“We strongly caution viewers that the footage about to be broadcast is of a highly graphic and unsettling nature. Viewer discretion is advised.”
The blonde anchor in the blue tie and somber jacket glanced nervously off-camera, swallowed as if there were a gun pointed at his head, then gazed back into the lens.
“I’d like to take a moment to remind our audience that it has never been the policy of this station, or its parent network, to panic or unduly alarm our viewership in bringing such events to public attention, or in any way exploit or sensationalize any such footage we may receive. That said, the videotape we’re about to present is uncensored and unedited in hopes that viewers might better prepare themselves for what is happening in the eastern portion of the country and which, by all reliable indicators, may spread our way in the coming days and weeks.
“This footage comes to us from our affiliate station in Chicago and was shot by W.N.C. cameraman Dennis Kabrich in the neighboring community of Elmhurst. Once again, what you are about to witness is real and is attributed to the so-called ‘Wormwood’ or ‘Yellowseed’ virus, first reported near the town of Willard, Pennsylvania, just two short months ago. This footage is of an extremely graphic nature and viewer discretion is strongly advised.”
With that, the cautions ceased and the videotape rolled.
Through the safety and insulation of the television screen, Larry Hanna and Rudy Cheng were transported from the quiet comfort of the Cheng’s rec room and thrust into an alley in Elmhurst, Illinois, where the Wormwood epidemic was running riot all around them. The two men leaned forward, anxious to make sense of what they were seeing, then shrank back, stunned and sickened, as the horrors contained within the tape became increasingly clear.
The footage began with a pitch and a sprawl, as if Dennis Kabrich, W.N.C.’s unfortunate cameraman, had fallen at a dead run. The sky flashed briefly, overcast and gray, and then two men toting automatic rifles hauled him to his feet. They fled after a group of four or five other men, all in gray-green fatigues, all running down the alley in a loose arrowhead formation, rifles at the ready.
The alley was closing up, coming to an end as a tall chain-link fence crowned with barbed-wire became apparent. On the other side lay a cross street, a scorched elm tree and a broad field of sodden grass. A two-story brick building stood at a distance in the field, looking for all the world like a bank vault or a castle keep, a place of unquestioning safety.
There was a wide gate in the fence, the post wrapped in steel chain and secured with a padlock, and as the group came to a halt, one man pointing his rifle at the lock, something shuffled at them from a dark garage to their immediate left. It looked like a scarecrow, its stuffing bursting from its gray skin in raw patches, and the noise it made was like a man drowning in syrup.
The squad turned.
“Shit! Look out”
One of the men screamed as the horror clamped onto him, its head dipping toward his neck and then jerking savagely away. A bright jet of arterial blood painted a fatal slash on the dingy white face of the garage.
The rest of the squad opened fire and pieces of flesh began to explode like wet sandbags. The soldier and the scarecrow fell to the gravel together and, as one of the remaining men turned back to the gate and made shrapnel out of the padlock, another unholstered his sidearm and stepped over the bodies they’d just put down.
Dennis Kabrich, his hands far from steady, brought the man and the pistol into focus as the soldier extended his arm and fired four shots into the writhing mass.
The dead soldier and the scarecrow sighed and grew still, tangled in a final embrace.
The squad moved through the gate and the camera followed, sparing only the briefest glance at the ground in passing. Spreading back into an arrowhead, they paused to kneel and fire at the occasional target while crossing the wide strip of asphalt. Dimly, at a distance, there were ragged screams and frantic bursts of automatic gunfire.
The camera halted in the street to pan left and then right, taking in the entire scope of the chaos. What appeared in the frame looked like the cooling remains of a five-day riot. Houses and apartment buildings were blackened and smoking, cars were smashed into one another, tipped on their sides or accordianed into power poles. Glass and debris littered the sidewalk and bodies lay like heaps of rags in the streets.
The destruction stretched on as far as the eye could see. Shadows stepped in and out of view, ragged figures inevitably drawn toward the heat or the smell or the focused movement of the squad, and as they appeared they were cut down, their mouths making the same drowning scream again and again — more frustration than any sense of pain or dying.
But then, they were already dead.
It was Wormwood that was making them walk again.
“My God.” Larry Hanna shook his head against the grim reality of the scene. “My God!” he whispered again, his complexion pale and nauseated.
Rudy Cheng’s hooded eyes glanced at his neighbor and then went back to the TV screen, one hand raised to his chin, stroking it as the squad of soldiers ran full-out across the grounds of an elementary school, chopping down anything that got in their way.
The camera picked out random morsels to broadcast:
A pile of burned bodies, as tall as a haystack…
A dead woman who’d wandered out in her nightgown…
A black dog feeding on the blanched corpse of a preschooler.
“I don’t think I can deal with this,” Larry moaned, stepping over the coffee table in his haste to reach the bathroom.
Rudy watched him go, wondering if any of them would have much choice.
Rudy’s wife Aimee awoke groggily as he slipped into bed several hours later. Her head turned automatically toward the clock. “It’s almost two o’clock!” she said, surprised. “Are you just coming to bed?”
He nodded then switched off the reading lamp on his side of the bed, letting darkness retake the room. Gradually, the moonlight in the curtains cast enough of a glow for him to see by. The dresser and the chair to the left side of the bed, the dark halo of his wife’s hair against the pillow, the vague smiles of his three children gazing out of oak frames on the far wall. Sarah, Denise and John, arranged in a diagonal line, oldest to youngest. He found his eyes kept returning to them, wondering if there would be new portraits to take their place the coming fall, each of them a year older. He wondered if any of them would be alive to have their pictures taken, never mind the school or the photographer.
The thought brought back the final few minutes of the videotape he and Larry had watched on the news. The squad of soldiers perched in a sniper’s line atop the school gymnasium, firing down at unseen targets while a man screamed for help in the background.
