Rebecca closed the door behind them. A steep flight of stairs faced them, with a yellow light shining on a concrete floor at the bottom.
“I used to bring all my boyfriends down to the range,” Rebecca said with a smile. She put her hand in his hair; he almost fell backwards, and she had to grab him by the arm. She pulled him close and kissed him.
Gary felt her tongue slip into his mouth. It was all getting to be a little too much: first guns, now Rebecca’s tongue darting down and touching the roof of his mouth and rubbing its roof sensually.
She finally pulled away. “You want to screw?”
“Yeah, sure,” Summers said. “But what about your father?”
Rebecca looked down the stairs past him as if he were a child.
He wanted to do both. Both seemed fun. He had a fantasy of shooting the pistol while they made love. He looked at her beautiful face in the light from a naked light bulb hung over the stairs. The basement smell mixed with something else: gunpowder, he imagined, or whatever smell guns made when you shot them.
“I’d like to shoot the gun and then make love,” he said sheepishly.
“Come on, then. That sounds like fun,” Rebecca said. “And it’s not a gun, it’s a pistol.”
* * *
Quentin looked out at the chaos on Main Street. The things were out there, but he could do nothing about it now. The deputies who had gone to the K-Mart were not responding to their radios. It had started to snow harder; all he saw was a driving sheet of white outside the office. He was holding on the phone for the State Police, trying to get assistance and some kind of explanation for what was happening to his town. Nothing he’d seen in the last thirty minutes made any sense. He was sure he was dreaming and that he would wake up. He kept praying he would.
“Quentin? It’s Captain Harrison, sorry. Look, before we start, let me tell you that the Governor’s office is calling for a State Of Emergency and has asked the National Guard to take up positions in several of the state’s major cities. So we don’t expect much from us for rural areas like yours, I’m afraid.
“And another thing: they are predicting the phones will go down soon, as they’ve had a lot of damage to one of the switching stations in Sacramento. Now what can I help you with?”
Quentin was watching one of the things come down the center of the street. It was a young woman in her thirties, half naked, beautiful and ugly all at once. A long stand of white spit dangled from her open mouth. She punched out a car windshield that had been abandoned on the street, then walked aimlessly away. The street in front of Quentin’s office was empty until several of the human-like things came out of Dr. Poole’s office, dragging a dead woman behind them.
“What’s going on? These things, what’s going on?” Quentin asked. The sound of his own voice sounded strange to him.
“Don’t know. Nobody does. There are guesses, that’s all. The only thing we know is that there are tens of thousands of them around the state. Some cites don’t have any, and things are normal. Then, some places—well, they’re hell on earth.”
“Are they sick? Are they still—human, or what?”
“Sheriff, I don’t have an answer.”
“We need help. I think we have hundreds here, and this is a small town. I only have nine law-enforcement officers. I’ve lost contact with more than half of my men. I’ve got two at the jail with me. We’ve got gangs of these things roaming Main Street killing people. It’s chaos—do you understand?”
“I understand. We can’t do much right now. There’s talk about the Army getting involved, but I haven’t heard for sure. They’re meeting about this at the White House.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Quentin said.
“The best you can. We’ve issued a shoot-on-sight order for the—things. Howlers, people are calling them. If you think it’s a Howler, kill it. Good luck.” The captain hung up.
All those seminars and meetings in Sacramento about emergency plans and inter-agency cooperation, that’s what they amounted to, Quentin thought. Good luck. He put down the phone in disbelief. It rang again almost immediately. He picked it up. All his office phone lines were lit up. People had started to call in, frightened and wanting to know where the deputies were. He didn’t know what to tell them.
“Daddy.” It was his daughter Sharon’s voice. “Daddy. You have to help me. They have Lacy here. God.”
“Where are you?” he said.
“Over on the Pinecone Road, white house on the corner, the old schoolhouse. Daddy, hurry. Please!”
The line went dead. Quentin put the phone down. He knew the house; it had been on his drug-watch list.
Before, he’d been confused and frightened and at a loss. Now, as he unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled down the M-16 and a bulletproof vest, he wasn’t thinking about anything but his daughters and his wife, what she would be thinking of him if he didn’t succeed. He dumped half a dozen extra fully-loaded clips into a metal garbage can and walked out of the office with the weapons and ammo. The phone was ringing, but he didn’t bother to pick it up.
“You’d better go home,” Quentin said, looking at his last deputy.
“Sheriff?”
“Let the prisoners out of their cells first. There’s nothing we can do now but be with our families. It’s every man for himself. God bless you,” Quentin said.
“Willis was right, then,” the deputy said. “He told me that I should get my wife and kids out of town. I thought he was crazy.”
The deputy heard the door close. He took the headset off and threw it on the office’s phone-system console, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. He felt helpless, as if he’d been afraid of this day all along, and now it had finally come. He went into Quentin’s office and grabbed one of the M-16s from the unlocked gun locker. He snapped in a clip and jacked in a round. The phone rang. Hoping it was his wife, the deputy picked it up.
“Quentin?”
“No,” the deputy said. “This is Deputy Troy.”
“Is Quentin there? This is Patty Tyson at the ranger station at Emigrant Gap. We need some help up here. Can you send a couple of deputies? There’s—well, I can’t quite explain it, but we’ve had several attacks by—”
“You’ll have to take care of it yourself,” the deputy said. “We’re overrun down here in town. There’s hundreds of the things here.”
“You’ve seen them, too?” Patty said.
“Yeah, I’ve seen them. I—” Something spun the deputy around. A half-naked woman, about thirty, was screaming, with a huge gob of white ropey-looking spit hanging from her mouth.
The deputy lifted his weapon and shot her in the stomach. To his horror, nothing happened; the thing kept screaming at him. He fired again, stitching its naked chest with rounds. The impact of the M-16’s fire shook its shoulders and head, back-footing it. But it still wouldn’t die. More of them were behind her.
Patty Tyson put down the phone. A chill ran down her back. She’d heard the man screaming over the phone and it had unnerved her. She looked out the office window. One of the things was coming slowly up the gravel driveway toward the ranger station. For some reason it was dragging a garbage can behind it.
“He said there are hundreds of them in Timberline,” Patty said. She looked at her boss, who had come in from the parking lot. He had his service pistol out and was standing in shock, staring at a waitress from the Denny’s who was walking deliberately up the gravel path. Patty looked at her boss. He was bleeding from his mouth where one of the things had punched him.