HOWLERS (17 page)

His wife came around the bed and helped pick him up. She had never seen him like this before, physically done in. Her own fear was subsumed in the shock of seeing her husband on his knees, talking to himself.

“Honey, please tell me what you saw. What is it?” She sat him on the bed, put her hands in his.

Marvin looked at his wife. He reached up and touched her face. “People have turned into some kind of monsters. They—they —”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Just that, people are turning into something inhuman, something I’ve never seen before. Something no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It’s as if they’ve been physically altered, too.”

“Why do we have to leave? Why is Mr. Crouchback sedated?” she said. Grace looked at the bedroom door. They’d taken Crouchback into the living room and let him lie down on the couch. He was speaking gibberish, not saying anything they could understand. Marvin had found him walking up the road toward the gate of their development in the snow, barefoot, talking to himself—in fact, displaying the symptoms he’d seen in his practice all week.

“He’s sedated because I’m afraid that he might become one of them. The gibberish is a symptom. But I can’t be sure. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”

“Why do we have to leave our home, Marvin? You haven’t told me everything.”

“Because I think that we should.” He couldn’t answer her truthfully. It would frighten her. He needed his wife’s help to save their daughter and get down the mountain, to what he hoped would be safety. If she had seen Richard . . . “I think we better eat something before we go,” he said.

His wife gave him a look Marvin had never seen before. “I’ve tried to call the high school and there’s no answer. Why? Why aren’t you telling me the truth? Why aren’t they answering the phone at the high school, Marvin?”

“I’m going to go look in on Vivian,” he said. “We should leave soon. It’s best.”

“Where are we going, Marvin? At least tell me that!” his wife said.

Marvin held the door. He was exhausted. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where they should go. All he could hope was that if they went somewhere else, they could escape the nightmare around them.

“I’m not sure exactly where yet. Down the mountain,” he said and closed the door.

CHAPTER 15

Turning from Main Street, Dillon walked down a side street’s antique duckboard sidewalk. The snow piled up here and there, dumped by the morning’s violent storm. Architectural features that had been obscured by the storm—doorways, banisters, cornices—were sharply outlined by sunshine.

An old man wearing a grease-stained snowsuit left a hardware store, bumping Dillon on the way to his car. The old man pretended not to notice the pistol stuck in Dillon’s belt, or the two hanging from his double shoulder holsters. The storefronts, the parked cars, the occasional pedestrians walking to their cars or toward Main Street, were still oblivious of the danger around the corner. 

If the government would just tell people
, Dillon thought, watching the old man get in his pickup truck and drive away as if everything were still normal.

The snow banks piled against the buildings were stark white, almost painful to look at without sunglasses. Dillon, having lost his dark glasses in the crash, had to squint.

His arm had been cut when he’d stopped to help a woman save her baby from one of the things. The Howler had been about to smash the baby’s head on the ground by its legs. The mother, screaming in horror, had tried to fight the thing.  Dillon had stopped and pistol-whipped the Howler, smacking him in the side of the head. He’d managed to snatch the baby away, but the thing had sprung up and bit him on the forearm. It had torn out a mouth-sized chunk of flesh before Dillon had shot him dead in the face.

Dillon had walked with the hysterical mother, who was holding her baby close. She begged him to help her get to her car. He’d stood in the middle of Main Street covering their escape, firing at Howlers that tried to jump on the woman’s car as she pulled away.

After that, out of ammunition, he’d been forced to ignore the mayhem and chaos on Main Street or he wouldn’t survive himself. He’d had to pass people fighting for their lives, some being beaten, some in tears having seen their loved ones murdered in the most horrible way. He’d turned down the first street that looked quiet, not knowing what he would do next.

  
Keep the money
. That was number one.

Stay alive, get out of here
. There had to be places without Howlers yet. He stopped to check the pistol in his belt, pushing it down so it wouldn’t show as much.

Funny
, he thought,
me saving a sheriff—a lawman
.
Maybe it was the wrong thing to do. Might end up regretting it
.

He wondered if he was going a little crazy. Maybe, he thought. Seeing a car bend the corner and come toward him, he stopped walking and put the two canvas bags of cash down. People in the car stared at him as they passed. Dillon looked at them carefully. One street could be normal, while on the next Howlers were overrunning everything, dragging people out of their cars and killing them with their bare hands. He looked up the street. It looked quiet. He picked up the bags again and walked on.

He glanced into a storefront beauty parlor as he walked by. A lot of middle-aged ladies stared at him from inside the shop, their heads trapped in old-fashioned conical metal hair dryers, oblivious to what was happening. He could only imagine what it would be like when the things got in there. He put down one of the canvas moneybags and waved at the women from the street.

“Get out!” he yelled.

