Текст книги "Howlers"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Willis gave up trying to explain it. He didn’t know the answer, and he’d always been good at finding answers. Problem solving had gotten him scholarships—first to Yale, then to Cambridge, then to Harvard Law School. But no one had ever given him a problem like this one.

He heard his wife again smashing the windows of the car with her bare hands, punching through the glass, and the terrible howling sound she’d made. It wasn’t like any human sound he’d ever heard.

“Willis, your mother is downstairs in the office.”

Willis turned from the window. He knew he must still look like what he had been, until yesterday afternoon when he’d killed his wife: a successful young attorney. The deputy in front of him was someone he’d grown up with. The two young men looked at each other.

“I got your mom in Quentin’s office. She—well, she’s very upset, Willis.”

Willis nodded.

“Eric, you have to go home and get Gina and the kids and leave Timberline. NOW. Okay? Right away!” Willis said.

“Willis, I can’t just go get my wife and kids and leave town.”

“Eric, listen to me! Please! You don’t understand. Something is terribly wrong here.”

“Willis, look. I know what you’re going to say. I’m your friend. We go all the way back to Ms. Pond’s first-grade class, remember?”

Willis nodded.

“Willis, they say you killed Ann and the kids. Quentin, everyone, says you’re crazy,” the deputy said.

Willis walked to the cell door. He put his hands on the bars. He reached out to his friend. He tried to grab Eric’s arm to convince him that it was dangerous—and that what had happened to his family could happen to anyone in town.

“I’m not an animal, Eric, for Christ’s sake. I’m not crazy. Please, listen to me. You have to go home, get Gina and the kids, and get out of town before it’s too late!”

“Willis, I can’t do that.” The deputy picked up a bag of clothes he’d set on the floor. “Your mom brought you some things from your place. Why don’t you change, and then I’ll take you downstairs.” The deputy unlocked the cell door.

The clothes Willis wore were the ones he’d worn the day before, and were bloodstained. His wife’s blood had soaked his shirt and t-shirt. It had dried, and the shirts were stiff and smelly. He’d appeared in court covered in Anne’s blood, refusing to wear the orange overalls the sheriff had offered.

“Willis, I’m sorry. I really am,” the deputy said. “Whatever happened up there, at your place, I’m sorry.” He swung open the cell door and handed Willis the bag of fresh clothes.

At 9:00 a.m., T.C. McCauley walked his prisoner out of Timberline’s granite-block sheriff’s station and put him in the back of his patrol car for the trip down the mountain to the state’s facility for the mentally ill in Sacramento. The judge in town had gotten the county prosecutor’s office to agree to a psychological examination before multiple charges of homicide were filed. The old judge, like so many of the town’s people, had known Willis Good his whole life, and felt sorry for him.

The wind started up as they pulled onto Main Street. A few people were making for work, bundled in snowsuits. Shop windows gave off a soft, yellowish glow. As the patrol car passed the front of the town’s brick library, snow began falling lightly again.

From the back of the sheriff’s car, Willis remembered all the winter days just like this one, spent in the town’s library studying. He pictured the small reading room and its green well-waxed linoleum floor, with its ceiling-to-floor shelves of books. He recalled the library’s smells that he loved: books, women’s sweaters, coffee that the librarians kept on a hot plate in the back office. He remembered the old librarian who’d befriended him when his mother, a drunk, first came to town. The ancient-seeming woman had given him a stack of children’s books and let him stay all day. When the other kids were sent home at dinnertime, he’d been allowed to stay. The librarians, having informally adopted him, would all chip in and buy him dinner from the Copper Penny, making sure he ate before they finally sent him home to his mother, who they suspected wasn’t feeding the boy enough. In many ways, the town had raised him.

“T.C., something is really wrong here,” Willis said from the back of the car. He said it almost offhandedly. “You’ll see. I told them back there, Quentin and anyone who would listen, but they don’t want to believe me. I figured part of it out this morning while I was with my mom. I’m sure it’s something at Genesoft. You know Ann worked at Genesoft. You know that, right? That she worked there?”

McCauley shot a glance into the rear-view mirror. They pulled out of Timberline and onto one of the loneliest country roads in the Sierra Nevada. The narrow county road connected Timberline with the rest of Southern Placer County. The early-morning shadows cast by pine trees were dark and cold-looking. Willis’s young face came out of one shadow and passed into another, then did it again, as he waited for the sergeant to answer him.

