HOWLERS (9 page)

CHAPTER 8

In August, the Copenhagen Zoo added an exhibit to promote its primate collection, amidst the baboons and chimpanzees: a
Homo sapiens
couple who will go about their daily business in a Plexiglas-walled natural habitat consisting of kitchen, living room, bedroom, and workshop, as well as a computer, television, cell phone, and stereo. Said a Zoo official, “We are all monkeys in a way, but some people find that hard to accept.”

Gary,

I thought you might want to join them!

Jeff.

At the bottom of the email was a photo of the young
Homo sapiens
couple’s “cage.” Gary Summers, 24 and a graduate of Cal Tech, read the email from a classmate who was working for NSA. Two other emails were waiting, but he didn’t have time to open them. He had an appointment in Timberline in an hour and a half, and before the meeting he wanted to stop by the video store to chat up a hot girl he’d seen working the day before.

His instant messaging service popped open with a random text message from a girl he’d met in Yosemite: an incongruous still photo of a mountain biker hopping his bike up the grand staircase of a plush hotel lobby, past well-dressed people, was attached to her message. His iPhone rang, giving him Billboard’s number-three hit: Love Club ring tones he’d downloaded over breakfast. Seeing his ex-girlfriend’s number, he almost let it go to voice mail but decided to take the call. Only because she owed him money.

“Hey.” He had rigged his cell phone with a recording that overlaid random office noise, leading any potential client to think he was sitting in a big time Microsoft-like environment. The app had cost him more than twenty dollars, but he loved it.

“It’s me, Cindy.”

“Hi—how you doing?” Gary looked at his watch, one of Apple’s new beta editions, which he was being paid to test.

He and Cindy had broken up two months ago and she was
still
calling him. He told himself to be polite. Maybe she was calling to say she would pay him the money she owed him. He wouldn’t mind doing the nasty with her again either, as she leaned toward the kinky. She’d once asked him if it was okay if she arranged a threesome.

“How’s the country boy?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” Gary said. He moved from the handset to the iPhone’s earpiece, losing only a few syllables of the conversation as he placed the “bug” in his ear.

“Come up and visit, bring my bike? What do you think?” she was saying.

“Sure, sure. Anytime,” Gary lied.

“If I did bring a friend, would that be cool?”

Gary was folding up his prize possession while he spoke, a new MacBook Air that had set him back plenty. “Sure.” He set the laptop in a backpack at his feet.

“What about tomorrow? It’s Saturday,” his ex said.

Gary heard a loud banging sound on the back door, then another. “Cindy, can you hold a second?” He pulled his earpiece off without waiting for an answer. He glanced past the living room that he’d set up as an office. His bike shoes clicked on the hardwood floor. He went through the kitchen, glancing at the mess of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. He went to the back door and pulled it open. Nothing. He stepped outside onto the snow. He’d put a few pieces of used garden furniture out in the backyard for his friends when they visited that fall. One of the chairs had been knocked over and looked surreal lying in the snow.

He looked over the field in front him. It was starting to snow in earnest. Summers could see someone, a man, running slowly across the field. The man stopped, turned and then went on. He felt snow hitting his face and shoulders while he stared at the running figure and realized he’d come outside without a shirt.

He stepped back inside the kitchen and locked the back door behind him. He walked back into the living room. His cell phone had dropped the call, a constant problem up here in the Sierra Nevada.

Typical,
he thought. He didn’t bother to call her back.

Three mountain bikes were parked in front of Timberline’s only video store. Like a lot of people, the employees of the video store, all in their twenties, couldn’t afford cars. Which was all the better, Gary thought, locking his bike next to an old red mountain bike that he knew belonged to
her
. The girl who owned it was nothing short of perfect. Tall, terribly blonde, and terribly beautiful, a real stunner. He was pumped from the ride from his house in the cold. His fantasies about the girl who worked at the store had come easy and fast while he rode into town. He double checked his lock, pulling on it, and walked into the store.

Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”
blasted through the Silver Screen’s barn-like interior, almost empty at this hour of the day. The girl he was chasing looked up and pretended not to see him as she put DVDs back on the shelf.

“What’s that?” Gary said, looking at the overhead screen. “It looks good.” He looked at the girl’s name tag. She’d never worn it before.
Rebecca
.

The young woman wearing it looked up at him, then down at the cart full of videos she was re-stocking.

“
Night of the Living Dead.
Romero,” the girl said. She took a video and dropped it in place. He noticed she’d added Kool-Aid green stripes to her blonde hair. She had pierced her belly button; the silver ring, very sexy, showed just over the edge of tight black yoga pants that made her butt look as good as any butt he’d ever seen.

