HOWLERS (28 page)

“No. No. I think you’re right to wait,” she said. “If we have to, I’ll help you do it.” She kissed him. She had an overpowering feeling of physical desire for Bell, a need to hold him. It was something atavistic and strangely primeval. She’d never felt anything like it; it was a powerful human need, the kind of love/security that had pushed human beings from socially-lame, monkey-like creatures to tribal societies with vast social powers—the most prominent being the ability to war
as a tribe
, one united and bloody fist held up to their enemies.

Bell, sensing something change, kissed her. He could hear the howling above them and didn’t care; he was getting used to that horrid sound. The howling no longer frightened him.

CHAPTER 22

“They’re both dead. And so is the dog,” Dillon said, looking up from the pile of half-eaten human intestines. He’d lifted the big dead German Shepherd off the fatter of the two dead, half-eaten eviscerated bodies lying on the cabin’s front porch.

“It wasn’t the dogs that pulled their guts out. It was feral pigs. We have them here,” Quentin said. He moved his heavy Maglite, sending its powerful yellow beam beyond Dillon, who was standing in a pile of guts. The flashlight’s beam caught a second dead dog lying by the cabin’s front door. “Pigs killed the dogs, I think.”

“Do you know the two dead guys?” Dillon asked.

“One of them,” Quentin said. “The fat one owns the place near mine.” He moved the light onto the cabin’s front door and saw it was closed. He moved the beam again, to the left, pointing it toward one of the cabin’s small windows.

“Why didn’t they smash the windows and bust in—the Howlers?” Dillon said.

“Don’t know. Something better came along?” Quentin said. “Maybe it was the dogs. Who knows?”

“Is this Chuck’s famous cabin?” Rebecca said. She was standing at the bottom of the steps next to Summers, and behind Quentin.

“This is it,” Quentin said. He pulled the key to the cabin’s front door from his pocket. The key was attached to his own key ring. He started toward the door.

Chuck Phelps had come to the hospital to visit Quentin’s wife and given her the key to his cabin, telling her all his secrets about the place. Marie, in turn, had made Quentin promise that he would carry the key with him from that day on. She’d had a dream about the cabin, she told him. In the dream an old man, “a priest-like figure,” had come to her and told her that if they lost the key they would all die—all of them: she, Quentin, and their two girls. Whatever Chuck had told her, when he came to visit her in the hospital that day, had made a profound impression on Quentin’s dying wife. Quentin had thought it was the morphine drip that had made her fixate on the key.

From the first time they’d met, Marie had always treated Chuck Phelps with a special kindness and respect, as if they shared a secret. As if she knew Phelps would be important to their family someday. On the morning she died, Marie had made Quentin promise that he would keep the cabin key on him
always
.

“It’s not what you think, the key,” his wife told him. He remembered her face as he walked toward the cabin’s front door.
How could she have known
this day would come
, he thought.

“My dad and Phelps were friends. Chuck told us about the place and that we would be one of the ‘chosen few’ who could come here. I always thought he was touched. You know, a little crazy,” Rebecca said.

The four of them had walked through the dark and through the thigh-high snow, leaving the patrol car behind on the county road. All they had for light was Quentin’s one Maglite. They’d heard howling over near the bed and breakfast and knew that the Howlers were nearby so they’d been careful, weapons at the ready, as they trekked toward the cabin in single file—Quentin in the lead, and Dillon covering their rear. Summers had lost his weapon in the snow when he fell. He’d not spoken a word since the shootout.

As Quentin stepped up onto the porch, something flew from a dark corner of the porch and knocked him backwards. A black Howler, one they couldn’t have seen—silent because of the  crossbow arrow protruding from its throat—had been lurking in the dark corner. It knocked the flashlight out of Quentin’s hand. They were plunged into darkness.

Quentin, pushed back off the porch, felt his face being punched as soon as he sank into the snow. The first punch hit him square in the nose and stunned him. The second, from the creature, knocked him unconscious. The Howler was big, with big fists, and with its added creature’s strength, the blows were devastating.

Dillon ran through the snow toward a tiny pool of light. The Maglite had fallen, its lens pointed down and into the snow. He grabbed it and shone it on the thing squatting over Quentin. Its fist was raised back, ready to strike him a third time. Dillon fired his Thompson, muzzle flashing, from the hip.

The burst hit the Howler in the shoulders and stitched a flesh-tearing line across its chest. Even then, the Howler landed a strong third punch as if nothing were wrong, the dozen or more .45 caliber slugs only a nuisance.