It might have been his daughters’ school, or his son’s.
Or he himself might be up there, firing a rifle.
Or screaming for help.
His wife and children the blackened bodies piled high on the soccer field.
The essence of the broadcast was that the experimental treatments and vaccines had all failed. Wormwood had jumped the quarantine lines and was heading west, bringing death and destruction to big cities and small towns alike. It was not in its nature to leave any stones unturned (much less an entire lot of them) and the chances of his whole family escaping the epidemic unscathed was about the same as walking between the raindrops of a spring downpour.
His wife’s hand reached out and touched him.
“You’re tense,” she told him gently, moving her palm over his chest. “I can feel it coming off you in waves.”
He sighed and took her hand, kissing it before setting it aside and turning his back to her.
She drew slow circles on his back and felt his breathing deepen as he sank into the padded arms of the mattress.
“We need to start making plans,” he told her, his face to the wall, nudging her out of a warm drowse. “We need to start getting ready for this thing.”
Aimee propped herself up on an elbow. “Rudy, Chicago is almost two thousand miles away. They’ll figure out how to stop it before it gets much further.”
He flipped himself on his back and gazed at the ceiling. “I wish I could believe that.”
“That news report must have been something to tie you in knots like this.”
“It was. I don’t know whether to wish you’d seen it or be grateful you didn’t.”
“Well you know how television can be. They like to play things up, make them look bigger than they actually are. With the right editing and camera angles, they can turn a five man street scuffle into civil unrest. What they didn’t show you is how normal things are a block or two away. You only saw what they wanted you to see.”
He nodded, thinking of the pile of bodies and the black dog, the line of gunners on the roof.
“This looked like the apocalypse.”
She laughed softly in the dark. “People have been seeing the apocalypse for two thousand years.”
A dead man came shambling out of a dingy garage and then disintegrated in a storm of gunfire, taking a screaming soldier with him.
“This looked pretty convincing.”
The bedroom lapsed into silence.
“What have you been doing all night?” she finally asked.
“Watching the news. Thinking about what I’ll do when this thing finally shows up.”
“If this thing shows up,” she amended, touching a finger to his lips.
“If,” he allowed, though not believing it. Aside from the Chicago video, more snapshots of the epidemic were surfacing, opening up like new doors to Hell. And that was just the television; he didn’t even want to look at the internet. It didn’t matter if you called it Wormwood or Yellowseed, it wasn’t the sort of thing that just petered out of its own volition. It had a maw the size of Texas and wasn’t likely to stop chewing until there was nothing left but silent earth and rotting dead.
“What sorts of plans have you been making?” Aimee asked, though hesitantly.
“I drew a map of the neighborhood,” Rudy told her.
“That sounds harmless enough,” Aimee said, relieved.
“Maybe I’ll show it to some of the neighbors tomorrow,” he decided. “See if anyone else has given this serious thought.”
“It occurs to me,” Rudy began, reaching into his hip pocket and unfolding the map, “that if we stick together as a neighborhood, we can defend ourselves better than we could as individual houses. Look here,” he said to Larry, who was stubbornly disinclined to look at his map. “We have a unique situation in that we live in a cul-de-sac with the creek to one side and the hillside to another. Natural barriers that make the street easier to defend.”
“Son of a bitch, Rudy,” Larry whispered, glancing around to see if anyone had heard him. “Are you nuts? What are you doing talking like this, drawing up a map? Deliberately trying to start a panic?”
“No, I just thought we should be as prepared as possible for wh-”
“Prepared for what? That joke we saw on TV? Come on!” Larry scoffed, red blotches appearing high on his cheeks. He gestured at the map in open contempt, as if he’d like to snatch it out of Rudy’s hands and erase his name from the domino-shaped rectangle they were standing in front of.
Rudy looked at his next-door neighbor and adjusted his glasses. “If you think that what we saw last night was a joke, you’re badly mistaken Larry.” He nodded at the house, as if including it in their conversation. “Go inside and turn on your set. If it’s a joke, it’s awfully contagious.”
Larry smiled, shaking his head to show he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “You know, with a few friends and a camcorder, I could put together a pretty convincing tape too. Nothing as good as the one last night, but then I’m an accountant, not a liberal arts major with no job and too much time on my hands. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, swinging an arm toward the house, “I’ve got some pruning to do before lunch.”
“If it helps, think of it as a storm,” Rudy suggested, “a hurricane. Take your truck down to the lumberyard and pick up some plywood. Stock up on canned goods and bottled water, maybe some candles and extra batteries. It never hurts to be prepared.”
“There’s nothing to be prepared for,” Larry maintained, turning back toward his garage.
“Do you have a gun?” Rudy asked, raising his voice.
Larry Hanna stopped along the zigzag of a patched crack and turned slowly around. What Rudy saw behind his pale blue eyes was another sort of patch, one that was under a great deal of stress at the moment.
“You know I do,” he said. “We went shooting with it last fall up at the pond. My dad’s target rifle.”
Rudy nodded. He remembered the rifle well: a single-shot .22 with a barrel as heavy as a cast iron skillet. It wouldn’t be much good in close quarters (except possibly as a club), but perched on a rooftop with a good scope, it would help keep Wormwood at a distance.
“You might at least pick up some ammunition,” Rudy said.
Larry opened his mouth to say something then shut it again. He took a step toward the curb, as if he couldn’t bear to shout his reply; that shouting might be overheard and lend his neighbor’s crackpot theories more credence.
“You’re not joking, are you? You really think that what happened in Chicago could happen here?”
Rudy regarded him for a moment, torn between the truth and not wanting to frighten him away. “At this point, Larry, I just think we ought to talk about it. Prepare ourselves for the possibility. I wouldn’t want to hear that it’s come after all the stores have been picked clean and it’s too late to do anything about it.” He raised a leading eyebrow. “Would you?”
