HOWLERS (14 page)

Marvin’s face and hand was covered in brains and a wet blood-filth, making the tire iron slippery. He stopped finally and realized he’d been screaming the whole time he was striking the thing’s head. He looked out the side window and saw only snow pushed against the glass and the sound of the car’s engine whining loudly. He wiped his face. It was slick with gray matter. He felt it on his fingers and face. He rolled over and kicked the driver’s seat upright, landing it in front of the steering wheel, but cocked to the right. He took a few breaths. He managed to shift the Volvo into reverse. He began to pray. His lips dirty, he prayed the car would respond.

He felt the tires slip and started to laugh, which shocked him. The salesman had talked him into buying a four-wheel drive, and he’d bitched about it for weeks afterwards. Now the Volvo pulled out slowly, in reverse, through ten feet of snow bank and back out onto the empty road.

*   *   *

“Who’s that?” Quentin asked. He’d seen the Military Police outside his office when he got back from Eileen’s. He was about to go out again and look for Sharon.

“It’s someone called Bell,” one of the deputies said. “Hey Sheriff, we’re trying to get Calvin on the radio, and nothing. He was supposed to be back from Reno this afternoon.”

“I talked to him first thing this morning,” Quentin said. “Keep trying. Why are they bringing him here—the Lieutenant? That’s an Army problem.”

“I don’t know,” the deputy said.

Miles Hunt walked up to the main counter of the Sheriff’s office. Quentin saw him and raised his hand in a hello. Miles walked through the doorway and up to the counter that separated the offices from the public anteroom. Miles looked at the young man sitting against the wall in chains and leg irons, and then at Quentin standing in his office doorway.

“Quentin, what’s going on?”

The sheriff looked at the young reporter and hesitated. “Buzz Miles through,” Quentin said.

Miles stepped to the gate in the counter and waited for the buzzer to sound. Bell glanced at him. His leg chains made a noise on the floor as he moved his feet. The buzzer sounded and Miles stepped though. He followed Quentin into his old-school, all-metal-furniture office. Quentin closed the door.

“What have you heard?” Quentin said, leaning against the door.

“I heard a lot of people in town are missing, and that’s not all. The paper sent me over for a list of missing people. Eileen was supposed to email it, but she must have forgotten. So I came over to get it myself. And I came to ask you what you’d heard about the rumors.”

“I can’t give it to you. The list, I mean,” Quentin said. He looked at his friend. “Not right now. This is all off the record. Do I have your word on that?”

Miles nodded.

“I got a call from the State Police in Sacramento about an hour ago,” Quentin said. “There’s some kind of … outbreak.”

“You mean like in the movies?” Miles smiled.

“No, there are people gone missing all over the state.”

“And that’s not all,” Miles said. “There are gangs of people roaming the streets of Los Angeles. Killing people.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Price called the
Los Angeles Times
,” Miles said. “He still knows a lot of people on the staff there.”

“Gangs of people?” Quentin sat on the corner of his desk, taking the news in.

“That’s what Price’s friend said. And something else. I went up to Genesoft’s news conference this morning. A woman stopped me in the hall and told me that there’s a serious problem with one of the company’s new products.”

Quentin’s cell phone rang and he picked it up.

“Daddy, it’s me,” Lacy said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in town, at the Copper Penny. I changed my mind, I’m going back to school,” she said. “I stopped here—I wanted to look for Sharon and tell her. And I just bought a new cell phone.”

“Don’t. I want you to come here, to my office right now. Right now,” Quentin said.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just want you to come to the office.” Quentin looked up at Miles.

“Daddy, is something’s wrong? Did you find Sharon? Is she okay?”

“No, I didn’t find her yet,” Quentin said.

“I think I know where she is. I’m going over there,” Lacy said.

“Lacy. Please, for Christ’s sake, not now!”

“Daddy, I can’t go back to school without getting her to go home. Mom wouldn’t like it. I know I can get Sharon to come home. I know I can.”

“Lacy ... Goddamn it!” The line went dead. Quentin held his phone, then put it down. “I’ve got to go out. I’ll be back.” Quentin rushed out the door, past the military police in the lobby of the building. Lieutenant Bell, handcuffed and waiting in one of the wooden chairs, watched Quentin move past him.

