Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  Anthony had been thinking about that very thing. His father would expect him to include Brent in every step of the operation, not necessarily because he was needed, but because Brent needed it, and in his father’s mind, that was the only factor that really mattered.

  “I don’t know,” Anthony said. “It’s safe, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, it’s safe, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  Jesse pushed a large floating tree limb out of his way. Now that they were closer to the highway, they were coming across a lot more debris. “It’s safe for now. But you saw those people in the water last night. What do you think the military’s gonna do when they get confirmed reports of cannibalistic survivors, especially ones that are attacking their people?”

  “The same shit they always do. As little as possible. They’ll help with evacuees, but they’ll ignore the problem as long as they can, leave it to the local authorities.”

  “I don’t think so, Anthony. This isn’t like Katrina. This isn’t a bunch of hard-luck cases stuck at the Superdome. You know what I think they’re gonna do? They’re gonna come in here with a shitload of National Guardsmen and they’re gonna clamp down on order as fast as they fucking can. We’re gonna see military everywhere. What do you think is gonna happen when they spot that wrecked Coast Guard helicopter? You think they’re gonna leave that one be?”

  Anthony kept on walking. He had been thinking about the same thing, the helicopter especially, and though he’d rather eat glass before showing how worried he was to Jesse, he was worried just the same.

  “We need to get the cash tonight,” he said.

  “Now you’re talking some sense,” Jesse said. “At least you’ve got that part figured out.”

  “Hey,” Anthony said, suddenly wheeling around on him. “You listen to me and you listen fucking good. I got this. You hear me? I got this. I know exactly what we need to do and when we need to do it. Don’t make that mistake again, Jesse. You and I, we will get this done. Even if my brother fucks up, you and I will get this done. We will get it done, and then we will get the fuck out of this town. You see those people over there? I refuse to end up like them. You hear me? I fucking refuse.”

  Anthony stared at him, not blinking, waiting for Jesse’s reaction to his words. Jesse was good. He was damn good. But he was a little bitch when it came to making sure he got his point across. Anthony didn’t like that. He had this under control, and goddamn it, Jesse better fucking know it, too. If Anthony’s dad had taught him anything, it was what it meant to be in control.

  Jesse stared back at him, defiant at first from being talked down to, but he didn’t have it in him to push the issue. They both knew that.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said at last. “Yeah, I hear loud and clear.”

  Anthony relaxed a little. He didn’t like getting angry like that, especially at Jesse, but he was mastering it now.

  “I’ll talk to my dad,” he said. “Even if Brent fucks up, we still need to include him. I know you know that. But you and I, we’ll get it done.”

  Jesse nodded, but didn’t say a word.

  “Come on,” Anthony said. “Let’s get us a boat.”

  Like everything else about the city’s response to these storms, the requisitioning of the motorboats was a hopeless mess. Nobody seemed to have any idea what was going on. Anthony was counting on that confusion so that he and Jesse and Brent could take one of the boats off to get the money.

  There were a lot more people hanging around the parking lot area. One man, an older white guy with a sunburned face and white hair and a Hawaiian shirt open to reveal his prodigious belly, was arguing with the fleet master, a thirty-six-years-on-the-job sergeant named Frank Gibbs, an old friend of his dad’s. Though he couldn’t hear their conversation, Anthony could tell what they were talking about by their body language. Frank was going to confiscate the man’s boat for the upcoming evacuation; the man didn’t want to give it up. The man was animated, waving his hands around his head, stamping his feet on the padded seat cushions of his boat. Frank Gibbs stood on the roof of a sedan, a clipboard in his hands, nodding slowly, as though he completely understood. Anthony had once watched Gibbs handle a complaint from a couple whose car had been ticketed while they were parked under a sign that read NO PARKING ANYTIME. Gibbs had taken the couple out to their car and shown them the sign. Then he took out a pocket dictionary and read the definition of each word on the sign, and in the process utterly berated them without ever raising his voice or giving any indication that he was calling them dumb-asses to their faces. Anthony couldn’t help but chuckle to himself. The poor guy in the Hawaiian shirt had lost the argument before he ever opened his mouth. He just didn’t know it yet.

