HOWLERS (19 page)

Bell fell backwards into the whiteness, continuing to fire his weapon into the Howler as it came after him, its arms reaching for him.

Bell pulled himself out of the snow, crawling over the body of the dead Howler. He looked up the hill toward the van. The Howlers were moving again, walking quickly. They’d finished with the van and were mindlessly trotting toward the howling they’d heard, thousands of them.

Bell looked down at the thing he’d killed. This one was slightly different from the ones he and the sergeant had seen earlier.

He heard honking. The car he’d seen a few moments before, while he’d been chased, had swung over to his side of the road and slowed. Its headlights flashed.  Bell waved his hands over his head in an attempt to get them to stop and pick him up. The car moved into the middle lane and began to slow.

Bell turned and looked up the hill. The Howlers were trotting down the road in a line that stretched across the freeway, like some kind of primitive tribe, filling all the lanes.

A young Chinese girl rolled down the window on the passenger side of the car as it slowed. Bell heard a voice. “Get in!” He ran to the back of the car and jumped into the back seat. Almost before he got in the car, the driver whipped around and they were moving the wrong way down the freeway in the fast lane, a whistling sound coming from an empty ski rack on the top of the car.

Bell turned around and looked behind him as the line of Howlers started to fade. Then he turned back to the couple in the front seat.

“You got any money?” the young man driving asked.

“What?” Bell said

“I said: Do you have any money?” the man said. The man driving glanced into the rear view mirror. He had a day-old growth of beard and was younger than Bell, about twenty-three or -four. Bell wanted to laugh. He looked at the girl. She was holding a gun on him; she had it propped on the top of the seat.

“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. We’re from Los Angeles and we’re about out of cash,” the young man said.

Bell started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. The couple watched and waited. The girl, chewing gum, elbowed her partner as if she was in on the joke.

“I just got out of jail. I don’t have any money,” the Lieutenant said finally.  He felt the car start to slow. He looked at the girl. She was petite and attractive; she was wearing an over-sized T-shirt that read Disneyland, with a drawing of Daffy Duck on the front. The pistol didn’t move.

“Oh, Johnny, let’s take him down the road a little ways,” she said. “He’s kind of cute. And the Howlers will just fuck him up. It’s such a waste. What’s your name, honey?”

“Bell,” the lieutenant said. He looked down the road. Cars were coming toward them on the freeway, in their direction. It didn’t seem to matter. The car didn’t slow. The driver looked for a way over onto the other side of the freeway, but a concrete barrier blocked the way. Bell heard the driver speed up. They were doing a hundred miles an hour. The cars in front of them were coming up quick. The girl seemed oblivious to their imminent death by front-end collision.

“Is it bad, in L.A.?” Bell said. He looked past the girl at the oncoming cars and wondered if they would make it past them, or if he would be killed.

“Oh, shit yes,” the girl said, and turned around and faced forward. “If the Howlers don’t kill you, the looters will. Won’t they, Johnny?” she said.

The young man nodded, intent on the oncoming cars.

The girl turned around again, oblivious to the danger, and smiled at Bell. “I think it would be better to have the things get you. At least it’s quicker than the looters,” she said.

The concrete barrier ended. The driver swerved the car across the open median toward the other side of the freeway. The driver, seemingly unfazed, drove down the grassy patch at ninety miles an hour. Cars passed them, honking. The front of their car bounced wildly until the driver—slowing the car down—moved off the grass and swung onto the roadway. He sped up, heading east—toward Timberline.

“No worse than the traffic back home on the 405,” the driver said.

The girl slugged him on the shoulder.

   Bell wanted to laugh again, but didn’t.
Enough of that
, he told himself. “How long has it been going on down there?” Bell asked.

“I don’t know,” the driver said. “Maybe a week.”

“What are the police doing down there?” Bell said.

“Cops disappeared right after it began,” the girl said. “They got a McDonald’s up here? I think I saw one when we passed,” she said.

“Denny’s,” Bell said. He was hungry, too; he hadn’t eaten anything since very early that morning. Despite the world having gone crazy, you still had to eat, he supposed.

“Hey, is it your birthday?” the girl asked him. “If it’s your birthday, maybe we could ask them for the—what do they call it?”

“Grand Slam breakfast,” her boyfriend said.

“It’s free, if it’s your birthday,” the girl said.

Bell realized the two were high, and maybe crazy too.

