Flesh Eaters (16 page)

They had decided not to move Ms. Hester. Her fever was still dangerously high and she was weak, and there seemed little point to removing her from Madison’s bed when she was already about as comfortable as she was likely to get.

Still, he had terrible thoughts about her dying in Madison’s bed.

He tried to reassure himself that she wasn’t going to die, that he was only torturing himself with the usual cruel fates one can’t seem to help envisioning for loved ones, but still, there was that voice in his head that just wouldn’t leave the thought alone. He kept coming back to it, the way the tongue continually returns to an injured tooth. What would happen if she really did die in here with them? Would Madison ever be able to sleep in here again? Would he expect her to?

Something big hit the house.

Jim glanced at Eleanor, who was holding Madison’s head against her chest. In the guttering candlelight, their faces had a yellowish tinge. They sat there for a long moment, stunned and frightened, watching each other and listening as the storm shook and battered their house.

The next instant they heard a prolonged ripping sound, like a wall being ripped away.

“Daddy,” Madison said, “what was that?”

He shook his head. Whatever it was—a tree limb or something—had almost certainly done some damage to the far side of the house. He could hear the wind pounding unnaturally over there, as though it had succeeded in opening up the house.

He glanced at Eleanor once again. She was frightened, he could see that immediately, and a part of himself that he didn’t like to own was thrilled by that fear. It gave him the chance to be the protector, for once.

“I’ll go check it out.”

“Jim, no!”

“It’ll be okay.” He stood up and gave her outstretched hand a squeeze. “I’ll be right back.”

He went down the hall and turned into the spare bedroom.

And there he froze.

The wind was very loud, like standing next to a jet engine. It had ripped a four-foot-long gash in the wall, and as he stood there in the doorway, he could feel it tugging on him, pulling him inside.

There were small tree limbs and leaves all over the floor, and the rain was swirling through the hole. Already it had puddled on the carpet. For years, they had been planning on turning this room into a craft room for Eleanor and Madison to share, and here and there soggy, colored pieces of Madison’s artwork clung to the walls and swirled in circles on currents of air.

A flash of lightning turned the room purplish-white, and in the lingering brightness that followed, he looked through the gash in the wall and could see a long ways down the south side of the block. Many of the houses over there were gone, nothing left but a wall or a roof tilting down into the floodwaters.

As he watched, the Beales’ house, two doors down from Ms. Hester’s, began to shake. He could see the roof trembling atop the walls like the lid on a kettle of boiling water, and then, with one sudden, ferocious snapping sound he could hear even over the roaring wind, the roof finally came loose and sailed free. It tumbled up into the air and was lost in the darkness and silvery blasts of rain.

Jim gasped.

My God
, he thought,
we were fools to stay. Our jobs be damned. They’re not worth this. They’re not worth gambling our lives on this. My God, preserve us please.

The next moment he felt Eleanor at his side. He put an arm around her and felt her shaking. Another blast of lightning lit the night, and in the flash he could see the tears on her cheeks.

“It’s all gone,” she said. “Everything. Gone.”

He pulled her close, only dimly aware that he was crying, too.

Later still, Eleanor opened her eyes, a little stunned that she could have fallen asleep while the storm was raging. Even now it echoed in her head.

Madison was sleeping in her lap. Her hair was damp with sweat and it had fallen in front of her face. Eleanor stroked her daughter’s bangs back from her eyes, and when Eleanor looked up, Jim was awake and watching her.

“You okay?” he whispered.

She nodded.

From the bed behind her, Eleanor heard Ms. Hester calling for water. Eleanor eased Madison’s head out of her lap and helped Ms. Hester drink from a plastic water bottle.

Ms. Hester was burning up and barely able to keep her eyes open, and she drifted back to sleep as Eleanor was sticking a baby thermometer into her ear.

“How is she?” Jim asked.

“Oh, Jesus,” Eleanor said. “Jim, she needs a doctor.”

“What is it?” he asked, nodding toward the thermometer.

“105.3.”

He whistled. “Damn.”

Eleanor put the thermometer back on the bedside table, wondering what she was supposed to do, if it was safe to move her.

