HOWLERS (16 page)

They’re so stupid!

“Stupid fuckers,” Dillon said out loud. He dropped the shotgun, now empty and pulled out the two pistols he had holstered before he’d walked into the bank. He began to fire.

The last Howler—another kid, only about ten—dropped at his feet as the pistols clicked empty. Dead Howlers rolled off the top of the Ford and onto the floor of the destroyed brokerage office. He picked up a section of gas line and smashed the kid in the head, killing him.

The heavy smell of cordite mixed with stinking Howler blood, but the Howlers were all dead and he had the two bags of money at his feet. “It was me or the money, motherfuckers!” he shouted, the adrenalin pumping through him so hard he felt high.

One of the stockbrokers—fat, still alive, his white shirt stained with blood—looked at him from the smashed water cooler where he’d been standing talking about George Clooney’s new girlfriend on his phone, and how he’d “like to do her, too.” He was frozen with fear but miraculously untouched, his belly sagging over his belt. CNBC was playing on a TV on the wall above him as if nothing had happened.

“You better clear out,” Dillon said to the fat man. “There’s probably more of them.”

The man—in shock—nodded, finally moving his head and dropping his phone.

Dillon picked up the two heavy canvas bags of money, each stamped with “Bank Of America on its sides, and walked out of the hole in the storefront office and into the chaos on the street.

*   *   *

“Dad, I want you to meet Gary Summers,” Rebecca said. She was standing next to Gary and smiling.

Mr. Stewart looked at the kid from behind the counter and smiled back. “Any friend of Rebecca’s is a friend of mine,” he said.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Rebecca said. “Come on in and I’ll show you the store.”

Gary followed. “I didn’t lock my bike,” he said.

Rebecca looked at her father and they both laughed.

“Son, you don’t have to lock you bike here in Timberline. And people don’t steal much from in front of gun stores, usually.”

Gary took one more look back at his $2,000 mountain bike. It was his prize possession, and he wasn’t sure.

Rebecca grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up to the long counter. “We got more pistols than any gun store in the Sierras,” she said, looking down at the huge assortment of handguns. “That’s why those people outside are mad at us.”

Summers didn’t know what to say. He looked up from the counter and saw that Rebecca’s father was looking down on the arsenal proudly.

“You an auto man, or revolver?” Stewart asked.

“Auto, I guess?” Gary said, not sure what the man meant; all his knowledge of firearms had come from video games or TV shows.

“I thought so,” Stewart said. He took out a Smith and Wesson 1918 Colt 45 and put it out on the counter on a piece of green felt. “Now that pistol, right here—and I don’t care what anyone says about the Glocks—This is the one I’d take to a gunfight,” Rebecca’s father said.

Gary looked at the thing. His parents had been horrified when he’d asked for a GI Joe once for his birthday. He reached for the pistol and picked it up. It was cold and slightly oily to the touch, and heavier than he expected. The pimpled grip felt oddly sensual. He’d never touched any kind of firearm in his life.

“How do you—load it?” Gary asked, fascinated. “Down here, right?”

Mr. Stewart and Rebecca were both too polite to register their shock at his ignorance.

“We got a shooting range downstairs in the basement. Want to try it?” Rebecca suggested. It was best to get him up to speed with firearms as soon as possible, before he said anything else that might put her dad off.

“Sure,” Summers said.

Rebecca winked at her father. It was a signal they used for inside jokes and for city-people ways, which were always strange.

Rebecca closed the door behind them. A steep flight of stairs faced them, with a yellow light shining on a concrete floor at the bottom.

“I used to bring all my boyfriends down to the range,” Rebecca said with a smile. She put her hand in his hair; he almost fell backwards, and she had to grab him by the arm. She pulled him close and kissed him.

Gary felt her tongue slip into his mouth. It was all getting to be a little too much: first guns, now Rebecca’s tongue darting down and touching the roof of his mouth and rubbing its roof sensually.

She finally pulled away. “You want to screw?”

“Yeah, sure,” Summers said. “But what about your father?”

Rebecca looked down the stairs past him as if he were a child.

He wanted to do both. Both seemed fun. He had a fantasy of shooting the pistol while they made love. He looked at her beautiful face in the light from a naked light bulb hung over the stairs. The basement smell mixed with something else: gunpowder, he imagined, or whatever smell guns made when you shot them.

“I’d like to shoot the gun and then make love,” he said sheepishly.

