Текст книги "Howlers"

“What the hell happened to him?” the lieutenant said.

The two helicopter pilots could see the disemboweled carcass of a man in the creek. The snow at their feet was stained red. Bits of flesh and guts led to the man’s body in the water. The carcass, held together by pieces of a jacket, had floated down and got caught on a thick snag of tree branches. The jacket’s fur-lined hood bobbed above the surface of the water. Two flesh-peeled human hands stuck out from the sleeves and broke the water line. The body had no head.

“We need a body bag or something,” the sergeant said.

“We’ll use the coat,” the lieutenant said.

The lieutenant, a tall, thin redhead from Mississippi, looked down the creek. Beyond the floating carcass, the creek had a straight run of about a hundred yards before it moved off to the right. Lieutenant Bell turned back to look across the snowy field they’d hiked over, then down at the blood-stained snow at his feet. “I don’t get it. All those people we saw. I don’t get it,” Bell said. They’d flown over a group of twenty or thirty people. The people had all run away into the tree line and disappeared. “The ranger didn’t say anything about other people,” Bell said, trying to keep a certain disinterested tone in his voice.

“They didn’t move like regular people,” the sergeant said.

“Well, sergeant, God is our copilot,” Bell said dryly. “Now I’m going down into that creek and pull what’s left of that poor bastard out of there. I could pull rank on you right now and make you go in there, but I won’t do that, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The lieutenant climbed down the bank. He thought he could reach down and hoist the headless body over the snag of logs and rocks, but realized it might all pull apart and decided against it.

“How do you end up like that?” the lieutenant asked, stepping back onto the bank. “Something attacked him. Maybe a bear, or coyotes. Something,” Bell said, answering his own question.

“Well, that must have been one pissed off fucking bear,” the sergeant said.

The lieutenant climbed around to the front of the snag and stepped into the creek. His brain went blue-hot from the cold as soon as the water flooded into his boots. He stepped up to his knees in the icy water. He slipped, but caught himself on a huge boulder jutting out of the rushing water. He heard the sergeant laugh behind him. The sergeant had been in Somalia, at the famous Battle of Mogadishu, and was not quite right in the head.

“I’m going to make you carry this guy on your fucking lap all the way back, Sergeant Whitney,” Bell said.

“You have to pull what’s left of his ass out of there first, sir,” the sergeant said.

   Bell walked further into the water, the creek up to the waist. He felt nothing; his lower body had gone numb from the cold. Bell made his way toward the mass of tree limbs and dead branches in front of him, the current trying to knock him down as he went.

He slipped and fell again, this time face down into the fast-moving water. The current drove him quickly into the bobbing carcass of what had been Chuck Phelps. Bell pushed himself off the body, horrified.

“You okay, sir?” Bell heard the sergeant’s voice as soon as he broke the surface of the icy water.  But he was in a panic and didn’t answer. Something was holding him against the body.

“I’ve fucking stuck myself on something,” Bell yelled. He ran his right hand down into the water and felt a small tree branch shoved into his side and puncturing his flight suit and skin. He pushed himself off the sharp point of the branch. A sharp pain ran down his legs. He backed away toward the bank to get the wound above the water line. He fought the current, which seemed to want to run him through again. He managed to turn around, the blood dribbling from a puncture wound in his side. The sergeant had jumped in the water and was coming toward him.

That was when they heard the first scream, like a hyena, a wild guttural howling, and screaming, somewhere above them.

“What the fuck was that?” Bell said, trying to stand up.

        *   *   *

       Patty looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Bits of snow were caught in her hair. She’d come back from lunch and gone into her cabin just behind the station’s front gate. She examined the fine wrinkles around her eyes. Thirty-three years old, she told herself. Time to get out the Oil of Olay?

She heard a knock on her cabin door. She went out into the cabin’s small living room and opened it, expecting it would be one of the rangers she worked with.

“Well, sweetheart, how are you?” Dillon said.

“What are you doing here?” Patty said.

“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in and say hello to my ex-wife,” Dillon said.

Patty stared at her ex-husband, shocked. “Why didn’t you write the lawyer?” she said finally.

“Cause I didn’t want a divorce,” Dillon said. “Are you going to make me stand out here in the snow?”

