“Canon EOS Cinema 300. High-definition four K CMOS chip with EF-mount lenses. Integrated stereo microphone, viewfinder, and battery pack.” As he spoke, Norton pointed out the various items he listed. “You have four fully-charged batteries, and over a terabyte of storage with all the memory cards, which are hot-swappable. Additional electronic viewfinder which mounts up top here, so you don’t have to hold the thing up to your eye all the time when you’re recording. Four different lenses, including wide-angle and a nice fifty millimeter one for portrait shots when you’re doing sit-down interviews. I’ve got a nice tripod with a geared liquid head, and of course, there’s a remote control for everything.”
“Yes, very impressive,” Sinclair said, his voice dry as he regarded the black camera gear. “Thank you very much for showing me your high-end camera gear. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
Norton clucked his tongue. “Come, come, Sinclair. You said you wanted to document Barry’s human rights abuses, right? You’re going to do that on your little phone?”
Sinclair blinked. “I’m sorry, what are you saying, exactly?”
“I’m saying the gear is for your use to make an official record of what goes on here,” Norton said.
Sinclair was confused. “I don’t understand.”
Norton sighed heavily and put his hands on his hips. “Sinclair, you’re a fucking idiot, and I’ve never, ever liked you or your shitty show—you have all the charisma of a corpse lying on the slab in a funeral home, and frankly, Larry King is better at interviewing people than you’ll ever be...and I never thought Larry King was a very tough act to beat. Despite these rather formidable deficiencies, you’re the only member of the national media in this town. Corbett wants you to capture everything. He wants a record of what happened here, even if it casts him in a very unflattering light.”
Really? Sinclair’s heart leaped at the proposition, as inconceivable as it sounded.
“Is this for real?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Sinclair almost couldn’t suppress the giggle that was building up inside him. “You mean to tell me that Barry Corbett wants me to make an official record of what happens in Single Tree during the emergency? One that’s unflinching in its scope?”
“Well, he might have a preference for truth as opposed to agenda, but he’s apparently willing to take the hit that comes with having a big-mouthed remora like you sucking the life out of everything. As nutty as that sounds,” Norton said. “I think he’s crazy to give you the opportunity, because I know how it’s going to play out. Something like, ‘crazed gun fanatics finally get their chance in a doomsday scenario’, or something like that. Right?”
“And isn’t that the truth, Norton?” Sinclair fairly purred. “Isn’t this really one man’s last gasp at achieving what he wants while running on his last thimbleful of testosterone?”
Norton glared at Sinclair. Miriam sighed and shook her head.
“Oh, Jock,” she said tiredly.
“Sinclair, you can think whatever you want about Corbett. You can run around dry-rubbing every liberal conspiracy theory about conservatives you like. You can even piss on this entire country and everything it stands—or stood—for. But remember this one small thing, you lobsterback blowhard”—here, Norton reached out and stabbed Sinclair right in the chest with his finger—“you live or die at the pleasure of Barry Corbett. You might want to pay the man some respect, because he hasn’t sent you packing.”
“Don’t touch me again,” Sinclair snapped.
“Believe me, sonny, the next time I decide to touch you, it’ll be with a clenched fist.” Norton picked up the backpack and shoved it into Sinclair’s chest, forcing him to grab onto it, just to prevent himself from falling on his ass. “The manual’s in the backpack. If you look hard enough, you might be able to find some words with proper British spelling.”
Sinclair firmed his grip on the bag and snatched it away from Norton. He stepped to one side. “I believe you were just leaving,” he said.
Norton shook his head and looked down at his camera gear, spread out on the dresser. “I never really got to use this stuff,” he said, a forlorn note in his voice. “Now that you’ve touched it, I’ll have to burn it.”
With that, the producer turned to leave. Sinclair was content to watch him go, but he couldn’t escape the burgeoning notion that he was being set up.
“Norton…is this really what Corbett wants?” he asked when the producer’s hand gripped the motel room’s door knob.
