The Last Town (Book 1): Rise of the Dead (8 page)

“No, sir, Mister Cranston. There is not a whiff of bullshit here. In fact, Los Angeles has been in receipt of the environmental notification forms for quite some time, and after some negotiations with the Inyo County environmental agencies, the project was approved two months ago.” Rollins smiled beneath his big mustache, and his teeth were blazingly white. “In fact, we’re even going to improve the taxiway and pour some new helipads for you. I’m happy to make your acquaintance, as I’ll be the project manager.”

Cranston laughed again. “You’re good, Rollins. You’re good.” He opened the envelope and pulled out its contents. Several dozen pages were inside, bearing the logo of the City of Los Angeles. “Very professional. But I’m sure, very phony, too.”

“Yeah, I was told you’d probably say that,” Rollins said. “I was told you were kind of a prick, too. Seems like both tellings were correct. You might want to contact your mayor or first selectman or whatever it is you have in this piss-poor town of yours, because they’ll probably want to know about your desire to torpedo the airport upgrade project. I’ll be waiting in my truck while the rest of the boys tie up a California interstate, just because you don’t know the difference between shit and shinola.”

Cranston heard Enrico chortle a bit behind him, and for a moment, he just gaped at Rollins. The smaller man didn’t smile, he just turned back to his truck and climbed into the cab.

LOS ANGELES, CA

Reese met the first of the National Guardsmen as they hopped out of an Army UH-60 Black Hawk that settled to the top floor of the parking garage. As he stood there, battered by the helicopter’s rotor wash, he saw another Black Hawk orbiting overhead, running a racetrack pattern around Hollywood. Reese wondered just how many soldiers would be joining the LAPD in this venture.

A short, swarthy man in a full Army Combat Uniform jogged toward Reese, leading the dozen or so Guardsmen behind him. Reese and the three uniformed patrolmen waited, squinting against the dust the Black Hawk kicked up as it lifted into the air and roared away from the parking garage. The Guardsman had subdued captain’s insignia on his helmet and uniform, and he carried an assault rifle and a gigantic rucksack that looked almost as big as Reese’s first apartment out of college.

“Hi, sir. I’m Captain Bobby Narvaez, Alpha Company, First Battalion, One Eighty-Fourth Infantry Regiment. Are you Officer Reese?” the soldier asked. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties, and he wore a pair of some of the most god-awful eyeglasses Reese had ever seen.

“I’m Detective Three Reese, Los Angeles Police Department. Hollywood Station homicide desk,” Reese said, admitting to himself that his response wasn’t nearly as impressive as Narvaez’s introduction.

Narvaez extended his hand, and Reese shook it. The soldier’s grip was strong as he pumped Reese’s arm three times.

“Good to meetcha, Detective. In about three hours, we’ll have around ninety troops on station. Will you guys have room for all of us?”

Reese wasn’t expecting that. “Uh, I don’t know. That wasn’t already arranged?”

“Only a platoon was supposed to arrive, but we got new orders to field the entire company,” Narvaez said. “Not from nothing, but if we know where our home turf is, the easier things will be.”

“I’ll find out about that,” Reese said, having to shout as the second Black Hawk came in to land. As it settled onto the parking lot, he saw two more helicopters flying toward the area. They were different birds, though, twin-rotored CH-47 Chinooks.

“Those are carrying our Humvees,” Narvaez said, following Reese’s gaze. “Two in each bird. The aviation guys used to sling ’em underneath, but it makes the Chinooks too slow. Turns out the special operations aviation guys load them inside, so we clipped the tactic from them.”

“Okay,” Reese said.

“You hear about New York?” Narvaez shouted as he watched the second Black Hawk disgorge more Guardsmen onto the concrete. One of his men waved them over, and the new arrivals hustled toward the group as the Black Hawk powered up and pulled out.

“What about it?”

“Lower Manhattan’s on fire,” he said. “Good-bye, Occupy Wall Street. They’re starting to move federal troops into the city now, because the NYPD and the Guard units down there can’t keep the stenches back.”

“Stenches?”

“Yeah, it’s what we call the zombies.”

Reese snorted. “Zombies, Captain? Really? You mean this just isn’t a bath salt epidemic?”

Narvaez looked at Reese with a frown. “Detective, are you plugged in to what’s happening in the rest of the world at all?”

“Hollywood’s my beat.”

Narvaez grunted. “Huh. Okay. Well anyway, Europe is about to tip over into the Dark Ages all over again. Russia’s pretty much gone—there’s a huge artillery fight going on outside of Moscow. Back east, there are substantial infestations of stenches now, in just about every metropolitan area, but New York City has it the worst in the nation. Two days ago, everything was under control, and the NYPD and New York Guard were exterminating the stenches wherever they found them. Then the balloon popped, and now there are thousands of them in the city. Maybe even hundreds of thousands, by now.”

“No shit,” Reese said, not particularly interested but keenly aware that the new information did nothing to diminish the sense of anxiety he felt. As a homicide detective, Reese had pretty much seen it all. In a city the size of Los Angeles, and a division as busy as Hollywood, he’d been exposed to a litany of heinous crimes, from gang killings that no one cared about to white-collar murder among the Hollywood elite which made the front pages. Solving homicides required attention to detail and a mastery of several disciplines, including investigatory and forensic. Zombies or “stenches” weren’t something Reese had any experience with.