“Come on, then. That sounds like fun,” Rebecca said. “And it’s not a gun, it’s a pistol.”

*   *   *

Quentin looked out at the chaos on Main Street. The things were out there, but he could do nothing about it now. The deputies who had gone to the K-Mart were not responding to their radios. It had started to snow harder; all he saw was a driving sheet of white outside the office. He was holding on the phone for the State Police, trying to get assistance and some kind of explanation for what was happening to his town. Nothing he’d seen in the last thirty minutes made any sense. He was sure he was dreaming and that he would wake up. He kept praying he would.

“Quentin? It’s Captain Harrison, sorry. Look, before we start, let me tell you that the Governor’s office is calling for a State Of Emergency and has asked the National Guard to take up positions in several of the state’s major cities. So we don’t expect much from us for rural areas like yours, I’m afraid.

“And another thing: they are predicting the phones will go down soon, as they’ve had a lot of damage to one of the switching stations in Sacramento. Now what can I help you with?”

Quentin was watching one of the things come down the center of the street. It was a young woman in her thirties, half naked, beautiful and ugly all at once. A long stand of white spit dangled from her open mouth. She punched out a car windshield that had been abandoned on the street, then walked aimlessly away. The street in front of Quentin’s office was empty until several of the human-like things came out of Dr. Poole’s office, dragging a dead woman behind them.

“What’s going on? These things, what’s going on?” Quentin asked. The sound of his own voice sounded strange to him.

“Don’t know. Nobody does. There are guesses, that’s all. The only thing we know is that there are tens of thousands of them around the state. Some cites don’t have any, and things are normal. Then, some places—well, they’re hell on earth.”

“Are they sick? Are they still—
human
, or what?”

“Sheriff, I don’t have an answer.”

“We need help. I think we have hundreds here, and this is a small town. I only have nine law-enforcement officers. I’ve lost contact with more than half of my men. I’ve got two at the jail with me. We’ve got gangs of these things roaming Main Street killing people. It’s chaos—do you understand?”

“I understand. We can’t do much right now. There’s talk about the Army getting involved, but I haven’t heard for sure. They’re meeting about this at the White House.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Quentin said.

“The best you can. We’ve issued a shoot-on-sight order for the—things. Howlers, people are calling them. If you think it’s a Howler, kill it. Good luck.” The captain hung up. 

All those seminars and meetings in Sacramento about emergency plans and inter-agency cooperation, that’s what they amounted to, Quentin thought. Good luck. He put down the phone in disbelief. It rang again almost immediately. He picked it up. All his office phone lines were lit up. People had started to call in, frightened and wanting to know where the deputies were. He didn’t know what to tell them.

“Daddy.” It was his daughter Sharon’s voice. “Daddy. You have to help me. They have Lacy here. God.”

“Where are you?” he said.

“Over on the Pinecone Road, white house on the corner, the old schoolhouse. Daddy, hurry. Please!”

The line went dead. Quentin put the phone down. He knew the house; it had been on his drug-watch list.

Before, he’d been confused and frightened and at a loss. Now, as he unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled down the M-16 and a bulletproof vest, he wasn’t thinking about anything but his daughters and his wife, what she would be thinking of him if he didn’t succeed. He dumped half a dozen extra fully-loaded clips into a metal garbage can and walked out of the office with the weapons and ammo. The phone was ringing, but he didn’t bother to pick it up.

“You’d better go home,” Quentin said, looking at his last deputy.

“Sheriff?”

“Let the prisoners out of their cells first. There’s nothing we can do now but be with our families. It’s every man for himself. God bless you,” Quentin said.

“Willis was right, then,” the deputy said. “He told me that I should get my wife and kids out of town. I thought he was crazy.”

The deputy heard the door close. He took the headset off and threw it on the office’s phone-system console, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. He felt helpless, as if he’d been afraid of this day all along, and now it had finally come. He went into Quentin’s office and grabbed one of the M-16s from the unlocked gun locker. He snapped in a clip and jacked in a round. The phone rang. Hoping it was his wife, the deputy picked it up.

“Quentin?”

“No,” the deputy said. “This is Deputy Troy.”

“Is Quentin there? This is Patty Tyson at the ranger station at Emigrant Gap. We need some help up here. Can you send a couple of deputies? There’s—well, I can’t quite explain it,  but we’ve had several attacks by—”

“You’ll have to take care of it yourself,” the deputy said. “We’re overrun down here in town. There’s hundreds of the things here.”

