Flesh Eaters (15 page)

“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 only 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.

They went up and down the stairs in a rush, lugging boxes and pictures and the last of the food and fresh water from the pantry. Jim was still acting strangely distant, giving her the silent treatment, but she didn’t have time to get it into with him. There was just too much to do and not enough time to do it in. It was the cop in her that allowed her to ignore his moods and push on with the job at hand, even though the woman in her wanted desperately to get him to say something, anything.

She was hauling the last of their family photo albums up the stairs when the shutters started to rattle. Eleanor put the albums down on the table in the upstairs hallway and listened. They were getting the first sustained winds. It wasn’t gusting anymore, but coming on in a slow rumble, and she had the strangest feeling, as if she was standing in a passenger jet struggling to lift off the runway.

She went in to Madison’s room.

Ms. Hester had never really managed to shake her fever, so they brought her into Madison’s room and let her sleep on the bed in there. She was sleeping fitfully now, Madison sitting on a chair next to her, mopping her face with a wet towel.

“How’s she doing?” Eleanor asked.

Madison frowned.

“Not so good, Mom. She’s been asleep for the last few hours, but she keeps waking up. And I’ve heard her mumbling a few times. She says she’s cold all the time.”

Eleanor saw the battery-operated thermometer on the nightstand next to the bed. “What’s her temp?”

“101.3, last time I took it. That was about ten minutes ago.”

“It’s been high for a while.”

“Three days.”

Not good
, Eleanor thought.

“Okay, anything else?”

“I’ve been treating the fever with Motrin and Tylenol, alternating them every six hours like you told me to. She won’t eat, but I’ve been able to get her to drink plenty of water, plenty of Gatorade, for the electrolytes. Dad went over to her house and got some of the Ensure from her kitchen and I’ve been giving her that, but it’s not really a substitute for eating, you know?”

They hadn’t realized it at the time, but when Eleanor pulled her out from beneath her bed, Ms. Hester had cut her left arm on the bed frame. The cut was deep, and Eleanor had been forced to use her first-aid kit to stitch it up. Madison had been a big help to her then, distracting Ms. Hester from the pain while simultaneously handing Eleanor the needed supplies, and together they had done a pretty good job. But the wound hadn’t really healed since then. Despite their best efforts, it was almost certainly infected. Eleanor just hoped it wasn’t something really bad, like staph.

“What about the cut?”

“No change. I’ve been giving her the antibiotics you got for her, but . . .”

Madison trailed off with a shrug.

“Is it still seeping?” Eleanor asked.

“Yeah. It doesn’t smell very good, either. I’ve been keeping it clean like you showed me, but it’s not healing. I’m kind of worried what’ll happen when we run out of bandages. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it clean.”

“We’ve got a ton of bandages,” Eleanor said.

“Umm, not really,” Madison answered.

“What do you mean? I had a whole case of them in the family disaster kit.”

“Yeah, I know. But she goes through them really fast. She’s been sweating so much lately. Every time I check the bandages they’re filthy from all the sweat.”

Ms. Hester groaned, and Madison turned to her. Eleanor watched as her daughter expertly mopped the older woman’s forehead. When Madison was done she got a bottle of water from the nightstand and tilted it to Ms. Hester’s lips.

When Eleanor had left for work eleven days ago, Madison had been a girl with posters of boy bands on her wall and stuffed animals in her bed. But now, here she was, the stuffed animals casually thrown to the floor, caring like a trained nurse for the woman who had been, in many ways, her grandmother. How did such a thing happen? How did it happen so quickly, and without Eleanor seeing any of it?

“Mom, you okay?”

Eleanor sniffled and tried to smile. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? Why are you rubbing your eyes? Are you crying? Ms. Hester’s gonna be okay. We just got to keep her hanging on until after this storm blows over.”

Eleanor nodded.

“You’re right, sweetie. You stay here with Ms. Hester, okay? I’m gonna go help Daddy get the last of our things upstairs.”

“Okay.”

Eleanor turned to go, but Madison stopped her as she reached the door.

“Mom, are we okay here?”

Eleanor turned her gaze to the top of the dresser next to the door. There was a little makeup mirror there. In it, she could see her reflection, and the face that looked back at her was dark with exhaustion.

“It’s gonna be a bad storm,” she said. “Maybe the worst one we’ve seen. But I think we’re gonna be okay. The house may flood, but we’ll be safe up here on the top floor.”

“I know that, Mom. I was . . .”

