Flesh Eaters (11 page)

“Good luck,” she muttered, and began the long walk down to the makeshift docks they’d built along Spur 5, where she’d left her canoe.

There was a cement loading dock behind the Student Service Center. Floodwater had come right up to the edge of the walkway that ran along the rear of the loading dock, and Eleanor and a few of the other police officers and firefighters who lived close by and who used canoes or small motorboats to get to work had taken to tying up their boats to an eighteen-wheeler that had been trapped in the flood. Somebody—Eleanor thought maybe it was Hank Gleason, but she wasn’t sure—had spray-painted
RESERVED PARKING FOR HPD ONLY
along the side panel of the big rig that was nearest the dock. Along the other side of the rig, the side that was facing the floodwater and was therefore impossible to get to from the dock unless you were swimming, the same somebody had painted
RESERVED PARKING FOR HFD HOSERS
. It had been funny the first time she saw it, but it didn’t seem so now. Now, the only thing on her mind was the approaching storm, and the disquieting notion that she was leaving her post at a critical moment. Why had Shaw insisted she go home? It didn’t make any sense to her, not with so much going on.

She stood on the edge of the walkway, watching her canoe floating the water, tethered to the rig’s rearview mirror, and tried to think it through.

But nothing came.

Shaw had always been a private man, never the kind to open up around those with whom he worked, especially when those people were younger than he was by a good twenty years and considerably below him in rank. But Eleanor had picked up a good many things over the two years she’d worked in the EOC, most of it by listening in on the edges of conversations, and she knew his talk of duty wasn’t just a front. He really did think that way, as though the big concepts in life like duty and honor and justice were living things that could be fed and nurtured, the same way you would with children. And she knew the commitment he felt to those big ideas had made him unpopular with the department’s current administration. They looked on him as an inflexible, hardheaded dinosaur, more a nuisance than an asset, somebody who needed to be put somewhere out of the way, where he could work out his remaining few years until retirement in relative isolation and then, they hoped, go away quietly. She thought of him going into that horde of reporters, the camera crews looking as though they might chew him to pieces, and smiled bitterly. Fate, it seemed, had other plans for Captain Mark Shaw.

Still, the canoe waited. Her family waited. She thought of Madison, who, at the beginning of this mess had helped her move their household supplies upstairs with the bored air of a teenager going through the motions, but who was now acting as a full-time nurse for Ms. Hester, carrying the weight of responsibility like a grown-up, and Eleanor wondered if Shaw hadn’t had a point about the family being the prime duty of a human being. Hadn’t that been what attracted her to working in the EOC in the first place? Didn’t she feel a sense of rightness when she prepared her family’s disaster plans? Maybe it made sense after all.

Eleanor untied the canoe and set out.

She paddled away from the Student Service Center, through the ghosts of flooded buildings and over the roofs of submerged cars. Occasionally she heard an antenna scraping against the metallic bottom of the canoe.

Then she went under the freeway, and when she came out on the other side she was in open water. In the distance she could see I-45, a dark spine of concrete stretching across the horizon. It took ten minutes of paddling to put the campus well behind her. Home was another three miles to the south, and she figured she’d be able to make the distance in plenty of time to help Jim and Madison prep the house for the storm.

In her mind she went through the lists of things he’d mentioned on the phone, small chores that had to get done, damage that had to be repaired before Mardel made landfall, and soon she found herself drifting through a neighborhood.

She stopped paddling and looked around.

All the houses were dark, of course. That didn’t surprise her. Nor did the extraordinary amount of damage that had been done. What did surprise her was the quiet. There were no cars, no planes in the sky, no screaming kids or lawn-mowers or ringing phones. A strange, eerie calm had settled over the houses, and the stillness that dropped over the city was both hypnotic and terrifying.

Off to her left, in the space between two houses, she saw a darkened figure wading toward her, chest deep in the flood water. She was pretty sure it was a man. He was moaning. Something about the sound chilled her nerves, and she took up her paddle and moved out again.

