Man Eaters (39 page)

Dallas wiped her eyes before mussing up his hair. “You’re too smart for your own good.”

“And that’s always been my greatest weakness.”

****

They made it to Louisiana without another incident. Everyone was heading northeast, except for the occupants of the Fuchs. The drive was mostly silent as everyone sat with their thoughts or read one of the three books they had.

Dallas held one in her hand and wondered how they would ever restart the country. Everything was in a state of stasis, in slow decay and disrepair.

Everything.

She wondered what would happen to people in prisons. Did they just starve to death? Or what of those in asylums or retirement homes? When did this end and how were they going to kick start it back to life?

Or would they?

If this was global, it marked the end of the world as they knew it. If it was national, it still marked the end of their world as they knew it. There was no scenario in which they would get their lives back.

“You okay?” Roper asked, sitting down beside her when Einstein took over as co-pilot.

“Just thinking is all.”

“We can’t worry about the future, Dallas. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other and try to make a safe haven for the rest of us.”

“I know. I get that. It’s just...it feels so futile at times.”

“We all feel that way, but we’re almost there. The hardest part is over. We fought back and won.”

Dallas laid her hand on Roper’s shoulder. “Doesn’t feel that way.”

“I know, but it will. You’ll see.”

Butcher called out, “Entering Loo-see-anna,” and everyone applauded. “We’ll stay on Ten until it drips down into NOLA on our way to the municipal yacht harbor. I want to stay out of the city at large because it’s hard to maneuver such narrow streets.”

For the first time in days, the mood lightened in the Fuchs as they made their way to New Orleans. Everyone got chatty, some even laughed, and everyone looked out the windows in anticipation of seeing the outer edges of New Orleans.

Old plantation style homes shared the countryside with shotgun houses and more modern day architecture. No one was in the streets, no one could be seen through their windows. It was as if they had driven up to a Hollywood sound stage. Even the flora and fauna felt fake.

Roper reached for Dallas’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “Everything is going to be okay,” she whispered. “Everything will be all right.”

They stopped one time inside Louisiana for a bathroom break, but everyone was anxious to get moving. It had been a long few days of being cooped up in the Fuchs and everyone just wanted some place to light.

“How’s it looking?” Roper asked Einstein. He matured since they’d hooked up and he looked through eyes wizened by pain and loss.

“Not bad. A few zombies here and there, but it’s not too bad. Traffic light.” He grinned. “The few cars we have seen are moving northeast. Interstate ten’s been pretty vacant.”

Butcher nodded. “I expect New Orleans to be overrun, though.”

“Why is that?”

“Close quarters. We need to remember this is like an epidemic and still spreading. Unless the people of New Orleans bailed, they ended up like every other city.”

Truer words were never spoken as Butcher pulled into the outer roads of the city. It was a ghost town. The bars were silent for the first time in probably a century, and the Mardi Gras beads hanging from balcony swayed in silence.

“Where are they all?” Cassidy asked.

“Look, these people survived Katrina and FEMA. They won’t go down to a bunch of mindless zombies without a fight. My guess is they took to the bayou.”

“Let’s hope so,” Dallas said, looking out at the empty streets. Here and there were dead bodies, but she didn’t know if those were dead or undead.

“There it is!” Einstein announced, pointing to a flag flying over the harbor.

As the Fuchs pulled in to the small harbor, Roper noticed how many of the slips were empty. “They took to the water.” She said, remembering the intel they’d learned along the way of foreign battleships lurking along the coastline. “Wonder if they got out?”

“My guess is no,” Butcher said, parking the Beast at the harbor. “Which is why we’re not DDing out of here for the open seas.”

“You sure?” Cassidy asked. “We could live for a month or so out to sea.”

“We’re sure. We’re going to grab one of these and sail it back into the mouth of the bayou and leave it anchored in the water. We can use it to house supplies and take us to the open sea, should that day come.”

Getting out, they all stretched. The only sound was the flapping of the flags on still masts and that incessant dinging of a solitary bell.