“Oh.”

They both looked up at the huge plasma TV screen. A black man’s face was held in a tight close up.

“He looks scared,” Gary said, not caring anything about it.

“Yeah, he’s about to have a real bad day,” Rebecca said.

The lights in the store faded. The music stopped. The TV screen went dead. Outside, the streetlights of Timberline went out. The store’s brief silence was replaced by the blaring of car horns as moronic types immediately hit their horns because the streetlights had stopped working.

“Sounds like San Francisco,” Gary said. “Listen, I was wondering if you would like to get a cup of coffee.” His ears seemed to grow sixteen sizes larger as he waited for her answer.

Rebecca pushed the cart with one hand. She had muscles on her arm that were bigger than his. She slid another video in place. “Okay. I have lunch in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Can you wait?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You’re not from Timberline, are you?” she asked.

“No, I’m new in town.”

“Where are you from?” She pushed the cart further down the aisle and he had to follow.

He looked at her butt. It was one of those high butts. She wore a black leather vest that was tight against her back.

“San Francisco,” he said.

“Why in the world would you come to
Timberline
?” she said. “It’s so out of it.”

“I like it,” he said. “I came for the mountain biking.”
And you’re here,
he thought.

The Higher Ground Cafe was one of the new additions to Timberline’s main street. It stood on the busiest corner in town. It had opened about the same time Genesoft, the biotech firm, had come to Placer County. It was a cool urban oasis in what was otherwise an old-fashioned strip mall. The cafe catered to younger ranchers and the new young professionals who were moving into town to work at Genesoft, as well as the new software firms, and video-game startups that had moved out of the Bay Area and located in the Sierra. At 11:30 it was crowded with every social stratum in Timberline: secretaries and lawyers from the courthouse, software geeks, young rancher types who liked fancy cappuccinos because they’d seen a bit of the world. The Higher Ground Cafe belonged to the young. It was theirs and they knew it.

“How can you like Timberline?” Rebecca said. “I’ve wanted to get out since I graduated from high school. I mean, I like it. But it’s
so
boring. What’s San Francisco like?”

They’d ordered mochas and got a table in the back. Rebecca Stewart was as tall as he was. It was one of the first times he’d found a girl whom he could look at directly. The lights—which had come back on while they’d walked across the street—flickered momentarily, and went out again.

“Does this happen much?” Gary said. He turned to look at the street. It was his first winter in the Sierras, and the idea of no power was frightening to him. Without electricity, his business as a web developer would be as productive as a dead body.

“Yeah. When it storms, it happens a lot,” Rebecca said. “You want to smoke a number?”

Gary checked at his watch and looked across the café at the perplexed faces of the other young people, who were mostly like him: new to the Sierras. They all found the lack of electricity disconcerting.
If the power doesn’t come on, then Mr. Worden won’t be able to see what I’ve done. I don’t want to use up my battery up showing him his site.
“Well, I don’t know,” Gary said. “I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t want to smoke it alone,” Rebecca said. She winked at him.

“Where?”

Rebecca stood up and led him into the Higher Ground’s back room, nodding to one of her friends who was manning the cappuccino machine. The storeroom was dark, the concrete floor was damp; the air was redolent with the smell of roasted coffee beans. The lights flickered as they walked into the room, but they didn’t stay on. Rebecca closed the door and flicked slightly. “Fuck it,” he heard her say.

All Gary could see was the light of the match when it was struck and the sound of the girl pulling on the joint. The end flared up, and the light of the match caught her blonde hair and the streaks of Kool-Aid green. She patted him on the shoulder as she sucked. She was trying to get him to relax.

The touch of her hand passed through him like a shot. It was electric. He reached for her and they kissed. It was all happening so fast, like it was all meant to be, he thought. It was like he’d won some kind of cool prize on the radio.

“I’m glad you came to town,” she said, pulling her lips away. She smelled of dope and some kind of sweet perfume, and some kind of girl smell that had attached itself to the white polyester sweater she wore under the leather vest. He didn’t know what it was, but it was about the sexiest combination of smells he could think of. He forgot all about his appointment, his fear of the lack of electricity, and his fear of the dark, which he’d had since he was five.

She took another long drag. In the orange-tinted demi-light, he saw her roll her eyes and pass him the joint. He took another hit and leaned back against the wall. The wall felt cold on his back and he heard her laughing in the dark, the little orange dot from the lit joint tracing bright lines in the blackness.

And then the THC began to wind, and unwind, in his head; the THC began turning his brain’s stoning-gear. It was greenhouse dope, raised by experts using high-powered chemical fertilizers. It was
killer
weed. Gary Summers started to laugh out loud.

