Flesh Eaters (33 page)

But in a world covered by water, graves were impossible, and he had been forced to leave Brent on top of the wall where he died, covered by a yellow tarp. He had carefully tucked the corners under the body and then sat back in a small boat that he had claimed for his own. And while the rest of the refugees filed out of the boatyard, Mark Shaw watched the tarp flutter in the breeze and thought of Brent, not as he had been there at the end, perpetually drunk and scared, but as the four-year-old boy who would sometimes come downstairs in the middle of the night to crawl into bed between his parents.

It was funny, he thought, how memory grabbed on to the littlest moments, the ones that simply
are
, the ones without a beginning or an end. Like the feeling of letting go the day he taught Brent to ride a bike, watching as he wobbled slowly down the sidewalk. Or driving him to school in the morning, that little-boy smile of his, no front teeth and full of radiant joy. Or watching football with him on the couch on Sunday afternoons. Or teaching him to shoot.

But he remembered these things, too.

The chemical stench of the floodwaters.

Burning buildings glowing against a nighttime sky.

Brent standing in the smoke-covered water, holding the AR-15 across his chest, trembling, unable to speak, unable to move.

The city, drowned and quiet and every bit as desolate as the Jerusalem of Jeremiah’s visions, shimmering in the light of the rising sun.

The faces of refugees, shocked and exhausted, as the boats carried them away.

Zombies.

His son, so much like him, dying on top of a wall.

Anthony saying, “Dad, he was supposed to run straight to you. He would have been safe if he’d just done it like I told him.”

Anthony saying, “Dad?”

Anthony saying, “Dad, say something, please.”

Later, Mark Shaw sat in the same little metal boat he’d been in when he said good-bye to Brent, bringing up the rear of the ragtag fleet of refugee boats. He was exhausted from fighting all night long. He was emotionally drained by his grief and his rage. The droning of the little 25 Johnson Outboard was trying to put him to sleep. The only thing keeping him awake now was willpower.

From his position at the back he had a clear view of the rest of the fleet, some four hundred–plus boats of every make and degree of seaworthiness. His best guess was that they had gotten away with fewer than three thousand of the original eighty thousand who had grouped together at the campus. Those few survivors were jammed into the boats now. Some boats were so overloaded that people were forced to hang over the sides, making them look, to Shaw, like those trains in India and Bangladesh with the natives spilling out like candy from a piñata.

From somewhere up ahead he heard people yelling and a woman crying. Shaw looked around for one of his officers, but none of them were close by. After the battle at the campus, he had only six left, and all of them were busy sprinting up and down the line, shepherding the fleet.

Shaw fed the engine a little more throttle and sped up to the disturbance.

The yelling was coming from a white Maxum Runabout with an open bow and yellow trim on the stern. Several younger men were trying to heave the body of a dead man over the side of the boat, while a wild-eyed woman tried desperately to stop them.

One of the men pushed the woman down, but she got right back up and wrapped an arm around the dead man’s neck.

“Let go of him!” she screamed. “You fucking bastards, don’t you touch him.”

“Hey,” Shaw said.

They didn’t hear him. Another of the men tried to pull the woman’s arm loose, and when that didn’t work, he balled his fist and made to punch her in the face.

“Hey!” Shaw said.

The man hesitated, his fist hovering above the woman’s wildly rolling eyes and terrified grimace. He and the rest of the men looked over the side, and into the barrel of Shaw’s Glock.

“You hit her, son, and I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

One of the other men reached for a shotgun, but only got it halfway up before Shaw covered him with the pistol.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Go on, put it down. That’s it. Okay, everybody, hands where I can see ’em. Just like that. Perfect. Now how about one of you guys tell me what’s going on here?”

They all yelled at him at once, and Shaw held up a palm to silence them. He felt tired and, in a crazy sort of way, bored.

“One at a time,” he said, and pointed at the man who’d been trying to pick up the shotgun. “You. What are you guys doing?”

The man looked to be barely twenty years old. He was thin and rough-looking, like a South Houston redneck meth head, tattoo sleeves that curled up to his neck.