Dillon moved the barrel up and caught the thing’s head, pouring rounds at the Howler’s skull and demolishing it. Dillon kept firing, chipping off chunks of face and skull until the thing slumped over, dead. Rebecca ran over and tried to pick Quentin up, but he was out cold.

“
Fuck
.” Dillon moved the flashlight off Quentin and swung it onto the far corner of the cabin’s porch, where the Howler had been lurking. He carefully looked for any others, but saw nothing. “Let’s take him inside.” He handed his Thompson to Summers.

The kid was frightened and tired. He seemed dazed. For just an instant, Dillon felt like pushing him down in the snow and leaving him outside for the Howlers to kill. He hated the kid for being so useless. He might just have smacked him, but Quentin’s cell phone began to ring.

Rebecca was able to dig the phone from Quentin’s over-stuffed down parka. “Yeah, who is it?” Rebecca said.

Dillon shone the light on the girl’s face.

“It’s Lacy. Who is this?”

  “
Lacy
! It’s Rebecca Stewart. Jesus, where are you?”

“I’m at the new hotel on Branch Road—do you know it?”

“Yeah. Sure. The fancy one,” Rebecca said.

“Yes, you have to come here and get us. Tell my dad. They’ve got us held here.”

“Who’s got you?”

“Two people—let me talk to my dad. Please.”

“I can’t.’”

“
Why
?”

“I just can’t,” Rebecca said. “He’s busy. We’re at the Phelps’s place.” Rebecca lied instinctively, afraid to tell Lacy her father was hurt.

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Rebecca said. “He just can’t talk on the phone.”

“Can you come, Rebecca? We need help.
Please
.”

“Who’s with you?” Rebecca said.

“The lieutenant. The one we met today. Dad knows who he is.”

“Okay. Yeah, we’ll come.”

“Rebecca, tell Dad they’re crazy. The people who—” the line went dead. Quentin’s cell-phone battery had run low and dropped the call.

“Who was that?” Dillon said.

“It’s Lacy. Quentin’s daughter. She needs help.”

“Tell her to get in line,” Dillon said. “Now help me get his heavy ass inside there.”

Summers stepped up and helped Dillon pick Quentin’s limp body up from the snow. Rebecca went up the stairs. Slipping on the thick gut-covered decking, she dragged the two dead bodies from in front of the cabin’s door and rolled them off the porch. They fell, one after the other, into the darkness.

“The key!” Dillon said.

“Shit.” Rebecca realized that it had been knocked out of Quentin’s hand when he was attacked.

“It must be up there,” Dillon said. He put Quentin back down in the snow, walked up the stairs and looked down on the blood-soaked porch. The Maglite’s beam caught bone bits and human guts mixed in with pig shit.

“It was pigs,” Rebecca said. “Please,
God
,” She got on her hands and knees and started to fish through the slimy offal and cold pig shit, laying her palms out flat and running them over everything, trying to feel for the key ring. “I got it! Give me that fucking light!” She jumped up, signaling for the Maglite, and ran toward the door, Quentin’s key ring in hand. She tucked the Maglite under her arm and went through several keys on the ring before she found the one that slipped into the lock. Her hands were slick and sticky with blood, her fingers freezing.

“Open, you
fucking
piece of shit!” She pushed the key in the lock and the door pushed open. It had been left unlocked since that morning, when Chuck rode away—and left open a second time when the accountant had tried to run out of the cabin with Chuck’s ninety-pound German Shepherd hanging from his neck, its teeth sunk deep into the man’s throat.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Bell was hanging upside down with his hands hog-tied behind him. He’d been strung up in the hotel’s lobby. He was hanging from a rope that had been thrown over a beam running across the lobby’s high ceiling. Everything Bell saw was from a disorienting upside-down point of view. He could hear the music in the bar blaring: the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”
From this strange angle, he watched two Howlers come through the lobby door and head straight for him. They were making a terrifying noise, excited perhaps because of the way he was strung up, and obviously helpless. Perhaps they were sensing an easy kill.

Bell’s heart raced to the point he thought it was going to actually burst. The two things loped across the huge lobby toward him, their eyes wild. He was swinging slightly. It had been Johnny’s idea to swing him occasionally, because he found it even more entertaining.

Sue Ling was the first to stand up from behind the lobby’s bar and take careful aim at one of the creatures, a Howler dressed in a prison guard’s uniform. She waited for it to get about three feet from Bell before she fired her pistol.  She and Johnny, both dead-drunk, had concocted a “live video game” to see how close they could let Howlers get to Bell, before they shot them down from their firing position behind the bar.

Sue Ling missed.

