The Last Town

by Knight, Stephen

  “More than they can handle, probably,” Reese said. “Why? You want to get out?”

  The man immediately shook his head. “No. I was just asking a question.”

  “No problem.”

  As the truck passed an alleyway, a speeding car headed right toward them, 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. A man stared up at him with terrified eyes, mouthing, “Help me,” behind the closed window. Reese jerked his thumb down the street toward the school as the truck rolled past.

  At the intersection with Seventh Street, a pack of corpses was moving up the street. They oriented on the truck the second Bates started turning off Alta. They reached toward it hungrily, and Bates accelerated.

  “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 as it drove into the crowd. Reese kept a hold of the side of the bed with his left hand while gripping his M4 in his right. The ghouls that weren’t run over charged at the truck’s sides, slapping at it as they tried to find purchase. They looked up at Reese with dull, hollow eyes and moaned in hunger. One managed to grasp the driver’s side-view mirror. Bates stuck his pistol in its face and fired, sending the corpse tumbling to the street. Another ghoul, a very tall one, hopped up and grabbed onto the side of the bed, then it tried to use the spinning tire as a foothold. The truck bounced as the zombie was ripped away and pulled underneath the turning wheel.

  Well, that was convenient.

  Another zombie hauled itself onto the top of the tailgate with a rasping roar. Hanging half into the bed, it reached for the woman holding the boy. The boy’s father grappled with it for a few seconds 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 fusillade of gunfire as four cops opened up on it at once. The boy shrieked, 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 said. “You’re okay!”

  “Check all the sides. Make sure we’re clear!” Plosser said.

  The cops obeyed 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. A gigantic traffic snarl at the foot of the Interstate 10 interchange had become a twenty-four-hour buffet for the hundreds of zombies that had converged on the area. The screams, gunshots, and roaring engines warned them well in advance, and Bates took a detour to circumvent the bedlam.

  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 far worse, but sitting high up in the rig’s bed gave the cops and Plosser excellent sight lines. Despite the darkness, they were able to handily repel the attacks. Also, the truck itself was a weapon. All Bates had to do was drive directly into any zombie groups and crush them beneath the rig’s tires. Reese still worried over how long that tactic would continue to work.

  Eventually, Bates pulled the truck back onto Lincoln and continued southward toward Long Beach. Reese checked his watch. It was almost three in the morning, but even at that late hour, chaos continued to reign. The dead were growing in numbers, and the living were in a fight for their lives. Occasionally, they would see mounds of squirming dead writhing as they feasted on trapped humans. Those mounds would quickly unwind as the truck drew near, but 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, those civilian cars and trucks served as barriers to slow the dead even further.

  Sometimes, panic-stricken civilians would sprint toward the truck, waving their arms and 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, the man faltered, and the opportunity was lost because a gaggle of stenches rounded the block. 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, coasting on an adrenaline high that didn’t seem to have an end. In counterpoint to his hyperalert state, some of the other cops were starting to wear out due to too much activity and too little sleep. Reese worried about Bates nodding off behind the wheel. He called out to him twice to ensure he was all right, and Bates assured him both times that 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 ocean breeze carried the smoke across the street, making it difficult to see. Bates had to slow down, and Reese clenched his teeth in frustration. The trip 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,” Renee said. She was holding her rifle in her lap with the barrel pointed toward the floor of the truck bed. Reese motioned for her to point it somewhere else. The last thing they needed was for her to accidentally blow away the driveshaft.

  “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 down very much.”

  “Fucking bright light of encouragement you are,” Marsh said.

  The truck pushed through the blackness, its headlamp beams catching the writhing smoke, making the tendrils seem to wriggle like a phantasm in pain. In the haze ahead, twin glows pulsed. As the truck moved closer, the glows resolved into the dully blinking hazard lights of a white car. The car was abandoned, its doors standing open. Whoever had left it there had fled in a hurry, perhaps even while it was 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, and the car slid off to one side to be momentarily dragged.

