The Last Town

by Knight, Stephen

  “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.”

  The pair moved deeper into the restaurant. Corbett idly wondered why Sinclair’s wife stayed with him. She had to know 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 the Oxford Dictionary.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Victor said, pulling his plate toward him. He leaned over and sniffed the French toast. “Hey, you might have been right about the French toast. It smells fantastic.” He picked up the sprig of parsley. “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “I hope that fucker gets out of here,” Corbett said, staring at Sinclair, who was settling 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 draped his napkin across his lap. Picking up his silverware, he regarded the hot breakfast 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 Cedars-Sinai with such rapidity that it was as though the hospital were vomiting out its rotting guts in one long, moaning, shambling rush. Reese found he was not alone. Bates and Miriam Pallata were with him. Half-eaten bodies and limbs were strewn everywhere. 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 covered everything, and the streets glistened with a ruddy hue as the sun tried to shine through a blanket of acrid, toxic smoke. Los Angeles was on fire.

  The dead closed in on them, their footfalls as loud as thunder and as impactful as an earthquake. A chorus of moans and grunts preceded them, a mounting dirge belted out by hundreds of dry vocal cords as the ghouls stalked toward them on dead limbs, arms outstretched, bloody fingers curled into claws. Several of them waddled, so full 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 870 in his hands, and he shouldered the weapon and fired. He emptied the magazine almost immediately, and by then, the dead were swarming over Bates, taking him down even as he fired his pistol into the mass with one hand and 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 way to save her. The pack descended, tearing away her uniform shirt then ripping her breasts into shredded meat. A ghoul pulled one of her large nipples into its mouth, making it disappear in a torrent of bright-red blood.

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

  He snapped awake then floundered about in the semidarkness, not recognizing it at first. He was lying on a narrow cot, a thin blanket covering him. The cot shook, and he lashed out with both hands. He was soaked in sweat, and his heart hammered in his chest.

  Bates stood at the foot of the cot, kicking it with his foot. “Time to get back at it, Reese,” Bates said, his voice thick from exhaustion, making his words sound more like a cadenced growl. Gunfire cracked somewhere outside.

  Reese lowered his arms and sat up on the cot. He threw aside the blanket and lowered his feet to the floor. He was still wearing his pants and a white T-shirt. One of his black socks was beginning to unravel, allowing him a glimpse of his left big toe. 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 croaked.

  “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 raised his head slightly as a pounding chatter tore through the air. He smiled. “Hear that? That’s a triple-barreled .50-caliber. The GAU-19, God’s gift to heavy-duty machine guns.” He bent over, grabbed Reese’s wrinkled dress shirt from the floor, 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 gave away his fear.

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

  “If you’ve got some clean 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. “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.”

  ###

  As Reese and the rest of the cops—there were fewer of them now, he noticed—stepped off the bus in the parking lot of Cedars-Sinai, he saw that the National Guard had been busy overnight. They had erected massive walls of sandbags that housed fighting positions, decontamination areas, and funneled kill zones. A pile of bodies lay in one corner, at least six deep and almost eight feet high, a gigantic mound of rotting flesh. Reese stared at it, transfixed. Even though he had long known that Los Angeles was a festering sore of disease and mayhem masked by the glitter and palm trees and the celebrity haute couture, he had never expected to see bodies stacked like that anywhere in the Southland. Not even in Crenshaw or Compton during the crack epidemic of the 1980s had he come across such a sight. Plenty of LAPD blue were mixed in the pile, as well as some Army uniforms. A tremendous horde of flies had settled on the corpses, like some sort of buzzing localized dust storm. A few Guardsmen clad in protective gear were loading the bodies into a five-ton truck. A man in a FEMA jacket was overseeing the operation, his face hidden behind a protective mask.

  “Something else you don’t see every day,” Bates said as he climbed down from the bus behind Reese. “Seems to be a new trend.”

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

  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 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 flew 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. Windows had been broken there too, leaving behind dark, empty gaps that made Reese think of missing teeth. The remains of an ambulance sat nearby, its twisted form 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 by the food truck.

  “The zombies are everywhere, sir,” the Guardsman replied. The younger man’s eyes were red and narrowed into slits. He clutched his M4 rifle across his chest, holding onto it with gloved hands like a lifeline. Judging by the amount of brass cartridges littering the street, 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 pointed up at the windows. “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 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 shifted his eyes away. “I do,” he said.

  Bates took a breakfast burrito, two plain doughnuts, and a cup of coffee. Reese had the same. They ate quickly, standing with the rest of the cops near a sandbagged revetment topped with concertina wire. A haggard LAPD lieutenant named Newman spotted Reese and walked over.

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

  “Hey, Reese. 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. 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.

  “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 and 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 from his doughnut. “What do you mean, Lou?”

  Newman shook his head. “They went down. Hard. Some of them are still up there, but they’re not exactly serving and protecting anymore.” A 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, 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. I mean he took aim and 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 damn stench drove it in. And it was full of zombies.”

  Reese 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.”

  “You’ll see,” Newman said quietly. “You’ll see it for yourself.”

  “Yeah, I guess I will. Who’s in command of the Guard? Is it still Narvaez?”

  “Who? Oh, you mean the old company commander?”

  “Yeah. Captain Bobby Narvaez. These are his troops, right? The same guys who came to Hollywood Station?” Reese waved a hand around the hospital.