“Willis, this is the hardest damn thing I’ve ever done,” T.C. said. He hadn’t spoken since he put Willis into the car. Willis looked out the window. T.C. McCauley had known him since they were boys.   Even as a child, T.C. had known about the conspiracy of kindness to keep Willis clothed, feed and nurtured.

“Why’d you do it, Willis? You went away to college back East—what was it, Harvard?”

“Yale,” Willis said.

“Your mom is doing so much better now, Willis.”

   “Look, T.C. , we do not have time to talk about my mother,” Willis said, getting angry. “Now I’m going to tell you a story. I want you to listen to it. I want you to listen very carefully. Down there in Sacramento, you know I’ll just be another guy in a police car. You’re my last chance. You’re everybody’s last chance. “I think I know what happened,” Willis said. “Ann got a job down at Genesoft. She was there all week, no break. They had some new products to launch. She came home yesterday at mid-morning. She said she was feeling funny. That’s when it happened. She changed. She became something—something monstrous.” He tried to say the word “monstrous” in a way that would sound sane.

“Willis, you killed Ann and the kids,” T.C. said.

Willis stopped speaking. The pain of the accusation shot through him. He tried to control his anger when people said that, but it was becoming more and more difficult. He wanted to scream into the nightmare, but didn’t let himself. Instead of yelling, he made himself speak very quietly, and very carefully.

“No. No, you see, that’s not what happened at all. I tried to save the children, but Ann was too strong for me. I couldn’t manage it. We fought out there on the driveway. I tried to stop her . . .  she killed the children.”

The deputy drove on, not answering.

T.C. lit a cigarette and inhaled, carrying the smoke deep into his lungs, savoring it. It was against the law to smoke in the patrol car but he couldn’t help himself. The storm raged around them, but neither of them mentioned it. The blinding glare of the patrol car’s headlights reflected back at him from the ugly white face of what was becoming a major blizzard. He leaned forward, reinserting the car’s cigarette lighter into the dash, the deputy’s big shoulders rolling forward. It was almost completely white outside. Inside the patrol car, the lights of the console gave a greenish tint to T.C.’s face. It would take another hour to get to the freeway at Emigrant Gap, another good hour from there to drive to the State’s facility for the criminally insane in Sacramento. He had listened to Willis’ story for the last half hour without saying a word.

“Do you believe me?” Willis asked, his voice slightly muffled by the plastic shield that separated the patrol car’s backseat from the driver. The snowstorm outside, the handcuffs, the dirty worn interior of the sheriff’s car, the ugly plastic divider between him and the deputy, were all making it seem hopeless. The Valium Dr. Poole had given Willis back in Timberline had sucked the life out of him. His throat was dry, his voice weak because he’d talked so much since he’d gotten in the car, almost nonstop.

“Can’t say that I do, Willis,” T.C. said. Crazy fucker.  McCauley’s eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. The deputy had carried a lot of men to the county jail. He’d heard a lot of stories. And he’d heard a lot of weird things from the back of the patrol car. He was used to it. But Willis’ story was the craziest he’d ever heard.

It’s the ones who look like choirboys that are the worst, the ones that look normal, T.C.  thought. And then he was sorry he’d thought it. He still liked Willis; he couldn’t help it. When you’ve known someone since you were kids, it’s impossible not to think you really know them. Knowing someone always makes for empathy, the deputy thought.

“You have to believe me. Don’t you understand? I’m just like you. You would have done the same thing, T.C. I’m not crazy! You have to believe me. For God’s sake!” Willis realized he was yelling, and stopped himself.

“Willis, look. There isn’t a lot I can do. You understand. I would save it for the doctors. Try to convince them—right?”

“There isn’t time for all that. It’s happening too fast,” Willis said. “I didn’t have any choice.” Willis looked through the milky-looking plastic divider at his last hope. “Ann was going to hurt us. They get very strong, you see. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened to her.” Willis’ voice trailed off. He understood suddenly that it was hopeless. No one was going to believe him. He looked at the T.C.’s eyes peering back at him in the mirror, unconvinced; they moved away.

The patrol car, its top carpeted with inches of hardened snow, its sides mud-spattered from the back country, turned off the busy frontage road into a halogen-lit gas station at Emigrant Gap. The gas station was crowded and oddly surreal-looking, the pump area brightly lit and busy.

