“I wonder if we should bother,” Pettis said around noon, as we rested with warm Cokes from the hotel’s machine, which the wolves had partially destroyed and which we took great pleasure in breaking open. “Every night those bastards have done a worse job on this place than the night before. The doors I can fix again, and we can patch up the hole over the kitchen, but I don’t think we can stand another night like last night. They know we’re here, now they know about the morgue. I think we should move elsewhere.”
“You said yourself there’s no other place in Hopkinsville as defendable as this,” Doc stated.
“There’s the bank vault,” Pettis replied. “With only the four of us, air’s no problem. There’s no way they could get in.”
As they discussed our plight I sat on the floor with my head against the wall. My mind wandered. I was very tired. Suddenly I was drifting off to sleep. I saw my wife and son again, standing on the porch of our house; they began to smile the smile of wolves, and behind them on the radio Jimmy Rogers’s voice drawled, “We need Proctor and Baines, we need Proctor and Baines, damn it, Wyatt and Doc, get on in here—”
I sat up. The Coke I was holding spilled. I blinked the real world back into my eyes.
“Doc, is your name Baines?” I asked.
He looked at me dispassionately. “Why, yes.”
“Do you know someone named Wyatt Proctor?”
He and Pettis looked at one another. “Of course.”
I told him about Jimmy Rogers and the radio.
“That crazy jackass,” Pettis said, brightening.
“Mr. Blake,” Doc said, “I don’t think you realize the service you’ve just performed.”
“We’ve been waiting to hear from Rogers for two days,” Pettis explained. “They were supposed to send a helicopter to take us to Edwards Air Force Base. That was the last we heard from them before the phones and power went dead. I spent the whole first day looking for a radio that worked. Every single one had been broken to bits. I was out in the desert looking for the chopper when I spotted you yesterday.”
Doc and Cowboy exchanged thoughtful looks.
“You think Rogers got things set up at Kramer?” Doc asked.
“Hell, I wouldn’t put anything past Jimmy. Edwards must have been overrun. He may have lost his copter, but—Jeez,” he said, smiling with new purpose, “we’ve got
It took the rest of the day to do it. We ate, then Doc and Amy got together everything we would need from the hotel while Pettis and I went shopping for the rest.
The street in front of the hotel was brilliantly lit with sunlight. I began to walk boldly out into it when Pettis took my arm. “There,” he said. Across the street, in the shadow between two buildings, was the crouched figure of a wolf.
Pettis raised his rifle. The beast retreated warily into the alley.
“It’s the full Moon,” Pettis said. “They’re getting bolder during the day.”
We proceeded with caution. We went first to the hardware store. While I stood guard out front, Pettis entered the gun room. After an interminable time, he let out a whoop of triumph and emerged with two shotguns, boxes of ammo, and what looked like an Uzi.
“I knew the bastard had one of these,” he said, holding the machine gun up. “He was with us in the bomb shelter the first night and kept talking about it. But he wouldn’t tell me where it was. Stupid son of a bitch was more worried about having an illegal firearm than he was about staying alive. It was in a false bottom in his desk.”
At the front of the store we gathered some tools, flashlights, and batteries. We also took a long length of plastic hose. Without explanation, Pettis took a few packets of flower seeds. Next we went to the supermarket where we had met the day before. We loaded everything from the hardware store into a cart and rolled to the door. Pettis checked the clip on the Uzi.
“Wait here,” he said, going in.
Through the front windows I saw him go down the dairy aisle and move back toward me up the next. I saw movement above him, up on the top shelf. He crouched and whirled. A staccato burst of fire leapt from the Uzi. A small torsoed wolf fell dead in front of him. He went on. I heard another burst of gunfire at the back of the store before he reappeared, signaling me in.
We loaded the cart with cans and boxes. For a few moments I allowed myself to become a child again, on a shopping spree. There was a perverse sense of delight in taking whatever we wished, and I indulged myself in boxes of cookies and packages of candy bars. By the time we had finished, the cart was nearly spilling over. We threw some unspoiled fruit into it before rolling it out onto the street.
We pushed the cart toward the outskirts of town. Just before Hopkinsville melted into desert we left the cart and turned down a narrow alley between two houses. On the right, about halfway down the alley, we passed a second-floor patio. The door leading to the patio was ajar. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door move. I turned and fired at it.
Pettis was down on the ground before the echo of my shot had faded. He got up cautiously, then studied the door, swinging untouched in the breeze. My shotgun blast formed a neat scatter of pellet holes in the stucco a foot above it.
“You’re a lousy shot,” he grinned. “Sure you’re not an engineer?”
“What have you got against engineers?”
He continued to smile. “You know what they say: It takes an engineer to build the Brooklyn Bridge, and he’s the first guy you can sell it to.”
His smile disappeared when we reached the end of the alley. The small structure there looked nothing like the garage it was. Its brown stucco exterior was fronted with neat flower boxes under curtained windows, its red- tiled roof ledged in white gingerbread trim. Only the double doors at one end gave it away.
There were holes in the double doors, some of the tiles had been broken and knocked from the roof, and most of the windowpanes had been broken. Glass shards were scattered over a once neatly trimmed lawn.
“Hell,” Pettis muttered. He produced a key for the garage doors, pulled them open, and disappeared inside.
He bent over the dented open hood of a small van. It had at one time been meticulously cared for; the chrome on the bumpers shone like new, the cherry red finish bright with wax where it wasn’t dented or scratched.
On the floor were tools—screwdrivers, the scattered remains of a wrench set, a meter with its face cracked. Pettis kicked at a nearby hex driver, cursing again.
“I hoped they wouldn’t get at it,” he said. “I thought it was well enough hidden. I really thought—” He kicked at the van, anger flaring.
He picked up a rag, then threw it down on top of the air filter cover. “Let’s see what I can do,” he said, resignedly. His head disappeared under the hood.
I went to the doorway and watched the alley. My gaze kept drifting back to the second-story porch with its swinging door. But only the slight breeze moved it as I watched.
Pettis banged around in the garage for a half hour before he called me.
“Don’t ask me why, but we’re in luck,” he smiled. “Every car I’ve looked at had hoses and tires slashed, distributor caps cracked, carburetors mangled. The only thing wrong with this was that the spark plug wires were pulled. Everything else is fine.”
“You mean it’ll
“Get in back and I’ll start it up.”
I went to the rear and turned the latch on the door. Hair rose on the back of my neck. The door flew open to reveal a snarling wolf.
I heard the rapping tattoo of Pettis’s Uzi, and the wolf cried out once and fell beside me.
Pettis looked at me. “Now we know why the car wasn’t trashed. We caught him in the middle of it.”
“Guess that still makes us lucky.”
“Or stupid. Get in.”
I climbed into the back of the van, and Pettis turned over the ignition.
The engine roared into life. Pettis whooped and edged the van slowly out of the garage and down the alley.
