The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead (11 page)

“That’s odd,” Danielle said from the back seat.

“What is?” Corbett asked, looking around.

“Lights are on in the house. I guess dad’s still up.”

Corbett grunted as the truck bore down on the simply ranch house surrounded by a sagging, weary-looking split fence. Sure enough, some lights were on inside. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was just after eleven.

“Maybe Martin’s watching the news,” he said. “Certainly a lot to keep a man up late at night these days, that’s for sure.”

“I guess,” Danielle said.

Corbett stopped the truck at the end of the driveway, and she gathered up the rifle box and pushed the right rear door open. “Okay. I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow. When do you expect we’ll start training?”

“This weekend, for sure,” Corbett said. “We’ll hammer out the details after tomorrow’s town meeting. I’ll work it out with Rafael so you don’t get penalized on the job.”

“Thanks, Barry.”

“No problem, Marine. We’ll stay put until you get inside.”

“Sure. Good night.” Danielle paused. “Um, good night, Mister Norton.”

“Call me Gary,” Norton said. “For the fortieth time.”

“All right, Gary for the fortieth time,” Danielle said, and Corbett thought he heard a slight, uncharacteristically girlish tone stray into her voice. He frowned.
Good God, does Dani have the hots for Norton?

She slammed the door closed and walked up the driveway toward the house. Corbett and Norton watched her walk up to the front door and push it open. He caught a glimpse of Martin Kennedy sitting in an old easy chair, as if watching television. He looked toward Danielle with a blank expression. Danielle hesitated for a moment, as if engaging in a brief conversation, then slowly stepped inside.

The door slammed shut behind her.

Corbett didn’t like that.

“Nice girl,” Norton said, apparently not noticing anything untoward.

“Yeah, well, you’re about to see her again real soon,” Corbett said, pulling away from the curb. He accelerated up to the next road, turned left, then pulled over and shut off the truck.

Norton looked at him, a bit confused. “Uh, what?”

Corbett switched off the interior lights so they wouldn’t pop on when the doors were opened. “Just get out of the truck, Norton.”

###

“Take it easy, bitch,” the short, muscular black man said when the girl pushed open the front door and found him standing off to one side with a shotgun pointed right at her. Her father, Martin, sat in the threadbare easy chair that faced the new TV he had bought a couple of weeks ago. There was a vicious knot swelling on his forehead, and a weal of dried blood tracked from his nose through his mustache. His hands were bound before him, wrapped up tight with an old t-shirt. Danielle stared at her father in shock. Martin Kennedy was one of the gentlest men she’d ever known. That someone would assault her father like that made her blood boil.

“Who the hell are you?” she shot back, even though she knew the answer.

“Get in,” the man snarled. His eyes were cold and predatory.

Without much of a choice, she stepped inside, and the black man kicked the door closed behind her. Danielle heard Corbett’s pickup pull away, and her spirits fell.

Okay, no support,
she thought. She and her father were alone with a murderous escaped convict.

“Drop the box!” the man shouted, listening as the truck drove off into the distance. Danielle put the rifle box on the floor, and the man with the shotgun motioned toward the loveseat next to Martin. “Sit the fuck down, bitch! Right now!”

“What are you going to do to us?” Danielle asked, slowly walking toward the loveseat with her hands slightly raised. She limped in an exaggerated fashion, even though she didn’t need to, but she caught the gunman’s eyes zeroing in on the motion.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“Lost part of my leg in an accident,” she said as she eased herself onto the loveseat. “Dad, you all right?”

Martin nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, Dani. He got me from behind.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’re cool.” She looked back at the short black man, still holding the shotgun on her. “What are you going to do to us?” she asked again.

“Bitch, I ain’t doin’
nothin’
to you if you both shut up and do what I say,” he said. He was sweating profusely, and his eyes seemed to be extremely bright in the pale light given off by the lamp that sat on the table between the easy chair and loveseat. “You do what I tell you, everyone has a good night.”

“So what do you want?”

“You got a Mustang in the garage. It run?”

“Yes.”

“What it got under the hood?”

“Three-oh-two V eight. Take it if you want it, but I hope you can drive a stick.”

“Is it fast? Looks like a piece of shit,” the man said.

Danielle snorted. “It’s plenty fast, guy.”

“Who dropped you off? That your boyfriend? He going to come back?”

“No, he’s not my boyfriend. And no, he’s not going to come back. He’s going home.”

“Good. Good.” The black man appeared to relax a little bit, but he kept the shotgun pointed at Danielle. After a moment, he nodded toward her leg. “Yeah, I can see one a your legs is fake, right?”

Danielle looked down. She wore low right shoes, and her jeans had pulled up just enough to expose the skin-like covering over her prosthesis. Even though it was an expensive piece of hardware, fake skin still looked like fake skin, even in this unflattering light.

“Yeah,” she said. “Listen, if you wanted the ‘Stang, why not take it already? My father knows where the keys are.”

“Well, might need some company,” the man said. “You know, a little somethin’ to buy me some time. Both a you got no plans right now, right?”

“Leave my daughter out of this,” Martin said.

“Old man, she already in it. And I told you before, you don’t shut up, you get hit again.”

The shotgun deviated slightly, moving away from Danielle and wandering more toward Martin. The older man just looked up from the worn chair he sat in, his hands trussed up in his lap. He glared up at the intruder, and for the first time in her life, Danielle realized that her dad was actually one tough cookie.

“Well, if you’re here to kill someone, go ahead and shoot me,” he said.

The black man smiled without any trace of humor. “Maybe I will. Maybe I just will.”

There was a loud knock from the kitchen, where the back door was. The man with the shotgun made a short strangled sound and turned toward the kitchen doorway, raising his weapon to his shoulder, taking the weapon’s front sight off her father.