Madison trailed off.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“The last couple nights, when I’ve been staying up with Ms. Hester, I’ve been hearing stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know. Stuff. Outside. People, I guess. I can hear them moaning. Sometimes it’s so loud I get scared. It’s a horrible sound. I . . . I can’t really describe it. But it’s like they’re scared and angry and . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t sound natural. Are we okay up here, Mom? Nobody’s gonna try to . . .”

“To what?”

“Well, get us. Are they?”

Outside, the rain was starting to come down hard. Eleanor listened to it whipping against the windows before she answered.

“Nobody’s gonna get us, sweetie. Your Daddy and I, we’re gonna be right here with you.”

“But there is somebody out there. Bad people. I’ve heard it on your police radio. They say people are eating each other.”

Eleanor tried to swallow, but couldn’t quite manage it. She was having a nasty case of déjà vu, her mind turning back to the meeting at the EOC and Captain Shaw lying to Joe Schwab about the cannibalistic attacks they’d seen. Christ, what was she supposed to say? How do you answer your daughter’s questions about people eating each other?

“We’re gonna be okay here,” Eleanor said. “I believe that.”

Madison nodded.

Eleanor went to the game room. Jim wasn’t there and Eleanor was relieved. Just a few minutes earlier she’d been looking for a chance to talk to him, but not now. Right now there was a nuclear bomb of a headache waiting to detonate just behind her eyes, and she needed a moment.

Lifting her shirt, she removed her Glock 22 from her waist and put it on the bumper pool table they’d pushed into the corner. It was her weapons table now, stacked with extra magazines for the Glock and for her Colt AR-15A3. There were boxes of ammunition, too. Leaning against the wall next to the table were the AR-15 and her Mossberg 500 twelve gauge. She looked from one to the other and finally settled on the twelve gauge. Then she took a box of 00 shot from the table and fed five shells into the Mossberg’s magazine tube. The shotgun felt heavy, solid, reliable. She muttered a silent prayer that she wouldn’t need it.

“I heard you in there,” Jim said from behind her.

Eleanor sighed, then put the Mossberg on the table and turned around.

“Are you talking to me now?”

“I never stopped talking to you.”

She huffed at him.
Seriously?
she thought.
Seriously?
She couldn’t believe it. This was just like him, so damn passive-aggressive.

“Ever since I got home you’ve been acting like I’ve done something wrong. What is it? Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said.

“It sure seems like it. Jim, if there’s something wrong . . .”

“I’m mad, okay. Yes, I’m mad. Just . . . not at you. It’s not your fault. I’m mad at all this . . . this . . . goddamn it. I’m sick of being locked up in this house. I’m going out of my head here. Eleven days now. Every couple of hours I go to the door and I look out and all I see is fucking water. It’s like I’m trapped on a goddamn island. At least you get to go out and see something besides the inside of our house.”

“Jim, that’s not fair. I have to work. I don’t get—”

“I’m not upset at you, Eleanor. I know you have to work. I know you’ve been burning yourself up. I know that. Trust me, I get it. This isn’t about you, okay? It’s me. It’s just me being stupid. I hear you talking to Madison about those attacks we’ve been hearing about on the radio, all those people eating each other, and I feel like I should be doing something. You know? I feel like I’m just wasting away, like I’m worthless.”

“I know,” she said, but even as she spoke Eleanor sensed that he was dealing with a level of frustration she couldn’t really get her mind around.

Until recently, she’d enjoyed her canoe trips back and forth from the EOC. There had been a peacefulness that came from gliding through the flooded ruins of the city that had recharged her mental batteries. He hadn’t had that opportunity, and it surprised her how willing her heart was to open up for him after only moments before lashing out at him for being a passive-aggressive boor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Jim, I didn’t even think about how isolated you and Madison would be here. Jesus, I should have thought of that. I spent weeks planning what we’d need in the family disaster kit, and it never even occurred to me that the worst part of it would be the isolation. I’m sorry.”

He walked over to her and put his arms around her.

“We’re gonna get through this,” he said. “We’re all right.”

She pressed her face into his chest and then recoiled.

“What?” he said.

“You kinda stink,” she said. “You need a bath.”

“You and me both,” he said, and hugged her tightly once more.

Later that night, during the worst part of the storm, Jim knelt on the floor of Madison’s room with his wife and daughter. Ms. Hester was in the bed next to them, her groaning barely audible over the wind and rain. Outside the house the storm rumbled and howled, flashes of lightning coming through the gaps around the edges of the plywood boards that covered the windows and bathing the room in a purplish-white light. To Jim, it felt as if the wind were an avalanche coming down all around them . . . so constant, so powerful . . . it seemed to be trying to lift the house into the air.