritty, and raw, but rather than it being gratuitous in terms of violence or gore, it actually uses these elements on a philosophical leveL.The fast-paced action and suspense…had me hooked from the very first page…”

Excellent Zombie Tale with a Twist
“…While there’s been a resurgence in zombie novels lately, Slow Burn stands out… the author has a great way with sensory detail that makes the novel come alive. Recommended for those who enjoy horror…and for those who are looking for an exciting, action-filled read.”

an excerpt from

Slow Burn: Zero Day

by Bobby Adair

Chapter 1

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That day arrived like every other day in my life…

I came into it ill-informed and unprepared.

There had been exaggerated news reports over the past few weeks about the upcoming flu season’s annual pandemic. The whiners on the talking-head channels were making noise about racial cleansing that had spread out of Somalia and into Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan. There was widespread civil disorder in China and the military was cracking down hard. Soldiers were marching. Tanks were rolling. Reporters were being arrested and internet communication had been disconnected, to whatever degree that can be done. There was rioting in some Mediterranean cities and the Mideast had oscillated into a more violent phase of its perpetual cycle.

The world was falling apart…

…in all the usual ways.

So I’d shrugged it off and spent my Saturday watching pre-season football with my buddies. I got a little too drunk, slept a little too late, and on that Sunday morning, my head hurt a little too much. It didn’t help that I was going to see my mom and Dan for a needling, nagging, degrading lunch that would end with my asking for a five-hundred dollar loan to cover rent, again, and I’d get another long speech about doing something with my life, showing a little enthusiasm, or developing some kind of work ethic.

How else could that morning have started, other than with a few shots from a now-empty tequila bottle on my kitchen counter?

And perhaps I should have not just noticed, but really paid attention to the weirdness in the streets on the drive over. But when one gets up in the morning and explicitly decides to paint oneself into oblivion behind a screen of booze, dark sunglasses, and heavy metal music, an unconcerned world just slides past, beyond an apathetic fog. Which is the whole point.

All of that worked just as planned until I walked into Mom’s house and slipped in some blood on the floor in the foyer. I was dumbstruck at the scene in the living room: some semi-mutilated guy, sitting deathly still in a chair by the fireplace, my mother, on the living room floor in a pool of blood, and Dan, on his knees with his back to me, hunched over her with busy elbows and noisy hands.

Time ticked languidly past. Unsavory images bombarded my optic nerve, only be to be rejected by my unreceptive brain.

Unencumbered by the state of horrified surprise that afflicted me, Dan stood up and looked at me with his thin gray comb-over dangling in front of his pale round face. His blood-smeared lips smacked and his crazy dark eyes fixated on me.

I yanked my phone from my pocket and threatened, “Dan, I’m going to call the police.” As if I wasn’t going to do that anyway.

He came at me, clearly not afraid of the police.

My feet somehow found traction on the slippery floor and I bounded into the kitchen. Dan gave chase with his big, blue-collar hands grasping at my shirttail.

With surprising speed, he caught me near the dishwasher. A big ape hand squeezed into my arm and spun me around. The other reached for my throat, with toothy jaws following close behind. I tried to protect myself by throwing up my left arm.

I reached over and pulled a large carving knife from the block on the counter, and I stabbed Dan, tentatively at first, but as his teeth tore my skin I stabbed again and again, with increasingly brutal enthusiasm.

When it was over, I sat on the floor with my back to a cabinet door in a large, copper-smelling puddle of Dan’s blood, with his sweaty body pinned across my legs.

He was dead.

I was fixated on the horrid bite wound on my left forearm. For a long time I watched, hypnotized, as the blood oozed and dripped.

Sometimes, a half-bottle of breakfast tequila just isn’t enough to deal with the day’s reality.

I dropped the knife and proceeded to roll the flabby corpse onto the tile.

I walked through the mess in the kitchen and found my cell phone on the floor in the foyer. Thankfully, it hadn’t broken in the scuffle. I dialed 911.

Busy.

Shit!

I tried again.

