HOWLERS (20 page)

Quentin looked at the young man and nodded.

“I tried to stop her, Sheriff. I guess that thing was a friend of hers. Did you know her?” Bell asked. “I found her over there in that house. I—”

“She was my daughter,” Quentin said.

Bell stopped in mid-sentence. Everything that had happened to him in the last twelve hours finally seemed to break through. He thought of his sergeant, and how things had been, and what they’d become: the man in front of him had had to shoot his own daughter.

Dillon, unfazed by the fall from the cruiser, was facing down the street, his Thompson pointed out in front of him. More Howlers were coming from other houses. They’d heard the call.

“We better get going,” Quentin said, still looking at his dead daughter. He took Lacy by the arm. She was weeping.

“Stop crying,” Quentin said.  “Are you listening to me, Lacy? I’m not going to lose you, too! Do you understand me? Lacy. Answer me! You have to stop crying and help me. Do you understand? I need you to listen to me.  Do you understand? I need you!”

Lacy looked at her father and then at her sister’s body lying in the snow.

“Yes, I understand,” she said finally. “I’m cold, Daddy.” Quentin handed Bell his Thompson, took off his coat and draped it over his daughter’s shoulders. He looked at Lacy; she looked disheveled, her sweater filthy. He realized, horrified, that something had happened to her. He noticed her car was parked in front of the house and that it must have been parked there for hours; its roof was covered in snow.

“Good. All right. Lieutenant, can you travel?”

“You don’t think I’m staying here, do you, Sheriff?” he said.

Dillon walked up to them. He had his weapon pitched over his shoulder, his hand on the stock. The snow was whirling around him.

“Well, now what? There are about sixty more of those things coming down from the center of town. I guess they got really good hearing,”

Quentin looked down toward Main Street. He could see a group of Howlers coming toward them, some were running in that awful ape-way using their knuckles. “I told Mike Stewart we’d come back for Rebecca and him,” Quentin said.

“You might as well walk on water,” Dillon said. “You’re low on gas. There’s no power; the gas stations are useless without power. If you go back into town, how are you going to get back out?”

“I said I’d go back,” Quentin said. “So I’m going back. Lacy. Does the Volkswagen have gas? Your car? Does it have gas?” He’d seen his daughter’s VW parked on the corner where she’d left it.

“Yes.”

“Okay, I want you and the Lieutenant to go to the Phelps ranch. You know Chuck’s place, his cabin? Lacy, listen to me. You know Chuck’s place?”

“Yes,” she said.

“All right, I want you and the Lieutenant to take the Volkswagen. I want you to take the old Curtis road. It should have been plowed this morning, so it will still be clear. There’s no reason for the things to be way out there yet. I want you to go to Chuck’s cabin and wait for me. Do you understand? You can go with them if you want,” Quentin said, turning to look at Dillon.

“Daddy, I don’t want to leave you. Please!”

“Honey, I want you to go to Chuck’s place. You’ll be safe there. Please. I have to go back and get Rebecca and her father. I promised I’d go back for them. I can’t leave them back there in town. I’ll come out to Chuck’s as soon as I get Rebecca and her dad.”

“I don’t understand,” Lacy said. She put her arms around her father’s waist and began to cry. She wanted to tell him what they’d done to her, but she couldn’t say any of it.

Bell pulled her gently off of her father.

“It’ll be all right,” Bell said. “It’ll be all right. I’ll drive. You just tell me how to get there.”

A group of Howlers came around the closest corner. They’d been telephone linemen; one of them still wore his hard hat. All three of them got down on their haunches in preparation to howl. Dillon turned and walked toward them. He realized he might be low on ammunition. He jogged back to the squad car. One of the Howlers was getting up as Dillon tried to pull the shotgun off the dashboard of the squad car, deciding to use it. Bell walked toward the three Howlers and opened fire on them with the Thompson. Dillon, standing at the patrol car, watched the three things torn apart by the bullets as they got off their haunches and tried to run at Bell. Lacy began to scream. When the firing stopped, Quentin walked to the squad car and unlocked the shotgun from the dashboard, allowing Dillon to grab it.

