Flesh Eaters (37 page)

. . . out from behind the van, holding both duffel bags in his fists. The fucking little girl was still screaming at him, but he didn’t have time for that right now. He didn’t have time for Sergeant Norton and her husband, either. There was no time, because in the two minutes he’d been behind that van, the refugee line had erupted into a full-blown riot.

Looking to his left, Anthony saw Garrity down on his knees, wrestling with a man and a woman. The next instant, the woman lunged at Garrity, knocked him onto his back, and took an enormous bite out of his throat.

Anthony’s eyes went wide.

He took a step that way, but stopped. There was no time for that, either. It was down to the wire now. He had to find his father, find Jesse, and get the fuck out of this godforsaken city.

But people were running everywhere, screaming, fighting with each other. There were others staggering slowly through the crowd, and Anthony could tell at a glance that they were infected. He counted six, nine, fourteen of them. Then more to his right.

“What in the hell just happened?” he muttered.

He pulled his pistol and started moving forward, looking for his dad.

He found Jesse instead.

Jesse was fighting with two zombies near the checkpoint. As Anthony approached, he saw Jesse break away from them, take a few steps back, and open fire with his M-16, dropping them instantly.

“Jesse!”

“Holy shit! Where have you been?” Jesse shouted at him. “Dude, your dad’s been looking everywhere for you.” Then Jesse noticed the duffel bags. “What are you doing with those?”

“We got to get out of here,” Anthony said. “Where’d my dad go?”

“He got some night-vision goggles from the Army. He was looking out over the city over there and saw a shitload of those zombies coming this way. That’s when he started yelling for you. Dude, where were you?”

“Getting these. Where is he now?”

“All hell broke loose back there,” Jesse said, pointing down the length of the refugee line. “He went that way.”

Anthony looked down the Beltway. From where he stood, he could see three on-ramps along its length. There were zombies coming up each of them, driving the refugees into a high panic. They were stuck, nowhere to run. The few officers posted along the line were laying down a steady stream of gunfire, their muzzle flashes like torches in the night, but Anthony knew they were doomed.

“My God,” he said. Then he turned to Jesse. “Okay, dude, we gotta go right now.”

“What about your dad?”

“He knows how to take care of himself.”

“Seriously? You’re gonna leave him here. He wouldn’t leave you.”

“Bullshit. The whole reason for doing this was to be able to start over once we get out of here. We can’t do that without the money. Now come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Jesse looked around uncertainly.

“Okay. Where are we gonna go?”

He pointed back to the nearest on-ramp.

“We can’t go that way.”

“Through the checkpoint.”

Before Jesse could object, Anthony took off running toward the checkpoint. Behind them, the riot had risen to a horrendous din of screams and moans and gunfire. Ahead of them, the refugees were surging forward, pressing up against the chain-link fence separating them from freedom. Through the huddle of bodies, Anthony saw the space-suited soldiers backing up, raising their rifles to their shoulders.

“No!” he screamed, but even as he yelled the bullets started flying. Those closest to the fence were nearly sawed in half. Those behind turned and ran, screaming even as they were shot in the back.

Anthony and Jesse were caught up among them, Anthony using his M-16 as a battle hatchet, swinging it back and forth to knock the panicked crowd out of his path. And then, suddenly, there was nothing between his position and the soldiers behind the fence but open ground and quite a few dead bodies.

Anthony saw three soldiers lower their weapons slightly.

“I’m a police officer,” he yelled at them. “We’re not infected. Open the gate!”

Another space-suited figure stepped forward and Anthony heard him give the order to fire.

“No!” Anthony shouted.

The soldiers raised their rifles again and opened fire. Anthony hit the ground and rolled over by a dead man who had come to rest on his side. He could feel the dead man’s body jittering as the bullets smacked into him. He kept down, yelling for Jesse to do the same. But when he rolled over onto his side to look for Jesse, he saw his friend facedown on the pavement, eyes and mouth open, with a puddle of blood spreading out from beneath his chest.

