The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead

THE LAST TOWN #4

FIGHTING THE DEAD

By Stephen Knight

© 2015 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, Singe 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

Others

Clarence Doddridge, convict

Auto, convict

Big Tone, convict

Shaliq, convict

Bruce, convict

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

“Okay, late-breaking news—this is getting really fucked up,” Bates said.

Reese only grunted as he leaned against the ring of sand bags. His ears were ringing from all the gunfire, and the smell of expended powder burned his nostrils. The National Guard had closed the hospital two hours earlier, against Reese’s instructions that it be kept open. But he had little say in the matter. The hospital administrator had informed him that they had no beds left, staffing levels were at an all time low, and supplies were running out. As the attending physician in the emergency room had told him, they’d have a tough time putting a band-aid on a kid’s skinned knee. From the reports he’d heard over the radio—as sporadic as they had become—the rest of the hospitals in Los Angeles were headed down the same path. Too much demand, diminishing resources, fewer staff, insufficient security. The City of Angels was going to hell.

And the dead just kept coming.

Reese went through shotgun rounds like they were water, always coming up short when he needed them. He blew through his allocation of pistol ammo as well, but they had ample reserve stocks thanks to the prepositioned stores someone had thought to provide. Just the same, the bodies were soon stacked up three deep around the perimeter, and more of the dead staggered up the street, drawn to the sounds of combat. They came from buildings, from cars, from nearby homes and apartments. They were men and women, boys and girls, families and homeless bums. Sometimes they would approach in pairs or trios, which was easy enough to deal with. Other times, it was as if they were being bused into the area, and dozens of slack-faced ghouls stalked their way up Gracie Allen Drive or down George Burns Road.

If it hadn’t been for the Guard, the LAPD would have been overwhelmed. The Guardsmen poured it on with their rifles, repelling wave after wave of the dead. But even they had a tough go of it until Lieutenant Colonel Morton called some Humvees forward. The armored vehicles were outfitted with triple-barreled .50 caliber machineguns in turrets, weapons Reese hadn’t even known existed. They blasted through the hordes like laser beams, slicing entire corpses in two, exploding heads, severing limbs. One burst could make the entire upper half of a stench literally disappear into ribbons of necrotic flesh that would collapse to the ichor-streaked street like yesterday’s garbage. Nothing could survive that kind of onslaught, not even the walking corpses that craved the flesh of the living. Reese and rest of the cops killed the damaged zombies that hadn’t been stopped by the machineguns with head shots. That was perhaps the most horrifying aspect of it. The dead ignored their injuries and remained fixated on feeding. They didn’t care if they were killed, they didn’t mind as pieces of their anatomy was blown right off, and they didn’t notice that in many instances they were trailing gray-black guts after them. All they wanted was to feed.

Reese did his best to ensure they died hungry.

Bates appeared on Reese’s left and held out a military-style rifle, just like the ones the Guard used. To the public (and to many LAPD officers) they were referred to as assault rifles, that fictional term dreamed up by the media to frighten domestic audiences across the country. Reese took it and examined it briefly. He was surprised to see that it was a select-fire weapon, capable of firing on full automatic until its thirty-round magazine was expended.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked the tall patrol sergeant.

“Gift from the Guard. Shotguns are useless out here, we need to take them at a distance, not when they’re twenty feet away,” Bates said. “You know how to use it, right?”

Reese set down his shotgun and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He flicked the selector to SEMI and popped a zombie right through the forehead at sixty feet away. It collapsed to the street, a momentary geyser of black liquid fountaining from its ravaged skull for a moment.

“Okay, no need to answer that question,” Bates said.

“Any word on whether or not Metro’s going to roll up and help out?” Reese asked, shooting another zombie. Bates raised his own rifle and did the same to another.

“Not a chance—like Newman said, Metro’s out of the picture. By the way, shit’s getting real at Hollywood Station. Zombies are rolling in hard.”

Reese wasn’t surprised, but he still didn’t like the news. “Where’d you hear this?”

“CP.” Bates took out another zombie as the collection of cops and Guardsman cracked away at the latest assault. It wasn’t much, maybe eight or nine ghouls picking their way toward the hospital. Many had gotten hung up in the razor wire the Guard had stretched across the area, but others managed to stumble through gaps in the fencing where a previous tide of the dead had crushed the wire flat beneath the press of dead bodies. “They wanted to pass the word on to you directly, but you were kind of busy shooting zombies, so I took the message.”

A Black Hawk helicopter roared past overhead, followed a moment later by two Apaches. The sinister-looking gunships broke away from the transport helicopter and orbited to the right. They circled over the hospital for a bit, rotors chewing up the sky. Bates looked up at them, and from the corner of his eye, Reese could see the tall patrolman grimace and shake his head.

“Motherfuckers are practically ringing the dinner bell,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Bates looked at Reese like he was dumb. “Detective, having helicopters flying laps over our position is probably only going to get the dead’s attention. Right?”

The sound quality of the helicopters’ beating rotors changed as they slowed and transitioned into hovers over San Vincente Boulevard, which was a couple of hundred feet from where Reese crouched behind a four-foot tall ring of sand bags. Over the drone of rotors and the whine of jet engines, he heard distant pops coming from inside the hospital itself. The Guard was conducting another clearing operation, which meant that injured people who had been brought in earlier in the day had expired, then came back to life as the dead.

