Author: Stephen Knight
Date: 2015-12-04 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Zombies
Description: A new miniseries set in the time of THE GATHERING DEAD!As the defenses are established and the small California desert town of Single Tree is effectively cut off from the rest of the country, the zombie apocalypse is in full swing. Major metropolitan areas are either overrun by the dead, or are threatened by the teeming hordes that are beginning to migrate across the nation.But billionaire Barry Corbett's hope of converting Single Tree into a small island of safety is threatened by a group of escaped convicts on one hand, and the hostile group of citizens led by town council member Hector Agui

THE LAST TOWN #4

FIGHTING THE DEAD

By Stephen Knight

© 2015 by Stephen Knight

dramatis persona

Single Tree, California

Barry Corbett, billionaire resident of Single Tree, California

Gary Norton, movie producer originally from Single Tree

Max Booker, mayor of Single Tree

Roxanne Booker, Max’s wife

Chief Greg Grady, Single Tree police chief

Danielle Kennedy, waitress and former Marine

Hector Aguilar, pharmacy owner and member of Single Tree town council

Gemma Washington, member of the Single Tree town council

Jock Sinclair, brash British television journalist

Meredith Sinclair, Jock’s wife, former fashion model

Walter Lennon, head of Corbett’s security detail

Victor Kuruk, leader of a Native American tribe living on a reservation next to Single Tree

Suzy Kuruk, Victor’s niece and tribal reservation police officer

Officer Mike Hailey, Single Tree police officer

Officer Santoro, Single Tree police officer

Officer Whitter, Single Tree police officer

Officer John Lasher, Single Tree police officer

Arthur Norton, Gary’s father

Beatrice Norton, Gary’s mother

Estelle Garcia, Singe Tree resident

Martin Kennedy, Danielle’s father

Raoul Salcedo, diner owner

Jason Donner, short order cook

Ernesta, Single Tree Pharmacy employee

Lou, Single Tree Pharmacy pharmacist

Rod Cranston, Single Tree airport manager

Enrico, Single Tree airport FBO employee

Randall Klaff, construction foreman

Danny Tresko, construction foreman

Chester Dawson, construction worker

Jose Ramos, construction worker

Bill Rollins, trucker

Los Angeles, California

Detective III Reese, LAPD

Patrol Sergeant Bates, LAPD

Detective I Renee Gonzales, LAPD, Reese’s partner

Detective II Jerry Whittaker, LAPD, Reese’s partner

Captain Miriam Pallata, commanding officer of the LAPD’s North Hollywood Station

Captain Marshall, Pallata’s predecessor

Lieutenant Newman, LAPD

Detective II Marsh, LAPD

PO Kozinski, LAPD

Lieutenant Colonel James Morton, battalion commander, California Army National Guard

Sergeant Kidd, enlisted noncommissioned officer

Captain Bobby Narvaez, company commander, California Army National Guard

First Sergeant Plosser, company NCO, California Army National Guard

Jed Simpkiss, helicopter pilot

Captain III Fontenoy, commanding officer of Wilshire Station

Lieutenant Toomey, Wilshire Station, LAPD

Others

Clarence Doddridge, convict

Auto, convict

Big Tone, convict

Shaliq, convict

Bruce, convict

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

“Okay, late-breaking news—this is getting really fucked up,” Bates said.

Reese only grunted as he leaned against the ring of sand bags. His ears were ringing from all the gunfire, and the smell of expended powder burned his nostrils. The National Guard had closed the hospital two hours earlier, against Reese’s instructions that it be kept open. But he had little say in the matter. The hospital administrator had informed him that they had no beds left, staffing levels were at an all time low, and supplies were running out. As the attending physician in the emergency room had told him, they’d have a tough time putting a band-aid on a kid’s skinned knee. From the reports he’d heard over the radio—as sporadic as they had become—the rest of the hospitals in Los Angeles were headed down the same path. Too much demand, diminishing resources, fewer staff, insufficient security. The City of Angels was going to hell.

And the dead just kept coming.

Reese went through shotgun rounds like they were water, always coming up short when he needed them. He blew through his allocation of pistol ammo as well, but they had ample reserve stocks thanks to the prepositioned stores someone had thought to provide. Just the same, the bodies were soon stacked up three deep around the perimeter, and more of the dead staggered up the street, drawn to the sounds of combat. They came from buildings, from cars, from nearby homes and apartments. They were men and women, boys and girls, families and homeless bums. Sometimes they would approach in pairs or trios, which was easy enough to deal with. Other times, it was as if they were being bused into the area, and dozens of slack-faced ghouls stalked their way up Gracie Allen Drive or down George Burns Road.

If it hadn’t been for the Guard, the LAPD would have been overwhelmed. The Guardsmen poured it on with their rifles, repelling wave after wave of the dead. But even they had a tough go of it until Lieutenant Colonel Morton called some Humvees forward. The armored vehicles were outfitted with triple-barreled .50 caliber machineguns in turrets, weapons Reese hadn’t even known existed. They blasted through the hordes like laser beams, slicing entire corpses in two, exploding heads, severing limbs. One burst could make the entire upper half of a stench literally disappear into ribbons of necrotic flesh that would collapse to the ichor-streaked street like yesterday’s garbage. Nothing could survive that kind of onslaught, not even the walking corpses that craved the flesh of the living. Reese and rest of the cops killed the damaged zombies that hadn’t been stopped by the machineguns with head shots. That was perhaps the most horrifying aspect of it. The dead ignored their injuries and remained fixated on feeding. They didn’t care if they were killed, they didn’t mind as pieces of their anatomy was blown right off, and they didn’t notice that in many instances they were trailing gray-black guts after them. All they wanted was to feed.

Reese did his best to ensure they died hungry.

Bates appeared on Reese’s left and held out a military-style rifle, just like the ones the Guard used. To the public (and to many LAPD officers) they were referred to as assault rifles, that fictional term dreamed up by the media to frighten domestic audiences across the country. Reese took it and examined it briefly. He was surprised to see that it was a select-fire weapon, capable of firing on full automatic until its thirty-round magazine was expended.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked the tall patrol sergeant.

“Gift from the Guard. Shotguns are useless out here, we need to take them at a distance, not when they’re twenty feet away,” Bates said. “You know how to use it, right?”

Reese set down his shotgun and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He flicked the selector to SEMI and popped a zombie right through the forehead at sixty feet away. It collapsed to the street, a momentary geyser of black liquid fountaining from its ravaged skull for a moment.

“Okay, no need to answer that question,” Bates said.

“Any word on whether or not Metro’s going to roll up and help out?” Reese asked, shooting another zombie. Bates raised his own rifle and did the same to another.

“Not a chance—like Newman said, Metro’s out of the picture. By the way, shit’s getting real at Hollywood Station. Zombies are rolling in hard.”

Reese wasn’t surprised, but he still didn’t like the news. “Where’d you hear this?”

“CP.” Bates took out another zombie as the collection of cops and Guardsman cracked away at the latest assault. It wasn’t much, maybe eight or nine ghouls picking their way toward the hospital. Many had gotten hung up in the razor wire the Guard had stretched across the area, but others managed to stumble through gaps in the fencing where a previous tide of the dead had crushed the wire flat beneath the press of dead bodies. “They wanted to pass the word on to you directly, but you were kind of busy shooting zombies, so I took the message.”

A Black Hawk helicopter roared past overhead, followed a moment later by two Apaches. The sinister-looking gunships broke away from the transport helicopter and orbited to the right. They circled over the hospital for a bit, rotors chewing up the sky. Bates looked up at them, and from the corner of his eye, Reese could see the tall patrolman grimace and shake his head.

“Motherfuckers are practically ringing the dinner bell,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Bates looked at Reese like he was dumb. “Detective, having helicopters flying laps over our position is probably only going to get the dead’s attention. Right?”

The sound quality of the helicopters’ beating rotors changed as they slowed and transitioned into hovers over San Vincente Boulevard, which was a couple of hundred feet from where Reese crouched behind a four-foot tall ring of sand bags. Over the drone of rotors and the whine of jet engines, he heard distant pops coming from inside the hospital itself. The Guard was conducting another clearing operation, which meant that injured people who had been brought in earlier in the day had expired, then came back to life as the dead.

Another man joined Reese and Bates at the sand bag wall, this one clad in full battle rattle over his Army Combat Uniform. It took a moment for Reese to recognize First Sergeant Plosser. He had been the previous Guard commander’s senior noncommissioned officer, and had survived an attack from his commander when he had suddenly died and reanimated as a stench. Reese didn’t know the full details behind Captain Narvaez’s death, only that it had been abrupt and essentially immediate. His body was somewhere in a pile of corpses that had been stacked up on the southeast corner of Gracie Allen and San Vincente, a grisly tableau of what the hospital had become.

Plosser looked up at the hovering Apaches as they slowly pirouetted in the sky, maneuvering until they were several hundred feet apart in a tail-to-tail formation. While he didn’t know the first sergeant at all well, Reese’s first impressions had been that the tall, rawboned man was a hard charger. Now he looked shrunken, his cheeks hollow and his face covered with grime and dark speckles of what seemed to be dried blood. Flecks of gray stood out in his razor stubble.

“Oh, this shit doesn’t look good,” Plosser said.

“They lining up to start shooting?” Bates asked. “Somebody call in some close air?”

“Looks like,” Plosser said.

“What’s close air?” Reese asked.

“Close air support,” Bates said. “It’s where helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft start dropping bombs and shit on bad guys that are about to overwhelm a friendly force.”

Reese looked around, but other than the few zombies writhing about in the wire, he didn’t see much of a threat. “So does this mean a shitload of zombies are coming at us from both directions? Big enough to overrun us?”

There was a thunderous rattle as one Apache opened up with the thirty-millimeter chain gun in its belly pod. The noise reverberated off the hospital buildings that stood on either side of Reese’s position. A second later, the other Apache began as well, and Reese saw a hail of cartridges falling from the aircraft, tumbling and twinkling in the late afternoon sunlight as they descended toward the street below. That the attack helicopters were firing in opposite directions at the same time did not seem to be a good omen.

Plosser put a nail in the thought’s coffin. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, this shit doesn’t look good at all.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

It didn’t take long for Doddridge to get the rest of the prisoners into the desert and out of sight of the highway traffic. Once that happened, they doglegged to the left and started heading for the small town in the distance. There were other people in the desert with them—and they were carrying packs on their backs or riding along in ATVs. A lot of them looked like Mexicans, or maybe even Indians, but the last thing Clarence Doddridge wanted to do was get into a meet and greet with a bunch of people in the desert after waxing a bunch of corrections officers. So he just charged through the scrub brush as quickly as he could, the shotgun in his hands, the sweat pouring off his face. Even though it was October, the desert was still hot as shit. Lizards occasionally streaked away from the group, winding around the scrub and disappearing from sight. That kind of freaked Doddridge out. He’d never known he was frightened of lizards before, but then and again, this was the first time he’d ever seen them.

Who knew a hard-core prison rat like me’d be ‘fraid of a lizard?

There was more activity in the desert aside from lizards and Mexicans or Indians. There were construction crews out there as well, tearing up the scrub as they got closer to town. To his surprise, he found a six foot deep trench had been dug in the desert floor, opposed by a tall earthen berm. Doddridge had no idea what to make of that shit. Why the hell would someone be digging trenches in the desert? Prospecting for water, or something?

It took some doing, dropping into the trench, climbing out, and mounting the berm. Auto had to help Doddridge, since he wasn’t a big person to begin with, and hauling himself out of a dusty trench wasn’t something he’d ever practiced before, but they did it. It was a pain in the ass, and the berm wasn’t a treat, either—by the time he crested it and stumbled down the other side, his boots were full of dirt. To top it off, he almost stepped on a rattlesnake, and it took every ounce of will he had not to shriek like a schoolgirl and blast it with the shotgun. Thankfully, the snake figured out it was outnumbered and slithered away as fast as it could.

“Man, that’s some freaky shit!” said the skinny kid with the glasses. Shaliq, his name was. Doddridge still didn’t know what a kid like him was doing in the federal system, but it didn’t matter. He was part of the posse, now. Doddridge’s Desert Rats.

“Yeah,” was all he said, and Doddridge was glad the guards had let him take a shit in the desert before he killed them all. Otherwise, he would’ve crapped his pants. He decided than that while lizards creeped him out, snakes absolutely almost made him lose his shit. Literally.

“What the hell are these guys doing out here, digging ditches in the desert?” asked the Latin King, Big Tone.

“What the fuck does it matter?” asked Auto. The huge man with the long blond hair shielded his eyes with one big hand and looked at the tractors tearing up the landscape in the distance. They were maybe a half mile away, not far from the traffic-clogged highway.

“Yeah, let’s not worry bout that shit,” Doddridge said. “We need to get us selves a place to hole up for a while, plan our next move. Come on.”

The place would be the first house they came upon, right off a stretch of concrete called Substation Road. It was on the southern border of the town, and the house was small but neat. Bird bath out front. Rock garden for a lawn. A carport with a white 1990s Caddy in the shade. Pink curtains visible through the windows. Everything about it screamed Old Lady to Doddridge, which meant there likely wouldn’t be much of a fight to be had taking it. The closest house was a few dozen yards away, and it looked a lot like this one: a small wood-frame bungalow-style home with a lot of features that could only be found in the desert, namely no lawn and some hardy trees barely hanging on in the heat.

Doddridge sent Shaliq and Big Tone to scout the back of the place. They came back after only five minutes, reporting that the backyard was pretty much the same as the front. No swimming pool, no hot tub, not even much of a fence. Some flowers and succulents in racks along the house’s back wall. More pink curtains. Another bird bath.

“So what we gonna do?” Big Tone asked.

Doddridge had been formulating a plan of attack when one simply devised itself. The door leading into the house from the car port opened, and a blue-haired old lady shuffled out. She wore a powder blue dress, a big hat, and absolutely huge sunglasses that were probably really fashionable back in the 1970s. She shambled toward the Cadillac Fleetwood sitting in the meager shade the car port offered, rummaging around in a bright yellow purse that was the size of a life preserver she held in one hand. The men were laying flat in the dust only forty feet away, and Doddridge heard the clink of keys as she pulled a key ring out of the purse.

“We taking her down?” Auto asked, and Doddridge thought there was a bit too much excitement in his voice.

“No, man. We’ll let the ol bitch drive away, then we’ll take the house,” Doddridge said. “We’ll see what she got, then wait for her to come home.”

“We ought to take her, man.”

“Auto, what the fuck for? Let her go out and do whatever she needs to do. We got all night to deal with her when she comes home. Don’t worry bout it. We take her down and the people who might be waitin’ on her could get curious why she don’t show up to bingo or whatever old white bitches do in the desert, and that leads to cops. Forget that shit.”

Auto made a disagreeable noise in his throat, but didn’t press the matter further.

The men spent the next few minutes taking in the rather unenviable entertainment that came from watching an old woman clamber into a big Cadillac. While Doddridge couldn’t see her face, he figured she had to be in her 80s judging by the sluggishness of her movements. Finally, she got herself situated inside the great white beast and started it up. The Caddy had an engine that still had some balls to it, and Auto nodded appreciatively beside him.

“That’s the old seven liter,” he said.

“Great, so we have our getaway car,” Big Tone said.

“Damn, I sure hope so,” Auto said.

“So what the fuck is taking her so long?” Shaliq said. “I got to take a piss.”

“Probably waiting for the air conditioning to kick in,” Auto said. “She’s old. She probably likes it like a refrigerator.”

For sure, the old woman didn’t close the driver’s door for another two minutes. When she did, she wrestled into her seat belt, and then spent another minute backing the Caddy down the twenty foot driveway. Carefully maneuvering the big car as if it was a battleship in a tight harbor, the old woman turned the vehicle until its chrome grille was pointed north up the street. She then accelerated away as if she was in the pole position in a NASCAR race.

Doddridge laughed at that.

The deadbolt on the door had been set, but the wood was old, and Auto was almost able to push the door open. He had been right—the old woman liked her environment to be cold, and Doddridge luxuriated in the air conditioned bliss of her home. The door from the car park led into a small and rather outdated kitchen. It was clean. The old lady apparently took pride in keeping her home spotless, and for a flickering instant, Doddridge felt sorry he and his new crew had despoiled such a pristine speck in the middle of the endless desert. The regret died almost instantly. He wasn’t one to carry much baggage, and he dropped the remorse as if it was too hot to hold onto.

The rest of the small house was much like the kitchen. A near living room with an old tube TV, a sofa wrapped in plastic like in the old days, newspapers on the coffee table, a well-used easy chair and ottoman. A single bathroom, so clean and bright that it almost looked alien to him—the lack of institutional hues struck him almost right between the eyes as he regarded the gleaming porcelain and the spotless glass of the sliding shower doors that sat above the tub. Two bedrooms, one with a pair of single beds that looked like they’d never been used. The second was the master, and it held a freshly-made queen bed and smelled of lavender and sandalwood. All in all, the small residence made Doddridge think he and his crew had taken residence inside one giant doily.

“Okay,” he said to the others as he returned to the living room. “Let’s get us squared away. Let’s see what the old lady has to eat.”

“I’d like to use the bathroom and take a shower,” said the pasty-faced white boy who had pissed himself on the bus. His voice was soft and almost sibilant, the way an extremely shy person might speak. Doddridge didn’t know anything about him, other than he had whimpered the entire trip from northern California.

“What’s your name?” he asked the white kid.

“Bruce,” the kid said.

Doddridge motioned to Shaliq. “You gonna tell me you’re nineteen, too?”

Bruce shook his head. “No. I’m twenty.”

Shaliq clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Shit, I’m still the baby.”

Doddridge nodded toward the bathroom. “Yeah, sure, Brucie, knock yourself out. You smell like piss, anyway.”

“Hey, hold on.” Big Tone stood by the low-lying coffee table. He tapped the newspaper he held in his hand. “You gotta see this.”

Doddridge scowled. “I ain’t got time to read no paper,” he said. The truth of the matter was, Doddridge was pretty much illiterate. While he could read at the first grade level on a good day, going through something like a newspaper article was roughly akin to him grappling with the theoretical possibilities posed by quantum physics.

Tone tapped the paper again. “There’s some sort of plague going on, man. People are dying all over. New York City’s burning down. Check it.” The older Latino turned the paper around so that Doddridge and the others could see it. The full color picture showed half of Manhattan island on fire, emitting huge columns of smoke that dwarfed those that had erupted during the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“Holy shit,” Auto said.

“That real, man?” Shaliq asked.

Tone shrugged. “Fuck if I know. It’s in the paper. Says that a few million people have died across the world over the last few days.” He shook his head. “LA’s getting it, too. Army’s mobilized. Food riots. And get this, people who die, they’re saying they ain’t really dead. They get up and start biting other people, spreading the plague.”

“Bitin’ people?” Doddridge asked. “What, like they’re some kind of damn zombies?”

Tone seemed to go pale at the word. “Look, I don’t know.”

Shaliq pointed at the television. “Let’s find out.”

Hell yeah, I could watch me some TV. “Go ahead,” Doddridge said. Shaliq moved to the television and switched it on. The old lady had a satellite subscription, and Shaliq turned it to CNN after consulting the viewing guide.

Sure enough, New York City was on fire. And so was Chicago. And Los Angeles.

“Holy shit,” Doddridge said after staring at the TV for less than thirty seconds.

The picture showed a horde of shambling people attacking cops in New York. The attackers didn’t appear to be bothered by tear gas or riot rounds or even real bullets. They just kept on coming, walking through the shit storm the cops sent their way. The only time one went down was when a leg had been hit, but even then, the crazies came at a crawl. They stopped for good only if they were hit in the head.

“Man,” Tone said, and his voice was small and weak. Doddridge glanced at him, and saw the Latin King’s face was ashen as he crossed himself.

“Fuck, man—I got to get back to Seattle,” Auto said suddenly.

“No one goin’ anywhere,” Doddridge shot back. “We gotta sit tight, learn about this shit. If somethin’s going down in the world, we need to know about it before we do shit.” He glanced at the thin white guy. “But you can go take your shower, faggot. Please.”

“Okay,” Bruce whispered, staring at the television with blank, blue eyes. “Thanks.”

Doddridge ignored him and looked at the TV for a few moments, listening to what the anchor was saying about the violence they were watching. Some sort of plague that actually reanimated the dead? People eating each other? No cure, no vaccine, no defense, but the president urged calm?

What the fuck? I finally get outta prison, and this is where my black ass fucking lands?

###

“We’ll need to start weapons training once the outer defenses have been finished,” Corbett told the council. “Everyone needs to know how to shoot. Everyone needs to learn how to defend themselves.”

