Flesh Eaters (34 page)

He mopped a hand across his face, wiping the sweat from his eyes.

He found it difficult to put into words exactly what he was feeling. Right after his wife’s funeral, after he was done with the etiquette of death, the inane process the living put themselves through to say good-bye to a life, he had gotten in his truck and driven north, eventually ending up on the shores of Lake Livingston. He had gone midway to Dallas for Christ’s sake, with no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it.

So he’d stopped at the lake and gone down to the water’s edge and looked out over a drab, November day. The horizon had been a watercolor smear of rain clouds, laced with threads of blue lightning.

He’d been thinking of Grace, and of duty. He’d hated her for dying, for abandoning her family, and he had hated himself because he knew how unfair he was being.

It was that same illogical hate that he was feeling now for Anthony. It wasn’t the boy’s fault, and he knew it. To Anthony, who was so perfect in so many ways, these storms, these zombies, this horrible messed-up clusterfuck of a world, were just bumps in the road. He wasn’t connected to anything, certainly not to the same sense of duty that governed Shaw’s life, and for him, life would go on. There were no wounds to heal because nothing cut him very deeply. How could it, without a sense of duty?

“Anthony,” Shaw said, “I want you to take those duffel bags and stash them somewhere safe. After that, you are to go topside and help get those people through the gate.”

“But Dad—”

“Do not talk back to me!” Shaw exploded. “Don’t you fucking dare. You hear me, Anthony? Don’t you fucking talk back to me. Boy, I don’t think you have the first fucking clue about what’s important in life. Maybe I’ve failed you. Maybe I assumed that you were so talented you would know those things without me teaching them to you. If so, that’s my fault. But I’m gonna rectify that right now.”

He turned to Jesse.

“Jesse, I have no control over what you do. You’re not mine. If you want to take your chances, if you want to abandon these people, go on. Take your share and get the fuck out.”

Jesse swallowed hard.

“No, sir,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

“Yeah, well, okay then,” Shaw said. “Good. At least one of you has got some sense of what’s important.”

“Dad, come on. I—”

“No,” Shaw said. “No. You shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear you speak right now. You will listen. You will keep your mouth closed. No son of mine is gonna creep away into the night like a thief. You got that? Your name is Shaw, and you will wear it proudly, for I worked hard to make it worth something. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now take those bags and stash them. Once you’ve done that, you get your ass topside and you do your duty. You have taken an oath, and you will live up to it. You will keep the charge that you have asked for.”

He stared at them both, dared them to speak.

Neither one did.

“Better and better,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

Anthony waded over to a red Toyota pickup. He remembered what had happened back at Canal Street when the water receded from the Volkswagen in which they’d originally stashed the money, leaving it in plain sight.

He didn’t want to take a chance like that again.

This pickup was hidden between a school bus and an overturned eighteen-wheeler. No one would find it unless they were looking for it, so he figured it was safe.

He popped the hood and put the duffel bags in with the engine. Then he waded back to the boat, and he and Jesse went to do their duty.

Captain Shaw walked up the freeway on-ramp and emerged onto the elevated deck of the Sam Houston Tollway. The noise and the stench of filthy people was almost too much. There were refugees as far as he could see. The road was packed with them. There were babies screaming. Injured people hobbling down the road as best they could. A few who couldn’t walk moaned and begged for someone to help them, older people mostly. Others just stared off into the unknown distance, their faces drawn, their eyes wide and vacant. One man was muttering madly as he swatted at invisible bees around his head. “This is the end,” he said. “Gonna get us all. I know it. I know it.” Children cried and clutched at their parents when they saw him. One father threatened to toss the lunatic over the side, and a few others grumbled in approval.

Shaw saw families with everything they owned stuffed into backpacks or wheelbarrows, or resting on top of doors they carried between them like stretchers. He was momentarily amazed at the number of little red wagons he saw. He didn’t know they still made them. Anthony and Brent had one just like that when they were kids. He remembered pulling them around in it when they visited Sea World in San Antonio, and Brent . . . God, the kid had been crazy, wheeling down hills, his head thrown back while he screamed with delight. “Daddy, look at me! Weeeee!” The memory brought a smile, but it quickly faded.

