Read HOWLERS for Free Online Page B

he’d built with his own two hands. It had taken him almost twenty years to finish it. No one looking at it would think it was, in fact, a modern-day fortress.
    People in Timberline thought he was crazy, but he didn’t care. They would be sorry. He wouldn’t be able to help most of them, he thought as he walked toward the porch, built six feet above the snowy ground. He’d built so many traps, fields of fire, and automobile traps, that he couldn’t remember them all. So he’d gotten a computer and begun a small log of the cabin’s military-style defenses; he’d employed a lot of what he’d learned during his three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The cabin was a state-of-the-art bunker disguised as a cabin.
    He’d learned all about computers, their use important to the fortress’s running—that had been ten years ago. Now it was all done and ready for the battle to come. When Armageddon arrived, he would be prepared.
    He walked through the snow toward the cabin’s wooden porch. Most of all he wanted to share his achievements with friends, people he liked. Many times he’d stopped his truck in front of Quentin Collier’s ranch and thought about showing Quentin everything he’d done inside the cabin.
    He liked Quentin. Quentin was one of a group of friends in Timberline who never looked at him like he was just an old crazy Vietnam vet. Chuck smiled. Every year he’d been invited for Thanksgiving at the Colliers’. Every year he’d gone. Thanksgiving at the Colliers’ was his one social event of the year, and he always looked forward to it.
    He’d stop his truck, turning off the engine, and fantasize about telling Quentin and Marie what he’d accomplished at the cabin, how thorough he’d been, the tunnels, the stores of food and ammo, the hidden diesel generator buried ten feet underground, equipped with its own exhaust and thousand-gallon fuel supply. But he couldn’t actually go through with it. Quentin, after all, was the town sheriff, and maybe he would have to tell someone about what he’d done—especially about his collection of fully auto assault rifles (more than fifty). No doubt he’d broken laws in collecting so many weapons of every description, and there were the highly-illegal plastic explosives, the homemade flame thrower, and the black-market hand grenades. Not to mention his newest addition: an M32 multi-barrel grenade launcher given to him by a close friend and fellow Vietnam vet who was developing the weapon for the Marine Corps, and making a fortune in the process.
    But even then he’d almost gone on down the gravel road into the Collier ranch and told Quentin because he wanted to tell his friend that his family would be safe—safe when Armageddon came. He wanted Quentin and Marie to know they would be welcomed at his redoubt. He wanted them to know that they could all hold out in the cabin together, that everything for them would be all right. He would share with the Colliers.
    When Quentin’s wife, Marie, had gotten breast cancer and passed two years ago, it had hit him very hard. He had cried in the cabin by himself. Marie Collier had been so sweet to him. Marie Collier was a good woman. Even now, two years later, he didn’t like thinking about her passing.
    It wasn’t fair , he thought, always the good people die and the evil people live to get old: the Clintons, both Bushes, Dick Cheney, big-time banksters . They all, no doubt, would live forever.
    “They all think I don’t like people,” Chuck said out loud. It isn’t that at all. It was just that I had something I had to do. I had to do this for my . . .  friends, the people I will invite . He would invite them. He began to tick off the names: Willis Good and his family; the Colliers; T.C. McCauley; the librarians in town, who never charged him for late fees. Farren Webb, the cook at the Copper Penny who always added extra French fries to his order; his uncle Sam, who was in the old-folks home in Reno