Busy.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

I walked out the front door and onto the wide porch. The upper middle-class cracker neighborhood ignored me, focused instead on its own pockets of human chaos. Four houses down, across the street, some sort of scuffle had spilled out of the front door and people were struggling on the lawn. A car raced up the street at a very unsafe speed. Some residents loitered aimlessly.

I dialed 911 again. Still busy.

What the hell?

I went back into the house, closing and locking the front door behind me. Things weren’t making sense.

I went into the living room and looked down at my mother’s torn body and shook my head. It was surreal.

I guess some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried, but I’d emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess.

I thought about an inheritance and an end to my financial troubles. I thought about the infection from Dan’s stale breath and yellow teeth beginning to fester under my skin. I thought about the eventual scar and the great bar room story it would make. Pain today, pussy tomorrow. Half a smile bent my lips.

The guy in the chair was in bad shape. Not living, of course, but in bad shape even for a corpse. His right arm was missing whole bite-sized chunks of flesh, human bite-sized chunks. His head was beaten beyond recognition. On the floor beside the chair lay a bloody fireplace poker, quite likely the weapon that had given his skull its new shape.

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt an uncharacteristic chill.

I looked down at the wound on my arm. Coagulation hadn’t yet begun to staunch the flow of blood. I needed to do something about that.

I dialed 911 again. Nothing.

Crap.

I went to Mom and Dan’s bedroom and into the master bath, opening the medicine cabinet.

I found an off-brand bottle of antibacterial liquid.

My head started to pound. The morning’s tequila had outlived its usefulness.

Looking around for something with which to scrub, I found myself staring at the toothbrush holder. Mom and Dan weren’t going to need those anymore. I lay my forearm over the sink, poured the antibacterial into the gaping tears, and clenched my teeth.

Holy crap, it hurt.

Next, I went after the wound with a toothbrush.

More pain.

More antibacterial.

Rinse. Soap. Scrub. Pain, pain, pain.

Rinse. Antibacterial.

Clench the teeth.

Don’t scream like a pussy.

Antibacterial.

Breathe.

My head was about to explode.

Letting my wound air-dry, I found a bottle of aspirin, threw four into my mouth and slurped some water from the sink to wash them down. I found a tube of antibacterial cream and squirted it liberally into the wounds as blood slowly mixed with it, trying to wash it back out. A box of Band-Aids would have to fulfill the next requirement, as no gauze or tape was in the cabinet.

I felt another chill. A fever was coming. Not good.

I used half the box of Band-Aids to pull the edges of my torn skin together. Blood oozed through. I found what appeared to be a clean washrag under the sink and used an Ace bandage to wrap it over my forearm.

I stood up straight to leave the bathroom and dizziness hit me so hard that I lost my balance and fell against the wall.

Christ!

Blood loss. It had to be the blood loss.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and tried 911 again. Still busy.

Suspecting then that the phone had been damaged in the scuffle with Dan, I made my way to the landline phone that sat on the nightstand by the bed.

I picked it up and dialed 911. Busy.

Dammit!

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

The dizziness returned and I fell into a sitting position on the bed.

The television’s remote control beckoned me from the nightstand. I grabbed it, leaned back on the headboard, and turned the television on. A few minutes of satisfying my addiction to mindless blabber would pass the time while I waited for the phones to free up. The news was on.

Eh.

Changing the channel suddenly seemed like an onerous chore, so I dropped the remote and let the TV’s colorful opiate wash over me.

A worried newscaster was talking over a video of some shopping center in France. He described the scene as a riot, but the video showed something much more violent.

People were running and screaming. Police were trying to restore order, but intermingled in the crowd were what appeared to be normal people, dressed in their Sunday afternoon casual clothes, going completely nuts.

“What the hell?”

The pounding in my head worsened. The chills carried with them a case of shivers. A high-grade fever was on the way. The four aspirin were proving insufficient. I reached for the telephone again to call 911, felt the room suddenly spin, and saw the hideous design on the carpet race up to smash me in the face.

Chapter 2

---

I woke up disoriented. My head throbbed. My throat was so dry I couldn’t swallow. My swollen arm hurt like hell. Numbness tingled my left hand.

