Flesh Eaters (19 page)

During the night, Mardel’s storm surge—a forty-seven-foot-high monster—had swept over South Houston and completed the destruction her lesser siblings Hector and Kyle had begun. The campus was already damaged by winds, but the storm surge had been the real destroyer. It smothered everything, including his headquarters over at the library, and he’d been forced to relocate to the College of Film and Technology for his teleconference this morning with the head of Homeland Security.

One of his staff, a smart young officer named Mark Eckert, had set him up with a laptop and a webcam and showed him how to use a program called Skype. Shaw, who in his younger days had enjoyed the occasional science-fiction movie, had leaned forward and watched his own fish-eye image appear at the bottom of the screen with a strange sense of disappointment. His face skipped and flickered, not at all the crystal-clear perfection Hollywood had promised in Kubrick’s
2001
and John Carpenter’s
Dark Star
. Reality seemed cheap, almost ghetto, like the future promised in
Soylent Green
’s Malthusian nightmare.

Frowning, Shaw had watched the screen fill with the face of George Dupree, director of Homeland Security. Dupree was a small, self-important man with prematurely gray hair that he slicked back with a handful of gel into a stiff-looking helmet.
Vegas hair
, Shaw had thought, with the flicker of a grin at the corner of his mouth. But Dupree’s accent wasn’t what Shaw had expected. He spoke with the slow, comfortable twang of Georgia or Arkansas, though the accent was stiffened by the aristocratic sophistication and aloofness of a Yale education. It was a strange combination, and Shaw had disliked it from the first.

“What exactly are ya’ll doing down there?” Dupree had said.

Shaw bristled at that.
Well, sir
, he’d almost said,
we’re dying down here and it would sure be nice if you lazy federal fucks could get off your asses and give us the help we need
.

But that dog wouldn’t hunt and he knew it. Instead, Shaw had squared his shoulders to the screen and said, “We’ve surpassed our response capabilities by a considerable margin, sir. I have roughly two million people stranded and starving in the South Houston area and no resources with which to care for or evacuate them. I need some—”

“I’m aware of all that,” Dupree said, and though the webcam cut most of the gesture off, Shaw could see his speech was being dismissed with a wave of the director’s hand. “I’m talking about all these reports of people being attacked and eaten. What in the hell is that about?”

“Isolated instances, sir. These people are starving.”

“Isolated my ass, Captain Shaw. Here, I want to read you something.”

Dupree picked up a piece of paper and frowned at it as if it’d been smeared with something nasty.

“This is an e-mail you sent me four days ago. In it, you assure me that these reports of cannibals are, and I quote, ‘Grossly exaggerated and mean-spirited attacks upon the people of Houston, many of whom have lost everything but their lives and their hope in the humanity and charity of others. ’ Okay, fair enough. But you go on to urge us to continue and even redouble our evacuation efforts. That we did, Captain.”

He put the paper down, folded his hands on the desk in front of him, and stared directly at Shaw.

“In the past week, the United States Air Force has flown a continuous shuttle service of C-5 Galaxies from the Houston area to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. They have evacuated nearly six hundred thousand people in that time. They have flown another seventy thousand to Dallas/Ft. Worth. It is the biggest civilian relocation in the history of the United States, and it was done on your assurance that these reports of pandemic infection and cannibalistic insanity are grossly exaggerated and mean-spirited attacks upon innocent people.”

Shaw swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat, but waited stoically for what he knew was coming.

“You lied to me, Captain Shaw. You lied to the world. And do you know what has happened as a result of that lie, Captain?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“The city of San Antonio is in the middle of a war, Captain. They’ve had literally thousands of these cannibals of yours bust out of their shelters. Their hospitals are overrun. Their police department and fire department have been gutted. Do you understand me? I said gutted. The same thing, I understand, is happening in Dallas/Ft. Worth. But it is especially bad in San Antonio . . . and all because they opened their arms to your evacuation effort.”

Dupree sifted through some papers on his desk. He found what he was looking for, but when he started speaking again, his tone had changed. Some of the anger was gone, replaced now with sadness and exhaustion.

“This is a report from a civilian doctor named William Stiles at San Antonio’s University Hospital. Dr. Stiles claims to have worked on several of these cannibals during the past few hours, and in this report he even identifies the specific disease responsible for their behavior. He calls it the necrosis filovirus, which he says is closely related to the family of viral hemorrhagic fevers. Are you familiar with a viral hemorrhagic fever, Captain Shaw?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“Well, for your benefit then, let me just tell you that these are nasty fucking bugs. I mean, seriously nasty. Like you have to wear a spacesuit to handle them nasty. AIDS is a Level Two infectious disease. These things are Level Four. Ever heard of Crimean-Congo fever? Marburg?”

“No, sir.”

“How about Ebola?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve heard of that.”

“Oh, well, that’s good, because you’ve just released Ebola’s big brother on the world, Captain.” Dupree looked over Dr. Stiles’s report. “Let’s see, what does he say here? Ah, yes. ‘The major difference between the necrosis filovirus and other members of the viral hemorrhagic family is the incubation time from initial infection to full manifestation of the disease. A person who contracts Ebola or Marburg is likely to exhibit a headache, backache, and other flu-like symptoms within five to ten days. The necrosis filovirus on the other hand seems to amplify within the host in just a few hours. After that, an infected person experiences almost total depersonalization, essentially becoming a zombie. The illusion that these people are the walking dead is even more complete when you see the clouded pupils, the smell of necrotic tissue, and the almost complete lack of sensitivity to pain. We have handled several confirmed cases of victims who are still ambulatory even though they’ve been eviscerated or shot multiple times. So in many ways these victims are the walking dead.’ ”

Dupree paused there. He looked at Shaw, and despite the sketchy quality of the video feed, Shaw could still see the nests of wrinkles forming at the corners of Dupree’s eyes and around his mouth. The man was nearly as exhausted as Shaw.