Danielle charged, and at the same time, the front door exploded inward, its aged, cheap wood practically exploding. Through all the flying wood, Danielle caught the barest glimpse of Barry Corbett, charging through the door with his big 1911 in both hands, eyes wide, mouth open in a soundless scream. The old man looked terrified in that fleeting instant, and Danielle wished she could take a picture for posterity.

Then she slammed right into the man with the shotgun like a linebacker, taking him to the floor. The shotgun went off, slamming her ears with a thunderclap of fury as a load of buckshot ripped through one plaster wall. Her ears rang, but she’d been through hell already in Iraq and it took more than a loud noise to throw her off. She ripped the weapon out of the man’s hands as they crashed to the floor, Corbett shouting for everyone to freeze. The man beneath her squirmed and kicked, and Danielle knew right then that she was no match for him—it was like trying to hold onto an enraged anaconda. So she cocked back her fist and punched him right in the throat. He made a strangled sound and went limp, then began thrashing like a fish on a gaff, twisting and writhing. Danielle punched him in the side of the head, but it wasn’t until Corbett stepped up and kicked him in the face that the guy’s lights went out.

The back door crashed open as Corbett pulled Danielle off the guy and knelt right on his chest. She looked up as Gary Norton pushed in through the kitchen door, his little Shield pistol held up before him.

“Thanks for joining the party, Gary, but Dani already took him out. Marine style,” Corbett said. He looked over at her and gave Danielle a crooked grin. “And it’s not even throat punch Thursday.”

“Hey, I did what I did,” Danielle said.

“Sorry, but the back door was locked,” Norton said, coming to a halt in the kitchen doorway and training his pistol on the man Corbett was kneeling on. He glanced up, saw the half-destroyed front door, and frowned. “I guess I shouldn’t have worried about causing any property damage.”

Corbett rolled his eyes, and Danielle could imagine what he was thinking.
Hollywood types.
“Why don’t you help Dani get Martin get undone, and let’s see what we have here?”

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

From the freeway, there were screams.

Reese listened to the cries in the darkness, his borrowed M4 always in his hands, the sweat seeming to pool beneath his tactical gear as he and the rest of the cops stood watch over the civilian in-processing that went on far too slowly. Whatever was happening on the Hollywood Freeway wasn’t at all pleasant to listen to as roving bands of stenches picked their way through the stalled traffic, feasting on anyone they could find. Not that they didn’t have a lot to deal with at ground level; there were plenty of zombies walking up on them as they followed the civilians to the queues that were becoming more and more disorderly as panic broke out. From what he had heard over the ROVERs, the sheriffs were telling new arrivals the Bowl was closed. Griffith Park was the new refugee site, which meant that several thousand people now had to hike almost three miles down Franklin Avenue to the park entrance. They’d need to pick their way past the roving bands of ghouls that were apparently everywhere in Hollywood. And while that might seem to be just another night to Reese—he had personally shot a zombie shambling toward the line of waiting civilians, a crumpled map to the stars clenched in one of its bloodied hands—it was something entirely different to a well-heeled young mother with three kids in tow. It was a raw deal, and all it did was cause more panic, which the LAPD and LASD couldn’t really deal with.

The last few hundred civilians were in the midst of being processed, and a few were ejected for having injuries that the sheriff’s department deemed suspicious. Reese had stopped worrying about that a couple of hours ago. He knew that some people were being turned away out of ignorance or fear, that they’d been cut and beaten up or scraped just trying to get to the Bowl. And now, they had to find someplace else to weather the gathering storm, as simple as that. One man had tried to convince the cops that his kid hadn’t been bitten, he’d torn up his hand while climbing a fence to avoid the dead. The rest of the civilians in the line had turned on him, pushing him and his family away, consigning them to whatever fate awaited them in the darkness. Even the laconic Sergeant Bates had thought that was a bit on the cold side, but there wasn’t much the fragmented remnants of the LAPD could do. Everyone had their hands full, and law and order were essentially memories of the past.

It was when the power failed that things got really interesting. Once the buildings and street lamps went dark, the only light in the area came from the cars and trucks and buses and motorcycles stuck on the 101. That drew the zombies in like moths to flame. The screams were endless, and metal crumpled in the night as panicked people tried to bash their way through the traffic with their vehicles. Horns blared, and occasionally, guns spoke. Bodies fell from the overpass. Some were zombies, others were motorists trading one gruesome death for another. Many of those reanimated, and crawled and hitched along Highland Avenue toward the razor wire barriers the Guard had erected all around the Bowl’s entrance. M4s crackled in the night, and in the aftermath, more bodies lay motionless in the street.

It’s gonna be a long night.

But the darkness that settled in over Los Angeles wasn’t absolute. Fires raged, some not very far away, their flames illuminating the great plumes of smoke they discharged with amber and orange light. Reese wondered how long it would take for the hillsides to go up. The rainy season was still weeks away, and the Hollywood Hills were as dry as tinder. The LA fire department was just as beleaguered as the LAPD now. With fewer crews, less operating equipment, and a city that was descending into chaos, Reese was convinced that wildfires would burn uncontained. It didn’t help that the Santa Ana winds were blowing, pushing fronts of desert air across the entire region.

The in-processing didn’t finish until almost three am. By that time, the troops from Hollywood Station were dead on their feet, and the sheriff’s department finally took pity on the city cops and called them in for a rest period. They were told they’d have three hours to eat and sleep, and then after that, they’d be doing whatever needed tending to. Reese was happy to call it a night.

So they turned their backs on the waiting streams of refugees, leaving them to the horrors of the night.