“Come along, luv,” he told Meredith.
Meredith looked up at him from where she lay listlessly on the bed. “To where?”
“Outside, of course. We have an event to document.”
She managed a small snort. “I don’t think I want to work with you on this, Jock.”
Sinclair was annoyed, but he felt he did a man’s job in preventing it from showing. “Whatever do you mean, darling?”
“Watching you aggravate these people while they’re trying to save this town isn’t my idea of fun, Jock. There’s no joy in watching you do what you’re best at: being an ass.”
Sinclair sniffed. “Well, then. Enjoy your time alone in the motel room, then.”
“I will. Trust me.”
Sinclair grabbed up the camera gear, swung into the backpack, and left the room. Insufferably spoiled little tart.
“Do take a moment to freshen up while I’m gone, would you?” he snapped just as the door swung closed, shutting off her reply. If she even made one. Meredith was starting to look like she was merely going to waste away. Not that it mattered to Sinclair, one way or the other.
###
He shot some practice footage outside the hotel, getting some angles on the stacked up traffic on Main Street and focusing on closed shops and stores on the other side of the four lane boulevard. The tension in the air was palpable, and horns were blaring up the street. For a moment, Sinclair felt as if he’d been transported across the country to midtown Manhattan during the evening rush hour—the rumble of engines, the shriek of various horns, the shouts of irate drivers. But no, he was still stuck in a podunk little town far from even the asshole of American civilization, which was of course Los Angeles.
Still, the symphony of horns was like a siren’s call to his ears. Sinclair marched up the sidewalk until he discovered the cause of all the pandemonium. One of the gas stations had been opened up, and the police were there, monitoring the refueling operations. A long, long queue of traffic led to the station parking lot. Sinclair raised the camera to his eye, going for a handheld shot since he hadn’t brought the tripod with him and shot some coverage of haggard-looking motorists refueling their cars and trucks while their families looked on with eyes full of weary despair. The sight seemed familiar to Sinclair, and he fancied it was similar to covering the aftermath of some great catastrophe, like a tornado tearing through a Midwestern trailer park. Only instead of glazed-eyed rednecks stumbling across the frame, there was a mix of families, from low income sort in battered minivans to well-heeled gentry in sleek European sedans. As he panned the camera around to take in more of the scene, he found one of the armed policemen centered in the frame. Though it wasn’t a policeman, after all; it was one of Barry Corbett’s hired thugs, clad in body armor and holding an assault rifle, one of the greatest sicknesses that seemed destined to perpetually infect American society. Sinclair felt a wave of disgust crest inside him, and he let the camera linger on the man for a long moment. He was dressed in khaki clothing festooned with pockets, and over his body armor he wore a vest that was literally studded with high-capacity magazines. He wore sunglasses with a cap pulled low on his head, but from the breadth of his shoulders and the thickness of his arms, Sinclair could see he was one of those beef-fed military fanatics, a poster child for the repulsive NRA. Taking his eyes away from the camera’s flat panel viewfinder, he peered around the camera and looked at the gas station directly. He saw that there were more of Corbett’s men, standing in different areas of the parking lot, watching the parade of misery from behind dark sunglasses. All had weapons.
Disgusting. Simply disgusting, he thought.
He documented more of the panicked citizenry and their unelected and unofficial overlords in the gas station before he moved on, heading north. Virtually all of the side streets had been blocked off, separating the residential areas of town from its center. The barricades were either vehicles or, in some cases, actual barriers of razor wire and sand bags. Sinclair was surprised by this blatant militarization of a small California town, and he shot all of it, dutifully encoding everything onto the solid state drives inside the camera. Some of these barriers were still being erected as he walked by, and those doing the work weren’t Corbett’s men. They were locals.
Simply amazing, he thought. It’s unbelievable. These people are willingly separating themselves from the refugees!
Sinclair wondered what had happened to the revered American hospitality he’d heard so much about.
“Excuse me!” he shouted to one group of men working on one of the barricades. “Can you tell me what you’re doing?”
The men over at Sinclair as he walked toward them, camera pointed right at them. There were five of them, two older men and three much younger—school boys, by the look of them. All were sweating in the late afternoon heat of the desert, and their clothes were sticking to their bodies like second skins.
“Aren’t you that television fella?” asked one of the older men. He wore a battered cowboy hat and actually had a bandana around his neck. And on his belt was a holster which contained an absolutely gigantic revolver.
My God, he actually thinks he’s John Wayne!
“Yes, I’m Jock Sinclair. Can you tell me what you’re doing here? Why are you barricading the street?”
The men exchanged glances, then turned back to Sinclair. They regarded the camera with suspicious eyes.
“It’s all right,” Sinclair said. “Barry Corbett himself approved of this—he wants me to document whatever happens inside Single Tree,” he said, adopting what he felt was a lofty but disarming air.
“Well mister, what does it look like we’re doing?” the older man in the cowboy hat said. He had a thick mustache that was streaked with gray, and his blue eyes shined brightly in the afternoon sunlight. When he didn’t add anything more, Sinclair understood that it hadn’t been a rhetorical question.
