Текст книги "Howlers"
Автор книги: Kent Harrington
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 25 страниц)
CHAPTER 24
Are you there?
The text messaging box sprang up on Miles’ iPhone, displaying Price’s cell number. He had forgotten all about his boss, his job, his fiancée, and even his parents. The last ten hours had been so intense that he’d had no time to reach out to anyone.
Yes. Miles tapped a message out on his phone quickly, hoping Price was okay.
I’m sending you something.
What? Miles wrote.
Not necessarily Genesoft’s GMOs that are making people sick. Probably Fukushima Daiichi site. Alarming report being suppressed by MS media.
Where are you? Miles wrote.
Office, Price texted back.
Can you get out of there?
No. They’re here. Open file attached to email sent you.
Miles switched screens and opened the email attachment. He read the top of the document quickly, a document from a laboratory in Great Britain, with a report on something called “Black Dust.”
What is this Black Dust? Miles texted.
Radioactive dust suspended in atmosphere. Dropping now along W Coast.
Is this what’s making people sick? Miles wrote.
I think so. Extremely high levels of radiation. Don’t think I will make it. Wish I’d had a son like you.
Miles looked at his screen, stunned by the text. He put down the phone. Price had always been friendly with him—kind, in fact—constantly covering for him and pushing him forward at the paper, even trying to get him a job on a big-city paper through his network of friends. But he’d never suspected a father-like love. The man he’d considered a crank was still trying to do his job as a journalist, even now. He was ashamed for having thought of Price as anything less, and for not having understood what Price really was: a committed member of the Fourth Estate.
“He’s got an emergency power plant, a big one. Diesel,” Dillon said excitedly. He’d come up from the hatch in the floor that led to the bunker complex. They’d only been here for a few hours and already the Phelps ranch was turning into a doomsday-prepper Disneyland—or wet dream, as Dillon called it while surveying the man’s gun collection. More than thirty rifles, mostly assault rifles, each type duplicated ten times. When he climbed down into the bunker for the first time, it had looked to Miles like a government armory.
Dillon had been on a scouting mission. Miles had intended to follow Dillon down into the bunker, but stopped when he got Price’s text.
“Don’t know how this guy did it. But he did. It’s a commercial rig and it’s vented somehow. There’s a thousand gallons of diesel down there, believe it or not, in two steel tanks. All we have to do is flip a switch and we’ll have juice. He left instructions. They say we should turn on the Apple computer on the dining-room table,” Dillon said.
“Well, go turn the power on. What are you waiting for?” Miles said. “I need to charge my damn phone.”
Dillon saw he was upset and went back down the ladder into the maze of underground rooms and hallways, Maglite in hand.
* * *
Howard Price turned on his small red Maglite, which he kept in his desk drawer for emergencies. It would be all the light he’d have until morning, as the building’s emergency generator had run out of diesel and quit, plunging the building into total darkness.
He put down his iPhone. The phone’s battery was dead, and he had no way to charge it unless he went out into the parking lot and used his car’s battery. He was tempted, but that trip would be dangerous, if not impossible.
He didn’t want to face the glass wall that was protecting him from the Howlers that were wandering the building. Instead, he turned the flashlight on the Building Seven poster a friend in the 9/11 Truth Movement had mailed him. He looked at the building that had fallen on that fateful day into its own footprint and in a grey cloud of dust, pulverized. Never hit by anything more than random debris, he thought. The poster’s caption read: 47 stories of steel and concrete don’t vaporize and collapse at free-fall speed because of fire. Wake Up America!
He would never know the truth, Price realized. He might not have had children, or a wife, but he’d worked for the family of mankind during his whole long career. His personal life had been a sad one. But now he saw it differently, and he smiled in a way he’d never smiled before. He felt oddly free of the sense of personal failure he’d carried with him for so long.
I’ll die happy.
He forced himself to turn from the poster and shine the small Maglite onto the city room outside. It was empty. The Howlers had left, unable to break down the thick bulletproof partition separating his office from the others. But he knew they were everywhere in the office park. He’d seen them from his window wandering the grounds. The city’s streetlights, for whatever reason, still worked, illuminating the bike paths and parking lots bathing them in a cold halogen light.
