The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead

by Knight, Stephen

  The Ghibli continued to lag its way northward. Sinclair thought he could hear something under the hood now, like a cylinder misfiring. He clenched his teeth and fidgeted slightly in the seat. He glanced over at Meredith, and in the light of the GPS display, he thought he could see her smiling wanly. Enjoying his discomfort, perhaps.

  Stupid tart, Sinclair fumed to himself.

  At last, the town of Single Tree appeared. The lights were still on, so that was something. And curiously, Sinclair thought he saw construction equipment out in the desert. Floodlights illuminated a large swath of the barren region as several backhoes went at it, attacking the desert floor with a vengeance. It was an odd time to be doing such work, seeing as it was almost three o’clock in the morning.

  Probably those god-awful frackers, Sinclair thought. Truly, greed knows no limit.

  The first gas station they came upon was full of cars and trucks, and traffic was backed up to the town limits. Sinclair pulled around most of it, stomping on the accelerator, trying to coax the overpriced piece of luxury Italian shit into something resembling forty miles per hour. The Ghibli began to shudder as its engine knocked. The car chugged past a Comfort Inn hotel, its parking lot full, then ambled its way past a lumber store—its parking lot was full as well, albeit with hulking trucks that bore all manner of construction equipment. Farther up was a small airport, its entrance gate closed and apparently locked. On the other side of the street—now called South Main Street, he saw—there was a Chevron gas station, also clogged with vehicles. Sinclair considered trying to make his way into the parking lot anyway, but there was no chance of him being able to turn against the oncoming traffic. Also, he didn’t want to stop, for fear the Ghibli wouldn’t start moving again.

  The car meandered past two more full hotels, several ramshackle homes, and what appeared to be a large parking lot full of more construction equipment. A Carl’s Jr. hamburger restaurant, currently closed. A Subway sandwich shop, also closed. A used car dealership, the sight of which got Sinclair’s hopes up, until he saw several hopped-up pickup trucks and lowriders out front. As much as he was growing to despise the Maserati, he knew nothing would come from allowing a gang of backcountry monkeys to prod and poke at it. The car shook and shuddered a bit more, actually starting to drop in and out of gear.

  “What in the hell is wrong with this car?” Sinclair muttered.

  “Just stop, Jock,” Meredith said wearily as the lights of the center of town came into view.

  “Where, Meredith? Where would you like me to stop?” Sinclair almost shouted.

  Meredith pointed out the windshield. “Right there. That looks as good a place as any.”

  Sinclair looked in the direction she indicated. A long, low-slung, vaguely horseshoe-shaped building the color of burnt orange sat in the darkness. The sign proclaimed it was the Trail’s End Motel, and in smaller text, Sinclair was informed that every room had HBO, a bathtub, and an ironing board.

  What’s more, a smaller sign glowed in the darkness like a happy afterthought: VACANCY.

  “You want to stay in a roach motel?” Sinclair was aghast at the prospect. “Meredith, darling, when was the last time anything less than a twelve-hundred-thread count set of sheets came into contact with your sacrosanct skin?” he asked, even though he was more worried about his own skin coming into contact with anything with a thread count south of five hundred ten.

  The Ghibli bucked again, almost throwing Sinclair against his seat belt. He cursed. Meredith sighed.

  “We don’t have much of a choice, Jock,” she said, the perfect picture of reason. “I really don’t think we’re going much farther.”

  “Damn this!” Sinclair shouted. He wrenched the wheel to the right, and the Maserati labored to get into the parking lot. He barely made it to the curb before the expensive car stalled with a lingering rattle. Try as he may, Sinclair couldn’t get the vehicle to restart. Frustrated, he collapsed back into the driver’s seat and regarded the sign towering over him.

  “Every room has an ironing board,” he said, bitterly.

  “You’d better hurry,” Meredith said. “With our luck, there’s probably only one room left.”

  Sinclair looked up as a two-door Jeep pulled into the parking lot. He threw open the door and lunged to get out, but the seat belt held him fast. He unlocked it with a curse and pulled himself out of the Ghibli’s opulent interior. His lower back was stiff and painful, despite the driver’s seat premium padded bolster. Growling in pain, he broke into a jog, heading for the motel office.

