The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead

by Stephen Knight

  THE LAST TOWN #1:

  RISE OF THE DEAD

  by Stephen Knight

  © 2014 by Stephen Knight

  LOS ANGELES, CA

  The child had been eaten.

  Reese had never seen anything quite like it in his fourteen-year career as a homicide detective, nor in the six years as a patrol officer before that. Los Angeles was a wild and crazy seedbed for all kinds of crime, and bizarre murders were hardly unknown in the City of Angels. But to come across a perp who had eaten his own child, and then gone on to maul a neighbor? That was some total Timothy Leary, badass acid trip that he’d never wanted to go on.

  The rest of the cops obviously felt the same way, from the dour-faced detectives from Hollywood Station to the unis who looked like they were ready to toss up their chow. Reese empathized with them; even though he was no stranger to death, he found he was reluctant to go into the blood-splattered nursery, where the hollowed-out remains of a small boy lay in a crib with a mattress so full of blood it could have been mistaken for red, if he hadn’t known it was originally white. And hanging over the side of the crib was a tattered streamer of intestine, intestine that had obviously been chewed on before the clearly deranged father had gone off in search of something else to gnaw on. Reese stood in the doorway to the nursery in a bright, sun-filled home off of Mulholland Drive, a nursery where bloodied footprints led out into the hall he was standing in. Children’s toys and games and puzzles were strewn across the floor, courtesy of a large shelving unit that had been knocked over. The drapes had been torn from the windows, and they lay in blood-speckled heaps near the crib. The name JOSHUA had been painted on the pale blue walls with an artistic flair, flanked by two big photos of the deceased child, one being swaddled by a new mother, the other of a proud new dad—now lying on his back, stone-cold dead, in the driveway of the house next door. Joshua—or what remained of him—lay motionless and cooling in the crib, his small head separated from his ravaged neck, all limbs missing, his body cavity emptied of all its previous possessions. The tang of blood and feces and urine hung in the room like some inescapable taint, and for the first time many years, John Reese felt like throwing up.

  “So look, how are we going to handle this?”

  Reese turned away from the carnage and looked at the senior patrolman who had come up the hall behind him, studiously avoiding the bloodied footprints that led away from the room. Bloody hash marks graced the walls at certain intervals, where blood-soaked hands had brushed against them. More pictures had been knocked askew. Reese had glanced at them on his way to the nursery. Photos of a young, successful couple, and their frequent trips to faraway places he would never see.

  “What?”

  The patrolman was a sergeant, a ten-year veteran of the LAPD. He looked at Reese with a frozen face, valiantly fighting to ward off the horror of the scene that he had come face to face with over an hour ago.

  “What do you want us to do?” the sergeant asked. “We’ve isolated the scene, and the house next door. The guy who was bit, he’s on his way to the hospital. Gotta tell you something, he doesn’t look so good. I have the officers who responded and shot the attacker hanging out in their car. SID is on the way, but their tech is running late, since he was on another call. Won’t be here for at least another hour.” The sergeant had dark hair that was shot through with strands of gray combed back from his forehead and held in place with copious amounts of styling gel. Reese wore his own hair high and tight, as he’d always had it, ever since he was a kid in high school and a star guard on the basketball team. Before that, he’d worn it long, real long, like a rock star from the 80s, but opposing players had a tendency to yank on it every now and then, even if it resulted in a personal foul. To ward off having his head yanked from side to side like some crazy yo-yo, he’d decided to go with a crew cut.

  “What happened to the guy who got attacked? What’s his name?”

  “Stanley Lazar. VP of accounting with Morgan Stanley. The EMTs took him away, said his vitals were for shit. Guy was probably having a heart attack, or a seizure, or something.”

  “We’ll need to talk with him,” Reese said, a little annoyed that the man had been carted off to the hospital. “Did the EMTs say what was wrong with him?”

  “They didn’t know, just that he was crashing out.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yeah. I saw him.”

  Reese spread his hands. “And?”

  “And what? Do I look like a doctor to you? I didn’t even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, Detective.”

  “Sergeant, just tell me how he looked. Okay?”

