by Joe McKinney
“Hold on to something.”
And with that he turned the boat away from the men aboard the Maxum and resumed his place at the fleet’s rear.
For the third time in an hour, Mark Shaw saw a Coast Guard helicopter fly overhead. They were crisscrossing back and forth over Northwest Houston, and probably elsewhere too, announcing the military-run evacuation point at the Sam Houston Race Park. Shaw stood up in the boat and looked around for landmarks he recognized. In the distance he could see the elevated sprawl of the Beltway, which meant they were almost there.
“Shouldn’t be too much longer,” he said to the woman, who still cradled her dead brother’s head in her lap. She stared at him, her eyes hollow and miserable-looking behind the stringy curtain of her hair. He had taken her aboard three hours earlier, and though he had tried to ask her name several times, she’d refused to say anything to him. She was, he feared, shutting down mentally. Many of the refugees were.
A few minutes later he saw Anthony’s boat speeding back to him. Anthony was behind the wheel, while Jesse rode in the front with an AR-15. Shaw had assigned the two of them to ride point for the fleet, and if they were coming back to the rear now it meant something was happening.
Shaw slowed his boat to a stop. “What’s going on?” he said.
Anthony looked at the woman and the dead man curiously, as though he wanted to ask where they came from, but decided better of it. He turned to his father, and then quickly looked down at his own hands on the wheel. He was too ashamed to meet his father’s gaze, that much was obvious, and Shaw thought that was probably just as well. If he got too close to Anthony right now he might punch his lights out. The anger was still fresh, still very raw.
Anthony said, “There’s some activity on the other side of the Beltway. Hand him the binoculars, Jesse.”
Jesse reached into one of the storage bins and handed the binoculars over to Shaw, who took them without comment.
“Where?” he asked.
“Over there,” Anthony said, and pointed past the Beltway. “It’s all around over there. Look anywhere.”
To the naked eye, it was just a long shimmering line against the water. Shaw hadn’t thought twice about it when he first noticed it, thinking that maybe it was just a trick of the light on the water. But now that he was looking at it through the binoculars, he could see what it was.
A chain-link fence.
An enormous chain-link fence that stretched for miles.
“I’ve seen soldiers patrolling outside it,” Anthony said. “They’ve also put up some barriers at the base of the fence and wrapped everything in barbed wire.”
Shaw lowered the binoculars.
“Those crazy bastards. They’re building a wall around the city.”
He shook his head in disbelief.
“What do you want to do, Dad?”
“The plan hasn’t changed. Get us to the Beltway. I want to find the on-ramp closest to the military’s evacuation point and get us up there. Once you find the on-ramp, start forming these people up and working them through.”
Anthony nodded.
“Go on,” Shaw said.
“Yes, sir.”
Anthony turned his boat around and glided off so as not to create a wake around his father’s much smaller craft.
When he was gone, Shaw raised the binoculars again and studied the fence.
“Those crazy bastards,” he muttered.
They reached the Beltway a little before one o’clock that afternoon. Shaw sped up and down the line of the fleet, watching as his officers helped civilians up the freeway on-ramp. He offered encouragement wherever he could, and for the first time in quite a while, he saw smiles and an appearance of collective relief on the faces of the refugees he passed. They were here. They were finally getting out of this hellhole.
He coasted over to the on-ramp and looked over the side. He could see the street below and he guessed the water was about four feet deep.
“Come on,” he said to the woman.
He climbed over the side, dropping into water that was up to his chest.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
The sound of her voice surprised him. He looked back at her.
“Ma’am, we have to leave here. There’s a military checkpoint up at the top of this ramp. From there, to be honest, I don’t know what will happen. But I do know that we have to leave now.”
“What about my brother?”
He sighed. He’d known this moment was coming, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it.
“They won’t let you bring a dead body through the checkpoint. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You fucking asshole. This is my brother. I can’t leave him here. I can’t. I won’t do that.”
“Ma’am,” he said, not unkindly, “I’ve brought you here to the way out. I can’t make you go through it. That’s gonna have to be your choice and yours alone. I know how hard this is. I understand.”
“You understand? Bullshit. Don’t patronize me. You don’t understand shit.”
His control almost broke. He could feel his anger rising. He could feel his mouth starting to tremble, the tears threatening. Shaw hadn’t wanted to cry, not yet, and certainly not in public. He knew he would, eventually, but it would be on his own terms.
“I lost my son back at the shelter,” he said.
That stopped her.
She sucked in a ragged-sounding breath and stared at him.
“It happened right before we got on the boats. He was bit by one of those zombies.” Shaw made a vague gesture toward the holstered pistol on his hip. “I had to . . . it was really hard.”
His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists. When he looked back at the woman, there were tears streaking down her cheeks.
“You can go without him, or stay with him. I won’t tell you which is best. To be honest, I don’t know which is best. But I have a job to do, and right now, that’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you.”
And with that, he walked toward the ramp.
“Dad.”