“I guess not,” Larry allowed. “If I thought anything was coming.”
Rudy nodded. “Why don’t you come over to the house this afternoon? I’ll talk to a few others in the neighborhood — Bud Iverson and maybe the Dawleys — and see what they think about this?”
Larry pressed his lips together and gazed down the short length of Quail Street, his jaw grinding back and forth, undecided. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said.
“That’s fine. About three o’clock?”
Larry nodded once in acknowledgement; again, giving the idea as little weight and gravity as possible. To give more would be to imply there was some reason to meet in the first place, which there most certainly was not. “What about Jan?” he wondered. “Should she come too?”
Rudy gave this some thought. “Why don’t we just keep it amongst the men for now,” he decided. “If we decide there’s reason to proceed, we’ll bring in the wives at the next meeting.”
“Yeah, well…” Larry’s expression turned weary and sour, as if he’d committed himself to picking up trash along the highway for the next two weekends. “I can tell you right now how I’m going to vote on the prospect of future meetings. It’s bad enough that I’m considering this one.”
Rudy took a deep breath and let it out. “Try to come with an open mind, Larry.”
“I’m not even promising I’ll come,” Larry replied, “but if I do, I’ll come with the mind I’ve got.”
Rudy nodded, spying Bud Iverson’s Cadillac sailing quietly up the street, as regal and as polished as when it left the showroom floor. It turned squarely into its driveway, waited patiently while the electric garage door opened, then came to rest on its spotless concrete pad.
Folding his map in half, Rudy excused himself and hurried over before the garage could swing shut again.
At 62, Bud Iverson was the undisputed patriarch of Quail Street. He and Helen had bought their house thirty years ago and raised four daughters in the immaculate split-level standing adjacent to the Hanna’s. All four girls had since moved out — the youngest heading off to college three years ago — leaving Bud and Helen to rattle about the oversized house on their own. The Cadillac gave Bud something to fawn over in the absence of his daughters, while Helen simply redoubled her efforts in the flowerbeds and garden.
She served Rudy and her husband tall glasses of iced tea and then withdrew from the room to let them talk, saying she’d be in the back yard if Janie, their eldest daughter, called. The two of them were going out shopping together after lunch.
Bud nodded in acknowledgement then waited until his wife was out of earshot. He looked Rudy over, his gaze penetrating: a sharp and steely blue beneath his wild gray eyebrows. “I take it this has something to do with the troubles we’re having back east?” he said, drawing his conclusion from the brief exchange he and Rudy had passed in the driveway.
Rudy nodded. “I thought it might be a good idea to get together as a neighborhood. Possibly draw up a contingency plan in case it comes our way.” He hesitated as Bud continued to stare across the table at him, as unflinching as a seasoned general. “I saw some footage on the news last night that was fairly shocking. It came out of Chicago, so there’s no question that it’s moving in our direction.”
“I believe I saw the same footage,” Bud said, picking up his iced tea and gazing deep into the glass, past the lemon slice and crushed ice to where a fine brown sediment had settled on the bottom, almost invisible to the naked eye. Bud seemed to read something of the future down there. “What exactly did you have in mind?” he wondered.
“At this point, nothing specific… other than getting together and discussing it.” He picked up his glass out of nervousness. “Truthfully, I’m open to just about anything.”
“Are you open to the possibility that there’s nothing we can do about it? That it may be too big to fight?”
“Nothing’s too big to fight,” Rudy contended, an edge of defiance in his voice. “We may not win, but as long as my wife and family are alive, I’ll fight it.”
Bud nodded, conceding the point. “Who did you plan on inviting to this discussion?”
“The whole cul-de-sac,” Rudy answered. “Or at least the men — as many of them as will come.”
“I might be able to help you out there,” Bud said, slowly warming to the idea. He picked up the map Rudy had unfolded on the table between them. “Who have you got left to talk to?”
“The Dawleys,” Rudy said then pointed to the bottom of the sheet. “Also these last two bordering Kennedy. The Navaros and the Sturlings.”
“What did Larry have to say?” Bud asked, leaning back, his blue eyes sharp again.
Rudy hesitated, his face becoming fluid, undecided. He took a deep breath. “Larry doesn’t believe the danger will reach this far. He believes the government will arrive at a solution before it spreads this far west.”
“And you don’t,” Bud concluded.
“I suppose anything’s possible,” Rudy replied, “but I’m not counting on it.”
A sardonic smile touched Bud Iverson. “I worked for the government for twenty years,” he confessed, though Rudy was already aware of this. “If they come up with a solution, it’ll be strictly by accident. At this moment, I’d say they’re far more concerned with digging foxholes and shredding documents.”
Rudy looked a little closer at Bud. “Are you convinced the government is responsible?”
“An interesting choice of words, but yes,” he nodded, picking up his tea, “almost certainly.”
The two men gazed at one another then Bud reconsidered the map.
“Mike and Pam are separated,” he reminded Rudy, tapping a blunt finger against the lot marked “Dawley”. “From what I’ve heard, he’s still in town though… What did you have in mind there?”
“Perhaps I’ll speak to his son, Shane. He must be 17 or 18 — driving for at least a year. I’ll ask him to come to the meeting tonight instead of his father.”
“All right,” Bud approved. “While you’re doing that, why don’t I tackle the last two? The Sturlings and the Navaros. I think I can get Don and Keith to come without starting a general panic.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Rudy nodded. “I don’t know them very well. They would probably take the suggestion better coming from you.”
“Well, I’ll do my best,” Bud assured him. “About three o’clock, you say?”
“Yes, if that works out for everyone.”
A flash of chrome and reflected sunlight cut through the window, streaking like a comet across the far wall. A trim, burgundy-colored Accord rolled to a stop in the Iverson’s driveway.
