The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead (11 page)

“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.

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.

But this job was pretty noncomplex. Straight trenches in soil that was pretty consistently friable, without a lot of stickiness due to a summer season’s lack of moisture, was damn easy work. The only impediments were miles and miles of creosote bushes, some Joshua trees, and the occasional yucca plant—nothing that could stop a ’dozer with work on its mind. And they weren’t within seventy feet of impacting the water table, so other than some stones and the piping that had already been marked by the initial survey teams, there wasn’t a lot to worry about. All they had to do was dig.

“Hey, Randy!” a voice called over the din of the moving equipment. Klaff sat in his pickup truck a bit away from the worksite, slurping away at a giant Styrofoam cup of coffee from the Single Tree Bistro, the only coffee shop that was open early in the morning. Klaff looked around and saw Chester Dawson pointing past his truck. Chester Dawson was an odd name for the kid, since he was a whipcord-thin Taiwanese man of about twenty or twenty-one. He’d started working on Klaff’s crew a couple of years ago, and while Klaff had been initially suspicious of a Chinaman’s (
Taiwanese,
he had to correct himself) work habits, he found that Chester was actually a pretty good digger. Plus, he had a nice South Texas twang, which coming from an Asian guy, delivered a lot of entertainment.

“What is it?” Klaff shouted back.

“Someone’s comin’!” Chester said, pointing again.

With a groan, Klaff turned in the pickup’s driver seat and looked out the rear window in the cab. Sure enough, some guy was walking up to the work site, stumbling through the desert. His clothes were a mess, and Klaff was certain he saw dust falling from the man’s bony shoulders with each step he took.

Whoa, looks like this guy’s been out here for a while,
he thought. He immediately figured it was some motorist whose ride had broken down somewhere on the highway, but what the hell was he doing coming
here?
There were plenty of cars and trucks on the highway. Someone there should’ve been able to help him out.

But then, the figure wasn’t stumbling toward him from the highway. It looked to Klaff as if the guy was emerging from the depths of Death Valley itself. Maybe he’d been heading toward US-395 and had seen the work site and changed course.

Klaff pulled himself out of the truck, then reached back inside. He had a cooler in the back, full of water and some beers, for lunchtime. He grabbed a bottle of water, just in case. There was no chance he was going to offer a Lone Star to a stranger, even if the guy was coming out of the desert.

“Let’s go check it out, Chester,” he said to the Asian man as he ran a hand over his face and squared his straw hat on his head. The man had clearly seen them, and he was stumbling toward them at a faster clip, bumbling his way through the creosote.

“Uh, y’all sure about that?” Chester asked.

“Well, Chester, what the hell are you afraid of? Looks like some poor old sumbitch got himself lost out here. The least we can do is check on him and make sure he’s all right.”

“Randy, I think we ought to wait,” Chester said. He trotted up to the truck and put his hands on its hood, his eyes narrowed against the morning light beneath the brim of his weathered Texas Rangers ball cap.

“Well shit, boy. Where were you raised up—some little renegade island province of China? Don’t you know what the hell common decency is?” Klaff shot back. He heard one of the bulldozers grind to a halt, and he looked back to see its driver was half-leaning out of his cab, shouting something that Klaff couldn’t hear over the thrum of its big diesel.

“I was raised in Calallen, damn it,” Chester said. He smelled like tobacco, and Klaff wrinkled his nose at the stench. He never did much like the stink of cigarettes. “And I dunno, somethin’ about this guy looks really fuckin’ weird.”

The driver of the stopped ’dozer yelled again, and Klaff waved at him. “Yeah, yeah, we see the guy! Get back to work!”

The driver retreated back into the bulldozer’s cab and went back to his job. Klaff turned and looked at the man approaching them. He was about a hundred or so feet away, and looked absolutely filthy. Like he’d been in the desert a long, long time.

“Guy looks almost dead on his feet,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. You folks from above Galveston don’t have a lot of common sense, right?”

Klaff frowned at that comment, the way any North Texan and born son of Fort Worth would have. “What are you trying to tell me, Chester?”

“I’m tryin’ to tell you that guy really
is
dead, Randy!” Chester half-shouted. “Look at him, for Christ’s sake!”

“Chester, taking the Lord’s name in—wait a minute, now. Are you telling me that’s a
zombie
headed our way?” Klaff turned and looked back at the man. Sure enough, if the zombies were real, this guy certainly fit the bill.

“You know, Randy, I have a feelin’ you’d really clean up on Family Feud,” Chester said. “You got a gun on you?”

“Hell no, I don’t have a gun. We’re in the People’s Republic of California, not Texas!” As the figure shambled closer to the truck—and damn, it was coming right for Klaff and Chester—Klaff tried to figure what he could use as a weapon. Sure, he could hop in the truck and run the thing down, but what if it
was
just some lost soul? Spending time in Single Tree’s jail would probably cut into his overtime earnings. He looked in the truck’s bed. All sorts of implements lay there. He tossed the bottle of water inside and reached for a shovel.

“Okay, I guess I can give him a line drive off the head if he’s a brain-eater,” Klaff said. He was developing a real case of the jelly-bellies right now. He had no idea what would happen if he beaned the guy on the head with a shovel in full swing, but he was certain it would involve a lot of blood.