HOWLERS (13 page)

“Okay. Love you too, babe.”

CHAPTER 13

Dr. Poole drove out of the Timberland High’s parking lot on the south end of Main Street in a quiet panic. A long line of yellow school buses were parked in the whirling snow. His Volvo dipped roughly off the school’s parking lot and onto the street. Everything that had gone on that morning, until that moment, had been bizarre, even horrible, but still dream like. Now it all seemed very real. His son had disappeared and he was on the verge of panic. He heard his cell phone buzz and he grabbed for it.

Find him?

He pulled the car over and texted his wife back.

No. Not yet.

The high school had called his wife and asked if their eldest son had been kept home. His wife, frantic, had begged Marvin to find their son Richard when Marvin had called her from the Sheriff’s office. So far he’d failed. Now he would have to go home and explain to her that hundreds of students were missing from Timberline’s schools, and that he had no explanation.

He drove down Main Street toward his practice, hoping to see his son on the street—his tall body bobbing the way it did when he walked, his hair riddled with snow. Marvin turned a corner by the town’s one pool hall where he knew the kids sometimes hung out. He slowed the Volvo. He saw the CLOSED sign in the pool hall’s window and went on toward the center of town, glancing down side streets. His cell rang and he snatched it off the passenger seat without looking to see who was calling.

“Poole.”

“Marvin, did you find Richard?” his wife asked.

“No, baby. But I’m sure he’ll call one of us.”

“I don’t understand, Marvin. Richard would never do this. Not call me. He would not cut school.” Marvin listened to his wife’s anxious voice. It was the first time he thought of lying to his wife since they’d met. He didn’t want to tell her what he’d heard. He didn’t want to tell her that something truly dreadful might be happening.

“He’s all right, some kind of prank. You know teenagers, just when you think you know them, they do something like this. It’s part of growing—”

“Marvin, don’t talk to me like that! I’m not a patient. Don’t. I want to know where my son is!” his wife said.

“Grace, how’s Vivian? Is her temperature any better?”

“No, it’s worse. She has horrible diarrhea, you better come see her. I don’t know what to do.”

“What about Richard? I was going to go up to the ski school and see if he—” he said.

“No, come home. See about your daughter first.” His wife hung up without saying goodbye.

Marvin turned the Volvo back onto Main Street with the thought of other mothers and fathers he’d seen, searching for their children at the high school. The doctor tried to put the conversation he’d overheard with the state police into some kind of context, trying to work it into his own son’s disappearance, but he couldn’t. How could anyone make sense of what he’d heard? The report was too bizarre to believe. There was some kind of reasonable explanation. Something was indeed terribly wrong, yes; he was sure of that. He’d sensed it for days, after seeing his patients’ strange symptoms. But there had to be a good reason.

At a stop sign he rubbed his eyes. One of his medical school professors had once said that just because someone was a Catholic, didn’t mean they couldn’t ride a motorcycle too: two diseases could exist together, living side by side.

One of his patients, a young mother with her baby boy, crossed the street in front of him. Bundled up, she lifted her hand to wave at the doctor, and smiled. Marvin watched the baby carriage, one of those new high-tech ones with the bicycle wheels, roll by. How could what he’d heard be true?  Marvin tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He glanced up instead and noticed the Christmas lights strung over the street.

“God damn it,” he said aloud.

The streetlight went out. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel.

Marvin pulled onto the old stone bridge over the Truckee River. It was a covered bridge, and once under the bridge’s shed-style roof, he was grateful for the partial darkness and a sense of quiet and protection. He glanced through the slats in the walls and saw the dark molten river running around huge snow-capped boulders, the rocks standing in dumb silent formations against the moving river. It all seemed so normal. He’d passed over this bridge a thousand times, a thousand times he’d felt the bump of his tires over the timbers, and felt the way it shook the car slightly. It reminded him of the first time he had driven over the bridge years before with his wife and son. And then he remembered Willis’ warning as he stood with the scalpel to his throat: “They’ll be here soon!”

