After getting the Jeep washed, he drove back to his home on Bush Street. His house was on a corner lot, and he had bought the neighboring lot from a resident who had moved back east. Combining them, he had built a modern but understated craftsman bungalow-style residence, complete with a swimming pool and a two-car garage. Solar panels graced part of the roof, generating enough charge to heat the water and keep the pool pump running but not much else. The house was big for the area but not so huge that it overshadowed the rest of the neighborhood’s ranch-style homes. Originally, he had wanted to make it two stories, but the town zoning board wouldn’t hear of it. In the end, he didn’t mind. Twenty-five hundred square feet was more than enough for one man, especially when he only lived there for less than two months a year.
After dumping his luggage inside and taking the time to ensure the firearms were locked up in the master bedroom’s gun safe, he stepped back out into the hot day. Next door, two cars sat in the driveway, which meant his parents were home. He sauntered across the grass, still green and lush thanks to the automatic sprinkler system, and opened the front door after knocking once.
“Hey, guys, it’s Gary,” he said as he stepped inside.
His father waved at him from the couch in the living room, which was just off the entry hall. Arthur Norton was a thin man in his late seventies. He wore wire-rimmed bifocals perched on the tip of his nose, his steel-gray hair was neatly combed, and there was nary a whisker on his chin that Norton could see. The older man had a bandage across the top of his right ear. Norton closed the door behind him and moved into the living room. From deeper in the house, he heard his mother talking, probably on the phone.
Arthur motioned toward the flat-screen television. “New York City’s on fire!”
“What happened to your ear?” Norton asked.
“What? Oh, some skin cancer. Nothing major. You hear what I said? New York’s—”
“On fire, yeah. I heard. LA’s headed that way, too. That’s why I’m here. Dad, do you guys still have all that emergency food I bought for you a while back?”
Arthur seemed not to hear as he continued staring at the television. Norton walked over and sat down at the other end of the big couch. The NBC affiliate in New York was broadcasting helicopter footage of a gigantic fire raging across the tip of Manhattan. It looked like the area had been bombed, and for the second time in his life, Norton saw the World Trade Center area on fire. The skyscraper formerly known as the Freedom Tower belched black smoke much the same way the Twin Towers had done fifteen years earlier. It was a depressing sight.
“This is huge, son,” Arthur said, his voice full of emotion. “Huge.”
“Dad, the food. You guys still have it, right?”
Arthur finally tore his eyes away from the screen. “What food?”
“Those six big buckets of food that I put in the third bedroom a couple of years ago.”
“Oh, those. No, they’re out in the garage. Your mom didn’t like them in the closet.”
Norton shook his head. “Dad, that stuff needs to be kept in a temperate environment. Extremes ruin the lifespan.”
Arthur waved dismissively. “A little heat isn’t going to hurt anything, Gary. It’s all vacuum sealed. Everything’s fine. So what was this you said about Los Angeles? Did you know the governor called up the National Guard? I heard the airport’s closed, too. Did you drive in?”
“All the airports are closed, and I got here a couple of hours ago. And yes, I know about the Guard being called up. And in a couple of days, Los Angeles is going to wind up just like that.” Norton pointed at the fiery devastation on the TV.
“Really? So this isn’t just another scare, like the bird flu or Ebola, this time?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Are your cars gassed up?”
“We going somewhere?”
“Dad, no. I’m just trying to figure out how you guys are squared away. Are the tanks full? Is there enough food in the house?”
“Well, sure, we have enough food,” Arthur said. “Your mom’s not into cooking much anymore, so most of it’s frozen or in cans.” He frowned. “So you think this is going to be something serious and long term?”
Norton nodded. “I think so. That’s why I’m here. Honestly, I think I was lucky to get out of LA when I could.”
Arthur picked up the remote and muted the sound. “So tell me about Los Angeles.”
Norton gave him the CliffsNotes version of his helicopter flight to Burbank and told him about the congestion at the airport. He added that the FAA had grounded all civilian aircraft.
