The Last Town (Book 6): Surviving the Dead

by Knight, Stephen

  By eleven, he returned to the crew quarters. Martin Kennedy was sleeping in the deckhand’s single berth, snoring loudly. Norton didn’t have to check on him any further to know the man was in great shape; anyone that could fall into a deep sleep less than ten feet away from thrumming diesels didn’t need a bedtime story or hot toddy.

  Danielle was waiting for him in the captain’s stateroom, lying on the double berth. She had earbuds in as she listened to music from her iPhone in a bid to keep the engine room noise at bay. Norton regarded her for a moment as he closed the stateroom door behind him. The bed wasn’t that roomy, but with her in it, it was all he needed.

  She looked up at him and smiled. She had showered, and he could smell her clean skin from where he stood. “Don’t worry about sleeping,” she said. “I take up less space than a normal girl.” She pointed to the bulkhead beside the door. Hanging from one of the coat hooks there was her prosthesis, swaying from side to side by its straps.

  Norton laughed, as in really laughed, for the first time in weeks. He felt the stress leave him as if it was draining out of the soles of his feet, through the decking, out the fiberglass hull, and into the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean. He climbed into the berth with her as she squirmed over against the bulkhead, reaching out for him as he slipped an arm around her waist.

  Corbett sat in the semidarkness at the rear of the pilothouse, swaying on the dining settee in rhythm with the Argosy as she plowed through the seas. He’d never been much into boats, and aside from a speedboat he had once owned when he was twenty-five years younger, hadn’t really thought much about them. But he was impressed with Norton’s choice. He had to admit it, the film producer had made some good equipment choices.

  Sleep wouldn’t come to him for days, he knew. When stress was high, rest wasn’t something Corbett could reliably entertain. So he just sat at the dining settee, getting up every now and then to help himself to some of Norton’s Earl Grey tea in the galley directly behind. He’d sat there the entire time, even while the others fixed themselves meals and ate and talked and cried. No one really tried to engage the old man in conversation. He didn’t mind. He had nothing to say, anyway.

  Don’t be such an old war horse, Kimosabe. The voice in his head wasn’t his, but Victor’s. Corbett smiled wryly at that. Victor Kuruk, still poking Corbett in the eye even from the grave. So typical of him. Even though they’d come from different places, they would wind up in the same one, when it was all said and done. Corbett found he was looking forward to it. Life was for the young, even though they squandered it relentlessly.

  “Barry?”

  Corbett looked up in the dark and saw Sinclair standing next to the settee. The Marine sitting in the helm chair a few feet away didn’t turn. He moved his head from time to time, scanning the displays, but that was it. He hadn’t spoken to Corbett, and Corbett hadn’t spoken to him.

  “What is it, Sinclair?” Corbett asked. His voice was rough and gravelly, a by-product of too much shouting, too much age, and too much despair.

  “May I sit?”

  “It’s not my boat. Do whatever you want.”

  Sinclair slid into the settee and rested his elbows on the generously lacquered table. He studied his dim reflection in the tabletop for a moment, then looked over at Corbett.

  “It appears I was wrong about you the entire time,” Sinclair said. “You’re nothing like I thought you were.”

  “What did you think I was, Jock?”

  “A selfish, self-interested bastard who saw the opportunity to lord over a town and mold it into something more to your liking,” Sinclair said. “I thought it was going to be All Hail King Barry. Instead, you turned out to be one of the most selfless people I believe I’ve ever met. You spent a lot of treasure doing what you did.”

  “What, money? That doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

  Sinclair hesitated. “Well. Except to those who don’t have it.”

  “You asking for a handout, Jock? Sure, I’ll write you a check for a hundred million, if you’ll only leave me alone. Deal?”

  “No need for that.” Sinclair reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the plastic baggie with the SD card inside. “Here it is. Sixty-four gigabytes of images I collected. I have four more of them. Over eighty hours of footage. Some people, when they view it, might see you as I did before. They might overlook the good you did, the sacrifices you made. They might just see what they want to see, a raging egoist with too much money and too much ambition, treating a small California town like his personal fiefdom.”

  “So they might,” Corbett agreed.

  “Shall I throw them overboard?”

  Corbett looked at Sinclair directly. “What?”

  “I said, shall I throw them overboard? No one will ever recover them, not out here,” Sinclair said. “No questions, no commentary, no inquisition into what you did, and who you might have done things to.”

  Corbett grunted. “A deal’s a deal, Jock. This’ll make you, if things get back to what was once normal. You’ll be able to write your own ticket. That little piece of hardware there’s going to be worth, oh, forty, fifty million. Easy.” He sipped some of his tea. It was just barely lukewarm, but he drank it anyway. “I gave you the opportunity to do with that whatever you wanted. So do it. Whatever you want.”