Max Booker didn’t have time to even do a face palm before Hector Aguilar exploded.

“Everyone needs to learn how to shoot?” the pharmacy owner said, his eyes wide and incredulous behind his glasses. “What lunacy are you talking about? This is a town full of people, not jack-booted thugs!”

Corbett stood before the council table in the meeting room, hands in his pockets. He wore jeans and a long polo shirt. He favored Hector with a frosty glare before his pulled his right hand out of his pocket. Booker thought for an brief moment that he might pull his .45—Booker knew the man was armed, had seen the tell-tale bulge of a big pistol tucked into a holster in the small of his back—but instead, Corbett merely pushed his own glasses up his nose.

“The dead apparently need a very specific injury in order to stop attacking,” the billionaire said. “That is, a shot to the head. Anywhere else doesn’t bother them. Might slow them down some, but won’t stop them. Head shots are the only guaranteed way to put them down for the count. Sounds easy, but it’s not, especially if the shooter is under stress, in an uncomfortable position, and isn’t properly trained.”

Hector laughed. It was an unpleasant sound. “So you think that arming the people and training them to kill is the answer?” He laughed again. “My God, you are a lunatic. Tell him, Chief.”

Chief Grady stirred a bit at the end of the table. “Mister Corbett, I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that a lot of our people are qualified or able to handle firearms.”

Corbett’s face swiveled to lock onto Grady like a turret on a battleship locking onto a target. “The Second Amendment doesn’t seem to cover that particular detail, Chief.”

“That’s not the point!” Hector almost shouted. “This is a peaceful place to live, and you want to turn it into a right-wing police state!”

“Chief, I think the answers regarding who can or cannot possess a firearm can be found in the California Firearms Law Summary released by the attorney general’s office,” Corbett continued, ignoring Hector. “If there are people who are mentally incompetent or who might be precluded from possessing a firearm due to previous criminal activity, I have no problem denying them access. On the other hand, folks who aren’t in a restricted category should be allowed to learn how to defend themselves, their fellow citizens, and the town. Remember, they’ll be shooting at the walking dead, not live people.”

“But we don’t even know if these people are actually dead!” Hector snapped. “No one has proven anything to the contrary! These are very, very sick people who need our help!”

“Hector, you saw an attack yourself!” Gemma Washington said, turning toward the mustachioed pharmacy owner. She sat between Hector and Chief Grady. “You were there—was Wally Whittaker still alive when he attacked Lou?”

Hector rolled his eyes. “Of course he was still alive! How else could he have bitten Lou?”

Corbett looked back at Grady. “Chief, what’s your take on that?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“No, but you’re a policeman.”

Grady fidgeted a bit in his seat. “Listen, I’m not qualified to say—I didn’t see him drop. When I got to Hector’s he had already attacked Lou, and he was going after Hailey, so I did what I had to do. He was definitely dead afterwards, though. That much is for certain.”

Corbett waved the issue aside. “All right. To continue, anyone who wants to learn will need instruction on how to handle and use firearms, as well as specific defensive tactics. It’s going to take a long time to get all the fortifications made, so folks will have to train up on what we have now, then be retrained with what we’ll have in the future.”

“About some of those plans,” Booker said, speaking for the first time since the session had begun, “are you set on partitioning the town?”

“I am. It’s the safest bet. If there’s a break-in, we’ll need to be able to shrink our perimeter and still keep everyone safe.”

Hector snorted. “So not only do you want to put up walls around the town, you want to put them up inside. That’s simply ridiculous.”

“I have to say, I’m not much of a fan of it either, Barry,” Booker added.

Corbett smiled thinly. “No? You’ll think differently when a bunch of slobbering, flesh-hungry ghouls are chasing your ass down Main Street, Max.”

That pissed Booker off. “Hey, I don’t deserve that attitude.”

Corbett held his smile, then ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair as the two men in his security detail stirred, uneasy at the suddenly contentious tones. Corbett looked away from the table and took a few steps to his right, then turned back to the council. “Listen, by tomorrow all the trenching will be complete. We’ll reinforce the sewer and gas lines and the water mains, then we’ll begin erecting walls all around the town. It’ll take two or three weeks to complete. By then, we’ll probably start seeing the effects of what’s been happening in the larger cities. Everyone’s going to be fighting for resources. Things are going to get very, very hairy. Not just competitive, mind you—but outright dangerous. And that’s before the zombies get here. If you’ve been watching the news, New York is totally down for the count. The entire Tenth Mountain Division is trying to take northern Manhattan, and they’re getting shut down. Boston is starting to destabilize, and so is DC. Los Angeles is about to go the same way, and there’s activity in Vegas, and it’s not the usual high stakes game. All this means there’s going to be a mass migration of frightened, panic-stricken people. They won’t have any way to take care of themselves, not over the long term. Too many people have gotten used to all the modern conveniences. Right now, supermarkets are running out of food. There are no more food or fuel or water deliveries, outside of what the utility companies can keep pumping out. When a man’s family is starving, cold, sick, he’ll do anything to take care of them. Anything.

“So we can’t leave the town open. Every day we do, we run the risk of something happening to us. To you. To your families. We’ve got to think about cutting ourselves off now, while we can still pick the time and manage things without having to fight off a panicking mob.”

Booker didn’t like the sound of that. “So what’s your solution to this, Barry?”

“Like I said in the plan, Max. We need to break the highway on either end of town. Make it so no one can get in.”

Booker shook his head. “No. No way. We’re not doing that yet.”

“The longer we wait, the more difficult it’s going to become,” Corbett said. “When we finally seal the town, we can’t have outsiders here. We don’t have the—”

“Barry, no way,” Booker said, raising his voice. “We can’t close the town. Not yet. It’s not time.”

Hector turned toward him. “What do you mean, ‘not yet’? You don’t plan on actually going through with his plans, do you?”

“I thought that was decided,” Gemma said.

“It was,” Booker said reluctantly. “It is.”

Corbett raised his hands. “Then I don’t see a problem. Let’s get to it.”

“No, Barry. It’s happening too fast,” Booker said. “We have obligations, to the town, to those who need to pass through, even to the state. We can’t start chopping up a highway and deny access. There’s no other road here people can use. What are we expecting them to do, hike over the mountains to get to where they need to go?” Booker pointed toward the room’s western wall, in the general direction of Mount Whitney.

Corbett nodded. “If they don’t turn around and head back to wherever they came from, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying we do. Listen, we’ve had this discussion already. The people caught out in that traffic? Not our problem, Max. It’s regrettable, and it’s unfortunate, and it’s even sad. There are families out there, people who are just trying to get somewhere safe. But we can’t help them. We can maybe save the town and the people who live in it, but we can’t save everybody else while doing it.”

“You mean, save yourself,” Hector said.

Corbett fixed him with a withering glare. “If saving myself was all that I was after, then the only wall being built would be around my property. And I’d probably put up a nice tower, too—just to watch you try and figure out how you could survive on your own, Mister Aguilar.”

“Barry.” Gemma’s voice was reasonable and well-modulated. “Barry, what do we do if the zombies come here and there are still people outside? Do we take them in? Do we turn our backs on them?”

The question interested Booker intensely. He looked at Corbett, but for once, the rangy billionaire didn’t seem to want to give a direct answer.

“It’s my hope those people will have moved on,” Corbett said.

“But what if they don’t?” Gemma pressed. “What if they can’t?”

Corbett clenched his teeth. “Then we let the chips fall where they may.”

Hector made a satisfied noise and crossed his arms, a sardonic smile forcing the ends of his mustache upward.

Gemma didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “I don’t know you very well, Barry, but that answer doesn’t seem to sit well with you.”

“Should it?” Corbett asked. “Nothing about this sits well with me. But this is the hand we’ve been dealt. We’re going to have to turn a cold shoulder on a lot of people. It’s going to be dirty business, but we have to get on with it.” He looked at Booker. “Now. Weapons training. We need to start bringing the rest of the town in on this. We’ll need an open meeting—people need to know what’s going on, and why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

“A lot of folks are curious,” Grady said. “My officers are being asked a million questions.”

“Then let’s give them some answers,” Corbett said. “I’d advise we let Gary Norton handle the public side. He’s better at that kind of stuff than I am, and he’d be a good backup for you, Max.”

Booker leaned back in his chair. Letting Norton take some of the heat was appealing, just in case things abated. But there was no way he’d be able to avoid most of the blowback; he was Single Tree’s mayor, after all. No one was holding a gun to his head and forcing him to enact Corbett’s plan, though he did figure things might come to that if he outright declined to join in the fun.

“I’ll consider that. But you’re right, we need to advise the townspeople about what’s going on. We should call a meeting for tomorrow night.”

“Tonight would be better,” Corbett said.

Booker frowned, and looked at the clock on the wall above the door. “Barry, it’s almost five o’clock now.”

Corbett nodded. “Better get on it.”

“Preposterous!” Hector said.

“Cluing in the town is preposterous?” Corbett responded.

“You know what I mean! Calling a meeting at the end of the business day is preposterous!”

Corbett shrugged. “Special circumstances, Hector. Special circumstances.” He looked at Booker. “Up to you guys to figure that out. Circling back to weapons training: I’ll ask Danielle Kennedy to assist, since she has all the training we need and pretty much everyone knows her. For advanced training”—Corbett pointed to the men sitting in the auditorium behind him—“we have some skilled personnel to turn to, as well. But it would be better if we were to notify the townspeople and let them know the reasons for doing all of this, and like I’ve already said, the sooner the better.”

Hector started to bloviate again but was interrupted by the radio Grady wore on his belt. “Fourteen, copy.”

“Sorry,” Grady said as he reached for the microphone clipped to his left shoulder. “Fourteen, go ahead.”

“Fourteen, reported 10-50 at the two mile marker on 395. Corrections bus from upstate. Can’t get through to the Highway Patrol. J four.”

Grady raised his brows. “10-4. Clear and direct.” He got to his feet and looked over at Booker. “Sorry, gotta go. Some sort of traffic incident involving a bus.”

“A corrections bus?” Corbett asked. “Prisoner transport?”

Grady shrugged as he walked around the table. “Don’t know. I guess the other guys are busy, so I won’t know anything until I get out there.”

Corbett turned and looked at his bodyguards. One of them nodded and stood up, moving to form up on Grady. “You want some company, Chief?”

“No,” Grady said. “I don’t. But before I go, when were you considering this ‘weapons training’, and where did you want to hold it?”

“On my land. I’ve got fourteen acres, and a big berm laid out to keep any stray rounds from going anywhere but into the desert,” Corbett said.

Grady nodded and looked back at Booker. “I’d let him do it, Max. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Booker said. “You sure you don’t need some help?”

Grady shot him a thumbs up and continued walking toward the door. “I’m good to go.”

###

Sinclair watched as Los Angeles slowly died and became resurrected. That was the wonderful thing about twenty-four hour news channels, the truth was always exposed—or, he well knew, at least what part of the truth fit the agenda. He had no idea whose agenda might include broadcasting the rise of the shambling dead, but it was on the telly, and Sinclair never passed up the opportunity to stay abreast of current affairs.

And current affairs told him that Los Angeles was beginning to die, just like New York had, and Washington, and Philadelphia, and countless other US cities. He had tuned in mostly to find out about what was happening in New York, and had been momentarily pleased to see his condominium building, the revered 15 Central Park West, silhouetted against a smoke-filled sky but still standing tall and proud over Central Park. A Central Park that was full of military helicopters that were being overrun by legions of dead. Sinclair had watched in horrified fascination as the video feed continued to broadcast over a satellite link, even though the camera—doubtless mounted to a new station remote unit—had long been abandoned. Creeping figures tottered across the park’s Great Lawn, overwhelming guards by sheer numbers alone. And interspersed here and there were faster ones, those who hadn’t been damaged too badly in their transition from life to death. They could still move, and fast. They didn’t seem to tire and slowed only when they were hit by a hail of bullets, or fell upon a living person. When that happened, the dead mounded over their unfortunate quarry, ripping it to pieces. Sinclair watched as the dead surged aboard running helicopters, ignoring the gunfire, savaging their crews. Two helicopters lifted off, but several of the dead managed to get aboard one of them. The aircraft heeled over and crashed back to the ground, its slashing rotors obliterating several zombies before it came to a halt. In what seemed to be seconds, the aircraft was overrun by a tidal wave of necrotic bodies, and the zombies flailed about as they each tried to gain their pound of flesh.

Sinclair knew then that he would never return to 15 Central Park West.

But now, the news was mostly about Los Angeles. The City of Angels was more spread out than the Big Apple, so the disease grew more slowly. But it did spread, until the local authorities couldn’t contain it anymore. A great herd of the dead shuffled along Interstate 405, attacking stranded motorists caught in the nearly motionless traffic, a great conga line eating its way to the north while another moved to the south. Several California Highway Patrol vehicles were overwhelmed, the patrolmen there killed as they tried to flee, their bodies illuminated by the sporadic flashes of emergency lights. News helicopters captured everything, zooming in so Sinclair could watch as the patrolmen met the most grisly of fates in full 720p, which was the highest resolution the blasted hotel’s television could manage. It was enough. By the end of it, Sinclair felt himself sickened by what he had seen.

And frightened almost out of his mind.

We have to get out of here, he told himself once again. The statement played through his mind on an endless loop, but escape from Single Tree was virtually impossible until the next morning, when he and Meredith would board a bus for Reno. From there, they would try to cut across California and get to the relative safety of San Francisco. The Bay Area was hardly trouble free at the moment, but San Francisco was holding out. Geography worked to its advantage, channelizing the dead into a relatively narrow area of approach where the SFPD and National Guard could make a stand. While most of the coverage focused on Los Angeles, a few details about the preparations in San Francisco did get some airtime. A great swath of the city’s southern boundary was being fortified as the authorities prepared to face the inevitable: a great, stinking mob of dead that would eventually take hold in the south and move to the north, in search of prey.

“Jock, turn it off,” Meredith whispered from the bed. “Please. Just turn it off.”

Sinclair, sitting on the foot of the bed, turned and looked at her. Meredith was hunkered down under the thin covers, her eyes wide and terrified. She seemed to have aged a dozen years in the past two days. Stress and Meredith did not go well together, he noted not for the first time, and the first casualty of her distressed state was her regal good looks. Sinclair sniffed, and wondered why he couldn’t have found someone with just as much wealth who was a little hardier. And younger.

With a sigh, he switched off the television and tossed the remote to the pillow next to her. “Fine. Watch some Big Bang Theory or something, darling. In the meantime, I’ll go out and try to find us something to eat.”

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

“Okay, the stationhouse is gone for good, and the hospital’s out of commission,” Reese told the rest of the cops in the mobile command center. “And the Guard can’t hold back the dead around here. We’re going to have to consider pulling out and setting up somewhere else.” As he spoke, more hovering Apaches poured fire at the advancing zombie hordes. In less than a week, their numbers were in the thousands, and according to one of the hospital staff, there was the great possibility that their reproduction rate had been severely underestimated. At first, the medical community had thought they were dealing with just a simple virus, a type of respiratory syndrome that was both fatal and untreatable when contracted. But restricting its spread was relatively easy, and there had been indications that the original viral outbreak had been abating. But those who died from the virus—established at a rate of one out of ten people—rose up again anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours after expiring. The virus they carried was much more efficient, able to replicate at an astounding rate the second it was introduced into a living host. Those who were bitten had hours to live, and conversion into what was known as a necromorph or a reanimant was absolutely guaranteed. Reese thought of all the people who had been bitten in the sprawling hospital which practically surrounded them. Even though the Guard had been systematically exterminating any zombies it found, there was little chance they’d found all of them. Which meant Reese and his meager command were sitting ducks.

The Apaches had managed to hold off the hordes for the time being, but they went weapons dry in only a few minutes. There was a rotation going on, where dry aircraft were replaced by helicopters with full magazines and rocket pods, but there were gaps in the coverage. There weren’t enough helicopters to go around, and requests for what the Guard called CAS were going through the roof. That meant the Guard troops on the ground had to engage, and according to the latest report he had received from Colonel Morton, they were running out of .50 caliber ammunition. That meant the great guns in the Humvees would fall silent, and Reese knew those were the only weapons that could keep the multitude of stenches at bay.

“So where are we going to go?” asked one of the cops, a patrolman Reese didn’t recognize. “Hollywood Station is gone, we’re not in contact with any other units ... where the hell do you suggest we go, Detective?”

Reese rubbed his face. His eyes burned, as if they were on fire. His hands shook, and he smelled like he’d been at one of LAPD’s firing ranges for a day straight. He looked over at Sergeant Bates, who leaned against an interior wall. Bates stared back, his blue eyes vacant but still sharp. Reese envied him. Even though Bates was stuck in the same shit as the rest of them, he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.

Outside, pounding rotor beats changed in pitch. The latest pair of Apaches to arrive was breaking station, heading back to LAX for more ammo and fuel. Reese listened to the sound of their passage, whirling rotors growing more and more distant. No other aircraft approached, aside the drone of a single news helicopter orbiting high overhead.

One of the tri-barreled .50 calibers opened up, spitting out a short burst.

“We could try for the Bowl,” Reese said, still looking at Bates. “A lot of civilians were relocated there. They’ll need our help.”

Bates shook his head. “Those people are going to need more help than what we can give, Reese.”

“No.” This came from another plainclothes detective, a skinny man named Marsh who worked the Gang and Narcotics desk at Hollywood Station. “No, the Bowl is where we need to go.”

Bates frowned and looked at him. “Why the hell for?”

“Because I heard that the Sheriff’s Department special operations division was up there, and they have MRAPs,” Marsh said. “We get our hands on one of those things, we go wherever we want.”

“How do we know if they’re still there?” Reese asked. “Has anyone been able to establish contact?”

No one could provide him with an affirmative, so Reese was inclined to forget about it. But the thought of having a heavily-armored vehicle was attractive. He’d seen several of the department’s MRAPs in the past, and they were definitely rigged for heavy duty. Driving over dozens of stenches wasn’t likely to even slow them down.

“Bates, what do you think about obtaining an MRAP?” he asked.

Bates pursed his lips, thinking about it. “Not something I’d turn my back on. But what if we get up to the Bowl and it’s a shit storm? We going to turn our back on those people?”

Reese didn’t know how to answer that. It galled him to allow civilians to face the dead alone, without the support of the LAPD. He’d made the same general argument to Colonel Morton only hours before, but that was when engagements with the dead were still considered less likely. Now, it was almost constant. Reese and his men had their squad cars and the RV they sat in, but that was about it. Helping the citizens of Los Angeles now was pretty much a pipe dream.

As he was trying to frame a response, someone pounded on the door. It was locked, so Reese leaned over and opened it. Colonel Morton stood outside, dressed in full battle rattle. He looked up at Reese from the street outside.

“Reese, we’re pulling out. The hospital’s been shut down, and my troops have been ordered to establish a perimeter around the Hollywood Bowl. You have any instructions from your superiors?” the big National Guard commander asked. He practically spit the words out, and Reese didn’t need a degree in psychology to know the Guardsman was still pissed with the way Reese had treated him earlier in the day.

“No. Our stationhouse has been overrun, and contact with remaining elements of the LAPD are pretty much screwed,” Reese responded.

Morton nodded, though Reese could see he didn’t like the news. “Your guys are welcome to come with us. We’re arranging for ammunition resupply up there, and another two companies of infantry are going to be deployed from the staging area at Griffith Park. There are a couple of thousand people up there who will need our help, and we have to secure the area until we can get enough aviation assets in to lift them out.”

“What about the rest of the people in the hospital, Colonel?”

Morton looked at Reese directly. “The medical staff is pretty much gone, Reese. You can stay here and empty bed pans if you feel you need to, but our orders are to displace and head to the Bowl.” The hulking Guardsman leaned into the command post RV and looked around at the other cops standing in the vehicle’s tepid interior lights. It was getting dark outside, and Reese noticed that Morton had a pair of night vision goggles attached to his helmet. “You don’t seem to have a lot of manpower left, Reese. You won’t be able to hold out for more than five minutes if one of those waves get through, and when they come, the aviation guys tell me they’re a thousand strong.” He looked at Reese again. “You’d better come with us. Cedar-Sinai is lost. No doctors, no nurses, so medical staff. Ambulances aren’t bringing in new patients. This place is a dead zone.”

Outside, the big .50-caliber guns opened up again, ripping off longer bursts. Morton stepped backward and looked toward San Vincente Boulevard, pulling the stock of his M4 into his armpit. The weapon looked almost like a toy in his grasp. The engagement heated up, and Reese heard more small arms join in the fun. Reese saw the muscles in Morton’s jaw stand out in stark relief as he clenched his teeth before the Guard officer turned back to the interior of the RV.