“It looks like you’re blocking a residential street,” Sinclair said.
“Damn right. We’re blocking all of them,” the man said.
“Yes, I know. But please, tell me why you’re blocking them?”
The man looked at Sinclair as if he was wearing a set of Spider-Man pajamas complete with pink bathroom slippers. “For security. Why else? Are you sure Corbett wants you running around with a camera? Because you seem kind of dumb to me.”
“I don’t—” Sinclair bit back his outraged response, took a breath, and tried again. “What do you mean, for security? Security from whom, exactly? Or what?”
The man pointed past Sinclair’s shoulder, at the traffic slowly churning up and down Main Street. “From them, for now. And later? From the God damn zombies. You know about those, right?”
“Yes, yes, we all know about the zombies,” Sinclair said. “But they’re not here, are they? And what threat do these poor people pose to you? Why barricade your streets? Shouldn’t you be welcoming them into your homes? Offering aid, food, a place to sleep? These are families, not criminals!”
“Yeah, well, we have families, too,” the man said. He pointed at the young men who continued to work, hauling sand bags out of a flat-bed truck and stacking them across the mouth of the road. “See these boys? They’re mine. See that other guy there, with the belly? That’s my brother. He has a wife and daughter. See this street? We live on it. We’ve lived on it since day one, when our great-grandfather built the first house back in the 1920s. My grandfather and his family grew up in it, my daddy and aunts grew up in that house, my brother and I grew up in it, and now my kids are growing up it.” He turned back to Sinclair. “We’re going to defend what’s ours. We feel horrible for what these poor people on the street are going through, but there’s nothing we can do for them. We have to put our families first.”
“But isn’t that hard-hearted? What about the young children that might need help? That are panicked out of their minds?” Sinclair pressed. Inwardly, he was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. He so loved it when he caught the so-called �
�salt of the earth” types engaging in exclusionary behavior. Especially the ones who wore guns and said they loved the Constitution as much as they loved the Bible.
“Like I said, we feel horribly for them, but there’s not a lot we can do,” the man in the cowboy hat said. “Corbett’s giving them fuel to get on their way. They don’t have a lot of time to do that before the town gets closed off, anyway.”
Sinclair frowned behind the camera. “Closed off?”
The other older man, the one with the big beer belly that was barely contained by his spotted T-shirt, pointed up Main Street. “Go take a look for yourself, mister. Everything’s right out in the open. Go take your camera and ‘document’ up there, would you? We’ve got work to do here.”
“I believe I will,” Sinclair said. “Thank you gentlemen for your time.”
“Yeah. Sure,” said the man in the cowboy hat. “Hey, don’t forget your going away present.” And with that, he farted loudly. The other men guffawed. Sinclair was shocked at the sudden, uncalled for vulgarity.
“Disgusting lout!” Sinclair snapped. He regretted the retort immediately upon recalling the revolver at the man’s hip. Taking a moment to demonstrate that discretion was indeed the better part of valor, Sinclair fairly scuttled away, heading up the sidewalk.
###
When Sinclair arrived at the northern end of Single Tree—a long, sweaty walk when one considered he had to lug a camera and backpack—he was surprised to discover construction equipment on one side of the highway. Long trenches had been gouged out of the earth, right up to the highway’s concrete surface. They were more than four feet deep. Out in the desert, more construction crews were busily planting steel beam posts that were hoisted in place by cranes. He didn’t know what to make of it.
The scene was frantic, not because of the equipment, but because police officers were turning the traffic away from town. More of Corbett’s men were here with their accursed assault rifles, and they weren’t content to just stand and observe; they were actually forcing carloads of people to turn away from the town. And the police allowed it to happen! Sinclair trained his camera on the commotion, dialing in the focus as best as he could. He was surprised to see that several of the officers on scene were Indians—not even Single Tree police, but Indians from the reservation.
He approached the construction crew on his side of the road. Again, he was confronted by another would-be cowboy, this time wearing a straw-type hat. “Help you with something?” the man asked. He chewed a toothpick and had a thick Fu Manchu mustache. He was burly—no, that would be too kind a description, Sinclair decided. He was fat, and had a round belly that threatened to peek out beneath his brown T-shirt. The man regarded Sinclair with dark, porcine eyes.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing here?” Sinclair asked, raising the camera.
“Hey, hold on there one minute,” the man said. “Did I say you could take pictures of me?”
“You work for Barry, yes?”
“Barry Corbett? Well, yeah. So?” The man had a deep voice that contained a fair amount of twang to it. Perhaps this one actually was a cowboy, after all.
“I work for Corbett, too,” Sinclair said, hopefully not through gritted teeth. “I’m his documentarian.”
The man blinked. “His what?”
“Documentarian,” Sinclair repeated.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time. But I don’t know what the hell a ‘documentarian’ is. Is that like a Democrat?”
Sinclair fought hard not to roll his eyes in utter disdain. Ever since arriving in Single Tree, he’d been running from culture shock to culture shock. Truly, the people in the entire town were remarkably dim. Was there no end to it?