“There’s Janie,” Bud said, regarding his daughter through the window. “Must be getting close to lunch.”
Rudy rang the Dawley’s doorbell and waited, standing in the recessed shade of the front step, the house itself grasping him in a loose embrace. To his ears it sounded vacant, or asleep. The light filtering through the textured glass panels that flanked the double doors was a gauzy shade of gray, the color of an old sock. No warm yellow or television flicker to be seen, so Rudy gave a halfhearted knock and then turned away, deciding no one was home.
He was halfway down the walk when the latch clicked quietly behind him. He turned, shading his eyes with his hand. “Shane?” he said, questioning the pale face regarding him through the doorway.
The boy nodded back at him, dyed black hair standing on end above a rim of eyeliner, as if he’d just tumbled out of bed. Skin so white it was edging toward transparency. A small silver hoop piercing the ridge of his right eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” Rudy apologized, thinking the boy looked ill, or on drugs. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Shane shrugged. “I wasn’t asleep.”
Rudy made his way back to the doorstep. “Is your mother home?”
Shane shook his head. “She got called back to work,” he replied, eyeing Rudy as if he couldn’t quite figure out what this visit was about. The wary expression on his face suspected a complaint. A stereo playing too loudly or too late into the night.
“Actually,” Rudy said, coming to an easy rest with his hands in his pockets, “it was you I wanted to talk to.”
The suspicion deepened. “Oh yeah? What about?”
As morning peaked and fell toward afternoon, Rudy found himself sitting in front of the computer in his den, scanning the day’s headlines and finding them curiously lacking, as if someone had been busy deleting the day’s events before he had a chance to sit down.
After last night’s video he expected something jarring: cities in smoke and ruin, panic and martial law, photographs of dead, gray faces. The lead story, however, was preoccupied with a highly publicized double-homicide in San Francisco: a striking brunette by the name of Patricia Brooks accused of waiting in her BMW outside a trendy bistro, then running down her husband and his mistress in front of dozens of shocked onlookers.
The story didn’t mention either of the victims coming back from the dead to devour Mrs. Brooks, nor was there any mention of Wormwood in the next story: a utilities fraud investigation in Colorado.
Frowning, Rudy scrolled up and checked the time signatures on the headlines and was surprised to find they were almost two days old. He clicked Refresh and the same page appeared, right down to the decimal point in the day’s stock market numbers.
Of course they’re the same, he thought to himself, refreshing the page yet again. It’s a Saturday. The markets are closed. Yet he was willing to bet he wasn’t seeing Friday’s closing figures; the news site had simply stopped updating sometime after 1:47 on Thursday afternoon.
A sudden image popped into his head: a computer terminal splashed with blood, the operator dead and gone off in search of his coworkers; the news no longer important. The news evident to anyone with two good eyes and a window.
He tried another site and was rewarded with something a bit more current. Chicago was deep in the grip of the plague. There were also reports coming from Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Toronto.
Slowly but surely it was spreading westward, moving like a great black curtain across the continent, dividing the land of the living from the land of the dead.
There was a photo that had been intentionally blurred, pixilated into a mildly abstract pattern of blues and grays. A note beside the link to enlarge the photograph warned of explicit content.
Rudy found that his hand was trembling on the mouse. It took him three tries to enlarge the photograph.
A dead face gazed back at him through the new window, a face that, despite its decayed and mangled features, looked quite a bit like Frank Sinatra. The caption below the photo read: “Unidentified plague victim roams the streets of Philadelphia”.
What the caption failed to mention, however, but was perfectly obvious, was that most of the man’s guts, including a long rope of soiled intestine, were dragging on the smoky thoroughfare behind him, begging to be stepped on or run over by the next passing car.
Rudy stared at the former Mr. Sinatra (unidentified) for a long moment, a stark, icy horror settling over him like rigor mortis.
He closed the window but the face stayed with him, hovering just out of reach, photographed with digital clarity in the stark light of day, roaming the smoky streets of Philadelphia, making its way steadily westward.
Yellowseed. Wormwood.
It stood in the doorway behind him, dragging its burden down the hall.
This thing wearing Sinatra’s ruined face.
The plague made the national news again, though now the coverage was more distant, the footage taken from the air, out the sides of helicopters as they overflew badly-infected neighborhoods. Pieces of the United States were breaking away, crumbling to ruin in the lands east of the Mississippi, the disease spreading much faster now, faster than anyone anticipated. Smoke from burning cities rose in black plumes over the Atlantic, perfectly visible in satellite photographs. By night, the fires themselves were visible. The largest, in Mobile, roared over twenty square blocks. It looked like a vengeful star fallen to Earth.
The sights had a sobering effect on Rudy’s guests. Larry contended that the satellite shots were fakes, computer-generated and therefore prone to manipulation, but even he shut up when one of the helicopters overflew a military base in North Carolina. There was a small, incredibly desperate war going on along its perimeter, hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of the infected massing outside its tall gates, creating breaches to pour through and spark sudden flashpoints.
The men of Quail Street sat in the Cheng’s rec room, cans of soda or glasses of lemonade forgotten in their hands, and watched a company of infantrymen gun down scores of civilians before they were overrun and torn to pieces by the blood-frenzied mob. The cameraman, circling above this scene, began to break down into sobs, his lens zooming down, picking out gruesome details, trembling as he tried to lock on a small drama involving a wounded soldier trapped on top of a utility shed. Eventually the shed collapsed and the soldier disappeared, though his blood surfaced in places, like a blossom in the water above a shark attack.
When they’d seen enough, Rudy switched off the set.
“Good Christ Almighty,” Keith Sturling swore, rubbing his eyes as if the images wouldn’t go away. As if they were burned in with phosphor, glowing even in the dark. He was a lieutenant in the National Guard and the sight of a base collapsing like wet cardboard had shaken him badly.
