The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead

by Stephen Knight

  Looks like we’ll be winning the jackpot soon enough, Victor thought. He wondered how big the zombie horde was that could have overwhelmed Ridgecrest, despite the presence of actual military units. Could the Navy be able to kill them all? He decided that would be a remarkable stroke of luck, and lately, Single Tree’s luck had been too good to hold out.

  “Gentlemen, if a sizeable force of zombies hits us, do you know what to do?” he asked the men on the wall with him.

  “We call Lennon, and he calls you,” one of them responded.

  Victor nodded in the darkness. “Stay sharp,” he said, then turned back to the ladder.

  ###

  Two days later, as luck would have it, Hailey was on the south wall again. Though the day was warm and bright, the weather was definitely turning cooler. Fall was here, and over the next few weeks, winter would doubtless make its presence known.

  Today though, a gaggle of road-weary stragglers advanced toward the outer wire. Three men and one woman. They carried weapons, packs, and looked as if they were just about completely run out. They were filthy and pale, and as they wended their way through the abandoned cars on the highway, Hailey could see they were plenty desperate.

  “Let us in!” one of the men cried as they advanced.

  Hailey stood up, exposing himself on the short wall. “Not going to do that,” he said. “You guys can walk around, keep heading north.”

  “They’re right behind us!” the man said. “Please, let us in!”

  That got Hailey’s attention. “Who is right behind you?”

  “Who do you fucking think?” screamed the woman. “The damned zombies, man! Thousands of them!”

  The rest of the people manning the short wall starting gathering their gear. One of them brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes and started scanning the distance, while another reported what they’d just heard to the tall wall behind them.

  “How far back?” Hailey asked.

  “A couple of miles, maybe not even that,” the woman replied. “Please, just let us in!”

  Hailey looked down at the guy on the radio. He was a young Native American, one of Victor’s guys. “What’s the word?”

  “The word is they walk around,” the radioman said. “Sucks.”

  “Ask if they can pass through and we let them out of the north side,” Hailey said.

  The younger man narrowed his eyes. “You know the answer to that already.”

  “Come on, ask anyway. All right?”

  The radioman sighed and brought the walkie-talkie to his mouth. Hailey turned back to the four people standing outside the wire.

  “We’re asking,” he said. “Sit tight for a moment while the bosses figure it out. Where you from?”

  “Ridgecrest,” one of the men said. “We got reinforcements. Marines. Held out for four days against a horde, we think they came from Vegas. Then a bigger one rolled up from LA. The Marines even had air support, and they weren’t able to hold them back.”

  “How long you been on the road for?”

  “Two days. Our ride shit the bed about twenty miles from here. We stopped for the night, then this morning we saw a few thousand stenches walking up on us.”

  “They see you?”

  “Doubt it. We move a bit faster than most of them. They don’t really go into full-on charge mode until they see meat, but then, some of them can run like Usain Bolt.”

  Hailey grunted and looked down at the radioman. “Well?”

  “You know the answer. They go around, they go back, they sprout wings and fly away. Doesn’t matter, they’re not getting in.”

  Hailey turned and looked back at the tall wall. The men there looked back at him, but he didn’t see anyone he recognized as an authority figure. He shifted his gaze back to the radioman.

  “Come on,” he said.

  The radioman shrugged. “You want to mess with Corbett’s troops? Like that guy, Lennon? If you do, you got brass ones, bro.”

  Hailey sighed and turned back to the four people on the highway. “Guys, you have to go around. We can’t let you in. Sorry.”

  Their faces fell, but the woman seemed to be the strongest of the bunch. “Got any water you can spare? Ammunition, food?”

  Hailey motioned them to one side. “Walk around. Check in with the north side detail. They might have something for you there by the time you get to them. Head out to the west and walk along the wire. You’ll be under observation the entire time, so don’t get any ideas.”

  The woman glared at him. “You guys think you’re prepared? You guys think you’re ready to face down what’s coming for you? Here’s a tip: you’re not.”

  Hailey looked down on the men and woman, then motioned to his right once again. “Thanks for the information. You need to go that way.”

