8/4/2023 0 Comments Slow burn bookBecause of the spring, we were immune to droughts, so never suffered any shortage of food. We traded with the tiny clans and homesteads we found, especially a group who’d set themselves up in the oilfields south of Odessa, pumping petroleum and trading it for food.īehind our wall and rings of defenses, we felt safe, successful, even. Murphy, me, and a handful of others ranged all over West Texas and into New Mexico, scavenging what we could and looking for survivors to bring into the fold. We hunted antelope on the plain and javelina in the nearby mountains, seldom venturing farther than a few miles from our fortified oasis-at least, most of us didn’t. We managed our herds of cattle, goats, and sheep. Together, we cultivated the fallow fields. Only thirteen of us were Slow Burns, the rare ones. Nearly all of them were “normals,” people with a natural immunity to the virus, brave survivors who’d fought their way through the infected hordes to get out of the cities and stumble upon us. Through the years, we took in another four hundred or so who’d wandered out of the desert, hailing from Amarillo, Abilene, El Paso, Cotulla. Originally, there were eighteen of us, me and the people I’d escaped from Austin with. The spring bubbled just four miles down Highway 17 from the town, providing an endless supply of water, which, before the collapse, had been used to turn the patch of dry desert dirt around Balmorhea into bountiful farm and pastureland. What made Balmorhea a refuge, though, wasn’t only its isolation, but San Solomon Springs, which gushed twenty million gallons of fresh water out of the earth every day. Primarily because few had the motivation or the fortitude to cross the desert on foot. Balmorhea’s layout, coupled with the hundreds of miles of desert and arid hills surrounding it, made it easy to defend from the millions of infected who still lurked in the cities and dense forests of East Texas. It was a compact place, just big enough for the five or six hundred oil field roughnecks, farmers, and ranch hands who lived there. Mostly houses and trailers, a school, some businesses, a few government buildings. The town was laid out in a tidy grid a half-mile square. It was the kind of place any pre-collapse suburbanite might have called a shithole. Even before the virus ravaged the world, Balmorhea was a dying town eight hours from everywhere in the remote desert of West Texas. What else could we do? Mope and starve?Īt the dawn of Year 14-fourteen years after the virus hit-I was living in Balmorhea. Those of us who survived that first year did our best to rebuild. The virus shattered the foundations of that world and sent it crumbling into rubble. All of it, compounding and congealing into a scab that shrank the world of humanity into a thing that felt small, false, and tenuous. Electronic toys blasted a 24/7 kaleidoscope of digital trifles at our faces, linking us into a communal, semi-conscious existence that none of us understood. Jets crisscrossed the sky, hauling ogle-eyed travelers to the novel comfort of dinners at McDonald’s restaurants in faraway cities. We were nearly eight billion strong at the time, splattered across the globe, ticking away in cities linked by weather-worn highways that rumbled under an endless rush of spinning tires. And we owed it all to a half-alive microbe, a tiny virus that jumped from a monkey to a bat to a pig, or whatever, somewhere in the jungles of Africa. A lifetime-the entire life of a teenager-since the cities collapsed.Īll those millions of nifty gadgets that numbed us to the daily drudge of subsistence in a corpo-centric economy, all of our progress and knowledge, our universities and institutions, those cavernous stadiums and sprawling airports, and maybe most of all, our dreams of a sparkly future, were lost. More than a decade since the electric grids last sparked across the wire and cool, clean water stopped flowing from the taps. being hunted.What you don’t know is, it’s been fourteen years since the virus destroyed humanity’s hubris-happy high-tech hyper-age. Kid or adult book? - Adult or Young Adult BookĬrime Thriller - Yes General Crime (including known murderer) - Yes If story PRIMARILY about main chr. (people, objects, places) 10% Tone of story - suspenseful (sophisticated fear) of violence and chases 10% Planning/preparing, gather info, debate puzzles/motives 30% Feelings, relationships, character bio/development 50% How society works & physical descript. Click on a plot link to find similar books! Plot & Themes Composition of Book descript.
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