Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  Then the floor shifted beneath her, and she ran for the back bedroom. The wind had blown debris into the doorway, but most of the room looked the same as it always did, neat and tidy. A flash of lightning filled the room, spilling light across the quilt at the foot of the bed. Eleanor got down on her hands and knees, lifted the bed skirt, and saw Ms. Hester curled into a fetal ball. She was trembling.

  “Betty Jo, take my hand. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  No response. The woman was in shock. Her eyes were open, glittering like coins caught by firelight, but they were unfocused and vague. Eleanor could hardly believe that the woman had made herself so small.

  “Betty Jo, please. Take my hand. I have to get you out of here.”

  Eleanor tried to reach for her, but Ms. Hester had wedged herself deep under the bed, just out of reach.

  “Please,” Eleanor said. “There’s no time.”

  Not gonna happen, Eleanor thought.

  She stood up, grabbed the wooden bed frame, and tried to lift it. If she couldn’t pull Betty Jo out, she’d throw the bed off her and scoop her up fireman-style. But it was a huge wooden sleigh bed, impossibly heavy. She strained against its weight with everything she had, but only managed to raise it a few inches off the floor.

  Her fingers were slipping, the muscles in her arms and back and neck screaming at her to drop the weight.

  “Come on,” she said. “Please.”

  “Eleanor! Where are you?”

  It was Jim’s voice, coming from somewhere in the living room.

  “In here,” she answered. “Help me!”

  The next moment he was by her side, his hands next to hers under the bed frame. She heard him grunting, felt his body tense next to hers, and the next instant the bed was rising, coming up above her head.

  “Get her out of there,” Jim said. “I’ll hold it.”

  Eleanor dropped to her knees again and scrambled under the bed. Ms. Hester’s body was curled so tightly into a ball Eleanor had trouble moving her.

  “Hurry!” Jim said.

  “Betty Jo, come on,” Eleanor said. She slid an arm under the woman’s trembling body and pulled her out from under the bed. “Clear!” she yelled to Jim.

  He let the bed fall, then reached down and scooped Ms. Hester up from the floor.

  “Find us a way out,” he said. “I’ll carry her.”

  The wind had blown a pile of crushed furniture and tree limbs and trash into the living room, and Eleanor had to climb over it to reach the front door. She kicked it once, twice, and it burst open as the wind caught it and ripped it from its hinges. In disbelief, Eleanor watched it slide across the yard and down the street.

  But there was no time to wait. The roaring wind in the doorway created enough suction to pull her out, and she had to grab hold of the frame just to keep from getting carried away like the door.

  Beyond the doorway, the sky had grown impenetrably dark. Rain was slashing sideways across her field of vision. She steadied herself against the wind, then reached in and took Ms. Hester from Jim.

  “You got her?” he asked, yelling to be heard over the wind.

  “Yeah, come on.”

  He scrambled out of the doorway after her and together, the two of them carried Betty Jo Hester across the street and into their house. Madison was waiting for them. She threw a towel over Ms. Hester and helped Eleanor clean her up.

  Ms. Hester started to come around after they had her dry and wrapped in blankets.

  She looked at Madison and tried to smile, but couldn’t. Her gaze shifted to Eleanor, and the sadness in her eyes nearly took Eleanor’s breath away.

  “He didn’t come back,” she said. “Bobby didn’t come back. He said he’d be right back for me. Why didn’t he come back?”

  Eleanor didn’t know how to answer her. She leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the forehead. Only then did she realize how much she ached, how every muscle in her body was trembling. She looked around the room, taking in the sight of her family around her, and then she let out a heavy sigh.

  They spent the next thirteen hours huddled in their game room like scared animals as the hand of God passed overhead.

  The next morning they stepped out onto their front porch and gazed at the destruction.