If I am going to die, why not do some good first, he thought. He’d gotten the story about the “Black Dust” three weeks before and pasted it to his office wall along with recent 9/11 stories. He’d been keeping track of the fallout from the Fukushima disaster, underreported by the corporate media. This time, and unlike during the aftermath of 9/11, he’d kept a meticulous journal that tracked all the four reactor’s major events as they happened. He’d filled up several notebooks, sometimes working late into the night. He had the weather patterns off the coast of Japan, both tide and wind, updated continuously on his computer since the disaster. It soon became clear that the Japanese company that ran the plant was losing control of the situation. Worse, the men—and women too, he supposed—who’d been sent in to try to repair and shut down the plant would die of radiation exposure in weeks, according to independent scientists who were blogging day and night.
He had to be as brave as the workers in Japan, he told himself. Or the men and women who’d worked to put out the Chernobyl reactor’s fire, who had died soon afterward.
“Come on, old boy. Step one is get your damn phone working.” Price walked to the door of his glass-enclosed office and unlocked it. He stepped out into the larger city room, which was a smashed-up mess: piles of computers, turned-over metal file cabinets, partitions blocking exit doors, odd bits left untouched—a nightmarish landscape. He searched the detritus for some kind of weapon, but found nothing but an old-school style metal letter opener. He picked it up off a desk and headed out into the dark hallway.
* * *
“What if I told you—” Johnny Ryder said.
“Shut the fuck up!” Bell said. He raised the pistol Rebecca had handed him and thought for a second time about firing a round straight into Ryder’s face.
“Hold on now, boy!” Johnny shot his hands up, his palms out in front of him. He turned to see Sue Ling boogying out the double doors from the pool area as fast as she could run.
Rebecca raised her pistol and waited for the girl to center on her pistol’s ramp sight. She placed the girl’s bobbing back, lining it up just above the sight’s front notch, and felt her finger start to squeeze the trigger. At the very last moment, she decided to run after her, instead of killing her.
“What if I told you I knew where there was a helicopter—a brand new one, fly-boy? What would you do then, huh? That’s right, at that old guy’s mansion. He had one on his property. Parked right behind the fucking house. And it looked spanking new to me.”
“Where?” Bell said.
“Well, that’s for me to know, and you to trade for,” Johnny said.
“What do you want?” Bell said.
“Me and Sue Ling go free. In exchange, we take you there, and you let us go when we get there. We get our Land Rover and our weapons back, too.”
Bell looked at Patty Tyson, who was standing behind Ryder, her pistol trained on Ryder’s back.
“I can fly it. If it’s true,” Bell said to Patty.
“It’s true, all right,” Johnny said, turning to look at Tyson.
“How far away is it?” Bell said.
“Close enough,” Johnny said.
“I don’t believe you,” Bell said. “I think you’re lying to buy time. So I don’t kill you.”
“Ask Sue Ling—if you catch her. If it is a lie, she wouldn’t know anything about it, would she?”
Rebecca fired in the air. Two Howlers were standing in the center of the hotel’s turnaround. They had been beating on a tourist who had been hiding in one of the rooms and had walked out trying to find her car in hopes of escape. One of the Howlers had pulled her from behind, snapping her neck and killing her instantly. The two male Howlers were busy pulling her apart.
Sue Ling stopped running, as she was heading straight toward the Howlers.
“Stop right there!” Rebecca said. The girl was incredibly fast, and Rebecca would have never caught her if it hadn’t been for the Howlers blocking her way.
Sue Ling shot her hands in the air and turned around. She was barefoot and began to shake; her clothes were wet, and the temperature outside was about 20 degrees.
“Shoot them, for fuck’s sake!” Sue Ling said. “Please. Hurry up!”
“You better come over here,” Rebecca said. She trained her pistol on the closer of the two Howlers.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” Sue Ling said. She started walking back toward Rebecca.
“Move to your right some,” Rebecca said.
The Chinese girl veered to the right and Rebecca fired at the first Howler. The bullet caught the man in the center of his forehead, shattering the top half of his skull.
“Shit—good shot!” Sue Ling said, turning and squealing with delight at the sight of the Howler falling stone dead, his brains tilting out of what was left of his skull. “You’re a goddamn Annie Oakley.”
Rebecca was about to fire on the second of the two Howlers, but the thing began to run down the driveway and away from her. Rebecca noticed that the driveway was being lit up by something. She could see car headlights, several of them, move through the pine trees that lined the driveway. Her first thought was that Quentin had come after them with more help, and she had a great feeling of relief.
The first car in the line stopped, and Rebecca heard the sound of automatic gunfire. The caravan of cars pulled forward again and came down the lane toward her. For a moment, watching the procession, she completely forgot about Sue Ling.
“Who the fuck is that?” Sue Ling said. She’d reached Rebecca’s side and turned around. She was shaking horribly, but she too was intent on watching the procession of cars.
