The Last Town (Book 4): Fighting the Dead (6 page)

The cop at the door knocked again, harder this time. For the first time in over an hour, the old lady on the couch stirred.

“Maybe I just answer?” she asked, voice low.

“Shut up,” Doddridge said, wondering why the fuck everyone had to start talking now, of all times. He took his right hand off the shotgun and wiped his palm against his pants, trying to get rid of the sweat.

###

Grady stood at the front door of Estelle Garcia’s neat little house. The lights were off, and the house was silent. He knocked one more time and called out, but Estelle didn’t come to the door. She wasn’t deaf, and her big vintage Caddy was still in the carport. That made Grady a little worried. He turned and looked back at the street. Victor stood on the sidewalk by his truck, one hand on the butt of a pistol that was on his hip. A few dozen yards award, Suzy was in the street, feet planted apart, right hand on her own pistol.

“Could she not be home?” Victor asked quietly. “Could she be with friends?”

“She doesn’t like to be out at night, if I recall correctly,” Grady said. He stepped away from the door, looking at the windows. He reached for his radio. “Base, this fourteen.”

“Fourteen, go.”

“Base, give a call to the Estelle Garcia residence. If she answers, have her come open the front door.”

“Fourteen, copy.” While he waited, Grady slowly drifted to his left toward the carport. The Caddy sat there in the darkness. There were no clicking sounds of cooling metal, so it hadn’t moved in a while. He heard distant peal of a ringing telephone inside the house. Five rings. Ten. Fifteen.

“Fourteen, copy?”

“Fourteen. Go ahead.”

“Fourteen, no answer at that residence. Copy?”

“Copy, Base.”

Grady stepped into the carport and walked to the front of the Cadillac. He put a hand on its hood. It was warmer than the ambient air, so it had been driven at some point during the day. He reached for the Maglite on his belt with his left hand and switched it on. He played the beam around the carport. The Cadillac was empty. There was nothing unusual in the carport itself; garbage and recycling bins, a stack of old newspapers, some closed cabinets. He stepped toward the door that led to the house, shining his beam on it.

The doorjamb was broken.

Grady drew his Glock and stepped closer, shining the brilliant flashlight on the doorjamb, ensuring that what he saw was in fact the case. It was. From the corner of his eye, he sensed Victor edging up the short driveway, pistol in hand.

Then the door to the house opened, and Grady barely saw the flash of lightning before the thunder hit him.

###

Doddridge knew the gig was up when the cop left the front door and, instead of returning to his vehicle or moving on to another house, moved to the carport. The door frame was damaged where it had been kicked in, and while an old lady might limp her way to the door and not really see the damage, as Estelle had done, a policeman was unlikely to not notice. The gig was up. They were about to get caught.

Time to get on with it.

Doddridge moved past Auto and walked through the kitchen and stood to one side of the carport door. He heard the cop’s soft footfalls outside, the soles of his shoes scuffing along some grit on the dusty concrete floor. Light filtered in beneath the door and, a moment later, around the cracked and broken wood of the doorframe. The light paused, then began to recede.

“Yeah, it’s
fuckin
’
showtime
,” he said to himself.

Doddridge fired through the door. The shotgun blast blew a nice hole right through the thin wood, and the pellets continued on and slammed into the man in the carport. He stumbled back against the Cadillac, the flashlight falling from his hand as he raised his pistol. Doddridge fired twice, hitting the cop first in the chest, then in the face as he slumped forward. The pistol slid out of the cop’s hand and skipped across the carport’s dry concrete pad.

“Dude, what are you doing?” Shaliq cried. “What the fuck!”

The old lady was wailing now, curling up on the couch. Tone stepped up to the window, raised his Glock, and fired five or six rounds outside. Glass shattered and the drapes twitched as his bullets lanced through them. Doddridge barreled past Auto, who was crouching near the living room wall. He ran straight for the sliding glass door at the rear of the house and eased it open. He stuck his head out, looked both ways, then jumped out into the back yard. The black desert awaited him, and off to his right, the long, slowly-moving conga line of traffic, headlights blazing in the deepening gloom. It was surprisingly chilly outside.

In the house, Tone kept firing, swearing for the fucking Indian to stay still. From the open carport, three deep reports came, and Doddridge looked back to see Tone spin around. Whoever had hit him had shot right through the house from the carport, which meant two things: the guy had some serious weaponry, and in order to make a shot like that, he also had to have X-ray vision.

More bullets ripped through the house, this time from the street. Doddridge heard the little pussy Bruce cry out, yelling he was hit. Doddridge took that as a good omen and sprinted to his right, head down, running all out through the yard of the house next door. He kept on going, even as people stirred in the surrounding houses. Once he had rolled down half the block, he cut to his right and juked up between two houses. He flattened against one, then slowly edged forward until he could look up the street.

Lights flashed, and a big SUV roared around the corner of a side street. For an instant, the lights had Doddridge fully exposed, but if the cop driving the SUV had seen him, he didn’t slow down. He kept charging down the street, where the gunfire still popped in the night.

Doddridge sprinted across the street and slipped past a couple of houses, running northward in the darkness.

###

For an instant, Victor had no clue what had just happened. There was a flash of light in the carport, and his initial thought was that Grady had accidentally discharged his weapon. Then he saw Grady’s flashlight fall, and two more great orange-yellow fireballs surged out of the house toward him. Grady was flung back against the Cadillac, then sank to the concrete floor.

