by Joe McKinney
“What?”
“To sterilize it. We need to keep this clean.”
“I don’t know,” Anthony answered. “I think maybe Brent had . . .” But he trailed off there. They hadn’t spoken of what happened to Brent back at the EOC’s boatyard, not in any sort of meaningful way, and Anthony seemed unwilling to bring it up now. Or maybe afraid to bring it up was more accurate.
“Brent had some? Vodka?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Come on,” he said, and put Anthony’s arm over his shoulder to support his weight. “Let’s go check.”
“Dad, I . . .”
“What is it, Anthony?”
They were moving into the hallway now. There was a zombie in the doorway at the far end of the hall and Mark Shaw dropped it with a single shot.
“She snuck up on me, Dad.” Anthony said.
“What do you mean?”
“She found out about the money somehow and when she came up behind me . . . the bitch just shot me. No warning. I think she was trying to steal it.”
Mark Shaw hesitated for a second, then continued. Had the boy forgotten that he’d lit them up with a searchlight right before the shots went off? Who did he think he was fooling? The only thing Shaw could think of was that he was covering for himself, the way he slinked off into this apartment building instead of staying in the fight.
Pride, he thought. That’s what it is, our goddamned stinking pride. Well, at least he comes by it honestly.
“You’re gonna be okay, son. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
Eleanor was aware of the smell as soon as she entered the church. She put the back of her hand over her mouth and nostrils, her face wrinkled up in disgust. Something was dead in here, and had been rotting for a while.
The church consisted of one small room, big enough to seat maybe a hundred people. It reminded her, briefly, of the little Methodist church her parents had brought her to when she was younger. But this one had been irreparably changed by the floods. The walls were mildewing plaster. They were literally melting, sagging and breaking apart in big wet chunks. Garbage and bits of seaweed and drifts of unnamable slag filled the spaces between the pews. Tree limbs were stuck in the rafters. And up near the altar, huddled together like a driftwood pile on the beach, were the bodies of some sixteen drowned souls.
A few of the bodies had been nibbled on by animals. One woman, down on her knees, her cheek resting against the back of a man in a filthy flannel shirt, was staring up at her with sightless dead eyes.
Eleanor found herself staring down into that woman’s face, wondering who she was, what had brought her to die here, on this alter. What faith did she have? Did it offer her anything in those final moments? She wondered if the woman’s faith could have answered Madison’s questions back on the boat.
And then her reverie was broken by the rapid crack of gunfire coming from somewhere behind her. Captain Shaw was in the middle of all those zombies back there, and it wouldn’t be long before he—and maybe his son, too—tracked her down.
It wouldn’t be difficult. This little church stood on the edge of what must have been a wide, empty stretch of undeveloped land, for she hadn’t seen any buildings beyond it. She would have to move if she wanted to live, if she wanted to find Jim and Madison.
She looked down at her red shirt and blue jeans and wished she had worn something different. The red shirt, especially, was going to make her a sitting duck.
And then she looked down at the dead woman again, and an idea occurred to her. It was a terrible idea, a grotesque idea, but it just might work.
Quickly, she turned the dead woman over. Her face was purple on one side where the blood had pooled after death, but Eleanor steeled herself and started undressing the corpse. She could feel the dead woman’s skin, and she gagged as she pulled the shirt off the body. Touching her was like poking the steaks through their cellophane shrouds at the supermarket, and she came very close to vomiting as the now naked dead woman dropped back down onto the pile of corpses.
She didn’t give herself a chance to think about what came next.
She took off her shirt and slid it down over the dead woman. And then—God, she would rather walk into roll call wearing nothing but her bra and panties and her gun belt than do this—she put on the dead woman’s shirt. She kept her eyes closed as she buttoned it up and then pushed the tails down into her jeans.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the corpse as she slid her backpack onto the corpse and propped it up in the window.
And then she did something only her desire to see Jim and Madison again would have allowed her to do. She wedged herself down into the pile of corpses, covering herself with them, pushing from her mind the weight of all that dead flesh, and there she waited.
“Holy shit. Dad, look there!”
Mark Shaw stopped and followed the line of his son’s finger. The only thing over there was a church, battered by the recent storms. He thought he saw a flash of red, but it was dark, and his eyes weren’t what they once had been.
“Is that her?” he whispered.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Anthony said. “Same shirt, same hair.”
“All right. I’m gonna put you down.”
Slowly, he leaned his son against a lamppost, making sure that Anthony had his good arm around it for support before letting go. Then he raised his rifle and centered it on the dark spot above the red shirt. The dumb bitch wasn’t even watching the obvious line of attack. Anybody who’d been through a basic weapons and tactics course would have found a better tactical position than that.
Mark Shaw raised the M-16 and centered Eleanor Norton’s head in his sights.
Then he fired.
No hesitation.
He lit her up, and even he could see that the three-round burst he’d fired had taken most of her head clean off.
Eleanor heard the rattle of gunfire a moment before the dead woman’s head splattered onto the water behind her. The body teetered and then collapsed, landing facedown in the water. Watching the body as it turned a lazy pirouette away from the window, Eleanor couldn’t hold her stomach down any longer. She retched, vomiting all over a dead man’s beard.
