HOWLERS (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Miles Hunt, tall and thin, was sipping a Starbucks double latte. Standing alone, he looked out from the newspaper’s well-lit third-floor city room. At 6:00 a.m. it was still dark in Nevada City, dawn twenty minutes away. A hulking snowplow passed in front of the Nevada City Herald’s new six-story building. The newspaper served Nevada City and scores of the surrounding small communities across the Northern Sierra. The cub reporter wore a black turtleneck sweater his fiancé had bought him in New York City, in an attempt to dress him à la
Esquire
magazine. Miles sported shoulder-length blond hair that girls loved, his Nordic good looks a gift from his Swedish mother.

Miles touched his face and then his ears, which were still ice cold. He’d driven into work from his parents’ home in Timberline with his Mustang’s top down because he couldn’t afford to get it repaired.

Why don’t you get a better job? Why? Any job would be better than this.
You have to leave town and go to San Francisco. Think up an app! Sell it to Apple for millions. What would it be? An app that eats student loan data! An app that blocks wedding-planners’ irritating emails, like the ones I’ve been getting all week: “Roses or Carnations? Boutonnieres for your guys—of course!

He’d begun forwarding questions relating to his upcoming nuptials to his fiancée, a budding fashion designer who worked for Lululemon. His fiancée was the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer, who was paying a small fortune for their wedding—solely, Miles realized, to impress the man’s horde of Gucci-clad friends, who expected a show. When Miles suggested they not have such an extravagant wedding, and instead donate some of the saved money to charity, the family—including his fiancée—had burst into laughter, thinking he was joking. They were all about the show of power.

Gazing out the window, Miles thought about the murders in Timberline and a chill went down his back. Like Willis Good, he too would soon be a young husband with responsibilities.  He’d come to realize, too, that his fiancée expected to live as if Miles were wealthy. She was already looking at homes they couldn’t possibly afford. This was it, he thought: student loans and a big fat mortgage. Maybe Willis had been under financial stress and snapped? He wondered what had happened to make Willis murder his wife and children. Willis had to be crazy. 

He’d covered the story. The accused murderer, Good, had been a close childhood friend, and someone he’d thought he’d known well. If he’d not gone to the house and seen the family’s dead bodies, including the couple’s two little boys, with his own two eyes, he would not have believed it.

“What do we really know about the world?” Howard Price, the Herald’s managing editor asked, walking up behind him.

Miles stepped away from the window, gladly putting the murders in Timberline and his fully-mortgaged future aside.

“Really, what do we know, young man? How do you know that CNN isn’t all fiction, the whole thing?” Price said. He looked at Miles self-satisfied, his fifty-something face fleshy, robbing it of authority. Price was on his favorite tangent: the remarkable and ever present conspiracy of: fill-in-the-blank.

“And don’t forget Building Seven,” Miles said, “whatever you do.”

“Exactly,” Price said, turning serious. “Building Seven wasn’t hit by anything but debris and it collapsed like a house of cards! I watched it myself that morning. Concrete and steel don’t just collapse, son. There was a small fire in the building. Hundreds of engineers are saying the official government explanations are scientifically impossible.” Price walked away, checking his Facebook page on his new iPhone.

Miles had heard it all before. His editor had been fired from his six-figure salary at the LA Times because Price had refused to put down the 9-11 story long after everyone else in the country had moved on. Even in kooky, hippie-dippy Nevada City, most of Price’s colleagues considered him a tin-foil-hat-wearing wing nut. When Price tried to get his reporters to read the reports issued by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, no one bothered. The fact was, no one—even professional journalists—cared about the story. Mainstream journalists who still cared, like Price, found themselves without employment, lucky if they could find jobs on small-town papers.

“I don’t know,” Miles said, walking to his messy-with-stuff metal desk. “But if it’s true about
Dancing With The Stars
being rigged, then I don’t want to go on living.” He enjoyed pulling Price’s chain.

“Don’t believe seventy-five percent of what you read, or what you hear on the Tell-U-Vision. You want to know my formula? I take everything and I divide it by the BS Factor,” Price said, taking off his glasses. His voice trailed off, lost in the clatter coming from one of the paper’s antiquated fax machines. Price opened a window on his computer and beckoned Miles over.

“Look at this,” Price said.

United Press International

Big Bear, California

Mass hysteria has hit Big Bear, California and several small towns in Southern California.