The first of four black Chevy Suburbans, without license plates, pulled into the turnaround, all four pairs of headlights pointing at them. The lead car switched to its high beams, which ruined Rebecca’s night vision, and more or less blinded both girls. As their eyes fought to refocus, they heard car doors open. When they could see again, they saw several men step out in front of the big cars. The men were pointing automatic weapons at them.
“Say something quick, or die right there,” one of the men said.
“Well—howdy, boys,” Rebecca said. She’d lowered her pistol to her side. Her eyes adjusted to the intense lights. She watched the second Suburban’s backdoor open and a man in a green snowsuit get out. He had white hair and was tall and thin. He walked to the head of the line.
“You, the other one, speak up,” one of the men said to Sue Ling.
“I’m cool,” Sue Ling said. “Not a Howler.”
“They’re human, I guess,” one of the gunmen said.
“Ladies, my name is Senator Prince. We’re here to rescue you from this horror.”
“You’d better drop the gun,” one of the Senator’s men said. The gunman was wearing an army-green Patagonia jacket and blue jeans. Something in his expression was scary—a profound indifference, as if he might be at the gun range sighting on a paper target. His ice cold expression froze Rebecca’s blood.
“Why would I do that?” Rebecca said, trying to sound tough.
“Well, so he won’t shoot you, dear,” the senator said, smiling. “You see, we prefer to be the armed ones. We want to keep it simple. But don’t worry. We’re here to help.” Senator Prince walked out in front of his men and smiled again as if there were nothing wrong in the world. “Now, who else is in there with you?”
Rebecca looked at the men with the senator. They were still aiming their automatic weapons at her and Sue Ling. She let go of her pistol and it fell to the ground.
“Excellent. Now, see? That’s a good girl,” the senator said. He walked up to the two girls and looked at them as if they were furniture in a store window, weighing their value. “My, you’re both quite lovely young women.”
Rebecca heard more car doors open and close and other men and women’s voices. Some of the richest “Fun Hogs” she’d seen around Timberline walked out from behind the headlights and toward the hotel’s entrance. Some were on cell phones. The well-dressed group walked by her without saying a word; a few small children followed with their brown-skinned nannies in tow.
The senator took Sue Ling by the shoulder and led her back into the hotel.
“What you need is to get out of those wet clothes,” the senator said.
* * *
“This is the control room, according to this Phelps guy’s instructions,” Dillon said. The below-ground-floor control room was small, paneled in knotty pine to cover the concrete walls, about eight by ten feet. A console ran the length of the longer wall, with two swivel-style desk chairs. A dozen TV monitors hung above the console. The monitors, which had sprung to life with the cabin’s generator, displayed various outside-the-bunker views. But the men could see little on screen, as it was pitch dark outside.
Dillon hit a switch on the console marked: “Exterior Perimeter Lights.” The perimeter of the cabin was bathed in halogen lights, mounted high in the surrounding treetops.
“Jesus,” Quentin said. “Look—there by the road.” Howlers stood in the county road at the entrance to the ranch, caught by the bright high-powered spotlights.
“There must be fifty of them,” Dillon said, looking at a monitor whose screen was dedicated to the ranch’s entrance.
Quentin sat in the second chair. “More,” he said. “More, I think.”
Dillon studied the console’s various switches, all of them marked with red-plastic labels.
“This guy was meticulous,” Dillon said.
“Yeah, Chuck was that, all right,” Quentin said.
“Exterior Sound,” Dillon said, reading one of the labeled switches. Under that switch were several other clearly labeled switches: Driveway, Rear of Cabin, West Side of Cabin, East Side of Cabin. Dillon hit the Driveway switch and they could hear howling on the speaker above them. It was eerie.
“They call to others, like wolves,” Dillon said. He watched the monitor showing the gathering of Howlers on the road, many of them on their haunches howling like dogs: men, women, children.
Watching the monitor, Quentin still couldn’t believe what had happened. Only yesterday morning he was worried about butterflies on the way to have breakfast with Patty. Now one of his daughters was dead, and the world he’d known was gone forever. At first he thought it was a nightmare; even when Poole had woken him, he was sure he’d dreamt it all and would wake up to find Marie lying next to him. But it wasn’t to be. It was Poole who’d told him that he wasn’t crazy, that the world had gone mad. When the doctor had left him in the room, lying on the cot, he’d broken down and cried, sobbing like a child with his daughter in his arms.
