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

by Knight, Stephen

  But this job was pretty noncomplex. Straight trenches in soil that was pretty consistently friable, without a lot of stickiness due to a summer season’s lack of moisture, was damn easy work. The only impediments were miles and miles of creosote bushes, some Joshua trees, and the occasional yucca plant—nothing that could stop a ’dozer with work on its mind. And they weren’t within seventy feet of impacting the water table, so other than some stones and the piping that had already been marked by the initial survey teams, there wasn’t a lot to worry about. All they had to do was dig.

  “Hey, Randy!” a voice called over the din of the moving equipment. Klaff sat in his pickup truck a bit away from the worksite, slurping away at a giant Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Single Tree Bistro, the only coffee shop that was open early in the morning. Klaff looked around and saw Chester Dawson pointing past his truck. Chester Dawson was an odd name for the kid, since he was a whipcord-thin Taiwanese man of about twenty or twenty-one. He’d started working on Klaff’s crew a couple of years ago, and while Klaff had been initially suspicious of a Chinaman’s (Taiwanese, he had to correct himself) work habits, he found that Chester was actually a pretty good digger. Plus, he had a nice South Texas twang, which coming from an Asian guy, delivered a lot of entertainment.

  “What is it?” Klaff shouted back.

  “Someone’s comin’!” Chester said, pointing again.

  With a groan, Klaff turned in the pickup’s driver seat and looked out the rear window in the cab. Sure enough, some guy was walking up to the work site, stumbling through the desert. His clothes were a mess, and Klaff was certain he saw dust falling from the man’s bony shoulders with each step he took.

  Whoa, looks like this guy’s been out here for a while, he thought. He immediately figured it was some motorist whose ride had broken down somewhere on the highway, but what the hell was he doing coming here? There were plenty of cars and trucks on the highway. Someone there should’ve been able to help him out.

  But then, the figure wasn’t stumbling toward him from the highway. It looked to Klaff as if the guy was emerging from the depths of Death Valley itself. Maybe he’d been heading toward US-395 and had seen the work site and changed course.

  Klaff pulled himself out of the truck, then reached back inside. He had a cooler in the back, full of water and some beers, for lunchtime. He grabbed a bottle of water, just in case. There was no chance he was going to offer a Lone Star to a stranger, even if the guy was coming out of the desert.

  “Let’s go check it out, Chester,” he said to the Asian man as he ran a hand over his face and squared his straw hat on his head. The man had clearly seen them, and he was stumbling toward them at a faster clip, bumbling his way through the creosote.

  “Uh, y’all sure about that?” Chester asked.

  “Well, Chester, what the hell are you afraid of? Looks like some poor old sumbitch got himself lost out here. The least we can do is check on him and make sure he’s all right.”

  “Randy, I think we ought to wait,” Chester said. He trotted up to the truck and put his hands on its hood, his eyes narrowed against the morning light beneath the brim of his weathered Texas Rangers ball cap.

  “Well shit, boy. Where were you raised up—some little renegade island province of China? Don’t you know what the hell common decency is?” Klaff shot back. He heard one of the bulldozers grind to a halt, and he looked back to see its driver was half-leaning out of his cab, shouting something that Klaff couldn’t hear over the thrum of its big diesel.

  “I was raised in Calallen, damn it,” Chester said. He smelled like tobacco, and Klaff wrinkled his nose at the stench. He never did much like the stink of cigarettes. “And I dunno, somethin’ about this guy looks really fuckin’ weird.”

  The driver of the stopped ’dozer yelled again, and Klaff waved at him. “Yeah, yeah, we see the guy! Get back to work!”

  The driver retreated back into the bulldozer’s cab and went back to his job. Klaff turned and looked at the man approaching them. He was about a hundred or so feet away, and looked absolutely filthy. Like he’d been in the desert a long, long time.

  “Guy looks almost dead on his feet,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. You folks from above Galveston don’t have a lot of common sense, right?”

  Klaff frowned at that comment, the way any North Texan and born son of Fort Worth would have. “What are you trying to tell me, Chester?”