They looked back at him stupidly through the window. One of them touched another on the arm and gave him a look.

“Get out, I said. While you can!”

Two of the old ladies, prune-faced, burst out laughing, thinking he was a drunk. Dillon stared at them, then opened the door of the salon. It was acrid-smelling, as if they’d been frying rats on a hot plate.

“There are Howlers, here in town. Down on the main street. They’ll be up here soon. Get out!” he said. He looked at the gaggle of ladies. They all looked like his mother under the hair dryers. Almost faceless, just eyes and chins. They’d stopped laughing when they saw the pistols.

He walked into the beauty parlor. It was warm; half a dozen ladies were under the dryers and more were having their hair cut in another room. The smell was worse here, almost as bad as a dead Howler, Dillon thought. The hairdressers, all young women, had stopped cutting hair and were staring at Dillon, their mouths open in shock.

“Listen, you better get out of here before I call the cops,” a young girl said. She wore black leotards and a white blouse. She held a spray can in one hand, and was talking on her cell phone, cradled on her shoulder, as she worked.

“You have a few minutes. If you leave now, you might make it,” Dillon said to all of them. “They’ll come up here too.”

The girl put down her can of hair spray, hung up on her call, and dialed 911.

Dillon watched her and started to laugh at the stupidity of it. “Go ahead and call! They’ll be picking that phone out of your ass when they get here.” He turned around and walked out of the shop’s front door, back out into the blinding sunlight of a suddenly cloudless sparkling blue sky. They were doomed, he thought.

He turned back and looked in the salon’s window. One of the women went back to her
People
magazine, sneering and muttering about people needing jobs.

    He hefted the moneybags and walked on.
Quit being a stupid shit. No one is going to believe you til they see them.
He glanced down the street. If he stayed here too long, he’d be dead meat too, he thought.  He began to walk by the cars parked on the lane, looking for one that had been left open. He found one with a jean jacket left on the front seat. He put the jacket on, covering his shoulder holsters so they wouldn’t be so noticeable.

He watched an old station wagon drive by, a mother and her children in the front seat, totally oblivious of what was in front of them on Main Street. He couldn’t hijack someone’s car, not now. He was a son-of-a-bitch, but he wasn’t heartless. He thought of going back to the used car lot he’d seen, where he knew he could hot-wire something and get out of here.

Then he saw the sign down the narrow snow-filled street: All American Gun Shop. Dillon crossed the street, snow crunching under his cowboy boots. He would need ammo, and lots of it.

He saw picketers in front of the gun store. Dillon looked at them incredulously. Mostly young kids, they looked at Dillon and asked him to join the protest. He’d stared at them, the bags of money in his hands, not knowing whether to laugh or what.

“Guns kill,” a young Latin girl said to him. She saw the pistol tucked into his jeans and backed away. The girl moved back into the safety of the moving queue.

“You all better get out of here!” Dillon shouted. “And you’ll need guns and ammo! That’s what I’m doing. The Howlers are down the street, right down there, on that main drag. I just came down from there.” He put the bags of money down and spoke in an earnest tone of voice. He didn’t want the Howlers to take the young girl, or any of the kids.

The crowd of twenty or so young people looked at him wide-eyed. One of them, a tall boy with pimples and red hair, burst out laughing. Some of the others began to laugh, too.

“He’s drunk,” the red-headed boy said.

“No, I’m not neither,” Dillon said. “I said there’s Howlers right down on the main street, they’re bound to get up here too! You got to get one of these and protect yourselves!” He ripped the automatic out from where he’d tucked it in the front of his jeans.

The grins on the faces of the young people turned to fear. One of the girls screamed and backed away, held around the waist by her boyfriend who’d come down the line to protect her. All the kids backed away down the sidewalk en masse.

Dillon heard the old-school brass bell attached to the store’s door, and felt something stick him in the ribs. He knew right away it was a weapon of some kind.

“Boy, put that down,” a voice said.

Dillon turned around and looked over the top of the head of the man, who was much shorter, holding the shotgun on him. The older man had a salt and pepper flat top and wore a red flannel shirt. His eyes were blue.  Dillon saw a look he recognized. He dropped the gun on the wooden sidewalk. The automatic clattered at his feet. The shotgun’s barrel was level and pointed at his stomach.

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone. I was just trying to warn them, mister,” Dillon said.

“What do you want here, boy?”

“Just some ammo, sir. And I’ll pay for it.”

The older man holding the shotgun looked down at the two canvas sacks at Dillon’s feet.

“Mister, I need that pistol back. I swear I didn’t mean no harm to anyone.”

“What do you need it for? You going to rob me?”

“No, sir. I don’t think I would have been standing out here shouting at people if I intended to rob you, would I?”

  “No, I guess not.” 