McCauley turned off the engine. The car’s radio, playing a country-western station stayed on, the music playing over the sound of the moving windshield wipers. “Jesus, kick me through the goal posts of life!” The song’s lyrics seemed oddly humorless in the early morning.

All the deputy’s twenty-seven years—three, very hard ones, spent in Iraq—showed as he glanced into the rearview mirror. He pulled on his cheap Sears winter gloves, then opened his car door. A cold wind was blowing straight off the Sierra. As T.C. walked, he pulled out his cell phone. He could make out traffic below on Highway 50 as he lifted the cell phone to his face. He’d dialed his home number in Timberline.

“Are you okay?” T.C. said. All the talk of dead wives had scared him. The deputy heard his wife’s sleepy voice come on the line. “I just felt like talking to someone,” he said. “I’m at the Denny’s at Emigrant Gap. I’m taking Willis to Sacramento.”  He could barely hear his wife’s voice over the wind. “Just wanted to say hi. I’ll call again when I get to the facility. I should be home around four, if the roads stay plowed.”

“There’s been a lot of strange news,” his wife said. “T.C., a lot of people are going missing here in town.”

The deputy held the phone and looked out at his patrol car. “That’s what Willis said would happen.”

“What?” his wife said. She worked as a fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school.

“Willis said that was going to start happening,” T.C. said into the phone. He had to speak up because the wind was gusting so hard.

“What?” his wife said again.

“The one who killed his wife and children. Willis Good. You know,” T.C. said. “He said his wife turned into some kind of monster.”

“What’s Willis got to do with this? Poor man,” his wife said.

“I don’t know.”

“T.C., I’m scared. I called my brother’s house in Reno this morning, and no one answered.”

“Well, the phone lines are probably down because of the storm last night,” T.C. said.

“No . . .  the lines are okay. I checked,” his wife said. T.C. didn’t hear the last part because of the wind, and the blaring of a big semi-truck’s horn, passing below on the freeway.

“I love you, baby,” she said. “Did Willis do it?”

“Yeah, he did it. I love you, too,” T.C. said. “I’ll see you for dinner.” He lowered his phone. He turned and looked at the sheriff’s car. If I start believing Willis’ story, I might as well follow him into the nut house myself.

T.C. got back in the patrol car. He looked in the mirror. Willis looked at him.

“You heard something, didn’t you?” Willis said. “I can see it in your face.”

“My wife’s people have gone missing in Reno,” T.C. said.

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you told me. I think it’s the phones. The lines are probably down,” T.C. said. “You know, because of the storm, so they don’t answer. Cell towers aren’t working, I mean.”

“It’s not the phones, God damn it!” Willis said. “It’s them. They’re turning into them!”

“Monsters, right?” T.C. said.

“I didn’t say that exactly. But yes, if you want to call them that: monsters. All right. Call them anything you want. What difference does it make what you call them?”

“You expect me to believe that bullshit, Willis?”

“All right. Wait until your wife disappears, then,” Willis said.

T.C. turned around. He looked at the prisoner through the dirty plastic divider. Anyone would look like a criminal through that plastic, he thought.

“I tell you what. If she disappears, I let you go,” T.C. said. “How’s that?”

“If she disappears, you won’t want to let me go,” Willis said.

The deputy pulled out of the gas station and crossed the frontage road, into the almost-full Denny’s parking lot. “You hungry?”

Willis looked at him.

“I guarantee this will be your last good meal for a while. I’d come in if I were you. I promised your mom I would make sure you had a square meal. If you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. I swear to God, Willis. Do you understand that? I’m not supposed to let you out of the goddamn car, much less take you into Denny’s for a meal.”

Willis nodded. He felt himself being picked up out of the back in the wind and cold. He felt the handcuffs come off his wrists.

“Thank you, T.C.,” Willis said.

“You’re welcome, Willis.” The deputy, much bigger than him, turned him around and they walked toward the restaurant together.

“Would you really shoot me?” Willis asked. He looked over his shoulder at T.C.. Willis was wearing the clothes his mother had brought him: a clean t-shirt, blue jeans and a heavy Sheriff’s Dept. green nylon coat that Quentin had lent him so he wouldn’t catch cold on the ride.

“Why, you feeling lucky?” T.C. asked.