Norton turned back and looked at him. He paused long enough to reach inside his vest and pull out a pair of sunglasses and slipped them on.
“Barry wants an official chronology of what happens here,” he said. “I don’t know why. Maybe he wants it to be some sort of historical record. An account of the town’s last stand.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Ask him when you see him.”
Norton stepped out of the motel room, letting the door slam closed behind him.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The thirty-plus mile drive to Long Beach wasn’t a piece of cake at all. In fact, it was worse than Reese had imagined it would be.
The big five-ton truck he and the cops had stolen from the Hollywood Bowl wasn’t meant for the tight, winding roads that twisted through the hills that separated Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley; in fact, there had been times in Reese’s past when he’d had a tough time driving a patrol car along roads like Mulholland Drive, and judging by the way people were being tossed around the big truck’s open bed, Sergeant Bates was likewise having some difficulty wending the huge truck around the sharp curves. The fact that traffic was mounting in both directions made things even more hellish. People were fleeing communities on both sides of the Hollywood Hills, coming up from Los Angeles to the south, or across from the San Fernando to the north. The zombie hordes were pretty much everywhere now, which meant the refugees were essentially fleeing from nightmare to nightmare, no matter which direction they headed in.
And echoing along the hillsides, the din of battle down at the Hollywood Bowl continued. Eventually, the sounds of combat petered out, though if it was due to distance or from the remaining defenders finally falling before the dead, Reese couldn’t tell.
There was a decent-sized traffic accident at the intersection of Mulholland and Outpost Drive. An expensive Bentley coupe had met its end after slamming into a Mercedes GL SUV at a high rate of speed while emerging from the side street. The Mercedes had been blown across Mulholland, and lay drunkenly in the ditch there, the wheels on its passenger side three feet off the pavement. Shattered glass lay across the black top, glittering in the fading light of the day. As the truck rolled closer, Reese stood up in the truck bed and looked over the cab at the accident scene. The Mercedes looked empty, but there was some activity in the Bentley. Thrashing away behind the limp air bags, a zombie sat in the front passenger seat, held in place by the seat belt it was too stupid to unlatch. The truck’s lights revealed it was covered with blood—whether its own or that of the driver it had been feeding on, Reese was not certain. The presence of the zombie only added to the chaos of the scene. Some passing motorists had apparently stopped to help, and from the groups of people standing away from the crash, Reese saw some of them had probably been bitten. They looked up at the hulking truck with hopeful eyes; it stood out like a sore thumb amidst the expensive European sedans and fancy Japanese light trucks.
The choices were to stop and attempt to render assistance to those who might be injured, or ignore everything. Reese couldn’t believe he didn’t even hesitate before making his choice.
“Bates, don’t stop!” he shouted over the noisy diesel as the big truck downshifted.
In response, Bates stepped on the truck’s horn. It was surprisingly puny-sounding, not the Godzilla-like blast Reese would have expected but a pale toot like something that would be more at home coming from a Toyota Prius. It wasn’t really enough to cause people to step back, but it at least got
some attention. When it became clear that Bates wasn’t about to stop, people scattered just as the big truck slammed into the Bentley. The truck’s bumper essentially nailed the zombie in the face as it intruded into the Bentley’s passenger compartment, flaying the roof away in a moment before the rest of the truck’s mass came into play. The Bentley was shoved down the road for a few dozen yards before its front end got hung up, then it spun toward the shoulder. The gigantic Army truck bounced up and down as its rear wheels rolled right over several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of imported sheet metal, leaving a half-mangled hulk in its wake.
“Absolutely kick ass!” Detective Marsh yelled. He looked both mortified and excited, like a little kid on his first trip through Disney’s Space Mountain.
“A HEMT-T wouldn’t even have slowed down,” said First Sergeant Plosser. The National Guard NCO was trying hard to affect a nonchalant air that Reese knew was false. He could see the tense fear in the man’s eyes, even in the deepening gloom.
