One of the milling Howlers looked up. It started to shriek, then howl. It made for Dillon, the Ford between them. The Howler, about twenty and clad in Cal-Trans overalls, climbed over the top of the Ford, taking the direct route. Dillon waited for him to come over the Ford’s roof. He shot him as soon as he came over the top, blowing him backwards. Several Howlers came up over the Ford in the same manner. Dillon fired again and again; three Howlers dropped from the shotgun’s blasts. The rest of the group came up at him, the same way, over the top of the Ford, just as he expected.

They’re so stupid!

“Stupid fuckers,” Dillon said out loud. He dropped the shotgun, now empty and pulled out the two pistols he had holstered before he’d walked into the bank. He began to fire.

The last Howler—another kid, only about ten—dropped at his feet as the pistols clicked empty. Dead Howlers rolled off the top of the Ford and onto the floor of the destroyed brokerage office. He picked up a section of gas line and smashed the kid in the head, killing him.

The heavy smell of cordite mixed with stinking Howler blood, but the Howlers were all dead and he had the two bags of money at his feet. “It was me or the money, motherfuckers!” he shouted, the adrenalin pumping through him so hard he felt high.

One of the stockbrokers—fat, still alive, his white shirt stained with blood—looked at him from the smashed water cooler where he’d been standing talking about George Clooney’s new girlfriend on his phone, and how he’d “like to do her, too.” He was frozen with fear but miraculously untouched, his belly sagging over his belt. CNBC was playing on a TV on the wall above him as if nothing had happened.

“You better clear out,” Dillon said to the fat man. “There’s probably more of them.”

The man—in shock—nodded, finally moving his head and dropping his phone.

Dillon picked up the two heavy canvas bags of money, each stamped with “Bank Of America on its sides, and walked out of the hole in the storefront office and into the chaos on the street.

*   *   *

“Dad, I want you to meet Gary Summers,” Rebecca said. She was standing next to Gary and smiling.

Mr. Stewart looked at the kid from behind the counter and smiled back. “Any friend of Rebecca’s is a friend of mine,” he said.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Rebecca said. “Come on in and I’ll show you the store.”

Gary followed. “I didn’t lock my bike,” he said.

Rebecca looked at her father and they both laughed.

“Son, you don’t have to lock you bike here in Timberline. And people don’t steal much from in front of gun stores, usually.”

Gary took one more look back at his $2,000 mountain bike. It was his prize possession, and he wasn’t sure.

Rebecca grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up to the long counter. “We got more pistols than any gun store in the Sierras,” she said, looking down at the huge assortment of handguns. “That’s why those people outside are mad at us.”

Summers didn’t know what to say. He looked up from the counter and saw that Rebecca’s father was looking down on the arsenal proudly.

“You an auto man, or revolver?” Stewart asked.

“Auto, I guess?” Gary said, not sure what the man meant; all his knowledge of firearms had come from video games or TV shows.

“I thought so,” Stewart said. He took out a Smith and Wesson 1918 Colt 45 and put it out on the counter on a piece of green felt. “Now that pistol, right here—and I don’t care what anyone says about the Glocks—This is the one I’d take to a gunfight,” Rebecca’s father said.

Gary looked at the thing. His parents had been horrified when he’d asked for a GI Joe once for his birthday. He reached for the pistol and picked it up. It was cold and slightly oily to the touch, and heavier than he expected. The pimpled grip felt oddly sensual. He’d never touched any kind of firearm in his life.

“How do you—load it?” Gary asked, fascinated. “Down here, right?”

Mr. Stewart and Rebecca were both too polite to register their shock at his ignorance.

“We got a shooting range downstairs in the basement. Want to try it?” Rebecca suggested. It was best to get him up to speed with firearms as soon as possible, before he said anything else that might put her dad off.

“Sure,” Summers said.

Rebecca winked at her father. It was a signal they used for inside jokes and for city-people ways, which were always strange.

Rebecca closed the door behind them. A steep flight of stairs faced them, with a yellow light shining on a concrete floor at the bottom.

“I used to bring all my boyfriends down to the range,” Rebecca said with a smile. She put her hand in his hair; he almost fell backwards, and she had to grab him by the arm. She pulled him close and kissed him.

Gary felt her tongue slip into his mouth. It was all getting to be a little too much: first guns, now Rebecca’s tongue darting down and touching the roof of his mouth and rubbing its roof sensually.

She finally pulled away. “You want to screw?”

“Yeah, sure,” Summers said. “But what about your father?”

Rebecca looked down the stairs past him as if he were a child.

He wanted to do both. Both seemed fun. He had a fantasy of shooting the pistol while they made love. He looked at her beautiful face in the light from a naked light bulb hung over the stairs. The basement smell mixed with something else: gunpowder, he imagined, or whatever smell guns made when you shot them.

“I’d like to shoot the gun and then make love,” he said sheepishly.

“Come on, then. That sounds like fun,” Rebecca said. “And it’s not a gun, it’s a pistol.”

*   *   *

Quentin looked out at the chaos on Main Street. The things were out there, but he could do nothing about it now. The deputies who had gone to the K-Mart were not responding to their radios. It had started to snow harder; all he saw was a driving sheet of white outside the office. He was holding on the phone for the State Police, trying to get assistance and some kind of explanation for what was happening to his town. Nothing he’d seen in the last thirty minutes made any sense. He was sure he was dreaming and that he would wake up. He kept praying he would.

“Quentin? It’s Captain Harrison, sorry. Look, before we start, let me tell you that the Governor’s office is calling for a State Of Emergency and has asked the National Guard to take up positions in several of the state’s major cities. So we don’t expect much from us for rural areas like yours, I’m afraid.

“And another thing: they are predicting the phones will go down soon, as they’ve had a lot of damage to one of the switching stations in Sacramento. Now what can I help you with?”

Quentin was watching one of the things come down the center of the street. It was a young woman in her thirties, half naked, beautiful and ugly all at once. A long stand of white spit dangled from her open mouth. She punched out a car windshield that had been abandoned on the street, then walked aimlessly away. The street in front of Quentin’s office was empty until several of the human-like things came out of Dr. Poole’s office, dragging a dead woman behind them.

“What’s going on? These things, what’s going on?” Quentin asked. The sound of his own voice sounded strange to him.

“Don’t know. Nobody does. There are guesses, that’s all. The only thing we know is that there are tens of thousands of them around the state. Some cites don’t have any, and things are normal. Then, some places—well, they’re hell on earth.”

“Are they sick? Are they still—human, or what?”