Flesh Eaters (2 page)

She shook the memories of those storms from her mind and focused her attention out the window. From where she stood she could just see a corner of Ms. Hester’s house across the street. The woman was eighty-four and struggling with what Eleanor suspected was incipient Alzheimer’s disease; but she was a sweet old lady and, with both Jim and Eleanor’s parents dead, had even filled in as the grandmother that Madison had never known. There had been several years, right around the time Madison was starting school and Eleanor was still slaving away as a detective in the Houston Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit and Jim was working at Gulfport Petrochemical, when they hadn’t been able to afford child care. They were working all the time, but still miserably broke. Ms. Hester had come to their rescue. She took care of Madison during those years—cooked her dinners, taught her to paint, even picked her up from school on early-release days—and in so doing had earned a special place in Eleanor’s heart. In all their hearts, actually.

And so it was with considerably more than neighborly concern that Eleanor watched the wind thrashing the pecan trees that surrounded Ms. Hester’s little one-story white house. Madison had spent the last six summers collecting pecans from those trees, she and Ms. Hester shelling them and turning them into pecan pies and candied pralines. The trees were beautiful, even useful in their way, but they were notoriously ill-suited for bad weather. The wood was soft enough that the weight of the nuts alone could cause limbs to snap off in late summer. A strong Category Five hurricane wind would blast the trees to bits. How long would it take, she wondered, before one of those bits lanced through the roof, or a side wall, sending shards of glass through the house like bird shot from a twelve gauge?

“Mom, you okay?”

Eleanor half turned from the sink but said nothing.

“Uh, Mom, hello?”

This time Eleanor turned around. The thick note of sarcasm in Madison’s voice was something new, something she’d picked up, Eleanor suspected, from Susie Tyler and Brandy Moore, two girls who had just recently become Madison’s closest friends. The three girls spent nearly every day that summer running around together, sleeping over at each other’s houses, learning how to be teenagers together. It was natural behavior, Eleanor knew, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Susie especially seemed like a bad influence, always so loud and disrespectful to the other girls’ parents. She had an annoying habit of making everything a competition between her and Madison, never missing a chance to gloat over some small victory or rub in some awkward moment on Madison’s part. And at twelve, Madison was having plenty of those.

Still, Eleanor backed off from actually telling Madison she couldn’t hang out with Susie. Her own mother had been a shrew when it came to Eleanor’s friends and had taken an almost sadistic delight in pointing out how much she disliked the girls Eleanor ran around with. It had made her afraid to have friends over, and Eleanor promised herself she wouldn’t be the same way, even if it meant swallowing the urge to fire a broadside here and there.

“I think it’s full, Mom,” Madison said, nodding at the sink.

Eleanor glanced behind her and saw that the five-gallon plastic water jug she’d been filling at the sink was indeed running over. She turned off the tap, poured off a little, and then screwed down the cap.

She lifted it from the sink with a grunt and put it on the floor next to the other four jugs she’d just filled.

“That’s the last of them anyway,” she said.

Madison was sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor, putting cans of soup into a cardboard box, but she paused long enough to study her mother.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, honey.”

“You sure? You kinda zoned out there for a second.”

Eleanor smiled, but didn’t respond. There were times, certain moments when Madison had her head turned just the right way, when Eleanor could see how much her daughter really looked like Jim. It was in the profile, mainly. They had the same little upturn at the point of their nose, the same tapered chin, the same little tiny ears. Madison was the adolescent girl version of her father; but whereas those same features gave Jim an intelligent, studious aspect—especially when he wore his glasses—in Madison they became stunningly beautiful.

That girl is going to break a million hearts one day
, Eleanor thought, and it was an idea that both terrified and delighted her.

“Why don’t you take those upstairs, okay?” Eleanor said, nodding at the box of soup.

“I can’t lift it.”

“What? Sure you can.”

“No, Mom,” she said, the sarcasm oozing back into her voice, “I can’t. It weighs, like, a whole ton.”

“No, it doesn’t. And don’t say ‘like.’ You know I hate the way that sounds.”

Madison sighed and made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes.