Bates sped up, accelerating down the road, the five-ton’s big wheels shimmying a bit as the huge vehicle wound its way along the hillside. Rolling past darkened hilltop mansions, Reese looked to the left. Out over the gap in the terrain that was called Runyon Canyon, he saw downtown Los Angeles in the near distance. Aircraft orbited overhead, planes and helicopters of all types, their anti-collision lights winking in the darkening sky. Half the skyscrapers that formed the city’s business nucleus were dark, nothing more than shadowy, bone-like spires reaching for the stars above like the talons of some fossilized beast. One of them—the Gas Company Tower, Reese decided—was ablaze, emitting vast clouds of black smoke over a thousand feet into the air. Further out, the entirety of the Los Angeles basin was a patchwork quilt of light and darkness, where illuminated neighborhoods which still had power stood out amidst broad swaths of communities where all electricity had failed. Reese groaned. Their path they would take them through both darkness and light, and both conditions would be problematic. Fires raged, isolated infernos that reminded him of the nights during the riots that had gripped the city in 1992. The City of Angels was coming apart at the seams, and as a cop with decades of experience, he knew the zombies were only one threat his fellow Los Angelinos would face that night.
“We’re going to be going through some of the shit neighborhoods,” Marsh said. Reese turned and saw the other detective was watching the same vista with narrowed eyes. “We got to pass through, what? Crenshaw, Gardena, Compton?” Marsh looked around at the others in the truck bed, as if hoping someone would tell him he was full of shit and not to worry. “I mean, there isn’t any way we’re going to be able to take the freeways, they’re loaded up. We’re going to have to take the surface roads, right? Drive through the hoods and barrios in Figueroa, all through South Central and Midcity?”
“Knock it off, Marsh,” Reese said.
“Seriously, what the fuck are we going to do, Reese?”
Plosser hefted his M4. “We shoot anyone who fucks with us, is what we do,” he said.
Marsh laughed, his voice high and almost girlish. “Oh, yeah? You think you and your rifle are going to mean shit to a bunch of Central American gang members?”
Reese stepped over to him and bent over, getting right in Marsh’s face. “Marsh—knock that shit off. Right now.” He jerked his chin toward Plosser. “You’re frightening the women.”
Plosser snorted at that.
“Reese, the town’s coming unglued,” Marsh said.
“So what? So fucking what, Marsh? We just ran out on a couple of thousand civilians. You think shooting Crips and Bloods is going to be any big thing?”
His tone must’ve gotten Marsh’s dander up. “Having an attack of the guilts, Reese?”
Reese turned away from him and looked through the trees, studying the smoke-filled basin below. “Fuck you, man. Fuck you.”
The trip down from the hills took over an hour, mainly because Bates continued down Mulholland well past where Reese expected him to descend. The patrol sergeant eschewed dropping down into the Sunset area, and pushed the big truck down the winding road until they came to a fire trail. The metal gate that barred entry proved to be no match for the five-ton’s heavy bumper, and it practically exploded as the truck blasted right through it. The big rig swayed from side to side as its tall tires dug into the hard-packed soil that made up the trail. Up here in canyon country, there were few lights, and the darkness was almost absolute. Overhead, military helicopters and transport planes flitted about the black sky. The hilltops were silhouetted against several pulsing, orange glows—fires, burning away in the city.
“Not likely to be many zombies up this way, right?” Renee Gonzales asked over the thrum of the diesel engine and the snapping pops of gravel beneath its tires.
“Probably not,” Reese agreed. “Not enough people up here to make it worth their while. But don’t take anything for granted. Stay sharp.”
“You got it,” Renee said. Her features were unreadable in the dark.
“Hopefully, we’re not going to drive into a brush fire,” Plosser said as he pushed his way to the front of the truck bed and looked over the cab. He had his helmet-mounted night vision monocle lowered over his right eye. “We need to keep that in mind, too. This fire trail’s pretty big, but we don’t want to get caught up in something we can’t make a three-point turn to get away from.”
