“You could use a bath, Reese,” Bates responded.
“Brace yourselves!” Reese shouted to the other people in the truck as he grabbed a hold of the five ton’s tail gate. The truck rocked from side to side, its suspension creaking and groaning until it had left the soft sand behind. Once it was on the harder pack inside the tidal line, the truck actually began accelerating. Reese leaned to the right. From his vantage point in the truck bed, he could see above the tall wave tops that rolled in. Sure enough, the Port Police boat was out there, and he caught glimpses of its rubber-hulled tender sailing into the surf.
The truck rolled into the surf in an explosion of spray. Its motor picked up as Bates hammered it one last time, forcing the big rig deeper into the water. At first, nothing much happened; the truck just seemed to be driving along as normal, albeit canted downward at the nose. Then a splash of water rounded the cab, showering droplets of sea water across the people cowering in the bed. The splash was followed by an all-out wave then, cold, Pacific water that flooded the truck’s bed and threatened to wash away anything that wasn’t tied down. Reese looked back at the shore. The truck was forty feet into the surf now, and the water was coming up over the tires.
Behind, the dead surged onto the beach. Several, like Surfside Eddie, were able to run to the water’s edge. They weren’t put off by the tide, and they hurled themselves into it in a bid to close on the truck. Behind, the majority of the mob slipped and slid, the loose sand slowing their progress.
The five ton finally began to wallow in the surf as waves broke over its hood. The truck’s bed was half-flooded now, and several cops were busily picking up as much ammunition as they could carry. Reese wondered how Bates was faring, as he had to be sitting in water up to his waist. Then, the diesel engine came to its rattling, waterlogged end, coughing out one last gout of gray/white smoke before falling silent. The rear of the truck bobbed lightly in the surf for a moment before enough water filled the bed to weigh it down.
Reese shouldered his rifle and started firing. He sent a round through Surfside Harry’s face, and the reanimated zombie bum disappeared beneath the waves. He sighted on another runner and blew away its jaw as it clawed its way through the waves—not good enough to stop it. His follow-on shot took care of it. A bleach-blonde bimbo zombie in a pink bikini was next, and its bottle-prepared tresses spread out across the water when it fell, bobbing there like a straw-colored mat. Renee joined him at the tail gate and added her own rifle fire to the fray. More stenches tumbled, collapsing into the water.
On the shore, the leading edge of the horde finally made it to the waterline. It shuffled into the sea as if of one mind.
“Come on, let’s go!” Thanh shouted. Reese looked over, and saw the rubber-hulled tender from the dive boat had pulled up alongside the truck. One of the two men standing in the vessel had used a boat hook to grab the truck’s side rail. The tender’s outboard motor rumbled, barely audible above the roar of the waves.
“Get the civilians in first!” Reese yelled, then returned to his business of shooting. Most of the runners were dead now, floating in the water, leaking tendrils of black ichor into the ocean. As Renee took out the last one, Reese shifted his fire toward the main body of the zombie advance. Icy-cold water swirled around his boots as he fired, taking down stench after stench. But for every one he took out, another would step into its place, pallid face leering, mouth open, eyes dim and stupid. Even the Pacific couldn’t hold them back; the zombie horde was in actuality the unstoppable tide here, not the world’s biggest ocean.
Renee tugged at his shoulder. “Reese, let’s go!”
“Go on,” Reese said. He continued firing; the zombies were only thirty feet away now, and there numbers were mounting on the sides. Soon, they would envelop the truck in a pincer-like movement, and that would be all she wrote.
Someone grabbed his collar and yanked him away from the tail gate, sending his next shot wild.
“What are you, Dirty Harry all of a sudden?” a very waterlogged Bates said. Reese hadn’t seen the patrol sergeant haul himself out of the flooded cab of the truck and clamber into the bed, but here he was, as big as life and twice as ugly.
“Good to see you again, Bates,” Reese said.
