Miles ran to the front door and locked it. He turned and saw the thing still twitching and clawing the living room carpet, the back of its head gone. The girl who had shot it seemed to be in a trance. She stepped over the dying still-squirming thing and walked down the hall toward the bedrooms.
“We better get back to the doctor’s,” Patty said, not bothering to turn around.
A loud rap sounded on the front door and then another, much louder. Miles jumped as if he’d been shocked. He slid open a metal cover on the front door’s peep hole and looked outside. He saw a Howler’s eye staring back at him, very close.
“Open the door,” Patty said.
Miles turned around. He saw the girl standing directly behind him. She had a hunting rifle slung over her shoulder, and was holding a pump-style shotgun in both hands. “Go ahead, open it.”
“Give me the rifle. There’s a pack of them out in the street in front of the doctor’s place.”
Patty unslung the Winchester .30-30 she’d found in Crouchback’s bedroom and handed it to Miles.
“It’s fully loaded,” Patty said. “He kept it loaded. Five rounds, one in the pipe. Make them count,” she said.
Miles looked at her. “You sure?”
“My father was a deer hunter,” Patty said. “I grew up with that model Winchester around the house. He used to make me clean it. Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes,” Miles said. “Six rounds.”
Patty reached over and unlocked the front door. Miles leveled the Winchester, pulling the hammer back, just before the door flew open.
CHAPTER 19
It had stopped snowing around three in the afternoon. The sky above them was crepuscular, red-tinged, and peaceful, Quentin thought, as the four of them sped down the narrow road. He glanced down at the gas gauge and saw that he still had a good half-tank of fuel in his patrol car. Better than nothing.
“You can’t keep me handcuffed, Quentin. It’s not fair,” Rebecca said.
“You promise not to shoot anyone?” Quentin asked. They were driving away from Timberline and toward Highway 50, on the two-lane road that had just been plowed that morning. The snow was six feet high on either side of the narrow county road. The patrol car’s red and blue lights were on. They were dodging abandoned cars that had been stopped by Howlers, the occupants dragged out and murdered. At times they had to slow down and weave around whole groups of cars. Some had been rolled over. At times it was necessary to drive the abandoned cars off the road in order to get past them.
A few random Howlers were still on the road. When Quentin could do so at the right speed, so that they wouldn’t hurt the patrol car, he pointed at a standing Howler and ran them over. One had gotten stuck in the patrol car’s undercarriage and been dragged, howling and screaming, for more than a mile, until its asphalt-burnt body had been torn apart and it finally shut up. The windshield on the patrol car’s passenger side had been shattered by a big Howler—a man Dillon recognized as the short-order cook at the Denny’s where he’d stopped that morning. The Howler had walked into the middle of the road and thrown a rock straight at their car as they sped toward him. The Howler was still wearing his apron and grey-checkered cook’s pants he’d worn earlier that morning.
“Okay, I promise,” Rebecca said.
“I don’t believe her,” Dillon said.
“Shut up. You murdered my father,” Rebecca said. “Asshole. Murderer!”
“Here’s the deal,” Dillon said. “It wasn’t your father anymore. He’d become one of them. I told you.”
“It’s true, Rebecca. I went down there myself and looked at your dad. He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that,” Quentin said. “I’m sorry. It happened to Sharon.”
“Sharon?” Rebecca said, stunned.
“Yes. This morning. We had to—end it. I know how you feel. But they wouldn’t have wanted to go on living like that. You know that as well as I do. It wasn’t really Sharon anymore,” Quentin said.
“Hey, the kid has fallen asleep,” Dillon said. He nodded to Gary Summers, who was nodding out his head against the window, fast asleep.
“He’s a pussy,” Rebecca said. “You should let him out. He’s no good to anyone.”
“Okay, unlock her cuffs,” Quentin said, taking the key from his shirt pocket. “She’s calmed down enough—I hope.”
Dillon took the handcuff key, reached over and unlocked the girl’s handcuffs. Rebecca opened the cuffs, lifting the bracket up from her right wrist, sliding her wrist out. She did the same with her left hand, freeing it too.
“Rebecca, I need your help. Up here, where we’re going. I’m going to arrest the men who raped Lacy. You’ve known my daughters, both of them, since you all were little girls. Will you help me do this?”
Rebecca sat back in the seat. She tossed the cuffs up to Dillon, who caught them.
“Lacy was raped?” she said.
“Yes, today. She was looking for Sharon and went to one of the gang’s houses in Timberline,” Quentin said.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“I knew Sharon was hanging out with those guys. I told her it was crazy,” Rebecca said. Lacy Collier had been one of her good friends in high school. Despite everything that had happened to her father and to her world in the last ten hours, the news of Lacy’s rape seemed to affect her in a strange way. She had always been jealous of Lacy having a mother when she herself didn’t. She liked to visit the Colliers’ home to see what having a mother was like. When Lacy’s mother died, it was as if her own mother had died.
“That’s fucked up,” Rebecca said. “Yeah, I’ll help. Sure.”
“There may be a gunfight,” Quentin said. “You okay with that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay with that,” Rebecca said. She looked over at Summers, who was still sleeping. “What are you going to do with the little bitch?” Rebecca said.
The man who’d shot her father laughed.
“I plan on taking him with us. When we’re finished up here, we’re going to Chuck Phelps’s place. Lacy is going to meet us there. We’ll stay there at Chuck’s place until the Army comes and they get rid of these—”
“Howlers,” Dillon said. “That’s what they called them down in Elko.”
The patrol car slowed down and Quentin took a right turn onto a narrow single lane. There was a nest of mailboxes, some with mail still stuffed in them, at the turn off.
“This is where I figure they’ll be,” Quentin said. It sounded to the others like he might be talking to himself.
* * *
Lacy looked out the bedroom window at Bell. He’d gone outside to the driveway to check on the truck. It was snowing very hard, so hard that at times it seemed the storm would cover everything and make it disappear: the driveway, the truck, even the lieutenant. They’d searched the house but found no firearms. Bell had found only a golf club. He carried it with him outside.
Lacy realized that the Lieutenant was a brave man and Robin Wood had been a coward, something she would never have expected. Smoke poured from the truck’s exhaust pipe as Bell kicked over the engine. The windshield wipers came on and pushed wind-driven piled-up snow off the windshield. Bell got out of the truck and moved the snow off the windshield with his hand. He climbed back in and drove the truck out onto the driveway and close to the front door. For just the briefest second, she’d panicked, thinking that Bell, too, was going to abandon her. But she watched him turn the truck and pull it very close to the front door, so when they left they wouldn’t have to cross the wide driveway.