The man was far away, but even still, she nudged the AR-15 at her feet a little closer, just in case.

CHAPTER 5

The hammer came down on the back of his thumb, and for a moment, Jim Norton just stood there, his mouth hanging open in shock. He had just enough time to ask himself why in the hell he’d been so careless when the pain flooded in and his whole body convulsed.

A strangled cry of pain escaped his throat.

He dropped the hammer and squeezed his injured thumb in his right hand, his body jittering like a man who has never had to piss so badly in all his life but has to wait just a little while longer.

“Fuck!” he yelled.

And yelling made something click inside him. His eyes sprang open. The pain was still there, but the rude blunt shock of it had abruptly given way to anger. He was breathing very fast, panting really, purple blotches swimming at the corners of his vision.

“Goddamn holy fucking shit!” he yelled, and kicked the wall so hard a thin curtain of dirt sifted down from the windowsill.

He stood there, hurting. The hammer was at his feet and he gave it an angry kick.

“Piece of shit,” he muttered.

Still clutching his injured thumb, he closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, trying to get it under control.

“Daddy?”

He opened his eyes. Madison was standing in the doorway, looking at him, her expression one of worry underscored by a note of fear.

“I hit my thumb with the hammer,” he said.

She stepped out onto the porch. “Oh no.” She reached for his hand. “Are you okay?”

What does it fucking look like?
he nearly said, but caught the words before they had a chance to come out. That wouldn’t do. Hurt as he was, it was hardly an excuse to lash out at her. God knows they’d done plenty of that over the last eleven days as it was.

With a great deal of effort he said, “No, sweetheart, I hit it pretty good. Do Daddy a favor, would you? Go get me a rag or something from inside.”

She looked at his hurt thumb. A thin trickle of blood was seeping out between his fingers and running down the inside of his wrist. She nodded.

“Okay, Daddy.”

Madison ran inside the house, and when she was gone, Jim took his right hand away and looked at the thumb. It was a mess. A small crescent-shaped cut had formed right below the web where the thumb met the hand, and within the curve of the crescent he could see the negative impression of the hammer’s nicked head. The left side of the cut was deeper, and bright red blood was flowing freely from it.

Tentatively, he tried to move the thumb, and right away felt like somebody had jammed a live electrical cord into his wrist.

“Okay,” he said. “Not gonna do that again.”

Fuck
, he thought,
probably broken. That’s just great. We got a big-ass storm on the way and I go and break my fucking hand. Lot of fucking good I’m gonna be.

He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, and when he looked up again, Madison was running out the door with the tackle box they were using for their first-aid kit in her hands.

She put it on the porch next to his feet, then took his huge hand in her small ones.

“Easy,” he said, wincing. “I think it’s broken.”

He tried to pull it back, but Madison held on firmly. She made a clucking noise and kept on examining his hand, turning it this way and that.

Jim Norton chewed his fingernails, always had and probably always would, no matter how much Eleanor complained about it. As a result, his fingernails always had a ragged, unkempt look. He wasn’t especially self-conscious about it, no more than a smoker is about smoking, but it did make it difficult to pry open the tabs on Coke cans or pick coins off a counter. Eleanor would sometimes see him struggling and she’d make the same clucking noise Madison was making now. It was an impatient,
Here, let me do it
gesture, and as he stood, watching his daughter examine his injury, he realized how very much she was beginning to look like her mother.

“It’s not broken.” She said it flatly, like a pronouncement.

“Feels broken.”

“It’s not. Just cut real bad. If it was broken I wouldn’t be able to move it like this.”

“Huh,” he said.

He looked at his injured thumb and frowned. Jim wasn’t sure which surprised him more, the easy confidence in his daughter’s voice or the fact that he was accepting as almost certainly accurate the medical diagnosis of a twelve-year-old.

“It is bleeding pretty bad, though. We’ll need to clean it and bandage it.”

She knelt down and examined the contents of the tackle box before finally settling on a roll of gauze and some hydrogen peroxide.

