The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead (2 page)

“Okay, maybe not,” Bates said, turning toward the threat. He raised his shotgun and began firing slowly and carefully, dropping five zombies while Reese continued reloading. By the time he had slid seven shells into his Remington 870 tactical, Bates was about done. Seven corpses lay on the floor, the majority of their heads missing, splattered across the walls and doors. There were only three left, and Bates was in the process of pulling his pistol when Reese stepped up beside him. He opened up with the shotgun, bringing down the remaining zombies. Behind them, Narvaez and the rest of the Guard were mopping up the room, exterminating any ghouls that had been overlooked in the initial assault.

“Hey, Reese!” Narvaez called, his voice muffled by his gas mask.

“What do you need?” Reese called back. His ears were ringing, and he wondered if all the firing in such close quarters would leave him with an award-winning case of tinnitus.

“Come on up here,” Narvaez said.

Reese looked over at Bates as the taller man slid more shells into his shotgun. The patrolman nodded to him, his blue eyes as cool as always.

“Go ahead, I’m good,” Bates said. “If anything else comes through those doors, I’ve got them.”

Reese nodded and picked his way across the carnage to where Narvaez stood with the rest of his troops. There were maybe fourteen bodies lying around the isolation ward. The floor was slick with a bloody gruel of blood, viscera, ichor, and water from the shattered sprinkler pipe. Another ceiling tile popped out of its frame, admitting a sudden gout of water that poured over a tangled mass of gray, lifeless bodies. Reese had to watch his step as he navigated his way around the motionless dead.

“What do you have?” he asked when he made it to Narvaez.

“We got a problem.” Narvaez nodded toward one of the curtained cubicles where a heavy hospital bed lay on its side. A male zombie clad in the remains of a hospital smock lay draped across it. Several exit wounds were visible in its back, with another in its skull. The corpse had been returned to death’s embrace, and its eyes were open and staring, seeing nothing. Reese turned back to Narvaez and spread his hands.

“Yeah, so? Good work,” he said, wondering why the hell the National Guard officer had called him forward.

Narvaez stared at Reese for a moment from behind his gas mask’s lenses, then pointed at the scene before. “Look around the bed, Detective.”

Reese stepped to his right, bringing the shotgun’s stock back into his shoulder, keeping the weapon low but ready. Leaning against the wall was a woman in her very early thirties. Her eyes were wide and panicked, and her blonde hair was plastered against her skull by a mixture of sweat and water. Her light-colored blouse was bloodied. She was gasping for air, frightened out of her mind as she looked back at Reese. A small form clung to her. A boy, maybe about three years old, his face buried against his mother’s neck as he whimpered.

A ragged, bloody hole had been torn out of the woman’s left forearm. She had been bitten.

“Please,” she gasped, looking up at Reese with those wide, terrified eyes. “Please.”

“You’re okay, ma’am,” Reese said, and he wondered just why the hell he was saying that. “Are you a patient?”

She looked at Reese stupidly for a moment, then shook her head. She turned her head fractionally toward the bullet-riddled zombie that lay across the overturned bed. Reese saw its arm was still outstretched, fingers curled into claws. Even in death, the corpse was reaching for its cornered prey.

“My husband was,” she said. “You’re a policeman?”

“Yes, I’m with the LAPD,” Reese told her.

“Take my son,” the woman said. “Please.”

“Okay,” Reese said, lowering the shotgun entirely. He saw the woman look at the LAPD patch on his tactical vest, and something akin to relief fluttered across her face for an instant. It was crowded out by the fear almost immediately. The lady knew what was in store for her. Reese reached out with his left hand, and the woman leaned forward, trying to push the boy into his arm. The boy cried out, and the woman cooed to him as she gently unwrapped his arms from around her body.

“It’s okay, baby,” she said. “It’s going to be okay. You go with the policeman. Mommy will be with you in just a few minutes, okay?”

The boy resisted. Reese stepped in closer and put his arm around the boy’s chest. Working with the mother, he managed to pry him away from her, but he screamed and cried. As he fought against Reese, he saw a flash of red on his shoulder. Blood was welling up underneath his shirt. Reese put him down and pulled back his top. The smooth skin beneath was marred by a bite mark. Even though the zombie that had bit him hadn’t had the time to tear the flesh away, its teeth had broken his skin.

Reese let the boy run back to his mother, and she looked up at him in shock.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “You don’t understand, I want you to take him
away
from me!”

“I know what you want,” Reese said, “but I can’t. Look.” He pulled the neck of the boy’s shirt aside, exposing the bite wound. The mother’s eyes went wide when she saw the angry injury. She shook her head in denial as tears welled up in her eyes.

“No. No, no, no,” she whispered as she pulled the crying boy back into her arms.

“What do you want us to do, Reese?” Narvaez asked.

“What do you mean,” Reese said, even though he very well knew the purpose of Narvaez’s question.

Narvaez didn’t say anything, just looked at Reese and waited. Reese didn’t answer him. He moved past the Guard officer and started making his way back to where Bates stood. Narvaez followed him a short distance.

“Reese, you’re the guy who’s supposed to tell us what to do here,” Narvaez said.

Reese turned around, suddenly pissed off. “What do you want me to say, Narvaez? Kill them? Is that what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want to do that,” Narvaez said. “It’s not what I signed up for. But we have to do
something
with them. We can’t leave them up here.”

