“How much ammunition do we have left?” he said. He began reloading his automatic from a half-full box of ammo on his desk top. They heard a crash in the back of the office. One of the things had punched out the back door’s window and was trying to tear through the wire screen that covered it.
“Well, what are you waiting for!” her boss said. “You going to wait for it to get in here and kill us?”
Patty Tyson lifted her pistol and aimed at the young man climbing through the broken window. She recognized him as the salesman who’d sold her car at the Chevy dealership in Nevada City the week before. She pulled the trigger several times and killed the thing as it tried to climb through the door’s window, its shoulders halfway through it. Her rounds went through the top of its head. It stopped moving; its body hung lifeless. It was the first time she’d ever shot anything, much less a human being.
She turned around. Her fellow officers had run out the front of the office and left her behind. They were jumping into the last working truck. She watched the truck, packed with rangers, pull down the driveway and turn onto the street, its back end sliding on the icy pavement.
* * *
Dr. Poole looked at his wife. The house was cold and dark, the heater and lights not working as the entire county’s electrical grid was down. Her pretty brown face was wet with tears.
“Sweetheart, I need for you to calm down and listen to me. All right?” Marvin said.
“I can’t leave without Richard,” Grace said.
“I’m afraid you have to,” Marvin said. He couldn’t tell her that he’d seen their son on the road. That he’d stopped the car, afraid of Richard when he’d seen him with that strange blank look on his face. His son had been standing in the snow with more of the things, long strands of strange thick-looking saliva hanging from his mouth. Marvin had driven on, not wanting to believe it until he heard Richard make that awful howling sound.
“I promise you, we’ll go by the high school on the way down the mountain,” Marvin said. It was a lie, but he didn’t know what else to say.
“What about Sidney?” she asked.
Marvin looked down at his suitcase. The bedroom was neat. His wife had been cleaning when he’d come in the door. She’d taken one look at him and screamed. His clothes were filthy from the fight in the car. He hadn’t answered her questions at first. He had no words to describe what he’d seen on the road.
“Listen, you have to get a few things together. I have some clothes Mr. Crouchback can probably wear. He is sedated right now. But he’s going to need some warm clothes. Can you fix him up with some? We have to take him. We can’t leave him here,” Marvin said. The doctor crossed the bedroom to his closet and took one of his Mackinaw coats and a few other things he thought would fit their neighbor Crouchback, who was sitting in their living room, obviously very ill. Marvin had done what he could for him.
“What’s wrong with Mr. Crouchback? Why aren’t you explaining anything, Marvin? What’s going on? You say we have to go down the mountain, but you don’t say why. You say we can’t wait and look for Richard, but you won’t say why?”
His wife sat down on the edge of the bed. She was much younger than Marvin, ten years. He had been married before and felt guilty saddling her with an older man, but he’d fallen in love with her so completely that he had been selfish. Now he wished he’d never met her. Then, maybe, she would have been spared all this horror.
“I’m sorry, you just have to trust me right now. Something bad is going on. Some kind of pathogen affecting people, making them sick. Maybe in the water—it’s best if we go down the mountain for the time being. I think it might be better away from here.” The strain of the last few hours was showing on his face. He collapsed on the rug, his elbows on the bed. He let his face fall into his hands. “I saw it developing. I should have been more aggressive.”
His wife came around the bed and helped pick him up. She had never seen him like this before, physically done in. Her own fear was subsumed in the shock of seeing her husband on his knees, talking to himself.
“Honey, please tell me what you saw. What is it?” She sat him on the bed, put her hands in his.
Marvin looked at his wife. He reached up and touched her face. “People have turned into some kind of monsters. They—they —”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Just that, people are turning into something inhuman, something I’ve never seen before. Something no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It’s as if they’ve been physically altered, too.”
“Why do we have to leave? Why is Mr. Crouchback sedated?” she said. Grace looked at the bedroom door. They’d taken Crouchback into the living room and let him lie down on the couch. He was speaking gibberish, not saying anything they could understand. Marvin had found him walking up the road toward the gate of their development in the snow, barefoot, talking to himself—in fact, displaying the symptoms he’d seen in his practice all week.
“He’s sedated because I’m afraid that he might become one of them. The gibberish is a symptom. But I can’t be sure. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”
“Why do we have to leave our home, Marvin? You haven’t told me everything.”
“Because I think that we should.” He couldn’t answer her truthfully. It would frighten her. He needed his wife’s help to save their daughter and get down the mountain, to what he hoped would be safety. If she had seen Richard . . . “I think we better eat something before we go,” he said.
His wife gave him a look Marvin had never seen before. “I’ve tried to call the high school and there’s no answer. Why? Why aren’t you telling me the truth? Why aren’t they answering the phone at the high school, Marvin?”
“I’m going to go look in on Vivian,” he said. “We should leave soon. It’s best.”
“Where are we going, Marvin? At least tell me that!” his wife said.
Marvin held the door. He was exhausted. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where they should go. All he could hope was that if they went somewhere else, they could escape the nightmare around them.
“I’m not sure exactly where yet. Down the mountain,” he said and closed the door.
CHAPTER 15
Turning from Main Street, Dillon walked down a side street’s antique duckboard sidewalk. The snow piled up here and there, dumped by the morning’s violent storm. Architectural features that had been obscured by the storm—doorways, banisters, cornices—were sharply outlined by sunshine.
An old man wearing a grease-stained snowsuit left a hardware store, bumping Dillon on the way to his car. The old man pretended not to notice the pistol stuck in Dillon’s belt, or the two hanging from his double shoulder holsters. The storefronts, the parked cars, the occasional pedestrians walking to their cars or toward Main Street, were still oblivious of the danger around the corner.
If the government would just tell people, Dillon thought, watching the old man get in his pickup truck and drive away as if everything were still normal.
The snow banks piled against the buildings were stark white, almost painful to look at without sunglasses. Dillon, having lost his dark glasses in the crash, had to squint.
His arm had been cut when he’d stopped to help a woman save her baby from one of the things. The Howler had been about to smash the baby’s head on the ground by its legs. The mother, screaming in horror, had tried to fight the thing. Dillon had stopped and pistol-whipped the Howler, smacking him in the side of the head. He’d managed to snatch the baby away, but the thing had sprung up and bit him on the forearm. It had torn out a mouth-sized chunk of flesh before Dillon had shot him dead in the face.