Larry looked numb, shell-shocked, the ice in his lemonade melting against his palms.
Bud was gazing at the darkened television, as if he were still receiving a signal from North Carolina, or perhaps having trouble disconnecting himself from what was happening there.
Don Navaro, who Rudy hadn’t met until that day, took out a cigarette and put it between his lips. He reached for his lighter, realized he was in someone else’s house, then tucked the cigarette away.
“Go ahead and smoke;” Rudy told him, “at least unless no one else minds. My wife may have something to say about it later, but I’d rather that everyone was at ease here, focused on the problems we’ll likely be facing.” He paused, pacing from the bookcase to the fireplace. “I think what we just witnessed is on its way here. It may show up tomorrow, or next week, or perhaps a month from now, but it’s coming.”
“Bullshit,” Larry growled, setting down his glass as Don set fire to the tip of his Winston.
“Go ahead, Larry,” Rudy invited, giving him an encouraging gesture. “I didn’t call this meeting to ram my views down everyone’s throat. I want to hear what you have to say.”
“This is all just a hoax!” Larry asserted, rising to his feet. “It has to be! There is no plague!”
“We just got through watching a massacre on the fucking television,” Keith Sturling frowned. “How the hell can you stand there and say it’s a hoax?”
Larry turned, the high red marks blazing on his cheeks again. “How many people have you seen killed on television? You don’t believe they’re actually dead, do you?”
“This is the news were talking about, man; not the fucking movies!” Keith shot back, his voice rising. “Pull your head out of your ass!”
“It’s the same process!” Larry contended, shouting right back. “Just because Dan Rather reads it off a teleprompter doesn’t mean it’s the truth!”
Keith opened his mouth to return another salvo but Bud got up from his chair, stepping between them. “Let’s just discuss these things calmly now, shall we, and not forget we’re guests in this house.” He smoothed back a lock of iron-gray hair that had fallen over his brow. “I’m sure we’ll all get a chance to air our views. Now,” he exhaled, turning toward Larry, “let’s start with the basic assumption that what the news is showing us is, indeed, actually happening. Larry, you seem to have a unique stance on all of this, so why don’t we start with you.”
“What’s the use? You all seem to have your minds made up against me.” His jaw shifted. “I didn’t come here to be shouted down or laughed at.”
“Then maybe you ought to explain your position more clearly,” Bud suggested. “Despite what we just saw on television, you maintain it’s a hoax. Can you tell us why you’re convinced of that?”
Larry Hanna looked at the faces of his neighbors; faces that he passed and waved to, day in and day out, for almost six years; all staring back at him now as if he’d suggested the Earth might really be flat after all. He considered walking out, wishing them luck in their grand paranoia, but the trouble with that was he couldn’t walk far. They were, after all, his neighbors; he couldn’t pick up his house and walk away with that as well.
So he sat down again, ready to receive the stones of their derision.
“I can’t accept that these are dead people, and that’s what it all comes down to,” he said with a sigh. “If death is no longer a reality — which, taxes aside, is the only real absolute we have — then where does that leave us?”
“Standing hip-deep in a pile of shit,” Keith Sturling said softly.
Larry ignored the remark, the root and depth of his distress becoming evident now. “Think about it,” he implored, looking at each of them in turn. “Where does it leave us? If that…” he pointed at the darkened TV screen, “is what waits for us after we die, what does that say about God?” He shook his head, angry. “That He’s abandoned us? That He’s stopped listening? I mean, what other conclusion can you come to?”
Rudy quietly cleared his throat. “You may be taking this, well…” — he hesitated, searching for words that wouldn’t offend or sound condescending — “too metaphysically. It’s shaky at best to start second-guessing God; assigning Him motives. From what I’ve gathered, this all started with a fallen defense satellite, which makes it more or less our doing. God had no part in it.”
“Oh, but He should,” Larry replied, the broken sadness in his eyes deep enough to drown in. “I’m not the kind of Christian who thinks God should step in and solve the world’s problems — make the Seahawks win on Sunday or tie a nice rainbow of peace around the Middle East — but this has to be an affront to Him. It has to be. If the walking dead don’t make Him sit up and take notice, He might as well be gone, or dead.”
He looked down at his hands, empty and useless.
“I can’t put my faith in a god like that.”
“So what do you intend to do?” Bud Iverson asked. “Fold up like a cheap suitcase and march Jan and the kids out to the street to be slaughtered? Is that any better than a lost faith?”
Larry put his head in his hands, shaking it slowly, vehemently, as if he still refused to believe he’d have to make such a choice. That buying plywood and .22 shells were tantamount to throwing 33 years worth of Sundays down the drain. “God help me, I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Larry,” Rudy said softly. “Listen to me. The issue of God aside, we may not have much time. Every hour, every minute that we sit here debating, the shelves at the hardware stores and the supermarkets are going to get thinner and thinner. People are going to see what’s happening back east and start to panic. Some of them will pack up their families and leave town, head out to less populated areas to try to get away from it, but most of us will probably stay in our homes and dig in.
“Now it’s my suggestion, for whatever it’s worth, that you take care of your wife and your two sons, take care of yourself, and let God worry about His own plans. It may be that He’ll surprise us all in the end — who’s to say? — but we’ll have to keep ourselves alive long enough to see it. There are more ways to commit suicide than pills or a gun to your head… sometimes just giving up is enough. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Larry looked up soberly and nodded.
“Good.” Rudy picked up his lemonade and took a long drink, as if clearing his palate. He set the glass down and let his eyes roam over the faces of his neighbors. “Now what I’m proposing is simple enough: we pool our resources and protect one another’s backs, when and if this thing finally shows. We buy supplies — canned food, bottled water, guns and ammunition, whatever we need to get ourselves through this — and we stick together as a group to keep it from marching up Quail Street.”
