HOWLERS by Kent Harrington

Marvin asked.
    Willis started to get up, swinging his feet off the examination table. “What time is it, doctor?”
    “Four o’clock,” Marvin said.
    “What day?”
    “Tuesday.”
    “Have they gotten here yet?” Willis asked.
    “Who?”
    “The things . The things we saw, T.C. and I. Where’s T.C.? T.C. Where is he?”
    “T.C.?”
    “T.C. McCauley, goddamn it. He saved my life out there,” Willis said. He tried to sit up.
    The doctor put his hand on his chest. Poole had cut Willis’ shirt off so that he was naked from the waist up. Good’s shoulders were very pale under the examination room’s harsh fluorescent lights. His jeans had been cut away from his wound, Marvin having cut his pants up the thigh so he could work on the bleeding leg. Willis had a horrible laceration, now stitched up—thirty reddish stitches visible and running from Good’s left knee all the way to his upper thigh. The young man’s face was drawn and ashen from the loss of blood. He seemed to Marvin to have aged ten years.
    “I don’t know,” Marvin said. “You had a bad injury from the crash.”
    Willis began to laugh. A portion of hair was missing from his scalp. Marvin had cut the tangled bloody hair off the side of Willis’ head, thinking he’d been cut there too. Clumps of hair and shirt covered the floor at Poole’s feet. The doctor glanced down at the mess of hair and bloody clothes. Have to move him to the hospital in Sacramento.
    “Kill me, please, Marvin.” Willis said, sitting up. He reached out and grabbed Marvin’s white lab coat, pulling him close, looking at Poole in a way no one had ever looked at the doctor before. Haloperidol dilated Good’s pupils. “I want you to kill me before they get here. I don’t want it to happen to me a third time,” he said. “Not what happened to them, please . I don’t want to be here when they come,” Good pleaded. “I know they’ll come. It happened to Ann and to T.C. I know. Do you understand?”
    “When who comes?” Poole said, thinking that Willis had completely lost his mind.
    “Them—those things that attacked T.C. and me on the road,” Good said. “I saw what they did. T.C. … he got sick, too. I was bringing him back here to Timberline when we were attacked.”
    Marvin heard the phone ring outside in the office. He looked into the young man’s eyes.
    “I want you to rest. I’m going to call an ambulance. You’ll have to go to the hospital in Sacramento. You’ve had a bad head injury, too, on top of the nasty cut, I’m afraid.”
    Dr. Poole went out to the front office and picked the office landline phone up from the floor. It immediately began to ring.
    “Marvin.” The doctor heard his wife’s voice. “Honey, Vivian’s sick. Should I bring her into town? I think it’s that flu you were talking about.” Marvin glanced into the surgery. He saw Good slide off the examination table and stand over a tray of instruments, his back to the doctor.
    “What’s wrong with her?” Marvin said. He watched Willis hold himself up, unsteady, using the corner of the examination table to support himself.
    “She’s got a fever, a hundred and three,” his wife said.
    “I’ll come home. Put her to bed. And stay with her.” Marvin put down the phone. He walked back into the surgery.
    Willis turned around and faced him. He had a short stainless-steel scalpel in his hand. He raised it and put the short fat blade against his throat.
    “I’m not going to be here when they come,” Willis said. “Do you understand that? I had to kill my own wife. She’d turned into one of those things . . .  No one believed me, and now it’s too late.”
    “Willis. Please , whatever happened, I can help you,” Marvin said, staring in horror.
    “No, you can’t. You’ll see when they get here. You’ll see when it happens to your family.” Willis’ hand trembled violently as he sunk the short blade into his carotid artery.
    Poole froze. The two locked eyes. Willis