“Captain Shaw, do you have any idea what you have done to your fellow Americans? You heard what Stiles wrote in his report. These are the walking dead. They are zombies. You’ve damned us all.”

Shaw bristled at that, but not because it wasn’t true. He was thinking of Joe Schwab, the head of public works, who had said nearly the exact same thing when he limped back into the shelter earlier that day after losing most of his work crews to the zombies out in the ruins.

“You lied to me,” Schwab had said. “You damned my men. You damned them all. You fucking bastard.”

Shaw closed his eyes and bowed his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Dupree. “There are nearly two million people left in this city who are not infected. I was only thinking of them. I thought there would be no way the government would evacuate them if they knew what we were dealing with.”

Dupree just stared at him.

“You’re no politician,” he finally said.

“I’ve been told that,” Shaw said.

“A politician would have found a way to pass this along. Are you really accepting full responsibility for this?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t see what else I can do.”

He had nearly added that he didn’t cause the disease, that it was unfair to heap all this blame on him, but he stopped short of saying that because he wasn’t entirely convinced it was true. Hadn’t he ordered the campus opened up for all these evacuees? Hadn’t this shelter, which had begun with such noble intentions, turned into a literal hell on earth? That was his doing. All this mess, he had miscalculated. He had set the dominoes in motion.

Dupree sighed heavily.

“We will continue our evacuation efforts,” he said. “But we’re going to have to change the way we’re doing things.”

“In what way, sir?”

“Effective immediately all federal transportation out of the affected area will stop. We’ve already started setting up a staging area at the Sam Houston Race Park. You know where that is?”

Shaw nodded, and his mind was already leaping ahead, considering the logic of the military’s choice. It made perfect sense. Located at the intersection of the North Beltway and the Tomball Parkway, both major expressways, it was easy to get to, especially seeing as most of the freeways were elevated and therefore above the water level. Also, the Tomball Parkway was wide, straight, and flat. The military could run planes, even the big C-5 Galaxies, out of there all day long. There were train tracks there, too, providing a second form of mass transit. And the race park itself was immense. It would make the perfect gathering point for the military to triage the crowds and cull out the infected, if any made it that far.

“We’ll have National Guardsmen standing by,” Dupree went on. “They will have a medical staff on scene who will examine every person looking to be evacuated.”

Shaw nodded. But then he realized what Dupree had not said, the part he had left out. Dupree’s people would handle the evacuation once Shaw got the survivors to the Race Park, but it would be up to Shaw to get them there. He would have to personally guide as many refugees as he could find across the flooded ruins of a city that was, geographically speaking, one of the biggest on the planet. And he would have to do it in the midst of a deadly plague. Suddenly things seemed a whole lot more complicated.

“Sir,” he said, “can’t you offer me any help at all? My men have scrounged every house, every marina, every boat shop in South Houston, and we have managed to come up with a little over three hundred usable boats. I simply don’t have the resources to help these people. Can’t you help me with anything? Helicopters, extra boats, anything?”

Dupree’s face remained cold and impassive as he shook his head from side to side.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said. “You’re on your own.”

“Yeah,” Shaw said. “Yeah, I’m sorry, too.”

And now, with the memory of that disastrous meeting still fresh in his mind, Mark Shaw smoked the last of his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the floodwaters. He looked up and scanned the gray sky. Then he closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his heart beating in his chest.

Footsteps on the tiled deck behind him brought him back to the moment.

“Sir?”

Shaw turned around. Mark Eckert, the same officer who had set up the Skype connection for him, was standing there in a uniform caked with mud.

“What is it, Mark?”

“I just came to see if you needed anything, sir?”

“You heard that, huh?”

Eckert smiled sheepishly. “Yes, sir, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” Shaw said, “there’s a lot of that going around these days. Listen, I want you to do something for me.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Make an announcement, spread the word, I want every policemen and firefighter down by the library in two hours. We’re gonna be leaving this place real soon.”

Eckert nodded and left without another word.

Twenty minutes later, Mark Shaw was inside the M.D. Anderson Library, headed towards the EOC’s former office, wading through water that was up to his thighs. The entire first floor was flooded and the corridors were black. The only light came from the flashlight he carried. The smell of mud and rotten flesh was so powerful Shaw had to pull his shirt up over his nose, but even then he was constantly on the verge of gagging.

When he entered the EOC office, he saw why. Two of his officers were dead in here. But that wasn’t all. A man was feeding off one of the dead officers, tearing shreds of flesh from the officer’s upper arm. At first Shaw couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at. The man was doubled over the dead officer, his hair hanging down like a filthy curtain in front of his face. The officer’s body was rising and falling with the zombie’s exertions. Shaw thought to himself:
He’s taking his pulse, right? Checking for a heartbeat.
But the next instant the zombie looked up at Shaw and a large piece of dark red flesh sagged from his mouth like raw liver.

“Oh Jesus,” Shaw said.

The zombie rose to his full height, water pouring out of what was left of his clothes. In the flashlight beam he looked unnaturally white, the flesh hanging from his lips shiny and almost black. The zombie climbed over the dead officer, then over the computer console where the officer had been sitting when he died. He was moaning; a horrible, stuttering sound that Shaw could feel echoing in his chest.