by Joe McKinney
There were structures to the left, and they seemed familiar. An AutoZone, a Mexican meat market, a CVS Pharmacy, all of them veering off at a forty-five-degree angle from Eleanor’s position. Wooden power-line poles tilted at odd angles, their cables sagging near to the water, and from the ragged line they made, she thought she had a pretty good idea of where they were.
“We need to head down that road there,” she said, and immediately realized how stupid she sounded. “That way, I mean. Where the road used to be.”
But Jim didn’t tease her. He just grunted and said, “Okay,” and paddled on.
He must really be tired, Eleanor thought. Poor guy hasn’t gotten any—
Eleanor wasn’t aware the black man in the tree was moving until he was already on them. She heard a rustle of leaves, the snap of tree limbs, a splash as he hit the water and tried to scramble over the side of the canoe. Water hit her in the face and she flinched, turning away from it. When she looked back again, she was staring straight down into a corpse’s face. The eyes were filmed over, a milky white. His skin had a gray, flabby appearance, as if it might slough right off the bone. His lips were cracked open, the teeth shattered and black with blood. And it really was a corpse’s face. There was no getting around that. She had locked eyes with him for only a second, but that was enough. She was sure of what she had seen. And she had just enough time to realize that she had been sure about Bobby Hester, too.
And Ms. Hester.
They were all corpses.
The black man groaned as he shot out of the water and into the canoe, his hands going all over Madison, whose screams were so loud they felt like ice picks jammed into Eleanor’s ears. Madison kicked him in the face, the heel of her tennis shoes smashing into the man’s mouth. Eleanor could hear his teeth snapping. She could see blood spurting across his face. And yet the man made no attempt to block her kicks. He didn’t seem to realize how badly his face was getting damaged. Instead, he just kept swiping at her, rocking the canoe wildly from side to side.
Eleanor tried to grab Madison and pull her back, but they were moving too much, pitching all over the place. She felt the boat rise beneath her, tilting, tilting, to one side, and she instinctively clamped a hand down on the gunwale to steady herself as the boat rolled over, tossing her headlong into the water.
She popped up immediately and looked around.
Jim was up by the bow, at the far end of the canoe from her. Eleanor saw him surface, swipe the water from his eyes, and spin around looking for her.
She couldn’t see Madison anywhere.
The cannibal—for that was what he must be, Eleanor realized, one of those cannibals—was still on his feet, though, and he was looking right at her.
“Madison,” Eleanor yelled. “Madison, where are you?”
She spun around wildly. She caught sight of Jim digging frantically at the water, but an impulse told her that he had no idea where Madison was, either.
“Madison? Madison?”
The cannibal growled.
The next instant, he was trying to climb over the capsized canoe in order to get at Eleanor, but the hull was slick with the oily floodwater and he slid off to one side. He tried again to scale over, and again he fell off. He was closer now to her end of the canoe, less than an arm’s length really, and yet he tried a third time to climb over the capsized canoe.
Why doesn’t he just go around? she thought. And somewhere in the back of her mind something clicked. She had asked exactly the right question. Not What in the hell’s wrong with him? but Why doesn’t he just go around? One step to the side and he could be right there in front of her, and yet he didn’t see it. He didn’t see the obvious. Why?
But the next instant the question was moot, for the stern of the boat tilted under the water, pushed down by his weight, and when he slipped off this time he was right in front of her, nothing between them.
He charged her.
“Get Madison out of here!” Eleanor shouted at Jim as the cannibal fell on top of her. She could smell the putrescence on his breath. She could feel the rubbery give of the flesh on his arms as she wrestled with him, holding him at arm’s length so he couldn’t bite her.
He was a lot bigger than Eleanor, but he was clumsy, his movements uncoordinated, and she managed to toss him to one side.
As the man went under the water, Eleanor’s muscle memory and training took over. At the police academy, the instructors preached the gunfighter’s gospel: Break contact, create distance, get your front sight on the target.
So she scrambled away from him, making sure not to lose sight of him, and reached down to her hip for her gun.
But it wasn’t there.
Where is it? The thought hung unanswered in her mind as a panicky wave of nausea filled her gut. And then, with an inward groan, she remembered. The gun had been digging into her ribs as she paddled the canoe. Despite the threat of cannibals, despite the tired but insistent voice in her head that told her she was making a mistake, she had slid the weapon from the waistband of her jeans and dropped it into the front pocket of her backpack, along with all her extra magazines.
Where it would be close, she thought bitterly, just in case I need it.
Now the backpacks were floating away from the canoe, carried by the sluggish current toward the line of bushes in front of the CVS Pharmacy. There was no way she could reach them now. The cannibal had his hands out in front of him, clutching at the air. The growl was gone. The sound crawling out of his throat now was an urgent, pitiful moan. The first two fingers on his right hand were bent back, obviously and horribly broken. As his other fingers reached for her, the two bent back ones hardly moved. All they could manage was a feeble twitching.
