Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  And now, as he stood on the stairs of the M.D. Anderson Library, listening to dogs bay in the night, he looked at his hands and realized his cigarette had smoldered down to the filter. He dropped the butt to the concrete and rubbed it out with the toe of his boot. Then he took another from his pack and lit it.

  Anthony showed up midway through his second cigarette.

  “You got another one of those?” he asked.

  Shaw handed him the pack and lit the cigarette for him.

  “Thanks,” Anthony said.

  He was dressed in a green T-shirt tucked into battle dress uniform pants, a floppy boonie hat pushed high up on his forehead, the way all the younger officers wore it these days. His shirt was snug enough to reveal his well-muscled, wiry frame. He carried himself with the easy confidence of a veteran SWAT officer, full of the knowledge that on the male hierarchy, he owned the top rung of the ladder.

  Back in his youth, Mark Shaw had been a founding member of Houston’s SWAT Unit. He recognized the swagger, the confidence, in his son’s body language, and it made him smile.

  But the smile didn’t last long.

  He couldn’t think of Anthony without thinking of his other son, Brent. Anthony had gotten his mother’s small stature—he was only five-nine—and her striking good looks. Brent on the other hand, was the spitting image of Shaw, a big bear of a man, several inches over six feet, with a barrel chest and a round face and a deep, clear voice.

  But that was where the similarities ceased. Anthony had gotten his father’s drive, his mental toughness, his ability to make decisions under pressure. But not Brent. Brent, the older of the two, was a gentle giant. He rarely asserted himself, and lately had taken to drinking far too much. Shaw hadn’t confronted him about the drinking, not yet anyway, but he had seen the signs of incipient alcoholism—the absences, the mood swings, the weak excuses for bad performance. Shaw knew it was yet another problem lurking in the wings, something he would have to confront as soon as all this other crap went away.

  Shaw pointed east over Anthony’s shoulder.

  “Did you know your mother and I built our first house about a mile that way?”

  Anthony glanced back at the darkness, but said nothing.

  “It wasn’t bad for a policeman’s first house,” he said. “Two bedrooms, a little yard with a garden. Your mom grew strawberries back then. I remember those things, not like you buy in the store.” He sighed. “I saw it last night—the house, I mean. It’s underwater mostly.”

  Anthony blew out twin streams of smoke through his nostrils.

  “Nearly everything’s underwater, Dad. This city’s gone.”

  Shaw took a drag of his smoke and nodded. For Mark Shaw, those flooded ruins out there weren’t just houses. They were homes. Lives had been lived there. Houston, for all its corruption and faults, was a place where men could raise their families. They could live quiet lives, not of desperation, but of honor, and integrity, and devotion to the ones they loved. And that was it. Family. Everything grew out of the family. That was the concept that defined a man, that ultimately decided if his life had value.

  He wondered if Anthony understood that as well as he should.

  “You okay, Dad?” Anthony asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You sure? You look tired.”

  “I am tired.”

  Shaw took a last drag on his smoke, jammed it out on the handrail, then dropped it in disgust. Sometimes he hated cigarettes, even though he knew he’d be lighting up again in ten minutes.

  “You’re not gonna have to worry about what’s going on here in a few days,” Anthony said. “We get that dynamite, and we’re home free. I’ve already scouted out the bank. It’s perfect. The whole building’s underwater, just like Brent said. Once I get that dynamite, Jesse and I can be in and out of that vault in no time. Give me an hour and we’ll all be seven million dollars richer.”

  “Yeah,” Shaw said.

  He looked east, into the darkened ruins, thinking about the house he and Grace had built all those years ago, Brent just a baby.

  But so much had happened since then. His sons had grown up, and Grace had died. And now he was facing a murky future. Without Grace, without his rudder, he’d fallen back on the one pillar that had never failed him—duty. The father was the provider; that was his duty. His job was to carve out a future for his children, by force if necessary, but provide for them he must do. To fail was not an option. Even if it meant breaking his oath to the law.

  The day before Hurricane Hector, he had been talking with Brent about Brent’s extra job as a security officer at the Republic of Texas Bank. Brent said that seven million dollars in cash was being stored in the bank’s vault. Shaw had thought little of it until the day after Hurricane Hector, when he happened to read an action report that stated all of Southeast Houston’s banks and jewelry stores and museums were now underwater.

  The property loss, the report’s author had written, will total in the trillions. Maybe even the hundreds of trillions.

  Shaw had nodded in agreement. But the thought of seven million dollars waiting down there in the bowels of that flooded bank, already written off by the insurance companies, had started his mind working.

  He had two sons, both of whom had joined the police department because he had led them to it with his talk of honor and brotherhood. It was a good job, he promised. No matter how bad the economy gets, you’ll never get laid off.

  But Shaw could read the writing on the wall. Houston would probably never recover from the twin scourge of Hector and Kyle, and if Hurricane Mardel hit them like the folks at the National Hurricane Center were saying, the city would be down and out for good.

  All his promises of good jobs forever would turn out to be a lie.

  And then, like a sign from heaven, the ATF delivered the Venezuelan freighter Santa Fe and its shipment of dynamite into his hands.

