Текст книги "Howlers"
Автор книги: Kent Harrington
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 25 страниц)
CHAPTER 7
Lacy Collier looked up from her medical textbook. She was alone in the big knotty-pine living room at her family’s ranch. The morning had a stillness she had not experienced in years. She’d lost her cell phone on a horseback ride and didn’t miss it, she decided, putting the book down. It was liberating to go without it. There were dimensions to morning she’d forgotten existed. It was liberating not to be interrupted by a random text message. The idea of being cut off completely—from her friends at school, from her boyfriend, from everyone—was liberating.
A light was on by the couch where she’d been trying to read, but the decision she had to make distracted her. Go back to medical school—or not?
She got up and walked to the picture windows that looked out on the barn, and the Sierra Madre behind in the distance. It was snowing hard, the bad weather obscuring almost everything.
I couldn’t be happy living here in Timberline again.
She would go back to school in San Francisco. As soon as Robin came, she would tell him. As much as she loved Timberline, she loved San Francisco, too. The city was full of young people and exciting. Timberline would always be home, but the City would be where she’d make a life for herself.
And I want to be a doctor. Medical school has to come first.
She could see Mount Baldy in the distance through the white haze of snow. They’d gone up to the state park and camped as a family before her mother had been diagnosed, three years before. Lacy pulled her hair down, unhooking it from the clip, and turned toward the coat rack by the front door.
The coat rack, with its pile of coats and hats, was one of her earliest memories from childhood. The rack said more about the people who lived there than anything else about the house. It was piled with weather-beaten cowboy hats, yellow slickers, jean jackets, Patagonia vests, and one of her father’s extra black-leather service holsters. She smiled and walked to the rack. Fishing through the layers of heavy coats, slickers and sweaters, one of her grandfather’s sheepskin-lined jackets fell on the floor. Then Lacy found it: the simple white windbreaker her mother had worn on their last camping trip, near the bottom of the pile.
Her mother had worn it on that last trip to the hospital, too. Lacy had found it and brought it home after she’d died. Looking at it, she remembered her mother running along a creek on the camping trip with a fishing rod in her hand, so alive. It was a week before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, before the shadow of death stalked her mother and all of them, changing their lives forever. Her mother had talked to her from right there by the front door as she slid her jacket on, not saying that she was going to the hospital. Lacy, on her iPad, had missed what her mother had said—something about fixing dinner in case she was late.
Her father’s empty holster fell on the floor at her feet, startling her. She picked it up and hung it back on one of the crowded old-fashioned wooden pegs. She took her mother’s coat to the couch and sat with it on her lap. She watched the snow fall from the window on the paddock outside, holding the coat.
“Mom, I’m pregnant and I don’t want to be,” she said aloud. She wanted to cry but decided she couldn’t, that it wasn’t right to cry.
The doorbell rang while Lacy was carrying her suitcase out to her Volkswagen bug. She dropped the suitcase in the hall and opened the door.
Robin Wood was standing on the porch. His Chevy truck was parked up by the barn.
“Your dad called. Have you told him? He didn’t say a thing.” The young veterinarian was wearing blue jeans and a down coat. He was handsome, stocky, and boyish, with black hair cut very short. They’d known each other since he’d opened a practice in town four years ago. It had been one of those passionate affairs, all about sex, laughter, and weekend trips to visit her in the City, and not about getting married, until the problem had come up. Because of her mother’s illness they’d kept their affair a secret from everyone.
“No,” Lacy said. “I can’t tell him.”
“Well, I think he should know now that we’ve decided to get married.” Wood smiled. The young man stepped in the door. She’d continued to keep the affair a secret from her family because she didn’t think her father needed the stress. Since her mother’s death, she had tried to protect him from anything that might worry him. She hadn’t told him that Sharon was smoking pot or hanging out with a rough crowd. She hadn’t told her father any of her own problems: adjusting to a high-pressure graduate school, and living in the big city for the first time in her life away from her family.
And she certainly hadn’t told him she was sleeping with Robin Wood, or that he wanted to marry her. After hearing she was pregnant, Robin had told her that an abortion was “out of the question,” which had shocked her.
“I’m going back to school,” she said. She grabbed Robin by the hand and pulled him into the house. “Come in and I’ll explain.”
“But—I thought we decided that we were going to get married and have the baby.”