Another man joined Reese and Bates at the sand bag wall, this one clad in full battle rattle over his Army Combat Uniform. It took a moment for Reese to recognize First Sergeant Plosser. He had been the previous Guard commander’s senior noncommissioned officer, and had survived an attack from his commander when he had suddenly died and reanimated as a stench. Reese didn’t know the full details behind Captain Narvaez’s death, only that it had been abrupt and essentially immediate. His body was somewhere in a pile of corpses that had been stacked up on the southeast corner of Gracie Allen and San Vincente, a grisly tableau of what the hospital had become.

Plosser looked up at the hovering Apaches as they slowly pirouetted in the sky, maneuvering until they were several hundred feet apart in a tail-to-tail formation. While he didn’t know the first sergeant at all well, Reese’s first impressions had been that the tall, rawboned man was a hard charger. Now he looked shrunken, his cheeks hollow and his face covered with grime and dark speckles of what seemed to be dried blood. Flecks of gray stood out in his razor stubble.

“Oh, this shit doesn’t look good,” Plosser said.

“They lining up to start shooting?” Bates asked. “Somebody call in some close air?”

“Looks like,” Plosser said.

“What’s close air?” Reese asked.

“Close air support,” Bates said. “It’s where helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft start dropping bombs and shit on bad guys that are about to overwhelm a friendly force.”

Reese looked around, but other than the few zombies writhing about in the wire, he didn’t see much of a threat. “So does this mean a shitload of zombies are coming at us from both directions? Big enough to overrun us?”

There was a thunderous rattle as one Apache opened up with the thirty-millimeter chain gun in its belly pod. The noise reverberated off the hospital buildings that stood on either side of Reese’s position. A second later, the other Apache began as well, and Reese saw a hail of cartridges falling from the aircraft, tumbling and twinkling in the late afternoon sunlight as they descended toward the street below. That the attack helicopters were firing in opposite directions at the same time did not seem to be a good omen.

Plosser put a nail in the thought’s coffin. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, this shit doesn’t look good
at all
.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

It didn’t take long for Doddridge to get the rest of the prisoners into the desert and out of sight of the highway traffic. Once that happened, they doglegged to the left and started heading for the small town in the distance. There were other people in the desert with them—and they were carrying packs on their backs or riding along in ATVs. A lot of them looked like Mexicans, or maybe even Indians, but the last thing Clarence Doddridge wanted to do was get into a meet and greet with a bunch of people in the desert after waxing a bunch of corrections officers. So he just charged through the scrub brush as quickly as he could, the shotgun in his hands, the sweat pouring off his face. Even though it was October, the desert was still hot as shit. Lizards occasionally streaked away from the group, winding around the scrub and disappearing from sight. That kind of freaked Doddridge out. He’d never known he was frightened of lizards before, but then and again, this was the first time he’d ever seen them.

Who knew a hard-core prison rat like me’d be ‘fraid of a lizard?

There was more activity in the desert aside from lizards and Mexicans or Indians. There were construction crews out there as well, tearing up the scrub as they got closer to town. To his surprise, he found a six foot deep trench had been dug in the desert floor, opposed by a tall earthen berm. Doddridge had no idea what to make of that shit. Why the hell would someone be digging trenches in the desert? Prospecting for water, or something?

It took some doing, dropping into the trench, climbing out, and mounting the berm. Auto had to help Doddridge, since he wasn’t a big person to begin with, and hauling himself out of a dusty trench wasn’t something he’d ever practiced before, but they did it. It was a pain in the ass, and the berm wasn’t a treat, either—by the time he crested it and stumbled down the other side, his boots were full of dirt. To top it off, he almost stepped on a rattlesnake, and it took every ounce of will he had not to shriek like a schoolgirl and blast it with the shotgun. Thankfully, the snake figured out it was outnumbered and slithered away as fast as it could.

“Man, that’s some freaky shit!” said the skinny kid with the glasses. Shaliq, his name was. Doddridge still didn’t know what a kid like him was doing in the federal system, but it didn’t matter. He was part of the posse, now. Doddridge’s Desert Rats.

“Yeah,” was all he said, and Doddridge was glad the guards had let him take a shit in the desert before he killed them all. Otherwise, he would’ve crapped his pants. He decided than that while lizards creeped him out, snakes absolutely almost made him lose his shit. Literally.

“What the hell are these guys doing out here, digging ditches in the desert?” asked the Latin King, Big Tone.

“What the fuck does it matter?” asked Auto. The huge man with the long blond hair shielded his eyes with one big hand and looked at the tractors tearing up the landscape in the distance. They were maybe a half mile away, not far from the traffic-clogged highway.

“Yeah, let’s not worry bout that shit,” Doddridge said. “We need to get us selves a place to hole up for a while, plan our next move. Come on.”

The place would be the first house they came upon, right off a stretch of concrete called Substation Road. It was on the southern border of the town, and the house was small but neat. Bird bath out front. Rock garden for a lawn. A carport with a white 1990s Caddy in the shade. Pink curtains visible through the windows. Everything about it screamed Old Lady to Doddridge, which meant there likely wouldn’t be much of a fight to be had taking it. The closest house was a few dozen yards away, and it looked a lot like this one: a small wood-frame bungalow-style home with a lot of features that could only be found in the desert, namely no lawn and some hardy trees barely hanging on in the heat.

Doddridge sent Shaliq and Big Tone to scout the back of the place. They came back after only five minutes, reporting that the backyard was pretty much the same as the front. No swimming pool, no hot tub, not even much of a fence. Some flowers and succulents in racks along the house’s back wall. More pink curtains. Another bird bath.