Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  “Dad, we don’t have much time. We have to get that money and leave this city. Come with me. We’ll get Brent and Jesse and get the money and get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “No,” Mark Shaw said.

  “What do you mean, no? Dad, this is what we planned for.”

  “Not quite. Listen to me, Anthony. You and Jesse, find your brother. Then the three of you go and get that money, and bring it back here.”

  “Here? Dad, why in the hell—”

  “Because we have a charge to keep, Anthony. We have a responsibility.”

  “To who? Dad, our responsibility is to our family. That’s what you always said. It’s family above all else. In the end, nothing else matters.”

  “Honor matters, Anthony. Our family name matters. Outside those doors there are eighty thousand people that are here because they trusted in me to lead them. If I abandon them now they will all die.”

  Anthony was shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Dad, that’s insane. You can’t . . . you have less than three hundred boats out there. How do you think you’re gonna transport all those people through a flood? There’s no way in hell you can do that. It’s crazy to try. You said yourself that Dupree doesn’t expect you to succeed.”

  “Anthony, you have to understand why this matters. If I don’t try to save those people, the name I’ll pass on to you and your brother will be worthless. It’ll be less than worthless. It will become a synonym for cowardice, and I will not allow my sons to wear that shame.”

  “Dad, I can change my fucking name.”

  Mark Shaw lunged forward, grabbed Anthony’s shirt by the collar and slammed him down onto a computer console. For a moment, he was nearly blind with a rage he hadn’t felt since he’d overheard Anthony calling his mother a drunk during his sophomore year in high school. The boy had been sixteen at the time, an athlete, and though small of frame compared to his father, every bit as strong. But when he’d heard what the boy had said, Mark Shaw stood up from his chair and slid the belt from around his waist and thrown Anthony facedown over the edge of the couch, at which point he’d begun to whip the boy’s ass until his jeans were shredded.

  Now, here they were, two grown men, and Mark Shaw was dangerously close to doing the same thing.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was a brutal whisper. “You will not change your name. Do you understand me?”

  Still on his back, eyes wide with alarm, Anthony looked up at his father and said, “Yeah. Shit, Dad, I hear you.”

  Mark Shaw lifted his son off the computer console and then slammed him back down. “Say the fucking words, Anthony. Say you will not change your name.”

  “I won’t. Christ, Dad, I won’t change my name.”

  “You have a good name, Anthony. An honorable name.”

  “Yeah, an honorable name. Dad, I get it.”

  Out in the hallway, the moaning was getting louder. Mark Shaw looked up and listened. He thought he could hear two, maybe three of those zombies out there. Then he looked down at the terror on Anthony’s face and for a moment was shocked and a little frightened with the violence he knew he carried around inside himself.

  He let go of his son and backed away. Anthony slid off the console and stood staring at his father, his expression a mixture of resentment and fear that made him seem ten years younger, almost childlike.

  “Listen to me, Anthony. I want you to go and get your brother. Go and get that money. When you have it, you come straight back here. You hear me? Live or die, I will do everything in my power to get these people out of danger. And I will make sure the name you and your brother carry out of this city is one you will never, ever think of changing. Is that clear?”

  Anthony tugged his shirt down at the waist to straighten it.

  “Yeah, that’s clear.”

  “Good. Now go and find your brother.”

  The moaning was extremely close now. Both men could hear the zombies splashing out in the hallway.

  “I’ll take care of those first,” Anthony said.

  “No,” Mark Shaw said, drawing his weapon. “We’ll take care of it together.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Eleanor stopped at her front door and stared at the water flowing through her dining room, her living room, out the broken windows along the back wall, momentarily stunned by it. The sight was completely insane, yet strangely beautiful.

  “Eleanor, you okay?” Jim asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, mentally shaking herself loose. “I’m coming.”

  She followed Jim and Madison out the front door. She tossed her Mossberg into the canoe they’d tied to the front porch, then helped Jim with their backpacks. Next she reached down to help Madison up into the canoe, but when she tried to lift her, the girl shrugged her hands away.

  “Madison?” Eleanor said.

  Madison wouldn’t look at her.

  She turned away from Eleanor and held her hands up to Jim, the same way she’d done when she was three and begging Daddy to carry her off to bed.

  Jim glanced from Madison to Eleanor, and she saw surprise there in his expression. Whatever was going on with Madison, it was news to him as well. He bent down and scooped her into the boat without saying a word to Madison, not even scolding her with a look, and Eleanor was thankful for that. Now was not the time.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Eleanor. He was nodding toward the boat, holding its sides to steady it for her.

  She climbed in, then leaned forward and touched the back of Madison’s shoulder.

  “Madison, sweetheart?”

  But Madison pulled her shoulder away again. “Don’t,” she said, without turning around, and scooted forward on the bench and hunched her shoulders forward. Eleanor could almost see her crawling into herself.

  Eleanor glanced at Jim for some clue, some sort of help, but all he could do was shrug.

  They moved away from the house, Jim and Eleanor paddling, Madison still silent and distant in the front of the canoe. The air was unbearably humid. A slight breeze blew from the south, but it wasn’t enough to chase away the mosquitoes, and it wasn’t enough to cool the heat on the backs of their necks. Eleanor was drenched in sweat, hot, and irritable and exhausted beyond measure.

