Cooley opened the door, stole a quick glance at the terrified injured man and then closed the cabin door behind him, locking it. Exhausted and drenched in sweat, Cooley watched from the window as the two Howlers literally pulled Billings apart, tearing his arms off his body first, as if he were a paper doll.

Still alive, Billings stood up, arms gone and shoulders spurting blood, and limped pathetically toward the cabin. But the creatures caught him after only a few steps.

Cooley, hands shaking, pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911.

“Hello, 911?”

“Yes, 911 operator speaking.”

“Operator,” Cooley said, “I’m in a cabin in the woods and someone has just been murdered.”

“Can you hold, please? We’re receiving a high number of calls.”

“NO, I CAN’T HOLD!” Cooley dropped his phone on the floor and blocked the door with an old-fashioned steel bar he saw for the purpose. The bar fell in place across the door, held by two steel hooks. Cooley, feeling safe, watched the naked creatures through the cabin’s small windows. Both were running toward the porch. The two things jumped up the stairs onto the porch; he watched them pound on the bullet-proof, two-inch thick, military-grade, and bomb-proof plastic.

He stared at the ugly things as the Howlers tried to smash the small windows. He backed away from the blood-printed glass as both Howlers broke their wrists trying to punch through it. It was impossible; the window’s thick plastic was too tough. The two finally stopped pounding, their broken and dangling hands useless, both began to howl and shriek.

“Jesus,” Cooley said, staring at the naked couple. Their faces had changed from just a day ago. Jesus . . . those two were staying at the B&B. He turned from the small bloodstained window and saw two dogs looking up at him. One of them, a giant German Shepherd, started to growl and then leapt at his throat.

CHAPTER 21

They’d stopped unexpectedly. The Land Rover’s headlights were shining on the entrance to an expensive five-star hotel’s elegant roadside entrance. The entrance was flanked by six-foot high portals made of smooth river stones, built to mark the place. The entrance, bathed in floodlights, stood out in the pitch black night as if nothing were wrong and the elegant hotel were open for business.

“Now what do we have here?” Johnny said. “How come they still got electricity?”

“Probably emergency generators,” Bell said from the backseat.

“It’s a hotel,” Lacy said. “What are we stopping here for?”

“People in there might need our help,” Johnny said. He had taken a suit of clothes from a mansion they’d robbed earlier. He was wearing a pair of expensive pants and jacket that were mismatched. The jacket was snakeskin and had cost $5,000. He’d taken the owner’s expensive Borsalino-made Panama hat, too, and was sporting it when he’d stopped to pick them up.

Johnny dug in the jacket pocket and took out a pharmacy-style pill container. “Got a thousand Oxy tablets at the Rite Aid in Reno! The whole damn pharmacy was wide open. No one there except some very dead people. Want some?” Johnny asked, looking at them in the rear-view mirror.

“No, thanks,” Bell said.

“Sure? Makes things a lot better. Got to face all this shit out here without drugs is hard on a man,” he said.

“I’ll say,” his girlfriend said. “A lot better with them than without them.” The girl was high and had chattered on the whole time since the couple had stopped for them, as if they were all on a lark, instead living a nightmare.

Lacy reached for Bell’s hand. It was the first time they’d touched like that. She wrapped her hand around his and held it tightly.

“Why don’t we just go on and meet up with my dad,” Lacy said. “It’s better if there’s more of us.”

“Well, for one reason I got some business up in there,” Johnny said.

“What kind of business?” Bell asked. The two stoners were using the horrible chaos as an opportunity to steal and loot without worrying about the usual consequences. It was why he had left them earlier that morning. It was crazy and immoral, yet they were doing it. Bell hated the man behind the wheel in the worst way. His old grandmother, a sharecropper all her life, had once said to him that the Devil at his strongest “wears a Sunday suit, but a Saturday-night smile.”

“That last place was a gold mine!” Sue Ling said.

“I’m sure it was,” Bell said.

“The old geezer had a great gun collection. All kinds of shit. He was some kind of banker. Said he was a big shot and could get us all the money we wanted,” Johnny said.

“I thought you said there wasn’t anyone at home?” Lacy said.

“Did I? Anyway, this looks like a pretty fancy place. They’ve got to have all kinds of good shit up in there. Rich people’s place—full of rich-people’s shit.”

“There are still laws,” Bell said. “Just because of what’s happened doesn’t mean—”

“Are there?” Johnny said.

“You think so?” Sue Ling said. “I don’t think there are any. Not anymore. Everything is free. It’s like Christmas, only better.” She turned toward them and smiled like a little kid. She’d raided some rich girl’s closet and wore a get-up like one of the Orange County Housewives, dressed for a glam-winter sojourn, complete with a white mink ski hat. “It’s not like—you know, it was before.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Lacy said.

“Wasn’t right to send me to Pelican Bay for two years either, or keep me in an isolation cell, but the motherfuckers did it anyway,” Johnny said. “All I did was sell a little meth.”

“You’re both crazy,” Lacy said. Bell felt her squeeze his hand again. “You’re both crazy. And I’m going to tell my father what you’ve done.”

“Well, are we crazy, honey?” Johnny asked his girlfriend.

“I’m crazy about you,” Sue Ling said. “Hey, I got a Chanel bag for free! Everyone in the store was dead!” The Chinese girl smiled in the deranged way that Oxy-moron heads developed, half shit-eating-ain’t-I-cute grin, and half seven-year-old’s smug look. The painkiller made them believe that everything and anything that came out of their mouth was either funny, or profound, when it was puerility personified.

The girl lifted a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum with the eight-inch barrel from where she’d had it stuck between her seat and the armrest. She pointed it at Bell. The huge pistol was fully loaded. Bell could see the tips of the bullets facing out from the pistol’s open cylinders.

“That pistol there is better than the Desert Eagle. We got both from the old guy. But the Smithy has that long eight-inch barrel; you get 2075 feet per second vs. 1475 feet per second with the Israeli’s Eagle. Shit, these Jews really know now to make some kick-ass guns! Both 300-grain loads, of course. That’s got the hollow points too. Hits these Howlers—Splat City, brain-wise. I get a kick out of watching them hit the deck,” Johnny said.

“I could shoot you both right now and I would get away with it. That’s so cool,” Sue Ling said and broke out laughing. Only joking.” She put the huge pistol down. “I wouldn’t, though— shoot you. I fired it up at the mansion and it hurt my wrist! We were messing around shooting down the hallways, to see how many doors we could get through. This fucking thing, we couldn’t find the bullet! I think it went through six doors!”

“It was a big-ass place! Had a private fucking lake,” Johnny said. “Some kind of special wine-drinking room. Fucking rich people think of all kinds of shit. Whoever heard of a special wine-drinking room? Fucking idiots. Old man kept asking me what I wanted with him. So I shot him in the foot and told him I wanted to see him dance, like in the Westerns. Remember? Fucker danced. Hopping like a motherfucker. They showed all the cool Westerns at Pelican Bay. I love me some Westerns,” Johnny said.