  Amidst the racket, Reese heard a dry moan. Emerging from the smoke, a dozen stenches stumbled, hobbled, shuffled, and lurched toward them, barely visible in the cast-off illumination from the rig’s headlights.

  Reese slapped the top of the cab. “Bates, heads up!” He then turned and shouldered his M4.

  He popped a round into one zombie’s face as it made to grab onto the side rail. It fell back, dragging another grotesquerie down with it. More gunfire came 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 directed them into the center of the bed, while keeping her own rifle at the ready. Plosser put a h
and on Reese’s shoulder to push him back against the bed then began firing. His night vision monocle gave him the ability to see farther into the smoke by amplifying the light 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 suddenly accelerated, causing 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.

  Reese heard cries for help, but they couldn’t help anyone. And even if they could, Bates wasn’t going to stop.

  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 surrounded by 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 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 leap onto the back bumper.

  Reese was surprised when a shape loomed over the cab. A zombie had apparently 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 slid off the right side of the hood.

  Reese wondered what Bates was doing in the cab during all that, but the truck was still moving. As long as it did, he tried not to worry.

  But the five-ton was still subject to physics, and while it was a hardy vehicle, it wasn’t invulnerable, and it couldn’t push through tons of dead traffic. Eventually, their luck began to run out. There were too many obstacles to navigate around, too many dead. Bates cut the wheel to the right and ran up an embankment, shoving aside an abandoned Tesla, crushing its unibody form in the process.

  The truck climbed up to Westchester Parkway, which wasn’t much in the way of an improvement. The road was as clogged with dead traffic as Lincoln Boulevard had been, and just as many zombies haunted the area. Deserted hotels flanked the road. Reese wondered if their lightless hallways were stalked by dozens of flesh-eating ghouls or if pockets of humanity still lingered inside, hoping for rescue.

  “Yeah, this is definitely a bag of dicks,” Plosser said. He scanned the roadway through his night vision device, his head swiveling from side to side. He pointed off to the right. “Don’t know if you can see it, but there’s what’s left of a Guard unit over there.”

  Reese and some of the other cops peered into the darkness. The lights were still on at the airport. Reese could make out the indistinct outlines of some slab-sided vehicles parked along the fence. There were more five-ton trucks, too.

  “Anything over there we might be able to use?” Reese asked.

  Plosser shook his head. “We’d never get over there, and if we did, we’d never get out alive. Stenches are everywhere.”

  Reese had to agree. Shambling humanoid figures moved across the tarmac, momentarily silhouetted against the glow emanating from the airport building.

  Marsh shook his head. “Fuck. What are they doing over here?”

  “Lots of people tried to get to the airport,” Reese said. “The zombies followed the chow line. And maybe the lights attract them, too. Who knows?” He paused then added, “Who cares?”

  The truck took a bumping left turn onto La Tierja Boulevard. Reese tried to recall what was in that area. He was pretty sure it was mostly industrial. Hearing popping noises of gunfire, he couldn’t tell if the truck was driving toward the shots or away from them.

  Bates’s voice came over his ROVER. “Reese.”

  Reese grabbed the microphone and pulled it toward his mouth. “Bates, how’re you doing?”

  “Still kicking it. Listen, we’re never going to get through if we stick this close to LAX. We have to head east for a while, put some distance between us and all the bullshit here.”

  “We don’t want to drive into South Central, man.”

  “If we don’t, we’re not going to be driving anywhere. The dead are all over this place. We need to get the fuck out of here. I’ll take La Tierja up to Manchester, and we’ll move across town on that. I’m thinking if we can make it to Prairie Avenue or somewhere in that area, we’ll have a better time of it.”

  Reese didn’t agree, but he wasn’t the one doing the driving. “Okay, if you think it’s the way to go. How’re you holding up? Do you want one of us to take over for you?”

  “No. I’m good. I’ll let you know when it’s time to change drivers.”

  “I’d rather fight gangbangers than the dead anyway,” Plosser said.

  “Yeah,” Reese said. “Sure you would.”

