The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead

by Stephen Knight

  But the bus hadn’t shown up, and while frustrating, it was not entirely unexpected. Out of an abundance of caution, Sinclair hadn’t even checked out of the roach coach they were staying in. Had the bus not arrived, they would have had nowhere to return. And while he’d had his fill of all the free HBO he could handle and had absolutely no use for a “free ironing board in each room”, sleeping on the street wasn’t on his personal bucket list. So Sinclair and Meredith just watched the traffic slowly trundle past. The gas station across the street was mobbed with vehicles, and it looked as if the place was deserted. Motorists were looking about in clueless agitation as they tried to fill their vehicles from pumps which had been switched off. Sinclair was joined in his observations by a pudgy Mexican woman wearing a loud floral dress and a wide-brimmed hat.

  “Guess they don’t know the station’s closed,” she said. “Martin ran out of gas yesterday.”

  Sinclair glanced down at her. She had a wide face dominated by an almost equally broad nose, atop which were perched a pair of slim sunglasses. Her lips were painted burnt orange, and her cheeks were burnished with a fiery blush. It was an odd composition that one might expect to find on a Dali painting.

  “No gas deliveries coming in?” Sinclair asked. “That’s odd, I thought I saw tanker trucks in a parking lot down the road.” He pointed down Main Street, the boulevard he and Meredith had hiked up to catch the bus to Reno.

  “Oh, those are Mister Barry’s trucks,” the woman said with a smile.

  “‘Mister Barry’?” Sinclair echoed. What, are we now on a plantation?

  “Yes, Mister Barry Corbett,” the woman said with a nod. She held several bags of McDonald’s breakfast burritos. Sinclair’s stomach roiled at the stench. “We been hearing he brought all that stuff in.”

  “Stuff? What stuff?” Sinclair asked. Then he remembered what the Mexican pharmacy owner had told him last night, that Corbett was going to convert the entire town into a fortress.

  “Oh, all sorts of stuff,” the woman said. “Trucks, trailers, all kinds of machines. I hear a lot of it came up from Texas, right when things started to go bad in LA.” The woman pointed westerly, trying to be helpful in ensuring Sinclair knew in which direction Los Angeles lay.

  Sinclair considered this. Aside from the fact all his recent major sources of information were Mexican, everything seemed to flow together in an odd way. Corbett returning to this hick little town. A surprising presence of construction goods, and from what the pharmacy owner had told him, an arsenal of illegal weapons. Defenses were being erected in the desert, though Sinclair hadn’t seen any of that himself—he hadn’t ventured out into the desert, and it had been deep night when the accursed Ghibli limped into town like a lame dog before rolling over and dying at the worst moment. All of this was circumstantial, of course, but in Sinclair’s business, circumstance and innuendo were more golden than cold, solid fact.

  So, Corbett’s making himself a little castle in the desert to hide inside, is he?

  “Excuse me, do you know if the bus to Reno is coming?” Meredith asked the portly Mexican woman.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Reno’s shut down,” the woman said. “My cousin live up there, works in the casinos. They have troubles, too. Sounds like the police can’t control it.” The woman sighed, her face falling. “I hope my cousin will be okay.” She recovered an instant later, and Sinclair had the sudden understanding that the woman before him wasn’t exactly a deep thinker. As if the four bags full of burritos weren’t enough of a clue. “But no, I don’t think the bus is coming any more. It didn’t come last time, either.”

  “Last time?” Sinclair asked.

  “Tuesday,” the woman said. “I ask the manager at the McDonald’s, he said the service, it was suspended.”

  “So we’re waiting here for no good reason,” Sinclair said, feeling rage boiling deep inside him. “It was supposed to arrive at eight forty-five! Why don’t they have a sign up?”

