Flesh Eaters

by Joe McKinney

“Okay. Where are we gonna go?”

  He pointed back to the nearest on-ramp.

  “We can’t go that way.”

  “Through the checkpoint.”

  Before Jesse could object, Anthony took off running toward the checkpoint. Behind them, the riot had risen to a horrendous din of screams and moans and gunfire. Ahead of them, the refugees were surging forward, pressing up against the chain-link fence separating them from freedom. Through the huddle of bodies, Anthony saw the space-suited soldiers backing up, raising their rifles to their shoulders.

  “No!” he screamed, but even as he yelled the bullets started flying. Those closest to the fence were nearly sawed in half. Those behind turned and ran, screaming even as they were shot in the back.

  Anthony and Jesse were caught up among them, Anthony using his M-16 as a battle hatchet, swinging it back and forth to knock the panicked crowd out of his path. And then, suddenly, there was nothing between his position and the soldiers behind the fence but open ground and quite a few dead bodies.

  Anthony saw three soldiers lower their weapons slightly.

  “I’m a police officer,” he yelled at them. “We’re not infected. Open the gate!”

  Another space-suited figure stepped forward and Anthony heard him give the order to fire.

  “No!” Anthony shouted.

  The soldiers raised their rifles again and opened fire. Anthony hit the ground and rolled over by a dead man who had come to rest on his side. He could feel the dead man’s body jittering as the bullets smacked into him. He kept down, yelling for Jesse to do the same. But when he rolled over onto his side to look for Jesse, he saw his friend facedown on the pavement, eyes and mouth open, with a puddle of blood spreading out from beneath his chest.

  “No,” Anthony said. “No!”

  But Jesse didn’t move. His sightless eyes just stared at Anthony, like a blank accusation.

  “No, Jesse. Oh shit, man. No.”

  Anger flared up in him and he rolled over onto his belly, the barrel of the M-16 resting on the dead man’s thighs. He flipped the selector switch to automatic and opened fire on the soldiers. Two of them went down. A third dived onto his belly. Two of the men who had been doing the medical inspections ran for the back gate. Anthony sighted in on their backs and fired, dropping them both.

  He glanced over the dead man’s legs and saw more soldiers coming up fast from the far side. Shit, he thought. Gotta move.

  He looked back toward the city and saw a crowd of the infected coming toward him. He was caught in the middle with nowhere to run.

  “My ass,” he said.

  Slowly, he inched his way over to the duffel bags and wrapped the straps around his fist. He took a few quick breaths, jumped to his feet, and started firing at the soldiers as he ran for the retaining wall at the edge of the roadway.

  The next instant he was the over the edge and falling feet-first into the blackness of the water below.

  “Mom.”

  Eleanor groaned.

  “Mom, please wake up.”

  Eleanor groaned again: Stop it. Hurts.

  Madison shook her even harder.

  “Mom, please get up!”

  “Madison?” Eleanor blinked. Her vision was blurry and her head felt as if it were about to collapse in on itself. What in the hell had Anthony Shaw done to her? “Madison, stop shaking me.”

  “Mom, please, we have to go right now. Those things, they’re everywhere.”

  Eleanor groaned. With Madison’s help she managed to sit up, but everything hurt. The right side of her face was sizzling with pain, as if she’d pressed it to a hot skillet. Jim was rolling on his side a few feet away. His face looked bad, his shirt soaked in blood, his eyes black and swollen. Eleanor’s mind was floating free, unable to focus, and looking at her husband she had a crazy, almost hilarious flash of Rocky Balboa in his corner, a battered man staring across the ring.

  “Eleanor . . .” he said, reaching a trembling hand toward her.

  “Mom, please, I need you to get up. There are zombies—”

  But the words were clipped away by an ear-piercing scream. Madison was on her feet now, pointing at the blurry figure who had stumbled around the front bumper of the van.

