Текст книги "Howlers"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“I understand. We can’t do much right now. There’s talk about the Army getting involved, but I haven’t heard for sure. They’re meeting about this at the White House.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Quentin said.

“The best you can. We’ve issued a shoot-on-sight order for the—things. Howlers, people are calling them. If you think it’s a Howler, kill it. Good luck.” The captain hung up.

All those seminars and meetings in Sacramento about emergency plans and inter-agency cooperation, that’s what they amounted to, Quentin thought. Good luck. He put down the phone in disbelief. It rang again almost immediately. He picked it up. All his office phone lines were lit up. People had started to call in, frightened and wanting to know where the deputies were. He didn’t know what to tell them.

“Daddy.” It was his daughter Sharon’s voice. “Daddy. You have to help me. They have Lacy here. God.”

“Where are you?” he said.

“Over on the Pinecone Road, white house on the corner, the old schoolhouse. Daddy, hurry. Please!”

The line went dead. Quentin put the phone down. He knew the house; it had been on his drug-watch list.

Before, he’d been confused and frightened and at a loss. Now, as he unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled down the M-16 and a bulletproof vest, he wasn’t thinking about anything but his daughters and his wife, what she would be thinking of him if he didn’t succeed. He dumped half a dozen extra fully-loaded clips into a metal garbage can and walked out of the office with the weapons and ammo. The phone was ringing, but he didn’t bother to pick it up.

“You’d better go home,” Quentin said, looking at his last deputy.

“Sheriff?”

“Let the prisoners out of their cells first. There’s nothing we can do now but be with our families. It’s every man for himself. God bless you,” Quentin said.

“Willis was right, then,” the deputy said. “He told me that I should get my wife and kids out of town. I thought he was crazy.”

The deputy heard the door close. He took the headset off and threw it on the office’s phone-system console, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. He felt helpless, as if he’d been afraid of this day all along, and now it had finally come. He went into Quentin’s office and grabbed one of the M-16s from the unlocked gun locker. He snapped in a clip and jacked in a round. The phone rang. Hoping it was his wife, the deputy picked it up.

“Quentin?”

“No,” the deputy said. “This is Deputy Troy.”

“Is Quentin there? This is Patty Tyson at the ranger station at Emigrant Gap. We need some help up here. Can you send a couple of deputies? There’s—well, I can’t quite explain it,  but we’ve had several attacks by—”

“You’ll have to take care of it yourself,” the deputy said. “We’re overrun down here in town. There’s hundreds of the things here.”

“You’ve seen them, too?” Patty said.

“Yeah, I’ve seen them. I—” Something spun the deputy around. A half-naked woman, about thirty, was screaming, with a huge gob of white ropey-looking spit hanging from her mouth.

The deputy lifted his weapon and shot her in the stomach. To his horror, nothing happened; the thing kept screaming at him. He fired again, stitching its naked chest with rounds. The impact of the M-16’s fire shook its shoulders and head, back-footing it. But it still wouldn’t die. More of them were behind her.

Patty Tyson put down the phone. A chill ran down her back. She’d heard the man screaming over the phone and it had unnerved her. She looked out the office window. One of the things was coming slowly up the gravel driveway toward the ranger station. For some reason it was dragging a garbage can behind it.

“He said there are hundreds of them in Timberline,” Patty said. She looked at her boss, who had come in from the parking lot. He had his service pistol out and was standing in shock, staring at a waitress from the Denny’s who was walking deliberately up the gravel path. Patty looked at her boss. He was bleeding from his mouth where one of the things had punched him.

“How much ammunition do we have left?” he said. He began reloading his automatic from a half-full box of ammo on his desk top. They heard a crash in the back of the office. One of the things had punched out the back door’s window and was trying to tear through the wire screen that covered it.

“Well, what are you waiting for!” her boss said. “You going to wait for it to get in here and kill us?”

Patty Tyson lifted her pistol and aimed at the young man climbing through the broken window. She recognized him as the salesman who’d sold her car at the Chevy dealership in Nevada City the week before. She pulled the trigger several times and killed the thing as it tried to climb through the door’s window, its shoulders halfway through it. Her rounds went through the top of its head. It stopped moving; its body hung lifeless. It was the first time she’d ever shot anything, much less a human being.

She turned around. Her fellow officers had run out the front of the office and left her behind. They were jumping into the last working truck. She watched the truck, packed with rangers, pull down the driveway and turn onto the street, its back end sliding on the icy pavement.

