Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  All she got was dead air.

  “Why aren’t they answering?” Jim asked.

  “I don’t know.” She switched channels to the SWAT frequency. “Bravo eighty-three-fifty, anybody on this side monitoring?”

  “Maybe the EOC got knocked out.”

  “That’s possible,” Eleanor said. “But that shouldn’t do anything to the radios. They’re on a multi-trunking system. Even if one tower goes out, another should be able to pick up the slack.”

  Out of habit, she checked the display on the front of the radio. She was on the right channel, and she had plenty of battery life. She was starting to get worried.

  “So what does that mean?” Jim asked.

  It means I’m sending signals, Eleanor thought, there’s just nobody on the other end to answer.

  Her gaze shifted from Jim to Madison.

  “It’ll be okay,” Eleanor said to her. “I’ll keep trying.”

  From somewhere downstairs, Eleanor heard the sound of splashing water. She looked up at Jim, and could tell by his expression he’d heard it, too. The sound continued and Eleanor had a chilling thought: Someone’s in the house!

  She picked up the Mossberg and racked a shell into the chamber.

  “You two stay here,” she said, and went to the head of the stairs. There was a man standing down there, his features lost in the shadows, water dripping from his tattered clothes.

  She thought: Not right. He is all wrong.

  Then the figure stepped forward and she saw it was Bobby Hester. He looked like a drowned man. His shirt was nothing but a rag matted to his bone-skinny, meth addict’s body. His long hair was plastered to his face. There was an open wound on the right side of his chest that made him look as if somebody had tried to carve him open with a spoon.

  Her first instinct was that he was dead.

  Eleanor had seen many corpses during her time as a cop, and Bobby Hester—impossibly—looked exactly like a corpse. It was his eyes more than anything else that froze her there, unable to raise the shotgun. There was a dead vacancy in his eyes. The same vacancy she had seen looking up at her from traffic fatalities and murder victims.

  Bobby raised his left hand and it thumped into the wall. He seemed unable to raise his right arm above his waist. A sickening moan welled up from within him and he started up the stairs toward her.

  She thought: This is not real. Not happening. And then, in the same mental breath: But it is. It is.

  “You need to leave, Bobby,” she said.

  But Bobby didn’t stop.

  He walked onward, his steps awkward, clumsy. He tripped and pitched forward, landing on his chin, then slowly pushed himself up and back onto his feet with his one good arm. Bobby was halfway up to her now.

  “Bobby I’m gonna shoot you. Turn around and walk away.”

  He reached for her, and his fingertips were white as a fish’s belly. God help me, she thought, and fired.

  He was maybe eight feet from her. The shotgun blast hit the already-shredded flesh of his right shoulder and spun him backwards and around. He hit the wall and slid back down the stairs, smearing a long clotted trail of blood behind him.

  She lowered the shotgun and put a hand over her mouth. Jesus, what had she done?

  “Mommy!”

  Madison’s scream jolted her back to the moment. She ran back to the game room. Jim was holding Madison in his arms, but he let her go when Eleanor appeared in the doorway.

  “Mommy!”

  Madison grabbed her around the waist, and Eleanor, who was too stunned to respond, let the shotgun’s muzzle dip to the floor.

  “Eleanor?” Jim asked. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Bobby Hester,” she said. She glanced back toward the stairs. “I shot him.”

  “What?” He ran forward, took the shotgun from her, and guided her to a chair. She dropped down into it. “Jesus, Eleanor, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  All she could do was shake her head no. “He didn’t look . . . right.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  She raised her gaze up to meet his and she thought: No, he was already dead. But instead she nodded slowly.

  “I think so,” she said.

  But even as she spoke she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Ms. Hester was at the door, walking stiffly toward the head of the stairs, her hands outstretched.

  “Ms. Hester, no!” Jim said.

  He jumped to his feet and ran after her, Eleanor following along right behind him.

  When Eleanor rounded the doorway she stopped. Bobby Hester was already at the head of the stairs and walking toward his grandmother’s outstretched arms as if he meant to fall into her embrace. It’s not possible, she thought. But there he was, a walking corpse with his right arm hanging by a burned scrap of flesh, his eyes depthless and empty.

  “Oh, Bobby,” Ms. Hester said.

  She stumbled, and in that moment he was on her. Eleanor saw Bobby lunge forward, his mouth opening to reveal black, bloodstained teeth. He grabbed her wrist with his left hand and at the same time clamped his mouth down on the side of her face. Ms. Hester collapsed beneath him, grunting, screaming, her fists pounding against his shoulders. Bobby Hester went down on top of her. And for a prolonged moment Eleanor could do nothing but stand there, mouth agape, watching as Bobby tore into his grandmother’s face with his teeth, spraying blood everywhere.

  It was the sound of flesh tearing that finally made her move. Bobby looked up at Eleanor and Jim and Madison with his dead-man eyes, and he had a great flap of bloody cheek skin hanging from his lips.

  She didn’t waste another second.

  Eleanor raised the Mossberg high over her head and slammed it down butt-first into Bobby’s forehead, knocking him to the ground.

  “Get her out of here,” Eleanor yelled at Jim.

