by Joe McKinney
In the end it was the sound of his voice, his growling, that stopped the blows. “Why do you gotta be like her?” he’d heard himself screaming. “You saw what drinking did to her. Why you gotta be like Mom? Got off the fucking floor, you goddamn disgusting fucking drunk.”
Anthony stood there, looking down at Brent, a cowering, dumb giant who was bleeding from his lips and nose, and then he looked at his own right hand, the hand that only seconds before had been a relentless, merciless weapon. Brent’s blood was on Anthony’s palm. But it wasn’t the blood that Anthony saw. His gaze was turned inward, and backward, over the years. In his mind he saw his mother, who, like Brent, had drunk her way into a useless oblivion, and Anthony found himself wondering if, in his mind at least, it had been his mother that he was slapping.
Yes, it had been.
He couldn’t deny that, not now that he had spoken the words. That was where the rage was. Not here. It wasn’t focused on what Brent had become, but on the example that had set him up for self-destruction. He felt the truth wrap around his heart like a cold, wet fog, and he was ashamed of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Brent.
But Brent still wouldn’t look directly at him. I hurt him bad, Anthony thought. Oh Jesus, I hurt him and I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. Oh Jesus, please help me.
He extended his bloody hand to Brent, and in Anthony’s mind, Brent wouldn’t take it because he was scared. They were acting out the roles their parents had played growing up, one the drunk, the other relentlessly violent, and then just as relentlessly repentant. Brent sees that, Anthony thought, realizes the drama they’re repeating, and it terrifies him.
But Anthony was wrong.
Perhaps on some subconscious level those things were playing out in Brent’s mind, moving like slow currents beneath a frozen lake, but the real demon that had locked him up and driven him down into the bottle was in fact nothing more complex than a drunkard’s shame and self-loathing. Anthony did not know it at the time, and would only learn the vaguest details of it later that night, but while Anthony and his father were shooting the zombies in the EOC, Brent had been looking for a place to hide. He’d already seen a few of the infected and made the mental leap that enabled him to acknowledge them as zombies.
Trembling with fear, he’d wandered through the uninhabited parts of the campus, looking for a place to hide and drink. He’d rounded a corner, and almost walked smack dab into the middle of four zombies who were wrestling a young girl of perhaps ten or eleven down to the ground. That part of the campus had, for the most part, stayed above the water level, and Brent had been lost in the squishing his boots made in the spongy grass when he heard the girl cry out.
He’d looked up, and there she’d been, one hand outstretched as the four tore at her clothes with their teeth and nails.
“Please!” she’d screamed at him. “Please, mister, help me!”
And Brent had just stood there, unable to make himself move.
“Please!” the girl screamed again.
Brent did move that time. He took a few steps back. His breath was whistling in his ears now, his heart beating painfully against the walls of his chest. His mind was screaming at him to turn and run. The little girl seemed to realize at the same time as Brent that he would be doing nothing to help her, and for just a moment, all her terror left her, and the look on her face changed to one of shocked abandonment and disbelief.
“Please!” she screamed again.
But if she said anything after that it was lost as the zombies huddled over her. Her pleas degenerated into inarticulate grunts and screams. None of the zombies noticed Brent. He was still backing away, shaking his head, slapping his hands over his ears as he tried to block out the sound of the girl’s pain and the wet, tearing noises the zombies made as they ripped her open and fed.
And, improbably, at that moment, the one clear thought that Brent could muster was not of the horrible tragedy playing out before him, or even of his own impotent response, but of that day he’d appeared before the chief’s Accident Advisory Board and Captain Macklin had asked him, “What the fuck’s going on with you? How’d you get like this?”
That memory and the shame it dredged up had been behind the look on Brent’s face as Anthony stood above him, his hand outstretched, trying to offer compassion. In the end Anthony had been forced to scoop his older brother up and half walk, half carry him out the door. They’d met up with Jesse Numeroff down by the loading docks, and Jesse had taken one look at Brent and said, “No. No fucking way. He’s so drunk he can’t even . . .”
But Jesse had trailed off.
He’d taken one look at the emotional weather brewing in Anthony’s eyes and he’d quickly realized the wisdom of keeping silent on the matter. He’d taken a step back and watched as Anthony dropped Brent down into the front of their bass boat. And when Anthony looked up at him and said, “Well, you coming?” he had only nodded.
Several hours later, while Mark Eckert was fighting his way into the EOC so he could say his farewells to his parents and, unwittingly, become an Internet sensation, the quick little errand that Anthony and Brent and Jesse Numeroff had started out on soon turned into a rolling firefight through a flooded version of hell.
The trouble started as they entered what appeared to be a deserted housing project. The project’s cinder-block walls, though scrawled with graffiti, had survived the storms. Only the doors and windows were gone. Water coursed through them, so that as they glided by, they could see straight through many of the buildings.
“Do you hear that?” Brent said.
He was sitting in the bow of the boat, where Anthony had put him before they left. The city around them had grown eerily quiet almost as soon as they pulled away from the campus, and when that happened, Brent had become jumpy, taking on the frightened wariness of a small animal
Jesse had gone to the back of the boat because he was disgusted by him, but even with the length of the boat between them, he could barely disguise his contempt.