“You don’t have to come,” Quentin said. “You should probably go with them. I probably won’t make it.”

Dillon looked at him, then reached inside the patrol car and grabbed one of the moneybags. He ran toward the VW with it. Quentin watched him, expecting him to get in with Bell and his daughter. But in a moment he was back, without the moneybag.

“I told them to take care of it for me,” Dillon said. “I don’t trust you.” Dillon broke out laughing, popped out his Thompson’s magazine and started to reload, pulling shells from his pants pocket. Plenty more Howlers stood between him and that blonde he’d seen in the gun store.

Quentin got behind the wheel of the patrol car and turned the car around and pointed it toward Main Street. He checked the gas gauge; he had a quarter tank left. He’d meant to get gas that morning on the way into town and had forgotten, and now it was probably too late. The pumps weren’t working at any of the local gas stations because the power grid had gone down. Quentin stopped the car in the middle of the street.

He looked over at Dillon, who was loading his Thompson’s second magazine, his fingers working quickly, the box of shells poured out between his legs.

“Sorry about your daughter,” Dillon said. He watched Quentin get out of the car. The snow was falling at an angle and coming down hard again. Dillon’s fingers stopped working over the bullets. It was silent in the car. The snow was almost blue. Dillon watched the Sheriff walk over to his dead daughter lying in the street. The big man put a coat he’d taken from the trunk of the car and laid it where his daughter’s face had been.

Dillon stopped his reloading and watched. He wondered what his own life would have been like if he’d not done the things he’d done, if he could have been like the Sheriff, standing over his dead daughter in the street. He envied the sheriff his pain, no matter how horrible—it was
something
, at least. He looked down again and scooped up more shells. The worst thing about all his years in prison was the coldness that had crept into him. He’d stopped feeling what people on the outside felt. He’d wanted a family, a normal life. He would never live to have them. He would probably never live to meet his own daughter.

Quentin got back in the car and slammed the door. He was weeping. Dillon looked up at him but didn’t say a word. They drove on in silence back toward the center of town with nothing but the occasional sound of Dillon shifting the re-loaded Thompson on his lap. He turned his head left and right looking for Howlers, the snow making it hard to see details.

It looks like the inside of one of those glass paperweights my mother used to collect
, Dillon thought. When he was a boy, waiting alone after school for his mother to get home from a twelve-hour shift, he would shake all her collection at one time and watch it snow, dreaming of the bright future he knew was waiting for him.

*   *   *

Miles got out of the highway patrol car, thanked the grim-faced CHP officer, and shut the door. The CHP officer, a friend of his father’s, had rescued him out on the road when he’d been attacked—Miles’ Mustang had been surrounded by a gang of the things. The patrol car took off immediately.

Miles watched the patrol car race down the street, its emergency lights flashing blue and red. Everything the CHP officer had told Miles on the way was unbelievable. Yet he was living proof of the officer’s fantastic story about roaming gangs stopping cars and murdering their occupants. Twice on the way here, and to his horror, the CHP officer had driven through milling gangs of random people, running over several, killing them, not slowing down if they were in their way. It was, Miles thought walking toward Poole’s house, the strangest day he’d ever lived through.

Like so many of the cars he’d seen on the road heading out of Timberline, Poole’s Volvo, sitting in the doctor’s driveway, had smashed windows and looked like a wreck. Its roof was partially collapsed. Miles had seen things on the road heading out of Timberline that he couldn’t explain. He’d seen strange-looking groups of people aimlessly huddled around abandoned cars. At one point he’d stopped his car and just stared at the people, wondering what in the hell they were doing. Spotting him, they’d rushed his car, and howling like lunatics, they’d pulled him from the Mustang.

Knocked to the ground, a little Mexican girl—no more than eight or nine years old—sprang on his throat. It was while the little girl, incredibly powerful, was throttling him that two Highway Patrol cars pulled around the corner and saved his life. Both officers had jumped from their patrol cars and opened fire on the gang. One of the officers trotted up to Miles, who was fighting to pull the girl’s hands from his throat, and shot the girl point-blank. The shot went off inches from Miles’ face. The little girl had slid to the ground, dead at his feet. Staggering to his feet, he’d looked at the officer in horror.