  Jim darted under the shotgun, grabbed Ms. Hester by the arm, and pulled her back into Madison’s room.

  Bobby had landed on his hurt right shoulder, but he never cried out. He gave no sign at all that he felt any pain. He climbed to his knees, and then to his feet. When he looked at her, his face streaked with blood from the gash on his forehead and the torn flesh hanging from his teeth, his eyes registered nothing.

  She thought: He’s nothing but a blank. He’s empty inside.

  Eleanor pointed the shotgun at his chest, but he didn’t seem to register it. He raised his one good arm and starting clutching the air between them, and right before she pulled the trigger he uttered a sound that was like air moving through old pipes.

  The sound was cut off by the shotgun blast, and the next moment he was dead, large, sloppy bits of him oozing down the wall behind him. Eleanor stared at the mess, and only after her mind caught up with the magnitude of what had just happened did she feel the bile rise up into her throat.

  At some point—she wasn’t exactly sure when—Jim put his hands on her shoulders and helped her to stand up straight.

  “You’re okay,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement of fact, but the sound of his voice was calming. It helped to center her. She stood up straight and blinked as purple splotches swam at the corners of her eyes.

  “Oh my God.” She looked at the bloody mess that had been Bobby Hester and nearly vomited again. “Oh God.”

  “What in the hell was wrong with him?” Jim asked.

  Eleanor just shook her head.

  He took a step toward Bobby’s corpse, almost as though he didn’t believe the man was really dead. He said, “You saw that look in his eyes, right? What in the hell was wrong with him? Was he high?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What then? What was that?”

  She was fighting for control, trying to stay on her feet.

  “I don’t know. Jim, it . . . it looked like he was dead.”

  “Yeah, he’s dead all right.”

  “No,” she said, surprised by the sudden violence, the absolute conviction,
she heard in her voice. “No. Before. He looked like he was dead before I shot him.”

  “What?”

  “Before I shot him. That look . . . Jim, I’ve seen that look. You know that look once you’ve seen it. It’s the way a dead person’s eyes seem to just stare off into nothing. There’s nothing else like that look. Once you see it, you feel small, you know? You feel like you want to crawl into yourself. You feel so small, so . . .”

  She trailed off helplessly. Whatever it was, she wasn’t saying it right. She didn’t have the words to tell him all the things that were wrong with the way Bobby Hester had stared at her, or the feeling of dread that had chilled her heart when he moaned at her.

  “What do we need to do now?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He looked at Bobby’s corpse, then down the stairs toward the water lapping against the walls of their entranceway.

  “What do we do?” he said. “The water down there looks like it’s about waist-high. We can’t stay here, can we? I mean, we have to leave, right? We have to go somewhere. Anywhere else but here.”

  “We need to leave,” she said. “We need to get Ms. Hester to a doctor. We need to report this shooting. We need to get the family somewhere with clean water and food and clean beds.”

  It was coming back to her now. Thinking about protocols gave her something for her mind to do.

  “We need to leave here,” she said. “We need to get our individual disaster kits together and get the family into the canoe. We can head toward the EOC and try to make contact with somebody with better information.”

  “Okay,” Jim said. “Okay. Our disaster kits are in the game room. We’ve got about ten gallons of water left. We should take all that.”

  “Agreed.”

  Suddenly, Madison screamed.

  Both Jim and Eleanor rushed to her door. Madison was up against the far wall of her room, her back pressed into the smiling faces of a boy-band poster. Crawling on the ground in front of her, pulling herself inch by inch toward Madison, was Ms. Hester.

  “Mommy, help me!”

  Eleanor ran inside, jumped over the bed, and landed next to Madison. She scooped up her daughter and tossed her onto the bed, where Jim caught her and pulled her back.

  Then Eleanor looked down into Ms. Hester’s face, and for a moment, she was so astounded by the snarling, dead-eyed thing staring back at her that she couldn’t move. Ms. Hester uttered a thin, stuttering moan and raked the air between them with her fingernails. Her head was thrown back, the tendons in her neck standing out like cords beneath the skin, her mouth twisted into a lipless grimace.

  How about now? a voice inside Eleanor’s head shrieked. How about now? You see those eyes. She’s dead, and yet there she is, looking to drag you down with her. Do you believe it now?

  She nodded. “I believe.”

  Another moan escaped Ms. Hester’s throat, and Eleanor backed away. The back of her legs hit the bedside table and she brought a hand back to steady herself. She felt a lamp back there and closed her fist around it. The next instant she pulled its cord from the wall and held the little pink lamp out in front of her like a talisman against Ms. Hester.

  “Ms. Hester, please.”

  But the woman’s expression never changed. There was no light behind those eyes. No emotion of any kind. She dug her fingers into the carpet and pulled herself forward. Eleanor could hear Ms. Hester’s fingernails cracking, breaking, as she pulled inexorably closer, the wound on her face seeping blood onto the carpet in a continuous flow.

  “Eleanor, come on!”

  She looked up at Jim. He had Madison behind him, his hand outstretched over the bed to her.

  “Come on.”