  “I don’t know, mister,” the Mexican woman said. Her words were drowned out as a white Chevy van suddenly accelerated through the traffic. It slammed into a car and lurched toward the street, its engine roaring. One of its front tires blew as the van jumped the curb, and for an instant, its black plastic grille was pointed right at Sinclair. Behind the vehicle’s cracked windshield, he caught a glimpse of a thrashing struggle, as if two people were fighting for the wheel. Then the van’s front tires hit a parking stop, and the vehicle cut away from him, scraping across two parked cars. Its rear bumper was torn loose in the impact, and half of it dropped to the asphalt, digging into it as the van continued accelerating, its blown front tire flipping and flopping like the tub of a stricken washing machine. The van plowed right into an old pickup truck that was backing out of a parking space, hitting it with such force that the truck seemed to almost bend. The van’s engine died in an explosive rattle, and a cloud of steam suddenly rose from its front end. The man sitting in the pickup truck looked quite shocked, but other than that, he was fine. He pushed open the truck’s driver’s door and eased himself out. Several people emerged from the McDonalds, mouths open at the severity of the accident.

  “Oh, gosh,” said the Mexican woman.

  “Jock, are you all right?” Meredith asked. She reached out and grabbed his arm.

  “Why, yes. Quite fine, Meredith,” Sinclair said, even though his heart was bucking to a bizarre disco beat inside his chest. “Thank you for asking.”

  The man who had been driving the truck peered in through the van’s windows, then tried to open the driver’s door. Even from his position near the street, Sinclair could hear someone frantically pounding inside the van. The pickup driver stepped to his right and opened the van’s loading door.

  Two bloodied figures crashed into him, pinning him to the pavement. A startled thrill ran through the crowd of onlookers, and the Mexican woman with Sinclair and Meredith put a hand to her painted lips.

  “Oh!”

  The pickup driver thrashed and screamed as the bloody people lying on him tore into him. One went for his belly. The other went for his face. His blood was bright in the morning sunlight.

  “Jock!” Meredith cried. “Oh, Jock, they’re killing him!”

  “Bloody right,” Sinclair said, and his voice sounded small and detached, even to him. A small, analytical part of his mind told him it was time to flee, to turn on his heel and run back to the hotel. Instead, he stood rooted to the spot, watching in horrified, slack-jawed fascination as the two people—zombies, he knew now—attacked the man beneath him in the most gruesome of manners. He stayed where he was even when a third zombie—a woman—emerged from the van. The newcomer glanced at its two brethren as they fed, then swept its dead eyes toward the parking lot entrance, where Sinclair stood. For a moment, their gazes met. When he peered into the bottomless nothingness of the zombie’s eyes, Sinclair heard himself release a high-pitched fart.

  No, no, not me—

  The onlookers standing by the restaurant doors reversed their course in a communal shriek, diving back inside the McDonalds without skipping a beat. The zombie’s head snapped back toward them, its eyes cold and predatory and full of an eternal starvation. It hissed and charged forward. Sinclair was astonished to see that there was nothing slow about this zombie—it ran like a sprinter, accelerating toward the McDonalds as if it saw the finish line just ahead. It rebounded off the plate glass window with a bang and fell back into the parking lot. Without skipping a beat, it vaulted to its feet and sprang forward again. This time, the window dissolved beneath the fury of the impact, parting in a thunderclap of sound as the ghoul flung itself into the restaurant, greeted by a chorus of horrified screams.

  “Jock!” Meredith cried again, eyes wide behind her expensive designer sunglasses.

  Sinclair shoved the portly Mexican woman and her four bags of sausage breakfast burritos out of his way. “Sorry, must be going!” he chirped, his voice high and panicked as he grabbed Meredith’s arm and
hustled her away from the restaurant. As they ran down the sidewalk, he heard the ungodly commotion inside the restaurant. An employee launched himself out of the drive through window and ran into the street, screaming. There was a hollow pop from inside, followed by more screams, then two more pops. Sinclair realized that someone inside had a gun, and they were doubtless shooting at the dashing grotesquerie as it ran throughout the establishment, likely savaging anyone and everyone it could grab ahold of.

  “Where are the police?” Meredith gasped as she ran down the sidewalk with Sinclair right behind.

  “Look at the traffic, Meredith! They’ll get here, but only after it’s too late,” he said, pushing her along. “Keep going—don’t stop, just keep going!”

