Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  Shortly after she’d moved to the Travelers Unit Eleanor had befriended a pretty young patrolwoman named Megan Weber, who was temporarily on assignment to Sex Crimes. Once she’d grown out the little-boy haircut they make female cadets wear while at the academy, Megan had turned into a knockout with a little waist and big boobs and a smile that made every man in the room forget what he’d been talking about. But she was nice, too—good people, as Eleanor’s dad used to say—and Eleanor had taken an instant liking to her, even though she was ten years younger. But Megan, like several other female officers her age, had fallen hook, line, and sinker for Anthony Shaw, who of course wasted no time getting into her pants.

  Eleanor warned her about hanging out with SWAT guys.

  “They’re cute, they’re built like gods, but they’re just man whores,” she’d said to the starstruck girl, and even as she said it she knew Megan wasn’t listening, not really.

  Well, Megan hadn’t gotten pregnant and she hadn’t gone all Fatal Attraction on him and gotten herself kicked out of the department. Nothing as melodramatic as that.

  But she had gotten her heart broken.

  Anthony Shaw asked her to get a friend they could, in his words, “throw into the mix.” She’d told him she didn’t want anything like that in their relationship, and he’d simply said, “What relationship? We’re just fucking here.”

  And that was that. Cops gossip worse than grocery-store magazines, and soon word got around that Anthony had kicked her to curb. As was always the way with working in the boys’ club that was the HPD, Megan had been branded an easy lay and Anthony went on about his business, able to proudly boast: “Yeah, I tapped that.”

  It made Eleanor sick sometimes, thinking about it.

  “Yeah, that’s him all right,” Hank said. “The guy in the front of the boat is his older brother, Brent. He’s a drunk. I don’t know the other guy, but I don’t think he’s PD.”

  “What are they doing? I saw them pulling duffel bags out of that car.”

  He handed her the binoculars back.

  “Don’t know,” he said.

  Something was happening behind them.

  Eleanor heard voices, several of them at once, and then someone shouting. She and Hank both turned around at the same time, and they saw Frank, the retired Marine, leveling his shotgun at a clumsy figure approaching them in the water.

  Frank yelled for the man to stop.

  He didn’t.

  And the next instant, before either Eleanor or Hank could say anything, Frank fired and nearly took the zombie’s head off.

  “Form up!” Hank yelled. “Everybody come forward.” Hank turned his canoe and paddled furiously toward the shooting.

  Eleanor raised her binoculars, and saw Anthony Shaw staring back at her with binoculars of his own.

  And then he lowered his.

  The man behind him hit the throttle and the bass boat took off.

  Eleanor continued to watch Anthony Shaw’s face as he slipped away into the rain-streaked night. His expression was difficult to read, almost inscrutable, but she could tell he wasn’t happy.

  CHAPTER 14

  With his pistol in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, Captain Mark Shaw pushed his way through the fringes of the terrified crowd and into the enclosed shallow lake in the front of the Engineering Building.

  “Keep moving,” he shouted. “You’ve got to keep moving.”

  To his left and behind him the campus was on fire, the orange glow from the flames reflecting on the water, making it look like molten rock. Black smoke turned the sky to a filthy, choking haze. And everywhere he turned, the screams of the frightened refugees and the moans of the dying and the un-dead threatened to fray his nerves to pieces.

  Off to his right a SWAT officer was knocked down by three of the infected. The man raised his hand to push them away and got two of his fingers bitten off. At the same time the officer managed to get his pistol under the chin of one of the zombies and fire.

  Both men went down.

  Shaw was already pushing his way through the waist-deep water to help the officer. He put down the remaining two attackers, emptying one of his few remaining magazines in the process.

  Shaw ejected the empty magazine and jammed it into the officer’s injured hand.

  “Hold this,” Shaw said. “Just keep your hand up and hold it. Keep it elevated.”

  The officer, who was already looking pale, his eyes strangely unfocused, tried to comply. He held the stump of his injured hand in the air while he swayed drunkenly. Shaw had to catch him once to keep him from tilting over sideways.

  The man was a goner, Shaw knew that. He’d seen the infection spread from one injured person to the next all night, and he knew this man had maybe thirty minutes before he too changed into one of those things . . . that was, if he didn’t bleed to death first. Either alternative looked likely.

  Briefly, Shaw glanced around.

  They didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the boatyard, no matter how hard he pushed and how loud he shouted. The infected were still everywhere. His own people were mostly dead now, and of the eighty thousand refugees he’d tried to evacuate, there looked to be fewer than four thousand. Most of them were so scared and unorganized they were beyond help. In the dark, it had become nearly impossible to tell who was a refugee and who was a zombie.

  Shaw reloaded his weapon, holstered it, and then took the SWAT officer’s AR-15 and pistol from him.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Shaw said.

  For a moment, the man seemed to understand what was about to happen, and was thankful for it, but the clarity soon slipped away. Sweat was popping out all over his face, and his eyes were clouding over.

  “You fought well,” Shaw said.

  Then he shot the officer in the head.