  “Even if it means throwing it over the side of the boat?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Corbett said. “I’d rather you take it as far as you can. I want people to know Single Tree. I want them to remember the people, and how they lived. And yeah, how they died.”

  “Some viewers—powerful viewers—might have you strung up, Barry.”

  “Let them.” Corbett rubbed his eyes. “Please let them,” he added, his voice soft. “There has to be a final accounting.”

  Sinclair sat there next to Corbett for a few minutes, then quietly got up and left.

  LATITUDE 32.511639, LONGITUDE -130.589518

  It took a little over two days to make the trip, as the seas deteriorated considerably on the second day. Norton stayed at the helm for nine hours straight, overseeing the yacht’s transit. A lot of the people were seasick from the fair-sized rollers that crashed over the bow, and he dispatched two of Lennon’s Marines to the crew compartment to keep an eye on the systems in the companionway outside the engine room. The Argosy fought its way through the weather without complaint or failure, her deep V fiberglass hull slicing through the mighty Pacific like a knife through butter. Norton couldn’t have been happier with his choice in yachts.

  As the weather cleared and the seas subsided, the boat began to make better time. The sun came out, and the temperatures rose. While the breeze was still brisk, the ambient air temperature was in the high fifties, which meant those who had a mind to do so could go onto the aft deck and enjoy some fresh air without worry of being swept overboard. Norton told the Marines Boomer and Browning to set up the long table on the aft deck, and invited other passengers to enjoy themselves on the fly bridge deck. While no one was breaking out the boogie boards and bikinis, the situation was approaching the kind of yachting Norton most preferred.

  And then, the radar began picking up substantial returns sixty nautical miles out.

  “Hey, Corbett. You know anything about this?” Norton asked.

  “About what, Norton?”

  “About what looks like a couple of aircraft carriers out ahead?”

  “Just keep going, Norton. See for yourself.”

  Norton resisted the urge to increase speed, but increasing speed meant burning more fuel. It would take hours to close on the contacts ahead, so he had no choice but to maintain his vigilance from the helm chair. He settled in for the long wait. Danielle came up and visited with the two men for a time, and as the day wore on, Norton heard the laughter of children playing in the salon. Apparently, someone had raised the big screen TV and had found the Xbox.

  Hey, whatever it takes.

  Over three hours later, the Argosy
got within visual range of the radar targets. Norton was taken aback as he viewed the FLIR picture, then grabbed his binoculars and looked through them for verification. He stared at what lay ahead through both devices for several minutes, until they slowly became visible to the naked eye. Lennon stepped out onto the bow of the boat, talking into his headset’s microphone.

  Norton turned to Corbett. “Corbett, you crusty bastard. You really know how to plan for this stuff, don’t you?”

  “On occasion,” Corbett said from the settee. “Though this one needed a couple of months to get straightened out. They were in different parts of the globe and couldn’t break free in time for us to go directly to them. That’s why I built up the town.”

  Norton raised the binoculars to his eyes again. Ahead were four gigantic ships. Two container vessels, two cargo vessels. And then, emerging from behind one of the vessels—a cutter. It swung its pointed bow toward the Argosy and accelerated toward her. Helicopters flew from ship to ship. Norton took note of the logos on the sides of the ship pilothouses.

  “You own these things?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why depend on other people to ship your petroleum product when you can do it yourself and keep the costs down? You know what you’re looking at there, Norton?”

  “Aside from really, really big boats? What?”

  “Our future,” Corbett murmured. “We can live on those for decades. They’re full of product, full of everything we need. Fuel. Food. Medical facilities. Aviation assets. Kids can be safe there. They can grow up without worrying about a horde coming for them. Maybe even you can grow old and gray, and have Dani change your Depends for you.”

  Norton chuckled. “Yeah, well. I’m all set as far as living quarters go.”

  “The helicopters and the cutter … they’ll be the key, Norton.”

  “Huh? Key to what?”

  “Those are Sikorsky S-92 choppers. Big lifters with a lot of capacity. There are spare parts for all of them on the cargo ships, and even two in storage. We can use those and fly them off the cutter when she’s closer to shore.”

  Norton turned back to him. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “There are people back in Single Tree,” Corbett said. “And I’m not going to forget about them.” The old man fixed Norton with his hard blue eyes. “What about you, Norton? Are you ready to leave those people back there? Just stay out here, soaking up some rays on a big ship that has everything you could want on it? Because if that’s your pleasure, you can do that.”

  Norton met Corbett’s gaze head on. “No, Corbett. I’m not gonna do that. When do we head back?”

  Corbett smiled slowly, and instead of looking like a tired old man, he looked like an angry old wolf, ready to start mixing it up with whatever came his way.

  “After I’ve had a long, long nap,” Corbett said. “But get ready, guy. It’ll be soon.” He sipped more tea. “Before you know it, it’ll be against the dead. And we’ll win, this time. We’ll win.”