Cheap motel carpet scum clung to my skin as I peeled my face away from the rug. I got up on my hands and knees. Standing and walking was out of the question, so I crawled to the bathroom sink where I pulled myself up.

Having accomplished that, I bent over at the waist and lay flat on the blue swirl faux marble counter top. I turned on the faucet. Beautiful, cool water flowed. I cupped a hand in the stream and sucked in what seemed like a gallon before I slipped back down to the floor.

Morning light spread shadows across the bathroom and onto the far wall above the garden tub. For a while, I watched a square of sunlight slowly inch down the wall as the sun went about its normal rounds.

As my dizziness waned, I pulled myself up to the sink again and gulped more water. My throat felt as if it had been sanded raw then left in the unforgiving sun to dry.

I dropped to the floor again and closed my eyes for a moment that lasted long enough for the sun’s rays to slide its square of light onto the floor.

When I opened my eyes again, my thoughts had cleared somewhat and I was able to hold a thought about something other than how completely shitty I felt. I pulled myself up to stand on wobbly legs.

To my surprise, I remained upright.

I drank again from the bathroom sink and looked down at the crusty brown washrag and bandage on my left forearm. I flexed my hand a few times. The damage wasn’t enough to hinder movement, but infection was sure to set in if I didn’t get to a doctor and get some antibiotics.

That’s when it occurred to me that it was late morning. The sunlight spilling in through the east-facing window made that clear. I realized that I had slept through the entire night on the carpet in the bedroom. I recalled the scene in the living room—Mom, Dan, and the guy with the smashed skull. I needed to call the police about that. They’d be none too thrilled with the elapsed time between the deaths and the phone call to summon them.

I thought back to Sunday’s breakfast tequila, and wondered how drunk I was when I’d gotten to Mom and Dan’s place. I wondered whether I’d been so drunk that I blacked out and delivered them some karma in a state of repressed psycho-rage.

Crap. I shook my head.

Maybe it was all just a nightmare.

Using the dresser, then the walls, then the doorjambs for support, I slowly made my way into the hall and out to the living room.

The pungent smell did its best to seep in through my pores as I forced my reluctant feet forward. The closer I got, the surer I was that my nightmare was real.

Step. Step. Step.

Christ!

A swarm of industriously prolific flies had come into the house through the open back door. They buzzed over the feast of Mom’s stinky remains and a generation of young maggots vacationed on the corpse of the guy in the chair.

Dan’s punctured body would be in the kitchen where I’d left it. I didn’t need a confirmation venture in there.

I needed to call the police, and in spite of the gore on the floor and the stench in the air, I needed to get something to eat.

I weighed the two priorities and the fear of the police’s authority sent me back into the master bedroom to the phone.

My cell phone lay on the floor near where I’d gone comatose the night before.

The landline on the nightstand, being so much closer to my hand, was my first choice. I lifted it to my ear.

Dial tone.

That was good.

I dialed 911.

Busy.

“Damn it!” I slammed it down. “What the hell is going on?!”

I sat down on the bed and dropped my head into my hands.

Well, no cops for the moment.

Food, then.

I managed my way back up the hall, passed the living room, and stopped at the entryway to the kitchen. The buzz of flies echoed off the tile and hard surfaces. A congealed puddle of Dan’s blood covered half the floor and spread all the way under the fridge.

I was stuck. To get to the fridge, I’d have to wade through the nastiness of Dan’s spilled fluids.

“Jesus, it just keeps getting worse.”

Tracking Dan’s sticky blood all over the house didn’t sit well with me, so I found the cabinet with the kitchen towels, grabbed a stack, and laid them out in front of me like stepping stones in the blood.

What seemed like a good plan prior to the first step, turned to shit when a towel slipped in the slime. My feet went out from under me and I fell. My head hit the tile and exploded in a flash of pain and bright lights. I sent a string of curse words echoing through the house.

As disgusting as it was, I lay on the floor for several long minutes while the pain, in what seemed like every part of me, took its time to dissipate.

At least nothing seemed to be broken. Feeling the disgusting brownish red goo all over my back, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and slowly stood.

Bracing myself on the counters, I got to the fridge and pulled it open. For the second time in as many days, God’s good fortune shone on me. An unopened thirty-two ounce sports drink sat on the shelf.