  Eleanor blinked at it, and an apparition from a horror show came into focus. The man was blood-streaked. His clothes were filthy and hanging off him in strips. His hair was dark with blood, one of his eyes gouged out and oozing gore. Part of his lips had been torn away. The one remaining eye leered at them with a bloodshot combination of murderous hate and numb emptiness, rolling in its socket as he raised his shredded hands and clutched at them.

  “Mom, get your gun!” Madison screamed.

  Eleanor rolled over, groping at the pavement around her. There was no gun. She tried to tell Madison that, but the girl wouldn’t stop yelling. Then Madison was pushing Eleanor over on her side, up against the retaining wall.

  “Hey, what are you . . .”

  “Get up, Mom!”

  Eleanor felt something slide underneath her. She looked down, and in her disconnected haze she saw Madison standing up with a rifle in her hands.

  “No . . .” Eleanor said.

  But Madison was already firing, the gun jumping in her hands. A three-round burst erupted from the barrel, and Madison fell backwards against the van, the gun still pointed at where the zombie had been.

  The rattle of gunfire cleared Eleanor’s head. She looked at the zombie, dead now, flat on his back, the top of his head blown off, and then back at her daughter. Madison was breathing hard, the air coming in big, heaving gulps. Her eyes were wide, staring at the dead man, her mouth open in terror that was slowly giving way to triumph.

  “Mom, did you see that?

  She turned to Eleanor, inadvertently pointing the M-16’s barrel at her.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Eleanor said, and grabbed the barrel and pointed it in a safe direction. “Yeah, baby, I saw it. Good job. Here let me have that.”

  Eleanor took the M-16 and turned its selector switch to single fire. Rising painfully to her feet she turned and fired at the four zombies who had stumbled around the back of the van. Then she turned back to the front and fired twice more. But she might as well have tried to stop a cattle stampede with a police whistle. There were zombies coming around both sides of the van now, and the three of them were trapped. Eleanor looked to the top of the van, but knew that wouldn’t work for long. And that only meant one thing.

  “Jim,” she said, “can you go over the side?”

  Long ropes of blood hung from his nose and chin. One ear had a nasty case of road rash where Anthony Shaw had dragged him over the pavement. But through the swollen bruises, his eyes were clear and bright.

  He stood up and leaned over the side. “The water’s not that deep,” he said, “but it’s only about a twenty-foot drop.”

  “Go,” she said.

  Without saying another word, he put his chest on the top of the retaining wall and rolled over.

  Eleanor heard him splash.

  “Jim?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Send Madison down.”

  “Go, baby. Hurry!”

  To her credit, Madison didn’t hesitate. She put her hands on the wall and was about to hurdle it when she stopped, scooped up her backpack, and jumped.

  “I got her,” Jim called up. “We’re okay. Hurry, Eleanor!” The zombies were closing in on both sides of her now, less than five feet away. Their moaning had reached a frenzied, urgent pitch. Their hands reached for her. She turned to face the retaining wall, and looked down. It seemed like a million miles.

  “God help us,” she said, and took a breath and jumped.

  CHAPTER 18

  Right before she let go from the retaining wall, Eleanor saw the water below writhing with bodies. She hit the water hard and went under. The next instant there were hands all over her and she screamed, slapping them away. She spun around, teeth clenched, fists raised, and barely recognizing the faces
of her battered husband and her daughter as they grabbed at her.

  “Behind you, Mom!”

  Eleanor turned.

  The water was full of zombies. Four of them were already wading toward her, less than ten feet away. She let Jim and Madison pull her back as she scrambled to get the shoulder strap of her M-16 off her arm.

  “Come on, Mom! Hurry!”

  The screams of the dying filtered down from above them. People were running, leaning over the retaining wall, yelling for help. The rattle of gunfire was nearly constant. A military helicopter raced overhead, a dim shape, like a dark, gigantic bird against a black sky. And sounding above it all were the zombies in the water, moaning with a fevered intensity that was deafening. Eleanor looked around and realized there were hundreds of zombies closing in on the refugees who had fallen from the Beltway, and the thought occurred to her that this must be what it felt like to be caught in the middle of a swarm of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

  She heard an ear-piercing scream.