“This dude just died,” he said. His tone suggested that that was all there was to say on the matter, and the others seemed to agree, for they were nodding in agreement.

“Okay,” Shaw said. “What did he die of?”

“How the fuck should I know? I look like a doctor to you?”

Shaw laughed. “No, son, you definitely don’t look like a doctor to me.”

“He’s gonna turn into one of them zombies. I don’t want no fucking zombies on this boat.”

The others all started talking at once, but Shaw didn’t try to silence them this time. What was happening here was pretty plain now. He could tell them that the zombies were diseased
living
people, not the walking dead like in the movies, but what was the point? None of them would listen, or understand if they did; and besides, there was an easier solution to the problem.

“Hand him down to me.”

That silenced them. They looked at Shaw, and then at each other.

“Come on. We’re wasting daylight. Hand him down.”

The woman, whose panic had flared again, said, “No! He’s not gonna change into one of them. He’s not infected.”

“Ma’am,” Shaw said, patiently. “Ma’am.” The woman looked at him, her chest heaving. “I know that. I’m gonna put him in this boat. I got room for both of you. You can tend to your husband while I steer.”

“He’s my brother,” she said.

“Okay, your brother. The two of you can ride with me.”

The wild fear cooled in her eyes. She looked at the men in the boat with her, and then down at the corpse. She swallowed hard and began to cry.

“Hurry it up,” Shaw said to the men. “Hand him down to me.”

They did as he asked, moving the body and helping the woman down to him in silence.

“You okay?” he said to the woman.

She was sitting against the gunwale, her brother’s head in her lap. She shook her head, but said nothing.

“Hold on to something.”

And with that he turned the boat away from the men aboard the Maxum and resumed his place at the fleet’s rear.

For the third time in an hour, Mark Shaw saw a Coast Guard helicopter fly overhead. They were crisscrossing back and forth over Northwest Houston, and probably elsewhere too, announcing the military-run evacuation point at the Sam Houston Race Park. Shaw stood up in the boat and looked around for landmarks he recognized. In the distance he could see the elevated sprawl of the Beltway, which meant they were almost there.

“Shouldn’t be too much longer,” he said to the woman, who still cradled her dead brother’s head in her lap. She stared at him, her eyes hollow and miserable-looking behind the stringy curtain of her hair. He had taken her aboard three hours earlier, and though he had tried to ask her name several times, she’d refused to say anything to him. She was, he feared, shutting down mentally. Many of the refugees were.

A few minutes later he saw Anthony’s boat speeding back to him. Anthony was behind the wheel, while Jesse rode in the front with an AR-15. Shaw had assigned the two of them to ride point for the fleet, and if they were coming back to the rear now it meant something was happening.

Shaw slowed his boat to a stop. “What’s going on?” he said.

Anthony looked at the woman and the dead man curiously, as though he wanted to ask where they came from, but decided better of it. He turned to his father, and then quickly looked down at his own hands on the wheel. He was too ashamed to meet his father’s gaze, that much was obvious, and Shaw thought that was probably just as well. If he got too close to Anthony right now he might punch his lights out. The anger was still fresh, still very raw.

Anthony said, “There’s some activity on the other side of the Beltway. Hand him the binoculars, Jesse.”

Jesse reached into one of the storage bins and handed the binoculars over to Shaw, who took them without comment.

“Where?” he asked.

“Over there,” Anthony said, and pointed past the Beltway. “It’s all around over there. Look anywhere.”

To the naked eye, it was just a long shimmering line against the water. Shaw hadn’t thought twice about it when he first noticed it, thinking that maybe it was just a trick of the light on the water. But now that he was looking at it through the binoculars, he could see what it was.

A chain-link fence.

An enormous chain-link fence that stretched for miles.

“I’ve seen soldiers patrolling outside it,” Anthony said. “They’ve also put up some barriers at the base of the fence and wrapped everything in barbed wire.”

Shaw lowered the binoculars.

