“Fourteen, copy?”
“Fourteen. Go ahead.”
“Fourteen, no answer at that residence. Copy?”
“Copy, Base.”
Grady walked around to the front of the Cadillac. He put a hand on the hood. It was warmer than the ambient air, so it had been driven at some point during the day. He reached for the Mag-Lite on his belt with his left hand and switched it on. He played the beam around the carport. The car was empty. There was nothing unusual in the carport: garbage and recycling bins, a stack of old newspapers, some closed cabinets. He stepped toward the door that led to the house, shining his beam on it.
The doorjamb was broken.
Grady drew his Glock and moved closer. From the corner of his eye, he saw Victor edging up the short driveway, pistol in hand.
The door to the house suddenly flew open. Grady barely saw the flash of lightning before the thunder hit him.
###
Doddridge knew the jig was up when the cop left the front door and, instead of returning to his vehicle or moving on to another house, moved to the carport. The doorframe there was damaged where it had been kicked in, and while an old lady might limp her way to the door and not really see the damage, as Estelle had done, a policeman would notice. They were about to get caught.
Time to get on with it. Doddridge walked through the kitchen and stood to one side of the carport door. He heard the cop’s soft footfalls outside, the soles of his shoes scuffing along some grit on the dusty concrete floor. Light filtered in beneath the door and, a moment later, around the cracked and broken wood of the frame. The light paused then began to recede.
“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ showtime,” he whispered.
Doddridge fired through the door. The shotgun blast blew a nice hole through the thin wood, and the pellets continued and slammed into the man on the other side. The cop stumbled back against the Cadillac, the flashlight falling from his hand as he raised his pistol. Doddridge fired twice more, hitting the cop first in the chest then in the face as he slumped forward. The pistol slid out of the cop’s hand and skipped across the carport’s dry concrete pad.
“Dude, what are you doing?” Shaliq cried. “What the fuck!”
The old lady was wailing on the couch. Tone stepped up to the window, raised his Glock, and fired five or six rounds. Glass shattered, and the drapes twitched as his bullets lanced through them. Doddridge barreled past Auto, who was crouching near the living room wall, and ran straight for the sliding glass door at the rear of the house. He eased it open, looked both ways, then jumped out into the backyard. The black desert awaited him, and off to his right, headlights blazed from the long, slow-moving conga line of traffic.
In the house, Tone kept firing, swearing for the fucking Indian to stay still. From the open carport, three deep reports came, and Doddridge looked back to see Tone spin around. Whoever had hit him had shot right through the house from the carport, which meant two things: the guy had some serious weaponry, and to make a shot like that, he also had to have X-ray vision. Shaliq bailed out then and ran right past him, heading out into the desert.
More bullets ripped through the house from the street. The little pussy Bruce cried out, yelling he was hit. Doddridge took that as a good omen and sprinted right, head down, heading through the yard of the house next door. He kept going, even when people started coming out of the surrounding houses. Once he had rolled down half the block, he cut right and juked up between two houses. He flattened against one then slowly edged forward until he could look up the street.
Lights flashed, and a big SUV roared around the corner of a side street. For an instant, the lights had Doddridge fully exposed, but if the cop driving the SUV saw him, he didn’t slow down.
Doddridge hustled across the street and slipped past a couple of houses, running northward.
###
For a moment, Victor had no clue what had just happened. A flash of light came from the carport, and his initial thought was that Grady had accidentally discharged his weapon. Then he saw Grady’s flashlight fall, and two more orange-yellow fireballs surged out of the house toward him. Grady was flung back against the Cadillac, then he sank to the concrete floor.
At the same time, more muzzle flashes erupted from the living room window. Victor was at an extreme angle to it, but he heard the snap of a bullet zipping right past his head. He leaped toward the carport, his .45 in his right hand. He realized he was caught between the gunman behind the door and the one sniping away from the window. He raised his pistol toward the wall and fired three shots in rapid succession, blasting right into the house. He doubted he’d hit anyone, but he hoped that the sudden onslaught of large-caliber rounds would make the shooter at the window pause and hunker down. He heard Suzy start firing. Compared to the roar of his .45, her nine-millimeter sounded downright anemic.