“You’ve seen them, too?” Patty said.

“Yeah, I’ve seen them. I—” Something spun the deputy around. A half-naked woman, about thirty, was screaming, with a huge gob of white ropey-looking spit hanging from her mouth.

The deputy lifted his weapon and shot her in the stomach. To his horror, nothing happened; the thing kept screaming at him. He fired again, stitching its naked chest with rounds. The impact of the M-16’s fire shook its shoulders and head, back-footing it. But it still wouldn’t die. More of them were behind her.

Patty Tyson put down the phone. A chill ran down her back. She’d heard the man screaming over the phone and it had unnerved her. She looked out the office window. One of the things was coming slowly up the gravel driveway toward the ranger station. For some reason it was dragging a garbage can behind it.

“He said there are hundreds of them in Timberline,” Patty said. She looked at her boss, who had come in from the parking lot. He had his service pistol out and was standing in shock, staring at a waitress from the Denny’s who was walking deliberately up the gravel path. Patty looked at her boss. He was bleeding from his mouth where one of the things had punched him.

“How much ammunition do we have left?” he said. He began reloading his automatic from a half-full box of ammo on his desk top. They heard a crash in the back of the office. One of the things had punched out the back door’s window and was trying to tear through the wire screen that covered it.

“Well, what are you waiting for!” her boss said. “You going to wait for it to get in here and kill us?”

Patty Tyson lifted her pistol and aimed at the young man climbing through the broken window. She recognized him as the salesman who’d sold her car at the Chevy dealership in Nevada City the week before. She pulled the trigger several times and killed the thing as it tried to climb through the door’s window, its shoulders halfway through it. Her rounds went through the top of its head. It stopped moving; its body hung lifeless. It was the first time she’d ever shot anything, much less a human being.

She turned around. Her fellow officers had run out the front of the office and left her behind. They were jumping into the last working truck. She watched the truck, packed with rangers, pull down the driveway and turn onto the street, its back end sliding on the icy pavement.

*   *   *

Dr. Poole looked at his wife. The house was cold and dark, the heater and lights not working as the entire county’s electrical grid was down. Her pretty brown face was wet with tears.

“Sweetheart, I need for you to calm down and listen to me. All right?” Marvin said.

“I can’t leave without Richard,” Grace said.

“I’m afraid you have to,” Marvin said. He couldn’t tell her that he’d seen their son on the road. That he’d stopped the car, afraid of Richard when he’d seen him with that strange blank look on his face. His son had been standing in the snow with more of the things, long strands of strange thick-looking saliva hanging from his mouth. Marvin had driven on, not wanting to believe it until he heard Richard make that awful howling sound.

“I promise you, we’ll go by the high school on the way down the mountain,” Marvin said. It was a lie, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“What about Sidney?” she asked.

Marvin looked down at his suitcase. The bedroom was neat. His wife had been cleaning when he’d come in the door. She’d taken one look at him and screamed. His clothes were filthy from the fight in the car. He hadn’t answered her questions at first. He had no words to describe what he’d seen on the road.

“Listen, you have to get a few things together. I have some clothes Mr. Crouchback can probably wear. He is sedated right now. But he’s going to need some warm clothes. Can you fix him up with some? We have to take him. We can’t leave him here,” Marvin said. The doctor crossed the bedroom to his closet and took one of his Mackinaw coats and a few other things he thought would fit their neighbor Crouchback, who was sitting in their living room, obviously very ill. Marvin had done what he could for him.

“What’s wrong with Mr. Crouchback? Why aren’t you explaining anything, Marvin? What’s going on? You say we have to go down the mountain, but you don’t say why. You say we can’t wait and look for Richard, but you won’t say why?”

His wife sat down on the edge of the bed. She was much younger than Marvin, ten years. He had been married before and felt guilty saddling her with an older man, but he’d fallen in love with her so completely that he had been selfish. Now he wished he’d never met her. Then, maybe, she would have been spared all this horror.

“I’m sorry, you just have to trust me right now. Something bad is going on. Some kind of pathogen affecting people, making them sick. Maybe in the water—it’s best if we go down the mountain for the time being. I think it might be better away from here.” The strain of the last few hours was showing on his face. He collapsed on the rug, his elbows on the bed. He let his face fall into his hands. “I saw it developing. I should have been more aggressive.”