The Last Town

by Knight, Stephen

  Reese nodded. “Okay. I’ll pass that back to my area commander. Anything else on that, or can we move on?”

  “What’s on your mind, Reese?”

  “I heard you guys are giving people the ballistic pain reliever if they show up with anything looking like a bite wound. I’ll assume you don’t discriminate on age, race, or sex.”

  Morton slowly pushed himself to his feet. He was just as tall as his size had promised, maybe six-four. Reese wasn’t a small guy, but Morton had a couple of inches and probably forty pounds on him, even without the gear. “These are desperate times, Detective Reese. I have troops to protect and a sizeable portion of a major metropolitan area to stabilize.”

  “That include murdering people, Colonel? You know, like maybe a little kid who got bitten by a dog instead of a zombie? Or do you guys take the time to ascertain the nature of the injuries these people come in with?”

  “We depend on the emergency department staff to make those determinations,” Morton said. “We have our own medical personnel assisting them, but we don’t decide who gets sterilized. The civilians in charge of this facility indicate who’s been bitten by a stench.”

  “And you just take care of it from there?”

  “Reese…” Morton looked as if he might be about to lose his shit, then he got himself squared away. “I take my orders from Sacramento. This is what I’ve been told to do. I don’t like this duty one damn bit, but I know these are the only measures that are going to mean anything.”

  Reese understood the rationale behind the decision. He also pretty much accepted it as necessary, but that still didn’t give him the option of forgetting he wore a badge. “The governor and his staff will pass that on to any survivors who might’ve lost a family member to your tender mercies, right?”

  “You talk a good game. You know, your Lieutenant Newman wasn’t too bothered by this last night when the stenches started popping up left and right.”

  “Newman’s a lazy piece-of-shit reject from Boston who still gets a boner whenever he overhears someone mention Bill Belichick. He doesn’t give a damn about this city, and he never did.”

  “And you do, is that it?”

  “I remember what I’m here for. If I didn’t, I would have been long gone.” Reese looked around the mini-bunker. “As you can see, things have changed a bit since I took my oath.”

  “You do whatever you think is right, Reese. You’re the civilian command authority here, and I can’t stop you from doing a damn thing. But I have my orders, and my orders are to put down stenches.” Morton glared at Reese, his face an impenetrable mask.

  Reese didn’t doubt that the National Guard officer’s orders galled him, but Reese didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. “You need to be careful in who you kill,” Reese said. “That’s it. Use all due caution, but if it comes to light that you and your guys made mistakes once this is all over, then you’re going to have guys like me taking a hard look at you—that means a murder rap. And saying you’re acting under orders from Sacramento sounds great right now, in the heat of things, but the reality is, you know better than to commit mass murder. Can you say that you’re a hundred-percent certain the men under your command haven’t done that? That maybe even you haven’t done that?”

  Morton’s expression didn’t change, but a slight tremor went through the uniforms running the radios. They glanced up at Morton surreptitiously, and that bothered Reese something awful. Reese was certain some questionable shit had gone down.

  “So what’s your advice, Detective?” Morton asked, ignoring the telltale reactions of the comms team.

  “Don’t kill the living. Blast the ever-living shit out of the dead, but don’t kill the living. That’s not your job, no matter what the politicians tell you. Because if the hammer starts to swing the other way, they’ll throw you and your guys under the bus in a heartbeat.”

  Morton smiled thinly. “You think they’ll even have the chance, Reese? You did take a look around outside, right?”

  “No, I don’t think there’s much of a chance of the politicians coming after you. I think this town is on the edge of going over. But I still have to do my job, which is protect the public. And if it turns out I have to protect them from the National-fucking-Guard, along with the zombies, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “That’s a shame, Reese. Because I’m not going to let some hair shirt with a badge try to tie my hands behind my back.”

  “I don’t tie anyone’s hands behind their back.” Reese reached behind him and pulled his handcuffs from his belt. “I use these, and not in a Christian Grey kind of way.”