  “Hey, Anthony,” Jesse said, tapping him on the shoulder, “take a look at that dude over there.”

  Anthony turned to Jesse. “Where?”

  “Over there. See him, in the green T-shirt, over by that staircase?”

  The smile slipped away from Anthony’s face. By now, he had seen literally thousands of survivors, people who had been pulled from upstairs windows or off rooftops, and he knew the look of one who has just been given a giant dose of humility from Mother Nature. He had also seen dead bodies that had been caught in the crotches of trees or in storm drains, the clothes shredded from their bodies by the wind and lashing rain. The man staggering down the grassy knoll from the staircase looked like a marriage of the two. What little clothes he had left hung from his body in strips. The look on his face was one of utter defeat at the hands of the storm. He could barely keep his balance, even though every step took him into deeper water. His shoulders were slumped forward, his head tilted grotesquely to one side. He had his hands out in front of him, his fingers opening and closing like he was begging for forgiveness from two firefighters who had their backs to him.

  “What’s his deal?” Jesse said. “He’s acting like those guys last night, the ones from Canal Street. You don’t think . . . ?”

  Anthony took a few hurried steps forward.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  One of the firefighters turned and looked over at him. So, too, did Gibbs and the fat man.

  “Heads up behind you,” Anthony said, and pointed at the man in the shredded green shirt.

  The warning came too late. The two firefighters, confused at first by the urgency in Anthony’s voice, were slow to turn around. When they did, the man in the shredded clothes lunged at them, knocking the closer of the two into the water and diving down on top of him. From where Anthony and Jesse were standing it was difficult to see exactly what was going on, at least at first, though they could tell that the man in the water was flailing his arms about as though he was reaching for something to hold on to. He tried to scream, but the sound was cut off when his face went under the water.

  The other firefighter just stood there, looking down at the stranger who had just climbed on top of his partner and was now tearing into his chest with his teeth and fingernails. The firefighter, who Anthony would learn later from Jesse was a fourteen-year veteran named Bo Moody, backed away for a moment, his face stricken with surprise and disgust, before rushing back to help his partner. Bo Moody threw an arm around the stranger’s neck and yanked him off his partner. Moody was a strong man with huge biceps, a weightlifting junkie, and the stranger in the shredded clothes seemed to fly out of the water, turning almost a full backflip over Moody’s shoulder in the process. He looked like a child’s rag doll getting thrown about by the family dog.

  The stranger hit the water stomach-first, but the belly flop didn’t seem to stun him at all. He stumbled forward, draping his arms over Moody’s shoulders like an exhausted runner crossing the finish line. Moody tried to get his hands under the man’s chest to push him away but for some reason couldn’t get enough leverage. He was off balance, staggering backward under the man’s weight, and though the stranger’s movements were clumsy and awkward, he nonetheless bent Bo Moody over backwards.


  Both men went under.

  Frank Gibbs was running that way, moving slowly through the waist-deep water. So too were Anthony Shaw and Jesse Numeroff, but they were farther off, and Frank Gibbs got there first.

  “Gibbs, no!” Anthony shouted, already pulling his gun.

  Gibbs closed on the Moody and the stranger and jumped into the fight. There were other groups of men standing around, checking the boats, and by now they too had advanced on the stranger. Seven or eight of them got to the stranger at the same time as Gibbs and pulled the stranger off Moody.

  For a moment, Anthony couldn’t see through the knot of bodies. Then he heard a scream and one of the men turned around, staggering away from the others, and as he fell into the water, still screaming, Anthony froze in his tracks. The ragged hole in the man’s throat was gushing blood into the water. The injured man continued to thrash, churning up the water around him, turning it a cloudy reddish-green as his neck wound jetted his life out of his body with every heartbeat.

  “Clear a hole!” Anthony shouted.

  He was closing on the group of men now, less than forty feet away, but he didn’t need to yell to clear the way. They were already falling back, separating, scrambling over each other to get out of the way of the madman in their midst.

