The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead (5 page)

“I’ll catch up with you later,” Bates said, looking toward the rear of the bus. Reese looked back too. He saw the hefty patrolman Kozinski sitting in his seat, his wide, chubby-cheeked face composed into hard, defiant lines. At the same time, there was a cast of guilt to his eyes. Kozinski knew he had fucked up, and fucked up badly. Despite how the department was portrayed in popular media, the LAPD was very unlikely to countenance a patrolman opening up on citizens with a semiautomatic rifle, even during the zombie apocalypse.

Reese left Bates to it and stepped off the bus. As soon as his feet hit the pavement, he heard someone call his name.

“Reese!”

Reese turned and found Renee Gonzales standing nearby, wearing a heavy tactical vest like himself. A rifle hung from its strap on her shoulder, barrel pointed toward the ground, and her Glock stuck out from her hip at an awkward angle beneath the lip of the armor. Her eyes had a vaguely panicked look behind her glasses.

“Renee. How’re you doing?” Reese asked.

“Tried to get in touch with you a couple of times. You get my messages?”

Reese frowned. He’d pretty much forgotten about his phone over the past few hours, so he reached into his pocket and fished it out. Sure enough, he had three missed calls, all from Renee in the past hour. He stepped aside to allow the rest of the cops to file off the bus and shook his head.

“Sorry, past few hours have been absolutely bat shit at the hospital. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on over there. Anyway, what’s up?”

“Jerry’s gone,” Renee said.

Reese felt his frown deepen. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he up and left, Reese. Left his badge, and department cell on his desk, but took everything else. Body armor, shotgun, rifle, his service pistol, all his allocated ammunition. Even the ROVER he’d been issued. I had one of the guys check his locker—everything’s gone.” She pointed into the parking lot. “So’s his car.”

“You try his personal cell?”

Renee nodded. “Goes right into voice mail. Sent a bunch of text messages, but no response.”

“You try the radio?”

Renee patted the transceiver attached to her shoulder. The Remote Out of Vehicle Emergency Radio, known to the cops just as ROVER, was an eight-watt communication system used for mobile operations when a patrolman had to leave his radio car.

“No response,” she said. “He just bolted, Reese.”

Reese found he was unsurprised by the news. Jerry Whittaker had a nice house up north, in Toluca Lake. He couldn’t afford it on his salary, but his wife could, thanks to her position as senior partner with a major business accounting firm. Reese had been invited up a couple of times, and he’d been impressed with his partner’s living situation. The couple had celebrated the arrival of their first child only a year ago, so Reese figured that Jerry had a lot to protect.

“You tell anyone about this?” he asked.

“Not yet. Wanted to run it by you first.”

“Forget about him, Renee. He’s in the wind.”

“They’ll start asking about him, Reese.”

Reese shrugged. “So tell them you haven’t seen him, and that you’ve tried to get a hold of him, but no dice. He’s made his choice, if there’s any blowback headed his way, he’ll have to take it on the chin.” Reese turned and watched as another platoon of cops moved toward the bus and climbed aboard. He looked beyond the vehicle, peering at the dark apartment buildings down the street. They made him nervous—the five-foot retaining wall that separated the stationhouse from the street likely wouldn’t be a huge deterrent if a herd of zombies suddenly appeared.

“I really don’t want to be on the line for this,” Renee said.

Reese sighed. “Tell you what. I have to meet with Pallata and give her the lowdown of what’s going on at Cedar-Sinai. I’ll pass it on to her, and tell her you didn’t know anything about it. How’s that?”

Renee nodded. “That’d help. I don’t want to throw Jerry under the bus, but …”

“You’re not. He did this to himself. I kind of doubt there’s going to be any time for an investigation anyway. Don’t sweat it, Renee. If things get back to normal, maybe he’ll be able to give a song and dance that’ll save his hide, but if not, you and me are going to step back and let the chips fall where they may. We’ve got other things to worry about.”

Renee nodded again. “Okay.”

“You have a duty station?”

“Just right here, waiting for a tasking.”

Reese nodded. He looked over and saw Bates standing in a tight huddle with the hulking patrolman, Kozinski. From the latter’s downcast expression, Reese could see that Bates was giving him hell without making any kind of scene whatsoever. Reese didn’t know Bates all that well since they worked different parts of the street, but the senior patrolman gave Reese the impression he didn’t much appreciate fuck ups by the men in his division.

“Okay. Why don’t you come with me—I have to file a report, then brief Pallata. I’ll fill you in on what’s going down at the hospital, and you can maybe give me some idea of what’s happening everywhere else.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

Norton couldn’t sleep.

He lay stretched out in the big king-sized bed, tossing and turning. For two hours, he pretty much just stared up at the dark ceiling, revealed to him only by the dim glow of the alarm clock’s LED display. The blackness here in the desert was pretty much absolute; even back on the shoreline of Malibu, there was still enough light pollution coming from the urban sprawl of nearby Los Angeles to contaminate the night. Back there, he sometimes felt it was never dark enough, even with the shades pulled over the windows and the sliding glass doors that led to the expansive deck. Here in Single Tree, he found the nighttime was almost
too
black, as deep and mysteriously forbidding as outer space.

