The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead (12 page)

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“Found us some transpo,” Bates said over a lukewarm paper bowl of New England clam chowder.

Reese was eating the same thing. It beat yet another burrito. “What do you have?” he asked.

“The Guard has a five ton sitting near the back gate,” Bates said. “Unguarded at the moment. I checked it out. Batteries are good, full fuel, all the tires are in decent shape. Once we get up to speed in that thing, nothing’s going to be able to stop us.”

“I thought we were going to get an MRAP,” Detective Marsh said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if I want to get into a shootout with the Sheriff’s department,” Bates said. “They have three of them here, but they’re sticking close to them. They know what they’re going to do when the hammer falls, and it doesn’t include helping out the LAPD.”

“So you’d rather get into a shootout with the National Guard?” Reese asked.

“The Guard has a lot of assets here, Reese,” Bates told him. “They positioned that unit and basically forgot about it. I know, because I’ve asked every Guardsman I can find about it, and they all just kind of look dumb and shrug. Kind of like the sheriffs, only without the cheesy mustaches and styling gel.”

“Let’s take it easy on the slurs,” Reese said. “Everyone’s keeping each other alive here. The sheriffs are here acting in mutual assistance, and the Guard is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let’s not let the old shit get in the way. All right?”

Bates frowned. “You became such a faggot when you made it to detective three, Reese.”

“Like I said: Let’s take it easy on the slurs,” Reese replied. “So more about this truck?”

Bates smirked. “Just when I thought you were going to ask us to sing Kumbaya, now you want to know how we’re going to skip out on everyone when things turn to shit, right?”

“Bates, you got something to say, or not? If so, get to it.”

“Truck’s at the back gate. We can get to it, we can drive out of here. I know how to drive it, so that’s not a problem. In case I don’t make it, though, it’s an automatic. No key needed. Prime the engine for three seconds, release for another three seconds, switch on the battery until you hear a tone, then push the same switch up to start. Voila.” Bates waved his plastic spoon in the air. “Don’t say I never did anything for you, Reese.”

“Yeah, okay. What else?”

Bates blinked. “What, that isn’t enough?”

“We need a destination,” Reese said.

“That’s easy,” Bates said, looking down at his bowl of chowder. “We head for the ocean.”

“For the ocean?”

Bates looked up. “Unless the stenches start walking out of the Pacific from Japan, then that would leave us with only three axes of attack to manage. And we can find a boat.”

“A boat?” Marsh asked. He looked at Bates with a skeptical expression. “What, you’re a sailor
and
an Army truck driver?”

“Let’s just say I have friends in high, low, and unexpected places,” Bates said.

“And where might these friends be, Bates?”

“Somewhere along Long Beach, and they’ll come when I call,” Bates replied.

Reese snorted. “So. You want us to drive thirty-plus miles south to Long Beach through the zombie apocalypse to meet some friends of yours in a little boat?”

“Not so little,” Bates said. “Sixty-seven feet, aluminum hull. Catamaran.”

“Damn, you have a boat like that on a sergeant’s salary?” Marsh asked. “Something you want to admit to here, Bates?”

Bates smiled enigmatically. “Nothing illegal going on here, Detective.”

“You talking about the Harbor Patrol dive boat, Bates?” Reese asked.

Bates raised a brow. “Looks like someone knows their way around sister departments, even down to the boat in question. Yeah, that’s what it is, and I’m tight with a lot of guys down there.”

“So what’s your escape plan after we get on the boat, assuming they’ll take all of us?”

“Santa Rosa Island,” Bates said. “It was the place to go if shit ever hit the fan. It’s hit the fan. Time to get there. Bringing along fellow cops was always part of the deal.”

Reese knew of it. It was a second largest of three islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. “What about others? Civilians? Families?”

“There’s a limit to what we can do, Reese. One boat, some prepositioned supplies and facilities ... you get the picture,” Bates said.