  The decision made itself.

  Shaw lit another cigarette, and it focused him back into the moment.

  “Are you and Jesse ready to move on the Santa Fe?”

  “Well, we can be. Not at this second, but we can be. We’ve still got a lot of planning to do.”

  “You have twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours? Dad, holy shit. That’s too soon.”

  “You have twenty-four hours, Anthony, or the operation’s a no-go. Got it? We wait any longer and the feds are gonna call in an FBI SWAT Team. We’ve got a narrow window of opportunity here. I want you and Anthony to get your gear together and move out tomorrow morning with first light. Can you make it happen?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said, grinding his smoke out on the pavement. “Yeah, we can do it. But—”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said. “Get it done, Anthony. Just get it done.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The next morning, Brent Shaw sat behind the wheel of a small ski boat, watching the flooded houses in the distance, trying his best not to think about the dead bodies he kept running over. His dad and his younger brother had promised him this little excursion was going to be quick and easy. So far, it had been anything but.

  “Okay, hold it up here,” Anthony said.

  “Why are we doing this?” Brent said. “Dad said for us to get this done fast.”

  “Just hold up. We’ll get there.” Anthony pumped his palm in Brent’s face like an angry traffic cop. “Right here! Stop!”

  The boat slowed and Anthony leaned over the gunwale.

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “No big deal. It’s just a dummy.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, like at the mall. A mannequin.” Anthony reached into the water and scooped up a white arm with a limp plastic bag hanging from the wrist.

  Anthony pointed it at Brent.

  “See?”

  Brent stared at his brother, not the arm.

  “That’s great, Anthony. Can we go now?”

  Brent didn’t do well around dead bodies. T
hat was no secret. Though he’d been a cop for close to ten years now, the smell of decomposition could still make him vomit unexpectedly. And since riding out from their temporary HQ at the University of Houston’s campus they’d seen hundreds of blackened corpses floating in the water. Brent was in hell.

  But of course Anthony was loving it.

  They’d run over several floaters already, and every time something thudded against the hull, Anthony would be ready with his one-liners. “Nice! Ten points.” Or Anthony’s personal favorite: “Hey, go back. I think you missed one.”

  Brent, meanwhile, would simply close his eyes and groan.

  The dummy’s arm that Anthony was now holding up so proudly was just one more excuse for his younger brother to needle him.

  Anthony stuck the dripping arm around the side of the windscreen, the hand inching toward Brent’s crotch. “You want me jack you off?” he said, speaking in a falsetto Vietnamese hooker voice. “Me got kung fu grip. Jack you off long time.”

  Brent swatted the hand away. “Jesus. Cut it out.” He wiped the water from his pants. “Quit laughing, asshole. What are you, like six?” He sat down again, his big hands draped over the top of the wheel. He was trying his best to look tough and pissed, but only came across as rattled.

  “You got problem with your wee-wee, big boy?” Anthony said, still in his hooker voice. “You no like me? Come on, you not too beaucoup for Rosie.”

  “I said cut it out.”

  “You sure? Rosie here’s about as close as you’re gonna get to a woman for a while.”

  “Throw it back in the water,” Brent said. “Please.”

  “Fine,” Anthony said, and threw the mannequin’s arm away. “But you know, you need to learn to have fun every once in a while. Being with you is like having Eeyore for a brother.”

  Anthony got up and went to the back of the boat, where Jesse Numeroff was giving their dive gear a final once-over.

  Brent watched him go, then hit the throttle and got them back on their way, trying his best not to think about the dull thuds he kept hearing against the bottom of the boat.

  “Hey, Brent, what’s that?”

  They had just rounded a thick copse of trees. Ahead of them, a perfectly straight white line stretched across the floodwater.

  Brent killed the throttle and scanned the water ahead. “Shit,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  Jesse Numeroff was coming forward now. He looked left, then right, following the track of the white line.

  “No way around it,” Jesse said. “Looks like we’re gonna have to swim from here.”

  Like Anthony, Jesse was short and slender and fast, built like an infielder. He and Anthony had been best friends since high school, where they’d played baseball together. Now he was a member of the Houston Fire Department’s elite High-Water Rescue Unit. When they were planning this operation, Anthony had suggested bringing in Jesse because of his dive skills, and their father, who had always liked Jesse, agreed without hesitation. And just like that, the three of them had fallen into the old familiar pattern. Anthony and Jesse were the Wonder Twins, the ones in charge. Brent was the chauffeur, the guy who carried the heavy stuff, the butt of their jokes.

  Anthony was standing beside Jesse now, looking at the white line in the water. “Okay, I give. What the hell is that?”

  “That’s the retaining wall for the Beltway,” Brent said. “The top of it anyway. I can get you right up to it, but there’s no way to get the boat over that without tearing up the hull.”

  “Just go around it?”

  “It’s too far,” Brent said. “It’d take us an hour either way to get around it.”

  “Be quicker to swim it,” Jesse said. “The Santa Fe’s about a mile that way, through those trees.”

  “I guess we don’t have any other choice, do we?” Anthony said.

  “Not really.”

  Brent turned the boat to their right and followed the retaining wall until they came to a purple charter bus up to its rearview mirrors in water.