I reached in, wrestled with the cap for a moment, put it up to my mouth, and poured it into my throat.

I stopped to take a breath. I sat the bottle on the island in the middle of the kitchen. The smooth granite invited my hands to linger on its cold surface. I leaned over, pressed my face on the stone, and reveled in the coolness.

As the minutes passed, the sugar from the sports drink seeped into my bloodstream and the glucose hit me like a rush of cocaine. The contrast from bad to good was so drastic it brought tears to my eyes.

With waning dizziness, I straightened up. I gulped down more of the sports drink and gingerly walked out of the kitchen.

I stopped for a brief pause in front of a large mirror in the foyer.

“Jeez.” I looked like crap, covered with blood, hair awry, an enormous makeshift bandage on my arm, and my skin so pale that I wondered how much blood I’d lost.

I went into the laundry room, stripped off my clothes, and threw them along with my gory tennis shoes into the washer. Naked, and still covered in the most disgusting goo, I walked to the guest bath and got into the shower to scrub myself clean and peel the crusty bandage off of my arm under the warm water.

After the shower, I sat naked on the bed and finished the sports drink as the sound of the washing machine in the next room vibrated. The wound on my arm oozed pus and blood. I’d need to rewrap it with whatever first aid supplies were left.

I picked up the remote and turned on the television. My thumb went on autopilot surf mode as I thought about what to do. The police, the hospital, or both?

News flickered to life on the screen.

Click. News.

Click. News.

Click. Still nothing but news.

“News sucks.”

I settled for one of the national cable news channels and turned up the volume.

The story was the same as Sunday, more rioting in France, but Germany, Italy, and England were added to the list. A panel of experts, or rather, speculators, argued about a virulent flu of some sort. International travel had been suspended by most countries. Airline stocks were tanking and the rest of the market was following their prices south. There was video footage of overwhelmed hospitals, and bodies lying in the streets. An announcement from the White House was expected in a few hours.

The washer buzzed, so I went into the laundry room, put my things into the dryer, and started it up.

Back in the guest room, I turned down the volume on the television and tried 911 again.

This time, it rang.

Chapter 3

---

Meeting a naked psycho-creep in a house full of dead people was sure to leave a negative impression on the soon-to-be arriving police, so I retrieved my damp clothes from the dryer and dressed.

Suddenly worried about disturbing the crime scene, I chose to sit in a tiny clean spot in the wide foyer, taking care to keep my hands in my lap.

It wasn’t long before the doorbell chimed twice, followed by a series of rapid beats on the door.

“It’s the police. Open up,” a voice commanded from outside.

“All right. Just a sec.” I stood as quickly as I could, considering my blood loss.

Again, pounding on the door. “It’s the police. Open up.”

“All right,” I croaked, then muttered, “impatient bastards.”

More beating on the door. “Sir, you need to open up.”

I pulled the door open a dozen inches.

Two policemen fixed me in the predatory stare of their big, black, bug-eyed glasses before glancing down to the blood-covered white marble floor. One officer’s hand landed on the butt of his gun. The second officer grasped the handle of his gun.

Very loudly, one of them commanded me to step slowly back from the door. The other officer ordered me to show my hands.

“What?” was all I got out before the cop closest to me rushed forward, shouldered the door, and knocked me onto my back.

Before I could react, a cop was on me. My arm was wrenched around behind my back and I was leveraged onto my belly. A heavy knee landed on my neck, smashing my face into the floor. A handcuff caught one wrist. My other wrist was yanked back and cuffed to the first.

It all happened faster than I could come up with a snarky comment. “Hey! Hey! I’m the one who called you!”

They pretended like I hadn’t spoken.

“Don’t move!” one of the officers commanded, as he took his weight off of me.

I found myself staring at his shiny black shoe, situated just inches from my face.

I heard footsteps as the other officer went further into the house.

“Oh, my God!” There was revulsion in the other officer’s voice.

“What?” the cop standing over me asked.

Nothing for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” said the second officer again.

“What?!” the first officer demanded. Then, to me he barked, “Don’t move.”