  She took it out on the mosquitoes. Just in the last few minutes they’d gotten terrible, practically swarming the canoe. She killed a big one on her arm, her face crinkling in disgust at its smashed body and the smear of blood in which it lay. Then she looked forward and saw Jim and Madison both swatting frantically at the bugs.

  “I’ve got some bug repellant,” she said.

  “Thank God,” Jim said. “Let me have some. These little bastards are eating me alive up here.”

  She pulled in her oar and got the combination bug repellant and sunscreen from her backpack. As far as getting her family prepared for this disaster, the backpacks had really been her crowning achievement. Making them was strangely satisfying, much like preparing Madison’s nursery had been in the months before she was born. Eleanor had stockpiled water and food and supplies just like the guidebooks said to do, but all of that was lost back in their house. The backpacks, on the other hand, went wherever they were needed. Each one was basically a turtle shell, a house carried on the back. She had planned the contents of each, packed them, reconsidered, reorganized, and repacked them. Then she’d weighed each and repacked them a third time. Each containing a complete ninety-six-hour survival kit—everything the wearer would need to get by for at least four days. But Eleanor had gone beyond those basic needs, and that was what really made her proud. She’d had dog tags made for each of them. She’d included family photographs, in case they got separated. Cash for each of them. A three months’ supply of Jim’s Diovan, for his blood pressure. Even a carton of Marlboro cigarettes for each of them.

  “You want me to start smoking?” Madison had said, holding up the cigarettes.

  “Of course not, you goof,” she’d said, stroking Madison’s hair out of her fa
ce, secretly delighted with the look of disgust on her daughter’s face. “They’re for you to use as currency. Just in case, mind you. You never know what people will do if they want to smoke bad enough.”

  Madison scrunched up her nose in that uniquely teenager way of expressing complete revulsion with the world of grown-ups. “That’s gross,” she said, and tossed the Marlboros back in the front pocket of her pack.

  But Jim’s medicine had been her greatest coup. The city’s insurance had given her hell about buying a three months’ supply of Diovan, and she’d given it right back to them. “Why,” she argued, “do you train me in disaster preparedness—a basic tenet of which makes it plain that you should have a long-term supply of prescription drugs on hand at all times—and then tell me that I can only buy thirty days at a time?”

  In the end, it had been the pharmacy that finally gave in. “You want a three months’ supply?” they’d said. “Fine. But you have to buy it on your own. Your insurance won’t budge.”

  She’d paid the extra money, and at the time had been aware of how paranoid she must have seemed. But she certainly didn’t feel silly about it right now. Glancing around at the submerged houses, the traffic lights dipping like low-hanging fruit toward the floodwaters, she was feeling anything but silly. As a matter of fact, she was basking in the righteous glow of vindication.

  “Hey, Eleanor,” Jim said, “you got that bug spray or what?”

  His voice snapped her back into the moment. She had her hand jammed down into her backpack, and it occurred to her that she had no idea how long she’d been sitting there like that.

  “Here it is,” she said, and tossed it up to him. “Madison, you need to put some on, too, okay?”

  Madison said nothing. She hadn’t moved since they’d left the house, except to swat at a mosquito or two. Her shoulders were still sagging forward, her brown hair covering her face like a curtain. Eleanor watched the gentle rise and fall of her body under her shirt as she breathed, and she was pretty sure Madison was sobbing.

  Jim put his hand on Madison’s knee and gave it a gentle shake. “Hey, sweetheart, you okay?”

  Madison suddenly lunged forward and buried her face in Jim’s chest.

  “Hey,” he said, his eyes going wide with momentary surprise. “You’re okay, sweetheart. We all are.” He gave Eleanor a perplexed look, a What am I supposed to do now? look, and then finally put his arm around her and let her cry.

  Over the past two weeks, Eleanor had made countless canoe trips between her house and the EOC. It usually took about three hours to make it one way.

  But that was before cannibals started appearing in the ruins.

  Now, as they paddled their way toward the EOC, they’d see dim figures moving through the endless piles of wrecked houses and jumbled piles of vehicles, stepping out from beneath the eaves of houses, staggering toward them. And always ceaselessly moaning.

  There were only a few, at first. But as Eleanor and her family moved north, gliding through the debris fields, they saw more and more people staggering around aimlessly, stumbling after them whenever the canoe got too close.

  The residential areas were the worst.

  In some places, the moaning was so loud, so disconcerting, that Madison had screamed, her hands clapped over her ears, until she broke down sobbing.

  Eleanor and Jim rarely spoke. A hush fell over them and it seemed dangerous somehow to speak. They watched the people who crashed out of doorways and stared at them as they floated by, and though it was impossible to know whether they were changed in the same way that Bobby Hester had been changed—that Ms. Hester, too, had been changed, Eleanor reminded herself—she’d hear them moan and the hairs would stand up on the back of her neck nonetheless.