Her stomach was still heaving when she heard voices at the front of the church. Captain Shaw and his son entered the building and moved quickly to the altar. They stopped next to the dead woman wearing Eleanor’s shirt and backpack and flipped her over.
The body rolled like a log in the water. There was very little left of the corpse’s head above the jaw, just an open cavity with clumps of matted hair sticking to the back of the emptied skull.
“Damn,” Anthony said. He turned away from the sight in disgust.
From her hiding spot under the pile of corpses, Eleanor watched Anthony Shaw closely. His right arm was dead by his side, the wound up by his shoulder obvious. She had drawn first blood. If nothing else, she had made the bastard pay for hitting her. And Jim, she reminded herself.
“What is it?” Captain Shaw said.
“Nothing, you just blew the shit out of her.”
“Had to be done.”
“Yeah,” Anthony said. “But damn, that’s a lot of damage.”
From somewhere outside, Eleanor heard the sound of zombies moaning. She tried to identify the number of voices, but couldn’t, and that only meant one thing. They were coming. Bunches of them.
Captain Shaw seemed to realize it, too. He started to move, then stopped to stare at the mound of bodies encasing Eleanor. Her eyes went wide and her pulse quickened. Had he heard something? Seen a flash of movement? She waited, cringing not only with disgust now, but fear as well.
But he didn’t move toward the mound. Instead, he seemed to be looking through them, through her, as though wrestling with something.
“Idiots,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” Anthony asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking.”
Anthony didn’t answer at first. He watche
d his father like one who has lived with a powerful man for a long time and has learned when it is best to stand and wait in silence while the other wades in the tidal flow of his thoughts.
But then there was a noise from the entrance to the church and Anthony turned on it suddenly. Eleanor could only see dim shapes moving in the starlight that framed the doorway, but she could hear them moaning, and she could hear the irregular rhythm of their hands slapping at the water.
“Dad,” Anthony said. There was an obvious note of alarm in his voice. “Dad, we need to get out of here.”
Only then did Captain Mark Shaw turn from the corpses. He scanned the doorway, and then the windows along the sides of the church, and slid the M-16’s sling off his shoulder.
“Okay,” he said. “Get behind me, Anthony. Let’s get out of here.”
Eleanor found herself alone beneath the pile of corpses.
The Shaws had fought their way out of the church and then slipped away into the night, but the moaning remained. The zombies, Eleanor knew, were very close.
She waited, afraid to move out from beneath her hiding place among the corpses. Though the moaning had suddenly stopped, she knew from all the splashing that more zombies had entered the church. Working as quietly as possible, she wedged herself down deeper into the bottom of the corpse pile, and watched the narrow gap between the bodies.
Several zombies staggered past. She could see them bumping into pews and slapping absently at the water around their waists. Then one of the zombies stopped directly in front of Eleanor’s line of sight and slowly turned its head in her direction. It had eaten something recently. She could tell it had made a kill right away from the clotted clumps of blood in its hair and the dark, ominous stains on its face and clothes. Mosquitoes swarmed around its face. She couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. Not even the thing’s race was obvious, and it occurred to her that she was looking at the great leveler of humanity. At last, here was something that cleared the slate . . . not only of the mind, but of the body as well. All are equal before the zombie. And it wasn’t beautiful. It was horrible in the most profound way imaginable. The essence was gone. Nothing but the shell remained . . . and in that, there was no beauty.
But the zombie was still staring into the pile of corpses.
Eleanor stared back at it, and she wondered what was behind those dead, vacant eyes.
Go away, she pleaded. Please, go away.
CHAPTER 19
Madison fought him all the way through the alley, kicking and screaming, beating against his back with her fists. She caught him in the kidneys once and he lurched forward, his knees buckling. He managed to carry her as far as the open courtyard behind the old gas station before his foot caught on something hard under the water and he pitched forward, face-planting into the water. Madison tumbled out of his arms and tried to scramble back to her mother.
“Madison, don’t!” he said. Jim grabbed her by the waist and pulled her back.
“Let go of me! What the hell’s wrong with you? We can’t leave her.”
He spun her around, and for a moment, the wild, bulging, unblinking intensity in her eyes frightened him. He’d never seen her so charged, so animated. It was as if she were giving off sparks.
But he held on.
“No,” he said. “You stay here with me.”
“We can’t leave her back there.” Big fat tears welled up at the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “She’ll die back there.”
“No, she won’t.”
“How do you know that? You can’t be sure of that.”
But he was sure. At that moment, with his daughter’s shoulders still gripped tightly in his hands, he knew it. Jim wasn’t exactly sure when the change in Eleanor had happened, but it had happened. Eleanor had become someone different, stronger than she had been before. She was in control. He could still see the confidence in her eyes and feel it coming off her like heat when she told him to take Madison out of the street. She would cover for them, she had said, and at that moment, he had believed it. His faith in her was as solid as his conviction that the sun would come up in the morning.
