“I see him,” he said.
Then he put the binoculars down, told the others to hold on tight, and gave the little bass boat all the throttle it had.
Captain Shaw stared at the approaching crowd of zombies and considered his options . . . and there weren’t many.
He was wearing an olive drab T-shirt and green BDU-style pants. He reached into the pockets on his thighs and came up with five fully loaded magazines for the Glocks and a sixth magazine that only had eight rounds in it. From the number of zombies he saw coming down into the boatyard, he could tell he didn’t have anywhere close to enough ammunition for a stand-up fight. He could get most of the ones out in front, maybe, if he made every shot count, but there were bunches more pouring in from the residential area south of the campus. Probably fleeing the rising tide, he thought. And that meant far more than he was equipped to deal with. Staying put was going to be suicide.
But, really, what other option did he have?
A quick look over his shoulder answered that.
Less than a quarter of the people he’d managed to lead this far had found their way into the boats. Some of the boats, he saw with mounting anger, were trying to leave, even though they were only half full. Some, he saw, had only one or two people in them.
“Fill the boats up front first!” he yelled at the crowd.
Barely twenty feet away, a man with a little girl on his shoulders turned to stare at him. His eyes were lit with a fevered intensity, like something inside his mind had let go. Thick cords stood out in the man’s neck. His lips were drawn back, exposing teeth clenched so tightly Shaw wondered why they didn’t shatter.
The man made some kind of inarticulate reply, and Shaw made to rush him, to grab him by the shoulder and spin him around and push him toward the front of the boatyard, but then he saw the look on the little girl’s face. It wasn’t fear. She looked dazed, her mouth slack. Her eyes had a glazed vapidity to them that made him slow, then stop, his head shaking from side to side very slowly.
“Go on,” he said, not yelling anymore.
Then he turned back to the advancing zombie crowd. The wind shifted as he did, and he caught the sickly sweet stench of open sewage mixed with gasoline and mud and rotting flesh. Hurricane Mardel had pushed immense piles of debris up against the southeastern edge of the campus, like snowdrifts against a prairie barn. The zombies wouldn’t be able to get through and come around on his right flank. They’d be forced by the walls of trash to veer more and more to the east, toward the highway, where the ground sloped away so much that, in places, the water was forty feet deep. Maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t need to kill them all to have a chance. If he could set up on a point along that wall of trash he could direct fire into the crowd and maybe force the zombies into deep water, where they’d drown.
It was as good a plan as any, he decided, and loaded fresh magazines into both pistols. He waded back toward the trash wall, right into the middle of the first few zombies to make it down to the boatyard, shooting them as he went.
He had made it most of the way to the wall when he heard the whine of a boat motor at full throttle coming up on his left. Shaw turned, and at first he thought he was looking at one of the refugees who had managed to get one of the boats running and was now tearing off in a blind panic.
The damn fool’s headed the wrong way
, he thought. And then stopped.
That’s Anthony driving that boat. Holy shit, that’s my boy!
The zombies were closing in on him, but even as he shot two of them, a wide smile spread across his face.
He let out a wild rebel yell, watching the boat as it swung toward him.
“That’s my boy!” he shouted.
He was delirious with excitement now. All the exhaustion of the preceding night seemed to slip away from him, and at that moment, he felt like his lungs had finally started to work again. Great waves of air rushed into his chest, filling him.
Yes!
But then the smile faded. They were slowing down. Shaw watched, dumbstruck, as Anthony slowed the boat to a stop. They were less than thirty feet from the nearest zombies, and they were stopping.
“What the . . . ?”
And then Anthony was forcing Brent over the side of the boat.
“What are you guys doing?” he yelled. “Jesus, what are you doing?”
Brent was trying to claw his way back into the boat, but Anthony was pushing him away with a rifle. Brent looked as wild eyed as the man who had been carting the little zombie girl around on his shoulders, maybe even worse.
And then Shaw realized: No, Anthony wasn’t pushing Brent away with the rifle. He was trying to give it to Brent, to make him take it. And a small black duffel bag, too.
