Flesh Eaters (45 page)

Shaw took the pistol from Anthony’s hand and walked around the bed frame so he could see out the gap. A zombie was trying to jam his face through the opening, the lips pulled back in a grin of bloody teeth, and right before Shaw shot him in the face he had a flash of Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, jamming his head through the door he’d just hacked with a hatchet, taunting Shelley Duvall with an insanely shrill, “Heeeere’s Johnny!”

Shaw’s first shot killed the zombie, but there were too many bodies pressing up against it from behind, and though the corpse sagged downward, it didn’t fall.

Shaw had just enough room to see over the dead zombie.

Working slowly, taking each shot in its turn, he emptied the remainder of the magazine into the crowd.

Let the corpses pile up
, he thought.
The fuckers’ll have to climb their way over. Maybe it’ll slow them up a little.

When the gun was empty he tossed it aside. There was no point in holding on to a weapon that didn’t have any bullets. And it wasn’t like they were going to get out of this alive. Shaw realized with an eerie calm that he’d already resigned himself to that fate. The only question was how long he could hold out.

But that wasn’t the only question, was it?

There was Anthony to think about, too. Shaw licked his dry and cracked lips, then looked at his youngest son, his wonderfully gifted child.

Anthony was doing badly.

Besides a distinctly circular swaying, he was pale, so very pale. His lips had lost their color. His eyes were red-rimmed and they had a glazed, unfocused look, as if he were high on dope and close to passing out. Beads of sweat rolled down his cheeks.

Shaw thought:
What about you, son? When the time comes, will I be able to do it for you, like I did for Brent?
But with the same mental breath he answered his own question:
Yes, you will. You have to. There is a duty to perform, and you will do it. Just like you’ve always done. Just like you tried to teach to your sons. Maybe Anthony won’t understand why you have to do it. Maybe he’ll spend his last few lucid moments pleading for you to save his life instead of taking it, for as gifted as he was, Anthony was never the one to make the hard decisions. He never understood that mercy could be savage, or that sometimes a father’s love could hurt. He never understood.

The zombies continued to pound on the door. Shaw could hear the wood snapping. It wouldn’t be long now, two or three minutes at the most. Soon, there would be some hard fighting, some Davy Crockett-at-the-Alamo hard fighting.

Shaw let his gaze slide from the door back to Anthony.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Anthony’s milky eyes turned on Shaw’s, and then seemed to slip out of focus again.

“I could have handled this better, I know,” Shaw said. “You trusted me to do the right thing, and I thought I was doing the right thing. But sometimes it’s hard, you know? It’s hard to always know what the right thing is. When you’re a dad you just kind of go with your gut most of the time and hope that dumb luck will see you through it. Most of the time it does, and when it does it feels so good, but . . .”

Shaw trailed off. He was rambling, not making any sense, and he knew it. Anthony was just staring off into space, as if he was empty inside. None of this was getting through.

You’re talking to yourself
, Shaw thought.

“Yeah, maybe,” he muttered.

He fingered the edge of the dresser, his mind turning back over the years.

“You don’t remember this,” he said to Anthony, “but when you and Brent were kids you had this bedroom furniture set that your mom insisted we get for you. ‘They’re growing boys,’ she said. ‘They need real furniture.’ ”

He laughed to himself.

“I still remember it. The Easton Collection, in honey pine. Easton, like the baseball bat, you know? I was a detective at the time, making shit for a paycheck, and that furniture cost a ton of money. But your mom said you guys had to have it, and she begged me to buy it. What could I do? I mean, it was for my boys, you know? Only the best. I’d do anything for you guys.”

He looked at Anthony, but there was nothing there. The boy had no time left. He’d probably go before the door did.

Shaw sighed.

“I worked God knows how many hours of overtime to get the money to pay for that furniture. I must have done a dozen twenty-hour shifts, maybe more than that. But I did it. We got the money and bought you guys the furniture. ’Course the first thing you did was color it with crayons. I remember you threw Brent into the bedside table about a month after I bought it and broke the lamp. God, you guys were horrible to each other. But it didn’t matter, you know? All the work, all the extra hours. It didn’t even matter that you wrote all over it. I’d never been so proud in my life, just knowing that I had provided for you, that I had done my job as your dad. There’s a power in that feeling that makes it all worth it. That’s what I wanted to do here, with this money. I wanted that feeling all over again. I wanted to know that I had provided for you.”

