Flesh Eaters (24 page)

“You’ve seen the way they stagger around. The way they moan. You can’t reason with them. They don’t even seem to hear you. They don’t seem to feel any pain. I watched one of them walking around with his intestines hangin’ out of his belly. And, I mean, they’re . . . you know, eating each other. What else could they be?”

Yeah
, she thought, remembering the look she had seen in Bobby Hester’s eyes and all that had come after that,
what else could they be?

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I just don’t know.”

Hank took them inside, where the Red Cross volunteers had set up a temporary shelter. There was no electrical power, of course, and the room was poorly lit by a single candle burning on a makeshift desk against the wall to the left of the door. Almost as soon as she entered Eleanor recoiled, not only from the smell of thirty people who had been living together in close quarters without air-conditioning, without bathing, without washing their clothes in days, but from the way their eyes had seemed to glow with a pale reflected light when they all turned as one to look at the new arrivals.

“It’s all right,” Hank said. “We don’t bite.”

She gave him a caustic look, but the poor man was too dumb to realize he’d made a poor choice of words. Jim and Madison didn’t hesitate, though. They followed Hank inside and smiled and muttered thank you as he introduced them around.

Eventually, Eleanor followed, too.

The glowing eyes she’d seen upon entering the room were gone now. They’d been replaced with worn, exhausted, but kind and smiling, faces. Hank had been right out there on the balcony when he referred to these folks as geezers, Eleanor thought. Not a single one of the volunteers looked to be under sixty-five. She spotted several older women playing bridge on an old Army cot. The women smiled at her, and especially at Madison, and Eleanor pushed down renewed thoughts of the thing that Ms. Hester had turned into.

But, she realized, Ms. Hester was another point in favor of Hank’s theory that the cannibals out there were zombies. Their bites are contagious, just like in the movies.

She shook the thought away and instead turned to Hank.

“How did you find these people?” she asked.

He beamed at her.

“I just got lucky, I guess. Captain Shaw sent me out night before last to find anybody I could and bring ’em back to the EOC. These folks here, they was set up in the gym over at the Elgin T. Baker Elementary School. They had the place all ready for refugees. Food, medical supplies, bunk beds, board games, you name it. They were ready.”

“Well,” said Eleanor, glancing around, “where are the refugees?”

“Nobody ever showed,” he said, and shrugged like it was no big deal. “Who knows why? It’s a shame, too, with all the supplies they had. I guess it’s just another one of those screw-ups that always seem to happen during times like this. You know?”

“Yeah,” she said.

Just another one of those screw-ups
, she thought bitterly. It made her wonder, when this was all said and done, just how much of the city’s disaster mitigation efforts would be summed up by those words. They were living through the greatest natural disaster since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and yet, despite all their training, all their drills and FEMA classes and grant money, they were bumbling around like idiots, humbled by the reality of nature.

Hey, but it’s all right
, that voice inside her head said. Only now the voice was anything but tentative. It was full-on sarcastic, laced with meanness.
It’s just another one of those screw-ups, ain’t that right?

Yeah
, she thought.
That’s right
.

“Sarge?” Hank said. “You okay?”

“Huh?” Eleanor asked. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking. Go on, you were saying?”

“Um, yeah, well . . . so when I get to the school, the area around it is pretty much hip-deep in water. The neighborhood, I mean, all the houses and stuff. I’m motoring down this street in a ski boat and at the end of it I see a playground and soccer goals. But the school itself is up on this hill, dry as a bone.”

“How’d you find out there were people inside?” Eleanor asked.

“I knew something was up. I could smell those zombies, you know? You know the way those zombies stink?”

“You could smell them? You didn’t hear them moaning?”

“Not at first. I heard ’em later, but the first thing I noticed was the smell. It’s that set-in dead-guy smell, like a really bad decomp. You’ve smelled that before. You know what I mean.”

Eleanor nodded.

“You ever smelled a body that’s been rotting inside an apartment with no air-conditioning in the middle of summer for three weeks?” Hank asked Jim.

