Текст книги "Howlers"
Автор книги: Kent Harrington
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 25 страниц)
Quentin walked around to the window. The fall deer season ended in a few weeks. Sure, he would have gone out and used up his tag fee. He knew Chuck. He lived on deer meat and chickens he raised, and in summer a large vegetable garden he planted. He had learned how to can things, too. He and Marie used to compare notes on their gardens.
A snowmobile started up across the meadow at the bed-and-breakfast, then another. Quentin walked around to the window. It was dark in the cabin. He pulled out his mag-lite and turned it on. He let the beam move over the rough wooden table. He smiled when he saw the new Apple computer. He moved the light across the living room and saw the Christmas tree.
Everything was in order. Neat. A set of canning jars was out on the kitchen counter, the jars lined up, neat; their lids stacked nearby. Quentin moved the beam of light to the hallway and stopped. There were several gun cases. He walked into the hallway and opened the gun lockers, looking for a .30-30. That was what Chuck would have taken with him, knowing that the deer this late in the season hid during the day in heavy brush.
Quentin moved the light from case to case. There were scores of military-style assault rifles—probably semi-autos, Quentin guessed—combat shotguns, and high-powered hunting rifles, all perfectly legal.
“No machine guns,” Quentin said out loud. That guy Cooley doesn’t know a machine gun from a horse’s ass. He saw an empty space in an older antique wooden gun case with a glass front. That was it. He’d gone hunting and had forgotten to tell Mordecai, their mailman. Still, that was a lot of mail. He would have gone out overnight, at most, not more than two days.
Quentin turned around and looked out at the new bed-and-breakfast across the field through the cabin’s open door. It was a stone building, two-story. No one he knew could afford to stay there. It cost four hundred dollars a night. Someone in town had told him it cost three million to build. He could see the steam coming out the windows of the indoor pool even this far away.
I better call up to the Ranger station and let them know just in case. If he doesn’t come back by tonight, we’ll start a formal search.
Quentin took the mail from his belt and laid it on the wooden table next to the canning jars. He kept one envelope and wrote a short note across the back.
Chuck—Please call me at the office.
Want to know you are OK.
Quentin.
Quentin took the package from where he’d stuck it in his jean jacket and laid it on the table. He glanced at the return address: Remington Firearms, Fort Wayne, IN.
* * *
It was snowing hard when Chuck Phelps gave up trying to fix the snowmobile. There was a gold-colored gas stain on the snow where the fuel pump had ruptured. Most men would have been scared. He was at least ten miles into the Emigrant Gap wilderness and it was snowing. He realized there was no fixing the pump and he would have to walk out. Compared to the Tet offensive in Hue, this would be a cakewalk, he told himself. No sweat.
His mustache and beard were covered in wet new snow. He took off his blaze-orange balaclava, rolled it out so that it could cover his face and slid it down. Better, he thought. He looked at his watch. It was 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday. He’d gone too far to make it back home on foot in one day. That meant he would have to keep moving all night or sleep here. He’d dig a snow cave, he decided, then start back home in the morning.
Stupid, he thought, getting angry enough to come out too far, not checking the weather report. My fault. He sat on his snowmobile and buckled on his snowshoes. He slung a small pack with survival gear and his .30-30 over his shoulder. It started to snow harder. If I hadn’t run into that damn runt accountant. I wouldn’t have run the machine so hard and blown the fuel pump. It had taken all his self-control not to deck the little fat guy.
He snowshoed across the field and over the rise. He decided to make a snow cave on the west side of the hill to take advantage of the cover. He continued up the rise, the .30-30 slapping his back. The snow was powdery and clean on the top of the rise, and, just underneath, he could feel it was hard, older snow. He could hear that odd crunching sound it makes when you break frozen snow late in the afternoon, after the sun goes down. He got to the top of the hill. He looked carefully for a good place to build the cave. He found a spot where the new snow had drifted deep near a stand of trees. He pulled out his small two-piece shovel from his pack. That was when he heard the first strange-sounding howl and turned around.
Below him, on the field he’d just come across, Chuck saw a gang of people running toward him. At first he thought he was dreaming, or that he’d gone crazy. They were running at him through the deep snow, across the empty field, all kinds of people: kids, old people, teenagers—too diverse a group to be search-and-rescue people. He thought he even saw a sheriff’s deputy. He wondered why they were running.