“No,” Anthony said. “No!”

But Jesse didn’t move. His sightless eyes just stared at Anthony, like a blank accusation.

“No, Jesse. Oh shit, man. No.”

Anger flared up in him and he rolled over onto his belly, the barrel of the M-16 resting on the dead man’s thighs. He flipped the selector switch to automatic and opened fire on the soldiers. Two of them went down. A third dived onto his belly. Two of the men who had been doing the medical inspections ran for the back gate. Anthony sighted in on their backs and fired, dropping them both.

He glanced over the dead man’s legs and saw more soldiers coming up fast from the far side.
Shit
, he thought.
Gotta move.

He looked back toward the city and saw a crowd of the infected coming toward him. He was caught in the middle with nowhere to run.

“My ass,” he said.

Slowly, he inched his way over to the duffel bags and wrapped the straps around his fist. He took a few quick breaths, jumped to his feet, and started firing at the soldiers as he ran for the retaining wall at the edge of the roadway.

The next instant he was the over the edge and falling feet-first into the blackness of the water below.

“Mom.”

Eleanor groaned.

“Mom, please wake up.”

Eleanor groaned again:
Stop it. Hurts.

Madison shook her even harder.

“Mom, please get up!”

“Madison?” Eleanor blinked. Her vision was blurry and her head felt as if it were about to collapse in on itself. What in the hell had Anthony Shaw done to her? “Madison, stop shaking me.”

“Mom, please, we have to go right now. Those things, they’re everywhere.”

Eleanor groaned. With Madison’s help she managed to sit up, but everything hurt. The right side of her face was sizzling with pain, as if she’d pressed it to a hot skillet. Jim was rolling on his side a few feet away. His face looked bad, his shirt soaked in blood, his eyes black and swollen. Eleanor’s mind was floating free, unable to focus, and looking at her husband she had a crazy, almost hilarious flash of Rocky Balboa in his corner, a battered man staring across the ring.

“Eleanor . . .” he said, reaching a trembling hand toward her.

“Mom, please, I need you to get up. There are zombies—”

But the words were clipped away by an ear-piercing scream. Madison was on her feet now, pointing at the blurry figure who had stumbled around the front bumper of the van.

Eleanor blinked at it, and an apparition from a horror show came into focus. The man was blood-streaked. His clothes were filthy and hanging off him in strips. His hair was dark with blood, one of his eyes gouged out and oozing gore. Part of his lips had been torn away. The one remaining eye leered at them with a bloodshot combination of murderous hate and numb emptiness, rolling in its socket as he raised his shredded hands and clutched at them.

“Mom, get your gun!” Madison screamed.

Eleanor rolled over, groping at the pavement around her. There was no gun. She tried to tell Madison that, but the girl wouldn’t stop yelling. Then Madison was pushing Eleanor over on her side, up against the retaining wall.

“Hey, what are you . . .”

“Get up, Mom!”

Eleanor felt something slide underneath her. She looked down, and in her disconnected haze she saw Madison standing up with a rifle in her hands.

“No . . .” Eleanor said.

But Madison was already firing, the gun jumping in her hands. A three-round burst erupted from the barrel, and Madison fell backwards against the van, the gun still pointed at where the zombie had been.

The rattle of gunfire cleared Eleanor’s head. She looked at the zombie, dead now, flat on his back, the top of his head blown off, and then back at her daughter. Madison was breathing hard, the air coming in big, heaving gulps. Her eyes were wide, staring at the dead man, her mouth open in terror that was slowly giving way to triumph.

“Mom, did you see that?

She turned to Eleanor, inadvertently pointing the M-16’s barrel at her.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Eleanor said, and grabbed the barrel and pointed it in a safe direction. “Yeah, baby, I saw it. Good job. Here let me have that.”