“Get back in the boat!” Shaw called out to him. “Get back in the boat now!”
But Anthony was already pushing away. His eyes were fixed on Brent, but he was motioning wildly toward Shaw, and Shaw could hear his younger son yelling, “Get him that rifle! Help him!”
The next instant Anthony was behind the controls again, the throttle buried as the boat sped into the middle of the zombie crowd, plowing over bodies with reckless speed.
Brent turned around, holding the AR-15 across his chest like a young girl does her schoolbooks, visibly trembling in the waist-deep water. He looked around at the zombies shambling toward him, and a sickening cry escaped his throat.
“No,” Shaw said, and ran that way.
“Holy fucking shit, Anthony!” Jesse said, looking over his shoulder as Anthony steered the boat away from his father and brother. “What in the hell are you doing? You just left him back there.”
Anthony turned the boat hard to the left, making a wide swath through another crowd of zombies. Their bodies folded under the boat with a series of loud, wet thuds, and when Anthony turned back to see what he had done the water was thick with twisted, deformed corpses.
He turned the boat yet again, this time back toward the boatyard, and backed off the throttle.
“What are we doing here, Anthony? What about your brother?”
“He’ll be all right,” Anthony said, and for a moment the image of his brother’s terrified face as Anthony forced him over the side both angered and worried him.
But he shook the doubt away.
He’d told Brent to get the rifle and the ammo to their father. Brent had understood what to do. Anthony was sure of that.
“Get those gas cans,” he said to Jesse. “We’re gonna make another pass through that crowd. You just make sure you get that stuff poured out into the water.”
“You’re not gonna—”
But Anthony wasn’t listening. He was already laying into the throttle, rocketing the boat forward.
“Oh shit,” Jesse muttered, and moved to the back of the boat where they kept the extra fuel. Holding on to the gunwale with one hand, he put the first of the plastic gas cans between his knees and unscrewed the cap.
“You ready?” Anthony said.
“Yeah, go.”
Anthony turned the boat again and accelerated into the main body of the approaching zombies. He started to turn the wheel sharply back and forth, kicking up a huge wake that knocked many of the zombies off their feet.
“Do it!” he yelled at Jesse. “Dump it all.”
When they had emptied all five gas cans, Anthony sped down to the eastern corner of the rec center, slowed to a stop, and turned to face the zombies. There were hundreds of them now. Their moaning had become so loud it drowned out the shouts and gunfire from the boatyard.
“Hand me that flare gun,” he said to Jesse.
Jesse got the gun out of the storage compartment under his seat and handed it to Anthony.
“You think this’ll work?” he asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
But Anthony was pretty sure of himself. Between the oil and the chemicals that were already in the water from the refineries down south and all the gas that had been spilled when the yard masters were getting the shelter’s impromptu fleet ready to go and the gas they had just put down, the water might as well have been a field full of kindling.
He raised the flare gun and fired a skipping shot over the water, igniting a trail of fire like a torch dragged through dry grass. But the flames dimmed, and then seemed to die out completely. Anthony watched it with a sinking feeling in his chest, and then he hung his head and let out the breath he’d been holding.
He glanced back at Jesse, expecting to see his own dark sense of failure staring back at him. But Jesse was watching the water, not blinking, his mouth hanging open slightly in expectation.
Anthony followed Jesse’s gaze, and as he did, the water erupted with a
whoosh
so forceful he felt it against his chest like a hard shove. The next moment, a blast of searing heat swept over his face, and he turned away, shielding himself with an upturned palm.
The flames burned intensely bright for perhaps twenty seconds, and then died down, leaving the air oily and black with smoke and thick with the smell of burning bodies and chemicals.
The smoke hung on the water like a fog, and for a long moment, everything was quiet.
Here and there Anthony could make out the sound of someone moaning. A few zombies, their hands blackened, the skin peeling away in charcoal-like clumps, reached for the boat as it glided silently by, but most didn’t move. They floated on the garbage-choked water, burned and dead, in such numbers that it left Anthony speechless.
