White Trash Zombie Apocalypse (25 page)

I love you dad I love you dad I love you dad helicopter here I love you just a minute I can hold on just a minute I love you dad I love you dad I love you I love you I love you
I love you

Someone tried to take my dad my meal my dad from me. I grabbed for what he cut, pants jacket brain bottles mine, wrapped it around my numb fist.
Mine
. I clawed at the man as he ripped my dad away, rose impossibly in the air. I screamed, reached for him. Nothing.
Nothing
.

I sank back, breath gurgling. Going still. Going quiet. Conserving. Waiting. An irresistible scent filling my senses, getting closer.
Brains
. I squinted against the wind as my prey descended toward me, my lips pulled back from my teeth in an eager snarl. I scrabbled against the tree branch, struggled to lunge and attack, rend and feast. He leaned toward me, and I threw my arm up, grabbed his ankle, pulled. Snapped at him. He reached, clamped my jaw in his hand, forced something between my teeth. My cry of rage died away as the leathery lump registered.

Brains. Chewy hunk of brains yes yes yes. My hand went to my mouth, held the chunk in place. Gnawed. Brains. Better, yes. Oh god.
Yes. I’m…Me. I’m Me
.

*   *   *

By the time I chewed and chewed and swallowed the brain-lump down, a hint of coherent thought returned to
let me know I was almost up the cable with my rescuer. The desperate urge to rip his brain from his skull had eased to Gee, He Sure Smells Yummy, but…

Oh my god.
Dad?
Nausea and worry swept through me.
Dad
.

As soon as I neared the open side door of the helicopter, strong hands grabbed me and hauled me the rest of the way in. Someone else wrapped a blanket around me and shoved an already-opened packet of brains into my free hand. I greedily sucked it down and as soon as I finished that one, the empty was yanked from my grasp and replaced with a fresh one. My gut did a strange lurch, and I realized that my innards were still in the process of healing from the serious damage caused by the tree branch.

After finishing the second packet, I regained the ability to actually pay attention to something besides my own hunger. My left hand was locked in a death-grip around my pants with its two bottles of brains. Good ole parasite survival instinct must’ve kicked in to grab them when the rescuer cut the jacket sleeve to free my dad. I unclenched my fingers and finally took a look around.

I didn’t know crap about helicopters, but this one looked military: utilitarian grey, with two seats for crew members up near the cabin; I was buckled into one of four fold-down seats at the back, though I didn’t remember any of that happening. My dad was in the seat right beside me. He had a blanket around him and held a towel to the back of his head. He met my eyes, gave me a tremulous smile. I did my best to return it. I didn’t know how much of my out-of-controlness he’d seen, but I sure as hell hoped not much. Thankfully, he’d been kinda out of it for the worst of the monster-mode. For that matter, so had I.

But I
had
been the monster for a while. If the helicopter hadn’t returned, would I have been able to control myself?
Would I have killed and eaten my own father? A shiver wracked me. I knew the truth, and it was a punch in the gut.

I almost ate my dad
. The memory went through me like a knife. The scent, the drive to do whatever I had to do to get those brains—my
dad’s
brains. No way could I have kept on living if I’d given in to the hunger and killed him. Or was suicide even an option? I had a feeling the survival responses of the parasite wouldn’t make it easy.

But I didn’t hurt him
, I reminded myself. Yeah, the helicopter had returned in the nick of time, but I’d managed to hold on for those precious few minutes, even with a goddamn tree stuck through my back. Props to stubborn-bitch-willpower for saving the day.

I hugged the blanket around myself and accepted a third packet from the rescuer. Might as well eat their supply of brains instead of going into the two bottles in my pants, especially since I had no idea how long I’d need those bottles to last. Whoever these people were, they sure as hell knew how to deal with hungry zombies, right down to having chewy brain-cakes on hand to keep the hunger distracted.

Shifting, I moved to sit closer to my dad. The thwupping roar of the chopper made it impossible to have a conversation, but I mouthed
You okay?
and he nodded in response. He pulled the towel away from his head, looked at the blood staining it. Scowling, I turned his head so I could look at the wound. I saw his lips move, and I had no doubt he was cussing me, but he didn’t resist. To my relief it didn’t look too bad. Probably wouldn’t need stitches, but I still intended to get someone with actual medical training to look at it once we got wherever we were going.