“You thinking of just hanging out there?” Reese asked. “Never been there personally, but I hear there’s not a lot on that place. Why not Santa Cruz Island? A little more built up. Hell, as far as that goes, why not Catalina?”

“A lot more likely to attract people,” Bates said. “This is a rally point, Reese. We get out there, we sit, and we wait.”

Marsh sipped a cup of coffee. It was useless; Reese could see he was fading fast. “For what?”

“To figure out what to do next,” Bates said. “Unless the government gets a handle on whatever’s going on, we’ll need to sit it out.”

“And what if sitting it out doesn’t work?”

Bates shrugged. “We go into Santa Barbara and scavenge for the rest of our lives. It’s going to be a pretty severe rustic existence, gentlemen. Get used to it.”

“So steal an Army truck, survive driving thirty miles through Los Angeles County, wait for a boat, take said boat to an island that probably won’t be all that uninhabited by the time we get there, and wait for Uncle Sugar to get his collective act together and kill all the zombies.” Reese rubbed his face. “Okay, I guess it’s all we’ve got, unless there’s a fortified mansion in Beverly Hills someone knows about?”

Bates shook his head, still smiling. His clear blue eyes didn’t flicker when a gout of gunfire roared in the very near distance. Reese himself barely jumped, but he did turn to see if something was up, other than the Guard working over zombies approaching the wire. It was only that.

Yeah, I guess I can get used to anything, now.

“All right, let’s get some sack time,” he said, finishing up his chowder and pushing himself to his feet.

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

The God damned bus isn’t coming.

Sinclair was fuming as he and Meredith stood like commoners in the parking lot of a McDonald’s located on Single Tree’s north end. He’d already had his fill of absolutely rancid food during his stay in the little desert town, but the dry, processed Egg McMuffin and sausage breakfast burrito he’d just had wouldn’t even qualify as one-star dining. And the tea they served made a two-day old used bag of Lipton’s best present like a perfectly-brewed cup of Earl Grey Supreme. If the overall foulness of the tastes he had encountered over the past half hour left his palate within five days, he would be pleasantly surprised.

Of course, Meredith had no problems consuming any of it, as she was a typical American. Sinclair had brought that up, of course—her ability to consume even the most grotesque foods as if they were from an establishment that had received a glowing Michelin five star review. It was nauseating, but he had to remind himself he hadn’t married her for her class, good looks, or gentle laugh. It was because she was the key to him accessing several hundred million dollars. After that happened, he couldn’t give a rat’s fart if she spent all day eating Cheetohs and diddled herself until her lady parts turned orange.

But the bus hadn’t shown up, and while frustrating, it was not entirely unexpected. Out of an abundance of caution, Sinclair hadn’t even checked out of the roach coach they were staying in. Had the bus not arrived, they would have had nowhere to return. And while he’d had his fill of all the free HBO he could handle and had absolutely no use for a “free ironing board in each room”, sleeping on the street wasn’t on his personal bucket list. So Sinclair and Meredith just watched the traffic slowly trundle past. The gas station across the street was mobbed with vehicles, and it looked as if the place was deserted. Motorists were looking about in clueless agitation as they tried to fill their vehicles from pumps which had been switched off. Sinclair was joined in his observations by a pudgy Mexican woman wearing a loud floral dress and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Guess they don’t know the station’s closed,” she said. “Martin ran out of gas yesterday.”

Sinclair glanced down at her. She had a wide face dominated by an almost equally broad nose, atop which were perched a pair of slim sunglasses. Her lips were painted burnt orange, and her cheeks were burnished with a fiery blush. It was an odd composition that one might expect to find on a Dali painting.

“No gas deliveries coming in?” Sinclair asked. “That’s odd, I thought I saw tanker trucks in a parking lot down the road.” He pointed down Main Street, the boulevard he and Meredith had hiked up to catch the bus to Reno.

“Oh, those are Mister Barry’s trucks,” the woman said with a smile.

“‘Mister Barry’?” Sinclair echoed.
What, are we now on a plantation?

