HOWLERS (32 page)

“There’s no way we can stop them if they want to get in here,” Miles said.

“Stop being such a pussy,” Dillon said, turning back to look at the monitors.

Miles reached up and flipped on the switch marked
Sound Front Driveway
. Immediately they heard the howling. It was the most horrible sound Miles thought he’d ever heard—overwhelming. He turned it off. He felt panicked, sure they were going to die. He looked around the concrete room. It seemed smaller than it had only an hour ago. It was cold in the room. He stood up.

“What are we going to do?” Miles said. His chest was tight. He turned off the screens. The monitors went dark. “What good is it to see them out there? Look how many there are!”

Dillon turned and looked at the younger man. He’d seen men go stir-crazy in prison. The kid had the same panicked look on his face. It often happened to new arrivals at San Quentin, men who were not used to sitting in a cell for long periods of time. He was used to small spaces, to the feeling of being locked down, suffocating, but he too had lost it after being in solitary confinement for six weeks. He’d woken up one morning and felt the walls actually move toward him. The prison’s psychiatrist who came to visit him later, after he’d gone “buggy,” said that sensory deprivation caused several symptoms. One of them was a sense of panic and the feeling you couldn’t breathe. It could even induce hallucinations.

“You’re okay, kid?” Dillon said. He took his arm. “You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”

The kid looked at him, his blue eyes crazy. “Maybe I’m becoming one of them,” Miles blurted. “I don’t feel good. Sick. Stomach.”

Dillon kept his hand on Miles’ arm. When he’d been in solitary confinement, he’d had the desire for another human being’s touch,
anyone’s touch
. He’d imagined he would die without feeling that kind of touch, he’d sat in the cell and remembered exactly how his mother used to touch his forehead when he’d been upset. He’d dreamt of his mother’s warm hand on his face. Once he’d sat in the cold “isolation cell” calling Patty’s name, trying to remember lying with her in bed, the incredible lush feeling of her naked body pressed next to his.

“You’re not sick. Sit down,” Dillon ordered. “You’re hungry. Let’s get out of here and go up into the cabin. There’s food. We’ll cook something. You’ll see. You’ll feel better.”

Miles sat down. The fear had gone from his eyes. His face changed, his look of panic gone.

“Thanks. I—”

“It’s okay,” Dillon said. “Fucking Howlers make you go nuts. Right?”

“Yeah,” Miles said, feeling ashamed of himself. He looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He could see his fingers trembling.

“Can you cook, kid?” Dillon asked.

“No. My mother—” He had not thought of his parents until Price had texted him. “I think I’ll call my mom and dad. Maybe they could make it here, too,” Miles said. He took out his phone and checked for a signal, but had none. “Phone doesn’t work down here. I’ll go up and try.”

“Sure, kid,” Dillon said. He saw some white spit forming on the corner of Miles’ lips, but didn’t let it register on his face. Instead he smiled and stood up, and they went up to the cabin’s main floor.

Chuck’s notes on the cabin’s larder, and the kitchen, were twenty pages long. He’d stocked regular food stuffs, including fresh vegetables and fruits, in a cold room at the back of the kitchen. Multiple cases of freeze-dried foods were stored downstairs in the bunker. At the end of the notes, Phelps had described the edible plants of the Sierra region and referred to several books on foraging in the cabin’s library.

The five of them sat at the big pine table with long benches, the small bulletproof window directly across from it. They had a view out onto the snowy field in front of the cabin. A few Howlers were scouting the cabin; others were sitting on the driveway, howling. One or two had already run up on the porch and banged on the window and door before Dillon had walked out onto the porch and killed them with a fully-automatic SCAR 17, the stock folded up so it was shortened.

They heated up canned chili and tried to pretend that the howling didn’t bother them. Twice Dr. Poole had walked to the window to look out on the howling creatures. Once he’d opened one of the firing ports built into the cabin’s wall and used a high-powered .306 to shoot one of the closest Howlers dead. But it didn’t seem to matter, as more from the road were coming up and sitting on the driveway—in plain sight—in that weird way they had, like coyotes, their heads tilted back, their face bent toward the night sky.

It was Lacy who got Marvin and led him back to the table, telling him his food was getting cold. She’d gently pulled him away from the window, taking the rifle from his hands and placing it against the wall.