“It means I’m documenting the events of the town. Through this,” Sinclair said, hefting the camera.
“Oh. You mean you’re a documentary filmmaker?”
“Yes. That’s exactly right.”
“Okay. So—”
“Wow, it’s Jock Sinclair,” said a Chinese-looking man with a deep Texas accent. He was dressed in dirty work clothes, and he shot Sinclair a toothy grin.
Sinclair was satisfied at having been recognized, even if it was from such a surprising quarter. “Yes, it is,” he said, smiling.
“You’re a real fucking jerk off,” the Chinese man with the Texas accent said.
Sinclair was scandalized. “I beg your pardon!”
“You know this guy, Chester?” asked the man in the straw cowboy hat.
“Yeah, he’s some dude who does talk shows on cable,” the Asian man said. “Hates guns, hates America, really hates Texas.”
“I do not!” Sinclair said. Not because the Asian man was lying, but because Sinclair feared he was getting set up to have his ass beaten down.
“That so?” asked the short, fat man with the thick mustache.
“Not at all!” Sinclair said. He looked at the Asian man. “Listen, I’m here at Corbett’s request. I have to produce a historical record of what happens in this town.” He looked back at the man in the cowboy hat. “And I’m here to interview you and your crew.”
“Well, we ain’t got much time to jawbone,” the man said, his voice a slow, contemplative drawl. “What do you need from us?”
“Are you the leader here?”
“I’m the foreman of this crew, yeah.”
Sinclair indicated the camera. “May I record you?”
The man sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Hold on.” He turned back to the Asian man, who was still standing next to him, looking at Sinclair while smiling like a mindless, buck-toothed ninny. “Get back to work, Chester. We have to start in about ten minutes.”
“Well, we’re ready, Randy—ain’t nothin’ to do, but wait.”
“Then go wait, Chester. Somewhere else,” the man in the cowboy hat said.
“Well, shee-it,” said the Asian man, and he walked away, head bowed.
The short man in the cowboy hat turned back to Sinclair. “Okay, let’s get this knocked out.”
Sinclair raised the camera and switched it on. “For the record, what is your name and job title?”
“I’m Randall Klaff, and I’m the daytime foreman of the entrenching team.”
“‘Entrenching team’? What is that, exactly?”
Klaff looked at Sinclair as if he was an idiot, then turned and pointed at the long ditch in the desert. “See that?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a trench. My men and I dig those. We’ve dug one all around the entire town in two days. We’re finishing up our job today when we cut the road.” With that, the foreman pointed behind Sinclair, indicating the highway behind him.
“You’ll be cutting through the road, you say?”
“Yep. In about ten minutes, as soon as the last carloads of people are out of Single Tree.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I feel it’s going to be pain in the ass, because concrete and asphalt are a lot tougher to cut through than friable desert soil.”
“No, no. I understand the work is physically more arduous. But what about the human cost?”
“What? Human cost? Are you asking me how much my men are paid by the hour?”
“The lives you might be destroying, turning families away from Single Tree,” Sinclair said.
Klaff sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Mister, I just dig ditches for a living. You want to have long discourse about the human condition, you’re going to have to find someone else to talk to. Our job is to dig trenches in the ground so the walls can go up to keep the zombies out of the town. That’s it.”
“So you don’t feel any remorse at turning away panic-stricken families?” Sinclair pressed.
Klaff’s eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his hat. “Listen, mister. You sound like someone with a bit of an agenda. Are you sure Barry Corbett sent you out here to talk to me? Because Barry kind of knows me, and he knows I don’t like long-winded conversations about things I can’t do nothing
about. In fact, he’d probably understand if I happened to drive over you with a bulldozer.”
Sinclair persisted. “So it means nothing to you?”
“As long as my family is safe, no, it don’t mean much to me at all,” Klaff said. “These are different times, mister. I can’t afford to get weighed down by a guilty conscience over stuff I can’t do anything about. What about you?”
“Me?” Sinclair asked.
“Yeah. What if one of these families can be safe if you give up your place in the town? You willing to do that?” Klaff asked.
Sinclair didn’t like the sudden turn, and he damned himself for not seeing it coming. This Randall Klaff fellow might be a Texan Neanderthal, but he was nevertheless quite clever. For a glorified ditch digger, anyway.
“When will you start your work?” he asked, deflecting the question.
Klaff smiled broadly. “What’s the matter, don’t want your answer on camera? Don’t worry, it was rhetorical, I think they’d call it. I know you’ve got yours, so you’re not going anywhere. Right?”
“The road, please,” Sinclair said.
Klaff sighed and checked his watch, then looked over at the men manning the checkpoint. “When those guys there tell us, we start getting to work. Shouldn’t be much longer now.”
Something buzzed in the sky overhead. Sinclair kept the camera trained on Klaff as he looked up. A drone puttered past, its four rotors flickering in the sunlight as it zoomed out over the highway.
“Well, what is this?” he asked.
The Last Town (Book 5): Fleeing the Dead Page 8