Текст книги "Howlers"
Автор книги: Kent Harrington
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 25 страниц)
CHAPTER 25
“What do you know about a fortified cabin near Timberline?” the black man asked. He was wearing clean Levi Dockers and a pressed white shirt. He looked very clean, his appearance a total contrast to Bell’s bloody and torn flight suit.
The black man was about forty or so, and had gray in his hair. He had entered the hotel room with an aura of quiet authority. The lieutenant had been standing looking out of the hotel room’s picture window and down on the pool, one story below. The dead had been carted off by the Senator’s troop of bodyguards—twenty or more of them, Bell had guessed. One of the Special-Ops types was standing in the shallow end of the pool in his underwear, using a net to scoop out all the floating debris. It seemed incredible that anyone could care about cleaning a pool under the circumstances, Bell thought, shaking his head.
“I don’t know anything about it. Why have we been locked up like this?” Bell said, turning around.
“You were placed under arrest yesterday. The military police are looking for you,” the black man said. His crisp white shirt made his skin seem that much darker.
“How do you know that?” Bell said, shocked that they knew about his arrest.
“We keep in touch,” the man said. “Tell me about the cabin. Where is it located exactly? We believe you know where it is.”
“I don’t know where it is,” Bell said. It was a lie. Rebecca had described to him where the Phelps cabin was exactly, telling him it was next to a sign that read Country Bride Inn and Spa. The girl had told him, too, that the cabin was marked by a barricaded driveway and directly across the road from the Inn, on the one road leading east from Timberline. Bell had lied instinctively, not sure exactly why, other than he’d decided he didn’t like the Senator, or his men or their assumed authority.
“I don’t believe you,” the man said. He had an Apple tablet computer and turned it toward Bell. The tablet showed a Google Earth view of Timberline and its environs. “Show me where it is and we’ll let you go. In fact, you can come with us. We need military men like you, under the circumstances.”
“Why do you care so much about that fucking cabin?” Bell said.
“It’s a place my employer is interested in,” the man said.
“Why?”
The man didn’t answer, but instead handed Bell the tablet.
“I told you, I’ve no idea where it is! I’ve never been there, and I’m not from around here. I was stationed at the Army’s—”
“We will kill the three girls unless you tell us exactly where this cabin is, all of them,” the man said. His face was placid.
The threat, Bell realized with horror, was a real one. The man had the dead eyes of the soldiers Bell had met before, men who’d been on several combat tours of duty in Afghanistan. They all had the same deadpan, empty-eyed look of professional soul-dead killers.
“What’s going on out there?” Bell said.
“What do you mean?” the man said. The question seemed to strike a nerve.
“I mean, what’s happened to people? You know damn well what I mean,” Bell said.
“We don’t know yet. Could be any number of things. Now, show me where this cabin is on the map.”
“I told you, I don’t have a clue,” Bell said.
“Okay. It’s on you, then.” The man left the room and came back with Patty Tyson. Bell had exchanged only a few words with her. She was dressed in a California State Park Ranger’s uniform. She was handcuffed with white plastic cuffs, her hands behind her back, a black nylon hood placed over her head. The black man was carrying an automatic. He pushed the woman into the center of the room and raised the pistol, aiming it at the back of her head, the barrel a few inches from the hood.
“Please—tell him,” Patty said under the hood. “Please.”
“Okay,” Bell said. “Okay, you win.”
“Good,” the man said. He lowered his pistol.
Bell went to the bed and sat down with the tablet. When he sat down he quickly unzipped the cargo pocket on his calf where he’d put a small pocket knife they’d missed when they’d searched him because it was so small. The man came and stood above him as he found Timberline and the county road heading east away from the town. Bell found the place he thought it might be and stuck a digital pin in it. He thought about attacking the man who was standing nearby, but success seemed a long shot. The small pocketknife was useless, and armed guards were somewhere out in the hallway.
“There. Now will you let us go?”
Instead of answering him, the black man walked out of the room without saying a word.
“Is there a guard outside the door?” Bell asked as soon as he was gone. Patty shook her head yes. He took the hood off her head. Her face was sweaty, her expression terrified.
