“Eww,” Madison said. “What happened to him?”
“Must have gotten caught in the explosions over by the Beltway,” Jim said.
“But how did he get all the way over here?”
“Who knows?” Jim said. “Maybe he got injured over there and died while he was trying to get away.”
“Maybe he drifted over here,” Eleanor offered.
“Yeah,” Jim said. “Could be. Here, help me move him off the boat.”
Eleanor and Jim grabbed the dead man by the back of his shirt and pulled him down into the water. Then they pulled the boat from the tree canopy and gave it a quick once-over.
“Looks like it’ll work,” he said.
“Yeah. Madison, you ready?”
Madison glanced at the dead man floating face up in the water, swallowed, and then got in. Eleanor followed, then Jim last. He tried to pull the starter cord on the boat’s outboard, but he couldn’t make it work.
“Eleanor, can you . . .”
“Huh?”
“My arms,” he said lamely. He looked mortified. “I can’t. They hurt too bad.”
She understood then.
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
They switched places, and Eleanor got the motor started and guided them away from the line of shrubs and toward the Beltway.
They were facing due east, and the coming dawn had lit the sky in tones of pink and gray. Ahead of them, the Beltway and the buildings around it looked like London in those grainy old black-and-white movies from the Second World War. Everywhere she looked, Eleanor saw skeletal ruins crumbling into the water. Some were little more than a single wall. Everything had been touched by fire. Gray concrete dust still hung in the air, moving slowly, like smoke on the water.
The water was thick with charred bodies. A few, horribly, still moved, and some of them could even raise a blackened hand and moan.
The Beltway itself was a jumbled mess. Large pieces of concrete jutted up from the water at odd angles, and in the screen of dust they resembled the prows of ships sinking into the ocean.
A helicopter flew overheard, very close.
Eleanor had already cut the motor a good distance back, rowing them to this point. She didn’t want the motor’s noise to attract soldiers—or worse, more zombies—and she thought that decision might save them now. The helicopters almost certainly had heat-sensing equipment, so they would pick them up for sure, but if the boat was just drifting, maybe they wouldn’t appear any different than the other bodies in the water and in the derelict boats. After all, most of them had been badly burned. Heat signatures would be everywhere.
“Get your head down,” she said to Madison. “Everybody stay still.”
“Mom . . .”
“Shhh,” Eleanor said. “We’re okay. Just stay still. It’ll be gone in a second.”
The helicopter glided slowly overhead. The pilot didn’t appear to be looking for anything in particular, just cruising, and Eleanor watched the aircraft glide away until the red taillights were far in the distance.
“I think we’re okay,” she said at last.
“No,” Jim said. “Eleanor, we can’t do it this way. As soon as they realize that we’re not a derelict, they’ll fire on us. We didn’t come all this way to die now.”
“No,” she said, “you’re right.”
“So what do we do?”
Eleanor smiled. Twenty-four hours earlier, she would have answered Jim’s question with an “I don’t know.” But now, things had changed. She had changed. And she knew exactly what they needed to do.
“Hang on,” she said. “We’re doubling back.”
The first fingers of daylight were spreading over the flooded ruins when she finally found what she was looking for.
“Okay,” she said in a whisper, “you two wait for me here.”
“Eleanor, I . . .”
“Hey, it’ll be okay. Jim, I can do this.”
He looked at her then, and the expression on his face was one she didn’t quite recognize.
“What is it?”
“It’s you,” he said. “You’ve changed.”
She started to object, to ask him what that was supposed to mean, but he stopped her.
“No,” he said. “No, no. It’s a good thing. I mean . . . oh hell. Eleanor, we’ve been married fifteen years, and I never knew this woman was inside of you. It’s like you’ve blossomed. . . . You’ve . . . you’re like Superwoman. Or Wonder Woman, or whatever the hell she’s called. But you
have
changed. All I’m trying to say is I like it. I like this.”
She was blushing to the roots of her hair.
“I don’t really . . .” she started to say, but trailed off.
