HOWLERS (24 page)

CHAPTER 19

It had stopped snowing around three in the afternoon. The sky above them was crepuscular, red-tinged, and peaceful, Quentin thought, as the four of them sped down the narrow road. He glanced down at the gas gauge and saw that he still had a good half-tank of fuel in his patrol car.
Better than nothing.

“You can’t keep me handcuffed, Quentin. It’s not fair,” Rebecca said.

“You promise not to shoot anyone?” Quentin asked. They were driving away from Timberline and toward Highway 50, on the two-lane road that had just been plowed that morning. The snow was six feet high on either side of the narrow county road. The patrol car’s red and blue lights were on. They were dodging abandoned cars that had been stopped by Howlers, the occupants dragged out and murdered. At times they had to slow down and weave around whole groups of cars. Some had been rolled over. At times it was necessary to drive the abandoned cars off the road in order to get past them.

   A few random Howlers were still on the road. When Quentin could do so at the right speed, so that they wouldn’t hurt the patrol car, he pointed at a standing Howler and ran them over. One had gotten stuck in the patrol car’s undercarriage and been dragged, howling and screaming, for more than a mile, until its asphalt-burnt body had been torn apart and it finally shut up. The windshield on the patrol car’s passenger side had been shattered by a big Howler—a man Dillon recognized as the short-order cook at the Denny’s where he’d stopped that morning. The Howler had walked into the middle of the road and thrown a rock straight at their car as they sped toward him. The Howler was still wearing his apron and grey-checkered cook’s pants he’d worn earlier that morning.

“Okay, I promise,” Rebecca said.

“I don’t believe her,” Dillon said.

“Shut up. You murdered my father,” Rebecca said. “
Asshole
. Murderer!”

“Here’s the deal,” Dillon said. “It
wasn’t
your father anymore. He’d become one of them. I told you.”

“It’s true, Rebecca. I went down there myself and looked at your dad. He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that,” Quentin said. “I’m sorry. It happened to Sharon.”

“
Sharon
?” Rebecca said, stunned.

“Yes. This morning. We had to—end it. I know how you feel. But they wouldn’t have wanted to go on living like that. You know that as well as I do. It wasn’t really Sharon anymore,” Quentin said.

“Hey, the kid has fallen asleep,” Dillon said. He nodded to Gary Summers, who was nodding out his head against the window, fast asleep.

“He’s a pussy,” Rebecca said. “You should let him out. He’s no good to anyone.”

“Okay, unlock her cuffs,” Quentin said, taking the key from his shirt pocket. “She’s calmed down enough—I hope.”

Dillon took the handcuff key, reached over and unlocked the girl’s handcuffs. Rebecca opened the cuffs, lifting the bracket up from her right wrist, sliding her wrist out. She did the same with her left hand, freeing it too.

“Rebecca, I need your help. Up here, where we’re going. I’m going to arrest the men who raped Lacy. You’ve known my daughters, both of them, since you all were little girls. Will you help me do this?”

Rebecca sat back in the seat. She tossed the cuffs up to Dillon, who caught them.

“Lacy was raped?” she said.

“Yes, today. She was looking for Sharon and went to one of the gang’s houses in Timberline,” Quentin said.

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“I knew Sharon was hanging out with those guys. I told her it was crazy,” Rebecca said. Lacy Collier had been one of her good friends in high school. Despite everything that had happened to her father and to her world in the last ten hours, the news of Lacy’s rape seemed to affect her in a strange way. She had always been jealous of Lacy having a mother when she herself didn’t. She liked to visit the Colliers’ home to see what having a mother was like. When Lacy’s mother died, it was as if her own mother had died.

“That’s fucked up,” Rebecca said. “Yeah, I’ll help. Sure.”

“There may be a gunfight,” Quentin said. “You okay with that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay with that,” Rebecca said. She looked over at Summers, who was still sleeping. “What are you going to do with the little bitch?” Rebecca said.

The man who’d shot her father laughed.

“I plan on taking him with us. When we’re finished up here, we’re going to Chuck Phelps’s place. Lacy is going to meet us there. We’ll stay there at Chuck’s place until the Army comes and they get rid of these—”

“Howlers,” Dillon said. “That’s what they called them down in Elko.”

The patrol car slowed down and Quentin took a right turn onto a narrow single lane. There was a nest of mailboxes, some with mail still stuffed in them, at the turn off.

“This is where I figure they’ll be,” Quentin said. It sounded to the others like he might be talking to himself.