  “Fucked up. In shock. He’d been bitten on the arm, and the bite ... it was turning black.” The sergeant shook his head. “Never seen anything like it before, and the EMTs didn’t like the way it looked. Said it was some sort of infection, but the guy had just been bitten.” He looked at Reese. “Tell you the truth, we’re wondering if this guy who bit him and ... did this ...” He nodded toward the abattoir-cum-nursery. “Well, we were wondering if maybe he had some sort of infectious disease.”

  Reese shrugged. He didn’t know anything about that. “Are Detectives Gonzales and Whittaker outside?”

  “Yeah. You want me to go get them?”

  “Please.”

  The sergeant left, happy to do so, striding away, his movements sure and swift. Reese turned back to the tragedy that lay inside the nursery. He would have to go in. There was no way around it.

  But Lord, he really didn’t want to.

  What kind of sick fuck could do this to his own kid ...

  He pulled on his latex gloves and slipped on thin booties over his dress shoes. The sterile dressings would help preserve the sanctity of the murder scene, not that there was any question what had happened. He’d quickly examined the corpse outside, the one the patrol cops had shot six times before it finally collapsed. The man had been wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, and the five bullets holes in his chest and belly had stood out like dark dots against his pale skin. But it was the shot beneath his right eye that had done him in, he had been told when he arrived on scene. The guy had taken the body shots without even flinching as he had advanced upon the cops when they arrived, and he had finally gone down when one of them managed to drill him in the head. There were expended cartridges all over the street, he had noticed. The unis had pretty much emptied their pistols at the guy, and only hit him six times at a range of twelve to fifteen feet. Other cops were canvassing the houses in the area, looking to see if anyone else had been hit by the fusillade. That would make the LAPD’s day, if some little kid had been shot, or if a pregnant mother had been cut down while going to the bathroom.

  Just another day in the Southland ...

  Slowly, reluctantly, Reese stepped into the nursery. He forced himself to look at the ravaged remains in the crib, and found it was just as horrible as he had feared it might be. A man, even one as jaded as a homicide detective, could take only so much. Reese could get through it, could conduct the investigation, but he knew the cost was going to be high. As soon as he saw the small, hairless head lying askew inside the crib, he decided that he was going to throw in the towel and retire.

  Enough was enough.

  “Hey.”

  Reese almost jumped, and he turned to see Detectives Roger Whittaker and Renee Gonzales standing in the hallway, peering into the room. Whittaker was a tall black man, his face neutral and blank, but there was something furtive about his eyes. He kept them rooted on Reese, not scanning the room like he usually did, fixing his attention on the lead detective, as if that somehow might spare him from the horror that lay inside the
nursery. Behind him, Gonzales held back, standing near the hallway’s far wall, her eyes downcast. Whittaker was tall and broad, six foot three and about two hundred pounds of hard muscle. Gonzalez was short and plump, older than the men because she’d gotten a late start in her career, but she was in many ways sharper and more facile than Whittaker. Whittaker was a meat-and-potatoes kind of detective; Gonzalez had a more agile mind, and could contemplate circumstances the big man might stroke out over.

  “The guy who got bit—did either of you have an opportunity to interview him before he was taken away?” Reese asked.

  “Nope. Guy wasn’t exactly in the frame of mind for a chat,” Whittaker said. “He was in full-on meltdown by the time we got here, and then the EMTs tossed him in the meat wagon and took him to Cedars.”

  “Go there and try again,” Reese said. “I want to know what happened. Any word on the mother?”

  “She’s on her way. Took off before we could get transport to her. She’s headed here.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Some veep at Warner Brothers. Said her husband wasn’t feeling well today, but she had a meeting she couldn’t shake. Was going to finish up and come right back, said she’d be done at about ten. Said the husband didn’t look that bad to her, and that he said she could go to work.”

  “She know what happened?” Reese asked.

  Whittaker glanced back at Gonzales, then turned back to Reese. He shook his broad head slowly.

  “No, man. She doesn’t know.”

  Reese sighed. “All right. You guys get over to Cedars. Interview the neighbor. Let me know what you find. I’ll square away the wife, wait here for SID, then head back to the station and start the murder book.”