All of the men, not wanting to admit it, were glad that she was playing the role of mother. Something about it was reassuring. They had watched her cook with rapt attention, all of them appreciating the normalcy of her opening cans of chili and filling a big stew-sized pot with it. She’d found bread and heated that up in the oven, never once acknowledging the howling. Lacy had not even stopped her preparations for dinner when Dillon had gone out on the porch to shoot the two Howlers dead.

Phelps’s larder was huge and ran down the length of the cabin’s west wall. It was stocked with all kinds of foodstuffs, enough for two years for fifteen people, the computer printout said. Lacy had read the “Kitchen” section of Chuck’s instructions—which had been addressed to her, as if he’d known all along that she would come here and be the one to read them.

Chuck had left a hand written note thumb-tacked to the cold-storage door.

Dear Lacy,

I hope it’s you who is reads this. If it is I know you are safe here. I promised your mother, long ago, that your family would have a place to go if the shit ever hit the fan. So now it has, but you, your dad, and sister will all be safe here. I remember when your mom first brought you here as a baby. Here is the photo I took of you and your mom a year after you were born. It was September and hot as hell! Love “uncle” Chuck.

Lacy understood that Chuck Phelps had been in love with her mother, and that they might have been more than just good friends—perhaps even lovers? It didn’t shock her. She’d always liked Chuck.

She looked at the old-school photo. It showed a young woman with a beautiful baby. Her mother was holding her up to the camera. Both mother and baby were smiling at the photographer. Pine trees were behind them, and a piece of machinery of some kind. It was at that moment, while she’d been looking at the photo, that Dillon had walked out on the porch despite the danger of being overpowered, and the sound of automatic-weapons fire filled the cabin. In a moment he’d ducked back into the cabin, closing the door. They were all looking at him gripping the wicked assault rifle, his face splattered with blood.

Lacy calmly put the photo back where she’d found it and went back to fixing dinner.

The first attack, waves of Howlers, came while they were eating. They just stared as hundreds of the creatures started running up the driveway toward the cabin. It was surreal, Lacy thought, looking up and seeing the snow-covered field empty and beautiful one minute, then full of Howlers the next. She stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs. Miles didn’t hear his cell phone ringing in the commotion that ensued; all of them had run to the cabin’s built-in gunports, where they’d prepared weapons, and opened fire on the attacking horde. For half the night or longer they fired at the Howlers, wave after wave of them running at the cabin.

It was Miles who had taken it on himself during the battle to bring each of them fresh ammunition. All of them were firing the same weapon, the FAL assault rifle. At the end of the battle, the Howlers piled up in front of the porch, five feet high, were giving the others a wall of dead bodies to hide behind. Some Howlers, especially children, would fling themselves off the heap and land on the porch, sometimes heading head-first into the bulletproof window in an attempt to smash it. Others would crawl up the stairs behind the dead and crawl, on all fours, toward the door.

At one point, one of the crawling ones grabbed Lacy’s rifle barrel and tried to yank it out through the gunport. She screamed for help. Marvin jumped up and helped her pull the butt of her rifle back. He managed to pour fire onto the Howler, splitting its face open.

Lacy sagged to the floor, exhausted. She turned and looked at her father firing, the sweat pouring from his face. He emptied a clip and caught her eye while turning to pick up one at his feet. For the first time in her life, Lacy thought she saw fear on her father’s face. He went back to killing.

At dawn it stopped. At dawn the snow fell lightly on two thousand dead bodies lying out on the field. Inside the cabin it was quiet. They were all past exhausted.

It was Marvin who walked outside first. He stood at the doorway, cold air pouring in looking at the nightmarish scene: dead Howlers piled in heaps in front of the cabin’s porch. Bodies were everywhere, all types of people. Some were obviously city people, judging from their dress.

Marvin looked at the pile in the nearest kill zone, twenty yards or so in front of the cabin. It was an abattoir: bodies piled on bodies, blood, guts, brain matter. He walked out into the field. He put down his rifle and began to pull bodies down from the pile and move them out of the way. He pulled a fat man whose head was gone, yanking him down from the top of the pile. He watched the thing slide down the scrum-like pile of bodies and land at his feet.

