Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

  They paddled down flooded streets between ruined buildings, marveling at how much damage the storms had done. Nothing had escaped the storms’ destructive power. Every billboard they passed had sections hanging loose from the frame, or blown out entirely. And so many buildings had burned. This, Eleanor remembered from her many briefings at the EOC, was an inevitable consequence of people forgetting to turn off the gas before the storm, despite the numerous warnings on the news and on the radio. It looked to Eleanor that some of those buildings must have blown sky high, judging from the burned bits of lumber floating down the street. There were plastic toys everywhere because they, too, floated. A shutter banged open and closed in the breezeway created by a roofless house. Somewhere, a dog howled. In the distance they could see a swarm of seagulls feeding on something, but they were too far away to see exactly what, and Eleanor didn’t really want to know anyway.

  The water was full of debris and dead animals and sometimes even dead people. But there were living people wandering around, too. That alarmed Eleanor at first because she was still rattled by the zombies they’d seen at the Meadow-lakes Business Park, but the people who were out now were clearly not zombies, even though they moved like people did in her nightmares. They seemed lost, disconnected from each other and their own fates. They were shiny with sweat, their faces traumatized, their clothes torn to rags. The city, and the people who haunted it, seemed to her to have taken on an otherworldly appearance that Eleanor found more and more claustrophobic as the day wore on.

  They passed a man seated on some kind of large board he’d put between the hoods of two pickups. As they drew closer a hush fell over the flotilla of canoes. Now, passing directly in front of the man, Eleanor could see the board was the front door of the house behind him. He was holding the drowned body of a child, a boy not much older than Madison. The man’s eyes were very white against the filth that covered his face.

  Hank pulled his canoe up to the man and spoke so quietly to him that Eleanor couldn’t hear what was said.

  The man made no attempt to answer.

  Hank turned back to the group and caught Eleanor’s gaze. He shook his head as though to say the man was lost to the world.

  They saw looters who didn’t even try to disguise what they were doing. Water moccasins moved like ribbons in the wind as they glided out from fallen trees. Eleanor saw dead bodies floating like driftwood, while not five feet away two men and a woman ate from a jar of mayonnaise they’d found somewhere. A helicopter passed overhead, and though they tried to flag it down, it never even slowed.

  “Don’t do any good to flag them down,” Hank said, gliding up next to their canoe. “That was the National Guard. They don’t stop anymore.”

  “Why not?” Jim asked.

  “Too many looters. Too many people shooting at the looters. I’ve talked to their pilots. They don’t want to fly into a situation and get shot by the people they’re trying to save. I can’t really blame them, I guess.”

  “So what good do they do? Why the flyovers?”

  “I guess so they can report what they see.”

  “To who? If they’re not gonna help, who is?”

  Hank shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  They all grew quiet.

  “What’s wrong, Hank?” Eleanor asked suddenly.

  He looked at her, surprised. “Ma’am?”

  “You’ve been acting down since we saw that man with the dead boy. Are you okay?”

  A wan smile danced at the corners of his mouth, and in that instant, Eleanor saw the stunning good looks that made all the women in the department sigh whenever Hank walked by. He really was a heartbreaker.

  “Just wondering what’s going to happen to us,” he said, gesturing at the destruction around them with a vague wave of his hand, “after all this is over.”

  “We’ll get through it. We’ll start over.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said after a long, thoughtful silence. “No, ma’am, I don’t think that’ll happen.”

  “Why the change in attitude, Hank? Last night, and yesterday, you didn’t seem to have doubts at all.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, funny how that’ll happen to a guy.”

  He paddled on, occasionally glancing back at the rest of the volunteers, making sure they were all still together. He was silent for so long that Eleanor thought that was all he was going to say, but when he spoke again, it was as though he hadn’t paused at all.

  “It’s just . . . all this stuff is gone now. Houston, I mean. I lived my whole life here. I don’t know how to begin starting over, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Eleanor said. “Yeah, I know.”

  When she was seventeen, Eleanor lost her grandmother. Or, rather, her grandmother had simply died. Eleanor didn’t really lose anyone, as her mother hadn’t spoken with her parents in a dozen years or more. She had only the vaguest of memories of her maternal grandparents, and at the time she’d had absolutely no clue as to why they’d dropped out of her parents’ life, and not enough sense to ask.

  But Eleanor was eager to meet her grandfather, even under the sad circumstances. Unfortunately, the man she ended up meeting was a broken one. If he had been a bad father to Eleanor’s mother, he had evidently been a loving husband to her grandmother, and over the course of the week they spent together, Eleanor watched the man fall apart. He barely spoke to any of them, but he had said something to Eleanor that had mystified her at the time.

  “Our lives,” he said, “are like a junkyard tumbling down the stairs. We have no control over what happens. There’s no master plan. We just exist until, eventually, it all comes crashing down.”

  Now, many years later, Eleanor understood the awful power of that nihilistic urge. She saw how strongly it called to the weary and the destitute, as though it had its own gravity. And if it could absorb Hank, who was blessed with so much and treated life with such simple, boyish joy, none of them were immune.