*   *   *

Lacy looked out the bedroom window at Bell. He’d gone outside to the driveway to check on the truck. It was snowing very hard, so hard that at times it seemed the storm would cover everything and make it disappear: the driveway, the truck, even the lieutenant. They’d searched the house but found no firearms. Bell had found only a golf club. He carried it with him outside.

Lacy realized that the Lieutenant was a brave man and Robin Wood had been a coward, something she would never have expected. Smoke poured from the truck’s exhaust pipe as Bell kicked over the engine. The windshield wipers came on and pushed wind-driven piled-up snow off the windshield. Bell got out of the truck and moved the snow off the windshield with his hand. He climbed back in and drove the truck out onto the driveway and close to the front door. For just the briefest second, she’d panicked, thinking that Bell, too, was going to abandon her. But she watched him turn the truck and pull it very close to the front door, so when they left they wouldn’t have to cross the wide driveway.

She heard the front door open and close again. She walked out of the bedroom. She’d been brushing her hair because it made her feel normal. She was wearing clean clothes, jeans and a blouse she’d left at Robin’s that summer. She’d found no winter clothes. She’d taken one of Robin’s down vests and pulled it on.

“Is there gas? Do we have enough?”

“The yellow warning light is on,” Bell said, his eyes meeting hers.

“Are there any of them—of those things, out there?”

“I didn’t see any,” he said.

Bell looked very pale and thin, she thought. “That’s probably not enough gas to get there,” Lacy said. She put her hairbrush down. She’d left it here that past summer too, when she’d thought she’d been in love.

“He never loved me at all,” Lacy said. “I was such a fool. Jesus!”

“Well, then something good has come out of all of this then,” Bell said. “I guess.”

“Have you ever been in love, Lieutenant?”

“You mean like not with my dog, right?”

She smiled. He had a way of making her smile as if things were normal, and she liked it.

“No,
not
with your dog.”

“Well, I’m a Southerner, and we love our dogs, ma’am,” he said. “No, not really. Not with a girl. I loved the Army, and flying helicopters, until this morning.”

“You’re lucky. You feel stupid when you find out that people weren’t who you thought they were.”

“How far is this place from here? This ranch?” Bell asked.

“It’s on the other side of town, toward Emigrant Gap, off the county road, about eight miles, maybe a little more, from here. We measured it once, Robin and I.”

“How long does it take to drive?”

“Twenty-five minutes in the summer, and if there’s no traffic. In winter it takes longer,” Lacy said. “We don’t have enough gas.”

“Probably not,” Bell said. “But we might. The warning light could have just come on, for all we know.”

“And if it didn’t just come on?” she said.

“I think you need to put on some warmer clothes,” the Lieutenant said. “You know, just in case we have to do some walking.”

*   *   *

Grace Poole, wearing just a pair of white panties and a man’s brown sweater, got up from the bed and stumbled across the cold, high-ceilinged master bedroom. She was barefoot. She stopped and looked down at her feet and realized she couldn’t feel the carpet. She paused as she crossed the room and looked at herself in the full-length dressing mirror. Her complexion was ashen grey. Her long hair was messy from lying in bed. She walked up closer to the mirror and touched her face, but couldn’t feel her fingers on her skin. She saw her left hand move over her forehead and nose, but she had no feeling as she walked her fingers over her face.

She spoke to the person she saw in the mirror; it was involuntary, as if she were being forced to speak. She heard gibberish and saw her lips move. A long white tail of thick-looking spit slid out of her mouth as she spoke. It hung grotesquely in the air, then dropped to the floor in one long elastic looking strand.

“Gotcha. Ketchup now; no deal. No deal. Samsung. Galaxy. Now! The magic of Macy’s ... no deal. News at bison. Stream.”
She heard herself saying the words. Spit from her mouth hit the clean dressing mirror, white globs of it splattering onto the clean glass.
“Fuckshit; fuckshit.”
She squatted on the floor and pissed on the room’s white rug, soaking her panties. She felt horribly nauseated. She stood, walked to the bathroom and threw up a white stream of spit into one of the two sinks. She looked up and yelled her husband’s name; but the words she heard herself scream were not what she’d intended to say. It was as if her vocal cords, and lips, had been taken over and were being run by remote control—by someone else, who was forcing her to speak things she had no intention of speaking.

She stumbled out of the bathroom and out into the hallway. She could see the backyard through a large transom window. She saw Marvin outside, without a coat, digging with a shovel, his arms moving quickly. He was standing in the middle of their snow-covered backyard. She leaned on the banister but couldn’t feel it. She could hear howling and looked out and saw several of the things begin to climb their green vinyl fence, coming from the forest behind the house.

