“Shoot him, sir! Shoot his ass!”

The lieutenant walked to the edge of the bank. The first of the three Howlers was struggling to stop and get back to the bank. The thing in the lead fought the current, trying to grab a snag. Bell waited as the man got closer. At ten feet the lieutenant fired twice: two bullets hit the thing dead in the chest. Nothing. The thing caught a snag and pulled itself to the other bank, his back to Bell. Bell could clearly see the bullet’s exit wounds—big rough chunks blown out by the hollow point bullets Bell had fired. The thing crawled up out of the water; another Howler came out right behind him.

The lieutenant panicked. He’d shot the man wearing the overalls multiple times with nine millimeter bullets in the center of his chest, and the thing was acting as if nothing had happened.

God help us, Bell thought. He was frightened; it was like no fear he’d ever felt before. Complete terror overwhelmed him. He fought every instinct that wanted to make him run away, throw down his weapon and run. But he didn’t. He looked back at the sergeant.

“Head, sir! Try the head!” the sergeant screamed.

The thing wearing overalls was turning around on its haunches on the uneven creek bank. It started to howl, the sound deafening. The thing’s mouth was wide open, its shoulders thrown back. It dropped its head, snarled and looked at Bell from across the creek.

This time the lieutenant made himself aim for the thing’s face. Bell got its face on the ramp sight and fired. Its face a halo of blood, the thing fell over. Bell heard the sergeant whoop.

“Head shots work, sir! They don’t like that one bit!”

The thing was staying down, twitching and grinding its heels in the snow bank but staying down.

“They aren’t so tough,” the sergeant yelled. Whitney waded out into the creek, up to his boot tops, and faced the next one floating toward them. He unloaded on the thing’s skull with the club. The lieutenant could hear the club whip through the air, watched the tree branch crush smash its skull. The thing slid into the water and floated on by.

A third one, an old lady, was right behind it. The old lady put her hand up, caught the club and pulled it out of the sergeant’s hands as if she was pulling it away from a baby. The force of it pulled Whitney toward her and further into the water.

The lieutenant waded out into the fast-moving current. The old-lady thing drifted toward him. She was baring her teeth like a mad dog. At two feet, Bell sent his last round into the old-lady thing’s right eye. The whole back of her head came away and splattered into the water. The rest of her slid below the surface.

The bodies were piling up on the snag, three of them now. The fast-moving water cascading over their dead bodies created a foaming white mass over the snag.

Bell reached down for the sergeant, struggling to get out of the deep side of the creek. Bell glanced down the bank after he fired. More things than he could count were running toward them, fifty yards away or less. Bell didn’t want to look anymore. He was sure he was going to lose his nerve.

“Jesus! We’re fucked,” the sergeant said, seeing more of them jump into the water. Whitney turned and looked at him, terrified.

“No, we’re not!” Bell said. “Unless these fucking things can fly, too.” Dropping the empty clip at his feet, Bell reached for the spare clip attached to his shoulder holster and rammed it into the pistol.

CHAPTER 8

In August, the Copenhagen Zoo added an exhibit to promote its primate collection, amidst the baboons and chimpanzees: a Homo sapiens couple who will go about their daily business in a Plexiglas-walled natural habitat consisting of kitchen, living room, bedroom, and workshop, as well as a computer, television, cell phone, and stereo. Said a Zoo official, “We are all monkeys in a way, but some people find that hard to accept.”

Gary,

I thought you might want to join them!

Jeff.

At the bottom of the email was a photo of the young Homo sapiens couple’s “cage.” Gary Summers, 24 and a graduate of Cal Tech, read the email from a classmate who was working for NSA. Two other emails were waiting, but he didn’t have time to open them. He had an appointment in Timberline in an hour and a half, and before the meeting he wanted to stop by the video store to chat up a hot girl he’d seen working the day before.

His instant messaging service popped open with a random text message from a girl he’d met in Yosemite: an incongruous still photo of a mountain biker hopping his bike up the grand staircase of a plush hotel lobby, past well-dressed people, was attached to her message. His iPhone rang, giving him Billboard’s number-three hit: Love Club ring tones he’d downloaded over breakfast. Seeing his ex-girlfriend’s number, he almost let it go to voice mail but decided to take the call. Only because she owed him money.

“Hey.” He had rigged his cell phone with a recording that overlaid random office noise, leading any potential client to think he was sitting in a big time Microsoft-like environment. The app had cost him more than twenty dollars, but he loved it.

“It’s me, Cindy.”

“Hi—how you doing?” Gary looked at his watch, one of Apple’s new beta editions, which he was being paid to test.

He and Cindy had broken up two months ago and she was still calling him. He told himself to be polite. Maybe she was calling to say she would pay him the money she owed him. He wouldn’t mind doing the nasty with her again either, as she leaned toward the kinky. She’d once asked him if it was okay if she arranged a threesome.

“How’s the country boy?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” Gary said. He moved from the handset to the iPhone’s earpiece, losing only a few syllables of the conversation as he placed the “bug” in his ear.

“Come up and visit, bring my bike? What do you think?” she was saying.

“Sure, sure. Anytime,” Gary lied.

“If I did bring a friend, would that be cool?”

Gary was folding up his prize possession while he spoke, a new MacBook Air that had set him back plenty. “Sure.” He set the laptop in a backpack at his feet.

“What about tomorrow? It’s Saturday,” his ex said.

Gary heard a loud banging sound on the back door, then another. “Cindy, can you hold a second?” He pulled his earpiece off without waiting for an answer. He glanced past the living room that he’d set up as an office. His bike shoes clicked on the hardwood floor. He went through the kitchen, glancing at the mess of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. He went to the back door and pulled it open. Nothing. He stepped outside onto the snow. He’d put a few pieces of used garden furniture out in the backyard for his friends when they visited that fall. One of the chairs had been knocked over and looked surreal lying in the snow.

He looked over the field in front him. It was starting to snow in earnest. Summers could see someone, a man, running slowly across the field. The man stopped, turned and then went on. He felt snow hitting his face and shoulders while he stared at the running figure and realized he’d come outside without a shirt.

He stepped back inside the kitchen and locked the back door behind him. He walked back into the living room. His cell phone had dropped the call, a constant problem up here in the Sierra Nevada.