Bell screamed, as the thing was only a foot away. Sue Ling fired a tremendously loud second shot. This time she caught the Howler in the head and its whole body fell violently back, stone dead.

Bell began to scream involuntarily. The second Howler had reached him and grabbed him by the collar. It stopped and looked at him, ribbons of saliva pouring from its gaping mouth.

Let me go home.
Why don’t they let me go home.
This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.

“
Four
!” Johnny yelled. Bell, his head turned toward the bar by the Howler tugging on his jaw, saw Johnny’s gun barrel flash. Johnny had popped up from behind the bar. A bullet struck the Howler in the side of the head. The impact from the Desert Eagle’s round knocked the thing over, shattering its skull. Its contents splattered Bell’s face with warm blood and greyish-colored brains.

“What a fucking
cool
game!” Sue Ling said. “You all right, honey?” 

Bell’s body was swinging. He heard the beam holding the rope creak. He had grey matter and blood on his face, covering his eyes. He heard himself scream at the top of his lungs, unable to stop. His long, horrible ululation was completely involuntary.

“He’s okay!” Johnny yelled. He came out from behind the bar and doused Bell’s face with a glass of cold beer, then wiped Bell’s brain-splattered face off with a dirty bar towel so he could see again.

“I’m going to kill you,” Bell whispered, looking up at him. “I swear to God! If it’s the last thing I ever do. I’m going to kill you.”

“Swing him higher!” Sue Ling yelled from the bar. “There’s more of ‘em out there. “Shit, this is
fun, baby
!”

Johnny Ryder grabbed the yellow-nylon rope holding Bell upside down. As if Bell were a child in a schoolyard, Ryder swung him. He grabbed the rope and ran as far as Bell’s body weight would let him. He ran after Bell’s swinging body and caught it, as it swung in the opposite direction, and pushed him higher. Bell’s body was swinging across the entire lobby, Bell’s head just missing the concierge desk. Johnny lifted the Desert Eagle and fired a round into the ceiling.

“
Yeah, baby!”
Johnny yelled
.

Bell felt himself swinging through space, the sound of the loud rock music from the bar in his ears, his face wet with beer. He knew he was going to die. He closed his eyes.
I can’t take much more
, he thought. He felt, for the first time in his life, he would beg. He was only a moment from losing his nerve. His threatening Ryder had been a show of bravado, nothing more.

The music switched to Heavy D’s “Now That We Found Love”: 

Now that we found love what are we goin’ to do 

With it?

Shake me, Shake me … Baby, Baby, bake me ...

*   *   *

Lacy had run down the narrow, well-lit hotel road. She was crying and didn’t know why she’d agreed to leave Bell. That had been the deal Bell had struck with the crazy Johnny. He’d agreed to let her go in exchange for the ten thousand dollars cash that she and Bell had collected from dozens of dead bodies. Bell had insisted she be allowed to leave the hotel in the limousine, the only car left with most of its windows intact.

The couple’s quest for cash money had been a horrible ordeal that had lasted several hours. A dozen or more Howlers had been randomly wandering the upper floors of the hotel. Bell had been able to kill them, always making sure Lacy was safe and hidden in the elevator. They’d not spoken a word since their strange, passionate encounter in the hotel’s kitchen. They had held each other close without speaking, as if they were the last two people left alive in the whole world.

At each floor Bell had Lacy wait inside the elevator, the loud sound of shotgun blasts coming from outside the elevator. He’d told her, stepping out into the hallway, shotgun in hand, to hit the close button and then use the emergency shut-off until he got back and pounded on the elevator doors, signaling her to open them. She would switch the elevator back on, the doors would open and Bell would throw wallets and purses into the elevator at her feet, adding to their horrible booty.

On the sixth floor he stepped into the elevator with his face blood-splattered, a deep scratch on his neck. He emptied his pocket and two shotgun shells fell onto the elevator floor. Bell’s hands were shaking.

“Only two shells left. Count the money,” Bell told her. He closed the elevator doors and hit the emergency shut-off button. Then he’d sagged to his knees and watched her empty wallets and purses he’d collected and begin to count the money.

“You’re hurt,” Lacy had said.

“You should see the other guy,” Bell had said. She could see he was exhausted, and that whatever he’d done out in the hallways and in rooms—four floors’ worth—had left its mark. His expression had turned vacant, his hands shaking involuntarily. His already filthy green-nylon flight suit was spotted with Howler blood.

“Let me help you,” she said. He shook his head no. “Why not?”

“I promised your father. How much have we got?”

She’d finished emptying the last wallet and counted the cash. “Nine hundred and thirty-three dollars from this floor. We’ve got eight thousand forty-two, all together.”