HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Read Free Book Online

and had lost an arm at the Battle Of The Bulge. People he cared about. Was it crazy?
    Only if I told stupid people .
       “No, I like people,” Chuck said, talking to himself, climbing the steep wooden stairs to the top of the porch. He stopped at the front door and wiped his feet. He’d put up a Christmas wreath. He loved Christmas and hated to see it go. He held the wreath in his hand. He’d decorated it himself with bits of colored foil and wooden ornaments, and bits of his first Apple computer. He loved computers, and country music, and Christmas, and he loved people. It was just that people didn’t love him back, since that time in the airport on his way back from Vietnam when a girl had called him a baby killer and spit on him. He’d never forgotten that. What her face looked like. She’d meant it.
    I liked people , he thought, looking at the wreath. And if truth be told, he had done things over there that were wrong.  He made a mental note: Next year’s wreath would be bigger. If Armageddon didn’t come, it would be bigger and he would buy one of those big plastic red bows he’d seen in a Seagram’s ad in the back of a Time magazine. No, he wasn’t a sad ol’ Vietnam-veteran “Prepper” like he’d seen on TV. He was different. He loved people. He wanted to save his friends from the war he knew was coming.
    He pushed the door open, taking the wreath off its nail. He didn’t have the heart to take the decorations off the wreath. He put the wreath on the rough wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was clean, its waxed hardwood floor spotless. He’d salvaged the flooring from an old abandoned farmhouse in the valley. The cabin’s living room had an almost feminine sensibility, everything well-scrubbed and orderly. He was a neat freak. The fire in the potbelly wood burner made the living room feel cozy. The big Christmas tree by the small bulletproof windows made it homey, too. He made a mental note to take the Christmas tree down when he got back from his hunting trip.
    He walked to the back of the cabin; a small hallway separated the living room from the one bedroom. In the hallway to the bedroom was a long row of gun cases. He walked to the first, unlocked it and took out his .30-30. “The gun that won the West,” his father had told him when he was a kid. He threw the lever back. The magazine was clear and smelled of Hoppe’s oil, a smell he loved. He walked back to the table, laid the rifle down, went back to the hallway.
    He crouched in the hall, pulled open the trap door and looked down into the bunker he’d hand-dug—some areas having to be dynamited to clear rocks. It had taken him six years to dig and blast out the space for the bunker, which was twice the size of the cabin. He’d spent whole days with nothing but a miner’s style hat with its puny light showing the black earth as he hand-dug the bunker’s two escape tunnels that ran for over a hundred yards, and ended at the county road.
    He hit the light switch on the wall and saw the crude hand-hewn stairs leading down to the lit-up bunker. The bunker held seven bedrooms, two fully-functioning bathrooms, and more rooms that held the bulk of the armory, with tens of thousands of rounds of ammo and more weapons. The redoubt was equipped with a state-of-the-art “control room” as well as a kitchen, larder and dining room. He’d installed a fully-ventilated power plant with a thousand-gallon reserve of diesel fuel. At the very back were the two escape-tunnel entrances, the tunnels laid with tracks for caisson-like carts that could be ridden or filled with equipment and pushed should the bunker need to be abandoned during an attack. The bunker even had its own gravity-fed water system that came straight off the Sierra behind the cabin. Every time he opened the hatch cover, he felt proud of what he’d accomplished.
    He took the steps down into the brightly lit bunker designed to comfortably hold a dozen of his close