CHAPTER 9

“Genie, I want to know where my daughter is,” Quentin said. “She’s not in at the pool where she should be. She has a PE class this hour, I thought.”

Quentin had walked into Timberline High’s busy main office. Two students were answering the phones. Quentin could see, too, that the main office’s multiple phone lines were all flashing red, people waiting to get through to someone at the office. The students manning the phones looked harried, and it was still first period.

Genie Lamont, wearing a pale yellow pants suit, had been Timberline High’s school secretary when Quentin had been a student more than twenty years before. The older woman, wearing reading glasses on a chain just as she had in his day, was beyond crusty. She looked up at the Sheriff. 

“Good morning, Quentin. We were just going to call you. I’ll tell Mr. —”

“Genie! I need to speak to my daughter,
now
!” He didn’t realize he’d raised his voice until everyone in the office got quiet and turned to look at him. He’d asked the swim coach about having seen Sharon at practice, and had gotten a blank look and a shrug. By the time Quentin reached the office, he was certain something was wrong. It wasn’t like his daughter to miss a swim practice. It was the one thing she was dedicated to.

“Well, Quentin. Why didn’t you say it was about Sharon?” The school secretary looked up at the IBM clock on the wall. “It will be the beginning of first period. What does she have first period?”

“I thought PE,” Quentin said. His voice was normal again. He hadn’t raised his voice since his wife died. It was as if he were afraid that if he got angry he wouldn’t be able to stop. “She came to school, but I guess she didn’t go to swim practice this morning,” he said, embarrassed.

“Kenny, get me Sharon Collier’s schedule, will you dear,” Genie said.

One of the students got up from a desk and went to a computer terminal and punched up his daughter’s schedule. The lights flickered and went off. The office changed from a well-lit glow to a dull room full of gray figures in an instant.

“Computer’s down,” the kid said. “We’ll have to wait for juice.”

“No, we won’t.” Genie went back to the wall and Quentin watched the woman pull out a paper file. “We were doing
this
way before we had one of those,” she nodded toward the computer. “I never liked those things, anyway. She’s in Biology this period, Quentin. Mrs. Richard’s class on the second floor. Room 156,” Genie said.

“Sheriff, could I speak to you for a moment?” The principal, Mat Marks, had come out of his office and was standing in his office doorway. They were the same age. Marks had been a poor kid when they were students at the high school together. Marks had worked his way up the ladder, even married one of Nevada City’s rich girls.

Quentin nodded hello.

“Quentin, I’ll call up to Sharon’s room and have her sent down so you can speak to her,” Genie said.

“Thanks, Genie,” Quentin said.

Since the intercom system was down, Genie sent a kid up to get his daughter.

Mat Marks, wearing a little American flag pin on his suit jacket’s lapel, closed the office door behind him. The office had a view of the big expanse of grass between the new gym and the school’s original old red-brick building.

“You’re coming to the wedding?” Marks said.

Quentin had to think. Then he remembered that Mat’s kid brother was getting married. “Sure, of course. Sharon showed me the invitation. She opens all the mail now, since—yeah, we’re going to be there. Me and the girls,” Quentin said.

“Good. Quentin, there’s something screwy going on. Over half the student body is missing today. And at least that many teachers. It’s never happened before. I thought you should know. I mean, maybe there’s some kind of bug. A real serious one, for that many people to be gone.
E. coli
, maybe?”

“That’s not exactly my department, Mat.”

“And that’s not all. Families have been calling up the school and asking us to check and make sure their kids are here. You aren’t the first. A lot of students went missing yesterday, too. Their parents say they never went home. Did you get any calls at the sheriff’s office?”

“I was just on my way in. I wouldn’t get missing persons calls on the radio. I was in Sacramento for two days. Just got back yesterday. Only emergencies come through on this.” Quentin tapped the Motorola radio hooked to his black-leather belt.

The door opened. Both men turned around. Quentin was expecting to see his youngest daughter standing in the doorway.

“Sheriff, Sharon’s not in class,” Genie said.

Quentin looked at the secretary. He felt his hand tighten where he had it on his gun belt.

“She was marked as absent in homeroom,” the secretary said. “But I wouldn’t worry, Quentin. A lot of kids are sick today.” The lights flickered on and went off again as she was speaking.

*   *   *

“No sir, I don’t understand it either,” the lieutenant said. “But it’s the God’s honest truth, sir.”

Lieutenant Bell was standing in the colonel’s office at the base. The medic had worked on him again, insisting they take Bell to a civilian hospital in Nevada City. The colonel seemed to dismiss the seriousness of Bell’s injuries; he’d sent the corpsman out of the office.