Jim shook his head.

He looked amused by Hank’s easy manner, even as his nose wrinkled at the thought of a rotting corpse, and Eleanor realized that this was why Hank was so popular at work. Everybody loved him because he made them feel as if they were the center of the world.

“I remember this one time,” Hank went on, “a bunch of years ago, I got this call for a suicide. I could smell it from the street when I pulled up, and I knew what I was gonna find even before I got out of the car. You just get that feeling that it’s gonna be a bad one, you know? So my partner and I went up to the house and got inside and there was this big fat dude hanging from his bedroom ceiling. He’d been there long enough for the rope to stretch his neck out like one of those African tribes in the
National Geographic
, you know the ones?”

Jim nodded.

“The guy was so fat the contract body-removal guys had to hold him by the legs while the firefighters cut the rope up near the ceiling. Of course he was bare-assed nekkid, too. Man, you should have seen it. When the body dropped, it sagged over the shoulder of one of the body removal guys like a bag of flour, and when that happened, all that decomp gas and the guy’s rotten guts shot straight out his ass. It sprayed the wall behind him and, oh man, did it smell. You should have seen us. Grown men—veteran cops and firefighters and morgue employees—we all went running out into the front yard. And of course it was a slow news night. Channel 13 was right there with a camera crew. They got a great shot of us puking our guts out.”

Jim looked as if he couldn’t make up his mind to laugh or vomit. Hank, of course, was laughing at his own story, his face turning red. His laughter was contagious, though, and Eleanor, despite everything on her mind, found herself laughing along with him.
Cop humor
, she thought.
God, we are a screwed-up bunch of folks.

“Anyway,” Hank said, after the laughter had died down, “I thought that was about the worst stink I’d ever smell in my life. Until I ran into the zombies around that school, that is.”

“They stank that bad, even outside?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes, ma’am. There was a lot of ’em.”

“How many?”

“I’m not sure, ma’am. Two hundred, maybe more. I circled around the corner of the building, and that’s when I heard them moaning. I’d already dealt with a few of them, but I hadn’t seen a group that big. They were beating on the walls outside the school’s gym. Really goin’ at it. I bet they’d been at it for a while, too. A lot of their hands had started to bleed from beating on the walls.”

“So what’d you do?” Jim asked.

“Well, I had my AR-15. I went up to the front of the boat and laid out a mess of magazines and then I started yellin’ to get their attention. One by one they turned around and came at me. After that, I just took it one shot at a time.”

“And you said there were two hundred or more of them?” Eleanor asked, horrified by the implications.

“Yes, ma’am. There were bodies everywhere by the time I was done.”

“What did you do then?”

“Well, I figured those zombies were after something inside that school. So I went inside and found these folks. We waited out the storm, and then this morning, when I couldn’t get the EOC on the radio, I figured we needed to take matters into our own hands. These folks here already had those canoes you saw out there, and together we made our way here.”

“What happened to your boat?” Jim asked.

“Lost during the storm.”

“Where were you guys gonna go?” Eleanor asked.

“Well, that’s the thing, ma’am, I don’t rightly know. I was kind of hopin’ you guys had heard something different. Maybe had some idea of what was goin’ on.”

Eleanor shook her head.

“No, I’m afraid not. I guess maybe we could double back to the EOC and see what’s going on there.”

“I still don’t understand why that’s a good idea,” Jim said. “If you can’t reach them on the radio, doesn’t that mean they’re in as much trouble as we are?”

“They probably are in trouble,” Eleanor said. “But it doesn’t mean they aren’t the best place to go for help. It just means their communications are offline. There could be any number of reasons for that. Plus, if there’s going to be any sort of organized evacuation effort, it’s going to be focused there. I think we’d be taking too big of a chance going anywhere else.”

Jim didn’t look as if he was convinced, but he didn’t say anything more on the subject. He just frowned, then nodded reluctantly.

Hank turned to face the rest of the room.

