Free The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead by Stephen Knight Page A

movement, he threw aside the blanket and lowered his feet to the floor. He was still wearing his pants and a white T-shirt, the latter moist with sweat. Black socks adorned his feet, and he saw one was beginning to unravel, allowing him to glimpse one of his big toes. A nice collection of black lint was visible beneath the corner of his toenail.
    “Reese, you with me?” Bates asked. “You know where you are?”
    “What’s with the shooting?” Reese asked. His voice was barely more than a croak.
    “What do you think? The dead have been walking up on the station for the past two hours. You slept through one hell of a gunfight. I guess you sure know how to get your sleep on.” Bates lifted his head slightly as a pounding chatter tore through the air. He smiled. “Hear that? That’s a triple-barreled fifty caliber. The GAU nineteen, God’s gift to heavy duty machine guns.”
    “Oh yeah?” Reese said stupidly.
    Bates bent over and grabbed Reese’s wrinkled dress shirt and threw it across Reese’s lap. “Get dressed. We need to roll back to the hospital in fifteen minutes.”
    Reese’s heart did a flip. The hospital …
    “We’re going back?” he asked, wondering if his voice illustrated his fear.
    A shadow flitted across Bates’s face for an instant, and Reese knew then that even the stoic Sergeant Bates didn’t want to go back to the killing ground of Cedar-Sinai.
    “If you’ve got a change of clothes in your locker, you’ve maybe got enough time to take a quick shower and change into them,” Bates said. “I heard there’s a meals on wheels at the hospital. We can chow down there.”
    “Are the dead coming out of the apartments?” Reese asked, thinking of the apartment buildings across Wilcox, the ones that faced the stationhouse. “Is that what the Guard’s shooting at?”
    Bates snorted. “No, man. They’re coming down out of the hills. The poor people left or died two days ago. Now, it’s the rich people looking to take a bite out of the LAPD’s collective ass.”
     
    ###
     
    Cedar-Sinai was much the same as when Reese had left it. As he and the rest of the cops—there were fewer of them now, he noticed—stepped off the bus, the only real changes had been in the fortifications. The National Guard had been busy overnight, erecting massive walls of sandbags that housed fighting positions, decontamination areas, and funneled kill zones. A pile of bodies lay on the corner, at least six deep. It stood almost eight feet high, a gigantic mound of rotting flesh. Reese stared at it, transfixed. Even though he had long known that Los Angeles had always been a festering sore of disease and mayhem masked beneath the glitter and palm trees and the celebrity haute couture , he had never in his life expected to see bodies stacked like this anywhere in the Southland. Not even in Crenshaw or Compton during the crack epidemic of the 1980s had he come across such a sight. The bodies numbered in the hundreds, and Reese saw plenty of LAPD blue in the pile, as well as Army Combat Uniforms. A tremendous horde of flies settled on the corpses, like some sort of buzzing, localized dust storm as Guardsmen clad in protective gear loaded the bodies into a hulking five-ton truck. He saw an individual with a FEMA jacket overseeing the operation, his face hidden behind a protective mask.
    “You don’t see that every day,” Bates said as he climbed down from the bus behind Reese.
    “No kidding,” Reese responded. “I’m kind of thinking it’s not the last time we’re going to, either.”
    Bates hadn’t been kidding. There was a food truck on site, secured by Guardsmen and manned by a couple of Latino men. Reese was amazed to find that he was actually quite hungry, despite the grisly tableau on the corner.
    Looks like I’m already getting used to the zombie apocalypse. It’s just the new normal.
    A line of Black Hawks passed by, the sound of their passage echoing off the hospital buildings like grating