She didn’t answer. “Why are you here, James?”

“I’m collecting for the Red Cross,” Dillon said. “How about it, can I come in for a moment?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “I have to go back to work.”

Dillon’s voice changed. “Look, I said a minute.”

She recognized the cold steel in it from years before. She didn’t want to mess with him when he used it. The edgy cold quality brought back all her fear of him, and she stepped back from the doorway into the cabin.

“Okay, a minute, James. Then I’m going to go back.”

“I just want to talk, that’s all. I’ll leave if you want me to,” Dillon said. “I wanted to see you. I was passing through, as they say. The lawyer told me where you were.”

“Okay, come on in,” his wife said.

He walked into the cabin and she closed the door behind him. They’d once been in love, and as he walked by her, she remembered how much she’d once cared for him.

“I came to ask you if you might want to—maybe try and—.”

“No, Jim, I don’t,” she said.

She’d left him when she found out he was a career criminal. They’d met in Las Vegas and gotten married almost immediately. She’d gotten pregnant almost immediately, too. He was arrested a week later for robbing a Brinks’ truck in the San Fernando Valley, wounding one of the drivers in a shootout that made the national news.

“Okay. I just wanted to hear it from you. I’ll sign the divorce papers,” he said. “How’s our daughter?”

“She’s fine. She lives with my mom. I can’t have her here at the station. I wouldn’t have gotten the job.”

She watched her husband shake his head. He wasn’t the angry young man he’d been when he went to prison. Something had changed in him. He was a hard man, yes, that was obvious, but something else had happened to him. He looked sad.

“I’m planning on going back east to see her,” Dillon said. “For Christmas next year.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Patty said.

“I still love you,” he said.

She didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

“Okay. I get it: it’s over. There’s one other thing. There’s something I have to tell you. It’s the other reason I came looking for you. You aren’t going to believe me, but you have to get out of here before it’s too late.”

Patty looked at her husband and burst out laughing.

Patty walked back out to her office from the hall of the ranger station and answered the phone. “Emigrant Gap ranger station.” Patty heard the clicking hiss of a cell phone connection, which usually meant trouble.

“This the ranger station?” a voice asked.

“Yes it is, can I help you?”

“Yes, this is the O’Brien party. We’re out on the north face of Mount Baldy and we need to be rescued.” Patty put the call on the office speaker phone and went to the map of the Emigrant Gap Wilderness Area that covered the operation’s desk.

“Mr. O’Brien, where on the mountain is your party?” She was still unnerved from seeing her ex-husband and thought it sounded in her voice. She hadn’t told Quentin about her daughter or her ex-husband, and regretted that.

“What?”

“I said, where are you on the mountain?”

“How the fuck—Oh my God ... . ”

“I said, where are you on the mountain?” Patty said.

The speaker on the desk went quiet, just the white noise of an open cell line. She waited a moment and then hung up.

“They’ll call back,” her boss said, not looking up from his desk. “They probably used their phone’s GPS and are on the way to the parking lot.”

She tried calling the cell number back, but got no answer; the call went to voice mail.

Twenty minutes later, while she and another ranger were deciding whether or not to send a second helicopter up to Mount Baldy, the lights in the office dimmed and went out. Her computer screen went blank. Patty heard one of the other rangers swear from his office down the hall.

She looked out her office window. The lights in the Denny’s, across the road, were out. She could see the stream of headlights on Highway 50 and snow, which was falling more gently now, but steady. She saw her husband’s face again and tried to forget it.

Just what I need right now, a felon in my life who says we’re going to be overrun by—what had he called them? Howlers? Jesus!

The Hotel De Ford had been built in 1932. The lobby smelled of dirty carpets that hadn’t been cleaned in years. The hotel’s lobby walls were the color of hot cereal. In the Sixties someone had bought plastic Danish furniture and set it down in the lobby. The once-white plastic chairs had turned a gray color. It was, Dillon had thought when he’d first walked into the lobby, the kind of place you saw in nightmares. He went to the front desk and got a single room.

“Is Mr. Kelloggs in room twelve?” Dillon asked the young desk clerk.

“I’m sorry, sir. You can ring if you want, but we can’t give out guests’ names or room numbers.”

