Dillon watched her and started to laugh at the stupidity of it. “Go ahead and call! They’ll be picking that phone out of your ass when they get here.” He turned around and walked out of the shop’s front door, back out into the blinding sunlight of a suddenly cloudless sparkling blue sky. They were doomed, he thought.

He turned back and looked in the salon’s window. One of the women went back to her People magazine, sneering and muttering about people needing jobs.

    He hefted the moneybags and walked on. Quit being a stupid shit. No one is going to believe you til they see them. He glanced down the street. If he stayed here too long, he’d be dead meat too, he thought.  He began to walk by the cars parked on the lane, looking for one that had been left open. He found one with a jean jacket left on the front seat. He put the jacket on, covering his shoulder holsters so they wouldn’t be so noticeable.

He watched an old station wagon drive by, a mother and her children in the front seat, totally oblivious of what was in front of them on Main Street. He couldn’t hijack someone’s car, not now. He was a son-of-a-bitch, but he wasn’t heartless. He thought of going back to the used car lot he’d seen, where he knew he could hot-wire something and get out of here.

Then he saw the sign down the narrow snow-filled street: All American Gun Shop. Dillon crossed the street, snow crunching under his cowboy boots. He would need ammo, and lots of it.

He saw picketers in front of the gun store. Dillon looked at them incredulously. Mostly young kids, they looked at Dillon and asked him to join the protest. He’d stared at them, the bags of money in his hands, not knowing whether to laugh or what.

“Guns kill,” a young Latin girl said to him. She saw the pistol tucked into his jeans and backed away. The girl moved back into the safety of the moving queue.

“You all better get out of here!” Dillon shouted. “And you’ll need guns and ammo! That’s what I’m doing. The Howlers are down the street, right down there, on that main drag. I just came down from there.” He put the bags of money down and spoke in an earnest tone of voice. He didn’t want the Howlers to take the young girl, or any of the kids.

The crowd of twenty or so young people looked at him wide-eyed. One of them, a tall boy with pimples and red hair, burst out laughing. Some of the others began to laugh, too.

“He’s drunk,” the red-headed boy said.

“No, I’m not neither,” Dillon said. “I said there’s Howlers right down on the main street, they’re bound to get up here too! You got to get one of these and protect yourselves!” He ripped the automatic out from where he’d tucked it in the front of his jeans.

The grins on the faces of the young people turned to fear. One of the girls screamed and backed away, held around the waist by her boyfriend who’d come down the line to protect her. All the kids backed away down the sidewalk en masse.

Dillon heard the old-school brass bell attached to the store’s door, and felt something stick him in the ribs. He knew right away it was a weapon of some kind.

“Boy, put that down,” a voice said.

Dillon turned around and looked over the top of the head of the man, who was much shorter, holding the shotgun on him. The older man had a salt and pepper flat top and wore a red flannel shirt. His eyes were blue.  Dillon saw a look he recognized. He dropped the gun on the wooden sidewalk. The automatic clattered at his feet. The shotgun’s barrel was level and pointed at his stomach.

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone. I was just trying to warn them, mister,” Dillon said.

“What do you want here, boy?”

“Just some ammo, sir. And I’ll pay for it.”

The older man holding the shotgun looked down at the two canvas sacks at Dillon’s feet.

“Mister, I need that pistol back. I swear I didn’t mean no harm to anyone.”

“What do you need it for? You going to rob me?”

“No, sir. I don’t think I would have been standing out here shouting at people if I intended to rob you, would I?”

  “No, I guess not.”

In the store window’s reflection, Dillon saw three Howlers coming around the corner. They wore gym shorts and t-shirts, but he could tell right away what they were because of the spit hanging from their open mouths.

One of the Howlers stopped in the middle of the street, threw its head back and began to make their sound, half human and half animal/monkey scream.

“You better shoot them,” Dillon said.

The man holding the shotgun looked at Dillon, then at the Howlers in the middle of the snow-covered street. “What did you say?”

“I said you better shoot those—those things,” Dillon said. The Howler stopped calling. “He’s calling more of them. There’ll be a whole bunch of them up here in a minute if you don’t stop him from calling like that.” Dillon bent down to pick up his pistol.

“Touch that, boy, and I’ll cut you in two,” Stewart said.

The protesters were looking at the Howlers standing in the street. All three Howlers squatted in the middle of the road. It was the first time Dillon had seen them do that, wait for more Howlers to show up. They were learning. They were learning fast. They had also changed a little bit since he’d seen them in Elko. Their arms were somehow longer than human arms, and their faces heavier, the jaws slightly thicker, like something Dillon had seen in a book.

“Boys, get out of that street!” Mr. Stewart yelled. “Hey, boys! I said get out of the street, that’s not funny. We got a lunatic here.”

Dillon waited as long as he could, but when the older man turned to look at the Howlers again, Dillon made his move. He elbowed the shotgun barrel away from him and with his other hand he swung out and caught the older man with a right to the jaw. The man crashed to the ground, out cold. Dillon held the shotgun by the barrel and then took it in hand, looking down at the man on the sidewalk. He pushed through the crowd of kids and stepped down into the snowy lane.

The three Howlers were crouched together like apes in a zoo. Dillon looked down toward the main drag, then kept walking. He raised the shotgun. One of the Howlers sprang in the air at him. Dillon fired. The other two stood up. Dillon shot a fat one in the head, took it clean off at the shoulders in a red haze. He leveled the shotgun on the other that had charged, running along the ground on all fours. Dillon held his fire. He hated Howlers and wanted this one in close before he killed it. He waited while the thing charged him.

The Howler used its arms to propel itself into the air. Dillon waited for it to get only inches from the shotgun barrel before he fired. Screams of horror echoed behind him. Bits of Howler sprayed Dillon’s face. It was splattered and bloody when he walked back up to the sidewalk, all three Howlers dead, their bodies lying in the lane behind him.

The protesters, running away, were halfway down the block. Dillon called after them, but it was too late. They’d all run toward Main Street, the exact wrong direction, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Jesus, what did you do that for?” The old man was holding Dillon’s pistol on him. Dillon watched the protesters running toward certain death.

“God damn it, why doesn’t anyone wake up?” Dillon said. He turned around to face the pistol leveled at him by the older man.

“You’re an animal.” The man was pointing the gun at Dillon’s face. He pulled the hammer back and wanted to pull the trigger.

Dillon watched him, unmoved. He knew the gun was empty. “It’s not what you think, old man. Those weren’t teenage kids you saw, they were Howlers, and they don’t give a shit about humans. You understand? They’ll kill us, or we kill them, it real simple. That pistol is empty. You better go get some ammo for it. Those things howled to their friends, and once they howl like that, more of them will show up very soon.”