Why are they out here? He wondered where they’d come from as he watched them. Maybe they’re making a movie.
He smiled. That was it; they were making a movie. Then he heard the howling sound again. It went through him like a shot. He looked hard at the scores of people running across the field at him. Somehow it reminded him of the war. Some of the people stopped, squatted in the snow and tilted their heads back like coyotes. He watched them tilt their heads at a strange angle and begin howling, making a strange monkey-like howling sound. The sound was raw and sounded more like what chimpanzees might make, than humans. The howls echoed against the surrounding mountainsides.
“Fuck this.” Chuck instinctively un-slung his weapon and took a knee in the snow. “These things ain’t human.” Chuck Phelps pulled the hammer back on the .30-30 and waited for the first one to get close. “I knew something bad was coming,” he said out loud, not particularly frightened, and began to fire his weapon.
Mobbed by the monkey-like things, Chuck Phelps died standing up, fighting, using the .30-30—emptied of ammunition—as a club. The U.S. Marines would have been proud.
CHAPTER 5
“This is not your grandmother’s tomato, ladies and gentlemen.” Genesoft’s PR man prattled on from the podium about something Genesoft was calling R19: the company’s long-awaited line of bio-engineered food products, including a salmon gene that was cross-referenced with the DNA of sugar beets and tomatoes, so the vegetables would produce omega-3 fatty acid. Time magazine declared the company one of the ten most innovative biotech firms in the world.
Miles Hunt watched the over-dressed PR man hold one of the genetically engineered vegetables in the air above his head, like an Olympian. Reporters from several of the state’s important dailies had come to Nevada City. The reporters had all been given a free breakfast and were now dutifully taping stories into their laptops, taking down the PR man’s words as if they were gospel.
A huge inflatable tomato-balloon floated above the crowded auditorium. R19 was painted on the balloon like a cute little label. It was corny and somehow frightening at the same time, Miles thought. He looked again at the pitchman, who was just warming up to his subject and looked to be on the verge of shouting at the audience à la Microsoft’s famous CEO, Steve Ballmer. The auditorium’s lights shone on the PR man’s gray Nordstrom’s suit, and on his bald and shiny pate. He looked, Miles thought, slightly engineered himself. You would have thought he was talking about something truly important, the way he was swinging around the stage with excitement.
PR spitting monkey. A great hood ornament in hell, Miles thought.
“And ladies and gents, these products will not spoil for exactly thirty days. Period. We guarantee it. Why? Because we have married two new exciting technologies: gene enhancement and irradiation. You go to the supermarket and buy one of our products, ladies and gentlemen, and we promise—NO, we guarantee you can store this tomato, in my hand, for a whole month before it goes bad.”
“My wife could spoil it,” a reporter sitting behind Miles said. A reporter from Barron’s financial magazine, sitting next to Miles, snickered and nudged Miles in the rib. Miles didn’t smile back.
Genesoft’s PR man stepped back, and using a red laser pointer, proceeded to shoot it at a list of the new line’s major selling points, the list projected on a large screen behind the man.
Genesoft’s new foods last twice as long as conventionally grown vegetables.
Genesoft’s new line of food products taste just as good as their conventional cousins.
Lower percentage loss from bruising during shipping and handling.
Higher net profits for the retailer, and especially the fast-food industry, as R19-engineered products have a shelf life that is double that of conventional products.
Miles got up from his seat, already bored. Staying close to the wall, he walked to the front of the auditorium and out into the hallway. He went to the coffee cart set up for the journalists. I can’t do this, he told himself. He searched the pink bakery boxes for something to eat, but they were all empty. Tissue paper and napkins littered the floor. He hefted the PR handout the press had been given—32 pages—and debated leaving early. You could just go home. No one would be the wiser. He glanced again at the empty pastry boxes. A bubble-style-sounding telephone started to ring somewhere down the empty hallway. He wet his index finger and picked up a flake of sugar left in one of the boxes. He wondered what would happen if his editor found out he’d left early. He poured himself another cup of bad coffee for the road. How excited could you get about a tomato? Unless she’s wearing a yellow bikini. He smiled at his own joke, dropped two white cubes of sugar into his Styrofoam cup and looked for the exit.
“Are you Mr. Hunt? The reporter?”
Miles turned around and faced a young woman in a fashionable blue pants suit and high heels. She looked pale, like she’d seen something awful.