  Where before there had been a suburban neighborhood of well-paved roads and wide, green lawns, there was now only water. Every house was an island, every one of them missing shingles from the roofs. Eleanor stepped to the edge of her porch and looked down. She could barely see the grass down there, beneath a foot of brown water.

  Out in the street it was deeper. She could see the roofs of cars poking up above the level of the water, which was flowing sluggishly to the south. She watched a large mattress float down the street. It hit the roof of a pickup and turned a slow pirouette before continuing on its way.

  Somewhere off in the distance, a dog was howling. It was a lonely, frightened sound that sent a shiver across Eleanor’s skin. She and Jim had debated about getting Madison a cat or a dog for the last several months, Eleanor saying no, absolutely not, and Jim, wishy-washy, as he always was when it came to saying no to their daughter, willing to give in to just about anything Madison wanted. She had hated being the bad guy when Madison asked, pleaded with them, for a pet. But now, listening to that terrified animal’s howls, she was glad she’d stuck to her guns.

  “Oh, wow!”

  Eleanor looked back at Madison. The girl was wide-eyed, looking at all the water.

  “It’s something, isn’t it, kiddo?”

  “Yeah. Oh my God. Ms. Hester, look at your house.”

  Madison pointed across the street. A large pecan tree limb was jutting out of the house, the gash in the kitchen wall packed with green leaves and garbage.

  “Did that happen while you guys were over there?”

  “No,” Eleanor said. “After.”

  She chanced a quick glance at Ms. Hester, who was staring at her house with an empty, shocked expression on her face. Eleanor put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder and made a silent gesture for her not to say anything more about it.

  To her credit, Madison picked up on the signals immediately, and the fascinated smile slipped from her face.

  Good girl, Eleanor thought.

  A motorboat came into view. The pilot eased back on the throttle and let it coast up to the curb in front of the Norton’s house.

  “Sergeant Norton,” he said. “Good morning, ma’am.”

  “Good morning, Hank,” Eleanor said.

  The pilot’s name was Hank Gleason. He was a member of SWAT Team 3, on loan to the EOC for as long as the city of Houston was in Phase III of the Disaster Mobilization Plan. Gleason was wearing green SWAT fatigues with a DayGlo green safety vest over top of his shirt. On his head was a floppy boonie cap, pushed far back, away from his sunglasses.

  “How y’all doin’?” he called out. “Everybody all right?”

  Eleanor couldn’t help but smile. He had that effect on most women.

  “We’re doing fine, Hank. You come to pick me up?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat to Ms. Hester and Madison. “Captain Shaw says if it ain’t too much trouble he’d like you to come back to work.”

  Jim caught the bow of the bass boat and guided it up alongside the porch.

  “Thank you, sir,” Hank said.

  He and Jim shook hands.

  “How is it out there, Hank? It got pretty rough here last night.”

  For the first time that Eleanor could remember, the smile disappeared from Hank’s face. His shoulders sagged and, in that moment, the unflappable SWAT veneer dropped away and he looked utterly exhausted.

  And then, just as quickly, the smile was back again.

  “Ma’am, I don’t envy you folks over at the campus. You’re gonna have your hands full.”

  “Why, what happened?”

  “All the evacuees from Galveston, Texas City, Dickinson, those places,” Hank said, “a
lot of ’em were stranded on the freeway by the floodwaters. Captain Shaw decided to open the campus to as many people as it could hold. People’ve been coming in by the thousands since before sunup. The place looks like its own little city now.”

  Eleanor didn’t know what to say. Captain Shaw was the incident commander for the entire region for the duration of the crises, but he didn’t have the authority to throw open the doors of a university to a bunch of stranded motorists. Something like that would take an act of Congress or an order from the governor or something. What Hank was suggesting was . . . it was crazy. It was career suicide on Shaw’s part.

  “So, what, he just opened up all the dorms and let anybody who needed a place to stay come on in?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s about the size of it. The school’s got restaurants, a hospital, its own power station. Captain Shaw opened it all up to the public.”

