More men joined them. 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.
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.
###
“Goddamn it, if you make me shit myself, I’ll make sure you guys burn,” Clarence Doddridge said.
“Hold it, Doddridge,” Harriman said. The corrections officer sat behind the Plexiglas partition that separated the prison transfer bus’s crew from the seven prisoners in the rear. The short, fat man had a flattop crew cut and a thick mustache dyed so black that it practically screamed fake.
“I cain’t hold it no longer,” Doddridge complained. “You fuckers already let this white boy over here piss himself.” He pointed, as much as the manacles that bound him to his seat would allow, at the man sitting in front of him. “You gotta let us go to the bathroom, man.”
“We ain’t gotta do shit for you, convict.”
“Well, I’m gonna do shit for you if you don’t let me outta here.”
They 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 any faster. There were only so many places to stop where prisoners could do their business.
Through the bus’s small, mesh-reinforced windows, he saw vehicle after vehicle full of people, belongings, and pets clogging up both lanes. The bus had been moving at maybe two or three miles an hour for most of the day. None of this really mattered to Doddridge. Being on that bus was likely the closest he would ever get to being a free man again 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. And at the moment, all he needed to do was figure out how to keep the contents of his bowels from blasting out into his khaki prison uniform.
“We’re about three miles outside a town called Single Tree.” Harriman smiled. “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 Auto, the big 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 nodded his thanks to Auto. He didn’t like white people in general, and the guy was pretty loathsome, but Doddridge had to acknowledge Auto’s effort on his behalf. It didn’t mean he didn’t want to kill the crazy car mechanic from Seattle, but Doddridge figured anything that might help him get off the bus and onto a toilet was worth a little nod.
“Then you shouldn’t have broken the law, convicts,” Harriman said, stretching out the last word then favoring them with a shit-eating grin.
Behind him, Hopkins, the older, skinny corrections officer, leaned toward the driver, who sat behind a steel-mesh cage. They conferred with each other for a few moments, then the bus edged off the road. After bumping across the uneven desert terrain for a hundred feet, the vehicle came to a halt.
Harriman turned toward the driver. “Hey, what the fuck?”
“Let’s let him off so he can take a crap,” Hopkins said. He pulled a shotgun from a nearby locker then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his mirrored sunglasses. He slid them on, straightened his olive uniform shirt, and nodded toward the fat officer. “Go on. Go get him.”
“Man, let the motherfucker shit himself!”
Hopkins’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.”
Harriman exhaled through clenched teeth as he put a hand on the big key ring on his belt. He unlocked the Plexiglas partition and pushed it open. He stared at the prisoners, 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.
Harriman 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. But Harriman was one of the more brutal pricks from Atwater, and no one was going to do anything that would earn them a hard and immediate beating with a tonfa stick. And while Doddridge 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,” Harriman said. “You know the drill. Be a good nigger, and you’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, man, sure thing,” Doddridge said.
Harriman released him from the restraints holding him in his seat then stepped back, allowing him to rise. Walking in leg irons wasn’t easy at any time, but it was even less so when his bowels were about to explode. At the front of the bus, Doddridge glanced at the driver. 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.
Doddridge shook his head. 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 and onto the dusty ground. It was just midmorning, and already, it was in the seventies.
Hopkins 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. The low-lying desert bushes that dotted the area were just short, broad scrub that might have thorns on them, nothing that would 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. 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,” Harriman 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,” Hopkins said.
Doddridge duckwalked away from the bus to a small, rocky depression that was kind of shielded by the creosote bushes. The foliage smelled like rain, and he thought that was odd.
“There’s good enough,” Harriman. He had his hands on his hips, the left close to his baton. He was only ten feet from the bus, while Hopkins 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?”
“Sure. When you’re dead.” Harriman smirked.
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 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.
“Oh man, the nigger’s dropping mud puppies all over the place!” Harriman laughed as Doddridge grunted, farted, and strained. “Is that how you treat your babies, Doddridge?”
“Keep laughin
’, man,” Doddridge muttered.
“Hey, Hopkins, take a look at the squatting porch monkey!”
The older guard shook his head and looked away as if embarrassed. Harriman cackled and clapped his hands as if applauding a command performance.
“Keep laughin’,” Doddridge said again.
“You say something?”
“Yeah, I asked if you got any paper,” Doddridge said.
Harriman grinned. Sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead. “You got some bushes there, Doddridge. Use all you need.”