“We did,” Lacy said. “Now I’m changing my mind. I want to go to school. I want to finish. I want to be a doctor. Maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe, after I’ve finished med school. If you still want to.”
She could see he was shocked. Men are really the weaker sex, she thought. Quick changes were never their forte.
“I’m a little confused, babe,” Wood said.
She didn’t like it when Robin called her “babe.” It reminded her of the random billboards of fashion models plastered on the bus stops in the city. It was something she heard fraternity boys call their dates. It wasn’t the only thing she had found to dislike about Robin Wood. Because he came from money he had, in many ways, never grown up. Maybe it had all happened too fast.
I don’t love this man, she thought. It was that one glaring fact that had, at the end of the day, made her change her mind about getting married. She would go down to San Francisco and have an abortion, and no one was going to talk her out of it.
“So am I. Come on, we’ll talk about it,” she said.
For the third or fourth time that morning, Lacy let the word “abortion” come to mind as she walked him toward the kitchen. Her mother and father had taught her that abortions were wicked. Robin was talking about telling her father their plans to get married. But she wasn’t listening. She felt completely trapped.
* * *
Lieutenant Bell’s commanding officer was speaking to someone in Sacramento, at Sixth Army’s headquarters. The colonel put down the phone and looked at him.
“Lieutenant Bell, you have fucked with the United States Army. I think that was a big mistake. I believe you killed Sergeant Whitney,” the colonel said. The colonel’s face was gray with anger.
Bell looked past the colonel and out to the landing field. Seventeen Apache helicopters were out on the field, their blades tied down because of the storm. Bell watched the blades on the choppers bounce in the wind, their black-nylon cords moving crazily, hoping he’d wake up from this nightmare.
“Sir, I’d like permission to sit down,” Bell said.
“Sit down. Fall down, I don’t give a fuck what you do, Lieutenant. You have disgraced this unit, and you are a liar and probably crazy. I wish you’d stick your head up your ass and disappear,” the colonel said.
Bell went to the wall by the door. There was a metal chair and he dropped into it. Light-headed, he looked down at his bloody flight suit. A corpsman had bandaged him up as soon as he landed, but the bandage was already stained red. It all seemed like a nightmare, except he wasn’t waking up. The worst part was he’d lost a friend. A good friend.
Do they really think I’d kill Sergeant Whitney? They’re crazy.
Bell heard the colonel talking to the MPs who had come into the room to take him to the Army’s stockade in Sacramento.
“It looked like we’d stepped back in time,” Bell said aloud from his chair. His tone of voice made the men stop talking, and all turned to stare at him.
* * *
“You all right, Sergeant?” Bell asked.
“I think so, sir. I don’t understand. It was just a kid and a woman,” the sergeant said. His voice was hoarse from the cold, as if he’d been yelling. The sergeant tried to spit, but the spit landed on his chin and he had to wipe it off.
The lieutenant looked down at the body of the boy. He had floated down and gotten caught on the same pile of snags that was holding the first body they’d found. Bell turned and looked at the dead woman. Her skull had been crushed by a large wet boulder that was still lodged in her smashed-to-a-bloody-pulp face. She’d died kneeling when Bell had crushed her skull. She was sagging backwards in the shallow water, bashed-in face turned toward the sky.
The lieutenant put his hand through his red hair. “I don’t know, but they would have killed us. And I know that little woman was stronger than I was,” Bell said. He stood up slowly. It all seemed impossible: the way the boy had flown through the air, the woman manhandling him as if he were a child.
“How can that be, sir? Look at her. She was a little woman,” the sergeant said.
“Let’s go,” the lieutenant said. “Before the rest of them find us.” He stepped into the creek looking for the sidearm the woman had torn from his hand. The six bullets he’d fired into her chest had done nothing to her.
“Sir. I see more of them,” Whitney shouted.
The lieutenant spotted the Beretta and picked it up out of a foot of water. He stood and looked up the creek. Six or seven of them were running like a pack of dogs down the bank toward them. He wasn’t going to call them “people” any more. Not after what he’d seen.
“I thought I saw a hunting rifle here in the water,” Bell said. “We could use it.”
Three of the things had jumped into the creek and were half-running, half-stumbling toward them through the fast moving creek. They could hear their strange awful howling, too.
“Sir, I don’t think we have time,” Whitney said.
