“The law can pick it up from there,” Billings assured Cooley, who had gotten him out of some hot water with the IRS. Billings considered Cooley a little bitch, but a useful one. “These types are all pretty much the same. They’re out of touch. Most of them are crazy. You say he’s a Vietnam vet?” Billings was sweating slightly because he’d splurged on a mineral bath and rub-down after breakfast with one of the cute hard-bodies Cooley had staffed the place with.
“Yes. But that might be just a story, you know, to get sympathy. Like bums who hold up cardboard signs and ask for handouts,” Cooley said. He turned off the satellite radio, tuned to 80’s hits. Cooley loved and admired Sting. They’d just missed the first on-air government warning about the Howlers, broadcast over satellite radio that morning.
“How far is the cabin from the road?” Billings asked.
“Not far. I was up there last summer. He took a shot at me!”
This was a lie; the truth was more prosaic. Phelps was in Timberline. The accountant had gathered up all his courage and decided to confront Phelps about his gun range—a perfectly legal one, the hick local sheriff had explained to Cooley. One that Quentin had checked himself, and found respected all the county’s ordinances about outdoor gun ranges.
“Yes,” Cooley continued. “Nearly killed me. I told the police up here, but they’re all, you know. They’re all a bunch of hillbilly types. You can’t believe it. It’s like going back in time up here. Everyone knows everyone. And they protect this crazy guy just because he was born here.” “He shot at you?”
“Yes. Nearly killed me, too. Came close. I ran, had to,” Cooley lied.
“I see,” Billings said. “And you told the police up here?”
“Yes.”
“All right, let’s go have a word with this yahoo.” Marching past a “No Trespassing” sign without a warrant made no difference to the two men.
Three Howlers attacked the two men as they climbed the steps to the Phelps cabin. Two were naked, a man and wife, having gotten sick while at the B&B’s isolated “lovers only” outdoor hot tub on a deck in the woods.
Cooley, always quick-witted, pushed Billings down in the snow in hopes he could make it into the cabin in time. Billings, already exhausted, fell backwards toward the screaming creatures who had run up behind them. Sitting in the snow, Billings took out his service pistol and fired at the screaming naked Howlers, missing all but the closest, which he killed by sheer luck. The other two reached him as his pistol clicked empty. One of them, the man, knelt immediately in the snow and shit. It was the strangest thing Billings had ever seen. The woman waited, not sure whether she should go on toward Cooley who was just making it up the stairs to the cabin.
“Help! Help me! For God sake!” Billings yelled. He stood up.
The female Howler, waiting for her mate, knelt and began to howl.
“Help me! I’ve hurt my ankle,” Billings said, not aware that it was Cooley who had pushed him down as he was running.
Cooley opened the door, stole a quick glance at the terrified injured man and then closed the cabin door behind him, locking it. Exhausted and drenched in sweat, Cooley watched from the window as the two Howlers literally pulled Billings apart, tearing his arms off his body first, as if he were a paper doll.
Still alive, Billings stood up, arms gone and shoulders spurting blood, and limped pathetically toward the cabin. But the creatures caught him after only a few steps.
Cooley, hands shaking, pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911.
“Hello, 911?”
“Yes, 911 operator speaking.”
“Operator,” Cooley said, “I’m in a cabin in the woods and someone has just been murdered.”
“Can you hold, please? We’re receiving a high number of calls.”
“NO, I CAN’T HOLD!” Cooley dropped his phone on the floor and blocked the door with an old-fashioned steel bar he saw for the purpose. The bar fell in place across the door, held by two steel hooks. Cooley, feeling safe, watched the naked creatures through the cabin’s small windows. Both were running toward the porch. The two things jumped up the stairs onto the porch; he watched them pound on the bullet-proof, two-inch thick, military-grade, and bomb-proof plastic.
He stared at the ugly things as the Howlers tried to smash the small windows. He backed away from the blood-printed glass as both Howlers broke their wrists trying to punch through it. It was impossible; the window’s thick plastic was too tough. The two finally stopped pounding, their broken and dangling hands useless, both began to howl and shriek.
“Jesus,” Cooley said, staring at the naked couple. Their faces had changed from just a day ago. Jesus . . . those two were staying at the B&B. He turned from the small bloodstained window and saw two dogs looking up at him. One of them, a giant German Shepherd, started to growl and then leapt at his throat.
CHAPTER 21
They’d stopped unexpectedly. The Land Rover’s headlights were shining on the entrance to an expensive five-star hotel’s elegant roadside entrance. The entrance was flanked by six-foot high portals made of smooth river stones, built to mark the place. The entrance, bathed in floodlights, stood out in the pitch black night as if nothing were wrong and the elegant hotel were open for business.
“Now what do we have here?” Johnny said. “How come they still got electricity?”
“Probably emergency generators,” Bell said from the backseat.
“It’s a hotel,” Lacy said. “What are we stopping here for?”
“People in there might need our help,” Johnny said. He had taken a suit of clothes from a mansion they’d robbed earlier. He was wearing a pair of expensive pants and jacket that were mismatched. The jacket was snakeskin and had cost $5,000. He’d taken the owner’s expensive Borsalino-made Panama hat, too, and was sporting it when he’d stopped to pick them up.
Johnny dug in the jacket pocket and took out a pharmacy-style pill container. “Got a thousand Oxy tablets at the Rite Aid in Reno! The whole damn pharmacy was wide open. No one there except some very dead people. Want some?” Johnny asked, looking at them in the rear-view mirror.
“No, thanks,” Bell said.
“Sure? Makes things a lot better. Got to face all this shit out here without drugs is hard on a man,” he said.
“I’ll say,” his girlfriend said. “A lot better with them than without them.” The girl was high and had chattered on the whole time since the couple had stopped for them, as if they were all on a lark, instead living a nightmare.
Lacy reached for Bell’s hand. It was the first time they’d touched like that. She wrapped her hand around his and held it tightly.
“Why don’t we just go on and meet up with my dad,” Lacy said. “It’s better if there’s more of us.”
“Well, for one reason I got some business up in there,” Johnny said.
“What kind of business?” Bell asked. The two stoners were using the horrible chaos as an opportunity to steal and loot without worrying about the usual consequences. It was why he had left them earlier that morning. It was crazy and immoral, yet they were doing it. Bell hated the man behind the wheel in the worst way. His old grandmother, a sharecropper all her life, had once said to him that the Devil at his strongest “wears a Sunday suit, but a Saturday-night smile.”