“I’ll tell the hospital staff,” Reese said.

“What? Why? What good is that going to do?”

Reese turned back to the Guardsman, almost slipping and sliding in the bloody gruel underfoot. “Because I don’t have any other guidance for you right now, Narvaez. That’s why.”

“You need to get some, then,” Narvaez responded. “Seriously, man. Someone has to start making some really tough calls, because they’re not the only ones.” The National Guard officer pointed back in the direction of the mother and child they had just left. “It’s spreading, Reese. It’s spreading fast now.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

In the town council chamber, Max Booker sat with the others as they leafed through the thick binders left behind by Barry Corbett and his men. It was interesting stuff, to say the least. The plans Corbett had put together were extensive, and the materials lists were almost thirty pages long all by themselves. According to the presentation, everything had been collected and was waiting on trucks parked at various locations throughout the town. Booker knew that most of the trucks were at the airport, but others had been spotted in the parking lots of local businesses. Booker had no idea which semi-trailer contained what, but he had no doubt that “product placement” was by design, not happenstance. Judging by the plans Corbett had drawn up, nothing had been left to chance. There was little doubt on Booker’s part that the wily old fox had prepositioned everything in accordance to when and where it would be needed.

And the diagrams themselves were works of either an inspired imagination, or a detail-oriented survivalist freak. Booker didn’t think Corbett was overly imaginative, so he automatically lumped him into the freak arena. He shook his head as he read the details. Plank steel walls twenty feet high, topped by concertina wire and surrounded on the outside by more coils of wire on the ground, called tanglefoot wire. Inside, another set of walls atop high dirt berms, from which battlements would be stationed. Trenches surrounding the outer perimeter that were ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. Inside the barriers, smaller, more modular defenses would be erected, so that incursions could be contained without the rest of the town being directly threatened. All manner of armaments were listed as well, including ammunition counts and types. Booker scanned the list, not because he was fascinated by weapons—far from it, he was never the type to be a card-carrying NRA fanatic, he was a politician—but to see just how far gone Corbett was. Seventy thousand three-inch shotgun shells with #3 buckshot. Two million rounds of M855 fifty-five grain in 5.56-millimeter. Two thousand LWRC International IC-Enhanced rifles. Two thousand Smith & Wesson M&P45 pistols. On and on it went, with more rifles, more ammunition, more instruments of violence. Booker was genuinely horrified.

“Well, I see Mr. Corbett isn’t worried about violating any state gun laws, seeing as how he’s basically broken almost every one California has,” Chief Grady said, as if reading Booker’s mind.

“I was just wondering that,” Booker said. “Are you going to arrest him?”

Grady grunted and shook his head. “I don’t think that’d be a very smart thing to do right now, Mayor.”

“Arresting that mad man would be
just
the smart thing to do!” Hector Aguilar said. Booker sighed internally. Aguilar was always fuming about something, and as much as Booker disliked and distrusted Barry Corbett, Hector actually
hated
the man with a passion. Booker knew it was nothing more than childish jealousy—Corbett was the captain of a multinational corporation which generated billions of dollars of profit every quarter, whereas Aguilar’s pharmacy and the handful of rental properties he had in town didn’t come anywhere near that. Sure, Aguilar lived better than most of the locals, but he was miserly when it came to giving back to the community. Booker thought it was oddly funny that the extremely liberal Aguilar guarded his earnings almost viciously, whereas Corbett, the living stereotype of the conservative one percent complete with Gulfstream jet, was paying it forward.

“Why don’t we finish this first, then decide,” Chief Grady said, a reasonable tone in his voice.

“Please,” said Gemma Washington. Her small, wire-rimmed glasses were perched low on her nose, making her look like some matronly school
marm
.

“Fine, let’s go through the rest of Corbett’s juvenile fantasy novel,” Aguilar said with a contemptuous sneer.

It took them the better part of two hours just to get a firm understanding of the concepts that Corbett was proposing. Booker was amazed. The transition to the town would be epic and profound. Corbett actually believed that the outside world was, in essence, coming to an end. And he wanted the town to be ready for it when it happened. Booker pushed the binder away from him and leaned back in his chair, trying to decide how he felt about it all. A lot of what he had just read left him terrified, while other parts seemed comforting in their sensible and rational approach.

Booker didn’t know what to think. Did he want Corbett to be wrong? Or did he want him to be
right
?

The others were stirring now, finishing up their reading. Booker stood up and ran a hand through his hair.

“Well, that was a lot to digest,” he said. “I think I’m calling for a bio break.”

“I think I’m calling for a laughing break,” Aguilar said. “Clearly, Corbett is a raving lunatic.”

Booker waved the comment away. “Yeah, we’ll get to that in a minute.” With that, he excused himself from the chamber and headed for the bathroom. Grady followed him, and Emma excused herself to the ladies room. When they returned to the chamber, Aguilar was still sitting in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his dark brows beetled in consternation as he watched them approach.

“Well, I don’t think we have very much to talk about, do we?” he snapped.

“Let’s try and keep our cool, Hector,” Booker said. “No matter what you think of Corbett, he is right about one thing. The world’s not a better place today than it was yesterday, and things are only getting worse.” He looked to Grady. “Why don’t you go first, Chief. Tell us what you know about things, before we get to what we have to discuss.”