CHAPTER 3

Quentin knew when he opened the car door that his life was going to change. He grabbed the door’s handle, but couldn’t make himself open it.  His eyes fixed on the red Denny’s sign showing through the falling snow. He’d been listening to the chatter on his police radio: Caltrans crews were about to blow a massive snowdrift on Emigrant Gap ridge. He knew that if the drift wasn’t blown, they were risking an avalanche that would close the road connecting Timberline to HHhighway 50, the town’s gateway to the outside world. Caltrans was broadcasting alerts to all police, sheriff departments, and Highway Patrol in the area. Quentin listened to an excited voice on the radio counting down. “Ten, nine, eight.” He switched the radio off.

You have to go on with your life. You’re only forty. Do you really want to be sitting by the fire alone the rest of your life? Okay, like the commercial says: Just do it.

He felt the door handle depress, the car door cracked open, a two-year spell broken. The life he’d lived before now—the years with his wife, who had been everything to him—were sucked out into the lightly falling snow. It wasn’t a betrayal; his wife, Marie, was dead after all. He felt the pain of that cold separation one more time nonetheless.

Time changes everything, he thought.

Quentin stepped out of his patrol car, slamming the door behind him. He looked up at the face of the Sierra, the sun nowhere to be seen.

You aren’t dead, you’re alive. So act like it, for Christ’s sake.

   Inside the packed restaurant he nodded to a table of Rotary Club members; the town’s prominent business people and ranchers ate at this Denny’s every Friday morning. The Rotary Club had contributed to all his campaigns over the years. He stopped and shook hands and made the necessary small talk about Founder’s Day, Timberline’s mid-winter holiday celebration that was right around the corner. They asked him about the possible highway closure and Quentin assured them the road would be back open in an hour, in plenty of time for the weekend’s festivities.

While he shook hands, Quentin searched the big dining room for Patty Tyson, the girl he’d come to meet. He saw her head bent over a newspaper in a booth in the back, along a row of windows with a view of the Emigrant Gap Ranger Station. Quentin lifted his cowboy hat, nervously slipped it off, and shook the last hand at the Rotary’s table. He made a passing joke to the business people, all old-time Timberline residents, about his not having had an opponent in the last election—an embarrassment, he told them with a smile, he was willing to undergo again.

   He left the Rotarians, most of whom he’d grown up with, and walked across the busy dining room. He tried to relax but couldn’t. The butterflies in his stomach rioted as he crossed the restaurant.

You’re an idiot for doing this. She probably just wants to talk about search and rescue, and now you’ve built yourself up for something else and you’ll be disappointed. She’s too pretty and young for you, anyway.

California State Park Ranger Patty Tyson watched the man she’d fallen in love with come into the Denny’s. For some reason, she immediately pretended she was immersed in the San Francisco Chronicle. She’d broken down and called Quentin at home, and, for all practical purposes, given herself away. She’d broken the Big Rule that she’d read in all the women’s magazines, but she didn’t give a damn.

What do rules have to do with it, she thought. Venus and Mars my ass.

She wanted to hook up with Quentin Collier, it was a natural and powerful feeling, and she didn’t feel like fighting it anymore. Desire was exhausting her.

She had fallen in love with him that past summer up in the high country when they were together on a search for a little girl who had been kidnapped from her parents’ car at one of the freeway rest stops on the highway, just a mile from the ranger station. They’d never found the little girl, or her body. But they had found something else, she thought now, pretending to read her newspaper: a quiet understanding on horseback. For one whole week, that summer, the entire search and rescue community, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe, had come out, hundreds of volunteers, into the Emigrant Gap Wilderness to help look for the little girl who’d come from Los Angeles with her young parents for a weekend in the mountains.

Patty let herself look up from the newspaper and study the sheriff as he stopped to talk with a table of older men and women. He was like a presence that wasn’t a presence, she thought. He was quiet and yet, when they’d talked those six July days—sometimes traveling on horseback, sometimes resting in the shade of a big pine tree with views of the Central Valley spread out green-beautiful below them—he’d told her stories about the Timberline he’d grown up in, stories about sheriffing, stories about deer hunting with his father and uncles in the Emigrant Gap Wilderness before it became a state park. As she’d come from the east coast, the stories fascinated her.

Something was compelling about the way he spoke to her. Something inside the story, something that he told with his eyes and his big cowboy smile. The way he patted a horse, or cinched a saddle, or stretched out by the campfire propped up on his saddle blanket, his shirt stained with sweat and grime. At those moments Quentin Collier looked like a man from another age. When she saw him back in town he seemed a little out of place. By the second day of the search, the others in the posse had disappeared for her.