“Fine,” Eleanor said. “We’ll get your dad to do it. In the meantime, find something else you
can
carry. What’s next on the family list?”

Madison huffed indignantly, then picked up a yellow, coil-bound notebook that Eleanor had prepared to guide the family during a hurricane. She called it their family disaster plan. It contained nearly everything they would need to know about the contents of their supply kits and evacuation routes, plus contingency plans for getting the family back together again after the storm, should they get separated. Each member of the family also had a backpack that contained an individual ninety-six-hour supply kit, a personal version of the yellow disaster plan notebook, family photos, important numbers, and a couple hundred dollars in cash. The backpacks were already upstairs. What Eleanor and Madison were doing now was checking off the family supply kit for sheltering in place and carting the contents upstairs, just in case the floodwaters swamped the first floor of their house.

Madison read from the list, pointing to items as she said their names. “Next up is sanitation. Toilet paper, soap, lady-time stuff”—Madison’s eyebrows raised slightly at her mother’s euphemism for feminine hygiene products—“disinfectant, bleach, garbage bags and ties. Why do you have those on here twice?”

“What?”

“Garbage bags and ties. You’ve got them here and in the Miscellaneous section.”

“The sanitation section ones are for when you have to go to the bathroom. There should be a bucket with a tight-fitting lid there, too.”

Madison’s lips parted slightly, her nose crinkling in disgust. “A bucket? Mom, that’s gross.”

“No, that’s survival, kiddo. You’ve never been through one of these storms. You don’t know how bad it can get. I remember when I was a girl the water was off for two weeks after Hurricane Ike. What do you think happens when the toilets stop flushing?”

“Well, yeah, but . . .” Madison trailed off, her gaze shifting to the box of plastic trash bags as if she was suddenly too grossed out to touch them.

“You’ll live,” Eleanor said. “If it’s all there, just take it upstairs.”

The smile disappeared from Eleanor’s face as she watched her daughter cart yet another cardboard box of supplies upstairs. There were rough times ahead, and the girl was in for one hell of an education on the fury of nature.

The thought sent Eleanor even deeper into her own head. She had talked with Jim an awful lot lately about how fast Madison was growing up. Her thirteenth birthday was only two months away, but the changes had already started. She and Madison had had the talk about the lady time, and it had been a lot harder, a lot more embarrassing, than Eleanor had expected it to be. But in a way that talk had prepared her to think of her daughter as a woman, something that Jim was having a much harder time doing. Perhaps it was Madison’s smile, that giggly little smile of hers that so perfectly recalled the way she looked as a toddler. Or perhaps it was just Jim’s stubborn streak. Eleanor wasn’t sure. But whatever the reason, he seemed determined to avoid the issue. He still called Madison his little girl, and in fact had started using the phrase more and more in recent months, which indicated to Eleanor that he knew the truth, at least on some level, but was unwilling to face it.

She couldn’t blame him. Not really. There were times—plenty of times, in fact—that she didn’t want to face it, either.

Jim’s electric drill had gone silent as he moved to a new window. The wind, too, quieted for a moment. And in that lull, Eleanor heard the sound of arguing from across the street. She craned her head out the window, and what she saw there made her chest tighten with both pity and rage.

Ms. Hester was standing in the front yard, looking smaller and even frailer than she had earlier that day, when Eleanor had passed her on her way into work. The wind was billowing her housedress out to one side, and her arms were crossed over her chest in a gesture that made her look completely helpless. Rain rings formed chain-mail patterns in the water at her feet. Standing at the edge of her lawn, next to a beat-to-hell red pickup, was her grandson, Bobby.

When the guys at work mentioned meth heads, Bobby Hester was the image that flared up in Eleanor’s mind. He was tall and lanky, so skinny his clothes fit him like a potato sack on a flagpole. He wore his filthy blond hair down to his shoulders, and there were tattoos all up and down his arms, where the veins stood out like electrical cords beneath his skin.

He was the one Eleanor had heard yelling, and as she watched he opened the passenger door of his truck and put Ms. Hester’s TV inside.

That manipulative, thieving little bastard
, she thought.