The place smelled of unwashed bodies and filthy clothes, but the Red Cross volunteers had nonetheless done an adequate job of keeping the place neat. There were plenty of cots against the far wall, and the ones that weren’t being used were smartly made. Off to the right they’d set up a long folding card table with a selection of MREs and cookies and bags of chips and bottled drinks. Madison was over there, Eleanor saw with a sense of relief, helping herself to some cookies. With everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, at least her appetite was intact.

“Hey everybody,” Hank said to the room, and waited as the others quieted down and faced him. “Looks like we’re gonna be heading out in the morning. We’re gonna try to get to the EOC over at the University of Houston campus. From there, hopefully we’ll hook up with some folks who can get us evacuated.”

This was greeted with a murmuring of relieved voices from around the room. Eleanor could see several of the volunteers actually letting out deep sighs and clapping each other on the back.

“But we need to head out early,” Hank went on. “So get your stuff together tonight. I wanna leave at first light.”

Eleanor turned from Madison to Jim. He was staring back at her. That look of wearied exhaustion was back again.

“Are you sure this is what we need to do?” he asked.

“I really don’t see that we have any other choice.”

“What if we just get in the canoe and head north? We’re bound to reach safety sooner or later.”

“But Jim, you’ve seen those cannibals out there . . . those zombies. Whatever it is that’s causing them to be the way they are, it’s contagious. That means their numbers are going to be growing. You heard Hank. He faced down at least two hundred of them. There are probably at least that many out there, waiting for us. We’d never survive on our own. We need to group together if we’re going to get through this. And that means going to the EOC. I don’t see any other way.”

Before he had a chance to answer, Hank put a hand on both their shoulders.

“I promised you guys some chow. What do you say? You hungry?”

Eleanor took an MRE from the table and a plastic gallon jug of water and looked around the room for Madison. She found her sitting on the edge of a cot with no sheets, preparing her own MRE.

“You mind if I join you?” Eleanor asked.

Madison looked up at her with forced nonchalance and shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

Damn it
, Eleanor thought, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks.
Why is this always so hard?
Times like this she didn’t feel like other moms. She’d watched other women handle their kids’ attitudes in public with patience and self-control, even though it was obvious they were burning up inside. Eleanor figured she missed that part of the deal when they were handing out mothering skills because at times like this, when she made an honest effort and Madison just tossed it back in her face, all she could think to do was get mean. It infuriated her, both because her daughter was being a little shit and because she wasn’t being enough of a grown-up to deal with it.
Jesus
, she thought,
why did parenting have to be so damn hard?

But this had to be done. They had to talk. It couldn’t go on like this. Eleanor knew that, and she suspected that Madison did, too.

So she sat down next to Madison and unpacked her MRE. The entree was beef enchilada in sauce, which wasn’t great, but at least it wasn’t chicken fettuccine. God, that stuff was awful.

Beside her, Madison was filling her meal pouch bag with water. Eleanor watched appreciatively as her daughter activated the chemical heater and dropped it into the water, then folded over the top of the pouch and stuffed it into the entree carton. That done, she leaned the carton against the leg of the cot to keep the assembly properly inclined, then opened up her package of peanut butter and spread it on some crackers.

“You know your way around an MRE,” Eleanor said, genuinely impressed.

“I’ve eaten a bunch over the last two weeks.”

Eleanor opened her mouth to tell Madison not to take that tone with her, but closed it again. That wasn’t going to work here. It would just drive Madison further away.

She separated out her own MRE, prepared her own meal pouch assembly, and then tucked the instant coffee into the back pocket of her jeans. Her clothes were still wet, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that.

“Hey,” she said to Madison, “what’d you get for dessert?”

“Chocolate pudding.”

“Ah, you got the good one. I got banana pudding.”

“I don’t like the banana pudding.”

“No, me, either. I guess you won’t switch with me then, huh?”

Madison tossed her dessert pouch into Eleanor’s lap. “Here, you can have mine. I’m not all that hungry anyway.”