Trucks and cars with snow on their roofs and hoods came at him in the opposite lane as soon as he’d crossed the bridge. He went down a mile and turned onto Ridgewood Avenue. He glanced at his watch. He would be home in twenty minutes, or less. He waited at the stop sign. A white VW bug crossed in front of him. He saw Lacy Collier. She wore dark glasses and a bright red wool ski cap. Lacy raised her hand and waved at him as she went on toward the center of town.

The Ponderosa Estates was a new development of expensive homes seven miles from Timberline. The doctor’s Volvo passed the garish sign advertising the development’s newest homes. “Fifteen Ranchettes Still Available!” a sign said. A car coming the other way through the snow was flashing its headlights, alternating between the high-beam and low-beam. The driver slowed down as he approached the doctor’s car. Marvin slowed, thinking there must be an accident ahead. The two cars stopped alongside one another. An older man rolled down his window.

“Mister, don’t go up that road, whatever you do!”

“What are you talking about?” Marvin said.

The man, in his seventies, was talking but keeping both hands on the wheel of his car. He was driving an old yellow Dodge; the car’s back window had been smashed.

“They’re attacking—up by Pollock Pines. I drove through them. I’m looking for a policeman. Do you have a cell phone? Mine is dead.”

“Yes,” Marvin said. “Attacking? Who’s attacking?”

“They tore a guy out of his van and killed him. There’s twenty or thirty kids in the middle of the road, pulling people out of their cars and murdering them.” The old man was obviously in shock, his mouth quivering slightly. Marvin had seen men’s lips quiver that way in Africa, during the worst Ebola outbreaks.

The man drove off without warning, seeming to have forgotten about asking to use Marvin’s cell phone.

   Marvin pulled over and got out of the car. It was snowing hard. He went to the back and searched the trunk of the Volvo for a weapon. Not sure why, other than the horribly frightened look on the old man’s face. Marvin took a tire iron out of the back. He got back in the car and put the tire iron on the passenger seat next to him. He had to drive through the intersection at Pollock Pines to get home. There was no way around it, no other route to take.

He pulled back onto the empty road. It was snowing harder. The sky had turned a flat death-gray, everything obscured except the road’s new asphalt.

He turned on the radio automatically and got the classical station from Sacramento. Marvin recognized the piece: “Swan Lake.” As he drove, he realized he’d broken out in a sweat. He glanced at the tire iron on the passenger seat next to him. He thought of his father, who had been a professional prizefighter in his youth; he wished his father were riding with him now.

Marvin saw the van first. Blue, all its doors were thrown open. It was parked in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. More abandoned cars were scattered beyond the van, one of them turned over on its side. He saw people milling about, a group of them wandering down the center of the road, mostly teenagers. Some he recognized from his practice. They seemed different: their faces were blanks, and their arms seemed somehow deformed, a little longer than normal, hanging out from their coats. One of the kids was dragging something behind him.

Marvin slowed the Volvo. The news came on and he switched the radio off and faced the oncoming phalanx of kids. He honked his horn. The faces remained blank. He laid on the horn. 

Something about the way they were walking down the center of the road, oblivious, told him not to get out of the car. Marvin reached for the tire iron on the seat next to him. He put the car in a lower gear and started toward the line of kids, slowly, still not sure what to do.

Have to get through. The man said “attacked.” Attacked.

He stopped the car. Marvin heard a sound on his right. Two men were standing on the side of the road. He turned to look at them. A tall white man looked at him with a blank expression. He was wearing a sheriff deputy’s uniform. The front of the uniform was covered in blood. Marvin felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and hit the button that lowered the window.

The deputy’s gun belt was askew. The other man, standing next to the officer, picked something up and rammed it through the doctor’s back windshield before Marvin could speak. A woman’s body, used like a battering ram, crashed through the back windshield, shattering it. The woman landed half in, half out, of Marvin’s back seat.

Marvin sat unable to move, the whole thing a horrible dream—impossible. The woman looked up at him, her face cut horribly by the glass. It was Eileen, the sheriff’s secretary.

