by Joe McKinney
Jim looked as if he couldn’t make up his mind to laugh or vomit. Hank, of course, was laughing at his own story, his face turning red. His laughter was contagious, though, and Eleanor, despite everything on her mind, found herself laughing along with him. Cop humor, she thought. God, we are a screwed-up bunch of folks.
“Anyway,” Hank said, after the laughter had died down, “I thought that was about the worst stink I’d ever smell in my life. Until I ran into the zombies around that school, that is.”
“They stank that bad, even outside?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes, ma’am. There was a lot of ’em.”
“How many?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am. Two hundred, maybe more. I circled around the corner of the building, and that’s when I heard them moaning. I’d already dealt with a few of them, but I hadn’t seen a group that big. They were beating on the walls outside the school’s gym. Really goin’ at it. I bet they’d been at it for a while, too. A lot of their hands had started to bleed from beating on the walls.”
“So what’d you do?” Jim asked.
“Well, I had my AR-15. I went up to the front of the boat and laid out a mess of magazines and then I started yellin’ to get their attention. One by one they turned around and came at me. After that, I just took it one shot at a time.”
“And you said there were two hundred or more of them?” Eleanor asked, horrified by the implications.
“Yes, ma’am. There were bodies everywhere by the time I was done.”
“What did you do then?”
“Well, I figured those zombies were after something inside that school. So I went inside and found these folks. We waited out the storm, and then this morning, when I couldn’t get the EOC on the radio, I figured we needed to take matters into our own hands. These folks here already had those canoes you saw out there, and together we made our way here.”
“What happened to your boat?” Jim asked.
“Lost during the storm.”
“Where were you guys gonna go?” Eleanor asked.
“Well, that’s the thing, ma’am, I don’t rightly know. I was kind of hopin’ you guys had heard something different. Maybe had some idea of what was goin’ on.”
Eleanor shook her head.
“No, I’m afraid not. I guess maybe we could double back to the EOC and see what’s going on there.”
“I still don’t understand why that’s a good idea,” Jim said. “If you can’t reach them on the radio, doesn’t that mean they’re in as much trouble as we are?”
“They probably are in trouble,” Eleanor said. “But it doesn’t mean they aren’t the best place to go for help. It just means their communications are offline. There could be any number of reasons for that. Plus, if there’s going to be any sort of organized evacuation effort, it’s going to be focused there. I think we’d be taking too big of a chance going anywhere else.”
Jim didn’t look as if he was convinced, but he didn’t say anything more on the subject. He just frowned, then nodded reluctantly.
Hank turned to face the rest of the room.
The place smelled of unwashed bodies and filthy clothes, but the Red Cross volunteers had nonetheless done an adequate job of keeping the place neat. There were plenty of cots against the far wall, and the ones that weren’t being used were smartly made. Off to the right they’d set up a long folding card table with a selection of MREs and cookies and bags of chips and bottled drinks. Madison was over there, Eleanor saw with a sense of relief, helping herself to some cookies. With everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, at least her appetite was intact.
“Hey everybody,” Hank said to the room, and waited as the others quieted down and faced him. “Looks like we’re gonna be heading out in the morning. We’re gonna try to get to the EOC over at the University of Houston campus. From there, hopefully we’ll hook up with some folks who can get us evacuated.”
This was greeted with a murmuring of relieved voices from around the room. Eleanor could see several of the volunteers actually letting out deep sighs and clapping each other on the back.
“But we need to head out early,” Hank went on. “So get your stuff together tonight. I wanna leave at first light.”
Eleanor turned from Madison to Jim. He was staring back at her. That look of wearied exhaustion was back again.
“Are you sure this is what we need to do?” he asked.
“I really don’t see that we have any other choice.”
“What if we just get in the canoe and head north? We’re bound to reach safety sooner or later.”
“But Jim, you’ve seen those cannibals out there . . . those zombies. Whatever it is that’s causing them to be the way they are, it’s contagious. That means their numbers are going to be growing. You heard Hank. He faced down at least two hundred of them. There are probably at least that many out there, waiting for us. We’d never survive on our own. We need to group together if we’re going to get through this. And that means going to the EOC. I don’t see any other way.”
Before he had a chance to answer, Hank put a hand on both their shoulders.
“I promised you guys some chow. What do you say? You hungry?”
Eleanor took an MRE from the table and a plastic gallon jug of water and looked around the room for Madison. She found her sitting on the edge of a cot with no sheets, preparing her own MRE.
“You mind if I join you?” Eleanor asked.
Madison looked up at her with forced nonchalance and shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
Damn it, Eleanor thought, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. Why is this always so hard? Times like this she didn’t feel like other moms. She’d watched other women handle their kids’ attitudes in public with patience and self-control, even though it was obvious they were burning up inside. Eleanor figured she missed that part of the deal when they were handing out mothering skills because at times like this, when she made an honest effort and Madison just tossed it back in her face, all she could think to do was get mean. It infuriated her, both because her daughter was being a little shit and because she wasn’t being enough of a grown-up to deal with it. Jesus, she thought, why did parenting have to be so damn hard?
