Текст книги "Howlers"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 21

They’d stopped unexpectedly. The Land Rover’s headlights were shining on the entrance to an expensive five-star hotel’s elegant roadside entrance. The entrance was flanked by six-foot high portals made of smooth river stones, built to mark the place. The entrance, bathed in floodlights, stood out in the pitch black night as if nothing were wrong and the elegant hotel were open for business.

“Now what do we have here?” Johnny said. “How come they still got electricity?”

“Probably emergency generators,” Bell said from the backseat.

“It’s a hotel,” Lacy said. “What are we stopping here for?”

“People in there might need our help,” Johnny said. He had taken a suit of clothes from a mansion they’d robbed earlier. He was wearing a pair of expensive pants and jacket that were mismatched. The jacket was snakeskin and had cost $5,000. He’d taken the owner’s expensive Borsalino-made Panama hat, too, and was sporting it when he’d stopped to pick them up.

Johnny dug in the jacket pocket and took out a pharmacy-style pill container. “Got a thousand Oxy tablets at the Rite Aid in Reno! The whole damn pharmacy was wide open. No one there except some very dead people. Want some?” Johnny asked, looking at them in the rear-view mirror.

“No, thanks,” Bell said.

“Sure? Makes things a lot better. Got to face all this shit out here without drugs is hard on a man,” he said.

“I’ll say,” his girlfriend said. “A lot better with them than without them.” The girl was high and had chattered on the whole time since the couple had stopped for them, as if they were all on a lark, instead living a nightmare.

Lacy reached for Bell’s hand. It was the first time they’d touched like that. She wrapped her hand around his and held it tightly.

“Why don’t we just go on and meet up with my dad,” Lacy said. “It’s better if there’s more of us.”

“Well, for one reason I got some business up in there,” Johnny said.

“What kind of business?” Bell asked. The two stoners were using the horrible chaos as an opportunity to steal and loot without worrying about the usual consequences. It was why he had left them earlier that morning. It was crazy and immoral, yet they were doing it. Bell hated the man behind the wheel in the worst way. His old grandmother, a sharecropper all her life, had once said to him that the Devil at his strongest “wears a Sunday suit, but a Saturday-night smile.”

“That last place was a gold mine!” Sue Ling said.

“I’m sure it was,” Bell said.

“The old geezer had a great gun collection. All kinds of shit. He was some kind of banker. Said he was a big shot and could get us all the money we wanted,” Johnny said.

“I thought you said there wasn’t anyone at home?” Lacy said.

“Did I? Anyway, this looks like a pretty fancy place. They’ve got to have all kinds of good shit up in there. Rich people’s place—full of rich-people’s shit.”

“There are still laws,” Bell said. “Just because of what’s happened doesn’t mean—”

“Are there?” Johnny said.

“You think so?” Sue Ling said. “I don’t think there are any. Not anymore. Everything is free. It’s like Christmas, only better.” She turned toward them and smiled like a little kid. She’d raided some rich girl’s closet and wore a get-up like one of the Orange County Housewives, dressed for a glam-winter sojourn, complete with a white mink ski hat. “It’s not like—you know, it was before.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Lacy said.

“Wasn’t right to send me to Pelican Bay for two years either, or keep me in an isolation cell, but the motherfuckers did it anyway,” Johnny said. “All I did was sell a little meth.”

“You’re both crazy,” Lacy said. Bell felt her squeeze his hand again. “You’re both crazy. And I’m going to tell my father what you’ve done.”

“Well, are we crazy, honey?” Johnny asked his girlfriend.

“I’m crazy about you,” Sue Ling said. “Hey, I got a Chanel bag for free! Everyone in the store was dead!” The Chinese girl smiled in the deranged way that Oxy-moron heads developed, half shit-eating-ain’t-I-cute grin, and half seven-year-old’s smug look. The painkiller made them believe that everything and anything that came out of their mouth was either funny, or profound, when it was puerility personified.

The girl lifted a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum with the eight-inch barrel from where she’d had it stuck between her seat and the armrest. She pointed it at Bell. The huge pistol was fully loaded. Bell could see the tips of the bullets facing out from the pistol’s open cylinders.

“That pistol there is better than the Desert Eagle. We got both from the old guy. But the Smithy has that long eight-inch barrel; you get 2075 feet per second vs. 1475 feet per second with the Israeli’s Eagle. Shit, these Jews really know now to make some kick-ass guns! Both 300-grain loads, of course. That’s got the hollow points too. Hits these Howlers—Splat City, brain-wise. I get a kick out of watching them hit the deck,” Johnny said.

“I could shoot you both right now and I would get away with it. That’s so cool,” Sue Ling said and broke out laughing. Only joking.” She put the huge pistol down. “I wouldn’t, though– shoot you. I fired it up at the mansion and it hurt my wrist! We were messing around shooting down the hallways, to see how many doors we could get through. This fucking thing, we couldn’t find the bullet! I think it went through six doors!”

“It was a big-ass place! Had a private fucking lake,” Johnny said. “Some kind of special wine-drinking room. Fucking rich people think of all kinds of shit. Whoever heard of a special wine-drinking room? Fucking idiots. Old man kept asking me what I wanted with him. So I shot him in the foot and told him I wanted to see him dance, like in the Westerns. Remember? Fucker danced. Hopping like a motherfucker. They showed all the cool Westerns at Pelican Bay. I love me some Westerns,” Johnny said.

“I want out!” Lacy said. “Let me out! He’s crazy!” She let go of Bell’s hand and reached for the car’s door handle but it was locked.

“Honey, you can’t go out there. They’re out there. Shit. Don’t act crazy,” Sue Ling said. The girl’s pretty young face wore a look of honest concern.

She might only be sixteen or seventeen years old, Bell realized.