She had been backing away from the man, cowering really, but then her foot hit something hard under the water. It was like a gunshot going off in her mind. Suddenly everything was clear. The cannibal lunged for her, almost diving. She stepped nimbly to one side and the man found himself facedown in the water. He seemed momentarily confused by this, as though he was unable to process why his victim had suddenly disappeared, and under different circumstances, the way his face went slack and his mouth fell open would have been comical.
But for now, she was all business. Eleanor immediately jumped onto the man’s back, got a knee planted firmly between his shoulder blades, grabbed his hair with both hands, and pushed his face under the water.
He began to thrash.
His arms splashed frantically, though clumsily, at the water, like a man who thinks he’s a bird and might be able to fly away if he just flapped hard enough. She could feel his legs kicking against hers, his upper body convulsing as he gulped in water instead of air.
“Drown, you asshole,” she growled.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jim looking at her. Without letting go of the cannibal, she met Jim’s gaze. His face was a mask of horror and shock and helpless confusion. She couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like to be in his shoes right now, watching his wife intentionally drown a man while she snarled at him like an animal.
The cannibal spasmed once, twice, and then he went slack beneath her. She slid her knee off the man’s back, but didn’t let go of his hair.
“Eleanor,” Jim said. There was a curious sympathy in his voice.
She glanced at Jim again.
“He’s dead,” Jim said.
She looked down at the dark crown of hair just below the surface, saw the strands of it waving like seaweed between her fingers. Her knuckles were white. The muscles in her forearms were tensed so tightly they hurt, and she had to will herself to release her grip on the back of the man’s head.
Madison, she thought, and that did it for her.
She pushed the cannibal’s corpse away and said, “Where’s Madison?”
Suddenly Jim was at her side, his arms around her. She struggled against him, still screaming her daughter’s name, when he finally grabbed her shoulders and spun her around to face him.
“Where?”
He stepped away from Eleanor and slapped the hull of the capsized canoe.
“It’s okay, Madison. You can come out now.”
Delicate fingers curled up and around the gunwale, and the next instant, Madison’s head popped up from under the canoe.
A gasp leaked out of Eleanor’s throat that was part laugh, part absolute relief and joy. “Oh my God,” she managed to say, and then rushed for her daughter and wrapped her arms around her in a hug so tight it took both their breath away. “Oh my God,” she said again. “Madison, I thought . . . I thought . . . oh thank God you’re safe.”
“Mom,” Madison said. Her tone was full of protest, but she didn’t make any attempt to pull away.
Eleanor released her grip and held Madison away at arm’s length.
“Are you okay, sweetheart? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
Madison shook her head no. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Oh, thank God.”
Eleanor closed her eyes and let out a long sigh of relief. Her mind had been filled with such horrible thoughts of what that man might have done to her, and the fact that he’d had no time to do anything to her made little difference. We invent such nasty fates for the ones we really love, Eleanor thought. Why is that? Why do we punish ourselves so much?
The clatter of a metal fence brought her back to the moment.
She turned around and scanned the flooded ruins. About a hundred feet away a man was trying to pull his battered body over a chain-link fence, and Eleanor realized with a withering sort of horror that the man was a cannibal, like the one she’d just drowned.
He wore the remnants of a blue chambray shirt and khaki trousers that were flecked with green leaves and stained a reddish brown in places. It was blood, she realized coldly. And looking at his face she could see that he had fed recently. His chin and cheeks and hair were slathered with clotted blood. Even at a distance she could see that one eye had been gouged out. He poked his fingers through the diamond-shaped holes in the fence and started to climb. His movements were awkward and labored, but it only took him a few moments to reach the top, and when he did he let out a moan that sent shivers down Eleanor’s back.
The sound carried over the water. There was a chilling rhythm to it, like the steady rise and fall of a large crowd heard from a distance. And then, from off to her right, she heard an answering moan.
She turned, and saw three more human train wrecks, up to their waists in water, shambling toward her. A short distance from them, the figure of a woman emerged from the broken windows of a storefront, her bruised face turning slowly until she zeroed in on Eleanor.
“There’s more of them over here,” Jim said.
Eleanor didn’t have to ask where. They were surrounded. The late-afternoon air was filling up with an almost desperate chorus of moans, and Eleanor realized with deepening despair and fear that they were calling to each other.
They’re ringing the dinner bell, she thought.
“We need to do something quick,” Jim said.
“Into the boat,” Eleanor answered him. “Everybody, into the canoe.”
Hurriedly, they righted the canoe, and Madison and Eleanor climbed in. Jim grabbed the short rope they’d tied to the stem post on the bow and pulled them along. The oars had floated along with the current, headed in the same direction as the backpacks, and when Jim reached the first of them he scooped it up and tossed it back to Eleanor.
The moaning cannibals were all around them now, emerging from nearly every yawning doorway and from behind every building. Eleanor turned around on her seat, scanning the ruins in utter dismay. Where had they all come from? The area had been completely deserted just moments before, and now, they were everywhere. Had all this really stemmed from that one man moaning as he scaled the fence? Was such a thing possible?