Marvin heard a shot ring out and simultaneously felt the crack of a bullet pass very near his head. A Howler, hiding behind the pile, had jumped at him and was in midair when Dillon shot him from the porch. The Howler, a teenage boy, landed at Marvin’s feet, its body twitching not quite dead. Marvin looked up at the porch and saw Dillon covering him. He went back to work without saying a word, dragging bodies from the pile and hauling them out of the way of their kill zone. His boots created a sludge of guts and blood and snow as he worked. The others came out of the cabin joining him in the ugly work, all of them realizing that the kill zone had to be cleared, or they would all die.

CHAPTER 26

“She’s in the bathroom,” Bell said, tossing the black man his penknife.

The man, catching the closed knife, looked at the thing dismissively. “Keep it, Lieutenant. They want you downstairs. Are you in or out?” the man said.

“Count me in,” Bell said and smiled.

“Good,” the black man said. He turned around. Bell saw he was holding an automatic in his right hand, the hammer down, but “hot” and ready to fire, he guessed.

“She was about to piss herself,” Bell said. “She’s in the can. I freed her hands. I couldn’t say no.”

The black man walked toward the closed bathroom door, turning his back on Bell. Raising his pistol slightly, he opened the door with his free hand. Bell could see Patty was sitting on the toilet, her pants down at her ankles. She looked up at the man, obviously terrified. Bell could hear her piss hitting the water in the toilet.

“Get the fuck up! You’re to be tattooed. You’re going to be a CG, like the other girl,” the man said, looking at her.

Bell walked toward the bathroom. He sprang on the man from behind. The man turned, but was too late to stop Bell from getting his left arm wrapped around his neck. Bell, taller, got his right arm—clamped at the man’s throat—locked into the crook of his left arm, then wrapped his left hand up and behind the black man’s head, forcing his head down, and against the arm at his throat. Once Bell felt his two arms lock, the way he’d been taught in Survival School, it would be almost impossible to break his hold. The man would stop breathing very soon, his trachea crushed. But it was like riding a bull; the black man, very strong, tried to buck Bell off his back, swinging Bell’s legs first left, then right.

Bell, managing to keep his arms locked, watched as the man brought his pistol over his left shoulder, intending to shoot Bell in the head. He fired over his shoulder, aiming his shot where he thought Bell’s head should be. The sound of the gunshot exploded through the tiled bathroom. But Bell, anticipating the shot, had dropped his own head behind the man’s, and the shot missed him, hitting the shower-stall glass door. Bell managed to force the man’s head down and toward the floor, making it impossible for him to fire at him again effectively.

The man managed to lift Bell completely off the floor, hitting out at the lieutenant with his elbow repeatedly after the shot failed. All the while the black man’s free left hand continued to try and pry Bell’s death-lock loose. He aimed his pistol at the girl, but Bell jerked the man to his left just as he fired at her and the shot went wild.

Missing her, the bullet hit the toilet’s tank and smashed it. Water leaked out of the cracked porcelain now. Bell heard the man’s pistol clatter to the tile floor. The man’s legs gave out, weakened from the lack of air.

Bell, his feet back on the floor, cranked down on the man’s neck with every ounce of strength his hundred-and-seventy pounds could muster. his whole body contracted with the effort as he tried to break the man’s neck. Airless and frantic, the man brought both hands up to the arms around his throat in a lame attempt to break Bell’s grip, but it was too late.

Bell felt the man’s windpipe collapse, finally crushed. The man’s strength left him completely. His two hands dropped away from Bell’s arms. He fell forward with Bell on top of him, still choking him for all he was worth. Bell, on his knees, heard himself grunt as he continued to try and snap the man’s neck, twisting it violently one way, and then another.

Patty had sprung up from the toilet, a toothbrush she’d picked up from the floor in her right hand. She rammed the green plastic handle straight into the man’s right eyeball, driving it into his brain, pushing it with her palm until it stopped moving. She’d sent the entire length into his head.

The man, in agony, managed to buck crazily from the pain, not dead yet. Bell rode him toward the wall by the toilet. Despite the toothbrush shoved into his brain and a crushed trachea, the man managed to struggle again. But Bell locked up with all his might a second time. The man finally slumped dead, his chest rammed up against the rim of the toilet.

