Flesh Eaters (29 page)

His fingers were shaking, but not badly. Jesse wouldn’t see it. Brent certainly wouldn’t see it, not in his present condition. But they were shaking, and that had him worried.

He was not in this to save Private Ryan.

He was in this for the money.

Anthony curled his fingers into a fist and focused on their surroundings, scanning constantly, the way he’d been taught in tactics training. Beyond the helicopter was the Church’s Chicken and the parking garage and farther on still the Texas Chemical Bank, which had been so kind to them as of late. Nothing seemed to be moving, and that was good. That was very good.

Gradually, the anxiety he had felt upon seeing the wrecked helicopter faded, and he was able to focus on the money. Thinking about it changed his mood considerably, and he was surprised to feel his mouth starting to water. Seven million dollars were only a few feet away now.
Gonna leave this town
, he thought, and in his head the words were almost a song.
Gonna leave this town with a sack full of loot. A new truck, a new house, a new life. And all I have to do is take it.

“Come to papa,” he muttered.

The car—it was an old Volkswagen; he could see that now—was up to the top of its doors in water. Anthony hit it with a spotlight. He could see the two duffel bags through the rear windshield. He wasn’t sure if the water was subsiding for good, or if this was just low tide, but whatever the reason they’d been lucky to find the money still here. Had someone come along, they could have reached inside pretty as you please and come up with more money than any honest man would know what to do with.

Lucky for all of them that hadn’t happened.

Anthony let his gaze slide over to where Brent was sitting. He was rocking back and forth again with a steady metronome-like motion, muttering constantly. Anthony couldn’t tell what he was saying, but he knew he didn’t like it. That was gonna be a problem right there. And it would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

Let Dad take care of it
, he told himself.
Just get the money.

He turned around to Jesse as he took off his tactical vest. “Here,” he said, “take the wheel for a sec. I’m gonna go get us started on our retirement plan.”

Jesse beamed a huge smile.

“Now you’re talking,” he said.

The boat was turning in a slow pirouette as it came out of the rain. At the sight of it, everyone went quiet. The low murmurs that had marked most of their journey through the flooded landscape disappeared and all eyes turned forward. One by one, they drew their paddles up into their laps, almost as if they were working off the same mental circuit, and stared as the gruesome spectacle drifted past.

Eleanor thought it was cutting across their line when she first saw the boat. The gray, foglike rain distorted her senses that way, made depth perception almost impossible. But she saw the truth a moment later. The boat was a derelict, floating aimlessly on the current.

And inside the boat was a man, seated against the pilot’s windscreen, his face tilted up toward the sky, his dead, unblinking eyes filling with rain. There was a bullet in his forehead, and when he came up even with her, Eleanor closed her eyes and turned away.

“You ready?” Jim asked her.

Earlier, Hank had managed to retrieve their backpacks, and Eleanor had slipped into a yellow raincoat and an Astros baseball cap. The rain sizzled on her hood and drained in curtains from the cap’s bill. Peering through the rain she saw Madison and Jim huddled beneath a blue plastic tarp, looking back at her.

“Eleanor? You ready?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They were the eighth canoe back from the front, placing them roughly in the middle of the pack. Hank was out in front with his AR-15, taking the point position. Nobody had argued. Two of the Red Cross volunteers near the back had shotguns. Hank said the scatterguns would work best covering their rear, especially as one of the Red Cross volunteers was a retired Marine who had fought in Afghanistan during the war. The volunteer’s name was Frank. He was in his sixties, she guessed, white-haired, but his belly was still flat as a board, and he spoke with an accent that sounded as if he was from Maine or Massachusetts or one of those states up east. Having spent her entire life in Texas, Eleanor really didn’t know and didn’t care about the difference in New England accents. They were all just Yankees as far as she was concerned, and they all sounded like Kennedys to her. Still, she’d seen Frank kill three of those zombies with his shotgun shortly after they fled the Meadowlakes Business Park, and Yankee or not, the man knew how to carry himself in a fight. She felt good with him back there, watching their tail.

