* * *
Dillon had sat in the cabin’s control room with Miles and watched the Howlers gathering for the last three hours.
“There are a thousand. Maybe more,” Miles said under his breath.
“More,” Dillon said. They looked at each other.
“There’s no way we can stop them if they want to get in here,” Miles said.
“Stop being such a pussy,” Dillon said, turning back to look at the monitors.
Miles reached up and flipped on the switch marked Sound Front Driveway. Immediately they heard the howling. It was the most horrible sound Miles thought he’d ever heard—overwhelming. He turned it off. He felt panicked, sure they were going to die. He looked around the concrete room. It seemed smaller than it had only an hour ago. It was cold in the room. He stood up.
“What are we going to do?” Miles said. His chest was tight. He turned off the screens. The monitors went dark. “What good is it to see them out there? Look how many there are!”
Dillon turned and looked at the younger man. He’d seen men go stir-crazy in prison. The kid had the same panicked look on his face. It often happened to new arrivals at San Quentin, men who were not used to sitting in a cell for long periods of time. He was used to small spaces, to the feeling of being locked down, suffocating, but he too had lost it after being in solitary confinement for six weeks. He’d woken up one morning and felt the walls actually move toward him. The prison’s psychiatrist who came to visit him later, after he’d gone “buggy,” said that sensory deprivation caused several symptoms. One of them was a sense of panic and the feeling you couldn’t breathe. It could even induce hallucinations.
“You’re okay, kid?” Dillon said. He took his arm. “You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”
The kid looked at him, his blue eyes crazy. “Maybe I’m becoming one of them,” Miles blurted. “I don’t feel good. Sick. Stomach.”
Dillon kept his hand on Miles’ arm. When he’d been in solitary confinement, he’d had the desire for another human being’s touch, anyone’s touch. He’d imagined he would die without feeling that kind of touch, he’d sat in the cell and remembered exactly how his mother used to touch his forehead when he’d been upset. He’d dreamt of his mother’s warm hand on his face. Once he’d sat in the cold “isolation cell” calling Patty’s name, trying to remember lying with her in bed, the incredible lush feeling of her naked body pressed next to his.
“You’re not sick. Sit down,” Dillon ordered. “You’re hungry. Let’s get out of here and go up into the cabin. There’s food. We’ll cook something. You’ll see. You’ll feel better.”
Miles sat down. The fear had gone from his eyes. His face changed, his look of panic gone.
“Thanks. I—”
“It’s okay,” Dillon said. “Fucking Howlers make you go nuts. Right?”
“Yeah,” Miles said, feeling ashamed of himself. He looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He could see his fingers trembling.
“Can you cook, kid?” Dillon asked.
“No. My mother—” He had not thought of his parents until Price had texted him. “I think I’ll call my mom and dad. Maybe they could make it here, too,” Miles said. He took out his phone and checked for a signal, but had none. “Phone doesn’t work down here. I’ll go up and try.”
“Sure, kid,” Dillon said. He saw some white spit forming on the corner of Miles’ lips, but didn’t let it register on his face. Instead he smiled and stood up, and they went up to the cabin’s main floor.
Chuck’s notes on the cabin’s larder, and the kitchen, were twenty pages long. He’d stocked regular food stuffs, including fresh vegetables and fruits, in a cold room at the back of the kitchen. Multiple cases of freeze-dried foods were stored downstairs in the bunker. At the end of the notes, Phelps had described the edible plants of the Sierra region and referred to several books on foraging in the cabin’s library.
The five of them sat at the big pine table with long benches, the small bulletproof window directly across from it. They had a view out onto the snowy field in front of the cabin. A few Howlers were scouting the cabin; others were sitting on the driveway, howling. One or two had already run up on the porch and banged on the window and door before Dillon had walked out onto the porch and killed them with a fully-automatic SCAR 17, the stock folded up so it was shortened.
They heated up canned chili and tried to pretend that the howling didn’t bother them. Twice Dr. Poole had walked to the window to look out on the howling creatures. Once he’d opened one of the firing ports built into the cabin’s wall and used a high-powered .306 to shoot one of the closest Howlers dead. But it didn’t seem to matter, as more from the road were coming up and sitting on the driveway—in plain sight—in that weird way they had, like coyotes, their heads tilted back, their face bent toward the night sky.
It was Lacy who got Marvin and led him back to the table, telling him his food was getting cold. She’d gently pulled him away from the window, taking the rifle from his hands and placing it against the wall.
All of the men, not wanting to admit it, were glad that she was playing the role of mother. Something about it was reassuring. They had watched her cook with rapt attention, all of them appreciating the normalcy of her opening cans of chili and filling a big stew-sized pot with it. She’d found bread and heated that up in the oven, never once acknowledging the howling. Lacy had not even stopped her preparations for dinner when Dillon had gone out on the porch to shoot the two Howlers dead.
Phelps’s larder was huge and ran down the length of the cabin’s west wall. It was stocked with all kinds of foodstuffs, enough for two years for fifteen people, the computer printout said. Lacy had read the “Kitchen” section of Chuck’s instructions—which had been addressed to her, as if he’d known all along that she would come here and be the one to read them.
Chuck had left a hand written note thumb-tacked to the cold-storage door.
Dear Lacy,
I hope it’s you who is reads this. If it is I know you are safe here. I promised your mother, long ago, that your family would have a place to go if the shit ever hit the fan. So now it has, but you, your dad, and sister will all be safe here. I remember when your mom first brought you here as a baby. Here is the photo I took of you and your mom a year after you were born. It was September and hot as hell! Love “uncle” Chuck.
Lacy understood that Chuck Phelps had been in love with her mother, and that they might have been more than just good friends—perhaps even lovers? It didn’t shock her. She’d always liked Chuck.
She looked at the old-school photo. It showed a young woman with a beautiful baby. Her mother was holding her up to the camera. Both mother and baby were smiling at the photographer. Pine trees were behind them, and a piece of machinery of some kind. It was at that moment, while she’d been looking at the photo, that Dillon had walked out on the porch despite the danger of being overpowered, and the sound of automatic-weapons fire filled the cabin. In a moment he’d ducked back into the cabin, closing the door. They were all looking at him gripping the wicked assault rifle, his face splattered with blood.
Lacy calmly put the photo back where she’d found it and went back to fixing dinner.
The first attack, waves of Howlers, came while they were eating. They just stared as hundreds of the creatures started running up the driveway toward the cabin. It was surreal, Lacy thought, looking up and seeing the snow-covered field empty and beautiful one minute, then full of Howlers the next. She stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs. Miles didn’t hear his cell phone ringing in the commotion that ensued; all of them had run to the cabin’s built-in gunports, where they’d prepared weapons, and opened fire on the attacking horde. For half the night or longer they fired at the Howlers, wave after wave of them running at the cabin.