“There’s something terribly wrong,” she said. “Here at Genesoft.” She looked him square in the eye when she said it. The young woman had her arms down at her sides, pressed tightly against her like she expected to be dragged off at any moment.
“I know,” Miles said. “I think they’re out of cream.” He hoped the joke would change the look on the girl’s face. He tried smiling at her, but that didn’t work either. The girl in front of him acted as if she hadn’t heard him, her face a blank.
“Are you the reporter, Miles Hunt?” she demanded.
“Guilty,” he said.
“Everyone is getting sick,” the young woman said. Miles noticed that she wasn’t wearing an ID badge, something he knew was required for everyone in the building. The press had been issued security badges just for the press conference.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be the speeches.”
“Sick. Everyone is sick. There is something wrong with R19,” she said.
It seemed funny to him. Something wrong with the tomatoes. How are things in Glocca Morra? He saw the headline. REPORTER TRACKS DOWN VEGETABLE MESS.
Miles looked down the well-lit antiseptic hall and wondered how he’d gone from being an A student at University of California’s School of Journalism to this moment. He looked back at the girl. He would excuse himself and leave. He wasn’t in the mood for gene-splicing conspiracy nuts, even attractive tall ones with great legs.
“The colonel’s recipe off?” he asked.
“Goddamn it, this isn’t a joke! People are horribly sick, a lot of them.” They both watched another reporter slip out of the auditorium and head toward the bathroom. The girl waited, not speaking again until the hall was clear. “Will you come with me, please?” she said and walked away.
He watched her rear, the pants suit pressed against some fancy underwear. He decided to follow only because she was pretty and he was bored.
You’re a hopeless sleazebag, he told himself, who is engaged to be married.
“My name is Susan,” she said. “I want you to promise not to use my name.” She picked her name tag up off her desk and pinned it to her jacket. “Susan Crown.”
“Okay, tell me all about it, Ms. Crown,” Miles said. She’d closed the door to her office. Miles looked around. The office was in keeping with the Genesoft collegiate esthetic.
“I called the paper. They said you were going to be here. They told me what you looked like. That’s how I knew who you were,” she explained. Miles picked up a photo of the young woman dressed in a military uniform standing by a mud building somewhere.
“Okay, what’s wrong with the product?” Miles asked.
“We all—” Crown closed her eyes and broke down.
This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he followed her. He put his cup of coffee down on a file cabinet.
“Susan, why don’t you take a deep breath and then tell me what’s going on, and I’ll try and help you,” Miles said. He tried to sound reassuring.
“We all had some of the new product at a company party a week ago. That’s when they started sending the R19 line out to supermarkets.”
“I thought that they were starting shipping today?” Miles said.
“No. No, they started shipping a week ago. The irradiation unit has been working on R19 for three weeks. The irradiation plant is in Sacramento.”
“But they said this morning that they’d just gotten approval from FDA to ship?”
“No, the FDA approved the line last week.” Crown sat down in her desk chair. “I get dizzy. I’m sorry. The investment bankers were here a month ago—JP Morgan, their top brass showed up here. JP Morgan convinced management to release early. The bank had our IPO to launch. That’s where I work, investor relations. They wanted the next quarter’s report to reflect the R19 line’s earnings. They wanted to ignore the hold-up with the FDA so they got approval, somehow. The bank has people inside the FDA who they said they could use to make sure we got approval and not to worry. And they did.”
“You’re saying they bought an FDA approval?”
“Yes. But something is wrong with the R19 line of products. I’m sure of it now.”
“How do you know all this?” Miles said. He noticed that there was a wash of sweat on the girl’s pretty face.
“My boyfriend works in executive row. He’s sick too. A lot of people who ate R19-treated food are sick. You’ve got to warn people. I can’t. I could lose my job.”
“What do you mean sick?”
“Acting strange. Not normal. That’s why I want you to come with me. I want you to come see my boyfriend. I want you to write about what’s happened to my boyfriend.” She got up from her desk, a little wobbly, and grabbed for her purse. “We can go now. I want to take him to the hospital, but he won’t let me,” she said.
“You said half the people here were sick? How do you know that?” Miles said.
“You didn’t notice? Look outside. It’s Tuesday morning. We are supposedly launching a hundred-million dollar product line all over the U.S.” She went to the window and pulled open the blind back, angrily. “Look! Look at the parking lot. Look!”