“Your call,” Johnny said. He turned and looked at Bell. “I’ll let your bitch out if she really wants out.” He reached for the Land Rover’s armrest and they heard the mechanical sound of all four doors unlocking together. “Go on ... get!”

Lacy looked at Bell, her hand on the door’s lever.

“We can’t get out here,” Bell said. “We’ll die. I promised your father I’d look after you.” Bell turned and looked at Johnny. “Why don’t you turn on the radio, see what you get. It’s satellite, so we should be able to get some news. Like you said.”

“So are you in, or are you out, bitch?” Johnny asked Lacy directly, ignoring Bell. He tilted the black porkpie hat back in frustration.

Lacy stared at him. “In,” she said finally.

“Right. Okay.” Johnny hit the latch and Bell heard all four door locks snap shut. “Now let’s go see what kind of goodies we can find.” They drove through the portals and turned down a long new-looking driveway passing a well-lit sign: “Sierra Ranch—a Four Seasons Luxury Resort and Spa.” Johnny turned on the satellite radio and instead of the news, tuned in a country and western station that was playing “Rawhide.” He and his girlfriend started singing along with the famous Frankie Lane tune: “Don’t try to understand ’em ...  just ride, rope, and brand ’em ...”

It was while they were driving down the driveway, Johnny making the cracking motion of a whip, playing along with the song, that Bell decided he would probably have to kill them both, and soon, or he and Lacy would be murdered by the two drug-fueled lunatics before the night was over.

The Howlers had already visited the hotel, and probably not that long ago, Bell thought, as they pulled into the elegant well-lit turn around, a majestic pine tree in the center of it. A bellman—his head pulled off his shoulders, exposing a blunt-looking spinal column—lay in the middle of the driveway. Expensive suitcases were scattered everywhere. Some had been opened and their contents scattered by the mindless creatures. Guests had been unloading, it seemed, as an extra-long stretch limousine was parked in front of the Bell Captain’s station, with all its doors left wide open. The limo’s back window was smashed in. The limo driver was hanging out of the driver’s side door; a large stone had split his skull wide open, the stone still protruding from the dead driver’s head.

“Je-e-sus,” Sue Ling said. “Look at all those clothes, babe!”

“Bonanza!” Johnny said. He pulled the Land Rover directly behind the limo. “Okay. Let’s see what we got here.”

Bell watched Johnny pocket the car’s electronic key, lifting it from a tray on the armrest.

“I’m staying here,” Lacy said.

“No. Everyone out,” Johnny said. “No fun otherwise. And, I don’t trust you.” He waved his pistol at them. “O—U—T, spells out. I’ve got an idea.”

“At least give us a weapon,” Bell said. “They could still be here, the things.”

“Well, just give us a shout if you see one,” Johnny said. Sue Ling stepped out of the car, the huge Smith & Wesson held in her left hand.

A man pushed through the doors of the honey-colored, log-cabin style lobby. He was in his forties, wearing smart ski gear. He looked terrified. “Thank God. Can you help us? My wife is sick. Please. Can you help us? We need a doctor. I’ve been trying to call out for an ambulance, but my cell phone doesn’t work.”

Johnny walked around the front of the Land Rover and lifted the Desert Eagle and pointed it at the man. “Hold on there, Sport. How many people are in there with you?”

The man stopped walking, stunned that the help he’d expected had turned into something else. “We were in our room—asleep. They came. We could hear the screaming in the lobby. We kept our door shut. It was terrible—what’s wrong? I’m not one of those things!”

“Any cops here?” Johnny asked.

“What?”

“You know, security? Guys with fucking guns?” Johnny asked.

“I didn’t see any,” the man said.

“Where’s your wife?” Johnny asked.

“Room 214. She’s very ill—I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I need help—the things. It’s terrible what—”

“Help?” Johnny said.

“Can you take us to a doctor?” the man asked. He glanced at Bell and Lacy, looking to the two of them for help.

“Oh, a doctor. Sure.” Johnny said.

“Thank you. I told my wife that—”

A loud shot rang out. The high-velocity bullet hit the standing man dead in his face. It blew the back of his head off, knocking him backwards as if he’d been hit by a bat. The shot reverberated around them.

Lacy screamed and Bell grabbed her, turning her away from the awful sight of the man’s skull broken open and his jerking feet. The contents of his skull spilled across the ground behind him.

“See if he’s got a wallet,” Johnny said to Sue Ling.

The girl ran over to the dead man, rifled his jacket pockets and came up with a wallet and a cell phone.

“Bingo,” Johnny said. “It’s dog-eat-dog out here, baby. Now, you two want to live, go get some wallets. And meet us back here in in the lobby in an hour. And I’d watch out for the guy’s bitch. No doubt she’s one of them by now.”

“You’re a murderer,” Lacy said in a quiet, horrified voice, turning toward Johnny.

“You figure that out on your own?” Johnny said. “Damn, you’re a smart bitch.”

“Can’t do it without a weapon,” Bell said. “Those things could be anywhere around here.” He tried to keep the anger out of his voice.

“Go,” Johnny said. “Go now! Go and get me SOME FUCKING MONEY!”

Sue Ling ran over to her boyfriend and tossed him the dead man’s wallet. “One,” the girl said, smiling and seemingly unaffected by the brutal murder. The two hugged.

Bell saw the girl had a diamond belly button piercing when she reached up to kiss her boyfriend. She’s a psychopath, Bell thought.

“You’re both insane,” Lacy said.

“You get us ten thousand dollars cash, and we’ll take you to that ranch. That’s how insane we are,” Johnny said. “We’ll wait for you in the bar.”

Bell wondered why they’d been kept alive, and now he understood. It was dangerous going into the hotel. Why not send them in to do the dirty work? If they were killed, what would it matter?

“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.

“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.