Horns blared, and raised voices carried over the desert. Hopkins took a couple of steps toward the front of the bus, where cars and trucks were jockeying for the space.
Harriman turned and asked, “Damn, what’s going on up there?”
Doddridge saw his opportunity. If the world’s goin’ to hell, might as well make the most of it. He grabbed a sizeable rock from the ground and rose to his feet as one last piece of important business slid out of him and plopped to the ground. The light breeze was chilly on his exposed ass, but that didn’t deter him in the slightest. Standing in the midst of his own stink, he clenched the rock hard in his right hand and twisted at the waist. It was hard to adopt a proper throwing stance with the leg irons, but he did the best he could. As a youngster, he had been a pitching star. Had it not been for the Bloods that ruled over Watts in the 1980s, he might have gone on to be the starting pitcher for the Angels. Instead, he’d gone into the crack trade, then the heroin trade, then the murder trade. But his body still remembered how to throw, and as he lined up with Hopkins, he reversed his twist and let the rock fly.
The older guard turned back around just in time to take the rock right in the forehead. He went down like a pile of bricks, the shotgun slipping from his hands. He hit so hard a cloud of dust rose up, like when Wile E. Coyote fell off a cliff chasing after the Road Runner.
Harriman gawked at his partner for a moment then moved toward him. “Yo, Vincent? You okay, man?”
Doddridge was slowed by his leg irons, but he crossed the ten feet that separated him from the fat guard in a few seconds. Harriman must have spotted the movement because he tried to step back, drawing his baton. Doddridge was faster. He looped his manacled hands over the man’s neck and pulled him close, at the same time delivering a harsh head-butt. The guard groaned but didn’t fall, so Doddridge used his head to hit him again and again, three times in rapid succession. Harriman let out a strangled cry as his nose, sunglasses, and front teeth broke. He collapsed to the ground, taking Doddridge with him. Doddridge raised the manacle chain over the man’s head then punched Harriman twice in the throat with both fists.
He scrambled to his feet and helped himself to the guard’s Glock pistol. With his pants puddling around his ankles, he shuffled back to the bus. The driver was still in the cage, peering out at the highway, watching the traffic struggle to get past the bus’s bulk.
Doddridge raised the pistol and fired three times. One round hit the steel mesh and ricocheted through the bus’s roof, blasting a small hole through the sheet metal. The other two ripped through the driver’s body, causing him to jerk and shudder. The bus’s diesel engine went from low idle to high-rev wail as his foot briefly came down on the accelerator, but the rig was in park, so it went nowhere. Doddridge fired again, just to make sure the guy was out of business. The bullet hit him in the head and continued on through the driver’s-side window, taking pieces of hair and bone with it.
Doddridge turned and saw Hopkins fumbling about in the bushes, trying to sit up. He was bleeding badly from the gash the rock had left in his forehead, and his sunglasses were knocked askew. Doddridge stepped away from the bus, raised the Glock, and shot him between the eyes. The guard flopped back to the ground and lay still. Doddridge went over and picked up his shotgun. Harriman moved his hand toward his empty holster. Doddridge was surprised the guy could still move. His mangled sunglasses hung from his right ear, twisted and useless, as blood streamed from his nose.
Doddridge leaned the shotgun against the side of the bus. Told you not to laugh, motherfucka. “How’s it feel to lie in your own piss, fucka?” He shuffled over to the fallen guard.
“Stay away from me,” Harriman croaked. “You’ll burn for this!”
“Sure. Hey, ’scuse me for a second.” Doddridge crouched beside him and pulled the key ring off the man’s belt. He found the key to his manacles and unlocked them, letting them fall to the ground. He then pulled the guard’s uniform shirt out of his belt and used its shirttail to wipe his ass.
Doddridge stood, pulled up his pants, then bent over and released the leg irons. He picked up the shotgun and used its butt to bludgeon the guard to death, viciously hammering his skull until it broke open, spilling gray-white brains onto the ground.
The motorists near the bus were starting to panic. Several cars and trucks pulled away and drove off into the desert, bouncing across the uneven terrain. Doddridge laughed. It was like a scene from a comedy, National Lampoon’s Desert Vacation.
