The Last Town

by Knight, Stephen

  Hailey was saved by his partner for the day, Suzy Kuruk. She was dressed in her tan tribal reservation police uniform, her long hair pulled up into a bun beneath her cap. She walked up to the man and put a hand on his arm. The guy towered over her five-foot-four frame, a giant consumed by fear and desperation.

  “Sir, maybe we can help you,” she said calmly.

  “How so?”

  “Yeah, how so?” Hailey echoed.

  Suzy ignored Hailey and focused her attention on the big man standing next to the rugged Dodge pickup. “We’ve been told that everyone has to move out of town, and no one can stay,” she said. “But obviously, in your case, we’re going to have to be creative. Can you hang here with Officer Hailey for a bit while I see what we can arrange?”

  The man huffed. “Hell, yes. I mean, what else can I do other than lead my family out of here on foot?” The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his plump Hispanic wife, holding their tiny baby and standing next to their six-year-old son.

  “Let’s see what we can do for you,” Suzy said. “Just stay here. I’ll be right back.” As she turned to go back to the Expedition, she gave Hailey a crooked smile and whispered, “Be cool. It’s going to be a long day.”

  ###

  Norton was just getting breakfast started when the doorbell rang. As he walked to the front door, the tiles cool against the bottoms of his bare feet, he instinctively checked to ensure the Shield was in its appendix-carry holster.

  Through the glass-paned front door, he saw Barry Corbett standing outside, dressed in his pseudo-intellectual cowboy getup of denim shirt and baggy jeans. Barry’s graying hair was neatly combed, as always, and he wore his hulking 1911 on his hip, in plain view. Concealed carry was pretty much a thing of the past, at least for the duration of the emergency.

  Norton unlocked the heavy door and pulled it open. “Barry, what’s up?”

  “Hi, Norton. I thought I’d drop in and see how things were going.”

  “Well, they were going fine until I started working for you. You always show up on the doorstep of your titular employees before they start work?”

  Corbett smiled thinly. “File a complaint with the EEOC.”

  Norton snorted and stepped back. “Well, come on in. I was just rustling up some breakfast.”

  “Got any coffee?” Corbett asked as he stepped inside. “Or has living in LA made you into a fruit-juice-only kind of guy?”

  “I always have coffee.” Norton closed the door behind the tall billionaire. “Come on in. Make yourself at home. It’s not much by your standards, but it’s not exactly a lopsided trailer, either.”

  Corbett grunted as he followed Norton down the hallway and into the kitchen, his boots clicking on the floor tiles. “Not bad. Would’ve thought a guy like you would have gone full-on gonzo, built a glass-and-metal monstrosity with a car park for six or seven cars.”

  “Not my style, at least not here in Single Tree. By the way, I’m old school with the coffee. Percolator brewed, none of those Keurig things.”

  “Strong?”

  “Bold enough to make you shit yourself twice.” Norton pointed at a door off the kitchen. “Bathroom’s that way, if you can hold it in long enough to make the trip, old man.”

  Corbett smirked. “Cheeky bastard. Give me a cup of your worst, Hollywood. I’ll show you how a real man takes it in.” He pulled out one of the barstools placed in front of the breakfast island and perched on it. He looked like a cross between a waiting buzzard and one of those raptors from Jurassic Park.

  Norton poured a cup of coffee. “Cream? Sugar?”

  Corbett looked offended. “What are you, a pussy?”

  “Sorry. I guess I should have asked what brand of whiskey you wanted me to stir in.”

  “Just the coffee, Norton.”

  Norton pushed the cup across the marble countertop. “Give it a shot.”

  Corbett lifted the steaming cup to his lips and took a sip. He held the coffee in his mouth for a moment then swallowed and nodded. “Tough stuff, just how I like it.”

  “I’m making French toast and bacon. I don’t usually eat breakfast, but these days, I figure I better eat whenever I can.”

  Corbett eyed the gas range. “Damn, that thing’s big. You a chef?”

