HOWLERS (27 page)

“How do I know you won’t just kill
us
?” Bell said.

“Well, you don’t. Do you, Sport?” Johnny said.

“Give me a weapon and I’ll do it,” Bell said. “I’ll get you the money.”

“Okay. Give him the shotgun we got from the old guy’s place,” Johnny said.

Sue Ling looked at her boyfriend, thinking it might not be such a good idea.

“Go on! He’ll do it. I know his type. Military boy, he’ll do it. And he’ll wave the fucking flag while he’s doing it.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t let him kill you,” Sue Ling said, going to the back of the Land Rover. She ran with a semi-auto style shotgun over to Bell and smiled. “I think you’re cute, and I’ll get mad at him if he shoots you. Maybe we could have sex sometime?”

“Give him a whole box of shells—might as well,” Johnny said. Sue Ling dug out a box of shotgun shells and tossed them to Bell. Johnny hit the door lock on the Land Rover; its horn honked, signaling it was locked. Johnny motioned with his pistol for Bell and Lacy to walk in front of them and into the lobby.

Bell looked down at the dead man as he passed him. He began to load rounds into the fancy-looking twenty gauge as he walked into the brightly lit hotel lobby.

Bell looked out on the lit outdoor pool and large patio area. Some kind of party had been going on by the pool when the Howlers attacked. A band had been playing; a wooden dance floor had been erected over the middle of the large heated pool, steam coming off of its surface. Men’s and women’s bodies floated in the pool. Some of the band’s equipment had been tossed into the water during the fight with the Howlers. Bell saw a set of brass cymbals lying at the bottom of the deep end, surreal.

“We have to get away from them,” Lacy said behind him.

Bell turned around. “How? There’s two of them and they’re well-armed,” Bell said. And we need their car. All the cars in the parking lot have had their windows smashed—did you notice? We’d freeze in any one of them. Try calling your father. Tell him where we are. Tell him to come get us,” Bell said.

Lacy took out her cell phone and dialed her father’s number. “There’s no signal,” she said.

“We’ll go up to the top floor and try,” Bell said. “Maybe there’ll be a signal up there.”

“I’m scared, Ken,” Lacy said. It was the first time she’d used his name.

“Me too,” Bell said. He walked to where they’d set up the food service. The table had somehow survived the mayhem and was full of food. The food warmers were still on, as were the gas heaters around the pool’s verge, their gas elements glowing blue-orange.

“Let’s eat something. Then we’ll go up on the roof.”

“I can’t,” Lacy said. “Eat, I mean.”

“
Eat
something. If we’re going to make it out of this, we have to eat,” Bell said. He was contemplating going down to the bar and killing the two. But he was afraid that if he failed, Lacy would be alone and doomed. He made a sandwich out of French bread and cheese and began to eat ravenously while looking for a beer. He found the drinks and opened a beer and guzzled it. Lacy looked at him. He realized he’d not eaten much of anything since that morning more than twelve hours ago, and what seemed like a lifetime now. He looked at his watch; it was 3:00 in the morning.

Lacy walked toward the food and picked up a piece of French bread.

“Put some protein on it,” Bell said. She did what he said. “And drink something, too.” He put down the shotgun and sat down on an Adirondack chair and looked out at the pool floating with debris and dead bodies, some of them bleeding into the water. It was only yesterday, he realized, that the world had been totally normal. He’d been planning a trip with his brother. They were going to meet in Scottsdale and watch the Giants play their first spring training game.

“Are they everywhere?” Lacy said. She came and sat on a chaise longue next to him. A pretty girl had been beaten with an ice bucket and was lying a few feet away, her chest having been bashed in with an electric guitar lying near her. Lacy turned away, looking for something to look at that wouldn’t sicken her.

“I don’t know,” Bell said. He picked up the beer and drained it. The alcohol made him feel better, looser and almost normal. He was physically exhausted in a way he’d never been before. It was as if he weighed 300 pounds. He made another sandwich and ate it, then another. While he ate the third one, he went around to the dead bodies and began to rifle purses and men’s pants pockets, looking for their wallets.

“What are you doing?” Lacy said, watching him rifle the dead.