  “I’m tryin’ to tell you that guy really is dead, Randy!” Chester half-shouted. “Look at him, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Chester, taking the Lord’s name in—wait a minute, now. Are you telling me that’s a zombie headed our way?” Klaff turned and looked back at the man. Sure enough, if the zombies were real, this guy certainly fit the bill.

  “You know, Randy, I have a feelin’ you’d really clean up on Family Feud,” Chester said. “You got a gun on you?”

  “Hell no, I don’t have a gun. We’re in the People’s Republic of California, not Texas!” As the figure shambled closer to the truck—and damn, it was coming right for Klaff and Chester—Klaff tried to figure what he could use as a weapon. Sure, he could hop in the truck and run the thing down, but what if it was just some lost soul? Spending time in Single Tree’s jail would probably cut into his overtime earnings. He looked in the truck’s bed. All sorts of implements lay there. He tossed the bottle of water inside and reached for a shovel.

  “Okay, I guess I can give him a line drive off the head if he’s a brain-eater,” Klaff said. He was developing a real case of the jelly-bellies right now. He had no idea what would happen if he beaned the guy on the head with a shovel in full swing, but he was certain it would involve a lot of blood.

  Chester jumped up onto the side of the truck’s bed and reached inside as well. He grabbed the handle of a pickaxe and slid back to his feet.

  “I’ll back you up,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks a million,” Klaff said.

  By the time the figure had closed to within twenty-five yards of the truck, it was pretty clear Chester had been right. The walking corpse was dressed in the tattered remains of a business suit, and its shoes were battered and torn by the harsh desert landscape. Its eyes were covered by a film of dust, and Klaff wondered how it could even see. Was it guided by something else, like smell, or did the dead have some supernatural mechanism that led them to living prey? Given that a dead person was walking toward them, that didn’t sound so farfetched.

  The corpse stopped ten yards away and seemed to regard Klaff and Chester with its dead, dry eyes for a long moment. It stood absolutely stock-still, not moving a bit. Klaff figured that was because it wasn’t even breathing, so there was no biological processes going on that might cause movement, no motion of the diaphragm, no pulse of blood through its veins, no nothing. He heard the bulldozers grind to a halt again, and from the corner of his eye, Klaff saw Jose Ramos jump out of his backhoe. He reached under it and wrenched the rig’s tire iron out of its clip and hurried toward Klaff’s truck.

  The zombie moved then. It took in a deep, dry breath and released it in a single, monotone moan that sounded like it was being made by rocks rubbing together. It reached toward Klaff and Chester as it stiffly marched forward, its jaws spread, revealing dry, yellowed teeth inside a dusty maw.

  Klaff swung his shovel like he was Babe Ruth dinging a meatball pitch. The shovel hit the zombie square in the head, and its sharp edge ripped right through its skull, chopping off the top three inches of bone and yanking the desiccated brain right out of the pan with a dry pop. The zombie collapsed right there, as if its legs had suddenly vanished. It crashed to the desert floor in an explosion of dust as the section of skull bounced off Klaff’s truck with a rattle. The brain flopped to the ground with a semi-wet plop.

  Klaff moaned in his throat slightly, feeling his gut roil. But upon closer inspection, there was no blood. There was a black substance that kind of looked like pulpy motor oil, bu
t nothing that he could immediately identify as blood. He let out a sour-smelling belch, but that was it. His stomach leveled out then, and Klaff was grateful. He didn’t want to puke in front of the boys.

  “You guys all right?” Ramos screamed as he pounded up to a stop beside Chester. He peered down at the corpse lying beside the truck, its sightless eyes peering into the bright, cloudless sky overhead. “Holy chit, it’s a fucking zombie, man!”

  Klaff felt a tremor go through him when his adrenaline-charged body finally checked in with his brain. He had just killed a zombie. A zombie that had come out from the desert.

  “Where there’s one, there’s more,” he said, and his voice sounded weak and distant.

  Chester and Ramos looked over at him as more men ran up. Klaff swallowed hard and looked at the mountain-studded horizon. Chester and Ramos did as well, while the rest of the guys hovered over the motionless corpse, gawking at it and wondering just what the hell happened.