He continued his slide to the left, pistol aimed at the door. The firing from inside had stopped, but he heard two women wailing. Suzy popped a few more rounds into the house then ceased fire as she advanced, hurrying toward him. In the near distance, Victor heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, probably his niece’s would-be suitor, Mike Hailey.
His foot hit one of Grady’s legs, and he glanced down. In the darkness, he couldn’t see much, but the police chief was covered with blood. He was still breathing, though, a harsh, gurgling rasp, drawn out and labored.
“Chief!” he hissed, reaching down to shake Grady’s shoulder.
With a roar, a huge man crashed through the remains of the garage door like a charging rhinoceros. Victor raised his pistol, but he was too slow. The big man crossed the distance between them in a flash and knocked his .45 aside. Victor pulled the trigger anyway, blasting a hole through the carport roof in a bid that the sound might distract the big, bearded man from crushing him like a bug. It didn’t work. The man slapped the pistol out of Victor’s hand then lashed out at him with a fist that in the dim light looked to be as big as a frying pan.
Victor Kuruk had spent most of his youth as an angry, oftentimes drunken, street pugilist. He had been filled with anger, shame, and disgust at what had become of his people, at what they had been reduced to, and the evisceration of their spirit. Alcohol could sometimes numb the pain, and he used it as often as he could. But fighting, especially fighting Anglos, was a longer-lasting salve. So whenever a white boy offended him, Victor threw himself into combat. And on more than one occasion, he had fought even when there was no offense to be found. Victor just liked to fight. And he had become very good at it.
He was no longer that young man, but the passing years hadn’t dulled his instincts. He ducked beneath the giant’s swing. He still caught a glancing blow on the side of his head as the fist sailed past and through the passenger-side window of Estelle Garcia’s Cadillac, shattering the tempered glass. Over the crash, Victor heard Suzy shouting for the big man to stay where he was. In response, the man tried to grab Victor. Victor batted the man’s arm away before his thick fingers could find suitable purchase.
Victor’s first instinct was to dance away. As a fighter, he had always enjoyed an uncanny combination of speed and strength along with an accuracy that was almost mechanically precise. But as a man in his sixties, he knew slugging it out with a combatant who appeared to stand six-foot-eight and outweighed him by as much as eighty pounds probably wasn’t going to work in his favor. So Victor stayed on the inside and released a flurry of blows against the man’s body, launching shot after shot. He braced himself against the side of the Cadillac for support so he could throw in as much power as he could.
The big man hunched over, the wind driven from his body. Victor launched a vicious left uppercut that slammed the man’s teeth together then finished him off with an equally savage right. Victor put as much of his body weight behind that final punch as he could, grunting as pain flashed across his knuckles. The big man collapsed, and Victor, a victim of his own inertia, fell on top of him.
“Victor!” Suzy cried.
Victor ignored her and wrestled with the man. Or at least, he thought he was until he realized the bigger man was down for the count. Victor rolled the giant over onto his face and yanked his hands behind his back. With trembling hands, he pulled his handcuffs from their pouch at the small of his back and slapped them on the huge wrists. He tightened them up then checked his work. Convinced that the big man wasn’t going anywhere, he clambered to his feet, using the fender of the Caddy to help him maintain his balance. He felt shaky all over and feared he might vomit all over the car’s wide hood.
“Hai’i!” Suzy called, using the Shoshone word for uncle.
“Nüü tsawinnuh,” Victor responded. I’m fine. He bent over and retrieved his Sig Sauer P220.
Red and blue lights flashed from the street, then tires screeched as Hailey’s Expedition braked to a halt in front of the house.
“Stay with the chief,” Victor told Suzy. “Wait for Hailey.”