  She turned and saw a woman get the flesh stripped from her body by a huddling mass of the infected.

  For a second, all Eleanor could do was stand there and gawk at the sight of that woman wailing in pain and fear, and she was hardly aware of Jim putting his hands under her shoulders and lifting her from the water until she was most of the way into the boat he had found.

  Eleanor dropped down into a cushioned bench seat, still staring at the woman. Madison was shaking her shoulders, pleading with her to snap out of it.

  “I’m okay,” Eleanor said. She grabbed Madison’s forearms and steadied herself. “Really, I’m okay.”

  Jim was already kneeling over the outboard, getting it started.

  The motor roared to life.

  “Hold on to something,” he said, and fed the throttle and turned them away from the thickest part of the zombie crowd.

  “Where are we going?” Eleanor asked him.

  He pointed underneath the Beltway. In the distance, Eleanor could see forty or fifty boats heading toward the military’s chain-link fence. Several of the smaller boats were already approaching the tangled rolls of concertina wire and large metal crosses in front of the fence, and it looked to Eleanor as if they were going to ram the fence and punch their way through.

  Eleanor held her breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  But she was unprepared for the sudden, blinding light that filled the night from the other side of the fence. Powerful spotlights hit the water and turned the boats and their occupants to silhouettes. Beyond the lights, Eleanor could see the outlines of several Coast Guard vessels spaced along the fence line. She heard harsh voices amplified through bullhorns, ordering the refugee boats to turn back.

  None of them did.

  She knew exactly what was going to come next, but the fierce mechanical surge of .50-caliber machine-gun fire still took her by surprise.

  In the glare of the spotlights she saw the first volley turn four of the lead vessels into airborne splinters.

  There was a momentary pause, and then the orders came again.

  “Fire! All boats, fire, fire, fire!”

  Soon the gunners were firing at will, tearing up the boats and survivors and zombies with indiscriminate abandon. The big black helicopter that had been circling them since before they jumped from the Beltway stopped almost directly over the Coast Guard boats and fired rockets into the water, turning it into a raging lake of orange flames.

  Through the glare of the spotlights and the flames and the smoke, Eleanor could see the helicopter rocking back, its nose pointed at the elevated roadway above them.

  “Jim!” she shouted. “Turn us around. Get us out of here!”

  But he was doing it already. The little wooden boat they were in sucked down into the water as they turned, and then rose on the crest of the wake wave as they accelerated.

  Eleanor kept looking over her shoulder, and when the rockets erupted from the helicopter, she threw Madison down to the deck and covered her with her body. Shrieking missiles thudded into the roadway above them, the explosions shaking the boat and deafening Eleanor’s ears. Bits of flaming concrete rained down into the water all around them. Drifts of sparks swirled in the air. And though it lasted only a moment, Eleanor could have sworn she heard the flaming bodies screaming as they tumbled down from the collapsing highway.

  She pulled herself up onto her elbows.

  Eleanor felt stunned by the concussive blast she’d just endured, as though she were standing under a bell jar with the world swirling all around her.

  She turned Madison over and saw the fear and the blind panic in her daughter’s eyes. “Are you okay, Madison?” she asked, unable to hear her own voice.

  Madison nodded slowly.

  Slowly, the silence in Eleanor’s ears was replaced by a painful ringing. She stood up, put her daughter on one of the bench seats, and turned to look at the burning, groaning Beltway as it collapsed into the water.

  This must be how Lot’s wife felt, she thought, right before she turned to a pillar of salt.

  And like Lot’s wife, she found she was unable to turn away from the destruction, the beautiful, horrific, world-ending destruction, even as her husband called her name.

  Half an hour passed.

