HOWLERS (30 page)

“No. Who would want me? I’m nuts. Even I know that! And you need a woman for that—right? I can’t just make one in the woodshop.” They’d both laughed.

“Thanks for not saying anything to Quentin about me coming out here. He worries about me walking out in the woods alone,” she said. “You’re a mess.”

Chuck had wood chips stuck to the hair on his chest.

“Do you get lonely?” Marie asked.

They were sitting out in the field in front of the cabin he was building. He’d brought out some cookies, gingersnaps he’d made himself, and ice-cold lemonade. They were sitting on a blanket. She took a bite of a cookie. “Did you kill people, Chuck? Is that the problem, why you want to be alone? I just come over here and talk about myself. You must be bored as hell of me.”

“No. I would miss your visits,” Chuck said. “Yes, I killed people.” He poured himself some lemonade. “I killed people who deserved it, and a lot of people who didn’t.”

“But it was war. You did what you had to do,” she said.

“I suppose,” he said. He had a far off look in his eyes. “My mom asked me not to go. She was a Quaker.”

“Really? I didn’t know that,” Marie said.

“Yup. I broke her heart when I enlisted. I don’t think she ever forgave me.”

“Why did you do it? Join?”

“I think I was afraid I wasn’t going to be a man if I didn’t do it. Stupid kid stuff. Come on, I want to show you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone. This is
my
secret,” he said and stood up. “Promise?”

“Yeah. Lips are sealed.”  She reached for his hand and held it like a little girl holding her father’s hand. “I like to hold hands,” she said. She reached over and hugged him and heard him start to cry. She held him and let him cry.

Exactly a month later she had a perfect baby girl. They walked through the field to the foundation of the cabin Chuck was building. He pulled a canvas off the center of the cabin’s foundation and exposed a network of tunnels and subterranean rooms he was digging below ground. Some of the tunnels went out beyond the perimeter of the cabin’s foundation and along the gravel driveway heading to the county road.

“Wow!” Marie had said in a low voice. “You did that by
yourself
?”

“Yeah, I know,” Chuck said. He smiled from ear to ear.

One of the tunnels went out and toward the field behind the cabin. “What’s that one for?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s for ambushes,” he said. “Yeah, had to rent a pneumatic jackhammer, ran into some mighty big rocks out there.”

Marie kept Chuck’s secrets. He was always invited to the family’s Thanksgiving dinners over the years. Her Thanksgiving dinners were picture-perfect affairs, always full of people and children and life. She’d been able to talk to Chuck when he came to visit her at the hospital toward the end. They never spoke of her illness, not once. Instead they reminisced about that summer Lacy was born, when she’d come to visit him.

“I brought you a key.” Chuck had told her that last day in the hospital. He dug in his pocket. “It’s for Quentin and the girls, and you, too,” he’d said.

She’d reached for it. The key was attached to small wood figure of a fish.

“It’s coming soon,” Chuck said.

“What’s coming, dear?” she’d asked. Marie took his hand and held it as she’d held it back then, twenty years before.

“The—something. I feel it now. It’s close. I had a dream. I won’t be there, but it’s important—the cabin—for Lacy and Quentin. They were there, in my dream, and they were safe. We were—” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence: in his dream he and Marie were spirits, watching her family from the top of the cabin’s roof. Chuck and Marie could see it all, but their loved ones couldn’t see them.

“What about Sharon?” Marie asked.

“I don’t know. She wasn’t there—in the dream. It was winter and I saw them there in the cabin, Lacy and Quentin. Will you tell Quentin to keep it with him, the key to my place?” Chuck said. “Please. He won’t understand if it comes from me. He thinks I’m a nut. But I know
you’ll
understand. You
always
understood me. You’re the only one who did. It’s important.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him. Chuck, I believe you. And I love you. You know that.”

Chuck Phelps had cried only one other time as a grown man, on the day he realized he was in love with another man’s wife and would never, ever, have her, or a
real
life. He cried a second time, holding the hand of the woman he loved.  He sat with her until she fell asleep and a nurse chased him out of the hospital room. He’d driven back home in the summer twilight, in a dull trance, full of regrets. He wished he’d never gone to their shitty war. It had ruined his life.