The problem, she knew, was that she’d always loved cowboys. And Quentin Collier was a cowboy. It was the reason she’d come west from Virginia; it was the reason she’d gone to the University of Nevada. It was the reason she’d called the sheriff and made herself sound like a schoolgirl with a bad crush.

But it was more than just the physical attraction, which was very strong. He made her feel safe. She remembered standing next to him one morning in the ranger-station parking lot, after they’d come down from the mountain, empty-handed, and depressed that the little girl hadn’t been found. Quentin was talking to the assembled press, radio and television. She’d felt a sense of well-being just standing next to him in the late afternoon sunshine, sweaty and saddle-sore, his voice deep and sonorous. She could read his body language already; he was trying to say the right things, nothing the little girl’s family might read, or hear, later and be hurt by. It was like standing next to one of those big old pine trees up on the mountain. You knew, that no matter what, the tree could survive it.

Okay, I have a thing for cowboys, she told herself as Quentin slipped into the booth. He probably thinks I’m a nut and is just being polite.

“Hi,” she said.

“Good morning.” Quentin was stunned again by Tyson’s good looks every time he saw her. She was a tall willowy brunette with big blue eyes.

The police radio on his belt squawked and he turned it down. Quentin looked even bigger sitting in the booth, she thought, his shoulders square and straight. He was over six feet and lean, so he looked ten years younger than his forty years. A number he’d seemed to go out of his way to mention to her, as if he were old.

“Caltrans is closing the road to Timberline,” Quentin said. “They’re going to blow a potential slide. A couple of areas, I guess.”

“I heard they were going to,” Patty said. There was an awkward silence.

Quentin put his cowboy hat down on the seat next to him and smiled as if the idea of a slide were funny. “I hope we don’t have any problems,” he said. “If the road to 50 is closed for too long, everyone will be on my ass.” He saw her smile; she folded up her newspaper.

Quentin’s mind froze again while he watched her. She had that effect on him. Lust had an odd way of grinding your thoughts to dust. Patty moved her long hair out of her eyes and looked up at him, tucking it behind her ear. Even in the sexless green uniform of a California State Ranger, she looked attractive. There was something profoundly womanly about her, he thought. He remembered her in the saddle and he almost blushed. The curve of her hips, the way she rode, the way her hips rocked. Masterly. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they rode a horse. Jerks and city people always rode with their boot toes shoved way too far into the stirrups. It never failed. Not her. She had a good seat.

No, he thought, there were two kinds of people: the kind who hold on to the saddle horn at a trot and those who don’t need to. Patty Tyson held her reins easy with just two fingers. She was that kind of girl, and she was loping through his dreams most nights now. An easy-two-finger-on-the-reins kind of woman.

The sheriff glanced out at the freeway below the restaurant. All the cars zooming past looked dirty, their outlines obscured by the snowstorm.

“Coffee?” A waitress rescued them from an awkward silence. The woman poured coffee into Quentin’s cup, not waiting for an answer. Patty offered her cup, glad the waitress had come.

Did I make a mistake? Patty tried to understand what was wrong. Maybe he thinks I’m stupid.

He had ordered quickly, and it was her turn.

“Pancakes,” Patty said, not bothering to study the menu.

The waitress adjusted her glasses. Middle aged, the waitress wore heavy makeup and had red hair, about the same color as the Denny’s sign.

“Dear, we’ve got sixteen types of pancakes at this Denny’s. What kind would you like?” The waitress touched her glasses with bemused exasperation, reading the obvious first-date look on the couple’s faces.

“Buttermilk,” Patty said.

“Okay . . .  we’re short-handed this morning. Coffee is on the house today,” the waitress said.

“I talked to your daughter when I called. She’s nice,” Patty said, trying to think of something quick to say as the waitress turned and left.

“Which one?”

“I think the older one. Lacy.”

“It’s like having two mothers,” Quentin said. “Especially Lacy. She’s going to Berkeley. She wants to be a doctor. She’s wanted that since we—” Quentin stopped himself. “Since I can remember. I keep reminding her she’s my daughter and not my mother, but it doesn’t seem to do much good.”

After the waitress brought them their breakfast, the conversation became easier. They talked about that summer when they’d met, about the fact the little girl was never found, how devastating it must have been for her mother and father. Quentin told her the father still called the office once a week just to check.