  They ran three blocks before Sinclair slowed and looked behind them. People were running from the McDonalds, and he was surprised to see a few people hurrying toward it. Sun glinted off oiled metal. They had guns. A moment later, a fusillade of gunshots rang out. Then silence reigned, aside from the rumble of slowly moving traffic and sporadic car horns. In the distance, a siren wailed.

  “All right, I think it’s over,” Sinclair said. He was gasping for breath, both from fright and the physical exertion of actually running any distance.

  “We have to get out of here,” Meredith said, panicked beyond belief. “We have to get to San Francisco!”

  “Meredith,” was all Sinclair could say. He felt light-headed and nauseous.

  “We have to get out!” she repeated, almost stridently.

  “Meredith, if it’s happening here, then it’s happening in San Francisco. An order of magnitude worse, even,” Sinclair said. “You heard the Mexican bitty, even Reno is in trouble. We can’t get the car fixed, and even if we could, we’d only make it as far as whatever gas is in the damn thing could get us. No mass transit out here in California—what do you suggest we do?”

  Meredith looked at him with her big eyes, full of terror. She literally wrung her hands before her in agitation. “So what are you suggesting, Jock? Do you have a plan?”

  “We go back to the hotel,” Sinclair said.

  A police vehicle slowly threaded its way through the heavy traffic along Main Street, lights flashing, siren blaring. It could only make two miles per hour, at best. Meredith regarded it for a moment, then turned back to him.

  “That’s the best you can do?” she asked.

  “No,” Sinclair said after a time. “I might be able to do one better than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That man I was talking to in the diner—Barry Corbett. Do you remember him?”

  “The Indian man who gave me his phone?”

  Sinclair shook his head. He grabbed Meredith’s arm and began hustling her down the sidewalk, casting an occasional glance over his shoulder to ensure nothing was following them. “No, not him. The old man. He has a plan to turn this town into a fortress. Maybe it’s in our best interests to stay right here, in Single Tree.”

  Meredith stopped. “You must be joking!”

  Sinclair yanked her along after him. “Darling, I’ve never been more serious about something in all my life.”

  ###

  Doddridge laughed when the kid Shaliq was brought into the small police station holding tank. He was covered in dust and sand, and looked as if he’d been trying to dig his way through the desert.

  “Where the fuck you been, dawg? Been tryin’ to play a real life game a Dig-Dug?” he asked, sitting on a plastic bunk that had no mattress. In the cell on the other side, Auto was lying on his back, snoring up a storm. His face was swollen from whatever beating he had taken.

  Shaliq didn’t answer. There was a bandage on his right forearm that extended from wrist to elbow. Doddridge examined that critically. Damn, boy got more than a punch to the throat.

  “He was in the desert,” said the fat old cop with the boozer’s nose who brought him in. He opened the door to the cell next to Doddridge’s and maneuvered the sullen Shaliq inside, positioning him off to one side of the doorway. Reaching through the bars, he grabbed the kid’s handcuffed wrists and held him in place, then slammed the cell door closed. Only after he was safely separated from Shaliq did remove the handcuffs. Shaliq gingerly brought his arms forward with a sigh and rubbed his wrists.

  “Damn things were too tight, I can’t feel my fingers,” Shaliq bitched.

  “How’s the arm, kid? You feel that?” the cop asked. His nameplate read LASHER, and Doddridge made him to be a big city cop who’d retired and joined the force in this podunk town.

  “What do you care, man?” Shaliq asked.

  “I don’t. You get a painkiller in three hours, so stay quiet until then. Lunch is at eleven-thirty.”

  “I’m Muslim, man. I need halal food.”

  “You’ll get a burger, fries, and a coke from Carl’s Junior and be happy about it.” With that, the old cop turned away and returned to a desk down the short hallway. Beside him was a locked metal door that had to be opened from the outside. Doddridge watched while Old Man Lasher collapsed into his chair and picked up an iPad.

  “Where they get you, boy?” Doddridge asked.