“Look,” Keith Sturling spoke up, “I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I just saw a U.S. Army base overrun with those things.” He glanced around the circle and came back to Rudy. “How do you expect to hold them off here, using rakes and shovels, when they couldn’t keep them out with an entire armory at their disposal?”
A murmur of assent greeted this. Don Navaro snubbed out his cigarette, nodding.
“He’s right. All I’ve got is an old shotgun and a hunting rifle. That’s not going to last long against a mob like that,” he said, gesturing toward the television.
Rudy held up his hands, palms open, as if surrendering. “Look,” he said, “I don’t pretend to know any more about this than you, but what I do know is I’m not going to give in without a fight. It may well be our fate to be overrun after firing a few futile shots, but I’ll go to whatever awaits me knowing I fired them. On the other hand,” he continued, “what we saw on television is just one perspective of what’s happening on that base.” He nodded at Keith. “How many men are inside that base that the helicopter can’t show us, holding their own against the attack?”
“I don’t know… a hundred, five hundred?” Sturling shrugged and conceded the point. “But how long can they hold out? And what’ve they got left to return to once it’s over?”
Bud rose to field that one, his tone snappish, impatient. “I don’t think all of you understand what’s happening here. This isn’t a choice between balling Miss America or winning the lottery, and choosing not to play isn’t an option. This disease, when it comes, isn’t going to play by any sense of fairness. It’s going to be ugly. It’s going to be death or survival, and if that weren’t bad enough, there seems to be a big gray area in the middle that sends you back to play for the other team once you’re dead, which means that if it happens to you, you’re going to be doing your level best to tear apart everything you’ve come to love and cherish. That means friends, family… maybe one or two of us as well. Get that through your goddamn heads. What Rudy’s talking about here is a choice between sticking together or going it alone. There are no odds or guarantees in that, but if it helps think about this: if by chance you do get infected, at least you know you’ve got someone beside you to put you back down; and from what I’ve seen, that’s no small blessing.”
Bud sat down, blew his nose into a handkerchief, and crossed his arms, his position well-apparent.
“I don’t think I can add much more to that,” Rudy conceded, gathering up a small stack of computer printouts: the map he’d drawn of the cul-de-sac and a list of supplies they’d need to make their stand against Wormwood, much of which he’d taken straight off a survivalist’s site on the internet. As no one got up to leave, he started passing them around the room, pausing when he came to the only member of the group who’d yet to voice an opinion or objection.
“Shane,” he said, hoping to encourage the teenager forward. “Is there anything you’d like to say? This is all uncharted territory, so I can promise we’re open to just about anything?”
Shane Dawley glanced uncomfortably at the men gathered around him, men who, up to now, he’d regarded as unfriendlies, trip-mines to be avoided much like policemen and school administrators. And he’d been happy to do just that. Sitting here amongst them, sipping lemonade in a bright corner of the rec room, made him feel uncomfortable, out of place, because the longer he sat with them, the closer he felt himself pulled toward an indefinable line. A line which divided a great many things: inclusion and exclusion, responsibility and indifference, childhood and maturity¼
He sensed that he might soon cross that line, and any hint or suggestion of participation on his part would only hurry him toward it, and that scared him.
It scared him almost as much as the reports on TV.
With all of them looking at him he felt he had to say something, yet, strangely enough, it was his father who was foremost in his thoughts — his father who should have been sitting here where he was, conversing with these men and making the difficult decisions; his father who knew them and would call them all by their first names. None of this Mr. Cheng or Mr. Hanna or Mr. Iverson shit, as if he were always at arm’s length.
He opened his mouth, unsure what would spill out, but of course, given the circumstances, it was his father. The idea that these men were busy building a barricade and his father might be standing on the wrong side of it. He told them as much, using words that came stubbornly, haltingly, as if each were a small shape he had to cut out of himself. A vein he had to jab open and bleed.
It was the most he’d said about the man in the seven months since his parent’s separation, and to men who were little better than strangers, though none of them laughed or made fun of him as he feared they might.
Rudy Cheng put a hand on his shoulder and the gesture didn’t feel weird or condescending, but sympathetic, as though he understood and wanted to help. “Would you like to call and invite your dad to the rest of the discussion?” he asked, taking his hand back to point out the phone. “I think it’s right that he should be here. God knows we could use his help.”
Shane nodded. Yes, he would like that very much.
Rudy held him back a moment. “You understand that doesn’t mean we want him instead of you, Shane. When the time comes, we’re going to need every man we can get, and young men like you especially. All right?”
Shane nodded. He broke for the phone, deciding he might have a part to play in this after all, so long as they told him what to do and didn’t call on him to make any life or death decisions.
As long as they kept it on those terms, he would be just fine.
After the meeting broke up, Rudy drove downtown to Jed’s Sport Shop and bought two handguns, a rifle, and a shotgun. The man behind the counter didn’t seem at all surprised, as though Rudy were the fifth or sixth customer that day to buy himself a small arsenal. With Wormwood on television, perhaps he was.
“The rifle and the shotgun you can have today, but you’re going to have to wait five days on the handguns,” he said, tapping the countertop with a fat index finger. Rudy nodded and the two of them waited while his MasterCard was run through the system. “Can I show you some accessories for those?” the clerk queried. “Scopes, cases, ammunition?”
“Cases I don’t need,” Rudy answered, “but yes, I’d like a scope for the rifle and as much ammunition as I can walk out of here with.”
The man looked at Rudy. A long, appraising gaze.
“You can buy as much as I’ve got, but hunting season is still a long way off.”
Rudy offered the man an embarrassed smile. “I need a lot of practice.”
The man smiled back. “How much practice do you think you need?”
Rudy looked at the prices posted on the shelves.
“Say about a thousand dollars worth.”
A small grunt escaped the clerk. “You must not be very good.”
“True,” Rudy agreed, “but I’m hoping to improve.”
