The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead

by Knight, Stephen

  “Well, I can help you out there,” Victor said, pulling a shiny iPhone 6 out of his jacket. Corbett raised his brows when he saw it.

  “You actually bought one of those?” he asked.

  Victor looked indignant. “Of course not. It was a gift.” He unlocked the phone and handed it to Sinclair, who took it with a dubious look on his face. He turned and handed the phone to his wife, who stood behind him with a dull, tired look on her face.

  “Meredith, would you be so kind?”

  “Sure thing, Jock,” she said. Her tone indicated she did in fact mind, but it was clear to Corbett that the glad-handing wasn’t over just yet. Corbett sighed and sipped some more coffee as he looked around the diner. The members of his detail were watching him, but no one had gotten up to see if he needed anything, like maybe putting a bullet through whatever passed for Sinclair’s brain. Corbett realized he could end it all right now by calling them over, but the last thing he wanted was for Sinclair to cause a ruckus.

  “Really, it is fantastic seeing you here,” Sinclair gushed.

  “I admit, you weren’t someone I’d anticipated running into,” Corbett said. “Especially after that hit piece you tried to ram down my throat a few years ago.”

  Sinclair waved the comment away. “Oh, that. That was business, Barry! It has nothing to do with what my real position on your industry might be. Without people like you, we’d have no energy, no fuel, no rechargeable power sources—”

  “And no global warming, I believe you stated,” Corbett said.

  Victor crossed his arms, enjoying the show. “Oh, is that how you two met.”

  “Barry, really, you’re not upset about that still, are you?” Sinclair asked, adopting an appropriately aggrieved expression. “That was just for the telly. Tell me you’re not holding a grudge!”

  “I’m not, Jock. As a matter of fact, I don’t give a damn what you might think of me.” Corbett sipped some more coffee.

  Sinclair’s mouth fell open. “Oh—well, I do hope there’s something I can do—”

  “Sir? I’m sorry, but does your phone work?” Meredith edged toward the table as more people entered the diner and pushed past her, hunting for a place to sit. She held Victor’s phone out to him. Victor took the iPhone, frowning.

  “Well, it did about an hour ago …” He thumbed his way across the icons on the screen and tried to place a call. He held the phone to his ear for a moment before his frown deepened. He slowly placed the phone in his jacket pocket again. “My sincere apologies, madam, but I guess the service is down now.”

  “Telecommunications are fragile, Vic,” Corbett said. “They weren’t going to last for long, anyway. Not with what’s going on.”

  Victor nodded and reached for his own coffee.

  Sinclair looked around the diner. “Well, perhaps a landline?”

  “Jock, you’re not going to get your car fixed,” Corbett said. “It’s well past time for that. What do you think Maserati is going to do, send a technician out here from Bakersfield?”

  Meredith turned to Sinclair, a look of concern cutting through the exhaustion on her face. “But without the car, how will we get to San Francisco? Is there bus or train service from here …?”

  “No trains out here, and I have no idea if there’s even a ghost of chance of you getting on a bus,” Corbett said. “I wouldn’t even know where you could get one.”

  “The McDonald’s farther up Main Street,” Victor said. “Those of us who are less fortunate than Mr. Corbett here are quite used to riding on the Eastern Sierra Transit Authority coaches. They usually leave for Reno at eight forty-five every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.”

  “But today is Wednesday,” Sinclair said.

  “Yes. It is.” Victor looked up at Sinclair’s wife. “So where are you staying?”

  “The Trail’s End,” she said.

  Corbett chuckled loudly. “Oh you are, are you? How do you find the accommodations there, Jock?”

  Sinclair pursed his lips, apparently upset by Corbett’s sudden outburst of mirth. “I find them … very, very basic,” he said.

  “Make room, folks. Chow coming through,” Danielle said, carrying Corbett and Victor’s breakfast on a wide serving tray. As Sinclair and Meredith stepped aside, Victor half-stood and took the tray from her, holding it so she could position their orders on the small table. She gave him a brief smile.

  “Thanks, Mr. Kuruk. Do you guys need more coffee?”

