Flesh Eaters (5 page)

“Anything else?” he said.

“We had three more deaths this afternoon in the shelter over at the rec center.”

“Damn,” he said. “How many is that now, eighteen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were these last three, the salmonella?”

“That’s what Dr. Bailey thinks. He told me all about it. And then he went on a very long tirade about how bad conditions were down there. He reminded me, several times in fact, that you promised him something would be done about the Porta-Potties.”

He scanned the room, watching his staff at their stations. Hector had done so much damage to southwest Houston they’d been forced to appropriate the campus as a forward dispatch point for relief efforts. They now occupied a large meeting room in the M.D. Anderson Library, the library’s cozy armchairs and lamp fixtures hastily tossed aside to make room for laptops and maps and phones.

Originally, the university had given permission for Shaw and his staff to move in here for the duration of the disaster. But that was before Hector caught the 2.5 million people in the evacuation zones of Galveston and Harris County flatfooted. Within hours of the storm, Shaw found himself the only functioning police authority in the affected area. He had an empty campus—built to house thirty thousand students, equipped with its own hospital and sewage plant and dormitories and restaurants and even a grocery store—that was situated right next to the only major highway leading out of the disaster zone. He had tens of thousands of injured, sick, and starving people stuck on that same highway.

And so, acting far beyond his authority to do so, Shaw made the only decision his conscience would allow and opened the entire campus and all its facilities as a shelter for any of the evacuees who could get there. Within a day they had swollen the campus to a population of more than eighty thousand.

But what began as a decision made for mercy’s sake quickly became a nightmare of filth and disease. They had, within a few days, run out of medicines and food and clean water and especially places for people to go to the bathroom. Staph and strep had already made an appearance. So too had salmonella. They had dialysis patients they couldn’t care for. Broken bones they couldn’t set. Cuts they couldn’t keep clean. There was even ominous talk from the few doctors they had of an imminent cholera outbreak.

“I’ll call Bailey back later,” he said. “Maybe smooth a few ruffled feathers.”

“Good luck,” Eleanor said.

Shaw nodded.

Sheltering all these people here had been a bad idea. He could see that now. Never mind that it had been done for all the right reasons. Never mind that he would have been crucified in the national media, and probably in the history books, had he failed to do so. All that really mattered was that someone was going to have to answer for the mess it had become, and that person was going to be him.

“Thank you, Eleanor,” he said. “Hey, by the way, how’s your family, your daughter—uh, Margaret, right?”

She brightened. “Madison. She’s doing good. I’m proud of her. We’ve got this older neighbor whose house got hit by a tree during Hector. . . . She’s staying with us. But she’s not doing so hot. Madison’s been really strong, though. You know, helping out, taking care of her. I almost hate to say it, but I think this experience has been good for her.”

“Well, times like these make us grow up fast.”

“Yes, sir. They do indeed.”

He excused himself and went over to his desk. In days gone by he had always kept a clean, orderly desk—once a Marine, always a Marine—but like the city outside his command post, his desk was now a wreck. He had to push reports and maps aside just to find his BlackBerry.

And because he hadn’t had enough misery today he checked the missed calls screen and saw the number had climbed to three hundred twenty-four.

Fucking wonderful
, he thought.

He dialed his youngest son’s number and Anthony Shaw answered on the second ring.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

“I’m up to my ass in headaches. Where are you?”

“We’re bringing the boat in now. It was rough out there tonight. There’s a lot of bodies floating around. A lot of people in shock.”

“Never mind that. I need to talk to you. How soon can you be here?”

“What, you mean at the EOC? I don’t know. We got a lot of gear to offload. And these survivors we found, we need to get them to the infirmary. I guess I can be there in about an hour, maybe.”

“That’s not gonna work. I want to talk to you now. Let Brent and Jesse take care of the boat and the survivors. Get here in ten minutes.” He paused for a moment, then added, “It’s about the
Santa Fe
.”

Anthony was silent for a long time.

Shaw could almost see his son’s lips pinch together, his brow crease. The boy was the very picture of his mother when he concentrated on something.

“Ten minutes,” Anthony said. “We finally gonna move on that?”

“Just get here, okay? I’ll talk to you about it in person.”

“Sure, Dad. On the way.”

Shaw hung up, then fished into his shirt pocket for his pack of smokes. Like everything else, Marlboros were in short supply these days, but he had been smart and stocked up before Gabriella. He had three unopened cartons underneath his cot.

He went out the front door of the library, lit a smoke, and turned to the south to watch the oil rig fires burning along the horizon. They lit the sky a dusty shade of orange. In the heat of the day the smell of the burning oil was so strong it made his eyes water, but at night it wasn’t so bad. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke out through his nose, savoring the cigarette and the slight head rush that came with his first bullet after waking up.

It was a good night, cool, no clouds, and a mild breeze out of the west was carrying the smell of the dead bodies away from him.

Thank God
, he thought,
for small favors
.

When he came back inside his city-issued cell phone was ringing. He stood there, watching it, knowing exactly who was on the other end of the line.

Shaw looked up; Eleanor Norton was watching him, a half smile on her face.

“Evan Robinson?” she asked.

“Yep, I’m afraid so.”

He let out a groan.
Trouble
, he thought,
is like a magnet. All it does is attract more trouble.

He picked up the phone and hit TALK. “This is Shaw.”

“Captain. This is Evan Robinson. I’ve been trying to reach you since last night.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You don’t return your phone calls?”

Shaw sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to imagine how nice another cigarette would taste.