Between 7:00 and 7:50 Rudy made three phone calls, all within the neighborhood. The first was to Larry who, though still sulky, told him, despite his better judgment, he had gone to the lumberyard and picked up enough plywood to fully reinforce the ground floor of his house. “As a matter of fact,” he went on, “Jan and I were just discussing that, and how we were going to tell Mark and Brian what we plan to use it for. Since it was your big idea, we were wondering if you had any suggestions?”
Rudy bit his lip and decided to let his neighbor’s resentment pass through him as if he were a ghost, already dead.
“Larry, you know your boys better than I do. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to handle them.”
“No?” Larry seemed to smile sardonically at that. “Just how to handle myself, huh?”
“Larry…” Rudy said, taking a deep breath, “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I just think we should be prepared. There’s no harm in that, is there?”
“Well no, but my bank account might disagree, after spending three hundred dollars on lumber today.”
Rudy laughed softly into the telephone. “Would it make you feel better to learn I spent over two thousand on guns and ammunition this afternoon?”
“You know, strangely enough, it does,” Larry laughed, his anger gone for the moment. The moment passed. “I’ll have to mention that to Jan; once she stops crying, that is. I’m sure she’ll get a real kick out of it.”
“If you really want my advice, Larry, I wouldn’t attempt to explain what’s happening to Mark and Brian. They’re too young to understand and it would only upset them.”
“True enough,” Larry agreed, “but we want them to be prepared, don’t we? I mean, that’s the important thing, isn’t it?”
Rudy put the phone down at his side for a moment, waiting for the dark clouds to lift.
“I can see that I called at a bad time,” he returned, his jaw clenched. “Maybe we ought to talk about this tomorrow?”
“Assuming we’re all still here,” Larry sneered, “and not snacking on one another.”
Rudy said good-bye and hung up before he could say something he’d later regret.
He closed his eyes and relaxed, clearing his mind of everything except the sound of his own breathing. He did this until his heart rate was back below 70 beats per minute and his hands were no longer clenched and knuckled at his sides. Until he felt somewhat himself again.
Then he picked up the phone and called the Dawleys.
“Just a minute, Mr. Cheng. Let me put my dad on.”
Sitting behind the desk in his upstairs study, Rudy raised a surprised eyebrow, though he wouldn’t have been quite so surprised if he’d gone to the window first and looked down at the Dawley’s driveway. Mike’s black Cherokee was sitting squarely on the concrete, in its old familiar space from months past, before the separation. Perhaps he and his wife had had a reconciliation, or perhaps they’d simply decided to cease hostilities until the present crisis had passed. Whatever the reason, Shane sounded absolutely thrilled about it.
“Hello, Rudy,” Mike Dawley said, sounding considerably more cordial than Larry. “What’s up?”
“Actually, I’d intended to talk to Shane about the trip the two of you made to the supermarket. I didn’t expect you’d still be there.”
“Yeah, well, Pam and I were just discussing that,” Mike replied, switching the phone from one ear to the other. “We haven’t come to a definite decision yet, but I may end up staying here a while, at least until we figure out where this Wormwood thing is heading.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Mike,” Rudy said, genuinely pleased after his part in ruining the Hanna’s evening. “I hope it all works out for the best.”
“We’re taking it one day at a time. I think that’s about the best we can hope for right now. Oh, and incidentally, Pam says she’d like to be a part of any future meetings or plannings, if that’s all right with you? Apparently they’re gearing up for this down at the hospital and some of the directives and contingencies that are coming down the pipeline are pretty damn frightening, to say the least. She thinks you’re dead-on about this; it’s gonna get ugly. When I told her you’d sent us down to the store for canned food and bottled water, she wondered if you’d given any thought to medical supplies?”
“I had, but only so far as over-the-counter items. Bandages, splints, disinfectants and such. Ideally, we could use some strong painkillers and antibiotics.” Rudy mused on this for a brief moment. “Perhaps we could ask everyone to empty out their medicine cabinets?”
“That’s an idea,” Mike agreed. “I’ll run it past Pam a little later.”
Rudy nodded. “I’m glad she’s interested and willing to participate. Her experience as an emergency room nurse will be a tremendous asset.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her you said so.”
Rudy marveled at how the Dawleys were coming together to cope with this crisis, while to the opposite side of him the Hannas seemed to be falling apart. He wondered what effect his meeting was having amongst the other houses in the neighborhood: the Sturlings, the Navaros and the Iversons. He was getting an early taste of how people responded to stress and adversity, and so far all they’d done was discuss it for a few hours over soft drinks and lemonade. What would happen, he wondered, when they had to start boarding up windows and shooting guns?
“So,” he went on, keeping the conversation focused on preparations, “how did you and Shane do at the supermarket?”
“Not too bad,” Mike replied, though Rudy thought he detected some hesitancy there. “The bottled water was running low. We got fourteen cases but I had to go to three different stores. I think we ought to start filling up jugs or whatever we’ve got from the house taps. A lot of people were loading up on the same stuff we were buying. At Safeway a fist-fight broke out over the last tank of propane, but otherwise people were fairly calm and orderly. They waited in line to pay just like usual, but you could definitely feel a tension in the air, like they were standing guard over their shopping carts and were willing to beat the hell out of anyone who tried to take anything from them. I was awful glad to get away with my head in one piece. The last stop I gave Shane my 9 millimeter and had him wait in the Cherokee to keep people from breaking in and stealing the stuff we’d already bought! I told him to fire a warning shot if anyone got too interested.” He took a breath. “I tell you there were a lot of empty spaces on the shelves, especially in the dry and canned good aisles; also the beverages, all varieties. I think it’s going to get worse as the days go by; I just hope to God that they’re still receiving deliveries and restocking at night!”