  Morton snorted. “You might be an old bull, but you still got balls on you. Gotta give you that much. How old are you, if I can ask?”

  “Fifty-four. What is this, you going to start a profile for me on eHarmony?”

  “Just idle curiosity, Detective.” Morton shrugged. “So… we appear to be between a rock and a hard place.”

  “Not really. Stop executing people, and we won’t have a problem.”

  Morton’s brow furrowed. “We’re not ‘executing people’ here, Reese.”

  Reese looked pointedly at the communications team. “Really? They seem kind of nervous about this discussion we’re having. Why is that, Morton? Tell you what, let me go pull the security camera tapes. I’ll take a look at the video in the command post. If everything is cool, we’re going to get along fine. If I see shit I don’t like”—Reese held up the handcuffs again—“then I’ll be back. And you might be one big son of a bitch, Morton, but this ‘hair shirt’ hasn’t gotten by this long by being a pussy.”

  “Fucker, you do whatever you want,” Morton said, his voice sharp and loud. “I’ve got work to do. Sergeant Kidd! You out there?”

  One of the Guardsmen standing security outside the room peered into the bunker area. “Right here, sir.”

  “This piece of shit is leaving,” Morton said, pointing a thick finger at Reese. “Make sure he gets out safely.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Guardsman stepped toward the door. “Officer, you want to come with me, please?” He pulled his rifle into both hands, staring at Reese’s shotgun.

  Reese put his cuffs back in their pouch. “Sure thing,” he said, locking eyes with the towering National Guard commander.

  SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

  Even though it was October, the days in the California desert at the foot of Mount Whitney were still hot and dry. The eight work crews digging the trenches in the parched soil certainly knew it. Using a combination of bulldozers and backhoes to tear great rents in the earth all around the town of Single Tree, they would work day and night until they were done. The almost three hundred workers had arrived over the past few days in trucks, RVs, and buses. All the transportation had been bought by Barry Corbett when possible or leased when purchase was not an option. The equipment was all company-owned, so there were no inquisitive third parties who needed to have their curiosity satisfied every hour.

  The foreman, Randall Klaff, was a short, burly Texan with a Fu Manchu mustache. He had never thought much of California and would have been happy if the entire fruity state had slid into the Pacific, never to be heard from again. But the zombie apocalypse—“zompoc,” some of the men called it—had reset everyone’s personal compass. While Klaff would have been content to watch the world burn, Dallas, his home, was thought to be living on borrowed time. When Corbett had taken Klaff into his confidence and explained what was happening, what would likely happen, and what would happen to him and his family, Klaff had signed on for the California job in a heartbeat. Klaff had seen Corbett’s diagrams, and while he thought the old man was probably pissing away a hundred million bucks or so on some shitty desert town, he had thrown in with him because he promised to keep Klaff and his family safe.

  So he stood in the scrubby desert, sweating beneath his George Strait Lambert straw cowboy hat, one of several he had bought at Cavender’s earlier in the year. The work was nothing n
ew to him. It was mostly the same as digging up the landscape while exploiting new oil fields, with the difference being that the current hole wouldn’t be hundreds of feet deep and ten wide. It would be ten feet deep and almost forty miles in circumference, except where oil, gas, and water mains fed into the town.

  “Good enough for me,” Klaff had said.

  He oversaw the first day’s work from seven in the morning through seven at night. The shifts would be long and hard, and when the job was done, they’d move on to other efforts. He shared responsibility for the trenching with another foreman named Danny Tresko. Tresko was ten years younger and had no problem working overnights. At forty-eight, Klaff found nighttime work no longer appealed to him, so he was content to let Tresko take over even if the younger man wore his hair long like some Mexican whore.

  The men and machines worked their way across the desert, in plain sight of the highway that led into town. Traffic there was backed up but still moving. That would change when he started chewing up the concrete with the heavy equipment. Corbett’s security teams would come in handy at that point. Klaff would never win a Mr. Sensitivity Award, but he’d seen the images on the nightly news. What Corbett had told him might come to pass was in full swing, and that left even a man as remote and uninterested as Klaff feeling the undertow of panic and fear tugging at him.