Shaw stopped. Anthony and Jesse were standing in the bow of their boat about twenty feet away. Both looked worried.
“I told you two to help get people through the checkpoint.”
“I know, Dad. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Can we talk?”
It was an intensely hot day. The air had taken on an almost tropical steaminess, and Shaw, who could feel the sun burning the back of his neck, was feeling irritable and tired.
“Make this quick,” he said.
Anthony glanced at Jesse, who quickly looked away, then at his father. “We just came from up top. Dad, you should see it up there. It’s crazy. All those people. And the military’s only letting them through one at time. There’s no order.”
“Anthony,” Shaw said, cutting him off, “say whatever it is you need to say, but don’t stand there fucking jerking my chain. Speak plainly.”
“Okay. All right, Dad. As crazy as it is up there, we think this is our best chance to get out of here with the money. They’re checking everybody over, making sure nobody’s been infected, you know . . . but being who we are, we could get through there. With all that confusion up there, we could slip away and be five hundred miles from here by nightfall. What do you say, Dad? You give the word, we’ll be out of here in no time.”
Shaw looked down at his hands. They were still trembling.
Then he looked to the south, across hundreds of flooded homes. In the distance, he could see people coming. Not zombies, but people. Refugees, like the ones he had risked everything to bring to this spot. He saw them carrying the remnants of their lives on their backs, whole families made transient.
He listened. Above him, thousands of scared people were growing restless. A helicopter’s rotors thrummed off into the distance.
He mopped a hand across his face, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
He found it difficult to put into words
exactly what he was feeling. Right after his wife’s funeral, after he was done with the etiquette of death, the inane process the living put themselves through to say good-bye to a life, he had gotten in his truck and driven north, eventually ending up on the shores of Lake Livingston. He had gone midway to Dallas for Christ’s sake, with no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it.
So he’d stopped at the lake and gone down to the water’s edge and looked out over a drab, November day. The horizon had been a watercolor smear of rain clouds, laced with threads of blue lightning.
He’d been thinking of Grace, and of duty. He’d hated her for dying, for abandoning her family, and he had hated himself because he knew how unfair he was being.
It was that same illogical hate that he was feeling now for Anthony. It wasn’t the boy’s fault, and he knew it. To Anthony, who was so perfect in so many ways, these storms, these zombies, this horrible messed-up clusterfuck of a world, were just bumps in the road. He wasn’t connected to anything, certainly not to the same sense of duty that governed Shaw’s life, and for him, life would go on. There were no wounds to heal because nothing cut him very deeply. How could it, without a sense of duty?
“Anthony,” Shaw said, “I want you to take those duffel bags and stash them somewhere safe. After that, you are to go topside and help get those people through the gate.”
“But Dad—”
“Do not talk back to me!” Shaw exploded. “Don’t you fucking dare. You hear me, Anthony? Don’t you fucking talk back to me. Boy, I don’t think you have the first fucking clue about what’s important in life. Maybe I’ve failed you. Maybe I assumed that you were so talented you would know those things without me teaching them to you. If so, that’s my fault. But I’m gonna rectify that right now.”
He turned to Jesse.
“Jesse, I have no control over what you do. You’re not mine. If you want to take your chances, if you want to abandon these people, go on. Take your share and get the fuck out.”
Jesse swallowed hard.
“No, sir,” he said. “I’ll stay.”
“Yeah, well, okay then,” Shaw said. “Good. At least one of you has got some sense of what’s important.”
“Dad, come on. I—”
“No,” Shaw said. “No. You shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear you speak right now. You will listen. You will keep your mouth closed. No son of mine is gonna creep away into the night like a thief. You got that? Your name is Shaw, and you will wear it proudly, for I worked hard to make it worth something. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now take those bags and stash them. Once you’ve done that, you get your ass topside and you do your duty. You have taken an oath, and you will live up to it. You will keep the charge that you have asked for.”
He stared at them both, dared them to speak.
Neither one did.
“Better and better,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”
Anthony waded over to a red Toyota pickup. He remembered what had happened back at Canal Street when the water receded from the Volkswagen in which they’d originally stashed the money, leaving it in plain sight.
He didn’t want to take a chance like that again.
This pickup was hidden between a school bus and an overturned eighteen-wheeler. No one would find it unless they were looking for it, so he figured it was safe.
He popped the hood and put the duffel bags in with the engine. Then he waded back to the boat, and he and Jesse went to do their duty.
Captain Shaw walked up the freeway on-ramp and emerged onto the elevated deck of the Sam Houston Tollway. The noise and the stench of filthy people was almost too much. There were refugees as far as he could see. The road was packed with them. There were babies screaming. Injured people hobbling down the road as best they could. A few who couldn’t walk moaned and begged for someone to help them, older people mostly. Others just stared off into the unknown distance, their faces drawn, their eyes wide and vacant. One man was muttering madly as he swatted at invisible bees around his head. “This is the end,” he said. “Gonna get us all. I know it. I know it.” Children cried and clutched at their parents when they saw him. One father threatened to toss the lunatic over the side, and a few others grumbled in approval.