People in the town of Big Bear have gone missing, say their loved ones. They’re missing in Bakersfield, Needles, Los Angeles, and hundreds of other small towns in Southern California. Not just one or two people, reports say, but tens of thousands in the last 48 hours, according to police sources. Relatives of the missing have jammed the police station in Big Bear looking for their loved ones who, they say, have literally disappeared off the streets and homes of this high-desert community, 70 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Authorities have no explanation for the disappearances.

“Now, even I don’t believe that,” Price said. “I’ll call my friends at the
Times
and they’ll get a big kick out of this. You’ll see.” Price looked at the copy and shook his head. “I think it’s some kind of New Year’s joke.”

“It’s the first of February,” Miles said. He lifted the lid on his cup of coffee and peeked at it.

“We’ll run it on page two. Follow up. It’s a good story, win or lose,” Price said.

“You’re kidding,” Miles said.

“Miles, will you please stop questioning authority. We are a small country newspaper. You are a small-town reporter; we are losing readers every day to Oprah Winfrey and unwashed, hare-brained bloggers, not to mention Twitter. Now get on the damn phone and get the story from—where is it?”

“Big Bear,” Miles said. “I thought you were just telling me how I’m supposed to question authority.”

“Don’t argue. And don’t forget you have to be at the Genesoft news conference at eleven sharp this morning. They have several new food products to announce. We’re going to give them a full page this Sunday,” Price said. “I promised the CEO, yesterday at lunch.”

“That’s not news, that’s public relations,” Miles said.

“Welcome to the news business,” Price said. “They scratch our backs—”

“We scratch theirs,” Miles repeated Price’s favorite saw. When he was first hired, fresh out of journalism school, the young reporter had been shocked to learn how much PR copy the
Herald
used. The paper often published whole stories that had originated in some big New York City PR firm, and were part of an expensive US-wide PR campaign.

Price turned around and left for his corner office. Miles printed up the UPI copy and went to his desk. He underlined the first four towns mentioned, then went to his computer and Googled Big Bear’s municipal listings for the police department’s non-emergency number. He dialed it. No one answered.

Well, so far, it’s no lie
, Miles thought and hung up.

        *   *   *

From his office window, Dr. Marvin Poole watched the string of colored Christmas lights twinkle out on Main Street. The doctor could see his new Volvo station wagon where he’d parked it earlier that morning, with several inches of new snow on the hood and roof. A sheriff’s car drove by in the misty grey penumbra. Poole saw T.C. McCauley, one of his patients, at the wheel. He caught a glimpse of Willis Good in the back of the patrol car and he shook his head. He’d treated the Good children only a few days before. He couldn’t believe what he’d read in the paper: that Willis had murdered his family in cold blood—all of them.

He made a note to call Willis’s mother and see if he could do anything for her. He’d always had a weak spot for the poor woman and her son.

“I have CDC on line three, doctor.” Marvin Poole heard his receptionist on the intercom and he reached for his desk phone, chagrined. It was hard to call a place where he’d once worked. He missed his former life; he missed walking into the middle of an epidemic in the backside of nowhere. But he was younger then, he reminded himself, and picked up the phone. Working at CDC was a job for young doctors.

“Doctor Poole, good morning, this is Dr. Franzblau. I got your message. I was intrigued. We haven’t had any cases of spinal meningitis west of the Rockies this year.”

“I’m not sure that’s it,” Poole said. “I spoke to the Virology department at UC Davis and we were discussing it. There was some disagreement. I’m a virologist, but right now I run a family practice. I used to work in Atlanta for you guys, though.” Dr. Poole slipped that in.

“Really,” Franzblau said. Marvin could tell that Franzblau could care less. “What division?”

“Childhood diseases. I was just out of medical school.”

“Yes,” Franzblau said. “Mosley is the head man now.”

“I’m sure you’re busy, so I’ll try and make this quick,” Marvin said. He watched his secretary push open his office door and put down a note by the phone.

The waiting room is
bursting
.

The word “bursting” was underlined twice in red.

“Well, as a matter of fact I am,” Franzblau said. “What do you have, doctor?”

“Sixteen cases that look like bacterial-related spinal meningitis. All acute. Just developed symptoms overnight. Ages range from ten up to fifty-five. So it’s all over the map, age-wise. There is lower-tract discomfort, vomiting, confusion, seizures. But here is the odd, but signature symptom: numbness in the extremities. All the patients complain of numbness. And copious amounts of phlegm. Something I’ve never seen before.”

“You’re in Northern California?”

“Yes, a small town in the Sierra Nevada—Timberline,” Poole said. “Backend of nowhere.”

