by Joe McKinney
The man out in front of the pack was nearly nude, his pants and shoes and most of his shirt and the left side of his underwear little more than tattered rags. He didn’t walk. He shambled. His arms hung like limp ropes at his side. His lower jaw worked up and down but never completely closed. There was a clumsy, faltering stagger to his walk, but it was the man’s eyes that held Anthony’s attention. Those glassy, depthless eyes.
Three years earlier Anthony had been on a high-risk narcotics search warrant. He was the lead man into the house after Russell Marks smashed the door open with a battering ram. There, not eight feet from the door, sitting on a couch, were three grown men and a grubby-looking, half-naked junkie girl of about fourteen. “Down, down! Police! Search Warrant!” Anthony had screamed, and saw one of the men rise from the couch with a pistol in his hand. Instinct took over, and he fired a three-round burst. And sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still follow the track of the bullets as they left his gun and thudded into the man’s chest and neck, knocking him back against the filthy gray wall behind him. The man had slid down to the couch and rolled over forward, landing faceup on the bare cement floor at Anthony’s feet. Anthony looked down at the man, watching the life slip out of his frightened gaze, watching his face grow slack, horrified and even a little thrilled that he had just killed a man who was trying to kill him. The look Anthony had seen in that man’s eyes as he died was the same look he was seeing now.
A loud, ululating moan rose up from the lead man in the group, and it snapped Anthony back into the moment. He grabbed onto the ropes and swung himself over the side, a small but insistent voice in his head urging him to go, go, go.
He and Jesse landed in the mud side by side. Jesse unhooked himself from the rope and started to walk toward the group, which was now almost upon them.
“Jesse, no!” Anthony said, and Jesse turned his head slightly back to Anthony as though startled by the urgency in his friend’s voice.
“Back away!” Anthony shouted.
Jesse turned back to the approaching group just as the lead man raised his hands and tried to grab Jesse by the shoulders. The man’s mouth came open, the moan still bleeding out, but changing now into something more like a wet, snapping sound.
Anthony was already running toward them. He had the butt of the AR-15 raised over his head, and as he closed the distance he slammed it down on the man’s face.
The blow cracked the man’s teeth off at the gum line and knocked him to the ground.
“He tried to bite me,” Jesse said. His eyes were wide, his mouth slack with disbelief. “Did you see that? He was gonna take a bite out of me.”
But Anthony wasn’t listening to Jesse. He was watching the man on the ground. An injury like that should have had the guy rolling around, screaming his lungs out. But he was getting back up. And he wasn’t making a sound. Blood was gushing from his mouth, his teeth little more than icicle-like stubs now, and he was getting up.
Anthony shook his head. No, he thought. Not possible. Not fucking possible.
“Move,” he said, grabbing Jesse by the shirt and pushing him away from the people closing in on them. “Time to go.”
They moved as fast as they could through the mud, their flippers swinging wildly between their legs as they ran.
Anthony glanced back over his shoulder. The survivors were turning slowly, stiffly, to follow them. But they didn’t run. They didn’t change their pace at all. They just kept shambling on.
“What the hell’s wrong with those people?” Jesse asked.
“I don’t know,” Anthony answered. “Just keep moving. Don’t stop.”
And they didn’t. Not until they rounded the copse of trees and came upon the edge of the trailer park. At that point Jesse reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the transistor radio–looking device and flipped it on.
“What do you want to do?” Jesse said. “Those people are too close. I hit this thing, they’re gonna die.”
Anthony nodded slowly. He knew that already. But his mind was replaying the things he’d just seen, the man getting up without saying a word, or showing even the slightest sign that he’d been hurt after having his teeth knocked down his throat, the dead vacancy in his eyes.
He heard a faint splashing to his right and turned. Anthony had just enough time to remind himself that the first dog he’d shot had landed over there, near that pile of gray, weathered lumber. But what he saw there now his mind refused to acknowledge. Three women, the clothes on their backs the same color as the mud on the sides of the trailers, were using their teeth and their fingernails to rip the dog’s carcass to pieces. One woman turned her head slowly around, ropey lengths of muscle and fur hanging from her lips, and rose to her full height.
She started toward them.
“Oh shit, Anthony,” said Jesse.
Anthony stared at the woman, transfixed by her, at the blood that had formed a wide, ghastly bib down the front of her tattered dress. For a long moment, he couldn’t wrap his mind around her. It was all just too much, too much to take in. But then he saw her eyes, the same dead, vacant eyes he’d seen on the man back at the ship, and a low groan escaped his lips.
“Hit it, Jesse. Blow the charge. Do it.”
“Yeah,” Jesse muttered. And then, louder: “Get ready to drop.”
Jesse hit the button on the detonator. Both men dropped to their knees, opened their mouths to equalize the pressure, and braced themselves for the blast.
The first explosion came a second later. It was a small blast, muffled by the hull of the ship. Anthony thought, Is that it? He was about to open his eyes when the next several blasts came, one after the other, so close together they might have seemed like a single blast if heard from a distance.