  “You need us to hang out for a while?” Whittaker asked. “I mean, you handling the mother alone, that’s—”

  “I’m good to go on that, Rog. You and Renee head for Cedars. Call me when you know what’s going on.” Whittaker shifted on his size fourteen feet, looking uncomfortable, but also almost grateful to be assigned to duty away from the murder scene. Behind him, Gonzales remained sedate, almost emotionless. She stared down at the floor before her, not meeting Reese’s gaze.

  “Go on, guys. I’ve got this, and there are a ton of unis here to help out.”

  “Uh ... yeah, all right,” Whittaker said finally, adjusting the wire-framed glasses he wore. He smoothed out his tie and took a step back from the door. He let his eyes wander toward the crib then, and his chin quivered minutely. That was all it took to break his reluctance to leave the scene, and he pivoted on his foot.

  “Call you from the hospital,” he said, and walked away.

  Gonzales looked up at Reese then, finally. “Something like this happened in Encino last night,” she said. “A man and a woman—they attacked their neighbors and killed their dogs. The neighbors barricaded themselves in a bedroom, and the West Valley guys had to shoot them both.”

  “Shoot the attackers, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reese wondered about that, then mentally shrugged. “Good to know,” he said.

  “Renee, you coming?” Whittaker asked from the far end of the hall.

  “Yes,” she said, and she moved like she couldn’t get away fast enough. Reese was left alone in the nursery, surrounded by blood and feces and tattered flesh, and the ghost of a murdered child.

  SINGLE TREE, CA

  Dubai was on fire.

  Danielle Kennedy watched it on the TV in the diner, wondering how such a thing had come to pass. She’d passed through Dubai while serving in Iraq, just a quick transit, so she’d had only the barest tastes of what the city and the UAE had to offer. It had been beautiful, of course; so very, very different from other cities she’d seen, like Los Angeles and Las Vegas or Reno. And most certainly, a world apart from lowly Single Tree, California, though the town she lived in was on the edge of a desert itself. She’d fancied the city was one of those places that was simply too beautiful to be real, and in a large part, she’d been correct about that. Dubai was completely manufactured, one of many virtually prefabricated jewels erected by the emirs and sultans and princes of the region, who burned through billions on lavish, indulgent projects while the majority of their countrymen barely earned enough to even exist. But seeing the city on fire, its great alabaster skyscrapers toppling, wreathed in flames and belching foul, black smoke into the air ... well, that was quite a lot for her to take in, as she sat in the back room on her break, rubbing her leg.

  Or what was left of it, anyway. She’d been in Iraq for only four months, a service support NCO with a Marine reserve unit. Her MTVR had been struck by an IED so powerful that the explosion had launched all seven tons of the vehicle twelve feet into the air after ripping its motor right off its mounts. Danielle didn’t actually remember the explosion. One second, she was sitting behind the wheel, listening to her section leader, Stewie MacGregor, going on about the heat, and how it was driving him crazier than a guy in a straitjacket who couldn’t scratch his itching balls. MacGregor was an odd kind of Marine, full of gung ho, but also something of a whiny little bitch. He came from some suburb of Seattle, where Danielle guessed they never got any heat at all, because when MacGregor was bitching, the temperature was only ninety-five degrees in the shade, and the MTVR’s air conditioner was working like a top. The cab of the truck was maybe seventy-five, which was practically the Arctic to Danielle. But she’d grown up only sixty-five miles from Death Valley, so she kind of knew what desert heat was.

  She remembered working up the nerve to tell MacGregor to shut his pie hole. Then the next thing she remembered, she was on her back looking up at the bright blue sky—there was remarkably little haze that day—watching tendrils of black milk curdle overhead. Except it wasn’t black milk, it was smoke. All around her, the air was full of the sounds of firecrackers. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, pop-pop-pop, BOOM! The bright sounds of cartridges hitting the ground beside her sounded almost xylophonic to her then, as if some jazz musician was slapping away at the bones, and she turned her head, looking for him. It had to be a man, of course. A guy with long sideburns and a Frank Zappa beard, wearing a Nair shirt and a bead necklace, his long dark hair moving lazily in the breeze that was as hot and dry as that made by a hair dryer. Instead, she saw her MTVR lying broken in the road a few dozen yards away, billowing smoke as it burned, its front end shorn away, its tires burning, emitting foul-smelling smoke the color of ebony. All around her, the Marines of Company B, 6th Motor Transport Battalion, opened up on their attackers. Danielle didn’t see any of Saddam’s fedayeen or al Qaeda in the area, only a bunch of frightened shopkeepers and taxi drivers and people who otherwise looked like they were basically noncombatants, and the company was hosing all of them down.