He leaned forward and kissed her then. “Just be careful, okay? Please.”
She nodded.
Jesus
, she thought, mentally kicking herself,
are you crying? Stop being such a girl.
Eleanor mopped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she handed Jim her backpack.
“You two get going,” she said.
“I love you, Mom,” said Madison.
“I love you, too, baby. Go with your dad, okay? We’ll be out of here before you know it.”
Madison hugged her. Eleanor didn’t want to let go, but she knew this had to get done. They were running out of darkness.
“Go on,” she said, guiding Madison toward Jim.
Jim took Madison by the shoulders and together they climbed out of the boat and swam silently over to a pile of broken concrete not far from a hole in the chain-link fence the military had set up. Two National Guardsmen were standing sentry duty by the hole. They were sitting in a small white fishing boat, drinking coffee from Starbucks cups, looking tired and bored. From the shelter of a bent-over street sign, Eleanor watched Jim and Madison glide into position, so that they were less than thirty feet from the sentries.
Good
, she thought.
Good job, Jim.
Then she turned the boat away and paddled a good distance off. Looking back to the east, she faced the spreading dawn. The horizon was lit with red and copper and gold, the flooded landscape below it a tapestry of shadow and murky light. Years later, when she thought back to this time, to leaving Houston, this is how she would remember it—the crumbling walls dappled with red sunlight, the water towers standing like mute giants over the rubble and the burned bodies, the demolished Beltway. She was tempted to turn back to the south and get one final look at the rest of the city that had been her home her entire life, but something told her not to, that looking back was somehow the wrong thing to do.
It certainly hadn’t worked for Lot’s wife.
It was the second time in as many days she had thought of the story of Lot’s wife, and she couldn’t help but chuckle now at the idea of a woman turning into a pillar of salt. But while she could laugh at the image, she could not laugh at the sense behind the story. For wasn’t there a certain undeniable truth in it? Didn’t it tally with Eleanor’s own situation, just a little? There was nothing behind Eleanor but the ghost of a city—the end of one life, and the beginning of another, but much more uncertain, life. And maybe that was why Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. Maybe she couldn’t reconcile the palaces of her memory with the ruins of her reality.
Maybe.
But there was no more time for idle thoughts and stories. She scanned the ruins to the east, looking for a target. There were burnt corpses all around her. She pulled one of them into the boat and positioned it next to her.
“You ready?” she said to the dead body. “Well, good. At least one of us is.”
And then she twisted the throttle all the way open, turning the little boat on a collision course with the military. She pulled the rifle’s sling over her shoulder and threw one leg over the gunwale.
“See you around,” she said.
Then she jumped over the side.
From his hiding place, Jim watched the little boat accelerate through a debris field of wrecked trucks and garbage and toppled street signs. There was a body hunched over the motor. He projected the line of the boat’s course and figured it would hit about six hundred yards north of their position.
That is, if the military didn’t blow it out of the water long before that.
In fact, he was already seeing movement around the quarantine wall. A pair of helicopters was sprinting that way, their noses dipped toward the water in an attitude that made them look fiercely determined.
Boats were scrambling outside the wall as well. He could see four of them powering up, turning that way.
Then he looked back at the hole. The two sentries were still sitting in their boat, drinking their coffee, their weapons leaning against their seats, only now they were craning their necks toward the little boat, watching it speed to its imminent destruction.
Jim wished he could make some sense out of the voices coming from their radios, but it just sounded like a garbled mess to him, the same as Eleanor’s police radio had back when she was still a patrol officer.
They didn’t seem too concerned, though.
“Daddy . . . ?”
Madison was looking at him.
Poor thing is terrified
, he thought.
Well, that makes two of us.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Your mother’s gonna be along here any second.”
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
No
, he wanted to say.
Instead he smiled and squeezed Madison to him. “Your mother knows what she’s doing,” he said.
And to himself he added,
Please let that be true.