“We may need to pay them if there’s no cell signal. We may be on our own,” Bell said, not looking at her.

“Let’s kill them,” Lacy said.

He found a wallet belonging to one of the well-dressed, dead party-goers. He opened it and pulled it out, but there was no cash. He saw a business card:
Michael C. Fox, Vice President, Facebook.

Bell tossed the man’s empty wallet into the pool and moved onto the next body. Only the wait staff carried any cash; the well-to-do guests had none. When he was finished walking around the pool and the dance floor, he had $520 in cash. He looked up and saw Lacy picking up a purse. A young girl, about twenty, had had been dragged to the edge of the pool and drowned; her long red hair was floating around her shoulders, losing its dyed color that was bleeding slowly out into the pool.

*   *   *

Price heard a loud banging on the glass. A Howler was trying to bust the glass with a chair, but the plastic office chair bounced off the bulletproof glass. The Howler stared at Price,  the thing’s mouth covered in dried spit. Price saw that the thing had blue eyes; it finally turned away and headed aimlessly into the city room.

Howard Price had been locked in his office for the last twenty-four hours. He watched the same three Howlers rummaging around the
Herald
’s destroyed city room. Howlers had attacked the office park, scores of them, coming in droves off the nearby highway. He’d been terrified and had been able to escape to his interior office. Several of his staff had stupidly run out of the building and been killed outside; but he’d known better, somehow, than to run blindly away. The bullet-proof glass, installed after a mass shooting in one of the office park’s buildings, had successfully kept the Howlers from breaking into his office and killing him. They couldn’t break it. He was able to concentrate on the satellite radio reports, and on his theories about what was happening.

Miles Hunt had called him with his own theory about the irradiated food being the cause, but he knew it couldn’t be that. The CEO of Genesoft had told him, in fact, that the new genetically irradiated foods had not yet been shipped. There had been a problem with the company’s new irradiation technology, which the company’s top executives had kept from everyone, even their investment bankers, who were about to bring Genesoft’s stock public in New York.

The CEO had sworn Price to secrecy in exchange for stock options. Price had been persuaded to join the conspiracy because he knew the paper’s owner was going to fire him at the end of the month, for continuing his 9/11 crusade. He was facing life at sixty with no savings to speak of, no job prospects, and no family. His wife had left him years before for an up-and-coming reality television producer
.
The producer, from an old-line Hollywood family and very wealthy, had in turn left Price’s ex-wife, gotten a sex-change operation and become a woman called Cathy, who then starred in her own reality TV show. Price’s ex-wife, traumatized in the worst way by her second husband’s gender change, had called Price and pleaded with him to take her back, but he’d refused.

Since then he’d been all on his own—lonely, yes, but not unhappy either. He’d taken the CEO’s bribe and received a million dollars’ worth of Genesoft stock options, in exchange for running articles that touted the companies new products and their “health benefits”—all of it a lie cooked up by a fancy PR firm in Chicago. Price had been ashamed of himself, but he was scared to death of ending up homeless. He’d reached the end of his emotional and financial rope. The very real prospect of being penniless and out on the street had frightened him in a way he’d never been frightened before.

Howard, his blue pinstriped shirt untucked and his tie off, looked at the maps he’d pinned to the wall. He wiped sweat off the back of his neck. For some reason the building’s heat had been turned up during the attack. The building’s emergency generators had, he guessed, only a few hours of diesel fuel left. The rest of Nevada City, he’d heard on the radio, was without power since the Howlers had attacked and destroyed a central power station in Sacramento, which serviced much of the mid-Sierra region. Many of the buildings in the office park were already completely dark.

For two years, he’d been tracking the wind patterns from Japan and keeping a large file on Fukushima Daiichi’s four crippled atomic reactors. When the earthquake and tsunami damaged Fukushima’s reactors, sending high amounts of radioactive sea water into the Pacific Ocean, a famous scientist asked him to cover the story. The mainstream press had been afraid to report that Reactors 3 and 4 had been cooled with seawater, which was allowed to run back into the ocean, unchecked and contaminated. The next day he had argued with his editor-in-chief about running a front-page article on the Fukushima catastrophe, and that had been the day the
L.A. Times
fired him. They had put up with his 9/11 hectoring, but Fukushima was a no-go zone.