  “Please call me Victor, and more coffee would be fantastic when you can,” Victor said, handing her back the serving tray.

  “Great.” Danielle turned and looked at Sinclair and his wife. “Folks, if you’re here for breakfast, it’ll be more enjoyable if you have a seat.”

  Sinclair looked like he was about to get huffy, but he managed to tamp down on his irritation. “Yes, well, perhaps we should.” He looked down at Corbett. “Good to see you again, Barry.”

  “Yeah, good luck to you, Jock. Hope you make it to LA, or San Francisco, or wherever you’re headed.”

  “Thank you. See you later on, perhaps.” And with that, Corbett was quit of Jock Sinclair. He wondered idly why his wife stayed with him—even she must have known that, underneath all the phony charm and his dazzling (American-made) smile, Sinclair was such a wanker that his picture was probably presented as an example of the word’s meaning in every dictionary that had ever been published.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Victor said, pulling his plate toward him, inspecting his meal with sharp eyes. He leaned forward and smelled the aroma of the cinnamon French toast. “Hey, you might have been right about the French toast. It smells fantastic.” He picked up the sprig of parsley that had been added and looked over it at Corbett. “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “I hope that fucker gets out of here,” Corbett said, staring at Sinclair as he and his wife settled in at a small table in the center of the diner.

  “Why? Is he ruining your appetite?” Victor asked as he poured maple syrup on his French toast. “Oh, lovely … there is about half a stick of butter on these!”

  “Trust me, Victor. If that man doesn’t get out of town before things get too hot, he’s going to cause us a whole lot of trouble. You think Hector’s a pain in the ass? You just met the man who broke the mold.” Corbett picked up his fork and knife in one hand, then draped his napkin across his lap. He regarded the hot breakfast sitting before him and was overcome by a wave of discouragement. Seeing Jock Sinclair had indeed ruined his appetite.

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Reese’s dreams were full of gunfire, smoke, death, and the dead.

  Blood-slicked ghouls poured out of Cedar-Sinai with such rapidity that it looked like the hospital was vomiting out its rotting guts in one long, moaning, shambling rush. All around them—Reese found he was not alone, Bates and, surprisingly, Miriam Pallata were with him—half-eaten bodies and parts of bodies were strewn everywhere. Great billowing swarms of flies descended on the remains, and flocks of black birds pecked at them, getting their fill of decaying meat and tissue and ravaged organs. Blood was everywhere, and the streets glistened with a ruddy hue in the muted light as the sun tried to shine through a blanket of acrid, toxic smoke. Los Angeles was on fire.

  The dead closed in on the trio, their footfalls as loud as thunder, as impactful as an earthquake. A chorus of moans and grunts preceded them, a mounting dirge sung by hundreds of dry vocal cords as the ghouls stalked toward them on dead limbs, arms outstretched, blood-stained fingers curled into claws. Several of them actually waddled, so full of feed that they appeared to be close to bursting. And still, they wanted more.

  Bates opened up first, his shotgun tearing through the dead’s leading ranks, mowing them down with a flurry of buckshot. Pallata joined him, her carbine sounding high and tinny compared to the full-throated blare of Bates’s Remington. Reese felt the weight of his own 870 in his hands, and he shouldered the weapon and fired. He emptied the shotgun’s tube magazine almost im
mediately, and by then, the dead were swarming over Bates, taking him down even as he fired his pistol into the mass with one hand as he swung his baton in a wide arc with the other. Pallata screamed as another group appeared to their right, coming up on her from behind. Reese hurled the shotgun at them and pulled his Glock from its holster, but there was no chance to save her. As he watched, the pack descended upon her, tearing away her uniform shirt, ripping her breasts into shredded meat. One ghoul pulled one of her large nipples into its mouth, and it disappeared in a torrent of bright, red blood.

  And then, Reese felt the cold hands of the zombies on his shoulders, weighing him down even as he tried to turn and fight. He was born to the blood-slick surface of Gracie Allen Drive as a dozen sets of slashing teeth descended upon him—

  He snapped awake when the ground shook, this time for real. But “awake” was a tenuous condition, at best. Reese floundered about in the semidarkness of the room he was in, not recognizing it at first. He was lying on a narrow cot, a thin blanket covering him. The cot shook again, and he lashed out with both hands, as if he was trying to swim through the room’s shadowy, gray light. He was covered with sweat, and his heart hammered in his chest like it had when he was a young patrolman chasing down his first suspect—a serial rapist, if he remembered correctly.