  We have to tell Barry about this, Klaff thought. If these things are already walking up on us, then we’re in a heap of trouble.

  ###

  “God damn it, if you make me shit myself, I’ll make sure you guys burn,” Clarence Doddridge said.

  “Hold it, Doddridge,” said the fat corrections officer with the shotgun. He was behind the Plexiglas partition that separated the prison transfer bus’s crew from the seven prisoners in the rear. The man was short with a flat-top crew cut and a thick mustache that he’d dyed so black that it practically screamed fake. The officer’s eyes were unreadable behind his mirrored sunglasses, but Doddridge knew what he’d see there if the dude’s eyes were visible. Fear.

  Doddridge liked that.

  “I cain’t hold it no longer,” Doddridge complained. “You fuckers already let this white boy over here piss himself, and I’m sure the rest of us gotta go, too. You gotta let us go to the bathroom, man.” He pointed to the man sitting before him in the bus, as much as the manacles that bound him to his seat would allow. The skinny white guy—a convicted drug dealer, Doddridge knew—just whimpered, sitting in a puddle of his own cold piss.

  “We ain’t gotta do shit for you, convict,” the fat man snapped back.

  “Well, I’m gonna do shit for you if you don’t let me outta here,” Doddridge said. And this time, he was telling the truth. He and the rest of the prisoners had been on the bus for almost three days. What was supposed to have been a quick transfer from Atwater Federal Penitentiary to the US Pen in Victorville was taking a hell of a long time. The route had been changed from a straight shot to the south due to the evacuation traffic coming out of Los Angeles, and the bus had started off heading north toward San Francisco before taking a big right turn and circling down on US 395. The fact that the bus was one of the older models without a bathroom on board didn’t make the time pass by any faster. There were only so many places to stop where prisoners could do their business.

  Doddridge didn’t exactly know or care what was going on in the world, but what little of it he could see, he could tell it was bad. Through the bus’s small, mesh-reinforced windows, he could see vehicle after vehicle full of people, belongings, pets, whatever, clogging up both lanes. The bus was moving at maybe two or three miles an hour, and had been for most of the day. None of this really mattered to him. This was likely the closest Doddridge would ever get to being a free man, unless something wonderful happened. He was a convicted murderer with a lifetime sentence. What happened out in the world wasn’t really his concern any longer. Right now, all he needed to do was figure out how to keep the contents of his bowels from blasting out into the khaki prison uniform he wore.

  “We’re about three miles outside a town called Single Tree,” the fat guard said, smiling beneath his mustache. “You hold it until we get there.”

  “Three miles? At this rate, man, we won’t get there for two hours! I cain’t wait that long!”

  “Come on, boss, let the guy out so he can take a dump,” said a bit white guy, chained to the plastic seat across the aisle from Doddridge. “We don’t want to be trapped in this bus with his stink everywhere!”

  Doddridge looked over at the man and nodded his thanks. He didn’t like white people in general, and the guy known as Auto specifically a pretty loathsome guy, but Doddridge had to acknowledge Auto’s effort on his behalf. It didn’t mean he didn’t want to kill the motherfucking crazy car mechanic from Seattle, but Doddridge figured anything that might help him get the fuck off the bus and onto a toilet was worth a little nod.

  “Then you shouldn’t have broken the law, convicts,” the corrections officer said, stretching out the last word while favoring the shackled prisoners with a shit-eating grin.

  Behind him, the older corrections officer—the one with the gray hair and skinny build and ruddy face—leaned toward the driver, who sat behind a steel-mesh cage. They conferred with each other for a few moments, and then the bus edged off the road and came to a halt after bumping across the uneven desert terrain for a hundred feet or so.

  The fat corrections officer turned toward them. “Hey, what the fuck?”

  “Let’s let him off so he can take a crap,” the older corrections officer said. He pulled a shotgun from a nearby locker, then reached into his shirt pocket and removed his own pair of mirrored sunglasses. He slid them on his narrow nose, straightened his olive uniform shirt, and nodded toward the fat officer. “Go on. Go get him.”