*   *   *

Dr. Poole looked at his wife. The house was cold and dark, the heater and lights not working as the entire county’s electrical grid was down. Her pretty brown face was wet with tears.

“Sweetheart, I need for you to calm down and listen to me. All right?” Marvin said.

“I can’t leave without Richard,” Grace said.

“I’m afraid you have to,” Marvin said. He couldn’t tell her that he’d seen their son on the road. That he’d stopped the car, afraid of Richard when he’d seen him with that strange blank look on his face. His son had been standing in the snow with more of the things, long strands of strange thick-looking saliva hanging from his mouth. Marvin had driven on, not wanting to believe it until he heard Richard make that awful howling sound.

“I promise you, we’ll go by the high school on the way down the mountain,” Marvin said. It was a lie, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“What about Sidney?” she asked.

Marvin looked down at his suitcase. The bedroom was neat. His wife had been cleaning when he’d come in the door. She’d taken one look at him and screamed. His clothes were filthy from the fight in the car. He hadn’t answered her questions at first. He had no words to describe what he’d seen on the road.

“Listen, you have to get a few things together. I have some clothes Mr. Crouchback can probably wear. He is sedated right now. But he’s going to need some warm clothes. Can you fix him up with some? We have to take him. We can’t leave him here,” Marvin said. The doctor crossed the bedroom to his closet and took one of his Mackinaw coats and a few other things he thought would fit their neighbor Crouchback, who was sitting in their living room, obviously very ill. Marvin had done what he could for him.

“What’s wrong with Mr. Crouchback? Why aren’t you explaining anything, Marvin? What’s going on? You say we have to go down the mountain, but you don’t say why. You say we can’t wait and look for Richard, but you won’t say why?”

His wife sat down on the edge of the bed. She was much younger than Marvin, ten years. He had been married before and felt guilty saddling her with an older man, but he’d fallen in love with her so completely that he had been selfish. Now he wished he’d never met her. Then, maybe, she would have been spared all this horror.

“I’m sorry, you just have to trust me right now. Something bad is going on. Some kind of pathogen affecting people, making them sick. Maybe in the water—it’s best if we go down the mountain for the time being. I think it might be better away from here.” The strain of the last few hours was showing on his face. He collapsed on the rug, his elbows on the bed. He let his face fall into his hands. “I saw it developing. I should have been more aggressive.”

His wife came around the bed and helped pick him up. She had never seen him like this before, physically done in. Her own fear was subsumed in the shock of seeing her husband on his knees, talking to himself.

“Honey, please tell me what you saw. What is it?” She sat him on the bed, put her hands in his.

Marvin looked at his wife. He reached up and touched her face. “People have turned into some kind of monsters. They—they —”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Just that, people are turning into something inhuman, something I’ve never seen before. Something no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It’s as if they’ve been physically altered, too.”

“Why do we have to leave? Why is Mr. Crouchback sedated?” she said. Grace looked at the bedroom door. They’d taken Crouchback into the living room and let him lie down on the couch. He was speaking gibberish, not saying anything they could understand. Marvin had found him walking up the road toward the gate of their development in the snow, barefoot, talking to himself—in fact, displaying the symptoms he’d seen in his practice all week.

“He’s sedated because I’m afraid that he might become one of them. The gibberish is a symptom. But I can’t be sure. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”

“Why do we have to leave our home, Marvin? You haven’t told me everything.”

“Because I think that we should.” He couldn’t answer her truthfully. It would frighten her. He needed his wife’s help to save their daughter and get down the mountain, to what he hoped would be safety. If she had seen Richard . . . “I think we better eat something before we go,” he said.

His wife gave him a look Marvin had never seen before. “I’ve tried to call the high school and there’s no answer. Why? Why aren’t you telling me the truth? Why aren’t they answering the phone at the high school, Marvin?”

“I’m going to go look in on Vivian,” he said. “We should leave soon. It’s best.”

“Where are we going, Marvin? At least tell me that!” his wife said.

Marvin held the door. He was exhausted. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where they should go. All he could hope was that if they went somewhere else, they could escape the nightmare around them.

“I’m not sure exactly where yet. Down the mountain,” he said and closed the door.