“Well?”

“Councilman Robinson, my cell phone has not stopped ringing for ten days now. I have no idea how many calls I’ve missed, but I’m sure it’s a bunch. So tell me, what can I do for you?”

Robinson huffed indignantly. “Look, I’m sure you people are real busy down there. . . .”

“You have no idea,” Shaw said.

“Yes, well, things are rough all over the city. Do you know what we’re dealing with out here?”

Maids who can’t make it to work, probably
, Shaw thought, and smiled for the first time in ten days. Councilman Evan Robinson lived in the River Oaks subdivision, Texas’s answer to Beverly Hills. It was, Shaw had heard, the wealthiest zip code in Texas, and the second wealthiest in the country. They had mansions there bigger than the elementary school where his wife Grace had taught for twenty-five years. Old Texas oil money at its most decadent.

River Oaks was built well beyond the flood zone. Shaw searched his memory for the last action reports he’d read on the area and couldn’t come up with anything beyond the common nuisances that came with any bad weather incident.

“I guess you’ve got a few downed power lines, water service interrupted, roads closed, some property damage from airborne tree limbs. That about cover it?”

“As a matter of fact, no, Captain, that doesn’t about cover it.”

Shaw didn’t have time for the other shoe to drop. “Okay?” he said.

Robinson huffed again, and Shaw had to smile at the mental image playing through his mind. Robinson was an effeminate man, delicately built, prissy, hardly what you’d expect from a family that grew out of Old West pioneers and wildcatter stock. Shaw could almost picture the man pushing the gold-rimmed glasses back up his nose while trying to hold on to his patience with both hands.

“Look here, Shaw, you know what a lift pump station is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you know what happens when a lift pump station gets its electrical power knocked out.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

The city of Houston had been dredged from a swamp back in the early 1800s. As it grew, it was forced to come up with sophisticated ways of disposing of its wastewater and sewage. Over the years a vast network of sewage lift pumps had sprung up around large developments. The lift pumps moved sewage out of the neighborhoods and into treatment plants owned and operated by a company called CenterPoint.

When the power was off, the pumps couldn’t work. Sewage backed up. Stinking brown water bubbled up from manhole covers. Backyards turned to rivers of filthy, muddy slime. The air thrummed with the collective murmuring of vast clouds of mosquitoes and flies. After Hurricane Ike back in 2008, the same problem had led to twelve reported cases of West Nile virus.

The answer, of course, was to get power back to the lift pumps; and to do that, relief workers had to physically climb into each station and connect it to a generator. They would then pump the station until it started yielding clean water again, and move on to the next station.

But it was a monumental task—maybe even an impossible one, under the present circumstances. CenterPoint had given him twenty-four generators, which was all they could find. Most of their equipment was still underwater, and probably would be for a very long time. And with those twenty-four generators and the twenty percent of their workforce they could locate, CenterPoint was setting out to do the impossible.

Of the city’s three surface water treatment plants, two were currently underwater. The third was so badly damaged it would take months to bring it back online.

Of the seventy-five core ground water plants, all were currently offline. Of those, fifty-two would have to be completely rebuilt. Nothing was salvageable.

None of the city’s six pressure-boosting/repump stations had survived.

And the list just kept getting longer with every new report coming across Shaw’s desk.

Thinking about that lengthening list, Shaw almost missed what Robinson said next.

“I just got off the phone with Jason Weeks over at CenterPoint,” Robinson said. “He tells me that you have appropriated every single one of their generators.”

“Yes, sir. That’s true.”

“It is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And who, may I ask, gave you the authority to do that?”

“I’m not following you, sir.”

“You’re not?”

“No, sir. I’m not. What seems to be the problem?”

“The problem? The
problem
? Captain, are you trying to be obtuse? Is that what’s going on here? Do you think this is funny?”

“Sir,” Shaw said, his voice heavy with exhaustion, “last night I was on a bass boat touring the Lower Second Ward and I saw this dead little black baby caught in the branches of a pecan tree. Poor little guy wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothes, his little arms just swaying back and forth in the floodwater. I could hear trapped people screaming for help in the attics of flooded houses. Everywhere you look you see the bloated bodies of people and animals floating on the current. So to answer your question, no, I don’t think any of this is funny.”

Robinson was quiet for a long moment.

“Look,” he said, and his voice sounded more subdued now, the anger gone, “all I’m asking is for you to release one of those generators. I know what you’re up against, and I—”

“You
know
? I’m sorry, sir, but did you say you
know
what I’m up against? You have no fucking clue what I’m up against, Councilman. I’m sitting on an eighty-thousand-person powder keg here. We’re starving. Not hungry, mind you—starving. I’ve got people dying because they can’t get fresh water. I’ve got people dying of diseases that aren’t even supposed to happen in this hemisphere. I’m up to my fucking chin in major-league death here, and you’ve got the balls to try to take a generator away from me just because your twenty-million-dollar mansion smells like shit. Is that really what’s going on here, Councilman?”

“Now hold on a second there, Captain Shaw. I understand that you are under a great deal of stress, but that does not give you the right to—”

“I’ll tell you what it gives me the right to do, Councilman. It gives me the right to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Silence.

It went on so long Shaw almost hung up. But then Robinson answered, his voice seething with barely restrained hostility.

“My next phone call,” Robinson said, “will be to Chief Harper. I have known your boss for the last fifteen years, and I guarantee you, Captain Shaw, that you have just cost yourself a job. You’ll be replaced by the end of the day.”