“I’ll take the purse,” Sue Ling said. She’d come out of the bar where they’d gone to sit. She must have been watching him. “It’s Louis Vuitton,” the girl said.
Bell threw her the handbag.
“Good work, sweet cheeks. Keep it up,” Sue Ling said, catching the purse. She turned and headed back toward the bar.
“Wouldn’t the elevator be safer?” Lacy said. They were standing in front of a sign in the lobby that marked the stairwell.
“I don’t know,” Bell said. “We have to keep looking for money. We’ve only collected about $3,000 dollars so far.” Muzak played from a speaker in the ceiling above them. “We’ll have to go through some rooms.
They heard a howling start up from somewhere in the building. They looked at each other. Another and another answered the first. It was obvious that Howlers were on the upper floors of the place.
“Why don’t we just kill them?” Lacy said. “You could have shot her just now.”
“Yes.” The idea of shooting the girl in cold blood was difficult for him to imagine. “If we have to, all right,” Bell said. “I’ll do it.”
“He plans on killing us,” Lacy said. “It’s obvious.”
“I’m not so sure,” Bell said. “I think they would have done it already. Out there on the road. I think they need help, if they’re attacked. That’s why we’re still alive. He knows if there are four of us they’ll stand a better chance of it in a fight with the things. My guess is that their plan is to use us. And we need them too, out there on the road, if there’s a fight.”
“Do you think he’ll take us to my dad’s?”
“Maybe he will, and for the same reasons. He’s betting that whatever they’ve done won’t matter now. They’ll add strength to any group we are a part of, and be welcomed.”
“Everything’s changed,” Lacy said. “Nothing matters. What people do any more doesn’t matter.”
“Survival matters,” Bell said.
She fell into his arms and held him tightly. “We need them too, then. It’s awful, this new world,” she said. “They’re evil.”
“Do you want me to kill them?” Bell pulled her away and looked her in the eye.
Her expression was changed from the girl he’d found earlier that day. They were not the eyes of a wounded girl any more. They were older and harder, angry perhaps.
“No. No. I think you’re right to wait,” she said. “If we have to, I’ll help you do it.” She kissed him. She had an overpowering feeling of physical desire for Bell, a need to hold him. It was something atavistic and strangely primeval. She’d never felt anything like it; it was a powerful human need, the kind of love/security that had pushed human beings from socially-lame, monkey-like creatures to tribal societies with vast social powers—the most prominent being the ability to war as a tribe, one united and bloody fist held up to their enemies.
Bell, sensing something change, kissed her. He could hear the howling above them and didn’t care; he was getting used to that horrid sound. The howling no longer frightened him.
CHAPTER 22
“They’re both dead. And so is the dog,” Dillon said, looking up from the pile of half-eaten human intestines. He’d lifted the big dead German Shepherd off the fatter of the two dead, half-eaten eviscerated bodies lying on the cabin’s front porch.
“It wasn’t the dogs that pulled their guts out. It was feral pigs. We have them here,” Quentin said. He moved his heavy Maglite, sending its powerful yellow beam beyond Dillon, who was standing in a pile of guts. The flashlight’s beam caught a second dead dog lying by the cabin’s front door. “Pigs killed the dogs, I think.”
“Do you know the two dead guys?” Dillon asked.
“One of them,” Quentin said. “The fat one owns the place near mine.” He moved the light onto the cabin’s front door and saw it was closed. He moved the beam again, to the left, pointing it toward one of the cabin’s small windows.
“Why didn’t they smash the windows and bust in—the Howlers?” Dillon said.
“Don’t know. Something better came along?” Quentin said. “Maybe it was the dogs. Who knows?”
“Is this Chuck’s famous cabin?” Rebecca said. She was standing at the bottom of the steps next to Summers, and behind Quentin.
“This is it,” Quentin said. He pulled the key to the cabin’s front door from his pocket. The key was attached to his own key ring. He started toward the door.
Chuck Phelps had come to the hospital to visit Quentin’s wife and given her the key to his cabin, telling her all his secrets about the place. Marie, in turn, had made Quentin promise that he would carry the key with him from that day on. She’d had a dream about the cabin, she told him. In the dream an old man, “a priest-like figure,” had come to her and told her that if they lost the key they would all die—all of them: she, Quentin, and their two girls. Whatever Chuck had told her, when he came to visit her in the hospital that day, had made a profound impression on Quentin’s dying wife. Quentin had thought it was the morphine drip that had made her fixate on the key.
From the first time they’d met, Marie had always treated Chuck Phelps with a special kindness and respect, as if they shared a secret. As if she knew Phelps would be important to their family someday. On the morning she died, Marie had made Quentin promise that he would keep the cabin key on him always.
“It’s not what you think, the key,” his wife told him. He remembered her face as he walked toward the cabin’s front door. How could she have known this day would come, he thought.
“My dad and Phelps were friends. Chuck told us about the place and that we would be one of the ‘chosen few’ who could come here. I always thought he was touched. You know, a little crazy,” Rebecca said.
The four of them had walked through the dark and through the thigh-high snow, leaving the patrol car behind on the county road. All they had for light was Quentin’s one Maglite. They’d heard howling over near the bed and breakfast and knew that the Howlers were nearby so they’d been careful, weapons at the ready, as they trekked toward the cabin in single file—Quentin in the lead, and Dillon covering their rear. Summers had lost his weapon in the snow when he fell. He’d not spoken a word since the shootout.
As Quentin stepped up onto the porch, something flew from a dark corner of the porch and knocked him backwards. A black Howler, one they couldn’t have seen—silent because of the crossbow arrow protruding from its throat—had been lurking in the dark corner. It knocked the flashlight out of Quentin’s hand. They were plunged into darkness.
Quentin, pushed back off the porch, felt his face being punched as soon as he sank into the snow. The first punch hit him square in the nose and stunned him. The second, from the creature, knocked him unconscious. The Howler was big, with big fists, and with its added creature’s strength, the blows were devastating.
Dillon ran through the snow toward a tiny pool of light. The Maglite had fallen, its lens pointed down and into the snow. He grabbed it and shone it on the thing squatting over Quentin. Its fist was raised back, ready to strike him a third time. Dillon fired his Thompson, muzzle flashing, from the hip.