CHAPTER 16

The men had been brutal, as if they weren’t human at all but black-leather-clad beasts. They had no mercy when she’d pleaded with them to stop what they were doing. They’d finally gone away. She’d fallen asleep, but only because they’d made her take a Valium to keep her from both escaping and sobbing. The sound of her crying bothered them.

Exhausted and filthy, Lacy, in a dream-like state, heard herself speak out loud, finally waking. She heard herself call for her father, as if he might come pick her up off the beer-stinking mattress and carry her out of the cold, tiny bedroom she’d been raped in.

After a horrible moment of consciousness, she knew that she’d been dreaming. She was in that awful house where she’d come to look for her sister. At last she opened her eyes. The sight of the empty room, a chair pushed over on the floor where they’d enjoyed her first, was surreal. She saw her jeans tossed across the room next to her ripped-from-her panties, both muddy and trampled.

She forced herself to sit up. It seemed as if the whole terrible memory of what they’d done to her would go away if she could just get dressed and get to her car.

The bedroom door was shut. She heard nothing from outside in the living room; the house was completely silent.

She got up, naked, and tried to put on the panties but gave up, seeing they’d been torn badly. She slid her jeans on, and then her gray wool sweater she finally found. It had been tossed into a corner and was clean.

She sat back down on the bed and started to cry. The Valium had left her with an overwhelming sense of fatigue. She felt the tears run down her cheek and wiped them with the back of her hand.

It was late afternoon, she guessed—or seemed to be, from the cold, dead light in the room. She checked the pocket of her jeans for her new cell phone and remembered she’d left it in the car with her purse. She stood up again, still feeling weak, and walked across the room. She lifted a sheet that was being used on the window as a curtain.

The snow was falling outside soundlessly. The road, which had been clear when she’d arrived, was white with snow. She put her head down on the cold glass of the window and told herself to get out. She walked to the bedroom door and tried it. It was unlocked.

She realized she had no shoes on and went back to look for them.  She remembered being pushed onto the chair and looking up at the three men, all of them high on amphetamines. One of them tipped the chair over, holding her by her foot, her shoe coming off in his hand. She found both her running shoes by the tipped-over chair. She couldn’t look at the chair without feeling sick.

She slipped her shoes on, went back to the door and listened. Not hearing anything, she pulled the door open.

The first thing she saw was a motorcycle stuck in the opposite wall, as if it had been hung like an ornament. The room’s couches and lounge chairs were turned over. A man, the one who’d come to the door and pulled her into the house, was on the floor of the tiny living room, dead, his head twisted grotesquely so that it was turned 180 degrees. His face was above his back.

She heard the front door’s screen door open and turned, startled. A young man with red hair, in a dirty uniform of some kind, stood in the doorway.

“Sorry, I saw you in the window and I—I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think you were one of them,” Lieutenant Bell said.

Lacy looked at the lieutenant. He’d left the stoner couple from L.A. when they stopped at the Denny’s on the road to Timberline, preferring to go it alone. And after he’d watched them rifle two dead bodies for cash, the Chinese girl taking a dead woman’s earrings and putting them on and laughing about it.

He’d found an abandoned mountain bike leaning against the back of the restaurant and ridden it back all the way into Timberline. He’d ridden to the sheriff’s office, expecting to find help, and found that abandoned too. The interior of the office had been wrecked. The bank across the street was mysteriously on fire. And everywhere he walked on Main Street were dozens of dead bodies and abandoned cars. He thought he was the last living soul on the planet until he’d cycled down a random residential street and seen the girl standing inside the house. She was the first human being he’d seen in more than an hour.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Lacy said blankly.

Bell limped into the house. His side was bleeding and he had a bruise on his face. He was wearing some kind of military overalls that were filthy.

“Is she here?” Bell asked.

“I—I don’t know. No. I don’t—I’ve been. I have to call my father,” she said. “Do you have a cell phone?”

“No. Land lines are down,” Bell said. “I’ve been in a few empty houses and there was no dial tone.”

“I need to call my father,” Lacy said again. “Do you have a phone?” She repeated the question as if she hadn’t heard him answer her.

Bell looked at the girl. He saw that something was very wrong with her. She was disheveled—trauma from seeing the killing in the house, he supposed. He didn’t know what to say. Bell glanced around the room. He saw a body part lying on the floor and looked up. The things had been here, it was obvious. The girl had escaped—or come in later—and now she was traumatized. It was understandable.