“They beat Rebecca,” she said. “I told them you knew where it was so they would stop beating her. I told them I didn’t know, and I don’t know.”
“How many are outside?”
“Three.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yes, I think so. What do they want with us? Why are they doing this to us? Who are these people?”
“They want the cabin, I think. They must know that it’s bad out there or they wouldn’t care about it,” Bell said.
“You mean the things are everywhere?”
“Yes. Probably. I think so. Or they would have sent a helicopter for the Senator by now, the government.”
“Jesus.”
Bell used his pocketknife to cut the plastic handcuffs off of Patty’s wrists.
“They’ll know you have that,” she said, nodding at the knife.
“We have to warn the others. Lacy and her father,” Bell said.
“How?” Patty said.
“We have to kill him,” Bell said, whispering.
She nodded. “How, without the men outside hearing?”
“I don’t know,” Bell said.
“I know I’m going to wake up. I know this is a nightmare,” Patty said.
“Yeah, I keep thinking that, too.” Bell said. He slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “But you see it isn’t, is it?”
Patty touched her stinging check and nodded. “How?” she said. “How do we do it?”
“You had to go to the bathroom. I’ll tell him I cut your handcuffs off. I’ll hand him the pocketknife when I explain what I did. Go in there and close the door. Sit on the toilet like you’re peeing,” Bell said.
She did what he asked.
* * *
The freeway out of Nevada City, heading east into the Sierras, was mostly empty. Only a few cars had gotten through from Sacramento, and those that did were driving in the fast lane at over 100 miles an hour, hoping to get away from the chaos behind them.
Price had decided that he would rather travel in the slow lane and be able to turn off the highway, if necessary. A man, at a strangely normal-looking rest stop he’d pulled into, driving in a camper full of people from Southern California, had told him that tens of thousands of Howlers were roaming Highway 50 near Sacramento. He told Price very few cars were getting through.
“What about the authorities?” Price had asked the man. Howard had stopped to pee, not being able to hold it any longer, and pulled off the freeway just below Emigrant Gap.
The man, armed with a hunting rifle, was standing guard while his friends filled water bottles from the tap at the rest stop. The man had told Harold an incredible story about what had happened in Los Angeles: how they’d escaped the hordes of Howlers only because he was a gun dealer and was coming back from a gun show in San Diego with all his stock of weapons and ammo when it all started.
“There are no cops now. They’ve all gone home to look after their own families, I guess. The only authorities we saw were some Homeland Security guys and their wives looting a Wal-Mart for ammo and food,” the man said. “They were set up real good; they had one of those high-off-the-ground crowd-control vehicles the cops use. But they didn’t want to help us, that’s for sure. We’ve had no help at all.” The gun dealer was Price’s age, and the strain of the last two days showed on the man’s grizzled unshaven face.
“Do you know what’s happened to people?” the man asked him. He introduced himself as Jon Wein and said he was born in Douglas, Arizona. It was odd, Price thought, that the man had told him where he was born. It was as if the two had crossed paths in the Old West.
“My name is Howard ... Howard Price.”
“Please to meet you, Howard,” Jon said.
“Jon, I don’t know what’s happened for sure, but I think it could be radiation poisoning—from Fukushima.”
“What’s that? Fuka what?”
“It’s an atomic power station in Japan,” Howard said.
“Never heard of it,” Jon said.
“Most people haven’t. They had an accident there, at the plant, back when they had the typhoon and tsunami in 2011.”
“Well, something sure as shit happened all right,” Jon said. “You have any kind of weapon, Howard?”
“Letter opener I found at the office.”
The man smiled at him and rubbed his chin. “You got to shoot them in the head, Howard. That’s the best way to kill them fast.”
“I see,” Howard said.
“Do you know how to use a pistol?”
“A little. I was in the Army,” Price said. “But I don’t have one.”
“I’ll give you one. I got lots of them in the mobile home. I can’t just leave you out here with a fucking letter opener,” Jon said and spit. “Jesus, Howard, maybe you’d better come with us.”