CHAPTER 15

Turning from Main Street, Dillon walked down a side street’s antique duckboard sidewalk. The snow piled up here and there, dumped by the morning’s violent storm. Architectural features that had been obscured by the storm—doorways, banisters, cornices—were sharply outlined by sunshine.

An old man wearing a grease-stained snowsuit left a hardware store, bumping Dillon on the way to his car. The old man pretended not to notice the pistol stuck in Dillon’s belt, or the two hanging from his double shoulder holsters. The storefronts, the parked cars, the occasional pedestrians walking to their cars or toward Main Street, were still oblivious of the danger around the corner.

If the government would just tell people, Dillon thought, watching the old man get in his pickup truck and drive away as if everything were still normal.

The snow banks piled against the buildings were stark white, almost painful to look at without sunglasses. Dillon, having lost his dark glasses in the crash, had to squint.

His arm had been cut when he’d stopped to help a woman save her baby from one of the things. The Howler had been about to smash the baby’s head on the ground by its legs. The mother, screaming in horror, had tried to fight the thing.  Dillon had stopped and pistol-whipped the Howler, smacking him in the side of the head. He’d managed to snatch the baby away, but the thing had sprung up and bit him on the forearm. It had torn out a mouth-sized chunk of flesh before Dillon had shot him dead in the face.

Dillon had walked with the hysterical mother, who was holding her baby close. She begged him to help her get to her car. He’d stood in the middle of Main Street covering their escape, firing at Howlers that tried to jump on the woman’s car as she pulled away.

After that, out of ammunition, he’d been forced to ignore the mayhem and chaos on Main Street or he wouldn’t survive himself. He’d had to pass people fighting for their lives, some being beaten, some in tears having seen their loved ones murdered in the most horrible way. He’d turned down the first street that looked quiet, not knowing what he would do next.

   Keep the money. That was number one.

Stay alive, get out of here. There had to be places without Howlers yet. He stopped to check the pistol in his belt, pushing it down so it wouldn’t show as much.

Funny, he thought, me saving a sheriff—a lawman. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do. Might end up regretting it.

He wondered if he was going a little crazy. Maybe, he thought. Seeing a car bend the corner and come toward him, he stopped walking and put the two canvas bags of cash down. People in the car stared at him as they passed. Dillon looked at them carefully. One street could be normal, while on the next Howlers were overrunning everything, dragging people out of their cars and killing them with their bare hands. He looked up the street. It looked quiet. He picked up the bags again and walked on.

He glanced into a storefront beauty parlor as he walked by. A lot of middle-aged ladies stared at him from inside the shop, their heads trapped in old-fashioned conical metal hair dryers, oblivious to what was happening. He could only imagine what it would be like when the things got in there. He put down one of the canvas moneybags and waved at the women from the street.

“Get out!” he yelled.

They looked back at him stupidly through the window. One of them touched another on the arm and gave him a look.

“Get out, I said. While you can!”

Two of the old ladies, prune-faced, burst out laughing, thinking he was a drunk. Dillon stared at them, then opened the door of the salon. It was acrid-smelling, as if they’d been frying rats on a hot plate.

“There are Howlers, here in town. Down on the main street. They’ll be up here soon. Get out!” he said. He looked at the gaggle of ladies. They all looked like his mother under the hair dryers. Almost faceless, just eyes and chins. They’d stopped laughing when they saw the pistols.

He walked into the beauty parlor. It was warm; half a dozen ladies were under the dryers and more were having their hair cut in another room. The smell was worse here, almost as bad as a dead Howler, Dillon thought. The hairdressers, all young women, had stopped cutting hair and were staring at Dillon, their mouths open in shock.

“Listen, you better get out of here before I call the cops,” a young girl said. She wore black leotards and a white blouse. She held a spray can in one hand, and was talking on her cell phone, cradled on her shoulder, as she worked.

“You have a few minutes. If you leave now, you might make it,” Dillon said to all of them. “They’ll come up here too.”

The girl put down her can of hair spray, hung up on her call, and dialed 911.

Dillon watched her and started to laugh at the stupidity of it. “Go ahead and call! They’ll be picking that phone out of your ass when they get here.” He turned around and walked out of the shop’s front door, back out into the blinding sunlight of a suddenly cloudless sparkling blue sky. They were doomed, he thought.

He turned back and looked in the salon’s window. One of the women went back to her People magazine, sneering and muttering about people needing jobs.