Marvin could tell the voice on the other line didn’t agree with his call of meningitis. He’d been around doctors long enough to tell when interest turned to skepticism. They usually just shut up then.

“You say in your email there have been no deaths. My guess is that we have a flu strain that is off our radar—hence the phlegm. But we’ll check the blood work. Send it in,” Franzblau said in a slightly patronizing tone.

“I’ve got several samples here on my desk, ready to send,” Poole said.

“We have a lab in . . .  let me see. Bakersfield.” Franzblau gave him the address.

“One other thing, doctor,” Poole said. “All the patients are suffering from neology, young and old. They are acting, quite suddenly, like schizoids.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Poole said. “They all start speaking gibberish. Patients who were perfectly sane. A lot of them talk about hearing God, or the Devil, speaking directly to them. The excessive phlegm seems to come on at the same time as the neology.”

“All right, let’s do the blood work-up. We’ll go from there. I’ll have someone here contact you as soon as we have something. You were right to call, doctor,” Franzblau said, his tone reversing to one of real concern.

Poole hung up the phone. His gut told him he’d missed something. He looked at the snack he’d bought from the new vegan restaurant in town: a bran muffin and a cup of coffee that he hadn’t had time to touch. He opened the white bag and took out his coffee.

He’d ruled out
E. coli
days before. Several of the patients had switched to pasteurized drinks since the last
E. coli
scare had hit the Whole Foods Market in Nevada City. Several patients had been in San Francisco and had just arrived in town, with no strong connection to anything in Timberline itself. He’d carefully queried them all about what they’d eaten, and whether they had traveled recently.

He opened the bag again, looked inside, and stood up. Could be some kind of reaction to the meth lab that had blown up east of town. He went back to his desk and picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office.
I was so stupid. I should have checked before. Of course, the meth lab. That was a huge explosion . . . toxic smoke and gases drifted right over town?

        *   *   *

From his second-story cell in the police station, Willis Good watched the Placer county sheriff’s car pull into the parking lot. He knew the sheriff’s car had come to transport him to Sacramento. He watched T.C. McCauley get out of his patrol car and cross the street, heading for the Copper Penny Cafe for breakfast. Willis counted the hand-painted signs on Main Street: Ski Shop, Nancy’s Five and Dime, The Copper Penny Café, and his own sign—Willis Good, Attorney At Law—that hung next to the dry cleaners on the corner, directly across from the café.

   Watching the familiar street, the horror of the last twenty-four hours seemed that much more impossible to comprehend. But he knew it was not a dream. What had happened up at his house, two miles outside of town, was real: his wife and children were dead.

Willis closed his eyes. He saw a flash of himself with the ax in his hand. The red splatter on the snow of the driveway. The hatchet sunk into his wife’s chest, going deep—the horrible sound it made splitting her sternum—both his hands on the handle. The blank look in her eyes. The horrible ribbon of spit hanging from her lips. The blow from the ax had only seemed to make her mad. He fought his wife back, trying to get their children in the car and away from their mother. He’d failed to save them.

He opened his eyes.

“That wasn’t my Ann,” he told himself out loud. “That was something that looked like Ann.” But it wasn’t Ann—whatever it was. Willis looked out on the street again, as he had all night, trying to find an explanation to the horrible events he’d witnessed. He saw Ann, smashing into the car where he’d hidden the children. She was so strong—like a man, the ax-head planted deep in her chest. No, even stronger, like some horrible superwoman.

Willis gave up trying to explain it. He didn’t know the answer, and he’d always been good at finding answers. Problem solving had gotten him scholarships—first to Yale, then to Cambridge, then to Harvard Law School. But no one had ever given him a problem like this one.

He heard his wife again smashing the windows of the car with her bare hands, punching through the glass, and the terrible howling sound she’d made. It wasn’t like any human sound he’d ever heard.

“Willis, your mother is downstairs in the office.”

Willis turned from the window. He knew he must still look like what he had been, until yesterday afternoon when he’d killed his wife: a successful young attorney. The deputy in front of him was someone he’d grown up with. The two young men looked at each other.

“I got your mom in Quentin’s office. She—well, she’s very upset, Willis.”

Willis nodded.

“Eric, you have to go home and get Gina and the kids and leave Timberline. NOW. Okay? Right away!” Willis said.

“Willis, I can’t just go get my wife and kids and leave town.”

“Eric, listen to me! Please! You don’t understand. Something is terribly wrong here.”

“Willis, look. I know what you’re going to say. I’m your friend. We go all the way back to Ms. Pond’s first-grade class, remember?”

Willis nodded.