Flesh Eaters - 03

by Joe McKinney

  Brent had been trying his hardest to crawl into a shell. His shoulders were stooped, his uniform a wrinkled mess, his mind a wrinkled mess, too. He felt as if his mouth was full of sand.

  “Brent?” Macklin said. “We’re waiting.”

  Brent had looked up at Macklin, at the other members of the board, all of them watching him expectantly, and said, “I . . . I—” and realized with a panic akin to drowning that there was nothing more. He had nothing. His mind was a blank slate. He looked at the young patrolman to his right, the man’s uniform pressed and clean, his face freshly shaven, and sweat popped out all over Brent’s body. His face felt hot, his skin damp. What was he doing here? What did they want from him? Couldn’t they just leave him the fuck alone?

  “Brent?” Macklin said. “The three hundred block of Irving? You sideswiped a parked car. . . .”

  The utter bewilderment must have been obvious on his face. He couldn’t remember any of it. He had no recollection of any accident. In his mind, there was only a long stretch of black, like an endless road with no scenery, where the memory should have been.

  He hung his head, defeated.

  Macklin had said something then that Brent didn’t catch, but he must have dismissed the other members of the board, for they rose as a body and slowly exited the conference room. When Brent looked up, he and Macklin were the only two left in the room, sitting at opposite ends of a long oval table.

  “Brent,” Macklin said. “Your dad is one of my oldest friends. I remember driving him to the hospital the night your younger brother was born. I care about your family, son. So tell me, what the fuck is going on with you? How did you get like this?”

  Brent had no answer. He’d sat there beneath an air-conditioning vent, sweating, ineffably miserable, embarrassed beyond—

  He heard the moaning again.

  Brent’s pulse quickened. He stood up, scanned the dark and flooded buildings, and saw nothing. He heard nothing. Trees rustled in the wind, and the moon’s reflection winked off the rippling floodwaters. But there was no movement.

  And no other sounds.

  Not even the frogs, he realized. The night had pulsed with their noises earlier. Where were the frogs? The question hung in his mind and wouldn’t let go. It unsettled him somehow. Had they left because of the approaching storm? Had they used that magical sixth sense that animals had that warned them of approaching natural disasters? Mardel was just hours away, after all. That must be it, he thought.

  He lifted the thermos to his lips and was surprised to find it empty. He shook it. There was a little down there in the bottom, but just the dregs. Had he really drank it all? Strange. He didn’t remember doing that.

  The sound came again. Behind him this time.

  Brent spun around. There was a car wash on the far side of Canal Street, one of those drive-into-the-stall-and-do-it-yourself places, and beyond that, a corner market and a Church’s Chicken. On the opposite side of the street was a square-looking brown brick building, the windows dark and vacant and eyelike. A few trees, a few cars, poked up above the surface of the water in front of the building.

  There was a figure moving around out there, crossing behind the brown brick building. Brent could only see the figure’s head and shoulders, wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman, but there was definitely a person out there.

  “Hello?” Brent called out.

  An answering shriek came from somewhere to his right. He spun around, his heart beating frantically in his chest. That familiar chewed-aspirin taste on the back of his tongue was back. He tried to swallow it down and couldn’t. He spun around again, scanning for movement, and saw none. In that instant he realized how very alone he was, how very frightened. Really and truly frightened. He stood there in the boat, watching the ruined buildings and the floodwaters, and it seemed to him that the buildings were actually leaning toward him, as though they expected something. For a moment, he considered hitting the alert button Jesse had given him, but the thought of what Jesse and Anthony might say if they scrambled back to the boat and found that there was nothing wrong but a paranoid drunk screwing up their operation made him put the alert button down on the seat.