Miles walked to the window. The new five hundred-car employee parking lot lay below. It was almost empty.
* * *
A siren wailed in the distance when Dr. Poole came back from lunch at the Copper Penny across the street. The doctor knew his waiting room would be full of one-o’clock appointments, and he felt oddly bored with the predictable afternoon. Looking at schoolboy tonsils and twisted ankles, he thought. You know you love them. If it was predictable sometimes, it was always gratifying to be respected and needed. Coming here to live was your idea, he reminded himself. He had quit the Center for Disease Control to bring up his kids in the mountains, as far away from big cities as he could get them. He and his wife joked that they would be the first black couple in America with children on the U.S. Olympic ski team.
Marvin heard the siren again and realized that it was coming into town and getting louder. Must be a fire. He stepped into his office through a side door and buzzed his receptionist.
“Okay. I’m back, Lisa. Is it full out there?”
“Is this the flu season?” his receptionist asked.
“Let the games begin,” Marvin said.
Two sheriff’s deputies dragged Willis Good by the arms through the waiting room and into Poole’s office. Good’s thigh was bleeding horribly from a laceration that was hemorrhaging badly; the bleeding had soaked his jeans so that the bottom of his right pant leg was saturated. Willis was screaming at the men who were dragging him.
“Let me go, they’re on the way. Let me go!”
The officers were fighting with Good, who was acting like a man possessed by the devil. He kicked out with both feet. He caught Marvin’s receptionist dead in the nose with the heel of his right dress shoe, knocking her into the wall and splattering her face with blood from his leg wound. She screamed in pain as blood began pouring from her nose; she sagged to the floor. Patients in the waiting room were trying to dodge Willis’ feet as he lashed out at them too, like a mechanical devil. A mother holding her toddler tried to run by Willis but he caught her with a vicious kick, sending her and the child into a table, knocking it over and sending magazines spilling across the floor as children and mothers screamed. The two sheriffs, trying desperately to control Good, were losing the battle.
“What the hell is going on here?” Poole shouted over the bedlam. He’d rushed out of one of the two examining rooms and into the chaotic waiting room. He immediately ran to his receptionist, holding her bleeding nose, and tried to lift her up.
“Just get his ass sedated, Doc,” yelled one of the deputies, battling Willis. The cop managed to smack Willis in the temple with the butt of his Maglite, but it seemed only to stun him. In a moment Willis was at it again, kicking out with both his feet like a wild animal. The deputy struck Good a second time, much harder. Willis went limp, knocked unconscious by the blow. Poole broke for the drug cabinet in the hallway and began rifling the drawers, frantically looking for something he could knock Willis out with.
Willis’ eyes were bloodshot and frightened when he regained consciousness two hours later.
“Willis, are you all right, son?” Dr. Poole asked. It was quiet. The two sheriff’s deputies had stayed behind until they too were called away by another emergency—some kind of riot at the Target on Highway 50. Marvin had assured them he could handle Willis. It seemed as if Timberline had been turned upside down in the matter of a few hours.
Marvin closed the door to the examination room. He’d had to send his receptionist home after bandaging her broken nose. The waiting room was a mess, his patients long gone. The chairs and tables all turned over. The men had struggled with Good a second time, until Poole had finally jabbed Willis with a 25-milligram dose of Haloperidol that had knocked him out almost immediately.
“Are they here yet?” Willis asked, looking up at the doctor.
“Who?” Marvin asked.
Willis started to get up, swinging his feet off the examination table. “What time is it, doctor?”
“Four o’clock,” Marvin said.
“What day?”
“Tuesday.”
“Have they gotten here yet?” Willis asked.
“Who?”
“The things. The things we saw, T.C. and I. Where’s T.C.? T.C. Where is he?”
“T.C.?”
“T.C. McCauley, goddamn it. He saved my life out there,” Willis said. He tried to sit up.
The doctor put his hand on his chest. Poole had cut Willis’ shirt off so that he was naked from the waist up. Good’s shoulders were very pale under the examination room’s harsh fluorescent lights. His jeans had been cut away from his wound, Marvin having cut his pants up the thigh so he could work on the bleeding leg. Willis had a horrible laceration, now stitched up—thirty reddish stitches visible and running from Good’s left knee all the way to his upper thigh. The young man’s face was drawn and ashen from the loss of blood. He seemed to Marvin to have aged ten years.
