Flesh Eaters (42 page)

So instead she followed the fence line up toward the street, figuring she would cross around the front of the gas station and retrace Jim and Madison’s track down the narrow alleyway on the far side. The plan had seemed simple enough while she was thinking it, and it looked as if it was going to stay simple . . . right up until the moment she turned into the alley between the gas station and the cinder-block wall.

A group of zombies was huddled there, unable to push forward because of some obstruction and too unaware to turn around and go back the way they’d come.

Until they heard Eleanor behind them.

At that point, one of them turned around and began to utter a long, stuttering moan. The others followed suit, and within seconds, Eleanor found herself backing up toward the boats with at least fifteen zombies closing in on her.

She turned to the left and to the right and saw more emerging from the gaps between the buildings down the length of the street. They stared at her for a second, and then they too started her way.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Just then she backed against the little green metal boat Captain Shaw had used to catch up with her while she was still fighting with Anthony. The boat was empty, no rifles, no loose ammunition or magazines, but beyond it, coming from the far side of the street, were more zombies.

She threw her backpack and rifle into the boat and climbed in.

“Let’s see if you start, you mother,” she said, and pulled on the motor’s rip cord. It coughed, sputtered, but failed to start.

From behind her, she heard a man’s voice and she turned, her heart rising up into her throat for a second because she thought it might be Jim. But right away she could tell who it really was. Out beyond the narrowing ring of zombies, Captain Mark Shaw and his injured son were staring at her, their faces an almost comical mixture of rage and wounded pride and the utter shock of disbelief.

And, under different circumstances, she might have laughed. But for right now she was all business.

“Start, please,” she said, and gave the rip cord another pull.

This time it fired up with a chain-driven rattle, belching clouds of oily black smoke. A zombie threw its arms over the side of the boat and Eleanor flinched away from the motor. But it only took a moment for her to regain control. She raised the butt of her rifle over the zombie’s face and slammed it down onto the bridge of the thing’s nose. It sagged back into the water and Eleanor landed hard on her knees, the boat rocking wildly. The motion caused her to fall backwards against the hull, where she stayed, eyes wide, her breaths coming in huge painful gulps.

In the distance, Captain Shaw was yelling something, but his voice was indistinct over the sound of so many zombies moaning.

Fingers clutched her hair, and she screamed and rolled in one quick motion. Three zombies were trying to get into the boat. Eleanor spun her rifle around and fired two bursts right into their faces.

No more time to lose
, she thought.

She grabbed the throttle bar and dropped the motor’s prop back down into the water. But no sooner had she got back on the seat than another zombie reached over the top of the motor, a swipe from its fingernails missing her nose by inches.

She didn’t think about what she was doing. There was no time to. If she had, she might have died. She twisted the throttle’s bicycle-type grip all the way open, throwing herself back down against the hull. The engine shuddered as the propeller cut into the zombie’s crotch and belly. Eleanor could hear the engine straining as the blades cut into its midsection, and then, for a horrible moment, leveling out to the steady burring roar of a blender on frappe as the blades entered the guts inside, churning up everything they touched.

The zombie still had its arms outstretched, as if it had every intention of bear-hugging the motor, but it was jittering now like a man being electrocuted. His mouth was open and his cheeks were shaking, ropes of bloody spit flying out to either side. But the zombie never even blinked. Even as the motor finally burned itself out, dying with a sickening crunch that might have been metal unable to cut through any more bone, the zombie stared at Eleanor with a look that was both utterly vacant and insanely hungry.

But it too died, and shortly after the engine conked out, the zombie fell face-first onto the top of the motor, uttering a breathy sigh as it collapsed.

Eleanor, on her back in the bottom of the boat, looked up at the dead zombie, horrified by what she’d just done. Her hands were shaking, her heart beating a thousand miles an hour. This was a full-blown adrenaline dump she was experiencing, and all because of what she’d somehow managed to make herself do.

Zombies were closing in on her on all sides.