His father nodded. “I heard that. It was on the news.”
“There’s more,” Norton said. He explained Barry Corbett’s plans to try to harden the town.
Arthur smiled and shook his head. “Barry always had a streak of altruism in him, even when he was a kid. But now I know what all those trucks are doing lined up on the side of the road down by the airport.”
“Oh my God,” his mother said from the kitchen. “Are you sure?”
Norton and his father glanced that way. Norton thought his mother had been listening to their conversation, but she was still on the phone.
“Mom, everything okay?” Norton called out.
Beatrice stepped into the kitchen doorway. She wore a simple blouse and a long skirt that almost brushed the top of her sandaled feet. Her gray hair was impeccably coiffed as always. Norton thought not for the first time that his mother made a great physical match for his LL Bean-clad father.
She held a yellow ’70s-era Trimline phone to her ear, and her blue eyes were wide. “Walter Wallace is dead! He had an episode in the pharmacy while waiting for his heart medication, then he attacked the pharmacist. The police shot him!”
“The police shot him?” Arthur asked. “Wally’s eighty-eight years old!”
“I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but—”
Norton waved a hand. “Mom! You said he attacked the pharmacist?”
“Yes. I’m on the phone with Lyda Whitman, and she saw it all! She says Wally collapsed, and they were giving him CPR, and then he just sat up and went berserk!” Beatrice turned away and walked back into the kitchen, animatedly talking into phone.
Norton’s father leaned back against the sofa’s overstuffed cushions and regarded the silent television for a moment. “Well, I guess Single Tree has its first zombie,” he said. “Maybe Corbett’s not just being altruistic. Maybe he’s right.”
ON THE ROAD, CALIFORNIA
The trip to Los Angeles had started out reasonably enough, despite the traffic on the highway. But as Jock Sinclair navigated the Maserati Ghibli westward toward the City of Angels courtesy of Interstate 15, things became more chaotic. While the eastbound traffic back toward Las Vegas was mounting, so was the traffic to the west. Sinclair had driven the route several times in the past few years, and it was unusual for there to be much traffic there in the middle of the American desert unless there was an accident or something. The radio wasn’t much help. Even the Sirius news stations were covering the goings on in New York and Europe, with a smattering of tidbits about Asia and the Middle East. Russia and great swaths of China had gone dark, despite the Russians launching perhaps the biggest artillery action in history to try to defend Moscow. And the reports that the Russians had been trying to stop a horde of zombies was enough to make Sinclair smirk as he squinted against the setting sun.
Zombies? Has the entire world gone completely mad?
Ensconced in the comfort of the Ghibli—a car Sinclair merely tolerated, as he felt an Aston Martin would have been much more sensible—it was easy for him to pooh-pooh the world’s troubles despite the traffic. With Las Vegas almost three hours behind him, he had calmed down a bit since he and Meredith had set out. Perhaps, he was beginning to think, he had overreacted in insisting they leave Las Vegas. It would have made more sense to try to launch his broadcast from the local television studio.
Sinclair had tried to call his superiors at
the cable news network to inquire about alternatives, but his messages had gone unreturned. That was troubling. Even calling through the switchboard and selecting random extensions hadn’t netted him a single answered call. His attempts to contact his people in Los Angeles had failed as well.
“Jock, maybe we need to go somewhere else,” Meredith said as he brought the car to another dead stop. “We could go up to San Francisco.”
“Oh, don’t be such a stupid twat,” Sinclair snapped. “I realize you love San Francisco, but it’s a town full of faggots and people with oatmeal for brains.”
“It could be safe there. We haven’t heard anything about San Francisco on the radio. Maybe everything’s still normal there.”
“Yes, normal with a possibility of being buggered,” Sinclair said. “We’re going to Los Angeles, Meredith. End of discussion. Now I suggest you lean back and enjoy the ride. You’ve certainly done enough of that in your life, haven’t you?”