Victor went into the house. The kitchen was unoccupied. His boots sent plastic shotgun shells skittering across the floor. He’d never had the reason or desire to visit Estelle Garcia and in fact barely knew who she was, but he’d been around long enough to be familiar with the layout of homes like hers. It would be a two-bedroom house with a living room separating the kitchen from the two bedrooms on the other side. And that meant the light switches were to his immediate left. Victor reached out, fumbling in the darkness. His fingers brushed against the cool tile of the backsplash before he found the switches. He flipped them on, and the kitchen was suddenly illuminated. Dishes covered every horizontal surface, along with containers of food and beverages.
“Help me!” someone screamed. “Oh fuck, help me!”
Victor stepped into the living room, .45 held at the ready. Estelle crouched on the sofa, her mouth opened in a soundless scream, tears streaming down her face. A blood trail on the dun-colored carpet led toward a short hallway. Two men were wrestling a few feet down the corridor. One was a pale guy with lank hair, dressed in a prison uniform. He was the one screaming, and his eyes rolled in terror and pain. The man on top was a muscled Hispanic with graying hair and a multitude of tattoos, both professional and of the prison variety. His shirt was saturated with blood, courtesy of two bullet holes in his chest.
Victor was delighted. He’d actually managed to hit the shooter when he’d fired through the wall of the house. Thank God for full metal jacket.
The guy lowered his head and ripped away half the other man’s cheek. The smaller white man screeched, a truly horrifying sound in such close quarters. Blood flowed across his face.
“Hey, get off him!” Victor shouted, horrified. He darted forward and kicked the big guy in the shoulder. When that had no effect, he stepped back and raised his weapon. “Freeze!”
The biter looked up, still chewing the fresh meat in his mouth. His eyes were open but completely vacant. He swallowed the mouthful of flesh then bent back over the screaming man to take another bite.
“Hey!” Victor shouted. “Hey!”
Why am I shouting at a zombie? Victor squeezed the trigger. The bullet plowed into the zombie’s left shoulder, parting skin and muscle and bone as the heavy 230-grain projectile transited through the ghoul’s body and exited somewhere around its lower back. The zombie didn’t react except to sag to the side a little. The thing just took another chunk out of the shrieking man beneath it.
Victor stepped forward, pressed the barrel of his pistol against the zombie’s head, and pulled the trigger. He barely heard the report over the ringing in his ears from all the previous shooting. The zombie collapsed as the bullet blasted through its skull and ripped away half of its lower jaw before it exited and disappeared into the hallway baseboard. The man trapped beneath writhed and screeched in agony, blood pouring from the rents in his face.
“Where are the others?” Victor shouted, keeping his weapon trained on the zombie and the screecher.
The man with the torn-up face didn’t answer, just kept screaming. Victor looked back at Estelle, still sitting on her plastic-wrapped couch, her eyes wide with fear.
“Estelle! Where are the others?” he shouted.
With a trembling hand, Estelle pointed toward the back of the house. Victor spun around and raised his weapon. But all he saw was the open sliding glass door on the other side of the dining room table. Damn.
“Chief! Chief Grady!” Suzy cried.
Victor halfway turned toward the kitchen. His niece was backing into the house, her pistol held in front of her. Beyond her, looming in the darkness of the carport, was Grady. The lower half of his face had been annihilated, but his eyes were intact, and they remained open and unblinking as they fixed on Suzy, tracking her every move.
“Shoot him!” Victor shouted.
Suzy fired four shots in rapid succession. Each bullet slapped into Grady’s vest, doing absolutely nothing to slow the zombie’s advance. Estelle whimpered, and the guy trapped beneath the other zombie screamed again.
“In the head!” Victor yelled. “In the head!”
A flash of light exploded in the carport, and the top of the Grady zombie’s head erupted. A fountain of brackish blood poured out of the ragged hole in the ghoul’s crown, and the grotesquerie collapsed to the linoleum floor with a crash. Suzy jumped back with a shout, lowering her Glock to keep it aligned on the target.
