“Okay, yeah, we need to go,” Plosser said. He sensed something was about to go wrong, and he wanted to get the hell away from it.
“What happened at the Bowl?” the patrolman asked again, voice loud and angry now. His right hand went to the Glock on his hip.
Plosser’s M4 came up in response as the Guardsmen drew down on the man. “Step away from the vehicle, or you will be shot!” Plosser thundered.
“Hey, hey, let’s take it easy!” the ranger said. He held up his hands and stepped back, looking from the patrolman to Plosser.
“Just tell me what happened at the Bowl,” the patrolman said, walking along with the truck. “Please.”
The boy Reese had picked up back at the Bowl began to cry, his face buried against his mother’s shoulder. He looked down at the patrolman. The man’s face was vague in the shadowy gloom.
“The Bowl is gone,” he said. “It was a hell of a fight, but the zombies won.”
“Fuck,” the man said. He lowered his hand from his weapon, and lowered his flashlight too. “Fuck.”
There was a thunk as Bates dropped the truck into neutral and revved its engine, signaling his intent to move on. The crowds in the parking lot before them began to part.
Reese turned to the civilians in the truck. “You heard the guy—we’re going to be driving through zombie central. You people want to get out here?”
“Hell, no,” said the father of the boy Reese had rescued. “We’re with you guys.”
The rest of the civilians remained silent. Reese shrugged at them, then looked at Marsh.
“How about you?”
Marsh looked up at him with wide eyes. “What about me, Reese? Jesus, you’re not kicking me out, are you?”
“No, Marsh. Just making sure you want to come along for the ride.”
“Fuck yes, I’m coming along!”
Reese motioned for him to keep his shit under control, then turned and faced forward. He took a moment to glance back at the highway patrolman, but the man just stood there, shoulders hunched, watching the big five-ton truck trundle away.
###
Coming down from the Temescal Gateway Park, the truck approached the intersection with Sunset Boulevard. This far to the west, it was relatively deserted. Across the street, an expensively blinged-out Ford Raptor lay on its side. Reese couldn’t tell what had happened to the truck—there was no sign of an accident. There was no one on the sidewalks, and the single house he could see across the street was dark and silent. Bates didn’t waste a lot of time. He continued across Sunset and down Temescal Canyon Road, heading south. The truck rumbled past the Theatre Palisades. A Neil Simon show was advertised on the dark marquee facing the street, and the theatre’s glass atrium was blank and vacant. Reese thought he heard a panicked shout from the apartment building behind it, but he couldn’t be sure. Beside him, Plosser kept his face pointed forward, regarding the road before them through his night vision monocle. They rolled past quiet houses and an empty community athletic stadium. Reese hadn’t spent much time in this neighborhood—the Pacific Palisades—but knew enough about it to recall it was almost bucolic in that it was full of leafy trees and a lack of high rise buildings. This was a family community, and he wondered where all the families were.
Bates cut the wheel to the left, turning off the street before the intersections with the Pacific Coast Highway. Sticking to meandering residential streets, he kept the big truck to the west of the 405 freeway. The neighborhoods on the west side were more affluent suburbs, which Reese figured might be a bit safer for travel. It was a good plan.
Soon though, the truck began moving into the more organized urban gridwork of the Midcity neighborhoods. These were less lily-white, more immigrant-fed communities. Reese was surprised to find the power was still on. Streetlights burned brightly, and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic began to increase. There was more of a frantic bustle here, and from the sacked convenience stores and supermarkets, Reese could see that circumstances were going to become more problematic.
Bates turned inland a bit, then made a right onto Lincoln Boulevard, taking them through the eastern end of Santa Monica. The houses here were a mix of residential luxury and old Los Angeles bungalows, one of the few areas in Santa Monica were high net worth individuals mixed with middle income families. The truck began to slow. Ahead, a Time Warner cable TV van had been t-boned by a school bus. Both vehicles were empty, lying in a broad field of shattered glass. Torn clothing and personal items lay scattered all about, much of it bloodstained. In the glow of the streetlights, Reese saw raw tissue glistening in the night, and bloodied footprints led off in almost every direction. They had missed the carnage, and if the school bus had been full at the time of the accident, Reese was glad to have foregone the show.