    He hefted the moneybags and walked on. Quit being a stupid shit. No one is going to believe you til they see them. He glanced down the street. If he stayed here too long, he’d be dead meat too, he thought.  He began to walk by the cars parked on the lane, looking for one that had been left open. He found one with a jean jacket left on the front seat. He put the jacket on, covering his shoulder holsters so they wouldn’t be so noticeable.

He watched an old station wagon drive by, a mother and her children in the front seat, totally oblivious of what was in front of them on Main Street. He couldn’t hijack someone’s car, not now. He was a son-of-a-bitch, but he wasn’t heartless. He thought of going back to the used car lot he’d seen, where he knew he could hot-wire something and get out of here.

Then he saw the sign down the narrow snow-filled street: All American Gun Shop. Dillon crossed the street, snow crunching under his cowboy boots. He would need ammo, and lots of it.

He saw picketers in front of the gun store. Dillon looked at them incredulously. Mostly young kids, they looked at Dillon and asked him to join the protest. He’d stared at them, the bags of money in his hands, not knowing whether to laugh or what.

“Guns kill,” a young Latin girl said to him. She saw the pistol tucked into his jeans and backed away. The girl moved back into the safety of the moving queue.

“You all better get out of here!” Dillon shouted. “And you’ll need guns and ammo! That’s what I’m doing. The Howlers are down the street, right down there, on that main drag. I just came down from there.” He put the bags of money down and spoke in an earnest tone of voice. He didn’t want the Howlers to take the young girl, or any of the kids.

The crowd of twenty or so young people looked at him wide-eyed. One of them, a tall boy with pimples and red hair, burst out laughing. Some of the others began to laugh, too.

“He’s drunk,” the red-headed boy said.

“No, I’m not neither,” Dillon said. “I said there’s Howlers right down on the main street, they’re bound to get up here too! You got to get one of these and protect yourselves!” He ripped the automatic out from where he’d tucked it in the front of his jeans.

The grins on the faces of the young people turned to fear. One of the girls screamed and backed away, held around the waist by her boyfriend who’d come down the line to protect her. All the kids backed away down the sidewalk en masse.

Dillon heard the old-school brass bell attached to the store’s door, and felt something stick him in the ribs. He knew right away it was a weapon of some kind.

“Boy, put that down,” a voice said.

Dillon turned around and looked over the top of the head of the man, who was much shorter, holding the shotgun on him. The older man had a salt and pepper flat top and wore a red flannel shirt. His eyes were blue.  Dillon saw a look he recognized. He dropped the gun on the wooden sidewalk. The automatic clattered at his feet. The shotgun’s barrel was level and pointed at his stomach.

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone. I was just trying to warn them, mister,” Dillon said.

“What do you want here, boy?”

“Just some ammo, sir. And I’ll pay for it.”

The older man holding the shotgun looked down at the two canvas sacks at Dillon’s feet.

“Mister, I need that pistol back. I swear I didn’t mean no harm to anyone.”

“What do you need it for? You going to rob me?”

“No, sir. I don’t think I would have been standing out here shouting at people if I intended to rob you, would I?”

  “No, I guess not.”

In the store window’s reflection, Dillon saw three Howlers coming around the corner. They wore gym shorts and t-shirts, but he could tell right away what they were because of the spit hanging from their open mouths.

One of the Howlers stopped in the middle of the street, threw its head back and began to make their sound, half human and half animal/monkey scream.

“You better shoot them,” Dillon said.

The man holding the shotgun looked at Dillon, then at the Howlers in the middle of the snow-covered street. “What did you say?”

“I said you better shoot those—those things,” Dillon said. The Howler stopped calling. “He’s calling more of them. There’ll be a whole bunch of them up here in a minute if you don’t stop him from calling like that.” Dillon bent down to pick up his pistol.

“Touch that, boy, and I’ll cut you in two,” Stewart said.

The protesters were looking at the Howlers standing in the street. All three Howlers squatted in the middle of the road. It was the first time Dillon had seen them do that, wait for more Howlers to show up. They were learning. They were learning fast. They had also changed a little bit since he’d seen them in Elko. Their arms were somehow longer than human arms, and their faces heavier, the jaws slightly thicker, like something Dillon had seen in a book.

“Boys, get out of that street!” Mr. Stewart yelled. “Hey, boys! I said get out of the street, that’s not funny. We got a lunatic here.”