  ###

  Four hours later, the first wave of zombies arrived.

  The staff manning the southern guard towers saw them first, when the horde was still almost a mile out. The people manning the short walls were pulled back inside the town before they could be seen, and for the time being, the sentries on the tall walls were told to keep themselves hidden. Only the sentries in the towers would remain; concealed behind the deeply tinted glass in each tower, they would remain unseen by the zombie horde as it advanced on the town. Their relief would happen under the cover of darkness, when the desert night was as deep and dark as outer space.

  The plan had been established long ago. While small groups of zombies were killed and burned, a large force would be allowed to approach without any action being taken. At the same time, the town would remain as quiet as it possibly could; no engines, no loud noises, no nothing. Even the cooking of food was forbidden, for fear that the dead might still somehow be able to smell it. The hope was the town would appear as dead to the zombies as they were. With nothing to capture their interest, they would move on.

  In theory, anyway.

  So the zombies advanced, and walked right into the first layer of defenses. The razor wire failed to deter them, but it did slow them down until the sheer force generated by the press of bodies overwhelmed the fences. Zombies trampled over each other as they surged into the trenches beyond, falling into them like bricks by the dozens. In one hour, the trenches were full of undulating bodies that roiled and squirmed in the warm daylight. Those zombies not yet caught up in the first lines of defenses pressed forward, walking right over the grotesque carpet of writhing bodies. They were initially stymied by the line of HESCO barriers. Though a few managed to climb over the structures, the majority of the dead were either too uncoordinated or too stupid to even try. They surged against the barriers, but made little headway, even with the mass of the zombies behind them pushing them forward. The HESCOs were too heavy to move. So the zombies just mounded up behind them, thrashing, occasionally moaning.

  The mounds grew larger and larger, until they finally spilled over the barriers, tumbling over them like fetid waves of rotting flesh. Awaiting them were more stretches of razor wire, and tanglefoot wire, which served to trap and immobilize the first elements of the zombie invasion. But it was a temporary halt. Soon, the numbers of stenches coming over the HESCOs overran these defenses, and soon, zombies were trying to scale the hard-packed berm that led to the tall steel walls that surrounded the town.

  In less than a few hours, the horde had defeated most of Single Tree’s elaborate fortifications. All that was left now were the tall, steel walls.

  ###

  “What worries me most is what if we have a break-in during the night,” Victor said. “Even with night vision, we won’t be able to take control of the situation very effectively.”

  Corbett nodded and looked around the room. All the principals were there, sitting around the big, circular dining room table in Corbett’s home. Walt Lennon, Gary Norton, Victor, Max Booker, Gemma Washington. The only absentee was Hector Aguilar; that was fine, no one really wanted to see him anyway. Once the walls had gone up, the irascible pharmacist had holed up
in his two story house and didn’t seem likely to emerge again until Hillary Clinton herself came calling to tell him the emergency was over.

  But at least we have our emergency backup agitator, he thought, looking across the room where Jock Sinclair was dutifully taping the proceedings. The English broadcaster had a pinched look on his face as he fiddled with the camera Norton had loaned him.

  “Nighttime would be pretty tough, I agree,” Lennon said. “But it’s still doable. So long as we keep them bottled up in the kill zones, we’ll be good to go.”

  “But they’re not finished,” Victor pointed out. “Some of them are just chain link fences.”

  “They don’t all have to be steel walls, Victor,” Corbett said. “I’d hoped they would be, but we just didn’t have the time to get them all erected. And now that the horde—or at least, one of the hordes—is here, we can’t exactly fire up the tractors and get them pulled into place.”

  “You’re telling me that chain link fences are all right, Barry?”

  Corbett grunted. “I’m telling you that they’ll channelize the dead into our kill zones, no matter what they’re made of. We keep them moving, they’ll go where we need them to go. We might have a few bolters here and there, but it’s a lot easier to take care of them individually than as a single monolithic threat.”

  “‘Monolithic threat’?” Max Booker snorted. “Taking a page or two from Reagan’s playbook, are you?”