At the same time, more muzzle flashes erupted from the living room window. Victor was at an extreme angle to it, but he heard the
snap!
of a bullet zipping right past his head. He leaped toward the carport, his .45 in his right hand. He realized he was caught between the gunman behind the door leading into the house, and the one sniping away from the window. He raised his pistol toward the wall and fired three shots in rapid succession, blasting right into the house. He doubted he’d hit anyone, but he hoped that the sudden onslaught of large-caliber rounds would make the shooter at the window take pause and hunker down. At the same time, he heard Suzy firing at the house. Compared to the roar of his .45, her nine-millimeter sounded downright anemic.

He continued his slide to the left, pistol up, aimed at the door. The firing from inside had stopped, but he heard two women wailing. Suzy popped a few more rounds into the house, then ceased fire as she advanced, hurrying toward him. In the near distance, Victor could also hear the sound of an approaching vehicle—probably his niece’s would-be suitor, Mike Hailey.

His foot hit one of Grady’s legs, and he chanced a glance down. In the darkness, he couldn’t see much, but the police chief was covered with blood. He was still breathing, though. A harsh, gurgling rasp, drawn out and labored.

“Chief!” he hissed, reaching down to shake Grady’s shoulder.

With a roar, the biggest man Victor had seen in decades crashed right through the remains of the garage door like a charging rhinoceros. Victor raised his pistol, but he was too slow—the big man crossed the distance between them in a flash and knocked his .45 aside. Victor pulled the trigger anyway, blasting a hole through the carport roof in a bid that the sound might distract the big, bearded man from crushing him like a bug. It didn’t work. The man slapped the pistol right out of Victor’s hand like it was a toy, then lashed out at him with one fist that in the dim light looked to be as big as a frying pan.

Victor Kuruk had spent most of his youth as an angry, oftentimes drunken, street side pugilist. He had been filled with anger and shame and disgust as what had become of his people, at what they had been reduced to, at the evisceration of his people’s spirit. Alcohol could sometimes numb the pain, and he used it as often as he could. But fighting, especially fighting Anglos, was a longer-lasting salve. So whenever a white boy offended him, Victor threw himself into combat. And on more than one occasion, he had fought even when there was no offense to be found. Victor just liked to fight. And he had become very, very good at it.

Now though, he was thirty-five years older, and fighting was a game for younger men. But the passing years hadn’t dulled his instincts, and he ducked beneath the giant’s swing. He still caught a glancing blow on the side of his head, but the bigger man’s fist sailed right through the passenger side window of Estelle Garcia’s Cadillac, shattering the tempered glass. Over the crash, Victor heard Suzy shouting for the big man to stay where he was. In response, the man made to grab Victor. Victor batted his arm away before his thick fingers could find suitable purchase in Victor’s jacket.

His first instinct was to dance away. As a fighter, Victor had always enjoyed an uncanny combination of speed and strength, and an accuracy that was almost mechanically precise. But he knew those capabilities lay in his past. As a man in his sixties, slugging it out with a combatant who appeared to stand six foot eight and outweighed him by as much as eighty pounds probably wasn’t going to work in his favor. So Victor stayed on the inside, and released a flurry of blows against the man’s body, launching shot after shot, bracing himself against the side of the Cadillac for support so he could throw in as much power as he could. At this range, his blows were as effective as they’d ever been. The big man hunched over, the wind driven from his body. When that happened, Victor launched a vicious left uppercut that slammed the man’s teeth together, then finished him off with an equally savage right. Victor put as much of his body weight behind that punch as he could, grunting as pain flashed across three of his four knuckles. The big man collapsed, and Victor, a victim of his own inertia, fell on top of him.

 “Victor!” Suzy cried.

Victor ignored her and wrestled with the man. Or at least, he thought he was, until he came to the conclusion that the bigger man was down for the count. He rolled him over onto his face and yanked his hands behind his back. With trembling hands, he pulled his handcuffs from their pouch at the small of his back and slapped them on. He tightened them up, then checked his work. Convinced that the big man wasn’t going anywhere, he clambered to his feet, using the fender of the Caddy to help him maintain his balance. He felt shaky all over, and for a moment, he thought he might vomit all over the car’s wide hood.

“
Hai’i
!” Suzy called again, this time using the Shoshone word for uncle.

“
Nüü tsawinnuh
,” Victor responded.
I’m fine.
He bent over and retrieved his Sig Sauer P220. Once it was back in his right hand, he verified the two spare magazines were still in the carrier on his belt. Red and blue lights flashed outside, and tires screeched as Hailey’s Expedition braked to a halt outside.

“Stay with the chief,” Victor said. “Wait for Hailey.” And with that, he pushed inside the house, where people still screamed. In the darkness, he saw the kitchen was unoccupied. His boots sent plastic shotgun shells skittering across the floor. He’d never had the reason or desire to visit Estelle Garcia in the past, and in fact barely knew who she was, but he’d been around long enough to be familiar with the layout of homes like hers. It would be a two bedroom house, with a living room separating the kitchen from the two bedrooms on the other side. And that meant the light switches were to his immediate left. Victor reached out in the darkness, fumbling, his fingers brushing against the cool tile of the backsplash before he found the switches. He flipped them on, and the neat kitchen was suddenly illuminated. Actually, on second glance, he saw it wasn’t so tidy, after all—dishes were on all the counters, along with containers of food and beverages.