The change had taken place right in front of him, and yet it had been so subtle that he hadn’t noticed it. He thought of her drowning the zombie outside of the Meadowlakes Business Park, of her taking charge of the Red Cross volunteers back at the Beltway, of her sitting in the bow of their little boat with the M-16 on her lap, of her telling him to protect their daughter as she held off two armed madmen and a city full of zombies, and suddenly he could see the through line. All the madness that had led them to this point made sense. All these years, Eleanor had been waiting for an obstacle big enough to stand in her way. And here it was, the catalyst. Her cocoon had ruptured, but what had flown free was not a butterfly, but a hawk . . . predatory, confident, ineffably beautiful. She was rising to the challenge.
She had only asked this one thing of him: protect their daughter.
Jim understood what he had to do. Now it was his turn to make good on his promise to Eleanor.
“Daddy . . . ?”
He tightened his grip on Madison’s shoulders.
“Listen to me. Your mother is going to be fine. I know it. I can’t tell you how I know it, but I do. I believe it. Right down to my bones I believe it. She told us to get to safety. We have to do that. She will find us.”
Madison softened a little. He could feel the rigidity leaving her muscles. She nodded, and for Jim, the changing expression on her face was like watching a fire go out. Only a steady calm remained. Had she also sensed the change in her mother? He didn’t think that she had seen it in the same way as he, but she must have seen something. Why else would she be yielding to him now?
“What do we do?” she asked.
Good question, he thought.
He looked around.
They were blocked on three sides by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence, off to the left, was a white, wooden building, dilapidated and sad-looking in the dark, and he guessed it was a church. Just on the other side of the fence was a large, rectangular building that might have been an apartment or possibly an office building. He couldn’t really tell because of all the trash and tree limbs that had accumulated in front of it. Looking farther down the block he saw dark, barnlike shapes. No telling what they were.
“We need to find a way to get over this fence,” he said.
Shots rang out from somewhere behind him and he turned. Madison had her back to him. In front of her, coming down the narrow alley between the white cinder-block wall and the gas station, were four zombies. Another staggered out of the gas station. He could see two more inside, coming toward the back door.
“Daddy!” Madison said.
She backed up, and Jim pulled her behind him.
He fired at the lead zombie coming down the narrow alley, hitting it in the arm. The zombie staggered, but didn’t fall. Its arm dropped uselessly to its side, and yet it kept on coming. He fired again and this time hit it in the chest. The zombie took a few steps toward him and then sagged down into the water.
Jim turned to his right and saw the zombie that had come out of the gas station was almost on him. Its mangled hands reached for him. Looking into its dead eyes, its open, bloody mouth full of cracked teeth, Jim felt a shudder all the way down to his bones. He fired a hurried shot that hit the zombie in the hand and blasted off two of its fingers.
“Goddamn,” he said, the bile rising up to the back of his mouth.
He fired again, and this time he got the zombie in the throat. The moan on its lips turned to a deep gurgling sucking sound, like a clogged drain
But, impossibly, it kept coming.
His third shot put it down.
“Daddy!”
More zombies were coming down the alley, clawing their way over the one he’d already killed. Five shots to put down two zombies, he thought. Christ, this isn’t going to work.
“Madison, see if you can f
ind a way through that fence.”
“It’s got razors on top of it!” she said.
“Just do it.”
His hands shook. He tried to aim the gun, but the front sights were bobbing all over the place. He couldn’t steady his hands. A voice in his head was screaming for him to shoot, but the trembling was spreading. His mouth went dry. First he was numb, then burning up. His breath was coming in fast, shallow gasps. When he did pull the trigger the bullet skipped harmlessly off the water near one zombie’s hip before smacking into the side of the gas station.
Come on, he thought, come on. Focus, Jim, get a grip.
From just behind him he heard the musical jingling of the chain-link fence.
“Daddy, I found it!” Madison shouted. “This way.”
When he looked over his shoulder he saw Madison slipping through the fence. A portion of it had come loose from the bottom of the fence pole and Madison was holding it open for him like a curtain.
“Come on, Daddy.”
He rushed through the opening. It was low and narrow. She had made it through easily enough, but Jim was much bigger and it cut painful gashes into his back. But he got through, grabbed her hand, and together they waded over to the nearest building they could find.
“Where are we going?” she cried.
“In here,” he said. He was thinking: Get to higher ground. Or someplace we can barricade ourselves. Anything but remaining out in the open.
They reached the building—it was an apartment building, he could see that now—and Jim started pulling trash and tree limbs away from the door. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Madison was still right there with him. She was watching the narrow strip of water they had just covered. Zombies were pouring out of nearly every doorway and advancing through every gap between the buildings. Their moans were deafening.
“Daddy . . .”
“Help me with this,” he said, and together they pulled a large tree limb from the apartment building’s door.
Jim climbed up on top of a bed frame and kicked at the door until it flew open. He held the door open as far as it would go and peered inside. He could make out a long hallway running the length of the building. It was flooded, just like everything else, and the far end was lost in darkness, but it was better than out here.