   Two days later, at two o’clock in the afternoon in the small community hospital in Nevada City, Marie dreamed of herself walking out, pregnant and hopeful and fearful all at once, on a hot July day, years before, watching the afternoon’s splendid painting of the sky’s beauties: the pines’ tops moving slightly in the warm breeze, the smell of those pine trees in summer, the confusion of the forest floor as she picked her way toward the Phelps place. She felt herself speed up, walking faster, something waiting for her. She felt/saw herself climb up onto an old stump, holding her precious round belly from which a daughter would emerge soon. She glanced behind her, back toward her home with its new shiny metal roof, put on that summer by her young husband. She thought she could hear Quentin hammering.

It was at that instant, with July’s big sun shining in her eyes, that Marie Collier passed away, the sound of a Sierra summer in her ears.

CHAPTER 24

Are you there?

The text messaging box sprang up on Miles’ iPhone, displaying Price’s cell number. He had forgotten all about his boss, his job, his fiancée, and even his parents. The last ten hours had been so intense that he’d had no time to reach out to anyone.

Yes.
Miles tapped a message out on his phone quickly, hoping Price was okay.

I’m sending you something.

What?
Miles wrote.

Not necessarily Genesoft’s GMOs that are making people sick. Probably Fukushima Daiichi
site. Alarming report being suppressed by MS media.

Where are you?
Miles wrote.

Office,
Price texted back.

Can you get out of there?

No. They’re here. Open file attached to email sent you.

Miles switched screens and opened the email attachment. He read the top of the document quickly, a document from a laboratory in Great Britain, with a report on something called “Black Dust.”

What is this Black Dust?
Miles texted.

Radioactive dust suspended in atmosphere. Dropping now along W Coast.

Is this what’s making people sick?
Miles wrote
.

I think so. Extremely high levels of radiation. Don’t think I will make it. Wish I’d had a son like you.

Miles looked at his screen, stunned by the text. He put down the phone. Price had always been friendly with him—kind, in fact—constantly covering for him and pushing him forward at the paper, even trying to get him a job on a big-city paper through his network of friends. But he’d never suspected a father-like love. The man he’d considered a crank was still trying to do his job as a journalist, even now. He was ashamed for having thought of Price as anything less, and for not having understood what Price really was: a committed member of the Fourth Estate.

“He’s got an emergency power plant, a
big
one. Diesel,” Dillon said excitedly. He’d come up from the hatch in the floor that led to the bunker complex. They’d only been here for a few hours and already the Phelps ranch was turning into a doomsday-prepper Disneyland—or wet dream, as Dillon called it while surveying the man’s gun collection. More than thirty rifles, mostly assault rifles, each type duplicated
ten
times. When he climbed down into the bunker for the first time, it had looked to Miles like a government armory.

   Dillon had been on a scouting mission. Miles had intended to follow Dillon down into the bunker, but stopped when he got Price’s text.

“Don’t know how this guy did it. But he did. It’s a commercial rig and it’s
vented
somehow.
There’s a thousand gallons of diesel down there, believe it or not, in two steel tanks. All we have to do is flip a switch and we’ll have juice. He left instructions. They say we should turn on the Apple computer on the dining-room table,” Dillon said.

“Well, go turn the power on. What are you waiting for?” Miles said. “I need to charge my damn phone.”

Dillon saw he was upset and went back down the ladder into the maze of underground rooms and hallways, Maglite in hand.

*   *   *

Howard Price turned on his small red Maglite, which he kept in his desk drawer for emergencies. It would be all the light he’d have until morning, as the building’s emergency generator had run out of diesel and quit, plunging the building into total darkness.

He put down his iPhone. The phone’s battery was dead, and he had no way to charge it unless he went out into the parking lot and used his car’s battery. He was tempted, but that trip would be dangerous, if not impossible.

He didn’t want to face the glass wall that was protecting him from the Howlers that were wandering the building. Instead, he turned the flashlight on the Building Seven poster a friend in the 9/11 Truth Movement had mailed him. He looked at the building that had fallen on that fateful day into its own footprint and in a grey cloud of dust, pulverized. 
Never hit by
anything more than random debris
, he thought. The poster’s caption read:
47 stories of steel and concrete don’t vaporize and collapse at
free-fall speed
because of fire. Wake Up America!

   He would never know the truth, Price realized. He might not have had children, or a wife, but he’d worked for the family of mankind during his whole long career. His personal life had been a sad one. But now he saw it differently, and he smiled in a way he’d never smiled before. He felt oddly free of the sense of personal failure he’d carried with him for so long.

