HOWLERS (35 page)

“It’s right up there.” Johnny pointed toward a barn-like garage. “I didn’t touch the thing. I’m no pilot,” Ryder said. “We don’t have much time. I told them exactly where this place was. I had to, or they wouldn’t let me come. They have some kind of drone and they followed me with it. They’ll be here soon. The drone is above us. So they know you’re here too, now.” Ryder pointed above him. An object hovered about a hundred feet above them, silent and grey.

“These are some high-tech
motherfuckers
,” Ryder said.

A burst of shotgun fire shattered the drone and brought it to the ground in pieces.

“Fuck them,” Rebecca said. She’d fired the AA 12 with one hand and was able to hit the drone in the moonlight.

“Is that a yes, chief?” Ryder asked.

Bell looked down the hill and saw two sets of headlights slowing on the highway below.

“Move that fucking jeep,” Bell said and lowered the empty pistol he had trained on Ryder. He got back into the limo and waited for the convoy below, watching it in the rearview mirror, as Ryder got the Land Rover pulled around and out of his way.

Bell floored the limo in reverse. He backed it down the driveway about fifty feet, then spun the wheel as hard as he could. The rear end of the limo slammed into the side of the hill. The stretch limo was now effectively blocking the driveway up to the mansion. Bell scrambled out and ran up toward the house.

*   *   *

Howard had carefully packed the medicines he’d collected at the doctor’s office, putting them in a cardboard box he’d found. The medicine locker in the Poole’s office had been untouched, despite the fact that the office was a wreck. Poole’s young receptionist, who had come back to check on the office, had been beaten with a chair and was lying in the waiting room, dead. Howard, sorry for the dead woman, had pulled a curtain off of a window and pulled it over her body.

Two cars had come racing through Timberline while he’d been in the doctor’s office. One had crashed trying to avoid an abandoned car and everyone inside had been killed immediately. The car’s horn was still blaring loudly. A second car, coming into town behind the first, managed to avoid the gauntlet of stopped cars. The second car, driving at high speed, had gone on toward the south end of town. Howard had seen them both pass through the office window, which had a full view of Main Street.

He stared out at the crashed car, its horn blaring loudly. He could see the dead bodies in the car. It looked like a whole family. The driver’s head had bashed the steering wheel so hard that it had engaged the horn. It had been Howard’s stopped Prius they’d failed to get around. He felt guilty. His hands had begun to shake.

He finished filling the box with the medicines he’d found and walked out of the doctor’s office and across the chaotic street toward the car that had just crashed. He laid the box in the snow and opened the driver’s-side door. A dead woman rolled out, about thirty, with short red hair. The family had hit a wooden telephone pole at sixty or seventy miles an hour. No one in the car had been wearing safety belts, probably so they could fire weapons at the Howlers.

The car, an old Dodge Dart, was full of weapons. The woman had a pistol in her clenched hand. He glanced at the backseat: at two teenage kids, their necks broken, their faces plowed brutally into the front seats when they collided with the pole. He turned away, unable to take the sight.

He looked at who he guessed was their father. The man had a box of bullets, still open and on his lap. His arms were heavily tattooed. The dead woman, her body dangling out of the car face up, had a surprised look, as if she might get up.

“My fault,” Howard said out loud. “My fault.” He was crying. “What’s happened to the world?” He yelled the words and looked around him. The street was littered with frozen bodies dusted in snow; abandoned cars, some with their doors still open; and dark storefronts. Nothing moved on the street.

He looked down at the automatic in the dead woman’s hand. He pulled the pistol from her still-warm hand and put it in the box alongside the medicines he’d collected. He heard a car’s motor from far away. The car slowly turned the corner onto Main Street. Howard recognized the old camper he’d run into at the freeway rest stop hours before. He moved away from the car with its horn still blaring and walked toward the approaching camper. It was snowing lightly. He stopped in the middle of the street, put the box on the ground in front of him and raised his hands in the air. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did that, but he did.

