CHAPTER 25

“What do you know about a fortified cabin near Timberline?” the black man asked. He was wearing clean Levi Dockers and a pressed white shirt. He looked very clean, his appearance a total contrast to Bell’s bloody and torn flight suit.

The black man was about forty or so, and had gray in his hair. He had entered the hotel room with an aura of quiet authority. The lieutenant had been standing looking out of the hotel room’s picture window and down on the pool, one story below. The dead had been carted off by the Senator’s troop of bodyguards—twenty or more of them, Bell had guessed. One of the Special-Ops types was standing in the shallow end of the pool in his underwear, using a net to scoop out all the floating debris. It seemed incredible that anyone could care about cleaning a pool under the circumstances, Bell thought, shaking his head.

“I don’t know anything about it. Why have we been locked up like this?” Bell said, turning around.

“You were placed under arrest yesterday. The military police are looking for you,” the black man said. His crisp white shirt made his skin seem that much darker.

“How do you know that?” Bell said, shocked that they knew about his arrest.

“We keep in touch,” the man said. “Tell me about the cabin. Where is it located exactly? We believe you know where it is.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Bell said. It was a lie. Rebecca had described to him where the Phelps cabin was exactly, telling him it was next to a sign that read Country Bride Inn and Spa. The girl had told him, too, that the cabin was marked by a barricaded driveway and directly across the road from the Inn, on the one road leading east from Timberline. Bell had lied instinctively, not sure exactly why, other than he’d decided he didn’t like the Senator, or his men or their assumed authority.

  “I don’t believe you,” the man said. He had an Apple tablet computer and turned it toward Bell. The tablet showed a Google Earth view of Timberline and its environs. “Show me where it is and we’ll let you go. In fact, you can come with us. We need military men like you, under the circumstances.”

“Why do you care so much about that fucking cabin?” Bell said.

“It’s a place my employer is interested in,” the man said.

“Why?”

The man didn’t answer, but instead handed Bell the tablet.

“I told you, I’ve no idea where it is! I’ve never been there, and I’m not from around here. I was stationed at the Army’s—”

“We will kill the three girls unless you tell us exactly where this cabin is, all of them,” the man said. His face was placid.

The threat, Bell realized with horror, was a real one. The man had the dead eyes of the soldiers Bell had met before, men who’d been on several combat tours of duty in Afghanistan. They all had the same deadpan, empty-eyed look of professional soul-dead killers.

“What’s going on out there?” Bell said.

“What do you mean?” the man said. The question seemed to strike a nerve.

“I mean, what’s happened to people? You know damn well what I mean,” Bell said.

“We don’t know yet. Could be any number of things. Now, show me where this cabin is on the map.”

“I told you, I don’t have a clue,” Bell said.

“Okay. It’s on you, then.” The man left the room and came back with Patty Tyson. Bell had exchanged only a few words with her. She was dressed in a California State Park Ranger’s uniform. She was handcuffed with white plastic cuffs, her hands behind her back, a black nylon hood placed over her head. The black man was carrying an automatic. He pushed the woman into the center of the room and raised the pistol, aiming it at the back of her head, the barrel a few inches from the hood.

“Please—tell him,” Patty said under the hood. “Please.”

“Okay,” Bell said. “Okay, you win.”

“Good,” the man said. He lowered his pistol.

Bell went to the bed and sat down with the tablet. When he sat down he quickly unzipped the cargo pocket on his calf where he’d put a small pocket knife they’d missed when they’d searched him because it was so small. The man came and stood above him as he found Timberline and the county road heading east away from the town. Bell found the place he thought it might be and stuck a digital pin in it. He thought about attacking the man who was standing nearby, but success seemed a long shot. The small pocketknife was useless, and armed guards were somewhere out in the hallway.

“There. Now will you let us go?”

Instead of answering him, the black man walked out of the room without saying a word.

“Is there a guard outside the door?” Bell asked as soon as he was gone. Patty shook her head yes. He took the hood off her head. Her face was sweaty, her expression terrified.

“They beat Rebecca,” she said. “I told them you knew where it was so they would stop beating her. I told them I didn’t know, and I don’t know.”

“How many are outside?”

“Three.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yes, I think so. What do they want with us? Why are they doing this to us? Who are these people?”

“They want the cabin, I think. They must know that it’s bad out there or they wouldn’t care about it,” Bell said.

“You mean the things are everywhere?”

“Yes. Probably. I think so. Or they would have sent a helicopter for the Senator by now, the government.”

“Jesus.”

Bell used his pocketknife to cut the plastic handcuffs off of Patty’s wrists.

“They’ll know you have that,” she said, nodding at the knife.

“We have to warn the others. Lacy and her father,” Bell said.

“How?” Patty said.

“We have to kill him,” Bell said, whispering.

She nodded. “How, without the men outside hearing?”

“I don’t know,” Bell said.

“I know I’m going to wake up. I know this is a nightmare,” Patty said.

“Yeah, I keep thinking that, too.” Bell said. He slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “But you see it isn’t, is it?”

Patty touched her stinging check and nodded. “How?” she said. “How do we do it?”

“You had to go to the bathroom. I’ll tell him I cut your handcuffs off. I’ll hand him the pocketknife when I explain what I did. Go in there and close the door. Sit on the toilet like you’re peeing,” Bell said.

She did what he asked.

*   *   *

The freeway out of Nevada City, heading east into the Sierras, was mostly empty. Only a few cars had gotten through from Sacramento, and those that did were driving in the fast lane at over 100 miles an hour, hoping to get away from the chaos behind them.

Price had decided that he would rather travel in the slow lane and be able to turn off the highway, if necessary. A man, at a strangely normal-looking rest stop he’d pulled into, driving in a camper full of people from Southern California, had told him that tens of thousands of Howlers were roaming Highway 50 near Sacramento. He told Price very few cars were getting through.

“What about the authorities?” Price had asked the man. Howard had stopped to pee, not being able to hold it any longer, and pulled off the freeway just below Emigrant Gap.

The man, armed with a hunting rifle, was standing guard while his friends filled water bottles from the tap at the rest stop. The man had told Harold an incredible story about what had happened in Los Angeles: how they’d escaped the hordes of Howlers only because he was a gun dealer and was coming back from a gun show in San Diego with all his stock of weapons and ammo when it all started.