In the store window’s reflection, Dillon saw three Howlers coming around the corner. They wore gym shorts and t-shirts, but he could tell right away what they were because of the spit hanging from their open mouths.

One of the Howlers stopped in the middle of the street, threw its head back and began to make their sound, half human and half animal/monkey scream.

“You better shoot them,” Dillon said.

The man holding the shotgun looked at Dillon, then at the Howlers in the middle of the snow-covered street. “What did you say?”

“I said you better shoot those—those things,” Dillon said. The Howler stopped calling. “He’s calling more of them. There’ll be a whole bunch of them up here in a minute if you don’t stop him from calling like that.” Dillon bent down to pick up his pistol.

“Touch that, boy, and I’ll cut you in two,” Stewart said.

The protesters were looking at the Howlers standing in the street. All three Howlers squatted in the middle of the road. It was the first time Dillon had seen them do that, wait for more Howlers to show up. They were learning. They were learning fast. They had also changed a little bit since he’d seen them in Elko. Their arms were somehow longer than human arms, and their faces heavier, the jaws slightly thicker, like something Dillon had seen in a book.

“Boys, get out of that street!” Mr. Stewart yelled. “Hey, boys! I said get out of the street, that’s not funny. We got a lunatic here.”

Dillon waited as long as he could, but when the older man turned to look at the Howlers again, Dillon made his move. He elbowed the shotgun barrel away from him and with his other hand he swung out and caught the older man with a right to the jaw. The man crashed to the ground, out cold. Dillon held the shotgun by the barrel and then took it in hand, looking down at the man on the sidewalk. He pushed through the crowd of kids and stepped down into the snowy lane.

The three Howlers were crouched together like apes in a zoo. Dillon looked down toward the main drag, then kept walking. He raised the shotgun. One of the Howlers sprang in the air at him. Dillon fired. The other two stood up. Dillon shot a fat one in the head, took it clean off at the shoulders in a red haze. He leveled the shotgun on the other that had charged, running along the ground on all fours. Dillon held his fire. He hated Howlers and wanted this one in close before he killed it. He waited while the thing charged him.

The Howler used its arms to propel itself into the air. Dillon waited for it to get only inches from the shotgun barrel before he fired. Screams of horror echoed behind him. Bits of Howler sprayed Dillon’s face. It was splattered and bloody when he walked back up to the sidewalk, all three Howlers dead, their bodies lying in the lane behind him.

The protesters, running away, were halfway down the block. Dillon called after them, but it was too late. They’d all run toward Main Street, the exact wrong direction, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Jesus, what did you do that for?” The old man was holding Dillon’s pistol on him. Dillon watched the protesters running toward certain death.

“God damn it, why doesn’t anyone wake up?” Dillon said. He turned around to face the pistol leveled at him by the older man.

“You’re an animal.” The man was pointing the gun at Dillon’s face. He pulled the hammer back and wanted to pull the trigger.

Dillon watched him, unmoved. He knew the gun was empty. “It’s not what you think, old man. Those weren’t teenage kids you saw, they were Howlers, and they don’t give a shit about humans. You understand? They’ll kill us, or we kill them, it real simple. That pistol is empty. You better go get some ammo for it. Those things howled to their friends, and once they howl like that, more of them will show up very soon.”

“I can’t kill you, you’re a lunatic,” Mr. Stewart said. He put the gun down “You’re a lunatic!” A sheriff’s car pulled up the street and stopped in front of the shop. Quentin got out of the car holding the M-16 by its handle. He had his bulletproof vest on. There was a dead body of a Howler, a woman, on the hood of the car; he’d hit her as he’d left Main Street and turned up the lane.

“The vest is a waste of time,” Dillon said. “They can’t shoot back.”

“Mike, I need all the ammo you got for this thing. And you’ll have to leave. You and Rebecca. You can come with me. You’ll have to leave the store, right now.”

“God damn, Sheriff, I’m glad to see you. This lunatic just killed three boys in cold blood. Out there in the street.”

Dillon turned and looked at the bodies in the snowy lane.

“What’s your name?” Quentin said.

“Dillon.”

“Is that the money you stole from the bank?”

“Sure is.”

“Thanks—I mean, for saving my ass back there. You could have let him kill me.”

“Didn’t see any point to it,” Dillon said. “I was in Nevada when they overran Elko. I hate ’em. Worse than the law.”

“Sheriff, have I gone crazy, or didn’t you hear me? This lunatic—”

“Shut up, Mike. It’s not what you think. Those weren’t boys, not anymore. They were something else. I know. They’re down on Main Street right now, hundreds of them. They killed everybody in the K-Mart an hour ago. Everyone in the Copper Penny. They’re all over the state and there’s no law to help us. All we got is each other. You understand? Him included,” Quentin said, nodding at Dillon.