HOWLERS (8 page)

        *   *   *

       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.

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.