From outside, she heard the sound of running water. She went down the hall to the craft room and looked out through the gash in the wall. The sky was a dirty white that made her think of dishwater. Still the sound of running water went on, even though there was no more rain, no wind. For a moment, she wondered if maybe a pipe had burst inside the walls. But she quickly dismissed that. The sound was bigger than a busted pipe, and anyway the water hadn’t worked in two weeks. As she stood there in the doorway, her mind went back to a camping trip they had taken two years before on the Red River. She had stood on the bank one morning, watching the huge majesty of the moving water, and she realized that was the same sound she was hearing now, the slow, relentless force of a great quantity of moving water.

Holding her breath, she advanced to the wall and looked down. She saw a wide expanse of water. It stretched off as far as she could see, only the tops of nearby houses and the canopies of trees visible.

The water was flowing around their house, moving to the north. But this was not the dark green murky water of Bays Bayou. This water was a greenish-gray, flecked with white foam, Gulf of Mexico water.

And it was rising quickly.

Her mind reeled at the implications. There seemed little doubt as to what had happened. The man from the National Hurricane Center had warned them two days ago that this might happen. Storm surges from Hector and Kyle had obliterated most of the natural barriers that kept Galveston and South Houston from disappearing under the sea. With those barriers gone, there was nothing to stop Mardel from pulling the ocean along with it. They had talked about the possibility that these storms might permanently change the geography of the Texas Coast, and now, it looked like that had actually happened. Eleanor was looking at high tide.

“Wow,” Jim said.

She looked back at him and managed to smile.

“Pretty incredible, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “There’ll be no coming back from this. That’s the Gulf of Mexico out there.”

“Well, you said you felt like you were stranded on a deserted island.”

He smiled and shook his head.

Then Eleanor glanced past him. Madison was standing in the hallway, and she looked frightened.

“Mom?”

“What is it, pumpkin?”

“It’s Ms. Hester. She’s in a lot of pain.”

“I know, baby. We need to get her to a doctor. I can’t do anything for her with what I’ve got here.”

Eleanor walked over to her and brushed the bangs out of her face again.

“I’m gonna try to raise somebody on my radio. You want to come with me?”

Jim and Madison followed Eleanor into the game room. Eleanor got her radio out of her gear bag and keyed it up. “Bravo eighty-three-fifty.” She smiled at Madison. “It’ll be okay, pumpkin.” Eleanor checked the radio. It was nearly fully charged. She keyed the radio again. “Bravo eighty-three-fifty to EOC.”

All she got was dead air.

“Why aren’t they answering?” Jim asked.

“I don’t know.” She switched channels to the SWAT frequency. “Bravo eighty-three-fifty, anybody on this side monitoring?”

“Maybe the EOC got knocked out.”

“That’s possible,” Eleanor said. “But that shouldn’t do anything to the radios. They’re on a multi-trunking system. Even if one tower goes out, another should be able to pick up the slack.”

Out of habit, she checked the display on the front of the radio. She was on the right channel, and she had plenty of battery life. She was starting to get worried.

“So what does that mean?” Jim asked.

It means I’m sending signals
, Eleanor thought,
there’s just nobody on the other end to answer.

Her gaze shifted from Jim to Madison.

“It’ll be okay,” Eleanor said to her. “I’ll keep trying.”

From somewhere downstairs, Eleanor heard the sound of splashing water. She looked up at Jim, and could tell by his expression he’d heard it, too. The sound continued and Eleanor had a chilling thought:
Someone’s in the house!

She picked up the Mossberg and racked a shell into the chamber.

“You two stay here,” she said, and went to the head of the stairs. There was a man standing down there, his features lost in the shadows, water dripping from his tattered clothes.

She thought:
Not right. He is all wrong
.

Then the figure stepped forward and she saw it was Bobby Hester. He looked like a drowned man. His shirt was nothing but a rag matted to his bone-skinny, meth addict’s body. His long hair was plastered to his face. There was an open wound on the right side of his chest that made him look as if somebody had tried to carve him open with a spoon.

Her first instinct was that he was dead.

