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.