The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead (2 page)

Or what was left of it, anyway. She’d been in Iraq for only four months, a service support NCO with a Marine reserve unit. Her MTVR had been struck by an IED so powerful that the explosion had launched all seven tons of the vehicle twelve feet into the air after ripping its motor right off its mounts. Danielle didn’t actually remember the explosion. One second, she was sitting behind the wheel, listening to her section leader, Stewie MacGregor, going on about the heat, and how it was driving him crazier than a guy in a straitjacket who couldn’t scratch his itching balls. MacGregor was an odd kind of Marine, full of gung ho, but also something of a whiny little bitch. He came from some suburb of Seattle, where Danielle guessed they never got any heat at all, because when MacGregor was bitching, the temperature was only ninety-five degrees in the shade, and the MTVR’s air conditioner was working like a top. The cab of the truck was maybe seventy-five, which was practically the Arctic to Danielle. But she’d grown up only sixty-five miles from Death Valley, so she kind of knew what desert heat was.

She remembered working up the nerve to tell MacGregor to shut his pie hole. Then the next thing she remembered, she was on her back looking up at the bright blue sky—there was remarkably little haze that day—watching tendrils of black milk curdle overhead. Except it wasn’t black milk, it was smoke. All around her, the air was full of the sounds of firecrackers.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
,
pop-pop-pop
,
BOOM
! The bright sounds of cartridges hitting the ground beside her sounded almost xylophonic to her then, as if some jazz musician was slapping away at the bones, and she turned her head, looking for him. It had to be a man, of course. A guy with long sideburns and a Frank Zappa beard, wearing a Nair shirt and a bead necklace, his long dark hair moving lazily in the breeze that was as hot and dry as that made by a hair dryer. Instead, she saw her MTVR lying broken in the road a few dozen yards away, billowing smoke as it burned, its front end shorn away, its tires burning, emitting foul-smelling smoke the color of ebony. All around her, the Marines of Company B, 6th Motor Transport Battalion, opened up on their attackers. Danielle didn’t see any of Saddam’s fedayeen or al Qaeda in the area, only a bunch of frightened shopkeepers and taxi drivers and people who otherwise looked like they were basically noncombatants, and the company was hosing all of them down.

She reached for her rifle, but couldn’t find it. She struggled to sit up, but rough hands pushed her back to the hot ground again, and she looked up to find Gunnery Sergeant Taggert crouching over her, his M16A3 right beside him.

“Stay down, Dani,” he said, his voice rough as large-tooth sandpaper even over the din of combat. Danielle did as he said, but something didn’t feel right. She lifted up her head and looked down the length of her body, across her utilities and the chest protector she wore. She saw her right foot, but no sign of her left. She raised her left leg, and only a ragged stump came into view, already half-wrapped in blood-stained gauze. Flies buzzed around it, attracted by the scent of liquids. The roar of combat didn’t bother the flies at all. And at that moment, it didn’t much matter to Sergeant Danielle Kennedy.

My leg ...

Before she passed out, she wondered how she would ever be able to nail the clutch on her Mustang back home.

But that was a long time ago, in a different life. Danielle Kennedy had been presented with a steady procession of prosthetic limbs, each pretty much the same, despite all the ballyhooed improvements the VA trumpeted. They all hurt the stump like hell, no matter how much padding they had, or how much lotion she put on the stump or what grade sock she put over it. Artificial legs were basically a bitch, and Danielle found she moved better hopping around on one foot than peg-legging it. However, her playing at being a monopedal kangaroo tended to flip out several folks in Single Tree, the so-called “people’s town” in the shadow of Mount Whitney, where everyone knew and cared for one another. One of those was Max Booker’s loudmouthed wife, which didn’t matter a damn to Danielle, but who happened to own the service station where her father worked. She kept trying to offer “helpful advice” to Martin Kennedy, who should “guide” Danielle toward using her prosthesis when out in public, especially since Single Tree was on occasion something of a tourist town. Out-of-towners might not understand that Dani was a Marine veteran who had been disabled in that God damn idiot W.’s grudge war against Saddam Hussein, and they might be shocked at her appearance.

So Danielle wore the damned peg-leg. Not because it made Roxanne Booker feel better, but because that way, she wouldn’t come pissing and moaning to her father. Martin Kennedy was a humble and decent man, and he didn’t deserve to be working for a shrew like Roxanne, much less be subjected to her ramblings on matters she knew nothing about.

Things only got more interesting when Barry Corbett got involved.

Danielle Kennedy was approximately five thousand social stations down the line from Old Man Corbett, who had always seemed to be old. She was a trailer park girl, and he was owner of Single Tree’s only mansion. Corbett had been born in Single Tree, and had left it in the 1960s—first, for Vietnam, and later, for Texas, where he managed to build an empire in the energy and mining sectors. He returned to Single Tree on at least a part-time basis in the very late 1980s, where he bought out his family home from the rest of his siblings, then bought up every house near it. He flattened everything and slapped together a slab-sided Adobe mansion that was at once hideous and gorgeous, a construct that a place like Single Tree never deserved and never wanted. It was located to the east of the town, on what passed for the town’s outskirts, which meant it was pretty much only a mile away from Main Street. As far as she knew, Old Man Corbett had never married, and had no dependents. Gossip varied; he was either a closeted gay man, or had lost his
cojones
to a Viet Cong sapper in 1968 at Khe Sanh. Then there were the more salacious lines of gab: Corbett was addicted to Viagra and had a stable of young girls all over the country, but mostly in his mansion in Dallas, where he had fresh young tail flown in from all over the world to satiate his deviant passions. Martin Kennedy, who had known Corbett obliquely in the days leading up to Vietnam, dismissed all of these notions. As far as he was concerned, Corbett was a guy who managed to score a big win in the game of big business, and now townspeople like Roxanne Booker and Hector Aguilar, who owned Single Tree Pharmacy, were mightily pissed that a guy from the east side of the town had done so well.