  “Damn this!” he said again. “Free HBO and ironing boards—damn this!”

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Reese was relieved of duty at two in the morning with orders to report back to the hospital by eight. He was also instructed to board an LAPD bus and head back to Hollywood Station to report the day’s activities. As Reese slogged his way aboard the waiting bus, he knew there was no chance of going home tonight—he wouldn’t be getting anywhere fast due to the gridlock. Even if he did manage to make it back to his condo in Culver City, by the time he tried to return to the stationhouse he’d have to do so either on his mountain bike or on foot. And fighting his way through the city as it went to hell wasn’t on his bucket list.

  So he sat on the bus with several other officers and watched the scenery slowly roll past as the big vehicle lumbered through the streets that were being kept open for official traffic. It was still slow going, for there weren’t enough cops and Guard troops available to keep the streets completely clear. What should have been a twenty-minute drive was stretched out to almost an hour and a half. A lot of the cops on the bus nodded off, including Bates, who sat scrunched up in a seat with his chin on his chest. Reese tried to do the same, but sleep eluded him. In the dim light of the bus’s overhead lights, he reviewed his notes and tried to mentally prepare his report before getting to the station. That was almost as hopeless as trying to sleep. His thoughts were all over the map, which was to be expected. The work week had started off with what seemed to be a grisly case of cannibalism, where a father had partially devoured his child before attacking a neighbor. It had been horrible, and had pushed Reese far enough over the edge that he had decided to throw in his papers and retire after almost three decades as a City of Los Angeles police officer. Now, the horror and disgust he’d felt at the crime scene seemed distant and quaint. He’d spent the day fighting zombies while trying to keep one of the city’s biggest hospitals open, and that had been an exercise in excruciating dread. Zombies—stenches, as the military called them—were no longer just a thing of film and fiction. They were real, and they were replicating madly all across the city, chasing down the living and tearing them apart. And those Los Angelinos that had been bitten but otherwise managed to survive an attack would soon die from the virus the dead carried, and in doing so, join their numbers. It was like some ghastly perpetual motion machine. Once set in motion, Reese wasn’t sure it could ever be turned off.

  Well, at least I can close the book on that kid’s murder, Reese thought. Case solved, and I didn’t have to do a damn thing. He snorted at the thought. He and his partners hadn’t even started a proper murder book yet, but the case was solved, even if just unofficially. No one would ever look back and wonder what happened to some little baby, massacred in his own crib by his father, who had come home from Saudi Arabia with a flu that had turned him into a zombie.

  The bus was held up for a bit as several firefighters tussled with a blaze on Melrose Avenue. The strip mall that housed the California Chicken Café was on fire, and while the fire department seemed to be getting it under control, the squad of National Guard soldiers escorting them was busy gunning down corpses that traipsed across the street in an attempt to attack them. The gunfire woke everyone up, and Bates leaned across the aisle toward Reese as he looked out the bus’s windows, eyes squinted against the glow of the flame.

  “That CCC?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Reese said.

&nb
sp; “Huh. Guess the chickens are finally getting cooked up right.”

  “Hey, driver! Don’t stop here, we’re a fucking target!” shouted one of the cops sitting behind Reese.

  “What do you want me to do, run over a couple of Army guys?” the driver shouted back. “They’re standing right in front of us!”

  “Maybe we ought to get out and lend a hand,” Bates suggested.

  Reese shook his head, feeling suddenly weary. “Hell, no. I’m not getting out of this thing.”

  “Come on, Reese. Get in touch with the crusty old patrolman that’s still lurking behind your detective shield.”

  Reese favored Bates with what he hoped was an icy glare. “Get in touch with yourself, Master Bates.”

  Bates snorted, then pointed at the sliding window beside Reese. “Well, if you’re feeling lazy, Detective, you don’t have to get out. Just open the damn window and shoot.”

  As Reese contemplated the efficacy of Bates’s suggestion, something bounced off the side of the bus, leaving a spider’s web of cracks in one of the windows. Over the gunfire, he heard someone shouting from one of the buildings overlooking Melrose. Bates leaned down in his seat and looked out the windows on his side.