She was watching the empty windows on the building to their right when Hank whistled. It was a quick, short sound, like one hunter might use to call to another in thick brush. Eleanor turned forward, and at the same time heard the old ladies in the canoes between her and Hank start to gasp.

There were dead bodies in the water. Lots and lots of them.

They looked like driftwood floating in the current. One corpse bumped against the front of their canoe and rolled over onto his back.

Madison uttered a high, piercing scream.

“Madison,” Jim said, and pulled her close, hiding her face in his chest.

Eleanor nodded her thanks to him, and then looked down at the dead man. He was Hispanic, probably in his late thirties, a little overweight, with scabbed-over scars all over his arms and neck, as if he had thrashed his way out of a tangle of barbed wire.

But there was no question what had killed him.

A large-caliber round had entered his head just above the line of his eyebrows. The exit wound had blown the top of his head open. Three large sections of his skull clung to his scalp like continents trying to break apart. It gave his head an impossibly stretched and distorted look, like something glimpsed in a funhouse mirror, and Eleanor had just enough time to process that all the gooey inner matter had seeped out of the skull cavity before she turned away, her stomach in her throat.

But there was nowhere to look that didn’t show her more of the same. The bodies were everywhere. There were literally hundreds of them.

Hank had turned around and was now paddling up beside them.

“You ever watch them shows on the History Channel about the Civil War?” Hank asked Jim.

Jim, who looked as ill as Eleanor felt and still held Madison against his chest, shook his head.

“I like watching them shows,” Hank went on, apparently oblivious to Jim’s discomfort. “I saw this one about the Battle of Chickamauga. . . . They said ten thousand soldiers died there in one day . . . most of ’em while fighting hand to hand in the Chickamauga River. The water was supposed to have turned red by the end of the day’s fighting. Kind of looks like what we got here, don’t it?”

He laughed to himself, but there was no insanity behind it. It wasn’t that kind of laugh. It was, rather, the sound a man makes when he thinks he’s seen enough, been asked to do too much, and then is forced to do a little more. He laughed like a man who had been worn down to the nub, but who refused to quit.

“Sergeant Norton,” he said, turning to Eleanor, “whatchu wanna do, ma’ am?”

Eleanor opened her mouth to answer, but then closed it again. There was something moving up ahead, at the far end of the street near the Church’s Chicken sign.

“Hold on a sec,” she said, and reached into her backpack and took out her binoculars.

“What is it?” Hank asked.

The first thing she saw was the wrecked Coast Guard helicopter, and it made her gasp. It had evidently crashed into the side of the building and tumbled down it. She could see first one, then two more dead bodies inside the helicopter, all of them still wearing their flight gear.

Then she focused the binoculars on a small dark-colored bass boat that was about fifty feet in front of the helicopter. A handsome younger man she didn’t recognize was behind the wheel. Another man, who looked disturbingly like a younger version of her boss, Captain Mark Shaw, was sitting in the front of the boat, rocking back and forth as if he was shell-shocked, an emotion that, at the moment, she felt she understood quite well. A third man was in the water, trying to force open the door of a flooded car.

As she watched, the man finally got the door open and reached inside. He came up with a large black duffel bag and handed it to the good-looking man behind the wheel, who took it and tossed it absently into the back of the boat.

The man in the water was wearing a mask, but even with that covering his eyes and nose, Eleanor could tell right away who it was.

“What is it?” Hank said again.

“That’s Anthony Shaw,” she said, handing him the binoculars. “And I’m pretty sure that guy in the front of the boat is his brother.”

“Are you sure?”

He put the binoculars up to his eyes and brought them into focus.

Yeah, I’m sure
, she thought.

Anthony Shaw she knew well . . . or, rather, she knew quite a bit about him. She’d seen his pictures up on her captain’s desk. Anthony Shaw had evidently been some kind of stud on the baseball field, and had translated those glory days into success with the ladies as an officer on the department.