She glared at him. “You’re a complete prick, Jock.”
“Where you see a prick, I see a man who is sensibly dedicated,” Sinclair shot back. He glanced at the integrated GPS display in the Maserati’s Italian leather-wrapped dashboard. “We’re just outside of Victorville, so it won’t be long now.”
“Jock, what if what we’re hearing on the radio is true? LA’s in lockdown. The National Guard has been called up. What if, even if we did get in, it turns out that this… this plague they’re talking about is really happening, and what if it’s even worse than they say it is?”
“Why don’t you leave the thinking to me, since I’m much better at it,” Sinclair said.
Meredith shut up. She didn’t have much stomach for fighting—decades of living the good life after having been born into money had seen to that—but the truth was Sinclair didn’t have a clue about what they would do if what she had brought up actually came to pass. While he was as cutthroat as anyone, his survival skills were more oriented toward ingratiation and subterfuge than outright conflict. He was a civilized man, and he’d never had to resort to uncivilized tactics, not even in barbaric places like Texas.
Another radio report from Los Angeles came on, detailing how the US Navy was about to establish a blockade of the conjoined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Sinclair didn’t like what he heard, but he listened to it anyway, while Meredith made another fruitless attempt at reaching her family in New York. Sinclair gripped the wheel, mentally cursing the thick traffic. He knew that if they made it into Los Angeles, there was likely no chance they would be able to make it out.
###
An hour later, Sinclair leaned forward in the Maserati’s driver seat. A collection of flashing lights lit up the three-lane highway ahead, and traffic cones had been set out, funneling the oncoming traffic toward the next exit. A dozen of the California Highway Patrol’s finest stood amidst the cones, waving people toward the rightmost lane. They wore face masks and had gas-mask bags strapped to their thighs. Also on scene were several military vehicles that even Sinclair recognized as Humvees, crewed by soldiers in full uniform. The concrete barriers that made up certain segments of the central divider between the southern and northern travel lanes had been removed, and as Sinclair watched, the CHP allowed a Ford Flex to make a U-turn and attempt to merge into the northbound traffic just ahead of a hulking truck hauling a Walmart trailer.
“My God, they can’t seriously be forcing us off the highway here,” he muttered. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!”
“They’ve been saying that Los Angeles is closed to ground traffic for the past hour,” Meredith said, pointing at the multifunction display in the center of the Ghibli’s dashboard.
Sinclair hadn’t missed those reports. But he knew how often the media messed up even the most basic items of information, and he’d been driving on blind faith that they’d messed this one up, too. “Yes, I was just hoping we might be able to get closer, thank you very much,” he snapped.
“Closer to what?” Meredith shouted.
Sinclair jumped in his seat. Meredith wasn’t the screaming type. That sort of drama was beneath her.
“Just how far into hell did you want to drive us, Jock? Halfway? All the way? Do you even have a plan, or are you just blowing hot air out of your ass like normal?”
Sinclair was momentarily taken aback by her outburst, then he realized Meredith was frightened almost to death, which he couldn’t blame her for. The radio was full of nothing but bad news. Their smartphones weren’t very useful, as neither of them had been able to make any calls of consequence due to congestion on the wireless networks. The only thing that could have made things worse would be if the emergency broadcast system was activated, and Sinclair didn’t doubt that was eventually going to be the case.
“I’m sorry,” he said through gritted teeth, an admission he’d almost never made in the past under any circumstances. “My plan was to get us back to Los Angeles, somewhere civilized, where there’s a large law enforcement community—”
“We had that back in Las Vegas!”
He ignored her interruption. “But now that things are obviously taking a turn for the worse, we’ll exit up ahead and see if we can’t make it north.” He cleared his throat. “To… to San Francisco.” He pointed at the GPS display. “We’ll try to make it to the Barstow Highway and cut across to the coast. If we can’t, we’ll take Interstate 5 up and find our way to San Francisco from there. We’ll only stop for petrol and food, but it’s probably best not to stop for long. Whatever this… this pandemic might be, it could very well be airborne, and they just haven’t mentioned it yet.”
