“This is it,” Quentin said. He pulled the key to the cabin’s front door from his pocket. The key was attached to his own key ring. He started toward the door.

Chuck Phelps had come to the hospital to visit Quentin’s wife and given her the key to his cabin, telling her all his secrets about the place. Marie, in turn, had made Quentin promise that he would carry the key with him from that day on. She’d had a dream about the cabin, she told him. In the dream an old man, “a priest-like figure,” had come to her and told her that if they lost the key they would all die—all of them: she, Quentin, and their two girls. Whatever Chuck had told her, when he came to visit her in the hospital that day, had made a profound impression on Quentin’s dying wife. Quentin had thought it was the morphine drip that had made her fixate on the key.

From the first time they’d met, Marie had always treated Chuck Phelps with a special kindness and respect, as if they shared a secret. As if she knew Phelps would be important to their family someday. On the morning she died, Marie had made Quentin promise that he would keep the cabin key on him always.

“It’s not what you think, the key,” his wife told him. He remembered her face as he walked toward the cabin’s front door. How could she have known this day would come, he thought.

“My dad and Phelps were friends. Chuck told us about the place and that we would be one of the ‘chosen few’ who could come here. I always thought he was touched. You know, a little crazy,” Rebecca said.

The four of them had walked through the dark and through the thigh-high snow, leaving the patrol car behind on the county road. All they had for light was Quentin’s one Maglite. They’d heard howling over near the bed and breakfast and knew that the Howlers were nearby so they’d been careful, weapons at the ready, as they trekked toward the cabin in single file—Quentin in the lead, and Dillon covering their rear. Summers had lost his weapon in the snow when he fell. He’d not spoken a word since the shootout.

As Quentin stepped up onto the porch, something flew from a dark corner of the porch and knocked him backwards. A black Howler, one they couldn’t have seen—silent because of the  crossbow arrow protruding from its throat—had been lurking in the dark corner. It knocked the flashlight out of Quentin’s hand. They were plunged into darkness.

Quentin, pushed back off the porch, felt his face being punched as soon as he sank into the snow. The first punch hit him square in the nose and stunned him. The second, from the creature, knocked him unconscious. The Howler was big, with big fists, and with its added creature’s strength, the blows were devastating.

Dillon ran through the snow toward a tiny pool of light. The Maglite had fallen, its lens pointed down and into the snow. He grabbed it and shone it on the thing squatting over Quentin. Its fist was raised back, ready to strike him a third time. Dillon fired his Thompson, muzzle flashing, from the hip.

The burst hit the Howler in the shoulders and stitched a flesh-tearing line across its chest. Even then, the Howler landed a strong third punch as if nothing were wrong, the dozen or more .45 caliber slugs only a nuisance.

Dillon moved the barrel up and caught the thing’s head, pouring rounds at the Howler’s skull and demolishing it. Dillon kept firing, chipping off chunks of face and skull until the thing slumped over, dead. Rebecca ran over and tried to pick Quentin up, but he was out cold.

“Fuck.” Dillon moved the flashlight off Quentin and swung it onto the far corner of the cabin’s porch, where the Howler had been lurking. He carefully looked for any others, but saw nothing. “Let’s take him inside.” He handed his Thompson to Summers.

The kid was frightened and tired. He seemed dazed. For just an instant, Dillon felt like pushing him down in the snow and leaving him outside for the Howlers to kill. He hated the kid for being so useless. He might just have smacked him, but Quentin’s cell phone began to ring.

Rebecca was able to dig the phone from Quentin’s over-stuffed down parka. “Yeah, who is it?” Rebecca said.

Dillon shone the light on the girl’s face.

“It’s Lacy. Who is this?”

  “Lacy! It’s Rebecca Stewart. Jesus, where are you?”

“I’m at the new hotel on Branch Road—do you know it?”

“Yeah. Sure. The fancy one,” Rebecca said.

“Yes, you have to come here and get us. Tell my dad. They’ve got us held here.”

“Who’s got you?”

“Two people—let me talk to my dad. Please.”

“I can’t.’”

“Why?”

“I just can’t,” Rebecca said. “He’s busy. We’re at the Phelps’s place.” Rebecca lied instinctively, afraid to tell Lacy her father was hurt.

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Rebecca said. “He just can’t talk on the phone.”

“Can you come, Rebecca? We need help. Please.”

“Who’s with you?” Rebecca said.

“The lieutenant. The one we met today. Dad knows who he is.”

“Okay. Yeah, we’ll come.”

“Rebecca, tell Dad they’re crazy. The people who—” the line went dead. Quentin’s cell-phone battery had run low and dropped the call.

“Who was that?” Dillon said.

“It’s Lacy. Quentin’s daughter. She needs help.”

“Tell her to get in line,” Dillon said. “Now help me get his heavy ass inside there.”

Summers stepped up and helped Dillon pick Quentin’s limp body up from the snow. Rebecca went up the stairs. Slipping on the thick gut-covered decking, she dragged the two dead bodies from in front of the cabin’s door and rolled them off the porch. They fell, one after the other, into the darkness.

“The key!” Dillon said.

“Shit.” Rebecca realized that it had been knocked out of Quentin’s hand when he was attacked.

“It must be up there,” Dillon said. He put Quentin back down in the snow, walked up the stairs and looked down on the blood-soaked porch. The Maglite’s beam caught bone bits and human guts mixed in with pig shit.

“It was pigs,” Rebecca said. “Please, God,” She got on her hands and knees and started to fish through the slimy offal and cold pig shit, laying her palms out flat and running them over everything, trying to feel for the key ring. “I got it! Give me that fucking light!” She jumped up, signaling for the Maglite, and ran toward the door, Quentin’s key ring in hand. She tucked the Maglite under her arm and went through several keys on the ring before she found the one that slipped into the lock. Her hands were slick and sticky with blood, her fingers freezing.

“Open, you fucking piece of shit!” She pushed the key in the lock and the door pushed open. It had been left unlocked since that morning, when Chuck rode away—and left open a second time when the accountant had tried to run out of the cabin with Chuck’s ninety-pound German Shepherd hanging from his neck, its teeth sunk deep into the man’s throat.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Bell was hanging upside down with his hands hog-tied behind him. He’d been strung up in the hotel’s lobby. He was hanging from a rope that had been thrown over a beam running across the lobby’s high ceiling. Everything Bell saw was from a disorienting upside-down point of view. He could hear the music in the bar blaring: the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.” From this strange angle, he watched two Howlers come through the lobby door and head straight for him. They were making a terrifying noise, excited perhaps because of the way he was strung up, and obviously helpless. Perhaps they were sensing an easy kill.

Bell’s heart raced to the point he thought it was going to actually burst. The two things loped across the huge lobby toward him, their eyes wild. He was swinging slightly. It had been Johnny’s idea to swing him occasionally, because he found it even more entertaining.