Reese shrugged. “How well can you see with that thing?”
“Real well. Don’t worry, I’ll start screaming and hollering if something’s about to go sideways.”
“What, they haven’t already?” Renee asked.
Plosser chuckled, but that was his only answer.
There were other people on the fire trail. A horde of dirt bikers squirted past the lumbering five-ton, heading north. Backpackers were out as well, forging their own way through the darkness. Many carried weapons, and they regarded the passing truck with suspicious eyes as they stepped off into the brush. Reese and the rest of the cops let them be. So long as no one turned a firearm on them, they were good to go. Reese idly wondered if stopping to talk with the people on the fire trail might be a good idea, in case they knew of a hot spot up ahead. Bates didn’t seem interested in slowing down for a chat, so it was a moot point.
Occasionally, gunfire rang out in the darkness. On a hillside that was briefly visible through the darkened, skeletal branches of looming trees, Reese saw muzzle flashes. Two groups, oriented toward each other. Someone was in a firefight, but they weren’t shooting at the truck. So technically, they weren’t Reese’s problem.
“If you can see well enough with that night vision device, Plosser, maybe you should take over so we can kill the lights,” he said. The five-ton’s headlights were pretty much the only constant source of illumination out in the canyons, which meant they could draw a lot of unwanted attention.
“Don’t think it’s going to be necessary,” Plosser said. “I see a road up ahead.”
Reese turned and looked, but couldn’t see anything outside the narrow path illuminated by the truck’s lights. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s there,” Plosser said. “Trust me.”
The tall NCO was right. Not long afterwards, the five-ton rolled through the fire trail’s exit and onto a darkened backcountry street. Low-slung, single story buildings stood off to the truck’s left. A flag pole stood nearby, and in the gloom thrown off by the truck’s headlights, Reese made out the star-spangled banner and the California state flag flapping limply in the breeze. There were vehicles parked around the buildings—most were white pickup trucks belonging to the California park service, along with some golf carts and California Highway Patrol cruisers. Lots of civilians, as well—in fact, there was something of a mob scene going on, with people running everywhere. They turned and gawked at the big National Guard truck as it emerged from the fire trail, its engine rattling.
“Hey, stop! Stop!” shouted a park ranger, running toward the truck while waving
his hands over his head. A CHP officer joined him, waving his flashlight in the darkness.
Bates downshifted and slowed to a crawl, but did not bring the truck to a complete halt. Reese leaned over the bed rail and looked down at the ranger and the highway patrolman.
“What’s the deal?” he asked.
“Who are you guys?” the ranger asked.
“LAPD and California National Guard.”
“Thank God! We can use your help, here!” The ranger turned and waved toward the parking lot and the parkland in the darkness. “We’ve got a couple of thousand people up here, and they need help. We can’t keep this area secure.”
Reese heard Bates’s voice over the idling engine. “Not stopping here, Detective.”
“We’re rolling through, we can’t stop,” Reese said. “We have orders down south.”
“Down south?” The highway patrolman was incredulous. “Are you guys crazy? Do you have any idea what’s down there?”
“You mean other than Santa Monica?”
“It’s zombie central down there, man. They’re pushing everyone out. Thousands of them, and I mean tens of thousands.”
Reese didn’t doubt him, but he’d already seen thousands of zombies with his own eyes, outside the hospital and at the Hollywood Bowl. “I get it,” he said. “But we have to go where we’re told to go.”
“But you’ll never make it!” the park ranger shouted. “You don’t know what you’re driving into!”
“Hey, we just made our way across from the Hollywood Bowl, and before that, we were at Cedar-Sinai,” Bates snapped from inside the cab. “You think we don’t know what’s down there?”
The highway patrolman stepped closer. “What happened at the Bowl?” There was a peculiar quality to his voice, a kind of desperation that sounded odd to Reese even under the current circumstances. Why would a CHP officer be so interested in the Hollywood Bowl?
Did he have family there?
The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead Page 2