  Every day, the news was worse. New York was on fire. Washington had fallen. Miami was a killing ground. Houston was in total lockdown, and the authorities in New Orleans and Birmingham were already losing the fight. He’d even heard there had been a dead-rise in Single Tree.

  Klaff understood his role in the grand scheme of life was to be a glorified ditchdigger, and that didn’t bother him at all. Even if he didn’t have hands as big as frying pans and fingers about as dexterous as Jimmy Dean sausages, his dyslexia and his squeamishness at the sight of blood pretty much queered any chance he might have of becoming a neurosurgeon. Klaff had only seen blood twice, once when a crane collapsed on some guy, smashing him flatter than a pancake, and the second time when a big wellbore drill bit had ripped off a guy’s arm. Klaff had held it together while on site in both instances, but as soon as he’d gotten home, he’d tossed up three weeks’ worth of Whataburger.

  The Single Tree job consisted of excavating straight trenches in friable soil without a lot of stickiness due to a summer season’s lack of moisture. The only impediments were miles of creosote bushes, some Joshua trees, and the occasional yucca plant, nothing that could stop a dozer. And the plans weren’t within seventy feet of impacting the water table, so other than some stones and the piping that had already been marked by the initial survey teams, there wasn’t a lot to worry about. All they had to do was dig.

  “Hey, Randy!”

  Klaff sat in his pickup truck a bit away from the work site, slurping away at a giant Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Single Tree Bistro, the only coffee shop open early in the morning. He looked around and saw Chester Dawson, a twentysomething whipcord-thin Taiwanese man, pointing past his truck. Chester had started working for Klaff a couple of years ago, and while Klaff had been initially suspicious of a Chinaman’s—Taiwanese, he mentally corrected himself—work habits, Chester was actually a pretty good digger. Plus, he had a nice South Texas twang, which coming from an Asian guy, delivered a lot of entertainment.

  “What is it?” Klaff shouted back.

  “Someone’s comin’!” Chester said, pointing again.

  With a groan, Klaff turned in the seat and looked out the rear window of the cab. Some guy was stumbling through the desert, headed toward the work site. His clothes were a mess, and Klaff was certain he saw dust falling from the man’s bony shoulders with each step he took.

  Whoa, looks like this guy’s been out here for a while. He immediately figured it was some motorist whose ride had broken down somewhere on the highway, but that didn’t explain what the hell he was doing coming there. With plenty of cars and trucks on the highway, someone should’ve been able to help him out. Maybe he’d been heading toward US-395 and had seen the work site and changed course.

  Klaff climbed out of the truck then reached back inside. He had a cooler in the back, full of water and some beers for lunchtime. He grabbed a bottle of water, just in case. There was no chance he was going to offer a Lone Star to a stranger even if the guy was coming out of the desert.

  “Let’s go check it out, Chester,” he called as he squared his straw hat on his head.

  The man had clearly seen them. He was stumbling toward them at a faster clip, bumbling his way through the creosote.

  “Uh, y’all sure about that?” Chester asked.

  “Well, Chester, what the hell are you afraid of? Looks like some poor old sumbitch got himself lost out here. The least we can do is check on him and make sure he’s all right.”

  Chester trotted over to the truck and put his hands on its hood, his eyes narrowed against the morning light beneath the brim of his weathered Texas Rangers ball cap. “Randy, I think we ought to wait.”

  “Well, shit, boy. Where were you raised up, some little renegade island province of China? Don’t you know what the hell common decency is?”

  One of the bulldozers ground to a halt, and its driver half-leaned out of the cab to shout something. Klaff couldn’t make out the words over the thrum of the big diesel.

  “I was raised in Calallen, damn it,” Chester said. He smelled like tobacco, and Klaff wrinkled his nose at the stench. “And I dunno, somethin’ about that guy looks really fuckin’ weird.”

  The driver of the stopped dozer yelled again.