“Okay, we move out in ten minutes. Feel free to form up on us. If not, good luck.” With that, Morton slammed the command post door closed. Reese leaned over again and locked it.

“Okay, how many guys do we have left here?” he asked.

“Twenty-two,” Bates said. “We lost three. Don’t know where they are, but they’re not answering their ROVERs, and no one’s been able to find any bodies. They either got up and walked away, or they got taken down and dragged off somewhere.”

“We going with the Guard, Reese?” Marsh asked. His narrow face was sweaty and he had a pinched expression, like he’d just sat on a thumb tack.

“Let’s get the bus. We’ll take the CP and the bus, and maybe a couple of squad cars. Not so sure they’ll be the best protection, but at least people will know who we are when we get close to the Bowl. Last thing we want is for the Sheriff’s department to light us up,” Reese said. “So yeah, I guess we’re going. No reason to stay if we’re just going to die. Anyone have any rebuttals?”

Reese looked around the command post’s interior. No one said anything, not even Bates. Reese figured that was about as good as it was going to get, so he nodded and got to his feet.

“All right. I’ll get back with Morton and tell him we’re forming up.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

The sun was setting by the time Grady made it out to the highway, his Ford Expedition bumping across the desert landscape. There was a small crowd standing next to a gray and green bus that was mostly unmarked save for a series of registration numbers above the windshield. Just the same, there was something institutional about the vehicle, and Grady would have been able to see that even if he hadn’t already known it was a corrections vehicle.

He pulled up next to the bus and the small crowd gathered there and flipped on the Expedition’s light bar, bathing the area in sporadic flashes of red and blue. He stepped out of the vehicle, adjusting his belt and ensuring his stick, pistol, and taser were in the right places.

“Fourteen, on scene,” he said into his radio.

“Fourteen on scene, copy,” came the response.

The small crowd turned and regarded him, and he waved them away from the bus. “All right, people, let’s step back here,” he said. Not far from where he had parked the Expedition, a tall man in a corrections officer uniform lay sprawled on the ground. He’d been hit by what Grady assumed as a shotgun at relatively close range, right in the head. Half his face was missing. Flies buzzed around the corpse.

Further downrange, another body lay amidst the scrub. This one had been a fairly portly man in real life, and his skull had actually been smashed open. Insects and dirt had already covered the whitish goo that spilled out of the broken vessel.

Someone alighted from the bus, and Grady saw the always regal-looking Victor Kuruk face him with his characteristic expression of absolute inscrutability. walked into the small police station. Today, Victor was wearing his “official” uniform—a reservation police jacket over a black T-shirt and black jeans.

“Good afternoon, Chief,” Victor said. Which struck Grady as kind of funny, since Victor was actually a real honest to God chief of a Native American tribe, whereas Grady was just a politically appointed law enforcement officer.

“Hi, Victor. What, ah, brings you here?” Grady asked, even though he didn’t have a lot of time for small talk.

“Some of my people came across the scene and told me of it. I only just arrived.” Victor pointed to the rear of the bus, where his lovingly-restored Dodge pickup truck sat. He then turned and pointed back into the bus’s open door. “The driver’s dead. Looks like there were three prison guards, and they were overwhelmed. I don’t know how many prisoners were on the bus, but they’re gone now. Are you going to assist me?”

“Assist you?” Grady asked.

Victor sighed and pointed at the ground. “They’re on reservation territory, Chief.”

Grady almost guffawed. “Victor, I don’t think so. The bus is on the shoulder of the highway.”

Victor sighed. “Which goes right through the res,” he said. “Normally, this would be the Highway Patrol’s bailiwick, but I’m guessing they’re not exactly running down to take a look, are they? Or the FBI?”

“Not able to get through to them,” Grady said.

“Think you can help me with crowd control while I take a look around?” Victor asked.

Grady sighed. “Victor ... this isn’t your investigation.”

Victor raised one eyebrow and crossed his arms. “Oh? Very well, then. Do carry on, Chief Grady—I’m not really all that interested in heading up a murder investigation right now. We have something that’s probably more pressing.”

“What’s that?” Grady turned and looked at the people milling around the area. They were definitely motorists, and many of them had likely seen what had happened. He was going to have to conduct a lot of interviews.

“Whomever killed these men are probably criminals, and they have a few hours lead time on us. And if I were them, I’d be headed for Single Tree,” Victor said. “Just in case you wanted to know what my thinking on the matter might be.”

Grady turned away from the crowd and looked at Victor with a frown. A chill ran through him. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you might be right about that.” He reached for the radio on his shoulder.

###

The news that there were potential murderers on the loose in Single Tree galvanized the town’s small law enforcement team into action. While Chief Grady was tied up out on the highway, that meant Hailey and the others had to start scouring the town, while also remaining available to other calls for assistance. Single Tree was not particularly vast—dimensionally, the town was maybe two miles wide by perhaps four long, but access was restricted by the heavy traffic clogging up Highway 395, which essentially split the town in two. Hailey happened to be on the eastern side of town, keeping watch on one of the local gas stations. There had been two incidents there today already, with exhausted motorists fighting each other for access to the gas pumps. The sun was setting, and the temperature was beginning to drop, but blood pressure wasn’t following in suit. The owner of the gas station had informed him that the underground tanks were running dry, and he estimated that in ten minutes he wouldn’t have any fuel to sell to anyone. Things were going to get ugly. Hailey advised him to close up and head for home as soon as the tanks were tapped. There was no need to stick around, and it didn’t seem like Hailey was going to be returning any time soon.

He pulled out of the back entrance to the service station’s parking lot and rolled south. A lot of traffic had boiled off of Main Street—what 395 was called when it bisected the town—which slowed his progress considerably. Most of the people were hopelessly lost, searching for an alternate to the highway when one didn’t exist. Hailey squirmed in his seat, pissed at the delays, but powerless to do anything about them. He didn’t want to run code three, because lights and sirens would only alert the bad guys that he was coming.

And since he’d heard that several armed corrections officers had been killed, giving the convicts a heads-up wasn’t high on his to-do list.

He kept his eyes open as he drove, looking for anything amiss. Single Tree was a small town, and usually, things didn’t change very much. But a few houses were vacant now, their residents having fled to other locations. A few more were vacation homes, and all but one of those were empty—the banker from Orange County had come to town with his family, and as Hailey’s Expedition rolled past, the man nodded to him. Hailey waved back. But aside from that, all was as it should have been, except for the occasional errant traffic that cruised around the neighborhood, searching for a way out. Hailey gave the passing cars and SUVs a look-over wherever he could, but no one seemed overtly suspicious.

And would you actually know what murderers look like? he asked himself. He was a small town, low-time cop. He knew what alcoholics looked like, and knew what shoplifters looked like, and what the occasional vagrant looked like. But murderers? If they were still wearing their prison uniforms and carried guns out in the open, then sure. Otherwise? Maybe not.

Chief Grady’s voice came over the radio. “Six, this is fourteen. Copy?”

Hailey reached for his radio transceiver. “Fourteen, this is six.”

“Six, head down to Substation Road. I’m with Res one and three. Make a pass through the neighborhood, we’ll be right with you. Copy?”

“Fourteen, copy. Direct to Substation, be there in about five minutes.” Res One and Three were tribal reservation units, with one being none other than Victor Kuruk, and three being Suzy Kuruk. Hailey found himself smiling a bit. He hadn’t been able to see much of Suzy since their brief lunch together on the day that old Wally had apparently turned into a zombie and attacked him.

He drove past the Single Tree High School, which was closed for classes due to the emergency. Just the same, its parking lot was hardly empty—several trucks and containers were there, being tended to by work crews that Barry Corbett had brought it. There were also several Native Americans, as well. It looked like they were working alongside Corbett’s crew, earning some dollars for some work. At the moment, all they were doing was unloading a shit-ton of building supplies. Hailey didn’t know everything that was going on, but the chief had passed on that the town was about to go under a pretty massive change. Unofficially, he’d also heard that Old Man Corbett was planning to turn the entire town into a fortress, and the suited Hailey just fine.

He made it down to Substation Road just as Chief Grady’s Expedition pulled around the far corner, followed by a shiny Dodge pickup and a reservation Suburban. Hailey accelerated down the street as the other vehicles pulled to the curb. He brought his own Expedition to a halt abreast of Chief Grady’s and rolled down the passenger window.

“What’s up, Chief?” he asked.

“We’re going to take a walk around and just make sure there haven’t been any break-ins,” Grady said. “Anyone else with you?”

Hailey shook his head. “Just me. All the other guys are tied up on the other side of town. It’s going to take a bit for them to get down here. So what’s the deal?” he asked, as Victor Kuruk alighted from his tall Dodge pickup. Beyond him, Suzy climbed out of her Expedition and adjusted her gun belt. She favored him with a sly smile and a not-so-sly wink. Hailey smiled back, then noticed Victor’s frown. Hailey looked back at Grady.

“We’ve got three dead corrections officers on the highway,” Grady said. “From the documentation on the bus, there were five prisoners being transported downstate. Looks like they shot their way out, and they’re probably holing up around here somewhere. I want you to shoot up to Muir and make a couple of passes. Keep your eyes open.”

“Anyone see anything?” Hailey asked.

Grady nodded. “Several motorists saw it go down, or at least part of it. And a bunch of guys took off and headed out into the desert. There’s a chance they could still be moving easterly, but with a town nearby, I’d think they’d come here first.” The police chief pushed open his door. “If you see something, call me. Don’t get directly involved in something, wait for the rest of us.”

“You sure you don’t want me to stick around?” Hailey regarded the short row of houses before and behind him. It was getting dark, and lights were starting to shine through several windows. A lost motorist turned onto the street but stopped when he saw the collection of police vehicles sitting at the end of the street. The car slowly backed off and turned up another street.

“I’m good,” Grady said. “Victor and Suzy are going to help out, so I’ll manage for the time being.”

“You got it, Chief,” Hailey said. He took his foot off the brake and pulled away.

###

“Okay, one cop just pulled away,” Big Tone said. He was stationed next to the living room window, peering around the edge of the curtains. “Got three more out there. Heh, one guy looks like an Indian.”

Doddridge held onto the shotgun with sweaty hands. “What, you mean like a dot head?”

“No, man, like a fucking Indian looking for a buffalo to shoot. Funny shit.”

The old lady who owned the house the crew had taken over sat on the plastic-wrapped couch, her silhouette barely visible in the darkness. When she had come home from wherever she had gone off to, Doddridge had met her at the carport door and took her in without incident. He had thought she was a blue-haired white woman when he’d seen her from a distance, but it turned out she was a Mexican named Estelle. She and Big Tone conversed in Spanish for a bit, and the Latin King seemed satisfied that she wasn’t going to cause any trouble. Doddridge didn’t quite believe that. He’d had more than a little bit of trouble from 80-something year old ladies in the past, but as long as she sat on the couch and didn’t move, everyone was going to be fine.

And then, the cops showed up.

Doddridge wasn’t surprised by it, though he’d hoped that the small town’s PD would be too tied up with other things to start pressing them so soon. They’d had a few hours to themselves, gotten cleaned up, ate, and had begun planning their next move. In the middle of the night, Doddridge intended to take the old lady’s Cadillac and enter the stream of slowly-moving traffic in what was certain to be a slow-motion escape from the town. It wasn’t preferable, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to do anything else. From the maps he’d found in old lady Estelle’s house, there was really only one road out of here, and that was the highway. There wasn’t anything in the house that could sustain the men for several days in the desert, and Doddridge wasn’t at all interested in busting his ass climbing over mountains and rocky ridges.

Now, he was beginning to wonder if that wasn’t a good idea, after all.

“What’re we gonna do?” Auto asked in the darkness.

“Not gonna do shit,” Doddridge said. “Wait for them to move on, then let’s sit tight for a bit before we bug out.”

“Hey, one of the cops is coming toward the house,” Big Tone said. He eased away from the window and reached into his waistband. He parked one of the guards’ liberated pistols there, and he pulled it free.

“Easy, ese,” Doddridge whispered. “Take it easy.”

“Not sweatin’ it,” Big Tone said. He raised the pistol and Doddridge saw its outline against the pale glow that penetrated the curtains over the living room window. There was a knock on the door, and in the silence that ensued, Doddridge heard the cop’s feet scrape against the stoop outside. After a lengthy pause, there was another knock, this time louder.

“Estelle! It’s Chief Grady!” a voice called out.

“Dude’s got to know she’s home,” Shaliq whispered. “Car’s out there.”

“Quiet,” Doddridge said.

In the hallway, the little pasty man named Bruce whimpered. “I don’t want to go back,” he said, his voice a strangled hiss.

“You’re not going back. Now be fuckin’ quiet,” Doddridge said. You ain’t goin’ back, you pussy, because I’ll fuckin’ kill you myself.

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.

“Help me!” someone screamed from the living room. “Oh fuck, help me!”

Victor stepped into the living room, .45 held at the ready. He saw Estelle crouching on the sofa, her mouth opened in an endless, soundless scream, tears streaming down her face. A blood trail was plainly visible on the dun-colored carpet, leading toward the short hallway that would take him to the bedrooms and single bathroom. Two men wrestled there. One was a pale man with lank hair dressed in a prison uniform. He was the one screaming, and his eyes rolled in terror and pain. The man on top of him had a bloody shirt, courtesy of two bullet holes in his chest. For a brief instant, Victor was delighted—he’d actually managed to hit the shooter before while firing through the wall of the house.

Thank God for full metal jacket, he thought.

The man on top was a well-muscled Hispanic man with graying hair and a multitude of tattoos, both professional and of the prison variety. As Victor watched, the man lowered his face toward the other man and ripped away half his cheek. The smaller white man screeched, a truly horrifying sound in such close quarters. Blood flowed across his face as flesh parted.

“Hey, get off him!” Victor shouted, horrified. He darted forward and kicked the Latin man in the shoulder, then stepped back and sighted down on him.

The Latin man looked up, still chewing the fresh flesh in his mouth. His eyes were open, but curiously vacant. He noisily chewed the human meat in his mouth while staring at Victor almost stupidly. Then he swallowed the mouthful of flesh and bent back over the screaming man to take another bite.

“Hey!” Victor shouted. “Hey!”

Why am I shouting at a zombie? he asked himself.

Deciding that was a waste of energy, Victor shot the Latin zombie and watched as the bullet plowed right into his left shoulder, parting skin and muscle and bone as the heavy 230 grain projectile transited through the ghoul’s body and exited somewhere around its lower back. The zombie didn’t even pay attention to the wound, even as it sagged to the side somewhat as the destroyed structures in its shoulder collapsed under its weight. It ignored that as well, and just took another chunk out of the shrieking man beneath it.

Victor stepped forward and pressed the barrel of his pistol virtually against the moving corpse’s head and pulled the trigger. He barely heard the report, thanks to the ringing in his ears from all the previous shooting, but he definitely saw the result. The zombie collapsed as the bullet blasted through its skull and ripped away half of its lower jaw before it exited and disappeared into the hallway baseboard. The man trapped beneath the now motionless corpse writhed and screeched in agony, blood pouring from the rents in his face.

“Where are the others!” Victor shouted, keeping his weapon trained on both the figures on the floor before him. The man with the torn up face didn’t answer, just kept screaming. Victor repeated the question, but got nothing out of him. He looked toward Estelle, still sitting on her plastic-wrapped couch, her eyes wide with fear.

“Estelle! Where are the others?” he shouted.

With a trembling hand, Estelle pointed to the rear of the room, past the dining table. Victor looked, and saw the open sliding glass door.

Damn.

“Chief! Chief Grady!”

When he heard Suzy’s cries, Victor halfway turned toward the kitchen. His niece was backing into the house, her pistol held before her. Victor looked beyond her, and looming in the darkness of the carport was Grady. The lower half of his face was virtually annihilated by the shotgun blasts he’d taken; it was only a mass of fleshy ribbons that still leaked blood. But his eyes were intact, and they remained open and unblinking as they fixed on Suzy, tracking her every move. Grady’s eyes looked exactly like those of the zombie at his feet right before Victor had turned off its lights forever.

“Shoot him!” Victor shouted.

Suzy didn’t wait. She fired four shots in rapid succession, and each bullet found its mark, slapping into Grady’s vest and doing absolutely nothing to slow the newly-risen zombie’s advance. Estelle mewled from her couch, and the guy trapped beneath the zombie screamed again. Victor shouted for Suzy to shoot the zombie in the head, but his words were lost in the din.

A flash of light exploded in the carport, and the top of the Grady zombie’s head erupted toward the ceiling. A fountain of brackish blood poured out of the ragged hole in the ghoul’s crown, and the grotesquerie collapsed to the linoleum floor with a crash. Suzy jumped back with a shout, lowering her Glock to keep it aligned on the target as Mike Hailey stepped up to the kitchen doorway, eyes wide. He held his own pistol in both hands, and he stared down at the body of his chief with wide eyes.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

The ride up to the Hollywood Bowl was one big blur to Reese as he sat in the swaying command post RV, watching lights of Los Angeles roll past as the National Guard column roared through the city streets. As the Cedar-Sinai medical complex fell behind, he felt a keen sense of despair. He knew there were people still in the hospital, live people, people who needed protection until they could be safely evacuated. But Reese’s contingent of police officers were run out, and the Guard couldn’t stay. Without the Guard, the LAPD was just another menu item. Reese told himself he was doing this to save his guys, and to maybe give those poor souls sitting up in the lower reaches of the Hollywood Hills some hope in a night full of desperation. But that was, he decided, a fucking lie.

We’re leaving because we’re fucking scared, and don’t want to die.

It burned deep inside him to admit that to himself, but at the same time, he was getting acclimated to the gloom. He looked at the officers sitting in the RV with him. Most were senior in grade, though there were a few who were still rookies. All of them had seen and done more over the past few days than they’d likely done over their entire careers. They all had the same shell-shocked, one thousand yard stare. They’d had enough, and all they wanted was to get home, have a shower, a hot meal, and lie in their own beds. But that wasn’t going to happen. A lot of these guys wouldn’t be getting home for weeks, if ever.

One person did meet his eyes. First Sergeant Plosser sat right behind Reese on a bench seat next to two LAPD officers. His bulky gear made him seem much bigger than the cops, even though they were wearing full tactical armor. Plosser’s haunted eyes seemed to gleam in the tepid light emanating from the few overhead dome lamps that were switched on.

“You having an attack of the guilts, Reese?” he asked.

“What?”

“I asked, are you feeling guilty about leaving the hospital?”

Reese shrugged and looked back out the windshield. He sat up front next to an old patrolman who drove the big RV. Ahead of them, a line of National Guard Humvees and a couple of five-ton trucks rolled up North La Cienega Boulevard. The street was lined with businesses, hotels, restaurants, but it was surrounded by residential streets. On occasion, a human figure would emerge from one of the buildings lining La Cienega. If they hurried toward the convoy with a stiff gait, they were either shot or just run over. If they were more animated, like frightened civilians, they were ignored. That darkened Reese’s depression, but only nominally. He felt himself evolving somehow, as if he was moving away from caring what happened to the people he was charged to protect.

“We’re doing what we have to do, Plosser,” Reese said.

“Keep telling yourself that. It’s the truth.”

“How many troops does the Guard have here?” Reese asked.

“Now? I don’t know. We have about fifteen thousand in the Army component. Toss in Air Force and Navy and Corps, maybe a total standing force of twenty-five thousand. Not including whatever federal troops get assigned to our mission area. But remember, California’s a big place. LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego—everybody gets their piece of the Guard pie,” Plosser said.

“So you don’t really have enough troops to contain this,” Reese said.

Plosser snorted. “Hell, no. I don’t think the entire Department of Defense has enough troops to contain this.”

“Gee, you’re really making us all feel a lot better about things,” one of the cops said.

Plosser snorted again. “I’m not here to make you boys feel better about anything. You all know what’s going down. LA is getting the shit kicked out of it, and the rest of the state’s not doing much better.”

“You have any recommendations, First Sergeant?” Reese asked. “As in, recommendations that actually make sense?”

Plosser thought about it. “We get up to the Bowl, we get ourselves organized, and we maintain lines of communication and lines of supply with the airhead up at Griffith. The Bowl isn’t a terrible place to try and defend under normal circumstances, but given the fact our enemy isn’t put off by fear, firepower, pain, or negotiation, it’s going to be tough as hell. We’ll be sandwiched between Los Angeles proper to the south and the Valley to the north. It’s going to be a major bag of dicks, but if that’s where we’re being sent, then that’s where we go. We can’t run, and we can’t give up. If we can’t save the civilians up there, then we need to figure out how we’re going to be able to save ourselves.”

“You have any recommendations on how we do that?” asked Detective Marsh.