  She felt a light tapping against her leg and screamed, but it was only the lamp. She dropped it then and grabbed Jim’s hand. He pulled her across the bed and the next instant they were running out into the hall, past the nearly decapitated body of Bobby Hester.

  “Stop,” she said. “Jim, wait.”

  “Eleanor, come on!”

  “No,” she said. “One second.”

  She ran into the game room and grabbed their backpacks and her Mossberg and her pistol. No time for the water, she thought. She threw the shotgun to Jim, swept as many boxes of shells as she could into her backpack, and together they ran down the stairs, where their canoe waited, tied to the front porch railing.

  Eleanor didn’t know it then, but she would never see the inside of their house again.

  CHAPTER 8

  A news helicopter crept slowly across the sky, endlessly circling, as though too stunned by the destruction to look away. Anthony Shaw expected to hear wailing cries for help from the hundreds of people wandering around campus, but not one of them made a sound, not one of them tried to wave the chopper down, and to him, that was even more chilling than the sight of all this water flowing through the buildings, blanketing the streets, drowning the cars. On the opposite side of the street, a black man with two orange cats in his arms and a little girl following along behind glanced up at the helicopter and then back at the little girl. She never even bothered to meet his gaze, just kept on walking.

  The little girl held a white plastic shopping bag that might have contained some wet clothes, but they had no other possessions that Anthony could see. The looks on their faces said it all. Life as they had known it was gone. What was left was an alien world for which they had no frame of reference.

  “These people look like they just stepped off a battlefield,” Anthony said.

  Beside him, Jesse grunted in acknowledgment. “That’s about the size of it. You know, your dad knew what he was doing when he set this job up for us. Don’t think I don’t realize that. These people . . . they don’t have anything left.”

  “Yeah, the sorry bastards.”

  They were making their way from the UC down to the rec center, where the fire department had managed to scrounge together a mismatched assortment of motorboats from private homes and other city departments; but even getting across the campus had become a chore now. Water was everywhere. To Anthony, the really amazing thing, the thing that really shook him, were the objects that remained above water. The windshields of trucks poked up from the slowing moving flood like surfacing submarines. Elevated pedestrian skyways, the kind that connected one building to another, now looked like fishing piers. Everything had a washed-out, gray look, except for the red of the stop signs, which stood out like candy. Over by the UC, a statue seemed to be walking on the water. And a short distance beyond that, the white, covered arch of a colonnade snaked over an open lake between buildings. The water changed everything. The most ordinary, everyday things became mysterious, even sinister, as though the world was slowly lowering beneath the waves and a new, darker one was taking its place.

  Also, there was a smell in the air he didn’t like, a sea smell, but the sea mixed with mud and sickeningly sweet stench of raw sewage and mud and rotting bodies. He had thought that he’d grown used to it, that it had seeped into the background radiation of smells that was life in the city these days, but he was wrong. Today, with the heat of the sun beating down on them, the smell was worse than ever. It seemed thicker, and almost dangerous somehow.

  Above him, the helicopter finally peeled off and headed north, and as it flew away, Anthony wondered if the rest of America wouldn’t watch the images it had just captured and scoff that the networks were just showing them something they’d run through Photoshop to better their ratings. Surely this kind of destruction couldn’t be real, not in America anyway.

  “Where the fuck is your brother?” Jesse said.

  Anthony let his gaze linger on the flooded ruins of the campus, ignoring his friend for the moment, choosing instead to marvel at just how thorough the storm had been. You had to look close at some of the buildings, but the damage was there. It hadn’t left a single structure intact. And, really, as bad as all this destruction was, it was still easier to think about a flooded city than his drunken failur
e of a brother. He had been exercising some serious mental discipline to avoid thinking about what Brent was up to right about now, but it was an ultimately futile chore. A lot like trying to keep Brent sober, Anthony mused. He suspected it couldn’t be done. In fact, Brent was probably passed out in one of these buildings somewhere, drunk out of his mind.

  “You hear me?” Jesse said.

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Anthony said. “I don’t know where he is. I told him to be here at thirteen hundred.”

  Jesse made an exaggerated show of looking at his watch. “Yeah, well, he’s late.”

  “I know he’s fucking late, Jesse. Give me a goddamn break, will you? He’s my brother. He’s my problem. You got that?”

  Jesse sighed.

  “And don’t say a fucking word,” Anthony said. “It’ll only piss me off.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Yeah, well, you want to. I know that look. I know that sigh. Just don’t, okay?”

  Jesse held up his hands in mock surrender. “Whatever, man. Like you say, he’s your brother.”

  Anthony spit into the water, and before Jesse could say more, before he could say what really needed to be said— that family notwithstanding the longer they let Brent take an active role in things the higher the chances became that their plans would come completely undone—Anthony turned away.

  They waded on in silence.

  The small fleet of motorboats was massed in the student parking lot a short distance away. Most of the crowds had thinned out, so that now there were only a few people wandering around, and most of those were city employees working on the boats. The few shelter residents they saw looked lost, but everyone, even the city employees trying to clean up the mess from the previous night’s storm, looked shell shocked. It was a look Anthony had seen a great deal of that afternoon.

  “If he doesn’t come, what are we going to do about the money?” Jesse asked.