The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead Read online

  “You’ll see,” Newman said quietly. “You’ll see it for yourself.”

  “Yeah, I guess I will. Who’s in command of the Guard? Is it still Narvaez?”

  “Who? Oh, you mean the old company commander?”

  “Yeah—Captain Bobby Narvaez. These are his troops, right? The same guys who came to Hollywood Station?” Reese waved a hand around the hospital.

  “Right—that guy. Yeah, he’s over there, probably near the top.” Newman pointed at the pile of bodies that was still being cleaned up. “He bit the big burrito about two hours ago, when he tried to tear out Plosser’s throat.”

  Reese blinked. “What? How did that happen?”

  “The guy just keeled over. Wasn’t bitten or anything, just dropped to the deck during a clearing operation. When his guys checked on him, he’d already turned into a stench. We figure he dropped from a heart attack or aneurism or something. Whatever it was, it hit him hard and fast. After that, and I mean right after that, he became a stench. Something else to watch out for—when someone dies, they reanimate, and damn quick.”

  Reese was taken aback by the news. “Okay … so who’s in charge now?”

  “A lot of these guys came in last night. Two companies of shooters. There’s a lieutenant colonel in charge now. His name’s Morton, a big black guy who looks like he could take out the entire San Francisco offensive line.”

  “Okay,” was all Reese could say.

  “You’ll find him inside—the Guard set up an operations center on the first floor. We’re running out of the mobile CP.” Newman pointed to where a big RV in LAPD livery sat behind a barricade. It was surrounded by concertina wire and sandbags. Reese saw fabric in the wire, fluttering in the dry morning breeze. Looked like someone—or something—had tried to get through. “Another gift from Metro, when there was some talk of them taking over.”

  “Are they?” Bates asked.

  Newman snorted. “From what I hear, there is no Metro any longer.” He looked at Reese. “What’s happening at the stationhouse? We’re having some trouble getting updates.”

  “Staffing is a problem. When we left, it was secure. But they have some issues with zombies walking up. The Guard and our guys had it under control when we left. Pallata’s in charge, Marshall dropped off the grid.”

  Newman snorted again. “Well, just think, she could’ve been Mrs. Reese a decade ago.”

  “Yeah, so that’s the update from my side,” Reese said. “Enjoy the bridal suite while you can. Anything else for us?”

  Newman shook his head. His face looked gray in the growing light of day. “Nah. You hook up with Morton, he’ll tell you what the current picture is. Later.”

  With that, the lieutenant headed for the bus. The rest of the previous shift’s cops were already boarding it, and some of Reese’s detachment were leaving their impromptu picnic area and heading to fill in their positions.

  “Bates, you want to come with me to talk with his Morton guy, or you want to take charge out here?” Reese asked.

  “I’ll stay put,” Bates said. “You go have your powwow. I’ll be in the command post, or you can reach me on the ROVER.”

  Reese finished the last of his burrito and decided to save the doughnuts for later. He left them in the paper bag and pushed it into one of the voluminous pockets on the clean tactical uniform he’d pulled from his locker at the stationhouse. He took another hit of coffee, then picked up his shotgun. It was going to be a long, miserable day.

  “I’ll catch up to you soon,” he told Bates, then turned and headed toward the entrance to the emergency department. Guardsmen on watch there eyed him suspiciously, but allowed him access after he identified himself. Reese found the emergency department had been turned into a miniature fortress during the hours he was away. Fighting positions had been established everywhere, along with a zone reserved for triaging incoming patients. There was blood on the carpet in several spots, and Reese wondered if the triage was done with a 5.56-millimeter bullet.

  A Guardsman led him to the command desk, set up behind a row of sandbags; almost a bunker inside the building. There wasn’t a lot of room inside, but three men sat monitoring radios. The glow of laptop screens filled the room, and Lieutenant Colonel James Morton sat on one of the narrow desks next to another radio.

  “You the incoming LAPD liaison?” he asked, barely looking up from his laptop. His voice was a deep baritone, which was fitting. Morton was an absolutely huge black man with shoulders that seemed five feet wide. The tactical gear he wore made him look even larger. His hair was so closely cropped to his skull that he appeared to be almost bald; in fact, the thin mustache that sat above his full lips seemed to have more hair in it than his head did.

  “Yeah, I’m Detective Three Reese. I heard you lost Narvaez last night.” Reese didn’t offer to shake hands. Morton didn’t seem to mind.

  “We lost him, along with six other troops,” Morton said. “Narvaez went out easy. The other guys were either bitten or actually torn apart. Is the Hollywood Bowl in your area of operations?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “FEMA and the CDC are setting up a refugee center there. I know why FEMA’s doing it, but not so sure why the CDC is involved. Can you fill in that blank for me?”

  “Didn’t even know about a refugee center at the bowl.”

  Morton looked up from his laptop then. To say the big lieutenant colonel didn’t have a pleasant face was an understatement. In the laptop’s bluish glow, it looked almost demonic.

  “Just how far down the food chain are you, Detective—Reese, you said your name was?”

  “Yeah. I run the homicide desk at Hollywood Station, so patrol missions wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse. I have a patrol sergeant on my detail, so if you want information regarding what might be happening up at the bowl, he might know more about it. Anything specific you need?”