  “I can tie off here pretty easy,” he said to Jesse. “Will this be a good landmark for you come back to?”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, “this’ll work fine.”

  Anthony and Jesse went to the back of the boat and donned their gear. As they climbed over the side, Brent said, “How long do you think this’ll take?”

  “Five to six hours, I’m guessing,” Anthony said. “You gonna be okay hanging out here?”

  Brent nodded.

  “You sure?” Anthony said, smiling wickedly. “All these dead bodies. You’re not gonna get too spooked?”

  “Fuck you,” Brent muttered.

  He grabbed a pair of AR-15s and handed them to Anthony, who passed one to Jesse.

  “Lighten up, big bro. I’m just funning with you. You shouldn’t have any trouble. But just in case, like if a Coast Guard team shows up or something, have them call Dad at the EOC.”

  “I know what to do,” Brent said. And then, almost below his breath: “I can take care of myself.”

  Anthony slid his goggles down over his eyes.

  “I know you can. I’m just telling you because the old man told me to. Oh, and steer clear of the trees. Water moccasins like to get up in there during floods.”

  Brent glanced at the nearby oaks and swallowed. Anthony was still messing with his head, he knew that, but he couldn’t help it. Snakes, like decomposing bodies, were one of his phobias.

  He turned back to Anthony and tried his best to sound confident and in control, like their father.

  “I got this, Anthony. You just do your part and I’ll do mine.”

  Anthony laughed, gave him a thumbs-up, and then he and Jesse slid away from the boat, gliding silently through the murky water.

  They dog-paddled most of the way to keep their legs out of the rubble that lurked just below the surface. Once they got out of earshot of the boat, Jesse said, “Hey, how did Brent’s Internal Affairs case work out?”

  “Which one?”

  “There’s another one?” Jesse asked. “I was talking about him being AWOL. Which one are you talking about?”

  “He wrecked his police car again.”

  “No way, really? What is that, like three this year?”

  “The crash review board gave him a fifteen-day suspension right before Gabriella, but my dad got it put on hold until we see what’s gonna happen with Mardel.”

  “That was cool of your dad.”

  Anthony laughed. “He wasn’t happy about it, that’s for sure.”

  “No, I bet not.”

  They paddled on in silence. This close to the Ship Channel, they had a clear view of the damage Hurricane Kyle’s storm surge had caused. Vast fields of garbage were strewn across the flooded landscape. Billboards were little more than skeletons with only a few scraps hanging from them. Telephone poles had been upended and tossed like driftwood against buildings that had every window blasted out. Nothing moved, and there was no sound but the splashing of their feet as they dog-paddled on and on.

  They came to an eighteen-wheeler and Jesse climbed up on top of the cab and looked east.

  “Not too much farther,” he called down to Anthony. “There’s a trailer park up ahead. Should be just on the other side of that.”

  He climbed down and dropped into the water next to Anthony.

  “Hey,” Jesse said, “listen, I gotta ask you something.”

  “Shoot,” said Anthony.

  “It’s about Brent.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your dad’s been covering for him a lot lately.”

  “Yeah, so? You’ve known my dad long enough to know he’s not gonna let his kid down when he’s going through a rough spot. That’s not the kind of man he is.”

  “I know that. I wouldn’t have agreed to get on board with this little operation if I didn’t know that.”

  “So what are you trying to say, Jesse?”

  “Well, it’s just that it seems like Brent
’s been going through a little more than a rough spot. Seems like it’s more serious than that.”

  Anthony didn’t answer.

  Though Jesse hadn’t said the words out loud, they were back to Brent’s drinking again. The subject had been coming up a lot lately, at work, at home, all the time. Brent had always been a heavy drinker, even back when they were in high school. But over the past year or so it had gotten way out of hand. From what Anthony had heard, Brent was calling in sick a lot, burning up his accrued leave bank. And there were other warning signs of bad things to come. Brent was obsessed with drinking. He talked about drinking all the time. He was irritable. They had grown apart since Anthony joined the SWAT Unit, but on the few occasions they’d hung out recently, Brent had gotten really blitzed, followed by blackouts the next day. It was troubling to watch him struggle, completely unwilling to talk about what was obviously going wrong in his world.

  And Anthony didn’t even want to think about the sudden rise in Brent’s on-duty police car crashes. In the seven years he’d been a policeman, Anthony had known more than a few cops who pickled themselves in booze. It was a common enough thing, considering all the shit your average street cop sees in his career. But even though it was common, and tolerated to some degree because nobody wanted to cut a fellow cop out of his pension, it was never cool. Drunks were taken off the street, pushed into some meaningless job where they didn’t interact with the public, where they couldn’t fuck anything up. Cops like that, they became pariahs. The department’s black sheep. They were snickered at behind their backs. Eventually, they were forgotten. Anthony bristled at the idea that his own brother was on the verge of becoming one of those kinds of cops. It stirred a vague sense of hostility somewhere down in his guts, coiling like a big snake.

  “You think he’s gonna be able to do his part in this?” Jesse said.

  Anthony kept his eyes straight ahead.

  “He’ll be fine,” he said.