He’d tried several times to call people he knew in LA, but the expensive
smartphone
he carried was useless for communication now. He wasn’t thrilled to find the landline wasn’t much better—
All circuits are busy. Please try your call later
. He had no idea what had happened to his friends and coworkers. Most of them were good people, and he felt a nagging sense of guilt at not taking time to reach out and try to warn them before leaving the city. He knew it was wasted emotion. If they hadn’t known well enough to get out, then there was no saving them. The reality was, he had barely made it out himself, and he had his own plane. For those less fortunate, trying to flee using the roads and freeways was virtually a death sentence in and of itself. He wouldn’t have been able to help them. An extra hour wouldn’t have made any difference.

He finally sat up and pulled on his jeans and left the bedroom, walking into the kitchen. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, but he flipped on the light over the sink and went through some of the cabinets anyway. Oatmeal. Chips. Bottled water. Booze, which he seriously considered for a long moment, especially the bottle of Glenfiddich 18 which practically seemed to be smiling at him. Canned goods, breakfast cereal, peanut butter, some freeze-dried products he had left behind some time ago. He pulled those out and inspected their labels. They were still good, their expiration dates indicating they would remain edible for almost another five years. He put them back and for a change of pace started going through the drawers.

He smiled when he found several packages of e-cigarettes in the junk drawer. Four Logic disposables, loaded up with 1.8% nicotine. Norton pulled one out and held the package up in the wan light, inspecting it. He’d used e-cigs in a bid to kick the smoking habit a few years back. They’d done the trick, and with their help, Norton had been able to eradicate a addiction that had blossomed to almost a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights a day. He checked the expiration date on the package, having to squint to read the faint type. It was less than a month past its best by date.

“Well, what the hell,” he said aloud, and he tore open the cardboard and plastic packet. He screwed the cartomizer into the battery and took a hit off the black cylinder. The tip glowed a bright blue like some sort of prop from a science fiction movie, and nicotine-laced vapor filled his mouth as he pulled it into his lungs. It was harsh, and he coughed a bit, but he appreciated the burn now in a way he never had before. He exhaled a cloud of vapor, watching it drift toward the ceiling, writhing slightly in the light before it vanished. He took another drag and didn’t cough this time.

Hey, not bad,
he thought.

He wandered through the house until he found himself standing on the back patio. Wearing only his jeans, the chilly air bit at his chest and feet, but Norton ignored it. Overhead, the stars blazed, blanketing the night sky with a pale light that was billions of years old. Norton contemplated them for a time, then looked over at his parents’ house, its roof just visible above the top of the tall fence that surrounded his property. It was dark and silent, and Norton was surprised he couldn’t hear his mother snoring. For his entire childhood, Norton’s mother was a perpetual snorer, so much so that his father wore earplugs to bed.

But the night wasn’t completely silent. Norton could hear the susurration of traffic flowing up and down Main Street, as people fled the terrors occupying their points of origin and hurried to encounter new ones on the way to their final destinations. Thinking about that made Norton aware that he had stepped outside unarmed, a thought that wouldn’t have crossed his mind two days ago. Now, he reminded himself, he needed to be armed at all times. Even in his own backyard, which was surrounded by a six-and-half-foot-tall fence.

He took another pull on the e-cigarette and looked up at the distant stars. They stared back at him coldly, dispassionately, completely unmoved by the horror that was spreading across the face of the tiny, insignificant planet on which he stood.

Norton sighed, took another drag, and made a mental note to talk to his parents about arming up. That would take some doing—while his father would probably understand the need, his mother hated firearms and would be a much tougher sell. With that thought in mind, he turned back to the patio door. He reentered the house, closed the door, locked it, and dropped the wooden stop into the sliding door’s rail for good measure. Just in case.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

By the time Reese had finished his report and filed the appropriate forms, it was almost three thirty in the morning. He staggered through the still-hectic hallways of Hollywood Station to the command center, his eyes burning, his joints aching. He stumbled twice, almost falling against the wall the second time. The exhaustion was taking its toll.

Captain Miriam Pallata didn’t look a hell of a lot better when he found her in the darkened command center. It was only half-manned, if that. Reese saw many of the desks and workstations were devoid of operators, and the remaining staffers were older cops or civilian workers. Reese wondered why that was.

He approached Pallata as she sat hunched over behind her desk, her face ashen in the gray glow of the workstation display before her. Pallata looked up at Reese with hollow, rheumy eyes. She didn’t seem to recognize him for a long moment as he stood before the desk, looking down on her.

“How’s it going, Captain?” he asked. His voice was made rough by the combination of exhaustion coupled with the lots of shouting he’d done during the hospital tour.

Pallata just looked up at him for a moment longer, then slowly nodded. “Reese. Didn’t think you were going to show up.”

Reese frowned. “What do you mean? I just filed my report.”

“Your report—?”

“Yeah. You know, my little department-mandated diary of how I spent my day?” Reese put his hands on the desk and leaned toward Pallata. She leaned back at the same time, an unsettled expression on her face. A tremor of fear flashed through her eyes. “Miriam, you all right? Maybe you need to grab a rack in the bridal suite for a while?” The bridal suite was the room where cops could crash during protracted emergencies that required extended staffing. It wouldn’t surprise Reese to learn it was full at this hour, but he was certain Pallata could get a cot if she wanted one.