  And then, almost as if he were responding to a movie director’s cue, a man floated around the corner on a rickety pool chair singing “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry.” The man was bare-chested and righteously drunk. He had an Igloo cooler tied to the back of the chair and the two remaining beers of a six-pack hanging from the chair’s headrest.

  One of the Red Cross volunteers began to chuckle, and Eleanor did, too.

  Someone called out to him, asking him if he wanted a ride.

  He looked at the long row of canoes as though startled, breaking off his song mid-verse. Then his smile grew large again and he raised his beer high and began to sing, his voice loud and off-key and not at all sane. “Them good ol’ boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing ‘This’ll be the day that I die.’ ”

  Eleanor and the others stopped paddling and turned to watch him float by, the chair keeping a surprisingly straight course through the current.

  He raised his beer to them one last time and sang, “This’ll be the day that I die.”

  Jim shook his head. “I think he’s right.”

  “Zombies’ll get him before nightfall,” Hank agreed. He looked around at the others. “Anybody need to stop for a rest?”

  Nobody did.

  “All right then, let’s keep going.”

  Later that afternoon, they arrived at the I-45 junction with Spur 5, on the northeast corner of the University of Houston’s campus. Eleanor, looking at a sea of burned and mutilated bodies, tried not to gag.

  Others weren’t so strong. She could hear them vomiting over the sides of their canoes, then muttering apologies to those around them.

  As they drifted closer to what had been the EOC’s boatyard, they began to hear moans coming from some of the bodies, and Madison clapped her hands over her ears to keep the sounds away.

  “What happened here?” Eleanor asked Hank.

  He scanned the campus and the floating field of burned bodies and he said, “I don’t know. You can see where a lot of these buildings have bur
ned, but I don’t think that’s what did this to these people.”

  “Do you think these were people from the shelters?”

  “Ma’am, I ain’t got the foggiest idea. It’s quiet now, though. Either everybody left or . . .”

  “Or they’re all dead,” Madison said sharply.

  He looked at her, not unkindly, then nodded.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

  “What are we going to do?” Madison said, looking from one adult to the next.

  “Well, if they’re not here, one of two things must have happened,” Hank said. “One, they got evacuated, which doesn’t seem real likely, or two, they went somewhere else to get evacuated. We need to figure out where.”

  “Okay, great. How are we going to do that?” Eleanor asked. “I went to every EOC meeting for the last five weeks and they never mentioned going anywhere specific to get evacuated. They threw out some suggestions, but nothing was ever decided on.”

  He shrugged.

  “I think I know where they went to,” Jim said.

  They all turned and stared at him.

  “Look there,” he said, and pointed at the wall of the rec center. “See it, just above the waterline.”

  Eleanor followed the line of his finger, and when she saw what he was pointing at, she laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “I see it.”

  Written in black paint that had started to run like the print on a horror movie poster were the words: ORDER TO EVACUATE: PROCEED TO SAM HOUSTON RACE PARK.

  “Huh,” Hank said. “Well, I guess that answers that.”

  “Oh man,” Jim said. “You cops are something else. It’s a wonder you ever solve any crimes at all.”

  “Cute,” Eleanor said. “Thanks for the support there, hubby.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, smiling at her.

  And then Hank rapped his knuckles against the side of their canoe.

  “Ma’am, check that out over there. See him, on top of that wall there?”

  He was pointing at a dead man in tattered green BDU pants. His chest was laced with cuts and deeper wounds, like teeth marks. Someone had made an effort to cover him with a blanket, but the wind had blown that away so that now it hung from the spot where it was still tucked under his legs. The man was big, heavyset, and there was a bullet hole in his forehead. For a second, Eleanor thought it was Captain Shaw, but the man was too young, his hair still black.

  “Is that . . . ?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “But we just saw them last night. He was with Anthony and that other guy.”

  “Yep,” Hank said. “Funny how things work out, ain’t it?”

  CHAPTER 16

  What Mark Shaw had wanted most after shooting his son was to dig a grave. Overcome with grief and rage, he’d wanted to slice the earth open with a shovel, tear into it, perform some violent, destructive act that would absorb all his fury.

  But he had wanted the work of digging, too.

  In a strange way that he didn’t completely comprehend, the digging would be both a destructive act and at the same time a creative one. It was the destruction he wanted, but it was the creative act he knew he needed. He needed to sweat. He needed to feel the muscles in his arms and his back burn with exertion. He needed to feel the blisters form and burst on his palms, because these things would honor his son. Self-flagellation would be the last act of love he could ever do for the boy.

  But in a world covered by water, graves were impossible, and he had been forced to leave Brent on top of the wall where he died, covered by a yellow tarp. He had carefully tucked the corners under the body and then sat back in a small boat that he had claimed for his own. And while the rest of the refugees filed out of the boatyard, Mark Shaw watched the tarp flutter in the breeze and thought of Brent, not as he had been there at the end, perpetually drunk and scared, but as the four-year-old boy who would sometimes come downstairs in the middle of the night to crawl into bed between his parents.