“You did it, man!” Jesse said. “Holy shit. I can’t believe that worked.”
Anthony only looked at him. He wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. He was too stunned by his own success. Slowly, his gaze turned back to the water.
Cheers rang out from the boatyard.
He wasn’t sure how he picked his father’s voice out of all that yelling, but gradually he became aware of his dad yelling Brent’s name.
They had drifted back toward the campus, close to the spot where he had dumped Brent over the side and told him to get the AR and the extra ammo to their father, and now, through the screen of oily smoke he could see that Brent hadn’t moved. He was still standing right where Anthony had left him, looking small and scared and very much alone amid a tightening cluster of zombies. He still held the gun across his chest as if it was an armful of chopped wood.
Another thirty or forty yards beyond Brent, Anthony saw their father, his face twisted with rage and fear, running toward Brent. He was yelling his son’s name, screaming for him to fight.
“Why won’t he move?” Jesse said.
“Brent!”
Anthony shouted.
“Shoot them, dammit! Shoot them!”
Brent lifted his head, as though he had heard the sound of someone speaking to him, but not caught the sense of it, and that was when one of the zombies fell on his back and pushed him down onto his knees. Brent let out a shriek and popped up again, but without the AR.
“Brent!”
Anthony cried, and jumped out of the boat.
He ran toward his brother.
Anthony pulled his pistol and fired into the crowd of zombies swarming around Brent.
The zombie’s touch had turned something on in Brent’s mind, for as soon as he got back on his feet, he started running. He was moving more quickly than Anthony had ever seen him move, and he was headed straight for the deep water near the base of the freeway.
“Yes,” Anthony said to himself. “That’s good. Keep going.” Then, more loudly: “Keep going, Brent! Run!”
But he didn’t make it far.
As Brent was running, one of the zombies managed to grab on to the back of his pants and hold on. Brent punched and slapped at the zombie, twisting one way and then other, but he couldn’t break the hold, and the next instant the zombie was on him.
Two others closed in.
Anthony fired and hit one of the zombies in the shoulder, but didn’t stop it. And that had been his last round. The slide was locked back in the empty position, the gun useless. Anthony holstered it and sprinted that way, and as he neared them he could hear thudding blows and the sound of his brother screaming.
Brent Shaw, who was a full six inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than any of his attackers, was getting pushed and pulled between the zombies like a kitten caught in a three-way dogfight. The zombies snarled and snapped, slashing at him with their teeth and nails. Brent’s body jerked and flopped without any sort of control. It took Anthony less than ten seconds to close the distance, but in that time, the zombies shredded Brent’s clothes and laced his bare skin with cuts and bites. Huge runners of blood ran down his chest and over the swell of his white belly, and all the while, his face grew ever paler.
“Brent, no!”
Anthony shrieked.
“No! No! Brent, hold on!”
Anthony grabbed one of the zombies and threw it off his brother. One of the other two reached for him, but Anthony was able to bat the zombie’s hand away and push it down into the water. The third never took its dead stare off Brent. It continued to slash and tear at him even as Anthony punched it in the back of the head.
He finally managed to pull the filthy thing off Brent and toss it away.
When he turned back to check on his brother he saw their father was already picking him up in a fireman’s carry and taking him away.
“Dad, is he . . . ?” But Anthony said no more. His father stopped, turned, his eyes bloodshot and shining with threatening tears, and then walked away.
Anthony heard the crack of gunfire and looked around.
He felt disconnected, lost, mentally numb, and he barely registered that Jesse was leaning over the gunwale of their boat with his pistol, shooting the few remaining zombies before they could reach the spot where Anthony was standing. To Anthony, the sounds of the shooting and the moaning and the noise of the refugees trying to climb into the boats had taken on a strange, muffled quality, and it occurred to him that he had grown used to it.
What a strange thing to think at a time like this
, he thought,
with your brother dying over there. That’s your fault, you know. Yours and yours alone.