“Thank you Jon, but I have a son—you know—up there in Timberline, and a wife. I think I better make sure they’re okay, but thank you.” It felt good to have the fantasy. It made him feel whole again. For a long time he’d felt so alone and sad about everything in the world. The fantasy about a family was something that made him feel better. He’d started telling complete strangers that “his family this, or his family that.” The fantasy was growing, taking on a life of its own, and he didn’t care; he liked it.
“Well, sure, I get that, but let me give you something. A gift, then,” Jon said.
Price looked at the huddled group of people at the water fountain; they were various ages and colors. The group were filling a motley collection of plastic containers from two water fountains in front of the rest stop’s bathrooms. Jon came out from the mobile home and handed him an old-school .38 Special revolver.
“All you have to do, Howard, is pull the trigger when they’re close: say six feet, or so.” He handed Howard the pistol and a box of ammo. “You want to practice? Maybe once, while I’m watching?” Jon turned around and pointed to a road sign that said Keep Off The Grass, maybe 50 feet away. “Can you hit that sign, Howard?”
“I’ll try,” Howard said. He lifted the pistol, aimed at the sign and pulled the trigger. The gun went off and he heard the bullet strike the sign, punching a hole in it.
“Well, there you go then, Howard. Good shooting!”
“Thanks, Jon.” They shook hands warmly as if they were old friends.
“You know what, Howard?” Jon said.
“No, what?”
“I always knew that atomic shit would blow back on us someday,” the old man said. “I was in the Navy back in the day, and saw one of the tests at Bikini Atoll.”
“‘It’s unreasonable to make such a big deal over the death of a fisherman.’ That’s what Edward Teller said,” Price said.
“The Jap fisherman that died?” Jon said.
“Yeah.” Howard said. “Funny the things you remember reading when you’re a kid. I’m over sixty and I remember things I read when I was ten,” Howard said.
The older man just looked at him and smiled, thinking that Howard was close to going around the bend, maybe from the stress of it all.
The old gun dealer and his new friends pulled out of the rest area ahead of Howard. The old man said they were going to try and go north to Oregon because they’d seen a rumor, on the internet that was still up, that it was okay up there. Howard wished them all luck. They’d all hugged as if they knew they might all be dead soon, and certainly would never met again.
Before he closed the door to his Prius, Howard looked around the eerie rest area. It was silent. The roof on the restrooms had snow on it that reflected the moonlight. He remembered a Kurosawa film; a bit of it ran in his head in perfect black and white, like these colors, a boy running down a snowy street in a small Japanese town.
“Akira Kurosawa,” Howard said out loud. “The Bad Sleep Well. Am I losing my mind? Who will look for us? We have no father or mother, and we are lost in the world.” He yelled, perhaps to break the silence. His voice echoed against the concrete and wood walls of the rest stop and died away in the shadows. The silence returned.
He walked across the parking lot. Miles had emailed him the directions to the cabin. He studied the email carefully. When he was sure he understood the directions, he got into his Prius. He put the revolver on the passenger seat next to him, locked the door and pulled out. The freeway was completely deserted as he gained speed and headed toward the turn off at Emigrant Gap. He tried to find a radio station to get any useful news, but all the government had hijacked all the local stations. All were playing the same loop, telling people “not to panic” and to “remain indoors, until further instructions.” Howard clicked off the radio, turned off the freeway and took the road toward Timberline.
* * *
Dillon had sat in the cabin’s control room with Miles and watched the Howlers gathering for the last three hours.
“There are a thousand. Maybe more,” Miles said under his breath.
“More,” Dillon said. They looked at each other.
“There’s no way we can stop them if they want to get in here,” Miles said.
“Stop being such a pussy,” Dillon said, turning back to look at the monitors.
Miles reached up and flipped on the switch marked Sound Front Driveway. Immediately they heard the howling. It was the most horrible sound Miles thought he’d ever heard—overwhelming. He turned it off. He felt panicked, sure they were going to die. He looked around the concrete room. It seemed smaller than it had only an hour ago. It was cold in the room. He stood up.
“What are we going to do?” Miles said. His chest was tight. He turned off the screens. The monitors went dark. “What good is it to see them out there? Look how many there are!”