  Klaff waved at him. “Yeah, yeah, we see the guy! Get back to work!”

  The driver retreated into the bulldozer’s cab and went back to his job. Klaff turned and looked at the man approaching them. He was about a hundred or so feet away and looked absolutely filthy, as though he’d been in the desert a long, long time.

  “Guy looks almost dead on his feet,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. You folks from above Galveston don’t have a lot of common sense, right?”

  Klaff frowned, the way any North Texan and born son of Fort Worth would have. “What are you trying to tell me, Chester?”

  “I’m tryin’ to tell you that guy really is dead! Look at him, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Chester, taking the Lord’s name in—wait a minute, now. Are you telling me that’s a zombie headed our way?” Klaff turned and peered at the man. If the zombies were real, that guy certainly fit the bill.

  “You know, Randy, I have a feelin’ you’d really clean up on Family Feud,” Chester said. “You got a gun on you?”

  “Hell no, I don’t have a gun. We’re in California, not Texas!”

  As the figure shambled closer, it veered a little to head straight for Klaff and Chester. Klaff tried to figure what he could use as a weapon. He could hop in the truck and run the thing down, but part of him feared it really was just some lost guy. Spending time in Single Tree’s jail would cut into his overtime earnings. He looked in the truck’s bed. All sorts of implements lay there. He tossed the bottle of water inside and reached for a shovel.

  “Okay, I guess I can give him a line drive off the head if he’s a brain-eater,” Klaff said. He was developing a real case of the jelly-bellies right now. He had no idea what would happen if he beaned the guy on the head with a shovel in full swing, but he was certain it would involve a lot of blood.

  Chester jumped up onto the side of the truck’s bed. He grabbed the handle of a pickax and slid back down to his feet. “I’ll back you up.”

  “Yeah, thanks a million.”

  By the time the figure closed to within twenty-five yards of the truck, it was pretty clear Chester had been right. The walking corpse was dressed in the tattered remains of a business suit, and its shoes were battered and torn. Its eyes were covered by a film of dust, making Klaff wonder how it could even see. Maybe it was guided by smell, or it had some supernatural mecha
nism that led it to living prey. Given that a dead person was walking toward them, the latter didn’t sound so farfetched.

  The corpse stopped ten yards away and seemed to regard Klaff and Chester with its dead, dry eyes for a few seconds. It stood stock-still, and Klaff figured that was because it wasn’t breathing, so there were no biological processes going on that might cause movement, no motion of the diaphragm, no pulse of blood through its veins, no nothing. The bulldozers ground to a halt, and from the corner of his eye, Klaff saw Jose Ramos jump out of his backhoe. Ramos reached under it, wrenched the rig’s tire iron out of its clip, then hurried toward Klaff’s truck.

  The zombie took in a deep, dry breath and released it in a single, monotone moan that sounded like rocks rubbing together. It reached toward Klaff and Chester as it stiffly marched forward, its jaws spread, revealing dry, yellowed teeth inside a dusty maw.

  Klaff swung his shovel like Babe Ruth dinging a meatball pitch. The shovel hit the zombie square in the head, and the blade ripped right through its skull, chopping off the top three inches of bone and yanking the desiccated brain out of the pan with a dry pop. The zombie collapsed as if its legs had suddenly vanished. The section of skull bounced off the truck with a rattle, and the brain flopped to the ground with a semi-wet plop.

  Klaff moaned, feeling his gut roil. Then, he realized there was no blood, just a black substance that kind of looked like pulpy motor oil. He let out a sour-smelling belch, and his stomach leveled out. Klaff was grateful. He didn’t want to puke in front of the boys.

  “You guys all right?” Ramos screamed as he pounded to a stop beside Chester. He peered down at the corpse lying beside the truck. “Holy shit. It’s a fucking zombie, man!”

  Klaff felt a tremor go through him when his adrenaline-charged body finally checked in with his brain. He had just killed a zombie. A zombie that had come out from the desert. “Where there’s one, there’s more,” he said, and his voice sounded weak and distant.