The camper, slowly navigating the street’s abandoned cars, finally came to a stop a few feet in front of him. The old man, Jon, was driving. Howard walked to the driver’s side window and watched Jon roll it down.

  “Howard? You can put your hands down, amigo. We’re friendly.”

“Jon,” Howard said. “I’m glad to see you. I killed these people.” Howard nodded behind him at the wrecked Dodge. He had to speak loudly over the sound of the car’s blaring horn.

“Where are you going?” Jon said, looking out in front of him at the smashed car. He could see how its bumper had chipped out a big piece of wood from the pole when it struck. “Looks to me like they hit the pole, Howard.”

“Yes, but it was my fault. My car, it was in the way,” Howard said. He felt exhausted.

“They were probably speeding, Howard.”

“Yes, they were, but it’s
my
fault.”

The man looked down at him. He opened the camper’s door and climbed down to the street. He was carrying an automatic in a pancake holster. Jon walked toward the car and checked on the family, making sure they were dead. He popped the hood of the car and pulled the horn’s wires out. The blaring stopped. It was quiet again. Jon walked back and looked down into Howard’s box.

“What’s that?”

“Medicine. There’s a cabin, about ten miles from here. I have some friends there. I’m trying to get up there. They needed these medicines.” Howard looked back at the car and saw the dead woman lying half in and half out of the driver’s side. She was facing the sky. He couldn’t stop looking at her.

“Well, we tried going north. There’s just too many of the things on the freeway. We almost didn’t make it back into the mountains,” Jon said. “Seems better up here on these country roads. I’ve picked up more stranded people, too. I’m running out of space. And I’m low on gas.”

“I’m glad to see you,” Howard said.

“I feel like Noah,” Jon said and smiled. “I think we’ve got twenty-five in there right now. I had to turn some kid away back down the road. No more room. Is there a gas station here?”

“Yes,” Howard said. “But there’s no power. It went out a little while ago.”

“Do you think we could stay with your friends? I’ve got a hand pump. We just have to tap into the gas tanks. And we can hand-pump the gas,” Jon said.

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I can call them. Ask.”

“Could you do that for me, please? I’ve got some little kids in there and they need something to eat. We can’t just drive around forever.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Howard said.

“Tell them I’ve got lots of guns and ammo. Maybe that will make a difference.”

Howard nodded.

“It wasn’t your fault, Howard,” Jon said.

They both heard a strange rattling sound. It was a sound that Howard had heard years before, in the Army. Jon turned around and looked down the street. Almost immediately, he knew what the sound was, too.

*   *   *

Gary Summers was two miles from Emigrant Gap on a stretch of country road that was dead flat. It had summer homes on either side, set back off the road. He’d thought of going through the abandoned-looking houses to search for warmer clothes, especially a pair of gloves, but he’d been afraid to. All the clothes at the B&B were way too big for him.

When he heard the M-1 Abrams tank, he’d stopped pedaling and pulled to a stop in the middle of the empty road. It was snowing hard, and at first he was unsure of what he was seeing: the dull, almost gold Abrams tank came out of the white mist, straight down the middle of the road.

He stared at it and blew on the freezing knuckles of his right hand. He looked down at both his hands, his fingers were bright red from cycling in the cold. Both hands were numb from exposure. He’d been unable to find any gloves at the bed and breakfast where he’d found the bike. He’d pedaled down the mountain and felt safer the further he got away from the Phelps cabin and Timberline. He’d not seen any Howlers or any sign of life for more than an hour. At times he’d had to slow down because of the dead bodies and the abandoned cars left on the road. But other than the dead, he’d seen no one.

He brought his right hand to his mouth again as he stared at the approaching tank and blew on his knuckles to help revive any feeling. But he couldn’t even feel his breath. The numbness in his hands was starting to make it difficult to steer the bike.