“They’re stupid. If they just ran down the bank, they’d be here,” the lieutenant said.
The sergeant waded across the creek to Bell’s side. Bell kept his eye on the things coming at them.
He heard the loud crack of a tree branch and turned around. The sergeant had grabbed a tree limb from the snag. He tested it in the air, swinging it back and forth. They waited for the attack; no time to run.
The sergeant waded back across the creek, his flight suit wet all the way up to his waist. His face was shining with sweat. One of the things was only about ten yards away, riding the center of the current, his arms moving above his head while he howled like an ape. It was an older man, about fifty, in bib overalls and green-flannel shirt. No expression on his face, Bell thought. Nothing. It was the face of a dead man.
“Shoot him, sir! Shoot his ass!”
The lieutenant walked to the edge of the bank. The first of the three Howlers was struggling to stop and get back to the bank. The thing in the lead fought the current, trying to grab a snag. Bell waited as the man got closer. At ten feet the lieutenant fired twice: two bullets hit the thing dead in the chest. Nothing. The thing caught a snag and pulled itself to the other bank, his back to Bell. Bell could clearly see the bullet’s exit wounds—big rough chunks blown out by the hollow point bullets Bell had fired. The thing crawled up out of the water; another Howler came out right behind him.
The lieutenant panicked. He’d shot the man wearing the overalls multiple times with nine millimeter bullets in the center of his chest, and the thing was acting as if nothing had happened.
God help us, Bell thought. He was frightened; it was like no fear he’d ever felt before. Complete terror overwhelmed him. He fought every instinct that wanted to make him run away, throw down his weapon and run. But he didn’t. He looked back at the sergeant.
“Head, sir! Try the head!” the sergeant screamed.
The thing wearing overalls was turning around on its haunches on the uneven creek bank. It started to howl, the sound deafening. The thing’s mouth was wide open, its shoulders thrown back. It dropped its head, snarled and looked at Bell from across the creek.
This time the lieutenant made himself aim for the thing’s face. Bell got its face on the ramp sight and fired. Its face a halo of blood, the thing fell over. Bell heard the sergeant whoop.
“Head shots work, sir! They don’t like that one bit!”
The thing was staying down, twitching and grinding its heels in the snow bank but staying down.
“They aren’t so tough,” the sergeant yelled. Whitney waded out into the creek, up to his boot tops, and faced the next one floating toward them. He unloaded on the thing’s skull with the club. The lieutenant could hear the club whip through the air, watched the tree branch crush smash its skull. The thing slid into the water and floated on by.
A third one, an old lady, was right behind it. The old lady put her hand up, caught the club and pulled it out of the sergeant’s hands as if she was pulling it away from a baby. The force of it pulled Whitney toward her and further into the water.
The lieutenant waded out into the fast-moving current. The old-lady thing drifted toward him. She was baring her teeth like a mad dog. At two feet, Bell sent his last round into the old-lady thing’s right eye. The whole back of her head came away and splattered into the water. The rest of her slid below the surface.
The bodies were piling up on the snag, three of them now. The fast-moving water cascading over their dead bodies created a foaming white mass over the snag.
Bell reached down for the sergeant, struggling to get out of the deep side of the creek. Bell glanced down the bank after he fired. More things than he could count were running toward them, fifty yards away or less. Bell didn’t want to look anymore. He was sure he was going to lose his nerve.
“Jesus! We’re fucked,” the sergeant said, seeing more of them jump into the water. Whitney turned and looked at him, terrified.
“No, we’re not!” Bell said. “Unless these fucking things can fly, too.” Dropping the empty clip at his feet, Bell reached for the spare clip attached to his shoulder holster and rammed it into the pistol.
CHAPTER 8
In August, the Copenhagen Zoo added an exhibit to promote its primate collection, amidst the baboons and chimpanzees: a Homo sapiens couple who will go about their daily business in a Plexiglas-walled natural habitat consisting of kitchen, living room, bedroom, and workshop, as well as a computer, television, cell phone, and stereo. Said a Zoo official, “We are all monkeys in a way, but some people find that hard to accept.”
Gary,
I thought you might want to join them!
Jeff.
