The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead (7 page)

“
Help me
!” someone screamed from the living room. “Oh fuck,
help me
!”

Victor stepped into the living room, .45 held at the ready. He saw Estelle crouching on the sofa, her mouth opened in an endless, soundless scream, tears streaming down her face. A blood trail was plainly visible on the dun-colored carpet, leading toward the short hallway that would take him to the bedrooms and single bathroom. Two men wrestled there. One was a pale man with lank hair dressed in a prison uniform. He was the one screaming, and his eyes rolled in terror and pain. The man on top of him had a bloody shirt, courtesy of two bullet holes in his chest. For a brief instant, Victor was delighted—he’d actually managed to hit the shooter before while firing through the wall of the house.

Thank God for full metal jacket,
he thought.

The man on top was a well-muscled Hispanic man with graying hair and a multitude of tattoos, both professional and of the prison variety. As Victor watched, the man lowered his face toward the other man and ripped away half his cheek. The smaller white man screeched, a truly horrifying sound in such close quarters. Blood flowed across his face as flesh parted.

“Hey, get off him!” Victor shouted, horrified. He darted forward and kicked the Latin man in the shoulder, then stepped back and sighted down on him.

The Latin man looked up, still chewing the fresh flesh in his mouth. His eyes were open, but curiously vacant. He noisily chewed the human meat in his mouth while staring at Victor almost stupidly. Then he swallowed the mouthful of flesh and bent back over the screaming man to take another bite.

“Hey!” Victor shouted. “
Hey
!”

Why am I shouting at a zombie?
he asked himself.

Deciding that was a waste of energy, Victor shot the Latin zombie and watched as the bullet plowed right into his left shoulder, parting skin and muscle and bone as the heavy 230 grain projectile transited through the ghoul’s body and exited somewhere around its lower back. The zombie didn’t even pay attention to the wound, even as it sagged to the side somewhat as the destroyed structures in its shoulder collapsed under its weight. It ignored that as well, and just took another chunk out of the shrieking man beneath it.

Victor stepped forward and pressed the barrel of his pistol virtually against the moving corpse’s head and pulled the trigger. He barely heard the report, thanks to the ringing in his ears from all the previous shooting, but he definitely saw the result. The zombie collapsed as the bullet blasted through its skull and ripped away half of its lower jaw before it exited and disappeared into the hallway baseboard. The man trapped beneath the now motionless corpse writhed and screeched in agony, blood pouring from the rents in his face.

“Where are the others!” Victor shouted, keeping his weapon trained on both the figures on the floor before him. The man with the torn up face didn’t answer, just kept screaming. Victor repeated the question, but got nothing out of him. He looked toward Estelle, still sitting on her plastic-wrapped couch, her eyes wide with fear.

“Estelle! Where are the others?” he shouted.

With a trembling hand, Estelle pointed to the rear of the room, past the dining table. Victor looked, and saw the open sliding glass door.

Damn.

“Chief! Chief Grady!”

When he heard Suzy’s cries, Victor halfway turned toward the kitchen. His niece was backing into the house, her pistol held before her. Victor looked beyond her, and looming in the darkness of the carport was Grady. The lower half of his face was virtually annihilated by the shotgun blasts he’d taken; it was only a mass of fleshy ribbons that still leaked blood. But his eyes were intact, and they remained open and unblinking as they fixed on Suzy, tracking her every move. Grady’s eyes looked exactly like those of the zombie at his feet right before Victor had turned off its lights forever.

“Shoot him!” Victor shouted.

Suzy didn’t wait. She fired four shots in rapid succession, and each bullet found its mark, slapping into Grady’s vest and doing absolutely nothing to slow the newly-risen zombie’s advance. Estelle mewled from her couch, and the guy trapped beneath the zombie screamed again. Victor shouted for Suzy to shoot the zombie in the head, but his words were lost in the din.

A flash of light exploded in the carport, and the top of the Grady zombie’s head erupted toward the ceiling. A fountain of brackish blood poured out of the ragged hole in the ghoul’s crown, and the grotesquerie collapsed to the linoleum floor with a crash. Suzy jumped back with a shout, lowering her Glock to keep it aligned on the target as Mike Hailey stepped up to the kitchen doorway, eyes wide. He held his own pistol in both hands, and he stared down at the body of his chief with wide eyes.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

The ride up to the Hollywood Bowl was one big blur to Reese as he sat in the swaying command post RV, watching lights of Los Angeles roll past as the National Guard column roared through the city streets. As the Cedar-Sinai medical complex fell behind, he felt a keen sense of despair. He knew there were people still in the hospital, live people, people who needed protection until they could be safely evacuated. But Reese’s contingent of police officers were run out, and the Guard couldn’t stay. Without the Guard, the LAPD was just another menu item. Reese told himself he was doing this to save his guys, and to maybe give those poor souls sitting up in the lower reaches of the Hollywood Hills some hope in a night full of desperation. But that was, he decided, a fucking lie.

We’re leaving because we’re fucking scared, and don’t want to die.

It burned deep inside him to admit that to himself, but at the same time, he was getting acclimated to the gloom. He looked at the officers sitting in the RV with him. Most were senior in grade, though there were a few who were still rookies. All of them had seen and done more over the past few days than they’d likely done over their entire careers. They all had the same shell-shocked, one thousand yard stare. They’d had enough, and all they wanted was to get home, have a shower, a hot meal, and lie in their own beds. But that wasn’t going to happen. A lot of these guys wouldn’t be getting home for weeks, if ever.