“I’ve …” Lacy looked at him.

On instinct he walked across the room, took the girl by the hand and led her out the front door to the street.  She followed him, not able or not willing to object. He didn’t know whether she saw what he’d seen on the floor: a man’s male organs tossed aside, ripped from his body.

“There’s a house next door. It has a cell phone. No one was there when they came. I think the place is pretty much intact,” Bell said. “Why don’t we go over there and try their phone?”

The girl looked at Bell and nodded. The dog that had been kicked by the man at the door that morning came out from behind a fence across the street, ran across the snowy road and put his head on the toe of Lacy’s running shoe. The dog barked. Lacy bent down and patted the animal carefully, as if she were reconstructing something inside of herself at the same time. She stood up and pushed the hair out of her face.

Bell saw she was weeping. It was the first human thing he’d seen since he’d left the crazy kids who had picked him up on the freeway and taken him up to the demolished Denny’s. He’d walked away from the couple as they rooted around in the body-strewn kitchen of the Denny’s looking for something to eat. Bell had thought that if he was going to die, he wanted to die alone, and not with a couple of lunatics from L.A.

   Something about this girl’s tears, the first normal thing he’d seen since his sergeant had been killed that morning, moved him unexpectedly. The tears on her face were, oddly, a sign of normal life.

“They were mean to the dog. He remembers me,” Lacy said, trying to hold back tears, her voice quivering.

Bell stepped out into the road in front of her. He heard the girl, but wasn’t listening. He saw the Howlers coming down the street, two of them, a man and a younger woman. They came from the direction the dog had come. One of the Howlers was naked from the waist down; she was dragging a carcass out into the street. The Howler dropped it and sat down on her haunches. The man, walking on his knuckles, wandered out into the middle of the snowy road, lifted his head, raised his elongated arms over his head, and began to howl.

“God damn you!” Bell said. He felt as if he were on the verge of losing his mind. He walked toward the man and fired his pistol. The thing tried to move back and Bell shot him again, this time in the head. The Howler fell over heavily in the fresh snow. The woman that had been dragging the carcass in her teeth let it go and started to howl, setting back on her haunches, her face raised toward the sky.

“Sharon! Baby?”

Bell turned around and saw the girl step off the porch and walk into the street, a strange look on her face.

“
Sharon
?”

Bell fired at the Howler but the pistol was empty, the slide all the way back. The girl was walking toward the Howler. The noise from the female Howler was terrific and horrible.

“What are you doing? That’s close enough,” Bell yelled. “Come with me!” He stepped between them. “I think there are some guns in the house over there.”

Lacy was trying to get by him. “Sharon … honey? God … Sharon!” Lacy started to trot toward her sister.

Bell, in horror, saw the thing turn and look at her. The girl was getting closer. “Shit.” Bell ran down the snowy road and picked Lacy up by the waist from behind. He felt the pain in his side as the girl fought him. He looked around him. Out of one of the houses another Howler, in black motorcycle leather, loped down the porch and into the street. Behind him several more Howlers came out on the porch of the house.

“Stop it. You’ll get us killed,” Bell said, clutching the girl as she kicked and hit at him. He guessed that the Howler had been someone the girl knew, and that she didn’t understand it would kill her.

“Sharon! Sharon, what’s wrong?” 

The pain in Bell’s side was excruciating. Lacy elbowed him twice in the face. He tried not to let go, but she was tearing away from him, the pain in his side overwhelming him.

“She’s not your friend anymore,” Bell yelled. Lacy finally tore away from him and headed back toward the Howler. Bell looked back toward the other Howlers spilling out onto the street, jumping from the porches of nearby houses. If he stayed here any longer, he would be killed.

The girl was still walking toward the Howler. The thing started calling to the others.

“Sharon, it’s me, Lacy. What’s wrong, honey?  Sharon?”

Bell turned away. He didn’t want to watch what was going to happen. He started to jog toward the house he’d seen with the shotgun. It was hard for him to run. He stopped in mid-stride.
I can’t let her die like that
, he thought.

“God damn you!” he said.  Bell turned around and walk-jogged back toward Lacy, who was looking at her sister, standing only a few yards in front of her.