He turned and looked out over the flooded city. He counted at least thirty towering columns of black smoke in the distance. Sunlight dappled on the water, making it look like liquid silver. And there was a smell, too. He hadn’t really noticed it when he was down in the boats, but up here, the chemical stench and sewer smell of mud were overpowering.

In the near distance, he could see more refugees approaching the freeway. Few of them had boats, and the others were forced to swim, for the water was a good fifteen feet deep out there. He thought about sending some of his men out there with boats to pick them up, but he knew that wouldn’t work. One of his officers, an older black patrolman named Garrity, was nearby, trying to help a woman with three crying kids find her missing son. Looking up and down the line of refugees, he could see his other officers were all trying to put out similar fires. They were every bit as exhausted as the people they were trying to help, and yet not one of them had quit. Not one of them had abandoned their post. Shaw was proud of his people. No one would be able to say that his men had shirked their duties.

A black kid of about sixteen waved Shaw down. “Hey man, how much longer they gonna make us wait? I’m fucking sick of standing in line.”

“I have no idea how long you’ll have to wait,” Shaw told him.

“Yeah, well, you the fucking law, ain’t you? Why don’t you get up there and find out?”

Shaw just stared at the kid. He didn’t even have the desire to go over and slap his face, which was what the kid needed. It was what his whole generation needed. It didn’t matter if they were black or white or Mexican, they all grew up with a sense of entitlement that was sickening. Everybody owed them something. They assumed they could talk to the law the same way they talked to their friends because the world had gone soft and they knew it. Everything was tolerated because nobody was at fault.

And to think, this was the generation that was going to inherit a world full of zombies.

Humanity is gonna go extinct in less than twenty years
, he thought bitterly.
With little pieces of shit like that kid at the helm, we’re doomed.

But like it or not, the kid had a point. The line didn’t seem to be moving at all. People had dropped their backpacks and they were sitting on them, shading themselves from the midday sun with whatever they had available. They looked tired and irritable and supremely bored.

Shaw walked down the line, toward the gateway.

What he saw there was incredible. People were being led one by one into a sort of holding tank between two large chain-link fences that ran from one side of the road to the other. Soldiers in white plastic biohazard suits and gas masks pointed rifles at each refugee as they were led inside the holding area, stripped of every scrap of clothing they wore, and inspected from head to toe. If they refused to undress, they were turned away. There were no second chances, and no explanations were given. You either did as you were told the first time, without complaint, or you were turned away.

Shaw saw it happen twice.

One woman, whether out of vanity or her own sense of entitlement, refused. She demanded to speak to the officer in charge. The soldiers pushed her back through the gate, and when she turned to scream at them, they raised their weapons at her face and ordered her to back away. Stunned and speechless, she just stood there, crying.

Another woman was led inside. She had a dazed, drunken look about her. She was limping and coughing, shielding her eyes against the sunlight.

“Stop there,” Shaw heard one of the soldiers say.

The woman did as she was told.

“Take off your clothes.”

The woman hesitated, and Shaw heard a soldier give the order to push her back through the gate.

“No,” she said, raising her palms at them in a gesture of surrender. “Okay.”

She began to undress. She untucked her blouse and started to fumble with the buttons. She seemed to be having a great deal of difficulty. From the stiffness of her movements, Shaw guessed she’d been badly hurt, and recently too.

The woman wasn’t making much progress on the buttons. She had to stop every few seconds to cough, and from the way she was swaying on her feet, Shaw thought she might fall over at any moment.

One of the soldiers gave an order Shaw couldn’t hear, and another soldier came up behind her and yanked her blouse off. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she stood there, trembling, looking scared and small and helpless. Her back was laced with cuts and there was a large, festering wound between her shoulder blades that looked to Shaw to be a bite mark. The soldier who had pulled off her blouse turned her around to show the injury to his superior, and it was then that Shaw got a look at the woman’s face. Her eyes had turned bloodshot and were lost in the black shadows that spread up from her cheeks. Her lips were cracked and pale, and when she coughed, he could see black bits of bloody phlegm fly out of her mouth.