  “Hey, if it fits, Max.”

  Booker fidgeted a bit. “How many of them are there, anyway?”

  Lennon consulted his notes. “We’ve counted up to six thousand, four hundred and seventy-three,” he said. “But that’s only those that are where we can easily see them. Our drones don’t have a huge amount of range. The truth of the matter is, it might be fifty thousand or more. We’ll never be able to get an accurate count, so I think we can just classify their numbers as a shit-ton and call it a day.”

  “So what happens if this shit-ton of zombies penetrates the wall in different places at the same time?” Booker asked.

  “We’ll use the partitions that were put up to segregate incursions from each other and taken them down one at a time,” Corbett said. “It’s all in the plan.”

  “You ever try and fight fifty thousand enemy at once, Corbett?” the mayor of Single Tree asked.

  “Nope.”

  “So how can you be confident it will work?”

  Corbett snorted. “Who said I was confident? I just said that’s what we’ll do.”

  Booker stared at him. “To tell you the truth, I was expecting to hear something else. You’re the one who sold this plan, Corbett. You mean to tell us now you don’t think it’ll work?”

  Corbett looked at the mayor evenly. “I got us this far, Max. If we’d listened to you or your pal Aguilar, we’d all be huddled in our houses as the damn things flooded the entire town. You know how many we’ve killed already? Over two hundred. How many people have we lost? None. If Single Tree’d been left in your capable hands, I think those numbers would probably be inverted.”

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Booker snapped.

  “Guys, why don’t we shut the fuck up about who’s got the biggest dick in this game,” Norton said. “But just to help things along in that context, we can rule out Lennon. I understand he has no penis, it was blown off in Afghanistan.”

  Lennon blinked. “I’m sorry, Mister Norton, but you’re very ill-informed. That happened in Grenada.”

  Norton laughed. “Well, okay then.” He sobered quickly. “Anyway. We are where we are, which is surrounded by a growing horde of zombies, and they don’t smell very nice. Maybe they get in, maybe they don’t. If they don’t, no problem. If they do, different story. So we have all these fences and walls erected to move them into certain spots where we can kill them. I’m cool with that. But what if we get hit with, say, a hundred thousand of them? That’s possible, right?”

  “It is,” Lennon said.

  “Jesus.” Victor looked shaken. “There’s no way we’d be able to effectively kill them all. Not even half that. A quarter of that.”

  “To be honest, even the entire US Army probably couldn’t do that very quickly,” Lennon said.

  “Marines could,” Corbett said.

  Lennon smiled thinly. “No, old man. Even us Marines couldn’t do it, but we’ll certainly give it a go if it comes to that.”

  “Excuse me, but what exactly are we discussing?” Gemma asked. “I mean, we’ve had this conversation before, in a couple of different ways. Have things changed?” She turned to Corbett. “Barry, you yourself said we might see tens of thousands of them. So you’re right. Are you saying that your plan won’t hold?”

  “So long as the walls stay upright, the plan is good,” Lennon said. “But there’s a component to it that we hadn’t thought of.”

  “What?”

  “Mounding,” Lennon said.

  Gemma cocked her head to one side. “Mounding. I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It’s a type of attack we’ve heard the dead conduct,” Corbett said. “We found out about it from a ham radio operator in Chicago. Basically, the dead pile up on each other against some kind of obstruction and form a mound. Eventually, it gets so high that the mound collapses, and the zombies fall over whatever obstacle caused the pile up. In our case—the walls.”

  Booker leaned forward. “You didn’t think of that?” he asked, shocked.

  Norton joined in. “Yeah, you didn’t think of that?”

  Corbett shot Norton an acidic look, then turned back to Booker. “We didn’t know that would be a consideration. But Max, a break-in was always going to be a possibility, regardless of how it occurs. It’s why we worked hard to erect internal defenses instead of just relying on the outside walls.”

  Booker spread his hands. “So why are we here?”