  But was he just a paranoid drunk? In his heart, he didn’t believe so. This wasn’t, after all, the kind of fear that had followed him during his early days on patrol. That fear made sense. Fear that some abusive and jealous husband might charge out of a back room during a family disturbance with a shotgun and blast his brains all over the front door; fear that he might actually find that cottonmouth that had got into some lady’s kitchen; fear that he might lose his job if he couldn’t control his drinking—those were all real, solid fears. But this wasn’t that kind of fear. It had a dreamlike quality to it, one that he hadn’t felt since he was a child, stepping down a long staircase into a darkened basement, dead certain that some hideous thing with chitinous claws for hands and merciless yellow eyes and breath that smelled of the morgue was waiting for him down there in the dark. It was that kind of fear.

  He tried shaking his head to loosen the fear’s hold on his mind. It made no sense, after all. Why should he feel that every vacant window was an eye leering down at him? Why should the very wind itself smell of death and corruption? There were no ghosts out here. Certainly none but those made of alcohol.

  Brent’s hands were trembling badly, and it took him several tries to turn over the stopwatch Jesse had left for him.

  Eight minutes left, provided everything was going according to schedule.

  Jesus, he thought. Hurry up, you guys.

  A splash behind him.

  He spun around. Looking out across the flooded street he thought he saw people in the water. He blinked, leaned forward, squinted into the dark. Yes, there were people out there, wading down the flooded street. Four, six—no, ten of them.

  At the same moment a Coast Guard helicopter, one of the big HH-60 Jayhawks, seemed to drop down out of the air above him, lighting him up with high-intensity spotlights. He threw up an arm to shield his eyes. Where had it come from? He hadn’t heard anything. One minute, the sky above him had been clear, the wind whistling monotonously. The next, he could feel the thropping of the rotors reverberating off his chest. The noise was deafening. The downwash of air from the helicopter’s rotors picked up trash from the boat and sent it flying around Brent’s head. Still shielding his eyes and struggling to keep his balance, he hit the alert button.

  “This is the United States Coast Guard,” an amplified voice from the helicopter boomed at him. “You are in a restricted area. Identify yourself.”

  Oh shit, Brent thought. Anthony, where are you?

  He went to the front of the boat and got the megaphone Anthony and Jesse had left for him, just in case somebody official came by asking questions. He pointed it up into the light and said, “This is the Houston Police Department. We’re searching for survivors. I have divers in the water.”

  With his other hand he reached into his back pocket and took out his badge and held it up toward the helicopter. They wouldn’t be able to tell if it was genuine or not, certainly not from way up there, but at least they would be able to see the light reflected off it and have an idea of what he was trying to show them.

  “Roger that,” the amplified voice from the helicopter said. “Do you need assistance? I have rescue divers standing by.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Wonder Twins emerge from the water less than twenty feet from the bow of the boat. They were stuffing several large black duffel bags into the backseat of a sunken car. As he watched, Anthony turned to him, a slight smile on his face. He gave Brent a thumbs-up sign, and Brent breathed a sigh of relief.

  Hot damn, he thought. Way to go, Wonder Twins.

  “Anthony, you guys hurry up,” he said. “There are people in the water over here.”

  Anthony’s smile slipped away. He said something, but Brent couldn’t hear him over the noise from the helicopter.

  “H.P.D., I repeat,
do you need assistance? I have rescue divers standing by.”

  Fuck, Brent thought. He knew he had to do something, and he had to do it quickly. He glanced around the boat and saw a handheld spotlight. Pointing the megaphone up at the Coast Guard, he said, “I’ve got survivors in the water.”

  And then he turned on the spotlight and pointed it over the back of the boat.

  And he froze.

  There, in the water, less than twenty feet from the boat, were the people he had seen wading toward him. Or, rather, they had looked like people then, in the dark and far away. But now that they were close enough for him to make out their faces, Brent saw that they were, in fact, horrors.