Plosser nodded out the windshield. “Those five-tons will do just fine. Once they get moving, we can bash through pretty much anything. They’re tough, durable, and can keep going through all sorts of shit. Not the most comfortable ride available, but they’ll get us to wherever we decide we need to go.”

“And where might that be?” Reese asked.

“Don’t know. The Mojave, maybe. It’ll take a while for these things to push out that way. And maybe they won’t—lots of people to feed on here in the LA basin. They might be occupied for the next several weeks.”

“We were thinking about trying to get one of the MRAPs the sheriff’s department has,” Marsh said.

“Great wheels if you can get ‘em, but I’m pretty sure whoever runs them right now isn’t exactly going to hand them over,” Plosser said.

“We’ll see about that,” the cop driving the RV said.

Plosser snorted again. “Yeah? You going to shoot sheriffs so you can steal their vehicles? Because that’s what it’ll probably come down to. You guys ready for that?”

Reese looked around the back of the RV. No one said anything. He slowly turned around and faced forward again, watching the city roll by. Guardsmen in the trucks opened up on a clump of zombies that was chasing a woman, but their aim was for shit. The woman went down, either because she tripped on something on the sidewalk or because she’s caught a round in one of her legs. The zombies mounded over her like a fetid tide.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Plosser mumbled.

###

As Plosser had said, the Hollywood Bowl itself wasn’t exactly in the best location. Surrounded by freeways and residential suburbs, it wasn’t terribly difficult to get to, though Reese saw that law enforcement and the meager Guard presence had worked hard to change that. There were rows of razor wire, sand bags, and gun emplacements at the entrance, all designed in a way to compress any zombie herds into narrow, confined areas where they could be serviced more efficiently. From the pile of corpses across the street, they had already been put to use. Just the same, the pile was much, much smaller than what Reese had seen over at Cedar-Sinai.

To the left was the lower parking lot area, and Reese could see several LAPD and LASD vehicles there, including mobile command posts like the one he sat in. He also saw several buses with pop-outs emblazoned with the FEMA logo. Cement barriers had been erected around the lots, and cops and soldiers were visible above them. Reese figured they were standing on the metal guard rails that surrounded the parking area. A team of National Guardsmen were setting up coils of razor wire.

“We’re going to have to wire up the entire perimeter,” Plosser muttered as the convoy rolled to a stop on Highland Avenue, just outside the fortified entrance.

“There’s a ten to twelve foot wall surrounding the entire rear of the Bowl,” Reese said. “A sound barrier. Only this part here facing the street is open.”

“It’s a deterrent, but not a fortification,” Plosser said with a grunt. “We’ll have to beef it up.”

“Sounds good,” Reese said.

Outside, a figure approached the idling RV. It was Bates, who had ridden up at the front of the column in one of the Guard Humvees. He stopped outside of Reese’s window.

“Area’s pretty secure,” Bates said once Reese had rolled down the window. “According to Morton, there hasn’t been a shitload of activity. Seeing as how the piles of dead stenches aren’t much more than three deep, I guess he’s telling the truth.”

“Is he taking command up here?” Reese asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I was told.” Bates turned his back to the RV and took a long look around, keeping the M4 he carried in a low ready state. He wore a tactical helmet with the visor raised. Traffic still moved leadenly along the Hollywood Freeway overpasses that were only a hundred or so feet away. A long line of Army Black Hawk helicopters buzzed past, heading toward the San Fernando Valley.

“Plosser, is Morton a decent commanding officer?” Reese asked.

“Yeah. He spent fifteen years active duty. He’s a cavalry officer. Leading a battalion of infantry must be a downer for him, though,” Plosser responded.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Plosser waved the comment aside. “Don’t worry about it. Yeah, Morton can get shit done. He’s a hard charger, but he’s not stupid.”

Reese looked down at Bates. “Bates, you want to step inside?”

“I’m good.”

“All right, suit yourself. What’s the plan?”

Bates pointed up the line of waiting vehicles. “They’re opening up the gates they set up to let us in. FEMA’s already set up in the lower parking lot. We’re going to be moved up the Bowl Road to Lot A. After that, not sure.”

“Who’s the operational leader?”

“Law enforcement side?” Bates shrugged. “Probably someone with the LASD.”

Ahead, vehicle engines revved as the column slowly began to move past the fortified entrance. Civilian traffic had been restricted the lane farthest from the Bowl, and Reese regarded the idling cars and trucks full of frightened civilians.

“Bates, hop in,” Reese said.

Bates waved him away. “You go ahead, I’m going to scout around and see if anyone from Hollywood’s here. I’ll meet you in the CP later.” With that, the tall patrol sergeant slapped the side of the RV and walked away, heading toward the rear of the column.

Crazy bastard, Reese thought, running a hand over his head. His hair felt lank and greasy, and he could smell the stink emanating from his armpits. He wondered if the smell would keep the zombies at bay when the bullets ran out.

###

Before they were allowed into the secure area around the Bowl, the LAPD and Guardsmen escorting them had to pass through several checkpoints. Each man and woman was thoroughly searched for bites, and had to provide detailed answers regarding any injuries that were discovered. They then had to scrub themselves with water and bleach, a painstaking process that was not only smelly, but uncomfortable. The bleach burned Reese’s skin and stuck in his nostrils, searing the back of his throat. At least he had found an antidote to his body odor.

Someone had brought fresh tactical uniforms, and Reese found one that almost fit, though he had to roll up the sleeves and work on making sure the trousers remained bloused in his boots. He reclaimed his detective ID and body armor, though the Guardsmen running the site weren’t eager to hand him back the M4 he had liberated from the hospital. One of Morton’s officers passed the word that the colonel himself had authorized the temporary transfer of the weapons, thought the soldiers manning the checkpoints were dismayed to find out that several forms hadn’t been provided making the transaction legal. Reese and the rest of the cops found the abject adherence to process somewhat humorous. It seemed that red tape wasn’t something cops had to cut through all the time, either.

When they were considered decontaminated, they were allowed into the fortified areas around the Bowl. There was another decon area set up, reserved for civilian refugees, and the line leading into it was long and seemed to hardly move at all. Officials from FEMA oversaw this one, and they were just as meticulous as the Guard had been. The problem was the civilians weren’t necessarily interested in waiting, and there always seemed to be some commotion going on. Reese was watching the FEMA and the few Los Angeles sheriffs on site try to manage the situation when Morton appeared at his side, towering over him in his battle gear.

“Detective, maybe your guys can help out with the civilians,” the big lieutenant colonel said. “You guys should know a thing or two about crowd control, right?”

“I was kind of hoping we might be able to get some food and rest before we got back to it,” Reese said, and he heard the simpering tone behind his words. Fuck, I sound like some spoiled brat whining after he’s been told to go to bed.

Morton snorted. “Yeah, that’d be nice. But I’m told we have about five thousand inside already, and we have at least that many outside waiting to get in. So no one takes a break.”

“Fantastic,” Reese said.

“You know what the capacity is in this place?” Morton asked.

“About eighteen thousand in the seats. How many troops are here?”

“A full battalion. Five hundred and twenty-seven, with another two companies inbound. The sheriff in charge told me he has eighty or so guys working for him, and about another forty to fifty LAPD have shown up. There’s a captain here named Fontenoy. You know him?”

“Her. She’s a second stick over at Wilshire Station. You know where she is? I should check in with her.” Aside from seeing her name on department org charts and what he’d heard from some fellow cops, Reese didn’t know much about Fontenoy at all.

“She’ll be up in Lot A,” Morton said. “I haven’t introduced myself to her just yet. What do you know about her?”

Reese shrugged. “Heard the cops out of Wilshire think she’s was a dimwit, and an incubating political stooge who has her nose fairly far up the backside of the mayor’s office. I guess she’s one of those diversity types, always going on about inclusion, etcetera.”

“Yeah, that should come in handy,” Morton said. “Listen, I guess she’s going to give you your final taskings, but I really need your guys out on the street helping out with the civilians. You’re the ranking guy from your station, right?”

“I guess.”

“Can you put your men to work, then come with me to meet this captain? We’ll want to check in with the sheriff’s guys, too.”

“What’s the point? What if Fontenoy just pulls them off?”

Morton smiled stiffly. “She won’t. Trust me.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

Corbett climbed out of his big Super Duty pickup, followed by Gary Norton and Danielle Kennedy. He’d been meeting with them at Norton’s residence to go over what the coming days would bring, and had just been briefing Danielle on the role he had fashioned for her when Walt Lennon informed him that there had been a shooting, and that convicts were apparently on the loose somewhere in town. He’d brought this information to Corbett in a bid to keep him locked down, but when Corbett found out that Chief Grady was one of the victims, there was no way Walt was going to be able to keep him hemmed up inside his house.

“Not safe,” Lennon kept repeating. “Listen to what I’m saying: escaped convicts who are armed. They are at large, which means no one knows where they are. Dead policemen. This is not something you should be exposing yourself to.”

“Walt, sometimes leadership requires risk. You might have learned that if you’d stayed awake during your officer training classes,” Corbett had said, and that was that. No matter how hard Walter Lennon pushed in his role as chief protector, Barry Corbett was still the boss. He got what he wanted, even if it meant Lennon or one of his men would have to take a bullet over it.

And that meant yet another Expedition rolled onto the scene, this one carrying six armed retired Marines who had seen battle in Iraq and Afghanistan and knew their way around killing people who they deemed threatening. Corbett knew he was perfectly safe in their presence, and that Norton and Dani would be, as well. By the time they arrived at the small house on the edge of town, there were three cops there and a gaggle of onlookers, many who stared at Corbett with a mixture of relief and apprehension when he arrived with his entourage.

“Victor, what are you doing here?” Corbett asked, when he saw his friend talking with two of Single Tree’s finest. He recognized Santoro, the beefy cop Victor had told him was a grade A pecker. It made sense—Santoro was a relative of Hector Aguilar, and peckerdom ran strong in that family like the Dark Side of the Force ran through the Sith.

“Barry? What are you doing here?” Victor looked past him at Walter Lennon, who sighed and spread his hands.

“My question exactly,” Lennon said, then turned away from both men as he kept eyes out, like any good Marine would do. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Danielle was doing the same, head on a swivel, scoping out the houses that faced the street, their facades illuminated in strobing blue and red emergency lights. Norton stood beside her, hands in his pockets, looking uncomfortable and out of place.

“I heard we might have lost the chief, and I wanted to get the information first hand,” Corbett said, stepping closer to Victor and Santoro. For all the stories that he’d heard, Santoro seemed suddenly meek. He looked up at Corbett, and Corbett looked back. For certain, he could see a little bit of the Aguilar bloodline in the chunky cop’s face. Olive complexion, thick-framed glasses, a busy dark mustache that sat above his lower lip like a caterpillar on a campout.

“Wilbur, is it?” Corbett asked.

Santoro nodded. “Yes, sir. I’m Officer Santoro,” he said, and a little bit of prideful arrogance crept into his voice.

“You next in line?”

Santoro seemed caught off guard. “Sorry?”

“Grady’s dead, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So are you next in line? Who leads the department now?”

Santoro shuffled his feet. “I’m the senior officer on the force right now, so yeah, I’m technically in command.”

“Good to know.” Corbett turned to Victor. “Vic, tell me what happened.”

Santoro held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Mister Corbett, but—”

“Santoro, how many prisoners are dead in Estelle’s house?” Corbett asked.

“Two, but one has been taken into custody.”

“And how many more are on the run?”

“That would be two, Barry,” Victor answered. “As best as we can figure. Estelle confirmed she saw five men, and we can account for three.” He turned back to Santoro. “By the way, I’ll need my cuffs back.”

“Santoro, how many officers are on duty at the moment?” Corbett asked.

“All of them,” Santoro answered. “Three of us are here, though one was involved in the incident. The rest are heading this way to search for the convicts.”

“We don’t know if they’re together, Barry,” Victor said. “They might have split up.”

“Are reservation police assisting?”

Santoro didn’t seem to like the question. “I’m not sure we’re going to need—”

“We are, in that I arrested one of the convicts and Tribal Officer Kuruk engaged the others, along with myself and Chief Grady,” Victor said, and his voice was stone cold. “Officer Santoro here seems to think that Single Tree’s small department can handle this situation without further assistance from us, but I have five officers already looking in the desert.” Victor nodded down the street, and Corbett looked in the indicated direction. He saw flashlight beams sweeping the scrub.

“Good,” Corbett said. “Walt, call in some of the guys. They should take direction from”—he looked back at Santoro for a long moment, then at Victor—“Tribal Police Chief Kuruk. Have them bring the dogs.”

“That means we’ll have to pull bodies off the construction details,” Lennon said. “The guys who are off will need a bit to get spooled up before they can step off. And it’ll take some time to get the dogs down here.”

“Understood,” Corbett said. “Do what you can, when you can.”

“Mister Corbett, this is a police matter, and I think I’ll be making the decisions,” Santoro said, though without a great amount of confidence in his voice.

“I think you’ll have some degree of input, Officer Santoro, but no one’s made you chief of police just yet. Vic, do you have enough time to walk me through the Cliff’s Notes version of what happened?”

“Sure. But important matters first—you don’t happen to have any of your revered flasks on hand, do you?”

Corbett started to respond with a needling remark about Indians and firewater, but Victor did look like hell. His hands were trembling, and his face had that cast to it which was a combination of numb shell-shock and nervous jitters. Corbett figured anything that might have knocked Victor’s carefully cultured stoic aura off balance was probably nothing but bad news.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a silver flask. He unscrewed the lid, and held it out to Victor. “It’s only Hennessey, nothing to get too excited about.”

Santoro looked on in distaste as Victor took the vessel without comment, took a long pull, then handed it back. Corbett recapped the flask and slipped it back inside his jacket. “More when you need it,” he said. He noticed for the first time the knuckles on Victor’s right hand were bloody, and he pointed them out. “Fisticuffs? At your age?”

“Grady turned into a zombie,” Victor blurted out.

“Damn, Vic, does liquor always work that quickly on you?” Norton asked, speaking for the first time since arriving.

Corbett looked past Victor at Estelle Garcia’s neat little house. In the flashing lights, he saw Mike Hailey and another officer standing by the open door that led into the house. Suzy Kuruk was there as well, panning the beam of her flashlight around the carport floor.

“Is he in the house?” he asked.

Victor nodded. “Yes.”

“Can you go back inside with me?”

“Yes.”

Santoro held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, no one’s going inside,” he said. “It’s a murder scene under active investigation. We have to collect forensic evidence—”

“Oh, Wilbur. Shut the hell up,” Corbett said before he started walking up the short driveway.

###

The scene inside the little house was gruesome, but Corbett had seen much, much worse during his time in Vietnam. He was nevertheless saddened to see Chief Grady’s cooling corpse spread out across the kitchen floor, his face and skull severely disfigured from both a convict’s shotgun blast and a shot from one of his own officer’s pistol. There was not a great deal of blood, which to Corbett meant that the man had already been dead when the fatal shot had been delivered.

“Oh, wow.” Gary Norton’s voice was strangled, and when Corbett turned to him, he saw the producer’s tanned, handsome face was wrinkled in disgust and horror. “I mean ... Jesus.”

“You’ve never seen anyone killed before, Gary?” Corbett asked.

“Not like this. Not someone I actually knew.”

Corbett nodded. He noticed Danielle was hanging back in the carport, standing next to Suzy Kuruk. Danielle looked at the dead man sprawled across the bright linoleum tile floor, and there was a great sadness in her eyes. Corbett didn’t like that. He looked at the smaller woman beside her. Suzy Kuruk looked much the same way Danielle did, but she’d had the presence of mind to secure Grady’s pistol. She held it in her left hand, already ensconced in a plastic bag that Corbett surmised was for preserving evidence.

Inside the kitchen, an older cop Corbett didn’t know was photographing the body. Mike Hailey stood in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the living room, his eyes blank and emotionless. To Corbett, it looked like the boy was in shock. And he had every right to be—not only had he seen two zombies up close in just a few days, one of them had been his boss, and he’d had to put him down.

“Okay, we’re coming in,” Corbett said, looking at the older cop with the digital camera.

“Oh, gosh, you probably shouldn’t do that,” he said. His voice was high and reedy, and his big nose was covered with a spider web of veins that told Corbett the guy was a veteran boozer. He didn’t recognize him, though he appeared to be around Victor’s age.

“Who are you?” Corbett asked.

“John Lasher,” the man said. “Officer John Lasher.”

“Officer Lasher, I’m Barry Corbett. Are you from Single Tree, perhaps?”

“Oh no, no. Not at all. I’m from Ridgecrest. I came up here a couple of years ago to get away from all that action down south.”

“There’s action in Ridgecrest?” Norton asked absently, still staring at Grady’s body.

“Dani, take Norton outside, would you?” Corbett said.

Norton looked up and shook his head, visibly steeling himself. “No. No, I’m good.”

“Mister Corbett, I’ve heard of you,” Lasher said. He reached down and hitched up his pants, which were sagging low due to his rather large belly. “Are you really a billionaire?”

“Yeah. Anyway, you done with your pictures?”

“Well ...” Lasher turned and looked back at Hailey, who finally looked away from the body of his dead boss.

“You guys can come in,” Hailey said. “Just be careful not to disturb any of ... any of the evidence.”

“In other words, don’t step in any gore,” Victor clarified. “Like Officer Lasher, there.” He pointed at a bloody scuff mark that bore a boot tread, and Lasher looked down in shock.

“Oh, my,” he said, mortified to see what he had done.

Corbett pushed into the kitchen, stepping around Grady’s corpse. He paused for a moment to inspect it, then pushed on into the living room. Victor followed, then Danielle, who took great care not to step on anything that might be important. Norton brought up the rear. Suzy Kuruk remained in the carport.

Estelle had been carted off already along with the prisoner Victor had managed to arrest. Inside, two more bodies lay in a tangled heap. On top was a Latino man with thick, tattoo-covered arms. He had been shot several times in the torso, and once in the head. Beneath him was a smaller white man, whose face had been savaged. It was obvious the Latino had turned into a stench and attacked him. The smaller man had been shot as well, and Corbett noticed all the shell casings in the room were from a .45. The cops all carried nine-millimeters, even Suzy out in the carport. Only Victor was a .45 man, like Corbett himself.

“I shot them both,” Victor said quietly.

“Had the second one turned?” Corbett asked. He turned and looked at Victor. “The one on the bottom?”

“Of course,” Victor said, but something flickered in his eyes. Corbett understood. The smaller man hadn’t turned yet, but he would. Victor and his beloved Sig P220 had taken care of that, then and there.

“Looks like someone went out the back,” Danielle said, pointing to the open sliding glass door.

“Oh, yes,” Lasher said helpfully. “That’s where we think the other convicts escaped from. We checked the rest of the house very carefully, there’s no one else in here.” He paused, and cleared his throat. “Um, may I start documenting this scene, please?” He held up his camera.

“Sure. Sure,” Corbett said. “Guys, let’s step outside. Hailey, can you come with us?”

“Yeah, all right,” Hailey said. His voice was a flat monotone.

Corbett led the entourage through the sliding glass door. Lennon and two of his men were already out there waiting. They wore tactical helmets now with AN/PVS-14 night vision monocles covering their right eyes. They scanned the desert, and each man held a pistol in his right hand.

“See anything, Walt?” Corbett asked.

“Negative. We’re secure for the time being. I have Tamblyn and McGregor out front. McGregor has the REPR locked and loaded.” Lennon pronounced the acronym for Rapid Engagement Precision Rifle as “reaper”, and the designation was apt. Corbett was frankly very fond of the weapon, which fired 7.62-millimeter man-killers out to ranges of over five hundred yards.

“I hope he’s not flashing that thing around in front of the police,” Corbett said.

“No, sir. He is not. He’s mounted up in the Expedition.” As he spoke, Lennon kept turning his head, panning the monocle across the dark desert.

“Did you want to talk to me about something, sir?” Hailey asked.

“I did. Your boss was long gone when you shot him, Hailey. In fact, you didn’t even shoot him—you shot a bag of bones that just happens to look like him. Do you understand what I mean?”

Hailey nodded in the darkness, his face only slightly illuminated by the light spilling out of the sliding glass door behind him. “Yes, sir. I know all that.”

“Well, you’re not acting like you know it, so you might want to take a moment and get yourself squared away,” Corbett said, not unkindly. “The rest of the guys on your force, are they any good? I understand Santoro and ... who’s the other guy, Vic?”

“Whitter,” Victor said immediately. “Does anyone mind if I smoke?”

“So long as you don’t light yourself on fire,” Norton said.

“I’m not that drunk. Yet.” Victor reached inside his jacket and pulled out his cigarette case.

