Flesh Eaters (23 page)

The cannibal, for his part, seemed unaware he’d just been killed. His face never changed expression. The bloody grimace that had turned his mouth into such an object of horror never relaxed. With no emotion of any kind, he slowly sank into the water, like a marionette whose strings had just been cut.

Confused, Eleanor looked at Jim, but he was clearly as confused as she was.

“What happened?” he said.

Her gaze went past him, fixing on a figure who was standing on the wraparound balcony of the office park. He was waving at them, a rifle in his hands.

“Is that . . . ?” Jim asked.

“Yeah,” Eleanor said, a smile creeping across her face as she took in the wiry country boy with the boonie cap pushed high up on his forehead, away from his sunglasses. “That’s Hank Gleason.”

CHAPTER 11

The water was deeper around the building, which, Eleanor could see from a cream-colored granite wall near the entrance to the parking lot, was called the Meadowlakes Business Park. Eleanor looked down as they entered the lake that had once been the building’s parking lot, and though the water was a dark gray and cloudy with silt and debris, she could still see the ghosts of cars down there.

She chanced a look behind her.

The crowd that had been closing in on them was struggling with the deeper water. Many were drowning as they tried to follow them. But there were many more gathering beyond the entrance, maybe a hundred total now, and their moans had become truly awful, rising to a deafening roar that seemed to echo off every building at once.

“Why won’t they leave us alone?” Madison screamed. “Leave us alone!”

Eleanor turned back to her daughter and saw that Madison’s face had turned an ashen white. Her eyes were wide, crazy looking, shiny and bloodshot. Beads of sweat had popped out all over her face, and the green T-shirt she wore was dark and wet at the neck and underarms. Her expression was one of utter despair and rage and exhaustion.

“Madison,” Eleanor said. Her voice was firm, but not without compassion. “Baby, look at me.”

Madison’s gaze shifted from the drowning cannibals to Eleanor, and in that instant, Eleanor’s heart broke.

“Mom, what’s wrong with them? Why are they like that?”

Suddenly Eleanor felt very tired. Her eyes had gone dry and they hurt. It wasn’t a needling pain, but the kind of soreness that came from too many hours of staying awake, heartsick with worry about life and family and the future. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and let out a long, tired sigh.

“They’re desperate,” Eleanor said at last. “Desperate people do terrible things.”

“Ms. Hester wasn’t desperate,” Madison countered.

She had that defensive, challenging tone that all teenagers seem to fall back on when the world of grown-ups stops making sense.

“She had
us
. We were family. We loved her.
I
loved her. Why did she change? Why did she turn into one of those crazy people?”

Eleanor opened her mouth to answer, but closed it again. She had nothing, no answer that would do her daughter’s question justice, and she knew it. There were times, she thought, when she still got the teenager’s point of view. It wasn’t
that
long ago, for Christ’s sake. But Madison was still looking at her with that look that was simultaneously defiant and wounded. And the truth was, Eleanor told herself, that she wasn’t even sure she had been telling the truth when she called those cannibals over there desperate. Madison was right about that. Ms. Hester hadn’t been desperate. She’d been attacked by her grandson, attacked so badly that, for a second, Eleanor thought he had killed her.

And then she became just like him.

Had something similar happened for each of those people at the edge of the parking lot? Did they have a Bobby Hester somewhere behind them, a crazed loved one who attacked them and changed them? She just didn’t know, but the possibility terrified her. They could be sitting at ground zero of an epidemic.

Eleanor closed her eyes and tried to push the image of Ms. Hester crawling across the floor of Madison’s room out of her mind.

But she couldn’t.

She could still hear Ms. Hester’s fingernails snapping as her clawlike hands gripped the carpet. She could still see the woman’s face, bloodstained and twisted with an expression that wasn’t quite rage, not quite pain, but something that was both of those things, and neither.

“Hey there, Sergeant Norton. How you doin’?”