“Hopefully,” Rudy agreed, but his voice held a grim note of skepticism. Supplies from the west would still be rolling, but those from the east…
Well, they had their own problems back east.
“I plan on making another trip tomorrow morning,” Mike went on, “but if it gets any worse we might consider going in armed groups, just to protect one another.”
Rudy nodded, troubled at how quickly things were starting to fall apart, though he should have expected it; they were, after all, watching the same television coverage. “I’ll mention that to Bud,” he said. “I’d planned on calling him next.”
“There’s one other thing you ought to give some thought to,” Mike added, “and that’s a line to fall back along if things go to hell faster than we planned. Instead of reinforcing everyone’s houses, we ought to pick one house on the block to hole up in and make a last stand, if it comes to that. Make it a goddamn fortress.”
Rudy immediately thought of Larry and Jan’s house. It was the only one he knew of that had an honest-to-God bomb shelter. The people who’d lived there before the Hannas had installed it, convinced the Russians were going to nuke the country out of existence. An older man and his wife; Rudy couldn’t quite recall their names, but they would have been about Bud and Helen’s age… had they survived the drunk driver who clobbered them out on the highway.
Life was sometimes funny that way.
Stubbornly refusing to go along with people’s plans.
Bud Iverson’s line was busy the first time Rudy tried to get in touch with him, so rather than sit idly at his desk, he turned on his computer and began checking the news sites for any updates they might be carrying on the epidemic.
His eyes scanned the headlines, unable to believe what he was reading.
(Associated Press) A 20 kiloton nuclear device was detonated approximately five thousand feet above downtown Chicago today at 4:12 pm Central Standard Time (local), in what officials are terming a “last, desperate attempt” to halt the spread of the violent and disturbing phenomenon known as Yellowseed or Wormwood. According to a spokesman for the Department of Defense and the White House, the order to “neutralize” the city was signed by President Watkins after a lengthy closed-door session with his entire cabinet. This decision came following a “frank and heated discussion after viewing literally hours of aerial surveillance footage taken at various points over the city since dawn,” footage described by one cabinet member as “gruesomely shocking”. Another member is quoted as stating: “If my family were trapped down in that Hell, I’d have signed the order myself.”
Reconnaissance satellites have yet to ascertain the extent of the damage or the effectiveness of the tactic, but a formal address to the nation is planned in the coming hours by President Watkins, once the full impact of the situation has been thoroughly assessed. In the meantime, citizens are urged to remain in their homes, bolt their doors, and arm themselves against forced intruders. Martial law remains in effect for the following cities: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati and Milwaukee.
Rudy shook his head, certain he was dreaming, tossing and turning in his bed. He glanced back over the past few hours, starting at the bottom of the headlines and reading his way up to the destruction of Chicago.
After two days of unconfirmed rumor and speculation, the story had finally broken open.
“My God,” Rudy said to Bud Iverson, his grip tight on the receiver. “Have you heard about Chicago? I can’t believe they actually dropped a nuclear bomb on an American city! My God!” he said again.
“I saw it on television not twenty minutes ago,” Bud sighed. His voice stunned, defeated, as if all the wind had been knocked out of him. “This changes everything, you know? Things are going to start falling apart very quickly now, whether Wormwood ever makes it here or not.”
Rudy supposed that was true, though it was shocking to hear it from Bud.
“There aren’t going to be any more peaceful trips into town to pick up supplies,” he continued over an angry sputter of static. “From now on it’s going to be dog eat dog out there for the last scraps on the shelves and then the situation’s going to go from bad to worse.”
“How so?” Rudy asked, not certain he wanted to know the cold specifics.
“Well what do you think’s going to happen when we can no longer run down to Safeway or 7-Eleven for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk because the lines of production and distribution are no longer moving? We’re going to start starving, that’s what’s going to happen; and again, this is regardless of whether Wormwood comes to town or not. The panic alone will trigger it.” Bud paused as another crackle passed down the line. “I think we were damned lucky to have gotten the supplies we did today.”
Rudy shook his head. “They won’t last long,” he said numbly. “Not if what you say is true.”
“Bank on it. I read somewhere that the average supermarket carries roughly three days worth of stock at any given time,” Bud mused, his voice strangely faraway. “Of course that’s assuming an average rate of consumption… not apocalyptic panic. I’d say that you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find anything on the shelves worth stealing come this time tomorrow.”
Rudy gave the point serious consideration.
“Maybe we should send a party down to the corner 7-Eleven right now,” he suggested, “while there’s still something to get?”
“That’s an idea,” Bud allowed, his voice breaking up and coming back together. “Can’t say if it’s a good one or not. After Chicago, all bets are off.”
“Perhaps a quick trip, while people are still in shock…” Rudy thought aloud. “Just three men and all we can fit into one vehicle.”
“Sounds a bit cold and mercenary when you say it like that,” Bud commented, “but I guess that’s what it’s going to take to survive in this brave new world of ours. Who did you have in mind?”
“Myself,” Rudy immediately proposed, “Mike Dawley and that four-wheel drive of his¼ and that’s about as far as I’d gotten.”
“What about me?” Bud volunteered. It sounded more like a challenge than a suggestion.
Rudy hesitated. “No offense, Bud, but I can’t see you running in and out of the store with a full case of canned food in your arms. I think that perhaps someone younger…”
“All right, all right!” Bud relented. “Point taken. Can’t say it does much for my pride, but I suppose that’s the way it is. I’d just be baggage.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Rudy said.
“No, but it’s the truth,” Bud exhaled, letting go of his wounded pride. “If it’s a young man you want, then I’d suggest Keith Sturling. He’s got a broad pair of shoulders, looks like he could plow a field with them; being in the Guards, he’s probably fairly handy with a rifle too. Want me to call him?”
“Do you think he’d do it?”
Bud laughed. “I think he’d knock both you and me down for the chance.”