They’re here
, Bell thought.
They’re here and he knows it
.

Bell turned in his chair. He held up his manacled wrist and tried to move his chained feet. He twisted in the chair, watching the sheriff pass, out on the street now, from the window behind him. The sheriff moved quickly down the sidewalk, and people moved out of his way.

Miles couldn’t wait for Quentin. He had a deadline at the paper and was already late with his end of the story. He stopped at the counter to look for Quentin’s secretary, but didn’t see her; he would have to write the story without a list of missing persons.

He tapped his fingers on the transom, frustrated because he couldn’t get any hard news to substantiate all the rumors he’d heard. Two deputies were talking to the Military Policemen at the far end of the counter. Miles turned and looked at the young redheaded lieutenant in leg irons and waist chain sitting against the wall. The lieutenant’s head was craned around so that he could see out the window behind him. Miles tried to overhear the conversation the deputies were having with the military policeman.

“From what I heard, he’s not all there,” one of the young MPs was saying. “He told the Colonel some kind of monsters killed his sergeant.”

“We’re out of rubber rooms, but we got concrete ones.” one of the deputies said. That got a laugh from the young cops all around.

“What did he do?” Miles moved down the counter. The men looked at him. “Press. Reporter for the
Nevada City Herald
,” Miles said to the two MPs.

“Murdered his sergeant,” one of the MPs said, nodding toward Bell.

“At the base?” Miles asked.

“No, out in the woods. They were on a search and rescue mission,” one of the MPs said.

“Why is he here?” Miles asked. His reporter instincts were firing.

“There’s some kind of closure on Highway 50. No one can get through,” the MP said. “We were ordered to leave him here. He’ll be picked up tomorrow. There’s no place to keep him up at the base. We were supposed to take him to the Army’s stockade in Sacramento, but were ordered to bring him here at the last minute.”

“Hey, are you a cop?”

Miles turned around; the young man in chains was looking at him.

“Are you a cop?” Bell asked. “Or a lawyer? Or what?”

“Reporter,” Miles said.

“Well, I got a story for you,” Bell said from across the room. “And it starts with I didn’t kill anybody.” 

“They’re here, aren’t they?” Bell asked. He’d turned from the window and put his handcuffed wrists on his lap.

The handcuffs looked heavy duty. The MPs had left, ordered back to their base. Miles and Bell were alone in the anteroom.

“Who’s here?” Miles asked. Miles glanced at Bell’s filthy and ripped flight suit and the military insignia on his shoulder. They were about the same age, he realized.

“The Howlers,” Bell said. “That’s why the MPs couldn’t take me down to Sacramento. See, I’ve figured things out now. I think the Army knows what’s going on too. They just can’t say. But I bet they know about the Howlers by now. I turned on the Apache’s gun camera. So there’s video, and they will have seen it by now and sent it on to Washington. I flew over several hundred people attacking cars on Highway 50.” The lieutenant’s blue eyes were very clear. He seemed completely sane.

   “What are you talking about?” Miles said. All morning he’d been hearing things that didn’t make any sense. He was tired of it. It had started to make him angry. If people had been lying to him, he’d had enough of it.

“I’m talking about the things that attacked me and my sergeant this morning—out there,” Bell said. Bell hadn’t been allowed to change his bandage. It was dirty, a bright red stain showing through the gauze that had been taped to his wound. For some reason the bandage reminded Miles of a book he’d read as a boy: 
The Red Badge of Courage
.

“You’re bleeding,” Miles said.

Bell looked down at his side. “Yeah. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

A deputy came up to them and started to unlock Bell’s manacles and leg irons.

“I’d like to interview the prisoner,” Miles said.

The deputy scratched his head, picked the chains up and put them on the counter behind him. “What for, Miles?” he asked.

Miles didn’t answer. He was afraid to say why.

*   *   *

Rebecca stared at the people picketing the front of her father’s store. “Guns Kill!” one of the picket signs said.
No shit! What do you think they’re for,
she thought. There were more picketers than usual. “Question Authority,” another sign said. The picketers were city types, mostly young, in their twenties. Rebecca watched a girl her own age; their eyes met as the girl passed by the shop window. The girl was on her cell phone. Rebecca held up her middle finger in a universal gesture. The girl saw it and turned away, shocked.