Grace went down the steps and threw up half way down. More glue-like spit streamed out of her mouth. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She saw the vomit run down her hands and between her fingers as she kept walking down the stairs and into the semi-dark foyer. She saw Crouchback’s body lying across the sofa, two round black-ringed holes in his face.

“Marvin—help me!” She heard her own voice speak some of the last intelligible words she would ever mouth. She heard the front door open and close behind her. She turned and looked at Patty and Miles Hunt. She thought she recognized them, but wasn’t quite sure.

“Mrs. Poole?” Miles said.

“Marvin,” Grace Poole said and wiped her mouth. “Marvin—outside.”

“She’s one of them,” Patty said. She raised the shotgun and was going to fire, but Miles knocked the barrel up. Her shot went wild, blowing a hole in the ceiling.

“
No!
” Miles screamed. Grace Poole ran down the stairs and toward the kitchen. Miles heard Patty’s shotgun rack almost immediately behind him.

“She’s one of them, God dam it!” Patty said.

Miles turned and looked at Patty Tyson. He could see she was horrified. He too couldn’t believe that Grace Poole, a woman he knew so well, was one of them.

He walked into the kitchen and saw Grace pull a kitchen knife from its place in a huge wooden block.

“Grace. Are you all right?
Grace
!” Miles said.

“Marvin,” Grace Poole said, and gestured outside; it was the coarse gesture of a Neanderthal, not the woman he’d known.

Miles looked out the French door and saw several Howlers inside the backyard. Two of them were crouched and were howling, their heads tilted up. “Grace. Don’t go out there!”

Grace Poole reached for the doorknob. Patty Tyson came through the kitchen doorway and fired her shotgun from the hip. The blast ripped off Grace Poole’s right arm at the shoulder. Miles saw the woman’s skull peppered with dark birdshot. The force of the blast shoved Grace Poole forward into the partially open French door. Grace’s head bounced off the glass, the door still intact. Her left arm gone, she turned and looked at them, then ran out the open French door into the backyard.

“Do that
again
and I’ll kill you,” Patty said looking at Miles.

“What did you do?” Miles said, horrified that the girl had shot Grace Poole.

“
Can’t you see
? She’s turned into one of them! We
have
to kill her!” Patty yelled, racking the shotgun. “Fuck! No ammo.” She looked down at the shotgun’s open breech.

They’d fought a horrific battle crossing the street on the way to the Poole’s house. They’d fired both their weapons at the gang of Howlers—ten or twelve of them, mostly teenagers—that had attacked them. They’d had to stand back-to-back and fire at the things as they ran at them. One of the Howlers had managed to tear the .30-30 from Miles’ hands. Patty had shot it in the head, at point blank range, damaging the .30-30. Miles had been sure he was going to die, watching the rifle snatched from his grasp. He’d frozen, terrified, staring at the Howler who lifted the rifle over its head ready to strike him with it. He’d been unable to move, paralyzed with fear.

Tyson turned and fired, blowing the thing’s head off at the shoulders. Miles had pulled the stock-shattered rifle from the Howler’s still standing body. Tyson screamed at him to run; they’d both run toward the Pooles’ house.

  Marvin stepped back. He watched the Howlers, five of them, drop over the green chain-link fence and into his yard.

“You’ll have to kill me!” he yelled at them. It was senseless, but he was tired of being afraid. He’d been terrified since he’d driven home from his office. It had been the kind of fear he’d never felt before, all-encompassing. And now he felt liberated from it. If he was going to die, he was going to die fighting.

He drew back the shovel and swung it like a bat. Two of the Howlers crouched on their haunches as soon as they landed in the yard and began to howl. Marvin turned and looked at the blanket with his daughter wrapped in it. Another of the Howlers dropped into the yard. He recognized a very fat woman who owned the 7-11 on Highway 50. Another Howler jumped off the fence and immediately came toward him at a lope using his knuckles to run along the frozen ground. Marvin raised his shovel and waited for the thing to get close enough to hit.

“Marvin.” Marvin turned and saw his wife. “Get back.” She spoke in a strange tone of voice. “Get back.” He saw that his wife’s face was bloody and full of buck shot, her nose smashed from hitting the French door, her left arm gone. He could see the raw white shoulder-bone socket exposed. Grace was holding a kitchen knife in her right hand.