Eleanor took the M-16 and turned its selector switch to single fire. Rising painfully to her feet she turned and fired at the four zombies who had stumbled around the back of the van. Then she turned back to the front and fired twice more. But she might as well have tried to stop a cattle stampede with a police whistle. There were zombies coming around both sides of the van now, and the three of them were trapped. Eleanor looked to the top of the van, but knew that wouldn’t work for long. And that only meant one thing.

“Jim,” she said, “can you go over the side?”

Long ropes of blood hung from his nose and chin. One ear had a nasty case of road rash where Anthony Shaw had dragged him over the pavement. But through the swollen bruises, his eyes were clear and bright.

He stood up and leaned over the side. “The water’s not that deep,” he said, “but it’s only about a twenty-foot drop.”

“Go,” she said.

Without saying another word, he put his chest on the top of the retaining wall and rolled over.

Eleanor heard him splash.

“Jim?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Send Madison down.”

“Go, baby. Hurry!”

To her credit, Madison didn’t hesitate. She put her hands on the wall and was about to hurdle it when she stopped, scooped up her backpack, and jumped.

“I got her,” Jim called up. “We’re okay. Hurry, Eleanor!” The zombies were closing in on both sides of her now, less than five feet away. Their moaning had reached a frenzied, urgent pitch. Their hands reached for her. She turned to face the retaining wall, and looked down. It seemed like a million miles.

“God help us,” she said, and took a breath and jumped.

CHAPTER 18

Right before she let go from the retaining wall, Eleanor saw the water below writhing with bodies. She hit the water hard and went under. The next instant there were hands all over her and she screamed, slapping them away. She spun around, teeth clenched, fists raised, and barely recognizing the faces of her battered husband and her daughter as they grabbed at her.

“Behind you, Mom!”

Eleanor turned.

The water was full of zombies. Four of them were already wading toward her, less than ten feet away. She let Jim and Madison pull her back as she scrambled to get the shoulder strap of her M-16 off her arm.

“Come on, Mom! Hurry!”

The screams of the dying filtered down from above them. People were running, leaning over the retaining wall, yelling for help. The rattle of gunfire was nearly constant. A military helicopter raced overhead, a dim shape, like a dark, gigantic bird against a black sky. And sounding above it all were the zombies in the water, moaning with a fevered intensity that was deafening. Eleanor looked around and realized there were hundreds of zombies closing in on the refugees who had fallen from the Beltway, and the thought occurred to her that this must be what it felt like to be caught in the middle of a swarm of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

She heard an ear-piercing scream.

She turned and saw a woman get the flesh stripped from her body by a huddling mass of the infected.

For a second, all Eleanor could do was stand there and gawk at the sight of that woman wailing in pain and fear, and she was hardly aware of Jim putting his hands under her shoulders and lifting her from the water until she was most of the way into the boat he had found.

Eleanor dropped down into a cushioned bench seat, still staring at the woman. Madison was shaking her shoulders, pleading with her to snap out of it.

“I’m okay,” Eleanor said. She grabbed Madison’s forearms and steadied herself. “Really, I’m okay.”

Jim was already kneeling over the outboard, getting it started.

The motor roared to life.

“Hold on to something,” he said, and fed the throttle and turned them away from the thickest part of the zombie crowd.

“Where are we going?” Eleanor asked him.

He pointed underneath the Beltway. In the distance, Eleanor could see forty or fifty boats heading toward the military’s chain-link fence. Several of the smaller boats were already approaching the tangled rolls of concertina wire and large metal crosses in front of the fence, and it looked to Eleanor as if they were going to ram the fence and punch their way through.

Eleanor held her breath, waiting to see what would happen.

But she was unprepared for the sudden, blinding light that filled the night from the other side of the fence. Powerful spotlights hit the water and turned the boats and their occupants to silhouettes. Beyond the lights, Eleanor could see the outlines of several Coast Guard vessels spaced along the fence line. She heard harsh voices amplified through bullhorns, ordering the refugee boats to turn back.