At the bottom of the email was a photo of the young Homo sapiens couple’s “cage.” Gary Summers, 24 and a graduate of Cal Tech, read the email from a classmate who was working for NSA. Two other emails were waiting, but he didn’t have time to open them. He had an appointment in Timberline in an hour and a half, and before the meeting he wanted to stop by the video store to chat up a hot girl he’d seen working the day before.
His instant messaging service popped open with a random text message from a girl he’d met in Yosemite: an incongruous still photo of a mountain biker hopping his bike up the grand staircase of a plush hotel lobby, past well-dressed people, was attached to her message. His iPhone rang, giving him Billboard’s number-three hit: Love Club ring tones he’d downloaded over breakfast. Seeing his ex-girlfriend’s number, he almost let it go to voice mail but decided to take the call. Only because she owed him money.
“Hey.” He had rigged his cell phone with a recording that overlaid random office noise, leading any potential client to think he was sitting in a big time Microsoft-like environment. The app had cost him more than twenty dollars, but he loved it.
“It’s me, Cindy.”
“Hi—how you doing?” Gary looked at his watch, one of Apple’s new beta editions, which he was being paid to test.
He and Cindy had broken up two months ago and she was still calling him. He told himself to be polite. Maybe she was calling to say she would pay him the money she owed him. He wouldn’t mind doing the nasty with her again either, as she leaned toward the kinky. She’d once asked him if it was okay if she arranged a threesome.
“How’s the country boy?” she asked.
“Wonderful,” Gary said. He moved from the handset to the iPhone’s earpiece, losing only a few syllables of the conversation as he placed the “bug” in his ear.
“Come up and visit, bring my bike? What do you think?” she was saying.
“Sure, sure. Anytime,” Gary lied.
“If I did bring a friend, would that be cool?”
Gary was folding up his prize possession while he spoke, a new MacBook Air that had set him back plenty. “Sure.” He set the laptop in a backpack at his feet.
“What about tomorrow? It’s Saturday,” his ex said.
Gary heard a loud banging sound on the back door, then another. “Cindy, can you hold a second?” He pulled his earpiece off without waiting for an answer. He glanced past the living room that he’d set up as an office. His bike shoes clicked on the hardwood floor. He went through the kitchen, glancing at the mess of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. He went to the back door and pulled it open. Nothing. He stepped outside onto the snow. He’d put a few pieces of used garden furniture out in the backyard for his friends when they visited that fall. One of the chairs had been knocked over and looked surreal lying in the snow.
He looked over the field in front him. It was starting to snow in earnest. Summers could see someone, a man, running slowly across the field. The man stopped, turned and then went on. He felt snow hitting his face and shoulders while he stared at the running figure and realized he’d come outside without a shirt.
He stepped back inside the kitchen and locked the back door behind him. He walked back into the living room. His cell phone had dropped the call, a constant problem up here in the Sierra Nevada.
Typical, he thought. He didn’t bother to call her back.
Three mountain bikes were parked in front of Timberline’s only video store. Like a lot of people, the employees of the video store, all in their twenties, couldn’t afford cars. Which was all the better, Gary thought, locking his bike next to an old red mountain bike that he knew belonged to her. The girl who owned it was nothing short of perfect. Tall, terribly blonde, and terribly beautiful, a real stunner. He was pumped from the ride from his house in the cold. His fantasies about the girl who worked at the store had come easy and fast while he rode into town. He double checked his lock, pulling on it, and walked into the store.
Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” blasted through the Silver Screen’s barn-like interior, almost empty at this hour of the day. The girl he was chasing looked up and pretended not to see him as she put DVDs back on the shelf.
“What’s that?” Gary said, looking at the overhead screen. “It looks good.” He looked at the girl’s name tag. She’d never worn it before. Rebecca.
The young woman wearing it looked up at him, then down at the cart full of videos she was re-stocking.
“Night of the Living Dead. Romero,” the girl said. She took a video and dropped it in place. He noticed she’d added Kool-Aid green stripes to her blonde hair. She had pierced her belly button; the silver ring, very sexy, showed just over the edge of tight black yoga pants that made her butt look as good as any butt he’d ever seen.
“Oh.”
They both looked up at the huge plasma TV screen. A black man’s face was held in a tight close up.
“He looks scared,” Gary said, not caring anything about it.
“Yeah, he’s about to have a real bad day,” Rebecca said.
The lights in the store faded. The music stopped. The TV screen went dead. Outside, the streetlights of Timberline went out. The store’s brief silence was replaced by the blaring of car horns as moronic types immediately hit their horns because the streetlights had stopped working.