  He looked from one face to the other. Each one had a waxy, yellowish complexion, almost corpselike. Their mouths were bleeding. Some were badly wounded, almost as though they’d been attacked by dogs or wild hogs or been thrown face-first through plate-glass windows. They had blood and mud in their hair. But it was their eyes that made the goose bumps come up all over Brent’s skin. Every single one of those people in the water, regardless of their injuries, stared back at him with white, vacant eyes that didn’t blink in the glare of the spotlight. The amplified voice said something, but Brent didn’t hear it. All he could do was stare.

  A man with a nasty-looking gash down the side of his face put his hands up out of the water and reached toward Brent, his fingers opening and closing as though he were begging for absolution. The man started to moan, and from somewhere down in his throat, Brent answered it with a moan of his own.

  Two heavy ropes dropped into the water about fifteen feet from the back of the boat. Brent heard a loud noise, like someone tearing long strips of paper, and when he looked up, he saw two Coast Guard rescue divers rappelling down into the water.

  “No!” he shouted. “No, don’t!”

  But they couldn’t hear him. They plunged right into the water, one of them swimming toward the closest survivor, the other making broad, sweeping hand gestures to the crew above as they lowered a floating gurney.

  Brent turned around and ran to the front of the boat. Anthony and Jesse were close now, almost within arm’s reach.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Anthony said.

  “Get in the boat,” Brent said. “Right now. Both of you. Get in the boat!”

  He looked over his shoulder and saw more people in the water, coming from around the far side of the building across the street.

  “Hurry, Anthony. Jesus Christ, get in the fucking boat!”

  He heard screaming coming from the stern. Looking back that way, he saw one of the Coast Guard rescue divers fighting with a small group of survivors. Brent couldn’t look away. The Coast Guard diver was punching at the faces all around him. He was screaming in shocked anger and in pain. They were biting him. They were tearing at his clothes and at his face, raking his dive mask with their fingernails. And as Brent watched, the water around the man turned a murky green.

  They had got to the other diver as well. He was waving furiously at the helicopter to raise him up, and at the same time trying to fight off a narrowing ring of attackers. Brent could hear the man screaming for help. In the flickering light from the helicopter’s strobes he could see the man’s face was twisted by panic and pain. And then, as the rope that led up to the helicopter went taut and an invisible pulley began to turn, Brent saw something that he couldn’t believe. Two of the crazed survivors were clinging to the rope. One had his arms wrapped tightly around the rescue diver’s shoulders, and he appeared to be tearing the man’s ear off with his teeth. The other survivor was several feet above the rescue diver, entangled in the rope, flailing madly for the diver just out of reach below him. Brent watched the three of them rise up to the helicopter. He saw frantic movement at the Jayhawk’s open cabin door. And then the survivor who had been entangled by the rope pulled himself up and over the threshold and crawled inside.

  “Oh my God,” Brent said.

  The helicopter held its position for just a moment. Brent thought he heard yelling from inside, but wasn’t sure if that was real or just his mind filling in for the void the shock had left behind. He would never know the truth, though, for the next instant the helicopter rolled over onto its side and crashed into the side of a building.

  Brent gaped at the scene. Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought there should be an explosion, but there wasn’t. No gigantic fireball. Instead, the air abruptly filled with bits of brick and powdered mortar and needlelike splinters of wood that whistled past his head and pelted his bare arms like angry hornets. In shock, he watched the crumpled, insectlike wreckage of the helicopter tumble three stories down the side of the building and splash into the water. The wreckage was followed a moment later by a billowing gray cloud of dust and aerosolized brick that oozed down the face of the building and spread out in slow motion over the water like a gossamer curtain blown from an open window.

  Brent was still watching the spreading gray cloud when Anthony grabbed him by the collar and threw him down to the deck. He hit his mouth on something and rolled over, a hand clamped over a bleeding lip, to look at Anthony.

  “What the hell . . .” he started to say, but never finished the sentence. Only a few feet from where Brent had been standing was one of the survivors, who had somehow climbed over the gunwale. He was staggering toward Anthony now, arms outstretched before him, hands clutching at the air, water dripping off his tattered clothes.