Anthony stirred then.

Shaw looked at him hopefully. “Anthony? Do you understand that? You don’t . . . hate me, do you? I promise you, I didn’t want this to happen.”

“Can I see the money?” Anthony said. His voice was slurred, the words coming out in a dreamy monotone.

“Sure,” Shaw said. “Yeah, of course.”

Shaw turned back to the mattress, where he’d stowed the two duffel bags. He unzipped one of the bags and looked inside.

“What the . . .” he said.

He stared at the contents, blinking rapidly, not at all sure what was going on. He turned the bag over on the mattress and what tumbled out made no sense at all. Plastic trash bags. Duct tape. Dust masks. Glow sticks. Candles. Chemical water purifiers. It was a classic survival kit, the kind the folks from FEMA had lectured his unit to prepare for their families at home.

And then it hit him.

Eleanor Norton
, he thought.
That fucking bitch. She did this. She beat me. How the fuck did that happen? How did
that
fucking happen?

He turned to Anthony, a stack of napkins in his hand, and had no idea what to say.

“Anthony, I . . .”

Anthony held out his hand. “I want to hold it,” he said. Shaw looked down at the napkins.

“Anthony, this . . .”

But then he understood, and he tore the band that held the napkins together and he stuffed the loose napkins into Anthony’s groping hand.

He closed Anthony’s fingers around the paper.

“You got it?”

“Yeah,” Anthony said. There was a dreamy sort of distance in his voice and in his eyes. “It’s nice,” he said. “God, it’s nice. I never thought I’d hold so much. I never thought . . .”

He trailed off.

Shaw watched him carefully, studying his eyes, the tremor in his lips.

“Anthony?”

“Dad, I wanted to . . . to say. . . . I wanted to . . .” He raised his hand slowly, and the paper napkins tumbled from his fingers and floated down to the water around his hips. Tears were streaming down Shaw’s face now. “I wanted you to know that I . . . I love . . . I . . .” Anthony trailed off again, as though he were deep in thought, considering exactly the right way to say what was weighing on his mind, and while he was lost in thought, the change happened.

The last spark of intelligence left his eyes. The essence of who he was, who he had been, was gone.

His left arm came up slowly. His mouth fell open and a moan rose up from his throat.

Shaw watched the change, weeping, then raised his rifle.

“I love you, too, Anthony. God help me, I love you with all my heart.”

And then he fired.

The bullet snapped Anthony’s head back and he sagged down into the water.

Shaw crossed the room quickly and scooped Anthony up in his arms. He pulled him back over to the mattress and threw his arms around him and rocked him gently.

“I love you,” he said, kissing the top of Anthony’s head. “I love you, Anthony.”

Shaw threw back his head and yelled at the top of his lungs. There was so much inside him, so much rage and love and fear and bitter, bitter loss, and it came out of him in a flood he couldn’t have controlled for all the world.

His high, lonely cry was met by renewed moaning from out in the hallway.

The door burst open, the top half coming loose from the hinges and falling over the top of the bed frame.

Shaw was ready for them. As they scrambled over the top of the bed frame, he was waiting with the M-16 trained on the doorway.

“Come on, you bastards!”

He started to fire, and he didn’t stop shooting, not until they pulled him down into screaming oblivion.

CHAPTER 23

It was a little after 3 A.M. when Eleanor and Jim and Madison slipped away from the apartment building and began their solitary trek toward the city walls. In the distance they could hear gunfire and helicopters and indistinct sounds that might have been screams. And, closer, coming from all around them, the moans of the infected.

There were survivors, too. Not many, but a few. They walked silently on, bound for God knew where. They didn’t hail the Nortons, and the Nortons didn’t wave or call out to them. It was as if they all existed under glass bell jars, visible to each other, but worlds and worlds apart.

It made Eleanor feel sad and small and very tired.

To the south, the sky was a hazy orange. The oil refineries were still burning, and the breeze carried the smell of ash and the sea, and under that, the deep, worn-in stench of chemicals and death. If this didn’t qualify as hell, Eleanor wasn’t sure what would.