“I don’t know,” Marvin said. “You had a bad injury from the crash.”
Willis began to laugh. A portion of hair was missing from his scalp. Marvin had cut the tangled bloody hair off the side of Willis’ head, thinking he’d been cut there too. Clumps of hair and shirt covered the floor at Poole’s feet. The doctor glanced down at the mess of hair and bloody clothes. Have to move him to the hospital in Sacramento.
“Kill me, please, Marvin.” Willis said, sitting up. He reached out and grabbed Marvin’s white lab coat, pulling him close, looking at Poole in a way no one had ever looked at the doctor before. Haloperidol dilated Good’s pupils. “I want you to kill me before they get here. I don’t want it to happen to me a third time,” he said. “Not what happened to them, please. I don’t want to be here when they come,” Good pleaded. “I know they’ll come. It happened to Ann and to T.C. I know. Do you understand?”
“When who comes?” Poole said, thinking that Willis had completely lost his mind.
“Them—those things that attacked T.C. and me on the road,” Good said. “I saw what they did. T.C. … he got sick, too. I was bringing him back here to Timberline when we were attacked.”
Marvin heard the phone ring outside in the office. He looked into the young man’s eyes.
“I want you to rest. I’m going to call an ambulance. You’ll have to go to the hospital in Sacramento. You’ve had a bad head injury, too, on top of the nasty cut, I’m afraid.”
Dr. Poole went out to the front office and picked the office landline phone up from the floor. It immediately began to ring.
“Marvin.” The doctor heard his wife’s voice. “Honey, Vivian’s sick. Should I bring her into town? I think it’s that flu you were talking about.” Marvin glanced into the surgery. He saw Good slide off the examination table and stand over a tray of instruments, his back to the doctor.
“What’s wrong with her?” Marvin said. He watched Willis hold himself up, unsteady, using the corner of the examination table to support himself.
“She’s got a fever, a hundred and three,” his wife said.
“I’ll come home. Put her to bed. And stay with her.” Marvin put down the phone. He walked back into the surgery.
Willis turned around and faced him. He had a short stainless-steel scalpel in his hand. He raised it and put the short fat blade against his throat.
“I’m not going to be here when they come,” Willis said. “Do you understand that? I had to kill my own wife. She’d turned into one of those things . . . No one believed me, and now it’s too late.”
“Willis. Please, whatever happened, I can help you,” Marvin said, staring in horror.
“No, you can’t. You’ll see when they get here. You’ll see when it happens to your family.” Willis’ hand trembled violently as he sunk the short blade into his carotid artery.
Poole froze. The two locked eyes. Willis closed his eyes and drew the blade across his throat. A long stain of blood started to run down Good’s neck. Marvin ran to him as he collapsed; he held Willis as the blood pulsated out of both severed arteries.
Willis opened his eyes. He tried to say something to Poole, but the doctor couldn’t hear it. Willis dropped off into unconsciousness. Marvin lowered Willis to the floor and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, knowing it was impossible, and that Willis would die, and quickly.
Marvin walked under the twinkling green and red Christmas lights hanging over Main Street. Cars moved like metallic bugs partially obscured by the snowstorm. Marvin could feel his blood-soaked sweater stick to his skin where he’d held Willis as he tried in vain to shut the man’s gaping neck wound. His cell phone began to ring as he waited to cross the snow-covered street. Car headlights looked oddly dim, and then became sharper as they approached. Still in shock, he didn’t realize he was leaving bloody footprints on the antique wooden sidewalk. He noticed his Volvo, parked only a few hours before; it seemed much longer now since he’d driven into town. He tried to stay calm, but the agonizing death throes of the young man, as he held him, were played back in a herky-jerky film in his head. Poole forced himself to turn away from what had just happened, but it was as if Good still held him, his convulsive bloody hand holding him close while he died in Marvin’s arms.
Marvin pulled his coat up around his face. He waited for the traffic to pass, then trotted across the street and walked into the Timberline’s sheriff’s office. The doctor was so well known in town, the sheriff’s deputies waved to him as soon as he came in. Then one of the deputies noticed the bloodstain on the doctor’s white sweater and cheek and stopped smiling.
“I have to speak to Quentin,” Poole said. The deputies all knew from the sound of the doctor’s voice that it was bad, whatever had happened. No one knew yet just how bad.