  And so Eleanor and her family kept moving east, off their intended course, away from the dead eyes staring back at them from the ruins. It still seemed ludicrous to her that she was being forced to avoid cannibalism that was, for all intents and purposes, contagious, but there it was.

  And here they were, getting farther and farther off course.

  Jim pushed the floating dead man away from the canoe, his paddle slipping off the man’s shoulder and striking his skull right behind the ear with a wet thud.

  “Eww,” Madison groaned.

  They had seen quite a few bodies in the last hour or so. They’d seen a lot of dead dogs and rats and cats and raccoons and even a big brown cow. Death, in fact, was all around them.

  They were coming up through the Second Ward now, and a lot of the houses here had fared badly during Mardel’s storm surge. In some places, they’d actually been uprooted from the ground and tossed together, one on top of another, like football players going for a fumble. In some of the houses, Eleanor could hear dogs howling out their hunger and their fear.

  But the wailing of animals wasn’t the only sound they heard. Here and there, amid the rubble, they could hear the voices of people, weak and muffled, but still insistent, as they cried out for rescue.

  And there was another sound, too. A thin, solitary moaning that was not one of pain, or loneliness, or despair, but something else. Something that sent a bone-deep shudder through Eleanor’s body and raised the gooseflesh on her arms.

  Eleanor scanned the ruined houses and saw nothing but bodies floating facedown in the water, their backs matted with wet garbage.

  “Why?” Madison said. Her voice was small and remote, almost a whisper.

  “What did you say, baby?” Eleanor asked her.

  Madison was quiet for so long that Eleanor thought her daughter would fall back into another of her spells, in which there was no reaching her.

  But then Madison spoke, and when she did it was with such rage, such sudden violence, that Eleanor recoiled from her, much in the same way she had recoiled from the snarling wounded thing that Ms. Hester had become.

  “Why did it have to happen to her? What purpose did that serve?”

  Eleanor’s eyes went wide. The little girl in front of her suddenly looked nothing like her daughter. Her lips were pulled back in anger, exposing large white teeth. Her cheeks puffed in and out, keeping time with the rise and fall of her tiny, nearly breastless chest. But it was the look of offended rage in the girl’s eyes that caused Eleanor’s throat to go hard as slate and her heart to skip its beat.

  “Why, Mom? Why did that happen? Why did it happen to her?”

  All Eleanor could do was shake her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I’m sorry, baby. I just don’t know.”

  And for the next twenty-four hours she’d be recalling her daughter’s questions and still struggling for an answer that made any sense at all.

  They came to a high white wall of painted cinder blocks that looked to run a couple hundred feet in either direction. Thick drifts of dead seaweed and trash and tree limbs were wedged up against the wall.

  In the front of the canoe Jim sat looking at the wall, the oar across his lap. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, the back of his neck black with wet dirt.

  He turned back to Eleanor and said, “Well, which way?”

  Eleanor had a compass and a map in her backpack, but she hadn’t needed it yet. Despite the fact that so much of the city was underwater now, there were still obvious landmarks to guide them. And besides, she’d been a beat cop for a good six years. She knew her way around the city, even as it was now.

  “I don’t see that it really matters,” she said.

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay. Got a preference? Which feels lucky?”

  He gave her a little wink with that last part, a private joke between them from back in the days when Madison was much younger and Jim and Eleanor could still make coded jokes about slipping off to the bedroom for a quickie, even while Madison sat in the living room watching cartoons.

  She snorted at him.

  “Neither one looks lucky,” she said.

  He pre
tended to look hurt.

  “Go left,” she said, and laughed at him quietly.

  You know, she thought, as the laugh trailed off and became a smile, he’s still pretty cute. A little bit chubbier than when I married him, but then, so am I.

  She watched the muscles along his back move under his shirt as he used the oar to get them pointed in the right direction, his shoulders dipping powerfully, first one way, then the other as he plunged the oar into the water, and she was surprised by the warmth spreading over her skin.

  Who knows? she thought. Maybe the left would be lucky after all.

  Later.

  “Do you think the EOC will still be functioning?” he asked, without looking back at her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But it’s worth going there, right?”

  “I think it is,” she said. “Honestly, Jim, I don’t know anywhere else to go.”

  “Okay,” he said. He nodded gravely.

  And they paddled on.

  They’d gotten used to the sight of bodies floating in the water. By that afternoon, they’d seen literally hundreds of them. They were everywhere. And so, when Eleanor saw the body of the black man caught up in the limbs of a fallen tree, she paid him little mind. He was just another corpse, heavyset, his clothes stripped from his body by high winds and water and debris, so that all that remained on his bloated frame was a filthy pair of briefs. He hung facedown from the tree limbs, his arms swinging lazily in the current. There were cuts and sores all over his arms and back, and he smelled of rotten meat. To Eleanor, he looked just like every other dead body she’d seen.

  She looked away.

  Off to her right was a wide, glassy sea of pewter-colored water, broken only by a line of trees and a white metal roof in the distance. The sky was a washed-out gray. Eleanor could see dark vertical streaks of rain beyond the white roof, but with the absence of a breeze, it was impossible to tell if the rain was coming their way or not. It looked depthless and utterly still over there, as if the rain was just hanging in the air.