“You’re lucky you’re not seeing me blow kisses to you as I sail off in the RIB,” Bates said, dragging Reese toward the side of the bed where the inflatable boat waited. It was full of people, and the cops and Plosser were firing on the zombies that got too near.
“We got all the ammo?” Reese asked, sloshing through the truck’s bed.
“We have all we’re going to get. Come on, Detective—get in there!”
Reese clambered over the side of the bed as the cops in the boat shouted for him to get a move on. The zombies were only ten feet from the truck now, standing in water that was up to their shoulders—several of them were reaching for it, ignoring the slap of the tide as it rolled over them. Reese fell into the boat, crashing into two of the cops. They bitched as they hauled him off to one side, making as much room for Bates as they could. As the sergeant stepped over the bed railing, zombies appeared behind him, climbing up the truck’s left side. Bates didn’t look back. He jumped into the boat, making it lurch in the water. The cop holding the boat hook lifted it away from the truck, and the officer manning the RIB’s center console slammed the transmission into reverse. Water poured in over the RIB’s short transom as it backed up, pulling away from the truck. There was a slightly scary moment as the vessel crested an incoming wave, but the water didn’t swamp the vessel. The boat just keep reversing until it was far enough away from the truck and the zombies that were slowly swarming it to be able to turn around.
And just like that, the inflatable’s bow was pointed west. It motored its way over the next wave, then accelerated toward the waiting dive boat several hundred feet away. The water behind the larger vessel seemed to boil. It was using its engines to hold its position instead of an anchor, and Reese figured it was safer that way. Any zombies lurking around on the bottom could conceivably climb up the anchor line to the waiting vessel.
Reese looked around until he found Bates. The sergeant was leaning against one side of the boat, wet, exhausted, and probably freezing.
“Bates, thanks for getting me out of there,” Reese said.
Bates only nodded. Reese moved closer to him and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Bates’s dark tactical uniform was cold and wet to the touch.
“Hey, you got a blanket or anything?” Reese shouted to one of the cops manning the tender.
“Wait until we get to the boat,” one of them said. “Be just a few seconds.”
“Bates, you all right?” Reese asked.
Bates looked up at him as if he had just asked the world’s stupidest question. “Why yes, Detective. I’m just peachy. How about you?”
Reese snorted and slapped Bates on the shoulder. The patrol sergeant was fine, no worse for wear.
“You sure took your time back there, Reese!” Marsh said. He looked like all of them did—tired and run-out, eyes hollow and dull.
“How’re you feeling, Marsh?” Reese asked.
Marsh’s expression turned sour. “I’m feeling fucking—BUUUURGH!” The paunchy detective barely managed to turn his face toward the water before he blew the remains of his chow into the air. Reese laughed and shook his head as Marsh clung to the side of the boat, heaving into the water as the tender bounced across the waves.
“Damn, ain’t never seen someone puke so much in my life,” Plosser said, deadpan.
Reese laughed again and turned around, looking up at the tender approached the waiting dive boat. They would be aboard in just a few minutes. Barring any sudden setbacks, like the appearance of zombies whales or sharks, the group would be safe for the time being. He slapped Bates on the shoulder again.
“You did great, Bates. Did it like a boss,” he said.
“Tell that to them,” Bates said.
Reese followed Bate
s’s gaze. At the end of the Santa Monica Pier, a group of people—live people—were frantically waving at the boat. He hadn’t seen them during the approach to the beach, so he figured they’d been hiding in one of the shops located along the long quay’s expanse, and had emerged when they saw the boat. Some of them had weapons, and they fired at the mass of zombies rolling up on them. There were too many. Even as some of the civilians made to jump into the icy Pacific, they were overwhelmed by the dead horde. It fell upon them, feasting and feeding.