  “I can’t believe that,” she said. “That’s . . . that’s nuts.”

  “It’s no joke, ma’am. I ain’t never seen anything like it. Most of the folks they’re taking in are the ones who aren’t strong enough to continue on their own. Old people, families with young kids, sick people, you know? But they got folks everywhere, wandering around like they’ve just been dropped on the moon. Nobody knows what the hell’s goin on.”

  Eleanor nodded, but she was still trying to imagine the scope of the gamble Captain Shaw was making.

  “I can’t believe this, Hank. Did the campus agree to let Shaw do this?”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know. Captain Shaw told me to come and get you, and here I am. All I can tell you is it’s gonna be a mess when you get there.”

  “Yeah, sounds like it. Well, I guess we should get going.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think so.”

  Eleanor turned and kissed Jim and Madison and climbed on to the bass boat.

  It would be three more days before she made it back home.

  CHAPTER 2

  Captain Mark Shaw, head of the Houston Police Department’s Emergency Operations Command, had slept in his uniform again. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Groaning, he sat up on the side of the bed and tried to stretch, but a sharp pain in his back made him flinch abruptly. He closed his eyes and waited for the pain to subside. Instead, an acid burn climbed up his throat. Looks like it’s gonna be aspirin and Rolaids for breakfast again, he thought bitterly. He’d been doing that an awful lot lately, too. How in the hell had he let himself get to this point? He was only fifty-eight, for Christ’s sake. It hadn’t been that long ago when he could do a week’s worth of twenty-hour shifts standing on his head.

  But these days, there were too many headaches, too many backaches. Heartburn was getting to be a daily companion.

  And he knew why, too. That part wasn’t a mystery.

  It was the job.

  A police career wears down every cop who takes the oath. Good man or crooked, a hard worker or a slug, it just doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, the job eats you up and shits you out its backside.

  The thing was—and it hurt more than a little to finally admit to himself that it was true—Shaw honestly thought it would never happen to him. Lesser men, sure. But he had somehow sold himself on the idea that he was made of iron.

  Good God, he thought, were you ever wrong.

  Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked over at the clock.

  Quarter past eight.

  That meant he’d been asleep for just under two hours. Since Hurricane Hector seven days earlier he’d been working nonstop, managing only a catnap here and there . . . and there had been very few of those. Now, his exhaustion ran bone deep. With a heavy sigh he rose from the Red Cross cot he’d moved into this little storage closet off the main floor of the EOC’s temporary headquarters, pulled on his gun belt, straightened his uniform, and walked onto the main floor.

  Sergeant Eleanor Norton, his XO, was standing with a few other members of his staff, going over a map of the Houston Ship Channel. They made eye contact; then she excused herself from the huddle of officers and walked over to him.

  “Anything new?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. A bunch. What do you want first, the bad news or the really bad news?”

  He smiled tiredly. “Break me in easy.”

  “Okay. I got another call from the ATF just a little while ago. They’re starting to get really uptight about the Santa Fe.”

  Shaw nodded. He’d seen that one coming. Seven days earlier Hurricane Hector had sent a sixteen-foot storm surge up the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel. That wave had wrecked countless offshore oil rigs and cargo freighters and homes and stripped massive amounts of trees from the landscape. It had also created a public safety nightmare. Every evacuation route out of the area was blocked. So too were most of the ways into the area. That left 2.5 million people homeless, screaming for help, with no power, no sanitation, no way out, and no way for rescue workers to get in.

  Then, two days ago, while they were still trying to recover from Hector, they got hit by Kyle. Kyle made Hector look like a rainy day in the park. That storm had sent a thirty-four-foot storm surge right up the same course, almost as if it were on a set of rails, and this time, the waters came in to stay. Though Kyle was only two days in the past, the experts were already saying that the one-two punch of back-to-back storms had changed the shape of the Texas coastline forever, with most of the land between Galveston and Southwest Houston now permanently underwater.