  Anthony had a pistol in his hands, and it was pointed right at the survivor.

  “Stop, police officer!” Anthony yelled. “Stop, sir!”

  The man kept coming. He was moaning now, a horrible, half-drowned sound that seemed to echo from the other survivors still in the water.

  “Goddamn it,” Anthony said, and fired two shots.

  Brent saw the shots hit the man center mass, right below the base of the sternum. The man convulsed like he was holding a live wire. But only for a moment. The next instant he was staggering forward again, arms outstretched. The same ululating moan filling up the night.

  “What the fuck?” Anthony said.

  He raised the pistol and fired a third shot, this one boring a hole right through the bridge of the man’s nose and exiting out the backside in a pink spray of shattered bone and brains.

  The man’s body wilted to the floor.

  Anthony turned to Brent. “Did you see that? I shot him twice in the chest, and he didn’t stop. I did. I shot him. I know I did.”

  Brent said nothing. He couldn’t speak.

  “Brent, goddamn it!” Jesse yelled. He grabbed Brent by the arm and threw him into the driver’s side. “Get us the fuck out of here. They’re everywhere!”

  Startled, Brent sat there watching Jesse, who had an AR-15 in his hands. There were survivors, their mangled hands clinging to the railing, trying to climb into the boat. Jesse shot three of them with the rifle, then turned back to Brent.

  “Go, goddamn it!”

  The night filled with the sounds of rifle fire. Brent hit the ignition, eased the throttle forward, and a moment later they were moving down the flooded street, skirting the wrecked Coast Guard helicopter.

  And all the while Jesse kept on firing, screaming for him to “Go, go, go!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Once Bobby Hester was gone, they waded through the living room to the back porch, where Eleanor had tied up their canoe.

  Jim held it steady for her as she climbed in.

  “You mind if I ride up front?” she asked him. “My shoulder kinda hurts from all that rowing.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You know,” she said, giving him a flirty little smile, “later on I think I might need a backrub from the hubby. And maybe a margarita to help me work out the kinks.”

  Jim didn’t return her smile.

  “Go on,” he said, nodding at the front end of the canoe. “I’ll paddle.”

  They were both experienced with the canoe, and when he climbed in, it wobbled on
ly a little. She felt raindrops on her arms and glanced up at the darkening sky. No doubt about it, they were in for a really bad one. Already the wind had picked up. It rippled the water that covered Ms. Hester’s backyard and tossed the smaller trees back and forth. A hummingbird feeder hanging near the back was spinning wildly. Yeah, she thought, this is going to be a crazy one.

  “Seems like I made it back just in time, huh?”

  He mumbled something she didn’t quite catch.

  Eleanor sensed an unpleasant note in his voice. She turned around and looked at him as he used the paddle to push away from the house.

  They floated out over the yard.

  Jim glanced at her, then lowered his gaze to the water and started paddling.

  “Jim, you okay?”

  At first she thought maybe something had happened during his fight with Bobby Hester, like maybe he got hurt somewhere she couldn’t see. But he wasn’t acting hurt. He looked mad, pissed off.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

  His only answer was a grunt.

  The first thing she’d noticed when she made it home was how high the water had gotten. Eleanor had been at work for two days, and in that time, the water from Bays Bayou had come right up to the edge of their front porch. She could literally dive off her doorstep—that is, if she was willing to brave all the nasty stuff floating around in the water.

  Their house was on the highest part of the street, and they’d been lucky in that regard. Most everybody else on the block already had three or four feet of water in their downstairs. So far, their house was still dry, but that was about to change. If the information she’d seen at work was accurate, and she figured it probably was, the storm surge they were about to get would completely swamp them. It would ride in on the standing floodwaters and sop everything in its tracks. By morning, they’d probably be able to go scuba diving through their living room, and that meant they had to hurry to get the last of their valuables upstairs.