Though she couldn’t hear what Ms. Hester was saying, she could figure it out without any real difficulty. Ms. Hester was scared. She wanted him to stay with her during the storm. She was probably begging him to stay.

But Bobby Hester would never agree to something like that.

He had miraculously reappeared in her life about two years ago, at the same time she started slipping a little from the Alzheimer’s. To Eleanor it was no coincidence. He was a wolf sensing an easy meal, nothing more. Certainly not the long-lost grandson he no doubt claimed to be. Eleanor had tried to say as much, but Ms. Hester wouldn’t listen to a word of it. She adamantly refused to see Bobby as bad news. She welcomed him into her home. And he repaid her kindness by robbing her blind.

Now he was telling her to stop her whining. That he’d be back. That he just wanted to take her electronic stuff someplace safe. She wasn’t holding back, was she? There wasn’t a TV someplace she hadn’t told him about?

The fucking bastard is gonna pawn everything she owns so he can get cash for his meth
, Eleanor thought, and suddenly the image of her putting a bullet in his brain was very strong, and more than a little satisfying.

A knock on the window made her jump. It was Jim, looking in on her, his knuckles still poised at the glass.

She undid the latch and opened the window.

“You’re seeing this, right?” he said.

“Yeah.” Her pistol was upstairs in her backpack, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d be able to hit Bobby from here. One good head shot would be all it’d take. “That man’s a slime ball.”

“That’s true,” Jim said. “You want me to go over there and tell her to stay with us?”

“I tried that this morning. She kept saying Bobby was going to stay with her tonight. That’s all she would say. ‘Bobby’s coming. I’ll be okay, Bobby’s comin’ over.’ ”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped, and then instantly wanted to pull the words back. “Sorry.”

He nodded. “It makes me angry, too.”

“Yeah.”

He had a hand on the windowsill. He was filthy from putting up the plywood screens and cleaning up the stuff from the yard that might blow around during the storm and cause damage, but she didn’t care. It was good to be home with him. She put her own hand on top of his and squeezed.

He looked past her to the kitchen. “Where’s Maddie?”

“Upstairs. We’re gonna need you to carry the food boxes.”

“Sure.”

In the distance, lightning flashed across the sky. A roll of thunder followed along close on its heels. The air smelled ominous, heavy with the scent of salt and sea.

“You can smell it, can’t you?” he said. “The storm’s getting close.”

“Yeah.”

Across the street, Bobby’s pickup fired up with a loud snarl, and he sped off, leaving Ms. Hester standing in her front yard. Ms. Hester watched him go, obviously frightened, then slowly turned and went back inside her house.

“What do you want to do about that?” Jim asked.

“She’s family. We’ll take her in. As soon as we’re done loading all this stuff upstairs I’ll go over there and get her.”

“And if she won’t come? You can’t make her leave if she doesn’t want to.”

“She’s family, Jim. I won’t let her ride this thing out alone.”

“Okay,” he said, and with that they closed the window and Jim dropped the last sheet of plywood into place over top of it.

The first heavy band of rain came about thirty minutes later. It slammed into the side of the Nortons’ house in enormous wind-driven blasts, beating against the roof and the exterior walls, roaring like a passing freight train. It lasted less than two minutes, and then slackened off to a steady, needling patter.

They were in the game room upstairs. Madison’s room was next door, but they had tacitly decided that the whole family would sleep here. Now father and daughter were rolling out sleeping bags, the two of them laughing over some stupid thing Jim had said. They seemed to be having a pretty good time of it, Eleanor noticed. She hadn’t heard Madison laughing like this in a long while. Not even the wind and the rain outside seemed to bother her, at least not yet. She had her daddy with her, the two of them too absorbed in being goofy to be afraid of a little wind and rain. Jim was treating this like a big adventure, at least in front of Madison, and Eleanor was glad for that. It would help Madison to remain calm when things got really bad here in another few hours, and perhaps it would also help Jim to hold on to his little girl for a little while longer. A crisis like this, it would be terrible for the great wide world outside their house; but here, inside, the Norton family was in a good place.