“Anyway, Hailey,” Corbett continued. “Santoro and Whitter, I know they’re reputed to be assholes. My question is, what about the others?”

Hailey shrugged. “They seem okay to me. We’ve only got a force of eight sworn officers, and Lasher’s a part timer, more of a hobby cop. Everyone can do their job, but murders and escaped convicts and stuff, that’s more for the Highway Patrol than us local yokels.”

“Mike, you okay?” Danielle asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Hailey responded dully.

“Hailey, it’s a shit job, but you’ve got to do it now,” Corbett said. “I’ll lean in and give you guys as much support as I can—we already have guys getting ready to come in and help with the search. And believe me, they’re better than the California Highway Patrol any day.”

“Hell yes,” Lennon said. He reached up with his left hand suddenly and pressed it against his left ear.

“Something over the radio?” Corbett asked. All of his men were wired up with communications gear. Lennon held up a finger and walked away a few steps. Corbett grunted and turned to Victor. “Okay, Vic. Give me your notes.”

“Heard about a shooting on 395, rolled up there with Suzy, we found a corrections bus with three dead prison guards in it. Grady arrived about two minutes after we did. We surmised that the prisoners had escaped, they were armed and dangerous, and that the potential for them heading for Single Tree was high. Hailey met us here on Substation Road, and Grady sent him off to Muir to check things there. We came here to Estelle’s, and guess what, bad guys. Boom, boom, zombies, boom boom.” Victor delivered all of that in a languid, emotionless monotone.

“Who shot Grady? The first time,” Corbett asked, looking at Hailey.

“Someone with a shotgun, which we haven’t found,” Hailey said. “So the guy who has it must have escaped.”

“The Latino had a pistol, which we recovered,” Victor said. “As far as we know, there are two men at large, and they have a shotgun and possibly two pistols between them.”

Lennon stepped back to the group. “Mister Corbett. The mayor is here, and he’s looking for you.”

###

With nothing else to do aside from watch television and watch Meredith slowly retreat into herself like a frightened sheep attempting to hide from a hungry wolf, Jock Sinclair headed to a pub—Or “bar”, as they call them in this country, he reminded himself—down the street from the roach coach motel he was staying in. The bar was called simply Bob’s Place, and it was virtually as low-brow as the name promised. Clearly, “Bob” was into Formica-topped tables, metal chairs, and weary tile. A substandard wooden bar dominated the far wall, and its lacquered veneer was worn in so many places that it resembled a patchwork quilt.

He bellied up to the bar and ordered himself a beer—a cold one, as they had only chilled draft available. As he sipped it, he looked around at the rest of the patrons. It was not exactly a full house, but it wasn’t empty, either. He spotted several travelers like himself easily enough, for they stood out amidst the jean-and-flannel shirt crowd of locals. Some were white, some Asian, and a handful were black, but most of the patrons seemed to be of Mexican extraction. Sinclair didn’t particularly like Mexicans, and occasionally referred to them as wetbacks, so long as he wasn’t on camera or wearing a hot microphone. He knew that he had to be careful in America, for they took their appellations very seriously. He couldn’t get away with calling a Jew a kike here, whereas in Europe it was practically expected. In many ways, America was so liberal it was almost silly, but they countered that by true stupidity from the right, such as continuing to allow citizens to own firearms. The asymmetry of it was almost astounding, when he thought about it. It was like the country was half pearl, half dung.

“Excuse me, are you Jock Sinclair?” asked a Mexican man with thick glasses and a big, bushy mustache.

“I am,” Sinclair said, even though he wasn’t exactly in the mood for talking. But he still received a little ego recharge at being recognized, especially in such a basic establishment as Bob’s Place.

“I watch you on the television, you’re quite good,” the man said.

“I thank you for that. And you are?”

“Hector Aguilar,” the man said, holding out his right hand. Sinclair shook it and favored the man with a smile.

“Please to meet you, Mister Aguilar,” he said with as much bonhomie as he could muster.

“The same here. So how did you manage to find yourself here in Single Tree?”

“Car troubles, of course,” Sinclair said. “My wife has a foreign import, and we can’t find anyone in town who can attend to it. Unless you happen to know someone who knows their way around a Maserati?”

“Unfortunately not,” Aguilar said. “Hey, aren’t you friendly with Barry Corbett?”

“I don’t know if ‘friendly’ is the term I would use,” Sinclair said before remembering that Corbett was a local. “Why, are you?”

Aguilar snorted and shook his head. “Quite the opposite.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Sinclair asked as innocently as he could. He looked around the bar while waiting for an answer.

“He’s going to destroy this town financially,” Aguilar said in a bitter tone. “Did you happen to notice all the construction that’s going on around town? He has dreams of turning Single Tree into some kind of fortress in response to the emergency that’s going on, as opposed to allowing the authorities to handle it. He even intends to barricade the town from the highway, and bar people from passing through. Can you imagine the arrogance? Separating a state highway, the only road through this area that actually goes anywhere?”

Sinclair was surprised by that. “Seriously? That’s what’s going on here?” Aguilar nodded, and Sinclair could see the man was actually angry. “Well, what do your politicians think of that?”

“I’m on the town council, but the mayor is leaning Corbett’s way. He’s just doing it for votes, and probably because Corbett is paying him off under the table. I’m the only one who’s against the insanity. Even the police chief is open to it.” Aguilar shook his head and took a pull off his mixed drink. “I can’t understand it. It’s going to destroy the town. The state will penalize us, the tourism will dry up, no shipments will be able to come in—we’ll all be broke by this time next year, and Corbett will probably just manage to skip away without even a slap on the wrist.”

“He is that kind of man, able to buy his way in and out of everything without regard for law or who might get hurt,” Sinclair said, allowing himself the opportunity to fan the flames of discord. “I interviewed him at length. He’s a climate change denier, and worse, his organization actually contributes to it. He might actually be responsible for what’s happening now, with the sickness that’s going on.”

Aguilar raised his brows. “Why, yes, that could be climate related, couldn’t it? Some sort of stress disorder, making people go crazy?”

“More likely some virus that was dug up and exposed to the open air,” Sinclair said. “You know that in the permafrost, there are all sorts of nasty little buggers that have been suspended in the ice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Corbett or one of his cronies managed to unearth something particularly nasty.” He swigged some of his wretched, cold beer. “And of course, people like him would rush to cover it up—no warnings, no confessions, not a single thought for anything other than their fat bank accounts.” The fact the Sinclair’s bank was on the fat side itself had nothing to do with the conversation, so of course he didn’t bring it up.

“You should report on this,” Aguilar said, his eyes shining the bar’s pale light. “It could be a great story, how one of America’s richest men totally destroys a helpless small town.”

“Well. We’ll have to see about that,” Sinclair said, looking down at his beer. “My wife and I will hopefully be catching a ride to Reno tomorrow, so I’ll be leaving.” He almost said “I hope to be leaving”, but managed to catch himself before letting the words slip out. No sense in offending the one soul in this Godforsaken little town that actually knew who he was.

Aguilar seemed disappointed. “Oh. That’s a shame. But if things don’t work out and you get caught here, let me know. I run the pharmacy up the street.” He pointed toward the wall behind the bar, indicating someplace Sinclair couldn’t see. “Unlike Corbett, I’m a small business owner who works hard every day.”

“Good man. Good man,” Sinclair said. “So tell me more, what is it that Corbett plans on doing, exactly?”

Aguilar grinned. “You’ll love this.” And he began to talk.

And Sinclair listened with rapt attention.

###

Max Booker’s first words to Corbett were, “What are you doing here?”

Corbett could see that his presence at the crime scene was pissing off Booker something fierce. Just the same, the mayor’s tone and general attitude got Corbett’s back up immediately. “I came as soon as I heard, Max. I figured you would have, as well. But it seems I beat you. Why is that, exactly?”

Booker glared at him in the strobing emergency lights. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he snapped.

Corbett stepped up and got right into Booker’s face. The mayor was a good twenty-plus years younger, and still looked to be in good enough shape to kick his ass, but Corbett was done playing around. All the talking, the convincing, the facts, the figures, the planning—he was sick of it. It was time to start making things happen, and Booker couldn’t get comfortable with it.

“Let me spell it out for you, Max. We start shutting down the town. Tonight, my men begin deploying razor wire all over the perimeter. We will fortify this town and make it as impregnable as we can. Your chief of police is dead. There are three corrections officers lying out in the desert, killed by escaped convicts, at least two of whom are loose in your town. Your emergency backup police chief, Wilbur Santoro, is about as bright as a bag of bricks and about as competent at the job of leading a police department as an old pair of underwear is at holding back a squirt of piss. I want you to give his job to Victor Kuruk, who by the way, apparently killed one convict, captured another, and shot two zombies. One of which happened to be Chief Grady.”

Booker’s eyes widened at that. “My God ... how did—”

“I told you, we’re all infected,” Corbett said. “The government is covering that up, but it’s the only answer for the spread. Yes, zombie bites are fatal, and the spit or whatever they carry is loaded with the virus that reanimates the dead. But those of us who die, be it from natural or unnatural causes, also reanimate. Old Wally was the test case, and Grady was the control. Both rose, and the only way to stop them was by shooting them in the head.”

“How did Grady die?” Booker asked.

“Looks like one of the convicts popped him with a shotgun. That man is still at large. I see that Estelle is gone, hopefully one of the locals have her? We’ll need her to provide a description.”

“Yes, she’s at the police station now,” Booker said. “Listen, about Victor, I can’t—”

“God damn it, Max, you can do anything you want. Victor has the gumption and skill set, and he has more people to bring into the mix. At the same time, you can appoint Santoro as the new chief, but you’d damn well better make sure he doesn’t get in my way.” Booker started to speak, but Corbett kept on going. “In about twenty minutes or so, more of my people will be here. These are ass-kickers and name-takers. They’ll be bring some dogs. We’re going to start hunting down the sad sack piece of shit who shot Grady. I want you to tell your cops to stop touching their junk here, because what happened, happened. We know who did what, so we need everyone in a uniform out policing the town, because we have to find these fuckers before they hurt more people.”

“So what are you telling me to do, Barry?” Booker was calming down now, no longer worried how it looked that he was late to the party. He was starting to think ahead. Like any politician, he was looking for the upside, and he could see that going toe to toe with Corbett wasn’t in his best interest.

“I’m telling you to give Victor temporary control of the Single Tree PD. He can direct them better than you or me. You’ve got to explain to Santoro that Victor’s not just some former Hollywood actor, that he’s a trained law enforcement officer, and he has the skills and personnel to make this run much more smoothly. And then I expect you to shut down Aguilar and anyone else who wants to get into a pissing contest about what’s going to happen as far as the town goes.”

“I was actually working on getting a meeting together for tonight, at nine o’clock,” Booker said. “Hector already refused to participate. He tried to get a hold of someone in Inyo to come down and reel you in, but there’s no one available. The CHP has enough problems up in Bishop, so you don’t have to worry about anything.”

Corbett waved that away. “Fuck the meeting, we’ll do it tomorrow. But our plans continue, regardless. By the end of this week, we’ll have the first layer of defenses up, and then we’ll start closing off the town. And after the meeting, once we know who’s up for it, we’ll start weapons training. I don’t want to hear any more shit about how it’s going to mess up our pristine lifestyle, we already have trigger-happy prisoners shooting up the place and flesh-eating zombies popping up. So are we clear on all of this, Max?”

“Yes,” Booker said, and his face looked pale and drawn in the flashing emergency lights. “We’re clear on it, Barry. On all of it.”

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

When Reese found Captain III Fontenoy, he wasn’t thrilled with what he saw. Fontenoy was a small-boned woman with a haggard expression. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun, and there were bags under her eyes that were so large, Reese wondered if someone had punched her out. She moved like a skittish bird, dark, red-rimmed eyes wide open, as if she was in a state of perpetual surprise. When Reese introduced himself to her and informed her he had a contingent from the North Hollywood Station, she looked at him as if he was an alien invader from outer space.

“Hollywood’s gone,” she said. She sat behind a folding table, and several patrolmen loitered around her. Reese didn’t recognize any of them, but everyone looked shell shocked. He wondered if he looked the same.

He nodded at her statement. “Yes, Captain. That’s what I was told. We were on duty at Cedar-Sinai, and we relocated here after ... after ...” Reese struggled with the words, trying to figure out how to frame it.

Morton came to his rescue. “After the hospital couldn’t sustain operations and was closed by the administrative staff,” he said. “We took the LAPD presence up here with us, Captain.”

Fontenoy looked up at Morton. “And who are you?”

“Lieutenant Colonel James Morton, First Battalion, One Sixtieth Infantry Regiment, California Army National Guard. We’re here to support you and conduct security operations for the Hollywood Bowl.”

“Do you know what’s going on at the mayor’s office?” Fontenoy asked him. “The staff should be at the city emergency operations center. Are you in contact with them?”

“I was earlier in the day, ma’am, but they went dark about four hours ago,” Morton said. That surprised Reese. He hadn’t known that, but he wasn’t surprised. The cops hadn’t been able to raise the EOC from the command post RV, either.

“I need to get there,” Fontenoy said.

“Well, ma’am, I’m not sure we’re in a position to assist you in that,” Morton said. “That’s all the way cross-town from here, and my men and I have a lot of work to do on station. You don’t have any transportation?”

“Yes, we have squad cars, but nothing that can survive an attack from ... from those things,” Fontenoy said. “They got into Wilshire Station, somehow. We had to retreat up here carrying what we had on our backs.”

“Well, you’re lucky to have made it, ma’am. Anyway, I’ve kind of co-opted Detective Reese’s team to help out with crowd control down on the street. It makes sense that police would be a better fit for that job, while us grunts secure the perimeter and try to fortify this place a bit more.”

Fontenoy seemed to not care. “Can’t you take me to the EOC in one of your vehicles?”

“Ma’am, I don’t think the EOC is there any longer,” Morton said.

“For what it’s worth, Captain, we brought a CP with us, and we haven’t been able to raise the EOC, either,” Reese said. “If I were you, I’d forget about it. The mayor and his staff are cut off for the time being, and we need to stay focused on the here and now.”

“I need to get there,” Fontenoy insisted. “I have to see it.”

Reese looked at Morton, who shrugged. “We might be able to get an aviation unit to check in on them, do an aerial recce pass. What’s the address?”

“Five hundred East Temple Street,” Fontenoy said. “On the eastern side of the city.”

“All right. Captain Fontenoy, are you in charge here?” Morton asked, finally.

“What? No, I’m from Wilshire Station. The Sheriff’s Department is in charge here. You want to talk to Captain Bauer. He’s over there.” She pointed at an green LASD command post trailer that was hooked up to a semi-truck tractor.

“Great, thanks,” Morton said, and he started walking away. Reese looked down at Fontenoy.

“Orders, Captain?” he asked.

“Do whatever the fuck you want, Detective,” she said, lowering her head and staring at the plastic tabletop before her.

Reese looked up at the rest of the cops standing around her, and they stared back bleakly. Two of them were lieutenants, his equivalent in rank. He sighed and motioned them over. Only one came.

“Yeah, what do you need?” the man asked. The nameplate on his chest read TOOMEY.

“We need to get down on the street and show ourselves,” Reese said. “The people will want to see cops, not soldiers. Let’s get your element down there and form up with my guys. Help them keep the peace, and keep the crowd under control. We don’t need any more panic right this second.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Toomey turned back and waved to the officers standing around Fontenoy. “Come on, guys. Let’s get back to work. Rojas, you stay with the captain. Everyone check your ROVERs, make sure you have all your gear.” He looked back at Reese. “You coming down?”

“I’ll be down in a bit—I want to sync up with the sheriffs and the Guard.”

“What’s your call sign?”

“Detective Four King. Hook up with Detective Marsh, he’s Detective Six King.”

“Got it.”

Reese watched the Wilshire officers slowly gather themselves together and start walking down Hollywood Bowl Road toward the main gate. Reese turned away from them and looked down at Fontenoy one last time, but she didn’t look up from her close contemplation of the table before her. The lieutenant standing behind her shrugged. Reese returned the gesture and started walking toward the green command post.

“Reese! Reese, is that you?”

Reese turned and saw Renee hurrying toward him from the box office area, still lugging a rifle and wearing full tactical gear. Her glasses were perched at an odd angle on her nose, and her face was grimy. A cluster of cops stood at the closed box office, hovering around the collection of coffee urns that had been set up.

“Renee,” Reese said, disbelieving it was actually her.

She hurried up to him and threw her arms around him. Reese didn’t know what to do, so he just hugged her back gingerly, mindful of the rifle that was now pinned between them.

“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought all of you guys were dead.”

“Same here,” Reese said. He pushed back a bit and looked down at her. “Renee ... how did you get here?”

“Hollywood was overrun,” she told him. “Pallata told us to get the hell out, and hook up with the LASD up here. The Guard bought us some time, so we scooped up all the civvies and headed up here in a couple of buses. Only about twelve of us left—everyone else are civilians who were in the stationhouse looking for a safe place.”

“And Pallata?”

Renee slowly shook her head. “She didn’t make it out, Reese.”

Reese sighed and nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say about that. “So who’s senior here?”

“From North Hollywood Station? You are,” Renee said.

Reese sighed again. “Outstanding.”

Gunfire crackled in the near distance, over by the houses behind the Bowl and its high wall. A sudden peal of screaming rose above it. More gunfire, this time from the opposite direction, up on the freeway overpass. Heads turned in both directions. At the coffee station near the box office, the cops there put down their cups and grabbed their weapons. Farther back, deeper in the parking lot, a knot of National Guard troops began advancing down the sloped drive.

“Reese, this is a bad spot,” Renee said.

“The Guard says it’s defensible,” Reese said. He knew it was a lie. He’d thought the hospital was safe too, with only two unobstructed approaches to their position, and they were still pushed out.

“It’s the freeway,” Renee said.

“What do you mean?”

“The zombies. They go after the people on the freeway.” She pointed up at the overpasses, then tried to straighten her glasses. She couldn’t. They were half-broken. “No one can get away, and if you don’t feel pain, breaking car windows to get at what you want isn’t a problem.”

Reese looked up at the overpasses, thinking about what Renee had just said. While the freeway was pretty high up and a couple of hundred feet away, if the dead were using the 101 as a stalking ground, then eventually, they’d come to realize that a few thousand or more tasty treats were waiting for them inside the Hollywood Bowl. Even though the concert hall wasn’t directly visible from the freeway, there was no way to camouflage the presence of so many people.

Oh, fuck.

“Okay. Listen, you stay up here near the sheriff’s CP. Go over there and introduce yourself to a big black National Guard guy. He’s their battalion commander, and we were at the hospital together. His name is Morton. Tell him you work for me, and tell him I’m heading up the LAPD presence here.”

Renee pointed at the table where Fontenoy sat with her pet lieutenant standing watch over her. “What about her?”

“Morton already knows she’s shot, and she’s not a factor. Pass on to him that I’ve got the LAPD under my control, then make sure the sheriff in charge knows that, too. I’ll be on the street. You know a big lug of a patrolman, Bates?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“If you see him, send him down to me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And send the rest of the Hollywood guys down. Unless they’re injured, we need them on the crowd.”

Renee swallowed. “Okay.”

Reese patted the ROVER handset on his shoulder. “I’m Detective Four King, just in case you’ve forgotten, Detective Four-Two King.”

Renee smiled vaguely. “I remember.”

Reese nodded and pointed at the sheriff’s trailer. “Okay. Get going. It’s gonna be a long night.”

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

One thing Doddridge could do, and do well, was run.

He bolted through the small town neighborhood as fast as he could, weaving through darkened backyards and pausing only a few minutes at a time to rest. When he passed close by a house, he would pause and examine it. No one was outside, and from what he could see, most were glued to the TV sets. Given what was going on in the world, that seemed like good advice. He’d watched the news for a couple of hours at the old lady’s house, and he still couldn’t believe what he’d seen on the boob tube. Zombies? What the fuck? He still couldn’t get his mind wrapped around it, and he wondered if maybe he should have just stayed in prison.

But that was hours ago. Now, he was back in his element. Or, to be more precise, one aspect of his element: running like hell from the cops.

As he ran, he cut diagonally away from the highway, putting some distance between him and the traffic that had the roadway clogged up like a sink full of old hamburger meat. There were too many people there, too many opportunities for him to be seen. As he stepped around the corner of a small house, a column of lights barreled down the street. He crouched and sidled toward a reel of garden hose mounted to the side of the house—not a lot of cover, but it would have to do—and watched as three Ford Expeditions zipped past, heading in the direction he had come from. The cops back at the house he and his crew had taken over had Expeditions, too. So these were more badges, heading south to figure out who was who. It wouldn’t be long until they started combing the town, looking for him.

