For two years, he’d been tracking the wind patterns from Japan and keeping a large file on Fukushima Daiichi’s four crippled atomic reactors. When the earthquake and tsunami damaged Fukushima’s reactors, sending high amounts of radioactive sea water into the Pacific Ocean, a famous scientist asked him to cover the story. The mainstream press had been afraid to report that Reactors 3 and 4 had been cooled with seawater, which was allowed to run back into the ocean, unchecked and contaminated. The next day he had argued with his editor-in-chief about running a front-page article on the Fukushima catastrophe, and that had been the day the L.A. Times fired him. They had put up with his 9/11 hectoring, but Fukushima was a no-go zone.

Despite his firing, Howard had continued to follow the story closely, and remained convinced that mass media had not paid nearly enough attention to the damaged Japanese reactors and their ongoing meltdown, and the massive release of radioactive pollution.

He stepped back and looked at the weather maps he’d printed out. The bright yellow and green maps showed wind directions in the Pacific over the last six months, super-imposed over the major Pacific Ocean’s currents—the most important one being the Kuroshio Current, circling between Japan and California. Both Hawaii and California were directly impacted by the toxic spill. Scientists, afraid for their own jobs, were emailing Price and other journalists, suggesting that in less than a year’s time, serious amounts of radioactive contamination would be arriving off the California coast. He’d gotten those emails months ago. He was convinced it was some kind of new radioactive pollution—created in Fukushima’s reactors, which he knew were in complete melt-down mode—that were affecting people, changing them; perhaps, he now suspected, genetically.

He went to his computer and clicked on his Outlook, but the building’s power went out. The office plunged into  darkness. One of the things started to bang against his office door again. Price heard himself scream when his flashlight beam caught two Howlers walking toward the office door. One of them—a small girl, no more than thirteen—was dragging a sledgehammer.

*   *   *

They’d gone through the pockets of the dead they’d found in the brightly lit lobby. One whole family had been killed: mother, father and three young girls. They’d been caught at the desk while they were checking in. Their suitcases were still lined up and waiting for the bellman to pick them up. The lieutenant had forced himself to go through the dead father’s pockets. The man had been beaten so badly that his face was just a raw bones-smashed mess, even his scalp had been torn off. Bell had fished out the man’s wallet and rifled it. It had three-hundred dollars in cash. He glanced at the man’s license. He was a doctor from Southern California, only thirty-eight. Bell tossed the wallet onto the floor. He checked the wife’s purse, but there was nothing of value but her cell phone. He checked the phone’s battery. It was full but there was no signal. He pocketed the cell phone.

“I’ll take the purse,” Sue Ling said. She’d come out of the bar where they’d gone to sit. She must have been watching him. “It’s Louis Vuitton,” the girl said.

Bell threw her the handbag.

“Good work, sweet cheeks. Keep it up,” Sue Ling said, catching the purse. She turned and headed back toward the bar.

“Wouldn’t the elevator be safer?” Lacy said. They were standing in front of a sign in the lobby that marked the stairwell.

“I don’t know,” Bell said. “We have to keep looking for money. We’ve only collected about $3,000 dollars so far.” Muzak played from a speaker in the ceiling above them. “We’ll have to go through some rooms.

They heard a howling start up from somewhere in the building. They looked at each other. Another and another answered the first. It was obvious that Howlers were on the upper floors of the place.

“Why don’t we just kill them?” Lacy said. “You could have shot her just now.”

“Yes.” The idea of shooting the girl in cold blood was difficult for him to imagine. “If we have to, all right,” Bell said. “I’ll do it.”

“He plans on killing us,” Lacy said. “It’s obvious.”

“I’m not so sure,” Bell said. “I think they would have done it already. Out there on the road. I think they need help, if they’re attacked. That’s why we’re still alive. He knows if there are four of us they’ll stand a better chance of it in a fight with the things. My guess is that their plan is to use us. And we need them too, out there on the road, if there’s a fight.”

“Do you think he’ll take us to my dad’s?”

“Maybe he will, and for the same reasons. He’s betting that whatever they’ve done won’t matter now. They’ll add strength to any group we are a part of, and be welcomed.”

“Everything’s changed,” Lacy said. “Nothing matters. What people do any more doesn’t matter.”

“Survival matters,” Bell said.

She fell into his arms and held him tightly. “We need them too, then. It’s awful, this new world,” she said. “They’re evil.”

“Do you want me to kill them?” Bell pulled her away and looked her in the eye.

Her expression was changed from the girl he’d found earlier that day. They were not the eyes of a wounded girl any more. They were older and harder, angry perhaps.

“No. No. I think you’re right to wait,” she said. “If we have to, I’ll help you do it.” She kissed him. She had an overpowering feeling of physical desire for Bell, a need to hold him. It was something atavistic and strangely primeval. She’d never felt anything like it; it was a powerful human need, the kind of love/security that had pushed human beings from socially-lame, monkey-like creatures to tribal societies with vast social powers—the most prominent being the ability to war as a tribe, one united and bloody fist held up to their enemies.

Bell, sensing something change, kissed her. He could hear the howling above them and didn’t care; he was getting used to that horrid sound. The howling no longer frightened him.

CHAPTER 22

“They’re both dead. And so is the dog,” Dillon said, looking up from the pile of half-eaten human intestines. He’d lifted the big dead German Shepherd off the fatter of the two dead, half-eaten eviscerated bodies lying on the cabin’s front porch.

“It wasn’t the dogs that pulled their guts out. It was feral pigs. We have them here,” Quentin said. He moved his heavy Maglite, sending its powerful yellow beam beyond Dillon, who was standing in a pile of guts. The flashlight’s beam caught a second dead dog lying by the cabin’s front door. “Pigs killed the dogs, I think.”

“Do you know the two dead guys?” Dillon asked.

“One of them,” Quentin said. “The fat one owns the place near mine.” He moved the light onto the cabin’s front door and saw it was closed. He moved the beam again, to the left, pointing it toward one of the cabin’s small windows.

“Why didn’t they smash the windows and bust in—the Howlers?” Dillon said.

“Don’t know. Something better came along?” Quentin said. “Maybe it was the dogs. Who knows?”

“Is this Chuck’s famous cabin?” Rebecca said. She was standing at the bottom of the steps next to Summers, and behind Quentin.