HOWLERS (7 page)

“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.

CHAPTER 6

It was useless trying to warn people.
They only laugh at you
, he thought, taking a deep drag off a fresh Camel cigarette. James Dillon looked out on the traffic from his seat in the Denny’s on Highway 50. He’d lit the filterless cigarette with a Zippo lighter his grandfather had given him on his twenty-first birthday. The old man had carried the lighter with him during the Korean War. It was one of Dillon’s few personal possessions; he’d been able to retrieve it, along with his wedding ring, from a box of things his aunt had kept for him when he got out of San Quentin.

That same year he was released from prison, he started to rob banks for a living. It had been going well enough. He worked with five other professionals. They took few risks, hitting only out-of-the-way banks, many in the Central Valley of California. All the small-town banks they robbed had easy access to major freeways and were mostly unprotected, with nothing more than surveillance cameras and small-town police forces to rely on. The police departments in rural small-town America were spread too thin to respond quickly to bank’s alarms, especially since the financial crisis. It was the first time since he’d been a Boy Scout that he had a savings account.

It was an off hour, between breakfast and lunch at the Denny’s. The restaurant was quiet. The surrounding booths were mostly empty. He knocked an ash onto the floor and remembered it was illegal to smoke inside a restaurant. He dropped his cigarette onto the dirty linoleum floor and smashed it out with the heel of his new Redwing boot. The last thing he needed was to be arrested for smoking.

A few truck drivers from a busy truck stop across the street sat at one of the tables behind him, talking in sleepy low voices. Dillon looked out at the nearly empty restaurant’s parking lot and saw the snow falling outside. It all seemed cold and dismal, and he felt lonely. He turned back from the windows and saw a waitress standing in front of him in her ill-fitting Denny’s uniform. He debated warning her of the things he’d seen. He wanted to grab her by the arm and explain that everyone sitting in the restaurant was in danger of losing their life, but he didn’t. He’d done it before, at a Denny’s in Fresno, and people there had just laughed at him.

“Warm that up for you?” the waitress said politely, not really looking at him.

Dillon looked up at the woman, at her makeup and her double chin, and behind her at the short-order cook who was diligently scraping burnt meat from the grill, getting ready for the lunch crowds that would soon fill the place. He put his hand over the top of the cup. Not seeing his hand cover the cup, the waitress started to pour coffee. The hot coffee spilled over Dillon’s hand. He didn’t feel a thing.

   “
Oh my God
! I’m so sorry,” the waitress said, shocked. She pulled back the glass coffee pot immediately, the coffee spilling onto the greasy brown Formica table.

“Yeah, fine. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”  He pulled his hand away and wiped it with a napkin, the burn finally registering.

“That was hot . . .  coffee,” the waitress said, looking at him as if he weren’t real.

Dillon looked at his hand. The skin around his knuckles was turning red, but he didn’t feel much pain yet. He had trained himself not to feel pain. That was what prison did for you. You trained yourself to be a gladiator. If he was anything, after seven very long years spent in San Quentin, James Dillon was a
bona fide
gladiator, with the scars, hard countenance—rarely able to find a smile—and crude blue-ink prison tattoos that marked him to civilians as a scary outlaw.

“Check, please,” he said.

“Sure. I’m
really
sorry, honey. I’ve been here since 5:00 a.m. You put it on automatic,” the waitress said, horrified by what she’d done.

“Don’t worry. It’s okay. If you could just please bring me the check,” Dillon said. He’d pocketed his lighter. “And don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.” He couldn’t look at the blousy older woman and not think of his own mother, who’d died while he was in prison. His mother had been a waitress in roadhouses all over West Texas and Southern California when he’d been a boy. It had just been she and he while he’d been growing up, and he missed her. She was the only person in his life who’d ever really, truly loved him. He had no one in his life, since his wife had left him.

His intense loneliness was starting to make him feel somewhat ghostly. He’d picked up girls—and some whores—along the way, but didn’t like it. It was just sex, and that wasn’t what he wanted.

The pain from his scalded hand began to register, but he cut it off like a yogi who could walk on fire.

“How far is the ranger station at Emigrant Gap?” he asked the waitress. He took out his wallet with his burnt hand.