He waited a few beats after the SUVs had disappeared into the deepening night, then scuttled across the street, crouching like he was a soldier in an episode of that old TV show Combat his older brother had loved, holding the shotgun in both hands. He was glad he still had the jacket he’d clipped from the prison bus. It was starting to get genuinely cold now, and he would eventually have to figure out which of these homes he was going to break into. He figured hitting one up on the eastern side of the town was the plan, preferably one that backed up to the desert. That way, if things really went to shit, he could haul ass out into the scrub. For sure, a town this small wouldn’t have a helicopter, so they’d have to pursue on foot. Or on horses, or camels, or whatever dumbass desert people did when they engaged in an overland police pursuit. He realized it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all he had going for him right now. His original plan had been to commandeer some wheels and get to LA, where he had people who could put him up for a bit while he planned his next move. But after seeing what was going down in LA on the television, maybe staying clear would be a better move.

But where will I go? he asked himself. Where’s a hood rat like me s’posed to hang, if not in the city? Am I gonna like go all dirt farmer, or somethin’?

One thing was certain—staying in Single Tree was unlikely to be an option, not after he’d killed one of their cops.

He crossed another lonely desert street, approaching the last line of widely-spaced houses that backed up to the desert. He loitered on the curb for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. He saw one of the houses had a shed behind it, just visible from where he stood. That might have to do, for the time being.

As he started off for it, a battered old pickup rounded the corner at the end of the street. Doddridge froze where he was and watched as the truck hauled itself into a driveway with the squeak of brakes and creak of old shock absorbers. A man climbed out of the cab and slowly walked toward the front door. He moved with a slight limp, and he carried one of those little Igloo personal coolers in his left hand. Doddridge heard the tinkle of keys as the man limped toward the front door of the darkened ranch-style house.

Well, one more home invasion won’t hurt, he thought, as he sprinted toward the house, barreling down on the man from behind, his feet barely whispering across dry grass.

###

Corbett wanted to stay and see the man hunt through, but Lennon wouldn’t stand for it; he’d already indulged him more than enough, and when Corbett had tried to have his way, Lennon finally told him he could either drive himself home, or he’d have some of the boys tie him up and drive him back. He informed his boss that the men would then take possession of every vehicle Corbett owned so he couldn’t get anywhere other than on his two legs. Corbett had laughed at that, despite the fact he knew Lennon was dead serious. He knew if he didn’t comply, then he’d spend the rest of his immediate future under Lennon’s thumb—that was part of the deal. When it came to matters of security, Corbett had agreed to give Lennon full operational control.

So he relented. Collecting Norton and Danielle, he returned to the waiting Super Duty.

“Dani, Norton and I will drop you off, make sure you get home safely,” he said, hoisting himself into the big truck and kicking over its diesel.

“I don’t think you have a lot to worry about right now,” Danielle said as she slid into the quad cab’s rear bench seat. Lying on the floor in the passenger side was a black and white box marked LWRC. She picked it up and pulled it toward her. “Especially since I have this.”

“You still have to scrub all the cosmoline off it,” Corbett said. “It’s not ready for prime time.”

“Oh, it will be,” Danielle said. In the rearview mirror, Corbett watched as she opened the box, and in the illumination of the dome light overhead, he knew she’d see the LWRC Individual Carbine-Enhanced rifle inside. It was covered with a ceramic cerakote finish over flat dark earth enamel. The rifle was a modernized version of the M16A3 she’d slung in the Corps, only instead of using direct gas impingement to drive the bolt assembly, the gas from each expended cartridge was directed forward against a rod which ferried the bolt assembly back and forth. This would keep the guts of the gun cleaner, and result in fewer fouling failures. She’d told Corbett she’d never had a weapon like this one before, and she was eager to break it down, clean it up, and get it operational.

“That’s my girl,” Corbett said as Norton climbed in beside him and slammed the door closed. The dome light faded out, and Danielle closed the box with a sigh.

“Yeah, thanks for the goods, Barry,” Norton said as he buckled his seat belt. “Nice weapon, just like my H&K five-five-six.” Like Danielle, Corbett had gifted Norton with an identical IC-E weapon.

Corbett sniffed as he dropped the truck into gear and pulled away from the Garcia home. A crowd of onlookers stood watching the activity surrounding the house from the sidewalks. They stirred uneasily in the darkness as the lights of Corbett’s Ford passed over them.

“Typical that you’d buy another European piece of shit rifle, Norton,” he muttered.

“What, only American-made ARs and 1911s for you, Barry?”

“You know it. If it’s not made in the US of A, I’m not touching it.”

Norton snorted and picked up his own rifle box and leaned it against the truck’s center console. “Well, I’ve heard good things about LWRC. I’ll let you know how they compare.”

“Please don’t.”

“Ha-ha.”

They drove in silence for the four minutes it took to shoot up Lake View Street at a sedate thirty miles an hour. That’s how long it took to drive less than two miles, the entire distance from the southern border of Single Tree to near its northernmost tip. This is where the “poor folk” lived, in small weathered houses that faced the eastern desert. Corbett and Norton had been mostly middle class, and lived on the west side in homes that faced Mount Whitney, in the section of town that had until recently been in the process of being taken over by people from Los Angeles and Vegas looking for cheap vacation homes or investment properties that could be rented out during the winter skiing season. While homes on the west side had gone though some changes and additions, those on the east side remained mostly the same. The only alterations made to them were by the desert itself, as wood was bleached, siding was blasted and cracked, fences collapsed, and paint peeled.

“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.

###

“Found us some transpo,” Bates said over a lukewarm paper bowl of New England clam chowder.

Reese was eating the same thing. It beat yet another burrito. “What do you have?” he asked.

“The Guard has a five ton sitting near the back gate,” Bates said. “Unguarded at the moment. I checked it out. Batteries are good, full fuel, all the tires are in decent shape. Once we get up to speed in that thing, nothing’s going to be able to stop us.”

“I thought we were going to get an MRAP,” Detective Marsh said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if I want to get into a shootout with the Sheriff’s department,” Bates said. “They have three of them here, but they’re sticking close to them. They know what they’re going to do when the hammer falls, and it doesn’t include helping out the LAPD.”

“So you’d rather get into a shootout with the National Guard?” Reese asked.

“The Guard has a lot of assets here, Reese,” Bates told him. “They positioned that unit and basically forgot about it. I know, because I’ve asked every Guardsman I can find about it, and they all just kind of look dumb and shrug. Kind of like the sheriffs, only without the cheesy mustaches and styling gel.”

“Let’s take it easy on the slurs,” Reese said. “Everyone’s keeping each other alive here. The sheriffs are here acting in mutual assistance, and the Guard is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let’s not let the old shit get in the way. All right?”

Bates frowned. “You became such a faggot when you made it to detective three, Reese.”

“Like I said: Let’s take it easy on the slurs,” Reese replied. “So more about this truck?”

Bates smirked. “Just when I thought you were going to ask us to sing Kumbaya, now you want to know how we’re going to skip out on everyone when things turn to shit, right?”

“Bates, you got something to say, or not? If so, get to it.”

“Truck’s at the back gate. We can get to it, we can drive out of here. I know how to drive it, so that’s not a problem. In case I don’t make it, though, it’s an automatic. No key needed. Prime the engine for three seconds, release for another three seconds, switch on the battery until you hear a tone, then push the same switch up to start. Voila.” Bates waved his plastic spoon in the air. “Don’t say I never did anything for you, Reese.”

“Yeah, okay. What else?”

Bates blinked. “What, that isn’t enough?”

“We need a destination,” Reese said.

“That’s easy,” Bates said, looking down at his bowl of chowder. “We head for the ocean.”

“For the ocean?”

Bates looked up. “Unless the stenches start walking out of the Pacific from Japan, then that would leave us with only three axes of attack to manage. And we can find a boat.”

“A boat?” Marsh asked. He looked at Bates with a skeptical expression. “What, you’re a sailor and an Army truck driver?”

“Let’s just say I have friends in high, low, and unexpected places,” Bates said.

“And where might these friends be, Bates?”

“Somewhere along Long Beach, and they’ll come when I call,” Bates replied.

Reese snorted. “So. You want us to drive thirty-plus miles south to Long Beach through the zombie apocalypse to meet some friends of yours in a little boat?”

“Not so little,” Bates said. “Sixty-seven feet, aluminum hull. Catamaran.”

“Damn, you have a boat like that on a sergeant’s salary?” Marsh asked. “Something you want to admit to here, Bates?”

Bates smiled enigmatically. “Nothing illegal going on here, Detective.”

“You talking about the Harbor Patrol dive boat, Bates?” Reese asked.

Bates raised a brow. “Looks like someone knows their way around sister departments, even down to the boat in question. Yeah, that’s what it is, and I’m tight with a lot of guys down there.”

“So what’s your escape plan after we get on the boat, assuming they’ll take all of us?”

“Santa Rosa Island,” Bates said. “It was the place to go if shit ever hit the fan. It’s hit the fan. Time to get there. Bringing along fellow cops was always part of the deal.”

Reese knew of it. It was a second largest of three islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. “What about others? Civilians? Families?”

“There’s a limit to what we can do, Reese. One boat, some prepositioned supplies and facilities ... you get the picture,” Bates said.

“You thinking of just hanging out there?” Reese asked. “Never been there personally, but I hear there’s not a lot on that place. Why not Santa Cruz Island? A little more built up. Hell, as far as that goes, why not Catalina?”

“A lot more likely to attract people,” Bates said. “This is a rally point, Reese. We get out there, we sit, and we wait.”

Marsh sipped a cup of coffee. It was useless; Reese could see he was fading fast. “For what?”

“To figure out what to do next,” Bates said. “Unless the government gets a handle on whatever’s going on, we’ll need to sit it out.”

“And what if sitting it out doesn’t work?”

Bates shrugged. “We go into Santa Barbara and scavenge for the rest of our lives. It’s going to be a pretty severe rustic existence, gentlemen. Get used to it.”

“So steal an Army truck, survive driving thirty miles through Los Angeles County, wait for a boat, take said boat to an island that probably won’t be all that uninhabited by the time we get there, and wait for Uncle Sugar to get his collective act together and kill all the zombies.” Reese rubbed his face. “Okay, I guess it’s all we’ve got, unless there’s a fortified mansion in Beverly Hills someone knows about?”

Bates shook his head, still smiling. His clear blue eyes didn’t flicker when a gout of gunfire roared in the very near distance. Reese himself barely jumped, but he did turn to see if something was up, other than the Guard working over zombies approaching the wire. It was only that.

Yeah, I guess I can get used to anything, now.

“All right, let’s get some sack time,” he said, finishing up his chowder and pushing himself to his feet.

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

The God damned bus isn’t coming.

Sinclair was fuming as he and Meredith stood like commoners in the parking lot of a McDonald’s located on Single Tree’s north end. He’d already had his fill of absolutely rancid food during his stay in the little desert town, but the dry, processed Egg McMuffin and sausage breakfast burrito he’d just had wouldn’t even qualify as one-star dining. And the tea they served made a two-day old used bag of Lipton’s best present like a perfectly-brewed cup of Earl Grey Supreme. If the overall foulness of the tastes he had encountered over the past half hour left his palate within five days, he would be pleasantly surprised.

Of course, Meredith had no problems consuming any of it, as she was a typical American. Sinclair had brought that up, of course—her ability to consume even the most grotesque foods as if they were from an establishment that had received a glowing Michelin five star review. It was nauseating, but he had to remind himself he hadn’t married her for her class, good looks, or gentle laugh. It was because she was the key to him accessing several hundred million dollars. After that happened, he couldn’t give a rat’s fart if she spent all day eating Cheetohs and diddled herself until her lady parts turned orange.

But the bus hadn’t shown up, and while frustrating, it was not entirely unexpected. Out of an abundance of caution, Sinclair hadn’t even checked out of the roach coach they were staying in. Had the bus not arrived, they would have had nowhere to return. And while he’d had his fill of all the free HBO he could handle and had absolutely no use for a “free ironing board in each room”, sleeping on the street wasn’t on his personal bucket list. So Sinclair and Meredith just watched the traffic slowly trundle past. The gas station across the street was mobbed with vehicles, and it looked as if the place was deserted. Motorists were looking about in clueless agitation as they tried to fill their vehicles from pumps which had been switched off. Sinclair was joined in his observations by a pudgy Mexican woman wearing a loud floral dress and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Guess they don’t know the station’s closed,” she said. “Martin ran out of gas yesterday.”

Sinclair glanced down at her. She had a wide face dominated by an almost equally broad nose, atop which were perched a pair of slim sunglasses. Her lips were painted burnt orange, and her cheeks were burnished with a fiery blush. It was an odd composition that one might expect to find on a Dali painting.

“No gas deliveries coming in?” Sinclair asked. “That’s odd, I thought I saw tanker trucks in a parking lot down the road.” He pointed down Main Street, the boulevard he and Meredith had hiked up to catch the bus to Reno.

“Oh, those are Mister Barry’s trucks,” the woman said with a smile.

“‘Mister Barry’?” Sinclair echoed. What, are we now on a plantation?

“Yes, Mister Barry Corbett,” the woman said with a nod. She held several bags of McDonald’s breakfast burritos. Sinclair’s stomach roiled at the stench. “We been hearing he brought all that stuff in.”

“Stuff? What stuff?” Sinclair asked. Then he remembered what the Mexican pharmacy owner had told him last night, that Corbett was going to convert the entire town into a fortress.

“Oh, all sorts of stuff,” the woman said. “Trucks, trailers, all kinds of machines. I hear a lot of it came up from Texas, right when things started to go bad in LA.” The woman pointed westerly, trying to be helpful in ensuring Sinclair knew in which direction Los Angeles lay.

Sinclair considered this. Aside from the fact all his recent major sources of information were Mexican, everything seemed to flow together in an odd way. Corbett returning to this hick little town. A surprising presence of construction goods, and from what the pharmacy owner had told him, an arsenal of illegal weapons. Defenses were being erected in the desert, though Sinclair hadn’t seen any of that himself—he hadn’t ventured out into the desert, and it had been deep night when the accursed Ghibli limped into town like a lame dog before rolling over and dying at the worst moment. All of this was circumstantial, of course, but in Sinclair’s business, circumstance and innuendo were more golden than cold, solid fact.

So, Corbett’s making himself a little castle in the desert to hide inside, is he?

“Excuse me, do you know if the bus to Reno is coming?” Meredith asked the portly Mexican woman.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Reno’s shut down,” the woman said. “My cousin live up there, works in the casinos. They have troubles, too. Sounds like the police can’t control it.” The woman sighed, her face falling. “I hope my cousin will be okay.” She recovered an instant later, and Sinclair had the sudden understanding that the woman before him wasn’t exactly a deep thinker. As if the four bags full of burritos weren’t enough of a clue. “But no, I don’t think the bus is coming any more. It didn’t come last time, either.”

“Last time?” Sinclair asked.

“Tuesday,” the woman said. “I ask the manager at the McDonald’s, he said the service, it was suspended.”

“So we’re waiting here for no good reason,” Sinclair said, feeling rage boiling deep inside him. “It was supposed to arrive at eight forty-five! Why don’t they have a sign up?”

“I don’t know, mister,” the Mexican woman said. Her words were drowned out as a white Chevy van suddenly accelerated through the traffic. It slammed into a car and lurched toward the street, its engine roaring. One of its front tires blew as the van jumped the curb, and for an instant, its black plastic grille was pointed right at Sinclair. Behind the vehicle’s cracked windshield, he caught a glimpse of a thrashing struggle, as if two people were fighting for the wheel. Then the van’s front tires hit a parking stop, and the vehicle cut away from him, scraping across two parked cars. Its rear bumper was torn loose in the impact, and half of it dropped to the asphalt, digging into it as the van continued accelerating, its blown front tire flipping and flopping like the tub of a stricken washing machine. The van plowed right into an old pickup truck that was backing out of a parking space, hitting it with such force that the truck seemed to almost bend. The van’s engine died in an explosive rattle, and a cloud of steam suddenly rose from its front end. The man sitting in the pickup truck looked quite shocked, but other than that, he was fine. He pushed open the truck’s driver’s door and eased himself out. Several people emerged from the McDonalds, mouths open at the severity of the accident.

“Oh, gosh,” said the Mexican woman.

“Jock, are you all right?” Meredith asked. She reached out and grabbed his arm.

“Why, yes. Quite fine, Meredith,” Sinclair said, even though his heart was bucking to a bizarre disco beat inside his chest. “Thank you for asking.”

The man who had been driving the truck peered in through the van’s windows, then tried to open the driver’s door. Even from his position near the street, Sinclair could hear someone frantically pounding inside the van. The pickup driver stepped to his right and opened the van’s loading door.

Two bloodied figures crashed into him, pinning him to the pavement. A startled thrill ran through the crowd of onlookers, and the Mexican woman with Sinclair and Meredith put a hand to her painted lips.

“Oh!”

The pickup driver thrashed and screamed as the bloody people lying on him tore into him. One went for his belly. The other went for his face. His blood was bright in the morning sunlight.

“Jock!” Meredith cried. “Oh, Jock, they’re killing him!”

“Bloody right,” Sinclair said, and his voice sounded small and detached, even to him. A small, analytical part of his mind told him it was time to flee, to turn on his heel and run back to the hotel. Instead, he stood rooted to the spot, watching in horrified, slack-jawed fascination as the two people—zombies, he knew now—attacked the man beneath him in the most gruesome of manners. He stayed where he was even when a third zombie—a woman—emerged from the van. The newcomer glanced at its two brethren as they fed, then swept its dead eyes toward the parking lot entrance, where Sinclair stood. For a moment, their gazes met. When he peered into the bottomless nothingness of the zombie’s eyes, Sinclair heard himself release a high-pitched fart.

No, no, not me—

The onlookers standing by the restaurant doors reversed their course in a communal shriek, diving back inside the McDonalds without skipping a beat. The zombie’s head snapped back toward them, its eyes cold and predatory and full of an eternal starvation. It hissed and charged forward. Sinclair was astonished to see that there was nothing slow about this zombie—it ran like a sprinter, accelerating toward the McDonalds as if it saw the finish line just ahead. It rebounded off the plate glass window with a bang and fell back into the parking lot. Without skipping a beat, it vaulted to its feet and sprang forward again. This time, the window dissolved beneath the fury of the impact, parting in a thunderclap of sound as the ghoul flung itself into the restaurant, greeted by a chorus of horrified screams.

“Jock!” Meredith cried again, eyes wide behind her expensive designer sunglasses.

Sinclair shoved the portly Mexican woman and her four bags of sausage breakfast burritos out of his way. “Sorry, must be going!” he chirped, his voice high and panicked as he grabbed Meredith’s arm and hustled her away from the restaurant. As they ran down the sidewalk, he heard the ungodly commotion inside the restaurant. An employee launched himself out of the drive through window and ran into the street, screaming. There was a hollow pop from inside, followed by more screams, then two more pops. Sinclair realized that someone inside had a gun, and they were doubtless shooting at the dashing grotesquerie as it ran throughout the establishment, likely savaging anyone and everyone it could grab ahold of.

“Where are the police?” Meredith gasped as she ran down the sidewalk with Sinclair right behind.

“Look at the traffic, Meredith! They’ll get here, but only after it’s too late,” he said, pushing her along. “Keep going—don’t stop, just keep going!”

They ran three blocks before Sinclair slowed and looked behind them. People were running from the McDonalds, and he was surprised to see a few people hurrying toward it. Sun glinted off oiled metal. They had guns. A moment later, a fusillade of gunshots rang out. Then silence reigned, aside from the rumble of slowly moving traffic and sporadic car horns. In the distance, a siren wailed.

“All right, I think it’s over,” Sinclair said. He was gasping for breath, both from fright and the physical exertion of actually running any distance.

“We have to get out of here,” Meredith said, panicked beyond belief. “We have to get to San Francisco!”

“Meredith,” was all Sinclair could say. He felt light-headed and nauseous.

“We have to get out!” she repeated, almost stridently.

“Meredith, if it’s happening here, then it’s happening in San Francisco. An order of magnitude worse, even,” Sinclair said. “You heard the Mexican bitty, even Reno is in trouble. We can’t get the car fixed, and even if we could, we’d only make it as far as whatever gas is in the damn thing could get us. No mass transit out here in California—what do you suggest we do?”

Meredith looked at him with her big eyes, full of terror. She literally wrung her hands before her in agitation. “So what are you suggesting, Jock? Do you have a plan?”

“We go back to the hotel,” Sinclair said.

