Flesh Eaters (21 page)

Madison scrunched up her nose in that uniquely teenager way of expressing complete revulsion with the world of grown-ups. “That’s gross,” she said, and tossed the Marlboros back in the front pocket of her pack.

But Jim’s medicine had been her greatest coup. The city’s insurance had given her hell about buying a three months’ supply of Diovan, and she’d given it right back to them. “Why,” she argued, “do you train me in disaster preparedness—a basic tenet of which makes it plain that you should have a long-term supply of prescription drugs on hand at all times—and then tell me that I can only buy thirty days at a time?”

In the end, it had been the pharmacy that finally gave in. “You want a three months’ supply?” they’d said. “Fine. But you have to buy it on your own. Your insurance won’t budge.”

She’d paid the extra money, and at the time had been aware of how paranoid she must have seemed. But she certainly didn’t feel silly about it right now. Glancing around at the submerged houses, the traffic lights dipping like low-hanging fruit toward the floodwaters, she was feeling anything but silly. As a matter of fact, she was basking in the righteous glow of vindication.

“Hey, Eleanor,” Jim said, “you got that bug spray or what?”

His voice snapped her back into the moment. She had her hand jammed down into her backpack, and it occurred to her that she had no idea how long she’d been sitting there like that.

“Here it is,” she said, and tossed it up to him. “Madison, you need to put some on, too, okay?”

Madison said nothing. She hadn’t moved since they’d left the house, except to swat at a mosquito or two. Her shoulders were still sagging forward, her brown hair covering her face like a curtain. Eleanor watched the gentle rise and fall of her body under her shirt as she breathed, and she was pretty sure Madison was sobbing.

Jim put his hand on Madison’s knee and gave it a gentle shake. “Hey, sweetheart, you okay?”

Madison suddenly lunged forward and buried her face in Jim’s chest.

“Hey,” he said, his eyes going wide with momentary surprise. “You’re okay, sweetheart. We all are.” He gave Eleanor a perplexed look, a
What am I supposed to do now?
look, and then finally put his arm around her and let her cry.

Over the past two weeks, Eleanor had made countless canoe trips between her house and the EOC. It usually took about three hours to make it one way.

But that was before cannibals started appearing in the ruins.

Now, as they paddled their way toward the EOC, they’d see dim figures moving through the endless piles of wrecked houses and jumbled piles of vehicles, stepping out from beneath the eaves of houses, staggering toward them. And always ceaselessly moaning.

There were only a few, at first. But as Eleanor and her family moved north, gliding through the debris fields, they saw more and more people staggering around aimlessly, stumbling after them whenever the canoe got too close.

The residential areas were the worst.

In some places, the moaning was so loud, so disconcerting, that Madison had screamed, her hands clapped over her ears, until she broke down sobbing.

Eleanor and Jim rarely spoke. A hush fell over them and it seemed dangerous somehow to speak. They watched the people who crashed out of doorways and stared at them as they floated by, and though it was impossible to know whether they were changed in the same way that Bobby Hester had been changed—that Ms. Hester, too, had been changed, Eleanor reminded herself—she’d hear them moan and the hairs would stand up on the back of her neck nonetheless.

And so Eleanor and her family kept moving east, off their intended course, away from the dead eyes staring back at them from the ruins. It still seemed ludicrous to her that she was being forced to avoid cannibalism that was, for all intents and purposes, contagious, but there it was.

And here they were, getting farther and farther off course.

Jim pushed the floating dead man away from the canoe, his paddle slipping off the man’s shoulder and striking his skull right behind the ear with a wet thud.

“Eww,” Madison groaned.

They had seen quite a few bodies in the last hour or so. They’d seen a lot of dead dogs and rats and cats and raccoons and even a big brown cow. Death, in fact, was all around them.

They were coming up through the Second Ward now, and a lot of the houses here had fared badly during Mardel’s storm surge. In some places, they’d actually been uprooted from the ground and tossed together, one on top of another, like football players going for a fumble. In some of the houses, Eleanor could hear dogs howling out their hunger and their fear.

But the wailing of animals wasn’t the only sound they heard. Here and there, amid the rubble, they could hear the voices of people, weak and muffled, but still insistent, as they cried out for rescue.