  ###

  Bates’s plan died shortly thereafter. After crashing through three rows of dead traffic on Sepulveda Boulevard and rolling up La Tierja, it became obvious the number of dead was increasing. Reese didn’t know what to make of it. Either zombies had already overrun the neighborhoods in South Central, or they were being pushed out. The latter was an event he considered to be very unlikely.

  As the truck made it to the intersection of La Tierja and Manchester, two things immediately became very clear. Manchester was totally blocked, thanks to several accidents and an ongoing fire that had consumed several vehicles. Hundreds of people were still trapped in their cars, surrounded by pulsing throngs of the dead. Reese was stunned by the sheer numbers of stenches. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, perhaps.

  “Christ,” Plosser whispered. He sounded like a man who had just had a blindfold removed only to discover he had been led to the executioner’s block.

  Reese grabbed his ROVER. “Bates—”

  “I fucking see it, Reese. We’re going for that building there. We need to get inside then barricade ourselves in tight for a while. We’ll have to wait until these things leave before we can go any farther.”

  “Let’s go back, Bates!”

  “Turn the fuck around and tell me how we’re going to do that, Detective.”

  Reese spun around, along with the other cops, and they all swore at once. Behind them, hundreds of stenches filled the street, shambling, loping, and crawling. They were surrounded by the legions of the dead.

  The truck angled off to the right and plowed through the rear of a motor home, sending fiberglass, plywood, foam insulation, and household goods exploding through the air. A queen-size foam mattress bounced off the top of the cab and skittered back into the street as the truck rolled into the parking lot of a five-story cube-shaped building. The structure was dark, but through the ground-floor windows, Reese saw the glow of an exit sign inside. The place still had power, for whatever it was worth. The truck braked to a halt just beneath the overhang that led to the building’s main entrance. Bates turned off the headlights, and the diesel engine coughed before it cut out.

  “Everybody out!” Bates yelled as he jumped out of the cab. He slammed the door shut behind him and bolted for the building.

  “Out! Out, out!” Reese echoed, pushing at the cops. “Help the civvies!”

  “What about the fucking truck?” Marsh asked. “What, we just leave it here?”

  “Stenches aren’t going to be interested in it,” Plosser said. “Come on. Pull the pins on that tailgate, and let’s get the hell out of here!”

  SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

  The biggest pain in Mike Hailey’s
ass right now, aside from the fact that Single Tree was teeming with displaced persons, was the disabled vehicles. People were running out of fuel along Main Street, and the halted cars and trucks mightily impeded the flow of traffic. That meant not only did he and the rest of the overworked town cops have to figure out how to clear the jams, but they had to deal with the people who were caught in a town that didn’t want them and couldn’t really take them in if it did. He’d already been read the riot act on that by the older cops. Single Tree was closed to everyone, and they had no choice but to try to relocate people as quickly as possible.

  But without wheels, that was going to be a tall order. Hailey couldn’t send a family of four, including a nine-day-old infant, walking. It just wasn’t who he was. Though he could be a hard-hearted son of a bitch when the chips were down, playing the part of one wasn’t in his DNA.

  “What do you mean, we have to leave the town?” the panicked father shouted when Hailey explained that there was no gas left and no accommodations in Single Tree. He looked around at all the closed shops along Main Street. “How? How are we going to leave without any wheels? How far do you expect us to walk, all the way to Bishop?”

  “Sorry, sir. I don’t have any answers for you,” Hailey replied. “All I know is that I’ve been told everyone has to leave town.”

  “Well, I’ve got an answer for you. Get me some gas, and I’m gone!”

  “Hey, take it easy. We don’t want any trouble here,” Hailey said. “You don’t want to get arrested.”

  “Kind of gets us off the hook, doesn’t it?” The man was a big beefy type, a true-blue Westerner. Hailey wasn’t a runt, but he knew the guy would probably have to be taken down hard if things escalated to the next level. The choice would come down to shooting the father right in front of his kids or being beaten to death.