  “Desert. Sent some dogs after me.” Shaliq held up his bandaged arm. “One of ‘em did this, so I shot it, and then the guys following beat the shit outta me.” He nodded toward Doddridge. “What happened to you?”

  “A girl beat him down,” Lasher said from the end of the hall, finishing off the statement with a reedy laugh.

  Shaliq smiled briefly. “For real?”

  Doddridge ignored the question. “Hey, man. I asked for a lawyer last fuckin’ night. When am I gettin’ one?”

  “Yeah, I want a lawyer, too,” Shaliq added.

  “When they show up, you’ll get them,” Lasher replied. “Public defenders are up in Bishop. No one’s coming down from there anytime soon, you can count on that. My advice? Keep things cool and pass your time counting the bars.”

  Shaliq sat down on his plastic bench. “Man, do I get a blanket?”

  “Yeah, when it’s time to sleep,” the cop said, staring intently at his iPad now.

  “White cracker motherfucker,” Shaliq said.

  Lasher nodded absently. “Uh huh.”

  “Hey, kid. Cool it,” Doddridge said. “We are where we are.”

  “Yeah, you fucking genius, man. Your powers of observation are overwhelming.”

  Doddridge snorted at that, then stretched out on his plastic bench and laced his fingers behind his head. With nothing else to do, he just stared at the ceiling, waiting until he could catch a nap. Things were going to shit out in the world, maybe being locked up wasn’t so bad after all.

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  The Guard fought sporadically throughout the night, but Reese still slept through most of it until he was roused for duty. The sheriff’s guys gave a quick security briefing, with a fresh-faced lieutenant dressed in a dirty Army Combat Uniform bearing the old universal camouflage pattern. Reese had already been told a new style was in the midst of being fielded, bearing the more efficient operational camouflage pattern. It made no difference to Reese, and he was pretty sure the zombies didn’t care, either way. Both sets of uniform didn’t exactly blend in with an urban environment any more than his LAPD blue tactical gear did.

  The situation hadn’t changed very much, which was a little surprising. Most of the zombies were sticking to the highway, as the terrain and vegetation surrounding the Bowl had somehow managed to mask the presence of several thousand civilians. Strict noise discipline was being enforced—even folks who snored when they slept had to put on a gas mask, which pretty much either cured sleep apnea or made sure the person wearing it passed out from lack of oxygen. Crying kids was a problem, and the fact that they were in an amphitheater didn’t help matters. And with the night being torn apart by screams, gunfire, helicopters, and the odd explosion didn’t exactly make for a night conducive to sleeping anyway. Reese figured that kids would have a tough time of it, but
children were more adaptable than adults. They’d get through it, one way or the other.

  Reese was curious about the zombie movements along the freeways. He’d been told during the briefing that most of the traffic was dead now, not going anywhere. There were people trapped in their vehicles, surrounded by hordes of ghouls, but there was no helping them. The Guard had its hands full dealing with the new refugee camp being set up in Griffith Park, which was a much larger area with hundreds of possible infiltration points. Even the observatory, which was where the Guard helicopters were operating out of, couldn’t be fully secured. There were just too many hiking paths leading to it.

  “That mean we’re in danger of losing air support?” Bates asked. He directed the question more toward the lieutenant than to the sheriff heading up the briefing.

  The Guard officer stirred uneasily. “No, sir. I don’t think so. A separate airhead’s been established at Ontario airport—”

  “Yeah, that’s like over fifty miles away,” said another cop. “I mean, I know helicopters can fly pretty fast, but that’s still going to be, what? A fifteen, twenty minute wait?”

  “Aircraft are in the area at all times, sir,” the lieutenant said. “We’re keeping a rotation of guns and ass-haulers over Los Angeles at all times.”

  “All right, if it’s okay with the LAPD, maybe we can stay focused on the here and now, and not worry about what may or may not happen,” the sheriff leading the briefing said.

  “Sure, let’s get back to how we’re going to get all these people out of here when the zombies figure out we’re in a great big serving dish,” Bates said. “They’re really pretty good at overrunning positions. Ask Colonel Morton, he can tell you all about that.”