“Those crazy bastards. They’re building a wall around the city.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

“What do you want to do, Dad?”

“The plan hasn’t changed. Get us to the Beltway. I want to find the on-ramp closest to the military’s evacuation point and get us up there. Once you find the on-ramp, start forming these people up and working them through.”

Anthony nodded.

“Go on,” Shaw said.

“Yes, sir.”

Anthony turned his boat around and glided off so as not to create a wake around his father’s much smaller craft.

When he was gone, Shaw raised the binoculars again and studied the fence.

“Those crazy bastards,” he muttered.

They reached the Beltway a little before one o’clock that afternoon. Shaw sped up and down the line of the fleet, watching as his officers helped civilians up the freeway on-ramp. He offered encouragement wherever he could, and for the first time in quite a while, he saw smiles and an appearance of collective relief on the faces of the refugees he passed. They were here. They were finally getting out of this hellhole.

He coasted over to the on-ramp and looked over the side. He could see the street below and he guessed the water was about four feet deep.

“Come on,” he said to the woman.

He climbed over the side, dropping into water that was up to his chest.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

The sound of her voice surprised him. He looked back at her.

“Ma’am, we have to leave here. There’s a military checkpoint up at the top of this ramp. From there, to be honest, I don’t know what will happen. But I do know that we have to leave now.”

“What about my brother?”

He sighed. He’d known this moment was coming, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it.

“They won’t let you bring a dead body through the checkpoint. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You fucking asshole. This is my brother. I can’t leave him here. I can’t. I won’t do that.”

“Ma’am,” he said, not unkindly, “I’ve brought you here to the way out. I can’t make you go through it. That’s gonna have to be your choice and yours alone. I know how hard this is. I understand.”

“You understand? Bullshit. Don’t patronize me. You don’t understand shit.”

His control almost broke. He could feel his anger rising. He could feel his mouth starting to tremble, the tears threatening. Shaw hadn’t wanted to cry, not yet, and certainly not in public. He knew he would, eventually, but it would be on his own terms.

“I lost my son back at the shelter,” he said.

That stopped her.

She sucked in a ragged-sounding breath and stared at him.

“It happened right before we got on the boats. He was bit by one of those zombies.” Shaw made a vague gesture toward the holstered pistol on his hip. “I had to . . . it was really hard.”

His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists. When he looked back at the woman, there were tears streaking down her cheeks.

“You can go without him, or stay with him. I won’t tell you which is best. To be honest, I don’t know which is best. But I have a job to do, and right now, that’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you.”

And with that, he walked toward the ramp.

“Dad.”

Shaw stopped. Anthony and Jesse were standing in the bow of their boat about twenty feet away. Both looked worried.

“I told you two to help get people through the checkpoint.”

“I know, Dad. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Can we talk?”

It was an intensely hot day. The air had taken on an almost tropical steaminess, and Shaw, who could feel the sun burning the back of his neck, was feeling irritable and tired.

“Make this quick,” he said.

Anthony glanced at Jesse, who quickly looked away, then at his father. “We just came from up top. Dad, you should see it up there. It’s crazy. All those people. And the military’s only letting them through one at time. There’s no order.”

“Anthony,” Shaw said, cutting him off, “say whatever it is you need to say, but don’t stand there fucking jerking my chain. Speak plainly.”

“Okay. All right, Dad. As crazy as it is up there, we think this is our best chance to get out of here with the money. They’re checking everybody over, making sure nobody’s been infected, you know . . . but being who we are, we could get through there. With all that confusion up there, we could slip away and be five hundred miles from here by nightfall. What do you say, Dad? You give the word, we’ll be out of here in no time.”

Shaw looked down at his hands. They were still trembling.

Then he looked to the south, across hundreds of flooded homes. In the distance, he could see people coming. Not zombies, but people. Refugees, like the ones he had risked everything to bring to this spot. He saw them carrying the remnants of their lives on their backs, whole families made transient.

He listened. Above him, thousands of scared people were growing restless. A helicopter’s rotors thrummed off into the distance.