Reese turned away from the sight, looking back at the shoreline. Dozens of zombies were crawling all over the abandoned truck, rooting around, searching for some sign that prey might still be there. Others floated in the water, still trying to follow the inflatable tender as it accelerated toward the waiting dive boat. A haze of smoke hung in the air, and to the south, the gigantic inferno around Long Beach still blazed. Immense columns of black smoke rose into the late afternoon sky, and he saw licks of brilliant flame lapping after the rising clouds. To the north, the Santa Monica Pier extended out into the Pacific. Figures shambled along its length, and he presumed they were tourists… at least, not any longer. Further inland, more smoke rose from uncontrolled fires. The towers of downtown LA weren’t visible, but Reese was sure they were standing silent sentinel over the demise of the city that had given them birth.
Los Angeles was history. It belonged to the dead, now.
SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA
“Man, why can’t we work during the night or something?” Shaliq said as he, Auto, and Doddridge worked the perimeter fence, filling in the holes around the support beams that had been erected. Each man wore a red jumpsuit they had been issued at the prison. The ones Doddridge and Shaliq wore were far too big; Auto’s was too small, and the big white giant from the Pacific Northwest looked almost clownish in the outfit with his pale ankles exposed. Each man also had a wide-brimmed hat to keep the heat off them while they worked, horsing around shovelfuls of sandy soil with gloved hands. The leg irons they wore topped off the prison fashion statement. The restraints made walking slow and torturous, but Doddridge didn’t really mind them. Being a man who had spent a great deal of time as a convict, he’d long grown used to them. And he’d grown used to being under guard as well, though the men who were watching the trio work were a bit different than the sloppy prison guards Doddridge had grown used to. He glanced over at the three men holding rifles. They stood forty feet away, and were dressed in military uniforms. These guys weren’t fat and out of shape, and while he couldn’t see their eyes thanks to the sunglasses they wore, Doddridge knew they were watching the prisoners intently. He had no allusions as to what would happen if he managed to slip out of his irons and make a run for it. While Clarence Doddridge was as mean as a junkyard dog with rabies, the three men standing guard were true apex predators. They wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond before they blew him away.
“We do what they tell us,” Doddridge said. “We work when they want us to. We eat and sleep when they let us. Hate to say it, but this is how it’s gonna be for a while.”
“Man, I wish we’d never left the pen,” Shaliq muttered. He was sweating heavily beneath his hat. His voice was practically drowned out by the roar of the bulldozer a few hundred feet away as it pushed a berm into shape out in the desert.
“How long before we try to make a break for it?” Auto asked.
Doddridge snorted. “Boy, you can start right now,” he said. “Go one, get it over with. Let those fuckers with the machine guns shoot you down.”
Auto glanced over at the guards. They stood more or less motionless in the heat of the day, rifles hanging across their chests. If the heat bothered them, they didn’t let it show. These weren’t young men, which Doddridge understood wasn’t a point in his favor. These were middle-aged guys with a lot on the line, a lot of experience. Obviously military or ex-military. Doddridge had never served a day in his life, so he didn’t know much about the Army or the Marines, but he knew enough to understand that these cats wouldn’t wait. The second he looked like he was going to go off the reservation, they’d hammer him.
“They don’t scare me,” Auto said.
“They fucking ought to, you stupid piece a shit,” Doddridge said. “They ain’t police. They ain’t going to arrest you and read you your rights again. They just gonna shoot you. Now if you going to run, you go do it—just let us know so we can get down on the ground and not get shot wit you.”
Auto looked at Doddridge for a long moment, then grinned beneath his thick, sweat-matted beard. “You scared, cuz?”
It took all of Doddridge’s strength not to swing his shovel around and knock the smile off Auto’s face. “Got nothin’ to do wit that. I just don’t wanna get shot, you stupid fucker.”
“Gentlemen, get back to work,” one of the guards said.
“We are working!” Auto shouted back.
“You’re also talking, which means you’re plotting, which means you’re about to die,” the guard responded mildly. “We already explained this to you. Stop talking. Keep working. Failure to comply will result in your immediate death.”
“You can’t fucking shoot me for talking if I want!” Auto roared.