Dillon waited as long as he could, but when the older man turned to look at the Howlers again, Dillon made his move. He elbowed the shotgun barrel away from him and with his other hand he swung out and caught the older man with a right to the jaw. The man crashed to the ground, out cold. Dillon held the shotgun by the barrel and then took it in hand, looking down at the man on the sidewalk. He pushed through the crowd of kids and stepped down into the snowy lane.

The three Howlers were crouched together like apes in a zoo. Dillon looked down toward the main drag, then kept walking. He raised the shotgun. One of the Howlers sprang in the air at him. Dillon fired. The other two stood up. Dillon shot a fat one in the head, took it clean off at the shoulders in a red haze. He leveled the shotgun on the other that had charged, running along the ground on all fours. Dillon held his fire. He hated Howlers and wanted this one in close before he killed it. He waited while the thing charged him.

The Howler used its arms to propel itself into the air. Dillon waited for it to get only inches from the shotgun barrel before he fired. Screams of horror echoed behind him. Bits of Howler sprayed Dillon’s face. It was splattered and bloody when he walked back up to the sidewalk, all three Howlers dead, their bodies lying in the lane behind him.

The protesters, running away, were halfway down the block. Dillon called after them, but it was too late. They’d all run toward Main Street, the exact wrong direction, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Jesus, what did you do that for?” The old man was holding Dillon’s pistol on him. Dillon watched the protesters running toward certain death.

“God damn it, why doesn’t anyone wake up?” Dillon said. He turned around to face the pistol leveled at him by the older man.

“You’re an animal.” The man was pointing the gun at Dillon’s face. He pulled the hammer back and wanted to pull the trigger.

Dillon watched him, unmoved. He knew the gun was empty. “It’s not what you think, old man. Those weren’t teenage kids you saw, they were Howlers, and they don’t give a shit about humans. You understand? They’ll kill us, or we kill them, it real simple. That pistol is empty. You better go get some ammo for it. Those things howled to their friends, and once they howl like that, more of them will show up very soon.”

“I can’t kill you, you’re a lunatic,” Mr. Stewart said. He put the gun down “You’re a lunatic!” A sheriff’s car pulled up the street and stopped in front of the shop. Quentin got out of the car holding the M-16 by its handle. He had his bulletproof vest on. There was a dead body of a Howler, a woman, on the hood of the car; he’d hit her as he’d left Main Street and turned up the lane.

“The vest is a waste of time,” Dillon said. “They can’t shoot back.”

“Mike, I need all the ammo you got for this thing. And you’ll have to leave. You and Rebecca. You can come with me. You’ll have to leave the store, right now.”

“God damn, Sheriff, I’m glad to see you. This lunatic just killed three boys in cold blood. Out there in the street.”

Dillon turned and looked at the bodies in the snowy lane.

“What’s your name?” Quentin said.

“Dillon.”

“Is that the money you stole from the bank?”

“Sure is.”

“Thanks—I mean, for saving my ass back there. You could have let him kill me.”

“Didn’t see any point to it,” Dillon said. “I was in Nevada when they overran Elko. I hate ’em. Worse than the law.”

“Sheriff, have I gone crazy, or didn’t you hear me? This lunatic—”

“Shut up, Mike. It’s not what you think. Those weren’t boys, not anymore. They were something else. I know. They’re down on Main Street right now, hundreds of them. They killed everybody in the K-Mart an hour ago. Everyone in the Copper Penny. They’re all over the state and there’s no law to help us. All we got is each other. You understand? Him included,” Quentin said, nodding at Dillon.

“You better stop the chin wag. They’re coming now.” Fifty or sixty Howlers were trooping up the street, looking for their brothers. “They’re changing,” Dillon said. “Changing from the way they were in Elko. Their arms and faces are different, maybe.”

  “Holy shit!” Stewart said.

“You got anything fully automatic?” Dillon asked. “Anything in there like what he’s got?”

“Well? Do you, Mike? For God’s sake, man, get it, if you do!” Quentin said.

Stewart looked at Quentin, then went back into the store.

“It’s better if we fight them from inside,” Dillon said. “If they get behind us we won’t have a chance. You won’t be able to kill them fast enough.”

“Look, I got to go get my daughter,” Quentin said, looking at Dillon, then at the troop of Howlers coming at them. “Can you help me? I can’t do it alone. Some assholes have her in a house down on the other side of town. I need back-up. I’ll help you get that money out of town if you come with me. If you help me get my daughters back.”