But this had to be done. They had to talk. It couldn’t go on like this. Eleanor knew that, and she suspected that Madison did, too.
So she sat down next to Madison and unpacked her MRE. The entree was beef enchilada in sauce, which wasn’t great, but at least it wasn’t chicken fettuccine. God, that stuff was awful.
Beside her, Madison was filling her meal pouch bag with water. Eleanor watched appreciatively as her daughter activated the chemical heater and dropped it into the water, then folded over the top of the pouch and stuffed it into the entree carton. That done, she leaned the carton against the leg of the cot to keep the assembly properly inclined, then opened up her package of peanut butter and spread it on some crackers.
“You know your way around an MRE,” Eleanor said, genuinely impressed.
“I’ve eaten a bunch over the last two weeks.”
Eleanor opened her mouth to tell Madison not to take that tone with her, but closed it again. That wasn’t going to work here. It would just drive Madison further away.
She separated out her own MRE, prepared her own meal pouch assembly, and then tucked the instant coffee into the back pocket of her jeans. Her clothes were still wet, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that.
“Hey,” she said to Madison, “what’d you get for dessert?”
“Chocolate pudding.”
“Ah, you got the good one. I got banana pudding.”
“I don’t like the banana pudding.”
“No, me, either. I guess you won’t switch with me then, huh?”
Madison tossed her dessert pouch into Eleanor’s lap. “Here, you can have mine. I’m not all that hungry anyway.”
“Baby, I was—”
“Don’t call me baby, Mom, I hate that.”
“Oh,” Eleanor said. “Oh, okay. I . . . I’m sorry, Madison. What would you rather I call you?”
“I don’t care. Anything but baby. I’m not a kid.”
“Madison, come on, you’re not even thirteen.”
As soon as she said it Eleanor knew it was wrong. But she didn’t get a chance to head off Madison’s reaction, for in that moment, her daughter’s face twisted out of shape as if she’d suddenly smelled something nasty.
“I don’t want to be reminded I’m a kid!” Madison nearly screamed at her.
An older woman who had been sitting on a nearby cot reading a David McCullough book looked up at them, caught Eleanor’s eye, and quickly looked away again.
Eleanor turned back to Madison, who was on her feet now, and said, “Madison, please. I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing for me say.” She patted a spot on the cot beside her. “Would you sit back down, please?”
“Why?”
“Please, Madison. I just want to talk.”
“About what?”
Once again, Eleanor felt a hot rage flash across her skin. She was very close to losing it. The urge to grab Madison by the front of her blouse and pull her down onto the cot was almost overpowering. But instead of giving into it, she closed her eyes and pushed the anger away.
After a few deep breaths, she opened her eyes again. Madison was looking at her, her hands on her hips, a twitch at the corner of her mouth that somehow knew better than to develop into the mocking sneer it had the potential to be.
Eleanor almost asked her to sit down again, but told herself she had to pick her battles.
“You’re upset about what happened to Ms. Hester, I know. I am, too.” Eleanor patted the cot next to her. “Will you tell me how you’re feeling? I’d like to know what’s on your mind.”
For just the thinnest of moments, the hard veneer of resistance on Madison’s expression wavered, giving Eleanor a glimpse of the wounded child underneath. Her heart filled with tenderness for her daughter then, and she thought: Most of the time I don’t understand her. Not anymore. She’s grown into somebody who’d rather push me away than open up. There’s a cold, whispering emptiness between us now. But right there, that’s the little girl who used to sit with me on the couch and laugh when I tickled her and shiver with delight when I read her the Harry Potter books.
But the thought was clipped off right there, for Madison’s face suddenly hardened, and the old obstinacy flooded back in.
“Jesus Christ, Mom, what do you think this is? You act like we’re living in some kind of sitcom. You think you’re gonna come over here and have a three-minute little heart-to-heart with me, and that’s gonna be enough to make everything all better again. Well, it’s not, Mom. This is real life. It sucks here. It fucking sucks.”
And with that Madison spun on her heel and stormed off.
Eleanor watched her go, dimly aware that most of the others had heard the outburst and were watching her out of the corner of their eyes. But Eleanor didn’t care about that. The most important thing in the world to her was walking away, her hands balled into fists, her cheeks wet with tears.
Eleanor felt as if a pit had opened up beneath her. The voice in her head that had spoken to her out on the balcony came back. Go after her, it said. Do something. Do some real parenting for a change.
But all Eleanor could do was sit there, stricken, unaware of the tears falling down her own cheeks.