  He suddenly realized the ground wasn’t shaking after all. Bates stood at the foot of the cot, kicking it with his foot. Gunfire cracked in the near distance, and in volume.

  “Time to get back at it, Reese,” Bates said, his voice thick and blurry from exhaustion that made his words sound more like a cadenced growl.

  Reese lowered his arms and slowly sat up on the cot. With a slow, hesitant movement, he threw aside the blanket and lowered his feet to the floor. He was still wearing his pants and a white T-shirt, the latter moist with sweat. Black socks adorned his feet, and he saw one was beginning to unravel, allowing him to glimpse one of his big toes. A nice collection of black lint was visible beneath the corner of his toenail.

  “Reese, you with me?” Bates asked. “You know where you are?”

  “What’s with the shooting?” Reese asked. His voice was barely more than a croak.

  “What do you think? The dead have been walking up on the station for the past two hours. You slept through one hell of a gunfight. I guess you sure know how to get your sleep on.” Bates lifted his head slightly as a pounding chatter tore through the air. He smiled. “Hear that? That’s a triple-barreled fifty caliber. The GAU nineteen, God’s gift to heavy duty machine guns.”

  “Oh yeah?” Reese said stupidly.

  Bates bent over and grabbed Reese’s wrinkled dress shirt and threw it across Reese’s lap. “Get dressed. We need to roll back to the hospital in fifteen minutes.”

  Reese’s heart did a flip. The hospital …

  “We’re going back?” he asked, wondering if his voice illustrated his fear.

  A shadow flitted across Bates’s face for an instant, and Reese knew then that even the stoic Sergeant Bates didn’t want to go back to the killing ground of Cedar-Sinai.

  “If you’ve got a change of clothes in your locker, you’ve maybe got enough time to take a quick shower and change into them,” Bates said. “I heard there’s a meals on wheels at the hospital. We can chow down there.”

  “Are the dead coming out of the apartments?” Reese asked, thinking of the apartment buildings across Wilcox, the ones that faced the stationhouse. “Is that what the Guard’s shooting at?”

  Bates snorted. “No, man. They’re coming down out of the hills. The poor people left or died two days ago. Now, it’s the rich people looking to take a bite out of the LAPD’s collective ass.”

  ###

  Cedar-Sinai was much the same as when Reese had left it. As he and the rest of the cops—there were fewer of them now, he noticed—stepped off the bus, the only real changes had been in the fortifications. The National Guard had been busy overnight, erecting massive walls of sandbags that housed fighting positions, decontamination areas, and funneled kill zones. A pile of bodies lay on the corner, at least six deep. It stood almost eight feet high, a gigantic mound of rotting flesh. Reese stared at it, transfixed. Even though he had long known that Los Angeles had always been a festering sore of disease and mayhem masked beneath the glitter and palm trees and the celebrity haute couture, he had never in his life expected to see bodies stacked like this anywhere in the Southland. Not even in Crenshaw or Compton during the crack epidemic of the 1980s had he come across such a sight. The bodies numbered in the hundreds, and Reese saw plenty of LAPD blue in the pile, as well as Army Combat Uniforms. A tremendous horde of flies settled on the corpses, like some sort of buzzing, localized dust storm as Guardsmen clad in protective gear loaded the bodies into a hulking five-ton truck. He saw an individual with a FEMA jacket overseeing the operation, his face hidden behind a protective mask.

  “You don’t see that every day,” Bates said as he climbed down from the bus behind Reese.

  “No kidding,” Reese responded. “I’m kind of thinking it’s not the last time we’re going to, either.”

  Bates hadn’t been kidding. There was a food truck on site, secured by Guardsmen and manned by a couple of Latino men. Reese was amazed to find that he was actually quite hungry, despite the grisly tableau on the corner.

  Looks like I’m already getting used to the zombie apocalypse. It’s just the new normal.