I’ll die happy.

He forced himself to turn from the poster and shine the small Maglite onto the city room outside. It was empty. The Howlers had left, unable to break down the thick bulletproof partition separating his office from the others. But he knew they were everywhere in the office park. He’d seen them from his window wandering the grounds. The city’s streetlights, for whatever reason, still worked, illuminating the bike paths and parking lots bathing them in a cold halogen light.

If I am going to die, why not do some good first,
he thought. He’d gotten the story about the “Black Dust” three weeks before and pasted it to his office wall along with recent 9/11 stories. He’d been keeping track of the fallout from the Fukushima disaster, underreported by the corporate media. This time, and unlike during the aftermath of 9/11, he’d kept a meticulous journal that tracked all the four reactor’s major events as they happened. He’d filled up several notebooks, sometimes working late into the night. He had the weather patterns off the coast of Japan, both tide and wind, updated continuously on his computer since the disaster. It soon became clear that the Japanese company that ran the plant was losing control of the situation. Worse, the men—and women too, he supposed—who’d been sent in to try to repair and shut down the plant would die of radiation exposure in weeks, according to independent scientists who were blogging day and night.

He had to be as brave as the workers in Japan, he told himself. Or the men and women who’d worked to put out the Chernobyl reactor’s fire, who had died soon afterward.

“Come on, old boy. Step one is get your damn phone
working
.”  Price walked to the door of his glass-enclosed office and unlocked it. He stepped out into the larger city room, which was a smashed-up mess: piles of computers, turned-over metal file cabinets, partitions blocking exit doors, odd bits left untouched—a nightmarish landscape. He searched the detritus for some kind of weapon, but found nothing but an old-school style metal letter opener. He picked it up off a desk and headed out into the dark hallway.

*   *   *

“What if I told you—” Johnny Ryder said.

“Shut the
fuck
up!” Bell said. He raised the pistol Rebecca had handed him and thought for a second time about firing a round straight into Ryder’s face.

“Hold on now, boy!” Johnny shot his hands up, his palms out in front of him. He turned to see Sue Ling boogying out the double doors from the pool area as fast as she could run.

Rebecca raised her pistol and waited for the girl to center on her pistol’s ramp sight. She placed the girl’s bobbing back, lining it up just above the sight’s front notch, and felt her finger start to squeeze the trigger. At the very last moment, she decided to run after her, instead of killing her.

“What if I told you I knew where there was a helicopter—a brand new one, fly-boy? What would you do then, huh? That’s right, at that old guy’s mansion. He had one on his property. Parked right behind the fucking house. And it looked spanking new to me.”

“
Where
?” Bell said.

“Well, that’s for me to know, and you to trade for,” Johnny said.

“What do you want?” Bell said.

“Me and Sue Ling go free. In exchange, we take you there, and you let us go when we get there. We get our Land Rover and our weapons back, too.”

Bell looked at Patty Tyson, who was standing behind Ryder, her pistol trained on Ryder’s back.

“I can fly it. If it’s true,” Bell said to Patty.

“It’s true, all right,” Johnny said, turning to look at Tyson.

“How far away is it?” Bell said.

“Close enough,” Johnny said.

“I don’t believe you,” Bell said. “I think you’re lying to buy time. So I don’t kill you.”

“Ask Sue Ling—if you catch her. If it is a lie, she wouldn’t know anything about it, would she?”

Rebecca fired in the air. Two Howlers were standing in the center of the hotel’s turnaround. They had been beating on a tourist who had been hiding in one of the rooms and had walked out trying to find her car in hopes of escape. One of the Howlers had pulled her from behind, snapping her neck and killing her instantly. The two male Howlers were busy pulling her apart.

Sue Ling stopped running, as she was heading straight toward the Howlers.

“Stop right there!” Rebecca said. The girl was incredibly fast, and Rebecca would have never caught her if it hadn’t been for the Howlers blocking her way.

Sue Ling shot her hands in the air and turned around. She was barefoot and began to shake; her clothes were wet, and the temperature outside was about 20 degrees.

“Shoot them, for fuck’s sake!” Sue Ling said. “Please.
Hurry up
!”

“You better come over here,” Rebecca said. She trained her pistol on the closer of the two Howlers.