The sound of the tank got louder. The tank’s wide and ugly tracks rattled over the snow-dusted asphalt. He could see details on the tank more clearly as it approached, its hatches were all shut tight. Its armored desert-colored sides carried wintertime camouflage netting rolled into neat bundles. The exhaust from its diesel engine hung in the thin cold air behind it, giving it an ominous look.

“Thank God,” Gary said out loud. If the U.S. Army had come, it was all going to get better now. He’d done the right thing. He raised his hand in a wave, as he expected the tank to slow and offer him help. He yelled at the top of his lungs. But watching it come toward him, he realized that it was not going to slow. Twenty yards away, he had to pull off the road and out of the tank’s way, or be crushed. He rode off the road just in time. The high sides of the Abrams just nicked his back wheel as he darted down the steep side of the roadway and into a trench that had been cut for summer run-off. A lesser rider would have not managed to keep the bike upright, but he did, riding it out of the trench again and back up onto the road.

The tank had not slowed down. It kept right on rolling down the middle of the road toward Timberline.

An hour later, at a checkpoint set up by the New Freedom Army and Homeland Security at Emigrant Gap, Summers was arrested and turned over to the MPs. He was tagged with a pink marker on his forehead, his bicycle taken from him. He was transported to a shape-up area in Sacramento at the McClellan Air force base.

An hour later, a quiet young man in a US Army uniform tattooed Summers’ shoulder and ass cheek. After he was tattooed, given a paper “dog-tag,” and made to drink a strange metallic-tasting concoction that could be “read” by any patrolling drone. They put him on a bus to Los Angeles.

Gary Summers was officially prisoner number 16,001. He wore the
CB
tattoo on his right ass cheek and a matching one on his right shoulder in dark blue
.
It was painful for him to sit in the transport truck because of the fresh tattoo on his ass. They put him to work as soon as he arrived at the comfort station a block away from the landmark once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and now named TCL Theatre, after a corporation.

On the way down the freeway near the outskirts of L.A., Summers and the other Comfort Boys, saw a billboard, brand new and glossy. It read:

FATHERLAND FIRST!

SERVICE, HONOR, DUTY!

WE WILL WIN!

Drawing on everything he’d been taught from the moment he was born, Gary Summers decided to be the best possible Comfort Boy he could be. By conforming—as he would later that evening for a bloated, gin-soaked, and Viagra-fueled general—he hoped his new masters would approve and favor him, that they would see that he was worthy.

CHAPTER 29

Lieutenant Bell had landed the “executive model” blue and white Sikorsky S-76D helicopter, intended for six people maximum, in the snowy and body-strewn field in front of the Phelps cabin. He’d run over the ground littered with hundreds of dead shot-to-hell Howlers and onto the burnt-black and charred porch to the cabin’s door.

“There’s very little time. There’s an M-1 Abrams on the way here. They intend to make this location some kind of headquarters,” Bell said as soon Quentin had let him in the heavy front door.

Bell and Lacy embraced spontaneously, surprising Quentin. “I’ve dropped Rebecca and Patty Tyson at another Prepper cabin. It was built by some millionaire. It’s unknown to the authorities, I think. It’s, well—it’s in a whole other league from this place.”

“You said a
tank
?” Quentin said.

“Yes. And it’s coming
here
. It’s only about five miles away, if that.”

“Then we’ll be rescued soon,” Quentin said.

“
No,
you don’t understand,” Bell said.

“Why should we run away? It sounds like the Army has come to rescue us,” Quentin said.

“It’s not what you think,” Bell said. “There’s been some kind of takeover—of the government. You don’t want to be here when they get here.”

“I don’t understand,” Miles said. “What do you mean,
takeover
?”

“I’m not sure. We were going to be made slaves. Rebecca was branded—they were going to make her a prostitute. It all happened at the hotel,” Bell said.

The others, including Marvin, looked at Bell as if he’d gone mad.

“Lieutenant, you’re not making any sense,” Quentin said. He turned and looked at Poole. 

“You just have to trust me,” Bell said. “At least let me take Lacy.
Please
. There isn’t much time. I’m telling you. And they have drones. They may already be above us, watching.”