“Dude, would you shut up?” he said. “Christ, you make me sick.”
“But I heard something,” Brent repeated. His voice was small, uncertain.
Anthony was driving the boat and Jesse nudged him with the toe of his boot. “Can you make him shut the fuck up, please?” There was anger in his voice now, above and beyond the contempt.
Anthony stared back at Jesse without speaking.
Then he looked forward to where Brent huddled against the bow. Brent looked as if he were trying to make himself invisible.
Anthony fetched up a deep sigh, and had someone told him that the gesture was an uncanny duplication of his father when confronted with matters he thought beneath his consideration, he would not have been surprised.
“Just give it a rest, Jesse,” he finally said.
“But—”
“I said, give it a rest. You’re not helping.”
The argument stopped there, for at that moment, as they glided past the end of one of the tenements and into the area that had been a parking lot just a few days earlier, they saw a nearly naked woman kneeling in the bed of a pickup. She looked up at them, and there was blood all over her filthy face. Her hair was matted with it. In her right hand she held what remained of a small black dog’s back leg.
Slowly, she rose to her feet and dropped the leg.
The remnants of the light-colored dress she’d worn were hanging from her hips in tatters. Her breasts, small and streaked with sooty grime, rose slightly as she raised her arms in the familiar clutching gesture of the infected. Despite the gore that covered her, and the knowledge of what she was, Anthony found himself glancing at her erect nipples.
Behind her, coming up quickly through the flooded parking lot, was a man whose right arm had been eaten away. His face bore a look of shock and empty horror unlike any Anthony had ever seen. A deep cut across his forehead appeared to have been opened with a swiping motion, as though someone had been tr
ying to scratch his way into his skull with their fingernails. But it was the arm that drew Anthony’s attention. It had been chewed off below the elbow and the bones inside shattered. A momentary image of some zombie greedily sucking the marrow from the ruined, severed part of the arm forced Anthony to close his eyes and mentally recollect himself.
From the front of the boat Brent let out a pitiful groan, and that was enough to connect a circuit inside Anthony’s mind.
When he opened his eyes, he was all business.
He pulled his pistol and shot the woman in the head, dropping her to the bed of the pickup even as a chunk of her scalp flew away behind her.
Then he centered his front sight on the chest of the one-armed zombie and fired. The man let out a gasp of air, as though he’d been punched in the gut, but he didn’t go down.
“No,” Brent groaned. He was holding his ears, his body curled into a fetal posture. “No, no, no.”
Anthony took a breath, then resighted his weapon on the man’s bleeding forehead.
His next shot made the zombie’s head snap back, and he sagged into the water.
Anthony scanned his surroundings, checking for more threats. The noise of gunfire had attracted a few others, and they were moaning, the sounds echoing off the cinder-block walls of the tenement, but they were out of pistol range and so Anthony holstered his weapon.
In the bow of the boat, Brent was now rocking back and forth, muttering to himself. He would be almost useless from here on out, Anthony realized. Best to just leave him where he was, where he couldn’t do any damage.
He turned back to Jesse, who had pulled out their AR-15 guns while Anthony was shooting the two zombies.
“I can get those zombies over there by the gas station, no problem,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, and then what?” Anthony asked.
He looked up at the sky.
It was getting dark fast, but even in the low light he could see more and more of the infected emerging from the surrounding buildings.
“Hold your fire. I want to try to stay mobile as long as we can. But keep those rifles handy. I’m pretty sure we’re gonna need ’em.”
Eleanor ran back inside the building, Jim right on her heels, and started looking for Madison. The room was lit only by a few guttering candles, throwing most of the room into shadows. She could make out about two dozen figures dozing on cots, none of them with sheets because it was hot and damp inside here.
“Where is she?” Eleanor demanded.
“Over there,” Jim said, and pointed toward the far wall.
“Madison!” Eleanor shouted. “Madison, get up.”
Most of the Red Cross volunteers had been trying to sleep, but now they were sitting up on their cots, blinking at her. More than a few of them were grumbling at being rousted.
In the dim gloom Eleanor made out her daughter’s face. She was blinking sleepily, and as Eleanor closed the distance between them, she could see the bloodshot haze of recent tears in her daughter’s eyes, her puffy cheeks, her red nose.
“Mom?”
Eleanor knelt down next to Madison and pushed the sweat-matted bangs from her face.
“I need you to come with us, right now? We’re not safe here.”
“Why? What is it? Did something happen?”
“Yes, sweetheart. We’re in trouble. There are more of those people outside.”
Madison got up from the cot so quickly she nearly knocked Eleanor over. She was wearing a baggy T-shirt she’d borrowed from one of the Red Cross folks, but they hadn’t been able to replace her jeans. Those were still soaking wet.
“You mean those . . . zombies?” she asked. She too could barely bring herself to say the word.
Eleanor nodded. “Come on, Madison. We gotta go.”
Hank was standing there when they turned around. Behind him, most of the Red Cross volunteers were looking on, their faces reflecting confusion and irritation.
