“I’m sorry, you just have to trust me right now. Something bad is going on. Some kind of pathogen affecting people, making them sick. Maybe in the water—it’s best if we go down the mountain for the time being. I think it might be better away from here.” The strain of the last few hours was showing on his face. He collapsed on the rug, his elbows on the bed. He let his face fall into his hands. “I saw it developing. I should have been more aggressive.”

His wife came around the bed and helped pick him up. She had never seen him like this before, physically done in. Her own fear was subsumed in the shock of seeing her husband on his knees, talking to himself.

“Honey, please tell me what you saw. What is it?” She sat him on the bed, put her hands in his.

Marvin looked at his wife. He reached up and touched her face. “People have turned into some kind of monsters. They—they —”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Just that, people are turning into something inhuman, something I’ve never seen before. Something no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It’s as if they’ve been physically altered, too.”

“Why do we have to leave? Why is Mr. Crouchback sedated?” she said. Grace looked at the bedroom door. They’d taken Crouchback into the living room and let him lie down on the couch. He was speaking gibberish, not saying anything they could understand. Marvin had found him walking up the road toward the gate of their development in the snow, barefoot, talking to himself—in fact, displaying the symptoms he’d seen in his practice all week.

“He’s sedated because I’m afraid that he might become one of them. The gibberish is a symptom. But I can’t be sure. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”

“Why do we have to leave our home, Marvin? You haven’t told me everything.”

“Because I think that we should.” He couldn’t answer her truthfully. It would frighten her. He needed his wife’s help to save their daughter and get down the mountain, to what he hoped would be safety. If she had seen Richard . . . “I think we better eat something before we go,” he said.

His wife gave him a look Marvin had never seen before. “I’ve tried to call the high school and there’s no answer. Why? Why aren’t you telling me the truth? Why aren’t they answering the phone at the high school, Marvin?”

“I’m going to go look in on Vivian,” he said. “We should leave soon. It’s best.”

“Where are we going, Marvin? At least tell me that!” his wife said.

Marvin held the door. He was exhausted. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where they should go. All he could hope was that if they went somewhere else, they could escape the nightmare around them.

“I’m not sure exactly where yet. Down the mountain,” he said and closed the door.

CHAPTER 15

Turning from Main Street, Dillon walked down a side street’s antique duckboard sidewalk. The snow piled up here and there, dumped by the morning’s violent storm. Architectural features that had been obscured by the storm—doorways, banisters, cornices—were sharply outlined by sunshine.

An old man wearing a grease-stained snowsuit left a hardware store, bumping Dillon on the way to his car. The old man pretended not to notice the pistol stuck in Dillon’s belt, or the two hanging from his double shoulder holsters. The storefronts, the parked cars, the occasional pedestrians walking to their cars or toward Main Street, were still oblivious of the danger around the corner.

If the government would just tell people, Dillon thought, watching the old man get in his pickup truck and drive away as if everything were still normal.

The snow banks piled against the buildings were stark white, almost painful to look at without sunglasses. Dillon, having lost his dark glasses in the crash, had to squint.

His arm had been cut when he’d stopped to help a woman save her baby from one of the things. The Howler had been about to smash the baby’s head on the ground by its legs. The mother, screaming in horror, had tried to fight the thing.  Dillon had stopped and pistol-whipped the Howler, smacking him in the side of the head. He’d managed to snatch the baby away, but the thing had sprung up and bit him on the forearm. It had torn out a mouth-sized chunk of flesh before Dillon had shot him dead in the face.

Dillon had walked with the hysterical mother, who was holding her baby close. She begged him to help her get to her car. He’d stood in the middle of Main Street covering their escape, firing at Howlers that tried to jump on the woman’s car as she pulled away.

After that, out of ammunition, he’d been forced to ignore the mayhem and chaos on Main Street or he wouldn’t survive himself. He’d had to pass people fighting for their lives, some being beaten, some in tears having seen their loved ones murdered in the most horrible way. He’d turned down the first street that looked quiet, not knowing what he would do next.

   Keep the money. That was number one.

Stay alive, get out of here. There had to be places without Howlers yet. He stopped to check the pistol in his belt, pushing it down so it wouldn’t show as much.

Funny, he thought, me saving a sheriff—a lawman. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do. Might end up regretting it.

He wondered if he was going a little crazy. Maybe, he thought. Seeing a car bend the corner and come toward him, he stopped walking and put the two canvas bags of cash down. People in the car stared at him as they passed. Dillon looked at them carefully. One street could be normal, while on the next Howlers were overrunning everything, dragging people out of their cars and killing them with their bare hands. He looked up the street. It looked quiet. He picked up the bags again and walked on.

He glanced into a storefront beauty parlor as he walked by. A lot of middle-aged ladies stared at him from inside the shop, their heads trapped in old-fashioned conical metal hair dryers, oblivious to what was happening. He could only imagine what it would be like when the things got in there. He put down one of the canvas moneybags and waved at the women from the street.

“Get out!” he yelled.

They looked back at him stupidly through the window. One of them touched another on the arm and gave him a look.

“Get out, I said. While you can!”

Two of the old ladies, prune-faced, burst out laughing, thinking he was a drunk. Dillon stared at them, then opened the door of the salon. It was acrid-smelling, as if they’d been frying rats on a hot plate.

“There are Howlers, here in town. Down on the main street. They’ll be up here soon. Get out!” he said. He looked at the gaggle of ladies. They all looked like his mother under the hair dryers. Almost faceless, just eyes and chins. They’d stopped laughing when they saw the pistols.

He walked into the beauty parlor. It was warm; half a dozen ladies were under the dryers and more were having their hair cut in another room. The smell was worse here, almost as bad as a dead Howler, Dillon thought. The hairdressers, all young women, had stopped cutting hair and were staring at Dillon, their mouths open in shock.

“Listen, you better get out of here before I call the cops,” a young girl said. She wore black leotards and a white blouse. She held a spray can in one hand, and was talking on her cell phone, cradled on her shoulder, as she worked.

“You have a few minutes. If you leave now, you might make it,” Dillon said to all of them. “They’ll come up here too.”

The girl put down her can of hair spray, hung up on her call, and dialed 911.