“Don’t get mad, get even,” her father said from the behind the counter. “I put an ad in the paper. We’re having a 50% off sale tomorrow, on all ammo.” He laughed.

“I don’t see why they care so much about guns,” Rebecca said, turning toward her father. She searched her pockets for a cigarette.

“I’m not sure. But I’ve given it a lot of thought this morning, watching them walk up and down in the cold. They’re scared, I think,” her father said. “I asked them to come in and talk about it with me. But they were afraid of me. Like I was evil.”

“Scared of what? Guns? You?” Rebecca came back along the long glass counter that was filled with handguns of all kinds. She reached over and kissed her father on his receding hairline. She couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being afraid of her dad. She went to one of the clothes racks and slipped an orange Day-Glo hunting cap over her blond hair. She had a habit of wearing something from the huge assortment of hunting gear when she was in the store. It was something she’d done since she was a little girl. Her father looked at her and remembered the little girl he’d been left with when her mother had run off. He loved his daughter so much that he didn’t know how her mother could have walked out on her.

“If people don’t understand something, they get frightened of it,” her father said.

“Why don’t they want people to have guns?” Rebecca came around the counter.

Her father was getting a new Swarovski rifle sight out of its box. He laid it out on the counter and began to take out the parts putting them in a line on a green piece of felt he used for resting pistols on.

“Maybe they’re right about some of the assault rifles, I don’t know,” her father said. “I’ve thought about getting rid of the assault rifles myself. But now the hunting rifles?” 

Rebecca was shocked. She looked at her father in amazement. It was the first time she’d ever heard him question himself.

“Since that kid fired on the school in Newtown, I haven’t been sleeping too well,” he said. “I mean, it could happen here in Timberline. I couldn’t take that. If it was one of my guns that killed those kids.”

“You said they were just a fad anyway. We could get rid of them. We don’t even sell that many,” Rebecca said. “People here don’t buy many assault rifles. They buy handguns, mostly.  But I draw the line with hunting rifles and shotguns.”

“Yeah, I did say that. These military style guns are mostly Chinese made. Not even American.” He took a semi-automatic AK-47-style assault rifle off the long rack behind him. Forty-odd assault rifles were chained to the gun rack, but they were still the minority of long guns he had for sale.

“You’ve just been listening to these tree huggers,” Rebecca said, lighting her cigarette.

“Well, I been reading their signs all morning. They get you to thinking. Some of the ideas aren’t bad. Like that one that says ‘Question Authority I like that,” her father said.

“You’ll start smoking dope pretty soon, if you don’t watch out,” Rebecca said. “Then I’ll have to throw your bail.”

The shop’s doorbell rang and Sharon Collier walked in. A huge dirty-looking biker walked in behind her. It was impossible to tell how old he was; he could have been twenty, or forty. Rebecca had seen the man around town since the summer. People knew the gang sold crank; more and more of the drug was being used now, especially by the unemployed.

“Hi, Mr. Stewart,” Sharon said. Her eyes were furtive, the young girl’s skin pale as paper.

“Hi, Sharon,” Rebecca’s father said.

“Hi, Sharon,” Rebecca said.

The biker with her didn’t say a word. He put his hand on the Sharon’s shoulder and prodded her forward. She walked toward the counter. Quentin’s daughter had on a pair of black yoga pants and her midriff was bare and red from the cold. The bearded and tattooed hulk followed her; his eyes darted around the store, appraising it. Finally he looked at the two people behind the counter. The biker stopped Sharon, grabbed her by the arm and whispered something in her ear. Then he pushed-moved her forward to the counter again.

Rebecca shot a look at her father.

*   *   *

It had started snowing again. A dozen Harley Davidsons, some with old-school butterfly style handlebars, were parked under a kind of low-slung, bleak-looking carport. The back end of the carport had collapsed under the weight of several feet of snow.

Lacy let her VW idle on the street in front of the house and its adjoining carport. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The front door of the house was open. She reached over and turned off the car’s radio. She’d driven to the high school, found Sharon’s best friend at her locker and demanded to know where her sister was. The girl had given her this address. It was what she’d expected; she’d heard her sister talking about the place.