And there was another sound, too. A thin, solitary moaning that was not one of pain, or loneliness, or despair, but something else. Something that sent a bone-deep shudder through Eleanor’s body and raised the gooseflesh on her arms.

Eleanor scanned the ruined houses and saw nothing but bodies floating facedown in the water, their backs matted with wet garbage.

“Why?” Madison said. Her voice was small and remote, almost a whisper.

“What did you say, baby?” Eleanor asked her.

Madison was quiet for so long that Eleanor thought her daughter would fall back into another of her spells, in which there was no reaching her.

But then Madison spoke, and when she did it was with such rage, such sudden violence, that Eleanor recoiled from her, much in the same way she had recoiled from the snarling wounded thing that Ms. Hester had become.

“Why did it have to happen to her? What purpose did that serve?”

Eleanor’s eyes went wide. The little girl in front of her suddenly looked nothing like her daughter. Her lips were pulled back in anger, exposing large white teeth. Her cheeks puffed in and out, keeping time with the rise and fall of her tiny, nearly breastless chest. But it was the look of offended rage in the girl’s eyes that caused Eleanor’s throat to go hard as slate and her heart to skip its beat.

“Why, Mom? Why did that happen? Why did it happen to her?”

All Eleanor could do was shake her head.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I’m sorry, baby. I just don’t know.”

And for the next twenty-four hours she’d be recalling her daughter’s questions and still struggling for an answer that made any sense at all.

They came to a high white wall of painted cinder blocks that looked to run a couple hundred feet in either direction. Thick drifts of dead seaweed and trash and tree limbs were wedged up against the wall.

In the front of the canoe Jim sat looking at the wall, the oar across his lap. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, the back of his neck black with wet dirt.

He turned back to Eleanor and said, “Well, which way?”

Eleanor had a compass and a map in her backpack, but she hadn’t needed it yet. Despite the fact that so much of the city was underwater now, there were still obvious landmarks to guide them. And besides, she’d been a beat cop for a good six years. She knew her way around the city, even as it was now.

“I don’t see that it really matters,” she said.

“Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. Got a preference? Which feels lucky?”

He gave her a little wink with that last part, a private joke between them from back in the days when Madison was much younger and Jim and Eleanor could still make coded jokes about slipping off to the bedroom for a quickie, even while Madison sat in the living room watching cartoons.

She snorted at him.

“Neither one looks
lucky
,” she said.

He pretended to look hurt.

“Go left,” she said, and laughed at him quietly.

You know
, she thought, as the laugh trailed off and became a smile,
he’s still pretty cute. A little bit chubbier than when I married him, but then, so am I.

She watched the muscles along his back move under his shirt as he used the oar to get them pointed in the right direction, his shoulders dipping powerfully, first one way, then the other as he plunged the oar into the water, and she was surprised by the warmth spreading over her skin.

Who knows?
she thought.
Maybe the left would be lucky after all.

Later.

“Do you think the EOC will still be functioning?” he asked, without looking back at her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“But it’s worth going there, right?”

“I think it is,” she said. “Honestly, Jim, I don’t know anywhere else to go.”

“Okay,” he said. He nodded gravely.

And they paddled on.

They’d gotten used to the sight of bodies floating in the water. By that afternoon, they’d seen literally hundreds of them. They were everywhere. And so, when Eleanor saw the body of the black man caught up in the limbs of a fallen tree, she paid him little mind. He was just another corpse, heavyset, his clothes stripped from his body by high winds and water and debris, so that all that remained on his bloated frame was a filthy pair of briefs. He hung facedown from the tree limbs, his arms swinging lazily in the current. There were cuts and sores all over his arms and back, and he smelled of rotten meat. To Eleanor, he looked just like every other dead body she’d seen.

She looked away.

Off to her right was a wide, glassy sea of pewter-colored water, broken only by a line of trees and a white metal roof in the distance. The sky was a washed-out gray. Eleanor could see dark vertical streaks of rain beyond the white roof, but with the absence of a breeze, it was impossible to tell if the rain was coming their way or not. It looked depthless and utterly still over there, as if the rain was just hanging in the air.

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.