“This is gonna sting some,” she said, and he had just enough time to muse how that too made her sound like her mother, before the liquid bit into his wound.

Jim closed his eyes and tried not to think of how the hydrogen peroxide would be foaming up upon contacting his blood and turning to little pink bubbles that ran greasily down his arm. He could, he knew, be an awfully big baby sometimes, and the thought brought on a wave of bitterness that was as palpable as half-chewed aspirin clinging to the back of his tongue.

Eleanor had once told him how thankful she was to have found him. They had been in the car at the time, coming home from an Astros game. Jim was driving and Eleanor was in the passenger seat, her legs curled up beneath her.

He glanced at her, a small, curious smile at the corner of his mouth, and said, “What brought that on?”

He knew she had dated some before they met. They never really talked about past loves. They both knew the other had had them, but there was never any reason to bring them up. Those were all in the past, and they hardly mattered, certainly no more than a batter’s practice swings before stepping up to the plate for real, and what they had together was real. It was for keepsies, as she sometimes said.

So he was a little surprised when she started telling him about some of the guys she had dated before she met him.

“This was after I became a cop,” she said. “Before that, you know, it was no big deal. Back in college, guys were just boys. No big deal. But after I became a cop, things just got weird. I learned to avoid telling guys what I did for a living, because once I did, they got all crazy on me.”

“Crazy?” he said. “Like how?”

“Not anything mean. Nothing like that. They just sort of drifted off, you know? Sometimes they’d become defensive. Sometimes they’d just stop calling. I used to think it was me, like maybe I was doing something wrong. I don’t know. I wondered if I had a nasty case of halitosis or something.”

She laughed, then put her hand on his arm.

“But then I was at the doctor’s office one day, and I met this woman there. She was about fifty, I guess. Pretty, you know, but obviously older than me. She was a chemistry professor at Rice. Anyway, we got to talking, and I was kind of surprised at how much we had in common. We were both single, both struggling, both completely clueless about what we were doing wrong in the dating department. And then she told me something really strange. She said she never told guys what she did for a living. When they asked, she’d just say she worked at a college, let them think she was a secretary or something.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Well, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You see, when guys found out she was a PhD, they ran the other way. They got intimidated, I guess. It was the same with me. Guys would find out I was a cop, and they would joke about it, but underneath it all, I could tell they were uncomfortable around me. I made them nervous. You can’t build a relationship that way.”

She paused then, and when he looked over at her, the smile gradually thinned from her face and became a look of utter gratitude.

“That’s why you were different, Jim. That’s why I fell for you. You weren’t like all those other guys. I love whatever it is you see in me. It feels special, like only you can see it.”

He hadn’t really known what to say to that—he never did, in situations like that—and perhaps she hadn’t expected him to say anything, for at that moment she put her cheek down on his shoulder and sighed, as if it was the best place in the world to be.

But looking back on that memory now, with his head swimming in pain, Jim Norton wondered if maybe she had misjudged him. Or maybe he was being unfair to her. He didn’t know, but he suspected it amounted to the same thing, for he found that after all these years of marriage he was, after all, a little intimidated by his wife.

No
, he thought,
maybe intimidated isn’t the right word. Maybe you’re resentful. Maybe that’s a better word for it. You’re resentful because here you are, the man of the house, the one who’s supposed to be the rock, the provider, and instead you’re standing here getting doctored by a twelve-year-old girl while your wife is putting on a uniform and saving the city. She’s the one with the balls. Maybe you should just go ahead and hand her your dick, too. You’re not gonna need it.

He frowned bitterly at the thought. He didn’t want to believe he was that shallow, but . . . was he? Did he really resent his wife for going out into that flooded mess of a world and doing her duty?

He was uncertain what he really felt, and that bothered him.

Madison was still busy wrapping gauze around his thumb. He gazed at the work she was doing and it occurred to him that she had actually done a really good job of it. The fit was snug, but not painful. He had experienced a moment of numbness in the thumb, but that was gone now, replaced by a dull, insistent throb of pain that he suspected would be with him for a couple of days at least.