  And the storm surge had done something else, too, something the experts had never predicted. It had created a secondary wave that kicked up all the debris and floating chemicals and topsoil and dead animals and houses and sewage and leaking oil from the offshore drills and turned it all into a wall of liquid mud that pushed inland as far as the 610 Loop, nearly 45 miles. Everything that wall of mud touched was now buried in the muck and irredeemably polluted.

  And that included a Venezuelan cargo freighter called the Santa Fe. According to the manifest her crew had forwarded to authorities at the Houston Ship Channel, she was loaded with some twelve hundred tons of ammonia gelatin dynamite, an underwater explosive used primarily by the oil companies to dismantle offshore oil drills. She was currently beached on a vast muddy plain near the suburban community of Deer Park, completely unsecured. An ATF special agent named Vernon Laidlaw had been crawling up Shaw’s ass for the last two days trying to get the cargo secured.

  “Did you tell him it’s on our to-do list?” Shaw asked Eleanor.

  “Yes, sir, I told him.”

  “And what did he say?

  “Same thing as last time. He reminded us of the Homeland Security guidelines concerning unexploded ordnance. I’ve heard it enough I can quote the whole regulation chapter and verse, if you want to hear it.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Captain,” Eleanor said, “I don’t think he’s gonna quit calling. He sounded pretty pissed off.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he ought to come down here and lend us a fucking hand if he wants it done so bad.”

  “Actually, he did offer that.”

  Uh-oh, Shaw thought. “He did?”

  “Yes, sir. He said he could send an FBI SWAT team down here to handle the demolition in situ if we couldn’t do it.”

  Shaw barely heard her. “In situ?” he muttered.

  “Yes, sir. It means where it sits.”

  He looked at her. “I know what it means, Eleanor. Were those his words, or something you came up with on your own?”

  “That was him, sir.”

  “Thank God. I don’t want any of my people to start talking like that.” He shook his head. “Fucking feds. Give a cop a grad school education and you turn him into a dickhead without the common sense God gave to the ass end of a goat.”

  Shaw watched his staff working over the Ship Channel map and figured he couldn’t wait any longer on the Santa Fe situation. He hadn’t wanted to act on this now. They had a list of other problems so long they’d probably never get through the
m all. Plus they had another hurricane, Mardel this time, forming out in the Atlantic. And, considering the way things had been going, he was willing to bet Mardel would be coming their way, too.

  No, he couldn’t wait too much longer.

  “Okay,” he said. “This is what I want you to do. Call Laidlaw back and tell him we’ll use our own people on the Santa Fe. Last thing I want is the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude rooting around my backyard.”

  “Uh, Captain . . .”

  “What?”

  “Sir, with all due respect, I don’t see how we’re gonna be able to do that. We’re buried under projects right now.”

  “We’ll find a way to make it work.”

  “But sir, I mean, if they’re offering help, shouldn’t we . . . ?”

  “I said no!” he snapped.

  She drew back, her eyebrows going up in surprise. Out of the corner of his eye, Shaw could see some of the officers on his staff watching them.

  “Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “if the feds wanna help, let ’em keep their sorry asses north of the city handing out sandwiches or something. The last thing I want is a bunch of SEAL team wannabes blowing up cargo freighters while I’m trying to rescue civilians. Tell Laidlaw to keep his people out of my way, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Her tone was withdrawn, chastened, and he was sorry he’d snapped at her. She didn’t deserve that. It was just that he was so damn tired. Really, really tired.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “We had three more deaths this afternoon in the shelter over at the rec center.”

  “Damn,” he said. “How many is that now, eighteen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What were these last three, the salmonella?”

  “That’s what Dr. Bailey thinks. He told me all about it. And then he went on a very long tirade about how bad conditions were down there. He reminded me, several times in fact, that you promised him something would be done about the Porta-Potties.”