  They floated aimlessly through the decimated buildings and the homes that listed in the water like wrecked boats along a forgotten coast. Zombies staggered out of doorways and slapped bloody hands on the fences, trying to reach them. Eleanor sat ready in the bow of the boat, watching them with the M-16 resting in her lap. She had a fully loaded magazine in the breach, and three more in a pouch she wore in a bandolier across her chest, but she knew those wouldn’t last long. If they got cornered, or caught in a stand-up fight, she could burn through all four magazines in the blink of an eye. So she watched the silhouettes separate from the darkness with a weary eye, determined to shoot only if they got too close.

  Behind her, Madison was crying softly. Over and over again, she kept muttering “Where are we gonna go? What’s gonna happen to us?”

  It was the paradox of parenting again, the question that had been hounding her since that first evening before Hurricane Hector, when the two of them had sat on the kitchen floor, laying by supplies. She both wanted to soothe her daughter’s fear, hold her tight and comfort her, and at the same time slap the ever-loving shit out of her for making so much noise. Playing to her better nature, Eleanor tried to soothe her. But she couldn’t answer Madison’s questions, no matter how hard she tried. Madison was too frightened, too damaged by what she had seen, and mere words wouldn’t compensate for that.

  Years before, as a rookie patrol officer, Eleanor had responded to a family disturbance involving a married couple in their fifties. No sooner had she stepped through the door than the drunken husband started yelling at her, complaining of everything from his wife’s addiction to heroin, to the bank foreclosing on his home, to the HPD’s continuing efforts to frame his son for robbery. The man had asked her what he was supposed to do to fix his life, and Eleanor, who was stunned by the idea of a man twice her age asking her how to run his life, had said: “How the hell should I know? I’m twenty-five years old. What do I know about living?”

  She was thirty-five now, a mother herself, a mother with a litany of troubles far beyond anything she could have imagined way back then, and yet she still didn’t have any answers. Life, she realized, really was a junkyard tumbling down a staircase. Things happened without justification, without closure. There was no grand design, no pattern. None that she could see anyway. Every day, as Sheryl Crow so eloquently put it, was a winding road. She wished she could tell Madison that in a way that would save her the trouble of having to learn it herself, but she knew that was impossible. Like coming of age, it was something Madison would have to learn for herself. No one could do it for her.

  Her mind was still chasing the rabbit around that same mental race track when they rounded a corner and glided up on Anthony Shaw,
who was standing in the back of a small metal fishing boat, kicking the outboard motor as if it had just called his mother a dirty whore.

  “Fucking piece of shit!” he roared at it, and kicked it again.

  He yanked the pull cord and nothing happened.

  “Goddamned fucking piece of shit!” he said, and gave it yet another kick. Then he stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. He dropped his hands down to his side and balled them into fists. He was standing that way, stiff with anger, when he seemed to sense a presence behind him.

  Slowly, he turned around.

  Eleanor was standing in the front of her boat, her M-16 leveled at him.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  He just laughed at her.

  “Jim, the light.”

  Their boat had a handheld spotlight mounted next to the motor. Jim fumbled with it, but managed to get the beam pointed at Anthony Shaw.

  Anthony raised one hand to shield his eyes, but he said nothing.

  In the glare of the spotlight’s beam, Eleanor could see the two black duffel bags on the bench in front of Anthony.

  “You stole that money, Officer Shaw.”

  “I told you. This is my family’s life savings.”

  “You’re a thief, Officer Shaw. You’re a disgrace.”

  His smile slipped away. “What are gonna do, Sarge? You gonna arrest me? If so, how about you come on over here and try to put on the cuffs? I’d like to see you try.”

  Eleanor realized she didn’t have an answer to that. What was she going to do? Christ, she didn’t even have a pair of cuffs with her. And she sure as hell wasn’t about to get into another fistfight with him. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t live through another round with Mr. SWAT.

  So what then? What was she going to do?

  He seemed to realize the answer before she did. She was going to do nothing. She was powerless, which meant that he controlled this situation. Eleanor had her husband and child with her. Anthony Shaw had only his rage and his money. She had the machine gun pointed at him, but he had the power.

  And from the smile on his face, he seemed to know it, too.