Flesh Eaters (25 page)

“Baby, I was—”

“Don’t call me baby, Mom, I hate that.”

“Oh,” Eleanor said. “Oh, okay. I . . . I’m sorry, Madison. What would you rather I call you?”

“I don’t care. Anything but baby. I’m not a kid.”

“Madison, come on, you’re not even thirteen.”

As soon as she said it Eleanor knew it was wrong. But she didn’t get a chance to head off Madison’s reaction, for in that moment, her daughter’s face twisted out of shape as if she’d suddenly smelled something nasty.

“I don’t want to be reminded I’m a kid!” Madison nearly screamed at her.

An older woman who had been sitting on a nearby cot reading a David McCullough book looked up at them, caught Eleanor’s eye, and quickly looked away again.

Eleanor turned back to Madison, who was on her feet now, and said, “Madison, please. I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing for me say.” She patted a spot on the cot beside her. “Would you sit back down, please?”

“Why?”

“Please, Madison. I just want to talk.”

“About what?”

Once again, Eleanor felt a hot rage flash across her skin. She was very close to losing it. The urge to grab Madison by the front of her blouse and pull her down onto the cot was almost overpowering. But instead of giving into it, she closed her eyes and pushed the anger away.

After a few deep breaths, she opened her eyes again. Madison was looking at her, her hands on her hips, a twitch at the corner of her mouth that somehow knew better than to develop into the mocking sneer it had the potential to be.

Eleanor almost asked her to sit down again, but told herself she had to pick her battles.

“You’re upset about what happened to Ms. Hester, I know. I am, too.” Eleanor patted the cot next to her. “Will you tell me how you’re feeling? I’d like to know what’s on your mind.”

For just the thinnest of moments, the hard veneer of resistance on Madison’s expression wavered, giving Eleanor a glimpse of the wounded child underneath. Her heart filled with tenderness for her daughter then, and she thought:
Most of the time I don’t understand her. Not anymore. She’s grown into somebody who’d rather push me away than open up. There’s a cold, whispering emptiness between us now. But right there, that’s the little girl who used to sit with me on the couch and laugh when I tickled her and shiver with delight when I read her the Harry Potter books.

But the thought was clipped off right there, for Madison’s face suddenly hardened, and the old obstinacy flooded back in.

“Jesus Christ, Mom, what do you think this is? You act like we’re living in some kind of sitcom. You think you’re gonna come over here and have a three-minute little heart-to-heart with me, and that’s gonna be enough to make everything all better again. Well, it’s not, Mom. This is real life. It sucks here. It fucking sucks.”

And with that Madison spun on her heel and stormed off.

Eleanor watched her go, dimly aware that most of the others had heard the outburst and were watching her out of the corner of their eyes. But Eleanor didn’t care about that. The most important thing in the world to her was walking away, her hands balled into fists, her cheeks wet with tears.

Eleanor felt as if a pit had opened up beneath her. The voice in her head that had spoken to her out on the balcony came back.
Go after her
, it said.
Do something. Do some real parenting for a change.

But all Eleanor could do was sit there, stricken, unaware of the tears falling down her own cheeks.

Later, after the sun went down, Eleanor made the instant coffee from her back pocket and took it out to the balcony to watch the water and try to think about everything that had happened. The coffee was good and hot. She drank it black. The misting rain from earlier was gone now, and looking up, she could see stars through the tattered remnants of gray clouds. Far off in the distance—to the south, she guessed—she could see a pale orange smear of a large fire burning just over the horizon. To the east, she could hear the hollow clap of rifle fire echoing off the floodwater. And all of this she took in absently, not really seeing any of it.

Things were really, really bad. There was no denying that. The full weight of just how bad weighed heavily on her mind. Not only was the world as she knew it collapsing around her, not only did her daughter hate her guts for some mysterious reason that continued to elude her, not only were there zombies out there trying to eat them . . . as if all that wasn’t enough, she was about to lead the only part of her life that still mattered into an uncertain future. She was gambling with her family’s lives, and that made her heartsick.