Eleanor had seen many corpses during her time as a cop, and Bobby Hester—impossibly—looked exactly like a corpse. It was his eyes more than anything else that froze her there, unable to raise the shotgun. There was a dead vacancy in his eyes. The same vacancy she had seen looking up at her from traffic fatalities and murder victims.

Bobby raised his left hand and it thumped into the wall. He seemed unable to raise his right arm above his waist. A sickening moan welled up from within him and he started up the stairs toward her.

She thought:
This is not real. Not happening
. And then, in the same mental breath:
But it is. It is
.

“You need to leave, Bobby,” she said.

But Bobby didn’t stop.

He walked onward, his steps awkward, clumsy. He tripped and pitched forward, landing on his chin, then slowly pushed himself up and back onto his feet with his one good arm. Bobby was halfway up to her now.

“Bobby I’m gonna shoot you. Turn around and walk away.”

He reached for her, and his fingertips were white as a fish’s belly.
God help me
, she thought, and fired.

He was maybe eight feet from her. The shotgun blast hit the already-shredded flesh of his right shoulder and spun him backwards and around. He hit the wall and slid back down the stairs, smearing a long clotted trail of blood behind him.

She lowered the shotgun and put a hand over her mouth. Jesus, what had she done?

“Mommy!”

Madison’s scream jolted her back to the moment. She ran back to the game room. Jim was holding Madison in his arms, but he let her go when Eleanor appeared in the doorway.

“Mommy!”

Madison grabbed her around the waist, and Eleanor, who was too stunned to respond, let the shotgun’s muzzle dip to the floor.

“Eleanor?” Jim asked. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Bobby Hester,” she said. She glanced back toward the stairs. “I shot him.”

“What?” He ran forward, took the shotgun from her, and guided her to a chair. She dropped down into it. “Jesus, Eleanor, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

All she could do was shake her head no. “He didn’t look . . . right.”

“Did you kill him?”

She raised her gaze up to meet his and she thought:
No, he was already dead
. But instead she nodded slowly.

“I think so,” she said.

But even as she spoke she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Ms. Hester was at the door, walking stiffly toward the head of the stairs, her hands outstretched.

“Ms. Hester, no!” Jim said.

He jumped to his feet and ran after her, Eleanor following along right behind him.

When Eleanor rounded the doorway she stopped. Bobby Hester was already at the head of the stairs and walking toward his grandmother’s outstretched arms as if he meant to fall into her embrace.
It’s not possible,
she thought. But there he was, a walking corpse with his right arm hanging by a burned scrap of flesh, his eyes depthless and empty.

“Oh, Bobby,” Ms. Hester said.

She stumbled, and in that moment he was on her. Eleanor saw Bobby lunge forward, his mouth opening to reveal black, bloodstained teeth. He grabbed her wrist with his left hand and at the same time clamped his mouth down on the side of her face. Ms. Hester collapsed beneath him, grunting, screaming, her fists pounding against his shoulders. Bobby Hester went down on top of her. And for a prolonged moment Eleanor could do nothing but stand there, mouth agape, watching as Bobby tore into his grandmother’s face with his teeth, spraying blood everywhere.

It was the sound of flesh tearing that finally made her move. Bobby looked up at Eleanor and Jim and Madison with his dead-man eyes, and he had a great flap of bloody cheek skin hanging from his lips.

She didn’t waste another second.

Eleanor raised the Mossberg high over her head and slammed it down butt-first into Bobby’s forehead, knocking him to the ground.

“Get her out of here,” Eleanor yelled at Jim.

Jim darted under the shotgun, grabbed Ms. Hester by the arm, and pulled her back into Madison’s room.

Bobby had landed on his hurt right shoulder, but he never cried out. He gave no sign at all that he felt any pain. He climbed to his knees, and then to his feet. When he looked at her, his face streaked with blood from the gash on his forehead and the torn flesh hanging from his teeth, his eyes registered nothing.

She thought:
He’s nothing but a blank. He’s empty inside.

Eleanor pointed the shotgun at his chest, but he didn’t seem to register it. He raised his one good arm and starting clutching the air between them, and right before she pulled the trigger he uttered a sound that was like air moving through old pipes.