A police vehicle slowly threaded its way through the heavy traffic along Main Street, lights flashing, siren blaring. It could only make two miles per hour, at best. Meredith regarded it for a moment, then turned back to him.

“That’s the best you can do?” she asked.

“No,” Sinclair said after a time. “I might be able to do one better than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“That man I was talking to in the diner—Barry Corbett. Do you remember him?”

“The Indian man who gave me his phone?”

Sinclair shook his head. He grabbed Meredith’s arm and began hustling her down the sidewalk, casting an occasional glance over his shoulder to ensure nothing was following them. “No, not him. The old man. He has a plan to turn this town into a fortress. Maybe it’s in our best interests to stay right here, in Single Tree.”

Meredith stopped. “You must be joking!”

Sinclair yanked her along after him. “Darling, I’ve never been more serious about something in all my life.”

###

Doddridge laughed when the kid Shaliq was brought into the small police station holding tank. He was covered in dust and sand, and looked as if he’d been trying to dig his way through the desert.

“Where the fuck you been, dawg? Been tryin’ to play a real life game a Dig-Dug?” he asked, sitting on a plastic bunk that had no mattress. In the cell on the other side, Auto was lying on his back, snoring up a storm. His face was swollen from whatever beating he had taken.

Shaliq didn’t answer. There was a bandage on his right forearm that extended from wrist to elbow. Doddridge examined that critically. Damn, boy got more than a punch to the throat.

“He was in the desert,” said the fat old cop with the boozer’s nose who brought him in. He opened the door to the cell next to Doddridge’s and maneuvered the sullen Shaliq inside, positioning him off to one side of the doorway. Reaching through the bars, he grabbed the kid’s handcuffed wrists and held him in place, then slammed the cell door closed. Only after he was safely separated from Shaliq did remove the handcuffs. Shaliq gingerly brought his arms forward with a sigh and rubbed his wrists.

“Damn things were too tight, I can’t feel my fingers,” Shaliq bitched.

“How’s the arm, kid? You feel that?” the cop asked. His nameplate read LASHER, and Doddridge made him to be a big city cop who’d retired and joined the force in this podunk town.

“What do you care, man?” Shaliq asked.

“I don’t. You get a painkiller in three hours, so stay quiet until then. Lunch is at eleven-thirty.”

“I’m Muslim, man. I need halal food.”

“You’ll get a burger, fries, and a coke from Carl’s Junior and be happy about it.” With that, the old cop turned away and returned to a desk down the short hallway. Beside him was a locked metal door that had to be opened from the outside. Doddridge watched while Old Man Lasher collapsed into his chair and picked up an iPad.

“Where they get you, boy?” Doddridge asked.

“Desert. Sent some dogs after me.” Shaliq held up his bandaged arm. “One of ‘em did this, so I shot it, and then the guys following beat the shit outta me.” He nodded toward Doddridge. “What happened to you?”

“A girl beat him down,” Lasher said from the end of the hall, finishing off the statement with a reedy laugh.

Shaliq smiled briefly. “For real?”

Doddridge ignored the question. “Hey, man. I asked for a lawyer last fuckin’ night. When am I gettin’ one?”

“Yeah, I want a lawyer, too,” Shaliq added.

“When they show up, you’ll get them,” Lasher replied. “Public defenders are up in Bishop. No one’s coming down from there anytime soon, you can count on that. My advice? Keep things cool and pass your time counting the bars.”

Shaliq sat down on his plastic bench. “Man, do I get a blanket?”

“Yeah, when it’s time to sleep,” the cop said, staring intently at his iPad now.

“White cracker motherfucker,” Shaliq said.

Lasher nodded absently. “Uh huh.”

“Hey, kid. Cool it,” Doddridge said. “We are where we are.”

“Yeah, you fucking genius, man. Your powers of observation are overwhelming.”

Doddridge snorted at that, then stretched out on his plastic bench and laced his fingers behind his head. With nothing else to do, he just stared at the ceiling, waiting until he could catch a nap. Things were going to shit out in the world, maybe being locked up wasn’t so bad after all.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

The Guard fought sporadically throughout the night, but Reese still slept through most of it until he was roused for duty. The sheriff’s guys gave a quick security briefing, with a fresh-faced lieutenant dressed in a dirty Army Combat Uniform bearing the old universal camouflage pattern. Reese had already been told a new style was in the midst of being fielded, bearing the more efficient operational camouflage pattern. It made no difference to Reese, and he was pretty sure the zombies didn’t care, either way. Both sets of uniform didn’t exactly blend in with an urban environment any more than his LAPD blue tactical gear did.

The situation hadn’t changed very much, which was a little surprising. Most of the zombies were sticking to the highway, as the terrain and vegetation surrounding the Bowl had somehow managed to mask the presence of several thousand civilians. Strict noise discipline was being enforced—even folks who snored when they slept had to put on a gas mask, which pretty much either cured sleep apnea or made sure the person wearing it passed out from lack of oxygen. Crying kids was a problem, and the fact that they were in an amphitheater didn’t help matters. And with the night being torn apart by screams, gunfire, helicopters, and the odd explosion didn’t exactly make for a night conducive to sleeping anyway. Reese figured that kids would have a tough time of it, but children were more adaptable than adults. They’d get through it, one way or the other.

Reese was curious about the zombie movements along the freeways. He’d been told during the briefing that most of the traffic was dead now, not going anywhere. There were people trapped in their vehicles, surrounded by hordes of ghouls, but there was no helping them. The Guard had its hands full dealing with the new refugee camp being set up in Griffith Park, which was a much larger area with hundreds of possible infiltration points. Even the observatory, which was where the Guard helicopters were operating out of, couldn’t be fully secured. There were just too many hiking paths leading to it.

“That mean we’re in danger of losing air support?” Bates asked. He directed the question more toward the lieutenant than to the sheriff heading up the briefing.

The Guard officer stirred uneasily. “No, sir. I don’t think so. A separate airhead’s been established at Ontario airport—”

“Yeah, that’s like over fifty miles away,” said another cop. “I mean, I know helicopters can fly pretty fast, but that’s still going to be, what? A fifteen, twenty minute wait?”

“Aircraft are in the area at all times, sir,” the lieutenant said. “We’re keeping a rotation of guns and ass-haulers over Los Angeles at all times.”

“All right, if it’s okay with the LAPD, maybe we can stay focused on the here and now, and not worry about what may or may not happen,” the sheriff leading the briefing said.

“Sure, let’s get back to how we’re going to get all these people out of here when the zombies figure out we’re in a great big serving dish,” Bates said. “They’re really pretty good at overrunning positions. Ask Colonel Morton, he can tell you all about that.”

The sheriff glared at Bates. “Who do you report to, Sergeant?”

“He reports to me,” Reese said tiredly.

“Maybe you might want to have a talk to him about professional conduct during a law enforcement operation,” the sheriff snapped.

“Bates, stop being dick,” Reese said. To the sheriff: “There, that ought to do it. What’s next?”

The sheriff shifted his glare from Bates to Reese. Reese stared back, too tired to be affected by a brother law enforcement officer’s pissed off attitude. The two gave each other the stink eye for a moment, before the sheriff finished up the briefing by detailing the LAPD patrol area along the wall. And that was it.

“So, it’s another day in paradise,” Bates said, as they got up from the folding chair he was sitting on. “I’ll have a double helping of shit on the side.”

“Try not to go full-on retard with the sheriffs,” Reese said. “We all depend on each other right now. Sheriffs, LAPD, Guard. We all have to figure out how we’re going to keep the civilians alive. Right?”

“Right,” Bates said.

“Just the same, keep an eye on that truck.”

“Fuck, yeah. You can count on that, Detective.”

The sun started to rise somewhere over the San Gabriel Mountains, and through all the smoke rising in the air from East Los Angeles, it was still glorious. There was no marine layer to speak of this late in the year, so Reese was able to watch the molten orb slowly crawl over the tan peaks in the middle distance. Helicopters buzzed through the air. People still screamed from the freeway, though that was becoming less regular, now that the easy prey had apparently been hunted out. From somewhere to the west, several loud explosions echoed off the hillsides around them. He heard whirling rotor blades interspersed between the thunderous reports.

“Hear that?” Bates asked. “Apaches. Using Hellfires.”

“Okay. Is that good or bad?” Reese asked.

Bates slowly shook his head. “It ain’t good.”

The LAPD was organized along the rear sound barrier wall of the Bowl, and from there they could overlook the entire amphitheater. It was full of people, tents, sleeping bags, stadium seating, and port-a-potties off to the sides. The Guard and a few FEMA folks were handing out MREs. There was no food preparation allowed, for fear the smells of cooking grub would bring the dead their way that much faster. Reese wondered if the zombies could smell—after all, they were dead, so why did they need to breathe? But they moaned and hissed and even roared when they were closing in on prey, so clearly, they were still able to fill their lungs with air when the need arose. He checked his watch. It was 7:16 am. They would be on-shift until eleven, then they get another meal and rest break. Above them, standing atop sand bag revetments, National Guard troops kept watch over the sound barrier wall. It had been reinforced in several places, with sand bags or simple lumber beams that had been toed into place. Coils of razor wire topped the walls now, and they gleamed in the sunlight, the edges of their blades sharpened to precision. Not that it mattered. If the dead managed to come over those walls, then they weren’t about to stop because of some razor burn.

Overall, the LAPD’s role was to provide a secondary defensive layer while also remaining in sight of the civilians below. The general theory was that if the civilians saw the police, they would gain confidence knowing that they were being protected by LA’s finest. Reese thought that was laughable. Most of the people in Los Angeles hated the LAPD. The last thing they thought kept them safe was the thin blue line. So Reese and the rest of the cops stood with the reinforced sound barrier wall to their backs and sweated in the rising sun. The temperature climbed up from the high fifties to the mid-seventies as the morning matured toward afternoon. It would hit the eighties before the day was through, and Reese couldn’t give a shit. All he wanted was to find a place to take a nap. An eight hour nap. They all felt the same way. The cops were exhausted and demoralized.

“Hey, Reese.” Renee had found him again, walking along the line of LAPD until she stood in front of him. First Sergeant Plosser was with her. The big NCO looked a little better than the last time Reese had seen him. The two men exchanged nods.

“Renee. What’s up?”

“Not a lot. Plosser here wanted to talk with you about what’s going on over in officer country.” Renee nodded across the Bowl, where the mobile command posts sat.

“Okay. What’s up, First Sergeant?”

“Morton is trying to arrange for another element to be flown in, but it looks like it’s not going to happen. There’s a big force of zombies moving south from the Valley. It’s working its way through Van Nuys, heading toward Studio City. Initially, the plan was to, uh, get them onto the One-Oh-One, but the activity that’s already on the freeway is preventing that. The stenches, they’re dumb, but they’re not so dumb as to stand in line waiting to get on a freeway. So they’re deviating. The Guard command’s trying to figure out how to stop them.”

Reese blinked, and one of the cops who overhead shook his head in exasperation. “Plosser, did you say the Guard was trying to get them to take the freeway? With all those people there?”

“Not so many people left any longer, Detective. That’s why zed’s on the move,” Plosser said. He held up a hand, cutting off Reese from further comment. “Listen, you want to hear what I have to say, or do you want to waste my time and your energy busting my balls about decisions I had nothing to do with?”

“Get on with it, Plosser.”

Plosser pointed toward the east. “See that big column of smoke there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s about sixteen miles away. Somehow, a tanker truck blew up. My guess is that someone hit it with an incendiary device of some sort, out by Monterey Park. Probably could have been an accident, more likely it was intentional, some sort of urban violence that got out of hand. Also possible, one of the aviators lost a lock with a Hellfire and popped the gas cow by mistake. Either way, I hear that fire is fully involved. There’s some firefighting apparatus on scene, but that’s going to slow the migration to the east.” Plosser looked back at Reese. “And I do mean the zombie migration, just in case you were wondering. That means it’s going to take at least another twelve to twenty-four hours for the stenches in the immediate vicinity to pass through. Expect them to find their way off the freeway in sufficient force to make us uncomfortable.”

“I’m already uncomfortable,” Reese said.

“Good, because it gets worse.”

Reese sighed. “Thrill me, First Sergeant.”

Plosser pointed at the sound barrier behind them. “To our south? Between ten to fifteen thousand stenches are picking their way in this direction. Coming out of Hawthorne, Inglewood, South Central, Crenshaw. The way I hear it, emergency services failed in those areas pretty quickly, I guess because a lot of them are high-crime areas, am I right?”

“You are correct,” Reese said.

“Well, once that force makes it to around Wilshire, all those disparate groups are going to start coming together. They’ll make another front we have to worry about. Basically, we are pretty much screwed and tattooed on this one, Detective. I wanted to pass that on to you, since it looks like the sheriff’s guys aren’t all that interested in getting the word out.”

Reese rubbed his eyes. “How long until the first wave gets here?”

“That’ll be from the south. Leading edge is only a few blocks away. Not terribly organized, as you might expect, and there are a lot of house and sloping terrain between us and them, but they will eventually make it here. And we will have to start fighting them off eventually, and the noise is only likely to draw even more in.”

Reese didn’t know what to say, so he just shrugged. “Okay. Is that all? I mean, it’s more than enough, but is that all of it?”

“That’s all I have to say right now, Detective. I hope you’ll get the word through more official channels, but I think everyone’s a little bit spooked right now, and they’re trying to make lemonade out of lemons.” Plosser spread his hands. “Stay sharp, keep an eye on the civilians. Things are probably going to get very loud in a little bit.”

Reese reached out and shook Plosser’s hand. “Thanks for the heads up, and sorry for the attitude.”

“Not a problem. I’ll check back with you later.” With that, the tall senior NCO strode off.

Renee looked shell-shocked, just like all the other cops. Her glasses were still lopsided on her face, and she held her rifle across her chest. She’d finally had the opportunity to put it to work the night before, when she had been rotated down to the main gate. The weapon’s ejection port was filthy with expended propellant.

Reese tapped the weapon. “You should probably clean that now, while you have the time,” he said.

Renee turned the weapon so she could look down at the dirty port. Her expression was one of chronic disinterest. “Yeah. I guess I should.”

“That weapon might be the difference between life and death, Gonzalez. Don’t get complacent. Clean it.”

“Okay. I will.” She paused for a long moment. “Fontenoy left sometime last night, to try and get to the EOC.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Tried to get the Guard to give her a lift, then tried to get the guys from Wilshire to drive her over in a squad. No one was stepping outside the wire after the civilians were dispersed, so the crazy bitch took a Shamu and went off by herself. She made it about a block before we heard her start screaming. Didn’t hear any gunfire, so she must’ve went down without a fight or managed to drive right though them.”

Reese thought about that. He wondered what depths of fear the narrow-shouldered commander had sunk to in order to actually bring about her own death. Staying in the Bowl was certainly preferable to leaving it without a butt load of firepower backing you up.

“Well, that is just fucked up,” Reese said. “I guess we all move up a notch in the chain of command.”

“I wonder how Jerry’s doing,” Renee said, suddenly recalling their other partner. Jerry Whittaker had disappeared early on during the emergency, taking most of his LAPD gear with him. He had a young family, and he’d made the only obvious choice in his circumstance.

“I’m sure he’s okay, if anyone can be in the middle of all this,” Reese said. In the distance, rotor beats approached. Another helicopter, orbiting the area.

Renee took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah. Yeah. All right, let me get this weapon cleaned up...”

Several Apaches appeared, rising over the Hollywood Hills. At the same time, some of the Guardsmen manning the barrier wall began firing into the neighborhood on the other side. The firing was intermittent at first, then quickly mounted in volume. As hot cartridge casings rained down on them, the cops of the LAPD turned and looked up. Reese saw one of the NCOs manning the battlements turn and look toward the upper parking lots, speaking into his radio headset. He didn’t look very happy. The Apaches drifted downrange, swinging out over Highland Avenue before they disappeared from his view. He could hear them, though; their rotors were slashing through the air only a few hundred feet away. Then he heard the thunder of their chain guns opening up.

“Okay, shit just got real!” Reese shouted to the other cops.

“Again!” Bates added, down the line.

SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA

The news of the zombie attacks at the McDonalds along Main Street had filled the city with fear. Booker called for an open town meeting starting at five pm, and had promised it would last until every last question had been asked and answered. Corbett appreciated that, and he spent a few hours in the afternoon working with Gary Norton on how to present the information that would be required. Norton was initially uneasy with the task, but he warmed up to it quickly. As a producer, he was used to making pitches as well as receiving them, and all he had to do was refer to the facts and figures Corbett provided. This didn’t mean it was going to be an easy sell; the ideological complexity of the town had drifted since Corbett was a young man, moving from the center-right to the left as more migrants settled in the town, along with Los Angelinos who were looking to get out of the big city. This gave liberal policymakers a chance they’d have never had in the 1960s or 1970s, and in a large part, they had actually made the town more successful, with cultural events like the annual film festival that actually attracted major names, and by breathing new life into the town’s previously moribund winter sports offerings. Corbett didn’t begrudge them their successes, but what the plans he’d set in motion promised to undue all of that, for years to come.

“Actually, I think the zombies are doing that,” Norton opined when Corbett brought up this point as a possible locus for resistance. “Nothing you’re doing is directed toward anything but securing the town. I get it, and I’m pretty sure I can sell that to the rest of the town. We have to go through some changes, mostly physical, but at our core, we’ll still be the same people. We’re not eliminating our way of life, we’re only guaranteeing it for future generations.”

“Vegas is going down hard,” Corbett said. “That’ll be our first problem. They’re already following 15 and 95 out of the town, chasing everyone who’s trying to evacuate. Some friends in the Air Force tell me that Nellis is going to pull all its assets out and restage them in New Mexico. I would guess Creech will be next. That means aviation support is out of the question for the short to medium term.”

“Okay. I don’t know what that means, but okay,” Norton said.

“It doesn’t mean a lot by itself. The important takeaway is that the zombies are using the highways to move around, and unless someone stops them, they’ll eventually be able to walk right up 395 to town. And we can expect a second migration from LA, too. The people trying to evacuate are basically driving right toward each other, and that’ll lead the zombies to us like a trail of bread crumbs.” Corbett sighed. “I figure a month before full-on contact, with a range of intermittent contacts before then, maybe as early as this week, next week for sure. People will eventually start dying on the road, and if those things manage to get out of whatever vehicle they’re trapped in, they might eventually find their way here. One of my work crews had a zombie walk right up on them.”

Norton looked surprised. “No shit?”

“No shit. They beat it to death with shovels. That’s why I’m so eager to get as many people proficient with weapons as soon as possible. The work crews will need security, and I don’t have enough shooters to provide that by themselves.”

Norton nodded. “All right. I don’t think that’s going to be a tough sell. Victor’s onboard with that, right?”

“Oh, yes. That’s something else you might have to smooth out a bit, that Victor’s acting as the senior law enforcer here and not the local guys. That’s going to cause some concern, but Victor is a commissioned LEO through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It’s not the FBI or ATF or even the CHP, but it’s still a federal organization. Remember that when someone like Hector Aguilar starts to piss and moan.”

“Ah. About Hector.” Norton put his hands flat on the large dining room table the two men sat it in Corbett’s southwestern-style home. “I hear he finally managed to reach some regional planner or something up in Bishop, someone who works for the county. He’s been telling them all about the plans to fortify the town, and he’s been pushing them to intervene.”

Corbett blinked. “Regional planner? Is that more or less effective than a community organizer?”

Norton snorted. “I have no idea.”

“Well, how the hell did he manage to do that?”

“His kid is in the ham radio club at school. Apparently, he managed to get word out that way.” Norton shook his head. “Damn, I didn’t even know ham radios were still a thing of the present. What next, Heathkit makes a comeback?”

Corbett leaned back in his chair, peering out the folding glass wall behind Norton that overlooked the landscaped backyard, the high fence surrounding the property, and the peaks of the mountains beyond. He had always known Aguilar would be a burr up his butt, but he’d dismissed the outspoken pharmacy owner as being nothing but a bloviating gas bag who was more into attracting attention than anything else. That he had managed to get through to someone in a supervisory position at the county level at a time when communications were failing was certainly innovative, if nothing else.

“Well, I can’t see Inyo County getting too involved with what we’re doing down here,” he said finally. “I’m sure they’ll blow a lot of sunshine up Hector’s ass, but they have problems of their own. Bishop is probably running out of food by now, which makes it even more necessary for us to sever the links leading to town.”

“I get that,” Norton said. “I understand what has to be done. A lot of the townspeople will too, but I want to tell you, once they see a bunch of starving kids trying to get through the wire ... well, that’s going to be tough to take. I’m not sure I could handle it, either.”