  “Man, let the motherfucker shit himself!” the fat man protested.

  The older guard’s face was mostly unreadable behind his sunglasses, but Doddridge was heartened to see him shake his head. “Not on my watch, Harriman. That’s just too much.”

  The fat man exhaled through clenched teeth and put a hand on the big key ring on his belt. He didn’t say anything as he unlocked the Plexiglas partition and pushed it open. He looked at the prisoners seated in the bus’s passenger compartment, and for an instant, Doddridge felt the man’s fear.

  Yeah, dawg, you fuckin’ scared of us. Good, I like that shit.

  He couldn’t wait to get his hands around the guard’s neck one day.

  The guard didn’t have much to be worried about. Everyone was chained to their seats, so the worst they could do would be to spit on the man as he walked down the aisle. And no one was going to do that, not when they knew the response would be a hard and immediate beating with a tonfa stick. Doddridge had pegged the fat corrections officer was one of the more brutal pricks from Atwater, and that meant no one was going to try anything stupid. And while Doddridge himself would have killed the guy without even a second’s hesitation, he had more important things to worry about. Like not allowing an eruption of hot mud to occur in his pants.

  “Come on, Doddridge—you know the drill. Be a good nigger, and you’ll be okay,” the fat guard said.

  “Yeah, man, sure thing,” Doddridge said.

  The guard released him from the restraints holding him in his seat, then stepped back, allowing him to rise. Walking while manacled and in leg irons wasn’t a very easy thing to do, even less so when your bowels were about to explode, but Doddridge duckwalked to the front of the bus. He glanced at the driver inside the metal cage. The man reeked of stale alcohol, and his hands seemed to tremble on the steering wheel. The driver didn’t look at him. His eyes were focused outside as he watched the traffic slowly roll past. Horns blared; the bus hadn’t entirely cleared the road, and the vehicles that tried to pull around were getting bottled up.

  Man, they send a brotha to prison for shootin’ hood rats everyone should be glad are dead, but they put fuckin’ drunks behind the wheel of a bus.

  He stepped down the short set of stairs to the dusty ground below. It was going to be a hot day, he thought. It was just midmorning, and already, it was in the seventies. The older corrections officer stood a fair distance away, shotgun in his hands, regarding Doddridge from behind his mirrored sunglasses. Doddridge looked around, trying to find the best spot to do a squat and blow. There were l
owlying desert bushes all over the place, just short, broad scrub that might have thorns on them. Nothing that was going to give him a lot of cover, which meant every car full of people on the highway would be able to watch him at work. Doddridge clenched his teeth at that. Even though he truly was a cold-blooded murderer, taking a crap right in front of a bunch of unknown men, women, and children was degrading.

  Take it like a man, boss.

  “Come on, Doddridge, get to it,” the fat officer said, coming down the stairs behind him. His keys jangled on his belt, playing a sweet song that sounded like freedom.

  “Well, where the fuck am I gonna go do it?” Doddridge asked, feeling his bowels turn painfully in anticipation of their upcoming release.

  “We don’t care, just pick a spot and go,” the older guard said in an impatient voice.

  Doddridge duckwalked away from the bus, looking around. He found a small, rocky depression that was kind of shielded by the creosote bushes. They smelled like rain to him, and he thought that was odd.

  “There’s good enough,” said the fat guard. He had his hands on his hips, the left close to his baton. He was only ten feet from the bus, and the older guard was maybe another ten feet from him. “Go shit in the bushes like the animal you are.”

  Doddridge held up his manacled hands. “Any chance you takin’ these off?” he asked.

  “Sure. When you’re dead,” the fat guard said, smiling.

  Doddridge looked at the keys dangling from the guard’s belt. Or maybe when you’re dead, motherfucka.

  With trembling hands, he hiked up his shirt and undid his pants, ignoring the people on the highway watching from slowly passing cars and trucks. He crouched and, after checking to ensure he wasn’t going to get anything on his trousers, let loose.