“Ooh, look at that bad boy,” Cassidy said, pointing to a sixty-foot yacht.

“Too hard to navigate the—” Suddenly, Butcher’s voice trailed off as she stared at the white flags flapping in the breeze. “Holy shitballs,” she said, laying her hand on her chest.

“What? What is it?”

Pointing to the succession of white flags flapping in the breeze, Butcher read each word scrawled on them: “Butcher. I. Am. Here.”

Everyone froze.

“Luke,” Butcher said, suddenly breaking into an enormous grin. “Luke is here.”

****

As it turned out, Luke wasn’t there, but he was anchored out in the harbor on a forty-foot yacht he had already stocked with food, water and ammunition.

When he pulled into the harbor, Butcher took off down the pier, where he swept her into his arms and kissed her passionately. Even the squeamish teenager smiled at the shared intimacy, and when Luke tied up the yacht, he had hugs for everyone.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Roper asked, eyeing the yacht.

“That’s a really long story I’d rather tell once we get you all settled in.”

Butcher raised her eyebrows. “Settled in?”

Luke was beaming. “Me and two other guys split from the military once we knew the whole truth. They’re staying at the place we found on the river. I’ve been coming here every day for a week, hoping you’d make it.” He smiled a huge grin at Butcher. “I was beginning to lose hope, but—” He looked over their shoulders at the Fuchs, “I see someone gave you some good advice.”

Butcher threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Boy did he ever.”

“God, is it good to see—” he looked around, his eyes suddenly saddened. “Safety? Peanut?”

“Those would be our stories to share when we get settled.”

He nodded sadly. “We’ll want to keep the Fuchs for sure, so some of you will need to—”

Butcher shook her head. “While we appreciate everything you’ve done and are doing, we made a pact not to separate.”

Luke looked quizzically at her. “Not a problem. I’ll take you up the river via the Fuchs. Once we get you all settled, I’ll come back for the boat.”

“Thank you. And thank you for coming to New Orleans. You don’t know how happy that makes me. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

Luke blushed and looked down. “If I’m going to defend this country, I want to do it for and with those I care about.” Turning to the yacht he waved everyone to follow. “But before we go, you all look and...well...smell like you could use a shower. It’s not a big boat, but I’ve got food, water, and fresh clothes…even if they are a bit big.”

One-by-one, as each of them had a shower on the boat, Luke stood watch over the Fuchs. When, after two hours, everyone was clean and had a full belly for the first time in weeks, they all piled into the Fuchs for the final leg of their long journey.

****

Home was a log cabin built on stilts about fifteen feet above the river.

“Oh wow,” Roper said as the Fuchs turned amphibian and drifted over to the house. The green, brackish bayou water lapped quietly onto the boggy shores as Spanish moss swayed in the breeze. Nature’s scent filled the air and the occasional cicada could be heard.

“This is perfect.”

“Well, not perfect. It’s a little small, but those things won’t be able to get to us.”

“What about the living?”

“Well now, that’s the cool thing. Enzo and Walker scoped the area out within a three-mile radius. There are plenty of survivors out here. People just like us. Some are living on boats, some on stilts, and some wily old coots who refuse to leave their tin roof huts. It’s crazy.”

“But is it safe?”

“Well, Enzo and Walker have seen three zombies become dinner for the ‘gators. See, they can’t walk on the soft ground. They get stuck and are soon eaten. This is, in my humble opinion, the safest place on the continent that’s above ground.”

When the Fuchs came to a stop, they all climbed out of the hatch and up the ladder into the surprisingly well-built house on stilts. The cabin looked to be about twenty years old with signs of having been recently patched and repaired. The outside looked like a log cabin, but the inside had a huge stone fireplace with a bunch of worn lounge chairs all around it. There were two bedrooms on each side, one with a queen bed and two twins, and another with four twins. All had cozy comforters on the edge of the bed and several large pillows.

“You’ve been busy.” Butcher said, nodding toward the twin beds.

“Gave us something to do.” Luke smiled gently. “I knew you’d make it. I just had to push the doubt deeper into the water.”