“Lieutenant, you just said that a gang of ”—the colonel turned and looked at the duty officer standing next to him—“
civilians
attached you and Sergeant Whitney. And that they
dragged
the sergeant away into the woods and killed him. Do I understand you correctly, Lieutenant?”

“Yes sir, you do. That is
exactly
what happened, sir. They broke his back first, sir.”
        “You say you fired your weapon at the civilians?”

“Yes sir, I did. But some of them didn’t—sir, some of the attackers were not affected by the fire, sir. It seems you have to shoot them just right. Head shots seemed to work, sir.”

“You’re fucking crazy, Lieutenant. Now I want you to tell me what
really
happened out there. You’re facing a court-martial, boy.”

“I did tell you, sir. Just now.”

“Tell me again,
asshole
.”

*   *   *

“What the fuck was that?” Bell said. “Sounds like a wolf or a dog.” The lieutenant looked at Whitney.

The sergeant turned toward the screaming sound. He looked down the creek. They both watched a kid at the lead of the pack run down the creek bank, fifty yards in front of them. The kid jumped into the water and came toward them, riding the current.

“It’s just a kid.” The sergeant turned around and faced Bell.

“Boy, what the heck are you doing out here?” the lieutenant yelled, watching the boy. Another one of the things jumped down from the bank and followed the boy into the icy water. A woman, about thirty, wearing dark-colored leotards, no shoes or coat on. “Ma’am?” Bell yelled.

Bell watched the two strange people float down the creek toward them. The boy turned and looked back toward the dozen or so things gathered about seventy yards up the creek who were pointing at the two pilots.

The boy in the water began to howl. It was loud, the same sound they’d heard moments before. The woman coming at them was being pushed by the current, behind the kid. She was stopped by a huge rock. She hit the boulder with her face, bounced off, and kept coming, swept along by the fast-moving creek. Bell watched her crash into the boulder and thought she would be hurt, but she just kept coming. Halfway to them, the woman began to howl, seemingly answering the kid’s howl.

Bell looked at Whitney. The sergeant was trying to say something but Bell couldn’t hear him. The howling stopped.

He’s only a kid
, the Lieutenant thought. He lifted his hand off his wound and raised his weapon. Another woman was running at them along the bank, older than the first, long gray hair, in some kind of supermarket-clerk-like apron. Bell watched her mouth open. It was big, looked distorted, un-human. She was baring her teeth like a dog might.

The kid was getting closer. His face distorted as if the muscles had gotten bigger, somehow exaggerated from normal human features. The kid stopped himself in the current and swung toward their side of the creek. He stood up and looked at them. He was wearing a red mackinaw and jeans and had brown hair.

“Hey, kid, what’s going on?” Bell said.

The kid looked at him and started to stumble through the water toward him.

“Stay right there!” Bell said.

The boy stopped, then sprung at them from fifteen feet away, like a wolf. He flew through the air and landed on the sergeant, knocking him down onto the bank, and dragged him into the water.

The lieutenant ran down the creek, trying to grab the kid from behind. It was like grabbing a wild biting dog. The boy turned on Bell and knocked him backwards toward the bank. The kid reached down and grabbed the sergeant by the throat. Death-panic showed in the sergeant’s face. He was trying to scream. Bell stood up and fired.

The shot hit the boy in the ear from almost point-blank range. He slid off the sergeant and into the water. Something got behind Bell and pulled him backwards. Bell’s weapon flew into the creek. The lieutenant scrambled to stand up. He looked at the woman with the gray hair lying beside him. She had him in a scissors lock with her legs. She was howling and snorting, spit was flying out of her mouth as she squeezed him with her legs. It felt as if he were being squeezed by a machine and not by some old lady.

Bell looked into the woman’s eyes. He punched her twice in the face. Nothing. He heard the screaming sound coming from her open mouth, which was dripping spit. She’d stopped for a moment, howling, her head back like a wolf’s. Bell tried to turn on his side, but her legs closed around him even tighter so that he had to fight to breathe. In a moment he would lose consciousness.

Bell watched the sergeant loom up behind her with a rock. He saw the sergeant’s big arms lift the rock above his head; then he drove the rock straight down, hitting the old woman’s head. The rock plowed into the top of her skull.

It was a horrible sound. Gray matter burst into the air. The howling stopped. The thing relaxed its legs. Bell felt the scissors grip give way, and he could breathe again. The sergeant dragged the old woman’s twitching body off of Bell and tossed her into the current. For a moment neither man spoke.

“What are they?” the sergeant said, holding his throat. “They look like people, but they can’t be. That was an old lady!”