Quentin got back in the car and slammed the door. He was weeping. Dillon looked up at him but didn’t say a word. They drove on in silence back toward the center of town with nothing but the occasional sound of Dillon shifting the re-loaded Thompson on his lap. He turned his head left and right looking for Howlers, the snow making it hard to see details.
It looks like the inside of one of those glass paperweights my mother used to collect, Dillon thought. When he was a boy, waiting alone after school for his mother to get home from a twelve-hour shift, he would shake all her collection at one time and watch it snow, dreaming of the bright future he knew was waiting for him.
* * *
Miles got out of the highway patrol car, thanked the grim-faced CHP officer, and shut the door. The CHP officer, a friend of his father’s, had rescued him out on the road when he’d been attacked—Miles’ Mustang had been surrounded by a gang of the things. The patrol car took off immediately.
Miles watched the patrol car race down the street, its emergency lights flashing blue and red. Everything the CHP officer had told Miles on the way was unbelievable. Yet he was living proof of the officer’s fantastic story about roaming gangs stopping cars and murdering their occupants. Twice on the way here, and to his horror, the CHP officer had driven through milling gangs of random people, running over several, killing them, not slowing down if they were in their way. It was, Miles thought walking toward Poole’s house, the strangest day he’d ever lived through.
Like so many of the cars he’d seen on the road heading out of Timberline, Poole’s Volvo, sitting in the doctor’s driveway, had smashed windows and looked like a wreck. Its roof was partially collapsed. Miles had seen things on the road heading out of Timberline that he couldn’t explain. He’d seen strange-looking groups of people aimlessly huddled around abandoned cars. At one point he’d stopped his car and just stared at the people, wondering what in the hell they were doing. Spotting him, they’d rushed his car, and howling like lunatics, they’d pulled him from the Mustang.
Knocked to the ground, a little Mexican girl—no more than eight or nine years old—sprang on his throat. It was while the little girl, incredibly powerful, was throttling him that two Highway Patrol cars pulled around the corner and saved his life. Both officers had jumped from their patrol cars and opened fire on the gang. One of the officers trotted up to Miles, who was fighting to pull the girl’s hands from his throat, and shot the girl point-blank. The shot went off inches from Miles’ face. The little girl had slid to the ground, dead at his feet. Staggering to his feet, he’d looked at the officer in horror.
“Howler,” the officer had said, and holstered his weapon.
While he’d been interviewing the lieutenant at the Sheriff’s Department—and concluding that the man was probably crazy—Miles had gotten a voice mail from a Genesoft executive, a man called Crouchback whom he’d met before. Crouchback asked Miles to come to his home, telling him it was urgent that they speak in private as soon as possible. Crouchback said he had something important to tell him, on the record, about Genesoft’s new R-19 line.
It was snowing again. Miles looked across the street. The front door of the Crouchbacks’ house was wide open. Miles had written about the swanky neighborhood’s McMansions and knew that Dr. Poole lived across from Crouchback’s place; his article had featured both men’s new homes. Poole was also on Miles’ interview list, since he’d heard from one of the deputies that Willis had killed himself in Poole’s office. Since what had just happened to him, though, and what the CHP officer had described to him, it all seemed pointless.
Miles thought he saw a woman lying on the floor in the Crouchbacks’ foyer. Two hours ago he would have rushed to help, but now he stopped himself, not sure what to do. The last thing the CHP officers had told him was, “Get a firearm.” The police were overwhelmed, and he would have to protect himself from the things. He decided to ignore the body.
He pulled the collar up on his jacket and walked across the street toward Poole’s house. He heard a gunshot and stopped in the middle of the street to see where it had come from.
A woman in a State Park Ranger’s uniform and a black balaclava came out between Crouchback’s place and the neighbor’s house on cross-country skis. The woman cut to her right, stopped and turned to face Miles. She had a pistol tucked into the front of her open blue parka. They looked at each other for a split second. He watched the hooded skier take off again, cutting across the snow-covered lawn, and then skiing over Crouchback’s driveway. Miles heard her skis make a loud scraping sound as she crossed the drive. The woman stopped again and glanced into the Crouchbacks’ open front door. Miles watched her point her pistol at the doorway. She swung her skis, taking big expert hopping steps, and was suddenly pointing her weapon at him.
He was about to yell “Hello” when she shot him.
Patty Tyson fired two rounds at the thing standing in the street and lowered her pistol. She watched him fall. She’d rigged a cord she’d ripped from her parka around the pistol’s trigger guard so she could hang the weapon around her neck as she skied. She draped the cord over her neck now. The Howler hadn’t even gotten off a scream.
I’m learning, she thought.
She skied across the lawn, building speed, and hit the sidewalk. From there, over the noise of her skies on concrete, she jumped the curb to the snow-covered street. The wide street had just enough snow that she could ski without too much trouble. She glided quickly, double-poling, by the body of the man she’d just shot down.
Patty heard a front door open and stopped and pointed her pistol toward the door. She was getting low on ammunition. She’d brought just two boxes of shells, and at this rate they wouldn’t last much longer. She leveled her pistol at the small black girl in the doorway, but hesitated when the little girl smiled at her. Howlers didn’t smile.
“Don’t shoot.” A tall black man scooped the little girl up in his arms and looked at Patty, a frightened expression on his face.
Patty lowered her weapon. It was the first human voice she’d heard since she’d left the melee at Emigrant Gap four hours ago and skied into the back country in an attempt to get away from the things.
“Sorry. I—” Her own voice sounded strange to her. She was hoarse from the cold and lack of water.
“My name is Poole. Marvin Poole. I’m not one of them,” the man in the doorway said.
“What the hell is going on?” Patty said. The black man was the first person she’d found in twenty miles of fire roads and streets who wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t know any more than you,” Marvin said.
“You have a telephone that works?” Patty asked.
She wore a balaclava over her face; the doctor couldn’t tell much about the woman, but he could see she was wearing a uniform and that she was obviously not one of them. She looked exhausted and frightened.