HOWLERS (6 page)

Quentin climbed off the tree and onto the other side of the barricade. His cowboy boots pushed through the deep snow. He knew from experience it was going to be a trudge to the cabin as Chuck purposefully kept the road un-plowed. He started out lifting his knees high, his jeans getting wet in the fresh snow. The wind picked up, blowing from the east.

He remembered the Phelps family in the ‘70s when Chuck’s father was still alive. Crusty old Phelps used to call him “Kid.” Chuck Phelps’s old man wore jeans and cowboy boots his whole life and could count the times he’d been further than Sacramento. Quentin remembered, too, the picnics in the meadow with several generations of both families, huge plates of food, yellow jackets, and the smell of wild flowers blooming in June. After their parents died Chuck’s sister had sold off her share of the ranch for a lot of money, moved to San Francisco and married a tight-ass professor. Chuck stayed on, living on his veteran’s benefits.

One of Chuck’s several dogs, a big German shepherd, started barking loudly. The dog came out from behind the cabin, bounding through the snow. His chest buried, the dog struggled to get to the sheriff. Quentin stopped. He tried to remember the dog’s name.  A Border collie came up behind the shepherd.

“Ronny, good dog.” Quentin called the shepherd’s name, clapping his hands together. The shepherd stopped barking when he heard his name called, then started running again, his tail wagging. He got within ten feet of Quentin. Big white strings of saliva hung from the dog’s open mouth.

“Ronny! Good dog. Come here . . .  Good dog!” The shepherd came forward in slow hops, its chest sending snow flying. Quentin patted the animal on the head when he reached him.

“Good dog. Where’s your master, huh? Where’s Chuck?” The dog barked twice, then took off running back toward the cabin, recognizing Quentin. The dog’s black fur was covered with snow powder.

   Quentin could feel the cold and wet through his jeans. He followed the dogs to the cabin’s front door. The stairs were covered in new snow, a sure sign that Chuck was gone.

The cabin door was crude and had big hand-forged hinges. Quentin knocked twice. Chuck had given them a key, which Quentin carried, but he didn’t use it. The little porch had firewood stacked up neatly next to the window. No lights were on inside.

Quentin turned around. Chuck had worked to make a clearing in front of the cabin on all sides. Quentin remembered one day, in mid-summer, coming down the road in his father’s car just to say hi. Chuck was out in the field in just a pair of shorts and a chain saw. It was right after he had married Marie.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” Quentin had said.

“Field of fire,” Chuck said.

“Field of fire?”

“Yup.”

“Man, you’re back home. This isn’t Vietnam,” Quentin had told him.

“I know that. But it’s going to get bad. All those riots in the cities. You wait and see,” Chuck said. “Just wait.”

“You didn’t come to the wedding. Marie and I were looking for you,” Quentin said.

Chuck put down his chain saw. It was blazing hot and he had wood chips and sweat and pine pitch sticking to his big upper body. His eyes were soft. Not the eyes of a man who had done several tours of duty in Vietnam and stayed in the Marine Corps, doing twenty years.

“I’m sorry about that, Quentin. I didn’t have no clothes for that. How’d it go?” Chuck asked. He killed the engine to the chain saw and all they could hear was a woodpecker’s euphonic tapping; the summer morning held a clear, soon-to-be hot sweetness.

“You know. Lots of people. Church in Nevada City was crowded,” Quentin said.

Chuck walked toward the car and they met out in the field and shook hands. Chuck’s greasy black Giants cap was pulled down low over his forehead.

“How’s married life? You got a sweet girl there in Marie. You’re a lucky guy.”

“It’s better than being shot at,” Quentin said. They both smiled at the joke.

“I figure a hundred yards is good enough—360. What do you figure? No sappers going to sneak up on my ass,” Chuck had told him.

Quentin had looked at Chuck squatting on the dirt, wearing his jungle-style combat boots. He was still back there. He hadn’t come home at all, Quentin realized.

Quentin turned around and knocked again on the cabin’s door, this time loudly. He tried the door. It was locked. He pulled the key to the place that Chuck had given Marie before she died, telling her it was important that her family have a key to the cabin. It was still a mystery as to why he’d given it to Marie in the hospital. She’d made Quentin promise to carry the key with him and he had. It was one of the last things they’d talked about. He unlocked the door and poked his head in.

“Chuck, you at home? It’s Quentin, I’ve got your mail!”

No answer. Chuck had obviously gone out. It was what Quentin had expected. Chuck was probably out deer hunting and forgot to tell Mordecai to hold the mail, or he’d gone to San Francisco to visit his sister, which he did once a year.

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.