“What about the old man in there? We can’t leave him,” Dillon said. “He won’t stand a chance.”

The Howlers had stopped at the beauty parlor and were swarming it. One of the old ladies was passed out of the parlor and torn apart as if she were made of paper instead of flesh.

“Can’t let that happen to him,” Dillon said, watching.

They’d been making out in the semi-dark, just a candle lit, when Rebecca noticed the light from the top of the stairs. Very stoned, she heard her father calling to her. She got off the couch and faced the narrow gun range they’d built into the store’s basement. She reached over and snapped on the range lights. Piles of old National Geographic magazines were stacked up on either side of the couch where Summers was lying, a shocked look on his face.

“Rebecca! God damn it! Get up here!” Something about the tone of her father’s voice froze her blood.

Gary looked up at her. A post blocked his view of her father. Terrified her father had caught them, Summers jumped up off the couch.

Rebecca turned, smiled, and held out her hand in an “it’s-cool” signal, a calm-down-no-problem-look on her pretty flushed face.

“Yeah? What’s up, Dad?” she said, hooking up her bra quickly, and finally stepping out of the dark to the bottom of the stairs.

“You better come up, honey. And bring the Thompsons, all of them,” her father said.

“Okay, but—”

“Rebecca, just do it, please.”

“Okay, Dad. Okay.” They heard the door close. Gary was putting on his bike shoes.

“God damn, that was close!” Gary said.

“Sure was. God, you’d think there was a war going on,” Rebecca said.

“What’s he want? What are Thompsons?”

“Machine guns,” Rebecca said.

“Excuse me?”

“Dad collects older machine guns. He wants me to bring up the Thompsons. Must have a collector up there or something. Probably the goddamn ATF agents again. He’s got one of the biggest collections in the state. It’s illegal, though, I guess. You don’t work for the ATF or anything, do you?” She smiled at Gary. “Somehow I don’t think so. Help me move these boxes out of the way.”

Gary turned around and looked at the couch they’d been making love on. Great stacks of National Geographic magazines stood on either side of the couch and ran down the walls of the shooting range. Rebecca went to the first stack and pulled down several bundles of magazines they used to hide the collection of automatic weapons. She reached into the space, opened a box and pulled out a Thompson. Gary recognized the thing from old black and white gangster movies he’d watched on TV.

“Holy shit!” he said.

“Pretty cool, huh? Here, take this one upstairs, and this one too.” She handed two of them to him. Summers stopped at the top of the stairs and turned around. Rebecca was taking out two more Thompson submachine guns from their original wooden packing cases.

“I never met anyone like you before,” Gary said, and went through the door into the store.

“Boy, give them guns,” Mr. Stewart said. Gary stepped out of the doorway. The sheriff he’d seen around town was at the counter. His face was hurt, one eye almost closed shut. The sheriff was taking boxes of ammunition and throwing them in a canvas bag he’d gotten from a rack. Another man, tall and muscular, was standing near the shop’s entrance—he looked a lot like a white version of the movie actor the Rock, Summers thought. The man had a shock of black hair, was about forty, and had crude tribal-style tattoos on his arms. The man stuck his head out the doorway and looked both ways.

Gary walked to the sheriff and handed him one of the guns. Quentin looked up from what he was doing.

“Kid can you use one of these?” Quentin asked. He nodded to the M-16 he was holding. From the look on the men’s faces, something was seriously wrong. Gary glanced at the man standing in the open doorway, who’d turned around.

“No time, they’re on the way,” Dillon said. He walked toward the gun counter. “Give me that thing!” Gary handed him one of the Thompsons.

“Where’s Rebecca?” Quentin said.

“Here I am, Sheriff.” Rebecca kicked the door to the basement shut with her foot.

Quentin looked up at the girl. He put his hands on the counter in a formal way, like a preacher at his pulpit.

“I want you to listen to me, girl, because what I’m going to tell you is the truth, but it’s going to sound pretty strange. There’s a bunch of things out in the street. They look human but aren’t. They’re going to try to kill us as soon as they get here. I don’t have time to explain. Lacy and Sharon need me. I have to go back outside. There’s no more law in town. I guess it’s everyone for themselves.”

Dillon yanked off the canister clip on the Thompson and was filling it with ammunition that Mr. Stewart had thrown to him from behind the counter.