“Ma’am, what’s going on?” he asked.
“Hank, the water out there. It’s getting to be low tide. It’s down to about six feet right outside the building.”
She saw his face harden at once.
“How many did you see?”
“I don’t know. It’s dark out there. I saw thirty or forty, but . . .”
“Yeah, there’s probably more.”
He turned to the Red Cross volunteers, all of whom were watching him fixedly now, waiting for instructions.
“All right, listen up, people. We may have some bad company here real soon. I hope you packed your gear when I told you to, ’cause we may have to cut out here real fast.”
He pointed to two of the volunteers.
“Frank, you and Jason check the south point over there. Try to get me an accurate count. The rest of you just hang tight.”
He turned then and moved for the door.
“Where are you going?” Eleanor asked.
“I’m gonna check the east side of the building over here. Try to see what we’re dealing with.”
“Hank, we have to leave here. Right now.”
“Sergeant Norton, with all due respect, ma’am, there’s only one stairwell leading up to this level, and I blocked that off with so much furniture those zombies’ll need blasting gear to get through it. We’re safe for right now.”
“Like hell,” she said. “Hank, that junk on the stairs will stop one or two of them as long as they’re over their heads in water, but there’s a whole mess of ’em out there now.”
And at that moment a low moan rose up from the night outside.
They heard a crash from the other side of the building.
Hank glanced that way; then he scooped up his AR-15 that was leaning next to the front door.
“Everybody hang tight,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”
Jim came up next to Eleanor and touched her hand as Hank disappeared out the door. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“We’ll let him scout it out. When he gets back, we’ll figure out what to do.”
“So, you trust this guy? He knows what he’s doing?”
“Yeah.” She turned then and looked at her husband. He was nervous. She could hear his breath whistling through his nostrils, but he had his other arm around Madison’s shoulder, and if she had doubts of their chances before, the sight of the two of them together gave her all the reassurance she needed. They were going to get through this. “Hank’s got it under control. He’s dumb as a bag of rocks in most things, but when the bullets start flying, he’s the best there is.”
“That’s good to hear,” Jim said. “Because I think we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”
The sky was ribbed with lightning, and thunder echoed over the desolate ruins. Behind the wheel of the bass boat, Anthony Shaw stared into a drizzling rain, into the dark, and was worried. The rain would cover the noise of splashes, which the zombies couldn’t seem to avoid making, and it cut visibility down to almost nothing. They were moving through uncertain waters now, surrounded by countless ruined buildings, weighed down by the knowledge they were being watched from every busted window, every darkened doorway.
Anthony had slowed the boat to a crawl. There was no sense in blindly racing around a corner and finding themselves in the middle of a crowd of zombies, something that had come dangerously close to happening twice already. But with the money so close, it took every bit of self-control he could muster. He fought down the urge to dig into the throttle and instead coasted forward through the rain, tense and watchful. Soon all this would be behind them.
He glanced forward to where Brent was sitting. He was no longer rocking back and forth in that oddly disturbing way that made him look like an autistic child in the middle of a meltdown, and from the dull light in his eyes Anthony guessed that some of the shine was wearing off his drink, but he still seemed too scared and too fragile for a man his size.
Behind Anthony, Jesse was quietly watching the ruins on either side of the boat, ready to fire if needed
. It had been on Anthony’s mind a lot lately about what would happen to the three of them after this was all over, and while he was worried about Brent, he had no doubt that Jesse would come out on top. Jesse was a cat. He’d land on his feet no matter what.
Anthony was still contemplating their future when, a few minutes later, a boat resolved itself out of the rainy gloom ahead. Instantly, the hairs went up on the back of Anthony’s neck. The boat was floating silently on the current, drifting towards them, while a figure staggered around by the controls.
Anthony resisted the urge to hail him. They’d seen far too many of the infected in these buildings, and with the tide at its lowest, those zombies could conceivably wade out to them and climb into the boat.
As the other boat drew closer Anthony saw that his instincts had been correct. The man on board was a zombie. Had to be. Anthony didn’t need to see the blood oozing from where the man’s left ear had been to see that. The vacant, yet insatiably hungry, look in the man’s eyes told him all he needed to know.
The zombie saw them at the same time Anthony spotted him, and for a moment, the zombie seemed uncertain of what to do. Then he climbed over the seats, stood as far up in the bow as he could get, and extended his hands outward as he began to moan.
The sound carried quickly, and as Anthony sat there behind the wheel, he could see heads popping up in the windows all around them. Soon moan was answering unto moan as the cries echoed back and forth.
“Shit,” Jesse said, “they’re calling each other out.”
“Yeah,” Anthony said, turning around slowly. He could see about twenty of the infected making their way into the flooded street, and what had been nothing but empty ruins moments before did not feel so empty anymore.
“We got to shut him up,” Jesse said, and before Anthony could stop him, Jesse raised his AR-15 and fired a single round at the zombie on the boat. The shot hit the man square in the forehead and threw him back against the pilot’s windscreen, his head falling back over his shoulders in a posture that made him look like an exhausted man finally at rest.