“Same here.” Corbett smiled when Norton looked at him without saying anything. “What? Did you think I could just turn that off? Did you know that I spent over eighteen million dollars last year providing emergency food relief to poor families in Los Angeles, Riverside, Houston, and Dallas? I set up nonprofits specifically to combat hunger, and I self-funded all of them. Who do you think fed more kids last year, me or Save the Children?”

Norton raised his hands in mock surrender. “Easy there, boss. I’m making no judgments, here. If you really were the evil right wing privateer everyone likes to think you are, then you sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging out here. You’d be in a bunker somewhere brewing a nice cup of tea made from the tears of starving orphans.”

“Who says I don’t, damn it?” Corbett said with a laugh. Norton smiled a bit and looked down at the planning documents before him, essentially a series of PowerPoint slides that had been printed out. Norton would show the full presentation on the big screen at the town hall later that day. Corbett couldn’t tell if Norton was nervous, but he suspected making the sales pitch to a captive audience was something he could handle.

“How’re your parents doing?” he asked.

Norton shrugged. “My dad’s good, though once the news stops coming through, I’ll have to find him something to keep himself occupied. My mother still thinks everything’s going to be fine. She and her friends are having a game of bridge tonight—want to stop by?”

Corbett snorted. “I’ll take a rain check on that one.”

“So you’ll be around if there are questions I can’t handle, right?” Norton asked, tapping the presentation before him.

“You know it,” Corbett said, “but the less I say, the better. I want you to handle this dog and pony show, Norton. You have the pretty face I don’t, and this is as much about identity politics as it is saving the town.”

###

The meeting had gone as well as could have been expected. Several hundred people had shown up, and the council chamber was standing room only. Norton delivered the presentation with a polished ease that impressed Corbett more than he would have thought possible, and took some time to add context by relating his escape from Los Angeles, so many days ago. He covered the important topics of the zombies that had arisen in the town, the death of Chief Grady and the appointment of Victor Kuruk as Single Tree’s acting top cop, and the apprehension of the three remaining escaped convicts. Norton answered questions directly and succinctly, without stumbling, and gave the impression that he knew what he was talking about. Corbett gave himself credit for that last one. After all, he’d spent hours prepping Norton and getting him up to speed.

In the end, the people did want to hear from him, so Corbett had to address the assemblage. Yes, he was paying for everything. No, he didn’t expect or want the town to reimburse him for expenses. No, he was not “taking over” the town from its elected leaders. Yes, he would obey every law and regulation.

“At the end of the day, folks, this is about the town, not me,” Corbett said. “Most of you have known me for a long time. I keep to myself, and don’t get involved in disputes unless I absolutely have to.”

“What about the outsiders who are already in town? The ones who can’t get out?” someone asked. “What happens to them?”

Corbett turned and looked at Max Booker, sitting at the long table on the stage.

“We’ll allow them to stay,” Booker said, looking at Corbett. “They’re Americans, and hospitality and charity are part of who we are.”

Corbett nodded without comment.

“And what about those you turn away?” asked a loud British voice. “What about all those families, trying to get to safety? Leaving them to the tender mercies of the zombies is essentially a human rights crime, isn’t it?”

Corbett sighed and looked into the audience. Jock Sinclair stood up near the middle of the sea of people in the auditorium, wearing a dark blazer over what appeared to be an immaculately-pressed white shirt. He was holding something in his hand—a smart phone, held straight out from his body.

“Excuse me, sir,” Booker said, noticing the phone as well. “Are you recording this session?”

“Yes, I am,” Sinclair said. “I’m Jock Sinclair, host of The Sinclair News Hour, and I’m making an official record of what is happening here.”

“There’s no video taping allowed in this building,” Booker said. “That’s clearly posted in the lobby.”

“I’m a credentialed journalist, and I’m exercising my First Amendment rights,” Sinclair countered.

“Jock, you’re not even an American,” Corbett said.

“Thankfully, your Constitution doesn’t discriminate,” Sinclair responded. “Or so I’ve been told. Though I’ve also heard some animals are more equal than others, right, Barry?”

“Look, I have to ask that you stop recording,” Booker insisted. “If you don’t, you’ll be escorted out.” As he said that last, Booker looked over at Victor, who sat at the end of the table in Chief Grady’s chair. Victor looked at Sinclair with emotionless eyes.

“What do you have to hide here?” Sinclair asked. “If the world is truly coming to an end, wouldn’t a record be perhaps useful for whatever future generations might survive?”

“Let him record,” Hector Aguilar said, smiling broadly beneath his thick mustache. He was enjoying Sinclair’s showboating, which didn’t surprise Corbett at all.

“I agree,” Corbett said, taking delight in the puzzled look that blossomed over Aguilar’s features when he realized Corbett was backing him up. “Let the man make his ‘official record’ of what we do here.” He turned back to Sinclair. “With regards to your question regarding human rights, that might be better directed toward the federal government. After all, the feds are the ones who are supposed to provide protection for the citizens of this nation, and they’re failing miserably. We’ve had escaped criminals enter our town, we’ve had zombie attacks, and we have critical supply issues … but no assistance, from either the federal, state, or county levels. If we’re going to survive, it’s obvious that we need to make some hard choices.”

“And those choices involve sending innocents into harm’s way,” Sinclair said. “Not judging, by the way … just asking,” he added, with a supercilious smile.

“I’m sure your intentions are nothing but noble, Mister Sinclair,” Norton said dryly from the stage before Corbett could respond. His comment brought a brief moment of laughter from the crowd, and Sinclair smiled with them. The smile was expertly faked, Corbett knew. Men like Sinclair never appreciated being laughed at. “But we have to embrace reality here,” Norton continued when the laughter had stopped. “We either try and save more people than we can support, which means in the end everyone dies, or we save just enough to make it through the coming year. It really is an either-or situation.”

“Certainly, you would agree that those you turn away will face nothing but the greatest of hardship,” Sinclair pressed. “Women. Children. Entire families will be wiped out.”

“And your solution to that is for the town of Single Tree to commit suicide, Mister Sinclair?” Norton asked. “To commit seppuku in a demonstration of supporting the common good? We have women, children, and entire families here, too. Because of Mister Corbett’s boundless generosity”—Corbett cringed at the term, and he could tell Norton had delivered the line just to needle him a bit—“the families of Single Tree and our neighbors from the nearby reservation will have a chance at survival. Is it your recommendation that we allow ourselves to die as well, starving to death behind the walls we’re building around the town? Because if you are, Mister Sinclair, I’ll personally make sure you don’t get another thing to eat, starting right now.” Norton finished that off with a winning smile of his own, which resulted in a loud round of applause.

Sinclair looked flustered for a moment, then recovered and shook his head. “I’m only asking the questions that I feel need to be answered,” he protested. “How you proceed is up to you and the people of Single Tree. Switching gears somewhat, is it true that you believe arming the entire town is a necessary step? Aren’t you concerned about having so many military assault rifles in untrained hands?”

Corbett took a deep breath, but again, Norton beat him to the punch. “Let’s be clear about some things with regard to that,” Norton said. “We have in our community several dozen people who are former military, including veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, not to mention previous conflicts. As you might expect, all of those people have more than a little bit of practical experience handling weapons. They, along with the consultants Mister Corbett has brought in, will form the training cadre that will instruct those civilians who are competent enough to bear arms. Those under eighteen years of age are not eligible, and Chief Kuruk and the rest of the law enforcement staff will determine if other factors might be involved that would prevent someone from legally possessing or being afforded the opportunity to legally possess a firearm. All of that was covered in the presentation you just saw, so I’m a little perplexed by your question.

“With regards to the notion that we’re handing out ‘military assault rifles’, I need to tell you that the term ‘assault rifle’ is made entirely from whole cloth. There is no specific weapon classification called assault rifles. That little nugget was made up by the anti-gun lobby in order to sow fear, and it’s something you and your fellows in the media willingly perpetuate. I’m aware of your stance on gun ownership, Mister Sinclair. I find it interesting that you stand before us in the guise of exercising your First Amendment rights, but will instantly seek to reduce the citizens of Single Tree from exercising their Second Amendment rights. While this is California, the most liberal state in the union and one that’s not exactly hospitable toward firearm owners, the town of Single Tree is historically a frontier town. We know our weapons, and we know how to use them, as they are tools that feature prominently in our history.”

Another round of applause. As Corbett looked across the crowd, he saw Danielle Kennedy sitting in the second row, next to her father. She was smiling as she applauded, and her eyes were locked onto Norton. He had to smile at that a bit.

“Very well,” Sinclair said, though not without a trace of disappointment.

“At this time, I’d like to ask if any of our residents have anything further to add,” Booker said. He waited for a time, and when no additional queries seemed to be forthcoming, he nodded. “Then at this time, the council believes the townspeople of Single Tree are in agreement with the plans set forth by Barry Corbett and company, and that those plans will continue as discussed. Many thanks to Gary Norton for his presentation. This meeting is adjourned.” Booker picked up a gavel and rapped it on the sound block before him.

And with that, the power went out. The crowd inside the big room released a startled gasp. The emergency lights snapped on, their battery-powered lamps providing pools of illumination that was just enough for people to be able to find their way to the doors.

“Okay, folks, let’s take it easy!” Booker shouted before the rising chorus of confused, fearful voices could take control. “Just make your way to the doors and out into the lobby. Take it easy, don’t push, don’t shove! Be mindful of the elderly and the young ones!”

Victor snapped on the flashlight that hung from his belt, and played the beam over Corbett. “Yep, still dog-butt ugly, even in the dark.”

“Stop screwing around, Victor!”

“Officers in the back, use your flashlights to assist!” Victor said. More flashlight beams cut through the darkness. Corbett was surprised to see the doors to the room were already open to the lobby, but the sun was going down behind the mountains. The light outside was tepid and wan.

He made his way toward Victor and Norton, carefully picking his way through the gloom. “Vic, you need to get officers out on the highway,” he said.

“Of course,” Victor said.

“No, no, you need to do it now. You need to start getting traffic turned around.”

“I will, Barry. What’s the rush?”

“We’re cutting the roads. Tonight,” Corbett said. “Enough screwing around. If we’ve lost power for good, then I want this town sealed tighter than a frog’s butt.”

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

The dead hit the Bowl like a stinking flood.

It took less than an hour for them to overwhelm the wire defenses that Morton’s men had erected. The coils of razor wire were crushed beneath the weight of hundreds and hundreds of cold bodies that continued to thrash about, ignoring the slashing razors the same way they ignored the fact that hundreds more ghouls were crushing them underfoot. The Guard and most of the cops had massed at the entrance to the Bowl, where they slugged it out with the dead, cutting them down by the dozens. For the moment, the high, reinforced sound barriers that surrounded three quarters of the amphitheater served to channelize the zombies into the main entrance, and Reese thought that was all right. It reduced the scope of the engagement to one front, and made it so the zombies were essentially walking into a kill funnel.

At the end of the first hour, thousands of rotting, cold corpses lay all across Highland Avenue. The piles of dead slowed the advance of the next waves, giving the shooters time to zero in and score perfect kills. But the mounds of bodies also worked to the advantage of the stenches. They provided cover behind which they could mass, and charge anew. When that happened, the big .50-calibers opened up, chopping the dead to pieces.

By the third hour, Reese couldn’t see much in the way of pavement—every open space on the street was occupied by a body. A Chinook came in, slinging a pallet load of ammunition. Boxes of .50-caliber ammo and 40-millimeter grenades were offloaded, as well as cans of 5.56-millimeter. In one flight, the Chinook had dropped in over two hundred and fifty thousand rounds of ammunition.

Well, that’s convenient.

“They keep that up, we might be able to get through this,” Bates said, as he fired his M4 at a shambling monstrosity. “Though they might need to send us a bunch of upper receivers, at this rate.”

“Maybe they will,” Reese said, shouting over the constant firing.

After five more hours, the LAPD cops were rotated back to rest and refit. Bates disappeared to check on the five-ton truck. Reese quickly broke down and cleaned his M4, then stuffed fresh mags into the magazine carrier he wore around his vest. He hadn’t fired his pistol yet, but he did check to ensure it was still functional. Then he helped himself to some chow—bags of MREs were set out, so he just grabbed one and ate as much of it as he could. The civilians inside the Bowl were severely freaked out by the din of combat, and Reese couldn’t blame them. He felt he was half-deaf already, and the constant combat left him feeling kind of strung out, like how a drug addict might feel when he needed a fix, but knew one wasn’t coming.

Bates returned and shot him a thumbs-up. “Truck’s still there,” he said, then set about breaking down his rifle to clean it. “How long do we have?”

“Don’t know. Better make it quick. Shit could go downhill in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah.” Bates quickly cleaned his rifle, then headed over to grab some food. Like Reese, he didn’t bother picking through the MRE bags looking for something specific. He just took the first one he came across, cut it open, and dug in. Reese grabbed a bottle of water and walked around the cluster of cops, checking to make sure everyone was accounted for. Everyone was there, and everyone was busy. Even Renee was cleaning her rifle, pausing every now and then to fiddle with her glasses.

“Renee, you have a spare set of specs?” Reese asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “at home.”

“Ah.” Reese knew she lived in a condo in West Covina, fifteen or so miles east of Los Angeles. There was no chance she would be getting her spare set of glasses anytime soon.

The few Guardsmen still manning the hastily-erected parapets along the sound barrier wall suddenly began shooting in eanest. Reese looked across the breadth of the Bowl, as did thousands of terrified civilians. There wasn’t much to see—just guys in Army uniforms shooting, which was pretty much the new normal right now. Then one of them grabbed a grenade and tossed it. It went off a few moments later with a hollow thump. More Guardsmen tossed grenades after that, and the firing picked up.

Bates looked up from his meal. “Second front,” he said, stuffing a piece of prepackaged cake in his mouth.

“What?” Renee asked.

“New wave coming in,” Bates said. He picked up his rifle and ran over to the rearming station, pulling fresh magazines. The rest of the cops stirred uneasily.

“Man, this shit is just never ends,” Marsh said. He looked like crap—face covered by gray-speckled stubble, eyes red and glazed, face drawn and haggard. Reese knew he looked the same way. Hell, he might look even worse, except Marsh was bald and Reese still had hair.

“It is what it is,” Reese said.

More Guardsmen pushed toward the far wall, running on either side of the bowl. Reese wondered what the emergency was. Then he saw a couple of Guardsmen actually wrestling with a zombie as it came over the top of the wall and lunged for them.

Holy fuck—

The men fired at the stench, but it was too close. It wrapped its arms around one and began to take him down while the other ineffectively kicked and punched it. He finally drew back and slammed it in the head with the butt of his rifle, but that didn’t seem to do much either.

Another zombie came over the edge, and behind it, scores of arms flailed in the air.

“Oh, shit!” Renee cried, and she frantically began slapping her rifle back together.

“What?” Marsh didn’t know what was going on. He turned and looked behind him, watching the scene atop the wall unfold. “Hey, how the hell did they get up there?”

“On your feet!” Reese ordered the cops. “On your feet, now!”

More Guardsmen ran toward the wall, followed by a slew of sheriffs and a few LAPD cops. The wooden parapet that had been built collapsed suddenly, and the two Guardsmen fell to the ground, one of them still wrapped up in the stench’s cold embrace. The Guard troops on the other fighting stations kept pouring on the firepower, but it was too late. Two more ghouls came over the top. Then five. Then twenty. They dropped into the Bowl like lemmings running off a cliff, only they didn’t die when they hit the bottom. The Hollywood Bowl was like a sinking ship, taking on the foulest of water.

“Where are the Apaches?” Reese asked.

“Busy, I guess,” Bates said. “So, we going for the truck?”

Reese raised his rifle and began firing across the Bowl, drilling the boiling mass of dead with shot after shot. A couple of other cops joined in as well, but the breach was too frantic for aimed shots. They hit several zombies, but they were non-critical shots. They just kept coming. The people in the Bowl began to surge away from the incursion, screaming. Reese stepped forward and looked into the amphitheater itself. There were already zombies in the mix, crawling in through the rear bleacher seats, dragging fractured legs behind them. Some cops floundered after them, trying to douse their lights before they could start inflicting more damage, but it was hopeless. There were hundreds pouring over the wall now, and they were intermingling with the Guard and police. And some of them were damned fast.

“Reese!” Bates shouted.

“Yes! Yes, go get the fucking truck!” Reese motioned the cops to follow, his legs quaking with fear. “Come on, let’s get going! Save who you can, let’s get going!”

The cops ran. Some of them ran light frightened rabbits; others ran like cops, stopping to urge civilians to follow them, to shoot a shambling zed, to pick up a fallen civilian. Reese scooped up and young boy who was crying and beckoned for his family to follow.

“Come with us!” he shouted.

The hulking truck was still there, and it looked as big as a house. Bates climbed into the cab, and its diesel engine rattled to life a moment later. Reese and two other cops stood by the tail gate, helping other cops and civilians aboard. From the other parking lots, he heard other engines roaring to life over the steady gunfire. A rattle of explosions tore through the fading light of late afternoon, and he saw a Humvee with a Mark 19 grenade launcher opening up on a gaggle of dead, blasting them to pieces. Desiccated body parts flew through the air. The slap of rotor blades echoed through the Bowl as a pair of Apaches roared in and orbited overhead as their pilots apparently tried to figure out where to start firing. Reese kept urging people to climb into the truck. He’d seen this before, and two Apaches weren’t enough to do shit. They’d use up all their ammunition in minutes, and then they’d be as useful as a Nerf Dart Blaster in an honest to God gunfight.

Pandemonium reigned. The screams, the gunfire, the sounds of maneuvering vehicles—it was total sensory overload, and it didn’t help that the acoustics of the amphitheater made it even more maddening. Reese felt dizzy from fear and adrenaline, his senses assaulted by the mayhem that surrounded him. There were too many people to save, and the truck was already almost full.

A zombie picked its way toward him, its jaws slick with blood, its gray-white belly so full it protruded before it like a balloon about ready to pop. It locked onto Reese and made for him, hissing. It went down as one of the cops in the truck shot it in the head.

“Reese, come on!” the cop shouted.

Reese tried to close the tail gate, but it was damned heavy. One of the cops jumped down and helped him, and the two of them managed to get it up high enough where the others could take over and pin it closed. The engine roared as Bates goosed the accelerator. Reese and the other cop climbed up and threw themselves into the truck’s long cargo bed. Someone else climbed up after Reese, and he twisted, trying to get his M4 up. It wasn’t a zombie; it was First Sergeant Plosser.

“Mind if I tag along, Reese?” the senior NCO asked.

“It’s an open party,” Reese said.

With that, Bates dropped the truck into gear. There was a metal gate in front, and he drove the truck right through it, ripping it off its hinges. There were zombies on the other side, but the hulking, olive-drab five-ton truck didn’t even slow down as it rolled right over them. The truck continued down the narrow service road that ran alongside the Bowl, then turned left, heading off overland. Everyone in the back of the truck held on for dear life as Bates steered the truck through the trees and scrub, heading in the general direction of the Hollywood Bowl Overlook, a small observation park that lay just off Mulholland Drive. The truck left a huge wake of dust behind it, and through the billowing clouds, Reese saw people running after the rig, waving their arms. Men. Women. Children.

And behind them, slower but tireless, came zombies.

The Apaches pirouetted overhead, already guns dry. Two more black dots appeared on the horizon, anti-collision lights winking in the darkening sky. Black Hawks, descending as they approached the Bowl. Reese wondered if they were going to actually attempt a landing. Plosser looked up at the approaching utility helicopters as well.

“I see the colonel’s getting a ride out,” he said, his tone dry as he held onto the side of the truck. He turned to Reese. “So, Detective. Tell me you have a plan? We heading for the Mojave?”

“Long Beach,” Reese said.

Plosser frowned. “Little late to work on your Hollywood tan, isn’t it? Gonna be night soon.”

“You like boats, Plosser?”

“Not really, But if there’s a paycheck in it, I’ll join whatever navy you want.”

Reese grunted as the big truck pushed through a copse of trees, actually knocking one right over. Its wheels spun as black exhaust erupted from its stacks, and for a moment, Reese feared the rig might get stuck. But it shuddered on, powering its way through the barricade of vegetation, then through the guardrail on the other side. Bates horsed the truck through a decidedly inelegant three point turn, and then, it was rolling down Mulholland Drive. Heading southwest, its square nose pointed in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. From up here in the hills, Reese saw the devastation that was being wrought on the darkened, powerless city. Columns of smoke rose in the air from fires that burned unabated, lighting up the city in the darkness. Helicopters of all kinds whirled across the sky.

Over thirty miles to Long Beach, he thought. A piece of cake.

TO BE CONTINUED IN

THE LAST TOWN #5: FLEEING THE DEAD