The burst hit the Howler in the shoulders and stitched a flesh-tearing line across its chest. Even then, the Howler landed a strong third punch as if nothing were wrong, the dozen or more .45 caliber slugs only a nuisance.
Dillon moved the barrel up and caught the thing’s head, pouring rounds at the Howler’s skull and demolishing it. Dillon kept firing, chipping off chunks of face and skull until the thing slumped over, dead. Rebecca ran over and tried to pick Quentin up, but he was out cold.
“Fuck.” Dillon moved the flashlight off Quentin and swung it onto the far corner of the cabin’s porch, where the Howler had been lurking. He carefully looked for any others, but saw nothing. “Let’s take him inside.” He handed his Thompson to Summers.
The kid was frightened and tired. He seemed dazed. For just an instant, Dillon felt like pushing him down in the snow and leaving him outside for the Howlers to kill. He hated the kid for being so useless. He might just have smacked him, but Quentin’s cell phone began to ring.
Rebecca was able to dig the phone from Quentin’s over-stuffed down parka. “Yeah, who is it?” Rebecca said.
Dillon shone the light on the girl’s face.
“It’s Lacy. Who is this?”
“Lacy! It’s Rebecca Stewart. Jesus, where are you?”
“I’m at the new hotel on Branch Road—do you know it?”
“Yeah. Sure. The fancy one,” Rebecca said.
“Yes, you have to come here and get us. Tell my dad. They’ve got us held here.”
“Who’s got you?”
“Two people—let me talk to my dad. Please.”
“I can’t.’”
“Why?”
“I just can’t,” Rebecca said. “He’s busy. We’re at the Phelps’s place.” Rebecca lied instinctively, afraid to tell Lacy her father was hurt.
“Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Rebecca said. “He just can’t talk on the phone.”
“Can you come, Rebecca? We need help. Please.”
“Who’s with you?” Rebecca said.
“The lieutenant. The one we met today. Dad knows who he is.”
“Okay. Yeah, we’ll come.”
“Rebecca, tell Dad they’re crazy. The people who—” the line went dead. Quentin’s cell-phone battery had run low and dropped the call.
“Who was that?” Dillon said.
“It’s Lacy. Quentin’s daughter. She needs help.”
“Tell her to get in line,” Dillon said. “Now help me get his heavy ass inside there.”
Summers stepped up and helped Dillon pick Quentin’s limp body up from the snow. Rebecca went up the stairs. Slipping on the thick gut-covered decking, she dragged the two dead bodies from in front of the cabin’s door and rolled them off the porch. They fell, one after the other, into the darkness.
“The key!” Dillon said.
“Shit.” Rebecca realized that it had been knocked out of Quentin’s hand when he was attacked.
“It must be up there,” Dillon said. He put Quentin back down in the snow, walked up the stairs and looked down on the blood-soaked porch. The Maglite’s beam caught bone bits and human guts mixed in with pig shit.
“It was pigs,” Rebecca said. “Please, God,” She got on her hands and knees and started to fish through the slimy offal and cold pig shit, laying her palms out flat and running them over everything, trying to feel for the key ring. “I got it! Give me that fucking light!” She jumped up, signaling for the Maglite, and ran toward the door, Quentin’s key ring in hand. She tucked the Maglite under her arm and went through several keys on the ring before she found the one that slipped into the lock. Her hands were slick and sticky with blood, her fingers freezing.
“Open, you fucking piece of shit!” She pushed the key in the lock and the door pushed open. It had been left unlocked since that morning, when Chuck rode away—and left open a second time when the accountant had tried to run out of the cabin with Chuck’s ninety-pound German Shepherd hanging from his neck, its teeth sunk deep into the man’s throat.
* * *
Lieutenant Bell was hanging upside down with his hands hog-tied behind him. He’d been strung up in the hotel’s lobby. He was hanging from a rope that had been thrown over a beam running across the lobby’s high ceiling. Everything Bell saw was from a disorienting upside-down point of view. He could hear the music in the bar blaring: the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.” From this strange angle, he watched two Howlers come through the lobby door and head straight for him. They were making a terrifying noise, excited perhaps because of the way he was strung up, and obviously helpless. Perhaps they were sensing an easy kill.
Bell’s heart raced to the point he thought it was going to actually burst. The two things loped across the huge lobby toward him, their eyes wild. He was swinging slightly. It had been Johnny’s idea to swing him occasionally, because he found it even more entertaining.
Sue Ling was the first to stand up from behind the lobby’s bar and take careful aim at one of the creatures, a Howler dressed in a prison guard’s uniform. She waited for it to get about three feet from Bell before she fired her pistol. She and Johnny, both dead-drunk, had concocted a “live video game” to see how close they could let Howlers get to Bell, before they shot them down from their firing position behind the bar.
Sue Ling missed.
Bell screamed, as the thing was only a foot away. Sue Ling fired a tremendously loud second shot. This time she caught the Howler in the head and its whole body fell violently back, stone dead.
Bell began to scream involuntarily. The second Howler had reached him and grabbed him by the collar. It stopped and looked at him, ribbons of saliva pouring from its gaping mouth.
Let me go home.
Why don’t they let me go home.
This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
“Four!” Johnny yelled. Bell, his head turned toward the bar by the Howler tugging on his jaw, saw Johnny’s gun barrel flash. Johnny had popped up from behind the bar. A bullet struck the Howler in the side of the head. The impact from the Desert Eagle’s round knocked the thing over, shattering its skull. Its contents splattered Bell’s face with warm blood and greyish-colored brains.
“What a fucking cool game!” Sue Ling said. “You all right, honey?”
Bell’s body was swinging. He heard the beam holding the rope creak. He had grey matter and blood on his face, covering his eyes. He heard himself scream at the top of his lungs, unable to stop. His long, horrible ululation was completely involuntary.
“He’s okay!” Johnny yelled. He came out from behind the bar and doused Bell’s face with a glass of cold beer, then wiped Bell’s brain-splattered face off with a dirty bar towel so he could see again.
“I’m going to kill you,” Bell whispered, looking up at him. “I swear to God! If it’s the last thing I ever do. I’m going to kill you.”
“Swing him higher!” Sue Ling yelled from the bar. “There’s more of ‘em out there. “Shit, this is fun, baby!”
Johnny Ryder grabbed the yellow-nylon rope holding Bell upside down. As if Bell were a child in a schoolyard, Ryder swung him. He grabbed the rope and ran as far as Bell’s body weight would let him. He ran after Bell’s swinging body and caught it, as it swung in the opposite direction, and pushed him higher. Bell’s body was swinging across the entire lobby, Bell’s head just missing the concierge desk. Johnny lifted the Desert Eagle and fired a round into the ceiling.