Mike Hailey appeared in the kitchen doorway, eyes wide. He held his pistol in both hands as he stared down at the body of his chief. “Oh, fuck.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The ride up to the Hollywood Bowl was one big blur. Reese sat in the swaying RV, watching the lights of Los Angeles roll past. As the Cedars-Sinai medical complex fell behind, he felt a keen sense of despair. He knew there were people still in the hospital, live people, people who needed protection until they could be safely evacuated. But Reese’s contingent of police officers had been run down, and the Guard couldn’t stay. Without the Guard, the LAPD was just another menu item. Reese told himself he was leaving to save his guys and to maybe give those poor souls sitting up in the lower reaches of the Hollywood Hills some hope in a night full of desperation.
But that’s a fucking lie. We’re leaving because we’re scared, and we don’t want to die. It burned to admit that to himself, but at the same time, he was getting acclimated to the gloom. Reese sat up front next to the old patrolman who was driving. Ahead, a column of National Guard Humvees and a couple of five-ton trucks rolled up North La Cienega Boulevard. The street was lined with businesses, hotels, and restaurants, but it was surrounded by residential streets. On occasion, a human figure would emerge from one of the buildings. If it hurried toward the convoy with a stiff gait, it was either shot or just run over. If the figure was more animated, like a frightened civilian, he or she was ignored. That darkened Reese’s depression, but only nominally. He felt himself evolving somehow, as if he was moving away from caring what happened to the people he was charged to protect.
He looked at the other officers sitting in the RV. Most were senior in grade, though there were a few rookies. All of them had seen and done more over the past few days than they’d likely done over their entire careers. They all had the same shell-shocked, thousand-yard stare. They’d had enough, and all they wanted was to get home, have a shower, eat a hot meal, and lie in their own beds. But a lot of the guys wouldn’t be getting home for weeks, if ever.
First Sergeant Plosser sat directly behind Reese on a bench seat next to two LAPD officers. His bulky gear made him seem much bigger than the cops, even though they were wearing full tactical armor. Plosser’s haunted eyes seemed to gleam in the tepid light emanating from the few overhead dome lamps that were switched on. “You having an attack of the guilts, Reese?” he asked.
“What?”
“I asked, are you feeling guilty about leaving the hospital?”
“We’re doing what we have to do, Plosser,” Reese said.
“Keep telling
yourself that. It’s the truth.”
“How many troops does the Guard have here?” Reese asked.
“Now? I don’t know. We have about fifteen thousand in the Army component. Toss in Air Force, Navy, and Corps, maybe a total standing force of twenty-five thousand, not including whatever federal troops get assigned to our mission area. But remember, California’s a big place. LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego—everybody gets their piece of the Guard pie.”
“So you don’t really have enough troops to contain this,” Reese said.
“Hell, no.” Plosser scoffed. “I don’t think the entire Department of Defense has enough troops to contain this.”
“Gee, you’re really making us all feel a lot better about things,” one of the cops said.
Plosser snorted. “I’m not here to make you boys feel better about anything. You all know what’s going down. LA is getting the shit kicked out of it, and the rest of the state’s not doing much better.”
“You have any recommendations, First Sergeant?” Reese asked. “As in, recommendations that actually make sense?”
Plosser glanced out the side window for a few seconds before responding. “We get up to the Bowl, we get ourselves organized, and we maintain lines of communication and lines of supply with the airhead up at Griffith. The Bowl isn’t a terrible place to try to defend under normal circumstances, but given the fact our enemy isn’t put off by fear, firepower, pain, or negotiation, it’s going to be tough as hell. We’ll be sandwiched between Los Angeles proper to the south and the Valley to the north. It’s going to be a major bag of dicks, but if that’s where we’re being sent, then that’s where we go. We can’t run, and we can’t give up. If we can’t save the civilians up there, then we need to figure out how we’re going to be able to save ourselves.”
“You have any recommendations on how we do that?” Detective Marsh asked.
The Last Town Page 24