“Okay, there’s something up ahead,” Plosser said, becoming suddenly animated. “I see a lot of cops and civilians. Looks like a road block. Lots of bodies, too.” As he spoke, several weapons fired. Not at them, but in the near distance.
Reese peered ahead. Sure enough, he could make out several LAPD tactical vehicles and squad cars, and beyond them, bulky figures moved about. In the background were the slab-sided walls of a large building. It would be Roosevelt Elementary School, one of the designated evacuation centers. It was still operational, which didn’t surprise Reese in the slightest. Virtually every LA-area school was a fortress now, under total lockdown even when things were fine and right in the world. It would take one hell of a horde to get inside. Reese reached for the ROVER handset on his shoulder and announced himself, but received no response. The radios had been silent for the past couple of hours, broken only occasionally by fragmented calls from patrol units that had wandered onto their frequency while searching for support.
The truck bumped a bit as it rolled over a score of bodies lying in the street. Reese grasped the side of the bed and looked down. These were bullet-riddled zombies, all of them killed by shots to the head. The stench of decomposition here was powerful, especially as the weight of truck compressed the corpses, causing them to split open and void the contents of their dead bowels.
In the back of the truck, someone retched.
“Reese! What are we doing here?” Bates shouted.
“Make contact. They’re our guys,” he said.
“Like hell, these are west side guys.”
“Well, then they shouldn’t be too surprised when we stop and ask for autographs, since they think they’re celebrities anyway. Right?”
Bates cackled in the cab and continued on toward the road block ahead. One of the cops there started waving them away frantically.
“What’s his problem?” Marsh was up on his feet now, looking over the top of the cab with Reese and Plosser.
“We’re going to cause a lot of attention,” Plosser said. “I get the idea these guys don’t want anyone or anything coming around to check out the truck.”
“Bates! Turn off,” Reese shouted. “Go right down Alta.”
Bates flipped on the truck’s turn signal, and the cops waved them on. They remained crouched behind their vehicles, weapons shouldered as they regarded the rows of houses alongside the school. A figure hustled out of one home’s driveway, loping toward the truck, running right for its grille. Reese knew some of the dead could move frighteningly fast, and this was one of them. Bates sped up and took it out. Reese heard the thing bumping and thrashing beneath the truck, and he hoped the rig’s giant transmission hub would brain it. No such luck. As the truck rolled past it, the ghoul scrambled back to its feet and tried to pursue the vehicle. It was moving a lot slower now, probably because both its legs were broken. But that didn’t stop it from trying, and it followed the truck as long as it could see it, rising, stumbling, falling. Rinse and repeat.
“Leave it,” Reese told Renee when she raised her rifle. “Let the guys on security take care of it. They don’t want any loud noises around here unless it has to happen, and right now, it doesn’t.”
�
�How many people are in that school, do you think?” asked one of the civilians. The narrow-faced man was looking back at the elementary school as it receded behind them.
“More than they can handle, probably,” Reese said. “Why, you want to get out?”
The man looked back at Reese sharply. “No. Was just asking a question.”
“No problem.”
The truck pushed on past an alleyway. A speeding car headed right toward it, engaging in a game of chicken that it couldn’t possibly win. Bates kept the truck’s speed at a constant twenty miles per hour; the car finally came to a shuddering halt and jerked toward the side of the road, its tires bumping over the curb in front of a trendy craftsman-style house. Bates let the truck drift a few feet to the right, and Reese looked down at the old Dodge Avenger that had almost driven straight into them. A man looked up with terrified eyes, mouthing Help me behind the closed window. Reese jerked his thumb down the street as the truck rolled past.
At the intersection with Seventh Street, things got real. There was a pack of corpses moving up the street, and they oriented on the truck the second Bates started turning off Alta. They reached toward it hungrily, and Bates accelerated forward.
“Okay, get ready for it!” Reese said to the others. “The bed of the truck is too high for them to climb into, but some of them might be able to hang on and haul themselves up, so be careful!”
“Are we shooting them?” one of the cops in the back asked.
“Not unless we have to. Stay cool. Maybe Bates will be able to take them all out.”