There were, in fact, so many problems pressing in upon her that she couldn’t number them all. She couldn’t pick them apart and deal with them individually, which was her usual way of attacking a difficult situation, for all those problems were interconnected, like a web.

She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the water lapping against the sides of the building, trying to impose a sense of peace on a mind that would have none of it, and that’s when she heard the splashing.

Her eyes flew open.

All at once her body was tense, hairs standing up on end. She looked straight down over the edge of the balcony and saw a zombie moving along the ground-floor wall, trying to find a way inside. The water was up to his chest, and she thought:
That can’t be. They were drowning before.

And then she saw why. Off in the distance, beyond the edge of the parking lot, the water was down. Cars that before had been up to their windows in water now appeared to be standing in shallow puddles. The water barely covered the bottom of the tires.

More splashing off to her right caused her to turn around. She could see a large crowd of zombies wading through the parking lot toward the building.

The glass doors slid open behind her and she spun around, startled.

Jim was standing there.

“She’s sleeping now,” he said. “I think she cried herself to sleep. Maybe tomorrow she’ll—”

“Jim, we have to get out of here. Now!”

“What?”

“There’s no time, Jim. We have to go. Look!” She pointed toward the approaching zombie horde.

“Oh my God,” he said. “What happened? How did they . . .”

“Low tide,” Eleanor said. “It’s low tide.”

CHAPTER 12

Mark Eckert slammed the door behind him and stepped out onto a small concrete patio. Before the storm the university’s art students must have used it as a smokers’ station. There was a battered metal chair to his right and next to that a low, cylindrical ash can. Here and there he saw a few soggy cigarette butts wedged into the cracks in the concrete. He grabbed the chair and slid its back under the door handle, the way he’d seen done in the movies. He had no idea if it would actually work or not, but then, he only needed a second or two head start.

From the other side of the metal door he could hear moaning. The zombies had caught up to him already.

So much for his head start.

Gingerly, he touched the burning gash on his right shoulder where one of them had bit him. It was hurting bad, already starting to smell like rot, and as he touched the edges of the pus-filled wound and tried to press a dangling flap of skin back over the missing chunk of his arm, he felt the first pangs of nausea. His head was a soupy mess, and it was hard to focus. What had he been trying to do again? Why couldn’t he remember? It was like his brain kept slipping into neutral.

A body slammed into the other side of the door with an explosive crack, knocking the chair out from under the door handle and sending it skidding across the concrete. Mark Eckert jumped, jarred out of his confusion.

He stepped back to the edge of the concrete patio, his heels hanging over the side, just as the door exploded open and the first zombies staggered through it. Mark couldn’t move his right arm. It hung limp as an empty sack from his shoulder, and that meant he had to shoot left-handed. It was a skill they drilled on constantly when he was a cadet in the Houston Police Department’s Training Academy, but even under the controlled conditions found at the gun range, he’d never been very good with his left hand.

But now, with a horde of zombies closing in on him and his head swimming and his body burning itself up with fever as it fought the virus waging war in his veins, conditions were anything but perfect.

Pretty damn crappy would be more accurate,
he thought, and a thin, weak laugh crawled out of his throat.

Still, he had enough presence of mind to fire off a round as the lead zombie crashed into him, knocking the wind from his lungs and sending him sprawling off the back of the patio. But as his body tumbled backwards he caught a glimpse of scalp and blood and bone exploding out behind the zombie’s head, and in the moment before he crash-landed, he let out a half-formed cry of victory.

Got you, you fucking bastard!

He landed with a splash, and for a moment, nearly blacked out. He had to struggle to hold on to consciousness. There was something inside him that seemed to be pulling him down, the way sleep can pull your head back to the pillow after a restless night of broken sleep. Only the pain in his shoulder kept him going. Mark shook the fog from his mind. His butt and lower back were underwater. Only his knees and his head and shoulders remained above it, making him look like a man trying to sit up in the bathtub. The water wasn’t deep, not nearly as deep as it had been earlier that afternoon, and, absurdly, the thought
Maybe it’s all going away and we’ll be okay!
played in his mind . . . except that it wasn’t going to be okay, not with the rest of those zombies tumbling down off the side of the patio like penguins off an iceberg. They were still coming for him, and nothing was ever going to be okay again.

