“Sheriff, I don’t have an answer.”

“We need help. I think we have hundreds here, and this is a small town. I only have nine law-enforcement officers. I’ve lost contact with more than half of my men. I’ve got two at the jail with me. We’ve got gangs of these things roaming Main Street killing people. It’s chaos—do you understand?”

“I understand. We can’t do much right now. There’s talk about the Army getting involved, but I haven’t heard for sure. They’re meeting about this at the White House.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Quentin said.

“The best you can. We’ve issued a shoot-on-sight order for the—things. Howlers, people are calling them. If you think it’s a Howler, kill it. Good luck.” The captain hung up.

All those seminars and meetings in Sacramento about emergency plans and inter-agency cooperation, that’s what they amounted to, Quentin thought. Good luck. He put down the phone in disbelief. It rang again almost immediately. He picked it up. All his office phone lines were lit up. People had started to call in, frightened and wanting to know where the deputies were. He didn’t know what to tell them.

“Daddy.” It was his daughter Sharon’s voice. “Daddy. You have to help me. They have Lacy here. God.”

“Where are you?” he said.

“Over on the Pinecone Road, white house on the corner, the old schoolhouse. Daddy, hurry. Please!”

The line went dead. Quentin put the phone down. He knew the house; it had been on his drug-watch list.

Before, he’d been confused and frightened and at a loss. Now, as he unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled down the M-16 and a bulletproof vest, he wasn’t thinking about anything but his daughters and his wife, what she would be thinking of him if he didn’t succeed. He dumped half a dozen extra fully-loaded clips into a metal garbage can and walked out of the office with the weapons and ammo. The phone was ringing, but he didn’t bother to pick it up.

“You’d better go home,” Quentin said, looking at his last deputy.

“Sheriff?”

“Let the prisoners out of their cells first. There’s nothing we can do now but be with our families. It’s every man for himself. God bless you,” Quentin said.

“Willis was right, then,” the deputy said. “He told me that I should get my wife and kids out of town. I thought he was crazy.”

The deputy heard the door close. He took the headset off and threw it on the office’s phone-system console, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. He felt helpless, as if he’d been afraid of this day all along, and now it had finally come. He went into Quentin’s office and grabbed one of the M-16s from the unlocked gun locker. He snapped in a clip and jacked in a round. The phone rang. Hoping it was his wife, the deputy picked it up.

“Quentin?”

“No,” the deputy said. “This is Deputy Troy.”

“Is Quentin there? This is Patty Tyson at the ranger station at Emigrant Gap. We need some help up here. Can you send a couple of deputies? There’s—well, I can’t quite explain it,  but we’ve had several attacks by—”

“You’ll have to take care of it yourself,” the deputy said. “We’re overrun down here in town. There’s hundreds of the things here.”

“You’ve seen them, too?” Patty said.

“Yeah, I’ve seen them. I—” Something spun the deputy around. A half-naked woman, about thirty, was screaming, with a huge gob of white ropey-looking spit hanging from her mouth.

The deputy lifted his weapon and shot her in the stomach. To his horror, nothing happened; the thing kept screaming at him. He fired again, stitching its naked chest with rounds. The impact of the M-16’s fire shook its shoulders and head, back-footing it. But it still wouldn’t die. More of them were behind her.

Patty Tyson put down the phone. A chill ran down her back. She’d heard the man screaming over the phone and it had unnerved her. She looked out the office window. One of the things was coming slowly up the gravel driveway toward the ranger station. For some reason it was dragging a garbage can behind it.

“He said there are hundreds of them in Timberline,” Patty said. She looked at her boss, who had come in from the parking lot. He had his service pistol out and was standing in shock, staring at a waitress from the Denny’s who was walking deliberately up the gravel path. Patty looked at her boss. He was bleeding from his mouth where one of the things had punched him.

“How much ammunition do we have left?” he said. He began reloading his automatic from a half-full box of ammo on his desk top. They heard a crash in the back of the office. One of the things had punched out the back door’s window and was trying to tear through the wire screen that covered it.

“Well, what are you waiting for!” her boss said. “You going to wait for it to get in here and kill us?”

Patty Tyson lifted her pistol and aimed at the young man climbing through the broken window. She recognized him as the salesman who’d sold her car at the Chevy dealership in Nevada City the week before. She pulled the trigger several times and killed the thing as it tried to climb through the door’s window, its shoulders halfway through it. Her rounds went through the top of its head. It stopped moving; its body hung lifeless. It was the first time she’d ever shot anything, much less a human being.

She turned around. Her fellow officers had run out the front of the office and left her behind. They were jumping into the last working truck. She watched the truck, packed with rangers, pull down the driveway and turn onto the street, its back end sliding on the icy pavement.

*   *   *

Dr. Poole looked at his wife. The house was cold and dark, the heater and lights not working as the entire county’s electrical grid was down. Her pretty brown face was wet with tears.

“Sweetheart, I need for you to calm down and listen to me. All right?” Marvin said.

“I can’t leave without Richard,” Grace said.

“I’m afraid you have to,” Marvin said. He couldn’t tell her that he’d seen their son on the road. That he’d stopped the car, afraid of Richard when he’d seen him with that strange blank look on his face. His son had been standing in the snow with more of the things, long strands of strange thick-looking saliva hanging from his mouth. Marvin had driven on, not wanting to believe it until he heard Richard make that awful howling sound.

“I promise you, we’ll go by the high school on the way down the mountain,” Marvin said. It was a lie, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“What about Sidney?” she asked.

Marvin looked down at his suitcase. The bedroom was neat. His wife had been cleaning when he’d come in the door. She’d taken one look at him and screamed. His clothes were filthy from the fight in the car. He hadn’t answered her questions at first. He had no words to describe what he’d seen on the road.

“Listen, you have to get a few things together. I have some clothes Mr. Crouchback can probably wear. He is sedated right now. But he’s going to need some warm clothes. Can you fix him up with some? We have to take him. We can’t leave him here,” Marvin said. The doctor crossed the bedroom to his closet and took one of his Mackinaw coats and a few other things he thought would fit their neighbor Crouchback, who was sitting in their living room, obviously very ill. Marvin had done what he could for him.

“What’s wrong with Mr. Crouchback? Why aren’t you explaining anything, Marvin? What’s going on? You say we have to go down the mountain, but you don’t say why. You say we can’t wait and look for Richard, but you won’t say why?”

His wife sat down on the edge of the bed. She was much younger than Marvin, ten years. He had been married before and felt guilty saddling her with an older man, but he’d fallen in love with her so completely that he had been selfish. Now he wished he’d never met her. Then, maybe, she would have been spared all this horror.