“Yeah, seems so,” Quentin said. “Turn it off. I got a headache.”
Dillon flipped the audio switch back to the off position and the howling stopped.
“How are those girls and Bell going to get in here? There are hundreds of them out there,” Quentin said. “We’ll have to call them, warn them that we’re surrounded.”
“I—that’s my ex-wife—Patty Tyson, with Rebecca,” Dillon said. He’d heard from Miles that his wife had been traveling with Miles and the doctor.
Quentin shot Dillon a look.
“You know her?”
“Yeah, we’ve met,” Quentin said. “She’s a ranger up at Emigrant Gap.”
“Yeah,” Dillon said, looking at him carefully. “I wanted to patch it up with her. We have a kid.”
Quentin stood up. He felt dizzy and sat down again.
“Are you okay?” Miles asked. He’d come in the room last and was standing behind Quentin.
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Quentin said. The room was spinning and he felt drunk. Quentin closed his eyes and opened them again. The spinning stopped.
“I wouldn’t have let them stay if I’d thought they couldn’t get back,” Miles said.
For the second time in his life Quentin Collier realized he had no answers. When Marie had been sick he’d scoured the Internet looking for any kind of cure, or possible cure, for her cancer. He’d discovered that the Internet was populated by horrible, cretinous faith-healers and quacks of the worst kind. That was the first time, late one night, he had to admit he was powerless in a way he’d never been before. God was going to steal something from him that he loved and he could do nothing to stop it.
He asked God, why his wife? Why the one person in the world he truly felt at ease with, the one person in the world he couldn’t afford to lose? He’d walked out of the house, the Sierra above him, cold-faced and hard looking in early autumn—the Indian summer gone, with winter waiting to come on. He’d broken into a run until he’d fallen down exhausted and hating God. Everything he’d believed in seemed to be a lie. There was no God, and there was no mercy in life. He’d stood up and swore to himself that he would never pray again, or believe in God again. Marie died two days later while he was down the hallway looking for a nurse. He’d collapsed when Lacy told him, refusing to believe she was dead.
“I don’t know what to do,” Quentin said. He was looking at the scene on the monitor.
“He’s dug an escape tunnel. It comes out about here,” Dillon said. He picked up the printout from Phelps’s Apple laptop. He showed Quentin the spot. “We could go out there and kill them all,” Dillon said, tapping the spot on the map with a pencil. “Why not?”
“Because there are fifty of them, or more. And there’ll be even more soon,” Quentin said. He stood up again. His head felt like it was going to split open.
“Well we have to do something,” Dillon said. “We can’t just let my wife and the girl die.”
“Ex-wife,” Quentin said. “We were seeing each other. Patty and I. You should know that.”
“I’m still in love with her,” Dillon said.
“Yeah? So what,” Quentin said and walked out. His vision was blurry.
Enfilading and Escape
Quentin, if you’re reading these instructions, I’m not there to help you or the people with you, so please read these instructions carefully.
There are two tunnels (West and East tunnels) both run parallel and on either side of the cabin’s driveway. Each of the two tunnels ends at the county road. And each tunnel can be used as escape route, should escape from the cabin be necessary. However, their primary function is to bring enfilading fire on the driveway and for ambushing the enemy from behind, should that become necessary.
The tunnels are each exactly four-feet wide and four-feet high to allow for easy movement of men and weapons. The tunnels are made of reinforced concrete. You will find each tunnel has two rolling platforms that will allow you to pull yourself along the tunnel. Each sled is six feet long and three feet wide. The sleds are designed to carry two men and ammunition. There are two escape hatches/cum ambush platforms along the tunnels: one at the very end of the tunnel and located exactly at the edge of the property—a few yards from the county road, and a second one midway down the driveway and exactly 50 yards from the cabin’s front porch.
The tunnel exits are marked by a red rope. If you want to open the tunnel, you must first pull the red rope . This will open a hatch cover, which is camouflaged.
First West Hatch: The driveway will be exactly twenty feet to your immediate right. Warning : in the wintertime, these hatch covers may well be covered with snow, which could block the way as you exit the hatch! There will be a flood light in the tree directly above you and facing the driveway, so an attack at night is possible. These outdoor lights are controlled from the control room.
First East Hatch: Ditto but the driveway will be to your LEFT .
Note that I’ve designed the hatch covers so that they will swing away from opening so it is possible to stand in the tunnel and fire from the opening, providing you protection and escape as the hatch can be closed manually by simply pulling it back into place with the red rope.
Remember: He who dares, wins!
Chuck.