Eleanor rose slowly from the water. She was behind a pile of concrete beams, watching the National Guardsmen through a gap in the rubble.
Definitely weekend soldiers,
she thought.
The two men were in their mid-thirties, both a little overweight, both more interested in complaining about their assignment than in watching their surroundings. And that was just as well. She had swum hard and fast to get here before the little motorboat reached the wall. If these two had managed to keep their heads out of their asses they would have surely heard her coming.
Oh well, she thought. You snooze, you lose.
She stepped around the cement pile with her weapon up and ready.
“Hey, hey!” one of the men said. Their coffee cups went flying as the two men reached clumsily for their weapons.
“Don’t do it, guys,” Eleanor said. “Hands where I can see them.”
From somewhere off to her right, Eleanor heard the sound of guns firing and she figured the little boat and its corpse captain had just been reduced to floating splinters.
She didn’t break her concentration, though.
“Fellas, I don’t want to kill you. Nobody else needs to die. Just keep those hands up where I can see them. Go on now. That’s it. Keep ’em up.”
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them said. The name plate on his uniform said GLADRY.
“Does it really matter, Mr. Gladry? You and Mr. Unwin there need to step out of the boat and onto the roof of that pickup there.”
Gladry just stared at her.
“Move!” she said.
“Fuck you, lady. We’re not going anywhere.”
Eleanor swallowed, flexed her finger on the trigger. Jesus, she didn’t want to do this. She did not want to kill these guys.
But just then, from beside her, she heard Jim’s voice. “You heard the lady,” he said. “You boys need to move it.”
Eleanor glanced at him. She was going to tell him he was crazy, order him back behind cover, remind him she had this under control, but that all changed when she saw him. He was standing there, water dripping off him, her pistol in his hands and pointed at the two National Guardsmen.
And then he winked at her.
The bastard actually winked at her. She would have laughed if she weren’t so damn terrified.
But evidently it was enough for the one named Unwin, because he stepped over the side and onto the roof of the pickup next to their boat.
Gladry tried to reach for his radio, which was resting inside a cup holder next to the driver’s seat, but Eleanor stopped him.
“No,” she said sharply. “Leave the radios, leave the weapons.”
The soldier nodded, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and followed Unwin onto the pickup.
“You can’t do this,” Gladry said to Eleanor.
Without taking her weapon off them, Eleanor gave a hand sign for Jim and Madison to climb into the boat the soldiers had just left. The two soldiers watched them get onboard. Their faces were taut with suppressed tension. A vein in Gladry’s forehead seemed to pulse.
“You’re wrong about that, Gladry. I’m getting my family out of here, and I can, and I will, do anything to make that happen.”
Then Jim lowered his hand toward her and Eleanor took it, and he swung her up into the boat. She picked up their radios and inspected the display. It was a Motorola, same as the one the HPD used, but with a slightly different channel system.
She tossed both radios into the water.
“Hey!” Gladry said.
Jim looked at the ripples where the radio had just sunk below the surface, and then to Eleanor.
“They can track those,” she said. She motioned at the pistol in Jim’s hand. “Cover them for a second.”
She ejected the magazines from each of the soldiers’ rifles and cleared the chambers. Then she tossed the rifles into the flooded cab of the pickup the two men were standing on.
“What did you do that for?” Unwin said.
“Just because I want my family to live doesn’t mean I want you to die,” Eleanor answered. She tossed their magazines into the flooded bed of the truck. “You can get those back once we’re out of sight. Deal?”
“Fuck you,” Gladry said. His face was turning beet red now.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” She turned to Jim and pointed at a line of buildings off to the left. “Take us out slowly, around that block over there. Don’t go too fast. I don’t want to attract any attention.”
“Okay,” Jim said, and they moved out.
They were able to follow Highway 290 for about twenty minutes before the water got too shallow for the boat. After that, they ditched it and started walking. It didn’t take long before they started hearing the sounds of cars in the distance.
“Eleanor,” Jim said, “you think we can stop soon? I don’t think I can walk anymore.”