The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead (3 page)

“I’ll pay for it. Hell, I’ll pay for five of them.”

Danielle regarded the old man for a long moment. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because you’re my sister,” he said.

“What?”

Corbett held up his left hand, and showed her the big ring there. In the center of the ring was an eagle astride a globe, and the globe itself lay across an anchor. The insignia of the US Marine Corps.

“US Marine Corps, 1967 to 1970,” Corbett said. “Us gyrenes, we have to watch out for each other.”

“I heard you were in Nam. Didn’t know you were a Marine, though.”

Corbett nodded. “And proud to serve, too.” He pointed at her artificial leg. “Let’s work on getting you a new one of those, huh? Something that works better than that chunk of wood and plastic?”

To say that the conversation was both unexpected and odd was a tragic understatement. Just the same, Danielle was intrigued by the offer. She did hate the prosthesis she’d been issued by the VA, and its fit around the stump of her left thigh left much to be desired; blisters, which were a painful occurrence, were a regular visitor. If the crazy old Marine thought he could help her out with that, then she was happy to give him a shot.

Three trips on a shiny private jet to Dallas, and she had a new prosthetic leg, one that worked almost as well as her original, God-issued equipment. She no longer limped all that much when she walked, and if she needed to, she could even run, though her gait was still irregular. She wouldn’t be giving Oscar Pistorious a run for his money in any Special Olympics events, but Danielle was happy to be more mobile. And the blisters? A thing of the past. With the appropriate care, the limb was as comfortable as a shoe. The most expensive shoe in town, of course, but she wasn’t counting the dollars.

She never asked Corbett how much the limb had cost, but if it was less than $50,000, she’d be surprised. The device was computer-managed, ran like a top, and even had internal gyros to help her maintain her balance. And the lower portion could be swapped out with a foot extension, which she normally wore, or a curved wick of aluminum, which allowed her to play sports more aggressively and not worry about busting the more normal-looking lower section. It looked odd as hell, of course, but Danielle was well past the looks stage of life.

War did that to you.

But now, Dubai was burning, and the news reports said there was some sort of infection sweeping through the Middle East. It had started in Russia, but the Russian authorities were supposedly “handling it” in whatever way Russians took care of such things. Now, Saudi Arabia was closed to all air traffic in both directions. Saudi nationals caught outside the border were SOL, and foreigners inside the Kingdom were effectively trapped. Israel was also in lockdown, and its military was on high alert. There had been mass shootings in Jerusalem, but from the jerky video footage that had been broadcast, many of those who had been shot were in the grips of some murderous rage. They charged Israeli military units, and showed no fear of the weapons arrayed against them. Danielle got the distinct impression she saw people—Israelis as well as Arabs—being blasted to bits by machine-gun or grenade fire, and
they still kept coming.
Even missing limbs and suffering from what appeared to be massive deboning injuries, the attackers kept at it, creeping along the ground as best as they could.

There were mounting reports of people eating each other. And not just in the Middle East, where Danielle had been blooded and knew relatively well, but in urbane Europe and America. In New York City, the National Guard had been called up, and there were talks of riots in Chicago and Miami. The CDC had issued official-sounding guidance which basically said, if someone bit you, report to a hospital immediately. Do not wait for EMS or other assistance if you have the ability to get yourself to a medical establishment in a more rapid fashion. Also, if individuals approach you and display any type of aggression, avoid them and notify law enforcement. Danielle didn’t quite know what to make of that. Was there some sort of viral outbreak occurring, some sort of pandemic that drove people mad?

“Zombies, man,” said a voice from behind her.

Danielle started at the sudden proclamation, and she turned awkwardly on her real leg (her artificial one behaved itself). Behind her, one of the short-order cooks, a pimply faced white kid named Jason Donner, leaned against the break room’s doorway. He smelled like tobacco, having come in from a smoke break out back. Raoul frowned upon smoking, but he wouldn’t be coming back to the diner until just before the dinner rush at five o’clock, when he’d bitch about the cigarette butts near the fire door, but would do nothing meaningful about the infraction. Jason’s lank blond hair was held out of his eyes by a skeevy-looking hairnet, and his oversized nose gleamed in the glow of the room’s florescent lights. He looked at the television with an odd, expectant expression.

“Say again?” Danielle said.

Jason pointed at the TV. “People are eating each other. It started in Russia, it made its way to Saudi fucking Arabia, and now it’s here in the US. You know who eats people, right? Zombies. It’s the fucking zombie apocalypse. George Romero was a prophet.”

“Zombies, huh?”

“Yeah. Before you know it, life’s going to be like that game
Left 4 Dead
, only we’ll be here in Single Tree waiting for the hordes to show up and rip our heads off and eat our guts.” Jason smiled a bit when he said that, but Danielle wasn’t sure he was joking. He was an odd sort, the kind of kid who would disappear into his Xbox if he could make it happen. The only reason he was working at the diner was because his mother had threatened to throw him out of their two-bedroom home unless he got a job, and Raoul’s place was within walking distance.

Danielle grunted and turned back to the TV. One of the network talking heads was repeating the guidance from the CDC, adding that the president would be addressing the nation within the hour. In the news scrawl that crept across the bottom of the screen, one of the factoids sent a brief chill up her spine: RIOTERS ATTACK CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL IN JERSEY CITY, NJ—ALL NEWBORNS BELIEVED TO BE DEAD.