The truck shuddered a bit as it drove right into the crowd. Reese kept a hold of the side of the bed with his left hand while gripping his M4 by its pistol grip in his right. Those ghouls which weren’t run over by the truck charged at its sides, slapping at it with their hands as they tried to find purchase. They looked up at Reese with dull, hollow eyes and moaned in hunger. One of them managed to snag a hold of the driver’s side view mirror. Before Reese could do anything about it, Bates stuck his pistol right in its face and shot it, sending the corpse tumbling to the street. Down a bit from where he stood, another ghoul—a very tall one—hopped up and managed to grab onto the side of the bed. It defeated itself when it then tried to use the spinning tire as a foothold. The truck bounced a bit as the zombie was ripped away and pulled underneath the turning wheel.
Well, that was convenient, Reese thought.
Then another zombie hauled itself over the tail gate with a rasping roar, reaching for the woman holding the boy. The boy’s father grappled with it for a moment before one of the cops pulled him back. The zombie pitched forward, trying to lever itself into the bed of the truck. It was flung out by a veritable fusillade of gunfire as four cops opened up on it at once, blasting it back into the street. The boy shrieked at the sudden noise, and his mother pulled him into a bear hug, as if to shield him with her own body.
“Take it easy, kid!” one of the cops snapped. “You’re okay!”
“Check all the sides, make sure we’re clear!” Plosser said. The cops did just that, and reported no more hangers-on. Reese leaned toward the driver’s side.
“Bates, you all right?”
“Just lovin’ life, Detective,” Bates responded. “Nothing like a little road trip through Santa Monica to clear your head.”
###
Lincoln Boulevard became more of a mess as the journey extended through Santa Monica. There was a gigantic traffic snarl at the foot of the Interstate 10 interchange, which had become a twenty-four buffet for the hundreds of zombies that had converged on the area. The screams, gunshots, and roaring engines warned the cops in the M939 five-ton truck well in advance, and Bates cut further to the north to circumvent the bedlam. Just the same, the big truck came under attack twice as shambling monstrosities surged toward it, boiling out of shadowy neighborhood streets. If the five-ton truck hadn’t been such a hulk, things would have ended much sooner than anyone would have liked, but sitting high up in the rig’s bed gave the cops and Plosser excellent sightlines. Despite the darkness, they were able to repel the attacks. And then there was the fact the truck itself was virtually a weapon. All Bates had to do was drive right into the mounting hordes and crush them beneath the rig’s tires.
Reese wondered for how long that tactic would continue to work.
Eventually, Bates pulled the truck back onto Lincoln and continued the southward trek toward Long Beach. Reese checked his watch. It was almost three in the morning, but even at this hour, panic continued to reign. The dead were growing in numbers, and the living were in the fight for their very lives. It wasn’t uncommon for the cops to see mounds of squirming dead, writhing as they feasted on trapped humans. Those mounds would quickly unwind as the truck drew near, but by and large, the dead were too slow to catch up to it. And while the truck could smash abandoned vehicles out of its path and suffer little damage in doing so, the vehicles served as barriers to slow the dead even further.
Sometimes, panic-stricken civilians sprinted toward the truck, waving their arms, shouting for help. Twice, Reese ordered Bates to stop. Both times, Bates ignored him. In one particularly horrifying moment, Reese saw a father winding up to actually throw his toddler into the truck. At the last moment, he faltered, and the opportunity was lost—just as a gaggle of stenches rounded the block, drawn to the street by the rumble of the truck’s passage. The man fled, carrying the child in his arms. The zombies shuffled after him in pursuit. Reese had no doubt how things would end.
Madness. It’s absolute madness.
Reese was keyed up, virtually coasting on an adrenaline high that didn’t seem to ever end. In counterpoint to his hyper-alert state, some of the other cops were starting to wear out. Too much activity, too little sleep. Reese worried about Bates nodding off behind the wheel. He called out to him to ensure he was all right. Bates assured him a nap wasn’t in the offing.
The truck rolled on, passing into another darkened neighborhood. An apartment complex was on fire a couple of blocks to the west, and the prevailing ocean breeze carried the smoke across the street. Bates had to slow the truck. Reese clenched his teeth in frustration. This was taking too long. By the time they made it to Long Beach, the sun would be up.