I watched his feet back slowly toward the living room. “Everything all right, Bill?”

Nothing.

“Bill?”

Just footsteps, shuffling backward.

Then Bill’s voice again, deflated this time. “Oh, my God.”

The second officer’s voice came next. “That’s sick!”

Then the footsteps got louder again.

The first officer’s voice yelled, “No!”

“You sick pig!” the second guy yelled, as I saw his shiny black shoe coming at my face.

Chapter 4

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My right eye was swollen into a bluish lump. My lips were chapped. My throat was dry. My formerly clean shirt had a fresh coat of dried blood, some of it mine, all down the front. I was handcuffed to a metal table in a police interrogation room, alone and staring at the camera in the upper corner.

With no windows and no clocks, I didn’t know what time it was. I only knew I’d been in there for many, many long hours.

While I waited for my unscrupulous interrogator to return, I amused myself by tapping out a rhythm on the table, and alternately extending a middle finger from each hand at the camera above.

I leaned over and lay my face flat on the table, drawing minor comfort from the temperature of the steel. I closed my eyes, knowing that as soon as I dozed off, my interrogator would return to deprive me of sleep.

I heard the door open, but didn’t respond.

The phonebook slammed down on the table next to my head. I was too exhausted to react.

I heard a voice tell someone else, “This one’s still out. I don’t know what sent all the crackheads on a killing spree this week, but we’ve got to get that shit off the street.”

“Yeah,” another voice agreed. “I’ve got mine next door. Let me know if you come up with anything.”

A moment later, the chair across the table from me scooted out and I heard a heavy man sit down.

He followed with a few exaggerated sighs. He loudly sipped from his coffee. He clinked the hard paper cup on the table next to my head.

Silence passed as he decided what to do next. A sharp exhalation and a hard slap on the back of my head announced his decision.

“Hey crackhead. Wake up.”

I didn’t react to the slap. Pain was becoming surprisingly easy to ignore.

I lolled my head in another direction and opened my eyes to look at my angry tormentor.

“What were you on?”

“What?” I feigned ignorance. I guess I was too hardheaded to cooperate.

He slapped me again.

“I thought police didn’t do this sort of thing anymore,” I said.

That earned me another slap.

The detective leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath and stared at me.

“Look, Ezekiel…Ezekiel, that’s your name, right?”

I picked my head up off the table. I straightened up in the chair, out of arm’s reach for the moment. “Yeah, but my friends call me Zed. Zed Zane.”

“Look, Zed, maybe you got started off on the wrong foot here.”

I looked down at the worn phone book on the desk and gave voice to my frustrations. “What? Is it your turn now to beat me with a phone book? Do you guys work in shifts or what? What time is it? Why can’t I get a lawyer? Why do you guys keep telling me the camera doesn’t work? Don’t you have one of those, ah…those, ah…who are those guys they have on TV? Oh, yeah, detectives. Why don’t you get one of them to look at the crime scene and confirm what I’ve been telling you all night? It has been all night hasn’t it?”

The detective ignored my outburst for several long breaths. “Are you done?”

In response, I chose a conversational technique that hadn’t failed me since junior high: I ignored him.

The big man leaned his furry forearms on the table. “You gotta understand, Zed. You come in here in wet clothes that you just washed all the evidence out of. You assault the arresting officers.” He shook his head.

“Bullshit.” I’d heard that accusation a thousand times at that point.

“You talk about killing your stepdad…You did kill him right? I mean you admitted that much, right? It’s right here in the file.”

Not any less irritated, I said, “I told you, it was self-defense. He was attacking me.” I drew a deep breath. “And where the hell do people even get phone books anymore?”

The officer crossed his big fuzzy arms and said nothing for a moment.

I did the same.

“Are you through?”

“Through with what?”

“Acting like an ass?” he said.

“What? Are you kidding me? Really? I go to my mom’s house yesterday morning. I find my stepdad going all cannibal on her in the living room. He attacks me and I stab him with a knife to defend myself. I call the cops and then Dudley Do-Right and his partner show up, don’t even ask me a question, and decide instead to beat the shit out of me and drop me here. Does that about sum it up?”