Dillon turned and looked at the younger man. He’d seen men go stir-crazy in prison. The kid had the same panicked look on his face. It often happened to new arrivals at San Quentin, men who were not used to sitting in a cell for long periods of time. He was used to small spaces, to the feeling of being locked down, suffocating, but he too had lost it after being in solitary confinement for six weeks. He’d woken up one morning and felt the walls actually move toward him. The prison’s psychiatrist who came to visit him later, after he’d gone “buggy,” said that sensory deprivation caused several symptoms. One of them was a sense of panic and the feeling you couldn’t breathe. It could even induce hallucinations.
“You’re okay, kid?” Dillon said. He took his arm. “You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”
The kid looked at him, his blue eyes crazy. “Maybe I’m becoming one of them,” Miles blurted. “I don’t feel good. Sick. Stomach.”
Dillon kept his hand on Miles’ arm. When he’d been in solitary confinement, he’d had the desire for another human being’s touch, anyone’s touch. He’d imagined he would die without feeling that kind of touch, he’d sat in the cell and remembered exactly how his mother used to touch his forehead when he’d been upset. He’d dreamt of his mother’s warm hand on his face. Once he’d sat in the cold “isolation cell” calling Patty’s name, trying to remember lying with her in bed, the incredible lush feeling of her naked body pressed next to his.
“You’re not sick. Sit down,” Dillon ordered. “You’re hungry. Let’s get out of here and go up into the cabin. There’s food. We’ll cook something. You’ll see. You’ll feel better.”
Miles sat down. The fear had gone from his eyes. His face changed, his look of panic gone.
“Thanks. I—”
“It’s okay,” Dillon said. “Fucking Howlers make you go nuts. Right?”
“Yeah,” Miles said, feeling ashamed of himself. He looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He could see his fingers trembling.
“Can you cook, kid?” Dillon asked.
“No. My mother—” He had not thought of his parents until Price had texted him. “I think I’ll call my mom and dad. Maybe they could make it here, too,” Miles said. He took out his phone and checked for a signal, but had none. “Phone doesn’t work down here. I’ll go up and try.”
“Sure, kid,” Dillon said. He saw some white spit forming on the corner of Miles’ lips, but didn’t let it register on his face. Instead he smiled and stood up, and they went up to the cabin’s main floor.
Chuck’s notes on the cabin’s larder, and the kitchen, were twenty pages long. He’d stocked regular food stuffs, including fresh vegetables and fruits, in a cold room at the back of the kitchen. Multiple cases of freeze-dried foods were stored downstairs in the bunker. At the end of the notes, Phelps had described the edible plants of the Sierra region and referred to several books on foraging in the cabin’s library.
The five of them sat at the big pine table with long benches, the small bulletproof window directly across from it. They had a view out onto the snowy field in front of the cabin. A few Howlers were scouting the cabin; others were sitting on the driveway, howling. One or two had already run up on the porch and banged on the window and door before Dillon had walked out onto the porch and killed them with a fully-automatic SCAR 17, the stock folded up so it was shortened.
They heated up canned chili and tried to pretend that the howling didn’t bother them. Twice Dr. Poole had walked to the window to look out on the howling creatures. Once he’d opened one of the firing ports built into the cabin’s wall and used a high-powered .306 to shoot one of the closest Howlers dead. But it didn’t seem to matter, as more from the road were coming up and sitting on the driveway—in plain sight—in that weird way they had, like coyotes, their heads tilted back, their face bent toward the night sky.
It was Lacy who got Marvin and led him back to the table, telling him his food was getting cold. She’d gently pulled him away from the window, taking the rifle from his hands and placing it against the wall.
All of the men, not wanting to admit it, were glad that she was playing the role of mother. Something about it was reassuring. They had watched her cook with rapt attention, all of them appreciating the normalcy of her opening cans of chili and filling a big stew-sized pot with it. She’d found bread and heated that up in the oven, never once acknowledging the howling. Lacy had not even stopped her preparations for dinner when Dillon had gone out on the porch to shoot the two Howlers dead.
Phelps’s larder was huge and ran down the length of the cabin’s west wall. It was stocked with all kinds of foodstuffs, enough for two years for fifteen people, the computer printout said. Lacy had read the “Kitchen” section of Chuck’s instructions—which had been addressed to her, as if he’d known all along that she would come here and be the one to read them.