  She reached for her rifle, but couldn’t find it. She struggled to sit up, but rough hands pushed her back to the hot ground again, and she looked up to find Gunnery Sergeant Taggert crouching over her, his M16A3 right beside him.

  “Stay down, Dani,” he said, his voice rough as large-tooth sandpaper even over the din of combat. Danielle did as he said, but something didn’t feel right. She lifted up her head and looked down the length of her body, across her utilities and the chest protector she wore. She saw her right foot, but no sign of her left. She raised her left leg, and only a ragged stump came into view, already half-wrapped in blood-stained gauze. Flies buzzed around it, attracted by the scent of liquids. The roar of combat didn’t bother the flies at all. And at that moment, it didn’t much matter to Sergeant Danielle Kennedy.

  My leg ...

  Before she passed out, she wondered how she would ever be able to nail the clutch on her Mustang back home.

  But that was a long time ago, in a different life. Danielle Kennedy had been presented with a steady procession of prosthetic limbs, each pretty much the same, despite all the ballyhooed improvements the VA trumpeted. They all hurt the stump like hell, no matter how much padding they had, or how much lotion she put on the
stump or what grade sock she put over it. Artificial legs were basically a bitch, and Danielle found she moved better hopping around on one foot than peg-legging it. However, her playing at being a monopedal kangaroo tended to flip out several folks in Single Tree, the so-called “people’s town” in the shadow of Mount Whitney, where everyone knew and cared for one another. One of those was Max Booker’s loudmouthed wife, which didn’t matter a damn to Danielle, but who happened to own the service station where her father worked. She kept trying to offer “helpful advice” to Martin Kennedy, who should “guide” Danielle toward using her prosthesis when out in public, especially since Single Tree was on occasion something of a tourist town. Out-of-towners might not understand that Dani was a Marine veteran who had been disabled in that God damn idiot W.’s grudge war against Saddam Hussein, and they might be shocked at her appearance.

  So Danielle wore the damned peg-leg. Not because it made Roxanne Booker feel better, but because that way, she wouldn’t come pissing and moaning to her father. Martin Kennedy was a humble and decent man, and he didn’t deserve to be working for a shrew like Roxanne, much less be subjected to her ramblings on matters she knew nothing about.

  Things only got more interesting when Barry Corbett got involved.

  Danielle Kennedy was approximately five thousand social stations down the line from Old Man Corbett, who had always seemed to be old. She was a trailer park girl, and he was owner of Single Tree’s only mansion. Corbett had been born in Single Tree, and had left it in the 1960s—first, for Vietnam, and later, for Texas, where he managed to build an empire in the energy and mining sectors. He returned to Single Tree on at least a part-time basis in the very late 1980s, where he bought out his family home from the rest of his siblings, then bought up every house near it. He flattened everything and slapped together a slab-sided Adobe mansion that was at once hideous and gorgeous, a construct that a place like Single Tree never deserved and never wanted. It was located to the east of the town, on what passed for the town’s outskirts, which meant it was pretty much only a mile away from Main Street. As far as she knew, Old Man Corbett had never married, and had no dependents. Gossip varied; he was either a closeted gay man, or had lost his cojones to a Viet Cong sapper in 1968 at Khe Sanh. Then there were the more salacious lines of gab: Corbett was addicted to Viagra and had a stable of young girls all over the country, but mostly in his mansion in Dallas, where he had fresh young tail flown in from all over the world to satiate his deviant passions. Martin Kennedy, who had known Corbett obliquely in the days leading up to Vietnam, dismissed all of these notions. As far as he was concerned, Corbett was a guy who managed to score a big win in the game of big business, and now townspeople like Roxanne Booker and Hector Aguilar, who owned Single Tree Pharmacy, were mightily pissed that a guy from the east side of the town had done so well.