The lieutenant stood on the man’s back and cranked his head back, feeling the neck snap. Patty grabbed the dead man by the back of his head and slammed his face down as hard as she could onto of the edge of the toilet bowl, splitting his skull open.

Bell, exhausted, rolled off and watched Patty drag the body up and put the man’s face into the piss-filled toilet bowl, holding it under water with her knee. She walked her knees up on the man’s neck, holding him down until she realized he was dead. She watched the last few bubbles of air from the dead man’s lungs came up out of the piss water. Bell could see the white of Patty’s naked thighs, her pants still around her ankles, as she knelt on the man’s submerged head, toilet water leaking onto the floor.

“Dead,” Bell whispered.

She finally climbed off the man’s back and away from the body. She bent down and pulled up her wet pants. Bell put his index finger up to his lips in a signal for quiet. He picked up the pistol from the wet floor, sure one of the guards would come in after hearing the shots.

   Patty finished buckling her belt. It was quiet, with only the sound of the water leaking from the toilet. Bell walked out to the room, planning to step outside and shoot it out with the guard.

Patty came to his side and grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “No. Wait.”

“We can’t wait,” Bell said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Someone must have heard those shots.”

“Let me go first. They’ve seen me. They won’t react to me, maybe.”

Bell looked at her. “Okay,” he said.

“I’ll walk out. If more than one is out there, I’ll tell them they’d better come and check on their friend.”

They heard howling outside the hotel, coming from the pool area. Bell walked to the window overlooking the pool and saw several Howlers standing around the verge of the pool. Their ugly faces were lit by the pool’s underwater light.

The group was cut down in a hail of automatic-weapons fire. The guards in the hall had left to deal with the Howler attack, he realized.

“I have to find Ryder,” Bell said. “We need to find out where that helicopter is.”

“What about the girl—Rebecca?” Patty said.

“Okay,” Bell said. “We find her first.”

“She’s just down the hall,” Patty said. “We were kept together.” Bell nodded.

Patty walked out of the room. She ducked back inside almost immediately and motioned for him to follow her. The hallway was empty, but he felt sure they wouldn’t make it more than a few yards before being cut down.

Patty stopped in front of a room several doors down. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. She knocked softly but got no answer. She turned to look at Bell. He leaned against the wall, motioning her aside, and kicked the door in.

*   *   *

Senator Prince looked up from an Apple tablet computer where he was poring over military grade maps of the Sierra Nevada, using Google’s special top-secret web site reserved for Government contractors and NSA. Two of his guards escorted the blond girl he’d asked for, in just her underwear, into his tidy hotel suite. The senator dropped an electronic pin, with gusto, into the spot where Chuck Phelps’s cabin had been finally located.

The NSA had been especially interested in the place because it was considered one of the best doomsday forts in the Sierra. It had been the NSA’s idea to fund a “Doomsday Prepper” series on Cable TV as a way to get more data from unwitting would-be preppers who deluged the show’s web site with comments, photos, and requests to be on TV, all without raising suspicion. The government had about ninety percent of all the Level One strong houses in the country located, photographed, and monitored continuously by high altitude drones. Level One structures—many with bunker-type constructions below ground, like the Phelps Cabin, were at the top of the government’s list.

The doomsday preppers, as a class, had been put on a master list in order of importance. A sophisticated algorithm regularly updated the list of Level One sites, the ones Homeland Security thought worth taking over in the event of any insurrection. NSA scanned the Internet for any mention of key phrases or credit-card transactions. Anyone buying, say, an electric generator and freeze dried food, or ammunition, during the same credit-card billing cycle would be added to a list of possible doomsday preppers. Homeland Security would search the target’s email correspondence going back five years, while the NSA program compiled property records, credit card purchase records, photo records, voice and messaging records. A Homeland Security drone would fly over any sites, once identified to take photos, sometimes during construction. Rural properties, especially those built expressly as “forts”, and with adjoining farms, were ranked Level One.

NSA had shared its information with important government contractors, asking them to build a database of all the important doomsday prepper sites in the country. A private intelligence organization reported 10,000 of them, and had built the database. Google had worked closely with Stratford and NSA; the special Google/NSA map of the Sierras was marked with several electronic red pins, all Level One forts. A click on Google Earth revealed photographic details under each pin.