The guard raised his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off three rounds. The sandy dirt between Auto’s feet exploded into the air, and Shaliq cried out as he fell over onto his back. The shots were so close together that Doddridge wondered if he had let loose a burst on full auto. Auto just stood there, smiling, but Doddridge could see the fear in his eyes. Down the line, the construction crew working on the wall paused to look at what was going on.
“Next three rounds I fire will result in one bullet in each head,” the guard said. “You are prisoners and murderers. You have no rights. Our orders are to kill you the second you become an inconvenience. You’re a flea’s ass away from reaching that designation. If you don’t believe me, yell at me again.”
Doddridge raised both his hands, letting his shovel lean against his shoulder. Shaliq gasped on the ground, eyes wide with fright. Doddridge looked from him to Auto, and stared directly into the big white dude’s eyes.
Your move, asshole.
Auto firmed his grip on his shovel and went back to work without a word. Doddridge did the same. Shaliq just lay on the ground, staring at the three guys in military uniforms with wide eyes.
“Louie, get up and get to work with Huey and Dewey,” the guard who had fired said. Doddridge snorted at that. Before being taken out of the town police station, the guard had told them they had new names. Doddridge was Huey, Auto was Dewey, and Shaliq was Louie.
Shaliq slowly got to his feet, his movements made slow by the tight embrace of his leg irons. With shaking hands, he went back to work, piling dirt into the holes around the support beams. They had done that thirty times already, and they had maybe two thousand more to go.
It was going to be a long day.
###
The southern approach to the town was the first one to be closed off, just outside the airport. Corbett attended to it personally, driving his big pickup along one of the back roads to the airport parking lot. Dozens of vehicles were there already—construction equipment, tractor-trailers, law enforcement trucks and squad cars. The lot had already been sealed off with razor wire and portable fencing, and guards were in position. Corbett parked his truck and slowly walked toward the main entrance which led to the highway, shadowed by Walt Lennon and another member of his personal security detail. In the distance, he heard a rap of gunshots, and he glanced over his shoulder to see Lennon reaching for the radio handset hanging from his shoulder. He spoke into it quickly, asking for a status.
“Just a demonstration for the prison work detail,” he explained a moment later.
Corbett nodded, and stepped past the gate and onto the shoulder of the highway.
A hundred feet to the south, he watched as the police—a mixture of the town’s law enforcement and Victor’s tribal cops—manned a barric
ade of HESCO containers that stretched across the road and directed the inbound traffic to turn back. A tanker truck had been positioned nearby to ration gasoline and diesel to those motorists who needed it. A maximum of ten gallons was dispensed per vehicle. It didn’t matter if the vehicle was a fuel-sipping Prius or an eighteen-wheeler with nearly empty saddle tanks, ten gallons was what they got. It was a tense scene, and a four-man team from Corbett’s security detail positioned themselves in plain sight. They didn’t ride up in an Expedition, either—they had an up-armored Humvee in which to respond to any crises, and while the vehicle wasn’t Corbett’s first choice for the role, the message it sent was unmistakable.
Don’t fuck with us.
There was a general sense of panic-fueled doom, and some of the motorists weren’t inclined to turning around. The police made them do it anyway, twice at gun point. Corbett’s guts churned at that. Pointing weapons at American citizens who were just looking for safety wasn’t what he was all about, but it had to be done. For the sake of the town, and for the sake of those motorists, they had to be turned back and put on the road. There was still some chance they could find safety elsewhere, but they had to leave now if they were going to do that. It was an example of tough love writ large, though Corbett didn’t kid himself. He knew he was sending a lot of these people off to their respective ends, and while heart-breaking, there was no other choice in the matter.
“Feeling good about yourself, Barry?”
Corbett turned around and saw Max Booker had walked up beside him. The mayor of Single Tree was dressed in rumpled khakis and an equally rumpled Henley shirt, its sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His glasses hung around his neck by a lanyard, and a pair of sunglasses was perched on his nose. Booker’s tone was full of righteous indignation, which was nothing new.
“Max,” Corbett said by way of greeting. “What brings you here?”
The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead Page 11