“Yes, Mister Barry Corbett,” the woman said with a nod. She held several bags of McDonald’s breakfast burritos. Sinclair’s stomach roiled at the stench. “We been hearing he brought all that stuff in.”

“Stuff? What stuff?” Sinclair asked. Then he remembered what the Mexican pharmacy owner had told him last night, that Corbett was going to convert the entire town into a fortress.

“Oh, all sorts of stuff,” the woman said. “Trucks, trailers, all kinds of machines. I hear a lot of it came up from Texas, right when things started to go bad in LA.” The woman pointed westerly, trying to be helpful in ensuring Sinclair knew in which direction Los Angeles lay.

Sinclair considered this. Aside from the fact all his recent major sources of information were Mexican, everything seemed to flow together in an odd way. Corbett returning to this hick little town. A surprising presence of construction goods, and from what the pharmacy owner had told him, an arsenal of illegal weapons. Defenses were being erected in the desert, though Sinclair hadn’t seen any of that himself—he hadn’t ventured out into the desert, and it had been deep night when the accursed Ghibli limped into town like a lame dog before rolling over and dying at the worst moment. All of this was circumstantial, of course, but in Sinclair’s business, circumstance and innuendo were more golden than cold, solid fact.

So, Corbett’s making himself a little castle in the desert to hide inside, is he?

“Excuse me, do you know if the bus to Reno is coming?” Meredith asked the portly Mexican woman.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Reno’s shut down,” the woman said. “My cousin live up there, works in the casinos. They have troubles, too. Sounds like the police can’t control it.” The woman sighed, her face falling. “I hope my cousin will be okay.” She recovered an instant later, and Sinclair had the sudden understanding that the woman before him wasn’t exactly a deep thinker. As if the four bags full of burritos weren’t enough of a clue. “But no, I don’t think the bus is coming any more. It didn’t come last time, either.”

“Last time?” Sinclair asked.

“Tuesday,” the woman said. “I ask the manager at the McDonald’s, he said the service, it was suspended.”

“So we’re waiting here for no good reason,” Sinclair said, feeling rage boiling deep inside him. “It was supposed to arrive at eight forty-five! Why don’t they have a sign up?”

“I don’t know, mister,” the Mexican woman said. Her words were drowned out as a white Chevy van suddenly accelerated through the traffic. It slammed into a car and lurched toward the street, its engine roaring. One of its front tires blew as the van jumped the curb, and for an instant, its black plastic grille was pointed right at Sinclair. Behind the vehicle’s cracked windshield, he caught a glimpse of a thrashing struggle, as if two people were fighting for the wheel. Then the van’s front tires hit a parking stop, and the vehicle cut away from him, scraping across two parked cars. Its rear bumper was torn loose in the impact, and half of it dropped to the asphalt, digging into it as the van continued accelerating, its blown front tire flipping and flopping like the tub of a stricken washing machine. The van plowed right into an old pickup truck that was backing out of a parking space, hitting it with such force that the truck seemed to almost bend. The van’s engine died in an explosive rattle, and a cloud of steam suddenly rose from its front end. The man sitting in the pickup truck looked quite shocked, but other than that, he was fine. He pushed open the truck’s driver’s door and eased himself out. Several people emerged from the McDonalds, mouths open at the severity of the accident.

“Oh, gosh,” said the Mexican woman.

“Jock, are you all right?” Meredith asked. She reached out and grabbed his arm.

“Why, yes. Quite fine, Meredith,” Sinclair said, even though his heart was bucking to a bizarre disco beat inside his chest. “Thank you for asking.”

The man who had been driving the truck peered in through the van’s windows, then tried to open the driver’s door. Even from his position near the street, Sinclair could hear someone frantically pounding inside the van. The pickup driver stepped to his right and opened the van’s loading door.

Two bloodied figures crashed into him, pinning him to the pavement. A startled thrill ran through the crowd of onlookers, and the Mexican woman with Sinclair and Meredith put a hand to her painted lips.