I released his head, gave him a quick hug, then made a comical effort to get my wet pants back on. I gave up
after half a minute of contortions and simply tied the legs around my waist, wrapped the blanket around me best I could, and sighed. Looked like I was getting rescued in my undies after all. Thank god I wasn’t in the habit of wearing a thong to bed.

My dad and I huddled close together for warmth and comfort as the helicopter circled the area. Two more times it descended to pluck people from the still-raging waters. The neighbors from across the street who’d called the cops on us more than once for domestic disputes. A single mom who lived nearby and her fourteen-year-old son who I suspected was responsible for the disappearance of tools from our shed. Petty neighborhood squabbles were forgotten as we helped each other get settled and offered comfort as we could.

Finally the pilot seemed to feel that either there were no others needing rescue, or there wasn’t enough room for more. The doors closed, and I felt us gain altitude. I wrapped an arm around my dad, shut my eyes, and tried not to think of this as the end of our world.

*   *   *

I opened my eyes when we touched down with little more than a light jostling. Whoever the pilot was, he was damn good. The engines wound down, and the silence when they stopped seemed unnatural after the din of before.

When the doors opened, our rescuers efficiently off-loaded us and passed us into the care of waiting emergency workers and Red Cross personnel. It took a few minutes for my surroundings to sink in, and then I registered that we were in a parking lot at Tucker Point High School. About twenty yards from the helicopter, several Red Cross vehicles clustered, one marked Disaster Relief. Tucker Point High was always used as a shelter during hurricanes, so it made sense for it to be used for this as well. A vague and misplaced worry wound through
me about how the movie people would do their filming with flood victims sheltering here and getting in their way, but then I decided that the school was no doubt more than big enough to accommodate everyone, and I surely had more important things to worry about. But I didn’t want to worry about the more important things. Not yet.

I kept the blanket wrapped around my waist and an arm around my dad, demanded that someone check out his head and snarled that I was fine. No one seemed to take any offense, and I dimly realized that I probably had an eyes-wide-in-shock look about me.

After asking a few pointed questions, I managed to learn that, earlier in the morning, engineers attempted to partially open the spillway in order to carefully bleed-off the overflowing Kreeger River down Cole Bayou and, eventually, out into the swamp. That would have been fine and dandy and would have caused a few extra feet of water at the most, except that minutes after the first bay opened, the entire aged structure gave way. In one gigantic rush, pretty much all the excess water in the Kreeger River diverted down Cole Bayou. The Army Corps of Engineers was already at work, though the general consensus seemed to be that, at this point, there wasn’t much to do except wait for the river to drop below flood stage.

I hovered near my dad as a medic checked his head, and I listened to a relief worker comment in hushed tones about how the flooding had wiped out a small trailer park. I knew the place—a collection of six or seven trailers with almost exclusively elderly residents. I figured there had to be other casualties as well, but no one had any hard numbers. The only possible bright side was that the worst of the flooding had been on our side of the road since the bayou ran behind our property, which meant that, apart from the unfortunately located
trailer park, probably less than a dozen houses had been affected. Moreover, at least half of those were fishing camps that weren’t usually occupied during the week.

“You don’t need stitches,” the medic told my dad, and I yanked my attention back to him. “You probably have a mild concussion, though,” he added.

“I ain’t goin’ to no fucking hospital,” Dad snarled before the medic could even get the suggestion out.

The young man flicked his eyes up to me. I gave him a very slight shrug and shake of my head to let him know that arguing would get him nowhere.

“All right,” he said to my dad. “But be sure to get as much rest as possible. And if you have any dizziness, headache, or blurred vision, let one of the volunteers know as soon as possible.”

Dad grumbled something that sounded like an “Okay,” and with that the medic moved on to treat the tool-stealing teen, who looked like a scared rabbit as he cradled his left arm to his chest.

The sun broke through thinning clouds for the first time in a week as another volunteer took us gently in hand and guided us toward the gym entrance.

Looked like it was going to be a damn beautiful day for the end of the world.