“Did you say Tyson, Patty Tyson?” Dillon said.

“Yes. I took her and Rebecca to the cabin. It’s not far away, about fifteen miles. It’s very high up in the Sierra, over 10,000 feet. It’s safe for the time being. There’s no road to it—they flew everything in to build the place. The government doesn’t know about it. The New Freedom Army, whatever they’re calling it. At least I don’t think they do.”

“He’s crazy,” Poole said.

“I’m not crazy! I know it’s all difficult to believe. Do you have a TV, or a radio? They’re asking people to turn in their
guns
. I’m
not
crazy. Who would ask that?” Bell said.

“No TV or radio. They’re down in the bunker. But we’ve been locked out,” Quentin said. “We’ve had no news since right after we got here. Is it bad? The Howlers?”

“I can take two of you. I’ll come back—if I can,” Bell said.

“What do you mean ‘if I can’?” Dillon said.

“You’ll have to neutralize the tank. It won’t be easy. But they’ll shoot me down otherwise. They’ve got a fifty caliber on that thing and the cannon. I’ve got nothing on that helicopter. It’s a civilian helicopter,” Bell said. “It’s a sitting duck.”

“We’re supposed to stop a tank?” Dillon said. He’d been in the 101
st
Airborne right after leaving high school, and dishonorably discharged for striking an officer. He knew what Bell was asking. “How the fuck do we do that? They’re eight-fucking-feet high!”

“We’re running out of time,” Bell said. He turned and looked out the bulletproof plastic window, scratched and smeared with blood. It was noon. The sun had crept out and was lighting the top of the pine trees. If the tank got into range of the helicopter, they would destroy it, and he and Lacy would be trapped here.

“There’s also several hundred Howlers on the road. I just saw them. There’s no escape,” Bell said. “You
have
to fight. The Sierra climbs steeply just behind the cabin. There’s no escape, that way either.” Bell felt like grabbing Lacy and just running out the door. On the way to the cabin he’d realized how much he cared about her.

“Takeover, you say?” Quentin said.

Lacy’s father looked horrible, Bell thought. He had a bad cut on the side of his head that Poole had stitched closed. The man seemed unsteady on his feet.

“Yes. I don’t know all the ins and outs, but—
yes
. It’s some kind of Fascist government. They’re crazy. Please let me take Lacy out
now,
while I still can.”

“I won’t leave my father,” Lacy said.

“Okay,” Quentin said. “All right. I trust you. And we don’t know what’s going on. It’s true, we’ve had no news at all here.”

“I want to go, too,” Dillon said. “That’s my wife up there. Patty.”

Bell looked at him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go. There’s room for one more.”

“I’ll stay. Let Quentin go. He’s injured,” Miles said.

“Not so fast,” Poole said, looking at Dillon. “We need you here—if the tank does come.”

“
Fuck
that. How are you going to kill a
tank?
You need an anti-tank weapon for that, you stupid asshole!
And
Patty needs me,”
Dillon said, looking at Quentin. Their eyes locked. For the first time, he could see that Quentin was jealous.

“Let him go,” Quentin said. “It’s all right with me. Lacy, you go. He’ll come back for us, you heard him. It’s what your mother would want. Please.” Quentin looked at his daughter. “Don’t make me beg you. I can’t lose you, too.”

Lacy ran into her father’s arms and held him. They held onto each other. Dillon got one of the remaining boxes of ammo, picked up a FAL and headed for the door, ready to leave.

“If you want to save your wife, I would stop that tank. If they capture any of you alive,
believe me,
they’ll find her soon enough,” Bell said. “I promise I’ll come back for you all. You have my word.”

“How the fuck do we let you know it’s safe to come back?” Dillon said.

“Because when I come back, I’ll either be shot down—or it will be safe, won’t it?” Bell said.

“Miles, you go then, with Lacy,” Quentin said. “Someone should fill the other seat.”