An NSA employee had deleted the Phelps site’s coordinates from the agency’s computer records, along with hundreds of other doomsday forts in California. The records had been part of an extensive database that listed all the Level One doomsday-preppers’ sites in the country, including Hawaii. But the talked-about Phelps strong house had been relocated and added back to the list.

Prince had decided to use the Phelps site as his headquarters during the campaign to clear the Sierra Nevada of Howlers. The provisional government being formed in Washington thought he would be safe there. The region’s other doomsday sites would serve as forts in the new government’s war against the Howlers.

Senator Prince had two satellite radios on the table. CNN was playing behind him on one of the room’s flat-screen televisions. CNN was broadcasting live feed from the destruction of Washington, DC by huge mobs of Howlers. Prince, however, knew something the reporters didn’t: the DC Howlers were fakes, a false flag using the Western states’ outbreak as the opportunity for a coup.

   A helicopter pilot was providing dramatic voiceover. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen said that the White House had been abandoned, and that the President and his family had been airlifted safely to Camp David. Due to the extraordinary emergency, the anchorperson said, the President had declared martial law “until further notice.” The military would be providing “continuity of government,” according to the President, who’d spoken to the country via a radio hook up early that morning. There was no further message at this time, nor any kind of explanation of what had happened in several major American cities on the West Coast.

The military had ordered all radio and television networks to stop broadcasting and to carry only approved news. CNN had been designated the official voice of the “provisional government.” Newscasters were using this term to suggest that the U.S. constitution had been abrogated, but no one at CNN questioned any of the military’s press releases.

With the help of government contractors, Senator Prince was cobbling together something called the “New Freedom Army.” Forces within the government had been waiting for any kind of social disorder to allow them to spring into action with a secret plan to “save the republic.” The emergency was the excuse needed to take over the U.S. government and run America with the super-rich at the wheel. The Howler emergency had been just the kind of national emergency they’d been waiting for—in fact, hoping for.

The senator was in close communication with other important members of the secret government. The Provisional Government’s first priority was the formation of something called the “Steel Ring,” which would both protect them from any counter-coup and insure their personal safety from the Howlers—which were real, and a threat.

The senator had had Rebecca brought to the Presidential Suite on the ground floor of the hotel. She’d been tattooed and was ready to be shipped to one of the new comfort stations the Provisional Government planned to open for its mercenary army.

The Provisional Government’s contractors, in anticipation of this takeover, had devised a new social order based on caste system, with slaves at the bottom. Slavery would make the new state able to compete economically against the rising Asian superpowers, especially China. Slave labor would build new factories. All prisoners of the New Freedom Army were to be tattooed with their new caste designations: BS for Blue Slaves, a category for the meanest hard labor tasks; CGS for comfort girl slaves; CBS for comfort boy slaves. OCSO-class slaves would be used in offices and big box stores, government relief centers, and in hospitals, and as support staff and domestic help. G-4-Zeros would be used in factories where reading and writing were required. The lowest castes would not be citizens, but would be “Use Slaves” and would work without any political rights. These castes were the property of the state and would be treated as chattel. A simple C would be used to brand conscripts to the army and police castes. Mercenaries were to be used as Special-Ops troops, and as a Pretorian guard for the top castes.

Army Conscripts would have full citizenship in the new state, but no political rights. Praetors, Bankers, and Consuls — men and women — would not be tattooed, but would wear uniforms with their caste clearly marked on their lapels.

The top caste, R1s, owned everything
,
including the State. R-1 ranking was reserved for the “Hundred Families,” and all their blood members. The Hundred Families would be represented on “The Council of One Hundred” by one male member from each family. Council members—called Praetors—would rule America by decree. Each Praetor would have one vote on the Council.

“What’s it stand for?” Rebecca had been stripped of her jeans and Pendleton shirt and was standing in just her bra and panties. A cruel new tattoo on her left shoulder read
CG
.

“Comfort Girl,” said Senator Prince. He wore a plush white hotel bathrobe.

A messenger stuck his head into the suite. “A large group of the things has been sighted near the hotel. Looks like they’re massing.”

“Stop them at the entrance,” Prince said. “We’ll be leaving soon for new digs by U.S. army helicopter. We’ll have two M1 Abrams tanks to clear the strong house at Timberline. They’re on their way from the Army’s Reno proving ground.”

“Yes, sir.”