  “We’ll need to do some things to help ensure the town remains intact,” Lennon said. “One way to prevent a break-in is to avoid attracting any unwanted attention. In this instance, the zeds can’t see us—they just see a wall. Most of them would ignore it, and that’s what we want. For them to see nothing of interest, and move on. That means people have to avoid being seen, avoid making noise, avoid anything that might indicate to the dead that there’s something of interest behind the walls.”

  Victor raised an eyebrow. “You mean you want the entire town to go quiet? No sound, no scents, no lights at night? That kind of stuff?”

  Corbett nodded. “Yeah. That kind of stuff.”

  Victor chuckled. “Oh, that’s going to go over well.”

  “It does beat the alternative.”

  “Okay, I see how that makes some sense,” Norton said. “But if we can’t even cook, what are we supposed to eat, Barry? You have a couple of shipping containers full of Triscuits, or something?”

  “We have over three hundred thousand meals ready to eat, as well as a variety of other pre-prepared foods,” Lennon said. “And yes, they are inside a couple of shipping containers located at the high school.”

  “Okay,” Norton said. “But God damn it, they’d better be good.”

  “Cooking inside of private homes is probably going to be permissible,” Corbett said. “So long as no one’s making kim chi or something. Right, Walt?”

  “I’m against it,” Lennon said. “That’s a stupid chance to take.”

  “I rather agree,” Sinclair said from behind his camera. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “Oh, you’re still here,” Norton said. “I liked it better when you were being quiet. It’s such a rare event, I was relishing it.”

  “Sorry to have derailed you. Would you like to retreat to your safe place?” Sinclair said.

  “Shut up, Jock,” Corbett snapped. “You’re not involved in this. Be quiet, or get the hell out.”

  Sinclair harrumphed and went back to the camera, brow furrowed.

  Corbett returned to the matter at hand. “So no cooking at all, Walt?
Could be a tough sell. What’s your plan for enforcing it?”

  Lennon sighed. “Self-control is going to be the requirement,” he said. “If someone breaks the rule, we can always cut the power to their residence. It might not mean much to an individual, but to a man or woman with a family who’s suffering, that might be a suitable punishment.”

  “You want to punish families for eating?” Booker said.

  Lennon looked at Single Tree’s mayor with an even stare. “I don’t want to punish anyone, Mayor. But if it comes down to it, inconveniencing a family versus losing the entire town doesn’t seem like a major deal breaker to me.” He nodded to Corbett. “I’ll leave that to you guys.”

  “Let’s get the word out on that as soon as we can,” Corbett said. “No cooking, and no lights at night. We need to keep this place under wraps for as long as we can.”

  “For how long?” Booker asked.

  “We suspect the horde will move on in a few days,” Lennon said. “A great many of the dead are already doing just that. Eventually, they’ll all be gone. We figure five to ten days should do it.”

  “Five to ten days,” Booker echoed. “How many days can we live on the prepackaged food you have?”

  “At three squares a day for everyone in town, about two months, if that’s what we have to do,” Lennon said.

  “Oh.” That seemed to mollify Booker for the moment.

  “Everyone will have to do their part,” Corbett said. “We have to get the word out as quickly as possible.” He checked his watch. “It’s just after one in the afternoon. We have to start notifying the townspeople of what we need them to do. Victor, sorry, but your office is going to be chief enforcer and receiver of complaints. If there are problems, of course the police would be the first folks to get tapped.”

  “Thank you so much,” Victor said, and Corbett couldn’t tell if the bitterness in his voice was real or feigned.

  ###

  The horde kept growing.

  Over the course of several days, Single Tree was literally surrounded by a pulsing mass of the dead. All the razor wire had been trampled flat, and the trenches had been filled to capacity with squirming dead bodies. A great number of the zombies trudged back out into the desert after finding nothing that piqued their interest, walking past the fortified town as they continued their search for living prey. But several thousand managed to cross over the HESCO barriers and push against the unyielding steel walls the surrounded the town, as if trying to find a way in. It was almost as if they could sense the presence of the living on the other side, but they weren’t coordinated enough to try and develop a mound that could threaten to overcome the tall partitions.