They killed all the babies? Why would they want to do that?

“Zombies,” Jason Donner said again, as if reading her mind. “They love tender little babies.”

LOS ANGELES, CA

“What’ve you got for me, Rog?” Reese said into his phone.

“The guy’s dead,” Whittaker said immediately.

“What guy?”

“The neighbor,” Detective Roger Whittaker said. In the background, Reese could hear Renee talking to someone, probably one of the hospital staff. “He went into some sort of cardiac or respiratory arrest right after he got here. They pronounced him about ten minutes ago.”

Reese frowned. He had just had a very stressful meeting with the mother of the dead baby, who had arrived at the house in a shiny blue Range Rover. The rest of the cops had faded back when she made her appearance, hovering in the background, making their presence known but more than happy to let Reese handle the bullshit duty of telling her that her baby had been killed by her husband, who had suddenly gone on an inexplicable murderous rampage. She had taken it stoically enough, though her eyes filled with unshed tears when Reese grew evasive about describing exactly how her child had been killed.

“I’ll have to wait for the lab results before I can make any declarations regarding the cause of death,” he had told her, which was an outright lie. He knew an autopsy of the husband would show that about sixty to seventy percent of the child’s body tissue was inside the man’s stomach, but there was no way he was going to tell that to the suddenly family-less woman from Warner Brothers.

“My husband came back from Saudi Arabia the day before yesterday,” she said, in a soft voice, eyes bright and shiny in the light of the California day. “He wasn’t feeling well, complained of stomach problems and headaches. Other people on the flight felt the same way, and with everything that’s going on in the news ... could it be the virus they’re talking about? Is that what made him ... do what he did?”

Reese felt out of the loop. He didn’t pay much attention to the news, not unless it pertained directly to his job, and his job rarely had anything to do with Saudi Arabia. “I’m sorry?”

“The virus from the Middle East. Did he have it?”

Reese felt suddenly vulnerable and exposed. While he’d had no contact with the dead perp beyond the cursory examination, he had been all over the man’s house. He had noted the pile of Tumi luggage in the master bedroom, and the copious laundry that needed to be done, so he’d already presumed the man had been on some sort of trip, but he hadn’t begun looking into it yet. And while he knew nothing about a virus or the goings-on in the Middle East, if there was some sort of event happening there, he was not thrilled to discover he might have been standing in a hot zone for the past three hours. He’d been wearing his gloves the entire time, and he avoided contact with any biological contaminants during that time, but what if there really
was
some sort of virus in the house? How was it transmitted—airborne?

Could I be infected?
he asked himself.

“Ma’am, we’ll be looking into that,” Reese had told her finally, before offering his condolences and motioning one of the uniformed cops over. He instructed the uni to call for an ambulance to take the woman to a medical facility that had some skills dealing the infectious diseases. While she looked fine to him, Reese was no doctor, and he wanted to ensure that if she was in fact infected, that she wasn’t spreading whatever her husband had brought back from the Middle East any further. And in the back of his mind, he remembered what Renee had told him before leaving for Cedar-Sinai, that Valley cops had taken down more folks who were acting like the recent widow’s husband.

Roger Whittaker’s news wasn’t exactly making things any brighter. “What were the extent of the guy’s injuries, again?”

“A bite and several scratches, it looks like,” Whittaker said. “Basically, some of the usual stuff you’d see when a couple of guys go at it.”

“So that’s what killed the guy, or did he have some kind of underlying medical condition?”

“Well, they’re not really telling me that stuff,” Whittaker told him. “Just that the guy passed away in the emergency room. They were still going through the examination process, and it sounds to me like he just up and died.”

Reese sighed. “Rog, you have to do a little better than that, man.”

“I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’! These people just aren’t talking to us yet ...” In the background, Reese heard a stir of commotion: raised voices, a shriek, something metal hitting the floor. Whittaker paused, and the sound quality changed a bit, probably as he turned in the direction of the ruckus. “Yeah, anyway, Renee’s working the desk, and ... uh ...”

“Rog? What’s going on?”

Reese heard someone screaming now, loud and strong, and the sounds of a distant struggle. Running feet then, as several people hurried past Whittaker. More shouts. Renee said, “Jesus, he’s
not
dead!” before another scream drowned her out. Someone yelled for help, and then a loud
clunk
strobed Reese’s ear, loud enough that he pulled his phone away.

“Roger?”

There was gunfire then, three rapid bangs that made people scream again. Someone was repeating “Oh, God!” over and over, and Reese had the impression it was one of the desk people Whittaker and Renee had been talking to.

“Did you get him?” Renee asked in the distance, her voice small but terrified. “Is he down?”

“Yeah, he’s down,” Whittaker said then, his voice growing stronger. There was a momentary scuffle, and then he was back on the line with Reese. “Hey, sorry about that.”

“Roger, what the hell just happened?”

“Uh, it looks like our dead guy came back to life and started chomping on people. Listen, Reese, I had to put the guy down. Looks like I’m about to be part of an officer involved shooting investigation, so—”

“I’m on my way,” Reese said, hanging up.