Flesh Eaters (38 page)

None of them did.

She knew exactly what was going to come next, but the fierce mechanical surge of .50-caliber machine-gun fire still took her by surprise.

In the glare of the spotlights she saw the first volley turn four of the lead vessels into airborne splinters.

There was a momentary pause, and then the orders came again.

“Fire! All boats, fire, fire, fire!”

Soon the gunners were firing at will, tearing up the boats and survivors and zombies with indiscriminate abandon. The big black helicopter that had been circling them since before they jumped from the Beltway stopped almost directly over the Coast Guard boats and fired rockets into the water, turning it into a raging lake of orange flames.

Through the glare of the spotlights and the flames and the smoke, Eleanor could see the helicopter rocking back, its nose pointed at the elevated roadway above them.

“Jim!” she shouted. “Turn us around. Get us out of here!”

But he was doing it already. The little wooden boat they were in sucked down into the water as they turned, and then rose on the crest of the wake wave as they accelerated.

Eleanor kept looking over her shoulder, and when the rockets erupted from the helicopter, she threw Madison down to the deck and covered her with her body. Shrieking missiles thudded into the roadway above them, the explosions shaking the boat and deafening Eleanor’s ears. Bits of flaming concrete rained down into the water all around them. Drifts of sparks swirled in the air. And though it lasted only a moment, Eleanor could have sworn she heard the flaming bodies screaming as they tumbled down from the collapsing highway.

She pulled herself up onto her elbows.

Eleanor felt stunned by the concussive blast she’d just endured, as though she were standing under a bell jar with the world swirling all around her.

She turned Madison over and saw the fear and the blind panic in her daughter’s eyes. “Are you okay, Madison?” she asked, unable to hear her own voice.

Madison nodded slowly.

Slowly, the silence in Eleanor’s ears was replaced by a painful ringing. She stood up, put her daughter on one of the bench seats, and turned to look at the burning, groaning Beltway as it collapsed into the water.

This must be how Lot’s wife felt
, she thought,
right before she turned to a pillar of salt.

And like Lot’s wife, she found she was unable to turn away from the destruction, the beautiful, horrific, world-ending destruction, even as her husband called her name.

Half an hour passed.

They floated aimlessly through the decimated buildings and the homes that listed in the water like wrecked boats along a forgotten coast. Zombies staggered out of doorways and slapped bloody hands on the fences, trying to reach them. Eleanor sat ready in the bow of the boat, watching them with the M-16 resting in her lap. She had a fully loaded magazine in the breach, and three more in a pouch she wore in a bandolier across her chest, but she knew those wouldn’t last long. If they got cornered, or caught in a stand-up fight, she could burn through all four magazines in the blink of an eye. So she watched the silhouettes separate from the darkness with a weary eye, determined to shoot only if they got too close.

Behind her, Madison was crying softly. Over and over again, she kept muttering “Where are we gonna go? What’s gonna happen to us?”

It was the paradox of parenting again, the question that had been hounding her since that first evening before Hurricane Hector, when the two of them had sat on the kitchen floor, laying by supplies. She both wanted to soothe her daughter’s fear, hold her tight and comfort her, and at the same time slap the ever-loving shit out of her for making so much noise. Playing to her better nature, Eleanor tried to soothe her. But she couldn’t answer Madison’s questions, no matter how hard she tried. Madison was too frightened, too damaged by what she had seen, and mere words wouldn’t compensate for that.

Years before, as a rookie patrol officer, Eleanor had responded to a family disturbance involving a married couple in their fifties. No sooner had she stepped through the door than the drunken husband started yelling at her, complaining of everything from his wife’s addiction to heroin, to the bank foreclosing on his home, to the HPD’s continuing efforts to frame his son for robbery. The man had asked her what he was supposed to do to fix his life, and Eleanor, who was stunned by the idea of a man twice her age asking her how to run his life, had said: “How the hell should I know? I’m twenty-five years old. What do I know about living?”