Until that guy ate his baby ...

“Yeah, no shit,” Narvaez said. “Air travel in the east is shut down, there’s a ground stop at every airport. I would imagine that’s going to be nationwide in a couple of hours. Airplanes are probably the best way to spread infected persons around the country, you know?” The soldier pointed toward the first Chinook as it slowly advanced toward the parking garage. “Okay, you guys might want to stand back a bit, these Chinooks have a rotor wash that moves at about a hundred ten miles an hour. Let us get our vehicles out, and then we’ll figure out the surface movement to your police station.”

“Surface movement?” Reese asked. “We can just drive or walk there, Captain.”

“Nothing’s as simple as that, Detective. Once you have the military in the mix, everything gets complex.”

“Good to know,” Reese said, thinking that things were complex enough already.

SINGLE TREE, CA

Norton had just watched the lone FBO attendant at Single Tree’s airport tow his Phenom into the hangar and was making to follow him in to do a final inspection when the roar of approaching jet engines caught his attention. He turned at the hangar threshold just in time to see a Gulfstream G650 coast in on its incredibly wide wings, its big flaps lowered like two tapering billboards to slow the massive jet so it could land. The engines went from a roar to a full-on bellow as the massive jet’s thrust reversers were activated. Along with judicious braking from the pilots, the sleek, sixty-seven-million-dollar aircraft slowed to taxiing speed well before it reached the end of the runway and executed a smart one-hundred-eighty-degree turn so it could amble back to the taxiway. Its landing lights gleamed brightly in the late afternoon sun.

“Well, I guess you’re not the only jet driver to come in today,” said the FBO attendant, a slender Mexican man named Enrico. “You ever meet Mister Corbett, Mister Norton?”

Norton nodded. “Oh, yeah. He’s okay once you get past the sourpuss Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD. We actually worked together, once. I hired him as a consultant for that TV series I did five years ago—”

“The one about the Marines?
Khe Sanh
? On HBO?”

“That’s the one.”

“That show was
awesome
, Mister Norton! I didn’t know you did that! How was it working with Mister Corbett?”

Norton only shrugged. Truth be told, Norton and Corbett got along all right, though the older man had no trouble telling Norton that some of his tricks were all bullshit to please the suits at HBO and grab some ratings. It had been the network’s highest-rated miniseries since
Band of Brothers
over a decade before, so Corbett had apparently been right.

As the jet drew nearer to the parking area, Enrico grabbed the orange wands.

“Sorry, Mister Norton, I’ve gotta go,” he said, tucking the wands under one arm so he could grab his earmuffs with both hands and slide them over his ears.

“No problem, Enrico. Thanks, man.”

Enrico hopped on the small tow motor and drove it out of the hangar. Norton was happy to see he’d had the presence of mind of uncouple it from the Phenom’s nose gear before taking off. Norton watched the big, beautiful Gulfstream roll into the parking area as Enrico parked the tow motor and hopped off. Using the wands, he guided the silver-on-white jet into position on the pad, its two large turbofan engines wailing. It finally came to a halt, and the turbines wound down into a descending growl. Norton had to admit, he was envious. Corbett’s jet was one beautiful bird, but it had been built for men and women who preferred the cabin to the cockpit. Norton’s Phenom 100 suited him just fine.

He turned away from the big Gulfstream as its boarding ramp descended and tended to his own aircraft. The plane had already been refueled, so that was taken care of. He placed chocks in front and behind all of the tires, put the shrouds over the pitot tubes, and using a small stepladder, placed the bright red plugs into the engine intakes, just to ensure no dirt or debris managed to enter the engines. There was nothing worse than sucking some foreign object into a jet engine where the turbine blades were rotating several thousand times a minute.

“Hey, Norton. What’s your net worth today?” said a gruff voice.

Norton finished tying off the plug in the number two engine and descended the small stepladder. He turned and faced Barry Corbett, watching as the taller, older man looked up at the Phenom jet beside him.

“About four hundred million. If the banks are still around tomorrow and the markets are open, maybe I’ll be another million or so richer. How about you?”

“Oh, I stopped keeping track after nine billion,” Corbett said. He reached out and put his hand on the side of the Phenom’s pointed nose. “You know, you take the seats out of this thing, and you’d have yourself a fighter jet.”

“That’s why I fly it. We should take a spin sometime.”

“Going to be a long wait for that. You planning on staying for a while?”

Norton folded up the stepladder and carried it toward the rear of the hangar. “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

“National airspace is going to be sanitized in three hours,” Corbett said.

Norton stopped and looked back at him. Corbett leaned against the Phenom casually, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. He crossed his skinny, leathery arms across his chest. Despite his age, Norton still got the impression Corbett’s muscles moved like pythons under his polo shirt.

“Say again?” he asked.

Corbett smiled cryptically. “All civilian aircraft east of the mighty Mississip are grounded. No new flights have departed in two hours. In another three hours or so, the FAA and Homeland Security are going to start scrubbing the rest of the airspace. By late tonight, the only planes in the sky will be military.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Norton asked. He thought of Chris Simpkiss, who was still probably flying people back and forth in his JetRanger.

“You know very well the most valuable commodity money can buy is information,” Corbett said. “Though some information is a lot more expensive than others. So if you were planning on just having yourself a twelve-thousand-dollar burger at the Burger Hop, you might want to consider getting the hell out of here before the curtain falls.”