“Howler,” the officer had said, and holstered his weapon.

   While he’d been interviewing the lieutenant at the Sheriff’s Department—and concluding that the man was probably crazy—Miles had gotten a voice mail from a Genesoft executive, a man called Crouchback whom he’d met before. Crouchback asked Miles to come to his home, telling him it was urgent that they speak in private as soon as possible. Crouchback said he had something important to tell him, on the record, about Genesoft’s new R-19 line.

It was snowing again. Miles looked across the street. The front door of the Crouchbacks’ house was wide open. Miles had written about the swanky neighborhood’s McMansions and knew that Dr. Poole lived across from Crouchback’s place; his article had featured both men’s new homes. Poole was also on Miles’ interview list, since he’d heard from one of the deputies that Willis had killed himself in Poole’s office. Since what had just happened to him, though, and what the CHP officer had described to him, it all seemed pointless.

Miles thought he saw a woman lying on the floor in the Crouchbacks’ foyer. Two hours ago he would have rushed to help, but now he stopped himself, not sure what to do. The last thing the CHP officers had told him was, “Get a firearm.” The police were overwhelmed, and he would have to protect himself from the things. He decided to ignore the body.

He pulled the collar up on his jacket and walked across the street toward Poole’s house. He heard a gunshot and stopped in the middle of the street to see where it had come from.

A woman in a State Park Ranger’s uniform and a black balaclava came out between Crouchback’s place and the neighbor’s house on cross-country skis. The woman cut to her right, stopped and turned to face Miles. She had a pistol tucked into the front of her open blue parka. They looked at each other for a split second. He watched the hooded skier take off again, cutting across the snow-covered lawn, and then skiing over Crouchback’s driveway. Miles heard her skis make a loud scraping sound as she crossed the drive. The woman stopped again and glanced into the Crouchbacks’ open front door. Miles watched her point her pistol at the doorway. She swung her skis, taking big expert hopping steps, and was suddenly pointing her weapon at him.

He was about to yell “Hello” when she shot him.

Patty Tyson fired two rounds at the thing standing in the street and lowered her pistol. She watched him fall. She’d rigged a cord she’d ripped from her parka around the pistol’s trigger guard so she could hang the weapon around her neck as she skied. She draped the cord over her neck now. The Howler hadn’t even gotten off a scream.

I’m learning
, she thought.

She skied across the lawn, building speed, and hit the sidewalk. From there, over the noise of her skies on concrete, she jumped the curb to the snow-covered street. The wide street had just enough snow that she could ski without too much trouble. She glided quickly, double-poling, by the body of the man she’d just shot down.

Patty heard a front door open and stopped and pointed her pistol toward the door. She was getting low on ammunition. She’d brought just two boxes of shells, and at this rate they wouldn’t last much longer. She leveled her pistol at the small black girl in the doorway, but hesitated when the little girl smiled at her. Howlers didn’t smile.

“Don’t shoot.” A tall black man scooped the little girl up in his arms and looked at Patty, a frightened expression on his face.

Patty lowered her weapon. It was the first human voice she’d heard since she’d left the melee at Emigrant Gap four hours ago and skied into the back country in an attempt to get away from the things.

“Sorry. I—” Her own voice sounded strange to her. She was hoarse from the cold and lack of water.

“My name is Poole. Marvin Poole. I’m not one of them,” the man in the doorway said.

“What the hell is going on?” Patty said. The black man was the first person she’d found in twenty miles of fire roads and streets who wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t know any more than you,” Marvin said.

“You have a telephone that works?” Patty asked.

She wore a balaclava over her face; the doctor couldn’t tell much about the woman, but he could see she was wearing a uniform and that she was obviously not one of them. She looked exhausted and frightened.

“No phone. Tower must be down. There is television now. And some radio,” Marvin said, holding his daughter in his arms.

“The media know what’s going on?” the woman asked.