The blast wave washed over them a moment later. Anthony was facing toward the boat when it hit. He saw an enormous wall of fire rise up over the trees, huge curtainlike sheets of red, yellow, and orange rising into the sky. A low rumble moved through the ground, causing the trailers around them to jitter and dance. Disoriented and barely conscious he tried to rise to his feet and staggered dizzily to one side, landing on a knee in the shallow water. Something whistled above him and he looked up in time to see a huge piece of metal shaped like a bicycle wheel and trailing a tail of smoke and cables sail overhead like a mad comet.
“Get down!” Jesse screamed.
But Anthony couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear anything but a constantly ringing noise. Stunned, he watched the comet crash into the side of a trailer, splitting it in two and sending the smaller of the two halves tumbling end over end into another trailer.
Anthony watched it settle back into the water, the ripples moving out and away from it, and for a moment his mind was an absolute blank. When he turned around again a giant column of black smoke was rising into the air where he had seen the curtains of fire just seconds ago. The air seemed full of burning twine and the smell of oil and charred metal. His vision was hazy, his balance shot. Anthony turned to Jesse and couldn’t focus on him. There seemed to be two of him crossing like ghosts into each other.
Jesse was yelling at him, but Anthony couldn’t hear him.
Anthony shook his head in confusion, and Jesse grabbed him and half turned him toward the women they’d seen eating the dog’s carcass.
The first woman was still coming toward them. She would take a few steps, list to one side, and pitch over into the water. But each time she fell, she got right back up, oblivious to the smoke seeping off her back.
“. . . all wrong!” Jesse was screaming into Anthony’s ear. “This is all wrong! We have to go.”
Anthony nodded. The muscles in his neck seemed to have lost the ability to control his head. It tilted too far forward, too far back. He grabbed Jesse by the shoulder and tried to speak.
No sound came out. His voice was nothing more than a tickle in the back of his throat.
But it was enough to get his point across.
Jesse pulled Anthony�
��s arm over his shoulder, and together they staggered back to where Brent waited with the boat.
CHAPTER 4
“Were you able to get ahold of your husband?”
Eleanor nodded. “I did, yes, sir.” She handed the cell phone she’d just used to talk with Jim and Madison back to Shaw. “Thanks for letting me use that.”
“My pleasure.” He held the door to the conference room open for her. “After you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Eleanor tried to smile as she walked into the meeting, but she was just too tired for pleasantries. Besides, it hadn’t been a good conversation with Jim. He and Madison were holding up okay, but the stress of being stuck indoors for days on end, and of taking care of Ms. Hester, whose health had been steadily failing since Hurricane Hector, was starting to wear on them.
Eleanor could hear it in their voices.
They were quarrelsome, short-tempered, snapping at each other while she tried to explain why it was she couldn’t come home just yet. This last call she’d hardly gotten a word in edgewise. Every time she opened her mouth, Jim interrupted her to yell at Madison, and by the end of the phone call, she was left wondering why she’d even bothered calling in the first place.
Part of her understood where they were coming from. It had been two and a half days since she’d last been home, and that was only to spend the night. Before that, she’d been away for three days. But it hadn’t been a cakewalk for her, either. The last eleven days had been mind-numbing. In that short time, her office had dealt with the fallout of two major storms—three, if you counted Tropical Storm Gabriella—an entire decade’s worth of hurricane activity in the span of two weeks. From her post at the EOC, Eleanor had watched those storms change her city forever. She had been at the switchboard of an endless stream of action reports and emergency evacuations and interagency wrangling, so that now, when she looked back over the past eleven days, she found her memory a complete blur. She couldn’t remember what storm had done what. Like the city outside, her mind was all a jumble.
But now that she was in the conference room, it was time for business. In here, they dealt with the lives of the eighty thousand people who had been crammed into the U of H campus, and fights with her family were a distraction she simply didn’t need.
Eleanor settled into a chair just to the right of Captain Shaw’s. She’d sat there during their first meeting—which had taken place the morning after Hurricane Hector, eight days ago now—and it had become her regular place for every meeting after that. Funny, she thought, how things like that worked out. There was a sort of etiquette to it.
Captain Shaw of course occupied the head of the table.
Seated at the foot of the table was Shaw’s counterpart in the fire department, Assistant Fire Chief Frank Clay, who also happened to be one of the handsomest men Eleanor had ever seen outside a movie theater, like a real-life version of Harrison Ford. These meetings had a way of going on way too long, and there had been several times during the past week when Eleanor, tired and bored, had found herself staring at Frank Clay, daydreaming like a heroine from a Lisa Kleypas novel.
Occupying the middle seat to Eleanor’s right was Joe Schwab, the head of public works, who, because he spent so much time helping his crews in the field, nearly always looked and smelled as if he had just got done mowing the yard.
Opposite him was Dr. Hugh Bailey.
Bailey had been one of the original refugees stranded by Hurricane Hector, but as the conditions worsened in the shelter, he had emerged as a leader, helping to organize their rapidly dwindling stores of food and medical supplies.
Among the five of them, they were overseeing a nightmare. When Captain Shaw opened up the University of Houston campus to any evacuee who could reach it, Eleanor had been in awe of the man’s courage. He was acting way above his pay grade, and doing it without flinching. But as the days went on, and the federal aid they’d been promised still didn’t come, Shaw’s outpost of mercy turned into a death camp of plague and starvation.
