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  THE LAST TOWN

  a novel of the zombie apocalypse

  by Stephen Knight

  © 2017 by Stephen Knight

  dramatis persona

  Single Tree, California

  Barry Corbett, billionaire resident of Single Tree, California

  Gary Norton, movie producer originally from Single Tree

  Max Booker, mayor of Single Tree

  Roxanne Booker, Max’s wife

  Chief Greg Grady, Single Tree police chief

  Danielle Kennedy, waitress and former Marine

  Hector Aguilar, pharmacy owner and member of Single Tree town council

  Gemma Washington, member of the Single Tree town council

  Jock Sinclair, brash British television journalist

  Meredith Sinclair, Jock’s wife, former fashion model

  Walter Lennon, head of Corbett’s security detail

  Victor Kuruk, leader of a Native American tribe living on a reservation next to Single Tree

  Suzy Kuruk, Victor’s niece and tribal reservation police officer

  Officer Mike Hailey, Single Tree police officer

  Officer Santoro, Single Tree police officer

  Officer Whitter, Single Tree police officer

  Officer John Lasher, Single Tree police officer

  Arthur Norton, Gary’s father

  Beatrice Norton, Gary’s mother

  Estelle Garcia, Single Tree resident

  Martin Kennedy, Danielle’s father

  Raoul Salcedo, diner owner

  Jason Donner, short order cook

  Ernesta, Single Tree Pharmacy employee

  Lou, Single Tree Pharmacy pharmacist

  Rod Cranston, Single Tree airport manager

  Enrico, Single Tree airport FBO employee

  Randall Klaff, construction foreman

  Danny Tresko, construction foreman

  Chester Dawson, construction worker

  Jose Ramos, construction worker

  Bill Rollins, trucker

  Los Angeles, California

  Detective III Reese, LAPD

  Patrol Sergeant Bates, LAPD

  Detective I Renee Gonzales, LAPD, Reese’s partner

  Detective II Jerry Whittaker, LAPD, Reese’s partner

  Captain Miriam Pallata, commanding officer of the LAPD’s North Hollywood Station

  Captain Marshall, Pallata’s predecessor

  Lieutenant Newman, LAPD

  Detective II Marsh, LAPD

  PO Kozinski, LAPD

  Lieutenant Colonel James Morton, battalion commander, California Army National Guard

  Sergeant Kidd, enlisted noncommissioned officer

  Captain Bobby Narvaez, company commander, California Army National Guard

  First Sergeant Plosser, company NCO, California Army National Guard

  Jed Simpkiss, helicopter pilot

  Captain III Fontenoy, commanding officer of Wilshire Station

  Lieutenant Toomey, Wilshire Station, LAPD

  Lieutenant Robert Robbins, Wilshire Station, LAPD

  Sergeant Rod Manalo, Wilshire Station, LAPD

  Others

  Clarence Doddridge, convict

  Auto, convict

  Big Tone, convict

  Shaliq, convict

  Bruce, convict

  Part One

  RISE

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  The child had been eaten.

  Reese had never seen anything like it in his entire fourteen-year career as a homicide detective, nor in his 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 a perp who had eaten his own child then gone on to maul a neighbor was way over the top.

  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 to the hall where he was standing. Even though he was no stranger to death, he was reluctant to go into the blood-splattered room. The rest of the cops obviously felt the same way, from the dour-faced Hollywood Station detectives to the unis who looked ready to toss their chow. The hollowed-out remains of a small boy lay in a crib with a mattress so blood-soaked it could have been mistaken for red had there not been a couple of small white patches near the bottom. Hanging over the side of the crib was a tattered streamer of intestine that had obviously been chewed before the deranged father had gone off in search of something else to gnaw on.

  Children’s toys and games and puzzles were strewn across the floor, having fallen from a large shelving unit that had been knocked over. The drapes had been torn from the windows and 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. In one, he was being swaddled by his mother, and the other showed him being held by his proud new dad, the man who was presently 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, and his torso emptied of all its previous contents. The tang of blood, feces, and urine hung in the room like an inescapable taint, and for the first time in many years, John Reese felt like throwing up.

  “So 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 bloody footprints leading away from the room. The sergeant was a ten-year veteran of the LAPD. He looked at Reese with a frozen expression, valiantly fighting to ward off the horror of the scene, which he had come face-to-face with over an hour ago.