Eleanor glanced up at the balcony. Hank Gleason was up there, smiling down at them with that cool, country-boy swagger of his, smoking a cigarette, and a momentary blush rose up in Eleanor’s cheeks. A sixteen-year-old memory surfaced along with it. It had happened before Madison was born, even before Jim had entered her life. She had gone to see
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
with two of her girlfriends from the department. They’d sat there in the darkened theater, feeling stupid, feeling like the only adults in a room full of teenyboppers, until the werewolf, Jacob Black, made his first appearance. Jacob was leaning against the trunk of a car, no shirt to hide the view, six-pack abs shiny with a thin sheen of sweat, and the entire audience, three hundred women in all, let out a collective, satisfied sigh.

Eleanor and her girlfriends held Hank Gleason in similar esteem. Like Taylor Lautner, who had played Jacob in
Eclipse
, Hank was pure eye candy. But whereas Taylor Lautner, a.k.a. Sharkboy, was really just a child growing into a man’s body, Hank was the real deal. He was a man in a god’s body. He was a six-foot-four monument to good genetics, for only perfect genes could account for a man who drank like an Irish poet and smoked like a barn on fire and yet still managed to look like an underwear model.

He’d been in the sun a lot these last two weeks, too. She could tell from the faint red glow of his skin, set off by the gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and the OD green T-shirt he wore. The added color made him look even more delicious.

Eleanor cleared her throat.

“We’re doing just great, Hank. Thanks for the help back there.”

He took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out beneath the toe of his boot. “Always happy to help out a lady in need,” he said, tipping his boonie cap jauntily at her. He looked over at Jim and said, “How about you, Mr. Norton? You doin’ okay?”

“Just great, thanks. Call me Jim.”

Hank’s smile grew bigger, even warmer, if that was possible. He had lovely teeth. “You got it, Jim. Call me Hank. And you, little lady,” he said to Madison, “how goes it?”

Madison tried to smile, but couldn’t muster a very convincing one.

Hank’s smile wavered a bit, but to his credit, he didn’t push it. “Y’all had a rough ride, I guess,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eleanor agreed. “You could say that.”

“Well, we got it pretty well covered up here. Water’s deep enough they can’t get to us, and even if they did, we got the only stairs blocked off.”

He pointed down the length of the building, where a large metal staircase was completely buried in a tangle of pipes and cables and all sorts of heavy debris. On the balcony above the stairs Eleanor saw about ten metal-hulled canoes.

“I was watching when you guys first showed up,” Hank went on. “I saw you flip over and lose your backpacks. They’re still stuck over there along that line of shrubs. I can help you get ’em back tomorrow morning, if you want. In the meantime, we got a bunch of supplies up here if you guys want to spend the night.”

“Who’s we?” Eleanor asked.

“Me and about thirty old geezers from the Red Cross. Volunteers, you know? Good folks. They had a ton of supplies with ’em when I found ’em. Come on up.”

Eleanor looked over at Jim.

“I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice,” he said.

“Yeah, I agree. Madison, this would be a good chance for you to get some rest. I know you had a really crappy day.”

Madison nodded.

She looked up at Hank and was about to ask him how they were supposed to get up there, but he was already lowering a rope.

Hank pulled them up the rope one by one, and then helped them stow their canoe with the others. With the boat secured, he pointed them down the balcony. “We’re this way. You guys hungry?”

“God yes,” Jim said.

Jim was drenched in sweat, sunburned, exhausted. He had an arm around Madison’s shoulder. His lips were cracked and pale, his face scruffy with a week’s worth of whiskers. Eleanor looked at him, and then at Hank Gleason, who was walking next to him, resplendent in his testosterone-laden maleness, and there was no comparison. Jim was your standard American male, a little dopey looking, soft around the middle, full of flaws. But Hank, Hank was the ideal. He was tall and lean, with muscles so hard you could you bounce quarters off them.

And yet, now that she had the two of them before her, Eleanor realized why she had fallen in love in the first place. Hank just bled into the background. For her, it was all about Jim. The sight of him hobbling along, sweaty, balding, kind of chubby, stiff from sitting in the canoe all day, but with his arm draped around their daughter, was enough to melt her inside. For her, that was real love.

“What?” Jim said. He was looking at her, a hint of a laugh in his voice.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m hungry, too.”

Hank Gleason clapped his hands.