He returned to the bus, which smelled like death. The driver was slumped over the wheel. Doddridge considered cracking open the cage, tossing the body, and just driving on, but the last thing he wanted to do was tool around in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a prison transfer vehicle that probably had GPS on it. Rummaging through the locker in the guard area, he found a couple of duffel bags full of clothes. The driver was about his size, so Doddridge took off his prison uniform and slipped into the man’s jeans, socks, and black T-shirt. The rest of the prisoners watched with hooded eyes as he dressed. The purple plaid long-sleeved shirt wasn’t exactly his style, but he put it on over the T-shirt anyway. The man had also packed a denim jacket, which Doddridge thought would come in handy at night, so he tucked it under one arm.
Doddridge put the Glock in his waistband and leaned the shotgun against the locker door. “Any of you fuckas want to hit the road? I figure since the world’s goin’ to hell ’n all, we might need to stick together for a while.”
“And go where?” Auto asked.
Doddridge pointed out the bus’s big windshield. “I figure that town there. It ain’t much, but it’s a start.”
“You with the Bloods, ese?” a stern-faced Latino in the back asked. His gray-streaked hair was slicked back from his forehead. His eyes were hard, the eyes of a lifer. Even if he’d been paroled, a guy like him would be back in the joint in a week. He had no chance outside.
“Bounty Hunter Bloods. You?”
The older man smiled. “Latin Kings, ese. We’re allies.”
Doddridge nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He pointed at a tall, skinny black kid sitting up front with big-frame glasses. “You, who you with?”
“No one, man. I’m independent.”
“How old are you, boy?”
“Nineteen.”
Doddridge guffawed. “Nineteen and already in the federal system? Must be one badass mothafucka. What you in for?”
The boy shrugged. “It don’t matter. I’m here.”
Doddridge considered that for a moment then bent forward and unlocked the boy’s manacles. He remained cautious, though, just in case the kid went for the pistol in his belt.
“You in the fed system if you wanna stay, boy. You choose.”
The boy rubbed his wrists and looked up at Doddridge with neutral, hollow eyes. “I didn’t say I wanted to stay.”
Doddridge gave him the keys. “Unlock anyone who wants to come.”
Doddridge picked up the shotgun and headed back outside. After stripping the dead guards of their spare ammunition and magazines, he dumped it all into one of the duffel bags. By the time he was done, all five prisoners had stepped out of the bus, Auto and the Latin King in the lead.
“So what’s the plan?” Auto asked. The man was about six-six, with long blond hair that hung down to his shoulders. He was pale, like Nordic pale. He wasn’t going to love being out in the desert after a while.
“We’re going to need a place to
hole up and figure out what’s next,” Doddridge said. “That town up there ought to do aight by us.”
“What about the cops there?” the kid with the glasses said. His dark skin was practically glowing beneath a sheen of sweat.
Doddridge lifted the shotgun. “That’s what this is for, boy. Got a problem wit that?”
The boy didn’t respond.
“What about the rest of the guns, ese?” the Latin King asked.
Doddridge eyed him. “Where you from, man? Who you run with?”
“Pasadena. I’m Tone.”
Doddridge searched his memory. “Big Tone? One of the vice kings from the PLK?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll walk for a bit, see what kinda ’rangement we can make. Let’s go.” Doddridge nodded toward the town ahead. “We got us a town to take.”
4
FIGHT
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
“Okay, late-breaking news. This is getting really fucked up,” Bates said.
Reese only grunted as he leaned against the ring of sandbags. His ears were ringing from all the gunfire, and the smell of expended powder burned his nostrils. The National Guard had closed the hospital two hours earlier against Reese’s instructions that it be kept open. But he had little say in the matter. The hospital administrator had informed him that they had no beds left, staffing levels were at an all-time low, and supplies were running out. According to the attending physician in the emergency room, they would have a tough time bandaging a kid’s skinned knee. From the reports he’d heard over the radio, as sporadic as they had become, the rest of the hospitals in Los Angeles were headed down the same path. The City of Angels was going to hell, and the dead just kept coming.
Reese went through shotgun rounds as if they were water, always coming up short when he needed them. He blew through his allocation of pistol ammo as well, but they had ample reserve on those because of the prepositioned stores someone had thought to provide. The bodies were soon stacked three deep around the perimeter, and more of the dead staggered up the street, drawn to the sounds of combat. They came from buildings, cars, and nearby homes and apartments. They were men and women, boys and girls, families and homeless bums. Sometimes they would approach in pairs or trios, which were easy enough to deal with. Other times, it was as if they were being bused into the area, and dozens of slack-faced ghouls stalked up Gracie Allen Drive or down George Burns Road.
The Last Town Page 20