The waitress was still staring at him, still in shock that he hadn’t even flinched when the coffee had hit his hand. “Over there,” she said, pointing with the coffee pot. “On the other side of the highway, there, where the flagpole is. You can’t miss it.” 

He left a twenty-dollar tip and thanked the woman, then walked to the cash register. A thin, pretty hostess was ringing up an older couple, the man in his seventies.

“Damnedest thing,” the old man said, counting out bills on the glass counter. “Damnedest thing. I know I hit that woman full on with my trailer. She didn’t even blink. She just got up and kept right on running . . .  damnedest thing I ever seen in my life.” The old man turned to Dillon.

The cashier winked at Dillon. She didn’t believe it. Dillon knew it was true. He stepped up to the cashier. She was fresh-faced, with blue country-girl eyes and short brown hair. He knew how long the girl would last once the Howlers got here. Dillon slid a five-dollar bill across the glass counter, over the gum and mint display, and paid for his cup of coffee.

“I thought I’d heard everything,” the girl said. She flirted with him. He was handsome, and women liked him. “I guess that geezer needs his medication. You from around here?”

“You better clear out,” Dillon said. “Clear out while you can.” He couldn’t help himself. The idea of everyone dying in here in a few hours was too much to bear. He had to say
something. Even if they laugh at me,
he thought.

“Pardon me?” the girl said.

“I said you better clear out.” He looked at the girl, then turned to the people in the diner. It was picking up; a few people were coming through the doors. He turned back to the girl. “They’ll be here soon. I’ve seen them. You don’t have much time,” Dillon said. He’d heard the news on his truck’s satellite radio. Even through the media’s half-truths, he knew it was getting worse. He’d seen it himself in Southern California only a day ago. Someone there had called them Howlers because of the sound they made.

“Right,” the girl said. “They sure are.” The girl obviously thought
he
was crazy. He’d seen that look before. A day ago when he’d driven into Big Bear, he’d seen the same look. They—the government—were keeping it quiet, he figured. They were keeping the news off the TV as long as they could. 
If it isn’t on TV, nobody believes you
. They would all find out the hard way, once it was far too late.

   It was snowing in earnest as Patty Tyson drove up the hill in her green state-issued truck and through the gates into the multi-building ranger station at Emigrant Gap. She’d stopped by the flagpole and took down the Stars and Stripes and the California Bear flag because of the coming storm. She set the flags on her desk and picked up her ringing desk phone.

“Emigrant Gap ranger station,” she said.

“Patty. It’s Quentin.”

“Quentin?” Patty’s heart sped up without her wanting it to. She grabbed the old-school telephone line and slid the phone closer to her.

“Patty, I’m calling because a friend of mine is missing. Well, not officially missing, yet. No one has filed a missing-persons report, but I think he’s in the park, north of the Army’s training center at Snake Creek. That’s where I think he is, probably in that canyon under Mount Baldy.” Patty grabbed a yellow pad and took down the coordinates. “He was in the Marine Corps with my older brother. He’s a funny guy, but a friend of the family, you could say.”

“Funny, ha ha? Or funny peculiar?” Patty said, while writing.

“Well, I guess funny peculiar. He sticks to himself,” Quentin said. “But he’s a good guy.”

“When did he come into the park?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I’d say in the last two days. I think he’s at Snake Creek because I know the locals deer hunt up there. It’s the best place and none of the city people can find it.”

“Do you want me to start a full scale S and R?” she asked.

“No. No, not yet. I don’t think Chuck is that kind of problem. He grew up out here. He’s a pretty tough ex-soldier. I don’t think it’s serious. But I thought you could have a helicopter from the Army’s base come down and fly over the canyon, down say to the highway. Tell them to look for a broken-down blue snowmobile. I think he probably had a breakdown and is walking out. He could be hurt, though, and not able to walk.”

“Of course,” Patty said.

“Thanks. I’ll call you.”

“Quentin—I had fun, this morning.”

“Me too,” he said.

“I’ll call your cell as soon as I hear anything,” she said. “What’s his full name?”

“Chuck Phelps. Thanks, Patty.”

She put down the phone and called the Army’s winter proving ground. They had a chopper in the air twenty minutes later.

     
*   *   *

“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.