“What about Howard?” Miles said. “He’s on the way here.”

“If your friend manages to get here, we’ll take care of him. You have my word on that. Go on, the both of you,” Quentin said. He didn’t say it out loud, but he was glad to see the young people leave. Something was hopeful in the idea they would survive this nightmare.

Miles and Lacy grabbed their coats and headed for the door. Lacy came back and held her father’s hand, tears pouring down her face. Bell had to come and pull her away. Dillon stared out the open cabin door, his rifle slung over his shoulder, the box of ammo in his hand.

Bell, Lacy and Miles ran out the door. Quentin thought Dillon would follow, but he didn’t. He stood frozen in the doorway.

They watched the helicopter’s blades start to turn and the powder snow under them being kicked up and whirled around it. The helicopter finally lifted off and headed east, just missing the tree tops, and finally disappeared into the clouds.

For a moment none of the three men left behind said anything.

“We got to get into that fucking bunker,” Dillon said without turning around. He ran out the open door without explaining, the FAL over his shoulder. Marvin and Quentin watched him trot through the snow toward the county road. They could see several Howlers in the distance coming toward him.

Poole turned and saw Quentin drop to the floor, writhing horribly. He rushed to his side. Quentin’s whole body began to jerk violently, an ugly white foam building on his lips.

*   *   *

Howard picked up the box with the medicine. It had stopped snowing. Rivers of blue showed in the sky where the clouds had parted. Sunlight hit the town and was reflected off its metal roofs.

The tank stopped in the middle of Main Street. It had crushed several cars that had been in its way, the tank powering easily over them and smashing them flat. The tank, fourteen feet wide, stopped directly in front of them, its cannon parallel to the ground.

“We’re saved,” Jon said. “God damn it! I knew it! I knew we’d be okay!”

The old man stepped out into the street and waved his hands in the air. Several people came out of the camper now that they thought it was safe. Howard watched them pour out of the passenger-side door. They were all kinds of people: blacks, whites, Latinos, children, young mothers. Jon slapped Howard’s back with excitement. The old man stepped toward the tank, waved his hands high in the air and whooped.

“God Bless America!” Jon yelled. He turned back to Howard, smiled and did a little dance. He pulled his sidearm out and shot a round into the air. A black woman came up, hugged Jon and then hugged Howard, then took off and ran toward the tank.

Howard turned his attention to the tank again. He didn’t smile. Something was wrong, he thought, about the way the tank just sat there, as if it were watching them. Why didn’t they acknowledge the celebration and open the hatch? He’d been in the Army. That would be the first thing a young soldier would do under the circumstances.

A young man, about seventeen with long blond hair, ran toward the tank shouting and waving at it happily, passing the black woman. The automated machine gun on top of the Abrams fired a burst and cut the boy in two pieces, killing him as he ran. The tank started up and came speeding toward them, firing its .50 caliber machine gun, targeting the camper.

The first volley had missed Howard. He’d stepped behind the camper, and its big engine block had saved him. He could hear the .50 caliber rounds tearing into the camper, breaking the glass and puncturing its aluminum rear, shredding it. He ran, the cardboard box still in his arms, toward his Prius. He heard the screams behind him and trotted on, terrified. He could see the glass of one storefront explode, then another.

His cell phone fell out of his pocket and he stupidly bent to pick it up. He turned and saw the front of the tank, its front end straight up in the air, climb up and crash down on the camper, collapsing its roof. He saw people running away, some cut down by the machine-gun fire as he climbed into his Prius and looked into the rearview mirror. The tank was backing up over the camper, driving in reverse, trying like some strange steel monster to crush what was left of its lopsided and smashed-in body.

Howard started the engine. Jon grabbed the passenger-side door, screaming for him to let him in. Howard slammed on his brakes, expecting Jon to jump in, but when he turned to look again, Jon had disappeared from sight, the door left open. Howard slammed his foot onto the gas pedal and raced down the street, swerving around scores of abandoned cars, the Prius’ passenger-side door still open. The Prius’ backend slid wildly as he turned off of Main Street.