Behind her, the Shaws’ voices were getting louder. But at that moment she didn’t care about any of that. The only thing that seemed real was the memory echo of the throttle bucking in her hand as it cut into that zombie’s guts and the blood that had splattered all over its face and the sickening crunch of metal on bone that had finally killed the engine and the zombie.

Those things were real.

But slowly, the adrenaline loosed its hold on her stomach and her muscles relaxed. She rose onto her knees and looked over the back of the boat . . . and all at once wished she hadn’t. Blood was pooling out from the dead zombie like a spreading oil slick. Large pink and yellow chunks of its guts floated on the water. The zombie itself had been split open from the crotch up to the base of the sternum, a curling length of its spinal column jutting out behind it like a rat’s tail. Eleanor gagged, but didn’t dry heave this time. It was just too much to process right now.

She heard the shots that followed, but didn’t realize the Shaws were shooting at her . . . at least, not at first. What she did realize was that the zombie that had been trying to climb into the boat while she had her back turned had just been perforated by rifle fire.

She heard a bullet strike the metal hull of the boat, and several others slam into the zombie that had luckily chosen the wrong moment to get between her and the Shaws. Eleanor watched the dead zombie slip off the gunwale and back into the water, a line of bullet holes down its back, and then looked up to see Captain Mark Shaw locking in his sights for another burst.

She hit the deck just as another three rounds struck the motor above her.

Oh Jesus
, she thought.
Oh my God. What do I do? What do I do?

Careful to keep her head down, she reached for her M-16 and pulled it in close to her chest. Then with her left hand she slipped one shoulder strap of the backpack over her arm.

“Please let this work,” she whispered, and without pausing to consider what she was doing she stuck the M-16 over the bow of the boat and fired one-handed toward the Shaws. The next instant she rolled over the side of the boat and slid under the surface. There were zombies all around her, but as soon as she went under, she was lost to them. She kicked as hard as she could toward the edge of the street. Several times she bumped into zombies and felt their hands clutching at her back and at her legs, but she never stopped kicking. She swam until her lungs began to burn and the need for air was too great to ignore. Only then did she pop her head up and look around.

She had emerged just behind a female zombie. It turned toward her and lunged, but Eleanor was just out of the zombie’s reach, and it fell face-first into the water. The woman popped right back up, spitting and swiping at the air with her diseased fingernails. Eleanor backed away, heading toward a small gap between an air-conditioner repair shop and a thrift store.

“Dad, over there!”

Eleanor spun around.

Captain Shaw and Anthony were almost on top of the boat now.
Christ, they’d covered a lot of distance
, she thought.
If I’d waited a second longer . . .

She ran for the alley, expecting the air to fill with bullets at any second, but miraculously, that didn’t happen. Eleanor rounded the corner, splashing and kicking as hard as she could, that voice inside her head, that voice that had grown more and more powerful since all this started, was screaming at her to go.
Run! Don’t stop! Run with everything you’ve got!

The alley was short. It opened onto a wide shallow sea that must have been a parking lot or a grassy courtyard before the floods. Ahead of her were three barnlike apartment buildings, white and dingy with steep sloping tiled roofs. An unbelievably huge crowd of zombies was pouring into the building on her left, their moaning so loud it seemed like a jet was passing overhead. More were coming from her right, attracted by the moaning. She was surrounded. Where was she going to go?

You gotta make up your mind
, the voice in her head said.
Go. Go now!

And so Eleanor ran.

Captain Shaw watched Eleanor slip into the alleyway with a dull rage that was becoming all too familiar. She had slipped through his fingers
again
. How the fuck did that happen? How was she even alive? He had killed her himself. He had blasted her brains out all over that fucking altar, all over those . . . those dead bodies.

A thought took shape in his mind. At first he refused to acknowledge it, but the more he tried to resist, the more sense it made.

After all, hadn’t she done the mama bird thing once already?

What would stop her from doing it again?