“Sounds like San Francisco,” Gary said. “Listen, I was wondering if you would like to get a cup of coffee.” His ears seemed to grow sixteen sizes larger as he waited for her answer.
Rebecca pushed the cart with one hand. She had muscles on her arm that were bigger than his. She slid another video in place. “Okay. I have lunch in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Can you wait?”
“Sure,” he said.
“You’re not from Timberline, are you?” she asked.
“No, I’m new in town.”
“Where are you from?” She pushed the cart further down the aisle and he had to follow.
He looked at her butt. It was one of those high butts. She wore a black leather vest that was tight against her back.
“San Francisco,” he said.
“Why in the world would you come to Timberline?” she said. “It’s so out of it.”
“I like it,” he said. “I came for the mountain biking.” And you’re here, he thought.
The Higher Ground Cafe was one of the new additions to Timberline’s main street. It stood on the busiest corner in town. It had opened about the same time Genesoft, the biotech firm, had come to Placer County. It was a cool urban oasis in what was otherwise an old-fashioned strip mall. The cafe catered to younger ranchers and the new young professionals who were moving into town to work at Genesoft, as well as the new software firms, and video-game startups that had moved out of the Bay Area and located in the Sierra. At 11:30 it was crowded with every social stratum in Timberline: secretaries and lawyers from the courthouse, software geeks, young rancher types who liked fancy cappuccinos because they’d seen a bit of the world. The Higher Ground Cafe belonged to the young. It was theirs and they knew it.
“How can you like Timberline?” Rebecca said. “I’ve wanted to get out since I graduated from high school. I mean, I like it. But it’s so boring. What’s San Francisco like?”
They’d ordered mochas and got a table in the back. Rebecca Stewart was as tall as he was. It was one of the first times he’d found a girl whom he could look at directly. The lights—which had come back on while they’d walked across the street—flickered momentarily, and went out again.
“Does this happen much?” Gary said. He turned to look at the street. It was his first winter in the Sierras, and the idea of no power was frightening to him. Without electricity, his business as a web developer would be as productive as a dead body.
“Yeah. When it storms, it happens a lot,” Rebecca said. “You want to smoke a number?”
Gary checked at his watch and looked across the café at the perplexed faces of the other young people, who were mostly like him: new to the Sierras. They all found the lack of electricity disconcerting. If the power doesn’t come on, then Mr. Worden won’t be able to see what I’ve done. I don’t want to use up my battery up showing him his site. “Well, I don’t know,” Gary said. “I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t want to smoke it alone,” Rebecca said. She winked at him.
“Where?”
Rebecca stood up and led him into the Higher Ground’s back room, nodding to one of her friends who was manning the cappuccino machine. The storeroom was dark, the concrete floor was damp; the air was redolent with the smell of roasted coffee beans. The lights flickered as they walked into the room, but they didn’t stay on. Rebecca closed the door and flicked slightly. “Fuck it,” he heard her say.
All Gary could see was the light of the match when it was struck and the sound of the girl pulling on the joint. The end flared up, and the light of the match caught her blonde hair and the streaks of Kool-Aid green. She patted him on the shoulder as she sucked. She was trying to get him to relax.
The touch of her hand passed through him like a shot. It was electric. He reached for her and they kissed. It was all happening so fast, like it was all meant to be, he thought. It was like he’d won some kind of cool prize on the radio.
“I’m glad you came to town,” she said, pulling her lips away. She smelled of dope and some kind of sweet perfume, and some kind of girl smell that had attached itself to the white polyester sweater she wore under the leather vest. He didn’t know what it was, but it was about the sexiest combination of smells he could think of. He forgot all about his appointment, his fear of the lack of electricity, and his fear of the dark, which he’d had since he was five.
She took another long drag. In the orange-tinted demi-light, he saw her roll her eyes and pass him the joint. He took another hit and leaned back against the wall. The wall felt cold on his back and he heard her laughing in the dark, the little orange dot from the lit joint tracing bright lines in the blackness.
And then the THC began to wind, and unwind, in his head; the THC began turning his brain’s stoning-gear. It was greenhouse dope, raised by experts using high-powered chemical fertilizers. It was killer weed. Gary Summers started to laugh out loud.
