The Last Town (Book 3): Waiting For The Dead Read Free Page A

left. “It’s spreading, Reese. It’s spreading fast now.”
     
    SINGLE TREE, CALIFORNIA
     
    In the town council chamber, Max Booker sat with the others as they leafed through the thick binders left behind by Barry Corbett and his men. It was interesting stuff, to say the least. The plans Corbett had put together were extensive, and the materials lists were almost thirty pages long all by themselves. According to the presentation, everything had been collected and was waiting on trucks parked at various locations throughout the town. Booker knew that most of the trucks were at the airport, but others had been spotted in the parking lots of local businesses. Booker had no idea which semi-trailer contained what, but he had no doubt that “product placement” was by design, not happenstance. Judging by the plans Corbett had drawn up, nothing had been left to chance. There was little doubt on Booker’s part that the wily old fox had prepositioned everything in accordance to when and where it would be needed.
    And the diagrams themselves were works of either an inspired imagination, or a detail-oriented survivalist freak. Booker didn’t think Corbett was overly imaginative, so he automatically lumped him into the freak arena. He shook his head as he read the details. Plank steel walls twenty feet high, topped by concertina wire and surrounded on the outside by more coils of wire on the ground, called tanglefoot wire. Inside, another set of walls atop high dirt berms, from which battlements would be stationed. Trenches surrounding the outer perimeter that were ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. Inside the barriers, smaller, more modular defenses would be erected, so that incursions could be contained without the rest of the town being directly threatened. All manner of armaments were listed as well, including ammunition counts and types. Booker scanned the list, not because he was fascinated by weapons—far from it, he was never the type to be a card-carrying NRA fanatic, he was a politician—but to see just how far gone Corbett was. Seventy thousand three-inch shotgun shells with #3 buckshot. Two million rounds of M855 fifty-five grain in 5.56-millimeter. Two thousand LWRC International IC-Enhanced rifles. Two thousand Smith & Wesson M&P45 pistols. On and on it went, with more rifles, more ammunition, more instruments of violence. Booker was genuinely horrified.
    “Well, I see Mr. Corbett isn’t worried about violating any state gun laws, seeing as how he’s basically broken almost every one California has,” Chief Grady said, as if reading Booker’s mind.
    “I was just wondering that,” Booker said. “Are you going to arrest him?”
    Grady grunted and shook his head. “I don’t think that’d be a very smart thing to do right now, Mayor.”
    “Arresting that mad man would be just the smart thing to do!” Hector Aguilar said. Booker sighed internally. Aguilar was always fuming about something, and as much as Booker disliked and distrusted Barry Corbett, Hector actually hated the man with a passion. Booker knew it was nothing more than childish jealousy—Corbett was the captain of a multinational corporation which generated billions of dollars of profit every quarter, whereas Aguilar’s pharmacy and the handful of rental properties he had in town didn’t come anywhere near that. Sure, Aguilar lived better than most of the locals, but he was miserly when it came to giving back to the community. Booker thought it was oddly funny that the extremely liberal Aguilar guarded his earnings almost viciously, whereas Corbett, the living stereotype of the conservative one percent complete with Gulfstream jet, was paying it forward.
    “Why don’t we finish this first, then decide,” Chief Grady said, a reasonable tone in his voice.
    “Please,” said Gemma Washington. Her small, wire-rimmed glasses were perched low on her nose, making her look like some matronly school marm .
    “Fine, let’s go through the rest