“She switched her clothes with that dead woman I shot,” he said.

Anthony turned to his father.

“You mean the one in the church?”

“Yeah.”

Anthony seemed confused. Shaw watched his son thinking the problem through, and then suddenly the lights went on behind Anthony’s eyes.

“You mean she . . .”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“But how could she
do
that?” Anthony said. His face was twisted up in a grimace as if he had smelled something bad. “I mean, under all those bodies . . .”

“It’s called mental toughness, Anthony.” Then, to himself, he muttered, “I just didn’t think she had it in her.”

He switched his rifle to semi-auto and started shooting zombies until the street was nearly clear. Then he went to his boat and examined the damage. Seeing what she’d done there, the way she’d nearly sliced the zombie in half with the propeller, all Shaw could do was stand in awe.

“Damn,” he muttered. “She’s a tough one all right.”

Anthony was watching the alley where they’d last seen Eleanor.

“There’s a lot of zombies over there,” he said. “What do you want to do, Dad?”

Shaw stared at the gutted zombie for a long time without answering.

“What are we gonna do, Dad?”

“We’re gonna find her, and when we catch her, we’re gonna kill her.”

Anthony nodded slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Good boy,” Shaw said. “How’s your arm doing?”

“It hurts like a son of a bitch. I can’t feel my fingers.”

“You feeling cold, short of breath?”

“A little, yeah.”

“Okay, we need to hurry this up. Go over to your boat there and get the duffel bags. I’ll carry them, but that means you’re gonna have to do some of the shooting. You think you can manage that?”

Anthony stiffened. “Yes, sir.”

Shaw nodded. “I hope so,” he said.

The front door was blasted inward.

As Eleanor reached the apartment building’s landing she saw it hanging from its bottom hinge. Beyond the open doorway was a narrow hall that ran the length of the building. At the far end was another door, also blasted inward. She stopped in the entranceway and looked down. Smears of what was almost certainly blood covered the top half of the door. Bits of debris floated lazily on the water that flowed through the building’s first floor.

The zombies, she realized, must have gone through every building out here, looking for survivors.

Looking for something to eat
, she corrected herself.

And more would be coming soon.

She glanced back at the water she had just traversed. There was no sign of the Shaws, but at the moment they were only one of her worries. Eleanor had managed to make it most of the way to the building before the zombies pouring into the building next door spotted her, and once they did, they sent up the call. She watched in horrified dismay as they peeled away from the building they’d been trying to enter and stagger-stumbled toward her. Within seconds, they were closing on her from three sides, far too many for a stand-up fight. She had seen row upon row of them advancing on her position, an almost endless tapestry of psychotic and mangled faces, and she had run for the door.

She made it inside, and they followed, as she both knew and feared they would. For a moment it looked as if she might be able to wade down the hallway and go out the back door, but she very quickly saw that wasn’t going to happen. Even before she reached the back door she saw a huge crowd, hundreds, maybe even thousands, emerging from the darkness south of the apartments.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not fair. Damn it.”

Zombies had already entered the front door, their moans echoing off the walls. Not knowing what else to do, she waded over to the stairs and climbed up to the second floor, where she turned and waited. She was thinking of the Meadow-lakes Business Park, how the zombies had struggled with the stairs, and she hoped that would help her now.

She gripped the rifle tightly as the first moans reached the foot of the stairs.

This isn’t going to work
, the voice inside her head told her.

“Yes, it will,” she snapped back.

She swallowed hard. Her waterlogged fingers felt cold and numb against the M-16’s metal receiver. Her breathing was coming fast and shallow now.

It won’t work
, the voice said again.
Remember Bobby Hester, how you watched him climb the stairs. You’ve got to run. Go. Run!

“It will work,” she said. “It will.”

But she didn’t really believe it, and when the first zombies appeared at the foot of the stairs and started up, she surrendered to the voice inside her head and ran up the stairs as fast as she could make her legs go.