“
Fuck,
it’s cold,” Sue Ling said. She started walking back toward Rebecca.

“Move to your right some,” Rebecca said.

The Chinese girl veered to the right and Rebecca fired at the first Howler. The bullet caught the man in the center of his forehead, shattering the top half of his skull.

“Shit—good shot!” Sue Ling said, turning and squealing with delight at the sight of the Howler falling stone dead, his brains tilting out of what was left of his skull. “You’re a goddamn Annie Oakley.”

Rebecca was about to fire on the second of the two Howlers, but the thing began to run down the driveway and away from her. Rebecca noticed that the driveway was being lit up by something. She could see car headlights, several of them, move through the pine trees that lined the driveway. Her first thought was that Quentin had come after them with more help, and she had a great feeling of relief.

The first car in the line stopped, and Rebecca heard the sound of automatic gunfire. The caravan of cars pulled forward again and came down the lane toward her. For a moment, watching the procession, she completely forgot about Sue Ling.

“Who the fuck is
that?
” Sue Ling said. She’d reached Rebecca’s side and turned around. She was shaking horribly, but she too was intent on watching the procession of cars.

The first of four black Chevy Suburbans, without license plates, pulled into the turnaround, all four pairs of headlights pointing at them. The lead car switched to its high beams, which ruined Rebecca’s night vision, and more or less blinded both girls. As their eyes fought to refocus, they heard car doors open. When they could see again, they saw several men step out in front of the big cars. The men were pointing automatic weapons at them.

“Say something quick, or die right there,” one of the men said.

“Well—howdy, boys,” Rebecca said. She’d lowered her pistol to her side. Her eyes adjusted to the intense lights. She watched the second Suburban’s backdoor open and a man in a green snowsuit get out. He had white hair and was tall and thin. He walked to the head of the line.

“You, the other one, speak up,” one of the men said to Sue Ling.

“I’m cool,” Sue Ling said. “Not a Howler.”

“They’re human, I guess,” one of the gunmen said.

“Ladies, my name is Senator Prince. We’re here to rescue you from this horror.”

“You’d better drop the gun,” one of the Senator’s men said. The gunman was wearing an army-green Patagonia jacket and blue jeans. Something in his expression was scary—a profound indifference, as if he might be at the gun range sighting on a paper target. His ice cold expression froze Rebecca’s blood.

“Why would I do that?” Rebecca said, trying to sound tough.

“Well, so he won’t shoot you, dear,” the senator said, smiling. “You see, we prefer to be the armed ones. We want to keep it simple. But don’t worry. We’re here to help.” Senator Prince walked out in front of his men and smiled again as if there were nothing wrong in the world. “Now, who else is in there with you?”

Rebecca looked at the men with the senator. They were still aiming their automatic weapons at her and Sue Ling. She let go of her pistol and it fell to the ground.

“Excellent. Now, see? That’s a good girl,” the senator said. He walked up to the two girls and looked at them as if they were furniture in a store window, weighing their value. “My, you’re both quite lovely young women.”

Rebecca heard more car doors open and close and other men and women’s voices. Some of the richest “Fun Hogs” she’d seen around Timberline walked out from behind the headlights and toward the hotel’s entrance. Some were on cell phones. The well-dressed group walked by her without saying a word; a few small children followed with their brown-skinned nannies in tow.

The senator took Sue Ling by the shoulder and led her back into the hotel.

“What you need is to get out of those wet clothes,” the senator said.

*   *   *

“This is the control room, according to this Phelps guy’s instructions,” Dillon said. The below-ground-floor control room was small, paneled in knotty pine to cover the concrete walls, about eight by ten feet. A console ran the length of the longer wall, with two swivel-style desk chairs. A dozen TV monitors hung above the console. The monitors, which had sprung to life with the cabin’s generator, displayed various outside-the-bunker views. But the men could see little on screen, as it was pitch dark outside.

Dillon hit a switch on the console marked: “Exterior Perimeter Lights.” The perimeter of the cabin was bathed in halogen lights, mounted high in the surrounding treetops.

“
Jesus
,” Quentin said. “Look—there by the road.” Howlers stood in the county road at the entrance to the ranch, caught by the bright high-powered spotlights.

“There must be fifty of them,” Dillon said, looking at a monitor whose screen was dedicated to the ranch’s entrance.

Quentin sat in the second chair. “More,” he said. “More, I think.”