It didn’t seem right that it could only be ten a.m. Everything we owned was gone. Nothing left but the clothes on our backs, and in my case hardly that. My jacket had been shredded and my shirt had a tree-branch–sized hole in the back. Fortunately I still had my cargo pants with its two precious bottles of brain smoothie.

Surely it should take longer than a couple of hours to wipe out a lifetime of possessions and memories, right?

What the hell are we supposed to do now?

I wanted to fall apart and allow the magnitude of our loss to sink in, wallow and roll around in the grief and anger and unfairness of it. But I didn’t. I had my dad to think of. I had to call work and start figuring out what steps to take. Figure out a place to live until we could rebuild. Or whatever the hell we were going to do.

Maybe that’s what maturity was all about, I mused in a weird numb fog as I pawed through hastily donated clothing for something to wear instead of a blanket. Maybe being “mature” wasn’t just holding down a job and starting a family and buying a house and paying
taxes. Maybe it was about putting a hold on your own reactions and needs until after you took care of the people who trusted you.

Maturity sucked.

I found clothing for me and my dad, went into the bathroom to change, then came back out and put a pile of folded sweats on the end of his cot. “Dad, here’s some dry clothes. You need to get out of those wet things.”

“Sure thing, Angel,” he replied, voice low and subdued. He didn’t move for several seconds while the worry that he was broken clenched tight in my chest, but then he finally stood, gathered up the clothing and shuffled to the bathroom. A few minutes later he came back, wearing the slightly too-large sweats and looking even more haggard and vulnerable because of it. In silence, he sank to the cot and laid down, back to me.

Troubled, I left him there and went in search of a phone I could borrow, since the flimsy Walmart bag hadn’t been enough to keep my own phone dry. I soon found a volunteer willing to let me use up her minutes.

Since I was actually scheduled to be at work, my first call was to Derrel. It went to voicemail which told me he was probably up to his eyeballs dealing with the people who hadn’t been as lucky as my dad and me.

“Hey, Derrel,” I said after the beep. “I…I’m not at work ’cause…”
Because I was clinging to my dad while impaled on a tree when I was supposed to clock in. My dad and I are only alive because I’m not quite human anymore
. “We got flooded. Bad. Lost my phone.”
Everything we owned is gone
. “I’m at the shelter at the high school. Me and my dad.”

I didn’t know what else to say, didn’t know how to put the magnitude of what-the-hell-do-I-do-now? into a voicemail. After a few seconds of my silence, the phone beeped again, and I disconnected. At least I hadn’t had the Coroner’s Office van parked at my house. Allen
would have done his best to figure out a way to blame me for the collapse of the spillway so that he could legitimately fire me for losing the van.

I called Marcus, the ache of wanting him almost painful. So what if he tended to be overprotective? Right now that seemed pretty minor. But his cell phone, too, went to voicemail, and I left pretty much the same message for him as I had for Derrel.

After I returned the borrowed phone to its owner, I got a couple of slices of pizza that had been donated by a local restaurant and made my way back to where the cots were set up. Dad had shifted to lie on his back and stare at the metal beams and fluorescent lights of the gym ceiling.

“Hey, Dad. I got some pizza for us.” I sank to the cot beside his, set the two paper plates down. “You want something to drink? They have cokes and stuff.”

“Not hungry,” he muttered. “You eat mine.”

“You gotta eat,” I said, worry pulling my mouth into a scowl.

He glanced over at me. “Yeah. Later.” He muttered something I couldn’t catch, then sighed.

I wasn’t all that hungry either at the moment. “Maybe we can put a trailer on our lot,” I suggested. “That wouldn’t be so bad, right?”

Emotions flickered across his face. “Sure. A trailer.”

It all hit me then. I mean, really hit me. The house I’d grown up in, lived my entire life in, was gone. Every picture, every scrapbook, every school paper from when I’d actually cared about school—gone.

I turned away, struggling to hold it together. Now wasn’t the time to break down. I couldn’t do that until I’d solved our problems and figured out how to care for my dad. I sure as hell didn’t need to fall apart here and let my dad think he’d somehow let me down. That would be me letting
him
down.