  “Wow, there’s a bunch of people on the roof of the gallery next door,” he said. “They’re throwing bricks and stuff at the bus.”

  “What are they saying?” Reese asked. “I can’t make it out.”

  Bates turned back to him and shot Reese his patented quirky smile. “They’re yelling ‘Fuck the LAPD’ and ‘Fuck the police.’ Gosh, even at the end of the world, people still hate the po-po of the LAPD.”

  “You fucking scabs!” one of the cops in the back of the bus shouted. Reese jumped as the man dropped the window beside him, pushed his rifle through the opened, and starting shooting at the people on the rooftop. Brass casings tinkled down the bus’s narrow aisle.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Reese shouted.

  “Yeah, Kozinski, that really isn’t all that cool,” Bates added, his voice not exactly full of concern.

  “Those fucking scrotes!” the cop in the back thundered. Even in the semidarkness of the bus’s interior, Reese could see the beefy man’s face was absolutely florid with anger, his eyes wide and shining. “Those scumbags are throwing shit at us while we try and save the city? Fuck them! Fuck them all!”

  At that moment, the Guard waved the bus on and the driver didn’t pause—he got the big vehicle moving, just as a bottle bounced off its roof. Kozinski fired another shot, then let out a big whoop.

  “Yeah, I got one of those fuckers!” he shouted, pumping one fist in the air.

  Reese looked over at Bates. The lanky patrolman shrugged.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Bates said.

  “Yeah, I think you’d better.”

  ###

  Hollywood Station was located on Wilcox Avenue, on the same block as the Los Angeles Fire Department Museum. The street was dark and empty, blocked on both ends by barricades manned by cops and more of Narvaez’s National Guard troops. As the bus trundled up the street, Reese leaned across the aisle and looked out the broad windshield. He thought he saw a lot more Army Combat Uniforms than LAPD blue out there. That didn’t necessarily alarm him—the cops needed to be out in the neighborhood, doing whatever they could to try and stabilize West Hollywood. The Guard was a better choice for securing facilities and roadways. While civilians would be more likely to approach policemen, they would be less likely to try anything silly with uniformed soldiers, especially when they were backed up by armored Humvees with machine guns in their turrets.

  Reese regarded the dark apartment buildings that looked out over the stationhouse parking lot. He saw no movement, but he couldn’t stop from wondering how many zombies might be lurking in them, along with terrified people who were barricaded in their one-and two-bedroom units. The lights were still on in the stationhouse, so either it still had city power or its generators were running. He figured it was the latter, for the buildings on the west side of Wilcox were totally blacked out. The offices across the parking lot entrance hosted a bail bondsman’s business. They were blackened and burned. The bus’s tires splashed through a thin gruel of dirty water that spread out across the street as tendrils of smoke continued to rise from the wreckage. The LAFD had apparently responded to the call, but Reese saw no sign of a continued firefighter presence.

  The bus pulled into the fortified parking lot and came to a stop with the explosive release of pneumatic brakes. The cops got up and prepared to disembark. Reese looked over at Bates, and the patrolman nodded to him.

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” Bates said, looking toward the rear of the bus. Reese looked back too. He saw the hefty patrolman Kozinski sitting in his seat, his wide, chubby-cheeked face composed into hard, defiant lines. At the same time, there was a cast of guilt to his eyes. Kozinski knew he had fucked up, and fucked up badly. Despite how the department was portrayed in popular media, the LAPD was very unlikely to countenance a patrolman opening up on citizens with a semiautomatic rifle, even during the zombie apocalypse.

  Reese left Bates to it and stepped off the bus. As soon as his feet hit the pavement, he heard someone call his name.

  “Reese!”

  Reese turned and found Renee Gonzales standing nearby, wearing a heavy tactical vest like himself. A rifle hung from its strap on her shoulder, barrel pointed toward the ground, and her Glock stuck out from her hip at an awkward angle beneath the lip of the armor. Her eyes had a vaguely panicked look behind her glasses.

  “Renee. How’re you doing?” Reese asked.

  “Tried to get in touch with you a couple of times. You get my messages?”