“Jesus,” Meredith said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“It might not be that bad,” Sinclair said, trying to force some comfort into his voice. “But it’s obvious now that we need to avoid people. People are spreading this kind of, uh, infection that makes them attack each other. We need to stay mobile.”
“What if we can’t stay mobile, Jock? What then?”
“Well, we fight, of course.” Sinclair hit the turn signal and looked over his right shoulder, trying to merge toward the exit. It was going to take some doing without rubbing paint with another vehicle.
“Fight?” Meredith snorted. “Jock, the last time you had a ‘fight,’ you were almost knocked unconscious by a forty-five-year-old television car show host.”
“That was not a fight. He sandbagged me!” Sinclair shouted as anger surged through his veins.
The driver of a pickup truck leaned on the horn as the Maserati began drifting into the next lane. Sinclair pulled the wheel to the left and edged away from the other vehicle, scowling as a Mexican man shouted something through the truck window.
Meredith shook her head. “It’s times like this that a gun would be a good thing to have.”
“A gun?” Sinclair said. “A gun, you said? Dear Meredith, haven’t you of all people come to realize just how much pain and suffering the ‘Amurican’ love affair with the gun has caused? Tens of thousands of deaths every year—”
“Jock, save it,” Meredith said wearily. “I know how you feel about guns. But right now, a gun would be a good thing to have, no matter what your views are.”
Sinclair snorted and shook his head. “A gun. Really, Meredith. Sometimes, you’re just so basic.”
She glared at him. Sinclair ignored her and concentrated on merging into the traffic headed for the off ramp.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The first few hours of Reese’s tour with the National Guard at Cedars-Sinai had been, for the most part, largely uneventful. He had been able to suck down some of the coffee donated by the Starbucks across the way in the Beverly Center and some sandwiches and pizza someone had brought over from the California Pizza Kitchen.
Whereas Bates roamed the hospital with a team of Guardsmen—he was a patrolman, after all—Reese stayed put near the emergency room entrance with Narvaez and his senior officers, who had commandeered a portion of the sidewalk and road
way beyond to serve as an impromptu command post. Narvaez coordinated his troop movements from a Humvee studded with antennas.
Sirens wailed all across the city, and every few minutes, an ambulance would roll in with new patients. Not all the patients were victims of zombie attacks. Several had fallen prey to vanilla criminal activity, such as assaults and home invasions, the numbers of which had increased substantially over the hours. As the zombie infestations grew, law enforcement resources were being put to the test. The 9-1-1 call centers were overloaded, meaning that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in need were being left to their own devices.
Once a patient had been identified as a crime victim, Reese interviewed them and took their information. By the time the sun had set, his notepad was already half full, and he wished the department had issued a tablet of some sort instead. His right hand was suffering from a severe case of writer’s cramp.
Reese was helping himself to another cup of tepid coffee when one of the senior nurses approached him. She was a short, sturdy black woman with salt-and-pepper hair and big eyes magnified by Coke-bottle glasses. She wore a long-sleeved shirt under her green medical scrubs, and she hugged herself as she looked up at him, as if trying to ward off a chill.
“Excuse me, are you with the LAPD?” she asked.
Reese wondered why she would ask the question since he was wearing a ballistic vest clearly marked as POLICE. “Yes. What can I do for you?”
“We have several cases that are terminal. In fact, we have one that might have died in the time it took me to leave the ward and come to you.”
“Ah.” Reese adjusted his vest and looked around. “Okay. People who had been bitten?”
“Yes. And some who weren’t. A traffic accident for one, a shooting for another.”
“Okay. And you have them isolated, right?”
“They’re in isolation, yes, but it’s not like a prison,” the nurse said. “If they really wanted to, they could get out. If they, you know… wake up.”
The Last Town Page 10