One person did meet his eyes. First Sergeant Plosser sat right behind Reese on a bench seat next to two LAPD officers. His bulky gear made him seem much bigger than the cops, even though they were wearing full tactical armor. Plosser’s haunted eyes seemed to gleam in the tepid light emanating from the few overhead dome lamps that were switched on.

“You having an attack of the guilts, Reese?” he asked.

“What?”

“I asked, are you feeling guilty about leaving the hospital?”

Reese shrugged and looked back out the windshield. He sat up front next to an old patrolman who drove the big RV. Ahead of them, a line of National Guard Humvees and a couple of five-ton trucks rolled up North La Cienega Boulevard. The street was lined with businesses, hotels, restaurants, but it was surrounded by residential streets. On occasion, a human figure would emerge from one of the buildings lining La Cienega. If they hurried toward the convoy with a stiff gait, they were either shot or just run over. If they were more animated, like frightened civilians, they were ignored. That darkened Reese’s depression, but only nominally. He felt himself evolving somehow, as if he was moving away from caring what happened to the people he was charged to protect.

“We’re doing what we have to do, Plosser,” Reese said.

“Keep telling yourself that. It’s the truth.”

“How many troops does the Guard have here?” Reese asked.

“Now? I don’t know. We have about fifteen thousand in the Army component. Toss in Air Force and Navy and Corps, maybe a total standing force of twenty-five thousand. Not including whatever federal troops get assigned to our mission area. But remember, California’s a big place. LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego—everybody gets their piece of the Guard pie,” Plosser said.

“So you don’t really have enough troops to contain this,” Reese said.

Plosser snorted. “Hell, no. I don’t think the entire Department of Defense has enough troops to contain this.”

“Gee, you’re really making us all feel a lot better about things,” one of the cops said.

Plosser snorted again. “I’m not here to make you boys feel better about anything. You all know what’s going down. LA is getting the shit kicked out of it, and the rest of the state’s not doing much better.”

“You have any recommendations, First Sergeant?” Reese asked. “As in, recommendations that actually make sense?”

Plosser thought about it. “We get up to the Bowl, we get ourselves organized, and we maintain lines of communication and lines of supply with the airhead up at Griffith. The Bowl isn’t a terrible place to try and defend under normal circumstances, but given the fact our enemy isn’t put off by fear, firepower, pain, or negotiation, it’s going to be tough as hell. We’ll be sandwiched between Los Angeles proper to the south and the Valley to the north. It’s going to be a major bag of dicks, but if that’s where we’re being sent, then that’s where we go. We can’t run, and we can’t give up. If we can’t save the civilians up there, then we need to figure out how we’re going to be able to save ourselves.”

“You have any recommendations on how we do that?” asked Detective Marsh.

Plosser nodded out the windshield. “Those five-tons will do just fine. Once they get moving, we can bash through pretty much anything. They’re tough, durable, and can keep going through all sorts of shit. Not the most comfortable ride available, but they’ll get us to wherever we decide we need to go.”

“And where might that be?” Reese asked.

“Don’t know. The Mojave, maybe. It’ll take a while for these things to push out that way. And maybe they won’t—lots of people to feed on here in the LA basin. They might be occupied for the next several weeks.”

“We were thinking about trying to get one of the MRAPs the sheriff’s department has,” Marsh said.

“Great wheels if you can get ‘em, but I’m pretty sure whoever runs them right now isn’t exactly going to hand them over,” Plosser said.

“We’ll see about that,” the cop driving the RV said.

Plosser snorted again. “Yeah? You going to shoot sheriffs so you can steal their vehicles? Because that’s what it’ll probably come down to. You guys ready for that?”

Reese looked around the back of the RV. No one said anything. He slowly turned around and faced forward again, watching the city roll by. Guardsmen in the trucks opened up on a clump of zombies that was chasing a woman, but their aim was for shit. The woman went down, either because she tripped on something on the sidewalk or because she’s caught a round in one of her legs. The zombies mounded over her like a fetid tide.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Plosser mumbled.

###

As Plosser had said, the Hollywood Bowl itself wasn’t exactly in the best location. Surrounded by freeways and residential suburbs, it wasn’t terribly difficult to get to, though Reese saw that law enforcement and the meager Guard presence had worked hard to change that. There were rows of razor wire, sand bags, and gun emplacements at the entrance, all designed in a way to compress any zombie herds into narrow, confined areas where they could be serviced more efficiently. From the pile of corpses across the street, they had already been put to use. Just the same, the pile was much, much smaller than what Reese had seen over at Cedar-Sinai.

To the left was the lower parking lot area, and Reese could see several LAPD and LASD vehicles there, including mobile command posts like the one he sat in. He also saw several buses with pop-outs emblazoned with the FEMA logo. Cement barriers had been erected around the lots, and cops and soldiers were visible above them. Reese figured they were standing on the metal guard rails that surrounded the parking area. A team of National Guardsmen were setting up coils of razor wire.

“We’re going to have to wire up the entire perimeter,” Plosser muttered as the convoy rolled to a stop on Highland Avenue, just outside the fortified entrance.

“There’s a ten to twelve foot wall surrounding the entire rear of the Bowl,” Reese said. “A sound barrier. Only this part here facing the street is open.”

“It’s a deterrent, but not a fortification,” Plosser said with a grunt. “We’ll have to beef it up.”

“Sounds good,” Reese said.

Outside, a figure approached the idling RV. It was Bates, who had ridden up at the front of the column in one of the Guard Humvees. He stopped outside of Reese’s window.