Not Flesh Nor Feathers (Eden Moore 3)

“To where? Where are you going to go, Eden? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Out, I guess. Home, eventually—someplace the river can’t catch me. Isn’t that what’s important right now? Just get away from it. Do you see where it is? It’s coming for us, and it won’t stop, and we’ve all got to get out of its way. ”

“It’ll go down eventually, darling. TVA will fix the locks and the rain will end, and everything will go back down to normal. ”

“No. I’m leaving. I want away from it. I want to be done with it, and with those things that won’t stop coming. And, Harry, when people see them—when people here at this shelter see them? And it won’t be long, you can believe me when I tell you that. When people see them it’s going to be fucking panic, do you hear me? There won’t be any more of this organized retreat, tidy like this. It’s going to be pandemonium. Chaos. It’s going to be screaming and running and dying. That’s what it’s going to be. They want out, and they want up, and they are coming. ”

“What are you talking about? You’ve completely lost me. ”

“You’ll catch up, whether you want to or not. You’ll find out. You’ll see. ”

“All right, I’ll see, then. You—damn. You look like hell. Let’s get you inside and cleaned up, straightened up. Maybe get you a cookie or something, some orange juice. ”

I shook my arm out of his grasp and scowled. “I didn’t just donate blood, Harry. I don’t need any of that. I just need away from her. I mean, here. I need away from here. ”

I didn’t know why I’d said that, until I’d had time for my few firing synapses to catch up with my Freudian back-brain.

“What? Who is ‘her’? What are you talking about?” Harry asked, and I think Nick already knew.

“The little girl,” he said. “She’s the one running this show, you said it yourself. So, what then? We find her, we deal with her, we wrap it up and write a four-minute piece about it. ”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure. And it’ll be just that easy, too. ”

“What little girl?”

“All right, let’s go sit down somewhere and have a talk. It’ll take a few minutes to catch you up. ” Nick was already scanning the crowd for an island of solitude to which we could retreat, but even before the screaming started, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

And then, it did—the screaming began in earnest, I mean—and I didn’t have to look down the street to know why. I only had to look down at my feet, where the edges of my boots were up to their soles in manky black river water.

“Too late,” I whispered. “Too late. Harry, go. Nick, go. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s about to get very, very nasty. ”

The first wave of the stampede cuffed us then, buffeted us back into the building as people who didn’t even know why they were running turned themselves towards the road and ran. The human tide parted around the cars and sometimes went over them; but people were really getting frightened. Part of it was that some of them had seen the wobbling, shaking bodies burned black and awful as they lumbered up out of the water. The rest of it was that so many of them hadn’t seen anything yet. All they knew was that there was running and screaming, and that to stay in place meant to be trampled—or caught by the unseen things oncoming.

“How do we get out of here?” I yelled, but was cut off by someone’s elbow in my face. I ducked aside and pulled Nick and Harry both with me. “And how, precisely, do we ‘deal’ with a girl who’s been dead for eighty years? And who’s powerful enough to raise the dead?” I braced one foot on a jutting edge on the building’s brick face, and jumped up to give myself a second or two above the crowd. I saw them, coming up the road, and I had to amend my statement. “So to speak. ”

“So to speak?” Harry asked, tiptoeing to see—and since he’s so much taller than me, he had an easier time of it. “Holy shit. . . . ”

“I wouldn’t call them ‘raised’ exactly, that’s all. They’re up and moving, but they’re not traveling with all their factory original parts, if you get what I’m saying. They’re blind and mindless. They’re being moved by the only one who can see—the little girl. She’s been using the biggest of them, a really big man, as her front man because he’s huge and intimidating looking. Do you see—Harry, look over that way again, tall man—do you see one that’s smaller than the rest of them?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “What the hell are they?”

“Zombies,” Nick said. “She’s right, let’s just get the hell out of here. ”

“Where?” Harry asked. “Back to the Choo-Choo?”

“You could do that, yeah. Or maybe just get out of town the more direct way—up the ramp there. These things can’t get very far out of the water; or even if they can, they can’t move very quickly on dry land. Get up there onto the asphalt. I think we’ll be pretty safe. ” The interstate was elevated behind the Read House anyway. It was the same road Nick and I had climbed from the ball park, and it ought to be well out of the water except right at the river.

Though many of the refugees wouldn’t be able to get terribly far on foot, they could get far enough. And quite a lot of them could probably make the mad, sprinting run to where 27 meets 24, a mile or two away—and there, the entire road is up on columns, elevated well above the earth.

“We need to spread that around,” Nick said, and he was right. I gave Harry a nudge, Nick a nod, and we three split up to burrow through the crowd. It was easier said than done.

People were panicking, and we were going against the flow of human traffic no matter which direction we picked. The Read House parking garage, the places on the sidewalks out front, and the lobby area were all a boiling stew of humanity and there was no way around it.

I peeled my eyes for people in uniform and I located them, here and there. One cop with a radio in one hand and a megaphone in the other had hooked his arm around a lamppost and was standing on its moorings, leaning above the crowd.

I worked my way towards him and when I reached him, I grabbed him by the leg. “Hey,” I said, and he looked like he wanted to ignore me. He tried to shake me off, but he didn’t have enough leverage to do so.

I had to yell over the din, and I was tired of yelling, but I wasn’t giving up yet. “Listen to me—and don’t ask any questions. Those things can’t get out of the water. They can’t leave it, not very far and not very well. ”