Bell looked down at the thing he’d killed. This one was slightly different from the ones he and the sergeant had seen earlier.

He heard honking. The car he’d seen a few moments before, while he’d been chased, had swung over to his side of the road and slowed. Its headlights flashed.  Bell waved his hands over his head in an attempt to get them to stop and pick him up. The car moved into the middle lane and began to slow.

Bell turned and looked up the hill. The Howlers were trotting down the road in a line that stretched across the freeway, like some kind of primitive tribe, filling all the lanes.

A young Chinese girl rolled down the window on the passenger side of the car as it slowed. Bell heard a voice. “Get in!” He ran to the back of the car and jumped into the back seat. Almost before he got in the car, the driver whipped around and they were moving the wrong way down the freeway in the fast lane, a whistling sound coming from an empty ski rack on the top of the car.

Bell turned around and looked behind him as the line of Howlers started to fade. Then he turned back to the couple in the front seat.

“You got any money?” the young man driving asked.

“What?” Bell said

“I said: Do you have any money?” the man said. The man driving glanced into the rear view mirror. He had a day-old growth of beard and was younger than Bell, about twenty-three or -four. Bell wanted to laugh. He looked at the girl. She was holding a gun on him; she had it propped on the top of the seat.

“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. We’re from Los Angeles and we’re about out of cash,” the young man said.

Bell started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. The couple watched and waited. The girl, chewing gum, elbowed her partner as if she was in on the joke.

“I just got out of jail. I don’t have any money,” the Lieutenant said finally.  He felt the car start to slow. He looked at the girl. She was petite and attractive; she was wearing an over-sized T-shirt that read Disneyland, with a drawing of Daffy Duck on the front. The pistol didn’t move.

“Oh, Johnny, let’s take him down the road a little ways,” she said. “He’s kind of cute. And the Howlers will just fuck him up. It’s such a waste. What’s your name, honey?”

“Bell,” the lieutenant said. He looked down the road. Cars were coming toward them on the freeway, in their direction. It didn’t seem to matter. The car didn’t slow. The driver looked for a way over onto the other side of the freeway, but a concrete barrier blocked the way. Bell heard the driver speed up. They were doing a hundred miles an hour. The cars in front of them were coming up quick. The girl seemed oblivious to their imminent death by front-end collision.

“Is it bad, in L.A.?” Bell said. He looked past the girl at the oncoming cars and wondered if they would make it past them, or if he would be killed.

“Oh, shit yes,” the girl said, and turned around and faced forward. “If the Howlers don’t kill you, the looters will. Won’t they, Johnny?” she said.

The young man nodded, intent on the oncoming cars.

The girl turned around again, oblivious to the danger, and smiled at Bell. “I think it would be better to have the things get you. At least it’s quicker than the looters,” she said.

The concrete barrier ended. The driver swerved the car across the open median toward the other side of the freeway. The driver, seemingly unfazed, drove down the grassy patch at ninety miles an hour. Cars passed them, honking. The front of their car bounced wildly until the driver—slowing the car down—moved off the grass and swung onto the roadway. He sped up, heading east—toward Timberline.

“No worse than the traffic back home on the 405,” the driver said.

The girl slugged him on the shoulder.

   Bell wanted to laugh again, but didn’t. Enough of that, he told himself. “How long has it been going on down there?” Bell asked.

“I don’t know,” the driver said. “Maybe a week.”

“What are the police doing down there?” Bell said.

“Cops disappeared right after it began,” the girl said. “They got a McDonald’s up here? I think I saw one when we passed,” she said.

“Denny’s,” Bell said. He was hungry, too; he hadn’t eaten anything since very early that morning. Despite the world having gone crazy, you still had to eat, he supposed.

“Hey, is it your birthday?” the girl asked him. “If it’s your birthday, maybe we could ask them for the—what do they call it?”

“Grand Slam breakfast,” her boyfriend said.

“It’s free, if it’s your birthday,” the girl said.

Bell realized the two were high, and maybe crazy too.

CHAPTER 16

The men had been brutal, as if they weren’t human at all but black-leather-clad beasts. They had no mercy when she’d pleaded with them to stop what they were doing. They’d finally gone away. She’d fallen asleep, but only because they’d made her take a Valium to keep her from both escaping and sobbing. The sound of her crying bothered them.

Exhausted and filthy, Lacy, in a dream-like state, heard herself speak out loud, finally waking. She heard herself call for her father, as if he might come pick her up off the beer-stinking mattress and carry her out of the cold, tiny bedroom she’d been raped in.

After a horrible moment of consciousness, she knew that she’d been dreaming. She was in that awful house where she’d come to look for her sister. At last she opened her eyes. The sight of the empty room, a chair pushed over on the floor where they’d enjoyed her first, was surreal. She saw her jeans tossed across the room next to her ripped-from-her panties, both muddy and trampled.

She forced herself to sit up. It seemed as if the whole terrible memory of what they’d done to her would go away if she could just get dressed and get to her car.

The bedroom door was shut. She heard nothing from outside in the living room; the house was completely silent.

She got up, naked, and tried to put on the panties but gave up, seeing they’d been torn badly. She slid her jeans on, and then her gray wool sweater she finally found. It had been tossed into a corner and was clean.

She sat back down on the bed and started to cry. The Valium had left her with an overwhelming sense of fatigue. She felt the tears run down her cheek and wiped them with the back of her hand.

It was late afternoon, she guessed—or seemed to be, from the cold, dead light in the room. She checked the pocket of her jeans for her new cell phone and remembered she’d left it in the car with her purse. She stood up again, still feeling weak, and walked across the room. She lifted a sheet that was being used on the window as a curtain.

The snow was falling outside soundlessly. The road, which had been clear when she’d arrived, was white with snow. She put her head down on the cold glass of the window and told herself to get out. She walked to the bedroom door and tried it. It was unlocked.

She realized she had no shoes on and went back to look for them.  She remembered being pushed onto the chair and looking up at the three men, all of them high on amphetamines. One of them tipped the chair over, holding her by her foot, her shoe coming off in his hand. She found both her running shoes by the tipped-over chair. She couldn’t look at the chair without feeling sick.

She slipped her shoes on, went back to the door and listened. Not hearing anything, she pulled the door open.

The first thing she saw was a motorcycle stuck in the opposite wall, as if it had been hung like an ornament. The room’s couches and lounge chairs were turned over. A man, the one who’d come to the door and pulled her into the house, was on the floor of the tiny living room, dead, his head twisted grotesquely so that it was turned 180 degrees. His face was above his back.