  Now Shaw was down to just a few officers to help him. They were spread out around the fraying edges of the refugee crowd, equipped, like Shaw, with bullhorns to keep the crowd together. But with so many of them dead, and so many of the infected swarming the area, even Shaw was beginning to doubt if they would survive.

  Turning on the crowd, he raised his bullhorn and urged them on.

  “Keep moving forward! Everybody move to the sound of my voice!”

  He had been yelling all night long, and his throat was raw, his voice hoarse, but he kept on. All they had to do was get through the gap between Melcher Hall and the engineering building, and they’d be at the boatyard. If they could just make it this last short distance, they might escape.

  “Keep moving, everybody. Officers, keep your edges tight. Watch your flanks!”

  The north side of the engineering building was on fire. Through the smoke and flames he saw a man stumbling toward him in tattered clothes. He had what looked to be grass in his hair. He was dragging something, a piece of sheet metal maybe, possibly a board.

  But he wasn’t moving right. He seemed to stagger and lurch.

  Shaw raised the AR-15 to his shoulder but didn’t fire. Perhaps the man was another refugee, only injured, not infected. But then more shapes resolved out of the swirling smoke behind the man and Shaw knew. They were in trouble.

  He circled around in front of the refugees from the shelter and yelled for them to hurry, waving his arms in a huge circular motion like an enraged traffic cop.

  “Come on, people, let’s move it along! Come on, move it. Keep going!”

  Exhausted men and women and children slogged through the water, shuffling past him at an aggravatingly slow speed. He wanted to grab them, throw them where he wanted them to be, but he could tell from their slackened expressions that they’d all been pushed past their breaking point. Most of them were only a few steps from falling over and quitting.

  “Keep moving!” he said again, but without the anger this time.

  From behind him, the zombies started to moan.

  He turned and saw the zombie who had been dragging the sheet metal emerging from the flames. His back was on fire, and ye
t he seemed completely unaware of the pain.

  Shaw raised his AR-15 and emptied the magazine into the approaching zombie crowd. Then he slung the rifle over his shoulder, got his bullhorn, and yelled, “Get some more officers up here! I need somebody to hold this gap.”

  The water was up to his armpits here in this part of the courtyard, and he glanced up. Daylight was an hour away at least, but as the dawn approached, so did high tide. The water was getting deeper. Slowly but surely, it was getting deeper.

  That’ll make moving difficult, he thought, but it’ll make it hard for those zombies, too. And it’ll make getting out of here in the boats easier, too. If we can ever get there.

  But that was the thing. Getting out.

  It had seemed like such an easy thing yesterday afternoon. After his video conference with Homeland Security Director George Dupree, and then his chance meeting with Anthony in the EOC office, Shaw had gone back to his temporary command post at the film and communications building and collected all the available officers he could find. From there, he’d gone to the main part of the shelter, issued weapons and bullhorns to his men, and told them start moving everybody out.

  “We are evacuating immediately,” he said to the crowd, most of whom hadn’t slept in two days, or eaten in longer than that, and so could barely lift their heads to hear him. “Take only what you can carry.”

  He’d gone from bunk to bunk then, rousting people, pleading with them to hurry, but everywhere he went he passed the sick and the disabled, and they couldn’t move, no matter how much he pleaded. A few had family, and they were the lucky ones. There would be somebody to carry them, care for them.

  Most, he knew, would be left behind.

  The first attack came while he was still trying to get people out of their bunks. He had two of his SWAT snipers posted along the east wall of the building, and they sent up the hue and cry that they had a large group of zombies gathering just outside.

  Unable to take his preferred route straight down Wheeler Street, Shaw ordered the building evacuated. He and his officers directed the refugees out the west doors, but it couldn’t happen fast enough. Zombies overran the SWAT officers along the east wall of the building and poured into the building. A blind panic took over then, with refugees pouring out windows and knotting together in doorways, crushing each other even as the screams and moans grew louder at their backs.

  Shaw had no idea how many thousands must have died in that first onslaught. He’d run out of the building with everyone else, shouting and pushing and kicking to keep people from running back into the path of the zombies, but once the refugees hit the water, their panic reached a fever pitch. Clothes and backpacks and blankets and endless drifts of trash filled the water, which was churning with bodies now. The trampling continued outside, and many who had barely been able to fight their way free of the exits found themselves hitting the water with no idea of where to go. They froze in place, only to be drowned by the crowd pushing its way free of the building.

  Looking around, Shaw saw other panicked people flooding out of other buildings. They were screaming, pleading for someone to save them.

  Off in another part of the campus, buildings were burning, turning the dark sky a sooty orange.

  Here in the core of buildings that had served as the main shelter, thousands of people were trapped, unable to escape the zombie crowd pouring in from the east. Shaw could hear their screams as they were torn to pieces.

  More still were caught in the upper floors, unable to get down, and here and there Shaw saw bodies dropping from windows three and four stories up.

  He had to restore order, he knew that. For a horrible, gut-churning moment he saw the whole thing slipping through his hands, the situation on the verge of complete failure, but then he looked across the parking lot to his right, and he saw his chance.