Painfully, uncertainly, he pulled himself to his feet.

He was exhausted.

The downward pull toward unconsciousness was almost irresistible. But he hadn’t lost his will to live. Not yet.

He turned and limped off toward the EOC.

Mark made his way as fast as he could around the corner of Farish Hall and continued on through the courtyard, past the Cullen Performance Hall and then onto University Drive. The library was up ahead on his right. Glancing around, he saw about forty zombies following him. Some were starting to fall back, but more than a few were keeping pace. A few were even gaining on him. He could probably make it all the way to the parking lot where Captain Shaw was trying to assemble the refugees and put them onto boats, but somehow he doubted it. The entire campus was overrun with zombies. The captain was surrounded the last Mark had heard, and that had been about two hours ago. He’d be doing his impression of Custer at the Little Bighorn by now. And besides, Mark thought bitterly, the way his body was rebelling against him, he’d probably collapse before he made it halfway. And that would mean letting those things tear him apart with their teeth and fingernails. That wasn’t going to happen.

So Mark Eckert ran.

But not wildly. As a kid he’d played with his dog in the surf down at Galveston and he knew how tired you could get running through shallow water if you didn’t pump your knees like pistons when you ran. Up ahead there was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence with a large white sign with red letters—
KEEP BACK FIFTY FEET AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY—posted near the gate. All he had to do was get through that gate and lock it. From there, the main office of the EOC was only a short distance away.

The gate was hanging open a few inches. His heart was pounding when he reached it. Every breath made it feel as if he were getting stabbed in the ribs with a pointed stick.

But for as bad as he felt, he stopped and took a quick look back at his pursuers.

The original group of forty or so that had cornered him in the lobby of the art building had thinned out to a long staggered line now.

The nearest zombie was a big white guy in mud-soaked jeans and a T-shirt that hung in bloody rags from his shoulders. Through the tattered shirt Mark could see the man’s white belly glistening. Water drops splashed up around him like white sparks as he charged the fence.

Behind him, maybe ten paces at the most, was another man who was missing one side of his face. The rest were coming up behind them. He could hear them, but he couldn’t see them in the darkness.

He jumped through the gate, spun around, and pulled it closed. Someone had left the padlock dangling from one of the diamond holes in the fence—even when the EOC was in everyday use, they’d been sloppy about locking it. Mark and his fellow officers had joked about the piss-poor security around here more than once, but he was thankful for it now. He fumbled with the padlock, trying to pull it out, but his fingers felt fat and numb. And trying to hurry only made it worse.

The lead zombie was closing on him now, close enough that Mark was getting splashed by the zombie’s awkward movements through the water.

“Come on, come on,” he pleaded with himself. “Come on, damn it.”

And then he had it. The padlock slid off the fence and Mark held it up triumphantly in front of him. He glanced at the zombie, and a chill went through him. The man’s eyes were clouded over, nearly completely white, as though with cataracts. They seemed utterly empty . . . even as the man’s lips drew back, revealing blood-soaked teeth and shredded gums.

Mark swallowed the lump in his throat and then jammed the arm of the padlock down through the latch and locked it.

A moment later the zombie crashed into the gate. He was followed by two more, then a third. Within seconds there were seven, then nine, twelve. And more were appearing at the fence with each passing moment.

Mark backed away from the fence, his head swimming, his vision blurry. He was wincing with every breath. He looked down the row of ruined faces leering vacantly back at him through the fence and he suddenly felt more scared than he had ever been before. At that moment, listening the almost musical clink of fists against the chain-link fence, it suddenly dawned on him just how much trouble he was in.