“Help me—doctor!”

Marvin heard himself scream. He had never screamed like that before in his life. It was an involuntary scream of fear and panic. He saw the deputy, still with that horrible blank face, drag the begging-bleeding woman back out of the smashed rear window by her shoeless feet.

“HELP ME, DOCTOR!”

Marvin punched the Volvo’s accelerator. The deputy picked the woman up and flung her over the roof of the car so that she landed face down on the hood with a slam. Marvin hit the brakes. Eileen rolled off the car’s hood and fell onto the road in front of him. The deputy dove, jumping into Marvin’s smashed-out back window. Marvin felt the Volvo run over something as it took off again. It was as if someone else were driving.

The gauntlet of Howlers converged on the car. Marvin laid on the horn; it was obvious they weren’t going to move. He drove directly into the mob of kids, knocking bodies into the air. The loud thudding was horrible.

Inside the car, the deputy was crawling toward Marvin. Glancing into the rearview mirror, Marvin saw its lips dripping ugly white ribbons of saliva. The deputy’s hand reached out for the passenger’s seat headrest and caught it; the thing pulled himself up towards the front of the car. 

Marvin, turning away from the road, and toward the deputy, picked up the tire iron. The thing looked at him like a shark; its eyes were flat, dead. Marvin brought the tire iron down savagely on the deputy’s wrist until he saw it break, and become useless.

Marvin turned back and faced the road, flooring the gas pedal again. The deputy’s body slid back toward the rear of the car. The Volvo, off the road and traveling at a high rate of speed, scraped the frozen snow bank that ran along the side of the road and on Marvin’s right, showering the windshield with frozen snow and making it hard to see out.

Frantic, he managed to steer the car back onto the roadway. Then Marvin saw the unbelievable: two of the things he thought he’d run over climbed up from the Volvo’s front bumper, where they’d somehow held themselves onto the car’s front grill after being struck. Marvin swung the wheel violently, right, then left, hoping to shake them off the car; but the two hunkered down and clung onto the Volvo’s bumper and grill, howling demonically.

Marvin glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the deputy had grabbed hold of his headrest with his one good hand. The deputy made a horrible grunting-screeching sound and began pulling at the driver’s seat furiously like a trapped ape. Marvin could hear the seat being torn loose from its bolts while he fought to hold himself, and the bucking seat, in place. He clung to the steering wheel in an attempt to keep himself righted and in control of the car; his seat slid wildly, and ripped loose from the floor.

He watched the two things climb up and onto the Volvo’s hood. One of them scrambled forward and punched its fist through the Volvo’s windshield, shattering the safety glass and turning the windshield green. Marvin’s seat tilted violently backwards; he was pitched ass-up, his feet suddenly off the floor. The screaming-howling sound became unbearable. Marvin saw the deputy’s face loom, its dead eyes and drooling mouth inches from his own.

   The Volvo, out of control, spun onto the icy median. Marvin could feel the car spinning, and then pitch over. Marvin heard the loud sounds of metal on asphalt. The Volvo rolled over completely, twice, finally righting itself. Marvin, his seat loose, bounced around the car. He saw the deputy’s legs pinned by the collapsing back end of the Volvo’s roof.

The car had miraculously come to a stop upright, but kept rolling forward, the engine still in gear. The Volvo struck the snow bank on the far side of the two-lane road and smashed into it, burying itself into the bank.

It was quiet, or seemed that way to Marvin. The things’ howling had stopped. He could hear the sound of the engine stuck at a high RPM. It was completely dark inside the car, which, Marvin realized, was buried in the snow bank. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned, looking for a way out of the car. He ran his fingers over the car’s console, felt the map-light button and switched it on.

He saw the deputy. The creature’s back had been crushed by the roof, but it was still trying to move. Marvin found the tire iron, picked it up and brought it down on the deputy’s skull again and again until it was just bloody red and grey pulp, the skull smashed to bits.