  “No. It just looks more impressive when I burn a hamburger to a cinder. You want something to eat?”

  Corbett shook his head. “I’ll pass. Have your breakfast. It’ll be fun to watch the French toast surrender to the all-American bacon.”

  Norton chuckled. “Well, I’ll try to make sure someone puts on a show. So what brings you this way?”

  “The town’s not that big, Norton. ‘This way’ is about forty-two seconds away from my place.”

  “Touché. Anyway, what brings you here?”

  Corbett hefted his mug. “Well, the coffee is pretty damn good, to tell the truth.”

  “Come on, Corbett. What is it?”

  Corbett sighed and put the cup back on the countertop. “The truth?”

  Norton pulled out a bowl from a cabinet and stepped over to the refrigerator. “No, I want you to lie to me. Of course, the truth.” He removed a carton of milk from the fridge and set it down next to the range.

  “They say there’s a cure for the infection,” Corbett said. “They’ve been shipping it out for weeks.”

  Norton turned around to gape at him. “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. Some facility around Odessa was manufacturing it. And yesterday, the military nuked it.” Corbett looked grim. “As in, our own guys actually deployed a nuclear weapon on American soil.”

  Norton was gobsmacked. “So they, uh, nuked the facility that was developing the cure. Brilliant! What the fuck for?”

  “As far as my sources can tell, it was a locus point for the zombies. They were converging on it. No one knows why. They compromised the facility, even though the military had stood up a silver-bullet task force of special operators and regular line units to secure it.”

  “So they went ahead and nuked it?” Norton shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “It was a target of opportunity,” Corbett said. “There were thousands, maybe millions of those things there. They got the people out then atomized one shitload of stenches. If nothing else, there’s a lot fewer of them in Texas.” He pointed to the west. “But that doesn’t help us out here. It’s spread to California, with the biggest outbreak occurring in LA. As far as I know, there are no plans to start nuking the Golden State, so we’ll definitely be having visitors in the near future.”

  “What about this cure?”

  “What’s been made is being distributed. To whom, I don’t know. Probably to the military and politicians, if I had to guess. John Q. Public is going to have to wait awhile. Don’t worry, Norton. We won’t be seeing any.”

  Norton turned back to the stove and placed a skillet on one of the burners. “Okay. I don’t understand half of what’s going on, but okay. At least there’s a cure.”

  “There’s a lot of thundercloud around that silver lining. That facility was considered a national asset. They had B-52s bombing the stenches, tons of Special Forces and SEAL teams backed up by Rangers, attack helicopters, replenishable defenses in depth. Hell, I was told they even had the Army Corps of Engineers helping them out. No expense was spared in securing it, and it still got overwhelmed.”

  Norton put some butter in the skillet. “What about us?”

  “That’s a bit of a sore point. We’re not a national asset. I pulled out the stops in getting a ton of essentials here, but I don’t have a squadron of heavy bombers at my beck and call. All the troops I brought with me are Marine Corps trained, but numerically, they’re about the size of maybe a platoon. Marines can do fantastic things, but forty leathernecks aren’t going to be able to hold off a couple hundred thousand zombies. The problem is that the highway will channel them right to us. We could be in a pretty tight spot.”

  “So what are you saying?” Norton asked. “
All this is for nothing? That we’re just wasting our time?”

  Corbett sighed and took another slug of coffee. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just telling you this because I want you to know. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Maybe the government will come up with some sort of biological weapon that’ll make these things decay and fall into millions of piles of bones. Maybe they have an anti-zombie weapon, and we just don’t know about it because they’re taking their sweet time to deploy it. Maybe the zombies won’t even come this way at all. Maybe the ones in Las Vegas will head to Arizona, and the ones in LA will split up and go to San Diego and San Francisco. Maybe we’ll be fine. Then again, maybe we’ll have four million of them walk up on us at once. I don’t know.”

  “Four million… really?”

  Corbett nodded. “It’s estimated that even after that nuke, there are still about fifty to seventy-five million zombies inside the United States alone, and that number is continuing to increase. Or so says my contact.”