“Plosser, can you see through this shit with your goggle?” he asked.
Plosser coughed. “No, sir. Won’t see through smoke. Or walls, or around corners. Just in case you were wondering.”
Reese grunted.
“Not digging this,” said Renee, holding her rifle in her lap, barrel pointed toward the floor of the truck bed. Reese motioned for her to point it somewhere else. The last thing they would need was for her to accidentally blow away the drive shaft.
“Let’s keep eyes out,” Plosser said. “Stay away from the side rails. The good thing about the smoke is the stenches won’t be able to see us very easily, but they can still hear us. And they don’t really need to breathe, so it’s not going to slow them up.”
“Fucking bright light of encouragement you are,” Marsh bitched.
The truck pushed into the inky blackness of smoke-filled night, its headlamp beams catching the writhing smoke, making seem to wriggle like a phantasm in pain. In the haze ahead, twin glows pulsed. As the truck moved closer, the glows resolved themselves into the dully-blinking hazard lights of a white car. The car was abandoned, its doors standing open. Whomever had left it there had fled in a hurry, while it was apparently still moving. The car had continued rolling until it came to a rest against a small pickup truck. There was no way around it, so Bates kept on going. There was a bump as the front bumper pushed into the car’s right rear fender. A squealing noise rose above the cackle of the diesel engine as the truck pushed the car out of its way. Sheet metal crumpled as the car slid off to one side and was momentarily dragged alongside the pickup truck it had rolled into after being abandoned. Glass shattered.
Amidst the racket, Reese heard a dry moan.
Emerging from the smoke, a dozen stenches
stumbled, hobbled, shuffled, and lurched toward the truck, barely visible in the cast-off illumination from the rig’s headlights. Reese slapped the top of the cab and shouted, “Bates, heads up!” He then turned and shouldered his M4, popping a round right into one zombie’s face as it made to grab onto the side rail. It fell back, dragging another grotesquerie down with it. There was more gunfire from the rear of the truck, and Reese glanced over to see two cops drilling a trio of zombies that were trying to clamber over the tailgate. The civilians sitting there shrieked, and Renee pushed them into the center of the bed, her own rifle at the ready. Plosser put a hand on Reese’s shoulder, pushing him back against the bed and began firing into the smoke-filled night. His night vision monocle gave him the ability to see farther into the smoke by amplifying the light spilling over from the truck’s headlamps, and he wasted no time in punching zombie tickets. Expended cartridges ricocheted off the cab and rolled around on the floor of the bed.
The M939 accelerated then, causing both Reese and Plosser to flail about. Reese managed to stay upright, but Plosser fell across a cowering Marsh, causing the older detective to curse.
“Thanks for allowing me to use you as a crash pad,” Plosser said before regaining his feet.
The truck pushed along the road, ambling through the smoke. Reese heard cries for help, but the cops couldn’t help anyone. And even if they could, Bates wasn’t going to stop on his own accord.
The people of Los Angeles were on their own.
###
Things got even worse when they got closer to LAX. The airport was surrounded by gridlock, despite the fact an airplane hadn’t taken off from there in days. Bates drove a meandering path around the airfield, trying to find an intersection that wasn’t blocked so he could cross to the south. The vast airport was, of course, in the middle of low-income neighborhoods. Zombies were everywhere, roaming in large packs. They zeroed in on the truck and surged toward it, mouths open, black tongues lolling, their eyes dull and fixed in the truck’s headlights. Bates crashed through them whenever he had to, and twice, Reese had to clean off the side of the truck with his rifle. The stenches were getting luckier; the roads were tough to navigate, which meant Bates had to drive slower, and that gave them the opportunity to grab a hold of the side of the bed, or launch themselves onto the back bumper. Reese was surprised when a shape loomed over the cab itself. A zombie had literally climbed over the front bumper and crawled over the hood. When it saw the people in the back of the truck, it charged toward them, but it was held up by the tall windshield. That gave Plosser enough time to drill it in the face with his M4, and the corpse sagged. It slid off the right side of the hood.
The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead Page 3