None of that really mattered to Danielle. Before she had joined the Marines, she had never paid much attention to people like Barry Corbett. He came and went in his shiny private jet as he pleased, and even paid to have the airstrip extended from about four thousand feet to over seven thousand feet. He’d had to buy off some folks in Los Angeles for that—LA apparently owned the airport, something that made no sense to Danielle, as Hell-A was over two hundred miles away—but if so, he’d managed it quietly and discreetly. And now, his airliner-sized personal jet could travel in and out as it pleased. After he’d had a thick concrete hangar built for it, of course.

When she’d come home from Iraq, persons like Barry Corbett no longer even registered on her consciousness. While she did not return a shattered woman, she did come back a changed one. Physically, for sure; but mentally and emotionally, as well. The Corps had diagnosed her with PTSD, simply because she no longer managed to sleep through the night after being almost blown into pieces inside a seven-ton tactical truck, as if that was something odd. And perhaps she did have the condition. After all, it took a special kind of stupid to come back to Single Tree with a single leg.

She remembered one day when she was peg-legging it down Main Street, heading to the diner and the cooking job that Raoul Salcedo had given her. Before Iraq, Danielle had been hopelessly, endlessly in love with Raoul’s older son, Ernesto, but Ernesto had hooked up with some hip-hop dancer in Las Vegas while she was deployed, and he’d never bothered to tell her about it before she came home to find out the truth firsthand.
Yes, my son is a miserable bastard,
Raoul had told her.
Yes, he was cheating on you the entire time you were away, and yes, he was cheating on you the entire time you dated him. But consider yourself lucky—you could have married him, and that would have been a great tragedy.
Perhaps feeling some guilt about how his son had mistreated her—serving her country in the most revered military branch there was, the United States Marine Corps—Raoul had hired her to work in his East Coast-style diner. Besides, he knew Danielle could cook. She had wanted to be a chef, and had paid special attention to the culinary arts. Raoul knew this firsthand, since she had cooked for his family three times in the past, and each meal had been an incredibly savory treat. It was on that winter day when the temperature hovered just around forty degrees or so that a big, cobalt-blue Ford F-350 sidled up the street beside her. She glanced over, and was surprised to see none other than Barry Corbett looking at her through the open passenger door window, his leathery, tanned face almost masklike in appearance. But set deep beneath his graying brow, Corbett’s blue eyes were as sharp as a peregrine falcon’s.

“Get in, Danielle,” he said.

Danielle slowed, which wasn’t tough to do, since she pretty much just limped along on her peg-leg anyway. “Why?”

“I’ll give you a ride to work,” Corbett said. His voice was low and husky, authoritative without being pushy.

“Well, it’s only like another five hundred feet away,” Danielle said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll drive slow. You won’t get there early.” When Danielle hesitated, Corbett stopped the truck and put it in park. A passing car pulled around the halted rig and continued on, its driver craning her head to try and get a look at what was going on. (
Barry Corbett likes disabled girls!
was likely to be the next topic of gossip.)

“You have to know, I’m not going to hurt you,” Corbett said. “Besides, your dad would kill me.”

“
My
dad?” Danielle asked, almost laughing at the thought of mild-mannered Martin Kennedy doing anything that outlandish.

“You’d be surprised what a man will do when someone hurts his daughter,” Corbett said. “Come on, girl. Get in.”

Danielle slowly walked to the idling truck and pulled open the passenger door. She regarded its voluminous, leather-appointed interior for a long moment, peripherally noticing that as she opened the door, a running board lowered into position to ease her boarding. Slick, that.

“Can you make it?” Corbett asked.

“What, are you going to carry me inside?” she shot back. “I’m an amputee, but I’m not helpless, Mister Corbett.”

Corbett laughed at that. “Well, all right, then. Take your time.”

Danielle used her good leg to lever herself up on the running board, then swung the peg-leg in. It bent at the knee in a semblance of natural function, and she was able to scoot across the warm leather seat and yank the door closed without falling out. She looked over at Corbett as he dropped the F-350 back into drive and trundled down the street.

“So what’s doing, Mister Corbett? How do you know me, anyway?”

“We’re pretty short on veterans around here,” Corbett said, “and we’re doubly short on young girls with one leg. You’re not a tough girl to find out about, Miss Kennedy.”

“Okay. So ...?”

“So how’s that leg the government gave you? Is it working out?”

Danielle shrugged. “It works okay.”

“There are better ones on the market, these days. Hell, some of ’em have computers in ’em that mimic actual human movement. You don’t need to adjust them mechanically, you just pull ’em on and walk. Or run. Or dance.”

“You want to dance with me, Mister Corbett?”

Corbett snorted. “Insouciant girl, aren’t you?”

“I don’t even know what that word means,” Danielle said, even though she certainly did.

Corbett stopped the truck in front of the diner and put it in park again. He had driven the five hundred feet in less than thirty seconds, and Danielle was a bit disappointed to have arrived so soon. The pickup was a lot nicer than her old, battered Mustang. Corbett leaned against the center console and looked at her, his eyes bright beneath his worn, white cowboy hat.

“Listen, I think you need a different prosthesis. The one the VA gave you is a piece of crap.”

“Well, that’s just it, Mister Corbett. I can’t afford anything other than what the VA can give me, you know?” Danielle jerked her thumb toward the diner. “Mr. Salcedo’s a decent man, but it’s not like he can pay me fifty thousand a year, or something.”