No response. I went on. “Now after who knows how long I’ve been in here, with you guys taking turns yelling at me, calling me a liar, oh, and beating me in the head with the phone book, you wanna say I’m acting like an ass? Well forgive me for being so goddamned rude!”

“Hi, I’m Zed Zane. I’m so pleased to meet you. Would you like a cup of tea?”

He didn’t react. He just stared at me.

So, we played the staring game for a good five minutes before I won and he asked, “Are you through now?”

“Whatever,” I responded.

“Let’s start again. I’m Detective Tom Wolsely.” He extended a hand across the table to shake mine.

I looked at his hand but made no move to respond. Of course, I did have two hands cuffed to the table.

“Don’t be an ass, Zed. It’s polite to shake a hand when it’s offered.”

“Maybe you guys should have thought about that whenever the hell it was that you locked me in here. How long have I been in here, anyway?”

The hand still hung over the table, just inches above the metal loop that constrained mine. “Zed?”

“Oh, good God.” I angled a wrist up and opened my palm.

He jiggled my hand roughly in the cuffs.

“Thank you, Zed.”

I let go and let my hand drop to the stainless steel.

“You have to understand, Zed, this story about your stepdad turning into a cannibal…what did you really think we’d think, Zed? It all sounds a little far-fetched, don’t you think? He was a deacon in the church. A member of the school board. A retired principal. Are we really supposed to believe he got all hopped up on crack and killed your mother and the neighbor?”

I nodded. “Of course I do. I thought the whole thing was pretty crazy when I got to my mom’s for lunch. Look, don’t you have some kind of forensics team or something? Don’t you guys look at evidence before you start beating the crap out of suspects anymore? I mean, Christ!”

“We’ve got people at the scene,” Detective Wolsely told me.

“So what’s the deal then? Are we going to just sit in this room until you get tired of beating me, or are you going to look at the evidence and then apologize to me?”

“Look, Zed. Let’s just put all of that aside for the moment. You keep saying you went to your mom’s house yesterday morning––”

“I did.”

“––and you tell us the story. But your story is so full of holes that you could drive a truck through it.”

“What? What holes? How can there be any holes? It’s not like you talked to the other witnesses, because you can’t, because they’re dead.”

“Zed, calm down. I’m trying to help you here, and in return I’d like for you to help me, too.”

“By being your punching bag?”

“Now, Zed, that wasn’t called for.”

“I don’t see how any time could be called for better than this one, do you? I mean, I have been in here for hours, being beaten and called a liar, yelled at, and berated, threatened, and, oh, did I mention, getting beaten like punching bag?”

Wolsely leaned back in his chair and froze in his cross-armed pose again.

“Whatever.” I sat back in my chair and drew a few deep, calming breaths.

“Zed, you say you got to your parents’ house yesterday morning, and you found your mom and the dead neighbor. Then you fought with your stepdad and that he was killed in the fight.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what happened.”

“Well, Zed, that’s not possible.”

“What do you mean? How could you even come to that conclusion?”

“Zed, we’re not complete idiots here in the police department. For one thing, our forensic guys are pretty good at determining time of death. It’s simpler than you think, especially when it’s recent. They just compare the core temperature to the ambient temperature, and get a pretty quick estimate of the time of death.”

“Okay, I watch TV, too. So what’s the problem?”

“Your stepdad has been dead for at least two full days.”

“What? What? That’s not possible.”

“See, Zed?” Wolsely said. “Holes in your story.”

“Wait, wait. What day is this?”

“What day is it?” Wolsely repeated.

“Yes. I told you I went to my parents’ house on Sunday afternoon. I told you I passed out…I guess from blood loss or something, but it must have been longer than I thought.”

“You passed out for two solid days and never woke up.”

“Why, what’s today?”

“Late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, you pick.”

“Wednesday?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. I guess so,” I said.

Detective Wolsely changed the subject. “Tell me about your mom, Zed.”

I huffed a couple of times and looked around the room while I thought about that.

After several minutes, I said, “You know, when I was kid I used to watch this Tarzan show on TV, and there was this recurring concept in that show about an elephant graveyard. Kind of the African version of El Dorado, only with ivory instead of gold.”

