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“What?” He looked down at me like I might be mad, but there was hunger in his lean, saggy face—like at least I was telling him something concrete, and this was a first for the day.
“Get everyone away from the water—away, it doesn’t matter where. Those things over there, the things you see coming—they can’t leave the water hardly at all. When they’re out of it, they move slow. Get everybody up onto the interstate—up that onramp and out. ”
He nodded like he understood but he wasn’t sure if there was any good reason to believe me. But right about then, gunshots popped around our ears like fireworks, like baby versions of the Salute shells for all their volume. People started screaming and the press of bodies only got worse, more frightened and desperate.
Glass was breaking and I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t know what it belonged to.
I think—at least, it looked like it, anyway—most of the gunfire was coming from the authorities and was aimed down the street where the water came creeping high, bringing the dead things with it.
“Headshots,” I told the officer, whose calf I still clung to. “Won’t stop them, but it’ll slow them down. ”
“Is that how we kill them?” he asked, and I thought he probably hadn’t heard me very well.
“No, can’t kill them. Already dead. Just distract them, slow them. Get everyone else out of the way. ”
He nodded again, but that didn’t mean anything. He lifted the megaphone to his mouth; it was one of those electronic ones that you push buttons to speak through, not an old-fashioned cheerleader’s model. When his voice came through the device the words were murky but much, much louder.
“Everyone go towards Martin Luther King. Go towards Twenty-seven!”
This was more or less the only direction anyone was running anyway, but they were all running like marbles dumped from a sack, bounding back and forth and around, ricocheting off of cars and off the sides of buildings—a great experiment in chaos flow. Gradually, the place was starting to empty.
The Read House had only held a finite number of fugitives from the water. There were only so many of those who knew they should flee, and only so many who were capable of running farther under their own power. The smaller ones, the older ones, the weaker ones were getting left behind, but that’s the way it always goes. That’s the way it always works when no one’s in charge and there’s no way to stop the water, or the monsters, and the only thing you can do is get out of the way.
It’s not like the government is there to help you.
So as the first wave poured, drained, and howled away from the building—even though some of them didn’t know what they were running from—most of the ones who were left were looking for safe places.
“Up,” I told the first one I found, an older woman with two small, shrieking kids who were probably grandchildren. “
Up, go up. Get as high as you can. The parking garage—get to the elevators. ”
“I don’t know where—”
“Come with me. ”
It was the best I could do; even though it trapped them up on the roof. Up on the roof, the helicopters swirled and swooped—the helicopters might see them and get them. And besides, that high up they were so far beyond the water they ought to be safe.
Safer. It was the best I could do.
I grabbed a couple more on my way to the elevators beneath the building. One was a heavily pregnant woman and one was an elderly man in a gray bathrobe; then we picked up a girl with crutches, and were lucky that a hotel employee (in his valet uniform) could lift her into his arms and carry her along with us.
I stuffed the lot of them into the elevator and called others over to do the same. “Go to the top level,” I told them. “Get on the roof and flag for the helicopters. ”
The police officer who’d been hanging on the lamppost caught up to us and saw what we were doing. At first I thought he was going to stop us and start making some official, by-the-book kind of suggestions that would royally piss me off, and then I’d have to kick him in the balls . . . but he surprised me.
“I’ll radio it in. The roof of the parking garage. ”
He left us, clutching the radio to his mouth and squeezing the buttons on the megaphone, which hung limp from his other hand. On his way back outside, into the stark white afternoon with the ash-gray sky, he waved others in our direction.
They hadn’t all been abandoned; someone always stays. A mother, a son, a father, a grandfather here and there, and more grandmothers with little ones in tow. There weren’t enough healthy helpers to go around, but even then—even understanding that terrible, awful things were creeping forward—the brave ones understood that there was time. The loyal ones kept one eye on the road and the river trash, calculating the time until there was no time left to run.
Outside and overhead there was at least one helicopter even before the elevator had time to return to us. We watched the digital numbers drop and cursed the seconds while the cars loaded and unloaded.
We cursed the moments as the refugees straggled past and the screaming all around us didn’t stop, only muffled itself to crying and shouting, which was no better but at least made it easier to hear—and easier to pass orders back and forth.
Harry found me again, down by the elevators.
He was panting, but still energized and ready to move bodies. “I heard there was some crazy woman stuffing people into elevators and sending them skyward. I figured it had to be you. ”