  “And who is this contact of yours?”

  “The son of a former Marine I served with. He’s attached to the directorate of contingency planning for Marine Special Operations in the Pentagon, though I doubt he’s still in Virginia. He’s probably in a bunker somewhere.”

  Norton ran a hand down his face, feeling razor stubble tickle his palm. Shaving was no longer a priority, so he was on the three-day growth schedule. Once it started to itch, he’d shave it off. He looked at Corbett and crossed his arms. “How many do you think we can repel?”

  Corbett shrugged. “No way to know that. Fifteen thousand should be doable if it comes down to it. Maybe more. But once we get their attention, we have it, no matter what. Only way out of that trap is to kill all of them, so that’s why we need to keep things quiet once the walls go up. It’s also another reason we need all the transients to clear out. We don’t want people outside the walls attracting unwanted attention.”

  Norton went back to preparing his breakfast, even though he really didn’t have much of an appetite any longer. “You’re a bright ray of sunshine this morning. Thanks for stopping by, you old ornery asshole.”

  Corbett chuckled. “I do have a reputation to maintain.”

  “Sure you don’t want any breakfast?”

  “You win. I’m in.”

  Norton started cracking eggs. “You know, I never asked. How did you get to where you are now? I mean, businesswise. I know all about Vietnam and the like, but I never figured out how a guy from Single Tree could become a billionaire.”

  “Luck. Being in the right place at the right time. After I got back from ’Nam, I got a job servicing equipment at a refinery outside of Houston. The guy who ran the joint was a World War II vet. He saw I had what it took to get things done, so he taught me everything he knew about the business, not just the refinery side, but the actual exploration, drilling, transport, even how product gets distributed once it’s all been blended up. He died three years later. That was in 1976. He left a big hole in the company, and I stepped into it. His partners let that happen, so I went from making nineteen thousand dollars a year to a hundred sixty. A guy could live pretty decently in Texas on nineteen grand a year back then, so making a hundred sixty grand was like winning a Powerball jackpot.”

  “No kidding. One sixty’s still good money, even today,” Norton said.

  “Yeah, so long as you’re not living in Manhattan or San Fran. Anyway, it didn’t take me long to get the company back on track. Actually, it never went off the rails. Everyone knew what to do, so it wasn’t a big feat. After that, though, I found that while I knew a lot about the maintenance business, I still didn’t know very much about the petrochemical industry. So I went to Lone Star College and got a two-year degree, then I transferred to Texas Tech in Lubbock. I earned my bachelor’s in a year then jumped right into the MBA program. I was probably one of the very few petroleum engineers with a business degree in energy commerce, back in those days. I still stayed employed full-time, and at the same time, I bought my way into a small oil and gas exploration company and helped them exploit a field off Ghana in 1981.”

  “Wow. Sounds like you never slept,” Norton said. “So that find in Ghana got you started?”

  “Somewhat. I came out of that one a millionaire. I also came up with a new dog-couple design that I patented and licensed to Chevron, and that one still pays me money today. That was where the big cash was, hooking up with the major O&G developers and licensing technology to them. I spun off the Ghana oil fields in 1988 and walked away with seven hundred fifty million. I started my own O&G exploration and development company that same year, along with a separate engineering company. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know which one makes more money these days.”

  Norton mixed up the eggs and milk. “Damn. And you still came back to Single Tree.”

  “A man has to stay grounded, has to remember where he came from in order to discover where he has to go.”

  “Another parable from Victor Kuruk?”

  Corbett smiled and sipped more coffee. “No, that one’s straight from me. Vic would have made it sound a whole lot prettier. And stoic.”

  “So you went from nineteen grand in the early seventies to, what, twenty or thirty billion today?”