Shaw saw families with everything they owned stuffed into backpacks or wheelbarrows, or resting on top of doors they carried between them like stretchers. He was momentarily amazed at the number of little red wagons he saw. He didn’t know they still made them. Anthony and Brent had one just like that when they were kids. He remembered pulling them around in it when they visited Sea World in San Antonio, and Brent . . . God, the kid had been crazy, wheeling down hills, his head thrown back while he screamed with delight. “Daddy, look at me! Weeeee!” The memory brought a smile, but it quickly faded.
He turned and looked out over the flooded city. He counted at least thirty towering columns of black smoke in the distance. Sunlight dappled on the water, making it look like liquid silver. And there was a smell, too. He hadn’t really noticed it when he was down in the boats, but up here, the chemical stench and sewer smell of mud were overpowering.
In the near distance, he could see more refugees approaching the freeway. Few of them had boats, and the others were forced to swim, for the water was a good fifteen feet deep out there. He thought about sending some of his men out there with boats to pick them up, but he knew that wouldn’t work. One of his officers, an older black patrolman named Garrity, was nearby, trying to help a woman with three crying kids find her missing son. Looking up and down the line of refugees, he could see his other officers were all trying to put out similar fires. They were every bit as exhausted as the people they were trying to help, and yet not one of them had quit. Not one of them had abandoned their post. Shaw was proud of his people. No one would be able to say that his men had shirked their duties.
A black kid of about sixteen waved Shaw down. “Hey man, how much longer they gonna make us wait? I’m fucking sick of standing in line.”
“I have no idea how long you’ll have to wait,” Shaw told him.
“Yeah, well, you the fucking law, ain’t you? Why don’t you get up there and find out?”
Shaw just stared at the kid. He didn’t even have the desire to go over and slap his face, which was what the kid needed. It was what his whole generation needed. It didn’t matter if they were black or white or Mexican, they all grew up with a sense of entitlement that was sickening. Everybody owed them something. They assumed they could talk to the law the same way they talked to their friends because the world had gone soft and they knew it. Everything was tolerated because nobody was at fault.
And to think, this was the generation that was going to inherit a world full of zombies.
Humanity is gonna go extinct in less than twenty years, he thought bitterly. With little pieces of shit like that kid at the helm, we’re doomed.
But like it or not, the kid had a point. The line didn’t seem to be moving at all. People had dropped their backpacks and they were sitting on them, shading themselves from the midday sun with whatever they had available. They looked tired and irritable and supremely bored.
Shaw walked down the line, toward the gateway.
What he saw there was incredible. People were being led one by one into a sort of holding tank between two large chain-link fences that ran from one side of the road to the other. Soldiers in white plastic biohazard suits and gas masks pointed rifles at each refugee as they were led inside the holding area, stripped of every scrap of clothing they wore, and inspected from head to toe. If they refused to undress, they were turned away. There were no second chances, and no explanations were given. You either did as you were told the first time, without complaint, or you were turned away.
Shaw saw it happen twice.
One woman, whether out of vanity or her own sense of entitlement, refused. She demanded to speak to the officer in charge. The soldiers pushed her
back through the gate, and when she turned to scream at them, they raised their weapons at her face and ordered her to back away. Stunned and speechless, she just stood there, crying.
Another woman was led inside. She had a dazed, drunken look about her. She was limping and coughing, shielding her eyes against the sunlight.
“Stop there,” Shaw heard one of the soldiers say.
The woman did as she was told.
“Take off your clothes.”
The woman hesitated, and Shaw heard a soldier give the order to push her back through the gate.
“No,” she said, raising her palms at them in a gesture of surrender. “Okay.”
She began to undress. She untucked her blouse and started to fumble with the buttons. She seemed to be having a great deal of difficulty. From the stiffness of her movements, Shaw guessed she’d been badly hurt, and recently too.
The woman wasn’t making much progress on the buttons. She had to stop every few seconds to cough, and from the way she was swaying on her feet, Shaw thought she might fall over at any moment.
One of the soldiers gave an order Shaw couldn’t hear, and another soldier came up behind her and yanked her blouse off. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she stood there, trembling, looking scared and small and helpless. Her back was laced with cuts and there was a large, festering wound between her shoulder blades that looked to Shaw to be a bite mark. The soldier who had pulled off her blouse turned her around to show the injury to his superior, and it was then that Shaw got a look at the woman’s face. Her eyes had turned bloodshot and were lost in the black shadows that spread up from her cheeks. Her lips were cracked and pale, and when she coughed, he could see black bits of bloody phlegm fly out of her mouth.
The woman was changing right in front of him, becoming one of those zombies. Her hand had been across her breasts, but it was slipping away now. She shook her head, as though there were no-see-ums biting at her cheeks, but it was a dreamy sort of gesture and one she evidently couldn’t control. She staggered once, righted herself, and began to moan. Slowly, laboriously, she turned toward the soldiers and raised her hands, clutching at them.