“Where are your guys?”

“Making rounds. See, everyone out here looks after everyone else, so the boys were bringing our neighbors treats they found in one of the yachts.”

“Treats?”

Luke grinned. “Candy. See, all of the tweakers got most of the candy when everything went down. The boys have traded for a lot of what you see here.” Luke went over and held up two of those loud party horns in the aerosol cans. “They use these to signal either living or dead trespassers.”

“You keep a watch?”

“Oh hell yeah. There’s a ladder on one of the cypresses that leads to a hunting blind. You can see most of the area from there.”

“How would we know who—”

Luke produced a dozen NOLA PD baseball caps. “These. Don’t ever leave home without them.”

Roper took hers and jammed it on her head. “Looks like you’ve covered everything.”

“Well, not everything, and not me. These Orleanians have been through a helluva a lot in the last two decades. They know how to survive disasters.”

“You call an apocalypse a disaster?”

Luke waved for everyone to have a seat. “You need to know how everything really went down.”

Once everyone was relaxing for the first time in weeks, Luke gave credibility to Einstein’s theory.

Standing in front of a small fire in the fireplace, he started. “The Middle East has been a thorn in the side of our government for decades. Apparently, one of our presidents signed an executive order to find a solution that would wipe the people of that region off the map so they could start with a clean slate. I guess we are tired of sending troop after troop into an arena that will never change and never stop fighting each other.”

“That’s—”

“Genocide. Yes it is. Our scientists came up with the idea that if we could secretly start the epidemic rolling in the Middle East where it would be easier to contain, our military could swoop in later as the hero with the solution. We would, in essence, claim the oil reserves, the fossil fuels, plutonium...hell, even their goats. We wouldn’t just be the heroes. We would be the benefactor of all things good.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Cassidy said.

Luke heaved a loud sigh. “Many of us were. When the boys and I got back to D.C., the rumors were rampant, but Enzo’s twin sister is a scientist and she dug and dug until she uncovered the truth.”

“You were right all along, Einstein.”

Einstein nodded once.

“What she uncovered was that secrets that big are worth a lot of money to the right people, so someone sold what they knew to another country. You can imagine how scary it would be to be our enemy at this point. So the country that knew the truth went to our allies, and in turn, various powerful countries created a committee to stop us in the event we were actually successful in creating this virus. Of course, we denied, denied, denied, and fell right into the committee’s trap anyway.”

“The trap was to smoke us out, huh? We chose to move the virus to an unknown location.”

Luke smiled at Einstein. “You’re good, kid. Because it was so volatile, only small canisters of it were kept in a dozen different locations throughout the country. Once those locations were compromised, again, because people will always pay for good intel, this global committee decided that we, as a super power, had run our course. It was decided that we were the world’s greatest danger, and so, they let the virus loose.”

“The terrorists got us, but we were shot with our own weapon.” Einstein could only shake his head.

“Didn’t they realize how utterly stupid it would be to allow the virus out?”

Shrugging, Luke turned to stoke the fire. “We’re pretty sure they had no idea it was zombies. Even if they did, who would have believed it? All they knew was that this virus could leave our infrastructure intact, our farms tillable, our water potable. They understood that we are a large cookie jar and pretty soon, there would be no one left to guard the cookies.”

Roper held up a hand. “Wait. Are you saying the rest of the industrialized world elected to be mass murderers of Americans?”

Luke looked down. “It’s not hard to understand why, Roper. We’ve been a nation less than two hundred and fifty years. During that time, we’ve been in the Civil War, French-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Viet Nam War, Cold War, Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War. We’ve destroyed economies, ways of life, and other religions. We are, in most of the world’s eyes, the greatest evil on the planet. We consume more, waste more, and share less. We have it all and yet, we do so little good.”

“So they opted to exterminate us?”

Luke looked up and nodded “Yes. That was their plan, but they had no idea the virus would have two legs and mobility. They didn’t know it would create man eaters. They also didn’t know if the antidote would work, so they pulled together a world army to contain us...to keep us here while the zombies eradicated us.”