Dillon picked up the white courtesy phone and punched in twelve.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said.

“It’s me,” Dillon said.

“Okay, we’re waiting,” the man said.

Dillon put down the phone and crossed the lobby to the elevator. The elevator was very small; a picture of a smiling piano player with a bad toupee was hung on the back of the elevator.

    The King of Croon, nightly, Hotel De Ford, Timberline

The three men, all with long criminal records, stood in the window of the hotel. It was the old-fashioned double-hung type window that you could open. A fire escape landing partially obscured the view of the gold-mining era town’s main street. From the room, the men could see a good portion of downtown Timberline.

“Hey, look at that kid,” one of them said. The men looked down. A pickup truck was forcing a cyclist off the street. The cyclist jumped the curb and almost hit an old lady coming out of the bank the men planned to rob in a few hours.

“I say three o’clock is good,” Dillon said. They had robbed banks all over the state of California, all of the heists in small towns with tiny police forces. This was physically the biggest bank they’d tackled. The stone building across the street housed the Bank of America branch; the building’s solid stone facade gave it the appearance of a big-city bank. It was only one story, but it was built high off the street with a wide granite steps leading up to two tall old-school glass doors. The bank was sitting at the busiest intersection in town, which wasn’t saying much.

“What’s the security like?” Dillon asked.

“There is none. No guard. Just the regular alarms. The town never incorporated, there’s just a sheriff’s office, across the street. They police the whole damn county. They’ve had a lot of cut backs since ‘08.”

Dillon looked up at Kelloggs. He was a tall man, heavy set, with very white skin. Kelloggs had that jail-bird quality that seemed to say “Graduate of Penal Institution,” stamped on his face. Kelloggs was wearing a cheap green Sears suit and a black tie and white shirt. It was the cheapest looking suit Dillon had ever seen. The gang posed as magazine salesmen—or, in Southern California, roofing salesmen—and dressed accordingly.

“Look, I have to tell you something,” Dillon said.

A black man named Earnest Flood, once an NFL linebacker in the ‘80s, had gone into the bathroom and was pouring himself a glass of water. He walked back into the room. A Taco Bell bag lay open on the unmade bed. Flood was a junk-food freak and always ate the same thing before a robbery. The black man was wearing two .45s: one tucked in the small of his back, the other in a shoulder harness.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dillon said, “but I’m going to tell you anyway. There’s something happening to people.”

“What do you mean?” Flood said. The California State Prison system had marked him as a Class One Felon, which meant that if he was arrested again he would spend the rest of his life at the state’s infamous maximum-security prison at Pelican Bay. “People starting to like magazine salesmen?”

“I saw something in Elko. Your wife’s in Elko, isn’t she?” Dillon said to Kelloggs.

“Close, in the desert, about twenty miles away. Why?”

“Try calling her,” Dillon said. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Go ahead. Try calling her.”

“Hey, is this a joke?” Kelloggs said. He went to the desk and sat down.

“No. There’s some kind of—I don’t know how to explain it, exactly,” Dillon said. He looked across the room at Flood. Flood had sat on the room’s ratty sunk-down-in-the-middle couch. “Just try and call her,” Dillon said.

“Are you saying something’s happened to my wife?”

“I’m saying that if you try and call on a land line you won’t get through, that’s what I’m saying. You’re not going to get through because they took over down there. The things took over. The Howlers,” Dillon said.

Flood smiled. It was the kind of smile cons get when someone bugged out in the yard, or some pretty eighteen-year-old punk said he wasn’t going to blow you. “White boy lost it,” he said. “White boy gone crazy.”

They watched Kelloggs dial the room’s phone. He ran his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. He had been born in East Texas; his father had been a Texas Ranger, no less. The room was quiet. Kelloggs looked at Dillon in a strange way while he dialed the phone. He held the old-school black receiver for a long time before he put it back down on its cradle.

“Lines are down, it says,” Kelloggs said. “They said to try later.”

“The lines are fine,” Dillon said. That’s not the problem.”

“Yeah? So what’s the problem, then?” Kelloggs asked.

Dillon sat down on the edge of the bed, opened a pint bottle of brandy he’d bought on Main Street and took a long pull. Then he told them what exactly he’d seen the day before.