Shortly after she’d moved to the Travelers Unit Eleanor had befriended a pretty young patrolwoman named Megan Weber, who was temporarily on assignment to Sex Crimes. Once she’d grown out the little-boy haircut they make female cadets wear while at the academy, Megan had turned into a knockout with a little waist and big boobs and a smile that made every man in the room forget what he’d been talking about. But she was nice, too—good people, as Eleanor’s dad used to say—and Eleanor had taken an instant liking to her, even though she was ten years younger. But Megan, like several other female officers her age, had fallen hook, line, and sinker for Anthony Shaw, who of course wasted no time getting into her pants.

Eleanor warned her about hanging out with SWAT guys.

“They’re cute, they’re built like gods, but they’re just man whores,” she’d said to the starstruck girl, and even as she said it she knew Megan wasn’t listening, not really.

Well, Megan hadn’t gotten pregnant and she hadn’t gone all
Fatal Attraction
on him and gotten herself kicked out of the department. Nothing as melodramatic as that.

But she had gotten her heart broken.

Anthony Shaw asked her to get a friend they could, in his words, “throw into the mix.” She’d told him she didn’t want anything like that in their relationship, and he’d simply said, “What relationship? We’re just fucking here.”

And that was that. Cops gossip worse than grocery-store magazines, and soon word got around that Anthony had kicked her to curb. As was always the way with working in the boys’ club that was the HPD, Megan had been branded an easy lay and Anthony went on about his business, able to proudly boast: “Yeah, I tapped that.”

It made Eleanor sick sometimes, thinking about it.

“Yeah, that’s him all right,” Hank said. “The guy in the front of the boat is his older brother, Brent. He’s a drunk. I don’t know the other guy, but I don’t think he’s PD.”

“What are they doing? I saw them pulling duffel bags out of that car.”

He handed her the binoculars back.

“Don’t know,” he said.

Something was happening behind them.

Eleanor heard voices, several of them at once, and then someone shouting. She and Hank both turned around at the same time, and they saw Frank, the retired Marine, leveling his shotgun at a clumsy figure approaching them in the water.

Frank yelled for the man to stop.

He didn’t.

And the next instant, before either Eleanor or Hank could say anything, Frank fired and nearly took the zombie’s head off.

“Form up!” Hank yelled. “Everybody come forward.” Hank turned his canoe and paddled furiously toward the shooting.

Eleanor raised her binoculars, and saw Anthony Shaw staring back at her with binoculars of his own.

And then he lowered his.

The man behind him hit the throttle and the bass boat took off.

Eleanor continued to watch Anthony Shaw’s face as he slipped away into the rain-streaked night. His expression was difficult to read, almost inscrutable, but she could tell he wasn’t happy.

CHAPTER 14

With his pistol in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, Captain Mark Shaw pushed his way through the fringes of the terrified crowd and into the enclosed shallow lake in the front of the Engineering Building.

“Keep moving,” he shouted. “You’ve got to keep moving.”

To his left and behind him the campus was on fire, the orange glow from the flames reflecting on the water, making it look like molten rock. Black smoke turned the sky to a filthy, choking haze. And everywhere he turned, the screams of the frightened refugees and the moans of the dying and the un-dead threatened to fray his nerves to pieces.

Off to his right a SWAT officer was knocked down by three of the infected. The man raised his hand to push them away and got two of his fingers bitten off. At the same time the officer managed to get his pistol under the chin of one of the zombies and fire.

Both men went down.

Shaw was already pushing his way through the waist-deep water to help the officer. He put down the remaining two attackers, emptying one of his few remaining magazines in the process.

Shaw ejected the empty magazine and jammed it into the officer’s injured hand.

“Hold this,” Shaw said. “Just keep your hand up and hold it. Keep it elevated.”

The officer, who was already looking pale, his eyes strangely unfocused, tried to comply. He held the stump of his injured hand in the air while he swayed drunkenly. Shaw had to catch him once to keep him from tilting over sideways.

The man was a goner, Shaw knew that. He’d seen the infection spread from one injured person to the next all night, and he knew this man had maybe thirty minutes before he too changed into one of those things . . . that was, if he didn’t bleed to death first. Either alternative looked likely.