She was thirty-five now, a mother herself, a mother with a litany of troubles far beyond anything she could have imagined way back then, and yet she still didn’t have any answers. Life, she realized, really was a junkyard tumbling down a staircase. Things happened without justification, without closure. There was no grand design, no pattern. None that she could see anyway. Every day, as Sheryl Crow so eloquently put it, was a winding road. She wished she could tell Madison that in a way that would save her the trouble of having to learn it herself, but she knew that was impossible. Like coming of age, it was something Madison would have to learn for herself. No one could do it for her.

Her mind was still chasing the rabbit around that same mental race track when they rounded a corner and glided up on Anthony Shaw, who was standing in the back of a small metal fishing boat, kicking the outboard motor as if it had just called his mother a dirty whore.

“Fucking piece of shit!” he roared at it, and kicked it again.

He yanked the pull cord and nothing happened.

“Goddamned fucking piece of shit!” he said, and gave it yet another kick. Then he stood up and ran his fingers through his hair. He dropped his hands down to his side and balled them into fists. He was standing that way, stiff with anger, when he seemed to sense a presence behind him.

Slowly, he turned around.

Eleanor was standing in the front of her boat, her M-16 leveled at him.

“Don’t move,” she said.

He just laughed at her.

“Jim, the light.”

Their boat had a handheld spotlight mounted next to the motor. Jim fumbled with it, but managed to get the beam pointed at Anthony Shaw.

Anthony raised one hand to shield his eyes, but he said nothing.

In the glare of the spotlight’s beam, Eleanor could see the two black duffel bags on the bench in front of Anthony.

“You stole that money, Officer Shaw.”

“I told you. This is my family’s life savings.”

“You’re a thief, Officer Shaw. You’re a disgrace.”

His smile slipped away. “What are gonna do, Sarge? You gonna arrest me? If so, how about you come on over here and try to put on the cuffs? I’d like to see you try.”

Eleanor realized she didn’t have an answer to that. What was she going to do? Christ, she didn’t even have a pair of cuffs with her. And she sure as hell wasn’t about to get into another fistfight with him. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t live through another round with Mr. SWAT.

So what then? What was she going to do?

He seemed to realize the answer before she did. She was going to do nothing. She was powerless, which meant that he controlled this situation. Eleanor had her husband and child with her. Anthony Shaw had only his rage and his money. She had the machine gun pointed at him, but he had the power.

And from the smile on his face, he seemed to know it, too.

He began to whistle. The sound was not musical, but shrill. Loud and shrill.

Eleanor saw movement out of the corner of her eye and glanced to the right. A zombie had stood up in the window of a home nearby, its eyes white and empty-looking against its mud-streaked face.

He whistled again, and the zombie responded with a desperate sounding moan, which was answered by other moans from the opposite side of the street.

“Stop it,” she said.

He just smiled and went right on whistling, only louder now.

Oh no
, she thought.
Officer Shaw, you crazy suicidal bastard.

“I’m not gonna arrest you,” she said, hoping to make him stop. “You know that. Not the way things are.”

The smile left his face.

“Then why are you wasting my time, bitch?”

“Because I want to know.”

He didn’t respond. Instead he reared his head back and howled like a wolf in the night.

Eleanor could hear splashing all around them now, and she knew what that sound meant. She had seen the way the infected massed on verbal cues. It would only be a matter of time before every zombie in the area was swarming on their location.

“Stop that!” she said.

“Stop what?” he said. “What are you scared of? Her?”

He nodded to her right.

Eleanor didn’t want to look. Anthony was smiling like a wicked child, and part of her knew that he was trying to trick her. How much more obvious could he be? She would glance to the side, then turn back to find him pointing a rifle at her. So she willed herself not to look, ignoring the splashing she heard over there.

His smile widened.

“Better tell your daughter to move out of the way. She’s about to turn into zombie chow.”

Eleanor flexed her finger over the trigger. She was stuck, and she knew it. She couldn’t back down, and she couldn’t shoot him. Not another cop. Not this way. He would do it to her in a heartbeat, but damn it, she couldn’t. Not like this.

And then the splashing grew louder.

She felt the boat rocking as Madison moved to the port side.