  Reese frowned. He’d pretty much forgotten about his phone over the past few hours, so he reached into his pocket and fished it out. Sure enough, he had three missed calls, all from Renee in the past hour. He stepped aside to allow the rest of the cops to file off the bus and shook his head.

  “Sorry, past few hours have been absolutely bat shit at the hospital. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on over there. Anyway, what’s up?”

  “Jerry’s gone,” Renee said.

  Reese felt his frown deepen. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he up and left, Reese. Left his badge, and department cell on his desk, but took everything else. Body armor, shotgun, rifle, his service pistol, all his allocated ammunition. Even the ROVER he’d been issued. I had one of the guys check his locker—everything’s gone.” She pointed into the parking lot. “So’s his car.”

  “You try his personal cell?”

  Renee nodded. “Goes right into voice mail. Sent a bunch of text messages, but no response.”

  “You try the radio?”

  Renee patted the transceiver attached to her shoulder. The Remote Out of Vehicle Emergency Radio, known to the cops just as ROVER, was an eight-watt communication system used for mobile operations when a patrolman had to leave his radio car.

  “No response,” she said. “He just bolted, Reese.”

  Reese found he was unsurprised by the news. Jerry Whittaker had a nice house up north, in Toluca Lake. He couldn’t afford it on his salary, but his wife could, thanks to her position as senior partner with a major business accounting firm. Reese had been invited up a couple of times, and he’d been impressed with his partner’s living situation. The couple had celebrated the arrival of their first child only a year ago, so Reese figured that Jerry had a lot to protect.

  “You tell anyone about this?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Wanted to run it by you first.”

  “Forget about him, Renee. He’s in the wind.”

  “They’ll start asking about him, Reese.”

  Reese shrugged. “So tell them you haven’t seen him, and that you’ve tried to get a hold of him, but no dice. He’s made his choice, if there’s any blowback headed his way, he’ll have to take it on the chin.” Reese turned and watched as another platoon of cops moved towa
rd the bus and climbed aboard. He looked beyond the vehicle, peering at the dark apartment buildings down the street. They made him nervous—the five-foot retaining wall that separated the stationhouse from the street likely wouldn’t be a huge deterrent if a herd of zombies suddenly appeared.

  “I really don’t want to be on the line for this,” Renee said.

  Reese sighed. “Tell you what. I have to meet with Pallata and give her the lowdown of what’s going on at Cedar-Sinai. I’ll pass it on to her, and tell her you didn’t know anything about it. How’s that?”

  Renee nodded. “That’d help. I don’t want to throw Jerry under the bus, but …”

  “You’re not. He did this to himself. I kind of doubt there’s going to be any time for an investigation anyway. Don’t sweat it, Renee. If things get back to normal, maybe he’ll be able to give a song and dance that’ll save his hide, but if not, you and me are going to step back and let the chips fall where they may. We’ve got other things to worry about.”

  Renee nodded again. “Okay.”

  “You have a duty station?”

  “Just right here, waiting for a tasking.”

  Reese nodded. He looked over and saw Bates standing in a tight huddle with the hulking patrolman, Kozinski. From the latter’s downcast expression, Reese could see that Bates was giving him hell without making any kind of scene whatsoever. Reese didn’t know Bates all that well since they worked different parts of the street, but the senior patrolman gave Reese the impression he didn’t much appreciate fuck ups by the men in his division.

  “Okay. Why don’t you come with me—I have to file a report, then brief Pallata. I’ll fill you in on what’s going down at the hospital, and you can maybe give me some idea of what’s happening everywhere else.”

  SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

  Norton couldn’t sleep.

  He lay stretched out in the big king-sized bed, tossing and turning. For two hours, he pretty much just stared up at the dark ceiling, revealed to him only by the dim glow of the alarm clock’s LED display. The blackness here in the desert was pretty much absolute; even back on the shoreline of Malibu, there was still enough light pollution coming from the urban sprawl of nearby Los Angeles to contaminate the night. Back there, he sometimes felt it was never dark enough, even with the shades pulled over the windows and the sliding glass doors that led to the expansive deck. Here in Single Tree, he found the nighttime was almost too black, as deep and mysteriously forbidding as outer space.