  It was funny, he thought, how memory grabbed on to the littlest moments, the ones that simply are, the ones without a beginning or an end. Like the feeling of letting go the day he taught Brent to ride a bike, watching as he wobbled slowly down the sidewalk. Or driving him to school in the morning, that little-boy smile of his, no front teeth and full of radiant joy. Or watching football with him on the couch on Sunday afternoons. Or teaching him to shoot.

  But he remembered these things, too.

  The chemical stench of the floodwaters.

  Burning buildings glowing against a nighttime sky.

  Brent standing in the smoke-covered water, holding the AR-15 across his chest, trembling, unable to speak, unable to move.

  The city, drowned and quiet and every bit as desolate as the Jerusalem of Jeremiah’s visions, shimmering in the light of the rising sun.

  The faces of refugees, shocked and exhausted, as the boats carried them away.

  Zombies.

  His son, so much like him, dying on top of a wall.

  Anthony saying, “Dad, he was supposed to run straight to you. He would have been safe if he’d just done it like I told him.”

  Anthony saying, “Dad?”

  Anthony saying, “Dad, say something, please.”

  Later, Mark Shaw sat in the same little metal boat he’d been in when he said good-bye to Brent, bringing up the rear of the ragtag fleet of refugee boats. He was exhausted from fighting all night long. He was emotionally drained by his grief and his rage. The droning of the little 25 Johnson Outboard was trying to put him to sleep. The only thing keeping him awake now was willpower.

  From his position at the back he had a clear view of the rest of the fleet, some four hundred–plus boats of every make and degree of seaworthiness. His best guess was that they had gotten away with fewer than three thousand of the original eighty thousand who had grouped together at the campus. Those few survivors were jammed into the boats now. Some boats were so overloaded that people were forced to hang over the sides, making them look, to Shaw, like those trains in India and Bangladesh with the natives spilling out like candy from a piñata.

  From somewhere up ahead he heard people yelling and a woman crying. Shaw looked around for one of his officers, but none of them were close by. After the battle at the campus, he had only six left, and all of them were busy sprinting up and down the line, shepherding the fleet.

  Shaw fed the engine a little more throttle and sped up to the disturbance.

  The yelling was coming from a white Maxum Runabout with an open bow and yellow trim on the stern. Several younger men were trying to heave the body of a dead man over the side of the boat, while a wild-eyed woman tried desperately to stop them.

  One of the men pushed the woman down, but she got right back up and wrapped an arm around the dead man’s neck.

  “Let go of him!” she screamed. “You fucking bastards, don’t you touch him.”

  “Hey,” Shaw said.

  They didn’t hear him. Another of the men tried to pull the woman’s arm loose, and when that didn’t work, he balled his fist and made to punch her in the face.

  “Hey!” Shaw said.

  The man hesitated, his fist hovering above the woman’s wildly rolling eyes and terrified grimace. He and the rest of the men looked over the side, and into the barrel of Shaw’s Glock.

  “You hit her, son, and I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

  One of the other men reached for a shotgun, but only got it halfway up before Shaw covered him with the pistol.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Go on, put it down. That’s it. Okay, everybody, hands where I can see ’em. Just like that. Perfect. Now how about one of you guys tell me what’s going on here?”

  They all yelled at him at once, and Shaw held up a palm to silence them. He felt tired and, in a crazy sort of way, bored.

  “One at a time,” he said, and pointed at the man who’d been trying to pick up the shotgun. “You. What are you guys doing?”

  The
man looked to be barely twenty years old. He was thin and rough-looking, like a South Houston redneck meth head, tattoo sleeves that curled up to his neck.

  “This dude just died,” he said. His tone suggested that that was all there was to say on the matter, and the others seemed to agree, for they were nodding in agreement.

  “Okay,” Shaw said. “What did he die of?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I look like a doctor to you?”

  Shaw laughed. “No, son, you definitely don’t look like a doctor to me.”

  “He’s gonna turn into one of them zombies. I don’t want no fucking zombies on this boat.”

  The others all started talking at once, but Shaw didn’t try to silence them this time. What was happening here was pretty plain now. He could tell them that the zombies were diseased living people, not the walking dead like in the movies, but what was the point? None of them would listen, or understand if they did; and besides, there was an easier solution to the problem.

  “Hand him down to me.”

  That silenced them. They looked at Shaw, and then at each other.

  “Come on. We’re wasting daylight. Hand him down.”

  The woman, whose panic had flared again, said, “No! He’s not gonna change into one of them. He’s not infected.”

  “Ma’am,” Shaw said, patiently. “Ma’am.” The woman looked at him, her chest heaving. “I know that. I’m gonna put him in this boat. I got room for both of you. You can tend to your husband while I steer.”

  “He’s my brother,” she said.

  “Okay, your brother. The two of you can ride with me.”

  The wild fear cooled in her eyes. She looked at the men in the boat with her, and then down at the corpse. She swallowed hard and began to cry.

  “Hurry it up,” Shaw said to the men. “Hand him down to me.”

  They did as he asked, moving the body and helping the woman down to him in silence.

  “You okay?” he said to the woman.

  She was sitting against the gunwale, her brother’s head in her lap. She shook her head, but said nothing.