  To Anthony, the man seemed rabid. With his chest heaving, his hands gnarled as though with arthritis, thick, jellylike ropes of blood and spit hanging from his mouth, he looked like something out of a Robert E. Howard story. And yet, for all the savageness of his countenance, the man’s eyes were the same dark, expressionless pits Anthony had seen in the trailer park next to the Santa Fe and in the flooded darkness over at Canal Street. Those eyes were completely vacant. They were a dead man’s eyes.

  Holy shit, Anthony thought. He’s a zombie. He’s a fucking zombie. But that’s not possible. It can’t be. And then, after skipping a mental beat, he thought, But it is possible. He’s right there.

  Anthony raised his pistol and fired once, putting a bullet through the man’s face, turning the spot where his nose had been to a dark slushy mess as the stranger sagged down into the water, rolled over onto his back, and went still.

  The sound of the pistol shot echoed over the water like a loud clap, and then everything went quiet.

  The men who, moments before, had been falling all over themselves to get away from the man now took a few tentative steps toward him. A few looked back at Anthony in shocked awe.

  “Get away from him,” Anthony said.

  He walked up to the body and looked down on it. The man’s eyes stared up at nothing, and looking into those eyes, those horrible, dead eyes, Anthony felt a shudder pass through him.

  That is a zombie, Anthony thought, marveling at the ease with which his mind slipped into this new mental track. For once the mental leap was made, it made perfect sense. This man—with his crazy, drunken gait and gnarled hands; with the skin of his face cracked open and beaded with a pale yellow mucousy stuff; with his lips torn from his mouth, leaving a sneering rail of bloody teeth—this man was a zombie. That’s what you are, the voice in Anthony’s head insisted. You can’t be, but you are. Goddamn it, that’s what you are. I don’t know how or why, but you’re a zombie.

  “What the hell’s wrong with that boy?” somebody said.

  Anthony glanced up to see who had spoken but couldn’t tell. His gaze shifted from one face to the next to the next and saw the same stricken look of horror that he realized must be on his own face as well. It was the man’s eyes, he thought. They hadn’t changed. Despite everything that was wrong and impossible about the corpse floating faceup in the water between them, the real horror was the way the man’s eyes had seemed dead even before Anthony shot him.

  “He’s a zombie,” Anthony said.

  He glanced at the others, almost daring them to challenge him, but nobody did. A few faces scrunched up in disgust, or perhaps in preparation for scoffing at him, but those expressions quickly melted away. He had touched on the word that none of their minds had let them speak, but now that it was out of the bag they all seemed to accept it as the only reasonable conclusion. This corpse was a zombie. There were zombies in the water with them. Anthony could feel a collective chill passing through them as the truth of it sank in.

  In the confusion, Anthony had lost sight of Frank Gibbs and the two injured firefighters. But now, as he turned away from the dead zombie, he happened to catch sight of Gibbs, who was hanging on the side of a flooded pickup truck, breathing hard, a stunned look on his face. One of the other firefighters, the first one to encounter the zombie, was already dead. The other one, the big one who had just stood there in shocked surprise as the zombie munched on his partner (and Anthony could understand now why that had happened), was getting pulled onto the roof of a car. He was bleeding badly from one ear, rolling from side to side in near unconscious misery. The others tried to hold him still, but he was so big they were having trouble.

  “You guys get him to the infirmary,” Anthony said.

  “That guy bit off one of his fingers,” one of the men said.

  It was true. Anthony could see a yellowed flake of living bone in the deep arterial blood running down the firefighter’s arm.

  “Well then, hurry it up,” Anthony told them. “Get him to the infirmary before he bleeds out. And somebody help Sergeant Gibbs over there, too.”

  The others moved off with the injured men.