  “Yeah. Basically. But it’s just money. Everyone wants to take it from me, of course. They all want a piece of the pie. I’m not greedy; I give away a lot. I’ve built hospitals all across the world, invested in pre- and post-natal care in third-world countries, and dumped a ton of cash into rebuilding Haiti and Ecuador after their earthquakes. I rebuilt an entire community in New Jersey after Sandy and put up a bunch of new homes for families who lost everything in tornadoes in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. But no one knows that shit, Norton. I don’t talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  Corbett shrugged. “It sounds too self-serving to me, like I’m trying to fluff up my own dummy.”

  Norton nodded. “I once paid for a Mexican woman to have retinal implants in LA. I didn’t really know her, to be honest. She was related to a woman I was seeing at the time.”

  “So you did it to get in good with the girl?”

  “Up front? Yes. But then, I was in the room after the procedure was done, and I saw this woman see her children for the first time. I cried like a fucking baby.” Norton smiled at the memory.

  “That’s why I do what I do,” Corbett said. “I like to make a difference. I like to feel like I’m useful for something other than just making tons of cash. That’s just the means to an end. You do anything like that again?”

  “Yeah. I set up a home for special-needs adults in Encino. I did that after that guy was killed in Fullerton by the police. Nobody pays anything for it. I handle the salaries and taxes and insurance, all that stuff. Well, actually, I pay people to handle it for me. I just throw in the cash and check on things every now and then to make sure no one’s playing loosey-goosey with the money. I paid for a couple of bookmobiles in LA County, nickel-and-dime stuff like that, nothing like what you do.”

  “It’s not a contest, Norton.”

  “So says the guy who’s saving an entire town, where I was basically only trying to save myself and my parents.”

  Corbett waved the comment aside. “How did you get started? The son of an accountant making a splash landing in Hollywood, how did that happen?”

  “I shot three porn movies in college that did pretty well.” Norton glanced over his shoulder. Corbett did not look amused.

  “Really,” Corbett said.

  Norton nodded. “Really. I was at school in San Francisco. I did Suzy Does San Francisco, a takeoff on Debbie Does Dallas. Ever see it?”

  “No. Neither one, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah. A shame. Both are legendary works.”

  “So you mean to tell me you acted in porno films?” Corbett asked.

  Norton laughed. “Hell, no. I directed them. Suzy Does San Franci
sco did really well, made three million bucks worldwide. The other two did all right, but they were straight-to-video. This was in the ’80s, when video porn was starting to beat the hell out of the theater chains. Even the Pussycat Theaters went under.”

  “So you made three million?”

  “Hell, no. I made a hundred seventy-five thousand. I used that to make a cheap horror flick in 1988 called Creeper. I retained sole rights then negotiated a split deal with a second-run distributor in Los Angeles in which I kept forty percent of the theatricals and retained ownership of the video sales. I sold that direct to video store chains. On that one, I made three million. After two more horror films, I pretty much hung up my directing spurs. Producing was much more lucrative, without so many early-morning wake-ups.” Norton soaked up the egg and milk with several slices of bread and tossed a couple into the pan. “Back then, everyone was trying hard to sell their products to the studios, get them to fund them, distribute them, pony up the print and advertising costs. I stayed small until the mid-’90s, doing shoots for one to five million bucks, and retained all the rights I could. It wasn’t until 1995 that I packaged a big-budget picture and released it through one of the majors. I think I got the last gross-dollar deal in the industry. That one made me.”

  “No kids, Norton?”

  “No. No kids, but I am the proud owner of two ex-wives.” Norton flipped the bread with a spatula. “What about you?”

  “Never married.”

  “Gay, right?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Sure it is,” Norton said. “You just need to loosen up a little, cowboy.”

  “Is that you asking me to wear assless chaps around town?”

  Norton sighed. “Thanks for the visual. As if the zombie hordes weren’t enough, now I’m trying very hard not to picture your withered hindquarters in a pair of chaps, walking down Main Street.”

  Corbett’s chuckle sounded like a wheeze. “Norton, you are all sorts of fucked up, son.”

  Norton shrugged. “Yeah. I guess I am.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Corbett cocked an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me you were expecting guests.”