“We have to find a boat,” Jim said. “I don’t think I can walk much farther.”

Eleanor, her hair in damp clumps around her face, her eyes heavy with exhaustion, knew exactly how he felt. She wasn’t far from falling over herself. Only Madison seemed to have any stomach left for a long walk. There was a sort of electric buzz around her. The girl couldn’t stand still. Her eyes darted everywhere. She flinched at the slightest sound. Eleanor watched her and knew the poor thing was in for a crash when the adrenaline wore off. She just hoped it wouldn’t happen too soon.

“I guess,” Eleanor said, “we head toward the wall and hope that we can find something. A lot of boats got left there.”

“How far you suppose it is?”

She shrugged. “An hour’s walk maybe. I don’t know.”

His shoulders sagged visibly. In the faint starlight he looked ten years younger, his hair darker, his chin more defined. And that was it, she realized. He did look younger. The exhaustion, the resignation, had given him a boy’s look. And yet one that seemed to hold the world at arm’s length. She wondered if her own expression was equally as youthful.

No such luck, sister
, she thought.
It doesn’t happen for women that way. The men get younger looking, the women just get exhausted. You probably look exactly like you feel, like you’ve been run over by a truck.

They trudged on.

In the distance Eleanor could see a street lined with the ruins of shops. Beyond that was the Beltway. Even from this far out she could tell that great lengths of it had collapsed and fallen into the water. Around them, the neighborhood had become a nightmare of burned buildings. Whole blocks seemed to have caught fire. In places, nothing remained but a few blackened poles sticking up from the water. Burned debris floated past them.

“Did those helicopters do all this?” Madison asked.

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“To push people back from the fence, I would imagine. My guess is they’re going to put up some kind of wall around the city, at least for the time being.”

“But what about all the people?” Madison asked. “What about the ones who aren’t infected?”

Eleanor sighed. “I suppose they’ll be locked in with the zombies,” she said.

“Oh my God,” Madison said, cupping a hand over her mouth. “That’s . . . isn’t that against the law or something? How can they do that?”

“These are desperate times,” Eleanor said. “People do desperate things.”

Madison didn’t respond to that. At first Eleanor thought it was another of Madison’s angst-filled teenage moments, where everything about the world of adults seemed stupid and unkind, but then she realized that Madison was crying.

“Hey,” she said, and put an arm around her. “Hey, you’re okay.”

“They’re gonna lock us in here,” Madison said.

Her untidy brown hair had developed a kink above her forehead. Eleanor touched her daughter’s hair and tried to smooth it down, but the hair wouldn’t cooperate.

“We’re gonna find a way out,” Eleanor said. “I promise you. I’m gonna take care of you.”

About a mile farther on they found a boat.

Jim noticed it first.

They were walking next to a line of shrubs that had somehow escaped the rockets and the fires that had destroyed everything else around here. Eleanor was watching Jim. He had stumbled twice in just a few minutes, and he seemed to be having some trouble breathing. He put a hand to his chest and rubbed there absently, the way a man will do when he’s felt a hitch in his heart beat that he hopes is nothing.

“Jim, you holding up okay?”

“Yeah, I just—” he said, and that was when they heard the sound of tree limbs scraping up against a metal boat hull.

They all stopped.

“You hear that?” he asked her, suddenly perking up.

She nodded. “It sounds like it’s coming from over there.”

Over there was on the other side of the line of shrubs. Jim didn’t hesitate. He ducked into the shrubs and disappeared.

“Jim, wait!”

There was a long pause, and then Jim’s voice rose over the shrubs. “It’s okay,” he said. “You two come on through.”

Eleanor glanced at Madison and Madison shrugged. “After you, Mom.”

“Thanks.”

Eleanor stepped through the shrubs nervously. The branches were scraggly enough that she was able to hold them out of the way for Madison, revealing a small silver boat with its prow jammed into the canopy of a fallen tree. Eleanor peeked around Jim’s shoulder and saw a dead man sitting in the boat. His head had lolled back over his shoulders, but Eleanor could still see the blackened flesh on one side of his face. His clothes too were burned.