  Anthony scanned his surroundings, looking for more zombies. He had absolutely no idea what was going on here. He had latched onto the term zombie because nothing else seemed to fit, and it had made sense at the moment. But now that he had some distance from that first initial shock he felt less certain. What did he really know about zombies anyway? Just what he had seen in George Romero horror movies, and he had been laughing at most of those, looking on zombies as nothing more than harlequins, the clowns of the horror world. But he wasn’t laughing now. No sir, there was nothing funny at all about this. His whole world had just been turned upside down, and there was nothing funny at all about that.

  “What are you doing?” Jesse asked.

  Anthony let his gaze wander over his flooded surroundings a moment longer, pausing wherever he saw someone wading through the water, watching them for signs of that drunken gait. He saw none, though. Everything had a washed-out, gray look to it. The only bright color belonged to the bone-white elevated portions of the highway in the distance. They looked like the skeletal humps of some enormous, snakelike sea monster frozen in time.

  “Anthony?”

  “I’m looking for more like him,” Anthony said.

  Jesse came up beside him and they both looked out toward the highway.

  “What do we need to do about the money?” Jesse finally said. “This changes things, right? I mean, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” Anthony said, shaking his head. “No. We still need to get the money. But we need to do it pretty damn quick.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Captain Mark Shaw stepped through a set of double doors and emerged onto a small open-air balcony that had, until recently, served as a study nook for the University of Houston’s film and technology students. But like everything else in Houston, it was a mess right now. The black wrought-iron furniture was tumbled in a heap along the railing to his right, and damp green leaves covered everything. They squished beneath his boots as he crossed the tiled deck. He went to the railing and looked out over the vast, shallow sea that now covered his city. The smell of mud and rot and ocean water rose up to assault his nostrils, and he grimaced.

  From somewhere off to his right a radio was playing a Tejano song. He listened to its rolling polka beat and smiled. It had been, what, more than two weeks since he’d heard music on the radio? Strange that he should hear it now. He’d always thought of music as a sign of hope, a symbol of man’s joy to be alive. He looked around and didn’t see any signs of that hope now.

  After a short while the song faded out and left silence in its wake.
Perhaps someone had made the owner of the radio turn it off. That would figure. All things considered, it did seem somehow disrespectful.

  Mark Shaw listened to the silence.

  There were no birds. No one was yelling. And of course there were no cars. It seemed Hurricane Mardel had brought quiet as well as misery, and in the stillness of the moment he could hear his own breath wheezing in his ears.

  He reached into the shirt pocket of his uniform, took out a rumpled pack of Marlboros and a BIC lighter, and fired up the last cigarette in the pack. The rush of nicotine calmed his jangling nerves a bit and he leaned on the railing, propped up by his elbows, smoking and thinking of his future.

  Prospects were not good. In fact, they were downright crappy.

  During the night, Mardel’s storm surge—a forty-seven-foot-high monster—had swept over South Houston and completed the destruction her lesser siblings Hector and Kyle had begun. The campus was already damaged by winds, but the storm surge had been the real destroyer. It smothered everything, including his headquarters over at the library, and he’d been forced to relocate to the College of Film and Technology for his teleconference this morning with the head of Homeland Security.

  One of his staff, a smart young officer named Mark Eckert, had set him up with a laptop and a webcam and showed him how to use a program called Skype. Shaw, who in his younger days had enjoyed the occasional science-fiction movie, had leaned forward and watched his own fish-eye image appear at the bottom of the screen with a strange sense of disappointment. His face skipped and flickered, not at all the crystal-clear perfection Hollywood had promised in Kubrick’s 2001 and John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Reality seemed cheap, almost ghetto, like the future promised in Soylent Green’s Malthusian nightmare.

  Frowning, Shaw had watched the screen fill with the face of George Dupree, director of Homeland Security. Dupree was a small, self-important man with prematurely gray hair that he slicked back with a handful of gel into a stiff-looking helmet. Vegas hair, Shaw had thought, with the flicker of a grin at the corner of his mouth. But Dupree’s accent wasn’t what Shaw had expected. He spoke with the slow, comfortable twang of Georgia or Arkansas, though the accent was stiffened by the aristocratic sophistication and aloofness of a Yale education. It was a strange combination, and Shaw had disliked it from the first.