Despite his firing, Howard had continued to follow the story closely, and remained convinced that mass media had not paid nearly enough attention to the damaged Japanese reactors and their ongoing meltdown, and the massive release of radioactive pollution.

He stepped back and looked at the weather maps he’d printed out. The bright yellow and green maps showed wind directions in the Pacific over the last six months, super-imposed over the major Pacific Ocean’s currents—the most important one being the Kuroshio Current, circling between Japan and California. Both Hawaii and California were directly impacted by the toxic spill. Scientists, afraid for their own jobs, were emailing Price and other journalists, suggesting that in less than a year’s time, serious amounts of radioactive contamination would be arriving off the California coast. He’d gotten those emails months ago. He was convinced it was some kind of
new
radioactive pollution—created in Fukushima’s reactors, which he knew were in complete melt-down mode—that were affecting people, changing them; perhaps, he now suspected, genetically.

He went to his computer and clicked on his Outlook, but the building’s power went out. The office plunged into  darkness. One of the things started to bang against his office door again. Price heard himself scream when his flashlight beam caught two Howlers walking toward the office door. One of them—a small girl, no more than thirteen—was dragging a sledgehammer.

*   *   *

They’d gone through the pockets of the dead they’d found in the brightly lit lobby. One whole family had been killed: mother, father and three young girls. They’d been caught at the desk while they were checking in. Their suitcases were still lined up and waiting for the bellman to pick them up. The lieutenant had forced himself to go through the dead father’s pockets. The man had been beaten so badly that his face was just a raw bones-smashed mess, even his scalp had been torn off. Bell had fished out the man’s wallet and rifled it. It had three-hundred dollars in cash. He glanced at the man’s license. He was a doctor from Southern California, only thirty-eight. Bell tossed the wallet onto the floor. He checked the wife’s purse, but there was nothing of value but her cell phone. He checked the phone’s battery. It was full but there was no signal. He pocketed the cell phone.

“I’ll take the purse,” Sue Ling said. She’d come out of the bar where they’d gone to sit. She must have been watching him. “It’s Louis Vuitton,” the girl said.

Bell threw her the handbag.

“Good work, sweet cheeks. Keep it up,” Sue Ling said, catching the purse. She turned and headed back toward the bar.

“Wouldn’t the elevator be safer?” Lacy said. They were standing in front of a sign in the lobby that marked the stairwell.

“I don’t know,” Bell said. “We have to keep looking for money. We’ve only collected about $3,000 dollars so far.” Muzak played from a speaker in the ceiling above them. “We’ll have to go through some rooms.

They heard a howling start up from somewhere in the building. They looked at each other. Another and another answered the first. It was obvious that Howlers were on the upper floors of the place.

“Why don’t we just kill them?” Lacy said. “You could have shot her just now.”

“Yes.” The idea of shooting the girl in cold blood was difficult for him to imagine. “If we have to, all right,” Bell said. “I’ll do it.”

“He plans on killing us,” Lacy said. “It’s obvious.”

“I’m not so sure,” Bell said. “I think they would have done it already. Out there on the road. I think they need help, if they’re attacked. That’s why we’re still alive. He knows if there are four of us they’ll stand a better chance of it in a fight with the things. My guess is that their plan is to use us. And we need them too, out there on the road, if there’s a fight.”

“Do you think he’ll take us to my dad’s?”

“Maybe he will, and for the same reasons. He’s betting that whatever they’ve done won’t matter now. They’ll add strength to any group we are a part of, and be welcomed.”

“Everything’s changed,” Lacy said. “
Nothing
matters. What people do any more doesn’t matter.”

“Survival matters,” Bell said.

She fell into his arms and held him tightly. “We need them too, then. It’s
awful
, this new world,” she said. “They’re evil.”

“Do you want me to kill them?” Bell pulled her away and looked her in the eye.

Her expression was changed from the girl he’d found earlier that day. They were not the eyes of a wounded girl any more. They were older and harder, angry perhaps.