Later, after the sun went down, Eleanor made the instant coffee from her back pocket and took it out to the balcony to watch the water and try to think about everything that had happened. The coffee was good and hot. She drank it black. The misting rain from earlier was gone now, and looking up, she could see stars through the tattered remnants of gray clouds. Far off in the distance—to the south, she guessed—she could see a pale orange smear of a large fire burning just over the horizon. To the east, she could hear the hollow clap of rifle fire echoing off the floodwater. And all of this she took in absently, not really seeing any of it.
Things were really, really bad. There was no denying that. The full weight of just how bad weighed heavily on her mind. Not only was the world as she knew it collapsing around her, not only did her daughter hate her guts for some mysterious reason that continued to elude her, not only were there zombies out there trying to eat them . . . as if all that wasn’t enough, she was about to lead the only part of her life that still mattered into an uncertain future. She was gambling with her family’s lives, and that made her heartsick.
There were, in fact, so many problems pressing in upon her that she couldn’t number them all. She couldn’t pick them apart and deal with them individually, which was her usual way of attacking a difficult situation, for all those problems were interconnected, like a web.
She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the water lapping against the sides of the building, trying to impose a sense of peace on a mind that would have none of it, and that’s when she heard the splashing.
Her eyes flew open.
All at once her body was tense, hairs standing up on end. She looked straight down over the edge of the balcony and saw a zombie moving along the ground-floor wall, trying to find a way inside. The water was up to his chest, and she thought: That can’t be. They were drowning before.
And then she saw why. Off in the distance, beyond the edge of the parking lot, the water was down. Cars that before had been up to their windows in water now appeared to be standing in shallow puddles. The water barely covered the bottom of the tires.
More splashing off to her right caused her to turn around. She could see a large crowd of zombies wading through the parking lot toward the building.
The glass doors slid open behind her and she spun around, startled.
Jim was standing there.
“She’s sleeping now,” he said. “I think she cried herself to sleep. Maybe tomorrow she’ll—”
“Jim, we have to get out of here. Now!”
“What?”
“There’s no time, Jim. We have to go. Look!” She pointed toward the approaching zombie horde.
“Oh my God,” he said. “What happened? How did they . . .”
“Low tide,” Eleanor said. “It’s low tide.”
CHAPTER 12
Mark Eckert slammed the door behind him and stepped out onto a small concrete patio. Before the storm the university’s art students must have used it as a smokers’ station. There was a battered metal chair to his right and next to that a low, cylindrical ash can. Here and there he saw a few soggy cigarette butts wedged into the cracks in the concrete. He grabbed the chair and slid its back under the door handle, the way he’d seen done in the movies. He had no idea if it would actually work or not, but then, he only needed a second or two head start.
From the other side of the metal door he could hear moaning. The zombies had caught up to him already.
So much for his head start.
Gingerly, he touched the burning gash on his right shoulder where one of them had bit him. It was hurting bad, already starting to smell like rot, and as he touched the edges of the pus-filled wound and tried to press a dangling flap of skin back over the missing chunk of his arm, he felt the first pangs of nausea. His head was a soupy mess, and it was hard to focus. What had he been trying to do again? Why couldn’t he remember? It was like his brain kept slipping into neutral.
A body slammed into the other side of the door with an explosive crack, knocking the chair out from under the door handle and sending it skidding across the concrete. Mark Eckert jumped, jarred out of his confusion.
He stepped back to the edge of the concrete patio, his heels hanging over the side, just as the door exploded open and the first zombies staggered through it. Mark couldn’t move his right arm. It hung limp as an empty sack from his shoulder, and that meant he had to shoot left-handed. It was a skill they drilled on constantly when he was a cadet in the Houston Police Department’s Training Academy, but even under the contro
lled conditions found at the gun range, he’d never been very good with his left hand.
But now, with a horde of zombies closing in on him and his head swimming and his body burning itself up with fever as it fought the virus waging war in his veins, conditions were anything but perfect.
Pretty damn crappy would be more accurate, he thought, and a thin, weak laugh crawled out of his throat.
Still, he had enough presence of mind to fire off a round as the lead zombie crashed into him, knocking the wind from his lungs and sending him sprawling off the back of the patio. But as his body tumbled backwards he caught a glimpse of scalp and blood and bone exploding out behind the zombie’s head, and in the moment before he crash-landed, he let out a half-formed cry of victory.
Got you, you fucking bastard!
He landed with a splash, and for a moment, nearly blacked out. He had to struggle to hold on to consciousness. There was something inside him that seemed to be pulling him down, the way sleep can pull your head back to the pillow after a restless night of broken sleep. Only the pain in his shoulder kept him going. Mark shook the fog from his mind. His butt and lower back were underwater. Only his knees and his head and shoulders remained above it, making him look like a man trying to sit up in the bathtub. The water wasn’t deep, not nearly as deep as it had been earlier that afternoon, and, absurdly, the thought Maybe it’s all going away and we’ll be okay! played in his mind . . . except that it wasn’t going to be okay, not with the rest of those zombies tumbling down off the side of the patio like penguins off an iceberg. They were still coming for him, and nothing was ever going to be okay again.