Detective Wolsely asked, “What does this have to do with anything?”

“You asked me a question, Detective. I’m trying to answer it.”

“Fine.”

“So, Detective, when the white men came to Africa, they didn’t see any elephant carcasses lying about with all the free ivory they could carry, so they concocted this theory about the existence of an elephant graveyard, where all of the elephants would go to die.

“I used to think my mom was like that graveyard, only instead of elephants going there to die, happiness would.”

Detective Wolsely asked, “And now that she’s dead, you don’t think that anymore?”

“No, that’s not it at all. I think that like those white men that went to Africa, who’d erroneously deduced the existence of an elephant graveyard, I erred in my deduction that my mother was a passive graveyard for happiness.”

Wolsely was getting bored.

“Did you know that hyenas eat bone?” I asked.

Detective Wolsely shook his head.

“Yeah, they’ll eat pretty much anything. Even bone. They’re predators. They’re scavengers. They’re ugly. But most of all, they’re voracious. That’s my mother.”

“Your mother is a hyena?”

“In a way, I guess. You see, she’s not the graveyard where happiness goes to die. She’s a voracious scavenger, constantly searching for any waning happiness, so that she can kill it off and eat up any evidence that it ever existed. That’s my mom.”

Detective Wolsely looked at me like he’d just found me covered in dog poop. “What drugs are you on, Zed?”

“What?”

“What drugs are you on? Nobody loses track of two days and then just gets up all normal and calls the police.”

“Normal? I never said that. I told you I feel like crap. I was running a high fever. I still am.”

“So you say.”

“Yes, I do say. Get a thermometer and check for yourself! Holy freakin’ crap!”

“Just tell me what you were on, Zed. Tell me where you got it. There’s something seriously bad out on the street and it’s making people crazy. We need to catch the guy that sold it to you. Things might even go easier on you if we can prove it was the drugs that made you crazy.”

“What?”

“We took a blood sample while you were passed out, Zed. We’ll figure out what it was. I mean, whether it was crack or meth or whatever. But we need to figure out what it was laced with. We need to know where you got it, so we can get it off the street. There’s a lot of people going crazy on this stuff, Zed.”

“What about that flu in Europe or whatever it is? I saw rioting on TV.”

“Zed, let’s be realistic here. There is no flu that makes people crazy.”

“How can you say that?” I asked.

“Ratings,” Wolsely said. “Sure there’s a flu but the flu makes you puke and cough. It gives you diarrhea. It doesn’t make people crazy. Those were just frightened people, doing stupid things. Zed, the world is much simpler than all of you conspiracy nuts think it is. People make bad, irrational choices for the stupidest reasons every day. I see it all the time, believe me. There is no crazy flu going around. The answers are never that complicated. Trust me.”

“Whatever.”

“Besides, why Austin? Why not New York, or LA, or Chicago? There are a hundred cities more likely to get an outbreak of the flu than Austin. We’re not exactly a major point of entry here, are we Zed? Come on, just tell me what you were on and where you got it.”

I shook my head and looked at the floor. “Jeez, Tom. Listen to me, please. I didn’t take any drugs. I was drinking. I drank a lot on Saturday. I smoked some weed with my friends. I drank some tequila on Sunday morning before heading over to my mom’s house. I’ve told you this a thousand times.”

“When did you smoke the weed?”

“It was just weed!”

“When did you smoke it?”

“The night before, like I said.”

“When the night before? Zed, it may have been laced with PCP, or something worse. Surely you’ve heard of that before. PCP makes some people lose their shit, Zed. That may have happened to you.”

I shook my head again and weakly said, “No.”

“Where did you get the weed, Zed?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t even my weed.”

“Who did you smoke it with, Zed? They may be having problems too. They might be in worse shape, Zed. They could be dead for all you know.”

I gave him the names of my buddies.

Chapter 5

---

The jail was old, like a hundred years old. The section I was in had been built in the late 1800s. It was dirty. It was smelly. Every surface was sticky beneath aged layers of oral ejecta and other human secretions.