These conference meetings had become increasingly tiresome, the news always worse than the day before, and she always felt exhausted and demoralized afterwards. But like it or not, she had to be here.
It was her job.
Shaw called them to order.
“I suppose you’ve all heard by now that Hurricane Mardel has been upgraded to a Category Five storm,” he said. “According to the National Hurricane Center, it’s a monster, nearly twice the size of Kyle. It’s expected to make landfall in about six hours. That doesn’t give us a lot of time. I want a quick status report from each of you. Major issues only. Don’t bog me down with a bunch of bullshit. I just want to know what’s wrong and what you’re doing to take care of it. Doc, you want to start us off?”
Hugh Bailey nodded slowly. He had probably been a presentable, if undistinguished-looking man, before all this started, but for the past eight days he had been doing hard work in the trenches of the shelter with only two changes of clothes. Now the yellow polo shirt and jeans he wore were filthy and sweat-stained.
“Well,” he said, “the salmonella drama continues. We’ve lost eighty people so far. A few infants, but most of them elderly. Right now we’re storing the bodies in the freezers over in the restaurant management building, but we’re running out of room, and, not to put too fine a point on it, those freezers haven’t been working since all this started. They’re cooler than anywhere else we’ve got to store them, but . . .”
He trailed off, then shrugged.
“But what?” Schwab asked.
The others were silent.
Bailey looked around the table, then finally settled his gaze on Schwab. “To be blunt, those bodies are starting to stink. I smelled them on the way over here. Pretty soon, and by that I mean pretty damn quick, we’re going to have to figure out something to do with them. We can’t leave them there. It’s not healthy for the rest of us.”
“But what can we do?” Schwab asked.
Again, Bailey looked around the room, and again, found no help from the others. “We’re going to have to start thinking about burying the dead.”
“What?” Schwab said. “We don’t have the authority to do that. Not here on this campus.”
“I don’t see that we have any other options,” Bailey countered. “Things aren’t going to get any better anytime soon. We all know that, right? I’ve listened to the reports during these meetings, and I know for a fact that we’re going to be stuck here for another two weeks at least. Maybe even longer. That means more dead. And of course that doesn’t take into consideration the additional problems Mardel is going to bring us. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they got better.”
He sighed.
“Which brings me to another matter. The electricity. Or rather, the lack of it. Without electricity, none of the water pumps work. Our water is filthy. Consider all those people out there in the shelter, eating food that none of us would have fed to a stray dog two weeks ago. We don’t have any functioning toilets. We haven’t had toilet paper in three days. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, that storm surge from Hurricane Kyle overloaded the campus’s sewage system. That’s caused a backwash that has contaminated everything around us. We have eighty thousand people jammed into cramped quarters, many of them sick and injured. Some with really serious stuff too, like AIDS and hepatitis and TB. A lot of people who were stranded at the airport came here too. It’s possible that some of them could be carrying really exotic stuff, frightening stuff. Demon in the Freezer stuff, for those of you who have read Richard Preston.”
He looked around the table, then went on.
“The short answer is that a lot more people are going to be dying over the next few days and I don’t have any way to help them. We can’t store the bodies. It’s hot as hell out there. Mosquitoes are everywhere. You put all that stuff together and you can expect a pretty huge die-off over the next few days. I say we sta
rt looking for a place to bury the dead. Temporarily maybe. The bodies can be moved to a proper cemetery later. But we need to find a grassy area now where we can dig some graves.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Schwab said. “How did this salmonella junk get started anyway?”
“I don’t think that’s really the issue we should be worrying about right now,” said Shaw, holding up his hands in frustration. “Doc, we’ll deal with the dead after we see what Mardel does to us. Right now, I just need the big picture. What else you got?”
Bailey nodded again.
“Okay. Big picture. Well, we’re out of food. We need fresh water, too. A lot of it. The people who aren’t busy shitting their guts out from the salmonella are starving and suffering from dehydration.”
“Okay,” Shaw said. “I’m supposed to be giving a press conference here in about thirty minutes. I’ll mention it then, and hopefully it’ll light a fire under Homeland Security’s ass. Anything else?”
“Well, yes. While you’re at it you might as well ask for a barge loaded down with antibiotics to be brought in here. On top of that I’ve got heart patients, diabetics, people with hypertension and about a hundred other chronic conditions. I don’t have medicines. I don’t have supplies. Even minor injuries are going to turn into something serious if I can’t treat them correctly.”
“I can’t read all that on the news,” Shaw said. “They’ll just cut me off. Do me a favor and write out a list of medicines and supplies you need, and I’ll see it gets forwarded. Anything else?”
“Yeah, I got a lot. You need to send those cameras into our shelters. If you want people to get motivated to help us, they need to see what’s really going on in there. It’s like walking through hell.”
“I know, Doc,” Shaw said tiredly. “Just put what you need on the list. I’ll see it gets to the news. That goes for the rest of you, too. Give me your lists before I go live.”