The Howler stopped, put its head down and looked at Bell. The thing’s arms were longer than he remembered. The thing looked at him and bared its teeth. Bell picked his pistol off the ground where he’d dropped it, walked toward the girl and picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. He walked, not expecting to live much longer, toward the house on the corner.

“You’re going to get us both killed! Don’t you understand?” Something hit him in the side of the head. He thought it was the Howler at first, then realized the girl was slamming him on the top of his head with her fists, trying to get him to drop her.

Through the hail of blows, he concentrated on the house across the street. He felt himself punched again and again. Lacy caught him in the temple and he dropped on his knees, stunned. Bell finally stood up, wobbly from the blow. The girl was running back toward the Howler and certain death and there was nothing he could do about it now.

The cruiser was gaining speed. The falling snow was making it hard to see, globs of wet snow collected on the windshield wipers as Quentin drove down the street toward Lacy.

“Howlers at two o’clock,” Dillon said. He stuck the Thompson out of the open window. A group of Howlers were climbing down from an old Victorian’s wide porch and into the street. Quentin heard the burst of automatic weapons fire. He glanced as the Howlers, a line of six or more, were cut down in the house’s front yard. He saw Dillon hang out of the patrol car’s window, swearing as he fired, the snow catching in his hair, the flash-suppressing barrel sparking blue in the twilight. The brass tossed in a stream from the machine gun.

Die. Die. Die. Die
, Quentin thought, watching the things fall. Dillon’s well-placed fire caught the entire group, high up, and right at head level.

Quentin turned his attention to the road again. He saw the house on the corner straight in front of him. The windshield wiper lifted a huge clot of snow, dragging it across the windshield; it disintegrated and for a moment he saw Lieutenant Bell trying to get up and Lacy running toward her sister, who was squatting in the middle of the street.

Quentin stepped on the brake. He felt the cruiser slide in the snow as he pulled it to the side of the road. For a long moment he didn’t watch the road at all, but instead kept his eyes on Lacy’s running figure. He heard Dillon saying something while trying to get out of the passenger door. Quentin, realizing that Dillon thought Lacy was a Howler, grabbed Dillon’s legs and shoved him out of the car before he could fire. He saw Dillon falling backwards into the snow. His machine gun went off. The roof of the patrol car was pocked with bullet holes, the fire nearly hitting Quentin. He could feel the impact of the shots as they struck the car’s roof, narrowly missing him. He slowed the patrol car to a crawl. He opened his door and turned toward Dillon a few feet behind him.

“It’s my daughter! Don’t shoot!” Quentin said.

Dillon, still holding his weapon, picked himself up off the snowy road and nodded. Quentin reached inside the car and reached into the backseat for a Thompson. Turning from the car, he called to Lacy. She’d stopped in the road in front of her sister. Bell was coming down the center of the street, limping. The Howler—who had once been his daughter Sharon—turned and looked at Quentin, spit hanging from her distorted face.

“It’s not Sharon anymore,” Quentin said to Lacy.

“It’s Sharon, Daddy. It’s Sharon! There’s something wrong with her.” Lacy stopped in front of her growling sister.

Quentin stepped away from the patrol car, weapon in hand. “Lacy, I want you to step over here. Okay?”

“Daddy, we have to do something!” Lacy said. “It’s Sharon. Daddy.”

Quentin raised the Thompson. The Howler had gotten off its haunches and was looking at Lacy. Quentin walked forward, waiting for the thing to spring on his daughter.

“Daddy, what are you doing? That’s Sharon!” Lacy was horrified to see her father pointing his weapon at her sister.

“It’s not Sharon,” Quentin said. “Not anymore.”

The Howler, snow on its naked shoulders, stepped toward Lacy. Slowly at first, then quickly, the thing reached for Lacy. It grabbed her around the neck with one of its hands.

Quentin began to fire. The bullets poured out of the Thompson and finding their target, pounded the Howler’s skull, obliterating it.

The Howler dropped Lacy on the ground and sagged to its knees, its face gone, just a wet red-white-bullet-pounded neck left on its shoulders.

Quentin walked toward his living daughter and helped her up off the snow. He hit the Howler with the butt of the weapon, knocking it over onto the road, stone dead. Lacy looked at him, beyond terrified.

“We have to go,” Quentin said. “Come on.” Quentin looked down at what had been his daughter.

Bell limped over to them. “God, I’m glad to see you, Sheriff. You remember me?”