“You’re not sick. Sit down,” Dillon ordered. “You’re hungry. Let’s get out of here and go up into the cabin. There’s food. We’ll cook something. You’ll see. You’ll feel better.”

Miles sat down. The fear had gone from his eyes. His face changed, his look of panic gone.

“Thanks. I—”

“It’s okay,” Dillon said. “Fucking Howlers make you go nuts. Right?”

“Yeah,” Miles said, feeling ashamed of himself. He looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He could see his fingers trembling.

“Can you cook, kid?” Dillon asked.

“No. My mother—” He had not thought of his parents until Price had texted him. “I think I’ll call my mom and dad. Maybe they could make it here, too,” Miles said. He took out his phone and checked for a signal, but had none. “Phone doesn’t work down here. I’ll go up and try.”

“Sure, kid,” Dillon said. He saw some white spit forming on the corner of Miles’ lips, but didn’t let it register on his face. Instead he smiled and stood up, and they went up to the cabin’s main floor.

Chuck’s notes on the cabin’s larder, and the kitchen, were twenty pages long. He’d stocked regular food stuffs, including fresh vegetables and fruits, in a cold room at the back of the kitchen. Multiple cases of freeze-dried foods were stored downstairs in the bunker. At the end of the notes, Phelps had described the edible plants of the Sierra region and referred to several books on foraging in the cabin’s library.

The five of them sat at the big pine table with long benches, the small bulletproof window directly across from it. They had a view out onto the snowy field in front of the cabin. A few Howlers were scouting the cabin; others were sitting on the driveway, howling. One or two had already run up on the porch and banged on the window and door before Dillon had walked out onto the porch and killed them with a fully-automatic SCAR 17, the stock folded up so it was shortened.

They heated up canned chili and tried to pretend that the howling didn’t bother them. Twice Dr. Poole had walked to the window to look out on the howling creatures. Once he’d opened one of the firing ports built into the cabin’s wall and used a high-powered .306 to shoot one of the closest Howlers dead. But it didn’t seem to matter, as more from the road were coming up and sitting on the driveway—in plain sight—in that weird way they had, like coyotes, their heads tilted back, their face bent toward the night sky.

It was Lacy who got Marvin and led him back to the table, telling him his food was getting cold. She’d gently pulled him away from the window, taking the rifle from his hands and placing it against the wall.

All of the men, not wanting to admit it, were glad that she was playing the role of mother. Something about it was reassuring. They had watched her cook with rapt attention, all of them appreciating the normalcy of her opening cans of chili and filling a big stew-sized pot with it. She’d found bread and heated that up in the oven, never once acknowledging the howling. Lacy had not even stopped her preparations for dinner when Dillon had gone out on the porch to shoot the two Howlers dead.

Phelps’s larder was huge and ran down the length of the cabin’s west wall. It was stocked with all kinds of foodstuffs, enough for two years for fifteen people, the computer printout said. Lacy had read the “Kitchen” section of Chuck’s instructions—which had been addressed to her, as if he’d known all along that she would come here and be the one to read them.

Chuck had left a hand written note thumb-tacked to the cold-storage door.

Dear Lacy,

I hope it’s you who is reads this. If it is I know you are safe here. I promised your mother, long ago, that your family would have a place to go if the shit ever hit the fan. So now it has, but you, your dad, and sister will all be safe here. I remember when your mom first brought you here as a baby. Here is the photo I took of you and your mom a year after you were born. It was September and hot as hell! Love “uncle” Chuck.

Lacy understood that Chuck Phelps had been in love with her mother, and that they might have been more than just good friends—perhaps even lovers? It didn’t shock her. She’d always liked Chuck.

She looked at the old-school photo. It showed a young woman with a beautiful baby. Her mother was holding her up to the camera. Both mother and baby were smiling at the photographer. Pine trees were behind them, and a piece of machinery of some kind. It was at that moment, while she’d been looking at the photo, that Dillon had walked out on the porch despite the danger of being overpowered, and the sound of automatic-weapons fire filled the cabin. In a moment he’d ducked back into the cabin, closing the door. They were all looking at him gripping the wicked assault rifle, his face splattered with blood.

Lacy calmly put the photo back where she’d found it and went back to fixing dinner.

The first attack, waves of Howlers, came while they were eating. They just stared as hundreds of the creatures started running up the driveway toward the cabin. It was surreal, Lacy thought, looking up and seeing the snow-covered field empty and beautiful one minute, then full of Howlers the next. She stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs. Miles didn’t hear his cell phone ringing in the commotion that ensued; all of them had run to the cabin’s built-in gunports, where they’d prepared weapons, and opened fire on the attacking horde. For half the night or longer they fired at the Howlers, wave after wave of them running at the cabin.

It was Miles who had taken it on himself during the battle to bring each of them fresh ammunition. All of them were firing the same weapon, the FAL assault rifle. At the end of the battle, the Howlers piled up in front of the porch, five feet high, were giving the others a wall of dead bodies to hide behind. Some Howlers, especially children, would fling themselves off the heap and land on the porch, sometimes heading head-first into the bulletproof window in an attempt to smash it. Others would crawl up the stairs behind the dead and crawl, on all fours, toward the door.

At one point, one of the crawling ones grabbed Lacy’s rifle barrel and tried to yank it out through the gunport. She screamed for help. Marvin jumped up and helped her pull the butt of her rifle back. He managed to pour fire onto the Howler, splitting its face open.

Lacy sagged to the floor, exhausted. She turned and looked at her father firing, the sweat pouring from his face. He emptied a clip and caught her eye while turning to pick up one at his feet. For the first time in her life, Lacy thought she saw fear on her father’s face. He went back to killing.

At dawn it stopped. At dawn the snow fell lightly on two thousand dead bodies lying out on the field. Inside the cabin it was quiet. They were all past exhausted.

It was Marvin who walked outside first. He stood at the doorway, cold air pouring in looking at the nightmarish scene: dead Howlers piled in heaps in front of the cabin’s porch. Bodies were everywhere, all types of people. Some were obviously city people, judging from their dress.

Marvin looked at the pile in the nearest kill zone, twenty yards or so in front of the cabin. It was an abattoir: bodies piled on bodies, blood, guts, brain matter. He walked out into the field. He put down his rifle and began to pull bodies down from the pile and move them out of the way. He pulled a fat man whose head was gone, yanking him down from the top of the pile. He watched the thing slide down the scrum-like pile of bodies and land at his feet.

Marvin heard a shot ring out and simultaneously felt the crack of a bullet pass very near his head. A Howler, hiding behind the pile, had jumped at him and was in midair when Dillon shot him from the porch. The Howler, a teenage boy, landed at Marvin’s feet, its body twitching not quite dead. Marvin looked up at the porch and saw Dillon covering him. He went back to work without saying a word, dragging bodies from the pile and hauling them out of the way of their kill zone. His boots created a sludge of guts and blood and snow as he worked. The others came out of the cabin joining him in the ugly work, all of them realizing that the kill zone had to be cleared, or they would all die.