  Along the hallway, crimson hash marks graced the walls at various intervals, where blood-soaked hands had brushed. More pictures had been knocked askew. Reese had glanced at them on his way to the nursery, all photos of a young, successful couple and their frequent trips to faraway places he would never see.

  “What do we have so far?”

  “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, though, 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 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, the same as when he was a kid in high school and a star guard on the basketball team. Before that, he’d worn it long—really long, like a rock star from the eighties—but opposing players had a tendency to yank on it, 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?” Reese asked. “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, either. They said it was some sort of infection, but the guy had just been bitten.” He glanced around then looked back 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 contagious disease or something.”

  Reese shrugged. “Are Detectives Gonzales and Whittaker outside?”

  “Yeah. You want me to go get them?”

  “Please.”

  The sergeant strode away, sure and swift, obviously happy to get out of the house. Reese turned back to the tragedy inside the nursery. He would have to go in. 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 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 of the father 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 bullet holes in his chest and belly had stood out like dark dots against his pale skin. The officers had informed Reece that the guy had taken the body shots without even flinching. He had just kept advancing. But he had finally gone down when one of them managed to drill him in the head. Expended cartridges lay all over the street. The unis had pretty much emptied their pistols but only hit the guy 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 again look at the ravaged remains in the crib. 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 and several inches from the body it should have been attached to, he decided he was going to throw in the towel and retire. Enough was enough.

  “Hey.”

  Reese almost jumped, and he turned to see Detectives Jerry Whittaker and Renee Gonzales standing in the hallway, peering into the room. Whittaker kept his expression neutral, yet he had a furtive look in his eyes. He kept them fixed on Reese, not scanning the room as he usually did, as if that somehow might spare him from the horror. Behind him, Gonzales held back, standing near the opposite 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. She said her husband hadn’t been feeling well today, but she had a meeting she couldn’t shake. She was going to finish up and come right back. She planned on being home about ten. The husband didn’t look that bad to her, and he told her she could go to work.”

  Reese checked his watch. It was nine twenty. “She know what happened?”

  Whittaker 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, Jer. 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 grateful to be assigned to duty away from the murder scene. Behind him, Gonzales kept staring at the floor, 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, adjusting his wire-frame glasses. He smoothed out his tie and took a step back from the door. He let his eyes wander toward the crib, and his chin quivered minutely. He pivoted and said, “Call you from the hospital,” as he walked away.

  Gonzales finally looked up at Reese. “Something like this happened in Encino last night. 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.”

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

  “Yeah.” Then she moved as though 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, CALIFORNIA

  Dubai was on fire.

  Danielle Kennedy watched the news about 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 taste of what the city and the UAE had to offer. It had been beautiful, of course, so 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 also on the edge of a desert.

  She’d fancied Dubai was one of those places that was simply too beautiful to be real, and in a way, she’d been correct about that. The city 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 earned barely enough to 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 her leg, 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 the explosion had launched all seven tons of the vehicle twelve feet into the air after ripping its motor right off its mounts.

  Danielle couldn’t remember the actual explosion. One second, she had been 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 with itchy 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 the temperature was only ninety-five degrees in the shade, and the MTVR’s air conditioner was working like a champ. The cab of the truck was maybe seventy-five, which was practically the Arctic to Danielle. H
owever, she’d grown up only sixty-five miles from Death Valley, so she knew what desert heat was.

  She remembered working up the nerve to tell MacGregor to shut his pie hole. Then the next thing she knew, 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 crackling of firecrackers. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, pop-pop-pop, BOOM! The pinging of cartridges hitting the ground beside her sounded almost xylophonic, as if some jazz musician were 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 paisley shirt with gigantic lapels and a bead necklace, his long dark hair moving lazily in the breeze, which was as hot and dry as that from 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 off, its tires aflame and emitting foul-smelling ebony smoke. 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, taxi drivers, and people who appeared to be noncombatants. But the company was hosing all of them down.

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

  “Stay down, Dani,” he said, his voice as rough as large-tooth sandpaper even over the din of combat.

  Danielle did as he said, but something didn’t feel right. She raised her head and looked down the length of her body, past her utilities and chest protector. 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 bloodstained gauze. Flies buzzed around it, attracted by the scent. The roar of combat didn’t bother the flies at all.