  A low concrete retaining wall had been run across the western edge of the lot just before Hurricane Kyle to help keep order while they were passing out food. A good two feet of the wall was sticking up above the water, and would serve as a natural defensive line. He called for every officer with a rifle to set up behind the wall while he ran up and down the lines of panicked survivors, telling them where to go.

  Once the officers behind the wall started shooting, the sound of gunfire became almost continuous. Shaw had to yell at top volume to make himself heard, even with the bullhorn, but it worked.

  He managed to get the disorganized crowd to push south through the campus.

  He himself brought up the rear.

  In the hellfire glow of the burning buildings he looked back and was about to raise the order for his men to fall back when they were overrun. Zombies in tattered clothes, their faces vacant and yet somehow wild, too, clawed their way over the HPD’s best fighting men. Men Shaw knew personally were torn to pieces before his very eyes, and all he could do was watch with a mounting sense of stunned horror.

  But he didn’t quit. He pushed on, pleading with the survivors to move along. He fought the tightening ring of zombies pouring into the campus and rising up from the ranks of fallen.

  Until daybreak. High tide was coming in. And still he hadn’t been able to get his charges to the boats.

  Had he really come this far to fail now?

  He refused to believe that. They were close, he told himself, and he allowed a spark of hope to fire inside his chest. Just around this building. That’s as far as these people had to go. They get there, and they just might live through this.

  In fact, many of the remaining survivors were already around the last corner. A few of his officers were there already, too, using their bullhorns to coax people forward into the waiting boats. He could hear their shouted orders even now.

  “Keep moving, everybody!” he yelled. “You’re almost there. Keep moving.”

  Screams erupted from the back of the line.

  Shaw ran that way and saw the zombies had overtaken a few of the more exhausted survivors.

  He threw his bullhorn down, got a pistol in each hand, and started shooting as he backed up, yelling over his shoulder for the crowd to keep on moving.

  Then he rounded the corner and entered the boatyard, and his heart sank. The scene was complete bedlam. They had collected hundreds of ski boats and fishing boats and everything else they could find that floated, but the yard master had been unable to position the waiting craft in any sort of orderly way. They were spread out at random over what had been the student parking lot along Calhoun Road, clustered together like a redneck yacht club at anchor, and the ragtag survivors were pouring over them in waves, crowding onto the boats closest at hand, capsizing several in the process, while the others farther off went unoccupied. His few remaining officers were desperately trying to maintain order, to keep the people moving forward, but there were just too many panicked refugees and not enough officers. Once again, Shaw saw it all slipping through his fingers, all control lost.

  A noise, like a low rumble coming up from beneath the screams of the panicked survivors, made him turn his head to the east. The sun was coming up now, spreading a smoldering orange and copper-colored glow across the water and the windowless buildings. The water looked as if it were on fire, and through that molten sea flowed hundreds upon hundreds of the infected.

  And when their moans reached Shaw, a sound that was part laugh and part groan escaped up his throat.

  Anthony, Brent, and Jesse had seen the fires from a long ways off.

  At first glance, the campus had looked like a mad streak of flame and soot across the sky. But from close up, it was a different sight entirely. Anthony Shaw cut the engines and simply stared, open-mouthed, at the destruction that lay before him.

  The campus had been changed considerably by the storm damage and by the occupation of eighty thousand refugees, but that alone did not account for this. As a kid, Anthony had seen plenty of movies about the apocalypse, The Postman, all the Mad Max films, 12 Monkeys, George Romero’s zombie films, and countless other
s, and what he was looking at now, the ruined skyline of the campus backlit by flames and the rising sun, was so much like that. The destruction was so complete, so indiscriminately savage, that it simply boggled his mind.

  “Anthony, this isn’t good,” Jesse said.

  “Is Dad okay?” Brent said.

  Both Anthony and Jesse looked at him. It was the first time he’d spoken since earlier that night.

  “I don’t know,” Anthony said.

  “What’s your plan?” Jesse asked.

  Anthony thought about that. In the distance, he heard what sounded like screaming and possibly gunfire. When he closed his eyes it almost reminded him of the sound of a Friday-night football game heard from a long ways off. That was probably where they’d find his father, who would no doubt be trying to get all the survivors down to the boatyard. That had been the plan before they left, and it didn’t seem likely that his father would have given up on it. Not the great Captain Mark Shaw. He never gave up on anything, once he set his mind to it.

  “I want to head east down I-45 over to Spur 5. From there we’ll head south and come up along the boatyard.”

  “And then?” Jesse asked.

  “I don’t know, Jesse. I really don’t know.”

  The land between the Interstate and the northern edge of the campus was flat and relatively empty. The only building in the area was the General Services Building, which marked the northernmost point of the campus, and once they rounded that they were faced with open water.

  But Anthony resisted the urge to give the boat full throttle.

  With the water only now starting to rise again, there were still numerous hazards, such as submerged walls and the roofs of cars and trucks, lurking only inches below the surface. Every now and then he could feel the hull glancing off something out of sight or scraping over the roof of a car, and the last thing he wanted was to rip the hull off the boat because he was in too big a hurry.