“It must be hard being a sheriff. I mean, having to see the bad guys win like that. I don’t think I would like that. I mean, to know that no matter what you do, how hard you try to find someone, you can’t,” Patty said.

“You never get used to it,” Quentin said, looking away. The waitress came and poured him another cup of coffee and told Quentin she’d voted for him. She said that he was doing a good job.

Quentin’s family went back to the Gold Rush. Because of that, people in Placer County viewed him differently from almost any other politician. People in Placer County didn’t think of Quentin as a politician; they thought of him as Sheriff Collier. People said Quentin Collier was a throwback to another, better time—before CNN, Fox News and cell phones. He was honest.

“How come you aren’t married?” Quentin said when the waitress left. He wanted to change the subject. The loss of the little girl had hurt him. He couldn’t talk about it. All the time he’d been searching the loss of his wife, her death, had been very fresh; in a way, he had been searching for them both. He didn’t want anyone else to go through what he was going through, but they’d failed. They hadn’t found the little girl. He’d had to come back down the mountain and face the girl’s young parents. The moment he looked into the father’s eyes he knew he was looking at himself. That someone was cutting something out of the father while he was still alive. Quentin had stood there and said what he had to say. And then, he’d wished he hadn’t said anything. Words, he knew, only made it worse. His words had stolen all hope, which was the last thing the little girl’s parents had left.

“I was,” Patty said.

“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“We found out we didn’t like each other.  In fact, I found out he was a real jerk.” The lights in the restaurant flickered.

“Trees popping,” Quentin said. “New snow brings down old trees and cuts the power. How would you like to go to the movies tomorrow night? Osage County finally came to Timberline.” Quentin surprised himself with the question. But he had the bit in his mouth. He was determined to reach for Life. The girl was life, if he’d ever seen it. He’d debated which movie she might like and decided against Need For Speed in favor of the popular woman-friendly, Meryl Streep movie.

“I’d love to,” Patty said. The lights flickered again, then went off completely, leaving the restaurant in semi-darkness. The diners gasped.

“Maybe that’s the first sign of an alien attack,” Quentin said in the semi-dark. “I don’t think they’ll like Placer County, though. We got more guns here than at the Remington factory.”  He heard her laugh. She still had a girl’s laugh. “I think everyone gets one the day they’re born. Girls and boys,” Quentin said. “The aliens will be shot at by five-year olds.”

“I don’t get off until six on Saturdays,” she said.

“We’ll go to the late show. Why don’t you come down to the ranch and you can see the place, have dinner and we’ll go from there. You can meet my two mothers. But they’ll probably demand you have me back by ten o’clock. And they’ll ask you how you drive. Also, they won’t let me go out with anyone who smokes.”

“Whatever they want,” she said. I’d like to have you in bed by ten o’clock, Patty thought.

The lights came back on and everyone clapped. He’d taken his first big step back into Life. Quentin Collier’s heart was pounding.

I might as well be sixteen again. It feels good to be alive, he thought.

        *   *   *

Chuck Phelps looked behind him at his idling snowmobile. It was snowing harder than what he would have liked. He had a checklist in his gloved hand. Chuck put it down for a moment and looked at his beautiful, albeit small, log cabin. He felt a tremendous sense of pride. It, and he, were ready for Armageddon. He had done everything a man could do to prepare for what he was sure was coming. He looked at the cabin he’d built with his own two hands. It had taken him almost twenty years to finish it. No one looking at it would think it was, in fact, a modern-day fortress.

People in Timberline thought he was crazy, but he didn’t care. They would be sorry. He wouldn’t be able to help most of them, he thought as he walked toward the porch, built six feet above the snowy ground. He’d built so many traps, fields of fire, and automobile traps, that he couldn’t remember them all. So he’d gotten a computer and begun a small log of the cabin’s military-style defenses; he’d employed a lot of what he’d learned during his three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The cabin was a state-of-the-art bunker disguised as a cabin.

He’d learned all about computers, their use important to the fortress’s running—that had been ten years ago. Now it was all done and ready for the battle to come. When Armageddon arrived, he would be prepared.

He walked through the snow toward the cabin’s wooden porch. Most of all he wanted to share his achievements with friends, people he liked. Many times he’d stopped his truck in front of Quentin Collier’s ranch and thought about showing Quentin everything he’d done inside the cabin.