  “Right. That guy. Yeah, he’s over there, probably near the top.” Newman pointed at the pile of bodies. “He bit the big burrito about two hours ago, when he tried to tear out Plosser’s throat.”

  Reese blinked. “What? How did that happen?”

  “The guy just keeled over. Wasn’t bitten or anything, just dropped to the deck during a clearing operation. When his guys checked on him, he’d already turned into a stench. We figure he dropped from a heart attack or aneurism or something. Whatever it was, it hit him hard and fast. After that, and I mean right after that, he became a stench. That’s something else to watch out for. When someone dies, they turn and damn quick.”

  Reese was taken aback by the news. “Okay… so who’s in charge now?”

  “A lot of these guys came in last night. Two companies of shooters. There’s a lieutenant colonel in charge now. His name’s Morton, a big black guy who looks like he could take out the entire San Francisco offensive line.”

  “Okay, where is he?”

  “Inside. The Guard set up an operations center on the first floor. We’re running out of the mobile CP.” Newman pointed at a big RV in LAPD livery surrounded by concertina wire and sandbags. A piece of fabric stuck in the wire fluttered in the dry morning breeze. It looked as though someone—or something—had tried to get through. “Another gift from Metro, when there was some talk of them taking over.”

  “Are they?” Bates asked.

  Newman snorted. “From what I hear, there is no Metro anymore.” He took a gulp of coffee. “What’s happening at the station house? We’re having some trouble getting updates.”

  “Staffing is a problem. When we left, it was secure. But they have some issues with zombies walking up. The Guard and our guys had it under control when we left. Pallata’s in charge. Marshall dropped off the grid.”

  Newman grinned. “Well, just think, she could’ve been Mrs. Reese a decade ago.”

  “Yeah, so that’s the update from my side,” Reese said. “Enjoy the bridal suite while you can. Anything else for us?”

  Newman shook his head. His face looked gray in the growing light of day. “Nah. You hook up with Morton. He’ll tell you what the current picture is. Later.” He spun around and headed for the bus. The rest of the previous shift’s cops were already boarding it, and some of Reese’s detachment were leaving their impromptu picnic area and heading to fill in their positions.

  “Bates, you want to come with me to talk with his Morton guy, or you want to take charge out here?” Reese asked.

  “You go have your powwow. I’ll be in the command post, or you can reach me on the ROVER.”

  Reese finished the last of his burrito and put the bag of doughnuts in one of the cargo pockets on his thigh for later. After taking another hit of coffee, he picked up his shotgun. It was going to be a long, miserable day.

  “I’ll catch up to you soon,” he told Bates then turned and headed toward the entrance to the emergency department.

  The Guardsmen on watch there eyed him suspiciously but allowed him access after he identified himself. The emergency department had been turned into a miniature fortress during the hours Reese had been away. Fighting positions had been established everywhere, along with a zone reserved for triaging incoming patients. There was blood on the carpet in several spots, and Reese wondered if the triage was done with a 5.56-millimeter bullet.

  A Guardsman led him to the command desk set up behind a row of sandbags, almost a bunker inside the building. There wasn’t a lot of room there, but three men were monitoring radios. The glow of laptop screens filled the room.

  Lieutenant Colonel James Morton sat at one of the narrow desks next to another radio. “You the incoming LAPD liaison?” he asked in a deep baritone, barely looking up from his laptop. Newman’s description had been accurate. Morton was a huge black man with shoulders that seemed five feet wide. His tactical gear made him look even larger. His hair was so closely cropped to his skull that he appeared to be almost bald. The thin mustache abo
ve his full lips seemed to have more hair than his head did.

  “Yeah, I’m Detective Three Reese. I heard you lost Narvaez last night.” Reese didn’t offer to shake hands, and Morton didn’t seem to mind.

  “We lost him, along with six other troops,” Morton said. “Narvaez went out easy. The other guys were either bitten or actually torn apart. Is the Hollywood Bowl in your area of operations?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “FEMA and the CDC are setting up a refugee center there. I know why FEMA’s doing it, but I’m not so sure why the CDC is involved. Can you fill in that blank for me?”

  “I didn’t even know about a refugee center at the bowl.”

  Morton finally looked up from his laptop. To say the big lieutenant colonel didn’t have a pleasant face would have been an understatement. In the laptop’s bluish glow, it looked almost demonic. “Just how far down the food chain are you, Detective… Reese, you said your name was?”

  “Yeah. I run the homicide desk at Hollywood Station, so patrol missions wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse. I have a patrol sergeant on my detail, so if you want information regarding what’s happening up at the Bowl, he might know more about it. Anything specific you need?”

  “Yeah, how will they secure the area? I’ve been checking the maps. It’s not exactly remote, and it’s surrounded by high-speed approaches. They’ve already relocated about a thousand people up there, and putting them in an undefended area like that is pretty much like setting out a warm buffet and pounding on a skillet with a spoon. How many patrolmen do you still have on duty?”

  “As of last night at around three a.m., I was told maybe a hundred, max.”

  Morton shook his head. “Well, listen, once things heat up over there, a hundred guys aren’t going to be able to do shit. And we don’t have the manpower right now. Most of the Guard was sent farther south. We have regular line units spooling up from Joint Base Lewis-McCord and Fort Irwin, but speed is something Big Army doesn’t do well. The Marines are being held down in San Diego. LA’s an Army show, at least for now.”