I was in a holding cell about seven feet deep and thirty feet long. One long wall was brick. The other three were comprised of iron bars with layer upon layer of flakes, painted over by more layers of flakes. Two rows of bunks, one on the top and one on the bottom, hung from the wall for a total of eight. A single commode stood at one end, covered in stains and lumpy smears.

With my photograph taken and black ink on my fingers, I was shoved into the cell that already held twenty-five other guys, laying and sitting in the bunks and on the floor. At least a few of my fellow inmates were mentally unplugged. They stared blankly at the wall. Some paced across the spots of floor where a foot would fit. One very animated guy bounced around the cell like a chimp, screaming Tourette’s-like profanities and gibberish. Most looked drunk, hung-over, beaten up, or some combination thereof.

“I need to see a doctor,” I told the jailer, as he slammed the door shut.

He headed back to the end of the hall as though I’d said nothing at all.

“Hey, I need to see a doctor!”

Nothing.

“Hey!” I yelled.

The jailer stopped and glared at me. “Look, bud, you can see we’re having a busy day. So lighten up, would you?”

“But I need medical attention for my arm.”

“After you get assigned to a cell, you can ask your guard for permission to go to the infirmary.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” The guard turned and ignored further protests.

The Tourette’s guy shrieked at the ceiling from his perch on a top bunk. Nobody paid him any mind.

I looked around…there was no bunk space available. There was barely any floor space either, the only exception being a few feet next to a comatose giant of a black man leaning on the bars near the commode.

I stood, holding the bars of the door and looking up and down the short hall. Two long halls branched off at either end and led to rows of cells in the new section of the jail. I heard the rowdy noise of hundreds of other prisoners coming from down those halls.

Tourette’s guy shrieked again. “I’m hungry!”

I leaned my face against the sticky, flaky iron bars and closed my eyes. The bite on my arm throbbed noticeably but didn’t hurt. Infection was sure to set in. I worried about that, and about what Wolsely had said about drugs in the weed my buddies and I had smoked on Saturday night.

I wanted to feel angry about the lazy incompetence of the police who’d locked me up, but all I felt was drained and frustrated.

I wondered how long I’d have to wait for my inevitable release. I flexed the fingers of my left hand again, checking for loss of movement.

The lighting in the jail was too stark, unnaturally bright. It bothered my eyes. I longed for a pair of sunglasses.

I was mere minutes into my incarceration and I was already bored.

An old tube television hung from the ceiling across the hall from the cell. There was something on about riots again, something about the new flu virus. Having grown up with Mom and Dan’s addiction to the repetitive ravings of the non-stop cable news faces, I possessed a high tolerance for hysterical speculation. Football, baseball, even bowling would have been a better choice than news on the TV.

I looked down at my feet. “This place sucks.”

Off to my right, I heard Tourette’s boy start bouncing on his bunk.

“Man, shut up,” somebody over there said.

A few more voiced agreement.

I looked over. Tourette’s boy was getting more aggressive.

Then, he surprised everyone by bounding off of the top bunk and onto one of the sitting prisoners.

A frenzy of fighting exploded from the far end of the cell. There was screaming, yelling, kicking, punching, and biting, lots of biting. The wave of pandemonium pushed toward me, and I decided the safest place in the cell was in the stinky muck in the corner behind the commode. I stepped quickly over the big black guy who was just starting to get up and wormed my way into the corner.

Yelling from outside the cell told me that the guards already knew what was happening in the cell.

There were arms and legs and fists. There were guys on the ground and guys clambering into the bunks. The big black guy had his back to me and pretty much blocked all access to my end of the cell. I’m sure that defending me wasn’t what he intended. He just didn’t see me as a threat.

Suddenly, Tourette’s boy came flying out of the melee and landed in some sort of monkey grasp around the big guy’s head and shoulders. As the big guy grasped at him to pull him off, Tourette’s boy caught me with the craziest eyes I’d ever seen, opened his mouth wide, and chomped down on the big guy’s neck.

A canister clinked in through the bars. Smoke exploded into the cell, burning my eyes.

The heavy metal door swung open and the guards, dressed in riot gear, bulled their way in.