The woman was changing right in front of him, becoming one of those zombies. Her hand had been across her breasts, but it was slipping away now. She shook her head, as though there were no-see-ums biting at her cheeks, but it was a dreamy sort of gesture and one she evidently couldn’t control. She staggered once, righted herself, and began to moan. Slowly, laboriously, she turned toward the soldiers and raised her hands, clutching at them.

“Do it,” Shaw heard one of the soldiers say, and the next instant, the woman’s body was bouncing and jittering as the bullets slammed into her chest.

She landed on her butt, her shoulders sagging, arms limp at her side, her legs out in front of her like a child sitting on the grass. Her face was flecked with blood. Her mouth tried to move, but at that instant, the soldiers fired again and she was laid flat under a hail of automatic weapons fire.

At the same time, the sound of gunfire sent a wave of panic through the assembled refugees. People were screaming, running away from the gate, creating a backwards surge that collided with the others farther back in line, who were pushing forward to see what the commotion was all about.

Shaw watched people trample each other.

A man was thrown off the side of the highway.

Still others, in the drive to escape, were throwing punches at those who blocked them.

The soldiers, too, were on edge, for many of them spun around to face the crowd, their weapons up and ready.

“Cease fire!” Shaw screamed at the soldiers. “Stop it!”

He pulled his badge from his belt and held it up high as he advanced on the chain-link fence.

“Don’t you dare shoot!” he said. “Lower your weapons. Put them down.”

The soldiers didn’t move. They were nervous. Even behind their gas masks, Shaw could tell they were green troops, not veterans. One of the soldiers pointed a trembling M-16 at him. Shaw slapped the chain-link fence and made the man jump.

“Lower your weapon. Now!”

The solder lowered his rifle a little, and looked around for someone to tell him what to do.

“You,” Shaw said to the soldier. “Get your commanding officer up here right now. I need to talk to him. Move!”

The man took a few steps back and yelled, “Colonel Adams!”

A man on the far side of the second fence came forward.

“Sir,” the soldier said, “I need you up here, Colonel.”

Shaw waited as the man approached. Shaw’s presence in front of the soldiers had eased the tension somewhat. No longer were refugees screaming in retreat. Many were keeping their distance, but all were turned his way, watching nervously. A few brave individuals even walked toward the gate, but the sight of the dead woman, her skull ruptured and her brains splattered across the pavement, kept them quiet.

Only the soldiers remained on edge. They kept their weapons trained on Shaw and on the crowd behind him.

The ranking officer stepped forward, suited and gas-masked like the others, and stood on the other side of the fence from Shaw.

“You the man in charge?” Shaw asked.

“That’s right. I’m Dr. Robert Adams, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.”

Shaw thought:
Active-duty man. That’s good.

But he also noticed the man referred to himself as doctor, and not colonel. Military doctors were like that. They didn’t think of themselves as soldiers first and foremost, but as doctors who had to wear a uniform every once in a while.

He said, “Dr. Adams, this is not working.”

“Who are you?” Adams said.

“My name is Mark Shaw. I’m the director of the Houston Police Department’s Emergency Operations Command and the overall incident commander for the police department. I brought these refugees here so that—”

“Mr. Shaw, I appreciate—”

“No,” Shaw said. “No, I don’t want to hear your platitudes, Doctor. I’m telling you that we have to find a better way to get these people through. The water’s deep out there right now, but when it gets dark, and the tide ebbs, we’re going to get the infected swarming this area in droves. These people will be sitting ducks up here.”

Adams crossed his arms over his chest, his plastic suit crinkling audibly.

“I have my orders, Mr. Shaw. This is the way my commanders have told me to get this thing done. We cannot allow any infected persons out of the city. The risk is too great.”