“Outstanding. After a day of dodging zombies I guess you guys are ready for some serious chow.”

He spoke casually. There was even a breezy note of humor in what Hank had said. But it still sent a chill through Eleanor. They had been walking along the balcony, a long line of dark and empty office space to their left, and to their right a misty sort of rain falling on the flooded city. The air had a briny, ocean smell. Eleanor, who was beginning to sense the mother bitch of all headaches coming on, had been trailing along behind, trying to relax. But her mind rebelled to the idea of zombies, and she stopped in her tracks.

“What did you say?”

The others walked on a few steps, unaware she that she was no longer following. Hank looked back at her over his shoulder and stopped walking too. He was still smiling, but the expression had lost some of its easy charm. He looked like a man just beginning to realize he’d said something wrong.

“I . . . I’m sorry, ma’am?”

“You called those people zombies. Those cannibals.”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Zombies? Like in the horror movies? The walking dead.”

“Well . . .” He trailed off, and abruptly he looked very uncomfortable. He glanced over at Jim, maybe for support, and Eleanor could see the Adam’s apple working up and down in his throat. “Well, I mean,” he went on, “they’re not exactly . . . you know, dead. But . . . yeah, I mean, they’re zombies. I mean, that’s what . . . isn’t that what you guys saw?”

Of course not, you idiot
, Eleanor thought. Adonis though he may be, she’d never held any delusions about Hank Gleason’s good genetics extending all the way up to his brain.
Zombies? Seriously? People are eating each other out there, people are dying, Ms. Hester is dying, and you’re making jokes about zombies? This shit is for real.

But doesn’t that one word make a lot of sense?
asked a tentative voice in her head.

Eleanor thought back to the horror movies she’d seen when she still watched garbage like that. Jim of course loved his horror movies, always had. But Eleanor, who had seen real monsters, who, during her tour of duty in Sex Crimes, had seen more murdered children than any normal person should have to see, was unimpressed by Hollywood’s trivial attempts at fear-making. Their monsters paled in comparison to the real-life horrors that walked the streets of every city in America and hunted its children like trophies. In her mind, zombies were nothing but harlequins, clowns in shabby makeup. They staggered around, pantomiming death, while cheesy music played on the soundtrack and bare-breasted bimbos titillated the teenage boys in the audience. From her youth she remembered the movie version of Max Brooks’s
World War Z
and the TV series based on Robert Kirkman’s
The Walking Dead
, and she remembered those grossing her out, but never scaring her. They were ridiculous. They were slow and stupid and little more than an excuse for a whole generation of angry-minded, disaffected youth to safely and sanely fantasize about killing loads of people. Zombies were wish fulfillment, nothing more.

But doesn’t that one word make a lot of sense?
repeated the faint, tentative voice in her head. Only now it was less tentative, gaining strength.
Doesn’t it?

Eleanor glanced out across the water. A misting rain was still falling. The water coursed slowly as it pushed, finger-like, into the low places between the buildings. And here and there, dark shapes moved at the edges of the parking lot, their moans echoing across the flood.

She turned back to Hank.

He was looking at her, that uncertain grin still on his face. Beside him, a head shorter and looking utterly bedraggled, Jim was also watching her. She stared back at Jim and wondered if his mind was having the same trouble linking up what they had seen with the word “zombie” and all it implied. It didn’t seem so. He, and Madison beside him, looked unruffled by the use of the word. It had no power over them. Not in the same way it did over her.

“But they’re alive,” she said. “Out there, when I . . .” She was about to say,
When I drowned that man out there
, but the words wouldn’t come. The memory of her own anger, and the look of disgust and worry and fear she had seen on Jim’s face afterward, crowded into her mind. “They’re not dead,” she said.

“No,” Hank said slowly. “No, they’re alive all right.”

“So how can they be zombies?”

“Well, I don’t mean zombies like in
Night of the Living Dead
and stuff like that. You’re right about them being alive. Those aren’t corpses. But the rest of it fits, doesn’t it?”

Again he looked at Jim, who nodded readily enough.

He does believe it
, Eleanor thought.
He, and Madison, too, they’re both buying this.