  A line of Black Hawks passed by, the sound of their passage echoing off the hospital buildings like grating thunder. As Reese looked up at them, he noticed that several windows in the hospital had been shattered. The Max Factor Family Tower that loomed over the entrance to the emergency department was pockmarked from gunfire. Entire windows had been shattered, leaving behind dark, empty gaps in the facade that made Reese think of missing teeth. The remains of an ambulance sat nearby, its twisted form absolutely riddled from bullets and, he guessed, one or two grenades, as well. The street was cracked and cratered in places. A child’s severed hand lay next to the curb.

  “Hey, what the hell happened here?” Reese asked one of the Guardsmen standing security over the food truck.

  “The zombies are everywhere, sir,” said the Guardsman. Reese didn’t recognize him, but the younger man’s eyes were red and narrowed into slits. To Reese, it looked like he’d been crying, but more like he was just run out. He clutched his M4 rifle across his chest, holding onto it with gloved hands as if it was his only lifeline. Judging by the amount of brass cartridges littering the street beneath Reese’s feet, maybe it was.

  “They come out of that ambulance over there?” Bates asked as he stepped into the food line.

  “Some did,” the Guardsman said. He looked like he was going to add something, but must have either lost his train of thought or figured it wasn’t important. Instead, he pointed up at the windows of the building overhead. “Most of them came out of the hospital. About a dozen of the fuckers jumped right out, trying to land on us. It was intense.”

  “And this is where I ask if you guys cleared the building, since we’re standing right under it,” Reese said.

  “It’s been cleared, sir. And we run patrols through it around the clock. Anyone who passes away gets drilled right through the head.” As the Guardsman spoke, a single shot cracked above them. The report was muffled by walls. “Just like that.”

  “You do wait until they’re dead, right?”

  The Guardsman looked like he didn’t want to answer the question. “I do,” he said, and left it at that.

  Reese stepped into line behind Bates. Bates took a breakfast burrito, two plain doughnuts, and coffee. Reese had the same. They stood with the rest of the cops near a sandbagged revetment topped with concertina wire and quickly ate. A haggard LAPD lieutenant Reese recognized spotted him and walked over.

  “Hello, Newman,” Reese said, imitating the greeting from Seinfeld as well as he could with a mouthful of hot burrito.

  “Reese,” the newcomer said. “You’
re the relief rotation site commander?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Lieutenant Newman looked at him with eyes that appeared to be absolutely shell-shocked. “I lost four guys last night,” he said. “You want to make sure your command is ready and able to fight. It’s only getting worse.”

  “We had some trouble yesterday as well,” Reese said.

  “Yeah, inside, right? Listen, there are parts of the hospital that we don’t go into anymore. We let the Guard handle it. Something happens, they go in, they clean house. Sometimes not all of them come out, and sometimes, there’s collateral damage. It’s just the way it is, all right?”

  Reese frowned. “You mean you let the Guard take over from the LAPD?”

  Newman snorted humorlessly. “It’s a fucking war, Reese. We’re cops, they’re soldiers. Who would you want to send into a firefight? We had a team from Metro roll in at four thirty in the morning to help out. They never rolled out.”

  Bates looked up. “What do you mean, Lou?”

  Newman looked at him with his dull, lifeless gaze. “They went down. Hard. Some of them are still up there, but they’re not exactly serving and protecting any longer.” A quick flurry of gunshots rang out from inside the hospital, and heads turned toward the building. Newman nodded slowly.

  “That’s the Guard, taking care of them. But Reese, listen, there’s something else you need to know. It’s fucking weird, man. Like, weird enough to make you want to shit yourself.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sometimes, these things … sometimes they remember shit, man. One of the soldiers actually started shooting after he became a fucking zombie. Literally, took aim, started shooting guys in the legs. And one of our guys who turned did the same thing.” He turned and pointed at the shot up ambulance. “That? You’ll never believe me, but a God damn stench drove it in. And it was full of zombies.”

  Reese actually chuckled. “You’re full of shit, Newman. I’ve seen these things, they can barely walk a straight line. But they sure do love to eat.”