Chuck had left a hand written note thumb-tacked to the cold-storage door.
Dear Lacy,
I hope it’s you who is reads this. If it is I know you are safe here. I promised your mother, long ago, that your family would have a place to go if the shit ever hit the fan. So now it has, but you, your dad, and sister will all be safe here. I remember when your mom first brought you here as a baby. Here is the photo I took of you and your mom a year after you were born. It was September and hot as hell! Love “uncle” Chuck.
Lacy understood that Chuck Phelps had been in love with her mother, and that they might have been more than just good friends—perhaps even lovers? It didn’t shock her. She’d always liked Chuck.
She looked at the old-school photo. It showed a young woman with a beautiful baby. Her mother was holding her up to the camera. Both mother and baby were smiling at the photographer. Pine trees were behind them, and a piece of machinery of some kind. It was at that moment, while she’d been looking at the photo, that Dillon had walked out on the porch despite the danger of being overpowered, and the sound of automatic-weapons fire filled the cabin. In a moment he’d ducked back into the cabin, closing the door. They were all looking at him gripping the wicked assault rifle, his face splattered with blood.
Lacy calmly put the photo back where she’d found it and went back to fixing dinner.
The first attack, waves of Howlers, came while they were eating. They just stared as hundreds of the creatures started running up the driveway toward the cabin. It was surreal, Lacy thought, looking up and seeing the snow-covered field empty and beautiful one minute, then full of Howlers the next. She stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs. Miles didn’t hear his cell phone ringing in the commotion that ensued; all of them had run to the cabin’s built-in gunports, where they’d prepared weapons, and opened fire on the attacking horde. For half the night or longer they fired at the Howlers, wave after wave of them running at the cabin.
It was Miles who had taken it on himself during the battle to bring each of them fresh ammunition. All of them were firing the same weapon, the FAL assault rifle. At the end of the battle, the Howlers piled up in front of the porch, five feet high, were giving the others a wall of dead bodies to hide behind. Some Howlers, especially children, would fling themselves off the heap and land on the porch, sometimes heading head-first into the bulletproof window in an attempt to smash it. Others would crawl up the stairs behind the dead and crawl, on all fours, toward the door.
At one point, one of the crawling ones grabbed Lacy’s rifle barrel and tried to yank it out through the gunport. She screamed for help. Marvin jumped up and helped her pull the butt of her rifle back. He managed to pour fire onto the Howler, splitting its face open.
Lacy sagged to the floor, exhausted. She turned and looked at her father firing, the sweat pouring from his face. He emptied a clip and caught her eye while turning to pick up one at his feet. For the first time in her life, Lacy thought she saw fear on her father’s face. He went back to killing.
At dawn it stopped. At dawn the snow fell lightly on two thousand dead bodies lying out on the field. Inside the cabin it was quiet. They were all past exhausted.
It was Marvin who walked outside first. He stood at the doorway, cold air pouring in looking at the nightmarish scene: dead Howlers piled in heaps in front of the cabin’s porch. Bodies were everywhere, all types of people. Some were obviously city people, judging from their dress.
Marvin looked at the pile in the nearest kill zone, twenty yards or so in front of the cabin. It was an abattoir: bodies piled on bodies, blood, guts, brain matter. He walked out into the field. He put down his rifle and began to pull bodies down from the pile and move them out of the way. He pulled a fat man whose head was gone, yanking him down from the top of the pile. He watched the thing slide down the scrum-like pile of bodies and land at his feet.
Marvin heard a shot ring out and simultaneously felt the crack of a bullet pass very near his head. A Howler, hiding behind the pile, had jumped at him and was in midair when Dillon shot him from the porch. The Howler, a teenage boy, landed at Marvin’s feet, its body twitching not quite dead. Marvin looked up at the porch and saw Dillon covering him. He went back to work without saying a word, dragging bodies from the pile and hauling them out of the way of their kill zone. His boots created a sludge of guts and blood and snow as he worked. The others came out of the cabin joining him in the ugly work, all of them realizing that the kill zone had to be cleared, or they would all die.