Briefly, a memory surfaced in her mind. She’d been a young patrol officer at the time, working nights in Houston’s Fifth Ward. One blisteringly hot summer night, while on routine patrol, she’d rounded a corner and seen a group of three teenagers arguing on the curb. Their voices were loud, but indistinct. She couldn’t make out what was said, only the anger with which the words were yelled. Then, suddenly, one of the boys had taken two lurching stagger-steps backwards, his hands flying up in front of his face. As he turned away there was a flash and the sound of three gunshots. He stumbled into the street, bent over, and collapsed not twenty feet from her front bumper.
The two boys on the curb stared at her, their eyes huge in the glare of her patrol car’s spotlights. One of them raised his pistol at her, but the other was already turning to run. He grabbed his friend by the shirt and pulled him after him.
By the time Eleanor got her car in park and scrambled out of it, the two were already gone.
And the third young man was dying.
She knelt down next to him and tried to talk to him, but all he could do was gulp air like a fish out of water. He died right there, on the pavement, as she was calling for EMS and backup.
But it was what happened afterwards that came to her mind now, for when she’d looked up from the dead boy’s blood-spattered face, she’d seen that the sidewalks on both sides of the street were filling with people. They watched her, their expressions impassive, unmoved by the tragedy in front of them, and as her gaze shifted from one to the next to the next, she thought: It’s the middle of the night. Where did all you folks come from? How did it happen? The street was deserted just a moment ago. Where did you all come from?
There was, she guessed, a certain magnetic quality to violence. People flocked to it like moths to a bare electric bulb. They fed off it somehow, even as it drained some vital quality from their souls and dulled their senses.
Maybe that was what was happening here, she thought, as she watched the cannibals closing in on them.
“Jim, get in the boat. Hurry!”
The moaning crowd was getting ever closer. The man in the blue chambray shirt had made it over the chain-link fence and was less than thirty feet away now.
Close enough she could smell him.
“Hurry!” she said again.
But Jim had found the other oar and was already pulling himself into the canoe. He dropped down onto the seat and without another word he dug into the water with his oar, really stabbing at it.
Eleanor joined him, and they moved off at a snail’s pace, following the current. Ahead of them was what had been a wide, four-lane road. It was full of people now, all of them splashing as fast as they were able toward the little canoe. Eleanor saw a new U-shaped building off to their right. It looked to be two stories high, glass all the way around, encircled by a wraparound balcony.
An office park, she thought. This part of town had been on the rebound before the storms, a lot of new development in the area.
“Take us over there to the right,” Eleanor said.
“Where?” Jim asked, looking around at her.
“Over there.”
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
“Look at the light poles. The water looks deeper over there. They’ll have to swim to follow us.”
“Got it,” he said.
They paddled toward the building, but they were going across the current now, and their progress was slower. The cannibal in the blue chambray shirt was nearly on them now. Another four or five steps and he’d be close enough to topple the boat.
“Mommy!” Madison screamed, and flinched away from the man.
Her movement set the canoe rocking wildly, and Eleanor had to grab her by her arm hard to settle the canoe. At the same time she raised her oar over her head and brought it down hard on the cannibal’s outstretched hand. The oar connected with his knuckles with a crunch of bone, but the man never cried out. Instead, he turned slowly to Eleanor and tilted his bloody face to one side. Then, with his other hand, he reached out for her.
Eleanor raised the oar again, but before she could bring it down, the man’s head burst open, and bits of bone and skin and lumps of his scalp splatted onto the water beside him.
Eleanor blinked at him.
For a second, her mind wouldn’t wrap around what had just happened.
The cannibal, for his part, seemed unaware he’d just been killed. His face never changed expression. The bloody grimace that had turned his mouth into such an object of horror never relaxed. With no emotion of any kind, he slowly sank into the water, like a marionette whose strings had just been cut.
Confused, Eleanor looked at Jim, but he was clearly as confused as she was.
“What happened?” he said.
Her gaze went past him, fixing on a figure who was standing on the wraparound balcony of the office park. He was waving at them, a rifle in his hands.
“Is that . . . ?” Jim asked.
“Yeah,” Eleanor said, a smile creeping across her face as she took in the wiry country boy with the boonie cap pushed high up on his forehead, away from his sunglasses. “That’s Hank Gleason.”
CHAPTER 11
The water was deeper around the building, which, Eleanor could see from a cream-colored granite wall near the entrance to the parking lot, was called the Meadowlakes Business Park. Eleanor looked down as they entered the lake that had once been the building’s parking lot, and though the water was a dark gray and cloudy with silt and debris, she could still see the ghosts of cars down there.
She chanced a look behind her.
The crowd that had been closing in on them was struggling with the deeper water. Many were drowning as they tried to follow them. But there were many more gathering beyond the entrance, maybe a hundred total now, and their moans had become truly awful, rising to a deafening roar that seemed to echo off every building at once.
“Why won’t they leave us alone?” Madison screamed. “Leave us alone!”
Eleanor turned back to her daughter and saw that Madison’s face had turned an ashen white. Her eyes were wide, crazy looking, shiny and bloodshot. Beads of sweat had popped out all over her face, and the green T-shirt she wore was dark and wet at the neck and underarms. Her expression was one of utter despair and rage and exhaustion.