  “Yeah, how will they secure the area? I’ve been checking the maps, it’s not exactly remote, and it’s surrounded by high-speed approaches. They’ve already relocated about a thousand people up there, and putting them in an undefended area like that is pretty much just setting out a warm buffet and pounding on a skillet with a spoon. How many patrolmen do you still have on duty?”

  “As of last night at around three AM, I was told maybe two hundred, max.”

  Morton shook his head. “Well, listen, once things heat up over there, two hundred guys aren’t going to be able to do shit. And we don’t have the manpower right now—most of the Guard was sent farther south. We have regular line units spooling up from Joint Base Lewis-McCord and Irwin, but speed is something Big Army doesn’t do well. The Marines are being held down in San Diego. LA’s an Army show, right now.”

  Reese nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll pass that back on 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 presume 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 four inches over six feet in height. Reese wasn’t a small guy himself, but Morton had a couple of inches and probably forty pounds on him, even without the gear.

  “These are desperate times, Detective Reese,” he rumbled. “I have troops to protect, and a sizeable portion of a major metropolitan area to try and 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, Reese. The civilians in charge of this facility indicate who’s been bitten by a stench.”

&nbs
p; “And you just take care of it from there?”

  “Reese.” Morton looked like he was about to lose his shit for a moment, 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 God damn bit, but I know these are the only measures that are going to mean anything.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Reese, even though he 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, Colonel. He 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 he was standing in. “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 that hid the bigger man’s true emotions. Reese didn’t doubt that the National Guard officer’s orders galled him, but he didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

  “You need to be careful in who you kill,” Reese told him. “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. 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.

  “So what’s your advice, Detective?” Morton asked, as if he hadn’t noticed the telltale signs coming from the comms team. Reese was certain some questionable shit had gone down.

  “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,” Reese said. “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 and 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.”

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

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

  “Just idle curiosity, Detective.” Morton paused for a moment. “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 in the room outside 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, waving for more of his men to join him. “Officer, you want to come with me, please?” He pulled his rifle into both hands, staring at Reese’s shotgun with eyes that seemed to be as big as coffee saucers.

  Reese put his cuffs back in their pouch. “Sure thing,” he said, locking his eyes with those of 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. This was hardly lost on the eight work crews that were digging the trenches in the parched soil, 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, a work crew of almost three hundred personnel who had arrived over the past few days in trucks, RVs, and buses. All the transportation had been bought and paid for by Barry Corbett where possible, and leased when purchase was not an option. The equipment used to actually do the work was all company owned, so there were no inquisitive third parties who needed to have their curiosity satisfied every hour. The defense of Single Tree was an entirely self-funded affair.

  The foreman of the excavation efforts was a short, burly Texan with a Fu Manchu mustache named Randall Klaff. Klaff had never thought much of California, and frankly would have been happy if the entire fruity state had slid right in the Pacific, never to be heard from again. Unfortunately, the zombie apocalypse—“zompoc,” some of the men on his crews called it—had reset everyone’s personal calculus, and now, being in California wasn’t quite so bad any longer, if it meant a respite from being eaten by the hungry dead. While Klaff himself would have been content to watch the world burn, his continued existence was called into doubt by the media onslaught covering the downfall of several cities across the globe, followed by major population centers in the US. Dallas, where Klaff lived, had been 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 signed on for the California job in a heartbeat.

  His disdain for the Golden State came up short when compared to his extreme desire for his family—and himself—to continue living.

  So he stood in the scrubby California desert, sweating beneath his George Strait Lambert straw cowboy hat, one of several that he had bought at Cavendar’s earlier in the year. The work was nothing new to him—it was mostly the same as digging up the landscape while exploiting new oil fields, with the difference being that this hole wouldn’t be hundreds of feet deep and maybe ten wide. It would be ten feet deep and almost forty miles in circumference, other than where oil, gas, and water mains fed into the town. 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 he would be able to keep Klaff’s wife and two daughters safe.r />
  Good enough for me, Klaff had said.

  So 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 this job was done, they’d move on to other efforts. He shared responsibility for the trenching with another foreman named Danny Tresko. Tresko was okay by Klaff, plus he 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.

  Klaff watched as men and machines worked their way across the desert, in plain sight of the highway that led into town. Traffic was backed up but still moving, he saw, but that would change when he started chewing up the concrete with the heavy equipment. That was where Corbett’s security teams would come in handy. Klaff wasn’t the most sensitive human being on the planet, but even he could feel 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. Klaff hadn’t heard much about what was going on in his locale, but he’d heard more than just whispers of bad tidings coming out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. He’d even heard there had been a deadrise in Single Tree, and while Klaff would never win a Mr. Sensitivity award, he figured that wasn’t exactly a good omen.

  So Klaff did what he did best: he pushed around men and equipment, and pulled earth out of the planet. He understood his role in the grand scheme of life was to be a glorified ditch digger, and that didn’t bother him at all. Besides which, even if he didn’t have hands that were as big as frying pans and fingers that were about as dexterous as Jimmy Dean sausages, then that touch of dyslexia on his mother’s side of the family had pretty much queered any chance he might have one day become a neurosurgeon. That plus the fact that he was secretly squeamish at the sight of blood, and he figured brain doctors probably saw a lot of that in their line of work. Klaff had only seen it twice in his career, once when a crane collapsed on some guy, smashing him flatter than a pancake, and again when a big wellbore drill bit had sheared and ripped a guy’s arm right off. 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.