He heard himself screaming as he drove, desperately jerking the car’s steering wheel to avoid colliding with random cars. He didn’t realize that he was driving at 60 miles an hour, the accelerator pinned to the floor. It was as if he were hearing someone else’s screams.

*   *   *

Dillon stopped jogging and took a knee in the snow. Several Howlers were coming up the road toward him. He watched one of them also get on one knee and begin to howl loudly. Dillon fired at the crouching Howler and saw it fall over. The others—they seemed to all be men—were running toward him. He waited for them to close in, then he cut them down.

He stood up and ran past their twitching head-shot bodies toward the county road. He had to guess where the cabin’s escape tunnel hatch might be located. He thought he understood Phelps by now. He would put it, he thought, very close to the road, but in a spot that was not open. He was sure of that.

More Howlers had gathered at the bottom of the road to the cabin, at the fallen trees that blocked the road up to the cabin. Dillon raised his rifle and fired. He fired until the weapon was empty. Two Howlers, a young man and a woman, jumped off the logs and ran toward him still alive. He could hear their shoes crunching the new snow. He took out a six-shot Smith and Wesson old-school .38 revolver, the only handgun they’d found ammunition for upstairs. He turned and looked to his left but saw nothing that would indicate a lid or opening to the tunnel.

It has to be closer to the road.
It’s at the fallen tree! That’s where it would be.

Dillon crouched. The two Howlers slowed, the man standing behind the woman. The woman leapt at him, springing into the air. Dillon dodged the thing and shot her as soon as she landed. Firing twice, he hit her in the neck and head. He felt himself knocked over and felt his shoulders being slammed on the ground. The second thing’s saliva hit him in the face as it shook him violently. He tried to lift his pistol, but it was caught between him and the thing’s chest. He fired anyway, but it did no good; the rounds went into the thing’s guts. He felt himself losing consciousness, his head hitting the ground repeatedly.

A shot rang out and he felt the thing let go of him and go limp. It slid to his right side and face-down into the snow.

Dillon felt himself being helped up by someone he couldn’t quite make out because of the Howler’s thick spit covering his eyes.

“I’m Howard,” the man said. A middle-aged man with thinning black hair, wearing a tie and a short-sleeve shirt, held a pistol in one hand and a cardboard box in the other.

Dillon focused. He wiped his eyes, his vision blurred, but he was sure it was a man and he was alone.

“Howard Price. I’m Miles’ friend. He said I might be safe here. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, thank you, Howard.” Dillon picked up the revolver he’d dropped. “I need you to help me find something, Howard.”

“Yes, of course,” Howard said.

“Well, what if it doesn’t work?” The four of them were crammed into the control booth: Quentin, Miles, Howard and Dillon. They were watching the tank commander on the video screen in front of them. Dillon had found the hatch to the bunker’s western escape tunnel, which Summers had left wide open. Dillon was able to climb in and climb back through the long tunnel in the dark, and into the main room of the bunker, and open the steel plate to the cabin.

The four of them were watching the Abrams tank, which had stopped only a few yards from the cabin’s front porch.

“It has a four-man crew,” Dillon said. “I know the Abrams tank. I was a crew member for a while when I was in the Army.”

Quentin looked at him. The medicine Price had brought was making him feel like himself again. “You’re sure?” Quentin asked.

“Yes,” Dillon said.

Price had recounted his horror story with the tank in Timberline, so no one had any illusions about what would happen if they were captured. Price had confirmed everything Bell had warned them about.

“We don’t know if the bunker might be affected,” Poole said. They’d all seen the instructions from Phelps about a “Doomsday Trigger.” It had been Howard who had read through Phelps’ handbook, found the section on the Doomsday Trigger, and read it aloud to them, twice. He was holding Phelps’s red binder with pages of instructions on the bunker’s various weapons systems available to the “survivors.”