“Mommy . . .”

And it was hearing her daughter calling her Mommy that did it. For the second time in just as many weeks she heard the helpless toddler calling through the voice of the girl. Eleanor turned, and saw a nearly naked woman with most of her face gone wading toward the boat. Her fingerless hands groped at the side of the boat.

Eleanor gasped.

“Mommy, shoot it!”

Eleanor turned the rifle on the woman zombie and fired a single round. It hit her in the forehead and laid her back into the water with hardly a splash.

A fast, simple death.

But there were more zombies behind her, coming into the street from the spaces between the apartment buildings. At first five, then nine, then a dozen more. They were everywhere.

She spun around, pointing her weapon at Anthony Shaw, but saw that he had beat her on the draw. He had his rifle pointed right at her, his finger tensed on the trigger. All he had to do was flinch, she realized, and she’d lose her entire family.

“Officer Shaw,” she said, unable to keep the pleading tone from her voice.

“Shut up, bitch,” he snapped. “Drop your weapon. Now! Put it down.”

No way
, she thought.
I do that and you execute me and my entire family.

She swallowed hard, suddenly aware of the sweat popping out all over her body. She was terrified. Her bladder began to ache. Her legs were weak, her hands numb. But he just stood there, smiling through his rifles sights, coldly indifferent to her fear.

Off to her left, a spotlight beam came on.

Out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor could see it flickering between the buildings over there, catching the shrubs and balconies in silhouette and throwing their shadows across the water. It was coming from a flat-bottom boat.

And then a voice rang out.

“Anthony, is that you?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Anthony answered, without taking his eyes off Eleanor. “Come on over.”

Eleanor saw Anthony’s eyes narrow, and she had just enough time to think
My God, he’s gonna shoot
, when the boat started rocking. She teetered, thrown off balance, and as she fell backwards she saw Jim leaping forward, grabbing Madison around the waist, and jumping into the water.

Anthony started firing, and a line of bullets ripped through the hull where Eleanor had just been standing.

Eleanor rolled over onto her back. Cold salt water was bubbling up through the holes in the bottom of the boat. It was already two inches deep and climbing up the sides of her body. Without even aiming she stuck the barrel of her M-16 over the gunwale and fired a three-round burst. From the other boat, Anthony screamed, and Eleanor felt a savage, primal yell rising up within her.

“You bastard!” she screamed, and fired another burst.

Her second volley went wide, but it must have come close enough to scare him, for he dove over the side. When Eleanor heard the splash she sat up and tried to find him. A terrible vision of him swimming back under the boats and coming up next to Madison and Jim flashed through her mind, but she suppressed it. Instead, she made herself take a deep breath.

Slow down, girl
, she thought.
Scan the water. Go slow.

Half a dozen zombies were already in the water, attracted by the noise of the fight, and there were more coming through the gaps in the buildings, but they weren’t close enough to be a threat yet. In the near distance, she could hear Captain Mark Shaw’s boat accelerating around the line of buildings to her left. But there was no sign of Anthony Shaw. She looked everywhere, but the dark water showed no sign of him.

Then she saw his M-16 in the bow of his boat. There was blood on the stock, the shoulder strap caught on a cleat.

The zombies were moaning now, their noise surrounding her. The nearest one was almost to Anthony’s boat, and she was running out of time. Another moment or two and she would have to start shooting or run away, and with Captain Shaw barreling down on them, they wouldn’t get far.

Maybe I killed him
, she thought.

But even as the thought started to seem possible, she saw him surface. He was moving along the far side of his boat, his hand inching toward his rifle.

“No you don’t,” she said, and fired at him.

She missed, but got close enough to force him back from the cover of the boat. He stood up, and for a moment, she had him framed squarely in her sights. He was bleeding from a nasty wound on his right shoulder, the arm hanging limply by his side. But it didn’t seem to be causing him a lot of pain at the moment. To Eleanor, it looked as if he was debating with himself about reaching for his pistol. Would he have time to get off a shot? He was good enough to kill her with a single shot, but to do it he would have to draw his pistol across his body with his left hand.